Two shows not to miss while they are still on are The Public Theatre's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park featuring the incomparable Annaleigh Ashford as Helena. If you have to wait on line all day in the park it will be worth your while but there are a couple of other options. The Public Theatre also has a line downtown which you can get to at 11am and still score tickets or you can try your hand at the on-line lottery (which is what I did). I know, you're saying "ANOTHER "Midsummer Night's Dream?" I've only seen it a million times already," but don't! Annaleigh Ashford brings new juice to the play which in this case would be more appropriately titled "All About Helena" or "Helena's Dream." From the moment she hits the stage she owns it, every inch of it.This is not to take away from the performances of the rest of the stellar cast but they are merely her supporting players here. A side note is that I loved the use of elderly actors as Titania's fairies, especially the diminunative 88-year-old Vinie Burrows whom I last saw in "Sumara" at The Soho Rep. I mind-checked her name because she made the otherwise baffling and directionless "Sumara" watchable. The director is Lear DeBessonet, one to watch if you're not already familiar with her name from the recent production of Suzan-Lori Parks' "Venus" as Signature and her various productions of Shakepeare as the Founder of Public Works at the Public Theatre.
The other show you should be buying tickets for RIGHT THIS MINUTE is the PTP/NYC production of Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia" at the Atlantic Theatre. I went not expecting much after having been so in love with the Broadway production several years ago that I begged another ticket and went twice. That production had a stellar cast, including Billy Crudup, Margaret Colin and Raul Esparza, and directed by David Leveaux it would be hard to beat. But I loved this smaller intimate production four floors underground at the Atlantic with it's no-name cast, directed by an in-house director Cheryl Faraone. The play straddles two time periods, 1809 and present at Sidley Park, a large country house in Derbyshire, England and revolves around a mystery. Intrigued? And let's hear it for all the unsung actors and directors of the theatre world who are doing strong work and will never get the recognition they deserve. I had been prepared to leave at intermission (it is a long play) but I was so engaged that after the break I couldn't wait to take my seat again. Let me give a special shout-out to several of the actors: Andrew William Smith as Septimus Hodge, a tutor and a great friend of Byron, Jonathan Tindle as Ezra Chater, a "poet," Megan Byrne as Lady Croom of the 1809 cast; Stephanie Janssen as the historical author Hannah, Jackson Prince as Valentine Coverly, an heir to the estate and a mathematical genius and Alex Draper as the recklessly ambitious academic Bernard Nightingale in the present day cast.
And there is a tortoise...
Less captivating is "The Fulfillment Center" at MTC. Directed by Abe Koogler, this is the second play I have seen by Daniel Aukin. I was blown away by "The Kill Floor" with Marin Ireland at the Claire Tow black box theatre at Lincoln Center a year or so ago. Taking place (for the most part) in an abattoir, the play was much more timely than the recent Pulitzer Prize winning Lynn Nottage play "Sweat," which dealt with some of the similar themes and felt old and regurgitated IMHO. Although the cast of "Fulfillment Center" is uniformly excellent (Eboni Booth, Bobby Moreno, Frederick Weller and the great New York mainstay Deirdre O'Connell) the play, which takes place in a shipping facility in New Mexico, a trailer park and a characterless apartment, lacks the immediacy of "The Kill Floor." The story is similar though, characters pushing to move on, to move up and to have some meaning in their lives. Worth seeing, still.
The very disappointing "Pipeline" by Dominique Morisseau and directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz at Lincoln Center is one to safely miss. Blaine-Cruz directed the deadly Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' "War" at the Claire Tow and Alice Birch's excruciatingly awful "Revolt, She Said" at Soho Rep so either she just chooses bad material or she is doing an injustice to these works. It will be certainly something for me to think about before I buy another ticket to a play she has directed. "Pipeline" an angry play about a black teen who has lashed out at his private school teacher in a moment of frustration and rage and looks to loose everything. But it is as much about his divorced, ostensively single-parent mother who teaches in a large inner-city public high school in Detroit. Karen Pittman gives a high pitched unmodulated performance as Nia, the lonely and unhappy mother, desperate to understand her son and do what is right for him, The stand-out performance comes from Tasha Lawrence as Laurie, a veteran white colleague of Nia's, who lashes out in anger at the futility of their job. Morisseau wrote the play as a tribute to her own mother who taught for 40 years in Highland Park, Michigan. The allusions to Richard Wright's Bigger Thomas in Native son are apt but the overuse of the the Gwendolyn Brooks poems is tiresome and lazy.
