Talking Broadway Plays and Amazing Performances from Jessica Chastain to a Tiger Puppet

By Seth Freilich | Miscellaneous | May 19, 2023 |

By Seth Freilich | Miscellaneous | May 19, 2023 |

On the heels of talking musicals, let’s jump right back in and talk about a few Broadway plays.

Life of Pi - Based upon the 2001 novel, ‘Life of Pi’ runs similarly to Ang Lee’s beautiful 2012 film. It’s a story most of us know — an accident leaves young Pi stranded for two hundred-odd days on a lifeboat with a (maybe allegorical) Bengal tiger. After the play premiered in Sheffield, it moved to London’s West End, where it racked up nine Olivier Award nominations, with five wins including for Best New Play. One of those wins went to the seven actors who performed the puppetry of Richard Parker, the tiger.

That’s the reason to see this show. Last season featured a revival of ‘Skin of Our Teeth,’ Thornton Wilder’s other Pulitzer-winning play. It was so-so, but featured some fantastic puppetry, an underappreciated art form. Here, ‘Life of Pi’ elevates the art form spectacularly. Richard Parker is simply amazing to watch. The show itself is crowd-pleasingly fine — there are some beautiful moments; the staging, particularly for the on-the-water stuff, is clever and well done; Hiran Abeysekera holds his own as Pi; etc. But this is Richard Parker’s show through and through. It’s disappointing the Tony Awards didn’t similarly nominate the puppetry, though the show did come away with five noms. Because although this was the “weakest” of the five plays I saw, it was easily the one that most wonderfully represents the beauty and thrill of live theater.

Summer, 1976 - Laura Linney and Jessica Hecht on stage for an hour? Yes, please. Speaking of Tony noms, it’s thrilling that Hecht got nominated, but I’m shocked that Linney didn’t also get one, as both are phenomenal. The show is just these two women telling us about the ups and downs of their unexpected friendship in the ’70s. Each actress not only plays herself in multiple time periods but also slips in and out of other characters to help the other better relay pieces of the story. The whole thing is just funny and beautiful and, ultimately, a rather melancholic exploration of fleeting friendships.

While there’s more that could be said about the show, it really just all boils down to that. ‘Summer, 1976’ was not the best show I saw, but that’s not a slight, it’s merely a testament to the strength of some of the other shows. However, it is definitely the one that hit me the hardest and is easily the one that will stick with me the most.

A Doll’s House - According to Wikiepedia, Ibsen plays are performed more than any other playwright who isn’t called William Shakespeare, with ‘A Doll’s House’ being the most popularly-performed of his shows. So it’s fair to wonder whether it’s possible to bring something new to this almost 150-year-old play. Playwright Amy Herzog (‘4000 Miles’) has written a new adaptation of the play and she and director Jamie Lloyd answer that question with a resounding “yes.” The play has always been about class and gender roles, but this adaptation is astoundingly relevant and present despite its 19th Century setting.

It helps when you have Jessica Chastain as Nora and Arian Moayed (‘The Humans’) as Torvald. This is a role Chastain was born for, full of the emoting and crying that she excels at, and Moayed deftly crafts a Torvald who is surprisingly sympathetic and endearing, well, until he isn’t. Director Lloyd pushes the minimalism to new heights with a completely exposed stage, except for a rotating center and a few chairs. When characters are “off stage,” we see them sitting in shadows in the wings. While it was a little too cold and detached for my taste, that was offset by the seemingly unnecessary (given the small theater) but intentional micing of the actors, which creates an almost uncomfortable intimacy where you can virtually hear every breath taken. Lloyd finds a unique way to (spoiler warning for a century-plus old play’s ending?) to have Nora’s exit at the end hit with a punch that had the audience gasping and cheering.

It took a while for me to process this one, particularly because of the coldness the staging left me with, but ultimately it’s a wonder.

Grey House - I knew very little going into this play except that (a) it was a horror story, (b) the cast included Laurie Metcalf (‘Three Tall Women’), Tatiana Maslany (‘Network’), and Paul Sparks (‘Hedda Gabler’), and (c) it was directed by the astounding Joe Mantello (‘The Humans’). I’m glad I knew nothing else because the less known the better. I’ve seen attempts at horror movie-type shows before to middling results. But this one nails what feels like a ghost story but is maybe something else. There were moments when the audience yelped exactly like they would at a horror movie, and it was a blast. The cast is outstanding (Millicent Simmonds, making her Broadway debut, was a standout), the set is dynamic and spooky, and the crisp play never overstays its welcome. Like a good horror story, there’s something more than creepiness and scares below the surface, and ‘Grey House’ sticks that landing as well. If your local theater stages this, read nothing about it, just go.

Fat Ham - In my college Shakespeare class, my final paper was on the relevancy of ‘Hamlet’ over the centuries and the countless adaptations and variations that have been made. So I feel confident in saying that ‘Fat Ham’ is the first version of the play set at a Black backyard barbeque focused on a queer and confused Black man trying to just figure his life out. Playwright Jame Ijames won last year’s drama Pulitzer for this show, and I understand why. I could easily write a few thousand words on this, from Marcel Speers’ debut as Juicy (the Hamlet character) to director Saheem Ali’s ability to give the show such vibrancy and life despite a static setting. But suffice it to say, everything about this show feels like ‘Hamlet’ — with plenty of winking nods to the 400-plus-year-old play — while also being decidedly fresh and of this moment. This is the kind of show where I’m so in awe of what the playwright has done that I immediately ordered the script so I can pour myself into the words. Theater is awesome, y’all.

Prima Facie - Just a quick note on this one. I didn’t see this one-woman show while in NYC, but only because I had already watched an in-theater broadcast via NT Live. Jodie Comer is a god-damned star. That’s all I can possibly say.