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Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive is, famously, the play that blew the lid off the subject of pedophilia in the theater. At its premiere in 1997 it was startlingly fresh and shocking—not because most people had never heard of such abuse but because the play painted such a uniquely detailed picture of exactly how it occurred, and was abetted and perpetuated, within an ostensibly ordinary and loving family. My most vivid memory of Mark Brokaw’s searing original production is of the knot in my stomach walking out. The play was so plausible in every nuance it made me grasp for the first time just how common such scenarios are in real life. Now Brokaw, 25 years later, has restaged the play on Broadway with the same extraordinary lead actors—Mary-Louise Parker and David Morse—and watching it makes me realize how much water has passed under this particular bridge in the meantime. An avalanche of other plays about pedophilia followed How I Learned to Drive, from Frozen and Doubt to Blackbird, The Nether, Downstate and many, many others, examining the subject from myriad different viewpoints. This surge of stories left us wiser and also a little jaded, especially after the rash of #MeToo-driven scandals involving famous predatory men and the hundreds of testimonies, books and documentaries that followed. The upshot is that Vogel’s play can’t shock in the same way anymore. It still has power, but of a different sort. Drive is a fractured memory-play that jumps back and forth in time. In the opening scene, set in 1969, 17-year-old Li’l Bit (Parker) sits in a parked car with an older man (Morse) who talks her into taking off her top. He turns out to be her uncle Peck, a reveal that felt like a bombshell in 1997. Today, most people know who he is going in (the play is that famous), so we watch for the subtleties of how all his inappropriate encounters with his niece play out. Sessions of driving instruction-cum-sexual grooming alternate with family scenes showing the willful obliviousness, even passive complicity, of Li’l Bit’s aunt and grandmother. The predation, we learn, began as early as age 11, and Li’l Bit’s memories of her flirtatiousness make clear that she believes she shares blame. Perhaps the most original and disturbing aspect of Drive was always the sympathy with which Vogel wrote Peck. Refusing to demonize him, she gave him qualities anyone might admire—courtesy, thoughtfulness, kindness, and most important, sympathy for Li'l Bit's intellectual ambitions (“You’ve got a ‘fire’ in the head”) that no one else in her crude, lowbrow family offered. In 1997, when Morse was 44 and Parker was 33, part of the play’s creepiness was that their relationship was truly charming onstage despite being despicable. The actors, after all, were age-appropriate for romance and had steamy chemistry, and the “reality” of childhood and adolescence in the play was evoked solely by Parker’s virtuosic acting—an astonishing repertoire of slouches, pouts, hip sways and foot shuffles that felt themselves like extraordinarily acts of memory. Looking back, it seems to me that that double dimension of the acting actually put the audience in a comparable dissociative state to Li’l Bit, who says that she retreated “above the neck” to process her story’s horror: That day [of her most difficult memory, from age 11] was the last day I lived in my body. I retreated above the neck, and I've lived inside the "fire" in my head ever since. That, I think, is where the knot in my stomach came from—an uncomfortably complicated visceral reaction to the horrific truth in front of me that my head strongly wanted to deny. It was a devastatingly sly Brechtian distancing effect that sharpened everyone’s feelings of complicity with a crime most of us (I presume) would not have owned. That is not the way the play feels today. At age 57, Parker’s easy access to all those physical evocations of girlhood is, if anything, more amazing than before. And yet there is no heat between her and Morse now. He, at 68, is grizzled and brittle, more like a grandpa than an uncle (made more evident by casting the very young-looking Chris Myers as the family’s actual grandpa). All Morse and Parker’s interactions seem sleazy from the outset even though both actors are reproducing their gestures and mannerisms from years ago with chilling accuracy. The play’s Brechtian distancing effects, in other words—which also include announced scene titles and a 3-member “Greek Chorus” (Myers, Johanna Day, and Alyssa May Gold) performing many other roles against type—are no longer muted or couched in an erotically charged, soft-focus memory blanket. They now assert themselves as the play’s main point, making it feel more like documentary or advocacy than poetic revelation. Let me be clear that the production is worth seeing, if only for Parker’s inspired performance. My wife pointed out that, given the play’s cooler, more factually oriented profile now, Manhattan Theatre Club could do a world of good by making the show available free or steeply discounted to teenagers. They are the ones, after all, who still truly need to hear this appallingly true story in all its detail, despite whatever they think they know about sleaze and predation. Photos: Jeremy Daniel How I Learned to Drive By Paula Vogel Directed by Mark Brokaw Manhattan Theatre Club at The Samuel J. Friedman Theatre

Walking out of the spiffy new production of Richard Greenberg’s Take Me Out, my canny friend Tom, who was seeing the play for the first time, offered this quick take: “really interesting, but why in the world did that character Mason Marzac need to be in it?” Anyone with fond memories of Take Me Out’s 2003 New York premiere would find this remark jarring, because Marzac was its biggest treat—a delightfully unguarded, hilariously bravura comic performance by Denis O’Hare that won a Tony. The thought that this character wasn’t needed would never have occurred to anyone back then. Yet Tom’s question made sense, and that has serious implications for the changed profile of this work twenty years later. Take Me Out dramatizes the fallout when a superstar pro baseball player suddenly comes out as gay at the pinnacle of his career—an event, one hastens to add, that has still never occurred in real life. The player, Darren Lemming, is a mixed-race phenom with strong “crossover” appeal strongly modeled on Derek Jeter and his team, the Empires, is a clone of the Yankees. Lemming is thus so secure in his stardom that he’s Teflon. Publicly untouchable. Or so he imagines. His teammates, some of whom considered themselves friends, aren’t happy that he failed to inform any of them beforehand. Some complain, for instance, that the clubhouse atmosphere has changed, with carefree towel-snaps at buttocks forever off limits. “We’ve lost a kind of paradise. We see that we are naked,” says his friend and cultured teammate Kippy. Darren’s disclosure was sparked by a bar chat with his best friend, a rival-team player named Davey Battle, who called him aloof (“you’re seen As Through a Glass Darkly”) and pressed him to express his “true nature,” make his “whole self known.” Personal complications metastasize into public disaster and scandal after an openly racist and homophobic young pitcher, Shane Mungitt, joins the Empires. Scott Ellis’s production is tight and strong. Grey’s Anatomy star Jesse Williams is terrific as Darren—low-key witty, affable yet reserved, and even more delightfully direct in imitating Jeter’s mannerisms than Daniel Sunjata was 20 years ago. Brandon J. Dirden also stands out as a ferocious Davey Battle—though Darren’s complete cluelessness about this “best friend’s” virulent religious bigotry always struck me as the play’s biggest plot weakness. The heart of Take Me Out isn’t in its plot, however, which is often clever but also sometimes far-fetched. Its heart is in the dream the play holds out of mainstream gay acceptance in American society. Football aside, by my lights baseball is still obviously the icon of mainstream America, and Greenberg’s story imagines what an abrupt forced acceptance might look like on the voluntary fields of fandom and friendship, rather than the contentious field of legal rights we’ve grown used to playing on since the Obergefell V. Hodges right-to-marry ruling. Greenberg’s story wouldn’t be moving, though, if it were just a parable about complications from a bombshell. What makes it gripping and delicious is the deep passion for baseball it channels. It even introduces the idea of a specifically gay passion that might conceivably bring bright novelty to the institution. And the source of this passion is Mason Marzac. Marzac is Lemmings’s money manager—a flamboyantly gay man suddenly assigned to him after his announcement (Darren: “I guess I got you because the guys with families are too distracted”). Mason also happens to be an ace at his job (“In my own little world, I’m you!”). The play’s ostensible narrator is Kippy, ably played with cool insouciance by Patrick J. Adams in the current production. But when trust between Kippy and Darren breaks down due to Kippy’s actions in the Mungitt affair, Mason becomes his main confidante. Mason becomes the savvy gay friend he never had, even restoring his flagging faith in baseball when ugly incidents mount. And because he speaks directly to the audience so much, he essentially becomes the play’s second (and more trusted) narrator. The crucial difference between Joe Mantello’s 2003 production and Ellis’s current revival is the portrayal of Mason. Back in 2003, Denis O’Hare played him as an extravagantly mannered imp, full of bubbly faux-humble affectations that were infectiously delightful—and, I might add, strongly reminiscent of Richard Greenberg himself. The role struck me as a fascinatingly personal creation—a rare Woody Allenish self-portrait by a writer not given to narcissism. Considering baseball deeply for the first time, O’Hare’s Mason enthused with the zeal of the new convert and made the audience eager fellow travelers on his intellectual mind-trips. . . . baseball is better than Democracy — or at least than Democracy as it’s practiced in this country — because unlike Democracy, baseball acknowledges loss. While conservatives tell you, leave things alone and no one will lose, and liberals tell you, interfere a lot and no one will lose, baseball says: Someone will lose. Not only says it — insists upon it! So that baseball achieves the tragic vision that Democracy evades. Evades and embodies. In the current production Mason is played by Jesse Tyler Ferguson as a sensible and practical company man who just happens to be fey and fanciful. Reacting perhaps to the reviewers who dismissed O’Hare’s performance as a gay stereotype (deeply unjust), Ellis and Ferguson went far in the other direction, toning down Mason’s personality so much that he no longer seems particularly perceptive or inspiring. O’Hare’s imaginative rambles were so electric and galvanizing they made you impute all kinds of qualities onto his Mason—artistic flair, investment expertise, talent at friendship. Ferguson’s Mason, by contrast, is so truly humble that his claim to being Darren’s investment counterpart seems absurd, his excurses on baseball rhetorical, and his penchant for digression tiresome. Why indeed, any discerning observer might ask, does the play need a second narrator? My take on this down-to-earth Mason isn’t a mere quibble over personalities. What’s at stake in this character’s performance of gay flamboyance is the very ability of Take Me Out to command a long-term place in the American repertory. This play cannot endure solely based on its topical depictions of institutional shock and celebrity embarrassment, which are already starting to age. Its claim on our national soul must and will depend on the strength of its visionary dream. Photos: Joan Marcus Take Me Out By Richard Greenberg Directed by Scott Ellis Second Stage/The Hayes Theater

Dominique Morisseau is aware that most of her fans see her as a predominantly naturalistic playwright with a sharp comic tongue and a sharper social conscience. She says so in an intro note to her wonderful new play Confederates, hoping to complicate that neat picture. Confederates is a broad and whimsical satire that leaps back and forth between time lines a century and half apart and leaves you wondering where this madcap side of her has been hiding all this time. This play doesn’t bother much with naturalism, as its main business is turning chuckles into clarifying anger about the dubious alliances Black women have endured in their long struggle for self-reliance, justice and dignity. Satire is a very tricky form. For one thing, it always plays to some people who just don’t get it, no matter how sharp it is. Secondly, it always runs the risk that its humor will be spoiled by too much contempt, because satirical authors are by definition driven by indignation. Audiences won’t laugh very long, or truly care, at clever ridicule alone, so good satires have to open out beyond the fools and scoundrels they’re lambasting. They have to adjust their canvas to work as a mirror that reflects broader absurdities and flaws that the author owns herself. Morisseau, to her enormous credit, sees this, and it’s what makes Confederates touching as well as acerbic and clever. The play begins with a complaint about a racially charged prank. Sandra, a Black political science professor at a contemporary private college, searingly played by Michelle Wilson, enters in a bright red power suit and displays a slide of a slave woman, breasts exposed, suckling a white baby. Someone has posted this picture on her office door with Sandra’s face photoshopped over the slave’s, and she is demanding an investigation. She is “not averse to images of slavery,” she says, as she analyzes them in her classes. Nor does she really understand the joke, or taunt, or insult, or whatever it was. Interestingly enough, she couches her reaction in an exasperated display of knowledge that also seems to be the cultural context in which Morisseau sees her own play. Sandra ticks off a formidable list of dozens of books, exhibitions, plays and films about slavery she’s read and seen over the years, from older works like Jubilee, Roots and Birth of a Nation to recent headliners like Slave Play, An Octoroon and Django Unchained. It occurred to me, listening to this list, that beginning a new play by name-checking rivals is pretty risky stuff (none of the named works is ever referenced again). Yet by the end, I saw a point in it: highlighting that none of those major past works adequately covered the same territory as Confederates, which is the minefield of unreliable “friends” that capable Black women have to negotiate as they strive to rise in the world. Confederates proceeds on two tracks over 90 intermissionless minutes, tightly directed by Stori Ayers to keep its tone light and farcical even when dealing with grim details of slavery and oppression. Sandra’s story is intercut with that of a bright and anachronistically sassy slave named Sara, played with hilarious, tightly wound tenacity by Kristolyn Lloyd, who is recruited as a Union spy during the Civil War. Sara wants to run away and fight the Confederacy with guns alongside her runaway brother Abner, a Union soldier who periodically returns to the plantation on reconnaissance missions. Abner discourages that, stressing her safety though it’s clear he’s threatened by her toughness and all-around competence. Enter Missy Sue, the master’s pushy daughter who illegally taught Sara to read and considers her a “friend.” She’s recently returned from a failed marriage up north and exposure to liberal ideas. Missy Sue puts Sara to work in the house so she can steal war information from her father’s office. Is this a trap to catch Abner when he picks up the info from Sara? Sara can’t know. Enter also the house slave Sara displaced, LuAnne, who is forced to share the master’s bed and who knows something’s fishy with Sara’s new assignment. Since snitches are handsomely rewarded in this world, how could Sara possibly confide in LuAnne? Meanwhile Missy Sue has made clear she wants Sara in her bed. The big picture here is that Sara is prevented from simply seizing her freedom because she has to use all her wit and cunning to protect herself from real and potential treachery by her purported friends. That’s the same picture that emerges from Sandra’s story—which is played with the same superb supporting cast, the actors dashing to and fro while briskly exchanging tear-away costumes. Elijah Jones, who plays Abner, doubles as Malik, an intense Black student Sandra likes and tries to help but who insists on looking for bias in everything she says. Kenzie Ross (Missy Sue) becomes Candice, Sandra’s white personal assistant, a self-involved, well-meaning twit who constantly blunders into casual racism and imagines a deep bond with Sandra simply because both recently went through breakups. Andrea Patterson (LuAnne) doubles as Jade, Sandra’s Black, untenured junior colleague who claims to idolize her but who drops by to guilt-trip her aggressively about her own upcoming tenure case. (This is the play’s one false note, as no real junior professor would ever be so rash.) I fear I haven’t made sufficiently clear how funny Confederates is. The script is rife with quips and zingers that have the audience almost constantly tittering and that drive home the politically tinged humor much more effectively than grim seriousness ever could. Yet the core strength of the work lies in Morisseau’s serious perception that Sandra and Sara’s stories, 160 years apart, illuminate one another. Both represent the cream of Black potential thwarted by comparable failures of solidarity. In a word, both women are surrounded by “confederates” rather than true supporters or friends, and that forces them to squander their creative energies in clever maneuvers of self-protection. This satirical farce, then, is really a kind of tragicomedy. The answer to the mystery of who posted the photoshopped picture—which I won’t reveal—is a fittingly ambiguous coda to it. You can tell that Morisseau probably wanted to end on an upbeat note but couldn’t figure out how, other than to have Sara and Sandra look at one another for the first time. Everyone in the play, it turns out, is both guilty and innocent. You’ll have to go see it to understand what I mean. Photos: Monique Carboni Confederates By Dominique Morisseau Directed by Stori Ayers Signature Theatre

In my time as a critic I've noticed on numerous occasions that musicals rooted in political satire always have second-act problems. They come out of the gate identifying a specific breed of corruption and a clear villain, then proceed to demonstrate that wickedness amusingly but schematically in a series of playful songs and dances, which sends them into a storytelling cul de sac. We may enjoy the variety in the evil-sampling but it doesn’t pack much potential for real surprise. Think of the classics of the genre: Threepenny Opera, The Cradle Will Rock, Urinetown. They’re all dynamic and hilarious as they introduce their crews of miscreants and establish their fields of venality, but after that they become essentially predictable, merely distracting us with wit and musical variety from their stories’ lack of real change-potential. We know after a half hour that Macheath, Peachum, Polly and Tiger Brown are all incorrigible crooks in Threepenny. The only open questions are who will survive and how each fun new song will vary the core themes of capitalist graft and impunity. In Cradle Will Rock, it’s clear even quicker that Mr. Mister’s tyranny over Steeltown will be unchanging and unchangeable. The way he keeps persecuting unionists is so monotonous it amounts to cliché—a problem that evidently worried Tim Robbins so much that he reduced the work to a sideshow in his 1999 Cradle Will Rock film. Urinetown is an interesting variation because it attacks the problem with pomo self-consciousness. Its winking characters inform us they’re as wise to the expectability of their plot as we are. Who cares if a ridiculously wicked corporation monopolizes toilets during a water crisis, or if its bosses get their comeuppance? What really matters is the belly-laugh silliness of the fairy tale. Black No More—the new musical adapted from George Schuyler’s 1931 satirical novel about an America upended by a medical treatment that turns Black people white—is the newest crop in this field, and there’s much to like about it. Curiously, though, none of its considerable cleverness went into solving this intrinsic second-act problem. That’s remarkable given the proven talent of its book-writer, John Ridley, who won an Academy Award for his screenplay of “12 Years a Slave.” The show’s impressive creative team also includes hip-hop star Tariq Trotter, aka Black Thought, the celebrated choreographer Bill T. Jones, and the New Group’s Artistic Director Scott Elliott. The musical is set in a cartoonish 1930s America that doubles as an Afrofuturist dystopia. Passing is as simple as lightening one’s skin tone in this place and the air swirls with hip-hop and R&B as well as jazz, blues and swing. When a slick-rapping Mephistophelian doctor named Junius Crookman (get it?), played by Trotter, opens a clinic for his new skin-whitening treatment in Harlem, an insurance salesman named Max Disher (Brandon Victor Dixon) rushes to be first in line. Max has been rejected by a blonde named Helen (Jennifer Damiano) and, clad in his new white skin, he dashes off to Atlanta to find her. She turns out to be the daughter of a white-supremacist preacher named Rev. Givens (Howard McGillin), who embraces Max and makes him his heir and protégé. The irony of an incognito Black man posing as an expert advisor to racist hatemongers, as their hated objects disappear (Blacks turn white by the millions), is the story’s satirical center. Crookman provides complications by countering political opposition to his lucrative business by urging the racists to adopt other hate targets: SCIENCE!!, immigrants, non-Christians, homosexuals and Asians. America’s not America, after all, without a denigrated underclass. The show’s music (credited to four artists: Trotter, Anthony Tidd, James Poyser, and Daryl Waters) is impressively various, ranging from gospel, blues and scat to big band, country-western, 1940s Broadway and hip-hop. The edgiest and most interesting material is in the rap, which Trotter performs with a flare and fluency he doesn’t muster in his acting. JUST IN CASE YOU HAD FORGOTTEN THAT THIS BIG APPLE’S ROTTEN AND WHEN YOU’RE BLACK YOUR COTTON PICKIN’ BACK YOU’RE LIKELY SHOT IN ALTHOUGH WITH SOME TUTORIAL ANY PROVERBIAL OREO MIGHT UNDERGO A MERCURIAL REMODELING Several standout performances are Tamika Lawrence as Max’s friend Buni and Lillian White as Madame Sisseretta, a hair-straightening beautician whose business dries up due to Crookman. The dancing is splendid—one witty sequence, supposedly in Max’s mind, contrasts awkward and lumbering southern do-si-dos with graceful and sensuous jazz dancers much more comfortable in their bodies—though it does grow a bit repetitive. More pointed humor like that Black/white sequence would have helped. The main reason the show starts to drag is that its story finds no effective source of novelty in the second half. Crookman is established early on as such an unequivocally diabolical race-traitor that he can’t surprise us with any new instances of treachery. Ditto the white devil Rev. Givens, as tedious a stereotype as Mr. Mister. Max expresses doubts about turning his back on his people as soon as he gets to Atlanta and his conscience keeps nagging at him as he takes his place in Givens’ family and Klan-like organization. The result is that we pretty much know where the plot’s headed after 20 minutes: Max will eventually risk telling Helen the truth and innocents will suffer for his bad choices. After reading Schuyler’s novel—which I heartily recommend—I was genuinely surprised that Ridley took such a pat, conventional view of it. Schuyler is titanically cynical. Everyone in his book is an unprincipled self-seeker or con artist trying to skim money from some phony benevolent organization and outfox all opponents—including Max, Crookman and outrageous caricatures of W.E.B. Dubois and Marcus Garvey. The novel’s suspenseful climax couples the birth of Max and Helen’s baby (surprisingly dark-skinned!) with a closely contested presidential election in which Rev. Givens is the Democratic candidate. Ridley clearly disliked the idea of such a morally bankrupt world, though such amorality generates a fictional environment that can surprise. Instead he opts for the same old bogus troubled-but-trying-hard world that Hollywood and Broadway have been fobbing on us for ages. Schuyler’s Max is no more or less Mephistophelian than his Crookman or anyone else. He’s just a savvy player in the world’s rigged game—a game we’re meant to study closely—who turns out to hold the right cards in the end to survive. Ridley turns him into a stock romantic hero who never gets a chance to reconnect with his loving nature and righteous soul because he’s martyred—by a simplistically malevolent character who doesn’t even exist in the book. Helen, for her part, shifts from one cliché to another: instead of the vapid beauty in the novel, she’s now a shallow but morally conflicted beauty. So much for obligatory nods to feminism. So much for Schuyler’s biting critique of America’s winner-take-all economic con game. The Black No More team is hardly the first to leave diamonds behind in adapting complex source material into a musical. What makes these deficiencies particularly disappointing is that an opportunity was truly lost here to make a new complex statement about Black futurity at a moment when American audiences are hungry for one. What might the second act of American Black history look like? You won’t find out in Black No More. Photos: Monique Carboni Black No More Book by John Ridley Lyrics by Tariq Trotter Music by Tariq Trotter, Anthony Tidd, James Poyser, Daryl Waters Directed by Scott Elliott Pershing Square Signature Theatre Center 480 W. 42nd St.

Taylor Mac is one of those magi of pandemonium who knows how to breach the defenses of people like me who don’t surrender easily to orgiastic theatricality. There’s something about Mac’s particular sort of resplendently queer excess and gallimaufry of progressive ideas that’s so joyful, sincere and essentially intelligent that it makes you throw up your hands, turn off your inner Aristotle, and enjoy the chaotic ride. The Hang is classic Mac—an utterly uncategorizable mélange of Aristophanic comedy, American musical, drag show, cabaret, jazz concert, song recital and philosophical symposium that you can’t help loving, no matter what you might make of its thought. It’s brash, bawdy, hilarious (alternately dumb and satirical) and infectiously sweet-tempered, with over 100 minutes of extremely catchy music by Matt Ray, a fantastic 8-piece band, a 9-member cast of crack dancers and singers, and jaw-dropping sculptural costumes by Machine Dazzle. This is what Mac does best—write and star in a saturnalian communal gathering that can double as a think-piece if you want it to, like A 24-Decade History of Popular Music and The Lily’s Revenge. And IMO, the magic in these shows is immensely more powerful than the scripted plays Mac writes (such as Gary and Hir, which also tend to be produced by others with a formality that saps their magic further). Directed by Niegel Smith (who co-directed A 24-Decade History) The Hang is framed as an alternative Apology of Socrates, Plato’s account of his mentor’s trial for corrupting the youth of Athens. Mac plays Socrates as a fabulous, floral-bearded, gnomic figure in a flower-petal wig and fluorescent chartreuse eye-shadow. Having already taken the mandated hemlock at the beginning, he invites his acolytes to a group-schmooze called a “hang” while he waits for death. They all oblige, of course—except for Plato, played by Ryan Chittaphong as a toga-clad stick-in-the-mud who takes down everything on a cardboard typewriter. Socrates compares him to the guy at a dinner party who won’t stop looking at his cell phone. Meanwhile the sung-through book and songs range digressively across dozens of subjects such as the meaning of art, the relationship of beauty to morality, whether Aristophanes was political, the absurdity of a protest against consumerism in the Gay Pride Parade by demonstrators wearing corporate black clothing, and much, much more. If I had to list my favorite sequences (no easy task) I’d mention: a killer baritone sax solo that arises out of nowhere; a riotous tap dance by a man wearing high-top Converse All-Stars, day-glo orange satyr horns and little else; and a marvelous “debate” that a trombone player conducts with himself, stepping from left to right while playing melodic passages “at odds” with one another and guiding our impressions with comic facial expressions. While it’s true that the entire extended run of The Hang through March 6 is sold out, I can report that 3 people waiting for returned tickets got in the day I attended. Part of me wants to clamor for a commercial producer to pick up this beautiful show which, judged purely on its own qualities, I think could run forever. Another part, though, fears that a transplant might kill the organism by separating it from the warm, laid-back, intimate soil it grew up in at HERE. The solution, no doubt, is for Mac to write some new lyrics about that dilemma and add them to the show The Hang Book and Lyrics by Taylor Mac Music and Music Direction by Matt Ray Directed by Niegel Smith HERE 145 Sixth Ave.

I went to the new opera Intimate Apparel because the 2003 play it was made from is one of my favorites by Lynn Nottage. Cards on the table, I’m no opera fan in general but rather one of those people who deeply enjoys a few dozen particular operas. This one—commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera and Lincoln Center Theater’s New Works Project and finally premiering after a 10-year collaboration between Nottage as librettist and the composer Ricky Ian Gordon—has many merits and beauties, but it’s not really interested in endearing itself to people like me. The Gordon score is sensitively synched with the drama’s complex psychological action and spiced with alluring ragtime, but its overall tenor is caustic and gravelly. It contains no melodious arias. The show is entirely sung-through and has only a handful of moments with directly comprehensible lyrics. The libretto is projected onto the set’s rear wall, an improvement, I suppose, on opera’s usual proscenium-top supertitles but hardly a substitute for the direct, immediate performer-spectator connections that plays and musicals establish. I found the show, particularly the first half, rather taxing. Intimate Apparel is the play that put Nottage on the map, announcing her as an important new American dramatic voice. Performed throughout the U.S. after its NY premiere, it tells the story of Esther, a talented Black seamstress in New York City in 1905, who exchanges letters with a Barbadian laborer named George working on the Panama Canal and decides to marry him sight unseen. The audience quickly recognizes that this romance will not go well, and the emotionally fraught complications that ensue could indeed be construed as operatic. What’s remarkable about the play, however, is its subtle, detailed portrait of an illiterate yet skilled and striving Black woman living a little-documented sort of life in post-Reconstruction America. The story is gripping and heartbreaking because of the very specificity that evidently had to be diluted to make room for music and dance in this opera. The original play’s opening scene, for example, is a private conversation between Esther and Mrs. Dickson, who runs the rooming house where she lives. Mrs. Dickson wants to entice Esther downstairs to join a lively engagement party for another resident and maybe meet an eligible young man. It’s a short, poignant, insular interaction whose bubble of protective emotion is punctured only at the end when we hear George’s first letter from Panama. The opera’s opening scene, by contrast, thrusts us into the bustle of that party, with a chorus of singers and dancers brightly intruding on Esther’s privacy (“Step lively! Light and gay! Light and gay! Step lively!). There’s even a fat, ebullient, frock-coated tenor playing the unappealing bachelor Mrs. Dickson wants to set her up with, who’s never seen in the play. The whole time these other people were onstage I wanted them to go away. Another example is the scene when Esther (Kearstin Piper Brown) and Mayme (Krysty Swann), a prostitute she has befriended, share their secret dreams of better lives. Esther has been saving for years to open a beauty salon and Mayme imagines traveling the world as a concert pianist. In the play this confidence is an intimate, wistful tête-à-tête exchange in a sultry, quiet boudoir. In the opera, it’s opened out as public performance, with the dreams described in an effusive duet anthem that transforms them into platitudes about self-reliance. ‘Cause no one does it for us, Gotta have a dream all our own ‘Cause no one does it for us, Gotta brave the cold world alone. ‘Cause no one does it, no, No one does it for us! There’s no need to go on. I recognize that I’m not the natural audience for this work and, happily, I found the second act more moving than the first. I liked, for instance, that the opera—well directed by Bartlett Sher—had sturdy and comely George (Justin Austin) traipsing through the background of Act 1: Esther’s winsome romantic fantasy. That sharpened the painful reveal after he arrives in Act 2, admits he paid someone to write his poetic letters, and proves to be a womanizing wastrel who gambles away her life savings. I also enjoyed the portrayal of Mr. Marks (Arnold Livingston Geis), a Jewish merchant Esther buys fabric from and secretly loves. Brown and Geis have a warm chemistry, and Sher wittily uses the sensuality of the fabric rolls in Marks’s shop to underscore their attraction. In the end, though, looking around me at the Mitzi Newhouse, at what I’d guess were 80 percent white faces and 50-odd empty seats, I wondered who the natural audience for this work was. Fifteen years ago the music critic Anne Midgette published a perceptive essay in The Opera Quarterly stating that she regarded the purpose and appeal of American opera as chronically unclear. Opera had never quite rid itself of the odor of foreign import in America, she said, and its audience was persistently balky and indeterminate. Even American composers signaled anxiety about this problem by avoiding the term “opera” in favor of ingratiating substitutes like “music theater” and “opercal” (Gordon’s odd coinage). A work like Intimate Apparel adds the perennial conundrum of how to diversify audiences in America’s historically white temples of high culture like Lincoln Center. The Met-LCT New Works Program deserves credit for trying to seed a future for the art by commissioning new operas by select playwright-composer pairs. It’s a worthy mission. Yet it remains to be seen how much traction these commissions acquire in a culture with such a long record of marginalizing this kind of art. Photo: T. Charles Erickson Intimate Apparel Libretto by Lynn Nottage Music by Ricky Ian Gordon Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater 150 W. 65th St.

On the way to a play one day in early 2019, I climbed out of the subway at 8th Avenue and 44th St. and was stunned to see a massive, multi-story billboard with no writing on it, just a black-pen drawing of Michael Jackson striking one of his iconic dance poses in a plain, deep-red field. Billboards that size tend to cost in the six figures. “Is that what I think it is?” I asked my theater friend. “A teaser for the new Michael Jackson musical? Yes,” he answered. What stumped me was why producers would shell out such serious money so soon after Dan Reed’s 4-hour HBO documentary Leaving Neverland dropped a bombshell of damning evidence of child abuse by Jackson, including extensive interviews with two grown men (Wade Robson and James Safechuck) describing detailed inappropriate boyhood encounters with the star. I’d read industry reports that the Jackson-musical project (then called Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough) would be withdrawn, either for a thorough makeover or possibly cancellation. “Maybe they rented the billboard before the dam burst?” I ventured. “Or maybe they know something we don’t know,” replied my friend, more prescient than he understood. The Jackson Estate went into overdrive in 2019 trying to rescue the star’s reputation. They denied all the allegations, maligned Robson and Safechuck, sued HBO, financed a counter-documentary, and seeded a public backlash that became racially tinged. How dare a white filmmaker and two white nobodies take down a beloved Black media idol whose rise to stardom meant overcoming entrenched racism in the music industry? Jackson’s music sales ended up increasing 10% that year, according to Billboard. The Estate dug in, determined to outshout, outspend and discredit all public voices friendly to the accusations. With the musical back in development, I was cautiously impressed to learn that the playwright Lynn Nottage—an artist of proven conscience and moral substance—had decided to stay on as retitled MJ’s book writer despite a fan outcry against her for sympathizing with Robson and Safechuck. Furious Jackson fans had clamored for her to be fired because she’d said publicly she found them truthful. Michael Paulson’s interview with Nottage and the show’s eminent choreographer/director Christopher Wheeldon, published in The New York Times on April 23, 2019, suggested that they both strongly believed in contextualization rather than cancellation, as I do. They are worth quoting at length: NOTTAGE We’re not journalists. Folks have to remember we’re theater artists that are examining the life of this very complicated artist. We can ask certain questions, but our job is not to answer those questions. My job is to reflect and interrogate and present. WHEELDON And paint a balanced picture. Yes, lean into the complexities, lean into the darkness, but also recognize the great amount of music and film and choreography that Michael left behind. Did the estate put any restrictions on what you could address? NOTTAGE No, they absolutely didn’t. Up until this point they have not, and I don’t believe they will. Initially when we sat down to do this musical we really had a very honest conversation with the estate — that if we can’t tell this full story then perhaps we are not the right people to do it. They know who I am as a writer. I’m very deeply invested in approaching my work with honesty and integrity. * * * Some fans are calling for you to be fired. NOTTAGE There will be people from every side who, no matter what we create, will condemn us, and we are prepared to enter into that very difficult space in order to make art. The fan base is intense. NOTTAGE I would ask that the fans be respectful to the process, and trust us as artists. And I do in some ways feel up to the challenge of telling this story, as scary as it is, because of the great divide that exists. But, in this day and age, I feel like if we as artists run away from complexity, then who are we? Well, I don’t know if I count as a fan but I’ve been respectful to the process. I’ve waited eagerly all through the pandemic theater closure to see what this impressive creative duo would do to lean into those complexities. Yet now that I’ve seen MJ, I can report with deep discomfort that it studiously, even defiantly, avoids them. The show is a dazzling, three-hour exercise in ignoring the elephant in the room, never once referring to the child-abuse charges, or Jackson’s death at age 50 from drugs. It gently drops a few general insinuations (e.g. “What do you have to say about the recent allegations” and “there are a lot of strange stories making the rounds”) only to brush them off with equivocation and bluster (“You have no idea the hell this man is going through, do you?”). Far from a balanced picture, MJ paints a disturbingly sanitized one that amounts to extravagant reputation-laundering. It should be said that the show is very entertaining. It features splendidly performed versions of 37 Jackson songs—each a powerful reminder of his remarkable presence in pop culture over four decades. The beauty, energy, innovation and, yes, the range and complexity, of his catalogue are on impressive display. Myles Frost, a Broadway newcomer playing the main Michael in his 30s (there are two others of younger ages), is a uniquely dynamic performer: a superb impersonator who thrills with the grace and accuracy of his dead-on vocals and dance moves, and also a comparably odd, can’t-look-away, chiseled-gamine physical type. Then there’s the dance. Wheeldon’s stunning choreography shrewdly expands on Jackson’s famous video and concert numbers and wisely emphasizes their theatrical roots in Fosse. I’m more than willing to concede that Jackson was a great artist, possibly a genius. There’s no need to deny that in order to object to this musical. The problem is in its denials and erasures, its tacit pretense that Leaving Neverland never existed. Had Nottage written exactly the same evasive book for MJ in 2018, sanctifying the subject as she does and insisting that all that matters is the art (Michael: “Listen to my music, it answers any questions you might have”), I would’ve congratulated her and wished her joy on the way to the bank. Our current moment demanded something more—especially given the sustained assault on truth and factuality we’ve been living through in the larger culture. Short of retooling this show entirely—making it, say, into a frank exploration of Jackson’s psychology and sexuality—the fitting and tasteful choice would have been to put MJ on hold. Let some time pass, enough for the child-abuse claims to settle on the public consciousness and take a place in Jackson’s posthumous profile that felt sufficiently debated. Imagine a worst case where the claims were eventually accepted as true by most people. I suspect that even then, a theatrical celebration of the Jackson song catalogue five or ten years down the road would have been welcomed without major outcry. That’s what dramaturgs are for: to write contextualizing program essays! To mount such a show now, however, just as the theater industry is emerging from long shutdown and reaching for truth about the worth and importance of its living, striving Black theater artists, amounts to unseemly. It comes off as a venal attempt to hide inconvenient truths and protect a lucrative brand at all costs. More. Hearing the defiant call-outs and cheers from fans all around me at the Neil Simon Theatre for every vague boast and self-justification from Frost-as-Michael (“My goal is to love our planet, foster racial tolerance and global unity”; “I love being a Black man, it hurts when people say otherwise”; “There’s been some dark struggles...Things I can’t...”) I was reminded of nothing so much as a Trump rally. Post-factuality is a political strategy—a calculated effort to spin an alternative narrative based on deceptively framed or cherry-picked “alternative facts” and thereby galvanize a tribe around shared grievances and the glorification of a savior-hero. The savior-hero treats compulsory forgetting as a loyalty test. I’d love to believe that phenomenon is not what I was witnessing in the feverishly vocal MJ crowd, but it sure did feel that way. Photo: Matthew Murphy MJ Book by Lynn Nottage Directed and choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon Neil Simon Theatre 250 W. 52nd St.

Skeleton Crew is Dominique Morisseau’s best play so far. It’s the most streamlined work in her celebrated Detroit trilogy, more tightly plotted, surprising, and moving than either Detroit ’67 (2013) or Paradise Blue (2015), both of which struck me as heartfelt but also faintly explanatory. Morisseau is a gifted poet of Black vernacular in the vein of August Wilson and also a committed chronicler of modest and marginalized Black American lives whose consequentiality she has a knack for elucidating. Her loving empathy for her conflicted and vulnerable characters is always palpable. I sometimes find that the seams of her research show—particularly in a play like Pipeline (2017) whose story of a Black teenager who assaults a teacher at an elite boarding school was weakened by overt topicality. Skeleton Crew, by contrast, feels purely personal, inspired and propelled by first-hand experience. I missed this play when it premiered at the Atlantic Theater in 2016. Back then it was overshadowed in the press by Lynn Nottage’s Sweat—a play with very similar subject matter, also by a Black woman, which transferred from the Public Theater to Broadway and won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize. Both plays revolve around an imminent American factory closure during the 2008 financial crisis. Now Skeleton Crew is getting its Broadway premiere, and it’s satisfying to discover that Morriseau’s work deserves the attention just as much. Skeleton Crew takes place in the grungy breakroom of a Detroit auto plant where four employees gather to eat, change clothes, schmooze and thrash out their reactions to the awful closure news. There’s a plot involving theft of factory materials, one character’s homelessness, and a simmering love affair, all engaging enough, but what really matters in the end is the reveal of each character’s true inner fiber. All four could easily seem like formulaic types. Faye is the “tough as bricks,” 29-year veteran hoping to reach the 30-year mark to get a big pension bump. Reggie is the shirt-and-tie foreman who came up as a line worker and has close personal ties to Faye not fully explained until late in the play. Shanita is the sassy and visibly pregnant, conscientious model worker whose prophetic dreams about labor pains are a poetic symbol of thwarted potential. And Dez is the slick-talking, gun-packing youngster sweet on Shanita who hopes to work six more months to buy his own garage. Yes, all this may sound typical, but what’s fascinating is that none of it feels that way in performance. I gave a lot of thought to why. For one thing, Morisseau wrote the roles extraordinarily well, imagining all four so fully that they vibrate with inner life and also speak a consistently beguiling verbal jazz. But for another, this is an extraordinary cast, directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson (who also directed the Atlantic version with a different cast). Every actor contributes in a different way to the show’s splendid nuance. Phylicia Rashad is a star known mainly for her dignity and self-possession in dominant leading roles. Remarkably, her performance as Faye is unreservedly humble, gritty, sharp and electric but never exceeding the brassy scrappiness such a grunt worker and aging dyke might exhibit (i.e. to hint at hidden glamour or poise). In fact, the heartsoreness of the performance is so believable that the secret Faye keeps hidden the entire play (I’ll avoid a spoiler here) carries an extra zing of amazement in the end. Everyone—characters and audience—must spend the last scene reflecting back on what we overlooked in her past words and actions. Brandon J. Dirden is just as clear and precise as Reggie, an ideal part for him. This actor excels in roles—such as Brutus in Julius Caesar and Agent Aderholt in The Americans—where sensitivity and brutality collide in a crisis of self-image. That pretty much sums up Reggie, an earnest and honest foreman used as a cat’s paw by management. Watch the subtle shifts of mood and tactic that Dirden’s Reggie deploys to get through to all the very different employees. Most impressive are the cracks in his proud control that arise with Faye, who accepts his exceptional softness all along but ultimately takes advantage of him. The younger actors, Joshua Boone as Dez and Chanté Adams as Shanita, are both excellent too, though their roles involve less elliptical journeys. These two basically circle one another, showing only their tough survival exteriors until they feel safe enough to come together and trust. It helps a lot that Boone and Adams have some hot chemistry as we root for them in their slow-approach dance. The one puzzle of the production is its use of supplementary music and dance not called for in the script. The show begins with a slick robot dance by a performer dressed in factory clothes (Adesola Osakalumi), who returns with more bot moves behind the blurry breakroom windows during scene transitions as harsh metal and punk music plays. These transitions are obviously meant to underscore the repetitive, machine-like nature of labor in the plant, as they’re accompanied by projections of moving machinery around the proscenium. Unfortunately, they feel clumsily imported from Expressionist drama—a movement interested mainly in types—and thus clash awkwardly with Skeleton Crew’s intense realism and vitally individual characters. Photo: Matthew Murphy Skeleton Crew By Dominique Morisseau Samuel J. Friedman Theatre 261 W. 47th St.

As most people reading this will already know, Company was first reworked for a female Bobbie (previously male Bobby) in 2018. Stephen Sondheim collaborated on a revision with the director Marianne Elliott that ran for 5 months in the West End. I remember thinking that the gender-switch for the lead character was a smart idea and was really looking forward to the Broadway version starring Katrina Lenk, which had 9 previews in March 2020 and then went into Covid hibernation until opening last week. I can now affirm that the gender switch was indeed an interesting twist, an experiment worth trying. What I’m less sure of is whether the celebrated play still deserves its lofty reputation. In 1970, when it premiered, Company was hailed as proof that musicals had finally grown up. It had unusually complex subject matter for the time—ambivalence about marriage as an institution and personal choice—and that theme tapped powerful social undercurrents from the sexual revolution and the just burgeoning national tide of divorce. The show became popular, several of its gorgeous and memorable Sondheim songs standards of the musical hit parade. Those songs were always the true source of the show’s air of maturity and gravity, as the book by George Furth was a loosely connected string of lightweight vignettes about 5 married couples who swirl around Bobby and vaunt their peccadilloes. Critics said Sondheim had invented a whole new theme-based “concept” paradigm for musicals. I was too young to see Hal Prince’s original production. I first saw Company in the 1995 Roundabout revival directed by Scott Ellis, when I was the same age as Bobby, whose 35th birthday is the show’s fulcrum. Most of its vignettes and songs use the caricatured couples either to ask whether marriage is worth the effort or to draw Bobby out about why he can’t commit to anyone. Sondheim and Furth (who died in 2008) revised the book to update the play’s environment—adding phone answering machines, for instance, changing “girls” to “women,” and inserting a few nods to AIDS. It was abundantly clear, though, that the basic premise came from the world of 1970. The 1995 trappings were overlaid on a dated social ground. That is exactly how the current revival feels too. Bobbie is now a she, the couples have become interracial, in one case gay, and everyone has cellphones so dating starts with swiping right and left. Yet every scene still treats singleness as an anomaly or social aberration that the couples—presumed ambassadors of normalcy—feel obligated to ameliorate. That made a kind of sense right up to the inauguration of divorcee Ronald Reagan. After that, not so much. Today, with half of us ruing the end of privacy and the other half compulsively sharing too much online, the spectacle of five couples harping on Bobbie’s singleness feels like oblivious badgering. Lenk’s Bobbie never has a chance to fear intimacy because she’s too busy fending off flagrant, belted-out insensitivity by her loving frenemies. There are a few gains to the gender switch. Feminism, alas, never lessened the terror many unpartnered women in their 30s feel about passing their sell-by dates, so the urgency of Bobbie’s 35th birthday takes on a new focus here. Lenk’s character is crowded in her tiny kitchen by increasingly enormous numeral balloons, and ultimately attacks them with a knife. When Bobbie’s friends call her the “perfect babysitter” and wax nostalgic about her taking their kids to the zoo, that has a looming-baby-clock aftertaste it lacked when Bobby’s friends said it. All the passages about Bobbie’s casual sex life take on new color too, because they’re filtered through our female gender assumptions. One gag is a possible improvement: it’s slightly less of a cliché for Bobbie to date a hunky airhead male flight attendant (played by Claybourne Elder) than for Bobby to date a bombshell-female one. A change I’d call a clear improvement is the new version of “Getting Married Today”—Sondheim’s famous patter song about wedding-day cold feet, originally sung by the manic character Amy. This number, a show-stopper, was always a red herring, frequently cited as proof that Company’s plot had no coherence. Amy has now become Jamie (Matt Doyle), about to marry Paul (Etai Benson) in a gay wedding that wasn’t possible back in 1995. The reworked song thus brings a surprising new dash of coherence: to the play’s list of marriage qualms we may now add current anxieties over how legal marriage may erode gay lifestyles (Jamie: “Just because we can doesn’t mean we should”). Doyle’s 200-words-a-minute rendition is a tour de force of panicked hilarity. It must be said that the gender-switch doesn’t always scan. The husbands are all such buffoons, for instance, that the multiple hints at possible hanky-panky between them and Bobbie make no emotional sense. She sings about their attractions in “Someone is Waiting”—“My loyal David, Loving Paul, Cute Jamie, Happy Peter, Handsome Larry, Wait for me”—but it comes off as pure rhetoric. Lenk’s Bobbie is charming but much more isolated emotionally than the male Bobbys I’ve seen (including Boyd Gaines in 1995). She seems cut off from real intimacy not just with her lovers but with everyone, emphatically including her friends. So then, what’s the point? I wanted to ask. It was Bobby’s affectionate friendships that brought warmth and poignancy to Company. That’s what made the mood of the final number “Being Alive” hopeful: Bobby was a demonstrably loving person who finally accepted that he had to let a life partner in. Now “Being Alive” is all resentment and anger. Lenk dashes back and forth across the stage literally pushing her 10 friends away, and that leaves the play feeling acrid and harsh. Its take-away, to me, is that everyone really should leave her alone. Photo: Matthew Murphy Company Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim Book by George Furth Directed by Marianne Elliott Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre 242 W. 45th St.

No living playwright deserves the lights, fame and flattery of Broadway more than Lynn Nottage. She’s a decorated writer of conscience and intense moral exploration (with Pulitzers for Ruined and Sweat) who also has a crack TV-writer’s gift for smart, nimble banter and distinct, memorably complicated characters. It’s very cool that her new play Clyde’s came straight to Broadway rather than opening downtown, because I think it has a shot of running for a while there. Imagine a Black woman playwright with box office clout in America. That would explode the collective brain of the commercial producing cabal! Clyde’s is the broadest comedy Nottage has written, and Kate Whoriskey’s direction broadens it still more. If that worries you, let it go. The show is remarkably thoughtful, fierce, and grounded, and its big production choices feel exactly right for the material. The cast is exceptionally fine and they justify all the amplifications with precise expressive gags, tics and eccentricities that they clearly came up with themselves. The action takes place in the kitchen of a truckstop diner in Berks County, PA, where every employee is an ex-con. Over 95-minutes, we learn their luckless and pitable back-stories. The proprietor Clyde, who treats everyone as insignificant and replaceable, also did time, though we have to guess why. She gives ambiguous answers and her hard-boiled meanness is legendary. What’s more, the kitchen isn’t wholly realistic. Vaguely miraculous events and dozens of sudden, spectacular lighting cues make clear that we’re in a sort of limbo or purgatory and Clyde may be the devil. Uzo Aduba’s Clyde is a tightly wound tangle of bellicosity and spite. Because she hires ex-cons fresh out of prison when no one else will, you first expect her to have a soft side, but that’s soon dashed. She berates Letitia (Kara Young) for lateness, knowing full well she’s a single mother with patchy child care whose crime was stealing drugs for her chronically ill daughter that insurance wouldn’t pay for (along with “some oxy and addy to sell on the side”). She also scolds and beats Rafael (Reza Salazar), though he’s obviously just a sweet, romantic kid whose offence was getting high and robbing a bank with his nephew’s BB gun to get money to buy his girlfriend an expensive dog (and accidentally shooting a security guard in the mouth with a BB). Young and Salazar are so endearing in these roles that it’s tempting to read Clyde’s persecution routine as a game. The kitchen’s pass-through window, for instance, becomes a site for Clyde (who for some reason is the diner’s only waiter) to play at being hateful. She periodically shows up abruptly there just to scare the daylights out of others. At one point she maliciously posts a handful of order tickets there one at a time, ducking out of sight after each bell ring, so that Rafael has to run back and forth from the grill to pick the tickets up. She also keeps appearing in new flashy outfits (designed by Jennifer Moeller). Two other ingredients are dropped into this comic-toxic solution that threaten to destabilize it. One is Montrellous, an unflappable and sagacious sandwich connoisseur—played with butter-smooth suaveness by Ron Cephas Jones—whom the other kitchen-workers idolize. He constantly proposes new menu items to lift the diner’s profile (and the staff’s dignity) and is repeatedly slapped down by Clyde. Montrellous: Maine lobster, potato roll gently toasted and buttered with roasted garlic, paprika and cracked pepper with truffle mayo, carmelized fennel and a sprinkle of...of...dill . . . Clyde: Where’s my ham and cheese on white? (Reverberating) NOW! The other ingredient is Jason—the only white character, played with wiry poise by Edmund Donovan—whose arms and face are covered with white-supremacist tats and who comes close to a violent faceoff with Clyde. Jason turns out to be the character from Sweat who, enraged at the loss of his factory job, went to prison for attacking a Columbian-American busboy. In Clyde’s he’s fraught with regret and trying to move on. Another playwright—maybe even Nottage at another time—would have taken these elements and forced them into a tidy and purposeful plot. Interestingly enough, Nottage doesn’t do that. Instead she de-racializes the tension—at one point Jason just tearfully confesses and apologizes to Montrellous as if to his busboy-victim—and then lets Montrellous’s challenge to Clyde linger, resound, and hang in the air for whatever we want to make of it. The play does have a climax of sorts involving a showdown over pickle relish and Montrellous’s latest exquisite sandwich, but it’s more a coup de théâtre than a ringing moral. My reading is that Montrellous has a sort of humble superpower that comes from his ability to concentrate, focus on a chosen task and accomplish it well even if others think it’s unimportant. In other words, he’s an artist whose materials happen to be sandwich ingredients. Many of his lines even sound lifted straight from a creative workshop: he keeps it gentle and positive, speaks to people’s strengths if he criticizes them, encourages them to believe in themselves, and (mostly important) makes clear that talent isn’t enough. You also need perseverance, sometimes the unreasonable and stubborn kind, to make art or live life well. Jason: So you don’t like it. Montrellous: I didn’t say that. You want it to do too much, and didn’t trust yourself with the ingredients. Let the natural flavors do the work. You put everything into this one sandwich. Edit. Pull back. Over complication obscures the truth. Amen. Photo: Joan Marcus Clyde's By Lynn Nottage Second Stage/Helen Hayes Theater

No production this fall had me more excited than Trouble in Mind, a pinnacle of the Black American canon that I’ve never seen. The play is the stuff of theater lore because of its cancellation 64 years ago on Broadway; in 1957 the author Alice Childress famously refused to soften its ending to please her producers. Strangely enough, I’ve now attended the long-delayed Broadway premiere—produced by the Roundabout Theatre to much fanfare amid an epochal national reckoning on racial justice—and yet feel I still haven’t seen the play. Trouble in Mind is a backstage story. Four Black actors and two white ones arrive at rehearsals for the Broadway production of a new play called Chaos in Belleville with “an anti-lynch theme.” It’s about a young Black man who dares to vote in the deep South and pays for it with his life. The lead actress Wiletta Mayer has no illusions about this play—“it stinks, ain’t nothin’ atall”—but the actors need the work and try their best to please the smug martinet of a (white) director, Al Manners, who invested in the play and thinks it’s genius. We hear the Black actors grumbling about their powerlessness in the industry, the paucity of fully dimensional Black roles, the demoralizing persistence of stereotypes, but they mostly keep it to themselves. The delicate conciliatory equilibrium is destroyed when Wiletta can’t stomach the play’s lies and distortions anymore and calls out Manners for his obliviousness and unacknowledged racism. I remember first reading Trouble in Mind decades ago and wondering how it would work in performance, because it contains two different actions artfully braided together. One is the slow-building showdown between Wiletta and Manners, which tracks with her gradual political awakening and climaxes with her blast at white liberal hypocrisy. The other is a subtler story of disharmony among the actors that carries much of the play’s nuance. The white actors and younger Black one, John, are all schooled in the American Method technique and its jargon (“justification,” “motivation”), whereas the older Blacks—Wiletta, Millie and Sheldon—have been performing just fine without formulas or jargon their whole lives. Manners, a smug and insecure creature of Hollywood, wields the newfangled “methods” (such as emotional recall and using insult to get an emotional rise) merely as tools for browbeating and getting his way, and Wiletta sees through him. Yet he succeeds in turning the actors against one another anyway by making some feel smarter than others. John, we’re told in a stage direction, has grown “ashamed” of Wiletta and Sheldon in Act 2. This division lingers at the end of the play, to the benefit, I can imagine, of all those who will go on belittling, stereotyping, and sidelining Black artists in the theater. My impression of Charles Randolph-Wright’s Roundabout production is that it brilliantly clarifies and dignifies the first of these actions—the showdown on racist attitudes—but neglects and obscures the other story of actor misconnections. The result is that it’s often hard to know what’s going on. LaChanze is excellent as Wiletta Mayer. A musical theater dynamo with a rich, earthy voice and broad emotional range, she brings warmth, authority and real star power to a role that calls for an aging and vulnerable star to sacrifice everything for a moral principle. Randolph-Wright knows how to frame LaChanze’s sort of zinger bon mots and soulful singing turns so that we thoroughly enjoy Wiletta and look forward to her defiance of Manners. Chuck Cooper is her perfect complement as Sheldon, a jovial journeyman actor who seems a consummate go-along-to-get-along guy until he shocks everyone late in the play by describing an actual lynching he witnessed as a boy. Cooper delivers this speech with such heart, gravity, and desolation that it rises to a transcendent indignation parallel with Wiletta’s outburst. The explicit social protest dimension of the show, in other words, comes through loud and clear. I defy anyone who has not read Trouble in Mind, however, to discern the crucial details of shifting power and respect among the cast. Brandon Micheal Hall plays John, for example, as a starstruck puppy who is exactly as devoted and deferential to Wiletta in the end as in the beginning. No trace of shame or pretension either in his version of John or Danielle Campbell’s version of Judy, the white ingenue fresh out of Yale whom John has a crush on. All the play’s shop-talk exchanges are flattened, delivered at the same even-toned emotional pitch, and rushed through as if the stakes don’t matter. At one point, Randolph-Wright has four actors, ostensibly in earnest conversation, just stand in a line downstage and speak straight into the house. The moment is so artificial it seems designed to deny connections among the characters. Among the most confusing scenes are those when the actors read passages from Chaos in Belleville. Granted, the irksome Manners (played with appropriate condescension by Michael Zegen) constantly interrupts and hectors so the actors never have a chance to relax into character. Still, Randolph-Wright has them speed through their rehearsed lines with such exaggerated affect and preplanned contempt that you can’t even understand the story, let alone decide whether the author of Chaos is a sincere failure or a sanctimonious hack. Here again, the fine-grained reality of the rehearsal room—engine of the play’s deepest drama—is blurred by sweeping, broad strokes. Powerful and timely as it still is—and its prescient attack on structural racism has not dated—there is a patina of age on Trouble in Mind, a slight creakiness in its storytelling pace and 1950s social details. You can well imagine this worrying a director. The way to solve it for performance, though, is surely to invest wholeheartedly in the particularity of the play’s world and try to bring it alive again, not to dodge or ignore it. Condemning racism is only one goal of this knotty and troubling play. It also explores racism’s roots, which are always in failures of connection between people. We have to feel those connections before we can be deeply moved by their failure. Photo: Joan Marcus Trouble in Mind by Alice Childress directed by Charles Randolph-Wright American Airlines Theatre/Roundabout Theatre Company

You may have noticed that we’re living through an epistemic crisis—a disorienting mass anxiety over the status of facts and the verifiability of knowledge. Whatever reassurance any of us might draw these days from, say, the return of scientists and other experts to positions of clout, we’re all well aware that their stature is fragile and that the loutish Legions of Truthiness are massing just outside the gates. Walking out of Dana H. and Is This A Room last week—two extraordinary “verbatim plays” playing in repertory at the Lyceum Theatre on Broadway—it occurred to me that this awful, looming disquiet is actually an ideal environment for documentary theater. Documentary theater loosely means any play rooted in the technical recording of reality, be it interviews, videos, transcripts of trials and hearings, recordings of conversations, etc., which theatermakers shape into dramatic form and perform with live actors. It’s been around since the mid 20th century. The commonest misconception about it is that its goals are primarily journalistic: revealing important new facts from the stage with the sexy help of name-brand actors. In fact, the best documentary plays are much slyer than that. Their special power is in the fascinating fractures they open up between what their recordings present as factual truth and the rich ambiguities of their stage presentations, which invariably evoke the myriad ways facts are skewed, fudged, spun, varnished, exaggerated, misconstrued, what have you. This is just the sort of fracture we’re all hypersensitized to at the moment. Dana H. (which, like its companion piece, was a downtown hit at the Vineyard Theater before the pandemic) has been shaped as a play by the well-known dramatist Lucas Hnath, who is listed as its author in the program, and directed by Les Waters. Every word in it, however, originally came from an interview that the director Steve Cosson, Hnath’s frequent collaborator, conducted with Hnath’s mother Dana Higginbotham. Cosson questioned her about a harrowing experience she had while Hnath was in college of being kidnapped, psychologically and sexually abused, and held hostage for months by an obsessed, suicidal, ex-con white suprematist. Onstage we see the formidable actor Deirdre O’Connell impersonating Higginbottom in a seedy Florida motel-room designed by Andrew Boyce, but the voices we hear are entirely Cosson’s and Higginbotham’s, played on loudspeakers. O’Connell lip-synchs the text—bits of interview Hnath has stitched together—and channels Higginbotham’s traumatic experiences by filling them out with astonishingly compelling gestural and facial language. The result is a tour de force of a very peculiar kind. The story itself is riveting and sensational, raising timely and disturbing questions about female powerlessness, repressed PTSD, the weirdness of Florida, law enforcement complicity with the Aryan Brotherhood, and much, much more. It would certainly make for a great “60 Minutes” episode. But that’s not its emotional center. The heart of the piece is both in the fractures it pries open between reported and interpreted realities, life and performance, experience and memory, and also in the spectral nature of acting itself, where a human being represents an invisible other always hovering over the experience like a ghost. All this together lends the play’s urgent questions a stimulating air of openness and awareness of the slipperiness of truth. Why, one can’t help but ask, for instance, couldn’t Higginbotham ever tell this story directly to her son? Instead of posing that question directly, Dana H. lets it hang as a tacit mystery tucked into the unremarked, occasional presence of Cosson’s voice. It’s a much stronger choice than pressing the point directly. For one thing, it’s a light rather than heavy touch, always better where teaching in drama is concerned. For another, it introduces the interrogative shadow of therapy, inviting us to explore multiple contradictory truths the way therapy patients do, and actors, and frustrated children, instead of imposing any single one on us. The decision to have O’Connell act only physically but not vocally is a comparably brilliant stroke. Hearing Higginbotham’s words seem to emerge from O’Connell’s mouth is richer and more evocative than hearing her actually speak them. It recalls the disembodied experience of trauma more than full impersonation would, keeping us conscious the whole time of the reluctance trauma victims often have to report what happened to them, or even admit it to themselves. But more than that, it’s the eeriness of the experience that sticks with you: watching O’Connell’s lips move while hearing another’s voice, we imagine Higginbotham as a dematerialized presence—a specter—whose trauma is witnessed by O’Connell like Marley’s ghost. This show, I suspect, would be more likely to build empathy (as opposed to mere pity) than a raft of “60 Minutes” episodes. Is This A Room is a parallel marvel. Created in 2019 by Tina Satter with her company Half Straddle, it riffs on another recorded source with remarkable theatrical inventiveness. This material is the heavily redacted transcript of the FBI’s interrogation of Reality Winner on the day she was arrested for leaking confidential government documents about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. The subject of the filched documents is in fact never mentioned, and that's the first of the piece's fascinating fractures. A slide tells us the transcript came from a FOIA request, so we assume that the many buzzes and pink light flashes that keep interrupting the action indicate censored passages. That in turn continually reminds us of the U.S. government's clumsy attempts to hide the plainly political nature of the Winner's prosecution, which ended in the longest sentence ever imposed under the perennially contested Espionage Act (62 months). And yet that's just the piece's surface. Unlike in Dana H., the actors in Is This A Room fully enact their story. Emily Davis plays 25-year-old Winner, an ex-Air Force linguist fluent in Dari and Pashto working as an intelligence contractor, and she’s joined by a trio of FBI agents played by Pete Simpson, Will Cobbs and Becca Blackwell. Winner is petite and affable, dressed in a plain white shirt and cutoff shorts, and the men, all armed, one in Kevlar, approach her like any bad-ass malefactor, dodging and blustering, cajoling and looming, even flirting as if following a script. They do everything you expect except recognize the obviously unthreatening nature of the woman in front of them (notwithstanding the multiple firearms she tells them she owns). Only near the end do they let on they’re fully aware she’s just a rookie who got snagged on the loose nail of her conscience. Satter turns the halting and disjointed verbal encounter into a fascinatingly awkward dance. On a simple array of plain grey platforms, the actors lunge, feint, circle and stalk one another, shifting positions for what sometimes seem like purely emotional or arbitrary reasons. The cops invade Winner’s personal space much more severely than realism justifies. Then, about two thirds through, the polarity reverses and Winner is suddenly in their faces. The moment corresponds to the point when she realizes she’s trapped and fumbles to explain the moral principle behind her crime to the cops. Is her turnabout a fantasy? A wish? It doesn’t matter, for the beauty of theater is to give imaginative agency to the powerless. Anyone who’s been on the fence about seeing these plays during their final weeks at the Lyceum should get off it. Photos: Chad Batka Dana H. by Lucas Hnath, directed by Les Waters Is This A Room conceived and directed by Tina Satter Lyceum Theatre 149 W. 45th St.