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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

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

Here it is, folks! For the first time in three years, the holiday roundup—five plays now running in New York City that you should absolutely, positively, unfailingly . . . maybe read about here before deciding to see. Evanston Salt Costs Climbing—The New Group at Signature Center The characters in Will Arbery’s Evanston Salt Costs Climbing—a play that dates from before his exquisite Heroes of the Fourth Turning, a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize—are two municipal road workers, their supervisor, and that supervisor’s step-daughter. Two of these are avowedly suicidal, all are self-critical, and their fumbling efforts to connect through pieces of story, meandering discussions of road maintenance, dark energy, cat diarrhea, Domino Pizza, and invocations of the renowned author Jane Jacobs, inject candor and sweetness into a prevailing sense of void, colored by their pervasive self-loathing. What’s important in Will Arbery’s plays occurs in the interstices. Stuff happens in his plots—people die, disappear, misunderstand or disappoint one another, dance, sing, appear as ghosts or dreams—but that’s not what usually grabs your attention. The drama invariably comes from the characters’ nervously unsettled emotional lives, which rise to visibility in anomalous moments of fugue, reverie, truncated storytelling, panic, rage, that sort of thing. His characters don’t tend to be clinically disturbed, but they’re not exactly stable either. The central ones are beset with a kind of existential dread that ordinary people don’t usually allow in. For reasons they sometimes explain well and sometimes struggle to articulate, his people come to doubt their normal ways of organizing and explaining experience, suddenly seeing dreadful abysses open up beneath them. And what’s astonishing about that is that Arbery treats those terrifying visions as unavoidable hazards of living a thoughtful life. Danya Taymor—who also directed Heroes—has cast Evanston Salt Costs exquisitely. The actors (Quincy Tyler Berstine, Jeb Kreager, Ken Leung, and Rachel Sachnoff) deserve huge credit for sustaining the oddly breezy-sad tone, which keeps the play unpredictable and quirky. Arbery isn’t for everybody—those who need dramas securely anchored in explanation lose patience with him—but his perplexities and mysteries are high points of any theater season for me. & Juliet: The New Musical—Stephen Sondheim Theatre Jukebox musicals are, by definition, absurd contraptions in which a popular song catalogue is trotted out for expensive new consumption, repurposed as the stuff of drama. Expectations are low and contrivance unimportant because storytelling holes will be overlooked by fans who just wanna hear familiar songs belted out live. & Juliet’s twist on this is to make contrivance into a comic virtue. David West Read wrote the smart book for this show built around the songs of Max Martin, who has written earworm hits for a list of stars so long that the chart in the program reads like a Who’s Who of Pop over two decades (Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, Celine Dion, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, Lady Gaga, you name it). The show’s conceit is that Shakespeare’s beautiful, strong and clever wife Anne Hathaway shows up one day at a rehearsal for Romeo & Juliet and has such forceful opinions about how to improve it that the couple ends up rewriting it in front of us as a mock-epic Battle of the Sexes. As they twist the plot like taffy, the results are played out onstage, with expectable absurdity. Who cares that “Show Me Love” doesn’t really make sense as a score for Juliet’s jubilant escape to Paris before she finds a new boyfriend (“This love I’ve got for you could/ Take me ‘round the world now/ Show me love”)? And who’s bothered that “Teenage Dream” has nothing really to do with the rekindled affair of Juliet’s middle-aged nurse Angelique (“You think I’m pretty without any make-up on/ You think I’m funny when I tell the punch line wrong”)? Taffy is fun and delicious, husband-wife spats reliably chewy, and & Juliet is a rollicking, well-oiled carnival ride. My favorite unintended irony is the cataract of triumphal assertion of the authentic self at the end (“Let me show you the shape of my heart”; “I know who I am, and where I’m from, and what I’ve done, and I really love me”), blared to the rafters by characters who have just spent two and a half hours stuffing themselves into pre-fab pop songs. Almost Famous: The Musical—Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre Cameron Crowe’s 2000 film Almost Famous has a permanent place in my heart as a coming-of-age story about a young critic. I’m well aware of all the reasons other people love it: the woozy-sexy aura of the 70s rock scene, the amazing soundtrack featuring The Who, Allman Brothers, Yes, Led Zeppelin, Elton John and so many others, the unforgettable performances by Billy Crudup, Frances McDormand, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Kate Hudson. All that understood, the film’s main distinction for me is the serious respect it pays to a budding critical intelligence, which is an extremely unusual movie subject. Fifteen-year-old William Miller (played by Patrick Fugit) improbably lands a plum assignment profiling a fictional band called Stillwater for Rolling Stone, and his talent and integrity are fiercely tested in the crucible of a chaotic cross-country tour. It’s worth noticing that while William’s vocation is mocked it’s never truly denigrated in the movie. He’s respected, without ever talking very much about anything—that would be un-filmic! It’s the way Hoffman’s Lester Bangs talks to him, and the way the Stillwater guys react to him, always off balance, that gives him dignity. Now Crowe has teamed up with Tom Kitt, composer of Next to Normal and If/Then, to reimagine Almost Famous as a musical, and the result has been lambasted by several prominent reviewers. The blanket scorn seems to me undeserved. Any average person attending this show for what might be called “jukebox reasons” will certainly come away entertained. The famous songs are all there to be relished, and so are 18 new ones, and the film’s hilarious distended-caper plot, replete with its rampant canoodling and multiple betrayals and reconciliations, is mostly intact and performed lucidly by a fine ensemble with excellent vocal chops. The one undeniable failing for me is that the musical never frames William with due respect. He’s as laconic as ever, played by Casey Likes, but stage musicals have no reaction shots (actors and their dialogue partners are always right there sharing focus), so no one’s reaction to William is ever highlighted or framed. Also, everyone in a musical is expected to sing, including William, so he ends up having extroversion thrust upon him, tagged with a dopey “I want” song (“No Friends”) just like everyone else. I wish Crowe had remembered that part of what’s special about people like William and Lester was that they don’t say everything they think, even under pressure. They keep their emotional powder dry to ignite it in dynamic, explosive prose. Almost Famous: The Musical may not be boring nor inept, as its detractors claim, but it has wandered far from the film’s unique writerly soul. Like’s William is just a greenhorn kid on a crazy caper, and that simply can’t move anyone in quite the same way. Kimberly Akimbo—Booth Theatre Ill-advised as it may sound, I went to Kimberly Akimbo—David Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori’s new musical version of Lindsay-Abaire’s 2000 play—to grapple with a childhood trauma. When I was 11, waiting on line at the grocery store with my mother, I spotted a National Enquirer headline that read “13-Year-Old Dies of Old Age!” and was terrified by it for days. I was sure I had the disease in the story and only a very inconvenient doctor visit reassured me I would ever reach high school. I mention this humiliating episode in the spirit of admitting that I’m the worst conceivable spectator for Lindsay-Abaire and Tesori’s dark screwball comedy about a 15-year-old girl with Methuselah Syndrome, an accelerated aging condition that makes her resemble her own grandmother. I saw the play two decades ago knowing nothing about it beforehand, and remember finding Marylouise Burke’s lead performance poignant and pointed without laughing once at her supposedly comic dilemma. Why then, you might rightly ask, would I go see the musical? Well, one reason is that all the artists involved are reputable and many people I respect loved the show at the Atlantic Theater last year. Another is that comic incongruity is an interesting phenomenon. Theater has been blending the funny with the gravely serious for millennia, and it’s pretty clear that laughter can at times give us a new handle on our fears. I thought I’d give the musical a chance to work magic the way the straight play couldn’t. But it didn’t work. Unfortunately, I still find the basic dramatic situation—in which a rare disease deprives a bright teenager of her entire future—so upsetting that neither Tesori’s fine songs nor the eccentric antics of Kimberly’s shady, degenerate family (which those around me found hilarious) could lift my spirits. Here’s the more general point, though. My own fears aside, this musical (like the play) doesn’t really have anything to say about fear, period, even though any kid saddled with such a disease would certainly feel it aplenty. The musical’s focus is on arranging its tumble of antic incidents so that Kimberly finds her way to a good friend and an exciting life adventure while she can still enjoy them. That’s a sweet story—living for the now—but some might find it (especially from a thoughtful author like Lindsay-Abaire) a tad incomplete. Downstate—Playwrights Horizons After four years, following much-celebrated runs at Steppenwolf and the National Theater, Bruce Norris’s Downstate, his most disturbing and provocative play to date, has arrived in New York in a sharp and subtle production directed by Pam MacKinnon. Many here know Norris mainly from his decorated yet much more mildly provocative Clybourne Park—a sequel of sorts to A Raisin in the Sun about the corrosive effects of gentrification and housing discrimination. Let me take this occasion to report, then, that the bristles on Downstate are much stiffer, sharper and more painful than Clybourne Park’s. The subject is pedophiles living in a group home in Illinois after release from prison. The story considers the effectiveness of and justification for the many severe restrictions on them imposed by draconian laws (e.g. no internet, alcohol, smartphones, or shopping or residing within half a mile of schools or playgrounds). Are these measures all legitimately protective, or do some amount to vindictiveness, or opportunistic virtue-signaling by authorities too busy to think through what might really work to reduce recidivism? The play risks sympathy with men guilty of unspeakable crimes in order to ask terribly difficult questions about what our social response really ought to be to such behavior. This is the kind of taboo-breaking subject that fine modern dramatists have reached for before to force us to look at ourselves in newly critical ways. I have no idea whether Norris will eventually be classed with the likes of Ibsen and Gorky for employing that strategy, but it’s not unthinkable. This finely observed play is so hard to watch that I suspect in the future it’s destined to be more read than performed. All the more reason to see MacKinnon’s searing and sensitive production while it’s still around. Photo credits: Evanston Salt Costs Climbing: Monique Carboni & Juliet: Matthew Murphy Almost Famous: Neal Preston Kimberly Akimbo and Downstate: Joan Marcus

Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, as anyone reading this knows, is a cornerstone of American drama. It’s the first play by a Black woman to be produced on Broadway (in 1959), the first Black play to be securely canonized and broadly popular, the first to attract a large Black public, and the first commercially successful play to depict Black life entirely free of stereotypes. For all its acclaim and renown, though, the play has also been an object of heated debate over the years, even among its admirers. What’s more, it has been so frequently produced that some of its characters have become stereotypes. The plot spring is an insurance check. The Younger family—squeezed three generations together in a small and squalid apartment with shared bathroom—disagrees over what to do with the payout for their deceased patriarch. Mama Lena isn’t sure, and her son Walter Lee, seething with resentment from thwarted ambition and humiliation in his chauffeur job, tries to browbeat her into financing a liquor store. Feisty Beneatha, Walter’s sister, is a college student fired with nascent feminism and African pride who hopes for financial help with medical school. Walter’s bitterness and bluster have begun to curdle his marriage to long-suffering Ruth, who is pregnant and considering abortion. Seeing the family splintering, and sick of the daily insult of their tiny flat, Mama decides to buy a house in a white neighborhood . . . which prompts a friendly white community rep to try to bribe the Youngers not to move in. From the day it opened, this play’s enormous popularity made it suspicious to some. White reviewers back then acclaimed the Youngers’s universality and respectability, how reassuringly similar they were to everyone else! Who, after all, couldn’t empathize with wanting to own a home or start a business? Liberal Blacks, for their part, acclaimed the play’s Civil Rights angle, regarding the family’s defiance of shameless housing discrimination as the moral of a straightforward allegory. Amiri Baraka put his own spin on the white line, deriding Raisin as assimilationist and “middle class.” Ossie Davis, who understudied Sidney Poitier as Walter in the Broadway premiere and later took over the role, described unease in the cast about the white response. White audiences loved Mama more than anything, viewing her as a heroic force of order and calm who was wise and powerful enough to blunt Walter’s scary rage at the play’s climax. Practically no one commented back then on the complex tensions within the play’s Black world—the many clashes of gender, generation, and class that sometimes had radical implications. Hansberry, a lesbian and Communist, considered Raisin a “half-victory.” All this public debate is crucial background to Robert O’Hara’s extraordinary revival of Raisin, now running at the Public Theater. This production seems to me a brilliant and inspired effort to correct the skewed perceptions in productions past. I have seen five other versions of this play, including two on Broadway, but none has struck me as so thoroughly and realistically infused with urgent Black issues as this one. O’Hara’s show rings and bristles with BLM defiance and horror at our current, viciously revanchist and racist right wing. More important, everything from the actors’ gestural language to the stage set to the director’s few pivotal changes to the script, feels flush with fresh observation of the play and Black life. I was a student at Yale Drama School in 1983-84 when Yale Rep—then led by Raisin’s original director Lloyd Richards—produced the play’s 25th anniversary production, directed by the distinguished poet, playwright and actor Dennis Scott. Dennis visited our class one day and told us that, out of respect for Lloyd, he felt he had to use Lloyd’s landmark production as a stylistic model. I remember thinking that a disarmingly honest remark. It certainly helped explain why Dennis’s production struggled to make a lasting impression of its own. The last half century, it must be said, have produced hundreds of comparable homages and facsimiles that have continually affirmed the play’s classic status but also left its cultural-political profile more and more vague and gauzy. In 1986, George C. Wolfe made Raisin the object of a sharp lampoon in the “Last Mama-on-the-Couch Play” section of The Colored Museum, which skewered its profusion of kitchen-sink clichés and white-gaze stereotypes. O’Hara’s production summons the ghost of The Colored Museum just by appearing at the Public, as Wolfe’s play did. Nevertheless, this Raisin is electrifying. I would never have thought any staging could make me feel I was seeing this play for the first time again, and yet this one did. Not one other Walter I’ve seen—not Sidney Poitier, Delroy Lindo, Sean Combs, Denzel Washington, or Danny Glover—has blazed with the incendiary, unapologetic anger and deadly self-loathing of Francois Battiste. Arriving home late and drunk in the silent opening scene (an O’Hara add-on), Battiste’s Walter struts across his own dark house with a jive hitch-step that is funny only because he’s alone. His solitary action makes clear that he has to fantasize about power in his cups because he never, ever tastes it in reality. When, soon after, Ruth (Mandi Masden) wakes up and makes him food, he flirts with and then bullies and needles her with such venom and disgust you fear for her safety and want to shout “flee!” This couple is in deeper trouble than any other Walter and Ruth I’ve seen. In fact, O’Hara moves the one intimate scene Hansberry wrote for them offstage, muting it as a voiceover with sounds of love-making. The point is, no Mama in the world—not even the one played by the formidable Tonya Pinkins here as a fascinatingly fragile and authoritative matriarch—could possibly defuse such an erratic, belligerent, powderkeg of a son. Battiste’s portrayal hasn’t a scrap of deference (as Poitier’s roles always did) to white fears of angry Black men. Walter is O’Hara’s linchpin. He even thrusts the character physically to the fore near the end in a sequence that breaks the fourth wall—at the play’s most painful moment, when Walter imagines groveling like a minstrel character to the white community rep. Instead of stressing Lena and Beneatha’s disgust at this speech, as most directors do, O’Hara brackets it as metatheater, pointedly implying that no viable future can exist for anyone in Walter’s world as long as men like him are permanently sidelined and belittled. Hansberry’s critique of the American dream feels more specific and trenchant here than Death of a Salesman’s. There is much, much more to admire. Paige Gilbert’s marvelous performance as Beneatha brings all that character’s delightful pluck, intelligence and humor into unique focus. Clint Ramos’s emphatically tatty set design is the first I’ve seen that honestly shows what the dilapidation and grime in the Younger apartment would really look like after decades of slumlord neglect. A scene I’ve never seen before (because it’s usually omitted) is also powerfully included here, showing a Black neighbor politely trashing the Youngers’s aspirations to rise in the world. O’Hara also adds a shocking coda, clearly meant to forestall any thoughts of a happy ending, that reveals some likely racist repercussions after the family moves to their new home. This Raisin is self-evidently a hammer meant to smash a chestnut. But it’s also a fascinating and necessary conversation across time between major Black artists, as well as proof that fresh and newly nourishing fruit can yet be harvested from a venerable and sturdy tree. Photos: Joan Marcus A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry directed by Robert O'Hara The Public Theater

The other night, I witnessed (along with 800 or so other people) a remarkable disruption and fumble near the end of Kenny Leon’s production of Topdog/Underdog at the Golden Theater on Broadway. This play, to remind you, is Suzan-Lori Parks’s extraordinary 2002 drama about two Black brothers named Lincoln and Booth (supposedly as a joke by their absconded father). Lincoln is a former three-card-monte hustler who now works at an arcade dressed up as his presidential namesake, where patrons pay money to shoot him. Booth is a heat-packing petty criminal and wannabe hustler who envies his brother’s skills. The historical karma of their names gives shape to their sibling rivalry and also, ultimately, tragic gravity to their vaudevillesque antics. Leon’s production, starring Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Corey Hawkins, is the play’s first Broadway revival, and it’s mostly very fine. Anyone who saw the iconic original version directed by George C. Wolfe 20 years ago, starring Jeffrey Wright and Mos Def, will notice some striking differences, but this show is also gripping and powerful in its own right. Leon’s Topdog is looser and more realistic than Wolfe’s, occasionally hit-or-miss in its comic timing and averse to slick transitions. Yet its roughness taps new energies in the play by making the brothers feel familiar to us. It’s delightful and thrilling to see this hilarious and troubling work repping and revving again on all cylinders (these are Parks’s repurposed jazz words for its verbal style). The disruption was this (spoiler alert): at the play’s climax about five minutes before the end, just after the character Booth (Abdul-Mateen) suddenly and shockingly shoots his brother Lincoln in the head, Abdul-Mateen let out a loud sob. Instead of the gasps and squalls of horror one expects at that instant, though, a loud peal of “church laughter” rang out from one section of the audience. “Church laughter” is any laughter inappropriate in a serious context, but this laughter was egregiously inappropriate. The shooting is Topdog’s most solemn moment, the turn in the play when all its levity has drained away and been replaced with pain, resentment, and violence. Now, who knows why such a clueless reaction ever occurs? Theater audiences are as bewilderingly various as any other random public crowd. These laughers could’ve been kids, for all I know. Or people not used to theater. Or zealots of meme culture whose emotional reactions now amount to nothing more than instantaneous whoops and “likes” of personal identification. Or even spectators who had understood the play’s horror but couldn’t bear it, so they laughed in compensation. Whatever. What particularly fascinated me was the way the interruption rattled Abdul-Mateen. It brought home how much live theater depends on its audience. Booth has close to 200 words to speak after the murder, including a tricky transition from bluster and defiance to self-doubt to devastating sorrow. Having given a consistently sharp and attuned performance up to that moment, Abdul-Mateen was thwarted from closing out the show with the same aplomb. His sob seems to have been just preverbal enough to unsettle those laughers’ sense of decorum around vulnerability. Cradling the prostrate Hawkins in his arms, he had to force himself stiffly through the weeping that ends the play. It was painful to watch. Theater disruptions are curious incidents. On the one hand, they shed grim light on audiences, perpetually updating our understanding of that inexhaustible wellspring of human thoughtlessness we can never quite forget however much we try. Cellphone interruptions are the worst of this problem in our era, so much that they’ve prompted a growing faction of star actors (including Patti LuPone, Hugh Jackman, Kevin Spacey, and the late Richard Griffiths) to turn holy warriors, shaming offenders from the stage. On the other hand, disruptions can also shed surprising new light on plays, by shifting the ground against which they’re seen. One example: in 2012 Paul Rudd and Michael Shannon pressed on gallantly in a Broadway performance of Craig Wright’s Grace, a play about hypocritical evangelists, after a patron in the balcony vomited into the orchestra. I can imagine their soldierly composure resembling real grace to some in that night’s audience, and further imagine that thought lingering as a clarifying foil for the cynical grace portrayed in the drama. Abdul-Mateen’s reaction to the unexpected church laughter held out a similar foil for Topdog/Underdog, for those inclined to see it. It underscored how risky Parks’s mixture of shtick and deadly seriousness always was in this play. Topdog is a race comedy that invites us to laugh at many matters that aren’t really funny at all outside the play’s funhouse-frame (theft, assassination, abandonment, fraternal betrayal, parental betrayal), and the emotional whiplash of its climax isn’t and can’t be easy for anyone to endure, on either side of the footlights. There’s a kind of sacred pact that’s established between performers and viewers at any non-trivial play, which both cast and audience deeply rely on for the magic of the event to work. It involves not only the basic willingness to suspend disbelief but also some quotient of empathy, a willingness to enter into other people’s possibly very different realities within the fiction and accord them provisional respect. When this compact is simply disregarded or abruptly violated by even a small handful of disrespectful viewers, that can be ruinous. It can break the basic spell that, in a nightly miracle we should never take for granted, transforms roomfuls of atomized, fractious and proudly diverse visitors into audiences. Photo: Marc. J. Franklin Topdog/Underdog by Suzan-Lori Parks directed by Kenny Leon Golden Theatre

Baldwin & Buckley at Cambridge, at the Public Theater, may be the most politically pointed production Elevator Repair Service has done. It’s certainly the most gripping work I’ve seen from this company since its wonderful Gatz over a decade ago. ERS specializes in slant-wise stagings of found texts such as novels and court transcripts. The famous 1965 debate that this piece reconstructs and reframes—between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley on the proposition "The American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro"—is a major touchstone of America’s racial justice struggle, available for viewing on a film that has been seen by millions. Despite that familiarity, ERS’s live reenactment, with splendid actors concentrating more on the sense of the words than on impersonations of the famous debaters, is a brilliantly effective tool for reminding us how maddeningly relevant the event’s core questions continue to be. Directed by John Collins, Baldwin & Buckley has no clear transition from pre-show to show. With the house lights on, the actors enter and sit in the front rows of the auditorium. Greig Sargeant (who also conceived the show) plays Baldwin and Ben Jalosa Williams plays Buckley, and they’re instantly recognizable in their natty 60s suits. Yet two other performers, younger men in contemporary clothes who could be spectators (Matthew Russell and Christopher-Rashee Stevenson) have also entered unnoticed. Only when they rise to speak do we recognize them as the undergraduates who, by tradition, Cambridge asked to take opposing positions on the proposition before the main debaters. Having sounded the core themes of the duel to come, they sit, leaving their present-day appearance to blur the distinction between 1965 and 2022. The Cambridge debate was really two sequential speeches, with Baldwin’s opening blast a justly celebrated, landmark oration. It’s certainly the heart of the play. Yet interestingly, Sargeant doesn’t mimic Baldwin precisely, adopting none of his distinctive intense stares, for instance, or his rocking to punctuate points. Sargeant speaks evenly, with a serene, slow-burn self-possession, laying out each step in the famous argument as if moving through chapters of a grimly familiar horror story. White fear is the main source of racism—racism is a scourge to whites and Blacks alike (“Something awful must have happened to a human being to be able to put a cattle prod against a woman’s breasts”)—Black exploitation is a measureless debt that demands recompense (“I picked the cotton, and I carried it to the market, and I built the railroads under someone else’s whip for nothing”)—and resolution may be impossible because Blacks and whites live in two different “realities,” only one of which permits a clear view of oppression. Even if you know what’s coming with Buckley’s hideous response, you feel energized as Baldwin-Sargeant wraps up, cheered that the whole gloriously pithy speech has been memorized, eloquently delivered, and heard again in 2022. Very quickly, any gladness is tamped down as Williams acutely replicates Buckley’s cold indifference to all Baldwin has said. Imitating Buckley’s silky hauteur but not employing his trademark lip-curl and Mid-Atlantic drawl, he makes Buckley’s remarks freshly shocking because, although we know very well that such thoughts are still common in our time, we actually don’t hear them spoken out loud very often. One cringes hearing Buckley inform the renowned Black intellectual that his skin color is “irrelevant” to his arguments; that his “flagellations of our civilization” amount to “posturing”; and that he should be grateful to be addressed today as a “fellow American” rather than a “Negro.” In the film, Buckley’s magisterial arrogance and reptilian sangfroid damn him because they’ve dated so poorly. His oily manner makes his brittle arguments odious before you even take them in. In the play, by contrast, Williams’s comparatively mild condescension allows you to listen and assess his ideas, such as they are, and compare them to those of present-day right-wingers. Everything he says, we realize, can be heard essentially unaltered today on Fox, Drudge, Breitbart, The Daily Wire, Truth Social, Parler, etc. That is horrible! Buckley fails to see why supporting segregation politely can’t be seen as respectable, for instance. He attacks Baldwin personally (Baldwin never did so with him), calling him a hypocrite for claiming to be oppressed when he’s “the toast of the town” wherever he goes, then fobs off that ad hominem attack as a general refutation of racial progressivism. Buckley thinks lack of sympathy for Blacks should qualify as proof of respect for them, then turns and blames them for their own suffering because they supposedly lack the ambition and industry of other minorities like Jews and Italians. His fuming about out-of-bounds threats to overthrow Western civilization could be a verbatim quote from Tucker Carlson. So much for respect. Baldwin, not a man to parade laurels, was always very proud of his resounding 544-to-164 victory at Cambridge Union, the world’s oldest debating society. When I first saw the debate film, I remember thinking it was too bad it had to take place in England. How much more of a productive scandal it might’ve caused had the two men squared off at, say, some southern American university newly opened to Blacks, such as the University of Virginia, Vanderbilt or the University of Georgia. That, obviously, was a fantasy about intellectuals and artists commanding more power than they’ve ever had in the U.S. (it’s also unlikely Baldwin would ever have accepted such an invitation). Still, given the way Baldwin & Buckley ends, I have an inkling Collins and Sargeant might share my fantasy. The last ten minutes of the show are a sort of meta-theatrical coda in which Sargeant and the actor Daphne Gaines speak both as themselves and as Baldwin and the playwright Lorraine Hansberry. As the writers, in lines taken from letters and interviews, they scoff at charges that Black demands for social change are too precipitate. As themselves, the actors turn their gaze on their own colleagues, reflecting on their experience participating in ERS’s 2008 production of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. They explicitly call out the company for first developing that piece with “no actual black people in the room” and then belatedly involving them “to be the black people.” Hansberry is given the last word: “I would like to submit that . . . there is a problem about white liberals. The problem is we have to find some way . . . to show and to encourage the white liberal to stop being a liberal and become an American radical.” As the show ended, I looked around the Public’s sold-out 275-seat Anspacher Theater and counted two Black faces in the enthusiastic crowd. (For comparison, there must have been 800 or more in the 970-seat Hudson Theater on Broadway the night I saw the Black Death of a Salesman there, whatever that means.) I feel sure that almost everyone at the Anspacher—radicalism and residual white-liberal racism aside—came to Baldwin & Buckley wholeheartedly on Baldwin’s side. Yet at that moment, the old fantasy from the film rose in my heart again. I found myself hoping against hope that this lucid and gritty artwork might possibly find its way in the future to venues friendlier to Buckley than Greenwich Village, and maybe even change a few still-reachable minds. Photos: Joan Marcus Baldwin & Buckley at Cambridge conceived by Greig Sargeant with Elevator Repair Service directed by John Collins The Public Theater

The opening of Tom Stoppard’s new play Leopoldstadt plunges us full bore into the sumptuous and elegant whirl of fin-de-siècle Vienna. In a huge family room gorgeously appointed (by set designer Richard Hudson) with an undulating divan, a grand piano, a plush Jugendstil rug and exquisite wood molding, we’re swept right into the warmth and hubbub of a large family’s holiday gathering in 1899. It is a prosperous, cultivated, comfortably assimilated Jewish family, well-connected and self-assured, whose swirling and wide-ranging conversation seems to touch on every major artist, thinker and cultural current of the era, from Freud, Mahler, Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal and Herzl to endangered liberalism, waltzing, the new mathematics, and the emperor’s shaky commitment to democracy. This breathtaking and enchanting snapshot of a refined, hopeful, briefly paradisiacal life is also, obviously, ominous since everyone watching knows it is ripe for destruction. It may not be easy to follow the myriad details of the family’s connections (there are more than 30 people to remember, and a briefly projected family tree is of little help), but the general picture seems to be the main point. Three acts later, in a scene set on Kristallnacht in 1938, the room has been transformed. It’s overcrowded, devoid of servants, stripped of ornamentation, and suffused with terror. The Gestapo is about to burst in. We’ve seen such scenes before in countless movies and plays, possibly even grown numb to them. But here the invasion proves freshly shocking, vicious and barbaric, precisely because of the radiance of what has come before, still glittering in our minds. Leopoldstadt is Stoppard’s belated meditation on his Jewish family, which he knew only vaguely about until his 50s (he’s now 85). As widely reported, having always felt thoroughly British, he was shocked to learn the full story, in middle age, of his Jewish parents’ nick-of-time escape with him at age 2 from occupied Czechoslovakia. He then became interested in his roots, but it was too late to reconnect because almost everyone had been murdered in the Holocaust. The Viennese family in Leopoldstadt is his imagined surrogate for the Czech family he never knew, and many commentators have welcomed the play as his most directly and profoundly personal. Patrick Marber, director of this Broadway production (and of the 2020 London premiere), called it Stoppard’s long-belated “ownership” of his Jewish side. The author himself, in interviews, has spoken of exploring latent identity (“It felt like unfinished business”) and repressed guilt (“The play grew out of . . . self-reproach about seeing my life as a charmed life”). These are welcome sentiments and admirable intentions. The result, as one might expect (more on that soon), is rather a mixed bag. Notwithstanding the thrill of Marber’s populous and opulent spectacle and the emotional punch of the scenes just described, Leopoldstadt is inconsistently dramatic and the opposite of an identity deep-dive. In fact, it shunts identity questions off onto its final act, set in 1955, and probes them only tentatively. In that act, a politically apathetic, 24-year-old writer named Leo, who was evacuated from Vienna to England as a young boy and feels thoroughly English, meets two surviving Jewish relatives he barely remembers, who explain the family’s fate. He listens, confesses his longstanding feelings of detachment, and then suddenly recovers a repressed memory of cutting his hand on Kristallnacht. This is, well, an anemic catharsis, glaringly unsatisfying for everyone—us, Leo, the relatives—and that may be Stoppard’s point. Nevertheless, it also feels tacked onto a play that has asked quite a bit of us in attending to family details that turn out not to be germane to the conclusion. Stoppard’s plays always feel valuable to me, even when they’re lumpy. He always shows flashes of brilliance and usually immerses us in some interesting new subject. It must be said, though, that beginning around The Coast of Utopia (written 2002, NY production 2006) his work started displaying a rather clumsy imbalance of information and dramatic action. Leopoldstadt, The Invention of Love, Rock and Roll, The Hard Problem and other later works have lacked the equilibrium and tight structures of earlier gems like Travesties, The Real Inspector Hound, The Real Thing and Arcadia. As I walked out of Leopoldstadt, I found myself reflecting on an incident related to this matter from 16 years ago, and I beg indulgence for a short digression on it. The incident was my sole face-to-face encounter with Stoppard. In 2006, when Coast of Utopia was in previews, the Drama Desk, an organization of critics I belong to, invited its members to a specially arranged Q&A with the author. He was in New York for the premiere of that 3-play, 9-hour cycle about 19th-century Russian radicals at Lincoln Center (which I hadn’t yet seen), and I was then at work on Great Lengths, my book about marathon theater productions. I saw the event as a singular opportunity—a chance to ask the most articulate playwright since Shaw (as Stoppard scholar Paul Delaney had dubbed him) for his thoughts about the very subject I’d been researching and pondering. I raised my hand, he called on me, and I asked this: “Mr. Stoppard, I understand your new play cycle is 9 hours long all together, an epic length that’s sometimes referred to as a marathon theater experience. I wonder if you could speak to how you see your material and its long form serving one another. Or share any other thoughts you might’ve had in conceiving a marathon experience?” Stoppard didn’t like this question and brushed it off. He said something to this effect: “That’s not my problem. I write something; I give it to the theater. It’s the theater’s business to decide what to do with it, how to present it. Next question.” I didn’t believe this—Stoppard was known to be a frequent and active presence at many of his rehearsals—but I didn’t take it personally. It was an answer of sorts and (as mentioned) I hadn’t yet seen the plays. As I reached the exit after the session, however, a sallow, grey-haired man I’d never met stepped in my path, in high dudgeon. “How dare you?!” he hissed. “I’m Bernie Gersten, Executive Producer of Lincoln Center. Who the hell do you think you are?! People like you make me regret ever agreeing to things like this. It’s disgusting! Get the hell outa here!” This did bother me, as you might expect. It was so abrupt and inappropriately aggressive I had no clue what to make of it. Once I saw Coast of Utopia, though, I had a hunch. Coast was a decidedly odd mélange (odd even for Stoppard) of scintillating, witty and quick-moving passages commingled with prolonged stretches of dullness and inertia that felt much more encyclopedic than dramatic. My question evidently touched a nerve. Author and producer were both prickly as wasps at the prospect of Stoppard being held answerable for any perceived doldrums in Coast. Their desperate defense, I surmised, was to treat the very idea that he bore any responsibility as unacceptable, a kind of theatrical thought crime. At 2 hours and 10 minutes, Leopoldstadt is no marathon but it does occupy us for more than an hour with dense and detailed family information we can’t possibly follow, and this information turns out to be unnecessary to the action’s development, climax, or conclusion. If you strain to follow it, as I did, you end up confused, or feeling foolish for the wasted effort, and that weakens the impact of the play’s ending. The wrenching final scene with Leo features a litany of death, with a cousin reciting name after name of family members murdered by the Nazis. This ought to be flat out heartbreaking but instead it feels anomalously hortatory and emotionally strained—in part because all the big, summary reflections about what has happened have been voiced by characters we only just met and, so, don’t care about. A writer of Stoppard’s stature has earned the right to buck convention, and his own past practices too, however he likes and ask us to look for artistic merit in it. Having done that, we who have followed him closely through all his stages have also earned the right to hope that the full magic of his signature juggling act—dazzling, entertaining, and educating us all at once—might some day return. Photos: Joan Marcus Leopoldstadt by Tom Stoppard directed by Patrick Marber Longacre Theatre

Martyna Majok’s Cost of Living—recently opened at MTC’s Samuel J. Friedman Theater on Broadway—is a gentle-natured, exquisitely calibrated, extraordinarily moving play about loneliness, missed connections, and vacillating intimacy. It also happens to be a play about disability, and about the complications, emotional and otherwise, that arise in caring for the disabled. Some of the theater’s outreach (“Take a photo . . . and tell us who has helped you”) as well as numerous reviews have cast this drama in a frame of advocacy. That’s unfortunate because the utilitarian spin distorts what’s distinct and exceptional about it. This piece lives in a thousand crucially messy character details that make the four humans in it vivid and unforgettable—a point that may sound obvious but, well, it took me by surprise. That’s because I missed Cost of Living during its 2017 run at the City Center, after which it won the Pulitzer Prize, and was introduced to Majok’s writing with her next play, Sanctuary City, which unfortunately missed the mark for me when I saw it at the Lucille Lortel last fall. A purportedly sensitive and artfully fractured psychodrama about young undocumented immigrants, Sanctuary City felt more like clumsy political stumping than fluid or urgent storytelling. What a delight, then, to go to Cost of Living and discover a play that doesn’t need to twist anyone’s arms because it has the power to break their hearts. With searing perception and subtle storytelling, it deserves its accolades. Superbly acted all around and directed with unerring sensitivity by Jo Bonney, Cost of Living toggles back and forth between two stories that are entirely separate until they meet in a beautiful and hopeful late-action twist. In one story, Jess (Kara Young), a 20-something immigrant alone and adrift in the U.S. despite being a recent Princeton grad, is hired to care for John (Gregg Mozgala), a wealthy Princeton grad student with cerebral palsy. In the other, Eddie (David Zayas), an unemployed truck driver separated from his wife Ani (Katy Sullivan), steps in to care for her in Jersey City when her paid caretaker flakes out. Ani became a quadriplegic after a car accident that happened as their marriage was failing. In a prologue set in a bar, we learn from Eddie that Ani has died and he is crushingly lonely. Both stories are written with deep compassion, but part of what makes them engrossing is the unexpectedness of their asymmetrical power relationships. The drama of these imbalances is intensified sharply and thrillingly by the fact that differently abled actors play John and Ani. John and Jess are both young, attractive, cultivated and articulate, for instance, and we’re led to believe that he hires her despite her lack of experience partly because he feels a connection. Overt flirtation develops in a scene where she undresses him, then bathes him in full view of the audience, but in the aftermath he shows himself to be either bafflingly clueless or cruelly manipulative. The abled caretaker Jess, in other words, being Black, poor, and homeless (the latter she never reveals to him) is the needier one, and John’s privileged myopia only deepens her desolation. Eddie and Ani, on the other hand, are working class and both financially insecure. When we first meet her we’ve already been charmed (in the prologue) by Eddie’s north-Jersey patois and his story about texting her even after death. She’s not what we might have expected, though. A legless woman in a slow-burn rage, she fumes defiance and resistance from a wheelchair that could be a rolling battlement. Slowly, haltingly, we recognize that this abuse is part of a private marital code, a sort of trial he probably often endured to offset his marital indiscretions and win access to her soft side. But how much will he endure now? And what softening is possible with armor as thick as hers? There are many astonishing moments. Watch Katy Sullivan’s face when Ani suddenly fears that she’s gone too far, a silent expression that seems to contain all twenty-something years of their marriage. It’s one of the most remarkable acting transitions I can remember. And watch David Zayas’s face in their following scene together when, with Ani in the bathtub, he plays imaginary piano on her soapy arm, craftily avoiding and confronting the subject of sensuality all at once. He concentrates so intensely here that he makes her do the same, and the music starts sounding as real as if Glenn Gould were onstage. This is a show not to be missed. A quiet, soul-stirring triumph. Photos: Julieta Cervantes Cost of Living by Martyna Majok directed by Jo Bonney Manhattan Theatre Club/Samuel J. Friedman Theatre

The opera Four Saints in Three Acts’ astonishingly successful run on Broadway in 1934 was the most celebrated avant-garde theater triumph of its age. With a libretto by Gertrude Stein that told no coherent story, a polymorphous score by Virgil Thomson that channeled everything from glee club tunes and children’s ditties to Gilbert and Sullivan, filigreed sets by Florine Stettheimer made of cellophane, and an all-Black cast of 22 singer-dancers recruited from Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom, the show was a huge, defiantly whimsical modernist spectacle that baffled ordinary audiences enjoyably enough to become a hot commercial ticket. Overnight it transformed Stein from a literary joke into a bestseller (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas had been published 6 months earlier) and brought Thomson the serious recognition long denied him. It was the mainstream arrival of two important, long-marginalized artists. More. In the decades that followed, Four Saints became the classical touchstone for every American theater avant-gardist planning an ambitious musical extravaganza, from Julian Beck and Judith Malina to Philip Glass, Robert Wilson, The Wooster Group, Richard Foreman, and Lee Breuer. All of them considered Stein and Thomson their godparents. How fascinating and jarring it is, then, to see Four Saints as a solo show in a remote warehouse in bleak industrial Brooklyn, embraced by an American avant-gardist as a very different sort of minimalist touchstone. Four Saints is the final part of David Greenspan’s trilogy of plays from the 1920s, all performed as solo works (following The Patsy in 2011 and Strange Interlude in 2017). Heroically, amazingly, he performs Stein’s maddeningly repetitious, disconnected and opaque libretto as a spoken text, without Thomson’s score—a feat of memorization so impressive it turns into one of the project’s most compelling features. Dressed neatly in blue slacks and a button-down shirt, standing on a worn ornate carpet atop an elegant, plinth-like platform, Greenspan speaks Stein’s words with sparkling clarity, grouping sentences and phrases together as a gifted storyteller would to make characters and fictional circumstances clear. The thing is, Four Saints contains no consistently drawn characters or connected story lines. It is an anticly self-reflexive, willfully disjointed text that teases us with the possible introduction of such theatrically grounding elements as character development and plotline, only to contradict, deny or dissolve them soon after. Greenspan’s eminently sensible delivery, then—changing voices for different speakers, grouping lines as conversational exchanges, using hand gestures to indicate spatial locations—amounts to a 90-minute MacGuffin. He does (like Virgil Thomson) find much musical beauty in Stein’s lines, presumably with the help of his director Ken Rus Schmoll. Some sequences rise to inquisitive lilts like woodwind trills, for instance, others meander up and down like elusive melodies, still others startle with rat-a-tat repetition like percussion cadenzas. Yet any promise of coherent organization or structure these effects might hold out is false. The work remains what it always was: a hermetic document of self-absorbed language-play by an author utterly uninterested in either the theater or fictional action beyond speech acts. It was Virgil Thomson’s savvy, pluck and professional connections—as well as a fantastical quirk of cultural timing—that made this stubbornly self-absorbed author a celebrity. (Steven Watson analyzes the cultural moment brilliantly in his book Prepare for Saints: Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, and the Mainstreaming of American Modernism.) Stein would never have achieved stardom on her own and it never did lead to other new triumphs in the theater. The production record for all of her plays, including this one, is meager to this day. With this fiercely idiosyncratic, extraordinarily disciplined solo show, then, David Greenspan has returned Stein to her roots, to the essence of who she always was as a playwright. And I mean that as a compliment. The 1934 production of Four Saints was a unicorn, a distracting anomaly in her history. Greenspan’s project—bizarre, difficult and lonely as it seems—touches the hermetic core of Stein. And that is the prime reason why it’s so moving. The mind and heart of that inaccessible poet, whose every brittle pun and insular non-sequitur defied intimate approach, opens up to us through the vessel of Greenspan’s remarkable passion. Photo: Steven Pisano Four Saints in Three Acts by Gertrude Stein Directed by Ken Rus Schmoll Produced by Lucille Lortel Theatre at The Doxsee @ Target Margin Theater 232 52nd St., Brooklyn

If nothing else, you have to admire the chutzpah of Robert Icke’s Oresteia, which tries to collapse the 8-hour, 3-play action of Aeschylus’s monumental Oresteia—a founding work of Western drama about cyclical family revenge—into a single 3 ½-hour contemporary domestic crime-drama. At New York’s Park Avenue Armory, Icke’s Oresteia (originally staged in London in 2015) plays in repertory with his Hamlet, reminding us how much Aeschylus and Shakespeare have always spoken to each other. Vengeance, family betrayal, the slipperiness of truth: nothing dated about any of these works’ shared themes. Unlike Icke’s Hamlet, however, which soars on Alex Lawther’s lead performance despite some off-the-wall directing choices, his Oresteia is implausible, fruitlessly mystifying, and at times downright gaseous. Aeschylus’s Oresteia, to remind you, dramatizes the murder of king Agamemnon by his wife Klytemnestra when he comes back victorious from the Trojan War. She avenges his killing of their daughter Iphigenia 10 years earlier, when a prophecy said her death was the price of favorable winds to Troy. The couple’s son Orestes later murders Klytemnestra to avenge Agamemnon, and Orestes in turn is ruthlessly hounded by mother-avenging deities called Furies. In the end Orestes is acquitted in an apocalyptic trial that sets male against female, human against god, sky forces against earth forces, and glorifies Athens’s religious and judicial institutions. The goddess Athena, acting as judge, breaks a jury tie in favor of Orestes because, she says, she lacks a female parent and tends to favor males. Icke’s Agamemnon is a self-assured guy in a business suit (played by Angus Wright) who does TV interviews, has a house with modern fixtures, and kids who listen to The Beach Boys. He’s not a king but rather a religious zealot and general who got himself elected Prime Minister (or something—it’s vague—“You were a controversial choice. An unpopular choice”). We see him manipulated by his brother and others into believing cryptic “communications” and “signs” that further their war aims, including the demand for his very cute daughter’s death. His faith is supposed to explain why this loving, modern dad, who dandles and fondles his daughter in affectionate domestic scenes, would actually hold her on his lap while a toady doctor administers a lethal drug-cocktail to her. Well, I don’t believe that for a second, and have trouble believing anyone else in the audience does either. Yes, fathers occasionally kill their children, but not this sensitive guy, in this contrivedly ruthless way. Again and again, Icke’s Oresteia violates the psychological reality that it carefully establishes in order to push on with its violent plot. Every pivotal event in it—closely hewing to its mythic source material—is consequently far-fetched and absurd. There are pleasures. Anastasia Hille is wonderfully acute as Klytemnestra in the early scenes—intense, sharp-eyed, and wholly believable as a caring and patient mom and a loyal political wife determined to support her husband though she doesn’t share his religious beliefs. Her clash with Agamemnon after learning of his plans to sacrifice Iphigenia is the show’s best scene—gripping because of the conviction and realism of her pleas: “The signs aren’t real – Agamemnon . . . it’s in your head, there isn’t any evidence”; “this is about us, this is about a person who came from us . . . what you are / destroying is us, doing something that will overwhelm our history, a single action which if you bring it down on us will obliterate the whole story which precedes it.” Once this marital argument is over, however, we’re meant to accept that Klytemnestra just gives up, overcomes her panic, and drops her threat to wake the whole house, grab Iphigenia, and run. Moments after the creepy execution, she even offers him grudging admiration, saying his act is “so mercilessly brave”! Come on!! That’s up there with land-sharks and the moonshot hoax for sheer, instantaneous incredibility. The independent-minded, devoted mother played by Hille, who is clearly educated and heads a Western household, would flee Agamemnon instantly and take a bullet for her child. Or else she’d remain fiercely defiant. Eventually, Icke seems to give up on his efforts at psychological plausibility anyway. By the second hour the show is sputtering and slogging through sloughs of airy rhetoric and hortatory abstraction untethered from understandable character development or connection. A character played by Kirsty Rider called Doctor (I had to check the program to find that out) traipses through the play in a black dress, chatting standoffishly with an emotionally disturbed, adult Orestes as if she were his therapist or personal philosopher. She’s clearly no help to him in any case, rattling on weightlessly and pretentiously about things like the confusing state of the world (“Not quite order, but not chaos”) and the relativism of truth. The play’s last act, the trial scene, amounts to a numbing continuation of this Doctor’s bloviation: principally endless strings of ponderous issues (everything from gender to truth to sanctioned violence to justice) trotted out monotonously to an unseen judge in a spirit of deadly administrative bothsidesism. Very few Americans have ever seen a good production of Aeschylus’s Oresteia. The work is seldom produced not only because it’s so ancient, long and difficult but also because its gender politics are now controversial. Why, really, should Orestes get off just because he’s male? Some theater artists have altered the ending, but Ariane Mnouchkine famously came up with a fascinating feminist approach to the trilogy in 1990 by combining it with Euripides's Iphigenia at Aulis in her landmark Les Atrides. The combination tilted audience sympathy toward Klytemnestra by starting the saga with her betrayal rather than (as in Aeschylus) her vindictive rage. Icke too has combined the material in these 2 works, but in a completely different way. Aeschylus and Euripides are very different writers. One is a poet of obscure imagery and dense symbolism whose characters retain a monolithic grandeur, and the other is the father of psychological realism and hence a hero to many moderns. Mnouchkine’s Les Atrides essentially “Aeschylized” Euripides by using Asian theatrical techniques to infuse his work with thrilling performative effects and nudge the whole multi-part production toward the broadly symbolic. Icke has done the opposite in his Oresteia, essentially “Euripidizing” the Aeschylus material by reimagining it as wholly realistic and contemporary. Another adaptor might have seen that such an ancient story needed major adjustment to fit its new, modern environment—as, say, Eugene O’Neill recognized in his Civil War-era Mourning Becomes Electra. Icke evidently saw no such need, and that’s why, to anyone familiar with them, his show feels so much like a diminishment of its venerated sources. Photos: Joan Marcus Oresteia after Aeschylus adapted and directed by Robert Icke Park Avenue Armory

Khaled Hosseini’s 2003 novel The Kite Runner is a vividly descriptive and often gripping tale of guilt and expiation, class conflict, and wrenching refugee experience, set mostly in Afghanistan before and during the first Taliban rule. The book was enormously popular in the U.S. when it first appeared, providing a sumptuously detailed picture of life in a distant and confusing land that America had just become more involved in than it ever anticipated and was eager to better understand. The American affection for the book was, I believe, partly due to its juxtaposition of horrific descriptions of Taliban brutality with the immigrant-hero’s successful American assimilation, which tapped into America’s deep desire to see itself as a savior just as it was becoming a blundering occupier. (We had just invaded Iraq.) Film and a stage adaptations of The Kite Runner, written and produced separately, quickly followed the novel, coincidentally both appearing in 2007. The film, directed by Marc Forster and written by David Benioff, was an indie hit, featuring breathtaking shots of soaring kites and rugged scenes (shot in dusty and bustling locations in western China) that beautifully evoked the lost milieu of vibrant and colorful, pre-Taliban Afghanistan. A luxuriant sense of place is a signal distinction of the book. Matthew Spangler’s stage adaptation, alas, has no such atmospheric potency and few substitutes for it, which may explain why it never came to New York before. It is a wordy, plodding, and claustrophobic play first staged at San Jose State University, where Spangler teaches, and then produced professionally at San Jose Repertory Theatre in 2009. Giles Croft directed it at Nottingham Playhouse in the U.K. in 2014, and that production moved to the West End in 2016-17 and has now opened on Broadway. The show has some strengths—one marvelous lead actor, for instance, and a lovely musical underscore by the tabla-player Salar Nader—but any fan of the book or film watching this play will likely miss the in-depth view into Afghani culture they both made palpable. Hosseini’s title refers to a traditional winter game (later forbidden by the Taliban) in which boys fly kites with ground-glass-coated strings and compete to cut one another’s lines. “Running” (or chasing down) the severed kites is part of the fun, and the narrator Amir’s childhood friend Hassan is considered a masterful “runner.” Amir is a wealthy Pashtun (the privileged majoritarian class) whereas Hassan, illiterate and unfailingly loyal, is a Hazara (an oppressed and disdained minority) and a family servant along with his father. Amir’s father, the tough and manly Baba, complains of Amir’s softness (“there’s something missing in that boy. You know what happens when other boys tease him? Hassan steps in and fends them off.”) The story turns on Amir’s cowardly failure to defend Hassan when, trapped by Pashtun bullies while running a kite, he is raped in an alley. The guilt-stricken Amir contrives to blame Hassan for a theft to get rid of him and he and his dad move away, leaving Baba inexplicably disconsolate. The rest of the very dense and twisty plot involves Amir and Baba’s perilous flight from Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion, their resettlement in the San Francisco area, Amir’s marriage and early success as a fiction-writer, and a late revelation about Hassan’s paternity that you can probably guess. The Americanized adult Amir is forced to face his demons by sneaking into Taliban-controlled Kabul to rescue Hassan’s orphaned son Sohrab. Spangler and Croft do find some effective, albeit bleak, ways to theatricalize all this. Amir and Hassan are played by adult actors—Amir Arison and Eric Sirakian—whose portrayals of slouchy, rubber-limbed boys are amusing and endearing. Sirakian in particular is so sweetly guileless as both Hassan and Sohrab that he steals several scenes. The set (designed by Barney George) is also neatly malleable, using an array of projections (by William Simpson) against a row of irregularly shaped posts and kite-shaped draperies to evoke far-flung locations from Kabul to Peshawar to San Francisco. None of this, however, can overcome that (1) the play’s physical business is consistently disappointing—lame kite-flying with little props on wires, innocuous violence by villains neither menacing nor convincing in fights; and (2) the play leans too heavily on narration, burdening Arison with storytelling at the cost of his character-acting. Spangler clearly felt obliged to fit in as much of Hosseini’s vast plot as he could, when thinning it might have made for a stronger drama. The play lasts two and a half hours, yet still rushes through many events and transitions so abruptly it reduces them to cliches: a jubilant arrival in San Francisco conveyed by brief grooving to Kool and the Gang’s “Celebration,” for instance, or Baba suddenly clutching Amir’s childhood notebook as a totem as he’s wheeled off to die of cancer. One innovation the show introduces I did appreciate: its modernized portrayal of Soraya, Amir’s wife. Soraya is a woman with a past. The daughter of a hard-nosed, exiled Afghan general, she once ran away with an Afghan man and lived with him for a month. The general extracted her by threatening to kill the man and himself, then moved the family from Virginia to the East Bay to escape the scandal. In both the book and the film Soraya is chastened by this experience and becomes compliant with her dad’s strict honor code and docile in the face of his tyrannical oversight. In the play, by contrast, Azita Ghanizada plays a thoroughly Americanized Soraya who is confidently independent, assertive, and unafraid of her dad. With numerous eloquent tisks and eye-rolls she makes clear that compliance is a charade she plays to get what she wants, and she disagrees with Amir as well as the general at times. Once, when Amir tells the general off for disrespecting Sohrab, she grabs her husband and kisses him like a movie star. This adjustment is refreshing. It makes Soraya’s character more substantial and also enriches the story’s warily optimistic ending in which Amir becomes the subservient kite-runner for Sohrab and finally recognizes how much pain and damage he caused by blindly accepting his Pashtun class privilege. That recognition, we know, was enabled by his immigrant experience, which made him a climbing member of an underclass (Baba had to work in a gas station) and a beneficiary of America’s professed class-leveling. In the play, his wife seems to complete his social education. It’s worth recalling, in this vein, that The Kite Runner film was banned in Afghanistan by the American-installed government of Hamid Karzai, both because of the rape scene and the depiction of Pashtun arrogance and brutality. In fact, several of its Afghan child-actors had to flee Kabul for their safety. Hosseini’s story, in other words, was never safe or triumphal for most people inside his native country, only for those “privileged” with emigration or exile. Now, of course, the Taliban is back in power and the film controversy may seem like ancient history to some. Not to me. With America threatened by its own revanchist movement to strip women of their rights and personhood, I don’t regard anything as reliably ancient, and I value The Kite Runner, in all its iterations, as a sobering reminder of everything now teetering in the balance. Photos: Joan Marcus The Kite Runner adapted by Matthew Spangler from the novel by Khaled Hossseini directed by Giles Croft Helen Hayes Theater

The first ten minutes of Robert Icke’s 3 ¾-hour Hamlet had me worried. Icke is a British directing star, known for contemporized takes on the classics, but the only other production of his I’ve seen was his busy and muddled adaptation of 1984 on Broadway in 2017. Like that show, his Hamlet kicks off with a sustained media rush: slickly produced newsreel footage of a Danish royal funeral, a virtual Ghost introduced on wall-size security-camera monitor feeds, a prolonged entrance by Hamlet underscored with canned Bob Dylan. Overcompensatory tech can be a flaming red flag; the panjandrums of prestige theater have worn out my patience over the years with their enormous expenditures on electronics that scream “I don’t really trust actors!” Happily, this was a false alarm. Icke’s Hamlet is actually grounded in a provocative, if flawed, interpretation and a wonderful acting performance by Alex Lawther in the title role. Lawther’s Hamlet is conspicuously young. A scrawny and fragile 27-year-old who looks 18, he introduces his prince to us with a slow, slouchy, moping stage cross on the enormous modern-palace set at the Park Avenue Armory (design by Hildegard Bechtler). Lugging a heavy briefcase, he plops himself on the floor as Dylan’s “Spirit on the Water” wafts in from a cheery, balloon-strewn party in a glass room upstage—evidently Claudius and Gertrude’s wedding reception. Dylan music scores much of the show, of which more in a moment. The wedding party, occurring a mere two months after the old king’s funeral, understandably leaves Hamlet disgusted, as does the advice by his mother and uncle to “cast thy nighted color off” and cut short his “unmanly grief.” He ends that scene in tears, underscoring not just their clueless insensitivity but also how freaky it is that neither of them is still grieving themselves. This Gertrude (Jennifer Ehle) and Claudius (Angus Wright) are as self-absorbed and hot for one another as teenagers. The controlling force of Lawther’s performance is the profound, unresolved, acute grief he projects from start to finish. He and Icke have both spoken at length about the extensive reading they did on grief in preparing the show (see their interviews in The New Yorker and The New York Times), but even if you knew nothing about that you could feel the painful understanding behind Lawther’s portrayal. His Hamlet is a lonely, vulnerable, heartsick kid unable to move forward and trying out various tricks and strategies to get himself unstuck: antics, drama, surliness, sarcasm, anger, attachment to Ophelia, rejection of Ophelia. Nothing works, none of it lightens his gloom, and he ends up so locked in by his feelings that he can’t take pleasure in anyone or anything. Even his famous humor consistently falls flat, crushed by his repeatedly re-confirmed isolation. Interestingly, Icke has cast Guildenstern as a sunny young woman, played by Tia Bannon, who behaves like a former college flame of Hamlet’s, arriving with her new boyfriend Rosencrantz (a chicly cool and resentful Calum Finlay). Hamlet is at first openly affectionate with Guildenstern and testy with Rosencrantz. But then the old flame proves just as untrustworthy as all his enemies, and you can feel his loneliness deepen. This is a gloomy and explicitly suicidal Hamlet, and it’s amazing that Lawther manages to lighten things in his soliloquies, which truly glow with mercurial intelligence and raw theatrical immediacy. The major conceptual gambit of Icke’s production is its tricky suggestion that Claudius may not have killed his brother after all. Wright plays Claudius as a genial political animal who clearly considers himself legitimate, chosen by due process in an elective monarchy. The stage world is modern, with video, motor vehicles, wireless ear-pieces, and guns but, oddly, no cellphones. In this contemporary (or near-future) Denmark everyone readily accepts the authoritarian form of government even though all their clothes and mannerisms—as well as the Dylan music—carry the swagger and assertive individualism of present-day democracies. The youngsters’ skinny hipster pants and sexy short skirts (Bechtler also designed the costumes) betoken nothing more than the pseudo-youth-rebellion of consumerism, and the Dylan music comes off as pure nostalgia. No fascist surveillance state here because such repressive oversight isn’t needed. Wright may be a bit stiffly formal as Claudius but he carries no air of guilt or deviousness. We’re meant to believe Hamlet’s threatening actions force him to defend himself with violence. In support of this, several key scenes are staged as though they’re figments of Hamlet’s imagination. The Ghost (David Rintoul), for example, first appears only in a grainy security-video seen by Horatio, the guards and then Hamlet. But when it’s time for him to speak with Hamlet, the Ghost suddenly appears in person in the guards’ room as the others magically vanish. When the Ghost leaves, the others instantly reappear, suggesting that the whole conversation about murder and revenge took place in Hamlet’s head. The Player King later on is also played by Rintoul, and when he arrives Hamlet registers shock at the resemblance. In the scene when Hamlet overhears Claudius confess his crime while praying (“my offence is rank/ it smells to heaven/ it hath the primal eldest curse upon’t”), Hamlet, as always, declines to kill him because he doesn’t want to send him, newly shriven, to heaven. Lawther’s Hamlet trains a pistol point-blank at Claudius as he kneels, and you have the feeling his uncle knows he’s there. In the end, there’s a direct confrontation that isn’t in Shakespeare’s play. After Wright’s Claudius admits that his praying was ineffective (“my words fly up/ my thoughts remain below”), he looks Hamlet in the eye in defiance, as if to say, “Now do you dare shoot me?” Hamlet hesitates again and his uncle snickers and leaves, adding to the prince’s already immense self-loathing. Clever as all this rearranging is, my feeling is that its yield is meager. Nothing much ever comes of Claudius’s supposed innocence, since he eventually turns on Hamlet anyway, and in thinking the new situation through we have to suppress any interest in important questions such as: why do the guards and Horatio also see the Ghost? Why did the royal marriage have to be so hasty? And what of Gertrude’s possible complicity? The alteration left me thinking that a guilty Claudius is simply more interesting than an innocent one because it activates more of Shakespeare’s text (even in Icke’s altered version) and makes a deeper character out of Claudius. One script change of Icke’s I did find very interesting. Most Hamlet productions use some version of the very long First Folio text, judiciously cut. Icke uses First Folio material sprinkled with interpolated speeches from the First and Second Quartos, including one rarely used speech in which Horatio informs Gertrude of Claudius’s plan to have Hamlet killed. This news is deployed as a character pivot, providing Gertrude a reason to finally distance herself from her husband (which Ehle’s Gertrude has repeatedly refused to do, pointedly discounting Hamlet’s harangue in the closet scene). Ehle’s first reaction to this news is strangely non-plussed but we soon see that her character is indeed transformed, no longer bright but deadly somber. In the duel scene minutes later, she has a shocking coda, deliberately drinking the cup of poison even after Claudius clearly warns her away from it. The implication is that she is trying to thwart the poisoning of Hamlet by taking the draught herself. There is much more to admire. Kirsty Rider’s Ophelia, for instance, has a tragic edge comparable to Lawther’s Hamlet. Ingenuous and amiable, she is also conspicuously young, going along to get along in the spying of the “get thee to a nunnery scene,” for instance, and thereby missing how much her choice hurts Hamlet. After he turns cold and her father is killed, Rider rises to her own portrayal of bottomless, heartrending grief in the mad scene, enumerating the many wounds and bruises on her arms and legs with the names of herbs and flowers. In such beautifully terrible moments, one forgets all irritations from other moments. Photos: Stephanie Berger Photography/Park Avenue Armory Hamlet by William Shakespeare directed by Robert Icke Park Avenue Armory