Off-Broadway: These Seven Sicknesses

The Bats at the Flea Theater

written by Sean Graney, after Sophocles

directed by Ed Sylvanus Iskandar

The most innovative staging in New York right now remounts one of theater's oldest bodies of work. Adapting Sophocles' complete plays, These Seven Sicknesses reimagines some of the most fundamental conventions of theater. Instead of shushing the audience under darkness while seven tragic acts play out solemnly onstage at the Flea, the cast mingles with the audience before the curtain, chatting, relaxing, and offering to fetch wine from the bar. At intermission, they serve dinner (a delicious eggplant curry) as well. By breaking down the conventional separation of stage and house, Sicknesses sets the audience up immediately for a evening of Greek theater that's unorthodox without being alienating.

Beware Greeks bearing eggplant curry?
photo: Laura June Kirsch

The performance itself follows suit with a lively low-tech staging. There's no bearded chorus chanting in unison to a be-togaed Oedipus. Instead, director Iskandar establishes a fast pace under the easygoing atmosphere: while the chorus sings a swinging blues, Oedipus shows his smarts by solving a Rubik's cube. Adaptor Graney has a loose poetic style that includes a great ear for idioms and a winning application of stock phrases. More importantly, he evokes ancient mythical elements without getting stuck in expository mode. As the evening moves from play to Sophoclean play, it brings back characters, places, props; Antigone (Katherine Folk-Sullivan, offering the most nuanced performance in the enormous, energetic cast), the Bow of Hercules, the Trojan War make multiple appearances. And so (naturally) does Greek theater's ubiquitous Messenger, who skims in on a sidewalk scooter, dressed like a telegram deliveryman, with news of another tragic offstage disaster.

Over the course of the evening, as the shades of the dead warn their daughters and sons of yet another impending tragedy, the tone darkens slowly like twilight falling. But Sicknesses never loses its sense of imagination. Even in its final act, Iskandar comes up with new theatrical devices for staging Sophocles' plots. His directorial brio matches the energy that Graney brings to Sophocles' work. Every few minutes brings another delightful moment: a clever line-reading, a cunning costume, a fantastic fight scene, a slab of warrior beefcake. The show works superbly from beat to beat, which makes the 5+ hours runtime (including intermissions for dinner & dessert) speed by. It slips in political commentary, offering perspectives on power and stances on waging war without obtruding into the mythic setting. Sicknesses is, quite simply, the sort of mounting of classical work that rekindles a passion for modern theater. It's also a fun party.

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These Seven Sicknesses plays at the Flea, closing on March 4. Tickets? 

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Theater: New Shows (February 14-20)

It's time to dive into the juvenilia of Eugene O'Neill! The Irish Rep takes a trad route into his 1920 Broadway breakthrough, while the Wooster Group will likely stay more faithful to the master's radical roots in their collection of one-acts. I'm a sucker for O'Neill's romantic gloom, so I'll see both. But for Pick of the Week, I'm drawn to the one-man Iliad at NYTW, which sounds like it's got great potential to stagger the viewer.

Beyond the Horizon
where: Irish Repertory Theater
first night: Wednesday, Feb. 15
Eugene O'Neill won the first of four Pulitzers for this drama. In retrospect, Horizon turned out to be the work of a still-immature master, so it gets produced only rarely today, but it prefigures many of O'Neill's obsessions: the sea, Cain/Abel relationships, female endurance, and a heated (some say overwrought) passion for language.

Call Me Waldo
where: June Havoc Theater
first night: Tuesday, Feb. 14
An otherwise whimsical comedy adds intellectual heft by mashing up union politics with American transcendentalist philosophy. So the collectivist action collides with individualist spirit, Alinsky shakes hands with Emerson, radicalism finds many forms, and a plumber finds his place in the world.

Early Plays
where: St. Ann's Warehouse
first night: Wednesday, Feb. 15
The Wooster Group goes even deeper into Eugene O'Neill's catalog than the Irish Rep this week, producing a collection of early one-acts from his Provincetown days. Turn-of-the-century maritime life gets the sleek experimental treatment, with NYC director Richard Maxwell subbing for Wooster guru LeCompte.

An Iliad
where: New York Theater Workshop
first night: Wednesday, Feb. 15
Tony-winning actors Denis O'Hare (Take Me Out) and Stephen Spinella (Angels in America) have taken a loose, modern approach to the original myth of endless war. Homer's account of the Siege of Troy gets a treatment so exhausting and imaginative that its creators alternate evenings on this one-man show.

The Lady from Dubuque
where: Signature Center
first night: Tuesday, Feb. 14
Aside from Virginia Woolf, Edward Albee's work tends to be dramatically obscure and freighted with symbolism. This mid-career revival creaks with allegory, staging a dinner among the well-heeled who carry on when an uninvited guest interrupts the party games. Not-really-a-spoiler: the lady is Death.

Painting Churches
where: Theater Row
first night: Tuesday, Feb. 14
This fine revival about aging WASPs stars the classy Kathleen Chalfant. Doesn't sound like much? It's produced by the Keen Company, whose mission is to program plays for grown-ups. Not dull Masterpiece Theater stuff or cynical vulgarities but work that has some heft, both emotionally and intellectually.

Shatner's World: We Just Live in It
where: Music Box Theater
first night: Tuesday, Feb. 14
William Shatner, a onetime Shakespearean actor from Canada, parlayed his cult role as Captain Kirk into strange para-celebrity. Now it takes him to Broadway. By now, you probably know if you want to see this one-man show that covers his eccentric career; no word if he sings or not, but we can hope!

Tribes
where:  Barrow Street Theater
first night:  Thursday, Feb. 16
David Cromer, one of the most compassionate directors in American theater, helms this script, which got nominated for an Olivier (London's big theater award). A deaf man living with his loud-mouthed family doesn't realize what he's missing until he falls in love with a independently-minded woman.

Last chance!
Inadmissible
where: Canal Park Playhouse

Merrily We Roll Along
where: City Center

The Philanderer
where: City Center Stage II

Samuel and Alisdair: A Personal History of the Robot Wars
where: The New Ohio Theater
Read my review

Tokio Confidential
where: Atlantic Stage 2

Theater: New Shows (February 7-13)

The Great White Whale of the week is Death of a Salesman. I can't seem to get excited about it, despite its pedigree―or maybe because of it. Dream teams and supergroups can be averse to risk. I'm more excited about the resurrected Bleecker Street Theater, where a loose adaptation of Moby Dick gets revived: And God Created Great Whales, a modernist mixed-media opera that I was sad to miss back in 2000.

Rinde Eckert and Nora Cole swim the whirlpool of madness
in And God Created Great Whales
(photo: Caleb Wertenbaker)

And God Created Great Whales
where: Bleecker Street Theater
first night: Tuesday, Feb. 7
This musical drama, which premiered in 2000, dives into the mind of a composer who's fighting dementia by trying to write an opera based on Moby Dick. The show's creator, Rinde Eckert, has a radical style that's closer to modern opera than musical theater. Its challenging style is matched by the reward.

Death of a Salesman
where: Ethel Barrymore Theater
first night: Monday, Feb. 13
Arthur Miller's Everyman tragedy fits the Great Recession better than the Internet boom of '99, when it was last revived. This time, Mike Nichols directs a heavy cast, built around Philip Seymour Hoffman, Linda Emond, and Andrew Garfield (star of this summer's Spider-Man reboot) as the unhappy Loman family.

Hurt Village
where: Signature Center
first night: Tuesday, Feb. 7
Set during a long Memphis summer, this show offers a finely-tuned social conscience with faint echos of A Raisin in the Sun. A family prepares to move from a housing project to a more hopeful life, with a focus on a veteran who unexpectedly returns from Iraq. FYI, playwright Katori Hall also wrote The Mountaintop.

The Inexplicable Redemption of Agent G
where: Theater Row
first night: Tuesday, Feb. 7
The Vampire Cowboys take an irreverent approach to genre work that's common on cable TV: horror, sci-fi, action―you know, the fun stuff! Their latest comedy is an Asian spy thriller with a revenge subplot, offering plenty of over-the-top violence while lampooning race and sex. Not to be missed!

Merrily We Role Along
where: City Center
first night: Wednesday, Feb. 8
This Sondheim musical has earned revisions and a higher reputation since bombing its 1981 Broadway premiere. Based, incidentally, on a 1930s Kaufman/Hart drama, Merrily follows a Hollywood bigwig backwards through his life to his happy beginnings as a Broadway composer.

The Navigator
where: WorkShop Theater
first night: Thursday, Feb. 9
A victim of the Great Recession finds the answers to all his problems coming from his car's navigation system. The plot sounds like whimsical fun―who hasn't wondered what that GPS voice could tell us? Hopefully, the light comedy sci-fi concept will move past simple sitcom territory to somewhere unexpected.

Poetic License
where: 59E59
first night: Thursday, Feb. 9
Though Poetic License is billed as a campus drama on the subjects of plagiarism and the scourge of publish-or-perish, a plot summary makes it sound more like a domestic drama with college trappings. A daughter returns home to introduce her new boyfriend to her poet laureate father and to spill a few secrets.

Rated P for Parenthood
where: Westside Upstairs
first night: Wednesday, Feb. 8
This domestic comedy treats the delights and hardships of parenting, from conception to college, in 90 minutes. Something about this show smells iffy―maybe because the press release says it's contains “giant doses of heart and humor”. Maybe I'm just cynical after 6 exhausting months as a father?

Venus in Fur
where: Lyceum Theater
first night: Tuesday, Feb. 7
One of the most electrifying American plays of the last decade shifts venues to continue its Broadway run. The battery that gives the play its special charge is Nina Arianda, who gives a nearly impossible role (dumb ingenue to smart cookie to dominatrix to Goddess) a soul. Go see this one.


Last chance!
Menders
where: The Gym at Judson
read my review

Science-Fiction Theater: Menders

(credit: Justin Hoch)

Flux Theater Ensemble at the Gym at Judson
written by Erin Browne
directed by Heather Cohn

In a catastrophic future, a young woman patrols the wall that keeps undesireables out of her city. To pass the time, her mentor tells her and her cousin parables with a slightly subversive tone, though the heroine can't say quite how. Erin Browne's self-serious drama expresses furious frustration over the political repression of homosexuality and a fearful depiction of how totalitarian states force its citizens to betray themselves by informing on others. But her dystopia is less like A Handmaid's Tale than The Hunger Games, substituting simple anti-authoritarianism for a more complex worldview and twisting the plot in obvious directions. Director (Heather Cohn) and dramaturg (Annie-Sage Whitehurst) should also have cut the recitations of Frost's “Mending Wall”. But these are faults of youth, forgivable with good performances (especially Matt Archambault) and a compelling design (Cory Rodriguez, who designs the set's walls slide ominously under their own power). Menders has the sincere intensity of a young company with something noble to say.

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Menders plays at the Gym at Judson, closing on February 11. Tickets?

Broadway: Wit

photo credit: Joan Marcus

MTC at the Friedman Theater

written by Margaret Edson

directed by Lynne Meadow

January 27, 2012

Cynthia Nixon sheds the glamour of her Sex and the City fame in her latest Broadway appearance. For the sharp, gripping revival of Wit, Nixon has shaved her hair clean off—scalp, eyebrows, and all—and her sole costume is a hospital gown that shows off not svelte calves capped by Manolos but spindly legs and bare feet. Nixon has spent most of the last decade-plus onstage in safe, middlebrow respectability, epitomized by her Rabbit Hole turn as a grieving mother, a role that was pure award bait (it won her the '05 Tony and Nicole Kidman an Oscar nomination in '10). Wit, with its cancer-battle plot, would seem to be more of the same. But Nixon and director Lynne Meadow prove that Margaret Edson's drama deserves its Pulitzer; the show, in turn, pushes them to find new vigor, intelligence, and boldness in themselves

In treating a woman dying of cancer, Wit refuses to fall back on the emotional safety of melodrama. The central role lets a middle-aged actress display dry humor, rigorous intellect, and the independence of a woman who's foregone a family for her career and excelled without apology. Nixon relishes the part. Maybe it's out of respect for the subject, but she avoids probing the character's emotional wounds (her usual approach to stagework) until the play's final scenes, when the displays of feeling have been earned. Meadow also refrains from her typically maximal style of direction: instead, she presents a black stage with a few skeletally white pillars, an absence of sound effects, and a finely clipped pace. This last quality, plus the work's intellectual rigor, makes the 100-minute, intermissionless drama neither exhausting nor brooding. Wit confronts the fact of human suffering with strength and proves itself a substantial drama.

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Wit plays at the Friedman Theater, closing on March 11. Tickets?

Theater: New Shows (January 30-February 6)

More than a dozen shows debut this week, over half of which make my to-see list. That includes my favorite play by Brecht; a rarely-seen Jacobean drama; three Euro classics from the dark, early half of the last century; a camp musical revival; new plays, musicals & anthologies by modern writers… and my Pick of the Week, The Ugly One, a German import, because I'm always fascinated to see what's big on Europe's stages.

Blood Knot

where: Signature Center

first night: Tuesday, Jan. 31

Check out the inaugural show at a new Off-Broadway space: the Pershing Square Signature Center (nowhere near Pershing Square itself, confusingly). Signature mounts a seminal work of African theater, the 1961 biracial drama of South African Athol Fugard, starring Wooster Groupie Scott Shepherd.

Carrie

where: MCC at the Lucille Lortel Theater

first night: Tuesday, Jan. 31

A cult classic of musical theater, Carrie became the epitome of Broadway flops after an eviscerating review from Frank Rich. Yes, you read that right: a musical, adapted from the Stephen King novel and subsequent movie about a misfit teen whose latent telekinesis comes out after one humiliation too many.

Professor Bernhardi

where: Marvell Rep at the TBG Complex

first night: Tuesday, Jan. 31

A young woman has septic poisoning after an illegal abortion; a Jewish surgeon gets pilloried first for her treatment and then for her death. This century-old Viennese work provoked protests and bans for obvious reasons. These Ibsenite dramas can be dusty, but feel so modern if they're done right.

Galileo

where: Classic Stage Company

first night: Wednesday, Feb. 1

One of my favorite plays! Bertolt Brecht takes apart the legend of the scientist's confrontation with the Catholic Church, taking stock of the historical forces involved but also the human motives behind both heroism and capitulation. F. Murray Abraham, in the lead, will likely bring out Galileo's gusto.

The Ugly One

where: Soho Rep

first night: Wednesday, Feb. 1

The best company Off-Broadway, year in/year out, introduces New York to one of Germany's hottest playwrights, Marius von Mayenburg. This provocateur satirizes image and identity in his pocket-drama, which has an engineer learn that his promising career has stalled because he's incredibly bad-looking.

The Urban Dictionary Plays

where: Ars Nova

first night: Wednesday, Feb. 1

Every year, Ars Nova puts together an anthology of punchy shorts on a quirky pop-culture subject by next-big-thing playwrights, some of whom will surely be lost to TV by the calendar's end. This season, the youngsters' inspiration is the Urban Dictionary, that crowd-sourced reference tool/time-suck.

Assistance

where: Playwrights Horizons

first night: Friday, Feb. 3

Leslye Headland surprised everyone (except literary managers, maybe) by debuting a gleefully dark comedy in Bachelorette a few summers ago. Let's hope her follow-up—a satire that covers an office of personal assistants to a capitalist magnate—has the same bold ability to revel in youthful misbehavior.

Lost on the Natchez Trace

where: Abingdon Theater

first night: Friday, Feb. 3

This two-actor play hits upon a scene fraught with potential: in swampland Mississippi, an injured auctioneer is found on an old Indian trail by a runaway slave. The tricky goal of this type of historical drama is to be neither too melodramatic nor too discursive, and to avoid soothing resolutions.

Lovesick, or Things That Don't Happen

where: 59E59

first night: Friday, Feb. 3

Aiming to be your Valentine's date, 59E59 programs this collection of love stories and love songs. It looks like Lovesick takes a romcom approach to romance, with pretty young people getting steamed up or steamy about sex. Hopefully, the creators will also delve into the more kinky and cynical aspects of amour.

Rutherford and Son

where: Mint Theater Company

first night: Saturday, Feb. 4

That rare treasure: a true lost classic by a female playwright (and a favorite of Emma Goldman!). The broad strokes sound like an English family melodrama—a northern industrialist disagrees with his son about how to save the firm—but it's remarkably attuned to class, sex, mortal, and even regional conflicts.

The Broken Heart

where: Theater for a New Audience at the Duke on 42nd Street

first night: Saturday, Feb. 4

An aristo undermines his sister's romance; an ingenue cuckolds her angry old husband. This may be Sparta, but it looks a lot more like the decadent Jacobean theater. Post-Shakespeare playwright John Ford wrote Tis Pity She's a Whore; his rarely-produced Heart sounds a bit less bloody but just as cynical.

Tokio Confidential

where: Atlantic Stage 2

first night: Sunday, Feb. 5

The heroine's name is Isabel Archer, the period is the Gilded Age, but if Tokio Confidential adapts Portrait of a Lady, it's hard to see the resemblance from a summary. In this modernist musical, American abroad Archer visits Japan, where she falls into the floating world of Tokyo's pleasure quarter.

A Map of Virtue

where: Fourth Street Theater

first night: Monday, Feb. 6

Not the only work of horror to debut this week (see Carrie), but this play sounds authentically creepy and not campy. It's that old standby: a group of friends stranded in the woods at midnight, unable to agree on what they saw. Compellingly, it's billed as a “symmetrical story”—what could that mean?

The Threepenny Opera

where: Marvell Rep at the TBG Complex

first night: Monday, Feb. 6

Two Brecht revivals in one week!? Mac the Knife's opinion must seem pointed and current to Marvell Rep: “Which crime is worse, robbing a bank or founding one?” Threepenny epitomizes the master playwright for most people, with its Weimar aesthetics, socialist politics, and alienated theatrical style.

Last chance!

The Canterbury Tales Remixed

where: Soho Playhouse

Close Up Space

where: City Center Stage I

The Fall to Earth

where: 59E59

Gob's Squad's Kitchen (You've Never Had It So Good)

where: The Public Theater

Instinct

where: Theater Row

LEO

where: Theater Row

Mission Drift

where: The Connelly Theater

Outside People

where: Vineyard Theater

Untitled Feminist Show

where: Baryshnikov Arts Center

Shakespeare Notebook: Richard III

The Bridge Project at BAM
written by William Shakespeare
directed by Sam Mendes
January 20, 2012
From his opening monologue, when he thwacks the brace on his leg as if disgusted at his own frailty, Kevin Spacey plays Shakespeare's twisted duke as a man crippled by self-loathing. He snarls defensively at his mother, who holds a Freudian power over him by neither loving him nor disowning him. He stumbles at his own coronation then smacks the hand that lends assistance. And in the character's final, nightmare soliloquy, when he claims, “Richard loves Richard”, he weeps at his lack of conviction. In Spacey's rich psychological interpretation, Richard's malignance, as well as his superhuman energy, is a displacement of self-hatred upon the world. He's quick to get offended—you've rarely seen such a sensitive Richard. It's as if, despite all those soliloquies, Richard can't let himself reflect or he'll realize he's both the source and ultimate object of his fury.

Kevin Spacey kills as Richard III
photo credit: Joan Marcus

Maybe to set off the ferocity of Spacey's performance, the rest of this Richard III is restrained and balanced. Sam Mendes takes his direction from the play's first word: “Now”, populating the English court with modern politicians who preen for photo ops in double-vented suits. The Republican presidential campaign will see its reflection in the vicious in-fighting of the House of York. Richard's ally Buckingham (Chuk Iwuji, smooth) is recast as a campaign manager, building support by smearing rivals and staging rallies filled with sanctimony. But like most of Mendes' stagework, the show's execution lacks physicality. It doesn't help that the stage design, like so many in modern theater, could serve for any of Shakespeare's dramas. A dozen actors enter from as many doors; thumped drums designate martial moments and synthesizers eerie ones. Fortunately, Mendes' cool approach and conventional design make Spacey's fierce performance look even stronger.

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Spacey's singular take on Richard Crookback reminds me of one pleasure of Shakespeare: each play's unending yield of new themes and approaches. Till this production, I never saw how Shakespeare uses the Christian concept of doomsday in Richard. The Endtime is on everyone's mind, from the murderers who worry about Judgment Day to Richard himself, who swears by “the time to come” (IE the afterlife). The accumulation of apocalyptic references contribute to the play's tone and filter deep into the structure. It turns the climactic battle into Armageddon, recasting Richard as Satan and Richmond (AKA Henry Tudor) as Christ. Richmond uses the rhetoric of holy war, he wages battle on behalf of peace, and he ushers into the kingdom an era of harmony. Just as Armageddon would be the end of history, Richard III ends Shakespeare's first tetrology of history plays. So its eschatological structure is probably deliberate.
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Shakespeare wrote Richard early in his career, which seems obvious when you notice how clumsy and self-conscious he can be about applying poetic devices. The opening speech breaks easily into stanzas, each beginning with “Now” and then with “I, who…”; Richard and Lady Anne fall into a stichomythic pattern, underscoring the success of his seduction; Margaret's curse grows more and more formal, to suggest a ritual's ornate power; and all these examples come from act one! Even Richard's great post-nightmare soliloquy has a mannered quality that shows the playwright is still rough in approximating spoken thoughts.
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Richard III plays at the BAM Harvey Theater (651 Fulton Street), closing on March 4. Tickets?