Morning Sun at Manhattan Theatre Club Stage 1

Morning Sun by Simon Stephens

Manhattan Theatre Club Stage 1 

Rating: C-

The writeup on the ArtNet website of Edward Hopper’s famous painting, Morning Sun, explains that “it hints at the bare bones of a narrative with the kind of spare, evocative style that has since influenced filmmakers and photographers.” So it is not surprising that the British playwright Simon Stephens was inspired by Hopper’s style in creating his new play, Morning Sun, at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s City Center Stage 1.

  

Edward Hopper’s Morning Sun

It is a “bare bones narrative” of the life of woman born and growing up in New York City from the late 1950s to her death in the 2000s. The style is “evocative” – an open stage at the full diameter of the theatre with no hints of a cramped apartment and several other environments that the play’s central character finds herself in during her uneventful life. The always fascinating Edie Falco plays Charlie (the character’s chosen name) while Blair Brown and Marin Ireland effectively play the other characters in Charlie’s life, most frequently her mother and daughter. While all of these people have names, they are listed in the program as “bare bones” named 1, 2, and 3.

In a promotional interview with the New York Times’ critic Alexis Soloski, Falco explains that the play is not epic, tragic, or especially momentous. “It’s just people, just trying to get through stuff,” Falco said. “There’s something very beautiful about that.”

Whether you find that “beautiful” or just plain boring depends on your tolerance for a play that has little to say other than most people’s lives are filled with personally significant events that they just have to “get through.” Unfortunately, I did not find it beautiful. The combination of the stark style and the lack of a through-line that gave the audience some insight beyond simple survival left me looking at my watch throughout the play’s 100 minutes without an intermission.

Minimalism can make for fascinating theatre. A play does not have to be filled with events that shout out meaning. Anyone who has enjoyed some of Harold Pinter’s masterpieces knows how powerful those features can become in the hands of a great playwright. In fact, Mr. Stephens has produced a number of highly regarded plays and adaptations, most notably Heisenberg and several much-produced adaptations of Chekov plays that make the “simple” truly meaningful.

This play was commissioned by the MTC and Mr. Stephens weaves this tale against the history of New York City from the 1950s to 2000s. In fact, the sometimes-sentimental references to stores that no longer exist clearly connected with the audience as they sighed or laughed at their mention. One of the play’s apparent themes is the way an individual’s life can be completely unaffected by major external events. Ms. Falco’s character is “out of town” on 9/11 and she sees no reason to return home immediately. After all, she is out of town and not directly affected by that tragedy.

And that 9/11 moment is typical of what makes this play so thin and unengaging. Events occur in the private life of Charlie and in the world surrounding her life. She deals with it or doesn’t. Others criticize her, or don’t. All the audience sees is a sequence of events in the life of a person who survives. If that is enough for you to enjoy an evening in the theatre, then get a ticket. But I wanted something more, something Chekhovian or Pinteresque or, more hopefully, “Stephensish.”

 

 

Catching Up…

Chicken & Biscuits at Circle in the Square

The Last of the Love Letters at the Vineyard Theatre

Sanctuary City a New York Theatre Workshop production at the Lucille Lortel Theatre

After several tries, this Saturday I finally had an enjoyable experience in a live theatre production. In a season when every Broadway and Off-Broadway theatre seems to be trying, in a single season, to make up for ignoring (or misrepresenting) Black people for 150 years, it was a delight to encounter Chicken & Biscuits at the Circle in the Square on Broadway. Playwright and actor Douglas Lyons has revived what used to be a Broadway staple, situation comedy, a play format that seems to have died with the passing of its master, Neil Simon. And like the works of Mr. Simon, Mr. Lyons’ audience laughs out loud throughout this portrait of an African American family before, after, and during the funeral service for their patriarch, the former pastor on their church.

Unlike some of the other plays in the effort to redeem the New York theatre’s mistreatment of people of color, Mr. Lyons play doesn’t wave an angry finger at its audience.  Its message is truly universal: loving your family is the most important part of our heritage.  And this is a family that has lots of eccentricities, after all, it’s a situation comedy. Zhailon Levingston, the production’s amazingly young director, skillfully draws the audience into each of these characters.  By the time the play gets to the actual church service, the Black and White theatergoers in the audience chime in with an “amens” and “hallelujahs” along with the characters on stage.   The playwright and director are not washing over the injustices that people of color have experienced in American theatre.  After all, Mr. Livingston is a board member of the Broadway Advocacy Coalition, an organization founded in the heat of recent police shootings to promote people of color in New York theatre.  But they know that one way to get people of all races to understand one another is to get their audience members to identify with the characters on stage.  And while Black church funerals may be alien to some members of the audience, we all can empathize with the mothers, fathers, daughters, and sons as they affirm their love for one another.  A great cast, evocative design, and costumes that define the characters make Chicken & Biscuits a thoroughly enjoyable comedy.

The Last of the Love Letters by Ngozi Anyanwu at the Atlantic Theatre is another play that simply presents its two characters in a situation that many of its audience members have experienced: the breakup of a deeply felt loving relationship.  Sanctuary City by Martyna Majok at the Lucille Lortel Theatre also focuses on the heart-felt relationship between a young Black boy and girl.  Both of these plays fail for me primarily because of their structure.  “Love Letters” is essentially two monologues as each character laments the loss of the other.  It starts with the playwright portraying a young woman who cannot make sense of her relationship with a former lover and the meaning of their breakup.  

After thirty minutes of what sounds like pointless jabber, we switch to the guy who is also plagued by the breakup in sixty minutes of jabber.  If you listen closely to these two pitiful people, you will hear virtually every imaginable positive and negative quality that lovers can experience with one another.  And that is what makes this play so annoyingly pointless.  Rather than giving the audience a new and interesting perspective on relationships gone bad, Ms. Anyanwu crams in virtually every thought each character might experience. 

Every so often, a man in a strange jumpsuit enters to apparently feed the male lover some type of medicine.  Is he in jail, in a psychic ward, or is he in some imaginary location?  Frankly, it does not matter because there is no reference in the monologues about the young man’s current location nor does it seem to have anything to do with their current state of mind.  On second thought, maybe it does, but that connection is never articulated in the two lovers’ ramblings. 

The title of Sanctuary City by Martyna Majok suggests we are about to see the hardships experienced by undocumented people in an immigrant-friendly city like Newark, NJ.  Indeed, one of the characters is considering a marriage of convenience to get citizenship.  And the play eventually tries to deal with that young man’s difficulty with entering into a false marriage to avoid deportation.  But once again the play’s structure prevents the audience from appreciating the central characters’ perspective. Only this time, the problem is the opposite of “Love Letters’” long monologues.  For the first sixty minutes of this play, there is no scene that is longer than sixty seconds.  Two high school classmates have an extremely close but totally unromantic relationship.  Even though the young girl climbs into the boy’s bedroom by the fire escape almost nightly to avoid her abusive mother, they sleep together, but separately. 

These minuscule encounters eventually evolve into a single, thirty-minute scene that takes place three years after they leave high school and each other.  Finally, we learn exactly why the boy resisted the marriage of convenience and why his relationship with his faithful female friend was entirely “hands off” (can you guess?).   

Rhythm is an essential element in making a play work.  Sometimes, a radical change in rhythm in a play can help the audience understand the significance or point of the play.  The two radically different rhythms in this play were just plain annoying. While the “normal rhythm” of the final thirty-minutes supported the unraveling of all that came before, by that time, I was exhausted by all of those thirty- to sixty-second encounters that preceded it.  There are the makings of an interesting play in those final thirty minutes, but that’s not the play Ms. Majok wrote and the New York Theatre Workshop produced at the Lucille Lortel Theatre.