twi-ny recommended events

THE PERPLEXED

Rival families try to find common ground in Richard Greenberg’s The Perplexed (photo © Matthew Murphy, 2020)

Manhattan Theatre Club
MTC at New York City Center – Stage I
Tuesday – Sunday through March 29, $99-$109
212-581-1212
perplexedplay.com

Succession meets Romeo and Juliet in Richard Greenberg’s The Perplexed, making its world premiere at City Center’s Stage I. The Manhattan Theatre Club production, which opened last night and runs through March 29, takes place in a stunning library in a Fifth Avenue mansion that has audience members gasping in delight (and jealousy) as they enter the space; the set, filled with books, austere furniture, and inviting nooks that disappear off into the wings, was designed by Santo Loquasto, who has won five Drama Desk Awards and four Tonys and has been nominated for three Oscars for his production design and costumes, most prominently for Woody Allen films. You are instantly sucked into this insulated sphere of the rich and the formerly rich, men and women dealing with who they were, not necessarily knowing who they are or who they will be.

Isabelle Stahl (Tess Frazer) and Caleb Resnik (JD Taylor) are getting married in the massive town house owned by her grandfather, the unseen, ridiculously wealthy Berland, who nobody seems to care for very much. Isabelle and Caleb have been destined to be together since they were six years old, but a rift over money tore the families apart until the two millennials reconnected on a subway platform twenty years later — how gauche! — and fell in love. The controlling and manipulative Berland is the father of the somewhat addled Joseph Stahl (Frank Wood), who is married to the elegant Evy (Margaret Colin), a candidate for City Council speaker; her red dress is wet and dirty from a stop she made at the site of a water-main break on the way to the wedding, and throughout the action the stain creeps slowly up from the hem. Their son, Micah (Zane Pais), is in med school but has also added acting in online porn to his resume. So much for the bride’s side.

Margaret Colin, Frank Wood, Ilana Levine, and Gregg Edelman play in-laws-to-be in MTC world premiere (photo © Matthew Murphy, 2020)

Caleb’s mother, Natalie Hochberg-Resnik (Ilana Levine), is a would-be social justice warrior not above delivering verbal jabs and none-too-subtle innuendoes, while her husband, Ted Resnik (Gregg Edelman), appears to be a pleasant, understated gentleman. “Don’t our children look too beautiful? Doesn’t it positively make you want to kill yourself?” Natalie says, to which Evy responds, “That’s not what does.” A few moments later, Natalie offers, “We can maintain an entente cordiale. For the kids.” Evy replies, “There’s never been a real reason for the rupture. We hate the same things. And the kids are so great. It would be a pity to make this evening worse than it already is.”

Meanwhile, Evy’s brother, the sarcastic, wry writer James Arlen (Patrick Breen), adds erudite commentary to the goings-on as former rabbi Cyrus Bloom (Eric William Morris), who will be officiating the marriage, is preparing his words for the ceremony. “I think you’re slinging a whole lot of bullshit here, James,” Cyrus says early on. “If I am, it’s not original to me, it’s what’s been passed down — heirloom bullshit,” James answers. It is clear that no one wants to be there with Berland as former glories, current enmity, and the stratifications of wealth threaten to crack the smooth social veneer. As the midnight nuptials approach, surprising past relationships among various characters are revealed and blood is spilled.

Richard Greenberg’s The Perplexed is about wedding that brings together two formerly wealthy families (photo © Matthew Murphy, 2020)

In Greenberg’s 2013 Broadway play, The Assembled Parties, one character says, “God is bogus, and religion a scourge. Still, I believe in something, though I’m not sure what.” The same thing applies to The Perplexed, which several times invokes the Kabbalistic concept of the broken vessels, which involves God’s light, good and evil, and repairing a shattered universe. Several characters think Cyrus can just spit out a biblical parable and all will be well, but that’s not quite how it works. “My friends started pointing out that I was using the word God a lot and wasn’t I an official atheist and would I please cut it out?” Cyrus admits. It’s hard to know just what the Arlens and the Resniks believe in. Perhaps it is all summed up by Patricia Persaud (Anna Itty), Berland’s housekeeper. “When we are foolish, it’s good that things hurt a little,” she tells everyone.

Efficiently guided through extensive changes during previews — there was confusion the night I went about the running time, which is currently officially listed as two hours and fifteen minutes with one intermission — by MTC artistic director and three-time Tony nominee Lynne Meadow, who has previously helmed Greenberg’s Our Mother’s Brief Affair and the aforementioned The Assembled Parties, the superbly acted The Perplexed is a clever and witty drawing-room comedy that journeys into the world of a privileged class trying to hold on after much of that privilege has gone away.

HOMAGE TO CHANTAL AKERMAN

Cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton will accompany text and film by her former partner, Chantal Akerman, in special tribute at FIAF

French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall, Tinker Auditorium
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
March 6-7, $7-$14 per event, $45 full weekend pass
212-355-6100
fiaf.org

FIAF is paying homage to the life and career of filmmaker Chantal Akerman with five special programs this weekend. Friday night at 7:00, FIAF will screen Akerman’s 2011 film, Almayer’s Folly, which was based on Joseph Conrad’s first novel, followed by a conversation with actor Stanislas Merhar and French journalist Laure Adler. On Saturday at 1:00, Akerman’s 2002 film, From the Other Side, about Mexican immigration in California, will be shown. The tribute continues at 3:15 with the unique documentary Chantal Akerman by Chantal Akerman, made for French-German television in 1997. At 4:30, the panel discussion “Chantal Akerman’s Legacy” brings together cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton (Akerman’s former partner), screenwriter Leora Barish (Desperately Seeking Susan, Basic Instinct 2), writer-director Henry Bean (Noise, Basic Instinct 2), actor, director, writer, and Akerman student Andrew Bujalski (Computer Chess, Support the Girls), and moderator Adler, with a toast at 6:00. The celebration of Akerman, who died in 2015 at the age of sixty-five, concludes Saturday night at 7:00 with “Chantal?,” a live performance by Wieder-Atherton, with works by Bartók, Janáček, and Prokofiev and originals set to Akerman’s written words and her 1968 short Blow Up My City, followed by a Q&A with Wieder-Atherton, Merhar (La Captive, Almayer’s Folly), and Adler. “I wanted to play along with her, her every move, her silences, her dancing at once burlesque and deadly serious, her anxiety as she is humming little tunes,” Wieder-Atherton explained in a statement.

THE LETTERS OF EFRATIA GITAI: A STAGED READING

efratia gitai

“IN TIMES LIKE THESE”: AMOS AND EFRATIA GITAI
MoMA, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Thursday, March 5, $8-$12, 7:00
Series continues through March 9
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
primolevicenter.org/events

In conjunction with the publication of the English-language edition of Efratia Gitai: Correspondence 1929–1994, MoMA will host “‘In Times Like These’: Amos and Efratia Gitai,” a series of events featuring the author’s son, award-winning Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai. Born in 1909 in Palestine to Russian Zionist parents, Efratia Gitai wrote letters throughout her life to Amos, her Bauhaus architect husband Munio Weinraub, and friends, sharing her views on the state of the world, from the Bolshevik Revolution and Viennese psychology to Churchill, Hitler, and kibbutzes. On March 5 at 7:00, Amos Gitai will introduce “The Letters of Efratia Gitai: A Staged Reading,” a ninety-minute presentation featuring Cannes Best Actress winner Barbara Sukowa (Berlin Alexanderplatz, Hannah Arendt) and Belgian actor and producer Ronald Guttman (Coastal Disturbances, Mildred Pierce) dramatizing the letters, which were curated by Rivka Gitai, Amos’s wife; they will be accompanied on piano by sixteen-year-old Yali Levy Schwartz. The series continues through March 9 with screenings of four of Amos Gitai’s films, Carmel, Esther, Berlin-Jerusalem, and Kedma, several of which will be introduced by the filmmaker.

CARMEN & GEOFFREY: A BIRTHDAY TRIBUTE TO CARMEN DE LAVALLADE

The life of Carmen de Lavallade and Geoffrey Holder is examined in low-budget documentary screening at Film Forum

CARMEN & GEOFFREY (Linda Atkinson & Nick Doob, 2006)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Friday, March 6, 6:30
212-727-8110
filmforum.org
firstrunfeatures.com

Film Forum is celebrating the eighty-ninth birthday of the one and only Carmen de Lavallade with a special screening of Linda Atkinson and Nick Doob’s 2006 documentary, Carmen & Geoffrey, along with rare footage of de Lavallade and Alvin Ailey dancing the ballet from Porgy and Bess in Howard Beach for a 1960 television show. Carmen & Geoffrey is an endearing look at de Lavallade and Geoffrey Holder’s lifelong love affair with dance — and each other. The New Orleans-born de Lavallade studied with Lester Horton and went to high school with Ailey, whom she brought to his first dance class. Trinidadian Holder was a larger-than-life gentle giant who was a dancer, choreographer, composer, costume designer, actor, director, writer, photographer, painter, and just about anything else he wanted to be.

The two met when they both were cast in Truman Capote and Harold Arlen’s Broadway show House of Flowers in 1954, with the six-foot-six Holder instantly falling in love with de Lavallade; they were together until 2014, when he passed away at the age of eighty-four. Atkinson and Doob combine amazing archival footage — of Eartha Kitt, Josephine Baker, Ulysses Dove, de Lavallade dancing with Ailey, and other splendid moments — with contemporary rehearsal scenes, dance performances, and interviews with such stalwarts as dance critic Jennifer Dunning (author of Geoffrey Holder: A Life in Theater, Dance and Art), former Alvin Ailey artistic director Judith Jamison, dancer Dudley Williams, and choreographer Joe Layton (watch out for his eyebrows), along with family members and Gus Solomons jr, who still works with de Lavallade. The film was made on an extremely low budget and it shows, but it is filled with such glorious footage that you’ll get over that quickly.

THE HOT WING KING

A close-knit group of friends prepares for a big contest in Katori Hall’s The Hot Wing King (photo by Monique Carboni)

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 22, $35-$55
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

Katori Hall’s The Hot Wing King is a tantalizingly spicy, robust and savory contemporary comedy that sticks to your ribs like only the best, well, hot wings. The play, which opened tonight at the Signature, has a familiar setup — a group of friends and family trying to win a cooking contest — but fresh ingredients and high style take these hot wings to the next temperature level. In Memphis, Cordell (Toussaint Jeanlouis) is getting ready to marinate 280 pounds of chicken for an annual hot wing contest, confident that he has a good chance of winning the $5,000 prize this year with a new recipe. Two months prior, he left his wife, kids, and job in St. Louis to be with Dwayne (Korey Jackson), an efficient and pragmatic hotel manager. Cordell’s prepping for the contest with his special team, the New Wing Order, which consists of him, Dwayne, the fabulously swishy Isom (Sheldon Best), and the basketball-loving Big Charles (Nicco Annan); the latter two men had hooked up once but now mostly poke fun at each other. Meanwhile, Cordell’s been frustrated by his lack of professional success since coming to Memphis, so the contest has become a benchmark for him. The Anchor Bar in Buffalo might claim that hot wings were invented there in 1964, but Cordell argues that his secret family recipe dates back to 1808.

“I ain’t move all the way down from St. Louis to be left in the house every chance he get,” Cordell says about Dwayne. Big Charles replies, “Number one, St. Louis ain’t all the way from nowhere. Two, this big old castle y’all done got fuh yuh self ain’t necessarily a cage, Cordell.” Cordell: “I gave up a lot for this. For him.” Big Charles: “And for yourself. You ain’t living a lie no more. Shackled by somebody else’s expectations of you.” Cordell: “Oh, I’m still shackled. Vanessa still ain’t signed them papers.”

EJ (Cecil Blutcher) and Cordell (Toussaint Jeanlouis) go one-on-one in world premiere play at the Signature (photo by Monique Carboni)

Everything is proceeding as scheduled until the drug-dealing TJ (Eric B. Robinson Jr.), Dwayne’s former brother-in-law (Dwayne’s sister tragically died), stops by to leave a package for his son, sixteen-year-old EJ (Cecil Blutcher), who soon arrives himself with two bags of clothing. The teen is looking for a place to stay, throwing a wrench into Cordell’s intensely managed strategy to make the wings. “Just know that when that bell ring we all gone be led by God’s will cause He gone guide us through the sauce and the fire for that whippin’ and whippin’ and whippin’,” Cordell says early on, but the Lord might have other plans.

Hall, whose previous plays include Our Lady of Kibeho and Hurt Village as part of her Signature residency and The Mountaintop and Tina: The Tina Turner Musical on Broadway (Hall wrote the book), was inspired to write The Hot Wing King by her brother’s relationship with his male partner and the real hot-wing festival held annually in her hometown of Memphis. Her dialogue is slick and smart (“I can smell shade a mile away — I’m a walking umbrella,” the gossipmongering Isom says), moving at an infectious velocity that practically sings; you might not understand all the colloquialisms, but they reverberate like music.

Dwayne (Korey Jackson) dishes out some advice to his nephew, EJ (Cecil Blutcher), in new Katori Hall play (photo by Monique Carboni)

The show is not specifically about gay men, or black men, or gay black men; it’s about four friends coming together to reach a goal, attempting to fight off various obstacles that are out of their control. Director Steve H. Broadnax III (The Hip Hop Project, Blood at the Root) keeps it all hopping on Michael Carnahan’s set, a comfy house with a living room, kitchen, upstairs bedroom, and outdoor basketball hoop. There are no women to be found here; this is a bunch of guys, superbly played by an outstanding ensemble cast that makes you want to hang with them as they goof around, needle one another, and, in the case of Cordell and Dwayne, explore their deepening but still new love.

The show continues through March 22 at the Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre; on Fridays and Saturdays, the Signature is serving Memphis-style wings (both chicken and vegan, with house beer); if you eat twenty in one sitting, your photo will be added to a lobby display so you can become a “Hot Wang Kang” yourself. “Everything always a contest with you,” Big Charles says to Cordell. But isn’t that true of all of us?

GRAND HORIZONS

Nancy (Jane Alexander) and Bill (James Cromwell) reevaluate their marriage in Bess Wohl’s Grand Horizons (photo by Joan Marcus)

Hayes Theater
240 West 44th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 1, $79-$149
2st.com/shows/grand-horizons

The opening scene of rising star Bess Wohl’s wickedly funny Grand Horizons is a masterpiece of simplicity. In a generic, pastel cookie-cutter home, an elderly couple, Nancy (Jane Alexander) and Bill (James Cromwell), are sitting down for tea. They both move slowly, saying nothing, their daily, dull routine instantly clear. “I think I would like a divorce,” Nancy announces peacefully. “All right,” Bill calmly responds as they continue doing what little they were doing.

Wohl’s hysterical Broadway debut follows such terrific shows as Make Believe, in which four young siblings are forced to take care of one another in their attic when their mother disappears; Small Mouth Sounds, which takes place at a silent meditation retreat where participants form a kind of temporary family; and Continuity, about the making of an action movie involving climate change in which the cast and crew function like a dysfunctional family.

Ben (Ben McKenzie) is less than thrilled at his father’s actions in Second Stage production at the Hayes (photo by Joan Marcus)

News of the impending divorce brings Nancy and Bill’s thunderstruck children rushing home to talk them out of it. The practical, workaholic Ben (Ben McKenzie) arrives with his pregnant wife, therapist Jess (Ashley Park), while Brian (Michael Urie) shows up alone, as he often does. A gay theater teacher, Brian is directing a cast of two hundred kids in a high school production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. But Nancy, a former librarian, and Bill, a pharmacist who now wants to be a stand-up comic, seem set on their decision, and as secrets emerge, Ben and Brian find themselves questioning everything they ever knew about their parents as they refuse to believe their mother and father can be serious.

“I thought it was kind of a good sign,” Ben says when Nancy and Bill appear to go to bed together, in the same room. “Sure, if you block out the part where they barely spoke to each other. And then your mom pretended to have dementia. And then your dad told a dick joke,” Jess responds. “No, I know, it’s insane, they’re children,” Ben acknowledges. The changing of places between the parents and the kids is at the heart of Grand Horizons. Brian brings back a one-night stand, Tommy (Maulik Pancholy), who becomes annoyed when Brian hesitates because of his family situation. “Lots of parents get divorced,” Tommy says. “It sucks when you’re like, eight. But you seem pretty middle-aged.” A moment later, Tommy explains, “They’re adults. They can do whatever the fuck they want.” To which Brian replies, “Are you kidding? Adults cannot do what they want. . . . The defining feature of adulthood is that you never get to do what you want. Children do what they want. Adults struggle to meet the needs of other people. Make a living. Satisfy a thousand obligations. And still fall short and wind up disappointing everyone.”

Wohl was inspired to write a play about gray divorce after some of her friends’ parents called it quits later in life, including director Leigh Silverman’s, after their fiftieth anniversary. (At one point, a distraught Ben declares, “I if you wanted to get divorced, you should have done it after we went to college, like normal people.”) Tearing down conceptions and expectations about sex, intimacy, and aging, Wohl (American Hero, Touched) and Silverman (Harry Clarke, In the Wake) share a keen sense of humor even as things get very serious. After Nancy makes a crack, the endlessly dreary and dour Bill opines, “What is she joking for? I’m the funny one. I’ve always been the funny one.”

Ashley Park, Michael Urie, Jane Alexander, and James Cromwell are part of outstanding ensemble cast in Grand Horizons (photo by Joan Marcus)

The ensemble cast, which also features Priscilla Lopez as a dentist office receptionist who also is trying to be a comedian, is in sync every step of the way; they seem to be having just as much fun as we are in the audience, relishing their antics on Clint Ramos’s pristine set (well, pristine until the end of the first act). Tony winner and Oscar nominee Alexander (The Great White Hope, The Sisters Rosensweig) and Oscar nominee and Emmy winner Cromwell (Babe, American Horror Story: Asylum) are exceptional as the divorcing couple driving a knife through their sons’ memories; it is a special treat watching them work together onstage, their years of experience taking the relationship between Nancy and Bill to another level. McKenzie (Gotham, The O.C.) and Urie (Torch Song, The Government Inspector) do a good job keeping pace with them as they occasionally bicker like an old married couple themselves.

I have to admit to a personal bias when it comes to Alexander. When I was a teenager, a friend and I were so excited to see her and Henry Fonda in First Monday in October on Broadway that we waited around to talk to her after the show. She appreciated our interest and invited us back to her apartment for tea, which I of course thought of when she makes tea in the first scene of Grand Horizons. That experience encouraged my love of theater and was one of the seminal moments that led me to the cherished responsibility of writing about the stage all these years later.

CITY WINERY PRESENTS: A CELEBRATION OF THE LIFE AND WORK OF HARRY BELAFONTE AT THE APOLLO

harry belafonte apollo

Apollo Theater
253 West 125th St.
Sunday, March 1, $58-$128, 7:00
citywinery.com
www.apollotheater.org

It should be a great night-o in Harlem when an all-star lineup of musicians gathers at the Apollo on March 1 to wish a happy ninety-third birthday to Harry Belafonte. Born Harold George Bellanfanti Jr. on March 1, 1927, in Harlem, the actor, singer, and activist will be feted by Maxwell, Common, Talib Kweli, Sheila E, Aloe Blacc, Alice Smith, John Forté, Gaël Faye, Mighty Sparrow, and the Resistance Revival Chorus, among others. Belafonte is best known for such films as Carmen Jones, Uptown Saturday Night, and BlacKkKlansman and such hit tunes as “Banana Boat Song” (in which he warbles, “Day-O”), “Matilda,” and “Jump in the Line.” All proceeds will go to the Popular Democracy Movement Center and the Harry Belafonte 115th St. Library. “The Popular Democracy Movement Center will give leaders, from the artist to the activist community, the forum to discuss, debate, and come to concrete actions that will direct national mobilization efforts,” Belafonte said in a statement about the organization. General admission tickets for “City Winery Presents: A Celebration of the Life and Work of Harry Belafonte” run from $58 to $128, with VIP packages starting at $350 and going up to $5,000 for VIP seating plus admission to the day-of rehearsals, backstage access during the performance, an exclusive after-party with the artists, and a signed poster.