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DELAYED GRATIFICATION, IMMEDIATE PLEASURE, OR . . . : THORNTON WILDER’S THE EMPORIUM AT CLASSIC STAGE

Thornton Wilder’s The Emporium has been reconstructed at Classic Stage (photo by Marc J. Franklin)

THORNTON WILDER’S THE EMPORIUM
Classic Stage Company, Lynn F. Angelson Theater
136 East 13th St. between Third & Fourth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 7, $46-$116
www.classicstage.org

In his Pulitzer Prize–winning plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, Thornton Wilder offers his unique perspective on America and the human condition, two lasting works that are revived and reinterpreted regularly. So when playwright Kirk Lynn began doing extensive research on Wilder after seeing David Cromer’s revelatory 2008 version of Our Town at Barrow St. and discovered an unfinished play, called The Emporium, he knew he had to complete it. And with the permission of the Wilder estate, he did just that.

After opening in Houston in 2024, the production moved this spring to Classic Stage, another exploration of the American dream that could be told only by Wilder — and Lynn, who fills the play with self-referential meta-commentary that can be both fun and confusing.

“‘Terrible news. It’s cancelled. Go home.’” Those are the first lines of this play. It’s called: The Emporium. It was written by Thornton Wilder. I want you to know the first lines, so you’ll know when it begins,” John (Joe Tapper) says at the start. “This is a preface. Like the front of book.” He gives a short biography of Wilder, followed by a summary of Lynn’s discovery of the long-lost work, which had twice been announced that it was going to Broadway with Montgomery Clift.

Lynn and director Rob Melrose’s adaptation shifts unevenly between the fictional setting of the play, about John, an orphan boy raised in the country who is trying to make it in the big city, represented by two competing department stores, and the making of the play itself. Early on there are tables filled with what represent Thornton’s pages, reminding us how Lynn had to construct the narrative. John reaches into one of the boxes and lifts out a baby. “So playful and strange. It’s definitely Wilder’s. How could he abandon it?” he asks.

The story then kicks off, the tale of that infant, who works on a farm and then heads out in search of his dream, deciding whether to work at the Emporium, a classy if stuffy story that believes in quality and history and cares about its customers, or Craigie’s, a more populist company that has parties all the time and demands little from its employees or consumers. The Emporium’s color is blue, while Craigie’s is green, the latter more interested in money than people. “You want regular, go work at Craigie’s Departmental. Nothing to distract you and everything’s perfectly clear,” Mrs. Graham (Candy Buckley), the farmer who raised him with her husband, tells John. “At five o’clock you can go home. Yes, sir, you can work at Craigie’s fifty years and any night you like, you can go home and hang yourself.”

A talented cast and cool mannequins breathe life into unfinished Thornton Wilder play (photo by Marc J. Franklin)

Things get complicated when John falls for Emporium counter girl Laurencia (Cassia Thompson), who needs to find out what the word astroclated means so she can understand a note she got from the firm’s mysterious directors, Mr. Gillespie and Mrs. Schwingemeister. Meanwhile, Mrs. Frisbee (Mahira Kakkar), Miss Coley (Eva Kaminsky), and Mr. Benjamin (Patrick Kerr) from the Retreat for Retired Department Store Workers have arrived to see the play and offer their thoughts, seated on the stage. “You don’t belong here!” orphanage superintendent Mrs. Foster (Buckley) declares. “We won’t be in the way,” Mr. Benjamin promises, coughing. Mr. Foster (Derek Smith) then asserts, “Enough! We’ll try to do something with you at intermission. Until then, put your chairs against the wall and show me you can act like an audience. It’s hard enough to get the attention of these juvenile pre-incarcerates —” referring to the regular audience.

A bottle of tincture serves as varying kinds of liquids. Characters discuss the differences between immediate pleasure, delayed gratification, and a third thing. Audience members are asked to bleat like sheep and are yelled at. A complaints/donation box is passed around. A vote about what happens next in the play is taken during intermission. More is learned about Thornton Wilder. And the future of the Emporium — the store and the play — is in jeopardy.

The Emporium is a bouncy, jubilant, and confounding show. Walt Spangler’s set is anchored by a large neon-style sign of the logo of the title store, Alejo Vietti’s costumes have a timeless quality, and the cast has a ball, particularly Tony nominee Smith (The Green Bird, The Lion King) and Drama Desk nominee Buckley (The Petrified Prince, Thoroughly Modern Millie), who plays multiple roles with comic delight.

Lynn and Melrose (The Servant of Two Masters, Born with Teeth) keep the audience involved throughout this absurdist satire of life in America centered around business in the big city. It’s not going to win a Pulitzer, and it’s not all Wilder, but it’s a charming piece of theater, whether you’re looking for delayed gratification, immediate pleasure, or whatever that third thing may be.

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

BUILDING COMMUNITY AMID COLONIZATION: INDIAN PRINCESSES AT THE ATLANTIC

Eliana Theologides Rodriguez’s Indian Princesses takes place at a camp where white fathers try to bond with their children of color (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

INDIAN PRINCESSES
Atlantic Theater Company, Linda Gross Theater
336 West 20th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 7, $25-$131.50
atlantictheater.org

In November 2018, I was fully delighted by Larissa FastHorse’s The Thanksgiving Play, a wild and woolly farce that took on important indigenous issues — in real life and on the stage — as a school attempts to put on a politically correct show about pilgrims and Native Americans. Nearly five years later, the play, in a different production, premiered on Broadway, where it lost all its charm and inventiveness, instead feeling like so many dried-out leftovers.

Eliana Theologides Rodriguez’s Indian Princesses falls somewhere in between, with wholly original and exciting scenes tempered by awkward turns that throw too many ingredients into the stuffing.

The title comes from a YMCA camp program, begun in 1926 as Y-Indian Guides, renamed Indian Princesses in the mid-twentieth century, and rebranded Adventure Guides in the early 2000s, tailored to create bonds between white fathers and their Native American children. Rodriguez, who is of Yaqui and Tewa heritage on her mother’s side and identifies as Mexican, went to the camp with her father in 2008 when she was ten, during the financial crisis, after he had to take a job out of state. “I was experiencing a coming-of-age moment that I didn’t have the words to explain and my dad didn’t have the tools to understand,” Rodriguez says in a playwright note. “Even the program’s title is a pernicious fiction: The so-called ‘Indian Princess’ is an archetype invented to justify the ongoing brutalities of colonization, acting as a foil to her people and an ally to her colonizers.”

In the play, a new “tribe” has been formed, consisting of three white fathers, one white grandfather, and five girls of color, from nine to twelve years old. The “chief” is Glen (Frank Wood), an evangelical Christian attending with his granddaughter, Samantha (Haley Wong), who is half-Japanese and worries about committing sins. The recently widowed Mac (Pete Simpson) is a conservative construction worker who has brought his half-Mexican daughter, Andi (Rebecca Jimenez), who is keeping the death of her mother from the other girls. The recently unemployed Wayne (Ben Beckley) has let his own issues get in the way of his relationship with his adopted daughter, Maisey (Lark White), who was born in Africa and may have supernatural powers passed down from her ancestors. And the kind, PC Chris (Greg Keller) is there with his step-daughters, Lily (Anissa Marie Griego), who is determined to play Penny Pingleton in Hairspray despite being half-Yaqui and half-Tewa, and Hazel (Serenity Mariana), who feels neglected and inferior.

Glen is the cheerleader as they go through various exercises, including passing around a talking stick, participating in arts and crafts, and taking on their archenemy camp in a talent competition, putting on America the Beautiful the Play.

Five adults portray girls between the ages of nine and twelve in Indian Princesses (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

In their off-Broadway debuts, Rodriguez and director Miranda Cornell tread similar ground as such other works as Eureka Day, Grief Camp, The Wolves, and the aforementioned Thanksgiving Play, with mixed success. The general themes of racism, classism, building community through assimilation, the rewriting of history, cultural appropriation, and finding one’s identity are dealt with in intelligent and often potent ways, but there are a lot of bumps in the road, from the staging — it’s too often not clear where the characters are, especially when it comes to the woods the girls like to hang out in — to genre clichés.

The cast is strong, particularly character actors supreme Keller (The Thanksgiving Play, Shhhh), Wood (Sideman, Toros), and Simpson (Infinite Life, Is This A Room), with Wong (The Welkin, Antigone), Jimenez (The Other Americans, Our Dear Dead Drug Lord), and White (Covenant, Grief Camp) standing out among the adults portraying the children.

A coproduction of the Atlantic and Rattlestick, the play is probably about fifteen or twenty minutes too long, with some scenes either dragging or becoming too chaotic, especially in the second half as the conclusion approaches, and several of the characters are not quite fully drawn, with some connecting better than others. But Rodriguez is tackling an important subject while introducing the audience to this surprising camp, which is simply fascinating.

America “stole our heritage from us, then bastardized, stylized, and sold that heritage back to us generations later as a ‘culturally appreciative’ family bonding activity,” Rodriguez continues in her program note, shining a light for all of us to see.

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

MARGARET CHASE SMITH AND “A DECLARATION OF CONSCIENCE”: A SIMPLE HERSTORY AT THE TANK AND TORN PAGE

Who: Jocelyn Kuritsky, Kate MacCluggage, Jake Hart, Colleen Werthmann, Cecil Baldwin, Carl Raymond
What: Special live radio play presentation of A Simple Herstory
Where: The Tank, 312 West Thirty-Sixth St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.; after-party at Torn Page, 435 West Twenty-Second St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
When: Sunday, June 7, radio play $28, 3:00, after-party free (suggested donation $13), 6:00
Why: In its award-winning inaugural season, actor, creator, producer, host/interviewer, and occasional designer Jocelyn Kuritsky’s audio fiction podcast, A Simple Herstory, explored the life and career of Victoria Woodhull, the suffragist who was the first woman to run for president, in 1872, representing the Equal Rights Party, battling incumbent commander in chief Ulysses S. Grant and newspaper editor and publisher Horace Greeley.

The upcoming second season turns its attention to Maine’s Margaret Chase Smith, who served in the House from 1940 to 1949 and in the Senate from 1949 to 1973. She ran for president in 1964 in the Republican primary, which was won by Barry Goldwater. Smith is most well remembered for her June 1, 1950, fifteen-minute speech delivered on the Senate floor that concluded with “A Declaration of Conscience,” a five-point message aimed at Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunt but still rings true today. “It is high time that we stopped thinking politically as Republicans and Democrats about elections and started thinking patriotically as Americans about national security based on individual freedom,” she said, supported by six other senators.

On June 7 at 3:00, a segment from season two of A Simple Herstory will be performed live at the Tank, featuring Kuritsky (Woodshed Collective), Kate MacCluggage (Left on Tenth), Jake Hart (Big George), Colleen Werthmann (Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play), and Cecil Baldwin (Welcome to Night Vale), directed by Meghan Finn (A Trojan Woman, Mahinerator) and written and developed by Jonathan A. Goldberg (Real Dead Ghosts, Deus Machina Ex or Eleanor Roosevelt vs. the God Machine). Don’t worry about the serious, and relevant, subject matter; Kuritsky promises “a fast, funny, inventive recounting of history that refracts the complexity and tension of politics through a live radio play experience.”

The show, being held in conjunction with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Tribeca Festival, will be followed by an after-party at Torn Page, where the creative team will discuss the project with moderator Carl Raymond, creator and host of the podcast The Gilded Gentleman.

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

THE BEST PLACE IN THE WORLD: XHLOE & NATASHA AT ARS NOVA

Natasha Roland and Xhloe Rice star in And Then the Rodeo Burned Down at Ars Nova (photo by Ben Arons)

AND THEN THE RODEO BURNED DOWN
Ars Nova
511 West 54th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Monday – Friday through July 10, $43.67 – $80.12
arsnovanyc.com
www.xhloeandnatasha.com

“This is the best place in the world,” Dale says several times in Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland’s enchanting, exhilarating And Then the Rodeo Burned Down. Dale is not just talking about the rodeo, where he is a clown who dreams of becoming a cowboy, but is referring to America itself — and how it may be necessary to burn it down and start all over again.

In 2022, the New York City–based duo known as Xhloe and Natasha won the Edinburgh Fringe First Award for Rodeo, then took home the prize in 2023 for What If They Ate the Baby?, a satire about being a conventional wife in 1950s America, and again in 2024 for A Letter to Lyndon B Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First, which captures the America of the late 1960s as well as today, as politics, religion, and the military become intertwined and the everyday struggles of the common people are completely misunderstood or purposely ignored.

Last month they received a special Drama Desk Award for Baby?, which ran at SoHo Playhouse in the fall, and Letter to LBJ, which played there last June. They were cited for “their absurdist sensibilities [that] test the parameters of several genres and movement styles . . . and invite new appreciation for all of them.”

Rodeo, which opens today at Ars Nova for a run that has already been extended to July 2, continues their testing of parameters in yet another brilliant, endlessly inventive, and absolutely delightful work of theatrical wonder.

The fun begins with the program itself, which, on one page, identifies Natasha and Xhloe, in clown makeup and western garb, as “prime suspects” in an unnamed crime and offers a reward if they are found alive. “We will not be held liable for any hijinks, shenanigans, or mishaps you may or may not encounter in pursuit of these delinquents,” the poster proclaims.

Emmie Finckel has transformed the space into a welcoming one-ring circus centered by a platform with a star in the middle, a small animal gate, and banners and flags hanging everywhere, some depicting cartoonish wealthy businessmen and ridiculous royalty. The entrance music consists of such songs as Luke Bryan’s “Country Girl (Shake It for Me),” Carrie Underwood’s “Before He Cheats,” and, appropriately setting the stage, Shania Twain’s “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!,” in which the superstar sings, “Let’s go, girls! Come on! / I’m goin’ out tonight, I’m feelin’ alright / Gonna let it all hang out / Wanna make some noise, really raise my voice / Yeah, I wanna scream and shout / No inhibitions, make no conditions / Get a little outta line / I ain’t gonna act politically correct / I only wanna have a good time.”

And Then the Rodeo Burned Down is a hilarious excoriation of the American dream (photo by Ben Arons)

Over the course of the next seventy deliriously entertaining minutes, Xhloe and Natasha ostensibly tell the story of Dale (Rice) as he shares his hopes and dreams, often counteracted by his shadow (Roland). “Who are you?” Dale asks the figure that is suddenly sticking close to him. “I’m just like you!” the shadow answers in the first of many instances of mirroring.

Naming the shadow Dilly Dally, Dale explains, “The rodeo is the best place in the world. It’s where cowboys compete in roping calves and wrestling steer and riding bronco and everybody cheers and claps for ’em and everybody comes to see ’em and everybody wants to go to the rodeo and everybody wants to work at the rodeo and I get to live here and be here every day . . . so.” The metaphor of the rodeo — whose fan base leans heavily toward midwestern Republicans — as America is made clear by their relatively ratty costumes: Not only is their makeup red, white, and blue, but Xhloe is wearing pants with red and white stripes, while Natasha’s has a star on her butt. Together, they form their own version of Old Glory.

Soon Dale is being mentored by the rodeo’s macho main attraction, Barnaby (Roland), who Dale considers to be the perfect cowboy and role model. He makes it clear that this is his show and that Dale should be thankful just to be in his presence. “Ya know, you don’t want to confuse the audience on where to look,” he points out. “’Cause I know a thing or two about show business and lesson number one is to never make an audience confused; audiences are notoriously stupid.” (Warning: There is more than one ‘lesson number one.’”)

Barnaby’s tutoring is a subtly effective way of emphasizing classism, power, and misogyny that is enhanced as he teaches Dale how to smoke, endangering his health while hiding the addictive element of cigarettes, and when Arnold the Bull (Roland) escapes from his cage, calling to mind unjustly incarcerated minorities, undocumented immigrants, and American citizens held down by a corrupt, biased, bigoted system. “That thick head of yours not know the rules?” Dale, who is terrified of breaking the written and unwritten laws, says.

Various hilarious episodes deal with freedom, the silencing of women, gun violence, same-sex relationships, poverty, religion, the price of gas, and shoveling shit. But Xhloe and Natasha make sure Rodeo never gets preachy, never wears its heart on its sleeve. Incorporating magic, music (relevant songs by Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley), mime, Marx brothers slapstick, and marvelously simple props, Xhloe and Natasha, with codirector Tom Costello, keep the laughs coming; the two performers’ affection for each other, and, perhaps even more important, for the audience, shines through. That tenderness and warmth are also evident in Angelo Sagnelli’s lighting, which primarily remains bright so everyone can see one another until snapping into a stark darkness.

The show takes a critical shift shortly past the halfway point, turning into a fascinating, no-less-funny treatise on creativity and art in a country that no longer values those fundamental elements as it once did. Defending his profession, Dale says, “It is a really important job. I keep everybody safe.” But from what?

Putting all that aside, at its heart And Then the Rodeo Burned Down is about how we need to learn to love ourselves before we can love others, and even the country itself, the type of love that involves empathy, compassion, faith, trust, hope, and, most definitely, plenty of laughter.

Thus, right now, Ars Nova is one of the best places in the world, wherever Xhloe and Natasha are.

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

BEING PRESENT: ALVIN AILEY BACK IN BROOKLYN AT BAM

Fourth consecutive AAADT BAM season features company premiere of Medhi Walerski’s Blink of an Eye (photo by Georgia Modi)

ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
June 4–7, $46-$156
www.bam.org
ailey.org

New Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater artistic director Alicia Graf Mack leads the company into its fourth consecutive visit to BAM with an exciting program running June 4–7. A mix of the old and the new concludes Mack’s inaugural season, which included a terrific December/January season at City Center that featured the world premiere of Cuban American theater director and arts educator and activist Maija García’s dazzling, fabulously costumed Jazz Island, a fable celebrating the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, inspired by Geoffrey Holder’s book Black Gods, Green Islands, about Trinidad and Tobago, with original music by jazz trumpeter Etienne Charles; Matthew Neenan’s Ailey debut, Difference Between, set to emotive choral music by MacArthur fellow and two-time Obie winner Heather Christian; Jamar Roberts’s compelling narrative solo Song of the Anchorite, a reimagining of Alvin Ailey’s 1961 solo Hermit Songs, set to jazz trumpeter Avishai Cohen’s interpretation of a Ravel adagio; Fredrick Earl Mosley’s Embrace, which incorporates tunes by Stevie Wonder, Kate Bush, Etta James, Maxwell, Ed Sheeran, Des’ree, and P!nk in exploring the intimacy of human connection as a group of dancers in everyday dress make inventive use of tables; and the company premiere of Medhi Walerski’s Blink of an Eye, set to J. S. Bach’s violin sonatas and partita performed by Itzhak Perlman.

At BAM, AAADT will present a new production of Judith Jamison’s Emmy-winning Hymn, the 1993 thirty-seven-minute tribute to Ailey set to music by Robert Ruggieri and text by Anna Deavere Smith that uses the words of Ailey dancers and Ailey himself; the fifteen-minute Blink of an Eye; and the thirty-six-minute 1960 classic Revelations, a cultural touchstone inspired by Ailey’s childhood.

“I definitely can say to the audience to be present as much as our dancers because it will be over in the blink of an eye,” stager Valentina Scaglia says about Walerski’s piece in the above video. “I think it’s important to just be there and just breathe it in and see what it does. I think the music and the dancers together will bring it over in the most wonderful way.”

On June 4 at 6:00, there will be a free roundtable discussion with the original cast of Hymn in the Adam Space; you can RSVP here.

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

CELEBRATING ISRAEL WITH TIGHTER SECURITY THAN EVER

The annual Israel Day parade will march up Fifth Ave. on May 31 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

ISRAEL DAY ON 5th
62nd to 74th St. up Fifth Ave.
Sunday, May 31, free, 11:30 am – 4:00 pm
israeldayon5th.com

On May 14, 1948, “The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel” proclaimed, “The State of Israel will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice, and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race, or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education, and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.” Israel’s existence has been fraught with controversy since the very beginning, but especially now since the October 7 attacks by Hamas and Benjamin Netanyahu’s military response in Gaza, but the nation perseveres, and on May 31 its seventy-eighth birthday will be honored with the annual Israel Day parade. This year’s theme does not back away from the growing vitriol, making a point: “Proud Americans, Proud Zionists.”

On Sunday, tens of thousands of marchers are expected to make their way from Sixty-Second to Seventy-Fourth Sts. up Fifth Ave., including members of synagogues and youth organizations, musicians, dancers, political figures (but not Mayor Zohran Mamdani), community and advocacy groups, civil servants, with lots of flag waving and singing, but the specific roster of entertainers is not being made public in advance of the event. There will be tighter security than ever, for participants as well as viewers; you can check out the details here. As a sign of the times, the grand marshal is police commissioner Jessica Tisch, who said in a press conference, “To be blunt, we are not messing around with security at this year’s parade.”

Onlookers. celebrants, and well-wishers can enter on Madison Ave. at Sixty-First, Sixty-Third, Sixty-Sixth, Seventieth, and Seventy-Third Sts.; the parade will also be broadcast on MY9 and livestreamed here.

PROFOUND ABSENCE: SHTTL KICKS OFF REEL JUDAISM SERIES

Two men are at odds over religion and love in Ady Walter’s Shttl

SHTTL (Ady Walter, 2022)
Temple Israel
112 East Seventy-Fifth St. between Park & Lexington Aves.
Tuesday, June 2, free, 7:00
Series runs select Tuesday nights through August 11
tinyc.org
www.menemshafilms.com

On the eve of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, a small Yiddish-speaking village on the Polish border teeters on the edge as the citizens debate war, collaboration, religion, women’s roles in society, and true love. In the tense, gripping Shttl, Ady Walter pulls off quite an impressive directorial debut, shooting the 110-minute film in one continuous take, shifting between black-and-white and color as the narrative unfolds: Mendele (Moshe Lobel) joins the military, promising to come back for Yuna (Anisia Stasevich), but while he is gone she is wooed/harassed by the mean-spirited Folie (Antoine Millet), whose father (Saul Rubinek) is the community’s spiritual leader. The strange spelling of the title is an homage to Georges Perec’s 1969 novel, La Disparition (A Void), which never uses the fifth letter of the alphabet, its loss a symbol of profound absence. (Both of French novelist Perec’s parents were killed during the Holocaust, his father on the field of battle, his mother in Auschwitz.) The village, or shtetl, was built for the film and was going to be turned into a Jewish-Ukrainian museum until Russia invaded Ukraine.

Shttl is screening June 2 at 7:00 at Temple Israel on the Upper East Side, kicking off the synagogue’s free summer Reel Judaism festival, and will be followed by a Q&A with New Yiddish Rep veteran Lobel, moderated by Rabbi David Gelfand. The series continues select Tuesday nights through August 11 with such other films as Katharina Otto-Bernstein’s 2025 The Last Spy, Sandi DuBowski’s 2025 Sabbath Queen, and Daniel Am Rosenberg’s 2023 Less Than Kosher, all followed by discussions.

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