10/27/25: Other
What: Ari'el Stachel's solo play about navigating his identity as a half-Ashkenazi, half-Yemeni Israeli with his lifelong struggles with anxiety and OCD.
And? He's truly a fantastic storyteller, and it's a gift to see him onstage again. He's unafraid to share some of the worst things he's done while trying to stave off his OCD and fit in with whichever community he's found. It's a story that's both familiar and different. Knowing the backlash that Stachel faced after trying to share his truth as a bridge across Arab and Jewish identities, it was validating to see this with such a full audience of a fairly wide demographic.
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| Ari'el Stachel. Photo by Ogata. |
What: Playwrights Horizons presents Jen Tullock's solo play, co-written with Frank Winters, about an ex-vangelical lesbian whose newest memoir incites controversy in her hometown as people dispute their portrayals in her book--including the woman she cites as her first love.
And? When I saw this was a solo show utilizing some onstage cameras, I thought it might be an attempt to copy (on a downsized level) the recent Broadway run of Dorian Gray. However, the video projections serve a different function here, freezing moments to highlight strange micro-expressions, or show an angle hidden from the audience across the proscenium's fourth wall. Frances's interactions with the people in her life--her literary agent, her brother, her mother, representatives of the church, and the first love in question--are performed against the overhead sound of a book launch interview, underlining moments when the contents of her book contradict what the other characters remember, leaving us wondering who is telling the truth and who is rewriting history. And the truth is that memory is always unreliable, changeable, and one-sided. A moment that can stay forever in someone's memory as an indelible life-changing moment, can for others, as M. Bison memorably said, only be Tuesday. As a performer, Tullock navigates the many characters with deceptive ease, slipping from one to the other with subtle shifts in posture and expression and more pronounce vocal variations. And as a playwright, she and Frank Winters craft a delicate piece: powerful and profound, charting what it is to try to process trauma to find truth, and what gets left behind of yourself when you have to leave. Frances herself, in intense closeup with her eyes wet but not letting the tears fall, reflects that in leaving the church, she escaped abuse but she also lost the joy of God. She lost her community.
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| Jen Tullock. Photo by Maria Baranova. |
