this week in theater

YERMA

An unnamed woman (Billie Piper) and her partner (Brendan Cowell) consider starting a family in Simon Stone’s sizzling Yerma (photo by Stephanie Berger)

Park Ave. Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
Monday – Saturday through April 21, $40-$135
212-933-5812
www.armoryonpark.org

Australian director Simon Stone puts domesticity and obsession under a microscope in the blistering, no-holds-barred Yerma, which opened last night at the Park Avenue Armory. His adaptation of Federico García Lorca’s radical 1934 drama, part of the Spanish poet and playwright’s seminal Rural Trilogy that also includes Blood Wedding and The House of Bernarda Alba, digs deep into the heart and soul of a woman who wants to have a baby but is having trouble conceiving. In a coproduction between the armory and the Young Vic, Stone moves the play to modern-day London, where a thirty-three-year-old blogger identified only as “her” (Olivier Award winner Billie Piper) and her forty-three-year-old partner, international businessman John (Brendan Cowell), have just bought a three-floor apartment. At first the couple is deliriously happy with their life, thrilled to be free of bourgeois expectations, when the woman suddenly and surprisingly decides she wants to have a baby, but John’s enthusiasm is questionable. They have difficulty conceiving, and soon all kinds of connections to sex and reproduction appear, from her pregnant sister, Mary (Charlotte Randle), married to a philanderer, to a former boyfriend, Victor (John MacMillan), now father of a two-year-old, who gets a job at her office. Her twenty-one-year-old assistant, Des (Thalissa Teixeira), talks about her extremely active sex life while the woman’s mother, Helen (Maureen Beattie), can’t stop complaining about raising kids. In none of the situations is having children and being a parent ideal; instead, each person faces their own demons. Over several years, as the woman battles infertility, she descends into an ever-more-difficult struggle to maintain balance in her life as madness threatens.

Two sisters (Billie Piper and Charlotte Randle) evaluate their situations while their mother (Maureen Beattie) looks on in Park Ave. Armory production (photo by Stephanie Berger)

Yerma unfolds on Lizzie Clachan’s spectacular stage, reconfigured specifically for the massive fifty-five-thousand-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall, which has previously been transformed in dazzling ways for productions of Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, Matt Charman and Josie Rourke’s The Machine, and Rob Ashford and Kenneth Branagh’s Macbeth, among other plays, art installations, and music events. The audience is seated on risers on two sides of the stage, a horizontal space encased by glass, making everyone a voyeur peering into someone else’s personal life, as if turning the woman’s blog into a physical reality. The woman is trapped within the glass structure, which evokes her mind; she is the only one who ever makes contact with the walls, except for when her mother washes it early on, not wanting to get involved too much in her daughter’s problems. Each side of the audience can see the other through the glass; at first it looks like it could be a reflection, but it’s not, equating everyone, as if the story we’re all experiencing could be happening to any one of us.

At certain angles, the actors are reflected multiple times; thus, it is often possible to see four or five ghostly, unformed versions of Piper, visible far off to the right and left and across to the other side of the audience. It is a powerful dramatic effect that makes her deepening issues that much more universal. The lightning-fast set changes by lighting designer James Farncombe occur in sudden blackness as magisterial arias echo loudly throughout the space and a monitor announces the next chapter, which have such names as “Conception,” “Disillusion,” and “Deception,” followed by phrases both descriptive and ominous. In addition, the characters are mic’d in such a way that their voices seem transcendent as they echo above them. (The gorgeous music and sound design is by Stefan Gregory.) It’s a testament to Stone and the exceptional cast that they do not let the complex staging overwhelm the intimacy of the story. Nothing is done simply for show or to merely revel in the magic of theater; every aspect of the production has been ingeniously crafted to organically intersect into a wholly involving and shattering experience that will leave you physically and emotionally exhausted as well as thoroughly exhilarated.

A couple’s relationship evolves and devolves in Yerma at the Park Ave. Armory (photo by Stephanie Berger)

In her North American stage debut, Piper (The Effect, Treats) is electrifying as her character devolves from a fun-loving, sexy, multifaceted woman into a mental wreck falling into the lower depths of the human condition; it is a brave, bold, unforgettable performance that leaves it all out on the stage and on the glass, literally and figuratively. Cowell (Life of Galileo, The Dark Room) marvelously complements her as John, maintaining the mystery behind the man’s fears and desires as he reacts to his partner’s gut-wrenching unpredictability. As a collective unit, the cast displays the wide range of emotions associated with pregnancy, from conception, the morning after pill, and abortion to motherhood, postpartum depression, and separation. It never lets up for a second throughout its one hundred minutes, with no detail extraneous; an early discussion of a certain sexual position only later lends insight into John’s unspoken feelings about potentially becoming a father, and even the characters’ names have been carefully chosen, with biblical and historical references or descriptions of who they are and what they want. And yet Toneelgroep Amsterdam veteran Stone (The Wild Duck, Miss Julie) has opted to not call the woman “Yerma” even though that is the title of the play — the name is shouted out only once in Lorca’s original — emphasizing her lack of identity without a child while reminding us again that she is us. It’s a terrifying prospect, brought to life in this stunning, brutal production.

THE WINTER’S TALE

Leontes (Anatol Yusef) grows suspicious of Hermione (Kelley Curran) and Polixenes (Dion Mucciacito) in The Winter’s Tale at TFANA (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Theatre for a New Audience, Polonsky Shakespeare Center
262 Ashland Pl. between Lafayette Ave. & Fulton St.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 15, $90-$125
866-811-4111
www.tfana.org

Theatre for a New Audience resident director Arin Arbus approaches William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale — a tragicomedy and late romance that is considered one of the Bard’s problem plays — with sharp teeth and claws bared, like a grizzly bear just awakened from hibernation. In fact, a bear — well, a man in a bear suit (Arnie Burton) — is a key character in the nearly three-hour production, which opened Sunday night at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Fort Greene. The bear, who lives under the stage, impacts the narrative in each of the very different two acts, which are famously separated by a sixteen-year gap in the story, another kind of hibernation. With snow falling in Sicilia, King Leontes (Anatol Yusef) is hosting Polixenes (Dion Mucciacito), the king of Bohemia, When Polixenes considers leaving for home, Leontes suddenly, and without reason, becomes convinced that his pregnant wife, Hermione (Kelley Curran), and the Bohemian leader are in love and have made a cuckold of him. Leontes’s trusted friend, Camillo (Michael Rogers), assures the king that no such treachery has occurred, but the king refuses to listen to him, declaring, “Is whispering nothing? / Is leaning cheek to cheek? Is meeting noses? / Kissing with inside lip? Stopping the career / Of laughter with a sigh? — a note infallible / Of breaking honesty. Horsing foot on foot? / Skulking in corners? Wishing clocks more swift? / Hours minutes? Noon midnight? And all eyes / Blind with the pin and web but theirs, theirs only, / That would unseen be wicked? Is this nothing? Why, then the world and all that’s in ’t is nothing, / The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia nothing, / My wife is nothing, nor nothing have these nothings, / If this be nothing.” In accusing his wife, the king has also deeply troubled their young son, Maximillius (Eli Rayman). Leontes orders Camillo to kill Polixenes, but instead Camillo flees to Bohemia with him. In prison, Hermione gives birth to a girl, and Leontes tells Lord Antigonus (Oberon K. A. Adjepong), the husband of Hermione’s dedicated lady-in-waiting, Paulina (Mahira Kakkar), to take the baby away and abandon it. After heartbreaking tragedy, the baby is found on the shores of Bohemia by a shepherd (John Keating) and his clownish son (Ed Malone), who bring the infant, whom they name Perdita, home.

Autolycus (Arnie Burton) offers a phallic flower in Arin Arbus’s latest Shakespeare adaptation (photo by Carol Rosegg)

After intermission, the dire, dour mood changes dramatically. Father Time (Robert Langdon Lloyd) walks with a cane onto the stage as green leaves fall in Bohemia, announcing spring. Time, representing the chorus, explains that sixteen years have passed, filling in the details of what has become of the main characters. Most important, Perdita (Nicole Rodenburg) is now a teenager who is close with Florizel (Eddie Ray Jackson), the son of Polixenes, although no one knows her true lineage. As the region prepares for a sheep-shearing feast, Autolycus (Burton), a former servant of Florizel’s who has gone rogue, picks a few pockets, including that of an audience member in the first row. “Ha, ha, what a fool Honesty is! And Trust, / his sworn brother, a very simple gentleman! I have sold all my trumpery,” Autolycus, who serves as the play’s turning point, admits. Through a series of events, everyone winds up back in Sicilia, where a little bit of magic eases much, but not all, of the pain that spread through the first act and the bitterness of winter turns into the hopeful blossoming of spring as time marches ever forward.

Bohemians celebrate at the sheep-shearing fest (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Arbus (King Lear, The Skin of Our Teeth) juggles the play’s so-called problems deftly, balancing the darkly serious with the lightly comic, moving things relatively briskly on Riccardo Hernandez’s spare but austere, at times almost blindingly white set, which features a large arch in the back, behind which projections change from ominous clouds to blue skies. Emily Rebholz’s contemporary costumes take some getting used to, although they do shift from dignified black, white, and brown in the first act to a more casual look with splashes of color in the second. Much of the cast, which also includes Maechi Aharanwa as Mopsa, Liz Wisan as Dorcas, cellist Zsaz Rutkowski, and multi-instrumentalist Titus Tompkins, is allowed a wide berth, especially during the wacky sheep-shearing festival, but Curran (Present Laughter, Sense & Sensibility), Rogers (The Call, Sucker Punch), and RSC vet Yusef (Hamlet, Boardwalk Empire) keep it grounded just enough. The Winter’s Tale might be a lesser-performed Bard work, but it still has its gems. “If powers divine / Behold our human actions, as they do, / I doubt not then but innocence shall make / False accusation blush and tyranny / Tremble at patience,” Hermione says, speaking for all truths. And of course, the play also boasts perhaps Shakespeare’s most famous stage direction: “He exits, pursued by a bear.”

THE LOW ROAD

Jim (Chris Perfetti) tries to unbalance the books while being celebrated by Old Tizzy (Crystal A. Dickinson) and Mrs. Trewitt (Harriet Harris) in The Low Road (photo by Joan Marcus)

Anspacher Theater, the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. at Astor Pl.
Tuesday through Sunday through April 8, $85
212-539-8500
publictheater.org

Pulitzer Prize winner Bruce Norris uses Adam Smith’s 1776 economic epic, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, as the basis for his potent and rollicking The Low Road, running at the Public’s Anspacher Theater through April 8. The Texas-born Norris follows the development of American capitalism through the trials and tribulations of one Jim Trewitt, from his birth in 1758 to the year of independence, 1776. The bitter yet playful satire is narrated by Smith (Daniel Davis), who hovers around the stage and in the aisles as he watches the shenanigans unfold along with the audience when he’s not front and center, using business-speak to introduce scenes. “As the ladies within had no marketable skills to speak of, they set about to purvey the only commodity available to them,” he says about a brothel, where the madam, Mrs. Trewitt (Harriet Harris), and her one-eyed slave, Old Tizzy (Crystal A. Dickinson), have taken in a baby left to them by one “G. Washington of Virginia,” according to a note that also promises they will be “generously compensated” upon the lad’s seventeenth birthday. One day, young Jim (Jack Hatcher) fortuitously comes upon a work-in-progress by Smith, reading a paragraph that will change his life: “Every individual endeavours as much as he can to employ his capital in support of domestic industry. He neither intends to promote the public interest nor knows how much he is promoting it. He intends only his own gain, and he is, in this, led by an invisible hand to promote an end that was never part of his intention. Nor is it the worse for society that it was no part of it.” Jim becomes a master with money, embezzling from Mrs. Trewitt without the slightest bit of guilt, and upon his seventeenth birthday, he (now played by Chris Perfetti) heads out on his own with a hidden stash under his hat. He buys himself a slave, John Blanke (Chukwudi Iwuji), loses a lot more than just his shirt to a mysterious masked thief, gets taken in by Brother Pugh (Max Baker), the presiding elder of the Bible-thumping New Light of Zion Colony of Waterfleet, and courts the daughter (Tessa Albertson) of the fabulously wealthy Isaac Low (Kevin Chamberlin). All the while, he is accompanied by Blanke, who turns out to be a lot more than the “deef . . . substandard product” he thought he purchased.

Jim Trewitt (Chris Perfetti) belittles his new slave, John Blanke (Chukwudi Iwuji), in Bruce Norris play at the Public Theater (photo by Joan Marcus)

Tony winner Norris (Clybourne Park, A Parallelogram) fills The Low Road with economic language and potent platitudes that never get tedious or pedantic — and much of which is as true today as it was in Smith’s time, taking on income inequality, class, gender, legacy, luxury, labor, power, property, organized religion, the military, and race. “All profit is theft,” Constance Pugh (Susannah Perkins) declares. “As he considered the disparity betwixt himself and the man whose chamber-pot he presently emptied, he wondered what it should be that caused such divergence of fortune,” Smith says of Trewitt cleaning up after the Duke of Buccleuch (Gopal Divan) at the brothel. “Might I suggest you learn to value that which cannot be obtained at gunpoint?” Blanke tells Jim shortly after they had been shackled together, evoking Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis in Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones. “You provide commendable service to my men and in return we provide you with protection. Now, surely that’s a fair exchange, yes?” Captain Shirley (Richard Poe) reminds Mrs. Trewitt when explaining why he and his soldiers don’t have to pay for their jaunts with her ladies of the night. “Yet somehow it seemed that, as his authority increased, the affection of those within had diminished proportionally,” Smith says of Jim as he cheats Mrs. Trewitt and her coterie, continuing, “For, their needs were modest, and, as a future gentleman, his were understandably greater.” And just in case the audience doesn’t tune into how modern these ideas still sound, the second act begins with a brilliantly conceived scene that establishes Jim as the founding father of corporate greed.

Isaac Low (Kevin Chamberlin) shares his good fortune with his wife (Harriet Harris) as their daughter (Tessa Albertson) and Adam Smith (Daniel Davis) look on in The Low Road (photo by Joan Marcus)

Four-time Tony nominee and three-time Obie winner Michael Greif (Dear Evan Hansen, A Parallelogram) superbly directs a cast of eighteen on the small Anspacher stage, which undergoes numerous changes by scenic designer David Korins, as chairs, tables, beds, barriers, a podium, and other elements are wheeled on and off; a short technical delay the night I went actually gave insight to the complexity behind the staging. Emily Rebholz’s period costumes and J. Jared Janas and Dave Bova’s wig and hair design are right on target, as is live music by violinist Josh Henderson, composed by Mark Bennett. Perfetti (Picnic, Cloud Nine) brings an engaging quirkiness to the role of Jim; you can’t help but root for him even though he does terrible things that will essentially lead to the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008. RSC veteran Iwuji (Hamlet, Hedda Gabler) is ferocious as John Blanke, representing America’s greatest shame and delivering the timeless line “But how much profit does one need? P’raps there ought be some penalty for the accumulation of unseemly wealth.” And Tony nominee Daniel Davis (Wrong Mountain, Talking Heads) lends it all a grand Shakespearean air. Thirty years ago, Gordon Gekko proclaimed, “Greed is good.” Norris ingeniously takes roads both low and high to reveal just how American that concept is, from the birth of the nation to this very minute.

HANOCH LEVIN SQUARED: THE LABOR OF LIFE & THE WHORE FROM OHIO

Yona Popoch (Gera Sandler) has had it with wife Leviva (Ronit Asheri-Sandler) in The Labor of Life

Theater at 224 Waverly
224 Waverly Pl. between Eleventh & Perry Sts.
Through March 29, $25 for one show, $45 for two, $65 for three, $75 for all four
866-811-4111
www.newyiddishrep.org

Perhaps New Yiddish Rep needs to take a break and catch its collective breath. The Jersey-based company was founded in 2013 to promote classic and contemporary Yiddish theater. It burst out of the gate with well-reviewed adaptations of Waiting for Godot in fall 2013 and the Drama Desk–nominated Death of a Salesman in fall 2015. (Sandwiched in between was a pair of one-act plays by Wolf Mankowitz.) But in the mere span of six months, New Yiddish Rep has staged a disappointing Rhinoceros, a lovely Awake and Sing!, and now the lackluster double bill Hanoch Levin Squared, two one-acts by the celebrated, controversial Israeli playwright who passed away in 1999 at the age of fifty-five. Levin was loved and hated for his political and religious satires (Hefez, The Dreaming Child) and triangular dramas (Yaakobi and Leidental, The Rubber Merchants); his works earned major prizes and were banned. New Yiddish Rep is currently performing Levin’s seventy-minute The Labor of Life and eighty-minute The Whore from Ohio in repertory at the Theater at 224 Waverly, both in Hebrew and in Yiddish, with English surtitles. I saw them both in Yiddish on the same night, and while each had its moments, they were far too workmanlike, losing the many nuances of Levin’s biting wit and sarcasm, instead played much too straightforward. The Labor of Life, from 1989, is directed by Ronit Muszkatblit (Hanna and the Moonlit Dress, Nature of Captivity) and stars Gera Sandler as Yona Popoch (played by Yosi Sokolsky in the Hebrew version) and Ronit Asheri-Sandler as his wife, Leviva. (Sandler and Asheri-Sandler are married in real life.) They’ve been married for thirty years, but Yona has had it and is ready to leave her. “I’m ruined,” he says. “How did it all melt away?” While Yona blames Leviva for his unhappiness, she blames him. “There’s no place for you to escape because wherever you go, you drag yourself with you,” she proclaims. It all takes place in, on, and around their bed (the sets for both plays are by Nathan Rhoden), where love does not seem to exist anymore, if it ever did. They are visited in the middle of the night by Gunkel (Eli Rosen, who translated both plays from Hebrew into Yiddish), who’s not exactly welcome in their home right then but sits down on the bed nonetheless and shares his fears of dying alone. Taking stock of his sad life, he says, “All in all, nothing but a Gunkel.” After Gunkel finally leaves, Yona cries, “We’re all Gunkels.” It’s a play about relationships, but none of the characters make any kind of connection with one another or the audience.

Bitterman (David Mandelbaum) and son (Eli Rosen) are thwarted by a prostitute in Hanoch Levin’s The Whore from Ohio

There’s a little more life in 1997’s The Whore from Ohio, directed by Obie winner Michael Leibenluft (I’ll Never Love Again, The Subtle Body), but it too fails to hit the key notes and also becomes a repetitive tale involving a trio of strange bedfellows. The raggedy Bitterman (New Yiddish Rep artistic director and cofounder David Mandelbaum) wants to celebrate his seventieth birthday by sleeping with a prostitute, in this case, Bronatsatski (Mary Black, played by Vered Hankin in the Hebrew version), who says she will let him do her in the dank, graffiti-laden yard for one hundred shekels. He haggles for a better price, but she is not budging. “What about a symbolic price?” he asks, offering her ten shekels, which she curtly refuses. “Just as I thought. There’s no respect for symbolism in the world anymore,” Bitterman opines. Eventually, he gives in, but his member has trouble getting started, complicating their arrangement. And it gets even more complicated when Bitterman’s grown boy, Bitterson (Rosen), shows up, defending his father and demanding his money back, which Bronatsatski is not about to do. Again, there’s lots of back and forth, discussions that should symbolize socioeconomic issues in Israel, the United States, and elsewhere but instead seems to just be about a son fighting for what he insists his father is due. “That hole will be locked up for good someday,” Bitterson tells Bronatsatski. The language in both plays can be surprisingly crude — however, you can’t hear the Yiddish word “tuches” enough — but it’s all too right-on-the-nose, lacking the symbolism that is in Levin’s words. Even at seventy and eighty minutes, both plays are too long, too tiresome, not offering the insight into the human condition that was so central to Levin. In the end, what we’re really left with are a couple of Gunkels.

ADMISSIONS

Sherri (Jessica Hecht), Bill (Andrew Garman), and Charlie (Ben Edelman) share a toast before things spiral out of control in new play at Lincoln Center (photo by Jeremy Daniel)

Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 29, $92
212-362-7600
www.lct.org

Joshua Harmon makes it three-for-three with his third professionally produced play, the timely and provocative Admissions, continuing at the Mitzi E. Newhouse at Lincoln Center through April 29. Harmon boldly skewers white privilege, a sizzling-hot topic in America today, in a work written by a white man, directed by a white man, performed by an all-white cast, and seen by a mostly white audience. Although criticized by some, it’s perversely critical that Harmon has included only white characters, because this kind of liberal racism and privilege is a specifically white problem that needs to be addressed by whites. Sherri Rosen-Mason (Jessica Hecht) and Bill Mason (Andrew Garman) both work at Hillcrest, a second-tier boarding school in New Hampshire where Sherri is head of admissions and Bill is headmaster. As the play opens, dyed-in-the-wool New Englander Roberta (Ann McDonough), who works in development, brings Sherri a draft of the admissions catalog, which infuriates Sherri when she sees very few people of color in the brochure. Her agenda is crystal clear: “When I first got to Hillcrest, the student body was ninety-four percent white, six percent students of color,” Sherri explains. “Now, I have worked like a dog the last fifteen years so that our school looks a little bit more like the country in which it is situated, and today, we’re eighteen percent students of color. Which is still an embarrassingly low number, but it’s three hundred percent better than where we were just fifteen years ago.” Roberta argues that she did her best and that she does not see color, that Sherri is overly concerned about race, leading to an uncomfortable discussion about just how black biracial student Perry Peters is. While Roberta says he is black, Sherri is worried that he doesn’t “read black” in the photo in the catalog. “He looks whiter than my son in this picture,” Sherri says, referring to Charlie (Ben Edelman), who, like Perry, is applying to colleges. But when Perry, whose mother, Ginnie (Sally Murphy), is good friends with Sherri, gets into Yale and Charlie gets wait-listed, Sherri starts singing a different tune, determined to do whatever she can to get her son back on the track of privilege and merit.

Sherri (Jessica Hecht) and Roberta (Ann McDonough) debate diversity at New Hampshire boarding school in Joshua Harmon play (photo by Jeremy Daniel)

Admissions is anchored by a long, show-stopping monologue by Charlie, marvelously delivered by Edelman, in which the angry student rails against the current politically correct climate that he believes favors women and people of color over white males. The speech infuriates Bill, who calls his son a “spoiled little overprivileged brat.” Later, when Charlie decides to take responsibility and do what he thinks is the right thing, Sherri admonishes him: “We’re not talking about diversity, we’re talking about you, Charlie, you.” And therein lies the NIMBY dilemma as Harmon harpoons liberal ideas of diversity, racial equality, quotas, and what used to be called affirmative action: It’s all well and good until it (maybe) affects their child. Sherri even goes at it with Ginnie, believing that Perry got into Yale primarily because he checked the “black” box on his application. But Ginnie fights right back, claiming that Bill has a better job than her husband, Don, because Bill is white and Don is black. Again, it’s evident that Harmon has included only the white people in his story, that Perry, Don, and any other black men or women exist offstage, as opposed to Dominique Morisseau’s hard-hitting Pipeline, which ran at the Newhouse last summer and was also set at a school dealing with race and class issues. White privilege is still rampant throughout the nation, no matter how many white people, liberal or conservative, think it’s not and find the whole idea offensive. Yet it is not the job of black Americans to “wake up” white Americans to their own racism; the oppressed do not need to appear before a white audience to explain themselves to their oppressors, and thus they are absent from Harmon’s play. White people need to clean up their own side, however messy and painful the process may be.

Ginnie (Sally Murphy) and Sherri’s (Jessica Hecht) friendship is tested in Admissions (photo by Jeremy Daniel)

Riccardo Hernandez’s open set serves as both the Masons’ kitchen and living room and Sherri’s office, equating the private and the professional. Director Daniel Aukin (4000 Miles, Bad Jews) navigates the tense, explosive dialogue seamlessly; theatergoers should pay close attention to the other characters when one is doing the talking, especially during the longer speeches. Tony nominee Hecht’s (The Assembled Parties, A View from the Bridge) hesitant style works well for Sherri, countering Garman’s (The Christians, Salomé) firmer, more direct approach. But it’s Edelman (Significant Other, The Idiot Box) who steals the show as Charlie, a confused kid trapped in the middle of an incendiary issue, a smart young man who has to find respite by running into the woods and screaming his head off. Harmon’s debut, 2012’s Bad Jews, was a dark comedy about three siblings fighting over a family heirloom; it began at the Roundabout’s subterranean Black Box before moving to the larger Laura Pels upstairs. His follow-up, 2015’s Significant Other, dealt with a gay twentysomething man who watches his three close girlfriends find love while he remains single; it started at the Laura Pels and then transferred to the Booth on Broadway. Admissions is about a lot more than just getting into college — and it certainly passes the test to qualify for a bigger house as well.

EDWARD ALBEE’S AT HOME AT THE ZOO

Peter (Robert Sean Leonard) and Ann (Katie Finneran) have settled into a comfortable existence in Homelife (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Irene Diamond Stage
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday-Sunday through March 25, $65-$85
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

“We should talk,” Ann (Katie Finneran) says to Peter (Robert Sean Leonard) at the beginning of Edward Albee’s At Home at the Zoo, a two-act play running at the Signature through March 25. “Do you mind if we talk?” Jerry (Paul Sparks) asks Peter in the second act. Every word matters in Albee’s minimalist play about language, communication, and loneliness. The second half of the work, The Zoo Story, began as a one-act play first performed in West Berlin in 1959. Nearly fifty years later, in 2004, Albee added a prequel, Homelife, in order to flesh out the character of Peter. Initially known as Peter and Jerry, the retitled Edward Albee’s At Home at the Zoo opens with Peter sitting in a chair with a matching ottoman, reading a book under a lamp. Andrew Lieberman’s set is otherwise bare, except for Cy Twombly–like pencil scribbles on the white walls and floor that could be editors’ marks (Peter works for a text-book publisher) while evoking a certain randomness. The forty-five-year-old Peter and the thirty-eight-year-old Ann live on the Upper East Side and have settled into a cozy, rather ordinary life. While that pleases Peter, Ann appears to want more. She leads their discourse from daydreams of public nakedness to contemplations of morality and mortality; before we know it, the two are deep in polite conversation about the mundane violence visited upon upper-middle-class sex organs: from prophylactic breast removal to infant circumcision. “Once you hear of an idea you never know where it will lodge itself, when it will move from something learned to something . . . considerable, something you might think about, which is not far from being thought about, if you wanted to, or needed to,” Ann says. “We all die of something,” Peter responds. Ann: “Sooner or later.” Peter: “Yes, but . . .” Ann: “Yes, but! Oh, you do love pedantry so . . . dying of not doing something can be carelessness!” Much of their conversation involves the semantic use of words; the couple exists together — and indeed is still happy — more through language than action. In the world they’ve created, being comfortable is not really a problem; in fact, Peter is so comfortable that he spends virtually the entire act seated in his chair. “I love you dearly,” Ann says. “But where’s the . . . the rage, the . . . animal? We’re animals! Why don’t we behave like that . . . like beasts?! Is it that we love each other too safely, maybe? That we’re secure? That we’re too . . . civilized? Don’t we ever hate one another?” That will have to wait until after intermission.

Peter (Robert Sean Leonard) and Jerry (Paul Sparks) talk it out in The Zoo Story (photo by Joan Marcus)

The second act, The Zoo Story, opens with Peter sitting on a park bench, reading. A stranger who later identifies himself as Jerry approaches him and says, “I’ve been to the zoo,” an ingenious transition from the first act, in which Ann was talking about animals and beasts. Speaking expressively in disjointed thoughts, Jerry is everything Peter is not; aggressive, unashamed, unfiltered, and, perhaps most important, potentially dangerous. “I don’t talk to many people,” Jerry tells Peter. “But every once in a while I like to talk to somebody, really talk, like to get to know somebody, know all about him.” Understandably uncomfortable, Peter responds, “And am I the guinea pig for today?” After a long, convoluted story about his landlady and her dog, Jerry does more than talk as he invades Peter’s space, leading to a shocking conclusion. Edward Albee’s At Home at the Zoo features fine performances from Tony winner Leonard (The Invention of Love, House) as the gentle, mild-mannered Peter and two-time Tony winner Finneran (Noises Off; Promises, Promises) as the curious and concerned Ann, but Albee saves the fireworks for Jerry, a bundle of nervous energy superbly embodied by Emmy nominee Sparks (House of Cards, Boardwalk Empire); he’s like a caged animal waiting to burst free, exacerbating a situation where anything can happen at any moment. (Perhaps the marks on the walls were made by human animals trying to escape their theatrical fate.) Drama Desk Award winner Lila Neugebauer (The Wolves, Everybody), who directed Albee’s 1959 one-act The Sandbox at the Signature in 2016, keeps the tension building in both sections of the play, which come together seamlessly. Of course, Albee, who was the Residency One Playwright at the Signature in 1993-94, is making a direct connection between theater and zoos, two places where humans pay money to watch others perform for them. Thus, Albee feels right at home at the Signature (as well as at the zoo; the author’s name in the title could be read as a possessive or as the subject of the sentence). And just like at the zoo, nobody likes to see sleeping animals; children and adults want to see some action, which is just what Albee gives them in the end.

JAPAN SOCIETY PLAY READING SERIES: MANHOOD

Japan Society Play Reading Series continues March 26 with Hideto Iwai’s Manhood

Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Monday, March 26, $15, 7:30
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

Japan Society’s 110th anniversary season continues March 26 with the thirteenth installment of its popular Play Reading Series, which features staged readings of works by up-and-coming Japanese playwrights translated into English. The latest is Hideto Iwai’s Manhood, which follows four men facing the natural aging process. The play is directed by Sarah Hughes (Wood Calls Out to Wood, Afterward) with a gender-swapped cast of Kate Benson, Ugo Anyanwu, Zoë Geltman, Daniel K. Isaac, Kristine Haruna Lee, and Mia Katigbak. Playwright, actor, director, and Kishida Kunio Award winner Iwai (A Certain Woman, The Husband and Wife), a former hikikomori who spent four years as a recluse because of violence he suffered at the hands of his father and brother, and Hughes, who directs and produces theater and new media, will participate in a Q&A following the reading. Previous works in the Japan Society series include Ai Nagai’s Women in a Holy Mess, directed by Cynthia Croot, Suguru Yamamoto’s Girl X, directed by Charlotte Brathwaite, and Seiji Nozoe’s Dancing with the Bird, directed by James Yaegashi.