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MADNESS AND MELODRAMA: FIVE EVENINGS AT THE CHAIN

Tamara (Snezhana Chernova) and Ilyin (Roman Freud) reunite after being apart for seventeen years in Five Evenings (photo by Alexandra Vaynshtein)

FIVE EVENINGS
Chain Theatre
312 West Thirty-Sixth St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
March 20-30, $49.87 – $71.21
www.fiveevenings.com

“No, this is madness,” Zoya says to Ilyin at the start of Jewish-Soviet playwright Aleksandr Volodin’s Five Evenings, a five-act multigenerational melodrama that is as relevant today as it was when it was first presented in 1959 at the Leningrad State Academic Bolshoi Drama Theater and later adapted into an award-winning 1978 film by Nikita Mikhalkov.

The work is now being revived by director Eduard Tolokonnikov and producer Polina Belkina for a thirteen-show run at the Chain Theatre, with Lana Shypitsyna or Snezhana Chernova as Tamara, Roman Freud as Ilyin, Ekaterina Cherepanova as Katya, Aleksei Furmanov as Slava, Inna Yesilevskaya as Zoya, and Dima Koan as Timofeev. The ninety-minute play (with intermission) will be performed in Russian with English surtitles; the set design is by Jenya Shekhter, with lighting by Ken Coughlin, sound by Denis Zabiyaka, and costumes by Natasha Danilova.

The story looks at two relationships, between the older Tamara and Ilyin and the younger Katya and Slava. In the second evening, they’re together at Tamara’s, and the two men have a chat while Slava sets the table, a scene that is representative of Volodin’s character development and dialogue:

Ilyin: See how nice it is? When there’s a white tablecloth and flowers on the table; it’s awkward to be petty, rude, or mean. The tablecloth should have creases from the iron — they bring back childhood memories.
Slava: How poetic.
Ilyin: One must live wisely, without haste. Remember, life’s book is full of unnecessary details. But here’s the trick: You can skip those pages.
Slava: Well, this is one page I don’t feel like reading. Aunt Toma can clean up when she gets here. After all, isn’t there a division of labor?
Ilyin: Don’t make me angry — get to work.

Katya walks in as Ilyin is teaching Slava how to box, declaring, “What are you doing, you slimy snake? What are you doing?!” A moment later, Ilyin says to Katya, “A demonic woman. Is that a manicure you’ve got there?”

Katya (Ekaterina Cherepanova) and Slava (Aleksei Furmanov) seek freedom and love in Five Evenings (photo by Alexandra Vaynshtein)

Born in Minsk and raised in Moscow after his mother’s death when he was five, Aleksandr Lifshitz — he changed his last name to Volodin because Lifshitz was too Jewish and was impacting his ability to get published — was drafted into the Red Army during WWII and was injured twice before earning a medal for courage. His first play, The Factory Girl, debuted in 1955 and traveled throughout the USSR. Five Evenings, which deals with time, suffering, resilience, and rebuilding, was followed by such plays as My Elder Sister and Do Not Part with Your Beloved in addition to several screenplays.

A champion of the individual who subtly rejected Stalinism in his works, Volodin died in 2001 in St. Petersburg at the age of eighty-two; his son Vladimir Lifschitz, professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin, revoked the copyright of his father’s plays in Russia after Putin invaded Ukraine. Lifschitz will be at the Chain Theatre to participate in a postshow discussion on March 20.

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

LILLIE P. BLISS AND BELLE DA COSTA GREENE: MAKING MoMA AND THE MORGAN

Lillie P. Bliss, seen here in a photo circa 1924, is subject of new MoMA exhibit (the Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York)

LILLIE P. BLISS AND THE BIRTH OF THE MODERN
MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art
11 West Fifty-Third St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Through March 29, $17-$30
www.moma.org

“Dear Miss Bliss,” Bryson Burroughs, curator of paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, began in a letter to Lillie Plummer Bliss upon her crucial support of the 1921 “Loan Exhibition of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Art,” “I salute you as a benefactress of the human race!”

Born in Boston in 1864, Bliss cofounded the Museum of Modern Art in 1929 with Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and Mary Quinn Sullivan. She died in New York two years later, leaving her collection of approximately 120 works by late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century French artists to the institution, including paintings by Paul Cezanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Georges Seurat, and Odilon Redon. She also encouraged the museum to sell pieces of her bequest as necessary to acquire other works, which led the museum to expand its collection with such masterpieces as Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night.

Bliss is celebrated in the lovely MoMA exhibit “Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern,” continuing through March 29. Organized by Ann Temkin and Romy Silver-Kohn, the show features such works as Cezanne’s The Bather, Seurat’s At the Concert Européen (Au Concert Européen), Marie Laurencin’s Girl’s Head, Amedeo Modigliani’s Anna Zborowska, Picasso’s Woman in White, and Henri Matisse’s Interior with a Violin Case.

The centerpiece is The Starry Night, which, if you’re lucky, you will get to experience on your own, as it’s hanging in a different spot from its usual place, free of the usual mass of people in front of it, taking photos and videos, obstructing one another’s clear views and peaceful contemplation of one of the most famous canvases in the world.

Installation view, “Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern” (photo by Emile Askey)

The show is supplemented with such ephemera as old catalogs, acquisition notices, pages from scrapbooks, photos of Bliss as a child, and a few rare letters, as Bliss requested that all her personal papers be destroyed shortly before her death in 1931 at the age of sixty-six. One key letter she sent to a National Academician is quoted in the MoMA book Inventing the Modern: Untold Stories of the Women Who Shaped The Museum of Modern Art, in which Bliss writes: “We are not so far apart as you seem to think in our ideas on art, for I yield to no one in my love, reverence, and admiration for the beautiful things which have already been created in painting, sculpture, and music. But you are an artist, absorbed in your own production, with scant leisure and inclination to examine patiently and judge fairly the work of the hosts of revolutionists, innovators, and modernists in this widespread movement through the whole domain of art or to discriminate between what is false and bad and what is sometimes crude, perhaps, but full of power and promise for the enrichment of the art which the majority of them serve with a devotion as pure and honest as your own. There are not yet many great men among them, but great men are scarce — even among academicians. The truth is you older men seem intolerant and supercilious, a state of mind incomprehensible to a philosopher who looks on and enjoys watching for and finding the new men in music, painting, and literature who have something to say worth saying and claim for themselves only the freedom to express it in their own way.”

Bliss did it her own way as well.

Clarence H. White, Belle da Costa Greene, platinum print, 1911 (courtesy the Clarence H. White Collection)

BELLE DA COSTA GREENE: A LIBRARIAN’S LEGACY
Morgan Library & Museum
225 Madison Ave. at 36th St.
Tuesday – Sunday through May 4, $13-$25
www.themorgan.org

“My friends in England suggest that I be called ‘Keeper of Printed Books and Manuscripts,’” Belle da Costa Greene told the New York Times in 1912. “But you know they have such long titles in London. I’m simply a librarian.”

Born Belle Marion Greener in 1879 in Washington, DC, Greene became the first director of the Morgan Library, specializing in the acquisition of rare books and manuscripts, a Black woman passing for white in a field dominated by men. Prior to her death in New York City in 1950 at the age of seventy, she destroyed all her diaries and private papers, but her correspondence with others paints a picture of an extraordinary woman breaking barriers personally and professionally as she came to be known as “the soul of the Morgan Library.”

Curated by Philip S. Palmer and Erica Ciallela, “Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy” consists of nearly two hundred items, from letters, photographs, yearbooks, and board minutes to illuminated manuscripts, jewelry, furniture, and books by Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William Butler Yeats, and Dante Alighieri in addition to canvases by Archibald J. Motley Jr., Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, Ḥabīb-Allāh Mashhadī, Albrecht Dürer, Henri Matisse, Jacques Louis David, and Thomas Gainsborough. Greene’s early holy grail was Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur; she was prepared to pay up to $100,000 for the work, printed by William Caxton in 1485, but won it for $42,000 at a 1911 auction.

Re-creation of Belle da Costa Greene’s office is centerpiece of Morgan exhibit (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Just as MoMA would not be what it is today without Lillie P. Bliss, the Morgan would not be the same without Greene. While at Princeton, she became friends with Morgan’s nephew Junius Spencer Morgan, who collected rare books and who recommended Greene to his uncle; J. P. Morgan hired her as a librarian in 1905, and she was appointed director in 1924. Her starting salary was $75 a month, but she was earning $10,000 a year by 1911.

The show is divided into sixteen sections, from “A Family Identity,” “An Empowering Education,” and “Questioning the Color Line” to “A Life of Her Own: Collector and Socialite,” “A Life of Her Own: Philanthropy and Politics,” and “Black Librarianship.” It details Greene’s childhood, her successful parents, her education, and her friendship with art historians Bernard and Mary Berenson; Greene had a long-term affair with Bernard, who had an open marriage with his wife. Following Morgan’s death in 1913, Greene worked closely with J.P.’s son, Jack, to expand the institution’s holdings. The centerpiece is a re-creation of Greene’s office, with her desk, swivel chair, and card catalog cabinet, all made by Cowtan & Sons, accompanied by a quote from a letter she wrote to Bernard in 1909: “I was busily engaged hunting up particulars of a certain book & half the Library was on my desk.”

One of the most heart-wrenching parts of the exhibit explores her relationship with her nephew and adopted son, Robert MacKenzie Leveridge, who died tragically in WWII.

The Morgan show is supplemented by three online sites that offer further information about Greene’s life and career: “Telling the Story of Belle da Costa Greene,” “Belle da Costa Greene and the Women of the Morgan,” and “Belle da Costa Greene’s Letters to Bernard Berenson.”

At the heart of it all is Greene’s dedication to her work. As she also told the Times in 1912, “I just have to accomplish what I set out to do, regardless of who or what is in my way.”

Like Bliss, Greene accomplished all that and more, in her own way.

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

LITERARY INSIGHT: KYLE THOMAS SMITH AND JOHN MADERA AT NYI MEDITATION CENTER

Who: John Madera, Kyle Thomas Smith, Josh Wexler
What: Writers’ Voices — An Evening of Literary Readings
Where: New York Insight Meditation Center, 115 West Twenty-Ninth St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves., twelfth floor, and online
When: Sunday, March 16, free with advance RSVP (suggested donation $15), 2:00
Why: “There’s an album called Classical Music for Creativity that is perfect, or almost perfect, for blocking out noise so you can read, write, or study. I suppose you could paint or draw or sculpt or design clothes to it too. You can buy it on iTunes for $7.99. I could look up the track listings and rattle them off for you, but the truth is, I don’t know which track is which, or who composed what, when it’s sounding away in my earbuds. All I know is that when I hit shuffle, there are no lyrics and no singing to distract me, and the orchestras’ crescendos are often all that it takes to bring what I’m writing to a crescendo. Theories like the Mozart effect say that just listening to classical music will raise your IQ. That kind of thing used to be hugely important to me when I was younger, but what’s more important to me now is that the music drowns out other people’s chatter. I don’t want anyone or anything intruding on my flow. Still, there’s too much cabin fever when you write at home past a certain number of days and libraries are so stuffy. Plus, you can’t bring drinks in. So, I go to cafes. I’ve been going to them ever since I was a teenager. It’s good to be around people, and even to hear a dull roar of their voices, just to know you’re a part of something larger than yourself and your confines. It’s even better if you can tune everybody out when you’re around them and for me, Classical Music for Creativity does the trick.”

So begins award-winning author Kyle Thomas Smith’s latest memoir, François (StreetLegal Press, 2024), the Chicago-born, Brooklyn-based author’s follow-up to the hilarious 2018 Cockloft: Scenes from a Gay Marriage and the poignant 2010 novel 85A. Smith will be around people on Sunday, March 16, when he appears at New York Insight Meditation Center to read from François, which features William Etty’s dramatic 1828 oil painting Male Nude, with Arms Up-Stretched on the cover. Smith, a practice leader in New York Insight’s Brooklyn sangha, will be joined by New York City–based writer, editor, and publisher John Madera, who will read from Nervosities (Anti-Oedipus Press, 2024), his debut collection of short experimental fiction that includes such stories as “Some Varieties of Being and Other Non Sequiturs,” “Anatomy of a Ruined Wingspan,” and “Notes Toward the Recovery of Desiderata.” Following the readings, Smith and Madera will sit down for a conversation moderated by bookseller, activist, musician, piano teacher, and suicide hotline director Josh Wexler. The event, hosted by the NYI Artist Salon and being livestreamed as well, will begin with presentations by other members of New York Insight’s community.

And just in case Smith is interested, among the works on Classical Music for Creativity are Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s Symphony in G Major, Wq. 182 No. 1: I. Allegro di molto, conducted by Hartmut Haenchen; several Vivaldi concertos for violin, cello, mandolin, and/or strings; and Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks, HWV 351: IV. La réjouissance, in addition to compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach, Arcangelo Corelli, Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven, and Jean-Philipe Rameau.

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

DAYS OF AWE: PHILIPPE LESAGE’S WHO BY FIRE

Aliocha (Aurelia Arandi-Longpre) and Jeff (Noah Parker) get close in Who by Fire

WHO BY FIRE (COMME LE FEU) (Philippe Lesage, 2024)
Film at Lincoln Center
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, Francesca Beale Theater
144 West Sixty-Fifth St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
March 14-20
www.filmlinc.org
www.kimstim.com

Winner of the Grand Prix from the Generation 14plus International Jury at the 2024 Berlinale, Quebecois writer-director Philippe Lesage’s Who by Fire (Comme le feu) is two and a half hours of angst, anger, and jealousy, a coming-of-age drama with a harrowing final fifteen minutes.

One of the special prayers recited during the Jewish High Holidays is the poetic psalm Unetaneh Tokef, which describes repentance, prayer, and charity and includes the following lines: “How many shall pass away and how many shall be born, / Who shall live and who shall die, / Who shall reach the end of his days and who shall not, / Who shall perish by water and who by fire, / Who by sword and who by wild beast, / Who by famine and who by thirst, / Who by earthquake and who by plague, / Who by strangulation and who by stoning, / Who shall have rest and who shall wander, / Who shall be at peace and who shall be pursued, / Who shall be at rest and who shall be tormented, / Who shall be exalted and who shall be brought low, / Who shall become rich and who shall be impoverished.” That quote, which was adapted by Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen into the 1974 song “Who by Fire,” captures the essence of the film, which opens March 14 at Lincoln Center, with Lesage participating in Q&As at the 6:15 screening March 14 and the 3:15 show on March 15.

The story unfolds at a secluded cabin in the gorgeous Canadian woods of Haute-Mauricie, where film director Blake Cadieux (Arieh Worthalter) has invited his former longtime collaborator, screenwriter Albert Gary (Paul Ahmarani), to spend some time. Joining Albert are his college-age daughter, Aliocha (Aurelia Arandi-Longpre), his seventeen-year-old son, Max (Antoine Marchand-Gagnon), and Max’s best friend, the shy, uneasy Jeff (Noah Parker). After a successful series of fiction films, Blake and Albert had a falling out, as the former turned to documentaries and the latter to animated television.

Blake lives with his editor, Millie (Sophie Desmarais), housekeeper, Barney (Carlo Harrietha), cook, Ferran (Guillaume Laurin), and dog, Ingmar (Kamo). Also arriving are well-known actress Hélène Falke (Irène Jacob) and her partner, Eddy (Laurent Lucas).

Over the course of several days, there is a lot of cigarette smoking and wine drinking, discussions about art and responsibility, sexual flirtations, and angry arguments between Blake and Albert that go beyond nasty, in addition to hunting, fishing, and white water rafting in the great outdoors, not all of which goes well.

Three uncut dinner scenes anchor Philippe Lesage’s Who by Fire

Who by Fire is anchored by three uncut ten-minute dinner scenes in which tensions flare, primarily involving Blake and Albert, including one in which oenophile Albert accuses Blake of switching out one of his wines. In two of the scenes, cinematographer Balthazar Lab’s camera remains motionless on one end of the long table, while in the third the camera eventually moves around to focus on Albert having an episode.

But at the center of the story is Jeff, who is awkward in his thoughts and actions. The film opens with Albert, his children, and Jeff driving on a deserted highway to be met by Blake’s helicopter. The first shot inside the car is of two young people with their hands on their knees; we don’t see their faces but can feel that at least one of them wants to touch the other. We soon learn that it is Aliocha — whose name in Russian translates to “defender of men” — and Jeff (the one who wants their hands and legs to meet). Later, after Max tells Jeff that he once caught his sister looking at S&M porn, Jeff makes a misguided play for her and, shunned, runs into the woods with his tail between his legs and becomes lost. After he is rescued, he grows mad at Blake when he catches the director and Aliocha in an intimate moment.

Most of the characters are either unlikable or not fully defined, so spending more than two and a half hours with them is a lot to ask. The cast does its job admirably, finding their way around some of Lesage’s occasionally meandering script. Cédric Dind-Lavoie’s droning score ranges from lilting to elegiac. A party scene that ends with the characters singing and dancing to the B-52’s song “Rock Lobster” starts out fun but quickly becomes something else, no mere break from the glum atmosphere.

Lesage (Les démons, Genèse) expertly balances the claustrophobic interior scenes by glorying in the beauty of nature, with outdoor scenes that celebrate the world outside. But not everyone is as comfortable as he is in those surroundings, leading to one tragedy that is followed by an even worse one, at least as far as manipulating an audience goes.

Who by Fire raises many of the questions asked in the Unetaneh Tokef, and he answers some of them while leaving plenty open to interpretation, as does Cohen when he asks, “And who shall I say is calling?”

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

JAMES JOYCE AND SEXUAL FREEDOM: EXILES GETS A RARE REVIVAL

Robert Hand (Rodd Cyrus) and Richard Rowan (Jeffrey Omura) are in love with the same woman in James Joyce’s only published play (photo by George Vail)

EXILES
Jeffrey and Paula Gural Theatre
A.R.T./NY Theatres
502 West Fifty-Third St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Wednesday – Sunday through March 15, $25-50
www.themaptheater.com/whats-on

Dublin-born writer James Joyce revolutionized literature with such novels as Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It is little known that he published a single play, Exiles, an intriguing and frustrating work that is currently having its first New York City revival in nearly half a century, staged by the MAP Theater at the Jeffrey and Paula Gural Theatre through March 15. (He reportedly destroyed his only other play, the five-act A Brilliant Career.) While the semiautobiographical work does not revolutionize live drama, it proves to be more than just a side note in Joyce’s history.

Written in 1914–15, Exiles was inspired by the author’s seven-month sojourn to Rome and features characters loosely based on Joyce himself; his wife, Nora Barnacle; his friend Oliver St. John Gogarty; and Vincent Cosgrove, a suitor of Nora’s. It takes place in the summer of 1912, nine years after journalist Robert Hand (Rodd Cyrus) and writer Richard Rowan (Jeffrey Omura) both fell for Bertha (Layla Khoshnoudi), but Richard won her heart — and also impregnated her, causing a scandal. Richard has just finished a book about Robert’s former fiancée Beatrice Justice (Violeta Picayo), who Richard was in love with when he met Bertha. Beatrice teaches music to Richard and Bertha’s son, Archie (Mattie Tindall), a happy child who runs around with glee.

Richard, a dour, humorless man, and Robert, a flamboyant, Byronic figure, are best friends and rivals at the same time. One afternoon Robert stops by Richard and Bertha’s home and finds Beatrice there. “Oh, but I’m sorry I did not know you were coming. I would have met you at the train. Why did you do it? You have some queer ways about you, Beatty, haven’t you?” Robert, carrying flowers for Bertha, ask Beatrice, who coldly responds, “Thank you, Robert. I am quite used to getting about alone.”

Beatrice exits, leaving Bertha with Robert, who poetically proclaims his desire for Richard’s wife, who drinks it all in, returning the flirtation. Robert asks if she can kiss her hand, and she holds it out for him. He asks to kiss her eyes and she obliges. He inquires about kissing her mouth and she replies, “Take it.”

Richard arrives, pretending he does not know what is going on between them. Robert has helped get Richard invited to a dinner with the vicechancellor, where they can discuss the open chair of romance literature at the university. They speak of Robert’s cottage, where he and Richard had some wild times with a bevy of women when they were younger. “It was not only a house of revelry; it was to be the hearth of a new life. And in that name all our sins were committed,” Richard says. Robert answers, “I have no remorse of conscience. Maybe you have.”

Having arranged that Richard will be busy that night, Robert makes a secret rendezvous with Bertha, imploring her to come to the cottage so they can consummate their desire. After Robert leaves, Bertha tells Richard everything; he wants to know every detail, and he listens without jealousy but with a touch of excitement, or at least as excited as he ever gets.

Calling Robert “a liar, a thief, and a fool,” Richard encourages Bertha to go. “You forget that I have allowed you complete liberty — and allow you it still,” Richard says, the first of many times he does so. Bertha gives Richard the opportunity to tell him not to visit Robert, asking if he will blame her if she goes, but Richard proclaims with little emotion, “No, no! I will not blame you. You are free. I cannot blame you.”

It’s a key moment in the narrative, complicating the audience’s relationships with the main characters in a drawing room morality play without a moral. Bertha does indeed go to the cottage — but so does Richard.

Robert (Rodd Cyrus) declares his love for the married Bertha (Layla Khoshnoudi) in Exiles (photo by George Vail)

Adapted and gracefully directed by Zachary Elkind, Exiles is a post-Victorian intellectual soap opera that evokes the love triangle in François Truffaut’s 1962 Jules et Jim and the partner-swapping in Paul Mazursky’s 1969 Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, tinged with the J. Geils Band’s 1980 hit “Love Stinks,” in which Peter Wolf sings, “You love her / But she loves him / And he loves somebody else / You just can’t win / And so it goes / ’Til the day you die / This thing they call love / It’s gonna make you cry.”

There may not be any tears in Exiles, but there aren’t a whole lot of laughs either. For all the freedom Richard keeps talking about, the adult characters are constrained by social mores, while the fun-loving Archie always has a smile on his face and a bounce in his step, too young to know of life’s many ills.

Cate McCrea’s set is a horizontal space with the audience sitting in three rows of rafters on either of the long sides. At each end is a white curtain and a chair, with two small, round ottomans in the middle, one oddly containing a pile of books and a few other objects. Amara McNeil’s lighting stays fairly bright throughout, so everyone in the audience is visible. Alyssa Korol’s contemporary costumes are highlighted by Bertha’s sexy flower-print dress.

Khoshnoudi is alluring as Bertha; it’s easy to see why everyone is in love with her. Omura, wearing wire-rim glasses that make him resemble Joyce, and Cyrus are each fine individually but don’t quite connect; it is difficult to imagine Richard and Robert were ever close friends. Picayo does what she can with the underwritten Beatrice, who is more of a plot device, while Tindall injects much-needed energy switching between Archie and Brigid, the Rowans’ servant.

Even at a trim ninety minutes, the show gets repetitive, but Exiles is no mere curiosity; it is an intelligent work written by a man at the peak of his abilities, exploring the idea of free love and open marriage in that brief window around the First World War, decades before they were to become hot topics in movies and on daytime television.

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

COMPLETING THE CHAIN: GARSIDE’S CAREER AT THE MINT

The Mint has resurrected Harold Brighouse’s 1914 political satire Garside’s Career (photo by Maria Baranova)

GARSIDE’S CAREER
The Mint Theater at Theatre Row
410 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 15, $39-$79
minttheater.org
www.theatrerow.org

I’ve written before about how one of the many joys of experiencing a work by the Mint Theater is not just the exquisite sets but the set changes; those in the know do not leave their seats during intermission but instead watch the transformation of the stage from one act to another, executed with expert precision, a choreographed dance that deservedly receives its own round of applause.

In the company’s latest show, a lovely revival of Harold Brighouse’s savvy 1914 political satire Garside’s Career, director Matt Dickson incorporates the set changes into the flow of the play; all the elements of Christoper Swader and Justin Swader’s scenic design are onstage through the entire 130 minutes (including intermission), piled in the back and the corners. As the story moves from Mrs. Garside’s working-class Midlanton cottage in Lancashire to Sir Jasper Mottram’s elegant house to Peter Garside’s extravagant Temple district home in London and back to the cottage, the furniture is switched out, mimicking Peter’s intense ambition, his past and future hovering around his present.

An engineer with a love of public speaking, Peter (Daniel Marconi) has been studying at night to earn a bachelor’s degree, with the support of his girlfriend, Margaret Shawcross (Madeline Seidman), a shy teacher who Mrs. Garside (Amelia White) believes is not good enough for her only child. Waiting for Peter to return home with his test results, Margaret tells Mrs. Garside, “I’m fearful of the odds against him — the chances the others have and he hasn’t. Peter’s to work for his living. They’re free to study all day long. Oh, if he does it, what a triumph for our class. Peter Garside, the Board School boy, the working engineer, keeping himself and you, and studying at night for his degree.”

Peter indeed has good news, explaining that he and Margaret can now marry, and he can be a journalist and go on lecture tours. “Peter, you didn’t do it for that!” Margaret declares, explaining that if they get married, she will have to give up her job as a teacher and that she is not in favor of his lecturing. Peter responds, “I did it for you. But I mean to enjoy the fruits of all this work. Public speaking’s always been a joy to me. You don’t know the glorious sensation of holding a crowd in the hollow of your hand, mastering it, doing what you like with it.”

Margaret makes herself clear, warning him of the intoxication of power, “I’ve seen men ruined by this itch to speak. You know them. Men we thought would be real leaders of the people. And they spoke, and spoke, and soon said all they had to say, became mere windbags trading on a reputation. Don’t be one of these, Peter. You’ve solider grit than they. The itch to speak is like the itch to drink, except that it’s cheaper to talk yourself tipsy.”

Peter’s boss, Ned Applegarth (Paul Niebanck), then arrives, with Peter’s colleagues Denis O’Callaghan (Erik Gratton) and Karl Marx Jones (Michael Schantz), not only to celebrate Peter’s success, but to convince him to run for a newly open Parliament seat, as a member of the Socialist Labour Party.

Denis spells it out: “We want you for another nail in the coffin of capitalism, another link in the golden chain that’s dragging us up from slavery the way we’ll be free men the day that chain’s complete.”

Effete siblings Freddie (Avery Whitted) and Gladys Mottram (Sara Haider) welcome Peter Garside (Daniel Marconi) into their elegant home in Mint production (photo by Maria Baranova)

Peter sees this as a great opportunity for fortune, fame, and more, but Margaret is hesitant, especially when Peter says that they can use their upcoming nuptials as an “advertisement” in the campaign. Ultimately, she decides that if Peter goes ahead with his candidacy, she will support the cause but will break their engagement, which delights Mrs. Garside.

Soon Peter is hobnobbing with the local wealthy Mottram clan: the haughty Lady Mottram (Melissa Maxwell), her flirtatious daughter, Gladys (Sara Haider), and her cheeky son, Freddie (Avery Whitted). They are initially enlisted by the opposition party to distract Peter from his campaign, but an attraction develops between him and Gladys, complicating matters, especially after he wins the election and heads off to London, his ambition growing by the minute, spiraling out of control.

The title character was inspired in part by Victor Grayson, a Liverpool carpenter’s son who became a fiery orator and controversial member of Parliament of whom Winston Churchill said in 1908, “The Socialism of the Christian era was based on the idea that, ‘All mine is yours,’ but the Socialism of Mr Grayson is based on the idea that ‘All yours is mine.’” Marconi (Sweeney Todd, The Mountains Look Different) portrays Peter with a gleam in his eye and a jaunt in his step; Haider (Partnership, Wait Until Dark) is enthralling as the sexy Gladys, while Seidman (Becomes a Woman, Partnership) excels as the steadfastly moral and independent Margaret, Gladys’s rival.

Garside’s Career is a solid, well-structured if somewhat slight comedy of manners with plot lines that relate to contemporary political situations, so it’s surprising that Dickson’s exemplary production is the New York premiere and, possibly, the first major US presentation since a Boston run in 1919. Brighouse also wrote the popular Hobson’s Choice, the oft-revived 1915 play that was adapted into an Oscar-winning 1954 film, the 1966 Broadway musical Walking Happy, and a 1989 ballet.

Thankfully, the Mint, as is its mission, has resurrected yet another long-forgotten gem with style and grace — and another memorable set.

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

DAKAR NOIR: PLAYING CHARADES AROUND Y2K

Dina Stevens (Mia Barron) involves Boubs (Abubakr Ali) in a complicated government plot as Y2K approaches (photo by Matthew Murphy)

DAKAR 2000
Manhattan Theatre Club
New York City Center Stage 1
Tuesday – Sunday through March 23, $79-$99
www.manhattantheatreclub.com
www.nycitycenter.org

“If we both describe the same thing at the same time, will one of our descriptions be more true than the other?” Isaac says to Nikolai in Rajiv Joseph’s 2017 time-leaping play Describe the Night. Later, Feliks tells Mariya, “You love to make up stories that are more interesting than what the truth is.”

The concept of “the truth” is also central to Joseph’s latest work, Dakar 2000, a gripping cat-and-mouse contemporary noir presented by Manhattan Theatre Club at New York City Center’s Stage 1 through March 23.

It’s December 31, 2024, and a fifty-year-old man (Abubakr Ali) walks onstage and delivers a monologue detailing a series of life-altering events that happened to him twenty-five years earlier, during the last few days leading up to Y2K, when some people thought the world might end.

Standing on a swirling ramp, he begins, “This is a story within a story, about a person within a person, in a time within another time. In a galaxy far, far away. All of it . . . is true. Or most of it, anyway. Names have been changed. Some of the places have been changed. Some of the boring parts snipped away. Some other stuff has been added to make it . . . theoretically more interesting. But otherwise all of it is almost entirely true.”

After telling us about a secret job he had that has taken him across the globe, he concludes, “The truth — the dumb, boring truth — is that this is mostly the story of a kid who just wanted to make a difference. And the truth is . . . he didn’t. I mean, I didn’t. Or I hadn’t . . . I hadn’t done much of any consequence, ever. Until I flipped my truck, just before the millennium . . . And met a woman who worked at the State Department.”

The narrative shifts to late December 1999, and Boubacar (Ali), known as Boubs (pronounced “boobs”), is a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal, stationed in Kaolack and building a fenced-in community garden in the nearby village of Thiadiaye. Sporting a bandage around his injured head following the accident, he has been called in to meet with Dina Stevens (Mia Barron), who identifies herself as the Deputy Regional Supervisor of Safety & Security for Sub-Saharan Africa. Dina watches Boubs carefully as he shares the details of what led to the crash; she then starts asking pointed questions that tear holes in his story. He keeps up what turns out to be a ruse until she accuses him of lying about his situation, and he ultimately admits to repurposing materials that were meant for other projects.

Threatening to send him back home to America, Dina, who is hell bent on avenging the murder of several of her friends in the 1998 embassy bombing in Tanzania, offers Boubs the option of performing an odd task for her instead, which leads to another task, and another, each one more mysterious and perilous — and bringing Boubs and Dina closer and closer. As Y2K approaches, Boubs doesn’t know what to believe, and neither does the audience.

Boubs (Abubakr Ali) and Dina Stevens (Mia Barron) grow close working together in Rajiv Joseph’s Dakar 2000 (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Dakar 2000 is a riveting thriller reminiscent of Stanley Donen’s 1963 Hitchcockian favorite Charade, in which Audrey Hepburn stars as an American expat unexpectedly caught up in a dangerous spy drama in Paris after her husband is killed and she is pursued by multiple men, one of whom (Cary Grant) claims he is trying to help her even though she catches him in lie after lie. Which is not to say that Barron and Ali have the same kind of chemistry as Hepburn and Grant, but the quirky relationship between Dina and Boubs is appealing. At one point, when they’re on Boubs’s roof, face-to-face, you want them to kiss but also want them not to, as neither one is ultimately trustworthy.

Two-time Obie winner Rajiv Joseph (Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, King James) and director May Adrales (Vietgone, Poor Yella Rednecks) keep us guessing all the way to the finale. Tim Mackabee’s turntable set moves from Dina’s office and a restaurant to the roof and a hotel bedroom, with small props occasionally surreptitiously added when it rotates from scene to scene. Shawn Duan’s projections range from a starry sky and outdoor African locations to text that establishes the precise time and location. A metaphor linking the 1997 Hale Bopp Comet to fate is confusing, but the choice of Culture Club’s 1983 hit “Karma Chameleon” as the song connecting Boubs with his ex-girlfriend is inspired, with Boy George singing, “There’s a loving in your eyes all the way / If I listen to your lies, would you say / I’m a man without conviction / I’m a man who doesn’t know / How to sell a contradiction / You come and go, you come and go.”

Ever-dependable Obie winner Barron (The Coast Starlight, Dying for It) effectively captures Dina’s enigmatic nature, representing an unethical government that holds all the cards. Ali (Toros) portrays Boubs’s younger self with a tender vulnerability that makes his actions understandable, although his overall characterization is ultimately a bit uneven, his voice too often switching pitches, his youth making him less than convincing as the modern-day Boubs.

Joseph has noted that Dina and Ali are based on actual people, but that doesn’t mean Dakar 2000 is a documentary play, particularly as words such as truth and lie show up over and over again. During the course of the work’s brisk eighty minutes, Dina tells Boubs, “You’re a good liar,” “Trust me, I wouldn’t lie to you about this,” and “Do you ever wonder if it’s all a big lie?” Meanwhile, Boubs wonders, “How could it be a lie?” when Dina questions humanity’s general consciousness.

Theater by its very definition presents a fictional version of reality, no matter how factual it might be. But in the case of Dakar 2000 and other plays by Joseph, we should be grateful that he “loves to make up stories that are more interesting than what the truth is.”

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