Impersonation and reenactment are staple modes in queer art. Beyond decades of celebrity drag, you could point to Rufus Wainwright’s recreation of Judy Garland’s legendary Carnegie Hall concert or Ron Vawter alternating as gay traitor Roy Cohn and avant-camp filmmaker Jack Smith in his 1992 double act. Morgan Bassichis’s Can I Be Frank? is a different sort of séance. Over the course of sixty-five minutes, the gangly, effusive comedian unpacks their obsession with “lost” gay comic Frank Maya, blending Maya’s jokes and their own millennial fame-lust in a giddy and (yes) frankly earnest study of ego and activism.

Before he died from complications related to AIDS in 1995 at the age of 45, Maya was poised to smash the lavender ceiling as an out, TV-ready stand-up comedian. Upon learning of this telegenic trailblazer from the ACT UP era, Bassichis (playing the fawning narcissist) thinks, “I’m going to win a Tony Award.” For Maya, berating the closeted Liberace weeks after the pianist’s death from AIDS and hungering for a cable special were one and the same goal: mainstreaming queer lives. Bassichis quotes poet Eileen Myles, “Frank was trying to make the world safe for Frank. He had a kind of selfishness to him that was political.” To which the latter-day stan adds, “Frank Maya wanted more, and I want more, too. I want to have sex with all of you!” Funnier than it is didactic, the show includes Bassichis’s wistful pop tenor and understated schtick, such as slinging the mic leash over one shoulder like they’re futzing with a strappy dress. Deftly staged by director Sam Pinkleton (Oh, Mary and The Rocky Horror Show), Can I Be Frank? had a much-lauded run last summer and returns for a Pride victory lap. —David Cote

Author of the 2022 novel Vladimir (and screenwriter for its Netflix incarnation), Julia May Jonas is already a dab hand at female rage and desire. Like the narrator of her book, the central figure of A Woman Among Women is an older authority figure whose ethical certainty comes unglued. Feminist bootstrapper Cleo (Dee Pelletier) is the folksy pillar of a close, progressive community in Northampton, Massachusetts. Her dissolute husband died in a drunk-driving accident years ago and she has since raised two daughters with her Platonic life partner, Tina (Tina Chilip). One set of neighbors is a leftie straight couple; another household is run by two ebullient lesbians. Cleo is founder of “The Center,” a psychological wellness mecca for women. In Sarah Cameron Hughes’s intimate, exposed-brick staging—a circle of lawn chairs on sage-green faux grass—the vibe is wry and inclusive. Actors look spectators in the eye and toss jokes or asides over a shoulder. It takes a while to realize the darkness encroaching on this backyard matriarchal idyll: Cleo has a daughter in prison who committed a terrible assault—for which the mother might be indirectly responsible.

Jonas has been writing gendered “responses” to the American canon for years, and this one addresses Arthur Miller’s All My Sons. Although the piece maps subtle gradations of group responsibility and punishment—where Miller was more bullish in exposing moral rot in the alpha-male industrialist—both plays are family tragedies, somber songs of pride and frailty. Jonas refrains from the soapboxing and closure that was expected in 1947. This Lincoln Center Theater production offers an absorbing hundred minutes, with Jonas’s witty, ricocheting dialogue, haunting plainsong interludes, and a wildly charming cast. —David Cote