‘Don Juan’
The director Lucie Tiberghien stages a charming (and free!) production of Stephen Wadsworth’s swift and sparkling adaptation of Molière’s 1665 comedy about the rogue Don Juan — that serial bigamist, notorious killer, insouciant blasphemer and jerk. Three superb multitasking performers (Daniel Pearce, Michelle Veintimilla and Naomi Lorrain) become a cast of a dozen or more, all dashing around Keshav Moodliar, who plays the titular seducer, and Kaliswa Brewster, who plays Don Juan’s reluctant servant Sganarelle.
It’s an exhilarating time: Pearce is one of the best stage buffoons I’ve seen in years; the set designer N. Wild creates a sleek jungle gym, full of opportunities for pratfalls and peek-a-boos; and the costume designer Ari Fulton’s surprisingly luxurious clothes reveal their own little jokes. (Moodliar wears a fantastic fetish-red leather coat with black lace epaulets, suggesting that the “D” in B.D.S.M. now stands for “Don.”) But something serious is afoot in Tiberghien’s work, too. Sganarelle is, in his private spirit, a good person, but he comes right to the lip of hell for all the things he does for Don Juan. Molière’s moral hasn’t rusted in the centuries since he wrote it: Don’t do the devil’s work just because you need his wages. HELEN SHAW
Through Sept. 27 at LeFrak Center, Prospect Park, Brooklyn; moliereinthepark.org.
‘Beyond the Stardust’
The Illustrious Blacks — both the Afrofuturist punk-electronica-disco duo and the married couple (Black! and Monstah) — are the twin suns of New York’s cyber-funk performance universe. To celebrate them appropriately, therefore, the director Niegel Smith has converted the Flea into a gorgeous outer-galactic dance club and staged a “live album experience,” which is part love-in, part morality play, part rave inside a pulsing pink nebula.
The vibes are liquid and far-out: The audience dances over and between a constellation of small stages; the Illustrious Blacks don’t “enter” the room so much as they descend from a D.J. booth, dressed as aliens in solar system headdresses, summoning us to our liberation. Gravity seems optional; oppression seems doomed. Nightlife virtuosos (like Blaine Petrovia) sing or strip or float up and down various aerial apparatuses, while the scenic and props designer Oscar Escobedo’s glittering overhead sculptures represent a Milky Way of Black queer ancestors: Jean-Michel Basquiat’s essence is invoked by a crowned disco ball, for instance, floating like Saturn among her smiling moons. SHAW
Through Oct. 18 at the Flea, Manhattan; theflea.org.
‘The Hope Theory’
For over a decade now, Helder Guimarães has been exploring a mix of illusion and theater in shows that incorporate both sleight-of-hand and narrative. The balance was off in the wordy “Verso” (2016), but much improved in “The Present,” a runaway online hit for the Geffen Playhouse in 2020. Guimarães’s latest is his best yet, partly because his demeanor here reveals flashes of frustration and even anger. How could it not? The 85-minute show includes an account of Guimarães being betrayed by a man he considered a friend, and its emotional center is the tale of his immigration to the United States from his native Portugal.
While Guimarães was able to land the kind of visa reserved for people of extraordinary ability or achievements, his girlfriend, Catarina (now his wife), was exploited by an employer who knew full well that her U.S. residency status was tied to her job, making it risky for her to complain. Under Frank Marshall’s steady direction, Guimarães integrates those stories with tricks that often have a metaphorical bent to illustrate his points. Of course, they also work perfectly well as great illusions that make you doubt your own eyes. Many involve playing cards, but a particularly lovely one uses a volunteer’s wedding ring and a yarn ball. This all builds up to a grand finale artfully assembled like fireworks with time-delay fuses: When you think it’s over, Guimarães unveils another flourish. This time, it really all worked out. ELISABETH VINCENTELLI
Through Dec. 6 at New York City Center Stage II, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org.
Back Onstage
‘Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library’
When Jenny Lyn Bader’s play “Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library” came to the WP Theater in 2024, Laura Collins-Hughes noted the way its “pernicious patterns” reflected “global trends.” In the time since, this production has traveled to the Traverse Theater in Scotland and performed at the Edinburgh Fringe. Now it’s back in New York — and the global trends have gotten, if anything, more pernicious.
From Laura’s original review: “The married woman of the title is better known as the writer Hannah Arendt, who was arrested in 1933, before she fled Germany. Hannah (Ella Kaille) has been hauled in for allegedly making the Nazis look bad: mimeographing antisemitic statements and imagery published in German newspapers for a Zionist group to disseminate abroad. A librarian reported her. Now Hannah, with her agile intellect, aims to unlock the humanity in Karl (Brett Temple), the police officer interrogating her, and thereby free herself. In this well-acted, precisely calibrated production directed by Ari Laura Kreith, she jokes, she flatters, she takes advantage of assumptions about female naïveté. Painting herself as dreamily curious and irreproachably truthful, she introduces moral doubt that smudges the crisp corners of Karl’s certainty. She plays him, really, but what she appeals to is his decency — his capacity for loving his neighbor as himself. A low priority, historically, once fascism rears its head.”
Through Oct. 25 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org.
‘Pre-Existing Condition’
“Watching this play is like seeing its author open up her rib cage and show us everything,” Laura Collins-Hughes wrote in 2024, giving the drama a Critic’s Pick. Marin Ireland’s play — a “potent playwriting debut” based, in part, on her own experience — has returned to the stage, still in its rigorously unadorned production directed by Maria Dizzia. (A succession of notable actors — including Lupita Nyong’o, Edie Falco and Phillipa Soo — play the main role at different parts in this run.)
As Laura wrote in her review: “The central character, whom the script calls A, is struggling to put herself back together after a breakup with a man who hit her. The trauma has been consuming her, against her will and for longer than she would have thought. ‘I feel like I’m becoming the villain,’ A tells her therapist. ‘I’m becoming this obsessive vengeful figure, because he said he’s sorry, so I’m the problem now.’ She doubts herself, blames herself, is fearful in ways she never was before. ‘I don’t want the big task of my life now to be “dealing with this,”’ A says, and certainly there are people in her life who wish she would get over it. ‘Pre-Existing Condition’ doesn’t feel like vengeance, though. It feels like one woman emerging scarred by a not uncommon experience that blindsided her, and badly wanting to alert the others.”
Through Jan. 8 at Greenwich House Theater, Manhattan; preexistingconditionplay.com.
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