live performance

THE BEST WE COULD (a family tragedy)

Ella (Aya Cash) considers her future as her parents (Frank Wood and Constance Shulman) worry about theirs in MTC world premiere (photo by Marc J. Franklin)

THE BEST WE COULD (a family tragedy)
Manhattan Theatre Club
New York City Center Stage 1
Tuesday – Sunday through March 26, $79-$99
212-581-1212
www.manhattantheatreclub.com
www.nycitycenter.org

Our Town meets Death of a Salesman in Emily Feldman’s potent and moving The Best We Could (a family tragedy), a Manhattan Theatre Club production running at New York City Center Stage 1 through March 26.

The ninety-minute show is narrated by Maps (Maureen Sebastian), who also occasionally plays different minor roles. “We’re about to get started here,” she says directly to the audience at the beginning. “Could we take some of these lights down a little bit, please?” she asks lighting designer Matt Frey, and he obliges. She sets the pace with an unhurried, relaxed monologue, then introduces the characters: Ella (Aya Cash), a thirty-six-year-old woman still trying to find herself, currently working as a chair yoga instructor at a rehab facility in Los Angeles; her father, Lou (Frank Wood), formerly a senior investigator at a biomedical research institute; her mother, Peg (Constance Shulman), a retired event planner who lives with Lou in New Jersey; and Marc (Brian D. Coats), Lou’s longtime friend and colleague who lives in Denver with his wife.

“Marc . . . You’re not really in the first part,” Maps says. “Sorry to make you wait.” Marc walks to a far corner of the stage, which is a large, empty central rug where all the action takes place. When a character is not in a scene, they watch from the sides or from the back, which resembles a garage.

Maureen Sebastian serves as the narrator and plays numerous small parts in The Best We Could (a family tragedy) (photo by Marc J. Franklin)

It’s Ella’s birthday, but she’s been stood up by her girlfriend. Maps directs her: “Wait thirty minutes. Wait an hour. Leave alone. . . . Tell Crystal it’s over. Your mother is calling. Answer the phone.”

After their dog dies, Peg sends Lou to California by plane to pick up a new rescue dog and drive back cross-country with Ella, who ostensibly has a meeting with a children’s book editor in New York City. On the way, Lou and Ella see various national monuments and stop to visit with Marc and his wife, Karen (Sebastian), in Colorado, where Lou discusses his pending job application in Marc’s department.

But the closer they get to home, the more uncomfortable both Ella and Lou seem with, as we eventually find out, good reason.

Feldman (Three Women in Four Chairs, My Lover Joan) and director Daniel Aukin (Fool for Love, Bad Jews) do a superb job conjuring a drive across America without any props other than chairs; when they stop at Mount Rushmore and the Grand Canyon, you feel you are there even though it is two characters sitting or standing on an empty stage. The spare set is by Lael Jellinek, with lighting by Matt Frey and sound by Kate Marvin. The cleverly outlined and believable story about an older man trying to hold his place in a world that that threatens to leave him behind, reminiscent of Willy Loman, gives way to one crucial late plot twist that jolts the narrative ahead toward its tragic conclusion but seems to have come out of nowhere except recent headlines, strangely ungrounded in the characters we’ve been watching for seventy minutes or so.

Peg (Constance Shulman), Ella (Aya Cash), and Lou (Frank Wood) face hard truths in Emily Feldman play (photo by Marc J. Franklin)

Tony winner Wood (Sideman, In the Blood) is wonderfully deadpan throughout, portraying a man who’s living in his own alternate reality. The always terrific Shulman (SHHH, Orange Is the New Black) is very funny as the ever-worried Peg, while Cash (From Up Here, The Pain and the Itch) keeps the deeply troubled Ella appropriately on edge, not necessarily the heroic figure we want her to be; her description of what her book is about is telling: “the inner emptiness of being a person living in a warlike society that, on some level, believes it has no future.” Coats (On the Levee, La Ruta) provides solid support as Lou’s old buddy, who knows more than he admits.

Sebastian (Vietgone, Now Circa Then) is a lovely stage manager, giving direction to the characters, delivering interstitial notes to the audience, and inhabiting several roles, generally in a track suit. (The costumes are by Anita Yavich.) She’s not about to take any nonsense from any of them, nor is she going to let the show drift too far off course. Once Ella and Lou return to Peg, Maps tells Ella, “Get everything out in the open.” Ella hesitates, so Maps adds. “Go ahead.” Ella does, and it’s not pretty. “I’m sorry. But, this is the tragedy part,” Maps tells us.

Despite its major plot misstep, The Best We Could is an involving tale that follows a relatively average, if offbeat, family trying to do the best they can. Sometimes it works out, and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s the American way.

THE SIGN IN SIDNEY BRUSTEIN’S WINDOW

Iris (Rachel Brosnahan) and Sidney (Oscar Isaac) get playful in long-overdue Lorraine Hansberry revival at BAM (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

THE SIGN IN SIDNEY BRUSTEIN’S WINDOW
Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Strong, Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St. between Ashland & Rockwell Pl.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 24, $84.50-$385
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

One of the first things you will ask yourself after seeing Lorraine Hansberry’s The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window is, Why haven’t I ever seen or read this before? Or even, Why have I never heard of it until now?

Hansberry changed theater forever with her 1959 masterpiece, A Raisin in the Sun. Five years later, her second play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, debuted on Broadway, starring Gabriel Dell as the title character and Rita Moreno as his wife, Iris. It ran for 14 previews and 101 performances; the last New York City revival was more than fifty years ago, playing nine previews and a paltry five performances at the Longacre, with Hal Linden as Brustein and Zohra Lampert as Iris. Whereas Raisin dealt with a Black family struggling to survive on the South Side of Chicago following the death of its patriarch, Sign is about a white couple in Greenwich Village trying to maintain their Bohemian lifestyle; racism and discrimination are only subplots to the central narrative.

The provocative play is now back in a stellar production at BAM’s Harvey Theater that continues through March 24 and stars Emmy nominee Oscar Isaac as Sidney, a New York City Jewish intellectual, and Rachel Brosnahan as his non-Jewish wife, Iris; the story is built around Sidney’s efforts to make a living and the travails of his friends and his wife’s family.

When the play opens, his latest business venture, a folk music café called Walden Pond, has failed, so he immediately decides to buy the local newspaper the Village Crier. The deal annoys Iris, a wannabe actress he has nicknamed Mountain Girl because of her Appalachian upbringing. “Where in the world are you going to get the money to pay for a newspaper?” a bewildered Iris asks. “It’s a small newspaper. A weekly,” Sidney explains. “Sidney, you can’t afford a yearly leaflet!” Iris declares.

Joining Sidney at the newspaper are his right-hand man, Alton Scales (Julian De Niro), and artist and designer Max (Raphael Nash Thompson), who has contempt for revolutionaries like Alton.

Alton (Julian De Niro) and Wally (Andy Grotelueschen) are a bit on edge in The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Sidney is a former idealist who no longer believes that he can save the world. “Since I was eighteen I’ve belonged to every committee to Save, to Free, to Abolish, Preserve, Reserve, and Conserve that ever was,” he tells Alton, who is a light-skinned Black man, and his friend Wally O’Hara (Andy Grotelueschen), a bushy haired white man running for local office as a reformer. Sidney goes on, “And the result — is that the mere thought of a ‘movement’ to do anything chills my bones! I simply can no longer bear the spectacle of power-driven insurgents trying at all cost to gain control of — the refreshment committee!”

Sidney calls Iris’s older sister, the bigoted and fashionable Mavis (Miriam Silverman), “the Bulwark of the Republic. The Mother Middleclass itself standing there revealed in all her towering courage.” Mavis responds, “I am standing here and I am thinking: how smug it is in bohemia,” blaming people such as Sidney for society’s ills, declaring, “Since you have all so busily got rid of God for us!”

Alton has fallen in love with Gloria (Gus Birney), Mavis and Iris’s younger sister, who works as a call girl in Miami, although Alton doesn’t know that. Because Mavis had difficulty accepting Iris’s marriage to a Jew, Iris and Sidney decide not to tell Mavis about Alton, assuming she’ll not respond well to the possibility of a Black brother-in-law, either. Meanwhile, gay playwright David Ragin (Glenn Fitzgerald), who lives upstairs from the Brusteins, occasionally drops by for some writing supplies or just to say hello and shake things up.

And things do indeed get shaken up immediately before and after the primary.

Obie-winning director Anne Kaufman (The Bedwetter, The Nether) gives Hansberry’s sharp dialogue and clever character development the room they need to breathe and grow, avoiding clichéd situations and stereotypes. The action unfurls on dots’ multifloor set, which is propped up from beneath as if it is floating in a mysterious space, a cramped Village apartment with a fire escape outside one window and a rooftop view. John Torres’s lighting and Bray Poor’s sound maintain the believability of it all.

Iris (Rachel Brosnahan) and Sidney (Oscar Isaac) can make only so much beautiful music together (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Isaac (Hamlet, Grace) is sensational as Sidney, completely immersing himself in this complex and unpredictable man who essentially wants to do the right things for the right reasons, who feels he is part of a bigger community that needs people like him. Brosnahan (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Othello) is a delight as Iris, who is ready to flower but is constantly thwarted. Silverman (Anatomy of a Suicide, A Delicate Ship) nearly steals every scene she’s in, representing how too many Americans feel toward people who are not like them but also how they are not innately evil and, perhaps, willing to adjust their views. Tony nominee Grotelueschen (Tootsie, Into the Woods) continues to prove he’s one of the best supporting players around as the politician seeking a newspaper endorsement. Birney brings a sweet innocence to Gloria, Fitzgerald is bold as the cocky David, De Niro is gentle as Alton, and Nash Thompson has a rousing good time as Max.

But at the center of it all, a daring humanity emanates from every moment. The play was inspired by a real election in Hansberry’s district in the Village; the Chicago native lived on Bleecker St. for many years prior to her death in 1965 at the age of thirty-four. BAM supplements the show with the biographical exhibit “‘Art Is Energy’: Lorraine Hansberry, World Builder” in the Rudin Family Gallery, consisting of photos, unpublished writings, recordings, drawings, Alison Saar’s sculpture To Sit a While, and more, lending insight into the playwright’s real life.

Theatergoers and critics might have been disappointed that The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window didn’t address racism directly like Raisin did as they tried to pigeonhole the Black woman writer, but her sophomore play has plenty to say about the human condition, and perhaps she was aware that the work would not be as successful as her first hit. About halfway through, Sidney and David have a key conversation in which Hansberry seems to be defending herself in David’s words.

Sidney: Tell me. What is your play about, David?
David: It’s not for me to say.
Sidney: Each person will “get from it what he brings to it?” Right?
David: To be real simple-minded about it — yes.
Sidney: Then, what makes you the artist and the audience the consumer if they have to write your play for you?
David: I know what it’s about. I told you, my plays have to speak for themselves.
Sidney: But to whom? For whom are they written and, above all, why are they written?
David: You hate my kind of writing because it goes beyond the walls of Ibsen’s prisons and Shaw’s lectures — that’s your problem, Sid.
Mavis: I just don’t know whatever happened to simple plays about simple people with simple problems.

Welcome to the wonderful world of Lorraine Hansberry and The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window.

BATSHEVA DANCE COMPANY: HORA

Batsheva Dance Company brings Hora back to New York in two-week Joyce engagement (photo by Steven Pisano)

HORA
The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Ave. at 19th St.
February 28 – March 12, $10-$75
212-691-9740
www.joyce.org
www.batsheva.co.il

Next year is the one hundredth anniversary of the Jewish circle dance known as the Hora, created by Baruch Agadati in Palestine in 1924, influenced by Romanian and Greek traditions. The dance is a staple of Jewish American weddings and bar and bat mitzvahs, usually accompanied by the folk song “Hava Nagila” and including the lifting of various celebrants on chairs. The Tel Aviv–based Batsheva Dance Company is paying tribute to that centennial by bringing back former artistic director and current house choreographer Ohad Naharin’s sixty-minute Hora, continuing at the Joyce through March 12.

When the 2009 piece came to BAM in 2012, I called it “a mesmerizing experience, a stunning balance of light, color, sound, and movement from one of the world’s most innovative and entertaining choreographers.” It is just as mesmerizing today.

Batsheva and Naharin have dazzled us with such other pieces as Deca Dance, Three, Minus 16, Project 5, Venezuela, and Last Work; this return to Hora is a welcome one, even if the required mask-wearing muffles some of the audience’s exhilarated gasping.

Naharin’s Hora features no chairs and no “Hava Nagila”; it takes place in an empty rectangular space bordered on three sides by a green wall, with a long bench (designed by Amir Raveh) in the back where the eleven dancers sit when not dancing. Isao Tomita’s electronic score incorporates such familiar sounds as Richard Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” Richard Wagner’s “Tannhauser: Overture” and “Die Walküre: Ride of the Valkyries,” Charles Edward Ives’s “The Unanswered Question,” Claude Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun,” Modest Mussorgsky’s “Catacombs,” and a whistled version of John Williams’s main theme from Star Wars. (The sound design and editing is by Maxim Waratt.)

The show starts with the eleven dancers rising from the bench and approaching the front of the stage, set and lighting designer Avi Yona Bueno initially casting them in silhouette. It is one of only a few times the performers will move in unison; they break out into solos and other configurations, seldom coming into contact with one another as they proceed in Batsheva’s unique Gaga language, ranging from sharp, angular gestures to nearly impossible formations that resemble animals, insects, and even animated video game characters. I’m still trying to figure out how Ohad Mazor touched his foot to his elbow.

There are also dazzling moments from Eri Nakamura (who designed the black costumes), Billy Barry (undulating on the floor), Sean Howe (repeatedly hitting himself in the head), Londiwe Khoza, Matan Cohen, Chiaki Horita (gyrating her torso) — well, the entire company, which also includes Chen Agron, Yarden Bareket, Yael Ben Ezer, Guy Davidson, Ben Green, Li-En Hsu, Adrienne Lipson, Gianni Notarnicola, Danai Porat, Igor Ptashenchuk, and Yoni (Yonatan) Simon, who all display a thrilling physicality, testing the boundaries of what the human body could, and should, do.

When all eleven dancers are off the bench, it is hard to know where to focus your attention, as they are all doing different things; if you follow a cartwheel, you might miss a trio rolling over the floor or a duo balancing against each other’s buttocks. To watch the entire troupe at once is to get absorbed in a kind of whirlwind of life in all its unpredictability and excitement. But no matter where you look, prepare to be amazed.

THE SEAGULL/ WOODSTOCK, NY

Thomas Bradshaw moves Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull to modern-day Woodstock in New Group world premiere (photo by Monique Carboni)

THE SEAGULL/ WOODSTOCK, NY
The New Group at the Pershing Square Signature Center
The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 9, $38-$107
212-244-7529
thenewgroup.org
www.signaturetheatre.org

While sitting in the first row watching Thomas Bradshaw’s outrageously funny and psychologically insightful modern-day adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, called The Seagull/Woodstock, NY, I was reminded that I have never seen a traditional version of the play, one that uses the original dialogue and time period. And that’s just how the Russian playwright wanted it.

In John J. Desmond’s relatively serious and straightforward 1975 Williamstown production, which went straight from stage to film, Konstantin (Frank Langella), a young playwright whose mother, Irina (Lee Grant), is an aristocratic star, tells his uncle, landowner Sorin (William Swetland), about Irina, “She knows of course I haven’t got any use for the theater. She loves the theater. Seems to her she’s working for humanity and the sacred cause of art. But to me her theater today is nothing, nothing but a mass of routine and stale conventions.” Sorin responds, “Well, we can’t do without the theater, my dear boy.” A fanciful dreamer, Konstantin declares, “We need new forms, Uncle! New forms we must have. And if we can’t have those, we shall have nothing at all.”

Thus, Chekhov himself essentially demands new interpretations, and in New York City we have received them with such challenging works as Elevator Repair Service’s 2022 Seagull at Skirball and Aaron Posner’s 2016 Stupid Fucking Bird at the much-lamented Pearl.

Bradshaw tears down conventions in his 160-minute version (with intermission) for the New Group, in which the action has been moved from a late-nineteenth-century Russian country estate to a contemporary riverfront home in artsy Woodstock in Ulster County. The play begins with the actors warming up on a wooden proscenium platform, doing physical and vocal exercises; the audience sits on three sides of the stage as they get an advance glimpse of the cast and try to figure out who’s portraying who. After several minutes, everyone joins in a singalong of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s 1970 classic “Our House,” the lyrics of which will run counter to what we are about to experience: “Our house is a very, very, very fine house / With two cats in the yard / Life used to be so hard / Now everything is easy ’cause of you.” (CSNY appeared at the 1969 Woodstock festival but did not sing that song; the next year, however, they released the song “Woodstock,” written by Joni Mitchell, in which they proclaim, “Got to get back to the land / Set my soul free.”)

A close-knit, motley crew is gathering by the river on Darren (Daniel Oreskes) and Pauline’s (Amy Stiller) property to see a new play by Kevin (Nat Wolff), a twenty-six-year-old ne’er-do-well living in the shadow of his narcissistic mother, Irene (Parker Posey), a star of the stage. Before she says hello to her friends and relations, she is already loudly complaining that there is no soy milk for her coffee. Kevin has written the one-person, two-hour show for Nina (Aleyse Shannon), a twentysomething with no boundaries. Kevin is in love with Nina, who will soon take a liking to the older William (Ato Essandoh), a well-known writer who is Irene’s current partner. Meanwhile, Pauline and Darren’s daughter, Sasha (Hari Nef), pines away for Kevin. Also on hand are Sasha’s teacher husband, Mark (Patrick Foley), brain surgeon Dean (Bill Sage), and retired lawyer Samuel (David Cale), Irene’s best friend.

Mother (Parker Posey) and son (Nat Wolff) have an awkward relationship in The Seagull/Woodstock, NY (photo by Monique Carboni)

When Sasha ridicules Kevin’s set, which consists solely of a cast-iron bathtub and a curtain that goes around it, Mark needles her, saying, “Tonight their artistic souls will unite on this very stage.” Right before Kevin’s play starts, Samuel tells Nina, who lives nearby and whose banker father is not a fan of her interest in theater, “Woodstock nurtures the artistic soul. Bob Dylan and Van Morrison wrote some of their best music here. [Your father] should have bought a place in the Hamptons if he wanted you to be a banker.”

Bradshaw fills the show with contemporary references, from Dylan and Morrison to viagra, #metoo, Alec Baldwin, wokeness, the Wailers, Donald Trump, Bertrand Russell, Instagram, Stephen Colbert, Tracy Letts, dramadies, and Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive. He also takes on race, class, sexual identity, and truth but in subtler ways than he has in such previous works as Southern Promises, Intimacy, and Burning, or at least more subtle for him.

But Bradshaw and director Scott Elliott’s central target is art itself. “Hi, I’m Nina. I’m not a character in Kevin’s play. I’m me,” Nina says as the play-within-a-play kicks off. “Kevin hates artifice. So do I. I am myself, or I am no one. Who are you? Are you, you? Or are you hiding from yourself?” She adds, “The fourth wall tonight is broken. So that means I can see you just as clearly as you can see me. I can see everything about you. I can see things even you can’t see.” The fourth wall of Bradshaw’s play was broken immediately as well, when the actors got onstage and we all sang, and the lights stay at a level that allows us to see everyone in the audience.

Nina, who is biracial, then discusses “the N word,” actually saying it in full several times, which confronts her audience as well as Bradshaw’s, a writer who often strives to make his audience squirm in their seats. “I get that the historical legacy of the word is offensive. But does the word itself have any power?” she asks. Then, in true Bradshaw fashion, she switches to one of his favorite topics. “We recently went through a long period of isolation. Everyone in our society did. It was a period of intense loneliness for me. And for many of you, I bet. And what were we all doing during that time? Masturbating. Why can’t we talk about it? We all do it. I’d rather discuss masturbating than the weather.” Bradshaw understands that theater itself can be a kind of masturbation; in fact, in Intimacy, a character not only pleasures himself (using a prosthetic) in view of the audience but launches a sticky white substance into the crowd, some of which landed on the head of a major critic, who was none too happy. (One friend joked to me that Anton’s last name should be “Jackhov,” pronounced “jackoff.”)

Irene (Parker Posey) gets in the middle of Pauline (Amy Stiller) and Darren (Daniel Oreskes) in New Group world premiere at the Signature (photo by Monique Carboni)

After Kevin’s play ends, Irene tells Nina, “You were very good, in spite of my son exploiting you.” Nina replies, “Oh no. It was my choice. And he totally respected me, as an actress, and as a woman of color.” Irene says, “So you didn’t feel the least bit weird pretending to, uh, touch yourself, onstage?” Nina explains, “Oh, I wasn’t pretending. I had to really do it, in order to crack the artifice of normal theatrical conventions. There’s nothing real about realism. That’s Kevin’s philosophy. He believes in hiding nothing.” That is Bradshaw’s philosophy as well.

Throughout the show, the actors and stage crew bring chairs and tables on and off Derek McLane’s intimate set, which includes a narrow lower level around the platform where people in the first row can get comfy and put up their feet — until some of the actors walk across it. At times Elliott choreographs the play like it’s a dance, expertly guiding the cast of ten in the small space, who enter and exit through the aisles.

The cast seems to be having a lot of fun, and that feeling is infectious; the play moves at such an intoxicating pace that you might be disappointed when it’s over, wanting to spend more time with these well-developed, endearing, annoying, and frustrating people. “I think my character would feel more authentic if we knew more of her backstory. Right now the play feels abrupt,” Nina tells Kevin, who argues, “It is abrupt. That’s the point. We’re subverting typical American Theater. We’re getting right to the heart of the matter instead of making our audience suffer through an hour of incredibly dull backstory.”

Posey (Hurlyburly, Fifth of July) is a burst of summer sunshine as Irene, in flowery dresses, bobbed hairdo, and gloriously fake smiles. (The costumes are by Qween Jean, with lighting by Cha See and sound by Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen that keep the audience immersed in the show.) Wolff (Buried Child, The Naked Brothers Band) wonderfully captures the constant nervous wreck that is Kevin, while Shannon (Charmed, Black Christmas) glistens as a strong young woman ready to take charge of her life, especially sexually, and Nef (Des Moines, “Daddy”) is a bundle of fear as the disillusioned Sasha. Cale, Essandoh, Foley, Nef, Oreskes, Sage, and Stiller round out the uniformly solid cast.

Bradshaw (Thomas & Sally, Fulfillment) and New Group artistic director Elliott (Mercury Fur, Sticks & Bones) also take a hard look at aging, not just in theater but in life. Irene is well aware that it is getting more difficult for her to find roles because she is in her fifties, and Samuel is facing serious health issues that affect the elderly.

“Is there anything new anymore? Are there any new stories? New forms? Or is everything just a new spin on something old? A reinvention of the comfortable and familiar?,” Kevin asks William. The Seagull/Woodstock, NY provides just the right answers to those questions.

THE TREES

Sheila (Crystal Dickinson) and David (Jess Barbagallo) are stuck in a rut in The Trees (photo by Chelcie Parry)

THE TREES
Playwrights Horizons, Mainstage Theater
416 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 19, $46-$76
www.playwrightshorizons.org

In L. Frank Baum’s 1919 book The Magic of Oz, the thirteenth and next-to-last of the illustrated Oz novels, a little girl named Trot and grizzled former sailor Cap’n Bill suddenly get stuck in the ground, and their feet start growing roots. As Baum writes: “This is hard luck,” [Cap’n Bill] declared, in a voice that showed he was uneasy at the discovery. “We’re pris’ners, Trot, on this funny island, an’ I’d like to know how we’re ever goin’ to get loose, so’s we can get home again.”

That’s precisely what happens to Sheila (Crystal Dickinson) and her older brother, David (Jess Barbagallo), near the beginning of Agnes Borinsky’s The Trees, making its world premiere at Playwrights Horizons (coproduced by Page 73) through March 19. It’s also what happens to the play itself, which is stuck in the mud from the get-go.

Sheila and David are both drunk, returning from a party. Instead of going into their house, they gleefully run around the forest until their feet get trapped in large circles and their toes start growing roots. “There’s still so much to do,” David says. “Will anyone notice?” Sheila asks.

People will notice, but there appears to be nothing much they can do about it as life goes on around the siblings, including visits from their Polish grandmother (Danusia Trevino); their longtime friend Charlotte (Becky Yamamoto); David’s boyfriend, Jared (Sean Donovan); Norman (Ray Anthony Thomas), who is caught in some nearby bushes; Saul (Max Gordon Moore), a rabbi from Cleveland; Sheryl (Marcia DeBonis), from the Cleveland congregation Sisterhood; twinks Julian (Nile Harris) and Tavish (Pauli Pontrelli); street vendor Terry (Sam Breslin Wright), who immediately senses opportunity; and, later, a child named Ezra (Xander Fenyes).

Agnes Borinsky’s The Trees takes place in a candy-colored forest (photo by Chelcie Parry)

Among the topics of conversation are capitalism, religion, romance, and loneliness, with hints at environmentalism.

“I think there’s a certain threshold of love one needs to feel in one’s life,” Norman says. “And if you never meet that threshold you continue to be filled with longing. You can keep on — but you’re hungry. And that is me. Slightly hungry. To the bitter end.”

The rabbi admits, “I’ve felt a great sliding in the world. Like we’re all sliding off this planet into somewhere . . . dark and ugly and dead. It seems a little bit like it’s all on autopilot. Like God is off . . . somewhere . . . else. And the plane of the world is off, somehow, and we’re just sliding. . . . And so when I read about you two, it seemed to me like God might have returned. And that this was the hand of God, that rooted you here. That life isn’t the miracle, but staying put. Because if the world were to tilt and the rest of us were to slide, you’d still be right here.”

David and Sheila remain right there as life plods forward, evoking Didi and Gogo in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, but Borinsky (A Song of Songs, Ding Dong It’s the Ocean) is never able to establish much of a story aside from the central idea of two characters in search of an exit. In a “Playwright’s Perspective” program note, she admits, “I’m not great at writing plot. I end up writing logistics. . . . Plots are a bit ridiculous.” Unfortunately, a plot is precisely what The Trees needs, something to be nurtured, that can grow over the course of, in this case, a striking-looking but ultimately aimless 105 minutes. (The fun lighting is by Thomas Dunn, with sound by Tei Blow and puppets by Amanda Villalobos.)

Parker Lutz’s pristine white set is a glistening fairy-tale world with Greek columns, but the narrative is choppy and random. Enver Chakartash’s costumes can get wildly colorful, at times conjuring the rainbow Pride flag, but it’s primarily all for show, with not enough substance. Too often characters come and go without adding much, anecdotes that might be cute but are not critical. Director Tina Satter (Is This a Room, Ghost Rings) can only do so much with her two stars essentially cemented in place, and I’m still trying to figure out why David and Sheila occasionally go down into the ground and then come back up again; it’s a cool effect that does not have any apparent reason, fitting in with the rest of the play.

In Baum’s The Magic of Oz, the Kalidah reflects, “Our own Kalidah King has certain magical powers of his own. Perhaps he knows how to fill up these two holes in my body.” Perhaps he also knows how to fill up the two bodies in holes in The Trees.

twi-ny talk: JODY OBERFELDER / RUBE G. — THE CONSEQUENCE OF ACTION

Jody Oberfelder, Grace Yi-Li Tong, Paulina Meneses, and Ashley Merker will perform Rube G. — The Consequence of Action at Gibney this month (costumes by Claire Fleury / photo courtesy Jody Oberfelder Projects)

RUBE G. — THE CONSEQUENCE OF ACTION
Gibney Dance Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center, White Box Studio C
280 Broadway between Chambers & Reade Sts.
Saturday and Sunday, March 4-5, 11-12, 18-19, $15-$25
jodyoberfelder.com
gibneydance.org

New York–based director, dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker Jody Oberfelder is the September 2023 entry in the Modern Women: 21st Century Dance Coloring Book calendar. On that page she says, “Standing on my head I see the world upside down. When I’m right side up, I look again with a different perspective.”

The quote is apropos of her latest piece, Rube G. — The Consequence of Action, making its world premiere March 4-19 at Gibney.

“Many of the younger generation know my name in a vague way and connect it with grotesque inventions but don’t believe that I ever existed as a person,” Rube Goldberg once explained. “They think I am a nonperson, just a name that signifies a tangled web of pipes or wires or strings that suggest machinery. My name to them is like a spiral staircase, veal cutlets, barber’s itch — terms that give you an immediate picture of what they mean.”

Reuben L. Goldberg (1883–1970) was an engineer, sculptor, inventor, author, and cartoonist who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for his political cartoon “Peace Today,” a depiction of an American family and their house perched atop a giant atomic bomb that is tilting precariously at the edge of a cliff. But Goldberg is best known for his drawings of crazy contraptions in which a series of odd items must connect in a chain reaction in order to make something happen, like dominoes but with objects and animals.

In Adam Felber’s 2006 novel Schrödinger’s Ball, a character explains, “You know: a lever is pulled, causing a boot to kick a dog, whose bark motivates a hamster to run on a wheel which winds a pulley that raises a gate that releases a bowling ball and so on? Until, at the end, finally, the machine does something incredibly mundane, like making a piece of toast. Yes? Well, as it turns out, that’s the world.”

A fun, immersive, interactive view of the world and our place in it, Rube G. — The Consequence of Action features Grace Yi-Li Tong, Paulina Meneses, and Ashley Merker, joined by Detroit native Oberfelder, weaving in and around an audience of forty people sitting on stools spaced two feet apart, with music by klezmer trumpeter Frank London. There is light touching as the performers ask audience members to give them small pushes, as if we’re all objects in a Rube Goldberg machine, which the Rube Goldberg Institution for Innovation & Creativity says “solves a simple problem in the most ridiculously inefficient way possible.”

In May 2019, London put together “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” at the New York Public Library, in which he selected a wide range of artists to pay tribute to such Jewish cultural figures as Hannah Arendt, Benjamin Cardozo, Morton Feldman, Susan Sontag, and Kurt Weill; Oberfelder was assigned Goldberg. She spent the next four years researching him, leading to the short film Rube G., the performance Rube G at Roulette, and Amphitheater in East River Park.

On a recent Monday afternoon, I was a “test guest” at a rehearsal for the new work, experiencing the piece and then talking about it afterward with Oberfelder, Yi-Li Tong, Meneses, Merker, and fellow test guest EmmaGrace Skove as Oberfelder took notes; she was particularly interested in a comment I made about one section reminding me of a pinball machine. Following the discussion, I spoke with Oberfelder — whose oeuvre also includes Madame Ovary, 4Chambers, Throb, The Soldier’s Tale, and The Title Comes Last — about Goldberg, working with new dancers, making connections, and her affinity for site-specific immersive presentations.

Jody Oberfelder watches team rehearse at Open Jar Studios in Midtown (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

twi-ny: In creating this work, did you have a specific fascination with Rube Goldberg himself or the Rube Goldberg machine?

jody oberfelder: I’m thinking of it in a larger context, like how one thing affects another. Frank London actually gave me the assignment in 2019. He had a thing about Jewish thinkers, philosophers, poets, writers. He had like twenty people on a program at the New York Public Library. And he assigned who got what. So I got Rube Goldberg. I knew about Rube Goldberg because when I was working on The Brain Piece, the neuroscientist who was teaching a class in illusion showed us the the Okay Go video [“This Too Shall Pass”], which is quite amazing. I think everybody knows about Rube Goldberg without knowing they know about Rube Goldberg. But now I’ve been researching who he was as a person and how he was of his time. The humor is very much Jewish humor too, like his comic strip “Foolish Questions.” He asks about how things affect each other and that’s a question that’s been in my choreographic toolbox. What interests me is intersections of people and ideas. And my medium is bodies. So this is really nice for me, instead of doing a purely conceptual piece to just work physically with awesome dancers.

twi-ny: You said Frank approached you in 2019, but I would’ve thought that it came out of the pandemic lockdown, when people couldn’t connect. But it was already in process.

j.o.: But that was different; it was more celebratory.

twi-ny: It has the same name, but it’s not the same?

j.o.: That one I called Amphitheater, because I knew I would do Rube G., and then we did the show at Roulette. It totally was about Rube Goldberg.

twi-ny: And you did the film also.

j.o.: The film was a total pandemic film. People said, Look, can’t we wear masks? I’m like, no. Because one day nobody’s going to want to see masks. I look at that film and it was everybody in their little boxes, they would go outside to dance. And I just strung them together with the same words that catalyzed this piece. Like “bounce lever carousel” is one, “slide slice.” So I just came up with the action words from studying Rube Goldberg machines that were posted online, the ones that people work on for a really long time and they jump up and down at the end. In fact, some of the sound score was ripped from YouTube. You can hear the dominoes falling.

twi-ny: So these are new dancers for you?

j.o.: Yes. And that’s what changed the piece.

twi-ny: In what way? Was it an open call?

j.o.: Yes, they’re from the audition that I had. I just thought start fresh, look around, see who’s out there. Ashley is my Gyrotonics teacher; she’s so beautiful when she teaches. I just said, Look, I’m thinking about adding in some new dancers. Do you want to come to the studio? And in a two-hour span of time, I made up a whole bunch of material with her; that was a no-brainer. And then I picked the other two from the audition I had.

twi-ny: Ashley just seems like a natural human connector.

j.o.: She danced with Doug Varone and she still dances with Jacqulyn Buglisi, but I had no idea. You don’t know until you get in the studio how someone will be with you. Each of them has their own quality. They’re not carbon copies of each other. They’re unique dancers. And they just went with the material. I had to stop inventing. Even Frank said, Jody, you’ve got too much material. Just stop inventing.

Grace Yi-Li Tong, Paulina Meneses, and Ashley Merker go horizontal mountain climbing in Rube G. — The Consequence of Action (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

twi-ny: You just want to keep watching them do something.

j.o.: Well, yeah. Now I want to do a pinball machine. I think we’ll have to do something as a transition where someone’s trying to get through and they get bounced back. That’s great.

I don’t like to get an idea from seeing someone in someone else’s piece, because they’ll be different. In fact, I did go see Ashley perform with somebody and I just said, She’ll be different with me.

twi-ny: Since the very beginning of your career, you’ve been into immersive, interactive, site-specific pieces, before it was a thing, a genre. What was the impetus?

j.o.: I’m pretty visual. And I like environments. If I look at the music stands in this room, there’s definite space around each one. [Gets up and walks around room] You get an idea from looking at the place that you’re in. [Returns to seat] The immersive stuff that I’ve been doing the last three years is very much like leading the audience on an experience so that they know what this space is, so that they’re going on a journey.

twi-ny: So that’s how you explore the spaces you’re in? Your mind automatically sees that.

j.o.: I applied for an NEA grant and hopefully we’re going to be partnering with Green-Wood Cemetery. That would be the next thing. I came up with a title before, and I have the location. It’s going to be called And then, no.

twi-ny: It’s a great place to see a performance.

j.o.: I’m also doing a piece called Walking to Present, which we’re doing in Munich, right on the site of a Trümmerberg, which is a trauma mountain. It’s at Olympiaberg in Olympic Park. What they did after World War II is they made these huge piles of rubble and just covered it with turf. And then they got the great idea to turn it into a park. And when, when the Olympics came in 1972, they made a beautifully scaled park. And that’s where the performance will take place.

So working on all this primed me to get back to Rube G. in a different way, so that it wouldn’t just be on the stage, there wouldn’t be a separation. It’s an experiment to see if I can be immersive inside, if I can make the room come alive as if it were an installation of people.

twi-ny: Right. As a test guest, that’s exactly what I felt.

j.o.: We’re all in this period where we need to lighten up and not be so hard on ourselves. And we’re in this period where a little goodwill, a little lightheartedness is important. There’s all this heavy stuff we have to think about daily. Walking to Present is a little more deep. But I hope I can find after this piece more lightness, even though the subject matter of walking through history and walking over history is heavy. Cemeteries are heavy, but, on the flip side, you can’t experience heaviness unless you have lightness.

twi-ny: You’re Jewish. Does that have anything to do with your choice of doing it in Munich [where eleven Israeli coaches and athletes were killed in a terrorist attack in the Olympic Village in 1972]?

Jody Oberfelder Projects will become a dancing Rube Goldberg machine in world premiere at Gibney (photo courtesy Jody Oberfelder Projects)

j.o.: Definitely. I’m married to a German guy, so I’ve been going to Germany a lot, and I performed there in 1983, a solo concert in a club, three pieces. And this curator saw me and we’ve been in touch all these years. I was doing my piece Life Traveler with the suitcases, where it’s a one-on-one piece. And she got the gist of that and just said, We’d love you to be part of the [2023 Dance München] festival. So I feel really lucky to have that be in such good company. But Rube G. is its own piece. And it’s not an identity piece. It’s just what it is. It’s not a political statement, but it is kind of, because what would be political about it is what happens when people gather together. Either you resist and you’re destructive or you’re constructive.

twi-ny: Do you see Rube G. as a natural progression of your career or more of an outlier?

j.o.: Oh, well, I see this piece as both. It’s a return to the really athletic physical stuff I did for most of the first twenty years. I mean, I was very athletic. I didn’t dance until I was nineteen and I did gymnastics and water ballet. I was a cheerleader. You couldn’t get me to sit in a chair for over forty minutes.

So it’s a continuation of my exploration of physical possibilities. And it’s fed by the idea that the fourth wall has to come down. It’s just not interesting to me to dance on a stage unless it’s something with bells and whistles, visual opera. I heard a piano concert, Yuja Wang, and that was on a stage and I was riveted, I was part of it. There’s a way to put things on a stage and have the audience be part of it. But I like intimacy.

twi-ny: As an audience member at so many of your shows, I can say that’s one of the draws; you’re not going to just be sitting in the audience as an observer. You’re going to be involved. You might be physically touched, but you’ll certainly be emotionally and psychologically touched.

j.o.: Well, with these pieces that only forty people can attend, it’s hard to make a living. I have to do a benefit and hope people will come to that [on March 19]. Apply for grants . . . but I’m not complaining. I don’t stop working. I feel like dancers and artists, we work so hard, and our brilliance is something the world needs. The climate is making the world smaller. We’re all going to be suffering the same things. I hope I’m putting something really great in the world for people to experience.

PICTURES FROM HOME

Danny Burstein plays real-life photographer Larry Sultan in Pictures from Home on Broadway (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

PICTURES FROM HOME
Studio 54
254 West 54th St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 30, $65-$312
212-719-1300
picturesfromhomebroadway.com

Even an all-star cast and an award-winning director can’t prevent Sharr White’s Pictures from Home from feeling like you’re watching people you don’t know show you their home movies and vacation photos; you can only care so much. The play, continuing at Studio 54 through April 30, has its share of touching and funny moments, but it’s primarily a bumpy, inconsistent trip through strangers’ family albums.

The show is adapted from photographer Larry Sultan’s 1992 book of the same name, the result of an eight-year project in which Larry (Danny Burstein) took pictures of his parents, Jean (Zoё Wanamaker) and Irving (Nathan Lane), primarily at their home in the San Fernando Valley. Larry lives in the Bay Area with his pregnant wife and child but spends many weekends visiting his mother and father to take photos, most of which are posed.

The three characters are aware of the audience’s existence, occasionally addressing them directly. The play begins with Larry explaining that he is a distinguished professor of photography at California College of the Arts in San Francisco and that “this project will become one of my hallmark achievements — I know that’s not a modest thing to say. Regardless, this isn’t about me, it’s about them.” Irv interjects, “Larry may say it’s about us, but trust me. It’s about him.”

Larry admits, “My wife, Kelly, and I joke that no matter how much respect I get in the outside world, stepping inside these walls is my Kryptonite. I turn to mush when I try to get the shots I’m looking for.”

After finding a dusty box in his parents’ garage filled with hundreds of reels of Super-8 film, “thirty years of folktales,” Larry decides to start photographing Irv, who is not in favor of the project and hates nearly all the pictures his son takes of him, and Jean, who is not so upset but doesn’t quite understand why Larry is making such a fuss.

Larry (Danny Burstein) documents his parents’ (Zoё Wanamaker and Nathan Lane) life in Pictures from Home (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Asking the unseen projectionist to play a clip from one of the reels, Larry tells us, “You can’t watch this movie without getting the impression of, of . . . a family living in a small apartment in Brooklyn projecting its dreams onto film emulsion.” He adds, “Knowing the disparity between the actual circumstances of the movie versus the hopes you nurtured when you made the movie . . . can’t you then imagine the possibility that a home movie could be more than, as you call it . . . ‘a record of actual events?’” (The projections are by Ben Pearcy at 59 Productions.)

Irv doesn’t want the memories to be treated like some kind of psych evaluation, so he answers, “What I’m saying is, why am I not allowed to just have my home movies?” Larry responds, “I’m not saying you’re not! But did you ever think that my examining them is perhaps my way of getting to know . . . a different version of you?” Irv declares, “Larry, I think you know me perfectly well. And if you’d like, I’ll introduce you to a version of your mother.”

It’s a very funny exchange, but it’s an argument that runs throughout the play repeatedly, offering little that is new. Irv is a realist who did whatever he had to in order to support his family, from working in clothing stores to becoming an executive for Schick razors. Jean raised the kids and, later in life, began a successful career as a Realtor, which the retired Irv considers a hobby.

We don’t learn much about Larry’s siblings, or his wife and kids; it’s like they are an afterthought, not that important as Larry instead digs into his parents’ lives, whether they want him to or not. He tells his bewildered father, “What I’m doing, Dad? Is looking for the, the . . . life beyond the frame.” He wants to preserve them, particularly as they get older, but he appears to be sacrificing his own present to accomplish that.

Michael Yeargan’s set is a comfy, relatively spare California living room, with a flowery couch, a desk, and glass doors leading to a backyard where Irv gardens and barbecues. The space is cantilevered, with the back wall painted an ugly green. I initially thought that it was done that way for effect, a metaphor for their off-tilt, colorless life. (I can already hear Irv saying, “I don’t think that’s a metaphor,” which he barks at Larry early on.)

Irving (Nathan Lane) gives his son (Danny Burstein) another talking-to as his wife (Zoё Wanamaker) watches (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

But it turns out that it very much matches Irv and Jean’s actual home, which is not a candidate for House Beautiful; it’s more like my great-aunt Sylvia’s old Florida place from that same era. All the photos and videos are taken from Larry’s collection; they are of the real Irv and Jean, not Lane and Wanamaker, which is both good and bad. While it’s exciting to see the actual pictures, several of which are warmly Rockwellian, it also forces us to compare how much the actors do or don’t look like the people they are portraying, Lane in his white wig, Wanamaker in a poufy hairdo. Burstein, in an obviously fake ill-fitting wig, looks more like Jerry O’Connell than Larry.

Thus, it is hard to lose yourself in the production, as the artifice stands out. Complaining about one of the photos of him, Irv tells his son, “The picture shows how strained and artificial the situation was that you set up.” The play cannot escape that same feeling.

Three-time Tony winner Lane (It’s Only a Play, Angels in America) plays, well, Nathan Lane, using his trademark boisterous bravado. When he shouts at Jean, “I can’t interject? I’m just doing a little interjecting!,” we see Lane, not Irv. Four-time Tony nominee and two-time Olivier winner Wanamaker (Loot, Awake and Sing!) is underused, usually kept in the background except when they are discussing a photo of Jean in the garage. And Tony winner Burstein (Talley’s Folly, Fiddler on the Roof) is ever likable, but his character is severely underdeveloped, leaving too many holes about his life away from his parents. It’s also hard to believe he’s playing their son, as Lane and Wanamaker are only eight and fifteen years older than Burstein, respectively.

White (The Other Place, The True, The Affair) and Sher (My Fair Lady, Oslo) can’t get past the general stagnation of an audience watching actors look at photos on a wall. You keep wanting the show to go somewhere, to offer more than one man’s attempt to ensure his parents live forever, at least on film. Instead, it’s too slight, 105 minutes of studying a family album I had only mild interest in.