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MONTAG

Novella (Nadine Malouf) and Faith (Ariana Venturi) face an uncertain future in Montag (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

MONTAG
Soho Rep
46 Walker St. between Broadway & Church St.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 20, $55
sohorep.org

In German, Montag, the name of Kate Tarker’s new play, making its world premiere at Soho Rep through November 20, means “Monday,” a day that is critical to the plot of the eighty-minute show. But it also made me think of Guy Montag, the protagonist of Ray Bradbury’s sci-fi classic Fahrenheit 451. Named after a paper company, Montag is a firefighter in charge of finding books in people’s homes and burning them, at 451 degrees Fahrenheit.

In the first chapter, Bradbury writes, “The last few nights he had had the most uncertain feelings about the sidewalk just around the corner here, moving in the starlight toward his house. He had felt that a moment before his making the turn, someone had been there. The air seemed charged with a special calm as if someone had waited there, quietly, and only a moment before he came, simply turned to a shadow and let him through. Perhaps his nose detected a faint perfume, perhaps the skin on the backs of his hands, on his face, felt the temperature rise at this one spot where a person’s standing might raise the immediate atmosphere ten degrees for an instant. There was no understanding it. Each time he made the turn, he saw only the white, unused, buckling sidewalk, with perhaps, on one night, something vanishing swiftly across a lawn before he could focus his eyes or speak. But now tonight, he slowed almost to a stop. His inner mind, reaching out to turn the corner for him, had heard the faintest whisper. Breathing? Or was the atmosphere compressed merely by someone standing very quietly there, waiting? He turned the corner.”

That same feeling pervades Montag, which takes place in set designer Lisa Laratta’s dark box in the middle of the stage. A lone light dangles from the ceiling. (The appropriately dingy lighting is by Masha Tsimring.) Faith (Ariana Venturi) and Novella (Nadine Malouf) sit opposite each other at a small table, the former smoking a cigarette, the latter crunching loudly on chips and crinkling the plastic snack bag. It’s live, in-person ASMR for the audience, experienced in a mysterious claustrophobic space instead of an online video. In the back is a wall filled with random, mostly unidentifiable objects, like remnants from a life shuttered away. Next to that is a doorway through which light can be seen, reminiscent of that corner Montag eventually turns onto.

It’s April 2014, and Faith and Novella live together in a basement apartment on a US army base in Germany; the former is a lead systems analyst from America, while the latter is a comfort woman for the soldiers, a Turkish immigrant who is now a German citizen. They are contemporary versions of the Gastarbeiter, or guest workers, who moved to Germany between 1955 and 1973; each one is married and has a child, none of whom the audience ever sees.

Two friends (Ariana Venturi and Nadine Malouf) search for meaning in Soho Rep world premiere (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

On this evening, Novella is ready to party. “We go all night?” Novella asks. “That’s the deal,” Faith says. “The deal we made with the devil.” They are in day seven of some kind of weeklong deprivation. During that time, a colleague of Faith’s named Clifford Andrews has gone missing. Faith interviews Clifford, channeled by Novella, who, when asked why he stopped coming to work, replies, in a nod to the Boomtown Rats, “Maybe I just don’t like Mondays.” He eventually gets extremely angry, which adds to the sense of danger that surrounds the somewhat existential situation. “Are you planning anything, Cliff?” Faith asks. (The Boomtown Rats’ 1979 hit “I Don’t Like Mondays” was based on a school shooting that year in San Diego.)

But even as they worry about what might happen next, they occasionally break out into song and dance, putting on glittering costumes (by Montana Levi Blanco) and moving and grooving to Beyoncé as well as Rupert Holmes’s “Piña Colada Song,” the real name of which is actually “Escape.” Several characters who enter late, played by Dane Suarez and Jacob Orr, add further confusion to an abstruse plot that is never fully revealed while also providing a sense of finality.

Director Dustin Wills (Wolf Play, Plano) has trouble finding a narrative flow to the proceedings, which too often feel jumpy and random, although he does capture the overall sense of impending doom. Venturi (Mary Page Marlowe, These Paper Bullets!) and Malouf (A Bright Room Called Day, Intractable Woman: A Theatrical Memo on Anna Politkovskaya) form an engaging bond as the friends trapped in a dystopian near-future.

Tarker (Thunderbodies, Laura and the Sea), who grew up on the outskirts of an army base in Germany, has cited such wide-ranging influences on the play as Carrie Mae Weems’s “Kitchen Table Series,” Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen, and Ridley Scott and Callie Khouri’s Thelma & Louise, which accounts for the show’s unpredictable course and what it is inherently about, although it’s no coincidence that in August 2014, four months after Montag is set, authoritarian Recep Erdoğan will be elected president of Turkey.

Faith sums it all up when she says, “Most people — they have no idea. How scary the world is.”

Ray Bradbury’s Montag would no doubt agree.

STEVE MARTIN, HARRY BLISS, AND NATHAN LANE: NUMBER ONE IS WALKING

Who: Steve Martin, Harry Bliss, Nathan Lane
What: Book launch
Where: The Town Hall, 123 West Forty-Third St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
When: Tuesday, November 15, $68, 8:00
Why: Multihyphenate Steve Martin has made films and records and written plays, movie scripts, novels, children’s books, and tongue-in-cheek self-help tomes. He has now entered the graphic novel field with Number One Is Walking: My Life in the Movies and Other Diversions (Celadon, November 15, $30), with the help of black-and-white illustrations by cartoonist Harry Bliss. A follow-up to their 2020 cartoon collection A Wealth of Pigeons, the new book features scenes in which Martin looks back at his career for the first time in print. The title comes from a Hollywood trope; in one panel, Martin explains, “On a movie call sheet, the actors are listed numerically. The lead is number one, the second lead is number two, etc. I was slightly embarrassed on my first film, The Jerk, when I would head toward the set and the assistant director would trail me, transmitting into his walkie talkie . . . ‘Number one is walking.’” Martin points out that he was also “number one” on Bowfinger, Cheaper by the Dozen, and Bringing Down the House, but when he did Nancy Meyers’s It’s Complicated with Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin, each time he came on set he was horrified to hear: “Number three is walking.”

Longtime New Yorker cartoonist Bliss has illustrated such books as Joanna Cotler’s Sorry (Really Sorry), Doreen Cronin’s Diary of a Worm, and Alison McGhee’s Countdown to Kindergarten as well as writing and illustrating Bailey and Luke on the Loose. On November 15 at 8:00, Martin and Bliss will be at the Town Hall to discuss their collaboration; serving as moderator will be the one and only Nathan Lane, who appears with Martin in Only Murders in the Building. All audience members will receive a signed copy of Number One Is Walking: My Life in the Movies and Other Diversions, courtesy of the Strand.

ALBERT CAMUS’ THE FALL

Ronald Guttman brings his one-man show, Albert Camus’ The Fall, to the Huron Club at SoHo Playhouse (photo © Zack DeZon)

ALBERT CAMUS’ THE FALL
The Huron Club at SoHo Playhouse
15 Vandam St. between Varick St. & Sixth Ave.
Wednesday – Saturday through November 19, $51, 7:30
www.sohoplayhouse.com/the-fall
www.highbrow.net

Theater is all about the connection between audience and performer. During the pandemic lockdown, I watched hundreds of livestreamed or prerecorded shows, but being at home in front of your computer by yourself is not the same as sitting in a dark venue with other people as a story unfolds in front of you, told by live actors.

Among the memorable virtual plays I watched was Albert Camus’ The Fall, Alexis Lloyd’s adaptation of Camus’ final novel, known in French as La Chute. The book was published in 1956; Nobel Prize winner Camus, who also wrote A Happy Death, The Stranger, and The Plague, would die four years later in a car accident at the age of forty-six. The one-man show starred Belgian-born actor Ronald Guttman onstage in FIAF’s Tinker Auditorium on October 1, 2020, with an audience of twenty-five.

Guttman has been presenting various iterations of The Fall, which he first read when he was seventeen, for more than two decades; the latest version, directed by Didier Flamand, takes place in the Huron Club at SoHo Playhouse, a downstairs bar with a small stage. The audience is seated at round tables, several of which are only a few feet from the stage; there is also a row of barstools. The walls are plastered with images of women, in framed pictures and pages from magazines, along with a few travel posters; the stage features a backdrop of an Amsterdam canal. Guttman, wearing an old brown suit, his long white hair nearly reaching his shoulders, enters from the rear of the room, instantly making eye contact with just about everyone. It’s an exciting moment that can’t be experienced virtually. He walks onstage and then scans the crowd again, deciding which member of the audience will serve as a stand-in for the man his character addresses directly in the book, which is essentially a public confession by Parisian ex-pat former lawyer Jean-Baptiste Clamence, delivered to an unidentified person in a seedy dive bar in Amsterdam’s red light district.

The night I went, he selected me.

“Pleased to make your acquaintance. You’re probably . . . a businessman? Kind of a businessman? We all tend to be kind of, in almost everything,” he says to me at the start, carefully looking me over. “Let me guess, if you don’t mind. You’re in your fifties, you’ve been around, kind of . . . Your hands are clean, and you’re well dressed, kind of. You’re upper-middle class, but . . . sophisticated upper-middle class. And you find me amusing, which means you’re open minded. Kind of.” He didn’t do too bad, although I was wearing a jeans jacket and a black mask. (Masks are optional.) I would nod, shake my head, or laugh in response, confident the best thing was to say nothing.

He then turns to the rest of the audience and explains, “As for me, well, I’ll let you be the judge of that. In spite of my good manners, and my way with words, I am a regular of these sailors dives, here in Amsterdam. There’s only one thing simple about me: I don’t own anything. I used to, I used to be wealthy, back in Paris.”

Looking at me once again, he adds, “Which makes us compatriots, I imagine?”

Ronald Guttman is mesmerizing as Parisian ex-pat former lawyer Jean-Baptiste Clamence in The Fall (photo © Zack DeZon)

It’s a fabulous opening to this immersive experience, in which Clamence shares aspects of his private and professional life as he walks around the space, gets drinks from the bartender — who spends the sixty-minute show reading a copy of Playboy — and stops by each table to make sure everyone is involved in his tale. He moves and speaks with an eloquent, elegant poetry as he explores the nature of truth and humanity’s innocence, and its guilt. “I look trustworthy, don’t you think?” he asks. “If thieves were always condemned, honest people would always feel innocent, and that would be a disaster.”

He talks about his success with women, about his insufficiencies, about shame. “Think for a moment about your own life, search your own memories, maybe you’ll find something of that kind,” he says. “Something you’ll tell me later, one day.”

The centerpiece is a rainy November night when Clamence — a play on the word clemence, which means “forgiveness” — passes a woman on a bridge, then hears a loud splash in the river below, along with several screams, followed by silence. “I wanted to run to her, but I didn’t move,” he admits. He walks away, convincing himself there was nothing he could do. It’s a poignant parable for the choices we all have to make every day. Camus is forcing us to put ourselves under the microscope, facing what we’ve done, what we haven’t done, and whether there’s still time to confess and change, how to avoid being judged but still be punished.

“You can never really prove anybody’s innocence, but you can be sure we’re all guilty,” he says. “Every man bears witness to the crimes of all the others, such is my faith, such is my only hope.”

Guttman (Bauer, Patriots) is mesmerizing as Clamence; he embodies the character from the moment he enters the Huron Club. We are not so much watching a one-man show as listening to a stranger telling us about his life and how we can learn from his story as we, perhaps, become friends.

“I don’t have any friends anyway, not anymore. I only have accomplices. But I have a lot of them; they are the whole of mankind,” he tells everyone. He then looked right at me and said, “And within mankind, you. You’re the first of my accomplices. The one who is there is always the first accomplice.”

Consider me guilty as charged.

BLACK NOTEBOOKS: RONIT

Shlomi Elkabetz documents the making of Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem with his sister, Ronit

BLACK NOTEBOOKS: RONIT (CAHIERS NOIRS: RONIT) (Shlomi Elkabetz, 2021)
New Plaza Cinema @Macaulay Honors College
35 West Sixty-Seventh St. between Central Park West & Columbus Ave.
Opens Friday, November 11
panoramafilmsus.com
newplazacinema.org

About halfway through his award-winning documentary Black Notebooks: Ronit, director Shlomi Elkabetz says in a gentle voice-over, “And so it happened. And I just observe. The parting and final conversations, and last words, if there were any, passed us by, like in a film, above and beneath life, and silence in life is the same as the silence of death.”

Shlomi is talking about his relationship with his sister, Israeli film star Ronit Elkabetz, who can be heard saying, “It’s over.” Shlomi, pensively looking out a window, turns to face the camera and continues, “And the same silences are still there. You and I still speak.” Shlomi then switches to a close-up of Ronit as he concludes, “And we never parted.” He next cuts back and forth between his and his sister’s faces before he gets up and walks away, then shows Ronit sitting by herself at a table with an empty chair.

The companion piece to Black Notebooks: Viviane, Black Notebooks: Ronit is a powerful and often uncomfortably intimate behind-the-scenes story about the making and marketing of the 2014 film Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem, the final work of a trilogy that began with To Take a Wife and Shiva. The three films were cowritten and codirected by the siblings and star Ronit (Late Marriage, The Band’s Visit) as the unhappily married Viviane Amsalem. In Gett, Viviane has filed for divorce in a religious court, the three-man beit din, seeking to obtain a gett, which will grant her freedom from her husband (Simon Abkarian), who refuses to let her go.

Fighting the lung cancer that will eventually kill her in 2016 at the age of fifty-one, Ronit is having difficulty with the movie. She forgets her lines and prefers to spend time with her two young children rather than do yet another take of a scene. “I can’t stand being so exposed anymore,” she tells her brother, explaining that she has lost her desire to act. But Shlomi is determined to finish the film, helping Ronit do the work any way he can, bringing family to visit the set, feeding her dialogue, and giving her extra time between shots. Her costar Menashe Noy, who plays her advocate, Carmel Ben-Tovim, watches her closely, not always sure what to do.

At one point, on the media tour supporting Gett, Ronit is standing in front of a mirror as Shlomi, visible in the reflection, films her with a small handheld camera. “Why not give an interview? Am I afraid? Yes, I’m afraid,” she says. “And I don’t want my fear to run my life. I don’t want that to happen; right away I say to myself: Okay, I don’t want to cooperate with fear.” Through it all, Shlomi holds the camera at chest level as he gazes at his sister, neither looking through the lens nor worrying about the angle. Duality, mirroring, and life versus the depiction of life are the inescapable themes.

“We’ll do the most amazing things, despite and because of the limitations!” Ronit tells her brother, although it’s clear that it won’t be easy. As Ronit becomes sicker, Shlomi grows more poetic, but neither will give up the fight.

Directed by Shlomi and cowritten with frequent collaborator Joelle Alexis, Black Notebooks: Ronit does a beautiful job of paralleling Viviane’s battle to obtain a gett with Ronit’s real-life struggle against cancer. When one of the beit din judges says to her, “Accept your fate. There’s nothing more I can do,” Ronit, as Viviane, shakes her head and covers her face with her hands, a reaction that could be Ronit being given a fatal diagnosis. The audience roots for both women, fictional and real; one melds into the other, lending a hybrid nature to the storytelling.

When Shlomi speaks of casting Noy, he points out, “Here, Menashe plays Carmel Ben-Tovim, who tries to save Viviane. And what I see is myself fighting alongside you. And now, when I look at the two of you” — Shlomi cuts to a shot of Noy looking over at a solemn yet steadfast Viviane — “I see me and you. But when I try to plead for you . . . It’s too much for me.” It’s almost too much for us as well, especially with the sweeping melodramatic score, featuring original music by Dikla and Yiftach Shahaf in addition to the Israel Symphony Orchestra performing Bernard Herrmann’s “Vertigo: Suite,” from the Alfred Hitchcock film in which Kim Novak plays two different women whom Jimmy Stewart’s character tries to make the same.

Winner of the Israeli Ophir Award for Best Documentary, Black Notebooks: Ronit opens November 11 at New Plaza Cinema, with Shlomi Elkabetz participating in Q&As on November 11 at the 7:45 show with American actor John Turturro (Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink), on November 12 at the 7:30 screening with American novelist Nicole Krauss (Forest Dark, The History of Love), and on November 13 at the 4:30 show with Israeli actress Mili Avital (Dead Man, Prisoners of War).

ACTION SONGS / PROTEST DANCES

Who: Edisa Weeks, Taína Asili, Spirit McIntyre, Martha Redbone, Noni Byrd-Gibbs, Steven Jeltsch, Johnnie Cruise Mercer, Devin Oshiro, Brittany Stewart, Marýa Wethers
What: Action Songs/Protest Dances
Where: Kupferberg Center for the Arts, 153-49 Reeves Ave., Flushing
When: Saturday, November 12, 8:00, and Sunday, November 13, 3:00, $20
Why: Given the state of the nation, particularly following the midterm elections, it is a time for action and protest. On November 12 and 13, Queens College will be hosting the timely program “Action Songs/Protest Dances,” featuring an impressive lineup of musicians and dancers. The event was conceived by director and choreographer Edisa Weeks in honor of civil rights activist James Forman (1928-2005), who wrote such books as The Making of Black Revolutionaries, Self Determination: An Examination of the Question and Its Application to the African American People, and High Tide of Black Resistance and Other Political & Literary Writings.

“I started teaching at Queens College in 2010, which is also when the QC Rosenthal Library Civil Rights Archives acquired James Forman’s personal papers,” Weeks said in a statement. “I was incredibly excited as Forman was the first person I heard criticize capitalism as an exploitive economic system. I was a kid at the time, and remember feeling shocked, as I grew up playing Monopoly and believing that capitalism was good and the ‘American Way.’ Since 2010 I’ve been wondering how I can lift up James Forman’s voice, work, advocacy, and sacrifices during the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Then in 2020 the pandemic happened, followed by the murder of George Floyd and Brianna Taylor. I began wondering how as a choreographer I can engage with the protests that were happening across the nation and help address injustices in America. The Kupferberg Center for the Arts Incubator Project provided the opportunity to create ‘Action Songs/Protest Dances,’ which celebrates the life and words of James Forman, and through music and dance advocates for America to be a truly great nation.”

The event features original songs by Taina Asili, Spirit McIntyre, and Martha Redbone, with dancers Noni Byrd-Gibbs, Steven Jeltsch, Johnnie Cruise Mercer, Devin Oshiro, Brittany Stewart, and Marýa Wethers. Each show will be followed by a discussion with the composers and performers, moderated by Miles Grier on November 12 and Natanya Duncan on November 13.

NEIL GREENBERG: BETSY

Neil Greenberg will present the world premiere of Betsy this week at La MaMa (photo by Frank Mullaney)

Who: Neil Greenberg, Paul Hamilton, Opal Ingle, Owen Prum
What: World premiere dance
Where: La MaMa’s Downstairs Theater, 66 East Fourth St. between Second & Third Aves.
When: November 12-14, 17-20, $10-$30
Why: “Betsy makes use of projected written text that situates the dance within a two-pandemic landscape of COVID and AIDS, and within the also-ongoing crisis of racism and white supremacy,” dancer and choreographer Neil Greenberg explains on the Kickstarter page for his latest piece, premiering November 12-14 and 17-20 at LaMaMa. “I’m working to expose the cultural rootedness of any performance material in the conditions of its production. The use of text simultaneously gestures toward the kind of meaning-making encouraged by language while also intervening to allow for other perceptual possibilities.” The work features Greenberg, Paul Hamilton, Opal Ingle, and Owen Prum, with an original score by James Lo and Zeena Parkins and lighting by Michael Stiller. A former member of Merce Cunningham Dance Company and dance curator at the Kitchen and currently on the dance faculty at the New School, Greenberg made his La MaMa debut in 1987 with MacGuffin, or How Meanings Get Lost.

“Betsy will engage with the phenomenon of performance itself, in a play with the multiple relational possibilities between performers and spectators, and between a work and its spectators,” Greenberg (Partial View, This) continues. “Betsy will be presented with audience surrounding the performance arena, each viewer necessarily experiencing the performance materials differently due to their distinct vantage point, enabling spectators to watch the dance, themselves, and each other as they watch the dance together.”

EDWARD ALBEE’S A DELICATE BALANCE

Tobias (Manu Narayan), Claire (Carmen M. Herlihy), and Agnes (Mia Katigbak) are stuck with Harry (Paul Juhn) and Edna (Rita Wolf) in Albee revival (photo by Carol Rosegg)

EDWARD ALBEE’S A DELICATE BALANCE
Connelly Theater
220 East Fourth St. between Aves. A & B
Thursday – Sunday through November 19, $35-$75
transportgroup.org

When I let a friend know that I was going to see the first-ever off-Broadway production of Edward Albee’s 1966 Pulitzer Prize–winning A Delicate Balance, he responded that he felt he didn’t need to see it because Pam MacKinnon’s 2015 2015 Broadway revival, starring John Lithgow, Glenn Close, Lindsay Duncan, Martha Plimpton, Bob Balaban, and Clare Higgins, was “perfection.” That’s a shame, because this new adaptation, a collaboration between Transport Group and the National Asian American Theatre Company (NAATCO), continuing through November 19 at the Connelly Theater, is definitely worth a visit.

Directed by Jack Cummings III, the three-act, two-intermission show takes place on Peiyi Wong’s horizontal living-room set, which juts out from the stage, where only a tall, impressive staircase resides. The audience sits on either side of the living room, furnished in what might be called midcentury academic WASP, featuring a pair of well-used couches, a few tasteful Ottomans, a small table, an Oriental carpet, and, at the far end, a fashionable bar glittering with cut crystal glasses and decanters. The stage is slightly raised, and below it, running around on all sides, the audience can see a single row of hundreds of immaculately shelved old hardcover books. Below the bookshelf, on the floor, sit carelessly arranged empty glasses of all types, evidence of problems underneath the dysfunctional family’s pristine veneer. (The terrific props are by Rhys Roffey.)

There’s not a lot of warmth in the household, beginning with matriarch Agnes (Mia Katigbak) and patriarch Tobias (Manu Narayan). The play opens with Agnes explaining, “What I find most astonishing — aside from that belief of mine, which never ceases to surprise me by the very fact of its surprising lack of unpleasantness, the belief that I might very easily — as they say — lose my mind one day, not that I suspect I am about to, or am even . . . nearby . . .” Retired businessman Tobias responds, “There is no saner woman on earth, Agnes.” Everyone in the play has their own issues with sanity, which is splendidly conveyed in Albee’s stinging dialogue.

Tobias and Agnes live with Claire (Carmen M. Herlihy), Agnes’s cynical alcoholic younger sister. The couple has just found out that their thirty-six-year-old daughter, Julia (Tina Chilip), is on her way home, as her fourth marriage appears to be over. But before Julia arrives, their best friends, Harry (Paul Juhn) and Edna (Rita Wolf), show up at their doorstep, asking if they can stay with them for an undetermined amount of time.

Claire (Carmen M. Herlihy) and Tobias (Manu Narayan) wonder where it all went wrong in A Delicate Balance (photo by Carol Rosegg)

When Claire asks them why they left their house in the middle of the night, Harry says, “I . . . I don’t know quite what happened then; we . . . we were . . . it was all very quiet, and we were all alone . . . and then . . . nothing happened but . . . nothing at all happened, but . . .” Edna adds, “We got . . . frightened.” Harry: “We got scared.” Edna: “We were . . . frightened.” Harry: “There was nothing . . . but we were very scared.” Edna: “We . . . were . . . terrified.” Harry: “We were scared. It was like being lost: very young again, with the dark, and lost. There was no . . . thing . . . to be . . . frightened of, but . . .” It’s a chilling scene, something that everyone can relate to, a sudden, unexpected fear of the unknown, in this case despite apparent wealth and success. But it’s even more powerful in 2022, delivered by these actors, when anti-Asian hate is rising in the United States and around the world.

Empty nesters Tobias and Agnes take them in and put them up in Julia’s room, news that the daughter greets with loud anger and resentment. Agnes next considers how her life would have better if she were born a man, in which case her only worries would be money and death.

Many cognacs and martinis are sipped as the six characters — haunted by the memory of Tobias and Agnes’s deceased child — mock one another, promise not to reveal secrets, ponder nuclear annihilation, and try to get Claire to stop playing her accordion. “I tell ya, there are so many martyrdoms here,” Claire declares at one of numerous uncomfortable moments. “One to a person,” Edna says.

Through it all, the regal Agnes, who believes strongly in manners and how one presents oneself to others, tries to keep everything from falling apart. She tells Tobias and Julia without much fanfare, “There is a balance to be maintained, after all, though the rest of you teeter, unconcerned, or uncaring, assuming you’re on the level ground . . . by divine right, I gather, though that is hardly so. And if I must be the fulcrum . . . I think I shall have a divorce.” Tobias is stunned, so Agnes clarifies, “No, no; Julia has them for all of us. . . . We become allegorical, my darling Tobias, as we grow older.”

Transport cofounder Cummings III (Come Back, Little Sheba; Broadbend, Arkansas) guides the actors with a steady, assured hand, letting just the right tinge of mystery hover over the proceedings. The all-Asian cast — a first for an Albee play in New York — sparkles in Mariko Ohigashi’s old-school suburban-chic costumes. NYC treasure Katigbak is cool and calm as Agnes, while Narayan portrays Tobias as a stiff-backed man whose nerves threaten to explode at any moment. Herlihy and Chilip are vibrant and noisy as the rowdier relatives, while Juhn and Wolf are like shadowy specters as Harry and Edna, whose fears make our own palpable.

Albee, who would go on to win Pulitzers for Seascape in 1975 and Three Tall Women in 1994, based the sharply drawn characters on relatives of his; I can’t imagine what a dinner party would be like with them. Well, maybe I can. And I’ll be sure to invite my friend who shouldn’t have skipped this revival.

[On November 9, there will be a preshow Casting Conversation with casting directors Stephanie Yankwitt and Andrea Zee and NAATCO creative producer Peter Kim, moderated by NYU professor Michael Dinwiddie.]