this week in theater

JEWISH LITERATURE AND REAL AND IMAGINED DEMONS: HANNAH ARENDT AND ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER

Hannah Stern (Ella Dershowitz) is watched by Gestapo officer Karl Frick (Brett Temple) in gripping play at WP Theater (photo by Valerie Terranova)

MRS. STERN WANDERS THE PRUSSIAN STATE LIBRARY
WP Theater
2162 Broadway at Seventy-Sixth St.
Through January 19, $39 – $129
www.mrssternwanders.com
wptheater.org

Last Saturday, I saw two shows involving Jewish writers, one a German woman who revolutionized political philosophy, the other a Polish man who kept a dying language alive through fictional narratives rich with folklore and history. Both were born in the first decade of the twentieth century, wrote about the Holocaust, had unique relationships with Zionism, and died in America.

The first play is a taut, gripping tale inspired by the little-known 1933 arrest of Hannah Arendt by the Gestapo, while the second is a slight but entertaining retelling of three Yiddish short stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Jenny Lyn Bader’s Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library is one of the best dramas of the year. The ninety-minute Luna Stage production opened in October at 59E59, where I saw an early preview, and has now moved to the WP Theater, where it continues through January 19 in an even better version. Bader is intimately familiar with Arendt’s life and career; her husband, Roger Berkowitz, founded the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, where she has served on the board of advisers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shane Baker and Miryem-Khaye Seigel bring a trio of Yiddish shorts to life in Bashevis’s Demons (photo by Maria Clara Vieira Fernandes/Viver com Yiddish)

BASHEVIS’S DEMONS
Theatre 154
154 Christopher St. between Greenwich & Washington Sts.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 5, $50
www.congressforjewishculture.org

Previously presented in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro, Bashevis’s Demons is making its North American premiere at Theatre 154 in the West Village through January 5. The seventy-five-minute show consists of three Yiddish tales by Nobel Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer, who wrote such books as Shosha, Satan in Goray, and Enemies, a Love Story in addition to the short story “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy,” which was made into a popular film by Barbra Streisand.

Directed and designed by Moshe Yassur with Beate Hein Bennett, the segments take place on a modest set centered by a comfy red velvet armchair on a Persian carpet, with a table off to one side with a few props, and a horizontal framed dark screen up above the stage, where operator Rokhl Kafrissen projects the English-language surtitles. Shane Baker portrays the demons, wearing a kimono and waving a fan, while Miryem-Khaye Seigel plays a married woman in white, a rabbi, and a hilariously costumed rooster.

The evening begins with 1955’s “The Mirror,” which Singer also turned into a full-length play. It’s set in 1856 in the Polish shtetl of Krashnik and is narrated by a demon who announces, “There’s a net as old as Methuselah . . . Soft as cobwebs, full of holes, it traps people even today. When a demon tires of chasing the past or spinning in a windmill’s arms, he can always settle in a mirror, like a spider in its web — and the fly must succumb.” In this case the fly is Tsirl (Seigel), a “young, beautiful, wealthy, childless woman, with lots of time and little comradeship.” Her husband is a traveling salesman who works for her father, a woodcutter, and her mother is deceased, so she often finds herself alone, missing the more active life she had in Cracow.

Distressed by her situation, she regularly goes up to the attic and sits in a velvet chair, looking into a gold-framed mirror with a crack in the middle and admiring her body. She embroiders Bible scenes, reads German poetry, and imagines heroic men coming to save her.

She is instead met by a demon in the mirror, who describes himself as an imp, a wedding jester, a clown who has “donkey ears; the horns of a ram; a frog’s mouth; and a goat’s beard. My eyes have no whites. I have no fingernails or teeth. My arms stretch like licorice, my horns bend like wax.” Through it all, Baker remains a bald man in a kimono, not changing makeup, more of a psychological demon than a physically grotesque trickster, as if any person could have a demon inside them.

Despite his ugliness, she is intrigued by him; they discuss wisdom, beauty, and desire, angels, G-d, and sin. When she leaves the attic and doesn’t come back the next day, he considers other actions, like clogging a chimney of the besmedresh or ruining the blowing of the shofar. “There’s no lack of business during the Days of Awe!” he proclaims.

When she at last returns, he offers to fly her to the garden of golden birds in Rehab the Harlot’s palace, an unimaginable journey that is a one-of-a-kind experience.

Shane Baker incorporates Yiddish and Japanese traditional storytelling in Bashevis’s Demons (photo by Maria Clara Vieira Fernandes/Viver com Yiddish)

“The Mirror” is followed by the first of two brief farcical interludes, “Thus Spake the Rooster,” adapted from Singer’s “Kukeriku,” Yiddish for cock-a-doodle-doo. Seigel, in full fowl regalia, talks about the meaning behind her kukeriku and, later, expresses her fear of Kapparot, the ancient Yom Kippur ritual where religious men swing live chickens over their heads before slaughtering them. (Singer became a vegetarian for the last thirty-five years of his life.)

Between the two-part “Thus Spake the Rooster” is “The Last Demon,” which switches between 1906 and 1956 and opens with a demon from Lublin declaring, “I, a demon, testify there are no more demons. No need, when people have themselves become demons.” He lives in frozen time in an attic in the small village of Tishevits, where he pores over a storybook filled with powerful Yiddish letters. Here, there are no flies in the spiderweb above him, not even a husk. He chatters on about Satan, a false messiah, “the good Inclination,” and Jewish writers.

He encounters a rabbi (Seigel) and decides to tempt him, one way or another, but the learned man proves to be a tough adversary. The demon decides he must appeal to the rabbi’s pride, telling him, “You alone can bring redemption or leave the world to fester for another 689,000 years.” That piques the rabbi’s interest, but when he asks the demon to give him two signs that he is telling the truth, the demon finds himself in trouble that he might not be able to get out of.

Baker, who was born in Kansas City and is not Jewish, is one of the leading figures in Yiddish theater, having performed in such shows as God of Vengeance (Got Fun Nekome) and his own translation of Waiting for Godot with the New Yiddish Rep and Tevye Served Raw, and he is the director of the Congress for Jewish Culture. He has studied with Charles Ludlam and Everett Quinton of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, Professor Avrom Nowersztern at a Yiddish summer course organized by YIVO, and kyogen and Noh master Juro Zenchiku, and he brings all those sensibilities to Bashevis’s Demons.

Everything comes to an awkward stop when, after “The Mirror,” Baker describes the background of creating the show; it would have been better to have included that information in the small program or online, as it takes the audience out of the mystical world that Singer so often immerses readers in. “Singer casts a spell,” Joyce Carol Oates wrote. “Open one of his books anywhere, the words leap out with a power that would seem to us demonic if it were not, at the very same time, so utterly plausible.”

Hannah Arendt died in New York City in 1975 at the age of sixty-nine, while Singer passed away in 1991 in Florida at the age of eighty-seven. Both left behind lasting literary legacies rooted in Jewish culture, history, and tradition; while Singer wrote in Yiddish, keeping the disappearing language alive, Arendt wrote in German and English — as well as one lone article in Yiddish, a November 1942 op-ed in the New York Yiddish paper Morgen Zshurnal about German and Hebrew speakers in Palestine.

Seeing Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library and Bashevis’s Demons back-to-back less than a week before Christmas and Hanukkah arrived, on the same day for the first time in nineteen years, was a vivid reminder of the demons that hover over us and inside us, yesterday and today.

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

EXISTENCE IS FUTILE: THE RETURN OF HANDSOME AND BEAUTIFUL RICHARD FOREMAN

Handsome Roger Vincent (Daniel Allen Nelson) and beautiful Madeline Harvey (Maggie Hoffman) contemplate coexistence in new Richard Foreman play at La MaMa (photo by Maria Baranova)

SUPPOSE BEAUTIFUL MADELINE HARVEY
La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club
The Ellen Stewart Theatre
66 East Fourth St. between Second Ave. & Bowery
Through December 22, $30-$35
www.lamama.org
objectcollection.us

“Don’t you get it?” the piped-in voice of eight-time Obie winner Richard Foreman asks in the downtown theater legend’s first play in ten years, Suppose Beautiful Madeline Harvey, having a too-brief run at La MaMa through December 22.

There’s no need to worry if you don’t get it all, or even much of it, in this stirring adaptation from the Brooklyn-based ensemble Object Collection, presented as part of its twentieth anniversary season.

In a script note, director Kara Feely explains that Foreman, who founded the experimental Ontological-Hysteric Theater in 1968, shattering the idea of what live drama can be, wrote Suppose Beautiful Madeline Harvey without any assigned dialogue. She has arranged it into a vastly entertaining philosophical treatise on the very existence of humanity, as well as life itself, where characters are said to be paper-thin, like the printed pages of a script.

The bleak (yet hopeful?) narrative unfolds in a mysterious, existential café where handsome Roger Vincent (Daniel Allen Nelson), named after a character in Nobel Laureate Patrick Modiano’s 1988 novella, Suspended Sentences, and beautiful Madeline Harvey (Maggie Hoffman) are perhaps destined to meet and fall in love — or not. The space, a kind of way station, has well-stocked bars at the right and left, a few tables in the middle, and a back wall of large windows that sometimes reflect the audience, as if we are there in the café with Roger, Madeline, narrators and Madeline and Roger doppelgängers Rita (Catrin Lloyd-Bollard) and Stephen (Avi Glickstein), and the Greek chorus of Bertrand (Nicolas Noreña), René (Timothy Scott), Louise (Yuki Kawahisa), and Charles (Alessandro Magania).

The chilly yet inviting and romantic set, by Peter Ksander, also features ten monitors playing abstract videos (designed by David Pym), accompanied by a live score composed by Travis Just and performed by Chloe Roe on guitar and voice, Jack Lynch on bass, sampling, and drum machines, and Just on saxophones, clarinets, and drum machines; all play synths as well.

Essentially, Madeline is getting off a bus, and she and Roger fall in love at first sight, but because it’s questionable whether either of them, or anyone in the café, actually exists, their future happiness is in doubt. Upon initially seeing Roger, Madeline says, “Here is the one who will certify to my existence,” as if we don’t exist on our own but only in the context of others.

Suppose Beautiful Madeline Harvey is another masterful work by Richard Foreman (photo by Maria Baranova)

As Madeline explains at one point, in poetic words delivered in a monotone: “No speaking about one’s inner life? Roger Vincent resembling everyone else — flat surface only — a PANCAKE-LIKE surface? . . . Now a surface PANCAKE-LIKE even in such good-bad times? Roger Vincent spread so thin — resulting in no depth at all but spread thin, flattened out to become so wide that Roger Vincent himself reaches the far edges of all that life might potentially spread out before Roger Vincent. And sometimes, Roger Vincent himself might be driven to accidentally express paper-thin ideas about his paper-thin life. On rare occasions, however, the no longer imaginable depth of things might surface in an unexpected explosion both banal and beautiful at once. On the other hand, a path followed diligently will often lose its appeal over time, and then more often than not the bottom falls out of life and whatever happens . . . ? Is no longer interesting.”

Props play a key role in the story, from red shoes, a red suitcase, a polka-dot skirt, and a small leather pocketbook to a briefcase, an orange, and a hat, as if clues. (The sharp costumes, which range from noirish to bizarrely aquatic and futuristic, are by Karen Boyer.) Various words jump out, typed in all caps in the script: SPACE VOIDS, TREASURES, TRUTH, MIRROR, FIRES, USELESS CATASTROPHE, and TWIST.

Meanwhile, Foreman, in a godlike manner that is sometimes enhanced by an almost blinding white light (the lighting is by Kate McGee, with sound by Robin Margolis), speaks of a world “within which the depth and intricacy and apparent solidness of this same world were REPLACED by a very DIFFERENT world in which ALL human beings were, well, so to say, paper-thin somehow, minus any enfolded depth. Mere surface alone, even if that surface seemed so clever and quick about the intricate ways of that same-such world. Which still had, you know, NO DEPTH? But suppose this only meant the scene of the action was now ELSEWHERE! No longer with human beings as such but, you know, ELSEWHERE! Even though this new THIN kind of being still participated, as of old, in many actions that were now ‘Elsewhere.’ As if within some fluid atmospheric field between people — which was now the place where the action was now taking place. No longer inside these very THIN human beings — instead permeated by some FLUID that enabled humans to now float on the surface of all things all the while BUFFETED by the ‘Elsewhere’ of a LIFE FORCE operating in new and unexpected ways on the surface of these people now lacking all inner depth. AND SUPPOSE it was really like this with people, HERE AND NOW?”

The work even calls into question its own existence. When Rita and Madeline are discussing the latter’s physical self and possible dissolving and disappearance, Madeline says, “And would it then be necessary to keep telling the stories of my life inside my own lifetime?” René posits, “So even if she didn’t exist . . . ,” to which Louise asks, “Did she exist?” and René concludes, “Would those stories still exist? But then, who or what would it be who was really existing?”

Maggie Hoffman stars as the mysterious title character in Suppose Beautiful Madeline Harvey (photo by Maria Baranova)

Suppose Beautiful Madeline Harvey is as much a 1980s-style downtown happening as it is a contemporary play; there’s a feeling that permeates through the theater that we’re watching something we never thought we would see again. The visual aesthetic is not paper-thin; the props and set are exquisitely curated and somewhat eerily seem as if they were transported directly from an ’80s production by someone who remembers the glee of discovering the thrift-store midcentury aesthetic — before the internet. At eighty minutes, it is just the right length; any shorter would have felt too quick, and any longer would have grown repetitive.

“All this serious thinking means things will always go wrong. But inevitably, I MUST think, so I must always go wrong,” Roger surmises. “Because one such as Handsome Roger Vincent does SEE many things, but handsome Roger Vincent never will never see everything, so Roger Vincent must always go wrong. Because Roger Vincent does not know, really, what I should really do with a life such as my own life. I HAVE it. But then?”

Get it?

It doesn’t matter, because we have the eighty-seven-year-old Foreman back, in a stellar bestowal from Object Collection that never goes wrong.

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

SURVIVAL AT SEA AND ON BROADWAY: SWEPT AWAY

A talented cast tries to stay afloat in Swept Away (photo by Emilio Madrid)

SWEPT AWAY
Longacre Theatre
220 West 48th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 29, $56-$216
sweptawaymusical.com

When I first heard that a show called Swept Away was coming to Broadway, I wondered how — and why — anyone would make a musical out of Lina Wertmüller’s 1974 class-clash shipwreck romantic comedy, Swept Away . . . by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August, which was remade in 2002 by Guy Ritchie starring his then-wife, Madonna. I eventually found out that it is in fact based primarily on Mignonette, the 2004 album by Americana roots-rock favorites the Avett Brothers, inspired by the true story of an English yacht that sank in 1884, leaving the crew of four men struggling to survive in a lifeboat, including the captain and teenage cabin boy Richard Parker — the name given to the Bengal tiger in the fictional shipwreck tale The Life of Pi. (There are also songs from such other Avett Brothers records as Emotionalism, The Carpenter, and True Sadness.)

Swept Away is now experiencing a different, unexpected type of survival. Last week, the ninety-minute show, starring Tony winner John Gallagher Jr. (Spring Awakening) and Tony nominee Stark Sands (Kinky Boots) and featuring a book by Tony winner John Logan (Red, Moulin Rouge! The Musical), direction by Tony winner Michael Mayer (Spring Awakening, American Idiot), and choreography by Tony nominee David Neumann (Hadestown), posted an early closing notice, explaining that the sails would be taken down after only twenty previews and thirty-two regular performances. It was as if the cast and crew were in their own lifeboat, lost at sea.

But on December 11, first Sands at the matinee and then Gallagher in the evening (the show I saw) gleefully announced at the curtain calls that, because of overwhelming audience response and a series of sell-outs, the “dark and risky” musical has a little more life left in it, extending two weeks. (Gallagher dared the audience to spread the word and maybe get another two weeks, but the website currently says “must end December 29.”)

The little musical that could premiered in 2022 at Berkeley Rep and moved to Arena Stage in DC last fall before cruising to Broadway. Swept Away looks and sounds great. The narrative unfolds on Tony-winning designer Rachel Hauck’s duly impressive set, a large ship on its final voyage — it is going to be sold for scrap — that juts out toward the audience and, later, stunningly capsizes, using mirrors on its underside to reveal what is happening in the lifeboat. All the technical aspects are exceptional, from Tony winner Susan Hilferty’s seafaring costumes to four-time Tony winner Kevin Adams’s lighting, Tony winner John Shivers’s sound, and the music arranging, orchestrations, and direction, by Chris Miller, Brian Usifer, and conductor and multi-instrumentalist Will Van Dyke.

The plot could use some course correction, although it is often saved by the stomping music and rousing choreography. A young man known as Little Brother (Adrian Blake Enscoe) has run away from his family farm to go on an adventure at sea, hoping to see the world, then return home and marry his childhood sweetheart, Melody Anne. His older brother (Sands) tracks him down and tries to prevent him from boarding the ship, but soon both of them are on their way to hunt whales, a dying occupation because of the invention and widespread use of paraffin and kerosene.

The captain (Wayne Duvall) is a stern, bearded fellow who insists on being called “sir” by his second mate (Gallagher), a salty sailor who takes Little Brother under his wing as they interact with the extremely well cast crew of men’s men (Josh Breckenridge, Hunter Brown, Matt DeAngelis, John Michael Finley, Cameron Johnson, Brandon Kalm, Rico LeBron, Michael J. Mainwaring, Orville Mendoza, Chase Peacock, Robert Pendilla, Tyrone L. Robinson, David Rowen, and John Sygar).

“We’re pagans and idolators here, waiting to whore ourselves from one pox-ridden port to another,” the mate says to the pious Big Brother, who wants everyone to join him in worship on a Sunday. “We’re sailors and workers; we got no time and no inclination for your pious bullshit, so do not embarrass yourself in front of the crew, and do not inflict your unforgiving sonofabitch G-d on the rest of us.”

Following a fierce squall, the two brothers, the captain, and the second mate are adrift at sea, going weeks without any food and water, growing hungrier and hungrier by the minute, recalling not only Pi Patel’s frightful journey in Life of Pi but Monty Python’s hilarious lifeboat sketch.

The musical doesn’t shy away from taking chances, although not all of them succeed, particularly involving Big Brother and religion. However, such splendidly rendered numbers as “Hard Worker,” “No Hard Feelings,” “May It Last,” and the title song keep everything afloat.

All of their prayers may not have been answered, but getting a reprieve at least through the Christmas holiday is something to sing about, with or without Madonna.

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

SOUL SEARCHING: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI AND BABE

The Light and the Dark looks at the life and times of Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi (photo by James Leynse)

THE LIGHT AND THE DARK (THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI)
Primary Stages, 59E59 Theaters
59 East 59th St, between Park & Madison Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 15, $66-$131
www.59e59.org

After seeing Kate Hamill’s The Light and the Dark (the life and times of Artemisia Gentileschi) and Jessica Goldberg’s Babe on the same day, I was hard-pressed to figure out why every woman doesn’t just go all Judith on their own Holofernes. While both plays explore misogyny, sexism, control of a woman’s body, and the dominant patriarchy in the arts, one does so much better than the other, although neither is ultimately successful.

At 59E59, Primary Stages is presenting The Light and the Dark, about Artemisia Gentileschi, the early Italian Baroque painter whose career was temporarily derailed by sexual assault and gender discrimination. Hamill’s previous feminist-driven works include stirring adaptations of Little Women, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Vanity Fair, and Dracula. She has portrayed such characters as Becky Sharp, Elizabeth Bennet, Meg March, Renfield, and Marianne Dashwood; in The Light and the Dark she inhabits the title role with a tender ferociousness as Artemisia matures from a precocious seven-year-old girl to one of the most talented and important artists of her era, even as she’s held back by men and social mores every step of the way.

Artemisia knows what she wants from a young age. Her Tuscan-born father, Orazio (Wynn Harmon), is a naturalistic, technically skillful painter who delivers precisely what his patrons desire. Admitting he doesn’t know how to raise a girl on his own, he decides to send her to a nunnery for her education, telling his daughter, “Think, if I build a big enough fortune and you mark the sisters well enough, you may be a fine lady — the wife or the mother of the great artist of tomorrow!” Misia, as he calls her, responds, “I don’t want to be a lady! I am I, your Artemisia. And I want to be a painter!”

When she is nine, Orazio lets Misia begin working in his studio, and six years later she is allowed to start painting alongside Agostino Tassi (Matthew Saldívar) and Cosimo Quorli (Jason O’Connell), which could be considered scandalous, especially when Orazio brings in a nude model, a sex worker named Maria (Joey Parsons). Soon the arrogant Agostino takes a personal interest in Artemisia, who is proving to be an exceptional artist with a unique perspective on traditional biblical scenes, and scandal does indeed ensue, against Artemisia’s will.

Artemisia Gentileschi has been undergoing a renaissance of her own this century, a heroic figure for the current time, spurred on by the 2002 Met exhibit “Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi: Father and Daughter Painters in Baroque Italy,” such books as Mary D. Garrard’s Artemisia Gentileschi and Feminism in Early Modern Europe and Gina Siciliano’s I Know What I Am: The Life and Times of Artemisia Gentileschi, and such plays as Sara Fellini’s NEC SPE / NEC METU and Howard Barker’s Scenes from an Execution. Artemisia often repeats “I, I, I” when talking about herself, trying to establish an identity that her father and his friends will not allow her to have because she is a woman, and she is prone to cursing like a sailor, dropping F-bombs again and again.

“Before Caravaggio, painters / Started with the light. / Blank canvas, blank fresco, / And painted layers upon that blankness — / But Caravaggio starts in the darkness / And carves his way out from the shadows,” she says in a way that refers to her own situation. She also declares, as if for all women, “Why should I suffer for nothing? / If I cannot undo it — and I cannot undo it. . . . / I can make it right. / I can control it.”

The show is visually beautiful, from Brittany Vasta’s alluring studio set to Jen Caprio’s lovely period costumes, Seth Reiser’s lighting, and Kylee Loera’s projections of such masterworks by Artemisia as Judith and Holofernes, Susanna and the Elders, The Allegory of Inclination, and Madonna and Child. The cast is effective, but Hamill and director Jade King Carroll too often get caught up in overly earnest monologues and preachy explications; Artemesia speaks at the audience instead of to them. Several didactic art lectures could have been cut or shortened — the play is too long at two and a half hours with intermission — in favor of the narrative itself, which can be compelling.

However, Carroll and Hamill do make The Light and the Dark feel relevant to what is happening today, particularly in the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Both female actors, Hamill as Artemisia and Parsons as Maria, ultimately take ownership of their bodies away from the men while subverting the male gaze; each gets fully nude, standing boldly onstage, not mere naked subjects to be depicted on canvas but real women shouting out their independence. They might not be holding daggers, preparing to cut off a perpetrator’s head, but you can see and feel their weapons nonetheless.

Gus (Arliss Howard) and Abby (Marisa Tomei) wonder about a new employee in Babe (photo by Monique Carboni)

BABE
The New Group at the Pershing Square Signature Center
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 22, $99-$119
thenewgroup.org

Jessica Goldberg’s Babe has much in common with Kate Hamill’s The Light and the Dark (the life and times of Artemisia Gentileschi); instead of taking place in the world of Baroque painting, it is set in the contemporary music industry, where an old-school record producer, Gus (Arliss Howard), spews sexism and misogyny in his search for artists with a soul. He gives short shrift to his longtime right-hand person, Abby (Marisa Tomei), who discovered 1990s sensation Kat Wonder (Gracie McGraw) but has never received the recognition she deserves.

When a young Gen Z woman, Katherine Becker (McGraw), comes in for a job interview and ultimately gets hired, each character’s flaws become exposed, as well as their strengths, but it is hard to care in this lackluster story searching for its own purpose, never filling in the blank canvas it started with.

Comparisons abound between the two shows. “I don’t want to make people feel great, I want to destroy shit! I want the girls in the front, moshing the fuck out of each other!” Kat declares in a way Gentileschi never would have. Abby, who is gay, explains, “People think if you’re a certain age without a partner, you’re alone. But it’s not true,” evoking Artemisia saying, “I have no interest — in marrying,” but with less conviction. While Hamill empowers Artemisia, having her stand onstage naked, using her body as a model for the self-portrait Allegory of Inclination, Goldberg makes Abby sexless, having had a double mastectomy as a result of cancer. “So it doesn’t really make me feel —” she tells Katherine, implying she lacks physical and emotional desire and confidence. While The Light and the Dark references Caravaggio, Michelangelo, Donatelli, and Botticelli, Babe brings up Liz Phair, Bob Dylan, Joan Jett, and Kathleen Hannah.

At one point in The Light and the Dark, men assume that Artemisia did not actually paint anything, that a woman is incapable of creating high-quality art and that someone else must be behind it all, which is one of the reasons Artemisia signs her name on her canvases “in bold type . . . And wait for my accolades to roll in!” In Babe, a New Group production at the Pershing Square Signature Center, Abby eventually asserts, “I want my NAME. On the record.” As women in fields run by men, neither receives those accolades, but Abby has settled for compromising where Artemisia keeps up the fight.

Marisa Tomei, Arliss Howard, and Gracie McGraw star in the New Group’s Babe
(photo by Monique Carboni)

During the job interview, amid outdated questions that would drive a human resources department to drink, Gus asks Katherine, “Do you have a soul?” Unfortunately, it’s Babe itself that lacks heart and soul. Even at only eighty-five minutes it drags on, like side two of an old record that doesn’t live to up to the flip side.

Derek McLane’s office set is attractive and BETTY’s original music is fine, but the narrative and time shifts are bumpy; director Scott Elliott never gets a handle on the rhythm. Interestingly, although Gus has a disdain for groups, preferring solo artists performing songs written by others, he wears a Killers T-shirt, the Las Vegas band led by lead singer and chief songwriter Brandon Flowers. The costumes, which never change, are by Jeff Mahshie.

Whereas it is obvious why Hamill made The Light and the Dark, celebrating a woman who faced tremendous obstacles in order to express herself through her remarkable art, it is decidedly unclear what points Goldberg (Refuge, Good Thing) is trying to make in Babe; it’s like a concept album without a concept. It purports to be about “the American spirit of individualism,” as Abby says, as well as the resistance to the DEI movement, but it’s as flat as an LP that is not going to go gold or platinum anytime soon, instead gathering dust on a shelf.

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

FREE RETURNS FROM MONICA BILL BARNES AT PLAYWRIGHTS HORIZONS

Monica Bill Barnes and Robbie Saenz de Viteri bring Many Happy Returns to Playwrights Horizons next month (photo by Paula Lobo)

Who: Monica Bill Barnes & Company
What: Hybrid scripted and improvised work
Where: Playwrights Horizons, Peter Jay Sharp Theater, 416 West Forty-Second St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
When: January 9-25, free with advance registration
Why: On its website, Monica Bill Barnes & Company announces, “Bringing dance where it doesn’t belong.” In the summer of 2021, the troupe, founded in New York City in 1997, staged Many Happy Returns, a dance-theater work that was devised as a one-time-only event commissioned by WP Theater to celebrate the return of in-person shows, reuniting performer and audience in the same space. From January 9 to 18, they will be happily presenting an expanded version of the show at Playwrights Horizons, a venue not usually associated with dance. Admission to all ten performances is free with advance registration.

In the show, which deals with memory and solace, co-artistic directors Monica Bill Barnes and Robbie Saenz de Viteri portray Barnes as a middle-age woman, with Barnes as the body and Saenz de Viteri the voice. Many Happy Returns combines scripted material with improvisation, as Saenz de Viteri types out new moments on the spot, inspired by the audience.

“So much is changing about what it means to be making live work now. That ever-shifting ground is pretty unsettling for a lot of us, in a lot of ways,” Barnes said in a statement. “Robbie and I felt like, ‘You know what? We want to make our own ever-shifting landscape to live in.’ It’s this joyful thing that’s also terrifying as a classically trained dancer; it’s an actor’s nightmare that I keep saying, enthusiastically, yes to.”

Saenz de Viteri noted, “Monica and I have no similarity in terms of training, but we laugh at the same things, and we get upset about a lot of the same things. In a crowded place, we find ourselves noticing a lot of the same things. Those overlaps became the grounds, many years ago, for starting to make things together. In Many Happy Returns, we’re taking all the pieces that make up a ‘character’ onstage — a story, a background, a specific way of moving, a specific way of talking — and breaking them all apart from each other. This fragmentary character of ‘Monica’ has allowed us both to channel some really vulnerable aspects of ourselves and share them in a different way than we ever have in our work — to ask how we make ourselves, out in the world, on a day to day basis.”

The piece is choreographed by Barnes, written by Saenz de Viteri, and performed by them along with Flannery Gregg, Mykel Marai Nairne, and Indah Mariana or Hsiao-Jou Tang; the directing consultant is three-time Obie winner Anne Kauffman (The Thugs, Mary Jane), with lighting and set design by Barbara Samuels and costumes by Kaye Voyce.

“Live performance feels like it needs a revolution right now, and not a revolution that involved burning everything down — but rather picking up the pieces and making new forms,” Kauffman said. “As a director, I love it — Monica and Robbie are stretching their brains and trying to conceive something that feels like it doesn’t exist yet. Playwrights Horizons and [artistic director] Adam Greenfield are always thinking in that way; in the rubble of theater postpandemic, he’s been putting words to actions in his programming. As a theater artist of over thirty-five years, watching Monica and Robbie and knowing Playwrights is the next presenter of Many Happy Returns, I feel so excited, like something new is bubbling up.”

Greenfield added, “Historically, Playwrights Horizons’ programming has excluded playwrights who create new work via interdisciplinary, non-literary methods (e.g., ensemble-devised work, improvisation, physical theater), and — in continuation of this theater’s longtime dedication to advancing playwrights — I want to think expansively about what that word means. From the moment I was first introduced to Many Happy Returns last year, I became eager to include these artists in our programming, not only because it affirms experimentation in the field of new plays, but because — in its very conception — this play embodies powerfully the inclusive, galvanizing potential of theater, as an art form and as a civic act.”

Act fast to get your free tickets — and be ready for the lack of a price to be incorporated into the relationship between performer, audience, and their respective expectations in Playwrights Horizons’ Peter Jay Sharp Theater.

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

OUR RIGHTS, OUR FUTURE, RIGHT NOW: IHRAF 2024

INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS ART FESTIVAL
The Tank
312 West Thirty-Sixth St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
December 9-15, $25
humanrightsartmovement.org
thetanknyc.org

On December 10, 1948, the United Nations released the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which announces, “Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world . . . The General Assembly proclaims this Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.” The theme of Human Rights Day 2024 is “Our Rights, Our Future, Right Now.”

In 2017, in celebration of the UDHR, playwright, author, and visual artist Tom Block started the International Human Rights Art Festival; the inaugural event was scheduled to be held at St. Mary’s Church but was censored by Archbishop Cardinal Timothy Dolan and had to quickly search for a new venue. “I feel fortunate in that I am not beholden to a spiritual structure that tells me who is worthy of a voice and protection and who is not. We believe that all people share this right,” Block said at the time. “We will not pick and choose among our acts or our issues, allowing some while rejecting others.”

That statement of purpose has remained a driving force as the festival has expanded over the years, having presented more than two thousand artists from more than one hundred countries. The sixth annual iteration takes place December 9-15 at the Tank with twelve thematic programs exploring climate change, LGBTQIA+ rights, immigration, and other basic human rights through dance, music, and theater, consisting of sixty new shows from nearly two dozen countries; all tickets are $25. Below is the full schedule.

Monday, December 9
Ten Minute Play Festival: Kelly Burr’s Passed Tents, Abhisek Bhattacharya’s Catastrophe, Robert Galinsky’s Requiem for the Wretched, Monte D. Monteleagre’s You Can Untie Them the Guards Can’t Stop You, Zareh Artinian Jr.’s Today’s América, Equity Library Theater of New York’s Across the Lake, and Rhys Collins’s Angelic Virtues, 7:00

Tuesday, December 10
Pride Residency and Performance by WADE Dance: Gesture Theater’s WAITING / POINTING, John Trunfio’s Pools, Donald Lee’s Fragility Cycle, and Noel Olson’s Do You Still Believe?, 7:00

Wednesday, December 11
Celebration of Immigration: excerpts from Natie’s “HOME”: Oceans — Ter La, Taiwo Aloba’s A Very Nigerian Dream, Kenneth Keng’s Through, Al Evangelista’s echoes, and Between Us Theatre Co’s Access Denied, 7:00

Wednesday, December 11
Celebration of LGBTQIA+: Jill Ohayon & Ryan O’Dea’s Turbulence, Maddie Moayedi’s Infractions, Farm Arts Collective’s Lucy Joseph, and Justin Anthony Long’s BIG ASS SECRET, 8:30

Thursday, December 12
Celebration of Women: Zizi Majid and Logan Reed’s Will, Groove with Me’s Her, Catherine Cabeen’s . . . yet again, Addison Vaughn’s Non-Advice to a Boat, and Miranda Stück’s I AM, 7:00

Thursday, December 12
Climate Change Action: Sarah Congress & Emma Denson’s Melting, Madeleine Yu-Phelps’s Ǝverything Okay, JCWK Dance Lab’s Eroded, and Lee Harrison Daniel’s sylvia, beginning to end and onward, 8:30

Friday, December 13
Human beings are members of a whole: Melis Yesiller’s Ünzile, Cecilia Whalen’s Two solos and a duet, Tina Bararian’s Built on Kindness, and Valentina Bache’s “It boils the water within,” dance event curated by Tina Bararian, 7:00

Friday, December 13
IHRAF TRANSforms — Celebration of Trans Artists: Ryan Hung and Charlie Meyers’s Now Boarding, Boundless Theatre Company’s Translucent, and Rush Johnston/Kaleid Dance Collective’s Until It Gets Dark, 8:30

Saturday, December 14
Celebration of Human Rights I: Rachael Sage’s Under My Canopy, Alex Manaa & Vaheed Talebian’s Another Cousin’s Wedding, the Invitation Arts Collective’s MOTHER EARTH, LET ME BLOOM, WaveLab’s Wave: A Hydrofeminist Performance, Joshua Piper’s Pas de Deux, and Inara Arts’s We Rise, 3:00

Celebration of Human Rights II: Carolyn Dorfman Dance’s CRIES OF THE CHILDREN, Steph Prizhitomsky’s Divine Hotline, BodyStories: Teresa Fellion Dance’s p u r p l e f l a m e, Steve Kronovet’s Waterslides in the Middle East, and Lindsey Wilson’s The Blackbird Trilogy, 7:00

Sunday, December 15
What to do? An evening of dance curated by Charly Santagado, featuring Lucienne Parker’s The Wetting of 12pm, Nathan Forster & Michelle Lukac’s Maybe We’re Trash, Lavy and Christian Warner’s pussys beat, I say to you, Amen O Lord, and excerpts from IMGE Dance’s (heart)beat, 3:00

Ten Minute Performance Festival: Pritha Mukherji’s Musings of an International Student, Tova Hopemark’s Heirloom, Little Shadow Productions’s You Have Arrived, Saidharshana Dhantu’s Behind Closed Doors, Jaymie Bellous’s Moonlight Becomes You, and sarAika movement collective’s Skin Deep, 7:00

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

THE WRONG KIND OF FAITH: TAMMY FAYE ON BROADWAY

Katie Brayben’s prayers for Broadway musical go unanswered (photo by Matthew Murphy)

TAMMY FAYE
Palace Theatre
1564 Broadway at Forty-Seventh St.
Through December 8, $59.75-$119
tammyfayebway.com

It’s extremely rare for a professional critic to see and review a new Broadway show that has already posted its closing notice. Two years ago, I saw KPOP at Circle in the Square; it announced it was closing a few days later, right before my review went up.

But I ended up seeing Tammy Faye — the much-heralded British import that had been nominated for four Olivier Awards across the pond, including Best New Musical, and won for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor — shortly after the news came that it would be cutting its run frightfully short, following twenty-four previews and only twenty-nine regular performances. I was determined to not let that information impact my experience, but it was nearly impossible to avoid the sad truth.

Tammy Faye is the first fully fledged show in the beautifully renovated Palace Theatre, which was built in 1913; it is well worth a walk up to the top to get a bird’s-eye view of its grandiose splendor. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the less-than-heavenly production on the stage, which bills itself as “the story of a traveling preacher’s wife who beamed into homes with a message of hope . . . and stole the country’s heart.”

Perhaps British audiences and critics were not as familiar with the lurid story of televangelist couple Jim Bakker (Christian Borle) and Tammy Faye LaValley (Katie Brayben), who rose to stardom in the 1970s and ’80s through their satellite network, The PTL Club (Praise the Lord), backed by Ted Turner (Andy Taylor) and also featuring Trinity Broadcasting Network founders Paul Crouch (Nick Bailey) and his wife, Jan (Allison Guinn). The premise of the musical is misguided from the start, attempting to literally and figuratively raise Tammy Faye high on a pedestal and celebrate her as a feminist icon even though much of America considers her and Jim a key part of the intrusion of Christian fundamentalism into politics. The show — and the intrusion — also involves such Electric Church preachers as Jerry Falwell (Michael Cerveris), Billy Graham (Mark Evans), Marvin Gorman (Max Gordon Moore), Pat Robertson (Taylor), and Jimmy Swaggart (Ian Lassiter).

One plot point revolves around California gubernatorial candidate Ronald Reagan’s (Lassiter) appearance on The PTL Club; when Jim and Tammy Faye do not officially endorse him, their rival Falwell, who is determined to bring the Bakkers down by any means necessary, informs Reagan, “Sir, it’s time to put G-d in the White House.” Reagan replies, “Isn’t that against the Founding Father’s intentions,” to which Falwell responds, “There is only One True Founding Father, sir.” The two men then talk about returning America to “greatness again,” a reference to Donald Trump that falls with a thud.

Jerry Falwell (Michael Cerveris) is out to stop Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker and The PTL Club (photo by Matthew Murphy)

The book, by James Graham (Dear England, Finding Neverland), is a paint-by-numbers retelling of Jim and Tammy Faye’s personal and professional relationship, from their meet cute at an event led by Graham — “My brothers and sisters, I cannot do this alone! So, who will join this new Christian army? Stand up and be counted!” — to Jim’s sexual misconduct with church secretary Jessica Hahn (Alana Pollard) and allegations of fraud with his right-hand man, John Fletcher (Raymond J. Lee). Tammy Faye is portrayed as an innocent throughout as well as a free-thinking conservative, especially when, on live television, she hugs Steve Pieters (Charl Brown), a gay pastor who has AIDS, sending Robertson and Falwell into a tizzy and running to Reagan for help.

Elton John’s (The Lion King, Billy Elliot) music is surprisingly bland and uninspired, while the lyrics, by Jake Shears (Tales of the City) of the Scissor Sisters, make excuses for Tammy Faye. “Now that I hear angels calling me home / What’s left of the debt to be paid / Could I have done better / Is the blame mine alone / Will I be forgiven / Or should I be afraid?” she sings in a hospital after being told she has cancer. “You’ve shown me where to find my wings / But I don’t know if they fly / Heavy is the weight of my shame / Questions run like rivers / In the tears that I cry / Will you make me answer for my name?”

Two-time Olivier winner Brayben (Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, Girl from the North Country) has been widely hailed for her performance as Tammy Faye, and it can be electrifying, but there’s a disingenuousness to it; Tammy Faye was a Christian music favorite, releasing such albums as Love Never Gives Up, We’re Blest, and Enough Is Enough, but Brayben plays her as a superstar, as if she were a pop goddess with Janis Joplin talent. There would have been no show at all if director Rupert Goold (American Psycho, Enron) had Brayben sing more like Tammy Faye, but it would have been more honest. Two-time Tony winner Borle (Some Like It Hot!, Something Rotten!) is miscast yet again, failing to capture Bakker’s boring nature, while two-time Tony winner Cerveris (Assassins, Fun Home) can’t get out from under his bad wig.

The set, by Bunny Christie, resembles a 1960s game show, with a large board of squares, like television screens, that occasionally open up to reveal characters; if only Goldie Hawn, Ruth Buzzi, Arte Johnson, or other stalwarts of Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In could appear to provide a good laugh.

The night I went, the most exciting moment was when two-time Tony nominee Andrew Rannells (The Book of Mormon, The Boys in the Band) held court during intermission from his tenth-row-center seat; Rannells was nominated for an Olivier for playing Jim Bakker in the London production, but he opted not to continue the role on Broadway, citing a contract dispute, although perhaps he also saw the writing on the wall.

Meanwhile, the temperature in the theater never rose past lukewarm. Audience response was tepid at best, and not just because there were a lot of empty seats. It was embarrassing when the actors asked for applause, as if we were watching a broadcast of The PTL Club, and not much came. And Finn Ross’s video design is hectic and inconsistent — and downright annoying when live projections reveal Tammy Faye getting ready in her dressing room, applying makeup and singing, her voice not synched exactly to the video, a prime example of how off-kilter everything is.

It’s always sad when a show closes early, leaving many hardworking and talented people out of a job. But just as the Bakkers accepted millions of dollars from their true believers and were busted for fraud, it would be hard to justify spending any of your money on this all-around-disappointing musical.

“Just reach out and open your hands,” Tammy Faye sings in “Open Hands — Right Kind of Faith.” In “If Only Love,” she promises, “We all possess the strength we need / If you believe, then you’ll succeed.” But it takes much more than just open hands and faith.

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