New Theatrical Musings
You’ll often find the best New York theatre when you wander away from Broadway.
Broadway designates its “off” cousins by seat quantity, so it’s really just a roundabout way of saying how much your production cost to put together. Shows in Broadway theatres have taken years to produce and have a lot at stake financially. It’s rare that a show can be written and staged within months of its inception.
Consequently, plots on Broadway can feel a little behind the times. Any timely jokes or themes are subject to the whims of the trend cycle. If you want to understand how playwrights, actors, and theatre-makers are responding to current issues, you have to go to the smaller theaters presenting new work.
This is the mission of Bluebird Theatre Company and their recent night of one-acts: 3, 2, 1! Three 2-Hander 1-Acts (performed November 11–12 at the Producers Club in New York City). Each play ran for about 20 minutes, and all were new works.
The first play in the collection was Duo (written and directed by Isaiah Stavchansky). We get to spy on the first date of a couple who have connected through the application-only dating app The Lox Club. Uri gets the ball rolling by failing to beat around the bush with his date, Rosie.
Rosie responds to Uri’s openness in kind. Her monologue about everything she wants out of a partner is both entirely inappropriate and perfectly calibrated to the character’s nervous energy. Uri reveals his own anxieties that make Rosie soften to him. Their odd couple pairing ends on a hopeful note. The actors successfully lead Rosie and Uri on the journey from strangers to potential partners.
The mismatched-character theme continued in the next one-act, Suffering Succotash (written by Jake Fallon and directed by Eka Kukhianidze). Two characters with an unlikely connection process their feelings with dueling monologues.
At first, the gap between Tara, the woman processing her grief over her father’s recent death, and Kane, the thrift store hype-influencer, seems too large to reconcile. They have a connection because Tara donates old shirts to Goodwill and Kane picks them up with intention of selling them, but the joy is in watching these two hard-headed characters come to grips with major difficulties.
Both actors commit entirely to their worldviews and hold the attention of the audience through their excellent monologues. The dissonance between them fades when you realize the streak of stubborn energy they’re each trying to overcome. When Tara and Kane finally intersect, their interaction is healing in the way that only kindness from a stranger can be.
The last piece was Ty and Ava (written by Megan Medley and directed by Lauren Montes). Ty meets Ava while Ava is looking to buy a couch and quickly inserts themself into Ava’s life.
Ty is nonbinary, which causes Ava to question her sexuality because she is attracted to Ty. Both actors are appealing in their roles and the attraction between them reads as very genuine. However, the writing of the show doesn’t gel particularly well. Ty’s actions feel like they were written to be self-consciously weird, as opposed to those of a real person. It was also an odd choice of play because it disrupted the balance: the first two shows were about two distinct types of odd couples, but the third show mirrored the first (in that it was the beginning of a romantic relationship) a little too closely in terms of plot. I would have expected a different type of odd couple to end the selection. It’s a slightly disappointing end to a well-performed night of theatre.
My qualms with the final play aside, I was truly engaged throughout the one-acts and I think the actors were uniformly excellent. The directors also worked well with the stage space, keeping the actors in dynamic stage pictures so it never felt like a basic scene study. Suffering Succotash stands out in this respect because it was trading off between monologues, but as an audience member I never felt a lull. The dialogue in Duo and Ty and Ava was also made more exciting by the actors’ physical embodiments.
Overall, the night was an impressive array of acting and writing talent. Choosing to see a night of new theatre, instead of the overpriced tourist attractions, usually leads to an excellent night of artistic engagement.
