The False Servant
Classic Stage Company
by Pierre Marivaux
Lust, avarice, and much cross-dressing ensues as CSC stages 18th-century Comédie Française dramatist Pierre Marivaux’s The False Servant, with the always intriguing Martha Plimpton. In a new translation by Kathleen Tolan, directed by Artistic Director Brian Kulick, a young woman disguises herself as a man to learn more about her husband-to-be. What she discovers bends everything from gender to the most cherished notions of love.

Orson’s Shadow
Barrow Street Theater
by Austin Pendleton
Set in 1960, Orson’s Shadow takes place as notorious film director Orson Welles senses his traction in the film industry slipping. Coaxed into directing a stage production of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros with Laurence Olivier and his lover Joan Plowright, the directorial giant finds himself at the helm of a volatile West End production filled with huge personalities. When Olivier’s eccentric wife Vivien Leigh shows up, egos collide on stage and off. Orson’s Shadow is a fictional imagining of an actual staging of an absurdist masterpiece, revealing the human frailty of titanic personalities.

Boozy: The Life, Death, and Subsequent Vilification of Le Corbusier and, More Importantly, Robert Moses
by Les Freres Corbusier Theater Company
The Freedom Tower? West Side Stadium? Les Freres Corbusier puts the punk rock back into urban planning with a blaze of streaming media, ridiculous choreography, and dozens of live fornicating rabbits. Moved to 45 Bleecker after a sold-out run at the Ohio Theater, Boozy tracks the life of Robert Moses, from idealistic youth to unstoppable power broker waging a desperate battle over the creation of New York’s bridges, highways, and public housing. Freemasons dance, FDR levitates, and Daniel Libeskind silently weeps. None shall be spared.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf
By Edward Albee
Edward Albee’s vicious, screaming, often drunk married couple Martha and George have been portrayed by everyone from Uta Hagen and Arthur Hill in the original 1963 Broadway production to, famously, a married Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Mike Nichols’ 1966 film adaptation. Here the raspy voiced all-attitude Kathleen Turner takes a go at Martha while curiously chosen comic thespian Bill Irwin portrays the wily, biting, uppity professor George. Carnage lies in their wake.

Score
SITI Company at New York Theater Workshop
by Anne Bogart
Tom Nelis portrays Leonard Bernstein and his passionate, glorious relationship with music in this solo theatre piece from the acclaimed SITI Company. With a score by Brahms, Haydn, and Mozart, director Anne Bogart and writer Jocelyn Clarke, who adapted Bernstein’s own writings, serve up Bernstein’s famous flamboyance as a showman, teacher, tastemaker, and ego-driven charmer, honoring one of the greatest of all American figures.