Off-Broadway spotlights 5 new playwrights
Stephen Kunken and Marin Hinkle in Primary Stages production of "RX," a new play by Kate Fodor and directed by Ethan McSweeny, playing off-Broadway at 59E59 in New York. (2012) Credit: James Leynse/
Works by new or little-known playwrights are attracting most of the right attention in Off-Broadway theaters around town. Here are five I recently got to know.
RX, Primary Stages, 59E59 Theaters, 59 E. 59th St.; 212-279-4200; primarystages.org
The research doctor asks the managing editor of a pig-factory farming magazine about her workplace depression. And, right away, you swear you can feel the audience lean forward and silently answer his questionnaire.
In "RX," Kate Fodor's smart lark of a social satire/romantic comedy, a pharmaceutical corporation is interviewing subjects for clinical trials for a pill to treat office unhappiness. As one gung-ho big-pharm executive (played with ferocious surety by Elizabeth Rich) explains: "Workplace depression is not a personal failing. It's a disease . . . we hope." Especially in "households earning at least $65,000."
Fodor, whose impressive "100 Saints You Should Know" explored the slippery and potentially deadly subject of faith in 2007, is in a lighter, but no less knowing frame of mind here. Marin Hinkle (Judith in "Two and a Half Men") plays sadness without tedium as the pig editor, a former prose poet, who knows not to cry in the office. Instead, she weeps in the "old-lady underwear" corner of a nearby department store. You should see the size of those comforting grandma underpants.
Of course, she and the disillusioned doctor (Stephen Kunken) fall in love, while she slowly responds to the meds. Or does she? Marylouise Burke creates another in her gallery of aging, not-cloying eccentrics as the widow in search of more than cotton underthings in director Ethan McSweeny's bright yet delicately wistful production.
CQ/CX, Atlantic Theater, Norton Space, 555 W. 42nd St.; 212-279-4200; atlantictheater.org
Meanwhile, in a very different depressed workplace, the vaguely disguised publisher and editors of The New York Times face the real-life 2003 plagiarism scandal of rising-star reporter Jayson Blair -- here called Jay Bennett.
Playwright Gabe McKinley, who worked on and off at the Times from 1996 to 2008, has attempted to capture the atmosphere and the pressure at the paper at a tumultuous time of changing demographics and journalistic styles. (The title refers to the editing mark for fact checking.) McKinley cops out of the big question: How could such a massive disgrace happen? Was Jayson/Jay (Kobi Libii) a sociopath? A cokehead? A hapless victim of opportunistic affirmative action?
Worse, McKinley simply isn't up to taking on these recognizable figures as more than broad caricatures, cowboys and monsters of grandiosity. The production does have a very clever multilayered set by David Rockwell and a cast of pros. But the good British director David Leveaux may be too far from the real subject to notice that the play is pointless and more than a little presumptuous.
RUSSIAN TRANSPORT, New Group, 410 W. 42nd St.; 212-239-6200; thenewgroup.org
Erika Sheffer tackles both a family tragicomedy and a big-picture global crime in her off-center, highly original and impressive playwriting debut. We are in the Sheepshead Bay bungalow of a struggling but loving family of Russian-Jewish immigrants. In moves the mother's handsome, increasingly menacing brother (played with imposing, silky duplicity by Morgan Spector). His arrival from Russia is first folded into the everyday family banter, before he ensnares the teenage children (beautifully played by Sarah Steele and Raviv Ullman) and, ultimately, reveals secrets that are genuinely surprising.
Despite some weirdness in her Russian accent, Janeane Garofalo is a sturdy, funny-serious and welcome presence as the nobody's-fool mother. Scott Elliott, head of The New Group, directs his new find with the tenderness and brutality it deserves. How he got the cast (including Daniel Oreskes as the hardworking father) to speak Russian -- or at least to sound as if he were speaking Russian -- is a very good mystery.
YOSEMITE, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, 224 Waverly Place, 212-279-4200; ticketcentral.com, closing Feb. 26.
Daniel Talbott's grim little family drama does have nice gritty performances by Kathryn Erbe (much-missed as Det. Eames in "Law & Order: Criminal Intent"), Seth Numrich (the human star of "War Horse"), Noah Galvin and Libby Woodbridge. There also is a convincingly freezing mountain-woods set (by Raul Abrego) in which the three dislocated children can shiver while digging a grave for their dog. Erbe plays the lost-soul of a mom, one with a shotgun, and the kids seem genuinely bored and stuck. We understand.
PSYCHO THERAPY, Cherry Lane Theatre, 38 Commerce St., 212-352-3101; psychotherapytheplay.com, closing Feb. 25.
Somehow, four high-functioning actors -- including Angelica Page and Jeffrey Carlson -- are trapped in Frank Strausser's inane dinner-theater-quality sex comedy about couples' therapy that, for reasons you don't need to know, ends up with two men and a woman as patients. Everyone, including the hyperactive shrink with the eating disorder (Jan Leslie Harding), appears to be having a good actor-y time. No director is listed, which leaves one fewer perpetrator to blame.
