Theater: New Shows (February 27 - March 4)

photo credit: David Hou

As if in response to the prayers of Senator Santorum, theater gets religion in our godless city this week. Skip the Lloyd Webber musical on Broadway and try the demon-puppet of Hand to God. Or ditch the divine altogether and see Once, a lovely romance based on the 2007 Irish cult film about a busker and an immigrant.


Eternal Equinox
where: 59E59
first night: Thursday, Mar. 1
Bohemian artists in a love triangle with an athlete! In 1924, a mountaineer pays a visit to the Bloomsbury set, where he tests a couple's open-minded approach to sex and adultery. Equinox made an impression on LA audiences with its frank sexuality and emotional heft, good ingredients to any period drama.

Flight
where: DR2
first night: Friday, Mar. 2
The background info on this show sounds awfully high-minded: “a man's search for truth, love, and his identity” etc.; a dying mother is also involved in the soulful analysis. But none of that info tells us much about the dramatic engine, a sign that, despite its claim to be “touching”, Flight may not be compelling.

Hand to God
where: Ensemble Studio Theater
first night: Wednesday, Feb. 29
This satire earned a massive audiences in its autumn run. A Texas Sunday school uses puppets to teach kids about Christ. But one puppet gets possessed by Satan himself, leading to anarchy in the congregation both in church and at home. Sounds like a cross between The Twilight Zone and Robot Chicken!

Jesus Christ Superstar
where: Neil Simon Theater
first night: Thursday, Mar. 1
By our count, this is the third Jesus to bow on Broadway now: he's spieling parables in Godspell and making a cameo in The Book of Mormon. So which should you see during Lent? This one's definitely the show biz-iest, with its “Jesus as Rock God” approach and direction from Jersey Boys' Des McAnuff.

Much Ado About Nothingwhere: The Secret Theater
first night: Thursday, Mar. 1
The squabble between Beatrice and Benedick hides mutual affection; the passion between Claudio and Hero masks uncertainty. Shakespeare's witty comedy always gives pleasure, so pull the script off your bookshelf to skim on the 7 train out to the aptly-named Secret Theater in Long Island City.

Once
where: Jacobs Theater
first night: Tuesday, Feb. 28
A Broadway transfer for this acoustic musical based on the lovely film of 2007, which won an Oscar for Best Song. An Irish busker and Czech immigrant develop an complex, true-to-life romance over the course of a week. Netflix the original film and then seek out this generous, emotional adaptation.

The Real Thing
where: The Secret Theater
first night: Saturday, Mar. 3
Tom Stoppard gets meta (more so) with this fictionalized autobiography―he left his wife only after the protagonist, a middle-aged, left-wing playwright, had done so! Happily, Thing has plenty of emotional heft, which Stoppard's plays often lack, as well as the wit and intelligence that are his hallmark.

Teresa's Ecstasy
where: Cherry Lane Theater
first night: Sunday, Mar. 4
Rather than chase Jesus around Times Square, try this drama about sex and religion. A professor researching a saint of the Spanish Renaissance makes a stopover to serve her husband divorce papers. Will she realize that a quest for the divine doesn't necessarily lead away from the pleasures of the flesh?

Thirds
where: Theater Row
first night: Friday, Mar. 2
Too often, estate dramas (where the conflict hinges on who gets what) soften the pettiness and viciousness that could make the show fun. Thirds, however, may get the inheritance right: one of three sisters begins to wall off her section of the house with actual brick and mortar!


Last chance!
The Broken Heart
where: TFANA at the Duke

The Inexplicable Redemption of Agent G
where: Theater Row

The Navigator
where: WorkShop Theater

Poetic License
where: 59E59

Professor Bernhardi
where: Marvell Rep at TBG Arts Complex

Richard III
where: BAM Harvey Theater

The Road to Mecca
where: Roundabout at American Airlines Theater

Rx
where: Primary Stages at 59E59

Shatner's World: We Just Live in It
where: Music Box Theater

The Threepenny Opera
where: Marvell Rep at TBG Arts Complex

Yosemite
where: Rattlestick Playwrights Theater

Sci-Fi Theater: The Navigator

Workshop Theater Company
written by Eddie Antar
directed by Leslie Kincaid Burby

Witness an everyman whose GPS starts offering stock tips, career advice, even solutions to his domestic stresses. The Navigator wears its Rod Serling influence broadly, by delivering the requisite twists, of course, but also a belief in the little guy and a touch of moral homily. It's even got a timely note in the hero's financial stresses. But it's no simple teleplay: a casting fillip adds theatricality with the GPS played by a live actor, Kelly Anne Burns, cool with her android twitches and robo-voice. She's paired with Joseph Franchini, whose ordinary Joe performance has a neurotic simmer that recalls Jack Lemmon. The deeper themes of how 21C Americans relate to our technology get brushed lightly, but they don't need much since the play views people with such warmth. This light comedy, just over an hour long, stands out as one of the most charming pieces of off-off-Broadway theater all season.

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The Navigator plays at the Workshop Company Theater, closing on February 26. Tickets?

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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?