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The Lehman Trilogy has shrunk since I last saw it at the Park Avenue Armory, in April 2019. Or maybe the world has grown bigger. The show is just as long as ever—three and a half hours—and all its theatrical virtues, the wonderful acting, setting and staging, are intact and still thrilling. But all the momentous events of the past two and a half years—the global pandemic, the violent election, the seismic racial reckoning—have seriously changed the environmental canvas on which plays spread out, and this one just doesn’t have the same grandeur as before. In 2019 The Lehman Trilogy swept me along handily in its grand, panoramic scope. I readily accepted it, with some caveats, as an epic story of American self-invention, bold ambition, shrewdly seized opportunity, and tragic downfall. Opening with a janitor cleaning up the Lehman Brothers office after the company’s shattering 2008 bankruptcy, the play flashed back to nervous Bavarian-Jewish immigrant Henry Lehman stepping off the boat in New York in 1844, and then launched into a 164-year-long tale explaining how he, his brothers and their progeny transformed a modest fabric shop in Alabama into a lucrative cotton merchandising business and eventually one of the largest investment banks in the U.S. The story struck me as iconic—pluck, energy and savvy conjuring something out of nothing, a trusty American myth pointedly retold through the lives of simple, decent men with rather straightforward capitalist ambitions and a nicely convenient ability to ignore snobbish exclusion. Even the play’s rushed Act 3 coda about the 2008 business collapse—treated as an avoidable tragedy about greed and moral laxity after the family relinquished control—carried me easily along on its tide of emotion. I loved the show’s theatrical ingenuity too. Three world-class actors—Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley and Ben Miles (now replaced by Adrian Lester)—played 70-odd characters while moving about an endlessly transformable rotating glass-cube, blending concise poetic dialogue with direct audience address, writing on the walls with markers, and manipulating file boxes to represent benches, counters, stairways and much more. Upstage massive, morphing projections of roiling oceans, blowing cotton fields, and twinkling cityscapes stunned with their gentle grandeur. The veteran director Sam Mendes and set designer Es Devlin have never done better work. The one major reservation critics had about the play in 2019 I shared: it all but avoided the role slavery played in generating the Lehmans’s gargantuan wealth. Ben Power (who adapted the play from Stefano Massini’s Italian original) made script changes to address this issue in 2021 and I was curious to hear them. They amount, alas, to a smattering of new, neutrally factual references plus the following lines addressed to Henry’s brother Mayer, which are uniquely harsh: Surely you knew it could not last, Mr Mayer? Everything that was built here was built on a crime. The roots run so deep you cannot see them but the ground beneath our feet is poisoned. It had to end this way. This is a worthy remark that smacks of sincere regret. But it barely scratches the surface of the critique this family’s cotton-based fortune deserves. Nor does the addition of Adrian Lester, a Black Briton, to the cast help at all. Like Beale and Godley, Lester plays so many different roles with power, precision, and grace that there’s no pointed social critique to his appearance. My disappointment in this Broadway remount isn’t about the slavery issue, though. It has to do with the broader matter of what the Lehmans represent. I find it hard, on second viewing, to accept this family’s string of scions—four-generations of them—as satisfying iconic Americans, which the play clearly intends. Every one of them dedicates his privileged life to the single-minded pursuit of business opportunity and profit. In the early 20th century, Bobby Lehman is presented as a possible exception, displaying a somewhat wider range of interests. A young man of twenty! a lover of horses and of drawing, Bobby enrolled at Yale! and immediately joined the most exclusive societies. He played polo with the heirs to noble families and spent his vacations in Europe. He wrote home about the modern paintings he acquired for the family collection: Cezanne…Matisse…Picasso … masterpieces.! Within minutes of this, though, Bobby too is folded into the warm embrace of perpetual acquisition, his broad cultural interests redirected toward cultural profits for good (“It’s time to bet on radio, moving pictures, theater. On entertainment”)—to the enormous relief of his father Philip. No other heir complicates the picture further. It’s possible, I suppose, that the Lehman family really is congenitally narrow in this way and, if so, shouldn’t a play featuring them offer some vantage point or platform for critique so we can put that in perspective? This play amounts to a paean. A friend of mine told me she found The Lehman Trilogy anti-Semitic because of its belabored insistence on the Jewish family’s greed and grasping. I’m usually sensitive to that dog whistle and didn’t hear it here. But I do feel that the Lehmans in the drama have too limited a human profile to carry the mantle of the American national character. A 90-minute play about narrow people who do noteworthy things can be amusing and interesting. Protagonists occupying us for three-and-a-half hours have to contain multitudes. That’s the way I feel now, at any rate, as all of us are coming out of hibernation and rethinking what it means to be a family members, professionals, artists. Americans. The bar is higher now. Photo: Juliana Cervantes The Lehman Trilogy By Stefano Massini, adapted by Ben Power Nederlander Theatre 208 W. 41st St. NYC

My first thought at the curtain call of Six: The Musical—the glittery, spangly, ear-splitting, surprisingly smart musical makeover of Henry VIII’s wives as girl-power pop stars that just arrived on Broadway after an 18-month delay—was that Lin-Manuel Miranda had worked too hard. Miranda took Broadway by storm by tapping a popular historical biography, Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton, as the prime source for a remarkably innovative historical musical that took six years to develop. Miranda checked and double-checked facts and read deeply in primary sources well beyond Chernow, forging a new theatrical form and staking new, diverse claims to hallowed national myths. He reportedly took a year just to fine-tune the number “My Shot.” Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, by contrast, created Six a few years ago as a larky school project when they were Cambridge University undergrads. It went to the Edinburgh Fringe, then exploded as a West End sensation and a popular tour and cruise show. Marlow and Moss didn’t sweat the library stuff much. She read Antonia Fraser’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII—a respected history meant to individualize the titular queens beyond their reductive generic labels “divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.” Moss’s pithy reaction: “Ooh, I think this could be cool, as a feminist thing.” Secondary sources here appear to be mostly Spotify, fanzines and music videos. The 80-minute show—which leaves Henry out, natch—has an all-women 4-piece band and needs nothing more than the rudimentary basics of each queen’s bio because its six characters are really pop stars engaged in a braggadocio song smackdown over whose life was most abysmal. Each is given a specific “queenspiration” (e.g. Beyoncé and Shakira for Catherine of Aragon, Lily Allen and Avril Lavigne for Anne Boleyn, Nicki Minaj and Rihanna for Anna of Cleves), which allows us to tell them apart as they brag over who “was dealt the worst hand.” This extraordinarily silly contrivance has no business working as well as it does. It glamorizes abjection, trivializes suffering, and rests on the decidedly weird premise that winning a prize for the greatest harm somehow advances the emancipatory cause of women. Yet none of that seems to matter much—for reasons I’ll speculate on. First, I think that because the show is short and its performers are all very strong vocalists, their solos grab focus and hold it. Second, once the solos are done, the conceit of the smackdown contest is dropped in favor of a spontaneous epiphany among the six, which many will see coming. Yes, they suddenly discover that their solidarity in reclaiming their individual stories from patriarchal history means more than winning! More on that in a sec. Third, we’re clearly not expected to follow the biographical details anyway, as the queens are mainly ciphers for the female-empowerment attitudes of their star alter egos: Aragon is regal and bossy, Boleyn sassy and sardonic, Cleves smugly self-satisfied, and so on. I, for one, couldn’t care less about these pop profiles. Yet despite that, I was mildly awed by the scores of young people around me at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre devotedly mouthing the lyrics as the actors sang, which continued throughout. I’d read that the cast album had been downloaded 100 million times since its release 3 years ago. Still, seeing that adoration in action, no doubt amplified by the release of bottled-up pandemic cabin fever, was a thrill in itself. I do recognize that not every new musical needs to be a Hamilton. Light entertainment has a place. Yet fluffy and lighthearted as Six obviously is, it does leave you wondering whether it has a valuable if vague feminist point—possibly tucked into its suggestion that, at least among celebrities, female solidarity can flourish now (unlike in the 16th century) and improve the world. Think of the hopes invested in Time’s Up! When I got home, as another check on this, I typed “do female pop stars support one another?” into the Google search box. The top result was a YouTube video of Ariana Grande gushing about Nicki Minaj: “I love that bitch so much! It’s crazy!!” Photo: Joan Marcus Six: The Musical By Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss Directed by Lucy Moss and Jamie Armitage The Brooks Atkinson Theatre

Bless me, reader, for I have slacked. It’s been 18 months since my last blog. I was too depressed and demoralized, sometimes too downright heartbroken actually, to muster the enthusiasm to write. My penance is . . . to write something. This space was conceived as a theater blog, and yes (in case you’re wondering) I saw a fair amount of the online theater that appeared during the pandemic. Some of it was good. Not enough. I won’t talk any of it down. All I’ll say is that it took seeing an extraordinary play live again—that’s live, rhymes with thrive—in real time, in the same room with a bunch of breathing, sweating, farting, cellphone-checking, pants-wearing—and vaccinated!—other people, to make me remember why the hell I used to do this. Like thousands of other people, I saw Pass Over three years ago. It came to Lincoln Center from Chicago, directed by Danya Taymor, and was then released as a film made by Spike Lee from the original 2017 Steppenwolf production (available on Amazon Prime). I really liked it then. But I was nevertheless totally unprepared for how moved I’d be at seeing it as the first twitching of life on post-Covid Broadway. Several of the big noisy musicals are already performing again, but at least for this emerging cave-dweller, it felt necessary and important to start with something emphatically poetic, unfrivolous, and recognizably attuned to the real-world upheavals we’ve all been living through. Pass Over is Antoinette Nwandu’s “conversation” with Waiting for Godot, as she has put it in various interviews. Two young Black men, Moses and Kitch, hang out on a street corner passing time with horseplay, word games and shared dreams of reaching the “promised land” if they could just “git up off dis block” and keep from being killed by “the po-pos.” On successive days, they’re visited by white characters—a white-suited, straw-hatted, faux-friendly man-boy named Mister and a shamelessly abusive cop named Ossifer (both played by the same actor, Gabriel Ebert)—who come and go freely. The biblical implications of Moses’s name grow more insistent as the play goes on. The biggest treats in it for me are the searing performances of Jon Michael Hill and Namir Smallwood, whose banter and byplay as Moses and Kitch have the physical precision and crack timing of tight comic duos like Laurel and Hardy, or probably more to the point, cartoon duos like Boris & Natasha or Daffy & Bugs. As touching and infectious as their intimate emotional connection is, the play isn’t completely realistic, so their emotion has to emerge from their repertoire of private routines involving shifty hats, moody glances, cocky struts, and much more. Just as important, they’re both superb at turning the rhythms and cadences of Nwandu’s language (a sort of clipped street talk in verse) into sensuous verbal music. The steady breeze of that music is a major propulsive force in the play that seems to drive the pair toward self-respect and survival. Mister and Ossifer, to all appearances, can’t even perceive, let alone enjoy it. There have been many explicit playwriting responses to Godot over the years. To me most have been woefully unsatisfying. Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is probably the most famous and I always found it overlong, mired in intellectual display, and infatuated with its own profundity. Miodrag Bulatovic’s Godot Came typifies another occasional approach: the topical sequel play. A parody of the repressive political machinery of 1960s Yugoslavia, this work irritates with bottomless cynicism, evoking the celebrated openness of Beckett’s nonspecific landscape only to mock and constrict it with overlaid topicality. Remarkably, Pass Over has none of these problems. The whole work feels original, organic, vital, and necessary. It can drop all the topical references to contemporary America it wants—to Mormon missionaries, Domino Pizza, Air Jordans, Whitney Houston, what have you—and still move us to tears with its suggestion that the misery in it might just be as immutable and abiding as the frustration, failure and decay in store for all of us. Nwandu has said that her conversation with Beckett about Godot began years ago with wondering where Black American experience intersects with the play. Didi and Gogo, she told Vulture, represented “the height of white western anxiety—the fact that these two men might be abandoned by God. It’s a terrible, existential feeling. But I looked up at them, and I was like, Wait, but they still get to be old. If they were Black, these characters wouldn’t be old.” The consequence was that her “tramp” characters would not only be abandoned, betrayed and bored like Beckett’s but also threatened by sudden, violent death at all times—death from “po-pos,” gangs, drug dealers, it doesn’t matter. They’re always precarious and exposed on their forlorn city block. Through all of Pass Over’s developmental phases, this basic circumstance hasn’t changed. Interestingly enough, though, Nwandu has substantially rewritten the text for each of its three major productions, each time tweaking the plot’s Black/white confrontation, particularly the ending, in different ways. The Steppenwolf version was the most polemical, a deliberately MAGA-defying cold-blooded murder of uppity Moses by Mister, essentially a lynching. The LCT3 version was a shade lighter, with Mister expressing helpless regret for the unceasing murders of Black men in the world. Now the Broadway version is brighter again, offering a relatively upbeat coup de théâtre that suggests paradisiacal redemption after trauma. Nwandu says that in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and all the other wrenching events of 2020-21, she wanted a healing ending that “will help bring joy and beauty and laughter and a little bit of grace and a little bit of Afrofuturism to any audience member, regardless of their race.” I can’t say much more on this without dropping spoilers. But I do want to observe how telling it is that none of the three endings affect the play’s core power. That power, interestingly enough, doesn’t depend on the ending because its generative source is the play’s disturbing basic conception, which tacitly compares Didi and Gogo’s incurable condition of waiting to the presumably incurable condition of structural racism behind Moses and Kitch’s suffering. Nwandu can suggest as many different liberatory releases from those conditions as she likes in her different endings. The foundation of her beautiful tragicomic drama will still be painfully tragic. Photos: Joan Marcus Pass Over By Antoinette Nwandu Directed by Danya Taymor August Wilson Theatre

Ivo van Hove’s retooled version of West Side Story opened a little more than two weeks ago and has already triggered such a gale of buzz, gossip, criticism and debate that the veritable storm of opinions is as interesting as any single opinion in itself. The Playbill.com list of reviews for this show is about twice as long as for any other on Broadway, and it doesn’t include feature and preview articles. I usually wait until after I’ve seen a play to read about it but in this case I felt so soaked with the discussion already that I gave in and decided to try absorbing it. As I took my seat the night before last, the pans and raves were sloshing around my brain, competing for synapse-space with all my vivid memories of seeing the show twice before on Broadway (once directed by Jerome Robbins, once by Arthur Laurents), seeing the film at least half a dozen times, and playing Chino in high school (dejectedly because the girl I loved starred as Maria; Chino, for the 1% who don’t know, was the killer of Tony and Maria’s forced match.) I’m delighted to report that all this distraction left my head after about 10 or 15 minutes. The show may have its weak spots—all well described by many critics. But from “The Dance at the Gym” on I let them go and succumbed to the powerful spell and breathtaking sweep of the thing. This West Side Story has passages of tremendous beauty entirely distinct from those in past productions, and a few standout performances. To damn or praise it unequivocally seems to me to distort what’s really there. Anyone who’s been following Van Hove over the years—and his 10 previous U.S. productions date back to 1996—knows basically what to expect by now. He uses video unsparingly and typically reimagines classic American dramas by discarding their familiar settings and retrofitting their characters with expressly contemporary behavior. He’s no stickler for interpretive detail. He doesn’t care, for instance, if the price of one transcendently revamped scene is that two others go limp or incoherent. To like him is to believe the gains outweigh the losses, so no one had any reason to expect uniform perfection in this West Side Story. What the show has provided is a must-see, must-discuss spectacle: the encounter of a famously naughty Belgian who likes to break things with a beloved American chestnut that’s been heretofore left more or less intact. It’s a worthwhile experiment—overdue by some measures, since five essentially straight Broadway productions preceded this experimental one—which dares us to interpret its outcome in different ways. The resulting public conversation is the show’s signal glory. Like the banana the artist Maurizio Cattelan duct-taped to a wall at Art Basel last fall (and sold for $120,000), Van Hove’s West Side Story has sparked an extraordinary discussion that wouldn’t have happened without it. Regardless what you think of the show, conversation is always healthy. Criticism, as we all know, is a degraded and endangered phenomenon. (That’s the main reason I do my TheaterMatters panels.) Yet here is a roomy raft of smart voices responding to the buzz of an art event by weighing in intelligently on a host of vital and important questions. For an eloquent discussion of the show’s “decolonizing” ambition, its use of diverse casting and location video to “scramble our racial signals” and blur the distinction between the Sharks and Jets, read David Cote’s essay in 4 Columns. For an acute take on the controversy surrounding the casting of the expelled-then-reinstated NYC Ballet dancer Amar Ramasar as Bernardo, read Helen Shaw in Vulture. For a cutting and passionate pan of the production’s oversized video, read Ben Brantley in the New York Times. And for an equally passionate celebration of the same thing, read Robert Hofler in The Wrap. I had thought full-dress, long-form essays on contemporary theater had vanished forever from the few intellectual monthlies that survive in America. I thought wrong. Check out Daniel Pollack-Pelzner’s outstanding piece in The Atlantic examining the sublimated queerness behind West Side Story’s use of ethnic stereotypes. This sort of discursive beehive, now rare, was once common in our theater. Its reappearance is a cause for celebration. West Side Story photos: Adam Rodriguez/Jan Versweyveld Cattalan photo: Rhona Wise/EPA-EFE West Side Story Book by Arthur Laurents Music by Leonard Bernstein Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim Directed by Ivo Van Hove #westsidestory #ivovanhove #arthurlaurents #leonardbernstein #stephensondheim

Documentary theater’s special power and credibility have always come from an appeal to fact. The problem is, the current moment of obscene public dishonesty and mass polarization presents very tricky conditions for such an art. How do you make a wide appeal to Fact when millions now mistrust authority and automatically believe the other side’s information is bogus? Verbatim interviews, court testimony, public documents and the like once provided reliable theatrical bona fides—as recently as 5 or 10 years ago! Today their credit is decidedly contingent. Supposedly hard evidence presented onstage can now seem soft, subject to doubts, from all sides, about how it was selected and manipulated for theatrical presentation. Coal Country, Jessica Blank and Eric Jensen’s new documentary piece at the Public Theater, deals with the Upper Big Branch Mine explosion in 2010 that killed 29 men in West Virginia. It is a work of unquestionable compassion and good will, built from interviews with victims’ families and court documents. Eight actors portray seven interviewees plus a judge, and the spoken testimony alternates with seven gorgeously gruff and tender country songs written and performed by Steve Earle. For all its empathy, benevolence and musical beauty, however, Coal Country feels anomalously limited in the end, even a tad evasive. It leaves troubling political questions about the narrowness of its concept and frame. First, credit and respect. Blank and Jensen are practically folk heroes to many for their magnificent, eye-and-soul-opening documentary play The Exonerated (2000), which used first-person narratives and legal records from wrongfully convicted death-row inmates to change minds, hearts and laws. That show, performed by actors speaking from humble stools, often with scripts in hand, was a pinnacle of documentary theater, and helped save innocent lives. Coal Country is in the more polished style of the couple’s 2009 piece Aftermath, which was built from interviews with Iraqi refugees living in Jordan and used actors in full costume performing amid projections and location-setting furniture. Coal Country’s actors are dressed as ordinary West Virginians and speak both alone on the empty stage backed by broken wood slats, in pairs and threesomes, and in musical sequence with Earle’s singing and strumming. At one point the group performs a tightly choreographed number flinging metal benches about to approximate dangerous mining maneuvers. The show starts with a foot-tapping song about the legendary miner-hero John Henry which sounds the theme of tough human workers threatened by automation and callous companies. The actors then tell personal stories that fill in the overarching backstory of a poor but intact single-industry community sapped and damaged by a new local employer, Massey Energy, even before the Upper Big Branch explosion. After purchasing the lucrative Upper Big Branch from a unionized company, Massey broke the union, neglected the mine’s ventilation systems and safety procedures, and misled federal safety inspectors to ensure uninterrupted production. The workplace was “a ticking time bomb,” as one character says, that workers couldn’t avoid because the town had no other employer. After the disaster, Massey added insult to injury by trying to silence the survivors. Public outrage was so furious, however, that CEO Don Blankenship was prosecuted. He was convicted on one of three counts, a misdemeanor of conspiring to violate mine safety standards, and served a year in prison with a $250,000 fine. Blankenship, who never appears, is the villain of the piece. We get to know Goose (Michael Gaston), a third-generation miner and star athlete who is outspoken about Massey’s working conditions and says they remind him of his grandfather’s tales from the pre-union 1920s. Goose’s wife Mindi (Amelia Campbell) describes their modest, loving life together and pleads with him not to return to work. Tommy Davis (Michael Laurence), another third-generation miner who vividly describes the fearsome darkness and danger underground, lost three family members in the explosion. Roosevelt Lynch (Ezra Knight) and Gary Quarles (Thomas Kopache) unforgettably evoke the 1000-foot “longwall” three miles underground, where a 100-ton machine shears hot coal “like a cheese slicer.” These characters are all richly detailed and deeply sympathetic. The acting is uniformly strong. And Earle’s music adds variety and complexity to spoken texts that might otherwise tend toward sameness and sentimentality. The song “Time is Never on Your Side” is heartbreakingly mournful: “The morning that the world began/ God reached out and closed his hand/ And when it opened up again/ A moment vanished in the wind.” The miners’ deaths register as terrible, momentous events amid this music. How admirable it was of Blank and Jensen to reach out to people from a part of America so deeply and famously suspicious of citified artist-types like them. As the New York Times reported, the people were reluctant to talk to the couple but persistence and steady presence eventually won trust. The artists were thus able to collect and preserve these precious stories. Coal Country is in that sense an important class-bridge, an assemblage of experiences new to most theatergoers that are personal and specific enough to generate empathy in anyone. The piece is a moving requiem for the dead, a ringing (if rather nonspecific) cry against injustice, and a stout counterpunch against the forces of erasure and forgetting. All of that said, I left Coal Country feeling unsatisfied with the scope of its gaze, with the lines it drew around the implications of the Upper Big Branch disaster. The meaning of this infuriating event resonates far beyond the details of these particular stories—in moral, political and historical terms—in many ways the play doesn’t acknowledge. What, after empathizing with these people’s suffering, are we supposed to do with those recognitions? A rousing song by Earle called “Union God and Country,” for example, describes the values the people hold most dear. MY DADDY WAS A MINER MY DADDY’S DADDY TOO UNION GOD AND COUNTRY WAS ALL THEY EVER KNEW THEY WORKED FROM EARLY MORNIN’ TILL THE EVENIN’ WHISTLE BLEW WHEN THEY’D STRIKE THE MINE THEY’D WALK THE LINE CAUSE THAT’S JUST WHAT YOU’D DO WHEN YOU’RE BORN IN WEST VIRGINIA A MINER THROUGH AND THROUGH UNION, GOD AND COUNTRY WAS ALL YOU EVER KNEW Is it peevish, or classist, or elitist, of me to ask whether American citizens in the media age, regardless where they live, bear some responsibility to widen their view beyond this, to progress from “all you ever knew” to “what we ought to know”? What about the environment, for instance? Are we to assume that all these people are climate-change deniers? And if not, how do they justify electing leaders who are? The current West Virginia governor, Jim Justice, is a billionaire coal exec and Trump-supporter who constantly presses to roll back environmental regulations. Don Blankenship got more than 27,000 votes in his 2018 run for the U.S. Senate. The play says nothing about these larger-context matters. The most educated character in Coal Country is a physician named Judy Jones (played by Deirdre Madigan) whose brother was killed in the mine. She comments near the end: “we’re all complicit because the lights must stay on, I mean, we’re addicted to electricity, right? We’re addicted to air conditioning, right?” But wait a minute. Are we all really complicit in that way? Shouldn’t a doctor be aware that West Virginia could invest in energy sources cleaner than coal if it wanted to? To this New Yorker, one major lesson of the Upper Big Branch disaster is that the coal industry is unforgivably dirty in more than one way, and it’s time for everyone to start turning decisively to alternatives. Look around! What more loving legacy could there be for those 29 lost lives than to move us all closer to that realization? Photos: Joan Marcus Coal Country By Jessica Blank & Erik Jensen Original music by Steve Earle Directed by Jessica Blank Public Theater #jessicablank #erikjensen #coalcountry #steveearle

Simon Stone’s Medea doesn’t feel much like an adaptation of Euripides. It’s a contemporary play about a woman named Anna—an accomplished medical researcher—who kills herself and her children after her husband betrays her. No character in it is called Medea, nor is the name ever mentioned. The title is a sort of culturati PR-grab. The story is based on a true-crime incident from the 1990s that Stone felt reflected pivotal aspects of Euripides’s story. He told the producer David Lan that he hated the tendency “to imagine Medea as a monster, a witch,” and wanted to show people instead how her story might happen “in their own home[s].” I had an argument with my wife about this play after seeing it at the BAM Harvey Theater, where Stone has re-staged it with the celebrity husband-wife team Bobby Cannavale and Rose Byrne. (It was originally done with Dutch actors in 2014 at the Toneelgroep in Amsterdam.) The play has glaring plausibility problems, major circumstances and decisions that just weren’t believable to me on the realistic plane the action asks to be measured by. Nevertheless, I thought the show, which takes place in a chic white void, had obvious and impressive theatrical power—a slick, efficient, elegant kick like a TV commercial or music video. The whole thing is 80 minutes long. I also thought Byrne’s performance—much of it seen in hyper-closeup on projected video—was exceptional, quirkily nuanced enough to paper over much of the script malarkey. My wife disagreed, or rather she felt that neither the kick nor the nuance mattered. For her Stone was either utterly clueless about women or so undiscerning that he could justify passing off an exceptionally disturbed one as an adequate portrait of the hugely complicated figure of Medea. She found the play insulting. Medea is the adaptation problem from hell. A mother killing her own children—a detail Euripides may have added to the myth—is so abhorrent and contrary to human instincts, let along those of mothers, that there aren’t many analogues to the plot as Euripides tells it. It’s understandable that some might want to reimagine the story in contemporary terms, work out how something like it might plausibly occur in our world. But reaching for tabloids is not a promising plan of attack. Stone reportedly began his process by searching through “schlocky true crime books.” He ultimately found the analogue he wanted in Debora Green, a Kansas oncologist who resented sacrificing her career for her husband and was convicted in 1996 of poisoning him with ricin and killing their children in a house fire. The basic problem is that any case like Green’s is too easily dismissed as exceptional, a freak show that leaves us cold because we can’t really see ourselves in such crazy behavior. I’ve seen at least half a dozen modern Medea adaptations. The only one that I felt came close to solving this problem was Luis Alfaro’s Mojada, produced last year at the Public Theater. On the surface Mojada is a realistic tale about illegal immigrants living in Queens, but it shifts the plane of plausibility by incorporating religious rituals that serve the purpose of enlargement and broad communal reference that myth does in Euripides. That’s crucial. In the opening scene Alfaro’s Medea is seen teaching her beloved, sensitive son shamanistic rites to transcend his body. But in the course of the play, the boy is slowly transformed by his Americanized father and his property developer-girlfriend into a consumerist zombie interested only in fashion and video games. Medea believes death is preferable to such a life, and that spiritual conflict makes the story heartbreaking. Far from being a lunatic we can dismiss, she is a cogent, loving mother who sees herself and the boy as metaphysically entrapped, so she sacrifices his mortal body in the sincere belief it will save his soul. Mojadas don’t grow on trees, alas. Nor do such rarities tend to have two-month, star-powered runs at the BAM Harvey Theater. Maybe it’s time to recognize that this material doesn’t best lend itself, nowadays, to the tropes of majoritarian thinking, or the conventional psychology of ordinary white people. Photo: Richard Termine Medea Written and directed by Simon Stone BAM Harvey Theatre #Medea #SimonStone

“Static” is one of those words from which most artists recoil. It’s typically used for something felt to be listless, inert, and boring. In fact, physical stasis is an artistic tool, or at least it can be. In the right hands, it can release unexpected and explosive theatrical energies that can’t come from movement. This week, two marvelous examples of this phenomenon—call it reverberant rigidity—coincidentally arrived in New York at the same time: Samuel Beckett’s Not I starring Jess Thom (in the Under the Radar Festival), and Queens Row, written and directed by Richard Maxwell at The Kitchen. The pieces are very different, but it’s worthwhile considering what they share by relying on performers planted in one place. Not I is Beckett’s famous 1972 monologue for a disembodied female mouth, named Mouth, suspended eight feet above the stage in the dark. This figure speaks at breakneck speed in brief, disconnected phrases that both performer and audience struggle to assemble into a coherent story. The backstory that can be discerned is of a woman who lived a lonely and largely silent life until age 70 when she blacked out and, upon awakening, erupted in a logorrheic torrent we presume we’re now witnessing. So alien is this experience to her that she denies it even applies to her. Hence the title; she pauses four times to declare, “what? . . who? . . no! . . she!” Jess Thom has been performing the role of Mouth for several years, mostly to great acclaim. Her distinction is that she lives with Tourette syndrome, a neurological condition involving involuntary verbal expostulations and sudden physical gestures called “tics.” With heroic effort over a year, she managed to memorize Beckett’s notoriously difficult text, but she cannot perform it without tics, which in her case means unpredictable interruptions of “biscuit,” “sausage,” “hedgehog,” and more colorful phrases like “fuck a goat,” along with blows to her sternum with her fist. The Beckett Estate (to its credit) approved the project based on Thom’s observation that the play felt like it was really about people like her. It’s easy to see why Thom believes this. The text is divided into short phrases similar in length and percussive emphasis to her everyday speech—which the audience hears during a preshow period when she welcomes them with sunny gregariousness. Moreover, Mouth describes an experience of feeling alienated from the source of her speech that clearly connects to Tourette (according to Thom), as do the character’s reference to her body as a “machine,” her perception of incessant “buzzing” in her skull, and her feeling of being inexplicably “punished.” All of this understood, no objective observer would label Not I a realistic play. Its symbolism is glaring and complex, as is the theatricality that italicizes its actorly demands as meaningful content. Beckett once wrote to one of its directors: “I no more know where she is or why thus than she does. All I know is in the text. ‘She’ is purely a stage entity, part of a stage image and purveyor of a stage text. The rest is Ibsen.” Thom’s insistence that Tourette syndrome was always the work’s true, heretofore neglected realistic underpinning—reported in numerous feature pieces and interviews over the past few years—had me worried. It made me expect a show rooted more in advocacy than art. How wrong I was. Her performance may be exuberantly inclusive—she explicitly welcomes all manner of “neurodiverse” and differently abled spectators and carefully describes the main events and sensory stimuli in the piece. There is also an ASL interpreter beside her. If all this is advocacy, then so be it. It is in no sense at the cost of art. This production is one of the strongest and most resonant interpretations of Not I I’ve seen. Thom’s performance is fleet, lucid and regularly rhythmic (including the tics) in a way that quickly becomes fascinating percussive music. The whole play lasts 12 minutes, about half the length of Jessica Tandy’s premiere performance, which Tandy thought too fast for intelligibility. Thom’s is more intelligible than most. And unlike the many Mouth performances in major theaters that could barely be seen because they were too far away, Thom’s is fully visible (and hence all the more moving in human terms) because the space at BRIC is intimate and the audience is up close. This Not I doesn’t stress terror as many others do because Thom isn’t blindfolded and strapped into a head-brace (which she couldn’t tolerate) but rather hooded and spotlit around the lower face. It stresses instead the panic of perpetually misfired human intercourse. Interestingly, this production (directed by Matthew Pountney) makes more effective use of the play’s second character, called Auditor, than any other I’ve seen. Often cut (with Beckett’s blessing—he was never happy with it himself), Auditor was originally a silent hooded figure who stands to the side and periodically shrugs in “helpless compassion.” Here the figure is replaced by the ASL interpreter, who is not hooded and whose manifold, fluctuating facial expressions—along with her flying arms and hands—constantly convey the nervous strain involved in trying to follow Mouth’s word torrent. She becomes a surrogate for us. Most significant of all is that Thom’s disability itself helps illuminate Beckett’s play, largely because it strengthens the resonance of Mouth’s physical fragmentariness and experience of disassociation. It’s often been observed that Beckett’s characters are frequently incomplete in some way—blind, lame, dumb, missing legs, shanks, torsos or the like. These conditions are metaphors for a general human condition of incompleteness. In our lost and fallen state, Beckett might say—caught between doubts in God’s existence and doubts in our own reason—we all are imperfectly abled. “That’s how it is on this bitch of an earth,” as Pozzo says. How better to drive this ruthless vision home than to employ an actor for whom no sentence is ever stable or intact—who is furthermore a natural ham with a big vibrant voice—to conquer one of the most difficult fragmentary word-mountains in literature, as best she can? Thom’s tic-inflected performance is an ideal vehicle for Mouth’s hazy and bewildering un-story. It broadens our view of excellence in Beckett performance, and in the theater in general. No one understands this view of theatrical excellence better than Richard Maxwell. “We are broken people, theater shows this,” he wrote, channeling Beckett in his 2015 book Theater for Beginners. He provides an example of an actor whose mother tongue was not English delivering the line “So we have each other” with an emphasis on “each.” Instead of correcting the emphasis, Maxwell kept the “broken line” in his show because it came from the actor’s “sincere and unapologetic” self and therefore felt more vivid and porous than any “correct” delivery. Queens Row, his latest play, offers sustained examples of this effect. Queens Row consists of three monologues, each a little over 15 minutes long and delivered by a different woman standing on a small wooden disk raised slightly above the bare stage floor. These women—Nazira Hanna, Antonia Summer and Soraya Nabipour—are all nonprofessional actors Maxwell found in Britain where the work premiered. He built the characters around them, he says, even though their British accents are rather odd accompaniments to their distinctly American characters. The monologues are set in a dystopian future following a new American civil war. In the first part, a resident of the fictional Massachusetts town of Queens Row (played by Hanna), sole survivor of a once-powerful local dynasty, describes the origins of the national conflict in tribalism and class resentment and explains how she lost her son after he moved to Odessa, Texas. He was killed in a police shootout after fighting with another man over his girlfriend. In the second part, an Odessa woman we presume is the girlfriend (played by Summer), speaks to the son’s spirit of their life together, how she misses him, her efforts to cope, her feeling of living at the end of an era, and her anxieties about raising the child they made together. The third part is spoken by a woman we gather is that child, grown up years later (played by Nabipour). Written in a strange, only occasionally comprehensible idiom that cuts words into pieces and reconstructs them in eccentric new ways, often dividing them into peculiar segments and sometimes slipping into strings of numbers and punctuation marks, it is the most artfully “broken” section of all. If there’s an overarching theme to the three gnomic, haunting monologues it’s in their common experiences of physical and spiritual deracination. They’re all fractional tales of absence and separation expressed in a language now abstract, now concrete, now lyrical, now practical, at all times rife with carefully crafted blanks. The deeper subject of Queens Row, for me and I expect many others (unless they’ve read it), is the audience’s experience of listening and trying to understand the three actors, which reflects the social and personal disconnections in the stories. In the first two sections this process is relatively straightforward because, despite the language’s stylistic challenges, Hanna and Summer basically stand there speaking as clearly as they can in their natural cadences. The third section introduces a wholly new complication because Nabipour sometimes doesn’t appear to be speaking English at all. She stands on the same small disk as the others but, unlike them, adds graceful, arcing arm movements and bends at the waist to her speech. One can’t tell whether this activity is expressive, nonsensical, stretching, or maybe even a form of involuntary tic. In any case, it is endlessly fascinating to wonder about as we struggle to decipher lines like “myfamouther thought shed foowuund luv” and “I herd the voyces. j g i 6 r h e7 e o] l clpp.” The weird, understated choreography in the performance sends our minds racing, spurring us to ask how the strangely broken character might be remade, newly assembled, into a human whole. That’s exactly what happens in Not I too. Not I photos: James Lindsay Queens Row photos: Paula Court ________________________________________________ Not I By Samuel Beckett Directed by Matthew Pountney Under the Radar Festival at BRIC House, 647 Fulton St., Brooklyn Queens Row Written and directed by Richard Maxwell The Kitchen, 512 W. 19th St., NYC #RichardMaxwell #QueensRow #NotI #SamuelBeckett #JessThom

An oddity of this theatrical season to ponder as we bid farewell to 2019: In two current New York productions model houses—gorgeous, meticulously constructed, doll-size edifices that split open to reveal uncannily detailed interiors—provided the standout staging moments. Both of these shows, as it happens, have the same set designer: multi-Tony-winning Bob Crowley. Neither show (in case you were wondering) is Tiny Alice, Edward Albee’s famously mystifying 1964 drama featuring a surreal model house center stage supposedly containing a wee version of the lead character. Neither show (in case you were also wondering) is Ibsen’s A Doll’s House either. The two plays are very different. Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance, directed by Stephen Daldry on Broadway, is a seven-hour, two-part, densely talkative epic about generational continuity and indebtedness among gay American men. Sing Street is a 2 ½-hour musical directed by Rebecca Taichman at New York Theatre Workshop, about a high school band in recession-strapped 1980s Ireland. It’s adapted from a 2016 film and has a book by Enda Walsh and music and lyrics by Gary Clark and John Carney. Crowley’s toy houses serve very different functions in these two plays. The one in The Inheritance, not seen until about halfway through, is a wide New England salt box that floats upstage in darkness, eerily isolated with illuminated windows. It’s a dreamlike vision of idyllic sanctuary, a miniature of the upstate New York home that one of the play’s characters turned into a hospice for dying gay men at the height of the 1980s AIDS crisis. Late in the action, this model slides forward and opens, revealing warm-looking rooms with tiny animated figures. The moment reads as a miraculous transformation: architectural Puritanism suddenly shocked into openness by the compassionate people who seized possession of the cold, rigid and rectilinear structure. The model house in Sing Street, by contrast, is only there for the preshow and opening moments, a homely presence in plain white light. It’s a charming old steep-roofed, brick townhouse that splits open at the first blast of guitar chords, revealing a young actor (Gus Halper) crouching behind it and an amazingly detailed interior that includes a tiny-poster-and-banner-emblazoned boy’s room. This model never returns, we presume, chiefly because the family whose home it signifies disintegrates during the play; thus, the rupture we saw at the outset is permanent. Furthermore, that private rupture is meant to signal a larger social one: the two band leaders hightail it to London at the end, demonstrating that 1980s Ireland is sadly losing its best and brightest to desperate emigration. Here’s the thing. Model houses are never simply fun decoration in serious plays, which both these works aspire to be. Their aura of surreality and uncanniness—which keeps us from looking away from them, all the stronger when their craftsmanship is as fine as Crowley’s—invariably makes us read them as part of the plays’ social critiques. That’s a great design opportunity but it’s also a risk: the plays have to deliver the social-critical goods or the models look too much like extravagant toys and flashy compensations. Personally, I have strong doubts about the claims to sweeping historical statement in both these shows. That’s the main reason why Crowley’s models stand apart in them for me. It would be a New Year’s treat to hear from readers who disagree with me and see this model question differently. What do you think? Inheritance photo: Bob Crowley Sing Street photo: Jonathan Kalb The Inheritance By Matthew Lopez Directed by Stephen Daldry Ethel Barrymore Theatre Sing Street Directed by Rebecca Taichman Book by Enda Walsh Music & Lyrics by Gary Clark and John Carney New York Theatre Workshop #TheInheritance #SingStreet #BobCrowley

Two years ago, the British director Richard Jones brought a stunning production of Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape to the Park Avenue Armory that set a new bar for theatrical use of that venue’s famously cavernous space. His Hairy Ape—reconceived from a proscenium version done at London’s Old Vic—was the most effective union of means and material I’ve witnessed in the Armory’s gargantuan 55,000 square foot drill hall. Set designer Stewart Liang surrounded the audience with a 50-ton circular conveyor powerful enough to sweep brightly colored, heavy shipping container-like scenic units in and out of view in seconds, and the actors, when not busy on those units, roamed and criss-crossed the vast tracts of floor and climbed the towering rear wall, appearing there like insignificant insects. The staging beautifully articulated the expressionistic loneliness of O’Neill’s drama, including its critique of industrial capitalism. The Armory building itself, an icon of gilded-age ostentation, stood as a strong reason why the tragicomic parable from 1922 felt freshly urgent and powerful. Now Jones is back on Park Avenue with another visual stunner: a massive new production of Ödön von Horváth’s 1937 play Judgement Day. Once again, he and his designers have filled and animated the space in awesome ways. Unfortunately, this time the material doesn’t justify the grandiloquent presentation. Horváth was an Austro-Hungarian, writing in German, who was killed accidentally by a falling tree branch in 1938 at age 36. His best plays are the Volksstücke (his word) that he wrote in the late 1920s and early 30s that were rooted in his keen observation of petty behaviors and lazy speech habits among lower-middle-class people. These works anticipate Naziism while avoiding sensationalistic events. What’s most effective and enduring in them—Tales from the Vienna Woods, Faith, Hope and Charity, and Kasimir and Karoline, for instance—is the way they augur imminent, society-wide moral collapse without explicitation, focusing on slogans, catchphrases, and seemingly innocuous passing observations. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, Horváth’s work grew more explicit and tendentious. (He was eventually banned and exiled to Paris, where he died.) Judgement Day is one of his later parables about collective responsibility and guilt. To me, these plays are comparatively obvious and preachy, alas, and the sleek and efficient new version of Judgement Day by Christopher Shinn that Jones is using does nothing to alleviate this. Judgement Day does have its fans. London critics swooned for Stephen Daldry’s production 30 years ago, and for James McDonald’s in 2009. If you swoon for, say, a didactic fable like Dürrenmatt’s The Visit or Brecht homilies like Roundheads and Peakheads and Fear and Misery in the Third Reich, then this may be the play for you. Judgement Day centers on a conscientious and well-liked small-town stationmaster named Hudetz, played by Luke Kirby (an Emmy-winner for his portrayal of Lenny Bruce on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel). Hudetz causes a train accident that kills 18 people when he fails to throw a switch because a flirtatious girl named Anna (Susannah Perkins) is distracting him. The local people dislike Hudetz’s older wife (Alyssa Bresnahan) and therefore scorn her when she tells the truth about the incident. Anna at first perjures herself to clear him, and then that goes terribly wrong. The rest of the drama follows the backbiting, rumormongering, and morally corrosive groupthink that surface in the town’s shifting reactions to the case. Jones has staged this story on and around a pair of massive, plywood-covered constructions vaguely shaped like children’s blocks and surrounded by lifesize cutout trees and fog (set design by Paul Steinberg). Forty feet tall and at least twice as long, these constructions have windows and arches and hinges that open on multi-floor rooms. Thus, depending on how they’re moved about the polished reflective floor (by techies with powerful lifting devices) they can serve as walls, interiors or landscape features like a railway viaduct. The action is wisely left in the 1930s (it wouldn’t wash any later). Severe expressionist lighting by Mimi Jordan Sherin (who also designed The Hairy Ape) amplifies all the emotions as the actors dash and march and creep across enormous distances in nightscape environments. A moodily modern-classic sound design by Drew Levy helps fill the time it takes to traverse these distances and also helps sear the stunning pictures in memory. Particularly spectacular and amusing is the way Jones handles the express trains passing through the station without stopping. No train is ever seen. A locomotive sound slowly builds to a deafening roar as lights flicker on the wall and the people waiting on the platform bend sharply and suddenly in the same direction as if blasted by a hurricane wind. This is beautiful, violent, and unforgettable. Powerful and clever as such effects are, however, they are powerless to deepen the play’s cursorily sketched characters, or to bring real surprise to the action. What’s more, though the performances by Kirby, Perkins and others (such as Harriet Harris, who plays the local busybody Frau Liemgruber) add wonderful nuance to their roles, the actors are for the most part too far away and absorbed into the killer stage pictures for us to appreciate them as individuals. That distancing effect severely restricts the play’s horror, which is all about what happens to individuals when they’re subsumed into crowds. Judgement Day does retain some warning value, as its admirers insist, as a harbinger of the alarming moral failures we are witnessing and contending with today. The problem is that its small-town, petty bourgeois milieu isn’t a very strong parallel to our urbane cynicism, and its characters’ questions about guilt and responsibility feel simple and quaint beside our internet-enhanced crowd horrors: you know, the Russian trolls, the cancel mobs, and the mass resistance to self-evident facts that sustains a ruthlessly unscrupulous, media-savvy President. Proto-Nazis are horrible, yes, but the people in this play just don’t feel threatening enough as a group right now to deserve their monumental frame. Photos: Stephanie Berger Judgement Day By Ödön von Horváth Directed by Richard Jones Park Avenue Armory #ÖdönvonHorváth #RichardJones #JudgementDay #ParkAvenueArmory

First of all, don’t be put off by the pompous, academic title. Thomas Ostermeier’s extraordinary History of Violence, adapted from a much-discussed 2016 novel by the 27-year-old French literary star Édouard Louis, dramatizes a harrowing and gripping story of rape and attempted murder set on Christmas Eve, 2012. There’s nothing sleepy, distant, or pedantic about this Schaubühne production playing at St. Ann’s Warehouse (even if it is in German with English supertitles). It really ought to be titled Story of Violence. Another suggestion: if you go (and you should), try to keep an open mind about the explicit representation of rape. Scenes depicting rape are almost always exploitative, I’m aware. Whatever criticality they might contain or intend is usually muddled by titillation. Ostermeier, though, sensitive as anyone to such contradictions, makes the violence here hideously realistic. It was the right choice. Seeing this crime in all its chaotic and shameful detail was the only way to keep it from sliding into metaphor, and allegory or metaphor would have softened and downplayed the particularized trauma that makes the story uniquely valuable. History of Violence is a work of autofiction that novelizes an attack that the author actually suffered shortly after moving to Paris for graduate school at age 20. Finally free to live openly as a gay man and intellectual, he was the first in his family to attend university, proud but also a bit conflicted about his great escape from the ignorance, racism and homophobic bullying of his working-class village in northern France. That escape—a self-discovering metamorphosis of Eddy Bellegueule into the pseudonymous Édouard Louis—was the subject of his debut novel The End of Eddy (2014), currently running in a British adaptation at BAM Fischer. International literary stardom doesn’t get much more impressive than the coup of two adaptations of one’s first books running simultaneously in New York at high-profile theaters. In France three years ago, the acclaim for History of Violence was mixed with controversy. As Jason Farago recently explained in a cogent essay-review of the book’s English translation in The New York Review of Books, Louis courted political notoriety as well as literary recognition and continues to do so. He has become an “implacable, immoderate opponent of Emmanuel Macron” and avid champion of the gilet jaunes (yellow vests), many of whom are poor, bigoted and from the same sort of provincial towns as him. Farago: Louis is the boy who escaped the boondocks yet became its spokesman. He is a passionate writer, and outspoken on behalf of minorities in a country that pretends they don’t exist; he is also impetuous, self-regarding, and—at a moment of alarming crisis in France and across Europe—all too willing to support populist reaction over sincere political engagement. In History of Violence, this schizophrenic perspective is seen in the character Édouard’s ambivalence over whether the man of Algerian background who attacked him ought to be prosecuted. The story—including a late-night pickup in the cold rain outside his apartment, hours of delightful, consensual sex before the violent turn, and vivid descriptions of Louis’s compulsive cleaning and reluctant visits to the hospital and police afterward—is told in a fractured, nonchronological manner in multiple voices. Seeking family comfort about which he’s skeptical, Louis has made a rare trip home to his village, where he lurks behind a door listening to his sister Clara narrate the whole saga to her silent truck-driver husband. She is sympathetic but also judgmental, protesting too much about the family’s tolerance of his gayness, sniping about his newly acquired bourgeois snobbishness, and citing moments in the story that suggest maybe he just got what was coming to him. The importance of class difference is foregrounded in the contrast between Clara’s version of events and Édouard’s many corrections and comments inserted in italics as he eavesdrops. So preoccupied is the book with dueling social codes that the rape, which occurs about halfway through, isn’t its climax. The emotional culmination is a long rumination on whether Louis should go to the police, which his intellectual friends Didier and Geoffroy (both well-known authors) push him to do but which he resists out of a philosophical objection to imprisonment and a conviction that a police report will “lock” him into a story that isn’t his own. He later castigates himself for fearing dark-skinned men on the street who remind him of the rapist Reda, calling himself a racist as if screaming at his sister or father. All this grows frankly self-pitying and pedantic by the end; the book’s self-important title is no accident. Neither Reda nor Clara nor her husband nor anyone else other than the narrator is fully developed as an individual. They all end up seeming like devices arranged to prove the author’s theory of social determinism regarding the roots of violence in society at large. Farago understandably compares them to “players in a Brecht Lehrstück.” To his enormous credit, Ostermeier did not dutifully follow this structure. He looked past the novel’s pedantic imbalance and drew out the riveting traumatic tale at its core. His adaptation sticks closely to Louis’s language but maintains focus on the rape and its traumatic aftermath. Onstage, the narrative’s stream of manic, analytical rumination seems unequivocally like a symptom of trauma. The running political commentary isn’t cheapened or downgraded. But it becomes much easier to swallow in the theater as a swirl of ideas and reactions bouncing around the very active mind of a traumatized young man who was impulsive and manic to begin with. Four actors perform in front of a wall-scale video screen constantly in use and alongside a live drummer (Thomas Witte) who adds enhancements throughout like a silent movie pianist. Wispy blond Laurenz Laufenberg, a ringer for the actual Louis, plays him in a plain pink sweater, and the other three (Alina Stiegler, Christoph Gawenda, Renato Schuch) play an array of other people from Clara and her beer-clutching husband to the police and medical officials Louis meets after his attack. There is nudity and extreme intimacy in several scenes—the acting is searing—as well as a few lightly sketched moments that are scarcely less memorable and moving. (At one point, for instance, Stiegler plays a doctor who has kept Louis waiting unnecessarily for an hour; watch her face as she realizes her mistake and registers her regret.) Schuch is especially compelling as the brooding, hunky Reda, blending the confidence of age (he’s a decade older than Louis) with a completely believable brittleness of self-hatred. The novel lends itself naturally to distribution of its prose into enacted scenes with dialogue. This may come as a relief to some viewers of Returning to Reims, another book adapted by the same team (Ostermeier and dramaturg Florian Borchmeyer) that played at St. Ann’s last year, with themes of homosexuality and colliding French social classes similar to those in History of Violence. In Returning to Reims, video played upstage as a lone actress (Nina Hoss) read the entire text by Didier Eribon (a friend of Louis’s and a character in his novel) at a table in a sound studio. Video in History of Violence, by contrast, is an active element in the acting. The performers shoot each other with iPhones, often from point-blank distances, their live-streamed images blown up in extreme closeup on the upstage screen while we watch them live in various states of vulnerability, embarrassment and uncertainty. The technique (whose smooth operation kind of amazed me) not only intensifies the kaleidoscopic storytelling. It also resonates beautifully with Édouard’s plural, unstable view of himself and with the pivot of the plot. The character Édouard’s first hint that something is amiss with Reda is the discovery that his iPhone is missing. The iPhone, a device symbolizing bourgeois status, is something Reda, an off-the-books laborer and child of an exploited immigrant, couldn’t afford and probably hopes to pawn. This small act shifts the whole tone of the action, launching it on its climactic path of naked aggression. The shift happens so suddenly it might as well be a gunshot, or maybe more to the point, the results of an election that shocks the social class that regularly attends plays at the Schaubühne or St. Ann’s. Photos by Teddy Wolff History of Violence by Édouard Louis Adapted by Thomas Ostermeier, Florian Borchmeyer and Édouard Louis Directed by Thomas Ostermeier St. Ann's Warehouse #HistoryofViolence #ÉdouardLouis #ThomasOstermeier

James Sheldon’s Reparations is a new play about racial grievance, guilt and retribution in America that, oddly enough, is both very smart and completely sincere. What I mean by that is that theatrical intelligence—particularly in the tonally tricky arena of race plays—usually seems to mean irony or cynicism nowadays: fractured realities, repurposed quotations, recycled myths, characters in masks or disguises. Reparations, by contrast, is resolutely personal, realistic and earnest. It’s almost like an essay in dramatic form, disconcertingly overt and explicit, like a blast of forthrightness from another time, though it’s set in today’s world. The thoughtful directness of this work put me briefly in mind of another blast from the dramatic past sometimes faulted as too earnest and essayistic, the James Baldwin classic Blues for Mister Charlie (1964), which was loosely based on the Emmett Till murder case. Both Blues and Reparations are full of subtextless scenes where people say exactly and exhaustively what they think. Both plays seem to dare us to dismiss them as obvious or journalistic, then effectively seduce us with their searing discussions of brutally abused black characters refusing to play nice. Reparations is being performed at the Billie Holiday Theater in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. At the performance I saw, the audience of about 100 was almost entirely black (I counted 4 white people including me), and the crowd spontaneously leapt to its feet at the curtain call, cheering with warm gratitude. Sheldon’s action opens on the steamy entrance of a couple—a young black writer and an older white book editor—who evidently just met at a reception and can’t wait to get into bed. The next morning they’re still handsy and hot, but a certain captiousness in Reg (Kamal Bolden), also seen the night before, doesn’t quite chime with the hookup coziness. His snappish retorts to Ginny (Alexandra Heil) about numerous seemingly innocent passing remarks start to seem like race-baiting, and when she finally calls this out, a plot bombshell drops that sends events swerving in unforeseen directions. Frustratingly, I can’t say much more about this, or the other surprises that stem from it, without spoiling the suspense. Suffice it to say that Reg, a novelist, actually did know Ginny and her late husband before, and some deeply ugly history is confronted when another couple, Ginny’s wealthy old friends Alistair and Millie (Gys de Villier and Lisa Arrindell), arrives for lunch. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s well-known 2014 argument for historical reparations to African-Americans tacitly hovers over the whole action, though the focus is on Reg’s particular case and the question of what is due him. The crowd reaction at the end of this play struck me as (at least in part) an exhale of relief that such urgent topical concerns hadn’t been overcomplicated with layers of reality-questioning theatricality but rather laid out plainly with lucid realism. Michele Shay directs the fine company with an impressively steady hand, keeping the play’s emotional powder dry long enough to give the late-action fireworks their proper punch. All four actors skillfully traverse some pretty wide emotional ground, much of which is rougher and slippier than they make it look. According to the program, Reparations is the first work by a white author to be produced at the Billie Holiday Theatre in its entire 47-year history. That’s no small matter. BHT is a proud, Obie-winning institution founded in the Civil Rights era that has consistently devoted itself to its local African-American community. This year, as part of a festival called “New Windows” conceived by Executive Director Indira Etwaroo, it is branching out and exploring “intersectionality and complexity of identity” as well as “voices and perspectives that have not historically been presented at The Billie.” Reparations is a launchpad for that outreach to a larger audience. It's a great reason to visit this theater, whether you’ve been there before or not. Photo: Dex R. Jones Reparations By James Sheldon Directed by Michele Shay Billie Holiday Theatre #JamesSheldon #Reparations #BillieHolidayTheatre #MicheleShay

Adam Rapp is a polarizing playwright. After bursting onto the scene in 2001 with Nocturne—a long, moving monologue by a man who accidentally kills his sister and then reinvents himself as a writer—he went on to write a number of other plays that mixed self-consciously poetic language with stockpiled shock effects such as nudity, masturbation and vomiting that a lot of people found gratuitous. His language has always been interesting, a pinch more crafted than most other contemporary playwrights’. Sometimes it sounds like pure, raw colloquialism. Other times it’s built on precise, figurative sentences with complex syntax, third-person narrative passages and startling metaphors that take a moment to process. If you like him you admire his demand that we listen closely. If you don’t, you probably consider his prose purple, show-offy and too bookish for theater—language that calls attention to itself for no dramatic reason. I liked the prosiness of Nocturne. I admired the twists of event and speech in Red Light Winter, too, his 2005 play that begins with a failed suicide by hanging. So for me his inventive, demanding language does sometimes rise to the challenge of expanding the imaginative world of the stage. I’ve also felt the opposite. The Sound Inside is the best, subtlest, most fully realized Rapp play I’ve seen. It’s also his Broadway debut. A two-hander about a Yale creative writing professor and a precocious student that premiered at Williamstown last summer, it arrives in a stunning production directed by David Cromer at Studio 54. Mary-Louise Parker, an actress who excels at intelligent vulnerability and effortless wit, is perfect casting for the lead: a novelist and story-writer named Bella Baird whose defining characteristic is her use of literary language as a social shield. The surface of The Sound Inside is a mystery, or meta-mystery, involving murder, betrayal and suicide, but at root, I think, it’s a tale of psychic survival in which artful words are seized on as a lifeline, an idiosyncratic reason for living, by Bella. The set (designed by Alexander Woodward), anomalously modest for Broadway, is a field of gloomy shadow occasionally broken by humble, unexceptional interiors occupying only a fraction of the wide stage—a grim faculty office, a plain living room, a shabby kitchen. Parker emerges from the darkness and proceeds to narrate her character’s backstory as if the audience were students being given a writing prompt. She lays out a string of basic facts: Bella’s age (53), marital status (single, prefers solitude), faculty status (10 years tenured), lack of property and family attachments (parents dead), sense of attractiveness (“four or five degrees beyond mediocre, also known as ‘sneakily attractive.’”), professional reputation (respected). Also, not to forget her recent diagnosis of stage-two stomach cancer. Her speech is salted with clever metaphors and chiseled sentences that contradict her teaching advice: “Ironically, she often dissuades her students from describing a protagonist in too fine of detail. Readers only need a few telling clues.” More on that in a moment. The plot mystery begins when an amiably captious, irritatingly ambitious, improbably articulate freshman named Christopher Dunn shows up at her office without an appointment and fulminates about Twitter, enthuses about Dostoyevsky, and tells her how much he likes her class. Splendidly played by Will Hochman, sneakily attractive in his own way, this kid is so arrogantly self-possessed you barely believe his professed social phobias. Then you forget all that because you see that his perceptiveness and original metaphoric formulations appeal to Bella. Turns out Chris is working on a novel. She, struggling for 17 years with her second one, invites him to dinner, and we’re off and running, set up to believe we’re in for an inappropriate affair. Maybe the theft of the kid’s writing too. No such stock stuff for Rapp. The plot keeps ahead of the audience with a savviness worthy of its cliché-phobic writer-characters. We’re led down a fascinating tunnel that—WARNING, SPOILERS HERE!—involves a murder in Chris’s novel meant to recall Raskolnikov’s that leaves us wondering about its autobiographical basis. Only trouble is, this murder, unlike Raskolnikov’s, really is unexplained, and Bella, his revered teacher, gushes over his mysterious use of the ellipsis. No truly fine writer would ever moon over that. Chris’s plot is summarized in a troubling scene where he must decide whether to help Bella commit suicide because she presumes her cancer is incurable. Then there’s a rush toward an ending that, if you’re content with the self-sufficient profundity of ellipses, is a marvelous fringe of carefully ambiguous threads. It’s indeed a beautiful demonstration of how potent “a few telling clues” can be. We’re left with a knot of reverberant, intertwined questions about the nature of Bella and Chris’s interdependency, the source of violence in Chris’s novel, the survival of his manuscript and memory, the survival of Bella as a woman and an author, and even the concrete reality of Chris himself. But if you’re not so quickly impressed with ellipses you have to look elsewhere for the larger holistic truth, the inner “sound” of the story referred to in the title. Maybe that truth is that though all of the writers involved here—Bella, Chris, and Adam Rapp—are clearly gifted, it’s equally evident that none will ever be a Dostoyevsky. The play, possibly, is about living with that. Photos by Jeremy Daniel The Sound Inside By Adam Rapp Directed by David Cromer Studio 54 #AdamRapp #TheSoundInside #MaryLouiseParker #DavidCromer