this week in theater

THE MOOD ROOM

Big Dance Theater’s The Mood Room explores Reagan-era consumerism and more (photo by Maria Baranova)

THE MOOD ROOM
BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
November 30 – December 7, $35–$55
www.bam.org
www.bigdancetheater.org

Tickets are going fast for Big Dance Theater’s The Mood Room, coming to BAM Fisher’s Fishman Space November 30 to December 7. The sixty-minute world premiere, presented in association with the Kitchen, combines music, dance, theater, opera, and text, adapted from Guy de Cointet’s 1982 play The Five Sisters and Anton Chekhov’s 1900 classic The Three Sisters. In a program note, BDT cofounder, choreographer, and director Annie-B Parson explains, “Sometimes you find an artistic soul mate in the simple act of opening a book. This is what happened to me when I read the late 20th c. ‘plays’ of visual artist Guy de Cointet. You see, they are not really plays, they are visual events with texts that bask in the hot mess of the non-narrative posing as narrative — a state I would call living! Here is where de Cointet and I intersect: he is devoted to detours, departures, tonal shifts, and the unconfirmed. An atmosphere of codes, exits, and non-results permeate the writing. He quotes without substantiation or reason, he is a-historic, is liberated from achieving even a glimmer of resolution, and his authorial voice is intentionally cracking. His theater is both textual and visually based, without any hierarchy for language, truth, or the answer — and the physical objects in the texts have no stable meaning throughout the play. No one changes; no one learns anything.”

The multimedia piece takes place in Los Angeles in the Reagan 1980s of rampant consumerism and trickle-down economics. Elizabeth DeMent, Theda Hammel, Kate Moran, Myssi Robinson, and Michelle Sui portray the five sisters, with an experimental score by Holly Herndon, sound and recomposition by Mark degli Antoni, set design by Lauren Machen, costumes by Baille Younkman and Samantha Mcelrath, lighting by Joe Levasseur, and video by Keith Skretch. You should always expect the unexpected with BDT, whose previous works include Comme Toujours Here I Stand, Antigonick, and Short Form, and it sounds like The Mood Room will be no different.

NOLLYWOOD DREAMS

Sisters Ayamma (Sandra Okuboyejo) and Dede (Nana Mensah) are about to have a superstar travel into their lives in Nollywood Dreams (photo by Daniel J. Vasquez)

Newman Mills Theater, the Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space
511 West 52nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 28, $39-$88 (use code MCC)
mcctheater.org

“When your spirit is sad and you’ve given up / and you don’t know where to go / Don’t get down, turn around / Pick up that remote and tune into your favorite show!” So goes the theme song to the popular Adenikeh! talk show in Jocelyn Bioh’s Nollywood Dreams. The same can be said for the play itself, an appealingly sweet comedy continuing at MCC through November 28.

Nollywood Dreams is set in Lagos, Nigeria, in the early 1990s, during the rise of the Nigerian film industry, what would come to be known as Nollywood, named after Hollywood and Bollywood. Gbenga Ezie (Charlie Hudson III), who studied in New York City before becoming Nigeria’s most popular filmmaker, is holding an open casting call for his new movie, The Comfort Zone, looking for an actress to play the love interest of superstar celebrity and all-around hottie Wale Owusu (Ade Otukoya), a blend of Tom Cruise, Denzel Washington, George Clooney, and Will Smith.

Ayamma Okafor (Sandra Okuboyejo), a young woman who works in her parents’ travel agency, is determined to get the part despite her lack of experience. “This is my calling,” she tells her gossipy older sister, Dede (Nana Mensah), who works with her and believes that Wale is destined to be her future husband. When Ayamma arrives at Gbenga’s Nollywood Dreams Studios, she faces off against her main competition, established star Fayola Ogunleye (Emana Rachelle), the “Nigerian Halle Berry with Tina Turner legs,” who is willing to go to extreme lengths in order to get the role. But Ayamma is not going to just sit back and let that happen.

Director Gbenga Ezie (Charlie Hudson III) gossips with popular talk show host Adenikeh (Abena) in Nollywood Dreams (photo by Daniel J. Vasquez)

“Ah, I am so silly! How could I not see — you are perfect for the role of Comfort’s mother!” Ayamma snarkily says. After they read together, Ayamma tells Fayola, “I will never forget this day for the rest of my life,” to which Fayola responds, “That is nice. At least one of us will remember it.” When Ayamma later meets Wale, sparks fly, complicating Gbenga’s ultimate decision, as the movie-within-the-play is a ridiculously soapy tale that just might be based on Gbenga’s real life, echoing the relationship between him, Fayola, Wale, and Ayamma, which serves as fodder for Adenikeh (Abena) and her show.

Arnulfo Maldonado’s set switches back and forth between the travel agency, which features two old floppy-disk computers and posters of vacations to African nations, and Gbenga’s studio, which shares some of the same furniture while the walls are plastered with silly movie posters. The stage morphs into Adenikeh’s program several times, the central couch and chair moving forward toward the audience, with a backdrop where Alex Basco Koch’s projections play. (The mystery of the quick set changes is eventually revealed.) Abena is a blast as the talk show host, part Oprah Winfrey, part Wendy Williams, pronouncing her words very carefully — especially “Nigeria” — while wearing ornate African finery by award-winning costumer Dede Ayite.

Director Saheem Ali, who also helmed Bioh’s Goddess at the Public and overrated Shakespeare in the Park presentation Merry Wives, in addition to Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror at the Signature, Chris Urch’s The Rolling Stone at Lincoln Center, and Donja R. Love’s Fireflies at the Atlantic, takes just the right approach with the clever material, mixing slapstick comedy with sweet romantic flourishes. Bioh, who has appeared in such plays as Suzan-Lori Parks’s In the Blood, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Everybody and An Octoroon, and Jaclyn Backhaus’s Men on Boats, explores not only celebrity culture and Nigerian film but class differences and ethnocentrism in Nollywood Dreams. After explaining to a phone caller that the Serengeti is not in Nigeria, Ayamma says to Dede, “These white people.” Her sister adds, “Africa is a country to them, you know that.”

In a script note, Bioh, an MCC playwright in residence who was born in New York City to Ghanaian parents and grew up watching low-budget Nollywood movies as a child in Washington Heights, writes, “Many of the themes of these [Nollywood] films dealt with love or family issues but were layered in subtext about the political strife/temperature of the country . . . telling the story of the sad duality that existed in Nigeria at the time: live like the rich or suffer like the poor — there is no middle. One could say the same about America, but I digress.”

In her daily greeting, Adenikeh says, “Thank you for letting me bring love into your home.” With Nollywood Dreams, Bioh, Ali, and a cool cast have brought love into the theater, as we finally escape our homes and return to live shows, especially irresistible ones such as Nollywood Dreams.

IN THE SOUTHERN BREEZE

Four Black men from different times meet in unusual circumstances in Mansa Ra’s In the Southern Breeze

IN THE SOUTHERN BREEZE
Rattlestick Playwrights Theater
224 Waverly Pl.
Wednesday – Monday through December 12, $40 in person or livestreamed
www.rattlestick.org

The central section of Mansa Ra’s In the Southern Breeze, which opened last night at Rattlestick, is a compelling fever dream in which four Black men from different time periods meet in a kind of bardo, trying to make sense of their existential situation. Unfortunately, that narrative is framed by a moralizing, didactic story involving a contemporary Black man (Allan K. Washington) literally at the end of his rope, as he considers hanging himself, suffering from severe depression because of pandemic isolation and systemic racism in America.

“It’s so stressful being black. And I don’t mean in some hypothetical way,” he says. The confinement of lockdown is also getting to him. “I honestly have no idea what’s gonna happen anymore. It’s been a while since I’ve interacted with people. Like a super long time. I was already depressed before the ’rona. Everybody was freaking out about quarantine cooped up with nowhere to go. But I was glad. I finally had a real excuse for not leaving my apartment. I know a lot about isolation. It feels like the walls are closing in around you. All day. And all night.”

While he contemplates his fate (offstage), a barefoot man in tatters enters. Madison (Charles Browning) is a runaway slave, just trying to stay alive while looking for his wife. He is soon joined by Lazarus (Victor Williams), a sharecropper who wants to know where his family is. Next, a Black Panther named Hue (Biko Eisen-Martin) arrives, calling out desperately for his wife. And finally, gay activist Tony (Travis Raeburn) shows up fresh from a protest march. As a group they represent such societal ills as racism, homophobia, injustice, inequality, and disenfranchisement, in search of their identity, separated from their wives and children as so many Black men have been throughout the history of the United States. “Unnatural fo’ a man to be taken ’way from his family. Just unnatural,” Madison says. It is critical to note that there are no women in the play; they exist on the periphery, longed-for sources of strength and ancestral continuity. Emmie Finckel’s set is a series of ever-smaller white-framed doorways on lush green grass, the promise of freedom closing fast.

In the Southern Breeze looks at loneliness, depression, racism, and isolation

Earnestly directed by Christopher D. Betts, In the Southern Breeze’s frame story ends up feeling like a cliched diatribe of platitudes lacking dramatic nuance; what the man is experiencing is horrific, something that no one should have to endure, but it comes off as more of an intense therapy session. A rant about holes, from the noose to anal sex to the planet Saturn, feels forced and unnecessary. The body of the play is powerful; Mansa Ra (fka Jiréh Breon Holder) should have more faith in his audience. For example, there is a moment near the end that could have made a memorable conclusion, but instead the narrative extends with a coda that plots out too easy a path for what is a complicated future. One of the smartest choices is to never show an actual noose, serving as a potent metaphor for what has lurked dangerously for centuries.

In her essay “Moral Inhabitants,” which influenced Mansa Ra, Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison writes, “Our past is bleak. Our future dim. But I am not reasonable. A reasonable man adjusts to his environment. And unreasonable man does not. All progress, therefore, depends on the unreasonable man. I prefer not to adjust to my environment. I refuse the prison of ‘I’ and choose the open spaces of ‘we.’” In the Southern Breeze works best when it deals with the “we” as opposed to the “I.”

In conjunction with the seventy-five-minute play, which runs through December 12 (both at the theater and streaming live) and is presented in partnership with Black Boys Do Theater, the Boys’ Club of New York, the Eastern Group Psychotherapy Society, and the National Alliance on Mental Illness, Rattlestick is hosting a series of community talks, on November 22 at 5:00 (on Zoom, before the livestream, about safe and private spaces), November 28 at 4:00 (an in-person postshow discussion exploring the intersection of mental health and the political and social climate), and December 6 at 5:00 (on Zoom, before the livestream).

GENEALOGY: A SATIRE OF INCONVENIENT FAMILY TIES

Genealogy will stream for free from Wisconsin on November 19 (photo by Steve Noll)

Who: Broom Street Theater, Knowledge Workings Theater
What: Free livestream of Genealogy
Where: Broom Street Theater YouTube
When: Friday, November 19, free with RSVP (donations accepted), 9:00
Why: The latest play by T. J. Elliott and Joe Queenan of Knowledge Workings Theater is currently being performed live at Broom Street Theater in Madison, Wisconsin, but the November 19 performance will be streamed live, and for free, on YouTube. Directed by Dana Pellebon, Genealogy is about a podcast, Chasing the Dead, that one night reveals ancestral connections that shake up the guests, a pair of married couples, one a former football player and his activist professor wife, the other a homemaker and former prosecutor and her high-powered lawyer husband. The cast of the show, which is subtitled A Satire of Inconvenient Family Ties and delves into slavery and reparations, features Karl Reinhardt, Jamie England, Quanda Johnson, Atticus Cain, and Jackson Rosenberry.

MRS. WARREN’S PROFESSION

Karen Ziemba leads a lovely ensemble in revival of Mrs. Warren’s Profession

MRS. WARREN’S PROFESSION
Theatre Row
410 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Dyer Aves.
Through November 20, $73 (save $20 with code MWPGM)
gingoldgroup.org
bfany.org

Gingold Theatrical Group returns to live theater with a charming and delightful revival of Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession, continuing at Theatre Row through November 20. GTG artistic director David Staller adapted the script from several versions Shaw wrote as well as a proposed screenplay, resulting in a lighthearted, peppery satire of Victorian mores and societal prejudices that feels fresh and sprightly today.

Inspired by Henrik Ibsen and his own 1882 novel, Cashel Byron’s Profession, about a man who hides his profession as a boxer from the woman he loves, Shaw’s play is set in 1912 in a country home in Surrey. Vivie (Nicole King), who has recently graduated from university with a degree in mathematics and is preparing to work in the city as an actuary, is waiting for her wealthy mother (Karen Ziemba) to arrive. Vivie has spent much of her life in boarding schools and doesn’t know her mother very well, and it soon becomes apparent that there’s no father in the picture. They are joined by three friends of Mrs. Warren’s: the pompous aristocrat Sir George Crofts (Robert Cuccioli), the architect Praed (Alvin Keith), Rev. Samuel Gardner (Raphael Nash Thompson), and the reverend’s son, Frank (David Lee Huynh).

Crofts, Praed, and the elder Gardner are aware of how Mrs. Warren made her money, first as a prostitute, then as a madam. It’s possible that one of them is Vivie’s father, but that is not exactly preventing them from wooing the young woman with talk of art, romance, faith, and financial success. Meanwhile, Frank, a gold-digging gambler who has known Vivie since childhood, is in love with her, or at least with her money, pitting the men against one another even though Vivie has made it clear that she is ready to make a life for herself in London, unattached.

Vivie (Nicole King) and Frank (David Lee Huynh) consider their futures in Mrs. Warren’s Profession

Handsomely directed by Staller, the comedy of manners and equality plays out over Brian Prather’s lovely white set, consisting of a few chairs, several long steps in the center that evoke the ups and downs of class, and tall, lacy white shelves containing books and dolls, with drapes and ivy nearly swallowing it all up, nature infringing on this community of calculating machinations. Asa Benally’s dainty period costumes and Brandy Hoang Collier’s props add to the overall gracefulness.

The play caused controversy when it debuted in London in 1902 (after having been banned since 1895) and in New York City three years later, primarily because of Mrs. Warren’s profession, even though it’s never mentioned by name. It was written as a call for women’s rights, which still feels relevant more than a century later, as sex workers fight for legalization and respect and women have had to leave the work force in droves during the pandemic to do unpaid labor at home.

In her off-Broadway debut, King is terrific as Vivie, a forward-thinking woman who insists she does not need a man in her life in order to succeed. The men surround her like hungry bees, but she is not about to let them suffocate her; her strong handshake alone intimidates them, revealing her power from the start. When Praed praises that her mother did not raise Vivie “conventionally,” she replies, “Oh! Have I been behaving unconventionally?” He answers, “Oh no: oh dear no. At least, not ‘conventionally unconventionally,’ you understand. . . . When I was your age, young men and women were afraid of each other.” Vivie appears afraid of nothing. “In today’s world there’d be no stopping her,” Shaw wrote. Vivie later tells her mother, “People are always blaming circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.”

And just as Vivie is not about to make any apologies for the choices she’s making and the circumstances she’s creating, Mrs. Warren, wonderfully portrayed by Tony winner Ziemba (Contact, Curtains), is proud of her own past, doing whatever she feels necessary to rise up from her lowly beginnings. (The potent role has previously been played by Joan Plowright, Dana Ivey, Elizabeth Ashley, Cherry Jones, and Lilli Palmer.) “What’s a woman worth? What’s life worth? Without self-respect!” she says to Vivie. “Why am I independent? Because I always knew how to respect myself and control myself.”

Shaw addressed gender stereotypes in his long and detailed 1902 “Author’s Apology,” which called to task critics and censors who, he believed, missed the salient points of the play, including celebrating the title character. “The notion that Mrs. Warren must be a fiend is only an example of the violence and passion which the slightest reference to sex arouses in undisciplined minds, and which makes it seem natural for our lawgivers to punish silly and negligible indecencies with a ferocity unknown in dealing with, for example, ruinous financial swindling. Had my play been titled Mr. Warren’s Profession, and Mr. Warren been a bookmaker, nobody would have expected me to make him a villain as well.”

In the hands of King and Ziemba, and Shaw and Staller, Vivie and Mrs. Warren, each heroic in her own way, tower over the men, who are mere flies buzzing about. Shaw has nothing to apologize for.

FAIRYCAKES

FAIRYCAKES
Greenwich House Theater
27 Barrow St. at Seventh Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 21,
www.fairycakestheplay.com

I came specially armed to see Douglas Carter Beane’s Fairycakes at the Greenwich House Theater earlier this week. There wasn’t a lot of positive buzz surrounding the campy musical, and its initial closing date of January 2, 2022, was quickly revised to November 21, 2021, a fact unfortunately visible at the entrance. My companion for the evening was a good friend who swore by Xanadu, the Tony-nominated 2007 Broadway musical, about Greek muses in leg warmers on roller skates, for which Beane had written the book. If anyone was going to see the potential inherent joys in Fairycakes, it was her.

Alas, we both agreed in this case that Beane’s new show is a hot mess with a convoluted narrative that feels like a high school senior play, albeit with a handful of superb actors. The cast, highlighted by the wonderful Kristolyn Lloyd, is exuberant, probably because they truly love performing the material and not because they’re glad they have to do so for a much shorter period of time than originally contracted for.

Fairycakes is a chaotic mashup of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and classic fairy tales, written and directed by five-time Tony nominee Beane, whose previous shows include The Little Dog Laughed, The Nance, Lysistrata Jones, and Sister Act as well as the 1995 film To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar. The music is by Beane’s longtime collaborator Lewis Flinn, with corny, repetitive choreography by Ellenore Scott. The ornate, DIY costumes are by Gregory Gale. It all unfurls on Shoko Kambara and Adam Crinson’s goofy set, with a movable wooden doorway behind which characters sometimes hide (although depending on where you sit, their sudden appearance might not be a surprise), a tree stump, and a forest backdrop.

On a magical night, the bare-chested Puck (Chris Myers) waves an aphrodisiacal flower around the characters, creating unexpected romantic pairings involving Gepetto (Mo Rocca), Pinocchio (Sabatino Cruz), Cinderella (Kuhoo Verma), pirate Dirk Deadeye (Arnie Burton), Prince Viktor (Jason Tam), Sleeping Beauty (Z Infante), and Peter Pan (Jamen Nanthakumar). Meanwhile, Oberon (Burton) and Titania (Julie Halston) are in a fight that, if they don’t resolve, will lead to the death of their children, Peaseblossum (Lloyd), Moth (Jackie Hoffman), Cobweb (Infante), and Mustardseed (Ann Harada). Also flitting about are a tinkling fairy (Hoffman), a cricket (Nanthakumar), a mermaid (Harada), a changeling (Nanthakumar), Cupid (Tam), an evil stepmother (Nanthakumar) and her plotting stepdaughters (Rocca and Cruz), Aurora, Goddess of the Dawn (Verma), and Queen Elizabeth I.

Until a switch in the second act, everyone speaks in stilted, self-referentially cutesy verse with far too many forced rhymes, and the narrative veers off into confusing subplots exacerbated by the inability of Beane to use the actual names of the characters from Peter Pan, the legacy of which is carefully protected by the J. M. Barrie estate.

That said, there were people in the audience the night my friend and I went who were having a great deal of fun, especially one person sitting behind us who was snapping, calling out gleefully, hooting, and snorting in approval. I wish we were watching what he was watching.

TAMMANY HALL

Jimmy “Beau James” Walker (Martin Dockery) and Fiorello “the Little Flower” La Guardia (Christopher Romero Wilson) step into the ring in Tammany Hall (photo by Maria Baranova)

TAMMANY HALL
SoHo Playhouse
15 Vandam St.
Wednesday – Sunday thorugh January 9, $93.75
www.sohoplayhouse.com

Tammany Hall is a rousing immersive production that puts audience members right in the middle of a fierce political battle — in 1929, between incumbent mayor Jimmy “Beau James” Walker (Martin Dockery) and Harlem congressman Fiorello “the Little Flower” La Guardia (Christopher Romero Wilson). The exciting and high-energy show takes place throughout SoHo Playhouse, renamed the Huron Club; numerous rooms have been repurposed by Dan Daly, from a central space with a boxing ring where a debate occurs to secret offices, a theater, the rooftop, and a bar — it might be the Prohibition Era, but the drinks are flowing.

It’s election night, November 5, 1929, a week after the Black Tuesday stock market crash. Gentleman Jimmy is running for his second term, backed by the powerful Tammany Hall machine, pitted against upstart reformer La Guardia, who wants to rid city government of corruption, patronage, and graft. The outcome appears to have already been decided — er, rigged — since Tammany Hall is Walker’s home turf and he is surrounded by sycophants and supporters. As the audience, which has been given ballots, finds seats around the ring, various characters come up and talk to them individually; how you relate to these brief chats could lead to what story you follow and how involved you get. There are at least three separate threads; I highly recommend that people in your group head off in different directions to compare notes later, as one participant will not be able to see everything by themselves.

“We got to get through the debate,” Tammany Hall operative Olvany (Isaac J Conner) says to guests. “We got to let La Guardia have his say, but we know Walker will have him down and out in the first round. It’s really a done deal and I know we can count on you, right? Of course we can.” Team Walker also includes the mayor’s mistress, Betty Compton (Marie Anello), who wants to become a popular entertainer; her fellow performer Marion “Kiki” Roberts (Chloe Kekovic); gangster Legs Diamond (Nathaniel J. Ryan); the wealthy, connected “Battery” Dan Finn (Andrew Broaddus); pianist and musical director Smarty (Sami Petrucci); choreographer Ritzi (Charley Wenzel), Judge Joseph Crater’s girlfriend; and Tammany Hall fixture Curry (Shahzeb Hussain).

Virtually on his own in enemy territory, La Guardia tells onlookers, “It feels like classic Tammany Hall, this. This overbearing architecture and antechambers and club exclusive access — I can’t stand it. Sure, that could just be a personal thing, but politics are made up of people and people building buildings and people choosing to build buildings like this — to make people feel privileged for being allowed to see inside them, inside the club. . . . We should all have access all the time. To the workings. To the truth. All these curtains and panels and smoke and mirrors, that’s hooey. Simple, open, transparency. It’s not a lot to ask for.”

Meanwhile, Isidor Jacob Kresel (Jesse Castellanos) and Valentine (Natasa Babic) appear to be recruiting people for undisclosed missions. It all comes together for a grand finale in an illegal downstairs speakeasy.

SoHo Playhouse is transformed into the Huron Club on election night, 1929, for immersive production (photo by Maria Baranova)

As with nearly all immersive productions, the more you put into it, the more you get out of it. You don’t have to participate; the actors are trained to select those who show more interest in lending a hand and getting in on the act. I loved every scintillating second as Kresel’s right-hand man, helping him and the Little Flower in their attempt to take down Tammany.

The many rooms of the Huron Club, built on property John Jacob Astor bought from Aaron Burr on Van Dam St., are brought to wonderful life by Daly, with clever touches everywhere you look, many referencing gambling; the lighting is by Emily Clarkson, with songs by Gavin Whitworth, sound by Megan Culley, and fanciful period costumes by Grace Jeon, all of which makes it feel like you’ve stepped into 1929 New York. Created and directed by Darren Lee Cole (Fleabag, Killer Joe) and Alexander Flanagan-Wright (The Great Gatsby, Orpheus), Tammany Hall is a sordid tale of power, greed, and hubris that fits right in with our current political climate, perverted by the rampant questioning of the legitimacy of America’s electoral process and the prevalence of big money. The tall and wiry Dockery is appropriately dapper, smarmy, and self-satisfied as Walker, while Wilson portrays La Guardia with a fiery passion and determination.

Perhaps it’s all summed up best by Ritzi, who says near the end, “I need a drink. You need a drink? The bar’s reopened. Tammany Hall still stands.” But not for long.