this week in theater

CRYSTAL AND PIRNOT: UNIQUE MONOLOGUES ABOUT HOME AND FAMILY

Billy Crystal shares intimate stories of his life and career in 860 (photo by Avery Brunkus)

860
Imperial Theatre
249 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through February 14, $84-$499
billycrystal860.com

At first glance, it would seem that Billy Crystal’s 860 and Mona Pirnot’s I Became We could not be more different. The former is a solo performance written by and starring one of the most popular American entertainers of his generation, a Jewish comedian from Long Island, in a one-hundred-minute multimedia production with an exquisite set, playing to sold-out houses of approximately 1,450 seats on Broadway through February 14. The latter is written by a rising playwright from Sarasota, Florida, who put on original Christmas plays as a child and whose latest work is a seventy-minute relatively sleek and streamlined production featuring a choir of sixteen robed singers standing on risers, with a conductor and a pianist, running through November 22 in a Gothic Revival building that used to be an Episcopal church, to no more than 199 people.

But they are strikingly similar, two hilarious, profoundly moving, and intimate first-person true monologues about home and family.

Billy Crystal won a special Tony Award for his 2004 Broadway debut, 700 Sundays, recounting the too-short time he spent with his father, jazz buff Jack Crystal, who died in 1963 when Billy was fifteen. The play was revived in 2013–14 at the Imperial and filmed for HBO. Crystal returned to Broadway in 2022 with Mr. Saturday Night, a musical adaptation of his 1992 film, earning Tony nominations for Best Actor and Best Book.

Billy Crystal’s 860 takes place in a re-creation of his home office in Pacific Palisades (photo by Avery Brunkus)

He’s now back at the Imperial with 860, named after the address of his house at 860 Chautauqua Blvd. in Pacific Palisades, California, which burned to the ground during the January 2025 wildfires. Crystal uses the tragic event as a frame to look back at the building of his career and his relationship with Janice Goldfinger; the two met when they were teenagers, married in 1970, and have two daughters, Jennifer and Lindsay, who he calls “my little deductions” as a family Chanukah video is projected on the back wall. The set, by Scott Pask, is a re-creation of his office at 860, featuring a long desk, photos of him with family and famous celebrities, and treasured keepsakes, a room he refers to as “my sanctuary.”

He talks about college (“I majored in film directing at NYU School of the Arts — it had not yet been Tisched.”), his early days in comedy clubs (particularly Catch a Rising Star, where he met Richard Lewis, Andy Kaufman, Freddie Prinze, Richard Belzer, Elaine Boosler, Jimmy JJ Walker, Jay Leno, and others); his first paid gig, opening for Blood, Sweat & Tears in Scranton (which became a turning point in his approach to his craft as well as an unforgettable story in itself because of the bizarre antics of BSW lead singer David Clayton Thomas); his days on Soap and Saturday Night Live; making such films as When Harry Met Sally, The Princess Bride, and City Slickers; his dedication to the national pastime; and his long friendships with Muhammad Ali, Rob Reiner, Robin Williams, and Mickey Mantle. He regularly tosses in political bon mots, such as this one about the Vietnam draft, which is another powerful scene in the show: “I didn’t dodge the draft, the draft dodged me, not like those cowardly rich bastards who would pay off a podiatrist to lie that his son has crippling bone spurs in both feet and can barely walk.” Sure, it’s an easy, safe target for his audience and is probably not necessary, but you can never laugh too much.

But Crystal always circles back to his beloved house, from the naches he and Janice experienced when they first laid eyes on it to how it immediately was family itself. “Over the years, the house became part of us, growing and aging with us . . . literally. Every inch of 860 was something Janice and I added,” he says as video of a fancy Japanese toilet appears. “And the best thing . . . it’s heated. And not by the person who sat there before me.” The show is a technical triumph, with projections by Hana S. Kim and Kylee Loera, lighting by Jen Schriever, sound by Dan Moses Schreier, and original music and adaptations by Marc Shaiman; we are not merely watching Crystal deliver a stand-up routine.

He also shares some extraordinary coincidences about the house, including that among the previous residents were the Usher sisters, who now lived next door, leading Crystal to christen it the House of Usher, which also had an unfortunate end. “Was it luck that we found this house? Or is it fate?” he asks.

Crystal, who has won Emmys for hosting the Oscars and the Grammys, is, well, mahvelous as he sweeps across his life, in both celebratory and self-deprecating ways, understanding how fortunate he has been, though he worked hard for everything he has achieved. Director Scott Ellis, who helmed the 2022 revival of the baseball-set play Take Me Out, keeps it all flowing smoothly as Crystal steps up to the plate again and again, smacking singles, doubles, triples, and plenty of homers. The concluding scenes are heartbreaking as the family returns to the house after the fires, but Billy, Janice, Jennifer, and Lindsay continue to try to find the bright side amid such horrific destruction.

I am generally not a crier, but I had tears in my eyes, from laughing and weeping, as Crystal proves himself yet again to be an American treasure, revealing an infectious love of life in all its pain and joy.

A sixteen-person classical choir portrays playwright Mona Pirnot in I Became We (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

I BECAME WE
Atlantic Theater Company
Linda Gross Theater
336 West 20th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 22, $25-$131.50
atlantictheater.org

Mona Pirnot’s three most recent plays have been intriguing twists on the conventional solo monologue presentation, employing what she has called “avatars and theatrical ventriloquism.”

In 2024’s I Love You So Much I Could Die at the 199-seat New York Theatre Workshop, Pirnot sat at a desk on a sparse stage, her back to the audience as a Microsoft text-to-speech tool, a disembodied male AI voice, read her deeply personal story, interspersed with five songs she sang on acoustic guitar, without ever turning around.

In 2025’s I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan at the Atlantic’s 99-seat Stage 2, downtown legend David Greenspan portrayed four women playwrights, including a version of Mona herself, as they contemplate the lousy financial prospects of independent theater versus making big bucks in television; as my friend and colleague Loren Noveck so eloquently wrote about it in exeunt, “Mona . . . is not a true representation of the playwright of the play for which we have all shown up and suspended our disbelief, according to the prologue delivered from the playwright’s POV as a narrator one step closer to herself. . . . You wouldn’t go if you didn’t want to see the endless hall of mirrors that is theatrical polymath Greenspan playing himself playing Mona Pirnot playing four playwrights, one of whom also is and is not Mona Pirnot.”

And now comes the sensational I Became We at the Atlantic’s 199-seat Linda R. Gross Theater, in which Pirnot is played by an exquisite sixteen-voice classical choir, accompanied by Blair McMillen on piano and conducted by Jack D. Coen, who wrote the music and cowrote the lyrics with Pirnot. The intimate subject of the narrative originated after Pirnot watched a segment on Jimmy Kimmel Live! called “What Do You Know About the Female Body?” in which a woman asked men on the street questions about the female reproductive system. (In another convergence between Pirnot and Billy Crystal, the latter appeared on Kimmel on September 30 to promote 860.)

Lovingly directed by Obie winner Sarah Benson (The Welkin, Fairview), the show begins with the choir singing about the sketch, explaining, “I was laughing and not at all surprised by / What was unknown to these full grown children. / I mean it’s only the creator of their lives / yet / What do they know about the / They don’t know shit about the / They don’t think twice about the female body.”

The chronicle then focuses on how Pirnot and her husband, the extremely successful Obie-winning playwright and director Lucas Hnath, attend a backyard barbecue in Brooklyn, and they’re the only couple there without children. The choir sings, “Good thing I never wanted children. / Good thing I never wanted children. / Good thing my husband doesn’t either. / Good thing my husband feels the same. / Good thing we’ve always been so sure that we don’t want kids. / And that / will / never / change.” Soon Pirnot and Hnath are reconsidering several choices they’ve made regarding home and family in both poignant and hilarious ways.

Jack D. Coen, seen here with his back to the audience, serves as conductor, musical director, orchestrator, arranger, and co-lyricist of I Became We (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

The extremely successful Hnath has written such highly praised works as A Doll’s House, Part 2 and The Thin Place as well as the solo shows A Simulacrum, starring actor, magician, and illusion designer Steve Cuiffo and which Hnath also directed and appears in as a prerecorded voice, and Dana H., a true story told via Deirdre O’Connell sitting in a chair and lip-syncing to a recording of Hnath’s mother describing her kidnapping. In addition, Hnath directed I Love You So Much I Could Die.

So Pirnot and Hnath are used to putting their lives out there for people to see, and Pirnot digs deep in I Became We, sharing stories about crying at the Adam Sandler movie Click and her mother retiring to Bolzano. The choir explains, “Look around at what you have. Look at where you are. / You have hit the sweetest spot, in demand but independent, you have come so far. / Interest but no pressure in what comes next from you / You’re wanted by so many people, needed by so few.” As they grow older — Pirnot is thirty-five, Hnath forty-seven — she feels like something is missing from their lives and that they still have time to make important decisions that will impact their future.

In the play, Pirnot calls her mother “a genius.” Well, so is Pirnot. I Became We is a wonderfully touching, beautiful evocation of life and art and the choices we have to confront, particularly women but their partners too, even if they don’t know how many eggs a woman is born with or where the cervix is. (Pirnot admits that she didn’t know the answers to all of Kimmel’s questions either.)

The choir, standing on risers and wearing dark robes, is magnificent, singing in unison and breaking out into a few solos, with lyrical details that will often have you roaring with laughter and nodding in understanding. (It’s worth celebrating each member the night I attended: Alison Cheeseman, Nathan Fletcher, Mark Hanke, Oliver Holt, Heather Jones, Helen Karloski, Kathryn McCreary, Neil Netherly, Lily Hazel Nussbaum, Logan Pitts, Carrie Quarquesso, AnnMarie Sandy, Michael Steinberger, Gregório Taniguchi, Tyler Tejada, Elizabeth van Os, and Zen Wu, with set by Mimi Lien, costumes by Louisa Thompson, lighting by Tuce Yasak, and sound by Palmer Hefferen.) Coen also does a glorious job as musical director, orchestrator, and arranger.

Pirnot is a fascinating writer; like Billy Crystal, she is not shy about sharing her personal and professional thoughts and feelings about home and family, but in her case she hides her face or entire body from view, finding new ways to create heartwarming, entertaining, moving, and unusual theatrical experiences.

At several points in I Became We she laments constantly being asked, “What’s next??”

I won’t pose that question to her, but I can’t wait to see where she and Crystal take us, well, next.

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

MEMORIES AND DREAMS: THE MORBS AT A.R.T.

Jen Diamond’s The Morbs is set in a cabin in the woods during an infection outbreak (photo by Geve Penn)

THE MORBS
A.R.T./New York Theatre
Jeffrey and Paula Gural Theatre
502 West Fifty-Third St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Monday – Saturday through November 21, $31.75-$62.75
eggandspoontheatre.org
art-newyork.org

Jen Diamond’s The Morbs is billed as a cabin-in-the-woods comedy-thriller, but it is much more than that; it is a deeply touching and affecting story of female friendship amid the outbreak of a disease that forces people to reevaluate who they are and what their place in the world is.

In an indistinct time that feels like the present but with no smartphones — the script refers to it as “today, yesterday, or tomorrow” — three Theta sorority sisters are celebrating their fifth college reunion. Theta not only is the eighth letter of the Greek alphabet but also refers to the rate of decline of an option value as it approaches its expiration date, not unlike how human beings begin to decay at a certain time of life, starting at different ages and deteriorating at different paces.

Tatum (Emma Kikue), Trish (Rachel Ravel), and Wendy (Alexandra Templer) were at a reunion mixer when word came down that a man in Rhode Island had contracted the Morbs, an infection with no cure that leaves its victims either Hollow (empty inside but not a zombie) or Lethal (violently murderous). To get away, they hopped in Tatum’s Mercedes-Benz and drove through an oncoming snowstorm to her family’s cabin in the New Hampshire woods.

Tatum had lived there when she was younger, so it is filled with objects from her past as well as many memories. Her mother’s sister, Harriet (Jennifer Regan), a Hollow woman, stays up the hill, alone after her husband, Bill, went Lethal and ultimately died. She’s neither a zombie nor a simpleton; she basically just exists day by day, completing her tasks but with no emotion, no cares or woes.

Mimicking Covid, particularly at the beginning of the pandemic, there is controversy over how the disease spreads; Trish points out, “Our Council still thinks you can get the Morbs through the phone lines, sewers, photographs, dreams . . . stupid.” Meanwhile, Tatum is hoping it will be contained within a day or two. Of course, that’s not gonna happen.

Chris and Justin Swader’s kitchen / living room set is ripe for chills, overstuffed with photos, furniture, tchotchkes, and a general creepiness, highlighted by Tatum’s rather large ragdoll, Mary. On one side is a jukebox, on the other a tiny television that doesn’t get any channels but can play VCR tapes; the movie atop a small pile is Joseph Mazzuca’s 1976 not-quite-cult-classic, Sisters of Death, which features the tagline “An invitation to six beautiful women . . . for a deadly sorority reunion.” To up the ante, there is no bathroom in the cabin; instead, there is an outhouse near the water pump, meaning that the three young women are occasionally going to have to step into possible danger.

Tatum, described in the script as “a rich bitch,” has faith that her multimillionaire father, who has made tons of money off the Morbs, will be able to save the three of them by paying off guards at checkpoints so that she and her father can wait everything out in Aspen. Trish is a smart, sensible married mother of a two-year-old; this is the first time she’s been apart from her daughter and worries that “my mom friends in my mom group are gonna judge me so hard for this.” A high-powered professional, she also has a major deal to negotiate the next day. Wendy, who stuffed her backpack with cans of soup, seems to be in the middle of a personal crisis, living by herself and possibly jobless.

Wendy and Tatum were very close in college, but they have not been in touch much since then; Tatum is surprised that Wendy even came to the reunion, and now she is concerned about her mental health.

“Like, this whole trip she’s been so weird, right? Acting like a fucking stranger. It’s like, I’m here for you. I want to help — just let me,” Tatum tells Trish, who responds, “Our little hermit.”

As the days pass, things get only weirder and stranger, in wickedly delicious ways.

Tatum (Emma Kikue), Trish (Rachel Ravel), and Wendy (Alexandra Templer) look back at the past while facing an uncertain future in The Morbs (photo by Geve Penn)

Named after the Victorian-era slang for temporarily feeling depressed or melancholy, The Morbs is about a lot more than three women trapped in a cabin in the woods, facing a possible apocalypse.

Soon after the three Theta sisters arrived in the cabin, Wendy had them all do a Commitment. “I swear I am Whole, to the best of my knowledge. I carry no infection, nor suspect I was exposed. I am making a Commitment to myself and to society. I am making a Commitment to humanity itself,” they recite in tandem. “This Commitment’s not a burden, but a sacred contribution. This commitment’s not a sin, but a gift to those I love. If I am infected, I will give my life to protect the others. If others are infected, I will take their lives with love and grace.”

It’s a promise to maintain the social order, to take a stake in the world, to help when necessary, even in the extreme. It’s also a promise to be strong women; there are no men in the cast, and the only ones mentioned are either sick, dead, greedy, or not what they appear to be.

The play is anchored by an unforgettable scene in which Tatum, Trish, and Wendy get a little tipsy and start dancing wildly to the Cranberries’ 1992 hit “Dreams” from the album Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We?; it’s absolutely exhilarating, a moment of pure freedom as lead singer Dolores O’Riordan sings, “Oh, my life is changing every day / In every possible way / And oh, my dreams / It’s never quite as it seems / Never quite as it seems . . . / I want more, impossible to ignore / Impossible to ignore / And they’ll come true / Impossible not to do / Possible not to do.” (O’Riordan died in 2018 at the age of forty-six from drowning by intoxication in a London hotel room.)

Diamond (Someone Buried Polynices, Porn: A Love Story) and director Lily Kanter Riopelle (The Slow Dance, The Collision and What Came After, or, GUNCH!) slyly play with genre tropes, enhanced by Paige Seber’s eerie lighting and Brandon Bulls’s ominous sound, which ranges from the the whistling wind and snowstorm outside to the music from the jukebox. There are a few curious choices; for example, the jukebox is sometimes on in the background, but it’s so low the audience, and maybe the characters as well, can’t really hear it. When the women come back in from the outside, there is never any snow on them. And it’s unclear why Trish doesn’t ask Tatum to have her father’s assistant try to contact Trish’s husband to let him know where she is. But those minor missteps do not detract from the overall strength of the play.

Kikue (Disruption, God Said This), Ravel (benevolent, Fiddler on the Roof), and Templer (Entangled, The Strangers Came Today) are electrifying as the three sorority sisters, who, in college, had their whole lives in front of them but have already, in a mere five years, learned a lot more about the real world. Regan (The Wind and the Rain: A story about Sunny’s Bar, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf) is heartbreaking as Harriet, a woman robbed of her personality and individuality. The disease she has is not the equivalent of Alzheimer’s, but it’s similar, and something that terrifies the three younger women.

About halfway through the play, Harriet shows Wendy what’s inside her memory box. “Memories. Memory box. Lotta things in here. Things from me. Things from dead people,” she says. “Bill. Lynn. Lotta papers. Lotta old tapes. My old dad. Uncle Rob. The Dog.”

The Morbs is steeped in memories, those that haunt us, those that delight us, those that we’ve forgotten, and those that we hopefully still have time to make.

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

SUPERNATURE, HUMANOIDS, AND ORIGINALITY: MACHINE LEARNING AT MNN

Two couples get more than they bargained for in Kate Vozella’s Machine Learning (photo by Valerie Terranova)

MACHINE LEARNING
Manhattan Neighborhood Network
509 West Thirty-Eighth St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Through October 30, $52.99-$104.99
littleenginetheater.com
mnn.org

Australian playwright Kate Vozella’s Machine Learning is one of the most pleasant surprises of the fall season.

Presented by Little Engine Theater, a nonprofit founded in 2024 “dedicated to producing bold international plays in unconventional spaces,” Machine Learning is just that: a bold international play in an unconventional space.

The dark comedy is running through October 30 at Manhattan Neighborhood Network on far West Thirty-Eighth St., home to public access television and podcast studios. Set designer Tyler Herald has transformed MNN’s event space into a pristine, glowing living room/kitchen in a research facility, evoking reality-TV locations with chic furniture, a sleek, silvery refrigerator and sink, locked windowshidden by long curtains, a Persian rug, and numerous Akari lamps. Fluorescent tube lights on the floor separate the audience from the actors, except where there is an imaginary door.

The concept is classic futuristic sci-fi: Two couples have agreed to participate in a project in which they will live in this surveilled environment for three months, observed by humanoids behind unseen two-way mirrors. The four people are supposed to be as normal as possible in order to teach the humanoids about love and sex, food and drink, relationships, and everyday interaction.

Complications arise almost immediately when it turns out that Willa (Michele Selene Ang) and Lucia (Emma Ramos), who are married, will be sharing the space with Charlie (Douglas Smith) and Georgia (Delaney Rowe), who are not. Willa, an unemployed teacher, and Lucia, a writer putting the finishing touches on her latest novel, are unhappy about it, while Charlie, a sculptor working as an assistant to a famous artist, and Georgia, a psychologist, are more accepting of the idea.

It soon becomes clear that Will and Lucia are dealing with serious relationship issues, which makes living with another couple in tight proximity less than ideal. Charlie is a somewhat free-wheeling dude who goes with the flow, so he’s open to just about anything, while Georgia seizes the opportunity to use her mean-spirited (lack of) social skills to get under everyone’s skin, which she does with a fierce directness and scary glee.

Hovering over it all is a disembodied AI voice that apparently sees and hears everything, attempting to satisfy their basic needs — so much so that Charlie believes the AI might be flirting with him, which Georgia rejects outright, leading to this key exchange:

Charlie: Look, I just think that this stuff matters. When it’s good, when it’s real, when it’s human, art connects people, it makes them feel. You’ve gotta understand that?
Georgia: What do they feel?
Charlie: I don’t know, like we’re not alone in the world or like the world isn’t such a horrible, fucked up place.
Georgia: We are alone, though, Charlie, and the world is a fucked up place.
Charlie: So let’s just kill ourselves now then, shall we?
Georgia: You first.
Charlie: What’s wrong with you?
Georgia: Me? What’s wrong with you? Why are you still here?
Charlie: What? Because . . . wait, what do you mean? Why are you? I’m not leaving / because I —
Georgia: I’m not leaving!
Charlie: Do you mean the Program, or this relationship?
Georgia: The Program. Obviously.
Charlie: It seemed like you were talking about this relationship.
Georgia: Well, I wasn’t.

As time goes on, alliances shift, secrets bubble to the surface, and all hell breaks loose, putting on quite a show for the humanoid companions, as well as the humans in the audience.

Charlie (Douglas Smith) and Georgia (Delaney Rowe) have very different views of humanity in compelling play (photo by Valerie Terranova)

It’s not like we haven’t been warned. From Isaac Asimov and Rod Serling to Karel Čapek and Ray Bradbury, we have been cautioned in books, films, plays, and television series that artificial intelligence and robots are destined to destroy humanity, in one way or another. Vozella prepares us as we enter the theater; one of the songs welcoming us to our seats is Cerrone’s 1977 disco-funk hit “Supernature,” in which the French composer and producer advises (in lyrics written by Lene Lovich), “Better watch out! / There’s no way to stop it / Now you can’t escape / It’s too late! / Look what you’ve done / There’s no place that you can run / The monsters made / We must pay!”

The cast, in Karen Boyer’s next-generation costumes, is superb, led by Rowe in her striking off-Broadway debut; her portrayal of Georgia as a self-obsessed, seductive, no-filter critical evaluator puts the others on constant edge and drives the story. (Some viewers might call the character a sociopath.) Smith (Punk Rock) is appropriately scatterbrained as the gangly Charlie, Ramos (Scenes from a Marriage, Camino Real) is strong as the determined Lucia, and Ang) (What You Are to Me) is touching as the vulnerable Willa. Christopher Wong’s lighting and Liam Bellman-Sharpe’s sound immerse the audience in this odd, awkward world.

Director Colm Summers injects an engaging sense of humor into the tense narrative, soliciting nervous laughter along with some hardy chuckles and knowing grins from the audience, which is essentially a stand-in for the humanoids. The research facility is a metaphor for the theater, a place where people go to be educated and entertained, where thoughts and conceptions are shared that just might help expand our consciousness if we’re fortunate. Humans have always searched for companionship, and, in the modern era, technology is at the center of it all.

Vozella also considers what is original, particularly the creation of art, the birth of children, and the construction and development of robots. In one scene, the voice sends Charlie a note that asks him to define the word original. The two couples argue about its meaning. Willa says, “Could it be . . . the point she’s making is that nothing is really original?” Lucia responds, “Who says nothing is original?” Later, she adds, “We never know what life is going to throw at us; sometimes we have to adapt from original plans —”

If humanoid companions are going to be carbon copies of actual humans, well, we better watch out, but at least we have such original plays as Machine Learning in the meantime, before it all comes tumbling down.

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

LOVE LANGUAGE: THE KICK INSIDE AT HERE ARTS CENTER

Nicolás Noreña’s The Kick Inside was inspired by Kate Bush’s 1978 debut album (photo by Jose Miranda)

THE KICK INSIDE
HERE Arts Center
145 Sixth Ave.
Tuesday – Saturday through November 7, $10.50-$126
here.org

“I’ve seen some weird things recently. I don’t know what to make of it,” Alenka (Tatyana Kot) says in Nicolás Noreña’s The Kick Inside.

I love weird; often, the weirder the better. But not always. And in this case, I certainly don’t know what to make of it.

The Kick Inside is an exquisite corpse play — a surrealist concept in which collaborators add pieces to a work of art in sequence — written by Penny Arcade, Jess Barbagallo, Ethan Fishbane, Richard Foreman, Hillary Gao, Nazareth Hassan, John Jesurun, Marvin Just, Dhari Noel, Normandy Sherwood, Hayley Stahl, and Fiona Templeton. It’s named after and inspired by Kate Bush’s 1978 debut album, which features such songs as “Strange Phenomena,” “Wuthering Heights” (about Cathy and Heathcliff from Emily Brontë’s novel), and “The Kick Inside” (about an incestuous relationship between siblings that ends with the sister’s pregnancy and the brother’s suicide). Although the play is not about the album, it does touch on many of the record’s themes, including the heart, the soul, and the strange.

It opens promisingly with Just’s “The Cinema,” in which a group of people are sitting in theater seats onstage, watching the closing credits of a movie — or the audience, as if we are performing for them. As Bush’s “Moving” plays, the viewers start leaving until a weeping Alenka is alone. “Moving stranger, does it really matter?” Bush asks.

Over the next few scenes, we meet Baba (Benjamin Forster), Jeannie the Tech Witch (Yuki Kawahisa), the voice of Alenka’s room (Alenka Kraigher), Alenka’s cousin Frankie (Frankie Placidi), Angel (Essence Lotus), Felix the Dog Who Is Also a Man (Felix Teich), and SN (Timothy Scott). We travel to a locksmith, a library, a bar, a diner, and various apartments as the actors rearrange Sherwood’s sets, makeshift pieces of cardboard, curtains, and other materials.

The abstract dialogue and plot are less surreal than confounding; while cool scenes occasionally pop up, including at a bus stop and a dry cleaners, everything else is too random, like atoms dancing around but never connecting. Amid aliens and oozing innards, there are discussions of words and rules.

“Excuse me, I’m looking for books that speak of language as magic,” Alenka says in a library. Jeannie replies, “Careful, in such a world it is necessary to learn the trick of remaining with one’s mind full of trembling expectation, poised to seize on the first and smallest indication of something happening — just outside the realm of habitual consciousness.”

Alenka (Tatyana Kot) and Baba (Benjamin Forster) try to connect at a dry cleaners (photo by Jose Miranda)

Later, in a diner, Jeannie tells a waitress who looks just like Alenka but claims not to be her, “For a long long time humans have been contained by their inability to communicate with the world around them. Languages were invented for this very purpose.”

Unfortunately, such dialogue does not communicate well to the audience, which, the night I went, was struggling to figure out what was going on. In addition, too much of the action occurs on the floor, so most of the audience is unable to always see it. Sitting in the last row, I used that time to watch foley artist Marija Kovačević to my right, where she was creating sound effects like on old radio shows, although occasionally too loudly.

The Kick Inside feels completely random; it has aliens, a talking canine, milkshakes, and innards. It also has a convoluted continuity and a confusing raison d’être. I’m all for breaking theatrical conventions and experimentation, but not when it is so forced, not organic.

“I’ve broken the rules!” Alenka declares. “The allegorical undeniable. In the allegorical undeniable, I have a name. Alenka. And everything in my path-encounter is fleeting-unnamed. But at some point a phrase a description a condition became a name and so now you know you have a name — you have a name to me!”

Even Denis Diderot, Noam Chomsky, and Steven Pinker would be confused. And Samuel Beckett too, especially at two scenes that borrow his stagecraft.

The first act concludes with Alenka reciting Bush’s “Feel It” from her first record, warbling, “Oh, feel it, oh-oh, feel it, feel it, my love . . . See what you’re doing to me.”

In his 1997 bestseller, True Love, Robert Fulghum wrote, “We’re all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness — and call it love — true love.”

There might be others who feel it for The Kick Inside, but it was not true love for me.

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

SICK OF THE PROPER ATTITUDE: THE MINT’S PHYL AT THEATRE ROW

Jack (Anthony Michael Martinez) and Phyl (Lily Ganser) consider Edwardian morality in Cicely Hamilton’s Phyl (photo by Todd Cerveris)

PHYL
The Mint Theater at Theatre Row
410 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 7, $79-$95
minttheater.org
theatrerow.org

Phyl is a shining example of what the Mint Theater does best: find a long-lost play and exquisitely bring it back to life on a gorgeous set with lovely period costumes and a fine acting ensemble.

In 1913, London-born playwright, activist, journalist, actress, suffragist, and feminist Cicely Hamilton was scheduled to premiere her latest play, Phyl, at Oxford. Despite having been approved by the Lord Chamberlain, it was banned by the vice chancellor because of its scandalous content. “It really does not matter. All those Oxford small boys can run up to London any time they like and see something much worse,” Hamilton said. “The vice chancellor is merely expressing his own opinion of the play. He does not like it, and he is supposed to be entitled to exercise his mediaeval privileges in keeping it out of his preserve. At Oxford as soon as you cease to be an Oxonian and show a sense of humor you are barred.”

The play was briefly staged in Brighton, Edinburgh, Manchester, and Chicago before disappearing for more than a century.

The Mint, which presented Hamilton’s Diana of Dobson’s in 2001, searched for Phyl, which had not been published; the company eventually found the Lord Chamberlain’s copy in the British Library.

Hamilton shows a sense of humor and more in the fancifully written play, which begins in a posh country house and moves to a luxury hotel in the second act. In her off-Broadway debut, Lily Ganser is enchanting as Phyllis “Phyl” Chester, an unhappy governess serving as a teacher to two spoiled brats, Betty (Tessa Blimes) and Olive (Charlotte Van Ledtje), who thrive on being mean to her. Their mother, Mrs. Ponsonby (Katie Firth), is a snooty, wealthy woman who treats Phyl with disdain. Mrs. Ponsonby is trying to make a match between rich, handsome bachelor Jack Folliott (Anthony Michael Martinez) and her daughter Mabel (Livvy Marcus), but Mabel has eyes for Captain Maloney.

After Phyl’s older sister, Cathy (Jennifer Blood), an ultraserious and dour office worker, pays a quick surprise visit, urging her to keep her job and put away some money, Jack comes down to say hello and make peace between Phyl and the young girls. The kids go to bed, and just as Phyl declares to Jack about her sister, “I want more! And I can’t have it. I’ve got to live as she does, and grow to what she is. I’ve got to —,” Mrs. Ponsonby enters, upset that Jack and Phyl are spending private time together. Jack leaves, and Mrs. Ponsonby coldly dismisses Phyl, but not before Phyl gets her say, scandalizing the older woman with her outspoken response.

Jack returns, apologizes for causing a problem, and sensually feeds Phyl some pudding as they come up with a plan to rid themselves of the Ponsonbys, which gets complicated almost immediately.

Phyl (Lily Ganser) and Jack (Anthony Michael Martinez) think about their future in recently rediscovered feminist play (photo by Todd Cerveris)

Phyl is a delightful romantic comedy that deals with class, manners, and gender stereotypes. “I am sick of the proper attitude,” Phyl proclaims near the end of the first act. The play evokes Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Downton Abbey while feeling fresh and alive in 2026. It follows in the footsteps of such other excellent female-centric Mint productions written by women as Elizabeth Baker’s Partnership, Hazel Ellis’s Women without Men, and Betty Smith’s Becomes a Woman, the last also splendidly directed by Britt Berke. In Phyl, Berke expertly guides the characters around Brittany Vasta’s elegant sets, from a dark and cramped downstairs room where a window blocks out the sun to a wide-open hotel suite with a balcony where life goes on in the street below, teasing and tantalizing Phyl.

Alicia J. Austin’s costumes are basically black and white in the first half, then bursting with color in the second as Phyl’s relationship with the outside world fills with potential. The mostly female crack crew also includes lighting by Mary Louise Geiger, sound by Jane Shaw, dramaturgy by Amy Stoller, and casting by Stephanie Klapper.

Throughout the show, Jack calls Phyl “little woman,” not realizing that it can be construed as being demeaning. But Phyl does not feel like a little woman as she slowly gains agency while learning how to assert herself and say what she wants, fully understanding the situation she is in. The plot threatens to approach Pretty Woman territory but cleverly sidesteps it.

Ganser (Stereophonic) commands the stage as Phyl, whether dressed in mournful black or colorful haute couture. She represents a kind of everywoman, both in Edwardian times and today. Martinez (Titus Andronicus) stirs things up as Jack, a gentleman of privilege who is more than just intrigued by Phyl.

Hamilton, a former teacher who never married, died in 1952 at the age of eighty, having penned more than thirty plays, novels, and travelogues, including the influential 1909 How the Vote Was Won, which ran on Broadway in 1910, as well as the lyrics to the 1910 protest song “The March of the Women.” She focused on women’s economic freedom (for example, in her 1909 book Marriage as a Trade), an issue at the heart of Phyl, which kicks off the Mint’s “Let’s Talk About Sex” season; next up is Miles Malleson’s The Fanatics in February.

I’m ready for more pudding; how about you?

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

SHAKESPEARE, CONSPIRACY THEORIES, GAY PRIDE, AND GUNS: ANON AT MCC

Michael (Andrew Garman), Delia (Isabel Mar), and Jeanie (Crystal Finn) try to enjoy a family dinner together in Anon (photo by Monique Carboni)

ANON
Newman Mills Theater
Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space
511 West Fifty-Second St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 1, $49-$112
mcctheater.org

As you enter the Newman Mills Theater at the Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space to see Anne Washburn’s Anon, the preshow playlist prepares you for what is to follow. First is Neil Young’s 2016 “Monsanto Years,” an eight-minute anticorporate screed in which the Canadian rocker and earth activist ominously declares, “You never know what the future holds.” Next is Lee Greenwood’s 1984 right-wing anthem “God Bless the U.S.A.,” in which the California-born Republican proclaims, “If tomorrow all the things were gone / I worked for all my life / And I had to start again / With just my children and my wife / I’d thank my lucky stars / To be living here today / ’Cause the flag still stands for freedom / And they can’t take that away.” Rounding out the opening trio is Kacey Musgraves’s 2018 psychedelic country hit “Slow Burn,” in which the Texas native, whose progressive views are often controversial in the traditional country music establishment, sings, “I’m alright with a slow burn / Takin’ my time, let the world turn / I’m gonna do it my way, it’ll be alright / If we burn it down and it takes all night / It’s a slow burn.”

The set, by the dots collective, is a plain, ordinary, bland room with a table and chairs at the center, bare walls, and a front door. There’s no evidence of the type of people who live there: rich or poor, Republican or Democrat, native-born American or immigrant, white, brown, or Black, Jewish, Christian, or Muslim. It’s a tabula rasa, ready for action. And action it finds.

It actually represents two houses in a San Antonio suburb, across the street from each other, one occupied by Jeanie (Crystal Finn), her husband, Michael (Andrew Garman), and their children, Delia (Izabel Mar) and the unseen Leo, the other by the newly moved-in gay couple Adam (Jeff Biehl) and Will (Jeremy Shamos). Scouring social media, Adam discovers that Jeanie spends a whole lot of time in her parked car posting right-wing conspiracy theories on TikTok. She rants, “I’ve been seeing a lot of comments and posts from folks who are really starting to freak out about the timeline: Why is Fauci still free, when will Hillary Clinton face judgement, where are the arrests, are there medbeds, and the Storm, the Storm, when is the Storm already?? And I just want to say, folks: Trust the Plan means: Trust the Plan.”

When Adam and Will put up a gay pride flag, Jeanie becomes incensed, and Will buys a gun. Welcome to America in the 2020s.

Will (Jeremy Shamos) and Adam (Jeff Biehl) go down another rabbit hole in Anon (photo by Monique Carboni)

Feverishly directed by Obie winner and Tony nominee Anne Kauffman, Anon, which the script calls “a kitchen table play,” takes its title from multiple sources, including QAnon and the anonymity that the internet can provide. The cast, led by a frenetic Finn, is fantastic, spreading throughout the political spectrum. Washburn delves not only into tolerance, freedom, and diversity but into the responsibility of parents, the needs of their children, and whether JFK Jr. is destined to become our next president. It’s a swirl of RINOs, libtards, MAGAts, online rabbit holes, and hating your neighbor, as Washburn and Kauffman create an almost too-real atmosphere in which people on opposing sides don’t actually speak to each other face-to-face. In later scenes, the two families’ lives intersect when they are in the house at the same time, although they don’t see one another.

The use of projections for texting and posting are overdone and the plot goes off on a few tangents, but Anon is a whipsmart, funny, and frightening foray into our immediate future, and it isn’t pretty. There’s also a significant amount of Shakespeare, as Delia is given a school assignment to write a soliloquy for a Bard character who doesn’t have one, a metaphor for how so many of us go on social media and deliver our own monologues, some in anonymity, some seeking to go viral.

As the third witch says in the first scene in Macbeth, “Anon!”

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

BRINGING DOWN THE HOUSE: PERICLES IN A BED-STUY CHURCH

PERICLES: IN CONCERT
Concord Baptist Church of Christ
833 Marcy Ave.
Monday, October 26, $33.85-$55.20
eventbrite.com
fireensemble.com

Last year I saw a rousing concert production of William Shakespeare’s Pericles inside the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, part of the Public Theater’s Public Works initiative. I wrote that it “features music and lyrics by Troy Anthony, a first for someone nurtured through Public Works; the score is an intoxicating mix of gospel, blues, ballads, R&B, and spirituals, at times turning St. John the Divine into a revival meeting. . . . The choreography is by Tiffany Rea-Fisher, who transforms a jousting tournament into a hip-hop dance battle. . . . There’s so much passion and energy on the stage that you just might forget that Pericles is not a very good play; a case has been made that the first two acts were actually written by pamphleteer and innkeeper George Wilkins. The story involves incest, pirates, child prostitution, resurrection, and betrayal as Pericles, the prince of Tyre, escapes the wrath of Antiochus and ventures to Tarsus, Pentapolis, and Ephesus, leaving behind his dead wife, Thaisa, and infant daughter, Marina. . . . Tony nominee Crystal Lucas-Perry brings the house down over and over again as Gower, the narrator, lustrous in a glorious white gown.”

A slightly different version of the show is being presented October 26 at the Concord Baptist Church of Christ in Bed-Stuy, codirected by Anthony and Rea-Fisher and performed by the ninety-person Fire Ensemble, “an intergenerational pop-up choir community that centers BIPOC and queer folx.” Lucas-Perry is reprising her role as Gower; the cast also includes Aisha Jackson, John-Michael Lyles, Jason Veasey, Jaime Cepero, Genesis Adelia Collado, Amina Faye, Treston Henderson, Ava Jones, Cal Mitchell, Dominique Smith, STONES, Cartreze Tucker, Matthew Elijah Webb, Samantha Williams, and Stephen Scott Wormley. Ticket prices range from pay-what-you-can in the balcony to $55.20 for front orchestra seats to see this special show.

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