Category Archives: American Play

Trenton is More than OK

It has been a long time since I have posted on this blog. It has lain fallow during the long months (now years) of Covid. With theatre in this country in even greater crisis than it has ever been in before, I wondered if there was a point to continuing on with this site, in this medium. Passage Theatre’s necessary and propulsive The OK Trenton Project inspired me to return.

In 2017, Black and Brown students of Camp Mercer sponsored by Home Front (as a matter of disclosure, my church frequently works with Home Front on charitable projects) under the mentorship of artist Eric Schultz, created a sculpture entitled “Helping Hands”, a work that was displayed at the intersection of Montgomery and Perry Streets in Trenton, NJ. It’s time there, however, was short-lived after accusations that it was a gang sign forced its quick removal. Since it vanished before the plaque could even be installed, the work has become known as “Ok Trenton”.

Playwrights David Lee White, Richard Bradford (who is a member of the acting company as well) and the rest of the ensemble have crafted a piece of documentary theater that seeks to understand why exactly “Ok Trenton” was removed. This choice serves the proceedings exceedingly well. White, Bradford, and their collaborative team seek to find out the who, what, where, when of the event beyond the hyperbolic headlines. In that, the play stands as a superlative work of investigative journalism. Schultz, the teens who worked on the project, gang members (current and former), politicians, other artists, and community activists were interviewed, and the interviews with them are performed by the tight-knit ensemble of five. Further, in the best tradition of The Tectonic Theater Project, they also want to find out the how and even more importantly the why. What elevates the proceedings is that that why remains elusive to the very end. No compelling reason for the destruction of public art reveals itself because, at the end of the day, what compelling reason could there be?

Overseen by the director (and Passage’s artistic director) C. Ryan Domingues, the stage is a judgement free zone – which proves difficult for the audience to maintain when one particular character emerges toward the end. What we the audience witness is the symphony of Trenton in all of its beautiful messy complexity, its hopes, its history, its trials, and its tribulations. As much as Bradford is the protagonist as he, Columbo-style, doggedly seeks resolution, the hero of the play is Trenton itself.

A piece of documentary theater can prove to be a difficult construct as there is frequently a tension between the needs of the documentary part of the equation and the theater part of the equation. White and Bradford make a daring choice when the pivot on the question of “has something like this ever happened before?” And, the answer is yes: a mural of Michael Brown and then a painting of the Puerto Rican flag on the side of a house. What The OK Trenton Project conveys achingly, passionately is that the diverse communities of Trenton long to express themselves through art in the face of reflexive and thoughtless opposition. As the company interviews local politicians, they find the official articulation for removing the sculpture is inchoate at the best (and it is rare we even get there). The tragedy here is the tragedy of the nation: irrational anger, resentment, grievance, fear is all that is needed to shut down someone just trying to have voice. The teenage artists have a clearer vision of trying to create a positive force for good, then those who seek to shut them down. Theatre is at its best when it can take the local, specific, and individual and make it universal. That is certainly what White, Bradford, and the company have accomplished.

Domingues makes great use of The Mill Hill Playhouse to represent all of Trenton. The company is uniformly excellent. The cast takes on multiple roles. Briefly, each stands out in a specific turn: Kevin Berger as Schultz, Carmen Castillo as graffiti artist Leon Rainbow, Molly Casey Chapman as Councilwoman Marge Caldwell Wilson, Wendi Smith as drama teacher Felicia Brown, and, most of all, Bradford, playing himself.

As part of its curtain speech, Passage welcomes its audiences back to live theatre. Thank you Passage for allowing me to return to my blog.

Whether in a Big House or Small, The Waverly Gallery Devastates

I have had the rare pleasure to experience a contemporary American play in two very different venues and productions in a ten-month period: Kenneth Lonergan’s The Waverly Gallery. I had seen the Broadway production back in September that garnered Elaine May a well-deserved Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play. More recently, I had the opportunity to catch Shakespeare & Company’s production in its smaller Elayne P. Bernstein with a three-quarter thrust stage. The point here is not to compare the two productions because ultimately that is an empty intellectual exercise and, well, plain silly. I mention the former in regard to the latter because it demonstrates the endurability and power of Lonergan’s work that it resonates with its elegiac fury regardless of the trappings of its given production.

With its narrator Daniel (an always nuanced David Gow) recounting a familial past, The Waverly Gallery would seem to belong to the tradition sparked by Tennessee Williams with The Glass Menagerie. And while that is certainly part of its DNA, Lonergan’s play also finds itself as part of an even more storied theatrical tradition – that of Greek tragedy. The plague here does not come in the form of a disease brought down on the City of Thebes but rather as Alzheimer’s as it cruelly afflicts Daniel’s grandmother Gladys (Annette Miller mining the full vivaciousness of this grande dame). In the large Broadway house, the tragedy is Gladys’s with Daniel serving as chorus. In the smaller house in Lenox, the tragedy is that of the entire family.

That sort of tragedy can be difficult for actors to play as they are not necessarily playing an action but reacting to an unseen force that overwhelms them. The family of Gladys, Daniel, Ellen (Gladys’s daughter/Daniel’s mother), and Howard (Ellen’s second husband) is an extremely accomplished one professionally and intellectually; indeed, you could easily find them in one of Woody Allen’s frequent romps through Manhattan’s Upper West Side. And yet, they are unequal to the task at hand. Who could be? They are by no means negligent. They address each new further turn into the darkness with competence and capability using humor as a defense mechanism to shield them from what they know must be. We can certainly empathize with them as they try to hold off fate for just one more day and then just one day more. When the owner of the building where Gladys keeps her little art gallery wants to renovate the space for a café, they are simply incapable of telling her at first. On Broadway, we as the audience were kept distant from their turmoil (aided by a production design that emphasized a rather cool palette) until the devastating coda. In the significantly smaller space, we are on the ride with them, which paradoxically places greater emphasis on the comedic moments andthe building dread.

This production is directed by the legendary Tina Packer, who founded the company. She has assembled an exemplary ensemble that feels like a family, jagged edges and all. She has given the actors the room to find every nook and cranny in their roles and to build fully-realized three-dimensional individuals. She finds the poetry in the often-overlapping dialogue. I did, however, think her guiding thesis for the play to be on the tentative side. She occasionally steps into her toe into the metatheatrical when, at one moment, she has Daniel step over the constructed “proscenium” to address the audience directly. Those moments, alas, are few and far between as she gives into a realism, which – given the limitations of the space and the demands of the play in terms of set changes – did not serve the production as fully as it might have. Whether Greek tragic or American dramatic tradition, often all we need is the rich language of a play and a powerful cast to realize the world of that language. She had both here coming into that rehearsal room.

The cast is uniformly excellent. The one not weakness exactly but weirdness of the Broadway production was the casting of Michael Cera as Don Bowman, the last artist Gladys showcases in her gallery. He is a more a product of the world of Lonergan’s film Manchester by the Sea, a man from the working-class environs of Boston who struggled to become a painter. Previously, I did not understand why either Don or Cera were involved in the proceedings. Here, thanks to David Bertoldi fully integrating himself into the production and fully realizing the pain haunting the character on the margins, I understand Don’s place as a reminder that this tragedy is not the tragedy of those who are visible in most of our storytelling but the tragedy of the human condition regardless of circumstance. Michael F. Toomey is a force of nature whenever on stage, but he allows the audience to see that his bluster and tactless joking are just means of buffering himself from the fateful journey his mother-in-law is taking (and the very different Hell of his own elderly parents). Elizabeth Aspenlieder bares open the brittleness, fragility, and desperation of Ellen. Her evolving grief charts with the vicious course of the disease. Aspenlieder wisely avoids making Ellen a saint or martyr, conveying that her ultimate act of giving will also devastate her.

David Gow as Daniel builds a complex character who has sought to insulate himself from complicated emotions and yet must by play’s end confront the hardest ones of them own. When Gladys has her final break with reality, Gow effortlessly puts Daniel on a rollercoaster ride where the final destination is despair. His humor will not prevent it. Deflection will not prevent it. Cheery reasonableness not will prevent it. His helplessness enrages him, and that rage scares him to the bottom of his core. By his final monologue, you can see him slowly build the architecture to face the harsh realities of the world, and one can well imagine Gow bringing equal power to Tom’s “blow out your candles” monologue in The Glass Menagerie. At the beating tragic heart of the production is Annette Miller’s Gladys. She makes clear the achievements of Gladys’s earlier life, and so the tragedy of what she is losing has that much greater weight. I wish that in that second act she founds a beat or two where Gladys has some momentary lucidity – the false hope of such moments would only have compounded the tragedy – but this is a quibble. By the end, when she is lost in her own mind – confused, frightened, without anchor, without understanding – one would have be dead three days not to be overwhelmed emotionally by Miller’s performance. At that moment, she is not Gladys character on stage but a woman in all of our lives whom we are losing.

Without question, Shakespeare & Company’s The Waverly Galleryis a production that should be seen. But I want to emphasize that you should see it even if – or especially if – you have seen the recent Broadway revival. It is a different vision and a successful one. And so your experience will be different but equally meaningful.

Indecent Meets the World

One of the great pleasures of Philadelphia’s Arden Theatre Company is that one can have an intimate experience of a play or musical that began its life in a giant Broadway barn. Arden has a history of utilizing its space to the advantage of the story the company is trying to tell. The best recent example is the production of Once, a show I had seen in New York and Toronto, but the Arden experience – with Thom Weaver’s light design that invoked Dublin and the proximity of audience to performers – was the magical one.

The company continues in that vein with Paula Vogel’s Indecent. Vogel had a unique achievement with this work as the protagonist of her play is another play, Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance. Vogel follows the journey that play took from a reading in a flat in Warsaw to a production in Berlin to a tour of the capitals of Europe to off-Broadway to Broadway (1923) and finally back to a ghetto in Poland during World War II. Playwright Asch is a supporting character in the life of his work. God of Vengeancewas accused of everything from anti-Semitism to indecency. It was the first Broadway production to dramatize a kiss between two women, and the “indecency” of the title derives from the charges of the Manhattan district attorney against the production (though not the play itself).

Vogel smartly places God of Vengeanceas foundational to the American theatre as we know it. She emphasizes the off-Broadway run at the Provincetown Playhouse; it shared the season with Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape. O’Neill himself shows up in a pivotal scene late in the play, and he places his imprimatur on the work. (Interestingly, when Indecent premiered in New York, a revival of The Hairy Ape with Bobby Carnavale was playing at The Park Avenue Armory. That 1923 Provincetown Playhouse season was pivotal that the city needed to experience it anew.)

Director Rebecca Wright keeps the production values confined to the bare necessities. She opens on the ensemble covered in ash, foreshadowing the play’s (and history’s) horrific trajectory. By the design, Indecentcalls for a Brechtian approach, and the director and her cast are up to the challenge of moving quickly through, time, and language. The company must nimbly from perfect English representing Yiddish to a broken English signifying an individual’s struggle with a second language (all made clear by super titles). The actors have so imbued their various characters and their world into their bodies and very being that set pieces are unnecessary. Doug Hara playing Lemml, the stage manager, serves as the beating heart of the play and chief defender of God of Vengeance. Michaela Shuchman and Mary Elizabeth Scallen find the elegiac complexities of a same-sex couple in early twentieth-century America. David Ingram as the older Asch bears the weight of the world and his own weariness in play’s coda set during the McCarthy period.

Part of the foundational myth of God of Vengeancewas how it traveled the world and touched so many individuals across a variety of cultures and circumstances with its – for then – unique tale of love and hope. What the Arden has demonstrated here is that Indecentcan take that same journey and transform every audience it encoutners.

Pirira Shoots for the Moon but Misses Its Mark

J. Stephen Brantley’s Pirira, now playing at Luna Stage in West Orange, NJ, has an epic vision and noble ambitions , but, alas, in its execution, cannot live up to its lofty goals. There are two principle narratives at play: Gilbert (Kevin Hillocks) and Chad (David Gow), two workers in the store room of a florist wholesaler in New York, deepen their relationship beyond casual acquaintances; Ericka (Naja Selby-Morton) and Jack (John P. Keller), two American NGO workers in Malawi, hide from an angry mob in a store room in Malawi. Eventually, the two strands will tie together at the end through the unseen title character Piriria.

Brantley attempts something quite complex in trying to forge connections between two disparate points in the world and uniting them together through shared connection, grief, and loss. This technique is one with which the likes of Caryl Churchill and Tom Stoppard have experimented. When it works, the various pieces come together and forge a theatrical musicality that transcends any one element. Alas, with Pirira, the whole is not greater than the sum of the parts.

Firstly, the action moves too quickly from one store room to other. Just as the audience is beginning to get a grounding in one place, we jump to another. Churchill in Cloud Nine and Stoppard in Arcadia give space to allow the different worlds to breath. For instance, in Arcadia, a given scene in, say, the early nineteenth century can last a good 10 to 15 minutes before moving to a scene set in the late twentieth century. Only at the end do the two worlds blend together.

Secondly, in this age of smart devices, we tend to want our plays to be short. That instinct, however, does not serve this work. There are four characters on stage – and Brantly should be commended for crafting equally complicated, flawed, nuanced, and three-dimensional characters – as well as the unseen Pirira. But the play is so rushed at 70 minutes that these characters suddenly feel compelled to tell their rich back stories not in a way that is organic but rather because we are nearing the climax of the play and we are required theatrically to have an epiphany here. Also, I lost track of Pirira in this, who obviously should be important but comes across as a last minute device. Chad, for instance, is a former undergraduate from Georgetown who experienced a great personal tragedy which prompted him to make a terrible mistake and now he is for some reason working at this flower shop. He comes across in the opening as a figure of white privilege, then becomes the voice of moral outrage, before, finally, allowing his defenses to drop away to emerge as a tragic victim. It can work and could work beautifully. But all that needs time for the character to live, breathe, show and not tell. The character of Ericka has similar problems with her trajectory, moving far too quickly from spoiled city girl to something more vulnerable (and I am not sure I bought the spoiled city girl piece of her character either).

Thirdly, ultimately, crises of Malawi should be center, but too often it feels like that this is seen too much through an American lens. (I do not necessarily know how to move past this as this is an American production by an American writer.) But it does feel that the scales of the play are tipped so that Chad has the moral high ground over Gilbert.

The actors are all at the top of their games because the script does provide a lot of meat for them to chew on. Keller imbues Jack with the right amount of world-weariness and damaged but still present hope. Hillocks subtly builds the fear beneath the anger of Gilbert. Selby-Morton digs into  Ericka’s past and ably and fully creates a person of contradiction and has that made those contradictions clear so the audience can embrace her empathetically. Gow travels the distance from comedy to drama with an effortlessness that marks an actor on the pathway to greatness. He makes the audience feel every horrific beat in his monologue about what happened to his lover back in Washington, DC with an elegiac percusiveness. Director Ari Laura Keith keeps the proceedings at a brisk pace, which is usually something productions should strive for, but here a slower tempo would have served the play better. She was not aided by the space, which often forced the audience to bounce back and forth between the two couples like they were at a match at the US Open.

There is a great a play inside Pirira, but it needs expansion and further development.

Guirgis as Witness

James Baldwin wrote of William Shakespeare: “The greatest poet of the English language found his poetry where poetry is found: in the love of the people. He could have done this only through love – by knowing, which is not the same thing as understanding, that whatever was happening to anyone was happening to him.” Later Baldwin writes that one of Shakespeare’s duties as poet is “to bear witness”.

I believe that that aspect of Shakespeare’s legacy is something that Stephen Adly Guirgis shares.  His plays are the poetry of the people – the people that most works of American culture refuse to see (except in jail cells and witness stands in Law & Order) – and his great gift is to take the language of the streets and transform it into music. This year The Signature Theatre has produced two Guirgis plays: Jesus Hopped the “A” Train earlier this year and now Our Lady of 121st Street. Plot is not so important in either. Indeed, the major plot movements happen off stage. What is important is character: how individuals respond to terrible situations (some of which they are responsible) and how they try to progress on an arc to some better, more moral place. Those movements are often slow, laborious, and can be measured in inches rather than miles. Sometimes the epiphanies – as one might fight in the fiction of Flannery O’Connor – are too terrible to behold; a person’s moral compass may improve but not the material facts of their lives.

The revival of Our Lady of 121st Street, directed by Phylicia Rashad, is a propulsive production. A nun has died and her body has gone missing; that even at the end the question of whether that disappearance was a desecration or ascension (or both) fuels the ambiguity and complexity of the work on display. The real journey of the work is an internal one of the characters who have come to pay their respects. This is a rogue’s gallery of the desperate and the destitute. Those who have made something of themselves are in terms of spirit or soul no better off than those who have been left behind.

Yet, the play bristles with hope. Father Lux (John Doman of The Wire fame fuses a world-weariness into the role), who exhibits few of the talents or skills needed for a spiritual leader, senses a possible path to salvation. An alcoholic NYPD detective (Joey Auzenne) battles his own guilt over the loss of a loved one. A struggling actor (Kevin Isola), realizing he is in a stifling relationship with his boyfriend, seeks to carve his own path.

The music of Guirgis relies on rapid-fire dialogue and idiosyncratic monologues. They are entertaining, shocking, funny. Those qualities often mask that individual quests are underway, challenged by many a personal demon. The production has assembled an ensemble of actors that understands that the language is active, that is action. Among the highlights are Erik Betancourt (who also shined in Jesus Hopped the “A” Train)  and Maki Borden as two co-dependent brothers, Paola Lazaro as a bitter but highly intelligent con artist who may be the only character who gets what she truly wants, and Quincy Tyler Bernstine (the MVP from Vineyard’s The Amateurs) who commands in every scene she is in.

For more information about the show, please follow this link http://www.signaturetheatre.org but don’t wait too long because it closes this weekend.

 

Revolutionary Art or Vandalism?

In the winter of 2010, graffiti artists used an outside wall of The Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago as a blank canvas upon which to create. This Is Modern Art by Idris Goodwin and Kevin Coval, which has taken a journey from Steppenwolf in Chicago (where it was commissioned) to the Kennedy Center, now has its New York premiere at New York Theatre Workshop’s Next Door. Blessed Unrest is producing.

The play investigates two intersecting concerns. The first asks whether the graffiti on the Modern Wing’s wall is an act of revolutionary art or vandalism. The second dramatizes the process by which a work of graffiti art is created. That is a lot weight to place on the slender shoulders of a play with an 85-minute running time. I am happy to report that play and production are more than up to the Herculean task.

The primary issue of the play is whether or not the graffiti on the Modern Wing (or, indeed, any building or structure we may see in an urban space) is art. The play boldly articulates that it is. Art critics such as Tony Bennett, deploying the lens of Michel Foucault, have argued in recent years that cultural spaces such as museums reinforce a stratified class hierarchy favoring the dominant. Though a museum claims to be open to all, how it presents its space often makes it an unwelcoming place to those outside of the neo-liberal hegemony. Culture is a barrier, not a leveler. What Goodwin and Coval convey with a crystal clear clarity is how this particular act of graffiti was about reclaiming a space, about sharing a work of art with the people, all the people. It is truly revolutionary.

If the above sounds a bit too abstract, the second part of This Is Modern Art‘s mission provides the production with a strong propulsive narrative. The play digs deep into the history and practice of graffiti art. The characters know the history of their craft and are inspired by a broad spectrum of artists from Sane and Smith to Basquiat to Caravaggio. Works about artists almost exclusively focus on the inspiration and the perspiration, so the act of creation always comes across as a snap. Not so here. Goodwin and Coval take time well spent to dramatize the collaborative process of developing a tag or piece, gathering the necessary materials, planning the logistics of how and when they are going to bomb, and executing all of the above. It is a harrowing process. One of the great elements of the film Love and Mercy is on the very long and difficult process it took Brian Wilson and The Wrecking Crew to build the Pet Sounds album. The play  taps into the struggle of artistic creation and ably translates that to the medium of graffiti art.

As the three artists, Shakur Tolliver (Seven), Andrew Gonzalez (J.C.), and Landon G. Woodson (Dose) are a tight and nuanced ensemble. Each of their scenes – whether they are breaking the fourth wall or engaged in a moment of naturalism – crackles with the energy of creation, passion, rawness, anger, respect for their craft and one another, and the love of beauty. The story tends to put the spotlight on Seven, we are always aware of how essential J.C. and Dose are to the collaboration. I particularly like J.C.’s mystical engagement with his Muse. They have an absolute commitment to the material. Nancy MacArthur plays Selena, Seven’s girlfriend and lookout for the group. I was unsure of why the role was there at first as she just seemed to be a Girl Friday along quite literally for the ride, but as the play progressed, it became clear the reason for her presence as Seven’s fears began to surface more and more. The most surprising moment of the play belongs to her near the end of the evening, and it is stunning.

This Is Modern Art fully engages in how space in this country is racialized. The art that Seven, J.C., and Dose create is available to all, even the homeless, while the art in The Modern Wing is available to those who can afford it. Seven feels excluded from the society of the art world by his race, economic status, and educational achievement; his exclusion is a tragedy because as play and performance demonstrate over and over again, he is both has a compelling artistic vision and a strong work ethic. As we are increasingly confronted by exclusionary spaces from public parks to Yale common rooms to Starbucks, the play offers an urgent contribution to the conversation.

The Next Door space is a small one, and there is not much room to maneuver. So there needs to be a special mention made of the collaboration between director Jessica Burr and scenic artist KEO XMEN. They recreate the original graffiti in a way that is striking, theatrically exciting, and surprisingly cost effective.

More information about the play can be found by following this link: https://www.nytw.org/show/this-is-modern-art/

Chekhov on Crack

Back in 1976 as part of his longer work Dogg’s Hamlet, Tom Stoppard wrote the “15-MInute Hamlet”, which includes the best known scenes of Hamlet performed at a quick clip. The cast then does it all over again, this time at the breakneck speed of two minutes. The most famous of tragedies is reduced to ridiculous farce. That is rather like the experience of Laura Wickens’s adaptation and consolidation of Anton Chekhov’s Platonov (an early and unfinished work that apparently clocks in at 5 hours) currently being presented by Blessed Unrest at the New Ohio Theatre.

I do not know the original work, but it seems to intersect with many of the plot points, characters, and themes from Chekhov’s better-known Cherry Orchard and shares some of the fervor of Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night. Director Jessica Burr has updated the design elements. If there is modern dress Shakespeare, why not modern dress Chekhov?

As a performance, there is much skill in evidence. A cast of six must serve as the population of an entire Russia villa. Since the roles they play often require them jump between genders, ages, and classes, they must demonstrate an adroit dexterity because there are times when one of their characters must then introduce the other one of the characters. The cast is energetic and game. Taylor Valentine, who plays the melancholic doctor and an aging housekeeper, appears to have a skeleton made more out of rubber than of bone as he bounces between roles, costumes, moods, and the occasional interspersion of modern dance.

This energy is quite entertaining in moments, but it does not add up too much. What we are given is the CliffNotes version of the play, moving with all haste from Chekhovian trope to Chekhovian trope. But none of it lands emotionally as we have no time to linger. Platonov (Darrell Stokes playing the role as reptilian yuppie) is the object of infatuation by several of the female characters, but we are never given a sense of the why because we are rushing far too fast from point a to point b to point c… and so on. And as the play moves to its darker conclusion fueled by the realization that Platonov is morally despicable, well, that too does not register. The audience never had the chance to experience Platonov’s allure so it cannot feel disappointment when he finally falls. Similarly, it is hard to feel for Anna (Irina Abraham) when her estate is auctioned to the outlaw Osip (Becca Schneider); it would have been wonderful to have gotten to know Osip more because he is quite the unique character in the Chekhov canon. In Stoppard this was fine because his exercise was tied to a larger work and because it intentionally satirizes a play that is achingly familiar. Platonov is not widely known, so what we are left with is Chekhov the Ride.

There is something in Platonov that speaks to the current moment of the #metoo movement – his manipulation and disposal of both his student Mariya (a sympathetic Javon Q. Minter) and his wife (Ashley N. Hildreth, long-suffering) – and could have been the focus of the adaption. I wish the adaptation had not been so literal – i.e. trying to cram everything into 90 minutes – but rather if it had pushed for a more nuanced innovation of its own, one that perhaps just carved out the relationship between Platonov, his student, and his wife. In that way, it could have been more true to Chekhov’s spirit (deeper exploration of the conflicts within characters) and spoken with greater authority to the world of its audience. As it is, though, it is just a bunch of stuff happening.

Passing Strange Leaves Its Mark

Though often referred to as a musical, Passing Strange is more than that. It cold be called an autobiography/memoir/meditation accompanied by musical interludes eliding with moments of comedy and tragedy. There is a lot of that going around of late (see Bruce Springsteen on Broadway). I had seen the original on Broadway where book and lyric writer Stew (he shares composition credit with Heidi Rodewald) also told his story on stage. I did not know how such a work of self-confession would work without its confessor on stage. Ten minutes into the production at The Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, I realized that my worries were without warrant.

The Wilma’s presentation establishes that Passing Strange was not a piece that could thrive only with its original cast but as a seminal and innovative piece of new American theatre that belongs in the same movement with Hamilton and Hadestown. Indeed, it feels more necessary now than it did in its initial run. The clear parallels with james Baldwin’s story land with greater force as the novelist/essayist has returned to the spotlight in our current discourse. When it arrived in 2008, it was at a moment of hope. Now, here in 2018, the spirit of liberation becomes more emphatic, more urgent. American culture is no longer “the white experience”, despite what the Administration is trying to promulgate through its reactionary policies and politics, and Passing Strange articulates that new societal reality.

Director Tea Alagić has assembled a powerful ensemble cast. The elation and, in the end, painful dawning self-realization of its protagonist that comes with the journeys of Youth (a compelling Jamar Williams leaving his fingerprints on the role) through punk-rock Europe still lands with its concluding tragic punch. The final reckoning too between Youth and Narrator (Kris Coleman who releases his anger in measured proportions), his older self, found new and dramatic dimensions as Coleman was more part of the action while when Stew did the role he was stuck to one place because of his instrumental duties.

Coleman and Williams create electricity between them in their two-hander moments. They have able support from the rest of the cast. Lindsay Smiling is wonderfully loopy in everything he does. Savannah L. Jackson and Tasha Marie Canales portray the various women with whom Youth has romantic/sexual encounters. Their prickliness and ennui allows them to tell their own stories rather than being ancillary to his story. Anthony Martinez-Briggs, whom I had seen in Flashpoint Theater’s Hands Up, successfully mines every line for its comedic possibilities. Kimberly S. Fairbanks conveys an entire life in her scenes as Mother, and she infuses her final conversation with Youth with such elegiac anticipation; her voice belongs to the angels.

The Wilma space serves the work well, allowing Alagić to paint her canvas with the language and music of the piece, the acting, and some strategic use of video in service of setting of time and place.

I have only recently begun to explore Philadelphia theatre (Arden, Lantern, etc.), and, late in the game, I have come to the Wilma. I have been pleasantly surprised by this exploration and, with Passing Strange, have come to appreciate the City of Brotherly Love as a place with a rich theatrical life.

More information by the show can be found here: https://www.wilmatheater.org

 

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.