this week in theater

“MASTER HAROLD” . . . AND THE BOYS

Sam (Leon Addison Brown) and Willie (Sahr Ngaujah) prepare for a ballroom dance contest in Athol Fugard’s “MASTER HAROLD” AND THE BOYS at the Signature (photo © Monique Carboni 2016)

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Irene Diamond Stage
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday-Sunday through December 4, $30-$50
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

South African playwright Athol Fugard revisits a painful part of his past in the Signature Theatre revival of his 1982 success, “Master Harold” . . . and the boys. Inspired by an actual event that continues to cause him shame, the play is set in St. George’s Park Tea Room in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, in 1950, just two years after Apartheid began. It’s a rainy afternoon, and the dapper Sam (Leon Addison Brown) is keeping watch on the empty restaurant while Willie (Sahr Ngaujah) cleans up. They discuss an upcoming ballroom dance competition, as the smooth-moving Sam offers advice to the stiff, distracted Willie. Sam tells him, “The secret is to make it look easy. Ballroom must look happy, Willie, not like hard work. It must . . . Ja! . . . it must look like romance.” Willie responds, “Now another one! What’s romance?” to which Sam answers, “Love story with happy ending. A handsome man in tails, and in his arms, smiling at him, a beautiful lady in evening dress!” They are soon joined by Hally (Noah Robbins), the seventeen-year-old son of the white family they work for as servants. While Willie calls the boy “Master Harold,” Sam refers to him as the more familiar Hally; the two are very close, and Sam is a kind of surrogate father to Hally, since the white boy’s real father is an alcoholic who has been hospitalized. Hally relates how he was beaten by his teacher at school that day, and Sam compares it to getting “strokes with a light cane” in prison. Hally dreams that things will get better. “I oscillate between hope and despair for this world as well, Sam. But things will change, you wait and see,” he says. “One day somebody is going to get up and give history a kick up the backside and get it going again.” Sam asks, “Like who?” Hally replies, “They’re called social reformers. Every age, Sam, has got its social reformer. My history book is full of them.” And Sam answers, “So where’s ours?” Meanwhile, Hally teaches Sam about history and language, discussing Winston Churchill, Napoleon, Charles Darwin, Abraham Lincoln, and William Shakespeare. “Vestiges, feudal system, and abolished. I’m all right on oppression,” Sam says, pointing out some words he doesn’t quite understand, in addition to one he does, all too well. But after Hally gets a call from his mother with news about his father, the relationship between Sam and Hally takes a nasty turn.

Hally (Noah Robbins) makes a bad situation worse in gripping Athol Fugard revival (photo © Monique Carboni 2016)

“Master Harold” . . . and the boys premiered at Yale in 1982 — it was initially banned in South Africa — with Željko Ivanek as Hally, Zakes Mokae as Sam, and Danny Glover as Willie; it then moved to Broadway with Mokae, Glover, and Lonny Price taking over as Hally, earning a Drama Desk Award as Outstanding New Play. In the 2003 Broadway revival, Christopher Denham was Hally, Michael Boatman was Willie, and Glover played Sam. The new Signature version, directed by the eighty-four-year-old Fugard, is superb in all respects. Christopher H. Barreca’s tea-room set has a lurking coldness, the rain outside threatening a coming storm inside as well. Brown (The Trip to Bountiful, Two Trains Running), who has appeared in two previous Fugard productions at the Signature, is outstanding as the refined and poised Sam, who only wants everyone to be happy and to better his own situation in life, while Ngaujah (Fela!) is effective as his comic foil, a black man who seems content to stay where he is, not rocking any boats. Robbins (Brighton Beach Memoirs, Punk Rock) simmers to a slow boil as Hally, Fugard’s alter-ego — the writer’s real name is Harold Athol Lanigan Fugard, there really was a Sam and Willie, and his mother did run the St. George’s Park Tea Room — leading to an explosive, powerful conclusion. “Master Harold” . . . and the boys is part of the Signature’s Legacy Program; four years ago, Fugard was the inaugural Residency One playwright at their new home, reviving Blood Knot and My Children! My Africa! in addition to premiering The Train Driver and The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek. Fugard and the Signature have brought back “Master Harold” . . . and the boys at an opportune moment, with America in the midst of a presidential election rife with heated arguments over class, race, gender, education, immigration, and the unequal distribution of wealth. Fugard writes and directs with such skill, and with such subtlety, that the play works in many contexts, relating to discrimination of all kinds everywhere, even when it’s a deeply personal tale story that still haunts him today. (There will be a discussion with dialect coach Barbara Rubin prior to the November 9 show, post-show talkbacks with members of the cast and creative team will follow the November 10, 15, and 22 performances, and the Signature Book Club will delve into Fugard’s Cousins: A Memoir on December 1 at 7:30.)

KINGS OF WAR

Henry V (Ramsey Nasr) doesn’t take kindly to French threats in Ivo van Hove’s KINGS OF WAR (photo by Richard Termine)

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
Peter Jay Sharp Building
230 Lafayette Ave.
November 3-6, $30-$130
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
tga.nl/en

If you’ve ever wondered just what all the fuss is about Ivo van Hove, then hustle over to BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House and see the Dutch-based Belgian theater director’s latest wonder, Kings of War. A follow-up of sorts to Roman Tragedies, van Hove’s five-and-a-half-hour merging of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus that played at BAM in November 2012, Kings of War seamlessly combines the Bard’s Henry V, Henry VI Parts I, II, and III, and Richard III into a dazzling four-and-a-half-hour multimedia extravaganza. The Toneelgroep Amsterdam production opens with a projection on a video screen of every English king or queen starting with Queen Elizabeth II and going backward to Henry IV, immediately linking the past to the present. Jan Versweyveld’s set and An D’Huys’s costumes bring them together further, with the characters dressed in contemporary clothing — the men in suits, the women in dresses, pantsuits, and heels — while the stage, inspired by Winston Churchill’s WWII War Room, features modern computers and old television monitors playing scenes from war movies. Translated into Dutch by Rob Klinkenberg and freely adapted by Bart van den Eynde and Peter van Kraaij, the play focuses on the kings and their thirst, or lack thereof, for power and the awesome responsibility they take on when deciding to go to war or not, exploring the psychological battles going on inside their head. Henry V (Ramsey Nasr) becomes a fast learner as he attempts to negotiate with the dauphin of France (Robert de Hoog) and his liaison (Chris Nietvelt) to prevent a war, but soon he is claiming the hand of Katharina (Hélène Devos) from her father, Charles VI (Leon Voorberg), in order to establish peace. Henry VI (Eelco Smits) is not quite as successful, a whimpering coward who does not want to be king; his feeble wooing of Margareta (Janni Goslinga) is hysterical. And then comes the dastardly Richard III, portrayed with a captivating bravado by Hans Kesting, sporting a hump and an ugly birthmark on his face; his bold pursuit to marry Lady Anne (Devos) after having just killed her beloved husband is utterly thrilling.

Henry VI (Eelco Smits) is not quite up to being king in four-and-a-half-hour extravaganza (photo by Richard Termine)

In a program note, van Hove, who recently directed the back-to-back Arthur Miller plays A View from the Bridge and The Crucible on Broadway and the David Bowie / Enda Walsh collaboration Lazarus at New York Theatre Workshop, explains, “It is fascinating to witness how crucial decisions about life and death are made. This play shows man at his most noble and at his most perverse. . . . It is inspiring to discover Shakespeare as a contemporary who is dealing with the type of events we see on the news every day: the dark machinations of the people in power and the violence that their decisions bring about.” Also inspiring is van Hove’s brilliant staging. The War Room changes with each new king, who is crowned in a stylistic manner as a brass band (Konstantin Koev, Charlotte van Passen, Daniel Quiles Cascant, Daniel Ruibal Ortigueir) plays and contratenor Steve Dugardin sings. The back of the set leads to morgue-like white corridors where various men meet their fate; the behind-the-scenes action is shown live on a large screen divided into rectangular grids, as a cameraman roams across the stage, getting up close and personal with the characters. (The video is by Tal Yarden.) It’s particularly effective during the spectacular Richard III section; as the king tries to convince the widowed Lady Anne that he is in love with her, her dead husband can be seen both on the screen as well as at the very back, on a gurney, his presence looming over them. Later, when Richard examines himself in a full-size mirror, the multiple images are breathtaking as van Hove reveals the villain’s many faces.

Richard III (Hans Kesting) takes a strange path in wooing Lady Anne (Hélène Devos) in Ivo van Hove epic at BAM (photo by Richard Termine)

Most members of the terrific cast play multiple roles, with Nasr as Henry V and Richmond, Eelco Smits as Henry VI and Grey, Bart Siegers as Edward IV, York, and Henry V’s chief of staff, Leon Voorberg as Charles VI, Warwick, and Stanley, Aus Greidanus Jr. as Gloucester and Buckingham, and de Hoog as the dauphin, Suffolk, and Clarence. The language has been modernized, which might at first bother Shakespeare purists, especially when reference is made to the current political situation in America, but that’s yet another way van Hove fuses the past with the present, as the fight for supremacy in the corridors of power is, of course, timeless and universal. (Thus, the ticking of metronomes as the finale approaches.) The nearly 270 minutes, with one intermission, fly by fairly quickly, as the play hits all the high notes at a gripping pace, zeroing in on deaths and coronations. Van Hove excels at adaptations, preferring them to new works; the Obie and Tony winner has previously been at BAM with Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, John Cassavetes’s Opening Night, and Sophocles’s Antigone, in addition to Roman Tragedies, continually coming up with remarkably innovative ways to tell stories, taking audiences to places they have never been before. Kings of War is another grand triumph, a staggering achievement from a true creative genius.

LOVE, LOVE, LOVE

Three’s a crowd when Kenneth (Richard Armitage), Sandra (Amy Ryan), and Henry (Alex Hurt) end up hanging out in Roundabout production of LOVE, LOVE, LOVE (photo by Joan Marcus)

Laura Pels Theatre
Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre
111 West 46th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 30, $99
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org

Mike Bartlett follows a pair of baby boomers through three generations in the blisteringly funny black comedy Love, Love, Love. The three-act play begins on June 25, 1967, as Kenneth (Richard Armitage) is hanging out in his brother’s flat, wearing an open robe and waiting for the Beatles to appear on television. His stuffy brother, the deadly serious Henry (Alex Hurt), wants him out of the apartment because his potential new girlfriend, Sandra (Amy Ryan), is coming over for dinner for the first time. While Ken, who is nineteen, has embraced the radical sixties, his older brother is a sour, old-fashioned drag. “Nothing like this has ever happened before,” Ken says, referring to people around the world tuning in at the same time to watch the Fab Four. “The laws are constantly being overthrown, the boundaries of what’s possible, the music’s exploding, the walls collapsing. That’s what’s going on. That’s what’s changing. We travel, do what we want, wear what we like. Enjoy it. Experiment. We’re breaking free.” Henry responds, “Well, you can break free right now and bugger off. She’ll be here in a minute.” Sandra, also nineteen, arrives like a burst of grooviness, looking like a cross between Judy Carne and Goldie Hawn from Laugh-In and ready for anything, which excites Ken but confuses Henry.

Dysfunction is always on the menu when Ken (Richard Armitage), Sandra (Amy Ryan), Jamie (Ben Rosenfield), and Rose (Zoe Kazan) get together (photo by Joan Marcus)

The second act moves ahead to a well-kept living/dining room in Reading, where Ken and Sandra live with their two teenage children, Rose (Zoe Kazan), who is turning sixteen at midnight, and the slightly younger Jamie (Ben Rosenfield), who is blasting the Stone Roses as the curtain rises. Ken and Sandra have settled into their suburban, upper-middle-class lives, a far cry from the dreams they had in the sixties. “We’re boring,” Sandra says. “We are boring, that’s true,” Ken agrees. Both parents have careers, and they selfishly don’t give much time or thought to their kids, particularly Rose, who has just returned from playing the violin at a school concert and is upset that she did not see her mother in the audience. After Ken and Sandra divulge some damaging secrets to each other, the family sits down to eat Rose’s birthday cake, but everything is ruined when Sandra makes a surprise announcement, telling the kids that it’s “the only way we can be free.” The finale jumps to 2011, with “Sexy Chick” by David Guetta featuring Akon playing on an iPad in a spacious living room in a fine country house. The family has gathered together for a funeral, but Rose has come primarily to ask something important of her parents. Meanwhile, Jamie just wants to play games on his iPhone and go sunbathing. As always, Ken and Sandra don’t really understand what Rose needs; Sandra is too busy smoking and drinking — there’s a whole lot of smoking and drinking throughout the play — and Ken is enjoying his retirement. “I just can’t concentrate anymore,” he says. “No need to. I love it. Freedom! At last!” But once again, it is not the freedom he envisioned when he first met Sandra forty-four years earlier.

Ken (Richard Armitage) and Sandra (Amy Ryan) reflect on their life and family in Mike Bartlett’s sizzling three-act play (photo by Joan Marcus)

Tony-winning director Michael Mayer (Spring Awakening, Hedwig and the Angry Inch) revels in Bartlett’s (King Charles III, Cock) razor-sharp wit, injecting a nearly breathless energy throughout the two-hour show as the dialogue bounces back-and-forth among the characters like a superfast game of pinball. Derek McLane’s (Anything Goes, 33 Variations) sets and Susan Hilferty’s (Wicked, Into the Woods) costumes are spot-on, clearly announcing the changing times. Queens native and Oscar- and two-time Tony nominee Ryan (Gone Baby Gone, Uncle Vanya) is wickedly funny as the unpredictable, self-absorbed Sandra, while Armitage (The Crucible, the Hobbit trilogy), the only actual British actor in the cast, is a steady anchor as the unwavering Ken; together they make a formidable stage duo as their characters evolve and devolve. “Nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be,” John Lennon sings in the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love,” the refrain of which gives the play its title. There might not be a whole lotta love in this dysfunctional family, but there is a whole lot to love in this wonderful Roundabout production.

BAM NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL: KINGS OF WAR

Innovative director Ivo van Hove merges four Shakespeare plays into one monumental production in KINGS OF WAR at BAM (photo by Jan Versweyveld)

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
Peter Jay Sharp Building
230 Lafayette Ave.
November 3-6, $30-$130
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

This past spring, BAM presented the Royal Shakespeare Company’s “King and Country: Shakespeare’s Great Cycle of Kings,” four Bard plays — Richard II, Henry IV Part I, Henry IV Part II, and Henry V — done in repertory over more than five weeks. Now superstar director and BAM fave Ivo van Hove, who just staged Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge and The Crucible back-to-back on Broadway in addition to Lazarus at New York Theatre Workshop, returns to Brooklyn with Kings of War, a 264-minute extravaganza that merges Henry V, Henry VI Parts I, II & III, and Richard III in contemporary surroundings. The cast features Ramsey Nasr as Henry V, Hans Kesting as Richard III, Eelco Smits as Henry VI, Hélène Devos as Lady Anne, Bart Siegers as Edward IV, Marieke Heebink as the Duchess of York, Leon Voorberg as Charles VI, and Alwin Pulinckx as the Prince of Wales. The Toneelgroep Amsterdam production, in a Dutch translation by Rob Klinkenberg adapted by Bart van den Eynde and Peter van Kraaij, is designed and lit, as always, by Jan Versweyveld, with costumes by An D’Huys and projections by Tal Yarden. There will also be a live brass band along with contratenor Steve Dugardin performing music by Eric Sleichim. Van Hove has previously staged Antigone, Angels in America, Opening Night, Cries and Whispers, and Roman Tragedies at BAM. Despite his innovative, often multimedia staging, both experimental and awe-inspiring, Van Hove is not just about dazzling production values. As BAM’s Christian Barclay notes in his BAMblog essay “Tragedy, Power, and Catharsis: Ivo van Hove’s Theatrical Humanism,” “At BAM, Van Hove’s intuitive, visionary approach to theater has now struck five times over just the past eight years (with all but one of the productions staged with his Dutch company, Toneelgroep Amsterdam). While certainly diverse in scope, from minimalist reimaginings of classic texts to wholly original screen-to-stage adaptations, all of Van Hove’s work could be said to proffer an acute examination of human behavior.” Kings of War will play a mere four performances at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House, running November 3-6, and according to the program there is only one intermission. Consider yourselves warned.

DOOMOCRACY

Will Star/Shooting Stars Pro (photo courtesy of Creative Time)

Voting rights is only one of the hot-button topics explored in Pedro Reyes’s political house of horrors (photo by Will Star/Shooting Stars Pro; courtesy of Creative Time)

Brooklyn Army Terminal
58th St. between First & Second Aves.
Through November 6, free, 6:00 – 12 midnight
creativetime.org
www.pedroreyes.net

While other New Yorkers were going to costume parties or trick-or-treating with their kids, I spent Halloween night in a political house of horrors deep in Brooklyn. Through November 6, Creative Time, the New York City nonprofit arts organization that has presented such outstanding site-specific projects as Kara Walker’s “A Subtlety” at the abandoned Domino Sugar Factory, “Drifting in Daylight” in Central Park, Mike Nelson’s “A Psychic Vacuum” in the Old Essex Street Market, and Duke Riley’s “Fly by Night” at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, has now turned its attention to the state of the nation as a contentious and perverse presidential election comes to a close. Mexican multidisciplinary artist and activist Pedro Reyes’s labyrinthine, Dada-esque Doomocracy has taken over the Brooklyn Army Terminal, where a dozen people at a time are guided through a series of scripted vignettes that deal with police brutality, voting rights, school safety, corporate greed, the health-care system, climate change, pollution, the unequal distribution of wealth, drone attacks, and other hot-button issues.

A candy coffin salesman (Matthew Korahais) takes a sweet view of death in participatory Creative Time project at the Brooklyn Army Terminal (photo by Will Star/Shooting Stars Pro; courtesy of Creative Time)

Directed by Meghan Finn, written by Paul Hufker, and curated by Creative Time artistic director Nato Thompson, Doomocracy is fully interactive; after being hauled into a van and driven to a secret spot, you will be pushed and prodded, get yelled at, be forced to climb four flights of stairs, burrow through a narrow corridor, and play a game of soccer over the course of about sixty minutes. Some of the scenarios are goofier than others, constructed with a low-budget DIY sensibility that you just have to go with, but they all make their points (although there’s a serious flaw in the abortion-related room), revealing the darker sides of America that we seem powerless to stop. The cast features more than thirty actors; standouts include Marjorie Conn as a voting poll receptionist, Matthew Korahais as a ghoulish coffin salesman, Carolina Do as a futuristic artisanal air saleswoman, and Joseph Gregori as a park ranger who offers the best surprise of the night. And it’s a thrill just walking through the nearly century-old army terminal, which was designed by Cass Gilbert during WWI to serve as a military depot and supply base and currently functions as an industrial warehouse and commercial complex managed by the New York City Economic Development Corporation. The fully booked Doomocracy also fits in well with the recent Escape Room craze, where people have to solve puzzles to proceed, but in this case there appears to be no real way out from this endless national nightmare.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S CORIOLANUS

Dion Johnstone is fierce as Coriolanus in bloody Red Bull production (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Barrow Street Theatre
27 Barrow St. at Seventh Ave. South
Tuesday – Sunday through November 20, $80-$100
www.redbulltheater.com
barrowstreettheatre.com

Director Michael Sexton and Red Bull Theater transport one of William Shakespeare’s lesser-known, lesser-performed plays, Coriolanus, to up-to-the-minute contemporary times in a fast and furious immersive adaptation bursting with passion and energy. Set and lighting designer Brett J. Banakis has transformed the Barrow Street Theatre into the site of an Occupy movement in Rome, where hungry young citizens (Edward O’Blenis, Olivia Reis, and others) are protesting the government’s control of corn. “We are accounted poor citizens, the patricians good. What authority surfeits on would relieve us,” one citizen proclaims. “If they would yield us but the superfluity, we might guess they relieved us humanely. But they think we are too dear. The leanness that afflicts us is as an inventory to particularize their abundance. Our sufferance is as a gain to them. Let us revenge it with our pikes ere we become rakes; for the gods know I speak this in hunger for bread, not in thirst for revenge.” While patrician Menenius Agrippa (Patrick Page) understands their complaints, his good friend, Roman general Cauis Martius (Dion Johnstone), dismisses the Occupiers as “dissentious rogues” and “fragments.” Later, when Martius returns a hero in the battle against Corioles and his archenemy, Tullus Aufidius (Matthew Amendt), earning him the new name Coriolanus, the citizens, spurred on by manipulative tribunes Brutus (Merritt Janson) and Sicinius (Stephen Spinella), decide to do whatever they can to prevent him from becoming elected consul, taking up weapons and smashing ballot boxes. As Coriolanus’s pride and power grow, his mother, Volumnia (Lisa Harrow), his wife, Virgilia (Rebecca S’manga Frank), their son (Reis), and family friend Valeria (Christina Pumariega), a chaste lady of Rome, try to tone down the rhetoric and focus on his humanity, but there appears to be no stopping an inevitable, and bloody, conclusion.

The exquisite Patrick Page is once again at his best as Menenius Agrippa in CORIOLANUS (photo by Carol Rosegg)

It might be Rome, 493 BCE, but it could just as easily be America, 2016, inside the Barrow Street Theatre. A platform juts out from the stage, with the audience sitting around three sides. The characters enter and leave by weaving through the aisles, often interacting with the crowd, shaking hands, giving them a balloon, or handing out ballots. The immersive structure helps cover up some of the play’s difficulties and deficiencies, particularly after Coriolanus is banished and considers joining up with Aufidius to take Rome forcefully. In his U.S. debut, Stratford Festival star Johnstone is fierce and aggressive in a challenging role that does not offer much subtlety; it is easier to get frustrated by Coriolanus’s choices than to get behind him as a heroic figure. Page (Casa Valentina, Spring Awakening), one of New York City’s finest and most natural stage actors, nearly steals the show as Menenius, his dialogue rolling eloquently off his tongue in a thrilling baritone that rattles through the theater; his Menenius is like a modern-day campaign manager unable to rein in his boss from certain self-destruction. Janson (TFANA’s Tamburlaine the Great, Notes from Underground) and two-time Tony winner Spinella (Angels in America, Red Bull’s Volpone) evoke a devious teaming of Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell, taking dastardly delight as political puppeteers fomenting rebellion. Harrow (Wit, Last Days of Chez Nous) is divinely elegant as Coriolanus’s distressed though determined mother, while Aaron Krohn is strong and stalwart as Coriolanus’s devoted right-hand man, General Cominius; Zachary Fine is a hoot as Titus Lartius and several others; and Amendt plays Aufidius like he’s a wasted British rock star. And costume designer Ásta Bennie Hostetter has fun with the outfits, from bold military uniforms to dapper suits, from hoodies to an Occupier’s T-shirt that says, “There is no capitalism without racism.” Longtime character actor Dakin Matthews, who has appeared in such recent political plays as The Audience and All the Way and was formerly artistic director of the Berkeley Shakespeare Festival, serves as dramaturg, noting in the program that Coriolanus “must appear before the people in humble garb, displaying his wounds and getting their ‘voices’ (votes), and then have their election confirmed by the people’s tribunes, who are so opposed to his elevation that they conspire to deny it to him by manipulating the people’s affections,” which sounds eerily familiar given what is happening in the current presidential campaign. Sexton (Shakespeare’s Margaret for Red Bull, Titus Andronicus at the Public), artistic director of the Shakespeare Society, keeps things chaotically orderly and involving, although a drug-party scene goes a bit over the top even as it adds needed humor. Red Bull excels at reviving seventeenth- and eighteenth-century plays (Volpone, The School for Scandal, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore), and Coriolanus is yet another triumph for this always inventive and extremely talented company.

THE CHERRY ORCHARD

John Glover, Joel Grey, Diane Lane, and Chuck Cooper squeeze into new Broadway adaptation of THE CHERRY ORCHARD (photo by Joan Marcus 2016)

American Airlines Theatre
227 West 42nd St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 4, $59-$149
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org

Rising Roundabout scribe Stephen Karam takes a curious pause in his soaring career with a misbegotten adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s classic comic drama, The Cherry Orchard. Karam’s two previous plays, 2011’s Sons of the Prophet and 2014’s The Humans, were both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, and the latter won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play when it was off Broadway and then the Tony for Best Play after transferring to the Great White Way. But his new version of The Cherry Orchard, in an exasperating production helmed by National Theatre associate director Simon Goodwin (The Beaux’ Stratagem, Routes), is sour from the very start. Chekhov’s plot is familiar to most theatergoers: After living in Paris for five years following the death of her husband and the tragic drowning of her seven-year-old-son, Grisha, Madame Lyubov Andreyevna Ranevskaya (Diane Lane) returns to the family home with her entourage, only to find that the entire estate, including her beloved cherry orchard, is going to be sold at auction because of failure to pay off massive debts. Yermolai Alekseyevich Lopakhin (Harold Perrineau), a successful businessman whose father and grandfather worked as serfs on the estate, offers a plan to save the house by cutting down the orchard and replacing it with vacation villas, but Lyubov and her arrogant brother, Leonid Andreyevich Gaev (John Glover), will have none of it, acting like spoiled children, refusing to face the direness of their situation. Also refusing to accept reality is Lyubov’s daughter, Anya (Tavi Gevinson), and her adopted daughter, Varya (Celia Keenan-Bolger). The family circle is filled out by governess and magician Charlotta Ivanovna (Tina Benko), family friend and landowner Boris Borisovich Simeonov-Pischik (Chuck Cooper), local clerk Semyon Panteleyevich Yepikhodov (Quinn Mattfeld), Grisha’s former teacher and current student Pyotr Sergeyevich Trofimov (Kyle Beltran), maid (Dunyasha), young servant Yasha (Maurice Jones), and doddering old servant Firs (Joel Grey). In addition, violinist Bryan Hernandez-Luch, clarinetist Liam Burke, and percussionist Chihiro Shibayama add cinematic music first from the sidelines, then from the back of the stage. But it’s all for naught.

Lopakhin (Harold Perrineau) tries to convince Madame Lyubov (Diane Lane) of the fate of the cherry orchard in Roundabout revival (photo by Joan Marcus 2016)

Chekhov’s plays are ripe for reinterpretation. This year alone has brought the Pearl’s Stupid Fucking Bird and Peter Pan Theatre’s The Seagull and Other Birds, two wildly inventive reimaginings of The Seagull, while the Maly Drama Theatre of St. Petersburg’s production of The Cherry Orchard at BAM was a brilliant, immersive take on the tragicomedy. But Karam and Godwin throw too much into the mix, getting trapped in a no-man’s land between traditional and experimental, classical and contemporary, realistic and metaphorical. Michael Krass’s costumes are all over the place, from sharp, modern-day suits to old-fashioned Eastern European garb, as is Karam’s dialogue. “What is it you’d say . . . ?” Madame Lyubov asks Gaev early on. “What’s the lingo?” And stage directions such as “Varya and Anya share a moment of ‘What the hell was that?!’” certainly don’t help. Karam also shifts the idea of serfdom into slavery, which Godwin overdoes by casting black actors as Lopakhin, Trofimov, and Pischik. Most of the play takes place in the nursery, which set designer Scott Pask has outfitted with tiny chairs and tables, Alexander Calder-like mobiles hanging from the ceiling, a toy village, and a mobile of small hot-air balloons hovering over a child’s bed. Yes, we get it; virtually all of the characters are acting like children. And it turns out to be more cringe-worthy than funny when the rather large Cooper wiggles into one of the chairs. The floor is an enormous trunk of a tree that has been chopped down, its myriad rings representing the changing times and generations, evoking the eventual fate of the cherry orchard and the Russian aristocracy — as well as this production itself.