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Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods was a very funny and refreshingly sex-forward hit at HERE Arts Center last year, written by and starring real-life partners Bailey Williams and Emma Horwitz. (Williams’ The Family Dog, which will play New York Theatre Workshop next after a successful SummerWorks premiere, and Horwitz’s Mary Gets Hers were similarly irreverent and nimble with genre.)
Their first work under the banner of Two Sisters, their new company, is The Executrix, an inventive and slippery one-act by Horwitz, which Sarah Blush directs. (Williams sells cuttings from their home’s plants by the entrance.) They describe it as a “style-lush tale,” which is a better way to express how ravishing and intoxicated by its own style the experience is than I can come up with.
Standing far from the back of the Target Margin Theater’s huge garage space, we catch famous artist Susan (Jennifer Ikeda) as she recounts what has led to her current situation: plummeting to her death from a high-above window. (It involves confusing the terms masturbation and defenestration.) Splat! and we’re allowed to take our seats alongside a long gingham table that extends into the ceiling. (Krit Robinson designed the sets and props; Karen Boyer the costumes.)
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Seated there, in a Park Avenue pantsuit, is Louise (Kelly McAndrew), Susan’s now-former lover, waiting for her dinner party to start. She’s seemingly unfazed by her situation until the headscarf and gloved arrival of Ida (Jennifer Ikeda), a mysterious guest who pushes her about the merits of art versus commerce, and whether the expensive meatball shop from which Louise sourced the meal is still hip. The two appear to be flirting.
Horwitz is in the realm of the ridiculous and Blush matches her blush. This is a production where McAndrew turns on a bordello-red lamp in order to climb up a cherry-picker ladder and answer a phone; where the garage doors dramatically open so that Molly Bernard can storm in, deliver a frenzied screed and throw a McGuffin of a suitcase against the floor. (T. Ryder Smith plays a late addition to the proceedings.)
With its blue velvet curtains, rockabilly soundtrack and general oddness, there’s more than a touch of David Lynch here, with some hearty helpings of Fassbinder’s Petra von Kant as well, like when Louise and Ida cozy up lesbionically on a white fur rug.
The plot admittedly escaped me for a moment, but on that rug takes place a brief interlude about Amelia Earhart, first ridiculous then suddenly haunting. It presages an idea, later explored, that we should not focus too much on the characters’ identities; that these are beings whose entire existence revolves around chasing each other across time and space. With style like this, and in such good company—good enough for me!
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Another seemingly eternal specter, capitalism, is getting a downtown whacking courtesy of Classic Stage Company’s revival of Waiting for Lefty. Clifford Odets’ episodic, pro-union drama from 1935 still has plenty of potency even if Steven Pasquale’s staging struggles to maintain momentum. It’s hardly his fault: each vignette amounts to “The Man = bad” and, true as that is, it grows tedious even with a top-notch cast that includes Tala Ashe, Raffi Barsoumian and Adam Kantor.
They play cab drivers meeting to debate an impending strike, with scenes dramatizing how they’ve arrived at the end of their respective financial ropes: food insecurity, dwindling wages, encouraged snitching and compromised ethics. The most chilling line is delivered by Henry Stram’s middle manager to Austin Durant’s underling: “Orders from above. I don't have to tell you from where. New type poison gas for modern warfare.”
Luckily, folk duo Yeller Tooth has created a handful of original songs to liven things up with music worthy of its Woody Guthrie direct-action ambitions. Its members, Sahar Milani and Cameron Scoggins, are on-hand to perform alongside Doireann Mac Mahon and Zach McNally, and Susan Misner choreographs some poignant beats for the ensemble, including a slo-mo tableaux that suggests the sluggish pace of liberation. (A comedic highlight is Greg Hildreth parodying the moment in Victrola-era ditties where a bowtie-sounding crooner slows down to talk matters of the heart.)
Pasquale proves himself a gifted actor’s director, and does his part to engage the audience by having them distribute pamphlets calling out the obscenity of our trillionaire era. Waiting for Lefty can drag, even at 75 minutes, but hopefully we’re not waiting for his next directorial project much longer.
The Executrix is scheduled through November 14, 2026 at Target Margin Theatre on 52nd Street in Brooklyn. For tickets and more information, visit here.
Waiting for Lefty is scheduled through November 29, 2026 at Classic Stage Company on East 13th Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.
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There’s something very cold about The Heart, though I respect the musical’s ambition as a constantly pulsing poperetta. Anne and Ian Eisendrath’s score, while littered with cliches, is mostly successful in that regard, and EDM was never about the lyrics anyhow. But though Kait Kerrigan’s book, adapted from the French novel Réparer les vivants, purports to honor life’s preciousness by following a heart’s 24-hour journey from death to transplant (and thus rebirth), it is icy and detached to the point of inhumanity. EDM winds up being a too-appropriate medium.
To be fair, I’ve always stood completely parallel to medical dramas, which continue to grow in popularity. But I remember the moment I realized that Grey’s Anatomy, for example, is as much about the melodrama as it is about watching graphic surgical footage (something I am never trying to do), and then mini-spiraling about how that type of media has led directly to the societal obsession with true crime (an icky genre, at best) and our broader dehumanization.
There’s a fetishization of the medical profession that The Heart feeds into; one which prioritizes efficiency over benevolence with AI-startup callousness. The plot is simple: 19-year-old Simon (Nick T. Daly) dies in a car accident, and hospital staff (Lincoln Clauss, Drew Gehling, Bre Jackson, Wren Rivera) work diligently to make the best of the situation and convince his parents (Joaquina Kalukango and Jason Tam) to authorize organ donations. Simon’s girlfriend (Max McKenna) is around to humanize him and tug at our emotions, and Claire (Heidi Blickenstaff) is the dying stranger who’d given up on life just before receiving the pivotal call.
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Medicine is an arena of facts over feelings, but a discomfort crept up on me while hearing Clauss’ transplant coordinator zone out from the grieving mother’s tears to note that “She’s speaking in the past tense now, it’s starting to soak in.” It’s one thing to mostly relegate Kalukango to tear-soaked distress—something she does very well and is gratefully allowed to break free from in the number “I Will Never Let You Go,” which, with her diva vocals over a thumping beat, should signal a possible career pivot into house music. But Clauss’ continuing to sing over her bordered on disrespect and undercut the scene’s emotion.
I shook that off and convinced myself to hop out of my feelings, but then a trend-chasing scene opened with a MMORPG sequence that’s halted when its gamemaster is called to duty and tasked with finding a quick recipient for the transplant. This goes into a number that gamifies that process, with the backwall projections (by Lucy Mackinnon) navigating through the healthcare mainframe, Matrix-style, as Rivera’s operator tells a possible beneficiary’s voicemail, “I’ve been trying to reach you for five minutes. 15 minutes left. Then I move on.”
It felt very much like the (ongoing) era of military training that harvested detached killers based on video game competence—the subject of the play Grounded, whose big-screen-based operatic adaptation The Heart’s production often evokes. (Robert Brill did the tech-heavy set for Christopher Ashley’s staging; Amanda Zieve designed the lighting; and Gareth Owen deserves an award for the crispness of the sound.)
There’s a strange tech-optimism at play, all on the back of actual humanity, which is why Blickenstaff’s arrival is so welcome: she actually gets to play a character, and manages to shade her once-doomed recipient with warm existentialism (the actor’s speciality?). When we meet her Claire, she’s getting drunk on her birthday, which she believes, maybe even hopes, will be her last. “Nobody Gets Out Alive” is the name of the song; a boppy Amy Winehouse dirge that taps into the human contradiction that the rest of The Heart cannot, even if the musical itself paradoxically embodies—we can rage against the machine, our ourselves, but it has to come from within.
The Heart is scheduled through December 6, 2026 at the Laura Pels Theatre on West 46th Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.
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There’s something very cold about The Heart, though I respect the musical’s ambition as a constantly pulsing poperetta. Anne and Ian Eisendrath’s score, while littered with cliches, is mostly successful in that regard, and EDM was never about the lyrics anyhow. But though Kait Kerrigan’s book, adapted from the French novel Réparer les vivants, purports to honor life’s preciousness by following a heart’s 24-hour journey from death to transplant (and thus rebirth), it is icy and detached to the point of inhumanity. EDM winds up being a too-appropriate medium.
To be fair, I’ve always stood completely parallel to medical dramas, which continue to grow in popularity. But I remember the moment I realized that Grey’s Anatomy, for example, is as much about the melodrama as it is about watching graphic surgical footage (something I am never trying to do), and then mini-spiraling about how that type of media has led directly to the societal obsession with true crime (an icky genre, at best) and our broader dehumanization.
There’s a fetishization of the medical profession that The Heart feeds into; one which prioritizes efficiency over benevolence with AI-startup callousness. The plot is simple: 19-year-old Simon (Nick T. Daly) dies in a car accident, and hospital staff (Lincoln Clauss, Drew Gehling, Bre Jackson, Wren Rivera) work diligently to make the best of the situation and convince his parents (Joaquina Kalukango and Jason Tam) to authorize organ donations. Simon’s girlfriend (Max McKenna) is around to humanize him and tug at our emotions, and Claire (Heidi Blickenstaff) is the dying stranger who’d given up on life just before receiving the pivotal call.
Medicine is an arena of facts over feelings, but a discomfort crept up on me while hearing Clauss’ transplant coordinator zone out from the grieving mother’s tears to note that “She’s speaking in the past tense now, it’s starting to soak in.” It’s one thing to mostly relegate Kalukango to tear-soaked distress—something she does very well and is gratefully allowed to break free from in the number “I Will Never Let You Go,” which, with her diva vocals over a thumping beat, should signal a possible career pivot into house music. But Clauss’ continuing to sing over her bordered on disrespect and undercut the scene’s emotion.
I shook that off and convinced myself to hop out of my feelings, but then a trend-chasing scene opened with a MMORPG sequence that’s halted when its gamemaster is called to duty and tasked with finding a quick recipient for the transplant. This goes into a number that gamifies that process, with the backwall projections (by Lucy Mackinnon) navigating through the healthcare mainframe, Matrix-style, as Rivera’s operator tells a possible beneficiary’s voicemail, “I’ve been trying to reach you for five minutes. 15 minutes left. Then I move on.”
It felt very much like the (ongoing) era of military training that harvested detached killers based on video game competence—the subject of the play Grounded, whose big-screen-based operatic adaptation The Heart’s production often evokes. (Robert Brill did the tech-heavy set for Christopher Ashley’s staging; Amanda Zieve designed the lighting; and Gareth Owen deserves an award for the crispness of the sound.)
There’s a strange tech-optimism at play, all on the back of actual humanity, which is why Blickenstaff’s arrival is so welcome: she actually gets to play a character, and manages to shade her once-doomed recipient with warm existentialism (the actor’s speciality?). When we meet her Claire, she’s getting drunk on her birthday, which she believes, maybe even hopes, will be her last. “Nobody Gets Out Alive” is the name of the song; a boppy Amy Winehouse dirge that taps into the human contradiction that the rest of The Heart cannot, even if the musical itself paradoxically embodies—we can rage against the machine, our ourselves, but it has to come from within.
The Heart is scheduled through December 6, 2026 at the Laura Pels Theatre on West 46th Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.
