live performance

EXTINCTION RITUALS

Akane Little is one of the performers in LEIMAY’s Extinction Rituals at Japan Society (photo by Takaaki Ando)

EXTINCTION RITUALS
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Friday, June 9, and Saturday, June 10, $20, 7:30
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org
www.leimay.org

Since 2001, Colombian dancer, director, and choreographer Ximena Garnica and Japanese video and installation artist Shige Moriya have been presenting mesmerizing, meditative multimedia productions that incorporate movement, light, music, and song. In such works as Becoming – Corpus, Floating Point Waves, and Furnace, they explore the relationship between humanity and the natural environment. During the pandemic, Garnica and Moriya, cofounders of the Brooklyn-based LEIMAY Ensemble, staged Correspondences in Astor Plaza, a sculptural performance art installation in which dancers wearing only gas masks were trapped in vertical transparent chambers partly filled with sand.

On June 9 and 10 at 7:30, LEIMAY, which is the Japanese term for a moment of change or transition, brings the work-in-progress dance-opera Extinction Rituals to Japan Society. In the below promotional video, Garnica describes it as “a multiyear, multidimensional project that will result in a series of performances and visual artworks.” They recently asked an AI, “What does ‘extinction’ mean to you?” and “What does ‘ritual’ mean to you?” The AI defined extinction as the “silent demise of vibrant stories, echoes silenced forever” and ritual as “sacred dance, rhythmic harmony, timeless connection, soul’s embrace.”

Garnica and Moriya directed, choreographed, and designed the piece, which deals with life and loss, celebration and remembrance, focusing on Japan, Colombia, and New York; it will be performed by dancers Masanori Asahara, Akane Little, Damontae Hack, Peggy Gould, and Yusuke Mori, with live music by composer and instrumentalist Kaoru Watanabe and Colombian composer and singer Carolina Oliveros. Each show will be followed by a Q&A with Garnica and Moriya; Shinnecock and Montauk elder and recovery coach Jennifer E. Cuffee-Wilson will moderate the opening-night discussion, “Extinction: Beyond Flora and Fauna.”

YYDC: NOWHERE

YYDC presents world premiere of Nowhere at Chelsea Factory this week (photo by Michael Waldrop)

NOWHERE
Chelsea Factory
547 West Twenty-Sixth St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
June 8-10, $35
www.chelseafactory.org
yydc.org

Chinese American choreographer Yue Yin and her YYDC troupe brings her original movement vocabulary, the FOCO Technique, to Chelsea Factory June 8-10 in the world premiere of Nowhere. The seventy-five-minute work unfolds in an unknown time and place, exploring uncertainty and disconnectedness. It will be performed by Liane Aung, Joan Dwiartanto, Alexsander Swader, Kristalyn Gill, Grace Whitworth, Nat Wilson, Corinne Lohner, and DaMond LeMonte Garner, with live music by composer and percussionist Alexandre Dai Castaing featuring Julia Kent on cello and prerecorded vocals by Brussels-based mezzo-soprano Emilie Tack. The set is by Andrew Boyce, with lighting by Solomon Weisbard and costumes by Christine Darch. YYDC’s previous work includes The Disappearing Element of Existing, Through the Fracture of Light, Vanishing Point, Stones and Kisses, and Ripple, a gorgeous piece created during the pandemic and presented at the 92nd St. Y and online.

DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES

Kirsten (Kelli O’Hara) and Joe (Brian d’Arcy James) hold on for dear life in Days of Wine and Roses (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES
Atlantic Theater Company
Linda Gross Theater
336 West 20th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 16, $112-$252
atlantictheater.org

There’s no sign of Johnny Mercer and Henry Mancini’s lush, overdramatic Oscar- and Grammy-winning title song from Blake Edwards’s 1962 film, Days of Wine and Roses, in the world premiere musical adaptation that opened tonight at the Atlantic. While its inclusion might not have helped, it certainly couldn’t have hurt.

Written by JP Miller, Days of Wine and Roses was initially performed live on Playhouse 90 in 1958, directed by John Frankenheimer and starring Cliff Robertson as Joe Clay and Piper Laurie as Kirsten Arnesen, eager young corporate colleagues whose burgeoning love is fueled by the bottle. Miller adapted the play for the screen, with Jack Lemmon as Joe and Lee Remick as Kirsten.

Composer and lyricist Adam Guettel and book writer Craig Lucas, who previously collaborated on the smash hit The Light in the Piazza, which won six Tonys, have now turned Days of Wine and Roses into an all-wet, thorny musical, supremely disappointing especially given its star power, with Brian d’Arcy James as Joe and Kelli O’Hara as Kirsten. It starts off promising, on board a yacht where Joe, a fast-talking New York City PR man, is entertaining male clients by hustling them into a back room and plying them with booze and babes. He assumes that Kirsten is one of his procured good-time girls, but she’s actually the secretary to his boss. A narrow pool of water at the front of the stage casts shimmering reflections across the characters, and a series of movable doors change colors like a mood ring (the set is by Lizzie Clachan, with lighting by Ben Stanton), but a life preserver ring in the corner is a harbinger of their fate.

Despite recognizing him as a player, Kristen agrees to have dinner with him, where he talks her into having her first alcoholic drink ever, a Brandy Alexander. That single indulgence leads them down a dark path of lies and deception as they get married, have a daughter, Lila (Ella Dane Morgan), and struggle personally and professionally because of their alcoholism. While Joe attempts sobriety through Alcoholics Anonymous with his sponsor, Jim Hungerford (David Jennings), Kirsten seeks refuge with her strict Norwegian father (Byron Jennings), who never liked Joe. The set opens up to reveal a seemingly impossible greenhouse, where Mr. Arnesen grows plants for sale, but it only spells more trouble for Joe and Kirsten, whose own growth is stunted by the bottle.

Days of Wine and Roses explores love and alcoholism at the Atlantic (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

In the show’s first song, “Magic Time,” Joe charmingly sings his dialogue to various people on the boat, including his assistant, Rad (Ted Koch), a client, Delaney (Byron Jennings), and Kirsten. “I’m not here for the fun,” she tells Joe, who replies in song, “Might be why you aren’t having any.” She answers, “Or . . . it might be you.” Their repartee is fast and witty, with sweet music by Guettel, but it quickly devolves after that as the score becomes laborious and the lyrics mundane. “Now I have / all I need / now that I’m your mama,” Kirsten sings to Lila. “There is a man who loves you / as the water loves the stone / and the stone adores the hillside / where the wind has always blown,” Joe sings to Kirsten. “Look, Daddy / Do you see the sun / the circle getting smaller / going to bed now / tucked in safe for the night,” Lila sings to Joe.

Tony nominee d’Arcy James (Into the Woods, Something Rotten!) is excellent channeling Lemmon as the outgoing Joe, but the small theater can’t contain O’Hara’s powerful, operatic voice. Tony nominee Lucas (Amélie, An American in Paris) stuffs too much plot into ninety minutes; the story jumps around, not allowing relationships to be properly nurtured. Tony-nominated director Michael Greif (The Low Road, Dear Evan Hansen) is unable to find enough balance in the characters or the bumpy narrative, which feels like a series of barely related vignettes and repetitive scenes. In addition, the only ones who sing are Joe, Kirsten, and Lila, adding to the arbitrariness.

Miller named the play after a line in the 1896 poem “Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam,“ in which Ernest Dowson writes, “They are not long, the weeping and the laughter, / Love and desire and hate; / I think they have no portion in us after / We pass the gate. / They are not long, the days of wine and roses: / Out of a misty dream / Our path emerges for a while, then closes / Within a dream.” The title of the poem comes from an ode by Horace: “The brief sum of life denies us the hope of enduring long.” Guettel and Lucas’s adaptation lacks the poetry of its inspirations. In order for the story to work, you have to believe in the love between Joe and Kirsten, beyond their dependence on drink, but in this case it’s hard to make that connection.

Kirsten (Kelli O’Hara) and Joe (Brian d’Arcy James) get lost in the darkness of alcoholism in Days of Wine and Roses (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

In the show, Kirsten is reading Draper’s Self Culture, a 1907 educational series that her father started her off on when she was a child. She’s up to the fourth volume, Exploration, Travel, and Invention; in the introduction, Tufts president Frederick William Hamilton writes, “Exploration, Travel, and Invention are three phases of man’s unceasing search for the unknown. One of the most remarkable of human instincts, one of those also which most sharply differentiate man from other animals, is this constant desire to penetrate the unknown, to solve the mysteries which lie all about us. Humanity has never learned to be quiescent in the face of mystery.”

Theater is all about exploration, travel, and invention, taking audiences on journeys of the heart, mind, body, and soul, penetrating the unknown and confronting life’s endless mysteries. Unfortunately, Days of Wine and Roses turns out to be a haphazard trip, with the main mystery being why it needs to be a musical at all.

THE COMEUPPANCE

Old friends gather for a pre-reunion reunion in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s The Comeuppance (photo by Monique Carboni)

THE COMEUPPANCE
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
The Pershing Square Signature Center
480 West Forty-Second St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 9, $49-$159
thecomeuppance.net/info

At the end of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s The Comeuppance, making its world premiere at the Signature, there were tears in my eyes. I wasn’t sobbing because of something that had happened in the plot or to any specific character but because of how brilliant the play is; its sheer beauty, from the writing and staging to the acting and directing, simply overwhelmed me, and I needed time to gather myself before heading home.

The Comeuppance is a fiercely intelligent, diverse revision of the Breakfast Club for the twenty-first century, an alternate version of the Athlete, the Brain, the Criminal, the Princess, and the Basket Case looking back at their lives two decades later and not necessarily liking what they see. A small band of high school friends have gathered for a pre-reunion twentieth reunion — Emilio (Caleb Eberhardt), an ex-pat artist living in Berlin returning to the US with a piece in the Whitney Biennial; Caitlin (Susannah Flood), the smartest student in school, who married an older man with two kids; Kristina (Shannon Tyo), a military doctor with five children; and Ursula (Brittany Bradford), the host of the party who spent years taking care of her elderly grandmother and now lives alone in her grandmother’s house. As the characters slowly congregate on Ursula’s porch, they reveal hints about their past and foreshadowings of the future. The simmering conflicts are ignited when Kristina surprises everyone by bringing along Paco (Bobby Moreno), whose traumatic five tours of duty in the Marines have left him heavily medicated, which does not stop his boisterousness.

The acerbic and direct Emilio makes his displeasure known, arguing that Paco was not in the same class with them and was not a member of their outsider “gang,” M.E.R.G.E., which stands for Multi-Ethnic Reject Group. “Does that spell ‘Merge’ or ‘Merg?’” Paco asks. “It’s a soft G,” Emilio, Ursula, and Kristina quickly bark out in unison. Kristina claims that Paco was an associate member because he was dating Caitlin, but that explanation doesn’t satisfy Emilio, who starts alluding to an incident that occurred between the couple. Meanwhile, Ursula, who has recently lost an eye so has difficulty with depth perception, is adamant that she will not be going to the reunion, and they are all upset that Simon has just canceled via text message. They also debate whether it is a good idea to arrive in a limo, which Kristina ordered, further establishing that the reunion has a different meaning for each of them.

“In high school, every stupid prom, every homecoming, we were always randomly showing up in a limo like somehow it was a thing that people did in real life,” Emilio says. “But we’re not teenagers anymore. Now we’re just adults showing up in a limo,” Caitlin contends. “But isn’t the point of this dumb event reliving high school for the night? I think people will think it’s funny. Maybe it is a little conceptual,” Emilio replies. Caitlin: “‘Conceptual?’ What does that mean?” Emilio: “Don’t worry about it. Listen: It’s just a little nostalgia.” Caitlin: “Well, you don’t still live around these people. I do.” Emilio: “So?” Caitlin: “So, for some of us, it may not be in our best interest to show up looking like shitheads.”

An ensemble cast excels in gorgeous world premiere at the Signature (photo by Monique Carboni)

They gossip about other students, talk about Zoom happy hours, defend the life choices they’ve made, and down glass after glass of spiked jungle juice as the late limo gives them time to explore who they were and who they are, while Emilio stirs the pot with his willingness to brutally criticize the others, loudly pointing out what he believes to be their flaws and their bad decisions. Early on, he shares three German words with Ursula: schadenfreude, torschlusspanik, and kuddelmuddel, which all come home to roost.

They also bring back an old method they used to cut off someone when they were rambling: pretend to snap their neck with a “KRK.” Little do they know how relevant that is, as throughout the 130-minute intermissionless play, every character delivers a monologue from Death, who lurks inside each of them. Their regular voices are joined by an otherworldly echo as Death, lit as if it is glowing from inside the body, directly addresses the audience, offering tidbits about its responsibilities and personal preferences.

The show begins with Death announcing from inside Emilio, “Hello there. You and I, we have met before, though you may not recognize me. People have a tendency to see me once and try hard to forget it ever happened — though that never works — not for very long.”

Later, inside Ursula, Death admits, “You’ll have to pardon me. I come and go. I get shy. Historically, I’ve been rarely met with anything other than fear or anger or regret and, as I’m sure you can imagine, that sort of energy gets . . . taxing. So I chose long ago to abandon any material form of my own and err on the side of the covert. I prefer now to move in and out of whatever vessel inspires me because, when I’m not working, I, like you, am a watcher. I like to watch. . . . I inhabit a body like this if my desire is to speak and, if I have one weakness, it’s for gossip. I suspect you share it. I don’t know what it is, but I find all creatures so interesting, their idiosyncrasies, their interiorities, their secrets. Their stories. These machines of will. And, like any good gossip, I’m always wanting to talk but, you know, finding the right listeners can be a challenge. So you should know you are very special.”

Death serves not only as a character in the play but as a vessel for Jacobs-Jenkins to espouse on the art of theater itself, the playwright as psychopomp. Jacobs-Jenkins, a two-time Pulitzer finalist and Obie winner whose previous works include Girls, Everybody, War, Gloria, Appropriate, Neighbors, and An Octoroon, tells stories that examine humanity’s idiosyncrasies, interiorities, and secrets, in search of an audience of watchers and listeners who are critical to the success of his craft. When Death says, “You should know you are very special,” it is Jacobs-Jenkins telling that to us.

In fact, the playwright continued to make changes throughout the rehearsal and preview process based on audience response; while that is not unusual, it was extensive in this case, and it shows. It’s a masterful production, radiantly directed by Obie winner Eric Ting (The Far Country, Six Apples), who maintains a steady, absorbing pace; you won’t even remember that there’s no intermission, not wanting to leave these characters even for a minute.

Ursula (Brittany Bradford) and Emilio (Caleb Eberhardt) wonder what could have been in The Comeuppance (photo by Monique Carboni)

Arnulfo Maldonado’s intimate set is practically in your lap, a cozy front porch with a few steps, a swing, a big chair, and wooden railings; a screen door leads into the house. Amith Chandrashaker’s lighting and Palmer Hefferan’s sound keep it all real, as do Jennifer Moeller and Miriam Kelleher’s naturalistic costumes.

Bradford (Fefu and Her Friends, Wedding Band) has a subtle power as Ursula, Flood (Make Believe, Plano) has a sensitive edge as Caitlin, Moreno (72 Miles to Go . . . , Lazarus) carries an impending sense of doom as Paco, Tyo (Regretfully, So the Birds Are, The Far Country) has a firm determination as Kristina, and Eberhardt (Choir Boy, On Sugarland) is a force as the sardonic, insensitive Emilio, who doesn’t know when enough is enough, especially when he’s right. Ursula might have studied mixology, but this group is like a toxic cocktail.

The Brooklyn-based Jacobs-Jenkins was born in DC in 1984, the year before John Hughes’s The Breakfast Club came out. He is the same age as the characters in The Comeuppance, who were rocked by Columbine and whose adulthood essentially began with 9/11, continued with the Iraq and Afghan wars, and then hit a peak with the Covid pandemic, death surrounding them every step of the way. Their youthful innocence is gone, even though a few of them are still trying to hold on to it.

But going back is not the answer, no matter how tenuous the immediate future might be, and just because you were friends in high school doesn’t mean you have to be friends now, in real life or on social media. The twenty years that have passed since prom were good to some and not so good to others, but all five M.E.R.G.E.rs have soul searching to do in order to face the personal demons buried deep within them.

The show is also likely to make you do some soul searching as well. All I know is that, while I wipe away these tears, I’m rethinking going to my next high school reunion.

BEES & HONEY

Maribel Martinez and Xavier Pacheco star in world premiere of Guadalís Del Carmen’s Bees & Honey (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

BEES & HONEY
MCC Theater
Susan & Ronald Frankel Theater
511 West Fifty-Second St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Through June 11, $54-$74
mcctheater.org

“Love me as I love you, good mommy / Give me your love without measure / Look for me like a bee to the honeycomb / Remove the sorrow / Drink the honey of my life,” Dominican musician and multiple Grammy winner Juan Luis Guerra sings in Spanish with his group 4.40 on his 1990 song “Como Abeja al Panal” (“Like a Bee to Its Honeycomb”).

The bachata hit serves as the inspiration for Guadalís Del Carmen’s bittersweet Bees & Honey, a coproduction of MCC and the Sol Project running through June 11. The 130-minute play (with intermission) is like a Latiné telenovela directed by Douglas Sirk, infused with the rhythms of the Dominican music genre known as bachata, exemplified by Guerra’s “Bachata Rosa,” which is playing when the show begins.

“Oh my god, I love this song. So romantic. I know, right?” Johaira (Maribel Martinez) tells the audience. Manuel (Xavier Pacheco) says, “Damn. This song takes me back. Man, I love me a good bachata. Bailao ahí, bien pegaíto like glue. Ain’t nothing like it.” A moment later, Johaira explains, “Bachata brought me and Manuel together almost eight years ago.” The opening is a prelude to what is to come: a flashback of those eight years.

Johaira is in a white bathrobe, sitting on a couch with her feet up. Manuel is in a chair off to her left. They talk to the audience individually, as if they are unaware the other is there as they share their origin story. Reza Behjat’s lighting switches spots on one and then the other. They interact directly with the audience; when Manuel sticks out his fist to bump with a gentleman in the first row, he waits for the man to reciprocate before continuing.

Johaira (Maribel Martinez) and Manuel (Xavier Pacheco) face tough times in Bees & Honey (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Alternating between Spanish and English, Johaira and Manuel talk about what was going through their minds the night they met at a club near Dyckman St. in Washington Heights; the action then cuts to that encounter and follows the rest of their relationship chronologically. While the actors no longer address the audience directly, the connection has already been made.

Manuel, who has long, tight dreads and sometimes wears a doo rag, is a former drug dealer who is now a mechanic with plans to open his own shops in all five boroughs (“maybe a location in Staten Island,” he says tentatively). Johaira is a prosecutor working a high-profile case that she hopes will lead her to become chief deputy in a new sexual-assault division. Manuel likes playing online video games with his friends while Johaira tries to get him more interested in the rest of the world, beginning with having him read bell hooks’s The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love and teaching him about power structures.

As Johaira’s case approaches its conclusion, Manuel seeks loans for his business, and they plan to start a family, they encounter more and more roadblocks, some societal, some self-imposed.

Martinez (Black Joy Project, Will You Come with Me?) and Pacheco (The Tempest, Richard III) are terrific as the seemingly mismatched lovers; you can’t help but root for them even as Del Carmen (Not for Sale) heaps on the melodrama, throwing tragedy after tragedy at them that can’t be eliminated with a video game controller or a legal objection.

Shoko Kambara’s comfortable set is a kitchen and living room with a bookshelf, tchotchkes, window air conditioner, working sink, and silver fridge; part of the floor and two doors in the back are painted by Washington Heights artist and muralist Danny Peguero in bright colors, featuring graffiti-like characters and architecture, adding to the Dominican feel. (More of Peguero’s art is on view in the lobby.)

Director Melissa Crespo (Espejos: Clean, Native Gardens) uses the set to its fullest, although there is a lot of entering and exiting that grows tedious. Germán Martínez’s sound design warmly incorporates Dilson’s original score with the dialogue to maintain a compelling atmosphere.

Devario D. Simmons’s costumes help define the characters, from Manuel’s work shirt with his name on it to Johaira’s wardrobe — which shifts from all white to all black to a colorful island dress — while celebrating their bodies; a significant part of the show is dedicated to the couple’s appreciation of their physical beings. “Love watching you squeeze that ghetto booty into them fancy power suits,” Manuel tells Johaira. When Manuel explains that he will not wear skinny jeans, Johaira says, “Yeah, ya butt and thighs are too juicy for ’em.”

The soap-opera elements threaten to overwhelm the play, but Bees & Honey is a tasty confection filled with plenty of sting.

PRIMA FACIE

Jodie Comer makes a scintillating Broadway debut in Prima Facie (photo by Bronwen Sharp)

PRIMA FACIE
Golden Theatre
252 West Forty-Fifth St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 2, $31-$335
primafacieplay.com

Jodie Comer is scintillating in her Broadway debut as a British barrister who has the tables turned on her in Suzie Miller’s Prima Facie, continuing at the Golden Theatre through July 2. In fact, it’s only the second professional stage appearance ever for the thirty-year-old Liverpool-born native, who had a supporting role in Fiona Evans’s The Price of Everything in 2010 but gained fame portraying assassin Villanelle in the television series Killing Eve.

In the Olivier-winning Prima Facie — which means “on the face of it” and is pronounced PRIME-ah FAY-see by the author, a former human rights and criminal defense lawyer herself— Comer portrays Tessa Ensler, a hotshot member of the Kings Counsel who specializes in sexual assault cases, often defending men accused of attacking women. For the first half of the ninety-minute play, she prowls across Miriam Buether’s caged set, contained within a neon frame that flashes bright light; Comer rearranges two tables and a handful of rolling chairs as she goes from law school and a courtroom to a bar, her office, her apartment, and her childhood home, where her mother and brother live. A ceiling-high bookshelf surrounds her on three sides, packed with white law journals.

In a fury of words and movement, she boasts about how the law to her is all about winning, doing whatever is necessary for her client. “It’s not emotional for me. It’s the game. The game of law,” she proclaims. She describes her cat-and-mouse legal style with relish. “There’s blood in the water and I let the witness swim on. No one can help him. And he swims right into it,” she explains. “I fire four questions like bullets. Bang. Bang. Bang bang,” she exults with glee. She makes it clear that it’s not about guilt or innocence, telling her colleagues that whether her clients did what they’re accused of or not is none of her concern. “You don’t play God, you don’t decide, or judge,” she says. Later, she explains, “The only way the system works is because we all play our roles. My role is defense, the prosecutor prosecutes; we each tell a story and the jury decide which story is the one they believe. They take the responsibility. . . . If a few guilty people get off, then it’s because the job was not done well enough by the prosecutor and the police.”

But Tessa’s world is rocked when she is sexually assaulted by her coworker Julian Brookes, a man she might have been building a relationship with and who she had previously slept with. Suddenly she is in the witness stand, being grilled by an attorney whose job it is to find holes in her story and to make it look like the act was not a crime but consensual. Even as she spots some of the same tricks she uses when she is the barrister, she realizes that the law is not necessarily about finding out what really happened. “The system I’ve dedicated my life to is called upon, by me, to find the truth. To provide justice,” she says as the prosecution starts its case.

Tessa Ensler (Jodie Comer) watches herself being interviewed in play about sexual assault and the law (photo by Bronwen Sharp)

Originally presented in Australia in 2019, Prima Facie arrives in New York at a watershed moment in American history. On May 9, 2023, a jury found former president Donald Trump liable for sexual assault, battery, and defamation, ordering him to pay $5 million in damages to journalist E. Jean Carroll, who he quickly defamed again. Last month, US Supreme Court associate justice Clarence Thomas was accused of numerous financial ethics violations; his 1991 confirmation hearings were delayed when Anita Hill accused him of sexual harassment. In October 2018, Brett Kavanaugh started serving as an associate justice on the Court following a contentious confirmation hearing that focused on sexual misconduct claims made by Christine Blasey Ford.

Those episodes called into question if, when, and how women’s accusations against men should be believed, bitterly dividing the nation along political lines, with people supporting the man or the woman depending on party. Meanwhile, public confidence in the justice system has been dropping, with approval ratings for state and federal courts and the US Supreme Court all trending downward.

Prima Facie is not a comeuppance for a lawyer who suddenly finds herself a wronged survivor but a cautionary tale warning that all women are susceptible to such treatment, no matter how knowledgeable about the law and regardless of the truth itself. Miller (Sunset Strip, Caress/Ache) puts everyone on notice, showing that the legal system is no game, despite what Tessa was taught in law school and as Kings Counsel, what happens when “a woman’s experience of sexual assault does not fit the male-defined system of truth.”

The fight is relentless; there’s a reason why Miller gave Tessa the last name Ensler, after playwright and activist Eve Ensler, now known as V, who was sexually and physically abused by her father and since 2011 has led V-Day, a global organization dedicated to ending violence against all women and girls on the planet.

Director Justin Martin (The Jungle, Low Level Panic) lets Emmy winner Comer cut free in the first half of the play but slows things down once Tessa reports the crime and is questioned at the police station and later in court. Comer is a whirling dervish at the start, dancing on tables, quickly changing costumes (by Buether) from suit to robes to party outfit, and tossing her peruke (legal wig) like it’s both a charm and a burden she fully controls.

But once Tessa is raped by Julian and decides to pursue charges, Comer explores the character’s self-doubt as Tessa’s grip on the law loosens amid systemic pitfalls that make sexual assault so difficult to prove, beginning with the distrust of the survivor’s claim that it was not consensual. At one point, we observe Tessa watching a video of her interrogation by police, stunned by her lack of confidence in relating her story. “I’d only ever seen video footage of rooms like this one,” she says. “Watching a client’s interrogation while sitting with my feet on the desk in chambers. All my sass and outrage at the tricks the police play. It’s different when you’re in here.”

Natasha Chivers’s lighting illuminates the bookshelves in soft blues and glowing white before suddenly turning to complete darkness; the video design, by William Williams for Treatment Studio, features a monitor suspended from above like a ghost. Ben and Max Ringham’s effective sound highlights an underlying propulsiveness and British musician Rebecca Lucy Taylor’s (aka Self Esteem) cinematic score.

The play, which has partnered with the Schools Consent Project and other organizations, does get preachy as the conclusion approaches and doesn’t hide its point of view — the program comes with a pull-out poster that lists disturbing facts about sexual assault and proclaims, “On the Face of It, Something Has to Change” — but Comer rises above the occasional didacticism by her sheer force of will. It’s a remarkable stage debut for a vastly talented television, film, and now theater actor on the rise.

During Carroll’s civil case against Trump, she was asked why she didn’t scream when he allegedly attacked her; it became a core issue of discussion. During the trial in Prima Facie, Tessa is asked, “Did you say anything else? Scream?” It’s a chilling moment that is likely to make you want to scream yourself.

FAT HAM

Fat Ham reimagines Shakespeare’s Hamlet taking place at a family barbecue (photo by Joan Marcus)

FAT HAM
American Airlines Theatre
227 West Forty-Second St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 2, $45-$242
212-539-8500
www.fathambroadway.com

Last July I saw James Ijames’s delightfully delicious Fat Ham at the Public Theater. The show has made the smoothest of transitions to Broadway at the American Airlines Theatre, with the same cast, crew, and set. If anything, the play is now even better, nominated for five Tonys, for Best Play, Best Featured Actress, Best Costume Design, Best Lighting Design, and Best Direction. Below is an update of my original review, slightly amended to account for the move to the Great White Way, with revised photos and a tiny tweak to the script.

There’s no “To be or not to be” in James Ijames’s rousing, spirited adaptation of one of William Shakespeare’s most famous tragedies, Hamlet. In the Pulitzer Prize–winning Fat Ham, continuing at the American Airlines Theater through July 2, there’s no “To thine own self be true,” no “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio,” no “Good-night, sweet prince,” no “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” But to give you the tasty flavor of Ijames’s big queer Black take on the familiar tale, his Hamlet, known as Juicy (Marcel Spears), says, “Ah, there’s the rub” only after Rev (Billy Eugene Jones) shares the secret to smoking pork.

The ninety-five-minute show, coproduced by the National Black Theatre and the Public, takes place in the backyard of, according to the script, “a house in North Carolina. Could also be Virginia, or Maryland or Tennessee. It is not Mississippi, or Alabama or Florida. That’s a different thing all together.” The time is “a kind of liminal space between the past and the present with an aspirational relationship to the future that is contingent to your history living in the south. All that to say . . . I’m writing this play from inside the second decade of the twenty-first century. This world aesthetically sits anywhere in the four to six decades preceding the current moment.”

At its core, the story echoes the original. Juicy’s father, the king (Claudius; Jones), has been murdered by his brother, Rev, who then married his brother’s widow, Tedra (Gertrude; Tony nominee Nikki Crawford). Juicy hangs out with his best friend, Tio (Horatio; Chris Herbie Holland). Everyone assumes that Juicy is destined to wed his supposed true love, Opal (Ophelia; Adrianna Mitchell). Her very protective brother, Larry (Laertes; Calvin Leon Smith), is in the military and suffers from PTSD. Tedra’s best friend, Rabby (Polonius; Benja Kay Thomas), Larry and Opal’s mother, loves drinking and celebrating the Lord.

The play opens with Juicy on the back porch of a suburban home helping prepare for a barbecue party for Rev and Tedra’s bethrothal as Tio watches porn on his phone. “Your daddy ain’t been dead a week and he already Stanley steamering your mom. Cold,” Tio says. “Stanley steamering your mom . . . ,” Juicy quizzically repeats. Tio clarifies, “Eating your momma’s box? Doing the nasty with your mom? That better?” This is not your grandparents’ Hamlet.

Rev (Billy Eugene Jones) leads a prayer before family and friends partake of barbecue in Fat Ham (photo by Joan Marcus)

A few minutes later, Juicy is visited by the ghost of his father, Pap, dressed in white, eerie smoke drifting around his neck and shoulders. Pap wants his son to avenge his death — and to stop eating candy bars unless he wants to get “the suga,” which runs in the family. Pap orders Juicy to split Rev open: “Make his thighs into hams. His intestines into chitlins. Pickle his feet and boil his head down to a skull! Crisp up his belly and dry out his balls and grind them up into a fine powder. Lay that all out on the table, invite over your nearest and dearest, and feast. And then make me a plate.” Pap also belittles his son’s education choices, studying human resources at the University of Phoenix. “Scam. Who goes to college online to learn how to manage human beings. Them things don’t go,” he scolds.

The potential relationship between Juicy and Opal has a bit of a problem that only the two of them are aware of: They are both gay. Meanwhile, Larry has a dark secret of his own. But the party goes on, as Rev sings Teena Marie and Juicy warbles Radiohead’s “Creep,” a kind of replacement for the “To be or not to be” soliloquy: “I don’t care if it hurts / I wanna have control / I want a perfect body / I want a perfect soul / I want you to notice / When I’m not around / So fuckin’ special / I wish I was special / But I’m a creep / I’m a weirdo / What the hell am I doin’ here? / I don’t belong here.” The lyrics represent what so many young queer Black men experience, not wanting to be made to feel invisible and less than.

Juicy uses charades to tell his uncle he knows what he did: “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of . . . the . . . King. Preacher. He is a preacher in this play,” he tells the audience. The game is on as Rev and Juicy battle it out.

Fat Ham is outrageously funny, featuring superb over-the-top performances by the ensemble. Spears (Othello, A Midsummer Night’s Dream) has a tender gentleness, a softness, to his every move; dressed in all black (the contemporary costumes are by Dominique Fawn Hill), he would fit right in as Usher in Michael R. Jackson’s A Strange Loop, another “big Black queer” character with a complicated relationship with his family and other people who’s trying to figure out just who he is and what he wants out of life. Human resources is probably not Juicy’s best career path. Perhaps Ijames named him after the Notorious B.I.G. song “Juicy,” in which Biggie Smalls declares, “You know very well / Who you are / Don’t let ’em hold you down / Reach for the stars / You had a goal / But not that many / ’Cause you’re the only one / I’ll give you good and plenty.”

Juicy’s (Marcel Spears) father (Billy Eugene Jones) is smokin’ in Fat Ham (photo by Joan Marcus)

Ijames (White, Kill Move Paradise) interjects Shakespeare at just the right moments, as when, after Larry and Juicy share an intimate moment, the latter turns to the audience and delivers one of the Bard’s masterpieces, the poetic speech that begins “What a piece of work is a man!” But Ijames keenly changes one pronoun, and the meaning of the prose is altered following the scene we just watched,

Stacey Derosier’s lighting keeps things bright and cheery, as does Darrell Grand Moultrie’s choreography on Maruti Evans’s backyard set. Director Saheem Ali (Nollywood Dreams, Merry Wives) ably balances the wackiness with the serious nature of so much of Ijames’s dialogue alongside whimsical references to Ms. Cleo, OnlyFans, and sexy muppets. But it’s not all lighthearted fun.

At one point, Tio, talking about what he is learning from his therapist, explains to Juicy, “He said . . . These cycles of violence are like deep. Engrained. Hell, engineered. Hard to come out of. Like, your Pop went to jail, his Pop went to jail, his Pop went to jail, his Pop went to jail, and what’s before that? Huh? Slavery. It’s inherited trauma. You carrying around your whole family’s trauma, man. And that’s okay. You okay. But you don’t got to let it define you.”

Juicy is determined not to follow in his father’s footsteps, trying to overcome the systemic institutional racism that dooms so many Black men and tears apart families. That’s not exactly the same thing as the handing down of the crown from generation to generation of white men and boys — but it has the potential to become the half-million-dollar crown Biggie was famous for wearing.