Category Archives: Off Broadway
‘Here There Are Blueberries,’ No Evil. Just Ordinary, Enjoyable Routines.
Here There Are Blueberries, now in its third extension at New York Theatre Workshop, is a many-layered, superb production running until June 30. Stylized and theatricalized as a quasi-documentary that travels back and forth from present to past to present by enlivening characters in various settings, the play unravels the mysteries centered around an album of 116 photographs taken at Auschwitz. Though the album has no photographs of the victims to be memorialized, it eventually is donated to archivists at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, by a retired U.S. Lieutenant Colonel.
Based on real events, interviews, extensive research and photographs rarely seen of the infamous concentration camp from another perspective, the play follows archivists who shepherded the photographic artifacts toward a greater understanding of the political attitudes and the daily routines of the people who ran the camp. Written by Moises Kaufman and Amanda Gronich, and directed by Moises Kaufman, Here There Are Blueberries is a salient, profound work that has great currency for our time.
With expert projection design by David Bengali, Derek McLane’s scenic design, which suggests the archivists’ workplace, and Kaufman’s minimalism, characters/historical individuals step forward to bear witness, like a Greek chorus, to speak from the ethereal realms of history. The play which has some Foley sound effects for purposes of interest, dramatizes scenes which hover around a concept. All of the fine artistic techniques by Dede Ayite (costume design), David Lander (lighting design), Bobby McElver (sound design), further the plays probing themes which examine questions the researchers ask about those who murdered and why they murdered. As the drama poses questions to its audience and itself, some, the play answers. Others, the audience must answer for themselves.
At the outset, a narrator explains the importance of the Leica camera for the people of Germany in the 1930s, when the society was at a crossroads after economic depression and the reformation of Hitler’s new government. Perched on a stand center stage is the camera in the spotlight, while projections of black and white photos scroll in the background, exemplifying the subjects taken by people using it. Some are of German people enjoying family events, as we note the narrator’s comment that in Germany, amateur photographers took up the activity as a national pastime and became “history’s most willing recorders.”
As the photos scroll showing stills of children and young adults giving the Hitler salute, the narrator suggests that “each frozen moment tells the world this is our shared history.” Her tone is ironic and the Hitler salute, as terrible as it is, physicalized by the bodies of children, indicates an alignment with Hitler’s politics, attitudes and way of life. Additional photos of children and adults enjoying outings, show Nazi flags; the narrator continues, the “apparent ordinariness of these images does not detract from their political relevance.” Indeed, she states, “On the contrary: asserting ordinariness in the face of the extraordinary is in itself, an immensely political act.”
In photographs and videos of Hitler’s marches by soldiers of the Third Reich (shown in the Nazi propagandist films of Leni Riefenstahl, etc.), we note Nazi militarization and might, which after a while are easily relegated to “the past.” Photographs throughout the play’s album note the Nazi flag, Hitler salute and SS uniform as a common fact of life lived at that time. Indeed, Hitler’s politics became the breath of life itself and all aspects of the German people’s existence and happiness were intertwined with Nazism, Hitler’s “great” leadership, his conquests, economic prosperity, and the ready identification with all of this by the average German. This was so until things went terribly sour and German war losses multiplied.
However, the Third Reich’s asserting ordinariness and commonality, when in fact it was anything but, is one of the concepts the archivists deal with throughout their journey to organize the photographs, categorize them and analyze what they are looking at in the photo album of the SS’ lives at Auschwitz.
The playwrights introduce us to the archivists in the second scene. It is then Rebecca Erbelding (Elizabeth Stahlmann), first reads the letter from the Lieutenant Colonel notifying the museum that an album with photographs from Auschwitz that he possesses might be of import. From that juncture on, we become engrossed in the archival journey as the researchers, experts and others delve into the album and attempt to understand it. Curiously, there are no photos of the victims and prisoners of Auschwitz.
As they take on the difficult task and uncover details through trial and error, eventually, researchers bring together the puzzle pieces which explain the photographs and identify the SS officials and the various workers up through the hierarchy, who helped Auschwitz seamlessly function. Clearly, Auschwitz was a huge endeavor that contained an industrial complex and barracks for laborers, housing for guards and administrators alike, and a killing machine and ersatz assembly line of death.
After pinpointing the owner of the album as Karl Höcker, who moved his way up to become the administrative assistant to the head of Auschwitz., the archivists (who also bring to life Karl Höcker and others via dramatization), gradually explore the lifestyle of those in the photographs. These include the SS guards, top brass, doctors, various secretaries (Helferinnen, who were in communications, etc., and held jobs at the camp), staff and others having meals, relaxing at a nearby resort and more daily activities.
None of the photos show the functions of Auschwitz, the prisoners, victims or crematoria. All is pleasant and reflective of the wonderful world that Hitler spoke about bringing to mankind after the “vermin” were removed. That the Helferinnen were photographed surprised a number of researchers who wondered if the young women knew about the gas chambers in the camp or smelled the acrid air of burning flesh in the crematoriums. After denials and relatives probing and finding innocence, what the women knew is later answered by one of the secretaries who was at Auschwitz. She was questioned after the war. Charlotte Schunzel stated she and the other women recorded how many were sent to hard labor and how many were sent to SB, “special treatment,” a euphemism for the gas chambers.
The archivists pin down the identity of the SS officers and high command in the photographs, one of whom was the notorious “Angel of Death,” Dr. Menegele. Another is the commandant who set up Auschwitz-Birkenau, Rudolph Höss. The researchers determine that the photos are like selfies that reveal the happy life of Karl Höcker (Scott Barrow), who would have been a “nobody” if he had not joined the Nazi party in 1937 and arrived at the camp in 1944, just in time to help “process” the thousands of Jewish Hungarians (350,000), who rode in trains three days, only to be murdered in gas chambers after they arrived.
Kaufman and Gronich seize our interest especially when actors take on historical personages, relatives of the SS, survivors, researchers, historians and others. in view of the audience, actors create Foley sound effects to usher in events and accompany Erbelding, Judy Cohen (Kathleen Chalfant), Charlotte Schunzel (Nemuna Ceesay), Tilman Taube (Jonathan Ravlv), Melita Maschmann (Erika Rose), Rainer Höss (Charlie Thurston), Peter Wirths (Grant James Varjas), and others as they uncover bits of information and puzzle together what is happening in each photograph.
The global attention the album receives (revealed by projections of headlines), brings new interest and revelations, some by grandchildren of the SS who are horrified to see uncovered aspects of their relatives they didn’t want to imagine. These aspects have been kept hidden from families out of shame and especially to avoid accountability. Perpetrators of murder and the accomplices to murder are still being located and held to account, even as recently as the last two years. Murderers and the complicit and culpable had a great need for covering up their crimes, as long as they were alive.
Another revelation comes from Holocaust survivor Lili Jacobs, who contacts archivists, as a result of the press reports. She had been holding on to an album she uncannily found of 193 photographs of the Hungarians arriving on the trains, all of whom were “processed” by the SS and high command in the photos. After she donates her album (it contains pictures of herself and family taken by the SS in the camp the day she arrived from Hungary), the researchers are able to solve the dates of the mystery of one photo which shows all the SS, high command and workers celebrating at Solahütte (a resort), where Karl Höcker occasionally rewarded the SS guards, workers, Helferinnen etc., when they did something special.
One example is given when guards prevented an escape by killing four prisoners. Administrator Höcker rewarded them for their “courage” by sending them to Solahütte for a few days.
Previously, the archivists couldn’t understand what and why the large group of camp officials, workers, drivers, Auschwitz staff, referred to by one archivist as the “Chorus of Criminals,” were photographed celebrating. However, through interviews with experts, and piecing together the facts, they divine why the entire group of Auschwitz Nazis standing and smiling, were enjoying the accordion music in one, fine, inclusive photograph, from the top brass in the front, to the lowly staff standing on a hill in the back.
With the evidence of the two albums together, archivists complete the full story of murderers and victims. The victims in Jacobs’ album were those who arrived in train transports from Hungary. The photographs included photographs of Lili and her family and her rabbi, right before they were separated into the lines for labor camp and gas chambers. In Höcker’s album, the administrator assembled and photographed the “Chorus of Criminals'” photograph for a vital reason. The murderers celebrating at Solahütte were congratulating themselves. They had successfully finished a job well done, the massive operation, processing Hungarians, dividing and selecting, so that 350,000 could be exterminated, among them Lili’s parents and two younger brothers.
Through their research, archivists discovered that Lili arrived one day after Höcker arrived at Auschwitz. He most probably received a career bump up to administer the massive “Hungarian Project.” In light of Lili’s discovery and sharing it with the archivists at the museum, she and they “get the full picture.” She sees the identity of the men who murdered her family. Finding the album of herself in the tie in with the album of the SS who ran the camp is an extraordinary sequence of events that is beyond coincidence. For her, the discovery is mystical and divinely spiritual.
Ironically, in Here There Are Blueberries, the victims that the Holocaust Memorial Museum has been so diligent about uplifting and respecting are not the only ones to be considered in studying and understanding the Holocaust. The innocent victims, indeed, were the extraordinary ones in Hitler’s politics that had infiltrated into the bones of the German people, but not the bones of the innocent ones ravaged by acts of the brutal tragedy delivered for the “good of the nation” in its lust for domination. The victims’ impossibly painful stories of survival or loss, escape, surrender, the trauma, and the horror, shock, astound and enrage.
That the ones who perpetrated murder and genocide were able to do it day in and day out as a matter of routine, a job to be done, exemplifies the normalization and internalization of a monstrous political attitude. That attitude that the SS, many Germans and surrounding cultures (i.e. Austria) adopted as right and true, a way of being, a way to live one’s life, which necessitated that others bleed and die for it as a general social good, is evidenced throughout Hocker’s album of photographs of the SS’s smiling faces as they perform daily activities.
It is this above all that Kaufman and Gronich bring to the table and highlight like no other work, with the exception of Martin Amis’ novel Zone of Interest, about the life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, which was recently made into a film, directed by Jonathan Glazer. However, unlike Zone of Interest, Kaufman and Gronich don’t include responsive photos to the crematoria. All photos of camp function and purpose are missing. Only in Lili Jacobs’ companion album do we note the horror of the transports and the photos of her rabbi, her parents and siblings who died.
The photos of those accountable for all of the activities at Auschwitz, their reason for being there-to kill, oppress, subjugate and promote the war effort-is implicit. Their very images in the photographs stink with the noisome odor of the gas chambers. The absence of the victims and any evidence of the killing machine, a final realization of the archivists who investigate the album, if anything, incriminates all of the SS officers even more in their guilt. If they were innocent and in the right, why did Höcker need to edit out the buildings of the killing machine, the prisoners and torturing that happened in the labor complex? Why did he need to present his album of “happy days are here again?” when obviously the smoke of the burning had to be hidden?
In the archivists’ explorations they learned the backgrounds of the SS running the camp were ordinary-former clerks, bank tellers, confectioners, teenage girls. We are prompted to ask what separates these murderers and accomplices to murder from the rest of us? Stating the Nazis were monsters allows us the luxury to say “we are not like them.” It dupes us to think we would never be caught up as these were, convinced in the rightness of their actions. This is a dangerous attitude. Indeed, playwright Kaufman reflects the overriding theme of Here There Are Blueberries when he states that “the Nazis were not monsters-they were normal people who did monstrous things.”
How are political cults convinced of their rightness convinced to murder for the right? How did the January 6th insurrection fomented by a sore loser with revenge on his mind to punish his VP because he didn’t do what “was right” happen? Are there any elements that might be compared? This amazing play is filled with parallels to our time, as it raises profound questions about our humanity. For that reason, as well as the fine dialogue and overall presentation and ensemble work, one should see this play.
Here There Are Blueberries runs 90 minutes with no intermission at NYTW on 4th St. between 2nd and the Bowery. Don’t miss it.
‘Sally & Tom,’ Suzan-Lori Parks’ Brilliant Play About Hemings and Jefferson, a Must-see
That “all humankind is created equal,” never was penned by Thomas Jefferson, nor by our most illustrious founding founders, who insured that only privileged white men with property were “equal” enough to vote. This is well noted by Suzan-Lori Parks in her satiric, New York premiere Sally & Tom, directed by Steve H. Broadnax III, currently running at the Public in its fourth extension until June 2nd.
Suzan-Lori Parks (2002 Pulitzer Prize and 2023 Tony Award winner for Best Revival of a Play for Topdog/Underdog), takes up Thomas Jefferson and fillets him for a farcical repast in this exceptional, complex new work. Examining Jefferson’s relationship with his slave mistress Sally Hemings (with whom he fathered six known children), Parks uses “their love” as fodder for her satiric cannons. She employs a play within a play structure to heighten the complexities of shedding noxious, historical, cultural notions and facing the contradictions in human behavior when attempting to do so.
During the process, where she alternates scenes from the play Pursuit of Happiness set in the past, and the actors working backstage to rehearse, revise and reconfigure the play in the present, Parks elucidates themes about racism, slavery, the patriarchy and power domination. Gradually, she reveals how the actors, and three of the technical team realize that these elements permeate their cultural attitudes in their own lives, despite their assumptions that they’ve released themselves from such bondage. Parks’ intention is for us to identify with the Good Company’s enlightenment and self-awareness toward a new “freedom.” Finally, Parks uses the occasion to expose fascinating information about “Sally and Tom” that the audience may not have known before.
Taking cues from Parks’ dialogue, Broadnax III’s setting leaps seamlessly as it alternates back and forth from 1790, Monticello, Jefferson’s plush home where the play, Pursuit of Happiness predominately takes place. Then Sally & Tom shifts to the present, backstage, and in the apartment of actors and lovers, Mike, the director, who plays Jefferson (Gabriel Ebert), and Luce, the playwright, who plays Sally (Sheria Irving). Like the characters they portray, Mike and Luce are intimate partners in their lives. Like Sally Hemings, Luce discovers she’s pregnant during the course of reworking and acting her role in the Pursuit of Happiness.
As a humorous, Mark Twain-like ironist, Suzan-Lori Parks sends up the cliche that truth in life is stranger than fiction, as the parallels between Sally and Tom and Mike and Luce blow up by the conclusion.
Broadnax III’s technical team crafts the sets (Riccardo Hernandez), costumes (Rodrigo Munoz), hair, wig, and make-up (J. Jared Janas & Cassie Williams), lighting (Alan C. Edwards), sound (Dan Moses Schreier), and music (composers-Parks and Dan Moses Schreier), to clarify when and where the action is unfolding. As the actors wrangle with increasingly desperate and funny problems, putting on the performance about Jefferson and Hemings, all of the characters/actors have different goals in their own pursuits of happiness. We get to see some of them blossom and others implode.
The enjoyment of Parks’ delightfully meaningful work is that one becomes immersed in both the Monticello past and the backstage present. The illusion of Jefferson’s Montocello is recreated at the top of the play as Tom and Sally dance the minuet accompanied on the violin by the slave, Nathan-actor counterpart Devon (Leland Fowler), as guests regaled in period clothes and wigs, enjoy their turns around the dance floor. As Parks exposes the colonial, repressive, anti-democratic culture of that time and stands it on its head in Pursuit of Happiness, she twits the current politically skewed theater trends presenting upbeat, nonthreatening productions, which offer “talk backs” when subjects skirt the edges of “triggering,” in order to “work through” potentially offended audience sensibilities.
Indeed, the actors of Good Company have changed their attitude toward offending audiences in this latest play to “stay alive,” and keep their company solvent. Good Company has been stretched to its limits in the past because audiences have rejected their “in-your-face” productions like “Listen Up, Whitey, Cause It’s All Your Fault.” Their producer and key financier Teddy schmoozes Luce and Mike to keep Pursuit of Happiness palatable to a diverse crowd.
The play is heavy on accurate information. Jefferson’s “kindness” to his slaves is suggested up to a point. However, one senses the irony of a sub rosa rebellion underneath this essentially Black play which points up the scandalous “relationship” of the “good guy” Jefferson and presentation of Sally, Jefferson’s mistress, who gently gestures to her baby bump at the end of the play. Theirs was no love relationship, Luce, the playwright insists.
As the playwright Luce and director Mike rework various scenes, put in and take out inflammatory speeches, and try the patience of their producer, who eventually quits because the play is still too “in your face,” they evolve in their understanding. They are forced to modulate their impulses which reflect the present.
Some of the actors, prefer to show that the oppressed slaves had agency. In one instance, a beautiful speech is so incendiary, Teddy wants it to be removed because then, the play would be a hit and “sell,” and he’d get his money back, obviously. The point is made that during Jefferson’s time, a slave’s agency would be construed as an act of rebellion and punished with death.
The tension between what was (the oppressive horrors of slavery), and what is (current cultural freedom especially in New York City), rocks Kwame (Alano Miller), who is on the verge of “making it” in the business. Kwame portrays Sally’s brother James, who Jefferson promised to free when they returned from Paris, where James enjoyed freedom as the other Blacks did. However, when Jefferson et. al. return to Virginia where slavery is the law of the land, Jefferson makes excuses about freeing James, because why would he do what is illegal and frowned upon by the society of his plantation peers?
James continually confronts Jefferson about his promised freedom, and stands up to Colonel Carey portrayed by Geoff (Daniel Petzold), who refers to Sally, his sister, as a “fine animal.” When Jefferson “mildly” rebuffs James telling him to “remember himself,” James holds forth in a three minute speech which producer Teddy insists must be cut.
As brother James, Kwame enjoys speaking truth to power, though it is completely ridiculous for the 1790s South. It is clear that Kwame chafes at portraying a slave and feels he must redeem himself in such a role. The speech, which he delivers to “perfection” is his shining moment. The cast initially agrees and Luce, believing that Teddy is under her power, massages the producer to keep the speech and prevent Kwame from walking. Instead, Teddy quits and Mike and Luce are left with a financial abyss to fill and a long speech which makes no sense in Jefferson and the fledgling United States’ tide of times. Of course the “full of himself” Kwame believes his empowerment speech is the only value Pursuit of Happiness has.
The show, however, does go on as Mike and Luce’s relationship is sacrificed, Kwame quits, scenes are rewritten at the last minute and the acting “troopers” pull together and get to opening night. In the process, the farce unleashes and the admixture of revelation and forgiveness but not forgetfulness wins the day for the actors, and even for Sally and Tom at the “perfect” conclusion, that a sadder but wiser Luce has written for Pursuit of Happiness.
The actors are top notch in this glorious ensemble where Sun Mee Chomet, Kristolyn Lloyd and Kate Nowlin portray supporting roles. For those who gloried in founding father Thomas Jefferson’s iconic stature, Parks, speaking through Luce, pointedly suggests Sally did not love Tom. Though he supposedly was a kind master, unless one could go back in a time machine taking one’s present-day perceptions with them, it is impossible to know, given he kept 600 slaves and sold them off to raise money when he went to the Capitol, New York City. Finally, the audience is reminded that our great founding father never gave Sally her freedom. It was Jefferson’s daughter Patsy, disappointed at her father’s lascivious behavior, who finally freed Sally after Jefferson died.
If the Good Company had had their way with Teddy, who most probably insisted they change it, the title would have been E Pluribus Unum (“out of many, one”), instead of the benign Pursuit of Happiness. One would think that the implied unity has yet to be achieved in our nation, culturally fractured by foreign adversaries like Putin for politically opportunistic reasons. However, looking beyond social media posts of Marjorie Taylor Green, MAGAS, and Russian and Chinese trolls, federally, we are indeed, E Pluribus Unum, united and standing tall, while we attempt to iron out issues, as Parks points out, that are extremely complex.
Sally & Tom runs two hours, thirty-five minutes with one intermission at The Public Theater, on Lafayette Street. I loved it.
‘Pericles’ by Fiasco Theater a Joyful, Redemptive Must-See at CSC
Fiasco Theater’s Pericles presented by CSC is one of William Shakespeare’s works written in the twilight of his career that reveals a “hero” who the fates torment and play with until it is enough, and he receives his wish of a fulfilled life with family. The production directed by Ben Steinfeld is stylized and cleverly wrought, advancing storms, shipwrecks, kidnappings and more with the ingenuity and charm joyfully delivered with as little forced spectacle as possible, yet with an intriguing, bold and seamless minimal set and prop design. Currently at CSC until March 24, this is a must see which Fiasco has brought for us to appreciate.
Steinfeld is Gower, the troubadour whose tale this is. Through his music, lyrics and poetry he sets up the play and requires the audience to use their imagination to become involved with Pericles of Tyre’s harrowing and amazing adventures of a lifetime. Steinfeld’s Gower introduces every section and gives a summation of events essentially cluing in and reminding the audience to stay focused and attentive. He leads the cast in song initially and establishes the mood for each of the acts, making sure to recap the events in rhyme after the audience returns from the 10 minute intermission before Act 2.
There are four actors who portray Pericles and give their timber to each scene and adventure that Pericles experiences as he goes on a hero’s journey learning wisdom, perseverance, patience and fortitude, struggling to overcome whatever Fortune brings.
The first Pericles is Paco Tolson who journeys to the kingdom of Antioch where he must solve a riddle to marry King Antiochus’ (Noah Brody) beautiful daughter (Emily Young). If he doesn’t solve the riddle, he forfeits his life and hangs like the other suitors in the public square which the creative team and actors simplistically yet fearfully stage with staffs and boxes/crates. Hearing the riddle, Pericles shows his brilliance apart from all the suitors who have courted the king’s daughter and died. He understands King Antiochus’ treachery. The riddle infers the king’s incestuous relations with his daughter, who he will never give to a suitor.
Upon realizing this horrid circumstance, Pericles also realizes his own fate. Either way, if he reveals the riddle and exposes the king’s sin to public humiliation or doesn’t, he’s a dead man.
Making his excuses, Pericles ends up escaping Antiochus’ kingdom. He intuits the king will figure out why he left and come after him, so Pericles goes on a journey to Tarsus where King Cleon (Devin E. Haqq) and Dionyza (Titiana Wechsler) make their home and suffer through the dire misery of famine that has struck their lands. Knowing their plight, Pericles brings corn to Tarsus’ starving people and saves them from death. Forever grateful, King Cleon makes Pericles revered and celebrated in the land with friendship and goodness. However, we learn that kings are political and variable and circumstances change to sever the friendship.
For the moment in his life’s travels Pericles is unaware of the possibility of deceit and betrayal. Called back to his home in Tyre by the administrator he left in charge, Helicanus (Paul L Coffey), Pericles once more bares himself to Neptune’s wrath on the fickle Mediterranean where the god upends and destroys his ship. Fiasco Theater’s inventiveness of Pericles braving the storm’s fury (Mextly Couzin’s lighting design and the Fiasco’s production design), using a bolt of cloth to suggest the tempestuous waves, maintains the stylized, roughly-hewn playfulness of the production. The soft, shimmery cloth symbolizing the waves belies the irony of Pericles’ situation on the roiling sea.
Pericles loses everything but his life and is washed up on the shores of Pentapolis. There, he is at the mercy of the fishermen who find him and change his fortune with happy information. Pentapolis is ruled by the goodly King Simonedes, (the humorous Andy Grotelueschen), a pleasant reversal of the kings who have gone before.
Shakespeare contrasts the kingdoms and their kings: the first is a lecherous murderer, the second variable in deceit and this third king. The fun loving Simonedes is popular even to the lowly fishermen who tell Pericles that the king holds a tournament and feast for his daughter’s birthday. The celebration is so that Thaisa (Jessie Austrian) may find suitors among the knights who joust for her. When Pericles’ armor washes ashore, the fishermen encourage him to compete for the king’s daughter. Shakespeare makes it a key point that though he is a stranger (an migrant) in their midst, he receives their country’s hospitality and mirth.
Pericles wins the jousting matches, performed with the sames staves Fiasco used to suggest the suitors’s hanging in Antioch. It is an example of how the theater company employs the props efficiently and meaningfully to emphasize themes of power, leadership and control. Through their variable exchange we note the contrast between the kingdoms and their rulers’ leadership, either deceitfully tyrannical or happily beneficent.
After the tournament, King Simonedes invites all the knights for a feast. The wooden crates which have been used as a throne, to circumscribe walls, etc., are now used to effect a long feast table. And there, Pericles (Titiana Wechsler portrays Pericles in this segment) gains the king’s favor and the love of Thaisa.
For his pains and pleasure, the Simonedes playfully uses reverse psychology to have the couple declare their love to each other by pretending to forbid their union. Jokingly, he reveals his pleasure at their marriage which produces an heir. In the next scene we see that a pregnant Thaisa, and husband Pericles (Noah Brody in this version) go on an ocean voyage back to Tyre to check on his kingdom.
Again, there is a storm at sea and dire circumstances. Thaisa who dies in childbirth must be thrown overboard to steady the ballast or the ship will sink. Pericles prepares her coffin with spices and jewels with a note to whomever finds the coffin to bury his wife whom he greatly loves. The child who was born as Thaisa died Pericles names Marina. To redeem the time, Pericles leaves Marina with those who revere him in the land of Tarsus. King Cleon and Dionyza promise to care for Marina like she is their own, while he returns to rule Tyre.
The staging of the scene where Marina is given to King Cleon is simultaneously juxtaposed with the fate of Thaisa whose coffin washes ashore at Ephesus. The director makes excellent use of the space at CSC to clarify what happens. As Pericles hands over baby Marina to his friends, a woman with powers of healing (Tatiana Wechsler with hair down in flowing priestly robes) restores Thaisa back to life. So thankful is Thaisa that she becomes a devotee of Diana and officiates at her temple. Meanwhile, Pericles is heartbroken and grieves his dead wife but joys that his child is being raised well. As fate would have it, during the fifteen years Marina has been brought up with the daughter of Dionyza, things grow problematic.
Dionyza envies Marina’s beauty and talents and decides she must be murdered for the sake of her own daughter, so their child will shine if the glory of Marina is removed. Though Cleon opposes Dionyza’s evil act, he is powerless to stop her. But just as Marina is about to be killed, pirates kidnap her and thwart the murder. In the following sequences, Gower shifts the mood once more and the riotous humor of how Marina’s chastity is used to great effect proves comical in a brothel run by Bolt (Andy Grotelueschen) and Bawd (Jessie Austrian). There, Emily Young’s Marina turns away the lusty, hot clients who are horrified that she pushes her virginity onto them and attempts to make them Diana (the feminist of the time) devotees. Of course the irony is that Thasia, her mother, is back in Ephesus praying as a Diana devotee.
In the second act, Fiasco’s farcical skills shine and the atmosphere shifts from Fate’s woes to merriment at those lecherous males who should be ridiculed for their unseemliness. However, when it is least expected, Pericles, who returns to Tarsus to bring his daughter back to Tyre to rule with him, discovers through Cleon that Marina drowned. Indeed, King Cleon and his wife have betrayed Pericles’ goodness and there is no punishment for them as there was for King Antiochus who the gods burned up. It would seem that incest is the worst crime when it begets murder. Dionyza’s intention of murder the wicked pirates interrupted; it is an irony is that the pirates evil act is turned around for goodness. Dionyza’s envy and murderous intention the gods leave to her and Cleon’s consciences to seek redemption.
Inconsolable that she is gone, Pericles (an excellent David E. Haqq in the last, most emotional segment) will not speak and is dead in spirit. How events change magically to effect Pericles’ reunion with his wife and daughter is poignant and heart-rending, if not fanciful in hope. Interestingly, Shakespeare makes abundant use of the Deus ex Machina (the gods interrupt evil fate to save the hero) in Pericles. As Gower and the cast conclude the tale of Pericles, King of Tyre, we are uplifted by the grace of a happy ending, and the redemption offered to Marina, Pericles and Thaisa because of their goodness, devotion to the values of truth, generosity, decency and steadfastness.
The strengths of this production include the fine ensemble’s seamless acting which provides the coherence throughout, even though the character of Pericles has four actors which was initially confusing. The whimsical and at times farcical, lighthearted approach toward myth-making and storytelling through music, rhyme, dance and song are superbly balanced throughout. The stylization is the correct choice for a play that gyrates throughout voyage, disaster, and roller coaster storms that metaphorically parallel human joys and sorrows.
That the play has been spurned as silly and not worthy of being produced has been a misread of the depth of one of Shakespeare’s most trenchant latter plays. The life theme is an important one. For those who patiently endure, they gain wisdom in temperance and the power to face and overcome trials of their faith. The obstacles help one all the more appreciate and be grateful for a life that acknowledges human beings live on the brink of peril every moment of their lives. To be numb to that knowledge is to live a zombie death in life.
This is a must-see, for the music, songs, fantasy, laughter and fanciful, profound truth-telling.
Pericles. CSC, 136 E 13th St between Third and Fourth Avenues. Closes March 24th. https://www.classicstage.org/pericles/
‘Corruption,’an Important Play at Lincoln Center Theater, Mitzi E. Newhouse
Corruption‘s well paced reimagining of the UK phone hacking scandal involving Rupert Murdock’s News Corp. empire is written by JT Rogers (Oslo) and directed by Bartlett Sher (Oslo). The hybrid drama/comedy is enjoying its premiere off Broadway, Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse. Rogers’ epic chronicle exposes key individuals employed by News Corp who follow a dangerous ethic: the ends justify the means. These media players believe that corporate profits legitimize any deleterious impact the media may have on the victims they exploit.
In the era of US fake conservative news, Roger’s two act play trenchantly reminds media consumers that malignant CEOs of companies monopolize and weaponize power and influence to oppress human rights. Ultimately, they direct global political affairs to their profitable advantage. Even if the companies harm the populace, and there are lawsuits, in the corporations’ ethos, it’s OK as long as the bottom line is not irreparably damaged. Corruption reveals that there are always ambitious and warped lackeys at the ready, like Rebekah Brooks (the excellent Saffron Burrows), who may engineer or accept malign acts for the company’s betterment.
Based on Tom Watson and Martin Hickman’s book Dial M for Murdock: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain, Rogers’ play is an exhaustive and detailed examination of the players and insider events which reveal the cover up of News Corp’s employees illegally trashing the privacy of 11,000 citizens. These not only included celebrities. Reporters used “information” illegally sourced from politicians and ordinary people alike. With this material reporters sensationalized stories for maximum shock value. When they couldn’t get enough truth or facts to fill a teaspoon, they made up lies out of whole cloth.
During the unspooling of the play’s events, we learn that no one was considered too great or too small to smear and damage, as long as the effect produced was eyeballs glued to the tabloids, specifically “The News of the World” headed up by Rebekah Brooks CEO of News International.
The play is at its edgy, sharp best when Rogers dramatizes the conflict between key adversaries Rebekah Brooks (Saffron Burrows), and Tom Watson (Toby Stephens), as well as their allies and foes. For Brooks, problematic allies she manipulates are legal counsel Tom Crone (Dylan Baker), and Rupert’s son, James Murdoch, (Seth Numrich) in addition to Prime Minister Gordon Brown (Anthony Cochrane). For Watson, major allies include Martin Hickman, friend and reporter for the Independent (Sanjit De Silva), the lawyer representing hacking victims, Charlotte Harris (Sepideh Moafi), and Siobhan, Watson’s wife (Robyn Kerr).
There are forty-six characters portrayed ably by thirteen actors. Rogers sacrifices in-depth characterization, in part, to relay the sweeping phone hacking story that energizes his themes. In the forefront is the imperative that a free, vital press, unhampered by a company’s profit motive, is essential to produce the facts and information which enable a democracy to function. That way citizens can make informed decisions to improve the social good and hold bad actors to account. However, to receive such news and information, the populace must be educated and knowledgeable. It is up to them to reject a diet of calumny, lies, and sensationalistic fabrications that support anti-science “the earth is flat” stupidities, and “in your face” political propaganda and nihilism.
Escapist tabloid journalism which exploits the “sickness” of others in a voyeuristic display to make the reader feel better with their lot, capitalizes on the lowest bar in human nature. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp revels in feeding the populace trash for high profits, then projects that citizens are to blame for demanding such fare. This is an affirmation that the character Rebekah Brooks suggests at the play’s conclusion. In her final commentary, she justifies the necessity of The News of the World with a presumption that without the tabloids’ profitable journalism, there would be no other journalism. “The
profits from my papers allow the papers you read to exist. There is no journalism without my journalism.”
However after careful consideration Rogers’ Corruption shows that Brooks and Murdoch’s tabloids and his faux “news” empire normalized indecency, negative propaganda and lies in order to control and gain power. The playwright’s overriding question is whether Murdoch and Brooks truly provided a necessary service or negatively frayed the social fabric of goodness because of their own greed and rapacity.
The play opens at Rebekah Brooks’ wedding reception, where Rogers introduces the ambitious woman that Rupert Murdoch trusted to make him money. In a private room, newly appointed head of News Corp UK, James Murdoch, and Brooks go head to head. They argue about the direction of News Corp’s future. James Murdoch asserts that the print division barely makes money. From James, we learn that Brooks has clawed her way through the ranks to be editor of The Sun, a powerful position which gives her equal footing to counter his arguments.
Numrich’s Murdoch states that technology, digital media, and TV are where News Corp will be in the future because print journalism is a relic of the past. Brooks argues that her print division fuels all other journalism. At the end of the scene James Murdoch congratulates her on her new appointment as CEO of News International. Father Rupert Murdoch trusts her with the responsibility of continuing the profitability of all the Murdock tabloids. She will not let papa down.
Throughout the play, Rogers highlights the nefarious brilliance of Brooks who maintains the efficacy of the scurrilous tabloids and stops at nothing to ensure they add to the soaring profits of News Corp. No wonder why old school Rupert Murdoch loves her more than his son, and does everything to keep her near, even after the scandal blows up in their faces.
In attempting to cram in salient details, Rogers keeps scenes short. Sher directs the action at a seamless, brisk pace with minimal set design by Michael Yeargan. The tech crew interchanges and rearranges tables between scenes to provide the change of setting and atmosphere of alacrity. The staging reflects the rapid and shifting state of the “news” media, hyped up on digital steroids. It predominately features multiple TV screens onstage and at the top of the proscenium. The screens show various news clips and shows during that time. The blinking screens are purposefully a distraction from the dialogue. When text messages are posted, we see the quotes projected on the back wall via 59 Productions projection design.
Ironically, with the media constantly flickering at us, the audience becomes numbed to the visuals and eventually ignores them. One of the takeaways of Sher’s staging is that the media overload we are expected to negotiate and be aware of on our phone screens numbs us and in fact dulls our awareness. It becomes harder to keep up or understand the complexity of events that are reduced to a few words of soundbites and quickly edited visuals. Without that complexity of understanding, facile, wrong opinions are formed and judgment is skewed toward the superficial assumption and wrong conclusion.
Companies like News Corp rely on tabloids to offer a contrast to the in-your-face screens which mesmerize and numb. The tabloids give the reader the semblance of “controlling” the information that they have bought in print. However, the opposite is true and, as Rogers’ drama proves, the tabloids are filled with mostly exploitation pieces that masquerade as factual and realistic. Understanding and depth are sacrificed for the superficial and shocking.
During the the first act, we note Brooks and News Corp’s power. Brooks gently threatens Prime Minister Gordon Brown to fire Tom Watson (his labor MP who has been his hatchet man). She warns Brown that the story she is releasing about Watson will create havoc and implies if Brown doesn’t get rid of him, it may take down the Labor Party and Brown with it by association. Brooks jokes that Brown is “running the country, isn’t he?” Indeed, maybe he isn’t, if Brooks is leveraging lies to force Brown to fire Watson.
Brooks wields tremendous power as a kingmaker and king breaker. She operates with impunity, because no one has the courage to investigate or litigate against “The News of the World’s” defamation, lies, calumny and payoffs. We learn the tabloids’ shock and scandal value are critical to blackmail. Brooks and the tabloid intimidate almost everyone who is anyone in the culture and society of the UK.
Watson confronts Brown about Brooks’ political hit job. Sher has the actual headlines projected on the backstage screen, “Treacherous Tom Watson,” “Mad Dog Trained to Maul,”etc. Brown soft pedals Watson by saying no one believes the lies that Watson “registered pornographic websites under other politicians’ names.” However, Brooks doesn’t retract the lies as other UK papers do. Siobhan, Tom’s wife, insists that Tom lay low in parliament and say nothing because she is tired of the negative PR and the outrage and stalking that has hounded them and terrified their son. Watson quiets down in parliament in the next scene and we see how Brooks gets her way now and in the future when News Corp backs the Tory Party candidate James Cameron to win.
Though Brooks has sucked the life and power out of Watson, he sues and his fury converts to action as he teams up with his friend Martin Hickman from the Independent and other allies after learning the police quashed an investigation into phone hacking. Brooks and Andy Coulson, the heads of News International disavow any knowledge of the hacking, despite documents that link hired investigator Glen Mulcaire’s (Dylan Baker), illegal acts to News International reporters.
The fact that only Mulcaire goes to jail while Andy Coulson is promoted to director of communications for David Cameron and the Torys spurs Watson and his team to apply pressure via Twitter, blog posts and other social media questioning why the police backed off the investigation. Not only do they elicit the help of a wealthy individual who had been hacked and slimed, eventually, they pull in the New York Times to cover their story. Watson’s team brings into view how Brooks and her cohorts have destroyed the lives of ordinary citizens and caused destruction and misery for profit.
In the very long first act which is expositional, perhaps some of the details and/or scenes may have been edited and reworked. The second act moves quickly to a satisfying resolution as The News of the World, Coulson and Brooks are held accountable. However, the punishment is a mere slap on the wrist for Coulson-four months in prison. Brooks is found innocent of all charges. Though Murdock closes down Brooks’ tabloid, after a time, she is keeping things humming elsewhere.
When the question arises, what did they all go through hell for, it is Watson’s wife Siobhan who encourages Tom to continue to stand up for the truth. Only with persistent fighting against the maelstrom of lies will the truth ever be seen. One can only hope.
Corruption is an important play about the Murdoch empire that reveals how News Corp steamrolled through the UK first to gain extraordinary power which then was used to blossom evilly in the US. Leaping across the pond News Corp’s malignant MO impacted the 2016 US presidential election by helping to install the incompetent, unqualified, Donald Trump as president. His negligent, derelict actions during the COVID-19 pandemic had serious global economic impact and social repercussions that many countries are still reeling from today.
Fox News in the US perpetuated Donald Trump’s making COVID-19 a political crises. Tragically, this political emphasis actually spread the contagion and made it difficult to ameliorate, especially in the southern United States. If the UK had acted to contain News Corp and hold it accountable with massive financial fines and more severe punishments, it may have paused News Corp’s Brooks, Coulson and others and curtailed its power and influence in the US
Rogers raises important questions in Corruption. What price do we pay for the decency and dignity of privacy? For those who violate our right to privacy, shouldn’t the punishment be severe because it is a crime of violence on our persons, a metaphoric rape and humiliation, especially if the citizens are not celebrities getting paid for their fame?
Though the play has infelicities, the acting, direction and pacing allow the themes to shine. It is these in our time that resonate most fiercely, especially as we face the AI fabrication of photographs, voices and more.
Corruption. Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse. The play is two hours forty minutes with one intermission. https://www.lct.org/shows/corruption/schedule/
‘The Ally,’ Terrific Performances of a Trenchant Play at the Public
The Ally, written by Itamar Moses (The Band’s Visit), and directed by Lila Neugebauer (The Waverly Gallery), currently runs in a World Premiere at the Public Theater until March 24th. Moses’ two act play that is largely polemical raises important and controversial questions in its two hours and thirty-five minutes. It is thought-provoking, historically informative and profound, and has great currency in light of the Netanyahu government’s war against Hamas. Though the play was written before the October 7th attack, the issues couldn’t be more on-point.
The Ally is short on dramatic tension, and long on terrific performances. The exceptional actors passionately argue about Black and Brown people struggling to achieve human rights in countries (Israel, the United States, etc.), which have their foundations in oppressive, white, patriarchal colonialism. Though the prejudices and discrimination have been called out and strides have been made, often the countries obfuscate justice, and in defensive mode, redirect their institutions, practices and social constructs away from equanimity, foregoing humanity, compassion and empathy to abuse those they subjugate.
To present the arguments and make a case with little resolution, Neugebauer’s vision offers a spare stage and few props to evoke the setting in a professor’s home and office on a University campus which represents a bastion of learning, where allegedly every viewpoint may be expressed without censure, to promote enlightened civil discourse and benefit the social good of the community. Moses’ protagonist on the field of intellectual battle is liberal Jewish professor Asaf (the excellent Josh Radnor).
Asaf’s Korean-American wife Gwen (Joy Osmanski), has been hired to give a positive spin on land the University is developing that was formerly used for housing in a lower middle class, Black area. The land has been appropriated, though the University has assured that it will provide housing units to compensate for the dwellings that have been demolished. How the situation evolved, we discover later, is fraught with rumors about underhanded tactics the University used to create circumstances beneficial to University expansion, while dismissing the interests of the Black community.
The main conflict begins when Asaf’s former student Baron (Elijah Jones), who is Black, feels encouraged asking Asaf to sign a social justice manifesto that involves his cousin Deronte, who was killed by police unjustly for a theft Deronte didn’t commit. After agreeing to sign once he looks over the twenty-page manifesto, Asaf realizes that the documented is personally sensitive to him in what it demands.
First, it aligns the history of violence against Black Americans to the violence against oppressed Black and Brown people who have been colonized globally and suffer under inhuman conditions. Additionally, the manifesto targets a controversial subject for Asaf, an American, who doesn’t identify culturally with Israel, though he was born there. The manifesto demands that sanctions be placed on Israel for its nihilistic treatment of Palestinians, resulting in an apartheid state. In clear terms it pronounces that a “failure to do so will leave the United States complicit in the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.”
Though he is Jewish, essentially, Asaf is an atheist. But he thoughtfully considers what he is signing, and questions the words “apartheid” and “genocide” as extreme, unrelated positions, though he feels that Baron’s cause is just. Helping support Baron holds no contentions for him, initially. The apparent police brutality in killing Deronte is one more example of murderous racism and the blue wall of silence that fronts against such horrific injustice in a country with a long history of slavery and oppression of Black and Brown peoples.
Gwen tells Asaf’ that his signing the manifesto will undergird her position as a university administrator pushing for expansive development of university housing into the Black community. If he refuses to support Baron it will appear that he cannot align with fighting injustice and it most probably will add to the negative spin already brewing about the expansion project which the Black community is resisting.
It is after Asaf signs the manifesto that problems arise which disastrously make him the “man in the middle” among activist organizations with conflicting agendas which demand that he support and be an “ally” with their specific causes and positions. The situation embroils him deeper in conflict with his conscience and beliefs and forces him to deeply question allegiances he would forge with others on campus, impacting his reputation.
Two organizations confront him after he signs Baron’s manifesto. Jewish representative (Madeline Weinstein), and Palestinian representative (Michael Khalid Karadsheh), ask Asaf to support their bringing a controversial speaker to campus. They tell him that the speaker argues for a revisionist history of Israel’s foundational and follow-up wars. Contrary to the standard view that Israel was defending itself, the speaker posits that the wars were fought ferociously for one reason: “the likely outcome was more territory.”
To his credit to give all opinions a place in civil discourse, Asaf discusses the nature of the support they want, but questions why they want this particular speaker. Additionally, with a follow-up which indicates that activist organizations are noting who is importuning Asaf, another oppositional individual shows up to challenge Asaf. Reuven Fisher (Ben Rosenfield), a religious Jewish graduate student attacks Asaf’s arguments and the others that we’ve previously heard. Fisher defends Israel ‘s position with the Palestinians.
Interspersed among those who have backed Asaf into a corner, Nakia Clark (Cherise Boothe), confronts him about his questioning the fact that Israel is the one expected to ameliorate its position and is always used as a “whipping boy,” when it is the only place historically where Jews can find safe on their home turf.
As we listen to their wrangling, we take into account that Nakia and Asaf have history together. Once a couple who dated, Nakia shepherded Asaf in community social justice, inspiring him to go with her on marches, and schooling him in protest as she strengthened her role as a Black community organizer. Now, years later, she challenges him once more to step up and not renege on his support of the manifesto which Nakia, herself, wrote.
Where is Asaf’s place in these arguments when the university community knows the stand he wished to take that he now equivocates about taking? Moses uses the character of Asaf as a canvas upon which to project all the viewpoints in the arguments about Israel, Palestine, Black discrimination and colonial oppression. The playwright proves knowledgeable and informative, especially in recounting the conflicts in the history of Israel starting from its inception in 1948 and its wars against the PLO and the complicated rise of Hamas which didn’t happen in a vacuum but was allowed by an extremist government to its own benefit, not necessarily to create equity and harmony with the Christians, Jews and Muslims who make Israel their home.
However, as has occurred since divisions created an untenable situation between Zionists, Palestinians, Muslims, Christians and Jews when Israel was formed in 1948 and worsened up to the present war in Gaza, there is only the horrific struggle. Moses indicates the lessons in why with his exploration of the reasons in The Ally. Thus, how can there be a positive resolution in this work? All is uncertain, with even more passionate feelings on all sides we’ve heard presented.
And of course, Asaf now has issues with each of the groups because of his lack of certainty; thus, his reputation has received a hit. Even Gwen is annoyed that his equivocation has bounced back to impact her project. Only more questions remain.
However, Moses and Neugebauer have pulled a rabbit out of a hat with this production which focuses the audience on the arguments which make them understandable and relatable, especially because the ensemble is just brilliant. Importantly, we have been shown the intricacies of intense debate which, if continued will eventually lead to the possibility of a positive resolution. Thus, we are left with the feeling that there must be an open dialogue during which responsible individuals listen to each other and again and again hash out some consensus, as impossible as that seems..
This is one to see because of its overall coherence, incredible performances and fine direction. Neugebauer stages the debate amongst the stakeholders, so we thrillingly follow every word. Could there have been edits? Perhaps. However, Moses has built solidly and any removal of the bricks in his structure will lessen the impact overall.
Kudos to the creative team who effect the director and playwright’s vision. These include Lael Jellinek (scenic design), Sarita Fellows (costume design) Reza Behjat (lighting design) Bray Poor (sound design).
The Ally runs 2 hours 35 minutes at the Public until March 24th. https://publictheater.org/productions/season/2324/the-ally/
‘Brooklyn Laundry’ a Soap-diluted Rom-com That Avoids the Soul-dirt
John Patrick Shanley’s Brooklyn Laundry, currently at MTC Stage 1 never quite elucidates trenchant themes though it might have with further character development. The 80 minute play, also directed by Shanley, currently runs at New York City Center Stage 1 until April 14th.
Starring Cecily Strong (“Saturday Night Live”), and David Zayas (“Dexter’), as the principal couple who meet in a drop-off laundry in Bushwick, Brooklyn, in Brooklyn Laundry Shanley presents two individuals who become involved with each other as a result of desperation, depression and loneliness. Also, they are between partners and have not been involved in a successful relationship ever.
The Meet-Up
Laundry owner Owen (the lively Zayas), engages in light conversation with Strong’s Fran as the play opens. She is an on again off again customer, whose boyfriend left. Fran admits later in the scene that she is self-conscious about the fact that she can barely scrounge enough laundry to drop off for one load. When she was with her boyfriend, the bag weighed thirty-eight pounds; they did their laundry together. Owen, who Fran reminds that he owes her credit for losing a bag of her laundry 6 months prior, acknowledges that her lost laundry is a mystery. He has been giving her credit, though she complains that it doesn’t cover the price of replacing the missing items.
As they chit chat, Owen notes her “gloomy” nature to jostle her out of it. He tells her she reminds him of his fiance, who was “smart, one inch from terrific, but gloomy.” Fran disputes his label about her and suggests reality has brought issues into her life, and it isn’t without reason that her situation doesn’t make her the sunshine kid.
Owen discusses the necessity for positivity and an uplifted attitude, sharing his recent life story. He became the owner of three laundries, after a car accident settlement and lawsuit against his 9 to 5 boss who unfairly fired him. Assured that he has answers for her life in the face of her wishing she could have a car accident and be so lucky for monetary settlements, he takes a leap of faith. With apparent confidence he asks her to dinner. Fran suggests she will after she returns from a family visit in Pennsylvania.
Shanley has established the ground rules for these two individuals from different backgrounds with little in common, who make a connection simply by being present together and willing it. From this initial spark, Shanley takes us on a journey of how unlikely singles Fran and Owen fall in love because of need.
Reality’s Gloom and Fran’s Escape
In the next segment, we understand why Fran is depressed when she visits her sister Trish (Florencia Lozano), who is ill with cancer, loopy on meds and lying in bed mostly unconscious. After her visit with Trish, Fran goes on her date with Owen high on magic mushrooms. She offers some to Owen and after a while he catches up to her. Together they experience the beauty of the lights and atmosphere of romanticism and their conversation intensifies.
On a sub rosa level, Fran introduces the mushrooms into the situation because she wants to escape thoughts about her dying sister. She chooses to live in a lovely, seductive place with Owen. She doesn’t share her Trish reality with him for fear it will drive him away. So she suppresses her emotions to suit his needs to be positive and upbeat. She puts aside her gloominess, despite the fact that complications with Trish abound and she has less than a month to live.
The mushrooms encourage their intimacy and Fran helps Owen conquer his sexual problems that happened as a result of his car accident, problems which turned off his former girlfriend who dumped him as a result of his poor performance. Interestingly, Owen is honest about a very sensitive subject with Fran and of course she helps him. On the other hand, Fran is dishonest with Owen because he set the parameters that she feels she must adhere to to be with him: no gloom. Thus, Fran and Owen become closer after their first date of intimacy, and after three weeks, theirs is a budding love.
However, another jolt of reality intrudes and slams Fran in her “honesty” with Owen. Fran’s other sister Susie (Andrea Syglowski is always spot-on), stops by to collect Fran so together they will make arrangements for Trish’s imminent death. Fran refuses to go with Susie initially. She fears if she leaves Owen to spend time with family, she will lose the momentum of their relationship and he will dump her for someone else. With lies of omission, she lives in her own dream that she can spin along her affair with Owen without introducing the ugly realities about Trish dying.
The argument that ensues between Strong’s Fran and Sydlowski’s Susie about whether to visit Trish before she dies is beautifully paced and authentically threaded by both actors. During their accusations against each other, we learn how high the stakes are for Fran, who has never been married and has been the hand maiden to her two divorced sisters and their relationships with their loser husbands. We realize why she elected to escape to a love relationship with someone off beat which she clings to so she doesn’t have to face the doom and sadness of her life. Because Owen doesn’t appreciate negativity, his wants prevent her from spilling her emotions to him. Ironically, she is cutting off a valuable part of herself because she fears he only wants “happy, happy.”
Spoiler Alert
Then Susie levels with Fran about why she didn’t accompany her to see Trish the last visit. Susie is dying of pancreatic cancer.
With charming facility Owen cleaned off the “gloomies” from Fran’s plate to no avail. Susie’s horrible news slams Fran with a triple portion of gloom. Not only must she confront Trish’s impending death and the consequences of its impact on Trish’s young child, Taylor, she must confront the consequences of Susie’s dire prognosis. Fran’s doom and gloom lifted for three weeks by Owen will be a permanent fixture in her life. Additionally, guardianship of her sisters’ three children and their financial custodianship falls to her as their closest living relative. Will Owen want to take on a woman with three kids especially since he confessed he only wants his own child and isn’t looking for huge bills to pay for the upkeep of children who aren’t his?
The strength of Brooklyn Laundry is in how Shanley weaves the events, to back Fran into a corner delivering reality’s blows to her life, while showing her desperation to escape her circumstances by not sharing the truth with Owen. Eventually, her own obfuscations come back to haunt her. When Susie tells her about her cancer, Fran wakes up and stops moving in her imagined dream. She assures Susie she will act responsibly. Shanley’s characterization of Fran reveals her nobility, self-sacrifice and integrity in honoring her sisters by raising their children. She has made up her mind and whatever Owen does is up to him, take it or leave it. Fran puts family first.
The Last 10 Minutes
The last ten minutes of Brooklyn Laundry are the most dynamic because we note the inner struggles of the characters as they deal with hidden truths. Fran confronts Owen who stopped answering her calls. Though he portrays himself as the victim and ignores her comments that he ghosted her, something he promised he would never do, eventually, he is forced to put his pride aside. They both realize what they will lose without each other, and they are able to accept with humility that they care.
Shanley perhaps misses important dramatic moments by having the characters report their reactions after the fact to each other, instead of establishing a few scenes that are immediate, confrontational and a dynamic build up with irony. Instead, he writes one scene of alive confrontation and saves it for the very end. It is then that Fran’s serenity with reality shines and Owen reveals himself to be a typical male, more full of himself than he needs to be. However, after Fran walks out of his life to live in Pennsylvania, he realizes his mistake. The play’s conclusion falls into place with a few humorous surprises to satisfy audiences.
Kudos to the involved three-set scenic design of Santo Loquasto, Suzy Benzinger’s costume design, Brian MacDevitt’s lighting design. MacDevitt presents the magical fairy land lighting of the restaurant scene perfectly. Additional kudos goes to original music and sound design by John Gromada.
Brooklyn Laundry is facile and enjoyable thanks to the excellent acting ensemble. Shanley’s rhythms about loss, need and taking risks without ego are imminently human and recognizable.
Brooklyn Laundry with no intermission is in a limited engagement until April 14th. New York City Center MTC Stage 1, 131 West 55th St between 6th and 7th. manhattantheatreclub.com.
‘The Seven Year Disappear,’ Mother-Son Relationship Chaos as Performance Art
In The Seven Year Disappear, Jordan Seavey (Homos, or Everyone in America), creates celebrated, bi-polar, performance artist Miriam (Cynthia Nixon), and her gay son Naphtali (Hebrew for “my struggle, my strife”), played by Taylor Trensch, to elucidate the darkness in a mother-son relationship when the personalities are hyper creative and high strung. Issues especially evolve when the artists, like Miriam, are complex, self-centered, demanding, assertive and exceedingly ambitious. Indeed, Miriam’s perspective and being blur the boundaries of normalcy and reality and engulf everything and everyone close to her, mostly her son.
Currently running as a World Premiere at the Signature Center, The Seven Year Disappear with no intermission concludes its limited run on 31st of March.
Directed by Scott Elliott with assists by Derek McLane’s scenic design, Rob Milburn & Michael Bodeen’s excellent sound design, Qween Jean’s costume design (workman’s black coveralls and boots), and John Narun’s projection design, which together, keep the audience stirred and engaged, The New Group’s presentation of Seavey’s comedic drama intrigues. There are no easy answers. Complication rules the day, and the overall structure of systematic flashbacks of titled events in three movements, slips backward in time, with four brief returns to the present year, 2016, then back again, to unspool the ominous artistic relationship between Miriam and Naphtali over a twenty-six year period.
The two-hander relies on the dynamic performances of Nixon and Trensch. The wrangling mother and son strike high points of Naphtali’s life, during the time when Miriam disappears for seven years (2009-2016). Her premeditated disappearance, a publicity stunt, happens right after funds have been raised for the first half of her commission as a performance artist in a project to be presented at MOMA. When Miriam goes missing, Naphtali contacts the NYPD and does all he can to relocate her, to no avail. She doesn’t want to be found and perhaps has elicited the help of MOMA to increase the suspense and excitement of her invisibility as performance art, that is a hardship especially to Naphtali. For her, it is a triumph. She will emerge to acclaim when she is ready, and then, present the key moments of her invisibility.
Leaving Naphtali to fend for himself with little money from 2009 through 2016 when she “returns,” he is forced to get a job and apartment and struggle on his own after being dependent on her. For emotional sustenance to fill in the void his mother’s absence has left, he engages with numerous unusual people, all of them portrayed by Cynthia Nixon, using various physical and vocal changes, as he searches for Miriam and irons out his own life. Naphtali is full of questions and feelings of victimization where he sometimes helps himself to drugs and alcohol and attempts to confront her abandonment, which has always been a fact of his life.
MIriam’s durational disappearance is another demonstration of her dislocation from motherhood which initiates when she left four-year-old Naphtali alone at the zoo watching penguins. She leaves him to pursue a drink with Wolfgang, who becomes her intimate partner for a time, then years later becomes Naphtali’s sexual lover for a time during Miriam’s disappearance. Ironically, when Wolfgang is concerned about the young Nephtali in the zoo, Miriam comments, “He’ll be fine.” As it turns out, leaving him traumatizes Naphtali, who never gets over it. We learn it sets him up for a lifetime of his mother’s leaving, which he never conquers.
Clearly, unlike Miriam’s rival, Marina Abramović, one of the most renown performance artists in the world, who chose not to have children, Miriam has Naphtali. However, she refuses to sacrifice her art for her son. Instead, we learn that she exploits him by incorporating him in her work as a durational performance artist. When he is older, he allows her to continue using him, even becoming her manager in order to be close to her, which he says is the only way he gains her attention.
However, Miriam’s seven year disappearance is a piece de resistance, a capstone to shake the art world, which reveals her dedication and wildness in her artistry to effect a total invisibility. On another ironic level, leaving her son and manager behind to go incommunicado is a cheap, attention getting stunt. If it is a cost to her, we don’t see it. We do see the pain it causes Naphtali.
Clues to what Miriam is doing appear throughout the drama which reveals the more pretentious side of the durational performance art world, which we note impacts her son, not necessarily others, as Marina Abramović’s performances do. Where Miriam’s rival has put herself through grueling feats to test her physical, psychic and mental strength to acclaim and positive impact, Miriam’s disappearance doesn’t function positively, though it forces Nephtali to appear to become more independent.
However, during the seven years, everyone Nephtali sees or meets for support (Wolfgang-a sexual father figure, Brayden-a gay lover, Tomas-a gay lover, Kaitlyn-his manicurist, Aviva-an actress, Michael-a gay priest who conducts sex orgies, Nicole-a detective), is a reflection of his mother. Indeed Cynthia Nixon portrays each of these characters.
Thus, though Miriam has “flown the coop,” she is very much present in Nephtali’s life and emotional and psychic imbalances. To say that Miriam’s parenting skills leave much to be desired is an understatement. Her strident character, arrogance, unapologetic nature, and “take or leave it” attitude blaming God for making her this way, only reinforces Marina Abramović’s quote that Seavey includes in the play’s script, which perhaps should appear in the production projected on a backdrop but doesn’t.
‘I had three abortions because I was certain that [having a child] would be a disaster for my
work. One only has limited energy in the body, and I would have had to divide it.’
– Marina Abramović
MIriam, clearly, has difficulty dividing her energies. Thus, she rationalizes using Naphtali to uplift her art at his expense. We learn she has done this cruelly, sadistically with performance art Seavey slyly references. With the artistic endeavors after the disappearance is over, Miriam hopes to achieve a redemptive artistic reconciliation, once again at Naphtali’s expense, though she sells it to him as an equalizer. She claims it will center on Naphtali as a co-partner in making her new performance art to finish MOMA’s commission, as they present their divergent experiences separated during her “seven year disappear.”
However, as we learn piecemeal, in reverse chronology what happens between the mother and son, taking it all in, the result is structural chaos in Naphtali’s life that he is in bondage to. Their relationship is a devastation. And the bits and pieces of performance art evident in the play (at the beginning when Nixon and Trensch stare at each other from across the table), Nixon’s various characterizations pitted against Trensch’s searching, enhanced in closeups by John Narun’s projection design, leave the audience enervated not uplifted.
The Seven Year Disappear is one to see for its performances and play structure. The mother-son relationship disturbs and gives one pause. Nixon’s Miriam is stark. Taylor Trensch’s portrayal is empathetic. Together, they evoke a work which is memorable and unique.
The Seven Year Disappear. The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre, The Pershing Square Signature Center
480 W 42nd Street https://thenewgroup.org/production/the-seven-year-disappear/
‘Jonah,’ Working Through Trauma Over Time
The world premiere of Jonah by Rachel Bonds directed by Danya Taymor and presented by Roundabout at Laura Pels Theatre, Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre, is in a limited engagement until March 10th. Billed as a “coming of age story,” Jonah follows a young girl traumatized by events after her mother joins up with a man and his sons. This becomes an untenable living arrangement from which she and her mother cannot escape, all of which we learn through her dialogue with three characters.
In a nonlinear fashion, with sketchy details, Bonds reveals Ana’s backstory by degrees, as Ana (Gabby Beans-The Skin of Our Teeth) interacts with Jonah (Hagan Oliveras), Danny Samuel H. Levine (The Inheritance), and Steven (Good Night, Oscar), throughout undefined time sequences. Using obscurity, intimation, opacity and mystery as key devices to unfold how the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” have impacted the main character Ana, we gradually learn how traumatic events might be worked through with fantasy and the imagination to promote redemption and healing.
Bonds opens the play with Ana at an unspecified educational setting, most probably a private high school where Ana tells Jonah she is on a scholarship. Jonah (the adorable, exceptional Oliveras), walks with her and engages her in friendly conversation. Ana, who attempts to remain aloof, eventually allows him to follow her up to her dorm room after a few interactions outside her dorm. In the next few scenes, Jonah and Ana grow closer and share intimate details about their sex lives. Both are virgins and their intimacy never really “gets off the ground” into something sexual, though what they do share is profoundly substantive, sweet and loving.
The manner in which Jonah leaves, and the fantasies Ana shares about her being in love and sexually fulfilled, indicate the possibility that Jonah is her fantasy. He is the way she wishes a partner in love might be: sweet, caring, solicitous about her comfort, flattering, overwhelmed by her beauty, and articulate to the extent that he engages her trust and faith. It is these qualities that elicit her reciprocation, until shockingly, at the “twinkling of an eye,” he falls back into the blackness of the doorway.
Bonds shifts the time in the next segments. The playwright introduces another character, Danny, who is troubled, confused, traumatized. Though Wilson Chin’s set design remains the same, unobtrusive beige (rugs, bed linens, walls, etc.,), Danny appears at her doorway, taking the place of the sweet Jonah. We learn Ana’s mother has died, after remarrying a violent alcoholic with two sons. He abuses son Danny because he stands up to him. Through Ana and Danny’s dialogue we learn that her stepfather is also brutal to Ana emotionally, but stops at the point of physicality. However, the intimation is that soon he will go after Ana, and perhaps he has already abused her with inappropriate sexual touching.
In Ana’s scenes with Danny, we note how she comforts him and helps him cope with his father’s abusive beatings, either attempting to dress his wounds or give him a head massage. Clearly, Danny is protecting her by taking the brunt of his father’s alcoholic abuse, and he goes to her in kinship for comfort. Bonds doesn’t clarify how her mother died. Nor does she explain what happened to her sisters, referenced in a photo she discussed in the previous scenes with Jonah.
The one positive element in the series of events in the Danny sequences is that Ana is excellent in school and is pursuing writing which helps distance her from the terrible home circumstances. Apparently, Danny effects their escape before the stepfather sexually abuses Ana, who avoids discussion of the specific details of their situation. However, because Danny references that he brought Ana and his brother to a safe place, we note that Ana possibly feels an obligation to comfort Danny.
In one scene when Danny visits her drunk in her new location, presumably another school setting where she is pursuing her writing, they are intimate. The experience isn’t pleasant, but she permits him to “deflower” her out of pity. Because he is “out of it,” he doesn’t realize what he is doing until after it is over and Ana withdraws from him and becomes remote. In the final Danny segment, he reads an assignment that she has written about him, though she attempts to explain it awat. He is so upset by her view of him that he cuts himself to release the pain of what he interprets to be her censure and loathing. As he goes into shock, she is forced to get help to take him to the hospital to stem the bleeding.
Once again, the scene shifts and a new young man appears at the doorway of the same beige room which by now we gather is a combination of Ana’s memory, a fabrication of an alternate reality that Ana constructs to help herself emotionally, or a dorm-like setting in the future that manifests some elements of objective reality. As Ana converses with Steven (John Zdrojeski), the dialogue lets us know the setting has changed to a writing retreat, and Steven is concerned why she is not dining with the other writers. During their conversation, Steven discloses he has read her novel and found it fascinating. As he attempts to become closer to her through his kind manner and friendly conversation, we note that he is more like Jonah from the first segments.
It is in this final segment with Steven that Ana discloses Danny committed suicide. The impact of this years later and the events that occurred in the past Ana relates to Steven, a lapsed Mormon because he wants to know about her family situation and her writing. During these segments with Steven, there is a scene when Jonah returns. He reaffirms their connection from the past. They discuss how they missed each other and Jonah apologizes for perhaps having done something that disconnected their relationship and closeness.
In this last meeting with Jonah, we realize that Jonah is symbolic. Perhaps, he is a configuration of her psyche that is her male counterpart. Perhaps he is a fantasy she uses to bring her to closure, so she can establish an intimacy that will help her overcome the previous traumas and unhealthful relationship with Danny.
Jonah and she briefly reunite in a healing moment and then he leaves. At the right time, Steven who has fallen asleep by her bedside, while Jonah visited, awakens.
It is after her visit with Jonah that Steven and Ana discuss the nature of intimacy and sex. Additionally, she is able to discuss God and answer Steven’s questions. As she describes her experience, we understand the impact of the past traumas. They disassociated her from her body and her faith in God. The pain was so great she went into a deep freeze and felt nothing, nor did she want to feel anything. However, the disassociation became a form of recuperation and allowed her an emotional pause. Eventually, as a result of it, she can begin to restore herself with a loving relationship, release the guilt and shame and become whole again.
During her discussions with Steven, they move to establish a closer, comfortable relationship, as Steven checks to make sure she is comfortable with him. Ana becomes reconciled to herself. She and Steven begin a more intimate chapter in their lives as Bonds concludes on an up note.
Bonds’ play is about the healing process after trauma and how individuals use elements of their own humanity to work through terrible events from their past. She merges fantasy and reality, past and present and cleverly uses the dialogue to identify emotional, psychological time so that we understand the nature of how physical violence and abuse may be worked through. Bonds’ conclusion shows Ana and Steven concerned for each other, unlike Ana’s incomplete, painful relationship with Danny, where Ana nurtured him as far as possible, but she wasn’t enough for him.
Bonds keeps us intrigued, though at times, the dialogue needed tightening. I drifted during some parts. I found the scenes with Jonah the most uplifting and credit Oliveras, who is sensational and believable as the forthright and candid Jonah. Levine has the most difficult role as Danny. His portrayal of Danny as broken, and as a taker is spot-on. Yet, despite the undercurrent of violence and overt neediness, Levine’s Danny is poignant. Additionally, he clarifies that, though Danny apologizes to Ana, we note that he is following in his father’s footsteps. He desperately needs help which Ana cannot give him or she will herself drown.
That she nearly does drown emotionally then closes off herself is a protective device against Danny, who has been so abused, he seeks suicide as a release for his inner torment. The extent to which his suicide impacts Ana and makes her feel guilty is intimated but not spelled out.
Zdrojeski’s Steven is a welcome contrast after Levine’s angst-filled Danny. His tenderheartedness recalls Jonah’s innocence and kindness. That Zdrojeski’s Steven is like Jonah in the concern expressed for Ana’s well being, as well as the admiration of her talent, creates the hopefulness that Bonds wishes for Ana’s emotional recovery. Beans’ Ana and Zdrojeski’s Steven remind us in a world of hurt, torment and violence, there are kind and loving individuals. Perhaps they are there when one doesn’t look for them or more importantly, when one is ready to work through one’s guilt, recrimination and pain.
Though Bonds ends the play affirmatively with Steven and Ana learning to be intimate with each other, she leaves many questions unanswered. What have we just envisioned? Were the scenes mere sketches in Ana’s psyche that are fantastical but not really grounded in objective reality? Or do they convey fictional accounts in Ana’s writerly imagination? Such is the nature of consciousness and the layers of personality when confronting trauma, abuse, violence so that the events tend to merge fantasy and reality in the haze of wounded memory. Taken on that level, Bonds’ work is fascinating and valuable.
The creative team effects Taymor’s unity of vision with Bonds’ themes with effective stylization,. Wilson Chin’s set design defines the place in Ana’s mind which never changes. Kaye Voyce’s costume design similarly remains the same for Ana and the characters with only two tops varying down through the years as Ana’s mind leaps in time segments. Likewise, Tommy Kurzman’s hair design (it stays the same), follows Taymor’s and Bonds’ vision that objective reality has been overcome by Ana’s interpretation and perspective in her conversations as she grapples with the past in her imagination in the present.
Likewise, the light flashes which signify a change in time sequence (Amith Chandrashaker’s lighting design), give structure to the scenes. The overall softness in the lighting when Ana is “in the room” with the young men, appropriately echoes the dimness of memory and hazy suggestion of imagination. Kate Marvin’s sound design accompanies the lighting flashes symbolically and indicates the shifts in time, reality, imagination.
The theme that over time one may heal from past emotional devastation, if one has the will to do so, is a hopeful one. Though we don’t understand all of Ana’s derivations through reality, fantasy, memory, flashback, objective reality, we do understand that she wants to release herself from the pain, and redeem herself so she can be intimate and open to love again. How Bonds effects this process is striking. The performances are terrific. And Beans sustains her energy and vitality throughout.
Jonah, Laura Pels Theatre Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre, 111 West 46th Street between 6th and 7th for the Box Office. For their website: https://www.roundabouttheatre.org/get-tickets/2023-2024-season/jonah/
‘White Rose the Musical,’ Impactful, Uplifting
Inspired by true events, White Rose the Musical with book and lyrics by Brian Belding and music by Natalie Brice, reveals the important story of heroic and morally engaged university students, who, at great risk to themselves, took a stand against Hitler’s Third Reich killing machine with paper, a mimeograph, ink and spiritual courage. Directed by Will Nunziata, with orchestrations by Charlie Rosen, and music direction, supervision and arrangements by Sheela Ramesh, White Rose, the Musical is a tour de force that resonates for us today.
Currently in its premiere at Theatre Row in a limited engagement until March 31st, the musical holds vital themes that uplift the human spirit. Importantly, it reminds us to stand against political criminals who would usurp power, murder, and destroy human rights to maintain their agenda of domination.
Celebrated throughout Germany today with memorials of school, street, fountain and plaza names, the group who identified as the White Rose printed and distributed leaflets and risked their lives to inform German citizens about the Nazi terrorists. They dared to countermand the brainwashing propaganda of Goebbels that dominated German culture and society. Their main purpose was to inspire and encourage citizens and create a community who did not feel alone against Nazi brutality, so they might resist, speak out and denounce the Third Reich in whatever way possible.
Belding begins the story with brother Hans Scholl (Mike Cefalo), and sister Sophie Scholl (Jo Ellen Pellman), looking out over a balcony readying themselves to take a final decisive action. Before they do, they recall to their remembrance how they arrived at this crucial moment from which there is no turning back. What follows is a flashback that reveals the arc of how the White Rose came into being, who was involved with the group and how they motivated citizens to take a stand with non-violent resistance.
In “Munich” Sophie Scholl sings about her decision to break away from activities elsewhere and join her brother Hans (Mike Cefalo), a medical student at the University in Munich. There, she takes a class with Professor Kurt Huber (Paolo Montalban), and meets Hans’ friends Willi (Cole Thompson) and Christoph (Kennedy Kanagawa). Willi is hopeless (“I Don’t Care”) about what is happening in a society cowed by the police and Gestapo overlords who monitor citizens’ every word, look and deed, ready to arrest anyone who even breathes counter to Nazi propaganda and Hitler’s political ideology.
It is 1942 and by this point in time, from books to decadent works of art, priceless cultural artifacts have been confiscated and banned, and professor Huber can only teach a censored curriculum approved by Hitler and his propaganda minister. Nevertheless, the professor manages to get around the bans and inspire his students to think, question, (“Truth”), and not allow themselves to be seduced by Nazi propaganda.
A series of events help to raise the consciousness of the activist students (“Blind Eye”). The oppressive social order impassions Sophie (“My Calling”) and Hans (“The Sheep Chose a Wolf”). With Hans’ friends they form the” White Rose,” a name which reflects innocence and goodness pegged against the dark storms of Nazism. First, they write anonymous letters against the Third Reich and send them to addresses of those living in Munich. When Sophie becomes friends with shopkeeper Lila (Laura Sky Herman), who gives her a mimeograph machine, Sophie and the others create leaflets and leave them on the streets where citizens can read their exhortations.
Complications develop. Frederick (Sam Gravitte), who is on the police force but answers to Nazi handler Max Drexler (Cal Mitchell), protects Sophie from being arrested. We discover that Frederick, who was a friend of Hans, knew their family. He and Sophie had a relationship then broke up. Now, when he suggests that they escape to Switzerland, (“Run Away”), it is too late. Sophie has found an important mission that gives meaning to her life, and she is not going to leave it for Frederick who is blind to the consequences of his complicity, however minor, with the Third Reich.
When Professor Huber becomes involved with the White Rose, they determine to step up their plans to engage the public. For example, they learn the elderly and handicapped are being euthanized as a part of the Nazi “master race” cleansing program. Thus, their moral imperative to encourage resistance and rebellion (“Why Are You Here?” “The Mess They Made”), gains greater impetus in the service of saving lives.
To expand their sphere of influence, Huber involves his friend Karl Mueller (Aaron Ramey), who is in another resistance group. Hans and Willi are called up to go to the Russian front and help there as medics. On the front, they see the torture and abuse of Jews first hand, and note the Nazi atrocities and brutalities on the civilian populations which stirs them to further redress Nazi abuse when they return home. In a pamphlet, the White Rose provokes the German population to turn away from the Nazis who are destroying their nation and are losing the war having been horrifically defeated at Stalingrad. In the meantime, Sophie invites Lily to join them. But Lily reveals she is a Jew in hiding, who must live in hope and keep on moving (“Stars”).
Sophie tasks herself with provoking the remaining members of the White Rose to continue decrying the propaganda of the Third Reich. However, the Nazis via Max Drexler have intensified their search and destroy mission to close down the White Rose. The Gestapo bring in Mueller for interrogation to find out who the White Rose members are. When he remains silent, they kill him to send a message to the White Rose. Either cease and desist, escape or be killed.
The question remains. Will the German people rise up and take a stand against the Nazis, which is what the White Rose intends they do? The revelation of who and what the fascist Nazis are happens slowly by degrees, primarily because the lies, the brainwashing, the power-mad, bullying Nazis mow down any in their path who resist. They control through fear and violence. The populace has no freedoms-of speech or assembly-or any rights apart from what the Nazis allow them. Their portion is oppression, abuse and mental and physical enslavement for if they don’t like it, they can’t even leave. Above all, they cannot voice another opinion contrary to Nazi propaganda.
As an oppressor under these conditions, Frederick goes through a crisis of conscience (“Air Raid”), and questions his cowardice being swept up to obey orders and continually bend to wickedness in the banality of evil. Kurt, Christoph and Sophie engage the population with expanded actions in graffiti and pamphlets. When Hans and Willi return from the front, Hans feels the pressure of being back and of having to protect Sophie from being arrested, a promise he made to his parents (“They’re Here Now”).
As Hitler’s armies suffer defeat in 1943, the prospect of the allies rescuing Europe from the fascists puts the Nazis in a frenzy to keep the populace in line by making more arrests (“Pride and Shame”). Ironically, as their brutal grip intensifies, Sophie and the other members become bolder. Sophie leads a walk out during a speech given to university students by Nazi official Paul Giesler (Aaron Ramey), that is particularly loathsome. In response the Nazis close down the university to punish them and look for the girl who led the walkout. However, news of the defiant walkout spreads far and wide and touches the hearts of students in other German universities.
As the members stay one step ahead of the Gestapo, Frederick, who knows they are the White Rose, tells Hans he can no longer protect them. The group decides upon an action in another city. It is then that the flashback comes to a close and the resolution and themes unfold. Rather than to spoil the last half of the musical, I can only recommend that you see this superb production for yourself to learn of the group’s final heroic actions.
White Rose the Musical with simplicity and beauty showcases the lives of individuals who lived and who have been memorialized in films and books. The production does a fine job of capturing the passion of the White Rose’s convictions with stirring music. The songs toward the end of the production especially, “They’re Here Now,” “Pride and Shame,” “Who Cares?” “We Will Not Be Silent” have particularly moving lyrics in strong melodies. The songs are a call to arms reaffirming immutable verities. To thrive and maintain one’s spiritual integrity, one must stand for justice and righteousness whenever possible in the face of tyranny, oppression and criminality.
Perhaps one reason why the songs at the end are the most impactful is because the arc of development of the music and book complicates. The numbers in the beginning are light, easy ballads that sound similar. However, when the themes of duplicity, treachery and corruption manifest in the understanding of the characters, (i.e. Hans describes the seduction of Hitler “The Sheep Chose a Wolf”), the music becomes more darkly driving and complex. Likewise, Cefalo’s interpretation of “They’re Here Now,” is exceptional in illuminating the fear and anticipation of being the hunted waiting to be caught.
The ensemble are uniformly strong with standouts Mike Cefalo as Hans, Jo Ellen Pellman as Sophie and Sam Gravitte as Frederick. At times, the performers needed to enunciate and articulate the superb lyrics which are too good to be missed. Whether it was an issue related to sound design (Elisabeth Weidner), or voice projection issues, Brian Belding’s lyrics (I read a copy of the fine script) must be heard. The lyrics manifest all of the insinuations of how corruption takes over, how despots rule with fear, and how in the face of darkness and evil, the only way to overcome the horror of such terrorism is with bravery, as the just shine the light of truth.
James Noone’s set design is appropriately minimalist with a curtain of the members of the White Rose projected on it at the outset of the play thanks to Caite Hevner’s projection design. With Sophia Choi’s period costume design, Alan C. Edwards fine lighting design and Liz Printz’s hair and wig design, the actors conveyed their characters with spot-on vitality.
The musical is a must-see because of its currency today. It reminds us that evil brutality and terrorism in a despotic, autocratic nation destroy the culture and people who support it. When human rights are vitiated and the populace cannot enjoy their freedoms of expression and rights over their own bodies, when ideas, books, and the arts are banned and burned, human dignity and community are demeaned and displaced. Such wickedness cannot live in truth because it is based on lies and propaganda which are created, not to uplift the common good, but for the purpose of idolatry, to worship one man and one ideology which must be bowed to, or one’s life or career are forfeited.
The limited engagement of White Rose the Musical on Theatre Row, 42nd Street between 9th and 10th, runs 90 minutes with no intermission. For tickets go to the Box Office or their website. https://whiterosethemusical.com/
‘Aristocrats,’ Irish Repertory Theatre, Review
Dysfunction and decay are principle themes in Brian Friel’s Chekovian Aristocrats, a two-act drama about a once upper middle class family in precipitous decline in the fictional village of Ballybeg, County Donegal, Ireland. Currently at the Irish Repertory Theatre as the second offering in the Friel Project, the intricate and fine production is directed by Charlotte Moore and stars a top-notch cast who deliver Friel’s themes with a punch.
Two members of the O’Donnell family, headed up by the autocratic and dictatorial father, former District Justice O’Donnell (Colin Lane),, who remains offstage until a strategic moment brings him on, have arrived at the once majestic Ballybeg Hall. They are there to celebrate the wedding of Claire (Meg Hennessy), the youngest of the four children, who still lives with her sister Judith (Danielle Ryan), the caretaker of the estate. Well into the play, Ryan’s Judith reveals the drudgery of her responsibilities caring for her sickly father and her depressive sister Meg, as well as managing the estate and the chores of the Big House.
At the top of the play, we meet the grown children who live abroad and arrive from London and Germany. These include Alice (Sarah Street), her husband Eamon (Tim Ruddy), and the O’Donnell brother Casimir (Tom Holcomb). As Friel acquaints us with his characters, we discover Eamon, who once lived in the village, claims he knows more about Balleybeg Hall from his grandmother, who was a maid servant to the O’Donnells. Also present is Willie Diver (Shane McNaughton), who is attentive to Judith as he helps her around the estate and farms and/or rents out the lands to the locals. Initially, we watch as Willie organizes a monitor through which Justice O’Donnell can speak and ask for Judith to attend to him.
By degrees, through the character device of the researcher, Tom Huffnung (Roger Dominic Casey), and especially the ironic comments of Eamon, Friel discloses who these “aristocrats” of Ireland are. First, they were the upper class with land, who once dominated because the English protestant faction empowered them to do their bidding. The irony is that over the years, they have devolved and have imploded themselves. The sub rosa implication is that the seduction of the English, to give these Catholic Irish power, has led to their own emotional and material self-destruction.
The father, the last of the dying breed of “gentlemen,” like his forebears, took on the cruel, patriarchal attitude of the English. Raising his family in fear and oppression, and indirectly causing his wife’s suicide, he has deteriorated after strokes. We learn this by degrees, as Friel catches us unaware, except for the title of the play, by revealing the characters to be on equal class footing at the play’s outset. We learn the irony of the great “fallen.” The past distinction between the “superior” O’Donnell’s of the Hall, and the rest of the village peasantry, who referred to them as “quality,” (Eamon’s grandmother’s definition), has faded and is only kept alive in the imagination of a few.
Throughout, Claire’s music can be heard in the background as Alice and Casimir converse with Huffnung, whose research topic is about the impact of the Catholic Emancipation laws on the “ascendant Roman Catholic ruling class and on the native peasant tradition.” In other words Huffnung has come to Ballybeg Hall to research the aristocratic O’Donnells and discover the political, economic and social impact they have had on the villagers.
Interestingly, Eamon sums it up to Huffnung when he ironically answers the question as an insider who knows the Hall and what it is like being married to Alice, one of the former “ruling class.” Alice and her sister Judith were repeatedly sent away from home for their schooling. Alice marries Eamon who, caught up in the Civil Rights action against the English Protestants, loses his job in Ireland and eventually works for the English government in London. Alone most of the day, Alice has become an unhappy, isolated alcoholic. Eamon, whose irony wavers between obvious bitterness and humor tells Huffnung that the O’Donnells have had little or no impact on the local or “native peasants,” of which he numbers himself as one of the classless villagers.
Indeed, noting the shabbiness of the Hall and the problems of the family members, we see the pretension of superiority has long gone. All of them face emotional challenges and need rehabilitation from their oppressive upbringing under their father, Justice O’Donnell who seems to have be a tyrant and unloving bully. We note this from his rants over the monitor and Casimir’s response to his father’s imperious voice.
Judith contributed to causing her father’s first stroke having a baby out of wedlock with a reporter, after joining the Civil Rights fight of the Catholics against the British Protestants. Forbidden to raise her child at home, which would bring shame to the family, she was forced to give him up for adoption; he is in an orphanage. Over the monitor in a senile rant we hear the bed ridden O’Donnell, refer to her as a traitor. Thus, we imagine the daily abuse she faces having to care for her father’s most basic needs, while he excoriates her.
Meg is a depressive on medication who helps around the house, plays classical piano, and plans for her marriage to a man twice her age in the village, a further step down in class status. Desperate to leave, she selects escape with this much older man who has four children. She enjoys teaching piano to them.
Casimir is an individual broken by his father’s tyranny and cruelty. Holcomb’s portrayal of the quirky, strange Casimir is excellent, throughout, but particularly shines when he reveals to Eamon, how Justice O’Donnell’s attitude shattered him. The Justice’s cruel judgments about his only son, are revealed by Casimir toward the conclusion of the play. Ironically, Casimir politely attempts to uplift the family history to Casey’s clear-eyed Huffnung who, tipped off by Eamon, fact checks the details and realizes that Casimir exaggerates with a flourish. Additionally, most of what Casimir shares about his own life is suspect as well, and used to appear “normal,” though he may be gay.
Thus, as Friel unravels the truth about the family, largely through Eamon, we come to realize the term “aristocratic” is a misnomer when applied to them. The noblesse oblige, if it once existed, has declined to mere show. As Casimir attempts to enthrall Huffnung with the celebrated guests who visited the Hall (i.e. Chesterton, Yeats, Hopkins), his claims by the conclusion are empty. In turn Huffnung’s research seems ironic in chronicling the decline of an aristocracy that has self-destructed because it remained isolated and assumed a privileged air, rather than become integrated with the warmth and care of the local Irish Catholics.
The brilliance of Friel’s work and the beautiful direction by Charlotte Moore and work of the ensemble shines in how the gradual expose of this family is accomplished. As the ironies clarify the situation, Friel’s themes indicate how the oppressor class inculcated those who would stoop to their bidding to maintain a destructive power structure which eventually led to their own demise. Of course, Eamon, who is bitter about this, also finds the “aristocracy” enchanting. He wants them to maintain the Great House and not let it go to the “lower class” thugs who will destroy it further, though it is in disrepair and too costly to keep up.
The class subversion is subtle and hidden. What appears to be “emancipation” perhaps isn’t, but is further ruination. How Moore and the creatives reveal this key point is vitally effected.
Thanks to Charlie Corcoran’s scenic design, we note the three levels of the Big House’s interior and exterior where most of the action takes place. David Toser’s costume design is period appropriate. Ryan Rumery & M. Florian Staab’s sound design is adequate. The original music is superb along with Michael Gottlieb’s lighting design. Accordingly, Justice O’Donnell’s entrance is impactful.
This second offering of the Friel Project is a must see. Aristocrats is two acts with one fifteen minute intermission. For tickets go to the Box Office of the Irish Repertory Theatre on 22nd Street between 6th and 7th. Or go online https://irishrep.org/show/2023-2024-season/aristocrats-2/
CAROLE DI TOSTI 