78 (2018-2019): Review: THE EMPEROR (seen September 14, 2018)

“Lord of Misrule”

The Emperor is Colin Teevan’s riveting theatricalization, slightly over an hour long, of Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuścińki’s (1932-2007) controversial 1978 book of that name. I say theatricalization, not dramatization, because the material is essentially a series of monologues providing fascinating information but nonetheless generally lacking the interaction of characters we call drama. Among the controversies the book raised were concerns about its factual accuracy, or what the author himself called “literary reportage.” 

Kathryn Hunter. Photo: Gerri Goodstein/

Considered a veiled jab at Poland’s communist regime at the time and its leader, Edward Gierek, it was translated into English in 1983 (when it was named the Sunday Times’s Book of the Year) and, four years later, turned into a play by Michael Hastings and Jonathan Miller for London’s Royal Court Theatre. Teevan’s is a new adaptation. 

Regardless of its relevance to communist Poland in the 1970s, The Emperor’s continuing value is as a coolly satirical, universal reflection on the excesses and abominations of autocracies everywhere, not least the one that’s growing in our midst. 

Temesgen Zeleke, Katrhryn Hunter. Photo: Gerri Goodstein.

But the chief reason to see The Emperor is the platform it provides for the diminutive British actress Kathryn Hunter, known for her idiosyncratic characterizations of both male (like King Lear and Richard III), female (Shakespeare’s Cleopatra among them), and even nonhuman characters. 

Her recent New York performances displayed her unusual gifts—partly the result of a car crash in her early 20s—as a “virtuoso physical performer.” Among them were Kafka’s Monkey, in which she played the title role, and director Julie Taymor’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where she gamboled as Puck. Hunter's present project, which began in England, is a coproduction of Brooklyn’s Theatre for a New Audience; the Young Vic, London; HOME, Manchester, and Les Théâtre de la Ville de Luxembourg. 

Kathryn Hunter. Photo: Gerri Goodstein.

Hunter is exceedingly well accompanied by Ethiopian-born musician/singer, Temesgen Zeleke, who sits to one side, performing exquisitely melodic tunes on his five-string krar lyre, and also playing four briefly limned characters. The focus, though, is on Hunter’s chameleon-like transformative powers as, combining her research with considerable inventiveness, she covers nearly a dozen different male roles (none of them Selassie); the book has over 30. For each, she adjusts her posture, gestures, facial expressions, and speech. 

Kathryn Hunter. Photo: Gerri Goodstein.

Among the characters are a valet; a menial whose sole task is to wipe the emperor’s dog’s pee from people’s footwear; a zookeeper who feeds the animals meat from a silver tray; a servant who carries the emperor’s pillows and must time their placement beneath his feet perfectly; the emperor’s purse bearer, and so on. Each describes his job while filling us in on Selassie’s extravagances and craving for self-enrichment through “development” in a nation desperately needing “reform” to overcome its suffering from hunger and poverty. 

Kathryn Hunter. Photo: Gerri Goodstein.

As the people starve, the emperor’s ego is assuaged by the construction of such things as His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, King of Kings of Ethiopia and Elect of God, Airport, or His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, King of Kings of Ethiopia and Elect of God, Ring Road and Tunnel. A clip from Jonathan Dimbledy’s powerful 1973 documentary, The Unknown Famine, underlines the disastrous conditions Selassie allowed to fester. Gradually, we learn of the plot to overthrow the emperor and of his ultimate demise at the hands of the Derg government.

Hunter—her wig cropped, scruffy, and gray—wears a uniform that can be civilian or military, its tunic buttoned or unbuttoned, its epaulets in place or removed, as suits each character. She doffs or dons a series of hats and toys with a variety of hand props, like a fly whisk, a cane, or piece of silk. Remarkably limber for a woman in her early 60s, she moves, relative to each character, with fluid grace or puppet-like awkwardness, as per Imogen Knight’s movement staging. During a scene expressing the court’s venture into “International Life,” she even dances funkily to a disco beat (bringing a surprised audience member on stage to join her).

Kathryn Hunter, Temesgen Zeleke. Photo: Gerri Goodstein.

Ti Green’s set, perceptively lit by Mike Gunning, is an open, wood-floored space, onto which a high, white curtain is sometimes drawn or withdrawn. Using little more than a chair, Hunter—flawlessly directed by Walter Meierjohann—delivers her monologues in spotlighted areas, shifting from one to the other as she changes character, the transitions being marked by explosive sounds created by Paul Arditti. When needed, informative titles flash on an upstage background; unfortunately, they’re fuzzy, hard to read, and vanish too quickly.

The Emperor is brief, thematically pointed, and perfectly executed. If you’ve never seen Kathryn Hunter, the moment is ripe.

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The Emperor

Theatre for a New Audience

Polonsky Shakespeare Center

262 Ashland Place, Brooklyn, NY

Through September 30

77 (2018-2019): Review: YOU AND I (seen September 13, 2018)

"Barry's First Play"

For my review of You and I please click on THEATER LIFE.

76 (2018-2019): Review: AGNES (seen September 11, 2018)

“Cracking Her Cheeks”

There’s no need to remind anyone that it’s hurricane season, with a little lady named Florence hurtling toward the Atlantic Coast. Tell that, however, to two emotionally churning plays now playing Off-Broadway, Hurricane Party, the weaker one, down at the Cherry Lane, and Agnes, at 59E59 Theaters. 

Hiram Delgado, Mykal Monroe, Julia Ramadei. Photo: Hunter Canning.

Both concern folks hunkering down to ride out the gathering storm with sex, games, and booze, the first in Conway, SC (a town right in Florence’s path, by the way), the other in New York City. In Hurricane Party, the fictional tempest is dubbed Evelyn (like the 1977 storm of that name), while the similarly made-up Agnes (despite there being a Hurricane Agnes in 1972) gives its name away in the title.

Although unintentional, there are several parallels in the plays. Both use the external hurricane as a metaphor for the internal turmoil roiling the characters’ relationship and feelings, including issues of faithfulness, friendship, and betrayal, expressed in verbal profanity and visually provocative hetero and homosexual behavior.

Both also are set in homes allowing multiple interior locations to be seen simultaneously. Hurricane Party separates the spaces with scrim-covered walls and Agnes (designed by Angelica Borrero)—which places the audience on either side of the tiny Theater C—shows a bedroom at one end, a living room in the middle, and a small kitchen at the other end. Strings of lightbulbs hanging overhead are used creatively by lighting designer Cheyenne Sykes.

John Edgar Barker, Mykal Monroe, Hiram Delgado, Julia Ramadei. Photo: Hunter Canning.

What sets Agnes truly apart is the presence of a 30ish young man named Charlie (John Edgar Barker), a high-functioning, near-genius with Asperger’s, whose own psychological tumult competes for attention with the conflicts raging among the other characters.

Julia Ramadei, Mykal Monroe. Photo: Hunter Canning.

There are five principals in Agnes: Charlie; his younger brother, Ronan (Hiram Delgado); his lesbian sister, June (Laura Ramadei), overly protective of Charlie; June’s lover, Elle (Mykal Monroe), about to enter medical school; and Anna (Claire Siebers), a high school friend of the siblings, who’s arrived seeking safety because her home is in the flood zone. Additional characters, played by these actors, interrupt the action with brief monologues from time to time but aren’t part of the main action.

Claire Siebers, Julia Ramadei. Photo: Hunter Canning.

It’s not long before the seething longings, disappointments, and frustrations of the five swirl together in what playwright Catya McMullen and director Jenna Worsham hope creates at least a Category 1 drama. While it sometimes clicks, Agnes never gets much past being a theatrical squall. In fact, unlike Hurricane Party, which includes a TV, there’s none in Agnes, whose characters barely pay more than lip service to what’s happening outside. Only the occasional intrusion of a sound effect (from designer Daniel Melnick) reminds us of the maelstrom.

Claire Siebers, John Edgar Barker. Photo: Hunter Canning.

Ronan, amusing, upbeat, and defiantly cute, is still shaky following a breakup with his girlfriend. Anna, bisexual and promiscuous, is a free spirit and world traveler, who once had a thing in high school with June. June, meanwhile, struggles to keep her old feelings for Anna under control while contending not only with her affection for Elle, jealous of both Charlie and Anna, but with her inability to process Anna’s involvement with the virginal Charlie. He, for his part, desperately wants to have sex with this attractive guest, of whose erotic high school adventures he’s fully aware.

John Edgar Barker. Photo: Hunter Canning.

All the characters wear more or less grungy clothes designed by Nicole Slaven. However, Elle’s complaint about Anna’s inappropriate clothing (“Like that’s not a shirt. Put a real fucking shirt on.”) makes little sense when Anna’s top is hidden by a scarf.  

Laura Ramadei, Hiram Delgado. Photo: Hunter Canning.

When the play begins, Charlie has just returned from a mysterious bus trip, his absence having thrown his brother and sister into worried turmoil. We don’t learn where he’s been or what he was doing until the end, which also ties together the nearly half-dozen monologues mentioned above. All coheres to dramatize the play’s central preoccupation, the difficulty of making human connections between one person and another, a concern with which Charlie is obsessed.

McMullen crafts clever colloquial dialogue and repartee, spoken at breakneck speed, often getting the audience (the younger members, at any rate) to laugh. Much of it is reliably vulgar in a world where play after play (like movie after movie) prefers constant iterations of “fuck,” as if “making love” or some other such euphemism is considered okay only if you’re in your dotage.

Mykal Monroe, Julia Ramadei. Photo: Hunter Canning.

Each actor plays with vigor and intelligence, although there's a whole lot of shouting going on. The one mildly questionable performance is Barker’s Charlie, played with great sensitively but in a manner reminiscent of the robotically childlike innocence Dustin Hoffman brought to Raymond in Rain Man. Obviously, people on the spectrum speak and behave in a wide variety of ways; that’s why they call it a spectrum.

Claire Siebers, John Edgar Barker. Photo: Hunter Canning.

Given Barker’s handsomeness, buffness, perfectly trimmed beard, and tattoos, however, U wonder if the role might not be more effective if spoken not like a stereotype but like the neurotypical person he seems, at least externally, to be. Of course, this is open for discussion, and I'm probably way off base, but it’s certainly possible that the contrast between Charlie’s naiveté and knowledge, at least as written, would work better if his conventionality, not his departure from the norm, was emphasized. Nonetheless, Barker makes an impressive Off-Broadway debut.

As for Agnes, she blows her winds, cracks her cheeks, and rumbles her bellyful but neither casts oak-cleaving thunderbolts nor spouts hurricanoes. 

OTHER VIEWPOINTS:

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Agnes

59E59 Theaters/Theater C

59 E. 59^th St., NYC

Through September 29

75 (2018-2019): Review: TEVYE SERVED RAW: GARNISHED WITH JEWS (seen September 12, 2018)

"The Milkman's on His Way"

There are few New York actors more capable of bringing true Yiddishkeit to the performance of Yiddish theatre than Allen Lewis Rickman. (Full disclosure: he was a student of mine at Brooklyn College in the late 1980s.)

Yelena Shmulenson, Allen Lewis Rickman, Shane Baker.

While specializing in Yiddish characters—he and his wife, Yelena Shmulenson, played the Yiddish-language prologue to the Coen brothers’ movie A Serious Man—he also excels in English-language roles. In fact, he was the funniest thing in Relatively Speaking, the bill of three one-acts by Ethan Coen, Woody Allen, and Elaine May, on Broadway in 2011. If he’d been in all three plays rather than one the show might have lasted longer than it did.

Now, joined by the excellent Shmulenson and the delightful Shane Baker, “the best-loved Episcopalian on the Yiddish stage today,” Rickman’s at the heart of a low-budget program, which he and Baker adapted, and Rickman directed, that introduces the life and work of the great, highly prolific Yiddish writer, Sholem Aleichem (1859-1916). (A rather fuller theatrical exploration of his writing was represented Off Broadway by Arnold Perl’s The World of Sholem Aleichem (1953), revived on Broadway with Jack Gilford in 1982.) 

Shane Baker, Yelena Shmulenson.

Aleichem (pen name of Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich), of course, wrote the stories about Tevye, the milkman, that inspired Fiddler on the Roof, now being given an excellent production—its first American one in Yiddish—at the Museum of Jewish Heritage. Indeed, as its title discloses, Tevye is at the heart of Tevye Served Raw. And Rickman, as the evening’s Tevye, is a perfect fit for the bearded, Torah-spouting patriarch. 

This isn’t Fiddler, of course, so Tevye doesn’t sing, but the role’s dramatic power comes across in the three sad and funny selections borrowed from Fiddler’s source material. The other selections, “What, Me Worthy?” “The Yiddish Sisyphus” “Strange Jews on a Train,” and “A Stepmother’s Trash Talk” (along with a lullaby, “Shlof, Mayn Kind,” sung by Shmulenson), provide insightful satirical sketches depicting late 19th-century Russian Jews. In the interstices, biographical details about the author are provided. Baker and Rickman’s translations are ripe and colloquial, sounding almost as natural as Aleichem’s Yiddish. 

Shane Baker, Allen Lewis Rickman, Yelena Shmulenson.

Some selections are entirely in Yiddish, with English titles projected on an upstage screen (where period photos are also shown), and some include simultaneous translation. In “Strange Jews on a Train,” for example, a female passenger pesters the man next to her for gossip about a wealthy citizen in his home town. Rickman stands between them and, shifting positions, rapidly translates each’s words and gestures for our benefit. It’s a masterful display of timing and expressiveness.

Produced in minimalist fashion with no set to speak of, with fundamental lighting by Joan Racho-Jansen and a few costume basics by George Spelvin (wink, wink), the show is the type that can travel anywhere without a fuss. Its principal drawback is that several selections tend to go on too long, like shaggy dog stories, but fizzle for lack of sufficiently strong payoffs.

Yelena Shmulenson.

One such example is “A Stepmother’s Trash Talk,” in which Shmulenson and Baker read off the extensive litany of Yiddish insults (like schlemiel) that Aleichem’s stepmother allegedly said and that he secretly transcribed in alphabetical order. As Rickman instantly translates, they go through the entire glossary. A tour de force, perhaps, but decidedly anticlimactic.

Allen Lewis Rickman, Yelena Shmulenson, Shane Baker. 

Of enormous help is the cast’s sheer delight in speaking Yiddish. You can just feel the pleasure they take in biting into the words and chewing all of Sholem Aleichem’s language for every flavor it contains. It’s almost as if bagels, lox, kugel, brisket, matzoh ball soup, challah, and latkes had been turned into language. Even with its title, Tevye Served Raw offers a hearty Jewish meal.

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Tevye Served Raw: Garnished with Jews

Playhouse Theater

151 W. 46^th St., NYC

Through October 3 (weekly performances are very limited so check the schedule beforehand)

75 (2018-2019): Review: COLLECTIVE RAGE: A PLAY IN 5 BETTIES (seen September 7, 2018)

"Pussy Riot"

For my review of Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties please click on THE BROADWAY BLOG.

74 (2018-2019): Review: HURRICANE PARTY (seen September 6, 2018)

"Storm and Stress"

For my review of Hurricane Party please click on THEATER LIFE.

73 (2018-2018): HEARTBREAK HOUSE (seen September 5, 2018)

"Let's Put on a Show"

New York revivals of George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House are relatively rare. Rarer still are revivals of any Shaw play inspired by noteworthy directorial gimmicks. Shaw himself was particularly keen against liberties being taken with his scripts, as Lawrence Langner’s G.B.S. and the Lunatic makes abundantly clear. However, with Shaw long dead (but possibly squirming a bit, if not actually turning, in his grave), director David Staller’s revival for the Gingold Theatrical Group, which specializes in G.B.S, has ignored the playwright’s control-freak tendencies by goosing the play within a lightly entertaining, if questionably necessary, premise. 

Karen Ziemba, Kimberly Immanuel. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

The production imagines that a show at London’s Ambassadors Theatre in 1940 is disrupted by the blitz, forcing the actors and audience to move to the basement. There, gathered amid the sandbags, props, costumes, and various theatrical paraphernalia on Brian Prather's simulated makeshift set, the cast distracts us with stiff upper lips and lots of jolly good English cheer. Wearing the attractive Edwardian costumes of Barbara A. Bell, and smartly lit by Christine Watanabe, they offer not only singalongs but a comically spirited version of Shaw’s play, its contents resonating with contemporary relevance.

Karen Ziemba, Derek Smith, Raphael Nash Thompson, Tom Hewitt (seated), Kimberly Immanuel, Lenny Wolpe. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

Assisted by period-looking programs (“programmes,” I should say), providing air raid warnings, period adverts, and the lyrics to nostalgic English songs, we join the actors to sing “Pack Up Your Troubles,” “Smiles,” “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” and similar ditties. This, of course, helps add several additional minutes to Shaw’s lengthy two and a half hour talkfest, whose prolixity eventually grows tiresome. As we wait for the All Clear siren, we view what Staller calls “Shaw’s most vital paean to resistance and perseverance against tyranny.”

Tom Hewitt, Kimberly Immanuel. Photo: Joan Marcus.

The script itself is Staller’s revised version of Shaw’s original, based on his original handwritten manuscript and subsequent Shavian documents. (A note from Shaw to Hermione Gingold, in the script, suggests where the production’s framing device came from.)  It would take a Shaw scholar to note the revisions but the play retains the essence of the standard version, published in 1919 and premiered on Broadway in a 1920 Theatre Guild production before being seen in London in 1921. Shaw was notorious for not wanting a word cut; when Orson Welles produced it for the Mercury Theatre in 1938 and couldn’t induce the playwright to make changes, he raged that “The play’s not good enough to cut.”

Alison Fraser, Tom Hewitt. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

Heartbreak House, Shaw’s “Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes,” was his attempt to write a “Chekhovian” tragicomedy; there’s very little here, though, that suggests Chekhov, although Oscar Wilde isn’t far away. The playwright’s verbal wit and mental pyrotechnics predominate in a play that has very little plot and is essentially a series of theme-laced speeches and dialogue, emanating from a group of appealing characters. Sex, politics, colonialism, capitalism, and truth are among the issues racing by. A 1920 critic noted, “The total effect of the play is a disillusioned and bitter picture of the moral slackness of liberal England in the face of the war’s challenge.” Others believed Europe itself was the play’s main target. 

Kimberly Immanuel, Raphael Nash Thompson. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

The action is set in 1914 in the titular, shiplike, Sussex mansion of the rum-drinking Captain Shotover (Raphael Nash Thompson), Shaw’s Life Force, an octogenarian creator of destructive inventions (which include intimations of the atom bomb), where he lives with his daughter, Hesione Hushaby (Karen Ziemba), and her vain husband, Hector (Tom Hewitt). The house represents the foundering ship of state its inhabitants are unable to control, those forces that led to World War I.

Raphael Nash Thompson, Kimberly Immanuel. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

A weekend house party draws together a representative cross-section of English society, most with no clear sense of their purpose in life. Young Ellie Dunn (Kimberly Immanuel), daughter of businessman Mazzini Dunn (Lenny Wolpe), whose “education” is at the play’s core, is dismayed to learn that the man she really loves is the philandering Hector. He himself flirts with Shotover’s other daughter, the beautiful Lady Ariadne Utterwood (Alison Fraser). 

Ellie proclaims she wants to marry the old captain. Capitalism—represented by Boss Mangan (Derek Smith), the tycoon whose enterprises Mazzini Dunn runs—is seen as of little avail in saving England, Shotover pontificates on Britain’s heading for a shipwreck, a burglar (Jeff Hiller), who is more than he seems, is caught, and an air raid (“Beethoven music”) is launched, killing the burglar and Mangan but thrilling, then disappointing, the rest.

Derek Smith,Raphael Nash Thompson (rear), Karen Ziemba, Tom Hewitt, Lenny Wolpe, Kimberly Immanuel, Jeff Hiller, Alison Fraser. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

The cast acts in a style mixing high comedy and farce, with some performances, like Alison Fraser’s (a cross between Angela Lansbury and Ariana Huffington), being especially noteworthy for their eccentric charm. Acting for the sake of acting sometimes trumps acting for the sake of ideas, especially in the campy cavorting of Jeff Hiller in three roles, the maid, Guiness; Ariadne’s foppish husband, Randall Utterword; and the burglar. At one point he rapidly shifts from role to role before our eyes by changing his accent and the way he handles his cap and costume. Nicely done as this kind of self-conscious clowning may be, it can easily seem more geared to drawing laughs than stimulating thoughtful responses.

Derek Smith, Alison Fraser, Kimberly Immanuel, Raphael Nash Thompson, Jeff Hiller, Karen Ziemba, Tom Hewitt. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

Staller’s brisk ensemble consistently juggles Shaw’s words with comic verve, managing to squeeze enough of the play’s intellectual juice to make the production viable. The play's longueurs are likely unavoidable in any rendering, faithful or otherwise, and the "let's put on a show" framing device, extraneous as it may be, has its particular pleasures. Anyway, all talk and no laughs would make Heartbreak House a much duller play.

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Heartbreak House

Lion Theatre/Theatre Row

410 W. 42^nd St., NYC

Through September 29