this week in theater

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.

NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL: THE SECOND WOMAN

The Second Woman repeats the same scene from John Cassavetes’s Opening Night one hundred times (photo by Heidrun Lohr)

THE SECOND WOMAN
BAM Fisher, Fishman Space, 321 Ashland Pl.
October 18, 5:00 pm – October 19, 5:00 pm, $25
718-636-4100
www.bam.org/secondwoman

Last month, Cyril Teste’s multimedia adaptation of John Cassavetes’s 1977 film Opening Night kicked off FIAF’s Crossing the Line Festival, an immersive production highlighted by the US stage debut of French star Isabelle Adjani. Cassavetes’s film stars Gena Rowlands, his wife, as a theater actress getting lost between fiction and reality during out-of-town previews of a show called Second Woman; Cassavetes plays her leading man. Now BAM is presenting another unique exploration of the film in its Next Wave Festival. Beginning at 5:00 on the afternoon of October 18 and continuing for twenty-four consecutive hours, actress Alia Shawkat (Arrested Development, Blaze) will perform the same scene from Opening Night one hundred times, each with a different man playing opposite her. (There will be short breaks at 7:00 pm and then every two hours.) Created, written, and directed by Nat Randall and Anna Breckon, Second Man features video direction by EO Gill and Breckon (there are four cameras in use), lighting by Amber Silk and Kayla Burrett, sound by Nina Buchanan, and set design by Genevieve Murray/FUTURE METHOD STUDIO.

As opposed to theater, which is live every night, a movie scene can be done over and over again until everyone involved — particularly the director and the star — is happy with the result. However, in this case, Shawkat — who in Miguel Arteta’s Duck Butter played a character on a twenty-four-hour date with another woman, making love every sixty minutes — will be caught in an endless loop, a repetition that will be different every time as the other actor changes. “The Second Woman takes as its starting point the idea that emotions and identities are culturally and historically specific, and that gender identities are defined by, and produced through, emotional cultures and norms,” Randall and Breckon explain in a program note. “Taking gender, as a particular relation to cultural power and privilege, as its focus, The Second Woman explores the ways in which gender privilege and power expresses itself through feeling.” Advance timed tickets allow entry at 5:00 and midnight on Friday and 4:00 and 8:00 am on Saturday; otherwise, you can buy tickets at the venue, and you are allowed to leave and come back at any time as space permits.

WHITE LIGHT FESTIVAL 2019

(photo copyright Hiroshi Sugimoto / courtesy Odawara Art Foundation)

Sugimoto Bunraku Sonezaki Shinju’s The Love Suicides at Sonezaki kicks off Lincoln Center’s tenth annual White Light Festival (photo copyright Hiroshi Sugimoto / courtesy Odawara Art Foundation)

Multiple venues at Lincoln Center
October 19 – November 24, free – $165
212-721-6500
www.lincolncenter.org

Lincoln Center’s multidisciplinary White Light Festival turns ten this year, and it is celebrating with another wide-ranging program of dance, theater, music, and more, running October 19 through November 24 at such venues as the Rose Theater, the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College, Alice Tully Hall, and the Church of St. Mary the Virgin. “The resonance of the White Light Festival has only deepened during its first decade, as we have moved into far more challenging times here and around the world,” Lincoln Center artistic director Jane Moss said in a statement. “The Festival’s central theme, namely the singular capacity of artistic expression to illuminate what is inside ourselves and connect us to others, is more relevant than ever. This tenth anniversary edition spanning disparate countries, cultures, disciplines, and genres emphasizes that the elevation of the spirit the arts inspires uniquely unites us and expands who we are.” Things get under way October 19-22 (Rose Theater, $35-$100) with Sugimoto Bunraku Sonezaki Shinju’s The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, a retelling of a long-banned tale by Chikamatsu Monzaemon using puppets, composed and directed by Seiji Tsurusawa, with choreography by Tomogoro Yamamura and video by Tabaimo and artistic director Hiroshi Sugimoto. That is followed October 23-25 by Australia ensemble Circa’s boundary-pushing En Masse (Gerald W. Lynch Theater, $25-$65), directed and designed by Yaron Lifschitz, combining acrobatics and contemporary dance with music by Klara Lewis along with Franz Schubert and Igor Stravinsky.

In Zauberland (Magic Land) (October 29-30, Gerald W. Lynch, $35-$95), soprano Julia Bullock performs Schumann’s Romantic song cycle Dichterliebe while facing haunting memories; the text is by Heinrich Heine and Martin Crimp, with Cédric Tiberghien on piano. The set for Roysten Abel’s The Manganiyar Seduction (November 6–9, Rose Theater, $55-$110) is mind-blowing, consisting of more than two dozen Manganiyar musicians in their own lighted rectangular spaces in a giant red box. Last year, Irish company Druid and cofounder Garry Hynes brought a comic Waiting for Godot to the White Light Festival; this year they’re back with a dark take on Richard III (November 7-23, Gerald W. Lynch, $35-$110) starring Aaron Monaghan, who played Estragon in 2018. Wynton Marsalis will lead The Abyssinian Mass (November 21-23, Rose Theater, $45-$165) with Chorale Le Chateau, featuring a sermon by Rev. Dr. Calvin O. Butts III. In addition to the above, there are also several one-time-only events, listed below.

DruidShakespeare will present Richard III at the White Light Festival November 7-23 (photo by Robbie Jack)

Thursday, October 24
Jordi Savall: Journey to the East, Alice Tully Hall, $35-$110, 7:30

Tuesday, October 29
Mahler Songs, recital by German baritone Christian Gerhahe with pianist Gerold Huber, Alice Tully Hall, $45-$90, 7:30

Thursday, November 7
Stabat Mater by James MacMillan, with Britten Sinfonia and the Sixteen, conducted by Harry Christophers, Alice Tully Hall, $50-$85, 7:30

Saturday, November 9
White Light Conversation: Let’s Talk About Religion, panel discussion with Kelly Brown Douglas, Marcelo Gleiser, James MacMillan, and Stephen Prothero, moderated by John Schaefer, Daniel and Joanna S. Rose Studio, free, 3:00

Sunday, November 10
Goldberg Variations, with pianist Kit Armstrong, Walter Reade Theater, $25, 11:00 am

Wednesday, November 13
Ensemble Basiani: Unifying Voices, Church of St. Mary the Virgin, $55, 7:30

Thursday, November 14
Attacca Quartet with Caroline Shaw: Words and Music, David Rubenstein Atrium, free, 7:30

Sunday, November 17
Tristan and Isolde, Act II, with the National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Gianandrea Noseda, featuring Stephen Gould as Tristan and Christine Goerke as Isolde, David Geffen Hall, $35-$105, 3:00

Thursday, November 21
Gloria, with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and its Choir, conducted by harpsichordist Jonathan Cohen, featuring soprano Katherine Watson, countertenor Iestyn Davies, and soprano Rowan Pierce, Alice Tully Hall, $100, 7:30

Sunday, November 24
Los Angeles Philharmonic: Cathedral of Sound, Bruckner’s “Romantic” Symphony, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel, David Geffen Hall, $35-$105, 3:00