Disco Pigs by Enda Walsh
Directed by John Haidar
Irish Repertory Theatre
Closes 4 March 2018 – Tickets here.

The original production appeared twenty years ago at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, yet  the script remains bracing and contemporary. Evanna Lynch and Colin Campbell bring a fervid chemistry to create a jarring blend of dread and nostalgia. They play Cork natives “Pig” and “Runt” (Darren and Sinéad to their parents), two lifelong friends born in adjacent cribs on the same day, celebrating their shared 17th birthday with a violent and strangely wistful Bacchanal. Communicating in a shared pidgin speech, they convey the unmistakable sense of an ending, their intense friendship doomed to fade or burn out with the pressures of impending adulthood.

This isn’t a show for everybody. It’s surreal and impressionistic, relying on narration from Pig and Runt to set scenes and account for other characters (it’s only a two-person cast). But the use of ambient sound and furious pacing give this show a rarely matched emotional rawness firmly rooted in the physicality of live theater.

Hangmen by Martin McDonagh
Directed by Matthew Dunster
Atlantic Theater Co.
Closes 25 March 2018 – Tickets here.

The Irish playwright, screenwriter, and film director Martin McDonagh’s return to the stage is a masterpiece.

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This post was published in my newsletter on 4 October 2016 – archived here

Aubergine, Playwrights Horizons
Run: 20 August 2016 to 2 October 2016
Attended: 29 September 2016
Playwright: Julia Cho
Director: Kate Whoriskey

Sick and dying parents are nothing new on stage.

It’s impossible to imagine the Eugene O’Neill oeuvre without the constant specter of decaying parents seized with depression and chemical dependence. Tracy Letts won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for August: Osage County built around a mother’s prescription pill addiction. In June of this year, The New York Times reviewed LCT3’s War under the headline “Review: ‘War’: A Deathbed Drama about Identity by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins.”

And now there is Julia Cho’s Aubergine. Fresh from a February premiere at Berkeley Rep, is another deathbed drama about identity. Where War used a matriarch’s death as a flash-point for sibling squabbles and recriminations, Aubergine strips the point of conflict down to an only child struggling to find comfort as his comatose father approaches death in a hospice bed at center stage.

Aubergine is impeccably cast and staged with a delicate and skillful use of space and motion. Tim Kang is convincing and sympathetic as Ray, a French-trained chef called home to care for his Korean immigrant father. Lucien, a hospice nurse played with easy gravity by Michael Potts, guides Ray through the antiseptic rituals of medically-supervised death. Sue Jean Kim is superb as Ray’s ex-girlfriend Cornelia, a Koreatown waitress. She’s called in to communicate with Ray’s Uncle (Joseph Steven Kang), who struggles with English. His conversations with Cornelia are staged with unobtrusive supertitles and carry some of the play’s most organic, moving moments.

Yet in important instances the play stumbles. Cho elected to begin the work with a monologue from a “foodie,” Diane, a superfluous character completely extraneous to the rest of the show’s action. An unnecessary exchange follows as Ray learns from a hospital worker that his father is ill. Finally it transports to Ray’s father’s dining room, where most of what we have already learned is reiterated in a more cohesive and relevant fashion. Other monologues pepper the show, with mixed success. Characters reminisce on the power of simple, beautiful meals in their memories – meals rooted in time and place, the smells and tastes incantations of old gatherings. This show, too, works best rooted in a time and place, and pulls the audience out with unneeded ingredients.