this week in theater

RETURN ENGAGEMENT: IS THIS A ROOM

FBI Special Agent Justin C. Garrick (Pete Simpson) confronts Reality Winner (Emily Davis) in Is This A Room (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Vineyard Theatre
Gertrude and Irving Dimson Theatre
108 East 15th St. between Union Square East & Irving Pl.
December 20 – January 19, $35-$100
www.vineyardtheatre.org

If you missed Tina Satter’s off-Broadway hit Is This A Room, it will be back at the Vineyard for a limited return engagement December 20 through January 19, with the same cast and crew. Below is my original review of this must-see work.

In 2017, upon first reading the official FBI “Verbatim Transcription” of the initial interrogation of twenty-five-year-old linguist Reality Winner regarding leaked classified information, Half Straddle founder and artistic director Tina Satter knew she had her next play. She also knew she had her star, company member Emily Davis. The resulting show, Is This A Room, which debuted at the Kitchen before evolving into the production returning to the Vineyard, is a gripping re-creation of the event, a dramatic word-for-word account of the FBI’s fascinating methods of questioning and Winner’s uncertain answers, at least at the beginning.

Parker Lutz’s spare stage consists of a few raised platforms and posts that represent both the outside and the inside of Winner’s house in Augusta, Georgia. There is no furniture and no props other than stuffed versions of Winner’s dog and cat. (Amanda Villalobos designed the animal puppets.) There is also a row of twelve seats along the back of the stage where a dozen audience members sit, including me; I felt like part of a jury and a person under surveillance, watched by Winner, the FBI agents, and the crowd in the regular seats. Special Agents Justin C. Garrick (Pete Simpson) and R. Wallace Taylor (TL Thompson) arrive at Winner’s (Davis) house just as she has come home from shopping. The men are in plainclothes; Winner is wearing a white button-down shirt, cut-off jean shorts, and yellow high-top canvas sneakers without socks, her hair pulled back in a knot. (The costumes are by Enver Chakartash.) While Garrick is friendly with Winner, making conversation about pets, exercise, work, weapons, and perishables, Taylor is much more direct and in her face, engaging in a variant of the classic good-cop, bad-cop scenario. In addition, an unidentified male agent (Becca Blackwell) in battle fatigues, as if ready for any kind of possible trouble, keeps entering and leaving, helping out with the dog and cat and securing the interior and exterior spaces.

Special Agents R. Wallace Taylor (TL Thompson) and Justin C. Garrick (Pete Simpson) interrogate Reality Winner (Emily Davis) as an “unknown male agent” (Becca Blackwell) looks on (photo by Carol Rosegg)

“Okay, well, the reason we’re here today is that we have a search warrant for your house,” Garrick tells Winner, who responds innocently, “Okay.” Garrick: “All right. Uh, do you know what this might be about?” Winner: “I have no idea.” Garrick: “Okay. This is about, uh, the possible mishandling of classified information.” Winner: “Oh my goodness. Okay.” As the interrogation continues, everyone starts letting their hands show a little more as the truth slowly comes out in drips and drabs. However, even though we now know that the investigation dealt with Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, at that point those elements were still classified, so a crash of sound and instant darkness detonates at each redaction, excitingly jolting the audience. (The lighting is by Thomas Dunn, with sound by Lee Kinney.)

Satter (Straight White Men, House of Dance) casts no judgments on the characters, telling the story as it happened; your personal beliefs will help you decide if you think there are heroes or villains in the true story. Davis (Satter’s The Seagull [Thinking of You] and In the Pony Palace/Football) sublimely captures the essence of the nervous, jittery Winner, who spent six years in the Air Force, was employed by the military contractor Pluribus International Corporation, had NSA security clearance, speaks Farsi, Dari, and Pashto, and only wants to do what is right for her country; even though most of the audience knows the outcome, either by having followed the news or read the insert in the program, it is utterly compelling watching Davis as Winner is confronted with more and more evidence against her. The three actors portraying the FBI agents are all effective, with Simpson (Straight White Men, Gatz) standing out as Garrick, garnering sympathy despite his manipulative methods. Is This A Room is a riveting play that explodes with importance at a very specific moment in time when whistleblowers are harassed and threatened by people in power who are trying to cover up vital information.

THE THIN PLACE

Hilda (Emily Cass McDonnell) wants to contact her deceased grandmother in New York premiere of Lucas Hnath play (photo by Joan Marcus)

Playwrights Horizons, Peter Jay Sharp Theater
416 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 26, $59-$99
www.playwrightshorizons.org

The opening credits for the 1960s horror anthology series The Outer Limits are famous among TV aficionados: A stern voice announces, “There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. . . . For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. We repeat: There is nothing wrong with your television set. You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to — the outer limits.” That statement also applies to live theater, where we sit in the dark and let cast and crew control transmission, using sound, light, costumes, architecture, dialogue, acting, and other crafts as we give up control, usually for more than an hour, and go on what we hope will be a great adventure. Florida-born playwright Lucas Hnath and British-born director Les Waters take us on such a journey in The Thin Place, which opened last night at Playwrights Horizons, where they turn the Peter Jay Sharp Theater into a haunted house worthy of The Outer Limits, The Twilight Zone, Thriller, and other classic spine-tingling tale spinners.

Linda (Randy Danson) and Hilda (Emily Cass McDonnell) become good friends in Lucas Hnath’s The Thin Place at Playwrights Horizons (photo by Joan Marcus)

Describing a party/performance he attended in Japan, the well-connected Jerry (Triney Sandoval) tells his friends Sylvia (Kelly McAndrew) and Linda (Randy Danson) and Linda’s friend Hilda (Emily Cass McDonnell), “So then at a certain point someone steps forward and begins to tell a story, a ghost story, and at the end of the story the uh teller extinguishes the candle — and then another person steps forward and tells another story, and tries to make their story even scarier than the last, and when they’re done, they extinguish another candle, and —” Sylvia cuts him off, saying, “For every candle? Jesus, sounds like torture.” What follows is not torture but delicious chills as Hilda proceeds to tell her own idiosyncratic and inexorably compelling ghost story.

Waters, the former artistic director of the Actors Theatre of Louisville, and Hnath are regular collaborators; several of Hnath’s plays have originated at that Kentucky theater. When Waters (For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday, Big Love) told Hnath (The Christians, A Doll’s House, Part 2) about what he calls “the thin place” — “where the line between this world and some other world is very thin” — Obie winner and Tony nominee Hnath was inspired to create a superb ninety-minute play about the power of the mind while cleverly toying with theatrical conventions. The play is narrated by Hilda, who often talks directly to the audience. Linda is an older woman who makes her living as a psychic medium, apparently communicating with the spirits of the dead. After Hilda attends one of Linda’s readings, the two women become close friends.

As a child, Hilda and her beloved grandmother would try to telepathically send words to each other, with some success. “I have no idea if it was real — was I really hearing her thoughts in the space just behind and a little above my eye?” Hilda asks. “Or was it something else. Did I just get good at guessing, guessing the kinds of words and thoughts and . . . now my grandmother — she said that what she was doing was — and my mother really would not have liked this — was that what she was doing was getting me ready for the day she died. . . . She’d be able to send words to me from beyond the grave. Just like you know how you pick up a phone and say hi how are you,” she says, evoking the Twilight Zone episode “Long Distance Call.”

Some potentially demonic topics are up for discussion at a dinner party in The Thin Place (photo by Joan Marcus)

Hilda wants Linda to help her speak again with her deceased grandmother — and perhaps find out what has happened to a missing family member. Linda brings Hilda to Sylvia’s house for a small dinner party, joined by Jerry, where they discuss Linda’s abilities. “I was thinking about it one night and it just sorta hit me that — I mean, if you look at it from the right angle — what Linda does — she grabs people’s minds — people she’s never met before, somehow she just manages to work her way in there, and people end up really trusting her,” he points out, echoing the pact we all make with creators when we enter theaters.

Danson (Arts and Leisure, Good Person of Szechuan), McAndrew (Men on Boats, Novenas for a Lost Hospital), McDonnell (The Antipodes, Mercury Fur), and Sandoval (Bernhardt/Hamlet, Marvin’s Room) are all excellent as they try to pull the wool over our eyes; Danson is warm and motherly as Linda, while McDonnell brings a spooky innocence to Hilda. Waters and Hnath are in control all the way, leading us deep into the eerie mysteries of this fantastical drama.

Mimi Lien’s effectively sparse set consists of a pair of comfy-looking armchairs that face the audience. Mark Barton’s house lights are on for much of the play, until they’re not. The show is not just a ghost story but a tale that takes place in the thin place between fiction and reality, between the living and the dead, between performer and attendee, about the things that go bump in the night — in our head and right before our eyes, what Rod Serling calls “the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, [which] lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge.” Go with an open mind. But do go.

JUDGMENT DAY

Stationmaster Thomas Hudetz (Luke Kirby) salutes as train passes by in Judgment Day (photo by Stephanie Berger)

Park Ave. Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
Monday – Saturday through January 10, $55-$195
212-933-5812
www.armoryonpark.org

In his 1936–37 work Judgment Day, Austro-Hungarian novelist and playwright Ödön von Horváth warns of the rise of fascism in Germany, comparing it to a speeding train approaching a station that has no idea it’s coming. That’s the central motif in Richard Jones’s admirable if uneven new production, adapted by Christopher Shinn, that opened today at Park Ave. Armory for a run through January 10. Jones, who presented a fierce version of Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape at the armory in 2017, once again makes unique use of the building’s vast Wade Thompson Drill Hall; Paul Steinberg’s set features oversized, flat, painted plywood trees around the back, sides, and corners and two giant, movable blocks of unpainted wood, like a child’s toys, one in the shape of an arch, the other flat and angled like a stray wall from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Mimi Jordan Sherin’s stark lighting creates distinct reflections on the shiny black floor, like the characters’ souls on display.

It’s the 1930s, and a lumberjack (Andy Murray), the gossipy Frau Leimgruber (Harriet Harris), and a traveling salesman (Jason O’Connell) are waiting for a local train. Stationmaster Thomas Hudetz (Luke Kirby) emerges only to ring the signal bell, standing at attention and saluting as the express roars by, thrillingly portrayed by Drew Levy’s immersive sound design and the actors’ dramatic reactions. After seeing off her fiancé, butcher Ferdinand (Alex Breaux), ingénue Anna (Susannah Perkins) teases the straitlaced Hudetz as his shrewish wife, Frau Hudetz (Alyssa Bresnahan), watches from above. Anna makes an unexpected and unwelcome move, beginning a chain of events that leads to the death of eighteen people, including a track worker (O’Connell) and train driver Pokorny (Maurice Jones) but leaving a witness, stoker Herr Kohut (George Merrick).

Paul Steinberg’s set features two large movable wooden structures (photo by Stephanie Berger)

A policeman (Charles Brice) and detective (Joe Wegner) arrive to find out what happened, but falsehood, deception, and long-simmering desires and grievances soon boil over. “I’m telling the truth! I swear to everything!” Frau Hudetz argues. Frau Hudetz’s brother, pharmacist Alfons (Henry Stram), becomes an outcast even after he disowns his sister. “Everything is connected,” he insists, but no one is listening to him. Guilt and mob mentality tear at the fabric of this small community, resulting in yet more death and destruction. “People are so fickle,” waitress Leni (Jeena Yi) says. “Who gives a shit about people,” Hudetz responds.

Paul Steinberg’s set steals the show in new production at Park Ave. Armory (photo by Stephanie Berger)

Jones’s staging often makes the characters look like little figures in a dollhouse, dwarfed by the two wooden blocks, as if they’re being manipulated by unseen forces. In his sharp uniform (the costumes are by Antony McDonald) and direct speech, Hudetz resembles a Nazi. “I was always a diligent official!” he says over and over, reminiscent of what would later become the Third Reich excuse “I was only following orders.” Judgment Day is a biting indictment of prewar German morality, written by Horváth after he had fled Germany and shortly before he died in Paris when struck by a tree branch during a thunderstorm at the age of thirty-six. The parable can’t quite carry the weight of the production through its ninety minutes, drifting between Expressionism and realism while evoking the style of Bertolt Brecht and a streamlined Robert Wilson, sometimes getting stuck in between. But there are numerous breathtaking moments as Jones (Into the Woods, The Trojans), Shinn (Dying City, Where Do We Live), and Horváth (Tales from the Vienna Woods, Youth without God) take aim at the spread of fascism and groupthink, in the 1930s and now.

HALFWAY BITCHES GO STRAIGHT TO HEAVEN

Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven features another large cast of well-drawn characters (photo © Monique Carboni)

Atlantic Theater Company
Linda Gross Theater
336 West 20th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 29, $81.50
866-811-4111
atlantictheater.org

New York City native Stephen Adly Guirgis has spent much of his career creating wickedly funny, socially relevant plays set in minority communities where the underrepresented, the underserved, and the marginalized confront religion, law enforcement, poverty, racism, systemic institutions, and family dynamics as they battle against a system set up to keep them down. Most of his plays, including Our Lady of 121st Street, In Arabia, We’d All Be Kings, and The Little Flower of East Orange, feature large ensembles that form tight-knit communities onstage. Such is the case with Guirgis’s return to the Atlantic, where his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Between Riverside and Crazy, debuted in 2014, with the world premiere of the fiendishly hilarious and hard-hitting Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven, which opened last night at the Linda Gross Theater.

A woman’s residence is the setting for new play by Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Adly Guirgis (photo © Monique Carboni)

The three-hour LAByrinth Theater coproduction, which flies by with one intermission, takes place in Hope House, a government-funded women’s residence for addicts, the abused, the mentally ill, and survivors of domestic violence. It is run by the strict, serious Miss Rivera (Elizabeth Rodriguez) and Nigerian social worker Mr. Mobo (Neil Tyrone Pritchard). Among those who find shelter at the home are the tough-talking Sarge (Liza Colón-Zayas); her single-mother girlfriend, Bella (Andrea Syglowski); teenage poet Little Melba Diaz (Kara Young); the foul-smelling Betty Woods (Kristina Poe); ex-con Queen Sugar (Benja Kay Thomas) and her bestie, Munchies (Pernell Walker); the lonely, alcoholic Rockaway Rosie (Elizabeth Canavan); the wheelchair-bound rule-breaker Wanda Wheels (Patrice Johnson Chevannes); the trans Venus Ramirez (Esteban Andres Cruz); and the twentysomething Taina (Viviana Valeria), who takes care of her mentally ill mother, Happy Meal Sonia (Wilemina Olivia-Garcia). Also on the staff are eager white millennial social worker Jennifer (Molly Collier); ex-con janitor Joey Fresco (Victor Almanzar); and Father Miguel (David Anzuelo), who has a dark secret in his past. Seventeen-year-old Mateo (Sean Carvajal), whose mother is staying at the home, often helps out, allowed to hang around as the women share their often very private concerns about their troubled lives.

Narelle Sissons’s bilevel set consists of the main gathering room, a stoop, an outdoor bench, a dark alley, a balcony, and a concrete front space where the residents gossip and drink and smoke in defiance of the regulations. LAByrinth artistic director John Ortiz (Guinea Pig Solo, Jack Goes Boating) infuses the proceedings with tremendous vitality as Guirgis’s well-developed characters fight for survival. Taina has a chance to go back to school but is terrified of leaving her mother. Venus insists on staying even though several residents cruelly reject her claim to female identity, accusing her of unfairly invading their safe space. Father Miguel jostles with a man (Greg Keller) who demands to see his wife, who has a restraining order against him. Miss Rivera isn’t sure that Jennifer has what it takes to deal with the residents, who can be harsh and unforgiving. Wanda Wheels seems determined to drink herself to death. And at the center of it all is Sarge, superbly played by Guirgis regular and Tony nominee Rodriguez (Orange Is the New Black, The Motherf**ker with the Hat). A veteran with PTSD, Sarge is fierce and unrelenting, quick to brutally insult people, especially Venus and Betty, but she sometimes lets her more tender and loving side show through. She tells Bella, “I commanded a platoon. I survived combat. Kept my people safe. Took care of the villagers as much as I could. I looked death in the eye — twice — and I didn’t flinch. I can do this, Bella. I can do this with you. If you let me.” Sarge approaches her life like she’s embroiled in a never-ending war, which is true of many of the women living there.

Ex-cons Queen Sugar (Benja Kay Thomas) and Joey Fresco (Victor Almanzar) face off in Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven (photo © Monique Carboni)

The title comes from a poem Little Melba Diaz reads that sums up much of what the play is about, the difficulties and challenges these women can’t break free from: “Halfway Bitches go straight to Heaven / I ex-caped foster care and met a boy named Kevin / He was the apple of my eye but nigga turned into a lemon . . . No money in my pocket, I was feeling kinda low. . . . Words are turds and rhymes are crimes / Memories mere summaries, / Though I might some day share some of these,” she declares. Despite getting a little syrupy as it winds down, Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven is another deeply affecting, honest, and gutsy work that lays bare the lives of too many women who rightfully doubt there’s any light at the end of the tunnel for them.

ONE NOVEMBER YANKEE

Harry Hamlin and Stefanie Powers play a trio of siblings in One November Yankee (photo by Matt Urban at NüPOINT Marketing)

59E59 Theaters
59 East 59th St. between Park & Madison Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 29, $75.50
212-279-4200
www.59e59.org

Writer-director Joshua Ravetch’s One November Yankee is literally and figuratively about flying, but the Delaware Theatre Company production, making its New York City debut at 59E59 with Harry Hamlin and Stefanie Powers, never gets off the ground. As the audience enters the theater, the sound system plays pop songs about air travel, and a small screen at the upper left shows videos of early, mostly comedic attempts to soar through the sky. Dana Moran Williams’s set is primarily the remains of a full-size yellow single-engine Piper Cub plane nose down, one of the wings badly damaged. Overwhelming the entire space, it leaves the actors only the cramped margins of the stage for their extensive dialogue and limited movement. In the first act, the plane is a MoMA art installation by Ralph Newman (Hamlin), an out-of-town artist and a favorite in Alaska and South Dakota who has yet to break through in New York. His older sister and agent, an aggressive curator named Maggie (Powers), is giving him a very hard time about it.

Ralph explains that the artwork, which he calls Crumpled Plane and describes as depicting “civilization in ruin,” is based on a real crash in which a brother and sister, and their plane, disappeared. In the second scene, Hamlin and Powers become those siblings, Harry and Margo Preston, respectively, who have crashed in the New Hampshire woods on their way to Florida for their father’s wedding. Like Ralph and Maggie, they are prone to dig at each other and throw hard-hitting barbs as they consider their chances for survival. In the third scene, it is sometime after the crash as hiking sibs Ronnie (Hamlin) and Mia (Powers) discover the plane in a vast forest and look around for clues about its destination, possible passengers, and pilot.

A sister (Stefanie Powers) and brother (Harry Hamlin) huddle together in Joshua Ravetch play about family and flying (photo by Matt Urban at NüPOINT Marketing)

Throughout the eighty-minute play, Ravetch (Wishful Drinking, Chasing Mem’ries: A Different Kind of Musical) makes repeated references to time, smoke and fire, fish, dentistry, hypothermia, and needles in haystacks in a thickly veiled attempt to bring the stories together and make various points about art imitating life imitating art, but extracting compelling continuity and relevance from the narrative is like, well, searching for that proverbial needle in a haystack. Ravetch has made a career of working with older television actors in the theater; since 2006, he has written (and often directed) works starring Dick van Dyke, Shirley Jones, Robert Forster, Brooke Shields, Tyne Daly, and Holland Taylor. Powers previously appeared in Ravetch’s one-woman show One from the Hart in 2006, and Hamlin teamed up with Loretta Swit for the 2012 debut of One November Yankee in North Hollywood.

In this iteration, which opened today at 59E59 and continues through December 29, the sixty-eight-year-old Hamlin (L.A. Law, Mad Men), who made his Broadway debut in 1982 in Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing! and was last on the Great White Way in 1996 in Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke, and the seventy-seven-year-old Powers (Hart to Hart, Die! Die! My Darling!), who has spent much of the last three decades onstage, appearing in such shows as The King and I, Applause, Looped, Matador, and 84 Charing Cross Road, in England and the US but not in New York City, are fine, both looking fabulous, but they are severely hampered by Ravetch’s often simplistic, repetitive dialogue, endless puns, and mundane plot. “The simplicity of the title is reflective of the simplicity of the art,” Ralph tells Maggie. “Tell that to your damn critics if you need something smart to say tonight. Watch my lips: ‘The simplicity of the title is reflective of the simplicity of the art!’ Would you like me to write it down?” Ralph, consider it done.

THE COURTROOM: A RE-ENACTMENT OF DEPORTATION PROCEEDINGS

The Courtroom details a hot-button immigration case (photo by Maria Baranova)

The Great Hall at the Cooper Union
7 East Seventh St.
Monday, December 9, free with advance RSVP, 7:00
waterwell.org
cooper.edu

In 2006, Filipino immigrant Elizabeth Keathley, whose husband is an American citizen, voted in Indiana elections. The next year, after a government official learned at a citizenship interview that she had done so despite not being a citizen herself, the Department of Homeland Security demanded her deportation. Her breakthrough legal case is dramatized in Waterwell founder Arian Moayed’s The Courtroom: A Re-enactment of Deportation Proceedings, a traveling free show that comes to the Great Hall at the Cooper Union on December 9. The stellar cast features five-time Obie winner and Tony nominee Kathleen Chalfant (Wit, Angels in America), two-time Obie winner J. Smith-Cameron (As Bees in Honey Drown, Succession), Happy Anderson, Hanna Cheek, Michael Bryan French, Mick Hilgers, Linda Powell, Jason Ralph, and Kristin Villanueva. All of the dialogue is taken verbatim from court transcripts; the ninety-minute play is directed by Waterwell artistic director Lee Sunday Evans (Dance Nation, Intractable Woman). Admission is free with advance RSVP, but it is strongly encouraged that you arrive early to grab a seat, as the civic-minded, socially conscious Waterwell (The Flores Exhibits, Fleet Week Follies) generally overbooks to make sure the house is full.

THE BUILDERS ASSOCIATION: ELEMENTS OF OZ

Unique app is key part of multimedia Elements of Oz

The Builders Association is restaging multimedia Elements of Oz at Skirball Center this weekend

NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts
566 La Guardia Pl.
December 7-8, $20-$25
212-992-8484
www.elementsofoz.com
nyuskirball.org

Three years ago, we saw the Builders Association’s multimedia Elements of Oz at the 3LD Art and Technology Center. The multimedia presentation is now back for three shows at NYU Skirball, December 7 at 3:00 and 7:30 and December 8 at 3:00, closing out Skirball’s yearlong celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall. Below is our slightly amended review of the December 2016 production.

The Builders Association (Sontag:Reborn, Invisible Cities) takes audiences on a wild trip down the yellow brick road as it deconstructs and reconstructs The Wizard of Oz in its fun and innovative multimedia experimental production Elements of Oz. Conceived by Marianne Weems, Moe Angelos, and James Gibbs, directed by Weems, and cowritten by Gibbs and Angelos, Elements of Oz delves into the legend and legacy of the classic 1939 film, sharing little-known stories, reenacting key scenes, and examining its online presence, including theories about how the book and movie are metaphors for the U.S. monetary system and gold standard. The show presents a small corp of actors who reenact and reshoot key scenes, creating a new version via multiple monitors that project what is happening onstage and freeze-frames taken from previous scenes. The piece is performed by Angelos, Sean Donovan, and Hannah Heller, who each portray several characters — all three play Dorothy Gale at various points. They not only switch roles, they also shift from commenting on the film to acting in its re-creation, and from past to present, telling tales of 1939 moviemaking and its ongoing reverberations in popular culture.

Following a YouTube overture, Angelos delivers the first of many “talking points,” giving inside information to the audience. “It’s a masterpiece,” she says about the film, “but all we see is the magic. We don’t see all the brutal work and failure.” Elements of Oz reveals how much of that magic was made as stage manager April Sigler, associate lighting designer Elliott Jenetopulos, video designer Austin Switser, production manager Brendan Regimbal, and technical director Carl Whipple set up and break down Neal Wilkinson’s sets, filming short scenes that are then edited live to mimic the original, shot by shot, and played back on a large onstage screen as well as the monitors that fill the theater. Meanwhile, Moe relates stories about Margaret Hamilton and her double, Betty Denko, suffering major injuries; how “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” was almost left on the cutting-room floor; that some of the munchkins were repurposed as flying monkeys; and what really happened when the film went from black-and-white to color.

Just as The Wizard of Oz made use of cutting-edge technology, so does Elements of Oz, which has a unique innovation of its own. During the show, which is based on both the film and the book by L. Frank Baum, there are moments that are best viewed through your smart phone or tablet via a free augmented reality app, designed by John Cleater, that enhances what you’re watching by adding visual and aural effects, from snow to giggling munchkins to other cool surprises. Angelos (the Five Lesbian Brothers), Donovan (Thank You for Coming: Play), and Heller (The World Is Round) are hysterical as they change from role to role, with Angelos as Dorothy and Glinda, the mustachioed Donovan as Dorothy, Uncle Henry, Mike Wallace, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, Salman Rushdie, and the Wizard, and Heller as Dorothy, Aunt Em, the Wicked Witch, the Scarecrow, Judy Garland, and Ayn Rand. (The costumes are by Andreea Mincic, with lighting by Jennifer Tipton, sound design and original music by Dan Dobson, and interactive design and programming by Jesse Garrison.) Originally presented by Peak Performances @ Montclair State University, the goofy and charming Elements of Oz is probably about twenty minutes too long, as things get a little repetitive, and as fun as the app is, you’ll find yourself at times looking at your phone, waiting for the next bit of AR to take place, instead of watching what is happening onstage. But like the original book and film, Elements of Oz is an enjoyable mind-expanding journey — and be sure to keep that app on as you exit Skirball and head toward Washington Square Park.