A September Off-Broadway Critic Roundup
Senior Critic Joey Sims has been busy catching up on theatre around town. His latest roundup of productions:
HOUSE OF MCQUEEN
The tasteless opening imagery of new play House of McQueen, at The Mansion at Hudson Yards through November 4, sets the tone for what we’re in for. When we first see legendary fashion designer Alexander McQueen (Bridgerton’s Luke Newton), he is downing a bottle of pills. Then, McQueen slashes his wrists. Next, he plunges a sword into his belly. And lastly, he hangs himself by his belt. Finding he still alive, McQueen resignedly goes back to work.
It’s a gross spectacle, an amateur playwright’s idea of some bold, envelope-pushing theatrical gesture. Could there be potential in taking a darkly humorous approach to McQueen’s tragic story? Certainly—it might be in keeping with the provocateur himself, a Cockney lad of modest beginnings. But Darrah Cloud’s dull text never commits to black comedy.
In fact, under Sam Helfrich’s vague direction, this listless production never commits to much of anything. Cloud drifts through McQueen’s life events with a Wikipedia-brained literalism, packing in all the big events but never finding narrative focus. McQueen’s demons are duly detailed—an abusive figure from his youth drifts on and off stage, glowering menacingly—but are never explored with any real depth.
It’s a shame, as Newton himself is a perfect fit for the role and acquits himself nicely. Outside of him, no-one else’s work gets any opportunity to stand out—not even McQueen’s own designs or Kate Voyce’s striking costumes, all sadly marooned on an unfathomably gray, grimly ugly set.
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THE BROTHERS SIZE
André Holland, man. Few actors working today could hope to equal the magnetic presence, considerable charm and titanic star-power of this extraordinary performer, thankfully back on a New York stage through Sept 28 in Geffen Playhouse’s superb revival of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s 2007 play, presented by (shudder) The Shed.
This staging, co-directed by McCraney and Bijan Sheibani, is beautifully wrought, an elegant and emotionally precise use of simple theatricality. Holland and co-stars Alani iLongwe and Malcolm Mays—both excellent in their own right—play all the action within a circle of white sand, a home that is also a prison.
Size is an early McCraney, and at times you can tell. The playwright is over-reliant on dreams and nightmares as metaphorical devices—these extended monologues, while gorgeously written, tend to sap the play’s narrative momentum.
But Size builds to a devastating conclusion, and its wrenching final scenes will be burnt into my memory for years to come.
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HOLES IN THE SHAPE OF MY FATHER
A solo work written and performed by Savon Bartley, Holes in the Shape of My Father traces a multi-generational legacy of young Black boys and absent fathers. Written entirely in lyrical verse, Bartley’s text is brutally truthful, yet delivered with a light touch. A skillful young performer, Bartley moves seamlessly between characters under Adam Coy’s tight direction, never pushing too hard.
Bartley ultimately looks to capture a universal trauma across the Black male experience, rather than specifically focusing on his own life. He is light on personal details, presenting his own family’s legacy of absent fathers as almost archetypal. Perhaps it is—but we are left with little sense of Bartley as an individual, robbing the play of some potential power.
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THE MATRIARCHS
Best known for her divorce comedy The Gett, which ran at Rattlestick Theater in 2022, playwright Liba Vaynberg continues to distinguish herself as a compelling chronicler of Jewishness in the present tense. Her expansive and mostly successful new work The Matriarchs, at Theaterlab through Sept 28, is testament both to Vaynberg’s sharp wit and her impressive ambition.
As the play begins, six bickering teenage girls are gathering for Shabbas. While preparing to break fast, the girls scream and argue over everything from Torah passages, to boys, to marriage. The characters are loosely based on biblical matriarchs, but you’ll lose nothing if that passes you by—all six girls are complex, fully-formed creations.
If The Matriarchs stuck simply to its opening premise, it would still be a smart little play. But the play keeps growing and expanding, following the girls into adult life as the same questions of faith, partnership and motherhood follow them over the decades.
Performed by a stellar ensemble under Dina Vovsi’s assured direction, this is a thoughtful work, rich with exquisitely poetic dialogue. Vaynberg falters only with her narrator, an overwrought device given the name “Mrs. H,” who is either God, or a mother, or both at the same time. It’s a tiring structural flourish, and feels ultimately unnecessary.
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BULL
It’s easy to pinpoint the “why” in reviving Mike Bartlett’s Bull right now. A viciously cruel corporate bullfight, Bartlett’s 2013 play is basically an Apprentice episode on steroids. Two soulless office workers, Isobel (Kerstin Anderson) and Tony (Alexander Pobutsky), scheme to wear down their insecure colleague, Thomas (Miles G. Jackson) ahead of a meeting with the boss, Carter (Paco Tolson). The company is downsizing, and by the end of this meeting, one of them will be out of a job.
The selfish inhumanity driving Isobel and Tony (and which drove Trump’s reality show, duly namechecked) is today a pervasive rot, gnawing away at American culture with terrifying efficiency. For the play’s first 30 minutes or so, Bartlett captures this crisis of cruelty with sharp wit. But then Bull just keeps hammering away, well after the point is made. That’s intentional; it is also numbing. Maybe that’s the idea.
If the play is ultimately unsatisfying, this cast could hardly be bettered. Jackson is tragically ordinary as poor Thomas, while Tolson is appropriately unfeeling as Carter (and smartly avoids evoking Trump himself). Anderson and Pobutsky are expertly in sync, one-upping each other’s sadism at every turn. And director Max Hunter keeps the proceedings taut and controlled, even as the text loses steam.
