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  • Doubtless Doubt

    Whatever your opinion of the profundity of John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer- and Tony-winning 2005 play Doubt: A Parable—and views on that in my circle are all over the map—we can all surely agree that it has the right title. A tightly written, 90-minute confrontation between a liberal and popular Catholic priest in 1964 and a stern and uptight nun who suspects him of child-molestation, it’s constructed as an inconclusive procedural, the story of a private, emotional, and admittedly biased investigation that leaves both sides tarnished and never clearly establishes guilt or innocence. Shanley very cleverly keeps the cards of evidence close to his chest in this work, leaving all possibilities tantalizingly open right up to the end. The tension, suspense, fun, and deeper meaning of the piece all depend crucially on maintaining doubt. The very first line is, “What do you do when you’re not sure?”—spoken by the priest in a sermon. In the premiere directed by Doug Hughes 19 years ago, Brian F. O’Byrne and Cherry Jones sustained this tricky balance with their dry humor and quirky personalities. Both developed complicated, nuanced characters who challenged any rigid stereotypes the secular audience might have harbored. Jones’s Sister Aloysius was a martinet with a twinkle in her eye, relentless but also, it seemed, open to seeing a larger picture if one could be made plausible to her. She never seemed petty, even after deciding to dig in her heels. O’Byrne, for his part, 11 years younger than Jones yet playing her superior, was a serious yet puckish and upbeat Father Flynn, a smart man aware of his own limitations. He exuded an air of common sense and also vague respect for absurdity. You had the feeling he could have won Sister Aloysius over with just a few differently chosen words. There were hundreds of laughs in that 2005 show, very few at those characters’ expense. What we laughed at was their utterly unpredictable maneuvering round each other. I am, alas, not a fan of the 2008 film of the play that Shanley directed, starring two world-class actors, Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman. That film unfortunately relied too much on closeups and lurid emotion, too little on intelligence and wit. It had humor but only sporadically, a lot of it killed by reliance on reaction shots. The evocative New York exteriors and the 18-year age difference between Streep and Hoffman should have combined to provide period poignancy, clarifying and accentuating the Vatican II-driven generational conflict in the piece, but that effect never gelled either. The filmmaker-playwright evidently believed that looking deeply into two great actors’ eyes was enough, and it wasn’t. We needed contextual air to appreciate the characters as breathing denizens of a larger world. Now the play is receiving its first Broadway revival, directed by Scott Ellis at the newly renamed Todd Haimes Theatre (formerly American Airlines Theatre) and starring Liev Schreiber and Amy Ryan. It’s easy to see why fine artists would want to revisit this work. So much has happened since its premiere that could cast the dramatic stalemate in rich new light: the #MeToo movement, for instance, the accession of Pope Francis, the release of the 2015 film Spotlight, new investigations into church abuse in Australia, Chile, Ireland and much, much more. The atmosphere of secrecy and grudging tolerance about Church-protected child abuse that still prevailed in 2005 is now swept away. How might this cleared deck change our view of Shanley’s troublingly Janus-faced story about not being sure? I wish Ellis’s production contained some fascinating answer to that question. To me at least, it doesn’t. This is a staging that, shockingly, has decided who is right: Father Flynn. Schreiber plays a man so sincere, sensible, self-aware and worldly-wise compared to Ryan’s unequivocally priggish, narrow-minded, vindictive Sister Aloysius that we end up certain of his innocence. Flynn’s seeming confession of suppressed homosexual desire about halfway through the action in fact reinforces our trust in him because it makes him seem honest. The “parable” in this production, in other words, is about the dangers of deep-seated homophobia and rushing to judgement. Flynn is a victim punished unjustly by a revanchist schoolmarm unafraid of her putative superior because she’s slicker than he is at manipulating church bureaucracy. It doesn’t help that Schreiber and Ryan are almost exactly the same age, because one effect of that is to remove the supposed threat Father Flynn’s youth poses to Sister Aloysius’s sense of church values (the script says Flynn is a generation younger). Ryan’s eyes never twinkle with flashes of self-doubt in this show. She never hints at possible understanding with Flynn. For her, it seems, conflict is purely conflict, and that is no welcoming environment for humor, even the dark sort. The main notes of this show are fear, frustration, vexation, and anger. It lacks surprise, suspense, and the relational complexity required for laughter. I do sympathize with Ryan, whom I’ve always enjoyed onstage (in Uncle Vanya, Saved, Crimes of the Heart, and many other shows). With no notice, she gamely accepted the role of Sister Aloysius only a month ago after Tyne Daly dropped out due to illness. I can well imagine that developing the complex dance of repulsion and attraction that the relationship of Flynn and Aloysius requires just can’t be rushed. Also, the other two actors in the cast—Zoe Kazan as the younger teacher Sister James, and Quincy Tyler Bernstein as Mrs. Muller, the possibly abused boy’s mother—are giving fine performances. Both bring distinctive twists to their roles that are a pleasure to watch. The one twist they can’t provide, unfortunately, is the indispensable note of doubt that any production of Doubt needs. For that, it seems, we’ll have to wait until next time. Photos: Joan Marcus Doubt By John Patrick Shanley Directed by Scott Ellis Roundabout Theatre Company at Todd Haimes Theatre

  • In Poor Voice

    Call me clueless, but I wasn’t aware, before seeing Mona Pirnot’s new play I Love You So Much I Could Die at New York Theatre Workshop, that computers today are almost all able to speak any text on the screen aloud. The default voices are pretty robotic, as I learned—emotionally flat, restricted in timbre, no breath pauses—but they do the job. You can understand the words. I can see why lots of people would find this feature helpful. Most of Pirnot’s play is spoken by one of these tinny, automated voices while she sits alone at a table on a bare stage with her back to the audience, operating a laptop to advance the text and occasionally singing songs she wrote and strumming a guitar. Here’s a suggestion: instead of continuing to read this review, why don’t you find the text-to-speech function on your own computer and listen to it. That’s much more likely than any description to convey what it was like to listen to such speech for 65 minutes in a theater. Pirnot is married to the accomplished playwright Lucas Hnath, who directed this play and has experimented before with live interactions between actors and machine-generated voices (A Simulacrum and Dana H.). I Love You So Much recounts a personal trauma in Pirnot’s life, sort of. It was some sort of health crisis, never specified, suffered by her sister in 2020 which left Pirnot so depressed she became withdrawn and uncommunicative. The male-gendered text-to-speech software we hear helped her out of that pit, becoming a lifeline for her in writing and therapy. “I mostly work with him these days,” she (voiced by he) says. “I love to work with him. I work with him so often I think in his voice. I hear my thoughts in his voice.” The play was evidently built around the idea of sharing the marvels of this miraculous accessory with us. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really glimmer with any sort of revelatory light. The sonic monotony, for one thing, is downright soporific—I started to nod after 15 minutes or so. More important, though, way before the end, Pirnot struck me as coyly evasive rather than mysterious or trapped in fascinating ways. Even her rigid stance of facing away eventually read more as a rigorously rehearsed trope for incapacitation than a moving evocation of the real thing. I couldn’t help but think of Beckett’s character C in Rough for Theatre II, who stands silently at a window with his back to the audience the whole play as two numbskull bureaucrats chew over his life. I also recalled Pinter’s characters in Landscape and Silence, who speak about one another while seated in opposing chairs but never acknowledge (or perhaps hear) each other’s voices. In all those plays, the characters’ stark withholding gestures are part of mysteries we’re meant to unravel and interpret. Pirnot’s play, by contrast, contains no comparable mystery, unless you want to count whatever unanswered questions there are about depression. Her withholding therefore comes off as, well, a conceit of alienation. Her songs may have been intended as a sympathetic counterpoint, since they’re our only opportunity to hear her actual voice, but their effect in performance is to affirm and deepen the sense of affected alienation because they’re all so breathily vague, melancholic, languid, and desultory. The play’s fractured narrative is clearly meant to tug our heartstrings, but it too proves unflattering. Wandering, roundabout, and maudlin, it begins with descriptions of ineffectual support groups Pirnot attended on zoom during the pandemic, moves on to a story about volunteering for God’s Love We Deliver that also failed to lift her spirits, and explains her disappointment with books she consulted (“the kind that [say], hey you, yes you, your mind is a prison but the key’s in your pocket”). We then hear the backstory of her romance with Hnath, learn of his staunch support during the sister’s health crisis, and finally get a misty-eyed account of the death of Pirnot’s family dog. What we never hear, throughout this whole play about a woman supposedly unhinged by her sister’s grave illness, is any information at all about that sister. Why was she so important? A sibling so central to Pirnot’s psyche as to be a pillar of her sanity surely merits a description, even if only an indirect one, possibly by describing their connection. The text at one point quotes a line in bell hooks’s book All About Love that reportedly meant so much to Pirnot that she highlighted it: “it is far easier to talk about loss than it is to talk about love. It is easier to articulate the pain of love’s absence than to describe its presence and meaning in our lives.” Ah, there’s the rub, I thought at that moment. Had this play taken hooks’s cue and freed itself from those “easier” pickings, dwelling less on loss, regret, and self-absorption, and reaching instead for the harder-to-get fruit of clear sight, acknowledgement, and ultimately insight, it would not have ended up feeling as sketchy, tenuous, and unfinished as it does. Photos: Jenny Anderson I Love You So Much I Could Die By Mona Pirnot Directed by Lucas Hnath New York Theater Workshop

  • Theater, Addiction, and Responsibility

    I almost didn’t go see Days of Wine and Roses: The Musical because my memories of the highly regarded 1962 film—directed by Blake Edwards and written by J.P. Miller—aren’t all that warm. I distinctly remember thinking, “So just stop drinking already!” I was able to appreciate Edwards’s artful direction, even at age 20, along with Miller’s subtle and perceptive story of enabling and co-dependency, and Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick’s fine performances (Lemmon was a real actor before he began leaning on mugging and shtick). But something in me resisted extolling a work principally dedicated to depicting an addiction in gory detail—especially an addiction like alcoholism, so widely and manipulatively touted as a “disease.” The 1958 Days of Wine and Roses teleplay by Miller that preceded the movie was (as I recently learned after looking it up) a veritable PSA for AA. Lurid, noir-ish, overwrought—it’s like Reefer Madness for drinking. Drama is usually compelling because of the human choices it depicts, preferably fateful ones. Watching a disease process ply a destructive path over several hours isn’t interesting in itself; in fact it’s a chore unless questions of choice and responsibility spring up. Death of a Salesman, as it happens, sparked a debate on just this question when it first appeared in 1949. The loudest fan chorus, then as now, celebrated it as a tragic portrait of a common man destroyed by the false seductions of the American dream. Yet a few perceptive critics pointed out that Willy Loman was mentally ill. Was a sick man really the best carrier of such an important political banner? By now, of course, this question has been hopelessly suppressed by the juggernaut making Willy into a holy martyr, but it was, and still is, worth asking. I’m delighted to report that Days of Wine and Roses: The Musical is a triumph. Directed by Michael Greif, it’s the first collaboration between playwright Craig Lucas and composer-lyricist Adam Guettel since their triumphal Light in the Piazza in 2005, and it recently transferred to Broadway from the Atlantic Theater. The music is remarkably textured and used in wonderfully original ways, effectively replacing dialogue in key exchanges and vividly expressing the complex humanity of the two very troubled people at the story’s center. Kelli O’Hara and Brian D’Arcy James are searingly powerful in the starring roles, particularly O’Hara. Both are exceptionally attuned both to the acting and singing demands of their separate roles, and also to one another. The show is 100 intermissionless minutes and never droops or lags. Most important, though, is that this musical owes its surprising power to a number of small adjustments that shifted the emphasis in the material toward personal responsibility and away from the putative disease-process of alcoholism. The chief adjustment is in the casting of O’Hara. This actress has shown in a string of lead performances in brilliant recent revivals of classic musicals (The Pajama Game, South Pacific, The King and I, Kiss Me, Kate) that she is uniquely adept at portraying women from the Eisenhower era in ways that subtly acknowledge how much water has passed under the feminist bridge since then. Her angelic voice aside, she has a knack for finding just the right knowing cock of the head, or steely tone, or longer hold on a man’s gaze, that makes her characters seem rooted in the present as well as the past. Kirsten Arnesen, whom she plays in Days of Wine and Roses, is a secretary who never went to college but loves literature and can recite works like “Gray’s Elegy” from memory. On the musical stage, she’s never shown as a subordinate in an office, always instead as a vivid, independent presence in places (such as a party, or a restaurant) where she can stand out as memorable—a person of palpable worth in the world. That goes a long way toward explaining why her fall ultimately feels so tragic, rather than merely pathetic. It was Brecht who first observed that the stage has a structural advantage over film in conveying savviness, because of its inherent artificiality. Except in the most hermetically sealed naturalism, stage performers more readily strike us as making choices rather than succumbing to overwhelming forces, as in film, if only because the seams of planning and rehearsal are never quite erased in theater. Our awareness of the labor behind the art can help keep it engaging, sharp-edged, and multidimensional—that is, when the artists involved care to use it that way. That element, I believe, is crucial in this show. You don’t realize until about 20 minutes in—and then it hits you like a pitcher of cold water—that O’Hara and James are the only ones in the ten-member cast who sing. (There’s one exception near the end—a brief number with the couple’s daughter.) The effect of this is extraordinary. The sonic separation of the cast creates the impression of a partitioned world in which one reality is poetic, musical and lubricated with alcohol, whereas the other is prosaic, spoken and burdened with the dry and terrifying clarity of everydayness. Kirsten complains at one point, “The world is so dirty to me when I’m not drinking,” and this line has no particular resonance in the movie. Lee Remick speaks it as a degraded wretch whom we can’t help but judge because we feel we’re better than her. Spoken onstage now by O’Hara, the line lands profoundly because it’s a description of an experience we’ve also just had. By this point, we’ve been listening to her and James sing their guts out for 100 minutes in a truly remarkable string of difficult and various numbers, used to convey how their characters creatively seek, invent, re-invent, abuse, and ultimately sacrifice their love for one another. Regrets about this, if they come at all, are for ourselves as much as for the divinely voiced wretches in front of us. Before the pandemic, Jesse McKinley published a piece in the New York Times about the ubiquity of new plays about addiction in the recent American theater. He mentioned, among others: Craig Lucas’s I Was Most Alive With You; Catya McMullen’s George Mertching is Dead; Sean Daniels’s The White Chip; Dave Malloy’s Octet; Quiara Alegria Hudes’s Water By the Spoonful; Adam Bock’s Before the Meeting; and Duncan Macmillan’s People, Places & Things. I might have added half a dozen more. Clearly, this theme is everywhere (and I haven’t even mentioned the fresh wave of opiate plays) and not going out of style any time soon. Yes, several of these plays are good. Nevertheless, too much work of this kind is driven by shallow, social-media-sanctioned confessionality and wrongly presumes the public’s automatic interest in addiction as a disease-process. Part of the marvel of Days of Wine and Roses: the Musical for me is how rare it is for any show to rise out of that all-too-common rut. I, for one, expected nothing from this work before seeing it and now consider it the best musical I’ve seen this year. Photos: Joan Marcus Days of Wine and Roses: The Musical Book by Craig Lucas Music & Lyrics by Adam Guettel Directed by Michael Greif Studio 54

  • What Can I Say?

    Rachel Bonds’s Jonah—directed by Danya Taymor at the Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre— is one of those plays it’s almost impossible to write meaningfully about without spoilers. I’m no spoiler zealot. If anything, I tend to lean toward open discussion with courtesy warnings, and sometimes I don’t bother with them when a play has had a previous run and been widely discussed. With a brand new piece, though, I’m loath to ruin the suspense and surprise. Jonah is a crafty and mysterious puzzle that’s crucially reliant on one big, climactic reveal. Every critic will want to weigh in on that reveal, but I’ll have to talk around it for now. Here’s what I can say. The show is worth seeing. It’s crisp, dynamic, lucid, and exquisitely cast. The 100 intermissionless minutes fly by quickly. Taymor has a knack for this type of intimate, small-cast work: heady talk among smart, troubled people in confined spaces, surreal touches, sexual encounters that feel edgy (think of Daddy, Heroes of the Fourth Turning, Evanston Salt Costs Climbing). The pacing, emotional build, and subtle physical movement here are all spot-on. Gabby Beans, a marvelously distinctive actor, plays the main character Ana, introduced as a teenage scholarship student from Detroit attending a boarding school, where she is pursued by a cute, shy, comparatively privileged boy named Jonah, played with understated charm by Hagan Oliveras. Things get steamy, they exchange kisses and fantasies, and suddenly, after an abrupt, surreal light cue that seems to suck Jonah away, we meet another, somewhat older guy named Danny who turns out to be her step-brother, played by Samuel Henry Levine. Ana is African-American, Danny and Jonah are white, and oddly enough, things also get steamy between the step-siblings. More abrupt light cues and suck-aways, and the action leaps forward in time, with no changes in costume or to the stark, beige, dormroom-cum-motel set (design by Wilson Chin). Ana is in college, then still older at a remote writer’s retreat (she’s become a writer), where another man, a lanky lapsed Mormon named Steven, pursues her. Steven is also white, just as earnest and sincere as Jonah, and played with comparably charming self-deprecation by John Zdrojeski. There are lots of hesitations, with standoffish Ana trying to keep to herself. Also dangers: she’s repeatedly menaced and threatened by Danny and can’t seem to break free. These are the mystery threads. It’s up to us to tie them together and decide which are real and which imagined. It has to be said that it’s a pleasure to watch all four of these fine actors perform. Each brings distinct, intelligent nuance to his/her role, which adds powerful particularity to the suspense in a play built very much around seemingly open-hearted dialogue that’s actually cagey. My reservations about Jonah are mostly about its ending. I won’t give it away, but my heart sank when I saw Bond making the terribly unfortunate decision to explain her big reveal. Here’s the nub. The play’s richest thematic tension is the contrast it sets up between male and female sexual fantasies, and Bonds’s explanation reduces that tension to a platitude. Jonah is about a single damaged woman whom its female author clearly finds fascinating, but in the end, her play can’t pass the Bechdel test. Every ghost and provoking voice in Ana’s head turns out to be male. I wanted to meet her mother and step-mother, whose bad luck and bad choices might have provided illuminated contrasts. And what about female friends? Did Ana’s fear and self-imposed isolation mean there were none? That’s worth knowing too. In the end, the character feels diminished in complexity compared to the absorbing figure introduced at the outset. Her enigma really depended on maintaining at least some of the blurry lines between types of fantasies. Sometimes, in playwriting, you have to know when you’ve thinned too much and when to leave blurry enough alone. Photos: Joan Marcus Jonah By Rachel Bonds Directed by Danya Taymor Roundabout at Laura Pels Theatre

  • Long and Short Hatreds

    Joshua Harmon’s Prayer for the French Republic is a very good play about anti-Semitism that left me glumly wishing it were great. Set mostly in 2016-17 Paris, it tells the story of a middle-class Jewish family, living in France for 5 generations, who feel threatened enough by rising anti-Jewish violence that they decide to emigrate to Israel. The play was produced by MTC in 2022 (unseen by me), won several awards, and has now re-opened on Broadway. You can easily understand why MTC brought it back. The acting is splendid in David Cromer’s lucid production. And last year, when the current Broadway season was planned, Trump’s cozy dinner with Jew-baiting Ye (a.k.a. Kanye West) and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes was a fresh outrage, the Tree of Life shooter was tried and convicted, and Fox News regularly fed fires of hatred with dog whistles about “globalists,” backstabbing bankers, and the perfidious entertainment industry. Harmon’s tale must have seemed like a perfect election-year choice. Then came October 7—first, the Hamas atrocities, then the horrifying destruction in Gaza. Since the fall, everything Jewish and Israeli in the arts has had to be absorbed into the context of a new war, and that shift inevitably alters the emotional ground of Harmon’s play, affecting its impact. The story turns on tense family arguments about matters like assimilation and national identity that seem, well, less pressing now. Numerous reviews 2 years ago described these debates as sharp, brassy, and cheekily topical; now they have an argumentative air and often lack snap. The play is 3 hours long and highlights several obsessed and loquacious characters clearly meant to amuse and fascinate as well as irritate, who now shade into the windy and overwrought. This noble, well-meaning play, with its moving climax and quotable, set-piece monologues about the long history of Jew-hatred, is being squeezed by the news in ways that don’t flatter it. Harmon is at his best in the specific, contemporary family story, not the play’s flashbacks to the grandparent generation in 1944-46 or in the tirades that feel like strained efforts at epic sweep. The Benhamou family—Charles a physician (Nael Nacer), Marcelle a psychiatrist (Betsy Aidem)—are welcoming a young American named Molly (Molly Ranson), their distant cousin on a college-year abroad, to their Paris home when their son, 26-year-old Daniel (Aria Shahghasemi), suddenly staggers in with a bloodied head. He’s been attacked by anonymous thugs whose slurs affirm that they targeted him for wearing a yarmulke. He refuses to call the police and also rebuffs his parents’ pleas to cover his kippa with a baseball cap. His biopolar, 28-year-old sister Elodie (Francis Benhamou—the name parallel a coincidence) jumps to his defense seemingly out of pure contentiousness: “Don't you think it's a problem, that a person can't go outside wearing something on his head for fear of being attacked? . . . Oh so Daniel's asking for it now? Is that seriously your argument?” I wish Harmon had stuck with this generational confrontation around the theme of laïcité-defiance. Instead of developing that conflict, though, he makes the play’s young people into rather unimpressive, peripheral players—flotsam rather than waves in the dramatic storm. Elodie proves to be a motormouth blurter of sundry opinions who tries to shame Molly for knee-jerk leftist naivete even though her own stridently pro-Israel points are all over the logical map and her non-conformist, sleep-till-noon, slacker demeanor doesn’t jibe with them at all. Hunky, guitar-playing Daniel, for his part, becomes Molly’s passing love interest, his sole, lame explanation for his out-of-the-blue religiosity a dew-eyed story about snow flurries making him feel “grateful to be alive”: “I wanted to say thank you, but who do you thank for the snow? So I went to synagogue.” The elders make all the important decisions that push the exile story forward. I had to wonder: in what present-day Western family does that really happen? Marcelle refuses at first when Charles comes home one day saying he “can’t do this anymore.” Armed guards at the synagogue, dirty looks at Daniel on the street, “They're stabbing Jews in Strasbourg. They're stabbing Jews in Marseille”—he feels unsafe and wants to move. Meanwhile, Marcelle’s brother Patrick (Anthony Edwards), who doubles as the play’s narrator, explains the family history of secularism: their forefathers founded a successful piano company in 1855, their grandparents arbitrarily survived the Nazi occupation in their own Paris apartment (this story staged in the flashback scenes). It seems like the plot is headed for a divorce when Marcelle abruptly changes her mind—due to her shock at a home-invasion murder of a Jewish woman in 2017—and soon the whole family is packing for Israel after a terrible brother-sister blowup. Reading over what I’ve written here, I fear it may sound harsher than my true feelings. I was indeed moved by several scenes in Prayer for the French Republic, including the rueful farewell when the family sings the “Marseillaise" together around their soon-to-be-abandoned heirloom piano. I do recognize that the story’s warning about the flimsiness of Jews’s security in even tolerant modern societies is all too relevant to today’s America (which Elodie acknowledges, then denies, then acknowledges again). The notes of Jewish pride the play sounds also touch me, and matter. Several people behind me shouted “Whoah!” after Harmon’s final set-speech about Jew-hatred through the ages, and I relished their rush. As a theater person, though, I also feel bound to point out that this is not a moment when such speeches can resonate at full power. The historian Robert Wistrich once called anti-Semitism the world’s “longest hatred.” One unfortunate facet of that longevity is that all our shorter hatreds—including, let’s admit, those in the hearts of Jews themselves—continually rear up and make things worse. There are certain moments when the theater needs to tap all the flexibility it can muster to respond to a quickly changing environment, and this play demonstrates that we’re in one now. Flexibility—which is always difficult—is supposed to be one of theater’s prime advantages over recorded media, and the current crisis really called for it in this case. Harmon did make script adjustments for this Broadway run—cutting some Trump-era references, for instance—but the Israel-Hamas war demanded more. New thinking was needed about what the contemporary characters in a play like this would actually say and do, should say and do on a 2024 stage. Several years ago, the playwright Antoinette Nwandu radically and effectively revised the ending of her extraordinary play Pass Over in response to George Floyd’s murder, the Black Lives Matter protests, and the pandemic. To me, that’s the depth of re-thinking Prayer for the French Republic needs to make a ringing artistic statement now. The real world, around just these issues, is too much crying out for acknowledgement. Photos: Jeremy Daniel Prayer for the French Republic By Joshua Harmon Directed by David Cromer MTC-Samuel J Friedman Theatre

  • More Sickly Mansions

    There are lots of reasons Americans have always loved family-dustup plays and exalted them with high honors. Families are one of the only social units nearly all of us recognize as valid, respectable, and universally relevant. Also, family dramas have historically been among America’s most effective means of hiding our politics from ourselves, keeping the personal and political in neatly separate boxes, the better to prove that our sufferings are actually tragic curses of a conveniently vague villain called “human nature,” rather than solvable structural problems in our social arrangements. We’re fortunate to live at a time when lots of good playwrights (Taylor Mac, Jackie Sibblies-Drury, Will Eno, and Young Jean Lee, for instance) have been chipping away at the hallowed family-reunion-showdown genre with brilliant sendups, queerings, and deconstructions. One of my favorite of these cheeky reimaginings—Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s gripping 2013 play Appropriate—has just opened in a new production at the Helen Hayes. This sizzling show directed by Lila Neugebauer is Jacobs-Jenkins’s Broadway debut, and it seems to me the must-see theater event of the winter. Appropriate gathers the three scions of the venerable Lafayette family at their former-plantation home in Arkansas for an estate sale and auction. There they discover shocking evidence that their recently deceased father, a respected and high-powered Washington lawyer, was probably a Klan member. This bombshell is a deviously barbed twist on the relatively mild secrets about addiction, infidelity, incest and cruelty revealed in all the canonized family plays by O’Neill, Inge, Lanford Wilson, Tracy Letts, and others. The album of lynch photos the Lafayette kids find, along with what appear to be jars of fetishized bones, are so troubling and explicit that everyone’s reflexive impulses to suppress, ignore and rationalize them are instantly obvious and ridiculous. We recognize their bumbling as a sign that this play is not about repression or avoidance, like most of its forebears. It’s rather a satirical x-ray of what such plays usually present as a supposedly normal and typical world. The Lafayettes are educated, well-meaning, 21st-century white people who can’t square the violent racism in front of them with their professed values. Jacobs-Jenkins makes them wriggle, squirm and twitch under his merciless magnifying glass as all their new and old resentments come to a raucous boil. To me, what’s really distinctive about Appropriate is its larky yet portentous tone. It may be thoroughly realistic but it’s also comically self-conscious in the way it constantly spotlights its characters’ many blind spots with stiletto punch-lines. The play isn’t written with love, or even affection, but it’s not exactly written with hate either—despite the rage that its lead character, eldest daughter and estate executor Toni, exhibits from beginning to end. Jacobs-Jenkins’s POV here feels like that of a bemused anthropologist—he was in fact an Anthropology major at Princeton—creating a document for examination by those who might come across it in the far future. It makes perfect sense that the last act culminates in a time-lapse coda showing what happens to the plantation house over uncountable years. Jacobs-Jenkins imagines a distant world in which the white cluelessness he examines has become an artifact to be unearthed and, perhaps, interpreted with fresh eyes. The heart of Neugebauer’s production is Sarah Paulson’s ferocious portrayal of Toni, the divorced mother of a teenage “fuck-up” (Rhys, played by Graham Campbell) who has been on the scene resentfully caring for old dad as he declined. Toni is so unrelentingly bitter, so full of toxic resentment at everyone but Rhys, that she makes Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf seem serene. Her greeting to Frank (Michael Esper), her long-lost brother, unseen for a decade: “What in fuck’s sake is going on? What are you doing here?” Her hello to Frank’s girlfriend River (Elle Fanning): “WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?!” And this is just in the first scene. The role of Toni is like Shakespeare’s Lear requiring the actor to start out at peak fury and then figure out how to modulate her performance for two and half hours to give the character variety. Paulson is masterful at this, finding so many interesting variations on Toni’s basic surliness—motherly defensiveness, sisterly indignation, in-law envy—that she actually elicits a thimbleful of sympathy in the end. All the other actors deserve deep bows too. Esper is thoroughly convincing as the earnest prodigal addict and pedophile Frank (now rebranded as Franz), returning to stick his opportunistic black-sheep’s neck back into the teeth of his sibling wolves. Fanning, for her part, understands every unacknowledged sharp edge around River’s supposedly tranquil New Age softness, an inheritance from her lawyer parents. Corey Stoll is also excellent as yuppie middle child Bo (short for Beauregarde), who, being happily married with two kids, convinces himself that his wealth and even-temper can lift him above the family fray. That he does come through the storm relatively intact is thanks mostly to his poised and courageous wife Rachael, played by Natalie Gold. Gold is the only one in the play with the sangfroid to go toe-to-toe with Paulson in high dudgeon. You honestly expect these sisters-in-law to draw blood in their climactic confrontation. In all probability, most people reading this now at the end of December are nestled, lodged, resignedly decamped, or otherwise hunkered down with their families. My advice to you: take a break from all that bliss, gratification, resentment, innuendo, violence, depravity or whatever it is, and go see Appropriate. Whatever your mood, mansion, or myth of origin, this play will unsettle it and make you reflect on it anew. Photos: Joan Marcus Appropriate By Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Directed by Lila Neugebauer The Hayes Theater

  • Cuban Just So Stories

    Buena Vista Social Club—a wonderfully infectious and sexy collection of golden-age Cuban music featuring all-but-forgotten virtuosic Cuban musicians in their 70s and 80s—has been wrapped in nostalgia and wish-fulfillment since its first release as an album in 1997. It was produced and brilliantly marketed by the American musician Ry Cooder and British producer Nick Gold and touched a tender nerve in the post-Soviet West. Thirty- and forty-somethings who were baffled by the novelties of rap and electronica (Cooder called them “the Jeep Cherokee set”) proved ripe for this record’s acoustic artistry and exotic Afro-Cuban idioms. And with the Castro government reluctantly opening up to tourism after the collapse of the USSR, the album powerfully dangled the dream of recovering a storied, bygone world of prerevolutionary Cuban nightlife, untainted by mafia thugs. It sold by the millions, jump-started the careers of its neglected performers, spun off an Oscar-nominated documentary by Wim Wenders, and now, 26 years later, has spawned an American stage musical. Branding is a wondrous thing. It works like a magic spell allowing the pleasures of familiarity to float free and innocent above unpleasant history—history, for instance, like America’s trade embargo of Cuba, which has caused untold suffering over 63 years and never forced the slightest increase in ordinary Cubans’s freedom. The embargo might as well never have existed for all the album’s 1930s and 40s son and bolero numbers are concerned. At least Cooder and Gold made sure the musicians were paid. We consumers, meanwhile, have for the most part mooned over the album’s timeless jacket photo of Ibrahim Ferrer striding past a vintage Studebaker and imagined ourselves transported to a paradisiacal island playground where everything is forever rhythmically and mythically just so and the revolution possibly never occurred. Now, before anyone gets too mad at me, let me just say that I’ve been as seduced as anyone by the record’s charms. I loved it from first hearing (and I wouldn’t be caught dead in a Jeep Cherokee). Furthermore, I was thoroughly seduced by this new musical, which, to its credit, tries to blend thick nostalgia with a bit of historical context (the book is by Marco Ramirez). Mostly, though, the show is a platter of musical delight, with crack live versions of the songs set to snazzy, pulsing, ballet-inflected dances choreographed by the husband-wife team Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck. Developed and directed by Saheem Ali, Buena Vista is fast-paced, steamy, and undemanding. It feels like spending two hours in an exhilarating nightclub from your grandparents’ time where no song is second-rate and every patron could be Ginger Rogers or Fred Astaire. They’re all having the time of their life, and so is the audience. As far as I could tell, the people around me at the Atlantic Theater were too busy tapping their feet to worry much about the many holes in the decidedly thin, get-the-old-band-back-together story. In real life, the recording session that birthed the album was a last-minute improv arrangement. Cooder had booked two guitarists from Mali to collaborate with some Cubans playing traditional Cuban instruments with African roots (he’d long been interested in such cross-cultural connections), but the Malians never arrived due to visa problems. With the help of a Cuban folklorist and bandleader, Juan de Marcos Gonzalez, he and Gold changed plans and tracked down a bunch of older, legendary local musicians, gathered them in a vintage RCA Victor studio (built in the 1940s and still using its original equipment), recorded versions of beloved old songs played with next to no preparation, and sat back to realize the results were miraculous. In the play, Ramirez (best known for The Royale at Lincoln Center in 2016) has erased Cooder and Gold (the former was central to Wenders’s documentary) and made Juan de Marcos the main organizer and guardian of authenticity and folk pride. No white heroes on this project, where (according to a preview article in The New York Times) “identity reconstruction” was central. All collaborators reportedly had to have Cuban roots or some other direct connection with the album, and all the lyrics remain in untranslated Spanish. The story takes many liberties with fact. The play’s Juan de Marcos, played with self-effacing fearlessness by Luis Vega, interrupts a solo session by famous Omara Portuondo (played by Natalie Venetia Belcon, whose alto voice is stunning) to entice her to join the session. She recruits old friend Compay Segundo (Julio Monge), and that triggers flashbacks to the 1950s when she was a pretty young star from a wealthy family, performing with her sister Haydee at expensive hotels. Haydee will flee to America after the revolution and beg Omara to come along, but she prefers slumming at the scruffy Buena Vista Social Club in disreputable Marianao. A central plot thread traces Omara’s regret at never speaking to Haydee again. Another involves a love interest between young Omara and the penniless young Ibrahim Ferrer, which also veers into betrayal. Ferrer, a sublime sones singer who was famously retired and shining shoes when invited to Cooder’s recording session, is here depicted as Omara’s natural duet partner and also a victim of despicable colorism. Both before and after the revolution, we see producers and club owners refusing him featured billing and stage time because of his dark skin. That Omara accepts this at one point for the sake of her career seeds yet another regret, and an effort to correct the injustice by featuring Ibrahim on the album. Interestingly enough, three of the band’s featured musicians—Omara, Ibrahim, and the pianist Rubén Gonzalez—have been double-cast with a younger and older actor, and yet only one of these pairs is used to clear advantage in the show. Both Belcon and Kenya Browne, who plays the younger Omara, are splendid singers. But neither Mel Semé (Ibrahim) nor Olly Sholotan (Young Ibrahim) manages to evoke the distinctive, richly careworn timbre of the real Ferrer’s voice, which dominates the Buena Vista album (appearing on 8 of its 14 tracks—on 5 as lead vocal). As for the pianist Gonzalez, his doubling is puzzling and thankless. The younger actor, Leonardo Reyna, is a fine keyboardist. But the older actor, Jainardo Batista Sterling, barely noodles a piano and mostly appears as a doddering woolgatherer. (Compay: “He doesn’t play anymore. He’s just here for the catering.”) That simply won’t fly with anyone who remembers Wenders’s film, in which the 80-year-old Gonzalez’s astonishingly agile, arthritic fingers are a constant feast for the camera. The script has other curious omissions. It fails to explain, for instance, why the titular social club has to be closed after the revolution, even though it’s a gathering place for unprivileged people sympathetic to the Communist cause. Or who the racist producer is who cajoles Omara into betraying Ibrahim at the moment when capitalism is crumbling (how and why is he “starting [his] own record label” then?). Or what any of the band’s extraordinary musicians actually think of Communism, in their heart of hearts. I suppose it's possible that answering these questions might have added too much length, or factuality, or serious politics, to the show, possibly compromising the enchantment of its delightful dramatized concert. The album’s songs are that alluring and magnetic, especially paired with Delgado and Peck’s sizzling dances, that they can carry the 2-hour evening despite Ramirez’s thin book. Nevertheless, the holes in his story are interesting and gaping enough that they leave you wondering why a slightly more critical relationship to the nostalgia and ahistorical mythology that launched the album to the stratosphere couldn’t have worked. We have, after all, seen that with Brecht/Weill, Sondheim, Sheik/Slater, and many others. Sometimes complicated stories sell well too, even in musicals. Photos: Ahron R. Foster Buena Vista Social Club Atlantic Theater Company Book by Marco Ramirez Music by Buena Vista Social Club Choreography by Patricia Delgado & Justin Peck Developed and directed by Saheem Ali

  • Waiting for Nora

    Stripped-down productions of classics are pretty familiar to New York theatergoers. We’ve had Ivo van Hove’s provocatively barebones O’Neill, Williams, and Moliere at New York Theater Workshop; Tea Alagić’s sleekly distilled Romeo and Juliet at Classic Stage Company; Fiasco Theater’s cleverly compressed Into the Woods at the Laura Pels; and many more. I even remember a literally stripped Naked Macbeth at the Sonnet Theater. Any seasoned theater fan expects such experimentation, even honors it, in our small and noncommercial venues, but Broadway is a tougher sell. It takes a special sort of chutzpah to be severely Spartan where orchestra seats run north of $300. The set for Jamie Lloyd’s new nouvelle-cuisine staging of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House at the Hudson Theatre, starring Jessica Chastain, is basically a floor-turntable and a few wooden chairs. There are no props in this rendering of the naturalistic classic, and the costumes are essentially chic black office-casualwear. Even the script has been pared down (by the playwright Amy Herzog) to a punchy, essentialized, 110-minutes, presumably for maximum thrust and efficiency. The complete play runs more than 2 ½ hours. This is Ibsen tuned to the key of Beckett. I was gripped by this experiment. I found Chastain’s performance canny and steely and rife with nuance. I also thought the bracing directness of all the emended character interactions focused and illuminated the play’s core questions in quirky and interesting ways. I can also easily see, though, that anyone not watching from amazing press seats like mine might not have appreciated all this because they didn’t have access to the nuance. In 2020, Lloyd planned to stage Frank McGuinness’s adaptation of A Doll’s House with Chastain in London. Then the pandemic arrived and the project was reimagined with a female adaptor (Herzog) interested in retooling the work for the #MeToo era. The result is a meditative, savvy and fascinatingly self-conscious Doll’s House. I am sure there are folks seeing the play for the first time at the Hudson (scattered audience gasps at the climax suggest that), but to me the show feels primarily intended for those who know A Doll’s House well, and may even feel overexposed to conventional versions of it. If you arrive early you can gaze at Chastain for 20 minutes during the preshow. She sits in a plain chair staring pensively ahead, legs crossed, arms folded, her long red hair neatly tied back, as the stage turntable spins her lazily around like a frozen Petit Four on a dessert tray, or a moody kid left behind on a carousel. Or something. She stays put in or near that chair for two hours, until the famous final exit when the character leaves her marriage. The point seems to be to isolate Nora and abstract her from any realistic detail that might steal focus from her precise actions and reactions at the play’s pivotal moments. In this spirit, every entrance and exit, and particularly every approach to and retreat from her, is precisely calibrated—sometimes to powerful effect. Her back visibly stiffens, for instance, after her tough old friend Kristine (Jesmille Darbouze) belatedly takes a seat beside her, interrupting her self-involved chatter to blurt out, “you’re basically still a child.” The intensity of this stiffening reaction is all the more noticeable and important without a fancily decorated living room to distract us. Chastain’s Nora has a solid core of self-respect to begin with, we understand. Another example is when Krogstad (Okieriete Onaodowan) explains his intention to blackmail Nora. Onaodowan faces upstage, never showing his face while delivering this speech so the only expressions we see are hers, and she is unforgettably ashen. Again, the shock of Nora’s learning is framed as the deservedly exclusive focus—all else is distraction. The most fascinating and revealing device of this kind comes when Nora becomes reluctant to see her children after Torvald (Arian Moayed) scares her with his remark, “lies contaminate the entire home.” There are no child actors in Lloyd’s show—the kids are played only as voice-overs. Thus, no realistic cooing or petting or irresistibly cute little bodies muddy the troubled waters of Chastain’s storm of self-doubt here. Her worry is exposed in all its raw isolation, becoming particularly poignant in Nora’s brief nonverbal exchange with the nurse Anne-Marie (Tasha Lawrence). There is a cost to all this precise calculation, of course, which leaves little room for actorly spontaneity. The physical distances on the large stage don’t help either. The cast’s head mics do amplify their quiet voices, but the end effect of that is more like a reference to intimacy than a convincing impression of intimacy. Interestingly, with the half-dozen actors dressed all in black and often casting sharp shadows on the bare stage walls, I was reminded of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, which is also a melodramatic family story blended with philosophical reflections about the distinction between actors and characters. Perhaps a double-reality of that sort was Lloyd’s aim with this show, which has the trappings of a workshop without a workshop’s lightness or looseness. The actor-friend who saw this Doll’s House with me said it reminded him of a few productions he has worked on in which the spontaneous first-day table-read turned out to be the best performance the cast ever gave. There’s a dreamy quality to the show, methodical as it is, that suggests a quixotic effort to bottle some precious creative lightning. Whatever the truth of that, the experiment seems to me worthwhile. If you attend, watch Chastain closely at the climax, at the crucial point of no return when Torvald irredeemably humiliates and degrades himself, raging (in Herzog’s pithily coarse words), “You stupid bitch!” Soon after that (spoiler alert!), she walks out the loading bay of the Hudson Theatre onto brightly lit 45th Street and disappears. No other Nora I’ve seen has more movingly conveyed the terrible experience of love melting instantaneously away into a puddle of lukewarm regret. Photos: Courtesy of A Doll's House A Doll's House By Henrik Ibsen A New Version by Amy Herzog Directed by Jamie Lloyd Hudson Theatre

  • Love--A Dissenting View

    Alexander Zeldin’s Love—a much-celebrated, quietly confrontational, British devised piece from 2016 about homeless people living in a temporary shelter—is a noble piece of theater. It focuses on two families struggling with grim precarity and maddening bureaucratic delay and indifference, telling an unsensational story about them mostly by way of minutely observed behavioral detail. The piece, now running at the Park Avenue Armory, was made in collaboration with actual shelter residents (hence the docudramatic detail), one of whom (a Sudanese refugee with no previous theater experience) is in the cast. This is no analytical Brechtian exposé. Love doesn’t argue for any particular political or policy change, or even trace any causes for the social ills it depicts. Its sole purpose is to generate empathy, using intimate, hyper-specific, realistic action to force us to see and feel uncomfortable things that we’re expert at looking away from. Brecht, who thought all theater should clarify social causes, would probably have dismissed it as sentimental. I’d read numerous admiring articles about Love from its prepandemic runs in London and elsewhere, and I wish my reaction was as warm as most other critics’ has been. Alas, the show didn’t have its intended effect on me, or on the diverse group of Hunter College students I went with . . . or, judging from the ubiquitous dozing and tepid applause I saw around me at the Armory, on many others. Zeldin has described himself as a protégé of Peter Brook, whom he assisted between 2010 and 2014. Like Brook, he’s partial to stripped-down stages, abhors showbiz razzle-dazzle, and believes fervently in the universal bonding power of a kind of anti-theatrical acting rooted in everyday behavior. (Much has been written about the contradictions inherent in Brook’s privileged white European quest for a universal theatrical idiom with the power to overcome all language and cultural boundaries.) Zeldin, for his part, has been more modest, avoiding grand claims. After apprentice directing for several years in big professional theaters, he turned to workshopping pieces from scratch with unknown and non-professional actors chosen for their familiarity with various species of precarity he wanted to examine: housing eviction, low-wage gig work, the indignities of ageing. He works through trust, getting vulnerable people to share their stories, quirks, fears and indignities. During the years he has worked this way, precarity—meaning any chronic insecurity inherent in neoliberal capitalism—has become a hot topic generally in British theater. Zeldin has stood out in this crowded field (including Anders Lustgarten, Chris Dunkley, Cardboard Citizens, and many others) for his stress on moment-to-moment lived experience (rather than analysis or allegorical storytelling) in pieces like Love, Beyond Caring, and Faith, Hope and Charity. Love contains a lot of silence and aimlessness, true to the doldrum environments of all public shelters with their pointless and infuriating waits, self-protective isolation, and sundry other irritants. We see heavily pregnant Emma (Janet Euk), for instance, delicately maneuvering around the morning moods of her step-kids, trying to keep things upbeat while negotiating a bathroom queue, food refusal, slow toothbrushing, all the while nervous about her partner Dean’s (Alex Austin) impending visit to the local housing office. We then witness an obese, middle-aged, unemployed man named Colin (Nick Holder), who cares for his senile and incontinent mother Barbara (Amelda Brown), passive-aggressively corner Emma to pump her for personal info and overshare his own. This sort of thing dominates the production’s 90 minutes. The material for Zeldin’s pieces is generated in improvisations, which he selects and edits, then publishes as dramas with his name on the title pages. I have some questions about this particular drama, as a “drama.” A play like Love depends on drawing us in, on making us feel that its depicted suffering is palpable and proximate. To achieve that it has to be close to us not only physically but also emotionally. It has to generate a kind of trust akin to that which Zeldin clearly won from his vulnerable collaborators—trust in the material’s truth, completeness, and relevance to our lives. That’s the only way to make us care and feel implicated—an especially steep challenge in America, where we have no welfare-state experience or expectations and audiences may well wonder why such a play’s stories are so horrible when every character (unlike most of our homeless) has a roof, heat, a functional kitchen, and a working bathroom. So here’s one question (from one of my students, but I wondered too). Why does the play include two characters of color only to marginalize them as fleeting cameos? A Syrian, Adnan (Naby Dakhli), who speaks little English, evidently exists merely to float in and out of sight—warned about fridge use, waved away when trying to share music from his phone. That’s about it. Except for a brief conversation entirely in Arabic he conducts with the Sudanese woman Tharwa (Hind Swareldahab), Adnan is a cipher. Tharwa gets more stage time but is comparably fragmentary. She pretty much amounts to a non-Western woman rushed out of the toilet, accused of swiping a cup, then heard singing to her child over her phone. What child? Why the separation? Evidently, we’re not supposed to ask. Or we’re supposed to feel bad that no one else asks. Does this guilt-effect really justify introducing non-white roles only to leave them minor and patchy? Another question: who gets to have full access to this play? None of the actors make any effort to project vocally in the Armory’s cavernous drill hall—they all murmur at a maddeningly low volume the entire time. My cash-strapped yet eagerly interested Hunter students and I were seated in rows J and K in a handful of $30 seats made available for the first two preview performances only. From there we caught roughly 60 percent of the dialogue. We had to read the script afterward to understand many details. We definitely envied the occupants of the few dozen “Premium” chairs that were arranged directly on the stage. No doubt those patrons heard every word, including the whispers, and all the appreciative reviews of Love have marveled at the intimacy with the actors experienced from those seats (which at the Armory cost $154). In other words, this internationally renowned play about poverty and homelessness is fully apprensible and enjoyable only to the wealthy in New York City. Love, for me, maintains an unbridgeable distance. It’s not just the size of the performance space but also the way the storytelling is restrained to a fault—so resistant to contrived plotting that it feels sleepy and anemic. We track Emma’s anxiety about giving birth before her family gets their own place, Colin and Dean’s shame at being unemployed, Barbara’s humiliation and despair at being incontinent, but somehow these matters never rise to be gripping; they hover and dally as informational. At least from row J, the play’s events remain interesting ideas generated in improv, material that might have been molded into a truly compelling play by someone who cared a bit more than Zeldin apparently does about the craft of playwriting. Photos: Stephanie Berger and Nurith Wagner-Strauss LOVE By Alexander Zeldin Written through devising with the company Park Avenue Armory

  • Between Riverside and Trumpism

    Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Between Riverside and Crazy, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015 after a triumphal 2014 run at the Atlantic Theatre, may be the best drama we’ve yet seen about the pervasive sense, now polarizing America, that our whole social system is rigged. It’s certainly Guirgis’s best play—the tale of a Black ex-cop who nurses a grudge (over being shot by a white cop) that seems perfectly straightforward until it starts taking seriously crazy turns. The play sparkles with Guirgis’s comic brilliance—his trademark gritty-glass humor never sags in it—and it features one of his juiciest ever crews of precisely drawn New York City lowlifes. Yet its real singularity, for me, is the way it uses the raffish antics of its amiable hustlers, addicts, and ex-cons this time as a tacit political warning—not the typical thrust of a Guirgis work. That warning element, gleaming just beneath the story surface, is what most stands out for me in the play’s new Broadway re-mount—which I recently saw, 6 weeks after the opening, because Covid outbreaks in the cast forced my tickets to be rescheduled twice. The production at the Helen Hayes Theater is more or less identical to the marvelous original one 7 years ago at the Atlantic, directed by Austin Pendleton. Only a single cast member is different: Common has replaced Ray Anthony Thomas as Junior. And yet how much has changed! The world of 2023, for one thing, casts the stubbornness of the play’s protagonist in a wholly new light. It’s astonishingly evident now that Guirgis anticipated the political tsunami that overwhelmed our country in 2016. His play was eerily prescient about the fires of class warfare that Trump would fan (and still fans). It explicitly dramatizes the seething class resentment behind the deliberate irrationality he modeled for the hard right—you know, the own-the-libs posture of never acknowledging inconvenient facts, which drives us all crazy. The play’s plot revolves around the apparent irrationality of Pops (a.k.a Walter Washington), a widowed ex-cop played by Stephen McKinley Henderson with unforgettable subtlety, mischief, and verve. Pops was shot 8 years earlier in an ambiguous incident whose racial component is disputed (he was plastered and belligerent outside an after-hours bar and didn’t identify himself as a cop). Since the shooting, Pops has refused all offers of financial settlement from the City, preferring endless litigation by his sketchy lawyers. He spends his time mostly sitting in his dead wife’s wheelchair (“It’s comfortable seating”), presiding like a “grieving despot King” over the palatial, pre-war, rent-controlled apartment on Riverside Drive that he rents for a tenth of its market value, now seedy, filthy, and run-down. His neighbors have been complaining about pot-smoking, vandalism, “unsavory characters,” and more, but he feels untouchable. I’m a ex-cop, war veteran Senior Citizen with a legal rent control lease from 1978 and I never pay late—I wish they would try to fuck with me. But it turns out that he is touchable. The landlord is using nuisance laws to try to evict him. Pops shares the flat with his son Junior, a small-time thief who stashes loot there, Junior’s ex-con friend Oswaldo (superbly played by a Victor Almanzar), an addict who loves Pops even though he attacks him when strung out, and Junior’s hilariously dim girlfriend Lulu (played by Rosal Colón with a bodacious, slinky deadpan), who claims to be an accounting student but never studies or goes to class and may be a hooker. Pops is fond of them all and enjoys their company. He’s wise to their evasions and games but accepts rather than judges them—exuding a wily chillness that is central to the play’s deviant beauty. The main complication arrives when two old white pals visit for dinner: Pops’s former patrol partner, Audrey O’Connor, now a detective, and the administrative lieutenant David Caro she’s engaged to. This couple (played by Elizabeth Canavan and Gary Perez) seems to genuinely care about him, swapping jokes, street memories, and tales of the hated Rudy Giuliani, in an air of warm camaraderie. It’s soon clear, though, that they really came to try to get him to settle his suit. The case has dragged on so long, they say, and his apartment scene has grown so problematic, that any legal leverage he once had is gone. A generous new payout offer is being held out now because certain ambitious politicians (Caro’s bosses) want the case to go away and they urge him to accept it. Pops’s intransigence in the face of this perfectly reasonable proposal is the core of the drama. He simply won’t budge, even after an eviction notice and a serious heart attack. Still crazier (spoiler warning here!), when the couple visits again, bearing yet another settlement offer to his bedside like mercy-messengers from heaven, he shocks them and us by demanding O’Connor’s engagement ring as the price for his signature. The ring, we’ve heard, is worth $30,000 and was bought with Caro’s poker winnings. So much for friendship! Craziest of all, Pops doesn’t even keep the ring after getting it. He ends up giving it away to a hustler who’d posed as a church lady and orphan advocate (Maria-Christina Oliveras, excellent). “There are no Orphans, Walter” she clarifies, incredulous at the gift. “Well—there are Orphans somewhere,” he retorts—a magnificently understated closing line. Since 2014, this ending has baffled and disappointed countless critics who have otherwise praised the play. The continuing general puzzlement is evident in many of the reviews from this December. I submit, though, that its sense should be perfectly clear in the present political moment—as clear as the smug, what-me-worry shrugs of Matt Gaetz and the swaggering selfies of Marjorie Taylor Greene. Walter Washington, like them, is a chaos agent, and Guirgis doesn’t cloak that one bit. He hides it in plain sight, revealing in the play’s final twists only the appalling depth of Pops’s commitment to chaos. In a recent forum on the future of liberalism in Harper’s, Cornel West reflected on the “neofascist backlash” now menacing the United States. Its biggest driver, he said, is that too many of our “fellow citizens . . . are thoroughly convinced that the professional-managerial class is dominated by greed and arrogance and condescension and haughtiness and has given up on respecting them as human beings.” Pluralism, equity and diversity may be bywords in every institution now, but the average person gleans little benefit from them because their main result has been greater “multiculturalism within the professional-managerial class [which] . . . just makes class hierarchy more colorful.” People like Pops, in our world, “still feel as if they’re pushed to the margins, as if their dignity is being crushed” regardless of the well-meaning liberalism they hear from their friends. There is no better explanation, I think, for the contempt Pops so shockingly shows for O’Connor and Caro. The social game of America, for him, has always been hopelessly rigged. All he hears when Caro speaks of solidarity (“We’re all cops here, Walter, right? No black, no white—just Blue”) is managerial opportunism: the complacent insider’s itch to get “promoted up the damn ‘Alpo dog food’ police chain.” Hence, with no education, no political connections, no stake for a 5-figure poker game let alone a chance to win one, and no rights anymore to the one chance at “elite” wealth he ever had (his rent-controlled apartment), Pops lets himself savor the rush of burning it all down—his integrity, his professional connections, his credit, everything that smacks of the system he never felt truly part of. I’m aware that Guirgis’s main reason for writing the play probably wasn’t just to drive home this polemical point. Nevertheless, there’s no avoiding the impression right now that he’s daring the elite theaterati to grasp it. Photos: Joan Marcus Between Riverside and Crazy By Stephen Adly Guirgis directed by Austin Pendleton Second Stage/Helen Hayes Theater

  • Apology for the Hand

    Painting—being 2D, static, and typically practiced alone—isn’t a natural subject for theater. But that hasn’t stopped any number of art-besotted dramatists from trying. The extraordinary Sunday in the Park with George aside, almost all my experiences of popular plays about painters and paintings have been disappointing, alas. Remember Art and Red? One was a buddy play that pandered to bourgeois shibboleths about the swindle of modern art and the other was a star vehicle for Alfred Molina that flogged tired clichés of the tortured solitary genius. Now we have Anthony McCarten’s The Collaboration, a twin-star vehicle about Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat that tries valiantly to rise above the quicksands just mentioned, with mixed results. Some of its ideas are indeed interesting, but that’s not what most people are likely to care about. The inevitable headline here is that both stars—Jeremy Pope and Paul Bettany—are extraordinary. In 1984, Warhol and Basquiat made 16 paintings together in an unlikely convergence of their very different natures and artistic attitudes. The exhibition that resulted was famously advertised as a prize fight, with both artists posed in boxing gloves, presumably duking it out for the title of Greatest Living Artist. In the play, directed by Kwame Kwei-Armah, the gallerist Bruno Bischofberger (drolly played by Erik Jensen) is the driving force behind the show idea, introducing the 24-year-old rising star (Basquiat) to the 56-year-old fading comet (Warhol) and cajoling them into working together. This isn’t really how the project started in real life, but never mind—you can look that up if you want. McCarten uses the situation to imagine a fragile and fractious friendship arising between a young, Black, dope-addicted, inspired wielder of brushes and a white, fame-addicted, bullet-weakened, established cultural disrupter who hadn’t used a brush creatively in decades. (Warhol’s silkscreens were produced mechanically by Factory minions.) McCarter’s Warhol and Basquiat are attracted to one another sexually, it seems, even though Basquiat supposedly has a girlfriend (Maya, played by Krysta Rodriguez), and even though Warhol is always quashing intimacy and spontaneity by trying to film his ostensible partner. Their conversation descends often into tense arguments over handicraft, individual vision, branding, consumerism and sundry other issues that resonate in both the 1980s and our era. It must be said that there’s a lot of clumsy writing in The Collaboration. This is the sort of play where characters speak the scenario rather than plausibly real thoughts, just to get background info out. Inorganic passages like this abound: BRUNO: You’re the greatest painter in the world, there’s absolutely no question. And everyone loves you, the world over— ANDY: Stop saying that. It's really not true. My reputation is in tatters, museums won’t take my works anymore, my prices are falling, they say I've ruined art for everybody. Nobody loves me, Bruno, and it's rotten of you to get my hopes up. Another blemish is that McCarten, a white author, sentimentalizes the human, emotionally driven rebellion Basquiat poses to Warhol’s mechanistic, surface-driven art (“I want to be a machine”) and the art establishment that idolizes his brand. The play nods to the violence and pain Basquiat’s work channels (one scene is built around the police-murder of graffiti-artist Michael Stewart, Basquiat’s close friend), but it has little to say about Black influence beyond the dehumanization of such racist assaults. Nothing, for instance, about the astonishing profusion of African-American art historical references Basquiat forced into the art conversation in the 1980s and beyond, which helped blast open the Eurocentric establishment’s standards of value. Despite all this, as mentioned, Pope and Bettany are so intensely watchable they make everything else seem secondary. Pope’s Basquiat is a beautifully brilliant imp, now coy, now brazen, now sullen, now bubbly, emitting sudden, unexpected bursts of warmth that thoroughly disarm and divert Warhol. Bettany’s Warhol seems to blush through his chalky pallor whenever a Basquiat remark catches him off guard. Bettany, in contrast, plays Warhol as an arch and brittle needler and provocateur, just as emotionally evasive and captious as you’d expect, but also anomalously vulnerable sometimes. The show’s most moving moments are the fleeting glimpses of Warhol’s terror at holding a brush again, which humanize his notoriously icy persona. (Amazing as both these actors are, Bettany surely had the harder acting task because he had less to go on. Warhol’s deliberately deadened front was all he usually let the public see.) And that brings me back to the plane of ideas. What raises The Collaboration above other art plays I’ve seen is the sustained challenge it poses to Warhol and his credo of unabashed vacuity. Some viewers, I’m sure, will come away from the show at the Friedman Theatre thinking of Warhol and Basquiat as comparable opportunistic figures simply competing for big money and visibility in the same overheated 1980s art market. But the play doesn’t actually accept that neat parallelism at face value. It treats the boxing-bout poster, for instance, as the pandering stunt it truly was. More important, it refuses to ignore the uniquely pernicious effect Warhol had in cultural history. He was, after all, the prime earthquake behind the postmodern tsunami of pedestalized superficiality, appropriation, irony, anti-humanism and anti-criticality. “Criticism is so old fashioned. Why don’t you just put in a lot of gossip,” he once said in Interview magazine. Here is McCarter’s Warhol in a similar vein, on his first day collaborating with Basquiat: All these screaming black figures you paint...how many screaming black faces can you do? Well I guess you can do them forever. I suppose that's how anyone gets famous nowadays – you do one thing till you get noticed for it, and you don't stop even when it's boring you to death – you have to go on and on with the same thing until finally you're a household name...which, now that excellence has lost its meaning, is all we've got left to aspire to. And here is the play’s Basquiat excoriating Warhol for those anti-values: You want me to live? WHAT ABOUT YOU, ANDY?! You gotta have a camera everywhere you go? Man, you’re so afraid to live you put a camera and a tape recorder between you and everything else . . . You make death. You’re not living . . . “Produce”? You re-produce. You’re the champ, Andy, the King of repetition, of structure, of order . . . the champ of “pretty,” boom . . . the champ of “famous,” boom . . . the champ of the invisible, of surfaces . . . what about mysteries, man . . . dreams you know . . . pain, shit, blood, magic, the divine? What about miracles?! Well I, for one, am willing to swallow a lot of sentimentality, clumsy exposition, and historical simplification for a play that takes Warhol and Warholism to task in this way. And McCarter isn’t equivocal. He dares to take a side. Painting and theater, it’s worth remembering, are both labor-intensive, handicraft arts struggling more and more for visibility, value, and survival in our time as the culture is gripped by ascendant new technologies. If you’re not a tad worried about the encroachment of “creative” AI today—even more than you might have been yesterday about, say, digital photography, film or video—then you haven’t been paying attention. The arrival of The Collaboration feels welcome in this atmosphere, and weightier than it probably would have felt even a few years ago. Photos: Jeremy Daniel, 2022 The Collaboration by Anthony McCarten directed by Kwame Kwei-Armah Manhattan Theatre Club/Samuel J. Friedman Theatre

  • Star Turns

    So it’s finally come to pass. Ninety-one-year-old Adrienne Kennedy, whom many consider America’s greatest living playwright and perhaps its greatest Black playwright ever, has arrived on Broadway. The work that got her there is Ohio State Murders, unquestionably her most accessible drama. No question that this author’s plays are demanding. They’re constructed like history- and literature-haunted nightmares, dense with layers of personal memory, found imagery and quoted text gathered around identity-splintered protagonists. For those who follow them closely, there are thrills, terrors and astonishments galore, and plenty of wisdom. Ohio State Murders, for all its multi-layered Kennedyesque complexity, is a nail-biting murder mystery and a searing confrontation with structural racism. Long revered in academia and honored by younger playwrights, Kennedy has never been a producers’ darling. She was mentored early on by Edward Albee and had some initial success with her Obie-winning Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964), but after that she was pretty much ignored or produced obscurely by white-run theaters, until being “discovered” again in old age by Signature Theatre and Theatre for a New Audience. Interestingly enough, she has lacked consistent Black support too. Black luminaries like Amiri Baraka and the critics Martin Duberman and Seymour Rudin dismissed her work in the 60s as too fantastical, female, personal, and bourgeois to serve the liberatory goals of the Black Arts Movement. It's a miracle—and a testimony to her indestructibility—that she persisted. The next time you find yourself carping about academia, spare a thought for the sustaining love and oxygen it offered this brilliant artist. Ohio State Murders is set in the titular university where both Kennedy and her fictional alter-ego Suzanne Alexander attended from 1949-51. Suzanne, now a successful author, has been invited back “to talk about the violent imagery in my work; bloodied heads, severed limbs, dead father, dead Nazis, dying Jesus.” We meet her rehearsing her talk in the deserted basement level of the college library, and watch as the speech expands into a harrowing drama of humiliation, ostracism, and violence enacted by herself and others. Two stories intertwine: Suzanne as a student remembered by Suzanne as a prominent professional. Student Suzanne endures appalling racism sanctioned by the school—white students suspect Blacks of petty crimes on no evidence, the headmistress raids Suzanne’s room and reads her notebooks and diary, no Blacks are considered capable of completing the English major—but she retains her new-fired love of literature. Unfortunately (spoiler alert!), her hopes come crashing down after an English professor named Hampshire, who she thought admired her, impregnates her and she is expelled. It gets even worse. Maddened by her refusal to disappear—like Thomas Hardy’s Tess, whose story is used as a parallel—Hampshire stalks her and murders her twin daughters. Suzanne’s plan (we never see her public lecture) is to reveal all this publicly for the first time, the university, the families, and the police having covered up the facts. She closes by saying: “And that is the main source of the violent imagery in my work. Thank you”—possibly still alone, rehearsing in the library. Kenny Leon’s production at the recently re-christened James Earl Jones Theatre (the gorgeously renovated former Cort) is first and foremost a showcase for its star Audra McDonald. And what a star turn it is, even though Kennedy didn’t conceive the play that way. Because it’s constructed as a series of fractured flashbacks in a private setting, the play pointedly de-emphasizes all demonstrative behavior. In fact, the younger Suzanne—Kennedy calls for separate actors to play the mature writer and the innocent college student—is described as increasingly withdrawn and silent as the action goes on. In all other productions I know of, the horrifying events themselves carried the burden of emotion, because the flashbacks are all brief, subdued, and dense with literary quotation. Older Suzanne maintains an icy factuality and journalistic detachment while narrating. Leon’s innovation is to have McDonald play both Suzannes and, with extremely emotional, sensitively nuanced acting, become the heroic agent of the character’s spiritual rebirth. The set has been designed by Beowulf Boritt as a maximalist bombing scene, with pieces of bookshelf crazily flying in every direction and a shattered rear wall framing constant snowfall between giant cracks. McDonald’s Suzanne is the bomb. On this sensationalized stage she is magnificently expansive, conveying not only every phase of younger Suzanne’s pain from all the play’s degrading and violent incidents but also, just as specifically and convincingly, all the cumulative pain that had lodged in older Suzanne. It is a melodramatic tour de force that melts the play’s psychic ice by the end and leaves no one in the audience dry-eyed. It must be said that, arresting and impressive as this approach is, it’s not what the author originally called for. It’s a clever and fanciful solution to the problem of staging a chamber piece in a venue far larger than those where Kennedy usually appears. The occasion obviously calls for broader effects than the script offers to keep the play from shrinking and shriveling. I admit that I was skeptical at first about all this, particularly about the unmitigated explicitation in McDonald's emotional expression. She won me over in the end, though, because her performance was never once false or forced. It’s downright thrilling to see her stretching her wings, and to see the play honored by such a big commercial gamble. The advantages of the original approach were on fine display back in 2007 in Evan Yionoulis’s production at the off-Broadway Duke on 42nd St., starring Lisa Gay Hamilton as older Suzanne and Cherise Booth as the younger one. (This was a Theatre for a New Audience production done before I started working there.) The Duke’s shallow stage could accommodate only modest theatrical effects other than projections, but the show never seemed skimpy to me because its theatrical modesty rightly concentrated attention on words. Words—particularly the kind that repay close listening by opening up vast parallel landscapes and startling comparative ideas—are what both Kennedy and Suzanne care most about. The truth is that, in a house as large as the James Earl Jones, that kind of concentration can be difficult if not impossible. It’s worth remembering that Ohio State Murders contains a severe institutional critique along with its astonishing personal survival tale. The unacknowledged racism depicted at Ohio State more than 70 years ago really ought to move us to reflect on all such systems that continue to deprive gifted African-Americans of options and agency. Giving Adrienne Kennedy a long-belated Broadway run is a start. Let’s hope it’s not the end of a newly energized public engagement with her. Photos: Richard Termine, 2022 Ohio State Murders by Adrienne Kennedy directed by Kenny Leon James Earl Jones Theatre

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