this week in theater

EVERYONE’S FINE WITH VIRGINIA WOOLF

There are some surprises in store for George and Martha Washington (photo by Joan Marcus)

There are some surprises in store for George (Vin Knight) and Martha (Annie McNamara) in Everyone’s Fine with Virginia Woolf (photo by Joan Marcus)

Abrons Arts Center, the Playhouse Theater
466 Grand St. at Pitt St.
Wednesday – Sunday through June 30, $65-$75
212-598-0400
www.abronsartscenter.org
www.elevator.org

Actress, songwriter, and novelist Kate Scelsa answers Edward Albee’s nearly-sixty-year-old rhetorical question, “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” in her first play for Elevator Repair Service, Everyone’s Fine with Virginia Woolf. Unfortunately, some things are fine but others are not with Everyone’s Fine, which opened last night at Abrons Arts Center. Founded in 1991, ERS specializes in inventive reimaginings of literary classics, from the eight-hour Gatz, which includes every single word of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, to a frenetically paced, modernized Measure for Measure as well as experimental adaptations of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (which ERS called The Select). The opening scenes of Everyone’s Fine with Virginia Woolf are terrific, a smart, hysterically funny reinterpretation of Albee’s original, only a whole lot more overtly sexualized, with shifting power dynamics. Following a college faculty party, George Washington (Vin Knight), a professor who teaches Tennessee Williams, and his plant-killing wife, Martha (Annie McNamara), are visited by a much younger couple, Nick Sloane (Mike Iveson), a slash-fiction writer and teacher at the college who is seeking tenure, and his wife, Honey (April Matthis), an online researcher with no personal or professional ambitions.

Honey (April Matthis) and Nick (Mike Iveson) don’t know what they’ve gotten themselves into in Elevator Repair Service parody (photo by Joan Marcus)

As they drink, and drink, and then drink some more, they come on to one another and discuss literature, Woody Allen, tennis, and imaginary children, using twenty-first-century language. “I’m totes cool with Virginia Woolf. / She’s my bitch. / I love her. / I like how she was super gay. / La la la de da,” Martha sings. It starts out like a wild and raunchy, NSFW Carol Burnett Show skit — think of Burnett as Martha, Harvey Korman as George, Vicki Lawrence as Honey, and Tim Conway as Nick — with clever wordplay as the characters explore sexual boundaries, self-oppression, and the lowly human condition. Even Louisa Thompson’s living-room and kitchen sets mimic that of a sketch comedy program, with painted fake backdrops that help generate low-budget slapstick. In addition, Scelsa and director and ERS founder John Collins riff on both Albee’s Tony-winning 1962 play and Mike Nichols’s Oscar-nominated 1966 film, the latter starring Richard Burton as George and Elizabeth Taylor as Martha. At one point in Everyone’s Fine, Martha is chewing on a chicken leg, a sly reference to Taylor’s famous bout with a chicken bone in her throat.

The party keeps going as Kate Scelsa’s Everyone’s Fine with Virginia Woolf has been extended at Abrons Arts Center (photo by Joan Marcus)

But the play soon devolves into too much self-parody and repetition, going way over the top. “All fiction is fan fiction,” both Honey and George say in response to Nick’s penchant for writing slash fiction, which Nick describes as “fan fiction where you make everyone gay even if they’re not.” That is precisely what Scelsa has done with Everyone’s Fine, which is essentially a slash-fiction version of Who’s Afraid? that is unable to sustain its seventy-five-minute length, which is significantly shorter than the original’s three and a half hours. McNamara (Gatz, The Sound and the Fury) steals the show as Martha, playing her with a carefully choreographed chaos steeped in riotous physical comedy as she establishes Martha as a powerful feminist figure; you can’t take your eyes off her for fear of missing even the slightest comic moment. And longtime ERS company member Scelsa — author of the well-received 2015 YA novel Fans of the Impossible Life, member of the indie band the Witch Ones, and cohost of the “Kate & Vin Scelsa Podcast” with her father, legendary free-form DJ Vin Scelsa — takes Albee’s third-act exorcism to absurd extremes with Lindsay Hockaday as an utterly confusing new character. It’s too bad that the play gets derailed, because it had all the makings of a fab parody, with some great lines, especially this gem from a drunk Honey, which relates to the work itself: “I mean, what were you trying to do? Coopt the infantilization of grown women into some kind of subversive gesture?”

TICKET GIVEAWAY: A BLANKET OF DUST

blanket of dust 2

Flea Theater Mainstage
20 Thomas St. between Broadway & Church St.
Monday – Saturday through June 30, premium tickets start at $67
866-811-4111
www.ablanketofdust.com
theflea.org

Richard Squires’s A Blanket of Dust, the political thriller opening June 12 at the Flea, begins on September 11, 2001, with Diana Crane on the phone with her husband, who is calling her from inside the North Tower as chaos mounts. After his death, she determinedly seeks justice but comes up against both the media and the government as she hunts for the truth. The world premiere, part of the Theater of Resistance, is directed by Christopher Murrah and produced by writer, actor, director, composer, and experimental gallerist Squires, whose previous works include Feathertop, The Fall of Albion, and the film Crazy Like a Fox. Angela Pierce stars as Diana, an Antigone-like figure who is the daughter of Sen. Walter Crane, played by Anthony Newfield, and the widow of 9/11 victim Sam Power. Alison Fraser is her mother, Vanessa, and James Patrick Nelson is her brother, Washington Post reporter Charlie Crane. Tommy Schrider plays bookstore owner Andrew Black, son of former CIA director Adam Black, who is portrayed by Brad Bellamy. The cast also features Brennan Caldwell, Joseph Dellger, Jessica Frances Dukes, Kelsey Rainwater, Peter J. Romano, and Peggy J. Scott.

The cast of A Blanket of Dust rehearses before opening at the Flea (photo by Jeffrey Wolfman)

TICKET GIVEAWAY: A Blanket of Dust runs through June 30 at the Flea, and twi-ny has two pairs of premium tickets to give away for free. Just send your name, daytime phone number, and favorite play or movie involving 9/11 and its aftermath to contest@twi-ny.com by Wednesday, June 13, at 3:00 pm to be eligible. All entrants must be twenty-one years of age or older; two winners will be selected at random.

CHERRY ORCHARD FESTIVAL: IVANOV

EVGENY MIRONOV and CHULPAN KHAMATOVA in Ivanov

Evgeny Mironov and Chulpan Khamatova star in State Theatre of Nations’ Ivanov at City Center (photo by Sergei Petrov)

New York City Center
130 West 56th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
June 14-17, $45-$155
(June 13 Q&A, NYPL, 18 West 53rd St., free with advance registration, 7:30)
212-581-1212
cherryorchardfestival.org
www.nycitycenter.org

In 2016, Russia’s State Theatre of Nations presented Shukshin’s Stories, starring People’s Artists of Russia Chulpan Khamatova and Evgeny Mironov, at City Center as part of the Cherry Orchard Festival of the Arts. The troupe is now back for the sixth annual фестиваль, staging Anton Chekhov’s Ivanov June 14-17. The show, the first full-length Chekhov work to be performed, premiered in 1887 at the Korsh Theatre, which is now home to the State Theatre of Nations. “My goal is to kill two birds with one stone: to paint life in its true aspects, and to show how far this life falls short of the ideal life,” Chekhov wrote in a letter to poet A. N. Pleshcheyev in April 1889, and he certainly attempted to accomplish that in Ivanov, which he significantly revised two years after its initial run. Thirty-three-year-old Russian opera and theater wunderkind Timofey Kulyabin (Macbeth, Kill) directs, with Mironov as title antihero Ivanov Nikolai, who is trying to again become the man he once was, and Khamatova as his wife, Anna/Sarah; the cast also features Victor Verzhbitsky as Shabelskiy Matvey, Elizaveta Boyarskaya as Sasha, Alexander Novin as Borkin Mikhail, Igor Gordin as Lebedev Pavel, Natalya Pavlenkova as Lebedev Zinaida, Dmitriy Serduk as Lvov Evgeny, Marianna Schults as Babakina Marfa, and Alexey Kalinin as Dmitriy Kosykh. Oleg Golovko designed the sets and costumes, with lighting by Denis Solntsev and contemporary dramatic adaptation by Roman Dolzhansky.

Founded in 2012, the Cherry Orchard Festival seeks to “introduce and promote global cultural activity and exchange of ideas to enlighten and engage an inter-generational audience through entertaining and educational programs and events in all genres,” per its mission statement. Tickets for the nearly three-hour show, which was nominated for several Golden Mask National Theatre Awards and will be performed in Russian with English supertitles, are $45 to $155, with some sections having already sold out. In addition, on June 13 at 7:30, the 53rd St. branch of the New York Public Library will be hosting “Meet-the-Artists of the State Theatre of Nations,” consisting of a free discussion and Q&A with Mironov, Khamatova, Boyarskaya, Gordin, Novin, and Verzhbitskiy as well as festival cofounders and executive producers Maria Shclover and Irina Shabshis.

FREE SUMMER EVENTS: JUNE 10-16

Ian Antal and Connie Castanzo star in New York Classical Theatre free production of Romeo & Juliet in the parks this month (photo courtesy New York Classical Theatre)

The free summer arts & culture season is under way, with dance, theater, music, art, film, and other special outdoor programs all across the city. Every week we will be recommending a handful of events. Keep watching twi-ny for more detailed highlights as well.

Sunday, June 10
Los Lobos family concert, Celebrate Brooklyn!, Prospect Park Bandshell, 3:00

Monday, June 11
Musical Chairs, with host Andy Ross and DJ Flip Bundlez, Bryant Park, preregistration suggested, 7:30

Tuesday, June 12
New York Classical Theatre: Romeo & Juliet, Central Park, enter at West 103rd St. & Central Park West, runs Tuesdays – Sundays through June 24, 7:00

Yiddish Under the Stars returns to Central Park this week (photo courtesy City Parks Foundation)

Wednesday, June 13
Yiddish Under the Stars, with Frank London and his Klezmer All Stars, Andy Statman, Pharaoh’s Daughter feat. Cantor Basya Schecter, Golem, Cantor Magda Fishman, Eleanor Reissa, Daniel Kahn & the Painted Bird, and Zalmen Mlotek, Central Park SummerStage, Rumsey Playfield, 7:00

Thursday, June 14
Savion Glover featuring Marcus Gilmore, BAM R&B Festival at MetroTech, MetroTech Commons at MetroTech Center, 12 noon

Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta will help you through those hot summer nights in Astoria Park on June 14

Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta will help you through those hot summer nights in Astoria Park on June 15

Friday, June 15
Drive-In Movie: Grease (Randal Kleiser, 1978), Astoria Park, Nineteenth St. & Hoyt Ave. North, 8:30

Saturday, June 16
enrico d. wey: silent :: partner, River to River Festival, Federal Hall, 15 Pine St., advance RSVP required, also June 15 & 17, 8:00

SECRET LIFE OF HUMANS

US premiere of David Byrne play explores what makes us human (photo by Richard Davenport)

BRITS OFF BROADWAY
59E59 Theaters
59 East 59th St. between Park & Madison Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 1, $70
212-279-4200
www.59e59.org
www.newdiorama.com

David Byrne — no, not the American singer-songwriter, artist, activist, filmmaker, and bike enthusiast but the award-winning British artistic director of New Diorama Theatre — takes a deep dive into what makes our species what it is in the strangely fascinating, offbeat Secret Life of Humans, which opened last night as part of the annual Brits Off Broadway series at 59E59. Inspired by Yuval Noah Harari’s 2011 bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and Dr. Jacob “Please call me Bruno” Bronowski’s 1973 book and BBC program The Ascent of Man, Byrne employs psychology and cultural anthropology to get inside our DNA. “In our minds we are these complex, rich, intellectual beings, full of nuance and philosophy, contradiction and politics, of science and art, of love and sadness,” Ava (an enticing Stella Blue Taylor) says at the beginning of the play. “We have gone from animals, to believing we alone were created in the image of gods. And now, finally, to where we are today, all powerful gods ourselves. Sitting in this lecture theatre, talking and listening.”

In her early thirties, Ava serves as a kind of host and narrator as well as a character, often speaking to the audience directly, supplying facts and providing transitions. Ava goes on a blind internet date with the slightly younger Jamie (a fine Andrew Strafford-Baker), who turns out to be the grandson of Dr. Bronowski (an excellent Richard Delaney), whom Ava has studied extensively. “He was like the first David Attenborough, wasn’t he?” she asks, a moment later offending Jamie by saying, “His view of the world is a little simplistic. For me. But he was groundbreaking. For the time.” The eighty-five-minute show then cuts back and forth between several narratives in multiple time periods: in the present, Ava goes back to Jamie’s parents’ house, where she wants to get a look into Bruno’s locked room; in the past, the doctor becomes involved in a secret project for the military in WWII with a soft-spoken, jittery mathematics graduate named George (a sensitive Andy McLeod); and, in between, Bruno is interviewed by Michael Parkinson on the BBC in 1974. (You can watch the full television discussion here.) Also making appearances is Bruno’s wife, Rita (a classy Olivia Hirst).

Richard Delaney portrays Dr. Jacob Bronowski in Secret Life of Humans at 59E59 (photo by Richard Davenport)

One of the central conflicts in the play is the historical ascent of man itself. While Dr. Bronowski ascribes to Rudolph Zallinger’s “The Road to Homo Sapiens,” the famous straight-line depiction of an ape evolving into a human that is also known as “March of Progress,” Ava believes in a more broken, crooked development, which is evoked in a nonlinear narrative that jumps around through time and space. “What I want to tell you, it starts now, some of it happened just a fortnight ago,” Ava says early on. “And some of it, it goes back thousands of years. Millions actually. And it’s about what makes us human. Of how we’ve progressed, but we’ve not changed. How our destiny as a species — in the same way a fruit holds a stone, its future, at its core — has been inside each one of us from the very beginning. About how this, our body, our animal body, is still layered with the footprints of those primitive ancestors. It’s still weak, analogue, vulnerable, and lonely. Often completely unfit for purpose.”

Secret Life of Humans features inventive staging by codirectors David Byrne and Kate Stanley (photo by Richard Davenport)

A coproduction of New Diorama and Greenwich Theatre in London, Secret Life of Humans premiered in 2017 at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and now fits right in at the cozy main theater at 59E59. Jen McGinley’s set expands from a lone chair in the center to several bookcases rolled on and off the stage and rearranged to identify different locations. Zakk Hein’s projections include archival footage of Dr. Bronowski with Parkinson, cave drawings, mathematical equations, and ghostly apparitions. In 1986, the David Byrne of Talking Heads fame directed, cowrote, and starred in True Stories, a film that he referred to as “a project with songs based on true stories from tabloid newspapers. It’s like 60 Minutes on acid.” With Secret Life of Humans, which also deals with the nature of truth and mixes fiction and nonfiction, the British David Byrne and codirector Kate Stanley, who previously collaborated on Down & Out in Paris and London, have come up with a play that is like BBC America on shrooms: In addition to the shifting time and philosophical and scientific perspectives, there also are people walking on walls. A form of theatrical excavation, the play is extremely self-aware, with a wry sense of humor, though it is also repetitive and occasionally teeters dangerously close to resembling an institutional, instructional video teaching us about various aspects of the social contract as we seek to define who we are, why we are here, and where we are heading. However, despite talk of death and nuclear destruction, Secret Life of Humans is ultimately optimistic about our future, as well as the future of science, philosophy, and theater itself.

DAN CODY’S YACHT

Cara Russo (Kristen Bush) is unsure what to do when Kevin O’Neill (Rick Holmes) offers her an unexpected opportunity in Dan Cody’s Yacht (photo by Joan Marcus)

Manhattan Theatre Club
MTC at New York City Center – Stage I
Tuesday – Sunday through July 8, $90
212-581-1212
dancodysyacht.com
www.manhattantheatreclub.com

Anthony Giardina’s Dan Cody’s Yacht has several gaping holes you could, well, pilot a luxury boat through. However, the Manhattan Theatre Club world premiere, which opened last night at City Center’s Stage I, still offers an intriguing ride despite the choppy waters it navigates through income and education inequality. The two-hour, two-act play begins in September 2014 in the suburbs of Boston, as smarmy financial wizard Kevin O’Neill (Rick Holmes) tries to bribe high school English teacher Cara Russo (Kristen Bush) to change his son’s failing grade on a paper on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the book that altered the course of his own life. “Incorruptible Cara Russo. I’ve heard about it, now I’ve seen it for myself,” he says, clunkily establishing the core of the narrative. “Chosen by her peers to be the powerful voice of the teachers in our town’s current, ill-advised plunge into liberal American mediocrity. The proposal to meld the two school districts — depressed Patchett, thriving Stillwell. To join the drug addicted, poverty ridden, low achieving children of your little town to the drug addicted but still high achieving children of mine.”

Cara, a divorced single mother, lives in Patchett, where her teenage daughter, Angela (Casey Whyland), goes to school, but she teaches in Stillwell, where Kevin’s teenage son, Conor (John Kroft), is slacking off. Cara is an important member of the committee that will decide whether the merging of the two very different schools, one filled with the haves, the other the have-nots, will be put to a public vote. Cara’s friend Cathy Conz (Roxanna Hope Radja), a working mother whose daughter, Britney, has just made the Patchett debate team, is not so sure that the plan to combine the schools is a good one. “Our high school is our town. We lose that, what have we got?” she says. “We ship our kids over the river to become second class citizens, they come back, how do they respect anything here?” Kevin invites Cara to join his small investing group, where he and other Stillwell parents, Geoff and Pamela Hossmer (Jordan Lage and Meredith Forlenza) and Alice Tuan (Laura Kai Chen), meet monthly, pooling their money to play the market as they drink wine and eat sushi. Cara argues that she doesn’t have any excess cash to get involved in “financial chicanery,” but Kevin convinces her to give it a try, and it all goes well, until it doesn’t.

Kevin O’Neill (Rick Holmes) heads an investment club with Geoff Hossmer (Jordan Lage), Pamela Hossmer (Meredith Forlenza), Cara Russo (Kristen Bush), and Alice Tuan (Laura Kai Chen) in MTC world premiere (photo by Joan Marcus)

Giardina (Living at Home) and Tony-winning director Doug Hughes (Doubt, The Father), who previously collaborated on the Drama Desk–nominated Lincoln Center production The City of Conversation, which also featured Bush, steer the ship through an extremely bumpy first act with several key flaws. The discussion about getting Angela into Stillwell seems moot, as it is way too late for her to switch schools in time to affect her chances to go to a better college. There is a serious ethical question about Kevin, who works professionally in private equity, running an investment club, even though the prospect of illegally sharing inside information is brought up. And it seems impossible for Cara to make enough money to afford to move out of Patchett as quickly as she plans to. But the second act is stronger than the first, delving deeper into the characters’ motivations and what they want out of life, which is more complicated than just more money and better education.

“Nobody told us to care about ourselves first,” Cara tells Cathy as she explains why she joined Kevin’s club. “Nobody told us that. And say what you will about that man, that is what he is saying to me.” Later, she adds, “Tell me. Go ahead, say it. You don’t want this. You want mediocrity. You’re happy with mediocrity. You’re happy with this,” referring to their dreary lives in Patchett. Kevin treats finance like sex; when he talks about the opportunities that can open up for Cara, he is practically seducing her. Kevin himself was inspired by the section of The Great Gatsby when the protagonist, then known as James Gatz, rows out to a yacht owned by the much older Dan Cody and becomes his personal assistant; Kevin believes that Gatsby and Cody had a sexual relationship, something that might have ultimately influenced his own life and career. Meanwhile, Angela is reading a worn copy of Leon Uris’s Exodus, more than hinting at the potential exodus of Patchett students across the river to Stillwell. It is small touches like these that rescue the play from drowning itself in murkiness.

Conor O’Neill (John Kroft) and Angela Russo (Casey Whyland) are caught in the middle of adult shenanigans in new play by Anthony Giardina (photo by Joan Marcus)

The main players, making their way across John Lee Beatty’s effective living-room, classroom, and kitchen sets, give solid performances, particularly Bush (The Common Pursuit, Taking Care of Baby), representing a middle class seeking to improve its lot in life against the odds. Holmes (Junk, Matilda) manages to avoid being a completely unlikable villain, although Kevin says some very hurtful things without regret. Whyland, a 2018 NYU graduate, and Kroft, in his New York debut, are both sympathetic as the teens caught in the middle, not fully understanding, or caring, about the towns’ battle over their future. It also brings to light another central focus of the play: fear. Various characters express being afraid they haven’t done enough for their children (or they’ve done too much), being afraid of change, being afraid of believing they deserve better, even being afraid of money itself. “I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth,” Nick Carraway explains at the beginning of The Great Gatsby. In Dan Cody’s Yacht, Giardina attempts to explore that inequality specifically relating to the education gap in contemporary society, though emerging with decidedly mixed test results.

THE GREAT LEAP

Ali Ahn, Ned Eisenberg, Tony Aidan Vo, and BD Wong star in The Great Leap at Atlantic Stage 2 (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

Atlantic Stage 2
330 West 16th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Through June 24, $61.50-$71.50
atlantictheater.org

Sports and politics are inextricably linked, from Olympic boycotts to government-sponsored doping to NFL players taking a knee during the national anthem. Lauren Yee brings them together again in the overstuffed, convoluted two-act play The Great Leap, which opened tonight at the Atlantic’s small, intimate Stage 2 theater. The work is inspired by the real-life story of her father, Larry, who was born in San Francisco to Chinese immigrants and became a local basketball legend, ultimately traveling to Beijing to play for America in a “friendship game” against China in 1981. The Great Leap builds a strange culturopolitical fantasy around that already incredible tale, moving between 1971, during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, when University of San Francisco assistant basketball coach Saul Slezac (Ned Eisenberg) is invited by Chinese leadership to come to Beijing and teach their players the US version of the game, working with low-level official Wen Chang (BD Wong), and 1989, during the Tiananmen Square uprising, when Saul, now the USF coach, is preparing to take his team to China for a rematch with Chang’s team. Chang is no longer a low-level official, however, and he has been playing a very patient game indeed getting ready for this particular “friendly” match.

Back in San Francisco, Chinese-American high school student Manford Lum (Tony Aidan Vo), a short, obnoxious, smart-mouthed Chinatown street player, is determined to get on Saul’s team and play in China. He aggressively harasses the Bronx-born, politically incorrect Saul, who says, “Why would I ‘see what you can do’ when you’ve just shown me what an inconsiderate sonofabitch you are?” Meanwhile, Manford’s cousin Connie (Ali Ahn) wants him to finish high school instead of heading off to China. Of course, he goes to Beijing, where he, Saul, and Chang all learn things about themselves and their place in the world before, during, and after the big game.

Wen Chang (BD Wong) and Saul Slezac (Ned Eisenberg) build an unusual friendship in award-winning play (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

Basketball is a team sport in which everyone has to do their part in order to be victorious. Even the best players are going to have difficulty winning if the game plan is off-kilter, and that’s what happens here. Yee and director Taibi Magar (Master, Is God Is) have constructed the narrative on a house of cards that just can’t stay up, an alley-oop that gets rejected. The likelihood of a short high school student joining a college team traveling to China is far from a slam dunk; even less likely is that the Chinese would allow an American team to come to Beijing in the midst of violent protests. In fact, a Chinese team flew to the US in 1985 to participate in a Friendship Tour, and in 2011 the Georgetown Hoyas went to Beijing to take on the Bayi Rockets; the fight that broke out during that game is evoked in Yee’s play.

The Great Leap takes place in a gym with a parquet floor, basketball markings, and three sets of doors from which the characters enter and leave. (The cool scenic design is by Takeshi Kata.) Projections by David Bengali identify the time and location and include archival footage of the Tiananmen Square protests. Tony winner and two-time Emmy nominee Wong (M. Butterfly, Mr. Robot) is sure and steady as the calm and thoughtful Chang, while Eisenberg (Six Degrees of Separation, Golden Boy) portrays the blustery, foulmouthed Saul with an almost too-natural ease. The show works best when it’s just the two of them onstage. Ahn (The Heidi Chronicles, Sugar House) isn’t really given enough to do, like the ninth or tenth player on the bench, while Vo (SeaWife, NoNo Boy) is on a perpetual fast break, a ball hog who never slows down to take a breath and never changes the frowning expression on his face. It’s actually exhausting to watch him. The ending sums up a lot of what is wrong with the production; it’s a stunning image, but it just makes no sense, stretching the bounds of credulity even if merely symbolic.

Yee (The Hatmaker’s Wife, Cambodian Rock Band) won the Kesselring Prize from the National Arts Club for The Great Leap, an award that “honors and supports playwrights on the brink of national recognition.” (The very prestigious jury consisted of John Guare, Anne Cattaneo, and Lynn Nottage; David Henry Hwang presented the award to her.) The Great Leap might not make the playoffs, but looking forward, there’s always next season.