Category: Off-Broadway Reviews

Alison was a teacher in the Blue Ridge school system but has been ordered by a court to live in a church halfway house.  Her romantic involvement with the principal went sour so she bashed his car with an axe.  The play opens with her arrival to this group, her new home for six months.  She carries a truckload of rage, sarcasm, defense mechanisms and an inability to sit still.  As played by the (seemingly always) superb Marin Ireland (Summer and Smoke, Ironbound, reasons to be pretty), she may be off-putting, or even repulsive, but her deeply wrought emotional scars are in full view.

The house is run by Hern (Chris Stack) and Grace (Nicole Lewis) who keep the peace, get their charges part-time employment and run Bible classes where sharing is encouraged.  This story takes place in western North Carolina’s hillbilly country.  The current residents include Cherie (Kristolyn Lloyd) and Wade (Kyle Beltran), both dealing with substance abuse problems.  What makes Blue Ridge compelling theater is its flawed cast of characters, each of whom is struggling with some personal demon.  Directed by Taibi Magar (Underground Railroad Game, The Great Leap), everyone in this stellar cast adds critical layers of personality and feeling to the spoken words.

The play expertly moves time along with simple changes to set decorations (Halloween, Thanksgiving) as we watch relationships develop and evolve.  Cole (Peter Mark Kendall) is the next to arrive after Alison.  He appears to be a variation on the dim white young man.  Playwright Abby Rosebrock has a lot to say about the treatment of women by men, particularly by those in power.  Rather than make this play an easy to swallow, one-sided feminist rager, Ms. Rosebrock writes much deeper levels of anguish in her character’s troubled souls.  As a result, the complexities of unravelling their motivations, desires and dreams continue to surprise and disturb until the very end.

Why Blue Ridge?  I presume that blue is the mood and ridge signifies an edge.  The sharp, dangerous edge on the side of a mountain where these humans are trying to avoid another fall.  As one might imagine, success does not come easily in this psychological group study of individuals searching for meaning, self-worth and personal happiness.  The Bible is used as a means to help analyze and inspire.  Given some of their personal quandaries, I found myself once again convinced that revered book does not have all the answers.

This play is not filled with simple exposition.  There were some older theatergoers vocally complaining that they did not understand what was happening, particularly in the latter stages.  Blue Ridge requires one to pause, to think, to observe, to question, to consider and to feel a wide range of emotions and thoughts.  You will laugh along with this dark comedy.  You will also be moved as to why and how difficult it is for some people to safely escape the Blue Ridge.

www.atlantictheater.org

Timely theater has not been in short supply this year.  The term “constitutional crisis” has been thrown around casually and frequently during the tumultuous reign of the Trump administration.  Are we at that stage or, as some might argue, have we been for the last two years?  Is Washington just incredibly mucked up like a company in need of a strategic vision, a refreshed mission statement, a competent leader, more talented managers, less self-dealing or all of that?  More than a few believe the current Republican leadership is pointing America in the right direction.  Throw all those sentences out onto the internet and watch the vitriol boil.  Amidst this political maelstrom, What the Constitution Means to Me is another play ready for our attention now.

When she was young, playwright Heidi Schreck raised money for college by entering competitions about the constitution in places such as American Legion Halls.  She was good at it and successfully paid for her entire state school tuition.  Ten years ago she was inspired to revisit her teenage encounters with the Constitution in a performance setting.  Excerpts of this piece showed up in our great artist incubator spaces, resulting in this finished play.

Ms. Schreck plays herself in her forties looking back and imagining her fifteen year old self.  She’s the one obsessed with Patrick Swayze and the witches in Salem.  The acting style is loose and free, filled with smiles and jokes.  Oliver Butler directed this play and you would hardly know there was direction.  Storytelling this effortlessly assured and accomplished could not have happened without a creative team’s singular vision.  All this lightness cleverly masks a serious debate about this particular document which has obviously been significant to her life.

This play is structured from a very personal perspective, centering around the stories of the female generations of her family who came before her.  Did and does this document effectively provide all citizens their unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?  Or have centuries of rule by white men, notably on the Supreme Court, purposely thwarted those rights by adhering to a document written when white men were the only American citizens who really mattered?

Amendment 9, the Dred Scott case and Castle Rock vs. Gonzales are some of the historical milestones that Ms. Schreck takes us through on her journey.  Since this is a reflection and not a civics class, the darkness under the surface of her feelings linger and have real impact.  Near the end of this play, a young African American girl (Thursday Williams, excellent and just as assured) joins her on the stage.  The two debate whether the Constitution should be kept in its current state with incremental improvements made (as the amendments allow) or completely abolished and rewritten.  This section was icing on a very delicious, substantial and filling piece of cake.

Term limits did not come up in this context but I’d certainly be in favor of a discussion on that topic, including for the Justices on the Supreme Court.  An extraordinarily high level and variety of playwrighting seems to be emerging from our political chaos.  I guess that’s the good news.

www.nytw.org

As Christmas Day is fast approaching, there is always so much left to do.  Getting everything right so we can spend time with loved ones.  Preparing a celebratory feast.  Buying a few presents that are symbolic for the joy of giving unto others.  Not all of us participate in this ritual due to our differences in religious beliefs or lack thereof.  Some people, like myself, relish the opportunity to have a fixed time on the calendar where we can engage in good tidings towards others and wish them a Happy New Year.  This year, The Jungle has tugged my heartstrings and shined a beacon of light on the term “generosity of spirit.”

The Good Chance Theatre was founded by British playwrights Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, the authors of this immersive, timely and important play.  In 2015, they established their first temporary theatre at a refugee camp in Calais, France.  Inside a twelve meter geodesic dome, these gentlemen spent seven months promoting freedom of expression, creativity and dignity for this struggling community.  The Jungle is based on their experience of living and working with migrants in this emerged city of hope.  That original dome is now inside the (once again) completely transformed cavernous space at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.  This is the first international production of this piece which originated in London.

Imagine yourself sitting in an Afghani restaurant in a refugee camp filled with citizens who fled the countries of Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan, Eritrea, Iran and others.  Imagine yourself surrounded by those lucky enough not to be killed on their journey.  Imagine reading this on an exhibit as you exit the theater:  “The Jungle was home to 1,496 children, 1,292 unaccompanied.”  Most of us are acutely aware of this global humanitarian crisis and the political football being played on the grandest of stages.  This unforgettable play is a time capsule of now.

The audience sits inside a restaurant within this sprawling self-governed refugee camp.  Different peoples are trying to make life bearable in a makeshift city near the motorway, some having travelled thousands of miles from war, poverty or genocide.  Many are dreaming of the white cliffs of Dover and salvation in the United Kingdom.  Some negotiate with smugglers or attempt life threatening rides inside trucks to cross the border.  Good Samaritans attempt to provide help in the form of housing, legal advice, medical care, supplies and empathy.  Everyone is angry.  Everyone is hopeful.  Despair is the oxygen starving these people.  Survival is the gut instinct driving them forward.  The Jungle tells the story of these individuals in a hyperactively urgent style.

Directed by Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin, the experience is overwhelmingly intense, heartbreakingly difficult and surreal.  The superlative cast conveys (and often screams) the written words but it’s the body language and the facial expressions which put this complicated camp into focus.  As you might expect, the play is definitely left leaning but miraculously is much deeper and a lot untidier than a simple liberal treatise.  You will laugh hearing these stories.  You will find the monologues riveting.  You will  marvel at how the human condition can summon up hope under these circumstances.  The Jungle will exhaust you emotionally.

And then you will be inspired by these two young writers who were part of a much larger story.  A group of disparate people linked by a desperate desire that The Jungle will only be a temporary home.  Was it temporary or a blueprint?  The living conditions were certainly tough but from the mud emerged a multinational place with playgrounds, churches, theaters and restaurants.

The food critic of the London Times visited the camp in February of 2016, an event which is mentioned in the play.  The reaction back home to a theater in a refugee camp caused the most “eye-rolling, brow-furrowing, exasperated exhaling.”  He was told that a theater in a refugee camp was a monument to bleeding heart liberalism.  His response:  “if I ever find myself lost and penniless, I hope it’s the liberals with leaky valves and a penchant for quoting Shakespeare that find me, and not the sanguine, pity-tight realists.  When are you too poor, too bereft, too unappreciative to need or deserve art?”

Never.

I stopped by Sur La Table yesterday for a Christmas gift.  I watched people of privilege vocalizing their frustration about the way the checkout lines were organized.  The wait was only a few minutes and fairly painless.  Another woman went on a tirade about their online customer service which could not (could not!) tell her which specific Le Creuset pans were in stock at a particular store.  I guess every city has it share of pain and tales of woe.

www.stannswarehouse.org

Should you be interested in learning more about how you can help, here are a few links:

www.helprefugees.org/jungle

www.stannswarehouse.org/getinvolved

My telephone once rang and I recognized my parent’s number.  Sometimes I would let the call go to voice mail when I wasn’t in the mood (or had the time) for a long, one sided conversation that had nothing to do with me or my life.  This particular time, unfortunately, I answered.  I was greeted with the following infamous quote:  “Hello Joe, your father and I were talking the other night.  All of our children are such disappointments.”  Apologia brought that memory back in full view since the mother at the center of this play is considered fairly monstrous by her children.

Kristin Miller lives in a cottage in the English countryside.  She is attempting to cook dinner for her two sons coming over to celebrate her birthday.  She is a famous art historian having just written a memoir called Apologia.  Neither of her sons are mentioned in the book.  Neither of her sons spent any time with her since their father reclaimed them before they were ten years old.  She was in Italy then, too busy with her passions and political activism.  This play explores the conflict of a woman’s choice to abandon her children to have a life dedicated to her causes and beliefs rather than her sons.  At this particular birthday party, the defensive walls are evident and, ultimately, breached.

Similarly to my own experience, Kristin’s children cope differently depending on their individual personalities.  Peter is the successful one who she taunts as another banker imprisoning African countries with debt.  He arrives with a new girlfriend in tow, a Christian American, which is hardly pleasing to her bleeding heart liberalism.  Simon is her wounded other son, unable to hold a job or write his novel.  He doesn’t show up for dinner but his wife is there, a soap opera actress.  The plot obviously deals with all of these relationships as they interact with, annoy and judge dear Mommy.  No worry, her moat is deep and her walls are high so there is plenty of opportunity for her offensive barrage.

I have seen Stockard Channing on the New York stage many times since she and Roundabout Theatre won their first Tony Awards with A Day in the Death of Joe Egg in 1985.  The women she chooses to play are interestingly flawed and complicated individuals.  In this performance, the role and actress are a strong match.  You may see her side of things and still dislike her immensely.  Hugh Dancy (Journey’s End, Venus in Fur) portrays both of her sons and he is convincing in the very different roles.  While the explosions that detonate the first act are memorable, the quieter war in the second half cuts even more deeply.  The lighting design by Bradley King is additive to the mood in Alexi Kaye Campbell’s play.

An apologia is a vindication, a justification or an explanation.  How Kristin chose to live her life and how her children attempted to process it now that they are middle aged is the meat of this feast.  The play is imperfect.  Some of the dialogue seemed forced and unnatural.  That did not matter to me.  I thoroughly enjoyed this play, these performances and this story.  Maybe one day I can imagine wanting to spend time with my mother on her birthday, listening to her apologia.  I doubt that will happen.  When one works so very hard to spread hatred and meanness, there is a point where the walls are fortified too high.  Better to find a castle of one’s own and thrive.

www.roundabouttheatre.org

A finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for drama, Thom Pain (based on nothing) was written by Will Eno.  His burst on to the literary scene was followed by three fine plays that I saw:  Middletown, The Realistic Joneses and Wakey, Wakey.  Mr. Eno has a quirky voice and develops his big themes in the small details.  His writing is often dark, introspective and quietly poetic.   I’ve enjoyed his work immensely.  Signature Theatre’s revival of his first success has allowed me to finally catch up with the one that put him on the map.

When a character has the last name Pain, you guess there is going to be some angst on display.  I assume that his title is also a distant homophonic cousin to Thomas Payne, the political philosopher during America’s revolutionary war.  The parenthetical “based on nothing” could be referencing Samuel Beckett’s Stories and Texts for Nothing since both have minimalism as writing tattoos.  These two men offer a bleak, tragicomic outlook on the human condition which is then tinged with offbeat humor.

This play is a monologue and there is a palpable air of loneliness encircling the stage.  We meet our man while sitting in the dark.  He is trying and failing to light a cigarette.  As we will learn over the course of 75 minutes, things don’t often go well for Thom.  He shares certain events that resonate firmly in his mind as a self-examination of his own unremarkable life.  Once he went for a walk since it was so nice outside.  He then drily states that it was raining.  I laughed out loud at the simple absurdity.

Michael C. Hall (Lazarus, Six Feet Under and Dexter) takes us through this journey which never seems to go anywhere, often has major detours seemingly without purpose, only to return to several existential questions about life.  What should one do with an infinitely short lifetime?  The play uses memories from childhood and relationships to illuminate his uncomfortable malaise.  Round and around the monologue travels in an unconventional way.  Mr. Hall keeps our attention through the absurdities but the quiet moments are shaded with the right hue of sadness.

Directed by Oliver Butler, the words become the star of this production linking simple stories to profound realities.  Mr. Hall’s delivery pulls us in and pushes us away, but we never really disappear.  Do any of these philosophical musings apply to me?  Long after we depart this life, we too will be nothing.  In the meantime, consider living life with less pain and less regret.  Thom Pain (based on nothing) really was a memorable debut by a playwright.  Mr. Eno’s works are well-worth seeking out and thinking about.

www.signaturetheatre.org

Apparently Lauren Gunderson, the author of Natural Shocks, was the most produced playwright in the United States last year.  While that designation excludes perennial favorite William Shakespeare, it is nonetheless a major accomplishment.  WP Theater, a company focused on presenting works by female artists, seemed a logical choice for this world premiere production.  This tedious play does nothing to help me fathom Ms. Gunderson’s success.

Pascale Armand (a Tony nominee for Eclipsed) portrays Amanda, a woman trapped in her basement as a storm is approaching.  The whole play is a monologue to the audience about the impending tornado and her feelings on many, many hot button issues.  Who are we, the audience, and why are we listening?  That oddity is cleared up in the last ten minutes or so but by then this play has jumped down so many rabbit holes that regrouping is not a reasonable expectation.  Ms. Gunderson bludgeons this play with themes which are either subtle throwaways or bolded banner headlines.

At one point, Amanda reaches into a storage box labeled books.  She pulls out Sense and Sensibility which she says she is currently rereading.  Why is it in a box in the basement?  That book is never referred to again but the feminist foreshadowing continues to pile on.  The large theme here is that men are very, very bad people.  Her father left her mom.  Her husband is not the man she thought he was.  She’s very analytical – an actuary! – so her analysis is calculated and measured.  Amanda is trying to be happy and forcefully (and sarcastically) sings “C’mon Get Happy” repeatedly, ominously warning that she needs to be ready for the judgment day.

With excitement, Amanda realizes there is alcohol in the basement.  She opens the bottle, swigs and soon thereafter puts it down, never to be touched or mentioned again.  Rabbit holes show up everywhere as if every calamity and self-preservation tactic facing a woman in danger must be checked off.  Ms. Armand tries to make this amateurish storytelling vaguely interesting but she cannot hold our attention, nor quite remember all her lines (though it is a long, often awkward monologue).

The ending of this play is perhaps the reason this vehicle was selected as part of WP’s season.  Even that section, however, strained all credibility despite being well-intentioned.  If the danger had passed over the house, as we are told, why stay in the basement?  The dialogue often made me cringe.  Here is a playwright who knew she wanted a powerful, topically relevant ending but was incapable of building a story or a character in which we believably could follow.  Or care.  Natural Shocks is a complete misfire.

www.wptheater.org

This Thanksgiving I was home, cooking and going to see the Macy’s parade live for the first time on what turned out to be the coldest turkey day in over a century.  My toes were not happy.  The parade was great fun in person and the meal was traditional, comforting and delicious.  The night before the big day, I decided to check out The Thanksgiving Play at Playwrights Horizons.  “Good intentions collide with absurd assumptions in Larissa FastHorse’s wickedly funny satire” was the description that drove me to start celebrating the holiday with a little snarky fun.

In the program notes, we learn that Ms. FastHorse is a Native American who loves Thanksgiving, the food and time with family.  A great quote:  “I love a whole day set aside to focus on gratitude.”  She is also acutely aware that this holiday was created by President Lincoln who was looking to unifying a very divided country during the Civil War.  (Maybe Ivanka Day is coming?)  After the Pilgrims survived their first New England winter, the inaugural feast occurred in 1621.  Centuries of genocide followed.  That is not what is taught to our children in school however.

Ms. FastHorse cleverly framed The Thanksgiving Play as a comedy with her characters in an elementary school.  They are rehearsing for the upcoming holiday show for the children.  Since the three locals are all white, they hire an actress to bring a real Native American to the proceedings.  The actress (Margo Siebert) does not really fit the description but she was an understudy for Jasmine in Aladdin, so that will have to suffice.

The play essentially covers the rehearsal period as they work through a series of scenes or improvisations to form a believably realistic message of what Thanksgiving means from the Native American point of view.  Well-meaning white liberals who are vegan-friendly, yoga practicing and self-lacerating attempt to do the right thing.  How should white people who are sensitive to the “true” history of this vilified race of people put on a play with white people playing all the parts and telling the story, as did the history books?

There are laughs in this play and the main target of Ms. FastHorse’s wit is clearly racism.  Her play covers a lot of ground and meanders around a lot of topics.  As a result, the play rarely hits the acerbic satire level that could be achieved.  There is one scene which is outstandingly inappropriate, contains horrifically offensive props and is very, very funny.  Four or five more of those scenes would elevate The Thanksgiving Play to a higher level of inspired lunacy or repulsive absurdity.  Instead, the production is a nicely performed, mildly amusing diversion.  It’s like turkey with no gravy.  Enjoyable but a little bland.

www.playwrightshorizons.org