Brooke Bloom

Queens

November 8, 2025

Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Martyna Majok, who has specialized in plays about the immigrant experience like Ironbound and Sanctuary City, has revised her play Queens first seen at the Claire Tow Theater at LCT3 in 2018. The new version now at Manhattan Theatre Club Stage I at New York City Center still with an all-female cast has three fewer characters and is now in two acts instead of three. However, the play, though still powerful and authentic, continues to be confusing as it goes back and forth between scenes in the borough of Queens in 2017, 2001 and 2011, and with two middle scenes set in the Ukraine in 2016. Mostly taking place in the same basement apartment in New York, at one point women from both 2001 and 2017 are on stage simultaneously. It is all a little bit difficult to keep the chronology straight. [more]

Lucy

February 14, 2023

Writer/director Erica Schmidt's "Lucy" is a play struggling to find a point of view, or perhaps a point of view struggling to find a play. If the latter is true, then that narrative position seems to be "good help is hard to find," which generally only satisfies an audience, at least the "help" part of it, when there's a "My Man Godfrey," or even "Mary Poppins," spin attached. But Schmidt apparently has adopted her position sincerely, with some topical digressions into issues like healthcare coverage and paid sick leave. Or maybe Lucy is just an exceptionally slippery satire, and I failed to grasp its profundity while wondering why the play had to last more than one scene. [more]

Time and the Conways

October 23, 2017

Elizabeth McGovern, Charlotte Parry and Anna Baryshnikov in a scene from J.B.Priestley’s [more]

Everybody

March 3, 2017

The original was aimed at an audience that most certainly was illiterate, so that the clever creators used cartoonish, unsubtle characters who spoke in popular jargon, even spouting profanity, which must have tickled the medieval audiences’ sensibilities and kept them following the actors in their juicy parts. Jacobs-Jenkins follows suit, but with his tongue firmly in his cheek, writing his characters, particularly Stuff (played with a no-nonsense, “from the block” insouciance by Lakisha Michelle May), as immediately recognizable twenty-first century caricatures. When cutie pie child Lilyana Tiare Cornell, playing the character Time, spouts the word “shitty,” the audience at the Diamond Stage giggles nervously. [more]

Cloud Nine

October 23, 2015

What is most remarkable about Caryl Churchill’s time traveling comedy "Cloud Nine" is that this prescient play about sexual politics and repression is now 36 years old, though it could have been written this year. Still a challenging gender-bending play, it asks us how far we think we have come from the Victorians in our attitudes about sex and identity. Set among the British in Africa during the repressed 1879 in Act I and back in England in liberated London in 1979 in Act II, the characters switch roles, genders and ages in the course of the evening. It isn’t obvious until the second half where the play is headed or how brilliant Churchill has been. Cloud Nine (which proves not to be a nirvana for the characters) challenges a great many of our strictly held beliefs about the way the world is or should be. [more]