This Beautiful Future
Opening Night: September 20, 2022
Theater: Cherry Lane Theatre
Website: thisbeautifulfuture.com
Caught in the middle of a war, two teenagers take shelter from a divided world. Elodie is French and 17. Otto, a German soldier, is 15. Safe from the debris outside, they meet secretly for one night. They talk, tease, and touch. They fall in love and fall through time. Kalnejais’ kaleidoscopic play is a story of uncomplicated first love in a very complicated world. It seeks out tenderness amidst tragedy. Hope in the hopeless.
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January 18, 2022
“This Beautiful Future” achieves a remarkable, aching alchemy, not because Elodie and Otto are star-crossed but because they’re ordinary, and because if not for the war, they might have retained their innocence.
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January 19, 2022
Carpanini and Mark both do strong work, unaffected by the audience sitting only a few feet away. They only fail, understandably, at seeming to be younger than they are.
READ THE REVIEWSeptember 20, 2022
What at first blush appears to be a swoony World War II romance about a soldier and a civilian grasping for a last chance at pleasure quickly evolves into something darker and stranger in “This Beautiful Future,” a drama by Rita Kalnejais that has returned for a limited run at the Cherry Lane Theatre after its New York debut earlier this year.
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September 20, 2022
What are the limits of empathy in the theater? Rita Kalnejais dances precariously close to the edge in This Beautiful Future, a love story about a young Nazi and his French paramour, now making a return engagement with OHenry Productions at the Cherry Lane Theater after its New York debut earlier this year at TheaterLab (the play originated in London in 2017). This dramatic jitterbug on the side of a cliff is what makes This Beautiful Future extraordinary, even if the love story at its center feels uncomfortably familiar.
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September 20, 2022
But just as Levinson’s series uses sexy neon to brighten up a storm of sensory overloading nonsense, so does director Jack Serio’s production of playwright Rita Kalnejais’ This Beautiful Future employ it to hide the fact she is saying very, very little.
READ THE REVIEWSeptember 20, 2022
This Beautiful Future is a peculiar yet quietly compelling portrait of two teenagers, a French girl and a German soldier, chasing a connection — and a roll in the hay — amid wartime. Over its compact 75 minutes, the play by Rita Kalnejais, an Australian writer based in London, lands with a modest impact as it pulls off a sly feat. It feels both very familiar (young love among the ruins) and disarmingly fresh (credit the unusual framework).
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September 20, 2022
How well does karaoke go with a World War II love story about a Nazi who is smitten with a young French woman in Chartres, Frances, in the year 1944? It’s a probably a question you’ve never asked, but playwright Rita Kalnejais answers it in her new play, “This Beautiful Future,” which opened Tuesday at Off Broadway’s Cherry Lane Theatre. To call it the proverbial oil-and-water mix doesn’t begin to describe this onstage mismatch.
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