167 (2017-2018): Review: THE AMATEURS (seen February 22, 2017)

“Not Prime Time”

While I admit to not having been entirely in love with Marjorie Prime, Jordan Harrison’s provocative, 2015 sci-fi drama about the cloning of departed loved ones, the play was respected enough to become both a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a movie featuring its original star, Lois Smith. 

I’d be very surprised if a similar fate lies in store for Harrison’s latest effort, The Amateurs, a labored comedy at the Vineyard set amid a band of 14th-century strolling players performing passion plays in a world suffering from the plague, intended as a metaphor for AIDS.

Thomas Jay Ryan, Michael Cyril Creighton. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

You’ll need more than two hands, though, to balance out the play’s multiple threads. For one thing, it tries to be one of those cheeky backstage comedies about amateurish actors’ egos, insecurities, jealousies, and production mishaps, not unlike a fledgling attempt at what Shakespeare pulls off so brilliantly in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Thomas Jay Ryan, Quincy Tyler Bernstine. Ph.oto: Carol Rosegg

It also offers a charmless variation of the artless theatricality enacted in the Dream’s “Pyramus and Thisbe” scene. There are so many anachronisms (like 17th-century sliding wings) that theatre historians will need CPR. 

Quincy Tyler Bernstine, Jennifer Kim. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

Then there’s the extensive, liberally adapted use of the “Noah’s Flood” segment from England’s Wakefield Pageant, the play-within-the-play that the players keep rehearsing, and whose theme of a brighter future following the deluge is tied to the subject of the suffering brought on by the plague. Also getting stage time is “The Seven Deadly Sins,” using large, distorted masks (designed by Raphael Mishier) reminiscent of those ubiquitous Halloween ones of Munch’s “The Scream.”

Thomas Jay Ryan, Greg Keller. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

But that’s not all. We watch a medieval actress, Holly (Quincy Tyler Bernstine), whose responsibilities include playing Noah’s nagging wife, discover the process of how to motivate her character. These discoveries bring her into conflict with the self-important, Bottom-like director, Larking (Thomas Jay Ryan), who, miscounting, insists that the actor has only one job: “Remember the words, and say them audibly.”

Gregg Keller, Thomas Jay Ryan, Quincy Tyler Bernstine. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

The plot includes romantic jealousies; the pregnancy of the promiscuous actress, Rona (Jennifer Kim), which leads to a comically exaggerated onstage birth; and the presence of a technically talented, nebbishy player, Gregory (Michael Cyril Creighton), too homely to get cast without a mask. Gregory not only creates a scenic scroll painting showing all the animals in Noah’s ark but, thanks to a holy relic, even nails the role of miracle worker.   

Michael Cyril Creighton. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

Further, we meet the secretly gay actor-lovers, Henry (Kyle Beltran) and Brom (also Beltran), who die from the plague; observe Henry’s return as a ghost; note the players’ frequent praying to personal deities (one does so while wearing tefillin); witness (again, with memories of the Dream) a tryout for a duke who, it is hoped, will save the actors from the plague by making them his resident troupe; and even encounter antisemitism through the person of a Jewish doctor called Physic (Gregg Keller) who takes refuge with the troupe when his people are blamed for the plague.

Michael Cyril Creighton, Greg Keller, Kyle Beltran. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

These and other issues stuff Acts One and Three, but it’s in Act Two that the play truly implodes by becoming a metatheatrical TED talk. This happens when the medieval world is abandoned and the actor of Gregory enters in modern grunge, breaks the fourth wall, and not only informs us he’s Harrison, the playwright, but also makes clear he’s Michael Cyril Creighton playing the part.   

Kyle Beltran, Jennifer Kim. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

After delivering a lengthy speech on his personal experiences growing up gay and encountering AIDS, he segues into an explanation of how Noah’s wife was “a milestone in the emergence of character.” This inspires him to talk about the evolution of human imagery in art as history moved from the Byzantine to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. At one point, he even brings on three actors wearing sandwich boards with images of the Madonna on their backs to illustrate his ideas. He does this effectively but anyone knowledgeable about the emergence of humanism from medieval piety will be familiar with the material.

Harrison isn’t finished, though. His next step is to have Quincy Tyler Bernstine appear as herself to talk about how she learned to characterize the essentially characterless role of Mrs. Cratchit in a production of A Christmas Carol, a discovery she deploys to emphasize the need for human agency. Regardless of how well these intrusions are acted, they come off as desperate attempts to distract from the flailing play around them.

Michael Cyril Creighton, Quincy Tyler Bernstine. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

David Zinn’s relatively simple set consists of a grassy stage dominated by a mound and a Mother Courage-like pageant wagon that opens to reveal a colorful, if historically inaccurate, scenic background. It’s later supplemented by a pretty but equally out-of-period court theatre setting. Jessica Pabst contributes attractive costumes, both straightforward and tongue-in-cheek, Jen Schriever lights everything with panache, and Bray Poor offers a helpful sound design and music.

Quincy Tyler Bernstine, Jennifer Kim, Kyle Beltran, Thomas Jay Ryan (above). Photo: Carol Rosegg.

A cast of well-respected New York actors, under Oliver Butler’s nothing-special direction, is unable to make The Amateurs, written in three intermissionless acts running a lugubrious 90 minutes, either funny enough to spark more than a few polite laughs or touching enough to draw tears. Unlike Harrison’s last play, The Amateurs isn’t ready for prime time.

OTHER VIEWPOINTS:

Show-Score.com

The Amateurs

Vineyard Theatre

108 E. 15^th St., NYC

Extended to March 29

166 (2017-2018): Review: EDWARD ALBEE'S AT HOME AT THE ZOO: HOMELIFE AND THE ZOO STORY (seen February 24, 2018)

"We Should Talk/I've Been to the Zoo"

For my review of Edward Albee's At Home at the Zoo please click on THE BROADWAY BLOG.

"What Did the Folks Next to Me Think?

I went solo to this show so I asked the young Asian woman sitting next to me for her grade. She'd never seen or read "The Zoo Story," she said. Her grade was a 90.

165 (2017-2018): Review: A MARRIAGE CONTRACT (seen February 23, 2018)

“Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay”

Alex Roe, artistic director the tiny Metropolitan Playhouse in Alphabet City, nobly devoted since 1992 to the exhumation of long-forgotten American plays, has dug more deeply than usual this time. His discovery: Augustin Daly’s 1892 A Marriage Contract, now showing as part of his company’s current Season of Resilience. 

In fact, you won’t even find the play’s title in the standard histories because it was actually staged at Daly’s Theatre as A Test Case: Grass vs. Granite, a broad satire on suburban vs. urban living.

Mike Durkin, Nick Giedris, Trevor St.John-Gilbert. Photo: YuFei Liang.

Daly (1838-1899) was one of the most prominent New York theatre figures of the late 19th-century, being a critic, producer, director, and very prolific playwright. He was known mainly for melodramas, like Under the Gaslight (that’s the one with the girl tied to the railroad tracks) and Leah, the Forsaken, both of which have played the Metropolitan. He also adapted many comedies from translations of French and German originals he commissioned, one such example being A Marriage Contract, based on a German farce by Oscar Blumenthal and Gustav Kadelburg called Grofßstatdluft (The Air of the Metropolis). 

Anna Stefanic, Trevor St. John-Gilbert. Photo: Hannah Stampleman.

In the 15th and final volume of his monumental Annals of the New York Stage, chronicler George C. Odell, after noting that the play opened on November 10, 1892, says it “held the stage for barely three weeks . . . , and, then, disappeared forever from our ken.” A later chronicler, Gerald Bordman, points out that it was a “major disappointment.” And thus it would have remained had not the Metropolitan given it—after 125 years of moldering in a forgotten grave—a new life.

Tyler Kent, Florence Marcisak. Photo: YuFei Liang.

And, indeed, the old farce still does have some laughs left in her, although one has to appreciate the limited circumstances of budget and casting under which she wheezes. As the headline on page 1 of the Sunday, February 25, 2018, New York Times Real Estate section reminds us, the play's central conflict over the relative values of residing in New York City or moving to the suburbs continues to embroil local yokels on both sides of the divide: “Suburban Idyll: Once You Have Decided to Move Out of the City, How Do You Determine Which Location Will Suit You Best?”

Jennifer Reddish, Anna Slefanic. Photo: Hannah Stampleman.

In A Marriage Contract, the suburban manufacturing magnate Jessekiah Pognip (Mike Durkin), devoted booster of his (fictional) New Jersey village, East Lemons, is seriously disturbed by the fast life of New York (although, hypocritically, not so much he can’t enjoy his own night on the town).

J.M. McDonough, Trevor St. John-Gilbert. Photo: YuFei Liang.

He’s so uptight, in fact, that, before allowing man-about-town, proudly profligate New York architect Robert Fleming (Trevor St. John Gilbert) to marry his daughter, Sabina (Anna Stefanic), Pognip insists the reluctant architect sign a contract (“a regular test case”). Its purpose is to make him promise to move to what—in those pre-Trump days—Fleming calls the “hole” of East Lemons, where Pognip can “keep his optics on him.”

Nick Giedris, Jennifer Reddish. Photo: YuFei Liang.

Writing up the contract is Ned Jessamine (Nick Giedris), gallivanting lawyer husband of Pognip’s niece, Juno (Jennifer Reddish). For much of the play, Juno will keep Ned in sweaty suspense by refusing to disclose just what secret she knows about his gadding about that could be used to divorce him.

Donna Eshleman, Teresa Kelsey. Photo: YuLei Fiang.

Life in East Lemons is a sour experience for Fleming, who, after six months, is bored up to his stiff collar with the lack of anything interesting to do, apart from a shooting gallery, village musicales, poetry readings by the local Browning society to the accompaniment of ice cream and cider, or games of euchre.

Andrew R. Cooksey, Jr., Mike Durkin, Tyler Kent. Photo: Hannah Stampleman.

Old Pognip, for his part, couldn’t be happier or more self-satisfied, thus only further irritating his son-in-law, who feels as much married to the old buttinsky as to the complacent Sabina.

J.M. McDonough, Tyler Kent, Trevor St. John-Gilbert, Terence Dineen. Photo: Hannah Stampleman.

And then there are the gossips, the need to maintain the puritanical town’s “moral average,” the lack of an express train, the day-late telegrams, the old news in the papers, the clockwork regularity of things, and everybody and his brother’s knowing your business. “It’s only among a million people we can be really alone,” Fleming laments.

Tyler Kent, J.M. McDonough, Trevor St. John-Gilbert. Photo: Hannah Stampleman.

Unable to bear it any longer, Fleming packs up and returns to the city, followed soon after—to her father’s amazement—by Sabina, wrapping up not only the main plot but several subplots when the entire cast gathers in Fleming’s new city flat.

Mike Durkin, Trevor St. John-Gilbert, J.M. McDonough. Photo: Hannah Stampleman.

Those subplots involve Juno’s distant cousin, the foolish Natty (Tyler Kent), who keeps coming in second when it comes to asking for a girl’s hand; East Lemon’s liberal-minded Dr. Tinkey (J.M. McDonough), fed up with the town, but ruled by his henpecking, nosey wife, Columbia (Teresa Kelsey); and, of course, Juno herself and Ned.

Trevor St. John-Gilbert, Tyler Kent, J.M. McDonough. Photo: Hannah Stampleman.

The contrived plotting is charmingly old-fashioned as are much of the stagey dialogue and constant asides. There’s nothing here that other turn-of-the-century farces haven’t done better, but its occasional wit and lack of prolixity are in its favor. It’s also interesting to see how Daly refashioned the German original to capture touches of New York life in the gay 90s, when up-to-date meant being “twentieth century.”

When Sabina and Juno go to a matinee it’s to “Ibsen’s last play,” with the admonition that they “leave the theatre at the first objectionable word.” Bedlow’s Island and the Statue of Liberty, as well as the steeple of Trinity Church, are touted as must-see tourist spots, and, as today, someone notes that the city’s occupants only see the local sights when accompanying someone from out of town.

And the flat that Fleming must abandon for East Lemons is on Broadway at 23rd Street, “right in the midst of the noisiest—gayest—brightest—maddest crowd on the continent.” You can decide for yourself how much this remains the case.

One of the liveliest sequences involves several of the men getting drunk on champagne and singing “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay,” a tune introduced a year earlier that became so popular in 1892 it was on everyone’s lips. So ubiquitous and, to some, annoying, was it that, given its ongoing familiarity (and its place at the end of Chekhov’s The Three Sisters), it’s intriguing to see what the play’s New York Times reviewer had to say about it on November 11, 1892.

But why must we have ‘Ta-ra-ra’ on this stage? It is not pretty, or funny, or graceful, or even naughty. It is worn out already, and the bootblacks—the progressive bootblacks—have found another tune to whistle. There are a dozen variety shows in town where they do this sort of thing better!

Of course, the introduction of the tune is probable enough, but the thing itself is so stale and common, the fun of the incident involving it is so obvious, that it gives people who look to this stage [Daly’s] for the best, the brightest, the gentlest, most poetic and fragrant in contemporary comedy, an unpleasant shock.

Readers, the shock is gone.

The production, performed in an intimate three-quarters-round space, uses director Roe’s own simple setting, with furniture moved by the actors when the action shifts between city and country. Sidney Fortner’s eye-catching costumes, close enough to period accuracy to pass muster, help greatly, while Roe’s competent but mostly unexceptional cast—the best work comes from Reddish, McDonough, and Giedris—keeps things lively. Still, with four acts running well over two hours, interest often flags.

Mike Durkin, Trevor St. John-Gilbert. Photo: Ed Forti.

A Marriage Contract maintains the Metropolitan’s reputation as a dependable theatrical curiosity shop. The play’s chief value lies in demonstrating the kind of thing our not-that-distant ancestors attended just as Ibsen, Chekhov, and modernists far more extreme were changing the dramatic landscape. On the other hand, overlong and dated as it is, it’s more entertaining than many other current plays I could mention. Who knows? Perhaps it won’t take another 125 years before its next revival.

OTHER VIEWPOINTS:

Show-Score.com

A Marriage Contract

Metropolitan Playhouse

220 E. 4^th St., NYC

Through March 18

"Did the Folks Next to Me Like It?"

My plus-one, a scholar in his mid-70s, gave the play a 55.

164 (2017-2018): Review: A WALK WITH MR. HEIFETZ (seen February 21, 2018)

"Fiddler on the Wall"

For my review of A WALK WITH MR. HEIFETZ please click on THEATER PIZZAZZ.

"Did the Folks Next to Me Like It?"

My plus-one gave the play a 45.

163 (2017-2018): Review: RETURNING TO REIMS (seen February 20, 2018)

"Documentary Theatre"

Once again, a production forces us to ask the question, what is theatre? Or, what is a play? Theatre is a shapeshifter and its definition is constantly changing. You can, for example, have theatre without the conventional elements of actors, sets, theatres, scripts, and so on. 

Nina Hoss, Bush Moukarzel. Photo: Arno Declair.

All of these elements are present, however, in Returning to Reims, now making its American debut at St. Ann’s Warehouse (following its world premiere in Manchester, UK, and a production in Berlin), which nonetheless expands a few theatrical boundaries and gives a new twist to the meaning of documentary theatre.

Nina Hoss. Photo: Arno Declair.

Returning to Reims (Retour à Reims) is an adaptation of the 2009 memoir of that name (English version 2013) by French philosopher Didier Eribon. Director Thomas Ostermeier, of the renowned Schaubühne Berlin, who presumably did the uncredited adaptation, has set the play in an expansive recording studio (designed by Nina Wetzel) where the actress Katy (Nina Hoss, Homeland, Phoenix) has been hired to voice Eribon’s first-person narrative for a documentary directed by Paul (Bush Moukarzel), a filmmaker. 

Perhaps 60 percent of the play shows the actress seated on a stool at center, reading Didier’s words, as a large, overhead screen—seen only by us—presents the rather artfully compiled documentary (created by Ostermeier and Sébastien Dupouey), with a haunting score by Nils Ostendorf. Meanwhile, the recording is monitored from a booth by the filmmaker and sound technician/studio owner Tony (Ali Gadema).

Nina Hoss, Ali Gadema. Photo: Arno Declair.

The rest of the stage time is occupied with discussions between Katy and Paul over the script’s political dimensions (along with systemic evil, conspiracy theories, etc.), and with the technician performing a politically charged rap song he wrote.

The song breaks the fourth wall, for some unexplained reason, allowing for additional such intrusions—as when Paul asks communists in the audience to raise their hands—that destroy the realistic world previously established.

Bush Moukarzel, Nina Hoss, Ali Gadema. Photo: Arno Declair.

Subtextual political connotations—including “processes of domination”—color all the characters’ interactions so perhaps this is somehow intended to include the audience in that realm.

The conclusion, devised so as to provide the actress’s richly personal perspective, offers home videos of Katy/Hoss’s own father, a communist trade unionist who lost faith in his ideology, turned Green Party activist and did humanitarian work for the indigenous people of the Brazilian rain forest (where we see a much younger Hoss having her face painted by a tribesman). This, we’re perhaps supposed to imagine, is intended as an alternative attitude toward the demoralizing forces of globalization, capitalism, and monopolization roiling the landscape.

Bush Moukarzel, Nina Hoss, Ali Gadema. Photo: Arno Declair.

The recording occurs in two scenes, a week apart, during the play’s uninterrupted (except for a brief blackout) two hours. The Eribon story, supported by considerable documentary footage from his life and times, recounts his feelings as a gay, progressive, intellectual from a poor, working-class family in the provincial city of Reims when, following his homophobic father’s death, he returns to visit his mother. Eribon, who considers himself a class traitor for abandoning his class origins, examines his identity issues in the light of political and sociological realities.

One theme that emerges, and which we understand to cover far more than the French politics it cites, concerns how the working classes, feeling betrayed, have been shifting from their traditional support of leftwing ideas and parties to populist, rightwing ones, particularly Marine Le Pen’s National Front. Trump’s name is never spoken but his existence in this maelstrom of international unease is hard to ignore. When Katy reveals her personal understanding of and involvement in the issues at stake, the play takes a surprisingly autobiographical detour into Hoss’s own life. It’s interesting but only serves to muddy the waters.

Returning to Reims is not a ready-made crowd pleaser. The narration’s low-key focus on Didier’s identity issues, the kind that have become increasingly familiar in recent years, is not as gripping as one could wish; not only do most American audiences have no connection to Didier, we’re hearing his thoughts through the medium of a woman’s voice and presence, creating a Brechtian effect that distances us emotionally. Moreover, the emphasis on the class-related preoccupations of European politics, while of intellectual interest, seems more appropriate for a TED lecture than a dramatic presentation.

Hoss, an exceptional artist, reads the narrative in a soft, naturalistic, barely accented, deceptively objective tone; its mood is perfect for the footage being projected if you focus only on that but it seems oddly disconnected from the narrator’s living, onstage presence, where we expect more overt demonstrations of action and emotion.

Even when engaged in vital dialogue with the somewhat more volatile filmmaker, Hoss’s demeanor—a reflection of gender-related dominance-submission issues?—is personable, droll, controlled, knowing, and disciplined. The scenes during which Paul gets Katy to divulge her personal story—at far too great a length—as her face fills the large screen over her head never betray that she’s performing rather than living what she’s portraying.

Bush Moukarzel, Nina Hoss, Ali Gadema. Photo: Arno Declair.

While there are several boring patches in Returning to Reims it generally manages to sustain interest; political junkies are likely to relish it more than those seeking dramatic action and strong feelings. The arguments are pertinent and thought-provoking but not notably polemical and the general subtlety of their presentation is less stimulating than an opening segment of Rachel Maddow on an active news day.

My politically active plus-one was hypnotized by the discourse from first to last. I, though, was more excited about seeing and learning about the fascinating Nina Hoss up close and personal.

OTHER VIEWPOINTS:

Show-Score.com

Returning to Reims

St. Ann’s Warehouse

42 Water St., Brooklyn, NYC

Through February 25 

Did the Folks Next to Me Like It (8)

This time it wasn’t someone next to me but a pleasant, white-haired woman who, hungry to discuss what she’d just seen, had begun to chat about the play with me and my plus-one on Dock Street as we walked to the subway. I asked for her grade on a score of 1-100. Hesitant at first, she offered a 6 or a 7. I asked if a 70 would do, and she agreed.

162 (2017-2018): Review: FLIGHT (seen February 19, 2018)

“A Modern Odyssey”

Warning: The following describes an uncommon theatre experience whose methods you may wish to discover for yourself. If that’s you, and you don’t want to read further, I’ll say only that Flight is a brief, excellently produced, nontraditional presentation about the experiences shared by two Afghan boys fleeing to England and presented not by actors but by miniature figures and scenic models. The production won an award at the 2017 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. For those who want more detail about the experience, read on.

 

Photo: Vox Motus.

The walk from the nearest subway to the Hotel McKittrick, a former warehouse, over on W. 27th near 11th Avenue in one of Chelsea’s less frequented sections, may not appeal to many theatregoers, especially older ones hiking there in inclement weather. 

However, after seeing Flight, an unusual theatrical experience created by the Scottish company Vox Motus about a pair of Afghan boys fleeing to the West, they’re likely to look forward to their return trip when they realize the insignificance of their trek in comparison to what the protagonists endure.

When you arrive at the McKittrick, you may see a long, barely moving line snaking down the block. It’s there to see, not Flight, but Sleep No More, the immersive, Macbeth-inspired presentation that’s been playing since 2011.

A bit further down the block, right in the middle of the queue, is another doorway to the same building, which you can enter at once, without waiting in line. It leads to a small lobby where a tiny elevator, operated by a black-garbed attendant, takes you to a second lobby, resembling the interior of an old-time, European train station, including picturesque telephone booths. I felt like I was in a Wes Anderson movie.

After you get your tickets, other very polite, black-clad attendants quietly guide you through dimly lit, ghostly corridors, past mockups of old-fashioned train cars on either side, to another station-like coat-check area, where a much-used luggage truck leans against the wall near an antique scale piled with vintage valises.

Once you’ve checked your belongings you’re ushered into one of the train cars you previously passed, where you wait with a small group of others to be summoned across the corridor into a different car. You sit silently with the group on a leather banquette-style couch as one by one, separated by several minutes, people in the group are summoned to another room.

There, in the darkness, you’re asked to sit alone in a petite cubicle, with black walls to either side. In front of you, is a black wall with a window-like opening lit by a horizontal streak of white light outlining vaguely defined forms. You’re given a headset and soon begin to hear composer/sound designer Mark Melville’s remarkable mix of sound effects, narrative (spoken by Emin Elliott), dialogue, and music that accompanies what you’re seeing.

And what you’re seeing is the story of the orphans, 15-year-old Aryan (voiced by Farshid Rokey) and his eight-year-old brother Kabir (voiced by Nalini Chetty), adapted by Oliver Emanuel from Australian journalist Caroline Brothers’s 2012 novel, Hinterland. The boys run off from their war-torn nation with $2000 and little more than the clothes on their backs in an attempt to get to relatives in London via Kabul, Tehran, Istanbul, Athens, Rome, and Paris.

They encounter awful experiences, including being shanghaied to do forced labor on a farm, and one of them being sexually abused, but they also share a few good times, like when they’re able to take a swim, or when a group of American young women in Paris buy them sneakers. On the whole, though, they suffer mightily as, using various subterfuges, they creep ever nearer to their goal. The story, based on Brothers’s interviews with numerous refugees, encapsulates the experiences of actual people into the odyssey of these fictional Afghan boys.

Photo: Vox Motus.

Most remarkably, their adventures are represented not by living actors, nor even by puppets, but by exquisitely rendered tiny sculptures of people, places, and things. These are placed within a series of diorama-like, square and rectangular openings that slide by very slowly, inches from your face, each little window brilliantly lit with miniscule instruments by designer Simon Wilkinson. The openings are built into a huge, revolving, drum-like or carousel structure that allows perhaps 25 people at a time to sit around it, each seeing in turn what the person just before them witnessed.

Sometimes only one opening appears, sometimes more. Cinematic methods are used, with close-ups, medium, long-shot, and birds-eye effects; human figures look to be anywhere from half an inch to two inches tall, with background persons often seen as silhouettes. Cars, trees, mountains, trucks, rubber rafts at sea, fruits, architecture, clouds, sky, planets, and whatever else is needed, no matter how grand or how minute, fill frame after frame.

The models are mostly realistic, often with awesome detail, but frequently distorted for emotional effect, like the urban buildings that curve threateningly over the boys, or the scenes that suggest etchings on glass, or the depiction of French security personnel as impersonal, threatening birds. (Rebecca Hamilton is the exceptionally gifted co-designer and lead model maker.) Birds, in fact, are a consistent visual motif, often representing freedom but also suggesting oppression and death.

The narrative of Flight has frequent ellipses that fail to explain transitional gaps in the story, and we have to fill these in ourselves or simply take it for granted that the story, for all its apparent literalness, is not always meant to be taken literally. A lot has to be crammed into its mere 45-minute presentation (which allows for multiple showings every day).

The presentation reminded me of a far more spectacular but in certain ways similar proto-theatrical genre, the 19th-century panorama; it also has a hint of the old zoetrope device. Regardless, I’m afraid that, however well-done Flight is, it’s easier to become absorbed in its artfulness than to become as deeply invested in it emotionally as would be the case were it presented as, say, a movie.

Still, Flight, directed with theatrical imagination and delicate sensitivity by Candice otand Jamie Harrison, is, on its own terms, an impressively original articulation of the plight of innocent refugees fleeing the world’s disaster areas while suffering the cold shoulder of international disdain. It avoids polemics or Pollyanna solutions in favor of focusing on two children as symbols of the many thousands like them seeking security by leaving country after country.

Flight leaves it up to us to consider the tragedy of these invisible souls who, each in their own way, seeks asylum from the poverty, bloodshed, famine, or corruption in their native lands.  

Perhaps the best way to conclude is by repeating the following program note:

As of May 2017 the United Nations Children’s Fund counted 300,000 unaccompanied and separated children moving worldwide. These are the documented cases. Of these 100,000 were caught trying to cross the US-Mexican border and 170,000 lone child refugees sought asylum in Europe.

OTHER VIEWPOINTS:

Show-Score.com

Flight

McKittrick Hotel

530 W. 27th St., NYC

Through March 25

"Did the Folks Next to Me Like It?" (7)

Because of the individual nature of this experience, I was unable to ask a neighbor for his or her reaction.