this week in theater

ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER: THREE PLAYS ABOUT DEAR OLD MOM

Five actors portray multiple characters in Neena Beber’s Brecht adaptation at BAC (photo by Maria Baranova)

A MOTHER
Baryshnikov Arts Center, Jerome Robbins Theater
450 West 37th St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
March 29 – April 13, $59-$79
www.bacnyc.org

There was already a palpable buzz at the Baryshnikov Arts Center on April 7, opening night of Neena Beber’s Brecht adaptation, A Mother, before several Jessicas arrived: Jessica Hecht, who co-conceived the show and was about to step onstage in her starring role as Pelagea Vlassova, and a resplendent Jessica Lange in the audience, who raised the event’s already high-glamour quotient. Lange, who has won three Emmys, two Oscars, and a Tony, has portrayed several memorable mothers onstage during her long career, including Phyllis in Paula Vogel’s Mother Play last year and Mary Tyrone in Jonathan Kent’s 2016 production of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, was there not just as a fan of Brechtian epic theater but also because Shura Baryshnikov, her daughter with BAC founding artistic director Mikhail Baryshnikov, is the show’s choreographer.

Brecht’s 1932 play, the full title of which is The Mother: The Life of the Revolutionary Pelagea Vlassova from Tver, is based on Maxim Gorky’s 1906 novel known alternately as The Mother and, more simply, Mother. Beber and her co-creator, Emmy and Tony nominee Jessica Hecht, have changed the title to A Mother, which gives it more of a universal feel. They have also updated the setting; the action takes place in 1917 Russia, 1979 Miami, and the present.

In Russia, the widow Pelagea Vlassova (Hecht) is worried that her son, Pavel (Fergie Philippe), has fallen in with dangerous revolutionaries Ivan (Portia) and Anton (Zane Pais), who are protesting the treatment of factory workers and are threatening to strike. In Miami, fifteen-year-old Jess (Hecht) is having a blast at JD’s Disco on the beach, where she dances with seventeen-year-old Daryl (Philippe), who she hopes will be her first true love. In the present, she looks back at her life, including the summer she spent at Camp Shalom Aleichem in Barkhamstead, Connecticut, where she learned about Brecht from counselor Michelle (Delilah Napier), who was determined to inject plenty of Brecht into the campers’ production of Lerner and Loewe’s 1951 musical, Paint Your Wagon.

Michelle is wrapped up in her own Brechtian world view. “Who cares what you see yourself as? Identification is the lowest form of appreciation!” she tells one camper. She advises another, “Play the opposite. Think the opposite. Do the opposite.” And she declares, “Everything artificial is less artificial if you acknowledge that it’s artificial. The best way to be real when you are doing a play is to be fake.”

That’s precisely how Beber, director Maria Mileaf, set designer Neil Patel, costumer Katherine Roth, choreographer Shura Baryshnikov, lighting designer Matthew Richards, and the cast of five approach A Mother. Their production regularly reminds us that we are in a theater watching a fictional show in 2025, from their use of Brecht curtains to Jess’s interactions with the audience and clever dialogue.

“I don’t care what they say, disco is never gonna die,” Daryl insists. One of the other clubgoers (Napier) explains, “Born in the clubs frequented primarily by gay and African-American and Latino fans in opposition to the dominant social structures!” Social structures involving race and injustice come to the fore when the narrative shifts to the real-life murder of Black insurance salesman and Marine Arthur Lee McDuffie at the hands of police officers, leading to the 1980 Miami riots. In one of the most poignant moments of the play, Arthur’s mother, Eula Bell McDuffie (Portia), sings the elegiac African American spiritual “Wade in the Water” (the tune of which Jess transforms into the Mourner’s Kaddish).

As per Brecht’s instructions for this “learning play,” music is a key contributor, with songs ranging from Lipps Inc.’s “Funkytown” and “Wade in the Water” to compositions by Mustapha Khan, William Kenneth Vaughan, and Norman (Skip) Burns. Among the new tunes are “Time to Fight” (“Take it to the street”), “Our Spot Is Desperate” (“Things can’t go on this way”), and “Let’s Make It Strange” (“You can melt gold to re-form / into shapes not quite born / with the fire of dialectical materiality”). As Michelle points out, “Think about that Brecht said: ‘Will there be singing in dark times? Yes, there will be singing, about the dark times.’”

Slyly referencing the Brecht-Gorky connection, the facade of the house at the back of the set features the number 775, a reference to Brecht’s 775th poem, “Stormbird,” which was inspired by Gorky’s “The Song of the Stormy Petrel.”

A Mother is a fun, thoroughly entertaining hundred-minute romp that maybe would have had even Brecht disco dancing at the end. “The aim was to teach certain forms of political struggle to the audience,” Brecht wrote in 1933 about the show. At the end of this production, Jess relates how copies of Brecht’s play were burned by the Nazis, then strolls through pieces of history on her way to today.

“I thought things would be different by now but dark times, dark times keep coming,” she says before reminding everyone about the hope — and revolutionary struggle — that is at the heart of epic theater.

Matt Doyle and Caroline Aaron star as son and mother in semiautobiographical play (photo by Carol Rosegg)

CONVERSATIONS WITH MOTHER
Theatre 555
555 West Forty-Second St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Wednesday – Monday through April 21, $67-$169
conversationsplay.com

Matthew Lombardo’s Conversations with Mother began life about a decade ago as a series of Facebook posts detailing verbatim phone calls the playwright had with his mother. He eventually decided to turn the daily talks into the semiautobiographical show, which closes April 21 at Theatre 555. (It had been scheduled to run through May 11.)

The play traces the relationship between Maria Collavechio (Caroline Aaron) and her son, Bobby (Matt Doyle), starting in Connecticut in 1966, when she is thirty-seven and he is eight. Bobby desperately wants to come home from sleepaway camp, and Maria says absolutely not — until he writes to her, “Dear Mom: One of the camp counselors asked me to stay with him in his van overnight. He has strawberry Charleston Chews, clicker clackers, and eyeglasses that have real X-ray vision. Can I stay with him some night? Love, Bobby.”

For the next forty years, Bobby keeps getting into trouble, refusing to follow his mother’s sage advice, as he moves to New York and falls in love with an abusive man. Often when admitting his bad choices to her, he asks if she’s mad, and when she says no, he adds, “Good. Cause there’s more.” The strong-willed Maria is not angry as much as disappointed that the tender and insecure Bobby cannot find himself a better life; she believes he is wasting his youth and his chances; he deserves more but won’t believe that. The problem never was that Bobby is gay — Maria embraces that from when he first comes out to her — but that Bobby keeps screwing up, both personally and professionally. And it gets tiring, for her and, unfortunately, the audience.

The play is told in such chapters as “Tell Me The Truth and I Won’t Get Mad,” “Why Can’t You Ever Meet a Nice Boy?,” and “If Your Phone Doesn’t Ring, It’s Me,” as Maria and Bobby go through good times and bad. Even as Bobby starts his career as a playwright, he is unable to enjoy it. He explains, “I’m just so tired. I don’t want to be hurt. I don’t want to be happy. I don’t want to be sad. I don’t want to be sorry. I don’t want to think. I don’t want to know. I just want to be numb.” Maria responds, “I don’t know what to do with you, Bobby. I really don’t know what else to do. I gave you everything. More than all the other kids combined. I gave you things in me I didn’t even know I had. And for what? So you can bitch about your shitty life? No one has a better life than you!”

The narrative takes a turn when Maria becomes ill, leading to a head-scratchingly melodramatic ending that seems to come out of nowhere.

Directed by Noah Himmelstein (The Lucky Star, Los Otros), Conversations with Mother takes place on Wilson Chin’s framed set, where various chairs, bars, and tables are wheeled on and off and props are hidden in the walls. Ryan Park outfits Aaron in fanciful dresses while Doyle wears camp T-shirts with a silly hat, a revealing apron with a silly hat, a hoodie, and eventually more grown-up clothing.

Aaron (Madwomen of the West, A Kid Like Jake) and Tony winner Doyle (Company, A Clockwork Orange) never quite connect; the characters feel like caricatures trapped in a repetitive circle that is hard for the audience to become engaged in. Lombardo, whose previous plays include Tea at Five about Katharine Hepburn and Looped about Tallulah Bankhead, doesn’t develop enough depth; perhaps he’s too close to the material.

At the conclusion of the eighty-five-minute play, you’re likely to think, thank goodness there’s not more.

Jeanine Serralles, Andrew Barth Feldman, and Joanna Gleason star as three generations of a Jewish family in New York in We Had a World (photo by Jeremy Daniel)

WE HAD A WORLD
New York City Center Stage II
131 West Fifty-Fifth St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through May 11, 4160
www.manhattantheatreclub.com
www.nycitycenter.org

New York City native Joshua Harmon is a master at writing about families, specifically Jewish ones, as evidenced by such works as Bad Jews, Skintight, and the epic Prayer for the French Republic. He turns his focus on his own clan in the beautifully told We Had a World, exploring his relationship with his mother and grandmother — and their complicated relationship with each other.

The hundred-minute play begins with Joshua (Andrew Barth Feldman) receiving a phone call from his grandmother, Renee (Joanna Gleason), whom he calls Nana, telling him that his next play should be about the estrangement between his mother, Ellen (Jeanine Serralles), and his aunt, the unseen Susan, focusing on a problematic Passover Seder — and that it should be called Battle of the Titans.

“I have — always wanted to write about our family; I didn’t know if — I had your permission?” he says. She gives him her blessing while making him promise that it will be “as bitter and vitriolic as possible. . . . You can even make your grandmother a real Medea. It ought to be a real humdinger.”

We Had a World is indeed bitter and vitriolic, and a real humdinger, but not in the way the fictionalized Joshua imagined; it is also sweetly innocent, tender-hearted, and almost too honest.

The story ranges from 1988, when Joshua is five, to 2018, when ninety-four-year-old Renee is sick. During his early years, Renee introduces Joshua to the arts, taking him to the R-rated Dances with Wolves, a Robert Mapplethorpe show, an exhibit featuring Tom Friedman’s Soap (which has a pubic hair on it), and the 1994 Broadway production of Medea starring Diana Rigg, an adaptation of the Greek tragedy in which a mother brutally murders her children.

“I don’t think my Mom would ever kill me,” Josh wonders.

“No, I don’t suppose she would,” Renee answers.

“Would you ever kill your children?” he asks.

“It would depend on the situation,” she responds.

Among the other cultural references are E. L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient, and Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country.

Over time, however, Joshua learns some hard truths about his grandmother while coming to understand his mother in a much more profound way.

Tony-nominated director Trip Cullman (Cult of Love, Significant Other) artfully guides the action on John Lee Beatty’s open set, the audience on three sides, practically in the characters’ laps; you’ll want to try out Renee’s two Parisian high-backed love seats covered in pale green silk, an important plot point, but don’t.

In her return to the stage after a self-imposed twelve-year absence, Tony winner Gleason (Into the Woods, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels) is luminous as Renee, who is not quite the heroic figure Joshua initially thought she was, while two-time Drama Desk nominee Serralles (Dying for It, Gloria) vividly captures the complexities of the more heroic Ellen.

The immensely likable Feldman (Dear Evan Hansen, Little Shop of Horrors) ably navigates between eras as he also serves as the narrator, sharing information directly with the audience. “Before I can take you to Nana’s apartment, you probably want to know a few things. Like why my aunt and mother don’t want to be in the same room. But giving you the sixty-five-year blow by blow of that relationship would . . . we only have one play, so . . . just take my word,” he says near the beginning. “But first — a small family drama? There’s going to be enough ugly stuff.”

Given Harmon’s track record, it’s easy to take his word, especially if there are more wonderfully intricate family dramas in his and our future. (Meanwhile, Passover is right around the corner.)

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

FASHION TALKS AT SHINE BY RANDI RAHM: BROADWAY NIGHT WITH SIERRA BOGGESS AND LAURA BELL BUNDY

Who: Sierra Boggess, Laura Bell Bundy, Nicole Ryan
What: Live, unscripted conversation with drinks, snacks, shopping, and cocktail gathering
Where: Shine by Randi Rahm pop-up boutique, 501 Madison Ave. between Fifty-Second & Fifty-Third Sts.
When: Wednesday, April 2, free with RSVP, 5:30
Why: Randi Rahm’s Fashion Talks at Shine kicked off March 5 with Bachelor Night, featuring Golden Bachelorette Joan Vassos, Bachelorette Charity Lawson, and moderator Nicole Ryan from SiriusXM, followed by Music Night with Jillian Hervey of Lion Babe on March 19. The third edition of the live podcast takes place April 2 with Broadway Night, when Ryan will be joined by actor, singer, and figure skater Sierra Boggess, who has starred in such shows as The Little Mermaid, The Phantom of the Opera, School of Rock, and Harmony, and actor, singer, and Tony nominee Laura Bell Bundy, whose Great White Way career includes Hairspray, Legally Blonde, and The Cottage.

“I always say, I’m in the art of fashion. To me, that means creating something that tells a story — something that moves people,” Rahm said in a statement. “These talks are an extension of that. They’re about connection, creativity, and the courage it takes to share who you really are. Laura Bell and Sierra embody all of that. They’re not only incredible artists but women who lead with heart, humor, and authenticity — and I’m so honored to have them join me in this space.”

Randi Rahm is hosting a series of fashion talks at Shine pop-up boutique

The intimate, candid conversation will be preceded by a chance to explore Rahm’s new ready-to-wear Shine collection and followed by a cocktail reception and more shopping; tickets are free with advance RSVP.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

BEAUTIFUL UNCERTAINTY: TOM SANTOPIETRO, AUDREY HEPBURN, AND DORIS DAY

TOM SANTOPIETRO AT B&N
Barnes & Noble
2289 Broadway at Eighty-Second St.
Monday, March 31, free, 6:30
212-362-8835
barnesandnoble.com
tomsantopietro.com

“When Audrey Hepburn died at 8 P.M. on January 20, 1993, at the age of sixty-three, she left behind one Academy Award, two Tony Awards, dozens of lifetime achievement awards, her beloved sons Sean and Luca, companion Robert Wolders, millions of fans, universal acclaim as an indefatigable activist on behalf of the world’s children, and one final surprise — a nearly empty closet.

“She had walked away from the church of fame that rules Hollywood and ever-increasing swaths of the general public yet held onto that fame without even trying. Her elusiveness only increased public interest in her films and clothes as well as her life and loves, but Audrey Hepburn had grown uninterested in rehashing old tales of Hollywood glamour and legendary friends. In an industry which based its self-image on endless awards shows, she was, it was safe to say, the only screen idol about whom a son could convincingly state: ‘Being away from home to win an award was really a lost opportunity. Walking the dogs with her sons was a personal victory.’”

So begins Tom Santopietro’s latest book, Audrey Hepburn: A Life of Beautiful Uncertainty (Rowman & Littlefield, March 2025, $45). Born and raised in Waterbury, Connecticut, Santopietro attended Trinity College in Hartford, then went to the University of Connecticut Law School, also in Hartford.

“I always joke that law school was the three misbegotten years of my life,” Santopietro tells me in a phone interview. “I stayed, I graduated, and as soon as I graduated, I said, I’m never doing this ever. And I never have. You know why? Because I was uninterested. And when it comes to work, we’re all good at what we’re interested in.”

A few weeks before, I had met Santopietro at the Coffee House Club for an Oscars straw vote event he hosted with his friend Simon Jones, who has appeared in such series as Brideshead Revisited, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and The Gilded Age (as Bannister) and in New York in such shows as The Real Thing, Privates on Parade, and, most recently, Trouble in Mind.

Santopietro is a lovely storyteller, in person and in print. Among his previous books are The Sound of Music Story: How a Beguiling Young Novice, a Handsome Austrian Captain, and Ten Singing von Trapp Children Inspired the Most Beloved Film of All Time; Considering Doris Day; The Way We Were: The Making of a Romantic Classic; The Importance of Being Barbra: The Brilliant, Tumultuous Career of Barbra Streisand; Why To Kill a Mockingbird Matters: What Harper Lee’s Book and the Iconic American Film Mean to Us Today; Sinatra in Hollywood; and The Godfather Effect: Changing Hollywood, America, and Me.

In A Life of Beautiful Uncertainty, Santopietro details Hepburn’s fascinating life and career in five acts comprising sixty-two chapters, including “What Price Hollywood,” “The Last Golden Age Star,” “A Star Is (Not Quite Yet) Born,” “Paris When It Fizzles — 1962–1964,” and “Everything Old Is New Again.” He explores Hepburn’s diverse filmography, from the many hits (Roman Holiday, Love in the Afternoon, The Nun’s Story, Charade, My Fair Lady, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Funny Face) to a trio of what he calls “mistakes” (Green Mansions, The Unforgiven, Bloodline).

On March 13 at 6:30, Santopietro, who lives on the Upper West Side, will be at the Barnes & Noble on Broadway and Eighty-Second St. to discuss and sign copies of A Life of Beautiful Uncertainty. Below he talks about speaking with Doris Day and Alan Arkin, the decline of theater etiquette, celebrities’ charitable work, and his favorite Audrey Hepburn film.

Tom Santopietro will be at Upper West B&N March 31 for NYC launch of his latest book (photo by Joan Marcus)

twi-ny: Where did your love of movies come from?

tom santopietro: When I was a little kid, I always liked movies. But what really accelerated it was when I was at Trinity, I took film courses at Wesleyan, which is in Middletown, and their film department was headed by an incredible woman named Jeanine Basinger. Have you ever met Jeanine?

twi-ny: I haven’t, but I know of her.

ts: She was on the board of the AFI. She was an extraordinary teacher who ignited my love of old films and Hollywood. And that’s where it really took off. Jeanine showed me possibility, and that’s what’s so great. That’s what great teachers do. So anyway, that’s where it really took off. And then I came to New York and worked on several Broadway shows, which I still do, but about twenty years ago, I thought, I want to do something more creative. And that’s how I started to write.

twi-ny: That was your first book, The Importance of Being Barbra, which was published in 2006.

ts: I’ve been fortunate and lucky, and I always joke, I didn’t tell anybody I was writing a book because I thought, What if I don’t finish it? And what if it’s really bad? And then when it was done, I sent it to my oldest friend, and a couple of days later, he called me back. And in a voice of total surprise, he said, It’s good. So I still laugh about that. And that led to Doris Day, Frank Sinatra, and then the Godfather movies.

twi-ny: I’m looking at the books you have written and their subjects. This is something we talked about at the Coffee House, that they’re all beloved icons, beloved films, beloved characters; there’s a lot of love in the room. And one of the things you told me was that that’s one thing you do when choosing a subject.

ts: Yeah, I really do. Because I think, well, you know this, you are a writer. I always say I don’t want to write a book about Stalin because I don’t want that monster in my head for three years. So these are people whose talent I admire so much. And also what I realized, Mark, and this just came to me when the Audrey book was completed, I thought, Oh, I’ve completed a trilogy of books about enormous stars, all of whom are incredibly nice, which is so rare in Hollywood. And that’s Doris Day, Audrey Hepburn, and Julie Andrews, these women who are beloved by their costars. And in the same way, I also realized after it was completed, Oh, I wrote a trilogy of books about family, and those were The Godfather, The Sound of Music, and To Kill a Mockingbird.

So I didn’t even realize it until the trilogy had been completed, but whatever was inside of me clearly needed to be expressed.

twi-ny: In the case of Doris Day, you had a conversation with her.

ts: Yes, after the book came out. The phone rang very late one night. It was after eleven, and I answered the phone grumpily.

I hadn’t eaten dinner yet. I had just come in from work. And I said, Well, who is this? And she said, Well, I’ve been trying to reach you from Carmel, California, for a long time. And then I realized it was Doris. Everybody wants to know what it was like. We spoke for an hour; as nice as she was on the screen, she was even nicer on the phone. It’s extraordinary. She was so unbelievably honest and open; she talked about her failed marriages, her love of animals, and Hollywood. So yeah, she was pretty terrific. I wrote that book because I felt she was a huge star who never received her due.

twi-ny: She retired from movies so early in her career.

ts: Another thing in writing about Audrey Hepburn is Audrey Hepburn and Doris Day had a lot of similarities, which was they worked from when they were teenagers nonstop. And then they both walked away from their fame; Doris said, “It means much more to me to work for animal welfare.” And Audrey said, “I want to work for UNICEF.” So that interests me a lot, that in our fame-obsessed society, world-famous women would walk away from it.

twi-ny: Right. And someone like Doris Day — I bet a lot of people don’t realize that she died only in 2019. So there was a long time, even with social media and the internet and everything, that she still wasn’t around. People didn’t know her, except for her charity work, but she wasn’t flooding Facebook with it. So, she was a very private person.

ts: Yes, a very private person. And so was Audrey. And so what interests me, Mark, is we’re a fame-obsessed society today, right?

twi-ny: Oh, yes.

ts: That’s reality television, everybody demanding to be famous.

twi-ny: Even the president.

ts: That’s a really interesting dichotomy. One thing I discovered while researching the Audrey book is that who knew that Audrey Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor were good friends? They were so opposite as people, but separately, toward the end of their lives, they used the exact same phrase: “At last, my fame makes sense to me.” And that’s because Elizabeth Taylor, with her AIDS activism, and Audrey, with UNICEF, that’s how they defined themselves. And I thought that was worth exploring.

twi-ny: That’s something that also happened and is still happening with Brigitte Bardot. She retired early to spend her life with animals and become an antifur activist. And I bet she would say the same thing as Audrey, Doris, and Elizabeth.

ts: I think that’s true. And because at a certain point, fame and money are nice, but how much does the acclaim of strangers really mean when you want to make a difference? And the difference comes through for these women through their social activism. Audrey was a kind of saint. She was such a good person.

twi-ny: All the people you spoke with, you probably never got a bad quote from anyone. Everybody just loved her. Is that right?

ts: That’s fair to say, and it’s not hyperbole. People who worked on the sets, everyone in the village in Switzerland where she lived, said she was unfailingly good to people. And I think after her war-torn, very disrupted childhood, I think she realized the value of family and the value of treating people with kindness. Because she said toward the end of her life, “The most important thing in life is being kind.” She really lived that.

Tom Santopietro signs copies of The Sound of Music Story at B&N in 2015 (photo courtesy Tom Santopietro)

twi-ny: In doing your research and interviews, was there one moment that really struck you or surprised you?

ts: I think the biggest surprise for me is how she really — how do I want to answer this — the reason why I titled the book A Life of Beautiful Uncertainty is that her entire life, she was uncertain of herself. And that was surprising. She genuinely did not think she was pretty. She just saw flaws everywhere. She genuinely did not think she was a good actress. And that shocked me because she was beautiful. And she was a terrific actress. And I think it stems from when, in the span of two months, she won the Tony Award and the Academy Award, and her mother said to her, “It’s amazing how far you’ve gotten considering how little talent you have.” [ed. note: In 1954, Hepburn won the Tony for Ondine and the Oscar for Roman Holiday.]

twi-ny: That haunts people, that kind of stuff.

ts: Yeah. So I think it all comes back to childhood, right?

twi-ny: It so often does.

ts: Barbra Streisand grew those incredibly long fingernails because her mother said, “Well, you should be a typist.” She grew her fingernails so she couldn’t type.

I think the other thing is that because I love films, and this is circling back to what we said earlier, I felt Audrey had never received her due as to how good an actress she was. Everybody says she’s charming and beautiful, but you look at a movie like The Nun’s Story, directed by Fred Zinnemann — that is a spectacularly good performance; the whole performance is with her eyes. And I wanted people to realize how skilled she was, even if she didn’t think she was skilled.

twi-ny: One of my favorite movies, and I don’t know that it would always be at the top of her list, but I adore Charade, which you write about in the book. Even with Cary Grant, Walter Matthau, George Kennedy, James Coburn, all these popular men in the movie, it is all built around her face.

ts: That’s exactly right.

twi-ny: And it’s the best Hitchcock movie Hitchcock didn’t make.

ts: That sums up that movie perfectly.

twi-ny: Do you have a favorite film of hers?

ts: That’s a great question. I know this is a cop-out answer, but I have three favorite films: The Nun’s Story, because her performance is spectacular. And also it’s really interesting the way it grapples with issues of faith and higher powers. My second favorite movie is My Fair Lady, because it’s so beautiful to look at and listen to. And the third one is, believe it or not, Wait Until Dark, because it still scares the living daylights out of me.

twi-ny: Yes. And it’s still scaring us. People who love Alan Arkin don’t realize that he could be pretty threatening.

ts: Toward the end of his life, I was able to interview him over the phone for the book. The funny thing is, when I finally got him, he started the conversation by saying, “Well, I hear you’ve been looking for me.” What he said was that Audrey was so lovely and such a good person that twenty years later, when she received the Chaplin Award from Lincoln Center, he was one of the speakers. And when he saw her, he actually apologized to her and said, I’m so sorry I was so mean to you in that movie, which is sort of amazing.

twi-ny: Can you share publicly who or what your next subject might be?

ts: I actually haven’t really figured out who I’m writing about next because, well, this has taken a long time, but also I wrote a play and it was produced this past summer in Connecticut. So I want to spend time putting the play out in the world for other productions, and it sort of fits in with what I write about because it’s a one-woman play called JBKO, about Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. So that’s really what I’m going to work on next.

twi-ny: Well, this is a good transition, because my last question was going to turn back to theater. You work as a house manager part-time on Broadway.

ts: Yes. I’ve been a general manager, and these days I’m working as a house manager most of the time. I don’t know if you’ve found this too, but because writing is so solitary, it’s really good for me to be around people at night at the theater. So that socialization is great, as long as the audiences are behaving themselves, of course.

twi-ny: That’s where I was going with this. At the Coffee House, we discussed how, since the pandemic, the audience’s relationship with the theater experience, interacting with other people, isn’t the same as when they were going out for a night of theater years ago.

ts: Well, I think it’s a funny thing, but since the pandemic, when people go to the theater, on some level they still think they’re in their living room streaming a show. That’s the only way I can try to make sense of it. When you’re home, you talk, you eat. And it’s different in a Broadway theater. So that’s sort of my best explanation for it.

twi-ny: Right. As someone who goes to a lot of theater, I’ve seen some things that I never had before. It’s like, I paid for my ticket, I can do whatever I want. But no, you can’t. It’s sort of representative to me of how we deal with our fellow human beings in everyday life. Now we’re much more quickly agitated, and people don’t want anyone telling them what to do.

ts: Exactly. Yeah, that has all changed. What hasn’t changed, the positive thing for me, is that theater offers people the sense of being part of a family. Everybody’s there backstage to put on the best possible show. I always say you belong when you walk through the stage door. And that’s a great feeling. That’s the joy of theater for me.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

BOXED IN: JOSHUA WILLIAM GELB’s [untitled miniature] AT HERE

Joshua William Gelb spends three hours a night in a tiny box at Here through March 25 (photo by Maria Baranova)

[untitled miniature]
HERE Arts Center
145 Sixth Ave.
March 18-25, $27-$102 (livestream only $10), 7:00, 8:00, 9:00
here.org
theaterinquarantine.com

In January, Joshua William Gelb, who had transformed his eight-square-foot closet in the East Village into a pristine white digital stage during the pandemic, escaped the safety of his home in order to present The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy [Redux], a staggeringly inventive hourlong multimedia play performed in a replica of his closet, accompanied by live and prerecorded video segments interacting with each other.

Gelb, whose collaborative virtual productions, dubbed Theater in Quarantine, include I Am Sending You the Sacred Face: One Brief Musical Act with Mother Teresa, Footnote for the End of Time, and Nosferatu: A 3D Symphony of Horror, now steps further into the technological avant-garde with the hybrid [untitled miniature], running through March 25 at Here. Each evening from 7:00 to 10:00, Gelb, nude and covered in white talcum powder, will perform in a white box measuring only 35″ wide by 19.5″ tall. His actions, which begin with him seemingly asleep, can be seen on an iPhone facing the box, a screen on the back of the box, three video monitors in the hallway, and a wall around the corner with nine screens that alternate between live and prerecorded scenes of Gelb in the box, sometimes bathed in yellow, pink, or other colors, along with television test patterns, the SMPTE color-bar grids that, sixty years ago, appeared on television sets after broadcasters shut down for the night — and which, if they came on today, would signal the end is near.

Audience members can relax on the vivid blue floor in the central space, sit in a chair, or walk around the room, following the show on an app that shares different views of Gelb and encourages everyone to participate in a chat that is read out loud by a female AI voice, audible to both the audience and Gelb. The only other items in the room are a red fire extinguisher and an old metal first-aid kit on the wall; after I accidentally knocked my head against it, one of the black-clad stage managers silently came over, opened it up, took out a small package that said “bandages,” and offered me a brown Tic Tac.

[untitled miniature] features a live video feed broadcast to numerous screens and online (photo by Maria Baranova)

In an Instagram post, Gelb delves into the nature of the work, explaining, “Why am I naked? . . . The naked body is the foundation of art. . . . I’m trying to see if it’s possible to find a real impression of tactility in the digital medium. I wanted to make a piece that really felt distilled down to its most essential elements, the smallest performance space possible and a human body. That shouldn’t be controversial, but try putting a naked body on the internet outside of OnlyFans and you hit a wall — algorithmic sensors, AI moderators, the corporate infrastructure that decides what is and is not acceptable. . . . Art isn’t about comfort or what’s acceptable. And artists need a digital space where they can push boundaries, even ones that make us uncomfortable.”

Gelb certainly looks uncomfortable as he wiggles, turns, squirms, and reconfigures his limbs; often, when he bumps into or purposely strikes the box, harsh, loud sounds reverberate blast out, a cacophonous symphony. At times the audience is enveloped in the much more rewarding sounds of chirping birds and a gently rushing river. Gelb occasionally lets out a grunt but is mostly quiet as he struggles inside the claustrophobic box.

Durational performance offers numerous ways to experience it (photo by Maria Baranova)

Gelb is clearly not enjoying himself, grimacing, staring out blankly, seemingly unable to get out of his predicament. Although one side of the box is open, he is trapped, in a cage he has built for himself. It’s as if he’s been sent to solitary confinement for an unnamed crime. Maybe he wakes up, wrestles with another difficult day, and goes back to bed — or perhaps has decided, once awake, to eventually stay under the covers, avoiding facing the world. He could be stuck on a social media platform on which he no longer wants to reveal himself. Or maybe he has experienced an entire lifetime in forty-five minutes, being birthed from the womb and later laid to rest in a grave.

The piece can also be taken more literally, applied to how we were all penned in at home during lockdown, terrified of leaving, spending too much time with our little electronic boxes that kept warning us of impending doom — and with which Gelb has carved out a unique and fascinating career.

At the show’s conclusion, there are no bows, no applause. Some members of the audience gingerly leave, and others stay, no one sure whether anything else is going to happen, sort of like life itself, before, during, and after a pandemic.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

THE GREAT PRIVATION: BLACK BODIES IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA AND TODAY

Charity (Clarissa Vickerie) seeks comfort in Nia Akilah Robinson’s The Great Privation (How to flip ten cents into a dollar) (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

THE GREAT PRIVATION (HOW TO FLIP TEN CENTS INTO A DOLLAR)
Soho Rep at Playwrights Horizons, Peter Jay Sharp Theater
416 West Forty-Second St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 26, $45
sohorep.org

Making striking off-Broadway debuts, writer Nia Akilah Robinson and director Evren Odcikin excavate the mistreatment of Black bodies through American history in the haunting yet exhilarating The Great Privation (How to flip ten cents into a dollar), the inaugural production of Soho Rep’s residency at Playwrights Horizons after the company had to leave its longtime Walker St. home.

The hundred-minute play takes on even greater meaning given the recent elimination of government internet links to the gravesites of Black, brown, and women veterans buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

The Great Privation switches between 1832 and the present. In the past, thirty-four-year-old Missy Freeman (Crystal Lucas-Perry) and her sixteen-year-old daughter, Charity (Clarissa Vickerie), have just buried Moses, their respective husband and father, in the African Baptist Church graveyard in Philadelphia. He died of cholera, which is sweeping through poor communities. A white man named John (Holiday) shows up with tools and a large sack; Missy surmises that he is a student at the college who has come to dig up Moses and use his body for medical experimentation. But Missy knows that after seventy-two hours, the body will have decayed enough to be worthless to the institution, so she plans to watch over the grave for three days while praying for Moses’s safe spiritual journey back to Sierra Leone. Throughout the play, a countdown clock keeps track of the time, beginning at 72:00:00 and moving swiftly between scenes.

“You told me white people take bodies to torture us further. Like what they did to Nat Turner last year. But students are the ones who take our bodies? . . . Why didn’t you tell me this before?!” Charity asks her mother, who replies, “I didn’t want it to be true. Not for US. It couldn’t be.” But it is.

Missy Freeman (Crystal Lucas-Perry) makes a deal with John (Holiday) as Charity (Clarissa Vickerie) looks on (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Later, a Black janitor named Cuffee (Miles G. Jackson) arrives, also carrying tools and a sack, ready to do what John didn’t. “How can you, a Black man, how can you live with yourself?” Missy asks him.

In the modern day, Missy and Charity, who live in Harlem, are working at a sleepaway camp on the grounds of the Philly graveyard. They’re on a break, discussing with John, a gay white counselor, how they are being unfairly disciplined by their boss, Cuffee. The women also discover that they are being paid less than John even though they have the same job and Missy has more experience than John. Meanwhile, Charity has gotten in trouble for vandalizing her school with her friends and posting it on social media. She tells her mother that she can’t delete it because “it’s already viral,” like it was a disease that can’t be cured (not unlike cholera once upon a time). “TikTok is the bane of my existence,” Missy says.

John then offers to show them the graveyard at night, and time and memory collapse into each other.

In researching the play, Robinson, who was born and raised in Harlem, read works by such authors, professors, and historians as Daina Ramey Berry, Lesley M. Rankin-Hill, and Gary B. Nash and scoured through the library at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture with the help of associate chief librarian Maira Liriano. Harriet A. Washington’s 2008 book, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, served as a major source. “Enslavement could not have existed and certainly could not have persisted without medical science,” Washington writes. “However, physicians were also dependent upon slavery, both for economic security and for the enslaved ‘clinical material’ that fed the American medical research and medical training that bolstered physicians’ professional advancement.”

A digital clock counts down from seventy-two hours to zero in Soho Rep production at Playwrights Horizons (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

The word “privation” in the title is short for “deprivation,” something the Black people in the show experience over and over in both time periods as they deal with generational trauma, grief, and stolen land and labor. It’s no coincidence that Missy’s husband’s name was Moses, the same as the leader of the Israelites who escaped slavery in Egypt but who was not allowed to enter the Promised Land, much like Moses Freeman’s spirit may not return to Sierra Leone. The second part of the title, the parenthetical How to flip ten cents into a dollar, is a phrase Robinson learned from her parents, referring to making something great with very little.

Mariana Sanchez’s set features a soft-sculpture tree near the middle of the stage, next to where Moses is buried. It is a place where Charity finds comfort, resting on the extensive roots that reach into the past and stretch out toward the future, enveloping her (and at several points seemingly coming to life with flashing LED colors). The two women wear the same long skirts throughout most of the play, adding coats to differentiate between 1832 and now; at camp they also wear more summery casual clothing. The costumes are by Kara Harmon; Marika Kent’s lighting and Tosin Olufolabi’s sound build a mysterious atmosphere, while Maxwell Bowman’s video and programming contribute an eerie surprise.

Missy Freeman (Crystal Lucas-Perry) and Charity (Clarissa Vickerie) enjoy a fun moment with John (Holiday) during a break at camp (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

The four-person cast is exemplary, led by Tony nominee Lucas-Perry (A Sign of the Times, A Bright Room Called Day), who imbues Missy with an earth-mother devotion and dedication, and Juilliard MFA student Vickerie, who already has the chops of a pro. Holiday, in his off-Broadway debut, and Jackson (Pay the Writer, Endlings) offer fine support as the women’s allies and enemies.

Despite its potent subject matter, The Great Privation is extremely funny, complete with a rousing fourth-wall-breaking finale that will have you moving and grooving. But it won’t make you forget the hard-hitting story you just experienced, especially as Black bodies both alive and dead continue to be disrespected in America, long past the time the clock hits zero.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

MADNESS AND MELODRAMA: FIVE EVENINGS AT THE CHAIN

Tamara (Snezhana Chernova) and Ilyin (Roman Freud) reunite after being apart for seventeen years in Five Evenings (photo by Alexandra Vaynshtein)

FIVE EVENINGS
Chain Theatre
312 West Thirty-Sixth St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
March 20-30, $49.87 – $71.21
www.fiveevenings.com

“No, this is madness,” Zoya says to Ilyin at the start of Jewish-Soviet playwright Aleksandr Volodin’s Five Evenings, a five-act multigenerational melodrama that is as relevant today as it was when it was first presented in 1959 at the Leningrad State Academic Bolshoi Drama Theater and later adapted into an award-winning 1978 film by Nikita Mikhalkov.

The work is now being revived by director Eduard Tolokonnikov and producer Polina Belkina for a thirteen-show run at the Chain Theatre, with Lana Shypitsyna or Snezhana Chernova as Tamara, Roman Freud as Ilyin, Ekaterina Cherepanova as Katya, Aleksei Furmanov as Slava, Inna Yesilevskaya as Zoya, and Dima Koan as Timofeev. The ninety-minute play (with intermission) will be performed in Russian with English surtitles; the set design is by Jenya Shekhter, with lighting by Ken Coughlin, sound by Denis Zabiyaka, and costumes by Natasha Danilova.

The story looks at two relationships, between the older Tamara and Ilyin and the younger Katya and Slava. In the second evening, they’re together at Tamara’s, and the two men have a chat while Slava sets the table, a scene that is representative of Volodin’s character development and dialogue:

Ilyin: See how nice it is? When there’s a white tablecloth and flowers on the table; it’s awkward to be petty, rude, or mean. The tablecloth should have creases from the iron — they bring back childhood memories.
Slava: How poetic.
Ilyin: One must live wisely, without haste. Remember, life’s book is full of unnecessary details. But here’s the trick: You can skip those pages.
Slava: Well, this is one page I don’t feel like reading. Aunt Toma can clean up when she gets here. After all, isn’t there a division of labor?
Ilyin: Don’t make me angry — get to work.

Katya walks in as Ilyin is teaching Slava how to box, declaring, “What are you doing, you slimy snake? What are you doing?!” A moment later, Ilyin says to Katya, “A demonic woman. Is that a manicure you’ve got there?”

Katya (Ekaterina Cherepanova) and Slava (Aleksei Furmanov) seek freedom and love in Five Evenings (photo by Alexandra Vaynshtein)

Born in Minsk and raised in Moscow after his mother’s death when he was five, Aleksandr Lifshitz — he changed his last name to Volodin because Lifshitz was too Jewish and was impacting his ability to get published — was drafted into the Red Army during WWII and was injured twice before earning a medal for courage. His first play, The Factory Girl, debuted in 1955 and traveled throughout the USSR. Five Evenings, which deals with time, suffering, resilience, and rebuilding, was followed by such plays as My Elder Sister and Do Not Part with Your Beloved in addition to several screenplays.

A champion of the individual who subtly rejected Stalinism in his works, Volodin died in 2001 in St. Petersburg at the age of eighty-two; his son Vladimir Lifschitz, professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin, revoked the copyright of his father’s plays in Russia after Putin invaded Ukraine. Lifschitz will be at the Chain Theatre to participate in a postshow discussion on March 20.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

JAMES JOYCE AND SEXUAL FREEDOM: EXILES GETS A RARE REVIVAL

Robert Hand (Rodd Cyrus) and Richard Rowan (Jeffrey Omura) are in love with the same woman in James Joyce’s only published play (photo by George Vail)

EXILES
Jeffrey and Paula Gural Theatre
A.R.T./NY Theatres
502 West Fifty-Third St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Wednesday – Sunday through March 15, $25-50
www.themaptheater.com/whats-on

Dublin-born writer James Joyce revolutionized literature with such novels as Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It is little known that he published a single play, Exiles, an intriguing and frustrating work that is currently having its first New York City revival in nearly half a century, staged by the MAP Theater at the Jeffrey and Paula Gural Theatre through March 15. (He reportedly destroyed his only other play, the five-act A Brilliant Career.) While the semiautobiographical work does not revolutionize live drama, it proves to be more than just a side note in Joyce’s history.

Written in 1914–15, Exiles was inspired by the author’s seven-month sojourn to Rome and features characters loosely based on Joyce himself; his wife, Nora Barnacle; his friend Oliver St. John Gogarty; and Vincent Cosgrove, a suitor of Nora’s. It takes place in the summer of 1912, nine years after journalist Robert Hand (Rodd Cyrus) and writer Richard Rowan (Jeffrey Omura) both fell for Bertha (Layla Khoshnoudi), but Richard won her heart — and also impregnated her, causing a scandal. Richard has just finished a book about Robert’s former fiancée Beatrice Justice (Violeta Picayo), who Richard was in love with when he met Bertha. Beatrice teaches music to Richard and Bertha’s son, Archie (Mattie Tindall), a happy child who runs around with glee.

Richard, a dour, humorless man, and Robert, a flamboyant, Byronic figure, are best friends and rivals at the same time. One afternoon Robert stops by Richard and Bertha’s home and finds Beatrice there. “Oh, but I’m sorry I did not know you were coming. I would have met you at the train. Why did you do it? You have some queer ways about you, Beatty, haven’t you?” Robert, carrying flowers for Bertha, ask Beatrice, who coldly responds, “Thank you, Robert. I am quite used to getting about alone.”

Beatrice exits, leaving Bertha with Robert, who poetically proclaims his desire for Richard’s wife, who drinks it all in, returning the flirtation. Robert asks if she can kiss her hand, and she holds it out for him. He asks to kiss her eyes and she obliges. He inquires about kissing her mouth and she replies, “Take it.”

Richard arrives, pretending he does not know what is going on between them. Robert has helped get Richard invited to a dinner with the vicechancellor, where they can discuss the open chair of romance literature at the university. They speak of Robert’s cottage, where he and Richard had some wild times with a bevy of women when they were younger. “It was not only a house of revelry; it was to be the hearth of a new life. And in that name all our sins were committed,” Richard says. Robert answers, “I have no remorse of conscience. Maybe you have.”

Having arranged that Richard will be busy that night, Robert makes a secret rendezvous with Bertha, imploring her to come to the cottage so they can consummate their desire. After Robert leaves, Bertha tells Richard everything; he wants to know every detail, and he listens without jealousy but with a touch of excitement, or at least as excited as he ever gets.

Calling Robert “a liar, a thief, and a fool,” Richard encourages Bertha to go. “You forget that I have allowed you complete liberty — and allow you it still,” Richard says, the first of many times he does so. Bertha gives Richard the opportunity to tell him not to visit Robert, asking if he will blame her if she goes, but Richard proclaims with little emotion, “No, no! I will not blame you. You are free. I cannot blame you.”

It’s a key moment in the narrative, complicating the audience’s relationships with the main characters in a drawing room morality play without a moral. Bertha does indeed go to the cottage — but so does Richard.

Robert (Rodd Cyrus) declares his love for the married Bertha (Layla Khoshnoudi) in Exiles (photo by George Vail)

Adapted and gracefully directed by Zachary Elkind, Exiles is a post-Victorian intellectual soap opera that evokes the love triangle in François Truffaut’s 1962 Jules et Jim and the partner-swapping in Paul Mazursky’s 1969 Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, tinged with the J. Geils Band’s 1980 hit “Love Stinks,” in which Peter Wolf sings, “You love her / But she loves him / And he loves somebody else / You just can’t win / And so it goes / ’Til the day you die / This thing they call love / It’s gonna make you cry.”

There may not be any tears in Exiles, but there aren’t a whole lot of laughs either. For all the freedom Richard keeps talking about, the adult characters are constrained by social mores, while the fun-loving Archie always has a smile on his face and a bounce in his step, too young to know of life’s many ills.

Cate McCrea’s set is a horizontal space with the audience sitting in three rows of rafters on either of the long sides. At each end is a white curtain and a chair, with two small, round ottomans in the middle, one oddly containing a pile of books and a few other objects. Amara McNeil’s lighting stays fairly bright throughout, so everyone in the audience is visible. Alyssa Korol’s contemporary costumes are highlighted by Bertha’s sexy flower-print dress.

Khoshnoudi is alluring as Bertha; it’s easy to see why everyone is in love with her. Omura, wearing wire-rim glasses that make him resemble Joyce, and Cyrus are each fine individually but don’t quite connect; it is difficult to imagine Richard and Robert were ever close friends. Picayo does what she can with the underwritten Beatrice, who is more of a plot device, while Tindall injects much-needed energy switching between Archie and Brigid, the Rowans’ servant.

Even at a trim ninety minutes, the show gets repetitive, but Exiles is no mere curiosity; it is an intelligent work written by a man at the peak of his abilities, exploring the idea of free love and open marriage in that brief window around the First World War, decades before they were to become hot topics in movies and on daytime television.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]