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“Immersive theater” is a gimmicky term that can be an indiscriminate pitch nowadays for any show where the audience has to move, or enter through a different door, or just sit in a specially constructed environment. The Jungle at St. Ann’s Warehouse is no environmental lark or gimmicky funhouse. It’s a gut-punch of a play about a notorious, sprawling Calais refugee camp that the French government bulldozed in 2016 and a nearly three-hour crash-course in empathy whose fierce immersion experience feels urgent, important, and utterly necessary to its artistic purpose. Anomalously enough, this play filled with panic and outrage feels like an antidote to outrage-exhaustion. It dumps you all at once into the lives of frantic, desperate, no-status people akin to panhandlers you might easily tune out, and then grips you with a flow of intimate detail and canny narration about them that peels away your emotional calluses. At intermission the night I attended, a push notification came through on my phone from the New York Times reporting that the Supreme Court had thwarted Trump’s effort to subvert America’s asylum law. Our government couldn’t summarily deny asylum anymore to those who crossed the Mexican border illegally. We actually had to live up to our compassionate PR. It was an eerie moment, as if Washington had suddenly supplied program notes for The Jungle, which happens to be about people in a nearly identical circumstance. The migrant characters in it, from seven different far-flung countries, are desperate to get through the Chunnel to the UK, whose law treats asylum-seekers much more generously and humanely than France’s. Yet in Calais, gathered in a roadside, town-size camp nicknamed The Jungle, they’re stymied by elaborate security measures put in place—mostly by the UK—to prevent people like them from ever reaching the other shore and benefiting from the law. Co-directed by Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin, The Jungle is a co-production of The Young Vic and The National Theatre in London and Good Chance Theatre, a group established by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson in an 11-meter geodesic dome in the Calais Jungle camp in 2015. These young British playwrights lived for 7 months there and established the dome as a center for creative expression in art, dance, and music as well as theater. The dome has been transported intact to St. Ann’s Warehouse and the audience can inspect its densely graffitied walls hung with hundreds of soul-bruising child’s drawings as they walk through to the playing area. A concession stand operates there, and a bearded guy plays plaintive melodies on a triple-flute during pre-show. There’s also a warren of makeshift refugee living quarters and a recreation of an Afghan restaurant that once thrived in the camp. The playing hall is a large rectangle where long restaurant tables serve as acting platforms and mulch-covered aisles divide the seating into country-specific areas: Egypt, Syria, Sudan, Eritrea, Afghanistan, Palestine. (I sat in Palestine.) The walls are ad hoc plywood-and-chicken-wire constructions like those in every ramshackle place you’ve ever seen. TVs at the corners silently flicker with Bollywood dance numbers, terrorism news, and occasionally footage of police actions in the real Jungle. The play’s storytelling is jagged, agitated, and untidy—exactly right for a drama of lives on the edge. You have to work a little harder to understand. The action opens on a flurry of announcements by some Brits in dirty down vests: a French court has authorized the police to clear half the camp, an area that includes the beloved restaurant where everyone gathers. The reaction is a panicked flurry by those who speak accented English and a babel of other languages. The 14 migrants in the cast are mostly men: guys in skullcaps and gym pants, keffiyehs and camo, the women in headscarves and sweatshirts, an abandoned little girl. They jostle us in the mulchy aisles, or bonk our drinks beside the platform-tables, then apologize graciously. There isn’t enough space for anyone, you soon understand, even this small theatrical sample group, and it’s about to get smaller. Soon, we know, it will be eliminated. In this way, the play starts with the awful end. “I know a little bit about telling stories. Always start at the end,” says gentle and worldly-wise Safi (Ammar Haj Ahmad), the Syrian English-lit student who serves as our on-again, off-again narrator. Then we backtrack to individual stories that make us care even more about the catastrophe yet to come. The pith of the migrant tales is in their enactment. The cast is uniformly extraordinary, making each highlighted character so unforgettably particular that his fate breaks your heart. John Pfumojena plays Okot, for instance, a 17-year-old Sudanese who fled his village because otherwise his mother would be tortured by Janjaweed trying to snatch the local young men for their militia. Pfumojena is so concentrated in his stony determination that his statuesque presence reads as an energy cell powering the scenes he’s in. Ben Turner plays Salar, the Afghan restauranteur who’s such an angry hothead to begin with you recoil from him. He slowly wins our affection with unexpected flexibility in the camp’s pivotal resistance debate and also by his care for orphaned 15-year-old Norullah (Mohammad Amiri). Amiri, for his part, also surprises by transforming Norullah’s racist contempt for Okat believably into fateful friendship. The complex cross-cultural bigotries in the camp are in no way papered over. Nor are the equally complex Western politics of immigration. The playwright “Joes” have made the very smart choice of subjecting the do-gooding British volunteer organizers in the camp to the same skepticism as everyone else. Paula (Jo McInnes), a woman in her 50s bent on helping children, Beth (Rachel Redford) and Sam (Alex Lawther), 18-year-olds just out of secondary school, all swoop into the camp on the wave of international sympathy for refugees that came with the viral internet pictures of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi lying dead on a Turkish beach in 2015. The self-congratulatory bleeding hearts of these naïfs are laid witheringly bare to everyone. These privileged Brits prove capable of some self-awareness, though. They launch into a discussion about “virtue signaling,” the cynical practice prevalent in their country and ours of announcing help for the needy that isn’t real or effectual, and this is the closest The Jungle comes to an explicit political message. Thankfully, it’s not pressed to too sharp a point. I found myself grateful that although these well-meaning people do end up actually helping out—with schooling, temporary housing, translation, legal aid, and more—they never acquire even provisional haloes. All the white people in the play remain recognizably flawed, and that’s a crucial strength. Such a ripped-from-the-news drama, bringing stories of the downtrodden into first-world cultural palaces like The Young Vic and St. Ann’s, can easily become a sort of self-serving virtue-signal itself if it can’t make its privileged audiences somehow recognize their own secret dodges, excuses and blind spots in the vexed arena it dramatizes. Only then can it possibly hope to transform whatever empathy it generates into meaningful action. Photo: Teddy Wolff The Jungle Written by Joe Murphy & Joe Robertson Directed by Stephen Daldry & Justin Martin St. Ann's Warehouse #TheJungle #JoeMurphy #JoeRobertson #StephenDaldry #JustinMartin

I caught up with The Thanksgiving Play a few days after Thanksgiving. I was in the mood to laugh and figured I might learn something. This work by Larissa FastHorse is (according to The Interval) the first full-length play by a Native American to be fully produced in a major New York theater. That seemed pretty important. Reviewers had called it a sharp satire. I was (am) woefully ignorant about Native American cultural politics and know next to nothing about NA views on Thanksgiving (you can’t read everything). The air, as always in November, was full of anodyne pabulum about turkeys and pilgrims and magically abundant corn—all those childish tokens of social concord we use to evoke a harmonious Eden our country never really had. I put on my shoes to go get happy and woke. How strange, then, to find that this play offered little corrective to any of that. It turned out to be an extended gag about the cluelessness of politically correct white people that, disturbingly and incongruously, recapitulated the historical erasure of Native Americans. Ha, ha, indeed. The Thanksgiving Play is constructed around a single situational joke, hammered home with a variety of comic nails over 90 minutes: a group of well-meaning white folks meet to devise a school Thanksgiving play that is sensitive to privilege and genocide . . . but it has no Native Americans in it. The plucky and hip director Logan (Jennifer Bareilles, perfectly insufferable) thought she had an NA actress. Her “Native American Heritage Month Awareness Through Art Grant” was supposed to be used to hire one. The self-absorbed ditz who shows up, though—Alicia (a terrific Margo Seibert)—is no such thing. Her head shot taken with braids and a turquoise necklace fooled Logan (“Every actress in LA has different types of shots. My agent told me to”). So much for due diligence. The rest of the play, adroitly directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel, rides this comic wavelet, such as it is, with a succession of hapless attempts to rescue the playmaking project while skewering the participants for their various foibles. Logan spouts female empowerment and trust in “inner beauty,” then laps up Alicia’s advice about makeup and hair-flipping. Jaxton (Greg Keller), a street performer who is Logan’s boyfriend, is so ridiculously open-minded he sees both sides of her direct insults (“You’re a terrible actor!” “I know that her lashing out is not about her and me but actually her double X’s fighting back against centuries of patriarchal oppression.”) Caden (Jeffrey Bean, duly wry), an elementary school teacher who not-so-secretly wants to be a playwright, has been assigned to the project as a historical consultant. He is the sanest of the group and has come with a thick sheaf of new-written pages, hoping to try his scenes out. Caden is the reason the play feels vaguely promising even after its satire grows monotonous after 20 minutes. His research seems like a vehicle to finally teach us something within FastHorse’s farcical frame—something we didn’t know, say, about Native American history, customs, thought, or even the story of Thanksgiving. That hope too is crushed, though, because everyone else treats his scene suggestions as diffuse or inappropriate and quickly dismisses them. In the end Logan’s brain-wave—her brilliant means of avoiding “red-face” (that no-go option of Caucasian actors portraying Native Americans)—is to ditch writing and acting entirely and simply make a play of “nothingness”: “We’ve been trying too hard. The empty space is completely, finally equal. That is our Thanksgiving play.” FastHorse has said her motivation for writing The Thanksgiving Play was her repeated rejection by American theaters due to casting excuses. I quote her at length so as not to edit her. I’m gonna get myself fired from American theater for telling this story. The reality is that the number one reason that I’m given for my plays not getting produced is casting. My past plays have all had at least one Indigenous character in them, and theaters believe they can’t find actors for the parts. (We can debate about this for a long time, but this is what I am told, often after they have already passed.) I know that American audiences are hungry to learn more about Native American issues through art because otherwise they don’t learn about them in this country. So, I set a challenge for myself to write a play that deals with Native American issues and in a way that removes the excuse of casting difficulty from the equation. I wish this was not a necessary step to get Indigenous stories into the cannon [sic], but this is where we are. However, I do like this play very much, and it is getting produced. (interview in DC Metro, Oct. 10, 2016) These remarks raise some pointed questions. First, did the stratagem succeed? Will this major New York production open up production opportunities for her other works? Or for plays by other Indigenous dramatists? We’ll see. Second, was the ploy worth it? Apart from the tacit erasure of Native Americans, FastHorse has risked the appearance of vindictiveness, of having introduced herself to the New York theater world by basically mocking its prime demographic. Third, what has Playwrights Horizons’s position been on the issues FastHorse raises? Did Tim Sanford choose this play over her others because he thought it was her best? And did he also raise “excuse[s] of casting difficulty”? Playwrights Horizons's web page for The Thanksgiving Play contains, among a slew of other great supporting materials, an article by Emma Miller about “the large community of Native artists making work here in New York City.” How did the theater’s awareness of this pool of artists affect its choices here? And did anybody consider the obvious choice of casting all the roles with NAs—surely the best rejoinder possible to the doubters out there? I have no answers to any of these questions. Yet they are irretrievably out there now, and we should all hope the conversation continues. Photo: Joan Marcus The Thanksgiving Play By Larissa FastHorse Directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel Playwrights Horizons #TheThanksgivingPlay #LarissaFastHorse

“So, a horse walks into a bar. The bartender says, ‘Why the long face?’ And the horse says, ‘I’m dying of AIDS. And I guess I feel a little sorry for myself.’ So the bartender says, ‘My God, that’s awful. I’m so sorry.’” Will Eno, Thom Pain Three years ago, the cultural critic Lee Siegel wrote a perceptive op-ed arguing that we were now living in the age of “the unfunny joke.” His examples were pretty convincing, and I thought back on them after watching Oliver Butler’s sharp production of Will Eno’s extraordinarily peculiar 2004 play Thom Pain (based on nothing), its first major New York revival. Seeing Thom Pain again made me reflect that before there was Tig Notaro removing her shirt in a 2015 standup act to reveal scars from her double mastectomy (Siegel’s prime example) . . . before there was Amy Schumer salting TV sketches with jarringly sober lines about rape, abortion and 9/11 . . . before there was Jimmy Kimmel using his normally comic talkshow monologue to discuss the open-heart surgery of his newborn son in 2017 and blast Republicans for trying to repeal the ACA . . . before the whole genre of standup seemed to implode under the pressure of Trump’s absurd presidency, with dead-serious screeds of all sorts now sugarcoated as bighearted shtick . . . there was Will Eno. Eno, obviously, didn’t invent the unfunny joke any more than these others did. Charles Isherwood pointed to a few other precedents in his infamous over-the-top New York Times rave about Thom Pain’s 2005 American premiere, when he called Eno “a Samuel Beckett for the Jon Stewart generation.” Albee should get a shout-out too. Yet Thom Pain did do something weirdly original. It concentrated unfunny humor into a uniquely sassy avant-gardist bomb, a drama so ostentatiously fizzled and vainly impudent that it ended up feeling tight. The way Eno composed this aggressive, digressive, perplexingly freewheeling monologue felt breathtakingly fearless and snotty in 2005. The title character compulsively tells and shortcircuits stories, directly engages the audience and then insults them, invents characters we suspect are versions of himself and then loses interest in them. Thom Pain even dares its audience to walk out (it includes one planted walkout). It plays Pain’s impatience, disdain and self-hatred off against our curiosity (weak as it may be) about why he’s so pissed off and what his decidedly murky suffering might have to do with us. Watching it is like sitting up all night with a bad, thankless friend in crisis. You know you’ve done the right thing, but the reward is sour, delayed and uncertain. James Urbaniak was excellent in the role thirteen years ago. A lithe, wickedly droll, intensely focused performer whose volubility tends to read as frustrated intellectualism, he made Pain come alive as a magnificent comic patchwork. Now sarcastic, now doubtful, now treacherous, now silly, now chatty, now reserved, he was a loose cannon who didn’t seem to believe anything he said, so every section of the play came off as a different virtuosic “act” polished to look accidental. Michael C. Hall’s Pain in Butler’s production is quite different. This character is also a charming, captious prick and a volatile, sardonic backslider but he doesn’t feel like a shapeshifter. He’s all of one capricious piece standing there so handsome in his natty black suit. His unreliability is skin-deep. The monologue is as mercurial as ever, but Hall seems motivated, fundamentally, by heartbreak over the lost love affair Pain keeps describing, fitfully, always with an edge of special sincerity—that is, when he isn’t digressing about whether he’s used too many words, or commas, or flirting with a woman in the front row. Hall excels at characters with something important to hide: Dexter the forensic techie who happens to be a serial killer; David Fisher the upright and respectable Six Feet Under funeral director who happens to be closeted gay. He has a knack for effortlessly inhabiting multiple personalities as a single burden, making fascinating complications seem like coherent syndromes. This is what makes him the perfect Eno performer. (He was hilarious in Eno's The Realistic Joneses in 2014 on Broadway.) When Thom Pain first appeared, Eno was all but unknown. By now we’ve seen more than a dozen other plays, so we know much more about his tendencies, obsessions and techniques. The way Pain flits from the mundane to the cosmic and back, for instance, all within a phrase or two, turns out to be typical of Eno’s people. “It’s sad, isn’t it? The dead horse of a life we beat, all the wilder, all the harder the deader it gets. On the other hand, there are some nice shops in the area.” The same is true of Pain’s schizy toggling between viciousness and warmth, lightheartedness and black withdrawal, as well as his anomalous preoccupation with obscure minutiae of language, as if word problems and metaphysical problems were indistinguishable. Pain: “From the New Century Dictionary of English (Rustling of paper, in the dark.): Quote, ‘Fear: 1. Any of the discrete parts of the face, as in the eyes or mouth, or eyes. 2. The capital of Lower Meersham, in the north central southeast corner. Pop. 8,000,0001, approx. 3. Fear. 4. See three. 5. There is no seven. (Pause.) Colloquial. Archaic. A verb. Or noun. Depends.’ End quote.” Hall’s distinction is the way he makes quirks like these seem integrated and necessary rather than outrageous and foreign to us. All of this understood, I must admit that, much as I admire Thom Pain, I’m not sure that the curdled, heartsick anger at its core is the best elixir for this moment when so many of us feel bludgeoned by the naked aggression emanating from our dear leader. I can well imagine even people who like the play feeling that the character of Pain is just too much of a toxic male to listen to right now. Butler and Hall have done peerless work. You just can’t help wondering how much that can matter if the average raw-nerved spectator heeds the advice of the title character and ends up checking out. Photo: Joan Marcus Thom Pain (based on Nothing) By Will Eno Directed by Oliver Butler Signature Theatre #WillEno #ThomPainbasedonNothing #MichaelCHall

To those who feel overexposed to Waiting for Godot—which includes many theater snobs—no text-faithful production may ever fully satisfy. A great many worldly people yawn nowadays at the play as written. They’ve seen enough Didis and Gogos who wear the requisite grubby clothes and boots and move among objects that actually resemble a tree and rock. For them the desolate, unaccommodated stage picture Beckett made famous has become a cliché, the existential malaise performed in it something like a postwar platitude. Some of these people are aficionados of the continental European practice of Regie—a word usually translated as “directing,” though its practitioners regard it as an autonomous art form in which playtexts may be treated as boundlessly malleable material—like sound, light and color. Regie fans would no doubt have preferred that Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival had invited, say, Dagmar Schlingmann’s 2015 Godot from Saarbrücken, in which the set was a pile of discarded modern clothes (which Lucky tried on) and the background was a large photo of a seascape. Or Ivan Panteleev’s 2014 Godot from Recklinghausen, in which Didi and Gogo appeared to land by parachute in an angular crater on an alien planet, out of which Pozzo and Lucky later emerged. In the event, the Festival invited none of these productions but rather the Druid Theatre Company’s eminently faithful Godot, directed by Garry Hynes. This production is rooted in the enduring yet perpetually un-chic Anglo-American tradition of directing as a sensitive and loving artistic service to the playwright. If you are open to such a production’s virtues, please take my word that this one is not to be missed. The acting, for one thing, is positively limpid. The compulsive game-playing between Aaron Monaghan (Estragon) and Marty Rea (Vladimir) is so fluid and convincing it could only have come from a thoroughly organic development process involving actors riffing off each other’s inspired comic habits and peculiarities. Strangely enough, all their antics feel lifelike even though the whole play is choreographed into tight mobile patterns and physical gags like those Beckett employed when he directed it in 1975. Rory Nolan’s Pozzo is another delight—a tightly wound, roly-poly, insecure gasbag whose hypersensitivity makes hilarious sense of countless lines that you may have assumed were hopelessly murky. The show is also stunningly designed. Francis O’Connor’s set is a flat, slightly raked, cracked-earth floor with a smooth egg-like stone and a lithe, tentacle-like, elegantly leaning tree, all framed by a glowing light-box frame that changes color with the time of day and a back wall of polished concrete that extends beyond the frame. The overtness of this frame imposes a tacit self-consciousness. It’s as if everything within it were quoted, enacted with awareness of all the innumerable Godots played before, even though the action feels consistently fresh, embedded in the urgent present. What is this company’s mysterious imperative to keep playing Godot? the frame seems to ask. Of course, the production must provide the only answer. The concrete rear wall is so like Lincoln Center’s walls, not to mention those of a thousand other arts centers built on the same brutalist aesthetic, that it continues this line of thought. The true answer to the timeless question of where the play’s action takes place seems, here, to be: in an arts center, where else?! Accessible, meticulously built, lovingly performed, Druid’s Godot has as much resonance as any cleverly deconstructed version, for those prepared to recognize it. Photo: Valerie O'Sullivan Waiting for Godot By Samuel Beckett Directed by Garry Hynes Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College #DruidTheatreCompany #GarryHynes #SamuelBeckett #WaitingforGodot

Nothing you do this week will likely be more worthwhile than spending 40-odd minutes with Dianne Wiest performing excerpts of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days for passersby in Madison Square Park. Every lunch hour until Friday, beginning at noon, Wiest is performing as Winnie, enclosed not in a mound but in a wacky, understated, rocklike sculptural costume designed by the visual artist Arlene Shechet. This event has arrived totally under everyone’s radar. The Park has dropped the ball on publicity. But maybe that’s okay. No prefatory fanfare, no curtain, no stage or framing gestures. Wiest, in situ, unobtrusively miked, just launches into the famous, indomitable, monologic role she played so searingly last year at Theatre for a New Audience, plopped down at one end of a dry fountain. People mill about, eat, smile, scoff, or ignore her. Some listen for a while and leave, others stay for 5 or 20 minutes. About 100 stayed the whole time on Tuesday. The various reactions are as absorbing as Wiest. A teenager sweeps in on a skateboard and lingers, unable to spurn the scene until he understands more about it. A black-jacketed guy who could be a Sopranos thug deadpan sneers, smiles involuntarily, then looks around to see who might have seen him do that. This is an astonishing event—one of those rare, precious happenings that makes you thrilled to live in New York City. Whether you saw Wiest’s performance in the whole play last year or missed it, you should go see this. It isn’t obvious, when you see Beckett in the theater, how his work might connect to the experimental tradition of ambient performance that harks back to John Cage. The idea Cage envisioned of a continuously running event that people drop in on at will, that blurs the boundaries between art and life, seems contrary to begin with to the purposes of our most authoritative playwright. There is a deep connection, though. It starts with the strong influence of visual art on Beckett and links to the fractured, indefinite, ontologically precarious nature of the restless logorrheic voices that drive all his best dramatic and nondramatic prose. The persistent voice at Madison Square Park is clearly Wiest’s, if you happen to be looking directly at her, but for the many who aren’t, or don’t want to, Beckett’s remarkable stream of pregnant, matter-of-fact speculation and introspection on the reality and value of every passing moment could also be coming from a radio, or the city’s ambient hubbub, or your own mind. This is environmental Beckett. Beckett as a condition of urban life. Go see Wiest if you want to understand this in your skin. Photo by Jonathan Kalb Passing By Samuel Beckett with Dianne Wiest Madison Square Park, NYC Oct. 22-26, 2018. 12-1. #DianneWiest #SamuelBeckett #HappyDays #ArleneShechet

JK: So Jonathan, did you like the show? JK: Can we come back to that, Jonathan? JK: Okay. What did you think of the reinvented environment? JK: I thought it was inspired. At least the intentions were. You walk into St. Ann’s Warehouse and it looks like a humble western Grange Hall, with bright tinsel bunting across the ceiling and walls of plain blond plywood everywhere. There’s a bland pastel farmscape painted on one side (in the same style as the show’s original sets) and menacing racks of real rifles on the other. The room hints at a passel of wry collisions and contradictions before the music even starts. You’re in a replica of an iconic American communal gathering place with your nose also stuck in the violence that underwrote the creation of such communities. JK: What about finding such a wholesome, self-consciously “nostalgic” rural habitat installed in the middle of gentrified DUMBO, for the amusement of the urban theaterati? JK: Are you saying it was insincere? Ironic? I guess we do chuckle at the idea of “nostalgia,” and the nod to those quaint aspirations to social concord behind the pastoral Grange idyll. But does that necessarily mean we sneer at the aspirations? Even cynical “citiots” can still regret the disappearance of places where Americans can gather and feel like one people. It’s probably true that most of us don’t find the question of whether farmers and cowhands can be friends particularly pressing. Nor does pretty Laurey’s indecision over whether to go to the box social with affably melodious Curley or ominously surly Jud Fry set most of us aflutter with anxiety. Yet the music for this show really is lodged in our bones. As we listen to the songs, most of them nailed with subtlety and conviction by a cast with killer vocal chops—in scaled-down arrangements by Daniel Kluger that emphasize intimacy and folksiness—we actually find ourselves longing to define “we.” We can’t help but ask what this famous composite portrait of aspirational America means to us. Turns out we’re invested in Oklahoma! in ways we don’t sufficiently understand, and Fish’s staging (with Laura Jellinek’s set design) helps us think about that. Most of the St. Ann’s crowd probably comes in vaguely aware that this show used a cartoon Western story set in 1906 to help America pluck up its courage and pride as thousands went off to war in 1943, but they want to know why that still matters. JK: What did you think of the diverse casting? JK: I liked it. The diversity itself, that is, not all the performances. Having a Laurey and Curley of different races forced the tale into the age of inclusion. It sent our imaginations and associations wandering across the whole American populace, rather than confining them to the white part that both the original musical and its source play, Lynn Riggs’s Green Grow the Lilacs, presented as the whole. Watching this cast I found myself reflecting on myriad textual and atextual possibilities of what could have been and might still be in farms like Aunt Eller’s and territories like Oklahoma. My biggest smiles came from Ali Stroker’s Ado Annie. Stroker uses a wheelchair, a reality that filtered her character’s story through the lens of disability. Her father’s desperation to offload her, the peddler Ali Hakim’s opportunism in angling for a quick roll with her: all of that took on its own special italics in this production. Especially cool was the strength and canniness of Stroker’s character. Her Ado Annie was in control the entire time. “I Caint Say No” was pure fun, but also style and strategy in concert. JK: So what were your reservations? JK: For one thing, the sightlines were atrocious, which is not a small thing. The playing area was like a mini-football field, a long central aisle with the audience on opposing banks of bleachers. To make that arrangement work, you have to employ the conventions of its Court Masque origins, which means moving players from one end to the other in processions (which needn’t always feel like processions). That’s the only way to make everyone feel included. Here, the 6-piece orchestra was plunked down at one end, blocking all but the most clumsy through-movement there, and the rest of the space was treated as a long thrust, with action played primarily for the benefit of folks at the other end. I was seated beside the orchestra at one of the long tables lining the sides, and I never saw anything but actors’ backs about half the time. It’s a testimony to the power of their pipes that I could tell how good the songs were even though I heard them only after the sound bounced off the walls. JK: Aren’t you exaggerating? Not every song was so poorly staged that way. Damon Daunno, for instance, the actor of Curly, opened the show with “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” walking around playing guitar. JK: Okay, so that’s true, I enjoyed that, and he did other songs that way too, but they were exceptions. JK: Anything else, bro? JK: Yeah, I thought Rebecca Naomi Jones lacked a clear objective as Laurey and had zero chemistry with Daunno. Her singing voice is angelic but she pretty much scowled the whole time and seemed to believe Laurey’s emotions were mostly anger. JK: But Sarah Larson singled Jones out for special praise in The New Yorker. JK: [Runs away weeping.] JK: Wait, come back! There’s chili and corn bread!! JK: Of course!—those magical restoratives renowned for their astonishing power to entice people back after intermission even if they couldn’t see half the action. JK: Speaking of intermission, what did you think of the reinvented dream ballet, which Fish moved from the end of Act 1 to the top of Act 2? JK: I wanted to like it a lot. The solo dancer Gabrielle Hamilton, brown-skinned, head shaved, brows bleached, wearing an oversize white T-shirt with the words DREAM BABY DREAM, rushes out and electrifies the room with an extraordinary surge of dashing and galloping (choreography by John Heginbotham). She seems to channel Laurey’s repressed sexual energy and cool wariness at the same time, tempestuous and self-possessed, fire and ice all at once. The orchestra turns electric, pumping out the folksy score with fuzzy acid-rock amplification, and Hamilton’s shimmies and flatfoot stomping seem to marry African-dance codes to the suggestive pelvic-thrusting, horse-straddle moves that got Agnes De Mille in trouble with puritans back in 1943. At first, the ballet struck me as a terrific, brain-clearing, palate-cleansing collision of cultural references that forced us once again to reflect on all the people excluded from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s original idyll. The fictional world, gently fractured in Fish’s Act I, was blasted open even wider, leaving the sense that anything could happen. Unfortunately, that promise was short-lived. Unlike De Mille’s dream ballet, which told a clear story about Laurey’s fears and desires through dancer counterparts for Curly and Jud, Heginbotham’s was completely non-narrative. The only re-entry to the action proper was a quick peek by the Curly and Jud actors out of doors near the end (Daunno and James Davis). By then the appearance of a dozen or so dancers from NYU Tisch joining Hamilton for some brief, underwhelming jogging around the stage had hopelessly muddled the identification of Hamilton and Laurey, and any other recognizable connections to the story. The ballet ended up feeling overlong and confusing. JK: Some of Act 2 did rejigger the action, though. Were those parts not sufficiently “blasted open” for you? JK: I liked them. In principle. The dispute between the farmers and the cowmen at the box social escalating to the point of reaching for the guns on the wall. The smooching sounds in the dark when Jud finally gets Laurey alone, after which he’s revealed with his pants unbuckled as they argue and she fires him (is she afraid of him or her own desire?). The wonderfully ambiguous climax where Jud, instead of falling on his knife accidentally after punching Curly at the wedding, hands Curly his own gun, which Curly shoots, spattering blood all over himself and Laurey in their spiffy wedding clothes. All this was refreshing and interesting. But the changes felt scattered and tentative in the end, inserted as anomalies into an act whose general tone and style were really the same as Act 1. Which is to say that the show as a whole was essentially bright and optimistic with sporadic hip touches, not thoroughly enough reconceived for its implied new, dark, critical through-line. JK: Yeah, I guess you’re right. Didn’t you wish they’d put Aunt Eller in a Brett Kavanaugh mask for the last scene when she bullies the federal marshal into dropping his demand for a murder trial? JK: This interview’s over. Photos by Teddy Wolff Rodgers & Hammerstein's Oklahoma! directed by Daniel Fish St. Ann's Warehouse 45 Water St., Brooklyn, NY #RodgersandHammerstein #Oklahoma #DanielFish

Intractable Woman 122CC Second Floor Theater 150 First Ave. (at 9th St.), NYC A week after Donald Trump was inaugurated, the atomic scientists who keep the famous Doomsday clock set it thirty seconds closer to midnight—the first such move since 1960. It occurred to me watching Intractable Woman, Stefano Massini’s harrowing “theatrical memo” about the murder of the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, that America could use a Doomsday gauge these days to remind us of the growing danger to journalists posed by Trump’s unrelenting anti-media hostility. It wouldn’t be a clock. Maybe a page of newsprint with adjustable numbers of blacked-out lines. Or how about a gunsight trained on a reporter who moves closer or farther from the crosshairs? Many level-headed people have been assuring us over the past 21 months that our democracy is stable and resilient, that despite everything it’s holding its own against an appalling, dubiously elected leader who neither respects nor understands its values. The checks and balances are working. The grownups are secretly in control. I defy anyone to come away from Massini’s painful play, cunningly directed for The Play Company by Lee Sunday Evans, feeling confident about any of that. Anna Politkovskaya was murdered in the elevator of her Moscow building in 2006 after a long and distinguished career reporting about the collapse of civil rights in Putin’s Russia and abuse of human rights in the Chechen War. Her devotion to facts, and her international reputation for sticking by them in the face of daunting obstruction, harassment and intimidation, earned her powerful enemies. Five people were eventually convicted in her killing, but no one in authority was ever held responsible for ordering it. The act was one of the clearest examples imaginable of anti-journalistic terrorism. Anyone who considers this story an exclusively foreign nightmare, an incident unthinkable in America given our Constitutional freedoms and protections, should take his/her head out of the sand. In June, five employees of the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, MD, were murdered in the newspaper’s office by a guy pissed off at the way the paper covered a criminal case against him. Such violence—tolerated and even savored by millions—is the inevitable result of the ceaseless presidential griping about unfriendly news coverage, his drumbeat of tweets about “fake news,” his restrictions on access and credentials for qualified journalists, and his vilification of them as “the enemy of the people.” There is, alas, more pain and terror around the corner. Intractable Woman is more a free-form dramatic essay and experiment in oratory than a traditional play. It tells a clear and powerful story about Politkovskaya’s experience reporting (mostly in Chechnya) and paints a compelling verbal portrait of her, drawing on her writings and interviews and writings about her in addition to invented speech. Yet Massini doesn’t specify the number of actors required, doesn’t divide the text into discrete speeches, doesn’t always specify locations, and often shifts between first- and third-person narration. All this leaves the director with the daunting task of inventing an action and circumstances that can give the material theatrical life without upstaging it, or otherwise undoing its gravity with self-important spectacle. Lee Sunday Evans has managed this with quiet aplomb. Inspired by a memorial to murdered journalists in Moscow (which spectators can see in a photo upon leaving), she and set designer Marsha Ginsberg have created a vaguely disquieting space with pale blue walls, rows of Soviet-bright, red-and-gold banquet chairs, and a general low-key pomposity that recalls a cheerless reception room in a government ministry. Here three actresses (all superb—Nadine Malouf, Nicole Shalhoub, and Stacey Yen) dressed in nearly identical, dark business suits speak the text in ever-changing orientations to one another and the environment. photo of Moscow memorial to murdered journalists With dozens of subtle and precise shifts in manner and voice, the women conjure dozens of different identities, sometimes for no more than a few moments at a time, and thus make themselves agents of a remarkably fluid and efficient narration. Along the way, they repeatedly reconfigure the chairs, suggesting numerous locations and also a variety of moods and environmental pressures on the speakers. The spatial shifting carries surprising punch after a while. I’m not completely sure why, but I suspect it has to do with the ambient murmur of instability it generates, which echoes the institutional assault on truth that dogs Politkovskaya at all times. The combination of plasticity, fluidity and pluralism reads as a foil in the end for the singular integrity of that precious, heroic woman. It also leaves us hoping against hope that we will somehow continue to see daylight between her circumstances and ours. Photos by Julieta Cervantes and Jonathan Kalb #StefanoMassini #LeeSundayEvans #AnnaPolitkovskaya #PlayCompany

I lost a night’s sleep recently over Forced Entertainment. I did it on purpose. They were coming to New York with one of their major marathon productions, something that had never happened before, and I had to see that in action. The piece was called And on the Thousandth Night, an eight-actor “durational” originally from 2000, which began at midnight at NYU Skirball Center and ended at 6 a.m. I lasted until shortly before 3. FE excels in durational theater (as I’ve described in Great Lengths), conceiving it as informal, game-based, decidedly slackerish yet somehow world-embracing events that often hold audiences spellbound. They don’t expect people to watch the pieces from beginning to end. You’re encouraged to come and go, and Skirball had gallons of free coffee and other wake-me-ups obligingly on hand in its comfortable lobby. Some picnicking, milling and schmoozing took place out there, but remarkably enough, most people sat tight in the auditorium. About 120 of the 350-odd midnight spectators reportedly stayed until 6. I wasn’t bored at all. The limiting factor was my body, which isn’t 25 anymore. I saw enough to be very glad the event happened and to affirm my conviction that this 34-year-old British company remains one of the most original, ingenious, aesthetically coherent and consistently inspired experimental groups on the Euro-American scene. The leaders of New York City’s big theater festivals—just to digress a moment—really ought to be ashamed that so little of Forced Entertainment’s work has been seen here. Their smaller pieces, for two or three performers, have played short runs now and then (Tomorrow’s Parties at Florence Gould Hall in 2016, Real Magic at the 2017 COIL festival), but the Skirball event was the first performance of a full-company FE work in the U.S. theater capital. The reasons are depressingly obvious. Our most prestigious forums for innovative performing arts—e.g. the Lincoln Center, White Light and Next Wave Festivals—are no less invested in celebrity, polish, and virtuosity than the commercial theater they purport to disdain. They just don’t know how to accommodate the wave of improvisatory, superficially mundane, anti-virtuosic work from recent years that has been variously called “real-life theater,” “theater of the awkward,” and “theater of the everyday” (which also includes Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, Goat Island, and Elevator Repair Service). For some reason, it doesn’t matter that this work is sometimes wildly popular. That it speaks a new kind of truth about our day-to-day lives and presumes to critique our received paradigms for excellence makes it vaguely threatening. The frame of And on the Thousandth Night is a storytelling game. Or a storytelling compulsion. Or a purgatorial sentence of perpetual storytelling. Or something. The seven performers, wearing cheap red cloaks and cardboard crowns, take turns telling improvised (or sometimes memorized?) stories that all begin with the phrase “Once upon a time.” The stories range from flippant glosses on famous fairy tales and myths to movies, plays and TV shows to silly and serious love and horror stories to dumb jokes and quips. Each performer speaks until another says “Stop,” and the interruptions are evidently compulsory. No story is ever allowed to finish. These kings and queens are condemned to usurp one another ad infinitum and then be summarily deposed themselves. The show’s title refers to the classic book 1001 Nights, which relates an act of marathon storytelling accomplished masterfully under threat of instant death. In And on the Thousandth Night, no performer has absolute power like the homicidal king in 1001 Nights, and none is particularly masterful or in greater danger than others, like Sheherazade. Nevertheless, there is a vaguely torturous undertone to the action, because the imperative to continue the game no matter what has been accepted by the whole company. Mental and physical exhaustion become a prominent part of the spectacle, forcing us to ask what exactly we are enjoying in the nonmetaphorical actor-breakdowns. The show begins with the actors sitting on chairs in a line on the forestage. As the night wears on, though, they all take breaks upstage, withdrawing with their chairs whenever they feel like it to rest, sleep, or eat and drink at a refreshment table in the corner. These breaks mirror the banality and casualness of everything else. But they also have the opposite effect of heightening tension sometimes. If five actors take a break at once, leaving only two actively performing, there’s enormous pressure on them to stay sharp and inventive. The “Stop” interruptions amount to story handoffs, and they are shaded with every conceivable mood and intention. They can be thrusts, parries, compliments, judgments, insults, deflections, defenses, and much, much more. They’re where you feel most sharply the knife-edge between collaboration and competition that the show rides on. It’s as if you’re catching privileged glimpses into the company’s real-world relationships. Tim Etchells, for instance, interrupts Cathy Naden at one point when her story is mashing up the plots of Alien: Covenant, Prometheus and Interstellar. He says, grinning, “Stop. Once upon a time there was an actor who couldn’t really remember a movie ...“ At another point, Etchells, Robin Arthur, and Terry O’Connor have a quick-fire comic exchange that feels almost like a values-based argument over the complexity of protagonists: “Once upon a time there was a very bad queen . . . “ “Stop. Once upon a time there was a very good queen . . . “ “Stop. Once upon a time there was a queen of morally neutral character…” No one owns material here, despite the constant pressure to invent. They often pick up on a tale just told, or told an hour or two earlier, redirecting and refocusing it, and to that degree some sharing is unavoidable despite the selfish premise of the competition. They will often cut one another off just before a climactic word is uttered, or leave one another to dangle and struggle with a thread that has grown thin. But they will also flash anomalous generosity at times. The most gripping moment of the three hours I witnessed (which also felt like the greatest compliment possible among the company) was when the whole group’s attention was held for several minutes by a beautiful and surprising origin myth spun out by Richard Lowden. And on the Thousandth Night is simple and clear in its rules but not at all simple in its implications. The same is true of all the other FE durationals. A mysterious alchemy occurs in these works as they cover so much experiential ground, without evidently trying to, that they come to seem like accidental epics. The inanities and wisdom and imaginative panache of the tales wash over us, we recognize the gifts and limitations of the separate performers, the opportunities and obstacles in the absurd performing circumstances. At the same time, we come to recognize all these conditions, qualities and people as constituents of a complex little world that feels weirdly complete in itself. The cracks and fractures in the childish game plan don’t feel childish or trivial in the end but open up to suggest immensities. Photo: Hugo Glendinning #ForcedEntertainment #TimEtchells #AndontheThousandthNight

My reaction to Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women when it first arrived in New York in 1994 was nicely glossed by the illustrious Uta Hagen in describing why she turned down the play’s central role: “I think that the old woman is relentlessly hateful—boring.” Just so. Ever since this play won the Pulitzer Prize that year, its fans have insisted that the hatefulness of its lead character—called simply A—served profound, redeeming ends. Critics up and down the “brow” spectrum, tired of hammering the talented, once lionized author for his string of disappointments over two decades, found themselves faced with an interesting, somewhat better work, one they could at least respect, and fell into throes of overpraise. They mooned over the insufferable A as a towering, Lear-like, actor’s pinnacle, an all-too-rare female career capstone not stereotyped, domesticated or anodyne like so many other famous valedictory roles. Her toxic narcissism and malice were supposedly cathartic, her torrential bile and choler a prolonged, repugnant baptism we just had to endure to reap the wisdom of Albee’s precious, tough-talk gospel of cosmic emptiness and grudging acceptance of mortality. None of this held water for me in the 1990s, and it still doesn’t after seeing the new Broadway revival directed by Joe Mantello, which maximizes every theatrical asset Three Tall Women possesses. I am not an Albee detractor. Nor am I so bourgeois as to need plays to be pleasant. But even acted by three world-class artists—Glenda Jackson, Laurie Metcalf, and Alison Pill—this play still leaves me as cold as a day-old senior-center hamburger. There’s something fatally phlegmatic and inert at the heart of this purportedly witty and aggressive drama. The big headline for this production has been the 81-year-old Jackson’s return to the New York stage after a 23-year hiatus in British politics (it’s the second role of her comeback, following a 2016 Lear in London). It’s exciting to see her again, with her energy and complicating character insights undiminished. Yet her A is, if anything, even more repellent than Myra Carter’s was in the play’s New York premiere, and that’s saying something. In Act 1, the relatively realistic section when, at age 91 or 92 (she argues the point), imperious A is attended in her “wealthy bedroom” by 52-year-old B (her personal caretaker—Metcalf) and 26-year-old C (a lawyer trying to untangle her affairs—Pill), Jackson punctuates her incessant taunts, barbs, whines, and slurs with a remarkably multifarious vocabulary of exaggerated grimaces, smirks, snarls and moues. Her performance is a tour de force, for sure, keeping one toe in realism while the other foot frolics in Kabuki-esque hyperbole. Prudently, Metcalf and Pill let the human whirlwind blow, clearly hoping it will blow itself out. Yet the question in our minds the whole time is what the storm of abuse is for. What’s our payoff for tolerating it? And what’s C’s motivation for sticking around when any normal person would have left after the first half dozen appalling provocations? The caretaker B is conceived as a normative role, her wry humor and cool compassion a sort of antacid helping everyone to stomach the bitterness. One hopes she’ll steer the play toward some frame of meaning for all the noxiousness, despite being a powerless employee, and Metcalf is very adept at this “moderator” role. She seems to sit in judgment not only on the old woman but also on Pill’s stiff and pert C, a character so thinly written in the first act she’s little more than a punching clown. Metcalf’s elastically reactive face and amusing assortment of appeasing and cajoling diversionary tactics at least keep us curious to learn more. The second act’s follow-through, however—widely celebrated as a great experimental innovation—has always struck me as an elaborate misfire. With A (or a dummy of her) lying in bed, supposedly incapacitated by a stroke, B and C enter discussing her condition and are then joined by the actor playing A, now fully rational. The three have transformed into different versions of A and their conversation becomes a sort of cat-and-mouse game involving memories and experiences. Who knew what when, or should have? Which selves are dishonest and denying and which self-aware? In the background, her estranged son enters and stands silently by the dummy, mustering a bit of deathbed tenderness after a 20-year absence that’s been described in different ways. Before explaining my disappointment with all this, let me just pause to concede that Mantello, with help from set designer Miriam Buether, has staged this second act gorgeously. Wisely ignoring Albee’s insistence that Act 2 be as thoroughly naturalistic as Act 1, Mantello gives it a shimmer of otherworldly mystery. The bedroom’s back wall becomes a mirror-array in which replicas of the recumbent dummy A recede into the distance like endless versions of her story. This is lovely as far as it goes, but in the end it’s just a sumptuous vessel for a half-baked playwriting idea. Citing Act 2, critics such as Mel Gussow and Robert Brustein have extolled Three Tall Women as a masterpiece of dramatic efficiency akin to Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. They observe that Albee, like Beckett, dealt with unusually autobiographical material and cleverly compressed the key features of a complicated life story into a brief interval by giving the old woman younger versions of herself to talk to. The conversation zeroes in on pivotal moments of decision and regret in her life just as Krapp’s tapes do with his (he listens to his younger selves talking). While this is interesting, and the efficiency in both plays is admirable, the parallel is revealing in unflattering ways too. The life story that Albee compressed this way was basically that of his cold, bigoted, infuriating mother, about whom he felt incapable of writing for decades. Finally managing it in Three Tall Women, he pointedly avoided inserting himself into the action except as that silent cipher of the son hovering upstage. This sidelining of himself, or his surrogate, feels like an avoidance of real confrontation with the mother. It’s the principal reason why the play feels dry, static, and evasive despite rising lyrically near the end to cathartic pronouncements about the “happiest moment” always being now. Albee shortcircuited the exorcism of long-suppressed emotion that he sought. In fact, one reason why Krapp’s Last Tape is indeed heartbreaking is that it’s about the author-protagonist. He’s the one ruthlessly confronted and dissected, so the piece feels confessional. Albee tried to pull off the same magic trick by confronting and dissecting a despised Other and it doesn’t work. Three Tall Women never convinces me that it’s really a dialogue between different people rather than a splintered, cerebral monologue pretending to be dialogue. The greatest actresses in the world can’t change that. Again, Krapp is revealing. He may be alone onstage, but he has such a sensuous relationship with his tape recorder that it feels like he’s playing an erotic two-person scene. There’s real carnality in that play. Albee’s nameless characters, by contrast, are more like Krapp’s inanimate tapes—vain, self-absorbed, disembodied voices with no relationship to the carnal presence of the man summoning them for his own urgent reasons. That disconnection is why they strike us as “relentlessly hateful” and “boring” rather than necessary or wise. There’s no redemption here, just the whimpering end of the story. Photo: Brigitte Lacombe #ThreeTallWomen #EdwardAlbee #JoeMantello #GlendaJackson #LaurieMetcalf #AlisonPill

Last Monday, about forty minutes into the final preview of Yerma at the Park Avenue Armory—Simon Stone’s breathtakingly intense Lorca adaptation from London’s Young Vic—an unhappy thud came out of the dark during a tricky scene change. The house lights rose, the show was paused for a half hour for “technical problems,” and then abruptly cancelled. I’d been rapt when the action stopped, not least because the scene just played was a pretty surprising addendum to a tale famously focused on a woman desperate to get pregnant. The scene showed Her (the new name of Yerma, which means barren in Spanish) and her husband John lounging around a slick modern living room, blissfully cooing and fondling a baby—a real one, not previously seen. Later in the week I returned to Yerma with rebooked tickets, saw a full performance, and had another surprise. That baby scene wasn’t in the play! Instead, the show continued at that point with a scene in which Her returned her sister Mary’s newborn son after babysitting him. What was going on? The bright and cluttered living-room set I’d seen on Monday, glowing with the chaotic warmth and contentment of family life, never appeared at any other point in the action. And all the show’s other scenes were visually chilly, vacant and arid. Yerma is performed inside a claustrophobic glass-walled box designed by Lizzie Clachan, with the audience seated on opposing risers. It’s a voyeuristic arrangement that feels like you’re staring into an animal cage. Evidently, the original plan for the show was for everything except the baby scene to be pointedly sparse inside this cage, which exchanges bare expanses of plain pile carpet for plain green grass, plain dead grass, and plain mud. Afterward, I asked a friendly-looking running-crew guy for an explanation. He readily told me that the baby scene isn’t included every night. The producers feel that the scene is pointless if the baby isn’t completely placid, so the scene is skipped on nights when he doesn’t cooperate. I felt lucky to have seen the scene—a fleeting, quasi-fantastical glimpse of the happy family Her will long for but never get. I also felt the public had a right to know about the two versions of the show. My main reason for telling this story, though, is that the extraordinary contrast effect of the baby scene highlights the chief strength and the chief limitation of Stone’s remarkable adaptation. The actors in this production are unforgettably vivid, fearless and honest—particularly Billie Piper as Her, a slow-building thunderstorm. These adults are as impossible to look away from as that baby. At the same time, the joyless, sterile environment they’re in (almost all the time) underscores what a thorny problem modernizing Lorca is. Transferring a mythic tale like Yerma to a modern, middle-class milieu may not wholly kill its sweaty, elemental essence but it does shrivel and stress it to the point where the animal looks like a completely different species. Lorca’s Yerma (1934) is a tale of peasants and farmers. Its tragic story of a woman’s increasingly frantic longing for motherhood is rooted in nature, the earthy rhythms, local mores and folk traditions of a small village that might as well be outside of time. The action is suffused with music and lyric poetry and is anything but urbane. The closest it comes to overt politics (apart from its allegory of barrenness) is its idiosyncratic mixture of pagan and Christian iconography, which offended Lorca’s stiff-necked enemies before the Spanish civil war. Simon Stone has transformed Lorca’s young, presumably illiterate protagonist, married to a remote and authoritarian sheep farmer chosen by her father, into a self-assured, media-savvy editor and “life style and culture” blogger at Britain’s “second most important paper.” Her is a liberated, feisty 33-year-old with confident sexual agency and a partner of choice. John, played by Brendan Cowell, is a hunky businessman, cluelessly laddish but basically affectionate and benign. Instead of disappearing into the fields for days on end like Lorca’s Juan, John jets off to business meetings and misses important stuff like a birthday, a moving day, and many monthly fertility windows. This marriage will be highly relatable to the British and American theatergoing class. John and Her are liberal, tolerant, handsome, ambitious, and “completely honest” about sex. They talk openly about porn, birth control, body hair, body odor, fantasies, stray attractions, and countless other explicit matters that, tellingly, do more to drive them apart than draw them closer. You can’t help thinking that preserving a few zones of privacy and mystery might have brought more intimacy and empathy. As in Lorca, a love complication is dangled and dropped. An old flame named Victor (John MacMillan) turns up, wonders why things ended between them, then leaves town. Frustrated at her inability to conceive, Her begins detaching from reality. The process begins with a confusion of her public and private obligations. She allows her 21-year-old assistant Des (Thalissa Teixeira) to goad her into spicing up her blog with intimate details from her life, thereby betraying the trust of John, her sassy academic mother, and her maddeningly fertile sister. The amoral online world thus replaces the busybody town gossips in Lorca who act as a chorus-cum-morality police. Yerma and Her both ruin their reputations by talking recklessly in public about wanting to get pregnant. Her ruins her career as a journalist too. For about two thirds of the action I thought all of this was fascinating, impressively precise, and very sensitively thought out. My reservations about it arose when the story moved into its extended crisis. At a certain point, Her plunges into a self-destructive spiral that involves, in rapid succession, stalking playgrounds, having anonymous sex in fields, losing her job, and demanding so many expensive IVF treatments that the couple’s money runs out, they lose their house, split up, and worse. Because very few clarifying details about all this are given, the story’s plausibility takes a big hit in its rush-rush final section. What most disturbs about Her’s breakdown, though, isn’t lack of realism but rather the perpetuation of longstanding pernicious myths about women. Simon Stone writes in a program note that Her is “a woman who exists everywhere in the world all the time.” Really? I can accept—barely—Lorca’s Yerma as a timeless mythic paradigm. The universalizing lyricism of the older play’s rural locale, along with its carefully preserved ambiguity about how much Yerma’s madness is due to biology, prepare us to see her in the broadest possible light, even as myth. Not so with a woman as familiar to us as Her. Stone’s character is steeped in the minutiae of contemporary, urban middle-class life. All the details about fertility treatments, ovulation cycles, abortion, first and second wave feminism, Twitter trends, sexual tastes, psychotherapy, home furnishings, yuppie work schedules, and more make it impossible to view her story within a mythic frame. So much detail lends the action a clinical feel, especially given the laboratory-like setting. On the one hand this familiarity sharpens our interest but on the other it makes us question everything the characters do and say. We can’t help seeing that their problems are due to practical choices rather than timeless or tragic inevitabilities (including biology). And in that light, the play’s violent conclusion seems to perpetuate a “desperate woman” stereotype. This stereotype may be ancient, and it’s certainly still common—in no small measure because of ubiquitous IVF nightmare stories. But it’s anything but harmless. It’s as destructive today as it ever was, undermining women’s dignity and autonomy and even fueling legal efforts to restrict their reproductive decisionmaking. Simon Stone, who surely knows all this, evidently decided to deploy the trope anyway in the belief that the performances in his show were powerful enough make us forget the problem and grasp back at myth. At least for me, that didn’t work. In my world, you simply can’t have your mythical cake and eat it realistically too. Photos by Stephanie Berger #Yerma #SimonStone #BilliePiper

Lindsey Ferrentino has done a marvelous thing in conceiving a substantial and nuanced lead character with Down syndrome in her new play Amy and the Orphans and insisting that the role be played by an actor with that disability. The performer she cast, moreover, Jamie Brewer, is terrific. Brewer is destroying hardened prejudices and professional barriers with her acute and subtle performance in Scott Ellis’s production at Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre. All of that said, Amy and the Orphans is unfortunately not the play it needs to be to demolish such formidable walls for the better. In a program note, Ferrentino explains that she based the play on her family’s experience with her now-deceased aunt Amy. Born with DS, Amy, on “medical advice,” was placed in a state-funded institution by Ferrentino’s grandparents. The family occasionally visited after that and took Amy home for holidays but “were never a part of her life on a daily basis.” The play turns this situation into an occasionally sweet but often coarsely reproachful tale of abandonment, neglect, moral compromise and willful ignorance. In the drama, Amy’s older brother and sister, Jacob (Mark Blum) and Maggie (Debra Monk), both in late middle age, fly into New York from California and Illinois to fetch her from her residence in Queens after their father’s death. Their mother is already dead, and they need to arrange dad’s funeral in Montauk and clear out his house. A road trip down the Long Island Expressway ensues that reveals, again and again, the siblings’ utter cluelessness about Amy’s life and character. Jacob and Maggie know nothing about her thoughts, abilities or activities. They’re also ignorant of her legal and financial circumstances and are therefore shocked to learn that as a ward of the state she can’t simply be released to them. Her pregnant and plucky Hispanic caretaker Kathy (Vanessa Aspillaga) has to join the trip, which puts rather a crimp in their self-congratulation, phony concern and disingenuous involvement. Kathy’s blunt commonsense, like Amy’s cool awareness and sly wit, strip the siblings of their comfortable cover. That dynamic occupies much of the play, and Aspillaga’s interactions with Brewer in these take-down scenes are a pleasure to watch. The actors feed beautifully on each other’s comic leads, setting up perfectly timed retorts. Ferrentino also provides a backstory consisting of scenes with the parents when they were young. Holed up at a couple’s retreat a year after Amy’s birth, Sara (Diane Davis) and Bobby (Josh McDermitt) try to forestall a breakup caused by the strain of Amy’s care, and we watch them slouch predictably toward their fateful choice: dropping her off at a nice-looking Staten Island home called Willowbrook. (!) Kathy, in an earlier scene, has apprised us of the criminal mistreatment and abuse that took place there in the 1960s and 70s. These parental flashback scenes are a bit static but they’re hardly the play’s biggest problem. That distinction belongs to the portraits of Jacob and Maggie, who are both such obnoxious and superficial sitcom caricatures that one aches for them to leave the stage whenever they return. He’s painted as a ridiculously stereotypical Bible thumper and health nut who travels with a juicer, she as a stereotypical Jewish loudmouth and snack-hound who constantly nags him about religion and food. They always speak as if expecting rim-shots but have trouble eliciting even polite chuckles. There’s a strange compensatory inversion at work in this play, a weird sort of reverse shallowness in which the playwright seems to have traded one stereotypical expectation for another, rather than just refraining from stereotypes altogether. Disabled characters in drama are usually stereotypes, and to her enormous credit Ferrentino has conceived Amy as an impressively complicated and conflicted human being with self-evident agency. Why, then, did the playwright have to surround Amy with one-dimensional siblings whose simplistic villainy diminishes her realism? How amazing it would’ve been to see this historic character move confidently in a world we fully believed in. How deflating it is to see her shifting about to find her place in a tawdry, unedifying and cartoonish psychodrama. Photo: Joan Marcus #AmyandtheOrphans #LindseyFerrentino #JamieBrewer

New Yorkers have split into factions on Martin McDonagh since his plays first showed up here two decades ago. The flippant relationship to violence, the motley assortment of cuddly killers, the casual, tongue-in-cheek racism and deep-baked cynicism, even his irritation at being compared to Quentin Tarantino: all this and more was held against him in countless reviews, essays and blogs years before the Best Picture Oscar nomination for Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri made him a household name. McDonagh’s fans have usually taken it all with a grain of salt. The callous, of course, just like brutality and horror, and the thoughtful see his uses of them as critical, not cynical or degrading. The writing is often deliberately offensive, for sure, but it can also be sensitive, and it sometimes rises to a brilliant, Ortonesque species of political farce. The complication with McDonagh is that he can’t be reduced to blood-and-gore pandering. Hangmen, his new play at The Atlantic Theatre, is not one of his best. It’s unfortunately one of his hollower creations like The Lonesome West, The Lieutenant of Inishmore, and A Behanding in Spokane, where the farcical terror feels routine and the laughs are mostly at the expense of pig-headed brutes whose portrayals are stereotypical and condescending. This is the sort of McDonagh play that has convinced so many people of his low motives and kept them from giving his better works like The Pillowman and Three Billboards a fair chance. For me, McDonagh’s claim to serious attention lies in his signature theme: the absurdity of violent justice. His plays typically feature twisted characters who settle scores, nurse grudges, pursue revenge, or in this latest case carry out judicial killings, invariably without knowing all the facts. As the audience gathers those facts, the characters look more and more ridiculous, and when he’s on his game the plays work a sort of miracle in which the clowns and dupes come to seem all the more relevant to us for their very ridiculousness. These better plays—The Beauty Queen of Leenane and The Pillowman, for instance—pull off the improbable balancing act of grossing us out while keeping us interested in their wacky meditations on right and wrong. The sensationalized violence ends up feeling necessary to their moral reflections, which is why they can feel brightly indignant, even fleetingly progressive, rather than cynical. None of that happens, alas, with a play like Hangmen. Its action opens in 1963 Britain in a grim, fluorescent-lit room where a guy named Hennessy (Gilles Geary) sits with his head in his hands pleading for mercy from prison guards and Harry the hangman (Mark Addy). Hennessy has been convicted of abducting and killing a girl, but he swears he’s innocent, struggles and protests in a way that makes you feel he is (Syd the stuttering assistant: “If you’d’ve just tried to relax, you could’ve been dead by now”), and he’s presently hanged anyway. It’s a disturbing scene, reminiscent of the desperate and ambiguous interrogation that opens The Pillowman, which launches that play’s fascinating meditation on copycat violence. Hennessy’s hanging might have launched an equally fascinating meditation on the barbarity of state execution, possibly taking a hint from Shakespeare whose prisoner Barnardine famously shouted: “I will have more time to prepare me, or they shall beat out my brains with billets.” Instead, McDonagh aims low and stays low. Pot-bellied Harry, irked at being dissed by Hennessy as a second-rate hangman, marches off to get breakfast, and the rest of the play is driven largely by his inferiority complex. Capital punishment recedes as comic background. The next scene picks up two years later in the dingy pub Harry runs with his wife Alice (Sally Rogers), on the day when the country has abolished hanging. A trio of regulars is there getting pissed and a plucky reporter is hoping for a comment. Harry haughtily refuses for a while (“one thing I’ve always prided myself on . . . is that on the subject of hanging, I’ve always chosen to keep me own counsel”), but he then decides to talk to the guy, goaded by the prospect of his hated rival Albert Pierrepoint beating him into the papers (“I’m just as good as bloody Pierrepoint!”). A few juicy quotes about Harry’s opinions on the electric chair and the guillotine come out of this, but what the scene primarily establishes is that petty rivalry is what really matters in the play. The plot shows signs of deepening when a slick stranger named Mooney (Johnny Flynn) arrives, sporting a London accent, a nattier suit than any of the northern hicks, and a menacing air. He chats up Harry’s moody teenage daughter Shirley (Gaby French), poses niggling, resentful questions about Hennessy’s innocence, and is thus planted to convince us he’s a creepy criminal prowling brazenly under everyone’s nose. Harry’s impulse to act rashly on that assumption sparks the string of misunderstandings and calamities that rush Hangmen to its savage climax. Once again, though, what always seems to matter is how hilariously dumb everyone is. Three Billboards features a passel of mercilessly mocked dumb hicks too. The difference is that those morons are seen against the foils of fiercely intelligent Mildred (Frances McDormand) and well-intentioned Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson). It should be said that the acting in this Atlantic production directed by Matthew Dunster is exceptionally good, particularly Addy, Flynn, Rogers and Reece Shearsmith (who plays Syd). The characterizations are ferociously precise, and they’re greeted with peals of duly earned laughter. It could be that, at another moment in time, I might laugh at a black comedy like this too even though its social critique is pathetically thin. Knowing what I do about McDonagh’s potential, though, and distressed as I am by the daily outrages perpetrated by countless real-world Hangman-Harrys, I just couldn’t summon a titter. Photo: Ahron R. Foster #MartinMcDonagh #Hangmen