this week in theater

EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENED AND WOULD HAPPEN

Heiner Goebbels explores the last hundred years of European history in Everything that happened and would happen (photo by Stephanie Berger)

Park Avenue Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
June 3-9, $40-$95
212-933-5812
armoryonpark.org

German composer and artist Heiner Goebbels constructs, deconstructs, and reconstructs the last hundred years of European history in Everything that happened and would happen, making its American premiere at Park Ave. Armory through June 9. Reconfigured for the armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall — it was originally staged in a former railway depot in Manchester — the multimedia, polyphonic spectacle starts as soon as the doors open, so be sure to get there early. The audience sits in rising rafters on the west side of the hall, watching a team of dancers in black (Juan Felipe Amaya Gonzalez, Sandhya Daemgen, Antoine Effroy, Ismeni Espejel, Montserrat Gardó Castillo, Freddy Houndekindo, Tuan Ly, Thanh Nguyễn Duy, John Rowley, Annegret Schalke, Ildikó Tóth, Tyra Wigg) carry seemingly random objects onstage — long tubes, metallic seashells, a gold sun, large cloths that they hang from above — position them carefully, then remove them.

Various people read passages from Patrik Ouředník’s 2001 Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century, a tragicomic, stream-of-consciousness look at the twentieth century, exploring war, racism, colonialism, collective memory, liberal democracy, the Holocaust, Barbie dolls, and more. Sentences are occasionally projected on hanging sheets designed with trees, maps, and architectural structures, in addition to unedited footage from Euronews’s No Comment, with no narration or context; the night we attended featured very recent live, often violent images from Syria, Colombia, and other nations. (The video design is by Rene Liebert.) In one corner smoke oozes out of a cave, creating a face. Rocks storm down in an avalanche. The dancers roll column-like plinths across the stage, pedestals without busts; later, one performer climbs on top of one and reads from Ouředník’s book.

Everything that happened and would happen has been reimagined for the Park Ave. Armory (photo by Stephanie Berger)

The dissonant score, from John Cage’s Europeras 1&2, is played by Camille Émaille on percussion, Gianni Gebbia on saxophone, Cécile Lartigau on ondes Martenot, Nicolas Perrin on guitar and electronics, and Léo Maurel on several specially built, unusual instruments. (The props are from Goebbels’s 2012 production of Europeras 1&2.) Willi Bopp’s stunning sound design has music and words emerging from numerous speakers throughout the hall, as if a choreographed sonic dance. Goebbels is a master of deception; while you’re watching one element, others will sneak up on you, offering surprises galore, evoking life itself — and war, specifically, but without the immediate threat. A long, narrow beam becomes a mobile trench. Black monoliths creep up out of the darkness. At one point I felt as if Birnam Wood was stealthily approaching; another reminded me of George Washington crossing the Delaware (even if it’s not from the last century). The dancers and musicians improvise, furthering the anything-can-happen atmosphere.

Perhaps what’s most invigorating about the 135-minute-plus intermissionless show — Goebbels’s third project at the armory, following Stifter’s Dinge in 2009 and De Materie in 2016 — is that despite the serious topics that are broached, abstract and not, Goebbels leaves it up to us to interpret what we are experiencing; he gives us the building blocks from which we can form our own narrative. “Everything that happened and would happen doesn’t participate in all the attempts to have yet another opinion as to the meaning of what has happened; quite the opposite. Guided by a deep mistrust in the transmission of a one-directional message, I don’t even try,” Goebbels explains in his director’s note. “Everything that happened and would happen seeks to open up a space of images, words, and sounds generous enough to avoid the impression that somebody on stage is trying to tell you what to think. It is a space for imagination and reflection, in which the construction of sense is left for everyone to assemble.”

Words, images, movement, and sound come together in unique, contemplative ways in Heiner Goebbels’s return to the armory (photo by Stephanie Berger)

It can be slow going, and several members of the audience did not make it to the end, which is too bad, because Everything that happened and would happen proves to be a provocative durational exploration of the past, present, and future fusing together, a multimedia barrage on the eyes and ears that demands our attention even as the mind wanders. Even when not much appears to be going on, something is, of course, mimicking life and the choices we make as we go about our day; Goebbels metaphorically hands us the controls and we watch and listen to what we want to, self-curating the presentation. Ouředník writes, “Historians said that historical memory was not part of history and memory was shifted from the historical to the psychological sphere, and this instituted a new mode of memory whereby it was no longer a question of memory of events but memory of memory.” On opening night, at the close of the show, Goebbels himself was helping the ushers steer the audience to the exits on the far side of the stage, forcing everyone to march along a battered landscape and take stock of where we are at this very moment in time, where we’ve been, and where we’re going. It’s a fitting finale to an adventurous evening of intoxicating, memorable theater.

TRIPTYCH (EYES OF ONE ON ANOTHER)

Triptych (Eyes of One on Another) takes a unique multimedia look at the work of Robert Mapplethorpe (photo by Maria Baranova)

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
Peter Jay Sharp Building
230 Lafayette Ave.
June 6-8, $30-$60, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

The controversial work of the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe has been undergoing a renaissance over the last few years, with documentaries, gallery and museum shows, and, perhaps most influentially, Patti Smith’s award-winning memoir about her life with Mapplethorpe, Just Kids. Now comes composer Bryce Dessner and librettist Korde Arrington Tuttle’s multimedia Triptych (Eyes of One on Another), playing at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House June 6-8. The sixty-minute theatrical oratorio is divided into three sections based on Mapplethorpe’s XYZ portfolios, which explore sadomasochism, flowers, and African American male nudes, respectively. The first part centers on Smith’s poem “The Boy Who Loved Michelangelo,” set to a Monteverdi madrigal; the second on Dessner’s personal reaction to the 1990 Mapplethorpe obscenity trial in Cincinnati, the composer’s hometown; and the third on poet and performance artist Essex Hemphill’s “The Perfect Moment,” which was critical of Mapplethorpe’s depiction of black bodies. “Aesthetics can justify desire, / but desire in turn / can provoke punishment. / Under public scrutiny / the eyes of one man / are focused on another. / Is it desire, equality, / disgust, or hatred?” he writes. Meanwhile, in a program note, dramaturg Christopher Myers asks, “Is it possible to imagine these men who are photographed with the impersonal intimacy of flowers, or bronze sculptures, as full human beings, with desires and pleasures of their own? Can we read the desire of the photographer, his conflicts and self-denials, in his steadfast commitment to a classical language that recasts leather daddies and daddy’s boys into upper middle class living room fantasies? Where in this thorny bramble of gazes, objectification, outrage, and intimacy do our own wants and expectations as an audience live?”

The production, which features giant projections of rarely shown Mapplethorpe photographs, is directed by Kaneza Schaal, with music performed live by Roomful of Teeth (Cameron Beauchamp, Martha Cluver, Eric Dudley, Estelí Gomez, Abigail Lennox, Thomas McCargar, Thann Scoggin, and Caroline Shaw), joined by soprano Alicia Hall Moran and tenor Isaiah Robinson; Brad Wells is the music director and conductor, with Jessica McJunkins on violin, Tia Allen on viola, Byron Hogan on cello, Kyra Sims on French horn, Ian Tyson on clarinet and bass clarinet, Laura Barger on piano and harmonium, Donnie Johns and Victor Pablo on percussion, and James Moore on guitar. The set and costumes are by Carlos Soto, lighting by Yuki Nakase, and video by Simon Harding. On June 7 at 6:00, the talk “Mapplethorpe in Performance with Bryce Dessner, Kaneza Schaal, and Korde Arrington Tuttle” will be held in the BAM Hillman Attic Studio.

HEINER GOEBBELS: EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENED AND WOULD HAPPEN

everything that happens

Park Avenue Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
June 3-9, $40-$95
212-933-5812
armoryonpark.org

In 2009, German composer and artist Heiner Goebbels brought Stifter’s Dinge to Park Avenue Armory, a work for five pianos, sans performers, an architectural, musical, kinetic collage with the voices of William S Burroughs, Malcolm X, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. In 2016, his multidisciplinary De Materie featured a lighted zeppelin and a flock of sheep. His latest spectacle to come to the Wade Thompson Drill Hall is Everything that happened and would happen, running June 3-9. Originally staged in a former railway station in Manchester, the 160-minute intermissionless piece, reconfigured for the armory, combines unedited footage from Euronews’s No Comment, music from John Cage’s “Europeras 1&2,” and text based on Patrik Ouředník’s Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century. “Heiner Goebbels is an artist who defies classification. Composer, visual artist, theatrical pioneer, philosopher, and poet of the stage, he has for decades created compelling productions using a wide variety of performers,” armory artistic director Pierre Audi said in a statement. “The Drill Hall thrives on art forms flirting with each other, teasing us, provoking us, challenging us. Goebbels is the ring master par excellence who offers us a production especially inspired by the armory space. The result is an immersive experience that leaves each of us, the spectators, with our own experience and interpretation.”

The work, which was co-commissioned by Park Avenue Armory, 14—18 Now, Artangel, and Ruhrtriennale and explores a century of world history, is conceived and directed by Goebbels, with lighting by Goebbels and John Brown, sound by Willi Bopp, and video by Rene Liebert, with five musicians (Camille Emaille, Gianni Gebbia, Cécile Lartigau, Léo Maurel, Nicolas Perrin) and twelve performers and dancers (Juan Felipe Amaya Gonzalez, Sandhya Daemgen, Antoine Effroy, Ismeni Espejel, Montserrat Gardó Castillo, Freddy Houndekindo, Tuan Ly, Thanh Nguyễn Duy, John Rowley, Annegret Schalke, Ildikó Tóth, Tyra Wigg). On June 6 at 5:30, Goebbels will take part in an artist talk with Gelsey Bell.

GARY: A SEQUEL TO TITUS ANDRONICUS

Gary (Nathan Lane) and Janice (Kristine Nielsen) have got quite a cleaning job ahead of them in Taylor Mac’s Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Booth Theatre
222 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 16, $39 – $169
shubert.nyc/theatres/booth

Downtown fave Taylor Mac makes quite an impression with his Broadway debut, the eminently strange and hysterically funny Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus. The play is set just after the bloodbath that concludes Shakespeare’s violent tragedy and is prefaced by a monologue by a midwife named Carol (Julie White), who self-referentially explains directly to the audience, “Like God, a sequel hides inside an ending: / When time is up you pray that it’s extending. / For life, to the cultured, and to the philistine / Once felt, is craved ’til thrills become routine. / But once routine the thrills, to thrill, must grow. / And if they don’t, an outrage starts to show. / So double up on savagery and war: / To satisfy you multiply the gore.” She introduces not only the rhythmic nature of the dialogue and the British accents all three characters will speak in but also the Monty Python-like comedy of spurting blood in which anything goes and no joke is too high or low. The Clown (named Gary by Mac and portrayed with extra relish by Nathan Lane), who had delivered a letter to Saturninus in the original Bard play, has avoided execution by agreeing to become a maid. Little does he know that he will have to work with the stern, humorless Janice (Kristine Nielsen) to clean up more than a thousand ragged bodies piled high in the royal banquet room, a fate perhaps worse than death.

Carol (Julie White) find herself in an icky predicament in Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

“I always was a clown who hated clowns,” Gary, who used to juggle pigeons on the street, confesses to the bodies. Belittled by Janice, he tells her he is “more like an everyman who’s a nobody else” and shares his dream of becoming a fool, which he describes as “a clown with ambition.” (Master clown and actor Bill Irwin is credited with the movement.) Janice teaches him the ropes, which involves thoroughly eliminating the remaining gas from each victim and then sucking out their innards and blood using two separate hoses. Mac includes a parade of flatulence and penis jokes that are not the usual Broadway fare while also taking on the current political climate in America. “Ya think the streets are all clean and nifty? Ya know as well as I it’s a hell on earth out there and only getting worse, what with the autocracy turned to a democracy turning back to an autocracy, as we speak,” Janice, who refuses to talk in rhymes or Iambic pentameter, says. A moment later, Gary bursts into tears and Janice uncaringly asks, “What ya crying for?” He answers, “The state of the world.”

The puns and buffoonery keep on coming as Pulitzer Prize finalist Mac (A 24-Decade History of Popular Music) and five-time Tony Award-winning director George C. Wolfe (Angels in America, Topdog/Underdog) push Janice, Carol, and Gary deeper into the mess left behind by the powers that be. The near-endless supply of dead people on Santo Loquasto’s imaginative set evokes the casualties of wars waged by tyrannical governments. “Seems the casualty is how casual it is,” Gary opines. But there are also glimmers of hope. Explaining the surprising emotions he experienced when he was barely saved from being hanged and saw the sky as if for the first time, Gary says to Janice, “Once ya feel that, it’s proof, aint’ it? Proof ya don’t gotta live your life accepting the muck.” He believes he can save the world, which Mac thinks everyone is capable of. Referring to the court, Gary says, “If two maids could turn the hopelessness of a massacre into a coup of beauty, they too can imagine a better world.”

Gary (Nathan Lane) impresses Janice (Kristine Nielsen) for a moment in Broadway comedy (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Tony winners Lane (Angels in America, The Producers) and White (The Little Dog Laughed, Airline Highway) and Tony nominee and Obie winner Nielsen (Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, Dog Opera) have a blast together. At the last moment, Andrea Martin, who was cast as Janice, got hurt and had to leave the show, so Nielsen moved from Carol to Janice and White came on as Carol, creating a formidable comic trio with a lot to say about society while making the audience laugh itself silly.

Mac, who uses the gender pronoun “judy,” delivers some grand pronouncements without becoming preachy, getting right to the point when Gary declares that the next step should be “not a violent coup. An artistic one. An onslaught of ingenuity that’s a transformation of the calamity we got here. A sort of theatrical revenge on the Andronicus revenge. A comedy revenge to end all revenge. Well, not just a comedy. A sorta folly. Not a spectacle. Or a comedy folly that is a spectacle. Sorta a machination. That’s full of laughter. But more than laughs. But with the laughs. Well, sorta a thinking man’s laughter. But could be a knee-slapper.” Which is just what Mac’s play is.

RED BULL THEATER: MAC BETH

Lady Macbeth (Ismenia Mendes) reaches out to her royal husband (Isabelle Fuhrman) in inventive reimagining of Shakespeare tragedy (photo by Richard Termine)

Lucille Lortel Theatre
121 Christopher St. between Bleecker & Hudson Sts.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 9, $77-$117
212-352-3101
www.redbulltheater.com

Erica Schmidt’s beautifully frenetic Shakespeare adaptation Mac Beth — yes, she has made the title two words, perhaps to emphasize the more feminine second half of the title — is an exhilarating demonstration of grrl power, ratcheted up to the nth degree. The Red Bull production, which continues at the Lucille Lortel Theatre through June 9, is set at a girls school where seven students enact an all-female version of Macbeth. They are dressed in schoolgirl uniforms of buttoned white shirts under tartan tops and skirts, with bloodred socks reaching up to their knees; aggressively ominous and gender-neutral hooded capes are added for the Weird Sisters. (The costumes are by Jessica Pabst.) Catherine Cornell’s set juts into the audience, covered in fake grass with a partially overturned couch, an iron bathtub, a campfire, and water-filled craters, as if the aftermath of a wild sorority bash. (When the characters imbibe, they do so from red plastic cups, a party staple.) And although they speak in the traditional iambic pentameter, they don’t disguise their voices to be more adult, instead sounding like a bunch of kids invigorated by putting on a show exactly the way they want to.

The Weird Sisters (Sharlene Cruz, AnnaSophia Robb, and Sophie Kelly-Hedrick) stir the boiling cauldron in Mac Beth (photo by Richard Termine)

Macbeth (Isabelle Fuhrman) is returning from a successful military campaign with the loyal Banquo (Ayana Workman) when they come upon three witches (AnnaSophia Robb, Sophie Kelly-Hedrick, and Sharlene Cruz, who play multiple roles) who predict that Macbeth will become Thane of Cawdor, then king, while Banquo’s sons will one day rule. Fear, jealousy, and revenge take over as the power grab is on, but with delicious twists; in the Bard’s day, his plays were performed by an all-male cast, but this twenty-first-century all-woman cast — armed with smartphones — revels in the gender shifts without altering the original text. “Are you a man?” Lady Macbeth (Ismenia Mendes) asks her husband. Facing a ghost (hysterically played by Workman), Macbeth declares, “What man dare, I dare: be alive again, / And dare me to the desert with thy sword; / If trembling I inhabit then, protest me / The baby of a girl. Hence, horrible shadow! / Unreal mock’ry, hence!” It’s as if they are caught up in a teenage horror flick, with all the adolescent tropes in place but seen only from the girls’ point of view. Even one of the witches’ prophecies takes on new meaning when she predicts, “Be bloody, bold, and resolute: laugh to scorn / The power of man, for none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth.” At one point Lady Macbeth tells a witch, “Unsex me here.”

AnnaSophia Robb and Sophie Kelly-Hedrick play witches and other characters in Bard play set at a girls school (photo by Richard Termine)

Schmidt’s (A Month in the Country, Invasion!) breathlessly paced version flies by in a furious ninety minutes, both sexy and sinister, gleefully performed by the terrific cast led by Fuhrman’s (All the Fine Boys, Orphan) tortured Macbeth and Mendes’s (Marys Seacole, Orange Is the New Black) malevolent Lady Macbeth. Robb (The Carrie Diaries, Bridge to Terabithia), NYU Tisch freshman Kelly-Hedrick, and recent CCNY grad Cruz make strong off-Broadway debuts, playing the witches as well as Duncan, Malcolm, Fleance, Rosse, Angus, Lenox, and other minor characters; in particular, Kelly-Hedrick captures the essence of girlhood — tinged with menace — in her squeaky delivery. Schmidt’s inventive staging also boasts a thrilling storm, a creepy doll, and a touch of gymnastics, although if there was one more loud bang against the tub I was going to scream. Schmidt was inspired to revisit Macbeth by reading stories about girls being murdered in the woods. In Mac Beth, she takes back the power, putting the girls in charge in a gender swap that is as exciting as it is, in this day and age, necessary. Schmidt makes us look at the bloody power plays of Scottish kings as if they are the social dominance battles of high school — and vice versa — and every audience member comes out a winner.

CURSE OF THE STARVING CLASS

Ella (Maggie Siff) is unable to control her son, Wesley (Gilles Geary), in Curse of the Starving Class (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Irene Diamond Stage
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday-Sunday through June 2, $35-$55
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

The Signature Theatre’s long relationship with Sam Shepard, dating back to 1996, continues with a powerful production of his Obie-winning 1978 stunner, Curse of the Starving Class. The play, which shatters any illusions about the American dream, began a remarkably fruitful period for Shepard, followed by such works as Buried Child, True West, Savage/Love, Fool for Love, and A Lie of the Mind over the next seven years. The Signature previously staged the play in 1997; the new adaptation is directed with a vengeance by Terry Kinney, the Steppenwolf cofounder who has directed Fool for Love and, who, incidentally, suffered a panic attack playing Tilden in Buried Child, which led to his six-year absence from acting in theater.

Kinney opens the show with an unforgettable moment involving Julian Crouch’s set, a large, open, rancid farmhouse kitchen in California where the supremely dysfunctional, self-destructive Tates are living a bizarre life. The father, Weston (David Warshofsky), is a drunk who broke down the door the night before in an alcoholic rage. His delusional wife, Ella (Maggie Siff), is so frightened of him that she has contacted a lawyer, Taylor (Andrew Rothenberg), in order to sell the house. Their young daughter, Emma (Lizzy DeClement), is desperate to run away. And her older brother, Wesley (Gilles Geary), is following in his father’s less-than-stellar footsteps. “This thing is no joke. Your whole life is changing. You don’t want to live in ignorance, do you? Squalor and ignorance,” Ella tells Emma. Emma is furious when she finds out that her mother and brother have sabotaged her 4-H project involving a chicken she had raised “from the incubator to the grave,” a stern metaphor for how the members of the family treat one another. The tension rises when Ellis (Esau Pritchett), the owner of the Alibi bar, arrives with some pretty compelling claims himself.

Emma (Lizzy DeClement) searches for answers as Taylor (Andrew Rothenberg) looks on in Shepard revival at the Signature (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Tates are like precursors to the Gallagher clan on the Showtime series Shameless, only without the sex and the comic relief. (The bar in Shameless is even named the Alibi.) There seems to be no way out from under the vicious cycle of alcoholism and violence that ensnares them, and they are doing everything they can to make sure to slam the door on any possible exit. Shepard includes numerous references to food throughout the play: Ella makes bacon early on, Emma is looking for her fryer, Wesley is constantly scouring the usually empty refrigerator, Weston inexplicably brings home a bag of artichokes, and a maggot-laden sheep is boarded in the kitchen.

“No one’s starving! We don’t belong to the starving class!” Emma screams. “There’s no such thing as a starving class,” her mother answers. “There is so! There’s a starving class of people, and we’re not part of it!” Emma responds, to which Ella replies, “We’re hungry, and that’s starving enough for me!” But what the Tates are hungry for is a question Shepard’s play never explicitly answers.

Ellis (Esau Pritchett) has bad news for the Tates in Curse of the Starving Class (photo by Joan Marcus)

The play is full of surprises, with a freshness that doesn’t feel the least bit stale, the unpredictability of the Tates front and center. Weston might drive a Kaiser-Frazer and a Packard, but there’s nothing old-fashioned about the problems they all are facing. Curse of the Starving Class is a wickedly brutal tale, a classic Shepard tale of toxic masculinity, addiction, and the dashing of hope. The family is so explosive that Emma believes there is nitroglycerine running through their veins, flowing in their blood. She might be right.

CONTINUITY

Alex Hurt, Jasmine Batchelor, Megan Ketch play actors making an ecological disaster flick in Bess Wohl’s Continuity (photo © Matthew Murphy)

Manhattan Theatre Club
MTC at New York City Center
The Studio at Stage II
130 West 56th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 9, $69-$90
212-581-1212
continuityplay.com
www.manhattantheatreclub.com

At one point in Bess Wohl’s fiendishly clever Continuity, the Manhattan Theatre Club world premiere that opened last night at Stage II at City Center, the stage is empty for several minutes. The set, designed by Adam Rigg, is anchored by a white styrofoam ice floe with a wall of ice in the back, leaning ominously forward. It’s an uncomfortably funny moment, the barenness a warning of what just might happen if the world keeps on its current pace, because the play is as much about narrative continuity as the continuity of humanity itself. The show within a show is about global warming, as in real life politicians, scientists, environmentalists, artists, and lay people fiercely disagree on what to do about climate change and whether it’s already too late; the deserted stage predicts a time in the not-too-distant future when living beings no longer exist on our doomed planet. But Wohl and director Rachel Chavkin, who previously collaborated on the smash hit Small Mouth Sounds, are not just preaching to the choir or spewing grandiose melodramatic rhetoric. Continuity is a sublime one-hundred-minute journey into the glorious stupidity of humanity as it faces its possible demise.

Jake (Alex Hurt) and David (Darren Goldstein) watch some monkeys online in Manhattan Theatre Club world premiere at City Center (photo © Matthew Murphy)

A film crew is in the New Mexico desert making an ecological disaster epic. Director Maria (Rosal Colón), a Sundance Award–winning indie filmmaker, is helming her first studio picture, not wanting to screw up her big break, while needy Hollywood star Nicole (Megan Ketch), who is playing environmentalist Eve, is having some issues, creating maddening delays for the crew and her fellow actors, the good-looking Jake (Alex Hurt), who is playing George, an ecoterrorist, and earnest, underutilized Anna (Jasmine Batchelor), who portrays Lily, a climatologist who has been captured by a gun-wielding George. “The time for science is over,” the Keanu Reeves–like hunk declares. “It’s time for action.” When screenwriter David Caxton (Darren Goldstein) arrives unexpectedly, Maria worries that the studio has sent him to keep an eye on her. Soon Larry (Max Baker), the crotchety science adviser, is questioning plot points that will wreak havoc on the film’s narrative and drain the story of its special-effects-laden promises. Through it all, the loyal PA (Garcia) does whatever is asked of him, no matter how patently absurd.

Maria (Rosal Colón) and David (Darren Goldstein) find themselves at odds while on-set in New Mexico (photo © Matthew Murphy)

Continuity was partly inspired by Wohl’s experience writing the cancer movie Irreplaceable You, so the film shoot feels authentic. The title of the play comes not only from the technical term for maintaining consistent details in a movie but also from the idea of uninterrupted existence, which is in global danger because of climate change. Wohl (Barcelona, American Hero) explores carbon neutrality, recycling, hypocrisy, science, capitalism, and other concepts as she litters the dialogue with such silly puns and wonderfully chosen phrases as “Stop shifting the ground under my feet,” “Water under the bridge,” and “The pace is glacial.” She and Chavkin (Hadestown, Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812) also probe race, gender, the #MeToo movement, and sexual orientation as Maria’s attempt to finish the scene before it gets dark mimics humankind’s not-so-concerted effort to save the Earth. “Please take care of our iceberg,” the offstage first assistant director tells everyone about a prop that people keep ruining, as if reminding all of us of the tenuousness of our situation. Lily and Jake watch a video on his phone of a monkey doing something amazing, as if evolution is being turned around. David is giving himself a fake tan, like a natural one is out of the question. It’s no coincidence that Maria won an award at Sundance, both because of the name of the festival itself as well as its relationship with seminal environmentalist Robert Redford. The stage production is doing what it can to not leave its own carbon footprint, reusing plastic bottles and other props and recycling cut-up paper into falling snow. Wohl calls Continuity “a play in six takes,” but we don’t have that many chances left to get it right.