live performance

A TALE OF TWO CLASSICS: TARTUFFE AND PYGMALION

Cleante (Hannah Beck) has plenty of reason to not trust Tartuffe (André De Shields) in playful revival (photo by Joan Marcus)

ANDRÉ DE SHIELDS IS TARTUFFE
House of the Redeemer
7 East Ninety-Fifth St. between Fifth & Madison Aves.
Through November 23, $72 – $162
www.tartuffenyc.com
www.houseoftheredeemer.org

Two classic plays dealing with power and control are currently running off Broadway, one wisely built around its beloved star, the other celebrating the author but detracting from the story.

Star power needs to shine in a suitable setting, and André de Shields has one befitting his resplendence in the House of the Redeemer. Built in 1914–16, the mansion was originally owned by Edith Shepard Fabbri, a great granddaughter of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, and her husband, Ernesto Fabbri, an associate of J. Pierpont Morgan’s. By midcentury it was deeded to the Episcopal Church, run by the Sisters of St. Mary until 1980, and designated a New York City Landmark in 1974.

Today it is home to concerts, Bible study, yoga, morning and evening prayers, cancer patients from Sloan-Kettering, and, through November 23, the gallantly titled and playfully rendered André De Shields Is Tartuffe. The scandalous 1664 French farce is being presented to a limited audience of one hundred a night in the historic library, which was constructed in an Italian ducal palace in the early 1600s and transported in two parts to New York City from Italy during WWI, serving as the centerpiece of the mansion.

The audience, sitting on three sides of the action, does not get to see the centerpiece of the show until the third act. Upon arriving at the House of the Redeemer, ticket holders are led into a salon with portraits, lenticular photos of Tartuffe, and a note from him that reads, “Tonight’s exorcism will redeem you as my true sycophants. The hour is upon you to seek within the sacred shelves of this salon and library six keys, six crosses, and six scrolls which will quicken your souls to a new dawn, a new day, a new life, and a new way . . . of . . .” There are also copies of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, and other books in the room, setting the literary mood. In the library, music director Drew Wutke is playing such sing-along pop songs as Billy Joel’s “Only the Good Die Young,” Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’,” and the Proclaimers’ “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” as the cast interacts with the audience, effectively shifting the tone.

Under Keaton Wooden’s whimsical direction, Ranjit Bolt’s 1991 verse translation unfurls on Kate Rance’s elegant set: just a few chairs, a pink couch, a lectern, and a Persian carpet. A long table at one end boasts seasonal decorations and a few more open books. The play begins with the characters introducing themselves: patriarch Orgon (Chris Hahn), who is hiding financial difficulties from his family; his second wife, Elmire (Amber Iman); his children, Damis (Tyler Hardwick) and Marianne (Alexandra Socha); his mother, the aristocratic Mme. Pernelle (Todd Buonopane), who goes everywhere with her (stuffed) dog, Flipote; the all-knowing housemaid, Dorinne (Phoebe Dunn), who never hesitates to speak her mind; Valère (Charlie Lubeck), who is engaged to Marianne; and Cleante (Hannah Beck), Elmire’s philosophical sister who is in love with Damis’s sibling.

Orgon and his mother have fallen under the spell of a man the others refer to as an “evil, scheming, cleverly charismatic, pretty sleazy, and potentially ruinous priest” named Tartuffe (De Shields). The stage is set early on, in this wonderful piece of dialogue:

Mme P: I’ve heard you say things that were sane. / And yet, to me, this much is plain: / My son should bar you — drive you hence. / He would if he had any sense. / You stand on shaky moral ground, / The mode of life that you expound / Is one that no one should pursue — / No decent person, in my view.
Damis: Your friend Tartuffe would jump for joy . . .
Mme P: You should pay him more heed, my boy. / Tartuffe’s a good man — no, the best, / And if there’s one thing I detest / It is to see a fool like you / Carping at him the way you do.
Damis: The man is a censorious fraud / And yet he’s treated like a lord! / He’s seized control, that’s what he’s done / No one can have an ounce of fun / Do anything but sleep and eat / Unless it’s sanctioned by that creep.
Dorine: Name just one thing he hasn’t banned, / Condemned as “sinful,” out of hand — / We have some harmless pleasure planned / And straight off he prohibits it, / The pious, pompous, piece of —
Mme P: – SHHHHH! / How else are you to get to Heaven? / He should ban six things out of seven / And you should love him, all of you — / In fact, my son should force you to.

Orgon is besotted with Tartuffe, who he claims has changed his life and set him free; he declares with no remorse, “Yes, I could see my family die / And not so much as blink an eye.” When he announces that he is going to give Marianne to Tartuffe instead of to Valère, no one is happy, especially Marianne, but she lacks the ability to defy her father’s wishes. And Orgon’s devotion to Tartuffe only grows more intense and problematic as time goes on.

A family is torn apart by a con man in André De Shields Is Tartuffe (photo by Joan Marcus)

Ah, yes, and then there’s De Shields himself. He is once again given the most grand of grand entrances, as he was in Cats: The Jellicle Ball. I wrote at the time about the Tony, Obie, and Grammy winner, “This is André De Shields’s world; we only live in it.” Tartuffe only reinforces that statement.

“Here comes Tartuffe!” Dorine declares, but she is really proclaiming, “Here comes André!” In the script, it merely says, “Tartuffe enters. It deserves its own page.” There is nothing else.

Twin doors open, and there is he, Tartuffe, in a spectacular cardinal-like floor-length red robe, a giant bejeweled cross around his neck and chest, shiny rings on almost every finger, and dark sunglasses. (The costumes, a mix of period chic and standard contemporary, are by Tere Duncan.) He preens to the audience as he prepares to chew as much scenery as possible through the rest of the play, with Tartuffe making bold confessions, secretly seeking romance, and lying through his teeth, his personal hypocrisy evoking that of the Catholic church and the upper classes. He is a magnetic con man — with fantastic silver hair — who knows precisely how to play the game, ready to improvise as necessary.

When Damis tells Orgon how the priest tried to seduce Elmire, Tartuffe admits, “Why should I try to hoodwink you? / Brother, your son speaks true: I am / A sinner, yea, a wicked man! / My rank iniquities are rife / And every instant of my life / Is foul with sin! Yes, all the time / I add another heinous crime / To a long list. I roll among / The other swine in swathes of dung! / Small wonder Heaven is content / To sit and watch my punishment. / Whatever charge he wants to lay, / Nothing, not one word, will I say / In my defense — I lack the pride. / Let me be loathed and vilified. / Believe him! Give your wrath full rein! / Cast me into the street again / Like any felon. Shame? Disgrace? / I merit them in any case, / Lay ignominy at my door, / I’ve earned it, fifty times and more!” But Orgon attacks his son as his love and respect for Tartuffe intensifies.

The show is a hilarious romp, with stand-out performances by Tony, Emmy, and Grammy winner De Shields, Tony nominee Iman, and Dunn, who is always worth watching, even when Dorinne is not in a scene. It can get a little goofy at times, and if you’re in the second or third row you might have some trouble seeing every detail, but it’s all so sweet-natured that you can forgive it its minor sins.

Among those who have previously portrayed Tartuffe onstage and on film are Raúl E. Esparza, Emil Jannings, Gérard Depardieu, Antony Sher, and John Wood; later this month, Matthew Broderick will play Tartuffe in a new adaptation by Lucas Hnath at New York Theatre Workshop. None of them get to have their name in the title.

Professor Henry Higgins (Mark Evans) has plans for Eliza Doolittle (Synnøve Karlsen) in Gingold production Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (photo by Carol Rosegg)

BERNARD SHAW’S PYGMALION
Theatre Row
410 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Dyer Aves.
Wednesday – Sunday through November 22, $36.50 – $92.50
gingoldgroup.org
bfany.org

Upon entering the theater to see Gingold Theatrical Group’s twentieth anniversary production of Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion — yes, the playwright’s name is part of the title — audience members are greeted by a series of posters featuring Al Hirschfeld drawings of George Bernard Shaw, including Shaw standing on the shoulders of William Shakespeare and Shaw painting a self-portrait with a colorful background. Lindsay Genevieve Fuori’s set is like a Hirschfeld tableaux, with a few chairs and tables, two steps leading to the facade of an opera house / temple with four ionic columns, a gable, and a raking cornice, and clouds with a hint of blue; in addition, there is a gold phonograph and a black recording machine that uses wax cylinders.

Hovering above is a caricature of Shaw as a winged angel, looking down as if he is a puppet master pulling all the strings. Several times during the show, thunder and lightning emerge from Shaw, reasserting his power and control over the proceedings. It comes off more as distraction than homage, artificially interrupting the narrative. Also disturbing any sense of flow is the intermittent appearance of four gods (Carson Elrod, Teresa Avia Lim, Lizan Mitchell, and Matt Wolpe, in multiple roles) who address the audience directly. They are based on a framing concept Shaw had drafted for the 1938 film adaptation but eventually scrapped; the dialogue Gingold founding artistic director David Staller uses is verbatim from the 1945 production with Gertrude Lawrence and Raymond Massey.

“Once upon a time, when we gods had a little more respect, you humans loved us. You built temples to us. We were always with you. Watching. Weaving our spells. And laughing at you,” Goddess 1 (Mitchell) says at the beginning. Goddess 2 (Lim) concurs, adding, “We laughed at you a lot. We still do.” There are not many laughs in this romantic comedy, and the satirical social commentary gets lost in the shenanigans.

The play, famously turned into the beloved 1956 musical My Fair Lady by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, was inspired by the Greek myth of the sculptor Pygmalion, a lonely man who carves a statue of a perfect woman he calls Galatea and then begs the gods to make real, which they do, but, as Goddess 1 explains, “There was a catch. A clause. A little hiccup that Pygmalion hadn’t thought to negotiate. The statue came to life, but with her own thoughts and feelings, with her own will. This possibility had somehow never occurred to Pygmalion. Oh, you funny humans. You men, in particular. And this, people: This is the story of that artist as reimagined by our friend, Mr. George Bernard Shaw.”

In Pygmalion, professor Henry Higgins (Mark Evans) is a persnickety phonetician lacking manners or social skills. When he encounters a poor, raggedy flower seller named Eliza Doolittle (Synnøve Karlsen) who speaks in what he considers a low-class Cockney accent, he makes a bet with his only friend, the far more practical Col. Pickering (Elrod). “You see this creature with her kerbstone English: the English that will keep her in the gutter to the end of her days,” he says to Pickering, right in front of Eliza, as if she’s not a person but a piece of clay. “Well, sir, in six months I could pass that girl off as a duchess at an Ambassador’s Garden Party.”

And so Higgins goes about molding Eliza into what he believes will be an honorable and respectable woman of society without paying attention to what Eliza wants, which is just to run her own flower shop. She defends herself by repeating over and over, “I’m a good girl, I am!” but that has no impact on Higgins, who treats her like she’s nothing more than a scientific experiment, referring to her as “so deliciously low. So horribly dirty. . . . I shall make a duchess of this draggle-tailed guttersnipe.”

Professor Henry Higgins (Mark Evans) has something to show Eliza Doolittle (Synnøve Karlsen) as Freddy (Matt Wolpe) looks on (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Meanwhile, Higgins’s mother (Mitchell) is not a fan of her son’s plan, pointing out to him and Pickering when they discuss the problem of transforming Eliza into a lady, “No, you two infinitely stupid male creatures: the problem of what is to be done with her afterwards.” Eliza’s estranged father, Alfred (Wolpe), is seeking a payoff to look the other way. Higgins’s housekeeper, Mrs. Pearce (Mitchell), insists that Higgins treat Eliza like a woman with her own mind. And Freddy (Wolpe), the sister of the prim and proper Clara (Lim), takes a shine to Eliza.

However, in inventing a new Eliza, Higgins gets more than he bargained for.

Goddess 1 strikes at the heart of the play when she says, “This is about human nature and human ridiculousness. It’s about . . . what is it about? About how easy it is to hide from ourselves. To hide from life. To wear the mask.” But Staller, who has previously helmed productions of such Shaw works as Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Heartbreak House, Arms and the Man, and Caesar & Cleopatra, with mixed results, can’t capture the essence of Shaw’s words in his staging. The humor falls flat, the acting is inconsistent, and the movement is too stagnant.

Staller might be among the most knowledgeable Shaw scholars on the planet — Gingold’s Project Shaw has presented all-star readings of every Shaw play, including “The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet” with André De Shields — but Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion feels like a piece of marble that still requires a lot of chiseling and forming. Cue the lightning and thunder.

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

THE LANGUAGES OF LOVE: ZOË KIM’S DID YOU EAT? AT THE PUBLIC

Zoë Kim shares her childhood trauma with a glowing orb in Did You Eat? (photo by Emma Zordan)

DID YOU EAT? (밥 먹었니?)
The Shiva Theater at the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 16, $80
publictheater.org

In 1992, Baptist minister and radio host Gary Chapman wrote The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate, in which he described five “love languages”: words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service, and physical touch.

In her autobiographical solo show Did You Eat?, Zoë Kim offers her own take on love languages, as they apply to her relationship with her parents, herself, and her place in the world as a Korean American. It’s a brave but uneven journey that explores severe trauma but doesn’t quite dig deep enough during its too-brief sixty-five minutes, as she tells her story to a glowing white orb that represents her inner child.

Kim was born in Seoul to a dysfunctional family mired in resentment. Her father, Appa, was the youngest of thirteen children and the only son. His parents, who were poor, heaped all their attention on the boy, considering him to be “their only hope.” Kim explains, “Every piece of food and clothing went to keep him fed and warm. It was normal for him to wake up on a winter morning to find one of his sisters frozen or starved to death. None of his twelve sisters made it to adulthood. Harabeoji’s [Grandfather’s] future was worth the lives of twelve daughters.”

While studying for her PhD, Umma (Kim’s mother) was forced by Harabeoji to give up her dreams of becoming a scientist and instead get married. She did not want to be a mother, but she got pregnant immediately; Appa was planning on having many sons, but when Kim was born, he was more than disappointed, and Umma and Appa spent the rest of their lives taking it out on their daughter, in different ways. “The day you are born is a tragic day,” she says to the orb. As a child, she blames herself for the breakup of her parents’ marriage and the lack of love she receives from them, praying to the gods to turn her into a boy.

However, she spends a lot of time with her grandmother, Halmeoni, who introduces Kim to theater, music, and poetry. “Feeding you is her love language,” she notes happily, even as she points out how miserable Harabeoji is to Halmeoni. “You learn that your love language is to make her laugh.”

At fifteen, Kim, who does not speak any English, is sent to boarding school in America, where she is determined to thrive, fighting her fears as she attempts to balance being Korean and American. At sixteen, her father tries to kill her. “Your American dream is vaporized,” she says, and is soon battling “anxiety, depression, rage, shame, guilt, and hurt,” believing that she brought it all on herself, that she deserves all the bad things that are being heaped upon her. “Will I ever be okay?” she asks.

We might be watching her in a play that has had success since its workshop debut at the 2023 Edinburgh Festival Fringe and is now being presented at the Public by the Ma-Yi Theater Company, but that doesn’t necessarily mean she’s okay, given what she’s had to deal with since birth.

The title of the show refers to how Umma would say things to her that meant something else. For example, “Did you eat?” actually was “How are you?,” and “Are you eating?” was “I’m worried about you.” It was as if Umma could not speak to her daughter directly, would not communicate with her in a caring and loving way, skirting around reality.

Director Chris Yejin and choreographer Iris McCloughan keep Kim on the move, adding a potent level of physicality that counters the inner turmoil with a sense of impending freedom rather than doom. In a midriff-baring costume designed by Harriet Jung that reveals impressive abs, Kim flits across Tanya Orellana’s geometric set, consisting of an abstract arrangement of white platforms, walls, and doors, amid Minjoo Kim’s colorful lighting and Yee Eun Nam’s projections, which range from English translations of Korean dialogue to photos of old hands and animations of rain and falling letters.

While Kim is an engaging figure onstage, the narrative and movement occasionally dip into cliché and repetition, especially when it comes to her overuse of the concept of love languages, and it’s not always immediately clear when she shifts between characters. In addition, the orb is at times distracting, a precious prop that can be too sentimental.

At the end of the show, I was happy that Kim had overcome so many obstacles, but on the way home I couldn’t help but feel that I was still hungry, that I wanted more. Perhaps that will be sated by the next two parts of what Kim is calling the Hunger Trilogy.

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

FASCISM ON THE MARCH: THEATRICAL DEPICTIONS OF HATE AND ANTISEMITISM THEN AND NOW

Torrey Townsend’s Jewish Plot takes a unique look at antisemitism (photo by Ken Yotsukura)

JEWISH PLOT
Theatre 154
154 Christopher St. between Greenwich & Washington Sts.
Through November 8, $52.24 – $73.24
www.jewishplot.com

About halfway through the shrewdly inventive Jewish Plot, one of the actors (Madeline Weinstein) reads a ferocious monologue by playwright Torrey Townsend that includes the following breathless diatribe:

“I’m just not hot right now / not exciting / not commercial / not happening / what I should do is make a pivot and frontface with something new / what I should do is start writing about Jews / it’s a subject that people love! / my god people love stories about Jews / it doesn’t even matter / stories about rich Jews / stories about poor Jews / stories about secular Jews / stories about religious Jews / Jews during World War Two / and Jews joining the underground / and Jews trying to escape the camps / and Jews being helped by non-Jews to escape the camps / and Jews being helped by other Jews to escape the camps / and Jews coming to America and assimilating / and Jews coming to America and not assimilating / and Jews experiencing trauma / yes especially above all else Jews experiencing trauma / Jews in the past experiencing trauma / Jews in the present experiencing trauma / Jews half in the past and half in the present experiencing trauma / Jews in multiple dimensions of time and place experiencing trauma / Jews beyond time and place experiencing trauma / Jews as stand-ins for all humans / the timeless truth of all humans experiencing trauma / modern Jews and ancient Jews and Biblical Jews experiencing trauma. . . .”

Right now there are numerous off-Broadway shows that tackle Jewish identity and trauma, coming at a fraught time when the mayoral race involves accusations of antisemitism and there is an uneasy ceasefire in the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas: Jewish Plot at Theatre 154, Hannah Senesh at Theatre Row, Awake and Sing! at St. George’s Episcopal Church, Slam Frank: A New Musical at Asylum NYC, and Playing Shylock at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center; in addition, the Mint’s Crooked Cross and William Spatz’s Truman vs. Israel closed last weekend. Below I take a closer look at four of them, which I saw on four successive days.

Jewish Plot seemed problematic from the start. First, it had to move from the Brick in Brooklyn to Theatre 154 in the West Village because of an electrical fire. Then, the night I went, Weinstein made a long announcement about how various actors and musicians had quit, but the show, an adaptation of I. W. Bruntmole’s 1889 Jewish Plot; or, The Semite of Mayfair, which deals with antisemitism in Victorian England, would go on, with four performers who would do their best with the technical aspects such as sound and lighting. Oh, and Townsend was in a dressing room still putting finishing touches on the second act.

In Bruntmole’s play, Baron Morris von Azenberg (Eddie Kaye Thomas), who is Jewish, is engaged to actress Sophia Fitzkernerton (Tess Frazer), who is not. But she has to break up with him because, despite his prominent station, her family has forbidden her to marry a Jew; her mother calls the Baron a “Jew devil,” while her brothers refer to him as “the filthy Jew beast.”

The devastated Baron heads off to the Sgorg Inn, where he meets the Abbé Artemis de Romantis (Frazer), who blames all the world’s ills on the Jews. “There’s nothing in the past two thousand years that doesn’t come down to the Jews,” he tells innkeepers Owen (Neil D’Astolfo) and Conner (Weinstein). “The Jews have the money, the Jews are the ones who have robbed the Catholic Church of its power, the Jews are the ones who have brought down the French Empire. Everything’s been a plot, an ingeniously worked-out plot orchestrated by the sons of Israel, the Zionists, the New World Order — call it by any other name. — The Jews control the algorithm; all the rest of us are mice scampering around inside their system.” Offended by the Abbé’s insinuations, the Baron challenges him to a duel.

Madeline Weinstein, Neil D’Astolfo — and the audience — can’t believe what they see at Theatre 154 (photo by Ken Yotsukura)

In the second act, Townsend delivers a furious screed about Jewish theater, taking on Itamar Moses (The Ally), Jesse Eisenberg (The Revisionist), Tom Stoppard (Leopoldstadt), and, primarily, Joshua Harmon (Bad Jews), while also bringing up such antisemitic tropes as Jews “eatin’ Christian babies, and drinkin’ their blood!”

Townsend throws in a litany of anachronistic references, intimating how antisemitism continues over time. “This is a Super Bowl of scapegoating, a primordial Mardi Gras,” Townsend writes. It’s a brutal yet hilarious monologue, way too long, but it is as Jewish as it gets, particularly when he includes his mother. “Imagine a Jewish story without a Jewish mother,” he opines parenthetically. He also brings up his grandfather, Meyer Steinglass, “the head and front of the Zionist effort,” who wrote speeches for Golda Meir and raised $35 billion for Israel Bonds.

Lovingly directed with chaotic flair by Sarah Hughes, Jewish Plot is wonderfully titled; it’s about the millennia-old plot against Jews, the supposed plot by Jews to control the world, the plot of Jewish plays, and the burial plot, as antisemitism has resulted in so much death. Weinstein (The Ally) is sensational in the wildly unpredictable work, serving as our personable guide through the neverending scourge of hatred and prejudice that comes with being Jewish.

David Schechter’s Hannah Senesh tells the inspiring story of a real Jewish hero (photo by Tricia Baron)

HANNAH SENESH
National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene at Theatre Row
410 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 9, $92.50
bfany.org
nytf.org/hannah-senesh

Writer-director David Schechter’s Hannah Senesh, presented by the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene at Theatre Row through November 9, is framed by the title character’s mother, Catherine, sitting in a chair, proudly telling the audience in heavily accented English about seeing her daughter in a Budapest prison in 1944, locked up with other underground Zionists. “Hannah’s behavior before the members of the Gestapo was quite something. She always stood up to them, warning them plainly of the bitter fate what they would suffer after they lose the war,” Catherine says. “Even the warden of the prison, who I can only describe to you as . . . inhuman . . . animal . . . even he considered it a privilege to visit her cell daily to argue with her fearless criticism of the German rule and her prophecies of Allied victory. He knew she was Jewish, but he also knew that she was a British paratrooper who had come to fight them. And having been taught for years that Jews never fight back, they will accept the vilest treatment what you give them . . . he was struck . . . by her courage.”

In between, Hannah tells her true story, based on her diaries and other writings (translated by Marta Cohn and Peter Hay), taking us from Budapest in 1934, when, at the age of twelve, she declares herself a vegetarian and complains about a party dress her mother has bought her, through her teen years as she describes her ideal boy and her fury when she wins a school election but it is invalidated because she is Jewish, to her decision to become a Zionist. Quoting Polish writer Nahum Sokolow, she explains, “Zionism is the movement of the Jewish people for its revival.”

Shortly after turning eighteen, she immigrates to British Mandate Palestine, where she lives on a kibbutz. But as Hitler and the Nazis continue their march through Europe, Hannah decides she has to get her mother out before it’s too late, so she volunteers for a dangerous mission.

Jennifer Apple portrays both Hannah Senesh and her mother, Catherine, in poetic show (photo by Tricia Baron)

Jennifer Apple is terrific as both Hannah and Catherine, the former with a gleefully idealistic view of life, the latter more pragmatic; Hannah often flits about onstage, singing, dancing, and twirling a large blue-and-white multipurpose cloth that evokes what will be the colors of the Israeli flag, while Catherine, in dowdy clothing, is tense and controlled. The set features the chair and a writing desk surrounded by walls on which the sun, clouds, storms, and abstract shapes are projected.

The music, arranged by Steven Lutvak, includes Schechter’s adaptation of “Soon” and Liz Swados’s “One, Two, Three” in addition to Senesh’s popular poem “A Walk to Caesarea (‘Eli, Eli’),” in which she sings, “Oh Lord, my G-d / I pray that these things never end / The sand and the sea / The rush of the waves / The crash of the heavens / The prayer of man.”

The narrative doesn’t focus enough on what made Hannah a beloved hero in Israel — I actually had to Google her when I got home to find out more of the details — and the late inclusion of a second character (Simon Feil) feels unnecessary, but the play does a good job introducing us to this extraordinary young woman.

I can’t help but wonder what she would do if she were alive today.

Sea Dog’s adaptation of Awake and Sing!, about a Jewish family, takes place in a church (photo by Jeremy Varner)

AWAKE AND SING!
St. George’s Episcopal Church
209 East Sixteenth St. at Rutherford Pl.
Through November 8, $25-$75, 7:30
www.seadogtheater.org

Zionism and Israel don’t come up in Clifford Odets’s 1935 family melodrama, Awake and Sing!, but the play, currently enjoying a sublime ninetieth-anniversary production from Sea Dog Theater at St. George’s Episcopal Church, does deal with antisemitism, and assimilation, in its own way.

In her 1983 book From Stereotype to Metaphor: The Jew in Contemporary Drama, Ellen Schiff calls it “the earliest quintessentially Jewish play outside the Yiddish theatre. It bears the unmistakable stamp of authenticity, exactly what one would wish from a Jewish dramatist writing a slice of Jewish life problem play.”

This is the third production of Awake and Sing! that I’ve reviewed. In 2013, I saw an excellent all-Asian adaptation from NAATCO at Walkerspace, and in 2017 I caught a superb Yiddish version from New Yiddish Rep at the 14th Street Y. Sea Dog’s rendition features a diverse cast, which makes the story more universal without sacrificing its Jewishness.

It’s 1933, and the Berger family is struggling to get by in a cramped Bronx apartment. Matriarch Bessie Berger (Debra Walton) wants her children to marry well, but son Ralph (Trevor McGhie), a wannabe entertainer, is secretly dating a young woman from a poor family, and daughter Hennie (Daisy Wang) is not particularly fond of her two suitors, the acerbic and cynical Moe Axelrod (Christopher J. Domig) and the plain, uninspiring Sam Feinschreiber (Sina Pooresmaeil). Bessie’s husband, Myron (Juan Carlos Diaz), is a timid, ineffectual man with a taste for gambling, while Bessie’s elderly father, Jacob (Gary Sloan), wanders around the apartment listening to Enrico Caruso and spouting Marxist doctrine. Bessie’s brother, Morty (Alfred C. Kemp), who has a successful fashion business, stops by once in a while to defend capitalism and help out financially, but apparently not as much as he could.

Jacob (Gary Sloan) tries to get through to his grandson, Ralph (Trevor McGhie), in multigenerational Clifford Odets drama (photo by Jeremy Varner)

An early conversation emphasizes the family’s religion.

Myron: The whole world’s changing right under our eyes. Presto! No manners. Like the great Italian lover in the movies. What was his name? The Sheik . . . No one remembers? [Exits]
Ralph: Jake . . .
Jacob: Noo?
Ralph: I can’t stand it.
Jacob: There’s an expression — “strong as iron you must be.”
Ralph: It’s a cock-eyed world.
Jacob: Boys like you could fix it some day. Look on the world, not on yourself so much. Every country with starving millions, no? In Germany and Poland a Jew couldn’t walk in the street. Everybody hates, nobody loves.

When Hennie gets pregnant and the man who did it leaves town, the close-knit but argumentative family has some important decisions to make, facing difficult choices in very hard times.

Director Erwin Maas and production designer Guy De Lancey, who previously collaborated on Sea Dog’s moving Tuesdays with Morrie, make good use of the church’s narrow chantry. The audience sits in two rows on either side of the space, which is centered by a long table with chairs at each end and a green apple in the middle, the only prop in the show. The characters occasionally walk behind columns, down the hall, and into nooks, where their consternation is livestreamed on four video monitors. The actors’ voices do reverberate in the high ceilings, but your ears will quickly get accustomed to that.

Odets, the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, chose the title from the Old Testament, Isaiah 26:19, which declares, “Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust,” but the added exclamation point seems almost like a tease as the men and women pursue an American dream that feels always out of their grasp, as if they will never be able to get out of the dust.

Many historians have likened this current time in the United States to 1930s Germany and the rise of fascism, and that undercurrent bristles under the play, since, with the benefit of hindsight, we know where things are heading for Jack, Morty, and the Jews of Europe.

The more things change. . . .

Mint revival is a timely look at the growth of fascism (photo by Todd Cerveris Photography)

CROOKED CROSS
The Mint Theater at Theatre Row
410 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Closed November 1
minttheater.org
bfany.org

Sally Carson’s Crooked Cross begins on Christmas Eve, 1932, and there’s no doubt as to what it’s about and where things are heading: The title refers to the Nazi swastika.

The American premiere of the 1935 play, based on Carson’s 1934 novel, comes courtesy of the Mint Theater, which specializes in reviving lost or forgotten works. The show closed November 1 at Theatre Row but leaves a lasting impression.

In the small German town of Kranach, Moritz Weissmann (Ty Fanning) is in love with Lexa Kluger (Ella Stevens), who lives with her brothers, Helmy (Gavin Michaels) and Erich (Jakob Winter), and their parents (Katie Firth and Liam Craig). Moritz, who recently lost his mother, is taking care of his aging father (Douglas Rees).

A few months later, at a ball in a Munich hotel, Moritz is accosted by a young man (Ben Millspaugh) wearing a uniform with a swastika badge on it who yells, “Blast you! . . . You filthy Jew . . . beastly foreigner! Get out of the way . . . or I’ll . . .” Lexa is shocked by the altercation, saying, “I didn’t know it was like that.” Moritz considers ending his relationship with Lexa so as not to put her in harm’s way, but there’s no avoiding it once Helmy, Erich, and their friend Otto (Jack Mastrianni), who desires Lexa, have all joined the party and go everywhere in their brown storm trooper uniforms with swastikas on the arm. (The frightening costumes are by Hunter Kaczorowski.)

When Lexa tells Helmy that she doesn’t want to give up Moritz, he accuses her of being selfish. “But Helmy, what is being selfish? I’ve thought of so many things lately. And the more I think, the more everything gets a different value,” she tells him. “I’m sure of one thing, I can say this about Moritz, and it’s rare to be able to say it about anyone – I don’t want a single thing different about him, there’s nothing I don’t want or don’t love about Moritz.” Helmy bitterly replies, “Only his being a Jew.” Lexa answers quietly, “Perhaps even that.”

Carson pulls no punches as the Nazi party quickly grows and Moritz has to reevaluate his future in Germany with his father and Lexa.

A close German family is torn apart by Nazism in Sally Carson’s Crooked Cross (photo by Todd Cerveris Photography)

“The German youth had been brought up to believe that their country was ‘beaten’ and ‘second-class.’ They developed a feeling of inferiority,” Carson said at a 1935 postshow discussion. “Then along came Hitler who said, ‘You are not second rate and you are not going to be.’ This creed inspired the young people. . . . Whether he will continue to bamboozle the people much longer, no one knows.” The British author never saw the full force of the Nazis in WWII; she died in 1941 at the age of thirty-eight. Crooked Cross was the first of a trilogy that continued with 1936’s The Prisoner and 1938’s A Traveller Came By.

Adroitly directed by Jonathan Bank on Alexander Woodward’s cramped living room set (which converts to other tight spaces), Crooked Cross is a warning sign in 2025, nearly begging the audience to squarely face what is happening in America and around the world, to the Jews, refugees, and other minorities. The narrative avoids getting preachy, instead making its points with expert precision. The fine cast is led by a stellar performance by Stevens, in her New York debut, as Lexa, a caring and honest young woman who represents all of us who believe that the worst will not happen, that humanity can never go that far.

But as Jewish Plot, Hannah Senesh, Awake and Sing!, Crooked Cross, and so many other works dealing with antisemitism, bigotry, and injustice have revealed across the last ninety years and more, it would be folly to underestimate the power and reach of hate.

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

A GOOD CANCER STORY: THE LUCKY ONES AT THEATERLAB

Janie (Danielle Skraastad) and Vanessa (Purva Bedi) take a long look at their friendship in The Lucky Ones (photo by Hokun Tsou)

THE LUCKY ONES
TheaterLab
357 West Thirty-Sixth St., between Eighth & Ninth Aves., third floor
Wednesday – Sunday through November 9, $30
theaterlabnyc.com
www.boomerangtheatre.org

“I get a lot of satisfaction from measuring up to other people’s expectations,” playwright Lia Romeo explained last year. She also noted, “Being a woman in the world has always involved a certain measure of pain. . . . Being a woman in the world means there are no good choices a lot of the time.”

She wrote that in an April 2024 Newsweek Community Forum article, “Do I Reconstruct My Breasts? I’m Torn by My Decision,” but those sentiments are central to Romeo’s The Lucky Ones, her 2019 play now making its New York premiere at TheaterLab through November 9.

Staged by Boomerang Theatre Company in association with Project Y Theatre/Women in Theater Festival, the eighty-minute show offers an insightful look at female friendship in the face of tragedy. Vanessa (Purva Bedi) and Janie (Danielle Skraastad) have been besties for nearly twenty years, after meeting at an acting class. Now in their early forties, Janie is a childless, divorced middle school drama teacher with low self-esteem, while Vanessa is a steady working actress with lots of boyfriends and a fun-loving, devil-may-care spirit.

When a bumbling oncologist (David Carl, who plays all the male roles) tells Vanessa that she has stage four cancer, Janie appears to be more devastated than Vanessa. “I feel like I’m doing this badly. I’ve never done this before,” the doctor admits. Vanessa asks, “How long have you been an oncologist?” Counting backward on his fingers, the doctor answers, “Four days.” We soon learn he was previously an acrobat specializing in chair work, but an injury led him to this second career.

Calmly pointing out that she has lived a healthy life, Vanessa says, “So I guess I just don’t understand how something like this could happen.” A moment later, she uses a chair to climb up on the doctor’s desk to have a cigarette, blowing the smoke into the vent like she did in junior high. Vanessa asks Janie to join her; initially hesitant, Janie finally gets on the desk and takes a drag. It’s a potent scene that humorously sets up the seriousness that follows.

Confined to her hospital room, Vanessa quickly grows bored and decides that she will help Janie create an online dating profile and live vicariously through her, but Janie is reluctant to get back in the game, lugubriously claiming that men never ask her out “because nobody loves me and I’m going to die alone.”

Janie does at last find a botanist she swipes right on, but when she chooses a date with him instead of watching Bachelor in Paradise with Vanessa, cracks in the friendship start growing and get wider.

“It isn’t my fault that you’re sick and I’m not!” Janie argues. Vanessa replies, “No, it’s not! — But it should have been me! If one of us got to have their whole — I would have been better at it.”

David Carl, Danielle Skraastad, and Purva Bedi star in New York premiere of Lia Romeo’s The Lucky Ones at TheaterLab (photo by Hokun Tsou)

Directed with a mischievous bent by Katie Birenboim, The Lucky Ones unfolds on Ant Ma’s at times almost blindingly white set, consisting of movable chairs, a couch, a desk, and a cabinet that unfolds into a hospital bed. Just about the only color comes from flowers, pink bottles that match Vanessa’s intravenous fluid, and Jeff Croiter’s lighting, featuring three open rectangles of fluorescent bulbs. Brandon Bulls’s sound navigates through city noise, a screaming deejay, loud music, the voice of the universe (prerecorded by Christian Borle), and a wildly orchestrated meditation session. Stefanie Genda’s costumes help differentiate the unpredictable Vanessa from the more staid Janie. Romeo’s dialogue occasionally gets a bit stilted, but she is able to wiggle out of it with the actors’ help.

Carl (David and Katie Get Re-Married, Fat Cat Killers) imbues all the men with an innate goofiness and innocence despite the various characters’ complete lack of facility with women. Bedi (Dance Nation, India Pale Ale) and Skraastad (The Mound Builders, Hot Fudge) have instant chemistry as the two women who must rely on each other for love and care; when Janie says to the doctor about Vanessa, “If you’re in the room with her, you don’t want to look anywhere else,” that quote could apply to Bedi and Skraastad, who evocatively portray the friends.

Whether by choice or circumstance, the sexy, outgoing Vanessa and the more ordinary and plain Janie have no one else in their lives to turn to, even as painful truths come out. In the exhilarating finale, Brandi Carlile’s “The Story” blasts out, with the Grammy and Emmy winner singing, “All of these lines across my face / Tell you the story of who I am / So many stories of where I’ve been / And how I got to where I am / But these stories don’t mean anything / When you’ve got no one to tell them to, it’s true / I was made for you.”

Written for the Brooklyn Generator, The Lucky Ones is the fourth work in Boomerang’s nine-play “Super Season” celebrating the company’s twenty-fifth anniversary. In this case, Vanessa sums the show up well when she says, “Oh, yeah. People love a good cancer story. There are the sad ones full of chemo and radiation and surgical scars — but there are also some that are really fun.”

Oh, and beware the cobra lily.

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

SEXUAL ASSAULT ON THE MENU: OH, HONEY AT LITTLE EGG

Carmen Berkeley is a much better actor than her character is a waitress in immersive Oh, Honey (photo by Krystal Pagan)

OH, HONEY
Little Egg
657 Washington Ave., Brooklyn
October 16 – November 7, $28.52 – $87.21
uglyfacetheatre.com
www.eggrestaurant.com

I’m an immersive theater junkie. Just say those two words — immersive theater — and I’m in, no matter the place or the subject; add in site-specific and I start palpitating with excitement. Several of my colleagues would rather be tortured by a Bad Cinderella marathon than see site-specific immersive theater; they don’t know what they’re missing. (Or maybe they do.)

So I jumped at the chance to see Jeana Scotti’s Oh, Honey at the happening Little Egg community restaurant in Brooklyn.

When I arrived at the eatery, on Washington Ave. on the border of Crown Heights and Prospect Heights, I was led to a chair in a row that had been squeezed in between a table and the beginning of the L-shaped counter. Most of the audience is seated at tables or at the counter, as if they were regular diners, but a handful of chairs and stools fill in empty spaces, a reminder that we’re here to watch a play and not have dinner, marring the site-specific illusion.

I initially declined a (free) mug of homemade tomato soup and the menu; already squished in the cramped row, I had nowhere to put the soup or the slice of pie I wanted to order. I understand that they need to get as many paying customers in to see the play as possible, but I already had a bad taste in my mouth. I looked around and I seemed to be the only one dissatisfied, but still.

I asked a waitress if there was anywhere else I could sit; I usually don’t complain about these kinds of things, but my level of discomfort was so off the charts I was considering just leaving. Fortunately, they were able to move me to the end of a long table, where I enjoyed the tomato soup, a glass of water, and a fine piece of lemon meringue pie. My site line was less than desirable, but I settled in for the show.

Four mothers (Maia Karo, Dee Pelletier, Mara Stephens, and Jamie Ragusa) meet the first Monday of every month at diner (photo by Krystal Pagan)

The action takes place at a table by the window, where four women meet for lunch the first Monday of every month. Vicki (Maia Karo), Lu (Dee Pelletier), Bianca (Jamie Ragusa), and Sarah (Mara Stephens) all have sons who have been accused of sexual assault on college campuses. (The story was inspired by a 2017 New York Times article about four such mothers in a Minneapolis suburb.) The women come together as a kind of group therapy to discuss their lives and their legal situations. They are served by Mari, a waitress portrayed by Carmen Berkeley, the woman I’d spoken to earlier about my seat; it turns out that she’s one of the actors.

Berkeley also stands out in the show. When it’s just the four mothers talking, arguing, commiserating, and supporting one another (or not), the play, directed by Carsen Joenk, feels fussy; their conversations are not something other diners would necessarily want to eavesdrop on. But when Mari is involved, the energy bumps up and various narratives become more intriguing.

Berkeley is terrific as Mari, who takes center stage a few times, from a confrontation with a man (Brian McCarthy, Lucas Papaelias, Jesse Pennington, or Ean Sheehy) to a surprising and poignant monologue about herself.

I’m glad I stuck it out, even if the seating arrangement continued to befuddle me. Not every meal is a delight from appetizer to main course to dessert, and the same can be said for immersive, site-specific plays, including Oh, Honey. But in the end, it is satisfying fare.

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

BLOWING IT ALL UP: A LIVESTREAMED PHANTOM FROM AN EAST VILLAGE CLOSET

Theater in Quarantine’s Phantom of the Opera can be experienced multiple ways (screenshot by twi-ny/mdr)

THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
NYU Skirball online
Through November 3, $22, 8:00
nyuskirball.org
www.theaterinquarantine.com

For Halloween 2023, Joshua William Gelb and his Theater in Quarantine (TiQ) company teamed up with NYU Skirball to present Nosferatu: A 3D Symphony of Horror, a livestreamed adaptation of the horror classic based on Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula. The show took place in Gelb’s 2′ x 4′ x 8′ closet in his East Village apartment, which he had converted into a claustrophobic white space for virtual dance and drama during the pandemic.

Earlier this year he took TiQ out of the closet, staging The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy at New York Theatre Workshop’s Fourth Street Theatre and [untitled miniature] at HERE Arts Center, revealing the genius behind his complex process.

Joshua William Gelb works his magic again in livestreamed horror classic for Halloween (photo by Theater in Quarantine)

Gelb is now back in his apartment, in a slightly larger white closet, for his unique take on The Phantom of the Opera, another Halloween commission from Skirball. The sixty-five-minute production offers viewers a variety of options: There’s a live chat and reaction emojis, the audience is represented by little circles at the bottom of the screen so you can feel like you’re not alone, and picture-in-picture allows you to toggle between the show itself and a behind-the-scenes camera where you can see how the DIY magic happens, which I found illuminating. (One night the toggle wasn’t working, so the picture-in-picture was instead projected side by side.) Or you can pay no attention to any of the bells and whistles and just experience the chilling final product with no interruptions.

In his introduction, delivered while he is applying the Phantom makeup, Gelb explains, “Just like the Phantom, you choose between the artifice of the opera and the reality of the infrastructure.” He has a lot to say about art, luxury, wealth, and power. “Maybe the Phantom isn’t a man hiding behind a mask; maybe he’s the infrastructure itself. Which is why, in wrestling with the question of the Phantom’s face, we think of it not as disfigurement but as damage, the visible strain of keeping a collapsing system alive. The cracks are architectural, the rot is institutional, budgets shrink — maybe someone should blow it all up.” He then asks, “How can you possibly introduce convention so antiquated to a new audience? It will happen to theater like it happens to the opera, like it’ll happen to the cinema, anywhere real people congregate in real space and real time.” He answers that question with his version of The Phantom of the Opera, based on Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel and Rupert Julian’s 1925 film starring Lon Chaney.

Directed by Gelb with scenography by Normandy Sherwood and sound by Alex Hawthorn, the black-and-white show features old-fashioned silent-film-style title cards, purposefully exaggerated acting, cardboard cutouts (for the Paris Opera House and other interiors and exteriors, the famous chandelier, the character of Carlotta), and such cinematic transitions as irising in and irising out.

The story is boiled down to its essentials. The new management (Erin Amlicke and Jon Levin) of the opera house finds a clause in the contract that states that an artist in residence known as the Phantom (Gelb) lives in the subterranean chambers and must not be disturbed. Thinking it is a practical joke, they sign on the dotted line and are immediately sent a note telling them that Christine Daaé (Sophie Delphis) will replace opera star Carlotta as Marguerite for Wednesday night’s performance of Faust.

“No ghost will frighten Carlotta!” the diva declares, but the nervous Christine does indeed go on, anxiously watched by her true love, Vicomte Raoul de Chagny (Curtis Gillen). Despite Christine’s success, management wants Carlotta to return to the role, which does not make the Phantom happy. He is also jealous of Raoul, who plans to take Christine away from the opera.

The Phantom clearly expresses his displeasure, and all hell breaks loose.

Raoul has his work cut out for him if he is to save Christine (Sophie Delphis) from the Phantom (photo by Theater in Quarantine)

Phantom has existed in multiple forms over the years, from the 1925 silent film to the 1929 reissue with sound, from the 1974 rock opera Phantom of the Paradise to the 1986 Andrew Lloyd Webber musical and subsequent 2004 film. In April 2023, the musical closed after more than thirty-five years at the Majestic Theatre on Broadway, but a reimagined immersive version, Masquerade, is now playing on West Fifty-Seventh St., where tickets start at over $200.

For a mere twenty-two bucks, you can experience Gelb’s Phantom of the Opera from the comfort of your own home, but be sure to keep the lights off and turn up the sound, as it’s a creepy, fun evening, immersive in its own way, putting a new spin on favorite scenes through virtuoso techniques that will surprise you, delight you, and, yes, scare you as it blows it all up.

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

WELCOME TO THE MACHINE: TIM BLAKE NELSON WORLD PREMIERE AT LA MAMA

A Lawyer (Elizabeth Marvel) attempts to defend her client in Kafka-esque And Then We Were No More (photo by Bronwen Sharp)

AND THEN WE WERE NO MORE
La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club
The Ellen Stewart Theatre
66 East Fourth St. between Second Ave. & Bowery
Tuesday – Sunday through November 2, $49-$99
www.lamama.org

“‘It’s a remarkable piece of apparatus,’ said the officer to the explorer and surveyed with a certain air of admiration the apparatus which was after all quite familiar to him. The explorer seemed to have accepted merely out of politeness the Commandant’s invitation to witness the execution of a soldier condemned to death for disobedience and insulting behavior to a superior.”

So begins Franz Kafka’s 1918 short story, “In the Penal Colony,” which actor, director, novelist, playwright, and screenwriter Tim Blake Nelson recently read with one of his sons. The existential tale serves as the inspiration for Nelson’s gripping new play, And Then We Were No More, continuing at La MaMa through November 2.

The two-hour show (plus intermission) takes place in the near future, in a privately owned prison in a large complex that has a new machine that apparently can painlessly and efficiently execute those convicted of capital crimes. It’s a Kafka-esque institution where no one has a name and everything has been decided in advance. An Official (Scott Shepherd) goes by the book but likes making an occasional joke, which floats away without a laugh. He has brought in a Lawyer (Elizabeth Marvel) to defend the Inmate (Elizabeth Yeoman), who has been convicted of killing her husband, their two children, and her mother. Often watching the proceedings from a distance is an Analyst (Jennifer Mogbock) representing the corporation’s financial interest in the machine. Meanwhile, the Machinist (Henry Stram) fiercely defends the system and his beloved execution device as he tracks statistics.

The Lawyer reluctantly accepts the job; selected by a computer algorithm she essentially has no choice. At the Lawyer’s first meeting with her client, the Inmate says to her in an irrational manner, “I am not no my name / by name name me by name / but you would say know me / by name / by my name / you would swim / in the muddy of no more name / rise up and see / vapor wickedness / bloom in white sky / rain retreat like lost / far flood / nameless name. . . . smell on you same air / breathe / anger / plague skin crawled / needs swarming / scratch self death.” The Lawyer soon learns that there is no option to delay or cancel the execution based on her client’s possible insanity.

During the trial, the case is made directly to the audience, which serves as a kind of jury; when the verdict is announced, the powerlessness of the individual envelops the room with Kafka-esque grandeur.

A Lawyer (Elizabeth Marvel) faces impossible odds with her client (Elizabeth Yeoman) in world premiere at La MaMa (photo by Bronwen Sharp)

And Then We Were No More is gorgeously staged by director Mark Wing-Davey (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Mad Forest), as the tension, and strangeness, ratchet up scene after scene. David Meyer’s jaw-dropping set features a series of strikingly colored air ducts, bland chairs and tables, and the mysterious machine that supernumeraries move around like automatons. Marina Draghici’s costumes range from office chic to an odd, somewhat deranged outfit worn by those about to be executed. Henry Nelson (one of Tim’s children) and Will Curry’s sound design switches from compelling interstitial music to ominous machine drones to horrific screeches when the Lawyer says the Inmate’s name out loud, in defiance of the rules.

The cast, which also includes William Appiah, E. J. An, Kasey Connolly, and Craig Wesley Divino as the supernumeraries in multiple roles, capture the feeling of the Kafka-esque environment, where so much is not explained. Nelson, who has written two novels and such plays as Socrates, Eye of God, and The Grey Zone (he adapted the last two into films) and has appeared in such movies as The Thin Red Line, Captain America: Brave New World, and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, has created a sinister, foreboding dystopian existence with And Then We Were No More, one that feels all too real given what is happening to the justice system under the current US administration.

Various scenarios are like warning signals, telling us what might be waiting for us right around the corner:

An Analyst: If the work is stymied, if we cannot demonstrate success . . .
An Official: I understand.
An Analyst: Everyone must understand.
An Official: We can do what we can do.
An Analyst: This is a sentiment no longer relevant in our time.
An Official: Or it’s the only relevant sentiment.

“Ready now!” the officer announces after preparing the machine to do its business in Kafka’s tale.

He might be, but are we?

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