23. Review: SHINING CITY (seen June 1, 2016)

"His Wild Irish Ghost"

Stars range from 5-1.

After a two-year renovation during which it kept active in temporary quarters across town at Union Square, the Irish Repertory Theatre has proudly moved back into its W. 22nd Street home with a generally excellent revival of Conor McPherson’s Shining City. The attractively upgraded space retains the same layout as before although the stage has been widened (at least for its current production) to eliminate the former seating area at stage right. A small balcony has been added and the well-cushioned seats are very comfortable but the auditorium incline remains insufficiently steep to prevent large heads from blocking your view. Nothing could be done to remove the supporting beam down right so designers will continue to find ways of incorporating it into their sets, as Charlie Corcoran does for the loft-like Dublin office he’s created for Shining City. 

Billy Carter, Matthew Broderick. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

The play, first produced in London and Dublin in 2004, and shown locally in a lauded 2006 Manhattan Theatre Club staging (two Tony nominations) starring Oliver Platt as John and Brían F. O’Byrne as Ian (roles now played by Matthew Broderick and Billy Carter), is an absorbing, 100-minute examination of lonely, confused, and guilt-racked modern Dubliners who have trouble communicating. McPherson (The Seafarer, The Weir), a master of David Mamet-like, disconnected, everyday language, offers a five-scene plot with little action but fertile chatter that twines itself inside and around your ears and won’t let go.

Billy Carter, Lisa Dwan. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

As is frequent in McPherson’s work, the supernatural creeps like the Dublin fog into the most natural circumstances when John, an ordinary man in his mid-50s, tells his new therapist, Ian, that he’s certain he’s seen the ghost of his late wife, Mari—who recently died in a car crash—at their home. He’s so frightened that he’s moved into a B&B. Ian, whose very first patient this is, doesn’t believe in ghosts and struggles to respond sympathetically. Soon his own soul-crushing problems with Neasa (Lisa Dwan), the vulnerable fiancée he got pregnant and for whom he abandoned the priesthood, emerge. Ian’s left her and the baby and, to her confusion, wants to end the relationship; she, forced to live with his brother and nasty sister-in-law, is upset enough to reveal a one-time fling she had with someone else; this only gives him an excuse to shift his guilt to her.

Lisa Dwan, Billy Carter. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

In another of John’s sessions, he offers a brilliant extended monologue, only briefly interrupted by Ian, covering the guilt he felt from his marital and extramarital experiences, and the painful result of an attempt to find solace at a brothel. Ian’s sex life is also problematic, as revealed when he brings home Laurence (James Russell), who has his own issues. In the final scene, John and Ian seem to be moving on with their lives, with Ian’s taking a surprising turn when McPherson closes with a lovely shocker.

Billy Carter, James Russell. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

Corcoran's design for Ian’s office (including that beam) seems a bit spacious for a beginning therapist but it's got the right ambience, especially under Michael Gottlieb’s meticulously crafted lighting, while Martha Hally’s casual clothes look fine on everyone. M. Florian Staub’s sound design and Ryan Rumery’s original music are their artistic best. The play itself requires direction that can control the dialogue the way a conductor does his score; Ciarán O’Reilly succeeds for the most part in being Shining City’s James Levine. 

The chief hindrance is Broderick’s reliance on that single tone of friendly, boyish appeal and touch of physical stiffness that pervades much of his work (and has helped make him a star). His Dublin accent (Stephen Gabis is the dialect coach) is consistent, if not quite as authentic as those of his all-Irish costars, and he handles the difficult, choppy locutions well, but he’s unable to capture the role’s darker, emotionally painful colors. Carter, far more nervously compelling, seems very much a real person in uncomfortable circumstances. Dwan has just the right sense of bafflement and anger for Neasa while Russell brings an interestingly honest sensitivity to the hustler.

The Irish Rep has put a fine foot forward for the premiere production at its refurbished West Side home. In commemoration, I offer this Irish toast: "May your home always be too small to hold all your friends!" 

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Shining City

Irish Repertory Theatre

132 W. 22^nd Street, NYC

Through

22. Review: CONFUSIONS (seen June 8, 2016)

“A is for Acting Ayckbourn”

Stars range from 5-1.

Prolific British playwright Alan Ayckbourn’s Confusions, a program of “five interlinked one-act plays,” first produced in England in 1974, two years before it was seen in London, is finally getting its New York debut at 59E59 Theaters as part of their annual Brits Off Broadway festival. Much like watching a Neil Simon comedy of the same era, seeing these comedies about marital dysfunction, adultery, male chauvinism, romantic disappointment, and related subjects—mostly about women getting the short end of the stick—allows us to compare attitudes of those times with ours. The plays are often funny but, given the passage of time, not as much as one might wish; only now and then, particularly in the final one, “A Talk in the Park,” do darker shadows fall.

Elizabeth Boag, Stephen Billington, Russell Dixon. Photo: Tony Bartholomew.

Ayckbourn’s fondness for clever playwriting devices is present, but not in the striking ways found in many of his more fully developed plays. One idea is to have a character from each play present in the next, although this isn’t followed through in “A Talk in the Park,” nor is it especially illuminating. (A similar technique, of course, was used many years ago in Schnitzler’s La Ronde.) In “Between Mouthfuls” two nearby couples are chatting at dinner in a restaurant only for their words to fade in and out as the focus shifts from table to table, allowing just what the waiter hears to be audible; since their mouths keep forming words, the effect is as if someone were playing with the volume control.

Mildly enjoyable as the plays are (the laughs are mainly of the chuckle variety), the chief reason to see them is the marvelous comic versatility of the five-member ensemble, which has come over from Scarborough’s Stephen Joseph Theatre, where Confusions was expertly staged by the playwright himself. Acting enthusiasts will want to see the tall, slender Stephen Billington go from playing the chauvinistic husband, Terry, in “Mother Figure,” to the elegantly swishy waiter in “Drinking Companion” and “Between Mouthfuls,” to the childish Boy Scout leader in “Gosforth’s Fête,” to the guy in “Talk in the Park” who’s trying to enjoy his time away from his nagging wife only to be assailed by an eccentric woman.

Charlotte Harwood, Richard Stacey, Elizabeth Boag. Photo: Tony Bartholomew.

And there’s Elizabeth Boag, who shifts from Lucy, the pajama-wearing mother in “Mother Figure,” whose round-the-clock raising of her little ones makes her treat even adults as kids, to Bernice, the well-groomed, sophisticated perfume salesperson in “Drinking Companion,” who helps her friend fend off a drunken Lothario, to Mrs. Pearce, the aging, upper-class, councillor’s wife in “Between Mouthfuls” and “Gosforth’s Fête,” to Beryl, the abused wife in “A Talk in the Park.” Each member of this chameleon-like company of character actors moves from role to role with equally delightful variations in appearance, voice, accent, and manner, ultimately providing a diverse satirical portrait of notably British character types.

Richard Stacey, Elizabeth Boag. Photo: Tony Bartholomew.

Stylistically, “Mother Figure” is almost absurdist in its depiction of a woman controlling a neighboring married couple (Billington and Charlotte Harwood) as if they were naughty children, while “Gosforth’s Fête” is pure farce in showing how many things can go wrong in setting up a public fundraiser. “Drinking Companion” is a character study of an unfaithful, heavy-drinking husband (Richard Stacey) trying to pick up a woman (Harwood) in the hotel he’s staying at; “Between Mouthfuls” watches two couples having dinner at nearby restaurant tables, with one pair being a cuckolded husband (Stacey) and his wife (Harwood) and the other the cuckolder (Dixon) and his own spouse (Boag), as an eavesdropping waiter (Billington) hovers patiently, trying to get each couple’s orders. Finally, there’s the slightly Beckettian “Talk in the Park” with five strangers occupying four benches: a man (Dixon) talks to the woman (Boag) next to him until, bored and bothered by her own problems, she moves to the next bench and does the same thing to the man (Stacey) next to her, and so on, with no one interested in what anyone else has to say nor able to find someone who wants to hear their own story.

Russel Dixon. Photo: Tony Bartholomew. 

Michael Holt’s simple, black, unit set remains essentially the same throughout, altered chiefly by the furnishings and props brought on with choreographic precision during the scene breaks to the accompaniment of bouncy British jazz. Jason Tyler makes the most of the lighting possibilities, and Holt’s costumes (and wigs, one imagines) provide the proper period look.

Stephen Billington. Photo: Tony Bartholomew. 

Not everything clicks during Confusion’s two acts, running two hours and 15 minutes, but there’s enough A-quality acting here to get you through even the A-list Ayckbourn’s occasional longueurs.

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Confusions

54E54 Theaters/Theater A

54 E. 54^th Street, NYC

Through July 3

21. Review: INDIAN SUMMER (seen June 7, 2016)

“Sandy at the Beach with George”

Stars range from 5-1.

In Gregory S. Moss’s Indian Summer, at Playwrights Horizons, George is an eccentric, full-bearded, humorously crabby, Tevye-like grandpa with an air of the beachcomber story-teller about him. It’s the kind of role made for Jonathan Hadary (whose résumé includes Tevye), who, indeed, plays the part in Moss’s “love letter to Rhode Island.” George, a widower, is the fourth-wall-breaking narrator in this washed out, elegiac dramedy, which centers on the summertime coming of age of his 16-year-old grandson, Daniel (Owen Campbell)—until it doesn’t. 

Jonathan Hadary. Photo: Joan Marcus.

It all takes place on a sunny Rhode Island beach, crafted against a sky-blue background framed within a rectangular, polished wood proscenium by Dane Laffrey with 15,000 pounds of actual sand to represent the dunes. Eric Southern has lit it elegantly to suggest different times of day and shifting moods, while Stowe Nelson’s quality sound design introduces the whoosh of the waves for added atmosphere.

Joe Tippett, Owen Campbell, Elise Kibler. Photo: Joan Marcus.

You’ve probably already seen some version of this two-hour scenario on film or stage. George is a longtime resident of (but not native to) a beachside community on the Rhode Island shore, and Daniel, whose mother is off “finishing some things up,” is spending the summer with him. Daniel’s a nerdy, scrawny kid who seems to have an unhealthily close relationship with his mother; this is a boy who, at his mom's suggestion, crochets to relieve stress. He may appear sexually ambivalent, but Moss nonetheless has him falling in love with Isabella “Izzy” Rizzo (Elise Kibler), the loud, profane, and sexy local girl he meets not so cute on the beach when she accuses him of stealing her six-year-old brother’s broken toy pail.

Joe Tippett, Elise Kibler. Photo: Joan Marcus.

Their friendship—opposed by George, who considers Izzy’s large, Sicilian-American family “low class”—begins with a hint of violence when Izzy says she usually punches those she dislikes, which would include outsiders like Daniel, called “summer people” by the locals; nonetheless, despite the tensions of their insider-outsider relationship, Izzy finds herself inexplicably drawn to him. The fly in the ointment is Izzy’s musclebound, immature, bullying (but really sweet) boyfriend, the Irish-American Jeremy (Joe Tippett), who senses a threat in Daniel’s presence.  

Owen Campbell, Joe Tippett, Elise Kibler. Photo: Joan Marcus.

Izzy and Jeremy, working-class stereotypes (although Jeremy is older than his childish behavior suggests), speak with vulgarity-peppered Rhode Island accents; for all their bravado, however, they reveal, unpersuasively, the penetrating souls of poets. Izzy, who writes down the meaning of words Daniel says that she doesn’t know (like “bereaved” and “provisional”), is elated when she stumps Daniel by calling herself an “autodidact.” Such moments have a passing charm but only serve to heighten the characters’ literary affectations.

Joe Tippet, Owen Campbell. Photo: Joan Marcus.

This feeling grows stronger in act two, much of which is devoted to characters engaging in role-playing duologues; although not really believable these have some smart, even touching moments, but they go too far when George asks the 17-year-old Izzy to wear the dress of his late wife, Milly, and improvise a conversation in her persona. The normally brazen Izzy not only does so with the genius of a Meryl Streep, she even offers an extemporaneous description of what it feels like to die that could never have come from her mouth. If she were so smart, I doubt she’d have made the life-altering decision she does before the play concludes. And then there’s George, to whom the play sharply shifts its attention away from Daniel at the end. He too makes a choice that, for all the wisdom he now and then shares, seems more a playwright’s device than what this person, as we’ve seen him, would do.

Elise Kibler, Owen Campbell. Photo: Joan Marcus.

The ensemble performs enthusiastically under Carolyn Cantor’s direction but the result is more external than internal. Joe Tippett, a scene stealer in the recent Familiar, is so here again with a showy performance that captures the exaggerations of Jeremy’s buff braggart but with so much vigor you can see his pumped-up Thespian veins popping. Kibler looks bodacious in her cut off short-shorts (Kaye Voyce did the spot-on costumes) but she, too, forces Izzy’s extreme characteristics, making her a Rhode Island faux-version of Mona Lisa Vito in My Cousin Vinnie. Campbell’s Daniel, like Kibler’s Izzy, is another example of an older actor playing a much younger role and therefore compelled to compensate with artfully artificial choices. Hadary, of course, is playing a Hadary role so there’s nothing new to say about it.

Jonathan Hadary, Owen Campbell, Elise Kibler. Photo: Joan Marcus.

Indian Summer touches on themes of growing up, sexuality, love, death, belonging, identity, and grief, and the fatalism implied by the line, “Fuck you, Mortal,” but little of it resonates beyond what we’ve seen in so many other plays. George’s occasional commentaries on the mysteries of life, particularly of the ocean, add to the insistent poetic mood, as when he explains “Indian Summer,” but not much to the progress of the plot.

it's a phenomenon we call,

politically and geographically incorrect as it may be,

“Indian Summer”—

that margin of sun-lit warmth after the end of August that always feels exceptional,

like a pocket of unexpected time,

a little reprieve between seasons,

in which things

people

lives and stories

are given a chance to collect themselves

to reconfigure

and, possibly, to CHANGE . . .

where one finds one’s self invited,

by God, or Nature, or the whims of climate,

to merely enjoy the surprise of it . . .

Jonathan Hadary. Photo: Joan Marcus.

If that sounds inviting, you may wish to try a splash in Indian Summer’s shallow surf.

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Indian Summer

Playwrights Horizons

425 W. 42^nd Street, NYC

Through June 26

20. Review: HIMSELF AND NORA (seen June 2, 2016)

"A Portrait of the Artist and His Muse"

For my review of Himself and Nora please click on THE BROADWAY BLOG.

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Himself and Nora

Minetta Lane Theatre

18 Minetta Lane, NYC

Through

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19. Review: THE TOTAL BENT (seen June 3, 2016)

"All that Glitters"

Stars range from 5-1.

The Public Theatre, with its rich history of finding gold in them thar offbeat musical hills (from Hair and A Chorus Line to Fun Home and Hamilton), hasn’t hit the mother lode with The Total Bent, the entertaining but seriously patchy new show by Stew (“text” and music) and Heidi Rodewald (music); their Passing Strange also had a Public run before moving to Broadway in 2007 and winning two Tonys.

Vondie Curtis Hall. Photo: Joan Marcus.

Gold glistens most brightly in the galvanizing performance of star-in-the-making Ato Blankson-Wood, the top-notch company surrounding him, and the foot-stomping, finger-clicking gospel, blues, rock, funk, and jazz score. The book (whoops, I mean “text”), though, is dross; when someone says, “That lyric will never make it to Broadway, never!” he could just as well be speaking of The Total Bent (in its present form, at any rate), which takes its title from a line of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s: “God does not judge us by the separate incidents or the separate mistakes that we make, but by the total bent of our lives.”

Ato Blankson-Wood, David Cale. Photo: Joan Marcus.

The audience at the Public’s Anspacher Theatre sits on three sides of a sprawling arrangement of furniture, floral carpeting, and equipment (designed by Andrew Lieberman and nicely lit by Thom Weaver) suggesting a recording studio in Montgomery (a.k.a. “Bluntgomery” in the script), Alabama, ca. 1960, during the heart of the Civil Rights movement. The seven-member orchestra, led by drummer Marty Beller, is upstage, its members including the guitar- and piano-playing Stew and the bass-playing Rodewald (the only female on stage). Stew also interjects ironic comments on what’s going down.

Blankson-Wood plays Marty, a sweet-faced, African-American songwriter and aspiring singer. He’s the opposite of his charismatic dad, Papa Joe Roy (Vondie Curtis Hall, Dreamgirls), a notable TV evangelical preacher-gospel singer with a troubled past who exploits Marty’s songs for his own career and is working on a “crossover-comeback” album. Marty, a protester against racial injustice who sees himself as a musical savior, wants to write a new kind of music using his “inside voice” to advance the cause, abandoning the black church’s deference to the white man (“Jesus Ain’t Sittin’ [in the Back of the Bus]”). The retrograde Joe Roy is content with the status quo, musically and politically; in “Shut Up!” he sings that since Jesus loves blacks, they should “suffer their oppression in style.” Thus is sparked the father-son combustion that drives the show’s racing motor.

Ato Blankson-Wood, Curtis Wiley, Kenny Brawner,Jahi Kearse. Photo: Joan Marcus.

Stew’s narrative creates a stew of father-son, religious, racial, musical, homosexual, artistic, and moral issues, including the price of fame. Complicating things is the arrival of the questionably motivated, white, British record producer, Byron Blackwell (David Cale), dressed in a bold plaid suit and speaking what sounds like a Liverpudlian accent; he’s hot for Southern black music and for Marty, too, hoping to make him a star and more. Joe Roy’s genius doesn’t miss his eye for talent either but it only furthers the family rift.

Ato Blankson-Wood, David Cale. Photo; Joan Marcus.

Instead of taking an intermission, the hour and 50 minute show goes into holding mode as a team of well-drilled techies sets up metal platforming so we can move to London, where Marty—in bushy Afro and Prince-like, skin-tight, open-chested, glam-rock duds (costumes by Gabriel Berry)—gives an explosively energetic concert backed by sensational singer-dancers (Jahi Kearse and Curtis Wiley). Then, remembering there’s an alleged “text” involved, the show shifts back to it for its fuzzy conclusion.

Curtis Wiley, Ato Blankson-Hall, Jahi Kearse. Photo: Joan Marcus.

Somewhere in here lies material for a solid show, but I suspect it would mean abandoning the current script in favor of a clearer, sung-through story. The storytelling is vague and the characters more shadows than substance. But the performances—fired up by Joanna Settle’s driven direction—are all terrific, most extraordinary being newcomer Blankson-Woods (a male ringer for Lupita Nyong’o), who brings a sizzling rock-star sensuality to Marty, especially during his concert section. In Kearse and Wiley, he has two supercharged Energy Bunny backup singer-dancers, with all three making the most of David Neumann’s concert choreography. Hall is perfect as the aging, still lithe and magnetic, preacher man, while Cale, who sings the music hall-style “Bluntgomery,” gives the middle-aged Byron the right mix of slime and sincerity.

Curtis Wiley, Jahi Kearse, Ato Blankson-Wood. Photo: Joan Marcus.

Does The Total Bent add up to more than its separate incidents and separate mistakes? That’s for God to judge and audiences to decide.

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The Total Bent

Anspacher Theatre/Public Theatre

425 Lafayette Avenue, NYC

Through June 19

18. Review: A PERSISTENT MEMORY (seen May 31, 2016)

"Trunks for the Memories"

Stars range from 5-1.

Memory issues plague David Huntington (Drew Ledbetter), the central character of Jackob G. Hofman’s lugubrious A Persistent Memory at the Beckett Theatre; as he struggles to prevent his memories from slipping this way and that, David even considers that he might have early-onset Alzheimer’s. Still, his problems seem more related to blocked feelings stemming from his difficulty in processing personal tragedies than from mental disease. Mainly, they appear to be the dramatist’s attempt to equate the human ability to grieve and its connection to memory to the mental and emotional capacities of elephants. 

A Persistent Memory. Photo: Russ Rowland.

Hofman’s structurally muddled play is framed by opening and closing scenes in Entebbe, Uganda, where David, privileged 30ish scion of a wealthy, philanthropic family, who’s seeking to fill an emotional hollow in his gut, has gone to learn about the rapid decline in the elephant population caused by ivory poaching. (He also participates in rebuilding hurricane-damaged homes in Mississippi.) In between, the action jumps around chronologically and spatially within the period of a year.

Drew Ledbetter, Victoria Vance. Photo: Russ Rowland.

Thus the play moves from Uganda to a brief, wordless scene two weeks earlier in an American home followed by a scene in a university lecture hall three days earlier, and then by one in a small Manhattan apartment nine months previously. After that we go back yet another three months to a Connecticut restaurant only for the action to move to a night club three weeks before the play’s first scene. And so on. While the script indicates precisely where and when the scenes are taking place no such information is conveyed to the audience, which—if it cares to—must decipher these things on its own.

Ariel Estrada, Drew Ledbetter. Photo: Russ Rowland.

In Uganda, David, who keeps a notebook of his experiences as a way of holding on to his fleeting remembrances, interviews Olivia (Victoria Vance), a European UNICEF worker in her 40s. (David’s family foundation funds important causes like saving Africa’s elephants.) She informs him of the increasing number of incidents in which elephants, historically peaceful, have been stampeding and harming humans, possibly a conscious reaction to their dying out. We also discover there’s evidence that they also mourn human death. (The story of elephants grieving over the death of “elephant whisperer” Lawrence Anthony has been documented, but I can’t find anything about elephants expressing remorse over the death of someone they’ve crushed.) The scene also mentions David’s late kid brother, Gabriel, for whom a traumatic childhood experience ultimately led to suicide, which haunts David, as do the circumstances surrounding his mother’s death.

Drew Ledbetter, Lisa Bostnar. Photo: Russ Rowland.

David and Olivia’s mutual contact is the Ugandan-American Elijah (Richard Prioleau), David’s close friend since boarding school and Oxford. He and his coke-snorting, violinist girlfriend, Carly (Claire Warden), figure prominently in the action, which, for some reason, hints at Elijah’s physical attraction for David. The other characters are Kasem (Ariel Estrada), a Thai whose lectures offer valuable information about pachyderm behavior, and Marie (Lisa Bostnar), a well-meaning widow in her 50s who becomes engaged to David’s father; she’s snidely dismissed by David—devoted to his memories of his late mother—as a probable gold-digger. Loss affects several of these people—Carly, who loses her violin; Marie, who lost her husband; and Olivia, whose alcoholism not only fueled her separation from her husband but made her unable to recall just what she did so she could take responsibility for it.

Claire Warden, Richard Prioleau. Photo: Russ Rowland.

Parris Bradley has designed a scenic framework composed of what might as easily be tusks as the ribs of an animal corpse in an elephant graveyard set against a cyclorama; crate-like furnishings, including a bed sitting awkwardly at center regardless of the locale, are scattered about. Miles Polaski provides a fine, throbbing sound score and the performance is dramatically lit by Greg Solomon, especially when the actors are highlighted in silhouette as they shift furniture in somberly choreographed movement; however, neither Jessi D. Hill’s snail-paced direction nor any of the mostly low-energy performances can do much to enliven Hofman’s play; the best work is by Prioleau and Bostnar. Although not new, the information about elephants is interesting but hasn’t been fully integrated into the dramatic action.

Hofman also includes several intrusive expository monologues, including one in which Olivia addresses an A.A. meeting and another featuring Marie speaking to her late husband’s grave. His choice to scramble the play’s chronology may have poetic qualities but it’s a distracting conceit that only serves to highlight the play’s weaknesses. If the intent is to suggest David’s disconnected memories it collapses since so much of what happens takes place without his presence.

I’m afraid A Persistent Memory is one I’m likely to soon forget.

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A Persistent Memory

Beckett Theatre/Theatre Row

410 W. 42nd Street, NYC

Through June 18