If you’re wondering what to watch this weekend, SoHo Playhouse and Lincoln Center Theater are streaming two options for your virtual viewing pleasure, both inspired by literary classics, in their ongoing series of online offerings.
Plague Doctor – Next up in the SoHo Streaming Series from Off-Broadway’s SoHo Playhouse is a loose and updated retelling of Boccaccio’s mid-14th-century collection of 100 tales told by a group of seven young women and three young men taking shelter in a secluded villa just outside of Florence to escape the Black Death – a devastating pandemic of the bubonic plague (1347-53), which claimed half the population of the city.
In the new play – written by Charlotte Ahlen, directed by David Lee Huynh, presented by Fat Knight Theatre and Lizardfolk, and performed by Ahlin, Danielle Cohn, Donovan Mendelovitz, Nikky Robinson, Aubrey Lace Taylor – 20-something roommates Cosmo, Casey, Roz, and Filomena find refuge in a storytelling contest to relieve the monotony of waiting out the present-day plague, while fending off the eponymous medieval Plague Doctor who haunts the corners of their apartment. As they spin their tales and voice their concerns about their stagnant careers, their languishing social lives, and the desperate state of the world, genres interweave, fiction comes alive, and the good Doctor wants in.
The virtual production is presented as a benefit to support the programming of SoHo Playhouse. A talk-back with the artists will directly follow the show, which will be livestreamed for four dates only, March 18-21. For tickets, priced at $25, go online.
Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike – Lincoln Center Theater continues its free full-length streams of acclaimed past productions in the series of Private Reels: From the LCT Archive with Christopher Durang’s hilarious Tony-winning comedy inspired by the themes and characters of Anton Chekhov. Presented in LCT’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater in the 2012-13 season, the live on-stage performance, directed by Nicholas Martin and featuring Genevieve Angelson, Shalita Grant, Billy Magnussen, Kristine Nielsen, David Hyde Pierce, and Sigourney Weaver, was originally recorded to obtain excerpts for promotional purposes, but has been edited for viewers to revisit at home during the pandemic shutdown.
Set at the family home of their deceased theater-loving parents in Bucks County, PA, the laughably angst-laden story follows the interactions of three single dysfunctional middle-aged siblings (two of whom still live in the house, supported by their movie-star sister, who comes to visit with her narcissistic boy-toy and a threat to sell), in a zany family reunion filled with adult sibling rivalry and childish temper tantrums.
The hit show streams free on Broadway on Demand, March 18, 7 pm-April 11, midnight. To register, click here. For a brief montage preview, click on the arrow below:
