twi-ny recommended events

JUST TAKING IT IN: GOING FULL MANTIS WITH MILFORD GRAVES AND ASHANTI ALSTON

Milford Graves enjoys a bite in his garden in new documentary about the unique percussionist and philosopher

Milford Graves enjoys a bite in his garden in documentary about the unique percussionist and philosopher

MILFORD GRAVES FULL MANTIS (Jake Meginsky, 2018)
Maysles Documentary Center
343 Lenox Ave./Malcolm X Blvd. between 127th & 128th Sts.
Sunday, September 27, $7-$15, 2:00, free Q&A 4:30
maysles.org
fullmantis.com

Jake Meginsky’s unconventional documentary of unconventional musician Milford Graves begins with the following epigraph from Graves: “Look at the room downstairs / Look at the garden outside / Don’t try to analyze it / Just take it in.” That is not only Graves’s life philosophy but also the best way to experience Milford Graves Full Mantis, which is screening September 27 at 2:00 at the Maysles Documentary Center. Born in 1941 in South Jamaica, Queens, where he resided until his death in February 2021, Graves was an avant-garde free jazz percussionist who played and lived to his own beat. In 2004, Meginsky knocked on Graves’s door, asked to study with him, and soon became the Professor’s assistant and documentarian; the film, codirected by drummer Neil Young, who also edited and photographed it with Meginsky, features compelling live footage along with peaceful moments in Graves’s basement and expansive garden. Early on, Meginsky shows a wild excerpt from a 1973 concert at the Jazz Middelheim Festival in Antwerp in which Graves performs with Joe Rigby and Hugh Glover on reeds and Arthur Williams on trumpet; the fierce, dissonant music might not be to everyone’s taste, but it serves as a terrific counterpoint to Graves’s calmer side, pontificating on, well, sometimes it’s hard to tell what, but it’s always fascinating.

There are also clips of Graves playing solo at the Brandeis Improv Festival in 2015 and in one of Park Ave. Armory’s historic rooms in 2016; in 2011 in his basement, where he’s surrounded by African sculpture, books, and computers that record his heartbeat and nervous system, which he incorporates into his work; and in Japan in 1981 with dancer Min Tanaka at a school for autistic children, where his unique performance inspired the kids to get up and move to the groove. In his backyard dojo he explains Yara, the discipline he invented based on martial arts, African ritual dance, the Lindy Hop, and the praying mantis and which he refers to as “the black way of self protection.” There are no talking-head experts or Graves acolytes singing his praises; the only voice heard in the film is Graves’s own, and for the first half of its ninety minutes Meginsky doesn’t show the film’s subject as he talks. Instead, while Graves speaks about his past and shares his kaleidoscopic philosophies, the camera slowly focuses on his lush garden or shows some of Graves’s animations.

But eventually Graves is seen sitting in his basement, telling a long, remarkable story of a turning point in his life. He’s an engaging character, bursting with enthusiasm and a unique view of the human body, the five senses, tear ducts, and the parasympathetic nervous system. And throughout, he keeps playing those drums, holding the sticks in his trademark way on a nonstandard kit he put together himself.

The screening at MDC will be followed at 4:30 by “An Afternoon with Ashanti Omowali Alston,” a free Q&A with the revolutionary, orator, writer, organizer, motivator, anarchist, and former Black Panther Party member, in conversation with political philosopher, academic, and author Joy James, focusing on the new book Anarchist Panther: The Selected Writings of Ashanti O. Alston (AK Press, August 2026, $21.99).

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

CHAOS AND FRENZY: DELIRIUM IN BROOKLYN

Andrey Burkovskiy and Chulpan Khamatova are delightful in Igor Golyak’s Delirium (photo by Austin Ruffer)

DELIRIUM
The Space at Irondale
85 S. Oxford St., Brooklyn
Monday – Saturday through November 7, $79-$139
deliriumnyc.com

Igor Golyak is one of the most exciting, inventive, and innovative directors working today, and he proves it yet again with the absolutely mind-blowing Delirium.

“I smashed all barriers . . . I flouted all the laws of time and space,” the protagonist Khonen says in Belarus-born S. Ansky’s 1920 play, The Dybbuk. In his unique adaptations of such important works as Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s Our Class, and The Dybbuk, Golyak, whose family fled Kyiv when he was a child, has smashed theatrical barriers and flouted time and space in extraordinarily reimagined adaptations that delve deep into war, antisemitism, and human connection.

In the deliriously brilliant Delirium, based on Romanian-French playwright Eugène Ionesco’s rarely performed 1962 Frenzy for Two, or More, Golyak, the artistic director of the Massachusetts-based Arlekin company, explores the complex nature of love and the absurd ridiculousness and horrors of war, laying bare the elements of stagecraft in telling the story of an unnamed man (Andrey Burkovskiy) and woman (Chulpan Khamatova) who bicker continuously in their ramshackle apartment in an unidentified country as a fierce military battle rages on outside. Jan Pappelbaum’s set is a marvel of chaos, a center platform with a pile of old, dusty mattresses, a bucket, empty window frames and mirrors, and a large fish tank with a large live goldfish in it, all surrounded by scaffolding tenuously holding aluminum sheets of varying sizes.

During the play’s fast-paced ninety minutes, the couple argues over just about everything, starting off with their decision to be together seventeen years before, immediately establishing the current state of their relationship.

She: The life you promised me! And the life you give me! I left my husband to follow my lover. How romantic! My husband was ten times better, seducer! He didn’t contradict me stupidly!
He: I don’t contradict you on purpose. When you say things that aren’t true, I can’t just accept them. I have a passion for the truth.
She: What truth? I’m telling you there’s no difference. That’s the truth. There’s no difference. A snail and a turtle, they’re the same thing.
He: No they’re not. They’re not the same animal at all.
She: Animal yourself. Idiot.
He: You’re the idiot.
She: You’re insulting me, you imbecile, you’re disgusting, seducer.

The mollusks represent themselves, two beings whose lives move slowly, if at all, trapped within shells that may not be able to protect them from what’s outside. The man and woman may think they’re different, but they’re more similar than they’ll ever admit.

She declares, “Oh, enough! Shut up! You’d better. I can’t stand listening to you ramble anymore.” He responds, “I can’t stand listening to you either. I don’t want to hear anything.” At that instant, an explosion rattles their apartment, a moment that’s both funny and frightening. They debate whether a plaster fragment is the Venus de Milo or the Statue of Liberty, signifying the loss of love and/or freedom. He’s hot, she’s cold. He says “yes,” she says “no.” Their constant disagreements over insignificant things pale in comparison to the war, which they take seriously only when they believe they are in immediate danger, like so many people around the globe — and especially in America.

A buzzer rings, and they worry that they’re coming for them. We never find out who “they” are — the good guys, the bad guys, ICE. In this case, it doesn’t matter, as the whole world has gone to hell, and there’s no place left to hide.

“We’re caught between two fires. What made you pick this place at the border of two neighborhoods?” she complains. He snaps back, “You’re the one who wanted this place. . . . You wanted this apartment for the beautiful view.” Today, it feels like we’re all living on the border of two combative neighborhoods, perhaps sacrificing safety for the illusion of beauty.

As the war grows closer to the man and the woman, they have to think fast, and stop quarreling, if they want any kind of future.

An unnamed man (Andrey Burkovskiy) and woman (Chulpan Khamatova) seek a place to hide in deliriously entertaining Ionesco adaptation (photo by Austin Ruffer)

Golyak directs with a masterful hand, leaving no stone unturned; he takes advantage of every word, every punctuation mark, never wasting an opportunity to add to the maelstrom. He makes ingenious use of the props, from a movable door and the mattresses to a radio and the aluminum sheeting; even Sasha Ageeva’s costumes get in on the act. An early scene involving the man’s hat and the woman’s wig is like a vaudeville skit, while other scenes recall silent comedy. Jeff Adelberg’s lighting, Denis Zabiyaka’s sound, and Anna Drubich’s music take expert advantage of the space, following the man and the woman as they make their way into the audience, onto the scaffolding, and across the balcony.

Burkovskiy (Seagull: True Story, Khonen in The Dybbuk) and Khamatova (Ivanov, Shushkin’s Stories), who appeared together in the San Francisco production of Our Class, are superb as the longtime lovers, reminding me of a younger Christopher Lloyd and Carol Kane, with touches of Ricky and Lucy, Ralph and Alice, and George and Martha. They both display expert comic improv chops and occasionally relate directly to the audience, particularly as the play progresses. Burkovskiy has an electric stage presence, while Khamatova wonderfully balances innocence and petulance.

Amid all the frenzied hilarity and increasing rubble, Golyak injects some key points that may seem obvious but are being ignored by too many of us. Talking about the approaching soldiers, the man says, “Whether they’re going up or down, it’s about the same. Next time they’ll come for us.” After a missile flies past, he admits, “Yes, it’s impossible to have peace; but it’s beyond our control. It’s objectively impossible.” And a few moments later, when the bombing appears to have stopped, she says, “Probably intermission.”

In Delirium, as in real life, there is no intermission, not even for that poor fish, who just keeps swimming around his tank, oblivious, just trying to survive until tomorrow.

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

ALL THE RIGHT REASONS: THOMAS & ME AT THE SHEEN CENTER

Mairéad O’Neill and Thomas Ellenson star in Thomas & Me (photo by Douglas J. Cohen)

THOMAS & ME
Frank Shiner Theater
Sheen Center for Thought and Culture
18 Bleecker St. between Mott & Elizabeth Sts.
September 24-28, $20-$75
sheencenter.org

“I love acting. It’s the only place people stare at me for the right reasons,” award-winning actor, writer, and director Thomas Ellenson says on his website. Ellenson, who has cerebral palsy, uses a power wheelchair, and communicates through an iPad, will be the center of attention when he brings his new play, Thomas & Me, to the Frank Shiner Theater at the Sheen Center, where it runs from September 24 to 28.

In the ninety-minute autobiographical show, Ellenson portrays a man who reevaluates his life as he considers proposing to his girlfriend. The cast also features Mairéad O’Neill (I and You, Soft Star) and Tyler Austin White (The Full Monty, Legally Blonde), with music and lyrics by composer-lyricist Douglas J. Cohen (No Way to Treat a Lady, The Opposite of Sex) and choreography by Megan Loomis.

“Thomas has created a truly heartwarming and moving story that invites both artists and audiences to reconsider how we tell stories about disability — and, in fact, about all our lives. It is a powerful, deeply human piece that has the potential to inspire meaningful change in how we all see ourselves,” codirector Stephen Santa said in a statement. Cohen added, “I’m excited to be working on such a unique, surprising, and theatrical piece with such a wonderful team of artists. In Thomas & Me, so much resonates emotionally for me, and Thomas has a gift for finding humor and universality in his storytelling. That made my job as a songwriter especially rewarding.”

Among the songs performed in the show are “I Am Not a Morning Person,” “Yes, But . . . ,” and “Waiting in the Wings”; Sujin Kim-Ramsey is the musical director.

Thomas & Me opens runs September 24 to 28 at the Frank Shiner Theater (photo courtesy Thomas Ellenson)

Ellenson previously won Best Production at United Solo in 2025 for Well, Life Sucks and Best Production at the One Festival in 2017 for It Is What It Is.

“If you can’t laugh at cerebral palsy, you really need to develop a sense of humor. And here it is,” Ellenson recently posted on Instagram.

The short run is almost sold out, so you better act fast if you want to stare at Ellenson for all the right reasons.

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

TICKET ALERT: KRAMER/FAUCI AT ST. ANN’S WAREHOUSE

Thomas Jay Ryan, Jennifer Seastone, Will Brill, and Greig Sargeant bring a C-Span discussion to vivid life in Kramer/Fauci (photo by Maria Baranova)

KRAMER/FAUCI
St. Ann’s Warehouse
45 Water St.
Tuesday – Sunday through October 24, $49-$89
stannswarehouse.org

[Below is my review of Kramer/Fauci when it ran at NYU Skirball this past February. It is now playing at St. Ann’s Warehouse from September 27 through October 24, with an official opening night of October 4. The cast and crew are the same for this engagement, but there might be some tweaks and changes that slightly differ from what I saw. For example, at Skirball, the columns at the sides of the stage were used as props. I am reposting this review in advance to give everyone a chance to get tickets now, as some performances are already sold out or have very few seats remaining.]

Daniel Fish again proves his genuine creative genius with the wildly entertaining and unpredictable Kramer/Fauci.

On November 30, 1993, C-Span host Steve Scully spoke about the AIDS crisis with Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, and playwright and activist Larry Kramer, author of the novel Faggots and the play The Normal Heart and cofounder of Gay Men’s Health Crisis and ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). For sixty minutes, while Fauci was in the studio with Scully and Kramer was beamed in onscreen from New York City, they discussed government funding, drug research, bigotry, public awareness, and more, in addition to taking phone calls from viewers.

Fish has transformed that visually dry program into an exciting, rich theatrical experience with such unusual elements as a woman on roller skates, a hilarious colorful costume, and a whole lot of bubbles.

As audience members enter the auditorium, six rows of nine lights apiece are blazing from the back of the stage, reminding me of a flag too bright to bear looking at — except for a colleague of mine who had (knowingly?) brought sunglasses. The show starts slowly in the empty space: Scully (Greig Sargeant) sits in the middle in a chair, Dr. Fauci (Will Brill), in a crisp suit, stands closer to the front to Scully’s right, and Kramer (Thomas Jay Ryan), in a turtleneck, hovers against the back wall to Scully’s left. The three begin reciting the exact transcript from the interview, as Scully raises a question about President Clinton’s formation of a new task force. Fauci provides a relatively straightforward bureaucratic response, but Kramer gives a hint of what’s to come when he criticizes the technology C-Span is using — he is unable to see Scully or Fauci but can only hear them, although he complains about the earpiece as well — and says, “This is a task force to identify what the stumbling blocks are, we know what they are: a lot of bureaucracy, a lot of red tape, a lot of stupid laws by Congress, and a lot of idiots, uhhhhhhh, putting their two cents worth, uh uhhh, how are you gonna get rid of all of these things is what I want to know and I have yet to hear a task force form to tell me that.”

After several minutes of physical stasis, Fauci and especially Kramer start moving around the stage as they argue over how recent administrations dealt with AIDS, what the real number of people afflicted with the disease are (and will be), how much money is needed for research, and why more is not being done. When Scully brings up the topic of the AIDS epidemic being normalized, Fauci begins, “Larry and I have had conversations about this many, many times over the years, and I a-appreciate it and in many respects, remire . . . admire the, the rage that he has about a very, very difficult problem. But I think you have to . . .” Kramer cuts him off, proclaiming, “Tony, if you start that business about science isn’t done that way, I’m gonna come on there and slap your face.” Fauci peacefully responds, “Nah . . . nah . . . All right, Larry, hang on for a sec. I love you, Larry . . . Uh . . . The fact is that the real solutions will in fact, come from the science.”

Scully occasionally cuts away to play audio footage of news conferences and to take calls, each of which is delivered by Jennifer Seastone in a few different voices, first riding in circles on roller skates and later donning an oddball costume. (The costumes are by Terese Wadden, with set by Jim Findlay, lighting by Scott Zielinski, and sound by Tei Blow.) Movement director Beth Gill soon has Kramer making his way over to Fauci and the roving callers, hugging one of Skirball’s golden pillars, and approaching the audience. It ranges from absurdly comical to substantially confrontational, all of it fascinating and compelling.

And then, the bubbles.

Expect the unexpected in Daniel Fish’s inventive re-creation of a C-Span program on AIDS (photo by Maria Baranova)

In A (radically condensed and expanded) Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, the New Jersey–born, New York City–based Fish used tennis balls and existing text in a play about the work of Infinite Jest author David Foster Wallace. Fish earned a Tony for his unique staging of Oklahoma!, in which the audience was served chili at intermission. In White Noise, he used bold, giant projections and an actor sitting in a large, dark circle in the middle of a screen to tell part of Don DeLillo’s treatise on consumerism gone mad. And in Elektra, Sophocles’s title character, played by Brie Larson, was a kind of punk goddess spitting out some of Beyoncé’s “Daddy Lessons” while an unexplained blimp floated nearby.

For Kramer/Fauci, the actors wear earpieces that feed them the lines in order to maintain the precise pace and tone of the original program. Tony winner Brill (Stereophonic, Oklahoma!) is cool, calm, and collected as the cool, calm, and collected Fauci, who might not have gained as much fame for his work on AIDS but became a divisive and highly public figure during the Covid-19 pandemic. Two-time Drama Desk Award winner Ryan (Eureka Day, Dance Nation) is sensational as Kramer, a deeply concerned, knowledgeable, and emotional activist who is fed up with the government’s response to what he insists is a plague, not merely an epidemic or crisis.

The play centers on the complex friendship between Fauci and Kramer, who strongly disagree on how to deal with AIDS. It is summed up best in this exchange, which, like everything else, is taken verbatim from the transcript, with every pause and repetition:

Kramer: It’s all of this rhetoric of yours and everybody else in the bureaucracy. You know, I want to say something about, about Tony Fauci because I think the world must think I ha—, I hate him or something the way I’m going on tonight. I love Tony, actually I d—, I think I probably have a more complicated relationship with Tony than anybody in my entire life. He is a man, an ordinary man who was being asked to play God and he is being punished because he cannot be God. And that is a terrible situation to be in to be the lightning rod for all of us. Uhhhh . . . he has had to deal with Reagan and Bush and defend those monsters, for all we know he probably kept the labs open when John Sununu and Gary Bauer, and other awful bigots, probably wanted them closed, and he had to do it at a price, probably uh at a price for his own soul that we’ll never know that that he had to say things that in his heart he never believed. But he is there and he has been the, this this this incredible fighter for us and for AIDS. I just get angry when he puts on this bureaucratic suit and out comes this boilerplate, uhhhhh, that like Donna Shalala said the same, they, all his rhetoric that doesn’t mean anything. Tony, more than anyone in this world, knows how awful everything is, knows what has to be done, knows that he should have been given a lot more money to do it, knows who all these terrible people are, and yet he can never say it in public like I can say it in public.
Scully: Dr. Fauci, let me go back to an earlier question . . .
Kramer: Why don’t you respond to that, Anthony?
Scully: Oh, go ahead, Doctor.
Fauci: I love you, Larry. [Laughs.]

The play is eerily prescient of so much of the ensuing debate about public health. Most of us well remember what happened during Covid-19, when Fauci was at odds with the Trump administration, and today the battle over vaccines rages on with new updates every day, while the LGBTQ community has a growing fight on its hands, about a lot more than just the taking down of a Pride flag. However, Fish doesn’t reference any of that, instead keeping his focus on communicating the drama of this extraordinary debate between two dedicated, extremely intelligent men trying to do what’s best for an ailing population. How he chooses to punctuate and illustrate the power of their conflict with stunning, dumbfounding, and yet somehow near-perfect staging is where his genius lies.

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

DESIGNING CLOTHES IS NEVER A PROBLEM: ISAAC MIZRAHI CELEBRATES THIRTY YEARS OF UNZIPPED

Isaac Mizrahi and Naomi Campbell look to the future of fashion in Douglas Keeve’s Unzipped

UNZIPPED (Douglas Keeve, 1995)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
September 25 – October 1
filmforum.org

About halfway through Unzipped, Douglas Keeve’s thrilling 1995 documentary, which follows fashion designer extraordinaire Isaac Mizrahi as he puts together his fall 1994 collection following a critical disaster, Mizrahi says, “Everything’s frustrating; every single thing is frustrating. Except designing clothes. That’s not frustrating. That’s really liberating and beautiful. I don’t know, being overweight and not being able to lose weight, you know, that’s a problem. Anything you’re really working hard at and that’s not working, that’s a problem. But frankly, designing clothes is never a problem.”

Of course, the statement doesn’t exactly ring true as Mizrahi, usually with his trademark bandanna wound around his wild, curly hair, encounters his fair share of difficulties as he meets with Candy Pratts and André Leon Talley from Vogue and Polly Mellen from Allure, expresses his hopes and fears with Mark Morris, Sandra Bernhard, Eartha Kitt, and his mother, and works with such supermodels as Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Shalom Harlow, Linda Evangelista, Carla Bruni, Christy Turlington, and Amber Valletta. Along the way he makes endless pop-culture references, singing the theme song from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, citing scenes from The Red Shoes, Marnie, Valley of the Dolls, and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and using Nanook of the North and The Call of the Wild as creative inspiration.

Mizrahi is a ball of neuroses throughout as he consults Ouija boards and Tarot cards to peek into his future and plays classical piano (Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier,” Debussy’s “Clair de Lune”) to calm himself down. “I’m not that stressed out,” he says. “I hate when people tell me I’m stressed out.” In his first film, director Keeve (Seamless, Hotel Gramercy Park), who was dating Mizrahi at the time, and Oscar-winning cinematographer Ellen Kuras (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Betrayal) switch from grainy black-and-white to color to sharp b&w as Mizrahi’s big show approaches, in which the major point of conflict is the designer’s desperate desire to use a scrim that will allow the high-powered audience to see the backlit silhouettes of the models as they change backstage, something not all the women, or his colleagues at Mizrahi & Co., are in favor of.

The film opens with Mizrahi devastated by the reviews of his previous show and closes with him quietly examining the reviews for his fall collection; in between is a delightful look inside the crazy world of fashion. And then Mizrahi will have to do it all over again for the next season. Winner of the Audience Award at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival, Unzipped is screening September 25 to October 1 at Film Forum in a new thirtieth anniversary 4K restoration with Mizrahi present for Q&As on September 25 at 8:00 and September 27 at 2:00 with Keeve and executive producer Nina Santisi and on September 26 at 8:00.

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

ENCORE ENGAGEMENT: MRS. STERN WANDERS THE PRUSSIAN STATE LIBRARY RETURNS TO 59E59

Hannah Stern (Ella Kaille) is watched by Gestapo officer Karl Frick (Brett Temple) in gripping play at 59E59 (photo by Valerie Terranova)

MRS. STERN WANDERS THE PRUSSIAN STATE LIBRARY
59E59 Theaters
59 East 59th St. between Park & Madison Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through October 25, $76-$96
www.59e59.org
www.mrssternwanders.com

[Below is my review of Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library when it ran at the WP Theater in 2024; I have made small changes to account for the current production at 59E59, where it continues through October 25, with the same cast, set, and director. There will be talkbacks following the performances on September 25 at 7:00, September 27 at 2:00, October 3 at 2:00, and October 10 at 7:00.]

Jenny Lyn Bader’s Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library is one of the best dramas of the year, a taut, gripping tale inspired by the little-known 1933 arrest of Hannah Arendt by the Gestapo. The ninety-minute Luna Stage production opened in October 2024 at 59E59, where I saw an early preview, and moved to the WP Theater in an even better version, and now has returned for an encore engagement at 59E59. Bader is intimately familiar with Arendt’s life and career; her husband, Roger Berkowitz, founded the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, where she has served on the board of advisers.

As the audience enters the space, they are instantly immersed in Arendt’s world in 1933 Berlin, through period music and Lauren Helpern’s stark set, a prison cell with two empty chairs, the white walls reaching out toward us. It feels like a warning that any of us could end up being interrogated under the dangling light fixture, then or now, especially given the rise of antisemitism across the globe. Barred, opaque windows do not promise hope.

A twenty-six-year-old burgeoning historian, philosopher, and author, Arendt (Ella Kaille) — whose married name at the time was Stern; she and her first husband, Günther Anders Stern, would divorce in 1937 — has been brought in by the Gestapo, along with her mother, who is in a separate cell. What Hannah thought would be just a brief questioning turns into several days of interrogation by Karl Frick (Brett Temple), an inquisitive Aryan guard who appears to be just as interested in her philosophy as in the identities of her dissident, Zionist friends.

After Hannah grimaces upon taking a sip of the coffee Karl has given her, he asks, “Do you not like the coffee?” She responds, “If I may speak freely? It’s terrible.” Karl: “Sorry to hear it. But at least I know you answer questions truthfully.” Hannah: “It wouldn’t occur to me to answer them any other way.” Karl: “That will make our time together easier.” It’s an intimate, critical moment that establishes the two characters and how they will relate to each other, Karl displaying genuine concern — it’s his first day on this new job, having been promoted from the criminal police to the political police — while Hannah plays a clever game of cat and mouse.

Karl grows suspicious when Hannah is visited by Erich Landau (usually played by Drew Hirshfield, although I saw his understudy this time, Jay DeYonker), a lawyer purportedly sent by the Zionists. “They are changing laws they made yesterday, then changing them again, by arbitrary police decree,” Hannah explains. Erich replies, “‘Arbitrary’? How can you say that? Laws create order!” Hannah answers, “In a classic dictatorship, yes. But the Nazis want chaos.”

Over the course of several days, Karl and Hannah discuss forced immigration, false idols, the arts, assimilation, love, the Bible, vegetarianism, German writer Rahel Varnhagen, and the Jewish Question as he tries to get information out of her while she cagily parries, brilliantly careful about everything she offers him.

Ella Kaille excels as a young Hannah Arendt in Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library (photo by Valerie Terranova)

In Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library Bader (The Whole Megillah: A Purim Spiel for Grown-Ups, None of the Above, Manhattan Casanova) captures the fear that many Jews live with, whether in 1933 Germany or 2024 America as the rule of law grows ever more arbitrary — and purposefully vindictive. The show is expertly directed by Ari Laura Kreith (Heartland, 167 Tongues); even though we know what’s ultimately going to happen, in general if not in the specific details, we are kept on the edge of our seats like a tense thriller, each scene offering new surprises and philosophical insight about what happened then — and can happen again.

A dead ringer for Natalie Portman, Kaille (Connected, Can You Forgive Her?) — whose father, controversial lawyer Alan Dershowitz, once debated Arendt and has written extensively about her (unfavorably) and whose husband’s last name is Stern — portrays Arendt with an astute elegance, from the way she smokes a cigarette and holds a cup of coffee to how she climbs on a table to look out the window, freedom just out of her grasp. Temple (The Valley of the Shadow, Henry IV, Part One) imbues Karl with a gentle vulnerability and curiosity not usually associated with Gestapo officers, while DeYonker, a five-year member of the Prague Shakespeare Company, is effective in his small but key role as the lawyer.

“Personally I think that’s the first big mistake in the history of thought — that truth comes at the end. I think truth comes at the beginning of a thought,” Hannah tells Karl at one point. In her February 1967 New Yorker article “Truth and Politics,” Arendt wrote, “We must now turn our attention to the relatively recent phenomenon of mass manipulation of fact and opinion as it has become evident in the rewriting of history, in image-making, and in actual government policy. The traditional political lie, so prominent in the history of diplomacy and statecraft, used to concern either true secrets — data that had never been made public — or intentions, which anyhow do not possess the same degree of reliability as accomplished facts; like everything that goes on merely inside ourselves, intentions are only potentialities, and what was intended to be a lie can always turn out to be true in the end. In contrast, the modern political lies deal efficiently with things that are not secrets at all but are known to practically everybody. This is obvious in the case of rewriting contemporary history under the eyes of those who witnessed it, but it is equally true in image-making of all sorts, in which, again, every known and established fact can be denied or neglected if it is likely to hurt the image; for an image, unlike an old-fashioned portrait, is supposed not to flatter reality but to offer a full-fledged substitute for it. And this substitute, because of modern techniques and the mass media, is, of course, much more in the public eye than the original ever was.”

Watching Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library in the context of current international politics is a chilling warning of what might lie ahead, especially if we cannot hear the voices from history, like Hannah Arendt’s.

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

“EARLY THOUGH THE LAUREL GROWS”: THE INVENTION OF LOVE AT THEATERLAB

Yaron Lotan and David Greenspan both portray A. E. Housman in Tom Stoppard revival (photo by Paul Lutvak)

THE INVENTION OF LOVE
TheaterLab
357 West Thirty-Sixth St., between Eighth & Ninth Aves., third floor
Through October 3, $44.40-$88.80
theaterlabnyc.com
themaptheater.com

In the the fall of 2000, Tom Stoppard and Daniel Mendelsohn took part in an extraordinary exchange of letters in the New York Review of Books following the latter’s lengthy critical chastising of the former’s The Invention of Love at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia. The back-and-forth could make for its own fascinating play, although audiences would have to be given extensive notes to catch even a handful of the endless literary and historical references (in the letters and the play). In fact, when the show reached Broadway in 2001, theatergoers were given a thirty-page booklet to help decipher various elements.

Of course, since Stoppard died last November at the age of eighty-eight, I don’t have to worry that he will come after me for this review, at least not in this life. In addition, it is far easier for me to research the language and setting of the play using the internet in a way that was not available a quarter-century ago.

Director Zachary Elkind and his MAP Theater are staging a rare US revival of The Invention of Love, running through October 3 at the nearly blindingly white space at Theaterlab. Stoppard would most likely take no issue with my thoughts on the first act, although he might not go easy on me when it comes to what follows after intermission.

The memory play opens with AEH, exquisitely portrayed by off-Broadway legend David Greenspan in a tight-fitting three-piece academic suit, pristine facial hair, and a slow, careful gait, entering the small room, where an audience of about a hundred sit in two rows on opposite sides. In the middle is a makeshift rowing boat on which Charon (Annabel Capper) will take the late poet and scholar across the River Styx and to the underworld of Hades.

“I’m dead, then. Good,” he says, recognizing the situation he is in, adding matter-of-factly, “And this is the Stygian gloom one has heard so much about.” It’s a brilliant opening that sets the stage for what we’re in for.

As AEH sits on one of the benches on the boat, his years as a student at Oxford start unfolding before his eyes. Sometimes he closes them, deep in thought, and other times he watches closely, as his younger self, identified in the script as Housman (Yaron Lotan), filled with a lust for literature and camaraderie, frolics with his new friends and classmates, A. W. Pollard (Daniel Liu) and Moses John Jackson (José Espinosa), arguing over the merits of Plato, Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and, primarily, the significantly lesser-known Sextus Propertius.

Housman also takes a fancy for Jackson, who is a champion runner, an unrequited love that would haunt him throughout his life and, here, into his death.

Stoppard revels in highfalutin intellectual conversations the three students have, as exemplified by this early exchange, as they are rowing on the Thames:

Housman: False quantities in all around I see, yea we have been forsaken in the wilderness to gather grapes of thorns and figs of thistles.
Pollard: That’s possibly why the College is named for John the Baptist.
Jackson: John the Baptist was locusts and wild honey, actually, Pollard.
Pollard: It’s the Baptist School of Hard Knocks. First the Wilderness, then the head on the platter.
Housman: It was clear something was amiss from the day we matriculated. The statutes warned us against drinking, gambling and hoop-trundling but not a word about Jowett’s translation of Plato. The Regius Professor can’t even pronounce the Greek language and there is no one at Oxford to tell him.
Pollard: Except you, Housman.
Housman: I will take his secret to the grave, telling people I meet on the way. Betrayal is no sin if it’s whimsical.
Jackson: We did the new pronunciation, you know. As an Englishman I never took to the speaking of it. Veni, vidi, vici . . . It was never natural to my mind.
Pollard: That was Latin, actually, Jackson.
Jackson: And “Wennus” the Goddess of Love. I mean to say!
Pollard: Perhaps I don’t make myself plain. Latin and Greek are two entirely separate languages spoken by distinct peoples living in different parts of the ancient world. Some inkling of this must have got through to you, Jackson, at the Vale Academy, Ramsgate, surely.
Housman: But “‘Wennus’ the Goddess of Love,” for a man of Jackson’s venereal pursuits, is a strong objection to the new pronunciation — where is the chemistry in Wennus?
Jackson: I know you and Pollard look down on science.
Pollard: Is it a science? Ovid said it was an art.
Jackson: Oh — love!

Charon (Annabel Capper) guides A. E. Housman (David Greespan) across the River Styx in The Invention of Love (photo by Paul Lutvak)

It’s not the details that matter so much as the flow of the dialogue, which unfurls in pure poetry.

Later in the first act, AEH gets the opportunity to walk into his earlier life, meeting the young man he was more than half a century ago. While AEH recognizes the strapping lad, Housman does not know he is speaking with his future self. It’s a profoundly touching and evocative scene, distinguishing the hope, and folly, of youth against the reality of a long-lived life of learning. Referring to his Oxford days, AEH says, “I felt as if I had come up from the plains of Moab to the top of Mount Pisgah like Moses when the Lord showed him all the land of Judah unto the utmost sea.” Housman replies, “There’s a hill near our house where I live in Worcestershire which I and my brothers and sisters call Mount Pisgah. I used to climb it often, and look out towards Wales, to what I thought was a kind of Promised Land, though it was only the Clee Hills really — Shropshire was our western horizon.” A. E. Housman would eventually gain international fame for his 1896 poetry collection, A Shropshire Lad.

Stoppard also introduces us to Lincoln College rector Mark Pattison (Sam Bolen), art critics Walter Pater (Abrar Haque) and John Ruskin (Spencer Lutvak), Latin scholar Robinson Ellis (Lutvak), and master of Balliol College Benjamin Jowett (Leland Fowler), who share their views on education, class, and, as Jowett states, “the ideal of morality, art and social order.”

AEH disappears for much of the second act, as the narrative focuses on Housman’s growing fondness for Jackson and what is happening outside the Oxford environs. Journalists Henry Labouchere (Fowler), Frank Harris (Lutvak), and W. T. Stead (Bolen) talk about the power of the press, professor John Percival Postgate recommends Housman for a position despite their disagreement over Propertius, and editor Jerome K. Jerome (Capper), Harris, and Housman’s new friend Chamberlain (Haque) discuss the merits of the imprisoned writer Oscar Wilde (Bolen).

When AEH returns, he exhibits his disdain for the term homosexual to Chamberlain, declaring, “It’s half Greek and half Latin!” He also doesn’t care for the word because he never publicly admitted that he himself was gay, which is brought to the forefront when he meets Wilde, whose lover, Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas, coined the phrase “the love that dare not speak its name.” Wilde is everything that AEH was not, but their interaction, which is a complete fiction, as the two men never met, goes on too long, extending an already too long second act.

You don’t have to be a Classics major to fall under the magical spell of The Invention of Love. Five-time Tony winner Stoppard (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Coast of Utopia) is in complete control, glorying in the poetry of language and the science of literature, even as he gets carried away in the later moments. Six-time Obie winner Greenspan (Strange Interlude, Four Saints in Three Acts) is mesmerizing as AEH, a proud and resolute man who, sadly, was unable to live life to the fullest. It doesn’t matter that the words he speaks and thoughts he shares are ultracomplicated and often impossible to truly understand, because they roll off his tongue with such grace and beauty that you never want him to stop.

A. E. Housman (Yaron Lotan) is haunted by his love for Moses John Jackson (José Espinosa) in Stoppard play at Theaterlab (photo by Paul Lutvak)

Lotan (You Don’t Have to Do Anything, Dead Poets Society) is charming as the young Housman, holding his own in his scenes with Greenspan and leading the energetic ensemble. Espinosa (Our Class, The Merchant of Venice) exudes sexiness as Jackson, who is in love with life in a way AEH and Housman never will be. (In the 2001 Broadway premiere, Richard Easton won a Best Actor Tony for portraying the elder Housman and Robert Sean Leonard captures a Best Supporting Actor Tony as the young Housman.)

Elkind (James Joyce’s Exiles, If We Kiss) makes excellent use of the intimate space as the plot shifts from rivers and a track meet to a club and the halls of Oxford. Bridget Lindsay’s set, which also features several white benches and cleverly incorporates the pole that stands in the middle of the room, is lit by Paige Seber with soft touches of blue, purple, and yellow. Alyssa Korol’s costumes are appropriately Victorian era, although it is curious that all the men except for AEH are barefoot.

The play also brings added meaning to one of Housman’s most famous poems, “To an Athlete Dying Young.” When Chamberlain quotes from it, Housman gets upset, saying, “This is a revolting habit, Chamberlain — I forbid you.” Despite potentially upsetting both Stoppard and Housman, I will leave you here with the full quatrain that Chamberlain referred to:

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

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