In The Bricks Festival

In an across-the-pond nod to the Edinburgh Fringe, New York Theatre Workshop is for the first time hosting its own mini-Fringe, In The Bricks Festival, only curated and much smaller than the Scottish behemoth. The festival, which runs through June 14, features four solo performances, three of which are autobiographical. As all the shows run 60-90 minutes, all four can be seen in a single day on Saturdays throughout the festival with a dinner break in the middle, and for those who don’t have the stamina for that much theatre in one day, single performances run throughout the week, with half-marathons available on Sundays.

The Peculiar Patriot - ★★★★★ 5 stars

The Peculiar Patriot is the one production of the festival quartet that’s not autobiographical, and it’s also the most polished. Co-presented by NYTW and the National Black Theatre, where it premiered in 2017 as part of its 49th season, the show emerged after years of development unusual to most plays: writer and performer Liza Jessie Peterson presented the work at 35 jails and penitentiaries across the country. The resulting show is a bracing reminder of the continuing inhumanity of America’s prison system.

Peterson was inspired by her decades of working with prison populations — in 2017 she authored All Day: A Year of Love and Survival Teaching Incarcerated Kids at Rikers Island — and she brings passionate authority and humor to her portrayal of Betsy LaQuanda Ross, who pays regular visits to her best friend Joann, who’s jailed in a women’s facility upstate New York.

With sharp direction by Talvin Wilks, the play is set entirely at a prison visiting room table but never feels narratively claustrophobic, as Katherine Freer’s superb projections expand the show’s scale beyond the prison walls. Peterson adds to the show’s wider scope as well, occasionally breaking out as one of the two men she socially veers between, her ex Curtis and new beau Pablo.

But it’s the indomitable Betsy who steals the audience’s heart. Her loyalty to her imprisoned friends and family is undeniable, even if that fidelity has come at great hardship to her. She doesn’t show her sadness on her visits, but the feelings often emerge indirectly and unexpectedly, as when she describes the gorgeous mountains and countryside that surround the upstate prisons she so often visits: “You name the mountain, the hillside and the rural town, I know the prison and bus route. Betsy LaQuanda Ross, I am your personal prison GPS.”

The Unexpected 3rd - ★★★★★ 5 stars

Writer and performer Kathryn Grody makes it clear from the start that her show is, in its own way, and on her terms, a work in progress. She enters with a heap of scripts and dumps them on stage, tossing pages aside once they’ve been performed. And while it may be true that the text of The Unexpected 3rd: A Radical, Rollicking Rumination on the Optimism of Staying Alive is actively fluid performance to performance, there’s no question Grody is in solid control of her show; throughout the show she impishly winks as she pulls hidden script pages from the most unexpected of places on Nina Bell’s quirky, clever set.

Finding herself unexpectedly on the precipice of 80 — both of her parents died in their 50s — Grody clearheadedly assesses the past as she warily approaches coming life chapters. Even so, she finds much of her life bewildering. She laments the loss of people who were part of her “life’s fabric” and is horrified by the shambolic state of many of the world’s democracies, but she also is amused that she — along with her mentioned but unnamed husband, Mandy Patinkin — became a social-media star during the pandemic when their son Gideon began filming his parents’ daily life and posting it on social media.

Director Timothy Near pays heed to his leading lady’s charm and quirkiness, giving Grody the space to effortlessly deliver constant laughs over the show’s brisk running time. Jubilant and confident, Grody insists on being seen. And should be.

Sardines (A Comedy About Death) - ★★★★ 4 stars

Chris Grace is a natural choice for In The Bricks as he’s actually an Edinburgh Fringe Festival stalwart. In 2023 he had great success with his show Chris Grace: As Scarlett Johansson, and this August is returning with a new work, Chris Grace: 88%. Now at NYTW he’s performing Sardines (a comedy about death), a well-received show he performed in Scotland two years ago that has finally arrived in NYC.

True to its title, Sardines is a comedy about death, a mix of stand-up and reflection on the many losses Grace has sustained, including both his parents, two siblings, and his long-time partner James. “Death does not happen in an orderly fashion,” he acknowledges, all while asking an existential question about the show itself: “Does art help? Does it actually make a difference to make shows about death?”

Humor is clearly Grace’s balm, and he knows how to structure some killer punch lines: “I had a stand-up show, and in the show, I told this joke. I said, this week, my sister Jessie died. And also, I saw the film Twilight: Breaking Dawn — Part 2. So I had a horrific experience that scarred me for life, and also my sister Jessie died.”

Sardines, finely directed by Grace’s husband, Eric Michaud, is beautifully structured, and Grace is a warm, engaging presence. But given the subject matter, it feels like the show could make more of an emotional impact. It’s perhaps churlish to wish that Grace dove a bit deeper to answer the questions he proposes at the show’s start, but to be fair, at the start of the show he tells the audience members that “if you don’t enjoy it, it’s your fault.”

Mention My Beauty - ★★★ 3 stars

Leslie Ayvazian is no stranger to solo shows. In her earlier play High Dive, she was paralyzed about turning 50. Now 77, she’s more reflective about the earlier parts of her life as she navigated the 1970s, a tumultuous time for young, ambitious women:

“What did I understand about Gloria Steinem? A smart woman with effortless beauty. And me a woman so full of effort. The Sexual Revolution preceded the Women’s Movement and that made for an incompatible situation. But if you’re 22 and it’s 1973, and you left the fiancé because he was your first, and the sex wasn’t good enough, then off you go.”

Ayvazian has compelling material aplenty, and she delivers her stories with wit and a lemon-sharp perspective, with no one receiving more citrus-y acid than herself. Reading from a script on a stand, it’s evident that Mention My Beauty is very much still in a formative stage. Not because of the quality of the storytelling, or her confident presence, but because of the abundance of material — adventures with her early boyfriends and roommates, her father’s alcoholism, the damaging vestiges of the Armenian genocide — still in the process of being streamlined into the narrative structure that can sufficiently contain Ayvazian’s anger, sadness, and forgiveness.