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JOB

A therapist (Peter Friedman) and his new patient (Sydney Lemmon) fight for survival in Max Wolf Friedlich’s Job (photo by Danielle Perelman)

JOB
SoHo Playhouse
15 Vandam St. between Varick St. & Sixth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through October 29
www.sohoplayhouse.com

The title of Max Wolf Friedlich’s intense generational thriller, Job, can be pronounced either with a soft o, meaning the type of work someone does, or with a hard o, referring to the biblical figure. Both characters in the world premiere at SoHo Playhouse will have to display patience and an innate understanding of their employment if they are going to survive this intense tale.

The show takes place in January 2020 in the San Francisco office of a therapist named Loyd (Peter Friedman), a sort of 1960s throwback who has to determine whether Jane (Sydney Lemmon) can return to her position in the tech world after having suffered a terrible psychological meltdown that went viral. As the play opens, Jane is holding a gun on Loyd.

“Thanks for squeezing me in,” she says plaintively, sitting down. “My pleasure. In general, do Wednesdays at this time work?” he asks, trying to ignore that his life appears to be in grave danger. For the next eighty minutes, Jane and Loyd play a kind of verbal cat-and-mouse game as facts slowly emerge explaining how it came to this.

Jane insists she is not a gun person but that her mental state is on the edge. She tells him, “I can’t imagine how scary that was for you — it was scary for me too — but I promise, I swear like . . . I will do whatever you need me to do just . . . I can’t be outside right now, I — I haven’t slept in a couple days, I haven’t — I can’t be outside, I just need to get back to work.”

Jane (Sydney Lemmon) believes she desperately needs to get back to work in Job (photo by Danielle Perelman)

Meanwhile, Loyd, responding to the shame Jane says she feels for having the gun, explains, “I’m not an especially spiritual person — at least not in the traditional sense — but I will contend that the people who wrote the Bible down were some very very clever people. We’re told that Adam and Eve eat the sort of magical wisdom apple, right? They eat the apple, realize they’re naked, and then . . . they feel shame. So shame is the very first feeling mentioned in the Bible — wisdom and shame are connected.”

Those two elements also arise in the Book of Job. “But where can wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding? Man does not know its value, nor is it found in the land of the living,“ Job says to his friends. Shortly after, God says to Job, “Your enemies will be clothed in shame, and the tents of the wicked will be no more.”

As the two protagonists continue to battle it out, an underlying theme begins to emerge, one of the young fighting against the old. Jane is in her twenties, working in the tech profession in a role that didn’t exist a mere ten years before, while Loyd, in his sixties, is a laid-back Berkeley grad with outdated sensibilities.

“It’s the field that’s the problem,” Jane tells him. “Because people with your job come into work wanting to connect trauma A to trauma D, so they always do — it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy or whatever.” When Jane explains how a creepy guy on a train both hit on her and insulted her at the same time, Loyd defends it as “a misguided attempt at being friendly — generational miscommunication.” She also asks Loyd, “Like why are you so terrified of progress?”

Loyd delves into Jane’s upbringing, looking for clues regarding her meltdown, but keeps coming up empty. “It was a perfectly nice granola middle class existence — nothing to cry about,” she insists. Jane, however, often turns the tables on Loyd, asking him personal questions that he does answer, perhaps out of fear knowing that there’s still that gun in her bag. But once he’s said enough, a major twist leads to an intense finale.

Loyd (Peter Friedman) is the arbiter of Jane’s fate in world premiere at SoHo Playhouse (photo by Danielle Perelman)

No matter how you pronounce it, Job is a nail-biter about patience, wisdom, and, primarily, responsibility, about people being accountable for their actions and living up to their obligations. Both Jane, who works in “user care,” and Loyd have jobs in which they help people, though in different ways, through a kind of protection.

In his off-Broadway debut, director Michael Herwitz keeps the drama at high-boil, making good use of Scott Penner’s basic set, a few chairs facing each other atop a rectangular, carpeted platform, with two small tables, an ottoman, and a lamp. Mextly Couzin’s lighting features several eerie blackouts, accompanied by Jessie Char and Maxwell Neely-Cohen’s effective sound. The costumes by Michelle Li consist of casual pants and an unbuttoned shirt for Loyd and green pants and a belly-revealing striped shirt for Jane.

Ever-reliable Tony nominee Friedman (The Nether, Ragtime) is phenomenal as an easygoing therapist who suddenly find his life on the line, while Lemmon (Tár, Helstrom) — the daughter of Chris Lemmon and granddaughter of Jack Lemmon — is exceptional in her off-Broadway debut, stretching her long body, clasping her hands, and holding tight to her gun as she slowly reveals some hidden truths. (Friedman played series regular Frank on Succession, while Lemmon appeared in three episodes as Jennifer, who’s starring in Willa’s play.)

The twist is a biggie and will turn some people off, as will the open-ended finale. But everything up to those points is taut and nerve-racking. It’s not going to hurt any of the participants to have this Job on their resume.

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

BIG TRIP: THREE LOVE STORIES NEAR THE RAILROAD

Krymov Lab NYC makes big debut with the two-part Big Trip at La MaMa

BIG TRIP
La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club
The Ellen Stewart Theatre
66 East Fourth St. between Second Ave. & Bowery
September 24 – October 15, $45
212-475-7710
www.lamama.org
www.krymovlabnyc.com

Moscow-born director, designer, and visual artist Dmitry Krymov makes a smashing debut with his new company, Krymov Lab NYC, in Big Trip, two shows running in repertory at La MaMa through October 15.

Krymov was preparing a production of The Cherry Orchard in Philadelphia in February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine. Condemning Putin’s actions, he became an exile and moved to New York City with his wife, Inna, where he started Krymov Lab NYC. The first part of Big Trip is Pushkin “Eugene Onegin” in our own words, an absurdist adaptation of Alexander Pushkin’s classic serial novel in verse, following the adventures of four Russian émigrés in downtown Manhattan.

You don’t need to have seen the first part to fall in love with the second, Three Love Stories Near the Railroad, Krymov’s wild and woolly, wholly unpredictable retellings of Ernest Hemingway’s four-pages-each “Hills Like White Elephants” and “A Canary for One,” followed by act two, scenes two and three of Eugene O’Neill’s Desire under the Elms.

With a dash of Brecht here and a dollop of Ionesco there, Krymov brings a circusike atmosphere to La MaMa, where most of the audience sits in rising rafters but some in semicircular rows on the stage. Emona Stoykova’s set is anchored by a dilapidated wall of cardboard splashed with white paint, with random objects on the floor buried in the rubble.

Host and guitar player Jackson Scott introduces the show. He constructs a table and chairs from the detritus. He tells clarinetist Erich Rausch that he’s not supposed to be here tonight and that the union will not allow him to get paid if he stays. The cast of nine sits stage right and makes costume changes in front of the audience because, as Jackson explains, “The dressing rooms at La MaMa are incredibly far away, and the last time we did this show, sometimes the actors didn’t manage to get here in time for their entrances. So that’s why they are all going to sit here, alright?”

Props are casually tossed around in Dmitry Krymov’s unpredictable Big Trip

Jackson orders the audience not to clap until all three works have concluded. “It is one single piece, like a symphony,” he says. Jackson also unveils the train, a model that putt-putts across the stage in the back.

Thus, right from the start, we are aware that this evening will be as much about the art of making theater as it will be about the art of performance itself.

In “Hills Like White Elephants,” a young couple (Tim Eliot and Shelby Flannery) is on a train going from Madrid to Barcelona. Although they never say the word abortion — echoing O’Neill’s 1914 one-act, Abortion, in which the title word is never uttered — it appears that they are on their way to end the woman’s pregnancy. “I know lots of people who have done it and it’s really very simple,” the man assures the woman. “And things will be like they were and you’ll love me again?” the woman asks. They order two Budweisers in a café and the bartender (Jeremy Radin) brings them two cups of shaving cream. A tall, bare-chested man (Kwesiu Jones) representing the unborn child dances around the woman and lays his head in her lap.

In “A Canary for One,” the bartender has taken over the narration, complaining about his disintegrating underwear. A man and a woman (Eliot and Flannery) are on their way to Paris to end their marriage. In their compartment is an older American woman (Annie Hägg) traveling with a shedding yellow canary. The scenery unfolds behind them from a scroll pulled open by an assistant named Shlomo (Anya Zicer) consisting primarily of black-and-white drawings of houses, people, and landscapes, as the host relates the tale, with limited spoken dialogue. Inventive things are done with luggage, cigarettes, and bread as the train continues on its way.

Big Trip concludes with scenes from Desire under the Elms

The evening finishes with a farcical reinvention of two scenes from Desire under the Elms involving the elderly Ephraim Cabot (Jones); his young wife, Abby (Flannery); and Ephraim’s ne’er-do-well son, Eben (Eliot). Cabot berates his son, calling him “a waste of my seed.” Abby loves Eben, who only has eyes for his dead mother. Ephraim and Eben walk around on long metal stilts, making movement comically difficult and ridiculous as they tower over Abby. Beneath all the pain and anguish, Abby has hope. “I hate you. I don’t need anything from you,” Eben tells Abby, who replies, “Don’t lie to me. I could feel the tenderness in your hands.”

The ninety-minute Big Trip is fun and frantic, filled with delightful non sequiturs, playfully silly song and dance, and hilarious self-referential nonsense. Each member of the crew deserves kudos: The choreography is by Baye&Asa and Rachel McMullin, with costumes and puppets by Luna Gomberg, sound by Kate Marvin, lighting by Krista Smith, and projections by Yana Biryukova.

The play also has a serious edge, with a dark take on relationships, whether between husband and wife or parent and child. Both Hemingway stories are drawn from his seminal 1927 collection, Men without Women, published just as Hemingway was gaining success as a writer, during the three-year period that included The Torrents of Spring, The Sun Also Rises, and A Farewell to Arms as well as his divorce from Hadley Richardson and marriage to Pauline Pfeiffer, the second of his four wives. Desire debuted in 1924, while O’Neill was married to the second of his three wives, Agnes Boulton.

“They never know what they want, these directors,” the host tells a stagehand. But writer, director, and adaptor Krymov knows precisely what he wants, even amid improvisation, building a unique kind of theater by exposing and transforming its conventions. As the script notes about “A Canary for One”: “This is a small scene. It doesn’t even pretend to be a play. It’s an idiotic, very small scene. But it is honest about what it is.”

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

MARY GETS HERS

A young girl (Haley Wong) seeks out her true path in Mary Gets Hers (photo by Daniel J Vasquez)

MARY GETS HERS
MCC Theater, Susan & Ronald Frankel Theater
511 West Fifty-Second St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through October 14
mcctheater.org
playwrightsrealm.org

Inspired by tenth-century German feminist playwright and poet Hrosvitha of Gandersheim’s Abraham, or the Rise and Repentance of Mary, Emma Horwitz’s Mary Gets Hers at MCC Theater is a satirical take on sin and salvation that unfortunately fizzles out too soon.

It’s around 950 AD, and eight-year-old Mary (Haley Wong) has just lost her parents to a plague that turns its victims into foam. She is found by the hermit monk Abraham (Susannah Perkins), who brings her back to the monastery so he can protect her with the help of the other monks, including the ultraserious Ephraim (Octavia Chavez-Richmond), who is dedicated to prayer and wears a hairshirt she continually scratches at. Abraham prepares a cell for Mary within his own cell, where he teaches her about God’s love.

“We sing to God / to whom i am betrothed / which means we are Together Forever / even though we’ve never met,” Mary and Abraham sing. “We are all so in love with God / he’s our father and our husband / that’s what all these songs are about.”

Hermits Abraham (Susannah Perkins) and Ephraim (Octavia Chavez-Richmond) are determined to protect Mary from sin (photo by Daniel J Vasquez)

Mary does not believe in God with the conviction that Abraham and Ephraim have and yearns for something more. The morning after Abraham has a horrific dream about a dragon and a dove, Mary is gone. At first, Abraham thinks that Mary was devoured by the dragon from his nightmare, but then reconsiders and enlists his friend, a soldier (Kai Heath) covered in chainmail, to rescue her from the harsh, godless world.

Meanwhile, Mary has found a new life at a nearby inn run by a shady man (Claire Siebers) who offers her room and board, but not exactly for free. One of her many male visitors declares, “When I was younger everyone called me / little man / little man, they called me / climbing up that tree / look at our little man, they said! / but i’m not so little now, huh? / i’m a gigantic man! / the size of a mountain! / or a church! / or a monster!” As the soldier continues his search, the hermits worry about Mary, who is not necessarily sad about her current condition.

You-Shin Chen’s set is sparse and haunting, with numerous drapes and curtains, items that once upon a time were treated as women’s work. Cha See’s stark lighting and Kathy Ruvuna’s mysterious sound are appropriately creepy, especially at the monastery, while Camilla Dely’s costumes are cute and playful.

There are parts of Mary Gets Hers — which is a production of the Playwrights Realm, not MCC Theater — that soar, funny, cynical, and clever scenes that question gender roles from the birth of Jesus and humanity’s connection to God and interpretations of sin and purity. Wong’s face is wonderfully malleable as she considers Mary’s life, while Perkins is adorable as the wide-eyed hermit who wants only the best for her. All five actors either identify as women or are trans or nonbinary, adding to the feminist bent, but Siebers struggles to juggle too many hats as multiple male characters.

The world premiere, directed by Josiah Davis, is unable to sustain its wry sense of humor and poignant narrative as things flail out of control, relying on physical slapstick where smart wordplay and staging previously worked. Initially, comparisons between the Middle Ages and today, the plague and Covid-19, felt timely, but Horwitz and Davis dull their blades through too much repetition over the course of ninety minutes. Mary might get hers in the second half, but we in the audience do not get ours.

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

JUDY CHICAGO IN CONVERSATION

Judy Chicago and Massimiliano Gioni will discuss artist’s career survey at New Museum on October 12 (photos by Donald Woodman; Christine Rivera)

Who: Judy Chicago, Massimiliano Gioni
What: Livestreamed talk
Where: New Museum YouTube page
When: Thursday, October 12, free with advance RSVP, 6:30
Why: “Art history is a patriarchal paradigm, and my work challenges that entire paradigm,” Judy Chicago proclaims in a promotional video for her latest show, “Judy Chicago: Herstory.” On view October 12 through January 14 at the New Museum, this first career museum survey of the artist born Judith Sylvia Cohen in Chicago on July 20, 1939, features painting, sculpture, installation, drawing, textiles, photography, stained glass, needlework, and printmaking spread across three floors, one of which is dedicated to materials from more than eighty women artists (“City of Ladies”). To kick off the show, Chicago will be in conversation with New Museum artistic director Massimiliano Gioni on October 12 at 6:30; the in-person event is at capacity, but the talk will be livestreamed for free on YouTube.

“Working with Massimiliano Gioni has been both a challenge and an absolute joy!” Chicago recently declared on Instagram. “He is one of the best curators I have ever worked with and I am looking forward to the first exhibition of my work that will provide an appropriate context, one that challenges the idea that art history is universal because it leaves out or marginalizes all the women artists upon whose shoulders we stand.”

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

MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH MARRIAGE

Three winged Mythology Sirens (Trio Limonāde) teach Zelma (Dagmara Dominczyk) old-fashioned ideas in My Love Affair with Marriage

MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH MARRIAGE (Signe Baumane, 2022)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
October 6-12
212-255-224
quadcinema.com
www.myloveaffairwithmarriagemovie.com

“I am a girl and I am weak,” seven-year-old Zelma (voiced by Dagmara Dominczyk) is taught in Signe Baumane’s wonderful animated feature, My Love Affair with Marriage.

In her 2014 debut, Rocks in My Pockets: A Crazy Quest for Sanity, the Latvian-born, Brooklyn-based filmmaker explored her family history of mental illness. In My Love Affair with Marriage, she follows the life of Zelma, from conception through childhood and the adult quest to find an identity.

Writer, director, animator, and designer Baumane combines hand-drawn animation, papier-mâché constructions, photographed backgrounds, and stop-motion animation to create a beguiling world that mixes reality with fantasy as Zelma goes through “Inception,” “Formation,” “Implementation,” and “Reconsideration.” Poignant scenes from her life — defending herself at school, moving to new countries, losing a friend, falling in love — are supplemented by songs performed by a Greek chorus of three winged Mythology Sirens (Trio Limonāde, consisting of Iluta Alsberga, Ieva Katkovska, and Kristine Pastare) who serenade her with old-fashioned notions about soul mates, virginity, sex appeal, shaming, weakness, and other concepts of life and romance. The heavenly music and songs are by Kristian Sensini, with lyrics by Baumane.

“It’s not a war / Not a tear / Not a wound / It’s the start of your monthly cycle,” the chorus tells Zelma. “You are on your way to becoming a woman / The worst is ahead of you / The world is full of traps set just for us women / Beware of everything / especially men / There are three simple rules for a woman to succeed in life / One: Be a virgin until you marry / Two: Choose and marry well / Three: Hold the marriage together whatever it takes.” Zelma responds, “But how about love?”

Zelma (Dagmara Dominczyk) is ogled by an older man on a train (Keith Randolph Smith) in My Love Affair with Marriage

As Zelma encounters new situations that she doesn’t understand, Baumane cuts to wildly inventive biology lessons animated by Yajun Shi in which an adorable smiling neuron (Michele Pawk) discusses fallopian tubes, the limbic system, major histocompatibility complex, the effects of oxytocin and dopamine, hormones, various parts of the brain, human microbiomes, and a bevy of scientific facts that impact how and why Zelma reacts to specific stimuli.

She is told early on that “ignorance is a girl’s bliss,” but she spends the film battling her biology and gender expectations to search out happiness and fulfillment, discovering that traditional ideas of subservience and marriage are not making her feel complete. Her relationships with such men as Bo (Matthew Modine), Sergei (Cameron Monaghan), and Jonas (Stephen Lang) bring her ever closer to who she is, but it is not going to be easy, especially as she still fights off the repression that was forced into her by growing up in the Soviet Union.

My Love Affair with Marriage is an engaging film that effectively turns stereotypical tropes inside out and upside down while avoiding becoming academic, moralistic, or didactic. Baumane uses different forms of animation for the personal, biological, political, and imaginary aspects of Zelma’s life, which helps maintain the fast pace of the 108-minute film. The entrancing visuals include works by Lasse Persson, Douglas Fitch, and Sandra Osip and art historical references, from Munch to Escher.

Dominczyk (Succession, The Lost Daughter) brings a childlike wonder to Zelma, while Tony winner Pawk (Crazy for You, Cabaret) is mesmerizing as Biology; if they ever make any kind of Biology collectible, count me in. Also in the voice cast are Erica Schroeder as Elita, Emma Kenney as Sarma, Clyde Baldo as Eduards the bully, Florencia Lozano as Zelma’s mother, Ruby Modine as Nina, Carolyn Baeumler as Darya, Christina Pumariega as Darya’s mother, Tracy Thorne and Laila Robins as emcees, Dale Soules as a Soviet official, and Michael Laurence as the Big Man.

But the focus is what’s happening in Zelma’s mind and body — which represents what’s going on in the viewer’s mind and body as well, regardless of gender. It might be an all-too-familiar story, but Baumane infuses it with a bold and intriguing freshness. Her depictions of kisses, coffins, clouds, and interior spaces are captivating, showing that life as a woman is no automatic fairy tale.

“To be a woman is dangerous and can be deadly,” Zelma, who turns into an animal when threatened, says. “I was so afraid to be a woman.” But that was once upon a time.

My Love Affair with Marriage opens October 6 at the Quad, with Baumane on hand for Q&As at the 2;30, 5:00, and 7:30 screenings every day through October 11.

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

SWING STATE

Peg (Mary Beth Fisher) and Ryan (Bubba Weiler) share a rare sweet moment in Swing State (photo by Liz Lauren)

SWING STATE
Audible Theater’s Minetta Lane Theatre
18 Minetta Lane between Sixth Ave. and MacDougal St.
Monday – Saturday through October 28, $47-$106
www.audible.com

Since at least 2006, white-nose syndrome (WNS), caused by a fungus known as Pseudogymnoascus destructans, or Pd, has been infecting and killing hibernating bats by the millions in North America. It was introduced from Europe, perhaps on the shoes of a traveler. According to the National Park Service, although there are no known cases of bat-to-human transmission, “Bats infected with either WNS or rabies may exhibit unusual behavior (e.g. erratic flying), which increases the risk for bat-human contact and exposure. Additionally, declines in bat populations can impact human health indirectly since humans depend on bats for important ecosystem services such as controlling pest insects.”

In Rebecca Gilman’s superb Swing State, extended at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre through October 28, the Pulitzer Prize finalist uses the bat disease as a metaphor for what’s ailing America. “The theory is that [WNS] stops their breathing so they’re startled awake from their torpid state and they start flying around, burning up calories that they can’t afford to lose,” sixty-five-year-old widow Peg Smith (Mary Beth Fisher) tells twenty-six-year-old Ryan Severson (Bubba Weiler), who does odd jobs for her on her forty-acre prairie farm. “You’ll see them flying around outside caves in the middle of the day, in the dead of winter, looking for food. But there’s nothing to eat — it’s winter, there aren’t any bugs — and eventually they burn up all their stored fat and they starve to death.”

Although the title refers to a battleground or purple state — as well as our state of mind as individuals and a country — Swing State avoids debating specific political issues, instead allowing them to arise organically as the plot develops. Among the topics that come up without being directly debated are gun control, the prison system, religion, the environment, alcoholism, health care, climate change, education, law enforcement, corporate control, and Covid-19, which some link to bats from China.

The 105-minute play is set in the summer of 2021 in the fictional Cardiff Township in the part of western Wisconsin known as the Driftless Area, which experienced no glacial drift during the last glaciation period. The show opens with Peg in her kitchen making zucchini bread. She takes the knife, brings it to her wrist, then drops it and says, “I don’t know. I don’t know what to do.” It’s a feeling many Americans have every day. A moment later, she adds, “As a species, we suck.”

Former convict Ryan (Bubba Weiler) takes a liking to deputy sheriff Dani (Anne E. Thompson) in latest Audible play at the Minetta Lane (photo by Liz Lauren)

Peg is a recent widow, childless, alone except for their dog, Walleye, and Ryan, a hired man and former convict. Peg has decided to leave her land to the Prairie Protectors (Gilman herself volunteers for the Prairie Enthusiasts) and the house and barn to Ryan.

A week later, Peg has notified the local authorities of the theft of her late husband Jim’s antique tool collection as well as Jim’s father’s classic Winchester 94 rifle. Sheriff Kris Callahan Wisnefski (Kirsten Fitzgerald) arrives with Deputy Dani Wisnefski (Anne E. Thompson), her niece, new to the force. Old tensions surface: The Callahan family owns thousands of acres around Peg’s farm, but Peg has vowed never to sell her property to them. “No Callahan is ever going to own an inch of my land,” Peg declares. Dani, who does not seem to be the law-enforcement type, likes and respects Peg, who taught her health sciences in high school, “how to be healthy in mind and body.”

The sheriff is certain that Ryan pulled off the heist and is eager to arrest him. Peg refuses to believe that he is responsible, and Ryan adamantly denies it. Dani, a sweet, innocent young woman, is bullied by her aunt into withholding her opinion, which is usually the most centrist, humanistic view, neither ultra conservative nor radically liberal. As the investigation continues, the plot twists and turns, revealing both the good and the bad that are so prevalent in contemporary America.

Gilman (The Glory of Living, Spinning into Butter) was born in Alabama, lived and worked for a long time in Chicago, and moved to rural Wisconsin about four years ago. Cardiff Township and Peg’s farm are a microcosm of society, representing a purple state with a wide variety of people as well as flora and fauna. At several points in the play, Peg brings in seeds from Shooting Star wildflowers that have been on the prairie for ten thousand years; she is trying to save and protect them, prevent them from going extinct. On the kitchen counter behind her is a box that contains Jim’s ashes. Life here, death there.

Rebecca Gilman takes a hard look at America in Swing State (photo by Liz Lauren)

Todd Rosenthal’s homey kitchen/dining room set is relatably old-fashioned, with a microwave, birdhouses atop a shelf, various pots, bowls, and jars, and books overflowing a bookcase. Evelyn M. Danner’s costumes have a timeless quality as well, Kris and Dani in brown uniforms, Ryan wearing a work shirt with a name badge, and Peg dressed primarily in pants and an unbuttoned shirt over a dark tee. Peg is not attached to her cell phone, which she regularly leaves on the table when she goes out. Kris is not fond of the tablet she now has to use while on the job. “I hate this fucking thing,” the ever-angry sheriff complains. There is never talk of modern-day equipment, only outmoded hand tools and an ancient tractor.

It could be 1971 instead of 2021. One of the only present-day references occurs when Peg explains why she no longer reads the local newspaper. “I canceled my subscription when they endorsed Trump,” she tells Kris and Dani. Peg might be clearly blue and Kris obviously red, but Dani and Ryan, the future, are more purple, not caught up in identity politics as much as struggling to make it through every day.

Each of the characters has suffered a loss of some kind, and they each have reacted differently to the sadness in their lives. Gilman’s dialogue has a poetic flavor to it, no matter what side of the fence you might be on; none of the characters are purely black and white but filled with complexity.

Gilman’s longtime collaborator, Tony winner Robert Falls (The Iceman Cometh, Shining City), directs his Goodman Theatre production with a constant tension buzzing just below the surface, ready to explode at any moment, just like America. Fisher (Frank’s Home, Boy Gets Girl) is mesmerizing as Peg; you feel her anguish in her every move as she strives to save a damaged planet while caring little about her own existence. Fitzgerald (Clybourne Park, A Moon for the Misbegotten) is staunch as the blunt sheriff, a role that could have been a stereotypical villain but is more than that here. Thompson (Gilman’s Twilight Bowl, Boy Gets Girl, and Spinning into Butter) makes a strong off-Broadway debut as Dani, an ingénue who grows up fast. And Weiler is arresting as Ryan, an enraged and exasperated young man who doubts that he will be given a second chance.

Besides bats, another flying creature that figures prominently in Swing State is the Henslow’s Sparrow, which All About Birds describes as “an easy-to-overlook bird with an almost nonexistent song,” which is also true of too many people in today’s America, beautifully captured in this heart-tugging, deeply affecting play.

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

NICK CAVE LIVE IN NEW YORK

Who: Nick Cave, Seán O’Hagan
What: Book signings and solo concerts
Where: The Strand, 92nd St. Y, Kings Theatre, Beacon Theatre
When: Book signings October 5, concerts October 6-8
Why: At the beginning of Faith, Hope and Carnage (Picador, September 19, $20), Irish journalist Seán O’Hagan tells Australian musician, composer, and author Nick Cave, “I’m surprised you agreed to do this given that you haven’t done any interviews for a long time.” Cave replies, “Well, who wants to do an interview? Interviews, in general, suck. Really. They eat you up. I hate them. The whole premise is so demeaning: you have a new album out, or new film to promote, or a book to sell. After a while, you just get worn away by your own story. I guess, at some point, I just realised that doing that kind of interview was of no real benefit to me. It only ever took something away. I always had to recover a bit afterwards. It was like I had to go looking for myself again. So five or so years ago I just gave them up.” O’Hagan asks, “So how do you feel about this undertaking?” Cave answers, “I don’t know. I do like having a conversation. I like to talk, to engage with people. And we’ve always had our big, sprawling conversations, so when you suggested it, I was kind of intrigued to see where it would go. Let’s see, shall we?”

Divided into such chapters as “A Beautiful Kind of Freedom,” “Love and a Certain Dissonance,” “A Radical Intimacy,” “A Sense of Shared Defiance,” and “The Astonishing Idea,” Faith, Hope and Carnage was assembled from forty hours of conversations between Cave and O’Hagan (Freddie Mercury: The Great Pretender). The two spoke about his childhood, family, and tragedy; absences, absolution, and addiction; Cave’s bands (the Birthday Party, Grinderman, the Bad Seeds), albums (The Boatman’s Call, Skeleton Tree, Carnage), and books (The Death of Bunny Munro, The Sick Bag Song); the pandemic; the Red Hand Files, where Cave answers one of the hundreds of letters he receives each week from fans; and grief — Cave has suffered immeasurable loss over the last eight years, including the passing of his two sons, his mother, and numerous friends and colleagues. “If this is a book that outlines a dramatic creative and personal transformation in the face of great personal catastrophe, it is also shot through with a sense of life’s precariousness,” O’Hagan writes in the afterword.

Cave will be in New York City this week in support of the paperback edition of the book. He will be at the Strand on October 5 at 11:30 am for a conversation and signing with O’Hagan, followed by a talk and Q&A that night at the 92nd St. Y’s Kaufmann Concert Hall at 7:30. Cave’s Live in North America solo tour — on which he’ll be joined by Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood — comes to the Kings Theatre in Brooklyn on October 6 and the Beacon in Manhattan on October 7-8,. I’ve seen him play solo, with the Bad Seeds, with Grinderman, and with Warren Ellis, and his shows are always like nothing you’ve ever experienced before.

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