Also: Misty Copeland’s Ballet Festival, the cogent poetry of Noname, the films of Otar Iosseliani, and more.July 31, 2026Wendy Wasserstein’s “An American Daughter” (revived, by La Femme Theatre Productions, at the Pershing Square Signature Center, now in previews) harks back to a more hopeful era. The play opened on Broadway in 1997, and it begins in the well-appointed Georgetown home of Lyssa Dent Hughes, a professor of public health and a fifth-generation descendant of Ulysses S. Grant. Her bid to become Surgeon General of the United States is derailed after her husband casually admits during a televised interview that she has never answered a jury summons. Within hours, a neglected civic obligation metastasizes into a national referendum on her privileged upbringing, her marriage, her ambitions, and her fitness for public life. A Beltway spin doctor is brought in to soften her damagingly competent profile, and Lyssa grudgingly consents to a follow-up interview, for which she dons a Hillary Clinton-esque headband: the center will not hold.The play was partly inspired by the failed nominations, in 1993, of Zoë Baird and Kimba Wood for Attorney General; the candidacies of both women imploded after revelations that they had employed undocumented household workers. With layer-cake wit, Wasserstein transforms the “Nannygate” contretemps into a broader meditation on political spectacle and competing visions of feminism. The foil to Lyssa’s second-wave, shoulder-pad feminism is the androgynously named Quincy Quince, a sound-bite-spewing churnalist and third-waver, played by a mini-skirted Elizabeth Marvel in the original Broadway production.“An American Daughter” is in previews, and opens on Aug. 11.