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LOVE

Part of the audience sits onstage at Alexander Zeldin’s Love at Park Ave. Armory (photo by Stephanie Berger Photography/Park Avenue Armory)

LOVE
Park Ave. Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at Sixty-Seventh St.
Monday – Saturday through March 25, $54-$168
www.armoryonpark.org

Park Ave. Armory is home to dazzling theatrical productions and art installations that can happen nowhere else. It is also home to Lenox Hill Neighborhood House’s Women’s Mental Health Shelter. So there is extra relevance to its latest show, writer-director Alexander Zeldin’s staggering, simply titled Love.

Originally presented by the National Theatre in London in 2016, Love takes place in a temporary housing facility in England. Natasha Jenkins’s creaky set features a shared kitchen on one side, a single, filthy bathroom on the other, and a pair of horizontal tables in the middle, behind which are two small apartments. In one, the fiftysomething Colin (Nick Holder) cares for his elderly mother, Barbara (Amelda Brown), who uses a cane and moves excruciatingly slowly. In the other, apprentice electrician Dean (Alex Austin) and his pregnant wife, Emma (Janet Etuk), who is studying to become a massage and wellness therapist, are packed together with Dean’s two children from his previous marriage, eight-year-old Paige (Amelia Finnegan or Grace Willoughby) and fourteen-year-old Jason (Oliver Finnegan).

Also staying at the facility are two lonely, solitary figures, Sudanese refugee Tharwa (Hind Swareldahab), who has been separated from her family, and Adnan (Naby Dakhli), an injured Syrian refugee who has recently been granted asylum.

Approximately ninety audience members are seated on the stage, either in a few rising rows on either side of the set or, mostly, in scattered chairs as if they’re also in the facility. Lighting designer Marc Williams keeps the house lights on for much of the ninety-minute play, implicating everyone in the homeless crisis, with jarring, sudden jolts of instant darkness at the end of some scenes. Josh Anio Grigg’s naturalistic sound and Jenkins’s costumes further immerse the audience in the bleak narrative.

Paige (Amelia Finnegan) shakes hands with new neighbor Colin (Nick Holder) as her parents (Alex Austin and Janet Etuk) look on in Love (photo by Stephanie Berger Photography/Park Avenue Armory)

Dean, Emma, Jason, and Paige are there due to a recent eviction and its aftermath, which embroiled them in bureaucracy. They are further dismayed when they learn Colin and his mother have been in the shelter for twelve months even though the legal limit is six weeks.

“They just cheat you like we’re waiting, fuck, we need somewhere adapted you know our place is like posh flats now,” the ineloquent Colin tells Emma, who responds, “Yeh no obviously I don’t want — the baby — to be born here.” But as time passes and Dean gets buried in red tape, that becomes more and more of a harsh possibility.

On a daily basis, Dean struggles to put any kind of nutritious food on the table, the characters fight over the use of the disgusting toilet, and they each search for the least bit of dignity they can manage. As Christmas approaches, the ever-hopeful and positive Paige practices for her role in the school holiday show, but the bitter and disgusted Jason wants no part of it.

Barbara (Amelda Brown) reflects on her dire situation in Love at Park Ave. Armory (photo by Stephanie Berger Photography/Park Avenue Armory)

Zeldin, whose other works include Beyond Caring and Faith Hope and Charity, did extensive research in developing Love, inspired by John Steinbeck novels; James Agee and Walker Evans’s seminal Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the 1941 book documenting the lives of three tenant families in the Deep South in words and photos; and the 2014 report “Christmas Families in B&Bs” from the housing charity Shelter, which revealed that more than ninety thousand children would be homeless that holiday season, focusing on twenty families. Zeldin met with them and incorporated their real-life stories into the play through home visits, workshops, and rehearsals. Meanwhile, the latest Shelter report says that 120,000 children are now “waking up in damp storage containers and cramped B&Bs.”

But Love is no mere melodramatic documentary work; instead it is a powerful, harrowing tale of inequality, unfairness, and an incompetent and uncaring government that turns its back on British citizens and refugees despite the laws. The uniformly excellent cast brings to brutal life the demeaning indignity so many unhoused families and individuals suffer through just to have a roof over their head and food on the table. The characters in Love are not asking for handouts or happy to be on the dole; Zeldin presents their disturbing plights with a humane understanding that calls for sociopolitical change without sentimental moralizing.

However, the Christmas angle grows a bit too saccharine, especially when Paige sings “Away in a Manger,” a song about Jesus’ humble beginnings, born in a trough without crib or bed.

Love might be set in England, but it’s all too relevant to what is happening in the United States right now and especially here in New York City, from refugees being bused and flown in from Texas and Florida to gentrification forcing families to leave their longtime communities. Housing insecurity is increasing at alarming rates, and the government can’t agree on any kind of effective action to turn the tide.

Throughout the play, Colin wears an Ed Hardy shirt that proclaims, “Erase All Fears.” It’s going to require a lot more than commercial slogans to institute necessary change.

LETTERS FROM MAX, a ritual

Letters from Max follows the epistolary relationship between a teacher and her student (photo by Joan Marcus)

LETTERS FROM MAX, a ritual
The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 26, $49-$139
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

As you enter the Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre at the Signature to see Sarah Ruhl’s Letters from Max, a ritual, a quote from Max Ritvo in handwritten cursive is projected on the back wall of the stage: “Even present tense has some of the grace of past tense, what with all the present tense left to go.” Unfortunately, there was not a lot of present tense left in Ritvo’s too-short life, but his legacy is preserved in the moving play, which centers around the letters, texts, voicemails, and conversations the young, enthusiastic poet had with Ruhl, the award-winning writer of such plays as In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) and The Clean House.

In 2012, Ritvo was accepted into Ruhl’s playwriting class at Yale. That began a four-year friendship in which the two shared an intimate and emotional correspondence as Max faced a recurrence of his pediatric cancer, Ewing’s Sarcoma, but did so with charm, whimsy, and hope. They discuss poetry, soup (“Soup is your religion,” Max tells Sarah), Halloween, various medical treatments, Einstein on the Beach, the streets of New York City, the afterlife, the existence of the soul, and reading and writing, with an enchanting honesty and humor.

The story is not a traditional tale of a mentor and mentee; Sarah and Max bring out the best in each other, both learning as their closeness deepens. “You know, in some ways, you are my teacher, not the other way around,” Ruhl says early on.

Sarah Ruhl (Jessica Hecht) and Max Ritvo (Zane Pais) explore life and poetry in Signature play (photo by Joan Marcus)

Hecht is terrific as Sarah, who she knows well, having appeared in Ruhl’s Stage Kiss at Playwrights Horizons in 2014 and pandemic microplay What do you Want What do you Want What do you Want for the Homebound Project; she portrays Ruhl with a tender confidence and just the right amount of mothering. A tireless actor who starred with Mikhail Baryshnikov in Arlekin Players Theatre’s hybrid Chekhov reimagining The Orchard last June and will next appear in David Auburn’s Summer, 1976 with Laura Linney on Broadway beginning April 4, Hecht has a quirky and distinct singsong voice that fits the character, especially when she recites poetry.

Ritvo is alternately played by Ben Edelman and Zane Pais; at each performance, whoever is not playing Max appears as Tattoo Artist Angel — based on a short work Max wrote in Ruhl’s class — and plays Ritvo’s songs, Edelman on piano, Pais on guitar. The actors do not attempt to mimic the real-life Sarah and Max but concentrate on bringing their essence to the stage, as related through their correspondence.

Marsha Ginsberg’s set is centered by a large semicircular object that recalls a zoetrope onto which S Katy Tucker projects words and images and opens up to reveal Max in a hospital bed. In a far corner is a piano; the soft lighting is by Amith Chandrashaker, with sound by Sinan Refik Zafar and costumes by Anita Yavich, highlighted by the angel outfit.

Ben Edelman and Zane Pais switch roles every night in Letters from Max (photo by Joan Marcus)

Ruhl first collected the material in the 2018 epistolary book Letters from Max: A Poet, a Teacher, a Friendship, then adapted it for the play, which was not initially planned but developed after Ruhl gave several public readings of the book. Director Kate Whoriskey (Sweat, How I Learned to Drive), who helmed Ruhl’s Dear Elizabeth, based on letters exchanged by poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, keeps the bells and whistles to a minimum; the show could use some trimming, however, as it gets repetitive and, at times, overly reverential. It would probably fare better at a streamlined ninety minutes instead of two hours with intermission.

In the lobby, the audience is encouraged to write a letter of their own to a loved one they think needs to hear from them. “I hope that this play can be an invitation into ritual or catharsis for whatever grief might be ailing you,” two-time Pulitzer finalist Ruhl explains. The Signature provides pen, paper, envelope, and even a haiku and will mail it for you.

Ultimately, the relationship between Max (Four Reincarnations, Aeons) and Sarah is summed up by these words from Max: “We’ll always know one another forever, however long ever is. And that’s all I want — is to know you forever.” Through these letters, the book, and now the play, Max gets his wish.

BECOMES A WOMAN

Emma Pfitzer Price shines in the Mint’s world premiere of Becomes a Woman (photo by Todd Cerveris)

BECOMES A WOMAN
Mint Theater at New York City Center Stage II
131 West 55th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 18, $45-$90
minttheater.org
nycitycenter.org

There was something extra special about opening night at the Mint’s world premiere of Becomes a Woman, written by Betty Smith, the Williamsburg-born novelist and author most famous for the semiautobiographical 1943 bestseller A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Smith’s hundred-year-old daughter, Nancy Jean, was in attendance, sitting in the first row at New York City Center Stage II.

Equally remarkable was that this excellent play, written in 1931, has never before been produced, anywhere. It is the Mint’s mission to resurrect long-lost plays, and this show, under Britt Berke’s loving, caring direction, is a sparkling gem that takes on feminist issues well ahead of its time, in intelligent, well-developed ways.

In her off-Broadway debut, Emma Pfitzer Price shines as nineteen-year-old Francie Nolan, who sings popular songs in Kress’s five-and-dime store on DeKalb Ave. Although the character shares the same name as the protagonist of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, there are few other similarities. (The store is also a fictionalized version of the actual Kress’s.) This Francie lives in an Irish neighborhood in Bushwick with her tough-talking father, a city cop (Jeb Brown); her old-fashioned mother (Antoinette Lavecchia), who spends most of her time cooking and cleaning; and her two teenage brothers, Frankie (Tim Webb) and Johnny (Jack Mastrianni), who are ready to quit school and start working, against their mother’s wishes.

“You’re going to keep on going to school. As long as your father has a good job and Francie keeps on working, my children are going to get a good education,” Ma Nolan tells them. “Now, Francie went to high school for two years. She wanted to go longer but two years is enough for a girl. She didn’t mind the scales. She practiced. That’s why she’s earning such good money as a musician today.”

Florry (Pearl Rhein), Francie (Emma Pfitzer Price), and Tessie (Gina Daniels) work together in a five and dime (photo by Todd Cerveris)

Wearing a sexy black nightclub dress, Francie sings popular tunes, accompanied by the sassy Florry (Pearl Rhein) on piano, in an effort to sell the sheet music. But it turns out that nearly all the men who ask to hear a song are more interested in going out with Francie, who refuses to date customers or “strange men.” She’s tired of hearing them say, one after another, “Are you doing anything tonight, baby?” To which she regularly answers, “Yes I am. And I’m busy every other night this week too. And next week.”

Among the songs Francie sings are “Left Alone,” “Me and My Family Blues,” “He’s My Man,” and “I Don’t Owe Nothing to Nobody,” titles that get to the heart of her character; dramaturg Amy Stoller created a music playlist that can be heard here.

Florry believes that Francie is a scared little mouse who should assert herself more and take chances to get a man. “She’s the kind that just tempts people to pick on her. She’s so afraid of everything,” Florry tells the older Tessie (Gina Daniels), who works the register and is in charge of the flowers. “She never fights for a seat in the trolley going home. I never have to stand.”

Francie is being wooed by taxi driver Jimmy O’Neill (Christopher Reed Brown), who fails to thrill her. But when the dashing and handsome Leonard Kress Jr. (Peterson Townsend), son of the chain owner (Duane Boutté), shows a liking for her, she starts dreaming of a better future.

Pa and Ma Nolan (Jeb Brown and Antoinette Lavecchia) have issues with their daughter in Betty Smith play (photo by Todd Cerveris)

“He’s different. I know he is. I know he’s not the doing-anything-tonight-baby kind. I’d hate him if he was like that,” Francie says. “What do you want a man to do? Worship you from a cloud?” Florry asks. “No, but I want a man to decide whether he likes me before he spends an evening with me and not after,” Francie explains. “Men ain’t made that way. A girl has to really like a man before she gets intimate with him but a man has to get really intimate with a girl before he likes her. Anybody will tell you that,” the cynical Florry says. “That’s not true. It can’t be true,” Francie insists.

Finally putting herself out there, Francie discovers that more of it is true than she ever imagined. But instead of wilting like a dying flower, she decides to take control of her situation, which presents a whole new set of challenges.

As with the best Mint shows, Becomes a Woman is exquisitely rendered, its two hours (with two intermissions) beautifully paced by Berke in her outstanding off-Broadway debut. Vicki R. Davis’s sets morph from the elegant Kress store to the plain and sensible Nolan home, which undergoes an important change after the second act. Emilee McVey-Lee’s effective period costumes range from the Kresses’s sharp suits to Ma Nolan’s frumpy house wear, Pa Nolan’s practical suspenders, and Florry’s long, flirty dresses. Mary Louise Geiger’s lighting and M. Florian Staab’s sound keep the audience immersed in the proceedings.

Juilliard graduate Price is a revelation as Francie, fully embodying the eminently likable character’s transformation from frightened wallflower doing whatever her parents tell her to into a strong young woman making her own decisions about her body and her life, not all of which end up the way she wants. Daniels (Network, All the Way) is wonderful as Tessie, Francie’s friend and mentor who has overcome her difficult past with the help of her charming boyfriend who always finds the goodness in situations, ambulance driver Max, played by a scene-stealing Jason O’Connell (Pride and Prejudice, The Dork Night).

The fancy Leonard Kress Jr. (Peterson Townsend) woos Francie (Emma Pfitzer Price) in Becomes a Woman (photo by Todd Cerveris)

Townsend (Chains, Fire Shut Up in My Bones) and Boutté (Parade, Carousel) excel as father and son, each offering surprises as Smith’s plot evolves. The fine cast also features Jillian Louis, Scott Redmond, Madeline Seidman, and Phillip Taratula.

Smith, who wrote such other plays as Sawdust Heart and So Gracious Is the Time and such other novels as Tomorrow Will Be Better and Joy in the Morning — as well as the book, with George Abbott, for the 1951 Broadway musical adaptation of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn — died in 1972 at the age of seventy-five and never saw Becomes a Woman onstage. More than fifty years later, her daughter got to witness this splendid play, a prescient exploration of a young woman’s coming of age that is not dated in the least; sadly, much of it is all too relevant today.

In a program essay by scholar, teacher, and historian Maya Cantu, Smith is quoted as saying, “A hundred years after I’m dead, people will still be reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.” Hopefully, a hundred years from now, people will also still be going to the theater to experience Becomes a Woman.

DARK DISABLED STORIES

Dickie Hearts and Ryan J. Haddad both portray Ryan in Dark Disabled Stories (photo by Joan Marcus)

DARK DISABLED STORIES
The Shiva Theater at the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 2, $60
212-539-8500
publictheater.org

In Thomas Bradshaw’s The Seagull/Woodstock, NY, a modern-day adaptation of the Chekhov classic for the New Group currently running at the Signature Center, wannabe playwright Kevin tells Samuel, “I’m developing a new type of theater. A theater that’ll be of interest to people under eighty. Mother wants everything neat and pretty. That’s not who I am.”

Disabled actor, playwright, and autobiographical performer Ryan J. Haddad delivers an exhilarating new type of theater with Dark Disabled Stories, which opened a nearly sold-out run at the Public’s small and intimate Shiva Theater last night. Produced with the Bushwick Starr, the seventy-five-minute show features a series of vignettes in which Haddad, who has cerebral palsy and uses a metallic, posterior walking frame, shares his real-life adventures seeking companionship and traversing the city, particularly on buses and subways, where he encounters difficulties specific to his disability. The tales range from hysterically funny and touching to heartbreaking and passionate, but he’s not angling for any sympathy.

“Now, if you’re gonna look at me as sad or pitiable . . . If you came here to pity me, you can leave. We’re only one story in, you can leave. And don’t ask for a refund. I am not here to be pitied and I am not a victim, is that clear?” he says early on. “I try to make disability funny so that nondisabled people can understand it and open themselves to it and realize that it’s not so scary, so dark. And make it more accessible for them. Not tonight. I don’t feel like it. I’m not saying I won’t make you laugh at all. I’ll probably make you laugh a lot. I’m a naturally comedic person, but . . . not everything is accessible to us, so why should we try to make our experiences accessible to you?”

I’ve seen several shows that use ASL interpreters and open captioning in clunky, distracting ways that detracted from the overall narrative, the exception being Deaf West Theatre’s 2015 Broadway revival of Spring Awakening. But Haddad and director Jordan Fein have ingeniously integrated multiple inclusive techniques that make Dark Disabled Stories that much more powerful and involving while remaining wholly organic.

Ryan (Ryan J. Haddad and Dickie Hearts) share personal, poignant stories in world premiere at the Public (photo by Joan Marcus)

Haddad wears a long crew-neck sweatshirt that says “Ryan” on it, as does Deaf actor Dickie Hearts, who signs everything Ryan speaks. Meanwhile, just offstage by a ramp, disabled actor Alejandra Ospina, who uses a motorized wheelchair, provides audio description of what is happening, detailing the Ryans’ movements, shifts in the set, and the projections on the back wall, which range from color changes — shocking pink is a favorite — to large words.

“I’m not Ryan, I’m Dickie, and I’ll be playing ‘Ryan’ alongside Ryan, who will also be playing ‘Ryan,’” Dickie explains. “Ryan has cerebral palsy, CP, and I do not. I am Deaf and Ryan is not. I’m not an interpreter, I’m an actor.” His words are both described by Alejandra and projected on the screen. In addition, there is an open space off to the side where audience members can go if anything is making them uncomfortable, where they can still watch the show and touch a soft-sculpture wall hanging. A handout in the program advises, “We invite you to react as you need, make sounds, and move around in ways that feel comfortable to your body. People may have different reactions and ways of expressing themselves. This is exciting and welcome.”

The set, by dots, the collective that also designed the costumes, is a shallow rectangular pink box with three blue bus seats, a pair of metal columns wrapped in magenta sequin fabric, and the title of the play spelled out in pink pillowlike bubble letters at the top and bottom (where it is upside down). The lighting is by Oona Curley, with sound by Kathy Ruvuna and video by Kameron Neal, all meshing in a smooth harmony that allows the audience of about ninety-nine, in risers and expanded wheelchair and mobility disability seating, to experience the play as they need/want to. Andrew Morrill is the director of artistic sign language, with Alison Kopit serving as access dramaturg.

Haddad’s previous works include the solo show Hi, Are You Single?; a multimedia installation about swimming as part of Lynn Nottage and Miranda Haymon’s The Watering Hole at the Signature; and My Straighties, Noor and Hadi Go to Hogwarts, and Falling for Make Believe at such venues as Ars Nova, Joe’s Pub, Dixon Place, and La MaMa. He presented a sneak peek of Dark Disabled Stories in August 2021 for Lincoln Center’s Restart Stages program.

He takes a giant leap forward with this full version of Dark Disabled Stories, a bold and daring play in which he is as funny as he is brutally honest. The first vignette deals with a sexual encounter in a gay bar with a stranger in Cleveland. Haddad holds nothing back, except the name of the man, a high school English teacher, as he gives extremely graphic details about what they fif together. Haddad is not doing this merely to shock the audience but to reveal, right from the start, that disabled people have the same fears and desires as everyone else. “I am not a victim, is that clear? That was a completely consensual encounter,” he says. “Hot. Passionate. With just the right hint of scandal. Only without the happy ending I would have hoped.”

Ryan J. Haddad, Dickie Hearts, and Alejandra Ospina rehearse Dark Disabled Stories (photo by Joan Marcus)

Haddad’s stories take place on public transportation, at an important business meeting, coming home from the grocery store, and crossing the street, as he faces situation after situation in which well-meaning samaritans, inaccessibility to certain locations, and his own pride thwart his everyday life.

As he’s being offered “a fuckton of money” by a man from a major university to present one of his solo plays there, he suddenly has to go to the bathroom but he sees that he won’t be able to fit his walker through the narrow space between tables at the restaurant they’re at. “I can’t possibly ask this handsome gentleman to help me. How on earth will he take me seriously if he sees me as a disabled person who needs help to get to the bathroom?” Haddad admits. “Even though he’s offering me money to do an autobiographical show about being disabled, I can’t let him see that I’m disabled. I’ll just pee on my own time.” It doesn’t end well.

Alejandra (Claire’s Broom Detective Agency: The Mystery of the Missing Violin, Emily Driver’s Great Race Through Time and Space!) and Dickie (The Deaf vs the Dead, Tamales de Puerco) each get to share a story of their own, which lends insight to who they are as individuals. Dickie’s tale is particularly chilling, as it involves his losing access to his hands temporarily. “My hands are how I communicate,” he explains with great worry.

Among the many appealing aspects of Dark Disabled Stories are how and what it communicates. Is it the future of theater? It certainly holds the promise of the future of a specific type of theater, one that would make The Seagull’s Kevin/Konstantin happy, if not necessarily his vainglorious actress mother.

THE BEST WE COULD (a family tragedy)

Ella (Aya Cash) considers her future as her parents (Frank Wood and Constance Shulman) worry about theirs in MTC world premiere (photo by Marc J. Franklin)

THE BEST WE COULD (a family tragedy)
Manhattan Theatre Club
New York City Center Stage 1
Tuesday – Sunday through March 26, $79-$99
212-581-1212
www.manhattantheatreclub.com
www.nycitycenter.org

Our Town meets Death of a Salesman in Emily Feldman’s potent and moving The Best We Could (a family tragedy), a Manhattan Theatre Club production running at New York City Center Stage 1 through March 26.

The ninety-minute show is narrated by Maps (Maureen Sebastian), who also occasionally plays different minor roles. “We’re about to get started here,” she says directly to the audience at the beginning. “Could we take some of these lights down a little bit, please?” she asks lighting designer Matt Frey, and he obliges. She sets the pace with an unhurried, relaxed monologue, then introduces the characters: Ella (Aya Cash), a thirty-six-year-old woman still trying to find herself, currently working as a chair yoga instructor at a rehab facility in Los Angeles; her father, Lou (Frank Wood), formerly a senior investigator at a biomedical research institute; her mother, Peg (Constance Shulman), a retired event planner who lives with Lou in New Jersey; and Marc (Brian D. Coats), Lou’s longtime friend and colleague who lives in Denver with his wife.

“Marc . . . You’re not really in the first part,” Maps says. “Sorry to make you wait.” Marc walks to a far corner of the stage, which is a large, empty central rug where all the action takes place. When a character is not in a scene, they watch from the sides or from the back, which resembles a garage.

Maureen Sebastian serves as the narrator and plays numerous small parts in The Best We Could (a family tragedy) (photo by Marc J. Franklin)

It’s Ella’s birthday, but she’s been stood up by her girlfriend. Maps directs her: “Wait thirty minutes. Wait an hour. Leave alone. . . . Tell Crystal it’s over. Your mother is calling. Answer the phone.”

After their dog dies, Peg sends Lou to California by plane to pick up a new rescue dog and drive back cross-country with Ella, who ostensibly has a meeting with a children’s book editor in New York City. On the way, Lou and Ella see various national monuments and stop to visit with Marc and his wife, Karen (Sebastian), in Colorado, where Lou discusses his pending job application in Marc’s department.

But the closer they get to home, the more uncomfortable both Ella and Lou seem with, as we eventually find out, good reason.

Feldman (Three Women in Four Chairs, My Lover Joan) and director Daniel Aukin (Fool for Love, Bad Jews) do a superb job conjuring a drive across America without any props other than chairs; when they stop at Mount Rushmore and the Grand Canyon, you feel you are there even though it is two characters sitting or standing on an empty stage. The spare set is by Lael Jellinek, with lighting by Matt Frey and sound by Kate Marvin. The cleverly outlined and believable story about an older man trying to hold his place in a world that that threatens to leave him behind, reminiscent of Willy Loman, gives way to one crucial late plot twist that jolts the narrative ahead toward its tragic conclusion but seems to have come out of nowhere except recent headlines, strangely ungrounded in the characters we’ve been watching for seventy minutes or so.

Peg (Constance Shulman), Ella (Aya Cash), and Lou (Frank Wood) face hard truths in Emily Feldman play (photo by Marc J. Franklin)

Tony winner Wood (Sideman, In the Blood) is wonderfully deadpan throughout, portraying a man who’s living in his own alternate reality. The always terrific Shulman (SHHH, Orange Is the New Black) is very funny as the ever-worried Peg, while Cash (From Up Here, The Pain and the Itch) keeps the deeply troubled Ella appropriately on edge, not necessarily the heroic figure we want her to be; her description of what her book is about is telling: “the inner emptiness of being a person living in a warlike society that, on some level, believes it has no future.” Coats (On the Levee, La Ruta) provides solid support as Lou’s old buddy, who knows more than he admits.

Sebastian (Vietgone, Now Circa Then) is a lovely stage manager, giving direction to the characters, delivering interstitial notes to the audience, and inhabiting several roles, generally in a track suit. (The costumes are by Anita Yavich.) She’s not about to take any nonsense from any of them, nor is she going to let the show drift too far off course. Once Ella and Lou return to Peg, Maps tells Ella, “Get everything out in the open.” Ella hesitates, so Maps adds. “Go ahead.” Ella does, and it’s not pretty. “I’m sorry. But, this is the tragedy part,” Maps tells us.

Despite its major plot misstep, The Best We Could is an involving tale that follows a relatively average, if offbeat, family trying to do the best they can. Sometimes it works out, and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s the American way.

THE SIGN IN SIDNEY BRUSTEIN’S WINDOW

Iris (Rachel Brosnahan) and Sidney (Oscar Isaac) get playful in long-overdue Lorraine Hansberry revival at BAM (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

THE SIGN IN SIDNEY BRUSTEIN’S WINDOW
Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Strong, Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St. between Ashland & Rockwell Pl.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 24, $84.50-$385
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

One of the first things you will ask yourself after seeing Lorraine Hansberry’s The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window is, Why haven’t I ever seen or read this before? Or even, Why have I never heard of it until now?

Hansberry changed theater forever with her 1959 masterpiece, A Raisin in the Sun. Five years later, her second play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, debuted on Broadway, starring Gabriel Dell as the title character and Rita Moreno as his wife, Iris. It ran for 14 previews and 101 performances; the last New York City revival was more than fifty years ago, playing nine previews and a paltry five performances at the Longacre, with Hal Linden as Brustein and Zohra Lampert as Iris. Whereas Raisin dealt with a Black family struggling to survive on the South Side of Chicago following the death of its patriarch, Sign is about a white couple in Greenwich Village trying to maintain their Bohemian lifestyle; racism and discrimination are only subplots to the central narrative.

The provocative play is now back in a stellar production at BAM’s Harvey Theater that continues through March 24 and stars Emmy nominee Oscar Isaac as Sidney, a New York City Jewish intellectual, and Rachel Brosnahan as his non-Jewish wife, Iris; the story is built around Sidney’s efforts to make a living and the travails of his friends and his wife’s family.

When the play opens, his latest business venture, a folk music café called Walden Pond, has failed, so he immediately decides to buy the local newspaper the Village Crier. The deal annoys Iris, a wannabe actress he has nicknamed Mountain Girl because of her Appalachian upbringing. “Where in the world are you going to get the money to pay for a newspaper?” a bewildered Iris asks. “It’s a small newspaper. A weekly,” Sidney explains. “Sidney, you can’t afford a yearly leaflet!” Iris declares.

Joining Sidney at the newspaper are his right-hand man, Alton Scales (Julian De Niro), and artist and designer Max (Raphael Nash Thompson), who has contempt for revolutionaries like Alton.

Alton (Julian De Niro) and Wally (Andy Grotelueschen) are a bit on edge in The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Sidney is a former idealist who no longer believes that he can save the world. “Since I was eighteen I’ve belonged to every committee to Save, to Free, to Abolish, Preserve, Reserve, and Conserve that ever was,” he tells Alton, who is a light-skinned Black man, and his friend Wally O’Hara (Andy Grotelueschen), a bushy haired white man running for local office as a reformer. Sidney goes on, “And the result — is that the mere thought of a ‘movement’ to do anything chills my bones! I simply can no longer bear the spectacle of power-driven insurgents trying at all cost to gain control of — the refreshment committee!”

Sidney calls Iris’s older sister, the bigoted and fashionable Mavis (Miriam Silverman), “the Bulwark of the Republic. The Mother Middleclass itself standing there revealed in all her towering courage.” Mavis responds, “I am standing here and I am thinking: how smug it is in bohemia,” blaming people such as Sidney for society’s ills, declaring, “Since you have all so busily got rid of God for us!”

Alton has fallen in love with Gloria (Gus Birney), Mavis and Iris’s younger sister, who works as a call girl in Miami, although Alton doesn’t know that. Because Mavis had difficulty accepting Iris’s marriage to a Jew, Iris and Sidney decide not to tell Mavis about Alton, assuming she’ll not respond well to the possibility of a Black brother-in-law, either. Meanwhile, gay playwright David Ragin (Glenn Fitzgerald), who lives upstairs from the Brusteins, occasionally drops by for some writing supplies or just to say hello and shake things up.

And things do indeed get shaken up immediately before and after the primary.

Obie-winning director Anne Kaufman (The Bedwetter, The Nether) gives Hansberry’s sharp dialogue and clever character development the room they need to breathe and grow, avoiding clichéd situations and stereotypes. The action unfurls on dots’ multifloor set, which is propped up from beneath as if it is floating in a mysterious space, a cramped Village apartment with a fire escape outside one window and a rooftop view. John Torres’s lighting and Bray Poor’s sound maintain the believability of it all.

Iris (Rachel Brosnahan) and Sidney (Oscar Isaac) can make only so much beautiful music together (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Isaac (Hamlet, Grace) is sensational as Sidney, completely immersing himself in this complex and unpredictable man who essentially wants to do the right things for the right reasons, who feels he is part of a bigger community that needs people like him. Brosnahan (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Othello) is a delight as Iris, who is ready to flower but is constantly thwarted. Silverman (Anatomy of a Suicide, A Delicate Ship) nearly steals every scene she’s in, representing how too many Americans feel toward people who are not like them but also how they are not innately evil and, perhaps, willing to adjust their views. Tony nominee Grotelueschen (Tootsie, Into the Woods) continues to prove he’s one of the best supporting players around as the politician seeking a newspaper endorsement. Birney brings a sweet innocence to Gloria, Fitzgerald is bold as the cocky David, De Niro is gentle as Alton, and Nash Thompson has a rousing good time as Max.

But at the center of it all, a daring humanity emanates from every moment. The play was inspired by a real election in Hansberry’s district in the Village; the Chicago native lived on Bleecker St. for many years prior to her death in 1965 at the age of thirty-four. BAM supplements the show with the biographical exhibit “‘Art Is Energy’: Lorraine Hansberry, World Builder” in the Rudin Family Gallery, consisting of photos, unpublished writings, recordings, drawings, Alison Saar’s sculpture To Sit a While, and more, lending insight into the playwright’s real life.

Theatergoers and critics might have been disappointed that The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window didn’t address racism directly like Raisin did as they tried to pigeonhole the Black woman writer, but her sophomore play has plenty to say about the human condition, and perhaps she was aware that the work would not be as successful as her first hit. About halfway through, Sidney and David have a key conversation in which Hansberry seems to be defending herself in David’s words.

Sidney: Tell me. What is your play about, David?
David: It’s not for me to say.
Sidney: Each person will “get from it what he brings to it?” Right?
David: To be real simple-minded about it — yes.
Sidney: Then, what makes you the artist and the audience the consumer if they have to write your play for you?
David: I know what it’s about. I told you, my plays have to speak for themselves.
Sidney: But to whom? For whom are they written and, above all, why are they written?
David: You hate my kind of writing because it goes beyond the walls of Ibsen’s prisons and Shaw’s lectures — that’s your problem, Sid.
Mavis: I just don’t know whatever happened to simple plays about simple people with simple problems.

Welcome to the wonderful world of Lorraine Hansberry and The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window.

BATSHEVA DANCE COMPANY: HORA

Batsheva Dance Company brings Hora back to New York in two-week Joyce engagement (photo by Steven Pisano)

HORA
The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Ave. at 19th St.
February 28 – March 12, $10-$75
212-691-9740
www.joyce.org
www.batsheva.co.il

Next year is the one hundredth anniversary of the Jewish circle dance known as the Hora, created by Baruch Agadati in Palestine in 1924, influenced by Romanian and Greek traditions. The dance is a staple of Jewish American weddings and bar and bat mitzvahs, usually accompanied by the folk song “Hava Nagila” and including the lifting of various celebrants on chairs. The Tel Aviv–based Batsheva Dance Company is paying tribute to that centennial by bringing back former artistic director and current house choreographer Ohad Naharin’s sixty-minute Hora, continuing at the Joyce through March 12.

When the 2009 piece came to BAM in 2012, I called it “a mesmerizing experience, a stunning balance of light, color, sound, and movement from one of the world’s most innovative and entertaining choreographers.” It is just as mesmerizing today.

Batsheva and Naharin have dazzled us with such other pieces as Deca Dance, Three, Minus 16, Project 5, Venezuela, and Last Work; this return to Hora is a welcome one, even if the required mask-wearing muffles some of the audience’s exhilarated gasping.

Naharin’s Hora features no chairs and no “Hava Nagila”; it takes place in an empty rectangular space bordered on three sides by a green wall, with a long bench (designed by Amir Raveh) in the back where the eleven dancers sit when not dancing. Isao Tomita’s electronic score incorporates such familiar sounds as Richard Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” Richard Wagner’s “Tannhauser: Overture” and “Die Walküre: Ride of the Valkyries,” Charles Edward Ives’s “The Unanswered Question,” Claude Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun,” Modest Mussorgsky’s “Catacombs,” and a whistled version of John Williams’s main theme from Star Wars. (The sound design and editing is by Maxim Waratt.)

The show starts with the eleven dancers rising from the bench and approaching the front of the stage, set and lighting designer Avi Yona Bueno initially casting them in silhouette. It is one of only a few times the performers will move in unison; they break out into solos and other configurations, seldom coming into contact with one another as they proceed in Batsheva’s unique Gaga language, ranging from sharp, angular gestures to nearly impossible formations that resemble animals, insects, and even animated video game characters. I’m still trying to figure out how Ohad Mazor touched his foot to his elbow.

There are also dazzling moments from Eri Nakamura (who designed the black costumes), Billy Barry (undulating on the floor), Sean Howe (repeatedly hitting himself in the head), Londiwe Khoza, Matan Cohen, Chiaki Horita (gyrating her torso) — well, the entire company, which also includes Chen Agron, Yarden Bareket, Yael Ben Ezer, Guy Davidson, Ben Green, Li-En Hsu, Adrienne Lipson, Gianni Notarnicola, Danai Porat, Igor Ptashenchuk, and Yoni (Yonatan) Simon, who all display a thrilling physicality, testing the boundaries of what the human body could, and should, do.

When all eleven dancers are off the bench, it is hard to know where to focus your attention, as they are all doing different things; if you follow a cartwheel, you might miss a trio rolling over the floor or a duo balancing against each other’s buttocks. To watch the entire troupe at once is to get absorbed in a kind of whirlwind of life in all its unpredictability and excitement. But no matter where you look, prepare to be amazed.