Marin Ireland is captivating in harrowing new play by Martín Zimmerman (photo by Joan Marcus)
Black Box Theatre
Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre
111 West 46th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 2, $25
212-719-1300 www.roundabouttheatre.org
About fifteen minutes into Martín Zimmerman’s shattering On the Exhale, there’s a collective gasp from the audience. The show’s lone character, an unnamed woman portrayed with extraordinary grace and dignity by Marin Ireland, has just revealed the tragic event that forever changed her life. For the rest of the hour-long play, there is an almost unbearable silence from the audience as the woman shares her harrowing story in the Roundabout’s basement Black Box Theatre at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center. No one shifts in their seat, unwraps candy, coughs; you can’t even hear a breath until, near the end, there’s one cathartic laugh that makes it all feel even more real. The woman is a high school teacher and single mother who has a dream/nightmare that one of her students might attack her with a gun; then, her actions following an actual mass shooting are completely unexpected and utterly haunting. Rachel Hauck’s set consists only of a long, rectangular metal floor and ceiling that look like they’re closing in on the woman, echoing the psychological prison she is trapped in. On one side of the stage is Jen Schriever’s lighting grid of sixteen spots that fade in and out on the woman as she speaks directly to the audience in the second person, as if the events are happening to everyone, implicating us all. Zimmerman (Seven Spots on the Sun, Let Me Count the Ways) takes on issues of parenting, politics, education, sexuality, feminism, the media, and, most significantly, gun violence in starkly intelligent and understated ways, while Leigh Silverman (Violet, In the Wake) directs with a captivating subtlety. Tony nominee Ireland’s (reasons to be pretty, Ironbound) every movement, from the lifting of a hand to the stretch of a finger, from a pause in the darkness to a stare into the distance, is packed with emotional power. It’s a gently frightening, boldly courageous performance. When the play is over, actress and audience can finally take a much-needed deep exhale, and Ireland unleashes a cleansing, heart-wrenching smile. It’s an unforgettable, exhilarating conclusion to a terrifying play that reveals an America that is all too familiar.
Linda (Janie Dee) faces down older daughter Alice (Jennifer Ikeda) as younger daughter Bridget (Molly Ranson) looks on in LINDA (photo by Richard Termine)
I’m writing this on International Women’s Day, when women around the world came together “to help forge a better working world — a more gender inclusive world,” which is particularly relevant to Penelope Skinner’s Linda, making its New York debut at City Center Stage I through April 2. Two-time Olivier Award winner Janie Dee gives a breathless, whirlwind performance as the title character in an otherwise lackluster, kitchen-sink production from Manhattan Theatre Club. It appears that Linda, a fifty-five-year-old marketing executive at Swan with a devoted husband and two daughters, has it all. The play opens with her making an impressive multimedia pitch for a new campaign for an anti-ageing cream, aiming it at older women who are often overlooked by the beauty market, unless they’re Helen Mirren. “Let’s make these invisible women feel seen again,” she says. “Let’s say to them: ‘Ladies? We know you’re out there! We see you! You exist!’” However, the head of the company, Dave (John C. Vennema), decides instead to go with a campaign aimed at social-media-savvy millennials presented by Amy (Molly Griggs), an ambitious and aggressive twenty-five-year-old who has her eyes set on Linda’s office and job. Meanwhile, temp Luke (Maurice Jones) finds Linda quite attractive. Back at home, Linda’s daughter from her first marriage, Alice (Jennifer Ikeda), spends most of her time in her room, wearing a skunk costume to try to make herself invisible to others because of a cyber-shaming incident that occurred ten years before, when she was fifteen. Linda’s other daughter, fifteen-year-old Bridget (Molly Ranson), from her second marriage to Neil (Donald Sage Mackay), is agonizing over which monologue to deliver at an audition to get into a prestigious acting academy. Her parents want her to do Ophelia, but Bridget is more interested in a stronger role, perhaps Macbeth or Lear, instead of the suffering, victimized female character. And Neil is in a new band with inexperienced young singer Stevie (Meghann Fahy). “I’m an award-winning businesswoman. I’m happily married with two beautiful daughters and I still fit in the same size ten dress suit I did fifteen years ago,” Linda proudly says several times, but her carefully constructed world is about to come tumbling down. “I will not disappear!” she declares, even as she is becoming a footnote in her own life.
Linda (Janie Dee) encounters unexpected problems at the office with company founder Dave (John C. Vennema) (photo by Richard Termine)
Titling the play after the protagonist’s first name places the character front and center, as if she’s on her own, battling stereotypes all by herself. She’s threatened not only by men but by women who want what she has and knowingly or unknowingly undermine her to taste at least a little bit of her power. Dee (Carousel, Comic Potential) is exceptional as Linda, a role originated in London by Noma Dumezweni after Kim Cattrall had to drop out for health reasons. She looks sexy and glamorous in Jennifer von Mayrhauser’s sharp, boldly colored outfits, but she stands out too much, overwhelming the other characters, who are more like caricatures. Walt Spangler’s revolving set drags down the narrative, as does Fitz Patton’s uninspired music. MTC artistic director Lynne Meadow can’t find a natural pace to the proceedings, which stagger from scene to scene. Skinner (The Village Bike, The Ruins of Civilization) packs Linda with far too many subplots, taking on too many women’s issues in a mere two hours. Each one is important in its own way, but they get lost in the shuffle. “I used to be the protagonist of my life and now suddenly I’m starting to feel irrelevant,” Linda admits; that statement also relates to the play itself, especially in the shadow of the International Women’s Day marches also known as “A Day without a Woman.”
Nancy (Annette O’Toole) and Ken’s (Reed Birney) marriage is turned inside out when Ken starts questioning his faith (photo by Joan Marcus)
2econd Stage Theatre
Tony Kiser Theatre
305 West 43rd St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 26, $82 www.2st.com
David Cromer’s revival of Tracy Letts’s 2003 Pulitzer Prize finalist, Man from Nebraska, is a gentle, beautifully poetic, sensitively drawn drama about one midwesterner’s crisis of faith and the effects it has on his family. Reed Birney, one of New York City’s finest, and busiest, actors, stars as Ken Carpenter, a fifty-seven-year-old insurance agent in Lincoln, Nebraska, who wakes up one morning in tears. “I don’t think . . . there’s a God. I don’t believe in Him anymore,” he tells his wife, Nancy (Annette O’Toole). “Maybe we’re just . . . science. Like they say. Accidental science.” As Nancy tries to comfort him, he adds, “Nobody listens when I pray. We’re not rewarded for what we do right — punished for what we do wrong.” Nancy invites the local pastor, Reverend Todd (William Ragsdale), to discuss the matter with Ken, ultimately suggesting that he take a solo vacation to clear his doubts. “Faith takes work. Sometimes you need a break,” Reverend Todd says. So Ken flees to London, where he was stationed when he was in the Air Force, leaving behind a confused Nancy, their upset daughter Ashley (Annika Boras), and his ailing mother, Cammie (Kathleen Peirce), who is in a nursing home. Generally calm and dependable, Ken gets involved in some very new experiences overseas as he sets out on a kind of Baptist rumspringa, meeting traveling businesswoman Pat Monday (Heidi Armbruster), poetry-reading bartender Tamyra (Nana Mensah), and cynical sculptor Harry (Max Gordon Moore), wondering if his life will ever be the same. Meanwhile, Reverend Todd’s father, Bud (Tom Bloom), decides to try to help Nancy through this difficult time.
Tamyra (Nana Mensah) and Harry (Max Gordon Moore) show Ken (Reed Birney) a different side of life in Tracy Letts revival at 2econd Stage (photo by Joan Marcus)
Originally staged in 2003 at Steppenwolf, Man from Nebraska unfolds like a gentle symphony in its New York debut at 2econd Stage; in fact, Letts, who won the Pulitzer and Tony for August: Osage County as well as a Best Actor Tony for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, calls the acts “movements” in the script. Cromer’s (Our Town, The House of Blue Leaves) staging is wonderfully precise and relatively simple, taking full advantage of 2econd Stage’s wide theater. Takeshi Kata’s set features only the most basic elements for each scene; lining the back and sides of the stage are a few beds, a church pew, a desk, small tables, two beds, a bar, and a sculptor’s area. Many scenes last only a few minutes, as the necessary element is brought forward in the dark; Keith Parham’s lighting then shines a spot on the actor(s) until the scene ends and the stage goes dark again until the next one. After intermission, the scenes are more like jazz solos, becoming longer and more complicated. Whether the scene depicts Ken and Nancy eating steak and mashed potatoes at a local restaurant, not saying much at all, or Ken pouring his heart out to Pat and Tamyra, everything is given equal weight and emotional impact. O’Toole (Hamlet in Bed, Cat People) plays Nancy with a slow simmer that threatens to boil as Ashley says some harsh things to her, but the show belongs to Tony, Obie, and Drama Desk winner Birney (The Humans, Circle Mirror Transformation), so quietly understated as Ken, whose last name, Carpenter, isn’t coincidentally the occupation of Jesus and Joseph. Troubled by his loss of faith, he is not quite everyman; he is very specifically the kind of heartlander who felt shunned by the Democrats and ended up voting for Donald Trump. He is undereducated, lacks culture (“I’ve never known anyone who read poetry,” he tells Tamyra after mispronouncing Pablo Neruda’s last name), and still uses such words as “colored” without realizing how offensive it is, especially to Tamyra, who is black. Letts and Cromer walk a very fine line between making Ken a sympathetic figure and a clueless redneck; in the hands of a different actor and director, this revival might not be nearly as successful, and timely, as it is.
The Fischer family face more than they bargained for in Roundabout world premiere (photo by Joan Marcus, 2017)
Laura Pels Theatre
Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre
111 West 46th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 30, $89
212-719-1300 www.roundabouttheatre.org
Right before seeing Steven Levenson’s If I Forget at the Laura Pels Theatre, I watched Ferne Pearlstein’s excellent The Last Laugh, a documentary about the appropriateness of jokes regarding Nazis and the Holocaust. Little did I know that Levenson’s stirring black comedy shatters boundaries by having one of its protagonists suggest that Jews should finally put the Holocaust behind them and move on. At one point, as much of the audience, including me, laughed at a religious-tinged joke, the woman seated to my left looked around and said, “That’s just not funny.” In the superb Roundabout world premiere, Jeremy Shamos is dazzling as cynical elitist Michael Fischer, a Jewish Studies professor who has been recommended for tenure; he is also writing a controversial book about Jewish history and heritage. It’s July 2000, and he and his non-Jewish wife, Ellen (Tasha Lawrence), a social worker, have just moved to Park Slope; their nineteen-year-old daughter, Abby, is on a birthright trip to the Holy Land. “I guess, I just still don’t really understand why we had to send our daughter to Israel in the most — the worst time to be in the Middle East in the last twenty-five years,” a rattled Michael says to Ellen. The Fischer family — Michael and Ellen; Michael’s younger sisters, Sharon (Maria Dizzia) and Holly (Kate Walsh); Holly’s second husband, the McCain-loving Howard (Gary Wilmes); and Holly’s son from her first marriage, teenage schlub Joey (Seth Michael Steinberg) — has gathered at the Washington, DC, home of patriarch Lou (Larry Bryggman) to celebrate the old man’s seventy-fifth birthday. Lou hasn’t been the same since the recent death of his wife, who needed special care, leading to arguments and estrangement among the siblings, with Sharon doing the vast majority of the daily, difficult work and Michael mostly staying away. “I’m not good in that sort of . . . I didn’t want to see her like that,” Michael says. “No one wanted to see her like that. We still did, though,” Sharon responds. Meanwhile, Holly has dreams of turning the family legacy, a property owned by Lou that for years has been operated as a bargain store by a Guatemalan family that pays below-market rent, into an interior decorating business for herself, but Sharon does not want to kick out Rodrigo and his clan, for more than one reason.
The Fischers get some bad news in Steven Levenon’s IF I FORGET (photo by Joan Marcus, 2017)
If I Forget is in some ways the Jewish version of Stephen Karam’s The Humans, which was also staged at the Laura Pels (before moving to Broadway) and also features a tear-away two-floor set, although in this case Derek McLane’s rotates to reveal another side. Levenson (Dear Evan Hansen, The Unavoidable Disappearance of Tom Durnin) takes sharp aim at faith and religion in the twenty-first century with insightful dialogue that incites both the characters and the audience. “The things he says sometimes,” Holly tells Ellen, referring to Michael. “If I didn’t know him, honest to God, if I heard him on the street, I would think he was an anti-Semite. Honest to God.” When Michael, an avowed atheist, finds out that Abby is rediscovering her Jewish roots, he gets into a philosophical argument with Holly.
Michael: Why is everyone, why are we excited about this? Holly: It’s wonderful. It’s keeping the tradition alive. Michael: Which tradition, exactly? Holly (to Ellen): He has to contradict everything. Michael: It’s not her tradition. It’s not, our grandparents, Mom’s parents, do you think they spoke Hebrew? They didn’t even go to temple. They were educated people. They were enlightened, cosmopolitan people. Now everyone is suddenly, I don’t know what happened. What happened? Everybody’s religious now? Holly: So what? Michael: The head of my department — and this is a smart guy, this is not, this is a world-renowned scholar — he grew up like us: cheeseburgers, sweet and sour shrimp, Christmas trees — remember, we had that Christmas tree? Holly: I love Christmas trees. Michael: Now, his whole family, they’re shomer shabbos, they’re walking to synagogue on Saturday mornings. Holly: Why does that upset you? Michael: Because we spent the entire twentieth century trying to get away from that. And now you look around and everybody on the Upper West Side is reading books on Kabbalah and kosher sex, whatever the hell that is, and it’s just, what happened to the last hundred years?
Didn’t we already have this conversation? Didn’t we decide we were done with, you know, spirits in the sky? Ellen: I think you could be a little more tolerant of other people’s beliefs.
Obie winner and Tony nominee Shamos (Engaged, Clybourne Park) is scintillating as Michael, all pent-up energy and intense nervousness, so sure he’s always right and quick to exploit others’ flaws; it’s one of those performances you can’t take your eyes off of, never knowing what he will say or do next. No matter how insensitive Michael gets, and he reaches some epic proportions, you still can’t help but root for him as he seeks tenure, tries to protect his daughter, and genuinely wants to do what’s best for the family. The entire cast is outstanding, from two-time Tony nominee Bryggman’s fading Lou — who delivers a captivating story about liberating Dachau at the end of WWII — to high school junior Seth Michael Steinberg’s Joey, a teenager who thinks he’s immune from the adults’ many problems. Walsh (Private Practice, Dusk Rings a Bell) and Dizzia (Belleville, In the Next Room [or the Vibrator Play]) make excellent foils, as the hoity Holly never misses a chance to take a shot at anyone and everyone while the steadfast Sharon plays martyr. Lawrence (The Whale, Proof) and Wilmes (Chinglish,Isolde) are both solid as the once-dependable in-laws who start showing cracks themselves. Shakespeare in the Park regular Daniel Sullivan (Prelude to a Kiss, Intimate Apparel) directs with a steady hand, maintaining a controlled chaos that could explode at any moment. Levenson has written a finely honed portrait of an American family coming apart at the seams as they examine the past and fear the future, with religion serving as the trigger. “Obviously you hate where you come from, you hate the culture that you come from,” Sharon tells Michael. They’re not exactly enamored with where they’re going either. Balancing humor and pathos, If I Forget — the title references both the phrase “Never Forget,” which Jews say about the Holocaust, as well as Alzheimer’s disease and personal and collective memory, is a powerful, very human play that captures the zeitgeist of Jewish life in the modern era, especially in a time when anti-Semitic hate crimes and mixed marriages are on the rise, religion drives so much political discourse, and the number of Holocaust survivors keep dwindling.
A group of friends are about to see their lives change in unexpected ways after graduating high school in NIBBBLER (photo by Russ Rowland)
Rattlestick Playwrights Theater
224 Waverly Pl. between Eleventh & Perry Sts.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 18, $32
866-811-4111 www.rattlestick.org www.amoralists.com
The always unpredictable Amoralists (Rantoul and Die,Hotel/Motel) turn to campy sci-fi/horror in its latest gem, Ken Urban’s suburban memory play Nibbler, running at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater through March 18. Bookended by a scene on Christmas Eve 2004, the story takes place primarily in the summer of 1992, as five friends from Medport, New Jersey, graduate high school and contemplate what comes next. “Weird to think we won’t all be here in a few months,” Smiths nerd Matt (Spencer Davis Milford) says. “None of us are going far,” his girlfriend, gorgeous blond Hayley (Elizabeth Lail), responds. “I know, but I feel kind of, I don’t know . . . What’s gonna happen to us?” Matt asks. Hayley is all set to go to Trenton State with the tomboyish Tara (Rachel Franco), but Tara, a virgin who is desperate to get laid by just about any means necessary, is still hoping that she’ll get into Stanford. Geeky Pete (Sean Patrick Monahan) is excited about going to NYU, but his best friend, ersatz group leader Adam (James Kautz), hasn’t yet made up his mind what he’ll be doing, acting like it’s all no big deal. But when a UFO lands nearby, the friends start changing after encounters with a green, scaly — well, you really have to see it to believe it (and be sure to pay attention to the details, designed to reveal critical information about what’s going on).
Officer Dan (Matthew Lawler) dispenses advice and more to teens at a New Jersey diner in new Amoralists play by Ken Urban (photo by Russ Rowland)
Urban (Sense of an Ending,The Correspondent) was inspired by the events of 9/11 in writing Nibbler, as well as Thornton Wilder’s Our Townand Mac Wellman’s Sincerity Forever.. There have been various iterations of the play over the last fifteen years, but looking back at his own past, trying to remember the feeling of hope that comes with youth, Urban has not altered the core philosophy, which is as relevant as ever. “Regardless of whether you deem the author prescient or not, the scenes involving politics remained untouched in all drafts,” he explains in a program note. The character of Adam is not only universal but also evokes the kind of lost American who ended up voting for Donald Trump this past November, feeling that Democratic Party elitists turned their back on him. Urban and director Benjamin Kamine (Carlyle, a cautionary tail) cleverly play with genre tropes, from teen sex flicks to Invasion of the Body Snatchers to coming-of-age dramas, incorporating a killer soundtrack, with snippets of songs by the Smiths, Depeche Mode, Sonic Youth, the Happy Mondays, the Butthole Surfers, and Joy Division. (Urban is also half of the band Occurrence, with Cat Hollyer; their latest album is titled, appropriately enough, The Past Will Last Forever.) Amoralists founding artistic director Kautz (Utility,The Bad and the Better) heads a talented cast, which also includes Matthew Lawler as sweet-natured Officer Dan, who has a fondness for his own misspent youth, as well as for Tara. Nibbler gets a little goofy at times, but it also shows a deep understanding of what it feels like to be a teenager. “What do you believe in?” Hayley asks Adam, who answers, “I believe that believing is a waste of fucking time.” But once again, we believe in the Amoralists, whose shows are never a waste of time.
A strange king (Tony Torn) rules over his underground lair and servant Dead Bill (Will Dagger) in LATTER DAYS (photo by Christopher Genovese)
Ars Nova, Theater 511
511 West 54th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 11, $21-$35
212-352-3101 dutchkillstheater.com arsnovanyc.com
Ben Beckley’s Latter Days is a strange and awkward piece of theater, more an exercise in character study than a fully fledged work. In an abandoned underground room that is part basement, part prison cell (designed by Carolyn Mraz), a king (Tony Torn) rules his lone minion, Dead Bill (Will Dagger), as they prepare for the end of days, believing an apocalypse will leave them in charge of the world. “When I walk the streets above, I see . . . faces turned from the sun,” Dead Bill says, continuing, “eyes heavy with grief unspoken. Hearts unraveling with secret sorrow. I want so much to speak with them, to tell them what’s to come.” The king responds, “You know you must not . . . You shall not . . . We forbid it!” The servant and the king, who speaks in Shakespearean ramblings and who uses a decrepit toilet bowl as his throne, go through the same tiresome rituals every day, involving street coffee, a thermos, an interminable countdown, and the official rubbing of the royal sores, although no skin-to-skin contact between ruler and subject is permitted. Dressed in a shabby makeshift robe that appropriately includes some tin foil around his neck (courtesy of costume designer Kate Fry), the potentate moves with mannered, silly precision, casting wide-eyed looks at the audience, as if trying to bring them under his lofty wings as well. Unfortunately, Latter Days, directed by Jess Chayes (I Will Look Forward to This Later, HOME/SICK), fails to reach any kind of sainthood; Dagger (Napoleon in Exile, The Convent of Pleasure) does an admirable job as the disciple, but Torn (Ubu Sings Ubu, The Oberon), the son of actors Rip Torn and Geraldine Page, is overly cartoony as the king. A presentation of the Dutch Kills Theater Company, the hour-long Latter Days is running in repertory with Jean Ann Douglass’s seventy-five-minute The Providence of Neighboring Bodies; the plays can be seen back-to-back for $30 with the code DKDUOBOTH. Just don’t tell them we sent you.
Emily (Isabelle Fuhrman) and Jenny (Abigail Breslin) chatter away in world premiere play from the New Group (photo by Monique Carboni)
The New Group at the Pershing Square Signature Center
Ford Foundation Studio Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 26, $65-$85 www.thenewgroup.org
The New Group’s All the Fine Boys is an extremely uncomfortable show to watch and hard to recommend, dealing with a controversial topic in challenging ways. The play, which opened last night at the tiny Ford Foundation Studio Theatre at the Pershing Square Signature Center, is well written, well acted, but clumsily directed by playwright Erica Schmidt, the wife of Emmy-winning actor Peter Dinklage and whose previous credits include the musical adaptation of Debbie Does Dallas. In a South Carolina suburb in the late 1980s, fourteen-year-old besties Jenny (Abigail Breslin) and Emily (Isabelle Fuhrman) watch horror movies and talk about boys and death. “I don’t really want to get older? I mean, I want to get out of middle school and I really want it to be summer and I’m excited to have a birthday party but getting older? I don’t know,” Jenny says. “I know what you mean. Like, sometimes I think, we’ll never ever be younger,” Emily responds. “This morning I looked in the mirror and thought: This is it. It’s never going to get better than this,” Jenny adds. Emily has her heart set on losing her virginity to dreamy seventeen-year-old Adam (Alex Wolff), a serious guitarist and poet who is starring in the high school play, Our Town, while Jenny is attracted to Joseph (Joe Tippett), a skeet-shooting champion from her church who is twice her age. Each girl explores her burgeoning sexuality with very different results.
Things get dark quickly in Erica Schmidt’s uncomfortable coming-of-age drama ALL THE FINE BOYS (photo by Monique Carboni)
Fuhrman (The Hunger Games, Orphan) and Oscar nominee Breslin (Little Miss Sunshine, The Miracle Worker) are terrific as the adolescent girls, endlessly chatting away with no real understanding of what they are getting themselves into. Fuhrman brings a sweetly innocent charm to Emily, who is worried about how big her breasts are getting, while the gravelly voiced Breslin evokes Emma Kenney’s portrayal of Debbie Gallagher in Shameless, as the chunky Jenny heads to a point of no return. Schmidt’s dialogue is sharp and on target; throughout the show, I couldn’t help but notice many women in the audience nodding in agreement at various things the two girls say to each other. It’s important to note that both actresses are actually twenty, especially in a critical scene between Jenny and Joseph that will have you upset that you’re not looking away (as well as wondering if it was necessary to be so graphic). Meanwhile, Wolff (The Naked Brothers Band, Patriots Day) and Tippett (Airline Highway, Familiar) do a strong job keeping their stock characters from becoming clichés. Amy Rubin’s set is a fairly standard suburban living room, with couch, television, radio, and VCR, a bathroom/entrance on one side and hallway on the other. Small changes are made as the action shifts from Jenny’s house to Adam’s room to Joseph’s place, but the overlaps (for example, leaving a pizza box on a table as the location changes) are distracting. The period soundtrack features songs by Hall & Oates, the Psychedelic Furs, the Cure, and the Smiths. All the Fine Boys is a flawed coming-of-age drama that explores a formidable topic in provocative ways that make it hard to recommend, but it will stick in your psyche long after you leave the theater.
