this week in theater

FINAL BOARDING CALL

Who: WP Theater in partnership with Ma-Yi Theater Company
What: New streaming play
Where: WP Theater online
When: Select hourly streams March 10-14, free – $100
Why: WP Theater and Ma-Yi Theater Company have teamed up to present the world premiere of Stefani Kuo’s Final Boarding Call, streaming at specific times March 10-14. Directed by Mei Ann Teo (The Shape of a Bird, SKiNFoLK: An American Show) with multimedia design by Hao, the play is set during the Hong Kong protests, as seven characters face the crisis from different perspectives, affected in different ways. A New York–based playwright, poet, and performer, Kuo (Architecture of Rain, Bedlam’s King Lear) explores global capitalism, Chinese power, and people struggling to get by in tough, dangerous times. Admission is based on what you can afford; the play features unique use of Zoom boxes, animation, and green screens in telling its story.

WP Theater has been busy the last several months, streaming such other works as Cori Thomas’s Lockdown, Obehi Janice’s Ole White Sugah Daddy, Monica Bill Barnes & Company’s Keep Moving, and Rebecca Martínez’s The Nourish Project. Up next is a broadcast reading of MJ Kaufman’s Galatea in association with Red Bull Theater. Similarly, Ma-Yi and its new Ma-Yi Studios have been producing virtual works, including Ohnobu Pelican’s Clippy & Ms. U, which deals with the Fukushima disaster; Frederick Kennedy’s mesmerizing Rest, which repurposes seismic data in conjunction with quarantine recordings; and Ron Domingo’s short film Sophocles in Staten Island, about a family obsessed with Greek tragedy. Next is Daniel K. Isaac’s Once Upon a (korean) Time in April.

Update: I had expected Final Boarding Call to be a straightforward short trip, but it ended up being an emotionally turbulent and wholly satisfying two-hour nonstop flight. Written by Stefani Kuo and directed by Mei Ann Teo, the play tackles the 2019–20 Hong Kong protests, also known as the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill movement, from multiple perspectives via seven characters, portrayed by actors over Zoom. Any public criticism of China is met with harsh retaliation, so some cast members don’t even use their full, real names in the credits, although facial recognition software makes that point moot.

Christina Ho (Sarah) is a flight attendant with a radical brother, Ting-Ting Ho, who is right in the middle of the protests at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She works with Godfrey Kwok (Will Dao), a flight attendant who takes a liking to one of his passengers, Marc Olberg (Philip Cruise), a Tiffany’s executive with an advertising dilemma. Lucy Wang (M) is a freelance journalist attempting to interview a mysterious protest leader who goes by the screen name cocacola_chicken_wing; Lucy is about to have twins with her partner, Ravichandran Chopra (Rohan Kymal), but her estranged mother, Xiao Feng (Y.C.), wants her to return to mainland China despite the the suppression of dissent. As the various narrative threads come together and the characters debate just what freedom is, a small television monitor shows violent, frightening news footage of the protests. “I really admire the Hong Kong people for their . . . your spirit. It’s just — we can’t live in idealism, right?” Marc tells Godfrey.

Teo and designer Hao employ an impressive arsenal of Zoom stagecraft: They include text messages, use green-screen backgrounds to create the illusion that the well-developed characters are in the same rooms, display written-out stage directions, and utilize multiple, changing boxes to keep the action flowing, which prevents Final Boarding Call from becoming a standard virtual theatrical presentation with actors essentially buckled into their seats, tray tables in their upright position. Final Boarding Call concludes with a hard-hitting, powerful monologue by Sarah that makes the audience complicit in the fight for freedom everywhere, in Hong Kong and wherever else human beings are being held down, in the midst of resistance and rebellion. It’s an impressive landing to a play that isn’t afraid to pull any punches or wear its heart on its sleeve, symbolically taking the kinds of risks that freedom is all about.

HYMN

Danny Sapani and Adrian Lester rehearse Hymn with director Blanche McIntyre for livestream (photo by Marc Brenner)

HYMN
Almeida Theatre
Available on demand through March 9, £15-£40
almeida.co.uk

Last month, London’s Almeida Theatre streamed several live performances of Lolita Chakrabarti’s new play, Hymn, followed by two discussions, all held with no audience. A recorded version of the sizzling two-character show is now available on demand, but only through March 9, so act quickly if you want to catch this stellar production. (You can watch the discussions any time here.)

The play starts with the two actors, Adrian Lester and Danny Sapani, walking onto the long, vertical wooden thrust stage wearing masks. They stop on opposite sides of a piano, turn off the house lights, click on a metronome, walk down the set, and circle around a small bottle of booze and a Bible, two items that men turn to in times of strife. Gil (Lester) picks up the latter, while Benny (Sapani) scoops up the former. They determinedly remove their masks, and the sound of shattering glass kicks off the dialogue.

“What the hell?” a surprised Benny, wearing a dark T-shirt, shouts at an unseen barman. “Get off me! Move your fuckin’ hands! . . . Been a shit day; I just’ wanna drink! People to stand next to. Nothing wrong with that, is there?” Actually, in the era of Covid-19, there is a lot wrong with that, and although the coronavirus is not part of the play, it is central to director Blanche McIntyre’s compelling staging.

Gil and Benny meet each other at the funeral service for Gil’s beloved, well-respected father, Augustus Clarence Jones, a successful stationer and family man known affectionately as “Gus.” But Gil is forced to reevaluate his father’s image after learning that Benny is his half-brother, only six days younger, the product of an affair between Gus and Benny’s mother. Gil rejects Benny’s claim outright at first, but soon they are having an exhilarating bromance, living a kind of fantasy, until reality takes hold again.

Hymn is beautifully written, directed, acted, and, perhaps most important, filmed. Even though this version is prerecorded with no audience, it has the feel of live theater, as photographed by screen director Matt Hargraves and his team of camera operators. McIntyre (The Writer, Women in Power) does a terrific job of keeping the two actors apart — they never come into contact with one another, never touch the same objects, keep at least six feet apart when standing still, even as they grow very close emotionally on the narrow stage. Chakrabarti (Last Seen, Life of Pi), who is married to Lester — the playwright and actors have all worked together previously, and Chakrabarti wrote Hymn specifically for her husband and Sapani — has created a fascinating relationship between the two men, who, despite sharing the same father, are very different people, neither exactly what they first appear to be. There’s nothing new about the plot itself — someone shows up at a funeral to claim they are a long-lost or hidden-away relative — but it’s treated with such care and humor that you’ll be sucked in immediately.

The spare set and costumes, which come into play big-time in one exhilarating scene, are by Miriam Buether, with lighting by Prema Mehta, sound by Gregory Clarke, and musical direction by D. J. Walde. The show features a handful of songs sung by Lester and Sapani, including Bill Withers’s “Lean on Me” and the Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” which easily could have been schmaltzy but instead point at how much the half-siblings need each other.

Hymn is a moving, powerful ninety-minute piece that, though a product of its time — it also delves briefly but critically into the BLM protests — well deserves to be brought back post-lockdown, when audiences will be able to absorb its elegance and artistry in person. Lester (Company, Sweeney Todd), who battled the coronavirus with Chakrabarti over Christmas, and Sapani (Invisible Cities, Big White Fog) capture their evolving feelings of brotherly love with intelligence and grace, fully immersed in the characters’ ever-more-complicated lives, sharing what Benny calls “sympathetic resonance.” In his eulogy at the beginning, Gil remembers his father telling him, “Music is silence, sound, and time. If you listen, Son, you’ll hear it too.” You can experience all that and more in this special production.

MTC CURTAIN CALL SERIES: THREE DAYS OF RAIN

Who: Patricia Clarkson, John Slattery, Bradley Whitford
What: Reunion reading
Where: Manhattan Theatre Club online
When: March 11-25, free with RSVP
Why: In 1997, Manhattan Theatre Club staged Richard Greenberg’s generational mystery Three Days of Rain, directed by Evan Yionoulis and starring Patricia Clarkson as Nan, John Slattery as her brother, Walker, and Bradley Whitford as their childhood friend Pip. The original cast is reuniting for a virtual reading of the Pulitzer Prize–nominated play, streaming as part of MTC’s “Curtain Call Series,” which kicked off last month with an excellent online version of another taut family drama, Richard Wesley’s The Past Is the Past, featuring Jovan Adepo and Ron Cephas Jones and directed by Oz Scott. The free series continues April 15–25 with Charlayne Woodard’s 1997 one-woman show, Neat.

Bradley Whitford, John Slattery, and Patricia Clarkson reunite for virtual presentation of Richard Greenberg’s Three Days of Rain

Update: “Do things really stay secret that long?” Pip asks Nan in MTC’s energetic Zoom reunion presentation of Richard Greenberg’s Three Days of Rain. Patricia Clarkson, John Slattery, and Bradley Whitford reprise their roles from the 1997 iteration of Greenberg’s tale of family subterfuge, unrequited love, requited love, mental illness, legacy, and plenty of secrets. The play begins in 1995, as the calm Nan (Clarkson), her brother, the manic-depressive Walker (Slattery), and their childhood friend, soap-opera star Pip (Whitford), prepare for the reading of Nan and Walker’s father’s will. Pip’s father, Theo Wexler, was the longtime business partner of the now-deceased Ned Janeway. They ran what became a successful architectural firm, which allows Greenberg and the characters to use a litany of building metaphors, comparing the construction of houses and office towers to people’s relationships and psyches. (You might also want to keep a running list to look up all of Greenberg’s high-falutin references later, from Heidegger, Hegel, and Handel to Trimalchio’s feast.) After intermission, the action goes back to 1960, with Clarkson as southern belle Lina, Slattery as Ned, and Whitford as Theo, laying the foundation for what would eventually happen to the Janeways and Wexlers.

The three actors are brilliantly engaging, filled with spirit and vitality as each performs from their own home. Director Evan Yionoulis never lets things get too static in those Zoom boxes as the trio share architectural drawings and an old journal. (However, couldn’t they have made sure that Clarkson had the same style blue book as Slattery?) There is an added layer of meta in that Clarkson, Slattery, and Whitford are revisiting their professional past in ways that are similar to how the play goes back in time to the previous set of Janeways and Wexlers; not only are the actors portraying the prior generation, but they’re returning to their own prior generation, nearly a quarter-century earlier, when they were not quite as big stars as they are today. In the brief talkback that accompanies the production, Whitford admits to weeping when he was off camera, overwhelmed by it all. The emotions felt by the actors are palpable; you might not break down in tears, but you will feel their joy and their pain, their confusion and their fears, both theirs and their characters’.

THE WILD PROJECT: HAPPY DAYS

Jake Austin Robertson and Tessa Albertson star in a pandemic-filmed version of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days from the Wild Project

Who: Tessa Albertson, Jake Austin Robertson
What: Filmed performance of Happy Days by Samuel Beckett from the Wild Project
Where: Stellar platform
When: March 5-7, 11-13, 19-21, and 26-28, free with RSVP (suggested donation $25; stream available for twenty-four hours)
Why: In May 2020, after beating their coronavirus infections, married couple Tony Shalhoub and Brooke Adams revisited Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, which they toured with in 2015, performing it live from their bedroom for Stars in the House, when it was still rare to see two people together onscreen. The two-character absurdist drama, which is primarily a two-act monologue by the actress, is a quintessential piece tailor-made for the pandemic lockdown. The woman spends the entire play in a kind of volcanic mound of dirt, only the upper part of her body visible, so Covid-19 protocols are easier to follow than if the play had a bigger cast with actors moving about a stage. The scenario also evokes how each one of us has been trapped in near-isolation while sheltering in place for a year now. The Wild Project is now tackling the play, which premiered at the Cherry Lane in 1961, streaming a sixtieth anniversary recording made in its East Village theater, with Tessa Albertson as Winnie and Jake Austin Robertson as Willie.

Previous pairings have included Fiona Shaw and Tim Potter, Dianne Wiest and Jarlath Conroy, and Rosaleen Linehan and Richard Johnson; Albertson (Shrek the Musical, Younger), at only twenty-four, and Robertson (Madman), who is not much older, are among the youngest actors to perform the roles. The hybrid theater/film, which is available Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays in March for twenty-four-hour streams, is directed by Nico Krell, incorporating elements from Beckett’s personal notebook from when the author helmed a production starring Billie Whitelaw in 1979; the new work features cinematography by Michael Cong, editing by Marco Villard, scenic design by Colleen E Murray and Nadja Antic, costumes by Jules Peiperl, sound by Stanley Mathabane, and lighting by Kia Rogers. Albertson twists her face throughout a goofy yet charming performance, the camera often coming in closer than human beings should ever be photographed. The way the yellow umbrella is stuck in the set is deliciously squishy, and Albertson’s lipstick is practically a character unto itself. “Another happy day,” Winnie proclaims early on. At a time when we all barely know what day it is when we wake up, lost in a coronavirus fog, you can never have too many happy days. As Winnie also says, “Here all is strange.”

POST THEATRICAL: PARTY LINE

PARTY LINE
Let’s Make a Theatre Company
March 8-15, pay-what-you-can
Tickets must be purchased by March 7
www.posttheatrical.org

With venues shuttered since last March, theater companies have come up with different, creative — and, in some cases, old-fashioned — ways of presenting works. On Site Opera’s To My Distant Love, Woolly Mammoth’s Human Resources, and 600 Highwaymen’s A Thousand Ways (Part One): A Phone Call took place over the telephone, while Ars Nova’s P.S. consists of a year of letters between two childhood friends, arriving every few weeks in the mail.

Purchase professor Scott Adkins and his Let’s Make a Theatre Company, formed last April during the pandemic, use both methods of delivery for Party Line, running March 8-15 and part of Post Theatrical, a festival of durational works from Pittsburgh’s RealTime Interventions that unfold through letters. In the 1930s and 1940s, communities used party lines, local telephone circuits in which users could hear other people’s conversations, resulting in the spread of gossip and other information (and misinfornmation). In Party Line, audience members receive a prerecorded phone call, via a robo-call platform, every night for eight days at 8:00, lasting between two and ten minutes each as an audio narrative evolves. In addition, they receive a self-addressed stamped envelope to correspond with any character of their choosing — who will write back. Of course, with the postal system experiencing historic delays, there’s no guarantee how long this part of the work will take, and it’s ironic given how many Americans have spent much of the crisis either sanitizing the mail or putting it aside for a while before opening it.

Adkins (Lakeview Terrace, TupuTupuTupu) wrote and directed the play, which features Ellen Walz, Chris Padro, Shavell Fernandez, Peter Moriarty, Sara Meade, Trevor Vaughan, Izzy Hamboussi, and Leah Bickley, with sound design and engineering by Gavin Price. Pay-what-you-can tickets must be purchased by March 7. Other Post Theatrical shows include the Wallpaper Company’s All Light on Earth Comes from Somewhere Else, New Georges’ Dream/Home, and Melisa Tien’s The Community Forest.

LUDIC PROXY: FUKUSHIMA

Japan Society: Online Contemporary Theater
Saturday, March 6, 9:30; Sunday, March 7, 4:30; Thursday, March 11, 8:00 (followed by a live Q&A), $15
Available on demand March 12—26, $15
www.japansociety.org
ayaogawa.com

In 2015 at Walker Space, Tokyo-born, Brooklyn-based playwright, director, performer, and translator Aya Ogawa debuted Ludic Proxy, a three-part immersive, apocalyptic play that takes place in the past (Pripyat, post-Chernobyl), the present (Fukushima, post-disaster), and the future (New York, underground). Ogawa has now adapted the middle section for the virtual multimedia production Ludic Proxy: Fukushima, streaming live through Japan Society on March 6, 7, and 11 (and available on demand March 12-26). The title, a phrase coined by a game designer, “refers to the phantom knowledge of something or somewhere real gained through game play,” Ogawa explains in a video about the reimagining. Originally commissioned by PlayCo in 2010, Ogawa was inspired to write Ludic Proxy following the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster in Fukushima Prefecture, the death of her mother, and the birth of her second child. “The collision of [these personal life-changing events and the global disasters] created the foundation for this play. And it made me really think about, How does the intrinsic human tendency to play, to want to play, help us process the catastrophes that we experience in life?” she adds. The three-act play gave the audience the opportunity to help direct the narrative, like a choose-your-own-adventure story; that component will be adapted for the virtual presentation, about two sisters (Saori Tsukada as Maho and Yuki Kawahisa as Maki) in Fukushima. Online viewers will be asked to vote on what one of the sisters, an avatar for the audience, says and does, meaning that every live performance is unique.

Live, online show features interactive component for audience to help steer the action (photo © Ludic Proxy: Fukushima 2021)

“During this almost year that we’ve been living through this pandemic, I’ve really been thinking about the Fukushima section,” Ogawa continues. “It has audience interaction built into it that translates naturally to a digital platform but also there is something newly resonant about its premise today in 2021.” The sisters are attempting to connect in a way that relates to the problems so many American families are having today amid different belief systems involving politics and Covid-19, while honoring the tenth anniversary of the Fukushima disaster. If you buy a ticket for March 6 or 7, you will also have access to the subsequent live performances; the March 11 show will be followed by a live Q&A with Ogawa (The Nosebleed, Journey to the Ocean, oph3lia). From March 12 to 26, on-demand viewers will be able to control the path of the prerecorded narrative themselves instead of via online polling by everyone watching. Ludic Proxy: Fukushima is part of Japan Society’s ongoing program “Ten Years Later: Japan Society Remembers 3.11,” which also includes the March 9 symposium “Resiliency & Recovery: A U.S.-Japan Dialogue Ten Years after 3.11” and “Tea Time Season Three: Remembering 3.11.” In addition, Ogawa is the special guest at the next PlayClub on March 9 at 5:00, a live conversation about Toshiki Okada’s 2018 Time’s Journey Through a Room; sign up now to read a copy of the script, which also deals with the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, and participate in the discussion, facilitated by Kate Loewald.

ADJUST THE PROCEDURE

Adam Files, Nicholas Miles Newton, Meagan Moses, and Ed Altman (clockwise from top left) get into a tense Zoom meeting in Adjust the Procedure

ADJUST THE PROCEDURE
Available on demand through March 28, $10
spincyclenyc.com

A new genre of theater has arisen during the pandemic lockdown: Zoom plays about Zoom gatherings, both personal and professional. I’m not talking about Zoom benefits with actors reading Shakespeare and Sophocles or Fast Times at Ridgemont High and The Princess Bride but new works written for Zoom, performed on Zoom — and set on Zoom. For the Public, Richard Nelson’s What Do We Need to Talk About? reunited the familiar Apple family with the original cast — Jon DeVries (Benjamin Apple), Stephen Kunken (Tim Andrews), Sally Murphy (Jane Apple Halls), Maryann Plunkett (Barbara Apple), Laila Robins (Marian Apple Platt), and Jay O. Sanders (Richard Apple) — holding a Zoom family meeting. Rough & Ready Productions’ seven-minute Brown, an early entry from April 2020, imagines a Zoom brainstorming session about the color of cruise line swimwear, particularly prescient given the status of cruises over the last year. And Jordan E. Cooper’s Mama’s Got a Cough (with the wonderful Danielle Brooks) is fourteen of the funniest minutes you’ll ever spend on Zoom, as a family convenes an emergency online meeting to figure out what to do about their elderly matriarch.

Spin Cycle and JCS Theater Company take it to the next level with Adjust the Procedure, which delves deep into the psychological impact the coronavirus crisis is having on individuals as well as institutions, in this case a university. Written and directed by Jake Shore, the play is built around several Zoom meetings dealing with the school’s Counseling and Wellness center and what might have gone wrong in the case of student David De La Cruz. Director of academic development Kyle (Adam Files) first discusses the issue with assistant dean of student achievement Ben (Nicholas Miles Newton), relating a call he received from the suicidal undergraduate.

“In most circumstances I wouldn’t have pressed him on it at all, I would’ve just followed the procedure, but I felt I had a responsibility to deal with it on my own for some reason,” a concerned Kyle says.

Ben initially seems more interested in following the rules than facing the reality of the situation. He replies, “I would advise against intervening. . . .” That conversation ends with Ben’s advice:

“You need to know your role, Kyle, and it’s going to help a great deal in the long run. The life of this student is not on your back. It does not hang in the balance due to anything that you’ve done or will do. That’s just not the way it is. You talking to him, interfering, it’s just not going to matter that much in the grand scheme of things. It’s brutal, I’m sorry to say it, but it’s the truth. You don’t have that type of responsibility to him, or to any other student. It’s just not your job.”

On another call they are joined by director of enrollment management Aimee (Meagan Moses), who appears to only care about the numbers on her spreadsheet rather than the students themselves. She explains with robotic precision, “As you both know, for the most part, we weathered the storm caused by the international student problem, and in addition to that, we’ve made up for the additional students who either dropped out, transferred, or exited for reasons directly tied to the pandemic.” Those reasons include deportation.

Despite Ben’s pleas for Kyle to stop, the latter continues to press the issue as they discover more about Counseling and Wellness and where the De La Cruz case failed. Soon Kyle, Ben, and Aimee are on a Zoom call with executive dean Frank (Ed Altman), who is all about protecting the university’s reputation and avoiding any kind of legal trouble, no matter the truth. The four of them get into it, ascertaining things about themselves and their colleagues they might not like, leading to a surprise ending.

Available on demand over the Stellar platform through March 28, Adjust the Procedure gets off to a slow start, just talking heads Zooming in from wherever they are sheltering in place, but Shore (The Devil Is on the Loose with an Axe in Marshalltown, Down the Mountain and Across the Stream) picks up the pace as he brings up pertinent issues that address how the pandemic has been handled from multiple perspectives. Kyle represents the person who wants to do right but is thwarted by rules and procedures that need to be reevaluated. Ben is the earnest employee who might agree with Kyle but is not about to rock the boat. Aimee is the efficiency expert who can’t see the human component. And Frank claims that he is “worried about society unraveling,” but his beliefs about just what that society is don’t necessarily gel with the others’.

No one comes out unscathed in this trenchant Covid-19 parable; it might be specifically about a university, since education has been so hard hit during the pandemic, but it could also be about corporations and local, state, and federal governments as they face the reality of mounting death tolls and economic collapse and decide how they are going to proceed, choosing whose interests to put first amid the bureaucracy and numbers crunching.

At one point the four characters are discussing a new class at the school, “Free Will: The Big Lie.” Frank pounces on the subject, declaring, “Do you know what an immature adolescent is going to think when he finds out that free will doesn’t exist? He’ll misconstrue it. All of a sudden, there’s no accountability for one’s actions. If there’s no free will, then there’s no control.”

As has been made all too clear during this crisis, control is all about power — control of information, of the media, of statistics, of money, of scientific interpretation — primarily at the expense of the individual, the poor schnooks trying to do right by themselves, their family, their school district, and their community, attempting to assert whatever free will is supposed to exist in a representative democracy. And as we have learned, procedures need to be adjusted, and fast.