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A Doll’s House made Henrik Ibsen a household name in 1879. It ruffled feathers throughout the Western world, provoking intemperate outrage, extravagant acclamation, and torrents of reaction in the form of articles, lectures, protests, sermons, and counter-plays. Sequels by other authors appeared shortly after the play’s premiere, most written as rebuttals to its perceived disparagement of marriage. How dare anyone argue that a woman might justifiably leave her husband and children? Ibsen’s Ghosts was itself a sequel of sorts suggesting that A Doll’s House was if anything too mild. (There a wife who dutifully stayed ensured that the sickness she condoned would be handed down to her child.) The pace of dramatic reaction and polemic slowed in the 20th century but never stopped. Our own age has seen Nobel Prize-winner Elfriede Jelinek’s 1979 play What Happened After Nora Left Her Husband, a grim and ultimately tendentious tale of serial sexist and capitalist exploitation following the heroine’s getaway, and Comden and Green’s 1982 Broadway musical A Doll’s Life, which closed after five performances and had a plot curiously similar to Jelinek’s. The latest addition to this tributary tradition is Lucas Hnath’s A Doll’s House, Part 2—a slick, intelligent, splendidly acted discussion drama that’s fun to watch though not entirely believable. It might be described as a sequel for the age of Wikipedia. Hnath’s play doesn’t represent a very deep reading of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. It clearly germinated in the shallows of the play’s popular reputation, responding more to casual knowledge of the plot, factoids and historical aftereffects of the sort one finds online than to what Ibsen actually wrote. It’s a play that uses not Ibsen’s characters but people with the same names as Ibsen’s characters to tell a wholly contemporary story about selfishness, selflessness, growth and compromise in long-term relationships. These characters wear Victorian-era clothes but speak and behave just like you and me, our partners, exes, and kids. In other words, they lace their language with casual profanity, plop onto the floor on the slightest pretext, and demonstrate with every other incidental mannerism that they aren’t living with the restrictions or cultural assumptions of Ibsen’s time. They’re clearly creatures of the contemporary world birthed by feminism, rock-and-roll, and 1960s counterculture. Fair enough. A Doll’s House, Part 2 is a contemporary relationship play in Victorian drag, a classical commentary projected through the lens of candidly confessed hindsight, akin to Paula Vogel’s Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief. I liked it well enough in that spirit. You wouldn’t call Hnath’s work gripping or suspenseful but it’s interesting and vivid, because the acting is first-rate and the stakes are urgent for the characters. Nora, out of touch for 15 years, has returned to Torvald’s house because she needs something from him. Now a famous author of novels that attack marriage and prompt women to leave their husbands (written under a pseudonym), she has antagonized a powerful judge whose wife left him after reading her. The judge discovered that Torvald never legally divorced Nora and is blackmailing her. Due to the patriarchal legal code, she is a criminal: all her professional contracts are void and her independent sex life adulterous. The crux of Hnath’s drama is in the return of this proud, strident, self-absorbed woman to the home of those she wounded and abandoned in order to achieve independence. Torvald, portrayed entirely as an innocent victim, could help her by just filing the divorce papers but at first refuses (for reasons she thinks she understands but doesn’t). She then tries to enlist others as allies: the servant Anne Marie (who brought her children up) and her grown daughter Emmy (who has no memory of her and wants what her mother discarded, a loving marriage and stable home). To Hnath’s credit, all of these are independent, self-aware, self-respecting people who hold their own with pushy and waspish Nora. All three challenge her to account for the wider repercussions of her choices years ago in ways she never wanted to face before. After much emotional struggle, the play ends on an honest, probing note of mutual recognition—a sort of respectful stalemate reminiscent of countless ruminative couple-dramas by authors like Donald Margulies, Richard Greenberg, David Lindsay-Abaire, and many others. At bottom, though, Hnath’s characters feel too much like pieces on a polemical gameboard to be wholly credible as people. What keeps their artifice from overwhelming things is the superb acting in Sam Gold’s production. Laurie Metcalf and Jayne Houdyshell are brilliantly sharp, funny and nuanced as Nora and Anne Marie. Metcalf is an impossible blend of self-confident gravitas and salty, borderline-hammy humor. She somehow turns sincerity and intimacy into an amiable pose. Houdyshell is the foil that makes Metcalf’s jarring shifts and contradictions work. Ibsen’s Anne Marie was a long-suffering supporting role but here she is a formidable player, an adversary who swears like a sailor when Nora is ungrateful and oblivious to class privilege, and a precisely modulated “straight man” who perfectly sets up Metcalf’s punch-lines. The intelligence and surprise of both these performances is enough reason to see the show. Yet here’s the wrinkle for those who care about Ibsen’s play. To characterize middle-aged Nora as a strident ideologue who returns begging for help because she’s been blind-sided once again by a malign, patriarchal legal maneuver (remember Krogstad?!) is an injustice to the original character. When Ibsen’s Nora leaves her home she is determined to learn the rules of the male-dominated world that infantilized her, that kept her ignorant of the values by which a false signature on a promissory note was held to be more iniquitous than letting one’s husband die. Hnath’s Nora has essentially made no progress in that mission. We’re asked to believe that after all that happened with Krogstad, she’s still so careless about legal matters that she never bothered to check whether she was legally divorced. Deep down, it seems, she’s still the vain, self-absorbed twit people took her for before her epiphany. My question for Hnath is: if that’s what you really think of Nora, and Ibsen’s play by extension, why bother writing a sequel or commentary to it? Isn’t that tantamount to saying that you regard it as a sad, degrading, decidedly unedifying tale about shallow, selfish people who flirt with a deeper view of themselves but ultimately shrink back from it? Isn’t one reason this drama still absorbs and enthralls people the world over 138 years after its premiere that it holds out the prospect of incremental growth beyond that? Stunted, culturally malnourished Nora miraculously finds a seed of full-blown humanity within herself and decides to go off and nurture it. No one can say for sure what her future is (she’s fictional, after all). But surely that seed ought to be seen as part of it. Photo copyright Brigitte Lacombe #HenrikIbsen #LucasHnath #LaurieMetcalf #JayneHoudyshell #SamGold

My companion at Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the new Broadway musical adaptation of Roald Dahl’s classic children’s book, was my 9-year-old niece Lily. Lily, unlike me, is an expert on all things Willy Wonka: the original 1964 book and both its movie adaptations—the 1971 version starring Gene Wilder, which I loved as a kid, and the 2005 remake starring Johnny Depp, of which more in a moment. All through our pre-theater cheeseburgers, Lily expounded on the nuances of Depp’s creepiness (“way more creepy” than Wilder), the ways both films differed from the book, and the reasons why each of the obnoxious kids in the story really deserved their horrible comeuppances. “Especially Violet. She’s a total pain!” Lily loves Dahl’s subversive edge and has lately been reading the unexpurgated Brothers Grimm. She’s at that age when kids want to know about the primal terrors they’ve avoided before now and see what’s behind the saccharine curtain that corporations and parents use to protect them from the abysses and anarchy in fairy tales and fantasy stories. Just to clarify, for those in caves or without kids: Wonka, a world-famous chocolatier, fired all his employees years ago because some were industrial spies and retreated to his factory, yet the factory has mysteriously continued to operate. Out of the blue he announces a contest in which kids who find five golden tickets hidden in chocolate bars win a tour of the factory. Sales skyrocket in response, with four tickets acquired by laughably spoiled and selfish kids and one by laughably poor but nevertheless generous and imaginative Charlie Bucket. During the tour, the four brats are duly unmasked and Charlie wins the grand prize, which turns out to be the whole Wonka factory. Lily and I both liked the musical, which is a major extravaganza backed by deep-pocketed Warner Bros., retooled (with a new director—Jack O’Brien replacing Sam Mendes) after a three-and-half-year London run and now destined to occupy the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre for years regardless of what critics say. A property this famous and pre-branded doesn’t need critical praise to thrive—that is, as long as it has coherence, theatrical inventiveness, and charm of its own. I felt sure this show had all of that. Then I went home and pulled up some reviews. David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter called Charlie “perversely charmless” and “aesthetically off-putting.” Jesse Green in New York compared it to “a hideous, cheap-looking, melted Whitman’s sampler.” Joe Dziemianowicz in The Daily News said it had “a pale score, a flavorless book and a dearth of eye candy that could have at least made it a spectacle.” Wow. Did I slip into a food coma during the show? I coulda sworn I heard Lily gasping when a paper-airplane letter Charlie wrote to Wonka rocketed up (on an invisible wire) from his hand to the balcony, and again when Charlie and his grandfather appeared in old-fashioned diving helmets connected to vertical pipes for breathing as projection effects behind made them seem to be walking through water. It seemed to me the whole theater was pulsing with admiring laughter when the Oompa Loompas—the short, supposedly tropical people who operate and live in the factory—turned out to be two-foot-tall, billowy, ethnically indefinite puppet-bodies attached to the heads of dancing actors whose own bodies were masked in black (design by the incomparable Basil Twist). If these things aren’t theatrical invention I don’t know what is. Now, I don’t want to overpraise Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, whose primary purpose clearly is brand-marketing. It doesn’t have the new-minted flavor of Matilda the Musical. But it is a theatrical achievement of sorts—smart, propulsive, engaging and punctuated with a dozen-plus bouncy new songs (by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman) that do succeed in making the familiar plot events feel fresh. The way the show repurposes two Wilder-era songs (“The Candy Man” and “Pure Imagination”) is also very canny. They’re used not just for nostalgia but also to help make the story of Wonka’s personal journey psychologically intelligible for a change. An important factor, no doubt, is that I never saw the Depp movie. On Lily’s advice, though, I shelled out $3.99 to watch it afterward online and was stunned at how spectacularly awful it was. Like the Dahl book, it doesn’t introduce Wonka until halfway through. Then it gives him an idiotic back-story about being the son of a fanatical dentist who forbade candy and made boy-Willy wear a ridiculous, round-the-head orthodontal apparatus. Worse, Depp plays grownup Wonka as a catatonic Michael Jackson clone (with perfect teeth) who speaks in fey, bloodless tones, rarely makes eye-contact, and has somehow (chemically? surgically?) avoided puberty. “Creepy” is too gentle a word for such an alarming deviant. No parent would let a kid near him. Watching this astonishing boondoggle made me understand the loathing of the musical’s reviewers. The show copies many basic design and character decisions directly from the movie—costumes, physical characterizations, the look of the factory and its crazy machinery—and if I too had seen the movie first, I’d have resented the zing of recognition and enjoyed the evening less. As it is, I took the show on its own terms and credited it with a few shrewd decisions. Book-writer David Greig, for instance, made sense of Wonka. The man, introduced right at the beginning, is getting old and his business is flagging. He needs an heir with new ideas and decides to re-enter the world to find one. It’s only after he opens a small candy shop on Charlie’s street, running it anonymously himself, that he hits on the idea for the contest, and by then he has already met the enchantingly sincere Charlie (played by Ryan Foust at our performance) and, we suspect, been won over by him. Christian Borle plays Wonka with a winking, spunky world-weariness. Erratic, irritable and bristly, with a receding hairline and glasses, he comes off as a safe eccentric because he’s clearly an adult. He enters singing “The Candy Man” as a rueful anti-anthem, his sighs and half-smiles implying that he’s not completely sure the world really ever can “taste good” anymore. He seems to warm to Charlie’s candor and energy despite remaining outwardly aloof and skinflinty. The point is, Wonka has a simple and plausible action-line now. Moreover, in Greig’s re-telling, mortality becomes truly central to the tale. It isn’t, as in the book and both movies, just a gag—involving, say, Charlie’s grandparents crowded into his house’s only bed, or all the seemingly lethal accidents that befall the naughty kids that turn out to be cartoonish pseudo-dangers. And speaking of cartoons, some real ones leave a strong beneficial impression on this show. At one point, clips of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck flash on a screen, and it occurred to me that Greig, whose book brims over with delight in loony wordplay, may well have taken a cue from the brainy-dumb scripts of Hanna-Barbera. In any case, all of his jokes too are clever enough to keep both kids and their adult chaperones entertained. A few samples: “WONKA: So long, Bucket. Remember, no man waits for time, don’t carp and seize the per diems!” “MRS. TEAVEE: Mr. Wonka – a simple knowledge of geology tells me that’s impossible. WONKA: Well a complicated knowledge of geology would tell you the opposite.” I suppose it’s true that none of this is all that profound. Nevertheless, the validation of intelligence, language, and wonder does have some value. If Charlie and the Chocolate Factory may be said to have a serious aspiration, it’s in the way it grapples with the always maddening conundrum of how to reach prematurely cynical kids whose innocence has been poisoned by ubiquitous media before they even understand what they’re sneering at. The reason Willy Wonka has to play his cards close to his chest, never giving away what side he’s on until the end, is that he needs to know for sure which kid shares his values. Only Charlie passes the test, and he’s still capable of innocent wonder largely because he’s so poor he’s media-free. Couched in a show whose tickets start at $79 and go up to $358, that thought may seem a little hollow, but that doesn’t make it worthless. And hey, I had a test too. It was called “the ride home.” Guess what? Everyone passed. Lily talked to me about the show the whole way and never once asked to play with my iPhone. Photo by Joan Marcus. #RoaldDahl #JackOBrien #BasilTwist #DavidGreig #MarcShaiman #ScottWittman

As I sat in my $95 seat applauding the elegant and very smart production of Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape now playing at the Park Avenue Armory, my emotions pulled in two directions. I was dazzled and thrilled by the principal artists, all of whom—the 15-member ensemble (especially the star Bobby Cannavale), the director Richard Jones, the designer Stewart Laing—deserve major accolades. At the same time I found myself seriously irritated at the ticket prices ($60-$195 with no student rush or discounts). There I was, sitting one block from Hunter College, where I’ve taught drama for 25 years, including, quite often, this very play, and none of my students could possibly afford to see it. Now, high theater ticket prices are hardly news in New York City. Broadway prices are in the same range as the Armory, and sometimes much higher. Hamilton in particular has raised eyebrows and hackles in recent years for resale prices of $2,500 per seat and more. And yet that situation has deservedly provoked blowback. Many commentators have pointed out that while Hamilton purports to empower minorities with all its main roles, including the country’s founding fathers, cast with actors of color, few among those historically disempowered groups can actually see the thing. It was touching to read, a year and a half ago, that the Rockefeller Foundation had donated $1.5 million to subsidize Hamilton-matinee tickets for 11th graders from low-income New York City families. As a faculty member at one of New York’s most diverse and prestigious public colleges, however, whose students are if anything MORE financially strapped than high-schoolers yet better prepared than them to appreciate the ideas and innovations in important new theater, I was chagrined that they were left out of the subsidy. Most Off-Broadway theaters dedicated to serious or classical drama recognize the importance of college student attendance by building discounts for them into their pricing policies. Student tickets are sold in advance for $30 at the Public Theater and $20 at Theatre for a New Audience. On the day of performance students can buy unsold tickets for $20 at Classic Stage Company and $10 at BAM. The Park Avenue Armory, despite its remarkably ambitious and innovative programming of late, has stuck with what is essentially a Broadway ticket policy. Its clientele is consequently overwhelmingly rich and privileged. Is this wrong? That’s not the point I want to argue. It is shortsighted and unwise. College students already interested in theater are the most likely ticket buyers of tomorrow. That’s the point the Armory should understand. These students should be cultivated and made to feel welcome in our opulent culture palaces, which often represent a social-class leap for them. The lack of diversity in the Armory’s audience is especially glaring with a play like The Hairy Ape because it’s one of American drama’s earliest and most cutting indictments of American materialism. This 1922 station-drama tells of the strange seriocomic passion of Yank, a crude, hulking coal-stoker on an ocean-liner whose generic name speaks for itself and whose self-confidence and self-image are shattered when he’s insulted by a slumming heiress. Yank has always found meaning (“belonging,” as he puts it) in his brawn, and the encounter with the heiress forces him to consider other yardsticks of value that he can’t understand. He passes through a series of baffling experiences—trying vainly to pick a fight on Fifth Avenue, trying to explain himself to fellow jailmates, trying to join the IWW—and finally confronts a gorilla in the zoo, calling him “Brother” just before the animal squeezes him to death. The Hairy Ape certainly requires an outstanding lead performance but it’s not really a star vehicle in the traditional sense. Yank is onstage the whole time and talks a blue streak about being a steely and sovereign man of the present (“aint got no past to tink in, nor nothin’ dat’s comin’, on’y what’s now”). Yet he’s misguided about his real circumstances. We see clearly that he’s caged, exploited, ignored and belittled in every scene by enormous forces beyond his control, and Cannavale captures this sense of haughty anonymity beautifully. He bellows hoarsely at everyone and springs with clenched fists at the slightest provocation, after which he invariably backs down. Cannavale’s distinctive voice and pugnacity make up for his modest physical stature. Unlike many other classic modern dramas, O’Neill’s play benefits from the use of powerful stage machinery. This is because the forces crushing Yank are the elements of industrial capitalism, and symbolizing that pressure with industrial stage machinery feels right. It fits the Expressionist style of the work, transferring emotion into objects. The only director other than Richard Jones I’ve seen effectively exploit this quality is the legendary Peter Stein, whose production of the play at the Schaubühne in Berlin I saw in 1986. Stein’s princely state-subsidized budget enabled him and designer Lucio Fanti to make the entire wall of the theater building seem to sway like a rocking ship in the opening scenes—a breathtaking effect. Jones’s staging is stronger and more elegant than Stein’s. This production began in 2015 at the Old Vic in London, where it was done in proscenium, and now Jones and Laing have reconceived it for the open space of the Armory drill hall. The audience enters to face towering bleachers of bright yellow plastic seats whose sickening, unnatural color, we soon find out, matches the walls of the cagelike room the stokers occupy in the ship. The sense of alienation this color generates is amplified by a gigantic, black, circular platform that revolves around the bleachers, sweeping different scene units on and off as necessary. The sheer power involved in operating this wheel lends an air of godlike implacability to Yank’s fate. Beyond that wheel the audience looks up at a huge expanse of empty black floor as well as the gorgeously dilapidated rear wall of the drill hall—a poignant, crumbling-brick totem of 19th-century mercantile dreams gone bust. Actors dance, climb, loom, and mill about all these areas throughout the play’s middle scenes, stalked by a wonderfully spooky man-in-the-moon balloon. The cavernous drill hall thus comes to resemble the cultural abyss destined to swallow Yank and all those like him. Anyone paying close attention to the play, then, really must pause in the end of this production and consider the implications of its exclusive venue. The Hairy Ape is about a downtrodden, subarticulate laborer presented as a typical dying-breed American. To perform it for crowds utterly devoid of anyone like him, and who know and associate with no one like him, is beyond distasteful. It repeats and reinforces the dreadful polarization of our country that is tearing apart our social fabric. Photos by Stephanie Berger #EugeneONeill #TheHairyApe #BobbyCannavale #RichardJones #ParkAvenueArmory

Come From Away, a relentlessly peppy new musical by the Canadian husband-wife team David Hein and Irene Sankoff, tells the story of how the remote town of Gander, Newfoundland (pop. 9000), welcomed more than 6000 stranded airline passengers from 38 grounded planes when the FAA closed American air space on 9/11. It is a worthy story on its face. The real Ganderites certainly behaved magnanimously. As we learn in the course of this show’s 100 hectic minutes of thumping group numbers, performed by a cast of 12 shifting among dozens of roles, the locals acted with extraordinary selflessness. They served food they cooked themselves, volunteered store-stocks, prepared public buildings, hotels, even their own homes for shelter: unflinching generosity and humble hospitality that deserves honor and praise. Why then does this show seem like an extravagant shadow-play produced by the Canadian Tourist Board for an audience of Plato’s cave-dwellers? Come from Away’s producers say that it’s really “a 9/12 show,” not “a 9/11 show.” What they mean is that it’s not about terrorism per se, and therefore gloomy, but rather about the heartening spirit of unity and communion that arose in its wake. Those of us who were in NYC then (and lots of other places) certainly remember this feeling, and rue its disappearance. Come from Away tries to recreate the sense of tolerance and fellowship the emergency generated, showing, for instance, an Egyptian passenger being segregated and avoided at first but then included and accommodated, and a gay couple nervous at first about being out in Gander but finding the locals unfazed by it. Four days of improbable brotherly love and multicultural harmony at the rocky edge of North America: it should warm your heart. Except that it doesn’t, because it’s really a War-on-Terrorism reprise of Rodney King’s naïve plaint: “Can’t we all just get along?” Every tale of a utopian Land of Cockaigne is really the shell of a lie. For one thing, Come from Away offers an escapist spectacle of unacknowledged white privilege. Because everyone in the play is either an airline employee, a passenger wealthy enough to buy an international airline ticket, or a middle-class Canadian, the people-mingling challenge the town faces seems far less vexing than it’s made out to be. Also, their genuine compassion aside, the main reason the Ganderites can afford to be so generous is that, like most first-worlders, they have oodles of surplus resources. Their model behavior is decidedly convenient—no crime, obviously, but not exactly a universal model either. Crowing about it for 100 minutes starts to seem self-congratulatory. And while asking New Yorkers to revel in such a fable might have been fine as lite entertainment had Hillary won the election, it feels a little tasteless now with the crypto-fascist currently occupying the White House inviting another 9/11 every day with his reckless belligerence toward all non-white Others. We remember too much about what happened in the wake of 9/11 (some of us, anyway) to feel the love adequately in anecdotes of stranger-bonding from back then. That era’s destructively ignorant President, W, whose hollow words of consolation and defiance are channeled by a Come from Away cast member, wrecked all hope of more Gander-like communion experiences for probably a century to come when he plunged the U.S. into two wholly unnecessary wars, which multiplied our enemies and compounded our dangers. That is the big, scary reality behind this innocuous little shadow of a show. Ignore what’s behind you if you want to, but don’t imagine you’ll learn anything meaningful about it unless you turn around. Photo: Matthew Murphy #DavidHein #IreneSankoff

Audacious risktaking in the theater comes in many colors, most of them loud. You can defy a censor, transgress a casting convention, shatter a shibboleth, violate a hallowed genre tradition, inject “low” or outsider influences, force structural change in a stodgy institution—the possibilities are legion. Every once in a while, though, a specially innovative artist like Will Eno appears whose audacity is instead quiet and understated. It involves dispensing with almost all the splashy theatrical tools that others might consider essential and standing aloof from the egotism and showmanship that usually drive the art, to say nothing of the industry. This sort of minimalist high-wire act is the legacy of Beckett and Symbolism (think Maeterlinck), and fine examples of it are exceedingly rare. Eno doesn’t work this way all the time, but the Eno plays that have struck me most deeply—Thom Pain (2005), which launched him, and his new Wakey, Wakey, now at Signature Theater in a production he directed—have been quintessentially Beckettian. They are brief, bare-bones creations whose deliberately flimsy, sham fictional circumstances are like gossamer fabrics that become strangely substantial for reasons you can’t necessarily pinpoint. Like Beckett, Eno trusts our desire and ability to see through his spurious surfaces and invest in their theater-as-life metaphors, which invariably peter out or break down in glum, hilarious, and provocative ways. Because we laugh, and are treated as smart, we’re moved to explore the grave and essential matters beneath the dumb jokes: questions, for instance, of what any of us is doing here, or what our time is worth. Time is framed and emphasized by Eno’s spare circumstances, stripped down to what’s intrinsic to theater—living people gathered together to watch other living people fill some of their utterly irreplaceable minutes. These bare facts are more or less thrown in our faces, like irritating candles held up to mortality. The title Wakey, Wakey is purposely silly and childish—something you might say to wake up a kid or make light of a funeral. The play was in part Eno’s response to the illness and death of Signature’s artistic director James Houghton last year. It opens by introducing a guy (named Guy) in a flash of light, sprawled on the floor like a beached dolphin. He says fervently: “Is it now? I thought I’d have more time.” Michael Emerson plays this role with unforgettable clarity and nuanced simplicity. He spends most of his time in a wheelchair, speaking easily to us like visitors to a sick room, or fellow patients, or game-partners, or seminar participants, or maybe just theater spectators. The set is a nondescript room with largely empty walls, a freestanding door that is never used and feels vaguely ominous, a pile of clothes and plain cardboard packing boxes strewn about the floor (design by Christine Jones). This could be a hospice, a hospital waiting room, a home. In any case, it’s decidedly liminal, neither here nor there, newly impersonal as someone is obviously moving out. Guy is pleasant with us, but serious. We learn little about him (he was a swimming and diving coach) but get it early on that he’s very ill, probably waiting to die. He winces in pain, fails to eat a sandwich, seems contemplative, concerned about calling for help. But then at other times he walks out of the wheelchair (slowly), tells wry jokes, and summons projections and sound effects like a Thornton Wilder stage manager. He has mortality on his mind, informing us, for instance, that 100,000 people died yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. Yet he hates to put us off: Oh, but we're not here to mope, right? We're here to listen to music and drink some grape juice, maybe get a free T-shirt. We're here to say good-bye, of course—there's always someone or something to say good-bye to, and it's important to honor the people whose shoulders we stood upon and fell asleep against. So, yes, we're here to say good-bye and maybe hopefully also get better at saying hello. To celebrate Life, if that doesn't sound too passive-aggressive. That last remark, as well as the T-shirt dig, are vintage Eno, like the snide cracks in Thom Pain, courtesies that aren’t courteous, acknowledging the unavoidable buildup of sentiment but complicating it, welding it to something tougher and more direct. Guy is a dying man who knows he’s a spectacle and evidently wants to make “something light and real and lasting” out of whatever his stage presence amounts to—“Until it’s gone, I guess,” he adds. At first he consults a pile of note cards he has prepared but over the show’s 75 minutes he grows hazy and forgets and drops them. He speaks of gratitude, asking us to shut our eyes and think of an important person from our past, shows a photo of a girl licking ice cream, shows a video of animals screaming that includes a frame of Pavarotti, offers passing comments, not always coherent, about bones, cells, tunnels, trains, saliva, Saltines, and much more. The triviality and arbitrariness are themselves moving. We witness memory beginning to disintegrate, the intangible weight of that. We hear a truck passing in the distance, a siren, galloping horses as an ancient picture of horses on a cave wall appears. Yet for all the poetry of this, it’s Emerson’s performance that gives the play potency. His intelligence, intensity and humor, his lack of self-pity and concentrated commitment to every whimsical and accidental moment that punctuates Guy’s peculiar farewell routine: all this is what infuses the play with loving, lumpy humanity and taut suspense. It also helps that the play’s late-arriving second character, a care-giver named Lisa, is played with the same no-b.s. intensity by January LaVoy. She casually mentions the real time. And she speaks to the fading Guy simply, practically, and straightforwardly, providing basic physical care and pleasant companionship without embellishment or empty reassurance. At one point he falls asleep and she suddenly, unshowily performs a little ceremonial dance, something like a yoga sun blessing, and seems otherworldly for a moment. The effect of this is inexplicably heartbreaking, a benediction for the hour and a quarter we’ve all spent pondering the materiality of nothing, a fleeting, lyrical respite from the awful tyranny of the clock. But that spell is itself suddenly broken as balloons and bubbles fall from the ceiling and a disco-ball flashes to party music. As we leave the baffled crowd gathers around free figs and coffee cake in the lobby. A veritable feast. Photo copyright Joan Marcus #WillEno

Like Beckett and Pinter, Caryl Churchill is writing fugues in old age (she’s 77). Far Away, A Number, and now Escaped Alone: these are all exquisitely crafted contrapuntal compositions that work much more through suggestion than statement, interweaving themes of global disaster, the banality of the everyday, and the mutability of memory and time. The plays are luminous, reverberant, cunning, but they can also be frustrating because they are only obliquely political. They flash topicality (environmental disaster, cloning) only to veer off into surrealism. It helps to remember that their real subject is the fear and anxiety beneath what we see and hear. Most of Escaped Alone consists of four 70-something women sitting in chairs and chatting over tea in a small suburban backyard—rendered with wonderfully spare serenity by Miriam Buether in James Macdonald’s Royal Court production. They gab about grandchildren, insomnia, shops, pets—that sort of thing. Yet each also soliloquizes at one point about a distinctive distress or phobia. Sally (Deborah Findlay), an affable former health attendant, is terrified of cats. Lena (Kika Markham), the optimist in the group, is an agoraphobe who can’t even get herself to Tesco. Vi (June Watson), a cranky former hairdresser, served six years for killing her husband. And Mrs. Jarrett (Linda Bassett) simply repeats the phrase “terrible rage” twenty-five times. Mrs. Jarrett serves as the play’s narrator of sorts. She’s the only one who directly addresses the audience, speaking at the beginning and end and between the eight brief scenes (the whole play is 50 minutes). She tells us at the start that she joined the others, mere acquaintances, after seeing an open door in the fence. Periodically the stage goes black and we see her standing in a black void framed by crackling red coils that look like space-heater elements as she describes horrific, decidedly bizarre, and mutually exclusive catastrophes, all in the past tense. A few samples: “Four hundred thousand tons of rock paid for by senior executives split off the hillside to smash through the roofs, each fragment onto the designated child’s head.” “The chemicals leaked through cracks in the money.” “The hunger began when eighty percent of food was diverted to tv programmes.” “The illness started when children drank sugar developed from monkeys.” “Four cases of arson by children and politicians, three of spontaneous combustion of the markets, two of sunshine, one supposed by believers to be a punishment by God for gender dysphoria.” These reports are clearly as much about the creation of disaster scenarios as they are about disaster itself. The creativity and humor in them stand out as much as their underlying fear or the way they amplify the breaches to tranquility in the soliloquies. Churchill’s shadow subject here is the pleasure taken in catastrophe—an emotion all four splendid actresses make vivid and palpable. The title Escaped Alone comes from a phrase in the Book of Job that Melville used near the end of Moby-Dick: “I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” It’s the testimony of a survivor, and presumably Mrs. Jarrett is this survivor, the one spared by god, or chance, to report on a traumatic ordeal in which everyone else perished. Her chief survival skill, Churchill suggests—and perhaps ours too—is making prophetic poetry from her own sensationalized imaginings. Photos by Richard Termine #CarylChurchill

Is it a good or bad thing for a dyed-in-the-wool dystopian like Wallace Shawn when real life suddenly serves up very convincing approximations of the nightmares of authoritarian obeisance and moral cowardice he has been imagining for the stage for more than three decades? A lot of doomsday predictions have been wafting about since the election of the white Mr. T. Fascism, totalitarianism, nuclear Armageddon, the collapse of truth, the end of the West: none of it may really be imminent but to all of us not sniffing Twitter-glue inside a Breitbart news-bubble, the worst feels terrifyingly plausible at the moment. Shawn’s Evening at the Talk House thus faces a rather demanding test. Written well before the recent election, the play now feels more like a prophecy than a thought exercise. It is a bone-chilling tale of complacent acceptance of authoritarianism in a similar vein to Shawn’s Aunt Dan and Lemon, The Fever, The Designated Mourner and Grasses of a Thousand Colors. London reviewers found it overblown and underwhelming when it premiered there in 2015. Some New Yorkers may feel that way now, seeing the New Group production directed by Scott Elliott, but I did not. To me recent events not only confirm the import of Shawn’s warnings; they make me more attentive than ever to the sort of can’t-look-away details he provides about exactly how such nightmares come about. Among this author’s special gifts is his unique insight into the stepwise mental compromises that ordinary people make—people like us, that is, not demonized, faraway others. What happens to someone like you or me when we’re pressured by group-oriented fear and threats to our self-interest and convenience? The titular Talk House, the play’s setting, is a casually genteel after-hours club in what was once the theater district of an unnamed city. A playwright named Rob (Matthew Broderick) and some of his former collaborators have gathered there on the tenth anniversary of the last play he wrote, which flopped and marked a sea change in all of their lives. Around that time theater all but died in this society, and the only person who seems to mourn it now is Nellie (Jill Eikenberry), the sweet manager of the club, whose business has tanked. Rob is positively disdainful, calling theater “an animal business of sniffing and staring” that “completely lacked art, not to mention, for my money, charm.” He and the others now either work in television—vaunting their fame, flaunting their cronyism, blind to the insipidity of their shows—or struggle as waiters and freelancers. The freelancing is where things get creepy. Under the leadership of a strongman named Ackerley—an elected ruler who can’t be criticized and who is chummy with Rob and the star actor Tom (Larry Pine)—the country has adopted an aboveboard “Program of Murdering” in which ordinary people earn cash by killing people the government considers a threat. The killing is mostly done remotely by drones, but also sometimes up close with poison pins. Anyone who questions the wisdom or morality of this policy—like the has-been actor Dick, for instance, played with grim insouciance by Shawn himself in shlumpy pajamas—suffers cautionary beatings. No thugs necessary, one’s own friends typically do the violent honors. What does this remind you of? Here is Annette (Claudia Shear), a former wardrobe mistress who now works for the program, explaining to a skeptical colleague why she regards it as thoroughly natural: . . . you know, we go about our lives every day -- we go to work, we talk, we drink glasses of wine -- and every once in a while, occasionally even in the middle of dinner, we feel the need to go into the nearest bathroom and use our asses to get rid of some waste. And we barely even give it a moment’s thought. So I mean you know, pardon me, but I’m making an analogy between dropping some waste into the toilet, you see, and dropping a few small bombs onto certain targets, you know, dropping some rather small bombs onto certain people who pose a threat to us, all rather casual, and then you wash your hands and return to the table. Annette brushes aside questions about whether “the right people” are being targeted (“we’re getting awfully good at determining that.”), blusters about the ends justifying the means (“the things we’ve done have really made a difference. I mean, we happen to be winning”), and flies into a rage after Dick presumes to mention the recent elimination (by poisonings in restaurants) of several actors they all know. Dick’s become an absolute horror. A horror! How can [the club] let him stay here overnight? . . . He’s just been telling us about the deaths of some awful people we used to know, when we’re trying to have a pleasant evening. . . Disgusting – it’s disgusting! He seems to be completely out of control . . . Annette’s reactions are the moral core of this hideously beautiful play. Acted with dead-on humble swagger by Shear, she is the consummate ethical compass with a stuck needle, the steady and reliable maternal figure in everyone’s past whose fearsome flashes of righteous indignation have been redirected toward bizarre objects. And this is what I meant before about the play’s value as a reality-check as we maneuver these days around our own monstrous Ackerley. Annette may be particularly grotesque but she is not unique. Shawn’s play contains half a dozen such distorted-mirror figures, and almost everyone will find their familiar counterpart. The world in Evening at the Talk House is morally dessicated just enough to frighten us and make us think, but not, in my view, enough to dismiss as beyond the pale of relevance. Friendship and compassion in this place have almost disappeared. National pride has almost been replaced by dispassionate competition and survivalism. Market popularity has almost displaced all other creative ambition. The remnants and shreds of humane decency that are left—in Dick’s character, in Nellie’s magnanimous hospitality, in the general civility with which everyone behaves—function as hooks that catch us and reel us in when part of us certainly does want to flee. Unjustly, I’ve said next to nothing about Elliott’s graceful, acute and assured production, which underscores all the points I’ve made, in part by warmly enveloping the audience in the commodious ambience of the Talk House stunningly created by designer Derek McLane. It feels as if we too had arrived to enjoy the plush couches, soft light and funny primary-colored drinks there. I suggest that you just go see the show. It will, I know, mean more to you than reading about it. Photo credit: Monique Carboni/www.thenewgroup.org

TRUE: Daniel Craig has real acting chops. If you doubted this because you thought the role of James Bond required nothing but charisma and hunkiness, or because you believed the lazy and snobbish critical reactions to his finely nuanced performance in Pinter’s Betrayal three years ago on Broadway, then I can’t sympathize with the trouble you will have getting tickets to the sold-out Othello now at New York Theatre Workshop. Craig’s Iago is eerily resolute and terrifyingly credible in his lightning shifts between submissiveness and belligerence—a truly disconcerting study in stolid, implacable malevolence. What’s more, he is thoroughly blended into this Off-Broadway ensemble. Except for the ticket-return lines and shiny black cars out front you’d never know he was a movie star—incongruous humility indeed in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. FALSE: A glib and sardonic Beatles reference can add substance to a flimsy social critique. Mike Bartlett’s King Charles III, which came to Broadway last year after a triumphal London run, was a clever and deeply thoughtful play that found tremendous social resonance in psychological speculations about Britain’s royals. His new play Love Love Love, alas, isn’t nearly as tight or insightful. Its main characters are a couple, Kenneth and Sandra (Richard Armitage and Amy Ryan in Michael Mayer’s Roundabout production) who meet cute (and reckless) in 1967, bamboozle Kenneth’s brother, and then develop into absurdly neglectful parents as the play follows them to 1990 and then 2011. These two are amusing monsters of self-involvement, horrifyingly fascinating in a sit-comish way as the stakes of their thoughtlessness keep rising with their kids’ desperation. Unfortunately, while they are credible enough psychologically, their appalling shortcomings never really hold water as a generalized social malady—notwithstanding the narcissistic zeitgeist now thrust upon us all in the wake of the 2016 presidential election (read ITWOTTPE from here on). TRUE: Plausible connections exist between apartheid South Africa and present-day America. The title character of Athol Fugard’s 1982 play Master Harold and the Boys is an angry white kid in 1950 Port Elizabeth who hides his frustrated longing for love, paternal support and friendship behind a mask of racist aggression and ends up wounding those (who happen to be black) who should be his closest allies and comrades. Sound familiar? The production directed by the author at Signature Theatre closed just as the United States was coming to terms with its own shockingly self-destructive bout of angry and impulsive adolescent aggression ITWOTTPE. FALSE: Assaulting women with machine-gun shouts of “shut up” can be funny in Trump’s America. All of the farcical shouting in The Front Page—and especially Nathan Lane’s incessant “shut up!” yawps at every hapless female who gets in his way as the newspaper managing director Walter Burns—is simply embarrassing ITTWOTTPE. The producers of this star-studded revival of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s 1928 screwball comedy, directed by Jack O’Brien, no doubt counted on its topical relevance during election season, what with its famous satire of bottom-feeding journalists and its spotlight on the Trumpian blowhard Burns. The way the election turned out, though, has buried for good the appeal of such boy’s club humor based on bullying and misogyny. The elixir of escapism has no bite. It’s all grown too gravely serious to be funny anymore. TRUE: Fiery social conscience (Brecht and his irritations aside) actually trumps realism in the theater when it’s made intensely personal. I’m thinking, of course, of Anna Deavere Smith and her searing show Notes from the Field at Second Stage, about America’s prison-industrial complex and school-to-prison pipeline. Take Smith’s impersonation of Michael Tubbs, for instance, a Stockton City Council member forty years younger than her and the opposite sex—a black guy who graduated from Stanford and could’ve done lots of easier things with his degree than return to his chronically depressed home town and try to help it. Smith bears no realistic resemblance to Tubbs (or most of the other 18 subjects in her show) but she slips into his laid-back posture and vocalisms as if they were a sport coat—which is all she uses for his costume. As in all her shows, she uses herself as witness and conduit for revelatory words—taken from public appearances and her own interviews—that the rest of us need to hear but couldn’t hear so well in other contexts because they’re muffled behind various layers of mediation, fear and avoidance. By selecting these statements and precisely impersonating the tone and mannerisms of the speakers, Smith turns recitation into personal encounter and draws us in more closely than we anticipate, even if we’ve seen and savored her before. After hearing Tubbs’s chilling observations about Stockton—there “really [are] no other alternatives or options for our boys and men of color” than “prison or death”—we’ve more or less forgotten the speaker, interesting as he is, and focused entirely on the shameful conditions he describes. That’s how Smith’s theater becomes a unique force of resistance to silence, indifference and inertia. We will need it more than ever now ITTWOTTPE. FALSE: The whole of Othello actually benefits from being set in a generic modern military barracks. Director Sam Gold and designer Andrew Lieberman have encased NYTW entirely in raw plywood, lined the floor with discolored mattresses, green plastic storage lockers, portable work-lights, Guitar-Hero consoles, AK-47s, and so on. It’s interesting for a while to imagine the grim environmental starvation suffered by men who, like Othello (David Oyelowo—amazing!), might have lived the bulk of their lives in such spaces. By intermission, though, the airless barracks feels constricting and dubious. Othello’s catastrophe is much more than a side effect of soldierly menace or machismo. It’s brought on also by decidedly domestic and romantic pressures that aren’t steeped in war. Mashing everything together into a stylistic monolith, especially ITWOTTPE, is reductive and confusing. TRUE: Better acronyms certainly await us ITWOTTPE. Photo by Chad Batka #DanielCraig #Othello #LoveLoveLove #AtholFugard #MasterHaroldandtheBoys #TheFrontPage #MikeBartlett #AnnaDeavereSmith #NotesfromtheField

Anyone so inclined could find plenty of reasons to carp about The Babylon Line, Richard Greenberg’s new play at the Mitzi Newhouse Theatre. It is oddly, defiantly equivocal, pursuing numerous plot threads that seem like they ought to be secondary and leaving several juicy character conflicts undeveloped. Its use of Levittown, NY, as a setting for thick-headed suburban malaise borders on cliché. And it dithers among six different endings rather than committing to one. The production by Terry Kinney is also, uncharacteristically, clumsily staged. Nevertheless, I liked this play, largely because it foregrounds creative writing—not the romance or glamor or prestige of it but the actual craft and labor of it as well as the relentlessly precise attitude toward language that must underlie it. The action takes place in a 1967 adult-education class at a high school in Levittown. Most of the students have enrolled only because the classes they really wanted, like Contemporary Events and Flower Arranging, were full. The instructor Aaron Port (Josh Radnor) is an acerbic 38-year-old with just a single story published who reverse-commutes from Greenwich Village and clearly doesn’t like teaching, not in this proudly bland place anyway. Aaron narrates the action as a memory play, and inasmuch as the focus is his internal creative struggle externalized as a thwarted love affair, the plot amounts to yet another cliché. Restless, quirky and fetching Joan Dellamond (Elizabeth Reaser), who arrives late and proves to be the class’ only talented student, flirts outrageously with him, and his resistance to her exposes his overcautiousness and (we’re meant to assume) probably explains his writer’s block. So far so formulaic. What lifts The Babylon Line above this worn pattern is the amount of time Greenberg devotes to examples of the students’ mostly awful writing. That is a huge risk. Most playwrights, in dramatizing a writing workshop, would find safer ways to spice things up, maybe with quotes from masters as Dead Poet’s Society does with Whitman and Shakespeare. Greenberg instead relies on a hilarious parade of ungainly, halting and crushingly trite passages from a motley crew of pupils we’re glad to spend time with (a trio of Jewish matrons, a curt Korean war vet, a guy who fried his brain with drugs), giving us the fun of playing surrogate teacher and critic. Greenberg doesn’t merely jeer at these prosaic people. He also marks baselines for improvement, which several of them do show. More important, he uses them as foils for standout Joan, who is inspired, and openly invites us to judge for ourselves whether her stories really are as good as Aaron’s reaction suggests. Here’s an example, recited by Reaser in her character’s sultry, Tennessee Williams drawl: The infant was not to be deflected. Clearly a baby with imperialist tendencies, it continued to reconnoiter what she still only so tentatively thought of as “her” living room . . . Luckily, this baby, seemingly so adventuresome, was, in truth, the spirit of inertia incarnate – it would tend to rest or move as it was acted upon. A little boot over the threshold and it was gone, before she even learned its sex. She closed the door, locked it, and returned to her chair. She was alone, true enough, but she was uncaught. I don’t want to overstate my case here. There’s way too little evidence to dub Joan a Chekhov or Cheever or Colette (whom she loves). Nevertheless, the wry bemusement behind that “deflected” and “imperialist,” the utterly unsentimental detachment of “reconnoiter” and “acted upon,” the electrical surprise of the closing “uncaught.” This sort of word choice is a big part of is what we mean by writerly talent, and its use as a pivot of dramatic suspense and recognition in an otherwise conventional play made me forgive the work all its blemishes. Joan has spent years closed in her house. She says (ostensibly about her character) and her hunger for emergence and fruitfulness: “Over seven years she had become as thin as a sentence, shadowy as a prayer. She wanted more.” It’s a cause for some celebration that part of Richard Greenberg, after more than two dozen plays, feels the same way. Photo by Jeremy Daniel #RichardGreenberg

What a journey Lynn Nottage’s Sweat has had. When this gorgeously incisive play about heartbreak and social collapse in the rust-belt opened at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival last year, it drew comparisons to John Steinbeck—deserved ones. No one has written more knowledgeably or empathetically about loss of dignity and rootedness during deindustrialization and the Great Recession than Nottage. And this play’s potency is compounded by the rarity of such realistically conceived blue-collar workers on the American stage in recent decades—a much-maligned and misunderstood demographic it would behoove all of us to know better. After Oregon and a run at Arena Stage in Washington (which co-commissioned it), Sweat opened at the Public Theater five days before the presidential election and was instantly acclaimed for its supposedly prescient analysis of Trumpism. Nottage and her director Kate Whoriskey had been visiting Reading, PA, and interviewing people there since 2012 (when it was named the country’s poorest city), and Sweat’s action is set in 2000 and 2008, well before Trump’s campaign. Nevertheless, the livid anger and disaffection of the play’s hardscrabble characters felt like a ready explanation of Trump’s horrifying rallies to the clueless New York theaterati. And the latest news is that Sweat is moving to Broadway. It will open at Studio 54 in the spring when its next wave of reaction will be steeped not in worried anticipation but actual experience of a Trump administration . . . heaven help us. I’ll refrain from prognosticating about that, except to hope that the Steinbeck comparisons grow a bit paler since The Grapes of Wrath appeared on the cusp of a new world war. Everyone should see Nottage’s play. The story alone won’t explain why as it too easily seems like a dry fieldwork research project. A group of coworkers at a Reading manufacturing plant are pressured with layoffs due to both NAFTA and the recession eight years later. One worker is disabled in an avoidable accident. Another is promoted from line worker to manager and given the job of locking out her friends. Still another, of Hispanic background but born in town, is frozen out of the union for years and then damned for scabbing during the lockout. Race hovers and scorches everything but never rises to the main cause of the several crises. The climax involves an unforgivable crime committed by two young friends, one black one white, in a moment of terrible desperation. Whoriskey deserves much credit here because her production sears these events into the heart like some diabolical home movie—grainily vivid and painfully familiar. The acting is uniformly honest and sharp with particularly fine performances by Carlo Albán as the busboy-turned-scab, James Colby as his gimpy boss, Will Pullen and Kris Davis as the youngster friends, and Michelle Wilson and Miriam Shor as their wonderfully gnarly mothers. For me, though, what stirs and sticks most in the end is the act of radical empathy the play represents. Our country is more dangerously divided at the moment than at any point since the Civil War, we’re told every day that preserving the fabric of our society depends on both sides emerging from their bubbles and listening to one another, and here is a play that represents three years of loving, immersive listening in the downtrodden heartland by a bona-fide member of the urban elite. That commitment is the reason why it barks and sings and laughs with truth. When a sensitive author puts in the time as Nottage has we will follow her past all those banal and unsolvable questions of blame and move on with her to ponder the larger and graver matter of what we owe one another as neighbors, countrymen, brethren and friends. Photo: Joan Marcus #LynnNottage

The Encounter, Simon McBurney’s two-hour intermissionless solo show on Broadway, which many critics have panegyrized as an enthralling immersive experience, left me indifferent and droopy-eyed. I’m not immune to the spell this show was trying to cast. Back in 2001 McBurney and Complicité came to New York with another piece, Mnemonic, that had many of the same basic ingredients—fragments of a contemporary story knitted together with bits of far-flung philosophical and scientific inquiry, along with a precisely applied multimedia technique—and I was seduced. I went to The Encounter expecting more of that synoptic magic. Instead the show struck me as a motley agglomeration of fragmentary journeys and inquiries whose connections were flimsy and only grew flimsier as the gimmickiness of the multimedia technique became clear. In case you haven’t heard, The Encounter provides all spectators with individual earphones attached to their seats. We hear McBurney’s voice through them as he dashes about the stage speaking into microphones that do cool stuff like change the direction of his voice, feed it through one ear or the other, distort its register, delay its delivery, repeat it on loops, and so on. He also creates sound effects, radio-style, with ordinary objects like a Cheez Doodles bag, water bottles, and a bunch of magnetic tape. It seems we’re meant to marvel that what we see sometimes doesn’t synch with what we hear. The blurred boundary between live and recorded sound replicates the disorienting mental experiences narrated in the show. The main experiences McBurney recreates are those of Loren MicIntyre, an American photographer who in 1969 rather recklessly went to document a remote Amazonian tribe called Mayoruna that had repeatedly retreated into the jungle to avoid contact with civilization. He nearly died after becoming marooned miles away from his river dropoff spot, and the tales we hear (most from the novelist Petru Popescu) describe, for instance, how he lost his mental and physical bearings along with his camera and other modern trappings, tried to communicate nonverbally with the Mayoruna “headman,” and hallucinated under the influence of a tribal brew. This material alternates with snippets of interviews with neuroscientists, philosophers, environmentalists and others who opine about the adventure and other matters, as well as interruptions by McBurney’s five-year-old daughter when she’s unable to sleep and wants daddy’s attention. McBurney also strips off his shirt and relates a comparatively pedestrian fantasy about a modern suburbanite “freeing” himself by setting fire to his material possessions in his yard. Here’s the problem. Apart from the questionable value of the earphones—which are physically irritating and don’t provide effects nearly amazing enough to nullify our natural preference for showing over telling in the theater—McBurney’s climactic regression to “primitive” unaccommodated man in the show feels hollow and irrelevant. He stripped his clothes off in Mnemonic too, as it happens, but there the act felt necessary and poignant because the multimedia effects were sporadic and lightly applied and because the piece’s equally improbable mélange of story bits and research threads about, say, a woman’s quixotic search for her father and the discovery of a 5,500-year-old corpse in the Alps all converged—movingly and dazzlingly—around the pivotal subject of memory. What is it? What does mean to form, lose and share it? Does it, can it, endure? No such pivotal subject exists in The Encounter that I can discern. The piece flails around trying to identify one but it never chooses among the many disparate options, such as professional ego, scientific hubris, the corruptions of civilization, the experience of time, distracted parenting, the neurology of perception, the dubiety of memory, and much more. McBurney can’t convincingly offer a theatrical parallel to McIntyre’s transformative regression-and-return adventure because his show fetishizes its fancy sound equipment. There is no real risk-all baring of theatrical means here, and that’s why the show feels dreary and dessicated. Technology alone can’t hold our fascination, and the work's claimed impoverishment and reduction to basics ends up feeling forced and hortatory, like a Beckett ride at a theme park. Photo by Gianmarco Bresadola #SimonMcBurney #Complicité

Although the PR images of leaping, lunging and levitating female soccer players seem to promise some badass athletic exertion, Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves doesn’t actually traffic in feats of prowess, or even the time-honored theatrical allure of toned and straining bodies. Over its long history theater has accommodated itself to real sports action on occasion. Among many others, I recall a play called Joe Fearless (A Fan Dance) in New York some years back that took place on a basketball court and had a heart-stopping jump-shot at its climax. Another, older play by Booker-Prize-winner David Storey is no doubt more relevant—The Changing Room (1971), whose action spanned an entire rugby match but showed none of the game. Only its physical and psychological effects on the players before, during and afterward were dealt with. The Wolves is written very much in Storey’s spirit. It covers more than one soccer game but like Storey it uses its sport—the elaborate preparations for it, its mental and physical costs—as a sort of dramatic alibi, an excuse to focus on character issues that only a team activity can properly frame because they’re so complicated and multi-sided. DeLappe’s action also zeroes in on tensions inherent in uniquely female social dynamics: questions of affinity and trust, for instance, and (even amid the licensed aggression of physical competition) pressures to be affable and ingratiating off the field. The cast is quite a large group: nine high-school-age girls, mostly in uniform, pass the ball gently on a section of bright-green pitch, but otherwise mostly confine their physical exertions to stretches and warmups. The stage is too small (at The Duke on 42nd St.) for anything more ambitious, and anyway the point is that the real action isn’t about physicality but rather certain interior experiences associated with it. The drama takes place in their chatting, squabbling, gossiping, backstabbing and jockeying for authority and advantage, all of which flow as smoothly and naturally as close-order drills. It all adds up to an awesome picture of the adolescent pain any girl might feel as she moves to adulthood, with only very scattered and imperfect guides and roadsigns to show her the way. De Lappe depicts the categorical support of the girls for each other as just another of those things they ultimately realize they can’t fully rely on. DeLappe and director Lila Neugebauer’s perceptiveness about these teenage group dynamics is exceptional. Pay attention and you’ll likely leave the play feeling as bruised, unsettled, and inexplicably lonely as the girls themselves. Photo: Daniel Vasquez #SarahDeLappe