‘The Notebook,’ Poignant, Reverent, Knockout Performances by Maryann Plunkett and Dorian Harewood
Fans who have seen the film or read Nicholas Sparks’ titular novel will not be disappointed with The Notebook on Broadway, currently running at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre. With music and lyrics by Ingrid Michaelson and book by Bekah Brunstettter, the musical based on the Sparks’ novel dramatizes the relationship of Noah and Allie using different couples to represent their life stages. With a few changes in the setting from the novel, young and old can appreciate the deeply personal aesthetic and profound expression of fidelity, not often seen, that reveals Allie and Noah’s intimacy and devotion to each other.
Directed by Michael Greif & Schele Williams, The Notebook’s staging is fluid and stylized, happening mostly in remembrances past. It simultaneously layers the key turning points in the stages of Allie’s and Noah’s relationship (teenage years, late twenties). Through vignettes of scenes between the young Allie (Jordan Tyson) and Noah (John Cardoza) and then the middle Allie (Joy Woods) and Noah (Ryan Vasquez), we understand how the couple’s relationship developed.
We are kept in suspense when Allie’s parents disapprove of Noah and they don’t see each other for years, each pursuing their own dreams. We learn what stood in their way to break them up, and discover how they eventually get back together again, despite their differences in background economically and socially.
The musical takes place in the present in a nursing home where Old Noah (the superb Dorian Harewood), lives to stay near his wife Allie (an incredible Maryann Plunkett), who has degenerative Alzheimer’s. If you have not seen the film or read the novel, you are unaware of Noah’s identity and intentions until he meets with his family and they tell him he cannot afford to stay with their mom in the facility to keep her company. He has to let her go. However, their bond transcends even their children. Noah ignores them.
The strength of the musical is in Greif and Williams’ staging that suggests memory and consciousness brought to life by the journal that Noah reads daily to Allie in her room in the extended care facility. Allie wrote the memoir in remembrance of their love. Noah’s promise to read it to her was made, we learn, when she realized she was becoming immersed in the darkness and confusion of early onset Alzheimer’s. She desperately hoped her own words would trigger her consciousness and memory to maintain their powerful love connection.
The musical’s inherent focus on memory and the indeterminate nature of time in human consciousness reveals how love transcends, heals and can make memories as alive as reality. Eventually, the truth can break through, as it does by the conclusion of the musical, when Allie realizes who Noah is and why he is with her every day. If one has had experiences with relatives who have Alzheimer’s, some relate that in the midst of their relatives’ seeming insentience, there are moments of clarity that appear miraculous. How and why this occurs with this unfortunate condition remains a mystery which one day may be solved.
In respectful consideration of Allie’s situation, Brunstetter’s book encapsulates The Notebook from Noah’s perspective. The directors are mindful of how Noah’s memories and Allie’s words stir Allie, Noah and even Fin (Carson Stewart), who at one point picks up the journal and reads a steamy scene that humorously wows him.
Predominately, the directors strive for coherent, symbolic and meaningful interaction between the couples’ vignettes chronicling, not always in order, but thematically, the events expressing Noah and Allie’s eternal bond created before they were married. As Noah dozes in a chair and dreams of the formation of that bond between Young Noah and Young Allie, the actors are situated downstage to the edge of the proscenium, where there is water and a shoreline bathed in Ben Stanton’s beautiful, bluish tinged moonlight. The night scene conveys an atmosphere of romance. The brief dialogue indicates the couple’s youthful naivete and exuberance where anything is possible even their love. Tyson’s Allie says the words no lover wants to hear; she has to “go home” to her parents.
Ironically, these are words Older Allie in the present says to the nurses and to Old Noah, in confusion, as if she’s searching for the comfort she associates with the home she once made with her life’s partner standing before her, who she doesn’t recognize. Plunkett’s Allie, unsettled in the extended care facility, is triggered by a past that nudges just below her consciousness. She tries but fails to remember the house that Noah built just for her. If only she could get back there, she would know where she is in the present and who the old man is who comes to visit every day.
In that first moonlight and romance scene, Young Noah’s response of eternal love is that Young Allie can stay with him forever, to which she playfully agrees. Simplistic, facile teenagers make promises. However, it is the rare relationship and rare individuals who keep promises in a world of lies, canards, fakery, AI, betrayals, and deceit, where “forever” love is expressed to “get over” and treachery and selfishness are the game plan.
The Notebook is profound in its simplicity, and can be underestimated. Indeed, who is able to love forever, be faithful to one person forever, and not just give lip service to a relationship? This is a key theme of the musical, for through Noah’s unwavering fidelity and Allie’s words, we see how this is possible for this couple who loves simply and endearingly. Overall, the production manifests this theme with sincerity aided by the phenomenal performances of Plunkett and Harewood, who pivot the action forward as the Noahs and Allies affirm the beauty of the relationship in snippets of dialogue and the vitality of song.
Young Noah and Allie lightly reference a forever love which indeed comes true; both age together and Old Noah stays with Old Allie to the very end of their lives. Likewise, the promise they make as kids to see each other the next day also comes true in their lives together, even when a gulf of oblivion separates them. Old Noah sees Old Allie in her room to read from the journal in hope every day. Plunkett’s masterful effort in presenting Allie’s struggle to know her identity and Noah’s, paves the way for the payoff at the conclusion, where she remembers, and together they metaphorically return forever to the home they have made of their love.
The music and songs resonate, some more forcefully, some more lyrically than others. The opening song that Harewood’s Noah sings with the ensemble (except for Older Allie), “Time,” is an inspiring and soulful ballad that embraces life’s mutability and time’s swift passage. The song summarizes the permanence of their future relationship and unfolds with the presence of the younger and middle couples who sing with Old Noah symbolizing Allie and Noah’s younger selves.
It is a soundscape of memories where they identify how they live “to keep going, keep running, keep standing, keep leaning, keep learning, keep hoping.” This premiere ballad establishes what’s to follow, as the ensemble’s voices meld with loveliness in lyrical harmonies. This first song, the song at the end of Act I, “Home,” and the final song, “The Coda” are the most powerfully wrought and most memorable and significant in relating the love and devotion of this unique couple who have been blessed in their love and faithfulness.
Throughout Act I Old Noah persists coaxing Old Allie with the journal passages, and we follow the narrative of their first kiss and first intimacy, first fight, first pledge to write to each other. The musical reveals these two are drawn to love on another level, which is the mysterious unseen of love relationships.
This is in contrast to the socially acceptable diagram of “successful love and marriage,” which Allie’s mother (Andrea Burns), wants for her daughter. Allie’s mother defines happiness by the society’s values of career success and college education, which Allie is forced to accept because of her mother’s betrayal for “Allie’s own good.”
However, Allie and Noah’s relationship, unlike Allie’s mother and father’s relationship, is not defined by material things and upward social mobility. Though Brunsetter doesn’t mention “spiritual” vs. “material,” the undercurrents are clear when the excellent Joy Woods’ Middle Allie in her solo numbers affirms who she is and who she wants to be (“Leave the Light On,” “My Days”). To what extent Noah is a part of who she wants to be, she discovers when she returns to the town and is drawn by curiosity and an unconscious, perhaps spiritual desire to locate the house Noah has built and outfitted for her with his superb carpentry and woodworking skills.
In the subsequent scene the invisible bond between them manifests. We discover what prevented them from being together sooner in a powerful scene between Burns’ mother and Woods’ Middle Allie. Instead of belaboring additional details, Brunstetter moves the action to its foreshadowed conclusion. This doesn’t occur before a few suspenseful, gyrating events in flashback and in the present. One is that Old Noah, who is in the hospital after a stroke, won’t be able to keep his promise to rekindle Allie’s memory ever again.
Kudos to the creative team who carried the directors’ visions for The Notebook. These include David Zinn & Brett J. Banakis (scenic design), Paloma Young’s color coordinated costume costume design, Ben Stanton’s lighting design, Nevin Steinberg’s sound design (I could hear every word) and Mia Neal’s Hair & Wig Design. Additional kudos to Carmel Dean’s music supervision and arrangements and Katie Spelman’s choreography.
The Notebook is a must-see because of the performances and the directors’ vision in bringing reality to a popular work of fiction. Ignore the pandering “tear-jerker” comments by some critics for whom fidelity and eternal love may be empty promises.
The Notebook, one intermission runs until November 24th. Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, 236 West 45th Street between 7th and 8th. https://notebookmusical.com/tickets/
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‘Pericles’ by Fiasco Theater a Joyful, Redemptive Must-See at CSC
Fiasco Theater’s Pericles presented by CSC is one of William Shakespeare’s works written in the twilight of his career that reveals a “hero” who the fates torment and play with until it is enough, and he receives his wish of a fulfilled life with family. The production directed by Ben Steinfeld is stylized and cleverly wrought, advancing storms, shipwrecks, kidnappings and more with the ingenuity and charm joyfully delivered with as little forced spectacle as possible, yet with an intriguing, bold and seamless minimal set and prop design. Currently at CSC until March 24, this is a must see which Fiasco has brought for us to appreciate.
Steinfeld is Gower, the troubadour whose tale this is. Through his music, lyrics and poetry he sets up the play and requires the audience to use their imagination to become involved with Pericles of Tyre’s harrowing and amazing adventures of a lifetime. Steinfeld’s Gower introduces every section and gives a summation of events essentially cluing in and reminding the audience to stay focused and attentive. He leads the cast in song initially and establishes the mood for each of the acts, making sure to recap the events in rhyme after the audience returns from the 10 minute intermission before Act 2.
There are four actors who portray Pericles and give their timber to each scene and adventure that Pericles experiences as he goes on a hero’s journey learning wisdom, perseverance, patience and fortitude, struggling to overcome whatever Fortune brings.
The first Pericles is Paco Tolson who journeys to the kingdom of Antioch where he must solve a riddle to marry King Antiochus’ (Noah Brody) beautiful daughter (Emily Young). If he doesn’t solve the riddle, he forfeits his life and hangs like the other suitors in the public square which the creative team and actors simplistically yet fearfully stage with staffs and boxes/crates. Hearing the riddle, Pericles shows his brilliance apart from all the suitors who have courted the king’s daughter and died. He understands King Antiochus’ treachery. The riddle infers the king’s incestuous relations with his daughter, who he will never give to a suitor.
Upon realizing this horrid circumstance, Pericles also realizes his own fate. Either way, if he reveals the riddle and exposes the king’s sin to public humiliation or doesn’t, he’s a dead man.
Making his excuses, Pericles ends up escaping Antiochus’ kingdom. He intuits the king will figure out why he left and come after him, so Pericles goes on a journey to Tarsus where King Cleon (Devin E. Haqq) and Dionyza (Titiana Wechsler) make their home and suffer through the dire misery of famine that has struck their lands. Knowing their plight, Pericles brings corn to Tarsus’ starving people and saves them from death. Forever grateful, King Cleon makes Pericles revered and celebrated in the land with friendship and goodness. However, we learn that kings are political and variable and circumstances change to sever the friendship.
For the moment in his life’s travels Pericles is unaware of the possibility of deceit and betrayal. Called back to his home in Tyre by the administrator he left in charge, Helicanus (Paul L Coffey), Pericles once more bares himself to Neptune’s wrath on the fickle Mediterranean where the god upends and destroys his ship. Fiasco Theater’s inventiveness of Pericles braving the storm’s fury (Mextly Couzin’s lighting design and the Fiasco’s production design), using a bolt of cloth to suggest the tempestuous waves, maintains the stylized, roughly-hewn playfulness of the production. The soft, shimmery cloth symbolizing the waves belies the irony of Pericles’ situation on the roiling sea.
Pericles loses everything but his life and is washed up on the shores of Pentapolis. There, he is at the mercy of the fishermen who find him and change his fortune with happy information. Pentapolis is ruled by the goodly King Simonedes, (the humorous Andy Grotelueschen), a pleasant reversal of the kings who have gone before.
Shakespeare contrasts the kingdoms and their kings: the first is a lecherous murderer, the second variable in deceit and this third king. The fun loving Simonedes is popular even to the lowly fishermen who tell Pericles that the king holds a tournament and feast for his daughter’s birthday. The celebration is so that Thaisa (Jessie Austrian) may find suitors among the knights who joust for her. When Pericles’ armor washes ashore, the fishermen encourage him to compete for the king’s daughter. Shakespeare makes it a key point that though he is a stranger (an migrant) in their midst, he receives their country’s hospitality and mirth.
Pericles wins the jousting matches, performed with the sames staves Fiasco used to suggest the suitors’s hanging in Antioch. It is an example of how the theater company employs the props efficiently and meaningfully to emphasize themes of power, leadership and control. Through their variable exchange we note the contrast between the kingdoms and their rulers’ leadership, either deceitfully tyrannical or happily beneficent.
After the tournament, King Simonedes invites all the knights for a feast. The wooden crates which have been used as a throne, to circumscribe walls, etc., are now used to effect a long feast table. And there, Pericles (Titiana Wechsler portrays Pericles in this segment) gains the king’s favor and the love of Thaisa.
For his pains and pleasure, the Simonedes playfully uses reverse psychology to have the couple declare their love to each other by pretending to forbid their union. Jokingly, he reveals his pleasure at their marriage which produces an heir. In the next scene we see that a pregnant Thaisa, and husband Pericles (Noah Brody in this version) go on an ocean voyage back to Tyre to check on his kingdom.
Again, there is a storm at sea and dire circumstances. Thaisa who dies in childbirth must be thrown overboard to steady the ballast or the ship will sink. Pericles prepares her coffin with spices and jewels with a note to whomever finds the coffin to bury his wife whom he greatly loves. The child who was born as Thaisa died Pericles names Marina. To redeem the time, Pericles leaves Marina with those who revere him in the land of Tarsus. King Cleon and Dionyza promise to care for Marina like she is their own, while he returns to rule Tyre.
The staging of the scene where Marina is given to King Cleon is simultaneously juxtaposed with the fate of Thaisa whose coffin washes ashore at Ephesus. The director makes excellent use of the space at CSC to clarify what happens. As Pericles hands over baby Marina to his friends, a woman with powers of healing (Tatiana Wechsler with hair down in flowing priestly robes) restores Thaisa back to life. So thankful is Thaisa that she becomes a devotee of Diana and officiates at her temple. Meanwhile, Pericles is heartbroken and grieves his dead wife but joys that his child is being raised well. As fate would have it, during the fifteen years Marina has been brought up with the daughter of Dionyza, things grow problematic.
Dionyza envies Marina’s beauty and talents and decides she must be murdered for the sake of her own daughter, so their child will shine if the glory of Marina is removed. Though Cleon opposes Dionyza’s evil act, he is powerless to stop her. But just as Marina is about to be killed, pirates kidnap her and thwart the murder. In the following sequences, Gower shifts the mood once more and the riotous humor of how Marina’s chastity is used to great effect proves comical in a brothel run by Bolt (Andy Grotelueschen) and Bawd (Jessie Austrian). There, Emily Young’s Marina turns away the lusty, hot clients who are horrified that she pushes her virginity onto them and attempts to make them Diana (the feminist of the time) devotees. Of course the irony is that Thasia, her mother, is back in Ephesus praying as a Diana devotee.
In the second act, Fiasco’s farcical skills shine and the atmosphere shifts from Fate’s woes to merriment at those lecherous males who should be ridiculed for their unseemliness. However, when it is least expected, Pericles, who returns to Tarsus to bring his daughter back to Tyre to rule with him, discovers through Cleon that Marina drowned. Indeed, King Cleon and his wife have betrayed Pericles’ goodness and there is no punishment for them as there was for King Antiochus who the gods burned up. It would seem that incest is the worst crime when it begets murder. Dionyza’s intention of murder the wicked pirates interrupted; it is an irony is that the pirates evil act is turned around for goodness. Dionyza’s envy and murderous intention the gods leave to her and Cleon’s consciences to seek redemption.
Inconsolable that she is gone, Pericles (an excellent David E. Haqq in the last, most emotional segment) will not speak and is dead in spirit. How events change magically to effect Pericles’ reunion with his wife and daughter is poignant and heart-rending, if not fanciful in hope. Interestingly, Shakespeare makes abundant use of the Deus ex Machina (the gods interrupt evil fate to save the hero) in Pericles. As Gower and the cast conclude the tale of Pericles, King of Tyre, we are uplifted by the grace of a happy ending, and the redemption offered to Marina, Pericles and Thaisa because of their goodness, devotion to the values of truth, generosity, decency and steadfastness.
The strengths of this production include the fine ensemble’s seamless acting which provides the coherence throughout, even though the character of Pericles has four actors which was initially confusing. The whimsical and at times farcical, lighthearted approach toward myth-making and storytelling through music, rhyme, dance and song are superbly balanced throughout. The stylization is the correct choice for a play that gyrates throughout voyage, disaster, and roller coaster storms that metaphorically parallel human joys and sorrows.
That the play has been spurned as silly and not worthy of being produced has been a misread of the depth of one of Shakespeare’s most trenchant latter plays. The life theme is an important one. For those who patiently endure, they gain wisdom in temperance and the power to face and overcome trials of their faith. The obstacles help one all the more appreciate and be grateful for a life that acknowledges human beings live on the brink of peril every moment of their lives. To be numb to that knowledge is to live a zombie death in life.
This is a must-see, for the music, songs, fantasy, laughter and fanciful, profound truth-telling.
Pericles. CSC, 136 E 13th St between Third and Fourth Avenues. Closes March 24th. https://www.classicstage.org/pericles/
‘Corruption,’an Important Play at Lincoln Center Theater, Mitzi E. Newhouse
Corruption‘s well paced reimagining of the UK phone hacking scandal involving Rupert Murdock’s News Corp. empire is written by JT Rogers (Oslo) and directed by Bartlett Sher (Oslo). The hybrid drama/comedy is enjoying its premiere off Broadway, Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse. Rogers’ epic chronicle exposes key individuals employed by News Corp who follow a dangerous ethic: the ends justify the means. These media players believe that corporate profits legitimize any deleterious impact the media may have on the victims they exploit.
In the era of US fake conservative news, Roger’s two act play trenchantly reminds media consumers that malignant CEOs of companies monopolize and weaponize power and influence to oppress human rights. Ultimately, they direct global political affairs to their profitable advantage. Even if the companies harm the populace, and there are lawsuits, in the corporations’ ethos, it’s OK as long as the bottom line is not irreparably damaged. Corruption reveals that there are always ambitious and warped lackeys at the ready, like Rebekah Brooks (the excellent Saffron Burrows), who may engineer or accept malign acts for the company’s betterment.
Based on Tom Watson and Martin Hickman’s book Dial M for Murdock: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain, Rogers’ play is an exhaustive and detailed examination of the players and insider events which reveal the cover up of News Corp’s employees illegally trashing the privacy of 11,000 citizens. These not only included celebrities. Reporters used “information” illegally sourced from politicians and ordinary people alike. With this material reporters sensationalized stories for maximum shock value. When they couldn’t get enough truth or facts to fill a teaspoon, they made up lies out of whole cloth.
During the unspooling of the play’s events, we learn that no one was considered too great or too small to smear and damage, as long as the effect produced was eyeballs glued to the tabloids, specifically “The News of the World” headed up by Rebekah Brooks CEO of News International.
The play is at its edgy, sharp best when Rogers dramatizes the conflict between key adversaries Rebekah Brooks (Saffron Burrows), and Tom Watson (Toby Stephens), as well as their allies and foes. For Brooks, problematic allies she manipulates are legal counsel Tom Crone (Dylan Baker), and Rupert’s son, James Murdoch, (Seth Numrich) in addition to Prime Minister Gordon Brown (Anthony Cochrane). For Watson, major allies include Martin Hickman, friend and reporter for the Independent (Sanjit De Silva), the lawyer representing hacking victims, Charlotte Harris (Sepideh Moafi), and Siobhan, Watson’s wife (Robyn Kerr).
There are forty-six characters portrayed ably by thirteen actors. Rogers sacrifices in-depth characterization, in part, to relay the sweeping phone hacking story that energizes his themes. In the forefront is the imperative that a free, vital press, unhampered by a company’s profit motive, is essential to produce the facts and information which enable a democracy to function. That way citizens can make informed decisions to improve the social good and hold bad actors to account. However, to receive such news and information, the populace must be educated and knowledgeable. It is up to them to reject a diet of calumny, lies, and sensationalistic fabrications that support anti-science “the earth is flat” stupidities, and “in your face” political propaganda and nihilism.
Escapist tabloid journalism which exploits the “sickness” of others in a voyeuristic display to make the reader feel better with their lot, capitalizes on the lowest bar in human nature. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp revels in feeding the populace trash for high profits, then projects that citizens are to blame for demanding such fare. This is an affirmation that the character Rebekah Brooks suggests at the play’s conclusion. In her final commentary, she justifies the necessity of The News of the World with a presumption that without the tabloids’ profitable journalism, there would be no other journalism. “The
profits from my papers allow the papers you read to exist. There is no journalism without my journalism.”
However after careful consideration Rogers’ Corruption shows that Brooks and Murdoch’s tabloids and his faux “news” empire normalized indecency, negative propaganda and lies in order to control and gain power. The playwright’s overriding question is whether Murdoch and Brooks truly provided a necessary service or negatively frayed the social fabric of goodness because of their own greed and rapacity.
The play opens at Rebekah Brooks’ wedding reception, where Rogers introduces the ambitious woman that Rupert Murdoch trusted to make him money. In a private room, newly appointed head of News Corp UK, James Murdoch, and Brooks go head to head. They argue about the direction of News Corp’s future. James Murdoch asserts that the print division barely makes money. From James, we learn that Brooks has clawed her way through the ranks to be editor of The Sun, a powerful position which gives her equal footing to counter his arguments.
Numrich’s Murdoch states that technology, digital media, and TV are where News Corp will be in the future because print journalism is a relic of the past. Brooks argues that her print division fuels all other journalism. At the end of the scene James Murdoch congratulates her on her new appointment as CEO of News International. Father Rupert Murdoch trusts her with the responsibility of continuing the profitability of all the Murdock tabloids. She will not let papa down.
Throughout the play, Rogers highlights the nefarious brilliance of Brooks who maintains the efficacy of the scurrilous tabloids and stops at nothing to ensure they add to the soaring profits of News Corp. No wonder why old school Rupert Murdoch loves her more than his son, and does everything to keep her near, even after the scandal blows up in their faces.
In attempting to cram in salient details, Rogers keeps scenes short. Sher directs the action at a seamless, brisk pace with minimal set design by Michael Yeargan. The tech crew interchanges and rearranges tables between scenes to provide the change of setting and atmosphere of alacrity. The staging reflects the rapid and shifting state of the “news” media, hyped up on digital steroids. It predominately features multiple TV screens onstage and at the top of the proscenium. The screens show various news clips and shows during that time. The blinking screens are purposefully a distraction from the dialogue. When text messages are posted, we see the quotes projected on the back wall via 59 Productions projection design.
Ironically, with the media constantly flickering at us, the audience becomes numbed to the visuals and eventually ignores them. One of the takeaways of Sher’s staging is that the media overload we are expected to negotiate and be aware of on our phone screens numbs us and in fact dulls our awareness. It becomes harder to keep up or understand the complexity of events that are reduced to a few words of soundbites and quickly edited visuals. Without that complexity of understanding, facile, wrong opinions are formed and judgment is skewed toward the superficial assumption and wrong conclusion.
Companies like News Corp rely on tabloids to offer a contrast to the in-your-face screens which mesmerize and numb. The tabloids give the reader the semblance of “controlling” the information that they have bought in print. However, the opposite is true and, as Rogers’ drama proves, the tabloids are filled with mostly exploitation pieces that masquerade as factual and realistic. Understanding and depth are sacrificed for the superficial and shocking.
During the the first act, we note Brooks and News Corp’s power. Brooks gently threatens Prime Minister Gordon Brown to fire Tom Watson (his labor MP who has been his hatchet man). She warns Brown that the story she is releasing about Watson will create havoc and implies if Brown doesn’t get rid of him, it may take down the Labor Party and Brown with it by association. Brooks jokes that Brown is “running the country, isn’t he?” Indeed, maybe he isn’t, if Brooks is leveraging lies to force Brown to fire Watson.
Brooks wields tremendous power as a kingmaker and king breaker. She operates with impunity, because no one has the courage to investigate or litigate against “The News of the World’s” defamation, lies, calumny and payoffs. We learn the tabloids’ shock and scandal value are critical to blackmail. Brooks and the tabloid intimidate almost everyone who is anyone in the culture and society of the UK.
Watson confronts Brown about Brooks’ political hit job. Sher has the actual headlines projected on the backstage screen, “Treacherous Tom Watson,” “Mad Dog Trained to Maul,”etc. Brown soft pedals Watson by saying no one believes the lies that Watson “registered pornographic websites under other politicians’ names.” However, Brooks doesn’t retract the lies as other UK papers do. Siobhan, Tom’s wife, insists that Tom lay low in parliament and say nothing because she is tired of the negative PR and the outrage and stalking that has hounded them and terrified their son. Watson quiets down in parliament in the next scene and we see how Brooks gets her way now and in the future when News Corp backs the Tory Party candidate James Cameron to win.
Though Brooks has sucked the life and power out of Watson, he sues and his fury converts to action as he teams up with his friend Martin Hickman from the Independent and other allies after learning the police quashed an investigation into phone hacking. Brooks and Andy Coulson, the heads of News International disavow any knowledge of the hacking, despite documents that link hired investigator Glen Mulcaire’s (Dylan Baker), illegal acts to News International reporters.
The fact that only Mulcaire goes to jail while Andy Coulson is promoted to director of communications for David Cameron and the Torys spurs Watson and his team to apply pressure via Twitter, blog posts and other social media questioning why the police backed off the investigation. Not only do they elicit the help of a wealthy individual who had been hacked and slimed, eventually, they pull in the New York Times to cover their story. Watson’s team brings into view how Brooks and her cohorts have destroyed the lives of ordinary citizens and caused destruction and misery for profit.
In the very long first act which is expositional, perhaps some of the details and/or scenes may have been edited and reworked. The second act moves quickly to a satisfying resolution as The News of the World, Coulson and Brooks are held accountable. However, the punishment is a mere slap on the wrist for Coulson-four months in prison. Brooks is found innocent of all charges. Though Murdock closes down Brooks’ tabloid, after a time, she is keeping things humming elsewhere.
When the question arises, what did they all go through hell for, it is Watson’s wife Siobhan who encourages Tom to continue to stand up for the truth. Only with persistent fighting against the maelstrom of lies will the truth ever be seen. One can only hope.
Corruption is an important play about the Murdoch empire that reveals how News Corp steamrolled through the UK first to gain extraordinary power which then was used to blossom evilly in the US. Leaping across the pond News Corp’s malignant MO impacted the 2016 US presidential election by helping to install the incompetent, unqualified, Donald Trump as president. His negligent, derelict actions during the COVID-19 pandemic had serious global economic impact and social repercussions that many countries are still reeling from today.
Fox News in the US perpetuated Donald Trump’s making COVID-19 a political crises. Tragically, this political emphasis actually spread the contagion and made it difficult to ameliorate, especially in the southern United States. If the UK had acted to contain News Corp and hold it accountable with massive financial fines and more severe punishments, it may have paused News Corp’s Brooks, Coulson and others and curtailed its power and influence in the US
Rogers raises important questions in Corruption. What price do we pay for the decency and dignity of privacy? For those who violate our right to privacy, shouldn’t the punishment be severe because it is a crime of violence on our persons, a metaphoric rape and humiliation, especially if the citizens are not celebrities getting paid for their fame?
Though the play has infelicities, the acting, direction and pacing allow the themes to shine. It is these in our time that resonate most fiercely, especially as we face the AI fabrication of photographs, voices and more.
Corruption. Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse. The play is two hours forty minutes with one intermission. https://www.lct.org/shows/corruption/schedule/
‘Doubt: a Parable’ The Revival With Liev Schreiber and Amy Ryan is Exceptional
If nothing is certain but uncertainty, then “doubt” is a natural state, as genius quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg in his uncertainty principle postulated. However, in the realm of faith, “doubt” may be a blasphemy as scripture encourages Christian adherents to “walk by faith, not by sight,” believing fervently, blindly in God and His truths. Such is the position that Sister Aloysius Beauvier (Amy Ryan) initially presents in John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt: a Parable ably directed with specificity and edginess by Scott Ellis.
Doubt, currently in its first revival on Broadway since it premiered in 2005 continues to be a controversial powerhouse exposing embarrassing infelicities about the Catholic Church and the patriarchy.
In this beautifully acted revival running with no intermission at Todd Haimes Theatre, we note how the play emphasizes many of the divisive cultural issues at stake today though the setting is 1964, the Bronx, New York. However, Shanley nails the timeless sticky problems operating then and now with institutions that are incapable of policing themselves when they are run by men. Specifically, the play delves into church sponsored schools. Their male dominated hierarchy and paternalism shuffled off the harder tasks of teaching, learning and administration to the women. In this instance, the Sisters of Charity do the scut work in “collaboration” with the diocese in the fictional St. Nicholas Church.
To highlight his themes Shanley contrives a situation among three religious adherents who influence children toward or away from Catholic tenets. These include the charismatic Father Flynn (Liev Schreiber), pastor of St. Nicholas, the school principal, Sister Aloysius, and neophyte teacher and nunm Sister James (Zoe Kazan). Their dynamic interplay reveals age-old issues about the best and worst of human nature, goodness, egotism, arrogance, the need to control through guilt and fear, inability to discern lies from truth, gender inequality and hypocrisy.
Doubt opens with Schreiber’s Father Flynn addressing the audience as his congregation, preaching a sermon on the opportunities of having doubt as a part of the bonds of faith. Father Flynn’s sermon frames the play’s arc of development and the subject becomes the driving force as each character confronts their uncertainties about what is right, decent, truthful as they project their own inner weaknesses onto the behavior of each other. Importantly, their uncertainties reveal a crises of their faith in God to move them through the darkness. Instead of allowing God’s love to unify them, darkness, suspicion and doubt overcome them.
The second scene opens on the office finely outfitted by David Rockwell’s wood paneled set design on a turntable which later revolves to show a pleasant Garden and backdrop of the city beyond. Sister Aloysius unleashes her intentions and suspicions on Sister James in the confines of her principal’s office. Ryan’s Sister Aloysius is a martinet who runs a tight ship with a stern, icebox demeanor. In her spot-on, nuanced portrayal of the nun, Ryan never shines forth Christ’s light and love and remains largely an emotionless cipher until the conclusion. To her credit, Ryan never pushes Sister Aloysius’s austere attitude over the edge, but breathes feeling and life into her persuasiveness and her determination with fervency.
On the other hand, Father Flynn (Liev Schreiber) the priest, who is the pastor of St. Nicholas, manifests an openness, intelligence, flexibility, forward thinking personality and sense of irony. He and Sister Aloysius appear to be opposites in character, though both fabricate and lie; Father Flynn to drive home themes in his sermons, Sister Aloysius to “get at” the truth. The lighthearted, yet controlling Father conducts the physical education program and religion at the school. Both Sister Aloysius and Father Flynn follow the hierarchy and answer to the Monseigneur. This remains an obstacle for Sister Aloysius because she deems the elder cleric “other worldly” to a fault. She tells the young neophyte Sister James (Zoe Kazan), that he “doesn’t know who the president of the United States is.” Yet, here men rule.
A problem for the manipulative, coercive Sister Aloysius, the Monseigneur will dismiss any issue she brings to him, unlike another cleric she confided in at St. Boniface who believed her word and got rid of a priest Sister Aloysius implies was a pederast. Suspicious about Father Flynn, and questioning the personal purpose of his sermon about “doubt,” Sister Aloysius picks at Sister James like a feather pecking chicken who dominates hens by pecking them to draw blood because she enjoys its taste.
Preparing her victim for maximum influence, Aloysius criticizes Kazan’s Sister James. She derides her showboating as a teacher, her enthusiasm about her subject, her kindness to the students. She discourages Sister James’ relaxed atmosphere in her classes. After reducing the young nun to tears, she directs the neophyte to be emotionless and watchful about anything untoward. We learn later, as Sister James confides in Father Flynn, that the older nun has stolen her joy about teaching and has contributed to her bad dreams and loss of peace. This irony is not lost on us today, when religion is used as a hammer and sickle to browbeat and slice up the condemned populace to contort their lifestyles to politicized religious tenets popular over 120 years ago.
Sister James becomes the perfect foil for the imperious, commanding Sister Aloysius to manipulate and play upon in the tug of war between Sister Aloysius and Father Flynn. Initially, the “war” appears grounded in a difference in philosophies and life approaches between progressivism vs. conservatism. However, the divisiveness between them takes a sinister turn and explodes as Sister Aloysius gives rise to her suspicions that Father Flynn is grooming Black student Donald Muller for pederasty by giving him alcohol in the sacristy. It is an accusation that is proven only in her imagination.
Sister James is like a deflated ball tossed about in the storm that rages between Sister Aloysius’s determination to expose and evict Father Flynn from the church and Father Flynn’s insistence he is telling the truth and has done nothing wrong. In a climactic scene between them, Flynn’s denials and pleadings with her to count the cost to Donald, him and herself and to amend her convictions and threats because of a lack of proof, go on deaf ears. She has converted herself into the “anointed.” She would make those of the Inquisition proud, except they never would listen to a female.
To complicate the matter Sister Aloysius meets with the Black child’s mother, Mrs. Muller (the superb Quincy Tyler Bernstine). Mrs. Muller expresses that she is thankful Father Flynn has become her child’s protector. If Donald stayed in his previous school, he “would have been killed” by the bullies. Sister Aloysius dismisses Mrs. Muller’s backstory about her son’s beatings by his father for “being that way.” Instead, the principal is self-righteous and gratified that her determination has led to Donald Muller’s being dismissed from the Altar Boys, which Mrs. Muller explains devastated Donald.
Mrs. Muller leaves with the assurance that Donald will be able to finish out the few months left, but Sister Aloysius is not satisfied and won’t be satisfied until Father Flynn has been exposed and kicked out of the priesthood. Because she is the assiduous hunter of her prey, Father Flynn, we become sympathetic to his cause and Sister James’ acceptance that he is innocent of Sister Aloysius’ allegations. However, the Catholic Church since 2000 has been expelling priests for pederasty and has paid great sums of money in damages to men who testified years later to being abused by priests’ sexual predation.
So, Father Flynn may be a pederast and Sister Aloysius may be correct in her “gut instinct” that he is a predator. Enter Werner Heisenberg. Uncertainty reigns without proof and admission of guilt and an act of contrition and repentance which Schreiber’s stalwart, assertive Father Flynn will never yield up.
The performances and direction are uniformly terrific as is Ellis’ pacing and vision which leaves the audience in a breathtaking conclusion and Sister Aloysius upended and overturned in her philosophy and life approach. Thanks to Linda Cho’s appropriate costume design, Kenneth Posner’s lighting design and Mikaal Sulaiman’s sound design, and Charles G. LaPointe’s hair & wig design, Doubt resonates with currency. As mentioned before, David Rockwell’s scenic design, first with a gorgeous cathedral interior setting for St. Nicholas, then with its turntable sets is appropriate for a place of peace which, by contrast, echoes with torment, division and fear.
The complexity of suspicion, accusation and innocence remind us of our time, and of the insistence of liars to demand they are right on little proof when the stakes are high. In the play’s instance careers may be upended, reputations are at stake, and individuals are harmed for the sake of one’s suspicions of imagination. Today, it is no less shattering that lies are the pylons which shore up candidacies to achieve power by any means necessary, even if it means the destruction of nations, citizens, the government. In its timeless themes about assessing truth when the professing upright religious protect liars, fantasists and themselves from accountability, Doubt is a profound must-see.
Doubt. Todd Haimes Theater, 42nd St between 7th and 8th with no intermission until April 21st. roundabouttheatre.org.
Athena Film Festival 2024: ‘Fancy Dance’ Panel
Decolonizing the Film Industry: Indigenous Women’s Voices
Athena Film Festival opened last weekend. The premiere women’s film festival in New York City celebrated its 14th year. In previous years, the amazing festival has had ground-breaking, maverick films and speakers like Gloria Steinem, Dolores Huerta, Eve Ensler and many more. Held at Barnard College, the labs, workshops and screening of cutting edge films proved to be exciting and revelatory in showing the direction of trends in women’s stories. Filmmakers, friends and supporters conducted talk backs and conversations, and experienced events that explored what it means to be a woman today among diverse groups.
Fancy Dance was a film I enjoyed seeing. There was a Talk Back afterward with the director and creatives who worked on and supported the award winning film, released in 2023 and screened in festivals around the country. Directed by Erica Tremblay and written by Erica Tremblay and Miciana Alise, Fancy Dance stars Lily Gladstone who has been nominated for an Oscar and received multiple awards from critics’ associations, film festivals and a SAG and Golden Golden award for her amazing performance in Martin Scorsese’s masterwork, Killers of the Flower Moon.
The panel after the screening of Fancy Dance.
Like Lily Gladstone and Erica Tremblay, many of the creatives who worked on the film were Indigenous woman and men. The story and themes revolve around Lily Gladstone’s character, Jax, a queer indigenous woman, who must confront her sister’s disappearance, while she lives and takes care of Roki (Isabel Delroy-Olson). Together Jax and Roki struggle to hustle money and at the top of the film we note that Jax with Roki as her accomplice steals a vehicle and drives it to a chop shop for a nominal amount of money. Tremblay, eschews political correctness in her portraiture of Jax and Roki who is not above stealing from a convenience store furtively picking and choosing items she likes while Jax picks up some supplies.
The film combines many elements and is a combination mystery, thriller, road trip and ultimately family drama as Jax deals with having to give up care of Roki to her white father and stepmother. The situation becomes problematic when her grandparents refuse to take Roki to the state powwow where Jax has obfuscated that her mom will be because she is a great dancer.
During the panel discussion which encompassed how the film was made, Tremblay discussed writing the characterizations specifically to go against the stereotyped “Indians” who vie between stoic, noble savages who are guardians of the lands vs. thieves, deceivers and killers who will stab white people in the face. Tremblay intentionally characterized Jax having a record. She steals and hustles money from those she can dupe, as does Roki. And the theme of trafficking indigenous women like her sister, who sell themselves to oil riggers or other temporary workers and then are abused sexually-which most probably happened to Jax’s sister, is highlighted in the film.
Tremblay discussed how indigenous creatives work together and supported each other’s films. When Gladstone worked with her, it was before Killers of the Flower Moon and her performance took off. Then after Tremblay couldn’t get distribution, she and her team slowly applied to film festivals (Outfest LA 2023, Sundance 2023, Hamptons International Festival 2023, etc.) where they won awards for Gladstone’s performance and Tremblay’s overall artistry, Best Narrative feature. By that point Gladstone received rave notices for her performance in Killers of the Flower Moon, and Tremblay persisted. Finally after about a year of struggling, trial and error leaping over distributors who couldn’t see a way to funding the film, Tremblay was thrilled that Apple+TV picked it up.
Tremblay said that Apple+TV was ideal because she wanted the film to have a wide viewership and Apple+TV’s streaming platform was exceptional. Rather than to have it appear in theaters for a week (that could be accomplished by submitting it to film festivals) and would be there and gone before most people saw it, a streaming service would offer it indefinitely.
Panel members affirmed that the indigenous film community networked and stayed upbeat and supported each other, especially during the dark times when they needed to raise money for payroll and then were at a loss about anyone picking up distribution. Tremblay and the others were hopeful about films about indigenous women in the future. Tremblay was working on seeing more humor in indigenous film, to break the stereotype of the remote, cold, unemotional “Indian” which she didn’t quite escape with her Jax character.
See Fancy Dance distributed on Apple+TV. Read my review on Blogcritics https://blogcritics.org/athena-film-festival-review-fancy-dance/
‘The Ally,’ Terrific Performances of a Trenchant Play at the Public
The Ally, written by Itamar Moses (The Band’s Visit), and directed by Lila Neugebauer (The Waverly Gallery), currently runs in a World Premiere at the Public Theater until March 24th. Moses’ two act play that is largely polemical raises important and controversial questions in its two hours and thirty-five minutes. It is thought-provoking, historically informative and profound, and has great currency in light of the Netanyahu government’s war against Hamas. Though the play was written before the October 7th attack, the issues couldn’t be more on-point.
The Ally is short on dramatic tension, and long on terrific performances. The exceptional actors passionately argue about Black and Brown people struggling to achieve human rights in countries (Israel, the United States, etc.), which have their foundations in oppressive, white, patriarchal colonialism. Though the prejudices and discrimination have been called out and strides have been made, often the countries obfuscate justice, and in defensive mode, redirect their institutions, practices and social constructs away from equanimity, foregoing humanity, compassion and empathy to abuse those they subjugate.
To present the arguments and make a case with little resolution, Neugebauer’s vision offers a spare stage and few props to evoke the setting in a professor’s home and office on a University campus which represents a bastion of learning, where allegedly every viewpoint may be expressed without censure, to promote enlightened civil discourse and benefit the social good of the community. Moses’ protagonist on the field of intellectual battle is liberal Jewish professor Asaf (the excellent Josh Radnor).
Asaf’s Korean-American wife Gwen (Joy Osmanski), has been hired to give a positive spin on land the University is developing that was formerly used for housing in a lower middle class, Black area. The land has been appropriated, though the University has assured that it will provide housing units to compensate for the dwellings that have been demolished. How the situation evolved, we discover later, is fraught with rumors about underhanded tactics the University used to create circumstances beneficial to University expansion, while dismissing the interests of the Black community.
The main conflict begins when Asaf’s former student Baron (Elijah Jones), who is Black, feels encouraged asking Asaf to sign a social justice manifesto that involves his cousin Deronte, who was killed by police unjustly for a theft Deronte didn’t commit. After agreeing to sign once he looks over the twenty-page manifesto, Asaf realizes that the documented is personally sensitive to him in what it demands.
First, it aligns the history of violence against Black Americans to the violence against oppressed Black and Brown people who have been colonized globally and suffer under inhuman conditions. Additionally, the manifesto targets a controversial subject for Asaf, an American, who doesn’t identify culturally with Israel, though he was born there. The manifesto demands that sanctions be placed on Israel for its nihilistic treatment of Palestinians, resulting in an apartheid state. In clear terms it pronounces that a “failure to do so will leave the United States complicit in the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.”
Though he is Jewish, essentially, Asaf is an atheist. But he thoughtfully considers what he is signing, and questions the words “apartheid” and “genocide” as extreme, unrelated positions, though he feels that Baron’s cause is just. Helping support Baron holds no contentions for him, initially. The apparent police brutality in killing Deronte is one more example of murderous racism and the blue wall of silence that fronts against such horrific injustice in a country with a long history of slavery and oppression of Black and Brown peoples.
Gwen tells Asaf’ that his signing the manifesto will undergird her position as a university administrator pushing for expansive development of university housing into the Black community. If he refuses to support Baron it will appear that he cannot align with fighting injustice and it most probably will add to the negative spin already brewing about the expansion project which the Black community is resisting.
It is after Asaf signs the manifesto that problems arise which disastrously make him the “man in the middle” among activist organizations with conflicting agendas which demand that he support and be an “ally” with their specific causes and positions. The situation embroils him deeper in conflict with his conscience and beliefs and forces him to deeply question allegiances he would forge with others on campus, impacting his reputation.
Two organizations confront him after he signs Baron’s manifesto. Jewish representative (Madeline Weinstein), and Palestinian representative (Michael Khalid Karadsheh), ask Asaf to support their bringing a controversial speaker to campus. They tell him that the speaker argues for a revisionist history of Israel’s foundational and follow-up wars. Contrary to the standard view that Israel was defending itself, the speaker posits that the wars were fought ferociously for one reason: “the likely outcome was more territory.”
To his credit to give all opinions a place in civil discourse, Asaf discusses the nature of the support they want, but questions why they want this particular speaker. Additionally, with a follow-up which indicates that activist organizations are noting who is importuning Asaf, another oppositional individual shows up to challenge Asaf. Reuven Fisher (Ben Rosenfield), a religious Jewish graduate student attacks Asaf’s arguments and the others that we’ve previously heard. Fisher defends Israel ‘s position with the Palestinians.
Interspersed among those who have backed Asaf into a corner, Nakia Clark (Cherise Boothe), confronts him about his questioning the fact that Israel is the one expected to ameliorate its position and is always used as a “whipping boy,” when it is the only place historically where Jews can find safe on their home turf.
As we listen to their wrangling, we take into account that Nakia and Asaf have history together. Once a couple who dated, Nakia shepherded Asaf in community social justice, inspiring him to go with her on marches, and schooling him in protest as she strengthened her role as a Black community organizer. Now, years later, she challenges him once more to step up and not renege on his support of the manifesto which Nakia, herself, wrote.
Where is Asaf’s place in these arguments when the university community knows the stand he wished to take that he now equivocates about taking? Moses uses the character of Asaf as a canvas upon which to project all the viewpoints in the arguments about Israel, Palestine, Black discrimination and colonial oppression. The playwright proves knowledgeable and informative, especially in recounting the conflicts in the history of Israel starting from its inception in 1948 and its wars against the PLO and the complicated rise of Hamas which didn’t happen in a vacuum but was allowed by an extremist government to its own benefit, not necessarily to create equity and harmony with the Christians, Jews and Muslims who make Israel their home.
However, as has occurred since divisions created an untenable situation between Zionists, Palestinians, Muslims, Christians and Jews when Israel was formed in 1948 and worsened up to the present war in Gaza, there is only the horrific struggle. Moses indicates the lessons in why with his exploration of the reasons in The Ally. Thus, how can there be a positive resolution in this work? All is uncertain, with even more passionate feelings on all sides we’ve heard presented.
And of course, Asaf now has issues with each of the groups because of his lack of certainty; thus, his reputation has received a hit. Even Gwen is annoyed that his equivocation has bounced back to impact her project. Only more questions remain.
However, Moses and Neugebauer have pulled a rabbit out of a hat with this production which focuses the audience on the arguments which make them understandable and relatable, especially because the ensemble is just brilliant. Importantly, we have been shown the intricacies of intense debate which, if continued will eventually lead to the possibility of a positive resolution. Thus, we are left with the feeling that there must be an open dialogue during which responsible individuals listen to each other and again and again hash out some consensus, as impossible as that seems..
This is one to see because of its overall coherence, incredible performances and fine direction. Neugebauer stages the debate amongst the stakeholders, so we thrillingly follow every word. Could there have been edits? Perhaps. However, Moses has built solidly and any removal of the bricks in his structure will lessen the impact overall.
Kudos to the creative team who effect the director and playwright’s vision. These include Lael Jellinek (scenic design), Sarita Fellows (costume design) Reza Behjat (lighting design) Bray Poor (sound design).
The Ally runs 2 hours 35 minutes at the Public until March 24th. https://publictheater.org/productions/season/2324/the-ally/
‘Brooklyn Laundry’ a Soap-diluted Rom-com That Avoids the Soul-dirt
John Patrick Shanley’s Brooklyn Laundry, currently at MTC Stage 1 never quite elucidates trenchant themes though it might have with further character development. The 80 minute play, also directed by Shanley, currently runs at New York City Center Stage 1 until April 14th.
Starring Cecily Strong (“Saturday Night Live”), and David Zayas (“Dexter’), as the principal couple who meet in a drop-off laundry in Bushwick, Brooklyn, in Brooklyn Laundry Shanley presents two individuals who become involved with each other as a result of desperation, depression and loneliness. Also, they are between partners and have not been involved in a successful relationship ever.
The Meet-Up
Laundry owner Owen (the lively Zayas), engages in light conversation with Strong’s Fran as the play opens. She is an on again off again customer, whose boyfriend left. Fran admits later in the scene that she is self-conscious about the fact that she can barely scrounge enough laundry to drop off for one load. When she was with her boyfriend, the bag weighed thirty-eight pounds; they did their laundry together. Owen, who Fran reminds that he owes her credit for losing a bag of her laundry 6 months prior, acknowledges that her lost laundry is a mystery. He has been giving her credit, though she complains that it doesn’t cover the price of replacing the missing items.
As they chit chat, Owen notes her “gloomy” nature to jostle her out of it. He tells her she reminds him of his fiance, who was “smart, one inch from terrific, but gloomy.” Fran disputes his label about her and suggests reality has brought issues into her life, and it isn’t without reason that her situation doesn’t make her the sunshine kid.
Owen discusses the necessity for positivity and an uplifted attitude, sharing his recent life story. He became the owner of three laundries, after a car accident settlement and lawsuit against his 9 to 5 boss who unfairly fired him. Assured that he has answers for her life in the face of her wishing she could have a car accident and be so lucky for monetary settlements, he takes a leap of faith. With apparent confidence he asks her to dinner. Fran suggests she will after she returns from a family visit in Pennsylvania.
Shanley has established the ground rules for these two individuals from different backgrounds with little in common, who make a connection simply by being present together and willing it. From this initial spark, Shanley takes us on a journey of how unlikely singles Fran and Owen fall in love because of need.
Reality’s Gloom and Fran’s Escape
In the next segment, we understand why Fran is depressed when she visits her sister Trish (Florencia Lozano), who is ill with cancer, loopy on meds and lying in bed mostly unconscious. After her visit with Trish, Fran goes on her date with Owen high on magic mushrooms. She offers some to Owen and after a while he catches up to her. Together they experience the beauty of the lights and atmosphere of romanticism and their conversation intensifies.
On a sub rosa level, Fran introduces the mushrooms into the situation because she wants to escape thoughts about her dying sister. She chooses to live in a lovely, seductive place with Owen. She doesn’t share her Trish reality with him for fear it will drive him away. So she suppresses her emotions to suit his needs to be positive and upbeat. She puts aside her gloominess, despite the fact that complications with Trish abound and she has less than a month to live.
The mushrooms encourage their intimacy and Fran helps Owen conquer his sexual problems that happened as a result of his car accident, problems which turned off his former girlfriend who dumped him as a result of his poor performance. Interestingly, Owen is honest about a very sensitive subject with Fran and of course she helps him. On the other hand, Fran is dishonest with Owen because he set the parameters that she feels she must adhere to to be with him: no gloom. Thus, Fran and Owen become closer after their first date of intimacy, and after three weeks, theirs is a budding love.
However, another jolt of reality intrudes and slams Fran in her “honesty” with Owen. Fran’s other sister Susie (Andrea Syglowski is always spot-on), stops by to collect Fran so together they will make arrangements for Trish’s imminent death. Fran refuses to go with Susie initially. She fears if she leaves Owen to spend time with family, she will lose the momentum of their relationship and he will dump her for someone else. With lies of omission, she lives in her own dream that she can spin along her affair with Owen without introducing the ugly realities about Trish dying.
The argument that ensues between Strong’s Fran and Sydlowski’s Susie about whether to visit Trish before she dies is beautifully paced and authentically threaded by both actors. During their accusations against each other, we learn how high the stakes are for Fran, who has never been married and has been the hand maiden to her two divorced sisters and their relationships with their loser husbands. We realize why she elected to escape to a love relationship with someone off beat which she clings to so she doesn’t have to face the doom and sadness of her life. Because Owen doesn’t appreciate negativity, his wants prevent her from spilling her emotions to him. Ironically, she is cutting off a valuable part of herself because she fears he only wants “happy, happy.”
Spoiler Alert
Then Susie levels with Fran about why she didn’t accompany her to see Trish the last visit. Susie is dying of pancreatic cancer.
With charming facility Owen cleaned off the “gloomies” from Fran’s plate to no avail. Susie’s horrible news slams Fran with a triple portion of gloom. Not only must she confront Trish’s impending death and the consequences of its impact on Trish’s young child, Taylor, she must confront the consequences of Susie’s dire prognosis. Fran’s doom and gloom lifted for three weeks by Owen will be a permanent fixture in her life. Additionally, guardianship of her sisters’ three children and their financial custodianship falls to her as their closest living relative. Will Owen want to take on a woman with three kids especially since he confessed he only wants his own child and isn’t looking for huge bills to pay for the upkeep of children who aren’t his?
The strength of Brooklyn Laundry is in how Shanley weaves the events, to back Fran into a corner delivering reality’s blows to her life, while showing her desperation to escape her circumstances by not sharing the truth with Owen. Eventually, her own obfuscations come back to haunt her. When Susie tells her about her cancer, Fran wakes up and stops moving in her imagined dream. She assures Susie she will act responsibly. Shanley’s characterization of Fran reveals her nobility, self-sacrifice and integrity in honoring her sisters by raising their children. She has made up her mind and whatever Owen does is up to him, take it or leave it. Fran puts family first.
The Last 10 Minutes
The last ten minutes of Brooklyn Laundry are the most dynamic because we note the inner struggles of the characters as they deal with hidden truths. Fran confronts Owen who stopped answering her calls. Though he portrays himself as the victim and ignores her comments that he ghosted her, something he promised he would never do, eventually, he is forced to put his pride aside. They both realize what they will lose without each other, and they are able to accept with humility that they care.
Shanley perhaps misses important dramatic moments by having the characters report their reactions after the fact to each other, instead of establishing a few scenes that are immediate, confrontational and a dynamic build up with irony. Instead, he writes one scene of alive confrontation and saves it for the very end. It is then that Fran’s serenity with reality shines and Owen reveals himself to be a typical male, more full of himself than he needs to be. However, after Fran walks out of his life to live in Pennsylvania, he realizes his mistake. The play’s conclusion falls into place with a few humorous surprises to satisfy audiences.
Kudos to the involved three-set scenic design of Santo Loquasto, Suzy Benzinger’s costume design, Brian MacDevitt’s lighting design. MacDevitt presents the magical fairy land lighting of the restaurant scene perfectly. Additional kudos goes to original music and sound design by John Gromada.
Brooklyn Laundry is facile and enjoyable thanks to the excellent acting ensemble. Shanley’s rhythms about loss, need and taking risks without ego are imminently human and recognizable.
Brooklyn Laundry with no intermission is in a limited engagement until April 14th. New York City Center MTC Stage 1, 131 West 55th St between 6th and 7th. manhattantheatreclub.com.
‘The Seven Year Disappear,’ Mother-Son Relationship Chaos as Performance Art
In The Seven Year Disappear, Jordan Seavey (Homos, or Everyone in America), creates celebrated, bi-polar, performance artist Miriam (Cynthia Nixon), and her gay son Naphtali (Hebrew for “my struggle, my strife”), played by Taylor Trensch, to elucidate the darkness in a mother-son relationship when the personalities are hyper creative and high strung. Issues especially evolve when the artists, like Miriam, are complex, self-centered, demanding, assertive and exceedingly ambitious. Indeed, Miriam’s perspective and being blur the boundaries of normalcy and reality and engulf everything and everyone close to her, mostly her son.
Currently running as a World Premiere at the Signature Center, The Seven Year Disappear with no intermission concludes its limited run on 31st of March.
Directed by Scott Elliott with assists by Derek McLane’s scenic design, Rob Milburn & Michael Bodeen’s excellent sound design, Qween Jean’s costume design (workman’s black coveralls and boots), and John Narun’s projection design, which together, keep the audience stirred and engaged, The New Group’s presentation of Seavey’s comedic drama intrigues. There are no easy answers. Complication rules the day, and the overall structure of systematic flashbacks of titled events in three movements, slips backward in time, with four brief returns to the present year, 2016, then back again, to unspool the ominous artistic relationship between Miriam and Naphtali over a twenty-six year period.
The two-hander relies on the dynamic performances of Nixon and Trensch. The wrangling mother and son strike high points of Naphtali’s life, during the time when Miriam disappears for seven years (2009-2016). Her premeditated disappearance, a publicity stunt, happens right after funds have been raised for the first half of her commission as a performance artist in a project to be presented at MOMA. When Miriam goes missing, Naphtali contacts the NYPD and does all he can to relocate her, to no avail. She doesn’t want to be found and perhaps has elicited the help of MOMA to increase the suspense and excitement of her invisibility as performance art, that is a hardship especially to Naphtali. For her, it is a triumph. She will emerge to acclaim when she is ready, and then, present the key moments of her invisibility.
Leaving Naphtali to fend for himself with little money from 2009 through 2016 when she “returns,” he is forced to get a job and apartment and struggle on his own after being dependent on her. For emotional sustenance to fill in the void his mother’s absence has left, he engages with numerous unusual people, all of them portrayed by Cynthia Nixon, using various physical and vocal changes, as he searches for Miriam and irons out his own life. Naphtali is full of questions and feelings of victimization where he sometimes helps himself to drugs and alcohol and attempts to confront her abandonment, which has always been a fact of his life.
MIriam’s durational disappearance is another demonstration of her dislocation from motherhood which initiates when she left four-year-old Naphtali alone at the zoo watching penguins. She leaves him to pursue a drink with Wolfgang, who becomes her intimate partner for a time, then years later becomes Naphtali’s sexual lover for a time during Miriam’s disappearance. Ironically, when Wolfgang is concerned about the young Nephtali in the zoo, Miriam comments, “He’ll be fine.” As it turns out, leaving him traumatizes Naphtali, who never gets over it. We learn it sets him up for a lifetime of his mother’s leaving, which he never conquers.
Clearly, unlike Miriam’s rival, Marina Abramović, one of the most renown performance artists in the world, who chose not to have children, Miriam has Naphtali. However, she refuses to sacrifice her art for her son. Instead, we learn that she exploits him by incorporating him in her work as a durational performance artist. When he is older, he allows her to continue using him, even becoming her manager in order to be close to her, which he says is the only way he gains her attention.
However, Miriam’s seven year disappearance is a piece de resistance, a capstone to shake the art world, which reveals her dedication and wildness in her artistry to effect a total invisibility. On another ironic level, leaving her son and manager behind to go incommunicado is a cheap, attention getting stunt. If it is a cost to her, we don’t see it. We do see the pain it causes Naphtali.
Clues to what Miriam is doing appear throughout the drama which reveals the more pretentious side of the durational performance art world, which we note impacts her son, not necessarily others, as Marina Abramović’s performances do. Where Miriam’s rival has put herself through grueling feats to test her physical, psychic and mental strength to acclaim and positive impact, Miriam’s disappearance doesn’t function positively, though it forces Nephtali to appear to become more independent.
However, during the seven years, everyone Nephtali sees or meets for support (Wolfgang-a sexual father figure, Brayden-a gay lover, Tomas-a gay lover, Kaitlyn-his manicurist, Aviva-an actress, Michael-a gay priest who conducts sex orgies, Nicole-a detective), is a reflection of his mother. Indeed Cynthia Nixon portrays each of these characters.
Thus, though Miriam has “flown the coop,” she is very much present in Nephtali’s life and emotional and psychic imbalances. To say that Miriam’s parenting skills leave much to be desired is an understatement. Her strident character, arrogance, unapologetic nature, and “take or leave it” attitude blaming God for making her this way, only reinforces Marina Abramović’s quote that Seavey includes in the play’s script, which perhaps should appear in the production projected on a backdrop but doesn’t.
‘I had three abortions because I was certain that [having a child] would be a disaster for my
work. One only has limited energy in the body, and I would have had to divide it.’
– Marina Abramović
MIriam, clearly, has difficulty dividing her energies. Thus, she rationalizes using Naphtali to uplift her art at his expense. We learn she has done this cruelly, sadistically with performance art Seavey slyly references. With the artistic endeavors after the disappearance is over, Miriam hopes to achieve a redemptive artistic reconciliation, once again at Naphtali’s expense, though she sells it to him as an equalizer. She claims it will center on Naphtali as a co-partner in making her new performance art to finish MOMA’s commission, as they present their divergent experiences separated during her “seven year disappear.”
However, as we learn piecemeal, in reverse chronology what happens between the mother and son, taking it all in, the result is structural chaos in Naphtali’s life that he is in bondage to. Their relationship is a devastation. And the bits and pieces of performance art evident in the play (at the beginning when Nixon and Trensch stare at each other from across the table), Nixon’s various characterizations pitted against Trensch’s searching, enhanced in closeups by John Narun’s projection design, leave the audience enervated not uplifted.
The Seven Year Disappear is one to see for its performances and play structure. The mother-son relationship disturbs and gives one pause. Nixon’s Miriam is stark. Taylor Trensch’s portrayal is empathetic. Together, they evoke a work which is memorable and unique.
The Seven Year Disappear. The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre, The Pershing Square Signature Center
480 W 42nd Street https://thenewgroup.org/production/the-seven-year-disappear/
The Orchid Show: ‘Florals in Fashion’ at The New York Botanical Garden
The Orchid Show: Florals in Fashion runs from February 17 through April 21, 2024
Orchid Extravaganza
The orchid extravaganza at NYBG is always a unique and winning experience whether one goes in the day or in the evening hours for Orchid Nights. This yar, the 21st edition of NYBG’s iconic annual orchid exhibition features stunning fashion-inspired floral designs from three celebrated artists.
Meet the Floral Designers
Floral Fashions by Collina Strada, Dauphinette and FLWR PSTL
The designers are Collina Strada by Hillary Taymour, Dauphinette by Olivia Cheng, and FLWR PSTL a.k.a. Kristen Alpaugh. The exhibit features the cleverness of the designers who integrate a gorgeous variety of orchids into their fashion creations in a dazzling and particular way. You will want to return again and again to marvel at the intriguing fashion designs composed of orchids and companion botanicals displayed poetically and artistically on mannequins.
Journeying Through NYBG Florals in Fashion
Orchids Always Inspired Fashions
For decades orchids, the most highly evolved, largest and most diverse families of flowering plants on the planet, have inspired fashions from Halston to Rodarte. For the 21st annual orchid exhibit, the NYBG horticulturists selected a showy panoply of specimens both popular and rare from the Garden’s collections. Interspersed among the orchids beautiful arrays are striking botanical specimens whose eye-popping collection accentuates the variety of hues, textures, sizes and differences in the wide-ranging orchid family. Some of these include epiphytic cacti, carnivorous nepenthes, air plants, beauteous bromiliads, maidenhead ferns and many more.
Olivia Cheng
In the Palms of the World Gallery Olivia Cheng of Dauphinette (https://www.instagram.com/p/CljdMacgnRH/) presents her amazing designs centered among the orchid displays which serve as the backdrop to frame Cheng’s creations amongst mirrors and a grand staircase. Headdresses of Tillandsia air plants suspended with an orb create a floating effect. Sustainable plant-based outfits are finely made of vibrant living material, i.e. elegant blue-green tresses of Huperzia, pastel rosettes of Echeveria, and delicate Spanish moss.
“A soft yet spikey palette of grasses, air plants and greens are the perfect foil to the orchids in Olivia Cheng’s edgy, ethereal designs. Cheng founded her fashion brand, Dauphinette, by transforming upcycled materials. The brand has since expanded with botanicals-including real resin-cast flowers and hand-drawn prints-enduring at the heart of Dauphinette’s designs.” (NYBG)
Cheng says of orchids, “Orchids have this very pristine and fantastical quality to them. And fashion is all about reinterpretations of what makes a person sexy or beautiful. That’s what makes orchids within fashion so symbiotic”
A Journey of Orchids Through Enid A. Haupt Galleries
From the Palms of the World Gallery and Cheng’s exhibit one proceeds along the orchid journey through the Conservatory’s Lowland and Upland Rain Forest Galleries. Along the way, look up to see hanging orchids seeking higher real estate up from the forest floor where there is more accessible light and moist air which they adore. Look down and you will note the Cymbidiums which flourish in soil as do the Lady Slipper Orchids.
Following the orchid journey you will notice the great diversity of orchid hybrids in magnificent colors which will take you through the tunnel of lights, your own runway, if you will, through the desert gallery.
Seasonal Exhibition Galleries, FLWR PSTL
Kristen Alpaugh https://www.instagram.com/flwrpstl/?hl=en shared the names of the figures she has decked out. They are dramatically expressive of a variety of emotions. Central in the rotunda is Regina. Regina towers up and beckons with warmth in a 360 degree panoramic cape of Phalaenopsis in various shades of pink, purple and fuscia companioned by mini ferns. Up high are air plants, Spanish moss and miniature orchids encircling Regina’s face with Alpaugh’s signature “Iritherium” (iridescent painted Anthurium plants).
Surrounding Regina four other mannequens represent elements of joy and beauty in modern expression. Victoria’s water lily hoop skirt fountain framed with white Phalaenopsis and amber hues, matching a head piece features a delicate, feminine, balletic form.
The others figures like Vespa with thigh-high floral boots and orchid headphones sport fun and rock the scene. FLWR PSTL’S vision is dramatized with “Iritherium”-iridescent painted Anthurium plants that she uses for floral displays and fantastical creations, one worn by Katy Perry in her music video Never Worn White. See the video by Katy Perry –Never Worn White below or go to YouTube to see the amazing dress FLWR PSTL created for her.
Kristen Alpaugh Works from an Emotional Foundation
When I briefly spoke to her Kristen Alpaugh said that she works from an emotional foundation to express her creations. Incorporating one essential orchids in her fun vignettes she mentioned, “Phalaenopsis orchid is a very warm and welcoming flower. It’s got this big face and these buttery petals, and it has a slightly shimmery finish, and it’s just like out there. It’s offering you a big hug.” Her experimental work merges natural beauty, high fashion and fine art. Interviews and features profile Kristen Alpaugh in The New York Times, The Lost Angeles Times, Architetural Digest and Vogue.
Collina Strada
Moving into coordinated orchid displays to the right and left of the final gallery walkway, Collina Strada’s “Freeze-Frame” runway vignettes emerge. Hillary Taymour uses her platform not only for fashion but for social issues and awareness. Her main concern is staying true to her craft, and staying on course to becoming a fully sustainable and radically transparent brand.
As such she employs upcycled materials such as “rose sylk,” made from salvaged rose plants. Taymour was the first to use artificial intelligence to generate looks for her New York Fashion Week and Spring/Summer 2024 collection. Her creations are accessorized by geometric plantings.
Orchid-decorated Kokedama-spheres of moss in which an ornamental plant grows-hang overhead. The mythic figures including a horse, frog, cat, are draped with Vanda orchids, many-hued miniature Phalaenopsis, variegated succulents and other botanicals.
Collina Strada manifests items that are created using sustainable methods and responsibly sourced materials to establish colorful designs for everyone. According to creator Hillary Taymour, “Nature is the mother of all inspirations.”
You can see a beautiful sunset in the middle of nowhere…and you’re never going to be able to mimic that beauty. Nature is the end goal of art.”
Orchid Nights
A main event during the Florals in Fashion Orchid Show, NYBG is hosting music, live performances and a selection of cocktails and lite bites for purchase at seasonal bars for adults 21 and over. Performances by the Iconic International House of Miyake Mugler, led by choreographer NY Father Icon Arturo Miyake-Mugler (Arturo Lyons), winners of Season 2 of HBO Max’s Legndary, wisk patrons to a ballroom culture scene with fashion and movement. Strike a floral pose entertaining your date in chic couture during one or more of the 7 Orchid Nights: Saturday, March 30; Friday, April 5; Saturday, April 6; Friday, April 12; Saturday, April 13; Friday, April 19; and Saturday, April 20, 2024, from 7 to 10 p.m. For additional programming at NYBG Florals in Fashion go to their website. https://www.nybg.org/
For additional events
‘Appropriate,’ Exceptionally Acted, Scorching, Complex, Revelatory
Appropriate’s theme
The truth is the truth, no matter how hard one betrays oneself into believing otherwise. Currently, segments of the American population have difficulty with the nation’s history of bigotry and murder and would mitigate it, not through reparations and reconciliation, but through dismissal and nihilism. As long as such masking occurs, the violence will continue in a legacy that can only be expiated and ended by confronting the deplorable aftereffects of racism head on. Such is the basic theme of Appropriate, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins harrowing, humorous, profound family drama about loss, self-betrayal, torment, fear and generational psychic damage, that is currently unraveling great performances at 2nd Stage’s Helen Hayes Theater. The drama with sardonic humor is in its Broadway premiere and has now been extended.
Before the curtain lifts onto the 7th generation Arkansas plantation home of the Lafayette family, the theater is plunged into the darkness of nighttime. Then, Bray Poor and Will Pickens let loose the prolonged, screeching sound of Cicadas, a sound repeated between acts and scenes. When Jacobs-Jenkins determines we’ve “had enough,” the lights dimly come up on a once stately mansion interior- living room, foyer, and stairs-leading up to the balcony landing and off to unseen bedrooms, where Toni (Sarah Paulson,Talley’s Folly), Bo (Corey Stoll, Macbeth), and Frans (Michael Esper, The Last Ship), slept during their childhood.
The mansion, in complete disarray, filled with hoarder’s junk-furniture, ceramics, glassware, clothing and more-still has remnants of beauty amidst its dilapidation and tawdry dressings of curtains and outdated furniture, thanks to dots’ prodigious scenic design. Symbolic of the once “glorious” South, with its penchant for ritual and gentility delivered by Black enslavement, servitude, Jim Crow peonage, bigotry and prejudice, the mansion, we come to discover, hides remnants of brutality, sadism and murder, a legacy of the Layafettes, which has not been recognized or confronted by the present generation, especially Toni.
The Backstory
In the backstory, we learn that Toni, Bo and their families are at the plantation for the auction of the estate interior, house and extensive property which includes two cemeteries, one for seven generations of Lafayette ancestors, and the other a slave cemetery isolated near the algae-ridden pond. Bo and Toni have kept in touch and were together for their father’s funeral six months prior, when they discussed raising money to pay off the loans of the estate’s indebtedness. Though they try to contact Franz, who has been AWOL for 10 years, they have been unable to tell him of their father’s death and the disposal of the estate.
It is no small irony that Franz, at the top of the play, comes in through the window with his girlfriend like a thief in the night, in the early morning hours, the day the liquidators are supposed to catalogue and price the estate’s valuables. When Paulson’s Toni makes a dramatic entrance from the 2nd floor balustrade, shining a flashlight on Franz, ranting at his presence and interrupting his reunion with her son, his nephew, Rhys (Graham Campbell), we question what is going on. From this incident of conflict, Jacobs-Jenkins unspools the mystery about the family, its members, their dead father and their ancestors. Throughout the play by agonizing and strategic degrees, the playwright reveals the Lafayette’s tragic family portrait, and explores many themes, key among them ancestral accountability for the past sins, which if not addressed or confronted, will be a curse on future generations.
As the play progresses and the siblings deal with the estate, we note that Toni, as executrix, makes unilateral decisions and controls everything to the point of “spur-of-the-moment” irrationality (though her explanations to herself are rational). This foments more chaos than is necessary in a situation fraught with turmoil, divisiveness and alienation among the siblings.
Pressures and conflicts in the Lafayette family
Pressures of the father’s illness and death, the disparate circumstances in each sibling’s family, Toni’s divorce and difficulties with her son Rhys (Graham Campbell), exacerbate the tensions of the stressful time, as the siblings attempt to create order out of chaos and obtain the most money to pay off the debts. Handling the estate and settling the inheritance would upend the most sanguine, peace-loving and close siblings. However, for the tormented Lafayettes, settling the estate is apocalyptic. The brokenness of each family member and their significant others raises the temperature of the non air-conditioned mansion to an explosive boiling point by the end of the play.
The first roiling incident begins with Franz, renamed from Frank by his California-dreaming, tendentious, sweetie, River (Elle Fanning is brilliant as the peace-keeping, pompous, shaman-loving spiritualist). The moment Paulson’s acerbic, sniping Toni sees Franz, she launches into strident questions, as he soft peddles his replies and defends himself against her accusations that he only showed up to greedily collect “his share.” When she threatens to “call the cops” on him, he ignores her and goes upstairs with River to sleep off their long trip from Oregon, where he had been hiding out for a decade.
Why she responds toward her youngest brother this way is revealed in the last act cataclysm. However, her bile-frothing attitude, while humorous and sardonic, frightens. Though she seeks hugs from her son Rhys and tells him she loves him, we question her volcanic response to Franz and fiery tirade answering Bo’s comments about shelling out money to maintain the estate through the last years of their father’s illness. Apparently, Bo paid for the aide who ministered to their father almost 24/7, and paid for all the house expenses. According to Bo, he took that “hit,” and hopes to recoup some of that loss from the proceeds of the auction and estate sale.
Questions about the kids’ discoveries
Toni dismisses him saying that it was “their father” who was ill. The implication is that he is heartless and should have opened his bank account willingly with no thought of recompense. We are curious about this “selflessness” she demands of others, while equating her time with her father and drives to Arkansas from Atlanta as more than the equivalent of the money Bo paid. Meanwhile, why wasn’t the father’s grand estate enough to pay for its upkeep? As a DC district justice (in line for becoming a Supreme Court Justice), didn’t the father have the acumen to financially manage it? Why didn’t Toni contribute monetarily, and why are there heavy loans against the property? And why did the father keep quiet about his precarious financial circumstances? Eventually, we learn the answers about this family which is so dysfunctional, it is caving in on itself by the weight of its violent legacy which they refuse to confront.
Little of what her siblings say Toni takes in giving any weight to their position or logic. She is quick to retort and uplift her own situation and attack theirs with seething anger. Whether this is a function of her age (the oldest), and her position as executrix, one concludes that it is mostly due to Jacob-Jenkins’ stylized characterizations in the service of elucidating his themes. A key theme is that karma is a bitch. Unless you break the cycle of abuse of others (slavery, murder) and acknowledge and reverse it, it comes to haunt you with its own particular brand of sickness and blight in the human heart. By the end of the play, we note how each sibling is crippled with agony, divided and isolated from each other without any possibility of reconciliation or redemption.
That this may be the result of what their ancestors had wrought upon the land they “appropriated,” and the slaves they abused, and the Black people they may have seen or had lynched, generational accountability is the last thing these present day Layafettes consider. However, adding other clues (i.e. River feeling the presence of spirits), it is a sub rosa theme of the play. Bo, Toni and even Franz hurt, lash out and move to disinherit themselves from each other, the estate valuables and the plantation which they leave to the elements, abandoning it.
Who would question their behavior? Who would want their legacy which involves lynchings (they find photographs of Blacks lynched), glass jars filled with noses, fingers, ears and penises of Black people carved out of the lynched bodies, and a Klan hood that was their father’s. Clearly, the race hatred permeated their childhood, but they didn’t realize it, having spent most of their lives in Washington, DC and some summers at the Arkansas plantation. Besides, around them, their father never mentioned the “N” word, though Bo remembers in college the judge refused to look at “in the eye,” or “shake the hand” of a Black dorm-mate.
The mystery revealed: spoiler alert.
The siblings and apparently, the father and mother, didn’t deal with their ancestry, but like so many others in the south, received the benefits of “free labor” and reaped the rewards of servitude and Black social oppression through the generations without considering the possibility of karmic reparations exacted on their being, emotionally, spiritually and psychically. Jacobs-Jenkins gives clues of the cruelty of their ancestors toward the Black population throughout, via the collector’s items and junk their father and his relatives hoarded.
That this sale of the estate represents the family’s apotheosis of failure and self-destruction, Jacobs-Jenkins uncovers by the conclusion. Bo has lost his cushy job. Toni has been fired from her teaching position when her son distributed her meds to classmates, for which he was kicked out of high school. She is finalizing her divorce and Rhys doesn’t want to stay with her but is going with his father because she is not a good mother.
We discover that Franz is only interested in collecting “his share,” after befriending Bo’s daughter Cassidy (Alyssa Emily Marvin), who broadcast family events to him via her Facebook pictures. Franz had been receiving checks from his father to pay for his upkeep after his jail sentence as a pederast (he got a teenager pregnant). During Toni’s harangues, we discover, though Franz is presently “clean,” Toni suffered with “worry” through his hospitalizations, rehabilitations and addictions to drugs and alcohol. Meanwhile, Franz blames his “bi-polar,” psychically-broken father who fell apart after his wife’s loss to cancer, as he attempted to raise Franz by indulging him. Franz also blames his siblings’ abandonment of him to his father’s questionably abusive care. Of course Toni counters Franz “defense” as lies.
The Lafayettes are an emotionally debilitated family on steroids
Jacobs-Jenkins clarifies that this is a emotionally debilitated family on steroids. Maybe the only member with any rationality is Bo, but only because of his wife. When discussing their father’s racism and prejudices, which Toni denies, Rachel mentions she overheard their father slur her when he referred to her on the phone with a crony, as Bo’s “Jew wife.” Toni dismisses her and the race hatred artifacts. She is “put-out” by Rachel’s alarm that the children have seen the photo album of Black lynchings and incensed that Rachel implies her father is anti-semitic and racist, she ends up provoking Rachel to provoke Toni to slur her. Toni does with ironic abandon, then claims she was joking.
Interestingly, Bo, who lives in the North has put a great distance between himself and his heritage, which is another form of dismissiveness. However, he has taken his racist attitudes with him. He attempts to recoup money from the estate by arranging to sell the photographs of the lynchings of Blacks, which apparently are valuable on a covert white nationalist market of sadistic memorabilia of the “good ole” Southern “glory days”
Bo is so numbed to his legacy, he doesn’t see the egregious amorality of making money off others’ victimization and death. This is a corrupt continuation of the “benefits” the South receives from its Jim Crow policies of racism and murder, heightened by the fact that there is a market for these “valuable collector’s items.” Though each revelation of the father’s racist hoardings is achieved through the kids’ innocent, sardonic, humorous discovery, as the adults try to cover up the shocking “in-your-face” racism, the audience’s real shock is at the macabre, psychotic nature of keeping such items. We ask, why would the father, a judge, “get off” on photos of Black lynchings and jars of Black body parts from the lynchings?
Who does the photo album belong to or the glass jars of body parts?
Toni, Bo and Franz don’t find this loathsome about their father, and try to pretend it belongs to someone else.
Jacobs-Jenkins clarifies the craven, broken psyche of Bo, Toni and Franz, who don’t see anything wrong with selling these items to recoup the estate’s losses. On the other hand, Rachel is outraged her children have been the ones to discover the photo album and jars of body parts. And at some point, she intends to discuss what they mean with her kids to work through the psychological shock of seeing such horrors. Indeed, she is the only one who seems to understand the brutality and violence such artifacts signify. It is her morality that stirs the morality of the others to try to protect the kids from further exposure. But Cassidy is interested because it is verboten, so she continues to look, seduced to the grotesque, cruel voyeurism that this American past was normal for the South..
The playwright speaks volumes through what is absent in the siblings’ conversation. They don’t deal with why the father hoarded such items and didn’t find a better place for them in the Smithsonian African-American History Museum, Arkansas African-American History Museum, or other educational institutions or museums. Why has he kept the photos in a shelf in the foyer, and the Klan hood and the body parts in his bedroom? They weren’t secreted away in a hiding place in the attic or elsewhere, but were out in the open. Obviously, there are two sides to the retired judge’s character. One part of him justifies lawless lynching via white domestic terrorist racism, while the other lives peaceably as a justice. Perhaps Franz has a better handle on his father’s “bi-polar” nature than Toni, who disbelieves all of the “incongruities” Bo, Rachel and Franz have pointed out about him.
The final coup de grâce
Jacob-Jenkins cannot resist the final coup de grâce on this tragic, racist, family legacy that is blowing up in their faces with regard to recouping money. Bo states the land cannot even be sold without dealing with the two cemeteries, so the property isn’t worth much. Secondly, Franz,, to “cleanse himself and get in good with his family,” throws himself and the photos into the pond by the slave cemetery before he knows they might be valuable. The photos are destroyed; the money up in smoke. This family can’t win for losing. Have the spirits of the dead effectively prevented any benefit to a family with its violent legacy of slavery and lynchings, as karma takes its recompense and the estate goes into receivership?
River, who has from the start been wary of the spirits on the place and has sensed “a presence” in the mansion, is used by Jacobs-Jenkins to validate this possibility that the spirits of lynched, enslaved African-Americans exact their karmic retribution. Additionally, the playwright and director’s vision reveal that such spirits may seek vengeance until the family expiates the bloodshed and torment their forebears have wreaked on the Black population on their lands. Thus far the current generation hasn’t and the siblings are a wreck.
The tragedy of blindness is on everyone in this family, who ignores the significance of those murdered, lynched, abused and oppressed. The lives of those in the slave cemetery and those in the photo album are like the lives of Blacks across the South, who were and are still being appropriated for money on the covert market of “lynching” items that white, terrorist racists find “quaint,” “cool” and “prize-worthy” for trading. It is an unacceptable criminal abomination that must not be normalized. It still is at what cost?
The siblings abandon the mansion and its contents which nature takes over and destroys through the decades as it collapses and a final haunting symbol emerges in the mansion center stage. It is a huge tree open to interpretation. It is representative of the lynchings in the photograph album which must be accounted for.
An amazing conclusion
The conclusion after the blighted family members have left, never to see each other again, is an amazing scenic feat. A tree rises from the mansion floor effected by the amazing scenic designers, dots. Neugebauer’s vision with dots’ execution of the house symbolically shattering as the tree rises up from the foundation of racial hatred, brings together Jacobs-Jenkins’ themes. They warn that despite assuming all is well, recompense will continue to be exacted for historic racial bloodshed and murder. As this family has a legacy of it and refuses to confront it, a bill for the bloodshed will be delivered on them and future generations, via psychosis, financial ruin, addiction etc. Karma is a bitch.
The play is exceptional in its themes and important in its significance about recognizing and not normalizing racial murder and lawlessness as the family tends to do when their father’s hidden life uplifts it. The characterizations serve the themes; the themes don’t arise from the characters. At times the dialogue is contrived to be humorous, especially as the playwright has stylized these individuals as types. Toni’s character is drawn as sardonic, insulting, shrewish and one-note.
The reason why the production gets away with the contrivances is because the director’s staging is perfection, the technical creative team is superbly coherent in conveying her vision. Most importantly, the actors are incredible, individually and as an ensemble. They flesh out and inhabit these unlikable individuals and make them watchable and horridly humorous. Paulson brings her own star quality and beauty to the role so we dismiss Toni’s obnoxiousness, until as with all of them, their faults gradually clarify and deaden them. Then, we reach the point of no return.
By the end we could care less that Toni declares herself dead to the others as they are dead to her. We watch as Bo weeps and questions why he cries. We assume that Franz will continue in his lost state with River directing him until she gets fed up. And Toni sums up what each of the siblings is thinking. She affirms this is who she is with them, implying they “make her” this way and she doesn’t like herself as a result. It is the same for Bo and Franz, who aren’t particularly happy with themselves. Neither do we empathize with any of them because they don’t acknowledge their legacy, they dismiss it or run from it. As their ancestors “threw away” Black generations, so these individuals in self-torment, “throw away” themselves…a tragedy.
This family is the problem and not the solution which is hard won. And as the themes imply, there must be recognition of the horrors of murder and reparations must be attempted. Karma is taking its toll. The sooner the crimes and injustice are recognized, the better for all who have a legacy of violence as this family does. Regardless of how disconnected they think they are from it, they are suffering and will suffer until the injustice is made right.
Kudos to the creative team not identified above. These include Dede Ayite (costume design) and Jane Cox (lighting design). This is not one to miss in its profound themes about the South, about normalizing crimes, and dismissing their historical significance and impact on us today.
Appropriate, two hours thirty minutes with one intermission at the Helen Hayes Theater, 240 W 44th St. between 7th and 8th. https://cart.2st.com/events/?view=calendar&startDate=2024-1
CAROLE DI TOSTI 