Screenshots from Zoom presentation Return the Moon by Third Rail Projects
RETURN THE MOON
Third Rail Projects
Select nights on Zoom through December 11, $15, $42, $67, 8:00 thirdrailprojects.com
Brooklyn-based Third Rail Projects specializes in site-specific immersive productions in unique locations, from a Bushwick warehouse to a former parochial school to backstage at Lincoln Center’s Claire Tow Theater. That’s not feasible during a pandemic lockdown, so the company has devised an interactive piece for Zoom, Return the Moon. Presentations over the platform have been slowing down dramatically now that theaters are opening and Zoom fatigue has more than set in, but Third Rail is forging ahead with the seventy-five-minute show, a melding of celebratory toast, ritual, and folktale made for a maximum of sixty audience members at a time.
Conceived and directed by Zach Morris and created by Morris, Alberto Denis, Kristin Dwyer, Joshua Gonzales, Sean Hagerty, Justin Lynch, Marissa Nielsen-Pincus, Tara O’Con, and Edward Rice, the live, online gathering is guided by a set of prompts that include being sent to a breakout room and sharing personal thoughts and memories in the chat. (Everyone renames themselves identically, ensuring anonymity.) The centerpiece is a tale about the New Moon told using a small shadowbox constructed of white paper. “Once upon a time, you, me, all of us, we found ourselves in a village,” the story begins. “Now, this was a long time ago. So long ago, in fact, that the sun hadn’t been born yet. And all we knew was night. And the Moon. Who back then didn’t wax and wane but instead always moved through the sky full and luminous. And the Moon shone on our village.”
As opposed to such previous Third Rail shows as Then She Fell,Ghost Light, and The Grand Paradise, this one takes place mostly in your mind, using your imagination to generate the shared space. It can get a bit twee and treacly, lacking the exciting cutting-edge twists and turns so prominent in Third Rail’s in-person stagings, but as the narrator says in the story, “For some of us, the village felt like a homeplace. For others, it did not. For some of us, it felt good and safe, but others longed to be somewhere else. Nonetheless, this is where we all were.” As a bonus, participants get a little package in the mail a few days after the show that lets them relive the tale as well as make their own, which is a lovely touch.
5 Indices on a Tortured Body: The Quarantine Body will conclude performance series on October 24 (photo by Bones)
5 INDICES ON A TORTURED BODY
Bronx Museum
1040 Grand Concourse
September 8 – October 24, free with advance RSVP
718-681-6000 www.bronxmuseum.org
Since July, the Bronx Museum of the Arts has been hosting “5 Indices on a Tortured Body,” a series of five live performances held in conjunction with the excellent exhibition “Wardell Milan: Amerika. God Bless You If It’s Good to You.” The small but powerful show by Harlem-based artist Wardell Milan, continuing through October 24, is part of the institution’s special fiftieth anniversary programming, focusing on social justice. “Amerika. God Bless You If It’s Good to You” consists of collages, photographs, and works on paper that address white supremacy and ask the question “What do terrorists do when they’re not terrorizing?” One end of the exhibit contains a ritual room inspired by the Rothko Chapel in Houston; for “5 Indices on a Tortured Body,” Milan is collaborating with Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist Zachary Tye Richardson and sculptor and designer Billy Ray Morgan to present the live events, which explore the disenfranchised and marginalized in search of a place of refuge. “The Chapel of Five Indices serves as a ‘Safe Space’ for these tortured bodies — interlinked through histories of violence, to be affirmed and celebrated,” Milan explains in a museum brochure. “Within this chapel, these irrepressible bodies cannot be flattened but must be reckoned with.” Below is the remaining schedule (“The Black Male Body” had its last performance September 4, with Richardson and Milan, written by Casey Gerald); admission is free with advance RSVP.
Wednesday, September 8 5 Indices on a Tortured Body: The Female Body, with Zachary Tye Richardson, Catherine Fisher, and Trinity Dawn Bobo, written by Fisher, 6:00
Saturday, September 25 5 Indices on a Tortured Body: The Trans Body, with Zachary Tye Richardson, B. Hawk Snipes, and Mae Eskenazi, written by Snipes and Richardson, 2:00
Wednesday, October 13 5 Indices on a Tortured Body: The Migrant Body, with Zachary Tye Richardson, DJ Chappel, and Brittany Bringuez, written by Jabu Ndlovu, 6:00
Sunday, October 24 5 Indices on a Tortured Body: The Quarantine Body, with Zachary Tye Richardson, written by Noah Wertheimer, 2:00
“Born in Flames: Feminist Futures,” features dazzling work by Chitra Ganesh, Saya Woolfalk, Huma Bhabha, and others (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Also on view at the Bronx Museum, through September 26, is the phenomenal “Born in Flames: Feminist Futures,” inspired by Lizzie Borden’s seminal 1983 underground classic film, Born in Flames, which is shown on a loop along with recent works by Caitlin Cherry, Chitra Ganesh, Clarissa Tossin, Firelei Baez, Huma Bhabha, Maria Berrio, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Rose B. Simpson, Saya Woolfalk, Sin Wai Kin (fka Victoria Sin), Shoshanna Weinberger, Tourmaline, and Wangechi Mutu.
STREB’s August performance at Jacob’s Pillow is streaming for free through September 16 (photos by Christopher Duggan and Jamie Kraus, courtesy of Jacob’s Pillow)
In July 2020, STREB Extreme Action shared Best Zoom Dance (with Martha Graham Dance Company) in twi-ny’s Pandemic Awards for Body Grammar, an inventive way to utilize dancers’ body parts to play with ideas of community and movement online, especially for a troupe used to working with unique action machines that often place the performers in physical danger. The Brooklyn-based company, founded in 1985 by Elizabeth Streb, maintained a continuous virtual presence during the lockdown, but you can now catch the troupe in person when they perform five outdoor shows September 17-19 at Manhattan West. (Admission is free with advance RSVP.)
The bill includes Molinette, in which three STREB action heroes have their feet affixed to a twenty-foot-high horizontal swivel pipe designed by Noe España, commissioned for the 2019 reopening of Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris; Add, a 1983 solo piece in which the dancer must stay within a cross taped to the floor; Plateshift, featuring six action heroes on a sprung floor that incorporates centrifugal force; and the world premiere of Kaleidoscope, in which eight action heroes are fastened to LERU (London Eye Rehearsal Unit), a solid steel circle that has them defying gravity, a STREB tradition.
To get in the mood, you must check out STREB’s return to Jacob’s Pillow last month after twenty years, streaming for free through September 16. The show consists of twelve repertory works from 1978 to 2006, performed on the outdoor Henry J. Leir Stage in front of a matinee audience by Jackie Carlson, Daniel Rysak, Tyler DuBoys, Justin Ross, Kairis Daniels, Luciany Germán, Leonardo Girón Torres, and associate artistic director Cassandre Joseph, wearing tight-fitting blue superhero costumes. The technical direction is by company emcee and DJ Zaire Baptiste, who knows how to rile up a crowd.
It shows the range of Streb’s choreography and her spirited use of existing and invented objects that often put the action heroes in danger, an astonishing melding of acrobatics, gymnastics, modern dance, and circuslike peril set to original music by technoaxe and compilations produced by Voodo Fé and Freshbeatz. Streb introduces each work with a quote from a review of the piece (from the Village Voice, the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Francisco Examiner, and the New York Times) and a snippet about where the idea originated.
It begins with 2006’s Tip, in which seven dancers move precariously on a tipping machine, a twelve-feet-in-diameter wheel cut in half, able to achieve complete verticality. Carlson twirls a wooden dowel like a baton in 1978’s Pole Vaults, Rysak brandishes a rope in 1983’s Whiplash, Carlson, Rysak, Daniels, and Germán toss around a heavy twelve-foot-long, three-inch-wide dowel in 1990’s Log, Daniels is trapped in a box modeled for Streb’s size in 1985’s Little Ease, Germán plays with a hula hoop in 1983’s Target, Joseph and Ross turn a long dowel into a third dancer in 1992’s Link, the troupe pays homage to the Three Stooges and Buster Keaton with a long dowel and a ramp with a cut-out window in 2002’s Buster, and the company does miraculous things with a pair of rectangular doorlike plywood slabs in 1984’s Surface.
There are also two brief pieces with no props, Ross honoring Merce Cunningham in 1978’s 7′ 43″ and DuBoys re-creating Streb’s 1983 solo, Add, which she remembers as being “the most painful two minutes of my life.” The show concludes in a big way with 2003’s breathtaking Air, in which all eight action heroes jump off a trampoline, landing on a large mat over and over again. As with so many of Streb’s works, you can’t help but wait for disaster to occur, but it never does, at least not in the numerous times I’ve been fortunate to see the endlessly brave and talented troupe perform, at such diverse locations as Park Ave. Armory, Gansevoort Plaza, and the World Financial Center as well as in the documentaries Born to Fly: Elizabeth Streb vs. Gravity and One Extraordinary Day. Be sure to stick around for the postshow talk with Streb, Joseph, and Baptiste, moderated by Pillow scholar-in-residence Maura Keefe.
The Chocolate Genius will lead an interactive demonstration at MAD in conjunction with new chocolate bar inspired by Fisher Dollhouse (photo courtesy Museum of Arts & Design)
Who: Paul Joachim, the Chocolate Genius What: Chocolate-making demonstration and hands-on activity Where:Museum of Arts & Design, 2 Columbus Circle When: Saturday, September 4, free with museum admission of $12-$18, noon–2:00 Why: Paul Joachim, the Florida-based artist known as the Chocolate Genius, has a simple but critical mission: “to transform one billion people or more through chocolate.” Joachim believes that “chocolate creates a visceral, personal response in everyone. It’s a bridge between classes, gender, religion, races — all labels of culture. In other words, chocolate creates a deep human connection — often missing in our divisive world.” Joachim will increase that deep human connection on September 4 when he he will lead an in-person, interactive chocolate-making demonstration at the Museum of Arts & Design, launching a new chocolate bar in conjunction with the exhibition “The Fisher Dollhouse: A Venetian Palazzo in Miniature.”
Chocolate demo takes place in Fisher Dollhouse exhibit at MAD (photo by Jenna Bascom)
On view through September 26, the dollhouse was created by New York–based arts patron and collector Joanna Fisher during the pandemic as a place of refuge; it was designed and built by dozens of craftspersons, with miniature works of art by Dustin Yellin, Ryan McGinness, Hunt Slonem, and others. On September 4 at noon, Joachim will show visitors how to make silicone molds, cast edible works, and temper chocolate at home, along with discussing the history of chocolate and cacao. The milk chocolate bars feature the facade of the dollhouse on their front. “When most people think of chocolate, it’s simply a chocolate bar,” Joachim’s mission statement continues. “I have the gift of transforming chocolate into a mystifying, inspirational experience, live and in front of audience’s eyes. Inspiring them with joy, awe, and love, disrupting the status quo, and pushing the boundaries of what is possible within each viewer’s point of view and own life.” Entry to this “Art Alive” presentation is free with museum admission. Also on view at MAD are “Craft Front & Center,” “Carrie Moyer and Sheila Pepe: Tabernacles for Trying Times,” “Beth Lipman: Collective Elegy,” and “45 Stories in Jewelry: 1947 to Now.”
Stephanie Osin-Cohen’s set design is a highlight of new play at Rattlestick (photo by Andrew Soria)
NI MI MADRE
Rattlestick Playwrights Theater
224 Waverly Pl. between Eleventh & Perry Sts.
Tuesday – Sunday through September 19, $40
866-811-4111 www.rattlestick.org
“Gender’s confusing in our family,” Bete (pronounced “BET-chi”) says in Arturo Luís Soria’s one-person show, Ni Mi Madre, performed live at Rattlestick and streaming online through September 19. In the sixty-minute play, writer-star Soria portrays his domineering Brazilian mother, zeroing in on their complicated relationship.
Ni Mi Madre, which means “not (or “nor”) my mother,” begins with Soria, in a long white gown (by Haydee Zelideth) that bares his hirsute chest, walking onstage carrying a row of ritual candles and flowers. He puts the objects down carefully and pulls the top of the dress over his chest and voilà, he is now his mother. He spends the remainder of the show acting and speaking like her as she discusses life and love, family and children, with a particular focus on her queer Latino son, Arturo.
“You know, he had the right idea going gay,” she says. “I just don’t think he executed it properly, because when he came out . . . He. Came. Out! I mean, it was like the Fourth of July on New Year’s, okay. Then he tells me he’s not just gay, he’s bisexual. So I say, ‘Listen, bisexuals are greedy, okay. The world is gay and it’s straight; it’s black and it’s white; it’s in and it’s out, so figure it out.’”
Arturo Luís Soria portrays his mother in one-person show (photo by Andrew Soria)
Elegant and proud, Bete talks about her three marriages, to Inebriated Jew, Ecuadorian Commie, and Gay Dominican; how it’s okay for her to beat her children; her dedication to Meryl Streep; and her own difficult mother. “My mother never wanted to be a mother. Never,” she explains. “You only get one mom. And my mother didn’t want me.” However, she’s not seeking sympathy but instead defends her treatment of her children.
“My kids don’t know how lucky they are to have a mother like me. I am their inspiration and they don’t even know it and I went through a lot of trouble to raise them,” she says. “I was a good mother to them. And I never abandoned them nor shipped them off to boarding school. I thought about it. Arturo was such a maniac as a kid I used to pray to God that he would go to sleep and not wake up until college, but those were only empty prayers. Kind of. Arturo thinks I was a bad mother to him. I wasn’t bad. He was a fuckin’ lunatic.” She might be harshly critical of him, but she also loves and supports him. “He’s following his dreams,” she adds. “He’s doing what I always wanted but never could because I didn’t have a mother like me.’
The night I saw the show, it was followed by a talkback with Soria and director Danilo Gambini (The Swallow and the Tomcat,An Iliad), a native Brazilian who has been working with Soria on the play since their Yale days going back to 2017 (in addition to other collaborations); Soria began writing Ni Mi Madre in 2008, and it has gone through numerous iterations before opening in New York City on August 25, when Soria’s mother was present in the audience. The postshow discussion lent further insight into mother and son, especially how the latter came to better understand and humanize the former through forgiveness and love as the play developed and he grew in the role. (There will be a free Zoom community conversation with Soria, Gambini, and Sam Morreale on September 2 at 5:00, and if you bring your own mother to the play, you can use code HIMOM to get her in for free September 2-6.)
The show, which features songs by Cher, Cyndi Lauper, Gloria Estefan, and Maria Bethania, lip-synced in drag finery by Soria, takes place on Stephanie Osin-Cohen’s gorgeous stage, a kind of shrine room with ritual objects, including candles galore, a bedecked vanity, and a large depiction of Iemanjá, the Umbanda (Candomblé) goddess of the sea, protector of fishermen and pregnant women — and who looks suspiciously like Cher. The floor is patterned like an Ipanema sidewalk of twisting black-and-white designs in the style of Roberto Burle Marx, which was highlighted in 2019 at the New York Botanical Garden. The walls are “persuasive papaya,” as Bete believes that “you have to paint the colors of your walls something that has to do with suggestive foods.” Krista Smith’s lighting shines brightly on Soria and casts long shadows on either side of the stage in one scene when Bete confronts her own parents.
Bold and barefoot, Soria (The Inheritance,Hit the Wall) fully inhabits the character of his mother. Too many of the lines fall flat and it can feel a bit repetitive even at only an hour, but Ni Mi Madre is a potent and poignant observation of first-generation immigrants, queer Latinidad, and the importance of family, despite the headaches.
“No matter how hard I try / You keep pushing me aside / And I can’t break through / There’s no talking to you,” Cher sings in “Believe,” which Bete mistakenly thinks is by Madonna. With Ni Mi Madre, Soria has taken a very public platform and touching way to break through to his mother.
David Gould steers through a treatise on toxic white masculinity in Islander (photo by Maria Baranova)
ISLANDER
HERE Arts Center
145 Sixth Ave. at Dominick St.
Through September 4, $25
212-647-0202 here.org/shows/islander
The New York Islanders ruined an important part of my coming-of-age. Going to high school on Long Island in the 1980s was not a home-ice advantage for true-blue Rangers fans. The Fish Sticks dynasty was shortly followed by the early, unexpected death of my father — who, I’m ashamed to admit, was one of those inexplicable people who rooted for both teams — making a bad time even worse. Although I don’t blame the Islanders for his passing, I see it as the culmination of a hellish nightmare that still haunts me today.
So the prospect of watching a play built around the Islanders’ disastrous 2017–18 season filled me with so much hope and joy that I wore my Mark Messier captain’s jersey to the show, Islander, which runs at HERE Arts Center through September 4. It didn’t even bother me that the Rangers actually finished below the Islanders that year, coming in last in the Metropolitan Division by a single but harrowing point.
However, I was soon to learn — after the singing of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” for which I was the only one standing — that the seventy-five-minute play is not really about hockey but is instead a thinly disguised treatise on toxic white masculinity that never mentions the sport and doesn’t bring up the last name of the key player and team or even use such terminology as “stick,” “puck,” and “neutral zone” till the end, when the protagonist (David Gould) is joined by an older fan (Dick Toth) and a young child (Aksel Latham-Mitchell) embodying that star player.
Gould, portraying a fictional amalgamation of Islanders players structured mostly around goaltender Jaroslav Halák, declares early on, “You can feel my breathing / you can feel my excitement / rough transitions through the decades / half-empty promises / a twenty-three-year-long drought / getting endlessly pushed around by my crosstown rivals / worst of all, I had to say goodbye to my home of forty-three years / forced out / some friends abandoned ship / and those that remained were tried, time and time again — / My friends have been through a lot / Life as my friend hasn’t been easy.”
The dialogue has been taken verbatim from television and radio broadcasts, interviews, blog posts, and podcasts but stripped of its hockey specificity, so it comes across as a privileged white man who believes he deserves to be successful, that it’s in his blood. “I’m good, I’m good. I’m exciting. I’m . . . sure, I’m a little bit lucky but I tend to look at luck as a surface level,” he tells us. “I’m the benefactor of the, of last . . . there’s a little bit of luck. But if you’re a good guy, you’re gonna create your own luck. Looking back on when I was bad, you could be like: oh, he’s a little unlucky. Because I was bad, you know? But like . . . so bad guys tend to do stuff . . . like that . . . but. I think I’m good. The system the . . . system is definitely working. Which is nice.” The “system” is not so much the Islanders’ method of play but the systemic problems in society that impact race, gender, and income inequality. When he adds, “Good is the enemy of great. No more good; it’s time to be great. Watch me,” he sounds like a finance bro determined to rake in mounds of cash.
An unnamed man (David Gould) and a fan (Dick Toth) talk hockey in Islander (photo by Maria Baranova)
You don’t have to understand anything about hockey to get the show, but it might help to know that the 2017–18 campaign was the Islanders’ third season at Barclays Center in Brooklyn; they had skated at Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale from their inaugural 1972–73 season through 2014–15 before moving back temporarily in 2018. The “John” referred to in the play is captain and team star John Tavares, who will become a free agent after that season. And hockey is by far the least diverse of the major sports, with very few people of color on the ice, behind the bench, or in the front office. The title, Islander, is as much a sly reference to colonialism as it is to hockey.
Compiled by Liza Birkenmeier and directed by Katie Brook, who previously collaborated on the terrific Dr. Ride’s American Beach House, and presented by Televiolet and New Georges, the show works best when Gould is directly addressing the audience and expounding on his abilities. “I need to come out on top. There’s no way around it. I need to come out on top,” he declares. He takes off his shirt to reveal his relatively hot bod, whispers confusing self-affirmations into a microphone in front of a mirror, performs interpretive movements that are more like ice dancing than hockey, and sits down with a fan and talks turkey over a cooler.
Once the narrative turns its attention to the details of hockey, it loses its flow and suddenly becomes about something specific instead of being a more abstract study of white male fragility. It’s like the power play is over and now the team is skating with a wing in the penalty box. As the fan explains, “I know exactly what you’re talking about. No one else does.” The spare set design — I’m still trying to figure out why a mattress was brought onstage — and lighting are by Josh Smith, with choreography by Katie Rose McLaughlin and sound by Ben Williams. Projections on the back screen keep track of the month of the season and ask such questions as “Do you believe that performance matters?,” “What do you think of natural selection?,” and “Have you ever been blindsided?,” the last being a hockey term for being caught unawares by a heavy body check.
“I think I’m the only one who understands the enormity of this historical moment,” the man says, adding later, “Why can’t I just win.” We are now in the midst of an enormous historical moment, one in which white men are not going to win like they used to. Islander is having a good season, better than the Islanders had in 2017–18, although it might not go far in the playoffs. Seating for the show at HERE is half capacity, so it should feel like a real Islanders game. The Islanders’ 2021–22 hockey season kicks off October 14, with the first thirteen games on the road before they christen the brand-new UBS Arena in Elmont with a home contest against Calgary on November 20. I do not wish them well.
Edward Einhorn’s Alma Baya can be seen in person or online (photo by Arthur Cornelius)
ALMA BAYA
A.R.T./New York, Jeffrey and Paula Gural Theatre
502 West Fifty-Third St. at Tenth Ave.
August 13-28, $25 in person ($15 until August 25 with code UTC61); available on demand through September 19, $25 www.untitledtheater.com
Writer-director Edward Einhorn’s Alma Baya is a claustrophobic, vastly entertaining sci-fi parable for this moment in time, an absurdist look at what comes next. The play can be seen in person through August 28 at A.R.T./New York’s Jeffrey and Paula Gural Theatre, or two recordings can be accessed online; the August 14 and 15 performances, featuring different casts, were livestreamed for on-demand viewing. I saw the show with Ann Marie Yoo as Alma, Sheleah Harris as Baya, and Rivera Reese as a mysterious stranger; the second cast consists of Maggie Cino, Nina Man, and JaneAnne Halter.
In a not-too-distant future in an undefined part of the universe, the stern, ultraserious Alma and the wide-eyed, innocent Baya are living in a self-contained, highly sterile white pod, following instructions word-for-word as laid out in a series of white books. Alma is the alpha woman, in charge, while Baya is her obedient, willing assistant.
Like pushing the button at the underground swan site in the TV series Lost, Alma and Baya must twist and turn various handles and wheels when alarm bells sound, even though they don’t know what any of it means. Their controlled existence becomes threatened when a shadowy figure appears outside the pod and they debate whether to let it in. “It’s terrible. It’s helpless. Waiting. It thinks it’s being rescued,” Baya argues. “Don’t you dare,” Alma shoots back. “It’s either it or us. . . . If it gets in, it will kill us.”
Alma ultimately relents and they open the airlock, inviting in an unnamed naked, feral woman with a protective suit who needs food and water and promises she’s not dangerous. Alma insists she is a threat, but Baya wants to help her. The stranger also says she can help maintain their crops in return for being able to stay with them; Alma and Baya had thought the crops were dead — they have no working suit and haven’t been outside in months — and so are intrigued by the prospect of more sustenance. However, as the stranger tells stories about how her pod was so different from this one and begins questioning the many rules and the very purpose of it all, Alma grows more suspicious of her intentions, calling her a liar who is cleverly plotting against them. “I’m too hungry to be clever,” the stranger says. “That’s too bad. I thought you were too clever to be hungry,” Alma responds.
Two casts alternate in futuristic parable Alma and Baya
All the while, Alma and Baya expect the eventual arrival of the original Alma and Baya, as predicted in the books, evoking the New Testament and the return of Jesus as well as Vladimir and Estragon in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. “When?” the stranger asks. “Someday,” Baya answers. Alma explains, “That’s why we’re here. That’s the reason that we’re here. All of us. Even you.” A moment later, the stranger asks, “How do you know whether they’ll come or not?” Alma: “Why else are you here?” The stranger: “I don’t know if there is a reason.” Ultimately, they all might be right, or they all might be wrong.
Staged by Untitled Theater Company No. 61 — which playwright, novelist, filmmaker, and podcaster Einhorn (The Marriage of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein,The Iron Heel) cofounded with his brother, David, who died of cancer during rehearsals — the seventy-five-minute Alma Baya adeptly tackles such topics as faith and religion, the refugee crisis, Covid-19, and others without ever mentioning them by name. The stranger could represent a manifestation of Jesus or the devil or a political refugee desperate for asylum; she even is a gardener, a profession that employs myriad people from other countries. There is also the much clearer comparison to the pods we all formed during the height of the coronavirus crisis, allowing only our live-in partner/families into our homes, afraid that anyone else could introduce Covid and kill us.
The fun, DIY set is by Mike Mroch, with flashy lighting by Federico Restrepo, effective sound by Mark Bruckner, and costumes by Ramona Ponce. The cast performs its job well, with Reese standing out as the stranger, a juicier role that keeps the audience guessing whether she’s good or bad. It’s an escapist play about how we are all trapped by something, including by ourselves, and that blind trust and faith are not always the best way out.
