this week in theater

JAGGED LITTLE PILL

The Healys celebrate another Christmas in suburbia in Jagged Little Pill (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Broadhurst Theatre
235 West 44th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 5, $49-$189
jaggedlittlepill.com

Don’t be misled into thinking that Jagged Little Pill is yet another high-profile jukebox musical about a famous entertainer. The mostly worshipful and misguided biographic whitewashes such as The Cher Show, Summer: The Donna Summer Musical, Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations, Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, and even the best of the bunch, Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, have been inundating Broadway over the last few years with, for the most part, a dreary mediocrity and predictability. Instead, Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody and Tony-winning director Diane Paulus have crafted a powerful narrative of suburban America inspired by the songs of seven-time Grammy winner Alanis Morissette, primarily from her smash 1995 breakthrough album, Jagged Little Pill, in addition to other tunes from throughout her career as well as a few new, previously unreleased ones, with music by her longtime collaborator Glen Ballard.

The show opens in the Healys’ home as Mary Jane (Elizabeth Stanley) is preparing the family’s annual Christmas letter. She brags about her husband, Steve (Sean Allan Krill), a partner in a law firm; their daughter, Frankie (Celia Rose Gooding), an artistic wunderkind; their son, Nick (Derek Klena), who has been accepted to Harvard; and even herself, focusing on how she has survived a car accident. “It’s amazing what you can get used to with a little discipline,” she cheerfully writes. “The mind and body are connected in ways we can’t even imagine. I’ve gotten to a point where I can’t feel anything!” She can’t feel anything because she’s hooked on opioids, which help her not face the reality of her life: Her husband is a workaholic, her daughter is a radical lesbian, her son is about to get caught up in a sex scandal, and she is a drug addict. When she later bumps into three vapid friends at the local coffee shop, one says to her, “M.J., you have to give yourself some credit. We all know you’re ‘Super Mom.’” But even Superman has his Kryptonite.

Lauren Patten brings down the house as Jo in Alanis Morissette musical (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Her carefully created world threatens to come crashing down when she learns that one of Nick’s best friends, Bella (Kathryn Gallagher), might have been raped at a party and Nick might be involved in some way. But she’s not about to let the truth get in the way of her family’s success, even as the house of cards starts tumbling down all around her. “Whether you like it or not, how you present yourself to the world matters,” she tells Frankie, an African American child the Healys adopted. “People act like my parents are heroes or something just for wanting me,” Frankie explains to Phoenix (Antonio Cipriano), the new kid in school. “My mom always says she ‘doesn’t see color.’ But sometimes I wish she did. Is that weird?” Frankie is instantly attracted to the strange Phoenix, which does not make her supposed girlfriend, Jo (Lauren Patten), very happy. Meanwhile, Steve thinks it’s time for him and Mary Jane to go to marriage counseling. “I don’t want to be resented when I’m just trying to provide for you / I don’t want to be berated for simply doing my best to reach you / I don’t want to be controlling / I just want our life to be normal again,” he sings. But nothing will ever be “normal” for the Healys again, whatever “normal” even means anymore. As Bella later says to Mary Jane, “Tell me when I’m going to feel normal again.”

Bella (Kathryn Gallagher) tries to stand tall in the wake of sexual abuse in Jagged Little Pill (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Jagged Little Pill has its share of jagged edges, occasionally dancing too close to clichés, hammering home its #MeToo message far too aggressively, Frankie’s affection for Phoenix is underdeveloped, and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s choreography feels like it’s escaped from a different show as an ensemble of frantic dancers regularly get in the way. They almost — but thankfully don’t — ruin Patten’s dynamic performance of one of Morissette’s most famous songs, “You Oughta Know,” which rocks the theater to its foundations. Patten, seen previously in such shows as Fun Home, The Wolves, and Days of Rage, firmly establishes herself as someone to watch. Cody (Juno, Tully) has a lot of fun with riffing on “Ironic” (“Hold up, wait a second, that’s actually not ironic,” one of Frankie’s classmates argues) and cleverly exposes disturbing aspects of suburban America while tackling issues of race, addiction, and sexual abuse.

Tom Kitt’s orchestrations do justice to Morissette’s originals, with powerful versions of such familiar songs as “All I Really Want,” “Hand in My Pocket,” and “You Learn” in addition to tunes from such other Morissette albums as Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie and Under Rug Swept, delivered by a terrific cast and an eight-piece band (that really don’t need to keep rolling onto Riccardo Hernández’s set. There’s also a beautiful scene in which Mary Jane is joined by her younger self in a haunting dance. Jagged Little Pill might not be nonfiction, but it rocks with a poignant realism, since Morissette’s songs are often so confessional, based on painful events from her life. The story takes place over the course of a year, concluding with a very different Christmas letter. As Morissette so poignantly wrote, “You live you learn / You love you learn / You cry you learn / You lose you learn / You bleed you learn / You scream you learn.”

TICKET GIVEAWAY: A SIGN OF THE TIMES

Javier Muñoz asks audiences to slow down, stop, and take a look at the world in A Sign of the Times (photo by Russ Rowland)

A SIGN OF THE TIMES
Theater 511
511 West 54th St.
Thursday – Tuesday through April 4, $51-$71
asignofthetimesplay.com

Writer-director Stephen Lloyd Helper’s A Sign of the Times was inspired by a twenty-second interaction with a road worker whose job was flipping a sign that said “Slow” on one side and “Stop” on the other. Helper (Smokey Joe’s Café, Syncopation) turned that into a poignant one-man comedy about depression and the state of the planet that is currently in previews at Theater 511. The ninety-five-minute play stars Brooklyn-born actor and activist Javier Muñoz, who brings his unique personal experiences to the show; Muñoz, who took over for Lin-Manuel Miranda first as Usnavi in In the Heights, then in the title role of Hamilton, was raised in East New York, is HIV-positive, and has battled cancer. “1st yr of conservatory I was asked why I chose this profession. I said cuz I wanted to help both light meet dark in us all. We exist w/in 1 another w/ every breath. Stand in defiance. Never stop listening to why you stand in defiance. There lay truth,” he recently posted on Twitter. In A Sign of the Times, his character references Albert Einstein, William Shakespeare, Greek mythology, theater, literature, and more as he searches for hope in a pain-filled world. The play features costumes by Soule Golden, lighting by Caitlin Rapoport, projections by Kristen Ferguson, and sound and original music by David Van Tieghem.

Hamilton alum Javier Muñoz stars in one-man show A Sign of the Times (photo by Russ Rowland)

TICKET GIVEAWAY: A Sign of the Times runs through April 4 (with a February 27 opening) at Theater 511, and twi-ny has three pairs of tickets to give away for free. (At the March 2, 3, 5, 6, and 9 performances, the role usually played by Javier Muñoz will be played by Greg Brostrom.) Just send your name, phone number, and favorite play, television show, or movie with a star from Hamilton in it to contest@twi-ny.com by Wednesday, February 26, at 3:00 pm to be eligible. All entrants must be twenty-one years of age or older; three winners will be selected at random.

BURNT-OUT WIFE

Sara Juli explores marriage in personal, funny ways in latest one-woman show (photo by Nick Pierce)

Dixon Place
161A Chrystie St. between Rivington and Delancey Sts.
February 21-22, 27-28, $19-$23, 7:00
dixonplace.org
www.sarajuli.com

“The funny thing about marriage over time is I was very focused on locking it in, and now I just feel locked in,” Sara Juli says in her one-woman show Burnt-Out Wife, which makes its New York premiere February 21-22 and 27-28 at Dixon Place in conjunction with the American Dance Festival. The comedic dance-theater work takes place in a peppy pink bathroom designed by Pamela Moulton, with Juli wearing a range of household costumes (or not much of anything) created by Carol Farrell as she sings, dances, and riffs on relationships while sharing intimate moments and eliciting audience participation. Juli, a Skidmore graduate with degrees in dance and anthropology whose previous shows include The Money Conversation and Tense Vagina: an actual diagnosis, lived in New York for fifteen years before moving in 2014 with her husband and two children to Maine, where she produces the contemporary dance series Maine Moves and runs the fundraising consulting practice Surala Consulting, among other artistic ventures. In preparing for Burnt-Out Wife, Juli and her husband went to marriage counseling, covering as many bases as possible as she explores commitment in deeply personal yet funny ways from a distinctly feminist perspective. The seventy-minute presentation, which involves cake, an original song, and plungers, features dramaturgy by Michelle Mola, sound by Ryan MacDonald, and lighting by David Ferri; tickets are $19 in advance and $23 at the door.

A SOLDIER’S PLAY

Capt. Richard Davenport (Blair Underwood) and Pvt. James Wilkie (Billy Eugene Jones) watch Sgt. Vernon C. Waters (David Alan Grier) in flashback in A Soldier’s Play (photo by Joan Marcus)

American Airlines Theatre
227 West 42nd St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 15, $59-$299
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org

Perhaps no one knows Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play better than David Alan Grier, even more so than Fuller himself. In the show’s original 1981-83 Negro Ensemble run, which earned Fuller the Pulitzer Prize and featured Adolph Caesar, Denzel Washington, and Samuel L. Jackson, Grier replaced Larry Riley as Pvt. C. J. Memphis. In Norman Jewison’s 1984 film, starring Caesar, Washington, Riley, Howard E. Rollins Jr., Wings Hauser, Robert Townsend, and Patti LaBelle, Grier played Cpl. Bernard Cobb. And now Grier is taking on the role of controversial sergeant Vernon C. Waters in the show’s Broadway debut, a Roundabout production that moves with expert military precision at the American Airlines Theatre.

It’s 1944, and Waters is in charge of an all-black unit of the 221st Chemical Smoke Generating Company at Fort Neal, Louisiana, under the command of Capt. Charles Taylor (Jerry O’Connell). In the opening moment, a drunk Waters is on his knees on a platform, calling out, “They’ll still hate you!” A shot rings out, and Waters falls dead, murdered in cold blood by an unseen perpetrator. Capt. Richard Davenport (Blair Underwood), a black lawyer attached to the 343rd Military Police Corps Unit, arrives to solve the crime, but the white Taylor has a problem with that.

“I didn’t know that Major Hines was assigning a Negro, Davenport,” Taylor says. “My preparations were made in the belief that you’d be a white man. I think it only fair to tell you that had I known what Hines intended I would have requested the immediate suspension of the investigation. . . . I don’t want to offend you, but I just cannot get used to it — the bars, the uniform — being in charge just doesn’t look right on Negroes!” Taylor attempts to talk Davenport out of accepting the case, in part because of the danger he thinks he will face from the local KKK, but Davenport is not about to be scared into leaving. “I got it. And I am in charge! All your orders instruct you to do is cooperate!” he firmly declares.

Capt. Charles Taylor (Jerry O’Connell) is not thrilled that Capt. Richard Davenport (Blair Underwood) has come to investigate a murder in Roundabout Broadway production (photo by Joan Marcus)

Assisted by Taylor’s right-hand man, Cpl. Ellis (Warner Miller), Davenport begins interrogating the members of the unit, which includes Pfc Melvin Peterson (Nnamdi Asomugha), Pvt. Louis Henson (McKinley Belcher III), Cpl. Cobb (Rob Demery), Pvt. Tony Smalls (Jared Grimes), Pvt. James Wilkie (Billy Eugene Jones), and Pvt. Memphis (J. Alphonse Nicholson), each of whom had a unique relationship with Waters, via their responsibilities to the army as well as through their place on the company’s extremely successful baseball team, as most of them played in the Negro League. Their stories unfold in flashback as Davenport and the witness sit stage right as the captain watches the action take place in the center and at left. Derek McLane’s two-level wooden set switches from the men’s barracks to Davenport’s and Taylor’s offices as chairs and desks are brought on and offstage and beds are pushed from the back to the front, accompanied by sharp lighting by Allen Lee Hughes.

Davenport also speaks with key white suspects Lt. Byrd (Nate Mann) and Capt. Wilcox (Lee Aaron Rosen); the former in particular is an avowed racist with no respect for Davenport. “Where I come from, colored don’t talk the way he spoke to us — not to white people they don’t!” Byrd says about Waters, talking about the night of the killing. Davenport discovers that Waters apparently had many more enemies than friends, resulting in plenty of suspects.

Broadway debut of Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play is set in an all-black army barracks during WWII (photo by Joan Marcus)

Directed with adroit sureness by Tony winner Kenny Leon (A Raisin in the Sun, American Son) and loosely inspired by Herman Melville’s 1924 novella Billy Budd, A Soldier’s Play is a scorching look at racism, in the military in 1944 as well as today. Waters strongly believes that black men need to rethink their place in society and how they will succeed. “The First War, it didn’t change much for us, boy — but this one — it’s gonna change a lot of things,” he tells Memphis. “The black race can’t afford you no more. There use ta be a time when we’d see somebody like you, singin’, clownin’ — yas-sah-bossin’ — and we wouldn’t do anything. . . . Not no more. The day of the geechy is gone, boy — the only thing that can move the race is power. It’s all the white respects — and people like you just make us seem like fools.” It’s not a position that everyone agrees with, but Grier (Porgy and Bess, In Living Color) handles the role with a grace and intelligence that makes Waters neither hero nor villain, instead a strong-willed individual with a different experience than his fellow soldiers, and a different way of approaching the future.

Underwood (A Streetcar Named Desire, The Trip to Bountiful), whose father is a retired army colonel, is bold and steadfast as Davenport, a fearless man who is going to stand by his convictions and fight for what he’s earned. O’Connell (Stand by Me, Seminar) is resolute as Taylor, who is somewhat caught in the middle, a stand-in for much of America of the 1940s (and today), wrestling with the racism he grew up with while seemingly trying to accept that things are changing. Leon and Fuller (Zooman and the Sign, A Gathering of Old Men) do an excellent job developing the characters, each actor — there are no women in this testosterone-filled tale — getting the chance to speak his mind, wearing Dede Ayite’s effective costumes and eliciting some whoops when taking them off. Now almost forty years old, A Soldier’s Play doesn’t feel dated in the least. In fact, it feels all too of-the-moment, and all too necessary.

ANATOMY OF A SUICIDE

Alice Birch’s Anatomy of a Suicide takes place in three concurrent time periods (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

Atlantic Theater Company
Linda Gross Theater
336 West 20th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 15, $51-$91.50
866-811-4111
atlantictheater.org

The beginning of the Atlantic’s US premiere of Alice Birch’s Anatomy of a Suicide is a chaotic cacophony of words and images, barreling at the audience in three parts at the same time. You’ll find yourself shifting your eyes and ears constantly, struggling to understand what exactly is happening. But stick with it; in the hands of director Lileana Blain-Cruz, the play slowly takes shape and you’ll fall into the unique and compelling rhythm of its multiple, interconnected narratives.

Mariana Sanchez’s open set is divided into three sections by invisible barriers, signaled by several doors at the back and Jiyoun Chang’s poignant lighting. There is a cast-iron tub in the middle and two more doors at the sides, through which chairs, tables, and other props are brought. Hannah Wasileski’s projections subtly change the texture of the walls in soft shades of blue, referencing changes in time. Stage right, Carol (Carla Gugino) has just attempted to kill herself, much to the dismay of her caring husband, John (Richard Topol). “It was just an accident,” she coldly claims. “You slit your fucking wrists,” he responds. In the center, a drugged-out Anna (Celeste Arias) is debating semantics with an upset doctor (Vince Nappo). “I sound like I’m trying — is the point though isn’t it cos the veracity of the whole thing lies in how likely it is I’d say what you’re claiming I said,” she argues. “Veracity — you can’t stand up straight but you can say veracity,” he says. And at stage left, another doctor, the very serious Bonnie (Gabby Beans), is being hit on by a bleeding patient, Jo (Jo Mei). “Do you want to grab a drink,” Jo asks as Bonnie tends to her wounded hand, not answering. “That is an incredibly long pause to follow that question,” Jo says, to which Bonnie replies, “You’ve had a lot of painkillers. You shouldn’t drink anything for a while.” Those three interactions establish the main characters in what becomes a gripping drama about the psychological legacies parents leave their children and the biology that determines depression.

Carla Gugino stars as a wife and mother battling depression in US premiere at the Atlantic (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

You’ll probably guess the relationship between Carol, John, and Anna fairly quickly, but the connection between Anna, Bonnie, and Jamie (Julian Elijah Martinez) will take a little longer, offering a clever surprise. Most of the excellent cast portray multiple characters, with Jason Babinsky, Miriam Silverman, Nappo, and Mei playing various friends, relatives, and coworkers and Ava Briglia taking on all the child roles. It can get confusing at times, but Birch (Lady Macbeth, Revolt. She Said. Revolt.), who won the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for Anatomy, and Obie winner Blain-Cruz, who has guided such complex, experimental works as Fefu and Her Friends, Marys Seacole, and The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World AKA the Negro Book of the Dead, eventually circle back with telling reveals and small shocks, making sure we feel the power of the story even if we can’t grasp hold of every word. Gugino (A Kid Like Jake, The Road to Mecca), Arias (Uncle Vanya), and Topol (Indecent, The Dance of Death) lead an exemplary ensemble (Gugino and Arias look particularly resplendent in Kaye Voyce’s lovely costumes), the actors hitting their marks like clockwork amid the overlapping turmoil, characters from each time period occasionally spouting key lines of dialogue in unison.

It’s like we’re in the mind of a depressed, suicidal person, experiencing what they’re experiencing as they battle a world filled with demons, an unrelenting barrage that they may not break free of. The sparkling white tub, which is never moved, is a constant reminder of what Carol, Anna, and Bonnie are facing as those around them seek to protect and love them, which doesn’t always make a difference. Performed without an intermission, it’s a tense and gripping hundred-minute journey into the legacies of mental illness, especially in women’s experiences. It’s not an easy play to watch, but you won’t be able to turn away.

MEDEA

Real-life partners Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale star in Simon Stone’s sizzling Medea at BAM (photo by Richard Termine)

Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St. at Ashland Pl.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 8, $45-$195
718-636-4100
www.bam.org/medea

As you enter BAM’s elegantly shabby chic Harvey Theater to see Simon Stone’s Medea, there are two young boys already onstage, one stretched out on the floor, on his laptop, the other leaning against a wall, on his smartphone. Bob Cousins’s dramatic cyclorama set is blindingly white, evoking a heavenly way station, making it look as if the unconcerned brothers are floating in a mysterious void. In this riveting adaptation, inspired by Euripides’s 431 BC original and the true story of Dr. Debora Green, who committed horrific crimes against her family in Kansas in 1995, Stone instantly puts us in the kids’ shoes. It’s a thrillingly uncomfortable moment since, of course, this is Medea, and we know it will not end well for the siblings. And getting there is indeed heart-wrenching.

Contemporary stand-ins for Jason and Medea, Lucas (Bobby Cannavale) and Anna (Rose Byrne) are married pharmaceutical scientists facing a crisis. Anna has just been released from a psychiatric facility after having done something bad to Lucas, who is in a relationship with a woman half his age, Clara (Madeline Weinstein), the daughter of their boss, Christopher (Dylan Baker). Anna plans to simply walk back into their old life with their two sons, Edgar (Gabriel Amoroso or Jolly Swag) and (Gus Emeka or Orson Hong Guindo), but Lucas has other ideas. “I know your trust will be hard to regain. What I did to you,” Anna says. “We don’t need to talk about it now,” Lucas replies. Anna: “No, I want to. It was a breach of trust. Most importantly it was trust that we lost.” Lucas: “I’m not —” Anna: “In all those messy months we lost sight of everything we’d promised to be to each other and both of us did that but I overstepped the line —” Lucas: “We should never have stayed together this long.” A determined Anna later adds, “I’m going to win you back.” That does not go so well either.

Social worker Elsbeth (Jordan Boatman) does not have the easiest of jobs monitoring Anna (Rose Byrne) and her two young sons (photo by Richard Termine)

Medea is ripe for reinterpretation, particularly in a world rife with misogyny and violence. In the past ten years I have seen Aaron Mark’s Another Medea, Limb Hyoung-taek’s Medea and Its Double, and Luis Alfaro’s Mojada, all of which took the central story and reimagined it in unique and compelling ways. Born in Basel and raised in England and Australia, Stone, who moves all around the globe, rarely settling down for an extended period of time, has previously adapted such classics as The Wild Duck, Miss Julie, John Gabriel Borkman, Peer Gynt, Three Sisters, and Hamlet and dazzled New York audiences with his sizzling Yerma at Park Avenue Armory in 2018, infusing his work with personal experience, as he does again with Medea.

The set features one large rectangular white wall that occasionally rises to serve as a projection screen, showing either extreme close-ups of the action, primarily a spellbinding Byrne, her evocative eyes searching for meaning, or live-stream shots by Edgar, who is making an autobiographical film for school. (The video design is by Julia Frey, with bright lighting by Sarah Johnston.) The play was originally performed at live-streaming master and BAM fixture Ivo van Hove’s Internationaal Theater Amsterdam (formerly Toneelgroep Amsterdam); the video footage can get to be a bit too much, so it’s a relief when the device goes away in the latter parts of the eighty-minute production, when things really heat up.

The cast is all new for this US premiere, with solid support led by Tony and Emmy nominee Baker (La Bête, Happiness, The Americans) and Weinstein (The Real Thing, Mary Page Marlowe) in addition to Victor Almanzar as bookstore owner Herbert, who offers Anna a job, and Jordan Boatman as Elsbeth, the social worker in charge of her case, keeping a close watch on her treatment of Gus and Edgar. At one point Stone makes a tongue-in-cheek reference to the finale of The Sopranos that is a wry riff on what ultimately happens in his take on Medea, as two famous families meet their fate.

Anna (Rose Byrne) is none too happy that her husband, Lucas (Bobby Cannavale), is now with Clara (Madeline Weinstein) in contemporary update of Medea (photo by Richard Termine)

Byrne (Bridesmaids, You Can’t Take It with You) plays Anna with a strong-willed vulnerability; she is no mere woman scorned, seeking revenge, but an intelligent wife, mother, and scientist who had the deck stacked against her and refuses to sit back and let everyone walk over her. She has a fiery, passionate chemistry with Cannavale (The Hairy Ape, The Lifespan of a Fact), who also displays a strong-willed vulnerability, allowing the cracks in Lucas’s armor to show through. “She created this instability,” Clara argues to Lucas. “I did too,” he readily admits. This is a Medea that could only be created in today’s #MeToo sociopolitical climate.

The Australian Byrne and New Jersey native Cannavale are real-life partners with two young boys of their own; after going through hell onstage, they head back to their nearby Gowanus apartment to be with their kids. Byrne and Cannavale work together often on television and in film, but this is the first time they are acting opposite each other onstage; later this year they will portray another married couple in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge for the Sydney Theatre Company. At the start of Medea, Anna shows Lucas a painting she made while at the asylum, depicting Noah’s ship in a storm, in which all the animals are drowning. “They thought they were safe and then another storm whipped up and capsized the ark,” Anna tells a confused Lucas. She continues, “You see the dead dove floating on the swell over there? With the olive branch still in its mouth?” It’s a metaphor for Anna’s state of mind, but one can also think of it as a kind of peace offering between Byrne and Cannavale as they return to a normal life following the searing heartbreak their characters experience night after night.

CHEKHOV/TOLSTOY: LOVE STORIES

Nicov (Alexander Sokovikov) argues with Lidia (Brittany Anikka Liu) over the social contract in The Artist (photo by Maria Baranova)

Theatre Four at Theatre Row
410 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Through March 14, $35-$65
212-560-2183
minttheater.org
bfany.org

One of the city’s most reliably consistent companies, the Mint, scored successes with its initial two productions of works by British character actor, screenwriter, and playwright Miles Malleson, 2017’s Yours Unfaithfully and 2018’s Conflict. But it’s unable to pull off the hat trick with Chekhov/Tolstoy: Love Stories, a pair of Russian short stories Malleson adapted into plays that have been brought together for the first time, running at Theatre Row through March 14. The Artist, based on Anton Chekhov’s “An Artist’s Story,” published in the April 1896 issue of Russkaya Mysl, takes place in a Russian country house where painter Nicov (Alexander Sokovikov) is staying. After five weeks, he has finally found inspiration, primarily in eighteen-year-old Genya (Katie Firth), who lives on Monsieur Byelkurov’s (J. Paul Nicholas) estate with her older sister, teacher and activist Lidia (Brittany Anikka Liu), and their mother (Anna Lentz). While Genya and Nicov share a flirtation, Lidia and the artist battle over social issues.

“Let them have time to breathe, don’t let them spend all their lives at the stove, at the washtub, on the fields — slaving, slaving, slaving just to keep alive,” Nicov, who was portrayed by Malleson in the 1919 original, says of the working class. “Let them have time for the life of the spirit. The highest vocation of man is spiritual activity, spiritual effort — the perpetual search for truth and the meaning of life. And when a man has recognised that vocation he can only be satisfied by religion, by science, by philosophy, by art, by the great things — and nothing else. And then, and not till then, civilisation will mean freedom.” An angry Lidia responds, “These are the things people say when they want to justify their inaction.” Directed by Mint head Jonathan Bank (Unfaithfully Yours, Katie Roche), The Artist is like an unfinished painting, feeling more like a work in progress than a completed piece. It’s difficult to get involved in the trials and tribulations of these people; neither the characters nor the plot is particularly compelling. The Mint is renowned for their sets, but Roger Hanna’s design for the play consists merely of a canvas on an easel, some chairs and a table, and a painted backdrop of a large tree that overwhelms everything.

Matryona (Katie Firth), Aniuska (Vinie Burrows), and Simon (J. Paul Nicholas) try to unravel the mystery of Michael (Malik Reed, center) in What Men Live By (photo by Maria Baranova)

The backdrop rotates to the threatening roots under the tree for Malleson’s adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s 1885 short story “What Men Live By.” In a Russian peasant hut where expert shoemaker Simon (J. Paul Nicholas) works with his wife, Matryona (Katie Firth), and the elderly Aniuska (Vinie Burrows), Simon comes home one night with the mysterious Michael (Malik Reed), a shoeless beggar who doesn’t speak and rarely smiles, even after Matryona agrees to let him apprentice with Simon, who quickly discovers that Michael is an extremely talented artisan. When they receive a special order from a nobleman (Sokovikov), Simon sees it as an important opportunity, until Michael takes things in a different direction.

In her directorial debut, longtime Mint sound designer Jane Shaw can’t find the heart of the religious-tinged tale, which was originally produced in 1919 as an antidote to the horrors of WWI. The conflicts never feels urgent enough, with plot twists coming too fast to let the drama take hold. While The Artist moves too slowly, What Men Live By packs too much into too little time on its way to its not-necessarily-surprising final revelation. Both works end up underwhelming, as if still being cobbled together, which is a rarity for the highly professional, superbly efficient Mint.