Goings on About Town: THE THEATRE NOW PLAYING

By THE NEW YORKER

Blindness

Illustration by Kate Dehler

Is it time, finally, to once again gather in a dark room and watch a play? Maybe, maybe not. But New Yorkers now have an intriguing option in “Blindness,” beginning previews on April 2, at the Daryl Roth Theatre. Walter Meierjohann’s production, imported from London’s Donmar Warehouse, is an adaptation by Simon Stephens (“Sea Wall/A Life”) of José Saramago’s 1995 novel, about a city thrown into chaos by a mysterious—and highly contagious—epidemic of sudden blindness. Theatregoers, masked and distanced in two-person pods (lone viewers can purchase a whole pod), listen on headphones as they watch the story unfold amid immersive lighting and staging. For tickets and information on safety protocols, which include “enhanced building ventilation technologies,” visit blindnessevent.com.

— Michael Schulman

Franz Kafka’s “Letter to My Father”

Of all the nightmarish cruelties visited on Kafka’s characters, none is realer than the emotional abuse exacted by a domineering patriarch. At thirty-six, Kafka set his filial grievances down in a forty-seven-page typewritten letter. The missive never reached its intended recipient (Kafka’s mother declined to relay it), but it was published forty years after the writer’s death. In M-34’s deliberately bleak and trippy adaptation for the theatre-in-quarantine era, the actor Michael Guagno reads the letter, from what looks like a subterranean storage room in the bowels of some dreary office building, or an alt-right radio personality’s doomsday bunker. The performance, directed by James Rutherford and delivered with perspiring, ruminative intensity, is live-streamed on the gaming platform Twitch, using six cameras positioned at different angles. The interface is complex enough to require an instructional video, which informs viewers that the six live feeds will inevitably desynchronize in the course of the ninety-minute show. Intentional or not, the lag produces a cool effect that, coupled with the dissonant droning of a synthesizer, tips into the delectably creepy.

— David Kortava

Glass Town

Miriam Pultro’s new song cycle imagines the Brontë siblings as members of a rock band—this premise, at least, scores points for not being about Emily Dickinson, who in recent years has become pop culture’s go-to nineteenth-century writer. The project is essentially a concert with a few spoken interstitials, with Pultro herself playing Charlotte Brontë as well as keyboards, the bassist and music director Katrien Van Riel as Emily, the guitarist Eddy Marshall as Branwell, and Emma Claye as Anne. Not that you would know without looking at the credits: characterization is lacking and the lyrics sport a vague emo sensibility rather than a fiery romantic one. Produced by the Tank and the Center at West Park and directed by Daniella Caggiano, “Glass Town,” which is named after an imaginary world dreamed up by the young Brontës, does not do much to reflect the original quartet’s bond, or their literary output.

— Elisabeth Vincentelli

Romeo y Julieta

In the 1997 book “Growing Up Bilingual,” the linguist Ana Celia Zentella observed that Puerto Rican children in New York City code-switched from English to Spanish about once every three minutes in conversations with peers. Some of Zentella’s now grown-up subjects may be among the fans of this bilingual audio rendition of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” presented by the Public Theatre and WNYC Studios. During a live-streamed Q. & A. with some of the cast and creative team, one listener commented that the radio play recalled “a gathering with my Nuyorican family—part Spanish, part English, all Spanglish.” At the risk of alienating monolinguals in both languages, the director Saheem Ali and the playwright Ricardo Pérez González have blended Elizabethan English with Alfredo Michel Modenessi’s modern Spanish translation to create a multicultural mashup that transcends time and space. (“Buenas noches, till it be morrow!”) The stellar cast of twenty-two, including Juan Castano and Lupita Nyong’o in the title roles, inflect the sixteenth-century tragic romance, originally set in Italy, with regional accents from Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala, and elsewhere, against a sonic backdrop of electronic cumbia, Latin jazz, fireworks, sirens, and swordplay.

— David Kortava

The Aran Islands

“And that’s my story”: such is the matter-of-fact ending used by one of the colorful narrators of these tales of magic and murder, told by natives of the desolate, starkly beautiful Aran Islands, off Ireland’s western coast. They were written down, in 1898, by John Millington Synge, a poet, travel writer, playwright (“The Playboy of the Western World”), and founding member of the Abbey Theatre. He had visited the place at the urging of W. B. Yeats, and in his time there, among elemental figures both human and topographical, he found a deep Irish story, imbued with a character equal parts primitive, pagan, and Catholic. Our guide on this wet, rocky, dangerous tour—a streaming production from the Irish Rep—is the fine actor Brendan Conroy, who single-handedly narrates Synge’s tales, embodying the storytellers as well as all the characters. The director, Joe O’Byrne, intercuts film of Conroy performing in a small theatre in Dublin with footage of the Aran Islands. It’s a good, evocative package, though inevitably less intense than an in-person performance would be.

— Ken Marks

The MS Phoenix Rising

The Dane Cruising conglomerate is preparing to resume operations post-COVID with a voyage inspired by Columbus’s expedition to the Bahamas. The onboard entertainment will be an avant-garde production of the Ionesco play “The Chairs.” Surely this will all go swimmingly. Conceived by Trish Harnetiaux (who also wrote the script) and Katie Brook (who also directed), this six-part audio play follows the Dane front office, mockumentary style, as it tries, in various conference calls, to tackle the mounting complications of the ship’s launch. Harnetiaux has a sure comic touch and delivers a zingy satire of both P.R. executives (who belatedly realize that “The Chairs” ends with a double suicide) and visionary theatre directors. Boosted by a terrific cast (even small roles are filled by such experts as André Holland, Estelle Parsons, and Corey Stoll), this production, part of Playwrights Horizons’ “Soundstage” podcast, is among the funniest to emerge from the pandemic.

— Elisabeth Vincentelli