featured

SUNSET BABY

Nina (Moses Ingram) and her father, Kenyatta (Russell Hornsby), meet for the first time in years in Sunset Baby (photo by Marc J. Franklin)

SUNSET BABY
The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 10, $49-$119
212-244-7529
signaturetheatre.org

“History is bullshit. Only thing matters is the present. The past don’t do a damn thing but keep you chokin’ on bad memories,” Damon (J. Alphonse Nicholson) says in Steve H. Broadnax III’s blistering revival of Dominique Morisseau’s Sunset Baby at the Signature.

Family legacy is at the heart of the play, which debuted in 2013 from the LAByrinth Theater Company. It’s the early 2000s in East New York, where Nina (Moses Ingram), teaming up with Damon, dresses up like a street hooker to sell drugs and steal from people. Nina’s mother, 1960s radical civil rights activist Ashanti X, has died, leaving behind a stack of love letters she wrote but never sent to Nina’s father, Kenyatta Shakur (Russell Hornsby), while he was in prison. Academics, publishing companies, and the press are after the letters and are willing to pay good money for them, but then Kenyatta shows up at his daughter’s doorstep, claiming he just wants to read them.

Nina, who was named after singer, composer, and activist Nina Simone, doesn’t trust this man, whom she considers a stranger; they haven’t seen each other in decades since he left. But Damon, always on the lookout for a deal, is interested in hearing what Kenyatta has to offer.

Several times during the play, Kenyatta stands alone, making a camcorder video that is projected on three screens. (The stark projections are by Katherine Freer.) In the first one, he essentially introduces the topics that the story will touch on. He says, “Fatherhood. Complex. Complicated. An abstract concept. Not clearly definable. Stages. For sure there are stages. Levels of its affectiveness. Affectionless. Manhood. Confusion. Preparedness. Lack of preparation. Funding. Resources. Instructions. No instructions. Child support. Life being run by child support. Drama. Suffocation. Lots of suffocation. Guilt. Lots of guilt. Incompetency. Freedom. Freedom lost. Freedom never acquired. Fear. Lots of fear. Decades and decades of fear. Lifetime of fear. Lifetime of fear. Fear. Fear.”

Damon praises Kenyatta’s activist past and sees the two of them as somewhat similar, telling him, “The fuck-the-government, disrupt capitalism, develop-our-own-economy type shit. I’m with it. Believe in that cause myself. My line of work is a little different, but same principles.”

Damon has a son of his own with another woman; the relationship is one of potential abandonment, echoing Kenyatta’s abandonment of Nina. “When a man wants to spend time with his child, shouldn’t be not a goddamn thing that gets in his way,” she tells Damon. She dreams of saving enough money to leave New York City for Europe, and Damon seems ready to go anywhere with her, thinking they are an inseparable Bonnie and Clyde. But nothing for Nina has ever been easy.

Nina (Moses Ingram) and Damon (J. Alphonse Nicholson) make plans for a better life in Signature revival (photo by Marc J. Franklin)

Sunset Baby recalls Suzan-Lori Parks’s 2001 Pulitzer Prize–winning Topdog/Underdog, in which two brothers contemplate their fate in their cramped, tiny apartment in a rooming house, one a petty thief, the other a bluesman portraying Abraham Lincoln at an arcade, both holding on to a small inheritance their mother left them. Nina lives in a tiny, cluttered studio apartment with decaying walls and the bathroom down the hall; however, where Arnulfo Maldonado’s set for the recent Broadway revival of Topdog/Underdog was claustrophobic, penning the characters in like a kind of prison, Wilson Chin’s set for Sunset Baby is more open, suggesting that Nina may be able to escape and seize the freedom she so desires. Emilio Sosa’s costumes delineate Nina from the two men in her life; Kenyatta and Damon wear ordinary, everyday jeans, shirts, and jackets, while Nina puts on glittery and shiny red and blue tight-fitting outfits, fancy boots, and any of a number of long wigs, only occasionally relaxing on her couch without all the glitz of the street.

Songs by Simone, who died in 2003 at the age of seventy, are scattered throughout the show, including “Love Me or Leave Me” (“My baby don’t care for shows / My baby don’t care for clothes / My baby just cares for me”), “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” (“I’m just a soul whose intentions are good / Oh, Lord, please, don’t let me be misunderstood”), and “Feeling Good” (“Stars when you shine, you know how I feel / Scent of the pine, you know how I feel / Oh, freedom is mine / And I know how I feel”), the tunes moving from the background to the foreground, lifting through the theater, courtesy of co–sound designers Curtis Craig and Jimmy “J. Keys” Keys.

Kenyatta (Russell Hornsby) tries to explain himself in a series of videos in Dominique Morisseau revival (photo by Marc J. Franklin)

Broadnax III (Thoughts of a Colored Man, The Hot Wing King) lets Morisseau’s (Skeleton Crew, Confederates) rhythmic, potent dialogue sing; words flow out of Nicholson (Paradise Blue, A Soldier’s Play) like music. Hornsby (King Hedley II, Fences) is convincing as the complicated Kenyatta, who always seems to be holding something back. And Emmy nominee Ingram (The Queen’s Gambit, The Tragedy of Macbeth), in her off-Broadway debut, is a powerhouse as Nina, a woman desperate to break free of the legacy that weighs her down.

In a program note, the Detroit-born Morisseau writes that when Sunset Baby debuted at the LAByrinth, it was only her second professionally produced play in New York City, her father was still alive, and she was “not yet a mother. Only a daughter.” But this revival has given her new insight into herself and activist movements, “that they are complex and most people can only understand the trauma from the side they are on, never from the assumed opposition.” She also points out, “My father believed in revolution so much that he espoused it on a daily. Our answering machine message would end with ‘long live the revolution.’ It took many years for me to understand what that meant to him. And then what it meant to me.”

That explanation lends underlying meaning to the relationship between parents and children when Nina declares to Damon, “I don’t need to be part of a revolution. I don’t want a movement or a cause. I don’t want a hustle or no fast money. I want a home. I want somewhere I can walk into my space and not have to look over my shoulder or hold my breath. I want some kids of my own. . . . I wanna sit in the horizon somewhere and watch the sun rise and set. I never even saw a fuckin’ sunset! I am not alive here. I am not alive in this chaos — you hear me? I do not want this shit no more.”

Nina just wants to be understood in a world that insists on defining her, but in Sunset Baby, Morisseau gives her voice and has it rise to the rafters and beyond.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

DAEL ORLANDERSMITH: SPIRITUS/VIRGIL’S DANCE

Dael Orlandersmith’s Spiritus/Virgil’s Dance is a multimedia journey into fate and destiny (photo © HanJie Chow)

SPIRITUS/VIRGIL’S DANCE
Rattlestick Playwrights Theater
224 Waverly Pl.
Through March 9, $50, 7:00
www.rattlestick.org

In Dante Alighieri’s fourteenth-century epic The Divine Comedy, Publius Virgilius Maro, better known simply as Virgil, shepherds the Italian poet through the “Inferno” and “Purgatory,” two of the three realms of the dead. “Thou follow me, and I will be thy guide, / And lead thee hence through the eternal place, / Where thou shalt hear the desperate lamentations, / Shalt see the ancient spirits disconsolate, / Who cry out each one for the second death,” Virgil, who represents human reason, says to Dante. Virgil (70–19 BCE) was the author of The Aeneid, which tells the story of Trojan War hero and refugee Aeneas’s journey toward his fate and destiny.

In Spiritus/Virgil’s Dance, solo show master Dael Orlandersmith portrays a fictional character named Virgil who takes the audience at the Rattlestick Theater on a sixty-minute multimedia odyssey into death and destiny, fate and fulfillment.

The mood is set early, with such songs as Johnny Cash’s Nine Inch Nails cover “Hurt” and Mavis Staples’s “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” playing as the crowd enters the space, giving it a holy feel. Takeshi Kata’s set features six floor-to-ceiling string-curtained cylinders containing furniture: a chair, a table, a lamp on a stand. We soon learn that each one symbolizes a chapter in Virgil’s own epic narrative as they try to find their place in a world complicated by loss and loneliness.

“Have I done it right?” Virgil asks. “Have I used time — my time — right?” Have any of us?

Virgil wanders from cylinder to cylinder, sharing moments from their past. They grew up in the Bronx, hanging out at Woodlawn Cemetery and going to St. Barnabas. Their parents’ love of music led Virgil to become a deejay at a pirate radio station in the East Village. As the years pass, Virgil realizes they need something more. “I make a decision to make more money / Move to another part of downtown / Because / That must be the answer / Me / Thinking the money / Another place / Has got to be the answer,” they explain, but it takes their mother’s unexpected death and their father’s sudden illness for Virgil to take a long look at their life, significantly influenced by their friendship with funeral director Jimmy McHugh and hospice nurse Peggy Callahan.

Dael Orlandersmith looks at her past and future in beautiful one-person show at Rattlestick (photo © HanJie Chow)

Born in East Harlem, Orlandersmith has been staging one-person dramas, some semiautobiographical, most featuring the playwright performing multiple characters, since 1995’s Beauty’s Daughter, which earned her an Obie. She won the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize in 2003 for Yellowman. More recently, Forever was a deeply intimate show about the severely dysfunctional relationship between a daughter and her alcoholic mother, while Until the Flood explored the tragic story of the killing of Michael Brown at the hands of police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014.

Orlandersmith is masterful in Spiritus/Virgil’s Dance, a beautifully rendered production lovingly directed by Neel Keller, who has been working with Orlandersmith for four decades. As Orlandersmith says at one point in the play, it’s a “celebration of life and death.” She doesn’t make major shifts in tone or body as she switches among the characters, always wearing the same all-black outfit (the costume is by Kaye Voyce) as she walks slowly around the cylinders, which have a heavenly glow (the sensitive lighting is by Mary Louise Geiger), the people they represent prepared for the great beyond. Nicholas Hussong’s projections include leaves blowing in the wind and the subway speeding by, accompanied by Lindsay Jones’s tender original music and sound.

As Virgil discovers their true vocation, it’s like they have been given a giant hug from the universe, something we all seek — and something we all receive from Orlandersmith in this gently, enveloping experience. You’ll leave the theater thinking of the words Peggy shared with Virgil: “Live your life / Live it fully / Do not leave here regretfully.”

Spiritus/Virgil’s Dance continues at Rattlestick through March 9; the March 6 performance will be followed by the discussion “Music Lives On” with Javier Arau, Felice Rosser, Elliot Sharp, and Matt Stapleton.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

VESELKA: THE RAINBOW ON THE CORNER AT THE CENTER OF THE WORLD

Documentary traces multigenerational history of Veselka, including father and son Tom and Jason Birchard

VESELKA: THE RAINBOW ON THE CORNER AT THE CENTER OF THE WORLD (Michael Fiore, 2023)
Village East by Angelika
181-189 Second Ave. at 12th St.
Opens Friday, February 23
veselka.com
www.angelikafilmcenter.com/villageeast

Watching Veselka: The Rainbow on the Corner at the Center of the World is like having two meals, the first a solid lunch, the second a complex, emotional dinner.

Michael Fiore wrote, directed, produced, and edited the film, which starts by telling the fascinating history of the beloved restaurant, opened by Ukraine immigrants Wolodymyr and Olha Darmochwal as a candy store on the southeast corner of Second Ave. and Ninth St. in 1954. It expanded over the years to a full-service restaurant as it was handed down to Wolodymyr’s son-in-law, Tom Birchard, and then Tom’s son, Jason. Cinematographer Bill Winters follows Jason and his employees greeting customers and working in the back office and kitchen, where they make five thousand varenyky (pierogi) a day, three thousand latkes (potato pancakes) a week, and fifty-two hundred gallons of borscht a year.

“Jason Birchard has a hunger to feed people like his father and grandfather before him,” narrator David Duchovny explains. “But the feeding goes beyond food itself. Food should unite us, and it can transport us.” Duchovny grew up in the area; his paternal grandfather was from Ukraine, his paternal grandmother from Poland.

Jason initially was not interested in following in his father’s footsteps, but stuff happened. “I’ve worn many hats here as the proprietor of Veselka,” Jason, who has worked at the eatery since he was thirteen, says. “I never really envisioned a long-term future here in the business. And with the onset of the war, some days I need to give a little extra love to my Ukrainian staff, who have been unsure of what the future holds.”

In the first half of the film, we are introduced to Mrs. Slava, who fries the latkes; grillmen Dima Prach and Ivan; Jason’s nephew Justin, who oversees business development; pastry chef Lisa; potager chef Arturo; short order cook Max; operations manager Vitalii Desiatnychenko; muralist Arnie Charnick; and the pierogi ladies. Everyone is considered family at Veselka, from the employees to the customers. “The way that they treat people personally is a direct reflection about what makes this place so special,” Lisa says.

During the pandemic, Veselka, which means “rainbow” in Ukrainian, turned to outdoor dining; in one poignant scene, Jason and Ukrainian consul general to New York Oleksii Holubov can only shrug as Mayor Adams, eating borscht, pays more attention to the cameras outside than to Jason’s pleas for Hizzoner to support the restaurant industry.

But everything got more complicated on February 24, 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine; the second half of the film focuses on Jason’s efforts to help his staff, most of whom have relatives in Ukraine, some of whom are determined to stay, others considering coming to America. Several male employees feel guilty for not returning to Ukraine to join the fight. For every person who shares their personal story, another chooses not to because it’s too painful. Veselka collects donations of clothing and other goods and raises money through borscht sales and its World Central Kitchen Ukraine Bowl.

Dima wants to bring his mother and aunt, who are twins, and his father and uncle to the United States. Vitalii is trying to get his mother out of Ukraine but agonizes when he cannot get in touch with her for days. The Ukrainian national baseball team comes to Coney Island to play charity games against the NYPD and FDNY. Charnick designs a new mural celebrating Ukrainian strength. Jason puts off expansion plans in order to help the community. Employees gather to watch news reports and speeches by Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. New York governor Kathy Hochul stops by to find out what she can do.

Veselka began life as a neighborhood candy store opened by Ukrainian immigrants

Veselka: The Rainbow on the Corner at the Center of the World is a testament to the human spirit, a vivid depiction of a community in action, showing how individuals can make a difference in difficult times. Jason is an inspiration, a mensch who doesn’t believe in the word no; he has an inner drive to do what’s right for others. He feeds people’s souls and their stomachs.

Ryan Shore’s score can get treacly, but David Sanborn’s sax solos lift the music. Fiore (Floyd Norman: An Animated Life) captures the essence of Veselka, which is the heart of the Ukrainian community in New York City and a vital part of the East Village. The film is especially poignant as the war enters its second year and the US Congress is taking its time deciding whether to send more funding to Ukraine.

Veselka: The Rainbow on the Corner at the Center of the World opens February 23 at Village East, just a few blocks from the restaurant, making your choice of where to eat before or after the movie that much easier. The 7:05 screenings on Friday and Saturday will be followed by Q&As with Fiore and Tom and Jason Birchard.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

MUNICH MEDEA: HAPPY FAMILY

Caroline (Crystal Finn), Alice (Heather Raffo), and Caroline’s Father (Kurt Rhoads) explore an incident from their past in Munich Medea: Happy Family (photo © Julieta Cervantes)

MUNICH MEDEA: HAPPY FAMILY
WP Theater
2162 Broadway between Seventy-Sixth & Seventy-Seventh Sts.
Through February 25, $30-$100
wptheater.org

An undercurrent of Greek tragedy winds its way through Corinne Jaber’s debut, Munich Medea: Happy Family, a compelling but ultimately unsatisfying drama.

The seventy-five-minute play is told in a series of monologues delivered to the audience by Alice (Heather Raffo), her childhood bestie, Caroline (Crystal Finn), and Caroline’s Father (Kurt Rhoads), a well-known stage actor. They each have their place on Kristen Robinson’s two-level set: Alice stays on the right side, which has a chair and a sink; Caroline is on the left, with a chair and a bench; and Father hovers over them literally and figuratively, his curtained private room in his house above his daughter, his open theater dressing room above Alice. A staircase looms in the back middle, separating all three characters except when Father, who has been sleeping with Alice since the girls were sixteen, comes down.

They all live in Germany, where Father is starring as Jason in a production of Medea, the character who cheats on his wife, their two young children paying the price for his infidelity.

“When I got to the theater the show had already started / I waited / And watched / Jason abandon his wife / And Medea plot on vengeance / Torn by pain, all of them / Too much love, I thought,” Alice says.

Alice initially believes she is a willing participant in the sordid proceedings, while Father is unrepentant: “Why did you tell them about our secrets? Why share things with them that they cannot understand? / Throwing pearls in front of sows / Why tell them what is precious and daring and other? / This otherness that disrupts their little middle-class lives / That scares them / And fascinates them / Why? / When I was here to protect you / To hold on to our stories / To hold on to this world of ours / To not let them tear it apart / We need to shield ourselves from them / We are not like them / We are made from other stock.”

Meanwhile, Caroline recalls her terror of Father, with good reason. She remembers, “My mother would go to bed very early / Once my sister had been put to sleep / My father was at the theater / And when he wasn’t / He was in his room / His sanctuary, as he called it / Locked up / Not to be disturbed / His room next to my room / Far away from my parents’ bedroom / His room where he worked his lines and read / I’d hear him recite / Loud and strange noises / And then go quiet again / I don’t really know what he did in there / I was frightened by the mysterious room / And his presence next to me / Invisible / At eight pm he’d watch the Sportschau / I could always hear the introductory tune of the Sportschau / I hated that tune / It meant that we were alone now / My father with his television and me with my book in bed / Only a wall between us / All I wanted was to be at the other end of the corridor / Where my mother was / In another world / A world of happy family / I still don’t know what that is / Happy family / But it does exist / I know it does.”

Alice (Heather Raffo) reevaluates the past in debut play by Corinne Jaber (photo (© Julieta Cervantes)

Father quotes Friedrich Schiller, Georg Büchner, and Rainer Maria Rilke, cleans his feet as if he is some kind of Jesus, and insists that anyone in his situation would have done the same thing; he defends his love of Alice by using Jason’s words, specifically misogynistic ones at that: “There should be some other way for men to produce children. Women would not have to exist at all. And then humanity would be saved a lot of trouble.”

Twenty years after everything went down, Alice and Caroline meet up again, but they still speak only to the audience and never to each other. Throughout, there is not a single scene in which the characters interact.

Munich Medea: Happy Family is a coproduction of PlayCo and WP Theater, the latter specializing in the work of Women+. The title is misleading; it feels like the play could have been set anywhere, not necessarily in Germany, and the Medea references might make one expect a different kind of ending.

Finn (Birthday Candles, Plano) ably portrays the tightly wound Caroline, Rhoads (Julius Caesar, Off Peak) is appropriately beastly as Father, and Raffo (Noura, 9 Parts of Desire) is riveting as Alice, but Jaber and director Lee Sunday Evans (Oratorio for Living Things, Dance Nation) can’t bring the disparate parts together. Just as the characters never connect onstage, the play never connects with its title or its promise and feels strangely unfulfilled, neither adding to the contemporary dialogue surrounding sexual abuse nor adequately exploring its namesake’s theme of parents killing their children with their own unbridled desire.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA

Emmy nominee Tim Daly and Tony winner Daphne Rubin-Vega star in new production of The Night of the Iguana (photo by Joan Marcus)

THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA
The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Irene Diamond Stage
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Wednesday-Sunday through February 25, $81-$161
iguanaplaynyc.com

On “Night of the Iguana,” from her last album, 2007’s Shine, Joni Mitchell sings, “The tour bus came yesterday / The driver’s a mess today / It’s a dump of a destiny / But it’s got a view . . . / Now the kid in the see-through blouse / Is moving in hard on his holy vows . . . / Since the preacher’s not dead / Dead drunk will have to do!”

Tennessee Williams’s 1961 play, The Night of the Iguana, has always attracted star power. It began as a 1948 short story, then developed from a one-act to a two-act to a 1961 three-act Tony-nominated play starring Patrick O’Neal, Bette Davis, and Margaret Leighton, followed by a 1964 John Huston film with Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, and Deborah Kerr.

The play is now back in a messy revival at the Signature Center from La Femme Productions that makes it clear why the show has not previously been performed in New York City this century: It’s not very good.

Directed by Emily Mann, the show centers on Rev. Shannon (Tim Daly), a defrocked priest who is now an alcoholic tour guide exhausted with life. It’s the summer of 1940, and he brings his busload of Texas Baptist female schoolteachers to the ramshackle Costa Verde Hotel in Acapulco, run by recent widow Maxine Faulk (Daphne Rubin-Vega), who is more than ready to get back in the action. The leader of the teachers, Judith Fellowes (Lea DeLaria), is angry at the shoddy tour while also trying to keep the teenage Charlotte (Carmen Berkeley) away from Shannon. Also at the hotel are aging poet Jonathan Coffin (Austin Pendleton) and his granddaughter, Hannah (Jean Lichty), who is caring for him; Pedro (Bradley James Tejeda) and Pancho (Dan Teixeira), who work for Maxine; and Frau Fahrenkopf (Alena Acker) and Herr Fahrenkopf (Michael Leigh Cook), a pair of Nazis traipsing around the place. Shannon has the bus keys, so Hank, the bus driver (Eliud Garcia Kauffman), can’t take off without the guide, who might be replaced by his colleague Jake (Keith Randolph Smith).

The Night of the Iguana takes place at a ramshackle Acapulco hotel (photo by Joan Marcus)

It’s a hot and sweaty day, but the play is cold and distant. The actors feel like they’re in different shows, never forming a solid whole. Beowulf Boritt’s invitingly decrepit set is wasted.

The Night of the Iguana came at the end of Williams’s most fertile period, the fifteen years in which he wrote The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Orpheus Descending, Suddenly Last Summer, and Sweet Bird of Youth. It was part of a downward spiral of poorly reviewed and attended shows that still attracted big stars but often had to cut their runs short. The Night of the Iguana is one of those Williams plays that everyone has heard of but does not live up to the hype.

Mitchell’s lines capture it best: “The night is so fragrant / These women so flagrant / They could make him a vagrant / With the flick of a shawl. / The devil’s in sweet sixteen / The widow’s good looking but she gets mean / He’s burning like Augustine / With no help from God at all.”

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

ON SET WITH THEDA BARA

David Greenspan portrays four roles in one-man On Set with Theda Bara (photo by Emilio Madrid)

ON SET WITH THEDA BARA
The Brick
579 Metropolitan Ave.
Monday – Saturday through March 16, $25-$89
transportgroup.org

Bushwick-based playwright Joey Merlo became obsessed with Theda Bara after his sisters searched online for his celebrity doppelgänger and it turned out to be the silent film star known as the Vamp. His infatuation led to the one-person genderqueer show On Set with Theda Bara, running at the Brick through March 9. (The play, which Merlo wrote while he was bedridden during his last semester at Brooklyn College, premiered at the 2023 Exponential Festival; Transport Group and Lucille Lortel Theatre have teamed up to present this encore run.)

Bara, whose name is an anagram for “Arab death,” was born Theodosia Burr Goodman in 1885 and died in 1955 at the age of sixty-nine. But in Merlo’s sixty-five-minute play, she is alive and well at 139, living in an upstate mansion. Six-time Obie winner David Greenspan portrays all four characters: Detective Finale; his adopted daughter, Iras; Ulysses, a Tennessee Williams–esque southerner who started playing the organ at screenings of Bara’s films when he was twelve; and the Vamp herself.

Frank J. Oliva’s set features a long, narrow table covered in black cloth, where thirty audience members sit, advised to not place any items on it, including their hands and elbows. At either end is one empty chair where Greenspan occasionally sits, behind each of which is a shadowy mirror. Twenty other patrons are on stools against the brick walls on opposite sides of the table; above the table is a row of low-hanging lamps, and there are two additional creepy lights on the walls. Greenspan wears old-fashioned slacks, a white shirt, and a red vest, vaguely resembling a carnival barker. (The lighting is by Stacey Derosier, with costume by Avery Reed and ominous sound by Brandon Bulls.) It all makes for a kind of eerie noir séance.

The muddled plot is difficult to parse out, so don’t try too hard. The sixteen-year-old Iras is missing, and Finale is determined to find her. She uses the pronouns they/them, which confuses Finale, who is also having a hard time with his husband, Richie. “The evening of February twenty-ninth I knew something was wrong because all I heard was silence,” he says about coming home from work and not hearing Iras “doing her Tick Tocks or giggling with her girlfriends.” His reference to silence being a problem evokes Bara’s career; she appeared in more than forty silent films between 1914 and 1926, but most were destroyed in a 1937 fire, and she never made a sound picture.

Duality is central to On Set with Theda Bara at the Brick (photo by Emilio Madrid)

Ulysses, who was sexually abused as a child, moves in with Theda, a campy vampire queen and modern-day Norma Desmond who enjoys watching videos of herself on YouTube and reading the comments section. “I know I’m a little twisted. I’m a very self-aware person. But sometimes I like to see myself,” she says. “These little clips from my lost films. All that exist of my former self. I look daring and surreal. Who doesn’t like to remember. . . .”

Greenspan, telling stories like Dracula, is mesmerizing in this tour de force, bending and curving his face and his fingers as he switches between roles, each with its own different vocal twang. Director Jack Serio, who has recently helmed intimate versions of Uncle Vanya and The Animal Kingdom for a limited audience, makes full use of the space; Greenspan (Four Saints in Three Acts, Strange Interlude) stops in front of the mirrors, hides against the wall, and glides across the table with a graceful majesty. However, none of that helps distill the raggedy plot.

The play is an enigma, as was Bara herself. “My life is one big lie,” she says in the play. “But so are the movies. . . . The truth is so subjective anyway. What’s wrong with a little lie!” One of cinema’s first sex symbols, she was married to one of her directors for more than thirty years, but they never had children. She was born in Cincinnati but her studio promoted her as being from exotic Egypt, the daughter of an artist and an Arabian princess.

Even her gender identity is debated in the show. “People used to think I looked like a man. I hated those sneering comments. At first. But then I came to enjoy the criticism,” she admits. “Yes, I look like a man! Because men have power! Maybe I am a man! Maybe I’m not. You’re mine now you’re mine. Kiss me, you fool! or was it Kiss me, my fool? I can never remember the line.”

The famous line comes from her 1915 psychological drama A Fool There Was, which can be watched in full on YouTube. It’s a splendid follow-up to On Set with Theda Bara.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

ALONZO KING LINES BALLET: DEEP RIVER

Alonzo King LINES Ballet makes Lincoln Center debut with Deep River

Who: Alonzo King LINES Ballet
What: Lincoln Center debut
Where: Rose Theater, Broadway at West Sixtieth St., fifth floor
When: February 22-24, choose-what-you-pay (suggested admission $35), 7:30
Why: San Francisco–based Alonzo King LINES Ballet makes its Lincoln Center debut this week with Deep River, an evening-length piece that kicked off its fortieth anniversary season last year. The title is taken from the popular spiritual performed by such singers as Marian Anderson, Paul Robeson, Odetta, Johnny Mathis, Mahalia Jackson, and Beverly Glenn-Copeland. The sixty-five-minute work features an original score, incorporating Jewish, Indian, and Black traditions, by multidisciplinary artist and longtime King collaborator Jason Moran and is sung live onstage by vocalist Lisa Fischer, alongside music by Pharoah Sanders, Maurice Ravel, and James Weldon Johnson, who wrote “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”

The company consists of dancers Babatunji, Adji Cissoko, Madeline DeVries, Theo Duff-Grant, Lorris Eichinger, Shuaib Elhassan, Joshua Francique, James Gowan, Ilaria Guerra, Maya Harr, Marusya Madubuko, Michael Montgomery, and Tatum Quiñónez, with lighting by Jim French, costumes and sets by Robert Rosenwasser, and sound by Philip Perkins. King, who was born in Georgia to parents who were staunch civil rights activists, notes in a statement about Deep River, “Love is the ocean that we rose from, swim in, and will one day return to.”