this week in theater

NOVENAS FOR A LOST HOSPITAL

Saint Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton (Kathleen Chalfant) rules over Novenas for a Lost Hospital (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Rattlestick Playwrights Theater and other locations
224 Waverly Pl.
Wednesday – Monday through October 13, $20-$60
212-627-2556
www.rattlestick.org

Cusi Cram’s Novenas for a Lost Hospital is part historical walking tour, part theatrical drama, honoring the legacy of St. Vincent’s in Greenwich Village, guiding sixty guests a night from a church courtyard to a theater to the park across the street from where the nonprofit Catholic hospital stood from its beginnings as a one-room medical facility founded by the Daughters of Charity in 1849 until April 2010, when it closed due to ballooning debt and questionable redevelopment plans. In the two-plus-hour show, longtime West Village residents Cram, Rattlestick artistic director Daniella Topol, and dramaturg Guy Lancaster relate the history of St. Vincent’s, a Level 1 trauma institution and teaching hospital that treated victims of the cholera epidemic in 1849, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, the Titanic sinking in 1912, the FALN bombing in 1975, and the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

Cusi Cram’s Novenas for a Lost Hospital explores the history of St. Vincent’s in Greenwich Village (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

But the hospital is perhaps most well known for being front and center battling the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, which is what Cram focuses on from the start, in the courtyard of St. John’s in the Village, where a singer (Goussy Celestin) welcomes everyone, hands are ritually washed, a quartet does the Hustle, and an ailing man bathes himself with agonizing difficulty. The action then heads indoors to the Rattlestick black box, where a collection of newspaper articles and photographs about St. Vincent’s are on display on upturned gurneys. After they are wheeled out, a long, repetitive, melodramatic middle section switches back and forth between 1849 and more contemporary times, led by Sisters of Charity founder and first American-born saint Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton (Kathleen Chalfant), who is accompanied by Sister Mary Ulrica (Natalie Woolams-Torres) and Sister Mary Angela Hughes (Kelly McAndrew) in the past and a pair of nurses (Woolams-Torres and McAndrew) more recently.

They are visited by flamboyant Afro-Caribbean slave, hairdresser, and philanthropist Pierre Toussaint (Alvin Keith) as they treat a series of patients, primarily Lazarus (Ken Barnett), so named because he won’t die, his boyfriend (Justin Genna), and choreographer JB (Justin Genna). “A crisis can be very grounding. Purposeful,” Lazarus tells the audience. “Not dying was my job for three years. And before that, trying to save everyone I loved or admired from dying a miserable, humiliating death was my job.”

The audience is led from a courtyard to a theater to a park in Novenas for a Lost Hospital (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Ultimately, the show, which is divided into nine novenas, including “A Prayer for the Reluctantly Resurrected,” “A Prayer for the Forgotten,” and “A Prayer for the Beauty of Chaos,” makes its way through the streets to NYC AIDS Memorial Park for a grand finale that brings everything full circle. Despite plenty of bumps and slow moments, Novenas for a Lost Hospital is a touching communal experience, a unique eulogy for an institution that helped define a neighborhood — and a city — through more than a century and a half and is now a memory of a bygone era when money wasn’t everything and individual lives mattered.

CROSSING THE LINE: WHY?

Kathryn Hunter in Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne's play 'Why?' at the Bouffes du Nord in Paris, June 2019 Pascal Gely

Kathryn Hunter wonders why in Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne production about theater itself (photo by Pascal Gely)

Theatre for a New Audience, Polonsky Shakespeare Center
262 Ashland Pl. between Lafayette Ave. & Fulton St.
Through October 6, $85-$120
866-811-4111
www.tfana.org
crossingthelinefestival.org

The basic three-letter question “Why?” can be a repeated response, over and over again, from a curious child learning about the world, a deeply philosophical inquiry into human nature, or a painful cry when tragedy occurs. In Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne’s Why?, continuing at Theatre for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center through October 6, it relates to two queries, general and specific: Why do we make and attend theater, and why did Josef Stalin have theater innovator Vsevolod Meyerhold and his actress wife, Zinaida Reich, brutally killed?

Part of FIAF’s multidisciplinary Crossing the Line Festival, Why? is also the centerpiece of “Peter Brook\NY,” a two-week, two-borough tribute to the ninety-four-year-old theater and film director — he actually prefers being called a “distiller” — an Emmy and two-time Tony winner who has written such books as The Open Door: Thoughts on Acting and Theatre, Tip of the Tongue: Reflections on Language and Meaning, and The Shifting Point: Theatre, Film, Opera 1946-1987 and has directed such plays as Hamlet with Paul Scofield, The Visit with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, Marat/Sade, and more recently The Suit, The Prisoner, and The Valley of Astonishment. He is a fixture at TFANA, which is around the corner from the BAM Harvey Theater, which he helped renovate in 1987 for his epic version of The Mahabharata. He and Estienne have been collaborating for more than forty decades, and they know theater.

Marcello Magni gets serious after clowning around in Why? (photo by Pascal Gely)

The first half cheerfully explores why there is theater at all, how it came to be, and what can make it so special. The show begins with Hayley Carmichael, Kathryn Hunter, and Marcello Magni, all dressed in black, giving a kind of master class in acting. Highlights include a clownish Magni running around in circles and Hunter wondering how to make the line “My Lord, the carriage awaits” not boring. They interact with the audience, even bringing a few people onstage for some clever improv, and clearly are in love with their chosen profession, just as we are in love with watching them. There’s lots of laughter, accompanied by Laurie Blundell on piano. Theater appears to be a friendly, safe space for everyone.

But in the second act, the trio, still wearing the same costumes, moving about on the same, mostly empty stage (Brook is known for his spare sets, as evidenced by his seminal book The Empty Space — A Book About the Theatre: Deadly, Holy, Rough, Immediate), the trio becomes far more serious, reading letters, news reports, and other documents relating what happened to Stanislavski protégé Meyerhold and Reich when they supported the communist revolution instead of Stalin, who dealt with them in violent, theatrical ways. The harsh tale also involves actor and director Konstantin Stanislavski and poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. “Theater is a dangerous weapon,” Meyerhold famously wrote in the 1920s. Nearly a century later, it still is; it may be able to entertain, educate, and enlighten us, but it is also seen by far too many as a threat, which Brook and Estienne point out in their inimitable, inestimable way.

SATOSHI MIYAGI: ANTIGONE

The Park Ave. Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall has been transformed into the Styx-like Sanzu River for breathtaking version of Antigone (photo © Stephanie Berger)

Park Avenue Armory
Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
Through October 7, $35-$175
Artist talk with Satoshi Miyagi and Carol Martin, October 4, $15, 6:30
armoryonpark.org

Satoshi Miyagi’s lush Antigone at the Park Ave. Armory is likely to be the most stunning and graceful adaptation of Sophocles’s classic Greek tragedy you’ll ever experience. Originally presented in a courtyard in a fourteenth-century palace in France to open the 2017 Avignon Festival, the hundred-minute production has been adjusted for the armory’s massive Wade Thompson Drill Hall. The work uses almost exactly half the drill hall space, taking place on a long, shallow eighteen-thousand-gallon pond at the far end of the hall, with the audience sitting in rising rafters before it. Miyagi, who previously staged a different version of the twenty-five-hundred-year-old play in 2004, has now infused it with Buddhist meditations on ritual and death. As the audience is being seated, characters in white kimono-like dress are standing like ghosts in the water, surrounded by several large cairns. (The elegant set is by Junpei Kiz, the sublime costumes by Kayo Takahashi, and the fab hair and makeup by Kyoko Kajita.) The main actors come out and gleefully announce that they are a troupe from the small city of Shizuoka about to put on Antigone, identifying who they are portraying and playfully giving an English-language summary of the story. At the end of the intro, the charming Micari, who plays the title character, exclaims, “We invite you to see what happens next. Enjoy the show!”

What happens next is exquisite. Miyagi combines elements of traditional Noh, kabuki, and bunraku theater to create a brilliant retelling of the well-known tale, with the main characters each portrayed by two actors, one who speaks the dialogue (in Japanese, with English supertitles) while kneeling in the water, the other who lyrically moves about the space and interacts with the rest of the cast. The priest (Tsuyoshi Kijima) floats in on a small raft with paper lanterns; he stops to give shiny white wigs to the protagonists. The sons of Oedipus, Eteocles (Morimasa Takeishi) and Polyneices (Keita Mishima), have killed each other in battle, the former fighting for King Creon (Kouichi Ohtaka; Kazunori Abe), the latter leading a revolt. Creon has declared that Eteocles is to get a hero’s funeral while Polyneices will be treated as a traitor, his body left to rot and decay in the desert — and that anyone who attempts to give him an honorable burial will be stoned to death.

Antigone (Micari) declares her freedom from the rules of the state in lush Satoshi Miyagi production (photo © Stephanie Berger)

Oedipus’s daughters, Antigone (Micari; Maki Honda) and Ismene (Asuka Fuse; Yuumi Sakakibara), disagree on how to proceed: While Ismene does not want to challenge Creon’s decree, Antigone is determined to follow the law of the gods and do right by Polyneices. “One sought to destroy us. One fought to defend us,” Ismene says about her brothers. “The dead are all the same. We send them off with the same rites,” Antigone argues. “That will not do. The death of a hero is different than that of a traitor,” Ismene answers. Antigone: “The difference doesn’t extend past death.” Ismene: “An enemy is an enemy even after death.” Antigone: “I was not born to hate. I was born to love.” Antigone, who is betrothed to Creon’s son, Haemon (Yoneji Ouchi; Daisuke Wakana), buries Polyneices and is turned in by a guard (Katsuhiko Konagaya; Tsuyoshi Kijima) who witnessed her illegal act. Creon then has to decide the fate of his would-be daughter-in-law as both Haemon and the blind prophet Tiresias (Takahiko Watanabe; Soichiro Yoshiue) demand mercy.

Antigone features a thrilling percussion score by Hiroko Tanakawa. Koji Osako’s extraordinary lighting design puts small lights in front of the moving actors, casting huge shadows on the wall that hover over everything like the gods looking down on humanity while evoking shadow puppet theater. Translated by Shigetake Yaginuma, the narrative, which resonates with regard to current global political situations (particularly in Japan, Greece, and America), centers on themes of gender and power. “As long as I live, no woman shall impose her will,” Creon says. “Never let a woman triumph over you,” he tells his son, who is torn between his love of Antigone and his duty to his father. Early on, Ismene explains to Antigone, “I cannot act in defiance of the state.” But Antigone refuses to acknowledge the government above the gods. “I do not fear the king,” she declares. “The law of the gods is what is most precious. . . . In the eyes of the king, mine must seem the actions of a stupid woman. But in my eyes, the king is foolish.”

Haemon (Yoneji Ouchi) is torn between love for this betrothed and responsibility to his father in Antigone (photo © Stephanie Berger)

Throughout the show, the chorus (Ayako Terauchi, Fuyuko Moriyama, Haruka Miyagishima, Kenji Nagai, Mariko Suzuki, Miyuki Yamamoto, Moemi Ishii, Momoyo Tateno, Naomi Akamatsu, Ryo Yoshimi, Shunsuke Noguchi, Yu Sakurauchi, Yukio Kato, Yuya Daidomumon, Yuzu Sato) slowly wanders across the Styx-like Sanzu River, which leads the dead to the afterlife, mostly silent except for the sounds of their feet gliding on the water and occasional musical verses, including, “Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man. . . . Never without resources, he has devised escapes from desperate plagues. Only against Death shall he call for aid in vain.” Miyagi, who with the Shizuoka Performing Arts Center has also staged Medea, Mahabharata, and Peer Gynt among other classics, is emphasizing the notion that death is the great equalizer, that people should not be basing their earthly deeds on how it will impact what may or may not occur when the end comes. It’s not about heaven and hell or good vs. evil, the living and the dead or the rich and the poor; his Antigone is set in an ambiguous time and place that could be anywhere and everywhere, a breathtaking display of philosophy and artistry that, at its core, is about the basic decency of love, honor, and respect. Do whatever you can to see it, even if you have to defy your own personal gods of schedules and emails.

OEDIPUS: Sex with Mum Was Blinding

Sound and image create a confusing cacophony in Elli Papakonstantinou’s OEDIPUS: Sex with Mum Was Blinding (photo by Carol Rosegg)

BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
September 25-29, $30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org/oedipus

Shortly after Elli Papakonstantinou’s OEDIPUS: Sex with Mum Was Blinding begins, the sarcastic MC (Misha Piatigorsky), a cross between Joel Grey’s emcee from Cabaret and the Joker from Batman recently escaped from Arkham Asylum, brings up the topic of free will and declares, “Oh! Did I say? . . . You are not allowed to leave this room until this is over!” Not everyone inside BAM Fisher’s Fishman Space obeyed, as there were a handful of walk-outs during the ninety-minute production, but they would have fared better if they had stuck it out a little longer; while the first hour of this multimedia collaboration between the Athens-based ODC Ensemble and New York City’s the Directors Company is a chaotic mess, things improve significantly when Papakonstantinou, who is credited with the concept, stage direction, libretto, and lighting, turns her attention to the specific matter at hand: the tragic story of Oedipus (Lito Messini), his wife and mother, Jocasta (Nassia Gofa), and their children.

For much of the show, the audience has no idea where to look or what to listen to as ideas of responsibility, judgment, faith, and determinism are raised. A doctor (science adviser Manos Tsakiris) talks to a woman (Theodora Loukas) about a dream she had. A boy (Elias Husiak) can’t recognize his own face. A three-woman chorus (Anastasia Katsinavaki, Messini, Gofa) sings about riddles while wearing futuristic sci-fi helmets. Smoke drifts up from a tray of dry ice. A male-voiced Siri talks in mathematical equations. Audience members are practically forced to answer questions about their own image and relationship with their parents, then shout out four pieces of text that are in the program. And live footage of extreme close-ups of faces, hands, feet, and nostrils are projected onto a large rear screen along with shots of car traffic, causing yet more confusion. I was most riveted by the MC’s long, thin baton he used for conducting, hoping that, when he put it away in the front pocket of his shirt, it would not end up poking him in the eye. (This is Oedipus, after all.)

Misha Piatigorsky stars as a sarcastic piano-playing MC and conductor in OEDIPUS: Sex with Mum Was Blinding (photo by Carol Rosegg)

But then we reach Level Three and the actual story of Jocasta and Oedipus starts playing out onstage with the characters themselves (instead of being told to us in the third person), and we are lifted by Gofa’s lovely jazz phrasings and Messini’s beautiful soprano. The narrative suddenly wraps around us and we feel, for the first time, emotional resonance. The MC’s expert piano playing and co-composer Julia Kent’s splendid cello merge together in wonderful ways, as the earlier theories that were so much balderdash now make sense. It’s too bad this experimental Oedipus didn’t start off like this. “We are haunted by the myth of our potential,” the woman says, which could be about the show itself, the audience haunted by what could have been.

CAESAR & CLEOPATRA

Cleopatra (Teresa Avia Lim) and Caesar (Robert Cuccioli) share an intimate moment in Gingold production (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Theatre Row, Theatre One
410 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through October 12, $69
gingoldgroup.org
www.theatrerow.org

Last week a friend of mine posted a photo on social media of his ridiculous view of the Gingold Theatrical Group’s presentation of Bernard Shaw’s Caesar & Cleopatra at Theatre Row; he was sitting behind a young man well over six feet tall, with a long neck, wide ears, and a topknot that added another six inches, blocking nearly two-thirds of the stage. My friend wasn’t missing much.

Written in 1898, Caesar and Cleopatra imagines a fictional meeting between Roman ruler Julius Caesar (Robert Cuccioli) and Egyptian queen Cleopatra (Teresa Avia Lim). Thirty years Cleopatra’s senior and far more versed in the ways of the world, Caesar is like Professor Higgins to her Eliza Doolittle. In fact, the play emerged out of an early draft of what would become Pygmalion. Caesar has arrived in Egypt ahead of his troops and at first does not believe that the young, whiny woman is who she claims to be; she doesn’t realize who he is as well. “Caesar’ll know that I’m a queen when he sees my crown and robes!” she declares. He responds, “He will know Cleopatra by her pride, her courage, her majesty, and her beauty.”

Politics takes center stage in Caesar & Cleopatra at Theatre Row (photo by Carol Rosegg)

But soon he is teaching her how to be a leader while she battles for control of Egypt against her brother, King Ptolemy, a puppet manipulated by his regent, Pothinus (Rajesh Bose). Caesar is joined by his humorless secretary, Britannus (Jonathan Hadley), and forthright military aide, Rufio (Jeff Applegate), while Cleopatra is nearly always accompanied by her mystical, protective nurse, Ftatateeta (Brenda Braxton). Later the dashing Apollodorus the Sicilian (Dan Domingues) devotes himself to her, but you’re unlikely to care by then.

Last year, Gingold turned the Lion Theatre into a London air-raid shelter during the Blitz for its scattershot version of Heartbreak House. The troupe is now back in the same space, renamed Theatre One after a renovation of Theatre Row, but they end up with the same unfortunate result. (Perhaps that specific room is doomed; I can’t remember the last time I saw something I liked in what was the Lion.) Director David Staller has done a deep dig into the history of the play, incorporating elements from letters, production notes, Shaw’s original handwritten manuscript, an early draft of the 1945 screenplay, and other sources, and perhaps that’s part of the problem; the show has no pace or rhythm. Brian Prather’s set is supposed to be an excavation site but looks more like unfinished scaffolding with plastic sheeting. It’s almost as if Staller, who has directed all of Shaw’s works, knows the play so well, and wanted to include so many unique touches, that he lost sight of the big picture. Cuccioli, as a smooth-talking superhero Caesar, and Lim, as a #metoo-era Cleopatra, never develop the necessary chemistry in choice parts previously played onstage and -screen by such pairs as Lionel Atwill and Helen Hayes, Cedric Hardwicke and Lilli Palmer, Hardwicke and Claire Bloom, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, Claude Rains and Leigh, Alec Guinness and Geneviève Bujold, Rex Harrison and Elizabeth Ashley, and Christopher Plummer and Nikki M. James. “We learn from history that we learn nothing from history,” Caesar says at one point. He’s more right about that than he realizes. If only “veni” and no “vidi”: Where was that tall guy with the topknot to block my view?

OEDIPUS: Sex with Mum Was Blinding

(photo by Elias Moraitis) OEDIPUS - Photos OEDIPUS

Elli Papakonstantinou’s multimedia, immersive adaptation of Oedipus Rex debuts at BAM this week (photo by Elias Moraitis)

BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
September 25-29, $30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org/oedipus

Perhaps more than any other Greek tragedy, Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex lends itself to all kinds of adaptations. The violent tale of murder, suicide, incest, and self-mutilation has been turned into operas, films, oratorios, and plays in multiple languages around the world; among those who have tackled the 429 BCE work are Pier Paolo Pasolini (Edipo Re), Luis Alfaro (Oedipus El Rey), Toshio Matsumoto (Funeral Parade of Roses), Gabriel García Márquez (Edipo Alcalde), Ola Rotimi (The Gods Are Not to Blame), Peter Schickele (Oedipus Tex), Jean Cocteau (La Machine Infernale), Park Chan-wook (Oldboy), German comedian Bodo Wartke (könig ödipus), and many others, moving the story to South Central LA, the Philippines, Japan, Nigeria, Colombia, and even outer space.

Lito Messini stars as title character in OEDIPUS: Sex with Mum Was Blinding (photo by © Karol Jarek)

Greek avant-garde creator Elli Papakonstantinou transforms Sophocles’s play into an immersive hybrid opera for the multimedia OEDIPUS: Sex with Mum Was Blinding, running at the BAM Fisher September 25-29. The hundred-minute piece, a collaboration between the Athens-based ODC Ensemble and New York City’s the Directors Company, features a score composed by Tilemachos Moussas and Julia Kent and played live by Kent on cello, Misha Piatigorsky on piano, and Barbara Nerness on live electronics; real-time video by Hassan Estakhrian and Stephanie Sherriff, with cinematic environments by Sherriff; costumes by Jolene Richardson; and masks by Maritina Keleri and Chrysanthi Avloniti. Papakonstantinou, whose previous work includes Louisette: The Backstage of Revolution, Touching the Bottom of the Sea, and The Kindly Ones (at the Mauthausen Concentration Camp Memorial), is credited with the concept, stage direction, libretto, and lighting. Lito Messini stars as Oedipus, with Nassia Gofa as Jocasta, Elias Husiak as the boy, Anastasia Katsinavaki as Teiresias, Theodora Loukas as the woman, Misha Piatigorsky as the MC, and Manos Tsakiris as the researcher. Papakonstantinou developed parts of the show during a residency at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music & Acoustics, where she worked with artists and scientists to address such questions as “Are we free?,” “Dο we experience free will?,” and “Are there real alternatives, or is all that takes place the outcome of necessity?” University of London professor Manos Tsakiris served as the scientific adviser for yet another unusual and original adaptation of this classic story.

MAC WELLMAN: PERFECT CATASTROPHES — BAD PENNY / SINCERITY FOREVER / THE INVENTION OF TRAGEDY

Kat (Emma Orne) points out some of society’s ills in strong revival of Mac Wellman’s Bad Penny at the Flea (photo by Allison Stock)

BAD PENNY
Flea Theater, the Pete
20 Thomas St. between Broadway & Church St.
Thursday – Monday through October 13, $17-$102
theflea.org

If there’s one thing to take away from the first three productions in the Flea’s five-play tribute to cofounder Mac Wellman, it’s to expect the unexpected. The seventy-four-year-old Cleveland-born Wellman, who started the Flea with Jim Simpson and Kyle Chepulis in 1996, eschews standard narrative conventions in his works, favoring unusual characters in unusual situations saying unusual things. You should kick off your Wellman adventure with 1989’s Bad Penny, a forty-five-minute site-specific piece originally staged in Central Park. Director Kristan Seemel has reimagined it for the Flea’s outdoor theater known as the Pete, a cramped space transformed by Jian Jung into a picnic area with a variety of chairs, tables, blankets, fake grass, and coolers. The oddball Kat (superbly played by Emma Orne) has picked up a tails-up penny and does not want it to ruin a perfectly fine day in the park, but she might not have a choice as she is joined by a group of ever-more-bizarre, surreal people who emerge from the audience. That person sitting next to you just might be the next actor to get up and pontificate on the state of the world; Emily White’s costumes are meant to mix them right in with us.

“I come here every day, every single day,” Kat says at the beginning. “I come here, to this spot, every single day and every single day, every single goddam day, it’s the same or it’s different or it rains or it’s clear or it snows or it’s bright and beautiful or it’s dark, rainy, and kinda foul. Or it’s like it is now, kinda strange. Sometimes the sky reminds me of home and sometimes the sky reminds me of the sea, or sometimes it doesn’t remind me of anything at all, much, and I pay no attention and sometimes the sky looks like its own reflection in an oily puddle of rain water, like nothing, nothing at all.” That covers about everything. Ray X (Joseph Huffman) is from Ugly, Montana, and is carrying a tire, looking for a gas station to fix his flat. Man #2 (Alex J. Moreno) thinks Ray X is crazy and a liar. Man #3 (Lambert Tamin) also doesn’t believe his story, accusing Ray X of being up to no good. Woman #2 (Bailie de Lacy) is suspicious of Kat, declaring, “There’s something the matter with you. Normal people don’t talk like you.” Meanwhile, a chorus of three women (Caroline Banks, Dana Placentra, and Katelyn Sabet) murmurs about the Dead Boatman of Bow Bridge (Ryan Wesley Stinnett), who just might be “coming to ferry the criminal to hell, the one who stole his penny, the one who thieved his bad penny, the one who thoughtlessly took what did not belong to him.”

Bad Penny takes place in the Flea’s outdoor space known as the Pete (photo by Allison Stock)

In Bad Penny, Wellman toys with audience expectations as monologues evolve into unpredictable diatribes, unfair judgments are made, and fear lurks close by. Performed by the Bats, the Flea’s resident company, the show features a mixed bag of acting, some good, some not so good, but it’s Wellman’s words, which he refers to as “objects,” that drive the story as he explores the mythology of the everyday and the “bad habits” we all “might acquire by hanging out with the wrong type of people, people not used to acting normal, people who act strange.” It’s an entertaining picnic in the park, enveloped in a warm and friendly weirdness that is as funny as it is intriguing and, well, strange. And yes, that actress is mimicking your movement.

The Bats revive Mac Wellman’s Sincerity Forever at the Flea (photo by Allison Stock)

SINCERITY FOREVER
Flea Theater, the Siggy
20 Thomas St. between Broadway & Church St.
Thursday – Monday through October 13, $17-$102
theflea.org

Wellman’s 1990 play Sincerity Forever presaged a key reason why Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election to Donald Trump as well as predicting a defining moment in the latter’s presidency: Clinton’s use of the phrase “basket of deplorables” and Trump’s claim that there are “very fine people” among white supremacists, respectfully. However, what may have been satire thirty years ago now feels more like a tepid documentary, resulting in a show that falls flatter than some very fine conspiracy theorists believe the Earth to be. The sixty-five-minute play, which can be seen the same night as Bad Penny, takes place in the hellish contemporary American town of Hillsbottom, where white hoods and robes are standard wear. (The costumes are by Barbara Erin Delo, with the dark warehouse delivery set by Frank J. Oliva.) The story unfolds through a series of conversations local young folk, who would not be accused of being the brightest bulbs in the chandelier, have in cars, represented by side-by-side chairs pulled up to the very edge of the stage.

“Molly, do you know why God created the world the way he did? So complicated, I mean,” Judy (Malena Pennycook) asks Molly (Charly Dannis), who wonders, “Why else would we not know anything, unless there were an intelligent being out there, somewhere, whose cunning idea it was that you and I, Judy and Molly, should be forever ignorant of the true nature of things, ignorant forever in absolute sincerity. Does Dexter really have a crush on me, or did he just say he did?” With Jesus H. Christ (Amber Jaunai), appearing to them as a black woman with a metaphorical heavy bag, joining them, Tom (Vince Ryne) tells Hank (Nate DeCook), “Now me, I too, may be as dumb as a post, and unclear about the multiplication table, the boundaries of more than a half dozen states, and unable to repair my own toilet, but dammit, Hank, if the English language was good enough for Jesus H. Christ then it’s good enough for me. Furthermore, I do not feel compelled by reason to accept this theory of evolution, nor the periodic table of elements, nor the theory of global warming, nor the supposed crimes against the Jews attributed to one Rudolf Hitler. Nor the spherical nature of the earth, because it’s against the law of nature and we would fall off for sure and my motto is: Never explain, never apologize.”

Sincerity Forever features Klansmen, Furballs, Jesus H. Christ, and warehouse workers (photo by Allison Stock)

Others who share their thoughts are George (Peter McNally), Melvin (Alex Hazen Floyd), and a pair of furballs (Zac Porter and Neysa Lozano) who hate Hillsbottom and everyone in it, as the second one explains: “I mean, it’s all so fucking decent and god-fearing and goody-two-shoes and law-abiding and thankful and smarmy and sentimental and full of wishful thinking and sugar coated bad faith and chintzy, cheesy, boring mediocrity it makes me want to gag. I mean, all these totally square fuckheads who only care about God and family and communication and community and law and order and morality and safe sex and global warming and Jesus H. Christ and the whole moldy, worn-out crock of shit. It makes me want to spew and leave my lunch all over their well-manicured lawns.”

That may have played like acerbic wit in 1990, but in 2019 it hits a little too close to home and comes off as too-easy fodder. It’s all so clear and obvious, as well as repetitive; director Dina Vovsi is unable to add any nuance or legitimate conflict, so the narrative just stagnates, a bunch of vignettes about dumb racists saying dumb racist things without realizing it, its point long made as the characters go on and on until Jesus sums it all up in a grand finale. In his author’s note, Wellman — who dedicated the work to Sen. Jesse Helms, “for the fine job you are doing destroying civil liberties in These States” — takes a shot at the National Endowment for the Arts, which gave him a grant for the project but then demanded not to be credited because they had issues with the play. They’re not the only ones.

Mac Wellman’s The Invention of Tragedy makes its long-awaited debut at the Flea (photo by Hunter Canning)

THE INVENTION OF TRAGEDY
Flea Theater, the Sam
20 Thomas St. between Broadway & Church St.
Thursday – Monday through October 14, $17-$102
theflea.org

“Perfect Catastrophes” continues with the world premiere of Wellman’s The Invention of Tragedy, which was written in 2004 as a response to the Iraq War but is finally getting its debut staging appropriately during the Trump era, when fear of the other keeps gathering momentum, be it for a wall, a Muslim ban, an upsurge in hate crimes, undocumented workers being rounded up by ICE, refugee deportations tearing apart families, or “imagining a terrorist under every hat.” Running in the Flea’s Sam theater through October 14, the hourlong play uses elements of Greek tragedy mixed with the nonsense lyrical style of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear and Kurt Schwitters’s “Ursonate” to skewer the America-first attitude that took over after 9/11 and runs rampant today. A chorus of seven young women (Sophia Aranda, Drita Kabashi, Mirra Kardonne, Susan Ly, Alice Marcondes, Ana Semedo, and Zoe Zimin) is disturbed when one of them, who becomes known as the Answerer (Kabashi), breaks away from the pack, followed shortly by the Enforcer, who morphs into the Hare (Ly). “This difference is a problem,” says the Narrator (Sarah Alice Shull), who offers details during each pause — or “paws,” as Wellman includes a never-ending stream of cat references — while playing a piano score by Michael Cassedy. Individuality is verboten in this world of mob mentality.

The second of a series of choruses chanted in unison declares in Orwellian groupspeak: “And chop the chails off all cats. The bird of alignment off to nuts grows grows a possum hell bore can’t do finger whole of a part yessir yessir yessiree at to on an island scamper way to benumbed fruitcake walk to lean to adventure whose whose which of the parterre o glad eyed speak, er, speech and say not to nothing but hinge grammaticus grammarye’s red boast o machine o machine break down de doom. O machine of the other the other imagining.” The chorus is troubled by the Answerer, as explained by the Narrator: “One step steps forth from the rest. Unlawfulness is revealed. Awfulness.” The chorus’s gobbledygook occasionally makes a more specific, understandable point as it soon adds, “Horror horror horror the world is broken broken and come to be fractured,” so the Enforcer is given an ax to take care of business.

Trouble ensues when the Hare (Susan Ly) and the Answerer (Drita Kabashi) break away from the pack in The Invention of Tragedy (photo by Hunter Canning)

But the Answerer is not about to fall into line with everyone else. “I have become one for my own mind in thought,” she announces. “I perceive how cats have been mistreated in these parts. Fed with crap food. Despised and chased. Played cat in the bag with and other such. Dull the fur. I see them treed and often hopeless and puzzled. And then there is is the oft spoken threat of top er chop off the chails of. Er them.” Later the Hare, who previously was a sandwich man wearing “low and vulgar sandwich boards,” asks, “Is then the symbol the same as the thing symbolized?”

Adroitly directed by Meghan Finn with a keen sense of humor and choreographed by Chanon Judson, The Invention of Tragedy is a terrifically rendered allegory about post-9/11 America. It was written fifteen years ago but feels like it could have emerged today, particularly as partisanship rules the day and Fox News and Trumpists get behind nearly everything the president does and says. Dare to speak your own mind and you risk more than just your tail being chopped off. Wellman is telling us we are all trapped in a hellish fairy tale, albeit one with candy-colored costumes and an innate charm that is ultimately deceiving.

Mac Wellman play series at the Flea also features a three-day symposium (photo by Crystal Arnette)

Up next in the Wellman festival are The Sandalwood Box and The Fez, presented together starting September 26. From October 4 to 6, the Flea will also host “The Art of Stacking the Deck: A Mac Wellman Symposium,” three days of panel discussions and performances with Wellman collaborators, protégés, and scholars.

Friday, October 4
Welcome Reception, 5:30

Saturday, October 5
Critical & Scholarly Discussion of Mac’s Work & Nontraditional Theater, with Kate Benson, Helen Shaw, Karinne Keithley Syers, and Anne Washburn, 10:00

Approaching Language in Mac’s Plays, with Claudia Brown, Meghan Finn, Jan Leslie Harding, David Lang, Paul Lazar, and Kristan Seemel, 11:30

Producing & Directing the Event in Mac’s Plays, with Elena Araoz, Kyle Chepulis, Meghan Finn, Anne Hamburger, Graham Sack, Kristan Seemel, and Maria Striar, 2:00

Performance of Terminal Hip, with Steve Mellor, 8:00

Sunday, October 6
Teaching and Learning Playwriting, with Eliza Bent, Erin Courtney, Kristine Haruna Lee, Young Jean Lee, and Sibyl Kempson, 10:00

A Conversation with Mac and Helen Shaw, 11:30

Performance of Terminal Hip, with Steve Mellor, 7:00