this week in theater

KING KONG

King Kong is none too happy with Broadway musical about him (photo by Matthew Murphy)

The Broadway Theatre
1681 Broadway at 53rd St.
Tuesday – Saturday through April 14, $69 – $175
kingkongbroadway.com

It isn’t beauty that kills the beast in the Broadway bust King Kong; it’s the music, lyrics, and story that lack the charm to soothe this savage breast, to paraphrase William Congreve. I don’t revel in taking yet more shots at the already brutally attacked musical, but I have little choice than to fire more artillery in the direction of the Broadway Theatre, where this travesty opened on November 8. King Kong himself, the eighth wonder of the world, is spectacular; designed by Sonny Tilders and Roger Kirk, lit by Peter Mumford, voiced by Jon Hoche, and operated by ten men and women, the one-ton, twenty-foot-high mechanical creature is just about everything you’d want from the beast. Unfortunately, the rest of the show is a hot mess. The songs by Marius de Vries and Eddie Perfect lack any kind of nuance (sample lyric: “Another arrow shoots Ann Darrow through the chest / But every ‘no’ only brings me closer to ‘yes’ / New York socked me with a body shot / But I’m not staying down / I’ll fight like hell / So ring that bell / Look who’s coming out swinging in the opening round.”) The direction and choreography by Drew McOnie is often head-scratchingly absurd, with several ensemble pieces seemingly there just to take up time and space. And Jack Thorne’s book puts too much of the focus on the Darrow character, resulting in yet another tired musical about a poor country girl desperate to make it big on the Great White Way.

Ann Darrow (Christiani Pitts), Carl Denham (Eric William Morris), and Lumpy (Erik Lochtefeld) are off on a cinematic adventure in King Kong (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Just as Darrow (Christiani Pitts) is about to give up on her dream, she is discovered by filmmaker Carl Denham (Eric William Morris), who whisks her off on an adventure on board the SS Wanderer, accompanied by his right-hand man, Lumpy (Erik Lochtefeld). Captain Englehorn (Rory Donovan) wants to know where they’re going, but Denham is not about to say — until Skull Island appears before them. There they encounter King Kong, who falls for Darrow before being captured and brought to New York City, where things don’t go too well for him, or for us. The beast itself is breathtaking, especially when Peter England’s projections make it look like Kong is running through the jungle or the streets of the city and when he makes his way to the front of the stage, carefully scanning the audience while asserting his strength and power. But the watered-down version of the story and too many stultifying scenes — you might just get seasick during a stormy voyage, and what’s with those green things climbing through green laser beams? — zap all the energy out of this classic tale. “What an ugly beast the ape, and how like us,” Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero said in the first century BCE. In King Kong, virtually the only thing that isn’t ugly is the beast.

MOTHER OF THE MAID

Joan Arc (Grace Van Patten) tries to reassure her ma, Isabelle (Glenn Close), in Jane Anderson’s Mother of the Maid (photo by Joan Marcus)

Anspacher Theater, the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. at Astor Pl.
Tuesday through Sunday through December 23, $110
212-539-8500
publictheater.org

This decade has seen diverse takes on the story of Joan of Arc, the real-life fifteenth-century saint who led the bloody battle to return the French crown to French hands and put Charles VI on the throne. Each one, of course, focused on Joan herself, a young girl who claims to see visions of Saint Catherine, who commands her to lead the charge. Among the twenty-first-century Joans are Laura K. Nicoll in Reid Farrington’s The Passion Project at 3LD, Marion Cotillard in Côme de Bellescize’s concert staging of Arthur Honegger’s Joan of Arc at the Stake at Avery Fisher Hall, Jo Lampert in David Byrne’s Joan of Arc: Into the Fire at the Public, and Condola Rashad in George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan on Broadway. But playwright Jane Anderson utilizes a different approach in Mother of the Maid, an intimate and involving play continuing at the Public’s Anspacher Theater through December 23. The protagonist here is Joan’s mother, Isabelle Arc, wonderfully portrayed as a religious, somewhat frumpy, very serious woman by six-time Oscar nominee, three-time Emmy winner, and three-time Tony winner Glenn Close, decidedly less glamorous and elegant than in her recent Broadway appearances in Sunset Boulevard and A Delicate Balance.

“Isabelle Arc is a god-fearing woman,” she tells the audience in the third person at the start. “She can neither read nor write and her skirts smell ripe as a cheese. But she can do all sorts of handy things such as gutting a lamb, lancing a boil, and hiding the family valuables during a raid. She’s never blamed God for a blessed thing.” She lives on a farm with her husband, Jacques (Dermot Crowley), their son, Pierre (Andrew Hovelson), and Joan (Grace Van Patten); they are a peasant family barely getting by. So Joan’s parents and Pierre don’t take too kindly to her announcement that Saint Catherine is ordering her to go into battle to put the dauphin on the throne. “I’m having holy visions, Ma,” Joan explains. “She fills me. She slays me. She takes me apart,” she adds about the saint. Her father whips her while Pierre and Isabelle watch. “I’m not confused. I’m furious. You’re a stubborn, reckless girl and you have no idea what you’re doing,” Isabelle says. But when local priest Father Gilbert (Daniel Pearce) informs them that the Bishop of Vaucouleurs believes that Joan is the Virgin Maid foretold in prophecies, Isabelle relents. “Our girl’s been chosen and we both should be fierce proud,” she says to Jacques. So Joan heads off on her journey, accompanied by her brother, leaving their parents to wait and worry.

Joan (Grace Van Patten) shows off her sword expertise to her brother, Pierre (Andrew Hovelson), in New York premiere at the Public (photo by Joan Marcus)

Mother of the Maid is a moving, poignant mother-daughter drama; at its heart is the age-old story of a beloved child leaving the nest, only in this case on the wings of angels, and with a bit more at risk. Van Patten holds her own with Close, employing a tough Brooklyn tomboy image as Joan’s power rises, then falls. John Lee Beatty’s cramped wood-based set features a revolving section that rotates from farm to royal court to dungeon, sharply lit by Lap Chi Chu. Jane Greenwood’s period costumes range from bright, bold colors to more earthy tones. Emmy winner Anderson (Olive Kitteridge, Defying Gravity) and Emmy-nominated director Matthew Penn (The Root), who worked with Close on the television series Damages, focus on the relationship between the characters, which also include the Lady of the Court (usually played by Kate Jennings Grant, although I saw a fine Kelley Curran), who is accustomed to the luxuries the Arcs have never known, and her lady-in-waiting, Monique (Olivia Gilliatt). Most of the action occurs offstage, but the narrative never feels explanatory; instead, it’s a potent look at family and responsibility, a familiar historical tale told from a different perspective, breathing new life into an ever-beguiling warhorse, anchored by a pair of outstanding actors, one as a nearly forgotten woman trying to adapt to the present, the other ready to leap into the future.

THOM PAIN (based on nothing)

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Irene Diamond Stage
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday-Sunday through December 9, $35-$65
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

At the entrance to the Irene Diamond Stage at the Pershing Square Signature Center, a sloppily handwritten sign says, “Pardon Our Appearance.” The theater inside seems to be in the midst of some serious construction: There’s a huge hole in the floor at the front of the stage, which is littered with various pieces of equipment, and protective sheets hang on the walls and from the ceiling, as if preventing the place from collapsing. Amy Rubin’s deteriorating set matches the crumbling mind of Thom Pain, superbly played by Michael C. Hall, in the Signature revival of Will Eno’s 2004 Pulitzer Prize finalist, Thom Pain (based on nothing), which opened last night. Pain is the epitome of the unreliable narrator, beginning jokes and stories he never finishes, posing repeated questions that he answers differently each time, and inviting audience participation only to then take it back. “How wonderful to see you all,” he says at the start, in near-complete darkness save for the occasional light from his cigarette. The seventy-minute monologue, previously performed by James Urbaniak and, more recently, Rainn Wilson in LA in 2012, touches on such notions as time and memory, fear and loneliness. Wearing an everyman-style standard suit (the costume is by Anita Yavich), Pain walks back and forth across the deep stage and wanders through the audience as he indifferently relates a tale about a young boy, his dog, and a puddle, possibly a scene from his past that left him emotionally scarred. “When did your childhood end?” he asks rhetorically. “How badly did you get hurt, when you did, when you were this little, when you were this wee little hurtable thing, nothing but big eyes, a heart, a few hundred words? Isn’t it wonderful how we never recover? Injuries and wounds, ladies and gents. Slights and abuses, oh, what a paradise.”

He self-referentially refers to the show as “our little turn, on the themes of fear, boyhood, nature, hate, the nature of performance and vice-versa, the heart of man, of woman, et cetera.” He steps in and out of darkness courtesy of Jen Schriever’s sharp lighting design. “Does it scare you? Being face-to-face with the modern mind? It should. There is no reason for you not to be afraid. None. Or, I don’t know,” he says. He makes direct eye contact with as many audience members as he can, searching for connections that have otherwise eluded him. “As for our story, if you’re lost at all, you’re not alone,” he tells us. “Don’t think I’m somewhere out ahead, somewhere, anywhere, with a plan. I’m right here beside you, or hiding behind you, like you, in terrible pain, trying to make sense of my life. I’m just kidding — you probably are alone. Or, I don’t know. Where are we, exactly, I wonder, in your estimation, in mine.” By the end, we know everything about him, as well as nothing, his search for relevancy perhaps evoking our own.

Hall, the Dexter and Six Feet Under star who has excelled on Broadway in Eno’s The Realistic Joneses and John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch and off Broadway in Ivo van Hove’s Lazarus, is outstanding as Pain, a role that Eno (Title and Deed, The Open House, Wakey, Wakey, all at the Signature) notes in the script should be played by an “actor [who] must also create a character that is close to — and largely derived from — himself.” Hall keeps us mesmerized with just the right amount of confusion to make us wonder what is real and what isn’t, what is truth and what is not. When he asks several times if we like magic, he is also referring to the magic of theater, which Eno and director Oliver Butler (The Open House, What the Constitution Means to Me) tear down rather elegantly. It’s a disorienting yet exhilarating experience, a journey into the digressive nature of life, constantly under construction, and the mind of a man trying to find his place in the world, just like we all are.

APOLOGIA

Kristin Miller (Stockard Channing) has a lot to say to her son Peter (Hugh Dancy) and his girlfriend, Trudi (Talene Monahon), in Apologia (photo by Joan Marcus)

Laura Pels Theatre
Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre
111 West 46th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 30, $99
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org

Successful art historian and proud humanist Kristin Miller (Stockard Channing) makes no apologies for the choices she’s made in Alexi Kaye Campbell’s Apologia, which continues at the Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre through November 30. An ex-pat living in the English countryside, Kristin is an uncompromising feminist and atheist who gave up custody of her children in order to pursue her career in Europe. On a spring day in 2009, she is expecting company for dinner, including her son Peter (Hugh Dancy), his new girlfriend, Trudi (Talene Monahon), her other son, Simon (also Dancy), his girlfriend, Claire (Megalyn Echikunwoke), and Kristin’s longtime friend, Hugh (John Tillinger). As they arrive, serious religious and socioeconomic conversations ensue, and it quickly becomes clear that Kristin respects no one as much as she does her own opinion. “Still raping the Third World?” she asks Peter, who responds, “If helping local initiatives and infrastructure projects off the ground is considered rape then, yes, brutally.” When she learns that Trudi is a vegetarian and a faithful Christian who met Peter at a prayer meeting, she digs in her talons. “I believe in mystery, imagination, and the power of myth and metaphor. But not in outmoded patriarchal propaganda,” she declares. When Claire, an actress, announces that her contract on a television series has been extended, all are happy for her except Kristin, who is quick to insult the program. “It was a little vacuous. I kept asking myself, ‘Why do people watch this? And why do they make it?’” But when the subject turns to Kristin’s latest book, a memoir called Apologia, the tension ratchets up, since she failed to mention anything about her sons or her family in it. But she’s not about to apologize for that either, as is evident when she explains what the title means: “a formal, written defence of one’s opinions or conduct.”

Hugh Dancy, Talene Monahon and Megalyn Echikunwoke in rehearsal for Apologia (photo by Jenny Anderson)

Tony winner Channing (Other Desert Cities, Six Degrees of Separation) is passionate and unrelenting as Kristin, who was English in the original version. She manages to keep the selfish, smug, and snarky writer from becoming too villainous or a mere relic from a different time; you keep wanting Kristin to say or do the right thing even though she never does, instead insisting on exploiting her supposed moral and intellectual superiority over everyone. She’s also not afraid to be exactly who she is; when she is given a Nigerian mask as a birthday present, she doesn’t hide her distaste. And it’s more than just a plot device that her oven isn’t working so she won’t be able to make dinner, a typically motherly responsibility. Dancy (Venus in Fur, The Pride) excels as both sons, whose names reference one of Jesus’s disciples, Simon Peter. Tillinger, a director who was lured back to the stage by Channing for this production — they starred together in Peter Nichols’s Joe Egg on Broadway in 1985 — does his best with Hugh, a relatively thankless part that merely serves as comic relief; when he departs Dane Laffrey’s book- and art-heavy set, his character is not really missed. Three-time Obie-winning director Daniel Aukin (Bad Jews, Admissions) guides the actors through some familiar, clichéd territory that is too straightforward and borders on just the kind of drama Kristin argues that Claire acts in. “She’s a bloody nightmare,” Peter tells Trudi. “Opinionated, didactic, dictatorial.” But that doesn’t mean she isn’t bold, brave, and heroic in her own way.

DRUID: WAITING FOR GODOT

Estragon (Aaron Monaghan) and Vladimir (Marty Rea) pass the time in Druid’s Waiting for Godot at White Light Festival (photo by Richard Termine)

WAITING FOR GODOT
Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College
November 2-13, $55-$95
www.lincolncenter.org
www.druid.ie

While celebrity casting certainly helps sell tickets, sometimes it can make a show more about the actors than the play itself. Regardless of the quality of the production, it’s often hard to separate the stars from roles, to judge the work by the writing and direction instead of the famous faces. Such has been the case with Samuel Beckett’s mid-nineteenth-century absurdist masterpiece Waiting for Godot. Here in New York City, Mike Nichols’s 1988 Lincoln Center revival featured Robin Williams, Steve Martin, Bill Irwin, F. Murray Abraham, and Lukas Haas; a 2009 Broadway adaptation boasted Nathan Lane, John Goodman, John Glover, and Irwin; and a 2013 Broadway smash had Sir Patrick Stewart, Sir Ian McKellen, Billy Crudup, and Shuler Hensley. New Yiddish Rep’s 2013 reimagined version in Yiddish, Vartn Af Godot, might not have had well-known actors, but the translation became the star. (It’s back for an encore engagement this winter at the 14th St. Y.) So it’s thrilling to see Irish theater company Druid’s adaptation at John Jay College’s Gerald W. Lynch Theater, where it continues through November 13 as part of Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival. The cast, at least here in America, is unknown, and they speak in Beckett’s native Irish tongue (even if the work was originally written in French), so the play’s the thing.

Lucky (Garrett Lombard) finally has a lot to say in Waiting for Godot at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College (photo by Richard Termine)

The tall and thin Marty Rea is Vladimir, or Didi, with shorter and stouter Aaron Monaghan as Estragon, or Gogo, somewhat reminiscent of Abbott and Costello. Francis O’Connor’s set features a leafless, curved tree and a smooth stone, possibly polished from years of Gogo sitting on it. O’Connor also designed the costumes, which include the two leads’ black, semi-homeless wear, bowler hats, and Gogo’s decrepit shoes, which have left one of his feet bloody. As they wait for Godot even though they have no idea why, they mutter about the burden of being human, dancing, crucifixion, and time. “We’ve no rights any more?” Gogo asks. “You’d make me laugh if it wasn’t prohibited,” Didi responds. “We’ve lost our rights?” Gogo repeats. “We got rid of them,” Didi answers. They get to the heart of the matter when Didi explains, “One is what one is. . . . The essential doesn’t change.”

They are confused when a boisterous man named Pozzo (Rory Nolan) shows up, dragging an apparent slave, Lucky (Garrett Lombard), with him; Lucky is not so lucky, carrying lots of luggage and being pulled by a noose. A noose had previously been referred to when Didi and Gogo examined the bare tree and considered hanging themselves from it, at one point curving their bodies to match the bend in the tree. And in each act a boy (either Nathan Reid or Jaden Pace) confuses them even further. Tony winner Garry Hynes’s (The Beauty Queen of Leenane, The Cripple of Inishmaan) direction makes such connections clearer than usual, allowing the audience to glory in Beckett’s language, from very funny conversations to a dizzying monologue delivered by Lucky. “That passed the time,” Didi says. “It would have passed in any case,” Gogo replies. “Yes, but not so rapidly,” Didi concludes. This two-and-a-half-hour production is more than a fine way to pass the time, offering a fresh, comic look at an old favorite.

BERNHARDT/HAMLET

Janet McTeer stars as Sarah Bernhardt in new play by Theresa Rebeck (photo by Joan Marcus)

American Airlines Theatre
227 West 42nd St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 18, $59-$159
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org

When turn-of-the-twentieth-century theater superstar Sarah Bernhardt played the Melancholy Dane in Hamlet at the Adelphi in London, actress and writer Elizabeth Robins wrote in her December 1900 review: “Madame Bernhardt’s assumption of masculinity is so cleverly carried out that one loses sight of Hamlet in one’s admiration for the tour de force of the actress. This is not to say that she gives us a man, but rather Sarah Bernhardt playing, with amazing skill, a spirited boy; doing it with an impetuosity, a youthfulness, almost childish.” Much the same can be said of Tony-winning actress Janet McTeer, who plays Bernhardt playing Hamlet in Theresa Rebeck’s uneven though often exciting Bernhardt/Hamlet, a celebration not only of Bernhardt but of the collaborative process of theater. The Roundabout production, continuing at the American Airlines Theatre through November 18, is set in 1897 Paris, where Bernhardt has decided to play the male part and is rehearsing with Constant Coquelin (Dylan Baker), François (Triney Sandoval), Raoul (Aaron Costa Ganis), and Lysette (Brittany Bradford). Bernhardt’s lover, the married Edmond Rostand (Jason Butler Harner), is not fond of her decision. “You want to be a man,” he tells her. “I do not want to be a man,” she replies. “You crave a man’s power,” he accuses her. “No man has more power than I do,” she says. “Shakespeare does,” he retorts. But she has the last word, proclaiming, “I will not go back to playing flowers for you fools. Not because I am too old. But because I was never a flower, and no matter how much you loved how beautifully I might play the ingenue, it was always beneath me. It is beneath all women.”

Edmond Rostand (Jason Butler Harner) watches Constant Coquelin (Dylan Baker) perform in Bernhardt/Hamlet at the American Airlines Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

Bernhardt demands that Rostand rewrite Hamlet specifically for her, but soon he is working on another play, Cyrano de Bergerac, which also gets her juices flowing. The same cannot be said for Rostand’s rightly jealous wife, Rosamond (Ito Aghayere); Bernhardt’s teenage son, Maurice (Nick Westrate); and acerbic critic Louis (Tony Carlin), wielding his poisoned pen with undeserved power. Meanwhile, Czech artist Alphonse Mucha (Matthew Saldivar) hovers around, creating the poster for the controversial show; in Shakespeare’s time, men might have played all the parts, but in the late Victorian/Edwardian era, a woman portraying the title character in the Bard’s greatest work is practically theater — and gender — treason. “And now we come to your tragedy,” Edmond says to Sarah, who responds, “I am not a tragic figure.” Edmond explains, “You are Sarah Bernhardt. But Sarah Bernhardt is a woman. And people do not want to see a woman play Hamlet.” To which Sarah argues, “I do not play him as a woman! I play him as myself.”

Directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel (Present Laughter, Hand to God), Bernhardt/Hamlet works best when it sticks to its title, when McTeer plays Sarah Bernhardt playing Hamlet. A lot of the rest is detritus that only gets in the way. McTeer (Mary Stuart, God of Carnage) is a joy to watch as her character, complete with crazy hairstyle, questions Hamlet’s motives as well as Shakespeare’s, romping around Beowulf Borrit’s handsome sets, which include an outdoor Paris café, the Adelphi stage, and Bernhardt’s elegant dressing room. Rebeck’s (Seminar, Downstairs) plot meanders; it feels like she tries to squeeze too much in and doesn’t trust that the audience will get the shock factor of Bernhardt’s ambition, especially in this modern era in which so much casting is gender (and race) blind. For example, in 2016, McTeer starred as Petruchio in Phyllida Lloyd’s all-female adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew at the Delacorte. But then McTeer proclaims, “Oh what a rogue and peasant slave am I! / Is it not monstrous that this player here, / But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, / Could force his soul,” and all is right again.

ENCORE ENGAGEMENT: SCHOOL GIRLS; OR, THE AFRICAN MEAN GIRLS PLAY

MCC’s School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play is back for an encore run at the Lucille Lortel (photo by Joan Marcus)

MCC Theater at the Lucille Lortel Theatre
121 Christopher St. between Bleecker & Hudson Sts.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 9, $49-$115
212-352-3101
mcctheater.org

Following its initial run last fall, MCC’s School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play, which earned a Drama Desk Award for Best Ensemble, is back at the Lucille Lortel Theatre for an encore engagement running through December 9. Below is an update of twi-ny’s original review from November 2017, with the new dates and actors added.

Actress Jocelyn Bioh’s professional playwriting debut is a sharp, uproarious tale of a clique of young boarding school students in central Ghana who can be as nasty as they wanna be, able to go toe-to-toe with Cady, Regina, Gretchen, Janis, and Karen from Mark Waters’s 2004 hit movie, Mean Girls. Bioh, who has appeared in such plays as Suzan-Lori Parks’s In the Blood, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Everybody and An Octoroon, and Jaclyn Backhaus’s Men on Boats, even references the film, which was written by Tina Fey (and the musical adaptation of which has been extended on Broadway through July 7), in the title of her show, School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play, which is back for an encore engagement at the Lucille Lortel through December 9. It’s 1986, and the students at Aburi Girls Boarding School are getting ready to audition for the Miss Ghana beauty pageant. Paulina Sarpong (MaameYaa Boafo) is the egotistical, narcissistic leader of a group of girls, willing to say or do just about anything to remain in charge. She brags about her soccer-playing boyfriend and how she is a shoo-in to be named Miss Ghana while brazenly putting down the rest of her crew, which consists of the tall, bright Ama (originally Níkẹ Kadri, now Latoya Edwards), the innocent, overweight Nana (Abena Mensah-Bonsu), and the twinlike duo of Gifty (Paige Gilbert) and Mercy (Mirirai Sithole). The power dynamic immediately shifts when headmistress Francis (Myra Lucretia Taylor) introduces a new student, Ericka Boafo (previously Nabiyah Be, now Joanna A. Jones), a beautiful, talented, and bold young woman who quickly challenges Paulina’s authority. Of course, putting Paulina on the defensive is not something you want to do, unless you’re ready for the barrage that will follow. So when Miss Ghana 1966, Eloise Amponsah (originated by Zainab Jah, now Zenzi Williams), whom Francis knows all too well, arrives to select one of the girls to compete in the pageant, the gloves are off and sides are chosen in a no-holds-barred battle for supremacy. “Headmistress likes to make everyone feel like they have a fair chance,” Paulina declares, “but we all know I’m the best.”

School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play was inspired by the true story of Yayra Erica Nego, the 2009 Miss Minnesota who went on to be named Miss Ghana 2011, a controversial decision for several reasons, including her fair skin, as well as by Rosalind Wiseman’s nonfiction book Queen Bees and Wannabes. In the seventy-five-minute play, Bioh, a first-generation Ghanaian American who went to boarding school in Hershey, Pennsylvania, explores such issues as body image and colorism, beauty and friendship, and race and class in this microcosmic Lord of the Flies scenario. Arnulfo Maldonado’s scenic design is simple but effective, a few tables in the school cafeteria, while Dede M. Ayite’s costumes change from the standard green-and-white school uniform to fancy dresses for the competition, giving each character a moment to shine. Tony-winning director Rebecca Taichman (Indecent, Familiar) keeps it all in check, never letting things get out of hand or become too clichéd. School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play is no mere African American version of Mean Girls; instead, it is as smart and entertaining, as sweet and honest, its characters as obnoxious and horrible and lovable and vulnerable, as teen girls themselves. The encore engagement will feature a series of special postshow events, including audience conversations on November 14 and 18 and a talkback on November 19.