On a school trip to Russia at age 17, myself and 20-30 other teenagers were shuttled around by two successive tour guides—the first in Moscow, a second in St. Petersburg. At some point during that first week, we asked our Moscow tour guide if life in Russia was better or worse since the fall of the Soviet Union.

“Life is better,” he insisted, pointing to the freedoms now afforded to individuals. “Some people will tell you otherwise, but they are looking back through…”—a pause as he struggled for the English expression, then found it—“...through rose-tinted glasses.”

Our second guide, in St. Petersburg, donned those rosy glasses without hesitation. “Life is much worse,” he proclaimed, lamenting a loss of national identity. “It does not feel like Russia anymore.”

The central trio of Lauren Yee’s off-kilter comedy Mother Russia fall firmly into that “rose-tinted glasses” camp. Struggling to find their bearings in the newly commercialized St. Petersburg of 1992, these adrift souls yearn for a time when things made sense—when Russia was Russia. Although, they do still enjoy a good McDonalds Filet-O-Fish.

“Is this what capitalism tastes like?” slobbers Dmitri (Stephen Boyer) as he devours the breaded patty provided by Evgeny (Adam Chanler-Berat), the weak-willed son of a former party elder. Evgeny was sent to shake Dimitri down, but he’s none too intimidating. Instead, he ends up joining Dimitri’s makeshift surveillance outfit, helping to spy on schoolteacher Katya (Rebecca Naomi Jones), who has returned home following a failed effort as a singer in the U.S.. 

Dmitri and Evgeny are a buffoonish pair, and Yee looks to play their hapless efforts at spycraft for broad laughs. On this front, the results are a mixed bag. Chanler-Berat is playing an ironic distance that clashes with Boyer’s more sincere approach. The overall tone should be absurd, and the pacing frantic—but director Teddy Bergman only sometimes hits on that combo, too often letting the tempo sag.  

Yee lands some solid zingers, but the play’s juvenile humor often frustrates. Dimitri’s mysterious client is “very high level,” he proclaims, explaining: “A fuck ton of stairs”; for productions of The Cherry Orchard in the Russian theater of 1992, “the cherries are non-union.” Etcetera, and so on.

The overall political message lands more firmly. When Dmitry laments that he can no longer join the brutal, dissent-smashing security force of the former Soviet Union, his reasoning carries a sting. 

“If I could join the KGB, I wouldn’t have to figure out who I was,” he sighs. “Because they would tell me!”

Thankfully, that’s the most near-didactic Yee ever allows her dialogue to become. The parallels to contemporary U.S. society in Mother Russia are clear—from the sneaking allure of authoritarianism, to undereducated washouts finding purpose as mindless thugs of the state. But Yee does not underline the point.

She instead finds an intriguing theatrical language for Russia’s slip back into autocracy. The old Russia is represented here by our semi-narrator, Mother Russia, who opens the play and comments on the action throughout. An excellent David Turner, in full-on Babushka mode, plays this embodiment of Russia’s lost Soviet soul with a thick accent, goading in direct address: “They think I will die before long, but! What do they know?” 

While this trio of kids bumble around aimlessly, Mother Russia dominates the stage, gliding in and out with power and poise. The young threesome speak in American accents (weak, gross); Mother speaks with a powerful Russian cadence (dynamic, formidable). In the tightly windowed playing space of dots’ garage set, these kids often appear like marionettes, running around with their heads chopped off. (Hand-painted backdrops drive home the point, delightfully so.) The continued power of Mother Russia, even in the midst of her supposed defeat, feels absolute; her eventual return to total might, inevitable.

Mother Russia is a tonal mess, but a savvy work in many respects. If Yee’s writing isn’t quite witty enough to sell some of her wilder ideas, she nonetheless lands at a stirring conclusion that hits uncomfortably close to home.

‍Mother Russia is now in performance at Signature Theatre in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.

To note someone’s ability to make their face go from happy to angry may be the most primitive performance critique, but I cannot find another way to describe how effectively Okieriete Onaodowan achieves this one-two-punch in The Monsters. Appropriately, Ngozi Anyanwu’s play, which she directs herself for this Manhattan Theatre Club and Two River Theater premiere, deals in duals and duels, following the reunion of two estranged siblings.

Onaodowan, best known for musicals like Hamlet and The Great Comet, excels in this quieter role, as the older brother who found sobriety and success in mixed martial arts. Permanently (and appropriately) stanced between protectiveness and withdrawal, it’s Aigner Mizzelle who truly gets to shine after her breakout in 2021’s Chicken & Biscuits. Charming and ingratiating, earnest and deliberate, she appears at her champion brother’s studio after a 16-year separation and is soon living and training alongside him. As the two-hander flips between the present and scenes from their past, when they shared a father whose issues with addiction they’d come to share, it’s a gift to see Mizzelle play so intelligently across a range of emotions. 

The slenderness of Anyanwu’s story is deepened by her direction, and enlivened by a sleek production team. (Andrew Boyce’s scenic, Mika Eubanks’ costume, Cha See’s lighting and Mikaal Sulaiman’s sound designs often conspire to make the one-act pulse with the energy of the most galvanizing sneaker commercials.) Surprises might be few, but The Monsters is a fine study of two siblings who refuse to be beaten down and find communion in the fight.

Similarly straightforward, even amid its own time-hopping, is Jacob Perkins’ The Dinosaurs, directed by Les Waters at Playwrights Horizons. Taking place at a group for women alcoholics, it is a lowkey meditation on sobriety and community, verging on slight but weighted by the strength of its performers: Kathleen Chalfant (who received entrance applause at the performance I attended), Elizabeth Marvel, April Matthis, Maria Elena Ramirez, Mallory Portnoy and Keilly McQuail.

The specifics of their stories are almost beside the point, which is not to say Perkins doesn’t provide them each a moving monologue about their rocky paths toward recovery. The point is that they’re together, and that they’re granted the space to air their grievances with politeness and understanding. Time is played for laughs – listen to what each of their last-ever drinks cost and try to wrap your head around a $1.98 whisky sour – and poignancy, as members flow through meetings.

Perkins writes in the program that he was inspired by The Decameron – a plague-era tale of storytelling as a means of survival – and that sense of cross-generational connection is aptly felt. One of the women’s stories, about an eye-popping interaction with her queer son, hints at one Perkins might (and should) tell next.

The Monsters is in performance through March 22, 2026 at New York City Center on West 55th Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.

‍The Dinosaurs is in performance through March 1, 2026 at Playwrights Horizons on West 42nd Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.

Precisely what—or who—is the mysterious Unknown at the heart of David Cale’s mind-scrambling solo work, now making its world premiere in a riveting production at Studio Seaview?

Multiple meanings present themselves. That titular "unknown" refers most obviously to the narrative mystery that drives Cale’s spooky thriller, here staged by Leigh Silverman (Suffs, Yellow Face) and led by multi-hyphenate Sean Hayes, returning to the stage following his Tony Award win for Good Night, Oscar in 2023. The title also refers to the “unknown” actor who is stalking Elliott, our storyteller, for reasons unclear. 

But the true “unknown” at the heart of Cale’s melancholy work is Elliott himself, a detached and near-dissociated writer played with notable restraint by Hayes—-a performer often prone to hamminess. 

The Unknown begins as luxurious red curtains part to reveal Elliott, a gay man in his late 40s, who shares that he is suffering from writer’s block. After setting aside an unproduced musical years earlier, he has been stuck. Unable to start a new project, whether novel, play or screenplay (he does them all), Elliott retreats to his friend Larry’s country home upstate. But it is there, late at night, that yearning lyrics from that musical come floating in through the windows, seeming to whisper from the woods:

I wish you’d wanted me 

How different life would be

I’d love you endlessly 

If you had wanted me

That mournful verse emanates from all sides of the Seaview space, murmuring into our ear in Caroline Eng’s perfectly unnerving sound design. Ghostly lighting by Cha See envelops Hayes in darkness, with only a sliver of light striking through the black. 

The song will follow Elliott back to New York, where events only grow stranger. Clearly, an actor rejected from a workshop of the musical (an “unknown,” not of significance) is the culprit. But the stultified Elliott is more intrigued than frightened, and soon seeks out his stalker, excited by the potential for new material. 

To say more would be spoiling the fun. Suffice to say, Cale expertly keeps up the tension, aided by Silverman’s carefully controlled direction. The playwright does allow himself the occasional sojourn—reflections on historic gay New York, particularly the legendary bar Julius, never find a  totally clear connection with our story. But they do help in adding some atmosphere, a bit of mise-en-scène.

Yet for all the details Elliot provides in unfolding his tale, he offers few about himself. The reasons behind that sketchiness do not become fully clear until the play's end. But Elliott’s enigmaticness ties into a moving central theme, one Cale also explored so beautifully in his previous solo work Blue Cowboy: the tragedy of half-existence, of a person struggling to live as their whole self—unsure, perhaps, of what that whole self would even look like. A walking unknown. 

Cale performed Blue Cowboy himself at The Bushwick Starr last fall, movingly so. The Unknown is written with a strikingly similar affect, or lilt, and one wonders if Cale intended to portray Elliott as well. But Hayes is wholly persuasive, shifting between an array of supporting characters with lightness and ease. And he is steadfastly steely as Elliott, allowing only glimpses behind the carefully cultivated demeanor of a man who can only exist through stories, never as himself. 

Cale’s text ultimately folds in on itself, in a smart if not altogether satisfying coup de théâtre. If the piece is not as emotionally devastating as Blue Cowboy, it still lingers, unnervingly. That unknown voice whispers, softly, of another self lurking the darkness. 

The Unknown is now in performance at Studio Seaview. For tickets and more information, visit here.