See This, Not That – 3/21-3/23
The politics of America’s past are litigated in two separate and very different plays running in New York City right now.
Branden Jenkins-Jacobs’ Appropriate at the Signature Theatre is a raucous, bold drama in which family secrets, entangled with historical tragedies, slowly ooze from the crumbling walls of the family’s estate on a former Arkansas plantation.
All The Way, starring Bryan Cranston, traces the first year of Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency from immediately after the assassination of President Kennedy through the passage of the Civil Rights Act to the elections of 1964.
All The Way‘s got celebrities and $200 tickets but Appropriate is our pick. It is haunting, moving, and full of surprises. Tickets are $25 and it only runs through March 30th.
Sports fans, from martial arts to baseball and football to boxing, have had a great season at the theater. Currently, you can catch either the legendary Houston Oilers coach Bum Phillips on stage at La MaMa in Bum Phillips All-American Opera or a musical adaption of the legendary movie Rocky.
But for the final bout in the last 15 minutes of Rocky, the show is boring and bland, yet, tickets are expensive. Bum Phillips, however, is colorful, funny, entirely original, and tickets are $25.
Existential angst has never been more popular on New York City’s stages. In Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land, starring Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen, you can see two men locked in a fancy London house. In Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit, at the Pearl Theatre, you can see three dead people locked in what seems to be a hotel lobby.
These philosophical plays are not for everyone but if you’re in the mood for an intellectual night out, No Exit, a play about three people in hell is resonant and poignant. It doesn’t appear on stage often and this well-made production is a great opportunity to see it live.