live performance

tanzmainz: SHARON EYAL’S SOUL CHAIN

Soul Chain is an explosive Joyce debut for tanzmainz (photo by Andreas Etter/tanzmainz)

SOUL CHAIN
The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Ave. at Nineteenth St.
January 24-28
212-691-9740
www.joyce.org
www.staatstheater-mainz.com

German-based tanzmainz makes its explosive Joyce debut with Sharon Eyal’s Soul Chain, fifty-five minutes of pure exhilaration and intensity, a thumping trance rave executed with a thrilling military-like precision. An international cast of seventeen fearless dancers first enters the empty stage on relevé, one, two, and three at a time, walking on tiptoes and the balls of their feet determinedly in Rebecca Hytting’s tight-fitting beige leotards, which run from shoulder to buttocks, most of the men bare-chested. Soon they are forming a hive or collective, part apian, part Borg, angulating their arms and legs with movements evoking insects; some collective members stand out by keeping an arm raised — or swiveling a head back and forth for a frightening amount of time — while the others dance in unison. (The brave company features Elisabeth Gareis, Daria Hlinkina, Cassandra Martin, Nora Monsecour, Amber Pansters, Maasa Sakano, Marija Slavec-Neeman, Milena Wiese, Zachary Chant, Paul Elie, Finn Lakeberg, Christian Leveque, Jaume Luque Parellada, Cornelius Mickel, Matti Tauru, Alberto Terribile, and Federico Longo.)

Alon Cohen’s stark lighting isolates individuals and cuts the stage in half, furthering the idea of a group and singular entities. Dancers occasionally break free and perform improvised solos that challenge the limits of physical possibility as Israeli composer and DJ Ori Lichtik’s original industrial techno score echoes through the theater, beating into your bones. Lichtik and Jerusalem-born choreographer Eyal of L-E-V, a former longtime Batsheva dancer and house choreographer, worked in conjunction with the dancers as the piece developed, establishing their own creative collective that ultimately links up with the audience. (To get in the mood, check out the accompanying Spotify playlist, consisting of forty songs that inspired the troupe.)

The night I went, the crowd didn’t want to leave at the end, joining together for three boisterous curtain calls, followed by an informative talkback with tanzmainz director Honne Dohrmann, dancers Monsecour and Longo, and Joyce marketing manager Nadia Halim, who shed more light on the process of making Soul Chain, emphasizing collaboration, protecting bodies, and Eyal’s goal of promoting passion and love and celebrating uniqueness amid longing and loneliness.

UNDER THE RADAR: FIELD OF MARS

Richard Maxwell’s Field of Mars explores the history of human existence from an Applebee’s in Chapel Hill, North Carolina (photo by Whitney Browne)

NEW YORK CITY PLAYERS: FIELD OF MARS
NYU Skirball
566 LaGuardia Pl.
January 19-22, 24-29, $60
publictheater.org
nyuskirball.org

“OMG.”

That three-letter digital exclamation is said throughout Richard Maxwell’s new play, Field of Mars, stated plainly by several characters as if it is just another article or preposition. As has been Maxwell’s style since he started his company, New York City Players, in 1999, all words are given similar treatment, delivered dryly, sans any deep emotion, all of equal weight and meaning. omg.

Named after an ancient term for a large public space or military parade ground, Field of Mars is about the beginning and the end of everything on Earth, with God himself portrayed by Phil Moore, who, with equal weight and meaning, also plays a manager at an Applebee’s in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, which serves as a kind of way station for humanity.

The audience sits on four rows of rafters onstage, facing the actors, in the otherwise empty NYU Skirball Center, which commissioned the piece for the Public’s Under the Radar Festival. The nonlinear story takes place on lighting designer Sascha van Riel’s relaxing set, a relatively featureless restaurant booth on one side, a bar/hostess station on the other, where Gillian Walsh is an alternate version of St. Peter at the gates of heaven, more concerned with her cover band and her BF than the future of the planet. The set is reminiscent of the one van Riel built and gets torn down in Maxwell’s The Evening, identified in that 2015 work as “a garbagey void” in “a lonely corner of the universe.”

Brian Mendes and Jim Fletcher rehearse for NYCP’s Field of Mars (photo courtesy New York City Players)

The show opens with Adam (Brian Mendes) and Eve (Walsh) in the Garden of Eden, disguised as a popular American chain eatery, and moves through various bizarre, seemingly unconnected scenarios involving music, invisible food, both evolution and creationism, and one hell of an orgy.

In the lengthiest segment, an early version of which I saw at the Clemente and is now more fully formed, two older musicians (Jim Fletcher and Mendes, the latter in his trademark Jerry Garcia T) are pitching their new song to a pair of younger producers (Nicholas Elliott and James Moore), one of whom is, well, an asshole who claims that punk rock never existed. The men’s long, Don DeLillo–like list of cool bands could have used some shortening — the play is too long at two and a half hours, with intermission — but Maxwell (The Vessel, Isolde, Paradiso) is not in a hurry here.

Characters in Kaye Voyce’s everyday costumes walk and squiggle slowly, the narrator (Tory Vazquez) has an extensive phone conversation about pigments with what sounds like a chatbot, early humans (Elliott, James Moore, Eleanor Hutchins, and Paige Martin) evolve, and three of the musicians, after discussing what their songs are really about, lamely “jam” on electric guitars, which are not plugged into amps, as life goes on around them. Meanwhile, the Applebee’s employees (Walsh, Moore, Martin, Lakpa Bhutia) wear masks around their chins as if understanding there’s a health crisis but not worrying about it.

So, what is Field of Mars really about? As one character notes, “Sometimes the confusion is part of it.” Perhaps we’re sitting onstage because we’re all part of this confusion, part of the problem as we potentially face the end times, masks around our chins.

There’s no program, just a glossy one-sheet with only the most basic of information, along with a free souvenir paper poster that features a drawing of a stick figure in a doorway on one side and advises on the other, “I promise I will not look to the natural world to make up for my lack of spirituality ever again.”

OMG. It all makes perfect sense to me.

TICKET ALERT: THE STRANGE UNDOING OF PRUDENCIA HART

National Theatre of Scotlands THE STRANGE UNDOING OF PRUDENCIA HART

The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart is making a return engagement to the McKittrick Hotel (photo by Jenny Anderson)

THE STRANGE UNDOING OF PRUDENCIA HART
The Heath in the McKittrick Hotel
542 West 27th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Wednesday – Monday, March 10 – April 30, $123.50 – $150.50
mckittrickhotel.com

Six years ago, the McKittrick Hotel presented The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart, a devilishly fun immersive show in its Heath Bar. The production is back for a return engagement March 10 – April 30, and tickets are going fast, so you better hurry if you want to catch this popular international hit. Below is my original rave from January 2017.

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Since March 2011, audiences in masks have been roaming around the McKittrick Hotel in Chelsea, following characters into nearly every nook and cranny in Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, a show, inspired by Macbeth, that redefined immersive theater. Now the same production company, Emursive, is presenting a twist on theatrical immersion with the National Theatre of Scotland’s international hit The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart, which continues at the McKittrick’s Heath Bar through April 23. This time, instead of the audience chasing the characters, the characters, who don masks at one point, move throughout the pub, talking to audience members, weaving around the space, sitting and standing on tables and chairs, and requesting audience help manufacturing some paper props. Created by writer David Greig (who appropriately enough wrote Dunsinane, a sequel to Macbeth) and director Wils Wilson, The Strange Undoing is about Edinburgh academic Prudencia Hart (Melody Grove), who is attending a conference in Kelso on border ballads, folk songs that were most famously written and collected by Sir Walter Scott. Also at the conference is Prudencia’s archrival, the motorcycle-riding Dr. Colin Syme (Paul McCole), who is described as “Dr. Colin Syme blokeish — obsessed with his kit / He’d eat himself if he was a biscuit.” (Much of the tale is related in delightful rhythmic couplets.) Snowed in on Midwinter’s Night, the prudish Prudencia rejects Colin’s offer to stay with him and instead makes her way through a Costco parking lot to a bed and breakfast that appears to be run by the devil himself (Peter Hannah). Meanwhile, musical director Alasdair Macrae and Annie Grace play multiple roles as well as various instruments, singing traditional ballads in addition to shanties written for the show, imbedded with a sly sense of humor. There’s even karaoke.

The National Theatre of Scotland’s The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart is devilishly good fun (photo by Jenny Anderson)

There are also plenty of self-referential treats. “This is exactly the sort of snow that if it were in a border ballad would poetically presage some kind of doom for an innocent heroine or an encounter on the moor with a sprite or villain or the losing of the heroine’s selfhood in the great white emptiness of the night,” Prudencia says at a critical juncture. Movement director Janice Parker keeps the cast, dressed in terrific period costumes with a contemporary twist, from knocking into the customers on Georgia McGuinness’s set, as references are made to the Proclaimers and Kylie Minogue, such topics as “Border Ballads: Neither Border nor Ballad?” and “The Topography of Hell in Scottish Balladry” are raised, the legendary ballad character Tam Lin is discussed, and free shots of Scotch are offered before the show and complimentary finger sandwiches are passed around at intermission. As with Sleep No More, the more you invest yourself into the proceedings, the more you will get out of it. Our enjoyment of the production was enhanced by our tablemates, who just happened to be the parents of one of the actors, making for some great conversation and many toasts. It’s all devilishly good fun, a time-traveling ballad that would make Sir Walter Scott proud.

BODY AS VESSEL: VIVIAN CACCURI AND MILES GREENBERG ON “THE SHADOW OF SPRING”

Vivian Caccuri and Miles Greenberg will discuss their collaboration “The Shadow of Spring” at the New Museum (photos courtesy of the artists)

Who: Vivian Caccuri, Miles Greenberg, Bernardo Mosqueira
What: Artist talk on “The Shadow of Spring”
Where: New Museum Theater, 235 Bowery at Prince
When: Thursday January 26, $10, 6:30
Why: You’d be doing yourself a disservice if you head to the New Museum to catch the subtle, intimate three-floor exhibition “Theaster Gates: Young Lords and Their Traces” before it closes on February 5 without also checking out multidisciplinary artists Vivian Caccuri and Miles Greenberg’s “The Shadow of Spring” in the lobby gallery.

Commissioned exclusively for the space, the show features two urethane fountains by Greenberg, each containing a kind of totem of broken human figures, in between two maplike embroidered wall hangings by Caccuri depicting faceless naked people engaged in various types of contact. The frames and base are speaker systems thumping out music that merges with the sounds of water dripping in the fountains, sending ritualistic vibrations throughout the room. Caccuri’s Vessel Flame and Vessel Body were inspired by Dante’s Inferno and raves held at her studio; the sounds were adapted from recordings of Greenberg’s body following workouts. Greenberg’s Mars and Janus statues were developed from one of his durational performances and used 3D scans to create the fragmented body parts. This is the first time Caccuri and Greenberg have collaborated together, presenting an encased environment that explores the relationship between sound and body, ritual and community, and nature and humanity.

On January 26 at 6:30, Caccuri, born and based in São Paulo, and Greenberg, who was born in Montreal and lives and works in New York and Reykjavik, Iceland, will be at the New Museum Theater for the artist talk “Body as Vessel,” in which they will discuss “The Shadow of Spring” in addition to their individual practices and processes; Brazilian exhibition curator Bernardo Mosqueira will moderate the conversation.

RONALD K. BROWN/EVIDENCE: OPEN DOOR/THE EQUALITY OF NIGHT AND DAY/GRACE

Ronald K. Brown’s The Equality of Night and Day makes its stunning NYC premiere at the Joyce this week (photo by Rose Eichenbaum)

Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE, a Dance Company
The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Ave. at 19th St.
January 17-22, $51-$71
212-691-9740
www.joyce.org
www.evidencedance.com

“When I work, in all situations, people meet me and they say, ‘You create family wherever you go,’ and so I think I have a nurturing side but I demand a lot,” Brooklyn-based choreographer Ronald K. Brown explains in an Alvin Ailey video about the making of Open Door, a piece Brown made for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in 2015. “Why do you have to open the door, how do you open the door, this whole thing of easing, pushing through the door . . .”

Brown created a sense of family and community yet again when his troupe, EVIDENCE, a Dance Company, kicked off its home season at the Joyce on January 17. The program started, appropriately enough, with the company premiere of Open Door, which was inspired by Brown’s travels to Cuba. In front of a screen that changes colors (the lighting is by Tsubasa Kamei), Arturo O’Farrill’s eight-piece Afro Latin Jazz Ensemble performs Luis Demetrio’s “La Puerta,” Tito Puente’s “Picadillo,” and O’Farrill’s “All of the Americas” (from his “Afro Latin Jazz Suite”) and “Vaca Frita” as nine dancers move about the stage, led by solos and duets by Shaylin D. Watson and Isaiah K. Harvey. Originally commissioned for AAADT in 2015, it’s an uplifting twenty-six minutes, with the dancers often putting out their palms in gestures of welcome, beckoning not only fellow dancers but immigrants from Cuba and around the globe.

Open Door is just the right aperitif for the world premiere of The Equality of Night and Day (TEND), a sizzling emotional work in which Brown gets more explicit as he tackles his recurrent themes of social injustice and racism. Five men (Demetrius Burns, Austin Coats, Randall Riley, Christopher Salango, Harvey) and five women (Watson, Shayla Caldwell, Joyce Edwards, Stephanie Chronopoulos, Breana Moore), in loose-fitting flowing blue costumes by Omotayo Wunmi Olaiya, gather and separate to a powerful original score by pianist Jason Moran and the rallying words of activist and writer Angela Davis, who declared in a 2017 speech at Brown, “During the coming period, our primary job will be to build community, to create community — in ways that allow us to understand that the work that we do now does matter, even if we cannot see in an immediate sense the consequences of the work we are doing. It will matter eventually.”

Photos of protests from the last half century and more, curated by Debra Wills, are projected on the back screen, instilling a sense of immediacy in the proceedings, which are highlighted by poignant movement by Burns, Caldwell, and Edwards, the men at one point covering their faces and letting out primeval screams. Later the dancers remove their tops and walk around in a kind of memorial prayer for Black bodies, reacting to Davis’s facts about the racial imbalance in crime and punishment.

The evening concludes with Brown’s half-hour classic, Grace, an appropriate finale providing subtle elegance following the exuberance of Open Door and the psychological intensity of TEND. Commissioned for AAADT in 1999, the deeply spiritual piece begins with Edwards standing in a large doorway at the back of the stage; as opposed to the first two works, where the dancers often came onto the stage with a swagger, here they mostly walk on and off calmly, five women and six men in lovely white or red costumes by Olaiya. They strut out their elbows and their hands reach for the sky to songs by Duke Ellington, Roy Davis Jr., and Fela Kuti, spreading the energy to the audience.

Some years back, I saw Grace at the Joyce with Brown himself dancing a major role. The Bed-Stuy native saved one final, exhilarating moment for the curtain call on January 17, cementing the loving community he had built over the course of the program. He came onstage to uproarious applause, walking gently with a four-pronged cane and being helped by his partner and associate artistic director, Arcell Cabuag. Brown suffered a debilitating stroke in April 2021, at the age of fifty-four, shortly after a residency at Jacob’s Pillow to develop TEND, but has vowed to walk again on his own, and he is ahead of his doctors’ prognosis. The smile on his face was infectious, assuring everyone that there is a promising future to look forward to for all of us.

THEASTER GATES: YOUNG LORDS AND THEIR TRACES — SPECIAL EVENTS

Theaster Gates pays homage to his father and his own childhood in Sweet Chariot and Seven Songs for Black Chapel #1–7 at the New Museum (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

THEASTER GATES: YOUNG LORDS AND THEIR TRACES
New Museum
235 Bowery at Prince St.
Tuesday – Sunday through February 5, $12-$18
www.newmuseum.org
online slideshow

“I make designations between a thing that I made that’s art, a thing I had fabricated that’s art, and a thing that was a preexisting thing that I put alongside other things that were made or fabricated. I don’t necessarily say, ‘Oh, this is all art,’ even though it’s all art, but I think that there are moments when I’m just trying to put things alongside each other like you would in your house or like you would in a shrine,” Chicago-born multidisciplinary artist Theaster Gates says in a video for his elegiac, beautiful, deeply moving “Theaster Gates: Young Lords and Their Traces,” continuing at the New Museum through February 5. “This show is about people who I’ve lost and the things that they left for me, or people who I love and the monument of love that I want to show for them.”

In the three-floor exhibition, curated by Massimiliano Gioni and Gary Carrion-Murayari, Gates pays homage to curator Okwui Enwezor, writer bell hooks, fashion designer Virgil Abloh, scholar Robert Bird, and enslaved potter David Drake (Dave the Potter) as well as his mother (Bathroom Believer), a devout Christian, and his father, a roofer (Roof Strategies for Museum Corridor, Sweet Chariot). Gates repurposes found objects gathered from demolished buildings and construction, including from St. Laurence Church on the South Side of Chicago and Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan, where he hosted “Black Artists Retreat 2019: Sonic Imagination.” Among the highlights of the show are Black Madonna, encased in a vitrine; the short film A Clay Sermon; a music video of Gates and the Black Monks of Mississippi performing an extended improvisational “Amazing Grace”; the fifty-foot-long Roof Strategies for Museum Corridor; and the silver monochrome Seven Songs for Black Chapel, which harkens back to Gates’s childhood.

There are still several special events being held at the New Museum in conjunction with this first-ever museum retrospective of the work of Gates, who turns fifty this year. On January 19 at 6:30 ($10), the panel discussion “Resurrections: Theaster Gates” features curators Jessica Bell Brown and Dieter Roelstraete and LAXART director Hamza Walker, moderated by Carrion-Murayari. On January 21 at noon (free with museum admission), independent archivist and memory worker Zakiya Collier will facilitate an “Out of Bounds” gallery talk about Gates’s archiving practices. On January 21-22 and from January 31 to February 3 (except January 30; free with museum admission), keyboardist and composer Shedrick Mitchell will activate the Hammond B3 organ in A Heavenly Chord, performing his unique mix of Gospel, reggae, R&B, jazz, and new age music. From February 3 to 5, Gates and the Black Monks will play impromptu performances in the fourth-floor gallery. And on February 4 at 4:00 ($8), Gates will be in conversation with writer and scholar Saidiya Hartman. But you needn’t rely on a special event to get you to the New Museum to see this well-designed, uncluttered, intimate exhibit, which also deals with social injustice, racism, and faith.

KIMBERLY AKIMBO

KIMBERLY AKIMBO
Booth Theatre
222 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 26, $84 – $419
kimberlyakimbothemusical.com

Broadway shows about death and dying tend to be serious affairs. Plays such as The Shadow Box, Marvin’s Room, Angels in America, ’night, Mother, and Whose Life Is It Anyway? are not lighthearted comedies; Wit is not exactly a laugh riot. (By the way, those six works have four Pulitzers between them.) But right now, Mike Birbiglia is facing his own mortality every night in his hilarious one-man show The Old Man & the Pool, at the Vivian Beaumont, while Kimberly Akimbo, an unusual, life-affirming musical about a high school girl with a terminal illness, is delighting audiences at the Booth.

Making a smooth transition from its fall 2021 debut at the Atlantic, Kimberly Akimbo is the must-see musical of the season. Adapted by Pulitzer winner David Lindsay-Abaire from his 2000 play of the same name, the show tackles how awkward kids can be during their teen years, as evidenced by the title. Kimberly Levaco (Victoria Clark), who is approaching her sixteenth birthday, becomes friends with super-nerd Seth (Justin Cooley), who is obsessed with anagrams; rearranging the letters in her name, he rechristens her Cleverly Akimbo. The show, the character, and Clark are all that and more.

Kimberly has an extremely rare genetic disorder, similar to progeria, in which she ages at four or five times the normal rate. Most girls look forward to turning sweet sixteen, but for Kimberly, she would be nearing the equivalent of eighty; she is magnificently portrayed by Tony winner Clark, who is sixty-three but infuses the part with a glorious enthusiasm and affection for life and what it offers, living every minute to its fullest, understanding it could — and will — all be over at any second.

Kimberly’s mother, Pattie (Alli Mauzey), is pregnant, stuck at home with carpal tunnel in both hands and making videos for her unborn child. “There’s a high probability that I might be dead soon. / So I won’t be around when you’re growing up, / and this video is the only way for you to know who I was. / And I want you to know who I was because / people are going to tell you things about me that just aren’t true,” she sings insensitively, bringing up her own potential death and focusing on her fetus instead of paying attention to Kimberly, who really is dying and might never get to meet her sibling.

Kimberly’s father, Buddy (Steven Boyer), is a low-level gambler and drinker who works at a gas station and does not know how to express love for his daughter; he’s still too much of a child himself. “I should be happy for her,” he sings when she makes a new friend, but he doesn’t know how. “I should be happy.” Later, he says, “I never pictured myself a father. I mean, I like kids, I just . . . I’m more of a bachelor uncle type.” He is more excited than Kimberly when he wins a Game Boy in a bet.

Kimberly (Victoria Clark, center) has issues with her parents (Alli Mauzey and Steven Boyer) in Broadway musical (photo © Joan Marcus)

Kimberly teams up with Seth for their sophomore bio class project, in which they have to explore a disease. Seth wants to use Kimberly’s condition, but she’s not so sure. Meanwhile, the quartet of Delia (Olivia Elease Hardy), Martin (Fernell Hogan), Aaron (Michael Iskander), and Teresa (Nina White) is pairing up for the project and preparing for Show Choir, a competition against other schools. In a fab subplot, they are also trying to figure out how to pair up relationship-wise, not quite knowing yet who’s gay or straight and who likes who.

They are planning on performing a medley from Dreamgirls.. It’s no accident that Lindsay-Abaire chose that particular musical, whose title song begins, “Every man has his own special dream / and your dream’s just about to come true / Life’s not as bad as it may seem if you / open your eyes to what’s in front of you.” High school kids are supposed to dream about the future, but Kimberly is running out of time. Meanwhile their main rival, West Orange, is doing Evita, a musical about Argentinian leader Eva Perón, whose life was cut short by cancer at the age of thirty-three.

Everything goes even more akimbo when Buddy’s sister, Debra (Bonnie Milligan), the black sheep of the family, arrives unexpectedly; the Levacos had escaped Lodi to get away from Debra, who has a penchant for breaking the law with a greedy selfishness and spending time in the hoosegow. She has a master plan involving bank fraud and a stolen US mailbox — itself a funny prop because the younger generations today mainly think of them as relics in the age of social media and texting, similar to pay phones — and attempts to get Kimberly, Seth, Delia, Martin, Aaron, and Teresa to help her with the scheme.

As Kimberly’s sixteenth birthday approaches, the cleverly askew storylines all come together for a poignant finale.

Kimberly Akimbo is about much more than a teen with a horrible disease; it’s a spectacularly insightful depiction of the joys and fears that teens experience, at school and at home, with friends and family, as they mature into young adults. Kimberly has an illness that strikes only one in fifty million people — meaning only seven people in the United States might have it — but she represents us all, children and grown-ups. Lindsay-Abaire’s (Rabbit Hole, Ripcord) book and lyrics capture the exhilarating highs and the devastating lows that are parts of everyday life, which is like an endless series of anagrams we try to unravel; when Pattie says, “I hate getting old,” she’s not just speaking for herself. And when she shares her anxiety over having another baby and Kimberly declares, “Scared it would be like me?,” it’s a feeling many can relate to. As Kimberly sings in “Anagram”: “With a change of perspective . . . ha-ha-ha-ha . . . / nothing’s defective / I wonder what you see / when you look at me.”

Tony winner Jeanine Tesori’s (Fun Home, Caroline, or Change) score matches the ups and downs of the plot, from the tender piano of “Anagram” to the jubilance of “Skater Planet” and “This Time,” with playful choreography by Danny Mefford (how do they ice skate like that?), realistic costumes by Sarah Laux, and terrific sets by David Zinn that range from a suburban skating rink to a high school hallway to the Levaco living room.

Mauzey (Wicked, Cry-Baby) and Boyer (Hand to God, Time and the Conways) are terrific as Kimberly’s parents, who attempt to navigate through what for them is also a traumatic situation, knowing their teenage daughter will not be with them much longer, while Jimmy Awards finalist Cooley excels as the awkward but determined and hopeful Seth, and Milligan (Head Over Heels, Gigantic), as a thief, essentially steals every scene she’s in.

But the centerpiece of the show is the unforgettable performance by Clark (Gigi, Sister Act), who won her Tony for The Light in the Piazza before most of the rest of the cast members were born, or were mere babes. Her every movement and gesture, her voice, and, most critically, her bright, searching eyes will have you convinced she is a fifteen-year-old high school student carrying all the requisite baggage — while also knowing that any day could be her last. But the show is not about aging and death; it’s an infectious celebration of life.

At one point, Martin says, “Who cares? It’s not like any of this counts.” Seth responds, “What do you mean?” Martin answers, “I mean, high school. This town. It’s not even real life. It’s just the crap you have to get through before you get to the good part.” Teresa chimes in, “And what’s the good part?” Martin answers, “Um, the rest of our lives?” Kimberly Akimbo makes it clear that right now is the good part, no matter how long the rest of your life is.