23 (2017-2018): Review: JULIUS CAESAR (seen June 10, 2017)

“Make Rome Great Again”

The New York theatre’s nonstop attack on President Trump raises the ante with Oskar Eustis’s controversial Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar. While current plays like Robert Shenkkan’s Building the Wall are specifically written with the POTUS in mind, and coming works like 1984, written before he took office, will, reportedly, be lofting stink bombs in his direction, even shows like Woody Sez: The Life & Music of Woody Guthrie and the imminent Attack of the Elvis Impersonators can’t resist firing a sling here and an arrow there in DJT’s direction. [Note: It’s just been announced that Delta and the Bank of America have pulled their support for this production.]

Nikki M. James, Corey Stoll. Photo: Joan Marcus.

As you may have heard, this up-to-the-minute, modern-dress revival, which runs a fast-paced, intermissionless two hours, is intended to remind us of the danger to democracy represented by our political situation. It presents the title character (Gregg Henry, very good) as the out-and-out avatar of our cockily blaring, pussy-grabbing president. He’s got the blond hair, navy suit, overlong tie, air of grandiosity, and supporters wearing “Make America Great Again” caps.

Tina Benko, Gregg Henry, Teagle F. Bougere, Elizabeth Marvel. Photo: Joan Marcus.

He bathes in a golden tub and is joined there by his fashionable, Slavic-accented wife, Calpurnia (Tina Benko). When he steps out of it starkers, he dons a plush, white bathrobe. The aftermath of his assassination—because he would deny Rome’s democratic tradition by agreeing to be its king—is as vivid as what led CNN to fire Kathy Griffin. All that’s missing is Alec Baldwin.

Although this may be the first New York production of Julius Caesar in which the Roman leader has been so closely likened to a sitting US president,* the idea of using modern dress to comment on current politics has been around ever since Orson Welles’s heavily adapted Mercury Theatre version, 80 years ago; subtitled The Death of a Dictator, it was inspired by the rise of Mussolini and set in a jackboot-wearing, totalitarian fascist state. The year, of course, was 1937, [A reader reminds me that the Acting Company offered an Obama-like Caesar in 2012.]

Gregg Henry and company. Photo: Joan Marcus.

Just as Eustis’s analogy leads to ambiguities that crumble on closer scrutiny, so did Welles’s, which couldn’t neatly express a propaganda message it wasn’t written to convey. Critic Grenville Vernon, for example, noted the difficulty of determining if the message was pro- or antifascist, or who the hero was. But there’s no denying the present version’s entertainment value for liberal audiences. It doesn’t matter if makes sense so long as it provides a valve for letting off political steam in these troubled times. Just don’t do it in Wyoming.

CoreyStoll and company. Photo: Joan Marcus.

Eustis’s program note says: “And in case any of you are wondering—no, we didn’t write any new lines. It’s all Shakespeare,” but a recorded announcement before the play begins notes an exception. It turns out to be the one about what Caesar could get away with by doing it on “Fifth Avenue,” which gets the biggest laugh but seems seriously out of place. On the other hand, there’s plenty in Shakespeare’s original to allow for contemporizing the intentions behind his words, even to the use of "posting" or "the press."

Corey Stoll, John Douglas Thompson. Photo: Joan Marcus.

The New York audience, of course, laps this stuff up like free ice cream, and, for all the seriousness of what’s depicted, the Caesar scenes play more like political comedy—every possible nuance gets a knowing chuckle—than solemn historical drama about the abuse of power and the collapse of democracy. It turns out, of course, that Caesar’s assassination wasn’t such a hot idea, so Trump haters hoping for the president’s removal should put aside their metaphorical swords and allow the legal issues to take their natural course.

Elizabeth Marvel and company. Photo: Joan Marcus.

In fact, for all his obvious arrogance and ambition, Caesar’s killing seems more the outcome of a band of fanatics than a blow for freedom. Caesar, however, dies midway through; once he’s gone (aside from a brief, ghostly appearance), the production’s air, shall we say, begins to leak, with two principal exceptions.

(Talking of swords, by the way, having Roman heroes die after calling for swords to run on when all that’s available are knives remains an irritating convention in modern-dress stagings of the classics. Guns are used frequently in Eustis’s staging—especially for a series of executions—but none seems available when a military leader needs to die. Perhaps they could use the sword that dominates the program cover.)

One of the exceptions preventing a completely flat tire is the dueling speeches of Brutus (Corey Stoll) and Marc Antony (Elizabeth Marvel) about Caesar’s murder, the first justifying it and the second, more famous (“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your covfefe”—just kidding), condemning it. As always, especially when well delivered, these rhetorical exercises demonstrate the power with which cleverly articulated words can manipulate mass opinion. The other is a fiery exchange between Brutus and Cassius (John Douglas Thompson) over their war with Antony’s forces. But not much else prevents the post-Caesar scenes from seeming dully anticlimactic.

David Rockwell’s set gathers an eclectic assortment of elements, including a metal tower faced with a picture of George Washington set against the preamble to the Constitution, and two huge, quarter arcs suggesting gears. Only when these latter come together to create a semicircular background to the assassination in the Senate does the set have aesthetic coherence. There’s also an extensive use of elevator traps to introduce and remove actors and scenic pieces (like that bathtub); one such unit is a shabby, motel-like room (subbing for a tent, I presume) for Brutus and Cassius’ argument. It looks like a discard from a Sam Shepherd play.

Kenneth Posner’s lighting is superb, Jessica Paz’s sound design enhances the atmosphere, Rick Sordelet and Christian Kelly-Sordelet’s fight business is gripping, and Paul Tazewell has come up with an abundance of present-day costumes, with touches like pussy hats, for a huge cast. A lot of future actors, many of them planted among us to rise up for mob scenes, are going to be able to list this Julius Caesar on their résumés.

The acting, by and large, is solid but unremarkable. It’s politically incorrect to say so but, for all her admirable skills, particularly during her well-delivered big oration, the presence of Elizabeth Marvel as Antony (for which she uses a vaguely Southern accent) is disconcerting, requiring constant self-reminders to overlook a woman’s being cast in this very masculine role. But, if it’s necessary to cast an actress as Antony, then few could do it quite so well. Stoll and Thompson are effective in their big confrontation and display a fine contrast elsewhere, the former’s rational attitude complemented by the latter’s rabblerousing fire. Neither, though, is able to overcome the lassitude that seeps in following the perforation of the pompous POTUS.

Critic John Mason Brown, overwhelmed by the power of Orson Welles’s 1937 adaptation, wrote: “Of all the many new plays and productions the season has so far revealed, this . . . is by all odds the most exciting, the most imaginative, the most topical, the most awesome, and the most absorbing. The touch of genius is upon it.” The Central Park production is interesting principally for its provocative topicality; the touch of genius, however, is not upon it.

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Julius Caesar

Delacorte Theater

Central Park at 81^st Street, NYC

Through June 18

22 (2017-2018): Review: WOODY SEZ: THE LIFE & MUSIC OF WOODY GUTHRIE (seen June 7, 2017)

“His Land Is Our Land”

Some years back I was driving through my neighborhood of Howard Beach, Queens, when I passed a marker in front of a small, nondescript, suburban-style ranch house, noting that the great American folk song writer and performer, Woody Guthrie (1912-1967), had once lived there. The sign has long been removed, perhaps because the people living there didn’t want the undue attention it might have been drawing. I’ve never forgotten the feeling of noting the ironic juxtaposition of this leftwing protest singer’s presence in one of New York’s most bourgeois enclaves. 

David M. Lutken, Megan Loomis. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

If you’re not sure who Woody Guthrie was and what he accomplished and stood for, I suggest you hop an MTA boxcar over to the Irish Rep on W. 22nd St. where Woody Sez, an excellent jukebox bio-musical about his life, is being enacted by a delightful quartet of multitalented singer-musicians. I have no idea of what the Irish connection is, if indeed there is one, but it will take only a few minutes before you stop wondering about it and give yourself over to the joys of topnotch musicianship and homespun biographical storytelling.

David M. Lutken, Helen Jean Russell, Megan Loomis. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

The show, for which New York is one stop on its decade-long journey since premiering at the 2007 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, was devised by David M. Lutken, Nick Corley (who directed), Helen Jean Russell, and Andy Teirstein. The tall, lanky, Ray Bolger-like Lutken channels the wool-cap-wearing Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, while Russell, Teirstein (from 23rd St. and Madison Avenue, we’re told), and Megan Loomis cover over three dozen songs in a bit more than two hours, with a single intermission; only a small number, including the left-wing anthem, “The Internationale,” aren’t by Guthrie himself.

Megan Loomis, Helen Jean Russell, David M. Lutken, Andy Teirstein. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

The music rarely stops, even as the charmingly humorous Woody recounts his biographical odyssey, including its hardship and tragedy, beginning with his childhood in Okemah, OK, and ending with his too-early death from the hereditary Huntington’s disease, which also killed his mother. With Guthrie playing a beat-up old guitar later labeled, as was Guthrie’s, “This Machine Kills Fascists,” we’re treated to some of the most famous roots-type songs of the mid-20th century.

Megan Loomis, Helen Jean Russell, Andy Teirstein, David M. Lutkin. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

The songs, some of which ran into radio censorship, help to illustrate Woody’s path toward left-wing, pro-union (“Union Maid”), anti-banking (“Jolly Banker”), and (until he enlisted in World War II) antiwar (“Sinking of the Reuben James”) activism. Best known, of course, are “This Train Is Bound for Glory,” “The Ballad of Tom Joad,” which keeps weaving its many-versed way through the show, “So Long It’s Been Good to Know You,” which gets a burst of happy New York applause when Woody aims it the Republicans, and, of course, “This Land Is Your Land.” Some songs are gentle and sweet, others make you want to clap your hands and tap your toes, but they all have a point to make.

David M. Lutken, Megan Loomis, Andy Teirstein, Helen Jean Russell. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

Lutken, a strong singer whose edgy voice resembles Willie Nelson’s, plays the harmonica and guitar, but his costars play a wide variety of stringed instruments, some of which I couldn’t name, and Teirstein adds what I think is a recorder as well as a brief passage on the spoons. As dressed by costumer Jeffrey Meeks in Grapes of Wrath-style garb, the company looks like friendly Okies who might have been traveling to California following what one song remembers as the “Dust Storm Disaster” of 1935. 

Working on Luke Hegel-Cantarella’s simple platform stage backed by period images, including a photo of Woody himself, with expert lighting by Michael Gottlieb, director Corley moves his cast around in continuously interesting patterns. Lutken’s solos dominate, but everyone else gets to shine as well, both in solos and brief acted segments.

Woody Sez begins with a bit of a preshow “warm-up” concert and ends with a too-brief post-curtain call hootenanny. Much of this music is as pertinent today as it was from the thirties through the sixties. For example, just listen, all you theatergoing hoboes, migrants, and boxcar hoppers, as Woody sings in “Why Do You Stand There in the Rain”:

If everybody owned everything

Then us poor folks all would sing

And the world’d finally come out fair and square.

The only time you’d have a brawl’d be

If someone built a wall around a County and then tried to call it theirs.

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Woody Sez

Irish Repertory Theatre

132 W. 22^nd St., NYC

Through July 23

21 (2017-2018): Review: THE ARTIFICIAL JUNGLE (seen June 6, 2017)

"Little Shop of Piranhas"

For my review of The Artificial Jungle please click on THE BROADWAY BLOG.

20 (2017-2018): Review: COST OF LIVING (seen June 3, 2017)

“People Who Need People”

Cost of Living, Martyna Majok’s often touching and funny new dramedy, which premiered last year at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, is about the mutual needs of people with disabilities and their caretakers. Now being presented by the Manhattan Theatre Club, it holds its audience firmly through much of its intermissionless hour and 40 minutes; eventually, though, its well-meaning intentions run into obstacles that seriously handicap the goodwill it’s so carefully generated.

Under the intelligent, sensitive direction of Jo Bonney, we watch, like voyeurs, as two able-bodied characters lovingly minister to two disabled ones, played (as is becoming increasingly common) by actors with real disabilities. Perhaps we even wonder how we ourselves would function in the same situations. But for all the naturalness of the actors, both able-bodied and otherwise, and the charm conveyed by the characters’ relationships and often funky dialogue, the play remains basically a series of situations in search of a plot.

It begins with a prologue set in a hip, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, bar around Christmastime with an out-of-work, depressed, middle-aged trucker named Eddie Torres (Victor Williams) delivering a monologue to an invisible stranger about why he’s driven here from his home in Bayonne, NJ. Lonely for his recently deceased wife, Ani, he’s been sending texts to her old number; someone, like a ghost (a more mundane explanation will be forthcoming), has invited the lonely guy here to meet her.

This provides the exposition for the flashback tale of Eddie, Ani (Katy Sullivan), and their on-the-rocks marriage. But before we get there, we’re introduced to a parallel story concerning John (Gregg Mozgala), a good-looking, wealthy, Harvard doctoral student confined by cerebral palsy to a motorized wheelchair. John interviews and hires Jess (Jolly Abraham), an attractive, young, Latina bartender uncomfortable talking about her past. She has a Princeton degree but the play never clarifies why she’s so poor or why she so ignorantly refers to John as “differently abled.”

As sound designer/composer Robert Kaplowitz's mood-setting music plays during the shifts, Wilson Chin’s turntable set, elegantly lit by Jeff Croiter, smoothly brings us to and from John’s upscale apartment and Ani’s more mundane one. At John’s place, we watch the growing friendship between John and Jess, which seems headed in a romantic direction. 

At Ani’s we observe the attempts of Eddie, who’s been involved with another woman, to reconcile with Ani, his estranged wife of nearly 21 years. She’s a wheelchair-bound quadriplegic suffering from a spinal injury (the actress, a U.S. Paralympics medalist, was born with no legs beneath the knees); Eddie, possibly seeking to make up for a guilty conscience, insists he’d be a better caretaker than a hired nurse.

Cost of Living’s most memorable scenes involve remarkably intimate bathroom scenes, with Jess attending to John’s shaving and showering needs, and Eddie washing Ani as she reclines in a freestanding tub. Jess’s professional, businesslike movements, especially when she dresses and undresses John, all the while chatting as if she were engaged in any average household activity, like cooking a meal or washing dishes, contrast with the tender, potentially erotic attentions of Eddie, leaning over the tub. Ani’s response to his touch is a moving account of how she compensates for her lack of feeling by depending on her imagination.

But, as shockingly demonstrated when Eddie briefly leaves her alone, Ani’s disability is such that you wonder why she doesn’t have someone with her 24/7. John, though a bit more mobile, also seems to have such a need. Ani’s emergency button might bring help to her in an emergency but how does she eat or use the bathroom when no one else is around? With no other characters available, the play fails to address these questions.                              

Also problematic are the scenes related to a prospective date between Jess and John, for which she gets all dolled up (by costumer Jessica Pabst). The writing is contrived to surprise the audience by showing John unsympathetically; my wife suggested that it “Just shows that you can be handicapped and still be a jerk.” All well and good, but it seems an artificial device that makes John more oblivious than he's thus far seemed, simply for dramatic effect.

In the final scene, when Majok attempts to bring both story lines together, Jess likewise seems out of character, and the ending is disappointingly awkward. Dramatic surprises are always welcome but they shouldn't seem forced or arbitrary.

Majok’s vivid dialogue, thoroughly seeded with profanities, flows naturally from the first-rate ensemble. Victor Williams’s Eddie is a charming, voluble, everyday lug, even making some of Majok’s strained, working-class locutions, like “You ain’t die,” sound natural. Jolly Abraham captures Jess’s determination, as well as the protective force field she projects, making the scene of her big disappointment especially affecting. Gregg Mozgala is consistently believable as the egocentric John until the writing makes him less so.

Most memorable is the redheaded Sullivan, with her nasal, high-pitched, Jersey accent shooting a profane stream of verbal bullets at Eddie, expressing both her sadness and anger, her love and disdain while repeatedly calling him a prick. 

Majok's title seems, on the one hand, to refer to the financial costs of living with a disability, contrasting John's wealth with Ani's dependence on Eddie's insurance. It also suggests the economic hardships represented by Jess's itinerant bartending and Eddie's unemployment. Its metaphoric implications, however, about the emotional and psychological costs incurred in codependent relationships, are perhaps its biggest takeaway.

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Cost of Living

Manhattan Theatre Club/New York City Center Stage I

131 W. 55^th St., NYC

Through July 16

                                                                   

19 (2017-2018): Review: ANIMAL (seen June 4, 2017)

"Mind Matters"

It’s a bit surprising but definitely encouraging to see a rising English star of Rebecca Hall’s (Machinal) stature performing in a tiny venue like the Atlantic Theater Company’s Stage 2, four flights down from W. 16th St. Given the demands of her role in British playwright Claire Lizzimore’s Animal, one can understand this artist’s desire to tackle the role of Rachel, a woman suffering from a troubling psychological disorder. Not, however, that Hall hasn’t been down a somewhat similar road just recently in her lauded performance as Christine Chubbuck, who suffers from depression in the biopic Christine.

Unlike Christine, Rachel is fictional, a sharp-edged, self-deprecating woman whose “anxiety has reached a vivid level of intensity,” as her psychiatrist, Stephen (Gregg Keller), puts it. Rachel, suffering from insomnia and not ready to return to work, is unwilling to admit she needs help and dismisses Stephen’s gentle inquiries with one irritatingly defensive quip after the other. 

At home, her extremely patient husband, Tom (Morgan Spector, Hall’s real-life spouse), does his best to keep his cool as Rachel behaves irrationally in one way or the other. She’s especially short when dealing with the frustrations of handling a tantrum-prone, wheelchair-bound, old lady (Kristin Griffith), whom we assume to be Tom’s dementia-afflicted mother. Rachel insists that the inarticulate woman’s cries are for her mummy: “Your mummy died a long time ago,” she tells her. 

In a plot that eventually seems largely a red herring, Rachel’s inner demons express themselves not only in how she perceives and treats the babbling old lady but in her encounters with a mysterious, devilishly attractive, kiss-stealing intruder, Dan (David Pegram). When Rachel engages in a dialogue with a ten-year-old girl (Fina Strazza) who responds in the shrink’s words, we realize the level to which Rachel’s, multi-medicated hallucinations have taken her. Whatever we’ve seen thus far is confirmed as mere manifestations of how Rachel’s mind manages her tormented world. 

Eventually, Rachel’s condition is anticlimactically given a name, she removes the wool cap she’s worn throughout, almost as if to keep her thoughts under control, and the occasionally surreal vagaries of what we’ve been watching fall into place. It’s hard not to feel that Animal is little more than the dramatization of a rather common mental condition (a recoverable one, by the way), showing the audience its symptoms so that it can respond at the end, “Aha! Is that what it was all about?” 

The play has some excellent exchanges. Although Rachel’s version of the disorder in question is perhaps a bit extreme, its enactment and the reactions to it can be quite absorbing. Still, Animal's focus on her mental issues and the consequent lack of suspense or developing action begins to make it seem longer than its intermissionless hour and 20 minutes. 

Director Gaye Taylor Upchurch, who staged the play’s premiere, at Washington, D.C.’s Studio Theatre, in the round, here works on Rachel Hauck’s alley-style, minimalist setting, with the audience on either side of a pale carpet on which sit a few chairs and such. Bradley King's lighting makes the most of its opportunities as does Stowe Nelson's mood-inducing sound design and Daniel Kluger's original music.

The cast, using British accents, maintains a consistent level of truthfulness, with Hall—whose voice, posh British accent, and intonations are dead ringers for Emma Thompson’s—offering just the performance you’ve come to see. She’s as honest, funny, cynical, angry, defensive, and confused as Rachel must be.

Keller and Spector bring well-balanced underplaying to their roles; Pegram (with a body so ripped you could scrub your clothes on it) adds a bolt of charisma; Griffith is effective in a role favoring sounds rather than words, and young Strazza makes the most of her brief scene in such august company.

It’s hard to recommend Animal as a first-rate drama but easy to recommend the first-class artistry of Rebecca Hall.

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Animal

Atlantic Theater Stage 2

330 W. 16^th St., NYC

Through July 2

18 (2017-2018): Review: SWEETEE (seen May 31, 2017)

"Musical Theatre Confection"

For my review of Sweetee please click on THE BROADWAY BLOG.

17 (2017-2018): Review: THE GOVERNMENT INSPECTOR (seen May 30, 2017)

"Gogol Marx the Spot"

For my review of The Government Inspector please click on THE BROADWAY BLOG.