The Alchemist

The Alchemist by Ben Jonson; adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher

Red Bull Theater at the New World Stages on 50^th Street

 

You can stop reading this brief review after the first sentence: It’s lots of fun! Playwright Jeffrey Hatcher has adapted the Jacobian poet and playwright Ben Jonson’s classic farce into two hours of laughs.  As Mr. Hatcher notes in the program, “Purists will call what I’ve written a free adaptation, and much of it anachronistic, but it’s intended to be Jonson’s style and spirit, if not his meter.”  And in that effort, Mr. Hatcher definitely succeeds.  As is typical of this comic format, the biggest laughs are in the second half, but the lead up to the door-slamming entrances and exits typical of the conclusion of a farce is also quite enjoyable.

 

This type of farce relies on a director and cast willing to exaggerate the idiosyncrasies of their character and to display timing that can succeed or fail by taking too long or not long enough with a smirk or a raised eyebrow.  Alexis Distler’s set, a 1500’s London home-entry room, gives director Jesse Berger all of the doors, grand stairway, and moveable walls needed to support the antics of three scheming scammers steeling gold coins from gullible victims in Jonson’s complex plot, simplified by Mr. Hatcher.

 

Red Bull Theater is best known for adapting classic plays in a style that is accessible to contemporary audiences and the cast of this production meets that challenge superbly.  The three scammers – played by Manoel Felciano, Reg Rogers, and Jennifer Sanchez – make their plots against others and against each other the perfect setup.  And each of the actors portraying the would-be victims create hysterical stereotypes that have the size and exaggerated personas that bring laughs to their gullibility.  Of special note are Jacob Ming-Trent, who plays an egotistic rich man who displays the joy of the outrageous costumes designed by Tilly Grimes and Nathan Christopher as the timid and naïve tobacconist.  But each of the other cast member’s rendering of these dupes is equally fun to watch.

 

It is wonderful to see Red Bull reentering its role as the advocate for plays that are usually limited to classroom discussions in theatre history classes.  After a year and a half of COVID craziness, it’s fun to see theatre at its craziest.

 

Rating: A (but only if you like this type of farce)

Trouble in Mind

 

Trouble in Mind by Alice Childress

At Roundabout’s American Airlines Theatre on 42^nd Street

 

The history of the first Broadway production of Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind is crucial to fully appreciating this fascinating play first performed off-Broadway in 1955. In fact, the producing organization, Roundabout Theatre Company, goes out of its way to inform the audience about the play’s history with program notes and an unusual pre-curtain-up announcement of that history.  In fact, as a book on the evolution of Black female playwrights notes, at the time of the first production, “Childress was the only African-American woman to have written, produced, and published plays for four decades.”  The original off-Broadway production stimulated interest in producing the play on Broadway.  However, when the producers insisted that Childress tone down certain parts of the play, she refused the production on “the great white way.”

 

This is a play about the way Black actors were treated in the 1950s and the limitations of the type of roles that were written for people of color – maids, butlers, etc. A multi-racial cast is gathered to rehearse a play-within-the-play that ends with a southern young Black man falsely accused of a crime and the eventual lynching of that innocent youth.  It’s a bit difficult to completely understand the full script for this would-be play, but it’s clear the enthusiastic White director, played by Michael Zegen, sees the play in-rehearsal as an opportunity for a Black actress to play a lead role. LaChanze gives a startling perfect performance as the actor, Wiletta Mayer, who struggles with portraying a southern mother in a racist society -- a break from the stereotypical roles she has always had to tolerate as a working actor in the 50s.  

 

This production is promoted by Roundabout as a “wry and moving look at racism, identity, and ego in the world of New York theatre.” The first act portrays the first day of rehearsals and, as I watched it, I kept seeing this production in light of the current revolution taking place with on- and off-Broadway with Black playwrights painting diverse and fully developed perspectives on the African American culture and challenges.  It’s easy to forget that this play is a portrait of the way Black actors were treated by directors, producers, and playwrights in the time before the civil rights movement of the 60s and 70s (and, unfortunately, decades after that time).

 

It's not until the second act that LaChance’s Wiletta Mayer rebels at the way the mother she is playing treats the son’s impending arrest. The last thirty minutes become an riveting and inspiring portrait of an actress who refuses to be a part of a completely unreasonable depiction of how any mother would advise her son in the face of racist violence.  Her turbulent rejection of the script with the director, and what her uproar reveals about the other characters, Black and White, puts the first act into perspective. Ms. Childress, is demanding the audience see the injustices that people of color experience both as theatre professionals and as members of our society.

 

It's rare that I decide that the last part of play redeems apparent weakness in everything leading up to the climax.  But Ms. Childress’s portrayal of actors trapped in the racism of theatre was important to show in this play in 1950s and now.  So, in the first act, Wiletta coaches the young actor playing her son in the play-within-the-play how to respond to the director -- Always laugh at his jokes and tell him his notes to the actors are right on the mark. Much of the subservience of the Black actors to the director, and to the racist demands of their profession, elicits laughs from the 2021 audience.  The actors’ “acting as they are supposed to act” are humorously exaggerated by the current production’s director, Charles Randolph-Wright; and the laughs seem to come from both White and Black audience members. I do not know how these roles were played in 1955, but this production certainly makes the playwright’s intent is clear and moving.

 

I should mention that a lot of the humor in both acts comes from its satirical references to method acting.  The 1950s were the heyday of Lee Strasberg and those who subscribed to his theory that good acting occurred when the actor internalized the character’s emotional response inside of the actors themselves.  Whether an audience in the 50’s recognized these exaggerated impositions on the actors’ style, clearly director Randolph-Wright coaxed laughs from a contemporary audience that has lived with actors committing excessive reliance on Strasberg’s theory ever since they started going to the theatre.

 

While LeChanze’s extraordinary performance is the highlight of the production, the rest of the cast is equally well suited to their parts.  Several actors (Black and White) must play self-deprecating characters whose subservience or old-fashioned acting style produces laughs.  A good example is Chuck Cooper’s Sheldon Forrester.  Forrester is so stereotypical of a “please the master” actor that he is actually accused by another character of being a Jim Crow.  But Cooper has been a proud American actor for over 45 years. He knows how to play this character with his tongue planted deeply in his cheek, forgiving the contemporary audience’s laughter at his character’s “yes-um” personality. This production maintains a carefully crafted balance between the humor and the horror of Ms. Childress’s intent.

 

Michael Zegen overplays the heavy-handed and totally insensitive first-time Broadway director – a veteran of Hollywood where the misrepresentation of people of color is rampant in the 1950s.  We would “get it” if Zegen toned down his overbearing persona and we might even find his Lee Strasberg moments humorous rather than simply domineering. Simon Jones’ as the Irish theatre doorman who has spent his life in various backstage positions acts as the frame for the play – speaking sense at the beginning and the end. The rest of the cast all fit their roles without flaw.  But it is LaChanze that carries the weight of a character discovering her true self and fearlessly confronting the injustices of her life that makes this production a rewarding evening in the theatre.  

 

Yes, the play appears to be dated and you might wonder during the first act why this play is currently relevant. But that seems to be the point of this revival.  The audience is supposed to look at this 1950s work and decide what it means in the 2020s – and there is much to enjoy and think about in this production as it stimulates “trouble in the mind” in the midst of our Black playwright revolution on- and off-Broadway.

 

Rating: A-

 

Morning’s at Seven by Paul Osborn

At Theatre of St. Clements at 46^th and 9^th Avenue

 

A classic comedy without the laughs!  That unfortunately describes the revival production of “Morning’s at Seven” playing at the Theatre at St. Clements on 46^th Street at 9^th Avenue.  Anyone who saw the multi-awarded 1980 revival knows that there are lots of laugh-out-loud moments in this 1920s portrait of four sisters, their mates, their off-spring, and life “in the golden years.”  But the current revival plays more like a Chekov play without that master’s sense of irony.

 

The failure is not in the casting.  This production has a group of a very experienced Broadway actors – Lindsay Crouse, John Rubenstein, and Tony Roberts to name a few.  These actors know how to play comedy.  So, the fault must lie with the director, Dan Wackerman, who has a history of successfully reviving old comedies. The combination of a great cast (on paper) and an experienced director drew me to buy a ticket to be reacquainted with a play that I loved when I directed a production in my days a theatre professor.

 

The humor in this play does not grow out of witty lines or surprising responses from characters.  What is funny are the delayed reactions, the unexpected facial expressions, and a plot that captures families grappling with the little things in their everyday life – oh, yes, and the possible marriage of a 40-year-old son and nephew to a woman he has been “dating” for 17 years.  Ironically, the two actors portraying the soon-to-be, or possibly soon-to-be, married couple seem to be the only players who know how to draw laughs from the eccentricities of their characters without destroying the charm of an old-fashioned play. 

 

One of the most telling indications that most this production’s failure is the fault of the director is the way he handled the “spells” suffered by Carl, one of the aging husbands and father of the potential groom.  Whenever he experiences any type of pressure, he leaves his house and bangs his head on a tree in the backyard.  But John Rubenstein, playing the temporarily unbalanced father of the would-be groom, puts both of his hands on top of each other and then bangs his head against hands, not the tree.  This is a minor buffering of the play’s humor, but this production is full of such misguided toning down.

 

What is left is a portrait of families that have tolerated each other for 40+ years coming to the conclusion that what they have is what they want – with one exception that is the inescapable laugh-line at the end of the play.  What’s most disappointing is that people who saw the 1980’s production will think their fond memory of this play is suffering from the type of forgetfulness that accompanies growing old.  And worse, those who never saw a good production of this classic will wonder what all of the fuss is about; why was this unamusing comedy revived? That’s a question that my very good memory of this play’s charm kept asking me as I watched this revival.  I sort of felt like leaving the theatre and banging my head against a tree.

 

Rating: C-

Trevor - A New Musical

Trevor - A New Musical

Stage 42 on 42nd Street

The new musical, Trevor, is based on an Academy Award winning short film by the same name.  Both portray a junior high school boy struggling with his identity, sexual and otherwise.  The short film led to the creation of the Trevor Project, an American non-profit that seeks to prevent suicide among LGBTQ youth.  Yes, both the movie and the musical portray that deeply disturbing event, and both have a happy ending, sort of.

 

However, the tone of these two fictional works is considerably different.  The film is narrated by the young boy named Trevor and combines tongue-in-cheek humor about his trials and tribulations at home and in school with the serious questions he has as he discovers his sexuality.  The musical portrays the boy as a “limp wrist” young gay stereotype who loves Diana Ross and wants to direct the “butch boys” at his junior high school in a choreographed entry in a school talent show.  The second act gets more serious when Trevor’s sexuality is discovered by his classmates and he attempts to put an end to his life with an overdose of aspirin. 

 

The big difference between the movie and the musical is the way the production team converts a 20-minute film into a two- and half-hour musical.  In the film, Trevor describes his discoveries directly to the camera. By the start of the movie, he has already come to the conclusion that he is different and that is OK.  The musical portrays the events in chronological order.  Trevor has not discovered his sexuality. He is unknowingly flamboyant.  He loves to imitate Ms. Ross when he is alone in his bedroom.  He feels more attached to the girls in his junior high school class.  His parents seem to be completely oblivious to their son’s “differentness” until his diary is discovered, and it reveals his feelings for the leader of a school athletic team, ironically named Pinky.

 

Alas, this is a musical and the creators are clearly more interested in making this show a hit than in truly dealing with the struggles that teenagers, gay or straight, have discovering their identity.  As such, it’s quite entertaining.  There are a lot of production numbers with young people dancing up a storm.  There are also two dozen original songs, although frequently it is tough to tell one musical number from another.  The opportunity to use the songs to reveal the young boy’s struggle with his identity was completely ignored.  Instead, a less than convincing portrayal of Diana Ross lurks above his bed as Trevor imitates her every move. Cute, but not terribly insightful.

 

The cast is generally very talented even if a few appear to be beyond the junior high school age – but boys always grow at different rates.  The young man playing Trevor, Holdem William Hagelberger, is quite amazing.  This 13-year-old from Sugarland, Texas, is the energy behind whole production.  He sings, he dances, and he keeps his audience rooting for him right up until the finale set to Ms. Ross’ hit “I’m Coming Out.”  The other boys and girls match Hagelberger’s energy while the adults are all portrayed as sort of “stick figures.”

 

Most of the events in the original film are replicated in the musical.  However, it’s unfortunate that the book and lyrics by Dan Collins and the music by Jullianne Wick Davis did not use the expansion of the piece into a two-and-a-half-hour production to more fully portray the struggles of LGBTQ youth trying to discover who they are and what their identity means to them.  There was room for lots of fun in this story without losing the opportunity to inform and challenge the audience.  The direction by Mark Bruni and choreography by Josh Prince are lively and engaging. This is an entertaining evening in the theatre.  But it’s also quite disappointing.

 

Rating: B-

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.

 

A Watering Hole

A Watering Hole 

 Conceived and Created by Lynn Nottage and Miranda Haymon 

 Signature Theatre on 42nd Street 

 Playing through August 8, 2021 

 The best thing about writing this review is writing a review. Like so many New York theatre addicts, the slow but deliberate reopening of our theatres is among the most treasured events in the opening up of our city – traditionally America’s theatre center. So, when one of my favorite off-Broadway theatres, Signature, announced it was offering what they described as a “grand experiment [that] deviates from the norm, presenting a new kind of theatre,” I rushed to buy my ticket. After all, the whole project was under the direction of one of our greatest living playwrights, Lynn Nottage. 

Alas, some of the best laid plans… “The Watering Hole” is a sort of contemporary art exhibit. Groups of only four people are guided by a Signature staff member through a series of displays, some simply poems on large sheets of cloth, others use video and other electronics to illustrate a poem or an idea. There are no live actors, other than recorded voices and people in videos. Each installation was designed by an up-and-coming playwright/visual artist, personally selected by Ms. Nottage and Ms. Haymon. 

As I expected, the themes center on the personal experiences of African-American, Latino, and, in one case, disabled, artists, related to water. This could be a fascinating creation, but unfortunately none of the exhibits are particularly notable and many times I could not wait until the Signature staff member took us to the next installation. The poetry was frequently mundane and there was very little that was intellectually stimulating. To be fair, several of the exhibits focused on our ability to appreciate the power of reflection, essentially asking us to concentrate on the nothingness. 

Some of the installations had references to the challenges of the pandemic. Others were personal narratives – perhaps the most interesting was a video in which a young physically disabled man tells the story of learning to swim when he was a child. Another is a memory of what it was like to open a fire hydrant in the city to splash around in water on a hot summer day. The audience sits around a fire hydrant than eventually sends mist into the air. 

For me, a former professor of theatre for 20 years, the most interesting aspect of this experience was to see all of the parts of Signature’s three-theatre complex including areas that are hidden from audiences. One of the installations put each attendee into a backstage dressing room. Eventually, participants get to sit on all three stages. While others listened to a narration, I examined the fly-galleries and stage equipment – I don’t think that was Signature’s intent, but it certainly makes you anxious to join the audience when their real season begins this fall. Some of the sites are almost eerie. Signature’s beautifully conceived lobby is stripped of all of its chairs and tables. Instead, there are three modern art ships in a huge empty space – there is none of the hubbub that makes that space come to life every night during the season – a reminder of what we missed during the last 15 months. And maybe that is the most profound message of this disappointing “grand experiment” – we yearn for the real thing and, barring any unexpected changes, it’s almost here.