Category: Off-Broadway Reviews

For the past decade, Richard Nelson has written eight plays which take place in the small town of Rhinebeck, New York.  The Michaels is my fourth visit to this community.  He writes Americana in a most intimate way.  Prototypical families filled with people who are thoughtful, decent, loving and worried.  The dramas are intimate in scale amidst the big wide world.  Events which influence and shape our lives are present but are not the sole focus.

The four Apple Family Plays were a sold out sensation at the Public Theater.  That Hopey Changey Thing took place during the 2010 midterm elections.  Sweet and Sad was set at the tenth anniversary of 9/11.  The next year, Sorry had the backdrop of the 2012 Presidential election.  The cycle wrapped up with Regular Singing in 2013 on the fiftieth anniversary of JFK’s assassination.  I missed them but they were a significant enough phenomena that PBS filmed them.

The Gabriels:  Election Year in the Life of One Family took place through the 2016 Presidential campaign.  This three part drama started with a funeral in Hungry.  The second play was What Did You Expect?  The final entry, Women of a Certain Age, opened on the night Donald Trump was declared the winner.  The play did not include the final results but the backdrop of an economically and morally fading America was omnipresent.

Two splendid actors, Maryann Plunkett and Jay O. Sanders, have appeared in all eight productions including The Michaels.  The characters may be different but their recurring appearance binds together Mr. Nelson’s thematic use of Rhinebeck.  The town becomes a familiar terrain used to dissect and ponder this time in American history.  There is a feeling of classic to this entire group of plays.

The Micheals is subtitled Conversations During Difficult Times.  In Rose’s kitchen on October 27, 2019, a group of women (and one husband) gather to recount past glories.  Rose (Brenda Wehle) is a semi-retired modern dance choreographer.  Irenie Walker (Haviland Morris), one of her celebrated dancers, has come to visit.  Once again, a meal will be prepared and cooked.  Conversations will gently swing from yesteryear nostalgia to today’s worries.

Rose’s daughter Lucy (Charlotte Bydwell) is a dancer who is practicing to perform a series of pieces from her mother’s repertory with her cousin May (Matilda Sakamoto).  The circle of life is ever present.  Nurturing is accompanied by stern warnings.  Kate, a retired schoolteacher, is a new friend who is preparing dinner.  Lucy was once her student.  The small town vibe hovers around these individuals.

Mr. Nelson considers major life moments in a beautifully understated way.  As a result, there is a richness to the dialogue which seems organic and very familiar.  Escape is the slightly unspoken word.  Rose has had a big career in the dance world of 1970’s New York.  She moved away.  What is best for her daughter and niece?  A romantic opportunity presents itself to another character.  This riddle creates heartbreak.  Should one be practical and responsible no matter what the alternative choice?

The Michaels is soft spoken and, like the quiche being prepared, takes time coagulating into the depths of its character’s emotions.  Deliberately paced, the onion peels back during this little reunion.  Pivotal life changing events are on the horizon for both the young and old.

This entire cast is directed with effortless naturalism by Mr. Nelson.  Each persona is a fully inhabited individual wading through life but stopping at this moment to do so with each other.  No more plot description is needed.  Letting this play unfold is one of its great joys.

Returning to Rhinebeck reminded me how little connectivity exists with my own family.  There is goodness in these people which, therefore, makes you want to visit with them.  They help me traverse the highs and lows of my own American journey.  Richard Nelson is a playwright who will always be worth your time.

The Michaels is being performed at the Public Theater through November 24, 2019.

www.publictheater.org

“If you want to know what’s wrong with this country, go ask a jazz musician.”  Jaymes Jorsling’s new play (A)loft Modulation is a lot like jazz.  Some sections are scintillating, magical and transporting while others are elongated and incongruous.  Patience, however, will reward those who travel this path.  A fascinating time capsule view into a vivid and complicated world of artists, dreams, demons and drugs awaits.

In 1955, W. Eugene Smith, a celebrated photographer quit his job “when Life Magazine was practically the internet.”  He left his family and moved into a dilapidated loft in Manhattan’s extremely seedy flower district.  Smith was in search of himself, his vision and his art.  Hall Overton, a Julliard teacher, was his neighbor.  Their adjoining lofts were the late night haunts of famous musicians (Sonny Rollins, Theolonious Monk), painters (Salvador Dali) and other colorful characters.

Between 1957 and 1965, Smith took 40,000 pictures of life in the loft.  He also wired the entire building as a recording studio and made 4,500 hours of audiotape.  Music, conversations and cats having sex.  A writer named Sam Stephenson researched all of this material for thirteen years.  He wrote an extraordinarily well-received book called The Jazz Loft Project in 2009.  Jaymes Jorsling’s play is inspired by this extensively documented slice of artistic New York life near the end of the heyday of jazz.

The character of Myth Williams is the Smith person from history.  His need for art is intense and raw.  The driving force?  “I want to matter!”  His loft has no door and is filled with cameras, pictures, booze and drugs.  Upstairs, the Julliard pianist Way Tonniver is composing and jamming late into the night.  Reggie Sweets is the brilliant drummer who everyone cannot praise enough.

One of the richest veins found in this play is Reggie’s mind.  When things are good, “it’s all a percussive orchestra.”  When he sees “the Picassos,” however, the pain hurts and his music suffers.  Myth asks who the Picassos are?  They are the “eyes of people not giving me 100%… in backs of heads… from sides of their necks… judging eyes, sprouting from everywhere…like fungus.”

Reggie turns to drink and drugs, as do many who frequent this loft.  Skyler is the prostitute who Myth befriends.  Chip is a junkie.  This world is alive with creativity, angst, self medication, joy and hardship.  The Cuban missile crisis and the assassination of JFK weave into this messy fabric.  In between scenes, improvisational jazz is played.  Directed by Christopher McElroen, the mood setting of the period feels right.

(A)loft Modulation also takes place in 2019.  Like the original researcher, the character of Steve Samuels (Kevin Cristaldi) discovers this treasure trove of images and piles of unlabeled audiotapes.  His intensive perusal through these artifacts becomes our journey.  Time shifts back and forth.  There is a moment late in the play when Steve listens in on the early days.  After all of the drama already endured, it was jolting to see the inhabitants returned to vibrancy and possibility.  The last line was quietly heartbreaking and utterly perfect.

This play does need some editing.  The scenes which are least effective are between Steve and his wife (Julia Watt).  She’s in real estate and introduced Steve to this forgotten museum.  His passion and drive to be consumed by something resonates strongly.  As someone driven by a passion for theater and writing after decades within the business world, I related to his desire to be immersed and energized by something non-linear and personally mesmerizing.  The simplistic bickering between the two, however, added little to the significant depths and themes of the overall story.

As piano player Tonniver, Eric T. Miller may have been beamed in from the era.  His physicality and presence were astonishingly real.  Why can some artists frequent this loft and yet not be consumed by their darkest impulses?  Mr. Miller’s performance as someone straddling the creative and pragmatic nicely hinted at a possible answer to that question.

PJ Sosko plays Myth Williams and is completely believable in the role.  I love that I did not like him even though I do admire tenacity.  As portrayed by the excellent Elisha Lawson, Reggie was the most contrasted individual with the highest of highs and the lowest of lows.  Even the grifter Chip (nicely embodied by Spencer Hamp) devolved as time progressed.

Humor is often employed by these individuals.  They seemed to enjoy each other, their collective dreams and quests for excitement despite the obvious potential for destruction and chaos.  Horn player Charlie Hudson III (Sleepy Lou Butler, terrific) may be the character who most helps us see the fun in this loft.  The female roles were tougher to swallow.  Christina Toth’s Skyler did not seem like a drug-addled prostitute from the period but she was effective in her relationship chemistry.

All of the action occurs on a memorable multi-level set design by Troy Hourie.  The building is presented as a cross-section with every room wide open for observation and study.  A large scale diorama with sound and movement ingeniously captures then and now (lighting by Becky Hiesler McCarthy).

This story is for those people interested in New York history, the creative mind, a willingness to pursue life unfettered by societal norms and the fragility of the human spirit.  (A film would not surprise me at all.)  As a play, A(loft) Modulation is a bit too slow and measured.  The vast amount of thought which came to me afterward nevertheless makes this production worthwhile.  Here’s an opportunity to listen to ghosts and consider the meaning of life and art.  That does not happen everyday.

A(loft) Modulation is presented by the american vicarious at Alliance of Resident Theatre/New York (A.R.T) and is scheduled to run through October 27, 2019.

www.art-newyork.org/theatres

www.theamericanvicarious.org

“If I had to do it all over again, I never would have had children.”  That line is not from playwright Bess Wohl’s Make Believe.  That chestnut is from an oft-repeated refrain from my mother.  This play explores similarly gloomy relationships between children and parents in a structurally interesting way.

David Zinn’s impressive stage set is an attic playground.  Up in this world where the children convene after school is a playhouse, a plastic kitchen set, a table and chairs, toys and storage boxes.  This play is set both in the 1980’s and the present day.  When taking your seat, the soundtrack includes The Police’s “Spirits in the Material World” and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s “Enola Gay.”

Young Addie (Casey Hilton) is pretending to be mommy with her Cabbage Patch doll.  The four children of this household have defined roles.  When Young Chris (Ryan Foust) comes home, he’s taunting studious Kate (Maren Heary) who chides him for making a ruckus.  Eventually they slip into family play have a pretend dinner.  Kate will scream “Now come on before it gets cold!”  Staring at the meatloaf, Chris barks “what the hell is this?”

Where are their parents?  Chris is mad that there was no snack on the table when he got home.  The phone rings and the children listen through the floor.  That is the connection to the outside world for them and us.  The answering machine picks up.  Over time the friction in this household will become even clearer.  Meanwhile, the children reenact the behaviors they witness including the pretend chugging of wine.

Make Believe is certainly funny and, for many of us, recognizable.  What makes this story so tantalizing are the layers of heartbreak which peek through the children’s personalities.  Kate writes a letter to Princess Grace of Monaco.  “It has come to my attention that I may be your child.”  Funny, yes.  Tinged with sadness, most definitely.

The story evolves to the current day and mysteries will be dealt with at a family reunion of sorts.  Ms. Wohl’s dialogue includes a hopeful thought:  “This is just childhood.  We’re not even going to remember most of this stuff.”  As you might expect, that’s not entirely accurate.  All of the kids had their own coping mechanisms in their youth.  Young Carl (Harrison Fox) did not talk and pretended to be a dog.  The reunion brings adults together who are still coping with unforgotten memories and disappointments.

Michael Grief has nicely directed this ensemble.  The children are equally natural and exaggerated in their depiction of their world.  The adults feel like extensions of their younger personas.  This fairly short play meanders and unravels in a casual and very effective way.  By the end, there is a completeness to the journey.  Funny and sad.  Thoughtful and angry.  Most importantly, so very real and, frankly, dispiriting.

Make Believe is a strong piece of theater.  My favorite performance was from the older Addie played by Susannah Flood.  That’s unfair to say because parents are not supposed to pick favorites, especially in a group this endearing and accomplished.  Not for nothing, this play reinforces that parents are not perfect!

I saw Bess Wohl’s exceptional hit play Small Mouth Sounds at Ars Nova in 2015. That memorable journey involved a silent retreat in which all the characters onstage did not speak.  The precise facial and body language conveyed their personal angst.  The audience was trusted to interpret and fill in the details.  Make Believe is similarly thoughtful.  From my seat, I’d note that it was also dismaying and so very true to life.

Make Believe has been extended through September 22nd at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater.  I fully expect regional theater companies will pounce on this one in the future.

www.2st.com

Jaclyn Backhaus has written Wives as a proudly feminist comedic reprimand which rails against patriarchal history.  This wildly uneven and ultimately unsatisfying short work ponders the women who had to sit on the sidelines of their husbands.  After a few laughs, there is an epiphany of sorts which, like the universe, contains a lot of dead space.

This play contains four sections which are unconnected except thematically.  Ms. Backhaus uses various eras to show disgruntled yet empowered women rising up against their tormentors (or buffoons depending on the vignette).  The lack of any continuing narrative isn’t really the problem.  It’s just a bit of clowning around before a bludgeon is used to mystically transcend space and time.

The first scene involves the French monarch Henri II, wife Catherine de’Medici and his mistress.  Catherine says to him, “U fakeass bitch.”  The language is vigorously contemporary and does produce laughs.  We’ve all seen countless historical pieces where wives of these periods knew about their husband’s infidelities.  This part felt like the appetizer to something bigger and better.

The entree portion of Wives is definitely the second section.  The widows of Ernest Hemingway get together upon his death.  All are dressed in black.  They reminisce and drink a bunch of booze.  A large marlin prop lambastes the trophy hunting of the alpha male stereotype.

When dessert arrives, it appears in the form of India when they were subjugated to the British.  There’s a Maharajah and his wife.  The target here, however, is the oppressive British male and his ineffective bumbling.  The patriarchy is bad message is expanded to colonialism.  That’s not a bad idea, just a very underdeveloped one.

Moving on quickly to after dinner drinks is when the ship steers violently off course.  At Oxbridge University, a coven of academic witches have a club.  A portrait of Virginia Woolf is on the wall.  Eventually there will be a transcendental connection with the universe which can be described as both a feminist rallying cry and a speechifying mess.  Maybe the after dinner drinks were eschewed for edibles in a legalized marijuana state?

All of this silly gobbledygook is handsomely staged by Director Margot Bordelon (from last year’s equally unremarkable Eddie and Dave).  The pace is frantic as the material requires.  All four actors do solid work in multiple roles, especially Adina Verson.  She memorably opens the play as a 16th Century chef in the mold of Julia Child.

There are chuckles to be had while enduring Wives.  Unlike Ms. Backhaus’ truly inspired Men on Boats, however, there’s nothing meaningful to absorb.  In that play, an 1869 expedition down the Colorado River was reenacted by a female cast.  That commentary on male bravado and aggressive masculinity was very effective.

Wives aspires to be a genre busting amorphous piece of theater.  Unfortunately, this frequently boring amusement is stuck on the corner of incomplete and forgettable.

Wives is running through October 6th at Playwrights Horizons.

www.playwrightshorizons.org

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Spiritual Resistance in the face of oppression is the theme for this season of the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene.  Their programming has been curated to accompany the exhibit “Auschwitz.  Not Long Ago.  Not Far Away.”  Hannah Senesh, the first of four mainstage productions, is definitely worth a journey to the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Battery Park.

Hannah is an iconic heroine from World War II.  She was 22 years old and living in Palestine when she volunteered to join with British forces in their fight against Hitler and the Nazis.  She parachuted into Yugoslavia and successfully crossed the border into her native Hungary.  She was captured, tortured and executed in 1944.

The play is a living, breathing diary using Hannah’s own words.  She introduces herself as a twelve year old on June 14, 1934.  She’s thinking about dress colors, becoming a vegetarian and her obsession with Leslie Howard in The Scarlet Pimpernel.  She’s young, vibrant and smart.  By November she notes that the present atmosphere is getting warlike.

Since much of this play takes place well before 1944, Hannah’s growth trajectory comes to vivid life.  A delightfully charming entry as a fifteen year old extensively describes her ideal boy.  An impossible list ends with “so far I’ve not met anyone like that.”  As a proud Jew, she starts to feel the growing antisemitism in a series of increasingly disturbing events.  The recollections from this personally observed and recorded history through the lens of this young woman is sobering.

Hannah joins Zionist youth meetings and believes that creating a Jewish homeland is a historical imperative.  Her mother thinks she is tempting fate.  Others are converting to Christianity in a display of “ostrich diplomacy.”  In 1939, she departs for Palestine.  Unbearable stories are emerging of atrocities being committed against Jews and others by the Nazis.  On January 8, 1943 she writes, “I’ve got to get back.”

Lexi Rabadi makes an outstanding off-Broadway debut as Hannah Senesh.  She opens and closes the play as her mother Catherine.  With minimal hair and costume changes, Hannah ages a decade.  The entire play is essentially a monologue and Ms. Rabadi completely captures the stage and our hearts.  The core defiance and pride within Hannah’s soul is laid bare.

David Schechter has written and directed his play based upon the translated Hungarian diaries and poems of this courageous woman.  There is a nice pace and flow to the storytelling.  Props and movement are simple and effective.  Rather than a chilling tale, Hannah Senesh celebrates the incredible heroism of a young woman driven to face fascist oppression head on.  The story is inspirational, remarkable and heartbreaking.  The lighting design by Vivien Leone beautifully frames the mood as we travel with Hannah on her spiritual journey.

Some of Ms. Senesh’s poems are set to music.  “One, Two, Three” was composed by Elizabeth Swados to words found in Hannah’s cell after her execution:  “I could have been twenty-three next July/I gambled on what mattered most/The dice were cast.  I lost.”

I visited Auschwitz for the first time last year.  The physical experience was overwhelming despite knowing this history.  The massive scale of hatred and cruelty stayed with me long after that day.  Genocide is still not dead in our world.  Hannah Senesh is a play for those of us who need a hope-inducing candle lit in the darkness of ceaseless inhumanity.

www.nytf.org

Five short plays are presented in a combination entitled Havel: The Passion of Thought.  The centerpiece is three of Vaclav Havel’s inherently political and autobiographical Vanek plays.  The fictional Ferdinand Vanek is a dissident playwright whose work has been banned by the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia.  Surrounding these fascinating and completely different works are two short plays by Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett.  The entire bill is exceptional theater from start to finish.

Pinter’s The New World Order begins with two men in an interview room hovering over a hooded prisoner seated in a chair.  Michael Laurence and Christopher Marshall taunt him.  They are relishing the idea of what they are going to do to him and his wife.  The torture speech is quite relaxed and unspecific which makes the verbal assault chilling.  The tone of oppression is firmly established.  They are “keeping the world clean for democracy.”

Havel’s Vanek plays follow.  All three involve a man named Vanek (David Barlow, outstanding) who was once a successful playwright but has since been silenced by the authorities.  The first is titled Interview.  Forced to work in a brewery to support himself, Vanek is subjected to a meeting with the brewmaster (Mr. Laurence).  Over the course of a beer-fueled conversation, we learn that the boss has been asked to spy on him.

Private View takes place in the apartment of Michael and Vera (Mr. Marshall and Emily Kron).  Vanek has been invited to admire their redecoration.  This hilariously self-absorbed couple obviously is not suffering under the regime.  They desperately want to  help their “best friend” and heap increasingly insulting advice.  The absurdities escalate to a satisfying and exasperating ending.

The third play is perhaps the most potent.  The idealistic Vanek can see the suffering of those who have fallen over and adapted to Communist doctrine in the first two scenes.  Protest makes us hear that conflict.  An old friend Stanekova (Danielle Skraastad) is a fellow artist who telephones Vanek out of the blue.  She was a cooperative type who abandoned morality for a successful career in television.  Why has she called after all this time?  Years of complicity have finally caught up with her.  The debate about her choices is fascinating.

What makes these plays so interesting for the audience is to see the world through Vanek’s eyes.  Much of the time he listens.  Are they judging him or themselves?  Since Havel’s plays were banned at the time, they were performed in living rooms and distributed as samizdat (dangerous dissident self-publishing).  The character of Vanek became quite well-known and other authors also wrote plays about him.  The character became a national symbol.  After the Velvet Revolution, Havel was elected the President of his country.

The short Samuel Beckett play Catastrophe was dedicated to then imprisoned Havel and concludes this collection.  A protagonist (Mr. Barlow) stands on a box.  The theater director (Madeline Ciocci) barks orders to her assistant (Emily Ballou), often drinking shots to get inspiration.  The scene is extremely demeaning.  This piece can be seen as overtly political about the struggle to oppose totalitarianism.  It can also be seen as an insider joke about the behavior of actors, playwrights and directors.  In either interpretation, the visuals here were stunning under Hallie Zieselman’s lighting design.

I caught these five plays as Trump was attempting to stifle members of the opposing political party during his self-adulating fascist rallies.  In Protest, Stanekova says, “the way I see it, you and your friends have taken on an almost superhuman task: to preserve and carry the remains, the remnant of our moral conscience through this present quagmire.  The thread you’re spinning on may be thin, but who knows, perhaps the hope of the moral rebirth of our nation hangs upon it.”

Directed by Richard Romagnoli, this exceptional troupe of actors brought all of these important works to vivid life.  Havel: The Passion of Thought is a thoroughly absorbing evening in the theater.  The timing is certainly ideal.  Pair this one with PTP’s similarly excellent Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth being performed in repertory.  Let these playwrights show you an urgent glimpse into a not so distant past where government aggressively suppressed dissent.

theaterreviewsfrommyseat/doggshamletcahootsmacbeth