COMMITMENT CRISES FUEL A CRACKLING COMEDY Many, many gay plays since Stonewall have pitted fidelity against promiscuity, love against sex, and, nowadays, marriage against friendship. Same-sex weddings have clearly intensified the painful choice between “sexual outlaw” and legal spouse. If children aren’t reason enough to keep folks together after sex wears thin, is sheer devotion?…

EVERYTHING’S FINE IN ‘59 It’s as welcome as flowers that bloom in the spring: A cascading, minute-by-minute hit,  Bye Bye Birdie  is a showcase for happiness even as it merrily mocks the pseudo-innocent “togetherness” of the Eisenhower Era and the scary advent of rock ‘n’ roll. For coy or legal reasons, Elvis Presley never gets mentioned in…

LEARNING TO BE LOVED The past clashes with the future in Dominique Morisseau’s  Sunset Baby, a drama more of reckoning than reconciliation. Despite her rage at the father she thinks deserted both her and her late mother in the name of impossible idealism, a daughter is forced to face a legacy of radical activism. Inevitably, a…

ANOTHER WALTZ WITH TENNESSEE Tom “Tennessee” Williams never buried his treasures. The ultimate, unashamed “bleeding heart,” this passionate playwright put his soul and guts into every show he ever wrote–actually into every character, with contagious compassion and dependable shocks of recognition. Sometimes, his works even capture his state of soul while writing them. Few do…

TOO TRUE TO BE NEW Subtitled “A Tale of Today,” Mark Twain’s early novel  The Gilded Age  was written in (and from) 1873, a dozen years before Huckleberry Finn rafted down the Mississippi. A conventional potboiler, its chapters were presumably grabbed from headlines detailing the scandalous Grant administration. Mr. Clemens’ 630-page epic, which anticipates Gore Vidal’s insider…

A SERIOUSLY STUPID SCREAMFEST Premiering in politically correct San Francisco in 2014, Christopher Chen’s cartoon drama purports to address multi-culturalism in politics. This two-act trifle focuses specifically–and improbably’”on two Asian-American presidential candidates from both parties. (I guess Latino or African-American “mixed race” prospects weren’t available.) A blatant and simplistic satire of race-baiting and identity politics,…

BAGGAGE HANDLING Unprocessed pain can supply grist enough for a playwright’s mill. But an unprocessed play is a lot less. Alas, there’s little design for loving in William Donnelly’s  No Wake, its plot almost an exact replica of Noël  Coward’s famous 1933 comedy. Deficient at supplying the psychological context for its emotional payoff, this 80-minute one-act, richly…