Electra Garrigó When Virgilio Piñera’s brazen, bewildering adaptation of Sophocles’s tragedy premiered in Havana in 1948, the literary establishment responded with contempt and disgust—and Cuban modernism was born. Restaged in 1958, its focus on princess Electra’s struggles against her unreasonable tyrant father, Agamemnon, bolstered pro-Castro sentiments (ironically, Castro would later jail Piñera for being queer). While Piñera fell into obscurity by the end of his life, director Kathi Kaity resurrects this seminal work in a Right Brain Project production that may provoke its own share of contempt. Kaity wisely does nothing to smooth over the script’s disjointed expressionism, putting a premium on physical and vocal stridency (Piñera aimed to provoke bourgeois audiences). But the show’s boldness often compromises fundamental comprehensibility, obscuring key relationships among characters. Still, it’s refreshing to see an almost entirely Latinx cast tackle this demanding work. —Justin Hayford
Phantom Pain William Faulkner’s line “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” could be the tagline for Barbara Lhota’s wise, witty play about three childhood friends, now in early middle age, suddenly confronted by ghosts of the past, specifically the traumas associated with decaying race relations in Detroit in the 70s. Lhota, a subtle but effective storyteller, pulls the audience in before we can resist, then keeps us absorbed in her narrative. Her characters are free of cliche—no wonder the actors in this world-premiere Organic Theater production, directed by Laura Sturm, seem to be having a blast. Their passion and energy provide the extra fuel that makes this quiet, intensely introspective tale so compelling. —Jack Helbig
Truth and Reconciliation British playwright Debbie Tucker Green turns catharsis on its head with this collection of brief scenes set in bare rooms across Europe and Africa. The people in those rooms are perpetrators, victims, and relatives of victims of such horrors as the Rwandan and Bosnian genocides, Northern Ireland’s troubles, and South African apartheid, meeting ostensibly to confront the crimes that connect them. The circumstances are odd in that participants encounter one another without mediators; the content is mostly trivial, hung up on questions of who will sit where, if they agree to sit at all; and Green’s pseudo-Mametian use of repetition and interjection gets annoying quickly, creating more chaos than clarity. But that’s the point: Discussion is useless. Only the guilty and the dead know the truth. Under Jonathan L. Green’s direction, this 60-minute Sideshow Theatre production concedes nothing to comfort. —Tony Adler
