Shakespeare, no dunce, set his history plays among the long-gone and largely forgotten. “Richard II,” for instance, took its first bow two centuries after the actual Richard II took his last. Anne Washburn gives herself no such breathing room in “Shipwreck: A History Play About 2017,” her thrillingly oracular but unfinished-feeling fantasy about the failures of liberalism in the deep recent past. But cracks in the conversation and in the play’s theatrical shell almost immediately signal squishiness in that position. (The Public, along with Woolly Mammoth Theater in Washington, has produced “Shipwreck” as a new on-demand audio play, available indefinitely and for free.)

Source: New York Times October 19, 2020 18:22 UTC