Category Archives: Off Broadway
‘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/
‘The Night of the Iguana,’ Theater Review
The Night of the Iguana is one of Williams most poetic and lyrical plays with dialogue that touches upon the spiritual and philosophical. On the one hand in Iguana, Williams’ characters are amongst the most broken, isolated and self-destructive of his plays. On the other hand, in their humor, passions and rages, they are among the most identifiable and human. La Femme Theatre Productions’ revival of The Night of the Iguana, directed by Emily Mann, currently at the Pershing Square Signature Center until the 25 of February, expresses many of these elements in a production that is incompletely realized.
The revival, the fourth in 27 years, and sixty-one years after its Broadway premiere, reveals the stickiness of presenting a lengthy, talky play in an age of TikTok, when the average individual’s attention span is about two minutes. Taking that into consideration, Mann tackles Williams’ classic as best as possible with her talented creative team. At times she appears to labor under the task and doesn’t always strike interest with the characters, who otherwise are hell bent on destruction or redemption, and if explored and articulated, are full of dramatic tension and fire.
Beowulf Boritt’s scenic design of the off-kilter, ramshackle inn in the tropical oasis of 1940s Costa Verde, Puerto Barrio, Mexico, and Jeff Croiter’s fine, atmospheric lighting and superbly pageanted sky are the stylized setting where Williams’ broken individuals slide in and out of reality, as they look for respite and a miracle that doesn’t come in the form that they wish. With the period costumes (exception Maxine’s jeans) by Jennifer Von Mayrhauser), we note the best these characters can hope for is a midnight swim in the ocean to distract themselves from their inner turmoil, depression, loneliness, DT’s and brain fever/ The latter are evidence of addiction recoiling, experienced by the play’s anti-hero, “reforming” alcoholic Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon (Tim Daly).
One of the issues in this revival is that the humor, difficult to land with unforced, organic aplomb is missing. At times, the tone is lugubrious. This is so with regard to Tim Daly’s Reverend Shannon, in the scene where he expresses fury with the church in Virginia that locked him out, etc. If done with “righteous indignation,” his rant, with Hannah Jelkes (Jean Lichty), as his “straight person,” could be funny as her response to him elucidates the psychology of what is really going on with the good reverend. It would then be clearer that Shannon is misplaced and just can’t admit he loathes himself and agrees with his congregants who see him as one who despises them and God, an irony. Indeed, is it any wonder they see fit to lock him out of their church?
The ironies, his indignation and Hannah’s droll response are comical and also identify Shannon’s weaknesses and humanity. Unfortunately, the scene loses potency without the balance of humor. Shannon is a fraud to himself and he can’t get out of his own way. Is this a tragedy? If he didn’t realize he was a fraud, it would be. However, he does, thus, Williams’ play should be leading toward a well deserved redemption because of the underlying humor and Shannon’s acceptance that his life is worth saving. In this revival, the redemption merely happens without moment, and the audience remains untouched by it, though impressed that Tim Daly is onstage for most of the play.
The arc of development moves slowly with a few turning points that create the forward momentum toward the conclusion, when Shannon frees an iguana chained at its neck so it won’t be eaten (a metaphor for the wild Shannon that society would destroy). The iguana is released, yet the impact is diminished because the build up is incompletely realized. Little dramatic immediacy occurs between the iguana’s release into freedom and the initial event when Daly’s quaking Reverend Shannon struggles up the walkway of Maxine’s hotel. Daphne Rubin-Vega’s Maxine Faulk and her husband Fred have previously offered escape for Shannon. Now, at the end of nowhere, he goes there to flee the condemnation and oppression meted out by the Texas Baptist ladies he is tour guiding, This slow arc is an obstacle in the play that is difficult to overcome for any director and cast.
In the Act I exposition, we learn that Shannon’s job of last resort as ersatz tour guide has dead-ended him in a final fall from grace. He is soul wrecked and drained after he succumbs to seventeen-year-old Charlotte Goodall’s sexual advances in a weak moment, while “leading” the ladies through what appears to be paradise (an irony). However, their carping has made the Mexican setting’s loveliness anything but for the withering, white-suited Shannon, who was moved toward dalliances with Carmen Berkeley’s underage nymphet. Whether culturally imposed or self-imposed, prohibition always fails. Ironically, clerical prohibitions (alcoholism, trysts with women), are the spur which lures Shannon to self-destruction.
Already a has-been as a defrocked minister when we meet him, Shannon is hounded by the termagant-in-chief, Miss Judith Fellowes (Lea Delaria), who eventually has him fired. He has no defense for his untoward behavior, nor explanation for his actions, when he diverts the tour, and like a foundering fish gasping for air, flops into the hammock at Maxine’s shabby hotel. There, he discovers that her husband Fred has passed. In her own grieving, desire-driven panic, Rubin-Vega’s Maxine welcomes Shannon as a fine replacement for Fred.
It is an unappealing and frightening offer for Shannon, who views Maxine as a devourer, too sexual a woman, who takes swims in the ocean with her cabana boy servants to cool off the heat of her lusts. Shannon prefers her previous function in her collaboration with Fred, when her protective husband was alive enough to throw Shannon on the wagon, so he could prepare for his next alcoholic fall off of it.
While the appalled Baptist ladies remain offstage, honking the horn on the bus to alert Shannon to leave, and refusing to come up to Maxine’s hotel to refresh themselves, Shannon makes himself comfortable. So do spinster, sketch artist and hustler Hannah (Jean Lichty is less ethereal than the role requires), and her Nonno, the self-proclaimed poet of renown, Jonathan Coffin (Austin Pendleton moves between endearing and sometimes humorous as her 97-year-old grandfather).
Oozing financial desperation from every pore, the genteel pair have been turned away from area hotels. As Hannah gives Maxine their “resume,” the astute owner sniffs out their destitution and is about to show them the door, when the down-and-out Shannon pleads mercy, and Maxine relents. Her kindness earns her chits from Shannon that she will capitalize on in the future. Maxine knows she won’t see a dime from Hannah or her grandfather, whether or not Nonno dramatically discovers the right phrasing and imagery to finish his final poem at her hotel, and earns some money reciting it to pay their bill.
Though the wild and edgy Maxine allows them to stay, she “reads the riot act” to Hannah, suggesting she curtail her designs on the defrocked minister. If Hannah doesn’t go after Shannon, she and her grandfather might stay longer. However, the tension and build up between Maxine and Hannah never fire up to the extent they might have.
To what end does the play develop? Explosions do erupt. Maxine vs. Shannon, and Shannon vs. Miss Judith Fellowes create imbroglios, though they subside like waves on the beach minutes after, as if nothing happened. Only when tour replacement Jake Latta (Keith Randolph Smith), confronts Shannon for the keys to the bus, must Shannon reckon with one who enforces power over him. Neither Maxine, nor her cabana boys, nor Hannah, nor Fellowes can bend Shannon’s will to his knees. Jake Latta’s reality rules the day.
As the bus leaves and his life blows up, Shannon must face himself and end it or begin anew. In the scene between Daly’s Shannon and Lichty’s Hannah after Shannon is tied up in the hammock to keep him from suicide, there is a break through. Daly and Lichty illuminate their characters. Together they create the connection that opens the floodgates of revelation between Shannon and Hannah in the strongest moments of the production. When Nonno finishes his poem and expires, the coda is placed upon the characters who have come to the end of themselves and their self-deceptions. Life goes on, as Shannon has found his place with Maxine who will help him begin again, free as the iguana he set loose. Perhaps.
Williams’ characters are beautifully drawn with pathos, humor, passion and hope. If unrealized theatrically and dramatically, they remain inert, and the audience doesn’t relate or feel the parallels between the universal themes Williams reveals, or the characters’ sub text he presents. Mann’s revival makes a valiant attempt toward that end, but doesn’t quite get there.
For those unfamiliar with the other Iguana revivals or the John Huston film starring Richard Burton and Ava Gardner, this production should be given a look see to become acquainted with this classic. In this revival, there are standouts like Daphne Rubin-Vega as the edgy, sirenesque Maxine, and Pendleton’s Nonno, who manages to be funny when he forgets himself and asks about “the take” that Hannah collected. Lea Delaria is LOL when she is not pushing for humor. So are the German Nazi guests (Michael Leigh Cook, Alena Acker), when they are not looking for laughs or attempting to arouse disgust. That Williams includes such characters hints at the danger of fascist strictures and beliefs, that like the Baptist ladies follow, threaten free thinking beings (iguanas) everywhere.
Humor is everpresent in The Night of the Iguana‘s sub text. However, it is elusive in this revival which siphons out that humanity, sometimes tone deaf to the inherent love with which Williams has drawn these characters. Jean Lichty’s Hannah, periodically one-note, misses the character’s irony in the subtle thrust and parry with Tim Daly’s humorless, angry and complaining Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon. Daly’s panic and shakiness work when he attempts to hide the effects of his alcoholic withdrawal. Both Lichty and Daly are in and out, not quite clearly rendering Williams’ lyricism so that it is palpable, heartfelt and shattering in its build-up to the significance of Shannon’s symbolically freeing himself and the iguana.
The Night of the Iguana with one intermission at The Pershing Square Signature Center on 42nd Street between 9th and 10th until February 25th. https://iguanaplaynyc.com/
‘Buena Vista Social Club™’ is Phenomenal, Theater Review
If you are a world music lover, you don’t need any introduction to the “Buena Vista Social Club,” a group of Cuban musicians that Cuban producer and musician Juan De Marcos González, brought together in a recording studio in Cuba to eventually release an album in 1997. González is to be credited for his passion to capture the striking beauty and spirit of traditional Afro-Cuban music of the Buena Vista Social Club, while some of the members were still alive and able to perform and record in 1996.
Surprising everyone, the Buena Vista Social Club musicians, who had been a hit in the 1950s and disappeared after the Cuban Revolution, created a smoking hot album in 1997 that won a Grammy in 1998. Subsequently, they were the subject of the documentary initiated by musician/songwriter Ry Cooder and filmed by Wim Wenders, that rocked the BVSC into the stratosphere of global fame by 2000, when the documentary was nominated for an Academy Award.
The Atlantic Theater Company’s musical, Buena Vista Social Club™ is based on the titular documentary with references to Buena Vista Social Club: Adios, a second documentary filmed in 2016. The superb musical, directed by Saheem Ali (Fat Ham), has as its creative consultant David Yazbek (The Band’s Visit). With book by Marco Ramirez and music by the Grammy Award winners known as the Buena Vista Social Club, the production currently runs with the ebullient magnificence of songs, brilliant tonal hues, dances and movements at the Linda Gross Theater with one intermission until 21st of January. The Buena Vista Social Club™ is a touch of paradise with Afro-Cuban rhythms and sonority that are unforgettable.
When you see it, and you must, you will not be able to sit still. The music fills you with its joyous power and heartfelt beauty. The production which extends beyond the crass label of “jukebox musicals” gives a reverential bow to the album, the documentaries and importantly, the magnificent musicians and singers who were vaulted to a success they had never known when they started out.
The production, loosely narrated by Juan De Marcos (Luis Vega), boasts a song list that is steeped in the incredible social club’s rhythms and cadences that spiritually manifest the history and diversity of the Cuban people. At the opening, De Marcos, who stands in Egrem Studios-the Old Havana music studio where musicians in the 1990s still record states, “A sound like this, it tends to travel.” His prophetic remarks reference how Buena Vista Social Club’s songs resonated and still resonate throughout the world today, even though most of the original members of the BVSC have passed. Only Omara Portuondo, the National treasure of Cuba, still sings and tours.
The key to opening the lock on the social club that dissolved with all the social clubs that Castro disbanded to end discrimination in Cuban society is Omara Portuondo. As the musical indicates, her notoriety and fame in Cuba allows her to serve as the bridge between the traditional musicians no longer heard and herself who is very much in the Cuban music scene in the 1990s and today.
Thus, the musical focuses on Omara and flashes back and forth from the past to the present in recounting her history with the BVSC, as well as introducing the members, and revealing how they were a part of the popular social club in a Cuba whose segregated clubs prevented various groups from singing and dancing together. The musical’s arc of development unspools as De Marcos attempts to interest Omara in making a recording of the musicians from long ago, who are still alive to keep the torch of Cuban folk music vibrating and lighting the way for musicians and fans of a younger generation.
Initially, when Vega’s, De Marcos approaches her, Omara (Natalie Venetia Belcon), is not interested because she doesn’t sing with a live band anymore. Her attitude is cold, aloof and proud, but later, we discover this hard shell fronts for deep pain underneath, concerning her alienation from her sister and niece because of the Revolution and the US embargo barring any exchange of visitors between the two countries. Recording the album would bring up tenuous memories. However, her dismissal of De Marcos on the surface appears to be because she is famous and he is an unknown, who intends to exploit her beloved renown for his own purposes.
Cleverly, De Marcos plays one of her old recordings with the BVSC. Only then, reflecting back to the past, does she relent and give her stipulations for the recording. First, she must be the voice that’s front and center, as De Marcos writes the arrangements. Second, she must be in control to select the singers and musicians. Thus begins the process, conveyed with humor and pathos, that Omara and De Marcos use to bring back the members of the BVSC, so that they are able to record together and reestablish the vitality, importance and universality of Afro-Cuban music, making them a global phenomenon.
The musical is an important tribute to revitalizing how the BVSC Afro-Cuban stars were incredible singers and musicians. It also intimates in the flashbacks and lovely balletic dances featuring the Young Omara (Kenya Browne), and her sister Haydee (Danaya Esperanza), the historical, social schemata of a diversely segregated Cuba, referencing its importance in the Slave Trade, the divisions between the rich and the poor, as well as Castro’s plan to bring equality to the country that backfired and instead created a hell and misery for the Cuban people. This was especially so after the revolution and the flight of wealthy Cubans and middle class off the island.
As is pointed out as a major theme, which indicates the segregation still is manifest concerning Cuba, the division became forever known as “the ones who stayed” and braved out the situation in their mother country, and the “ones who left” and went to various parts of the United States and elsewhere.
Crucially, Omara is an important symbol of transition and the voice and the bridge between the rich and the poor, the socially upscale strata of Cuban society, and the segregated, representing the traditional Cuba with which all Cubans can identify, if they put their prejudices away. Indeed, in this musical, the character of Omara magnifies the best of Cuban culture. She recalls the past and weds it to the present, in the tears and pain of the loss of family and her sister Haydee, who died before she was ever able to see her again. Because Omara was already famous, she was able to negotiate travel as she employed her talents on tour. This mobility was not possible for the other BVSC musicians who were not as famous, and lived under the oppression of segregation and poverty before and ironically, after, in Castro’s Cuba.
Obviously, the ones like Omara who had mobility or the thousands of others who left, had some money to establish themselves elsewhere, even though they lost their lands and businesses to Castro’s “communistic” usurpation. It is a wealth Castro didn’t share with the Cubans who stayed, reminiscent of Vladimir Putin’s behavior toward the Russian people in today’s Russia. Like a predominance of the Russian society, the Cubans who stayed were impoverished and the musical references that during the “Special Period” when the dissolved U.S.S.R. split up, there was no longer any “communistic” aid to Cuba. Thus, the people starved.
The hope of recording an album with BVSC members was to earn a bit of money, as many of the musicians and singers we meet and learn about in their relationships to Omara and the club were barely scraping by from day to day. During the production we meet the incredible individuals who Omara was close to and sang with in the 1950s when they were young and in 1996 during the recording. These include the charming, funny Compay (Julio Monge), the sweet, loving Ibrahim (Mel Seme), the wonderful pianist Ruben (Jaindardo Batista Sterling) and Eliades (Renesito Avich).
The seminal moments of the production however, meld the present to the past, revealing how Omara connected with each of the BVSC members in the flashbacks with the Young Omara and the Young Haydee. The musicians/singers include the Young Compay (Jared Machado), the Young Ibrahim (Olly Sholotan), and the Young Ruben (Leonardo Reyna).
The balletic sequences with dancers portraying the Young Omara and Young Haydee, choreographed by Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck, developed and directed by Saheem Ali. These sequences seamlessly and stylistically reveal the differences in opinions between the sisters, regarding the BVSC which Haydee feels is beneath her. Also revealed in these flashback dance sequences, is Omara’s sadness in losing her sister and family forever because of the Revolution and US Embargo. As Belcon’s Omara sings of her feelings, the poignance of her expressiveness resonates with all Cubans and punctuates the cruel punishment visited upon the people by both governments, revealing the malevolence of political machinations. However, it is in the power of the songs that the Cuban people thrive and with dignity transcend the brutality.
The BVSC playlist is sung in the native tongue of the BVSC, and on one level doesn’t need translation because the music “speaks” for itself. However, the musical’s closed captions in Spanish, should also have had an English counterpart. In English, the lyrics can relate the historical culture of the Cuban people which is referenced throughout in the English dialogue and storyline. English closed caption lyrics, as well as Spanish, would convey the complete picture of the BVSC and its tremendous importance socially, politically (their democratic diversity should not be diminished), and spiritually.
The BVSC’s immutable human values conveyed in their incredibly poignant rhythms and music is what resonates and draws in fans globally in an egalitarian message that makes sense and that most human beings yearn for. Politics and the power hungry divide to conquer. The music of the people soars, uplifts, transcends hardship and unifies. This production’s value is priceless and the ensemble of musicians and singers are fabulous in memorializing the Buena Vista Social Club for all time.
The creative team brings the director’s vision together in a beautifully stylized way that breathes life into the real musicians and singers who made up the BVSC (1950s, 1996). These creatives include Arnulfo Maldonado (sets), Dede Ayite (costumes), Tyler Micoleau (lighting), Jonathan Deans (sound), J. Jared Janas (hair, wigs & makeup), Dean Sharenow (music supervisor), Marco Paguia (music director, orchestrations & arrangements), Javier Diaz, David Oquendo (additional arrangements), the swings and band.
The company of Buena Vista Social Club™, Atlantic Theater Company, 20th Street between 8th and 9th. https://atlantictheater.org/production/buena-vista-social-club/
‘Hell’s Kitchen,’ Alicia Keys’ Glorious Musical, a New York High
Vibrant, relentlessly electric, Hell’s Kitchen with music and lyrics by Alicia Keys and book by Kristoffer Diaz sends one out into the night elated and energized. In a sold out run at the Public Theater, Hell’s Kitchen is transferring to Broadway for five good reasons. These include award-winning Alicia Keys’ glorious music, Adam Blackstone’s music supervision, Camille A. Brown’s dynamic choreography, Michael Greif’s thoughtful direction and Alicia Keys and Adam Blackstone’s arrangements of key songs from her repertoire, and three new ones.
Integrating Keys’ playlist with an organic storyline rooted to a New York setting during a period of a few months, Greif, Keys and Diaz’s choices stir up the magic that makes this work sizzle beyond the bounds of the typical jukebox musical.
Clearly, the coming of age story about a seventeen-year old living in Manhattan Plaza takes its inspiration from Keys’ life. She lived in Manhattan Plaza with her mother, and then she took off, living independently after about a year, all before seventeen. Diaz’s book moderates Keyes’ exceptionalism, especially that she began to establish her musical prodigy at 7, and by seventeen was arguing with Columbia records about control of her music, image and songs for an album she already created.
Ali (Gianna Harris the night I saw it), dramatically casts herself as a Rapunzel in cargo pants and Tommy Hilfiger underwear and tops, locked away in the isolated “tower” of Manhattan Plaza by her mother, Jersey (Shoshana Bean). Though mom intends for her to stay safe from the dangers of Hell’s Kitchen, which is gradually being cleaned up of its unsavory druggy characters by then Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Ali questions her mother’s judgment.
Narrating her story in the present, Ali flashes back to key events and key people she meets in her life at the large, subsidized housing arrangement for artists initiated by Estelle Parsons and others. Parsons and other fed up actors, musicians, dancers, etc., encouraged city fathers to create apartments where artists could live while working in the city whose rising costs have continued to this day.
(Joan Marcus)
Artists then and now bring in millions/billions of dollars to the second largest entertainment capitol of the world, yet, subsist on poverty level wages, plying their craft, despite being unable to maintain themselves even on welfare. As a former actress, Jersey is able to meet the requirements at the Plaza for a small living space with Ali, still working part-time as an actress when she can get jobs. However, forced to scramble to support them, Jersey, works the night shift with a steady job, having essentially given up her career to take care of Ali, who doesn’t understand or appreciate the sacrifices her mother has made.Instead, Ali focuses her complaints on her absent father who abandoned the family, and her lack of freedom to hang out with friends and strike out on her own to do what she wants.
The overriding conflict in Hell’s Kitchen is between mother and daughter in their story of reconciliation, which on another level writes a love letter to New York’s loudness, brashness, street people, and atmospheric social artistry in the 1990s.
Key to the arc of development is that Jersey doesn’t want Ali to follow in the shadow of her “mistakes” (she got pregnant and had to raise Ali), which she sings about in “Teenage Love Affair” as she affirms why Ali’s soulful father Davis (the smooth-sounding, seductive Brandon Victor Dixon) was not the type of man to settle down. Having heard this story before, the fun and juice of her mother’s passion for her father prod her emotions. She is seduced to walk the alluring tightrope of danger to replicate her mother’s forbidden experiences while trying to find her true purpose which will lift her up from identity disappointments and anger about her father’s neglect. But how can you tie down a crooning club singer who is always on the move and looking for excitement around each corner of life?
This background is presented in Act I (‘The Gospel,” “The River,” “Seventeen,” You Don’t Know My Name,”) as Ali seeks her identity and purpose apart from the family situation she rejects, spurred on by her friends to throw herself at Knuck (the adorable Lamont Walker II when I saw it). The twenty something is one of a three-person bucket drumming crew providing excitement and sexy currents busking in the courtyard of Ali’s residence. Ali’s attraction to him is so palpable, Jersey warns the doorman and her police friends to “watch out” for her daughter’s wiles with the “bucket drummer,” which miffs Ali. When tensions increase with her mother, Ali seeks comfort from Miss Liza Jane’s classical piano playing in the Ellington Room of the Plaza, which so inspires her, she realizes she’s found a part of herself, (“Kaleidoscope”).
Although Keyes’ own storyline is much more complicated, Diaz keeps it simple in order to integrate Keys’ repertoire which includes eleven numbers in Act I and twelve in Act II (according to the program). In Act I, the songs weave Knuck and Ali’s coupling in “Gramercy Park,” and “Un-thinkable (I’m Ready),” and gyrate into an amazing “Girl on Fire” in a heady, rigorous number that involves the entire company and ends in an explosion of emotions.
Unable to contain themselves, Knuck and Ali are intimate in Ali’s apartment. Is it any surprise that Jersey looses it when she finds the older Knuck and her underage daughter on the living room sofa in a rerun of Jersey’s life with Davis? Shocked that the precocious, sexually self-possessed Ali is seventeen (making him a rapist), Knuck is infuriated and races out. He is one step ahead of Jersey but is arrested, and humiliated in public, which Ali tries to prevent but can’t.
Because of her colliding impulses and emotions, Ali has recklessly endangered and effectively punished Knuck for his affections which he tried to resist. In a gender role reversal, she has exploited him as the “innocent,” while “getting off” on using her sexual power. Too late, she backtracks with empty apologies and remonstrances.
The event resolves in the Ellington Room where Ail seeks comfort, while Miss Liza Jane sings the instructive and heartfelt “Perfect Way to Die,” highlighting the culture’s racism, police brutality and discrimination as the daily portion of hatred and violence that communities of color still have to face and fear. Act I concludes powerfully with the song highlighted by Peter Nigrini’s projection design in black and white of victims of future police brutality. Miss Liza Jane and Ali conclude in hope with a focus on Ali’s lesson at the piano. The reveal is that art is the way out of the ghetto, the violence, the discrimination, the institutional racism that so often cuts down Black men and colored populations.
Act II (“Authors of Forever,” Heartburn,” “Love Looks Better,” “Work on It,” to name a few), follows with a lengthy resolution after Ali experiences a loss, ends her brief encounter with Knuck, and Jersey calls in Davis to help her daughter overcome her emotional depression and grief. Together, father and daughter sing a lovely duet with Davis at the piano. Mother and daughter have a new appreciation of one another and the musical ends on a celebratory bow to the city with Keys’ “Empire State of Mind.”
The covers, Gianna Harris, Lamont Walker II, and Crystal Monee Hall are spot-on marvelous, working seamlessly with Shoshana Bean’s powerhouse singing and emotionally riveting portrayal of Jersey. Bean’s Jersey is a tumbling cycle of love, fear, anger and confusion as she tries to negotiate the rebellious Ali. Likewise, Harris perfectly portrays her attempt to kindle a relationship with Davis. The smooth, relaxed portrayal by Brandon Victor Dixon, shines as the counterpart of Jersey. His mellow, and beautifully mellifluous singing is sensational. Dixonl clearly reveals why Bean’s Jersey fell hard for him and was so acutely disappointed and broken when they couldn’t make it as a family.
The musical, pegged as entertainment with the intent of heading for a Broadway audience avoids going as far as it could only inferring Knuck’s arrest might have ended up in a brutal attack against him. Instead, the death that occurs is a loss that is devastating, but not aligned with any cultural indictment. It is most felt by Ali and it triggers her feelings to be more supportive and loving of her mother which ends up in a satisfying and uplifting conclusion.
Nigrini’s colorful projections of New York City lighten up Robert Brill’s grid-scaffolding, dark scenic design and minimalist set pieces. Dede Ayite’s costume design is setting appropriate and dated for that period in time. Lighting design by Natasha Katz, sound design by Gareth Gwen, and hair and wig design by Mia Neal all are in concert with Greif’s vision of a Hell’s Kitchen which is undergoing transformation and hope, despite unresolved institutional racism and discrimination.
I was most drawn by Camille A. Brown’s choreography and the dancers amazing passion and athleticism incorporating a variety of hip hop dances from the period and then evolving into something totally different. Unusually, there is movement during times when least expected, but all correlated with the emotion and feeling of the characters making the dancers moves emotionally expressive and coherent.
Hell’s Kitchen is a winner. Look for it when it opens on Broadway or try your luck with tickets based on availability at the Public Theater on Lafayette Street, downtown. https://publictheater.org/
‘The Gardens of Anuncia’ Lyrical, Unique, Fanciful, Directed by Graciela Daniele
In order to deal with the past, sometimes memories must be altered to beautify the ugliness of their reality. This is one of the themes in Michael John LaChiusa’s musical, The Gardens of Anuncia, directed and choreographed by Graciella Daniele. The Gardens of Anuncia is currently running at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse.
The musical’s picaresque, lyrical journey memorializes the women who inspire and encourage the artistic soul of Annuncia (Kalyn West), as she grows into a teenager, who then will flourish in her global career as a director, choreographer and dancer. The journey intimated is that of Graciella Daniele, Tony Award nominee (ten times), and recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award. Though she never won a Tony, Daniele’s directing and choreography of Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life, Annie Get Your Gun, Marie Christine, Once on This Island, The Pirates of Penzance, and Ragtime, are among her most memorable achievements.
Wisely, LaChiusa focuses not on the public career of Daniele, but on those who grounded the choreographer and director to prepare her to be an overcomer, ready to face obstacles and not be daunted by them. Through present narration by the older Anuncia (the charming, endearing Priscilla Lopez), on the eve of her acceptance of the Lifetime Achievement Award, in the garden of her country house, Anuncia meditates in flashback about her childhood with the three great women who influenced her, making her who she is today. As she readies herself to bury her aunt’s ashes, a final goodbye, she works through her memories, some hurtful, all poignant, growing up in Buenos Aires, Argentina during the Peronista government and movement in the 1940s and 1950s.
Auncia’s memories are vignettes that encompass vital turning points and revelations in the lives of the Younger Anuncia, Tia (Andrea Burns), Granmama (Mary Testa), and Mami (Eden Espinosa), all of them flowers burgeoning in the beautiful garden of her mind. Bounded by the older Anuncia’s narrative, we are introduced in the “Opening” to the women and their routines in the life they live daily in Granmama’s house in Buenos Aires. Together, the women raise the youngster and support each other after Mami and Anuncia are abandoned by Anuncia’s father, referred to as “That Man.” Lyrically, poetically, La Chiusa moves from present to past as the older Anuncia lands on memories that eventually reveal how each of the women traverse the paternalism of a male world and thrive.
The superb Priscilla Lopez (i.e. The Skin of Our Teeth, Anna in the Tropics), originated the role of Diana Morales in A Chorus Line, winning an Obie Award and Tony nomination. Lopez and Kalyn West portray Older Anuncia and Younger Anuncia, playing off one another seamlessly with grace. Through her reflections, the older Anuncia merges with her younger self to gain strength to finally put to rest the pain of the past, manifested in her finally burying her Tia’s ashes. As Lopez brings humor, poignancy, wisdom and loveliness to the older Anuncia, West embodies the innocence, increasing understanding, anger and astuteness when she asks questions and discovers the truth behind the answers that Tia, Grannmama and Mami give her.
From Tia, Young Anuncia learns to use her imagination to explore her world in, “Listen to the Music.” Additionally, Tia explains why she isn’t married and implies that she is happier without being tied down, having to answer and be obedient to a husband (“Smile for Me, Lucia”).
From her mother Mami, she receives the gift of ballet classes to strengthen her flat feet, as well as her interest in the dance. In Espinosa’s interpretation of the sensual “MalaGueña,” Mami dances the tango and sings about the club where she goes to dance with various partners in order to have fun, something that Granmama disapproves of.
Mary Testa’s Granmama adds humor and irony to the relationship the women have with each other. From Granmama, Anuncia learns her love of the dramatic and theatrical, as her Granmama’s reactions are always over the top. Her relationship with her husband, Anuncia’s grandfather, is explosive and extreme. It is forged in scandal and passion, thought it ends up in an eventual tiresome marriage, after which Granmama, eventually kicks him out. In “Waiting/Dreaming,” Anuncia learns they long for each other when he is away in the merchant marine, then can’t wait until he leaves, after a few days of crazy arguments and harangues when he returns.
From each of these incredible women, Anuncia attributes elements of her inner soul. Importantly, she also learns how and why “That Man,” her father, abandoned them and left them destitute, forcing Mami and Anuncia to move in with Tia and Granmama. All of the songs and events take place with the backdrop of danger and “disappearances,” during the Peron regime, a regime which also threatens the family when Mami is arrested.
The events in flashback and flash forward, with Older Anuncia’s narration that bridges them, unspool fluidly in a stylized, minimalist set design by Mark Wendland. The past and present flow into each other in Older Anuncia’s memory, suggested by the ease by which the characters step into the present in the garden of flowers that Older Anuncia talks to, beautifully intimated by Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer’s lighting design.
The garden is the perfect place of solitude where Old Anuncia revisits conversations and events with these beloved women, who shaped her and sent her with confidence and beauty into the wide world. The colorful, atmospherically lighted beads with attached flowers (Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer), separate the downstage where the conversations and reminiscences take place, with the past behind the beading where the characters exit.
Lopez, in her direct address to the garden of flowers that includes the audience, animates and enlivens them. Lopez is so specific in her performance, we believe she sees the peonies, the irises, the anemones and forsythias, though nothing is there. However, we note that this is who Anuncia has learned to be, influenced by Tia, to use her imagination.
Thus, in her garden of delights, she is able to converse with the floral pageantry she has planted, as well as the two male deer who come to visit her and nibble on her vegetables. The deer, who are brothers, are hysterically portrayed by Tally Sessions. The first deer gives her the wonderful advice to “Dance While You Can,” as they do a bolero. The second deer, shows up after an interval in time. He shares with the Older Anuncia that he lost his half-brother, who was hit by a car, obeying a “deer crossing” sign. The half-brother is bitter and droll. Lopez’s Anuncia returns the advice she received from the cheerful brother to the nihilistic half-brother, almost cheering him up.
The other male parts are portrayed by Enrique Acevedo who is Granpapa, That Man (Anuncia’s father) and other characters.
Older Anuncia’s garden meditations where she speaks to the plants and the deer are charming, ethereal and magical. They are part of her cultural heritage and legacy from Tia. Like her conversations with Tia, Mami, Grandmama and the others who have passed on, they are a part of her and not “ghosts” or something to be frightened of. The enlivened memories eventually bring the Older Anuncia to closure so that she can finally bury Tia’s ashes. It is time to rest her memories, it is time she lays them in peace in the garden of her mind, manifested in her country house garden.
Daniele directs and stages the actors specifically and acutely so that they seem to create their own geometric patterns and rhythms. The choreography remains simple and evocatively cultural, reflecting the time and place to emphasize the Older Anuncia’s memorialization of the women who are so dear to her. Though West does some ballet, it is more representational, as befits the glimpses into the past, as if Anuncia looks into the mirror and can only bear snippets of reminiscences. Indeed, memories are elusive and questionable. Did certain events happen? There is one that the Younger Anuncia affirms happened and wishes she could forget.
From the lyricism, to the suggestiveness and poetic nuances, LaChiusa’s musical is in a category by itself. As elusive as a butterfly’s shimmering, gossamer wings, The Gardens of Anuncia floats into our consciousness with its poignant softness and seduction with stirring themes about the power of imagination, the profound love conveyed by relatives to strengthen progeny, about legacy, and about the wisdom and love it takes to understand the impact of one generation shepherding the next.
The ensemble are exceptional. They merge, flow, harmonize, dance, spinning into the garden’s loveliness, then retreating back into the corner’s of the Older Anuncia’s mind. Just great!
Kudos go to all the creative team who explored and solidified Daniele’s vision of LaChiusa’s evocative, unique musical. In addition to those mentioned above, these include Toni-Leslie James (costumes), David Lander (lighting design recreation), Drew Levy (sound), Michael Starobin (orchestrations), Deborah Abramson (music director), and Alex Sanchez (co-choreographer).
The Gardens of Anuncia, Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse. Website: https://www.lct.org/shows/gardens-anuncia/
Dianne Wiest in ‘Scene Partners,’ a Wild, Woolly Romp Through The Reality of Imagination
How many women have dreamed of a career in Hollywood only to be dunned by everyone in their lives, except the still small voice encouraging them to try? And after they’ve reached their seventies and it’s too late and they attempt a career in the movies? WTF! Are they out of their minds? In Scene Partners, currently running at the Vineyard Theater, John J. Casewell, Jr. (Wet Brain) presents such a woman in his character Meryl Kowalski, portrayed with exceptional authenticity by Dianne Wiest in a bravura role that challenges expectations.
If Meryl’s relatives believe her packed bags, they would stop her and instead, shore up her living will and have her make final payments on her cemetery plot. Actually, they don’t have to. It’s 1985 and the entertainment industry patriarchy is in full swing, still the perfect place for abuse and rejection. After all, women in their late thirties are considered ancient and unbankable. Men and their puppet females in the industry will send Meryl to an insane asylum or to the grave toute suite, once she discovers how uncooperative they will be. Let her go to Los Angeles and make a fool of herself, a lesson she will never recover from. NOT!
the rub of John J. Casewell, Jr.’s genre-bending play is that Wiest’s enigmatic, nuanced Meryl succeeds beyond our wildest dreams. And she succeeds at a fractious time in the factory town when she should crash and burn immediately. Instead, Meryl and the acolytes she picks up along they way, unspool her anti-matter adventures that involve lift chairs and elevator shafts, and defy sense and sensibility, just for the fun of it.
Indeed! What else has a 75-year-old to do after her mouche (fly projected on a screen), husband dies and frees her from his battering abuse and emotional terrorism? Of course, she must free herself and follow the yellow brick road of her dreams sans money, sobriety and nihilism to become a movie star.
Part of the charm, humor and horror of Casewell Jr.’s Scene Partners, guided by astute director Rachel Chavkin, is that he playfully strings together scenes that appear haphazard but eventually have their own coherence, for a time. He stands familiar tropes (like logic and reality), on their heads, juxtapositioning them so that up is down, left is right. Then he turns them around again. Where is this lack of structural structure taking us, deep into the recesses of Meryl’s imagination? Or is this the stuff that dreams are made of and we all will wake UP back in Meryl’s kitchen, her bags ready to be unpacked?
This out of the box thinking is a good thing, for along the journey, we come to admire this unusual protagonist and find her humorous and adorable. Engaged, we watch as Meryl (turns out she was the first “Meryl” before the other actress), uses her determination and nimble mind, in whatever state it’s in to live in irony, freedom and her fantastic imagination. After all, what is reality anyway but quarks, particles, protons and electrons spinning beyond the speed of light so that what we think is a solid, is actually an illusion of spinning particles. What better place for Meryl to be than the land of illusions to add her own fantasies and realities to theirs! And lo and behold, she gets people out there to believe her! Could this happen as easily in New York City?
In a non-linear, fractured fashion, Meryl eventually spills the beans about her life which is being made into a film with her scene partners from acting class. Born in Los Angeles her father loved her, but her parents divorced and her mother ran away with another man, dragging her along. This stepfather fancied Meryl’s youth and expended himself on her, raping her for his good pleasure, though her mother and stepsister Charlize (the excellent Johanna Day), refused to acknowledge his sinister, sick lechery.
Masochistically continuing the abuse, instead of seeking freedom, we learn, she marries an abuser for life, named Stanley Kowalski. She explains, and we laugh, “I have no idea who’s responsible for feeding the details of my life to Mr. Williams for his little play.” Seeing her father relentlessly beat her mother, daughter Flora (Kristen Sieh), another victim, becomes an addict who depends on Meryl for food, clothing, everything.
Appalled that her mom is leaving her with no food in the house and abandoning her to confront her own addictions (principally self-destruction), Flora criticizes and insults Meryl for following her dreams. Meryl replies, “I have been acting all of my life! It’s about time I get paid for it!”
Indeed, I cannot imagine anyone else in this role, even Meryl Streep. In every breath of dialogue, Dianne Wiest appears to comprehend this victim turned hero, who is a combination of fantasist, Norman Vincent Peale practitioner and chronic traumatic encephalopathy survivor (battered brain syndrome). The power in her will to carve out her own reality out of life goal takes an inner truth and determination that Wiest so capably expresses. She has done similarly in each of the roles she performs, i.e. the sweetly accepting mother in Edward Scissorhands, the hysterical actress Helen Sinclair in Woody Allen’s Bullets Over Broadway (1994). In this ironic, wildly insentient role of Meryl, she achieves a pinnacle, if that is possible. I hope not, for she is imminently watchable and must do more stage productions.
When she points the gun at Josh Hamilton’s Herman, you believe she will shoot as she smiles at him. She’s happily dead serious. Thus, he believes her and he takes her on as his client, interested at her new approach and believability.
Additionally, at times Wiest’s Meryl is out of focus as if in medias res, in a chopped up segue which has no before and a questionable after, confused, wobbly, unsure of herself. This is especially so in the opening scene when she appears on camera (David Bengali’s video & production design), via projection. Styled with make-up and hair for her “close-up, Mr. DeMille,” her wide-eyed, silent response to the voice-over director’s, “Whenever you’re ready, sweetheart,” appears vacantly shocked. Is she amazed that she actually is where she said she would be? Or is something else going on, like a lapse in memory or identity? Wiest keeps her portrayal fresh, surprising, astounding. You can’t take your eyes off her.
Intentionally difficult to describe, Caswell, Jr.’s play hides in the shadows, as if throwing onto the stage anything that is humorous, upended and Wiest is up for. He twits our need to grasp onto something firm, like an arc of development that doesn’t involve Meryl’s strange train ride and sexual intimacies with a Russian conductor. And then there is a hop, skip and jump to “Horray for Hollywood!” and Meryl is threatening Herman Wasserman for auditions and parts with a gun. Speedily after that, she is in acting class with fellow actors.
Scene Partners succeeds because it cracks open another realm of being that is illogical and brashly, humorously defiant. It asks us to accept Meryl for who she is and what she learns about herself in her fragility, lapses, unreal realities and bits and pieces from movies that have clearly impacted her psyche. With help from a fine ensemble, Johanna Day’s grounded stepsister, John Hamilton, edgy and annoying in various roles, Kristen Sieh and others, the vignettes created and cobbled together form a life resurrected into one of purpose, joy and happiness. Does it truthfully matter if we don’t understand all elements about Meryl? Do we ever understand all elements about ourselves?
If we see through a prism the rainbow colors, some emphasized one day, others the next, maybe that’s a good thing. And if we follow dreams, even if only in our imaginations, perhaps that’s all that matters if we don’t harm anyone else. In fact, we may even bring others together pursuing the “unlikely” or the “ridiculous.”
Kudos to the creative team which includes Riccardo Hernandez (scenic design), Brenda Abbandandolo (costume design), Alan C. Edwards (lighting design), Leah Gelpe (sound design), Leah Loukas (hair, wig & makeup design), David Bengali (video & projection design) and others. And special kudos to the director, actors and Wiest, who helped to make Meryl’s world authentic in its wild and crazy configurations.
Scene Partners is a must-see for its zaniness and for Wiest’s dynamic, fascinating performance. For tickets go online https://vineyardtheatre.org/shows/scene-partners/
CAROLE DI TOSTI 