BROADWAY & ME QUICKIES

The Play: Meat Suit, or the Shitshow of Motherhood; a series of skits about the downside of being a mother, performed as an avant-gardist clown show with outlandish costumes and forget-them-as-soon-after-you-hear-them songs  Written and directed by: Aya Ogawa       One good thing: It’s always nice to see a traditional theater company like Second Stage giving mainstream exposure to a downtown show maker like Ogawa  One not-so-great thing: Maybe it's because I'm not a mom but the roll call of observations presented here—some women are ambivalent about becoming mothers, moms can be competitive with one another when it comes to childrearing, being a parent can be exhausting—just don’t seem all that cutting-edge or insightful    

The Play: Mother Russia, a goofy but still sharp critique of the former Soviet Union’s chaotic transition from communism to capitalism during the 1990s as experienced by two bumblers who try to adapt to the changes by cooking up get-rich schemes and by spying on a former famous dissident with whom one of them falls in love Written by: Lauren Yee        Directed by: Teddy Bergman One good thing: There’s a lot to love here, including the droll drag performance by David Turner in the title role, the dumb-and-dumber antics that  Steven Boyer and Adam Chanler-Berat gamely bring to life and a surprise dance interlude but I’m going with the clever low-tech sets devised by the design team dots One not-so-great thing: It’s a shame that the talented Rebecca Naomi Jones wasn't given more to do in the role of the former dissident.    

The Play: An entertaining psychological thriller about a playwright who finds the lines between his life and his art blurring after he hooks up with a mysterious guy in a bar who starts popping up in unsettling ways   Written by: David Cale        Directed by: Leigh Silverman One good thing: Caroline Eng’s eerie sound design helps to keep everything deliciously off-kilter   One not-so-great thing: The plot is overly convoluted but Sean Hayes is so charmingly adept as he portrays a dozen or so characters in this 75-minute solo show that he makes a slightly bumpy ride totally worth the trip    

The Play: The Dinosaurs, an earnest but ultimately disappointing play about the importance of 12-step programs like AA, filtered through the time-jumping experiences of a group of women who meet weekly to support one another as they share their stories and their struggles to maintain sobriety   Written by: Jacob Perkins        Directed by: Les Waters One good thing: Any chance to see master actors like  April Matthis,  Elizabeth Marvel and  Kathleen Chalfant  is a treat One not-so-great thing: The play doesn’t really say anything new about the challenges of recovery that hasn’t been said in scores of other plays and movies      

The Play: The Other Place; a disappointing modern-day riff on the Antigone story that flirts with themes of grief, incest, infidelity and mental illness but without saying anything meaningful about any of them Written and directed by: Alexander Zeldin         One good thing: Tobias Menzies brings his usual leonine intensity to the role of the uncle who clashes with the play’s version of Antigone over how best to honor—or dishonor—the dead One not-so-great thing: The sound design— little chirps to signal scene changes and ominous clangs to announce “important” moments—was annoying and the visuals didn’t make much sense either, particularly a large and seemingly expensive screen that hovered over the stage at certain points but disappeared during others    

The Play: Making a Show of Myself; a surprisingly moving one-woman show about the importance of the stories we tell one another, and ourselves  Written by: Mary Kate O Flanagan        Directed by: Will O’Connell One good thing:  The Irish-born Flanagan delivers each of the six beautifully crafted monologues about her life in an unusually soothing and totally captivating voice  One not-so-great thing: There’s no set, no costume changes and no major traumas revealed, which may disappoint theatergoers who require heavy helpings of razzle-dazzle