Mankind is Sci-Fi Theatre at Its Best

Robert O’Hara’s Mankind, now playing at Playwrights Horizons, is a gonzo nuts completely off-its-rocker laugh-out-loud tragedy, and I mean that as a compliment. It was near impossible to predict how the plot would unfold from scene to scene. By intermission, my guest and I just decided to stop trying and just let O’Hara take on his roller-coaster ride of work.

I won’t say much about the plot, so you can enjoy the thrill of the ride yourself. Suffice to say, the publicity material for the show is accurate but reveals little. Hundreds of years into the future, women have died off. In order for the species to survive, men have had to adapt and so have altered the male body to support pregnancies. The dark comedy dissects media culture, religion, and, most importantly, the permanence of patriarchy. What intrigues is how many of society’s worst instincts flourish without the presence of women. O’Hara slyly builds a world where men continue to speak for women, even if they are not present.

Mankind comes at an opportune moment, and, whether intentional or not, comments on the conditions that created the #metoo movement. The men of Mankind, while not the embodiment of evil, are short-sighted, vain, narcissistic, officious, mercurial, uncaring, and unaware. They damage all they touch, and rather than seek a better way, they try to weasel out of things. They are the bull in the china shop that, after having demolished the first shop, has been taken to a second. It is a searing indictment.

The ensemble of six men is uniformly excellent, and they fulfill the most important rule of an actor appearing in a satire: to play with absolute seriousness the most ridiculous lines and actions given to you. Bobby Moreno as Jason stands-out in particular. He portrays Jason as a somewhat dim man who is also eager to exploit any opportunity for profit. Again, not wanting to give anything away, the costumes, sets, and props do justice to O’Hara’s bat-shit crazy vision. Which, again, is a good thing.

Link

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/as-tourist-friendly-musicals-take-over-broadway-no-longer-belongs-to-playwrights/2017/12/27/2826fd20-d930-11e7-8e5f-ccc94e22b133_story.html?utm_term=.adac8249ea94

So Holden Caulfield Made It To Adulthood. Now What?

Because of the complications of copyright, we may never see a living embodiment of Holden Caulfield on either stage or screen. Terrence McNally, however, offered us the next best thing with Where Has Tommy Flowers Gone?, a work that premiered in 1971 at the Yale Rep. It combines autobiographical elements with a not-so-subtextual musing of what Holden Caulfield would have been like if he had made it to adulthood and the 1960’s. Indeed, the narrative movement conforms much to the original novel’s: a journey to New York City (this time on a plane instead of a train), a disastrous dalliance in a hotel, an ambivalent relationship with an older brother, a nervous breakdown in the rain. Now, though, the rebel without a cause suddenly has a cause.

There are some dated elements to McNally’s script (a starchy female customer at Bloomingdale’s for instance), but much of it remains surprisingly relevant in part because the playwright did not construct a realistic work. It is more of a meditation on the 1960’s counter-culture movement and its relationship to its roots in the 1950’s. In pushing his Holden-like character forward, McNally also does the same with other 1950’s icons such as James Dean and Marilyn Monroe. Tommy himself embodies both the positive and negative of that counter-culture movement (in 1971 the country found itself in a pretty dark place and elements of the peace movement turned to violence for political purpose). One can hear echoes of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas when he reflects, “So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.” The play and character walk the razor’s edge between the wave and the place where it broke, between Woodstock and Altamont.

It is in that ambiguity that the plays finds its resonance, particularly a year into the Trump Era. In a time when the old idealism is lost, when a sense of loss and abandonment is profound, and when desperation builds to an overwhelming force, it requires no great act of imagination what troubling path some might choose.

Of course, what is needed to convey this 1971 work in 2017 is a creative team that can navigate its extremely treacherous currents. Fortunately, Starting 5 Productions has done just that. Director Laura Braza and her design team have just done that. Scene designer Zach Serafin constructed one of the better sets I have seen on an off-off-Broadway budget that both tells the (expressionistic) story and conveys a certain beauty of the underground in its own right. Braza, further, keeps the the production moving at pace without sacrificing emotional depth.

The ensemble moves seamlessly from the ridiculous to the realistic. Emily Kitchens, playing numerous roles, does a hilarious job as an oblivious Pat Nixon. Portraying Ben Delight, Daniel O’Shea finds nuance in the role of the gentleman beggar. Emma Geer infuses Nedda Lemon with a melancholy that informs even her happier moments. When she admits to her deep unhappiness in her final scene with Tommy, we can just hear her heart break.

The lynchpin of all of this is Tommy, played by the exceptional David Gow. Gow does not so much embody the role as devour it. The danger of Holden or Tommy is that either could easily be reduced to a sociopath. The necessary approach, therefore, is to embrace the damaged child  that is Tommy, that he has been damaged by the family, nation, world, and his own dreams. Gow pulls back from the bombast and hubris that often colored individuals from the counter-culture and instead fills his Tommy with vulnerability and despair. Even as he sits in the airplane drinking champagne looking across at America, an elegiac note sounds in his voice. When in the play’s coda, he loses everyone, we know, from Gow’s careful construction, that these are in fact losses that he cannot bare (despite his seeming bravado to the contrary). Yet, he finds puckish fun in the more surreal elements; he offers a vaudevillian physical battle with Mrs. Nixon as a blind handicapped girl at a photo op, a dead-on parody of James Dean, and a wonderfully demented performance as a Trotskyite Marilyn Monroe. This last left parody behind in the rear-view window and entered the realm of the sublime. Throughout, Gow finds the humanity that underscores all the character’s actions, and thus finds the tragic in the play’s final moments.

Where Has Tommy Flowers Gone? performs through December 17. More information can be found here: https://wherehastommyflowersgone.weebly.com

Oedipus el Rey Tells a Familiar Tale in Startling New Ways

I haven’t had a chance to sit down until now and reflect on Luis Alfaro’s Oedipus el Rey at The Public Theatre until now (three days before it closes). So I will keep this brief.

The play tells Sophocles’s infamous story through the twin lenses of modern American society and Mexican folk tradition. What is startling is how well the original holds up AND gains immediacy and relevance in its movement through time and space. Alfaro puts on stage what Sophocles puts off stage, including a particularly long and brave and compelling scene between Oedipus (Juan Castano) and Jocasta (Sandra Delgado) when they unknowingly violate the laws of both gods and men.

The play is spare and yet full. The ensemble cast performed superbly, and the more mystical effects were both of the New World and Otherworldly.

Afterglow Marks a New Era in Gay Theatre

S. Asher Gelman’s Afterglow, now playing at The Loft at the Davenport Theatre, is an innovative work that represents a new chapter in the American LGBTQ theatrical tradition. As the marketing material makes abundantly clear, there is a moment (or several) erotically charged moments during the course of the production. What separates Afterglow from its predecessors is that this act occurs at the beginning of the play and not its conclusion.

Why does this matter? Traditionally, the arc of the gay play in the years and decades immediately following Stonewall focused on a protagonist who was struggling with (usually his, sometimes her) identity and the narrative explored how said protagonist learned to embrace the self and accept and offer love in a relationship that was forbidden either legally or culturally. The final erotic act was liberating but also transgressive in a heteronormative context.

By placing the erotic moment at the beginning of the play, Gelman acknowledges the history of his sub-genre and moves beyond. Where does gay theatre go now? (And this answer is obviously complicated by uncertainty created by the Trump Administration). What is so bracing, so refreshing, so compelling about Afterglow is how clearly it demonstrates that a gay couple, free of stigma, suffers the same trials and tribulations of all couples. Simone de Beauvoir wrote, “Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female – whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.” Here, the gay couple behaves as a human couple, and some may dismiss it as simply imitative of the heterosexual. But what Gelman dramatizes is clearly human. Ultimately, the play, while having special appeal and resonance to a gay audience, speaks to all.

Afterglow is a character study of three complicated, flawed human beings. We begin in the immediate aftermath of a three-way sexual encounter between married couple Josh (Brandon Haageson) and Alex (Joe Chisholm) along with the younger Darius (Patrick Reilly). Such activities are designed by the couple to spice up their marriage. Extramarital sex is allowed, but extramarital emotional commitment is a no-no. Of course, in tragic inevitability, Josh falls for Darius. Josh tries to maintain his marriage (they will also soon have a child through a surrogate) while keeping Darius a part of his life. The consequences are inevitable and predictable. Which does not mean they are not emotionally searing because, alas, we have all been party to similar events.

Gelman is careful not to put any villains on his stage; he is also careful not to put any heroes there as well. Josh, an extroverted artist, and Alex, an introverted scientist, have very different personalities. Josh needs  more attention than Alex can provide. Similarly, he has no plans to fall in love. Darius, for his part, is not looking to break up a home and is quickly overwhelmed by his interactions with both men. Communications break down, misunderstandings mount, and the heart and mind war with one another. And so the play concludes as far from erotic celebration as possible. Afterglow‘s question is one that the theatre has wrestled with for centuries: how, once we fall in love, do we maintain the fire of that love across the years? Josh and Alex, like so many before them, have failed to find an answer. The dark epiphany is the audience’s heartbreak.

All three member of the cast portray their flawed characters simply and honestly. Gelman also serves as director and provides space for his characters and words to breathe. Ann Beyerdorfer, the scenic designer, deserves especial commendation for transforming the tiny Loft space into the lived-in world of Josh, Alex, and Darius.

More information about the play can be found here: http://afterglowtheplay.com

What Happens to the Message if the Messenger is Flawed?

Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Jesus Hopped The “A” Train is a play and a poem, a prophesy and a prayer, a profane rant and a psalm. Underlining this extremely tender and human work set entirely on Rikers Island in New York are the questions: can we see God in the most unlikely of places and can we hear his message even if the messenger is flawed? Guirgis has rightly earned a reputation for taking the language of the street, and like Charles Bukowski, elevating it to poetry. Yet, I have always found there to be an intense spirituality to his plays (this is the man after all who penned The Last Days of Judas Iscariot after all) that ask the impossible questions of faith and our relationship with the divine.

The revival of this work currently playing at the Signature does full justice to the script. Indeed, it feels more relevant now than it did in the waning days of the Clinton Administration. For in a time and a place that is increasingly divided between us and them and between the haves and have-nots, who better than to spread the word of Jesus (who, in his own day, was a refugee and a member of a marginalized community on the periphery of a great empire) than someone wearing a prison uniform? Guirgis forces his audience to confront the comforts of their own belief systems by placing the gospel in the mouth of Lucius Jenkins, a serial killer. Performed with a fiery intensity by Edi Gathegi, Lucius stands as a paradox. Lucius admits to being a killer, but he is no penitent either. “Every day I got left,” he says, “I’m a live free. I’m a open up that gift God  give me each and every day, save me the wrappin’ paper so’s I could package up my gift and pass it on.” The gauntlet has been thrown down. Do we have the ears to hear even though this perfectly acceptable notion within the Christian tradition (and a good deal others) are said by someone we find morally repugnant? And if we cannot, then is not us that are lacking?

This is a fantastic direction for a play to take for it is impossible to leave that question in the theater. It haunts one in the hours and days after the performance. And it is in that the theater finds its true mission. A film cannot live on in us this way a theatrical performance can, and as theatre has its origins in religious ritual, it works best when it incubates questions of the metaphysical. The playwright dazzles with easy elisions of the sacred and sacrilegious, but all the while he is laying the foundation of his moral inquiry – and that is what lasts.

Gathegi is ably joined by Sean Carvajal in the lead role of Angel. When Carvajal’s Angel appears , we can feel the suffering coursing through his body, which manifests itself as added weight as if Angel alone were walking on a higher gravity planet. He navigates beautifully the shoals of dialogue, moving quickly from his tough guy persona to his more intimate reflections. In the end, Angel has the choice between the expedient path and the morally correct but harder path. We at last realize that he was actually listening to Lucius. We as the audience may have been rooting for him to choose expedience, but in the end, he was right and we were wrong. Both Gathegi and Carvajal take on parts originally played by Ron Cephas Jones and Jon Ortiz, and they invest them fully in their own energy, their own truth.

Ricardo Chavira, Stephanie DiMaggio, and Erick Betancourt round out the rest of the excellent ensemble. Paula R. Clarkson’s direction keeps the focus on the moral complexity of the world on stage and not pyrotechnics.

Thornton Wilder once stated, “I regard the theater as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being. ” When theatre is doing its job – as Jesus Hopped The “A” Train surely is – then it communicates what it means to be human. The audience member having experienced this play would be hard pressed after not to use the lens of the play to wonder if certain decisions are made because they are socially acceptable or if they are truly right. Can we see that Jesus is on the “A” Train and “see us safe to bed”?

Mary Jane Has Soul

I hate plays and films about people with incurable diseases. There is only one narrative trajectory they can possibly have. The protagonist has little agency and is often a victim. The messages of such productions is often maudlin or saccharine or a combination of the two. They are designed to make you cry etc. I say all of this just to demonstrate what Mary Jane had to work against with me as audience- member. That I not only liked it but thought it was an incredibly compelling piece of theatre indicates the achievement of the playwright, director, and actors. It is a great play and production. And, yes, it did make me cry (a little).

First, playwright Amy Herzog wisely focuses her attention not on the patient (a never-seen three-year-old child) but on his primary caregiver. the titular Mary Jane. Second, Herzog dramatizes the struggles Mary Jane has both concerning the care of the child but also issues surrounding that care (trying to maintain a job, navigating the bureaucracies of the medical establishment and the city). Finally, the playwright carefully deconstructs how this loving, smart, and competent woman is slowly overwhelmed with the enormity of the task ahead of her. She never whines nor laments. She keeps trying to maintain her resilience and, yes, her cheerful disposition, but that slowly breaks down (as her son moves from home care to the ICU).

In this, Herzog has found a gifted collaborator in director Anne Kauffman, who maintains a laser-like focus on the journey of Mary Jane. While we feel her travails throughout, she is never a victim. She always maintains some small agency.

And, of course, the play rests on the shoulders of its incredible cast. Carrie Coon, who was the best thing in the might Leftovers cast, invests her portrayal of Mary Jane with subtlety and nuance throughout. Exhausted but never defeated, she fully expresses the brutal struggles of her character and yet we never sense anything less than full love for her son. She is ably supported by an all-female ensemble. Liza Colon-Zayas embodies two medical professionals who are grounded and dedicated, supportive and realistic. The deep subtext of Colon-Zayas conversation with Coons in the hospital is streaked through with both hope and fatalism. Equally poignant is Susan Pourfar as another mother, Chaya (from the Orthodox Jewish community), who has a child with similar disabilities. It is a fascinating scene where Mary Jane discover what they share and what is distinct for each of them. Actresses for years on end will be employing this scene in their workshop classes. Finally, Brenda Wehle as a Buddhist nun shares the stage with Coons for the play’s elegiac conclusion. Herzog quietly but persistently has crafted a story of faith and inquiry, wondering aloud about our place in the world and the purpose behind our bonds to another. That she never telegraphs her inquiry but we realize slowly that this is what we as the audience are being asked to contemplate is a masterful turn of writing.

If it may be said that a work of art has a soul, then this is such a work. Mary Jane only has a few more performances. Catch it while you can.

Only Vaunting Ambition

Given the preponderance of Shakespeare productions in major playhouses on both sides of Atlantic (and the presentation of those as special events at the cinema) as well as film adaptations of the canon – all of which have the resources to engage in world-building – it is left to the smaller theatre companies to focus on the internal lives of the characters. This is a fine and worthy mission indeed,  and that is the course taken by Hudson Theater Works with its production of Macbeth at the Woodrow Wilson School in Weehawken.

The play needs no introduction here. One of its most powerful themes – that of overweening ambition – has markedly modern resonance, especially close to a metropolitan center where fortunes and political careers are built upon such ambition. Though the play is set in a dark age of Scotland when Christianity’s hold on the population is far from a sure thing, where the appearances of witches is far from surprising, and power comes from the sword rather than law and tradition, director Frank Licato’s concerns are on the contemporary moment. Times and technology may change, but  ambition is still the destroyer.

Kevin Cristaldi and Daniela Mastropietro as Macbeth and his Lady embrace the complexity, offering up nuanced Shakespearean performances while still channeling a more modern vision of the roles. They first appear as that accomplished, tasteful, and, above all, nice professional couple. Yet, when opportunity presents itself, they abandon all morals and ethics and pursue their ambitions to the detriment of all, including themselves. The yuppie veneer of respectability is just that – they are hollow to the core. Cristaldi’s Macbeth whispers rather than bellows (think Pacino’s turn as the corporatized mobster in the second Godfather); his weapons is less a bludgeon and more a scalpel. His existential exhaustion come Act V is a refreshing and right choice. Mastropietro too reveals how Lady Macbeth is surprised (but not nearly enough) as she takes each harrowing step away from humanity into her own lust for power. When she realizes at the end of Act I that she would have murdered her own baby to satisfy her own bleak desires, she takes away everyone’s breath, including her own.

Brendan Walsh and Peter Collier as MacDuff and Malcolm make worthy adversaries. Shakespeare works not in binary oppositions but in trinary oppositions. Think Hamlet, Laertes, and Fortinbras. Often Malcolm gets lost in the crush between Macbeth’s murderous rampages and MacDuff’s need for violent retribution. But important in there too is Malcolm, and Licato wisely refrains from cutting their scene in England when they plot Macbeth’s overthrow (and MacDuff learns of the loss of his family). As played, these two men do not necessarily like each other all that much, but they form an alliance anyway to destroy a shared enemy. Collier in particular crafts a tougher-than-usual Malcolm, informed from his experience playing Henry V. The troubles that afflict Scotland will not end with Macbeth’s death. It will be difficult for either men to defeat the other, and the civil wars will continue. Licato emphasizes that cycle of violence with the return of the witches who repeat the opening lines of the play.

For a Macbeth that is very much part of our world, check out Hudson Theater Works production.

Details can be found here: http://www.hudsontheatreworks.com

American Brecht

The play that sold me on Suzan-Lori Parks as earning a place in the American theatrical pantheon was not – unlike probably for most folks – Top Dog/Underdog but Father Comes Home from the Wars (which premiered at The Public in 2014). I loved the inventiveness of that work and how she threaded the needle of both Homeric Epic and American Realism. I also loved Jacob Ming-Trent as Dog.

The Red Letter Plays: Fucking A, now playing at The Signature,  is equally inventive, if not more so. Always daring, always pushing the envelope, always bravely dramatizing controversial material, Parks strives to inculcate the principles of Brecht within an American vernacular. She succeeds. Indeed, at intermission, I often found myself referring to the heroine Hester Smith (Christine Lahti) as Mother Courage, though that is not the most precise parallel.

In a world both recognizable and strange, Hester is an abortionist (hence the letter A branded into her). Abortionists are the untouchables of this society, performing a necessary function and yet marginalized and vilified. Hester works to earn enough money to pay for her son’s release from prison, which, because of an overly complex and incompetent bureaucracy worthy of Terry  Gilliam’s Brazil, seems an ever more remote possibility. Adding to the the pessimistic mood, her son is in prison because of an accusation and trumped up charges courtesy of the Mayor’s wife.

What follows is a spiraling tale of revenge and tragedy (in the Ancient Greek sense of the term). Hester has her hope destroyed, which unleashes her dark program of revenge. Parks walks a tightrope in her construction in echoes of Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan. In her trajectory, Hester commits both good and bad deads, is understandable and monstrous, worthy of pity and terror. Parks, like her predecessor, manages in the course of the evening to coax the audience to abandon its standard ethical compass and finally view Hester within the very specific context of her life and world rather than judge her from the comfort and privilege of a bourgeois point-of-view. In one regard, the play demands: how we can possibly judge her? She is neither saint nor sinner, but a product of her own history. The message is clear. Parks and director Jo Bonney want us to emerge from this theatrical experience and apply that same principle to those marginalized in our own world.

And that theatrical experience is often dizzying. The work conveys the terrible cost of a society bound by hierarchies of class and gender. Prostitution is another profession that has been institutionalized. Canary Mary (Joaquina Kalukango) has some limited perks and influence because the Mayor is her sole “client”; as the play progresses, she too learns how powerless she truly is. The bond of women (particularly lower class women) remains the one ray of light in an otherwise dark landscape. That the women have their own language that the men do not understand further enhances the image that they are a conquered people communicating under the noise of the colonizing power.

Despite the bleakness, the play is often funny. There is a monologue near the end of Act I that deliriously ups the comedic absurdity with each and every breath. It is a moment of artistic virtuosity and exemplary craft. The production includes a number of songs, that, in Brechtian fashion, comment more upon the action than give voice to the characters’ emotions.

Stand-outs in the cast include Kalukango, who deploys the tartness of her character to hide and then reveal the wisdom and underlying humanity of her character, and Ralph Nash Thompson as Butcher, who delivers the above mentioned monologue. But the evening belongs to Lahti, who travels the spectrum of ridiculous hope to deep despair to cold anger with ease.

Fucking A is not always an easy play to sit through, but it is a vital, necessary evening of theatre that further cements Parks’ earned reputation as one of our leading playwrights.

For more information about the production, please follow this link: https://www.signaturetheatre.org

Just a Fun Show

Nothing particularly revelatory here. I had the opportunity to see The Play that Goes Wrong while I was in London. It’s a fun show. It’s a very fun show. I have nothing to add to what seems to be commonplace knowledge. If you want a show where you can turn off your brain and just laugh, this is the one. I would argue that it is better than Noises Off, which peaks in the second act with a third act that just doesn’t quite deliver the same oomph. I’m just happy that a show that started as fringe theatre has had so much success on both sides of the Atlantic. And kudos too to Seán Carey, who understudied for Leonard Cook the night I saw it. I didn’t notice until later that he was not a regular performer.