★★☆☆☆ Raul Esparza comes back to the New York Stage as the title figure in John Doyle’s Neo-Brechtian(?) production.
Off-Broadway
The Other Josh Cohen: A Lovable Loser’s Valentine
★★★★☆ David Rossmer and Steve Rosen’s musical is as sweet as a bag of half-price Kit Kats
The Other Josh Cohen: See a Loser Be a Winner By Doing the Right Thing
★★★★☆ A schlub loses everything but later gains true love in a little, New York-y musical
Thom Pain (based on nothing): Life, the Art of the Possible
★★★★☆ Will Eno’s early one-man play is revived, its brutality and beauty intact
Thom Pain (based on nothing): Some Existential Rambles With Michael C. Hall
★★★★☆ Signature Theatre smartly revives Will Eno’s significantly meandering monodrama
Eve’s Song: Patricia Ione Lloyd’s Tough Look at Racism Today
★★★★☆ A middle-class black family and interloping spirits hold out little hope for today’s race relations
Eve’s Song: How Black Women’s Lives Don’t Always Matter in America
★★★☆☆ The Public Theater premieres the threnody of a blameless woman’s destruction
The Thanksgiving Play: Knocking the Stuffing Out of White Liberal Correctness
★★★☆☆ Playwrights Horizons premieres a satirical comedy that’s tasty but underdone
The Thanksgiving Play: Maybe It Wasn’t All Fun and Maize
★★☆☆☆ This Playwrights Horizons satire amusingly skewers already well-skewered American patriotic pieties
Usual Girls: Aching Just Like A Woman, and Breaking Too
★★★★☆ Ming Peiffer charts the fraught, funny, frightful journey from female adolescence to womanhood in a stirring new play