"Thunderbodies" are us, "Mockingbird" is not and the divine Twyla Tharp

November has been a month for a lot of ambitious but deeply flawed plays with the exception of a dance performance that soared.

Kate Tarker's "Thunderbodies" at Soho Rep is a loud, messy play reminiscent of Ionesco's "Jack, or The Submission" and "Rhinoceros."  It is directed Lileana Blain-Cruz who is having a moment now, having just come off  the successful run of Marcus Gardley's divine "The House That Will Not Stand." at NYTW. It's hard not to love the actors, Specifically veteran actress Deirdre O'Connell as the monstrous Grotilde and Matthew Jeffers as Boy, Grotilde's son.  Jeffers was the only "light" in the recent revival of Caryl Churchill's "Light Shining in Buckinghamshire" at NYTW and he is mighty good here as well.  "Thunderbodies is about war and politics and no way out...  As usual there too much throwing garbage around the stage for my liking but it makes it's point.

The only good reason, and it is indeed an excellent one, to see Alexi Kaye Campbell's "Apologia" at The Roundabout is to see Stockard Channing flex her acting muscles.  I have to admit that I'll see her in anything.  She usually has better material to showcase her talent,  "Other Desert Cities," "Six Degrees of Separation," "Joe Egg" to list a few,  but her performance here as Kristin, an aging social activist who has just written a memoir, elevates the material. The other performances are pretty wan, including Hugh Dancy as both the sons who she has managed to completely leave out of her memoire (hence the crux of the play).  I have also have been less than impressed with recent work of director Daniel Aukin: "Admissions" at LTC and "Fulfillment Center" at MTC and Ranco Viejo at Playwright's Horizons.  He is either managing to trivialize good material or opting to direct less than excellent works.  Take your pick. 

"The Hard Problem" at Lincoln Center is a new but minor Tom Stoppard.  It's enjoyable but doesn't go deep the way his best work does.  Jack O'Brien is Stoppard's go-to director at LTC and although he does his best he can't raise the play to the level of "The Coast of Utopia" or "The Invention of Love."  A sticking point for me is that Stoppard's muse this time around is Adelaide Clemens.  This is yet another strong Stoppard role for an actress and Clemens just doesn't have the weight of, say, a Carey Mulligan (sorry Stoppard, but Carey is already taken by David Hare).  The play about an ambitious young woman with a secret in her past, rests on her shoulders and she's just too uninteresting an actress to pull us in completely.   Even so, an evening with Stoppard is always food for thought and time well spent.

"The White Album" at BAM is pointless. Mia Barron, who we last saw in  Sarah DeLappe's "Wolves" at Playwright's Realm, is convincing as Joan Didion although she bears absolutely no resemblance to her. But then, Vanessa Redgrave in "The Year of Magical Thinking" didn't either.  The staging by Lars Jan for his Early Morning Opera company with a literal glass house, smoke and mirrors and enactments is mostly unnecessary.  Read the book instead. 

Peter Brook and Marie-Helene Estienne's "The Prisoner" at Theatre for a New Audience is also disappointing.  Perhaps Brook, in his 90's, is losing the thread of how to tell a story.  This is parable, if you will.  A man is condemned to sit outside a prison in punishment for the unspeakable crime of having murdered his father.  But his crime is muddied by the fact that he killed his father because he caught him sleeping with his sister who he also desired and that he received his punishment from his uncle who stood idly by and did nothing and so on... I suppose the question is whether we need to be behind actual bars to be in prison.  Although culturally and ethnically diverse  the actors are not very interesting and fail to make us care. 

"To Kill a Mockingbird" at the Shubert, adapted by Aaron Sorkin and directed by Bartlett Sher,  feels like a better than average television drama.  Which makes sense since in addition to the much loved "West Wing" Sorkin created "Newsroom" in which Jeff Daniels starred, as he does here. Daniels doesn't have to compete with Gregory Peck but he is still no Atticus Finch.  He fails to make us see the goodness and decency of the man.  Instead we get a scolding father and self-righteous lawyer.  I found Celia Keenan-Bolger believable as the 12-year-old Scout even though I have an intense dislike of seeing adult actors portray children on stage.  She brings layers to her performance lacking from the other performances. Too many of the characters are stock: the white trash accuser, the drunk with a heart of gold, the fair and jovial judge and so on.  The whole play feels rickety, like a summer stock show thrown up in a week or two.  Still, the night I went, there was a standing ovation.  I wasn't surprised considering how much the both the book and the movie have become such a part of our cultural narrative.  The audience wanted to love it so they did.

Twyla Tharp at the Joyce delights with "Minimalism and Me" an instructional piece on her earliest dances narrated by Tharp herself.  She remounts her earliest works from 1965 to 1971 and we see the progression of her choreography leading up to the perfect "Eight Jelly Rolls" from 1971.  As ever, Tharp has and eye for picking exquisite dancers and it's such a treat to see Tharp step out at 77 and dance for a few moments. Heaven.

OK!

"Oklahoma" directed by Daniel Fish at St. Ann's Warehouse is a mixed bag.  To begin with, the Rebecca Naomi Jones who plays Laurie is such a downer that none of it makes sense.  No Shirley Jones she. We have to fall in love with Laurie for the play to click.   On the other hand, I am absolutely in love with the actor who plays Curly, Damon Daunno, who was also rock-star magnetic in Hadestown at NYTW (but totally wasted in the dreadful "The Lucky Ones" at Ars Nova).  And Mary Testa brings much needed energy as Aunt Eller. The rest of the performances are pretty stock including the wheelchair bound Ali Stroker as Ado Annie.  Then there is the excruciating dream sequence, a ballet in the original production and movie but here a  modern dance number choreographed by John Heginbotham  that features lots of prancing and writhing around on the floor. No.  My heart went out to the lovely young dancer Gabrielle Hamilton.  I've also left out attributing the production to  Rodgers and Hammerstein because the current staging couldn't be further from their musical.  I did love the old-timey band of barn dance musicians on stage but much of the singing can only be described as caterwauling, a waste of some excellent vocal talent.  And the blood-splashed ending was more grotesque than I'm sure the original creators had in mind. The production dragged on in spots, specifically the darker moments with Jud Fry. We don't need to be literally kept in the dark for a long stretch, a few minutes would have done the trick. Or maybe the whole play should have been done in the dark?

A very slight play that I don't really recommend unless one is exploring ones queer identity is "Plot Points In Our Sexual Development" by Miranda Rose Hall at the LTC3.  The director Margot Bordelon made a lot of busy work for the two very fine actors, Jax Jackson and Marianne Rendon, for what is essentially a series of monologues about their growing and developing awareness of their sexuality and how it effects their relationship.

Daniel Alexander Jones as Jomama Jones in his "Black Light" at Greenwich House is pure cabaret. Jomama Jones along with her band and back-up singers entertain with a show that is pure camp.  It does addresse racism in the patter between songs  but I preferred Jone's full length autobiographical play "The Book of Daniel" which dealt with the same issues and felt more complete as a play.  But bravo!

I'm not an opera connoisseur but the staging of the 1981 Philip Glass opera "Satyagraha" BAM about Gandhi was nonsensical.  The opera is about Gandhi's years in South Africa, from 1893 to 1914 where he formed his guiding philosophy of "truth force" ( Satyagraha ) and fought for the civil rights of Indians.  This Swedish import incorporates the marvelous Cirkus Cirkor into the Folkoperan opera.  The circus acts are presumably meant to be an echo of the relationship between risk and payoff in Gandhi's life and the emphasis of the Bhagavad Gita on delicate balance but are ultimately distracting and ... no... not great. So much walking on balls and business with blocks of wood and a big pile of yarn. The libretto, adapted by Constance DeJong from the Bhagavad Gita, a classic of Hindu scripture and a foundational guide for Gandhi's activism, and, sung by Leif Aruhn-Solen(Gandhi), Karolina Blixt among others, was gorgeous.  There were many moments when I preferred to close my eyes to the business on stage and just listen.

And, finally, Theresa Rebeck's "Bernhardt/Hamlet" is an old-fashioned play with old-fashioned performances and it's just fine. It's kind of like sinking into a comfortable and well-worn armchair for 2 1/2 hours.  I'm not at all surprised that the director Moritz von Stuelpnagel is an old hand at directing Noel Coward.  Except for too much fluttering of the arms in Act I, Janet McTeer, an unlikely choice to play the sensual 5'3" Divine Sarah, delivers with a nuanced portrait of the aging actress attempting to revive her career by mounting a production of "Hamlet" with herself in the title role.  Much talk is given to her difficulties with Shakespeare's verse and hilarity ensues.  Dylan Baker as the hammy veteran actor Constant Coquelin is pitch perfect but the performance that really stands out is that of Jason Butler Harner as the playwright Edmond Rostand who was possible Bernhardt's lover.  He's the kind of actor who becomes the role almost as if by osmosis.  In looking at the program I see that he has been in numerous plays I have seen and loved over the years and I can't for the life of me remember having seen him before. Bravo!  My kind of actor. 

"The Ferryman," "The Ferryman," "The Ferryman"

Although I enjoyed Jez Butterworth's previous plays that made it to Broadway "Jerusalem" and  "The River" temendously,  "The Ferryman" is such a glorious evening of theatre [three and a quarter hours worth that fly by] that it surpasses anything he has done before. "Jerusalem" was such a tour-de-force for that grandstanding Anglo-American actor Mark Rylance that the other actors had almost no chance to breath their parts.  "The River" was more or less a showcase for the always amiable and attractive Hugh Jackman.  But the cast of "The Ferryman," which originated in London and is here directed by Sam Mendes, is a true ensemble, each one superb.  Paddy Considine as Quinn Carney the head of a large Irish family and Laura Donnelly as Caitlin Carney his sister-in-law lead the cast.  Fionnula Flanagan,  Dearbhla Malloy and Mark Lambert represent the older generation, all established Irish actors of some note, but even the young 'uns, many of them American and new to the cast for the Broadway production incorporate seamlessly into the mix.  Even those not familiar with the Irish "troubles" will have no problem following the story which revolves around the disappearance of Caitlin's husband 10 years prior and the events that ensue when his executed body is found in a bog. The different political leanings of the members of both the older and the younger members of this large extended family are front and center.  This devastating play, rich in language, political insight and human tragedy, is a must see. 

The Russian "Measure for Measure" at BAM Harvey comes close (Shakespeare ... hello ...) although I would have enjoyed it a tad more if it it hadn't been in Russian and the supertitles had been translated from the original English and not from the Russian translation of the English.  The cast, all from The Pushkin Theatre Moscow, are directed by Cheek by Jowl's Declan Donnellan. Anna Vardevanian as Isabella particularly stands out.  This is physical theatre. The staging is minimal and the ensemble at times appear as Greek chorus but it all comes together cohesively and times one even forgets that the actors are not speaking in English.

More or less in keeping with "Measure for Measure," "The Bacchae" also at BAM Harvey is a physical production. Anne Bogart directs the  Siti production of the Euripides play at times almost as it were a  dance.  The story of Dionysus arriving in Thebes as a human and wreaking havoc is a classic but always has the ability to catch one by surprise with it's brutality. The work of the very fine ensemble is at times humorous and at other times shocking, sending spasms of fright and fear through the body of the audience like an electric shock. Euripides would have approved.

Bedlam's "Uncle Romeo Vanya Juliet" disappoints.  I, followers of this blog know, am a huge fan of Bedlam.  They have their hits and misses and this one is in my opinion a miss, albeit a glorious one.  The idea of mashing together "Uncle Vanya" and "Romeo and Juliet" is a curious one.  I did not get it.  Call me thick.  Performances, as always, are excellent, notably Susannah Millonzi as Sonya and Edmund Lewis as Vanya and the direction by company founder Eric Tucker is mostly excellent except for another Ivo Van Hove moment of trashing the stage.  Perhaps the less said, the better.  I look forward to their next production which I hope is as awesome as their "Pygmalian" earlier this year.

The Trisha Brown Dance Company at BAM Fisher is an example of a rudderless endeavor.  Not every dance company is capable of performing up to the standards set for them by their creators after said creators are gone.  Merc Cunningham was right to say "no mas" although several of his dancers have gone on to start companies of their own where they continue to perform his choreography and this is fine.  Pina Bausch's Tanztheater Wuppertal has managed to hang on to magic of it's creator as evidenced in their recent revisiting of Cafe Muller/The Rite of Spring at BAM and even that felt like something was missing.  Not all the dancers who currently make up the TBDC are equal and it is evident in the three pieces performed at the Fisher.  I don't believe that a couple of them would have made the cut had she been alive.  "Ballet" from 1968 which opens the program and relies heavily on video screen shots of the Trisha Brown from the 60's is o.k. but Cecily Brown lacks the presence of Brown.  The second dance "Pamplona Stones" from 1974 features two dancers of mismatched ability and, although retaining some of the intended humor of the original, is awkward as a result.  The final dance of the night "Working Title" from 1985 is the most successful and the company performs it well but there are too many pauses to "move furniture" as it were and this breaks the continuity to the extent that we in the audience are in danger of losing interest.  The black and white photo of Trisha Brown in the program has more life than the entire evening.


And just for laughs see "Head over Heels." This Broadway play directed by Michael Mayer["Hedwig and the Angry Inch," "Spring Awakening"] with music by The Go-Go's about a Medieval Kingdom where everything is topsy-turvy and everyone seems to be questioning their sexuality is enchanting, engaging and fun.  Have relatives or friends coming to town? Take them!

The Time Is Right For Some Collective Rage and a Reexamination of the 14th Amendment

Now seems to be the precise time for a production of "Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties" Jen Silverman's angry queer play directed by Mike Donahue for the MCC Theatre.  The acting is outrageously good.  Dana Delaney is the surprise here.  Who knew she was one to take on a role in such a play after plum in popular mainstream shows China Beach and Desperate Housewives.  She goes full out here as Betty 1, the arguably angriest of the Betties, an UES housewife who falls for her queer black boxing instructor Betty 5, played by Chaunte Wayans (yes of that Wayans family).  Lea Delaria (Betty 4), and Anna Villafane (Betty 3) are edgy and sharp as the star-crossed lovers of the play but I think my favorite performance came from Adina Verson as Betty 2, another privileged but decidedly mousier housewife who discovers her vagina.  Yes, reader, I did write that.  If you are shocked easily by graphic language then I suggest you steer clear of this production which culminates in a loose interpretation of the tinker's play from "A Midsummer Night's Dream," here called variously "Pyramid and Thursday" and, my favorite, "Burmese and Frisbee." Pratfalls and bad behavior ensues. But this is ultimately a play about angry women and what happens when they are pushed to the edge by their partners and society.

It's also the right moment in time to examine the 14th amendment in Heidi Schreck's "What the Constitution Means to Me" at The New York Theatre Workshop.  Directed by Oliver Butler and performed by Shreck herself, the play takes us back 30 years to when she made money for college by debating the 14th Amendment at various American Legion halls around the country.  The play shifts back and forth from those days to the present as she continues to explore the meaning of the 14th Amendment, finishing with a real time debate with a 15 year old girl (Rosdely Ciprain at the performance I attended).  Much food for thought here(did the 14th Amendment originally apply to women and people of color, for instance?).  I must also mention Mike Iveson who Schreck essentially uses as a prop until the moment when he is cast into the spotlight to share his experience as an LBGTQ man and stops the show. And did I say mention that you will also be very entertained?

Jonathan Payne's "The Revolving Cycles" at Playwright's Realm directed by Awoye Timpo is an ernest play about racism in America that doesn't hit the mark.  Again, as in "Fairview" Jackie Sibblies Drury's much overpraised play at the Soho Rep earlier this year, a playwright breaks the fourth wall and attempts to draw the audience in without earning it. There have been far better plays this year by black playwrights about the black experience in America including Aleshea Harris's "Is God Is" at the Soho Rep and Antoinette Nwandu's "Pass Over" at LTC.   Let's acknowledge fine playwriting when we see it and stop giving slaps on the back to playwrights of color for inferior efforts.  Two terrific performances keep "Revolving Cycles" afloat, that of Kara Young as Karma, a street kid trying to uncover the mystery of her one-time foster brother's disappearance, and Deonna Bouye shape-shifting in multiple roles. 

In "Girl From the North Country" at The Public Theatre, Conor McPherson brings his rural Irish characters and Dylan songs to  Duluth, Minnesota during the Depression.  The play itself is clunky and forced but the arrangements of the Dylan songs are divine as is the dancing by the ensemble cast with standout performances by Mare Winningham, Jeannette Bayardelle and Todd Almond who delivers a bring-down-the-house interpretation of "Duquesne Whistle." If you love Dylan and don't mind sitting through the labored plot surrounding the songs this may be enough.  It wasn't quite enough for me.

Too Much, Too Little

Do you know that feeling when you're late to the party and then feel like you shouldn't have bothered to show up at all?  That's how I felt about 10 minutes into Tracy Letts' "Mary Page Marlowe" at The 2nd Stage.  Even the usually reliably fine direction of Lila Neugebauer failed to make this play feel more than a poorly written soap opera following the mostly tragic life of one Mary Page Marlowe from her teen years to her cancerous 60's. Although there were some decent performances, especially that of Blaire Brown as the aging Mary Page, most of the casting was a cheap attempt to elevate the production by casting celebrity children and television actors. That said, Tatiana Maslany from "Orphan Black" was fine as Mary Page at age 27 and 36.  But Meryl Streep's daughter Grace Gummer as Mary Page's mother Roberta, continues to demonstrate that the best actors do not necessarily beget great actors. This is the second play in which she has underwhelmed me, the first being Stoppard's "Arcadia" where her acting chops were well beneath her cast mates.  Letts' play is somewhat copying the device that Clare Baronn used to great success in "I'll Never Love Again" where she cast her teenage self with actors of all ages, sexes and ethnicities to brilliant effect.  Here, Letts casts several actors as Mary Page at different stages of her life.  But some of the actors blur together and don't present any great age difference.  It might have been better for Letts to stick to one or two actors and flesh out the play which feels like a series of scenes strung together.  I also had the take-away that Letts doesn't really understand women.  This is an occasion, another example being "The Rape of the Sabine Women, by Grace B. Matthias" last year at Playwright's Realm,  where a woman's story is perhaps not best serviced by a male playwright.

From the Sublime to the Ridiculous

I cannot stress enough how important it is to hasten to New York Theatre Workshop to see the current production "The House That Will Not Stand" a glorious retelling by playwright Marcus Gardley of Lorca's "House of Bernarda Alba" set in the New Orleans of the early 19th century.  Liliana Blain-Cruz who directed Lucas Hnath's "Red Speedo" at NYTW and a cast of skilled and talented black actresses makes Lorca's play a commentary on the position and fate of black women in a post-Civil War South. I learned a term new to me, "placée," for free women of color who lived as wives of ethnic European men but were not legally recognized.  Beartice Albans, as portrayed by Lynda Gravatt, is such a woman.   She has lived in great comfort and raised three daughters but her "husband" has just died and the girls are eager to break out of the their very restricted life.  The oldest, Agnes, has dreams of becoming a placée herself, something that her mother is dead-set against.  All the actresses are excellent but Harriet Foy as the maid and yet-to-be-freed slave Makeda powerfully embodies black women and their story throughout time.   This ensemble acting at it's best and it's marvelous to see an all female black cast show us how it should be done.

The much anticipated rock opera "This Ain't No Disco" from Stephen Trask creator of "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" and Peter Yanowitz of The Wallflowers at Atlantic Theater Company fails to hit the mark,  any mark.  The director, Darko Tresnjak, has some interesting work under his belt including the Tony award winning  "A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder" on Broadway and "The Killers" with Michael Shannon at TFANA but seems to have lost his way here.  Perhaps it's the material, the final days of Studio 54.  But this musical doesn't fully embrace the hedonistic raunchiness of that time and place.  The story lines are contemporary cliches: the young gay man at the mercy of  a predatory older and successful and possibly in-the-closet boss, the struggling lesbian artists, the black single mother with dreams of becoming a music star.  It's like Studio 54 as told by Walt Disney and with less imagination.  But the real crime here is that the music isn't good enough.  It's disco without the disco.  Not good enough.

"The Saintliness of Margery Kempe" by John Wulp at The Duke on 42nd Street is a twist on a medieval morality play. Let's presume that one is even interested in such a play and then presume that one wants to spend two and a quarter hours in the company of even a stellar group of actors in such a play... As always, Andrus Nichols, late of the Bedlam Theatre Company, is divine as the bored medieval housewife who wants to shine and to that end makes it her business to become a saint.  Jason O'Connell, another Bedlam regular is also excellent in a variety of roles but, alas, the play, under the direction of Austin Pendleton,is tedius.

The Potomac Theatre Project's twofer at The Atlantic Theater Stage II consists of Caryl Churchill's "The After-Dinner Joke" directed by Cheryl Faraone and Howard Barker's "The Possibilities" directed by Richard Romagnoli.  PTP has mounted stellar productions of in the past including Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia" last year, directed by Faraone, and Barker's "Scenes from an Execution" in 2015 (the last major performance by the great actress Jan Maxwell who retired directly after and, sadly, died earlier this year), directed by Romagnoli.  But the current offerings are disappointing and amateurish.    There a few performances that stand out but the overall effect is that of assembling a cast of student actors around a few excellent veteran actors.  The 1977 Caryl Churchill play feels dated.  In the 70's Churchill was still feeling her way to become the playwright who has given us the groundbreaking "Cloud Nine," "Mad Forest," "Top Girls" and most recently "Escaped Alone."    I would have preferred to see Barker's "The Possibilities" decalogue in it's entirety instead of just the four short plays offered here and skipped the Churchill.  Barker is an underproduced playwright in this country, one of the original Angry Young Men of British theatre and his often violent plays, even those written decades ago, still feel timely. There were echoes of his groundbreaking "Saved" in which a baby is stoned to death by disaffected and helpless working class youth in the very fine "Cypress Avenue" at the Public this year. At the time it shocked.  It still does.

The Magnificent Carey Mulligan

Carey Mulligan is magnificent in the one woman show "Girls and Boys" at The Minetta Lane Theatre.  Mulligan is simply "Woman." We listen as she recounts the story of how she met her husband on an Easy Jet line in Italy and her story progresses to their marriage, her career, her success, his failure, their children and so on.  For much of the play Mulligan stands uncomfortably in what feels like a box on stage but these scenes are intercut with her in her apartment attending to her children.  I wouldn't want to give out too many spoilers here because the shock we feel at the end is necessary to the experience but I will say that the subject matter of the play is something I would not be surprised to see Ken Loach take on.  I'm still not big on one-person shows and this one could even have been judiciously cut but Mulligan commanded the stage and my attention for 90 minutes. This is the third time I've seen her on stage.  Previously she made the emotionally fragile Nina in "The Seagull" live as a fully realized human being and her performance in David Hare's "Skylight" opposite Bill Neigh was heartbreaking.  In her performances both in theatre and on film her intelligence and self-awareness are always evident.  Props to the Set Designer Es Devlin, Video Designer Luke Halls and Lighting Designer Oliver Fenwick who transform the stage magically as the play goes on.  The apartment is at first all ashy tones but as the play progresses bits of color are added: a toy, a piece of fruit, a pillow until the apartment becomes vibrant with color.  I was surprised that the play was written by a man, Dennis Kelly, because "Woman" rings so true.   Lindsey Turner masterfully directs as she did Rebecca Hall in "Machinal" several years ago.   Magnificent, magical, masterful ... I think I've used up my alliteration quota for this piece.

An import from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival "secret life of humans" is at the 59E59 theatre. Written by David Byrne and directed by Byrne and Kate Stanley,  "secret life of humans" addresses the question of whether our species is capable of learning from our mistakes.  It's not a brilliant work but has its interesting moments and the acting is all quite good, especially Olivia Hirst.  The set and visual projections are clever but a little to busy for my taste.

Rounding out this post is "Fire in Dreamland" at the Public Theatre, written by Rinne Groff and directed by Marissa Wolf.  It's a serviceable well-constructed play but not especially novel.  Once again, as with "secret life of humans," the performances are all perfectly fine but not especially noteworthy. I have seen Rebecca Naomi Jones do better work in "Describe the Night" at the Atlantic Theatre and also on Broadway in "Passing Strange." It was not an unpleasant way to spend a couple of hours but there are better off-Broadway plays to be had at the moment like "Girls and Boys" and "Pass Over" at Lincoln Center.

The Elephant in the Room

I feel that I need to address the elephant in the room.  In the few months I have seen several plays written, directed and acted by people of color.  The elephant in the room, you need to ask?  Well, in almost all instances the audience has been majority white, in one case all white.  If you read my last blog post you will know already that I wasn't impressed with Jackie Sibbeles Drury's "Fairview" which specifically took aim at this phenomena by breaking the 4th wall and commanding the mostly white members of the audience to change places with the black actors on stage to their supposed discomfort. This actually had the opposite of the intended effect on me.  I was just annoyed as the play I felt was just not good and the the playwright and her (white) director were challenging me, in effect saying that if I thought the play was bad it was only because as I, as a white person, didn't "get" the black experience. 

But as Aeshea Harris's "Is God Is" made me cringe in my whiteness so did Antoinette Nwandu's "Pass Over" which I just saw at the Claire Tow theatre at Lincoln Center.  If, after either of these plays, the stage lights had been turned on the predominantly white audience I would have been turned to stone.  The Steppenwolf production of "Pass Over,"  here directed by Danya Taymor, caught the eye of Spike Lee who directed a filmed version now streaming on Amazon Prime.  But I expect the filmed version is missing the immediacy of the theatrical production.  Two youngish black men trapped on their street for eternity (how could one not reference Beckett) by the gangs on one side and the police on the other. A white actor represents both the police and that do-goody white liberal(until he is not) offering them comfort and the possibility of an out.  Could he be us?  It's terrifying.  Jon Michael Hill and Namir Smallwood are both achingly good as Moses and Kitch.  But how can we as white, middle class, educated possibly really understand. Seriously.

How can this problem be addressed?  The New York theatre-going audience is primarily made up of white, middle class liberals like me but more and more of the plays presented off-Broadway are being written, acted and directed by people of color.  What does it feel like for them presenting a play about their experiences as such to an audience that is a sea of pale faces? Do they wonder if we are even getting it?  I don't know what the answer is.

Diving Into June

"Cyprus Avenue" is a chilling play.  Something happens that I believe has only happened once before on stage, in Edward Bond's "Saved" from 1965.  That play has seldom been mounted since because of the disturbing nature of an act of violence.  There are some things that even a very sophisticated theatre-goer has trouble wrapping one's mind around. Stephen Rea is crushing as Eric, the Belfast protestant who has seemingly lost his mind and believes that his new granddaughter Mary Mae is Gerry Adams (the leader of Sinn Fein the Catholic Republican political organization often sited for it's terrorists acts).  Dan Ireland's play is masterfully directed by Vicky Featherstone with superb performances from the entire cast.  It's powerful and raw and I caution you not to go if you have a low threshold for violence but, that said, try not to miss it in it's limited run at the The Public Theatre.

Lauren Yee's "The Great Leap" at the Atlantic Theater Company is also a political play but much, much tamer.   Directed by Taibi Magar who recently directed the outstanding "Is God Is" at Soho Rep, this play takes on the Cultural Revolution by way of a basketball game between an American college team and their Chinese counterparts with a son/father relationship thrown in for good measure.  It's not a great play but Magar continues to impress me as a director and the performances from B.D. Wong and Ned Eisenberg as the coaches Wen Chang and Saul hold the play up.   And while not terrible, Tony Aidan Vo the young Chinese-American player and Ali Ahn as his cousin are a little to showy for the the material. 

I finally got around to seeing "The Band's Visit" the week before it won the Tony for Best New Musical.  While I would not have necessarily put it in that category as it's a play with music rather than a musical, given the competition ("Spongebob Squarepants" for one) I'm not surprised it took the big prize.  I was especially smitten with the song "Omar Sharif" which is sung by Katrina Lenk as Dina.  She also came away with a Tony as did my favorite performer in the play Ari'el Stachel as the Egyptian musician who dispenses advice to a lovelorn Israeli.  I'm not sure why Tony Shalhoub won the Tony for Best Actor in a Musical for Tewfiq the conductor of the Egyptian Orchestra since he talks his way through part of one song and that's it.  I actually saw a different actor in the part, the very fine Dariush Kashani who I admired in both "Oslo" at Lincoln Center and "The Invidisible Hand" at NYTW.  A shout out to David Yazbek and Itamar Moses who wrote the music and the book respectively and to the always fine director David Comer.

Elevator Repair Service's "Everyone's Fine With Virginia Woolf" at the Abrons Arts Center on the LES is serviceable.  The company takes classics and turns them on their heads but have yet, for me, to have a production that measures up to their "Gatz," a seven hour 'reading' of "The Great Gatsby." For example, they were off the mark with their last production, "Measure for Measure" at the Public which was good fun but deteriorated into silliness at the expense of Shakespeare.  Here they are obviously taking on Albee and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf."  The director Kate Scelsa is an ERS regular who has performed in "Gatz," "The Sound and the Fury" and and others.  Her "Virginia Woolf" lays it bare the subtext in Albee's play. The production opens brilliantly but eventually deteriorates into a bizarre free-for-all vampire story and slow journey to Hell led by a robot (why?) which basically wrecks everything they have set up before. This is disappointing because Vin Knight and Annie McNamara as George and Martha Washington really give Tracy Letts and Amy Ryan a run for their money.

"Fairview" is another disappointing production from Soho Rep who had redeemed themselves in my eyes with Aeshea Harris's  brilliant "Is God Is" earlier this season. This is not the first time I have disagreed with Ben Brantley of The New York Times who wrote "You begin watching by feeling mildly amused, then uneasy, then annoyed, then unsettled."  The only thing I felt was annoyed. This is a play about race and the playwright Jackie Sibbiles Drury wants us, the audience, to feel uncomfortable in our whiteness (those of us in the audience who are white) but she does not EARN this from us.  It's a flawed play with equally flawed direction by Sarah Benson who is an excellent director when she has something of real worth to work with like Sarah Kane's "Saved" or Branden Jacobs-Jenkins "An Octoroon" but gets lost when directing messy not fully realized work like this.  Such was also the case with her direction of the impossibly convoluted and disjointed Richard Maxwell play "Samara." Perhaps the play needed a black director as had  "Is God Is,"  but I still think it would not have been enough.  Plus I am getting really tired of second act climaxes where the actors wreck the stage.  This is lazy writing/direction.  Spoiler alert! The final moment of the play when the white members of the audience are ordered to come on stage and the black actors take their place in the audience felt forced.  My discomfort was for the actors and the playwright not for my whiteness. 

Saving the best for last, the Maly Drama Theatre of St. Petersburg, Russia production of the Friedrich Schiller "Love and Intrigue" at BAM is dazzling. Where have I been?  How did I not know about this company?  Lev Dodin has adapted and directs a extremely pared down version of the original five hour play.  At two hours and 15 minutes (no intermission) he still manages, according to the BAM program notes, to add text by Jean-Jaques Russo (as my theatre companion quipped, "You know, that philosopher from New Jersey") and Otto von Bismark.  The two lovers, Ferdinand and Luise are starred crossed lovers, much like Romeo and Juliet but with a German duchy, the Duke's aristocratic consort and political intrigue thrown in. The production is stylized and there's a little too much walking, dancing and sliding across long wooden tables but the performances are clean and tight, the costumes exquisite and the set like I like it, almost bare... an empty space.

A Splendid Marin Ireland

The splendid Marin Ireland almost made me love Tennessee Williams with her performance in The Transport Group's "Summer and Smoke" at CSC Rep.  Her Alma, a Southern spinster who harbors feelings for her childhood friend and neighbor John, is staggering.  Perhaps Williams  intended Alma to be as fragile as Amanda in "The Glass Menagerie" or as delusional as Blanche in "Streetcar" but Ireland gives Alma  a strength of character that is lacking in Williams other heroines.  She has some of Stella's groundedness right up to the end when she finally gives in to the despair that she will never have her great love.  I was taken by Nathan Darrow's John whose work I had previously not known.  He was grand and a match for Ireland.  Jack Cummings III, the Transport Groups co-founder and artistic director, directed this jewel of a production. 

It was a long long long "Long Day's Journey Into Night" at the BAM Harvey.  Lesley Manville's morphine-addicted Mary was one note and Rory Kennan's portrayal of Jamie as an ADHD young man barely out of adolescence distracting and annoying.  Matthew Beard as Edmond was less so but seemed to be channeling Edgar G. Robinson and Jimmy Cagney via Martin Scorsese with his accent throughout the play.  I lay the fault for the disjointed performances at the feet of the director Richard Eyre (or SIR Richard Eyre as he is called in the program). Only Jeremy Irons was convincing as the parsimonious patriarch of the family, James Tyrone. And his is a marvelously complex and moving performance.The play is as close to autobiography as O'Neill got.  I would say closer except that O'Neill's older brother had already died of alcohol by the time the events of the play take place.  So taken in historical context Jamie is really a ghost which makes sense since his character never feels fully a part of the play. The string of monologues delivered by each of the characters feels like a tired theatrical device, one I'm sure that O'Neill would have worked out of the play if he had lived to see it produced.  And are standing ovations now de rigueur for having sat through an extremely long play? Baaaah...

On a minor note, while in L.A. earlier this month I caught Amy Herzog's "Belleville" directed by Jenna Worsham at The Pasadena Playhouse. While I was not a huge fan of either "4,000 Miles" or "Mary Jane" at least the latter addressed with great delicacy and understanding the very real dilemna of having a severely handicapped child without unlimited resources.  "Belleville" has little intrinsic value and, in fact,  borders on the absurd. A young American couple in Paris obviously have marital issues but what it turns out to be behind their issues, at least on the husband's side, stretches the imagination.  Although I am admirer of Thomas Sadoski's work (he was brilliant opposite Marin Ireland in Neil LaBute's "reasons to be pretty"), his character as written lacks credibility. Anna Camp is, however, at least to me, a revelation.  She's a fine stage actress lost in a muddled production of a poorly conceived play.  I also liked Moe Jeudy-Lamour who plays the enterprising very young Senegalese-French landlord and though I found the performance of Sharon Pierre-Louis who plays his strict Muslim wife unnecessarily wooden.  A directorial note: If you're going to have a character slash his wrists in the bathroom don't keep tantalizing us with the possibility he will jump off the balcony.

Storms of April

The RSC brings "King Lear" to BAM Harvey director by the RSC Artistic Director Gregory Doran and starring the inimitable Antony Sher in the title role.  Sher's performance is idiosyncratic and engaging but the performance of the night is that of Pappa Essiedu at Edmond, the illegitimate son of the Earl of Gloucester, solidly enacted by David Troughton.  Essiedu is already making a name for himself at the RSC and one can see why here.  His Edmond is a pure evil, a textbook sociopath.  Sexy, smart and soooo laid back, he easily manipulates his father and his naive and trusting brother Edgar.  His seduction of Goneril and Regan is smooth, effortless if you will.  In his performance one can see a callous college frat boy chocking up his wins and sneering at the ease of it. In another stand-out performance, Antony Byrne brings a youthful buoyancy to the part of the older Earl of Kent,  Lear's most loyal  subject and protector.  I wish I could say the same for the rest of the cast.  Mimi Ndieweni's Cordelia is pretty much by the book,  Nia Gwynne's Goneril is weak, Kelly Williams Regan is cartoonish  and Oliver Johnston does not give Edgar/Mad Tom the complexity the role requires.  Graham Turner as Fool also disappoints in a role that is usually a win-win.  His performance is disjointed and one never feels his real despair over the banishment of Cordelia.  But Essiedu's Edmond is more than reason enough to weather through the four hours at The Harvey.

The revival of Caryl Churchill's "Light Shining in Buckinghamshire" at NYTW forty years doesn't come together this time around.  Directed by Rachel Chavkin a NYTW Usual Suspect and whose work I generally admire even when the material falls short, this "Light" fails to shine.  Chavkin has assembled a motley crew of actors of various ability and training and it shows.  An old trouper like Vinie Burrows who was a delight at 89 as Mustard Seed in last summer's Shakespeare in the Park production of A Midsummer Night's Dreams" is not matched in talent or ability by the other cast members with the exception of the height-challenged actor Matthew Jeffers who engages and delights in his various roles. Even Rob Campbell who is a regular in Churchill's plays disappoints.  It feels almost as though he is saying "This is an amateurish production.  What am I doing here?  Why even try?" Evelyn Spahr in particular is appalling as she mugs her way through various roles in this period piece about the Civil War in England in 1642 led by Oliver Cromwell.

"Dance Nation" at Playwright's Horizons and directed by Lee Sunday Evans is Clare Barron's latest and, while I thought that her two previous plays "You Got Older" and "I'll Never Love Again" were superior,  the risks she is willing to take like the cross generational casting of her teenaged protagonists, a devise she used to ever better effect in "I'll Never Love Again," have electrifying results.  The play is searing in addressing the pain of female puberty and how that pain plays out later on in life.  This is where her use of actresses of different ages to play the seven young dancers really clicks.  Lucy Taylor the 40ish actress playing Ashlee alone on stage and spotlit, delivers a devastating monologue that carries her from her 13 year old self to the sexually unsure mature woman she has become. The monologue destroys... But everyone in the cast is excellent from Eboni Booth as the insecure Zuzu who is expected to fulfill her mother's dream to Dina Shihabi's Amina, the star dancer of the company who realizes that she must build a shell around herself if she wants to succeed.   There's a moment at the beginning of the play that that is intentionally reminiscent of "A Chorus Line."  The audience recognizes this and it brilliantly sets the stage for what is to come. Barron has the ability to mine other plays for bits that she makes her own.  I continue to be astounded.

April Is Not The Cruelest Month

Glenda Jackson in "Three Tall Women" is magnificent.  Reason enough to see the current revival on Broadway at the Golden Theatre. Also, Albee.  Directed by Joe Mantello (usually not his biggest fan having disliked intensely the recent critically acclaimed "The Humans" and "Blackbird") with recent Tony winner Laurie Metcalf and Alison Pill (miscast IMHO), Albee's play soars on the the wings of Jackson's performance. "Three Tall Women" is Albee's letter to his mother, a wealthy socialite who adopted him as an infant but failed to nurture him and rejected him for being a homosexual.  But this is not a harangue.  It feels rather as if Albee understands and even admires his mother if at times she feels like the devil  She's not a nice woman but does that matter?   In the first act the 90 (or is it 91?) year-old A is confined to her room and attended by B, a health-care aide (Metcalf), and C, a young lawyer (Pill) who has been tasked with attending to her bills.  In the second act Pill and Metcalf play A at earlier stages of her life with varying degrees of success.  Metcalf is convincing but I didn't believe Pill in that role. It's hard for either of them, superb actors that they are, to measure up to Jackson even after her 22 year hiatus from the stage.

Bedlam's "Pygmalion" (on which "My Fair Lady" is based) is also not to miss although you will probably have to.  The show closes after a very limited run at The Sheen Center on Bleecker street on April 22nd and is currently sold out. Bedlam is able to populate whole universes with 4, 5, 6 or 7 as they do here.  Shaw was a genius at creating strong women characters, ones who don't need men to give them a feeling of self-worth and it is especially evident in the character of Eliza Doolittle, here played to perfection by Vaishnavi Sharma who appeared in two previous Bedlam productions, "The Seagull" and "Sense and Sensibility."  Eric Tucker not only directs but is outstandingly irritating as Henry Higgins and Beldman regulars Edmund Lewis and Nigel Gore return to play Mrs Higgins and Henry Pickering respectively as well as a host of other characters.  The newcomers to Bedlam are Annabel Capper as the exquisitely imperious Mrs. Pierce and Rajesh Bose as the unctuous but charming Alfred Doolittle.  What a joyful production. 

Then hasten to "My Fair Lady" at Lincoln Center to see Lauren Ambrose make the role of Eliza Doolittle her own.  While watching "Pygmalian" I kept expecting the characters to burst into song at any moment.  Here they do!  Who knew that Lauren Ambrose had a voice to rival Kelli O'Hara's (who I must admit I had imagined in the role)? Norbert Leo Butz has a raucous and engaging turn as Alfred Doolittle; "Get Me To The Church On Time" is always a show-stopper.  But every word, every song of this great musical is imprinted on our memories, those of us of a certain age, and it's thrilling to hear them sung to such perfection.   Bartlett Sher, who it seems directs every musical at Lincoln Center (his "South Pacific" and "The King and I" were both extraordinary),  has put together a marvelous company that includes, in addition to Ambrose, Harry Hadden-Paton as Henry Higgins, Diana Rigg as Mrs. Higgins, Allan Corduner as Colonel Pickering and newcomer Jordan Donica as Freddy Eynsford-Hill.  There's nothing like a musical at Lincoln Center when it's done right.

You may have already missed seeing Billie Piper in "Yerma" at the Park Avenue Armory.  Hers is a tour-de-force performance but the Lorca play doesn't really work as reinvented for yuppies in today's London.   Lorca's "Yerma" is specific to a time and place (1934, Spain) when a woman's most important role in life was to be a mother.  Her descent into madness is the result of her inner struggle with not being able to fill this role.  Transposed to a yuppie professional woman in her 30's who has only just had the idea that to complete her life she must have a child when she has never wanted one before, does not like children and has no motherly instincts, it fails to make sense.   "Her" as she is called in the current production simply wants something that she is unable to have. She goes mad for not being able to get what she wants but it's really not about having a child. She would have found something else to obsess on that would drive her over edge if having a child was taken out of the equation.  She is spoiled and entitled and I had very little sympathy for her.  However, the production, as directed by Simon Stone, is beautifully staged in a glass/plexiglass box with audience on both sides and the performances are all terrific. 

The Roundabout Theatre Company's revival of "Travesties" directed by Patrick Marber with Tom Hollander is a miss in my book.  The revival of Stoppard's 1974 play about an English official, Henry Carr, in Zurich during WWI who has either real or imaginary encounters with James Joyce, Tristan Tzara and Lenin, all in Zurich at the time, misses the mark.   The performances are uneven and the play never reaches the frenzied pitch it requires in order to embrace the absurdity of the subject.

Do you need to go to every Shakespeare production on in New York?  Then you could do worse with Theatre for a New Audience's "The Winter's Tale" directed by Arin Arbus.  See it, if only for Anatol Yusef's powerful  Leontes, the jealous king who exiles his loving wife and condemns her newborn daughter to death but lives to regret it.  Or better yet to see Antigonus, in Shakespeare's arguably most famous stage direction,  "Exit, man pursued by a bear."

Backwards Through March

I saw Tony Kushner's "Angels in America," in a sense, backwards.   Two weeks ago my flight to New York from Berkeley was canceled so I didn't make it back in time for Part 1: Millennium Approaches although I did catch Part 2: Perestroika the next night. I was later able to snag a single ticket for Part 1 so, in a sense, I saw it backwards. As always with Kushner, I was blown away by the breadth of his intellect and the magnificence of his stagings.  For anyone who doesn't already know, the play addresses the issues of mortality, specifically with respect to the AIDs epidemic in the 80's when there was little hope for a cure. The acting, under the direction of Marianne Elliot, is tight. The revival comes to Broadway after a hugely successful sold-out run at The National Theatre in London. It should be no surprise that Elliot has directed several of the most original plays in recent times:  "Heisenberg," "The Curious Incident..." and "War Horse"  and I look forward to her upcoming revival of Sondheim's "Company." In keeping with the recent National productions of "War Horse" and Phillip Pullman's "His Dark Materials," Elliot makes great use of sophisticated puppetry for the Angel who was played by Amanda Lawrence in Millennium Approaches and by her understudy Glynis Bell in Perestroika, both wonderful.  It's hard to single out a performance above the others from this mostly British cast.  Everyone on Broadway appeared in the National Theatre production except for Lee Pace as Joe Pitt.  Seeing the plays backwards had a curious effect on me.  Performances that I didn't respond to in Perestroika moved me in Millennium, specifically Pace and James McArdle as Louis and Andrew Garfield's Prior Walter seemed to have more depth.  However, other performances I found more nuanced in Perestroika: Denis Gough's Harper Pitt,  Susan Brown in her incarnations as Mormon mother and Ethel Rosenberg, and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett as the magnificent nurse/friend Belize, a part that Geoffrey Wright owned in the original production. But this was especially true of Nathan Lane who brought much of his schtick from "The Producers" to the character of Roy Cohn in Millennium Approaches and let it fall away in Perestroika. Ethel singing a Jewish lullaby to Cohn on his deathbed was always and will remain my favorite moment in the the play. 

The Vineyard Theatre Production of "Harry Clarke" which recently moved to the Minetta Lane Theatre is an absorbing and entertaining one-man show. I'm not big on one-man/woman shows but the play, by David Cale, about an accidental conman is fun and Billy Crudup delivers a stunner of a performance as the duplicitous and possibly sociopathic title character.  Leigh Silverman who helmed another recent excellent one person show with Marin Ireland, "On The Exhale," directs. You're in for a bumpy ride.

Go see "This Flat Earth" at Playwright's Horizons, a musing on the effects of a mass shooting in a suburban middle school. The playwright Lindsey Ferrentino is having a moment.  She has two plays running simultaneously ("Amy and the Orphans" is currently running at the Roundabout).  Directed by Rebecca Taichman who directed Paula Vogel's "Indecent," "This Flat Earth" supposes a school shooting in a middle school in a posh suburb on New York.  How timely.  The play was of course written before the Parkland shootings but after Sandy Hook and the countless others.   It's a play about a 13 year old girl and the end of innocence.  Ferrentino was herself inspired to write the play from her own experience as a naive 13 year old at the time of the attacks on the twin towers. The performances are all stellar, especially newcomer Ella Kennedy Davis as the 13 year old Julie.  I don't know how old the actress is but based on her still-developing body certainly no older than 14. She has talent well beyond her years. Watch for her in the future.

You can miss "The Lucky Ones" at Ars Nova unless, of course, you are a 30-something living in Williamsburg and nostalgic for "Hair" and "Godspell."  I was not a fan of The Bengsons recent autobiographical show "Hundred Days" at NYTW for some of the same reasons I could not respond to "The Lucky Ones," the self-indulgent naval-gazing for starters.  I have to say I'm a little disappointed with the fine director Anne Kauffman( "Sundown, Yellow Moon," "You Got Older," "Mary Jane") for hitching her star to their wagon. The pointless hippy dippy dance sequences only made this production worse in my opinion, Kauffman's idea or the Bengsons'?  Their music is not terrible though. Perhaps they should try to write about something other than their own personal experiences.

Wrapping up February

Edward Albee's "At Home At The Zoo:  Homelife & The Zoo Story" at Signature is a pretty perfect evening of theatre.  Directed by Lila Neugebauer, who directed the stellar "The Wolves" at The Playwright's Realm last year, and starring Robert Sean Leonard, Paul Sparks and the divine Katie Finneran, this is an evening of pure intellectual and artistic satisfaction.  The scenic design by Andrew Lieberman takes the Cy Twombly squiggles that serve as a backdrop for the exploration of a marriage in  "Homelife" and replicates them in the pattern of the park benches in the encounter between two strangers in "The Zoo Story."  Albee always forces us to dig deeper and to think more about our preconceived beliefs of who we are.   Signature is often hit or miss but they always get Albee right.  Bravo!

The latest offering from The Playwright's Realm is a bit of a miss although an enjoyable one.  Since their above-noted production of "The Wolves" and the equally impressive but less lauded "The Moors" their offerings have not been up to the mark.  In Don Nguyen's "Hello, From The Children of Planet Earth" a lesbian couple who are having trouble in their attempts to conceive contact a male classmate and friend of one of the women, now a NASA scientist keeping track of  the Voyager satellite, for help.  Jade King Carroll adeptly directs the able cast but the subject matter is pretty old-hat.  I feel like I've seen this play many times before.  The most interesting aspect of the production is the character Farthest Explorer portrayed here by Olivia Oguma who as Voyager 2 muses about the universe from their place in space.  I suppose there are parallels to be had to the situation on Earth but mainly I just enjoyed her performance.

"Hangmen" at Atlantic Theater Company is Martin McDonagh's latest, coming on the tail of his enormous success as writer/director the Academy Award nominated "Three Billboard Out of Ebbing, Missouri."  I wasn't a fan of the film but his plays, most recently the "The Beauty Queen of Leenane" at BAM, are always powerful. "Hangmen," which had it's debut at The Royal Court Theatre in London, has retained it's director Matthew Dunster and much of the original cast including the mesmerizing and edgy Johnny Flynn as Mooney, a presumed rapist and murderer, and Mark Addy as Harry, one of the hangmen in question.   Ultimately the play is a Wild West story of vigilante justice, superb in it's telling.

The Soho Rep is finally back in their home space on Walker Street with "Is God Is" by Aleshea Harris.  The play is directed by Taibi Magar, who most recently directed the acclaimed "Underground Railroad Game" at Ars Nova.   Twin sisters who were badly burned in a fire set by their father are sent by their dying mother who they barely know to find him and murder him.  Dame-Jasmine Hughes and Alfie Fuller are terrifying as the sisters but then everyone in this gothic revenge play is pretty terrifying. I also couldn't stop feeling the influence of Sam Shepard throughout. Props to Soho Rep for producing a really fine play with black characters, a black playwright and a black director.  That's what I call making it real.  I'm back on board with Soho Rep!

I hate to end this blog post on a downer but Joshua Harmon's "Admissions" at Lincoln Center is a total fail in my book.  The subject is tired and the direction and acting do nothing to raise the material.  The son of the white admissions officer at an elite (but second-tier) prep school whose mantra is diversity is not accepted to the Ivy of his choice but his (half) black friend and classmate who has lower grades, test scores and fewer extra-curriculars has been.  Crisis for the privilaged white family!  Yawn.  The biggest problem with the play though,  directed by Daniel Aukin, is that there are no people of color in the cast.  Or the audience at the performance I attended.  I don't even know what to say about that... 

Easing into February

I think it's the enda Enda for me.  With "Ballyturk" at Saint Ann's Warehouse Enda Walsh returns to a set-up he used in "Arlington"(also at Saint Ann's Warehouse) of characters trapped in a room in the perhaps not-so-distant future "waiting", obviously an homage to another well-known Irish playwright whom we need not name.  And to add to the already yawn-worthy premise he uses the Ivo Van Hove trick of throwing garbage all over the stage for what reason I'm not sure although it's quite the thing these days.  The fictional village of Ballyturk and its occupants that the two trapped characters create recalled Dylan Thomas's "Under Milkwood" and gave me a glimmer of hope that the play might have something other than its fatalistic outcome up its sleeve but it was not to be. However, the performances by Tadhg Murphy, Mikel Murfi and Olwen Fouere as a third character (the devil?, angel of doom?, god?) are superb.

"He Brought Her Heart Back In A Box" from the African-American playwright Adrienne Kennedy currently at Theatre for a New Audience is admirable if a bit static.  It stars two young Yale School of Drama graduates Juliana Canfield and Tom Pecinka and is directed by Evan Yionoulis, the resident director at the Yale Repertory Theatre.  Unfortunately the 45 minute play feels more like a history/civics lesson on race relations in the South than a window into Kennedy's person history. The 1940's.  A boy.  A white boy.  A girl.  A black girl. A black girl who can "pass."  A love story.  A tragedy.  You can guess the rest.  However, Christopher Barreca's scenic design is delicious. a single long staircase divides the set representing the divide between the lives of the characters which they must not but do cross.  The lighting by Donald Holder is dreamlike and Justin Ellington's score which incorporates period songs and Noel Coward's "Bitter Sweet" is hypnotic.  And it's worth the trek to Brooklyn to see what the 86 year old Ms. Kennedy is up to even if it's not such a much. It's still a much more than most.

"An Ordinary Muslim" directed by Jo Bonney now in previews at NYTW is just that: ordinary.  Hammaad Chaudry, a first time playwright from Edinburgh has nevertheless amassed quite an impressive string of playwriting awards for a thus far unproduced playwright so forgive me for expecting more.  I felt no empathy for the central character Azeem, the spoiled son of an Anglo-Pakistani family.  He is "an angry young man" struggling with what it is to be a Pakastani in England and, although his is a real dilemma, the character does not look to any solutions other than to reject everything that is offered him and Sanjit De Silva was unable to make his character likable or even understandable.  Andrew Hovelson as Azeem's work friend David who bends over backward to support his friend and Angel Desai, who briefly appears as Azeem's sister Javaria, are the only characters who elicit any sympathy.  The plays follows a pretty straightforward narrative and there's not much original to be had here.  The Pakistani Joe Orton Chaudry is not.

"Returning to Reims" now playing at St. Ann's Warehouse is more of history lecture than a play until the last 15 minutes but you may have fallen asleep or zoned out by then.  This is not to say that the content is not interesting but it's not theatre. An actress called Katy, Nina Hoss, arrives at a recording studio and immediately starts to record the narration for a documentary.  The confusion begins when we discover about 20 minutes in that the narrator is a gay French man, the French writer Didier Eribon, and not a straight German woman so all our assumptions up to that point we must discard.  This is just one of the ways the director Thomas Ostermeier attempts to straddle the bounderies of gender as well as nationality and political thought but it's just confusing as opposed to revolutionary.  The documentary within the play follows Eribon's autobiographical book about growing up gay in a working class enclave of Reims, France.  He not only records his own development but that of the working class and their move from political progressiveness to the embrace of the nationalist movement and Le Penn.  There are certainly parallels to the current climate in this country  and in this sense the play is timely and presumably the reason for the production being presented here.  Hoss is an exquisite actress (If you haven't seen the 2014 film "Phoenix" set in Germany in the aftermath of WW2 add it to your Netflix queue) and even given the relatively flat delivery of the narration her voice is intoxicating.  But the real meat of the play comes in the final 15 minutes or so when Hoss begins to tell the her own story and we discover that her father is Willi Hoss who himself came from working class beginnings and went on to co-found the Green Party in Germany. In my opinion this should have been the the beginning...

Ah, January

Fiasco's "Twelfth Night" at CSC started out my year on a leaden foot. This is probably the most performed of all of Shakespeare's plays for the simple reason that it is almost impossible to ruin.  Well, it happened.  I am so unimpressed with this company that was born out of the Brown/Trinity MFA acting program.  In an interview in the program, the company founders, Noah Brody and Ben Steinfeld,who also are co-directors of and actors in the play, state that they have been "heavily influenced by the work of Cicely Berry and Andrew Wade" who "opened our eyes to the purpose, structure, and rhythm of prose." Aside from the fact that Shakespeare ain't exactly prose, nowhere in the current production is this in evidence. One would think that classically trained actors, even in the U.S. would have more of feel for and understanding of the language of Shakespeare.  Instead, the actors, most notably Emily Young who plays Viola,  awkwardly gesticulate and punch out their words.  The only solace I found was in the musical interludes.  I plan to pass on this company's future productions.

But all is well in the world after seeing "Farinelli and the King" at the Belasco Theatre.  The play, written by Claire Van Kampen and directed by John Dove, is a sensory joy.  Mark Rylance has always been too hammy a theatre actor for me but the part of the manic-depressive Philippe V of Spain is tailor-made for him (quite literally as Ms. Van Kampen is his wife).  This is a character of great excess and Rylance plays it to the hilt.  Farinelli, the castrato who Queen Isabella introduces into his life to soothe his madness, is portrayed by the actor Sam Crane as well as two countertenors (there are no longer any castrati for obvious reasons), Iestyn Davies and James Hall.  The conceit works to perfection.  As the singer(s) Farinelli sings his gorgeous arias he is shadowed by the actor dressed as his twin.  Melody Grove as Isabella is the queen who loves her husband beyond imagination but is as seduced by Farinelli's voice as he is.  I last saw her as the title character in the "The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart" at the McKittrick Hotel where she masterfully held the stage. The production design is exquisite and the lighting draws us into the period.  I read somewhere that the production is lit exclusively by candlelight.  I don't know if this is true but have no reason to doubt it.

"The Children" directed by James Macdonald at the the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre is another British import. Lucy Kirkwood's post-apocalyptic play set in a cottage on Britain's east coast in the aftermath of nuclear disaster has already garnered her awards, most recently the U.K. Writer's Guild Award for Best Play.  The play which stars Ron Cook, Francesca Annis and Deborah Finley debuted at the Royal Court Theatre in 2016.  A couple, retired nuclear physicists played by Ron Cook and Deborah Finley are visited by a friend, Francesca Annis also a nuclear physicist, who they haven't seen in years.  As the play unfolds we begin to suspect the reason for her visit. No spoilers here but it's not a happy one.  The acting is what lifts the play above the material (which is good but perhaps overpraised).  I was especially pleased to see Deborah Findlay in another meaty role, having recently had the great fortune to see her in Caryl Churchill's "Escaped Alone" at BAM,  another play with a post-apocalyptic bent.

Best and Worst of 2017

There was so much good theatre this past year if you were lucky enough to catch any of it. Below are my top 10 in no particular order:

Eugene O'Neill's "The Hairy Ape" at The Park Avenue Armory with Bobby Cannavale
Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia"  by PTP/NYC at the Atlantic Theatre
Stephen Sondheim's "Sunday in the Park with George" on Broadway with Jake Gullenhaal and         Annaleigh Ashford
Bill T. Jones "A Letter to My Nephew" at BAM Harvey
Duncan MacMillan's "People, Places, Things" at St. Ann's Warehouse with Denise Gough
Jen Silverman's "The Moors" at The Playwright's Realm
Rachel Bonds' "Sundown, Yellow Moon" at Ars Nova
J.T. Rogers "Oslo" at the Newhouse Theatre at Lincoln Center
Lucas Hnath's "A Doll's House Part 2" on Broadway with Chris Cooper and Laurie Metcalf
Heather Christian's "Animal Wisdom" at The Bushwick Starr

Honorable Mentions:

The Encore production of Lerner and Loewe's "Brigadoon" at City Center with Kelli O'Hara
Martin McDonagh's "The Beauty Queen of Leenane" at BAM Harvey
Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch's "Cafe Muller and Right of Spring" at BAM Opera
Shakespeare in the Park's "A Midsummer Night's Dream"at the Delacorte with Annaleigh Ashford
Amy Herzog's "Mary Jane" at NYTW
Martin Zimmerman's "On the Exhale" at The Roundabout with Marin Ireland
Robert Lepage's "887" at BAM Harvey
David Harrower's "Knives in Hens" at 59E59
Gare St. Lazar Ireland's "The Beckett Trilogy" at Lincoln Center White Light Festival with Conor   Lovett
Manual Cinema's "Mementos Mori" at BAM Fisher.

I saw many, many more performances that I enjoyed in 2017 but I'm sticking to naming only the best of the best, although perhaps an extra honorable mention to Richard Nelson's "Illyria" at The Public Theatre is necessary.

My favorite emerging theatre companies at the moment are The Playwright's Realm, The Bushwick Starr and Ars Nova although they have had their share of misfires.  Last year I would have included Soho Rep but I was really put off by several recent productions and readings.

Unfortunately, some of the WORST theatre ever also happened in 2017.  Here are a few for your consideration:

Theatre de la Ville, Paris's production of Albert Camus's "State of Siege" at BAM Opera
Ayad Akhtar's "Junk" at  the Beaumont Theatre at Lincoln Center
Richard Maxwell's "Samara" at Soho Rep
Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen's "The Light Years" at Playwright's Horizons
Geoff Sobelle's "The Object Lesson" at NYTW
Lynn Nottage's "Sweat" on Broadway
Matthew Aucoin's "Crossing" at BAM Opera
Michael Yates' "The Rape of the Sabine Women by Grace P. Matthias" at the Playwright's Realm
Dominique Morriseau's "Pipeline" at the Newhouse Theatre at Lincoln Center
Bryna Turner's "Bull in a China Shop" at the Claire Tow Theatre at Lincoln Center

December Blew in and Out

Much as I would like to report that I loved Ariane Mnouchkine's 3 1/2 hour "A Room in India" at the Park Avenue Armory, I cannot.  I am a great champion of her work with Theatre du Soleil having been blown away by the Oresteia (Agamemnon, Choephori, and The Eumenides) at  her space outside of Paris, the Cartoucherie, in the early 90's and extremely moved by "Le Derniere Caravanserail" (about the immigrant crisis in Europe) at the Lincoln Center White Light Festival several years ago. But I found "A Room in India" to be shrieky and self-indulgent. Presumably it is autobiographical.  Although titled, "A Room in India" the room could have been anywhere.  It's really about the room in the mind of the creator and her central question "Of what worth is the theatre I am creating?" although once again she addresses the immigrant crisis. While normally I have had no problem, even enjoyed, the length Mnouchkine's productions, in this case I would have preferred some trimming, especially of the Indian dance sequences. There are enough ideas ping-ponging around during the play for several plays and it feels like everything get short shrift here. On a side note, the Indian pre-performance dinner was wonderful.

"Farmhouse/Whorehouse" at BAM Fisher is a one-woman show with Lily Taylor.  This "Artist Lecture," as it is called in the program, is by Suzanne Bocanegra and directed by Lee Sunday Evens takes us to the author's grandparent's farm in Texas which was across the road from the infamous "chicken farm" on which "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas" was based. The story is interesting and well constructed although I could have done without the playwright feeding lines to Lily Taylor over a monitor throughout the play.  Taylor is a charming stage performer, something I did not expect having never been overly impressed by her film work.

"20th Century Blues" at The Pershing Square Signature Center by Susan Miller is essentially chick-lit for women in the over-60 bracket.  If you fit that category then you will find the two hours pleasant enough. Four women who met at a protest in the 70's have continued to meet every year to catch up and have their picture taken by the central character, a photographer.  Each character is a type that we know well and the play addresses all the issues we expect: marriage, divorce, career, children.  A niggling complaint was with a discussion of plastic surgery, as will happen when women of certain age and class get together.  Polly Draper in the central role claims to eschew it although her face lifts and other work are clearly evident. This is an example of middling play wasting the talents of a great director, in this case Emily Mann. The performance to note is that of Kathryn Grody, a veteran New York actor and Mandy Patinkin's wife. 

Bedlam, as always, strikes home with their production of "Peter Pan" at The Duke theatre. I wouldn't put it at the top of my list of Bedlam productions (the honors go to "Hamlet," "Sense and Sensibility," "Twelfth Night," and "What You Will" in that order) but the company is always inventive and pushing the boundaries with cross-dressing actors and sometimes overtly sexual insinuations.  This is not a "Peter Pan" for the young set.  Directed by company founder Eric Tucker who also plays
Father among a slew of other characters, the ensemble cast includes Bedlam regulars Edmund Lewis, Kelley Curran and Susannah Millonzi as well as newcomers to the company Zuzanna Szadkowski and Brad Heberlee(as Peter Pan).

Who am I to write a review of the Broadway production of "SpongeBob SquarePants," based on a popular cartoon I have maybe seen two episodes of?  I don't know what got into me (Perhaps because the book by Kyle Jarrow was directed by the experimental director Tina Landau and the songs by Steven Tyler, Cyndi Lauper and David Bowie were straight out of the 80's rock pantheon. Was this enough?) but I coerced my 21-year-old son into attending with me with an offer of Black Tap and off we went.  Ethan Slater is indeed a find for Broadway as the title character and the sets are Rube Goldberg fun.  I did get a little head-achey as the play went on but the Ziegfeld-inspired number performed in Act II by Gavin Lee as Squidward, "I'm Not a Loser," conjures up the great Tommy Tune.  Go for that.

An overhyped "Today Is My Birthday" at Home. Written by Susan Soon He Stanton and directed by the reliable Kip Fagan there is really not much to recommend here.  The main character Emily, who, by the way, does not have have a birthday during the course of the play, is portrayed by another downtown stalwart Jennifer Ikeda. I found no fault with the performances and was especially taken by Nadine Malouf who plays a distraught mom but the devise of having the characters only interact on the phone felt tired and there was nothing unique or special in this story of a young woman coming home after a failed relationship and career.

Playwrights Horizons finally delivers with "Mankind."  Perhaps not to everyone's taste, this futuristic tale of a society where there are no women is cleverly conceived and entertaining.  The premise is that men can get pregnant and are subject to the same societal dictates that women are now so, when one of the main characters get pregnant and wants to have an abortion, he and his partner are sent to prison.  However, when he gives birth to the first girl since the extinction of women he becomes a god to the new wave of male "feminists."  The play which was written and directed by the queer black playwright Robert O'Hara is broad but original and moving and addresses the question "Has man EVER been kind?".