There are family secrets we inherit, family stories we repeat and family wounds we spend a lifetime trying to understand. In Crazy Mama: A True Story of Love and Madness, playwright Sharon Scott Williams turns her own family history into a theatrical examination of what happens when a child grows up loving someone she cannot save.

Rubicon Theatre Company will bring the Off-Broadway premiere of Williams’ autobiographical play to 59E59 Theaters this fall, with Linda Purl taking on an extraordinary 16 characters under the direction of Anson Williams. Will Huse joins her as The Blues Man.

For television audiences, the director Anson Williams remains instantly associated with Warren “Potsie” Weber on the iconic series Happy Days, but his career behind the camera has been extensive, directing hundreds of hours of television. There is also a delightful bit of Happy Days symmetry in his collaboration with Purl: she played Ashley Pfister, Fonzie’s girlfriend, during the series’ tenth season. Decades later, the two are reunited on considerably darker territory, with Williams directing Purl through a story in which comedy and heartbreak live uncomfortably close together.

The story begins just days after Sharon’s eighth birthday. Racing home from school to beat her teenage brother, Spikey, to the final piece of birthday cake, she walks into the kitchen and finds her mother holding a knife. The sheriff takes her mother away, and a deputy gives the little girl an explanation both brutally simple and wholly inadequate: her mama is “not right in the head.”

What follows is not simply a story about mental illness. It is the story of a daughter who spends decades believing that if she loves fiercely enough, tries hard enough or somehow finds the right answer, she can rescue her mother.

That distinction gives Crazy Mama its emotional center. Mental illness affects the person living with it, but its reach rarely stops there. It changes marriages, childhoods, siblings and entire families. Williams writes from the perspective of someone who knew both the love and the fear inside that experience.

“Mental illness affects one in four people, but all-too-often individuals and families don’t speak of their experience and hide their pain,” Williams says. “I was lucky. I had my family to help me through it, but there were times we were afraid to talk about it. Crazy Mama is a story that helps lift that stigma.”

Rather than treating its subject with unrelenting solemnity, the play is laced with humor as well as pathos. That matters. Families living through extraordinary circumstances still laugh, fight over birthday cake, irritate one another and get through Tuesday. Resilience isn’t always heroic. Sometimes it is simply continuing to love someone when love cannot fix what is wrong.

For Purl, whose career has moved easily between stage, film and television, Crazy Mama presents a formidable theatrical challenge. Sixteen characters pass through a single performer, requiring not merely vocal or physical transformation but the creation of an entire family and world around one woman’s memory.

The production arrives in New York following its world premiere at Rubicon Theatre Company in Ventura, California, in March 2025. Rubicon Producing Artistic Directors Karyl Lynn Burns and Jonathan Drahos now bring the work east for its Off-Broadway debut.

The creative team includes Brian Gale, who provides lighting and projection design, and Lindsay Jones on sound design. Alexandrea Hess Rodriguez serves as production stage manager, with Stephanie Coltrin as associate producer.

At its heart, Crazy Mama asks a difficult question: What happens when the person you desperately want to save is someone you do not have the power to save?

Williams lived that question. Now Linda Purl will become the 16 people who helped her tell the story.

Performances begin September 16, with opening night set for September 22. The limited engagement runs through October 18 in Theater C.

Crazy Mama runs two hours and five minutes, including intermission, with performances Tuesday through Friday at 7:30 p.m., Saturdays at 2:30 and 7:30 p.m., and Sundays at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $42, including the $2 fee, through 59E59 Theaters, by phone at 646-892-7999, or at the box office at 59 East 59th Street.

DamonHorowitz with-Truman Gaudoin, Desiree Baxter, Jim Pratzon and Tyler Moss Photo by Valerie Terranova

There is a provocative idea buried inside Becoming Hamlet, Damon Horowitz’s new adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy at the Five Angels Theater: We are Hamlet. I am Hamlet. You are Hamlet. Horowitz is Hamlet. Director Sybille Bruun invites the audience not simply to observe Shakespeare’s tortured prince but to inhabit him, speaking his words and, for those who choose, stepping directly into the action. The production describes the audience as a “central dramatic presence,” with participation optional and designated non-participatory seating available, which I took.

It is an intriguing concept. I also found it pretentious. Horowitz, who serves as the production’s “Hamlet Guide,” has an unusual résumé for an Off-Broadway adaptor and performer. He previously served as Google’s in-house philosopher, has appeared on the TED mainstage and has taught at Columbia, Stanford and San Quentin State Prison. That philosophical impulse is all over Becoming Hamlet. The production is less interested in presenting Hamlet than in deconstructing him, turning Shakespeare’s tragedy into an exploration of whether Hamlet’s grief, indecision, anger, fear and eventual acceptance are somehow universal. Is this who we all are? Becoming Hamlet thinks so. I am not convinced.

The bones of the story remain familiar. Hamlet’s uncle Claudius (David H. Littleton) has murdered Hamlet’s father, seized the throne and married his widowed sister-in-law Gertrude, played here by an emotionally cold Désirée Baxter. Claudius wants Hamlet to remain at court, accept the new family structure, continue his relationship with Ophelia (a lackluster Judith Feingold) and settle into his place as the king’s new son. In other words: I have the power now, and someday, if you behave yourself, perhaps you will too.

Damon Horowitz, an audience member, and Equiano Mosieri Photo by Valerie Terranova

Then Hamlet’s dead father returns. Equiano Mosieri makes a genuinely ghoulish Ghost, bringing the production one of its strongest jolts of theatricality as the murdered king demands revenge. From there, Hamlet’s emotional trajectory remains Shakespeare’s: profound grief gives way to despair, obsessive questioning and paralysis before arriving at something resembling calm acceptance in the face of death.

The production’s central conceit is that Horowitz does not carry that journey alone. We do. Audience members who consent to participate are handed cards containing Shakespeare’s lines and invited to speak them from their seats. Those choosing active participation can become even more directly involved, while four facilitators guide the audience through the evening. The company explicitly describes the audience as Hamlet and the professional actors as scene partners responding to whatever the participants bring to the performance.

Here is where Becoming Hamlet lost me. I do not particularly like participating in my theatre. I want the actors to make me think, feel, question and reconsider; I don’t need to be handed a line to accomplish that. More importantly, the device repeatedly interferes with the dramatic momentum. Shakespeare’s language requires thought, breath, intention and emotional connection. Passing Hamlet among audience members inevitably means passing him among people with wildly different abilities to deliver that language. One moment has theatrical weight; the next sounds like somebody reading from a card.

The result is a production constantly operating at different levels of performance. Just as one of the professional actors begins digging into a scene, Hamlet can suddenly become an audience member concentrating primarily on getting the words out correctly. The emotional temperature drops, the rhythm changes and the actors have to begin rebuilding what has just been interrupted.

That is not the audience’s fault. It is the structural problem created by the concept.

The irony is that a production designed to get us deeper inside Hamlet sometimes kept me farther away from him. Rather than becoming immersed in one man’s increasingly desperate psychological state, I became conscious of the theatrical mechanism required to make all of us that man. I saw the facilitators facilitating. I saw the participation being organized. I saw the concept. I wanted to see Hamlet.

There are moments when the conceit suggests something genuinely interesting. Hearing the same character voiced by different people can underline the universality of grief and indecision, and I can see Becoming Hamlet being particularly effective for a high school or college audience encountering the play seriously for the first time. Shakespeare can become intimidating when his language is placed behind glass and treated as sacred literature. Asking young people to put the words into their own mouths could break that barrier beautifully.

As theatre for me, however, it became somewhat sing-song and overly intellectualized. Hamlet already contains one of the greatest examinations of consciousness ever written. Shakespeare does not need much help making us recognize ourselves in the prince. That is precisely why the play has survived for more than four centuries.

Claudius (David H. Littleton), (Addy Jenkins) and an audience member Photo by Valerie Terranova

The supporting actors are therefore placed in an unusual and not always enviable position. Littleton’s Claudius understands the seductiveness of authority, while Baxter keeps Gertrude emotionally protected, a woman whose choices remain deliberately difficult to penetrate. Feingold’s Ophelia has the challenge of establishing intimacy with a Hamlet who is, by design, never entirely one person. Steven Lamont brings welcome force to Laertes, while Truman Gaudoin as Guildencrantz and the rest of the ensemble move in and out of a theatrical world whose center is constantly changing.

Visually, the production fares better. Amit Gajwani’s costumes manage to feel contemporary while keeping the characters connected to Shakespeare’s world, which also helps enormously in keeping everyone straight. Maryam Sweirki’s lighting knows exactly where our eyes should go, while Yijun Yang’s minimalist scenic design uses reflective Mylar to return our own images to us. It is a clever extension of the evening’s thesis: wherever we look for Hamlet, eventually we encounter ourselves. Marlon Feld’s original music is rather brilliant, giving the production a cinematic scope that the small physical space cannot provide.

That brings me back to the question underneath the entire evening. Are we all Hamlet? We certainly know grief. We know betrayal, indecision, anger, desire, paralysis and the terror of making a choice whose consequences cannot be undone. In that sense, Shakespeare settled the argument centuries ago. We recognize Hamlet because some part of him already belongs to us. Recognizing Hamlet is not the same thing as being Hamlet.

That distinction matters. Theatre allows us to enter another human being’s consciousness without requiring us literally to become that person. That mysterious transaction between actor and audience is one of the things theatre does better than almost any other art form. I don’t need to speak Hamlet’s words to feel his grief. I need an actor capable of speaking them so truthfully that, for an instant, I recognize his grief as my own.

Becoming Hamlet attempts to collapse the distance between spectator and character. For some audiences, particularly those who love participatory theatre, that may be exactly what makes the evening exciting. For me, eliminating that distance also eliminated some of the dramatic depth.

At least Horowitz and Bruun have done something merciful that generations of Hamlet directors have struggled to accomplish: the evening runs approximately 100 minutes, without an intermission, rather than the three-plus hours a relatively complete Hamlet can demand. Strangely though, it still felt longer than it should.

There is intelligence behind Becoming Hamlet, and there is certainly ambition. I simply found its central device more gimmick than revelation. When the audience becomes Hamlet, the production gains participation but loses the sustained psychological journey that makes Hamlet such an extraordinary role in the first place.

To participate or not to participate?  For me, the answer was easy. I would rather watch a great Hamlet become Hamlet than be told that Hamlet is me.

Becoming Hamlet:  Five Angels Theater, 789 Tenth Avenue at 52nd Street. Presented by The Directors Company. Performances through October 3.

There are certain conversations that simply belong in New York, and putting Gustavo Dudamel and Lin-Manuel Miranda together beneath the stars in Central Park feels like one of them.

On September 23, The Public Theater will bring back its Public Forum Duets with Public Forum Duet: Gustavo Dudamel & Lin-Manuel Miranda, a free, one-night-only event at the revitalized Delacorte Theater. The evening will combine conversation with live musical performances as two very different musical forces talk about music, life and, most intriguingly, what both mean in New York City.

Dudamel arrives at a fascinating moment in his relationship with the city. The celebrated conductor is the incoming Tang Music & Artistic Director of the New York Philharmonic, bringing with him not simply an international reputation but a deeply held belief in music as something that should reach beyond the traditional walls of the concert hall.

Miranda hardly requires an introduction to a New York theater audience. The creator of Hamilton has become one of the city’s most recognizable artistic voices, but his connection to The Public makes this particular pairing especially appropriate. Hamilton began its New York life at The Public before moving to Broadway, making The Delacorte an unusually fitting place for Miranda to join a musician beginning his own major new chapter in the city.

What makes the evening particularly appealing, however, is the word duet.

The Public Forum series has long been built around the idea that conversation itself can be a form of performance. The Public describes the program as a place where “art, ideas, and action collide,” bringing artists, thinkers and public voices together to examine the larger questions moving through the culture.

Dudamel and Miranda should have plenty to discuss.

One comes from the world of orchestras, where hundreds of years of musical tradition meet the challenge of attracting the audiences of tomorrow. The other helped take American history, hip-hop, musical theater and immigration and turn them into one of the defining theatrical phenomena of the 21st century. Both have spent much of their careers challenging assumptions about who certain kinds of music belong to and who should be invited into the room.

New York has always been a city that absorbs musical languages and makes something new from them. Classical music, Broadway, jazz, salsa, hip-hop, opera and countless sounds carried here by generations of immigrants coexist within a few subway stops of one another. Yet arts institutions everywhere are confronting the same question: How do you honor tradition without allowing tradition to become a gatekeeper?

Dudamel and Miranda have approached that question from very different directions. Bringing them together isn’t simply an appealing celebrity pairing. It offers the possibility of a conversation about where music goes next—and who gets to come along.

Best of all, the evening remains rooted in one of The Public’s defining principles: access.

Free tickets will be distributed on September 23 in several ways. Distribution outside The Delacorte begins at noon; an in-person lottery will be held at noon in The Public Theater lobby at 425 Lafayette Street; the TodayTix digital lottery remains open until noon that day; and a standby line at The Delacorte can begin distributing available tickets as early as 6 p.m. Public Theater members can also reserve seats with an additional donation.

Public Forum Duet: Gustavo Dudamel & Lin-Manuel Miranda — tickets and information

There is something wonderfully old-fashioned about the whole proposition: gather New Yorkers in Central Park, put two extraordinary musical minds onstage, add live music and see where the conversation goes.

In a city increasingly divided into algorithms, audiences and carefully targeted demographics, perhaps there is still something radical about simply gathering together to listen.

On September 23, New York gets one hell of a duet.

When I heard that Karen Ziemba and Marc Kudisch were starring in L.B. Browne’s world premiere of Safe House at Theatre Row, I was excited. Put two seasoned stage actors of this caliber together in an intimate theatre and there is every reason to expect sparks. There are indeed some very fine performances here. The problem is that Browne’s drama, directed by Benjamin Viertel and produced by split/decision, is so packed with crises, secrets, politics, illness, trauma and family dysfunction that eventually the play begins collapsing under the weight of everything it wants us to carry.

An upcoming presidential election has left the country on edge, and Rock (Kudisch) is convinced that a second American Civil War is imminent. His response is to transform the basement of his suburban Pennsylvania home into a bunker, determined to protect his family from the catastrophe he believes is coming. What they don’t know is that Rock is facing another catastrophe entirely: more than a year earlier, he learned that he is dying from Huntington’s disease, a diagnosis he has kept secret from his wife and daughters. That alone is enough for a play.

Karen Ziemba, Anna Roman, Marc Kudisch Photos by Viktorija Mickute

However Safe House keeps going. Rock’s wife, Slipper (Ziemba), is a stay-at-home mother who has spent much of her life giving herself to her husband and family. Their high-achieving daughter Ashley (Anna Roman), a lawyer, has sacrificed much of her own life for her parents and has become wound so tightly that unhappiness seems to have settled permanently into her body. Their younger daughter Claire (Grace Church) left home at 15, an absence that appears to have torn the family apart, although the deeper question is whether these people were ever truly together in the first place.

Glenn Steven Allen, Marc Kudisch Photos by Viktorija Mickute

Then Claire comes home. She is pregnant and wants an abortion. She has joined a cult. She has also blown up a gas line. Meanwhile, Rock is hallucinating conversations with his dead father (Glenn Steven Allen), a man he idolizes and mythologizes, as well as visions of the younger Claire (Julianna Layne). Huntington’s disease, political paranoia, impending civil war, a hidden terminal diagnosis, abortion, estrangement, religious extremism, domestic resentment, terrorism, parental failure, memory, inherited illness and hallucination are all competing for oxygen. There is simply too much here.

Julianna Layne, Marc Kudisch Photos by Viktorija Mickute

What makes that frustrating is that Browne has found an interesting central idea. Rock is building a physical safe house because he believes concrete, supplies and preparation can protect the people he loves. Yet everything threatening this family is already inside the house. The danger isn’t waiting beyond the front door. It lives in the secrets they keep, the things they refuse to say and the damage they have done to one another. That is the play I wanted Safe House to trust.

Kudisch carries much of the weight of the evening, and his work is intense, intelligent and carefully considered. He gives Rock enough conviction that his obsession with the bunker never becomes merely ridiculous. Even as the character’s world becomes increasingly unstable, Kudisch keeps searching for the man beneath the fear. It is the kind of grounded stage work that reminds us exactly why he belongs in the theatre.

Karen Ziemba,Marc Kudisch Photos by Viktorija Mickute

Ziemba brings warmth and an expressive emotional life to Slipper, particularly in the smallest reactions. Her face frequently tells us what the dialogue has not yet managed to say. Unfortunately, too much of that dialogue is difficult to hear. In a theatre this intimate, an audience should not be struggling to catch an actor’s words, and Ziemba frequently drops her volume to a level that leaves important moments disappearing before they reach us.

Roman brings welcome humanity to Ashley, a character who could easily have become simply the uptight, resentful daughter. Instead, we see the exhaustion underneath her rigidity. Church and Layne, both non-union performers, hold their own impressively beside the considerable Broadway veterans around them. Church has the particularly difficult assignment of making Claire credible despite the astonishing amount of narrative baggage Browne has placed on the character, while Layne gives the younger Claire an affecting presence. Justin Lee Miller rounds out the company in the roles of a doctor and police officer, and Glenn Steven Allen gives substance to the father Rock has turned into something larger than the man himself.

Viertel’s direction, however, compounds the play’s problems rather than clarifying them. This is a small theatre, yet the production does not consistently reach the back of the room. More importantly, the staging needs to help us navigate Browne’s many competing ideas, distinguishing the essential from the incidental. Instead, too much arrives with equal dramatic importance, leaving the audience to sort through an already overcrowded narrative.

At approximately 90 minutes, Safe House shouldn’t feel long. It does. Not because there isn’t enough happening, but because there is far too much. The play doesn’t need another idea. It needs the courage to surrender several of them.

Browne has something here, particularly in the contradiction embedded in her title. Rock believes he can build safety. Slipper believes devotion can preserve a marriage. Ashley believes responsibility can hold a family together. Claire has gone searching elsewhere for whatever she could not find at home. Every one of them is trying, in a different way, to create security. Yet this house has never really been safe.

That is where Safe House becomes most interesting. Strip away some of the political catastrophe, the accumulating revelations and the sheer abundance of issues, and underneath is a painful story about a family desperately preparing itself for a war outside while failing to acknowledge the one that has been raging inside for years.

Safe House: Theatre Row, 410 West 42nd Street, through September 13.

There are performers who make you wonder how they did it. Then there are performers who make you stop caring how they did it because you’re having far too much fun watching them do it. Suhani Shah belongs firmly in the second category.

Her Spellbound, now finishing its limited New York engagement at SoHo Playhouse, left me with two questions: Why is this woman not playing a much larger venue, and how is she not already a household name in America and beyond?

Shah certainly isn’t unknown elsewhere. She has performed more than 5,000 shows across 20 countries, amassed more than 10 million followers across social media, and brought Spellbound to sold-out audiences across India, the UK, Australia and beyond. In 2025, she received FISM’s Award for Best Magic Creator, becoming the first Indian to receive the honor. Yet this extraordinary performer has arrived in New York for a relatively intimate run at SoHo Playhouse, where Spellbound plays only through September 6.

New York, pay attention. Shah doesn’t need spectacle. There are no massive contraptions, disappearing elephants or Las Vegas machinery attempting to convince us that something impossible just happened. Her material is human beings. She watches, listens, plays, calculates—or does something I am still not entirely prepared to explain—and somehow appears to get inside people’s minds. More importantly, she is completely adorable.

That matters more than it sounds. Mentalism can become chilly very quickly. There is something inherently intimidating about a performer standing in front of an audience essentially saying, I know something you haven’t told me. Shah removes that barrier with humor, warmth and an extraordinary natural likability. She has that elusive quality the entertainment industry spends fortunes trying to manufacture: the “it” factor. You want to watch her before she has done anything astonishing.

Then she starts doing astonishing things. Spellbound is built around audience participation, with Shah pulling seemingly random information from the people sitting in front of her. The audience isn’t decoration; it becomes her material. Numbers are chosen, thoughts are formed, decisions appear spontaneous, and Shah keeps pulling information out of the room that she simply shouldn’t possess.

Then comes the piece that floored me. Early in the evening, Shah borrows a twenty-dollar bill from an audience member. Remember that bill. You won’t understand its importance until much later. Another audience member receives what appears to be a certificate naming them the evening’s “Best Audience Member.” Someone is brought onstage, and that person and four others supply random numbers. Nothing about the sequence seems particularly consequential at the time. It is simply another piece of Shah’s very clever game with the audience. Until the end.

The certificate isn’t what we thought it was. It contains the total of those randomly supplied numbers. That twenty-dollar bill returns. Its serial number corresponds to the same number. I was spellbound.

But something more interesting happened to me during Spellbound. Shah convinced me so completely of her ability that I began wanting more than the show was designed to give me.

The material in Spellbound is wonderfully calibrated for a broad audience. It is funny, accessible, surprising and enormously people-pleasing. People gasp. They laugh. They stare at each other trying to work out what the hell just happened. Shah understands exactly how to construct an evening that sends an audience home delighted.

I wanted her to go deeper. I wanted to know what happens when Suhani Shah stops asking for numbers and begins asking the questions we don’t know how to answer. I wanted to see what she perceives beneath the easily accessible layers of a person. I wanted the psychological, intuitive, even psychic possibilities of what she does explored much further.

That is admittedly asking Shah to perform a rather different show—and quite possibly one that a general audience wouldn’t want to experience. I am the person who wants to know what is underneath the underneath. Give me the trick and I’m delighted. Convince me that you can actually perceive something I cannot, and I immediately want to know what that ability says about consciousness, intuition and the human mind. Shah made me believe there is considerably more there.

Whether what she does is mentalism, extraordinary observation, psychology, intuition, technique, something genuinely psychic, or some combination Shah is far too clever to reveal. What I can say is that sitting in the theatre, she made it feel absolutely real. That is ultimately the mentalist’s greatest trick or is it a trick?

The title Spellbound turns out to be unusually accurate. Suhani Shah is warm, funny, astonishingly accomplished and enormously charismatic. More than that, she feels like a performer who has not yet reached the size of American stage she belongs on. SoHo Playhouse may be where New York is discovering her. I have a strong suspicion it won’t be where New York ultimately keeps her.

By the way, T2C isn’t finished with her yet. Check out Live From The Hotel Edison Times Square Chronicles Presents, where Suhani Shah will join us for our next podcast. After watching her read an audience, I have an infinite amount of  questions of my own that I can not wait to address.

Do not miss Spellbound. It plays at the SoHo Playhouse through September 6th, so you have two more performances to catch her. Information and tickets are available through SoHo Playhouse, with Shah’s future international dates available at Suhani Shah’s official site.

This is not a show to miss.