This Month In Theater: June 2010

The Merchant of Venice and The Winter's Tale  
The Public Theater's annual free-admission Shakespeare in the Park will be a rotating repertory this summer: two nights of MV, two nights of WT, and so on. Both plays are great crowd-pleasers, packed with danger, romance and people in disguise. MV, directed by Daniel Sullivan, stars Al Pacino as the thwarted moneylender, Shylock, with Lily Rabe as Portia, the shrewd lawyer. The complex WT, directed by Michael Greif, is part comedy, part tragedy and part romance. Ruben Santiago-Hudson plays jealous King Leontes, who believes his wife is having an affair with his best friend. A baby is abandoned, there's an oracle's prophecy and a 16-year passage of time before everything gets worked out.
 
The Delacorte Theater in Central Park, June 9 -Aug. 1, (212) 539-8500.  For schedule: publictheater.org.
 

Great Small Works' Ninth International Toy Theater Festival
Great Small Works brings together hundreds of artists from all over the world, for two weeks, to display their miniaturist magic in individual performance spaces spread out through St. Ann's giant warehouse area. A featured troupe is Holland's Hotel Modern, presenting Kamp, a frighteningly realistic depiction of Auschwitz, utilizing thousands of three-inch-tall puppets as prisoners and guards, along with stark settings and simple devices, all manipulated by a trio of performers.
 
St. Ann's Warehouse, 38 Water St., DUMBO, Brooklyn, May 30 - June 13, (718) 254-0779. For schedule: greatsmallworks.org
 
Too Soon Festival  
Every year the truly wonderful Brick Theater comes up with a ridiculous theme for its summer 10-show fest.  The funny thing is: no matter how silly it sounds, the shows are always well-produced, enthusiastically acted and well worth a visit. This year salutes the half-baked idea. I hope to see Chemistry, by Danny Bowes and Jillian Tully, wherein Bowes and Tully meet at a wine bar and decide to write a play together, each playing the other; RIP JD: A Celebration of Death, in which J.D. Salinger's works are treated unmercifully, now that he can't sue anyone; and The Wedding of Berit Johnson and Ian W. Hill, the actual nuptials of downtown's most prolific playwright/director, Hill, and his tech/ light board partner of 10 years, Johnson.
 
The Brick Theatre, 575 Metropolitan Ave., June 4-27, (866) 811-4111.  For schedule: bricktheater.com.
 
Clubbed Thumb's 15th Annual Summerworks Festival 
These people have been putting on first, or nearly the first, plays of young, mostly female, playwrights for years now; and as the seasons have progressed, a lot of their "graduates" have gone on to become well-known names in downtown and off-Broadway theater.  This year's three plays in three weeks, running consecutively, are: Dot, by Kate E. Ryan, directed by Anne Kaufman, about a TV-watching older woman in Florida who befriends the neighborhood's weird kid. The cast of six includes the superb Mary Schultz, with original music by the multi-talented Mike Iveson. Next is Five Genocides, by Samuel D. Hunter, directed by Davis McCallum, about a woman named Katie, who likes her work at the Fashion Bug, but has to deal with drunken in-laws. The Small, by Anne Washburn, directed by Les Waters, is about a man and his dog, the man's dreams and a phony organic food store.
 
The Ohio Theater, 66 Wooster St., (212) 352-3101, June 6 - 26.
 
Can You Hear Their Voices  
Back in 1931, Whittaker Chambers (later to become the key witness vs. convicted communist spy Alger Hiss) wrote a magazine piece about an Arkansas drought, which revealed a rural world of hunger and deprivation and governmental bureaucratic neglect. (Sound familiar?)  Hallie Flanagan and Margaret Ellen Clifford then wrote a dramatization of the plight of these desperate tenant farmers.  The ground-breaking Peculiar Works Project, which has produced terrific site-specific revivals of early off-off Broadway plays for the past 10 years, is reviving this play, with an 11-actor ensemble playing 25 roles, co-directed by Ralph Lewis and Barry Rowell.
 
A Pop-Up Space, 2 Great Jones St., (between Broadway & Lafayette), previews June 3, opens June 6-27, (212) 352-3101.
 
Above: Al Pacino as Shylock in the Merchant of Venice.