To My Girls

D+

Since I had not seen a play in almost four months, I really hoped that my return to theatergoing would be an auspicious one. Alas, it was not to be. This alleged comedy, which somehow made it to Second Stage's Tony Kiser Theater, is a dud. If JC Lee (Relevance) set out to write a "Boys in the Band" for the 2020's, he missed the mark. A group of five 30-something gay men who have not seen each other since before the pandemic have rented a home in Palm Springs for the weekend from Bernie (Bryan Batt; Forbidden Broadway), an older gay man who lives just down the street. Curtis (Jay Armstrong Johnson; On the Town) is an aging cute white boy. Castor (Maulik Pancholy; Grand Horizons) is his motormouthed South Asian friend whose love for Curtis has gone unrequited. Leo (Bretton Smith; Be More Chill) is a black friend from New York, a character who remains frustratingly underdeveloped. Jeff (Carman Lacivita; Marvin's Room) and Tom are a couple whose arrival keeps getting postponed. (Tom may be the smartest of the lot -- he never arrives.) Castor brings home Omar (Noah J. Ricketts; Frozen), a superbly built, exotic younger man he meets at a bar. Underlying tensions rise to the surface. Amidst the bitchy one-liners, a few of which are quite funny, we are subjected to monologues on generational differences, white privilege, the privilege of good looks, the corrosive influence of social media, and the effects of living through the age of MAGA. Judging from this group, despite all the changes of the last couple decades, including same-sex marriage and greater LGBT rights, the emotional life of American gay men has not improved. The final message seems to be that there's no problem a lively drag number can't fix. Under the direction of Stephen Brackett (Be More Chill), the action moves fitfully. The deliberately (I hope) hideous set by Arnulfo Maldonado (A Strange Loop) is a tribute to bad taste. The transition between scenes is marked by garish colored lights, courtesy of Jen Schriever (A Strange Loop). The costumes by Sarafina Bush (Pass Over) are appropriately over-the-top. Honesty compels me to report that much of the audience seemed to be having a very good time. To each his own. Running time: a long 90 minutes without intermission.

The Moors

C

Jen Silverman’s dark, quirky comedy for Playwrights Realm brings us the world of the Brontes with a touch of Beckett. Agatha and Huldey are sisters living in the family manse after the death of their father. Agatha, a seemingly serene spinster, as played by Linda Powell (The Christians), is a dead ringer for Gertrude Stein. Her emotionally flamboyant younger sister Huldey (Birgit Huppuch of Men on Boats) has literary pretensions and tries to read her diary to anyone who will listen. Emilie (Chasten Harmon) is a pretty young governess who has just arrived after being recruited through letters allegedly written by the sisters’ unseen brother Branwell. The reasons for his absence and for her being hired to care for a nonexistent child are eventually revealed. Hannah Cabell (Men on Boats) plays the dour Marjory, the scullery maid, and Mallory, the parlor maid, who may be the same person. Andrew Garman (The Christians) plays the sisters’ large mastiff who suffers from loneliness and depression. Teresa Avia Lim plays the injured moor-hen the mastiff takes a fancy to and has philosophical discussions with. All the repressed emotion leads to an outburst of violence, followed by a song, complete with mic. The ending is rather low-key. The subplot of the two animals is interesting, but does not really cohere with the main story. The production is first-rate. The cast is uniformly strong, the understated set by Dane Laffrey is evocative, the costumes by Anita Yavich are wonderful, the lighting by Jen Schriever is effective and there’s lots of fog. Mike Donahue’s direction is smooth. What the play lacks in coherence, it almost makes up for in cleverness and originality. It would benefit from a 15-minute trim. It was well-received by the audience, which must have had a median age below 30. Running time: one hour 45 minutes; no intermission.

On the Exhale

B

Marin Ireland (Ironbound, reasons to be pretty), one of our most talented stage actors, seems incapable of giving a less than compelling performance. In this dark drama by Martin Zimmerman now at Roundabout Underground’s Black Box Theatre, she plays a professor in a “concealed carry” state, who is morbidly afraid that some male student, unhappy with a grade, might settle his grievance with a gun. As a single mother, her main fear is that no one would be there to raise her only child. When a gunman does strike, it is not at the university, but at her son’s elementary school. Her son is one of the victims. She deals with her grief in quite unexpected ways. While the acting is impeccable, the material seemed a bit formulaic. During the last 15 minutes, the play took what I felt was a wrong turn that undermined some of its force. The set design by Rachel Hauck is minimal in the extreme — a platform with a black wall behind it. Emily Rehbolz’s costume does not call attention to itself. The lighting by Jen Schriever very effectively enhances the production. Leigh Silverman’s (Violet, Chinglish) unfussy direction is assured. It’s only an hour long, but it’s a very intense hour.