128 (2019-2020): Review: THE YOUNG MAN FROM ATLANTA (seen December 7, 2019)

"Foote and South Unease"

As a longtime admirer of the prolific playwright, Horton Foote, who died in 2009 just before his 93rd birthday, I looked forward to adding The Young Man from Atlanta to the list of other Foote plays I’d seen, read, and appreciated. I’d missed its New York premiere at the then Off-Off-Broadway Signature Theatre, in 1995, when it won the Pulitzer. (It received a short-lived Broadway run in 1997.) 

That prize, some have suggested, recognized not just the play but Foote’s extensive output, including three other Foote plays produced by the Signature that 1994-1995 season, Talking Pictures, Night Seasons, and Laura Dennis. 

Rear: Dan Bittner, Devon Abner, Harriett D. Foy, Stephen Payne; front: Aidan Quinn, Kristine Nielsen, Pat Bowie. All photos: Monique Carboni.

Based on my experience at other Foote plays, I’d expected a realistic, sentimental, family dramedy, filled with secrets, lies, and unexpected revelations, set anywhere between the early and mid-20th-century, most likely in Harrison, Texas, the fictional version of Wharton, where the playwright had his roots. Three characters in The Young Man from Atlanta—Will and Lilly Dale Kidder, and Lily Dale’s stepfather, Pete Davenport—hearken back to earlier Foote plays, Roots in a Parched Ground, Lily Dale, and Cousins, each a part of Foote’s epic, nine-play, semi-autobiographical The Orphans’ Home Cycle. The action, though, is set in Houston, the year is 1950, and the central concern—never explicitly mentioned by name—is the homosexuality of a character we never meet.

Aidan Quinn.

The Signature, now one of New York’s prime Off-Broadway institutions, permanently ensconced at the impressive Pershing Square Signature Theatre, is again responsible for The Young Man from Atlanta, but it’s hard to see from this production—directed by Foote specialist Michael Wilson (The Trip to Bountiful)—aside from its author’s reputation, what might have inspired its receipt of a Pulitzer Prize. Enjoyable as some of it is, the writing is unmistakably old-fashioned, melodramatic, even, dependent on lengthy, over-obvious exposition, and burdened by an unsatisfying, almost perfunctory resolution. 

Aidan Quinn, Dan Bittner.

And while it has a cast of notable actors, the production often suffers from overacting, as well as a scene design that serves more to confuse than to illuminate the topography of the dramatic locale.

The Young Man from Atlanta, named for a character who never actually appears, reminds us that, for all the glowing accounts we have of America’s grand, postwar economic boom, cracks in the system were forming, even for those who had floated successful careers on the rising tide of American capitalism. Houston, on the cusp of the boom, rapidly confirmed its position as the largest city in the American south, a sub-theme of the play, which posits Atlanta—which never came close—as its potential rival.

Kristine Nielsen.

Profiting from his role as an executive at a Houston wholesale produce company is the gregarious Will Kidder (Aidan Quinn), 61 (the original script says 64), who has just bought a $200,000 home, as well as an expensive new car for his loving, although recently prayer-obsessed, wife, Lily Dale (Kristine Nielsen), 58 (61 in the original script), who abandoned her talented musical talents when Bill died. Will and Lily Dale recently suffered the tragic loss of their son, Bill, the circumstances of whose death by drowning point to suicide.

But not long into the first scene, in Will’s office, his boss, Ted Cleveland, Jr. (Devon Abner), citing business losses, has no alternative but to fire Will, who helped build the company with Ted’s father, and to hire as his much younger replacement, Tom Jackson (Dan Bittner). Both Tom and Ted are shown as humane, not rapacious, characters, but the bitter Will is determined to strike back by starting his own, rival company. First, however, he will need to raise the money for a big loan.

His initial optimism is dashed when he discovers that Lily Dale, to whom he annually gave sizable Christmas gifts of money, has doled out substantial amounts to Randy, a sweet young man from Atlanta. Randy, their son Bill’s roommate and loving friend at an Atlanta boarding house, has managed to earn Lily Dale’s considerable pity. (Hints suggesting Randy’s gayness, like his excessive weepiness, sprinkle the dialogue.) Will, though, has explicitly forbidden Lily Dale from being in contact with Randy. The family’s new economic constraints also ensnare the finances of Lily’s 78-year-old stepfather, Pete Davenport (Stephen Payne), an accommodating soul who’s been staying with the Kidders, on their dime.

Kristine Nielsen, Stephen Payne.

Will, crushed by the pressure of contending with the death of his 37-year-old son, the possibility of Lily Dale’s having been conned by Randy, and the difficulty of raising funds for his new business, is too much for him, and he suffers a heart attack that makes him housebound as he slowly recovers. In consequence, the play works out Will’s business problems, Lily Dale’s emotional ones, and the issue of Randy’s potentially fraudulent connivances, which Lily Dale is loath to accept because his words (whose relative truth or falsity remains ambiguous) offer succor in her time of need.

Kristine Nielsen, Harriett D. Foy.

It also introduces a silly, but interesting conspiracy theory given credence by the gullible Lily Dale about Eleanor Roosevelt supporting a so-called Disappointment Club in which black maids (there’s one in the play, well-played by Harriet D. Foy) conspired to disappoint white employers.

Regardless of the family tensions and misery that erupt from the confluence of Bill’s death, Will’s firing and resulting need for funding, Lily Dale’s disbursal of her savings, and yet another loss of money of which we learn, the play fails to coalesce convincingly. The secondary roles are all decently played, including Jon Orsini as Carson, Pete’s grandnephew, who once roomed with Randy. There’s also Etta Dorris, played effectively by Pat Bowie, an elderly black woman who once worked for the Kidders; the woman’s presence, though, seems decidedly extraneous.

Pat Bowie, Kristine Nielsen.

As Will, who suggests a Willy Loman-like aura of both brashness and defeat, the usually excellent Aidan Quinn (TV’s “Elementary”) is uneven, ranging from superficially anguished to artificially blustery, shouting far too often. Kristine Nielsen (Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus), one of our top comic actresses, has fewer convincing moments, being unable to meld her familiar flibbertigibbet mannerisms with a realistic portrait of Lily Dale that goes beyond making her a perpetual airhead. And Stephen Payne’s (Straight White Men) Pete is simply colorless.

Kristine Nielsen.

Van Broughton Ramsey provides suitable period costumes, and David Lander lights the stage effectively enough, but Jeff Cowie’s set (apart from Will’s office, indicated merely by a desk and chair) provides an architecturally odd impression of the Kidders’ new home. It’s placed against neutral black curtains at either side, with a substantial window in the upstage wall, beneath which runs a slightly raised platform, with doors up several steps at either side.

Characters enter and leave via the sides, as well as through the doors, even going out one door and entering through the other despite being separated by an exterior yard seen through the window. At one point we even see two characters walking across the yard as they go from one room to another. Whatever the explanation for this arrangement, it’s definitely distracting.

Given the Signature’s devotion to Horton Foote, one of the iconic American playwrights whose work is embraced by this theatre, it’s disappointing to see a less-than-superior production of his sole Pulitzer-winning work.  

The Young Man from Atlanta

Pershing Square Signature Center/Irene Diamond Theatre

480 W. 42^nd St., NYC

Through December 15

126 (2019-2020): Review: ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN IN THE THEATER: THE MUSICAL WORLD OF MAURY YESTON (seen December 5, 2019)

“And It Did!”

Let me admit up front that, much as I love musical theatre, I’m not much of a fanboy beyond the classic work of Gershwin, Kern, Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, Loesser, and the like, with, perhaps, a few exceptions, like Hamlisch and Sondheim. 

Alex Getlin, Benjamin Eakeley, Justin Keyes, Jovan E'Sean, Mamie Parris. All photos: Carol Rosegg.

So, seeing a splendid revue of the cream of Maury Yeston’s crop at the York Theatre comes as something of a revelation, as I never saw his biggest Broadway shows, Nine and Grand Hotel, represented by nearly one-third (eight) of the 23 songs in Anything Can Happen in the Theater: The Musical World of Maury Yeston. I saw Broadway’s Titanic, and the Off-Broadway Death Takes a Holiday, but not the other Off-Broadway shows on his résumé. 

Justin Keyes, Mamie Parris, Benjamin Eakeley, Alex Getlin, Jovan E'Sean. 

Of course, a revue of show music is not like seeing the songs as they were performed in their original contexts, especially when the revue’s format is as pure as it is here. In other words, Anything Can Happen . . . has no immediately discernible through-line or theme other than to arrange one song after the other, sung chorally or solo, balanced mainly by the relative nature of their musicality or tempo. There’s no linking dialogue of any sort, so you need to glance at your program to learn even the most basic thing about any song, which, of course, is what show it appeared in.

Mamie Parris.

Alex Getlin.

Aficionados—the kind who listen over and over to cast albums—will certainly know most songs’ provenances, and anyone familiar with the source material of Grand Hotel and Nine will quickly link their songs to those shows. On the other hand, half a dozen are not attributed to any show at all.

Justin Keyes, Alex Getlin, Benjamin Eakeley, Mamie Parris, Javon E'Sean.

The show’s conceiver, director Gerard Alessandrini, of Forbidden Broadway fame, says in a program note that these “are from shows that Maury wrote that never reached the boards, and some are independent songs not from any specific project—and one was written specifically for this show.” For ignorant viewers like me, it’s a shame that, at the least, none of these are so noted in the program or given the benefit of a simple, identifying projection.

Mamie Parris, Alex Getlin, Javon E'Sean, Justin Keyes.

That, however, is my sole quibble (well, okay, that title could be clipped) with this awesomely engaging overview of the best of Maury Yeston, who wrote both the thoroughly delightful music and the unusually witty, touching, or poetic—as the case may be—lyrics of one song after the other. Indeed, when divorced from their original contexts, and insightfully interpreted by such an attractive, superbly gifted ensemble as the three men and two women gathered here, the lyrics assume an even more distinct clarity because you automatically create your own situation for understanding and relating to them.

Javon E'Sean, Alex Getlin, Justin Keyes.

A single pianist, the exceptional Greg Jarrett, is situated up center within James Morgan’s elegantly simple, cabaret-style set of a sky backdrop, a few platforms, and several arched, false prosceniums (think Radio City Music Hall or the Hollywood Bowl). Notable are the panels displaying blown-up images from Yeston’s scores. 

Benjamin Eakeley, Mamie Parris, Greg Jarrett (at piano), Justin Keyes, Alex Getlin, Javon E'Sean.

On this stage, perfectly lit by Jacob Zadek, the company sings singly, in pairs, trios, quartets, or in full, its costumes (elegantly designed by Melinda Hare) being either basic black, or a variety of character-defining garments, like a chef’s toque and apron, or pink, silk pajamas. Gerry McIntyre’s choreography is the ideal fillip for enriching the show’s visual charms with creative movement that adds immeasurably to the experience.  

Javon E'Sean, Justin Keyes.

From the get-go, the ensemble—Benjamin Eakeley, Jovan E’Sean, both tall and lanky, in contrast to the shorter Justin Keyes, the dark-haired Alex Getlin and the blonde Mamie Parris—grabs you with its charisma, intelligence, and vocal expertise, turning each number into a virtual show-stopper. (Both Keyes and Getlin were in the show’s 2017 premiere at the Triad, which included Broadway star Robert Cuccioli singing the songs now handled by Eakeley.)

Mamie Parris, Alex Getlin.

Benjamin Eakeley.

It’s a good thing the show keeps going, though, because you wouldn’t want to miss a single note or lyric, starting with the entire company singing the title song, an upbeat, comical lament about what actors have to endure.

YOU WANNA KNOW WHY I PUT UP WITH ALL THIS AGGRAVATION!
YOU WANNA KNOW WHY I AM STUCK IN THIS POSITION!
TO HAVE TO TOLERATE EACH IMBECILIC SITUATION

AND LISTEN TO SOME RANDOM SCHMUCK IN AN AUDITION?

Javon E'Sean, Mamie Parris, Justin Keyes.

From then on it’s a continual can-you-top-this sequence, ranging from Parris’s jazzing it up with a medley of “Shimmy Like They Do in Paree” (Death Takes a Holiday) and “I Want to Go to Hollywood” (Grand Hotel) to E’Sean’s lovingly sensitive “I Had a Dream about You” (December Song) to E’Sean, Getlin, and Keyes’s brilliant sendup of classical composers’ names, “I Don’t Want to Rock ‘n Roll,” to Eakeley’s teaching an infant in the soothing “New Words” (In the Beginning) to Parris and Getlin’s hilariously rambunctious “No Women in the Bible” (In the Beginning) to Getlin’s heartfelt “Strange” to the inspirational (if ironic) “Godspeed, Titanic,” with which the entire ensemble closes the show.

Javon E'Sean, Mamie Parris, Benjamin Eakeley, Alex Gitlen, Justin Keyes.

Yeston’s lyrics are often insanely clever. In “Salt ‘n Pepper,” for example, Keyes, dressed like a chef and pushing a small cart on wheels about, does a standout job of giving us knowing looks as he tosses off deliciously ribald, innuendo-enriched, food-related lyrics. But they’re also touchingly lyrical, as in “You’re There Too” (In the Beginning), sung by Keyes and E’Sean, and “Mississippi Moon,” soloed by Eakeley. 

Javon E'Sean, Alex Getlin, Benjamin Eakeley, Mamie Parris, Justin Keyes.

The title of Anything Can Happen in the Theater couldn’t be truer. I entered the theater only casually familiar with Maury Yeston’s music. I left it . . . I guess I have to say it . . . a fanboy. And I think you will, too.

Anything Can Happen in the Theatre: The Musical World of Maury Yeston

York Theatre at St. Peter’s

619 Lexington Ave., NYC

Through December 29

125 (2019-2020): Review: THE UNDERLYING CHRIS (seen December 4, 2019)

"The Circle of Life"

In The Underlying Chris, Will Eno (The Realistic Joneses, The Open House) has crafted another thoughtful, intellectually interesting, theatrically quirky play driven by a tricky premise. In this one, at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater, he imagines the life cycle of a representative human being, from the cradle to the grave, in a series of 11 vignettes (following a prologue) acted by an 11-member company smoothly directed by Kenny Leon.

Eno suggests that each of us has a multiplicity of identities because we’re constantly changing. A physician in the play even declares:

You are trillions of cells going this way and that. Hundreds of billions of cells die and get born in you, everyday. That’s probably the size of your big toe, coming and going, everyday.

To emphasize this, “Chris” appears in each succeeding scene as either male or female, white or otherwise, which also represents his/her (no “theys,” “theys,” or “thems”) universality. The eponymous name keeps changing, too: Chris, Christine, Kristin, Christopher, Christoph, Christiana, Topher, Krista, Kris, and Kit, although you’d need to see the script to separate some of these from their homonyms. Each actor—Isabella Russo, Lenne Klingaman, Nidra Sous La Terre, Hannah Cabell, Howard Overshown, Michael Countryman, Lizbeth Mackay, Luis Vega, Denise Burse, and Charles Turner—gets to play a version of Chris.

Meanwhile, the other characters in Chris’s life similarly undergo such transformations. Once the idea kicks in, you spend more or less time watching each succeeding scene figuring out who is who, as the actors shift from role to role, different ones taking on the same characters as new ones are introduced. It’s a bit complicated at first, but you eventually get the hang of it. Unfortunately, the payoff is incommensurate with the effort.

Eno uses an Our Town-like speech by Christine (Isabella Russo), a precocious, prepubescent girl in a man’s suit, to introduce the action. Her explanation informs us that the play will be about things like identity and change, or the essence, spirit, or mystery of a life, how it’s shaped, and maybe even what it means. She also suggests that life’s happenings are akin to a twitch in one’s back caused by “a tiny little movement in the just-wrong direction.”

The 90-minute play itself soon will show us, for example, how a father’s fondness for flying his infant about might inspire that child to practice diving; how the tragic loss of a child’s parents affects their future; how a diving accident could lead to an orphan’s adoption; how a medical student’s chance encounter with a veterinarian might lead to marriage and a career-changing decision, and so forth. Through it all, however, the “underlying” person—including back pains that began in infancy—remains the same.

As Chris ages, leaving adolescence and diving behind to become a tennis player (good enough to warrant a radio interview), he/she gets married (for a time, at least), becomes a psychologist, has a daughter (and, later, a grandchild), moves into a new office, takes up acting, fails a driver’s license eye test, celebrates a birthday at a nursing home, collapses while waiting for therapy, and is buried. It’s a life, an ordinary, middle-class one, filled with the sadness and pleasure of any life, made theatrically interesting more by how it’s expressed than by what it contains.

Arnulfo Maldonado’s efficient set—mainly units that slide in and out—tells us just as much as we need to know about each locale, sometimes realistically, sometimes with a mere hint or two. Amith Chandrashaker’s lighting helps greatly, as do Dede Ayite’s costumes, which avoid defining any moment too precisely by a particular period.

While very well-acted by an ensemble—each playing more than one role—ranging across the years in age and stage experience, nothing we see is particularly moving since the playwright’s conceit separates us intellectually from becoming deeply invested in what happens. Eno’s writing, with its dollops of humor, bon mot-like profundities, and “Where’s that from?” quotations, is skillful enough to keep us curious, but the events of this universal life prevent anything from being especially surprising. Of course, the ending, despite eccentricities in its depiction, is a foregone conclusion.

Having the characters continually represented by actors of differing ages, genders, and races dissipates our interest in them as well-defined persons. Thus, much of the time we’re responding more to the playwright’s contrivances than to his people and events, making the experience more cerebral than emotional.

Will Eno has found a diverting device to illuminate a human life. The underlying problem of The Underlying Chris, however, is that Chris’s life is not a particularly unusual one and, apart from the charm or humor of this or that moment in its enactment, not even a clever gimmick can compel continued interest in it. To do that, you'd need Thornton Wilder.

The Underlying Chris

Second Stage Theater/Tony Kiser Theater

305 W. 43^rd St., NYC

Through December 15

124 (2019-2020): Review: MsTRIAL (seen December 2, 2019)

"Red Herrings"

For my review of MsTrial please click on Theater Pizzazz.

123 (2019-2020): Review: THE HALF-LIFE OF MARIE CURIE (seen December 3, 2019)

“Science, Suffrage, and Scandal”

Lauren Gunderson is a young playwright known for being perhaps the most produced American playwright of recent years, despite barely any of her plays being seen in New York; the only one I’ve seen, at any rate, is Bauer. She is likely to see her status remain stable when regional companies—especially those with missions geared toward middle and high school kids—get their hands on The Half-Life of Marie Curie, a two-hander now being produced by Audible at the Minetta Lane. 

Not that it’s a breakthrough play, or even a memorable one, by any means. What it is, though, is a well-crafted, 90-minute, informational dramatization of the friendship of two brilliant women of the early 20th century, scientists who made their mark in the face of great resistance from the patriarchy.   

Francesca Faridany. All photos: Joan Marcus.

These women—the entire dramatis personae of Gunderson’s drama—are Marie Curie (1867-1934) and Hertha Ayrton (née Phoebe Sarah Marks, 1854-1923). The former (Francesca Faridany, Black Panther), familiarly known as Madame Curie, was a Polish-born Frdench physicist and chemist who was not only the first woman to win a Nobel Prize but the first person, regardless of gender, to win a second, a feat that remains unmatched. Equally unusual is that each was awarded in a different field, physics and chemistry.

Kate Mulgrew.

Hertha (Kate Mulgrew, Orange Is the New Black), born in Sussex, England, to a Jewish family, was an outstanding physicist as well as an electrical engineer, being the first woman to become a fellow of the Royal Society. She was also a leading suffragette, who even spent time (like her daughter, Barbara) in prison for her protest activities.

Both women also made invaluable contributions to the Allies during World War I.

The Half-Life of Marie Curie, set mainly between 1911 and 1914, provides enough scientific background to highlight, in accessible terms, the women’s accomplishments, but is principally concerned with charting their strong friendship. It leans toward being hagiographically didactic, but serves nicely to humanize these women, who spend most of their time conversing not so much about their scientific preoccupations—electric arc lighting, the motion of sand and water ripples, the fanning away of poison gas, radium, x-rays, radioactivity, and so on—but about the obstacles they overcame to fulfill their destinies. 

This was a world where women still could not vote, where married women were considered ineligible to become fellows of the Royal Society, and where the Nobel Prize people asked Marie not to show up in person to receive her award.

Francesca Faridany, Kate Mulgrew.

Of primary dramatic concern is Hertha’s deployment of her earth-motherly warmth, spiced with an occasional “shit,” to support Marie, whose husband, Pierre Curie, died in 1906, when contemporary French society turned against her when her affair with the married (but estranged) scientist, Paul Langevin, was made public. The scandal, which had anti-Semitic elements, even though Marie was not Jewish, even drove crowds to vilify her outside her house. Much of the play concerns Marie’s depression, including her traveling to England to spend the summer of 1912 with Hertha in hopes of lifting the cloud that weighed on her. 

Francesca Faridany.

As often in biodramas seeking to include as many biographical details as possible, Gunderson turns now and then from conventional dialogue to poetic rumination to direct address, sometimes in the first person, as in this summing up by Marie of her later career:

I work and work. I travel the world. The girls come with me. The American president hosts me. I am a member of the League of Nations with Einstein. The Radium Institute grows and grows. I am still sick, always sick, but I accept this life because it is mine. Because you gave it back to me.  

Kate Mulgrew, Francesca Faridany.

By and large, The Half-Life of Marie Curie is a thoughtful, educational (the theatre was filled with high schoolers), occasionally humorous (for example, Hertha begs Marie for details of her sex with Paul), but barely dramatic look at the human side of two female pioneers. One of them, Marie, is emotionally damaged, proud, and not always ready to listen to reason, as when Hertha warns the pain-racked Marie that the glowing vial of radium she carries as a keepsake is dangerous to her health. The other, Hertha, is gregarious, aggressively no-nonsense, and even coarse, but she’s the friend every troubled soul love to have. 

The writing provides both stars with an incentive for first-class emoting, and both Faridany (using a heavy French accent) and Mulgrew (her accent British posh)—dressed by Sarah Laux in period-perfect clothes—deliver, although Faridany’s eternally self-pitying Marie eventually starts to grate. Gaye Taylor Upchurch directs them efficiently enough on Rachel Hauck’s sparsely furnished, elegant set, backed by dominating, translucent, latticework wall, and expertly lit by Amith Chandrashaker.

Kate Mulgrew, Francesca Faridany.

The Half-Life of Marie Curie doesn’t glow as steadily as Marie’s precious vial but it seems likely to have more than a half-life in the American theatre. 

Francesca Faridany, Kate Mulgrew.

A final note: present at the Minetta Lane the night I went was Alan Alda, the actor, who wrote a play called Radiance: The Passion of Marie Curie in 2011. An interview with him about the play is in this link.

Francesca Faridany.

The Half-Life of Marie Curie

Minetta Lane Theatre

18 Minetta Lane, NYC

Through December 22