What We Think Will Be Great
Heroes of the Fourth Turning (Playwrights Horizons; previews 9/13)
Will Arbery’s vertigoinducing Plano was one of the highlights of the spring. With Heroes of the Fourth
Turning, the Texas-raised playwright dares to wade into some murky waters with the story of four young conservatives descending into existential chaos at a party in Wyoming. Arbery’s writing is spooky and wry without being twee, generous without naïveté, and I’m ready for his take on America’s middle and its far right.
Scotland, PA (Laura Pels Theater; 9/14–12/8)
I honestly don’t know whether I’m psyched or nervous about Roundabout’s new musical adaptation of filmmaker Billy Morrissette’s 2001 riff on Macbeth, which sets Shakespeare’s bloody tragedy in a sleepy Pennsylvania town where a burger-joint manager and his wife take matters (and deadly deep fryers) into their own hands. The movie is eerie, sly, gruesome fun, and features Christopher Walken in the Macduff role and Andy Dick as a Weird Sister—that’s a tall, eccentric order for any adaptation, and it will be a creepy treat to see how the musical’s vaunting ambition plays out.
The Inheritance (The Barrymore; previews 9/27)
Elisabeth Vincentelli recently wrote about the frustrating discrepancy between Broadway’s historical embrace of gay and lesbian stories, and she’s not wrong. Even so, I find myself eager to see this epic two-parter inspired by E. M. Forster’s Howards End.
Matthew Lopez’s exploration of lineage tells the story of a group of gay men in New York a generation after the aids crisis. Directed by Stephen Daldry, it’s an ambitious attempt to continue Angels in
America’s “great work,” as well as winner of the 2019 Olivier for Best New Play—but truly, they had me at Forster.
Hamnet (BAM Next Wave Festival; 10/30–11/3)
This year’s Next Wave lineup—which features a deconstructed Swan Lake and a Three Sisters riff played out in two different spaces, with one audience watching half the play as a live film—is full of fascinating stuff. Especially enticing is Hamnet, a new play by the Irish theater company Dead Centre that explores mortality, legacy, and longing through the eyes of a boy who died when he was 11 years old—and who happened to be the son of the most famous playwright of all time.
The Crucible (Bedlam @ the Connelly; 11/8–12/29)
The ingenious, scrappy magicians of Eric Tucker’s Bedlam dismantle and reassemble classics with a playful, rigorous hand. If their rendition of Arthur Miller’s fiery McCarthy-era cautionary tale The Crucible is as invigoratingly actor- and argument-driven as their fierce, funny, stripped-down
Saint Joan, it will probably cut closer to the heart of the matter than the show’s last Broadway outing, levitation, live “wolf,” and all.
Fefu and Her Friends (Theatre for a New Audience; 11/16–12/8)
The wise and radical Cuban-American playwright María Irene Fornés died late last year, and it’s thrilling to see her formula-defying plays popping up again. Encores! recently revived her absurdist musical Promenade, and this fall, Lileana Blain-Cruz takes on one of Fornés’s bestknown works, the enigmatic story of a gathering of women at a New England country house in 1935. Perspectives are constantly shifting in
Fefu, a landmark of feminist theater that grapples with internalized sexism.
Keep (St. Ann’s Warehouse; 12/4–12/19)
The monologuist Daniel Kitson once made me weep profusely by sitting at a desk and reading a story about Santa. Also with a story about a weird lonely writer and a weird lonely woman and a weird lonely mouse. Also by talking about the flat he once lived in in London. He’s unsentimental and heartbreaking, part comedian, part raconteur, and part solo theater magician, and I can’t wait for this meditation on regret, hope, and “the inevitable sadness of ever holding on to anything.”
Judgment Day (Park Avenue Armory; 12/5–1/11)
Richard Jones singlehandedly convinced me that theaters should keep tackling Eugene O’Neill with his invigorating 2017 production of The Hairy Ape. I’ve already got palpitations about his return to the cavernous dream castle that is the Armory with this adaptation of a criminally underproduced masterpiece by Ödön von Horváth about a station master whose fleeting inattention causes a tragedy that sends his community into a devastating spiral.