Weekly Margin 2024, W44: Other, Nothing Can Take You From the Hand of God, The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire, Dreadful Episodes, Queens

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.

Ari'el Stachel. Photo by Ogata.

10/28/25: Nothing Can Take You From the Hand of God

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.

Jen Tullock. Photo by Maria Baranova.

10/29/25: The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire

What: Anne Washburn's new play, presented by Vineyard Theatre and The Civilians, about how a community living off the grid grapples with the sudden death of one of their own.

And? Anne Washburn's plays are always interesting and I never quite know what to make of how they end. The cast here is top-form and the script and director are careful not to pass judgement on them, even when problematic actions and thoughts come to light. This choice allows the audience to not only understand why and how these people are attempting to lead this life, but also to observe the cracks in the edifice, and how it may eventually crumble. Trope-wise, this has elements in common with her big winner, Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play: a found community surviving outside a technology-based society (though for vastly different reasons), and culminating in a pageant performance that attempts to explain the world they know to themselves and to those who will come after. Also, some singing. Anyway, if anyone else sees it, let me know, so we can unpack it more together.

Bobby Moreno, Bartley Booz, Cricket Brown, Donetta Lavinia Grays,
Jeff Biehl, Bruce McKenzie. Photo by Carol Rosegg.

Also, I wrote the below musing on Facebook, but may as well share it here too, for posterity:

I've been noticing a growing trend over the last decade with plays: ending on an intake of breath, the moment of hesitation before a step, or perhaps right as the final one is taken. While first acts still end on some sort of button, final moments of the second act (or a one-act) are determined to do anything but. There's something to be said for the ambiguity of the moment, for audiences leaving the theater discussing what they think would happen next. But we know that the playwright, the director, the cast must have some decision made, even if they're leaning into the ambiguity of it. So why the pause? Why the moment of indecision/decision? Is it the fear that the fulfillment of that choice will have less impact? What does that say about the storytelling if they don't trust the story?

I don't have an answer yet, but it's something I've been thinking about. It's a move that works really effectively the first time you see it, but loses some power with each new iteration.

I'm thinking also of Fiona Shaw in Testament of Mary, and the final moment, which was a choice: a completed sentence and final thought, an underlining of the entire preceding play. I'm thinking of what a gut punch that final line was, and how I walked away obsessing over it, and how I still think about that moment to this day. "No," and a sharp withdrawal of light and sound.

So there's also something to be said for the button at the end of the play, of committing to a completed action or thought.

10/30/25: Dreadful Episodes

What: 59E59 hosts the DC-based Happenstance Theater's devised work of vignettes inspired by the work of Edward Gorey (and others).

And? What a delightful confection of macabre little tales and song. Six ensemble members plus a musician perform a series of vignettes: some connected, some stand-alone, dipping into the poe-faced irony and sepia-toned style of Gorey's work with a practiced step. Though it's hard to pick a favorite, I'm going to choose one anyway: the eleven o'clock number, balletic slow-motion catastrophe of a croquet game, with foley sounds and underscore provided as if we were watching a silent film slowed down.

Jay Owen, Sarah Olmsted Thomas, Mark Jaster, and Sabrina Mandell in
the vignette "The Late Patron." Photo by Leah Huete.

10/31/25: Queens

What: Martyna Majok's new play at MTC's Off-Broadway space, spanning sixteen years in a basement apartment in Queens housing refugee women from various countries, trying to earn enough to send for their families, and trying to figure out how to stay. One woman, Renia, arrives bedraggled and with only one plastic bag of belongings in 2001; by 2017 she is the owner of the building but the basement apartment is empty.

And? Majok is very good at crafting characters who grab our empathy by the throat, then proceed to do unforgivable things. But then that's often the question of her plays: are these things forgivable? Do these people deserve forgiveness? Do they want it? How can you heal from a life-rending scar? This play stands alongside her earlier works, Ironbound and Sanctuary City, as studies of the immigrant/refugee existence in the States: how these people must live on the fringes to survive, and how they survive, and how they hold onto their dignity despite their struggles (her Pulitzer-winning Cost of Living is the outlier among these, focusing on people with disabilities and people struggling with poverty). This play is a gut-punch but it's also funny. It's just moments but every moment could be the end of everything. Majok is definitely a must-see playwright for me. I've read Ironbound but I hope I get to see a production someday (incidentally, this production features Marin Ireland, the star of Ironbound, as well as Sharlene Cruz, the star of Sanctuary City). These two are excellent as expected, but truly the entire cast is so uniformly excellent as well: raw and human, unapologetic and fully realized.