★★★☆☆ Good acting breathes life into a comedy that unexpectedly turns sorrowful
Off-Broadway
Love, Linda: Stevie Holland Explains Why Mrs. Cole Porter Is So in Love
★★★★☆ Twenty of the great love song purveyor’s greatest hits recalled in a musical autobiography
Renascence: Edna St. Vincent Millay’s First Great Poem, Greatly Staged
★★★★☆ Carmel Dean, Jack Cumming III, Dick Scanlan, Scott celebrate the making of the poet’s prize-winning poem
The Niceties: Inside Ivy Walls, No Room For Empathy
★★☆☆☆ Two women separated by age and race find no common humanity in Eleanor Burgess’s dispiriting new play
Lewiston/Clarkston: A Western Landscape, Majestic and Tragic
★★★★★ Samuel D. Hunter surveys the America we still don’t know well enough in his beautiful, haunting two-part play
Lewiston/Clarkston: Westward Ho! 200 Years Later
★★★★☆ Two separate but thematically related plays by Samuel D. Hunter make for a uniquely special dramatic event
India Pale Ale: Immigrant Punjabi Drama Makes for Pale Ale
★★★☆☆ Jaclyn Backhaus fights back at current domestic policies to mixed but hopeful results
Happy Birthday, Wanda June: Kurt Vonnegut’s First Play Not Happy-Making
★★☆☆☆ The revival takes advantage of the Donald J. Trump environment but not well
School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play: Jubilantly Funny High School Days
★★★★☆ Jocelyn Bioh’s uproarious comedy returns to MCC
Plot Points in Our Sexual Development: In a Queer Relationship, Universality
★★★★☆ A careful, wry look inside a very specific relationship—and at how everyone grows up and figures themselves out