Writing Roundup: 2025

This year I've ...

My story "House Rules," which appears
in Behind the Revolving Door, was
nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

... written and presented "No Trouble in River City: When Broadway Revisals 'Fix' the Wrong Things" at the MLA 2025 Convention

... attended and written about 119 theatrical experiences for 2025

... written full reviews of 15 shows

... written five new poems (okay it's not a lot but it's better than zero)

... ranted about Eugene O'Neill and got paid for it

... submitted 191 pieces for publication

... had nine of those pieces accepted for publication (eight are out now; one is slated for next year)

... had one of those nine pieces nominated for the Pushcart Prize (I'm aware thousands of pieces get nominated; it's still nice)

... queried the manuscript of my second collection 38 times

Next year, I'd like to ...

... get back on the story-writing horse

... write that Beauty and the Beast /  Lilo and Stitch paper

... succeed in finding a publisher for my collection

... I dunno, write another parody of "The Raven"? That seems to be a thing I do

Best Theater of 2025: Another Year End, Another List

Hello hello and it's time for another year-end round up of my favorites of all the theater I saw in 2025. I've been thinking this month about what a shame it is that the Fall season brings us so many strong pieces of theater, many of which don't survive past the new year for one reason or another (if it's a star-studded play, it's often a limited run anyway), and can therefore be forgotten come awards season, even if they're remembered fondly for these end of the year Best-Of lists. But then, I wonder if the weightedness of the Spring season representation at the Tonys et al is mirrored for the year-end lists. Do Spring shows that burned brightly but briefly make the cut? (Not to brag, but it looks like my list is almost evenly divided between first half of the year and second half. Go me!)

This is just me musing. I haven't run the numbers. But hey, speaking of numbers, this year I saw 128 pieces of theater with 9 repeats, leaving 119 unique pieces of theater. Of those 119, 70 were plays, 39 were musicals, and 10 were streaming.

In order of appearance, these ones stuck around in my brain, my heart, and/or my gut.

Weekly Margin 2025, W50: Meet the Cartozians, This World of Tomorrow, Prince F****t

12/09/25: Meet the Cartozians

What: 2nd Stage presents Talene Monahon's play about the Armenian people in America and their complicated history with conditional whiteness and assimilation. Its first act based on the true story behind the 1925 court case United States vs. Cartozian, in which Tatos Cartozian, a survivor of the Ottoman Empire's genocide of Armenians, was about to become a naturalized U.S. citizen but suddenly had that citizenship revoked. In his subsequent trial his attorney successfully argued that Armenians counted as white people rather than Asian, and were therefore permitted American citizenship (archaic laws regarding citizenship limited eligibility to white and Black people only). The play's second act takes place a century later, as Tatos Cartozian's descendant stars on her own reality show (a stand-in for the Kardashian family) and is interviewing four people of Armenian descent to discuss what their Armenian identity and traditions mean to them. Over the course of this discussion, the question of whiteness is again interrogated, with some characters insisting Armenians are white while others are adamant they are part of the larger SWANA amalgam of ethnicities and therefore not white.

And? The above summary sounds pretty cold and clinical when written out, but I wanted to articulate the larger questions and theme of the show. But the story told is incredibly heartfelt and deeply personal. It's impressive when a playwright is able to take on a philosophical argument--with far-reaching implications--without making the play feel like a lecture or a debate. Here, every argument is grounded in full characters who all have something to lose and a desperate need to hold their own ground. David Cromer is truly a fine director, always able to drill down to the deeply human in his productions, and I'll be interested to read the script to see what moments were Monahon's and what were Cromer's. I'm thinking of the decade-spanning thousand-yard stare of both of Nael Nacer's characters as a quiet roaring is heard, perhaps in his head, perhaps in our collective memories. The dark history of a monstrosity survived even as the scars from the trauma linger on. The cast is doing terrific work, from Andrea Martin's reliably scene-stealing work that manages to be both hilarious and heartbreaking, to the quiet dignity of Nael Nacer's work especially in the first act, to Will Brill's continuing to show off his wide range, to, well everyone, but those are the three I wanted to highlight.

Will Brill, Andrea Martin, and Nael Nacer as Wallace McCamant,
Markrid Cartozian, and Tatos Cartozian. Photo by Julieta Cervantes.

12/12/25: This World of Tomorrow

What: The Shed presents a new play adapted from three of Tom Hanks's short stories, about Bert, a man in 2089 who becomes enamored of traveling in time to the New York World's Fair in 1939--and the woman he meets there.

And? One of the important lessons I learned in my twenties, both from a very good creative writing teacher and from The Shakespeare Forum, is the importance of meeting a piece of work on its terms rather than the terms you think it should be. So this is going to be a mix of my attempt to meet this play on its own terms but also contending with it within the larger context of theater. To handle the latter part first, the stakes and tension never feel fully established: it's not clear the importance of the work Bert is neglecting and ultimately abandoning when he keeps returning to 1939, and so his choice seems obvious and easy. Meanwhile, the MacGuffin of the damage time travel can wreak--as well as the deus ex machina of overcoming that MacGuffin--are glossed to the extent that those stakes also don't feel particularly grounded or real. As a play in the larger context of how plays usually work, it seems a weaker, flimsier piece.

But I was still touched by the love story, so I need to also meet this piece on its own terms. And it deserves that from me especially, since the majority of my fiction writing doesn't pivot on the tensions you would see in traditional stories, but rather engaging in characters and moments in time. So if we agree that it's not the writers' intent to really delve into what it's like in the future or the important work being accomplished there, if we engage instead with the emotional themes, perhaps we can land where the play and production would like us to land. Where when we look neither toward the utopian future nor toward a nostalgia-tinted past, but focus rather on the immediate need to engage with the present. When Bert travels back in time it's a bit like Groundhog Day, he can visit only one day in one location over and over again, but he can choose how to play with the nuances within that. That day is all he has, but the same is true for Carmen, the woman he meets and falls in love with. Carmen has a past she'd rather not revisit and a future that feels uncertain and unknowable. She focuses intensely on the present, on what she can do with her today. And here in this day is when they can meet and perhaps both find a second chance at life and love. The charisma and chemistry between Hanks and his costar Kelli O'Hara does a lot of the heavy lifting here, reminiscent of Hanks's past films with Meg Ryan. And so that is the play being told: themes of enjoying this precious moment we have, and the fairy tale soulmate love we might find. Meeting the play on those terms, it's a sweet narrative. Perhaps they don't all need to be bombastic.

Kelli O'Hara and Tom Hanks as Carmen Perry and Bert Allenberry.
Photo by Mark J. Franklin.

Weekly Margin 2025, W49: Gotta Dance! with American Dance Machine

 12/02/25: Gotta Dance! with American Dance Machine

What: A tribute to iconic musical theater choreography ranging from Bob Fosse to Jerome Robbins to Gene Kelly to Michael Bennet to Susan Stroman to Billy Wilson.

And? full review here.

Georgina Pazcoguin, Taylor Stanley, and Afra Hines perform
"Manson Trio." Photo by Bjorn Bolinder.

Margin Notes: Gotta Dance! with American Dance Machine

Gotta Dance! with American Dance Machine

Seen on: Tuesday, 12/02/25.

Anthony Cannarella and Samantha 
Siegel with the ensemble in "Sing, Sing, Sing."
Photo by Bjorn Bolinder.

Plot and Background

A tribute to iconic musical theater choreography ranging from Bob Fosse to Jerome Robbins to Gene Kelly to Michael Bennet to Susan Stroman to Billy Wilson.

Thoughts:

What an absolute delight of an evening! This is an excellent showcase, not only of the varied visual voices of these choreographers, but also of the dancers performing them. While watching, I was struck over and over by how many different styles a musical theater dancer must master. There's the precise and sinuous body isolation of Bob Fosse, the flair of Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, the exuberance of Susan Stroman, the gestural and explosive athleticism of Jerome Robbins, the joy of Lynne Taylor-Corbett, the loose-limbed fluidity of Billy Wilson, the romantic grace of Christopher Wheeldon, the classic showmanship of Michael Bennett and Bob Avian. And, well, the shimmy of Joey McNeely. It's such a glorious tasting menu--a feast, really--of choreographers at the height of their game.

Weekly Margin 2025, W48: Oedipus, Chess, The Seat of Our Pants, Art, Marilyn Maye at 54 Below, Little Bear Ridge Road, The Baker's Wife, Ragtime, Masquerade, Archduke, A Christmas Carol at the Merchant's House

Buckle up, folks, it's the Thanksgiving week roundup!

11/24/25: Oedipus

What: Roundabout hosts the West End hit adaptation of Sophocles's  play, translated by director Robert Icke into a contemporary political thriller. Oedipus here is an idealistic politician on the final day of his campaign for office, with his wife on his arm, his brother in law advising him as speechwriter, his three children in attendance, and his mother as an unexpected visitor. In the wake of his campaign promises to release his birth certificate and to solve the mystery behind his predecessor Laius's sudden death thirty-four years ago, secrets are unwillingly dragged into the light, and well--you know the story right? Everyone knows the story here.

And? While I've had a mixed experience with Icke's work in the past, this adaptation and production are extraordinarily good. Mark Strong and Lesley Manville are doing such fully realized work, you forget they're actors. Oedipus and Jocasta are genuinely in love and  they truly want to do good; and despite any damages he may incur, Oedipus is dead set on finding out the truth and doing right by it. Which, of course, is what you need to make the agony of a Greek tragedy work. Lesley Manville in particularly is absolutely heartbreaking as you see the realization of the full truth register on her face, in her gut. I couldn't take my eyes off her.

The production itself outside of the performances is also very well structured: a formerly pristine white space with rotating walls and large glass windows, full of the stuff and chaos of campaigning. As these are gradually cleared, all of the furniture being slowly moved out, we become aware of the lie of transparency in this space, of the obstacles to clear sight and truth. But we also approach closer to the purity of that truth, the clean white space where there is nowhere left to hide. Meanwhile (not subtly, but still effectively) a large digital clock counts down the minutes until the results of the election come through and his victory is assured. It is also, we know, counting down the minutes until the truth is revealed. And indeed, the clock hits zero when Jocasta tells Oedipus who he actually is and what he's done.

Just excellent work all around.

Jordan Scowen, Olivia Reis, Mark Strong, Lesley Manville,
James Wilbraham, Anne Reid, and Bhasker Patel as Eteocles,
Antigone, Oedipus, Jocasta, Polyneices, Merope, and Corin.
Photo by Julieta Cervantes.

11/25/25: Chess

What: Danny Strong's rewrite of the notoriously messy but beloved musical makes its way to Broadway, starring Lea Michele, Nicholas Christopher, and Aaron Tveit. What is it about? Depends on the version you're watching but the tl;dr is: chess literally and also as a metaphor for Cold War machinations, and also there's a love triangle that is actually a quadrangle.

And? I don't know what to tell you guys. Well, I do, but I'm disappointed to do it. It's so weird, I remember liking Danny Strong's revision to the book in DC. Was I wrong, or have they kept working on it to the degree that it's reverted back into a mess again? This script feels both overwritten and underwritten: the Arbiter's narration is too peppered with tired references to today's political woes and too dumbed down to the lowest common audience denominator. On the flip side of that, the dialogue scenes that remain are so underwritten that the rest of the cast has almost nothing to work with. Svetlana is reduced to a mustache-twirling sex kitten (though I lay the blame for that not only on Strong but also director Michael Mayer). Shakespeare Forum's credo is that "love is the strongest choice." If there's no actual love left between Svetlana and Anatoly, where is the tension on whether or not he should return to the USSR? Meanwhile context has been broken enough that Florence's big second act solo, "Someone Else's Story," is completely isolated from any other scene such that it may as well be a concert performance on PBS (granted, the lyrics are generic enough that the song can be reassigned to anyone else and still pretend to make sense). Florence walks out on stage, stands and delivers, the audience cheers, and off she goes again. I also don't understand either the song's placement in the eleven o'clock spot, or why it's played so positively. She's about to lose the love of her life and she knows it. Florence is--and I think always has been--let down by the script. She's meant to be the main character, but nearly every action she takes is in service of someone else, always a man. You can argue that the point of the story is that they're all pawns being controlled and sacrificed by the officers of the state, CIA agent Walter and KGB agent Molokov, but in that case wouldn't a great arc be Florence stepping away from pawn status and becoming the queen she should be? Guys, wouldn't that be nice? They claim she's one of the best chess players in the world. Why isn't she better at this kind of strategy?

Actually let's talk a bit more about that "what action are we playing here" question. "I Know Him So Well" is one of my favorite two-woman duets in musical theater. It just sounds so lovely. But it should be about both Florence and Svetlana realizing (or thinking they realize) that they can't hold onto Anatoly. Florence sings "he needs security" because she believes he will leave her and return to his wife; Svetlana sings "he needs his fantasy and freedom" because she believes he will never return home but continue to wander the world as a refugee with a lover, not a wife. That's what the lyrics mean. And again, that's the exciting tension, both fully convinced they know him so well while also demonstrating he remains unknowable. If they're both playing the song like Florence has already won, what am I watching? Why are they doing this to Zelda?

Back to the Arbiter (this review is as messy as the show). At first I loved the use of his role: narrator and puppet master I could get behind (excellent use of him with the choreography of the ensemble), but treating his role like someone spoon-feeding Cold War politics to first graders grated on me almost immediately. Either trust the show or don't; either trust the audience or don't. Either do a concert or do a show. 

And the design! Let's pick on them too (this is turning into the rant I did about Company a few years ago). The scenic design is pretty sparse and concert-y, which, fine, I guess. However, there is a moment in the first act when a full bed with headboard appears out of the trap in the floor. I thought, "ah, things are finally real and concrete because their connection is concrete and real, and the aesthetic is about to transform." Nah. Back to minimalism after that. So I don't understand that choice. I also don't understand the costume design. Are we playing with black and white chessboard color palette or aren't we? Is Svetlana's burgundy dress meant to show she doesn't belong on the chessboard? Then why is she given calculated moves? I just ... come on, y'all, tell a coherent story. 

"Other than that, Zelda, how was the play?" Incredible performers. Truly. These voices are unreal. Sean Allan Krill as Walter isn't given enough to do for his talent, but he makes a meal out of what he has. Likewise, as his USSR counterpart Molokov, Bradley Dean gets to shine the way he deserves. Though I was routinely annoyed by the lines handed to the Arbiter, Bryce Pinkham remains a delight onstage. Lea Michele's Florence is let down by the writing, as ranted above, but what an absolute treat to hear her put her mark on this score. She knows how to texture a lyric: when to keep it close and intimate and when to belt it out. Aaron Tveit's Freddie is appropriately a mix of insufferable and charismatic enough to make you want to forgive him. He's excellent throughout (and has a fun bit of costume choreography in "One Night in Bangkok"--guys, I know they can't cut this song because it's the biggest hit from the show, but they really should cut this song if they want to script to ever actually work), and really lets everything explode in his big second act number "Pity the Child." And Nicholas Christopher as Anatoly? This is a star-making role. He's been quietly on the rise for a while now and it's such a gift to see him claim the spotlight the way he deserves. He has such physical restraint, cool as a cucumber, which makes it all the more powerful when he finally lets loose his rafter-shaking voice. His "Anthem" was unlike any other rendition of that song I've heard.

Aaron Tveit as Freddie with the ensemble of Chess.
Photo by Matthew Murphy.