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Richard Gilman, an old teacher of mine and a terrific critic, used to say that whenever he read reviews dismissing a new play as “static,” “inert” or “tedious” he wanted to run right out and see it. The wisecrack was meant to disparage reviewers more than to praise anticlimactic drama per se. But since I had just read all those words in several bored prominent-newspaper reviews of Nathan Alan Davis’s Nat Turner in Jerusalem before seeing it at New York Theatre Workshop, the quip sprang to mind as I walked out. My pulse was thumping then, because I thought this play was graceful, intelligent, and seriously disquieting. Nat Turner is a furiously contested figure. A slave in Southampton County, Virginia, he led a revolt in 1831 that killed 55 whites, 33 of them women and children, claiming (according to his somewhat dubious “confessions” published that year by an opportunistic lawyer named Thomas Gray) that he was following God’s orders. To Gray, he was a terrorist and religious fanatic. To William Styron, whose novel The Confessions of Nat Turner won the Pulitzer Prize (and also the censure of numerous black writers) in 1967, he was a bumbling rebel infatuated with a white woman. To Styron’s critics and others, he is a hero and martyr to black resistance and liberation. Davis has no new incendiary view to peddle with this play. He is no Nate Parker, whose The Birth of a Nation, opening this week, tells Turner’s story and looks to be a cinematic bomb. Davis’s comparatively modest purpose seems to be to understand Turner’s religious mission sympathetically and clarify his legend cogently for an age preoccupied with terrorism and structural racism. The basic dramatic circumstance is the same as the flashback frame for Styron’s novel: a jailhouse interview the night before execution between Turner and Gray. Davis also adds conversations between Turner and a thoughtful, devout guard played by the same actor who portrays atheistic Gray (Rowan Vickers). Both of these white men listen to Turner, himself in chains, explain why they are the ones truly imprisoned because they have accepted the benefits of a depraved social order. “I am the return/Of all the plagues of Egypt,/Come in this day to this nation:/The earth’s most prideful and most prosperous,” Davis’s Turner says, speaking throughout in a sonorous free verse that the actor Phillip James Brannon delivers with warm, earnest fervency. Relatives of his victims, he continues, should not grieve for their slain children, for “They are in heaven with their innocence./What greater danger could there be for the souls of those infants/Than to come of age here in Virginia? If you loved your own daughter, Thomas Gray, you’d smother her in her cradle this very night.” The play’s language is a bit grandiloquent at times, and its Jesus references can be a tad heavy-handed. Yet the eeriness of such soothing words of violence makes its own powerful point, and it feels right and inevitable to make Turner’s religious martyrdom, inherent in his story from the beginning, the center of a drama. The actual Turner, after all, really did attest to prophecy, and his place of trial, judgment and execution really was called Jerusalem (a town in Virginia). It happens that constrained or incarcerated protagonists often come off as scapegoat-martyrs, even when their crimes are appalling (Eichmann, Leopold and Loeb). The challenge for an ambitious dramatist is to make the stakes of their sufferings clear so the audience can feel meaningfully connected to people they’d otherwise disavow. When the stakes are left murky or sentimental (think The Kiss of the Spiderwoman), the result inevitably feels weak and mannered. But when they are made momentously clear (Prometheus Bound, Fugard’s The Island) or lucidly ambiguous (Beckett’s Happy Days, the Pomfret Castle scene of Richard II), the result can be gripping and heartbreaking despite the action’s physical stasis. This basic insight is a mainstay of Davis’s play, and he and his director Megan Sandberg-Zakian were brave to stick with it. Nat Turner in Jerusalem is indeed an immersion in charged stillness. Whatever it lacks in conventionally defined “momentum” and “suspense” (the reviewers’ chief complaints) it makes up in fineness of thought, clarity of expression, and elevation of spirit. Such a drama requires unusual concentration, yet repays that investment many times over. Photo credit: Joan Marcus #NathanAlanDavis #NatTurnerinJerusalem

Taylor Mac calls his extraordinary theatrical marathon, five years in the making, A 24-Decade History of Popular Music. This title is coyly misleading, because the show is really a blazingly perceptive, wildly subjective history of the United States told by means of a 240-year music playlist. Over twenty-four hours it features 246 songs, divided by decade from 1776 to 2016, lushly performed by Mac in a creamy baritone while decked out in hilariously wacky sculptural costumes designed by Machine Dazzle and accompanied by a crack chorus and orchestra directed by Matt Ray. Yet the marathon’s first installment, “Act I: 1776-1806” at St. Ann’s Warehouse, along with a ninety-minute section I saw last year at the Prospect Park Bandshell, left me with the strong impression that the show’s gorgeously arranged songs aren’t really its point. Sure, they’re delightful, cleverly selected, and lovingly performed. But they seem to me a dazzling pretext, an alibi for some of the slyest and smartest political theater to arrive in New York since Angels in America. Like Tony Kushner, Mac has grasped a basic and widely misunderstood fact about American theater: that politics in it needs an alibi if it wants to reach a large audience. Americans are allergic to politics onstage unless it’s wrapped in sensational theatricality. Its politics are the most original aspect of Mac’s elaborate drag act. He is indeed, as he claims, a fabulous bridge-builder between the queerly marginal and the dully normative. Swanky new St. Ann’s Warehouse, with its $55 tickets and glassy, riverview lobby, is hardly the natural backdrop for edgy drag-club stories like Mac’s about, say, food inserted into bodily orifices (a running theme on Thursday). Yet all Mac’s stories and antics are in the service of larger points about power and identity, inclusion and exclusion, aggression and repression, and more, about which judy (Mac’s preferred pronoun--I've been misgendering judy) has a lot to say. The songs in the show—even in the relatively obscure early period of Act I (think “Yankee Doodle Dandy”)—evoke a nonspecific nostalgia. And our affection for them along with their dynamic appropriation makes us question that nostalgia. Mac turns our sentimentality against us by luring us into thinking about it, about not only the musical sources of it but also the ideas that our ancestors guzzled, coughed and sponged up rather than truly examining. It’s the patter between songs, and often within them, that makes this clear. The patter carries the thread of unique and gritty social observation that knits the show together. A colonial-era drinking song whose name escapes me, for instance, prompts a digression about playing beer pong at a Dartmouth frat party, which sparks a reverie about the smell of piss, which sparks another about Dartmouth’s profile as the incubator of capitalists who piss expertly on the poor. Later, a nearly nude Mac will sing while fondling and groping a bald audience member in a blue blazer, afterward turning and quipping with a wink: “I picked you because you look like you went to Dartmouth.” At another point an old round set to a nursery rhyme—“Oh dear what can the matter be?/Johnny’s so long at the fair”—prompts a digression about the woman imagined to be singing it. Left alone at home, worried “Betty” can’t look for Johnny herself because respectable women can’t go unaccompanied to fairs. This fact leads her to wonder about her rights, and then wonder whether Johnny might possibly be tarrying with some non-respectable woman at the fair. Betty’s thoughts eventually settle on ostracism of hussies rather than solidarity with women to gain rights. Mac remarks that “in capitalistic America, we always forgive the enemy and despise the outsider”—an observation judy chillingly ties to the aftermaths of all America’s major wars. Not everything in the grueling, three-hour, intermissionless act is as sharp and penetrating as I’ve made it sound. Nor would you want it to be, as Mac’s humor depends very much on rough, seat-of-your-pants spontaneity to take flight. (“Perfection is for assholes!”) All of that understood, I can’t think of a more worthwhile way to spend three, six, or, hell, if you have the stamina, twenty-four hours. It’s truly remarkable, for one thing, to find such deep patriotism in such an outsider artist, someone bullied and shunned who had more reason to hate than most but instead came out and imagined a bigger, more fabulous tent than any politician. You’ll never see American history in quite the same way again.

This is a first for me! A video commentary rather than composed one--about Matt Ross's beautiful film Captain Fantastic. #MattRoss #CaptainFantastic

Setting Shakespeare in modern Africa is risky business for a white first-world director. That said, the temptation is perfectly understandable. No place on today’s earth struggles more prominently and dramatically over democracy, tyranny and the corruptions of power—Shakespeare’s major political themes. Still, however well handled, this choice by any white artist is bound to seem exploitative, touristic, and opportunistically exotic to some. Then there’s the inevitable problem of spotty relevance (no contemporary setting ever fits Shakespeare perfectly). The more specific a setting is the greater the danger of encumbering a play with extraneous baggage. And making it nonspecific risks falling into reductive generalization about Africa. Simon Godwin negotiates this minefield as well as any director I’ve seen. His predominantly black Hamlet—the first in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 141-year history to employ a black actor as the Danish prince, shockingly—is unforgettably vivid. It is eclectic in its African references, as was Gregory Doran’s all-black RSC Julius Caesar, which visited BAM in 2013. Yet the effect here (even in the cinema version, which I saw) is unusually compelling. The African environment feels more personal, and Paapa Essiedu’s performance as Hamlet is so strong that he soon becomes the only gauge of importance and relevance we care about. Esseidu is a young-looking 25 and the appeal of this Hamlet is decidedly youthful. It pulsates with color, vigor, and energy. Emphatic drumming punctuates nearly every scene, and Hamlet shares clubby-cool gestures and facial expressions with every other character in his generation. The bright color is striking in a play so suffused with gloom, grief and reflection. Funereal clothing in the first court scene quickly gives way to vivacious colored fabrics and resplendent polychrome prints. In feigning madness Hamlet transforms into a paint-spattered graffiti artist, a Basquiat-wannabe who prances about with chic, day-glo stains on his face and grungy suit. The Act 5 fencing match becomes a ritualistic wooden-stick fight with Hamlet and Laertes stripped to the waist, both wearing sexy red pantaloons. Essiedu’s Hamlet is every inch a college kid. Godwin’s production begins with an invented prelude in which beaming Hamlet receives a diploma from Wittenberg University (whose Ivy Leaguish seal hangs upstage) only to be rushed off the dais to plod seconds later behind his father’s coffin while his mother (Tanya Moodie) and uncle (Clarence Smith, in military regalia like a Sani Abacha or Idi Amin Dada) gaze down from a high window. The implication is that this popular, privileged foreign student, soaking up the civilizing light of an American liberal arts institution, was suddenly yanked from his campus idyll to face nightmarish events back home. Whatever ideas of normalcy his education gave him provide no preparation for treacherous Elsinore now. Essiedu weeps openly and copiously in the Act 1 court scene—a perilous choice given the limitations it would seem to impose on Hamlet’s subsequent emotional journey. Yet Esseidu makes it work. His anguish, so obviously sincere, sets Claudius on edge, threatening his tight control over the proceedings. Then Essiedu shifts and deals frantically with Horatio (Hiran Abeysekera) and Marcellus (Theo Ogundipe), moving swiftly after that through giddy gladness, gentle wit, sober self-possession, and more. The main impression is of a kid not yet fully formed, a human work in progress sidetracked and possibly stunted by his encounter with the ghost. He doesn’t know himself why he feels so distraught and grasps at the prospect of violent revenge to find psychological answers. This sense of his vulnerability in arriving at a newly unsafe childhood home serves as the production’s emotional heart. Hamlet finds himself a misfit just when he was beginning to feel well-adjusted, it seems; and what we witness is his search for a new emotional foundation that fits his idealistic and creatively impulsive self-image. The graffiti artist is a flagrant affectation, a safe, late-adolescent form of acting out that is borderline irritating. What keeps it vaguely plausible is that it’s not overdone or overintellectualized. Essiedu wears his intelligence lightly, trying to wield it as a tool of social connection whenever possible. All of his big speeches feel electric with surprise, obviously the fruit of fresh cultivation in Essiedu’s unique mental garden. Sometimes he even seems actually mad, as when he violently attacks Ophelia (Natalie Simpson) toward the end of the “nunnery” scene. As for the African setting, that it hangs together as a convincing environment at all is downright miraculous given how unassertive and ad hoc it is. Godwin says he took a research trip with his creative team to Ghana, Essiedu’s ancestral home, but apart from Ghanaian drum music, the show’s appearances and sounds are rather generalized (one of the gravediggers sings a calypso tune, for instance). This is Denmark as a generic West Africa where the people happen to speak Renaissance English. As I thought about why this manufactured place worked so well as a setting a wonderful recent book came to mind: Elizabeth Maddock Dillon’s New World Drama: the Performative Commons in the Atlantic World. Dillon uses the term “commons” in both its abstract political and concrete geographical senses, meaning both a locus of power and sovereignty for a people and a public place of common use. The theater, she points out, is a quintessential commons not only because “audience and actors together form an assemblage that both embodies and represents the collectivity of the people” but also because the new configurations of that collectivity encountered in theater often stretch and challenge spectators’ notions of how their community is and ought to be defined. This idea captures the spirit in which Godwin plies the treacherous waters of interculturalism. It’s not to advertise the brilliance of any new cultural parallels he has discovered, or to make any armchairish claims of universalism, or even (I believe) primarily to offer opportunities to talented nonwhite British actors. The thrust seems to me an impulse to use the stage as a vibrant performative commons where a truly fresh, persuasively complex, and marvelously inclusive image of contemporary life may be imagined and enacted. Considering all the terror of Others roiling among us at the moment, on both sides of the Atlantic, this is an eminently worthy and welcome vision. Full disclosure: Simon Godwin will be directing Shakespeare's Measure for Measure at Theatre for a New Audience in spring 2017. Photos by Manuel Harlan © RSC #Shakespeare