Margin Notes: Bitcoin Bad Boy

Bitcoin Bad Boy

Foreground: Gianna Hoffman as
Sallie. Background: Jack Orrico as
Dan and Gloria Sangirardi Jung
as Barbara. Photo courtesy of the
production.

Seen on: Wednesday, 10/21/26.

Plot and Background

As part of Chain Theatre's Factory Series, Inferno presents Ben Schiller's sequel to the 2024 Happenstance. At a Bitcoin World conference in Vegas, Charlie Schwagg--newly released from prison after writing a code that constituted money laundering--is hailed as a liberated hero of cryptocurrency. However, with his release contingent on his selling certain talking points in his keynote speech, notably those in service of a corrupt politician, his crisis of conscience leads him to instead flee the city, expose the truth, and bring the news to the world not only online but also to a stadium audience in New York. Playwright Schiller used his decade of experience in crypto journalism to inform Charlie's two poles: a "free" market of cryptocurrency about to be regulated and dismantled, and the hope of something purer and cleaner, a return to the free without any malingering corruption.

Thoughts:

Play: Well, it's a lot. It's a lot of moving pieces and a lot of players with questionable motives, from Charlie's parasitic and opportunist brother and parents, to two aggressive fans-slash-muggers in a parking lot, to the strong-arming from the power suit-wearing politician, to Charlie's redemption in the form of his spiritually-inclined ex-girlfriend. When Crypto Czar points out the flickering neon lights of Vegas to Charlie, he asks him what that looks like to him. Charlie responds, "Hell?" "No," Butch replies, "that's freedom." At the center of it all, Charlie seems more a shiftless wavering soul rather than an anchor, a core around which the other characters orbit. Perhaps that's the point: it is only when he finally crystalizes his beliefs that his posture transforms from a constant side-to-side shuffling to standing tall and still. That being said, I'm not sure the arc is fully earned. The scenes tend to meander both within the moments as well as the fade from one space to another. The family's transformation from using Charlie to supporting him moves too quickly to absolve them of their corruption, and a reconciliation never makes it onstage. Girlfriend Sallie's redemption of Charlie, meanwhile, feels as shapeless as her hippy-dippy world view (she's absconded from Burning Man to rescue him, based on a psychic revelation). I suspect some of these relationships are more rewarding for an audience already familiar with these characters from Happenstance, but coming at them fresh with only this play leaves me with a lot of unknowns. That being said, while the emotional resonance of the relationships runs on the light side, playwright Schiller does an admirable job of catching the viewer up on the backstory itself. The most strikingly drawn conflict and tension of this play lies between Charlie and politician Butch, whose villainy is clean-cut and merciless. But with his absence from the final reckoning, the weight of that conflict reaching its climax with more a whimper than a bang.

Weekly Margin 2026, W42: Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library

10/13/26: Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library

What: Luna Stage and Richard Jordan Productions with Traverse Theatre present Jenny Lynn Bader's play covering Hannah Arendt's arrest and interrogation that immediately preceded her escape from Germany and the rise of the Nazi party.

And? There are some elements here of environmental tension and threat, but not enough. Hannah is kept in isolation in a basement prison cell for several days, not knowing if her mother (also arrested) is safe. She doesn't know if she will be released. She has no contact with the outside world. It isn't until a lawyer lies his way into her cell that she even knows she's being charged with treason. And yet this woman seems never unsure, never unsafe. It's never once clear that she's deliberately manipulating her interrogator and obfuscating her motives. She has no emotional journey because she starts where she ends, never really fearing she could be tortured or killed at any moment. Her interrogator Karl, then, is the character with an actual arc and journey: that of a green and insecure officer putting on bravado but eventually being won over enough to assist her in escaping punishment. And as it's not clear if he's making this exception for just her or if she really has turned him around on "the Jewish question," I therefore don't know why I should care much about the journey of a Jew-hater.

Ella Kaille as Hannah. Photo by Valerie Terranova.

Weekly Margin 2026, W41: Other Desert Cities, Night of January 16th

10/06/26: Other Desert Cities

What: A Broadway revival of Jon Robin Baitz's play about a family rocked by their adult daughter's upcoming memoir which reveals long-hidden secrets ... and leads to more revelations.

And? I saw the first Broadway run, about fifteen years ago, and over the course of this new production had my memory slowly jogged regarding upcoming revelations. It's well-acted, particularly Ed Harris as the patriarch Lyman. Lily Rabe has a very different take on Brooke, the catalyzer of the family catastrophe, than Rachel Griffiths, which affects the dynamic overall. Griffiths's Brooke was brittle and guarded but without the teeming warmth of Rabe. Either approach is valid, but it changes the nature of the audience's shifting loyalties. Overall a quality presentation of a solid play.

10/09/26: Night of January 16th

What: Ruth Stage presents Ayn Rand's courtroom drama, inspired by the death of Ivan Kreuger, in which a jury selected from the audience must vote on whether or not to convict the woman accused of his murder.

And? I'll confess I don't understand the meaning behind a number of director Theo Devaney's choices for this interpretation. Some things work very well: the ballet of Hannah Beemer's Lady Justice as she moves blind through the courtroom, the stillness of Christa B. Allen's Karen Andre in contrast to the almost frenetic movement of some of the witnesses. The sparseness of Tomas Calinao Correa's scenic design is effective as well with its floating chairs and podia but no actual physical grounding in a courtroom. The whole thing feels a bit like a dream, or a nightmare -- but here perhaps is where the vision loses me. There are a number of disparate elements that certainly feed the chaotic eclecticism of a nightmare but make very little story or metaphorical sense, like the prosecutor dressed as a dominatrix, the gradual undressing of both her and Karen (especially with no men onstage receiving the same treatment), the vision of the defense attorney as a hollow-eyed casino lounge sleeze, or cringing clerk Siegurd as a swaggering don with his peacoat draped elegantly over his shoulders. And of course the framing device of the cast as groaning, lumbering zombies awaiting their turn on the stand. I had hoped by the end of the production I would understand why, what statement was being made, but that did not happen. By and large these big swing choices distracted but did not fully obfuscate the play itself, but they still followed me home as unanswered questions.

Weekly Margin 2026, W40: Anon, Burning Leaves, Degenerates, Slam Frank

9/30/26: Anon: A Tempest at Our Kitchen Table

What: MCC presents Anne Washburn's newest play. In a suburb of San Antonio, a middle aged gay couple moves into a neighborhood across  the street from a family whose matriarch is knee-deep in the QAnon conspiracy swamp. As paranoia grows in both households, a violent confrontation feels more and more inevitable under the flashing lightning and booming thunder of a gathering storm.

And? This is pretty great. The overlay of the teenage daughter's work with King Lear is perhaps not subtle, but it is consistently satisfying; and her discussion of the difference between a monologue and a soliloquy sheds a perspective on how broken down online discourse has become that I hadn't actually considered before. A soliloquy isn't a conversation, like a monologue can be. Neither is a screed on X or a conspiracy-laden TikTok. They're bellowing into a void or at an imagined audience. As act two opened, I did one of those knowing chuckles of "ah right, this is an Anne Washburn play," but don't want to spoil more than that. At the end of the play, well ... I didn't realize we were at the end of the play. But otherwise I thought it was pretty great theater.

dots's scenic design is an interestingly spare and liminal space: a long wooden kitchen table in a room bare of other furniture or any art on the wall. To either side of the room, half-behind a scrim are cardboard boxes, but the question remains if the families are moving in or moving out, or--in the case of Jeanie's family--never quite finished moving in a year later. The concept for Cha See's lighting design is less clear to me. The general illumination of the space is fine, but I was continually distracted by the columns of round lights framing the space, and the significance of which lights were lit at different times. I didn't manage to resolve this by the end of the production, but I'm assuming it didn't distract anyone who isn't the kind of nerd I am. Good cast all around, especially Crystal Finn as the strident Jeanie and Izabel Mar as her outspoken daughter.

Izabel Mar as Delia and Crystal Finn as Jeanie.
Photo by Monique Carboni.

10/01/26: Burning Leaves

What: TOSOS presents the world premiere of Tom Rowan's play about Matt, a former New York actor, seeks a new start as a high school drama teacher in a small town in Illinois. As he attempts to engage the children on local events by encouraging them to craft a devised docuplay about the question of a nuclear power plant being built in their dying factory town, he encounters Jesse, a troubled young student with acting potential but a strong resistance to engagement as he wrestles with his sexuality. 

And? full review here.

Foreground: Campbell Idol as Jesse. Background: Sophie
Tanabaum as Hallie, Becky Rusch as Alicia, and Brady Dalton
Richards as Matt. Photo by Mikiodo.

Margin Notes: Slam Frank

Slam Frank

Olivia Bernábe as Anita and Walker Stovall as
ASM. Photo by Shawn Salley Photography.

Seen on: Saturday, 10/03/26.

Plot and Background

Inspired by a viral tweet asking if Anne Frank ever acknowledged her white privilege, Joel Sinensky and Andrew Fox conceived Slam Frank: The Anne-Frank Afro-Latin Hip-Hop Musical. Following a hit run with Asylum NYC, the encore production comes to the Orpheum Theatre. The premise of this production is a progressive theater attempts to retell Anne Frank's story while including as many diverse identities as possible, from ethnicity to gender to sexuality to neurodiversity.

Thoughts:

Play: We open with the "Artistic Director" of a progressive theater company standing onstage to introduce the show, beginning with a land acknowledgment which stutters to a stop when he can't remember the name of the indigenous people who originally lived here. He then goes on to explain his attempt as a cis white male to make space for other identities to express themselves, and the audience is chuckling along, knowingly acknowledging the performative wokeness and over-correcting we are about to witness in longform. And then we're in it, with Anita--not Anne--rapping into a hand-held mic about writing in her diary.

As the show goes on, the various characters emerge as one marginalized identity or another--or many intersectional ones. Anita is a Latina teen told to repress her ethnic identity to be more commercial (even as the ghost of her Abuela encourages her to remember who she is). Edith, Anne's mother, is a proud Black woman in a bold African print dress, who continually breaks the fourth wall to remind us that this is happening "today"--both the today of 1944 but also the today of 2026. Otto, her husband, is every neurodiverse identity the writers can throw at the wall, while also a closeted homosexual. The family Van Daan, hiding in the attic with the Franks, consist of Mr. Van Daan, the cis white villain; Mrs. Van Daan, a repressed woman on a journey of self-actualization; and Peter, their child who comes out as nonbinary (this of course leads to Anita discovering this must mean she's pansexual). Peter's number, the enjoyable tuneful "Non-Binary," is a showstopper coming-out for all characters (except Mr. Van Daan and Margot--hang on, we'll get to her in a moment), featuring each ripping off their yellow stars in favor of stars with the flag colors for their respective identities, complete with pronouns. The show-within-a-show and its characters are so enamored of exploring these identities that the actual circumstances of the Franks and Van Daans hiding in an attic are forgotten: at one point a character brings up the Nazis, and Anita, bewildered, replies, "the what?" That's the point, though: the writers takes the deliberate approach of appropriating a story without addressing the real circumstances, à la Cole Escola's conscious decision to not do any research when writing O, Mary! (reinforced especially in Slam Frank by the mispronunciation of character names: the t in Margot shouldn't be silent, for example). The extent of that appropriation--taking a story explicitly about the attempted annihilation of the Jewish people and making it explicitly about anyone else (reducing Jewish people, as unfortunately is happening a lot right now, to "white Europeans")--reaches full expression with Anita's sister Margot. Margot is the only character remotely coded as Jewish: lighting Shabbat candles and wearing a scarf over her hair. She's also the only character who doesn't speak.

Margin Notes: Burning Leaves

Burning Leaves

Foreground: Campbell Idol as Jesse.
Background: Sophie Tananbaum as Hallie, 
Becky Rusch as Alicia, and Brady Dalton Richards
as Matt. Photo by Mikiodo.

Seen on: Thursday, 10/01/26.

Plot and Background

Matt, a former New York actor, seeks a new start as a high school drama teacher in a small town in Illinois. As he attempts to engage the children on local events by encouraging them to craft a devised docu-play about the question of a nuclear power plant being built in their dying factory town, he encounters Jesse, a troubled young student with acting potential but a strong resistance to engagement as he wrestles with his sexuality. 

Thoughts:

Play: Rowan's play is well-constructed with a strong line of tension powerfully carried by director Graydon Gund. The dialogue is unstilted and honest, and I care about each character onstage, their wants and needs, as well as their individual hang-ups. I spent the show genuinely concerned for how things would shake out, desperate for a happy ending, but aware of the warning signs that we were headed for trouble. Matt moves into a spare room in the high school counselor's house, and proceeds to help around the house (including raking and burning the titular leaves), inadvertently inciting a crush in the recently-divorced Jane. He continues to unconsciously stir pots when he eschews the idea of putting on a musical (to the intense frustration of student Alicia, who has been counting on landing a leading role as a senior), favoring instead scenes from Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams, until he lands on the concept of the devised theater piece. And finally, in his biggest slip in judgement, he ignores the resistance of both counselor Jane as well as Jesse's hostile (and homophobic) father to encourage Jesse to pursue an acting career. Of course things will go badly. The best intentions, etc.

While Matt is, frankly, not a good teacher for a group of high schoolers still figuring out who they are, he is also simultaneously a good mentor for artists discovering their inner aptitudes: Hallie, the daughter of his landlord/school counselor Jane, shows an innate attunement for how to craft disparate elements from raw interviews into a coherent narrative. He recognizes (as does she) that though she is no actor, she can be a capable playwright (and, though they don't say it, a strong dramaturg). Jesse, meanwhile, demonstrates strong instincts with his connections to Hamlet's struggles, finding a way to externalize his own unspoken pain and fear. Where Matt falls short, continually, is in knowing how to balance his instincts of open vulnerability (no doubt a carryover from his time in the downtown New York theater space) with the boundaries needed to effectively teach teenagers without any lines being crossed. He's already off to a bad start by living in the spare room of the school counselor, which means cohabiting with one of his own students; but when his interest and kindness to Jesse spurs the teenage boy to not only come out to him but to also express his love for him, Matt completely fails to properly establish boundaries to protect not only the vulnerable child but also himself (for that matter, he should have immediately reported when Jesse confirmed his father beat him). Though it's clear he feels protective of Jesse and doesn't want to hurt him, what little he does to enforce boundaries is ineffective. It's also clear he understands on some level that what he's doing is wrong, hiding from Jane the full extent of their connection. Though he never crosses the physical boundary that would lead to actual molestation of a minor, his relationship to Jesse, with its inherent power dynamic and age gap, is not a safe environment for a vulnerable boy, especially when the shit hits the fan.

What follows, then, at least for this audience member, is both a lingering frustration with a deeply flawed protagonist, and a strong protective instinct for the teenage boy, hoping against hope that he will come out of all this safe and with the potential to lead a happy life.