The hottest ticket in town at this very moment is the reverse-threaded Merrily We Roll Along, and we at Vulture are likewise similarly ready to scroll back through the year and consider how we got here. A couple of related themes emerge: the recovery (partial, fitful, extremely incomplete) of commercial theater after the pandemic, and the pointedly high number of plays this year that engaged with themes of illness and isolation. We’re also pleased that we doubled our critical firepower this fall, bringing back Sara Holdren to join Jackson McHenry, and once you’ve read the year-end conversation between them below, you can dive into their top-ten lists here.
Year in Culture
Sara Holdren: I came back to this job in August, moving up from Virginia, and feel a little bit like Thomas Jefferson — “What’d I miss?” I’m curious about whether you have feelings about the year as a whole, the spring versus the fall.
Jackson McHenry: In the spring, because of the Tony season, there were a lot of Broadway musical revivals—Parade, Sweeney Todd, Camelot—that had a “we’re back from the pandemic, we’re going big” bent. They were various degrees of successful — with Camelot, I guess we learned that Aaron Sorkin’s maybe not the one to revise your musical’s book. I did like Parade and Sweeney a lot. But as I was thinking back on it, the one that hit me hardest was the Encores! revival of The Light in the Piazza with Ruthie Ann Miles. It was a relatively straightforward version of the show, except cast with an Asian-American mother and daughter, which adds another interesting tension to a story about encountering all these European depictions of beauty in Florence. But there was a simple clarity to Miles’s performance, in terms of singing and acting, that was heartbreaking.
Sara: I do feel like I’ve noticed this fall that, along with the brand-new plays, there have been quite a few “modern classics” reappearing — like Brian Friel’s Translations at the Irish Rep. It was a gorgeous piece. Rather like you’re describing with Piazza: straightforward in many ways, beautifully acted, deeply felt but not schmaltzy. Really, it’s been a great season for Irish playwrights overall.
Jackson: Right, you really liked the new Waiting for Godot.
Sara: And DruidO’Casey! Both felt like exciting opportunities to revisit brilliant plays that aren’t ancient-old and being torn apart or heavily riffed on, and that also aren’t brand new and attempting to speak exclusively to this moment. Again, the confidence to be forthright with this material: Waiting for Godot felt like that — this wasn’t a production that was risking the Beckett estate’s wrath interpretively, but it was also wonderfully distinctive thanks to Michael Shannon and Paul Sparks. There was a real trust in the play, and a trust in each other, and it let the text breathe in such a robust way. And then DruidO’Casey was just such an epic undertaking — this day-long venture through these three sad, funny, disturbingly present-feeling plays. I was especially thrilled by Shadow of a Gunman. There was, I think, something the Druid actors really understood about the place of clown in the context of terrible danger. Absurdist comedy as a response to violence, to fascism — a way of defying fear, and of processing the constant possibility of that knock at the door. It’s always confused me that we don’t write more of this kind of material in America, given our own horror show…
Jackson: Purlie Victorious is something like that, though, and Kara Young’s performance in that is definitely up there for me as a total comedic showcase. It’s talking about the most viciously cruel system, but playing it for laughs.
Sara: Purlie is a fantastic example of an American writer doing something similar, and, again, of bringing back an older play that still has so much life in it. It’s such a vital, generous show, and the high physical comedy was just so delightful and impressive, especially Kara Young.
Jackson: One thing I had to put on my list that was both straightforward and totally not was seeing these two drag queens, Baby Love and Charlene, lead their own version of Wicked for their Fagtasia series at Three Dollar Bill in Bushwick.
Sara: Oh, my God, I wish I’d seen this.
Jackson: It was a very close, lip-sync mimic of the show, fully staged with a few ad libs, so when Elphaba says she hates her roommate she says “trans” instead of “blonde” (there was a whole tongue-in-cheek gender play thing going on, which is a good way of making the green metaphor explicit). And of course it had a tiny budget, so “Defying Gravity” happened on a cherry picker with some cloth draped over it, as people threw dollar bills from the audience. It was done with such love and delight that it hit right at the core of why a big touristy show can get so popular, and it also went until well past 2 a.m. When I saw Wicked itself around the 20th anniversary I just thought, Well, this is not as good. This should only be done in drag.
Sara: When Phantom closed, I was like, “Reopen it, but as Rocky Horror. Let it be camp!” Why not lean into some of these things as community pageants?
Jackson: In a less celebratory vein, there were a number of plays that were metaphorically or literally reckoning with the pandemic, especially over the summer. Primary Trust, by Eboni Booth, I loved as a gentle piece about loneliness and the need to find other people, anchored by a sad-sweet William Jackson Harper. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s The Comeuppance is directly about people settling in for their 20th high-school reunion in 2023, complete with the ominous presence of death. Even Annie Baker’s Infinite Life this fall has the specter of illness lingering over it.
Sara: I liked Infinite Life so much that I was genuinely surprised by the split opinion around it. To me it radiated such extraordinary patience — this incredible willingness to have us simply sit with something. The container was so controlled, and it held so much — these specters of the pandemic you’re talking about, the presence of mortality, the breakdown of our bodies. It all just sat there calmly facing us on these reclining chairs. Actually, Prometheus Firebringer was, for me, another example of a show that packed so much into a very calm container. The show exists inside this academic box, as a “lecture,” and that’s all you’re watching — Annie Dorsen giving her talk while, on the other side of the stage, AI is generating content in real time. But I found it so intellectually galvanizing, and also weirdly beautiful — the way in which she sat there and quietly showed us how much more interesting a person is than this technology.
Jackson: The apocalypse has been unleashed already, but we’re going to make you sit gently with that. That’s how I felt watching The Trees too. It was purposefully anticlimactic: The big thing happens, these two siblings mysteriously take root in a park, and then it holds in the strange aftermath. It makes you aware of discomfiting giant structural things like climate collapse, but in a way that might be more unsettling because it’s so calm.
Sara: It’s wild how many playwrights maybe kind of want to turn into trees right now? I can’t say I don’t get it, though. All these tree plays — they feel like a way of processing grief and disempowerment and existential dread. Like, is there a way to stay put and become part of the earth again?
Jackson: There’s even that tree by the side of the road in Godot. And I’ve thought a lot about the tree in the set of Wet Brain, a play about siblings who’ve inherited various addictive tendencies from their father gathering to take care of him as he imagines he’s had—or maybe really has had—this encounter with extraterrestrials. There’s a scene with the family on the roof, staring out into space, with the tree behind them seeming to move in the darkness. Again, all those questions about taking root, and growth, and grief… That play shared something with How to Defend Yourself, which is about college students doing a self-defense class after a rape on campus, in that both were very open to the spikiness of their characters. How to Defend Yourself is an issue drama, but it wasn’t didactic in the way many can be; it was willing to go deep into the discomfort and weird impulses that come with desiring, fearing, and trying to control or not control your sexual impulses. I enjoyed an openness to the question of, “We’re these weird physical containers. What does that mean?”
Sara: Speaking of weird physical containers! I loved Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken — and, frankly, while I expected the gonzo-ness and the explosiveness of if, what I didn’t really expect was this incredibly pure heart underneath all of the fluids and feces and vagina costumes. It was actually so sweet and welcoming. It had this endearing PBS quality, with a wild improvisational layer on top.
Jackson: A show like that floating near my top ten is The Appointment, a musical revue performed by fetuses that’s sending up the messaging around abortion. It was dark and strange, but with lovingly old-fashioned showmanship.
Sara: Speaking of things that are very sweet and sincere, and at the same time quite-serious-actually, School Pictures is a really special show. The writer/performer Milo Cramer used to tutor kids for the SHSAT, and they’re just up there alone with a ukulele and a baby piano, and they sing these songs inspired by their former students. It’s hard not to make it sound twee, but they’re dealing with all this self-doubt, and reckoning with these huge, awful systems in which they and these kids and all of us are stuck, and they’re amazed at the kids and also appalled and overwhelmed by them. It’s a show about wondering how to teach nuance and gentleness and complexity in a world that wants test scores and hot takes and easy answers — like, the girl who has to write a five paragraph essay answering the question, “Is Othello racist?” and he’s like, “What do we do here?”
Jackson: Okay, it’s that time: We’ve got to talk about Merrily We Roll Along.
Sara: Of course! We both have it on our lists — I mean, it’s been pretty universally praised.
Jackson: Who would’ve thought? I saw it in December last year Off Broadway, after I had to send in my Top 10 list, so I’m just counting both productions for this year. I loved it at NYTW, and it’s great to be so close with the performers, but once it got to Broadway it filled up the theater so well. There’s an extra oomph when a giant night sky extends over the proscenium in “Our Time” and a giant red curtain comes down behind Gussie when she does their Broadway show. (Krystal Joy Brown’s Gussie really clicks in a bigger space.) The experience of watching it was, for me, also energized by seeing Sondheim’s Here We Are around the same time.
Sara: Look, he made one last hat. I was happy it’s a weird, ambitious one. With a bear!
Jackson: Here We Are is totally ungainly, but fascinating in its unsolved riddles, which Mantello and Ives were smart to leave open-ended. Its songs just stop! There’s something to not forcing a simple answer key onto it. Similarly, Merrily has often been treated like a thing to be fixed, and Maria Friedman takes on a lot of the revisions that happened over the decades (you need “Growing Up”!), but she makes the show work by playing the crux of its emotional core straight. She stares down this thing and goes, let’s commit to it. People say Frank is a problem character? Why not set it all in Frank’s house? And Lindsay Mendez as Mary has that impossible role that could be a sitcom character version of a snarky mess, but she plays it with total earnestness.
Sara: It’s played straight with three people who are clearly so invested in each other as performers. They’re filling out the humanness of those parts. You can sometimes get a little bit of that “I just drink vodka and smoke cigarettes” vibe with these roles, but there isn’t any armor in that way here. Everybody is very exposed.
Jackson: Merrily shares that sincerity and that really tight ensemble dynamic with another show on both of our lists, Stereophonic, which is also about how difficult it is to be with other people and make art with them.
Sara: We’re in a moment when companies are very much trying to keep things short and punchy, and David Adjmi’s Stereophonic — daring to be three hours long, and really nailing it — felt similar to Infinite Life to me, in that both are so entirely confident and patient. Stereophonic risks actually moving at the speed of process because process is what it’s about, and there’s this real love and care shown for both the moments of revelation, and also the moments of being completely stuck in quicksand — the frustration and the personal and artistic disappointment. I also loved that, at the end of the show, though they’re clearly in this very fractured place, Adjmi doesn’t wrap things up for us. He doesn’t tell us whether the band is through or not. In a way, it feels like the flip side of Merrily, where you start with this brokenness and trace it backwards — here, the clock runs forward, and so many things come apart, but there’s still a question mark in the air. Maybe this is just the always-pain of being messed up and driven and trying to make something incredible with a bunch of equally messed up, driven people. Art isn’t easy!
Jackson: As my friend pointed out, all of the songs that we see the band spend significant amounts of time in the studio playing are the ones they later say they’ve cut from the final album. It shifts your focus from the end result to whatever happens along the way.
Sara: That’s fantastic. Clever, too — on the off chance you found the songs not as brilliant as advertised, don’t worry, so did the band! And, as you say, it suddenly becomes about the minutiae of making the thing, the hours and hours spent on whether the drums are at the right tempo, or whether or not to cut one verse. So much meaning and beauty accumulates around that struggle.
Jackson: With Merrily too, I’d rather not ever know if their passion project about senate pages could have been good. (Take a Left, a terrible name!) It can just hang there as this unfulfilled promise. Friendships split and bandmates come and go, but there’s so much to get out of sitting there in the space between beginning and ending.
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