Brits Off Broadway 2019

Square Go

June 16, 2019

Scottish playwrights Kieran Hurley and Gary McNair explore the murky pre-adult domain with candor and humor in "Square Go," an appealing two-hander directed by Finn Den Hertog and featuring two fully adult actors, Daniel Portman and Gavin Jon Wright, portraying—respectively—Max and Stevie, a pair of 13-year-old besties who seem to transform, regularly, into each other’s biggest enemy. There are hilarious moments in the play, but Hurley and McNair don’t treat the characters in a condescending way. [more]

Posting Letters to the Moon

May 21, 2019

The epistolary "Posting Letters to the Moon" may, on the face of it, make one think of A. R. Gurney’s "Love Letters" or Helene Hanff’s "84 Charing Cross Road. "But unlike those two memorable plays, PLTTM as “compiled” by Lucy Fleming, whose mother was the British actress Celia Johnson and whose father Peter Fleming was a travel writer--as well as the older brother of James Bond creator, Ian Fleming--never really tells a story nor conveys what her parents’ relationship was like. [more]

Caroline’s Kitchen

May 11, 2019

In "Caroline’s Kitchen," British playwright Torben Betts ("Invincible," "The Unconquered," "Muswell Hill") has written a state of the nation farce which has no laughs. As the play under the title "Monogamy" has been very successful in England, it is possible that it just too British for American audiences. Similar to the plays of Alan Ayckbourn in dealing with middle-class people confronted with chaos not entirely of their own making, "Caroline’s Kitchen" unfortunately has only unlikable, self-absorbed characters caught up in a series of situations that simply get worse without having us on their side. Don’t blame the actors in this Original Theatre Company and Ghost Light Theatre co-production if Betts’ characters are unsympathetic although that may be his take on the nation at this moment in time. [more]

Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain

April 28, 2019

Likability is in short supply nowadays and the three playwright/performers who created this comedy, based on an actual pamphlet handed to Americans during World War II, have spun the dry, inadvertently funny, official publication into a delightfully involving charmer. (Copies of the actual pamphlet are available in the lobby.) Dan March, James Millard and Matt Sheahan, the actors, along with John Walton, the show’s director and co-author, treat the audience members as the American soldiers on English soil for the first time, totally ignorant of the British customs, language, sports, food, etc. There’s a lot of winking going on to be sure as Lieutenant Schultz (Millard) and Colonel Atwood (March), Americans, and Major Gibbons (Sheahan), an Englishman, share with us everything we wanted to know about Britain but were afraid to ask. [more]