live performance

ENCORE PRESENTATION: THE HONEY TRAP AT IRISH REP

Leo McGann’s The Honey Trap at Irish Rep travels between the present and 1979 (photo by Carol Rosegg)

THE HONEY TRAP
Irish Repertory Theatre, Francis J. Greenburger Mainstage
132 West Twenty-Second St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Wednesday – Sunday through February 15, $60-$125
irishrep.org

Inspired by Ed Moloney’s Belfast Project at Boston College, in which audio interviews were conducted with approximately fifty former paramilitaries involved in the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and ’80s, Leo McGann’s The Honey Trap is a gripping thriller that explores the Troubles in a unique and compelling way. It is now back at the Irish Rep for an encore run January 10 through February 15, giving everyone a second chance to catch this piece of theatrical magic.

The play begins in the dark, with snippets of dialogue heard in voiceover from former members of the IRA, the UDR, and a Scottish soldier talking about the thirty-year conflict. “They act holier than thou but they were rotten to the core. They couldn’t kill us themselves so they got their death squads to do it for them,” a Republican woman says. A former Ulster Defence Regiment man states, “I see them rarely enough but I do now and then. The post office. The big supermarket. Petrol station sometimes. I look them straight in the eye. They know what they did.”

As the voiceovers fade out, we see Emily (originally Molly Ranson, now played by Rebecca Ballinger), a twentysomething American PhD candidate and researcher, sitting at a table preparing to interview David Henson (Michael Hayden), a former British soldier. He is suspicious of Emily’s possible biases, as the vast majority of her previous subjects were on the side of the IRA, but he sees this as an opportunity to set the record straight. “Okay. I mean, I know you’re more interested in talking to IRA types, but here we are. I’m glad I’m going to get a chance to tell you the truth. Because you won’t get that from them,” he says. She responds, “We’re thrilled that you’re telling your truth.” To which he shoots back, “My truth? No. The truth.”

For the next two hours (with intermission), the play shifts between the present and 1979, when the young Dave (Daniel Marconi) and his friend and fellow soldier, Bobby (Harrison Tipping), had a night out that ended up with Bobby’s murder, a case that was never solved. We gradually disover that Dave is not speaking with Emily merely to share his story but also to find out who killed Bobby — and perhaps exact revenge.

In 1979, Dave and Bobby, who are both married, are at a pub after a tough day working riot control in West Belfast. As part of a game meant to embarrass Bobby, Dave forces his mate to approach two young women, Kirsty (Doireann Mac Mahon) and Lisa (Annabelle Zasowski), despite Bobby’s initial reluctance. Soon the four of them are flirting.

The action occurs in flashback around the table where Emily is interviewing Dave, who carefully watches his memories unfold as Emily continues to probe. Dave insists that he and Bobby were at the bar just to relax and have a few pints. “Did you have any idea anything was amiss?” she asks. He replies, “Not a clue.”

Dave eventually takes off, leaving Bobby with the two women. “And that was it. Last I ever saw of him,” Dave explains. “They took him to some flat just outside Belfast. We don’t know if they interrogated him first or what. Then someone shot him twice in the head. His own mum wouldn’t have recognised him. But they left his army ID in his pocket. So that made it a bit easier. Thoughtful of them, eh?”

In the second act, the modern-day Dave travels to South Belfast to meet Sonia (Samantha Mathis), who he believes knows exactly what happened to Bobby that night.

Every character gets more than they bargained for in The Honey Trap. McGann (Friends Like These, In the Moment) and director Matt Torney (The White Chip, Stop the Tempo), both of whom grew up in Belfast, maintain a simmering tension all the way to an explosive conclusion, with plenty of shocks and surprises, overcoming a few awkward moments. At the center of it all is the older Dave, who is onstage the entire show, either in the present day meeting with Emily and Sonia or watching his younger self on the night his life changed forever.

Tony and Olivier nominee Hayden (Judgment at Nuremberg, Carousel) is riveting as Dave, a private man on a quest while fighting off his demons; it will make you wonder what you would do if given the opportunity to watch scenes from your past unfurl before your very eyes. The rest of the cast is strong, led by a tender performance by Mathis (33 Variations, Make Believe) as a woman who thought she had escaped her past.

Master set designer Charlie Corcoran expertly integrates the different time periods and locations, from the unionist pub to a coffee shop to a bedroom, enhanced by Sarita Fellows’s casual and military costumes and Michael Gottlieb’s sharp lighting, switching between brightness and dark, shadowy interiors. James Garver’s sound ranges from the voiceovers to a loud pub and a quiet café.

The Honey Trap — which takes its name from the form of covert deception in which an operative uses seduction to lure someone into a manipulative situation — is another winner from the Irish Rep, a complex play that explores issues of guilt, responsibility, trauma, and vengeance that might be about a specific fictional event but feels all too relevant in today’s world.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

EDWARD REVISITED: INTERACTIVE SOLO SHOW TOURS CITY BOOKSTORES

Ed Schmidt’s Edward is back for a bookstore run this winter (photo by Sophie Blackall)

EDWARD
Multiple bookstores including the Strand, Rizzoli, PowerHouse Arena, the Mysterious Bookshop, McNally Jackson, and Books Are Magic
January 22 – March 1, $40
edschmidttheater.com

Last May, I saw Ed Schmidt’s Edward at the All Street Gallery on the Lower East Side. It is now back for a tour of New York City bookstores in Brooklyn and Manhattan, running January 22 through March 1. Below is my original review; please note that tickets go fast to this unique theatrical experience.

Ed Schmidt knows about endings. His 2010 solo show, My Last Play, was ostensibly his swan song, written two years after the death of his father and a transformative rereading of Our Town, concluding a twenty-year career that had also featured Mr. Rickey Calls a Meeting, The Last Supper, held in his Brooklyn kitchen, and the monthly variety show Dumbolio. Nevertheless, in 2015, Schmidt, at the time a professor and basketball coach at Trinity on the Upper West Side, wrote and performed the high school basketball drama Our Last Game, staged in an actual high school locker room.

Thankfully, Schmidt is back again with the superb Edward, the poetic, graceful, intimate tale of one Edward O’Connell, an unspectacular but respectable and enigmatic divorced father and educator. The hundred-minute play takes place at All Street Gallery on Hester St., with the audience of between twelve and eighteen people sitting around a long white table covered with twenty-seven objects and an empty box. Fortunate ticket holders are encouraged to arrive early and examine each piece, to pick them up and scrutinize them closely: A Brooks Robinson baseball glove. Four neckties. Mr. Potato Head. A copy of The Catcher in the Rye. A “Goose Girl” Hummel. An ashtray. A jazz CD. A postcard of a boy on a lake. A business card.

“Edward O’Connell died twelve years ago, at the age of seventy-three, and left behind this box, and all that it contained,” Schmidt, resembling a mild-mannered Kevin Costner and sounding like a toned-down Albert Brooks, begins. “With these twenty-seven objects, there are over ten octillion ways to tell Edward’s story. Ten octillion. That’s a one followed by twenty-eight zeroes. That’s the number of grains of sand on the Earth. Multiplied by the number of stars in the Milky Way. In other words, an unfathomable number. Tonight, we will tell one of those ten octillion versions.”

Wearing a dark suit and white shirt, Schmidt then serves as an Our Town–style Stage Manager, going through the objects in random order, each one a way into Edward’s life, directly or indirectly. He speaks in the third person although it feels like he’s channeling O’Connell, delving deep into his being. We learn about Edward’s wife, Angela, and their children and grandchildren; his love of the Celtics and Red Sox; his battles with department head Nona and headmaster Renée Marsh at his school, Enright Academy; his first car; his favorite word; the vacation when he thought his son had drowned; where he was at seminal moments in US history; his multiple regrets.

Many passages unfurl with a quiet majesty. “He likened her transformation to watching a sunset: you can sense a change coming — the air cools, the light fades, the sky pinkens, and then, all of a sudden, you realize, ‘It’s dark. When did that happen?’ Or perhaps the proper metaphor was a sunrise, and darkness slowly, suddenly turning to day,” he muses.

Others are experiences that everyone can relate to. “You know how, on every To Do List, there’s that one task that never gets done? It’s the one item that, for whatever mysterious reason, you can’t cross off, and it ends up getting transferred to the next list and the next and the next, and, in the end, you either complete the task or you just let it slip away and forget, but, in either case, your inability to follow through feels like a moral failure. Why did it take me so long to clean out the gutters? Or send that thank-you note? Or throw away that box of stuff in the attic? What is wrong with me?”

But each helps us learn who Edward O’Connell was and, in turn, who Ed Schmidt is — and who we are. As you walk around the table, examining the objects, several almost certainly will stand out to you personally, bringing up your own memories; for me, the baseball glove, The Catcher in the Rye, the small rock, and the Hummel figurine sent me back. The friend I attended with had actually completed the very jigsaw puzzle that was on the table. Schmidt’s writing is so evocative that the stories will also remind you of similar situations you got tangled up in as a child and an adult.

In Francesco Bonami’s newly updated semifictional Stuck: Maurizio Cattelan — The Unauthorized Autobiography, about the Italian artist and prankster, Bonami writes, “Here is my story of his story. You can believe it or not — it doesn’t matter, just as long as you enjoy it, that’s enough. If cultivating ‘doubt’ is essential to life . . . well, Maurizio Cattelan harvests doubts like nobody else.” Schmidt has accomplished a similar feat with Edward.

Ed Schmidt’s Edward is an intimate and poetic tale of an ordinary man’s life (photo courtesy Ed Schmidt)

Spoiler alert: The next two paragraphs give information about the show that you might not want to know before seeing it but was a critical part of my connecting with the work. The objects are chosen one at a time by the audience, going around in a clockwise circle. I thought long and hard about the two that I selected, wanting to impress Schmidt, hoping they would lead to great anecdotes that I would feel partly responsible for, and imagining that I could have shared my own reminiscence about them.

It seems impossible for Schmidt to know O’Connell as well as he does, especially since Edward did not leave behind a memoir or journal. But as real as O’Connell’s life appears to be, did he even exist? Did Schmidt make it all up, or perhaps use elements from his own life in crafting the play? Going on an intense Google search, I found that there is very little on the internet about Schmidt, and there seems to be no Edward O’Connell who died in 2012 at the age of seventy-three. However, I did find facts about other Edward O’Connells and various Schmidts that pop up in Edward, from names to professions to family relationships. For example, Schmidt talks about a skiing accident that Edward’s brother, Steven, had. I discovered a Substack post by political pundit Steve Schmidt about a skiing accident as well as a news story about a man named Steve Schmit who survived a life-threatening skiing mishap. Coincidence? Maybe — but maybe not.

Spoilers over, it’s also clear that Schmidt has some prankster in him too, as well as a wicked sense of humor, which emerges in his official bio, where he calls himself a “Playwright, Performer, Director, Producer, Genius,” lists the many rejections his plays have received from “some of the most and least venerable theater companies in America,” and explains that “none of Mr. Schmidt’s work has been made possible, in part or in whole, by the generous support of the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, or the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, or of any corporate foundation or charitable institution, though it’s not for lack of trying.”

As Bonami posits about Cattelan, “It doesn’t matter, just as long as you enjoy it, that’s enough.” For one thoroughly enjoyable evening in a Lower East Side gallery, it was enough to believe in Edward O’Connell, to believe in Ed Schmidt, and just maybe to believe in oneself.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

TAKING CARE: DIVERSION IS NO MERE DIVERSION

Mike (Connor Wilson) and Mandy (West Duchovny) form a bond in Scott Organ’s Diversion (photo by Edward T. Morris)

DIVERSION
The Barrow Group Performing Arts Center
520 Eighth Ave. between Thirty-Sixth & Thirty-Seventh Sts., ninth floor
Tuesday- Sunday through January 11, $49
www.barrowgroup.org

“If you’re gonna take care of people, you have to take care of yourself first,” Emilia (Tricia Alexandro) tells Mandy (West Duchovny) in Scott Organ’s potent Diversion, one of the best plays of 2025. It’s a maxim that rings true both on- and offstage.

The show unfolds at the Barrow Group Performing Arts Center, on the ninth floor of the modernized hundred-year-old high-rise office tower at 520 Eighth Ave., where ticket holders have to display their ID and have their picture taken at the front desk, not that different from entering a hospital these days. Once upstairs, some audience members have to walk right through Edward T. Morris’s intimate set, a nurses’ break room at a hospital’s ICU, in order to get to their seats, adding to the immersive feel of the powerful narrative.

It’s the holiday season, shortly after Thanksgiving, and the nurses’ manager, Bess (Thaïs Bass-Moore), announces to her staff that someone has been stealing, or “diverting,” Oxycontin and fentanyl patches; an investigator named Josephine Holden (Colleen Clinton) has been sent by the feared Fortune Consultants to uncover the perpetrator. A former nurse herself — a fact she uses to try to gain the nurses’ trust — Jo is an unwelcome intruder in their private space, where they take much-needed respite from treating seriously ill patients fighting for their lives in the ICU.

At first, the stern Bess tells her team of four nurses that if it is any one of them, they need to come clean and that if they are an addict, she will make sure to get them help and not notify the police. Bess’s boss, Cunningham, has placed them all under suspicion: the hypercritical Amy (DeAnna Lenhart), a long-established nurse with back pain who is married to a cop; the younger Mike (Connor Wilson), a single father with a special-needs kid; newcomer Mandy, who is living with a sketchy boyfriend; and Emilia, a sterling nurse who ran the triage during the Covid pandemic and whose husband just moved out after they were unable to conceive.

When everyone denies being involved in the thefts, Bess admonishes them: “Look. I gave everyone a chance. A very fair chance. And whoever did this decided instead to tell me and all their peers here to fuck off. And I will accordingly offer them the same respect when I find them out. This is an embarrassment. And I gave you all a chance. And whoever it is didn’t want to deal with me so they can deal with the cops. Cunningham wants a head on a pike. I will deliver that head.”

Amy and Emilia have worked together the longest and are close. When they start looking into who the culprit might be, Emilia says, “You’re my Watson?” Amy replies, “Or perhaps I’m your Holmes.” Meanwhile, Mike and Mandy bond as the probe deepens and New Year’s Eve approaches with Jo determined to get to the bottom of it.

Bess (Thaïs Bass-Moore) turns to Emilia (Tricia Alexandro) to try to solve a mystery in powerful play from the Barrow Group (photo by Edward T. Morris)

Diversion is expertly directed by Seth Barrish (The New One, Death, Let Me Do My Show), getting the most out of the relatively small, confined set, while Organ’s (17 Minutes, Phoenix) dialogue is sharp and on point, with a poetic flow and no wasted words. Solomon Weisbard keeps the lights dim, making the audience feel as if it’s in the room with the nurses, enhanced by Geoff Grimwood’s sound, which incorporates hospital noises into the mix. Gina Ruiz’s blue-scrub costumes are offset by Jo’s wardrobe and a late surprise.

Alexandro (Seven Deadly Sins), Bass-Moore (Any Ordinary Day), Clinton (Muswell Hill), Lenhart (The Fear Project), and Wilson (Stone Don’t Lie) are excellent as believable men and women who have sacrificed some of life’s inherent joys in order to help others, at the risk of personal health and, as Jo notes, “moral injury.” In her off-Broadway debut, Duchovny (the daughter of David Duchovny and Téa Leoni) sparkles as Mandy, a young woman still figuring out who she is and where she belongs. She may not be the smartest of the group — she regularly does not understand certain words or know various aphorisms, telling Emilia in a charmingly hesitant, choppy manner, “You’re like good at quotes” — but she might have the biggest heart. It’s a complex and tender performance that bodes well for her future.

“I will do all in my power to maintain and elevate the standard of my profession,” reads part of the Florence Nightingale Pledge, which is referred to several times in the play and is something all six characters took upon their pinning when they became a nurse. “I will zealously seek to nurse those who are ill wherever they may be and whenever they are in need.” It is an oath they all take seriously and defines why they have chosen that field. “Why did you take this job?” Emilia asks Mandy early on, sarcastically adding, “The vacations? The fact that your schedule is flexible? The fact that there is always work?”

Nurses who are overworked and underappreciated is an age-old dilemma, one that Organ subtly notes by having the clock in the break room stuck at 2:47, as if time doesn’t change anything. (It’s also a reference to how they are essentially on call 24/7.) It takes more than just banging pots and pans and whistling and cheering at seven o’clock to celebrate devoted health-care workers, and Diversion goes a long way in showing that.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

YIDDISH PRECISION: NIGHT STORIES AT THE WILD PROJECT

Shane Baker and Miryem-Khaye Seigel star in four spooky tales by Avrom Sutzkever (photo by Jeffrey Wertz)

NIGHT STORIES: 4 TALES OF REANIMATION BY AVROM SUTZKEVER
the wild project
195 East Third St. between Aves. A & B
Tuesday – Sunday through January 11, $54.22
thewildproject.com
www.congressforjewishculture.org

The wonderful duo of Shane Baker and Miryem-Khaye Seigel have again teamed up with directors Moshe Yassur and Beate Hein Bennett, this time for Night Stories: Four Tales of Animation, a quartet of short works by Smorgon-born Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever, a leader of the Jewish Resistance and a Vilna ghetto survivor who wrote and spoke often about the Holocaust; the play is a follow-up to last December’s Bashevis’s Demons, which dramatized three Yiddish tales by Nobel Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer and was also produced by the Congress for Jewish Culture.

Running at the wild project through January 11, the sixty-five-minute Night Stories features supernatural fantasies that are reminiscent of The Twilight Zone and Night Gallery but lack the final twist; in fact, the audience couldn’t tell when several of them had concluded. In addition, although each is told poetically amid an appropriately ominous atmosphere, unfortunate choices about the space can interfere with sight lines, resulting in the opening setting me off course from the start.

In the brief “A Child’s Hands,” Baker and Seigel stand at opposite sides at the front of the stage, emotionless as they perform the text in Yiddish. However, from my seat, Baker was blocking part of the supertitles, which are projected at the top back, behind him and Seigel. I had to shift quickly to the right and left to read the translation but even then could make out only some of it. The woman in front of me actually got up and changed her seat in the first row so she could see the words, adding to the distraction. Thus, it was hard to concentrate on what appeared to be an intense story about handprints on the frosty window of a cellar that holds a horse’s head and scraps from a women’s prayerbook.

“Lupus” is a solo piece in which Baker portrays a writer fed up with the spread of electricity, preferring to stay safely inside his apartment with his trusted old lantern. “Electricity is electric wires, electric chair. Maybe tomorrow they’ll make an electric bed, electric bride and groom, and electric children will be born. Or die,” he mutters to himself. “But the old lantern is like another living being. It’s my first appraiser. By night I read it my creations and according to the lantern’s expressive flame, I understand clearly which pieces can go to hell and which — to heaven.” He is soon joined by an orphaned shadow that he has resurrected, like his own Frankenstein’s monster, except this one, a former cyanide dealer called Lupus, wants him to “unalive” him. Instead, the writer reads from his manuscript, explaining, “I have a good memory because I’m not strong enough to forget.” Baker sits at a small table stage left, next to a divider onto which his shadow becomes Lupus. Although Baker does a good job using his voice to differentiate between the two characters, and Cameron Darwin Bossert’s lighting maintains the haunting feeling, the supertitles do not delineate who is saying which lines, so it’s often difficult to know who is speaking. And then the audience didn’t know it was over until the furniture began being rearranged.

In “There Where the Stars Spend the Night,” a man in a hat and suspenders (Baker), sitting on a park bench with his composition notebook, is joined by a woman (Seigel) who thinks he is the dead Volodya. “A miracle! How can you be alive, when your soul is no longer within you?” she declares. Deciding to go along with it, he responds, “I’ve been alive since I was born, maybe longer. And no one ever suggested such a divorce. True, I’ve never seen my soul, but I can swear it’s buried inside me safely and no sophisticated soul-thief has stolen it.” It’s an engaging exchange that also feels like more is to come.

The evening finishes with “Portrait in Blue Sweater,” about a writer who proudly wears the sweater his mother made him for Chanukah while he describes his friendship with real-life Vilna painter Chaim Urison. “A quiet type, his minimal speech was a pale imitation of his silence,” the writer says about the artist. “But his painting was eloquent, with an authenticity that shone out from underneath the colors, as if they were overpainted. Like clouds overpaint the sunset before a storm.” Evil spirits, souls, and a duel to the death are discussed until an image puts an exclamation point on it all.

Baker once again proves that he is a gem of Yiddish theater, as he has in such previous shows as God of Vengeance, Tevye Served Raw, and Waiting for Godot. There’s an elegant grace to the way he performs in Yiddish, a celebration of the language and its unique poetry, and he has a fine accomplice in Seigel, who is also a successful Yiddish singer-songwriter and music and culture scholar.

A program note points out, “The stories you will witness require your full sensory attention.” It also quotes Yiddish literature expert Professor Ruth R. Wisse, who writes in her introduction to the 1989 Sutzkever collection Prophecy of the Inner Eye, “For Sutzkever everything hangs on the precision of each Yiddish word. It is the supreme validation of reality and of his authentic powers as its prophet.” In addition to the problem I had following the English surtitles of “A Child’s Hands,” there were some dropped props and a few other minor distractions that impacted my overall enjoyment of the show, but I’m glad I saw it, and I will keep on going to anything Baker is involved with as he continues to resurrect the glory of Yiddish theater.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

HOW ABOUT A NICE GAME OF CHESS? GLITZY REVIVAL MAKES DAZZLING NEW MOVES

Bryce Pinkham leads a supercharged ensemble in Chess Broadway revival (photo by Matthew Murphy)

CHESS: A COLD WAR MUSICAL
Imperial Theatre
249 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through May 3, $74-$571
chessbroadway.com

There are practically as many versions of the musical Chess as there are opening gambits in the fifteen-hundred-year-old game of intense strategy and mental acuity. With an original book by Tim Rice, music by ABBA’s Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, and lyrics by Rice and Ulvaeus, the show has gone through multiple adaptations since the release of the concept album in 1984, from concert versions to music videos to full theatrical presentations in the West End in 1986, on Broadway in 1988, and around the world, attracting major directors (Trevor Nunn, Des McAnuff, Jim Sharman, Rob Marshall) and actors (Josh Groban, Judy Kuhn, Raúl Esparza, Carolee Carmello), featuring significantly changed books (by Richard Nelson, Robert Coe, and Rice himself, several times) involving song swaps and deletions and major plot alterations, often due to shifting world politics, primarily between Russia/the Soviet Union and the United States.

The current Broadway production, scheduled to continue through May 3 at the Imperial Theatre, where it’s breaking house box-office records, is the first iteration I’ve seen, and I found it to be a ton more exciting than watching, well, a chess match. Tony-winning director Michael Mayer (Spring Awakening, American Idiot) has teamed up with Emmy-winning film and television writer, actor, and director Danny Strong, making his Broadway debut, to reimagine the show, and it’s a major triumph filled with clever and insightful moves, despite occasionally delving into soapy melodrama, while not overplaying the cold war connections between the 1980s and today.

“Nineteen seventy-nine. The entire world is on high alert, trapped in a never ending confrontation between two opposing ideologies: communism and democracy,” the Arbiter (Bryce Pinkham), a kind of narrator and referee who oversees the proceedings, announces at the start. The ensemble belts out, “No one can deny that these are difficult times,” and the Arbiter responds, “It’s the US vs. USSR / Yet we more or less are / To our credit putting all that aside / We have swallowed our pride. . . . / No one’s way of life is threatened / by a flop.” The ensemble adds, “But we’re gonna smash their bastard / Make him wanna change his name / Take him to the cleaners and devastate him / Wipe him out, humiliate him / We don’t want the whole world saying / ‘They can’t even win a game!’ We have never reckoned on coming in second / There’s no use in losin’.”

Just in case you’re not already considering how the plot aligns with the foreign policy of President Donald Trump compared to that of Ronald Reagan, who was commander-in-chief when the show was written, the American chess master is named Freddie Trumper (Aaron Tveit), who is in love with his second, the beautiful theoretician Florence Vassy (Lea Michele). They are preparing for a major match against the brilliant Anatoly Sergievsky (Nicholas Christopher), whose handler is the devious Alexander Molokov (Bradley Dean). Molokov is quick to remind Anatoly what happened to the previous Soviet champion who lost to an American, but Anatoly tells him, “I do not fear sharing the same fate as Boris Ivanovich. The State cannot execute a man that is already dead.” But Molokov is relentless in his defense of his country, later using Anatoly’s estranged wife, Svetlana (Hannah Cruz), against him.

As the players travel to Merano, Stockholm, and, most famously, Thailand, where they spend a memorable night in Bangkok, relationships come together and fall apart, loyalty is tested, and the SALT II treaty is hotly debated as the KGB and the CIA fight to assert their prominence, with the game of chess as its centerpiece.

Freddie Trumper (Aaron Tveit) and Florence Vassy (Lea Michele) have a complicated personal and professional relationship in Chess (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Inspired in part by the famous 1972 world championship between American Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky of the Soviet Union held in Reykjavík, Iceland, which was seen as a microcosm of the ongoing battle between the US and the USSR, Chess is a thrilling evening of theater, highlighted by Pinkham (A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder, Ohio State Murders), who serves as an engaging ringleader to the proceedings, addressing the audience directly and including playful contemporary references. He is often accompanied by a terrifically talented ensemble performing Lorin Latarro’s dazzling choreography; the singers and dancers are like a glorious symphony that makes you instantly forget the book’s occasional meanderings and messiness.

The orchestra is spread across David Rockwell’s glittering multilevel set, which boasts columns of chess pieces and live and archival video footage by Peter Nigrini. The costumes, by Tom Broecker, glitter as well, particularly for the ensemble, with flashy lighting by Kevin Adams and blasting sound by John Shivers.

Yes, there are too many songs, Freddie’s transition to being an announcer is annoying, the love triangle is messy, the politics are oversimplified, and the ballads are histrionic, but Mayer and Strong keep the actual chess to a minimum, and every time the show threatens to give in to the lowest common denominator, Pinkham and the ensemble swoop in to rescue it as the endgame approaches.

This Chess is certainly no flop.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

LAST CHANCE: SIX MISS AND DON’T-MISS SHOWS CLOSING THIS WEEKEND

Laurie Metcalf can’t believe another Broadway show she’s in is closing early (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

LITTLE BEAR RIDGE ROAD
Booth Theatre
222 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 21, $74–$206
littlebearridgeroad.com

For me, the biggest disappointment of the year in theater is the early closing of Samuel D. Hunter’s sensational Little Bear Ridge Road. Originally scheduled to run until February 14, it is instead closing December 21, after opening on October 30 to a bevy of rave reviews. The play is a gripping ninety-five minutes of nonstop tension, brilliantly directed by two-time Tony winner Joe Mantello on Scott Pask’s beautifully minimalist set. On a couch on a round, carpeted platform, Sarah (Laurie Metcalf) and her nephew, Ethan (Micah Stock), spend a lot of time watching TV and complaining about their lives following the passing of Sarah’s brother, Ethan’s estranged father, a drug addict who died a miserable death. It’s a fabulous Broadway debut for Hunter, whose previous superb works include A Bright New Boise, The Whale, Lewiston/Clarkston, Greater Clements, A Case for the Existence of God, and Grangeville. I apologize for all the superlatives, but each one is well deserved.

Perhaps it’s what I’ve just dubbed the Metcalf curse.

Despite having earned four Emmys (out of twelve nominations), two Tonys (out of six nominations), and an Oscar nod, Metcalf has been in several shows that have shut their doors early, although not because of her performance. For every success like Three Tall Women and A Doll’s House, Part 2, there’s Hillary and Clinton, Grey House, The Other Place, and the aptly titled Misery.

In Little Bear Ridge Road, Metcalf plays Sarah, a nurse and loner who seems to be mad at the world, ripping off such one-liners as “Just because it’s so complicated that you have to watch an episode recap every week doesn’t mean it’s better,” “Why are you still here?!,” and “All this time you’ve thought I had an issue with you being gay? That’s the most interesting thing about you.” Ethan is a wannabe writer who is deeply uncomfortable in his own skin and exploring a potential relationship with an astrophysicist named James (John Drea) he met online. The narrative takes place between 2020 and 2022, and the pandemic plays a key role in how characters interact with each other, whether out at a bar or sitting home watching television, especially Extraterrestrial. Heather Gilbert’s intimate lighting is exceptional, making the audience feel like it’s on the couch, hanging out with Sarah, Ethan, and James.

Talking about the Orion constellation, James tells Ethan, “Okay, so — all three stars in the belt look like they’re in a line, but they’re actually spread out over about eight hundred light years. The closest is like twelve hundred light years away and the farthest is like two thousand.” It’s a clever metaphor that relates to how far away people can be even when they’re right next to each other — or conversing online. It’s both hilarious and meaningful when Sarah thinks she is texting Kenny, a handyman who is helping them with Ethan’s father’s house, but instead finds that she has accidentally FaceTimed him.

Hunter, who wrote the play specifically for Metcalf’s return to Chicago’s Steppenwolf company after a fourteen-year absence, brings it all together in a poignant finale that incorporates so many major and minor details and what seemed to be asides but then form a cohesive and thought-provoking whole, like a musical composition without a note out of place.

So why is it closing so early?

If I knew that, I’d be a producer.

James Corden, Neil Patrick Harris, and Bobby Cannavale star as three friends reaching a crisis point in Art (photo by Matthew Murphy)

ART
Music Box Theatre
239 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 21, $136.10 – $371.10
artonbroadway.com

One of my favorite theatrical moments of 2025 occurred at the end of the matinee of Art I attended. As the curtain closed, James Corden gave a little hop, skip, and jump, grabbing onto the shoulders of his two costars, Bobby Cannavale and Neil Patrick Harris, as a wide, childlike smile broke out across his face. It was one of the most happy-making things I’d seen all year.

It made the whole experience that much more enjoyable, helping me forget some of the holes in what is a pleasurable if not nearly as deep as it wants to be show. What are these men doing in Paris? Were they ever really close friends? Can Marc (Cannavale) and Serge (Harris) just leave poor Yvan (Corden) alone already?

When the audience enters the Music Box Theatre, they are greeted by a framed white rectangle on the red curtain, not only representing the white painting that Serge has paid three hundred thousand dollars for, but also the blank slate we all come into the world with, onto which we project our personal likes and dislikes, including how we appreciate, or don’t, art itself. When the play is over, some will have loved it, some will have despised it, and other, perhaps most, will find themselves in between. Friends will defend their views, just as Serge defends his purchase to Marc, who is insulted that Serge spent so much money on a white canvas, while Yvan is caught in the middle.

After Marc calls the painting “shit,” Serge tells the audience, “He doesn’t like the painting. Fine . . . But there was no warmth in the way he reacted. No attempt. No warmth when he dismissed it without a thought. Just that vile pretentious laugh. A real know it all laugh. I hated that laugh.”

Marc decides to get Yvan’s opinion, explaining, “Yvan’s a very tolerant guy, which of course, when it comes to relationships, is the worst thing you can be. Yvan’s tolerant because he couldn’t care less. If Yvan tolerates the fact that Serge has spent three hundred grand on some piece of white shit, it means he couldn’t care less about Serge. Obviously.”

Are we nothing more than our thoughts about art — or, for that matter, politics or other loaded subjects? Can each one of us see a white painting differently without casting aspersions?

Art was written in French by Yasmina Reza and premiered at Comédie des Champs-Élysées in Paris in 1994. Christopher Hampton’s English translation debuted in London two years later, with Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay, and Ken Stott, and made it to Broadway in 1999 with Alan Alda, Victor Garber, and Alfred Molina. It’s a star-driven vehicle, so director Scott Ellis gives each actor the chance to shine, and Cannavale, Harris, and Corden chew up the scenery with glee, especially Corden, whose Yvan is a kind of everyman not wanting to fight with his besties, more concerned about his impending wedding, which has reached the crisis-level planning stage. When Marc asks Yvan if he would be happy if Serge gave the painting to him and his bride as a present, he says to the audience, “Of course it doesn’t make me happy. It doesn’t make me happy, but, generally speaking, I’m not the sort of person who can say I’m happy, just like that. . . . You’re either happy or you’re not happy, what’s why wouldn’t I be got to do with it?”

Exactly.

A senior retirement community is clouded with an air of mystery in Everything Is Here (photo by Mari Eimas-Dietrich)

EVERYTHING IS HERE
59E59 Theaters
59 East 59th St. between Park & Madison Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through December 20, $75.50
www.59e59.org

One of my favorite plays of 2023 was Annie Baker’s Infinite Life, which takes place at a Northern California clinic that treats chronic pain sufferers, mainly women.

One of my favorite plays of 2025 was Talking Band’s Triplicity, an experimental work about the interconnected, overlapping lives of four strangers in New York City.

Peggy Stafford’s Everything Is Here is a charming and gentle tale that is like Talking Band’s version of Infinite Life.

Bev (Jan Leslie Harding), Janice (Mia Katigbak), and Bonnie (Petronia Paley) live at a senior community retirement facility, where they participate in programs, sit around and discuss personal issues, and are taken care of by a young nurse named Nikki (Susannah Millonzi). The play begins with Grant (Pete Simpson), who runs several of the programs, asking the women to lie down on the floor and follow his instructions:

“There are these huge old trees that you don’t even know how old they really are / Maybe they’re ancient? / You’re not sure but this thought crosses your mind: ANCIENT TREES,” he says. “You stop dead in your tracks / Stop right now / Everybody stop / Don’t move / Okay, good / Something is gone that should be there / And it was there / In your pocket and now it’s not.” The audience falls under his spell as well.

For the next eighty minutes, the characters converse about dogs and cats, Salisbury steak, the large garden gnome just outside the window, Middle Earth, assisted suicide, and trust. They feed the fish, worry about a dangerous tree branch that could fall at any moment, and help Grant audition for a local production of A Streetcar Named Desire. (The curiously comforting set is by Richard Hoover.)

We soon learn that Bev is considering leaving, Janice is a kleptomaniac, Bonnie is a fine Blanche DuBois, and Nikki and Grant take a liking to each other.

But at the center of it all is a constant feeling of loss, of something that’s missing, physically, emotionally, and psychologically, with a hovering sense of impending doom.

Everything Is Here is worth seeing for the excellent cast alone, a joy to behold, whether they’re arguing, getting their vital signs checked, or dancing in their chairs to Lisa Fagan’s minimalist choreography. (Note: Simpson and Katigbak were in Infinite Life, and Simpson and Millonzi were in Berlindia!, which also used a goldfish tank as a metaphor, so the closeness of the actors is palpable.) Finn (The Invention of Tragedy, Doomocracy) adds just the right touches, and Stafford (Motel Cherry, 16 Words or Less with Katigbak) maintains a level of mystery around the proceedings, providing no easy answers in her abstract narrative.

On the way out, don’t be surprised if you reach into your pockets, wondering if something is missing, if everything is where it’s supposed to be.

Archduke takes some playful liberties with famous assassination (photo by Joan Marcus)

ARCHDUKE
Roundabout at Laura Pels Theatre
Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre
111 West 46th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 21, $69-$102
www.roundabouttheatre.org

On June 28, 1914, nineteen-year-old Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, which led directly to the start of WWI. Pulitzer Prize finalist and Obie winner Rajiv Joseph, who has written such complex and intriguing shows as Gruesome Playground Injuries, Describe the Night, and Dakar 2000, imagines the events leading up to that fateful day in Archduke, a delicious, if slight, dark comedy.

The assassination plot is orchestrated by Dragutin “Apis” Dimitrijevic (a scenery-gobbling Patrick Page), a real-life Serbian military officer and cofounder of the Black Hand, a secret society dedicated to “Unification or Death.” With the help of a doctor, Apis convinces three young men, Gavrilo (Jake Berne), Trifko (Adrien Rolet), and Nedeljko (Jason Sanchez), that they have tuberculosis and should accomplish one last heroic deed before they die: murder the archduke.

“I never had no meaning. Not in my life. Never had it. Never will have it,” Nedeljko says to Gavrilo. “I wasted my life.” But given a new sense of purpose, the three men go to Apis’s resplendent home, highlighted by a huge wall map of Eastern Europe, are served by Apis’s dotty housekeeper, Sladjana (Kristine Nielsen), and plan the attack.

Joseph and Tony- and Obie-winning director Darko Tresnjak mix in a little of the Three Stooges’ You Nazty Spy! here, a touch of Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator there, along with a dash of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. At just over two hours with an intermission, Archduke is too long, and some of the slapstick grows repetitive and falls flat, such as Sladjana’s efforts to find Apis’s “special box.” It probably would have benefited from being streamlined to a tighter ninety minutes.

That said, it’s still an enjoyable take on an international tragedy with far-reaching ramifications while also commenting on disaffected, angry, aimless young men and political violence, no laughing matter in the United States today.

“Cats do not lay eggs,” Apis says at one point. “Never let anyone ever tell you that they do.”

Yes, the Habsburg hegemony can be funny.

Oklahoma Samovar shares the story of five generations of a Jewish family in America (photo by Marina Levitskaya-Khaldey)

OKLAHOMA SAMOVAR
The Downstairs at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club
66 East Fourth St. between Second Ave. & Bowery
Thursday – Sunday through December 21, $25-300
www.lamama.org

Prior to seeing Oklahoma Samovar at La Mama, all I knew about Jews in the American West I learned from Blazing Saddles and The Frisco Kid, two comedies starring Gene Wilder that feature a bit of Yiddish. In 1987, award-winning author, teacher, and playwright Alice Eve Cohen met her eighty-seven-year-old great-aunt Sylvia, who shared with Cohen her family’s remarkable history fleeing from persecution in Latvia and starting a farm during the 1889 Oklahoma Land Run, the only Jews to do so. Cohen has been working on the play, which won the 2021 National Jewish Playwriting Contest, since 1987, and it is now making its world premiere at La MaMa through December 21.

Directed by Eric Nightengale, the play begins in 1987, when twenty-one-year-old Emily travels from Brooklyn to an Oklahoma farm where Sylvia lives, bringing with her an urn with her mother’s ashes. She also has a tape recorder to document Sylvia’s answers to her many questions, most importantly: Why did her mother want her ashes spread over the farm, which Emily knew nothing about? Sylvia shares her story as the play goes back and forth between eras and several actors switch among multiple roles: Nadia Diamond is Emily and Rose, her maternal great-grandmother; Seren Kaiser is Clara, Emily’s mother as a little girl; Sahar Lev-Shomer is Jake, Rose and Sylvia’s pioneer father; Alex J. Gould is Ben, Rose’s husband, and Max, Jake’s best friend; Sarah Chalfie is Hattie, Rose and Sylvia’s mother, and Maxine, Ben’s gallivanting, bisexual sister; and the scene-stealing Joyce Cohen is Sylvia at ages four, fourteen, forty-five, and eighty-seven as well as some minor characters.

The narrative follows Jake as he emigrates from Latvia to New York to avoid fighting in the Russian army; meets Max, who helps him find a job; is joined by his fiancée, Hattie, who is not keen on moving to Chandler, Oklahoma, where there is no synagogue and no other Jews; and begins raising a family. Emily is initially tight on time; like Hattie, Chandler is not at first her cup of tea — she believes that Sylvia is living on stolen land — but she soon becomes enthralled with learning about her ancestors. At the center of it all is a Russian samovar that Hattie brought from the old country.

“Look at this samovar. It’s the family heirloom,” Sylvia tells Emily, continuing, “Mom and I were starting to – we were just beginning to make a connection, and — suddenly she’s gone. She wanted me to come here with her ashes, and I have to know I’m doing the right thing. Sylvia, you’ve told me stories, but not what I need to know. Could you fast-forward a few decades?” Sylvia cautions, “You’re in a big rush. Try switching from coffee to tea, might help ya slow down.”

The first act sets everything up well, but the second act slows it all down. Characters and relationships get confusing, the set changes involving colored windows/walls feel extraneous, and standard melodrama takes over. It probably would have worked much better as a streamlined ninety-minute one-act.

There are lovely, touching moments throughout and creative staging, but it tries too hard to be an epic while raising all-too-relevant issues such as immigration, assimilation, and bigotry. “There’s no antisemitism in Chandler,” Rose asserts. Ben replies, “Where there are Jews, there is antisemitism.” It ends up being not quite enough to sustain its length, although it’s nearly worth it just to watch the wonderful Cohen, who is endearing as Sylvia.

Even Kristin Chenoweth can’t save The Queen of Versailles from getting high on its own supply (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

THE QUEEN OF VERSAILLES
St. James Theatre
246 West Forty-Fourth St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 21, $88.48-$441.28
queenofversaillesmusical.com

It’s never fun writing a review for a show that is closing early; it’s sort of like that old saying, Don’t speak ill of the dead.

When I went to the St. James Theatre to see The Queen of Versailles, a musical based on the hit documentary, I was fully prepared to find something to like about it despite all the negative chatter that was circulating. And indeed, I thoroughly enjoyed the first scene, which takes place in Paris in 1661, as Louis XIV (Pablo David Laucerica) is getting ready to move to his new home in Versailles.

“I am the king, Louis Quatorze / My life is shinier than yours / In fact, I am the living proof / That life is quite unfair / I am the Sun King, like Apollo, / But with better hair,” Louis sings in an extravagantly decorated room. “And now that I am twenty-three / And fin’lly firmly in command / To celebrate the glory that is I, / I want to build a palace / Splendiferous and grand, / The grandest palace ever to be seen in any land, / In a little country village called Versailles!”

I also was all in on the second scene, with the action moving to Florida in 2006, where Jackie Siegel (Kristin Chenoweth) is overseeing the construction of her own Versailles with her fabulously wealthy, much older husband, David (F. Murray Abraham).

“We didn’t know we would need / The biggest home in America / That was never part of our plan,” Jackie sings. “But ev’ryone has needs to be filled, / Add ’em all up and we’ve got to build / The biggest home in America, / Because we can.”

After that, well, I just couldn’t.

Jackie and David live with Jackie’s daughter, the cynical Victoria (Nina White), and are soon joined by Victoria’s cousin, Jonquil Peed (Tatum Grace Hopkins). Also hovering around are Gary (Greg Hildreth), David’s business associate, and Sofia Flores (Melody Butiu), the Siegels’ nanny. The story devolves quickly into tawdry melodrama, along with clunky staging and less-than-compelling musical numbers. The book, which refuses to decide whether Jackie is a strong woman, a greedy socialite, or a misunderstood wife and mother, is by Olivier nominee Lindsey Ferrentino, the director is Tony winner Michael Arden, and the music and lyrics are by Oscar winner Stephen Schwartz, all of whom should have known better.

Tony and Emmy winner Chenoweth powers through the one hundred and fifty minutes with grit and determination — and, of course, fanciful costumes (by Christian Cowan) — and it’s always a treat to see the now-eighty-six-year-old Abraham, even if it turns out that he’s not exactly a song-and-dance man. But it’s impossible to care about anything that happens on Tony winner Dane Laffrey’s often elegant set (but the less said about his video projections, the better) or about any of the characters, particularly Jackie herself.

In a script note, Ferrentino explains, “The Queen of Versailles is the story of one family that reflects an entire country — a modern fable about the American Dream and what it has become in contemporary America. Our main character does what America teaches: work harder, want bigger, never stop. Her unfinished palace becomes a mirror to a culture that mistakes accumulation for meaning. Jackie is as complicated as the nation that created her.”

Not quite, especially as the country is mired in another economic crisis propelled by the growing wealth gap between the 1% and everyone else.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]