live performance

ONLINE DATING: PLOTTING A NEW STRATEGY

Jenny (Heléne York) and Adam (Michael Zegen) go on a strange date in Strategic Love Play (photo by Joan Marcus)

STRATEGIC LOVE PLAY
Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre
18 Minetta Lane between Sixth Ave. and MacDougal St.
Monday – Saturday through December 7, $86-$106
www.audible.com
strategicloveplay.com

The prospect of sitting through another play about online dating is as enticing as, well, going on an online date itself. But playwright Miriam Battye and director Katie Posner dig deep into the human need for connection in the Edinburgh Fringe–winning Strategic Love Play, which opened tonight at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre for a limited run through December 7.

“Should we just hold hands and start promising shit now so we don’t have to do this bit?” Jenny (Heléne York) asks Adam (Michael Zegen) when they meet at a table in an empty cabaret. “Sure!” Adam says, to which Jenny replies, “Oh shit! That was easy!” She reaches out her hand, but Adam does not take it.

There is nothing easy about online dating, especially when it’s about a lot more than just swiping right or left for a night of sex.

At the beginning, Adam is stiff and reserved, looking around like he’d rather be anywhere else than at that table at that exact moment. Jenny is open and honest, sick and tired of being let down by men and determined to make this date work. As they sip their beers, they try to find commonalities, but Adam grows more and more distant and disinterested, which frustrates Jenny, who suggests they just be who they are, whoever that is, “instead of the whole — I gotta seduce them by pretending I’m normal. But also disclose my not normal. In a fucking cabaret. So they’ll never be shocked or disappointed or leave me one day when I’ve put both my feet in —”

When Adam makes a move to leave early, Jenny is having none of it. She demands to know why, but all he can say is “You’re. Hey, you’re great” while insisting he is not a dick. When he lobs mean-spirited jabs at her, she initially takes it with self-deprecating stabs at herself until she fights back at his superficial needs and desires.

“So are you currently in a fantastic relationship?” she asks rhetorically. “’Cos I’m sorry if I was mistaken but I thought you were standing opposite me with a rock in your gut.” In response, he tells her she’s a sociopath.

When Jenny proposes a bizarre plan for how the rest of the date should go, he thinks it’s a bad joke, but he also can’t walk away as they consider future possibilities.

Adam (Michael Zegen) and Jenny (Heléne York) explore possibilities in potent drama (photo by Joan Marcus)

Strategic Love Play quickly rises above its clichéd rom-com subject matter, offering new perspectives on how two adults — their ages are never given in the play, but Yorke is thirty-nine and Zegen forty-five — might be able to find one another, despite personal and societal expectations and long-held biases and desires. It is like they are the only two people in the world; although there is a bar and other tables on Arnulfo Maldonado’s charming set, no one else is ever seen or heard. One of the themes is that two is better than one, in almost any circumstance; it’s evident as well in Battye’s dedication of the play to “the love of my life (tbc).”

Their conversation is a roller coaster of thoughts, feelings, and emotions between one person who arguably shares too much and a second who is bottled-up. Appropriately, she wears a low-cut, revealing top, while he looks constricted in his tight-fitting shirt. (The costumes are by Dede Ayite.) Jen Schriever’s lighting features more than a dozen large globe bulbs hanging from the ceiling, subtly changing colors from white, yellow, and red to orange, purple, and blue, both signalling and creating the many shifts in mood that Battye (Scenes with girls, Find a Partner) and Posner (You Bury Me, Hungry) orchestrate. Strings of holiday lights glitter above and behind them, as if something special is happening.

Both Zegen (Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, A View from the Bridge), best known for his role as Joel on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and Yorke (American Psycho, Bullets over Broadway), one of the stars of The Other Two and a regular on Masters of Sex, find just the right balance in their characters, who can go from likable to disarming in the snap of a finger.

By the end of the play, they both seem to be more mature and more attractive, as if our seventy-minute date with them at the Minetta Lane went very well indeed.

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

HANGING ON EVERY WORD: THE GREAT GATSBY FROM START TO FINISH

Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz takes place in a ramshackle office (photo by Joan Marcus)

GATZ
Newman Theater, the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. at Astor Pl.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 1, $210
publictheater.org
www.elevator.org

Elevator Repair Service’s eight-hour Gatz is no mere gimmick, and it’s much more than just a unique theatrical experience; it’s a way of life and a treatise on the human condition.

In 1980, comedian Andy Kaufman began reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby to a university audience that was soon clamoring for him to do almost anything else as it became apparent he was going to read the entire text. ERS founding artistic director John Collins took that to the next level in 2004, creating Gatz, a durational show constructed around every single word of the Great American Novel (other than the chapter numbers). Over twenty years, Gatz has traveled from a Williamsburg garage to locations all over the country and the world, but it didn’t make its official New York City debut until 2010, at the Public, because of rights issues with the Fitzgerald estate. It is now back at the Public’s Newman Theater for a farewell encore presentation through December 1; only a handful of tickets remain.

The play, which consists of four acts, two intermissions, and a ninety-minute dinner break, is set in a somewhat ramshackle, drab office that seems stuck in time, with a long desk cluttered with detritus, a plain brown couch, a glassed-in room in one far corner, high shelves of boxes stuffed with papers, a dusty file cabinet, a booze station, a whiteboard with an employee schedule, a bulletin board with random items pinned to it, a horizontal window revealing a narrow hallway, a fax machine, and a poster of a lion below the declaration: “Stop sharing your income! Start saving taxes with Republic Funds Investment Program.”

An employee (Scott Shepherd) enters, sits at one end of the desk, and turns his DOS computer on and off several times, as it’s not working properly. Another employee (Jim Fletcher) enters, sits down at the other end of the desk, and reads a newspaper before pressing the keys on an old typewriter. Growing bored and frustrated, the first man picks up the 1995 Scribner paperback edition of The Great Gatsby and starts reading it out loud.

“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since,” he says. “‘Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’ He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgements, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores.” There is nothing boring about Gatz.

At first, his coworkers are confused by what he is doing, but soon they are delivering lines of dialogue themselves — Jay Gatsby (Jim Fletcher), a mysterious, wealthy man who likes to throw parties but keeps a low profile; Daisy Buchanan (Tory Vazquez), Gatsby’s former flame and Nick’s cousin; Tom Buchanan (Pete Simpson), Daisy’s untrustworthy oaf of a husband; Jordan Baker (Susie Sokol), a professional golfer and Daisy’s best friend; George Wilson (Frank Boyd), who runs a local gas station; Myrtle (Laurena Allan), George’s wife, who is having an affair with Tom; Catherine (Annie McNamara), Myrtle’s sister; photographer Chester McKee (Vin Knight) and his wife, Lucille (Maggie Hoffman), who live in the apartment house where Tom has his trysts with Myrtle; Michaelis (sound designer Ben Jalosa Williams), a neighbor of George and Myrtle’s; Ewing Klipspringer (Mike Iveson), a regular Gatsby party guest; Meyer Wolfsheim (Shepherd), Gatsby’s mobbed-up business partner; and Henry C. Gatz (Ross Fletcher), Gatsby’s father.

Nick Carraway (Scott Shepherd), Tom Buchanan (Pete Simpson), and Jay Gatsby (Jim Fletcher) are played by office mates in Gatz (photo by Joan Marcus)

Director Collins includes numerous moments when the world of the book merges with the world of the office while acknowledging that this is a performance being staged in a theater. Phones ring in the office and in the retelling. Employees murmur and whisper to one another in the background as Shepherd keeps reading the novel. Paper is thrown through the air like pages torn from a book. Workers enter and leave just as their Gatsby doppelgängers do. The green light across the Sound that Gatsby is obsessed with is represented by a tiny light on a smoke alarm. Shepherd reads about a motorcycle and the thunderous sounds of a bike shake through the space. In the book, Nick talks about Klipspringer playing the 1920 song “The Love Nest,” and the tune can be heard, including the lyrics, which are not in the book.

At one point, when Gatsby’s hair is mentioned, both Fletcher, who is bald, and Shepherd do a double take and mug for the audience, a move that emphasizes that even while the production is being faithful to the novel by pronouncing every word, there is still plenty open to interpretation; after all, people read the same book but don’t see the exact same things in their imagination. Thus, when a child in the book says, “Aunt Jordan’s got on a white dress too,” we are not taken aback that the character in fact is not wearing a white dress; however, we are dazzled when Nick says, “I hadn’t gone twenty yards when I heard my name and Gatsby stepped from between two bushes into the path. I must have felt pretty weird by that time, because I could think of nothing except the luminosity of his pink suit under the moon,” and Fletcher appears in a luminous pink suit. As a bonus, Gatsby’s father — a part that is often left out — is played by his real-life dad, Dr. Fletcher, who has performed the role since 2005. (The costumes are by Colleen Werthmann, with original scenic design by Louisa Thompson and soft lighting by Mark Barton.)

The cast is extraordinary in morphing between office drones and Gatsby characters: Simpson is a hulking, primal Tom, tossing around mail like he treats his wife; Vazquez infuses Daisy with a strong sense of conviction; Sokol excels as an efficient employee and Baker, who knows exactly what she wants and how to get it; and Williams ably marks the past and the present, not only portraying Michaelis but also operating the sound from a desk at front stage right, complete with a laptop that is a regular reminder that this is a show we are watching in 2024, even if the book takes place in the 1920s and the office hijinks occur in the 1980s.

Fletcher, one of New York City’s most adventurous and engaging actors, gives us a Gatsby we’ve never seen before, one that is more memorable than Robert Redford’s in Jack Clayton’s static 1974 film and Leonardo DiCaprio’s in Baz Luhrmann’s glitzy 3-D 2013 extravaganza. A veteran of ERS, the Wooster Group, and NYC Players, Fletcher brings his trademark deadpan style to the role; he is tall and sturdy, imbuing Gatsby with a touching vulnerability that is at odds with his steadfast office worker.

Mayhem ensues when a mundane office starts merging with The Great Gatsby (photo by Joan Marcus)

After all, despite his name being in the title of the book, the protagonist of The Great Gatsby is not Jay but Nick, who is telling the story. Shepherd originated the role of Carraway, and his performance is one of remarkable depth and substance. Although the paperback is in his hands for nearly the entire show, he actually knows the book by heart, but it is not basic recitation. He understands every word, every line, every plot twist, bringing an intoxicating nuance to the story while not drastically altering the tone of his voice. In the fourth and final act, I felt a twinge of sadness as I saw the remaining pages dwindle, knowing the end was coming. Gatz is like nothing I’ve ever experienced before; I now understand why so many friends and colleagues have seen it multiple times. It might last the length of an average American work day, but its marvelous pacing makes it fly by — yet in one of the show’s many clever touches, the clock on the desk never advances a second.

Given that the novel is now in the public domain, there are likely more Gatsbys to come, following this year’s disappointing Broadway musical and last year’s immersive, participatory show in addition to Rachel Chavkin’s musical adaptation that ran this summer at the American Repertory Theater at Harvard. It’s a shame that Gatz, which explores the drudgery of everyday life alongside the fictional, fantastical domain Gatsby tries to construct around him, will never be performed again in New York City, that more people will not be able revel in this one-of-a-kind interpretation, an American classic all its own.

The last word, of course, will be Fitzgerald’s:

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further. . . . And one fine morning —

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

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

ALVIN AILEY: ON THE CUTTING EDGE

Carmen de Lavallade performs with Alvin Ailey at Jacob’s Pillow in 1961 (photo by John Lindquist)

EDGES OF AILEY
Whitney Museum of American Art
99 Gansevoort St.
Wednesday – Tuesday through February 9, $24-$30 (eighteen and under free; Friday nights and second Sundays free)
212-570-3600
whitney.org

“I’m trying to hold up a mirror to our society so they can see how beautiful they are, Black people, you know?” Alvin Ailey once said.

When I was in junior high, we were visited by Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. I had never seen anything like it, certainly not in my all-white class on Long Island. It opened my eyes to a world of possibilities, now highlighted at the end of every year when I go see AAADT in their annual season at City Center. I was even pulled onstage once by Ailey dancer Belén Pereyra to join her and others for an audience participation section of Ohad Naharin’s Minus 16.

The continuing legacy of Alvin Ailey himself and his company is celebrated in the exhilarating exhibition “Edges of Ailey,” on view at the Whitney through February 9. The dazzling multimedia show features painting, sculpture, drawings, photography, postcards and letters, video, notebooks, posters, and more, along with a multichannel loop of rare archival footage of the troupe’s remarkable history, circling around the top of the gallery in an awe-inspiring video installation. The artworks are divided into such categories as “Blackness in Dance,” “Black Spirituality,” “Black Liberation,” “Ailey’s Collaborators/Nightlife,” and “After Ailey,” arranged in sections that encourage fluid but random movement; you can wander through at your own pace, following your own path.

The exhibit is supplemented by several vitrines filled with wonderful ephemera, from family photos, programs, and research notes to epistolary exchanges with Dudley Williams, Langston Hughes, and Ailey’s mother, Lula Cooper. The notebooks are utterly fascinating, with exciting and revealing notations, early drafts, intricately detailed schedules, and such quotes as “One must discover what the music is about + visualize it if possible.” and “Very important: The choreographer as storyteller / story inventor.”

Exhibit includes notebooks filled with intimate and intricate details of Alvin Ailey’s life and career (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

A handful of the pieces were created specifically for the show, while others date back to the 1860s. Among the artists represented are Carrie Mae Weems, Jacob Lawrence, Lorna Simpson, James Van Der Zee, Alma Thomas, Kevin Beasley, Elizabeth Catlett, Jean-Michel Basquiat, David Driskell, Purvis Young, Horace Pippin, Theaster Gates, and Lyle Ashton Harris. A poem by Nikki Giovanni, “Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea (We’re Going to Mars),” hangs on a long, narrow vertical panel. Three stark 1970 woodcuts by Aaron Douglas are titled Bravado, Flight, and Surrender.

In the center of the space is a daring untitled sculpture by David Hammons made of human hair, wire, metallic mylar, a sledge hammer, plastic beads, string, a metal food tin, panty hose, leather, tea bags, and feathers. Faith Ringgold’s United States of Attica map is in the red, black, and green colors of the Pan-African flag. One of the most poignant sections is “Black Women,” a gathering of such works as Emma Amos’s 1985 Judith Jamison as Josephine Baker, Elizabeth Catlett’s 1947 I Am the Negro Woman, Beauford Delaney’s 1965 Marian Anderson, Geoffrey Holder’s 1976 Portrait of Carmen de Lavallade, Kara Walker’s 1998 African/American, Mickalene Thomas’s 2024 Katherine Dunham: Revelation, and Karon Davis’s 2024 Dear Mama, paying tribute to Black women artists and performers — and, particularly, longtime Ailey dancer and artistic director Judith Jamison, on whom Ailey choreographed the 1971 solo Cry, a birthday present for his mother that he dedicated “to all Black women everywhere — especially our mothers.”

Ailey collaborator Romare Bearden’s “Bayou Fever” series is a colorful depiction of joy and movement. Choreographer and visual artist Ralph Lemon’s Untitled (On Black Music) consists of forty-one ink and watercolor on paper drawings, leaving one slot empty at the lower right. Video stations show performances by Jack Cole, the Katherine Dunham Company, Martha Graham, Duke Ellington, Lester Horton, Pearl Primus, and Ailey himself, including in the three-minute black-and-white A Study in Choreography for Camera, directed by Maya Deren and Talley Beatty.

Ailey was born in Texas in 1931 and died from an AIDS-related illness in New York City in 1989, at the age of fifty-four. He left behind a thrilling legacy of movement and music honoring the African American experience and supporting civil rights and social justice. It’s evident not only in the exhibition itself but in the accompanying program of live performances, which has already featured Ronald K. Brown and Matthew Rushing and continues November 7-9 with Yusha-Marie Sorzano’s This World Anew, November 16 with Bill T. Jones’s Memory Piece: Mr. Ailey, Alvin… the un-Ailey?, December 13-15 with Will Rawls’s Parable of the Guest, January 17-19 with Jawole Willa Jo Zollar’s Solo Voyages, January 24-26 with Excerpts from New Works, February 6-8 with Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born’s let slip, hold sway, and Ailey II: Harmonic Echo November 20-24, December 21-22, and January 22-26.

Hope Boykin’s Finding Free makes its debut at Ailey season at City Center (photo by Paul Kolnik)

ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER
New York City Center
131 West 55th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
December 4 – January 5, $42-$172
www.alvinailey.org
www.nycitycenter.org

Before or after visiting “Edges of Ailey,” you must see the real thing, taking in a a show or two at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s five-week season, its sixty-sixth, at New York City Center, running December 4 through January 5. As always, it’s a combination of world and company premieres, classic favorites by Ailey and other choreographers, and presentations with live music; many programs conclude with the AAADT’s masterpiece, the thirty-six-minute multipart Revelations.

“This season we celebrate the lineage and legacy of Mr. Ailey, highlighting his acclaimed works as well as new ballets by choreographers for whom he paved the way,” interim artistic director Matthew Rushing said in a statement. “As I look at the repertory for our season, I am reminded that dance is both a reflection of our past and a guide to our future. We are excited to welcome audiences this holiday season to be inspired by Ailey’s extraordinary artistry and rich story, as it continues to be written.”

“All New” evenings feature former Ailey dancer Jamar Roberts’s Al-Andalus Blues, set to music by Roberta Flack and Miles Davis; former company member Hope Boykin’s Finding Free, with an original jazz and gospel score by pianist Matthew Whitaker that he will perform live at several shows; Lar Lubovitch’s Ailey debut, Many Angels, which explores St. Thomas Aquinas’s question “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?,” set to Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5; and Rushing’s Sacred Songs, built around music from the original 1960 version of Revelations that was eventually edited out because of length.

There will also be new productions of Elisa Monte’s twelve-minute duet, Treading, and Ronald K. Brown’s spectacular Grace, which premiered at City Center twenty-five years ago. The opening night gala honors dance educator Jody Gottfried Arnhold with presentations of Grace with Leslie Odom Jr. and Revelations with a live choir.

Other highlights are Dancing Spirit, Brown’s tribute to Jamison; Roberts’s 2019 Ode; Elizabeth Roxas-Dobrish’s Me, Myself and You; Amy Hall Garner’s CENTURY; Hans van Manen’s Solo; Alonzo King’s Following the Subtle Current Upstream; and Kyle Abraham’s Are You in Your Feelings? Among the Ailey classics on the schedule are Memoria, A Song for You, Cry, and Night Creature. Saturday matinees are followed by Q&As with the dancers, which this year welcome newcomers Leonardo Brito, Jesse Obremski, Kali Marie Oliver, and Dandara Veiga and the return of Jessica Amber Pinkett; closing night will celebrate what would have been Alvin Ailey’s ninety-third birthday.

And to keep your Ailey fix rolling, you can stream the eight-part Ailey PBS documentary Portrait of Ailey here.

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

COEXISTENCE AND THE OUD

Tom Block’s Oud Player on the Tel rehearses in advance of November 8 opening at HERE (photo courtesy Tom Block)

OUD PLAYER ON THE TEL
HERE Arts Center
145 Sixth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday, November 8-24, $35-$150
www.oudplayeronthetel.com
here.org

Playwright, author, and philosopher Tom Block delves into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the concept of coexistence in his new drama, Oud Player on the Tel, running November 8-24 at HERE Arts Center.

Presented by the International Human Rights Art Movement (IHRAM), the seventy-minute show is set in the Middle East in 1947, right before the establishment of the State of Israel. Block details the relationship between two families, Palestinian olive farmers and Jewish refugees, that takes a turn when a member of each clan changes their name to Herb Gordon and, in true Romeo and Juliet style, a young member from each falls in love with each other.

The play is directed by Jesica Garrou and features Mark Quiles as Amir, Mark Peters as Melke, Isaiah Stavchansky as Moritz, Hari Bhaskar as Mahmud, Maya Koshaba as Rashida, Inji El Gammmal as Fatima, and Jennifer Tulchin as Shoshana. The set is designed by Richie Oullette, with lighting by Riva Fairhall, costumes by Cathy Small, and choreography by Hala Shah. The original score is by Rachid Halihal, who appears as the oud player.

Block, the founding executive director and recording secretary of IHRAM, has written such books as Shalom/Salaam: A Story of a Mystical Fraternity and The Fool Returns, which explore connections between Jewish and Islamic mysticism.

“Oud Player on the Tel is a historically based piece that hopes to open a doorway to conversation by using absurdism, humor, and much history to tell an ugly truth,” Block told twi-ny. “We’ve had a couple readings and in both cases, people came in loaded for bear, and they left scratching their heads. It does find nuance in the middle of this geopolitical nightmare.”

THE POSTPOETIC MACHINE: INSTALLATION AND ACTIVATION

THE POSTPOETIC MACHINE: MAFE IZAGUIRRE’S VISIONARY EXPLORATION OF HUMAN-MACHINE SYNERGY
Theaterlab Gallery
357 West Thirty-Sixth St., between Eighth & Ninth Aves., third floor
November 4–10, discussions free with advance RSVP
theaterlabnyc.com

Maria Fernanda (Mafe) Izaguirre continues her examination of the relationship between art and technology, humans and machines in the interactive, immersive installation “The Postpoetic Machine: Mafe Izaguirre’s Visionary Exploration of Human-Machine Synergy,” running November 4–10 at Theaterlab. The Venezuela-born artist, whose previous work includes “The Mind Project,” “Flowers of New York,” and “Sensitive Machines,” explains on her website, “In 2022, I created the Postpoetic Machine™, a device that explores vibration as universal language. I use this machine to challenge the limits of human language and radically experience otherness. I collect and transcribe fragments of human and nonhuman voices, then compose them into unrestricted spatiotemporal and metatextual realities.” Mentored by Venezuelan poet Eleonora Requena, Izaguirre incorporates resonance realms, interspecies communication, and a hybrid chorus into the cybernetic piece, which will be on view daily between noon and 6:00 and will feature four two-hour experimental performance sessions with New York City–based artists.

Izaguirre will discuss hybridization at the opening reception on November 4 at 7:00. On November 6 at 7:00, Tokyo-born movement artist Yoko Murakami focuses on moving interaction. On November 9 at 5:00, Syracuse-born interdisciplinary performer and educator Peter Sciscioli delves into sounding bodies. And on November 10 at 5:00, Caracas native Enrique Enriquez probes bird talk, followed by a closing Q&A.

“I am exploring pre-linguistic patterns understood and mediated by a human-machine hybrid language,” Izaguirre continues. “I set on the horizon of possibilities willing to expand myself into an open and endlessly flowing existential abyss.”

Admission is free, but advance RSVP is strongly suggested for the activations.

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

SUMP’N LIKE OUR TOWN: AMERICA ONSTAGE

The Mint produciton of Lynn Riggs’s Sump’n Like Wings is worthy of much applause (photo by Maria Baranova)

SUMP’N LIKE WINGS
The Mint Theater at Theatre Row
410 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 2, $39-$99
minttheater.org
www.theatrerow.org

In 1938, Thornton Wilder, who was born in Wisconsin in 1897, wrote what many consider one of the greatest American plays, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Our Town. The drama, a perennial favorite in high schools and community theater and off and on Broadway, is set in the small, fictional town of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, in 1901, where ordinary people go about their ordinary lives, including going to church, falling in love, and facing tragedy. It can currently be seen in an all-star version at the Ethel Barrymore through January 19. Wilder, who was gay, also won Pulitzers for his 1927 novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and his 1942 play, The Skin of Our Teeth.

In 1925, Lynn Riggs, who was born in Oklahoma in 1899, wrote Sump’n Like Wings, a little-known play that was published in 1928 and premiered in 1931. The rarely performed drama is set in the small, fictional town of Claremont, Oklahoma, where ordinary people go about their ordinary lives, including going to church, falling in love, and facing tragedy. It concluded its too-short run at Theatre Row on November 2. Riggs, who was gay, also wrote the 1931 play Green Grow the Lilacs, which was the basis for the classic musical Oklahoma!, which won a Pulitzer in 1944 in addition to several Tonys and Oscars over the years.

The New York premiere of Sump’n Like Wings is presented by the Mint, the theater world’s finest purveyor of lost, forgotten plays, but this one is a welcome change of pace for the company, which specializes in British and American working-class tales and drawing-room comedies that often explore sociopolitical issues of their time. The splendid two-hour, two-act play takes place in the Old West of the 1910s, where the characters speak in western drawl and rhythm unusual for the Mint but as exquisitely rendered as ever.

The strict Mrs. Baker (Julia Brothers), a widow, operates the dining room of the St. Francis Hotel for Ladies and Gents in Claremont, where she is raising her sixteen-year-old daughter, the wild child Willie (Mariah Lee), with the help of her brother, Jim Thompson (Richard Lear), who owns the hotel. The town is aghast when shoplifter Elvie Rapp (Lindsey Steinert) lets all the prisoners out of the local jail; to rehabilitate her, Sheriff Beach (Andrew Gombas) is forcing her to work for Mrs. Baker. Instead of going to school, Willie waits tables for her mother, but she is being pursued by the married Boy Huntington (Lukey Klein), who wants to run away with her. Judging them all is Jim’s housekeeper, Hattie (Joy Avigail Sudduth).

Talking about why she let the men go, Elvie tells Willie, “You don’t know whut it is to be locked up, locked up away from the sun and the air. You don’t know whut it means not to be free to go and come whenever you please — with no one to stop you, and no iron bars a-shuttin you in like a animal —.” Willie cuts her off, declaring, “I — do — too.” Elvis responds, “You don’t! You cain’t know! And you don’t know how fin’lly you git sick, sick inside of yer head, so you’d do anything — anything at all to git free, to git away. It ain’t that you wanta go anywheres. It’s the idy of the bars that makes you mad. The bars git in yer mind, and you’d do anything to break em down, to git rid of em —.”

Lynn Riggs’s Sump’n Like Wings explores life in a small Oklahoma town in the 1910s (photo by Maria Baranova)

Therein lies the theme of the play; nearly every character is trying to escape something, searching for freedom from the bars that have surrounded them. They hop railroad cars, go to church, fight over a game of checkers, fall in and out of love, bury themselves in the newspaper, or break the law, challenging societal norms or getting swept up in them. In the first scene, Mr. Clovis (Buzz Roddy), Mrs. Clovis (Traci Hovel), and Osment (Mike Masters) are eating in the dining room and gossiping about Elvie. While the Clovises see the former prisoners as “crimernals, ever one of em!,” cowman Osment insists, “They was men, Mis’ Clovis. They was men.”

They then hear fierce noises coming from behind a closed door; it’s Willie, screaming to be let out, threatening to kick the door down. Mrs. Baker yells right back at her, threatening her. It ultimately turns out that the door is not locked, that Willie could have opened it at any time by herself. But not everyone in Claremont — or anywhere, in the past, present, or future — knows that.

The Mint is justifiably renowned for its fashionably detailed sets, but Junghyun Georgia Lee keeps it relatively simple this time, employing a handful of unadorned wooden chairs and tables that are moved around as the scene shifts from the dining room to a hotel office to a rooming house, with a closed door at one end and an open one at the other. In the back are rows of horizontal slats with enough space between them that the outside world is temptingly visible, filled with both hope and fear. Emilee McVey-Lee’s period costumes maintain the mostly brown color palette. As always with the Mint, the cast is impeccable, transporting the audience to 1910s Oklahoma. Raelle Myrick-Hodges’s (Dirty White Teslas Make Me Sad, Flyin’ West) intricate direction adds contemporary relevancy to the play nearly a century after it was written; who isn’t seeking some form of escape from something these days?

Riggs, who was part Cherokee and served in the US military, died in New York City in 1954 at the age of fifty-four, leaving behind twenty-one full-length plays, about a dozen screenplays (The Plainsman, Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror), and numerous short stories. He was inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame in 1943 and deserves to be better remembered for more than just one play.

Jim Parsons stars as the Stage Manager in Broadway revival of Our Town (photo by Daniel Rader)

OUR TOWN
Ethel Barrymore Theatre
243 West Forty-Seventh St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Through January 19, $74 – $321
www.ourtownbroadway.com

Two-time Tony winner Kenny Leon’s streamlined adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town suffers from trying too hard to be all things to all people. Like Sump’n Like Wings, it has a spare, rustic set, with various chairs and tables being moved around and a large distressed wood barn wall in the back, with one door and a pair of windows that open up like the Laugh-In joke wall. Fifteen audience members sit in boxes on either side of the stage, more like a jury than part of the neighborhood being celebrated between them. Meanwhile, rows of lanternlike lights extend like stars over the stage and the audience, as if we’re part of this neighborhood too. (The set is by Beowulf Boritt, with costumes by Dede Ayite, lighting by Allen Lee Hughes, and sound by Justin Ellington.)

The first words we hear are “Shema Yisrael,” which begins the Jewish prayer of affirmation, here from the 2019 Abraham Jam song “Braided Prayer,” which features sacred words from multiple religions; the cover of the album features three silhouetted figures in three doorways, holding different phases of the moon, surrounded by religious-tinged quotes in English, Hebrew, Arabic, and other languages. The Stage Manager, played with frantic charm by Jim Parsons as if he’s trying to end services early — Parsons previously played the Supreme Being in 2015’s An Act of G-d at Studio 54 on Broadway — points out, “Religiously, we’re eighty-five per cent Protestants; twelve per cent Catholics; rest, indifferent.” Thus, there appear to be no Jews (or Muslims) in 1901 Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, although, near the end of the play, a Jewish star is visible on a gravestone in the cemetery.

In addition, the diverse casting is strongly evident, as if making its own case, including deaf milkman Howie Newsome (John McGinty), who communicates with his customers in sign language. And to insist on the play’s relevance in the twenty-first century — the time and setting in noted as “now” — two characters pull out cell phones, only to be chastised by the Stage Manager. It’s less cute than it is annoyingly disconcerting. And when a belligerent woman, portrayed by Bryonha Marie, who is Black, asks, “Is there no one in town aware of social injustice and industrial inequality?,” it takes on a different meaning today than it would have when performed by a white actor seventy-five years ago. (The question might sound like it’s been added for this production, but it’s in the original script, again revealing Wilder’s talent for the universal.)

George Gibbs (Ephraim Sykes) chats with Mr. and Mrs. Webb (Katie Holmes and Richard Thomas) in Kenny Leon’s Our Town (photo by Daniel Rader)

Wilder populates his imaginary world with mostly respectably people doing mostly respectable things. “Nice town, y’know what I mean?” the Stage Manager says. “Nobody very remarkable ever come out of it, s’far as we know.”

Dr. Gibbs (Billy Eugene Jones), the town MD, chats with the paper deliverer, Joe Junior, while Mrs. Gibbs (Michelle Wilson) tends to her garden and their son, George (Ephraim Sykes), dreams of being a baseball player and is falling for his next-door neighbor, Emily Webb (Zoey Deutch), who lives with her brother, Wallee (Hagan Oliveras), and their parents, Mrs. Webb (Katie Holmes), who also has a garden, and the knowledgeable Mr. Webb (a standout Richard Thomas, yet again), editor of the Grover’s Corners Sentinel. Shorty Hawkins flags the 5:45 train to Boston. The town drunk, Simon Stimson (Donald Webber Jr.), conducts the church choir. State university professor Willard (Shyla Lefner) encapsulates the town’s history.

Constable Warren (Bill Timoney) walks the beat, engaging in small talk with the citizenry. Mrs. Soames (Julie Halston) raves on and on about a wedding. Undertaker Joe Stoddard (Anthony Michael Lopez) hates to supervise when they’re burying a young person.

In Grover’s Corners, people live and people die. There are no spoiler alerts when the Stage Manager tells us what is going to become of some of the characters. Leon has eliminated the two intermissions; the three acts — “Daily Life,” “Love and Marriage,” and “Death and Eternity” — are identified by the Stage Manager, who hustles things along, getting the audience out in a mere hundred minutes. This Our Town is a pleasant experience; there are plenty of untidy edges and few lofty moments. But it doesn’t quite feel like real life either; the manipulation is evident, including at the end, where tears flow.

Wilder, who was Protestant and served in the military, died in Hamden, Connecticut, in 1975 at the age of seventy-eight, leaving behind dozens of full-length and short plays, seven novels, and one screenplay (Shadow of a Doubt), but he will forever be remembered first for Our Town.

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

GOOD CINDERELLA: A TWI-NY TALK WITH DAVID PASTEELNICK

David Pasteelnick plays Lord Pinkleton in Blue Hill Troupe’s production of Rodgers + Hammerstein’s Cinderella (photo by J. Demetrie Photography)

RODGERS + HAMMERSTEIN’S CINDERELLA
The Theatre at St. Jean
150 East Seventy-Sixth St. between Lexington & Third Aves.
November 1-9, $45-$100
bht.org/events

“David is a treasure,” playwright and author Jessica Feder-Birnbaum says about David Pasteelnick.

I heartily agree.

Since 2007, Pasteelnick has been involved with the Purim Spiel at Town & Village Synagogue (T&V), the annual comic retelling of “The Megillah,” the story of Esther, Mordecai, Queen Vashti, King Ahasuerus, and the evil Haman, who is trying to get rid of all the Jews of Persia. After collaborating with several temple stalwarts adapting canned scripts, Pasteelnick started writing the show from scratch in 2014, featuring musical parodies performed by members of the shul, based on such cultural touchstones as Harry Potter (“Esther Potter & the Megillah of Secrets”), Disney movies (“When You Wish Upon a Spiel”), Schmigadoon! (“Schmegillah!”), and Stranger Things (“Stranger Spiels”) as well as the media (“Fake Schmooze”). The fun, goofy productions are codirected by Feder-Birnbaum, with Cantor Shayna Postman as musical director and Gary Mund providing the orchestrations; Pasteelnick always plays King Ahasuerus.

For more than twenty-five years, Pasteelnick, who was born and raised in New Jersey and lives in Brooklyn with his husband and cat, has been a grant writer and manager, working for several high-profile arts institutions; he has been with the Brooklyn Public Library since 2013. In addition, he was recently inaugurated as the president of the board of the Blue Hill Troupe, a hundred-year-old organization dedicated to the legacy of operetta masters Lewis Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. The amateur company puts on one of thirteen Gilbert & Sullivan (G&S) works every spring; in 1984, they added a fall production, performing such musical theater favorites as Anything Goes, Urinetown, Little Shop of Horrors, Follies, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

This past spring they staged H.M.S. Pinafore (next year will be The Grand Duke), and they will be presenting the 2013 Douglas Carter Beane Broadway version of Rodgers + Hammerstein’s Cinderella at the Theatre at St. Jean November 1–9, directed by Robert DuSold, conducted and musically directed by Noah Turner, and choreographed by Sabrina Karlin, with Rachel Naugle as Ella and Amnon Carmi as Prince Topher; Pasteelnick plays Lord Pinkleton. (Among his previous roles for Blue Hill and the St. Bart’s Players are King Sextimus the Silent in Once Upon a Mattress, Major General Stanley in The Pirates of Penzance, Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls, and Charles Guiteau in Assassins.) Beane, who was nominated for a Tony for his adaptation of Oscar Hammerstein II’s 1957 book, will participate in a talkback following the 4:00 matinee on November 3.

“David is an amazing collaborator. He is kind, gracious, and open to suggestions,” Feder-Birnbaum adds. “His tremendous talent brings out the best in the entire cast. He is able to gauge our community’s strengths and is able to tailor musical numbers and comic bits to their capabilities. He is dedicated to making our spiels an ensemble effort giving everyone a chance to shine.” A self-proclaimed Sondheim freak, Pasteelnick brings that same dedication to the Blue Hill Troupe.

On a recent Saturday afternoon, I met with Pasteelnick in the midtown space where the troupe was busy rehearsing Cinderella amid set construction, costume making, and sirens, as we discussed musical theater, presidential responsibilities, exhaustion, and more. Just as we began, a man walked in and approached us.

David Pasteelnick, his husband, Karl, and David’s sister, Ellen, take a break at the 2024 US Open in Queens (photo courtesy David Pasteelnick)

david pasteelnick: This is Sam Militello. He has been with the troupe about forty years.

sam militello: Thirty-four.

dp: Thirty-four years. He does backstage and front stage; we have some people who do both. He does a lot of the lighting with his wife, Betsy, who’s been a past president of the troupe, among other things. Sam’s a pillar of the troupe. And I will say, these folks are professionals; I can’t really call this amateur theater. It’s what I like to call professional amateur theater. We have really high production values.

twi-ny: Well, I see what’s going on right now, with the costumes, the set building, the rehearsal.

dp: It’s people just like that. Not just talented performers but technically skilled and artistic members as well.

twi-ny: You’re currently working on the fall show. What are some of the main differences between that and the spring show?

dp: The fall show started as a way to give more people opportunities to participate. Musical theater is also a somewhat different voice type. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have that legit operatic voice, or maybe you’re a great belter, or you prefer to be in the G&S ensemble but are still interested in larger roles outside that genre. It’s an opportunity for people to do other things. However, if you’re in the troupe and you don’t want to audition for a lead G&S role, you’re still automatically in the ensemble if you’re a front stage member.

Backstagers [members who are primarily not performers] also have the opportunity to audition for the fall show. It’s one single cast, and we typically perform it in a smaller space. The spring show has its lead roles double cast to give more people an opportunity to play the principals.

The troupe was founded in 1924 with Gilbert & Sullivan in mind. In fact, our bylaws are written in verse, like a G&S patter song. But about forty years ago, audiences started to change; audiences in 1970, 1980, 1990 were different from those in 1930 and 1940. And the membership started to shift as well; some people not only loved G&S but also musical theater. So we decided to add a musical, because at the time we only did one show a year; we just did G&S in the spring. So we began doing fall shows, which are musical theater.

twi-ny: You were born and raised in New Jersey. You clearly have been into the arts your entire life.

dp: Yeah, my folks were very culturally connected.

[Sam comes by again and looks down at the table.]

sm: That’s my phone.

twi-ny: Ah, that’s your phone. I was gonna take it if it was left there.

sm: You don’t want to. I’m a criminal lawyer.

twi-ny: I thought you were going to stop after the first word.

dp: No, he’s a criminal lawyer.

[Sam walks off with his phone.]

twi-ny: So, David, how did you get into musical theater?

dp: Well, it’s funny. I grew up in central-northern Jersey. My folks, they mostly listened to classical music, and we went to museums. But, you know, Broadway was there. We didn’t go a lot, but it was there. Also, my local library had an enormous musical theater album collection. And I just gravitated toward that. Even in school, in grade school, intermediate school, high school, I was always doing shows. I could sing, and I enjoyed it. I went to artsy summer camps. So it was always just there; I was always interested in doing it. And then in college as well.

twi-ny: At Brandeis.

dp: At Brandeis, exactly. When I graduated, I found there was a community theater right in my town. Although, amusingly enough, at the time, when you’re a kid, you go to the high school that’s in your town, go to the houses of worship that are nearby in your area. I thought, I live in Randolph, therefore I can only perform at the Randolph Community Theater, because that’s my community theater.

It didn’t occur to me until a couple years later that I could go somewhere else. And then, Boom! There were four or five other theaters I could perform at. I performed at the Barn Theatre in Montville. the Black River Playhouse in Chester, the Dover Little Theatre, Studio Players in Montclair; the County College of Morris had a light opera company. I had all these places that I performed at. And then I moved to New York and thought, well, I can never do community theater in New York because it’s all professionals here. I had no idea there was community theater. So there were several years I just did not do theater because I just didn’t think it was an option.

And then I was going to a piano bar and started making friends there, and one of them said, “Hey, I’m doing a community theater show, come see me.” So I attended a performance and saw they were just like me, and I started doing community theater again. For about six or seven years, I was performing with the St. Bart’s Players, and some of those people were also in the Blue Hill Troupe and said, “We really think you would like it,” so I auditioned and joined and they sucked me in.

twi-ny: That’s serendipitous. What were some of your favorite shows that you saw growing up?

dp: My goodness, okay.

twi-ny: Maybe a few that influenced you.

dp: Some of the shows I like the best are the shows that my parents had cast albums of. My dad had Fiddler on the Roof.

twi-ny: My parents too.

dp: But he also had Tom Lehrer, he had John Denver, Pete Seeger, plus a whole bunch of classical music. I loved “Night on Bald Mountain,” “Danse Macabre,” “Nutcracker.” I went to ballet as well growing up; I enjoyed the storytelling and everything. But I remember seeing Barnum in high school.

I took a theater class as an elective, and we went and saw Barnum. And I loved it. If I look back on missed opportunities, I worked for the school newspaper, and every year the editors got to go to a Broadway show. The year before I became an editor they saw Sweeney Todd.

twi-ny: I saw that in high school on a school trip.

dp: I was heartbroken I missed that. So the following year, I made the editorial staff. I was so excited. But that year we went and saw Laser Floyd at the Hayden Planetarium. I was like, What? I became editor for this? I was profoundly disappointed.

Actually, in eighth grade we did You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, and I had the best time doing that. I discovered Li’l Abner, Snoopy!, which is a bit obscure. Working, I remember, blew my mind. And then in college I really started to get into Sweeney Todd and Sondheim because some of my friends were into it.

I did Cabaret while I was in college, and I did Merrily We Roll Along my senior year. And that was a phenomenal experience. I did summer stock for a very brief time. I did The Music Man and a couple other things. But I saw The Secret Garden during that time and that was an amazing experience. I just love that show so much. Oh, The Magic Show, way back when I was in grade school. That wasn’t a typical Broadway show; it’s a Stephen Schwartz musical, but you can’t do it now because the rights are all messed up legally.

twi-ny: Doug Henning.

dp: Well, he was gone by the time I saw it, but he was the one who started it. My bestie at the time was an amateur magician himself. He would do backyard shows and raise money for charities and stuff like that.

[We hear singing in the background coming from the rehearsal room down the hall.]

dp: This is “Stepsisters’ Lament.” It’s a great number, the act two opener.

And I just loved [The Magic Show]. That show blew me away. No one’s ever done it again because the rights are tied up in some kind of legal battle. It’s crazy.

twi-ny: Probably estate stuff. They were just starting to do Broadway commercials around then. And everybody knew that commercial, with Henning.

dp: I think it’s funny; there are so many commercials for shows that I never saw. I remember the radio commercials for Pippin. I was like, What is this?

twi-ny: With Ben Vereen.

dp: Yeah, Ben Vereen was in it. But it was movie musicals on TV mostly that my sister and I saw: Funny Girl, West Side Story, Oklahoma! We watched them every year. The Sound of Music. Any time they were on; we would watch them over and over and over again. The Wiz, South Pacific, Hello, Dolly!

twi-ny: You don’t want to read my review of the Bette Midler version.

dp: OK, that’s fine. I saw it twice, once with Donna Murphy and once with Bernadette Peters. Completely different.

David Pasteelnick plays King Ahasuerus in “Schmegillah!” Purim Spiel at T&V (screenshot courtesy T&V)

twi-ny: Do you have a dream role?

dp: As I’m heading toward sixty, I’ve actually had to say goodbye to a number of dream roles.

twi-ny: Why?

dp: If someone got on their knees and begged me, I would go, Okay, fine, even though it’s wildly inappropriate. But for me, if I’ve aged out, in my head, I’ve aged out. I’ve seen shows where someone who is way too old to do a part do a part, and I just see that and go, “I will never do that.” Even if I could sing it, people would be looking at me and thinking, “Why is this old, old person in this role for a middle-aged person or a young person?” I had a friend, lovely guy, but he was doing juveniles into his late thirties. It’s like, yes, but no.

I’d always wanted to do the baker in Into the Woods. I’ve done Jack. I would love to do that role. But I just feel I’m too old for it. So now, the Mysterious Man / Narrator. I would love to play that; I still love the show. A perfect example is A Little Night Music. I’ve done the show three times. I did it as Henrik when I was age appropriate for Henrik. I did it as Mr. Erlanson when they went with somebody else for the lead, but I was good enough to be ensemble. And then I got to do it again and be Fredrik when I was the right age for Fredrik.

twi-ny: Did that give you a new perspective on the show as a whole or just those characters?

dp: It’s my opportunity to revisit the show in a different way, how you’re doing the show as Henrik versus Fredrik versus the liebeslieders. It’s very different, and also each show is different itself, in different spaces, different director’s vision, how it was staged, how it was cast. But I don’t know perspective-wise; for me it would be more like if I did the same role twice, and I’ve done that. I did Judas/John the Baptist from Godspell twice.

Two very, very different productions, so you just get a different sense of the show. And also, Godspell is just so malleable. People do different things with it all the time.

twi-ny: I saw one of my best friends play Jesus at Temple Gates of Zion in Valley Stream. He’s Jewish, and the show was at a synagogue.

dp: Well, they’re all Jewish, technically, if you think about it.

twi-ny: Right! Which brings us to how we know each other. We met at T&V, which my wife and I found after a long search, and you found it after a long search as well.

dp: Yes.

twi-ny: There’s something just so warm and loving about that community.

dp: It’s very unique, and it filters down from the top.

twi-ny: For many years now, you have written and starred in the Purim Spiel.

dp: I believe coming up will be my twelfth or thirteenth.

twi-ny: How did your involvement get started?

dp: Within a year or two of my being there, people thought, this guy sings; I think I probably advertised whatever shows I was in on the listserv, so people knew I was doing shows.

twi-ny: You have an impressive resume.

dp: T&V would buy these prewritten scripts from another temple; they were like hour-and-a-half-long spiels. Cantor Postman would buy the rights to the script and then we would have to chop it down, and so the first few years we were doing these Frankenstein-ed scripts. And so we did a couple years of that. One year we did a movie, which is where I met Jessica Feder-Birnbaum. We screened it for the congregation and it was a lot of fun.

The following year we went back to the Frankenstein-ed scripts. About two or three years into it, I remembered that decades ago, when I was in my synagogue in New Jersey where I grew up, they’d asked me, You do community theater. Would you do one for the kids in Hebrew school? And so for three years, I created scripts for them. And so I was, like, Wait, I have these scripts. So one year at T&V I said, Can you give me what you’ve got and I can edit it so that it’s actually of a piece?

The cantor was a little skeptical, but she and Jessica and I sat down together and we smoothed it out and fixed a lot of things, because I’m a stickler with song parodies. So we would rewrite lyrics and fix things, make characters make sense and cut stuff out.

twi-ny: And the three of you worked really well together?

dp: Yes. And then the following year, the cantor said, Well, let’s try one of your scripts. Years ago, one of the ones I did was “The Brothers Grimmberg’s Purim Tales.” And we had Little Red Schmatta, Snow Weiss and the Twelve Tribes, and Cinder Esther.

twi-ny: I remember that.

dp: So “Cinder Esther” was the first one I did, but I rewrote all the songs. Also we had an entirely different number of people, so I had to completely change the casting. But it went really well, and we were off to the races after that. We have a system now, because it’s me, it’s Jessica, it’s Gary Mund, and the cantor. In the summer we have these post-wrap-up dinners, A: to celebrate, and B: to think about the following year and talk it through. What did we do? What could we do better?

Initially it was stuff that amused me, like the Marvel superheroes one, I enjoyed that, but a lot of people didn’t get it. Which is why the Disney one worked so well, why last year’s general musical theater one, “Shmegillah!,” was also popular. It’s telling the same story every year, but it gets to stay fresh. The next one is going to be Sesame Spiel. Sesame Street is going to be the theme. We’ve got King Grovershverous. Haman the Grouch.

[Feder-Birnbaum points out, “Every June, the Spiel Team — David, Cantor Postman, Gary Mund, and I — meet to discuss the following year’s spiel. Whether it’s tapping into the contemporary Netflix zeitgeist or leaning into the nostalgia factor, David will come up with an innovative and hilarious concept.”]

twi-ny: That’s a great one. Cookie Monster?

dp: Cookie Mordecai.

twi-ny: Excellent.

dp: But Esther will be Esther because there’s always at least some humans. It also depends on who shows up at auditions. So we’ll figure that out.

twi-ny: I had a blast the one year I did it online.

dp: You were terrific.

twi-ny: Awww. I could never do it in person, but I was happy to be able to do it virtually. They’re all on YouTube.

dp: Yeah. Anyone can watch them.

twi-ny: Let’s go to another part of your life. While you’re doing all this music theater, you’ve been a grant writer for various arts organizations, right now at the Brooklyn Public Library.

dp: It’s been just over a decade, yeah.

twi-ny: How has the grant-writing process changed over the last twenty-five years, since you started?

dp: The one thing for sure that’s changed a lot is just how much more online it is. Some people still use mail, because they’re small family foundations and don’t have a website. But a lot of places have moved online; they have portals, or you just email it to them.

twi-ny: There’s such a skill to grant writing. Is it just something that you’ve learned over the years or did you just take to it immediately?

dp: It’s a mix. I did go to graduate school for arts administration, which is not fundraising specifically. It was one of several different things we learned about, at Teachers College at Columbia. We learned about fundraising, but we learned about how to create a business plan. We learned about labor laws. We learned about collective bargaining. We had org psych stuff, real estate, the history of the nonprofit field in America, how to incorporate a nonprofit.

I was at Roundabout for five years. I worked very briefly at Signature.

twi-ny: With Jim Houghton?

dp: Yes. May he rest in peace. A lot of the great nonprofit theater leaders have passed: Todd Haimes is now gone. Jeffrey Horowitz is still alive at Theatre for a New Audience, although he’s stepping down. I was there for about six years. Then I went to this museum that shall remain nameless for three years.

But it allowed me to have more than just theater on my resume, and that got me to the library. I’ve learned so much there. I help fund early literacy, we’ve done social worker grants, funding for incarcerated individuals, a capital campaign, small-level capital projects, teen internships, education programs. It’s been expanding so much over these last years. and the need is so much greater now for a lot of the things that we provide.

twi-ny: That’s good training for the Blue Hill Troupe, since you’re now the president.

dp: Yes, for this year. You’re president for one year.

twi-ny: You’ve got such a busy life. How do you maintain a balance, and what do you hope to accomplish as president? What’s your platform?

dp: Well, it’s interesting. It’s a two-edged sword, because last year was our centennial, and that was an incredibly important year, our one hundredth anniversary. There was a big push to involve membership: do more, give more, show up more, perform more, bigger budgets, buy more tickets, sell more tickets, So coming into this year, I knew I had an exhausted membership, but my goal is to find ways to keep people engaged through this year, to make sure we still raise substantial money for our partner charity, Young People’s Chorus of New York City.

They told me, “You get the victory lap year,” But I’m like, “No, I don’t. I get the everyone’s exhausted year.” It’s actually harder than people think.

twi-ny: It’s like being the manager of a baseball team that wins the World Series. The next year, you want to win the series again. You can’t just party all year.

dp: Exactly. There is that pressure that we have. Hopefully, everyone’s caught their breath a little, bringing it back to normal. This year has been a bit of a struggle. Every show we do, except for the director and the musical director, every single position is volunteer. The lighting designer is a volunteer. The set construction, costume and props construction is all volunteer. Stage management, show program creation: We do our own playbills — everything is in-house.

So I try to give people support and encouragement, asking, “How can I assist you?” A lot of brainstorming, making sure the membership understands this year is another full-out year, that we all need to show up in all the different ways that troupe members show up. And they have shown up, thankfully.

Also, Cinderella is perhaps a bit ambitious. We have a lot of ball gowns.

Blue Hill costume crew is hard at work on a Saturday afternoon (photo by twi-nymdr)

twi-ny: Yes, I saw some of them being made. They’re beautiful.

dp: Our costume crew is here on a Saturday, they’re working hard. We always work on Saturdays, on the weekends. Probably the busiest time. We’re starting to do weeknight sessions. We need people every weeknight. There are things to paint, things to hammer, things to stitch.

twi-ny: And I see them doing it right now.

dp: Exactly. And they do amazing work. They’re sculpting, they’re cutting up wood, they’re building. It can be a bit last minute. Sometimes, we’ll be in dress rehearsal and we’re told, “Don’t touch that because the paint’s still drying.”

That’s just how it is sometimes with amateur groups; people also have jobs and families.

twi-ny: You’ve done it so many years now. Is it always a thrill and exciting, or every year is it, Uh oh, no, we’re not going to make it?

dp: Every show is different. I will say some shows we’ve just gently landed that plane and other times, well, buckle up, there’s going to be turbulence. You can absolutely never predict. I have been in shows where leading up to tech week, I’m, like, “Wow, we are golden.” And then tech week comes and it’s, like, What happened? We’re so off the rails. Maybe there are technical elements or some kind of complication with sound or with lighting that we didn’t anticipate.

And so, in tech week, with the pressure, with that deadline looming, people just boom, boom, boom, boom — they get it done. And then we open and it’s like, How did we do that? Again, it’s a testament to the professionalism of our group, that people really do come through and they will stay until one in the morning redoing the lighting plot because they believe in the troupe and they are dedicated — and that’s just one of the many inspiring things with this group.

Until the curtain goes up on opening night, I will be believing that we can do this. I don’t know that I’ve ever done a show where we opened and I thought, Holy f%^k, that was a disaster. That’s never happened. There have been rough openings where we made it by the skin of our teeth but then the next night we know it will be better.

But the energy’s there. Our casts are really great. I remember one of my roles, it was in Patience; or Bunthorne’s Bride. I have this patter song. It was in the middle of the first act, on opening night. And someone had brought a toddler, and that kid screamed through my entire patter song. But the orchestra kept playing and I kept singing. And I’ve seen other people, something falls and they just keep going, something knocks over or the lights go out, we just keep going.

twi-ny: The show must go on.

dp: Each show is worth doing. We’ve all worked so hard. People just commit. They’re giving their all, and that carries the show through. We just believe in ourselves, and we know the track record’s there. And we also have this reputation to uphold. Absolutely. People come to our shows and they have definite expectations.

When I worked at that museum that shall not be named, I had a friend who had previously only seen me do a staged reading of a show, and then I told her, I’m doing this other show, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and you should come. She said okay. And she was expecting something like the reading.

But she was not prepared for the level that she got from the Blue Hill Troupe.

twi-ny: That was like the first time I saw the company. I was not expecting that level of quality.

dp: Yeah, and we don’t charge nearly as much compared to professional theater, which we are essentially giving the audience. So, you know, we’re the best deal in town.

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