this week in theater

MOSTLY MOZART FESTIVAL

Boy Blue’s Blak Whyte Gray makes a special return engagement at 2019 Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center (photo by Carl Fox)

Multiple venues at Lincoln Center
July 10 – August 9, free – $120
www.lincolncenter.org

With the demise of the Lincoln Center Festival last year, the institution’s Mostly Mozart Festival has filled in many of the gaps, expanding its breadth to cover much more than classical music and related events. Thus, its fifty-third season is a multidisciplinary affair with a wide variety of dance, theater, music, and film that is mostly non-Mozart. The summer festival begins July 10-13 with the world premiere of Mark Morris Dance Group’s Sport at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater, set to Erik Satie’s “Sports et divertissements,” along with the company’s Empire Garden and V. Other dance programs include a special return engagement of Boy Blue’s Blak Whyte Gray August 1-3 at the Gerald Lynch Theater at John Jay College, with Kenrick “H2O” Sandy and Margo Jefferson participating in a talk after the August 2 performance, and the US premiere of Yang Liping Contemporary Dance’s Under Siege August 8-10 at the David H. Koch Theater, a lavish dance-theater production inspired by historic events in Chen Kaige’s Farewell, My Concubine, the 1993 epic that will be screened July 28 at the Walter Reade Theater. The festival will also be showing Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon on August 4, which features Oscar-winning production design by Tim Yip, the set and costume designer of Under Siege.

Yang Liping Contemporary Dance’s Under Siege makes its US premiere at Mostly Mozart Festival (photo by Ding Yi Jie)

Of course, there is plenty of Wolfgang Amadeus and other classical programs at the festival. The Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra will present Beethoven’s “Eroica Symphony” July 23-24, Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” July 26-27, “Mozart & Brahms” July 30-31, “Beethoven & Schubert” August 2-3, “Joshua Bell Plays Dvořák” August 6-7, and “Mozart à la Haydn” August 9-10, all at David Geffen Hall. British theater group 1927’s production of The Magic Flute July 17-20 at the Koch features the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, a cast from Komische Oper Berlin, colorful animation, and imaginative set design. The intimate series “A Little Night Music” in the Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse includes performances by cellist Kian Soltani and pianist Julio Elizalde; pianist Michael Brown; vocalist Nora Fischer and guitarist and vocalist Marnix Dorrestein; violinist Pekka Kuusisto and bassist Knut Erik Sundquist; soprano Susanna Phillips and pianist Myra Huang; pianist Martin Helmchen; pianists Lucas and Arthur Jussen in their New York debut; Brooklyn Rider; and pianist Steven Osborne. And on August 4, the Budapest Festival Orchestra will play works by Haydn, Handel, and Mozart at the Geffen, with soprano Jeanine De Bique, conducted by Iván Fischer.

Mostly Mozart Festival features New York production premiere of The Magic Flute by British theater group 1927 (photo by Michael Daniel)

One of the highlights of the festival is sure to be Davóne Tines and Michael Schachter’s The Black Clown July 24-27 at the Gerald Lynch, a musical theater piece based on Langston Hughes’s 1931 poem, with Tines as the title character, choreography by Chanel DaSilva, and set and costumes by Carlos Soto; the July 25 show will be followed by a talk with Tines, director Zack Winokur, and DaSilva. In addition, there are several free, first-come, first-served events: the panel discussion “Mozart’s Magic Flute: In His Time and Ours” July 20 at 3:00 at the Kaplan Penthouse; the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) performing works by Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Bergrún Snæbjörnsdóttir, and Ashley Fure at the David Rubenstein Atrium on July 25 at 7:30; the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, conducted by Louis Langrée, playing Mozart’s “Gran Partita” July 27 at 3:00 at St. Paul’s Chapel; ICE’s “Composer Portraits” program of works by Iranian composers Anahita Abbasi, Aida Shirazi, and Niloufar Nourbakhsh at the atrium August 5 at 7:00; and violinist Tessa Lark and bassist Michael Thurber at the atrium August 8 at 7:30.

Soho Rep.’s FAIRVIEW

Beverly (Heather Alicia Simms) and Dayton (Charles Browning) get ready for a family affair in Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview (photo by Henry Grossman)

Theatre for a New Audience, Polonsky Shakespeare Center
262 Ashland Pl. between Lafayette Ave. & Fulton St.
Tuesday – Sunday through August 11, $55-$115
866-811-4111
www.tfana.org
sohorep.org/fairview

At the beginning of Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Fairview, which has successfully transitioned from Soho Rep. to the much bigger Theatre for a New Audience, a black woman onstage approaches the fourth wall as if it were a mirror, checking her hair and applying lipstick, but she’s not seeing herself, of course; what she is looking at is a space filled primarily with white people who have paid good money to watch her and the other actors/characters in the dark. It’s an incendiary concept that gets more radical — and openly angry and confrontational — as the story makes its way through four ever-more-antagonistic acts, taking a recent theme to a whole new level of supreme discomfort.

There might be an explosion of high-quality plays on and off Broadway by black men and women about the black experience — think Suzan-Lori Parks, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Lynn Nottage, Tarell Alvin McRaney, Dominique Morisseau, Jocelyn Bioh, Jeremy O. Harris, Lydia R. Diamond, and Dael Orlandersmith, among others, as well as such directors of color as Kenny Leon, Liesl Tommy, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Lileana Blain-Cruz, and Leah C. Gardiner — but the audience for these shows is still predominantly white, something that has not gone unnoticed by black artists. In the Flea’s 2015 interactive Take Care, written by the white Todd Shalom and the black Niegel Smith, who also directed, an audience member is given the job of pointing out all the black and brown people in the room and telling them to gather in a corner, as if being rounded up for nefarious purposes. (I had that responsibility when I attended.) In Jordan E. Cooper’s 2019 Ain’t No Mo’, in which all of the people of color in America are being sent back to Africa, a minister tries to get the mostly white audience to shout out the N-word, with no success save for one black woman the night I went.

Sisters Beverly (Heather Alicia Simms) and Jasmine (Roslyn Ruff) do battle in Pulitzer Prize winner (photo by Gerry Goodstein)

In Thomas Bradshaw’s 2019 revival of Southern Promises at the Flea, also directed by Smith, a mini-Roots-like tale is performed by an all-person-of-color cast, playing slaves as well as slave owners and a white preacher; at the curtain call, much of the white audience stood and applauded, but a handful of blacks were silent, appearing distraught by what they had just witnessed. And in Triptych (Eyes of One on Another), a multimedia production about Robert Mapplethorpe’s photos of, among other subjects, black male bodies, with a score by the white Bryce Dessner and a libretto by the black Korde Arrington Tuttle, a black actor watches from the front of the stage, never speaking, until at one point he sits down in the primarily white audience and claps and cheers by himself, leaving the crowd to wonder if they just aren’t getting it. All of the above incidents are deeply uncomfortable moments involving race and, more specifically, the “segregation” that still exists in the theater.

“In America you are obsessed with race, and you never never never think about class,” a character says in Fairview. “The rich profit from the racism. The poor get nothing from it.” The play takes place on Mimi Lien’s almost blindingly white stage, a huge, fancy dining room / living room that feels like The Jeffersons meets The Cosby Show by way of Edward Albee and Noël Coward. At the front of the stage is a black border, a few feet high, that makes it look like the Frasier family (a nod to Kelsey Grammer’s popular Frasier sitcom?) is on a television screen while also serving as a small barrier keeping actors and audience separate. At the start, Beverly (Heather Alicia Simms) sings along with Sly & the Family Stone’s 1971 disco hit “Family Affair” on the radio, but the station changes a few times by itself, as if reminding the audience — and Beverly — that someone else is in charge.

Keisha (MaYaa Boateng) and her aunt Jasmine (Roslyn Ruff) do some celebrating in Fairview (photo by Henry Grossman)

Beverly and Dayton (Charles Browning) are getting ready for a dinner celebrating her mother’s birthday; they are joined by their daughter, graduating high school senior Keisha (MaYaa Boateng), and Beverly’s gossipy sister, Jasmine (Roslyn Ruff). In the second act, the action is repeated, but silently, as four white people in voiceover (Hannah Cabell as Suze, Jed Resnick as Mack, Natalia Payne as Bets, and Luke Robertson as Jimbo) discuss the loaded question “If you could choose to be a different race, what race would you be?” It gets even whiter in the third act, when Beverly’s brother and his wife finally arrive and the matriarch comes downstairs, followed by a finale in which all hell breaks loose and theatrical conventions are turned inside out and upside down. What might be exhilarating at first quickly becomes something else as Drury (Marys Seacole,; We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South West Africa, from the German Südwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915), director Sarah Benson (In the Blood, An Octoroon), and Boateng/Keisha go where no play has gone before, particularly involving gender, class, and stereotyping in addition to race.

The stellar production, which has been extended at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn through August 11, is ingeniously directed by Benson, who navigates the changing emotional temperatures of the four distinct acts, with terrific lighting by Amith Chandrashaker, sound by Mikaal Sulaiman, and costumes by Montana Levi Blanco, fully immersing everyone in the ever-darker proceedings. Fairview — the name itself can be broken into two words, explaining part of Drury’s mission — offers a very different experience to white audiences as compared to black and brown theatergoers. Regardless of your color, however, there’s nothing you can do to prepare yourself for what happens, or for your ultimate reaction, as white privilege and white guilt take center stage without apology.

DYING CITY

Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Colin Woodell star in two-actor, three-character play at Second Stage (photo by Joan Marcus)

2econd Stage Theater
Tony Kiser Theater
305 West 43rd St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Through June 30, $30-$125
2st.com/shows

With President Trump threatening to attack Iran and Congress fighting over whether to fully fund ailing 9/11 first responders, Christopher Shinn’s 2007 Pulitzer Prize finalist, Dying City, takes on added relevance in its intense Second Stage revival at the Tony Kiser Theater, where it runs through June 30. The two-actor, three-character play shuttles between July 2005 and January 2004 as Gold Star wife Kelly (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) examines her relationship with her husband, Craig (Colin Woodell), upon the sudden arrival of Craig’s twin brother, Peter (Woodell), late one night at her Manhattan apartment. It’s been nearly a year since Craig was killed in the Iraq war, and Peter, an actor on the rise, needs to connect with Craig’s widow, Kelly, a therapist who has not been returning his calls or emails.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead makes a strong theater debut as a Gold Wife widow in Christopher Shinn’s Dying City (photo by Joan Marcus)

“It’s — yeah, it’s. — I’ve been meaning to call you and — it’s — I just haven’t. I’ve been so busy,” Kelly stumbles, offering excuses. “I wanted to make sure I had the, that I had enough — energy, mental space, before I called.” Kelly seems to want to put everything behind her and get on with her life, but Peter, who is starring in a New York City production of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night — a prime example of family dysfunction — insists on dredging up the past, insinuating that something may be wrong with the story of Craig’s death. Peter is also facing problems with his boyfriend, Tim.

Meanwhile, in 2004, it’s Craig’s last night at home before heading to Fort Benning in the morning, and Kelly is not having the touching goodbye she expected as he criticizes Peter’s choice of movies and lovers and how she is handling one of her patients, a man who claims to be a fierce animal in bed. “You’re so passive,” Craig tells Kelly. “This always happens when we talk seriously about my work,” she responds. “We don’t talk seriously about your work,” he replies. “Exactly,” she shoots back. As that final night gets rehashed, Kelly, Peter, and Craig enter some harsh territory.

Colin Woodell plays very different identical twin brothers in Dying City revival (photo by Joan Marcus)

Obie winner Shinn (Where Do We Live, Now or Later), who also directed this version, has said that he structured Dying City like a trauma; in many ways, it feels like Kelly and Peter are suffering through their own forms of PTSD over what happened to Craig and how that has impacted their lives. Dane Lafrey’s comfortable, uncluttered apartment-house set — a sharp contrast to the characters’ inner turmoil — consists of an L-shaped couch at the center, with an unseen kitchen off stage left, a hallway in the back that leads to the bedroom, and a television in the front corner, often tuned to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. The barefoot Winstead wears the same clothing throughout the ninety-minute play, while Woodell makes slight changes as he morphs from Craig to Peter and back again, usually walking out of view as one character and then returning as another, darkness and a flash of light accompanying the shifting scenes. (The costumes are by Kaye Voyce, with lighting by Tyler Micoleau.)

Winstead (Fargo, All About Nina) is terrific in her stage debut, embodying Kelly’s extreme unease at having to speak with Peter and look at the past, while Woodell (Unsane, Masters of Sex), who did in fact recently appear in a revival of Long Day’s Journey into Night (in LA), excels at keeping his portrayals of the twin brothers separate, the needy Peter insecure and sensitive, the brash Craig more concerned with his manhood. Dying City is a breadcrumb play; the plot and its many intricacies — among the topics that get covered are sexual assault, the military, political leanings, guns, homosexuality, the theater, lies, violence, love, and war — unfold slowly in bits of dialogue that require close concentration. However, following the crumbs does not lead to a fairy-tale ending but to a devastating finale.

LITTLE WOMEN

Kate Hamill adapts Little Women for the twenty-first century and plays Meg (far left) (photo by James Leynse)

Cherry Lane Mainstage Theatre
38 Commerce St.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 29, $82-$152
212-989-2020
primarystages.org
www.cherrylanetheatre.org

Kate Hamill strips down Louisa May Alcott’s classic semiautobiographical children’s book, Little Women, to its bare essentials in her self-described “radical adaptation,” a Primary Stages production continuing at the Cherry Lane through June 29. Hamill, who previously wrote and starred in dynamic versions of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice and William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, explores gender identity and traditional male and female roles as it relates to both the mid-to-late nineteenth century and today. The story zooms in on Jo March (Kristolyn Lloyd), a tomboy who wants to break out of her family’s small world by going to college, becoming a writer, and traveling through Europe. She lives with her mother, known as Marmie (usually Maria Elena Ramirez, although I saw Mary Bacon, who also plays Aunt March), who understands the significant differences among her children; the oldest sister, Meg (Kate Hamill), already a spinster at sixteen; the sweet but sickly thirteen-year-old Beth (Paola Sanchez Abreu); the youngest, twelve-year-old Amy (Carmen Zilles), who is determined to find her Prince Charming; and their maid, Hannah (Ellen Harvey, who also portrays Mrs. Mingott), who is pitching in more than ever while the family patriarch, Robert March (John Lenartz), is off fighting for the Union in the Civil War.

Fifteen-year-old Jo develops an intimate friendship with their new neighbor, Laurie (Nate Mann), an effeminate piano-playing orphan who lives on a large estate with his wealthy grandfather, Mr. Laurence (Lenartz), and is being tutored by John Brooks (Michael Crane, who also plays the nasty parrot). The tutor is preparing Laurie for upper-middle-class manhood: college followed by heading up the family business, which he is loathe to do. “I’m not very good at being a, you know, a ‘lady,’” Jo, who shortened her name from the more feminine Josephine, says to Laurie, who prefers being called that instead of his more masculine given name of Theodore. “I’m not very good at being a ‘gentleman.’ So perhaps we should — be ourselves,” he says. They are mirror images of each other, both wanting to further their education and travel overseas while just being their not-so-cisgender selves, an option open to them in 2019 but not in the 1860s.

The March family needs a group hug in Primary Stages production at the Cherry Lane (photo by James Leynse)

Hamill has excised many supporting characters and changed several key plot points in order to focus more on the family dynamic and the individual sisters’ relationships. “You’re all growing up so fast,” Marmie says. In fact, the word “grow” is used extensively throughout the play. “In this story, they never grow up. They just stay the same, and it lasts forever,” Jo tells Beth when she’s about to read her one of her tales. “Nothing lasts forever,” Jo responds. “We all grow up, eventually,” Laurie says later with a tinge of sadness. “One isn’t better than the other. They just need different things to grow,” Marmie says about flowers but referring to her children as well. Meanwhile, Hannah explains, “Took care of all of you since you were babies. Each one of you growing different than the other.” In Hamill’s view, as kids head toward adulthood, they don’t have to follow societal norms and do what’s expected of them; they can make their own choices, follow their dreams.

Purists shouldn’t be worried; this is still Alcott’s Little Women, even as it’s reclaimed by Hamill, whose mother first gave her the book when Kate was reaching puberty. She is not reinventing or reimagining it so much as bringing a contemporary perspective that is refreshing while still remaining true to the heart of the novel. The play, which, even with its changes, sticks more to the original story than Hamill’s previous works, is briskly directed by Sarna Lapine on Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams’s two-level set, the upstairs containing Jo’s writing desk and Beth’s bed, the main floor serving as multiple locations with very minor adjustments. Lloyd (Dear Evan Hansen, Paradise Blue) is superb as Jo, prancing about with a fake mustache, wearing men’s clothes (the fine period costumes are by Valérie Thérèse Bart), and determined to make something of herself, but as a person, not specifically as a woman. In his New York debut, Mann, a recent Juilliard grad, is wonderful; he and Jo practically melt into each other. And Hamill is a cool Meg, giving her more weight in this adaptation. The play also features a lovely piano score by Deborah Abramson, which works its way into the narrative. We can’t get enough of Hamill’s ingenuity and can’t wait to see which classic she tackles next.

THE MOUNTAINS LOOK DIFFERENT

Matthew Conroy (Paul O’Brien) and Martin Grealish (Con Horgan) do not become the best of friends in Mint production at Theatre Row (photo by Todd Cerveris)

The Mint Theater at Theatre Row
410 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 21, $65
minttheater.org
bfany.org/theatre-row

I knew there was a problem the moment I walked into the theater where the Mint is staging the American premiere of Micheál mac Liammóir’s controversial 1948 play, The Mountains Look Different. The company, which specializes in resurrecting long-forgotten works by little-known writers, is justly celebrated for its exquisitely rendered period sets, which often elicit gasps of joy from the audience. But the set for this production, continuing at Theatre Row through July 14, is standard and ordinary, a small farmhouse with painted backdrops of mountains and sky. (The set designer is Vicki R. Davis, who has previously wowed us with her sets for such previous Mint shows as Katie Roche, Women without Men, and The Price of Thomas Scott.) Unfortunately, the play can be described as plain and ordinary as well, a rarity for Jonathan Bank’s supremely talented and otherwise consistently dependable Mint.

Martin Grealish (Con Horgan) has something to say to his new daughter-in-law, Bairbre (Brenda Meaney), in The Mountains Look Different (photo by Todd Cerveris)

It’s St. John’s Eve in the west of Ireland, and miller Matthew Conroy (Paul O’Brien) has arrived at the home of Martin Grealish (Con Horgan) to greet his niece, Bairbre (Brenda Meaney), and her new husband, Tom (Jesse Pennington), Martin’s son, who are coming back from London, where Bairbre toiled for thirteen years. While the happy and positive Matthew is excited by the marriage, the dour, bedraggled Martin is suspicious, and he grows even more leery when the couple shows up: He doesn’t trust that the modern, elegant Bairbre can possibly be in love with his odd and awkward son. And when he thinks he recognizes Bairbre, matters get even worse.

A small community gathers on St. John’s Eve in American premiere of Micheál mac Liammóir play (photo by Todd Cerveris)

St. John’s Eve is a night of bonfires, but The Mountains Look Different, which was inspired by Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie, never ignites. It is a one-note morality play, lacking depth and nuance, directed with overly straightforward precision by actor Aidan Redmond. The acting is fine; the cast also includes Daniel Marconi as farm handyman Bartley, Liam Forde as addled tin whistler Batty Wallace, and Cynthia Mace as an old woman named Máire, who declares, “Oh, isn’t it a glorious thing a lone woman to have a man around the place the way he could be putting in a word for her or be striking a blow for her, and she not able to make a stir for herself with the dint of the weakness does be on all female women, God help us!” However, the story surrounding the play is more intriguing than the play itself: There were religious protests over immorality when the show first opened at the Gate, and Gate cofounder mac Liammóir (The Importance of Being Oscar, Where Stars Walk) — who portrayed Tom — was, twelve years after his death in 1978, revealed to not be Irish at all but an Englishman named Alfred Willmore.

TONI STONE

April Matthis scores as Negro Leagues player Toni Stone in Lydia Diamond play at the Laura Pels (photo by Joan Marcus 2019)

Laura Pels Theatre
Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre
111 West 46th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through August 11, $79-99
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org

April Matthis steps up to the plate and delivers big-time as the title character in Lydia Diamond’s Toni Stone, which opened tonight at the Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre. Mathis is utterly engaging as Toni Stone, the first woman to play in the otherwise all-male Negro Leagues. Born Marcenia Lyle Stone in West Virginia in 1921, Stone was a tomboy growing up, with a special affection — and talent — for baseball. “This is what I need. What I’m good at. What I do better than anybody. What I know better than anybody,” she tells the audience at the start of the play. She also explains, “I’m not a big talker. I talk a lot, but I don’t talk big. I have pride, but I wouldn’t say I’m proud. I don’t put more in a story than is really there. And I don’t like it when other people do. So don’t think I’m bragging when I tell you that I do the things I do well, better’n anybody.” That admission is what makes the play work so well, a guideline that Diamond and Tony-winning director Pam MacKinnon follow like a rulebook; the show is not an overwrought melodrama about a woman succeeding where only men had before, or a cliched tale of a superstar lady attempting to balance sports with her home life, or a worshipful celebration of a heroic athlete fighting the status quo and leading her team to a championship. It’s just about Toni Stone, a relatively ordinary woman who was so good at playing baseball that she decided that’s all she wanted to do, just play the game without any of the meta that comes with being black and a woman during the Jim Crow era.

Indianapolis Clowns players clown around in Roundabout production of Toni Stone (photo by Joan Marcus 2019)

Riccardo Hernandez’s set resembles parts of a ball field, with stadium lighting, three rows of rafters, and dugout benches. Most of the cast, primarily consisting of Stone’s teammates, are always in their uniforms, hanging out in the background like a Greek chorus, taking practice swings, and razzing each other, occasionally joining Stone in the spotlight. (The period costumes are by Dede Ayite, with lighting design by Allen Lee Hughes and choreography by Camille A. Brown.) Stone broke into the Negro Leagues in 1953 with the Indianapolis Clowns, represented here by catcher Willie “Stretch” Gaines (Eric Berryman), chief clown Richard “King Tut” King (Phillip James Brannon), the short, brainy, well-hung Spec Bebop (Daniel J. Bryant), ladies’ man Elzie Marshall (Jonathan Burke), the flashy but not-too bright Jimmy Wilkes (Toney Goins), Woody Bush (Ezra Knight), utility man Rufus McNeal, and the hard-drinking Willie Brown. (King Tut and Spec were real players while the others are fictional composites.) Diamond (Stick Fly, Smart People), who admittedly does not know much about sports, was approached to write the play by independent producer Samantha Barrie and baseball fanatic Mackinnon (Clybourne Park, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), who had optioned the 2010 book Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone by Martha Ackmann.

Their collaboration results in a well-balanced narrative that avoids banal genre tropes even as the story deals with racism, misogyny, homophobia, and exploitation. Stone, who replaced Hank Aaron on the team, refuses to be turned into a novelty; when she is first signed by Clowns owner Sydney Pollack — “He’s white. He’s the owner of the Clowns,” she says, even though he’s played by a black man — he tells her that he is going to have the pitchers from the other clubs take it easy on her, which enrages her. She just wants to be treated like any other player, a second baseman doing her job. She works so hard at baseball that she doesn’t have the time, or desire, for much of a social life, although she is aggressively courted by politically connected entrepreneur Auralious Alberga (Harvy Blanks). And she confides in an elegant prostitute named Millie (Kenn E. Head), a character inspired by the many madams Stone got to know while barnstorming through the South who would let her stay in the brothels when segregated hotels shut their doors on the Clowns.

Matthis (Measure for Measure, Signature Plays: Funnyhouse of a Negro) hits a home run as Stone, giving a gem of a performance, instantly developing an easygoing, casual rapport with the audience. Just as Stone was the only woman on the Clowns, Matthis is the only woman in the cast, as men take on the other female roles. Mackinnon gets the sports right, which is not always the case in theater, which can sacrifice crucial little details in favor of artistic license. In addition, you don’t need to know anything about sports to get sucked into the innate charm of Toni Stone, which at its core is about the erasing — one could say whitewashing — of women, especially black women, from history. Prior to Ackmann’s book and Diamond’s play, Stone was barely a footnote in the history of baseball and the Negro Leagues, but her legacy is now sealed, without being glorified, which is key, especially because, as it turns out, she was a solid if unspectacular player, albeit a groundbreaker. Toni Stone continues at the Laura Pels through August 11; starting June 21, the Roundabout will have ballpark-style giveaway nights for the first twenty-five ticket holders to check in at the merch booth.

SOMETHING CLEAN

Doug (Daniel Jenkins) and Charlotte (Kathryn Erbe) face a traumatic situation in Something Clean (photo by Joan Marcus)

Black Box Theatre
Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre
111 West 46th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 30, $30
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org

Kathryn Erbe is riveting as a mother obsessed with scrubbing away all remnants of a horrible crime in Something Clean, Selina Fillinger’s fierce yet sensitive new drama continuing at the Roundabout Underground’s Black Box Theatre through June 30. Erbe is Charlotte, a married mother of a son who is in prison for committing a despicable, if unexpected, crime. Charlotte spends much of the play cleaning — she carries around yellow gloves, Neosporin, and Band-Aids, at the ready to wipe away the recent past and protect any wounds; she also meticulously vacuums and does the dishes and the laundry over the course of ninety minutes. In fact, the play opens with her explaining, “I can clean toilets. Bathrooms, storage rooms, clothing, whatever you need. I’m really good at tackling stains, any stains.” Charlotte is volunteering at the local Center for Sexual Assault Prevention and Intervention, where she meets Joey (Christopher Livingston), a survivor who runs the place and befriends her, although she does not tell him her full name or who her son is. She also does not tell her husband, Doug (Daniel Jenkins), that she is working there as the previously happy couple deals with the traumatic strain their family is going through, each handling things their own private way.

As she grows more distant to Doug, who travels often for business and is worried about Charlotte’s state of mind, she becomes much closer to Joey, treating him almost like a son. She desperately tries to keep the two parts of her life separate; Joey calls her Charly, while Doug calls her Lottie, intimately and uniquely cutting her name in half. Reid Thompson’s set highlights that difference: The audience sits on the two horizontal sides of the stage, which features a storage room at the center on one side and Doug and Charlotte’s bedroom and kitchen on the other. In the middle is a round table that exists in both worlds, a shared space destined to bring it all together. Margot Bordelon’s (Eddie and Dave, Too Heavy for Your Pocket) astute direction and Jiyoun Chang’s deeply expressive lighting help guide the audience as they watch the play unfold in the style of a tennis match as the action goes back and forth between the two locations, in addition to a gaspworthy surprise.

Charlotte (Kathryn Erbe) and Joey (Christopher Livingston) bond in new Roundabout play by Selina Fillinger (photo by Joan Marcus)

Erbe (The Grapes of Wrath, The Father), Jenkins (Oslo, Big River), and Livingston (Wilder Gone, Party People) are terrific in what is essentially a series of poignant duets, but it’s Fillinger’s (Faceless, The Armor Plays: Cinched/Strapped) writing that stands out. The Chicago-based actress and playwright, who graduated from Northwestern only three years ago, shows a remarkably perceptive understanding of human nature, especially regarding marriage and parenthood, for someone so young. A scene late in the play when Doug and Charlotte take a stark look at their life is so beautifully written, so insightful and observant, that it brought tears to my eyes. Something Clean takes on several hot-button issues and approaches them with touching grace and intelligent humor, elevating it above so many social justice plays, making it about so much more than wiping up a mess or sweeping problems under the carpet.