this week in theater

BAM NEXT WAVE: HAMNET / HE DID WHAT?

Dead Centre makes its BAM debut with Hamnet (photo by Ed Lefkowicz)

HAMNET
BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
Through November 3, $25
718-636-4100
www.bam.org/hamnet
www.deadcentre.org

What is a son without a father? What is a father without a son? Those questions are at the heart of Dead Centre’s Hamnet, making its New York premiere this week at BAM. The sixty-minute multimedia show is part of new BAM artistic director David Binder’s inaugural Next Wave Festival consisting exclusively of BAM debuts, and this one is highlighted by a dynamite performance by Aran Murphy as the title character, in his professional acting debut. Murphy is a contemporary Hamnet, William Shakespeare’s only son, who died tragically in 1596 at the age of eleven. The boy is dressed in modern clothes, carries around a backpack, and regularly asks Google for information; it’s as if he’s been searching for his father, who abandoned him and his twin sister, Judith, and their mother, Anne Hathaway, in order to write his plays, for more than four hundred years. “To be, or not to be,” he declares several times, hoping that maybe his dad’s writings will help him find him.

Written and directed by Dead Centre founders Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd, Hamnet features a large screen at the back of the stage, where the audience is live-streamed through most of the show. Jose Miguel Jimenez’s innovative video design and Liv O’Donoghue’s choreography form a kind of magic as Hamnet roams Andrew Clancy’s set, sometimes disappearing onscreen even though he is right in front of us, or vice versa, and growing even more complex and eerie when the ghost of his father (Moukarzel) appears. The narrative at times becomes murky and confusing, but the technical wizardry and Murphy’s astounding portrayal overshadow its shortcomings. “Who would fardels bear, / To grunt and sweat under a weary life, / But that the dread of something after death, / The undiscovere’d country, from whose bourn / No traveller returns, puzzles the will, / And makes us rather bear those ills we have / Than fly to others that we know not of?” Hamlet asks. Hamnet is a hypnotic puzzle about death, grief, and personal identity, albeit one that is not easily unravele’d.

BAM presents free animated street opera on building facade (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

HE DID WHAT?
Peter Jay Sharp Building
30 Lafayette Ave. at St. Felix St.
Through November 2, free, 7:00 – 10:00
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.dumbworld.co.uk

After seeing Hamnet, make your way around the corner to BAM’s main home, the Peter Jay Sharp Building, which houses the Howard Gilman Opera House, to catch the world premiere of Dumbworld and Irish National Opera’s He Did What? The ten-minute animated film, conceived and created by Brian Irvine and John McIlduff with video by Killan Waters and Conan McIvor, is projected onto the facade of the building at the corner of Lafayette Ave. and St. Felix St. The audience is given headsets through which they hear the hysterical story of three alter kockers with walkers parading slowly down the street, a man followed by two women. The two women are gossiping about him, as his wife recently caught him in bed with another woman and is deciding what to do about it. The characters are sung by Doreen Curran, Sylvia O’Brien, and Dan Reardon, with music composed by Irvine and played by the RTE Concert Orchestra, conducted by Fergus Shiel. The piece was written and directed by McIlduff; the riotous words also appear on the wall in goofy, graffiti-like type, complementing KAWS’s BAM mural and David Byrne’s bike rack across the street. While Hamnet will have you wondering, “How did they do that?,” the free presentation of He Did What?, running 7:00 to 10:00 nightly through November 2, will have you saying again and again, “He did what?” as well as “Oh no she didn’t. Oh yes she did.”

BELLA BELLA / A WOMAN OF THE WORLD

Kathleen Chalfant is radiant as Mabel Loomis Todd in A Woman of the World (photo by Carol Rosegg)

A WOMAN OF THE WORLD
59E59 Theaters
59 East 59th St. between Park & Madison Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 17, $25-$35
212-279-4200
www.59e59.org

Currently two one-person shows about real women are running off Broadway, both with a feminist bent, both starring New York theater legends. Yet they could not be more different, one far superior to the other. At 59E59, five-time Obie winner Kathleen Chalfant is beautifully portraying Mabel Loomis Todd (1856–1932) in the Acting Company’s world premiere of Pulitzer Prize finalist Rebecca Gilman’s utterly delightful A Woman of the World. It’s 1931, and Todd is giving a lecture, “The Real Emily Dickinson,” at the Point Breeze Inn on Maine’s Hog Island. In the 1890s, Todd edited several collections of Dickinson’s poetry, published after the reclusive New England poet’s death in 1886 at the age of fifty-five, and Todd built a lucrative and unusual career around her association with Dickinson. Todd’s talk is supposed to be about Dickinson, but it ends up instead delving into Todd herself as she shares intimate stories about her own life, including her relationship with her husband, astronomer David Todd; her close friendship with Emily and her brother Austin; and her affection for Hog Island, much of which she owns.

Mabel Loomis Todd (Kathleen Chalfant) details her relationship with Emily Dickinson and her family in A Woman of the World (photo by Carol Rosegg)

“If you haven’t already, do step outside tonight and look at the sky. It’s one of those clear nights on Hog Island when the stars are so close you feel like you could reach out and touch Polaris,” she says wistfully. “And while you’re out there, listen closely and you’ll hear — well, besides the wind in the trees — and the waves on the rocks — which together comprise the most peaceful sound I know. . .” Margaret Montagna’s sound design includes chirping birds that add to the allure. Todd continually turns to her unseen daughter, Mrs. Millicent Bingham, who is signaling her from the back, particularly as her mother gets distracted and goes off topic, letting her personal biases and vengeful character show through, as well as her extreme self-aggrandizement. “I confess to you, it’s been something of a burden to me over the years that men have always found me impossible to resist. And it’s not because of anything I actively do to attract them,” she boasts. “It’s because the average man is rarely exposed to someone of my natural talents, and singular charm. When I was young, I was renowned for my beauty. But more than that, I was an accomplished artist.” There’s seemingly nothing Todd couldn’t do, and she wants the audience to know about it all.

But soon after she notes that “like all families, the Dickinsons had their secrets,” it’s the Todd family secrets that come pouring out, one after another, offering myriad surprises and more than a few shocks. Chalfant (Wit, Talking Heads) fully embodies the elegant and graceful Todd, wearing an ankle-length off-white dress with a long necklace and short hair like a second skin. (The costume is by Candice Donnelly.) She is captivating and beguiling as she slowly glides around Cate McCrea’s tiny yet cozy set, featuring a wooden bench, a pair of carpets, and two stacks of books on the floor, with framed pictures of plants on the wall and a window revealing clouds and sky. Gilman (Soups, Stews, and Casseroles: 1976; The Glory of Living) and director Valentina Fratti (Williston, R.U.R.) turn the 2019 audience at 59E59 into the 1931 crowd in the parlor at the Point Breeze Inn as we hang on Todd’s every word and movement, enraptured by the house of cards she has so carefully constructed. Todd was clearly ahead of her time, in more ways than one.

Harvey Fierstein plays firebrand Bella Abzug in Bella Bella (photo by Jeremy Daniel)

BELLA BELLA
Manhattan Theatre Club
MTC at New York City Center
130 West 56th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 1, $99-$139
212-581-1212
www.manhattantheatreclub.com
bellabellaplay.com

Four-time Tony winner Harvey Fierstein pays tribute to another woman ahead of her time, Bella Savitsky Abzug (1920-98), in Bella Bella, an MTC production making its world premiere at New York City Center. Fierstein wrote the play, based on Battling Bella’s own words, and stars as the Bronx-born firebrand, an antiwar social activist, feminist, and lawyer who spent three terms as a US Congresswoman. It’s September 15, 1976, and Abzug is cooped up in the cluttered bathroom of a room at the Summit Hotel on West Fifty-Seventh St. while awaiting the returns in her Senate primary race against Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Her husband, Martin; daughters, Eve and Liz; sister, Helene; press secretary, Harry Holzer; and famous friends Shirley, Lily, and Gloria are all gathered outside the bathroom, cheering on the outspoken Abzug, who spends the time regaling the audience with anecdotes from her personal and professional life, focusing on how she has never backed away from a challenge.

“When I started this whole senatorial campaign,” she explains, “a pollster handed me a survey and was surprised when I threw it back in his face. ‘Would you vote for a woman if she was qualified?’ Now why the hell does a woman have to be qualified when a man only has to be a man?” Further regarding woman politicians, she declares, “We are not all good any more than all men are bad. But to my grave I will defend the right of a woman to be an unqualified asshole and still become president just like a man.”

Harvey Fierstein wrote and stars in Bella Bella (photo by Jeremy Daniel)

The play is stuffed with such quotes, in addition to Yiddish phrases, and Fierstein (Torch Song Trilogy, Casa Valentina often mugs to the audience for extra laughs. It’s more like a series of gags than a compelling narrative. Fierstein first appears onstage silhouetted in the shower entrance, holding one of Abzug’s trademark large hats. The hat “kinda became my thing,” she later notes. “And the press, the only thing they wrote about was, ‘The hat. The hat. The hat.’ I finally said, ‘Anyone want to know what’s under the hat?’” But Fierstein puts away the hat after the beginning and chooses not to impersonate Abzug or her style; instead, he speaks like himself, and he wears a black shirt and pants, standing barefoot on the stage. (The costume is by Rita Ryack.) Thus, we’re all too well aware that we are watching Harvey Fierstein as Bella Abzug, a stark contrast to Kathleen Chalfant’s expert personification of Mabel Loomis Todd. Director Kimberly Senior (Disgraced, The Niceties) seems limited by John Lee Beatty’s busy set, which includes a stellar rendering of the facade of the Summit Hotel but nothing is done with it aside from a very brief, very tiny shadow of a person walking down the hall. Abzug was a central figure of life in New York City in the 1970s, a passionate leader and fighter, but Fierstein never grabs hold of the era or the woman, and neither do Caite Hevener’s period projections. We never get to know any more about what’s under the hat than we did when we came in, which is a shame, because there was no one else quite like Bella.

LINDA VISTA

Dirty old men Wheeler (Ian Barford) and Michael (Troy West) can’t take their eyes off of Anita (Caroline Neff) in Linda Vista (photo by Joan Marcus)

Helen Hayes Theater
240 West 44th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 10, $79-$199
2st.com/shows/linda-vista

Tracy Letts details the midlife crisis of a fifty-year-old white man recognizing that life and love are passing him by in the darkly comic though ultimately unsatisfying Linda Vista, continuing at the Helen Hayes through November 10. The Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright (August: Osage County) and Tony-winning actor (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) — the only person to earn both of those recognitions — started writing the play four years ago when he turned fifty and has incorporated many elements from his own life into the narrative. Let’s hope that most of what the main character, Dick Wheeler, broadly played by Letts’s onstage doppelganger, Ian Barford of August: Osage County, does to others is fictional.

Paul (Jim True-Frost), Jules (Cora Vander Broek), Wheeler (Ian Barford), and Margaret (Sally Murphy) go on a double date in Linda Vista (photo by Joan Marcus)

Wheeler has just turned fifty and is going through a contentious divorce; he is moving into a San Diego apartment complex near the water with the help of his longtime friend Paul (Jim True-Frost). A former photojournalist, Wheeler put his lenses away long ago and has been working at a small camera shop run by Michael (Troy West), a slightly older man who lives with his mother and has never met a misogynist comment that was beneath him. They both have their eyes on Anita (Caroline Neff), a buxom young assistant who puts up with the verbal harassment because she needs the job. Paul and his wife, Margaret (Sally Murphy), set Wheeler up on a blind date with Jules Isch (Cora Vander Broek), a life coach who likes karaoke, and Wheeler is soon falling for her. Meanwhile, Wheeler, who has virtually no contact with his son, is helping take care of Minnie (Chantal Thuy), a pregnant Vietnamese American whose boyfriend skedaddled.

At both work and home, Wheeler starts making questionable decisions that jeopardize his happiness — if he can ever be happy. “Life is mostly disappointing,” he says to Anita. He is dour and cynical, whereas Anita is hopeful, Minnie is carefree, and Jules is forward thinking. “You have to learn to love the place you are,” Jules explains to him. His frame of reference — Ali McGraw, the Crypt Keeper, Mr. Coffee, New Coke — is a thing of the past. He’s a fervent believer in the truth — “I don’t lie,” he tells Paul — but he is living a lie, represented by his giving up documentary photography, which in theory captures reality, something he is ardently avoiding. He’s also a Stanley Kubrick fanatic; it’s no coincidence that Kubrick began his career as a street photographer and documentarian before making extraordinary fiction films. The number of Wheeler’s apartment is even 217, the room number from Stephen King’s The Shining where some bad things happen involving sex and aging. (The room number was changed to 237 for the Kubrick film.)

Jules (Cora Vander Broek), Wheeler (Ian Barford), and Minnie (Chantal Thuy) discuss life, sex, and more in Tracy Letts play at the Helen Hayes (photo by Joan Marcus)

Unevenly directed by Dexter Bullard (Grace, Lady), Linda Vista features a terrific revolving set by Todd Rosenthal that rotates from apartment to camera store to bar or restaurant, evoking the circular nature of Wheeler’s life, going around and around but making no real progress. Barford (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, Letts’s The Minutes) is a natural for the role; he sounds and moves like Letts, who has appeared in such television shows and movies as Little Women, Homeland, Lady Bird, and The Sinner. But Letts, whose other plays include the wonderful Mary Page Marlowe and Man from Nebraska, has created a character so unlikable that you won’t want to spend much time with him — in this case, more than two and a half hours; in fact, all of the men have contemptible qualities, while the women are much smarter but still make implausible choices. Parenting is a key theme of the play; it’s probably best that several of these characters do not procreate. Barford and Vander Broek (All My Sons; Soups, Stews, and Casseroles: 1976) have steamy chemistry during their courtship, but it is only a brief respite from Wheeler’s annoying, self-destructive tendencies, and the same goes for the extremely graphic sex scenes. Letts has included snippets of Steely Dan songs throughout; in “Aja,” Donald Fagen sings, “Up on the hill / people never stare / They just don’t care.” At the end of Linda Vista, the audience cares — but judges, as well. And the verdict is not a favorable one.

BAM NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL: HAMNET

Dead Centre makes its BAM debut with Hamnet (photo by Ernesto Galan)

BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
October 30 – November 3, $25
718-636-4100
www.bam.org/hamnet
www.deadcentre.org

New BAM artistic director David Binder continues his season of BAM debuts with Hamnet, presented by Ireland’s Dead Centre. In 1585, William Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway, gave birth to twins, son Hamnet and daughter Judith. Hamnet died tragically in 1596 at the age of eleven; three years later, the Bard wrote perhaps his greatest play, Hamlet, at least partly about a young man haunted by the death of his father. Founded in 2012 by Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd and based between Dublin and London, Dead Centre has previously staged Beckett’s Room, Lippy, (S)quark!, Souvenir, Chekhov’s First Play, and Shakespeare’s Last Play; all but Lippy deal with writers, including James Joyce and Marcel Proust in addition to Samuel Beckett, Anton Chekhov, and Shakespeare. It has long been debated whether Shakespeare wrote Hamlet specifically in reaction to the death of his son, or whether Hamnet also inspired part of other works. For example, in King John, published in 1623, Constance says, “Grief fills the room up of my absent child.”

“Over centuries of feverish speculation, the most compelling reflections on the presence of Shakespeare’s emotional life in his plays — preeminently, James Joyce’s brilliant pages in Ulysses, but there are many others — have focused on Hamlet,” Shakespeare expert Stephen Greenblatt wrote in 2014 in the New York Review of Books. “This biographical attention to a work deriving from recycled materials and written for the public stage would seem inherently implausible, were it not for the overwhelming impression on readers and spectators alike that the play must have emerged in an unusually direct way from the playwright’s inner life, indeed that at moments the playwright was barely in control of his materials. I will attempt in what follows to trace Hamlet back to a personal experience of grief and to sketch a long-term aesthetic strategy that seems to have emerged from this experience.” The sixty-minute multimedia piece, running October 30 to November 3 at BAM Fisher, features text and direction by Moukarzel and Kidd, with dramaturgy by Michael West, set design by Andrew Clancy, costumes by Grace O’Hara, lighting by Stephen Dodd, sound by Kevin Gleeson, video by Jose Miguel Jimenez, and choreography by Liv O’Donoghue. Aran Murphy plays Hamnet, addressing the audience directly as he shares his tragic tale.

ONLY HUMAN

Only Human takes an unusual look behind the creation of people on earth (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

Theatre at St. Clement’s
423 West 46th St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Wednesday – Monday through January 5, $39-$125
866-811-4111
www.onlyhumanmusical.com

During intermission of the new musical Only Human, which opened this week at the Theatre at St. Clement’s, a random fellow theatergoer approached me and said, “Well, that wasn’t as terrible as I’d expected.” But then we went back for the second act.

The main attraction of this world premiere production is the return to the stage of Oscar-nominated actor and musician Gary Busey — playing God. Stunt casting doesn’t get much better than that. The story begins in the early days of the planet, as God, in a casual suit, is in the process of creating the earth. He’s not quite an all-knowing, all-powerful supreme being but more of a doofy man-child with a support staff: the ambitious, self-obsessed Lou/Lucifer (Mike Squillante), the eager, talented, high-strung Maggie/Mary Magdalene (Kim Steele), and the slacker ne’er-do-well cursing druggie Jay/Jesus (Evan Maltby), the son of God. Lou has a detailed plan to put a new creature on the planet, humans, but everyone disagrees on just how to make them, arguing over the importance of free will, among other things. Lou is ultimately cast out of heaven and sets up shop in hell, leading to a second-act battle for the fate of the world.

Lucifer (Mike Squillante) talks down to God (Gary Busey) in Only Human at the Theatre at St. Clement’s (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

First-time book writer Jess Carson and director NJ Agwuna can’t get a handle on the characters or the story, neither of which makes sense, requiring too many leaps of faith. “Who are you?” Lou and Jay ask each other in a duet; don’t ask me, because I have no idea. It’s impossible to figure out the motivations behind much of the action — and don’t even try to relate it to what is in the Bible itself. Time, space, and interpersonal relationships all are mixed up and regurgitated in head-scratching ways. The music and lyrics, by Squillante, lead singer of the band Running Lights, are mundane and clichéd, while Adrià Barbosa’s orchestrations and arrangements are tame and ordinary. Several of the songs in the second act are unnecessary reprises from the first act, adding nothing to the drama except slowing it down. One of the themes of the play is humanity’s “perfect imperfections,” but the musical’s imperfections are far from perfect. Everybody doesn’t always win; someone is going to lose.

A supernatural fight between God and Satan deserves much more excitement. Andrew Moerdyk’s set features a white wall in the back, the top right of which occasionally slides open to reveal God’s office, complete with computer, silly mottoes, and various ephemera. A gold ladder — a stairway to heaven? — allows the others to go up to meet with the supreme being, whom the script refers to as the boss. The ladder is occasionally wheeled around the stage as a prop, just for the heck of it; it’s always there, so why not use it, I guess.

The best part of the show by far are the minor angels played by Ben Bogen and Lili Thomas, who take care of menial tasks but also get to display their singing and dancing chops, making the most of Josue Jasmin’s limited choreography. Bogen brings down the house when he delivers a letter to Lou and really lets loose. But it’s impossible to not focus on the seventy-five-year-old Busey, a Texas native who started his career as a drummer before appearing in such films as Lethal Weapon, Point Break, and The Buddy Holly Story; he also performed in South Pacific and A Midsummer Night’s Dream eons ago. Busey suffered a serious motorcycle accident in 1988 and a drug overdose in 1995, leading to his participation on Celebrity Rehab in 2008. You spend much of the show hoping he doesn’t make any major mistakes, and he doesn’t, although he also doesn’t reveal much depth. He clasps his hands together a lot, repeatedly opens his eyes wide, and makes eye contact with as much of the audience as he can, bringing us into his corner as we root for him. He even sings near the end, but it’s not like the old days. Alas, we are all only human, every one of us, imperfections be damned.

EMPEROR SERIES: KWAIDAN — CALL OF SALVATION HEARD FROM THE DEPTHS OF FEAR

Shirō Sano and Kyoji Yamamoto team up at Japan Society for Kwaidan

Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Thursday, October 24, $30, 7:30
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

Japan Society gears up for Halloween with the spooky presentation Kwaidan — Call of Salvation Heard from the Depths of Fear. On October 24 at 7:30, popular Japanese film and television actor Shirō Sano (Zutto Anata ga Suki data, Karaoke) will read five tales of the supernatural he selected by Lafcadio Hearn, aka Yakumo Koizumi (1850-1904), with live music played by guitarist Kyoji Yamamoto, of BOW WOW and VOW WOW fame. (Sano and Yamamoto both hail from Matsue City in Shimane Prefecture.) Japanese film fans will be familiar with Hearn’s oeuvre from Masaki Kobayashi’s 1965 horror anthology, Kwaidan, which consists of the Hearn tales “The Black Hair,” “The Woman of the Snow,” “Hoichi the Earless,” and “In a Cup of Tea.” The performance will be preceded by a short lecture by Hearn’s great-grandson, Lafcadio Hearn Memorial Museum director and folklorist Bon Koizumi, and a reception with the artists will follow the show, which is part of Japan Society’s Emperor Series, celebrating Emperor Naruhito’s ascension to the Chrysanthemum Throne on May 1.

SLAVE PLAY

Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play has moved from New York Theatre Workshop to Broadway (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Golden Theatre
252 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 19, $39-$159
slaveplaybroadway.com

Over the last several years, I’ve had the privilege of seeing four terrific shows first off Broadway and then on, then on the Great White Way. In each case, nothing was lost in the transition to the bigger stage; in fact, three of them received Tony nominations for Best Play — Indecent, Pulitzer Prize recipient Sweat, and The Humans — with The Humans winning the award. (Unfortunately, the sadly overlooked Significant Other had only a short stint on Broadway.)

So at first I was surprised to hear that Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play, which initially ran at New York Theatre Workshop last season, was heading to the Golden Theatre for a Broadway engagement, not least because of its graphic sexual content as well as its central subject matter involving a trio of dangerous sexual interactions defined by race, gender, and power on a plantation in the Antebellum South as well as today: black slave Kaneisha (Joaquina Kalukango) and her white overseer, Jim (Paul Alexander Nolan); Alana MacGregor (Annie McNamara), the plantation owner’s wife, and her “mulatto” house servant, Phillip (Sullivan Jones); and Dustin (James Cusati-Moyer), a white indentured servant, and Gary (Ato Blankson-Wood), his black boss. Clint Ramos’s set has been expanded, with two levels of mirrored doors that open up to reveal characters and bring on and off various pieces of furniture; the MacGregor plantation is represented by a long horizontal image of the main house on the mezzanine facade that is reflected in the mirrors across the back of the stage so the audience can see itself. At NYTW, the mirrors made it feel like we were all on the plantation, making us complicit in America’s original sin of slavery.

Kaneisha (Joaquina Kalukango) and Jim (Paul Alexander Nolan) face issues of race, gender, and power in Slave Play (photo by Matthew Murphy)

But at the Golden, the mirrors feel more gimmicky, less insightful and condemnatory. The two-hour intermissionless play is divided into three sections, each of which now struck me as being too long and repetitive, continuing well past their expiration date. And the shock value of the brutal sex scenes and, especially, the second-act twist seemed much more tame. The cast, which is the same except for Kalukango replacing Parris — Irene Sofia Lucio and Chalia La Tour are also back as politically correct comic facilitators Patricia and Teá, respectively — is again uniformly strong, with Cusati-Moyer standing out as a white man claiming he’s not white. So what happened? Only small tweaks were made to the script and direction. Perhaps it’s the spate of works by black playwrights about the black experience in America; since Slave Play debuted at NYTW, I’ve seen Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Pulitzer-winning Fairview, Thomas Bradshaw’s Southern Promises, Jordan E. Cooper’s 2019 Ain’t No Mo’, Suzan-Lori Parks’s White Noise, Tori Sampson’s If Pretty Hurts Ugly Must Be a Muhfucka Lynn Nottage’s By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, and Harris’s own “Daddy.”

There’s no denying that it’s a boon to the artform that so many diverse voices are now being heard onstage, both on and off Broadway, dealing with issues that must be faced in a society still teeming with institutional and systemic racism; what used to be the exception (August Wilson, Lorraine Hansberry, Ntozake Shange, Adrienne Kennedy) is quickly becoming the norm (see also Lydia R. Diamond, Dominique Morriseau, Danai Gurira, Dael Orlandersmith, and Katori Hall, among others). But maybe the shock I experienced when I first saw Slave Play has worn off a bit as the subject matter becomes more commonplace in American theater. Maybe the Golden is too large a venue for the intimacy Harris is exploring in the show. Maybe the flaws in Slave Play are more evident in this bigger production, particularly when seen for the second time. Or maybe the novelty of the play has just dissipated as more nuanced ones come along. I’m not sure any of that matters from a critical standpoint, as the producers just announced that it’s off to a solid financial start, even extending the run two weeks.