The Dahls have a Christmas to remember — or forget — in Cult of Love (photo by Joan Marcus)
CULT OF LOVE
Hayes Theater
240 West 44th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Through February 2 2st.com
I started to call Leslye Headland’s hilarious, on-target Broadway debut, Cult of Love, the story of a dysfunctional family at Christmas, but I stopped myself because it sounded redundant; has there ever been a holiday-themed play about a functional family?
Directed with plenty of pizzazz and panache by Obie winner and two-time Tony nominee Trip Cullman, the hundred-minute satire introduces us to the musical Dahl family, who come together on Christmas Eve at their farmhouse in Connecticut to sing songs and do battle. Patriarch Bill (David Rasche) is a piano-playing Pollyanna and a hugger who prefers to avoid arguments; his children think he might be suffering from dementia, because how else can he be so positive? Matriarch Ginny (Mare Winningham) strums the guitar, sings songs about Jesus, and plays favorites with her children, even though she fails to see it.
The Dahls’ eldest progeny, Mark (Zachary Quinto), is a law clerk in DC, almost became a priest before abandoning Christianity, and is having marital problems with his wife, Rachel (Molly Bernard), who converted from Judaism and drinks too much at family events.
Older daughter Evie (Rebecca Henderson) recently got back from her Italian honeymoon with her new spouse, Pippa Ferguson (Roberta Colindrez); both have successful careers in brand management.
Third child Johnny (Christopher Sears) is the ever-late prodigal son who has been in and out of rehab for years; everyone is excited when they learn he is bringing a mystery guest, Loren Montgomery (Barbie Ferreira).
The baby of the group, twentysomething Diana Dahl Bennett (Shailene Woodley), is a Bible thumper with a six-month old son with her husband, Episcopal priest James Bennett (Christopher Lowell), and she is pregnant again.
Music is the only thing a Connecticut family can agree on in hilarious Broadway satire (photo by Joan Marcus)
Over the course of a fretful, highly volatile evening, the Dahls and their significant others discuss racism, homophobia, smoking, molestation, mental health, the Mexican wedding cookies known as polvorones, and tolerance in between picking up instruments (guitars, banjo, ukulele, melodica, washboard, sleigh bells, maracas) and breaking into traditional religious songs as well as tunes by Radiohead, the Fleet Foxes, and Sufjan Stevens, displaying gorgeous harmonies and pure joy that, momentarily, put aside their seemingly endless issues with one another.
“Evie! Are you picking a fight during Christmas carols?” Mark cries out. Evie responds, “I’m questioning the problematic lyrics, Mark!” Diana concludes, “You ruin it when you do that.”
When Evie wants to talk about Bill’s health, Mark argues, “Is Christmas really the best time for that?” Evie explains, “Christmas is exactly the time to talk about the things we never talk about.”
John Lee Beatty’s cluttered Christmas-themed set feels homey and lived in, with windows and glass doors that offer peaks at what is going on in the outside world, where perhaps sanity is possible. Jacinth Greywoode’s expert musical direction will make you wonder if there will be a cast album. The ensemble is terrific as Cullman guides them through an ever-more-claustrophobic situation.
“You must be having a wonderful time,” Bill says to Loren, who answers for her and the audience when she replies, “Oh, sure. I love the singing, the lesbian drama. It’s all great.”
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Marlon Brando (Brandon Flynn) has an unusual audition with Tennessee Williams (Robin Lord Taylor) in Kowalski (photo by Russ Rowland)
KOWALSKI
The Duke on 42nd Street
New 42 Studios
229 West Forty-Second St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through February 23, $40-$140 www.kowalskionstage.com
In 1947, still basking in the glow of the breakout success of his semiautobiographical play The Glass Menagerie three years earlier, Thomas Lanier “Tennessee” Williams III was preparing to take the oddly titled A Streetcar Named Desire to Broadway. Although he wanted thirty-four-year-old Oscar nominee John Garfield to star as the protagonist, Stanley Kowalski — the name of a Polish American soldier Williams met at the International Shoe Company — hot director Elia Kazan, affectionately known as Gadge, insisted he audition a little-known twenty-three-year-old actor named Marlon Brando from Omaha, Nebraska. Brando had appeared in a handful of stage productions, including I Remember Mama at the Music Box; Maxwell Anderson’s Truckline Cafe, which lasted only ten performances at the Belasco; and Jean Cocteau’s Eagle Rampant, in which he played Stanislas opposite Tallulah Bankhead, but he was fired before it came to New York, where it flopped. He wouldn’t make his film debut until getting the lead role in Fred Zinnemann’s 1950 military drama, The Men.
Gregg Ostrin re-creates what that initial meeting could have been like in the somewhat superficial yet satisfying Kowalski, running at the Duke through February 23.
Originally produced in Los Angeles in 2011, the show has been significantly revised and updated for its New York premiere. The main narrative is framed by a 1977 interview with Williams (Robin Lord Taylor), who wants to discuss his latest work but instead is steered into going behind the scenes of Streetcar yet again.
“Do we need to talk about it? I’m here to talk about my latest one. I think it’s my best. What is it called? It’s called, well, I can’t remember that, baby. No, of course I know the name. Tiger Tail, yes. I think it’s my best play since . . . my last play,” he tells an unseen journalist, who wants to hear about Brando. “Who? No, I’m just joking. Of course I know to whom you are referring. I just don’t want to talk about him. Does he need more publicity? He is certainly capable of generating more than enough on his own. Of course I remember the first time I met Marlon. No, it was not in a theater.”
The narrative goes back thirty years, when Williams, known to his friends as Tom, is living in his Provincetown beach house with his muse and partner, Pancho Rodriguez y Gonzalez (Sebastian Treviño), a rugged young Mexican American who loves to drink and have sex. Hanging around is Margo Jones (Alison Cimmet), a Texan who had directed Williams’s previous two plays, You Touched Me and The Glass Menagerie, and is not happy when she learns that her supposed close friend has chosen to go with Kazan for Streetcar. “You want my assessment? The play is genius and so are you,” she tells Tom, adding, “You’re also a callous little shit who can rot in hell.”
Williams seems to enjoy manipulating people, pulling their strings until they bite back and then hitting even harder. He regularly belittles Pancho, and his lover is getting tired of it; when Pancho complains about having to use the outhouse because the inside toilet is broken, demanding, “When are we gonna get the plumbing fixed?,” Williams replies, “As soon as you decide to fix it.” The angry Pancho responds, “I’m not your fucking plumber.” When Pancho calls Williams “a pathetic old drunken queen,” Williams declares, “I am thirty-six, which makes me neither pathetic, nor old. Drunken and a queen, well, I suppose that’s a different story.”
Kowalski reimagines a day with Tennessee Williams (Robin Lord Taylor), Margo Jones (Alison Cimmet), Jo (Ellie Ricker), Marlon Brando (Brandon Flynn), and (Pancho Rodriguez (Sebastian Treviño, not in photo) (photo by Russ Rowland)
After Pancho and Margo head out to a nightclub and Williams goes into the bedroom, Brando (Brandon Flynn) enters the empty living room, three days late. Bold and brawny in a tight white T-shirt, leather jacket, jeans, and boots, he is cool, calm, and collected, especially when Williams comes upon him and assumes he is either a thief or is there for Pancho. Brando takes his time, enjoying Williams flirting with him, before letting the playwright know he is there to audition for the role of Stanley. They instantly engage in a verbal boxing match, throwing around subtle and overt insults at each other as Brando fixes the toilet and the fusebox and they both keep drinking and smoking while sharing private tales, Brando about losing his virginity, Williams about his beloved sister, Rose.
They are soon joined by Brando’s twenty-year-old traveling companion, Jo (Ellie Ricker), who had no idea they had an appointment with Williams. She is overwhelmed, having seen Menagerie five times, and Williams capitalizes on her fandom, cozying up to her in order to make Brando jealous. “Darling girl, let’s not stand on ceremony. Call me Tom. All my closest friends do,” Williams says to Jo, then turns to Brando and orders, “You may call me Tennessee.” The jabs keep coming fast and furious as Brando essentially auditions without using the script.
David Gallo’s set is a welcoming, cozy living room with a bar on one side and a small kitchen on the other. Lisa Zinni’s apt costumes help define the characters instantly. Taylor (Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom,The Shooting Stage) is masterful as Williams, balancing the playwright’s vulnerabilities and insecurities with his giant ego and need to intimidate others. Flynn (Kid Victory,Much Ado About Nothing) has raw energy as Brando, who is on the cusp of becoming one of the biggest stars in the world; while Taylor inhabits Williams, it’s hard not to keep judging how good a job Flynn is doing as Brando, even though he is not mimicking him exactly, which would be an impossible task. In one of the most resonant moments of the play, Williams watches with quiet disgust as Brando, who has already helped himself to cookies and food in the fridge, fishes through a dish of candy, touching every one before deciding not to have a piece, knowing how much it would annoy the playwright. It sums up their relationship without a word said about it.
In his off-Broadway debut, Treviño (On Your Feet,The Jury) is striking as the underwritten Pancho, clearly the model for Stanley in Streetcar; Ricker is charming as Jo, an aspiring actress who is pulled between her affection for both Williams and Brando; and Cimmet (Party Face,someone spectacular) is effective as Williams’s abused sounding board.
Did it all happen this way? It might not perfectly match the accounts of the afternoon published in such books as Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me and John Lahr’s Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, but it entertainingly captures the essence of a meeting that changed the future of Broadway and Hollywood.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
DANCE REFLECTIONS: WHAT THE DAY OWES TO THE NIGHT
Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Ave. at 19th St.
January 28 – February 2, $12-$82
212-645-2904 www.joyce.org www.cie-koubi.fr
Last January, French choreographer Hervé Koubi brought down the house at the Joyce with his troupe’s stirring 2023 production, Sol Invictus, so it’s no surprise that Compagnie Hervé KOUBI sold out in advance its encore engagement of 2013’s What the Day Owes to the Night. A later production dazzled Joyce audiences in 2018, and it’s back to once again push the limits of what the human body can do.
In a program note, Koubi, who discovered his family’s Algerian roots when he was twenty-five, explains, “This project is at the crossroads of two preoccupations: my taste for the construction and the danced composition and a deep need to bring me closer to my origins in the land of Algeria. Links to be found, others to be renewed, and still others to be built.” Upon learning of his heritage, he spent four years in Algeria and came back with a movement language that incorporates hip-hop, the Afro-Brazilian martial art of capoeira, break-dancing, gymnastics, ballet, and contemporary dance, performed by an all-male North African ensemble.
The sixty-five-minute presentation is named after the 2008 novel by Yasmina Khadra, the pseudonym of Algerian author Mohammed Moulessehoul; the show does not follow the plot of the romantic drama as much as the feel and setting, structured around the midcentury battle of Mers El-Kebir, the Algerian War for Independence, and the hours in a day.
The insanely talented dancers — Badr Benr Guibi, Giacomo Buffoni, Mohammed Elhilali, Vladimir Gruev, Youssef El Kanfoudi, Abdelghani Ferradji, Oualid Guennoun, Bendehiba Maamar, Nadjib Meherhera, Houssni Mijem, Ismail Oubbajaddi, Matteo Ruiz, and El Houssaini Zahid — are dressed in white cotton pants with panels that swirl and shirts that eventually come off, revealing duly impressive torsos. The flowing costumes are by assistant choreographer Guillaume Gabriel, who also arranged the score, which features Johann Sebastian Bach, Sufi music, and the Kronos Quartet performing songs by Egyptian Nubian musician Hamza El Din, in addition to moments of poetic silence.
The dancers begin in a pile in a far corner, then stir in a hazy, smokey dawn. Over time, as Lionel Buzonie’s lighting gets sharper and brighter, resulting in different shades of shadows on the white floor and, for one section, two dozen golden circles, the men do jaw-dropping head spins; shoot our their arms as if defending themselves; lift up one man high into the sky; and form two groups that each toss a dancer up and others catch him.
They swirl like whirling dervishes, writhe on the floor, and arch and angle their bodies in unison. They run forward and backward, perform cartwheels and diving somersaults, and hold hands in a circle. At one point, twelve men line up on one side and all watch a dazzling solo. At another, they come together and do simultaneous handstands, their bare feet dangling in the air like roots growing out of the earth. They occasionally slow down, most likely to gather their breath before the next action-packed moments.
Part of the Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels initiative, What the Day Owes to the Night does become a bit repetitive — is it possible for remarkable head spins to become de rigeur? — but it is also utterly thrilling, a unified piece that immerses you in Koubi’s world, radically changed by his discovery of his secret family identity. It will likely make you think about your own ancestors and wonder what beauty might be hidden there.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Sarah Street’s mouth is the star of the first of three short Beckett plays at Irish Rep (photo by Carol Rosegg)
BECKETT BRIEFS: FROM THE CRADLE TO THE GRAVE
Irish Repertory Theatre, Francis J. Greenburger Mainstage
132 West Twenty-Second St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Wednesday – Sunday through March 9, $60-$125
212-727-2737 irishrep.org
Why is the Irish Rep presenting Beckett Briefs: From the Cradle to the Grave, three short works by Samuel Beckett, now? “Because he’s Irish, and he knows things,” Irish Rep artistic director Charlotte Moore and producing director Ciarán O’Reilly explain in a program note.
The Dublin-born playwright died in Paris in 1989 at the age of eighty-three, during the Irish Rep’s second season, in which they staged Chris O’Neill and Vincent O’Neill’s one-man Endworks, based on more than a dozen Beckett plays. The company has since performed Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape in 1998, Endgame in 2005 and 2023, A Mind-Bending Evening of Beckett in 2013 featuring Act without Words,Play, and Breath, and Bill Irwin’s solo show On Beckett in 2018, 2020, and 2024.
In his unique, existential writings, Beckett displayed a flair for knowing things, although it is usually not easy to parse out exactly what he means, a significant part of the joy of experiencing his plays, which also include the full-length All That Fall,Happy Days, and Waiting for Godot. Theater itself is a regular subject; his scripts have extremely detailed instructions of nearly every movement, costume, and prop, and the narratives are often about the art of storytelling.
Such is the case with Beckett Briefs, a trio of tales about life, death, and the afterlife in which the narrative style drives the work.
First up is Not I, Beckett’s 1972 monologue that has been performed by Beckett muse Billie Whitelaw, Jessica Tandy, Julianne Moore, Lisa Dwan, and British comedian Jess Thom, who incorporated her copralalia (cursing) form of Tourette’s syndrome into her delivery of the nonstop barrage of text. The play generally runs between nine and fifteen minutes; it is not a race, but the actor is expected to go through the 2,268 words as fast as possible. “I am not unduly concerned with intelligibility. I hope the piece may work on the nerves of the audience, not its intellect,” Beckett wrote in a 1972 letter to Tandy prior to the play’s world premiere at Lincoln Center.
A hole has been cut in a black curtain more than eight feet above the stage, so the only thing we can see is a mouth peeking through, in this case belonging to Irish Rep regular Sarah Street. Her teeth are sparkling white and her red lipstick thick and emotive — resembling the famous movie poster for The Rocky Horror Picture Show — as she speeds through Beckett’s wildly unpredictable verbiage, barely stopping to breathe. Known as Mouth, the character has been mostly speechless since her parents died when she was an infant, but now, at the age of seventy, words start pouring out of her.
The audience is not meant to understand every plot detail as she relates stories involving shopping in a supermarket, going to court, sitting on a mound in Croker’s Acres, and searching for cowslips in a field, bringing up such concepts as shame, torment, sin, pleasure, and guilt. The protagonist has suffered an unnamed trauma that has led to her becoming an outcast from society and virtually unable to communicate with others. In many ways, she is as surprised at what she’s saying as we are at what we are hearing. For example:
“imagine! . . . whole body like gone . . . just the mouth . . . lips . . . cheeks . . . jaws . . . never . . . what? . . . tongue? . . . yes . . . lips . . . cheeks . . . jaws . . . tongue . . . never still a second . . . mouth on fire . . . stream of words . . . in her ear . . . practically in her ear . . . not catching the half . . . not the quarter . . . no idea what she’s saying . . . imagine! . . no idea what she’s saying! . . and can’t stop . . . no stopping it . . . she who but a moment before . . . but a moment! . . could not make a sound . . . no sound of any kind . . . now can’t stop . . . imagine! . . can’t stop the stream . . . and the whole brain begging . . . something begging in the brain . . . begging the mouth to stop . . . pause a moment . . . if only for a moment . . . and no response . . . as if it hadn’t heard . . . or couldn’t . . . couldn’t pause a second . . . like maddened . . . all that together . . . straining to hear . . . piece it together . . . and the brain . . . raving away on its own . . . trying to make sense of it . . . or make it stop . . .”
O’Reilly, the director of all three parts of Beckett Briefs, has excised the second character, known as the Auditor, who in some renderings stands off to the side of the stage, hidden in the shadows. (In Thom’s case, the Auditor served as ASL translator.) So the focus is completely on the mouth in a dazzling performance by Street, a celebration of language and a potent reminder that life is to be lived, not merely watched or listened to, that there is more to our existence, even beyond theater.
Sarah Street, Roger Dominic Casey, and Kate Forbes examine their love triangle in Beckett’s Play (photo by Carol Rosegg)
In Endgame, a married couple named Nell and Nagg live in garbage cans. In Play, the middle section of Beckett Briefs, three people find themselves in urns in the afterlife, only their heads and the outlines of the vessels visible. A man (Roger Dominic Casey) appears to be doomed for eternity to be trapped between his wife (Kate Forbes) and his mistress (Street). They look straight ahead “undeviatingly,” the script says, and speak only when a spotlight shines on them.
Their initial exchange sets the stage of this forever love triangle.
W1: I said to him, Give her up. I swore by all I held most sacred — W2: One morning as I was sitting stitching by the open window she burst in and flew at me. Give him up, she screamed, he’s mine. Her photographs were kind to her. Seeing her now for the first time full length in the flesh I understood why he preferred me. M: We were not long together when she smelled the rat. Give up that whore, she said, or I’ll cut my throat — [Hiccup.] pardon — so help me God. I knew she could have no proof. So I told her I did not know what she was talking about. W2: What are you talking about? I said, stitching away. Someone yours? Give up whom? I smell you off him, she screamed, he stinks of bitch. W1: Though I had him dogged for months by a first-rate man, no shadow of proof was forthcoming. And there was no denying that he continued as . . . assiduous as ever. This, and his horror of the merely Platonic thing, made me sometimes wonder if I were not accusing him unjustly. Yes. M: What have you to complain of? I said. Have I been neglecting you? How could we be together in the way we are if there were someone else? Loving her as I did, with all my heart, I could not but feel sorry for her.
It’s a tour de force for Casey (Aristocrats,CasablancaBox), Forbes (A Touch of the Poet,Rubicon), and Street (Molly Sweeney,Belfast Girls) as well as lighting designer Michael Gottlieb and sound designers M. Florian Staab and Ryan Rumery, who must be in perfect sync and not miss a beat as the spotlight switches from face to face in the snap of a finger, sometimes illuminating all three characters at the same time. Occasionally the light grows dim, signaling the actors to slow down. As with Not I, it is not a race, but it leaves the audience breathless, as if we had just finished running laps.
Everything slows down in the finale, Krapp’s Last Tape, but that doesn’t mean it is any easier to decipher. The set, by Irish Rep genius Charlie Corcoran, is a dark, messy room with overstuffed shelves, a desk with an old-fashioned reel-to-reel tape player and several canisters on it, and a light fixture with a single bulb dangling overhead. The unkempt, disheveled Krapp (F. Murray Abraham) shuffles around the floor, struggles to open one of the drawers in the front, and takes out a banana, which he fondles before eating it, tossing the peel to his right. Beckett, a vaudeville fan, does indeed have Krapp slip on it. Krapp, occasionally letting out tired grunts of woe, then opens the second drawer, takes out another banana, peels it, and puts it in his mouth, being more careful this time with the peel. However, he decides not to eat the banana, instead putting it in his pocket.
An aging man (F. Murray Abraham) looks back at his younger self in Krapp’s Last Tape (photo by Carol Rosegg)
He goes in the back and returns with a large ledger that he looks through, reading out loud, “Box . . . thrree . . spool five. Spool! Spooool!” He finds the box he needs, starts playing the recording, then sweeps everything else off the desk and onto the floor. He has chosen to listen to a memory of his thirty-ninth birthday, his young self explaining, “Thirty-nine today, sound as a bell, apart from my old weakness, and intellectually I have now every reason to suspect at the . . . crest of the wave — or thereabouts. Celebrated the awful occasion, as in recent years, quietly at the Winehouse. Not a soul. Sat before the fire with closed eyes, separating the grain from the husks. Jotted down a few notes, on the back of an envelope. Good to be back in my den, in my old rags. Have just eaten I regret to say three bananas and only with difficulty refrained from a fourth. Fatal things for a man with my condition. Cut’em out! The new light above my table is a great improvement. With all this darkness round me I feel less alone. In a way. I love to get up and move about in it, then back here to . . . me. Krapp.”
It doesn’t appear that much has changed over the last three decades, Krapp still alone, still eating bananas, still surrounded by darkness. As the tape continues, Krapp scampers off to take a few gulps from a bottle of liquor, looks up the meaning of “viduity,” sings, and recalls a romantic evening on a lake. But the tape does not provide him with happiness; he barks out, “Just been listening to that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago, hard to believe I was ever as bad as that. Thank God that’s all done with anyway.”
The autobiographical, poetic Krapp’s Last Tape was written in 1958 for Patrick Magee and has also been performed by Harold Pinter, Brian Dennehy, Michael Gambon, and, primarily, John Hurt, who brought it to the 2011 BAM Next Wave Festival. Oscar and Obie winner and Emmy and Grammy nominee Abraham (Good for Otto,It’s Only a Play), who is eighty-five, fully inhabits the role of a man long past the crest of the wave. The desk is near the front of the stage, so close to the audience that you can practically reach out and touch him, although you’re probably inclined to stay away from such a dour, sad, disheveled person.
All three plays, which total about seventy-five minutes, deal with time, memory, and the futility of language, as each character faces issues with communication yet delivers masterful articulation. Expertly directed by O’Reilly (Endgame,The Emperor Jones), Beckett Briefs is a vastly entertaining evening that immerses you in the unique, engaging, complex, and minimalistic worlds the playwright is renowned for, enigmatic works that are worth revisiting over and over again, offering new and fascinating insights as viewers age and understand them in ever-changing, profound ways.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
The pure and passionate love between Princess Imogen (Jennifer Lim) and Posthumus Leonatus (KK Moggie) is challenged in NAATCO’s Cymbeline (photo by Julieta Cervantes)
CYMBELINE
Lynn F. Angelson Theater
136 East Thirteenth St. between Third & Fourth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through February 15, $25-$55 https://www.naatco.org
“Context is everything,” according to a phrase attributed to twentieth-century sociologist Alvin Ward Gouldner, author of such books as The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology and Against Fragmentation: The Origins of Marxism and the Sociology of Intellectuals.
That expression was on my mind as I watched the National Asian American Theatre Co.’s (NAATCO) splendid production of William Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, running at the Lynn F. Angelson Theater through February 15.
When I saw Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me at New York Theatre Workshop in 2018, it was the day that the Judiciary Committee had voted to advance the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh for Supreme Court Justice to the Senate floor. The air was thick with that event, which Schreck shrewdly noted without getting specific, but the entertaining show soon had the audience laughing.
I saw Cymbeline the day I learned that President Donald J. Trump had signed an executive order declaring, “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality. . . . Agencies shall remove all statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications, or other internal and external messages that promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology, and shall cease issuing such statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications or other messages.”
Andrea Thome’s modern-verse adaptation, which identifies itself as “all-femme, all–Asian American,” feels like a punch to the gut of that executive order, which essentially seeks to ban the word “gender” from the English language. It is particularly relevant in a work by Shakespeare, since original productions of his plays featured all-male casts because women were not permitted to perform onstage in Elizabethan times. , as it was considered unladylike and demeaning to their established role in Victorian society.
In Ancient Britain, King Cymbeline (Amy Hill) has banished Posthumus Leonatus (KK Moggie), a soldier who has wed his daughter, the princess Imogen (Jennifer Lim), without royal permission, ignoring their deep love for each other. The queen (Maria-Christina Oliveras) is determined that her son from a previous marriage, Cloten (Jeena Yi), will be Imogen’s husband, ensuring he will be the next ruler.
In exile in Rome, Posthumus boasts to a group of men from Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and France about his true love’s undying fidelity. The Frenchman tells the doubting Iachimo (Anna Ishida) of a conversation he had with Posthumus the night before in which they both were “lavishly praising our beloved mademoiselles back home; this gentleman at the time vouching (and vowing to defend it with his blood) that his lady was more lovely, virtuous, wise, chaste, faithful, praiseworthy and less temptable to seduction than any of the most extraordinary ladies in France.”
Iachimo takes that as a challenge and offers half his estate against Posthumus’s diamond ring, which belonged to Imogen’s mother, that he can seduce the princess and bring back absolute proof of his success. “The goodness of my mistress exceeds the depth of your vulgarity. I dare you to this match,” Posthumus says, agreeing to the bet and adding that they will duel when Iachimo fails.
Cymbeline features an “all-femme, all–Asian American” cast (photo by Julieta Cervantes)
Even though Imogen boldly rejects Iachimo’s advances, he tricks Posthumus into believing that the princess did indeed surrender her honor, prompting Posthumus to write to Imogen advising her to meet him in the Welsh town of Milford Haven and commanding his loyal servant, Pisanio (Julyana Soelistyo), to kill her because of her adultery. “Do I seem to the world to lack humanity so much as this crime asks?” Pisanio says, questioning the order.
In addition, the foolish Cloten has decided that he too will head to Milford Haven, to kill Posthumus and “defile” Imogen on his path to becoming next in line for the throne.
Meanwhile, the Roman ambassador Caius Lucius (Purva Bedi) has threatened King Cymbeline with war if he does not pay tribute tax to Augustus Caesar; the queen has acquired poison from the doctor, Cornelius (Narea Kang), that she intends to use on Imogen; and on her way to Wales disguised as a boy named Fidele, Imogen encounters a father and his two boys, who live in a cave, surviving on sheer will. Little does she know that it is actually Belarius (Oliveras), who was wrongly banished by Cymbeline many years before and who absconded with Arviragus (Annie Fang) and Guiderius (Sarah Suzuki), the king’s two young sons and her half brothers, who the ruler believes are dead.
The numerous subplots all come together in a rousingly satisfying finale.
Cymbeline is a problematic play that is far from the Bard’s finest. It feels cobbled together with leftovers from such other works as Twelfth Night,Romeo and Juliet,The Comedy of Errors,Richard III,Hamlet, and Othello. A dream sequence involving the god Jupiter (Soelistyo) is one of Shakespeare’s strangest, most awkward scenes. The dialogue lacks memorable, familiar lines. At nearly three hours (with intermission), it is too long. In New York City, the play has never made it to Broadway; the Public has presented it three times in its Shakespeare in the Park festival, in 1971, 1998, and, most recently, 2015, with Patrick Page as the king, Kate Burton as the queen and Belarius, Hamish Linklater as Posthumus and Cloten, Lily Rabe as Imogen, and Raúl Esparza as Iachomo.
But NAATCO, in partnership with Play On Shakespeare, has breathed new life into the show. Yi-Hsuan (Ant) Ma’s spare, often bare set is highlighted by a multipurpose large stretch of cloth that cleverly morphs from a bedsheet to royal drapery to a cave entrance, evoking what would be considered then women’s work, made by seamstresses. Mariko Ohigashi’s costumes feature lots of black leather and British and Roman finery that stand in contrast to the princess’s white gown. Yiyuan Li’s lighting keeps the audience, sitting on three sides of the action, visible through much of the show, as if we are all part of the kingdom, especially on the several occasions where the fourth wall is broken. Caroline Eng’s sound includes musical chimes that signal various changes.
The banished Belarius (Maria-Christina Oliveras) has raised Arviragus (Annie Fang) and Guiderius (Sarah Suzuki) in a cave in the woods (photo by Julieta Cervantes)
The majority of the cast is exemplary, ably emitting Shakespeare’s poetic iambic pentameter even when Thome’s contemporary translation uses modern language, although Bard purists should not be too worried.
Here is one example of Thome’s (Pinkolandia,A Dozen Dreams) style, with the Folger Library version first, followed by the new adaptation:
Cloten: Was there ever man had such luck? When I
kissed the jack, upon an upcast to be hit away? I
had a hundred pound on ’t. And then a whoreson
jackanapes must take me up for swearing, as if I
borrowed mine oaths of him and might not spend
them at my pleasure.
Cloten: Has there ever been a man with luck like mine? I’d bowled my
ball, just kissed the jack . . . and then was hit away! I had bet a
hundred pounds on that game: and then that damned monkey
son of a whore had to scold me for swearing.
It is important to point out that the ensemble is identified as “all-femme,” not “all-woman”; in real life, not all of the actors use the pronouns “she/her.” In addition, being “all–Asian American” is a strong rejoinder to the Asian and immigrant hate so pervasive in America today and apparently supported by the current administration, which is also seeking to subvert the fourteenth amendment by ending birthright citizenship and to deport Dreamers. Director Stephen Brown-Fried (Misalliance,Awake and Sing!), who does a terrific job guiding the proceedings, does not emphasize any of that, instead letting it all unfurl in an organic and natural way, gender be damned.
“I see a man’s life is a tedious one,” Imogen says in a soliloquy in Act 3, Scene 6, in front of the cave in the Wales forest.
In this wonderful adaptation in these troubled times, that statement speaks volumes.
[There are several special postshow events scheduled: January 29 is AAPINH Night, with a talkback with the director, members of the cast, and the casting company; February 2 is Shakespeare Trivia Night after the matinee; and the February 6 performance will be followed by the panel discussion “Shakespeare in Translation: Body and Verse,” with Lue Douthit, Karen Shimakawa, and Thome.]
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Target Margin Theater’s adaptation of Show Boat continues at NYU Skirball through January 26 (photo by Greg Kessler)
SHOW/BOAT: A RIVER
NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts
566 La Guardia Pl.
Through January 26, $60 nyuskirball.org
In 1927, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s Show Boat revolutionized musical theater, taking on such tough topics as racism and addiction while making the narrative central to the production. Hammerstein called it a “musical play,” and Richard Rodgers announced that it was “trailblazing.”
You wouldn’t know any of that from Target Margin Theater’s head-scratching adaptation, renamed Show/Boat: A River, that is confusing audiences at NYU Skirball through January 26 as part of the Under the Radar festival.
There’s something off from the very first moments. The lights are on throughout the theater as several actors take the spare stage, the only design a large white cloth in the back with two doorways cut out, one marked “White,” the other “Black,” seen backward, meaning we are inside, not outside, but of what there is no telling. They begin singing “Cotton Blossom,” explaining, “Listen / N-word — work on de Mississippi / Black people work while de white folks play — / Loadin’ up boats wid the bales of cotton, / Gittin’ no rest till the Judgment day.”
The use of “N-word” is like nails on a chalkboard, and the first act doesn’t get any better. Each cast member wears a beauty-pageant-like sash that identifies their character as either white or black, and since some actors play multiple roles without costume changes, it’s impossible to know who’s who; one character is even portrayed by two people at the same time. I tried to make sense of it all by reading Target Margin Theater founding artistic director David Herskovits’s script after seeing the show, but it refers to the speakers and singers by their real first names, not the characters’. I initially was trying to figure out who Ruby is, as she’s not listed in the program as a performer and is not the name of any character, major or minor, but realized that it refers to the woman playing Magnolia; my first guess was they changed actors but didn’t update the script, although it now looks like Ruby is the nickname for the actor.
The plot, or what I could make of it, does follow the original story line, based on Edna Ferber’s 1926 novel. It’s the late 1880s, and Capt. Andy Hawks (Steven Rattazzi) owns and operates the Cotton Blossom, a riverboat docked in Natchez, Mississippi, whose star entertainer is Julie LaVerne (Stephanie Weeks), who is married to leading man Steve Baker (Edwin Joseph). Julie is half Black but passing as white. Capt. Andy and his unpleasant wife, Parthy (J Molière), have a daughter, Magnolia (Rebbekah “Ruby Reb” Vega-Romero), who is a burgeoning star. Known as Nola, she hooks up with smarmy gambler Gaylord Ravenal (Philip Themio Stoddard). Villain Frank Schultz (Tẹmídayọ Amay) and his wife, Ellie May Chipley (Caitlin Nasema Cassidy), the toast of Cairo, Illinois, are supporting actors in the troupe. Joe (Alvin Crawford) is a dockworker whose wife, Queenie (Suzanne Darrell), is the ship’s cook.
Pete (Stoddard), an engineer, has the hots for Julie and had given her a brooch that she then gifted to Queenie. The jewelry becomes a key symbol, bringing up issues of race, infidelity, and ownership — of things and people.
“That’s hell of a thing to do — givin’ my presents to a n—,” Pete tells her. She responds, “Pete — if Steve ever knew about you sending me that brooch, I declare he’d just about beat you to death.” Pete then threatens, “Well, he better not try, and you better be pretty nice to me — or you’ll be mighty sorry.”
A few moments later, Frank asks Queenie, “Where you get that brooch you got on?” She answers simply, “It was given to me.” Gaylord demands, “Who give it to you?” and she says, “Ax me no questions ‘n’ ah’ll tell y’no lies!”
It’s often difficult to tell who’s who and what’s what in Show/Boat: A River (photo by Greg Kessler)
Show Boat debuted on Broadway in 1927, with revivals in 1932, 1948, 1983, and, most recently, 1994, with Rebecca Luker, Lonette McKee, Robert Morse, Elaine Stritch, John McMartin, and Cloris Leachman. The musical was made into a film in 1936 by James Whale, with Irene Dunne as Magnolia, Hattie McDaniel as Queenie, Helen Morgan as Julie, and Robeson, who was not in the original Broadway cast, as Joe; George Sidney’s 1951 movie, starring Kathryn Grayson, Ava Gardner, Howard Keel, Joe E. Brown, Marge and Gower Champion, and Agnes Moorehead, earned Oscar nods for Best Color Cinematography and Best Scoring of a Musical Picture.
The first act of Herskovits’s two-and-a-half-hour Show/Boat: A River feels like an open rehearsal that still needs a lot of work. Early on, the “Show Boat parade” celebrates the upcoming performances on board the Cotton Blossom; during intermission, a very different kind of parade occurred, as dozens of audience members abandoned ship and left the theater. They did not return.
The second act is significantly better, although not necessarily anything to sing about. The sashes have been replaced by circular buttons, Kaye Voyce’s set adds numerous elements, Dina El-Aziz’s costumes get to shine, and Cha See’s lighting is not always annoyingly on, all combining to finally achieve important character and plot development. Perhaps more important, the score by musical directors Dionne McClain-Freeney (also vocal arranger) and Dan Schlosberg (also orchestrator) settles into a groove, performed by Nan-Cheng Chen on cello, Nicole DeMaio and Kristina Teuschler on reeds, Thomas Flippin on guitar, and Sam Zagnit on bass, the band visible in the pit where the actors occasionally take rests.
Among the highlights of Kern’s music and Hammerstein’s lyrics (he also wrote the book) are such songs as “Make Believe,” a duet between Stoddard and Vega-Romero; “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” which becomes Nola’s dazzling audition number; “In Dahomey,” a racist tune at the World’s Fair; the moving “Bill,” achingly delivered by Weeks; and the show’s standard-bearer and underlying theme, “Ol’ Man River,” made famous by Paul Robeson as Joe and here boldly performed by Crawford: “Dere’s an ol’ man called de Mississippi; / Dat’s de ol’ man dat I’d like to be! / What does he care if de world’s got troubles? / What does he care if de land ain’t free?” he asks, bellowing, “Ol’ Man River / Dat Ol’ Man River, / He mus’ know sumpin’ / But don’t say nuthin’, / He jes’ keeps rollin’, /
He keeps on rollin’ along. . . . Ah gits weary / An’ sick of tryin’, / Ah’m tired of livin’ / An’ scared of dyin’, / But ol’ Man River, / He jes’ keeps rollin’ along.”
Oh, and don’t wait for “After the Ball,” because it’s been left on the cutting-room floor.
It all adds up to too little, too late by a beloved Brooklyn-based company that has been staging unique versions of classic and new works for four decades. Sometimes, as in this case, the ship just sinks.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
A dodo and a young boy are best friends fighting to survive in Dead as a Dodo (photo by Richard Termine)
DEAD AS A DODO
Baruch PAC
55 Lexington Ave. between Twenty-Fourth & Twenty-Fifth Sts.
Tuesday – Sunday through February 9, $55 utrfest.org bpac.baruch.cuny.edu
“The race is over!” the Dodo suddenly calls out in Lewis Carroll’s 1865 masterpiece, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Its animal friends crowd around, pant, and ask, “But who has won?”
You might be surprised by who wins in Wakka Wakka’s Dead as a Dodo, an awe-inspiring, visually stunning parable about the potential end of the human race and the tenuous future of the planet, sensationally staged with puppets. Running through February 9 at Baruch PAC as part of the Under the Radar festival, the eighty-minute extravaganza plays off the old adage “as dead as a dodo,” which refers to a person, place, or thing that is either no longer alive or decidedly out of date. The dodo (Raphus cucullatus) itself was a flightless bird of Mauritius that was last spotted in 1662.
In the Bone Realm, a pair of skeletons, a female dodo and a young boy, are besties. The boy is searching for bones to replace his arm and leg, digging into the basalt for anything that will fit. “So I’m missing an arm / And my ribs are all broken / I’ve lost half my teeth / And my skull is cracked open,” he sings. “Yes, I’m falling apart / And I’m close to the end / Still I’ve gotta take heart / Because I’ve got a friend / And my friend is a dodo.”
The two are always on the lookout for the Bone King and his daughter, the conniving princess, who are determined to own every bone in the land and are prepared to rip them right off the boy if necessary. “After life is stripped away / All the flesh has decayed / What remains? / Nothing but the bones / Nothing but the bones,” the king chants with dastardly glee. “All the bones in the fields are mine / You can try to take ’em if you got the spine.”
The greedy Bone King wants to own it all in sensationally eerie Dead as a Dodo (photo by Erato Tzavara)
As the boy fears he is disappearing, he notices that the dodo has grown a new feather or two — indications of life. When the Bone King discovers the feathers as well, the Bone Doctor, a kind of Grim Reaper, commands, “It is a plague upon our kingdom. There is only one thing to do. . . . You, sire! — Must chop it up and throw it into the fiery waters of the River Styx!”
The boy and the dodo then set off on a dangerous journey into other realms, where they meet a scavenging demon, a chatty gondolieri, a giant glowing fish, devil goats, a woolly mammoth, and a scientist named Phinneas who believes that the resurgent dodo is a sign that “the Age of Shimmering Darkness and Fog is coming to an end.”
But no one knows what will happen if the dodo actually returns to the Living Realm, rising like a phoenix. “Ha! That is not the order of things,” the gondolieri argues. “The river only flows in one direction.”
The staging of Dead as a Dodo is a marvel of technology and DIY ingenuity. There are three layers of opaque black string curtains onto which Erato Tzavara’s projections and Daphne Agosin’s lighting lend the proceedings a breathtaking 3D atmosphere. Lei-Lei Bavoil, Alexandra Bråss, Andy Manjuck, Hanna Margrete Muir, Sigurd Rosenberg, Marie Skogvang Stork, Anna Soland, and Kirjan Waage, dressed in black sequined costumes that meld into the background except for their glitter, operate the puppets with great skill and more than a touch of jaw-dropping magic.
The set and costumes are by Wakka Wakka cofounding artistic directors Gwendolyn Warnock and Waage, who also wrote and directed the production; in addition, Waage designed the puppets, based on actual skeletons. Thor Gunnar Thorvaldsson’s music and soundscape, harvested from geodes and crystals and featuring bells and gongs, keep the audience immersed in the riveting narrative, which evokes the climate change, war, and greed that threaten the earth today.
The look and feel of the show were inspired by Tales from the Crypt,Dante’s Inferno, old Silly Symphonies cartoons, and the art of Hieronymus Bosch, a mix that relates to the company’s Bioeccentrism Manifesto, which states, “Life like art is hyperbolically weird, stupendous, openly ridiculous, momentary, rapid, flashy fleshy and loud,” words that can also describe Dead as a Dodo and such previous Wakka Wakka works as The Immortal Jellyfish Girl,Animal R.I.O.T., and Saga.
The show is also about our own fear of death. “When you vanish, will you forget everyone you love?” the basalt asks at the beginning. Shortly after that, the dodo pulls an alarm clock out of the rubble and it rings. “That’s just junk,” the boy says, ignoring the literal and figurative wake-up call, a warning cry to all of us that humanity is on the brink of extinction.
“What do you think happens when you disappear completely? Are you going to forget about me? Will I forget you?” the boy says to the dodo, continuing, “I don’t want to disappear. I’m not ready.”
Then again, as Emily Dickinson once wrote, “Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul, / And sings the tune without the words, / And never stops at all.”
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
