live performance

WORD ALCHEMY: XU BING AT CHINA INSTITUTE

Who: Xu Bing, Susan L. Beningson, Owen Duffy
What: Talk and book launch
Where: China Institute in America, 100 Washington St.
When: Tuesday, June 10, free ($49.87 with book), 6:30
Why: Last year, Asia Society Texas hosted “Xu Bing: Word Alchemy,” an exhibition of more than fifty of the Chinese artist’s works from throughout his nearly half-century career, including woodcut prints, videos, drawings, and installations. Born in China in 1955 and based in Brooklyn and Beijing, Bing has displayed “Phoenix” at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, “The Living Word” at the Morgan Library, Square Word Calligraphy: Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, Walt Whitman at the Brooklyn Museum, and The Character of Characters at the Met. On June 10, he will be at China Institute in America — where his work will be featured in the fall exhibit “Metamorphosis: Chinese Memory and Displacement” — to launch the full-color catalog of “Word Alchemy,” joined by exhibition curators Susan L. Beningson and Owen Duffy.

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

STRIKING CHOICES: THE WASH AT WP THEATER

A group of Black laundresses prepares to strike in Kelundra Smith’s The Wash (photo by Hollis King)

THE WASH
WP Theater
2162 Broadway at 76th St.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 29, $30-$45
www.newfederaltheatre.com

The real Atlanta Washerwomen’s Strike of 1881 is the setting of Kelundra Smith’s moving if earnest The Wash, making its New York premiere at the WP Theater. A production of Woodie King Jr.’s New Federal Theatre, the fictionalized story is an account of one of first workers’ strikes in American history, all too often left out of our national narrative. Smith powerfully reclaims Black history, as well as her own; the seven characters all carry the names of Smith’s actual female ancestors and family members.

The play begins as a kind of symphony, as five Black women go about their business, washing and drying white people’s clothes using buckets, irons, and washboards, in front of two movable walls onto which are projected colorful abstract images that evoke the work of Georgia-born African American artist Alma Thomas.

The walls are soon spun around to reveal the inside of a double barrel shotgun house where the women gather to clean, gossip, and share their personal stories. The home is rented by Anna (Eunice Woods), a practical widow who runs a sort of workers’ cooperative, washing laundry collected from white Atlanta households. Anna wants to make sure everyone working there gets paid, although their clients aren’t paying them, evading their bills and paying in beans and rice instead of cash. Among the women is Anna’s closest friend, the god-fearing Jeanie (Bianca LaVerne Jones), who lives upstairs. Anna dreams of having her own bakery where she can sell her honeycomb cornbread and Jeanie’s “oh my” pies.

Jeanie: We been over this a thousand times. We ain’t answerin’ to white folks. We done got us a system. We only gots to talk to dem when we pick up they dirty clothes and drop off the clean ones. Dey pissed about it.
Anna: War been over almost twenty years. We oughta be past dis by now.
Jeanie: Dem crackers just killed the president. It ain’t over to dem.
Anna: It’s getting worse. I don’t know how much longer we can go on like this. No mo rice, beans, and hand-me-downs.

Jeanie has just found out that her son and daughter-in-law are going to have a baby, so she needs to make enough money to afford a bus ticket to Rochester. Thomasine (Margaret Odette), who has four young children, is married to an abusive husband. The newly married and madly in love Charity (Alicia Pilgrim) is looking forward to having kids. And Jewel (Kerry Warren) is in college, where she is very good friends with another woman student. The women are fed up with doors being slammed in their faces when they ask for payment, so they start considering striking, and a heated discussion ensues.

Anna: What else are we gonna to do? We tried waiting. We tried asking. We supposed to go the police?
Charity: They’ll arrest us for callin ’em.
Jewel: We wouldn’t be the first. Remember a few years ago in Galveston and Jackson? They did it.
Thomasine: They tried that here last year and the year before. Police pulled washerwomen’s hair out in the street.
Charity: But this a new day. Mrs. Anna say the Cotton Expo comin’.
Jewel: Plus, after they stole the election from that Negro alderman last year, I think folks will hear us out.
Anna: Jeanie, we did say —
Jeanie: We was just talkin’.
Anna: That’s the problem. It’s a lot of talkin’ ’round here, but now it’s time to demand. No pay, no wash.
Jeanie: Strike? If we ain’t workin’, how we gonna pay the property tax?
Thomasine: I got four kids comin’ up like dandelions. Somethin’ is better than nothin’.

The real Atlanta Washerwomen’s Strike of 1881 inspired play making NYC premiere at WP Theater (photo by Hollis King)

Anna: Something ain’t paying my property taxes. Matter of fact, we not even gettin’ something. We’re gettin’ anythang, and that’s worse. If we can set our own rates, I can pay my taxes ’fore the law come.
Jeanie: Think about this, Anna. What good it’ll do if we strike? It’s plenty of washerwomen in this city. Folk’ll take dey laundry to somebody else, and we’ll have a stain on us.
Jewel: She’s right. It’ll only work if everyone does it. We have to get more women to join us.
Jeanie: More womens? This Atlanta. Dem crackers will have us swingin’ from a Georgia pine.
Jewel: Times are changing. Negroes comin’ up around here.

They gather in a church basement, where they establish their makeshift headquarters for the strike, forming a union called the Washing Society. They are surprised and suspicious when Mozelle (Rebecca Haden), a single white mother, shows up, offering to help get the white laundry women in Castleberry to join the fight. As the number of strikers increases dramatically and the newspapers pick up the story, Anna, Jeanie, Thomasine, Charity, and Jewel reexamine what they want out of their lives, as individuals and as Black women.

The Wash is the conclusion of Smith’s Reconstruction Trilogy, following The Vote and The Knot. She and director Awoye Timpo (In Old Age, Good Grief) build a heartwarming portrait of community among the women, six unique characters who come together while facing their complicated personal situations. The narrative becomes repetitive, and the continual turning around of Jason Ardizzone-West’s set is time consuming and grows a bit tedious; perhaps the play would benefit from being streamlined from 135 minutes with intermission to a more concise 90 minutes without a break.

Gail Cooper-Hecht’s period costumes capture the look of the time, while Belynda M’baye’s wide-ranging props fill the shelves of Anna’s kitchen and workspace. Abhita Austin’s projections include shots of actual newspaper articles weighing in on the strike. Choreographers Adesola Osakalumi and Jill Vallery create scenes with movement that are like dances, all lit by Victor En Yu Tan, achieving what Smith explains in the script: “This play is meant to move like the wind; it’s gentle and breezy in some moments and swift and sharp in others.”

Pulling no punches, The Wash might wear its heart on its sleeve, but it tells an important, little-known story in a way that makes it relevant today, rather than just another episode from America’s shameful past.

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

AWAITING THE PENUMBRA: LUNAR ECLIPSE AT SECOND STAGE

Em (Lisa Emery) and George (Reed Birney) take stock of their life together in Donald Margulies’s Lunar Eclipse (photo by Joan Marcus)

LUNAR ECLIPSE
The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Irene Diamond Stage
Tuesday – Sunday through June 22, $74-$114
2st.com

Donald Margulies’s immeasurably moving and intelligent Lunar Eclipse begins with a man (Reed Birney) sitting in a folding chair under a tree in the middle of a grassy field, crying inconsolably. He tries to hide his sorrow when a woman (Lisa Emery) arrives, but soon they are both digging deep into their lives as the earth passes between the sun and the moon.

The couple is named George and Em, after George Gibbs and Emily Webb, the neighbors who fall in love in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Although the play is not specifically about those two characters, it does echo Wilder’s approach, making them represent any wife and husband looking back after fifty years, the good times and the bad. It’s nearly impossible to not imagine yourself in one of those chairs — regardless of your current age — next to your longtime partner, taking stock of your accomplishments and failures as the sky turns from bright to dark to bright again.

For ninety minutes, George and Em bicker over minute things, discuss their children, remember their first night together, and honor the many dogs they had, buried around them in that field. Although no time period is given, cellphones never appear. George and Em talk about their health problems; George is afraid he’s starting to lose his mind. He says, “Feel like I’m at sea, sometimes, in the middle of a storm. Looking for a place to land only there’s no land in sight.” Em replies, “You’re the sharpest man I know.” But George insists he is changing, and not for the better. “Isn’t that something? To think that we’re here? At this stage? Already? Look at us: Almost done. Lights out.”

As the total eclipse begins, George pulls out his binoculars, laments having had his telescope stolen, and hopes to see the rare Japanese Lantern Effect. Em asks George why he was crying, and although he is initially hesitant, he eventually tells her. They talk a lot about love and death.

Describing a troubling experience he’d had very early that morning, a kind of walking nightmare, George says, “My heart . . . was racing . . . I could feel blood rushing to my head. I could hear it in my ears. Afraid if I said anything, if I made any sound at all, if I’d budged one inch, everything would just . . . crack.”

She kisses his hand, and he wonders why she did that. He is worried about the future of humanity. She asks if she has ever done anything that surprised him. He’s sorry to hear about her sadness. In some ways they evoke not only Wilder’s George and Emily but also Edward Albee’s George and Martha from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, although not nearly as extreme, nonviolent, and relatively sober.

They’re not rich, they don’t have a close, loving family, and they recently said goodbye to their last dog, but they still care about each other, even if he doesn’t want to admit it.

George: Anything I can do to help . . .
Em: You mean that?
George: Of course I mean that.
Em: Thank you. That’s kind of you to say.
George: I’m not being kind. I’m your husband.

Em (Lisa Emery) and George (Reed Birney) remember the good times and the bad in beautiful Second Stage play (photo by Joan Marcus)

Em sums up their life — all of our lives — when she then says, “The worst thing in the world that could possibly happen happens and you go to sleep and morning comes and whataya know, you wake up and you’re still breathing. You didn’t die during the night. That’s your punishment, I guess: You live another day. And all the days after that.”

Presented by Second Stage at the Signature Center, Lunar Eclipse is a near-masterpiece by the Brooklyn-born, New Haven–based Margulies, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Dinner with Friends, was a finalist for two other Pulitzers (for Sight Unseen and Collected Stories), and won the Thornton Wilder Prize for literary translation in 2018. Margulies dedicated the work to his father-in-law, George Street, a Kentucky farmer who died in 2010.

Walt Spangler’s set is a lovely, inviting grassy expanse beautifully lit by Amith Chandrashaker, with Sinan Refik Zafar’s nature sounds encompassing the theater, immersing the audience in the experience, along with Grace Mclean’s gentle music. S. Katy Tucker’s video projections follow the course of the eclipse in the sky behind the actors, who are dressed in Jennifer Moeller’s casual costumes. My lone quibble is when dark clouds are projected as George mentions dark clouds hanging over him.

Drama League nominee Kate Whoriskey (Clyde’s, Sweat) directs the show with a compassionate, tender hand, giving plenty of room for Margulies’s poetic dialogue to shine out of the shadows. For the next lunar eclipse, you’ll want to find a grassy, private space where you can sit next to your loved one and enjoy the event, but be careful what you share.

Tony winner Birney (Chester Bailey, The Humans) and Drama Desk nominee Emery (Six Degrees of Separation, A Kind of Alaska) are sensational together, he both gentle and brash as George, who admits to being disappointed with how his life ended up, she touching and considerate as Em, who believes she did the best she possibly could.

Which is all any of us can ask for.

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

STOPPING BY A DINER ON A SNOWY EVENING: WILLIAM INGE AT CLASSIC STAGE

Bus Stop takes place in a comfy diner in small-town Kansas during a snowstorm (photo by Carol Rosegg)

BUS STOP
Classic Stage Company, Lynn F. Angelson Theater
136 East Thirteenth St. between Third & Fourth Aves.
Through June 8, $76-$132
www.classicstage.org

This is the last weekend to see Jack Cummings III’s ravishing adaptation of William Inge’s Bus Stop, the 1955 play that was expanded into a popular film in 1956 — famously starring Marilyn Monroe — and turned into a musical, Cherry, in 1972.

A coproduction of Classic Stage Company, the National Asian American Theatre Company (NAATCO), and Transport Group, the story takes place in a small-town Kansas diner, where a bus has been sidelined because of road closures during a March storm. Working the night shift are Elma (Delphi Borich), a high school student saving money for college, and the older Grace (Cindy Cheung), who needs a jolt of excitement in her life.

The local sheriff, Will (David Lee Huynh), prepares them for the bus’s arrival, letting them know that it will be at least several hours before the roads are cleared. Soon the bus driver, Carl (David Shih), enters, followed by Dr. Lyman (Rajesh Bose), a professor attracted to literature, alcohol, and Elma; Cherie (Midori Francis), a nightclub chanteuse; Bo (Michael Hsu Rosen), a twenty-one-year-old Montana rancher determined to marry Cherie; and his right-hand man, the loyal Virgil (Moses Villarama), who travels with his guitar.

Over the course of one evening, the men approach the women and a variety of encounters ensue: couplings motivated by convenience, lechery, and thunderstruck first love that would raise a few questions about consent today. With deft artistry, the company makes the story work without raising the hackles of every woman in the audience, which it could well do. The characters rhapsodize about love and loss, sex and grief, either looking back at where their life went wrong or gazing into a future they hope will be filled with something better.

Peiyi Wong’s diner set is realistic and charming, while Mariko Ohigashi’s costumes evoke midcentury America. As the narrative focuses on various pairs having conversations, R. Lee Kennedy’s lighting shifts on them but keeps the others in clear view. Cummings III, who previously directed Inge’s Picnic, The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, and Come Back, Little Sheba, maintains an even flow during the show’s two hours, including one pause and one intermission. The all-Asian ensemble is excellent, although it takes time for one of the key plots to heat up.

The diner might not have rye bread, cheese, or booze, but it’s still a lovely place to settle in for a few hours, especially when you need a break from what’s going on outside.

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

AMY LaVERE AND WILL SEXTON: MAKING MAGIC AT THE BITTER END

Amy LaVere and Will Sexton come to the Bottom Line on June 8

Who: Amy LaVere and Will Sexton
What: New York City concert
Where: The Bitter End, 147 Bleecker St. between Thompson St. & LaGuardia Pl.
When: Sunday, June 8, $22.73, 7:00
Why: “Maybe I was thinking of you / Maybe I think about you all the time / Whenever I see your number / Come into my telephone line / Feels like I conjured you up / Kinda like I made you call / Or maybe I’m just never not thinking about you at all / Or could we be powerful? / Do you feel the same? / If I can bring you on / Just thinking ’bout a song / I don’t wanna jump the gun / But we could be magic,” singer-songwriter and bassist Amy LaVere sings on her new single, “We Could Be Magic.”

Be on the lookout for that tune and such others as “No Battle Hymn,” “Take ’em or Leave ’em,” and “Dreamer” when LaVere and her husband, guitarist and songwriter Will Sexton, come to the Bitter End on June 8. Based in Memphis, the Shreveport-born LaVere — a budding novelist — and Austin native Sexton have been collaborating for eleven years, releasing such albums as Runaway’s Diary and Painting Blue, playing a riveting melding of Americana and indie folk. They are also part of the band Motel Mirrors, with drummer Shawn Zorn and guitarist John Paul Keith.

“Maybe we’re the ones to get it done,” LaVere sings at the conclusion of “We Could Be Magic.” You can find out if they are Sunday night at the Bitter End.

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

SOLID GOLD STARS: FIRST SATURDAY AT THE BROOKLYN MUSEUM

Bertha Vanayshunis will present Drag History Hour at the Brooklyn Museum on June 7

STAR-MAKERS
Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, June 7, free with advance RSVP, 5:00 – 10:00
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum honors queer artists with its free Pride Month First Saturday program, “Star-Makers,” inspired by Oscar yi Hou’s The Arm Wrestle of Chip & Spike; aka: Star-Makers. The evening features live performances by the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus, Tasha, Boston Chery, and Undocubougie; a Drag History Hour performance lecture by Bertha Vanayshun, with Dev Doee, I’m Baby, Emi Grate, Harriet Tugsmen, and Aimee Amour; a pop-up Brooklyn market featuring Depop; a voter registration drive; a Hands-On workshop in which participants will make Pride pins; the Teen Talk “Queering the Collection”; Queer Figure Drawing with the Brooklyn Loft; and a screening of Seán Devlin’s 2023 film, Asog.

In addition, the galleries will be open late so you can check out “Nancy Elizabeth Prophet: I Will Not Bend an Inch,” “Brooklyn Abstraction: Four Artists, Four Walls,” “Consuelo Kanaga: Catch the Spirit,” “The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago,” “Breaking the Mold: Brooklyn Museum at 200,” and more.

The glittering “Solid Gold” exhibit, which comprises more than five hundred gold objects, closes July 6. Divided into such sections as “Origins of Gold,” “Design Strategies,” and “Crowned,” the exhibition includes contemporary and ancient jewelry, fashion, film clips, ceramics, paintings, illuminated manuscripts, photographs, coins, and video installations. Among the highlights are a 1930s radio, Christian Louboutin footwear, a tribute to Elizabeth Taylor and the 1963 film Cleopatra, Zadik Zadikian’s 2024 Path to Nine sculpture, Egyptian gold flakes from 1938–1759 BCE, Rembrandt’s Jan Uytenbogaert, Receiver — General (The Gold — Weigher), John Singer Sargent’s Egyptian Woman (Coin Necklace), an excerpt from King Vidor’s Cover Girl with Rita Hayworth, artifacts from James Lee Byars’s 1994 Santa Fe performance, photos by Charles “Teenie” Harris, a necklace by Alexander Calder, a nineteenth-century reclining Buddha, and dresses by the Blonds, John Galliano, Mary McFadden, Paco Rabanne, Halston, and Yves Saint Laurent. Be sure to address appropriately.

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

A COFFEE HOUSE TONY AWARDS PREVIEW WITH MARK RIFKIN, SIMON JONES, DAVID BARBOUR, AND MARTHA WADE STEKETEE

Who: Simon Jones, David Barbour, Martha Wade Steketee, and Mark Rifkin, plus Steve Ross
What: Tony Awards preview and cabaret concert
Where: The Coffee House Club at the Salmagundi Club, 47 Fifth Ave. between Eleventh & Twelfth Sts.
When: Wednesday, June 4, free for members, $10 for nonmembers, 5:30
Why: The seventy-eighth annual Tony Awards take place Sunday, June 8, at Radio City Music Hall, but you can get a sneak peek at who the winners might be when the prestigious Coffee House Club hosts its popular Tony Awards preview on June 4. Discussing the shows nominated in the major categories will be the inimitable Martha Wade Steketee, the incomparable David Barbour, and me, moderated by the wonderful actor and raconteur Simon Jones. You can read our bios below.

The event begins at 5:30 at the Salmagundi Club and will be followed at 6:30 by “Steve Ross & Friends: Cole Porter, Sung & Unsung,” in which the legendary Crown Prince of New York Cabaret will perform favorite and surprise Porter tunes. Admission is free for members and $10 for guests; everyone is invited to an a la carte dinner afterward to continue the party with advance RSVP.

Simon Jones will moderate Tony Awards preview at the Coffee House Club on June 4 (photo by Conrad Blakemore)

Simon Jones has starred opposite Joan Collins, Lauren Bacall, Rex Harrison, Claudette Colbert, and Angela Lansbury over thirteen productions on Broadway. His most recent appearance was in Trouble in Mind at the Roundabout Theatre in 2021–22. He has recorded more than two hundred audio books. He played King George V in the first Downton Abbey movie, and his other film credits include Miracle on Thirty-Fourth Street, Twelve Monkeys, Brazil, and Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. In a TV career spanning forty years, he remains well known for his performances as Arthur Dent in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Bridey in Brideshead Revisited, and Sir Walter Raleigh in Blackadder, and currently he is one of the stars of The Gilded Age on HBO/MAX, as Bannister the butler. Season three begins June 22.

Martha Wade Steketee is a theater-loving public policy researcher who currently practices in the fields of dramaturgy, criticism, and theater research. She serves as chair of the Drama Desk nominating committee and on several play prize committees, is a member of the Henry Hewes Design Awards Committee and past chair of the American Theatre Critics/Journalists Association, and author of the Women Count report series analyzing gender in hiring trends off Broadway since 2010.

David Barbour is editor-in-chief of Lighting & Sound America, which covers design and technology in live entertainment. He is also copresident of the Drama Desk and a member of the New York Drama Critics Circle and the Henry Hewes Design Awards Committee.

Mark Rifkin is a member of the Drama Desk and the American Theatre Critics/Journalists Association and has been running the online newsmagazine This Week in New York since 2001, covering art, film, theater, literature, dance, music, food, and anything else that requires someone to leave their apartment in the five boroughs. You can follow his “mad transit” adventures on Substack.