Author: David Gorsline

What is this? we ask ourselves ten minutes into Mr. Burns, a post-electric play. Some guys sitting around a campfire, telling stories that they remember badly, hoping that the creak in the woods they just heard is food and not an intruder? A surprisingly moving passage in which news is exchanged by summoning names from address books?

And yet, and yet. Out of such rude yet inherently theatrical materials, Anne Washburn recapitulates the development of culture: survivors of a generalized failure of the electric power grid keep themselves alive by quoting bits of Gilbert and Sullivan and episodes of Matt Groening’s The Simpsons. As the years roll along, quotation becomes invention; light comedy and satire becomes bloody, lyrical tragedy. Or, as my OTC put it, when there is no physical property to speak of (when your stage machinery is made of recycled blue plastic tarpaulins), there remains intellectual property.

Some engaging acting performances in the first act—James Sugg’s taciturn, Robert Mitchum-channelling Sam, the travelling Gibson (Chris Genebach) with hidden G&S skills—become absorbed into the ensemble playing of the second and third acts. Indeed, by act 3, set far in the future, we’ve dispensed with distinguishable characters at all. But it’s that third act towards which this play is driving, a marvelous palimpsest of bits of Western culture high and low (mostly low)—Brechtian songs, all of the actors in half masks, Britney Spears chartbusters—all of the theatrical wires showing because there’s no technology to make them disappear. The thrilling miracle of the end of the act is that there are juice-carrying wires at all.

• Mr. Burns, a post-electric play, by Anne Washburn, directed by Steven Cosson, music by Michael Friedman, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Mike Nichols keeps the opening moments of Death of a Salesman quiet, soft, and slow, all the better to set off the fireworks to come. The performances here set a reference standard for Arthur Miller’s iconic work, though we do miss the scrim effects specified by the text. Andrew Garfield gives us a grittier, more street-wise Biff Loman; Molly Price does comic va-va-va-voom as The Woman. Philip Seymour Hoffman is grounded, stolid as Willy Loman as his American dream breaks apart under his feet. He is a bear at bay—until his closing beat, when he sprints to escape.

With one arguable exception, the underscoring by Alex North and Glen Kelly works very well here, giving the piece a bit of Tennessee Williams flavor. The compact set by Jo Mielziner keeps the playing spaces contained; for once, the Lomans’ kitchen is the size of a real kitchen for a house built in 1920.

What resonates with today’s audiences, evidenced by sympathetic chuckles, is the play’s critique of postwar consumption-driven economics; planned obsolescence is planned obsolescence, whether it’s a refrigerator that wears out just as the last installment payment is made, or today’s electronic gadgets with their forced upgrades. Willy Loman’s boss Howard (the wired-up gearhead Remy Auberjonois) would be less reprehensible were he pushing paperwork in his interview with Willy, rather than futzing with his new wire recorder.

• Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller, directed by Mike Nichols, Ethel Barrymore Theatre, New York

Harold Pinter is perhaps at his most Beckettian in The Caretaker, particularly in the character of the shabby, smelly old man Davies (Jonathan Pryce, approaching statesman status). Director Christopher Morahan pushes the comedy as far as it will go, with a who’s-got-the-bag sequence that owes a little to Chuck Jones. Alex Hasselll as Mick delivers Pinter’s signature brooding menace, while Alan Cox gives us an understated gem of a monologue for damaged Aston, lit by an exquisitely gradually tightening pool of light designed by Colin Grenfell.

Extra-live acoustics in the work-in-progress BAM Harvey Theater at times rendered Pryce’s dialect too murky.

• The Caretaker, by Harold Pinter, directed by Christopher Morahan, BAM Harvey Theater, Brooklyn, N.Y.

War Horse is a masterful piece of ensemble theatricality. This simple story of a boy and his horse Joey is told with live actors and bunraku-inspired puppets, augmented by a series of projections against a screen that resembles a torn scrap of paper.

The trials of Joey, acquired by the English army for service in the last major war in which cavalry was used (the so-called Great War), are our entry into an account of the inhumanity of that war — hence, as told here, this is not a piece that younger attendees will have the patience for.

This is the sort of puppetry that works because you’re always aware of the machinery, so a change to the fabric covering the horses’ bodies tells us all that we need to know about their condition.

If the acting and the musical underscoring are at times melodramatic, the work knows that its most touching effects are the simplest ones: a paddock established by four actors holding staffs; fallen bodies on a battleground transformed into a graveyard’s mounds by the arrival of the women they left behind, in chorus; the twitch of a horse’s ear or the heave of a foal’s chest; wagon ruts established by rumpled scraps of cloth laid on the deck. Perhaps most dramatic is the death of Joey’s rival-turned-compatriot, the horse Topthorn. When Topthorn goes down, the puppeteers detach themselves from his armature and back offstage quickly, his departing life force briefly become personified.

• War Horse, based on the novel by Michael Morpurgo, adapted by Nick Stafford, in association with Handspring Puppet Company, directed by Marianne Elliott and Tom Morris, Lincoln Center Theatre at the Vivian Beaumont, New York