this week in theater

RETURN ENGAGEMENT: MAC BETH

Lady Macbeth (Ismenia Mendes) reaches out to her royal husband (Isabelle Fuhrman) in inventive reimagining of Shakespeare tragedy (photo by Richard Termine)

Hunter Theater Project
Frederick Loewe Theater at Hunter College
East 68th St. between Lexington & Park Aves.
Monday – Saturday, January 6 – February 22, $49 ($15 for students)
www.huntertheaterproject.org

If you missed Erica Schmidt’s Red Bull Theater production of Mac Beth at the Lucille Lortel Theater in mid-2019, it will be back for a return engagement at the Frederick Loewe Theater at Hunter College as part of the Hunter Theater Project, running January 6 to February 22. Below is my original review of this inventive and engaging work, which features much of the original cast, with Brittany Bradford now as the title character and Dylan Gelula taking over for AnnaSophia Robb.

Erica Schmidt’s beautifully frenetic Shakespeare adaptation Mac Beth — yes, she has made the title two words, perhaps to emphasize the more feminine second half of the title — is an exhilarating demonstration of grrl power, ratcheted up to the nth degree. The Red Bull production is set at a girls school where seven students enact an all-female version of Macbeth. They are dressed in schoolgirl uniforms of buttoned white shirts under tartan tops and skirts, with bloodred socks reaching up to their knees; aggressively ominous and gender-neutral hooded capes are added for the Weird Sisters. (The costumes are by Jessica Pabst.) Catherine Cornell’s set juts into the audience, covered in fake grass with a partially overturned couch, an iron bathtub, a campfire, and water-filled craters, as if the aftermath of a wild sorority bash. (When the characters imbibe, they do so from red plastic cups, a party staple.) And although they speak in the traditional iambic pentameter, they don’t disguise their voices to be more adult, instead sounding like a bunch of kids invigorated by putting on a show exactly the way they want to.

The Weird Sisters (Sharlene Cruz, AnnaSophia Robb, and Sophie Kelly-Hedrick) stir the boiling cauldron in Mac Beth (photo by Richard Termine)

Macbeth (Isabelle Fuhrman) is returning from a successful military campaign with the loyal Banquo (Ayana Workman) when they come upon three witches (AnnaSophia Robb, Sophie Kelly-Hedrick, and Sharlene Cruz, who play multiple roles) who predict that Macbeth will become Thane of Cawdor, then king, while Banquo’s sons will one day rule. Fear, jealousy, and revenge take over as the power grab is on, but with delicious twists; in the Bard’s day, his plays were performed by an all-male cast, but this twenty-first-century all-woman cast — armed with smartphones — revels in the gender shifts without altering the original text. “Are you a man?” Lady Macbeth (Ismenia Mendes) asks her husband. Facing a ghost (hysterically played by Workman), Macbeth declares, “What man dare, I dare: be alive again, / And dare me to the desert with thy sword; / If trembling I inhabit then, protest me / The baby of a girl. Hence, horrible shadow! / Unreal mock’ry, hence!” It’s as if they are caught up in a teenage horror flick, with all the adolescent tropes in place but seen only from the girls’ point of view. Even one of the witches’ prophecies takes on new meaning when she predicts, “Be bloody, bold, and resolute: laugh to scorn / The power of man, for none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth.” At one point Lady Macbeth tells a witch, “Unsex me here.”

AnnaSophia Robb and Sophie Kelly-Hedrick play witches and other characters in Bard play set at a girls school (photo by Richard Termine)

Schmidt’s (A Month in the Country, Invasion!) breathlessly paced version flies by in a furious ninety minutes, both sexy and sinister, gleefully performed by the terrific cast led by Fuhrman’s (All the Fine Boys, Orphan) tortured Macbeth and Mendes’s (Marys Seacole, Orange Is the New Black) malevolent Lady Macbeth. Robb (The Carrie Diaries, Bridge to Terabithia), NYU Tisch freshman Kelly-Hedrick, and recent CCNY grad Cruz make strong off-Broadway debuts, playing the witches as well as Duncan, Malcolm, Fleance, Rosse, Angus, Lenox, and other minor characters; in particular, Kelly-Hedrick captures the essence of girlhood — tinged with menace — in her squeaky delivery. Schmidt’s inventive staging also boasts a thrilling storm, a creepy doll, and a touch of gymnastics, although if there was one more loud bang against the tub I was going to scream. Schmidt was inspired to revisit Macbeth by reading stories about girls being murdered in the woods. In Mac Beth, she takes back the power, putting the girls in charge in a gender swap that is as exciting as it is, in this day and age, necessary. Schmidt makes us look at the bloody power plays of Scottish kings as if they are the social dominance battles of high school — and vice versa — and every audience member comes out a winner.

UNMAKING TOULOUSE-LAUTREC

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (Daniel George) tips his hat in Unmaking Toulouse-Lautrec (photo by Brandon Saloy of Mia Isabella Photography)

Madame X
94 West Houston St. between LaGuardia Pl. & Thompson St.
Wednesday, Friday, Saturday through March 6, $40 – $55 (includes one beverage)
www.unmakinglautrecplay.com

After witnessing the extravagant calamity that is Moulin Rouge! The Musical! on Broadway, I was hoping for a more poignant and intimate experience out of Bated Breath’s Unmaking Toulouse-Lautrec, which trumpets itself as an “immersive, environmental” show, extended five times at the tiny Madame X lounge on West Houston St. Despite some dandy touches, however, it also left me cold and detached, scratching my head over what could have been.

Conceived and directed by Bated Breath artistic director Mara Lieberman, Unmaking Toulouse-Lautrec takes place in a small, cozy space, dark and plush red, where the audience sits on couches and chairs that surround the action. The actors enter and exit from the back room behind the bar and the front main entrance, which is next to a small balcony. (If you have to go to the bathroom during the show, you are sure to step in the way.) Born in the mid-Pyrenees in 1864, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec became a painter and a regular at the seductive Parisian cabaret known as the Moulin Rouge. The play begins with the death of Lautrec (Daniel George), announced by his father, Alphonse (CJ DiOrio), who calls him “the kindest soul you could ever have met.” Cabaret performer Yves Guilbert (Glori Dei Filippone) adds, “Tiny painter,” can-can star Jane Avril (Kat Christensen) “Stiff and hobbled,” fellow painter Suzanne Valadon (Mia Aguirre) “French aristocrat,” and Yves again “Star of Paris.” The story then weaves back and forth between Toulouse-Lautrec’s relationship with his mother, Adele (production designer Derya Celikkol), and his friendship with club owner Aristide Bruant (DiOrio) and the Moulin Rouge performers. Although they describe him as a “puppet” and a “little monster,” they appreciate his talent and pose for him (among other things, leading to a doctor closely examining him and the women).

Toulouse-Lautrec (Daniel George) and his mother, Adele (Derya Celikkol), reach out to each other at Madame X (photo by Brandon Saloy of Mia Isabella Photography)

Even at only sixty minutes, Unmaking Toulouse-Lautrec is repetitive and features several superfluous scenes, including a performance of “Ah la Salope!,” the chorus of which includes the line “Go and wash your ass,” and an inexplicable digression into an auction where the value of some of Toulouse-Lautrec’s paintings are listed from recent, twenty-first-century sales, completely taking us out of the period narrative. (Bated Breath seems to have a thing for auctions; its 2017 Beneath the Gavel was set in the contemporary art world and invited the audience to bid on works.) Just because a setting is intimate and the actors make a lot of direct eye contact does not make a show immersive; Unmaking Toulouse-Lautrec feels oddly distant though you can reach out and touch the actors.

However, you really shouldn’t; at the bar before the show, a patron ran her hand along one of the female performers’ stockinged leg, which was stretched out alluringly against the bar, and the bouncer looked none-too-pleased. That same woman and her partner also took full advantage of the policy that nonflash photography and video is encouraged during the show; they sometimes filmed entire scenes, which was extremely distracting, especially because no one else was doing it. The cast is solid, the dancing exciting in such close quarters, and Gail Fresia’s costumes are fun, but you don’t learn anything about Toulouse-Lautrec that you didn’t already know, and you don’t feel like you’re in the Moulin Rouge; you are quite well aware that you are an audience member watching a show about it. A scene in which Suzanne poses for the artist is cleverly staged, and the VD exams are very funny, but too much of Unmaking Toulouse-Lautrec seems unmade itself.

THE SOUND INSIDE

Mary Louise Parker and Will Hochman star in Adam Rapp’s The Sound Inside on Broadway (photo by Jeremy Daniel)

Studio 54
254 West 54th St.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 12, $49-$169
212-719-1300
soundinsidebroadway.com
www.lct.org

The Sound Inside is one of the most beautifully composed shows I have ever seen, an exquisitely rendered work that could have come only from the mind of an expert storyteller. Originally presented in 2018 at the Williamstown Theatre Festival and commissioned by Lincoln Center, it is written by novelist and playwright Adam Rapp, a Pulitzer Prize finalist who has authored such books as The Year of Endless Sorrows, Punkzilla, and Know Your Beholder and such plays as Red Light Winter, The Metal Children, and Blackbird, which he adapted into a 2007 film he also directed. In The Sound Inside, a luminous Mary Louise Parker stars as fifty-three-year-old Yale professor Bella Lee Baird. (Rapp has taught at the Yale School of Drama, and his mother’s maiden name is Baird.) Bella, who has written a mildly well received book, Billy Baird Runs through a Wall, alternates between telling her story in the first and third persons directly to the audience, as if narrating a novel, and participating in scenes with one of her students, the enigmatic and cynical Christopher Dunn (Will Hochman).

“A middle-aged professor of undergraduate creative writing at a prestigious Ivy League University stands before an audience of strangers,” Bella says to open the play. “She can’t quite see them but they’re out there. She can feel them — they’re as certain as old trees. Gently creaking in the heavy autumn air. Is this audience friendly, she wonders? Merciful? Are they easily distracted? Or will they hear this woman out? And what about her? Ironically, she often dissuades her students from describing a protagonist in too fine of detail. Readers only need a few telling clues.” Rapp and director David Cromer, who subtly transforms Studio 54 into an intimate classroom, follow that advice, offering only a few telling clues at a time as we excitedly hear this captivating woman out.

Christopher Dunn (Will Hochman) talks literature and more with his professor, Bella Lee Baird (Mary Louise Parker) (photo by Jeremy Daniel)

Christopher shows up at Bella’s office one day without an appointment. He has a supreme distaste for rules and regulations and eschews common decency. “Do me a favor. Next time you want to stop by without an appointment at least shoot me an email first,” she tells him. “Yeah, I don’t really do that,” he responds. They discuss Dostoyevsky, hipster baristas, and the book Christopher is writing. They strike up a friendship, but Christopher knows he is taking up a lot of her time. “I mean, if you get tired of me just say so and I can go like wander campus and get mentally prepared for the big football game coming up with Harvard this weekend,” he says. “Stockpile the coldcuts. Get my face painted. Do some steroids. Headbutt random campus bulletin boards, etcetera, etcetera.”

Bella, who’s dealing with stomach cancer and has no one else in her life, welcomes the offbeat Christopher into her daily existence. “I have no children and I’ve never been married,” she tells the audience. “Like many single, self-possessed women who’ve managed to find solid footing in the slippery foothills of higher education, I’ve been accused of being a lesbian. And a witch. And a maker of Bulgarian cheese. And a collector of cat calendars. Both my parents are dead. My father suffered a fatal heart attack at sixty-two and I’ll get to my mother in a minute. I have no brothers or sisters. I live in faculty housing. I don’t own property. I’m essentially a walking social security number with a coveted Ivy League professorship and a handful of moth-bitten sweaters.” As they grow closer, they both consider breaking down the barriers that make them each such lonely beings, committing to no one but themselves.

It’s impossible not to become instantly infatuated with Bella, so bewitchingly played by Tony, Obie, and Emmy winner Parker (Proof, Weeds). You want to just rush onstage and give her a giant hug to assure her everything will be all right, even if it won’t. Parker holds the audience in her hands, giving a tour-de-force lesson in acting. Hochman (Sweat, Dead Poets Society) is impressive in his Broadway debut, not intimidated in the least. Rapp celebrates literature without getting pedantic as he explores Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist, and James Salter’s Light Years. Alexander Woodward’s set features several rooms that move into the foreground and disappear into the background, superbly lit by Heather Gilbert, each one representing a different aspect of Bella’s life. Tony winner Cromer (The Band’s Visit, Our Town) keeps up a lively pace as the characters scrutinize what they are to each other.

The play refers several times to a framed photograph in Bella’s office of a “woman standing in the middle of a harvested cornfield. She’s in all black and tiny in the vast dead field,” she tells Christopher, who asks, “Is that you in the photograph? Of course it is.” But Bella says she has no idea who it is. The next time he visits her in her office, Christopher is mesmerized by the photo and asks, “Has she gotten smaller? . . . I have this weird feeling that if I come back tomorrow the field will be covered. With snow. Like twenty inches. But no footprints. The woman’s just there. As if the field imagined her.” Bella asks, “Do you think it would be a better image?” He replies, “Maybe not better. But somehow more inevitable.” It’s a fabulous moment in a fabulous play, and one that zeroes in on just who these two people are and what they want out of life.

THE SORCERESS (DI KISHEFMAKHERIN)

Jazmin Gorsline excels as bride-to-be Mirele in The Sorceress (photo © Victor Nechay – Properpix.com)

Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust
Edmond J. Safra Plaza, 36 Battery Pl.
Through December 29, $59-$125
866-811-4111
nytf.org
mjhnyc.org

Two years ago, the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene presented a work-in-progress version at the Museum of Jewish Heritage of The Sorceress (“Di Kishefmakherin”), the first Yiddish theater production to be performed in America. The company, which has had tremendous success with its spectacular adaptation of Fiddler on the Roof, is now back at its MJH home with a full staging of The Sorceress, a delightful if slight operetta that continues through December 29, including two special performances with a buffet on Christmas Day.

Dani Apple, Lexi Rabadi, Lorin Zackular work up some dastardly magic in National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene production (photo © Victor Nechay – Properpix.com)

Written by Avrom Goldfaden, the Father of Yiddish Theater, it’s a Cinderella-like tale set in the town of Botoshani, Romania, where the young, lovely Mirele (Jazmin Gorsline) is preparing to wed the handsome and stalwart Markus (Josh Kohane). At her birthday party, she is sad, unable to celebrate because she misses her mother, who died too young. “Is it fair, my dear daughter, that you disturb the celebration with such sad thoughts?” her father, the wealthy Avromtshe (Bruce Rebold), sings. “Isn’t your stepmother faithful just like your very own mother?” he adds, but therein lies the problem. Avromtshe’s new wife, Basye (Rachel Botchan), is, yes, an evil stepmother who plots with the local sorceress, Bobe Yakhne (Mikhl Yashinsky), to make sure she gets exactly what she wants. She has her husband arrested and forces a separation between Markus and Mirele in a greedy plan that confounds the close-knit community, which is struggling to survive in hard times.

Unlike NYTF’s wonderful 2015 production of The Golden Bride, The Sorceress shows its age; written in 1877, it was brought to America in 1883 by fourteen-year-old actor and soon-to-be Yiddish legend Boris Thomashefsky. Some of the jokes are once-fresh (maybe) but now stale vaudeville routines, including one involving needles, salesman Hotsmakh (Steve Sterner), and Koyne (Lexi Rabadi), but other moments are heartbreaking, such as the handler’s (Rebecca Brudner) desperate call as she sells her wares. “Nobody in the world, / Can live out their years. / Without earning a little money. / A job is a burden,” she sings. Gorsline and Kohane are in fine voice, as is the always dependable Botchan. Yashinsky overplays the title character, chewing up far too much of Dara Wishingrad’s set, which resembles those used in a traveling show. Dani Apple, Lorin Zackular, and Rabadi are playful as a trio of witches; the large cast also includes Dylan Seders Hoffman as Basye’s daughter, Lize, Jonathan Brody as the conniving Uncle Elyokem, Mark Alpert as Katsef the butcher, and Samuel Druhora as the Turkish organ grinder. Izzy Fields’s appealing, elaborate costumes capture the era and its strife, while Merete Muenter’s choreography makes excellent use of the small space, especially in the market scene.

The Sorceress features a large cast at the Museum of Jewish Heritage (photo © Victor Nechay – Properpix.com)

But the real star of the show, which is helmed by NYTF associate artistic director Motl Didner, is the music, marvelously performed by Lauren Brody on accordion, Elise Frawley on viola, Evan Honse and Rebecca Steinberg on trumpet, Sam Katz and Inna Langerman on violin, Tony Park on clarinet, Reenat Pinchas on cello, George Rush on bass, Matt Temkin on drums and percussion, and associate musical conductor D. Zisl Slepovitch and conductor Zalmen Mlotek on piano. It’s light and frothy one moment, then dastardly and devious the next, as the story takes on such relevant topics as wealth inequality, human trafficking, and the spreading of wicked lies through the social construct. The Sorceress is the first fully restored work in NYTF’s Global Restoration Initiative, which resurrects lost Yiddish plays through extensive research. May there be many more.

AILEY REVEALED: ALL NEW

Donald Byrd’s Greenwood looks at 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre (photo by Paul Kolnik)

ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER
New York City Center
130 West 56th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Through January 5, $29-$159
212-581-1212
www.alvinailey.org
www.nycitycenter.org

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s monthlong 2019–20 annual winter season at City Center is titled “Ailey Revealed,” offering a potpourri of works that celebrate the company’s past, present, and future. Every year I attend one of the “All New” programs, and the one I saw on December 20 was, pun intended, a revelation. The evening began with choreographer Donald Byrd’s fifth work for the company, Greenwood, a stirring interpretation of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, which is also the starting point of the sensational HBO series Watchmen. In the late spring of 1921, there was some kind of incident between white elevator operator Sarah Page (danced here by Danica Paulos) and black shoeshiner Dick Rowland (Chalvar Monteiro), a pair of teenagers who might have known each other and even had a relationship. For still unknown reasons, she screamed and he was arrested, imprisoned, and nearly lynched. When the black community marched to the jail to protest, the white community, already uneasy at the success of black businesses in Tulsa’s Greenwood district, known as “Black Wall Street,” used the situation as an excuse to rampage through the district, kill hundreds of black citizens, and destroy millions of dollars’ worth of property.

Set to original compositions by Israeli ambient music composer Emmanuel Witzthum (joined on two pieces by British musician Craig Tattersall) as well as two southern black folk songs, Greenwood is a fierce and powerful thirty-five-minute work. The elevator scene is repeated slightly differently several times, as if in differing recollections and retellings, each followed by Monteiro trying to escape (running in place) as two black couples, Clifton Brown and Jacquelin Harris and Solomon Dumas and Ghrai DeVore-Stokes, react alongside them and Ku Klux Klan members wreak havoc. The three couples are in conventional 1920s attire, the men in suits, the women in brightly colored long dresses, while the Klan (Jeroboam Bozeman, Patrick Coker, Samantha Figgins, James Gilmer, Michael Jackson Jr., Yannick Lebrun, and Miranda Quinn) is dressed in silver outfits and masks. (The superb costumes are by Doris Black; Watchmen fans are likely to think of “Mirror Guy” from the cable show.) Throughout the piece, Courtney Celeste Spears, in more traditional African apparel, walks slowly around the stage, solemnly bearing witness to the tragedy. A long opening in the back serves as an entrance and exit, Jack Mehler’s lighting changing colors as smoke emerges, as if hell awaits. Byrd refers to his recent work as a kind of “theater of disruption”; Greenwood more than captures that philosophy.

Camille A. Brown’s City of Rain is a tribute to a lost friend (photo by Paul Kolnik)

Following intermission is a new production of Lar Lubovitch’s sensual 1990 duet Fandango. The seventeen-minute work is performed by Paulos and Brown to Ravel’s “Bolero,” both in black costumes. They longingly explore each other’s body, much of the time moving on the floor. It’s like a sweet palette cleanser after the brute force of Greenwood and a tender lead-in to the company premiere of Camille A. Brown’s City of Rain, a reimagined version of the Tony winner’s 2010 work about the loss of her friend Greg “Blyes” Boomer, who died of a paralyzing illness the previous year.

Set to Jonathan Melville Pratt’s “Two Way Dream” for strings, percussion, voice, synthesizers, and laptop, City of Rain features ten dancers (Jeroboam Bozeman, Patrick Coker, Solomon Dumas, Jacquelin Harris, Yannick Lebrun, Danica Paulos, Belén Indhira Pereyra, Miranda Quinn, Jessica Amber Pinkett, and Courtney Celeste Spears) moving in unison, rolling around on the floor, breaking off into smaller groups, and reaching toward the sky for seventeen minutes, in costumes by Mayte Natalio and with lighting by Burke Wilmore. Brown (The Groove to Nobody’s Business, The Evolution of a Secured Feminine) melds different styles in the emotionally gripping piece.

Aszure Barton’s BUSK is reimagined for Alvin Ailey (photo by Paul Kolnik)

The evening concludes in a big way with the company premiere of Aszure Barton’s 2009 BUSK, in which the daring Canadian-born choreographer explores what she calls the “multitasking [and] the wisdom of the body.” Updated for this presentation and staged by Jonathan Alsberry, BUSK, which is named for the Spanish word “buscar,” meaning “to look for, is performed by thirteen dancers dressed in dark monks’ robes with hoods, designed by Michelle Jank. Nicole Pearce’s lighting and set includes a small stoop and a disco ball. The spectacular piece is packed with stunning moments and punctuated with surprise and delight: The dancers occasionally make funny faces, sit in a center circle and bow their heads, and wave white-gloved hands. A soloist has fun with a hat. An impressive chest is bared. The score consists of eight wide-ranging songs, by Camille Saint-Saëns, Moondog, Daniel Belanger, and others, that add to the unpredictability of the twenty-minute work. Barton’s previous Ailey piece was 2013’s Lift. Let’s hope it’s not another six years before the next one.

The City Center season, which wishes a fond farewell to longtime dancer and associate artistic director Masazumi Chaya, who has been with the company since 1970, continues through January 5. There will be all-new programs on December 28, January 1, and January 4 (with a mix from the above as well as a new production of Judith Jamison’s Divining and/or the world premiere of Jamar Roberts’s Ode). In addition, “Ailey Classics” takes place December 28 and January 3, “3 Visionaries” on December 24, and the season finale on January 5.

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.