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Yesterday I knew nothing about the playwright Gracie Gardner or The Hearth, a feminist theater company co-founded by Kenyon alums Julia Greer and Emma Miller. Today, after seeing Miller’s production of Gardner’s Athena at Jack in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, starring Greer and the equally awesome actress Abby Awe, I want to see everything all these young women do. Gardner recently won the American Playwriting Foundation’s Relentless Award for a previous play, Pussy Sludge. Relentless is also an apt word for Athena, an 80-minute wolf-stare of a play that freezes you in its opening seconds and doesn’t really release you until the lights come up again. Athena is about two teenage fencers who decide to train together in New York City for a national competition. Much of the physical action consists of actual épée-fencing that is very carefully staged and adroitly performed, as it has to be because vital dramatic questions turn on the outcomes of thrusts and bouts. The girls chat together for the first time after one of them bursts into tears after losing to the other. We then watch them gradually grow closer while practicing. They challenge each other physically, share innumerable facts, quirks, confidences, foibles, and observations, and also question each other’s tactics and values. Crucially, though, trust never fully gels between them. Mary Wallace (Awe) and Athena (Greer) ought to be besties, if only because five hours of daily training together leave little time for other friends, but caution and competitiveness hang in the air between them like referee whistles. There is a class difference. Mary Wallace buses in from Teaneck, NJ, cares a lot about homework, has an intact family she likes, and wants to be an environmental lawyer, whereas Athena lives with her tuned-out, chain-smoking single dad in cramped NYC apartment, has adopted a goddess’ name (she won’t reveal her real one), and doesn’t seem sure about college. Other differences may weigh even more heavily. Mary Wallace, for instance, is short, shrewd and virginal while Athena is tall, muscular and (in Mary Wallace’s words) “advanced.” Awe and Greer make these characters so intimately vivid and particular you feel as if you’re eavesdropping on them in the gym. It would give away too much to spell out where the tension leads. Suffice it to say that being true to oneself in the spirit of pure competition figures centrally in the climax, whose outcome is reflected by the wonderfully innocent and clarifying reactions of a surprising third character, Jamie (Eva Ravenal), who enters briefly in the final scene. Athena shares certain basic features with last year’s Pulitzer finalist, Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves, which also deals with trust, loyalty and burgeoning adulthood among girl athletes (soccer players) who practice in front of us onstage. Gardner’s play is in some ways sharper, though, partly because the cast is smaller but also because fencing is just easier than soccer drills to pull off realistically in a theater. In any case, rumor has it that this fantastic show may extend its sold-out run. I hope it does, because it deserves that, and more. Photo: Mike Edmonds #Athena #GracieGardner

Plays set in recording studios, in my experience, are usually stories of entrapment. The spaces themselves—the soundproof walls and windows, the microphones poised to expose people’s emotional innards, the expensive equipment with its vague techno-promise of newness—are harbingers of pressure and trouble even before anyone enters them. Think of August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, where masterful black musicians gather to produce art and instead find themselves in a crucible of racism and exploitation that explodes in on them. And think of Eric Bogosian’s Talk Radio, where a popular shock-jock provokes, insults and brutishly titillates his callers, feeding voraciously on all the negative energy until he breaks down before our eyes. Interestingly enough, the remarkable Berlin Schaubühne production Returning to Reims, now visiting St. Ann’s Warehouse, defies this pattern. It is entirely set in a claustrophobic recording studio somewhere in Europe, which we stare at for ten minutes before the action begins, particularly at a mic conspicuously planted center stage. Yes, this mic will be a tool for wrenching emotional revelation by the central character, and yes, the confined space will exacerbate tensions between all the characters, just as expected. In the end, though, the play doesn’t leave you feeling breathless, or pummeled, or unsure whether you’ve just been abused or enlightened, as those other plays do. Instead it leaves you grateful, motivated to go talk to someone different from you, and even cautiously hopeful that greater empathy and understanding across social and political class-lines might actually be possible. Returning to Reims was created collaboratively by the director Thomas Ostermeier, who leads the Schaubühne, and the company member Nina Hoss, most familiar to Americans as the German spy, Astrid, in the TV series Homeland. The piece is structured as an adaptation of the French social philosopher Didier Eribon’s 2009 memoir Retour à Reims, which reflects on his escape from working-class French roots to discover and emancipate himself as a gay man and an intellectual. The book is a chillingly precise, remarkably self-possessed description of personal and class alienations that will feel depressingly familiar to any conscious Westerner in the Trump and Le Pen era. Eribon’s parents, staunch Communist voters for most of their lives, transformed into Le Pen supporters. He set out to explore how that happened in personal and macrosocial terms, and to figure out what might be learned from it. Hoss plays an actress named Katy who arrives to record passages from Eribon for use as voice-over narration in a film by Paul (Bush Moukarzel), a self-confident, young white guy. As she reads, sections from the film are projected behind her, showing various political confrontations past and present, including workers’ rallies and student uprisings, as well as footage of the actual Eribon visiting his widowed mother in the dreary French town he abandoned. Katy ruffles feathers by not behaving as a mere hireling performer. She interrupts the work to argue about what she sees as distortions to Eribon’s politics in Paul’s text cuts and imagery. These delays, in turn, vex the non-white studio owner Toni (Ali Gadema), who has donated studio time to Paul and evidently thinks the argument effete and lame. These low-key fractures in the peaceable recording session open up surprising avenues of new communication. Having apologized for his “unprofessional” snit, for instance, Toni drops the fact that he raps and then (with minimal prodding) performs an impressive number revealing sides of himself the other two never thought to inquire about. Katy (also with minimal prodding) then starts talking about “her” father, whose life story matches that of Nina Hoss’s father, Willi Hoss, a well-known politician and activist who started out as a farm laborer, became a prominent Communist and founder of Germany’s Green Party, and later traveled to Brazil to help indigenous people get access to clean water. Paul soon realizes that this father’s story, told by Katy with intense admiration and steady passion, is exactly what he needs to make his film personal and compelling. Images of Willi from Katy-cum-Nina’s phone are projected onto the upstage screen, and Toni, watching and listening to it all, eventually melts his cool. After a while, these three very different people find themselves engaged in meaningful conversation. That final scene is an inspiring, ice-breaking and trap-breaking moment. Nevertheless, it ought to be said that the play’s immediacy and theatricality are almost entirely in its second half. The interrupted recording session in the first half is a bit word-heavy, and the swerve away from it belatedly refreshing. It’s also worth pointing out that the parallel between Eribon and Hoss is inexact. They’ve both recently lost their fathers and Hoss obviously has deep empathy for the simple pride and practical mindset of laborers. As the child of a leftist activist, though, she doesn’t carry the guilt, shame or anger of someone like Eribon who fled a mind-numbing, abusive, right-wing environment for his very life. This week, The New Yorker published an interesting piece by Cynthia Zarin that quotes from an interview with Ostermeier. In it he reveals that he does have an abusive working-class background like Eribon’s, and harbors many of the same conflicted feelings about maintaining or cutting off contact. Those feelings were the initial spark for this extraordinary project; they moved him to send Hoss the Eribon book right after Trump was elected. Whoever our parents are and wherever we come from, we can be grateful he did. Photo: Arno Declair #ReturningtoReims #ThomasOstermeier #NinaHoss

I want the experience for the audience to be a sort of speeding train that gets completely and totally out of hand. --Robert O’Hara (New York Times interview, Dec. 20, 2017) Robert O’Hara’s Mankind, directed by the author at Playwrights Horizons, is a play desperately trying to get in trouble. It satirizes religion, men, feminism, social conservatism, and hookup culture, all with the same sassy irreverence. The trouble is, effective satire works through precision strikes, not cluster-bombing. The only sure way to get people good and outraged is to settle on a target and demonstrate that you know it better than its defenders. You may have heard of this play’s basic premise, a sure attention-grabber in the #metoo moment. O’Hara’s futuristic society is devoid of women. For reasons never explained, they all died out 100 years earlier, but humanity survived because men developed the ability to bear children. O’Hara’s inspiration was Douglas Turner Ward’s cheeky 1965 satirical fantasy Day of Absence, about whites coping with a world where blacks have suddenly disappeared. In Mankind an all-male world copes with its repressed need to resurrect females. In the first scene, two swaggering “bros,” Jason and Mark (Bobby Moreno and Anson Mount), introduced as casual “fuckmates,” not really in “a relationship,” bicker over a wee accident. “Dude, I’m pregnant.” “Dude, It’s probably not even mine.” “Dude, I could have not told you.” Displaying all the emotional intelligence of really dull 14-year-olds, they agree to “get rid of it.” The wrinkle: abortion is illegal in their vaguely authoritarian, socially conservative society. After some bungling, they’re both arrested for attempted murder. The baby, born in prison, then turns out to be a girl (named “Cry-Baby”), which is a big deal. It makes them “the most famous people on Earth,” and as newbie celebrities on TV (a scene both actors hilariously nail) they open their big shallow mouths to opine that there’s nothing wrong with recreational sex and that God for them is female. This sass makes them heroes, and then demigods, to a countercultural insurgency called Feminism. That’s the setup, and when Cry-Baby dies—“It’s the AIR!!” (don’t ask)—events slide into wacky theatricality. Jason and Mark are broken out of jail and effectively re-imprisoned in a Temple, where they’re bedecked in extravagant, Ziegfeldesque getups. Clergymen in cardinal-red distribute bloody Cry-Baby fetishes and holy cards to the audience (only to the men, thank you) and lead them in prayer. It’s all a hoot, sort of. Feminism has become a religion, albeit without women, replete with gruesome idols, violent dogma, and fundamentalist extremists. All this isn’t quite as clear in the play as I’m making it sound, because everything is generously larded with non sequiturs, tomfoolery, and petty distractions. For instance: “amen” in the Feminist church is intoned as “a-wo-men.” Discussions about parents don’t bother distinguishing between “fathers” and thus turn the word into Ionesco-like nonsense (everyone’s “father” might as well be Bobby Watson in The Bald Soprano—you know, the one with the same name as his cousin, son, father, uncle and aunt). In a play at peace with being a confection, such indiscriminate whipped cream would be harmless and delightful. Plays that ask you to think hold fun to higher standards, though. Why, I kept asking myself while watching Mankind, was I never properly delighted, or angry, or offended, or strongly moved in any other way? I think the reason is that the play, for all its insolence, isn’t a very sharp satire. It was a clever idea to send up liberal feminist pieties and mansplaining appropriation by comparing them to religion, but O’Hara’s skewering stalls on the level of sketch comedy. After the comic dust settles, he doesn’t seem to know very much about either feminism or parenting, and without those notes of empathy and understanding for his targets his humor can’t touch us deeply. Nor can his politics ring true. What has happened to gender—gendered behavior, gazes, presumptions, pressures—in the absence of women? Do children still contend with binaries as they grow? If so, do they amount to the old binaries, and if not, are there still attractions of opposites in other ways? O’Hara says nothing about these fundamental matters, and instead glosses the values of his reactionary world as a vague reflection of uptight middle America. Instead of considering how the new single-sex reality he posited would affect everything from family models to social and political structures to the very nature of ambition and desire, he borrowed a few hated features from his own, old world and set them up as a straw target. You can’t even tell, through all the mock-Catholicism, whether the counter-cultural Feminist insurgency in Mankind really represents a true underclass that might be (or feel) differently gendered from the ruling class. Sometimes the movement comes across as a mere front for a testosterone-driven campaign to legitimize casual sex. That sort of murkiness is why Mankind couldn’t generate the scandal O’Hara wanted. It’s never wholly clear what track the speeding train is on, and what exactly people are supposed to get mad at. Photo: Joan Marcus #RobertOHara #Mankind

Annoying as it is, I have to start with a spoiler alert. That’s because what’s most interesting to me about Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children—now playing in a splendid Royal Court Theatre production at MTC’s Friedman Theatre, directed by James Macdonald—just can’t be explained without giving away the plot-rabbit that she hides up her sleeve for about two-thirds of the play’s 110-minute action. Stop reading now if you want to save this surprise for the theater. I can’t cater to that desire because I think the mini-mystery that prolongs Kirkwood’s spring is her play’s one major blemish. The Children presents itself for over an hour as a rather plodding “unexpected guest play.” Rose (Francesca Annis) shows up out of the blue at the coastal retirement cottage of her old friends Robin (Ron Cook) and Hazel (Deborah Findlay), and then we’re fed an unremarkable teasing menu of possible reasons why she’s there (most to do with infidelity and feminine competition), until the truth is finally revealed. That truth is grisly and worth waiting for, sparking a profound conflict and debate. All three characters are British nuclear engineers in their sixties. A calamity has occurred in the U.K. similar to the one that destroyed the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan in 2011—a core meltdown caused when a post-earthquake tsunami swamped the basement cooling equipment. The play, it turns out, is not about sexual dalliance. Its subject is self-sacrifice for the sake of others. Rose has come to ask her old cronies to join a repair crew made up exclusively of retired engineers. They will try to stabilize the damaged reactor, subjecting themselves to dangerous, probably lethal radiation in order to spare the younger engineers now working there, many of whom have young families. Rose feels generational guilt about the meltdown, and doesn’t shrink from lobbing it at the others. We built a nuclear reactor next to the sea then put the emergency generators in the basement! We left them with a shit-show waiting to happen and no evacuation procedure! And then they were the ones standing in the dark, trying to fix something we could have predicted, we should have predicted, opening valves by hand, even though it was already too late! This is a gripping confrontation. The characters, superbly acted by the dead-on cast, are delineated with a fine brush, each reacting differently to the ethical challenge. Hazel in particular needs time to process her complicated loyalties and resentments, and because she turns out to be the only one not already tainted by cancer, she qualifies (sort of) as a bumptious surrogate for the average spectator. It occurred to me afterward, though, that the play was even more uncommon for its theme—let’s call it eco-altruism. Self-sacrifice has of course been a dramatic staple since ancient times. Tragedy would have been unthinkable without it—think of Alcestis and Iphigenia—and so would all religious drama rooted in the crucifixion story. Even irreligious modern playwrights who disavow tragic grandeur use self-sacrifice for emotional emphasis—think of Kattrin in Brecht’s Mother Courage and the burghers in Georg Kaiser’s Burghers of Calais. What’s rare in The Children, it seems to me, is the specifically scientific spin Kirkwood gives this theme in the topically supercharged context of environmental disaster. After all, we now have defenders of long-term environmental policy neglect running the American government and the EPA, not just Koch Industries—zealous defenders of neglect as thought-leaders! Thankfully, the play doesn’t pose the same sort of guilt trip to its audience that Rose does to Hazel and Robin. That would alienate us irrevocably. What it does is frame a tense meditation on the necessity of death, the acceptance of our demise to make room on Earth for younger people, as a practical, ecological problem rather than (as we usually hear about it) a religio-philosophical one. Once the play moves out of the rut of its trivial love-triangle, it blossoms into a tenacious and thorny think-piece about scientific ethics and the limits of self-interest. There are no easy villains or heroes in it in the end, as there aren’t in, say, Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People or Churchill’s Far Away (other meaty plays touching on eco-disasters). There is only the permanently urgent quandary of how anyone can act morally under morally haywire conditions. Photo: Joan Marcus #LucyKirkwood #TheChildren #JamesMacdonald

Toward the end of the fourth and final hour of Ivo van Hove’s interminable adaptation of Ayn Rand’s bloviated and adolescent-minded novel The Fountainhead (which recently visited BAM for five performances), I grew twitchy and restless and started looking around at some of my fellow audience members. Onstage, the winsome Dutch actor Ramsey Nasr, playing Rand’s starchitect-protagonist Howard Roark, was midway through his rousing climactic speech that justifies all his actions as heroic defenses of the individual threatened with ceaseless assaults by monstrous collectivism. This speech, a ridiculously implausible, self-aggrandizing, sensationalized monument to Whataboutism, was driving me insane. We should all, Roark insists, forgive his recklessly irresponsible and wasteful act of dynamiting an affordable housing project simply because those who changed his design plans without his consent violated his sacred creative integrity. Furthermore, we should swoon before the irresistible sexiness of his quintessentially “independent mind” and forget that his love affair with Dominique Francon (Halina Reijn), the novel’s sole trite pseudo-concession to human feeling, began with a rape. As all this was grossing me out just as much as it did when I read it at age 15, I looked around and saw three or four other patrons in what can only be described as unmistakable ecstasy. A rapt, gray-haired, potbellied man in his 60s was leaning so far forward that the patron in front of him could probably feel him breathing down his back. A blonde woman in her 40s was sniffling—sniffling! at Roark’s sinister warning about “a herd of brainless, soulless robots”—with both hands cupped on her cheeks. At the curtain call these people and dozens of others leapt to their feet, pounded their hands together, and shouted “Bravo!” until they were hoarse. To all appearances these folks were devoted Randies who had thrilled to a dramatization of one of their sacred texts by a director-adaptor with no evident critical relationship to it. Van Hove had indeed applied his whole, formidable inventory of slick, high-modernist stage tricks—large projections, use of hand-held mics, visible techies presiding over tables of blinking equipment, a sleek glass-and-metal environment by Jan Versweyveld—while presenting Rand’s story essentially straight, as if it were self-evident that her absurdly overwrought, convoluted, soap-operatic plot was gripping to everyone. To non-acolytes, that is laughably not the case, which made the show’s four-hour length a wannbe-epic conceit. It really ought to be said that this production’s abdication of critical engagement raises Randian questions of selfishness and irresponsibility regarding the director, especially in light of the fact that his signature stylistic gestures were so generic this time. The show wasn’t merely tedious and disappointing but something more troubling than that. Van Hove is currently the most prominent and celebrated European star director working on the American stage, and he used his privileged position atop the high-culture pyramid in this case to deliver, in effect, a drowning gulp of unfiltered triumphal-capitalist propaganda to an American audience under vicious assault by kleptocratic billionaires posing as our political leaders. What we need right now, I feel emboldened to say, is informed and engaged wisdom and guidance, not vacuous, nostalgic homage to a morally primitive teenage cult object. I delighted in some of Van Hove’s early work in this country, but for a while now he has seemed to me the theatrical equivalent of a starchitect like Howard Roark himself. What bugs many thoughtful people about flashy and glamorous starchitecture is that the buildings often have nothing to do with their surroundings, having been primarily conceived as sculptural objects meant to boost their makers’ fame and prestige. Fun, original buildings are wonderful when they meaningfully serve the people and places around them, but not when they’re wasteful and irrelevant, ignoring all social, environmental and economic considerations beyond the designer’s fee. Van Hove’s The Fountainhead is exactly this sort of decontextualized prestige-project. It tells a tale of ego, glamor and repudiation of social duty through a theatrical language that heedlessly maximizes ego and glamor. That leaves you with the very uncomfortable impression that this director might be as willfully blinkered about the role of art in society as Ayn Rand was. Photo: Richard Termine #TheFountainhead #IvovanHove #AynRand

Jeffrey Horowitz, Artistic Director of Theatre for a New Audience, forwarded me the following email exchange between him and a subscriber who was offended by one of the theater's productions. I thought it was remarkable enough to be worth posting, so here it is with his permission. No changes were made to the texts except to anonymize the subscriber's name and remove private contact information. From: Subscriber Date: December 5, 2016 at 9:46:48 PM EST To: info@tfana.org Cc: Jeffrey Horowitz (Artistic Director) Subject: Please refund me the rest of my subscription I attended a performance of The Servant of Two Masters last week, and I am still angry about my experience. I have been attending TFANA productions since 2007, many years as a subscriber when finances allowed. Usually I have been floored with how good the shows are (with the occasional clunker, but you can't win them all). However, what I saw on Tuesday made it quite clear that I am no longer welcome at your theater. For starters, for what was billed as a comedy, the production was simply not funny. If this was meant to be a reproduction of commedia dell'arte, I can see why that genre died out. But then the script moved on to anti-Trump jokes. While I voted for him, I can see that the Orange One certainly opens himself up for some mockery. However, these were not clever quips at his expense; they were just mean. I would have thought that the backlash after the cast of Hamilton lectured the Vice President-elect would have been a lesson; plenty of artists and theater professionals thought the behavior was inappropriate, and that it made the cast and producers look bad. I guess that message didn't reach TFANA. After the fourth nasty barb at the expense of Trump (and Trump voters such as myself), I left the theater. In four decades of theater-going, this was the first time I left a performance before the first act was over. Nevertheless, after twenty minutes (four Trump jokes in twenty minutes? Really?), I had no confidence that the mean-spirited attempts at humor were going to let up, so I decided to cut my losses. Speaking of cutting my losses, I was dismayed that this was only the first production of the current season. Since you made it quite clear that people like me are not welcome at your theater, please do me the favor of refunding the rest of my subscription. You are, of course, free to put on stage whatever you want, but if you are going to insult members of your audience, you should not expect them to come back. Sadly, Subscriber From: Subscriber Sent: Thursday, December 15, 2016 2:04 PM To: info Cc: Jeffrey Horowitz Subject: Re: Please refund me the rest of my subscription I have not had the courtesy of a reply to this e-mail. Please let me know when I can expect a refund. Subscriber From: Assistant to the Artistic Director Sent: Thursday, December 15, 2016 4:31 PM To: Subscriber Subject: Re: Please refund me the rest of my subscription Dear Subscriber: Jeffrey Horowitz, Artistic Director, received your e‐mail. He apologizes for the delay in getting back to you. He will be writing to you personally as soon as he is able. Thank you. From: Subscriber Sent: Wednesday, December 21, 2016 7:50 PM To: Assistant to the Artistic Director Subject: Re: Please refund me the rest of my subscription At this point, I really am more interested in getting a refund rather than engaging in a dialog, especially as no one at TFANA appears to want to talk about this. I'm not sure if the credit card I used for the subscription is still valid (my bank keeps switching things up with the new chip cards), so someone from the box office may need to call me to get the updated card number to process the refund - prorated, of course, since I'm not a monster. Subscriber From: Jeffrey Horowitz Sent: Thursday, December 22, 2016 12:06 PM To: Subscriber Subject: Re: Please refund me the rest of my subscription Dear Subscriber: Thank you for writing. I sincerely appreciate that you have been attending Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA) productions since 2007 as a subscriber and single ticket buyer and that you purchased a four play subscription for our 2016‐17 season. You raise important issues. I’ve been delayed in responding due to several deadlines and not because, as you wrote, “no one at TFANA wants to talk about this.” As you will read, TFANA is making you two offers. To begin, you wrote “the production was simply not funny.” While some critics found this production of SERVANT funny – for an example, please see the link to the TIME OUT review – the New York Times critic in this link has the opposite point of view. This only proves, of course, that art is personal – for the artists, audiences and drama critics. There are differing opinions, and when you buy a ticket, there can be no guarantee by the management of a refund if a patron doesn’t like or agree with the taste or point of view of the production. You note that in the nine years you’ve attended TFANA shows, there has been the “occasional clunker.” But, SERVANT was not, you explain, just a clunker. You feel the improvised anti‐Trump jokes in SERVANT were not funny at all, but so inappropriate, offensive and mean, that it made you feel – as a supporter of Mr. Trump – personally unwelcome at TFANA, angry and driven away. You demand a refund of the tickets you purchased for the remaining three plays of our season. TFANA won’t agree. In the first place, the form of commedia dell'arte is satiric and requires improvisation about and response to current events. There were jokes about subjects besides the Trump victory ‐‐‐ including artists’ wages, sex, marriage and TFANA’s repertory. Commedia (and art) challenges and provokes, and while that may be upsetting, it doesn’t mean you or anyone else is unwelcome. If I were to accept your argument, refunds would be due patrons, for example, who felt a portrayal of Shylock was anti‐Semitic; or Kate (in TAMING OF THE SHREW) was insulting to women; or the burning of the Koran in TAMBURLAINE was anti‐Islamic. If I wanted to avoid potential refunds, I would have no choice other than censoring artists and removing from productions what I thought might be offensive to some. But this is against one of the purposes of theatre, which is to provoke dialogue and a conversation. You are not unwelcome. I don’t think you are a monster. It is the opposite. We don’t want a homogenous audience. We want a lively one. Therefore, TFANA would like to organize a public discussion free for our audience during our current season at the theatre and invite you to be on a panel with a moderator. You will be paid a $200 honorarium and the panel will discuss issues you have raised. We will work with you to find a mutually convenient time. I believe it would be a great conversation and hope you will agree. However, TFANA will not issue refunds for the misperception that any patron is unwelcome because of artistic expression. Next, you have three remaining subscription tickets, one each to THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH, HAPPY DAYS and MEASURE FOR MEASURE. As a courtesy, we will convert the three tickets into Flex tickets as you wish and at no charge. Instead of having one ticket to each of the plays, you can allot your three tickets as you like. For example, if you don’t want to attend MEASURE, you can have two tickets for HAPPY DAYS and ONE FOR SKIN OF OUR TEETH, etc. I look forward to your response. Sincerely, Jeffrey Horowitz Founding Artistic Director Theatre for a New Audience From: Subscriber Sent: Thursday, December 22, 2016 12:35 PM To: Jeffrey Horowitz Subject: Please refund me the rest of my subscription Thank you for taking the time to reply. I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding here of what it means to be welcome, in particular at your theater. I explained that I felt that I was unwelcome, and that you and your artists made it quite clear that people like me don't belong in your audience. You are trying to claim that's not true. However, simply stating that "you are not unwelcome" doesn't make that statement true. You don't slap someone in the face, tell them "you're welcome here!" and expect them to believe you. I'm not sure if you're being insincere, if you think I'm gullible, or that you are so blind to your artists' bad behavior that you can't see why I should be offended. If I had to guess, I would suspect it's the last of these. I think you are also missing the distinction between being controversial (Merchant, Shrew, etc., though really, these are only controversial if directors choose to make them so) and just being plain old rude, which is what was going on at Servant. So, no, I don't want to go back to TFANA. I'm breaking up with you, because I get that you're clearly not that into people like me. I can handle it - but please don't drag this out. Just issue a refund, and we'll go our separate ways. And honestly - a panel discussion? Do you honestly think I want to go up on stage so that the rest of your audience can sneer at me, as well as your artists? Nope. Horrible idea. From: Jeffrey Horowitz Sent: Thursday, December 22, 2016 12:55 PM To: Subscriber Subject: Re: Please refund me the rest of my subscription Dear Subscriber: You could say all this publically on a panel and have a response in real time with others. I’m sorry you decline an offer which is meant in good faith. Having produced MERCHANT, SHREW, TAMBURLAINE and other plays, I can tell you that those who are insulted by those works of art feel just like you. They don’t see the art as simply controversial. They see it as a slap in the face and against people like them. But, no one is slapping in the face. You are not unwelcome. We all have to hear one another. The panel discussion would be fair and there would be others who would be sympathetic to your point of view. You might, as well, persuade those who don’t agree with you – like good theatre. Happy holidays and as explained there are no refunds. If you change your mind, let us know. Jeffrey Horowitz Founding Artistic Director From: Subscriber Sent: Thursday, December 22, 2016 9:00 PM To: Jeffrey Horowitz Subject: Re: Please refund me the rest of my subscription You keep pushing this panel idea, and I think that, once again, you are missing the big picture. I'm not an artist. I'm not an advocate. I am, or rather was, an audience member. I am (or, again, was) also a customer. It's not my job to persuade your audience. It's also not my job to persuade your artists. I don't think trying to change their minds would be in the least bit productive, and your assertion that I would be treated fairly or that there would be others that share my point of view is, at best, naive. I mean, have you met these people? (Quick refresher: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKOb-kmOgpI) I'll repeat myself: my role here is a customer. I'm not saying what you should or shouldn't put up on stage. After all, it's your company and your right to express yourself artistically as you choose. However, I'm choosing not to buy what you're selling. There are plenty of comparisons I could make, none of them perfect, but here's one: say you were promoting a series of elegant dinners prepared by the city's finest chefs. I sign up for all four dinners, but at the first one I learn that all the dishes feature bacon... and I keep kosher. And then I learn that the second dinner is probably going to explore the theme of shrimp, and after that ham, and the series will be crowned by luxurious lobster. All delicious, and probably superbly prepared, but not for me. Unlike what you did with Servant, those chefs probably weren't hoping to insult anyone, but they're certainly not catering to everyone. As a customer, I would want to get my money back, at least for the dinners I wasn't going to attend in the future. Does that help? You keep repeating that I'm "welcome" at TFANA, but I simply don't believe you. We've gone past the question of whether I should want to give you a second chance. At this point this is really just a customer service question, not one of artistic ideals. Please process my refund. Is it really worth this much of your time to hold on to $150? Subscriber From: Jeffrey Horowitz Sent: Friday, December 23, 2016 2:44 PM To: Subscriber Subject: Re: Please refund me the rest of my subscription Dear Subscriber: You purchased a four play subscription package in August, 2016. The price you paid for the four‐play package is significantly reduced over the price of single tickets and described the plays. It stated clearly “All productions, artists and dates are subject to change. All packages are non‐refundable.” As a customer, it is your responsibility to decide if our package with its qualifications is to your liking and if you agree to its terms. You did and purchased the four play package. You argue now that you should receive a refund for the remaining three of the plays because it is as if you purchased four dinners only to then find out after purchasing that the foods that will be served at the dinners are not to your liking or diet. If, in your example, of a four dinner package, you were advised before purchase that it is a final sale and there are no refunds, it would be your obligation to ask what would be served at the dinners. You only asked for a refund for three of the plays on the basis of your anger over the artistic content of SERVANT OF TWO MASTERS and your stated belief that you are not welcome at TFANA. I cannot assure you or any other customer if you might be upset by the plays and productions you subscribed to, but it is TFANA’s policy and principle not to issue refunds for subscription packages. Our policy stands to all who purchase subscriptions. I assure you that you are welcome at TFANA and hope you will reconsider and attend. Sincerely, Jeffrey Horowitz Founding Artistic Director Theatre for a New Audience From: Subscriber Sent: Friday, December 23, 2016 3:54 PM To: Jeffrey Horowitz Subject: Re: Please refund me the rest of my subscription I have arranged to have the balance of my subscription converted to a "donation" so that at least I can get some tax benefits out of it. You have handled this situation poorly. Your attitude betrays a great deal of arrogance (a panel discussion will make it all better? For crying out loud!). It also shows poor business sense - most businesses, even those that operate close to the bone as I'll assume yours does, know that the best way to handle an unhappy customer is to refund his money and make him go away, as someday he may choose to come back. You've guaranteed that I will never darken your doors again. You have also greatly reduced my enthusiasm for going to the theater in general. You've endorsed the idea that artists should be able to insult their customers with impunity and without consequences, and I still don't think you see how reckless and divisive this behavior is. Goodbye. #JeffreyHorowitz #TheatreforaNewAudience #ServantofTwoMasters

Julia Cho’s Office Hour began life as a reaction to the 2007 mass-shooting at Virginia Tech. It ruminates on the persistent and ghastly problem of gun violence in the U.S. by dramatizing a nail-biting encounter between a college writing instructor and a silent, stony, black-clad, loner student very like the Virginia Tech shooter, a Korean-American named Seung-Hui Cho. Julia Cho is Korean-American, and rage at racial discrimination is a point of connection for her fictional instructor and student, both Asian-Americans. In the first scene, the instructor, an adjunct named Gina (Sue Jean Kim), is warned about the student, Dennis (Ki Hong Lee), by two English Department colleagues who have found his truculent and withdrawn presence creepy and his writing alarming—suffused with raw aggression and mechanistic sexual violence. The colleagues (a white man and black woman) complain that even though Dennis clearly fits the profile of “a shooter,” their college has declined to intervene, and they expect Gina to share their dread. Instead, she sets out to reach Dennis during a private conversation. What follows is a 75-minute encounter (the whole play is 90 minutes) in which Gina tries to coax Dennis out of his shell with a combination of ordinary kindness, personal confession, and teacherly blandishment. That none of it seems to lead anywhere—she gets him talking but neither character ever alters any position—ultimately feels more frustrating than the play’s many plausibility problems. I’m not speaking, for the moment, about Cho’s maddeningly indeterminate structure in which the story keeps screeching to a halt with violent shocks, only to continue as if that violence didn’t happen. I’m speaking rather of large leaks in the basic situation. For one thing, Dennis is so blatantly menacing that he’s a walking red flag that, post-Virginia Tech, no American university would ignore. Any student with as many risk-factors as him nowadays would be tagged for mandatory intervention and his teachers supplied with special security and instructions not to be alone with him. I say that as a long-time college professor who has dealt with plenty of bizarre behavioral cases. More egregious, it’s impossible to believe that a mature woman like Gina would rush to spill her guts with a surly kid who’s never spoken to her (sharing stories of her stalled career, unsupportive parents, broken marriage), just on a hunch that a touch of racial solidarity will move him. I also don’t buy that such an insecure and underpaid adjunct would risk so much for her job. Cho clearly wants us to accept that Gina is driven by a simple desire to help Dennis, to try to understand him when no one else has bothered. The trouble is that her efforts don’t resemble idealism so much as suicidal delusion. She ends up seeming like the one who isn’t understood, despite the actress Sue Jean Kim’s heroic efforts to flesh her out in Neel Keller’s swift and smooth Public Theater production. It’s also worth mentioning that the majority of American mass-shooters are white—a rather important fact that has finally received due attention and commentary in the years since Virginia Tech. Think of Aurora, Newtown, Las Vegas, and all too many others. The Stony Brook sociologist Michael Kimmel has attributed this preponderance to a class-based feeling of “aggrieved entitlement.” In light of this, it’s hard to see how Office Hour advances the national conversation by inconclusively emphasizing the factor of minority-resentment. As already mentioned, Cho’s play has a stop-and-restart, alternative-reality structure punctuated by jarring gunshots. In recent years other, more philosophically minded playwrights have also used this technique—Nick Payne in Constellations, for instance, and Brian Yorkey in his book for the musical If/Then—to juxtapose parallel universes. These alternatives had a wistful quality to them as we pondered the various coulda, woulda, and shoulda-been scenarios. No one feels wistful about a subject as brutal, frightening, and rawly topical as gun violence. Because Office Hour is structured as a thriller, it occurred to me about halfway through that its stop-and-restart technique recalled, more than anything else, the megapopular R.L. Stine kiddie-thriller series Goosebumps—You Choose the Scare! When they were young, my kids used to clamor for those books at bedtime. What they especially liked, I felt, was the way the choice of plot trajectories shortcircuited any buildup of real fear. The deflections helped them settle down into comfy slumber, convinced as much that none of the scary stuff had actually happened, as that all of it had. Photo by Carol Rosegg #JuliaCho #OfficeHour

[JK note: the TheaterMatters blog was previously called Something the Dust Said] Dear Dust Man, I’m an avid theatergoer who missed seeing Nia Vardalos’s stage adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s bestselling book Tiny Beautiful Things during its sold-out run at the Public Theater last year, and I just can’t decide whether I should run out and grab a ticket now that the show has re-opened there in a larger house. I loved Vardalos’s wry film My Big Fat Greek Wedding and enjoyed her sassy acting in the TV spinoff (My Big Fat Greek Life) but I didn’t read Strayed’s book and the prospect of a stage play based on a collection of advice columns kinda makes me cringe. I feel buffaloed by all the articles that have extolled the show as a stupendous tearjerker—yet another in this Sunday’s New York Times! Can you advise? What to think of these omens of ick? Yours, Ickophobe Dear Ickophobe, You’re right to be wary. Very few bakers could make this theatrical cake rise. The Strayed book is extraordinary. You should read it. It utterly reinvents the trivial form it comes from, bringing depth, anomalous compassion and a sort of acute perceptiveness that can only be called wisdom to the dubious practice of advice-giving. In the persona of the columnist Sugar, Strayed digs out the meaty (and ultimately unanswerable) questions beneath the often petty and practical ones her readers ask, grappling with them in relentlessly searching ways. She is loving, smart and surprising, calling out hypocrisy, evasion, equivocation and more while also goading, praising, encouraging, and grieving with her correspondents like a trusted friend. She wins your trust, respect and affection because (her saccharine pseudonym notwithstanding) she doesn’t hide. The hallmark of her column is its use of beautifully turned, soul-scouring stories from her own life. That said, the book is unlikely material for a play. The chief obstacle, as you seem to surmise, is the sincerity of the speaking voice. On the page, Sugar is delightfully complex and multidimensional, drawing on such a broad variety of life experience that the events of the writing seem to travel the globe even though they never really leave her mind. She’s sharing opinions and points of view and they are anything but narrow. On the stage, though, that singular voice with its unvaryingly earnest attitude has to be front and center, and who wants to sit through long speeches by any ceaseless do-gooder, no matter how perceptive or precise? That’s the ick-anxiety. The thing is, Vardalos and company have figured this problem out. In this adaptation (done with the director Thomas Kail and Marshall Heyman) she shares the stage with three other actors—Teddy Cañez, Hubert Point-Du Jour and Natalie Woolams-Torres—who speak to her, at her, sometimes over her, playing dozens of other people who wrote to Sugar, chiming in with conversational snippets drawn from her columns and reader-letters. These people wander around the modestly furnished kitchen/living room set, which is warmly cluttered with the bric-a-brac of family life (unwashed dishes, plastic letters on the fridge, disorderly bookshelf), while only Sugar really seems to live there. Their physical presence, as though conjured by her empathy toward them, makes the generosity of her letters to them all the more moving. Vardalos’s wryness is the perfect delivery vehicle for these gorgeous letters. She’s an actress who seems always interrupted mid-bustle, which makes her a tad edgier than Strayed. That’s a good thing. As a theatrical character Sugar needs a slightly higher quotient of reluctance and hassled sincerity than the book’s character. Because she is even-keeled and unruffled like a therapist one moment, then emotionally leaky and breakable the next, Vardalos can convince us that writing her column really costs Sugar/Strayed some blood and tears. That’s the crucial trick. The impression of rattled sophistication Vardalos leaves is what I think gives so many worldly-wise audience members the permission they need to cry. The smart and cagey way this show handles sticky emotion made me reflect on my longstanding irritation at people who insist on believing that tears are the gold-standard of quality in drama, no matter what callous assholes say to the contrary. I feel like I’ve always been one of those callous assholes, even when I’m weeping at the theater. Many years ago, near the beginning of my college teaching career, an incident occurred with a very smart student that bothered me at the time but clarified my view of this issue. It involved one of those exceptionally bright and engaged students who raises the level of class discussions, the kind you call on a little too much because you’re always curious what they’re thinking. At a certain point in the semester, she stopped participating, and I figured she’d just gotten busy and had to let our reading slide. In retrospect, I saw that the turning point was a unit on American drama in which I’d used Brecht as a foil for Clifford Odets and Arthur Miller, asking whether the intense feelings the Americans’ plays evoked could really ever lead to improvement of the social problems they were critiquing. I’d also assigned Rousseau’s attack on bourgeois sentimentality from two centuries earlier: “In shedding tears at fictitious misfortunes, we discharge all the duties humanity requires of us on such occasions without any further inconvenience to ourselves . . . when a man goes to a play . . . to weep at imaginary misfortunes, what more can be expected of him? Is he not perfectly satisfied with himself? Does he not even boast of his sensibility?” In the end, as I found out, my student felt buffaloed by all these readings and the stacked class discussions of them. When she finished her final exam—which was perfect—she walked up to me and said: “So it has to be complicated? If something’s not complicated, you don’t respect it? That’s not how everyone is. Thanks for the class.” I never saw her again. I’d like to believe that that parting shot made me a better teacher. It certainly made me rethink the emphases and balance in all my classes that play ideas off against feelings. And today, I believe that experience also helps me see that even the people who have nothing to say about Tiny Beautiful Things but “look how it makes people cry!” are certainly getting much more out of it than that. Yours, Dust Man Photo: Joan Marcus #NiaVardalos #TinyBeautifulThings #CherylStrayed #ThomasKail

The most interesting question about David Greenspan’s one-man, 6-hour performance of Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude is why an artist of his intelligence, wit and sophistication would want to do such a thing. In 1963, reviewing one of the three Broadway productions it has had, Richard Gilman called this 1928 drama “very likely the worst play that has ever been written by a dramatist with a reputation.” Strange Interlude is dramatic literature’s great cautionary lesson in the wages of unbridled bloviation: a 9-act, numbingly prolix, psychologically preposterous, embarrassingly pretentious, drearily melodramatic saga about a woman unhinged with regret about not sleeping with her hunky fiancé before he left to fight and die in World War I. Early fans (including, ahem, the Pulitzer Prize judges) evidently convinced themselves that the play was cutting edge because it interlaced stream-of-consciousness monologues and confessional soliloquies with conventional dialogue. Psychoanalysis was all the rage in the 1920s and lifting the lid on the unconscious counted as scandalous. In fact, O’Neill’s hyperventilated inward speech (“I wish she hadn’t told me this . . . it has upset me terribly! . . . I positively must run home at once”) didn’t reveal much that wasn’t perfectly clear to close listeners of his soap operatic overt speech (“I saw what a fool I’d been—a guilty fool! So be kind and punish me!”). And the stakes of the endlessly silly story were too obvious and commonplace to justify the epic scale. The gaseous self-indulgence of this work was already mocked in the 1930s—most memorably by Groucho in Animal Crackers (“Pardon me while I have a strange interlude…”). What, then, did a serious artist like Greenspan see that made him want to go to the trouble of memorizing the whole 200 pages and perform all eight roles of this work himself? Was he a devotee? Did he have novel insights into Strange Interlude and strong convictions about what the rest of us have been missing? These mysteries motivated me to buy a ticket, even though, after enduring the Glenda Jackson Broadway production in 1985, I swore on a stack of clammy Freud lectures that I’d never sit through the play again. As anticipated, Greenspan is the chief object of fascination. Dressed in a three-piece, pinstriped suit, he moves about a series of sparely furnished, roughly period rooms talking to himself for all 6 hours. The rooms have been specially built inside the Irondale Center in Brooklyn, an old former church space with a mezzanine used for meal breaks and to seat the audience when Greenspan performs the final two acts atop the rooms’ plywood ceilings. The movement of the audience between acts helps keep the blood circulating and the eyes open. Greenspan’s skill at distinguishing the characters is a marvel to behold. His vocal and gestural distinctions are stunningly sharp, with slight head movements and the smallest variations of pace and accent accomplishing clear changes of identity. The impression of dialogue is accomplished with gentle twists of the body left and right and sometimes just tiny nods. Interestingly, Greenspan uses no special inflections for the asides and soliloquies that he doesn’t also apply to the dialogue. And that is really the chief innovation of the production. He and his director Jack Cummings III have rendered the play’s famous—and famously cloying—distinction between inward and outward speech moot. When the words come from one individual mouth, the entire action becomes an inner monologue. This quality may have been immanent in the original work, but Greenspan makes us focus on it, consider it as a possible essence of this critically unloved text. The play, here, becomes a melodrama of the soul. We watch Greenspan explore the swollen psychic landscape so devotedly that we cheer him on against our better judgment. He’s on a quest, and quests are captivating. He’s trying to locate some fount of non-platitudinous wisdom in the tale with his signature theatrical approach of public solitude. He was the guy, remember, who wrote and starred in The Myopia, a 2010 solo show with 22 different roles. His 2007 solo play The Argument channeled the remarkable devotion that a particular Greek translator and scholar had to Aristotle. His 1988 HOME Show Pieces featured a man masturbating alone on a bed interrupted by phone calls and a playwright sitting on his apartment toilet fantasizing about fame. It occurred to me at one point during Strange Interlude, watching him gaze upward, trance-like, that the show was a sort of ambulatory séance. Greenspan was contacting the dead on our behalf in the form of characters we’d never properly appreciated, and letting them speak, now through him. I didn’t leave this show with a whole new appreciation for Strange Interlude. I don’t think any intelligent person could. Nevertheless, I don’t regret seeing it because it’s a riveting spectacle of quixotic devotion. For those who’ve never seen O’Neill’s play before and might be curious, let me just say, with confidence, that it doesn’t get any better than this. Photos by Carol Rosegg #DavidGreenspan #EugeneONeill #StrangeInterlude

Richard Crookback is Shakespeare’s dazzling carnival monster, a showoff criminal who charms us into reveling in his villainy. It’s a no-brainer to make him funny-scary in production. Or over-the-top disgusting, or intimidating, or lurid, or for that matter attractive. The sole requirement is a big, game ham. What’s really difficult—close to impossible, actually, after 424 years of sensationalizing—is to make him genuinely disturbing, to portray this monster in a way that breaks through our psychic defenses and plants sticky misgivings about ourselves and our world in our minds. Thomas Ostermeier’s astonishing production of Richard III, visiting BAM from the Schaubühne in Berlin, got there with me about two thirds through, during what would otherwise have seemed a cheesy interlude of audience participation. More on that in a moment. The show is an ordeal, and is meant to be. For two and half intermissionless hours Lars Eidinger, who plays Richard, treats the stage as his personal terror-playground. The set is a semicircular sandbox backed by a two-tier metal gallery and steps, and he swans and struts about it, his head wrapped in what looks like a medical skull strap, implying that his character’s deformities are natural advantages. His hump and clubfoot are just appliances, casually removed or revealed as necessary as he coaxes, lies and bullies to get his way. The appliances aren’t restrictions but rather graphic reminders that he’s “marked” in obvious ways to others in his world—they know he’s questionable but don’t see how deep his malice goes. In fact, Eidinger is physically freer as Richard than any other actor I’ve seen. He strips naked at one point to woo Lady Anne. His most vital accessory isn’t even on his body but rather on the stage. It’s a mic hanging from the flies that functions also as a spotlight, video camera and trapeze line (the rigging for this device must be a nightmare). Eidinger uses it in nearly every scene in marvelously different ways—confiding or cracking wise, swinging or whipping the wire, magnifying his face, or generally presiding like a demented emcee. You can’t wait to see what he does next with it. Only once does he appear physically confined or inhibited by anything. Interestingly enough, that’s after he’s crowned king and dons a stiff corset and plastic neck brace. The irony is so glaring it’s moving. Power is the one true disability, as we’ve seen to our revulsion with Harvey Weinstein. The production's decisive moment comes in Act IV, after Buckingham, the character who helps Richard murder his way to the throne, is cheeky enough to ask for his promised earldom. Eidinger’s response is to smear a plate of oleaginous brown food across the Buckingham actor Moritz Gottwald’s face and torso. He then piles it on with an obscene, juvenile taunt: “Hey, you look like shit! Have you eaten pussy yet today?” Frankly, I yawned at that. At first. But Eidinger pushed it further. He dashed into the audience repeating the lines in German, then switched to English, pumping the crowd to get them to shout the lines along with him as a jeering cheer. That’s when I gulped. A hundred or more presumably liberal, sophisticated, evolved and enlightened BAM-goers gleefully took up the prompt, shouting those foul words aloud again and again like 12-year-olds on a dare. Who the fuck were these people? I thought I knew. And what else might they do in the anonymity of a crowd? The Harvey Theater suddenly felt like an unsafe space. “Murderers are not monsters, they're men. And that's the most frightening thing about them,” wrote Alice Sebold in The Lovely Bones. The line could be a byword for Ostermeier’s production, which isn’t naturalistic but nevertheless finds ways to make every outrage, treachery and perversion in Richard III seem uncomfortably human and personal. German Shakespeare can be trying for native English-speakers because it starts from wholly different premises from British and American Shakespeare. Germans think they love the Bard but they actually love their adopted and translated image of him. Having little access to the magic of the original language, their usual approach is to build ingenious conceptual frames for the stories and dominant themes, or else radically alter the balance of suggestion and explicitness with efficient (and reductive) modern prose translations. Every once in a while, though, an uncommonly perceptive German conducts a clear-eyed, open-ended exploration, using the extraordinary resources of a German institution, and ignites illuminating fires that we Anglophones couldn’t precisely because of our attachment to the language. That is what happened with Ostermeier, and it is thrilling to see. Photos by Richard Termine #Shakespeare #RichardIII #BrooklynAcademyofMusic #ThomasOstermeier #LarsEidinger

Maria Irene Fornes’s 1983 play Mud, widely considered a contemporary classic, is rarely produced at full strength. Each of the four productions I’ve seen—including a dreadfully misconceived version directed by David Esbjornson in the 1999 Fornes season at Signature Theater—were flawed in basic ways. In my experience, what usually happens is one of two things. Either Fornes’s powerful visual imagery and whimsicality are sacrificed for pedestrian realism, making the work, to all appearances, a mildly offensive, downtown-chic docudrama about hillbillies. Or else the opposite occurs. The production strains so much after indirection and surreality that it ends up draining everything of plausibility, including the surrealism. Elena Araoz’s Boundless Theatre Company production, running at Teatro Circulo until Oct. 29, is a particularly fine example of the realistic bias. It is funny, sharp, moving, and happily avoids the pedestrian. Set in a spare, bone-white wooden room perched on a red-earth promontory, Mud tells the story of an illiterate young woman named Mae who strives to escape poverty, brutality and ignorance by learning to read. She is thwarted by two millstone-men, one named Lloyd who is young, rude, shabby and has been with her since childhood, the other named Henry, an older, quasi-respectable neighbor she invites in and hopes to learn from. This gorgeously bleak work is a tough and elastic tissue of verbal artifice, not a naturalistic study of real-world squalor. It tells a tale of crushed self-reflection but as a dance of strange balances. The action is clearly allegorical yet for 17 quick scenes it twists our emotions with the details of three decidedly idiosyncratic temperaments. Frozen tableaus occur between the scenes, the dialogue is chiseled and rigorous like Beckett’s, the environment ambiguous and claustrophobic, yet the characters earn money, visit a medical clinic, and tend real vegetables. We’re supposed to be unsure whether we’re in a flagrantly theatrical purgatory or a place locatable on a map. Another peculiarity is that the play dangles emancipatory feminism only to undercut it in the end. Mae may ultimately be a victim, but she doesn’t do much to help herself. She never seeks connections with anyone or anything outside her trap of a home, and her admiration for Henry’s ability to speak well is curiously passive. It’s never entirely clear what the two of them want from one another, and her incipient power over language, her nascent awakening, comes to nought. The strength of Araoz’s production is its sharp focus on this pointedly inconclusive story of timidity and indolence in the face of gnawing spiritual hunger. The stage design by Regina Garcia shows no structure on a promontory, only a drab, dark and seedy kitchen interior with a few whimsically wayward wood pieces jutting out here and there. The audience—no more than a few dozen people—is shoved up against a plain kitchen table and chairs so closely we feel like eavesdroppers. Nicole Villamil is terrific as Mae—fierce and diffident, cold and tender, bemused and serious as necessary, carelessly graceful and effortlessly subservient without ever seeming to fake it (a common problem with this role). She quickly establishes clear and distinct relationships with both men—Julian Elijah Martinez as Lloyd and Nelson Avidon as Henry—which allows us to follow the text’s many subtle power shifts as intimately as the actors’ facial expressions. The men too feel strongly anchored to her, one another, and their environment. Martinez whimpers, sulks and shrinks inside his skin when Lloyd is ill, then seems to grow, actually to swell physically when he recovers, leaping about the minuscule kitchen while gloating at Henry’s illness and very nearly braining some front-row patrons. Avidon, for his part, wisely underplays Henry’s early gentle interactions with Mae, and that softspoken start sets him up nicely to shock us with his naked malice as a cripple later on. This production does lack the image-punch of the original play, the visual grandeur and complexity of the enigmatic stage picture Fornes conceived. But it credibly captures the moment-to-moment nuance of the funny-sad, touchingly sick tale better than most others I’ve seen, and that’s no small accomplishment. Photos by Al Foote III #MariaIreneFornes #Mud #ElenaAraoz

From Brecht’s plan to project films of Marxist revolutions behind Didi and Gogo in Waiting for Godot to JoAnne Akalaitis’s explicitly postnuclear Endgame, firebrand directors have never stopped trying to amp up the social and political relevance of Samuel Beckett. George Tabori’s Happy Days in which Winnie was a paraplegic confined to a bed rather than buried in a mound was in my view the nadir of such disastrous experiments, reducing one of drama’s most monumentally reverberant images to a puny polemic. Devotees of explicitation have far more often embarrassed themselves than illuminated the plays. Questions of textual fidelity aside, the suppressed power of Beckett’s emptied-out, introspective, profoundly ambiguous environments invariably ends up seeping through any imposed topicality like a prodding conscience. For this reason the preshow spin of Beckett in the City: The Women Speak had me worried. This site-specific staging of Beckett’s short, later works for women—Not I, Footfalls, Rockaby and Come and Go (originally produced in Dublin)—is presented by the Irish Arts Center in three dingy rooms in a former piano factory on West 52nd Street. A program note and pre-curtain announcement by the director Sarah Jane Scaife invite us to draw parallels between poor immigrant women who might have worked in such factories long ago and the ghostly, fragmented characters in the plays. This is not an obvious analogy, to me at any rate. It turns out, however, that Beckett in the City: The Women Speak is a canny, subtle and startlingly beautiful event, rooted in uncommon sensitivity to the enduringly odd content of these plays. The evening has many moving parts—the plays, the multi-part site, texts and videos projected on the walls that both set the mood and offer critical foils—and all of it contributes to one of the most intelligent and resonant feminist readings of Beckett I’ve seen. The audience—only 38 people are allowed in—is first ushered into a small, darkened room where a full-wall video shows three women in clogs, plain skirts, and sweaters shuffling aimlessly about a dreary and dilapidated space, peering out high windows, never engaging one another. Between the plays, other videos (all credited to Kilian Waters) will show these same women drifting up and down seedy stairs, moving listlessly in and out of doorways—very much like depressed patients in a mental institution except that their movements are eerily smooth, phantasmal, and graceful. They are marginal and discarded females, we understand, but not valueless. That note lingers as the crowd is led to a still smaller room for Not I. Not I is the most notorious of Beckett’s late “dramaticules,” a disjointed, torrential monologue for a disembodied mouth surrounded by darkness, tightly masked to isolate that part from the rest of the performer as she talks about a woman suddenly gushing speech after 70 years of silence. Many know this work from the 1977 TV version starring Billie Whitelaw, an unforgettable 12-minute closeup. In most productions done in conventional theaters, however, Mouth is so infinitesimal to most spectators that the obscene spectacle of its manic pulsation has to be taken on faith. It might as well be a faintly flickering star. The first distinction of Scaife’s Not I, then, is that no spectator is more than 15 feet from its powerful lead actress, Bríd Ní Neachtain. Ní Neachtain sits in the dark atop a 5-foot stool, unrestrained by any head-clamping apparatus (such devices resembling medieval torture contraptions are often used for this role). The tight spotlight on her mouth spills a bit onto her chin and neck but any distraction from that soon gives way to utter absorption in the nuances of her flapping, swelling and shrinking mouth movements. The mouth is fascinating in itself, alternately abstract and suggestive of some toothy, sentient sea creature escaped from the water and suspended in midair. Ní Neachtain’s performance is also distinguished by its pacing. She doesn’t speak at the breakneck speed actors usually adopt in this role but rather at a sober conversational clip, as if struggling to articulate a particular thought. Her pace gradually quickens, presumably as the lucidity of that thought eludes her. The implication is that Mouth, here, is not just the childlike, impulsive head-case she’s often taken to be. She’s rather a whole, adult woman striving to communicate through obscure impediments that, for reasons unknown, take the form of metaphorical fragmentariness. The staging is also unique in that this striving is witnessed by another woman. Not I’s second character, a sexless, hooded figure called Auditor who is often cut, is here played by the recognizably female Joan Davis, who stands bareheaded about 4 feet from Ní Neachtain, tenderly raising her arms each time Mouth denies the first person (“what? . . who? . . no! . . she!”) and earnestly peering at her as if searching for her eyes. This Auditor might be a passerby, a friend, a good Samaritan, or a reflected self. In any case, she is an Other who cares, an engagement that transforms the hermetic spectacle into an enigmatic social encounter. The stagings of the other plays all have rich twists like this as well. In Footfalls, for instance, a play for a woman pacing back and forth in a strip of light speaking with the offstage voice of her indigent mother, the actress Michèle Forbes provides both voices. She has recorded the mother’s lines. As we realize that these two characters are now one, the disturbing dilemma of the protagonist, May, who feels insufficiently present in the world and tries to reassure herself with the sound of her own footsteps, is sharpened. She copes not just by compulsively pacing but also by compulsively inventing imaginary Others. This idea is admittedly present in the original script. May tells a story about a woman named Amy who, like her, is lonely, paces, and is only sporadically material, inflecting it with writerly phrases like “as the reader will remember.” Forbes adds other creative strategies, such as a slow choreography of ethereal hand and arm gestures that clasp her head, block her face, and wrap her torso. These are like dance movements of the mind that feel privately sensuous, meant for her alone, and they are exquisitely framed in the dim glow of several large, upstage frosted windows. A single frosted window beside a rocking chair comprises the setting for Rockaby, Beckett’s gorgeous play about an isolated old woman listening to her own voice speaking in lullaby cadence while being rocked to apparent death by a mysterious offstage force. Joan Davis performs this work with ferocious intensity in extremely dim light, costumed in a plain black, wholly unreflective dress rather than the glittery sequined outfit Beckett called for. As with Not I, the stress is placed on the character’s human reality, subtly shifting the emphasis to place her equally in the world and in the play’s weird, synthetic, pathetic twilight. Scaife has been careful to remain scrupulously faithful to the broad ambiguity of Beckett’s social environments. Nevertheless, she is also clearly determined to confront us with specific worldly matters such as the burdens that gender and sex stereotypes hang on women, and their historical warehousing, sidelining and dismissal. Between Footfalls and Rockaby, the milling audience is shown a projected text from the Irish Constitution venerating the traditional family and discouraging women from working outside the home. One of the more interesting interpretive choices of the evening has to do with female agency. It occurs in the final work, Come and Go, and involves a small change in stage directions. This play for three women whose bodies are hidden inside “dull” full-length coats, their eyes obscured by “drab nondescript hats,” centers on three old school friends and their moments of whispered gossip. As each of the three characters exits in turn, the other two share a shocking confidence about her, possibly concerning serious illness. “Does she not realize?” “Has she not been told?” “Does she not know?” The adjustment Scaife made was to have each woman re-enter one line earlier than Beckett specified, so that she overhears one of the reaction lines, “God grant not,” “God forbid” or “Please God not.” In other words, each character knows she’s just been discussed and decides to ignore it. She may intuit what they’ve said about her too. The effect of this is to downplay the impression of these women as dupes or unwitting victims of socio-cosmic cruelty and to suggest instead a common, conscious choice among them for friendship and connection, despite the disappointments that go along with that. It’s extraordinarily difficult to let the air of the outer world into Beckett’s cloistered late dramas without distorting them or depleting their mysterious energies. Sarah Jane Scaife and these three phenomenal actresses, improbably, have found a way of doing so, and their work deserves a far larger audience than it will likely reach in this sold-out New York run. Photos: Amanda Gentile/ADG Photography #SamuelBeckett #SarahJaneScaife #ComeandGo #Rockaby #Footfalls #NotI #IrishArtsCenter