this week in theater

NOT A SENSATION: THE WHO’S TOMMY / LEMPICKA

The Who’s Tommy is back on Broadway in a bewildering revival (photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)

THE WHO’S TOMMY
Nederlander Theatre
208 West Forty-First St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 21, $89.75-$319.50
tommythemusical.com

Watching Lempicka at the Longacre, where it just announced an early closing date of May 19 — it was scheduled to run until September 8 — I was struck by how similar it was to The Who’s Tommy, which is packing them in at the Nederlander.

Each show focuses on a unique title character — one a fictional “deaf, dumb, and blind kid” who has been part of global pop culture since 1969, when the Who’s rock opera was released, the other a far lesser known real Polish bisexual painter named Tamara Łempicka, who was born in Warsaw in 1898 and died in Mexico in 1980.

Both musicals were presented at La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego prior to opening on Broadway, both involve world wars and fighting fascism, both feature ridiculously over-the-top choreography, and both use empty frames as props that detract from the protagonist’s creative abilities. And as a bonus coincidence, Jack Nicholson, who portrayed the specialist in Ken Russell’s 1975 film adaptation of Tommy, is a collector of Lempicka’s work, having owned Young Ladies and La Belle Rafaela.

While there are elements to like in Lempicka, there is virtually nothing worth singing about in Tommy.

In his Esquire review, John Simon called Tommy “the most stupid, arrogant, and tasteless movie since Russell’s Mahler. To debate such a film seems impossible: anyone who can find merit in this deluge of noise and nausea has nothing to say to me, nor I to him.” Although I’m not as vitriolic as Simon, I felt similarly about the movie — and now about the current Broadway revival.

The Who’s double album is a masterpiece about a young boy who witnesses a violent death and loses the ability to see, hear, and speak. The record delves into Tommy’s mind as he is abused and harassed by relatives and strangers but finds surprising success at pinball. The loose narrative allows the listener to fill in the blanks by using their imagination.

That imaginative space was taken away by the bizarre film, but the original Broadway musical version from 1993, with music and lyrics by Pete Townshend of the Who and book by Townshend and director Des McAnuff, did an admirable job of bringing the somewhat convoluted tale to the stage, earning ten Tony nominations and winning five trophies, for director, choreographer, score, scenic design, and lighting. With McAnuff again directing, this iteration earned a solitary nod as Best Revival of a Musical, which is one too many.

Mrs. Walker (Alison Luff) tries to help her young son in The Who’s Tommy (photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)

It’s 1941, and Captain Walker (Adam Jacobs) goes off to war. His pregnant wife (Alison Luff) is devastated when the military arrives at her doorstep and tells her that her husband has been killed in action — even though he is actually in a prison camp. Four years later, Captain Walker returns home to find his wife has taken a new lover (Nathan Lucrezio); the men get into a scrap, and the captain shoots the lover dead. Four-year-old Tommy (Cecilia Ann Popp or Olive Ross-Kline) witnesses the scene, and his parents plead with him, “You didn’t hear it. / You didn’t see it. / You won’t say nothing to no one / Ever in your life.” The boy takes those words to heart.

As he grows up (played by Quinten Kusheba or Reese Levine at ten and Ali Louis Bourzgui as a teenager and adult), he is taken advantage of by his uncle Ernie (John Ambrosino) and cousin Kevin (Bobby Conte) while his mother and father try to cure him by taking him to a psychiatrist (Lily Kren), a specialist (Sheldon Henry), and a prostitute known as the Acid Queen (Christina Sajous). But he shows no interest in life — although he does spend a lot of time looking at himself in a large mirror — until he winds up at a pinball machine, where he proves to be a wizard and soon becomes a hero to millions, the modern-day equivalent of a YouTube gamer going viral. Nonetheless, that doesn’t mean everything is suddenly coming up roses for him.

McAnuff, choreographer Lorin Latarro, set designer David Korins, projection designer Peter Nigrini, costume designer Sarafina Bush, lighting designer Amanda Zieve, and sound designer Gareth Owen bombard the audience with so much nonsense that it is impossible to know what to look at or listen to at any given moment; it’s like the London Blitz has taken over the theater for 130 overcharged minutes (with intermission), complete with dancing uniformed fascists. The orchestrations by Steve Margoshes and Rick Fox are fine, but this has to be about much more than just the Who’s spectacular songs, too many of which tilt here. The barrage of empty frames and projected images might hurt your neck and give you a headache, while the vast amount of unnecessary movement and strange costume choices will have you bewildered, as will the decision to have no actual pinball machines onstage, just a pretend table.

Luff (Waitress, Les Misérables) and Jacobs (Aladdin, Les Misérables) avail themselves well amid the maelstrom, as do the younger Tommys, but Bourzgui, in his Broadway debut, fails to bring any nuance to the character, whether he is patrolling the stage following his younger selves or being chased by Sally Simpson (Haley Gustafson). He’s certainly no Roger Daltrey, on the record or in the film.

This hyperkinetic mess is no sensation, lacking emotional spark as it takes the audience on a less-than-amazing journey for which there appears to be no miracle cure.

Tamara de Lempicka (Eden Espinosa) examines her work in biographical Broadway musical (photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)

LEMPICKA
Longacre Theatre
220 West 48th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through May 19, $46-$269
lempickamusical.com

Many of the technical aspects of Lempicka are oddly similar to those of Tommy. Just as Tommy never plays an actual pinball machine, Tamara de Lempicka (Eden Espinosa) never actually paints; she often stands in front of an easel with no canvas, carefully moving a brush in her hand. Riccardo Hernández’s set is laden with empty frames much like those in Tommy. Paloma Young’s costumes for the fascists are overwrought, like Sarafina Bush’s in Tommy.

However, Bradley King’s lighting makes sense, playing off Lempicka’s Art Deco style and angular figuration, while Peter Nigrini’s projections provide necessary historical context and spectacular presentations of her work.

But the biggest difference is in the two leads. Espinosa gives a powerful, yearning performance as Lempicka, a woman caught between her traditional family — husband Tadeusz Lempicki (Andrew Samonsky) and daughter Kizette (Zoe Glick) — and her lover, Rafaela, beautifully portrayed by Amber Iman. (Rafaela is a conglomeration of Lempicka’s girlfriends rather than any one of her individual historical lovers.) She is also trapped by her desire to become an artist and go out clubbing at a time when women were expected to stay home and take care of the household.

The story is bookended by an older Lempicka sitting on a park bench in Los Angeles in 1975 with an easel; at the beginning, she recites a kind of mantra: “plane, lines, form. / plane, color, light.” A moment later, she sings, “Do you know who I am? . . . An old woman who doesn’t give a damn / that history has passed her by / History’s a bitch / but so am I / How did I wind up here?”

In 1916, during WWI, Lempicka marries lawyer Tadeusz, whose prominent family wanted him to wed a woman of higher status. (The book, by Carson Kreitzer and Matt Gould, plays fast and loose with some of the facts for dramatic purposes.) Tadeusz is arrested in the Bolshevik Revolution, and Lempicka goes to extreme lengths with a commandant (George Abud) to get him released. After losing everything, they start all over in Paris, where Tadeusz takes a job at a small bank and Lempicka mops floors. While he is obsessed with finding out what she did to get him freed, she explores her art, experiencing Paris’s nightlife and meeting Rafaela, a prostitute, at a lesbian club run by Suzy Solidor (Natalie Joy Johnson), who later opens the hot La Vie Parisienne.

Lempicka is energized by her new lifestyle, but her husband is growing suspicious — and jealous when, helped by the Baron Raoul Kuffner de Diószegh (Nathaniel Stampley), his wife (Beth Leavel), and Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (Abud), Lempicka’s art career starts taking off. “We do not control the world,” Marinetti tells Lempicka. “We control one flat rectangle of canvas.”

When using Kizette as a model, Lempicka can’t differentiate between art and life. Kizette pleads, “mama, look at me / mama, look at me / see me / keeping so still / while your eyes dart back and forth / me / the canvas / me / the canvas / me / me / mama, look at me.” But all Lempicka can offer is, “eyes, Paris blue . . . flecked Viridian green . . . my daughter / shape and volume / color and line.”

Rafaela (Amber Iman) creates a sensation in Lempicka (photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)

Lempicka garnered well-deserved Tony nominations for Espinosa (Rent, Wicked) for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Musical, Iman (Soul Doctor, Shuffle Along) for Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Musical, and Hernandez and Nigrini for Best Scenic Design of a Musical. In key supporting parts, Johnson (Kinky Boots, Legally Blonde) and Abut (Cornelia Street, The Visit) overdo it, while Glick (Unknown Soldier, The Bedwetter) is sweet as Kizette and Tony winner Leavel (The Drowsy Chaperone, Crazy for You) stands out as the Baroness, but both could use more to do.

Tony-winning director Rachel Chavkin (Hadestown, Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812) has too much going on, unable to get a firm grip on the action, while Raja Feather Kelly’s choreography brings too much attention to itself. Kreitzer’s music, with orchestrations by Cian McCarthy, meanders too much, often feeling out of place as the narrative changes locations and emotional depth, while Gould’s lyrics range from the absurd (“The Beautiful Bracelet,” a love song to a piece of jewelry; “Women,” in which the ensemble declares, “Suzy / You’ve made an Oasis / we live through the days / till we can be Here / Where Everything — and Nothing / is Queer”) to the obvious (“Pari Will Always Be Pari,” “The New Woman”) to the heartfelt (a pair of lovely duets between Espinosa and Samonsky on “Starting Over” and Iman and Samonsky on “What She Sees”).

“I can see the appeal,” Rafaela sings, and it is easy to see the appeal in a show about Tamara de Lempicka. Unfortunately, this one is not it.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

SYMPHONY OF RATS

The Wooster Group revisits Richard Foreman’s avant-garde Symphony of Rats (photos © Spencer Ostrander)

SYMPHONY OF RATS
The Wooster Group
The Performing Garage
33 Wooster St. between Grand & Broome Sts.
Through May 9, $20 rush tickets, $35 in advance, 7:30
thewoostergroup.org

In 1988, the Wooster Group staged Richard Foreman’s Symphony of Rats, written, directed, and designed by Foreman, the treasured avant-garde playwright and founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater. In 2022, the company asked Foreman if it could present a new adaptation. Foreman responded, “You can do whatever you want! I hope it’s completely unrecognizable.”

Mission accomplished.

The 2024 iteration of Symphony of Rats is a hallucinatory journey into outer and inner space that begins with a fever dream in which Ari Fliakos offers, “Symphony of Rats is about the President of the United States as someone no different from the rest of us: a mixed-up, stupid, fallible person bounced back and forth by forces outside his control. The President is receiving messages by means other than the known senses, and he doesn’t know whether to trust them or not, just as we all receive messages . . . from our unconscious, . . . or God, . . . or the media, . . . or our past experience . . . , and often don’t know . . . whether to validate them by paying attention to them and acting upon them, or to dismiss them as . . . irrational impulses we hope will pass.”

It’s a necessary prelude, as everything that follows, under the precise direction of Elizabeth LeCompte and Kate Valk (who appeared in the 1988 original), is beautiful madness.

Ari Fliakos and Jim Fletcher star in Symphony of Rats at the Performing Garage (photo © Spencer Ostrander)

Fliakos plays the President, who sits in a wheelchair commode at a pair of tables at the front of the set. To his left is Guillermo Resto, who makes deep-voiced declarations through a basketball hoop on its side. To his right are Niall Cunningham, Andrew Maillet (who provides additional sound and video), and assistant director and stage manager Michaela Murphy, fiddling on laptops. Jim Fletcher moves around the stage, portraying a doctor, a scientist, a gnarly rat, and other characters.

LeCompte’s set also includes blackboards, clotheslines on which cardboard is pushed and pulled, an old easel, a narrow column with a basketball on top, a changing scenic backdrop, and projections of an adorable circular digital being who climbs up and down a pole and goes for a walk in its stick-figure-like body.

Over the course of eighty wildly unpredictable minutes, the actors break out into new tunes by Suzzy Roche (“The Door Song,” “The Human Feelings Song,” “The Ice Cream Song”), study an impressive fecal log that comes out of the President, debate going to the chaotic Tornadoville, contemplate ingesting a magic lozenge, discuss evolution and children’s books, recite William Blake’s “Tyger Tyger,” and watch clips from Ken Russell’s 1969 cinematic adaptation of D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love and Steve Beck’s 2002 horror film Ghost Ship. There’s an MST3K aspect to the whole show, which features sound and music by Eric Sluyter, video by Yudam Hyung Seok Jeon, lighting by Jennifer Tipton and Evan Anderson, phantasmic costumes by Antonia Belt, and dramaturgy by Matthew Dipple. Tavish Miller’s technical direction is a marvel as complex audiovisual elements pop up everywhere.

Although you should not be obsessed with figuring out the details of what constitute the plot, there are references to the President’s mental well-being, world hunger, sleeping leaders, and environmental catastrophe, evoking the current sad state of the planet. There’s also a scene in which the President juggles the globe à la Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator.

“Trust me, trust me. It’s so much fun to be inarticulate, Mr. President. Trust me. It really is so much fun,” Jim advises. Later, the President admits, “I think I’m losing my mind.”

Everything in Symphony of Rats might not be immediately recognizable, but it is most certainly not inarticulate, providing provocative fun as only the Wooster Group can.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

“OH, MARY!”

President Abraham Lincoln (Conrad Ricamora) and First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln (Cole Escola) have a rare pause in “Oh, Mary!” (photo © Emilio Madrid)

“OH, MARY!”
Lucille Lortel Theatre
121 Christopher St. between Bleecker & Hudson Sts.
Through May 12; moves to Lyceum Theatre June 26 – June 28, $49-$298
www.ohmaryplay.com

Cole Escola’s “Oh, Mary!” is the funniest, most outrageous show I’ve seen this season. I was finally able to catch it after several extensions at the Lucille Lortel — and now it’s on its way to Broadway, opening June 26 at the Lyceum. Nearly a week after seeing it, I’m still laughing about it.

In the eighty-minute farce, Escola plays the desperately unhappy Mary Todd Lincoln. It’s nearing the end of the Civil War, and President Abraham Lincoln (Conrad Ricamora) has had enough of the first lady, who has a fondness for booze; he’d rather spend private time with one of his young officers, Simon (Tony Macht). Mary wants to return to her previous career in cabaret, much to Abe’s displeasure, so he tells Mary’s chaperone, Louise (Bianca Leigh), to come up with other activities to keep Mary busy — and away from him. Abe himself suggests that Mary study acting, which he considers a far more respectable profession than cabaret, hiring a teacher (James Scully) who will change the course of the couple’s life.

Escola mines every line for hilarity while director Sam Pinkleton, who is primarily a choreographer, never misses an opportunity for physical comedy gold. Lincoln is not a brave, thoughtful leader but a complaining buffoon. “God, we’re screwed! We might as well surrender and kill ourselves now!” he tells Simon when the outcome of the war is still in doubt. When Simon advises they should meet with General Burnside, Honest Abe admits, “Let’s go. After dealing with my foul and hateful wife all morning, a little war might be a breath of fresh air.” Later, when Abe is looking to blow off more steam, Simon says that would make him very happy too. Abe asks Simon, “Would it? Would it put a big smile on your face to see me release everything I’ve got pent up?” Simon responds, “Of course. I want you to take it easy, sir.” To which Abe adds, “Oh, I’ll take it easy. And you’ll take it hard.”

Escola gleefully gobbles up the scenery as Mary appears in a drunken stupor, jumps on her husband’s desk, and gets oh-so-close to her daring acting teacher. She’s not exactly the most on-the-ball of first ladies. Each time the president mentions the North and the South, Mary asks, “The south of what?” Quoting Shakespeare, she recites to her teacher, “To be or not to be, that is a great question.” Excited to learn about subtext, she attempts to impress her teacher by explaining, “Well, a character might say, ‘Chicken tummy time’ when what they really mean is, ‘I’m hungry,’ only it doesn’t come out quite right because they’re inbred. Is that subtext?”

Mary Todd Lincoln (Cole Escola) is in search of alcohol and more in “Oh, Mary!” (photo © Emilio Madrid)

While some of the subtext is completely made up, some is based on fact or the gossip of the time. It has long been rumored that Lincoln might have had a thing for Union officer and law clerk Elmer E. Ellsworth, which was explored in Roger Q. Mason’s 2022 streaming play, Lavender Men. Mary did have a difficult life, losing three children and suffering from mental illness that Dr. John Sotos diagnosed in his 2016 nonfiction The Mary Lincoln Mind-Body Sourcebook as the effects of pernicious anemia, but she also was well educated, spoke French fluently, and had studied dance, music, and the social graces. Escola never merely makes fun of her but instead celebrates her with nonstop hilarity.

The set by dots is true-blue and unpretentious, from Lincoln’s White House office, complete with a portrait of George Washington looking down on the absurd proceedings, to a wood-paneled saloon. Holly Pierson’s period costumes are right on point, highlighted by Mary’s full-skirted black gown, as are Leah Loukas’s wigs, particularly Mary’s pigtails and Abe’s black hair and full beard. Cha See keeps it all well lit, with fun music by Daniel Kluger, who designed the sound with Drew Levy.

Escola, who scored with the online pandemic comedy special Help! I’m Stuck!, is magnificent as Mary, fully embodying her as they have a blast with her foibles while also honoring what she went through. It’s an unforgettable breakthrough performance by a writer-actor with a bright future. Ricamora (Here Lies Love, The King and I) is simply fabulous as more than just Escola’s, er, straight man, giving Honest Abe some surprise edges. Scully (The Erlkings), Leigh (The Nap, Transamerica), and Macht (The Alcestiad) all excel in their supporting roles.

The title of the show refers to the prayer to the Virgin Mary seeking protection from sin, but it also is a twist on the catchphrases Mary Tyler Moore’s character often said to her husband, “Oh, Rob,” and her boss, “Oh, Mr. Grant,” on The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, respectively; Moore changed television as a successful actress, singer, dancer, and producer, so Escola reverses the dynamic, seeing Moore as a kind of role model for Mary Todd Lincoln in a time warp.

The tongue-in-cheek lunacy even extends to the two-sided program card, which is styled like the one for Our American Cousin, the play Abe and Mary were watching at Ford’s Theatre when he was assassinated.

But the play gets serious as well. At one point, Mary asks her teacher if he has ever had a great day. She clarifies, “I mean a truly great day. The kind of day so great it imbues every single sad or boring or terrible day that came before it with deep meaning because from where you stand on this great day, all those days were secretly leading to this one. And you stand there, high on the hilltop of this great day, watching the sun set on your past, and it all looks so beautiful and so perfect and you think, ‘if only I could stay here, where I can see everything so clearly, where all of my hopes feel rewarded and all of my pain finally makes sense.’ But you can’t stay there. You have to come down the hill and walk into tomorrow and it becomes so clear that the sad days and the boring and the terrible days aren’t secretly leading anywhere.”

Any day that includes “Oh, Mary!” is a great day; we might not be able to stay there, but we can keep on laughing as we come down that hill and walk into tomorrow.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

ORLANDO

Taylor Mac stars as the title character in Sarah Ruhl’s Orlando at the Signature (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

ORLANDO
The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Irene Diamond Stage
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday-Sunday through May 12, $45-$119
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

Will Davis’s Signature revival of Sarah Ruhl’s Orlando starring Taylor Mac was one of the most hotly anticipated off-Broadway shows of the season. Sadly, it turns out to be one of the most disappointing.

In 1927, Virginia Woolf, struck by sudden inspiration, wrote Orlando: A Biography, a story about a person who wakes up one morning a different gender and experiences life over five hundred years; it was based on Woolf’s relationship with her friend and lover, author and garden designer Vita Sackville-West. “I have written this book quicker than any; & it is all a joke; & yet gay & quick reading I think; a writer’s holiday,” Woolf noted in a letter.

In 1998, Ruhl, just out of Brown University, was asked to write a theatrical adaptation of the novel, which had been made into a film in 1992 written and directed by Sally Potter and featuring Tilda Swinton in the title role. In a burst of enthusiasm, Ruhl wrote the first draft “aided by the intrepid speed of youth,” she explains in a program note to this new production.

Perhaps everyone needed to slow down when it came to this fussy revival.

The trouble begins with Arnulfo Maldonado’s sparse set, which is far too large, the actors lost in the vast space, eliminating any sense of intimacy with the audience. There are several black umbrella lights onstage, as if the cast is in a photography studio, voguing for unseen cameras. Various props, from a long table to a royal throne to miniature trees and houses, appear and disappear, often confusingly, as when the houses are left in the back. Oana Botez’s clownish costumes are way over the top and the cast, aside from Mac — Janice Amaya, Nathan Lee Graham, Lisa Kron, Jo Lampert, Rad Pereira, and TL Thompson — is inconsistent, some actors bland, others downright annoying as they portray multiple characters. The hundred-minute play also doesn’t benefit from having an intermission to separate the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from the eighteenth to twentieth; not all audience members returned after the break to what was already far from a full house.

The unsteady narrative goes back and forth between the characters engaging in dialogue and speaking in the third person directly to the audience. The break comes after the following exchange, which more than hints at the current controversy over gender identity:

Chorus: We have no choice but to confess . . . he was a woman.
Chorus: No human being, since the world began, has ever looked more ravishing.
Their form combined in one the strength of a man and a woman’s grace.
Chorus: And here we pause. Orlando had become a woman — there is no denying it.
Chorus: But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as they had been.
Chorus: The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity. Their faces remained, as their portraits prove, practically the same.
Chorus: Many people have been at pains to prove, first, that Orlando had always been a woman, and secondly, that Orlando is at this moment a man.
Chorus: Let biologists and psychologists argue.
Chorus: It is enough for us to state the simple fact:
Chorus: Orlando was a man till the age of thirty, when she became a woman and has remained so ever since.
Orlando: I want to go home. To England.

A clownish cast of characters is part of disappointing revival (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Over the course of half a millennia, Orlando falls in and out of love, is harassed, meets Shakespeare, and tries their hand at poetry. Orlando also discovers the societal shortcomings of being a woman. “How odd! When I was a young man, I insisted that women be obedient, chaste, and scented. Now I shall have to pay in my own person for those desires. For women are not — ” Orlando gets cut off, then continues, “obedient, chaste, and scented by nature. They can only attain these graces by tedious discipline. There’s the hairdressing . . . that alone will take at least an hour of my morning . . . there’s looking in the looking glass . . . there’s being chaste year in and year out. . . . Christ Jesus! When I set foot on English soil, I shall never be able to crack a man over the head, or draw my sword and run him through the body, or lead an army . . . All I can do is to pour out tea and ask my lords how they like it.”

Orlando also discovers that despite now being a woman, they are still in love with Sasha, a Russian princess, while beginning to feel the effects of gender discrimination. Orlando soon learns, “One: That you are dead, and therefore cannot hold any property whatsoever. Two: That you are a woman, which amounts to much the same thing.”

Ruhl (Letters from Max, a ritual; The Oldest Boy; Pulitzer finalist In the Next Room, or the vibrator play) and Davis (India Pale Ale, Men on Boats) make those points over and over again as scenes go on too long and some of the play’s unique visuals are repeated until tiresome. Too often it’s like we’re watching an episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race mixed with a dose of Forrest Gump instead of a meaningful and funny historical drama dealing with gender inequality, sexual orientation, power, and love. Even the endlessly inventive Mac (A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, Bark of Millions) is unable to lift the show.

Woolf’s book might have been ahead of its time, but this production, coming almost one hundred years after the novel, feels dated, stale, and out of place, already past its prime.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

RACE AND GENDER DISCRIMINATION ONSTAGE: JORDANS / SALLY & TOM / SUFFS

Naomi Lorrain and Toby Onwumere both play characters named Jordan in Ife Olujobi’s new play at the Public (photo by Joan Marcus)

JORDANS
LuEsther Hall, the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. at Astor Pl.
Tuesday – Sunday through May 19, $65-$170
publictheater.org

“A reckoning is coming and the likes of you will be crushed by the likes of me!” the enslaved James tells his owner, Thomas Jefferson, in Sally & Tom, one of three current shows with ties to the Public Theater that deal with race and gender discrimination — and a coming reckoning.

At the Public’s LuEsther Hall, Ife Olujobi’s Jordans is set at a modern-day photo studio called Atlas, where some heavy lifting has to be done. The small company is run by the white, domineering Hailey (Kate Walsh), whose staff consists of the white Emma (Brontë England-Nelson), Fletcher (Brian Muller), Tyler (Matthew Russell), Ryan (Ryan Spahn), and Maggie (Meg Steedle) as well as a Black woman named Jordan (Naomi Lorrain), who they all treat, well, like an enslaved woman. While the others bandy about ridiculous ideas regarding Atlas’s future, Jordan has coffee purposefully spilled on her, is told to clean up vomit and human waste, gets garbage thrown at her, and is essentially ignored when she’s not being harassed.

When a photographer (Spahn) is snapping pictures during a photo shoot, he calls out to the model (England-Nelson), “Tell me, who is this woman? What does she want?” It’s a question no one asks Jordan.

Concerned that the company is becoming “vibeless” because their personnel lacks diversity, Hailey hires a Black man also named Jordan (Toby Onwumere) as their first director of culture. When 1.Jordan, as he’s referred to in the script, arrives for his first day, he asks Jordan, “What’s a brotha need to know?” And she tells him: “Well . . . the way I see it is, I work in an office owned by an evil succubus, staffed by little L-train demons, and I spend all day trying not to fall into their death traps. Sometimes it feels kinda like a video game: me running around, dodging flying objects, trying to save my lives for future battles. But then I remember this is my actual life, and I only have one. So.”

Hailey enters and runs her hands over 1.Jordan’s body as if she were evaluating a slave she has just purchased. Maggie demands to know where he is from — and she does not mean where he was born and raised, which happens to be in America. Fletcher, Emma, Tyler, and Ryan bombard him with questions about why his father was not around and was such a deadbeat. The stereotypes keep coming, but 1.Jordan stands firm, even as Hailey asserts to him when they are alone, “I am the owner of this studio.” He has been hired to be the (Black)face of the company and to do whatever he is told. Did I mention that 1.Jordan’s last name is Savage?

Outside the office, the two Jordans disagree on how to “play the game.” Jordan advises 1.Jordan to keep his head down, follow the rules, and not to show off his accomplishments. “You have to let them think that they own you,” she says. But 1.Jordan is determined to be a success on his terms, not theirs, arguing, “I want the freedom to do what I want without having to beg.”

Soon the Jordans become interchangeable, their roles and responsibilities merging and veering off in strange ways, each seeing the white world they inhabit from a new viewpoint. “Who are you?” Jordan asks. 1.Jordan replies, “Who am I?!” Meanwhile, the racist clichés ramp up even more.

Ife Olujobi’s Jordans is set at a modern-day branding studio (photo by Joan Marcus)

In her 2021 pandemic book No Play, in which Olujobi interviewed hundreds of theater people about the state of the industry as impacted by current events — I was among the participants — she asks in the chapter “the end of all things as we understand them”: “In the context of the racial and social justice movements reinvigorated by last year’s uprisings in response to the police killings of Black people, and in the simplest and most literal terms possible, what does ‘doing the work’ mean to you?”

Jordans — the title instantly makes one think of Michael Jordan’s heavily marketed and branded sneakers — is about doing the work, no matter your race or gender. Olujobi, in her first off-Broadway play, and director Whitney White (Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, On Sugarland) don’t back away from harsh language and brutal situations to make their points about where we have to go as a nation, when to take action, and when to sit back and listen. At a talkback after Donja R. Love’s Soft in 2022, White, who directed the show, told the audience that white people were not allowed to take part in the discussion. It was a sobering experience that has remained with me.

Lorrain (Daphne, La Race) and Onwumere (Macbeth, The Liar) are superb as the two Jordans, who get under each other’s skin both literally and figuratively. In an intimate and potent sex scene, only Lorrain’s vulva is exposed, not for titillation, but to declare that power and success do not require a penis. Walsh (If I Forget, Dusk Rings a Bell) excels as Hailey, who represents white leaders of all kinds.

The narrative has a series of confusing moments, and it’s too long at 140 minutes (with intermission); the scene with influencer Kyle Price (Russell) feels particularly extraneous, draining the story of its thrust. But the finale makes a powerful statement that won’t be easy to forget.

Sally Hemings (Sheria Irving) and Thomas Jefferson (Gabriel Ebert) pause at a dance in Suzan-Lori Parks’s new play at the Public (photo by Joan Marcus)

SALLY & TOM
Martinson Hall, the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. at Astor Pl.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 2, $65-$170
publictheater.org

Pulitzer Prize winner Suzan-Lori Parks pulls no punches in her sharp and clever Sally & Tom, continuing at the Public’s Martinson Hall through June 2. It’s a meta-tale about different kinds of enslavement, from the start of America to the present day.

An independent, diverse theater troupe called Good Company is rehearsing its latest socially conscious play, The Pursuit of Happiness, the follow-up to Patriarchy on Parade and Listen Up, Whitey, Cause It’s All Your Fault. It’s set in Monticello, Virginia, in 1790, at the plantation home of Thomas Jefferson, who is in the midst of a sexual “relationship” with Sally Hemings, one of his slaves; he first started having sex with her when she was fourteen and he was forty-four. The show-within-the-show is written by Luce (Sheria Irving), a Black woman who plays Sally; her partner, the white Mike (Gabriel Ebert), is the director and portrays Tom. Dramaturg and choreographer Ginger (Kate Nowlin) is Patsy, one of Tom’s daughters; stage manager and dance captain Scout (Sun Mee Chomet) is Polly, Tom’s other daughter; publicist and fight director Maggie (Kristolyn Lloyd) is Mary, Sally’s sister; music, sound, and lighting designer Devon (Leland Fowler) is Nathan, Mary’s husband; Kwame (Alano Miller), who is looking to break out into film, is James, Sally’s older brother; and set and costume designer Geoff (Daniel Petzold) plays multiple small roles.

The opening scene between Sally and Tom sets the stage.

Tom: Miss Hemings?
Sally: Mr. Jefferson?
Tom: What do you see?
Sally: I see the future, Mr. Jefferson.
Tom: And it’s a fine future, is it not?
Sally: God willing, Mr. Jefferson.
Tom: Do you think we will make it?
Sally: Meaning you and I?
Tom: Meaning you and I, of course, and, meaning our entire Nation as well. Do you think we’ll make it?
Sally: God willing, Mr. Jefferson. God and Man willing. And Woman too.

While Tom is keeping his relationship with Sally secret, Mike and Luce do not hide theirs, although Luce is suspicious of Mike’s ex. Art imitates life as what happens in the play is mimicked by what is occurring to the company members. When Luce points out, “This is not a love story,” she might be talking about not only Sally and Tom but her and Mike. When unseen producer Teddy demands that a key speech by Kwame, aka K-Dubb, be cut and threatens to pull his funding, the company has some important decisions to make that evoke choices that Sally and Tom are facing. Jefferson admits to owning six hundred enslaved people, including Sally and her family, while Luce declares, “Teddy don’t own me.” And just as the company was depending on the money promised by Teddy, Sally and James are quick to prod Tom of his vow to eventually free them. “We build our castle on a foundation of your promises,” Sally tells Tom.

“Handing me a book while you keep me on a leash,” James says to Tom. “Do you want me to remind myself of how kind you are? Kinder than other Masters, hoping that I will rejoice every day that you keep me enslaved? Let me proclaim my Liberty: You are not on the Throne! I stand with all Enslaved People who rise up and revolt! I say ‘Yes’ to the Revolutions that explode and that will continue to explode all over this country. I condemn the ‘breeding farms’ not more than a day’s ride from here. I acknowledge all the Horrors and the Revolutions that you dare not think on, and that we dare not speak of in your presence. What would we do if we were to wake up out of our ‘tranquility’? The wrongs done upon us would be avenged. And the world order would be upended!”

As Tom decides whether he should go to New York City at the behest of the president and who he will bring with him, Luce and Mike have to reconsider the future of the play, and their partnership.

Sally & Tom is about a small theater company putting on historical drama (photo by Joan Marcus)

Presented in association with the Guthrie Theater, Sally & Tom might not be top-shelf Parks — that illustrious group includes Topdog/Underdog, Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3), In the Blood and Fucking A, and Porgy and Bess — but it’s yet another splendidly conceived work from one of America’s finest playwrights. Parks and director Steve H. Broadnax III (Sunset Baby, The Hot Wing King) breathe new life into a familiar topic, which has previously been explored in film and opera as well as television, music, and literature.

Irving (Romeo and Juliet, Parks’s White Noise) and Tony winner Ebert (Matilda, Pass Over) are terrific as the real couple from the past and the fictional contemporary characters, their lives becoming practically interchangeable on Riccardo Hernández’s set, which contains Monticello-style pillars, the actors dressed in Rodrigo Muñoz’s period costumes. The score was written by Parks with Dan Moses Schreier; Parks, an accomplished musician, composed and played the songs for her intimate 2022–23 Plays for the Plague Year, and on April 29 she appeared at Joe’s Pub with her band, Sula & the Joyful Noise.

“You will be ashamed that you were proud to father a country where some are free and others are enslaved! Where some have plenty and others only have the dream of plenty!” Kwame proclaims to Tom. “All them pretty words you write, Mr. Jefferson, they’re all lies! You’ll soon be ashamed by the lies that this country was built on, Mr. Jefferson! Ashamed by the lies on which we were founded, and on which we were fed, and on which we grew fat!”

As Jordans and Sally & Tom reveal, those lies are still with us, more than two hundred and thirty years later.

Shaina Taub wrote the book, music, and lyrics and stars in Suffs on Broadway (photo by Joan Marcus)

SUFFS
Music Box Theatre
239 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Wednesday – Sunday through January 5, $69 – $279
suffsmusical.com

The reckoning forges ahead at Suffs, Shaina Taub’s hit musical that began at the Public’s Newman Theater in 2022 and has now transferred to the Music Box on Broadway in a rearranged and improved version.

Most Americans are familiar with such names as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, but Taub focuses on the next generation of women who fought for the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in the second decade of the twentieth century: Alice Paul (Taub), Inez Milholland (Hannah Cruz), Doris Stevens (Nadia Dandashi), Lucy Burns (Ally Bonino), and Ruza Wenclawska (Kim Blanck).

The musical focuses on generational conflict and disagreements about strategy that have characterized all sorts of progressive movements in the United States; an older, more sedate crowd wants to work within the system, while young radicals want to bust it open with outright aggression.

In Suffs, the youngsters decide to take on the powerful National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), led by Carrie Chapman Catt (Jenn Colella) and Mollie Hay (Jaygee Macapugay), a group that does not want to ruffle any feathers. While Carrie sings, “Let mother vote / We raised you after all / Won’t you thank the lady you have loved since you were small? / We reared you, cheered you, helped you when you fell / With your blessing, we could help America as well,” Alice declares, “I don’t want to have to compromise / I don’t want to have to beg for crumbs / from a country that doesn’t care what I say / I don’t want to follow in old footsteps / I don’t want to be a meek little pawn in the games they play / I want to march in the street / I want to hold up a sign / with millions of women with passion like mine / I want to shout it out loud / in the wide open light.”

While Carrie is content to set up pleasant meetings with President Woodrow Wilson (Grace McLean) that are either nonproductive or canceled, Alice has no patience, demanding that action happen immediately. After seeing Ruza give a rousing speech at a workers rally, Alice asks her to join their movement. “Look, I want no part of your polite little suffragette parlor games,” Ruza says. Alice responds, “Well, that’s perfect, because when we take on a tyrant, we burn him down.”

One of the most troubling aspect of the fight for twentieth-century women’s suffrage is its relationship with Black-led racial justice and civil rights movements. Suffs does not ignore the issue and instead makes it a major plot point. When Black journalist and activist Ida B. Wells’s (Nikki M. James) offers to bring her group to join the march, Alice initially rejects her, fearing that southern white donors will pull their funding, but Ida won’t take no for an answer.

“I’m not only here for the march,” Ida tells Alice and the others. “My club has also come to agitate for laws against lynching; my people cannot vote if they are hanging from trees.” She also proclaims in the showstopper “Wait My Turn”: “You want me to wait my turn? / To simply put my sex before my race / Oh! Why don’t I leave my skin at home and powder up my face? / Guess who always waits her turn? / Who always ends up in the back? / Us lucky ones born both female and black.”

Despite the march’s surprising success, the suffragists still have their work cut out for them if they are going to convince the powers that be that women deserve the right to vote.

Inez Milholland (Hannah Cruz) leads the charge for women’s right to vote in Suffs (photo by Joan Marcus)

Taub’s (Twelfth Night, As You Like It) lively score, with wonderful orchestrations by Michael Starobin, and sharp lyrics keep the show moving at a fast pace, matching Alice’s determination to break down political malaise by getting things done ASAP. Tony nominee Leigh Silverman (Merry Me, Grand Horizons) directs with a stately hand that never lets the energy slow down.

Taub fully embodies Alice, a fierce, driven fighter you would want on your side no matter the issue. Tony nominee Colella (Come from Away, Urban Cowboy) is a terrific foil as Carrie; their battles are reminiscent of those between Gloria Steinem and Phyllis Schlafly over the ERA in the 1970s — which Alice also was a part of. Tony winner James (The Book of Mormon, A Bright Room Called Day) brings down the house with “Wait My Turn,” and, in their Broadway debuts, Bonino is lovable as Lucy, Blanck (Octet, Alice by Heart) is a force as Ruza, Cruz rides high as Inez, Dandashi is sweet as the nerdy Doris, and Tsilala Brock adds a sly touch as Dudley Malone, President Wilson’s chief of staff.

As in Jordans and Sally & Tom, Taub’s Suffs explores various aspects of race- and gender-based discrimination, and each offers a very different conclusion.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

MACBETH (AN UNDOING)

Liz Kettle portrays a mysterious narrator guiding audiences through a unique version of the Scottish play at TFNA’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center (photo by Ellie Kurtz)

MACBETH (AN UNDOING)
Theatre for a New Audience, Polonsky Shakespeare Center
262 Ashland Pl. between Lafayette Ave. & Fulton St.
Tuesday – Sunday through May 4, $97-$132
www.tfana.org

Zinnie Harris pulls a thread from the Scottish play to unravel and reconstruct it in her unique and appealing revamp, Macbeth (an undoing).

The tinkering begins with the curtain; I can’t remember the last time I saw a curtain used at Theatre for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center. Here it’s like a tease, promising something different, and that’s just what writer-director Harris and the talented ensemble deliver.

The play, arguably William Shakespeare’s most malleable, usually begins with the three witches prognosticating Macbeth’s future, but Harris kicks things off with a theater hand named Carlin (Liz Kettle) telling a knock-knock joke. She knows precisely what the audience is there for. “Misery seekers — here they come. Eyes all nasty and randy for gore. You recognise yourself? Mouths open, tongues out. You’re all the same,” she says. “Death is what you want — blood, despair, the fall of man? It’ll be as you last saw it — but no matter, things fare better when they are played and played again. Never an end to your asking for more. And — what more do we have for your ghouls? Bare boards. Nothing much. If you’re looking for pyrotechnics, you’ll be disappointed — no thunder to speak of, no heath — no lightning, no rain — what will you do? No matter, you say — blood cold and unmoving — just give us the play! The play the play, of course we’re here to do the play.”

Macbeth (an undoing) is a stripped-down version of the tale of power and ambition. The Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh production features a cast of ten actors turning the familiar story upside down and inside out; characters are excised, motivations flipped, and roles reversed on a makeshift set that is constantly being taken down and rebuilt. The central figure is a revamped Lady Macbeth (Nicole Cooper), who takes the reins early and never gives them up.

The basics of the narrative are there: A trio of witches (Emmanuella Cole, Star Penders, Kettle) tells war hero Macbeth (Adam Best) and his right-hand man, Banquo (James Robinson), that the former will become thane of Cawdor and then king and that the latter will be the father of kings. After King Duncan (Marc Mackinnon) indeed names him the new thane of Cawdor, Macbeth and his wife conspire to murder the ruler, who has come to their home to celebrate and spend the night. Macbeth’s rise leaves a trail of blood behind, along with a guilty conscience that overwhelms him.

If that sounds like the traditional Macbeth you’ve seen perhaps numerous times, well, Harris throws a lot of that tradition out the window and reimagines the narrative from a feminist angle, mostly with gritty success.

Lady Macbeth (Nicole Cooper) and her husband search for their sanity in Macbeth (an undoing) (photo by Hollis King)

The bloody soldier (Taqi Nazeer) who announces at the beginning, “Doubtful it stood,” has trouble getting the words out, so Carlin spurs him on. When he says they won the war, she asks the badly wounded man, “Aye, did you win?”

Macbeth is not the heroic figure we are used to seeing at the start of the play; instead, he’s indecisive and tentative, like a grounded bird. Upon learning of his possible future from the witches, he proclaims to Banquo, “I’m the thane of fucking Cawdor.” When Lady Macbeth removes a ladybird (the British term for a ladybug) from his sleeve, declaring it’s good luck, he sees it as “another strange soliciting”; a raven — a bird of prey — shrieks, and Macbeth wonders what he is going to wear for dinner. At the end of the scene, Carlin picks up the ladybird and puts it in a box, saving it to perhaps perform evil deeds later.

Carlin then becomes a bent-over servant who says a line that is usually spoken by the nobleman Lennox: “And the obscure bird clamoured outside the window the livelong night.” She adds, “And yet downstairs a party. Duncan couldn’t hear the screams of the birds over the sound of his own delight.” Duncan might not be able to hear the birds, but we can, courtesy of sound designer Pippa Murphy.

Lady Macduff (Cole) is given more prominence in Harris’s adaptation; she is pregnant and carrying on a torrid affair with Banquo. Her husband (Thierry Mabonga) is a cuckolded buffoon who is always in a hurry. When he tells Malcolm to pick up branches and Malcolm asks where they are, Macduff replies, “On the trees, you idiot. Where branches grow. Though god knows how you grew on the royal one.”

Lennox (Nazeer) and Ross (Laurie Scott), a messenger, seem to have emerged from a contemporary cocktail reception. At the celebration for King Duncan, a bird flies inside. “I don’t like birds,” Malcolm complains. “No matter – I’ll deal with it,” the determined Lady Macbeth says. “It makes a racket,” Lennox adds. “Perhaps Cawdor’s spirit coming to piss on the party — !” Ross concludes. While Shakespeare has Ross and Lady Macduff cousins, Harris changes it to Lady Macduff and Lady Macbeth. “Cousins, as you always remind me, the root and tree of our family are not as close as sisters,” Lady Macbeth opines.

The biggest change occurs in the second act, when Lady Macbeth essentially swaps roles with Macbeth, becoming the central figure, even taking over one of Macbeth’s most famous soliloquies. In this version, Lady Macbeth stares madness in the face as she recounts her numerous failed pregnancies and admits feeling confused about one of the play’s new fragments about her character. She asks the witches, “But even if I was given to remorse and grief, what would she fall down upon? For taking the options that a man would? For living in a life and place that was so brutal that power by any other means was impossible.”

Moments later, Macbeth wonders, “How comes it that all our children die?” Lady Macbeth laughs, looks at him, and responds, “So I am reduced to my infertility after all. Even by you. I thought I loved you.” She’s also reduced to her infertility by Harris, who teeters on the edge of undoing one of her major themes by blaming Lady Macbeth’s impending insanity on her inability to become a mother.

The party is just about over in feminist reimagining of Macbeth (photo by Gerry Goodstein)

Kettle (Dracula: Mina’s Reckoning, Attempts on Her Life) is a splendid host for the 155-minute evening (with intermission), smoothly transitioning among her three roles; I would have loved to see more of her as Carlin, our guide through a sometimes confusing reinterpretation by Harris (The Scent of Roses, The Duchess [of Malfi]) that is often exhilarating and occasionally awkward as she toys with classical tropes. Cooper’s (Coriolanus, Medea) Lady Macbeth is bold and strong, not about to play second fiddle to Best’s (Cyrano De Bergerac, The Beauty Queen of Leenane) duly tentative and jittery Macbeth. Mabonga (Everything Under the Sun, Last Dream on Earth) redefines Lady Macduff, while Penders (Aganeza Scrooge, SCOTS) provides comic relief while engenders sympathy as the not-ready-for-prime-time Malcolm.

Tom Piper’s fog-drenched minimalist set, with metal structures, wooden panels, and various pieces of furniture wheeled on and off, alternates between the present day and the distant past — yes, that’s a telephone and an electric lamp on Lady Macduff’s desk — and shabby-chic fun-house mirrors shift characters’ physical dimensions at certain angles. Alex Berry’s costumes maintain the dichotomy, highlighted by Lady Macduff’s dazzling red dress and a series of magically bloodstained white frocks. Oğuz Kaplangi provides atmospheric interstitial music.

Late in the show, Carlin says to Lady Macbeth, “Knock knock knock, open locks. And perhaps we do meet one more time. In a place where we talk about women helping each other. Of seeing each other as we are.” Lady Macbeth asks, “Why do you do this?” Carlin answers, “Because you always got us wrong.” Harris goes a long way to setting things right, although there are slip-ups.

The play concludes with another new fragment, this one incorporating a snippet of a famous quote from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as Harris wonders whether her new version has offended anyone, then thinks better of it as birdsong floats in the air. It’s a lovely ending to a tragic story.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

TEETH

A group of Promise Keeper Girls vow to remain chaste until marriage in uproarious Teeth (photo by Chelcie Parry)

TEETH
Playwrights Horizons, Mainstage Theater
416 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 28, $125-$145
www.playwrightshorizons.org

As if the world isn’t screwed up enough, now we have to be on the lookout for toothy genitalia.

In the 2013 book The Moral Panics of Sexuality, Michelle Ashley Gohr, in the chapter “Do I Have Something in My Teeth? Vagina Dentata and Its Manifestations within Popular Culture,” writes, “Although it is easy to feel overwhelmed by the seemingly endless tirade of moral and political outrage, corporate greed, sex scandals, gun violence, and more, these societal crises have not simply spontaneously arisen in response to a mere few contemporary problems. Rather, today’s moral panics represent an aggregate of borrowed histories layered on for centuries upon centuries. . . . One well known anxiety, the fear of female sexuality, signifies one such displaced anxiety that has taken a displaced form through the little known yet subtly prevalent myth of vagina dentata. While this myth or its basic retellings may not have an obvious place in everyday language or discourse (and few are aware of the myth’s manifestations in current U.S. culture), it nevertheless functions as a powerful force in contemporary conversations about women’s sexuality and the villainization of female desire.”

Gohr, an Arizona State University librarian and faculty associate, then goes on to discuss Michael Lichtenstein’s 2007 award-winning horror comedy Teeth, in which a teenage virgin finds out the hard way that she has teeth in her vagina.

Pulitzer Prize winner Michael R. Jackson and Anna K. Jacobs have now adapted the film into the ravenously funny and bloody musical Teeth, continuing at Playwrights Horizons through April 28.

The story takes place in the present day in New Testament Village, where Pastor Bill O’Keefe (Steven Pasquale) runs a congregation of high school students called Promise Keeper Girls, who have vowed to remain chaste until marriage, along with several celibate boys. In his opening livestreamed homily about Adam and Eve and the serpent and the apple, he declares, “Woman? Where is your fig leaf? Woman? Where is your shame? I’m gonna ask that again! WOMAN? WHERE IS YOUR FIG LEAF? WOMAN? WHERE IS YOUR SHAME?!?”

He is decrying Amy Sue Pearson, a pregnant teenager he says “let the Enemy corrupt her mind!” He has charged his cultlike team of followers with the responsibility of “carrying the banner for an especially awesome message of female empowerment through sexual purity!,” but he feels they have failed their mission by not protecting Amy Sue. He rails against the boys and the girls, warning them that the same thing better not happen to them. Promise Keeper Girls leader Dawn, the pastor’s stepdaughter, falls right in line, declaring, “I say Promise Keeper Girls can’t be about feeling good! I say Promise Keeper Girls have to be about being good!!!”

A trio of Truthseekers vow to fight for masculinity in horror comedy musical at Playwrights Horizons (photo by Chelcie Parry)

Dawn and the other PKGs, Becky (Courtney Bassett), Fiona (Phoenix Best), Trisha (Jenna Rose Husli), Rachael (Lexi Rhoades), Stephanie (Wren Rivera), and Keke (Helen J Shen) assure Pastor Bill that they will not allow any boy to pound their precious gift, and Tobey (Jason Gotay) and Ryan (Jared Loftin) swear they will do no pounding. But Brad (Will Connolly), the pastor’s son, is having none of it. A shy, withdrawn gamer, Brad thinks the church is a sham. He turns instead to a secret group known as the Truthseekers, led by a mysterious disembodied voice called Godfather, as if the exact opposite of the pastor.

“There’s a pain all men carry, Truthseekers,” Godfather says to Brad and a pair of fellow Truthseekers (Gotay and Loftin) wearing black VR headsets. “Some of us carry it in our shoulders. Some in our stomachs. Some of us even carry it in our balls — in our nutsacks. It’s a pain we’ve become numb to in this era of ‘dismantling the patriarchy.’ An era where our every word is ‘mansplaining.’ An era where any male who expresses sexual desire gets labeled a predator or an ‘incel.’ We can’t even sit on a bloody train without being ‘manspreaders’ for Christ’s sakes! Because we take up too much space!” Godfather proclaims that their enemy is the feminocracy — but to learn how to fight back, the trio must access Truthseeker Premium.

As Brad delves further into the Truthseekers and Dawn and Tobey consider going all the way, the battle lines are drawn and blood is spilled from the hungry choppers that inhabit Dawn’s yearning vulva.

Pastor Bill O’Keefe (Steven Pasquale) has his hands full as he tries to save teenage girls from being pounded between their thighs (photo by Chelcie Parry)

Jacobs (POP!, Harmony, Kansas) and Jackson (A Strange Loop, White Girl in Danger) collaborated on the terrific book, which pays homage to Little Shop of Horrors — one scene involving a gynecologist (Pasquale) harkens back to Little Shop’s dentist dilemma — while tackling religious obsession, female empowerment, and sexual desire. Jacobs composed the rousing score, which crosses genres, while Jackson wrote the lyrics to such hilarious songs as “Precious Gift,” “Between Her Thighs,” “Modest Is Hottest,” “According to the Wiki,” and “Take Me Down.” Kris Kukul’s expert orchestrations are horror-movie worthy, performed by music director and conductor Patrick Sulken and Randy Cohen on keyboards, John Putnam and Liz Faure on guitar, Steve Count on bass, Melissa Tong on violin, and Marques Walles on drums and percussion.

It’s hard to beat such quatrains as “Press our flesh together / Bless me as her groom / Watch me be reborn as I / Fertilize her womb” and “As promise keeper girls, we’re soldiers in battle / With this ring we sally forth to win the war / His word is very clear, he gave us two choices / Take your pick — are you a virgin or a whore?”

Obie-winning director Sarah Benson (Fairview, In the Blood, Samara) fills nearly every moment with wild and woolly fun, culminating in an orgiastic finale that reverberates throughout the theater. Raja Feather Kelly’s choreography rocks out to Jacobs’s music on Adam Rigg’s two-level set, which always has a cross hanging in the back, often set aglow as if delivering messages from above (and below). Enver Chakartash’s costumes range from hoodies and high school jackets to leather and lace, with prominent heavenly whites and demonic reds. Jane Cox and Stacey Derosier’s lighting and Palmer Hefferan’s sound envelop the audience, while Jeremy Chernick’s tongue-in-cheek special effects up the ante.

The ensemble cast has a field day incorporating tropes from horror films and coming-of-age dramas. The set can barely contain Pasquale (The Light in the Piazza, American Son), who infuses the pastor with otherworldly aspirations. Louis (White Girl in Danger, Soft Power) beautifully plays Dawn, who undergoes quite a metamorphosis, while Connolly (Once, Clueless: The Musical) is wonderfully mopey as the disgruntled Brad.

Jackson, who won the Pulitzer and two Tonys for his first show, the semiautobiographical A Strange Loop, might have slipped a bit with his follow-up, the disjointed and overwrought White Girl in Danger, but he gets right back on track with Teeth, a precious gift with plenty of bite.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]