this week in theater

AUTUMN ROYAL

Life is not exactly looking up for Timmy (John Keating) and May (Maeve Higgins) in Autumn Royal (photo by Carol Rosegg)

AUTUMN ROYAL
Irish Repertory Theatre, Francis J. Greenburger Mainstage
132 West 22nd St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 21, $50-$70
212-727-2737
irishrep.org

It was with a bittersweet wistfulness that I entered the Irish Rep for the first time in more than a year and a half. During the pandemic lockdown, the company was at the global forefront of digital theater, presenting more than a dozen outstanding livestreamed and recorded shows online, using cutting-edge technology that went far beyond Zoom boxes and clumsy green-screening. (Among the best were The Weir, Bill Irwin’s On Beckett / In Screen, and The Cordelia Dream; twelve of the shows are still available on demand.) Of course, I was excited to be back at the Francis J. Greenburger Mainstage on West Twenty-Second St. for a matinee, greeted by masked founding directors Charlotte Moore and Ciarán O’Reilly as I made my way in to sit with an audience of real people rather than virtual avatars Zooming in from home.

The Irish Rep has brilliantly reopened with the North American premiere of Kevin Barry’s Autumn Royal, a charming two-character, seventy-minute dark comedy that takes place on a claustrophobic set, an oddly appropriate reminder of the lockdown. The walls seem to be closing in on May (Maeve Higgins) and Timothy (John Keating), a pair of thirtysomething siblings who are caregivers for their ailing father, who lives upstairs in the attic. Charlie Corcoran’s set consists of a small table, two chairs, a doorway leading out of the house, and stairs to the attic, which appear ridiculously small and narrow, practically untenable. It’s as if May and Timmy are trapped, not only in their quaint Cork City home, but in the past, still reeling from their mother’s sudden departure when they were young. (“Went out for a packet o’ Birds custard and never came back,” Timmy recalls.)

Timmy dreams of moving to Australia to become a surfer, while May is much more realistic in their lack of options. She counters his talk of riding a wave with a detailed description of a local woman whose mother fell into a fireplace and “half the face melted off her.” It’s as if they’re fire and water, opposites who need each other.

Their father is never seen — it’s like he’s quarantining — but is occasionally heard, and every once in a while he bangs on the floor, sending dust and crumbling parts of the ceiling down on his grown children, who are not particularly fond of a poem he is writing about a duck walking across a puddle. However, the three of them bond over the 1982 song “Zoom” by Fat Larry’s Band, which Timmy blasts from an old boombox, on cassette. (Yes, even the name of the song evokes virtual theater, even though the play was first performed in Cork in 2017.)

May and Timmy share memories with little thought of their future. “I remember fucking everything,” May proclaims. A moment later, she adds, “We’re never going to get past ourselves here, Tim.” Timmy replies, “I’m definitely going to Australia, May. All I need is to have, like, two grand, I think is it?, in the, am . . .” She shoots back, “Timmy? You’re not going to make it as far as the Esso station.”

A haunting darkness hovers over a sister and brother in Irish drama (photo by Carol Rosegg)

They start to believe that their lives might be different if they put their father in a nursing home, but whenever they start thinking about how things can improve, their discussions turn sour. “All we’re doin’ now is talkin’ ourselves into a very dark read o’ things, yunno?” Timmy says. “Ah, the world sometimes is just complete . . . fucken . . . bollocks, like,” May opines. No matter which way they turn, regardless of their desires, they just seem to end up stuck back at home, their parents practically ghosts haunting their lives.

Directed by O’Reilly (The Weir, The Emperor Jones) with a deft touch, Autumn Royal features projections by Dan Scully, sometimes of blood covering a wall, while others evoke the siblings as kids in the back of a car on a Sunday drive to Tipperary, a beach scene, the silhouette of a mysterious woman, white picture frames, and, repeatedly, a loud washing machine, the spin cycle representing the inner chaos and repetition of their existence, just going around in circles. Keating (The O’Casey Cycle, Pericles) — a true New York theater treasure — and Higgins (Extra Ordinary, Naked Camera) deliver a terrific one-two punch as the arguing siblings, he tall, gangly, and comical, she short, tough, and harder-edged. They each get long monologues, but they really shine when they are both onstage, playing off each other like a classic comedy team, one goofy and wide-eyed, the other harshly direct and to the point. In his first stage work, novelist and short story writer Barry (Beatlebone, City of Bohane) adds a healthy dose of Irish doom and gloom to a common situation, one that hits a little closer to home in the time of Covid.

THEATER OF WAR: TAPE

Who: Tracie Thoms, David Denman, Nyasha Hatendi, Bryan Doerries, more
What: Livestreamed play reading followed by community discussion
Where: Theater of War Productions Zoom
When: Thursday, October 21, free with advance RSVP, 7:00
Why: Theater of War’s live presentations of play readings followed by community discussions continue October 21 with an investigation into consent, power dynamics, and sexual assault. The evening begins with a dramatic reading of scenes from Stephen Belber’s 1999 play, Tape, about two friends who meet with a woman one of them might have date raped back in high school; it was made into a 2001 film by Richard Linklater starring Ethan Hawke, Robert Sean Leonard, and Uma Thurman. The reading will be performed by Tracie Thoms, David Denman, and Nyasha Hatendi, helmed by Theater of War artistic director Bryan Doerries. Immediately following the reading, Doerris will facilitate a discussion held in conjunction with Go Purple Day.

“Awareness is the first defense against domestic violence, and every year, with NYC Go Purple, we keep this important issue in front of New Yorkers,” Mayor’s Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence commissioner Cecile Noel said in a statement. “Domestic violence awareness and prevention is not confined to one day of the year. NYC Go Purple reminds us that, every day, every New Yorker can play an important role in ending domestic violence.”

On October 28, Doerries will speak with author Margaret Atwood about social activism and his new translation of the Oedipus Trilogy; on October 27, David Patrick Kelly, Glenn Davis, Amy Ryan, David Strathairn, Marjolaine Goldsmith, and Jumaane Williams will perform Oedipus the King, followed by a discussion on the pandemic and the climate crisis hosted by the University of Notre Dame as part of its “Care for Our Common Home: Just Transition to a Sustainable Future” forum.

THE FEVER

Wallace Shawn’s The Fever continues at the Minetta Lane through October 24 (photo © Daniel Rader 2021)

THE FEVER
Minetta Lane Theatre
18 Minetta Lane between Sixth Ave. and MacDougal St.
Tuesday – Sunday through October 24, $56
www.audible.com

About two-thirds of the way through The Fever, Wallace Shawn’s one-person play being revived at the Minetta Lane, two audience members siting at the front right got up to walk out. Star Lili Taylor paused her monologue but stayed in character as she told the audience she would wait for the two women to leave. They exited slowly, apparently unaware the show had stopped, hoping to sneak out unnoticed. Wryly smiling, Taylor announced that this would be a good time for anyone else thinking of leaving to head for the exits. Wisely, no one took her up on her offer.

The Fever premiered at the Public in 1991, winning an Obie for Best New American Play. The New Group brought it back in 2007 at Theatre Row; Shawn played the unnamed lead both times. Vanessa Redgrave starred in Carlo Gabriel Nero’s 2004 film version. Now the New Group, in conjunction with Audible, is presenting a limited run, with the innately appealing and engaging Taylor as the traveler, a woman sharing tales of vacationing in banana republics. Although you can imagine how Shawn would have delivered the lines, in a much more wild and snarky way, Taylor is exquisite, like a dear friend sitting down with you and talking over tea and finger sandwiches. The writing and performance are so vivid, you’ll feel like you’re on these trips with her, seeing and experiencing exactly what she is seeing and experiencing.

The show is again directed by New Group founding artistic director Scott Elliott, with a light, amiable hand. A masked Taylor arrives in the theater huffing and puffing, running down the aisle and wriggling onto Arnulfo Maldonado’s set. She puts down flowers and coffee, just as so many of us do regularly when we come home, and begins to wheel out furniture on the otherwise barren stage — a lamp, a comfy chair, an end table with two doors. (The cozy lighting is by Cha See.)

“Okay, so it’s great to see all of you. I mostly see your eyes, obviously, but that’s a very beautiful part of any human being — or animal,” she says, welcoming us into her world. “I don’t know how many of you have dogs, but I love the eyes of dogs in particular. Anyway, as you can see, I’m sort of setting up a very small room here. It’s really just suggestive of a room; I’m not trying to convince you that it’s a real room, but it’s useful to represent a room just to help tell the story I’m going to tell you, and also, I don’t know, I think a completely bare stage can sometimes create a sort of almost threatening atmosphere, as if someone were saying, you know, ‘Don’t get too comfortable, there won’t be anything charming or attractive in the course of our evening at all,’ whereas I find these little bits of furniture quite pleasant and nice.’”

She immediately takes us into her confidence, and we’re on her side, identifying with her thoughts about travel, politics, and art. She seems to care about people in need, and we at first forgive her for certain views that sneak into her story. She notes that she goes to “poor countries” where they don’t speak her language, words that begin to make us uncomfortable as they’re repeated, almost like a mantra. Soon she is emphasizing dichotomies of income inequality: She looks at the helpless people across the street in a shelter as she eats in a fancy restaurant. Recalling how an office worker detailed cases of political murder, torture, and rape sponsored by the government, she remembers her parents teaching her how to properly go to the bathroom, wash her hands, and brush her teeth. She describes a wealthy old man spending a ton of money to keep himself alive as he’s dying, paying for all kinds of special treatments, a direct comparison to an execution by injection she recounted earlier. She prances about on a nude beach while so many in the world can’t afford proper clothing and shelter.

Lili Taylor stars as a well-off traveler sharing vacation stories in The Fever (photo © Daniel Rader 2021)

She admits that she has lived in towns “whose streets ran with the blood of good-hearted victims,” but she still loves the violin and Beethoven. “I like to go out at night in a cosmopolitan city and sit in a dark auditorium watching dancers fly into each other’s arms,” she says, turning a mirror on just about everyone in the theater. She sees The Cherry Orchard with friends but doesn’t understand why she was supposed to be weeping by the end.

Where we were previously nodding in agreement with the traveler, we become taken aback as she starts criticizing poor people for depriving her of the fun she used to have. “I’d always said, ‘I’m a happy person. I love life,’ but now there was a sort of awful indifference or blankness that was coming from somewhere inside me and filling me up, bit by bit,” she complains. “Things that would once have pleased me or even delighted me seemed to go dead on me, to spoil. But my problem was that somehow, suddenly, I was not myself. I was disconcerted.” She turns so sad that she can’t even give her family presents anymore, and it isn’t long before she is blaming the poor.

Our comfort level continues to decrease when she proclaims, “Yes, I’m an aesthete. I like beauty. Yes — poor countries are beautiful. Poor people are beautiful. It’s a wonderful feeling to have money in a country where most people are poor, to ride in a taxi through horrible slums.” She rationalizes why she is not going to give all the money in her purse to a beggar, arguing that she worked hard for that money. “I’m entitled to be served, I’m entitled to expect that certain things will be done. Which means that the holders of money determine what happens in the world,” she says.

Ah, there it is; the truth comes out, and it’s not easy for a liberal New York City audience to hear. Years before the subprime mortgage crisis, before President George W. Bush called his base “the haves and the have-mores,” before the immigration crisis reached epic proportions, before corporations as people were awarded First Amendment rights, Shawn spotlighted the privileged, the growing income gap, and the personal justifications necessary to maintain some agreeable level of inequality by people on both sides of the aisle.

Taylor (Six Feet Under, Household Saints), who played Lemon in the New Group’s 2004 revival of Shawn’s 1985 examination of civilization, Aunt Dan and Lemon — and was mesmerizing reprising the role with the rest of the original cast in a streaming Zoom version during the pandemic — is a warm, affectionate actor, and she excels as the traveler, setting us up for a reevaluation of our personal belief systems, of what we deem important and unavoidable on a beautiful planet where ugliness awaits just around the corner. We can’t help but like her, and in liking her — at least in part because we identify so closely with her — we give her character the benefit of the doubt.

As Pogo said in a 1971 Earth Day comic, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Perhaps that’s why those two women got up and left before the play was over.

PERICLES 2021

Who: Red Bull Theater
What: Online reading and discussions about Shakespeare’s Pericles
Where: Red Bull Theater YouTube and Facebook
When: Livestreamed events October 4, 11, 18, 25, 28, free with advance RSVP
Why: Last year Red Bull Theater presented “Othello 2020,” a deep dive into the Shakespeare tragedy through performances and discussions. This year Red Bull is digging into one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known works, Pericles, about the Prince of Tyre, who sets out on a series of adventures when the answer to a riddle goes awry. In a statement, Red Bull founding artistic director Jesse Berger explains, “Shakespeare’s Pericles is at the heart and soul of Red Bull in many ways: our founding play, Jacobean in period, hopeful in spirit, and about the power of imagination at its core. ‘It hath been used as restoratives,’ the poet Gower says right at the beginning of the play. To me, this play is about restoring hope and peace after a period of turmoil and tragedy. I’ve always loved the idea of this play as a hero journey, and a play about the healing power of storytelling itself. As the play that began the life of our theater company, it seems most appropriate that we explore this play anew, continuing our journey — toward our twentieth year of existence as a company, reemerging out of the pandemic shutdown, and inviting new voices to be in creative conversation with the play and the Western classical canon.”

Red Bull’s inaugural production, in 2003, featured Daniel Breaker in the title role, with Raphael Nash Thompson as Gower and Cerimon; on October 4, Thompson, who also portrayed Gower in Sir Trevor Nunn’s version at TFANA in 2016, performed the prologue “To sing a song that old was sung” and discussed the play in a RemarkaBULL Podversation with Red Bull associate artistic director Nathan Winkelstein that you can watch here. “Exploring Pericles in 2021” began on October 11 and continues October 18, with BIPOC artists Grantham Coleman, Kimberly Chatterjee, Callie Holly, Mahira Kakkar, Jordan Mahome, Anthony Michael Martinez, Clint Ramos, Kenny Ramos, Madeline Sayet, and Craig Wallace delving into what Pericles means today. On October 25, Kent Gash will direct a livestreamed benefit reading of the play, with Coleman as Pericles. The programming concludes October 28 with an interactive Bull Session featuring Gash, scholar Noémie Ndiaye, and members of the company.

“Over the last two decades, Pericles has been produced around the world more often than in the entire twentieth century,” writes Ndiaye, an assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago. “The play was wildly popular in its own time, and it is now poised to become one of the twenty-first century favorite rediscovered Shakespearean plays. It may have caught the attention of contemporary theatermakers invested in diversifying Shakespeare in part because its geographical location, which moves between ancient Lebanon, Turkey, Libya, and Greece, makes it suitable for cross-cultural multiracial casting. And, certainly Pericles is a fertile terrain for racial investigation. Yet at the same time, the play’s consistent characterization of ‘fairness’ (a word used twenty-three times) as the feminized object of Pericles’s desire and the curative means of his salvation frames his journey as a romantic quest for whiteness and white world-making at the dawn of modernity. It is that fraught and complex racial terrain with which contemporary theatermakers must reckon when they stage Pericles today, finding new creative ways of doing Shakespeare better, Shakespeare with us and for us.”

CHICKEN & BISCUITS

A family gathers to say farewell to its patriarch in madcap Chicken & Biscuits (photo © Emilio Madrid)

Circle in the Square Theatre
1633 Broadway at 50th St.
Through January 2, $69.50
chickenandbiscuitsbway.com

I was in serious need of some unabashed laughter when I entered Circle in the Square last week, and that’s precisely what writer Douglas Lyons, director Zhailon Levingston, and a fab cast of eight delivered with the madcap comedy Chicken & Biscuits. It’s a divine stew of familiar plot points stirred together in an appealing way, set in a vibrant Black church community, a throwback to the popular crowd pleasers of the 1930s to 1960s that have been popularized more recently by Tyler Perry onstage and onscreen.

Much of the cast and crew are making their Broadway debuts, so the play gets a bit ragged and repetitive at times and is too long at more than two hours, but it’s a ton of fun nonetheless. Set designer Lawrence E. Moten III has transformed the intimate space into St. Luke’s Church in New Haven, with four mobile pews, stained-glass windows, and a pair of kitschy religious portraits. The patriarch of the Jenkins family, Father Bernard, has passed on, and his relatives are gathering to send him off to his beloved late wife in style. Well, kind of.

New pastor Reginald Mabry (Norm Lewis), the husband of Bernard’s oldest daughter, the God-fearing Baneatta (Cleo King), is worried about the eulogy he is preparing, while Baneatta is not looking forward to seeing her sister, the hard-partying, loud, and demonstrative Beverly (Ebony Marshall-Oliver), who arrives with her soon-to-be-sixteen-year-old, glued-to-her-smartphone daughter, the sarcastic La’Trice Franklin (Aigner Mizzelle).

Baneatta is none-too-happy that her son, Kenny (Devere Isaac Rogers), has brought his boyfriend, the white, Jewish nerd Logan (Michael Urie), who has no idea what he’s gotten himself into. Kenny’s older sister, Simone (Alana Raquel Bowers), shows up solo.

“Lord . . . please give me your strength on today,” Baneatta says at the beginning. “Bless me with your patience to deal with my family, for they know not what they do. Lord, help me keep my eyeballs rolled forward, as they have a tendency to roll backwards around foolishness. And Lord, keep me from strangling my baby sister, no matter how much she tests me. For you and I both know . . . she’ll try it. Keep all things unlike you at bay.”

Circle in the Square is transformed into a church in Chicken & Biscuits (photo © Emilio Madrid)

A hilarious farce ensues, as the funeral attendees cut one another down and their private aspirations pop out all over. Wearing a glittering, tight outfit more appropriate for a sleazy nightclub, Beverly tells La’Trice, “They say the best place to find a husband is inside God’s house, and that’s exactly what Beverly will be doing. ’Cause your triflin’ daddy ain’t good for nothing but his child support check, so every new day is an opportunitay.” La’Trice asks, “Even at Grandpa’s funeral?” Beverly responds, “It ain’t a funeral, it’s a celebration! That’s the problem with Black folk, our mindset, always stuck in tradition. Why we gotta wear black, huh? We already Black! We should be honoring my daddy in style, color! Hell, canary yellow was his favorite, and he wore it like a pimp. Shit, he taught me good fashion!”

Logan, a kind of onstage representative of the white theatergoing audience that suddenly finds themselves inside a Black church, says to Kenny, “I’m penetrating a private cultural tradition.” Kenny asks, “Why penetrating?” Logan answers, “It’s like a reverse Get Out, and we all know how that ended.”

The plot thickens when a mysterious woman (NaTasha Yvette Williams) steps up to the pulpit to share her thoughts about Bernard, and all hell breaks loose.

Dede Ayite’s ebullient costumes and Nikiya Mathis’s spectacular wig, hair, and makeup design are key ingredients in Chicken & Biscuits, adding plenty of sweetness and spice. The cast, led by Lewis (Porgy and Bess, The Phantom of the Opera) in his first Broadway nonmusical and King (Jelly’s Last Jam, Beau) in her Great White Way bow, is clearly having a ball, keeping the audience howling with laughter and breaking into spontaneous applause — as well as shouts as if we were all at Sunday service. “Why is everyone screaming at him?” Logan asks Kenny during a call-and-response part of Reginald’s sermon. Sure, it can get too sitcomy, but so what? Not all of the courses are delicious, but there are more than enough savory moments to make the show worthy of a very favorable Yelp review.

The last time I was at Circle in the Square was for Daniel Fish’s controversial Oklahoma!, which included free chili for everyone at intermission. Alas, there are no chicken and biscuits for the audience in Chicken & Biscuits, but there are plenty of tasty treats to satisfy the soul.

POLYLOGUES

Xandra Nur Clark wrote and stars in one-person show about ethical nonmonogamy (photo by Ashley Garrett)

HERE Arts Center
145 Sixth Ave.
In person through October 9, $40
On-demand streaming through October 13, $20-$25
here.org/shows
www.polyloguesplay.com

A few years ago, a friend of mine told me that his girlfriend had just explained to him that she was polyamorous. I had not heard that term before, and he wasn’t quite sure what it meant either, but it wasn’t merely that his partner wanted an open relationship so she could see other people. It went well beyond that.

Writer and performer Xandra Nur Clark explores the reality of polyamory in the insightful one-person show, Polylogues. The seventy-five-minute piece of documentary theater has just finished its run at HERE Arts Center and is available on demand through October 13. Clark, a queer Indian American community builder who studied with Anna Deavere Smith, interviewed more than fifty people over three years about ethical nonmonogamy, ranging in age from five to seventy-five, from eleven different countries and numerous races, religions, socioeconomic backgrounds, and political perspectives. Clark wears earphones during the Colt Coeur production, listening to the actual words spoken by the subjects and enacting them for the audience, which sits on three sides of Clark, who doesn’t do a deep dive into each character but embodies them with small differences in tonality and gestures. The characters are either the one who initiated the idea of nonmonogamy in the relationship, the one who was asked to consider it, or had nonmonogamous parents. In some cases they are happy with their decision to participate, but in others it either goes awry or they appear to be trying too hard to defend and rationalize their choices.

Ryan points out, “I’m not behaving like a quote unquote normal person would behave in this situation.” Shamma offers, “When you spend your whole life as a cheater, right? You’re doing it to fulfill a certain insecurity that you have in the, you know, a gap that you have in the relationship?
So you go to the next person to fill that gap. . . . Why can’t this be a new form of family?!” Trudy refers to the additional person as a “love friend.”

Casius says, “Most people think polyamory is just like about having orgies! . . . It’s like being willing to do anything for another person no matter what!” Jackson declares, “You know, I’m not a fucking toy! You know, like, I’m a person. And it’s not that we couldn’t have made a very casual arrangement, but, like, I need to have some autonomy in that decision!”

K, a Muslim from Malaysia, where men can have multiple wives, asserts, “Nonmonogamy interacting with male privilege, or interacting with capitalism, can, like, produce some really, like, frightening dynamics. . . . And finding ways to self-limit that in my nonmonogamy practice is . . .
important to me. To ensure I’m not trying to . . . I don’t know, like, build a . . . mmm, I don’t know . . . build a harem or something.”

Xandra Nur Clark embodies multiple characters involved in polyamorous relationships (photo by Ashley Garrett)

The issue of jealousy comes up numerous times. Alex admits, “I’m not okay with him with another girl other than his wife, but I’m okay with him with his w-wife. I want it — this one, this one guy love me with his full heart, everything. But meanwhile, I still got freedom to choose someone else!” And CJ concedes, “I’m fine with being with one person. But I always want to make sure that the other person doesn’t feel an obligation to me. I don’t want you to feel like you’re stuck with me.” She later adds, “It’s just like,
well, I’ll just — if this is just a little piece of it, I can get through nonmonogamy, I’ll take this little piece. Or like, if we’re ‘n a . . . nonmonogamous relationship, you can’t break my heart. But, maybe I just equate breaking my heart with cheating on me.”

Directed by Molly Clifford (Karaoke, Soldier), who introduces the piece in a clever way that prepares everyone for what is to follow, Polylogues begins with a stream of questions and statements on the wall behind Clark, including the key one: “How do you experience love in your life?” Clark (Everything You’re Told, Separated) is charming as she embodies the diverse characters, displaying a relaxing demeanor that brings ease and comfort to an audience that most likely doesn’t understand the complexities of modern-day ethical nonmonogamy, a term I had not encountered until seeing this show. You’re likely to be enticed by the play, if not polyamory itself, although I’m not sure my friend is ready to hear more about it just yet.

TWI-NY TALK: ANTHONY BARILE / 1-2-3 MANHUNT

Anthony Barile with Ilene Kristen in Tony DiMurro’s 1-2-3 Manhunt, opening October 10 at Theater for the New City

1-2-3 MANHUNT
Theater for the New City
155 First Ave. between Ninth & Tenth Sts.
Thursday – Sunday through October 24, $15-$18
theaterforthenewcity.net
www.123manhunt.com

“I really thought I had a place in telling stories in film or theater,” actor, restaurateur, Realtor, and kung fu instructor Anthony Barile says to me over Zoom. “People like me are needed. I feel I have a story to tell; I can portray a person like me who has a story to tell.”

I’ve known Barile since high school on Long Island, where he lettered in football and basketball; I never expected that all these years later, I’d be interviewing him about his performance in a play, Tony DiMurro’s 1-2-3 Manhunt, which opens October 10 at Theater for the New City. The show is set on a Lower East Side tenement roof and deals with Alex (Santo Fazio), an old school Italian American man returning to the neighborhood, and Alec (Chris Paul Morales), a Chinese American teenager dreaming of a career as a professional baseball player. Barile portrays Alex’s best friend, Frankie, which came relatively easy; in real life he’s best friends with Fazio, who he met in 1985. They last appeared onstage together in a 1994 revival of Michael Gazzo’s Hatful of Rain at the Actors Studio, helmed by original director Frank Corsaro, that attracted such luminaries as Norman Mailer and Shelley Winters.

Barile’s path to becoming an actor was a circuitous one.

“It was completely by accident,” the Brooklyn-born Barile explains. “I was going through a lot of changes at this particular point of my life. It was around 1990. I was in a long-term relationship that had ended, and, with that kind of life jolt, I decided to take the time for myself to explore things.”

He quit college the day Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham died, drove a bread truck, then moved to Manhattan in the mid-’80s and started snapping a lot of pictures around the city. He took a photography class at SVA, a martial arts class — “I thought, I kinda like to fight, so this would be good” — and studied film production at NYU, a connection that led him to acting.

“A lot of friends I met, through my roommate at the time, were actors,” he remembers. “I was invited to a barbecue on the Fourth of July, and one of his friends was studying with Sandra Seacat. She was at this barbecue and got to speaking with me and invited me to her acting class. It was unrelated to acting — she wasn’t that kind of person. She’s a wonderful human being, a phenomenal acting coach; she was just interested by me. I don’t know, she embraced me. She was thinking, ‘This guy’s been through some stuff, he’s leaving his twenties — he should come to my class.’

“Because that’s what her classes were about, finding out who you are, in a healing way. I’m like, I don’t think so; it’s not really my thing. But then I’m thinking that if I want to work with actors in film, maybe it’s a good idea I understand how they think, how they operate, what the process is. So I go.

Former Three of Cups co-owners Anthony Barile and Santo Fazio reunite onstage for the first time in twenty-five years

“I still have my notes, my journal from that day — it was mandatory that you take notes. I read it every once in a while, and I was writing, ‘These people are nuts. They’re super self-indulgent and just out of their minds. This is an insane way to spend a day.’ But I continued in her class because I was fascinated. I’d go to her special workshops, where there would be people who would come from all over the country, some big names. I was never really starstruck; being a New Yorker and living in New York City, especially in the ’80s and then the ’90s, you see famous people all the time. But now I’m watching their process. It was amazing. And now she wants me involved, she wants me acting; she snuck it in on me.”

Barile, wearing a Mets hat and Pretenders T-shirt, shakes his head and laughs as he recalls what happened next.

“We’re doing all kinds of Chekhov pieces. Now, I’m going to be honest with you; I’d never read Chekhov. I don’t know who Chekhov is. This is not my world. Okay, I’ll read it. So I read it and I’m like, ‘Well, this is pretty crazy stuff. Do I understand this even? And then she gives me a scene partner, a name actor, and another friend of mine. We’re doing a scene from Kafka’s The Trial. Again, this is so foreign to me.

“The name actor is getting ready to audition for a major motion picture, so he’s there to get his chops together. So I go up to Sandra and I say, ‘Sandra, you think I should tell him that I’ve never acted before?’”

He laughs again. “And she’s like, ‘Oh, no. Oh, no no no no no. What’s acting? You’ll only make him nervous. There’s no reason for that. Just go, go live, go do the work I’m telling you to do, and go live this scene.’ So I did, and it was kind of phenomenal. So that was the beginning of the bug.”

Barile learned a lot more than acting from the workshops.

“As a human being, it was like an exorcism of my soul. We did dreamwork and numerology and method sensory work, we studied Indian philosophers and poets, Jungian psychology. It made me look at my life and go, ‘What has been going on?’”

Anthony Barile and Santo Fazio share a moment while appearing together in Hatful of Rain at the Actors Studio

His next teacher literally threw the book at him.

“I went on to study with Susan Batson — that was another insane experience where I wasn’t fully prepared for what I was walking into at all. The first time she saw me, she said to the other students, ‘Who’s the Anthony Quinn–looking motherfucker?’ It was an audition class; I didn’t know that. She would have us dance in a circle, speak our thoughts, and then she would write a monologue every day and have you perform it in front of a director and casting agent. Your job was to get the job.

“But she was so brutally tough. She threw things at me at times. She would sit in her apartment with her back against a bookcase. This one time, I remember, my character was supposed to cry in this emotional moment. And my crying was so phony that she just reached back, grabbed a book off the shelf, and flung it at me. I didn’t see it coming, so I got hit in the head by it. She’s like, ‘What the fuck is that? Don’t ever fucking do that in my fucking class again. Get the fuck out of here. If you really gotta cry, pull a hair out of your nose, but don’t do that shit.’

“I didn’t go back for weeks after that, but then I went back, and she tells me, ‘You’re either very brave or very stupid.” Barile also studied with such other prestigious teachers as Marcia Haufrecht and Sheila Gray.

In December 1992, Barile, Fazio, and a third partner had opened the Three of Cups, a Southern Italian restaurant on First Ave. Three of Cups cook Anthony Alessandro was an Actors Studio member, and when one of the supporting actors in Hatful of Rain wasn’t working out, Alessandro asked Barile to take over the role of Chuch, a junkie who was played by Harry Guardino in the 1956 original Broadway production.

“I was scared shitless. What an amazing experience. But I was terrified,” Barile readily admits. “I had gone knee deep into studying; I was entrenched. But all of that work went out the window because I was so fucking scared. Fortunately, the actors in this play were so good that all I really had to do was listen — listen backstage, listen onstage, and I was in it. I just opened my heart and listened, learning to just really be free.”

His next show changed his life. His friend Mark Nassar, a Three of Cups regular, had originated the role of Tony in the hit immersive play Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding. Nassar suggested that Barile join the cast in 1995, portraying the groom’s best friend. At the end of his one-year run, Barile started dating Justine Rossi, who played Tina. The two later married; they now live in Bayside and have two kids in college.

“What a great gift it’s been,” Barile says of Tony n’ Tina. Before the pandemic, he was asked to come back as the priest, Father Mark, and has performed the role in New York as well as in Oklahoma, North Dakota, South Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, and New Orleans. He’ll be playing Tony’s father in Chicago in November, and recently his daughter appeared in the show, which includes a heavy amount of improv.

“Owning Three of Cups was very helpful in that. What they call it in Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding is table work, because it’s a wedding, you’re dealing with dinner guests. So my interaction with my customer base at Three of Cups got me ready for that. By nature, I’m a ballbreaker. I like comedy; I’m not afraid to break horns or just tell you what I think. So all of those things helped each other. And that training makes me a stronger actor for sure.” He would later appear in plays by David Mamet and John Patrick Shanley in black box theaters, including inhabiting a half dozen characters in Mamet’s Edmond. Three of Cups, where Justine had also worked before they were married and which hosted live music and comedy in its downstairs space, closed in April 2018.

Anthony Barile stands outside his beloved Lower East Side restaurant, Three of Cups

In 1998, Barile played the brutally violent Sally Hipps in DiMurro’s fabulously titled Moe Green Gets It in the Eye at La Tea Theater at the Clemente Soto Velez Arts Center on the Lower East Side.

“I connect to Tony’s writing,” Barile says. “He’s very New York, writing about the Italian American experience. I’m very familiar with that because a lot of the characters he writes about I know very well, whether they be family members, acquaintances, friends, people I’ve worked with. I like his language, and he’s a super guy as well.”

In 1-2-3 Manhunt, which is directed by William Roudebush with set design by Julie DiMurro, Tony’s wife, Barile plays another tough guy, Frankie. They were supposed to begin rehearsals in March 2020, but the pandemic canceled that. Since then, DiMurro has made small changes to incorporate the coronavirus crisis and other current events. They chose not to rehearse or do any readings over Zoom, getting together instead for the first time about a month ago.

“My favorite thing about my character is his enjoyment of a good laugh,” Barile explains. “He loves a good laugh, and he’s a ballbreaker. Listen, the writer knows me. Tony put things in the piece that are straight references right out of Three of Cups, because he used to visit me there all the time.”

Barile is also thrilled to be working with Fazio again.

“It’s like, wow. He’s my best friend in the show,” he tells me. “I’ve known Santo since 1985. It’s fun telling him stories onstage in character, because he’s my best audience. He can recognize when I’m in truth.”

A huge Mets fan — he was at Shea Stadium and Citi Field for the deciding World Series games in 1986, 2000, and 2015 — he is not thrilled with where the club is after a disastrous year.

“It will be a blow-up off-season, from top to bottom, starting with the front office,” he says. “They suck. It’s a curse. I was miserable. I can’t even believe my investment emotionally.”

I ask him what it’s like wearing a Yankees hat in the show.

“Frankie is definitely a baseball fan, and I figured that him being from Staten Island, he’s a Yankees fan. It also was a way for me to know I was playing someone else, not myself, because I’m most comfortable and successful in characters that aren’t too far removed from who I am.
In my approach to a character I like to have at least one part of my costume/wardrobe anchor me to him. In this case it’s the Yankees hat, for sure. As the great Lee Marvin once said, ‘Show up on time, know your lines, and let the clothes do the acting.’”

Barile and his wife also starred together as a couple preparing to go out for the first time since the pandemic took hold in Kevin Alexander Leonidas’s short film You Can’t Fix Stupid, and Barile, aka Mummy, appeared in David Shapiro’s seven-part documentary series Untitled Pizza Movie, about famed pie man Andrew Bellucci.

“I enjoy a good story,” Barile says. “You just want to be natural about it. Just tell the story.”