Wanted

What Wanted actually is

Mary and Martha Clarke are twins in 1893 Texas who can pass for white and do, which buys them movement through a country that would otherwise not allow them any. Their mother Tallulah is a sharecropper carrying a debt none of them can pay. What the sisters decide to do about it is the plot, and the production's own description does not soften it: they are driven to desperate measures, and they become outlaws.

Around them is what the show calls the Kinfolk — a chorus of ancestors who guide the sisters through the story. That device is the reason the piece reads as an odyssey rather than a heist, and it is the part of the staging the production leads with.

The cast is led by Solea Pfeiffer and Liisi LaFontaine as Mary and Martha, Grammy winner Ledisi as Tallulah and Grammy nominee Luke James as Elijah. The show ran previously under the title Gun & Powder; the Broadway production is the first to carry the name Wanted.