this week in theater

THE RED LETTER PLAYS: IN THE BLOOD

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through October 15, $30 ($75 starting October 10)
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

In Fucking A, the first of the two Red Letter Plays that Suzan-Lori Parks wrote in the late 1990s inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the protagonist, Hester Smith, is an ostracized abortionist with an “A” branded near her heart, a single mother with a son in prison, both caught up in a cruel system. In the first Red Letter Play, the extraordinary In the Blood, which is currently running in tandem with Fucking A at the Signature Theatre, the main character is Hester, La Negrita (Saycon Sengbloh), a welfare mother with five young children from five different men. In her case, the “A” is the first letter of the alphabet; she is trying to learn to read and write, without much success. Hester and her kids — Jabber (Michael Braun), Bully (Jocelyn Bioh), Trouble (Frank Wood), Beauty (Ana Reeder), and Baby (Russell G. Jones), all wearing Montana Levi Blanco’s fanciful costumes — live in filth under a bridge, where trash is regularly pumped in. The town blames Hester herself for the predicament she’s in; at the beginning of the play, members of the community yell at her, “That’s why things are bad like they are / cause of girls like that . . . And now we got to pay for it. . . . She don’t got no skills / cept one,” adding, “She knows she’s a no count / Shiftless / Hopeless / Bad news / Burden to Society / Hussy / Slut / Pah!” But Hester adores her children, constantly referring to them as her “treasures,” her “joys.” She wants her life to be a fairy tale; she even tells her kids a bedtime story that serves as an uplifting metaphor about their situation. Hester is desperate to provide for her family, but she sometimes gets in her own way, looking for shortcuts because she doesn’t know any better. Each of the actors playing Hester’s children also doubles as an adult with ties to her: Amiga Gringa (Reeder) is a prostitute who is friends with Hester; the Doctor (Wood) offers her free medical tests and advice; Welfare Lady (Bioh) wants Hester to start helping herself and being more conscientious; Reverend D. (Jones), the father of one of Hester’s kids, keeps avoiding acknowledging their former relationship; and Chilli (Braun), the love of her life, is back in town and looking for her. (The names Reverend D. and Chilli are direct references to Puritan minister Arthur Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne’s husband, Roger Chillingworth, from Hawthorne’s 1850 novel, although the plot is completely different.)

In the Blood is beautifully written by Pulitzer Prize winner Parks (Topdog/Underdog, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World and superbly directed by Obie winner Sarah Benson (An Octoroon, Samara), never heavy-handed as they explore racism, misogyny, religious corruption, and inefficient government bureaucracy. Louis Thompson’s set has Hester trapped from the outset, a curved metal ramp serving as a Sisyphean non-exit, while bars put Hester in a zoolike cage. Tony nominee Sengbloh (Eclipsed, Hurt Village) gives a deeply heartfelt performance as Hester, La Negrita, a caring woman who just wants her family to be happy. “My lifes my own fault,” she recognizes. “But the world dont help.” Each of the adult characters delivers a soliloquy, called a “confession,” regarding their connection, primary sexual, to Hester, seeing her first and foremost as a sexual object, not as a person with very real problems. “Do not for a moment think I am one of those people haters who does not understand who does not experience — compassion,” the Doctor says. The Welfare Lady explains, “I walk the line / between us and them / between our kind and their kind. / the balance of the system depends on a well-drawn boundary line / and all parties respecting that boundary.” And the Reverend D. admits, “Suffering is an enormous turn-on.” In the Blood, which also features choreography by Annie-B Parson and movement by Elizabeth Streb, is a riveting, deeply intelligent and powerful parable that takes place in the “here” and “now,” marking it as a timeless work about institutionalized social ills that don’t look to be going away any time soon. (Parks will be playing with her band, guitarist Christian Konopka and percussionist Julian Rozzell, on October 7 at 4:15 and 6:30 at the Signature Café + Bar; admission is free and open to the public. There will also be a talkback with members of the cast and crew following the October 5 performance of In the Blood.)

BAM NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL: THE PRINCIPLES OF UNCERTAINTY

Maira Kalman looks on as her online graphic diary is brought to life at the BAM Fisher (photo by Rebecca Greenfield)

BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
September 27-30, $25
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

The audience at the BAM Fisher isn’t the only one smiling throughout The Principles of Uncertainty, the lovely multimedia collaboration between choreographer John Heginbotham and author-illustrator Maira Kalman; the musicians and dancers seem to be having just as much fun, if not more. Based on Kalman’s 2006-7 online graphic diary, the hour-long dance-theater piece is infectiously gleeful from start to finish. The sixty-eight-year-old Kalman is onstage the entire show, reciting text, calmly watching from the back, and, yes, dancing with Lindsey Jones, John Eirich, Courtney Lopes, Weaver Rhodes, Amber Star Merkens, and Macy Sullivan (several of whom are from Dance Heginbotham). The baroque and carnivalesque songs are played by music director Colin Jacobsen on violin and viola, Caitlyn Sullivan on cello, Nathan Koci on accordion, and Alex Sopp on flute and vocals. The lively staging puts Kalman in a large movable box, where she’s joined by assistant director Daniel Pettrow for some literary surprises and acerbic comedy; meanwhile, Todd Bryant projects (not enough of) Kalman’s words and drawings on a back wall, and a classical framed painting lies on the floor. (Kalman also designed the set and the costumes.) Heginbotham’s choreography includes repeated pairings: dancers’ foreheads rest against each other, and gentle fists press against knuckles and palms. The set is reconfigured — nearly everything is on wheels — while Nicole Pearce has a ball with different colored lights, and the band, members of the chamber ensemble the Knights, plays works by Bach, Villa-Lobos, Schubert, Beethoven, and Mexican ranchera king José Alfredo Jiménez. “John and I are trying to make something that feels like nothing,” Kalman writes in the program. “Well, not nothing, of course, but the kind of nothing that is full of the sad sweet funny uncertain life we lead.” As an added touch, each seat is covered by a two-sided cloth printed with words from the serious to the silly, the practical to the mundane. But there is nothing mundane about The Principles of Uncertainty, which indeed is a unique look at “the sad sweet funny uncertain life we lead.”

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE

Hunky version of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange is now playing at New World Stages (photo by Caitlin McNaney)

New World Stages
340 West 59th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Wednesday – Monday through January 6, $59-$99
www.aclockworkorangeplay.com
newworldstages.com

Director Alexandra Spencer-Jones reimagines the stage version of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange as an energetic, hyperstylized gay fantasia with a cast of muscle boys but never quite achieves the rhythm that made the 1962 novel and Stanley Kubrick’s controversial 1971 film so involving. The London hit, which opened last night at New World Stages, features an all-male cast led by Jonno Davies as Alex deLarge, a juvenile delinquent who enjoys the old ultraviolence while defying all forms of authority. Alex speaks in Nadsat, Burgess’s brilliant invention, a subversive teen slang drawn from both Russian and English, but Davies’s delivery is more aggressive than poetic and is too often difficult to understand. Upon encountering one of his enemies, rival gang leader Billy Boy (Jimmy Brooks), Alex says, “Well, if it isn’t fat stinking billy bob Billy Boy in poison. How art thou, thou globby bottle of cheap grazzy chip oil? Come and get one in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles, you eunuch jelly, thou!” When Alex decides to make himself leader of his Droogs, Georgie (Matt Doyle), Dim (Sean Patrick Higgins), and Pete (Misha Osherovich) are none too happy and ultimately leave him to be caught by the police after a particularly vicious attack on an old woman (Ashley Robinson). In prison, Alex, known by his number, 6655321, volunteers for an experimental procedure, the Ludovico Technique, run by Dr. Brodsky (Brian Lee Huynh), who is attempting to erase the impulse to do evil from the minds of criminals (perhaps evoking gay conversion therapy). The Chaplain (Timothy Sekk) warns Alex, “When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man. . . . Is a man who chooses to be bad in some ways better than a man who is forced to be good?” But Alex decides that freedom is worth any cost.

Jonno Davies struts his stuff as Alex in A Clockwork Orange (photo by Caitlin McNaney)

While Davies portrays only Alex, the other eight actors play nearly three dozen roles, with Sekk standing out as the concerned Chaplain and the wonderfully smug Mr. Deltoid, Alex’s probation officer, who deliciously exaggerates certain words and isn’t afraid to tell Alex what he thinks of him, calling him “Villainy Incarnate. . . . Original Sin prowling the town.” The relatively spare set, which features three rows of seats on either side for audience members, is dark and black, with an occasional table brought to the center, a raised platform, and some oranges and glasses of milk on the back wall. The transitions between scenes and episodes of violence and rape are performed like 1980s dance videos, complete with cinematic slow motion; the soundtrack consists of original pulsating music by Glenn Gregory and Berenice Scott that incorporates Alex’s beloved Ludwig van and Rossini’s “The Thieving Magpie” alongside such club anthems as Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax.” You might suddenly think you’re at a rather hot Pride party as Jennifer A. Jacob’s mostly black-and-white costumes come off and on the hunky dudes. The show also includes the much-debated twenty-first chapter of Burgess’s book — which was not available in America until 1986 and was not used by Kubrick in his Oscar-nominated film because of how it resolved Alex’s story — and it brings things to a confusing halt in the play, making us wonder what it was all about. Spencer-Jones (Dracula, Gobsmacked!) seems so intent on dazzling us with the hot dancing that Burgess’s message about adolescence and maturity, religion, government control, and behaviorism gets lost. But there are still lots of oohs and aahs from the crowd when the actors really let loose and get down and dirty.

THE PRINCIPLES OF UNCERTAINTY

John Heginbotham and Maira Kalman collaborate on the multimedia The Principles of Uncertainty at BAM this week (photo by Adrienne Bryant)

BAM NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL
BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
September 27-30, $25
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

“How can I tell you everything that is in my heart. Impossible to begin. Enough. No. Begin. With the hapless dodo,” Maira Kalman writes at the start of her 2006-7 online graphic diary, The Principles of Uncertainty, which ran on the New York Times website. The diary was later published in book form, with such chapters as “Sorry, the Rest Unkown,” “Celestial Harmony,” “Ich Habe Genug,” and “Completely.” Kalman, the author and/or illustrator of such other books as My Favorite Things, Looking at Lincoln, and Beloved Dog has also designed sets and costumes for the Mark Morris Dance Group, delivered a popular TED talk in 2007, and was the subject of a major retrospective at the Jewish Museum in 2011. The New York City–based Tel Aviv native will take the stage at BAM this week for the sixty-minute dance-theater piece The Principles of Uncertainty, a live staging of her blog in collaboration with choreographer John Heginbotham in which she will perform with Dance Heginbotham, which is celebrating its fifth anniversary this year. While Kalman sits in a box reflecting on her memories, dancers will move around the stage as members of the chamber ensemble the Knights play live music composed, curated, and arranged by Colin Jacobsen. The piece is directed and choreographed by Heginbotham, with illustrations, costumes, and set design by Kalman. In the catalog of the Jewish Museum exhibition, “Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World),” Kalman explains, “There is a strong personal narrative aspect of what I do. What happens in my life is interpreted in my work. There is very little separation. My work is my journal of my life.” This multidisciplinary collaboration at the BAM Fisher, which runs September 27-30, is merely the latest chapter of her intimate story, engaging with the public in yet another new way. (The September 28 performance will be followed by a Champagne toast and dessert reception on the Fisher Rooftop Terrace for those who purchase a $200 Celebration Ticket in conjunction with Dance Heginbotham’s fifth anniversary.)

CROSSING THE LINE — ANNIE DORSEN: THE GREAT OUTDOORS

Annie Dorsen transforms FIAF’s Florence Gould Hall into a planetarium in The Great Outdoors

French Institute Alliance Française
Florence Gould Hall, 55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
September 21-23, $35
Festival continues through October 15
212-355-6160
crossingthelinefestival.org
www.fiaf.org

Obie-winning, New York–based algorithmic performance artist Annie Dorsen often uses appropriated text in her pieces, drawing meaning out of an endless supply of information, logic, and language, and she’ll be doing so yet again in her latest work, The Great Outdoors, part of FIAF’s 2017 Crossing the Line Festival. She’s asked audiences to take the mic and recite snippets of famous and not-so-famous speeches in Spokaoke (CTL 2013), had actors use Shakespeare’s Hamlet as data in A Piece of Work (BAM Next Wave Festival 2013), and in Magical (Coil 2013) repurposed words and movement by Martha Rosler, Yoko Ono, Marina Abramović, and Carolee Schneeman, with the help of choreographer Anne Juren. In The Great Outdoors, Dorsen, who also cocreated and directed Passing Strange, transforms FIAF’s Florence Gould Hall into an inflatable planetarium, where every star is like a human being currently online, a countless number of seemingly anonymous blips seeking and supplying content and making connections, primarily commenting on reddit. Of course, the title is more than ironic, as so many people experience the great outdoors from the comfort of their computers at home. Kaija Matiss will read text taken live off the internet by programmers Marcel Schwittlick and Miles Thompson; Sébastien Roux does the sound and music, while the video programming is by Ryan Holsopple, who designed the starshow with Dorsen. Dorsen has been building a rather impressive resume; her collaborators have also included DD Dorviller (Pièce Sans Paroles), Questlove (Shuffle Culture), Stew (Passing Strange), Laura Kaplan and Jessye Norman (Ask Your Mama), and ETHEL (Truckstop). The Great Outdoors runs September 21-23; CTL continues through October 15 with such other presentations as Faustin Linyekula / Studios Kabako’s In Search of Dinozord, Nora Chipaumire’s #PUNK, and Alessandro Sciarroni’s UNTITLED_I will be there when you die.

OFF-BROADWAY WEEK 2017

Hester Smith (Christine Lahti) cries out at her continuing misfortune in Signature revival of Suzan-Lori Parks play (photo © 2017 Joan Marcus)

September 25 – October 8
Tickets 2-for-1 with code OBWF2017
www.nycgo.com

Broadway Week just concluded, offering tickets to most Broadway shows available for half price, and now it’s time for Off-Broadway Week to get in on the two-for-one deals as the fall season begins. Three dozen plays and musicals are participating, from the tried and true to the new and untested, with several highly anticipated works by major playwrights. We highly recommend both of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Red Letter Plays at the Signature, In the Blood and Fucking A, which take off from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, as well as Simon Stephens’s exquisite On the Shore of the Wide World at the Atlantic. There are such old mainstays as Stomp, Blue Man Group, Perfect Crime, Avenue Q, and Gazillion Bubble Show as well as such newcomers as A Clockwork Orange at New World Stages, MCC’s Charm at the Lucille Lortel, Brian Friel’s The Home Place at the Irish Rep, Anna Ziegler’s The Last Match at the Roundabout, Amy Herzog’s Mary Jane at New York Theatre Workshop, and Torch Song at Second Stage with Michael Urie.

RHINOCEROS

Café denizens can’t believe what they see in New Yiddish Rep adaptation of Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros (photo by Pedro Hernandez)

Castillo Theatre
543 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Thursday – Sunday through October 8, $45
212-941-1234
www.castillo.org
www.newyiddishrep.org

With the recent success of its productions of Death of a Salesman, Waiting for Godot, and God of Vengeance, the New Yiddish Rep’s world premiere of Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros in the rich, historical language promised a potential stampede. Unfortunately, Ionseco’s 1960 absurdist screed against the rise of Fascism creeps in more like a mouse in a surprisingly lackluster production. “Rhinoceros reminds me of the personal struggle of many of my current and former co-religionists who are trapped in their own skin,” translator and former Hasid Eli Rosen, who also stars as Jean, writes in a program note. He hopes the play “will penetrate the high walls of ghettos and sound the shofar of freedom to humans everywhere,” an apt metaphor as Rosh Hashanah and the Days of Awe approach, but the play falls well short of its admirable goals. Continuing at the Castillo Theatre through October 8, Rhinoceros takes place on director Moshe Yassur’s small, spare set, consisting of a few chairs and tables and walls from which further elements, such as a bed, emerge. The erudite Jean (Rosen) is waiting for Bérenger (Luzer Twersky) in a café run by a cheapskate proprietor (Amy Coleman) who regularly berates her waitress (Mira Kessler). Jean chastises Bérenger for his lack of dignity, decrying his penchant for alcohol, uncombed hair, and lack of a tie. But Berenger — Ionesco’s everyman who appears in several of his works — just wants to relax and take a break from what he considers his exhausting life. After a rhinoceros makes its way through the middle of town, the characters in the café — which also include the Logician (Alex Leyzer Burko), a housewife clutching her dear cat (Macha Fogel), the grocer (Sean Griffin), the grocer’s wife (Caraid O’Brien), a gentleman (Gera Sandler) with the hots for the housewife, and, eventually, Daisy (Malky Goldman), with whom Bérenger is smitten — start debating what they saw and what it means, even as the rhino, or perhaps a different one, marches back through town in the other direction. But when people begin actually turning into rhinos themselves, only Bérenger refuses to become part of the crash.

Jean (Eli Rosen) and Bérenger (Luzer Twersky) argue about logic, demeanor, and rhinos in Ionesco’s absurdist classic (photo by Pedro Hernandez)

In writing Rhinoceros, Romanian playwright Ionesco (Exit the King, The Chair) was inspired by the fascism that was building in Romania and across Eastern Europe in the 1930s. Rosen makes clear parallels to what is happening now in America, as antifa battles white supremacists and neo-Nazis and President Donald Trump shows dictatorial tendencies. Rosen even uses the phrase “fake news” when Botard (Burko) declares that the whole rhino story is a hoax, propaganda perpetrated by journalists and university elitists. “An example of collective psychosis,” he tells Dudard (Griffin), “just like religion — the opiate of the people!” However, the translation is too obvious in making connections to contemporary America, and the staging is static and uninvolving. What could have been intimate — the audience is seated on two sides of the catty-corner set — instead separates the two parts of the crowd and creates a distance from the actors, who are often only several feet away. The surtitles, projected on the two perpendicular walls, contain a handful of typos and sometimes can’t keep up with the spoken dialogue; in addition, when the actors spoke out of turn or missed a cue, it was hard to follow what was going on. The play has a long, distinguished history; Laurence Olivier and Joan Plowright starred in Orson Welles’s original London version, and Zero Mostel won a Tony as Jean in the 1961 Broadway edition, with Eli Wallach, Anne Jackson, and Jean Stapleton. (Mostel also starred with Gene Wilder and Karen Black in the 1974 film directed by Tom O’Horgan.) But it’s not a big-name cast that is missing from New Yiddish Rep’s version; in 2012, Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota and Théâtre de la Ville brought their wildly inventive take to BAM’s Next Wave Festival. Yassur a Romanian who has previously directed Ionesco’s Jacques, or the Submission; The Bald Soprano, and The Future Is in Eggs, never finds the right balance between absurdity and reality, getting caught in the middle, as if blinded by the dust of the stampeding animals.