this week in theater

FOR COLORED GIRLS WHO HAVE CONSIDERED SUICIDE/WHEN THE RAINBOW IS ENUF

Lady in Brown (Celia Chevalier) stands center stage in exhilarating revival of for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf at the Public (photo by Joan Marcus)

Martinson Hall, the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. at Astor Pl.
Tuesday through Sunday through December 15, $85-$150
212-539-8500
publictheater.org

I remember as a kid being intrigued by a television commercial for an oddly named play — for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. I even recall the precise, rhythmic elocution used by the female announcer pronouncing the title, which included a word I didn’t think you could say anymore on television. I was further fascinated when my parents came home from the show at the Booth and gave me the Playbill, which listed a cast of seven women by color (Lady in Brown, Lady in Yellow, etc.), with Lady in Orange portrayed by the playwright herself, Ntozake Shange. More than forty years later, I finally understand what the hubbub was all about after seeing Leah C. Gardiner’s stirring revival at the Public Theater, where the original production moved in 1976 after earlier iterations at smaller venues in Berkeley and downtown New York (and shortly before moving to Broadway).

Seven women come together to share their stories and empower one another in Ntozake Shange’s brilliant choreopoem (photo by Joan Marcus)

Extended at the Public’s Martinson Theater through December 15, for colored girls is a breathtaking “choreopoem” with music, performed by seven women named for the colors of the rainbow, with the addition of one: Lady in Red (Jayme Lawson), Lady in Orange (Danaya Esperanza), Lady in Yellow (Adrienne C. Moore), Lady in Green (Okwui Okpokwasili), Lady in Blue (Sasha Allen), Lady in Purple (Alexandria Wailes), and Lady in Brown (Celia Chevalier). Over the course of ninety thrilling minutes, each actress takes center stage, sharing stories about the “dark phrases of womanhood,” including sex, racism, misogyny, gender bias, slavery, domestic violence, abortion, and rape. But these women refuse to view themselves as victims or even survivors. They each wear outfits that feature the face of their most beloved female relative (the dazzling costumes are by Toni-Leslie James), and they have taken their power back, controlling their personal narrative and identity as they openly support one another in an invigorating display of camaraderie and friendship through both good and bad times. Often the ensemble forms a semicircle of love and respect as they watch each other deliver their tales in turn. They are seven unique personalities with unique body types moving individually and in unison to choreography by Tony nominee Camille A. Brown and original music by Martha Redbone in addition to such familiar songs as Martha and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Streets” and the Dells’ “Stay in My Corner.”

They hail from Nashville, Washington DC, Strasbourg, Harlem, Havana, Brooklyn, and Delaware but are from anywhere and everywhere. “Are we ghouls? / children of horror?/ the joke? / don’t tell nobody don’t tell a soul / are we animals? have we gone crazy?” Lady in Brown asks, adding, “This is for colored girls who have considered suicide / but moved to the ends of their own rainbows.” But as exhilarating and potent as it all is, the women understand the reality of their daily existence. “We gotta dance to keep from cryin,” Lady in Yellow says. “We gotta dance to keep from dyin,” Lady in Brown adds. “I come in at dusk / stay close to the curb / round midnite / praying wont no young man / think i’m pretty in a dark morning,” Lady in Blue admits.

Sasha Allen brings down the house as Lady in Blue in for colored girls revival (photo by Joan Marcus)

The cast is fantastic, highlighted by Allen (Hair, Ghetto Superstar) tearing down the house with a rousing number about satisfaction and an intimate solo dance by Okpokwasili (Poor People’s TV Room, Bronx Gothic), while Moore (Orange Is the New Black, The Taming of the Shrew) brings an infectious, unbridled enthusiasm to her role. Myung Hee Cho’s inclusive set features three rows of chairs along the back arch of the circular stage, in front of a large mirror, which reflects the audience so they appear right behind the cast, who enter and exit through three different doorways. Jiyoun Chang’s lighting is often very bright, so everyone in the theater is usually visible.

Obie winner Gardiner (If Pretty Hurts Ugly Must Be a Muhfucka, born bad) and her all-female crew have crafted an emotionally involving and stimulating work, anchored by Obie-winning, Oscar-nominated poet, novelist, playwright, kids’ book author, activist, and essayist Shange’s (Mother Courage and Her Children, Whitewash) gorgeous words, which resonate with truth and beauty; it’s a shame that the Trenton-born Shange did not get to see this triumphant revival of her play (which she updated in 2010 and was inspired by her own life, which included four suicide attempts), as she passed away last year at the age of seventy, leaving behind a wide-ranging and deeply powerful legacy.

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.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 24, $45-$100
www.vineyardtheatre.org

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 now running at the Vineyard through November 24, 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.

SOFT POWER

Francis Jue stars as an alternate version of David Henry Hwang in Soft Power (photo by Joan Marcus)

Newman Theater, the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. at Astor P.
Through November 17, $100
212-539-8500
publictheater.org

This is the last weekend to see Soft Power, David Henry Hwang’s “play with a musical” at the Public’s Newman Theater. Hwang uses several real events as inspiration for this East meets West tale of politics, strange bedfellows, and culture clash: On November 29, 2015, the playwright was stabbed in the neck in a seemingly random attack that might have been racially motivated; on November 8, 2016, Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election to Donald Trump; and Chinese producers approached the LA-born Hwang multiple times to write a big show for them. In Soft Power, Dragon Entertainment Group North American president Xūe Xíng (Conrad Ricamora) wants DHH (Francis Jue) to write a Broadway-style musical for its new theater in Shanghai, based on a popular Chinese romantic comedy called Stick with Your Mistake, in which an unhappy couple decides to stay together because that’s what Chinese people do to save face. DHH says he will consider it only if they change the ending and the husband and wife go their separate ways to try to find true love.

Alyse Alan Louis steals the “play with a musical” at the Public (photo by Joan Marcus)

On election night, DHH, Xūe Xíng, and his close friend, Zoe Samuels (Alyse Alan Louis), go to Lincoln Center to see a smash production of The King and I as part of a campaign rally for Hillary Clinton (Louis) that will be followed by a gathering at McDonald’s. The next day, Xūe criticizes an American system that can result in Trump’s victory and DHH is stabbed in the neck, perhaps by an anti-immigrant Trump lover. DHH goes ahead and writes the musical, with life imitating art imitating life, as Shanghai producer Xūe Xíng travels to New York City to convince DHH to write a musical for him as Xūe, a married father, falls in love with Hillary Clinton.

East meets West in takeoff of The King and I (photo by Joan Marcus)

Directed by Leigh Silverman (The Lifespan of a Fact, Hwang’s Chinglish and Golden Child), Soft Power has several terrific moments, including when the orchestra is revealed — the audience gasps in unison at the sight — and when Samuels tears the roof off the joint in a rousing solo as Clinton singing about her experiences on the campaign trail. Clint Ramos’s set also features a plane mimicking the ship from Lincoln Center’s The King and I. But as with many Hwang (M. Butterfly, Flower Drum Song) works, his political leanings come through too didactically, too one-sided. More subtlety would have helped. “Communism in China has raised hundreds of millions out of poverty,” Xūe tells DHH. “But here in America, you have too much freedom. You really believe your voting will force the rich to give up their money? Here, you cannot even force your mentally ill to give up their guns.” DHH asks himself, “Am I even gonna be able to live in this country anymore? Almost half the population just voted for a guy who thinks [Asians] don’t really belong here. That we should be nothing more than supporting characters in someone else’s story.”

Later, DHH sings, “Xing, you’ve helped me see / I don’t have to play a role / I’m not two halves, I’m whole / Enough, just as I am / It’s something to be proud of / I guess that’s love.” Hwang wrote the play and the lyrics, with music and additional lyrics by Jeanine Tesori (Fun Home, Caroline, or Change) — among the revealing song titles are “Dutiful,” “I’m with Her,” “Good Guy with a Gun,” and “Democracy.” Danny Troob’s orchestrations are fairly standard, as is Sam Pinkleton’s sometimes goofy choreography. Soft Power, which comes on too hard, is also at least the fourth recent play I’ve seen in which the narrative breaks away into a panel discussion / group therapy session that evaluates what we’ve been watching; I’ll be fine if that doesn’t come along again anytime soon.

BrandoCapote

BrandoCapote takes place in a Kyoto hotel that doubles as purgatory (photo by Miguel Aviles)

The Tank
312 West 36th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 24, $25
thetanknyc.org

In 1957, thirty-two-year-old writer and journalist Truman Capote was sent to Kyoto by the New Yorker to do a story on thirty-three-year-old actor Marlon Brando, who was in Japan making Sayonara, Joshua Logan’s movie based on James Michener’s novel about an air force pilot who falls in love with a Japanese dancer during the Korean War. Husband-and-wife team Reid and Sara Farrington use the resulting article, “The Duke in His Domain: Marlon Brando, on Location,” as the jumping-off point for the multimedia production BrandoCapote, continuing at the Tank through November 24. The seventy-minute show, set in the hotel where Capote is interviewing Brando, also incorporates elements of Capote’s 1965 nonfiction novel, In Cold Blood, an investigation into the senseless murder of the Clutter family in Kansas by Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, as well as the tragic circumstances surrounding Brando’s son Christian, daughter Cheyenne, and Cheyenne’s boyfriend, Drag Drollet.

As they have done in such previous dazzling works as The Passion Project, CasablancaBox, Gin & “It,” and A Christmas Carol, the Farringtons use film clips to propel the narrative, projected with pinpoint precision onto Japanese fans and umbrellas that the five-person cast open up and turn toward the audience. For example, a clip of Brando as Col. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now asking, “Are you an assassin?” is followed by Capote answering, “No no no, I’m a journalist!” The dialogue is a compelling, sometimes confusing patchwork, with some lines spoken live by the actors onstage — Rafael Jordan as Brando, Jennifer McClinton as Capote, Lynn R Guerra as Brando’s mother, Dodie, Laura K Nicoll as Cheyenne, and Cooper Howell as Christian — some from the film clips, and others prerecorded audio snippets (with Sara Farrington and Akiyo Komatsu delivering different vocal impressions of Capote), in which case it is sometimes lip-synced, causing a panoply of beguiling chaos. “He paused, seemed to listen, as though his statement had been tape-recorded and he were now playing it back,” Capote writes of Brando in the article.

Clips from Marlon Brando movies are projected onto such objects as umbrellas to propel the plot of multidisciplinary work at the Tank (photo by Miguel Aviles)

Dressed in colorful kimono designed by Andre Joyner and constructed by Kelvin Gordon-El, the actors move to intricate choreography by Nicoll based on Japanese noh, bunraku, and kabuki traditions that repeats continually throughout the show, as if the director is yelling “Cut!” and the scene is being done over. “Sorry, sorry. Lemme start over. I’m gonna get this right,” Brando says after re-creating a violent scene from A Streetcar Named Desire. There are also excerpts from On the Waterfront, Mutiny on the Bounty, Julius Caesar, Last Tango in Paris, The Missouri Breaks, Sayonara, The Godfather, and other Brando films, many of which deal with childhood and the relationship between parents and children. “The son becomes the father, and the father the son,” Brando as Kal-El says to his infant son in a clip from Superman. “You are all my children,” Brando as Dr. Moreau tells his hideous creations in The Island of Doctor Moreau. Meanwhile, Brando threatens to kill his father if he ever beats his mother, a wanna-be actress, again. And after being called a “sissy” by other kids, Capote says of the bullies, “Buttoned up, boring, faceless nobodies — the kind of son my mother always wanted.”

The set is continually destroyed and resurrrected in Reid and Sara Farrington’s BrandoCapote (photo by Miguel Aviles)

Chairs and tables are overturned, carried offstage, then brought back on as the characters fold up and then ritualistically unfurl long black-and-white or red obi sashes, placing them carefully across the floor. Someone calls out, “Let’s get back to the interview,” and a sound glitch takes the action back to Capote in the hotel, which doubles as purgatory. It all comes off like clockwork, which is fascinating to experience. It is also repetitive in an abstract way, which can be both titillating and aggravating. But it’s always stimulating, both aurally and visually. “I’m not an actor,” Brando says self-effacingly. “I’m a mimic. Everyone is. And I’m not successful.” However, BrandoCapote is, in part by not merely mimicking its two famous celebrities but taking their story to another level.

BAM NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL: USER NOT FOUND

Terry O’Donovan plays a man experiencing grief in public in intimate User Not Found (photo by Rebecca Smeyne)

Greene Grape Annex
753 Fulton St.
November 9-16, $65
www.bam.org
danteordie.com

BAM’s Next Wave festival of debuts under new artistic director David Binder has another first, a show taking place not in the Harvey, the Howard Gilman Opera House, or the Fisher but up Fulton St. at a nearby café. London-based site-specific-performance purveyors Dante or Die is staging its poignant User Not Found in the cozy Greene Grape Annex, where the small audience sits at shared tables or on benches or stools. It’s an intimate and clever exploration of grief and one’s digital legacy in the age of social media that will have you thinking about your own online footprint.

Each audience member is given a headset and a cellphone. After some Norah Jones music concludes, a man starts talking; it takes a minute or so to realize he is sitting at one of the tables, getting ready to share his tale as it unfolds in real time. We see and hear exactly what he sees and hears on his phone, from text messages and relaxing apps to photos and videos that bring up memories. (The music and sound design is by Yaniv Fridel, with video design by Preference Studio and creative technology by Marmelo.) Identifying himself as Terry (Terry O’Donovan), he is just finding out that his ex-lover Luka has died and that he is the executor of his digital profile via a company called Fidelis, which means “always faithful”: It is his responsibility to determine whether to keep or delete Luka’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tinder, etc., pages. Having been unceremoniously dumped by Luka in a brutal breakup, he has no interest in the job, yet he begins searching through Luka’s data to see what he has been doing since he left him as well as remembering some of the good times. Terry walks all around the café (the lighting and set design is by Zia Bergin-Holly), seeking out eye contact and making connections, and at one point he does an interpretive dance across the floor. (The production is copresented with BAM neighbor the Mark Morris Dance Group.)

User Not Found takes place in Greene Grape Annex café near BAM (photo by Rebecca Smeyne)

Written by Chris Goode and created by O’Donovan and Daphna Attias and inspired by a 2015 Guardian article by Caroline Twigg entitled “What happens to my late husband’s digital life now he’s gone?,” User Not Found is a very human and deeply cathartic look at grief and how it’s shared in our current world of continual contact through technology. The point is, of course, that Terry could be any of us; as you glance around at the other people in the audience, you might wonder if they’ve been through anything like Terry has, since each one of us has our stories that we choose to share or not. Director Attias carefully balances our communal and individual experiences as Terry reaches into his heart while mourning right in front of us, going through some of the five stages of loss in a swiftly moving ninety minutes. Once you leave the café, it’s highly unlikely that you won’t be considering who you would make your digital executor while also pondering what is still on your MySpace page.

(User Not Found runs through November 16; in addition, Dante or Die will host the artist workshop “Site-Specific Theater-Making” at the Mark Morris Dance Center on November 13 at 2:00 as part of BAM’s Artist Lab program.)

FIRES IN THE MIRROR

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 15, $40 – $75
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

On August 19, 1991, seven-year-old Gavin Cato was struck and killed by a car driven by Yosef Lifsh in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The next day, riots broke out that pitted the black community against Orthodox Jews in a bloody battle that resulted in the murder of Yankel Rosenbaum, a visiting student from Australia. A year later, Baltimore-born actress and playwright Anna Deavere Smith staged Fires in the Mirror at the Public, a one-person show that explored the incendiary situation from multiple angles, consisting of verbatim dialogue taken from a series of interviews Smith conducted with more than one hundred people. With race still such a heated topic more than a quarter century later, the time is ripe for a revival; as part of her residency at the Signature, Smith has brought back the play, passing the torch to Michael Benjamin Washington, who will be performing the show, which opened tonight at the Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre, through December 15. Washington is heart-wrenching as he spends 110 uninterrupted minutes switching among more than two dozen men and women as racial issues, biases, anti-Semitism, and social justice take center stage and the events of August 19-21, 1991, unfold.

Washington portrays such public figures as writer Ntozake Shange, theater director George C. Wolfe, the Reverend Al Sharpton, activists Angela Davis and Sonny Carson, and author Letty Cottin Pogrebin as well as various rabbis and ministers, Crown Heights residents, and relatives of both Cato and Rosenbaum. He makes subtle costume changes to indicate each character, adding a bowtie or a necklace, putting on a jacket, or taking off a shirt. (The costumes are by Dede M. Ayite.) Similarly understated are his shifts in accent to identify different individual monologues, all of which sing with their own poetry. Each character is introduced by Hannah Wasileski’s projections, which bounce off the floor and onto the long mirror at the back of the stage. Each interview is titled: an anonymous Lubavitcher woman’s segment is called “Static” because she is trying to get a non-Jew to turn off her radio on Shabbos; Wolfe’s is “101 Dalmatians” because as a child he could not go to the movies to see the animated film because the theater was segregated; Rivkah Siegal’s is “Wigs” because she describes the rules for Orthodox wives’ hairstyles; and an anonymous young man’s is “Bad Boy” since he doesn’t believe that sixteen-year-old Lemrick Nelson could have killed Yankel Rosenbaum because Nelson was an athlete and thus cannot be bad.

Accusations are made, prejudices are revealed (on all sides), the mayor and the police are blamed, and belief systems are challenged and defended. In addition to tables, cabinets, and chairs, Arnulfo Maldonado’s set is backed by a large mirror in which the audience can see itself, implicating all of us in the conflict. Fluidly directed by Saheem Ali (Kill Move Paradise, Passage) to prevent narrative gaps, Fires in the Mirror offers a provocative look at who we were then and who we are now, anchored by a bravura performance by Washington (The Boys in the Band, La Cage aux Folles). Among her other one-person shows, Smith documented and dramatized the 1992 LA riots in Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (which the Signature is remounting in spring 2020), took on the health-care crisis in Let Me Down Easy, and examined the school-to-prison pipeline in Notes from the Field. As this revival of Fires in the Mirror reveals yet again, Smith is a master at verbatim theater and at taking the nation’s temperature, while Ali and Washington prove the timeless universality of Smith’s work.

TAITEN: NOH & KYOGEN

Noritoshi Yamamoto (right) and members of his prestigious family will perform Kagyu (The Snail) at Japan Society November 14-16 (photo © Yoshiaki Kanda)

Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
November 14-16, $97, 7:30
www.japansociety.org

Japan Society’s Emperor Series, celebrating the ascension of Emperor Naruhito to the Chrysanthemum Throne in May, concludes with a special program that includes a noh play created for Emperor Taishō’s ascension to the throne in 1912. In honor of the era turning from Heisei to Reiwa, Kurouemon Katayama X will stage Taiten, portraying the god Amatsukami, wearing a Mikazuki mask as he descends from the heavens for a ritual dance. The work is rarely performed; in mounting the Reiwa version, Kurouemon X was influenced by notes left by his father and grandfather from the 1912 original commission. In addition, Noritoshi Yamamoto and members of his family will perform the comedic kyogen play Kagyu (The Snail), in which a servant is sent to gather up snails but collects a traveling priest instead, thinking it is the shelled gastropod.

The show runs November 14-16, at the same time the succession rites, known as the Daijosai, or the Great Thanksgiving Ceremony, are taking place at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. The November 14 performance will be followed by a soirée, and Japan Society will host a noh workshop with actors from the Kyoto Kanze Association on November 15 at 1:00 ($60) and a kyogen workshop with members of the Yamamoto Tojiro Family of the Okura School of Kyogen on November 16 at 1:00 ($60). This is a rare chance to experience these works, so tickets are going fast despite their relatively high cost for a Japan Society event.