this week in theater

FLIGHT

flight 2

The Heath in the McKittrick Hotel
542 West 27th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Daily through April 20, $45
212-904-1880
mckittrickhotel.com
www.voxmotus.co.uk

Emursive productions, the innovative team that has brought such successful immersive shows as Sleep No More and The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart to the McKittrick Hotel in Chelsea, has done it again with Vox Motus’s Flight, a very different, much more settled kind of presentation that melds art, theater, and literature into something wholly new. The gripping story, which unfolds over about sixty tense minutes, was adapted by Oliver Emanuel from Australian journalist Caroline Brothers’s 2012 debut novel, Hinterland. For those of you who like surprises and prefer not to know anything about a show before heading to the theater, that is all I am going to tell you, other than I highly recommend it for fans of experimental, unusual methods of storytelling — you can stop right here and go get tickets now. (Also, it is definitely not for kids; no one under fourteen will be admitted.) For those of you who need to know more, read on for further details, although I strongly suggest you don’t. The primary reason I am sharing more information is to sing the praises of the people behind this unusual adventure.

Vox Motus’s Flight can be experienced at the McKittrick Hotel through March 25 (photo by Beth Chalmers)

SPOILERS AHEAD! Entering the show takes place via a number of anteroom-type spaces: a special elevator, a coat check, a train car, and a dim, curtained space, from which theatergoers are led one-by-one into even darker private booths. Directed by Jamie Harrison and Candice Edmunds of Scottish theater company Vox Motus (The Infamous Brothers Davenport, Slick), Flight reveals itself in tiny dioramas that revolve past you on a carousel; the parade of scenarios of many shapes and sizes produces an effect similar to that of viewing graphic novel panels. The tale follows two young Afghan brothers, eight-year-old Kabir (voiced by Nalini Chertty) and fifteen-year-old Aryan (Farshid Rokey), as they flee their home country in search of freedom, a path that will take them across Europe as they encounter terrible danger, awful hardship, and moments of delight, with a third-person narrator (Emun Elliott) serving as guide. Each diorama, many of which feature the sun or the moon in the background, is designed by Harrison and Rebecca Hamilton, with tiny figures trapped in tiny rooms, forced to work on a farm, and in transit, always frightened that they will be caught. The dioramas are lit like movie sets by Simon Wilkinson, with a compelling score and sound design by Mark Melville. Part art installation, part immersive theater, Flight, the title of which refers to the brothers’ passage toward freedom as well as Kabir’s desire to fly through the air, is a timely look at what so many refugees must do to escape their violent country and find a new home, risking their life for a little bit of food and a place to sleep without fear. It’s a harrowing journey that is intelligently depicted by Vox Motus, avoiding treacly sentimentality and instead focusing on a simple narrative and the genuine peril the boys, and so many refugees and illegal immigrants around the world and in America, face on a daily basis. The production, which won a Herald Angel Award at the 2017 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, continues at the McKittrick Hotel through April 20. Don’t hesitate to get on board, while you still enjoy your own freedom.

PARTY FACE

Oscar-winning actress Hayley Mills returns to the New York stage in Party Face (photo by Jeremy Daniel)

Stage II at New York City Center
Thursday – Monday through April 8, $38-$128
212-581-1212
www.partyfaceplay.com

There’s a good amount of fun to be had in Isobel Mahon’s Party Face, continuing at New York City Center’s Stage II through April 8. But there’s also something just a little bit off, detracting from the overall impact of the play, which was named Best Production at the 1st Irish Awards. The night I went, the onstage clock was an hour fast, so when one character arrives early, the party host says, “It’s only twenty to . . . I said eight.” But the time on the clock was actually twenty to nine, and no one ever corrected the issue as the play continued and the clock kept real, running time. Of course, I don’t know if the clock is off for every performance, that maybe it is supposed to represent how everything is askew in this self-contained world, but there are other problems as well — in addition to some pure pleasures. Recently released after a stay in a psychiatric ward, Mollie Mae (Gina Costigan) is hosting a small gathering to show off the new extension on her kitchen, which features an impressive refrigerator, large cabinets, and a marble island in the center, with one corner smashed up. It’s her domineering, judgmental mother, Carmel (Hayley Mills), who has arrived early, bearing fancy nibbles to counteract her daughter’s low-rent crisps and hummus. She has also arrived with her share of quips belittling Mollie, complaining about her makeup, what she’s wearing, and even the flowers she has put out. “Oh, lovely flowers,” the impeccably dressed and styled Carmel, who is all about appearance, says. “’Course, in my day you never saw a lily outside of a funeral parlor.” Mollie is upset when Carmel tells her that she has taken the liberty of inviting one of Mollie’s neighbors, Chloe (usually played by Allison Jean White, but we saw her understudy, Alison Cimmet), an overly glamorous gossip queen who never misses a chance to stick it to Mollie, all in the guise of being a caring friend. They are soon joined by Mollie’s sister, Maeve (Brenda Meaney), a tough, cynical divorcee who rolls her eyes at most of what her mother and Chloe say. The last guest is Bernie (Klea Blackhurst), an oddball woman who met Mollie in the mental hospital and has a liking for wrapping everything in cling film, the British term for plastic wrap. Insults fly, secrets are revealed, and all kinds of objects get wrapped in cling film as the five very different women relentlessly go at it; the only sign of a man is an offstage topiary bush in the shape of male genitalia, trimmed by Mollie’s absent husband, an architect named Alan.

A small gathering results in a series of revelations in Isobel Mahon’s Party Face (photo by Jeremy Daniel)

Party Face might not be The Women, but Mahon (So Long, Sleeping Beauty; Box of Frogs) has created five overly caricatured but recognizable ladies who deliver some very funny, if sometimes a bit obvious, dialogue. Mentioning her husband, the superficial and vapid Chloe states, “Turlough says, ‘Chloe, you’re such a good listener, you mustn’t let people take advantage.’ But as I say, ‘Turlough, it’s what gives my life meaning. And I think meaning is so important in life.” Carmel continually sides with Chloe, who is like the daughter she never had, as she keeps taking shots at both Mollie and Maeve. When Carmel discusses how she and her friends have all gotten Botox, Maeve says, “Jesus, it’s an epidemic; your lunches’ll be great gas, sixteen at the table and not a twitch between you.” Carmel replies, “Oh, you can mock, Maeve; wouldn’t do you any harm to have it done yourself. You’re not blessed with Mollie’s good skin.” But it’s Bernie who saves the day, and the play, with her strange pronouncements, her fear of germs, and her genuine honesty. When Chloe asks her if anyone else from their “little community” is coming, Bernie replies, “Well, I asked a couple from our obsessive-compulsive encounter group but they’re both agoraphobics, so they wouldn’t come out.” The audience is virtually another guest at the party, which takes place on Jeff Ridenour’s cozy kitchen / living room set. In her off-Broadway directing debut, Amanda Bearse (Married with Children, Fright Night) keeps all the characters busy, although some of the slapstick is too forced. It’s a joy to see Mills, a child star who appeared in such films as The Parent Trap, Whistle down the Wind, Pollyanna, and Tiger Bay, in such an intimate venue at City Center. No stranger to the stage, she won a Theatre World Award for her 2000 performance in Noël Coward’s Suite in Two Keys and more recently toured with her sister, Juliet Mills, in James Kirkwood’s Legends! Mills, now seventy-one, is delightful as Carmel, an extravagant, vain, and sexy woman who cares most about how things affect her. Costigan (The Suitcase under the Bed, Crackskull Row), Meaney (Indian Ink, Incognito), and Cimmet (Amelie, The Mystery of Edwin Drood) are all solid but they are overshadowed by Blackhurst (Everything the Traffic Will Allow, Hazel), who is impossible to stop watching as she delivers funny lines or keeps wrapping whatever she can get her hands on. Of course, she does so with see-through cling film, so the objects are still visible, much like the party faces that the other women first put on but ultimately pull away to reveal their true selves. Several of the late revelations come out of thin air, attempting to explain some of the interactions between Carmel and her daughters, but it reduces the energy, which is perhaps most evident in the ever-present chunk missing from Mollie’s marble kitchen island. Now, if only I could figure out what’s up with that clock.

IN THE BODY OF THE WORLD

Eve Ensler stands up against cancer in new one-woman show (photo © Joan Marcus 2018)

Manhattan Theatre Club
New York City Center Stage 1
Tuesday – Sunday through March 25, $90
212-581-1212
bodyoftheworldplay.com
www.nycitycenter.org

In the wake of losing my mother to lung cancer just after Thanksgiving, one of the last things I wanted to do was see a play about a woman fighting the cursed disease. But Eve Ensler’s daring, delightful one-woman show, In the Body of the World, which opened tonight at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Stage I at City Center, is bursting with the affirmation of life and the celebration of joy. In 2010, the Tony- and Obie-winning writer of The Vagina Monologues and The Treatment was diagnosed with cancer; she first wrote about it in her 2013 memoir, In the Body of the World, which she has now successfully adapted for the stage. Ensler divides the eighty-minute performance, directed with flair by two-time Tony winner Diane Paulus (Pippin, The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess), into three sections, “Somnolence,” “Burning,” and “Second Wind,” as she honestly and often poetically talks about her childhood and her family and relates her cancer to things much bigger than herself. “A mother’s body against a child’s body makes a place. It says you are here. I have been exiled from my body. I was ejected at a young age and I got lost,” she says at the beginning. “For years I have been trying to find my way back to my body, and to the earth. I guess you could say it’s a preoccupation.” Ensler strides about Myung Hee Cho’s set, consisting of a wooden chair, a credenza with an altar/cabinet on top, and a chaise longue, which serves as Ensler’s loft, her hospital room, and her hotel room in what she calls Cancer Town, the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Ensler, a twice-divorced vegetarian and activist who was fifty-six at the time of her diagnosis, had stopped drinking in her twenties and quit smoking in her thirties, so the cancer came as somewhat of a shock, especially when she learned she would have to have her “mother parts,” her uterus, cervix, fallopian tubes, ovaries, and some of her vagina, removed. “Do you have any idea who I am? Do you have any fucking sense of irony?” she tells the doctor.

Eve Ensler bonds with nature as she fights for her life in MTC’s In the Body of the World (photo © Joan Marcus 2018)

Ensler exposes her body and her soul as she goes through chemo and becomes involved in the creation of City of Joy, a community of women survivors of rape and violence in Bukavu, Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, run by Dr. Denis Mukwege and Mama C, aka Christine Schuler-Deschryver. (The amazing work they do is documented in Madeleine Gavin’s extraordinary 2016 film, City of Joy.) Ensler says that Dr. Mukwege “was literally sewing up the vaginas of rape survivors as fast as the militias were tearing them apart. . . . There were hundreds of these stories. They all began to bleed together. The destruction of vaginas. The pillaging of minerals. The raping of the earth. But inside these stories of unspeakable violence, inside the women, was a determination and a life force I had never witnessed.” Refusing to feel sorry for herself, Ensler reexamines her place in the greater world, continually working to teach people to stop sleepwalking through life and start taking responsibility for themselves and others, using this stage as a wake-up call for all of us.

Occasionally projections by Finn Ross cover the stage and the back wall, depicting protests, scenes of nature, people at City of Joy, certain key words, and a tree that deeply impacts Ensler’s recovery. She sometimes flirts with new agey ideas and twelve-step jargon — and she tries to get everyone up and dancing at one point in a rather goofy moment — but, being Eve Ensler, she also finds time to briefly fire away at political and social injustice. And then, at the end, she offers a magical surprise that every audience member should experience instead of rushing to get home; I wouldn’t dare give it away, but you can get a look at what it is here if you can’t help yourself. Ensler, a New York City native, is also a founder of V-Day, “a global activist movement to end violence against women and girls” that in 2018 is celebrating the twentieth anniversary of The Vagina Monologues with special events on and around Valentine’s Day. This year’s V-Day motto is “Rise, Resist, Unite,” which is also the route Ensler took in her fight against cancer, as depicted in this warm and very funny performance. I wish my mother were around to have experienced it for herself.

IMPERFECT LOVE

Brandon Cole’s Imperfect Love reveal backstage intrigue as a troupe struggles to save a troubled play (photo by Richard Termine)

Connelly Theater
220 East Fourth St. between Aves. A & B
Tuesday – Sunday through February 25, $39-$49
800-838-3006
imperfectlove.net
www.connellytheater.org

Inspired by the stormy real-life romance between Italian actress Eleonora Duse and writer Gabriele D’Annunzio, Brandon Cole’s Imperfect Love, which opened this afternoon at the Connelly Theater, is a rather unfortunate imperfect storm of inconsistent acting, a mind-boggling plot, confusing dialogue, and confounding direction. In 1899 Rome, playwright Gabriele Torrisi (Rodrigo Lopresti) is furiously working away on his latest tale, being staged at the grand Teatro Argentina. His girlfriend and star, Eleonora Della Rosa (Cristina Spina), offers suggestions; they argue hotly; finally, they are joined by the rest of the company, debonair leading man Domenica (Aidan Redmond) and a pair of clowns, Marco (Ed Malone) and Beppo (David O’Hara), who serve as comic relief, à la Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, as well as a kind of Greek chorus by way of Waiting for Godot. All know that their play is in trouble, and they feel especially threatened by the growing popularity of dramas by up-and-comers Anton Chekhov and August Strindberg. “Is it my fault the critics hated my play and you in it?” Gabriele says to Rosa. As they work on trying to fix it, it is often hard to determine whether they are having genuine tiffs about their offstage relationship or are improvising new lines of dialogue, whether what they are saying is part of the play or the play within the play (and maybe even the play within the play within the play, or something like that). Domenica and Rosa consider moving on to perform an Ibsen play, while Gabriele floats the idea of his going to Paris to work with Sarah Bernhardt, whom Rosa loathes. Meanwhile, Marco and Beppo reveal an innate knowledge of theater as they add their own theories in order to save Gabriele’s play and keep their jobs.

Marco (Ed Malone), Domenica (Aidan Redmond), and Beppo (David O’Hara) face theatrical conundrums in world premiere at the Connelly (photo by Richard Termine)

Cole started working on Imperfect Love in 1984, then teamed up with his longtime friend and collaborator, John Turturro, to turn it into the 1998 film Illuminata, which they cowrote. It was directed by Turturro, who starred as a playwright named Tuccio who was having issues with his latest play and his actress girlfriend, Rachel. Cole (Nothing Works, Pete Smalls Is Dead) first attempted to bring the play to the stage in 2000, then revised it in 2016, resulting in this world premiere that has inexplicably been extended to February 25 at the small but stately Connelly, a charming former opera house. Oscar winner Gianni Quaranta’s (A Room with a View, La Traviata) sets and period costumes are a bit too klunky (although the miniature model of the set and characters in the lobby is cool), and director Michael Di Jiacomo (Somewhere Tonight, Animals with the Tollkeeper) is unable to rein in the random feel of it all. (And speaking of reining in, what’s with the horse?) Redmond (A Particle of Dread, I Sell the Dead) is stalwart as Domenica, channeling Fernando Rey, and gangly L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq clown-school graduate Malone (The Three Irish Widows Versus the Rest of the World) is fun to watch, but Lopresti (4am Redmond & Meda, I’m Not Me) and Spina (Texts&beheadings / ElizabethR, Kaos) lack any sort of chemistry, so the central romance feels flat and dull, zapping any energy from the play. “Now look here, I never gave up, not on one line no matter how weak it was, I never forced any moment,” Domenica says at one point. Unfortunately, sometimes it is better to just give up.

HINDLE WAKES

Wealthy scion Alan Jeffcote (Jeremy Beck) finds himself in trouble when he cheats on his fiancée with the middle class Fanny Hawthorn (Rebecca Noelle Brinkley) in Mint production of Hindle Wakes (photo by Todd Cerveris)

The Mint Theater
The Clurman Theatre at Theatre Row
410 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through February 17, $65
minttheater.org
www.theatrerow.org

New York City is filled with hidden gems and secret treasures, but the sheer number of fellow enthusiasts can make us reluctant to share our discoveries, keeping them to ourselves so we can still easily acquire tickets to shows and tables at restaurants and avoid lines at galleries, etc. But one of my simple pleasures over the last five years has been singing the praises of the small but phenomenal Mint Theater Company, which since 1995 under the leadership of artistic director Jonathan Bank has “scour[ed] the dramaturgical dustbin for worthwhile plays from the past that have been lost or neglected.” As its official mission statement explains, “We do more than blow the dust off neglected plays; we make vital connections between the past and present.” Bank and the Mint have given us another wonderful gift with its latest offering, precisely the kind of play that they do so well, a work written in 1912 by a long-forgotten playwright that has not been performed in New York City since 1922. Penned by Stanley Houghton, a former office boy working for his father in Manchester in addition to being an amateur actor and theater critic, Hindle Wakes is an essentially simple morality play set in the fictional town of Hindle in Lancashire during wakes week, an originally religious, then secular holiday when mills and factories close, giving a vacation to industrial workers, many of whom head off to seaside resorts. One such mill employee is Fanny Hawthorn (Rebecca Noelle Brinkley); the play opens as she is returning home from a supposed break in Blackpool. But when she insists that she was there with her friend Mary Hollins, her parents, Christopher (Ken Marks) and his unnamed wife (Sandra Shipley), know she is lying and soon force her to reveal that she actually spent the weekend with Alan Jeffcote (Jeremy Beck), the son of wealthy mill owner Nathaniel (Jonathan Hogan) and his unnamed spouse (Jill Tanner). “She’s always been a good girl,” Christopher says with a tinge of sadness, later adding, “This is what happens to many a lass, but I never thought to have it happen to a lass of mine!” Christopher and his wife believe that Alan must do the right thing and marry Fanny to avoid public gossip and scandal, so Christopher immediately goes to the Jeffcote mansion, where he meets with Nat, an old friend who enjoys reminding Christopher that if he had followed Nat’s lead, he could have been a rich success too. It turns out that Alan is already engaged to Beatrice Farrar (Emma Geer), daughter of the former mayor, Sir Timothy Farrar (Brian Reddy), a wealthy industrialist himself, so the Jeffcotes have to decide what to do about the lurid situation with their son, a would-be playboy who doesn’t understand what all the hubbub is about.

Sir Timothy Farrar (Brian Reddy, left) and Nathaniel Jeffcote (Jonathan Hogan, right) decide the fate of Alan Jeffcote (Jeremy Beck) in Hindle Wakes (photo by Todd Cerveris)

In Hindle Wakes, which continues at the Mint’s new home at Theatre Row through February 17, Houghton, who died of meningitis in 1913 at the age of thirty-two, blurs the lines between the classes, emphasizing how one wrong, or right, turn can change a family’s future. A scathing look at the collision of old-fashioned morality and newfangled sexual freedom, the play was controversial for its time, a shocking look at a woman’s right to control her own body. Both the Jeffcotes and the Hawthorns seem to be enjoying their lives, but while Christopher does not appear to be jealous of Nat, it’s clear that Mrs. Hawthorn wouldn’t mind being a little more like Mrs. Jeffcote. But it’s also not just about wealth. “Money’s power. That’s why I like money,” Nat tells his wife. “Not for what it can buy.” The set, always a bulwark of any Mint production — many in-the-know Mint lovers stay in their seats during intermission of shows in which the set undergoes a dramatic change before resuming, although that is not the case with Hindle Wakes — designed by Charles Morgan, shifts back and forth from the striking elegance of the Jeffcote breakfast room, serviced by their maid, Ada (Sara Carolynn Kennedy), to the mundane casualness of the Hawthorn breakfast nook. The fine cast is led by Tony nominee Hogan (London Wall, As Is), who portrays the surprisingly unpredictable Nat with exquisite touches, from how he sits by the fireplace to how he moves with his cane. The costumes, by Sam Fleming, are as impeccable as ever, another Mint tradition, as is Gus Kaikkonen’s (The Voysey Inheritance, A Picture of Autumn) astute direction, which draws parallels between the two clans even as it points out their differences. The play might be more than a hundred years old, but many of the values it explores resonate today, in the bedroom, in the boardroom, and in religious institutions around America. Upon Houghton’s passing, Robert Allerson Parker wrote in the New York Press, “The death of Stanley Houghton has taken away a real force in making the English drama cosmopolitan rather than insular, in widening its appeal while deepening its insight.” Thankfully, the Mint is very much alive to continue to bring us such splendid cosmopolitan drama, a treasured company highly deserving of widening its own appeal as well.

THEATER OF WAR: THE DRUM MAJOR INSTINCT

drum major instinct

Brooklyn Public Library — Central Library
10 Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn
Sunday, February 4, free, 2:00
www.bklynlibrary.org
theaterofwar.com

The Brooklyn Public Library and Theater of War Productions pay tribute to the fiftieth anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s final sermon, “The Drum Major Instinct,” with a free dramatic reading at the Central Library branch at Grand Army Plaza on February 4 at 2:00. Inspired by the tenth chapter of St. Mark’s Gospel and J. Wallace Hamilton’s 1952 homily, “Drum-Major Instincts,” Dr. King delivered the speech at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on February 4, 1968; he would be assassinated exactly two months later. “There is deep down within all of us an instinct. It’s a kind of drum major instinct — a desire to be out front, a desire to lead the parade, a desire to be first. And it is something that runs the whole gamut of life,” Dr. King said. The piece will be performed by American actress Samira Wiley, who starred as Moira in The Handmaid’s Tale and Poussey Washington in Orange Is the New Black, accompanied by the Phil Woodmore Singers, the gospel choir that performed in Theater of War’s adaptation of Antigone in Ferguson, Missouri, in response to the shooting of Michael Brown. Among the members of the choir are Duane Foster, a former teacher of Brown’s, and Lt. Latricia Allen, commander of the Community Engagement Unit of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, in addition to other musicians, educators, activists, and police officers. The sermon will be followed by a guided audience discussion about racism and social justice, led by choir member and Ferguson social worker DeAndrea Blaylock-Johnson and Theater of War artistic director Bryan Doerries. “Every now and then I guess we all think realistically about that day when we will be victimized with what is life’s final common denominator — that something that we call death,” King preached. “We all think about it. And every now and then I think about my own death and I think about my own funeral. And I don’t think of it in a morbid sense. And every now and then I ask myself, ‘What is it that I would want said?’ And I leave the word to you this morning.”

HE BROUGHT HER HEART BACK IN A BOX

Kay (Juliana Canfield) and Christopher (Tom Pecinka) battle racism in the Jim Crow south in He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box (photo by Gerry Goodstein)

Theatre for a New Audience, Polonsky Shakespeare Center
262 Ashland Pl. between Lafayette Ave. & Fulton St.
Tuesday – Sunday through February 11, $90-$125
866-811-4111
www.tfana.org

In 2016, the Signature presented a powerful revival of Adrienne Kennedy’s Obie-winning debut play, 1964’s Funnyhouse of a Negro, as part of a trio of experimental one-act plays, with Edward Albee’s The Sandbox and María Irene Fornés’s The Drowning. Now Theatre for a New Audience is staging the world premiere of the eighty-six-year-old Kennedy’s first play in nine years and first solo-written drama in two decades, He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box, which opened last night and deals with many of the same issues, focusing on generations of Americans affected by Jim Crow laws and institutional racism, and it feels like not a moment too soon nor a moment too late. Inspired by events in her own life and featuring snippets from Noël Coward’s Bitter Sweet and Christopher Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris, the fifty-minute show is set in the fictional town of Montefiore, Georgia, in June 1941, where Christopher (Tom Pecinka), son of successful white businessman Harrison Aherne and a white woman — Harrison also has three young children by three black women — and Kay (Juliana Canfield), the daughter of a white writer and a black woman who died mysteriously shortly after Kay was born, have declared their desire for each other. The two seventeen-year-olds know their love is forbidden so they keep it a secret as Christopher leaves for New York City to pursue a stage career and they exchange letters. “He just knew these things. He understands history. He understands the devastation of the human spirit,” Chris writes about his father. “He knows the importance of making a person enter through the back door and of never addressing them as you are addressed. He understands how language can be used to humiliate.” Kay writes back, “My grandmother always said we saw my father all the time on Main Street but he never looked our way. My grandmother said, ‘Your father would look away but his mother would look at you like she was going to kill you right there.’” Meanwhile, Christopher begins to question his father’s friendship with Germans as WWII spreads around the world and is about to involve America. As they continue writing letters and planning their marriage, they traverse Christopher Barreca’s breathtaking set, a floor with several chairs, one of which is occupied by a life-size puppet representing Harrison Aherne. A long stairway leads up to a closed door; on either side are huge brick barriers. Video designer Austin Switser projects images on the floor, walls, and steps of two trains, one for blacks, one for whites; signs in waiting rooms and at water fountains declaring “White” and “Colored”; and photographs further displaying differences in class and race embodied by Christopher and Kay’s relationship.

Adrienne Kennedy’s He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box is a haunting memory play about childhood, first love, and Jim Crow (photo by Gerry Goodstein)

Kennedy (Sleep Deprivation Chamber, June and Jean in Concert), who lived in New York for thirty years before moving to Virginia six years ago to be with her son, Adam, her collaborator on several plays, looks directly at racism and segregation and the lasting effects of slavery in He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box, as the history of two families becomes a microcosm for societal ills that sadly continue to be crucial sources of pain in American life today. It’s a dark fairy tale ably guided by Obie-winning director Evan Yionoulis (The Violet Hour, Three Days of Rain), who helmed the Lortel Award-winning TFANA revival of Kennedy’s Ohio State Murders in 2007. Despite its often confusing and fragmentary narrative, which eschews contemporary realism, Pecinka and Canfield, in her professional New York stage debut, are tantalizing together, striking surprisingly emotional chords as Kay and Christopher’s Romeo-and-Juliet-style love grows. The play is exceedingly angry and at times agonizingly personal, as if we are meeting Kennedy’s inner demons, as if she knew what she wanted to say and got right to the point, unconcerned with conventional plot and character development. (She wrote the play for her grandson after watching him graduate from a Virginia high school, feeling that not much had changed since the 1950s.) But there are also transcendent moments of pure poetry as Kennedy illuminates the sheer hatred that lies at the heart of racism. As you enter the theater, be sure to stop by the miniature model of the gray, dank Montefiore town, devoid of people, as if haunted, with tiny segregation signs at a water fountain and in the train station waiting room. As Kennedy demonstrates, one possible future is that there will ultimately be no one left, neither blacks nor whites, all victims of fear, jealousy, and the violence that comes with that.