Ragtime Revisited

Review of Ragtime, the Musical, Goodspeed Musical Theater

Based on a novel by E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime is a sprawling story of life in the U.S. just past the turn of the century (1900, that is). The story is as uplifting, infuriating, and mercurial as the country itself, and it is brought to gripping life on the stage at Goodspeed. Directed with admirable pacing by the very versatile Christopher D. Betts, Ragtime features a gut-wrenching performance by Michael Wordly as Coalhouse Walker, Jr., a Black ragtime musician forced to confront the political system, soaring sonic beauty from Brennyn Lark as Sarah, his love, and a powerfully determined and indelible portrait of Mother by Mamie Parris.

Michael Wordly as Coalhouse Walker, Jr., in Ragtime, the Musical at Goodspeed; photo by Diane Sobolewski

What makes the book by Terrance McNally so brilliant is the way it keeps in play so many of the subplots and timely references that Doctorow weaves into his story. With its major characters separated by class, race, and place of origin, Ragtime shows us the social mores of a society that nominally accepts the concept of “equality before the law,” but has trouble putting it into practice.

We meet a comfortable white family in New Rochelle, NY: Father (Edward Watts, perfectly cast), who has a yearning to go exploring with Admiral Peary; Mother (Mamie Parris, outstanding), who takes in a non-white foundling as a matter of conscience; their Little Boy (Sawyer Delaney, very impressive), who has a way of letting others know what he knows, and Mother’s Younger Brother (Behr Marshall, who seems to have a local fan-club), who goes from starstruck enthusiast of the captivating performer Evelyn Nesbit (Mia Gerachis, quite comical) to a radicalized youth, via the spell cast by eloquent and passionate Emma Goldman (Blair Goldberg, also perfectly cast), and Grandfather (Stephen Tewksbury), played for laughs.

Mother’s Younger Brother (Behr Marshall), Father (Edward Watts), Mother (Mamie Parris), Little Boy (Sawyer Delaney), Grandfather (Stephen Tewksbury) in Ragtime, the Musical at Goodspeed; photo by Diane Sobolewksi

We also meet newcomers to these shores: Tateh (David R. Gordon, excellent) and his daughter, immigrants who are struggling in the streets of New York. Eventually, Tateh’s artistry and quick sense of what sells will lead to the kind of show-biz transformation made possible by the burgeoning film industry, a change fully fleshed out in Gordon’s soulful and gifted Tateh.

Little Girl (Sofie Nesanelis), Tateh (David R. Gordon) and ensemble in Ragtime, the Musical at Goodspeed; photo by Diane Sobolewski

Throughout, swift scene changes provide wonderfully varied glimpses of life and times in the early twentieth century: we see Henry Ford (Matt Wall) churning out his landmark Model T automobiles; get glimpses of Harry Houdini (Jonathan Cobrda, working it for all its worth), a famous escape artist and impresario; get to see crowds thrilling to Emma Goldman’s challenges to the capitalist system of worker exploitation, and linger with Mother and Tateh during one of those fortuitous encounters that the city somehow makes happen. In Act II we even get a manly outing to a ball game, and follow the adventures of Evelyn Nesbit who could easily command an entire musical devoted to her career.

Henry Ford (Matt Wall), Coalhouse Walker, Jr. (Michael Wordly) and ensemble in Ragtime, the Musical, Goodspeed; photo by Diane Sobolewski

The heart and soul of the story and this show are Michael Wordly as Coalhouse Walker, Jr., and Brennyn Lark as Sarah. Their duet in Scene 9, “Wheels of a Dream” is a show-stopping wonder. The mother of the foundling (eventually called Coalhouse Walker III), Sarah is found and also taken into the New Rochelle residence—while Father is off in the arctic wastes. The boy’s father, Coalhouse, Jr., finds her there and begins a long courtship to prove to her he’s reliable and devoted to mother and child. His proud purchase of a Model T sets up a main plot-point (adapted by Doctorow from Heinrich von Kleist’s novel Michael Kolhaas) that puts into play racism, materialism and the workings of the justice system as forces always ready to provoke and incite. The violence that ends Act 1 has a grim inevitability, but is also a reminder that the outrages that inspired the slogan “Black Lives Matter” are an ongoing aspect of life in the U.S.

Sarah (Brennyn Lark) in Ragtime, the Musical, Goodspeed; photo by Diane Sobolewski

The challenge for Lynn Ahrens, Lyrics, and Stephen Flaherty, Music, was to find a way to express all this in song, and one is constantly surprised and delighted by how they manage it, using the always catchy musical phrasings of ragtime to flesh out the score. Considerable pressure is established by the success of Act I at bringing us into these lives and creating lively tableaux of movement and music—with effective ensemble work from choreographer Sara Edwards. What can Act II bring to light?

Jeremiah Valentino Porter, Rory Shirley, Jalyn Crosby, Jordan Alexander and ensemble in Ragtime, the Musical, Goodspeed; photo by Diane Sobolewski

The stand-off between Coalhouse, Jr., and the powers-that-be furthers the darker themes of the novel, but before that crisis, we’re favored with two important numbers: “Sarah Brown Eyes” lets Coalhouse reanimate his love for Sarah, and allows Sarah to join him in a rendering of their enduring bond; and “Back to Before” is Mother’s grand statement, a passionate song that accepts the challenges to the status quo seething in the words of Emma Goldman, in Coalhouse’s challenge to racial hatred, and in her own realization that life without Father can be a truly liberating prospect. Finally, I caught a personal note in how Betts isolates the figure of Coalhouse Walker III during the Finale, “Ragtime/Wheels of a Dream,” with the boy perhaps a stand-in for the gifted director himself.

Mother (Mamie Parris) with Father (Edward Watts) in Ragtime, the Musical, Goodspeed; photo by Diane Sobolewski

Making use of every bit of Goodspeed’s just-big-enough stage, Ragtime is a musical that provokes, inspires and delights, an entertainment with complex themes and a fully engaging presentation. The design elements by its talented team—Emmie Finckel, Scenic Design; Stephanie Bahniuk, Costume Design; Charlie Morrison, Lighting Design; Jay Hilton, Sound Design—deserve mention as much of the pleasure of the show is in how it looks and sounds.

A revival of this always timely musical will go up at the Lincoln Center in NYC beginning in September. Get the jump on it, and go to Goodspeed to see Ragtime ignite its audience.

Ragtime, the Musical
Book by Terrence McNally
Music by Stephen Flaherty
Lyrics by Lynn Ahrens
Based on the novel Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow
Directed by Christopher D. Betts
Music directed by Adam Souza
Choreographed by Sara Edwards

Scenic Design: Emmie Finckel; Costume Design: Stephanie Bahniuk; Lighting Design: Charlie Morrison; Sound Design: Jay Hilton; Original Orchestrations: William David Brohn; Additional Orchestrations: Kim Scharnberg; Wig, Hair & Makeup Design: Tenel Dorsey; Intimacy Consulting & Fight Direction: Kelsey Rainwater; Dialect Coach: Jennifer Scapetis-Tycer; Casting: Hardt Casting; Production Stage Manager: Chris Zaccardi; Director of Production: Endla Burrows; Production Manager/Technical Director: Dominick J. Pinto; Associate Artistic Director: Michale Fling; General Manager: Gretchen Wright

Cast: Jordan Alexander, Shaunice Maudlyn Alexander, Mia Bergstrom, Tommy Betz, Jodi Bluestein, Yophi Adia Bost, Jonathan Cobrda, Jalyn Crosby, Sawyer Delaney, Joseph Fierberg, Mia Gerachis, Blair Goldberg, David R. Gordon, Nathan Haltiwanger, Brennyn Lark, Behr Marshall, Henry H. Miller, Robin Louise Miller, Sofie Nesanelis, Mamie Parris, Jeremiah Valentino Porter, Rory Shirley, Denver Andre Taylor, Stephen Tewksbury, Xavier Turner, Matt Wall, Greyson Wallace, Edward Watts, Michael Wordly

Musicians: Keyboard 1/Conductor: Adam Souza; Keyboard 2: William Thomas; Violin: Lu Friedman; Trumpet: Renee McGee; Trombone: Matthew Russo; Bass/Tuba: Stuart Gann, Adam Hammer; Reeds: Liz Baker Smith; Guitar: Nick DiFabbio; Percussion: Elliot Wallace

Goodspeed Musicals
April 25-June 15, 2025; Press Opening: May 7, 2025

"What a Drag It Is to See You"

Review of Notes on Killing Seven Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Board Members, Yale Repertory Theatre

Do boards just generally have a bad name? To be “on the board”—doesn’t it suggest a level of integration into The System that may be met with envy, anger, maybe even revenge fantasies among underlings? Is there a relation between board-dom and boredom? Did you ever want to get up-close and personal with a “member of the board”? Or line ‘em up and shoot ‘em?

In Mara Vélez Meléndez’s Notes on Killing Seven Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Board Members, now playing at Yale Repertory Theatre through May 17, Lolita (Christine Carmela), a trans Boricua woman packing her father’s gun, has come to NYC to off an entire board. Consisting of seven unelected climbers put in charge of “oversight, management and economic stability” for Puerto Rico, the board’s snazzy acronym spells P-R-O-M-E-S-A, or “promise.” As with other government entities we might think of, PROMESA seems primarily designed to promote the interests of those in power while shafting the general population. The board has managed Puerto Rico into economic chaos. Lolita thinks enough is enough.

Samora la Perdida, Christine Carmela in Notes on Killing Seven Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Board Members, Yale Repertory Theatre; photo by Joan Marcus

She takes the name of an actual woman, Lolita Lebron, who, with other Puerto Rican nationalists, opened fire on the US House of Representatives back in 1954, an act of retaliation, as they saw it, against the recent conversion of Puerto Rico into a US commonwealth. The play’s Lolita arrives at the Wall Street office of PROMESA fueled more by frustration than murderous intent, but her early mic drop moment puts the case clearly: “Do we hesitate to kill our leaders because we’re tired? Or . . . are we tired because we keep hesitating to kill our leaders?”

In the reception area of PROMESA, Lolita passes out from anxiety and comes to while the Receptionist (Samora la Perdida), hoping to help, realizes she’s armed. What follows is absurdist, dreamlike, and very, very much campy drag. Receptionist suggests a trial run at assassinating the board members—they are in possession of a binder with headshots and resumés for each of the seven—and before you can say “seven extravagant costume changes will be involved” Receptionist has taken on the task of enacting each board member as a fantasy drag alter ego.

It makes sense the way loose analogies sometimes do: political and economic self-determination—as for instance as an independent country with its own elected officials—is “like” self-determination in terms of non-binary gender constructions, see? At least both have to do with liberty, the kind that repressive regimes are apt to police or undermine or repress. And so, the fantasy board members that Receptionist conjures enact a sequence of problematic figures for whatever future Lolita is trying to imagine or implement.

I can’t say I quite “got” all seven as types or archetypes or even just as the fractious performers they are. And I have to admit that from time to time I found myself counting how many we’d met and how many more we still had to see—making the show feel a bit like having to get through a series of appointments. Next?

Samora la Perdida, Christine Carmela in Notes on Killing Seven Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Board Members, Yale Repertory Theatre; photo by Joan Marcus

The fabulous costumes by Arthur Wilson manage to keep one-upping the outrageousness (the last is truly mind-bending), and the songs and routines will land differently for different viewers (I probably laughed most outright at the initial reception that Artritis—a Reagan-era geriatric—met with, to the tune of “9 to 5”). My favorite board-member, though, for sheer entertainment, was Karlos Grace, the playboy, because he seemed to break most with the general technique on view. Samora la Perdida has a way with all these roles but their lip-synching was always theatrical in a very repetitive way (just giving “notes”). The board-persons that stood out most have some obvious cultural cachet—a judge, and, especially, a bishop.

Samora La Perdida, Christine Carmela (seated), in Notes on Killing Seven Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Board Members, Yale Repertory Theatre; photo by Joan Marcus

If you’re an enthusiast for drag shows—and I’ve seen more than a few in the precincts of theater—you will likely find much here to amuse. For me, though, there is an awkward disconnect between the fun of drag—even in the more subversive or openly political numbers I’ve seen—and the situation Lolita is supposedly in. In Javier Antonio González’s direction, the caricatures that Receptionist enacts are always courting audience response, the way a drag number does, while the interplay of board-member with Lolita (who gets to indulge in a variety of time-killing devices while waiting for the next costumed creature) sometimes becomes a whirlwind of half-begun statements, implied arguments and dissing—of each other, of each board-member’s failings, of the revolutionary pose in general. There’s very real friction between what Lolita wants and what the board-members may be said to stand for, but the best dialogue occurs between Lolita and Receptionist, who identifies as Nuyorican, as, for instance, when they try to hash out, as “colonized siblings,” what exactly Puerto Rican-ness could or should be. Receptionist’s viewpoints often seem about as mercurial as they come, while Lolita’s are very much thoughts in progress.

Christine Carmela, Samora la Perdida in Notes on Killing Seven Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Board Members, Yale Repertory Theatre; photo by Joan Marcus

Doaa Ouf’s projections and collage of surveillance screens do much to add visual interest, and pretty much any time the scenic designer at the Rep—here Patti Panyakaew—uses the space under the stage as part of the set we’re in for a visually stunning event. As Receptionist quips at one point “it’s an elaborate show” and it certainly is, an extravaganza of bits and routines and, yes, killings that are always diverting, as theater.

At one point Lolita offers notes to Receptionist about performance: “Be sublime, not performative.” Easier said than done. Later, Lolita tells Bishop Avid Silk, “I need reasonable conversation about statehood, liberation, what’s next.”  Ummm…

Notes on Killing Seven Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Board Members
By Mara Vélez Meléndez
Directed by Javier Antonio González

 Scenic Designer: Patti Panyakaew; Costume Designer: Arthur Wilson; Lighting Designer: Yung-Hung Sung; Sound Designer: Joyce Ciesil; Projection Designer: Doaa Ouf; Hair Designer: Matthew Armentrout; Make Designer: Sarah Cimino; Choreographer: Javier Antonio González; Production Dramaturgs: Daria Kerschenbaum, Abraham E.S. Rebollo-Trujillo; Fight and Intimacy Directors: Kelsey Rainwater, Michael Rossmy; Vocal and Dialect Coach: Cynthia Santos DeCure; Stage Manager: Aura Michelle

Cast: Christine Carmela, Samora la Perdida, with Yan-Carlos Diaz, Flower Estefana Rios

Yale Repertory Theatre
April 25-May 17, 2025

Strangers in a Station

Review of Heisenberg, New Haven Theater Company

The latest New Haven Theater Company production Heisenberg, directed by Steve Scarpa with a cast consisting of George Kulp and Melissa Andersen, opened this weekend and plays tonight and next Thursday through Saturday, May 8, 9, 10, only.

The play, by Simon Stephens (perhaps best known for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time), is engaging, surprising, and ultimately genial and optimistic. It’s not that there’s not a dark side to it all, but Melissa Andersen’s Georgie Burns, as the life force of the play, keeps us, like her stodgy foil Alex Priest (George Kulp), uncertain, fascinated, and vaguely unsettled, never knowing what will come out of her mouth next.

Alex Priest (George Kulp), Georgie Burns (Melissa Andersen) in Heisenberg at New Haven Theater Company, directed by Steve Scarpa

So let’s deal with the “uncertainty principle” right up front. The play is named for Werner Heisenberg, a German physicist who noted that you can’t measure accurately both position and speed of electrons at the same time. As translated into more day-to-day contexts, the Principle has come to be synonymous with the idea that the position/motion of the observer affects the observation. You can’t know what the world actually is until you factor out the distortion your own observations bring to the matter.

Why is this relevant to the play? It seems to me that Stephens wants us to see that someone like Georgie, who is constantly creating fictions about herself—we could also call them lies—is a “particle” we cannot observe properly without some understanding of what it is we think we see from our limited position and our own relative motion. As our stand-in for that process, Kulp’s Priest, an Irishman living in London since his adolescence and a single man with a butcher shop for most of his life (he’s now 75 and thinking of retiring), is laconic, stolid, somewhat distrustful, and, ultimately, more and more receptive.

But what is becoming receptive to? The notion that a much younger woman—hitting her forties—who spontaneously kisses him on the back of the neck in a train station might actually be a good thing for him. A woman who claims any number of things: she’s an assassin, a waitress, a receptionist at a school; she kissed his neck in memory of a lost husband; she never had children; she never married, but she wants to find out where her grown son is living.

Melissa Andersen’s Georgie is lively, lovely, but also clearly more than a bit damaged. The fact that she’s so verbal is both a come-on and a dodge, a way of keeping as many possibilities in play at once, even in the same sentence. George Kulp’s Alex is even a tougher read: he has the tone of a man not easily impressed nor easily convinced; he’s mostly satisfied with his solitary pursuits—like long walks listening to an infinite variety of musical styles (which he enumerates at one point) on his Walkman. He tells Georgie that the difference between hearing music and listening to it is a matter of thinking about where it’s going, how it’s developing its themes. Which is a nice instruction for following a play as well.

The play is perfect for NHTC, requiring little in the way of set and props, and keeping us focused throughout on the perfectly paced dialogue achieved by this well-meshed cast and director Steve Scarpa (who directed the first show NHTC presented in the theater-space they’ve been in for over a decade). The play works because the oil and water mix of these two characters keeps alive the notion that they may have a special significance for one another—which is easy enough to maintain as there are no other persons in the play for comparison or contrast. Early on, Georgie ascertains that Alex has no one—no living siblings, no close friends, no younger relatives, nor any online life (he’s put off by the fact that he and his butcher shop are Google-able). In other words, he’s the perfect mark for a certain kind of romance-based hustle.

The most relevant uncertainty concerns where these two are headed and how fast: is Georgie simply hustling Alex? Is she genuinely trying to find acceptance or fun or something deeper from this cautious but quite genuine older man? Does she even know? For the issue isn’t only Alex’s uncertainty and ours, there’s a very real uncertainty at the heart of Georgie, who knows all kinds of ways to play with people but seems never quite certain what she’s playing at.

What you make of it all may have a lot to do with where you are in the electron stream of your own limited lifetime, and, for instance, whether 75 years is unthinkably far ahead or around the bend, and 40something an orbital position or receding almost out of sight. The play’s optimism comes from its convincing sense that we often don’t know who we really are or can be. And that’s a good thing.

Heisenberg
By Simon Stephens
Directed by Steve Scarpa

Producer: J. Kevin Smith; Production Stage Manager: Stacy Lupo; Lighting Design: Adam Lobelson

Cast: Melissa Andersen, George Kulp

New Haven Theater Company
May 1-3 & May 8-10, 2025

In Their Triumph Die

Review of Romeo & Juliet, Hartford Stage

The highest praise you can give to a production of Shakespeare’s oft-produced Romeo & Juliet is that it’s so good it makes you forget what’s going to happen, and the current Hartford Stage production is that good. Maybe there are some who don’t know the play’s outcome, but most do know, even if they’ve never seen the play performed (and I’ve seen three professional productions in CT previously). And yet the Hartford Stage production, directed by Artistic Director Melia Bensussen, and playing through May 18, almost makes us forget, so that we can be caught up again in the brilliance of the play.

The cast of Romeo & Juliet at Hartford Stage, directed by Melia Bensussen; photo by T. Charles Erickson

The way to grab audiences is to give us an incredibly well-paced first half that reminds us that Romeo & Juliet is funny and fun. It’s been said that the play was originally intended as a comedy in which everything works out well in the end, and you can almost believe it up until the point at which Mercutio and Tybalt are killed. After that it’s a different play and, though our “star-cross’d lovers” remain hopeful, even they have a feeling that this can’t end well.

Juliet (Carmen Berkeley), Romeo (Niall Cunningham) in Romeo & Juliet at Hartford Stage, directed by Melia Bensussen; photo by T. Charles Erickson

This production’s success owes much to its two leads. Niall Cunnigham is a likeable, youthful Romeo. Capable of playing both comedy and romance, Cunningham can crank up the windy rhetoric and also entertain us with Romeo’s awkward uncertainty. The second half, when he’s mostly offstage in exile, yearns for his return. Carmen Berkeley’s Juliet is boisterously charming and candid and full of irresistible spirit throughout the play. She’s a winner all the way. The garden scene with its famed balcony is lively and lovely, and Berkeley makes us feel the wonder of it all through Juliet’s eyes.

Juliet (Carmen Berkeley) in Romeo & Juliet at Hartford Stage, directed by Melia Bensussen; photo by T. Charles Erickson

Benussen’s incredibly energetic production makes the most of the play’s action and comedy, abetted by the Annmarie Kelly’s Nurse, a garrulous, well-meaning soul who dotes on Juliet—their chemistry does much to establish how lovable Juliet is; and by Carman Lacivita who gives Friar Lawrence both humor and thoughtfulness and the requisite panic when he gets in over his head; and by Juan Arturo’s very dashing Benvolio, and Alejandra Escalante’s well-spoken and rakish Mercutio (for a woman to play a male role is not surprising, but to make Mercutio—Mercutia?—a woman is a bit of a stretch); Escalante, a Shakespeare veteran, is suitably charismatic in this plum role.

Mercutio (Alejandra Escalante), Tybalt (Brandon Burditt) and cast in Romeo & Juliet at Hartford Stage, directed by Melia Bensussen; photo by T. Charles Erickson

The first half, then, with all the swordplay and the first meeting of the lovers and the exchange of vows and the dynamics of the household chez Capulet is quite diverting. And it’s not a fault of the production that Shakespeare’s plays tend to drag a bit in Act IV before having a quick end in Act V. Here it’s because Romeo and Juliet don’t have any more scenes together until the end and even then, not really.

Lady Capulet (Eva Kaminsky), Capulet (Gerardo Rodriguez) in Romeo & Juliet at Hartford Stage, directed by Melia Bensussen; photo by T. Charles Erickson

Juliet’s best scene after the break is when she tries to delay marriage to Paris; the scene is well-played though the gender switch of giving lines written for Capulet to his wife is curious; certainly Eva Kaminsky delivers them exceedingly well, but the iron will shown in the lines doesn’t sit well with other aspects of the character of Lady Capulet as written. Elsewhere, as in his upbraiding of Tybalt, Gerardo Rodriguez perhaps shows his Capulet is not quite equal to the requisite bluster. Meanwhile, the news that Lady Montague died of grief flits by barely acknowledged since she never appears onstage in this production.

Friar Lawrence (Carman Lacivita), Romeo (Niall Cunningham), Juliet (Carmen Berkeley) in Romeo & Juliet at Hartford Stage, directed by Melia Bensussen; photo by T. Charles Erickson

Did I mention the costumes? Fabian Fidel Aguilar’s designs need to be seen. Not only colorful, rich and dazzling, the costumes incorporate motifs and a palette of Mexican provenance, lending this production a provocative aura. This is nowhere more striking than in the dance sequences, such as the ball where actors wear masks for Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), making death a kind of honored guest in this play. Yes, it’s sad things don’t work out for everyone, but the play—and Bensussen’s vision of the play accentuates this—lets us know that death always has a part to play, in every life, and that here it comes freighted with themes like doomed love, and mortal enmity, and the kinds of risks, chances, and bad luck that put fatalism in fatalities (there are six, counting Lady Montague).

Tybalt’s ghost (Brandon Burditt) in Romeo & Juliet at Hartford Stage, directed by Melia Bensussen; photo by T. Charles Erickson

The Set Design by Christopher & Justin Swader is open and eye-catching and graciously devoid of the gravel that graced it in Hartford Stage’s most recent previous production of R & J. The many points of entry and exit are used very effectively, and Dale A. Merrill’s Choreography and Ted Hewlett’s Fight Direction add much flair to the proceedings. Dan Kotlowitz’s Lighting Design subtly takes its cues from changes in the colors of Juliet’s gowns. Which is to say this is a visually splendid production with an impressive grasp of the play’s strengths and a bracing commitment to its spectacular theatricality and vitality.

So fresh and welcome is this Romeo & Juliet, shall I compare it to a summer’s day?

Nurse (Annmarie Kelly), Juliet (Carmen Berkeley) in Romeo & Juliet at Hartford Stage, directed by Melia Bensussen; photo by T. Charles Erickson

Romeo & Juliet
By William Shakespeare
Directed by Melia Bensussen

Choreography: Dale A. Merrill; Scenic Design: Christopher & Justin Swader; Costume Design: Fabian Fidel Aguilar; Lighting Design: Dan Kotlowitz; Sound Design: Darron L. West; Wig, Hair & Makeup Design: Tommy Kurzman; Fight Director: Ted Hewlett; Voice & Text Coach: Julie Foh; Casting: Alaine Alldaffer and Lisa Donadio; Production Stage Manager: Nicole Wiegert; Assistant Stage Managers: Julius Cruz and Maia Tivony

Cast: Opa Adeyemo, Juan Arturo, Carmen Berkeley, Emily Bosco, Brandon Burditt, Niall Cunningham, Alejandra Escalante, Eva Kaminsky, Michael Samuel Kaplan, Annmarie Kelly, Carman Lacivita, Gerardo Rodriguez, Liliana Alva, Jeremy Parrott, Jason Pietroluongo, Madelyn Rothstein

Hartford Stage
April 17-May 18, 2025

Who Can You Trust?

Review of Primary Trust, TheaterWorks, Hartford

Eboni Booth’s Primary Trust, winner of the Pulitzer in Drama for 2024, gives us a story of contemporary trauma that is more Frank Capra than Franz Kafka. And that in itself is refreshing. Directed by Jennifer Chang at TheaterWorks Hartford with a commanding sense of how to use the playing space for maximum effect, Primary Trust is an energetic feel-good play in which “the little guy” manages to navigate the minefield of everyday life without losing his dignity, much. How often does that happen?

As a note on the setting in the playbill reads: “Cranberry, New York: A medium-sized suburb of Rochester. Before smartphones.” It’s the last line that is so telling, as it not only puts the action back there before 2007, but before the reach of media via the phone became ubiquitous and incessant. As the singer Greg Brown puts it, “People used to spend quite a bit of time alone.” Remember?

Kenneth (Justin Weaks) in Primary Trust by Eboni Booth, TheaterWorks Hartford; photo by Mike Marques

The plot point, though, is that even when our hero, a young Black man named Kenneth (Justin Weaks), is alone he’s not really alone. As we learn early, he has an almost constant companion: an imaginary middle-aged friend called Bert (Samuel Stricklen). The interplay between the two is the main focus in the early going and when we learn of Bert’s phantasmal status we have to recalibrate a little. Because without Bert, with whom Kenneth haunts a tiki bar called Wally’s, downing mai tais during the two-for-one happy hour, Kenneth has only his job at a bookstore. And when the store’s genial owner, Sam (a quick study in type by Ricardo Chavira), has to sell out to afford a necessary operation, which also requires moving to the dry atmosphere of Arizona—Kenneth’s got nothing. But Bert.

Corinna (Hilary Ward), Kenneth (Justin Weaks) in Primary Trust by Eboni Booth at TheaterWorks Hartford; photo by Mike Marques

As the story develops—pushed along by Kenneth sharing his story in direct address to the audience—we see Kenneth learn to navigate life on his own. And that means talking to people who, unlike Bert and the audience, are actually in scenes with him. Chiefly, that’s a string of waitresses/waiters at Wally’s, all played by Hilary Ward with a zestful rendering of different attitudes, dialects, and levels of professionalism. Eventually, the friendly and interested Corrina emerges from the pack and makes a chance suggestion about job prospects at a local bank (Kenneth’s deceased mother had been an employee at a different bank). Kenneth, who previously had a social worker who found him a job, takes the initiative and, with Bert’s backing, goes to a job interview where he meets the generally sympathetic Clay (Ricardo Chavira as an enthusiastic former high school football star), gets hired, and soon begins to succeed on the job.

Clay (Ricardo Chavira), Bert (Samuel Stricklen), Kenneth (Justin Weaks) in Primary Trust by Eboni Booth at TheaterWorks Hartford; photo by Mike Marques

Interestingly, Kenneth’s traumatic backstory, which features the original for Bert, is not told to the audience, but rather to Corrina on an impromptu night out at a French restaurant. As we might expect, further trauma will surface when Kenneth comes to understand that having real people in his life makes having an imaginary companion more difficult. While the more dramatic touches in the play can feel a bit manipulative, the likeability of all the characters we meet—including a slew of eager to-be-pleased bank customers (Ward again)—keeps the play bouncing along in a mostly cheerful groove.

Corrina (Hilary Ward), Kenneth (Justin Weaks) in Primary Trust by Eboni Booth at TheaterWorks Hartford; photo by Mike Marques

The fact of personal trauma is treated seriously, and the play’s main strength is the way Booth and Chang make theater of the sharing of stories and telling truths as a mainstay of fellowship. We see how relations between employer and employee, or between customer and worker, can be cordial rather than adversarial. Primary Trust takes its title from the name of the bank where Kenneth works, but it also alludes to the idea that trust is primary to any friendship. We may decide for ourselves whether the virtual world has helped to foster or undermine such trust. To say nothing of the political climate the internet aggravates.

The entire cast is engaging and makes each character—no matter how briefly glimpsed—come alive vividly. The more extended roles—Corrina, Clay, Bert—let us learn more about Kenneth by reflection, as we come to know him better by the kinds of interactions he inspires. As Kenneth, Justin Weaks’s thoughtful and touching performance works through a gripping emotional range—at times, reserved and closed off, at other times effusive and emotional. Kenneth is the heart and soul of the play, a young man already sorely tried by life who helps us realize that just getting by can be a great triumph. As we watch, his joy in life becomes ours.

Kenneth (Justin Weaks), Bert (Samuel Stricklen) in Primary Trust by Eboni Booth, at TheaterWorks Hartford; photo by Mike Marques

The staging here is very fast and effective, as in most TheaterWorks shows, with serviceable props and backdrops that quickly shift the scenes, letting us feel we’re becoming at-home in Kenneth’s mind, finding out that empathy can be a magic door into another world.

Primary Trust
By Eboni Booth
Directed by Jennifer Chang

Set Design: Nicholas Ponting; Costume Design: Danielle Preston; Lighting Design: Bryan Ealey; Sound Design: Frederick Kennedy; Wig Design: Earon Chew Healey; Associate Director: Moira O’Sullivan; Dialect Coach: Jennifer Scapetis-Tycer; Stage Manager: Tom Kosis

Cast: Ricardo Chavira, Samuel Stricklen, Hilary Ward, Justin Weaks

TheaterWorks, Hartford
April 10-May 11, 2025

The Play That Keeps Playing

Review of Theatre People, Westport Country Playhouse

What is the chief characteristic of “theatre people”? Paul Slade Smith’s play of that name, playing at Westport Country Playhouse through April 12, suggests that “theatre people” may often feel they’re in a play, so that life tends to be a matter of plots and subplots and complications that may lead to a happy ending (comedy) or an unhappy ending (tragedy). Cleverly playing on an awareness of life’s theatricality and of comic theater’s familiar tropes, Smith’s play, ably directed by Mark Shanahan, enacts the kind of fast-paced comedy that Westport Country Playhouse has a tradition of bringing off extremely well.

Margot (Mia PInero), Victor (Michael McCorry Rose), Olga (Erin Noel Grennan), Oliver (Rodolfo Soto), Arthur (Michael McCormick), Charlotte (Isabel Keating) in Theatre People, Westport Country Playhouse; photo by T. Charles Erickson

Visiting at a Rhode Island mansion to hear Broadway star Margot Bell (Mia Pinero) perform, Charlotte Sanders (Isabel Keating) and Arthur Sanders (Michael McCormick) are playwrights who hope to facilitate Margot’s participation in the play they plan to make of a new novel, The Angel in the Next Room (which, unbeknownst to Margot, has been written in dedication to her by Oliver Adams (Rodolfo Soto), a young writer in love with her). To help what the Sanderses assume to be a definite couple work together, Charlotte has arranged for Oliver to stay in a bedroom adjacent to Margot’s. Complications arise when Margot is overheard being not so angelic in the next room, much to Oliver’s dismay.

Oliver (Rodolfo Soto), Arthur (Michael McCormick), Charlotte (Isabel Keating) in Theatre People, Westport Country Playhouse; photo by T. Charles Erickson

The Sanders must rectify the situation, which means: dealing with Oliver’s despair (given several comical layers by Rodolfo Soto); enlightening Margot of the enormity of the situation (the Sanders desperately need a hit play), which causes Mia Pinero to move swiftly from grande dame to flustered ingenue; roping Oliver’s rival, the handsome, dashing and dim actor Victor Pratt (Michael McCorry Rose), into their plans—which means he may have to flap his arms like a showboating angel at some length; and enlisting all manner of help from Olga (Erin Noel Grennan), a scene-stealing and theater-deprecating housemaid who stands in at times for a playwright, a director, and an audience. The cast are all equal to their characters’ supposed real selves as well as the play-within-the-play characters they have to convince one another they understand (which is not easy!).

Charlotte Sanders (Isabel Keating), Margot Bell (Mia Pinero), Victor Pratt (Michael McCorry Rose) in Theatre People, Westport Country Playhouse; photo by T. Charles Erickson

Adapted from Ferenc Molnár’s Play at the Castle (1924), which was popularized in English by P. G. Wodehouse as The Play’s the Thing (1926), Theatre People is set in the 1940s, the chief era for Hollywood screwball comedies, with the Sanderses sometimes flinging off sallies worthy of Nick and Nora—Isabel Keating, who plays Charlotte with a fizzy, can-do assertiveness, even resembles Myrna Loy a little, especially when some of the fizz falls flat and she has to consider that intricate plots may be easier to pull off on stage than in life. As her often bemused, confused partner who lives his life rising to her bait, Michael McCormick shows off great timing, a skeptical foil who knows how to make the most of any opening given.

Charlotte Sanders (Isabel Keating), Arthur Sanders (Michael McCormick) in Theatre People, Westport Country Playhouse; photo by T. Charles Erickson

The romantic triangle that has to center the shenanigans is never as diverting as the fiction Charlotte devises so as to tie-up everyone’s loose ends, and Margot and Victor spend the whole first act on the other side of that well-appointed wall, while Oliver is the kind of unrealistically romantic naif whom one can’t imagine writing a novel much less a good one. Such devices make “theater people” seem rather silly, but the protracted “rehearsal” that, in Act 2, makes ridiculous theater of Victor’s wooing of Margot—and creates a preposterous plot that lets Arthur literally play God—is the pay-off, and even manages to make Olga a believer in the value of theater. The value certainly includes the ability to make everything—set (James J. Fenton), costumes (Annie J. Le), lighting (Alyssandra Docherty), sound (Jill BC Du Boff), props (Anya Kutner) and hair/makeup (J. Jared Janas) as top-notch and flawless as possible as they are here.

Olga (Erin Noel Grennan), Charlotte Sanders (Isabel Keating) in Theatre People, Westport Country Playhouse; photo by T. Charles Erickson

There’s a point fairly early in the play when Charlotte tries to explain theater’s attractions to a doubting Olga, whose common sense grasp of human foibles doesn’t see why anyone would want to waste time re-enacting such things. Charlotte describes how the audience at a play are able to forget the world and all its troubles while getting caught up in the lives being staged before them by living people. The words, we can imagine, are meant to have a resonance for our particular times, but can—we realize—be assigned to any time in human history. The power of theater to create a facsimile of life that can fascinate us, whether believable or unbelievable, laughable or lachrymose, keeps us returning to our seats. As the final entry in the venerable Westport Country Playhouse’s “Season of Laughter,” Theatre People capably reminds us that people who live only on stage need an audience to come alive. They need us, in other words, theater’s people.

Theatre People
By Paul Slade Smith
Adapted from Ferenc Molnár’s Play at the Castle
Directed by Mark Shanahan

Set Designer: James J. Fenton; Costume Designer: Annie J. Le; Lighting Designer: Alyssandra Docherty; Sound Designer: Jill BC Du Boff; Prop Supervisor: Anya Kutner; Wig, Hair, & Makeup Designer: J. Jared Janas; Production Stage Manager: Rebecca C. Monroe; Assistant Stage Manager: Christine Lemme; Production Assistant: Zach De Brino; Assistant Director: Anissa Felix

Cast: Erin Noel Grennan, Isabel Keating, Michael McCormick, Mia Pinero, Michael McCorry Rose, Rodolfo Soto

Westport Country Playhouse
March 25-April 12, 2025

The Art of Belonging

Review of Laughs in Spanish, Hartford Stage

Alexis Scheer’s Laughs in Spanish, playing at Hartford Stage through March 30, grabs us from the start: a blank wall where expensive artworks should be hanging and a loud, sustained scream of “fuuuuuck!” from art dealer Mariana (Stephanie Machado). ‘Tis the season of the famed Art Basel Miami Beach, and Mariana must needs sell art. The missing paintings, though, come to seem mostly a minor plot point, a way to start the action with a bit of bait-and-switch. Directed by Lisa Portes, the play begins with comic, on-the-job high anxiety, but gradually becomes a play about relationships, and family, and community values.

I might have preferred to watch Mariana deal with the art world.

Mariana (Stephanie Machado), Estella (Maggie Bofill) in Laughs in Spanish at Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

But that’s just me: the accent here is on the accents, we might say. The play treats—with ready humor and a bubbly cast of characters—the shifting roles people play in their lives—work, family, romance—and, more particularly, the tonal shifts that come from being manifestly Latine, in some situations, and more knowingly Angloese in others. The fun of watching the play comes in seeing how the role and tone shifts are instinctive, instructive, and played for effect in a variety of social situations by this able cast.

Start with our screaming art dealer (Machado a little later does a rattled scream that easily eclipses her opening bellow): Mariana, we see, is a savvy, self-sustaining success, but success can easily totter into failure; besides the upcoming reception for art now gone, she has to deal with her assistant Carolina (María Victoria Martínez) who is a Latine artist looking for a break—and who cooly suggests her works should be hung in lieu of the purloined pieces; then there’s Mariana’s mom, Estella (Maggie Bofill), who is a celebrity because of a role she plays in a telenovela, and who is back in her old Wynwood stomping grounds for reasons of her own (but which are relevant to Mariana). Coincidentally, Jenny, Estella’s assistant, an Anglo, is a former school-chum of Mariana’s at the boarding school that absentee mom Estella sent her young daughter to. Does that backstory spell friction or romance? Meanwhile, there’s also very agreeable Juan (Luis Vega), the kind of security guard who thinks it’s no sweat when highly valuable art disappears on his watch, and who is more than cozy with Carolina.

In other words, there are past, present, and future situations aplenty. In all the busyness of the various cross-purposes, the play loses some of the charm that got us interested in the first place. The two strong characters here are Mariana and Estella, both given fascinatingly varied readings by Stephanie Machado and Maggie Bofill, respectively. The mother-daughter dynamic is the most fully fleshed-out, and watching these two work through their pasts and presents is rewarding viewing. Bofill’s Estella is the more demanding and commanding, even when she tries to be humble, and her range of ways to work a room never runs dry. Late in the play she delivers a speech/monologue that left me a little uncertain of its relevance but never in doubt that it was fun to listen to and watch.

Estella (Maggie Bofill); Mariana (Stephanie Machado), foreground, in Laughs in Spanish at Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

Machado’s Mariana can be breezy, ballsy, bitter, blithe—and believably girlish. She’s comes across as the kind of character that—if maybe not telenovela material—can be easily imagined as a sit-com heroine, cut from the Mary Tyler Moore Show mold (if that’s not too ancient a reference). This week, we see her deal with missing art, a school crush, and the fall-out from mom’s misdemeanors. Next week?

Jenny (Olivia Hebert), Mariana (Stephanie Machado) in Laughs in Spanish at Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

The supporting cast all get to have spotlight moments too: the scene of Carolina and Juan in his car with siren and lights going works as contemporary comedy-romance; Jenny’s scene with Mariana lingers maybe a bit too long in the indirection of romantic buildup but is still sweet; and anyone’s scene with Estella upgrades the play’s humor. She’s a walking, talking comic melodrama.

Estella (Maggie Bofill) in Laughs in Spanish at Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

Brian Sidney Bembridge’s scenic design is a bright open space that also shows off Hartford Stage’s spinning stage, so that we get a welcome scene change—twice—in the midst of the action. The street-art on a wall has the requisite Miami feel, I assume, and the forest of trees is foreboding and funky at once. Harry Nadal’s costumes are colorfully varied, and there are lively dance/movement routines to the original music by Daniela Hart/UptownWorks. Throughout, Lisa Portes shows a sharp sense of how to have her cast play to an appreciative audience. Most laughs land and some even simmer.

Carolina (Maria Victoria Martínez), Juan (Luis Vega) in Laughs in Spanish at Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

Laughs in Spanish shows us a vividly turning wheel that presents each character functioning in more than one environment and in more than one capacity. The point of it all, ultimately, turns on which self each character is most comfortable as; or we might say, which identity is the most authentic. The strength of Scheer’s play is that it shows we are each authentically, truthfully, actually more than one thing. The best we can do is make our various selves align with those we care about most.

Mariana (Stephanie Machado), Estella (Maggie Bofill) in Laughs in Spanish at Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

Laughs in Spanish
By Alexis Scheer
Directed by Lisa Portes

Scenic Design: Brian Sidney Bembridge; Costume Design: Harry Nadal; Lighting Design: Sherrice Mojgani; Original Music & Sound Design: Daniela Hart/UptownWorks; Dialect & Voice Coach: Cynthia Santos DeCure; Production Stage Manager: Theresa Stark; Assistant Stage Manager: Christina M. Woolard; Associate Artistic Director: Zoë Golub-Sass; Director of Production: Bryan T. Holcombe; General Manager: Emily Van Scoy

Cast: Maggie Bofill, Olivia Hebert, Stephanie Machado, Maria Victoria Martínez, Luis Vega

Hartford Stage
March 6-30, 2025

Don't Blame the Mirror

Review of The Inspector, Yale Repertory Theatre

“Dying,” the apocryphal theater saying goes, “is easy; comedy is difficult.” Farce, we might say, is even trickier. Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector dates from 1836 and is one of the classic farces of the era, a play that skewers the pretentions of provincials and metropolitans, of liberals and conservatives alike. If it’s a given that the officials in an out-of-the-way Russian village will be hopelessly corrupt, naïve and inefficient, it’s also a given that any remedy from higher up will be just as ineffectual. In Gogol’s world, humanity is ultimately at its own mercy; witless, indulgent, perverse, false, sentimental, occasionally inspired, the best and worst of our collective species wars in each individual brain and breast.

Yura Kordonsky’s adaption, which he also directs, is now playing at Yale Repertory Theatre through March 29 and aims to be as broadly comic as possible. It’s a production not without its dark side, but the manifest effect is gleeful celebration of theater as contrived spectacle.

Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector, Yale Repertory Theatre, left to right: Whitney Andrews, Darius Sakui, Brandon E. Burton (kneeling), Annelise Lawson, Edoardo Benzoni, John Evans Reese, Malik James, Grayson Richmond; photo by Joan Marcus

The distraught Mayor (Brandon E. Burton) of a nameless village has received word that an inspector, traveling incognito, will be coming to town to spy upon the local officials, who, we see, are a dissolute pack of incorrigibles: The Director of Public Health (Whitney Andrews) runs a hospital where patients die or get well because “they would have anyway”; The Judge (Darius Sakui) proudly takes bribes as suitable to the dignity of his office; The School Superintendent (John Evans Reese) is far too timid to impose any order on his teachers and resents them for acting better educated; The Postmaster (Annelise Lawson) opens and reads all mail in hopes of finding romantic billets-doux; and The Doctor (Grayson Richmond) is German, speaks no Russian, and is therefore made an authority. Then there are the townsfolk in the form of two nearly Beckettian clowns called Bobchinsky (Edoardo Benzoni) and Dobchinsky (Malik James) who vie for the thrill of spreading gossip. Finally, the Mayor’s family: Anna (Elizabeth Stahlmann), a wife and mother who resents being left out of events and sees the maturation of her daughter, Marya (Chinna Palmer), as an affront and a revolt, whereas Marya while naïve is no longer a child.

Marya, the Mayor’s daughter (Chinna Palmer), Anna, the Mayor’s wife (Elizabeth Stahlmann) in Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector, Yale Repertory Theatre; photo by Joan Marcus

Word comes that a stranger with a servant is staying at a local inn and has let drop that he’s from St. Pete’s (aka, St. Petersburg). This unsuspecting visitor, Ivan Khlestakov (Samuel Douglas), with his man Osip (Nomè SiDone), is trapped in town because his gambling losses have left him without funds. The officials’ efforts to bribe him relentlessly and favor him with all manner of obsequious attentions suits him wonderfully, leading to romantic entanglements and other potentially consequential exposures.

Ivan Khlestakov (Samuel Douglas), Osip (Nomè SiDone) in Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector, Yale Repertory Theatre; photo by Joan Marcus

The cast—all graduates from or current students in the MFA acting program at the David Geffen School of Drama—attack the material with what might be called collective mania. At the heart of the show is Samuel Douglas’ Ivan, played as a whining, preening man-child wildly fluctuating between astonishing self-importance and trembling insecurity. His initial surprise at his fawning reception, signaled by a high-pitched laugh reminiscent of Tom Hulce’s Mozart in the film Amadeus (1984), eventually gives way to a smug superiority as he deigns to humor each official’s shameless courtship.

Marya, the Mayor’s daughter (Chinna Palmer), Ivan Khlestakov (Samuel Douglas) in Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector, Yale Repertory Theatre; photo by Joan Marcus

The scene where Ivan attempts to secure a mischievously animate boot demonstrates the incredible vigor of Douglas’ physical comedy. His Ivan is a whirlwind of energetic bursts and outrageous attempts to curry favor. He boasts of being friends with Pushkin (as was Gogol) and aims to let his playwright friend Nikolai know of his adventures so they can be put into a play. While one might wish for a somewhat more temperate manner in Ivan’s bewilderment during the long leadup to Intermission, the play’s second Act finds our hero a bit more knowing if not outright Machiavellian. His turn-on-a-dime seductions of both Anna and Marya make hay of the usual love-interests of romantic plays, and are enacted with great relish.

Anna, the Mayor’s wife (Elizabeth Stahlmann), Marya, the Mayor’s daughter (Chinna Palmer), Ivan Khlestakov (Samuel Douglas), The Mayor (Brandon E. Burton) in Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector, Yale Repertory Theatre; photo by Joan Marcus

Other standouts are: the comic timing of the entire cast, particularly during the reading of a revelatory letter late in the play; Elizabeth Stahlmann’s grandly unhappy Anna who imperiously questions random audience members from a window, fidgets erotically before Ivan, and treats her daughter as an evil double; Annelise Lawson’s neurotic Postmaster whose literal scream for attention is one to remember and whose dimness is her greatest charm; the bluster and fawning of Brandon E. Burton’s Mayor, a figure who, through all the mannerisms of caricature, manages to be a character and the author’s deliberate spokesman at one key point; Malik James’ Dobchinsky who is so flustered by his moment in the limelight when interrogated by Anna that he spends it crawling over surprised audience members; and Edoardo Benzoni’s Bobchinsky, a peasant soul grappling for a modern sense of self, whose great claim is that he “lives here!”

Piotr Ivanovich Dobchinsky (Malik James), Piotr Ivanovich Bobchinsky (Edoardo Benzoni) in Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector, Yale Repertory Theatre; photo by Joan Marcus

Also for special mention: Silin Chen’s majestically dilapidated set, with exposed brickwork, a windowed room that makes for intrigue, with a sash that serves for a balcony à la Romeo and Juliet, and a stage full of eternal snow that sticks to every costume and at different points becomes medicinal or celebratory; KT Farmer’s range of costumes from the believable to the fantastic (check out those vermin), with any article apt to become a prop when suitable; Masha Tsimring’s lighting plays with situations as though a visual “score”; Minjae Kim’s sound design gives the musical score its due and includes atmospheric sound effects; Arseniy Gusev’s musical compositions shine in the gripping dream sequence before intermission, and there’s even a Pushkin poem set to music and sung with artful artlessness by Chinna Palmer as Marya.

The cast of Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector, Yale Repertory Theatre; Marya (Chinna Palmer), center; photo by Joan Marcus

The sting of Gogol’s satire might seem a bit dulled by the relentless zaniness of Kordonsky’s approach, but the exuberance of the comic hijinks becomes its own rationale. If we’re never remotely in anything like a real place with real people, then we might realize that what we’re seeing is not so much Theater of the Absurd as absurd theater. While the first asks us to question everything that could give coherence to theater as a telling representation of real life, the second lets us know that such theatrical questioning is no answer.

The dark side surfaces in those eerie vermin who seem both humanoid and alien and eager to take over; in the faceless collective that threatens Ivan as his shadowy double (as the actual inspector might be), but can also stand for bureaucratic anonymity (or DOGE dodginess?); and in that final image of the swinging chandelier—ask not for whom the candles dim.

We might shape the play’s relation to the us of the US 2025 thus: if those in power are thorough idiots not to be trusted, what of the idiots who let such idiots run things?

The cast of Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector, Yale Repertory Theatre; photo by Joan Marcus

Nikolai Gogol’s
The Inspector
Newly adapted and directed by Yura Kordonsky

Scenic Designer: Silin Chen; Costume Designer: KT Farmer; Lighting Designer: Masha Tsimring; Sound Designer: Minjae Kim; Composer: Arseniy Gusev; Hair Designer: Matthew Armentrout; Production Dramaturgs: Sophia Carey, Georgia Petersen; Technical Director: Cian Jaspar Freeman; Fight and Intimacy Directors: Kelsey Rainwater, Michael Rossmy; Vocal Coach: Walton Wilson; Casting Director: Calleri Jensen Davis; Stage Manager: Adam Taylor Foster

Cast: Whitney Andrews, Edoardo Benzoni, Brandon E. Burton, Samuel Douglas, Malik James, Annelise Lawson, Chinna Palmer, John Evans Reese, Grayson Richmond, Darius Sakui, Nomè SiDone, Elizabeth Stahlmann

Yale Repertory Theatre
March 7-29, 2025

Living Hell

Review of The Christians, New Haven Theater Company

“I have a powerful urge to communicate, but I find the distance between us insurmountable.” That may be the most resonant line in Lucas Hnath’s The Christians, playing for one more weekend at New Haven Theater Company, March 6-8. The words suggest the huge gaps that have arisen between “different sides” in our republic—right, left; Republican, Democrat; conservative, liberal—and, as in the play, between different beliefs within, nominally, the same religion.

The play is a serious, non-satiric, non-sentimental treatment of crisis in a religious community, and, directed by Deena Nicol-Blifford, is given another satisfyingly professional production in New Haven Theater Company’s long career. Well-cast, well-paced, with a telling grasp of how well this play works in front of a small audience, NHTC’s The Christians might convert you to the joys of small, local theater. As in the storefront where Pastor Paul’s church began, everyone present is fully visible.

The audience is the congregation, to a certain extent. We aren’t given cues, but we do watch as these somewhat theatrical church people go through their contortions. They generally speak into microphones as if their every thought must be broadcast (or in fact is, as the man upstairs is always listening). There’s a stultifying lack of humor in these characters, and a tendency to speak as if their beliefs determine the fate of humanity.

Such attitudes might be played with a sharp irony, but Hnath’s play takes these folks at their word, giving us glimpses of what it’s like to walk with Jesus every step of one’s life. Nicol-Blifford’s very capable cast convince us of the stakes here, even if we might think that whether Pastor Paul (Marty Tucker) or Associate Pastor Joshua (Gavin Whelan) believe in Hell or not doesn’t actually affect its existence or non-existence. To be fair, for the pastors the question isn’t simply whether they believe in Hell or not, but whether or not they should be trying to convince others to believe in it or not.

The play begins, riskily, with a sermon. As Pastor Paul, Marty Tucker is so spot-on believable it’s a bit uncanny. He exudes the measured cadence of a man who makes his living by public speaking, with the lofty tone of a man thoroughly wrapped-up in his own ethos. His story about wooing his wife Elizabeth (Susan Kulp) when she was a stranger on a plane, sending her a note with the quotation above, is made to stand for his ability to surmount the “insurmountable.”

Pastor Paul may be forgiven for being fascinated by the fact that others find him fascinating: his congregation has grown from less than fifty to the tens of thousands. (We’re meant to be seeing the leader of a megachurch, and I’m sure big theater productions with bigger budgets might try to recreate all the razzamatazz of church-going as arena spectacle, but the much smaller scale here means we can appreciate all the more the subtlety of the script.) Pastor Paul opens his sermon telling us that the church has overcome the cost incurred by building its grand meeting hall, and now is free of debt.

The relief of being financially solvent perhaps inspires Pastor Paul to attempt a radical change in the church’s dogma, which in effect says that a person’s soul could be in heaven, even if that person, in life, had never professed belief in Jesus Christ. The blowback on this alternative, and ostensibly progressive, creed is immediate. Associate Pastor Joshua, played with suitably dogged intensity by Gavin Whelan, takes exception, trying to quote the Bible to his purpose, but is nimbly rebuffed by Pastor Paul; Jenny (Margaret Mann), a seemingly meek and appreciative congregant, steps up to the mic with a testimonial that questions Pastor Paul’s good faith in changing course only after his congregation had sacrificed and scrimped to pay for his grand hall; Elder Jay (J. Kevin Smith), mostly supportive in private conversations with Paul, seemingly withdraws his backing when the church loses significantly more congregants than the initial fifty that had backed Joshua, now leading them as his followers.

Elizabeth (Susan Kulp), Paster Paul (Marty Tucker) in The Christians, New Haven Theater Company

In all this, The Christians stays within the bounds of religious practice and religious freedom. Few if any religions haven’t had schisms, heretics, and clashing doctrines even if not always spinning off into new faiths. We’re treated to a glimpse at how communities form and splinter, especially when it’s a matter of this charismatic leader or that. But Hnath’s play moves as well into more intimate realms. Late in the play we see Pastor Paul in conversation with his wife Elizabeth. The tension here comes from the pastor following only his own lead, keeping his wife uninformed of his intentions. What’s more, as Elizabeth presents her view, in Susan Kulp’s carefully modulated tones, we learn that she sides with Joshua on the question of Hell, and feels that her women’s Bible-study group might be a forum for her to express her dissatisfactions with her husband’s teachings.

In the end we see that, though the play concentrates on the problems that arise when a pastor veers from agreed-upon church doctrine into his own soul-searching agenda, The Christians isn’t only about religious belief or faith. Hnath’s text gestures toward the beliefs we profess but don’t really hold, the beliefs we change but conceal from others, the beliefs we use to denigrate those with other beliefs, and how hard it is to talk meaningfully about something that always, it seems, amounts to “a feeling.”

What’s bracing about the play is its sense that an inability to communicate is not insurmountable. Everyone in the play gets to state their views. The downside is that the firmer they are in their beliefs, the more the distance between their beliefs grows.

Insurmountable? As any good pastor might say, “let us pray.”

The Christians
By Lucas Hnath
Directed by Deena Nicol-Blifford

Co-Producers: Deena Nicol-Blifford and J. Kevin Smith; Stage Manager: Abby Klein; Set and Sound Design: Deena Nicol-Blifford; Lighting Design: Michael Abbatiello

Cast: Susan Kulp, Margaret Mann, J. Kevin Smith, Marty Tucker, Gavin Whelan

New Haven Theater Company
February 27 & 28; March 1, 6, 7, 8, 2025

Tend Your Own Garden

Review of Native Gardens, Westport Country Playhouse

At the conclusion of Voltaire’s satirical narrative Candide, the protagonist reflects that the only way to find happiness in this volatile and uncertain world is “to tend one’s own garden.” Karen Zacarías’ bright situation comedy, Native Gardens, playing at Westport Country Playhouse through March 8, directed by Joann M. Hunter, suggests—comically—that tending a garden may come with its own stress and political tensions.

Frank Butley (Adam Heller), Virginia Butley (Paula Leggett Chase), Tania Del Valle (Linedy Genao), Pablo Del Valle (Anthony Michael Martinez) in Native Gardens, Westport Country Playhouse; photo by Carol Rosegg

Anna Louizos’ sumptuous set confronts us with two different backyards, situated in an upscale neighborhood in Washington DC. On our right, a well-appointed brick house with a stone porch on the back and a very well-tended garden full of bright blooms; on our left, a less maintained house, with siding, overhung by the leaves and branches of a large tree, and a yard with a simple table and chairs near an ivied fence. On the right live the Butleys, Virginia (Paula Leggett Chase) and Frank (Adam Heller), gray-haired, affable, Republican; Frank tends his garden assiduously, desperate to do better than Honorable Mention in the yearly neighborhood competition. On the left, live Tania Del Valle (Linedy Genao), a pregnant doctoral student, and her husband Pablo (Anthony Michael Martinez), a Chilean immigrant eager to make partner at the law firm where he works. They are the new owners of this fixer-upper, and we learn that Tania is very committed to using only indigenous plants in her gardening as she looks askance at Frank’s fussy, imported flowers and shrubs.

Even if the clash here were only about the do’s and don’ts of horticulture, the confrontation between these two couples would likely spin through a number of push-button topics designed to demonstrate the perils of neighborliness in ideologically fraught times. Early on, the talk establishes that Tania’s “people” have been on the North American continent for ages, that she is from New Mexico, not Mexico, and that Pablo hails from a world of chauffeur-driven limos and private schools. Frank and Tania seem to bond on the importance of gardening, even if their ideal gardens are very different; Virginia attempts to find common cause with Pablo by asserting that being a woman in a male preserve such as engineering—her field—is comparable to being a non-white man trying to climb the ladder today.

Pablo Del Valle (Anthony Michael Martinez), Frank Butley (Adam Heller), Tania Del Valle (Linedy Genao) in Native Gardens, Westport Country Playhouse; photo by Carol Rosegg

Zacarías’s dialogue lets each character get across an individual perspective but without drawing major fault lines. Everyone is trying to be likeable. The real disruption occurs not for reasons of taste, or background or even political affiliation. When the Del Valles decide the chain-link fence must go, to be replaced by a wooden one that the Butleys welcome, a glance at the map of their plot indicates that their property line actually extends about two feet into Frank’s garden. Now, it’s time to bring in the rhetorical big guns—about land-grabs, borders, and squatter’s rights, about time-honored stewardship, the rule of law, and old privilege vs. new ambition.

Zacarías works in just enough issues-talk to indicate how our larger cultural surround inflects even our most trivial occupations, and Joann M. Hunter’s direction keeps everything on an even keel, so that we are intrigued more than confronted by the situation. Mention should be made too of how well the silent “workers” are played by Horacio “Joe” Cardozo and Brianna Parkin, whose very presence shows how necessary an underclass is to any upper-class assertions.

Pablo Del Valle (Anthony Michael Martinez), Frank Butley (Adam Heller) in Native Gardens, Westport Country Playhouse; photo by Carol Rosegg

All the drama plays out with notable give-and-take—as for instance, the escalating late-night fracas between Frank and Pablo that is not without a certain self-consciousness, or the “women make nice better than men” assumptions that goad Virginia and Tania into a talk that goes delightfully off the rails. Throughout, there is a fairly nuanced sense of how these two contemporary households differ, and, most usefully, how the perspective of being near retirement vs. up-and-coming plays into the situation.

The problem, which gets uglier and less resolvable as it goes on, receives a dramatic turn that could be called “bambina ex machina.” The epilogue might seem corny in its “can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” cheer, but Zacarías seems to assume that, if we can suffer being ribbed for our eagerness to assert our distinct identities and preferences and assumptions, we can also be ribbed for our hope for happy endings. The script is resolutely fun, but rarely really funny.

Tania Del Valle (Linedy Genao), Frank Butley (Adam Heller), Virginia Butley (Paula Leggett Chase) in Native Gardens, Westport Country Playhouse; photo by Carol Rosegg

The cast acquit themselves well, all very believable in their roles, bringing enough particularity to seem individuals rather than types. As Pablo, Anthony Michael Martinez doesn’t seem yet the slick lawyer we might expect him to become, and his effort at domestic tranquility requires much input from his wife. He seems to spend most of his time flustered. Linedy Genao’s Tania has a freshness and youth that might make us think she’ll be docile and meek, but guess again; when she cusses out Virginia in Spanish we have a glimpse of how risky it is to cross her. As Frank, Adam Heller seems a truly likeable guy’s guy, the type that inhabited many a sitcom where a family is presided over by a sometimes wise, sometimes silly successful white male (early on, Tania quips that the Del Salles are “living next-door to the Dick Van Dyke Show”); he does go on a bit too much about his damn garden contest, but that just shows he’s used to getting his way. The star of the show is Paula Leggett Chase’s Virginia, full of arch mannerisms and meaningful silences and comic timing; we see how much having an argument with these newcomers gets her juices flowing and we imagine Virginia hasn’t been this turned-on in years.

Frank Butley (Adam Heller), Virginia Butley (Paula Leggett Chase) in Native Gardens, Westport Country Playhouse; photo by Carol Rosegg

The set, costumes, lighting, incidental music between scenes are all superb—and all serve well the expectation that theater show us a reasonable facsimile of our lives and times. Playing in Westport, we might find we do indeed recognize these characters and, with the world as dictated by Washington DC becoming daily a more alarming concern, we might find a trip back to the relative stabilities of the late twenty-teens reassuring. As Tania allows at one point, their neighbors, though Republicans, “are people too.”

Native Gardens
By Karen Zacarías
Directed by Joann M. Hunter

Set Designer: Anna Louizos; Costume Designer: David C. Woolard; Lighting Designer: Charlie Morrison; Sound Designer: John Gromada; Prop Supervisor: Anna Dorodnykh; Production Stage Manager: Abigail Zaccari; Assistant Stage Manager: Willy Kinch; Production Assistant: Mariana Jennings

Cast: Paula Leggett Chase, Linedy Genao, Adam Heller, Anthony Michael Martinez

Westport Country Playhouse
February 18-March 8, 2025

Indelible Dialogue in a Diner

Review of Two Trains Running, Hartford Stage

A diner in a failing section of Pittsburgh in 1969. The Hill District was a Black neighborhood where a local community once self-sufficient and set apart has undergone a series of hard changes due to unemployment and the “redevelopment” which destroyed the neighborhood and the storied roots of many people, not least the playwright August Wilson. Wilson’s Two Trains Running, of all his plays set in his birthplace, is particularly aware of its moment. 1969 is a point at which, for some of his characters, what once was is still real while the notable changes for the worse have become irrevocable.

Wilson not only trusts his characters to have sufficient depth to touch on the themes that matter to him, he’s also able to let action become a background to how these characters talk out their reactions, their hopes, their fears, and their grudges. While there is a strong literary command here, one would be hard-pressed to turn any character into a symbol or a stand-in for a particular ideology. Wilson’s characters always speak their individual truths, eventually, and being present while that happens is a major incentive to attend his plays.

Two Trains Running is one of the most rewarding and deeply observed plays in the canon of works by this towering American playwright. Hartford Stage’s production, playing through February 16, is not to be missed.

Memphis (Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr.) in August Wilson’s Two Trains Running, Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

At the center of the story is Memphis (Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr.), a diner owner who originated in Alabama and plans to return to property there, someday. He’s still got the deed, he insists. Key to his current situation is whether to sell out, now that the neighborhood barely sustains his business and, if so, for how much. His pride in his past accomplishments and in his once central place in the local community sustains him as hard times come on. His diner is still a gathering place, but the regulars are not exactly boon costumers.

Foreground: Holloway (Jerome Preston Bates); background: Memphis (Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr.), Sterling (Rafael Jordan) in August Wilson’s Two Trains Running, Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

Chief among them is Holloway (Jerome Preston Bates), the main source of local history and the one best able to articulate the grievances of the area; Wolf (Postell Pringle) is younger, a hip numbers runner who flits in and out to drum up business and to take messages on Memphis’s pay phone, much to the proprietor’s annoyance; a newcomer is Sterling (Rafael Jordan), recently released from the penitentiary and desperate for work and for any kind of welcome to give him a sense of belonging. They are joined at random moments by: Hambone (David Jennings), a character afflicted by mental troubles who carries a long-standing grievance against a white employer for the unsettled payment of a ham for work done; and West (Jeorge Bennett Watson), the only well-to-do local Black businessman because, as an undertaker, he is never without work. Finally, there’s Holloway’s only worker, the harried and patient Risa (Taji Senior) whose presence strategically offsets the men’s club ambience at the diner. She bears self-inflicted scars on her legs that suggest a backstory the others aren’t quite willing to face.

The excellent cast renders these characters in all their verbal glory. The Hartford Stage playing space in Lawrence E. Moten III’s realistic design gives ample area for director Gilbert MacCauley’s subtle choreography of action that lets us follow interplay that happens both before our eyes and in our ability to follow a speaker’s manner and particular logic. The way these characters talk to each other is the marrow of this play, and it’s a memorable experience to hear Wilson’s dialogue given its full dimensions. Lighting (Xavier Pierce) and Costumes (Devario D. Simmons) provide visual cues that give extra weight to the personalities on display.

Memphis (Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr.), Wolf (Postell Pringle) in August Wilson’s Two Trains Running, Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

As Memphis, Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr., has the necessary presence, showing us a man both genial and anxious, able to muse aloud and to denounce the failings he sees in others, while demanding his due. Whether or not his grasp of reality is as unflinching as he thinks it is becomes a plot point when it comes to his evaluation of the diner. His crony, Halloway, a fixture at the diner, is a captivatingly mercurial figure in Jerome Preston Bates’ rendering; his intonations are like a jazz player, riffing on repetitions like Halloway’s recurring praise of Aunt Ester, a legendary figure of the neighborhood known for her wisdom and clairvoyant insight. Postell Pringle’s Wolf is pitch perfect in his facial reactions—like his ability to stare daggers—his vocal sallies, and his general demeanor: the way he looks through the glass door, up and down, before he puts a foot out tells us a lot about the kind of hustle he’s on.

Sterling (Rafael Jordan) in August Wilson’s Two Trains Running, Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

As the two younger characters who might form a couple, Sterling and Risa seem perhaps the more formulaic aspects of the play, and yet Wilson has a way of making them both very individual and surprising. As Sterling, Rafael Jordan is earnest and dogged, getting on others’ nerves at times, and yet trying to find some way to please; he’s also a loose cannon because the others don’t know exactly what all he might get up to doing. His preening insistence that Risa will marry him once his number comes in provides the play with some romantic comedy elements, and the interplay between Risa and Sterling finds touching use of Gregory Robinson’s original music. Taji Senior gives Risa a mixture of skepticism and sympathy toward the others that makes her at times a stand-in for the audience, trying to assess which of these very voluble men, all assertive and bossy with at least a pretense of charm, is most worth our trouble.

Risa (Taji Senior) in August Wilson’s Two Trains Running, Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

The main figure of sympathy is Hambone, who seems to live on handouts and disability payments while reciting his credo: “He gonna give me my ham.” David Jennings quite simply owns this role, his performance is forceful, funny, dramatic and fully engaged. As West, the least sympathetic if only because the most well-off, Jeorge Bennett Watson has the dignity of a professional and a long-tested patience that could make him our stand-in as well. His gentle hat-roll late in the play shows that even an undertaker can be playful.

Memphis (Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr.), Hambone (David Jennings) in August Wilson’s Two Trains Running, Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

August Wilson, who was born in 1945 and died in 2005, wrote a play for each decade of the twentieth century, each of them packed with characters who have compelling realism and archetypal power. This play has long seemed to me one of the more enduring, if only because the 1960s have played such an major part in influencing American culture through the end of the twentieth century. Two Trains Running manages to dramatize cultural forces of the time while avoiding some of the more obvious clichés of the period. It is a treasure of a play, full of history, grievance and hope, and brought to indelible life at Hartford Stage.

Foreground: Risa (Taji Senior), West (Jeorge Bennett Watson); background: Sterling (Rafael Jordan) in August Wilson’s Two Trains Running, Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

August Wilson’s
Two Trains Running
Directed by Gilbert McCauley

Scenic Design: Lawrence E. Moten III; Costume Design: Devario D. Simmons; Lighting Design: Xavier Pierce; Original Music & Sound Design: Gregory Robinson; Wig, Hair & Makeup Design: J. Jared Jonas; Intimacy Coordinator: Kelsey Rainwater; Vocal Coach: Cynthia Santos DeCure; Casting: Alaine Alldaffer & Lisa Donadio; Production Stage Manager: lark hackshaw; Assistant Stage Manager : Adalhia Ivette Hart; Associate Artistic Director: Zoë Golub-Sass; Director of Production: Bryan T. Holcombe; General Manager: Emily Van Scoy

Cast: Jerome Preston Bates, David Jennings, Rafael Jordan, Postell Pringle, Taji Senior, Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr., Jeorge Bennett Watson

Hartford Stage
January 23-February 16, 2025

Trouble in Paradise

Review of Eden, Yale Repertory Theatre

Set in the area of New York City called San Juan Hill in 1927, Steve Carter’s Eden draws us into the tensions between two neighboring families, tensions that stem from class and racial distinctions in the Black community. The main thematic concern of Carter’s play is how divisive cultural conceptions can undermine racial solidarity. It's a worthwhile historical lesson since, for those who didn’t spend much or any time in the twentieth century, the lack of specific ethnic or national identifications in blanket terms like “white” and “black” and “POC” lends itself to an unnuanced view of such identities. Carter’s lively, incisive, well written and engaging play, directed with superlative pacing by Brandon J. Dirden at the Yale Repertory Theatre through February 8, takes us back into U.S. history with the kind of command of period and personality that we find in peers like Arthur Miller and August Wilson.

Nimrod (Juice Mackins), Solomon (Prentiss Patrick-Carter), Agnes (Alicia Pilgrim), Annetta (Lauren F. Walker) in Eden, Yale Repertory Theatre; photo by Joan Marcus

As Miller and Wilson often do, Carter sets his play in a very specific time and place and focuses on a particular family. The Bartons consist of a father, Joseph (Russell G. Jones), and a mother Florie (Christina Acosta Robinson), who are West Indian, with two daughters, Agnes (Alicia Pilgrim) and Annetta (Lauren F. Walker), born there as well, and two sons, Nimrod (Juice Mackins) and Solomon (Prentiss Patrick-Carter), who were born in New York. The immediate contrast, played for laughs by the young boys, is the difference between the way the former islanders speak and the way the local Black youths (at the time designated “Negroes”) speak. It’s a cultural difference the young people can view as significant or not, but in their home their father is adamant that his children will not mix with “these people.” American Blacks, in his view, are inferior to Blacks from the Indies.

Annetta Barton (Lauren F. Walker), Eustace Baylor (Chaundra Hall-Broomfield in Eden, Yale Repertory Theatre; photo by Joan Marcus

Of course this culturally exclusive prejudice will be tested by the familiar “melting-pot” conditions of life in New York City, for the boys, and by the thorny issue of who gets to decide whom marriageable daughter Annetta, eighteen, will marry. Joseph Barton favors Mr. Wallace, a bachelor friend and successful store-keeper, old enough to be Annetta’s father but “pure” in his bloodline; Annetta, in the course of the play, falls for Eustace Baylor (Chaundra Hall-Broomfield), a young man who comes from the U.S. south and is living across the hall with his aunt Lizzie Harris (Heather Alicia Simms).

Carter deftly constructs scenes that illuminate this world and, while the plot developments are hardly surprising, real drama comes from getting to know these characters, and seeing how they come better to know themselves and each other.

Florie Barton (Christina Acosta Robinson), Joseph Barton (Russell G. Jones) in Eden, Yale Repertory Theatre; photo by Joan Marcus

There are wonderful, fully involving performances throughout. Christina Acosta Robinson is superb as Florie Barton; seemingly a self-effacing wife and mother, she comes on strong near the end of Act I and completely alters the family dynamic in Act II. Robinson plays her as a woman awakened to her own missed potential by witnessing her husband’s brutal mistreatment of Annetta. Russell G. Jones conveys what Joseph imagines to be tough love and high standards with a patriarchal superiority he deems unquestionable. More than a little tyrannical, he fears the scrappy street ethos of the U.S. will undermine his values, and of course he’s right, but how that plays out is key to the drama Carter finds in questions of social mobility and constructions of racial identity.

Joseph Barton (Russell G. Jones), Annetta Barton (Lauren F. Walker), Florie Barton (Christina Acosta Robinson), Eustace Baylor (Chaundra Hall-Broomfield) in Eden, Yale Repertory Theatre; photo by Joan Marcus

As the young couple yearning to breathe free, as it were, Lauren F. Walker’s Annetta presents the mix of innocence and knowing charm that easily stirs Eustace, played by Chaundra Hall-Broomfield with the kind of heartening self-confidence and easy manner we expect will carry the day. The scenes of confrontation with Mr. Barton have a grim inevitability since neither man can admit the other’s view.

As Aunt Lizzie, Heather Alicia Simms brings a further dimension to the story as a woman much more experienced in how immediate and provisional love can be, but also how life-altering. A conversation in Act II between Lizzie and Florie goes a long way in undermining Mr. Barton’s sense that there should be significant difference between the women due to birth and circumstances. They align in a wish to see the couple succeed.

Florie Barton (Christina Acosta Robinson), Lizzie Harris (Heather Alicia Simms) in Eden, Yale Repertory Theatre; photo by Joan Marcus

Ultimately, this cannot be a “happily ever after” story because the faultlines are too clearly marked. The difficulties of living with the hand one was dealt go beyond the bounds of this story for each character. Carter has the skill to conjure the relations that are meaningful for each character, letting us see how all are affected by such conflicts.

The scenic design by George Zhou, costumes by Caroline Tyson, lighting by Ankit Pandey all contribute significantly to the play’s strong naturalistic affect, creating spaces—including an impressive rooftop set—that feel fully inhabited. Aided by Ein Kim’s poetic projections and Tojo Rasedoara’s sound design and original music, the production is a triumph of subtle tech touches.

Eden’s title refers to Joseph Barton’s sense that the promised land, ultimately, is Africa, the land of his origins, following the views of his hero Marcus Garvey whose photo is prominently displayed in the home. Carter’s play shows how the realities of place have a way of taking precedence over ideological considerations, providing a view of how history is often shaped by unexpected affinities and differences.

Joseph Barton (Russell G. Jones), Solomon Barton (Prentiss Patrick-Carter), Nimrod Barton (Juice Mackins) in Eden, Yale Repertory Theatre; photo by Joan Marcus

Eden
By Steve Carter
Directed by Brandon J. Dirden

Scenic Designer: George Zhou; Costume Designer: Caroline Tyson; Lighting Designer: Ankit Pandey; Sound Design and Original Music: Tojo Rasedoara; Projection Designer: Ein Kim; Hair and Wig Designers: Krystal Balleza and Will Vicari; Production Dramaturgs: Austin Riffelmacher, Tia Smith; Technical Director: Nickie Dubick; Fight and Intimacy Director: Michael Rossmy; Vocal and Dialect Coach: Paul Pryce; Casting Director: Calleri Jensen Davis; Stage Manager: Hope Binfeng Ding

Cast: Chaundre Hall-Broomfield, Russell G. Jones, Juice Mackins, Prentiss Patrick-Carter, Alicia Pilgrim, Christina Acosta Robinson, Heather Alicia Simms, Lauren F. Walker

Yale Repertory Theatre
January 16-February 8, 2025

A Wild Goose Chase

Review of A Sherlock Carol, Westport Country Playhouse

Watching A Sherlock Carol at Westport Country Playhouse, written and directed by Mark Shanahan, you might find yourself thinking: how is it no one ever thought of doing this before? To combine two of the most venerable figures of Victorian literature—Sherlock Holmes and Ebenezer Scrooge—into a single story? Deerstalkers off and boughs of holly raised to Shanahan for coming up with this corker of an idea and bringing it to amusing life on the Westport Country Playhouse stage for eight pre-Christmas performances, December 17-22.

Dan Domingues, Isabel Keating, Joe Delafield, Sharone Sayegh in A Sherlock Carol, Westport Country Playhouse; photo by T. Charles Erickson

The story draws heavily on the familiar plot of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, in which Scrooge, a fractious miser, meets with three Spirits of Christmas and undergoes a spiritual transformation—from malevolent to benevolent. Shanahan’s A Sherlock Carol makes Holmes, the famous sleuth, undergo a similar series of events. While that might make for enough of a parallel, as we watch the generally detached and unmoved Holmes become more accessible to his emotions and the spirit of the season, there’s another plot point that’s a bit more surprising.

Holmes, in depression, has withdrawn from his old friend and chronicler Dr. Watson, and sees no point continuing his investigative adventures now that his arch-nemesis Moriarity is dead (“which must be clearly understood”). Who should try to lure him back into the field but Dr. Timothy Cratchit, a now fully grown “Tiny Tim.” And the mystery to be solved: What caused the death of good old Scrooge?

So, a mystery for Christmas, and a story arc moving toward good cheer through the chillier aspects of the season. While we might think Scrooge deserves to be mourned, we can also expect that—in the fashion of Marley’s Ghost—he’s bound to pop in sooner or later.

Sherlock Holmes (Drew McVety), Ebenezer Scrooge (Byron St. Cyr) in A Sherlock Carol, Westport Country Playhouse; photo by T. Charles Erickson

What best abets this swiftly moving and theatrically resourceful tale is the cast Shanahan has assembled to flesh out this ensemble of characters: Holmes (Drew McVety); Scrooge (Byron St. Cyr); Tim Cratchit (Dan Domingues); Scrooge’s housekeeper Mrs. Dilber (Joe Delafield); Dr. Watson (Delafield again); Holmes’ one-time flame Irene Adler (Isabel Keating), now a widowed countess; Emma Wiggins (Sharone Sayegh); various Fezziwigs (Keating, Domingues); Old Joe the notions dealer (Delafield again), and the erstwhile Inspector Lestrade (Sayegh again). Viewers who attended Westport’s irrepressible staging of The 39 Steps in the fall will recall Joe Delafield as our harried hero Mr. Hannay and Sharone Sayegh as a series of damsels he encountered. Here, their skill at quick-change characters is invigorating, with either apt to steal any scene they’re in.

Dan Domingues creates what is probably the most sympathetic character in Tim Cratchit, and Isabel Keating’s Countess belts out “The Twelve Days of Christmas” (which, we learn, was old Scrooge’s favorite carol). Byron St. Cyr’s Scrooge is a jolly old soul, often speaking in lines from the lessons the Spirits taught him once upon a Christmas eve. As Holmes, Drew McVety can reel off deductions and observations with the impatience of a genius irked that what is obvious to him is a mystery to others. His final recounting of what happened to Scrooge is a bit reminiscent of the two solutions in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express: one improbable, the other likely.

Shanahan has created the kind of script where anything anyone says may be an important detail in the mystery or a riff on some aspect of a Holmes story—particularly “The Mystery of the Blue Carbuncle”—or Dickens’ Scrooge story, so the ball just keeps bouncing along. And does indeed become something of “a wild goose chase.”

Irene Adler (Isabel Keating), Sherlock Holmes (Drew McVety) in A Sherlock Carol, Westport Country Playhouse; photo by T. Charles Erickson

The play is a good opportunity to create curiosity in youngsters about these unforgettable characters as originally presented. The staging stimulates with an awareness of how theater can transform space, time and persons in an eyeblink, bringing alive a wealth of detail with nimble wit and a knowing collusion with the audience. Costumes by Linda Cho have the requisite Dickensian look and James J. Fenton’s scenic design is mostly open stage graced by a range of interesting and imaginative props. And for the dialogue, accents abound.

With the first two shows of Westport Country Playhouse’s “season of laughter,” Shanahan has directed plays that depend on the actors’ awareness of the audience, which—for A Sherlock Carol—requires and repays a certain kindly Christmas presence. Hardly “elementary,” it’s a good deal of intricate fun.

Ebenezer Scrooge (Byron St. Cyr) in A Sherlock Carol, Westport Country Playhouse; photo by T. Charles Erickson

A Sherlock Carol
Written and Directed by Mark Shanahan

Scenic Designer: James J. Fenton; Costume Designer: Linda Cho; Lighting Designer: Alyssandra Docherty; Music & Sound Designer: John Gromada; Fight Choreography: Seth Andrew Bridges; Assistant Director: Anissa Felix; Production Stage Manager: Becky Fleming; Assistant Stage Manager: Amadi Cary

Cast: Joe Delafield, Dan Domingues, Isabel Keating, Drew McVety, Sharone Sayegh, Bryon St. Cyr

Westport Country Playhouse
December 17-22, 2024

Performance schedule is Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday at 7 p.m.; Friday and Saturday at 2 and 7 p.m.; and Sunday at 2 p.m. The play is recommended for age 7and up. Running time is 108 minutes, including one 15-minute intermission.

Pre- and post-show offerings include Together at the Table, on Wednesday, December 18, at 5:30 p.m., offering a pizza dinner to families or groups with student-age children; and Pride Night, on Thursday, December 19, at 6 p.m., featuring a cocktail party for the LGBTQ+ community and friends, with a limited open bar from Trevi Lounge and appetizers from Walrus Alley.

During the run of “A Sherlock Carol,” the Playhouse will be giving back to the community, benefiting individuals and families served by the Domestic Violence Crisis Center, Norwalk Toys for Tots, and Homes with Hope. Donations may be dropped off in the collection boxes located in the Playhouse lobby during box office hours, Tues. through Fri., 12 to 5 p.m.

For Jim Cory (September 1953-October 2024)

Sometime in August a book was delivered at my driveway door: Jim Cory’s Why is That Goddamned Radio On?, a collection of essays and stories. I was pleased to see that three of Cory’s essays which New Haven Review had published, on which I’d been editor, are included: “So What Do You Think About Concrete?” (Issue 18, 2016), “Are Birds Spies?” (Issue 20, 2017), and “Waiting for Janis” (“What Was She Like,” Issue 24, Spring 2020). Three other essays in the book, “Where’s the Hot Boy Going Tonight?,” published in Chelsea Station, June 2018, “Who’s Vladimir Horowitz?,” published in Chelsea Station, August 2019, and “Wild Children, Screaming Mommy,” unpublished until now, I’d read in manuscript. In fact, I wanted to publish “Who’s Vladimir Horowitz?” in the Review but the essay was already committed. We got “Fascinating Asshole: How I Learned to Love Frank Sinatra” instead (Issue 22, 2018), which didn’t make the book.

After finishing some reading I was doing for a project, I settled in as summer turned to fall, getting through the nine essays fairly quickly, enjoying an in-depth reacquaintance with Cory’s lively prose. I dawdled through the four stories, distracted by other reading and the start of the theater season and Halloween and house-guests. When I finished the last story, “An Ideal Couple,” which made a strong impression on me, it was already early November. I thought it was time to review the book or at least to send Jim, who I’ve known since the 1979-83 period when I lived in Philadelphia and we’d both frequented some of the same outlets for poetry readings and worked in succession on a newsletter called “Poetry News,” a response. After a few emails in August about my receiving the book, I hadn’t heard from him since a brief postcard in early September. I went onto his facebook page to see if I’d missed any updates and there found a few posts in sorrow at his recent death, which I learned had taken place on October 12. That and other pertinent information is contained in an appreciative obituary, here, written by Gary Miles for the Philadelphia Inquirer, where Jim reviewed books for many years.

I’d known that Jim’s health had been greatly compromised by a battle with cancer in the fall of 2023, an account of which he intended to shape into a memoir-essay called “Anus Horribilis” (some of which is published online here). And yet the presence of the book in my mail had seemed to indicate he was sailing full-speed ahead, so I hadn’t given much thought to a lack of social media presence (as getting things done often requires a sabbatical from online distractions).

I was distressed by the news of his death, made worse by a sense of profound failure: I hadn’t given Jim a timely response to his collection. Not that hearing from me would have made any great difference, but, while reading, I was thinking of things I might say, little realizing I had already missed my chance to address any further words to him. A sadly lost opportunity, and even more depressing is the realization that I would never again have a response from him about anything I might write. That familiar phrase, “the rest is silence,” is so devastating in this case because Jim Cory was a writer, reader, critic, poet, talker with a natural, witty, and direct approach to the world and to a vast wealth of knowledge he contained seemingly effortlessly. I could only mourn the loss, even as I thought of the mischievous grin he’d wear as I rebuked him for having the gall to die without mentioning it.

Staggered by the way our own lives can make us oblivious to contemporaneous events, I looked at my Google calendar to see what had occupied me back on October 12, a Saturday. I saw that I’d attended a Drag Extravaganza for Heartbeat Opera near Washington Square in NYC on the eleventh, and, knowing that Jim had been an activist for LGBTQ rights and a devotee of classical music, I felt he would’ve approved. Not only that, I reflected that Jim, as the first out, gay friend I ever had, had an effect on my understanding of same-sex relations, so that my presence at the drag event might owe something to his pervasive influence in the first place. On Saturday, the date of his passing, I had worked on poems for a special project in a book arts class my wife was working on and it struck me that Jim, whose early poems my wife and I had published as Crossing the Street in the Rain (1982), the second chapbook created by Gypsy Press in Philadelphia, was implicated in my own verse-writing in ways I might not consciously recognize; I know that while working on the project I thought Jim would be interested and I wanted to show him the finished product.

The next day, the thirteenth, was a beautiful day in New Haven, with crisp air and generous sun, and happened to be my deceased dad’s birthday (he would’ve been 97, and I can gratefully cite Jim’s enthusiastic praise for a painting I’d done in 2020 from a photobooth picture of my Dad taken in 1949). My wife and I were in New Haven to visit Hull’s art store for the aforementioned book project and had an extended lunch at House of Naan, and I thought that Jim might smile to think that “Don and Mary”—whom he had welcomed into his home on several occasions in our Philly days for big bowls of spaghetti, cheap red wine, and plenteous gossip and opinion and chat—were still out and about, together after all these years.

So long, Jim, and thanks for everything. You are missed.

Jim Cory, Philadelphia, March 1985

On Why is That Goddamned Radio On?, Radiator Press, 2024, 266 pages

The three essays I worked on each showed me a side to my friend that I was fascinated to learn about and which engaged me in the way that the best personal essays can. In my time editing for New Haven Review and as a tutor of youthful writers, I generally stand on one truism: if I like the voice, I’ll follow it anywhere. Topic, subject matter, personal proclivities, background, tastes—all are much less important than the tone. It’s not what’s told, it’s how it’s told that matters to me. And Jim Cory’s voice on the page is engaging, direct, full of a certain knowingness about himself and about how people are that comes from a lifetime of reading and observation. He’s great company.

“Where’s the Hot Boy Going Tonight?” kicks things off with a return to origins. Cory eulogizes in his familiarly ornery, love-hate way a dive-bar on Spruce Street in Philadelphia called Roscoe’s, frequented by gays who want to drink cheap, maybe get picked up, and at least bitch in freedom about whatever is bitchable, which is just about anything. Cory’s taste for the place is knowing and, since he was just starting out, impressionable. As he says at one point: “My status as a suburban interloper is evident to all but me. I look, sound and act like Bryn Mawr or Radnor. And green? There must be a particular shade of it that equates to my naivete then. Fern, perhaps?” He elaborates the self-portrait, c. age 21, and charms me with a glimpse of the proto-Cory: “At the time, my utter lack of life experience bequeathed to me an intellectual vanity stunning in its arrogance and vacuity. Was that little half-in-the-bag poseur babbling about Céline or Hart Crane or Henry James really moi?”

The first time I met Jim Cory he had just delivered a talk on Hart Crane for the Active Poets Theater, which met Sundays in the Painted Bride Art Center on South Street. I remember him pacing about, occasionally stuffing a fist into a pocket and jiggling change, and I was entranced by his way of reciting/reading Crane’s verse as though he—Jim—loved each word and now was letting us in on his own ecstasy. The above reference in the essay made me long for more on how that “poseur” became the unique individual I’d met when he was barely twenty-six and I newly twenty. What’s more, the lines recalled to me how caustic and gleeful Jim could be toward “stunning vanity, arrogance and vacuity” in others. I realize that his puncturing of such bubbles came from a good deal of self-knowledge about his own pretensions, and the long slog of shedding them.

But the essay’s brief look at proto-Cory doesn’t set up a retrospective on the author, rather that naivete is exampled by young Cory’s ignorance of who Sarah Vaughn is. The first person of that name he encounters is a drag queen at Roscoe’s. The world of drag queens in the gay community is glimpsed tellingly, but stories about Roscoe’s Sarah are a lead-in to Cory’s eventual amazement, very precisely rendered, at performances by the real Sarah Vaughn. The confluence of the two Sarahs is unique to the author’s perspective and that little irony is what drives the essay. Cory goes so far as trying to imagine the real Sarah (aka, “The Divine One”) meeting the drag Sarah—where else?—at Roscoe’s. The essay’s treatment of the drag Sarah Vaughn implies, we might say, the essay “What Makes a Queen a Queen?”, first published in Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide in 2017 and included here. There, Cory enumerates various kinds of queens, and this aside gives a sense of his sociology—which is more in the nature of a fan than an academic:

I’ve always thought the idea of Queer Studies earnest to the point of tedium.
Why not Queen Studies? […]
Queen can evoke whole ontologies. It’s specific, but almost infinitely malleable.
Attach it to a trait, to sexual behaviors, to objects or fetishes, and watch it morph into a category, even if just, for the moment, a category of one. If there’s one, there are, implicitly, more. You just have to meet them.

The two essays “So What Do You Think About Concrete?” and “Are Birds Spies?” epitomize the kind of essay I liked receiving at New Haven Review. Written in a direct, confiding style, with plenty of details about the subject matter, both essays take the reader places. In “Concrete,” we travel with Cory to visit his aunt Dorothy who lives in Fargo, North Dakota, and is fondly recalled as a Talker. Like her nephew, Dorothy liked riding the railways and talking at random to whomever interested her. The essay’s title is given as the kind of unpredictable opening query she might hazard just to get the ball rolling. Not only does the essay provide a loving and sharply observed portrait of this maiden aunt who lived to be 93, but recounting his occasional visits out her way lets Cory talk about the Midwest, about train travel, and about the kinds of things that watching someone age while outliving them might stir, so that he’s able to recreate his acquaintance with his aunt and family, provide telling examples of his aunt’s acerbic conversation, and reflect on Dorothy’s impact on him to provide a fitting eulogy.

Jim Cory, I didn’t know until I read “Are Birds Spies?”, was a dedicated birdwatcher. The essay gives an introduction to “the life” and what makes enthusiasts travel about the country in search of birds that, in many cases, don’t particularly wish to be seen. There are also interesting anecdotes about how he got into the pursuit, about the types of people one encounters, and asides on matters that occur to him on the topic of birds, as for instance, the essay’s title—a question poet Gregory Corso once posed to Allen Ginsberg. My favorite passages express reflexive moments, as when Cory sees himself—alone on a trail—a sitting duck for bears or mountain lions or when his delight in spotting a bird he thought he might never see comes through. Similarly, “Romping Through the Swamp” allows Cory to dawdle through nature—particularly, Tinicum, “1,200 acres of woods and wetlands opposite Philadelphia International Airport”—and to expound on the peculiarities of the prothonotary warbler. The essay seems a partner of the birdwatching essay, and includes a glimpse of the author, at twelve, falling in love with swamps. As someone with very little feel for the specifics of nature—in no matter what setting—these essays impressed me with how knowledgeable Cory was, and not only about literature or history.

The reason I wanted to publish “Who’s Vladimir Horowitz?” when I read it was because it features an evocation of the relationship Cory was in when I first knew him. The context of the question is that his partner, Brian, does not know who Horowitz is, then Cory scores great seats for them to see the piano virtuoso perform at the Philadelphia Academy of Music. But the couple, often fighting over Brian trying to get the author to quit drinking, have a spat and Brian never does see Horowitz, though Cory’s evocation of the concert is the heart and soul of the piece, a way of saying what, Cory tells us, Brian once said when they ran into each other some time after Horowitz’s death: “I should’ve gone with you that time.” Cory doesn’t end with that “I told you so” moment. Having outlived Brian—who died of pancreatis with HIV—Cory recalls the time Brian let slip his dream: “I wanted to save you.” Rueful, as retrospect so often is, there can also be sly ironies a real writer can’t resist.

Though he was born about six months after my older brother, I never suspected that Cory—who I’d known in a context of literature, poetry, jazz and classical music—had, like my brother, a long-haired, acid-dropping phase in his teens. The essay “Waiting for Janis” relives that period in a way that positions it indelibly in my own bailiwick of writing about rock music as part of an odyssey of personal identity. It was the essay most fun to work on and the one for which Jim expressed most appreciation for my editing. The book’s title essay takes us even further back, to adolescent Cory’s infatuation with a General Electric radio he received as birthday present at ten or eleven. The question of the title evokes the author’s father demanding why the radio is playing when it should be off—it’s bedtime. But the question sends Cory off on a historical jaunt, telling us how radios in general and the particular model of his childhood came to be, and how the nature of Pop music on local radio stations colored his life, as it did for so many who hit their adolescence in the Sixties (or, like me, the Seventies). The main jist of the essay though—which is both autobiographical and historical in method—is to rectify the fact that “we rarely consider how everything we own, or use, contains a history.” The history of any object concerns what enabled it to be made in the first place, long before it becomes the story of how any particular person—or a generation—interacts with that object or, in this case, the world of popular culture it helps us inhabit.

Finally, an essay I saw go through a few iterations—“Wild Children, Screaming Mommy”—stems from a unique object that Cory found “a dozen years” after his mother’s death: her diary consisting of 365 pages, one page for every day of the year, beginning in 1938 and ending sometime in the late 1960s, generally one line per day, at most. As Cory remarks: “Daily and in secret the diarist (from diarium, Latin for day) inscribes unguarded thoughts and feelings. She conceals her manuscript where none would think to look. Diaries tend to surface posthumously.” As opposed to journals which, as Cory notes, are often “created . . . with an eye on eventual publication.” Cory’s essay is the closest his mother’s diary comes to publication, and it is fascinating to navigate its pages with him, reading over his shoulder at what gives him pause, what elicits comment. Cory’s mother “married for love but also to get out of North Dakota” in 1946, and gave birth to seven children. There’s much understated poignancy in this revisiting of what Mrs. Cory, a housewife in a variety of locales as her husband, a salesman, moved the family several times, finds worth recording. As glimpses into the life of “the everyday housewife who gave up the good life for me,” as a sentimental Glen Campbell song of 1968 has it, the entries, mostly very terse, are eloquent when fleshed out by Cory’s musing reimagining of all his mother doesn’t say. What comes across in memorable fashion is how writing, as a private act, shapes a version of the self that might be remote to anyone but the individual writer; we look on, watching as life happens, as aging makes changes, and children grow, and caring for them goes on and on and on.

The four samples of Jim Cory’s fiction were all previously published and all four have a similar focus: the lives of gay men during Cory’s youth, and two—“The Rise and Fall of Malibu Barbie,” “Dish”—are in the first person. The first story, “Date,” and the fourth and best story, “An Ideal Couple,” are in third person. The stories in the first person are very anecdotal, offering a glimpse into a coterie of friends who are in almost constant communication about what’s what in the gay community in Philly. “Dish,” in particular, recreates a Klatch of regulars who “used to gather in the corner booth of a certain diner a short block from Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square” after their Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. The contrapuntal dialogue among four to six speakers keeps the story moving as they ponder the relations of the “dish,” a figure both desired and reviled, whereas the other third-person story does much the same with the fortunes of a gym proprietor known as “Malibu Barbie.” These stories eschew the kinds of overarching commentary that Cory the essayist practices so well and can seem a bit repetitive in their incidents, though Cory’s ear for the give-and-take of dialogue and an eye for the obsessions of the day are in good evidence.

The third person stories may be only thinly veiled autobiographical fiction but the detachment from a personal perspective make them stand out in this volume, and both are the earliest writing here: “Date” is from 2005, and “An Ideal Couple” is from 1995. The latter ends the volume with an epiphany on the part of Tom about his recently deceased friend Steve, whom he’d known for decades:

Then the thought came to Tom that Steve, who’d lived as if the act of living were a chore, and always by himself, who’d seemed so far from the reach of love, had loved him, Tom. Had always loved him. From the beginning. And had, somehow, chosen never to state it.

The words, coming near the end of Why is That Goddamned Radio On?, resonate as an early example of Cory’s ongoing theme of the small, personal slant on life that everyone has and that so few become aware of in others. Sometimes not until too late.

The last time I saw Jim Cory was when he came to New Haven to read and to participate in a party at the Institute Library for New Haven Review. It was March 2019, and a year later everything would close down for a time. He stayed over at our home in Hamden and I know we talked at one point about Proust, sharing how much we loved that return at the end of the grand, multi-volume novel when so many characters from the narrator’s youth are seen in old age. We were not yet 66 and not yet 60 at that time, but, having known each other for forty years, had seen a world of changes that made those old days at the start of the 1980s “temps perdu” indeed. Reading Cory’s book recalls to me the Philly I knew, and shows me the Philly he knew in ways I never knew, and for that I’m very grateful. Most of the pieces end the way Proust ends and the way many of Cory’s stories, in person, ended—with some reflection on change, on age, on death, as Cory seemed always to entertain whatever might seem entertaining about that baleful “et in arcadia ego” that whispers to us even at our most contented or expansive. Against that, he had the wit and the talent and the intelligence to know that life offers us an abundance of matters to take to heart, to feed our imaginations and to stimulate our sense of the value of the time we have. As he says to us at the close of “Romping in the Swamp”: “No doubt some people find all this tedious. If you don’t know what you’re seeing, it all seems the same. Finding your way inside any body of knowledge requires an entry point. Direct the attention and it will happen.”

Cory shows us in this book some of the things to which he directed his formidable attention. And “it happens” each time. I’m very glad these gems were collected here for his readers and hope there will be more. I’ve heard that Jim Cory’s literary executor has another volume in the works.

Radiator Press

Entre Nous

Review of Dear Elizabeth, New Haven Theater Company

Sarah Ruhl’s Dear Elizabeth, now playing at New Haven Theater Company for four more performances—tonight and next Thursday through Saturday—has an unusual remit: to present the story of the friendship between Robert Lowell (Ralph Buonocore) and Elizabeth Bishop (Sandra E. Rodriguez) using only excerpts from the published correspondence between the two famous poets as text to be spoken by the actors playing them. The sense of this restriction is that it lets us hear the voices of these two inestimable writers as pitched to one another, an ongoing verbal pas de deux that lasted thirty years. Indeed, the last letter Bishop wrote Lowell was en route to him in New York when he died of a heart-attack in a cab in 1977. Bishop died two years later.

The premiere production of Dear Elizabeth, at Yale Repertory Theatre in 2012 directed by Les Waters, had a wealth of interesting visual aids to hold our attention. At New Haven Theater Company, director J. Kevin Smith provides a much more intimate approach that has its own very choice theatricality. Set up with seating on all four sides, the play happens before us as an imagined space, one that Lowell and Bishop seemingly enter into readily. Their letters—usually written when considerable distance separates them in life—provide a particular intimacy that each strove to maintain, in different ways at different times. There are dramatized moments—such as their mimed meetings when we don’t get to hear them speak because what they said was not recorded—and moments of whimsy as when one or the other climbs a step latter as though to move above and beyond the quotidian bounds of life.

Elizabeth Bishop (Sandra E. Rodriguez), Robert Lowell (Ralph Buonocore) in Dear Elizabeth; photo by New Haven Theater Company

Moving chronologically through this literary acquaintance that becomes a lifelong friendship, we see how the two began, early on, with belief in one another as readers of and commentators on each other’s work. An aspect that never flags, with each dedicating poems to one another, and, late in Lowell’s career, arguing good naturedly but pointedly over Lowell’s use of doctored versions of his former (second) wife’s correspondence in his long poem “The Dolphin.” The “mixing of fact and fiction” is what Bishop objects to, so we can imagine that she would not censure Ruhl’s use of the poets’ correspondence since—though the play does not show us all that was said—the playwright uses only what was actually written. (Though on the question of tampering with written materials—which Bishop also faulted Lowell for—I will offer one cavil: to quote at length from Lowell’s famous poem “Skunk Hour,” dedicated to Bishop, without including the lines about the skunk not only truncates a powerful poem, but leaves those unfamiliar with the poem uncertain about what Lowell means when he said, in a letter, that he had become a skunk.)

Robert Lowell (Ralph Buonocore) in Dear Elizabeth; photo by New Haven Theater Company

The notion of the correspondence as a drama is supported by the way the two seem to require one another as audience to lives that move along with much travel and, for Lowell, three wives and two children, and, for Bishop, much time alone and then a long-term relationship with Lota de Macedo Soares, living together in Brazil, that ended tragically. The friendship between Lowell and Bishop had its more intense phase before Lowell met wife number two, Elizabeth Hardwick, author, critic and one of the founders of the New York Review of Books. Indeed, a powerful letter later in the play shows Lowell giving vent to reminiscence over the early possibility of a marriage to Bishop, whom he met before he met Hardwick. The possibility may have been only in his mind, but as depicted by the play, the earlier moment, when Lowell writes of meeting Hardwick and soon enough is enacting a marriage, finds Bishop sitting at her desk blowing bubbles and seeming to ignore his epistles. Was there ever a chance for these two to live as a settled couple? Doubtful, but, the play suggests, not unimaginable.

How we see this relationship owes much to how it’s staged. The strictures of the play make the audience seem to be reading the words of the poets over the shoulder of the playwright. Ruhl chooses what to include and what to exclude and provides terse statements of fact in a voice-over so that we will know things the letters don’t spell out. In addition, a silent factotum, called Brigit (Abby Klein, wonderfully focused) moves on and offstage, bringing in and removing props, aiding and abetting the dramatic business in a manner that seems to comment ironically on the fact that Lowell and Bishop have gone from living confidantes and career poets—each winning many important prizes—to figures in a play.

Elizabeth Bishop (Sandra E. Rodriguez) in Dear Elizabeth, photo by New Haven Theater Company

As characters, Rodriguez’s Bishop is the more winning of the two. Rodriguez infuses Bishop with a vital circumspection, a way of approaching life as though it’s happening to someone else. So those moments when she breaks down are all the more powerful as we see at once with what strength of purpose she pursued her very individual life. As Lowell, Buonocore never quite gets across the manic quality in Lowell, which he references in his letters—having not only to take medications but sometimes being relegated to sanitariums. In Lowell’s words one detects a performative quality that does lend itself well to those passages where Buonocore’s Lowell comments drily on others.

The main strength of the play is that it makes us aware of how any attempt to present oneself in a verbal medium begs a certain indulgence from the audience. An audience of one—the person addressed—has now become “the ages,” leaving us to make of these lives what we will. There’s a very successful moment late in the play when Lowell and Bishop circle one another reciting the various salutations and closings they had used with one another in the course of thirty years of letters. The lines compose a poem with very specific referents and contexts, full of affection, self-aware humor and a very, very personal touch, such as only real friends can appreciate between each other.

Dear Elizabeth
A play in letters from Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell and back again
By Sarah Ruhl
Directed by J. Kevin Smith

Producer: Margaret Mann; Production Stage Manager: Stacy Lupo; Lighting Designer: Adam Lobelson; Sound Effects: Tom Curley

Cast: Ralph Buonocore, Abby Klein, Sandra E. Rodriguez

New Haven Theater Company
November 7, 8, 9, 14, 15, 16, 2024

Sarah Ruhl Play Next for New Haven Theater Company

Preview of Dear Elizabeth, New Haven Theater Company

The work of poets Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) and Robert Lowell (1917-1977) is often discussed together because of the strong affinities the two writers had for each other and one another’s work. In the era since their deaths—two years apart—Bishop’s work has somewhat eclipsed Lowell’s, though he was a much better-known figure during their lifetimes, from an august Boston Brahmin family that traced its ancestors back to the Mayflower. Both poets won Pulitzers and National Book Awards, and both had great influence on subsequent generations of poets through their publications and teaching. The degree to which their actual personalities inflected their poetic personae is a question of their ongoing interpretation, and both have dedicated fans enamored of the unique musics of their verses.

The two are even more inextricably linked posthumously because of Sarah Ruhl’s play, Dear Elizabeth (first produced at Yale Repertory Theatre, directed by Les Waters, in 2012), which will be revived this week and next by the New Haven Theater Company. The play derives from Words in Air, a 2008 volume that collects the complete correspondence—over 450 letters—between Bishop and Lowell, written from 1947 to 1977. Dramatized by two actors playing the poets and speaking lines the poets respectively wrote each other, Bishop and Lowell become eloquent and—in the wide range of their lives—exemplary figures for their literary generation.

J. Kevin Smith, a longtime member of NHTC, directs the play which runs November 7, 8, 9 and 14, 15, 16. Dear Elizabeth, he reminded me, was originally scheduled as a script-in-hand read last year at this time, with two different casts slated to play Bishop and Lowell. Of that run, which was scrapped when one of the participants was unable to perform, Ralph Buonocore has been retained to play Robert Lowell. Ralph had a small but essential role in last NHTC season’s success Webster’s Bitch and was memorable, several seasons ago, in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Sandra Rodriquez, a veteran of NHTC having appeared in The Cult, Trevor, and most recently Goldfish, will be playing Elizabeth Bishop. They are joined by Abby Klein, who also played in Webster’s Bitch, as Brigit.

For Smith, the move to a full production for the play, as opposed to a staged reading, comes from a fuller immersion in the play and consideration of the kinds of stage directions Sarah Ruhl works into the text. He mentioned that Ruhl’s Foreword to the play suggests that the play could be done in a very scaled-down version, as for instance “a book club reading.” The Yale Repertory Theatre version was nothing like that, featuring water running on stage and levitating props, and Smith sees much potential for a version of the play somewhere between special effects and no effects.

He sees “magical realism” in what Ruhl writes about what happens onstage and feels the NHTC production will “facilitate the magic of the play,” which is a matter of “mood and how it is created” in a story that spans thirty years and though “platonic is passionate.” Particularly “compelling” for Smith is how Bishop and Lowell “do the dance of their relationship,” which at one point stirs from Lowell a love letter that Ruhl called “one of the most beautiful love letters ever written.” Ruhl, Smith said, became enamored of the correspondence when a friend gave her the book when she was under bed-rest while pregnant with twins. The playwright became convinced that the words in the letters needed to be heard aloud, and wrote a play to dramatize the unique nature of this enduring friendship.

As Ruhl says in her Foreword to the play: “It’s difficult to write about friendship. Our culture is inundated with the story of romantic love. We understand how romantic love begins, how it ends. We don’t understand, in neat narrative fashion, how friendship begins, how it endures. And yet life would be unbearable without friendship.”

Dear Elizabeth is about how friendship made the highly fraught lives of two highly wrought poets more bearable and, in their letters, indelible.

Dear Elizabeth
By Sarah Ruhl
Directed by J. Kevin Smith
New Haven Theater Company
Thursday, November 7 & 14 at 7:30 p.m.
Friday, November 8 & 15 at 8 p.m.
Saturday, November 9 & 16 at 8 p.m.
839 Chapel Street, New Haven

A Funny Thing Happened at the Theater

Review of The 39 Steps, Westport Country Playhouse

Westport Country Playhouse is back, under new Artistic Director Mark Shanahan, with a scheduled three-play season of comedies. The first, now playing through November 9, is the four-actor, multipart entertainment The 39 Steps, a slapstick rendering of a spy novel by John Buchan that reached the big screen in 1939, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. From that date, you can tell that a plot based on British secrets being leaked to crafty Germans was certainly timely. Nowadays, the espionage hijinks play out as a comically nostalgic recall of music hall comedy, chases on a train, and the clash of London panache with rural Scots oddity, among other things.

Richard Hannay (Joe Delafield) in The 39 Steps at Westport Country Playhouse; photo by Carol Rosegg

As our often flappable and put-upon hero, Richard Hannay, Joe Delafield looks like he belongs in a film from the Thirties or Forties: lean, “with piercing blue-eyes,” and a rakish moustache, Hannay, bored in his London flat, seeks excitement by going to the theater. There an act called Mr. Memory (Evan Zes) is interrupted by a gunshot and soon Hannay is swept up into a spy plot by Annabella Schmidt (Sharone Sayegh), whose hilarious accent and truly comic mannerisms seem to captivate our hero; that is, until she suddenly turns up dead.

Now if you’re thinking that doesn’t sound exactly hilarious, how wrong you are. You have to see the trench-coated hitmen (Zes and Seth Andrew Bridges) waiting by a streetlamp that they carry dutifully onstage each time Hannay or Schmidt looks out the window, and Annabella’s death throes have to be seen to be believed.

Richard Hannay (Joe Delafield), Annabella Schmidt (Sharone Sayegh) in The 39 Steps at Westport Country Playhouse; photo by Carol Rosegg

A major asset of this production is the casting: Delafield looks his part, certainly, and Sayegh conveys well the three different women that Hanny encounters and takes a more than casual interest in, especially plucky Pamela, a blonde who doesn’t buy his preposterous story, with good reason. Their “romantic interludes”—with lighting and sound that arrive on cue like a DeMille close-up—are almost as fun as what happens when two people handcuffed to each other have to navigate varied terrain, or remove stockings.

Richard Hannay (Joe Delafield) with Clown 2 (Evan Zes) and Clown 1 (Seth Andrew Bridges) in The 39 Steps at Westport Country Playhouse; photo by Carol Rosegg

Then there are the Clowns, Zes and Bridges. Zes, as Professor Jordan’s wife, looks like Groucho Marx in drag, and his extended effort to introduce Hannay, mistaken as a visiting candidate, at a political rally, is the kind of comedy that really must be done live to come off. We become the baffled rally crowd trying to discern if the speaker is saying anything intelligible at all. It’s a tour de force of silliness. And Bridges, as Professor Jordan, whom Hanny seeks out for help, creates a bizarre character who gets more and more unhinged. The return to the Mr. Memory act brings us full circle with the knowledge of the mysterious MacGuffin called “the 39 Steps” hanging in the balance.

Director Mark Shanahan handles all this with obvious love of the source material—not only Barlow’s adaptation but also the Hitchcock film universe that hovers as background, giving us jokes that play off a creepy but familiar world, as when a silhouette of the Bates Motel indicates Hannay’s and Pamela’s destination. Or when a tableaux of WWI fighter planes suddenly appears when Hannay goes on the run.

Richard Hannay (Joe Delafield) in The 39 Steps at Westport Country Playhouse; photo by Carol Rosegg

Westport’s The 39 Steps is inspired silliness handled with a great feel for the very visual humor of this enthusiastically charged romp.  Is there anything of substance in the story? As a hero, Hannay is typical of Hitchcock who likes his protagonists to be Everymen without any particular agenda. When Hannay is forced to improvise a stump speech in Scotland, he comes up with the kind of “a better world for everyone” rhetoric that sounds good without having any bite. Knowing nothing about the community he is addressing, he’s rather limited in what he can say, but it does somewhat fall on our ears as the sort of speech that, in 1939, would be rather weak and anodyne. But in the play there are real enemies and lives are really at stake. Just like in real life.

The cast of The 39 Steps at Westport Country Playhouse; photo by Carol Rosegg

The 39 Steps
Adapted by Patrick Barlow
From the Novel by John Buchan
From the Movie by Alfred Hitchcock
And an Original Concept by Simon Corble and Nobby Dimon
Directed by Mark Shanahan

Scenic Designer: James J. Fenton; Costume Designer: Jeni Schaefer; Lighting Designer: J. Dominic Chacon; Sound Designer: Ryan Rumery; Movement Coordinator: Steve Pacek; Production Stage Manager: Megan Smith; Assistant Stage Manager: Amadi Cary; Production Assistant: Chris Conte

Cast: Seth Andrews Bridges, Joe Delafield, Sharone Sayegh, Evan Zes

Westport Country Playhouse
October 22-November 9, 2024

Bipolar Soul

Review of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, Hartford Stage

Hartford Stage kicks off its 61st season with a classic, directed by Artistic Director Melia Bensussen. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) has been adapted numerous times as plays, films, spoofs and even a musical. One notable film adaptation featured Fredric March in the title double-role, for which he won the Best Actor Oscar for 1931, and was then remade with two-time Oscar winner Spencer Tracy as Jekyll/Hyde in 1941. Of course, the notion of a “Jekyll-Hyde” is common parlance for a dual personality, and we might suppose a contemporary version of the play will be somewhat sportive with the theme.

Fortunately, the Hartford Stage production uses Jeffrey Hatcher’s 2009 adaptation, which is respectfully faithful to the plot and the delivery of Stevenson’s multi-perspective tale. Like the theater’s handsomely stylish staging of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (a local tradition), Bensussen’s Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde brings literature to life.

Omar Robinson, Nayib Felix, Nathan Darrow, Jennifer Rae Bareilles, Peter Stray in Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde at Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

The main curiosity, going in, may be: how are they going to handle the transformation scene? Hollywood likes to employ special effects to make the contemporary sense of filmed realism include the fantastic, but the stage is apt to find means a bit more theatrical. Indeed, the inspiration of having Hyde conveyed by multiple actors (Peter Stray, Omar Robinson, Nayib Felix, Jennifer Rae Bareilles), and several times in tandem or unison, delivers an eerie and intriguing effect. Instead of watching someone in makeup enact a monster, we see how the Hyde personality manifests itself across race and gender and in various spaces simultaneously. And the Hartford Stage, with its wide-open circular playing space surrounded by an amphitheater of seats, is perfect for the swift physicality of this production, which never remains static for long, thanks in part to Shura Baryshnikov’s choreography. The scenic design (Sara Brown) also plays well as the operating theater where Dr. Jekyll (Nathan Darrow) and Sir Danvers Carew (Nayib Felix) do an engaging little number we might call “dueling doctors.”

Nayib Felix, Peter Stray, Sarah Chalfie, Jennifer Rae Bareilles in Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde at Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

The story, in Hatcher’s version, includes a woman—Elizabeth Jelkes (Sarah Chalfie)—who actually falls for Mr. Hyde, which gives a different wrinkle to the battle for ascendancy between Jekyll, a staid if somewhat peremptory gentleman who experiments upon himself, and Hyde, a bestial and immoral scoundrel who, the play suggests, might be an exciting person to know. You know how a certain kind of person is readily attracted to “bad boys”?

Nayib Felix, Sarah Chalfie in Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde at Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

While there are many ways the story might be made more arch or ironic or campy in its presentation and implications, Bensussen’s production is notable for taking Stevenson’s creation and Hatcher’s text seriously. This production works so well not only because it is so well-played and well-staged, but also because the familiar theme seems to have finally escaped the “monster movie” circuit and gotten back to serious drama.

Nathan Darrow in Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde at Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

Darrow’s Jekyll is a man who feels he can manipulate anyone and anything: his friends, the law, science, and even Hyde, his darker or less amenable side. His argument with Dr. Carew is over the question of “the soul” as a material element of the brain or a spiritual essence. The notion that exciting certain areas of the brain and suppressing others would cause complete personality change is credible, and Hatcher brings in elements from another Stevenson story (“The Body Snatcher”) in which the unethical use of cadavers is addressed. Jekyll, we see, is a man who, like Victor Frankenstein (with whom he is often compared), believes that scientific knowledge takes precedence over legal strictures, religious belief and sentimental attachment. His tragedy stems from not really knowing himself. The “evil” in him isn’t a scientific side-effect but an essential element of his psyche. As, indeed, it may be for us all.

Jennifer Rae Bareilles in Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde at Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

Watching the story play out is to be implicated to some degree in the sentiments expressed by  a bystander and witness to a brutal murder: she knew she should call for help, but she wanted to watch. The lure of sensationalism and violence is so deeply woven into so much of our entertainment, it is no surprise to learn we have, collectively, a “bad side.” What we might be surprised to learn is how easily that bad side could get along in the world without a care for the missing censure of the “good side.”

Omar Robinson in Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde at Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

Hartford Stage’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is fascinating and exciting theater.

 Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde
Adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher from Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Directed by Melia Bensussen

Choreographer: Shura Baryshnikov; Scenic Design: Sara Brown; Costume Design: An-lin Dauber; Lighting Design: Evan C. Anderson; Original Music & Sound Design: Jane Shaw; Wig, Hair, & Makeup Design: Jodi Stone; Fight Choreographer: Omar Robinson; Voice & Dialect Coach: Jennifer Scapetis-Tycer; Casting: Alaine Alldaffer; Production Stage Manager: Nicole Wiegert; Assistant Stage Manager: Julius Cruz; Associate Artistic Director: Zoë Golub-Sass; Director of Production: Bryan T. Holcombe; General Manager: Emily Van Scoy

Cast: Jennifer Rae Bareilles; Sarah Chalfie; Nathan Darrow; Nayib Felix; Omar Robinson; Peter Stray

Hartford Stage
October 10-November 3, 2024

Horsing Around

Review of falcon girls, Yale Repertory Theatre

Adolescence in all its earth-shaking, hormonal change is the setting of Hilary Bettis’s falcon girls, now playing in its world premiere at Yale Repertory Theatre, directed by May Adrales. While such material may be all-too-familiar in popular films and TV shows, Bettis’ compassionate play benefits from the specificity of its context.

The cast of falcon girls by Hilary Bettis at Yale Repertory Theatre; photo by Joan Marcus

The action, set in the early ‘90s, comes to us through the main viewpoint of the new girl in eighth grade in a school in rural Colorado where ranches and horses abound. H (Gabrielle Policano)—always addressed as Hilary and sometimes “Hillary Clinton” in the play—strikes us at first as an early-teen enthusiast utterly entranced by animal life, particularly horses, and eager to share her love with the world (her mother breaks for animals, especially turtles). In the early going, it seems we’re going to be treated to an extended revamp of Mean Girls, as none of the girls on the FFA (Future Farmers of America) competitive team welcomes a new recruit. H gets to be an alternate to an alternate, and spends her time pining for more status and generally dumping on her single-parent mother, Beverlee (Liza Fernandez), a nurse, for always working.

The classroom stuff is all zippy and overwrought as only young teens can be, and the cast is uniformly excellent at bringing the earnest tones of these girls’ voices to life (though we might begin to wonder why anyone, having lived through middle-school, would want to revisit it). Diversity here takes the form of different levels of disfunction: there’s April (Alexa Lopez), a wide-eyed would-be starlet (she wants to go to Hollywood and marry Neal Patrick Harris, har har); Carly (Alyssa Marek), a troubled girl with abusive father; Mary (Anna Roman), a fully indoctrinated proselytizer for Jesus; Rebecca (Annie Abramczyk), whose demanding mom is all about winning no matter what, and Jasmine (Sophia Marcelle, but on opening night played by understudy Gabriela Veciana), a girl who has begun surfing the perilous waters of online chats and phone sex. The girls are fond of stressing that they love each other like sisters and not “like a lesbian.” For a time we might imagine that H is the least burdened, but the second act does away with that view, and suddenly it’s all about the backstory.

H (Gabrielle Policano), Jasmine (Sophia Marcelle), April (Alexa Lopez), Carly (Alyssa Marek), Rebecca (Annie Abramczyk), Mary (Anna Roman) in falcon girls by Hilary Bettis at Yale Repertory Theatre; photo by Joan Marcus

The best part in the early going is when H sassily takes on the role of “horse evaluator” with her teammates as examples. Terms like “pig-eyed” and “breeding hips” get thrown about as the girls strike postures somewhere between artist models, cover girls and science specimen. We get not only the way the features of humans and horses share certain tell-tale aspects, but also that, in her chosen field, H has what it takes. Which doesn’t mean she’s going to be popular. Also made clear is how important the FFA culture is for these teens, leading not only to status, but to enabling careers from veterinarians to ranchers and entrepreneurs.

The cast of falcon girls by Hilary Bettis at Yale Repertory Theatre; photo by Joan Marcus

The consoling rides back home from lost competitions with Mr. K (Teddy Cañez), the patient, dedicated, and virtuous coach, are charming set-pieces that let all the different agendas of this often catty young team play out. Indeed, Cañez’s warm and knowing performance is a welcome break from the various kinds of hyperventilating on view, which includes the crush of the only male teammate, Dan (Juan Sebastián Cruz), on H, which leads him to be a joke mainly for his sartorial choices and his assumption that posing with a gun is the way to a girl’s heart. Cruz is very agile in the dance numbers (Kimiye Corwin, choreographer) that show us what the kids like to step to and how they work off nervous energy.

Bettis’ main theme is the vulnerability of these girls who are restlessly and self-consciously located somewhere on the continuum between children and adults, while trying to navigate their growing awareness that praying to Jesus and trusting in his love may be more panacea than problem-solver. A plot point about a real local girl—Heather Dawn Church—who was kidnapped and killed by a local man (not identified and arrested until four years later) adds a certain element of foreboding, as the darker side of life might find anyone, and Carly is living in the house formerly occupied by the Church family.

H (Gabrielle Policano), Beverlee (Liza Fernandez) in falcon girls by Hilary Bettis at Yale Repertory Theatre; photo by Joan Marcus

The story concerns us with the difficulties faced by teens at all times, and perhaps more so with each passing generation, though I do wonder about the audience for this particular version of teendom. Those who, like Bettis, were teens in the ‘90s (my daughter fits the bill) might run screaming at having to revisit those years, and current teens may be only dimly interested in a time when you had to use call-waiting on landlines to communicate with your friends. As for genial old folks like me, “our withers are unwrung,” so to speak, but, even so, I hear the voice of Alicia Silverstone in Clueless (1995) saying “Tell me that part about Kenny G. again…”

But, unlike Clueless with its lively satire of the Valley and the kids who once upon a time inhabited it, falcon girls doesn’t mock outright the lives of these enterprising kids, trying instead to illuminate aspects of their world for those of us not to the ranches born. Though the biggest lesson we might receive is that the democratic reach of capitalism and its reigning patriarchal discourse means that, in the U.S., life is often a version of “same shit, different State.” Playing at Yale, the play does agreeably promote the value of education, though with the cautionary notion that you might know all there is to know about animal life and nothing at all about yourself.

falcon girls
by Hilary Bettis
Directed by May Adrales 

Scenic Designer: Beowulf Boritt; Costume Designer: Micah Ohno; Lighting Designer: Kyle Stamm; Sound Design and Original Music: Joyce Ciesil; Projection Designer: Christian Killada; Hair, Wig, and Makeup Designers: Krystal Balleza and Will Vicari; Production Dramaturgs: Amy Boratko and Lara Priya Sachdeva; Technical Director: Tom Minucci; Fight and Intimacy Director: Kelsey Rainwater; Vocal Coach: Julie Foh; Choreographer: Kimiye Corwin; Casting Director: Calleri Jensen Davis; Stage Manager: Josie Cooper

 Cast: Annie Abramczyk, Teddy Cañez, Juan Sebastián Cruz, Liza Fernandez, Alexa Lopez, Sophia Marcelle, Alyssa Marek, Gabrielle Policano, Anna Roman; understudies: Ruth Aguilar, Caroline Campos, Dylan Scarlett Foster, Francisco Morandi Zerpa, Brendan Titley, Gabriela Veciana, Rosie Victoria

Yale Repertory Theatre
October 10-November 2, 2024

Family Snapshots

Review of 2.5 Minute Ride, Hartford Stage

A 75-minute play delivered in the form, for the most part, of a slideshow lecture about her family, Lisa Kron’s 2.5 Minute Ride closes out Hartford Stage’s 60th anniversary season as a unique show wherein amusement parks meet Nazi deathcamps. In the play’s original formulation, back in 1999, Kron played herself, giving glimpses of her family as they visit annually Cedar Point Park in Ohio, noted for its amazingly fast, tall, and breathtaking roller-coasters, or prepare for her brother’s wedding in Brooklyn, or—checking off a list of things to do with Dad before he’s gone—visit Auschwitz in Poland where his parents and other relatives died after he was placed in a Kindertransport that brought him to the U.S.

Lisa (Lena Kaminsky) in Lisa Kron’s 2.5 Minute Ride at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

As Lisa, Lena Kaminsky takes charge of the material with great aplomb. We can easily believe these are her experiences she’s recounting, and her way of working the material—Lisa is a somewhat captious host quite often—redounds to the success of this production, directed by Zoë Golub-Sass. The pacing snaps as Lisa confides and mocks and reveals. The main dramatic crux is that, in the midst of her straight-forward recounting of events, Lisa may come to weigh her experiences differently, as she does when she has to admit to a surprising flood of emotion at her brother’s wedding, or may even come to question why she’s trying to tell us what she’s telling us, as when she finds her descriptive powers tested by having to recreate the visit to Auschwitz. At that point, we could say she isn’t simply recreating, she’s reliving, and her distress becomes palpable.

But that’s also when we may become acutely aware that Kaminsky isn’t Kron, so that a scripted breakdown doesn’t quite play the same as one that could be coming directly from the author. That’s not likely to bother most viewers, but it did give the play, for me, an odd double-focus. First, on the question of how well Kron’s script conveys what she wants to say; second, how well Kaminsky plays Lisa. A theatrical monologue can be by an entirely fictional character, of course (see David Cale’s Sandra, now playing a few blocks away at TheaterWorks, Hartford, for instance), and so we know the actor onstage has adopted the role of the narrator/character. But when the monologue must render some aspects of the speaker’s relations with actual family members we might find ourselves thinking how fixed and undeviating this little slice of life has become. And we might become more aware of how structured the monologue is, especially as Kron likes to jump back and forth between Cedar Point and Auschwitz as though they should have some relation other than that furnished by visiting both with her aging father. Or so as to make one visit’s comic elements offset the creeping horror of the other visit, which becomes a bit of a crutch.

Lisa’s relation to her father is really what’s at issue here, but she keeps distracting us with other aperçus, as for instance the vapidity of a superstore in Michigan, or the lack of real pizza in Poland, or—more interesting—her mother’s refusal to be photographed from the time her children ceased to be infants, or the different roller-coasters and how it feels to ride them with an elderly man who might suffer a physical problem during their oh-so-fast flight. We might wish she’d concentrate more on this old man, though she makes it clear she finds it hard to do so. She began by trying to make a video documentary in which he could speak his memories, but the format didn’t work and that caused her a bit of soul-searching.

And that attempt is a telling failure because it lets us know that 2.5 Minute Ride is another attempt, in a very different medium, to tackle the problem. It’s up to viewers if it works, but I’d say the real takeaway, with regard to her father, is his comment about his time as a youth in Germany where he wonders if, had he not been a Jew, he could’ve resisted becoming a Hitler Youth, the way one German boy he knew did. Later, as an interrogator with the U.S. Army, stationed in Germany, Kron’s dad gets a man to admit he was actually with the Gestapo, though he had lived in denial of that fact. The admission comes freighted, we might say, with the man’s grievance against history. Had the Nazis won, his actions as a Gestapo officer would’ve been praised. Instead, he’s a criminal. Kron’s dad sympathizes.

The poignancy and pointedness of Mr. Kron’s statements simply bubble up and subside within the busy texture of Lisa Kron’s need to dramatize her relation to this man. I found myself trying to imagine what a monologue in her father’s voice might have sounded like. But that would’ve meant Kron stepping outside her own experience to attempt to recreate someone else’s. At one point, she admits the limits of her method: ''When I try to tell his stories, I begin to hyperventilate, and I don't know why. I can feel the myth, the awe creep into my voice, and it makes me feel sick because what does that have to do with him?'' The fact that the question is rhetorical doesn’t mean Kron needn’t try to answer it.

Lisa (Lena Kaminsky) in Lisa Kron’s 2.5 Minute Ride at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Late in the play, Lisa, placing her hand on a chair, says that she learned in drama school that if there is a piece of furniture onstage you should put your hand on it so as to appear bigger. In the play’s concluding line, she says, “I’m putting my hand on my father’s life.” We may infer she did so to feel bigger, but we might also wonder if she succeeded.

2.5 Minute Ride
By Lisa Kron
Directed by Zoë Golub-Sass

Scenic Design: Judy Gailen; Costume Design: April Hickman; Lighting Design: Daisy Long; Original Music & Sound Design: Jane Shaw; Production Stage Manager: Avery Trunko; Director of Production: Bryan T. Holcombe; General Manager: Emily Van Scoy

Cast: Lena Kaminsky

Hartford Stage
May 30-June 23, 2024