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...