this week in theater

THE TERMS OF MY SURRENDER: REVISITED

The Donald hovers over Michael Moore in The Terms of My Surrender (photo by Joan Marcus)

Belasco Theatre
111 West 44th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through October 22, $29 – $149
www.michaelmooreonbroadway.com

I attended the star-studded August 10 opening of Michael Moore’s Broadway debut, the mostly one-man show The Terms of My Surrender, in which the Flint native rails against Donald Trump and shares stories about how one person can make a difference. In my review the next day, I noted that there was a handful of important flaws; other critics were somewhat less generous (amid some raves). With all that is going on in the world, overwhelming us on a constant basis, I decided to revisit the Belasco Theatre the next week to see if Moore and director Michael Mayer had made any important changes and how Moore might incorporate the violent white nationalist march in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The show turned out to be much better the second time around. Moore was more comfortable (though not when it comes to dancing), several cringeworthy lines and a dreadful bit were cut, and no special guest arrived for the interview segment. Trump’s words relating to Charlottesville were projected across the stripes on the American flag that hovers behind Moore, and the proceedings had a more agreeable narrative flow. Moore did note at one moment that he went ahead with a line his producers wanted him to get rid of, and he made a point of explaining that he would not have done the show unless the producers agreed that all balcony seats would sell for $29, something he did not say on opening night, so perhaps the show has indeed undergone some necessary and successful nipping and tucking. Whatever the case, The Terms of My Surrender improved greatly upon repeat viewing, even if Moore is still preaching to the converted. However, I’m unlikely to go back a third time; as with presidents, two “terms” are enough.

MARVIN’S ROOM

Sisters Lee (Janeane Garofalo) and Bessie (Lily Taylor) reunite after eighteen years in Marvin’s Room (photo by Joan Marcus)

American Airlines Theatre
227 West 42nd St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Through August 27, $47-$127
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org

Scott McPherson’s 1990 play, Marvin’s Room, is finally making its Broadway debut, in a touching and funny Roundabout production directed gracefully by Anne Kaufman. The work, which focuses on the complex relationship between two sisters, ran in New York at Playwrights Horizon and the Minetta Lane Theater in 1992-93, winning two Drama Desk Awards (including Outstanding Play) and an Obie, and was then turned into a film in 1996 with an Oscar-nominated Diane Keaton, Meryl Streep, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Gwen Verdon. For its Great White Way bow, it has enlisted a pair of fab actresses to portray the sisters. Lily Taylor stars as Bessie, a forty-year-old woman who has been caring for her ailing father, Marvin (Carman Lacivita), and her partially incapacitated aunt, Ruth (Celia Weston), in their Florida home for decades. “Dad’s dying but he’s been dying for about twenty years. He’s doing it real slow so I don’t miss anything,” Bessie tells Dr. Wally (Triney Sandoval), who is filling in for her regular physician. “And Dr. Serat has worked a miracle with Ruth,” she adds. “She’s had constant pain from her back since she was born, and now the doctor had her get an electronic anesthetizer; you know, they put the wires right into the brain and when she has a bad pain she just turns her dial. It really is a miracle. . . . If she uses it in the kitchen our automatic garage door goes up. But that’s a small price to pay, don’t you think?” The scene’s elements of vaudeville slapstick prepare the audience for Bessie’s discovery that she is sick as well. Her sister, Lee (Janeane Garofalo), arrives from Ohio to offer assistance, along with her two boys, Charlie (Luca Padovan) and the older, deeply troubled Hank (Jack DiFalco). It’s not exactly the most heartwarming of family reunions as everyone tries to decide how far they’re willing to go to help.

Ruth (Celia Weston) and Bessie (Lily Taylor) have their hands full in Broadway debut of 1990 Scott McPherson play (photo by Joan Marcus)

Garofalo (Russian Transport, The Truth about Cats and Dogs), in her Broadway debut, and Emmy winner Taylor (Aunt Dan & Lemon, Six Feet Under) get the sibling thing just right; they even look somewhat similar, and more so as the play continues. Taylor plays Bessie with a soft vulnerability beneath her hard shell, while Garofalo is excellent at keeping Lee’s motives just under the surface. Whenever they are together, Marvin can be seen in silhouette lying down in the bedroom, a constant reminder of what drove the sisters apart. Tony nominee Weston (True West, The Last Night of Ballyhoo) provides comic relief as the slow-moving, God-fearing Ruth, who refers to a bowel movement as a “stinky.” The set by Laura Jellinek (The Nether, The Wolves) easily slides from kitchen to doctor’s office to hospital room to retirement home while Obie winner Kauffman (Marjorie Prime, Belleville) moves the story at a calm pace despite the occasional fireworks. The play was inspired by childhood memories as well as a different play McPherson was writing, about an AIDS clinic. McPherson later cared for his partner, a cartoonist and activist who died of AIDS in February 1992 at the age of thirty-three; McPherson, who also wrote Scraped, passed away from AIDS complications later that year, at the same age. Marvin’s Room is a tragicomic story that boldly addresses the question of what happens when a caregiver needs a caregiver as well as a bittersweet reminder of the weight of family responsibility and heartbreaking loss.

PIPELINE

Nya (Karen Pittman) desperately tries to protect her son, Omari (Namir Smallwood), in Dominique Morisseau’s riveting Pipeline (photo by Jeremy Daniel)

Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through August 27, $87
212-362-7600
www.lct.org

Pipeline is an up-to-the-minute, honest, and hard-hitting look at race, class, and the education system in the United States from Detroit native Dominique Morisseau. Continuing at the Mitzi E. Newhouse through August 27, the intensely intelligent, powerful play was created by Morrisseau shortly after completing her award-winning Detroit Projects trilogy (Detroit ’67, Paradise Blue, Skeleton Crew) and before she begins her Residency Five at the Signature Theatre in April 2018 with a revival of Paradise Blue. In this new work, Morisseau brilliantly introduces Nya (Karen Pittman), a divorced public-school teacher in an unidentified city facing a family crisis, as she leaves a complicated, heart-rending phone message for her ex-husband, Xavier (Morocco Omari), explaining in fractured sentences that their son, Omari (Namir Smallwood), is facing explusion from school. However, she decides to delete the message, replacing it with a blunt “Calling to talk to you about our son. Give me a call back when you get this. Thanks. Bye.” In the span of just a few minutes, Morisseau has set the stage beautifully, establishing character, plot, and mood. Omari is a dour teenager who has attacked one of his teachers during a discussion about Richard Wright’s Native Son, an incident that was captured on video and is about to go viral. Omari’s girlfriend, Jasmine (Heather Velazquez), is a whirling dervish of opinions who’s never afraid to say what she is thinking. Meanwhile, Nya’s fellow teacher, the bitter, old-fashioned Laurie (Tasha Lawrence), has returned to school after getting involved in a serious fight between two students. “A good old ass whipping can teach a lot,” she says. The teachers are sometimes joined by Dun (Jaime Lincoln Smith), a flirtatious school security guard who promises Nya and Laurie that he’ll do whatever he can to prevent further clashes with students. But when Omari runs off, Nya becomes desperate to find him before his future comes crashing down. It’s all summed up by Jasmine, who tells Nya, “Sometimes somebody mess with you on the wrong day. . . . It’s like THEY don’t know it’s your last straw. But they ain’t seen how many times you been sucked of everything you got. They go pickin’ at you like lint, and be lookin’ surprised when you knock ’em flat the hell out.”

Jasmine (Heather Velazquez) and Omari (Namir Smallwood) face a troubling situation in poetic Lincoln Center production (photo by Jeremy Daniel)

Nya occasionally addresses the audience directly, as if they are in class themselves, but Morisseau, a former teacher whose mother was a public school teacher, and Obie-winning director Lileana Blain-Cruz (War, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World) never allow the play to become overly preachy or pedantic. (There’s even a program insert, “Playwright’s Rules of Engagement,” which notes, “This can be church for some of us, and testifying is allowed.”) The set, by Matt Saunders, swiftly changes from office to lunchroom to dorm room to classroom to hospital waiting room, with occasional scenes taking place in what Morisseau, who is also a writer and executive story editor for the Showtime series Shameless, calls “undefined space.” Omari’s fight with his teacher is representative in many ways of the confrontations between police and black and brown men and the need for personal space, and it’s all sensitively portrayed by an exceptionally strong cast and exceptional writing. “It’s a gamble, Jasmine,” Nya says. “All the time. You send your young man out into the world everyday, or away for a weekend. A semester. A school year. But you don’t know . . . You have no idea if they’re safe. You have no idea if one day someone will try to expire them because they are too young. Or too Black. Or too threatening. Or too loud. Or too uninformed. Or too angry. Or too quiet. Or too everyday. Or too cool. Or too uncomposed. Or too mysterious. Or just too TOO. You don’t know, Jasmine.” The relationships between the characters are fully believable as Morisseau steers clear of genre clichés in making the many issues Pipeline raises a microcosm of what is happening in twenty-first-century America. And at the center of it all is Gwendolyn Brooks’s 1960 poem “We Real Cool,” which is projected onto a blackboard and adorns the cover of Lincoln Center Theater Review: “We real cool. We / Left school. We / Lurk late. We / Strike straight. We / Sing sin. We / Thin gin. We / Jazz June. We / Die soon.” Pipeline is a poetic indictment of institutionalized societal constraints, a lesson we all need to learn.

A PARALLELOGRAM

Bruce Norris’s A Parallelogram explores time travel and potential tragedy (photo by Joan Marcus)

2econd Stage Theatre
Tony Kiser Theatre
305 West 43rd St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Through August 20, $37-$109
2st.com

2econd Stage follows up its poignant New York premiere of Pulitzer Prize winner Tracey Letts’s 2003 Man from Nebraska with the superb New York premiere of Pulitzer Prize winner Bruce Norris’s 2010 A Parallelogram, continuing at the Tony Kiser Theatre through August 20. “If you knew in advance exactly what was going to happen in your life, and how everything was going to turn out, and if you knew you couldn’t do anything to change it, would you still want to go on with your life?” thirty-five-year-old Bee (Celia Keenan-Bolger) asks her boyfriend, the married fortysomething Jay (Stephen Kunken), adding, “What if it turned out to be for the best if we’d never even existed?” It’s a classic science-fiction trope, handled with unique flair by Norris, director Michael Greif, and a strong cast of four. Celia Keenan-Bolger stars as the conflicted Bee, a Rite Aid regional manager who is apparently being visited by her future self, an older woman (Anita Gillette), identified in the program as Bee 2, who sits on a chair in the front corner of her bedroom, smoking and sardonically dropping hints about what is in store for Bee’s life. Invisible to the rather self-involved Jay, who moved in with Bee after leaving his wife and two children, Bee 2 nevertheless manages to set off quite a battle between the two lovebirds. The virile young JJ (Juan Castano) mows the lawn outside, but he’ll be inside soon, while Bee 2 plays with some kind of high-tech remote that can shift time backward and forward, the stage going dark and lights flashing to signify the movement of time. (The lighting designer is Kenneth Posner.) But the more Bee gets involved with Bee 2, the more Jay grows concerned about her mental health, and the more the audience is drawn into a parallelogram of ideas and questions about chronology, sanity, narrative, and theater itself.

Bee 2 (Anita Gillette) speaks directly with the audience in 2econd Stage production (photo by Joan Marcus)

Norris (Clybourne Park, Domesticated) and Greif (Dear Evan Hansen, Rent) include lots of little clues as to whether Bee is actually in contact with Bee 2 or is imagining it all and is in the midst of a breakdown, from Bee’s proclivity for playing Solitaire on the bed to the placement of a clock and a TV and Jay’s insistence that he can not only smell the smoke but see it, pointing out the drifting trails that evoke the lines that Bee 2 explains circle the planet and meet themselves, resulting in slightly different realities converging. Bee even tells Bee 2 that people can’t smell light or time, as if they just have to have faith, just like the audience must have faith in the magic of theater. The idea of doubling also relates to the two men, who are not accidentally named Jay and JJ and who play key roles in various aspects of Bee’s life. Three-time Tony nominee Keenan-Bolger (The Glass Menagerie, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee) is delightful as Bee (previously portrayed by Kate Arrington in Chicago and Marin Ireland in L.A.), a kind of surrogate for the audience as we contemplate whether she is delusional or not; of course, it helps that Tony nominee Gillette (Chapter Two, Moonstruck), who clearly relishes her role, often addresses us directly, but she is a highly unreliable narrator. Tony nominee Kunken (Enron, Frost/Nixon) is terrific as the easy-to-despise Jay, while Castano (Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train, Transfer) holds his own as the bilingual JJ. Obie winner Rachel Hauck’s set quickly rotates from ground-floor apartment to hospital room (where Bee 3 makes a subtle Three Stooges reference), with both spaces resembling each other, another instance of doubling, as is the existence of theater in general, something that presumes to re-create real life onstage. A Parallelogram asks some key questions while not offering any concrete answers. There’s a minor slip-up here and there and not every detail holds up to concerted investigation, but we could always grab hold of that remote and try to fix a few holes — but would it really change anything?

TICKET ALERT: KPOP

kpop

A.R.T./New York Theatres
502 West 53rd St.
Monday – Saturday, September 5 – October 7, general admission $45 (select dates $25-$35), premium $75
212-352-3101
arsnovanyc.com/kpop

Tickets are going extremely fast for Ars Nova’s latest production, KPOP, a collaboration with Ma-Yi Theater and Woodshed Collective running at A.R.T./New York Theatres from September 5 to October 7, with opening night set for September 22. The immersive show takes audiences behind-the-scenes at a K-pop music factory and will involve standing, walking, climbing stairs, and dancing as a cast of eighteen leads audiences throughout the space. It was conceived by Woodshed Collective (Empire Travel Agency, The Tenant) and Jason Kim; Kim wrote the book, with music and lyrics by Helen Park and Max Vernon, choreography by Bessie winner Jennifer Weber, and direction by Teddy Bergman. Ars Nova has previously presented such inventive, immersive works as Small Mouth Sounds, Eager to Lose, The Lapsburgh Layover, and a little thing called Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812. So this is no time to dawdle if you want to catch what promises to be another unique, unpredictable experience.

MICHAEL MOORE: THE TERMS OF MY SURRENDER

Michael Moore makes his Broadway debut in The Terms of My Surrender (photo by Joan Marcus)

Belasco Theatre
111 West 44th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through October 22, $29 – $149
www.michaelmooreonbroadway.com

“How the fuck did this happen?” Michael Moore asks at the beginning of his Broadway debut, The Terms of My Surrender, which opened last night at the Belasco Theatre for a three-month run. He makes it clear that he’s talking about the election of Donald J. Trump, not his one-man show on the Great White Way. For nearly two hours, the filmmaker, activist, and mensch, dressed in his usual schmatas including ever-present baseball cap, mixes pivotal moments from his life with ideas about how the left can come together and retake control of the White House and Congress. When he’s talking about President Trump, usually standing at a microphone at the front center of the stage, a giant American flag behind him, he does not quite have the fanatical fury or commanding presence of George C. Scott as General George S. Patton that setup evokes but instead comes off as a comic pundit preaching to the choir on MSNBC. But when he sits down at a desk or in a comfy reading chair and shares personal stories about how one person — himself, in several cases — can indeed make a difference, the his performance is riveting. Moore relates how he got involved in an Elks Club controversy; how he and a friend went to Germany to protest Ronald Reagan’s visit to a Nazi cemetery in Bitburg; how the governor of Michigan is involved in the poisoning of thousands of children with lead-laced drinking water in Moore’s impoverished hometown of Flint; and how one librarian from Englewood affected the publication of his 2001 book Stupid White Men. (That librarian, Ann Sparanese, was in the audience on opening night and received a standing ovation. Also on hand for the opening-night celebration were Harry Belafonte, Anna Deavere Smith, Dan Rather, Christie Brinkley, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Marlo Thomas, Jonathan Alter, Nia Vardalos, Al Sharpton, Rosanna Scotto, and Tony Bennett.)

Michael Moore settles in for his Broadway debut, The Terms of My Surrender (photo by Joan Marcus)

Michael Moore will consider ways to win back Congress and the White House during three-month run at the Belasco Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

A set piece about carry-on items banned by the TSA is hit-or-miss, and a game show pitting the dumbest Canadian in the audience against the smartest American is silly and goes on too long, serving as a way for Moore to spout yet more statistics at us. An informal tête-à-tête with a surprise guest — on opening night it was Gloria Steinem and previously has featured Bryan Cranston, Rep. Maxine Waters, Morgan Spurlock, and Judah Friedlander — can become self-indulgent, a crafty way to turn the spotlight away from Moore temporarily, but that’s easier said than done, as Moore can’t help being the center of attention, whether on a Broadway stage, on television (TV Nation, The Awful Truth), or in such films as Roger & Me, Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11, and Michael Moore in Trumpland. His shocking tale of receiving death threats and assassination attempts brings the show to a screeching halt when he decides to test the FCC by calling a public figure and making the same death threats he got from Glenn Beck. Moore most certainly is not in Trumpland at the Belasco, where the predominantly liberal audience claps often in support of the Flint native’s views on the president and politics. Tony-winning director Michael Mayer (Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Spring Awakening) has his hands full with the show, which jumps around from scene to scene and bit to bit, including a fair amount of ad-libbing, as Moore updates his comments with the latest news to keep things fresh. Tony-winning designer David Rockwell’s (She Loves Me, Kinky Boots) set features a desk and chairs that slide on- and offstage and a large American flag backdrop onto which Andrew Lazarow projects photographs, clips of Trump, headlines, and other images. There’s also an empty presidential box waiting for Trump, complete with “little opera gloves,” but don’t expect Trump or Vice President and Broadway superfan Mike Pence to take those seats anytime soon. The show is uneven, but when Moore, an often amiable yet fiery fellow who drives the right insane, gets away from the rhetoric and focuses on his heartfelt conviction that one person really can initiate change — and insists that now is most definitely not the time to give up — The Terms of My Surrender is right on target, reminding us all that if Moore can do it, there’s no reason we can’t either.

CORKSCREW THEATER FESTIVAL

corkscrew theater festival

Paradise Factory
64 East Fourth St. between Second & Third Sts.
August 7 – September 3, readings free, shows $24
347-954-9125
corkscrewfestival.org

On August 20, FringeNYC will hold a fundraising variety show in which they will reveal the future of the popular summer theater festival, which will not be taking place this year. Stepping into the void is the debut of the Corkscrew Theater Festival, presented by the Brewing Dept. and Fortress Productions at Paradise Factory in the East Village. The festival consists of five world-premiere productions and five readings running August 7 through September 3 by early-career artists, most of whom identify as female; the readings are free and the shows are $24. “The plays featured in the inaugural Corkscrew Theater Festival center on the need to be seen. By the institution that won’t listen to you, by the sibling whose struggles affect both of you, or by the boyfriend who just doesn’t understand that you’re turning into a werewolf,” artistic director Thomas Kapusta said in a statement. “We’re proud to give these new artists and their stories – some joyful, some tragic, and some hilarious – the chance to be seen and heard in quality productions performed in repertory this summer.”

The plays, which tackle such subjects as mental illness, queer love triangles, millennial privilege, and, yes, werewolves, consists of Kaela Mei-Shing Garvin’s High School Coven, directed by Felicia Lobo; Robert Zander Norman’s All of My Blood, directed by Taylor Haven Holt; Nora Sørena Casey’s False Stars, directed by Jenny Reed; Lilla Goettler and Katie Hathaway’s Ex Habitus, directed by Lilla Goettler; and Morgaine Gooding-Silverwood’s Cradle Two Grave, directed by Gooding-Silverwood and choreographed by Raquel Chavez. The readings, about such topics as an interracial couple in a gentrifying neighborhood, amateur porn, nuclear holocaust, and an island of giant rabbits, comprise Uzunma Udeh’s A Day in the Life: A Performance Piece of Performance Pieces, directed by Udeh and Ann-Kathryne Mills; Ayo Edebiri and Nick Parker’s Mad Cool, directed by Diane Chen; the musical Hot Cross Buns, with book and lyrics by Julia Izumi and music and lyrics by Grace Oberhofer, directed by Logan Reed; Laura Winters’s Gonzo, directed by Noam Shapiro; and Ryan Bernsten’s The New Order, directed by Kristin Skye Hoffmann.