Rhoda Feng on the Best Performing Arts of 2024

BRANDEN JACOBS-JENKINS, APPROPRIATE (HAYES THEATER, NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 29, 2023–FEBRUARY 25, 2024)

In the grand tradition of dysfunctional family dramas, this play brings three semi-estranged siblings back to their childhood home—a soon-to-be-liquidated plantation in Arkansas—in the wake of their father’s death. Naturally, resentments build up like asbestos in an attic. All of this production’s elements—from its blistering writing and go-for-broke performances to the surreally loud trilling of cicadas in the prologue—are exceedingly well integrated.
LUCY KIRKWOOD, THE WELKIN (ATLANTIC THEATER COMPANY, NEW YORK, MAY 16–JULY 7, 2024)

For this tale based in eighteenth-century England, twelve women convene to decide whether Sally Poppy (Haley Wong), who is accused of murder, is truly pregnant—a verdict that could save her life. Though the production has shades of Sidney Lumet’s Twelve Angry Men (1957), The Welkin is more crucible than courtroom drama. “She has been tried in a cold room by cold men on the word of a cold husband, with no-one to speak for her and a mob outside the window,” observes Lizzy Luke, a midwife played by the excellent Sandra Oh. Lizzy’s determination to speak for Sally soon transforms the juridical inquiry into something larger (a scorching critique of binarized gender roles) and unexpected (redacted here for spoiler-y reasons).
S. SHAKTHIDHARAN, COUNTING AND CRACKING (NEW YORK UNIVERSITY’S SKIRBALL CENTER, SEPTEMBER 20–22, 2024)

Approximately three and a half hours and featuring more than a dozen characters who speak in a mix of English, Sinhala, Tamil, Turkish, and Yolngu Matha, Counting and Cracking ranks as one of the most ambitious shows I’ve seen this year. This wonderfully layered play immerses us into the lives of far-flung members of a Sri Lankan Australian family. As befits a high-thread-count production, attention is paid to even the minutest details: The patter of rice falling into a bowl mimics the sound of rain, while musicians to the side of the stage re-create the dial tone of a Skype call.
LUKE MURPHY, VOLCANO (ST. ANN’S WAREHOUSE, NEW YORK, JANUARY 10–21, 2024)

This year’s Under the Radar festival featured a smorgasbord of remarkable transdisciplinary shows, but the one that managed to annex a significant part of my amygdala was Volcano, a three-and-a-half-hour durational exercise in dehydration (storytelling comes second). The show’s two phenomenal dancer/actors, Murphy and Will Thompson, sweated bullets as they careered across a stage encased in a glass box. The nameless characters, emissaries for a federal space-mission program called the “Amber Project,” seemed to be enacting various rituals for posterity—or, perhaps, for extraterrestrials in a nearby orbit.
DAVID HENRY HWANG, YELLOW FACE (ROUNDABOUT THEATRE COMPANY, NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER 13–NOVEMBER 24, 2024)

“Asians have consistently been caricatured, denied the right even to play ourselves,” says a fictionalized version of the show’s author, DHH, when he hears about the casting of a white actor in a staging of Miss Saigon. The Broadway revival of this nervy work, helmed by an (un)stable of talented Asian actors, flips the script on racial representation while avoiding the pitfalls of “message plays.” It’s ingeniously structured as a series of chaos-inducing cue-ball breaks, the most consequential of which involves, ironically, DHH’s decision to put a white actor in his own play-within-this-play. Smudging the line between fact and fiction, the hilarious, meta-theatrical Yellow Face goes well beyond dramatizing the contradictions of being both an insider and an outsider in the Asian American community.
JEZ BUTTERWORTH, THE HILLS OF CALIFORNIA (BROADHURST THEATRE, NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER 29–DECEMBER 22, 2024)

Set in a Victorian guesthouse in Blackpool, England, in the years 1955 and 1976, this piece traps three grown sisters in a room thick with decades of resentments. Their mother, an unseen force who expires upstairs at the beginning of the first act, once dreamed of making them a famous singing trio, à la the Andrews Sisters; each daughter carries the weight of that failed ambition. When an American talent scout arrives in a flashback, the looming offstage moment of his private audition with Joan, the eldest sibling, casts a long, uncomfortable shadow over the latter-day reunion.
AMY HERZOG, MARY JANE (SAMUEL J. FRIEDMAN THEATRE, NEW YORK, APRIL 2–JUNE 30, 2024)

Herzog drew from her own experience caring for a sick child to write this quietly affecting play. Mary Jane is not so much a work about illness as it is one around illness. It refreshingly dispenses with sentimentality and the types of stale platitudes we get from feeding quarters into the back of a pundit’s head. In its unshowy way, the play feels like an offering: a chance to accompany a mother (a wonderfully understated Rachel McAdams as the titular character) as she tends to the needs of her offstage son, troubleshoots medical equipment, banters with the nurses who drift in and out of her apartment, and counsels another mother with an unwell child.
LARA FOOT, LIFE & TIMES OF MICHAEL K (ST. ANN’S WAREHOUSE, NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 29–DECEMBER 23, 2023)

This production, based on J. M. Coetzee’s Booker Prize–winning book, does more than just squire words from page to stage: It combines light-on-exposition narration with Bunraku puppetry to track the gossamer movements of its protagonist. We first see Michael K as a friable child bullied for his cleft lip; he then transforms into a man with twiglike limbs who embarks on a quixotic journey through war-torn South Africa. The show was transcendent—the deft choreography of puppets (created by Handspring Puppet Company), with their delicate gestures and chiaroscuroed expressions, made me want to move ever closer to the stage.
GILLIAN SLOVO, GRENFELL: IN THE WORDS OF SURVIVORS (ST. ANN’S WAREHOUSE, NEW YORK, APRIL 13–MAY 12, 2024)

This reckoning with the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire in West London is a worthy heir to the socially conscious “living newspaper” plays of the twentieth century. The show’s force lies in the stark testimonies of survivors, who recount lift failures, faulty cladding, and ignored warnings with chilling clarity. Early on, audience members are asked to introduce themselves to one another, fostering a brief, fragile sense of community—much like Grenfell’s residents once had. As memos of cost-cutting decisions flash on screens, the show lays bare the years of greed and disregard that led to this slow-motion disaster.
SEAN O’CASEY, DRUIDO’CASEY (NEW YORK UNIVERSITY’S SKIRBALL CENTER, OCTOBER 4–14, 2023)

O’Casey’s tragicomic “Dublin Trilogy” was a triumph: at once a wide-angle portrait of Ireland’s capital city and a deeply intimate look at the lives of its tenement-dwelling characters. The three plays—The Plough and the Stars, The Shadow of a Gunman, and Juno and the Paycock—span seven years (or roughly nine hours, including intermissions, in theater time) and are set during periods of political upheaval: the Easter Rising, the Irish Civil War, and the Irish War of Independence. Under Garry Hynes’s exacting direction, these heartbreaking and humorous works never felt like ponderous history lessons.

PERFORMING ARTS

BRANDEN JACOBS-JENKINS, APPROPRIATE (HAYES THEATER, NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 29, 2023–FEBRUARY 25, 2024)

LUCY KIRKWOOD, THE WELKIN (ATLANTIC THEATER COMPANY, NEW YORK, MAY 16–JULY 7, 2024)

S. SHAKTHIDHARAN, COUNTING AND CRACKING (NEW YORK UNIVERSITY’S SKIRBALL CENTER, SEPTEMBER 20–22, 2024)

LUKE MURPHY, VOLCANO (ST. ANN’S WAREHOUSE, NEW YORK, JANUARY 10–21, 2024)

DAVID HENRY HWANG, YELLOW FACE (ROUNDABOUT THEATRE COMPANY, NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER 13–NOVEMBER 24, 2024)

JEZ BUTTERWORTH, THE HILLS OF CALIFORNIA (BROADHURST THEATRE, NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER 29–DECEMBER 22, 2024)

AMY HERZOG, MARY JANE (SAMUEL J. FRIEDMAN THEATRE, NEW YORK, APRIL 2–JUNE 30, 2024)

LARA FOOT, LIFE & TIMES OF MICHAEL K (ST. ANN’S WAREHOUSE, NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 29–DECEMBER 23, 2023)

GILLIAN SLOVO, GRENFELL: IN THE WORDS OF SURVIVORS (ST. ANN’S WAREHOUSE, NEW YORK, APRIL 13–MAY 12, 2024)

SEAN O’CASEY, DRUIDO’CASEY (NEW YORK UNIVERSITY’S SKIRBALL CENTER, OCTOBER 4–14, 2023)

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