this week in theater

BRIGHT STAR

Carmen Cusack belts away on moving set in dazzling Broadway debut in BRIGHT STAR (photo by Nick Stokes)

Cort Theatre
138 West 48th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 26, $45 – $115
brightstarmusical.com

The opening number of the new Steve Martin and Edie Brickell musical, Bright Star, takes a chance right from the start, putting its cards on the table as Alice Murphy (Carmen Cusack) declares, “If you knew my story / My heaven and hell / If you knew my story / You’d have a good story to tell.” It turns out that Bright Star does have a pretty good story to tell, for the most part, and it does so with an intoxicating homey style and sweet sense of humor. The fairy-tale-like narrative, with its fair share of darkness, shifts between the 1920s and 1940s in North Carolina. In 1945, Billy Cane (AJ Shively) has returned home from the war with a jump in his step but is saddened to learn from his father (Stephen Bogardus) that his mother has recently passed away. Determined to become a writer, Billy has been sending his stories to his childhood friend Margo Crawford (Hannah Elless), who owns the local bookstore. Now grown up, she has taken a more romantic interest in Billy, who is oblivious to her desires; he decides to move to Asheville to try to get his writing published in the prestigious Asheville Southern Journal, which will be no easy feat, as it is run by notoriously difficult editor Alice Murphy and her two gatekeepers, the snarky and sarcastic Daryl Ames (Jeff Blumenkrantz) and the sexy and alluring Lucy Grant (Emily Padgett). When Billy first arrives at the company, Daryl tells him that the New Yorker wanted to steal Miss Murphy away, but Lucy notes that the dour editor wanted to stay in North Carolina. “That’s good!” Billy cries out. “Not for young tadpoles like you,” Daryl says. Lucy adds, “She once made Ernest Hemingway cry. He lay right there, banged his fists on the floor, and sobbed.” Billy asks, “Why?” to which Lucy replies, “He used the word ‘their’ as a singular pronoun.” The story then jumps back to sixteen-year-old Alice (Cusack) in 1923 and her flirtation with twenty-year-old Jimmy Ray Dobbs (Paul Alexander Nolan), the hunky son of Mayor Josiah Dobbs (Michael Mulheren). But the mayor, a big-time businessman of the Old South, has other plans for his son, preparing to marry him off to help the company. However, Jimmy Ray wants to go to college and experience the world outside Zebulon. “You can’t expect the future to be just like the past / You haven’t got a clue, sir, please try to understand,” Jimmy Ray sings. “When I stood tall, side by side with your grandpa / There was just nothing at all we couldn’t do,” his father responds. Soon the two main plots merge, leading to a surprise conclusion that is not quite as shocking as it thinks it is but is heart-wrenching nonetheless.

Part of band spends entire show in mobile cabin in musical by Steve Martin and Edie Brickell (photo by Nick Stokes)

Actor, musician, novelist, comedian, and playwright Martin (Picasso at the Lapin Agile, Shopgirl) and folk-rock musician Brickell — billing themselves as the new Steve and Edie — collaborated on the music and story, inspired by an actual event; Martin wrote the book, while Brickell wrote the lyrics. (The musical was initially based on their 2013 album, Love Has Come from You, but went through major changes, leading to their 2015 follow-up, So Familiar, which includes their versions of many of the songs that made the final show.) Director Walter Bobbie (Chicago, Venus in Fur) and choreographer Josh Rhodes (Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella, It Shoulda Been You) make fantastic use of Eugene Lee’s (Wicked) rustic set, an open cabin (reminiscent of the one at the start of The Jerk) where four members of the band (Michael Pearce, Bennett Sullivan, Rob Berman, Martha McConnell) play and which gets moved around as the setting changes to the offices of the Asheville Southern Journal, Margo’s bookstore, Mayor Dobbs’s residence, and the Shiny Penny bar. Occasionally a model train passes overhead when a character is traveling. Cusack is sensational in her Broadway debut, going back and forth between the young Alice to the older Miss Murphy with wit and elegance, singing with a vibrant, evocative voice and infectious confidence. The show works best when the music follows more of an Americana roots and bluegrass style, which is especially embraced by Nolan (Jesus Christ Superstar, Doctor Zhivago); his duets with Cusack are the musical highlights of the production. The weak link is the dull subplot about Billy’s desire to be a writer, with Shively (La Cage aux Folles, February House) too straitlaced to keep things interesting, lacking any edge, and Martin can get a little too erudite with his literary barbs. In addition to the musicians in the cabin, there are more up top on either side of the stage; Peter Asher’s music direction and August Eriksmoen’s orchestrations mostly work, although the Shiny Penny scene, featuring the ensemble song “Another Round,” is a disaster in every which way. (And why did they have to use glasses with tops on them, making it look ridiculous when characters apparently take a big drink but the same amount of liquid is still clearly visible in their glass?) Stephen Lee Anderson (The Iceman Cometh, The Kentucky Cycle) does a fine turn as Alice’s Bible-thumping father, and Mulheren (Spider-Man, Kiss Me, Kate) gives the mayor a Big Daddy–like presence. “Should’ve raised you with a firmer hand,” Daddy Murphy sings to his daughter in a strong number. For a show partially about writing, Bright Star would have benefited by being edited with a firmer hand, but it’s still an entertaining musical with supreme moments.

(On April 12, Martin and Brickell will be at the Upper West Side Barnes & Noble at 86th St. & Lexington Ave. for a discussion with Asher and a CD signing of So Familiar; priority seating will be given to attendees who purchase the disc there.)

BLACKBIRD

Una (Michelle Williams) and Ray (Jeff Daniels) revisit a past traumatic event in very different ways in BLACKBIRD (photo by Brigitte Lacombe)

Belasco Theatre
111 West 44th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Monday – Saturday through June 11, $39 – $145
blackbirdbroadway.com

In 2007, Jeff Daniels starred with Alison Pill in the off-Broadway premiere of David Harrower’s Olivier Award–winning play, Blackbird, directed by Joe Mantello at Manhattan Theatre Club. Nine years later, Daniels is revisiting the incendiary work by digging even deeper into his controversial character in the show’s must-see Broadway debut, running at the Belasco through June 11. Daniels plays Peter, a man suddenly forced to confront his past when Una (Michelle Williams) surprises him at his office late one afternoon. Fifteen years earlier, Peter, then forty years old and known by his given name, Ray, had an inappropriate and illegal relationship with Una, who was twelve at the time. “What cinched the decision to return was that Ray still terrified me,” Daniels wrote in a recent column in the New York Times. “Every actor knows you can’t run from the ones that scare you. It’s not the acting of the character, nor is it the dark imagination it takes to put yourself through all of his guilt, regret, and shame. To truly become someone else, you have to hear him in your head, thinking, justifying, defending, wanting, needing, desiring. The more I looked back at the first production, the more I saw what I hadn’t done, where I hadn’t gone. I’d pulled up short. Found ways around what was necessary. When it came time to truly become Ray, I’d protected myself. He’d hit bottom. I hadn’t.” Daniels indeed hits rock bottom in his remarkable, and terrifying, portrayal of Ray, humanizing a man who committed a horrible crime and tries to escape its consequences and get on with his life, changing his identity and moving away. But as Una, Williams is Daniels’s equal, fully inhabiting the difficult role of a young woman who, on the cusp of adolescence, had her future shut down by Ray’s actions. Tiny, wearing giant heels, and wrapped in a red puffer coat, Williams suggests both a fully adult woman and a sexualized child, delivering a character who never had opportunities to figure out who she is and potentially live a normal life. Their confrontation takes place in a small employee cafeteria in Ray’s office, where he at first denies even knowing who she is, although his head looks like it is about to explode. “This was pointless. Absolutely pointless. Can you see that?” Ray asks her, adding, “You’re a / some kind of ghost / turning up from nowhere to / Go home. / Please. / Leave me alone.” Una responds, “I do feel like a ghost. / I do. / I feel like a ghost. / Everywhere I go. . . . / You made me into a ghost.”

Una (Michelle Williams) considers where life has brought her in BLACKBIRD (photo by Brigitte Lacombe)

Williams and Daniels go at it in real time during the play’s ninety minutes, as details of past and present slowly emerge. Their words come in fits and starts, with incomplete sentences and several long monologues that are filled with emotion. While Una is often coy, Ray is angry, afraid not only of Una but of being discovered; as they play a vicious game of cat and mouse, switching between roles of attacker and prey, figures occasionally walk past in the hall or a colleague of Ray’s knocks on the door and asks for him. (These extras are seen only in silhouette through frosted doors and windows.) But even though we know in our hearts that what Ray did to Una was completely wrong, Daniels is able to elicit compassion for Ray, while Williams sometimes makes us feel like Una is taking advantage of the situation in unfair ways. I hated myself for thinking that, but that’s part of the beauty of Harrower’s (Knives in Hens) piercing dialogue and Mantello’s (The Humans, Other Desert Cities) astute, no holds-barred direction. “I am entitled to something. / To live,” Ray says. “I lost more than you ever did,” Una replies. “I lost / because I never had / had time to to to begin.” Scott Pask’s set is cold and unfeeling, almost antiseptic except for the mess of food wrappers and garbage left behind by employees. Trash becomes an integral part of the proceedings. Una tells a story about getting upset when she saw a man drop a can of beer and a cigarette on the sidewalk. “It’s not the litter / it wasn’t the litter / the dirtying,” she says. “It was the man, the person doing that. / Because he hasn’t been, been / schooled / educated / civilized enough / and I thought, / I just thought you are a beast.” She’s of course not talking only about the stranger but about Ray as well. But Ray refuses to see himself as a beast, and Una refuses to regard herself as garbage.

Ray (Jeff Daniels) tries to avoid a meltdown when part of his past comes rushing back in BLACKBIRD (photo by Brigitte Lacombe)

Watching Blackbird is as uneasy and uncomfortable as it is captivating and physically and mentally exhausting. I found myself leaning forward in my seat, mesmerized by every word and every nuance and movement by three-time Oscar nominee Williams (Cabaret, My Week with Marilyn) and Emmy, Drama Desk, and Obie winner Daniels (The Newsroom, The Squid and the Whale) as they worked their magic. They both give dynamic, unrelenting performances that are brave and bold. It’s more than just a battle of wits and power, or an argument about the nature of love, or an exploration of the very different responsibilities of adults and children. The production, which includes excellent sound design by Fitz Patton and lighting by Brian MacDevitt, masterfully challenges the viewer to disregard extremes and do some genuine soul searching of their own. Of course, just by calling the woman “Una” sets herself off by herself, as if she is alone in the world. (The film version, the debut feature by Australian theater director Benedict Andrews, is called Una; Rooney Mara plays Una, with Ben Mendelsohn as Ray.) On the way out of the Belasco, you’re likely to find yourself in a heated discussion with your companion over whether the show was honest and truthful about pedophilia, whether it was more of a glorified rape apology, whether it was a love story, or whether it treated both characters equally. You’re also likely to find yourself wanting a thorough shower.

IRONBOUND

Marin Ireland gives a tour-de-force performance in IRONBOUND at the Rattlestick (photo by Sandra Coudert)

Rattlestick Playwrights Theater
224 Waverly Pl. between Eleventh & Perry Sts.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 24, $55-$70
866-811-4111
www.rattlestick.org
wptheater.org

Marin Ireland is an absolute marvel in Ironbound, an otherwise relatively standard play by Polish-born playwright Martyna Majok that gets a terrific staging at the Rattlestick by director Daniella Topol. Tony and Independent Spirit Award nominee Ireland is onstage for all eighty minutes as Darja, a cleaning woman who can’t find success and happiness in her life. Darja spends the entire play at a shoddy bus stop across the street from a New Jersey factory where she used to work before it closed, assuring that the American dream will remain just out of her reach. The story shifts back and forth between 1992, when Darja is with her first husband and true love, Maks (Josiah Bania), a fellow Eastern European immigrant who is determined to become a blues musician in Chicago; 2006, when she meets Vic (Shiloh Fernandez), a young drug dealer; and 2014, as she argues with longtime boyfriend Tommy (Morgan Spector) over their future and what to do about Darja’s son, who has disappeared. The focus is primarily on the present, as Darja, now a cynical self-preservationist, confronts Tommy about his extramarital activities. When he tries to calm her down, she barks at him, “We are not having nice conversation now. The past. Memories. No.” She might give the impression that she’s in charge, but there’s an underlying fear and desperation that makes her more vulnerable than she wants to reveal. “I am forty-two years old, married-twice-already woman: I have no time for stupid. So I weigh you on scale. Okay?” she tells Tommy, but it’s clear that she’s losing control.

Darja (Marin Ireland) and Tommy (Morgan Spector) argue about their future together in IRONBOUND (photo by Sandra Coudert)

The set, by lighting designer Justin Townsend (Here Lies Love, The Other Place), features a lone bench in front of a murky, creepy bus shelter strewn with gravel and garbage. Overhead, stretching the length of the theater front to back, hang five enormous, riveted steel beams (actually painted wood) that make the audience feel as if it is waiting for the bus with Darja, huddled underneath a trestle. You can’t take your eyes off Ireland (Reasons to Be Pretty, Glass Chin, Marie Antoinette), whose every physical movement and glare speaks volumes. The rest of the cast play their roles well, but their characters and tales are nowhere near as interesting and compelling as Darja’s, and they become somewhat quaint and repetitive as the show goes on and overdoes the obvious distinctions between rich and poor. Director Daniella Topol (Charles Ives Take Me Home, Lascivious Something) keeps the attention firmly on Darja, where it belongs, letting Ireland do what she does best. Ironbound, which premiered in the fall of 2015 at the Round Theatre in Washington, DC (with Bania and three different actors), is a presentation of the Women’s Project Theater, which is “dedicated to developing, producing and promoting the work of female theater artists at every stage in their careers.”

PERICLES

Pericles (Christian Camargo), the prince of Tyre, has tough times trying to find love and family in Trevor Nunn TFANA production in Brooklyn (photo by Gerry Goodstein)

Theatre for a New Audience, Polonsky Shakespeare Center
262 Ashland Pl. between Lafayette Ave. & Fulton St.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 10, $75-$85
866-811-4111
www.tfana.org

There’s a reason why so many theater lovers, and even Shakespeare aficionados, have never seen or even read Pericles: It’s not a very good play. In addition, the general consensus among scholars is that it’s only one-third Shakespeare anyway: Most think pamphleteer and innkeeper George Wilkins, a friend of Shakespeare’s, wrote the first two acts and that Shakespeare penned the third. The play has never been performed on Broadway, has never been made into a film, and has been presented only once at the Public’s Shakespeare in the Park outdoor summer festival at the Delacorte, in 1974, with Mary Beth Hurt and Randall Duk Kim. (However, in the fall of 2014, the Public did take a trimmed-down version of Pericles on the road in its Mobile Shakespeare Unit.) Now award-winning British director Sir Trevor Nunn, who has brought us The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, Arcadia, Copenhagen, and, yes, Cats, Les Misérables, and Starlight Express, is tackling Pericles for the first time, the thirty-fifth Shakespeare play he has directed. (He is planning on completing all thirty-seven from the first folio with upcoming productions of King John and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.) In his first show initiated in the United States with an American cast, Nunn is directing a rousing version of Pericles at Theatre for a New Audience’s (TFANA) Polonsky Shakespeare Center, where it has been extended through April 10. The play is narrated by real-life fourteenth-century English poet John Gower (Raphael Nash Thompson), serving as a kind of one-man Greek chorus. Pericles (Christian Camargo), the prince of Tyre, has traveled to Antioch to solve a riddle that will win him the hand of the daughter (Sam Morales) of King Antiochus (Earl Baker Jr.); if he fails, he will be killed. Realizing that the riddle is about incest between the king and the princess and that he will be slain even if he gives the right answer, Pericles asks for more time, and the king grants him his request while also sending his henchman, Thaliard (Oberon K. A. Adjepong), to murder the prince. Pericles flees home, where his trusted adviser, Helicanus (Philip Casnoff), tells him he must leave at once, certain that King Antiochus will do anything to see him dead. And so Pericles sets out on a series of Odysseus-like adventures that include several shipwrecks as he marries Thaisa (Gia Crovatin), daughter of Simonides (John Rothman), the king of Pentapolis; has a daughter, Marina (played as a teenager by Lilly Englert), who is raised by Cleon (Will Swenson), the governor of Tarsus, and his wife, Dionizya (Nina Hellman); and mourns the passing of his wife, who dies in childbirth.

Nunn’s Pericles takes place on a relatively empty stage with minimal props; scenic designer Robert Jones’s backdrop features a ritualistic large circle that occasionally opens up to introduce characters and shine bright colors (or the sun or moon) onto the otherwise stark setting. PigPen Theatre Co. founding members Alex Falberg, Ben Ferguson, Curtis Gillen, Ryan Melia, Matt Nuernberger, Arya Shahi, and Dan Weschler are joined by musicians Haley Bennett, John Blevins, Philip Varricchio, and Jessica Wang to perform a medieval dumb show throughout the play (they are playing when the house opens, so arrive early to get right into the mood); the delightful period music is by Shaun Davey, who also composed the score for the 2002 Royal Shakespeare Company production of Pericles, during Nunn’s stint as artistic director of the RSC. Camargo (Dexter, The Hurt Locker), who has previously played Coriolanus and won an Obie as Hamlet at TFANA, is at first forthright as Pericles, then heartbreaking as the prince’s life takes dark turn after dark turn. Englert, who made her stage debut in Julie Taymor’s TFANA production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and followed that by playing Cordelia in Arin Arbus’s King Lear at TFANA, is strong and confident as Marina as she faces personal danger. The rest of the cast, which also includes John Keating, Zachary Infante, and Ian Lassiter as the three fishermen; Adjepong and Patrice Johnson Chevannes as brothel owners; Keating as Boult, their bawdy, gangly servant; Lassiter as their main customer, Lysimachus, governor of Mytilene; and Baker Jr. as Cerimon, the physician, are in full sync throughout the two-hour, forty-five-minute show, but it’s TFANA regular Constance Hoffman’s mind-blowing costumes that rule the day, a wild and thrilling mix of Greek classical, African, street-corner bum, and Goth, balancing glorious pinks, deep oranges, purples, and white with black, brown, and gray. Dionyza’s hat and the bawd’s outfit are unforgettable, drawing the audience’s attention away from the huge holes in the story; Nunn does some patching as well, fiddling around with the kitchen-sink-mishmash of a narrative by moving things around and adding elements of Wilkins’s novel The Painful Adventures of Pericles. It all might not make for a great play itself, but it is quite a grand entertainment, and about as good an introduction to this work as you’re likely to get. (On April 10, following the last performance of Pericles, the musicians from PigPen Theatre will give a concert that is free to TFANA season subscribers and anyone who purchased a ticket to see Pericles between March 29 and April 10; premium $125 tickets are also available, which come with various bonuses.)

TICKET ALERT: THE REDEMPTIVE POWER OF ANCIENT STORIES

Paul Giamatti, David Strathairn, and Bryan Doerries team up for special event at the 92nd St. Y

Who: Paul Giamatti, David Strathairn, Bryan Doerries, Thane Rosenbaum
What: “The Redemptive Power of Ancient Stories”
Where: 92nd St. Y, Buttenwieser Hall, 1395 Lexington Ave. at 92nd St., 212-415-5500
When: Saturday, April 16, $32 ($15 for ages thirty-five & under), 7:30
Why: “What do Greek tragedies have to say to us now? What timeless things do they show us about what it means to be human? What were these ancient plays originally designed to do? And can they still work for audiences and readers today?” writer, director, and translator Bryan Doerries asks in the prologue to his book The Theater of War: What Ancient Greek Tragedies Can Teach Us Today (Knopf, September 2015, $26.95). Doerries is the artistic director of Outside the Wire, a self-described “social impact company” that presents such projects as End of Life, Prometheus in Prison, and Theater of War, which consists of dramatic readings of Sophocles’s Ajax and Philoctetes performed for military and civilian communities in America and Europe, with a particular focus on the psychological and physical impact of war. On April 16, Doerries will be joined by Emmy-winning, Oscar-nominated actors Paul Giamatti (Cinderella Man, John Adams) and David Strathairn (Good Night, and Good Luck.; Temple Grandin) at the 92nd St. Y, where they will perform dramatic readings and participate in a discussion moderated by writer and law professor Thane Rosenbaum. The evening will conclude with Doerries signing copies of The Theater of War as well as his brand-new graphic novel, The Odyssey of Sergeant Jack Brennan (Pantheon, April 5, 2016, $19.95), which links Homer’s Odyssey to American soldiers returning home from Afghanistan.

HOLD ON TO ME DARLING

Nancy (Jenn Lyon) dreams of a better life with Strings McCrane (Timothy Olyphant) in new Kenneth Lonergan play (photo by Doug Hamilton)

Atlantic Theater Company
Linda Gross Theater
336 West 20th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 17, $66.50-$96.50
866-811-4111
atlantictheater.org

Emmy-nominated Deadwood and Justified star Timothy Olyphant makes a welcome return to the New York stage for the first time in twenty years in the world premiere of Kenneth Lonergan’s Hold on to Me Darling, which continues at the Atlantic through April 17. In 1996, Olyphant appeared at the Atlantic in The Santaland Diaries, Joe Mantello’s adaptation of a Christmas-themed essay by David Sedaris. In 2000, Olyphant auditioned for Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me but didn’t get the part; however, this time around Lonergan went right to Olyphant for the role of Strings McCrane, a contemporary version of a massively popular Elvis Presley–like country singer and movie star. An extended investigation into the construction of self in our age of celebrity, the play opens in a hotel room, a way station where McCrane suddenly finds himself at a crossroads when his beloved mother dies. Reevaluating his life and career, he decides that he’s a fraud who never lived up to his mama’s expectations. “I’m thirty-nine years old, and I ain’t never met a woman yet who looks at me twice for myself. All they see is Strings McCrane. But he ain’t there no more, Jimmy. How can they grab hold of a man who isn’t there? How can you touch somethin’ you can’t feel?” he says to his long-suffering, dedicated assistant, Jimmy (Keith Nobbs), who has quite a man crush on his boss. AWOL from the science-fiction movie he’s shooting in Kansas City, Strings is preparing for his mother’s funeral in Tennessee while trying to avoid the press and paparazzi. He quickly falls for married masseuse Nancy (Jenn Lyon), a big fan who can’t wait to get her hands on him, in more ways than one.

hold on to me darling

Strings soon decides that he is going to leave the high life and settle down and raise a family. “I don’t want to be a somethin’ anymore, Nancy. I want to be a person. The person my mama always wanted me to be. And that’s what I’m gonna dedicate my life to doin’, just as soon as I get done with this goddamn space movie,” he tells her. Back in Tennessee, he meets with his somewhat estranged brother, Duke (C. J. Wilson), a hearty and hardy working man with a wife and kids and lots of debt. Duke, who is prone to such phrases as “Jesus Christ in a downtown Memphis hair salon,” doesn’t believe that Strings can make such a drastic change, that he could say goodbye to stardom and instead get a job at Ernie’s feed store. “I’m dead serious, Duke,” Strings says. “I know it sounds crazy. But why not? I’m totally miserable, Duke. My life is a sham. I’m gonna say that again: My life is a sham. And if I don’t find some kind of peace inside myself I’m gonna put a shotgun in my mouth one of these days and paint the back of the tool shed with my brains.” Strings finds yet another reason to come back home when, at the funeral home, he reconnects with Essie (Adelaide Clemens), his second cousin, twice removed, who has blossomed into a beautiful young woman who recently lost her father and husband. Essie is honest and forthright, the salt of the earth, a person who, like Duke, is not afraid to speak the truth with Strings, whose life is otherwise filled with sycophants. “I guess maybe getting’ other people to think for him and make up excuses for him and invent a whole lot of reasons why the ordinary rules of human decency don’t apply to him is all part of who he is,” Essie says to Nancy, “and what we’ve all made him into. With his enthusiastic participation, I might add.”

Brothers Strings McCrane (Timothy Olyphant) and Duke (C. J. Wilson) try to reconnect in HOLD ON TO ME DARLING (photo by Doug Hamilton)

The first act is an outrageous tour de force of brilliant acting, writing, and directing, both funny and poignant, as Lonergan (This Is Our Youth, The Waverly Gallery) and Atlantic artistic director Neil Pepe (Hands on a Hardbody, Speed-the-Plow) delve into the psyche of a seemingly wildly successful man who reaches the conclusion that his entire life has been a waste. Unfortunately, Lonergan has written himself into a corner that he can’t quite get out of in the second act, when Strings goes back to his hometown and tries to make a go of it as just a regular guy. But Hold on to Me Darling, even without its direct-address comma, is a joy to experience, led by a terrific performance by Olyphant, whose southern twang and wide-eyed innocence are utterly engaging. Wilson (The Lady from Dubuque, Happy Now?), one of New York’s best actors, delivers a John Goodman–esque performance as Duke, who isn’t exactly thrilled with how his “normal” life has turned out either. In her off-Broadway debut, Clemens (Rectify, Parade’s End) is sweet and charming as the sweet and charming Essie, a serious young woman whose view of the world is not quite as realistic as she might think. Walt Spangler’s (Between Riverside and Crazy, Tuck Everlasting) revolving set offers a little big of magic as it goes from scene to scene as if shifting between compartments in Strings’s brain. Hold on to Me Darling is no mere tragicomic tale of fame and fortune but instead a complex story of love and loneliness, of family and legacy, exploring the trials and tribulations of a superstar who just wants to be treated like any other human being. And is that so much to ask?

STUPID FUCKING BIRD

The Pearl Theatre tackles Aaron Posner’s “sort-of” adaptation of Chekhov’s THE SEAGULL, STUPID FUCKING BIRD (photo by Russ Rowland)

The Pearl Theatre
555 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through May 8, $60-$80
212-563-9261
www.pearltheatre.org

If the title of the current production at the Pearl didn’t already prepare you for something unusual at the theater that houses “New York’s only classical resident company,” then perhaps the flimsy wall of doors onstage painted with huge letters spelling out the name as well as a Warholesque-posterized photograph of Anton Chekhov would give you a hint. And if you’re still not sure, you’ll probably catch on once a young man comes out, looks at the audience, and says, “The play will begin when someone says: ‘Start the fucking play.’” As he’s hit with a barrage of shouts of “Start the fucking play” from a suddenly roused crowd, the play does indeed start. And the audience-actor barrages continue to fly for the next two hours, a raucous romp through the world created by Chekhov in his 1896 tragicomic favorite, The Seagull. Aaron Posner, a former actor and longtime Shakespeare director who has written reverent adaptations of Chaim Potok’s The Chosen and My Name Is Asher Lev and Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion, is now in the midst of a quartet of irreverent Chekhov adaptations, or, as he warns, “sort of adapted.” Stupid Fucking Bird furiously breaks down the barriers between actor, character, and audience, between truth, reality, and fiction, as it investigates unrequited love, lust, and the value of art. Conrad Arkadina (Christopher Sears), known as Con, is putting on a show featuring his girlfriend, Nina (Marianna McClellan), in the lakefront backyard belonging to his mother, superstar actress Emma Arkadina (Bianca Amato). Emma is joined by her lover, famous writer Doyle Trigorin (Erik Lochtefeld), and her relatively plainspoken brother, Dr. Eugene Sorn (Dan Daily). Also on hand for the “site-specific performance event” are Con’s best friend, the well-meaning, very odd Dev (Joe Paulik), and the dark, brooding Mash (Joey Parsons). Dev loves Mash, Mash loves Con, Con loves Nina, his muse, but Nina is instantly attracted to Trigorin, setting in motion some fab relationship confrontations alternating between sad and pathetic and sexy and funny. The conceit is that not only is this a play-within-a-play, it’s a play-within-a-play by actors who understand that they are performing a play for an audience, as made clear when it all begins. “This is a play. There is simply more than one reality going on at a time,” Posner explains in a “Meta-Theatrics” stage note.

Nina (Marianna McClellan) stars in her boyfriend’s play-within-a-play in STUPID FUCKING BIRD (photo by Russ Rowland)

Con’s supposedly cutting-edge performance piece with Nina is a pretentious piece of claptrap, even if Emma never gives it a fair chance, and Stupid Fucking Bird has every possibility of being a piece of pretentious claptrap as well. But it skillfully avoids such a fate over and over again through its clever dialogue, superb acting, and fearless direction by Davis McCallum (The Whale, Water by the Spoonful), a Shakespeare veteran who has recently helmed such rediscovered old treasures as Fashions for Men and London Wall at the Mint. Sears (London Wall, Third) is an aggressive whirlwind as Con, overcome with an endless supply of energy and rage that he can’t rein in. Paulik (A Feminine Ending, P.S. Jones and the Frozen City) is a hoot as Dev, a simple, soft-spoken young man who tries to find the good in life even though he is poor and unloved. Pearl veteran Parsons (The Rivals, The Misanthrope) is wonderfully gloomy as the dour goth Mash, who dresses in black and occasionally breaks out her ukulele and sings a sad song (“Life is a muddle / Life is a chore / Life is a burden / Life is a bore”). Daily (The Dining Room, Sin: A Cardinal Deposed) is downright amiable as the friendly Sorn, a combination of Sorin and Dorn from Chekhov’s original, while Lochtefeld (Small Mouth Sounds, February House) and McClellan (#liberated, Cherry Smoke) make a fine pair of potential cheating lovers. And Amato (Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia) does a grand star turn as the self-obsessed diva determined to maintain her career success — and her sexuality.

The actors go in and out of character as they explore love and death, art and sex in irreverent Chekhov adaptation (photo by Russ Rowland)

Stupid Fucking Bird is very much about making connections, among the actors, the characters, and the audience; at several points, members of the audience are asked to participate, although at other times the questions posed apparently to them are actually rhetorical. The physical space is broken down too; the first act takes place in front of the wall of doors, a space recognized as the front of the stage, but the second and third acts are set in the kitchen of the lake house as actions occur somewhat more conventionally from a theatrical perspective, although you should still expect the unexpected, particularly when the actors venture into the audience. (The stage design is by Derek Dickinson.) You don’t have to know anything about The Seagull to thoroughly enjoy this passionate, free-wheeling marvel of a production, chock-full of self-referential commentary on itself and the theater in general, with tongue in cheek as well as sticking out at everyone and everything with humor, cynicism, and sarcasm while staying true to the spirit of Chekhov’s original. (Posner’s second Chekov “irreverent variation” is Life Sucks, or the Present Ridiculous, based on Uncle Vanya.) “Life is disappointing,” Mash sings early on. “You try you die so why begin / It’s all a game you’ll never win.” When life includes such deliriously chaotic yet controlled rave-ups like Stupid Fucking Bird, there’s nothing disappointing about it at all.