this week in theater

IF I FORGET

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.

NIBBLER

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.

LATTER DAYS: AN ARS NOVA FLING

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.

ALL THE FINE BOYS

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.

TICKET ALERT: INSIDE

Immersive show at St. John the Divine challenges audience perception of reality (photo by Ana Margineau)

Immersive show at St. John the Divine challenges audience perception of reality, two people at a time (photo by Ana Margineau)

Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine
1047 Amsterdam Ave. at 112th St.
March 15-18, $40, 5:40 – 9:00 pm
212-316-7540
www.popuptheatrics.com
www.stjohndivine.org

Slots are filling up fast for PopUP Theatrics’ latest immersive theatrical production, Inside, which investigates perception, alternate realities, and unique interpretation. Previously staged in a Madrid hotel and a Bucharest train station, Inside now moves to the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, where two guests at a time will be led on an adventure through nonpublic areas in and around the historic space, seeing the same things but being fed different information. The monthly five-night runs begin March 14, with pairs taking off on their seventy-minute adventure every twenty minutes from 5:40 to 9:00. The show was devised by PopUP Theatrics partners Tamilla Woodard, Ana Margineau, and Peca Stefan, examining the question “How much of what you experience is affected by the voices in your head, being those media, social media, or family-inherited beliefs?” Collaborating with PopUP on Inside, which is directed by Margineau, are playwrights Zhu Yi and Troy Deutsch, director France Damian, and choreographer Joya Powell, with production design by Deb O. In a statement, Woodard explains, “With this immersive, our intention is to make it plain that you can be in the same place at the same time and have your perspective manipulated, so much so that you can begin to ignore the reality in front of you.” In these challenging times, there’s something to be said for ignoring the reality right in front of you, and what better place to do it than one of New York City’s most beautiful treasures.

EVENING AT THE TALK HOUSE

A veteran cast looks at the past, present, and future of the theater in EVENING AT THE TALK HOUSE (photo by Monique Carboni)

The New Group at the Pershing Square Signature Center
The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 12, $100-$120
www.thenewgroup.org

“We need more plays!” Nellie (Jill Eikenberry) cries out in the New Group’s marvelous production of Evening at the Talk House, making its U.S. premiere at the Signature Center through March 12. That sentiment couldn’t be more true, especially if they’re such works as Wallace Shawn’s utterly delightful, deliciously wicked black comedy, one of the most gregarious shows you’re ever likely to see, despite its dark undertones. The audience enters the Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre directly onto Derek McLane’s inviting set, where the all-star cast is mingling in the main meeting room of the Talk House, a club where New York’s literati partied once upon a time. The audience sits on rising rows on two sides of the stage, but before taking your seat, you can mix with the actors, enjoy gummy worms and marshmallow hors d’oeuvres, and sip colored sparkling water from plastic cups. A group of colleagues has gathered at their old hot spot, the Talk House, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the opening night of Midnight in a Clearing with Moon and Stars, a fondly recalled critical and popular failure by playwright Robert (Matthew Broderick), now a successful TV writer. He is joined by star Tom (Larry Pine), composer Ted (John Epperson), costume designer Annette (Claudia Shear), and producer Bill (Michael Tucker), along with longtime Talk House host Nellie and server Jane (Annapurna Sriram), who regularly took great care of them ten years before. There is also an unexpected guest, Dick (director and playwright Shawn), a sad, bedraggled shell of a man who thought he should have gotten the Midnight part that ultimately went to Tom. The show begins with an extraordinary, and lengthy, monologue by Robert, making direct eye contact with nearly everyone in the audience as he fills in the details of who everyone is (and was) as well as what has become of the theater in this ostensibly realistic yet unsettling somewhat parallel universe. “At that time, you see . . . theater played a somewhat larger part in the life of our city than it does now,” he says. “A decline in the theater-going impulse could in a way be seen as a small price to pay for the rather substantial benefit derived from entering into an era that quite a few people would describe as much more tranquil and much more agreeable that the one that preceded it. . . . Because what exactly was ‘theater,’ really, when you actually thought about it?” It isn’t long before Robert discovers that this new era is not quite as tranquil and agreeable as he thought, as Shawn slyly injects some frightening twists that go by all too smoothly, highlighting how increasingly easy it is to accept monstrous horrors in our everyday life. Is this our world? Or a wryly distorted funhouse mirror of it?

Dick (Wallace Shawn) and Robert (Matthew Broderick) reminisce over old times in New Group production of Shawn play (photo by Monique Carboni)

Evening at the Talk House unfolds in a kind of near-future alternate reality where the “walls have ears.” In describing the setting of Midnight, Robert explains that it took place “in a sort of imaginary kingdom that predated history altogether or stood to one side of it, at any rate.” Although Shawn wrote Talk House several years ago, it prefigures the Trump era, as the president threatens to cut arts funding and fiercely battles a free press. “I want the old days back! Where are they? Where have they gone?” Dick, wearing pajamas, his face battered and beaten, says. “The old days were wonderful days! And they were better for me — I mean, personally, you see, they were much better for me.” There’s no room anymore for nostalgia in this world, which has changed so drastically even if not so overtly. Both the old days and the new days seem good for Shawn, who has written such previous plays as Aunt Dan and Lemon and The Designated Mourner, cowrote and costarred in Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andre, and has memorably appeared in such films as Heaven Help Us, The Princess Bride, and Radio Days. In Evening, Shawn’s writing, acting, and direction are impeccable; the play is like a poignant short story come to life, with well-developed characters and sharply unpredictable dialogue. The acting is excellent all around, a mostly veteran cast clearly having a grand old time, glorying in their love of theater even as their characters have experienced its downfall. Audiences can rejoice as well; with shows such as Evening at the Talk House, the theater is far from a thing of the past.

ESCAPED ALONE

Linda Bassett, Deborah Findlay, Kika Markham, and June Watson star in Caryl Churchill’s ESCAPED ALONE (photo by Richard Termine)

BAM Harvey
651 Fulton St.
February 15-26, $30-$90
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

Award-winning British playwright Caryl Churchill artfully reproduces the random textures and intricate rise and fall, and the complicated rhythms of our banal daily conversations in the glorious Escaped Alone, which continues at BAM through February 26. But under those chats, lurking in the interstices and bubbling just underneath the surface, are horrors that are exposed in dystopian apocalyptic interludes. Churchill masterfully captures the zeitgeist of life in the twenty-first century through the gossiping of a quartet of women just passing the time. Mrs. Jarrett (Linda Bassett) is walking along the street when she hears three acquaintances chattering away behind a fence. She steps through a gate to join Sally (Deborah Findlay), Lena (Kika Markham), and Vi (June Watson) in Vi’s grassy and sunny suburban backyard where, over the course of an hour, the women discuss children, television programs, cooking, jokes, and how things change as they get older. “It all goes by,” Sally says wistfully early on. Every so often Mrs. J steps out of the scene as red neon lights flash around the proscenium (evoking the special lighting effects employed in Churchill’s recent Love and Information) and proceeds to deliver deadly funny details of various devastating global catastrophes, including floods, mass hunger, and killer viruses, as if she is a lone witness. She then returns to her chair like nothing happened. Meanwhile, Sally, Lena, and Vi each give a personal monologue of their own, the lights dimming on the other three and zeroing in on the speaker as one by one the women share their inner fears in a matter-of-fact manner.

Linda Bassett Caryl Churchill (photo by Richard Termine)

Mrs. Jarrett (Linda Bassett) discusses global calamities in ESCAPED ALONE at BAM (photo by Richard Termine)

The play takes its name from a quote from the Book of Jonah that was also used by Herman Melville in Moby-Dick: “I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” Sally, who has a cat problem, Lena, who wants to be invisible, and Vi, who had a rather unfortunate incident with her husband, might still be trying to escape while Mrs. J faces it in her own way, ending her first monologue by saying, “Survivors were now solitary and went insane at different rates.” The characters regularly fly off on tangents, speaking in partial sentences that combine to form a kind of fluid, abstract stream-of-consciousness poetry that is absolutely lovely to listen to. Peter Mumford’s lighting is virtually a character in itself, making the most of Miriam Buether’s bright, charming set, which recalls the famous Robert Frost quote “Good fences make good neighbors.” (The fence also evokes Donald Trump’s wall, except this one offers free entry and exit.) The four women, who were all in the original Royal Court Theatre production, are extraordinary, their words ricocheting off one another like a championship doubles match at Wimbledon. Longtime Churchill collaborator James Macdonald (Cloud Nine, A Number) oversees it all with a deft hand, keeping every little bit utterly captivating. Now seventy-eight, multiple Obie winner Churchill (Top Girls, Serious Money) has written yet another stunning work, cutting into the contemporary mind like a surgeon, exposing the mystifying stories we tell ourselves to get through our days.