November Is Packed!

Run to get tickets to see Denise Hough's electrifying performance  in "People, Places & Things" at St. Ann's Warehouse now through December 3rd.  Be prepared though; this is a tough look at addiction. Ms. Hough's Emma is an actress on a downward spiral due to her addiction to just about everything.  Duncan MacMillan's play comes to Brooklyn from a hugely successful run at the National Theatre in London. The play itself is pretty standard stuff but, as directed by Jeremy Herrin, and with a magic box of a set by Bunnie Christie it takes us on a surreal  journey down the rabbit hole (yes, the allusion to Alice in Wonderland is intended). The supporting cast is excellent, especially Nathaniel Martello-White as Mark, a recovering addict who becomes Emma's friend in rehab.

Another show not to miss is "Animal Wisdom" at The Bushwick Starr which was recently extended through December 9th.  Heather Christian's show is part revival meeting and part ghost story as well as a memoire of Ms. Christian's childhood experiences being raised in the deep South. Or, as the program notes state: "Heather talks to dead people, gets freaked out and writes music."  Under Mark Rosenblatt's direction "Animal Wisdom" seems so specific to Christian and her friends/musicians that one cannot imagine it performed by anyone else.  Hence, a good reason to catch it while you can in the intimate Bushwick Starr theatre.

Kate Hamill's "Pride and Prejudice" is not up to Bedlam's marvelous "Sense and Sensibility" but a step up from "Vanity Fair," both also adapted by Ms. Hamill and starring none other than ...   Still, the six actors portraying the multitude of characters from the timeless Austen book have a rollicking good time and take us along for the ride.   I only wish Hamill would have left the sneer behind in her portrayal of Elizabeth Bennett.  It does a disservice to Austen and her most famous creation. But the Primary Stages production directed by Amanda Dehnert on through December 19th is still a most enjoyable way to pass an evening.

I wish I could be more laudatory about Rajiv Joseph's "Describe The Night" at The Atlantic Theatre Company.  I was a big fan of "Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo" on Broadway and "Guards at the Taj" which was also at The Atlantic, both tightly crafted and absorbing, but this fictionalized story of the Russian writer Isaac Babel is all over the place. This comes down in part to the direction by Giovanna Sardelli but the play itself is a massive undertaking for any director, spanning almost a century and following multiple interrelated characters. I don't know what the plays original intent was but somewhere along the line it became heavy with veiled allusions to Trump's presidency.  Fine performances from Danny Burstein as Babel,  Zach Grenier as the Stalinite officer who becomes Babel's unlikely friend and Tina Benko as his mad wife and Babel's lover keep it afloat. How much is fact and how much fiction we may never know even with the list of basic facts about Babel that are available on the way out of the theatre. Most impressive is the set by Tim Mackabee, a towering archive of secret Russian documents always ominously present.

In the "if you blinked, you missed them" category are "The Beckett Trilogy" at The Duke Theatre, "Knives in Hens" at Theatre 59E59, "State of Siege" at BAM Opera House and "Man to Man" at BAM Fisher.

The Beckett Trilogy had a three day run as part of Lincoln Center's white light festival and was a hot ticket. I managed to get a return on the day of the last performance and it was worth it to see Conor Lovett of Gare St. Lazare Ireland enact three monologues adapted from Beckett's "Molloy," "Malone Dies" and "The Unnamable."  Of the three, all directed by Lovett's wife Judy Hegarty Lovett, "The Unnamable" came the closest to the feel of the great playwrights best works.  Lovett, along with his wife, has spent his career exploring and performing Beckett's work.  I think Beckett would have approved.

I caught "Knives in Hens" at the very end of its run spurred on by a great review in The New York Times.  I otherwise would have missed it not being a great fan of David Harrower whose "Blackbird" was overhyped and inferior.  This is an earlier play which took place somewhere in feudal Scotland in the early 1500's.  In its current staging director Paul Takacs places the story in the rural South of this country with a cast of three audaciously talented black actors: Robyn Kerr, Shane Taylor, Devin E. Haqq.  I was especially moved by the choreography of Yasmine Lee whose sensuous love-making moments frame the play.

There is really not much to say "State of Siege" at BAM Opera.  Adapted from Albert Camus's "The Plague" and directed by Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota for Theatre de la Ville, Paris this  dark and quasi-operatic display was pretty dull aside from the impressive set by Yves Collet.

And there is even less to to recommend "Man to Man" at BAM Fisher, a one-woman show by Manfred Karge and directed by Bruce Guthrie & Scott Graham(it took two?) about a German woman who adopts the identity of her dead husband in order to survive to survive in Nazi Germany.  As with "Describe The Night," the play attempts to span several decades.  There is a lot of use  of visual gimmicks which feel too studied and Maggie Bain's accent is more Irish or Scottish than German.  Fail.