this week in theater

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.

DE MATERIE (THE MATTER)

Heiner Goebbels’s adaptation of Louis Andriessen’s DE MATERIE is an audio and visual wonder — complete with sheep and light-up zeppelins (photo by Stephanie Berger)

Park Ave. Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. between 66th & 67th Sts.
March 22–30, $85-$195
212-933-5812
www.armoryonpark.org

Regardless of how well prepared you think you are for Heiner Goebbels’s awesomely strange spectacle De Materie, you’re not; get ready to be confused, amazed, bewildered, delighted, mesmerized, and frustrated, often all at the same time. Goebbels’s awe-inspiring version of Dutch new music composer Louis Andriessen’s four-part masterwork, initially presented at the 2014 Ruhrtriennale at a former power plant in Germany, is making its North American stage premiere this month in the Wade Thompson Drill Hall at the Park Avenue Armory, where it fits like a glove. The nearly two-hour work is divided into four very different sections that explore freedom and innovation through the age-old philosophical battle between matter and spirit. De Materie is constructed like an architectural magnum opus of experimental music, dance, art, theater, opera, and science, with many memorable parts that come together to form an ever-greater whole . . . or not, as tenor Pascal Charbonneau explains, intoning passages from Dutch physicist Gorlaeus’s Idea physicae. A small choir sings “Plakkaat van Verlatinghe,” the Act of Abjuration declaring Dutch independence from Spain, and later adds sections from a 1690 primer on shipbuilding (“Aeloude and hedendaegsche Scheepsbouw en Bestier”) by Nicolaas Witsen. Subtitles are projected onto glowing zeppelins, walls, and tents in which silhouettes mysteriously gather.

DE MATERIE features music, dance, theater, art, spoken word, philosophy, mysticism, and even boogie-woogie (photo by Wonge Bergmann)

Thirteenth-century devotional mystic poet Hadewijch (soprano Evgeniya Sotnikova) sings of corporeal love with God as black-covered figures on benches behind her change position every time the lights go off and then on again. Piet Mondrian’s 1927 “Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue” is brought to life with swinging pendulums as Gauthier Dedieu and Niklas Taffner dance the boogie-woogie and the theory of the line is discussed through texts by mathematician and theosophist M. H. J. Schoenmaekers. Madame Curie (Catherine Milliken) reads from her Nobel Prize acceptance speech and the diary she kept following the death of her husband. And one hundred sheep from Pennsylvania bleat from the back of the hall, although no translation is provided. The dramatic, varied score is performed with vigor by the fifty-plus members of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) and ChorWerk Ruhr, conducted by Peter Rundel. The sets and lighting by Klaus Grünberg and sound design by Norbert Ommer are mind-blowing; the fab costumes are by Florence von Gerkan, with choreography by Florian Bilbao. So, when put together, what’s it all about? In his director’s note in the program, Goebbels, who previously presented Stifters Dinge at the armory in December 2009, writes, “Our visual solutions for this piece — tents in the first act, benches in the second, the pendulum in the third, and the sheep in the fourth act — aren’t symbols for something that needs to be deciphered or understood. They all are what they are: tents, benches, pendulum, and sheep — and zeppelins. But what you feel or imagine about them — that is your business alone. Just don’t underestimate the sheep.” Actually, you shouldn’t underestimate any of this equally dazzling and head-scratching adaptation of one of the great new-music compositions of the twentieth-century.

TICKET GIVEAWAY: LEONARD NIMOY’S VINCENT

vincent

LEONARD NIMOY’S VINCENT
Theatre at St. Clement’s
423 West 46th St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Wednesday – Sunday through June 5, $59-$89
starrynighttheater.com/vincent

Leonard Nimoy lived long and prospered before passing away last February at the age of eighty-three, leaving behind a legacy that includes two children, two marriages of more than twenty years, major roles on and off Broadway (Equus, Fiddler on the Roof, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest), and this little television and movie franchise known as Star Trek. But one of his most important personal projects was a one-man show called Vincent, which he adapted from Phillip Stephens’s Van Gogh and toured in beginning in 1981. In the play, Vincent’s younger brother, Theo, talks about life with his older sibling, an artist whose talent and innovation was only recognized after his death. The thoroughly researched text is based on hundreds of letters between the brothers; Nimoy also traveled to Arles, Saint-Rémy, and Auvers while preparing the show. The play is now being revived by the Starry Night Theatre Co. starting April 1 at the Theatre at St. Clement’s. Company artistic director James Briggs plays Theo, with Dr. Brant Pope directing. “Last week when we buried my brother, there was so much I wanted to say, I couldn’t do it,” Theo says at the start. “You see, I simply couldn’t speak. I didn’t express myself. It’s been a burden on my soul . . . what I wanted to say and I couldn’t . . . what I needed to say, what you need to hear. So I thank you for this second opportunity.”

James Briggs stars as Theo van Gogh in revival of Leonard Nimoy’s VINCENT at the Theatre at St. Clement’s

James Briggs stars as Theo van Gogh in revival of Leonard Nimoy’s VINCENT, coming to the Theatre at St. Clement’s

TICKET GIVEAWAY: Vincent begins previews April 1 and opens April 7 at Theatre at St. Clement’s, and twi-ny has three pairs of tickets to give away for free. Just send your name, daytime phone number, and favorite van Gogh painting to contest@twi-ny.com by Wednesday, March 30, at 3:00 to be eligible. All entrants must be twenty-one years of age or older; three winners will be selected at random.

ECLIPSED

Danai Gurira’s ECLIPSED follows a group of women just trying to survive during Liberia’s second civil war (photo by Joan Marcus)

Golden Theatre
252 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 19, $45-$149
eclipsedbroadway.com

When Academy Award winner Lupita Nyong’o was invited to star in a play at the Public by artistic director Oskar Eustis, she immediately chose Danai Gurira’s Eclipsed, and it’s easy to see why. Eclipsed is a searing look at five women trying to find ways to survive during the second Liberian civil war, a memorably written, directed, and acted story filled with surprising dark humor among horrific abuse and violence. The play was initially staged by Woolly Mammoth and then at Yale Rep in 2009, where Nyong’o served as an understudy and never got the opportunity to go on. It was such a success at the Public last fall that it has since transferred to Broadway, where it’s running at the Golden Theatre through June 19. Set in 2003, the play explores the terrifying situation of five women, three of whom live together in a ramshackle cement hut riddled with bullet holes and are sex slaves to a local commanding officer. They are known merely as wife Number One (Saycon Sengbloh), who has been there the longest and manages the household; pregnant wife Number Three (Pascale Armand), who likes to complain and is rather scattershot; and the new girl, wife Number Four (Nyong’o), who is determined to hold on to her identity despite what is happening to her and the others. When Number Four asks Number One about her age and Number One doesn’t seem to care, Number Four says, “Don’t you want to know? I don’ know, I just tink we should know who we are, whot year we got, where we come from. Dis war not forever.” Number One responds, “Dat whot it feel like,” to which Number Four replies, “Ya, but it not. I want to keep doing tings. I fifteen years, I know dat. I want to do sometin’ wit’ myself, be a doctor or member of Parliament or sometin’.”

Despite such dreams, their value as objects rather than humans is made clear; every so often, they suddenly line up in a row as the unseen CO walks by and chooses which one he wants to have sex with. When they return, they go straight to a basin, grab a washcloth, and clean themselves. Soon Number Two (Zainab Jah) returns, a revolutionary carrying a rifle and bringing rice, which Number One refuses. Number Two, who has joined the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) against corrupt President Charles Taylor, wants to recruit Number Four, but Number Four is too immersed in a book she is reading out loud, about a U.S. leader named Bill Clinton. “A white man?” Number One asks. “Ya, he white. He from America,” Number Four answers. “You sho he white? Dere lots of Liberians in America. Maybe he American from Liberia or Liberian from America,” Number Three adds. “No, I tink he American from America,” Number Four, who wears Rugrats and Tweety Bird T-shirts, says. Later, Number Three claims, “He see me, he gon’ forget dat white wife. She betta not let him come ’ere.” In her fantasy of release, she’s still a concubine, only to a white U.S. president rather than a Liberian warlord, perhaps a sly dig at the “liberation” of first-world women. The whole conversation about Bill and Hillary Clinton and Monica Lewinsky is much-needed comic relief as things heat up and Rita (Akosua Busia), a peace worker dressed in white like an angel, comes to the compound to meet with the CO and try to help end the civil war.

Lupita Nyong’o considers joining the fighting at the behest of Zainab Jah (photo by Joan Marcus)

Eclipsed is the second of four plays about Africa and African Americans written by Gurira, a Zimbabwean American who plays zombie killer Michonne on The Walking Dead; she won an Obie for 2005’s In the Continuum, was nominated for an L.A. Drama Critics Circle Award for 2012’s The Convert, and Familiar has been extended at Playwrights Horizon. In her return to the stage — and her Broadway debut — following her Oscar-winning performance in 12 Years a Slave, Mexican Kenyan Nyong’o is mesmerizing as a young woman bright beyond her years, prepared to do whatever it takes to maintain her identity and, ultimately, regain her freedom without sacrificing her humanity, something that the brutal, fierce Number Two no longer worries about. “We gon’ restore Liberia to its rightful people,” Number Two tells Number Four. “You understand, de enemy, de enemy is no longer human being. Okay?” Reprising their roles from the Yale Rep production, Jah (Ruined, The Convert), who was born in England and partly raised in Sierra Leone, fully inhabits her role as the freedom warrior, inspired by real women who took up arms to fight against Taylor’s rule, while Armand (The Trip to Bountiful, An Octoroon), who was born in Brooklyn and whose parents are from Haiti, is charming as a woman who never quite learned how to take care of herself. Sengbloh (Marley, Hurt Village), who is of Liberian heritage, is bold yet tender-hearted as the strong-willed but perhaps misguided ersatz leader of the sex slaves, and Ghanaian Busia (Mule Bone, The Talented Tenth) lends a touching vulnerability to the peace worker who has a personal agenda in her mission. Together they form a kind of alternate family of parents and children attempting to deal with an impossible situation, their performances ringing true with realistic and rhythmic movement and dialogue, beautifully directed by South Africa native Tommy (Ruined, The Good Negro), who has been with the show from the start. The set and costumes by Clint Ramos and music and sound design by Broken Chord add to the mood, which is fraught with danger yet resilient with hope, giving balance to this extraordinary story by and about women and power. Coincidentally, the Playbill front cover features a close-up of Nyong’o’s very serious face, while the back cover shows her bursting with happiness in an elegant advertisement for a high-end makeup company, providing quite a contrast that is, in some ways, metaphorically echoed in this very special production.

KING AND COUNTRY: SHAKESPEARE’S GREAT CYCLE OF KINGS

David Tennant stars as Richard II in Royal Shakespeare Company production at BAM (photo by Keith Pattison)

David Tennant stars as Richard II in Royal Shakespeare Company production coming to BAM (photo by Keith Pattison)

Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St.
March 24 – May 1, $30-$200
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

In a letter to his mistress, Lady Emma Hamilton, in 1800, Admiral Horatio Nelson wrote, “My greatest happiness is to serve my gracious King and Country, and I am envious only of glory; for if it be a sin to covet glory, I am the most offending soul alive.” BAM references that famous quote in its glorious program “King and Country: Shakespeare’s Great Cycle of Kings,” and it would be a sin not to covet it. In honor of the quadricentennial of the passing of William Shakespeare, who died in 1616 at the age of fifty-two, BAM has teamed up with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Ohio State University to present the Henriad, four Shakespeare plays in repertory at the BAM Harvey over the course of thirty-nine days, concentrating on Kings Henry IV and V. All four works are directed by RSC artistic director Gregory Doran, with sets by Stephen Brimson Lewis, lighting by Tim Mitchell, music by Paul English, sound by Martin Slavin, movement by Michael Ashcroft, and fights by Terry King. David Tennant (Doctor Who, Broadchurch, Jessica Jones), who played the title character in Doran’s 2008 staging of Hamlet with Patrick Stewart as his father, has the lead role in Richard II, with Julian Glover as John of Gaunt, Leigh Quinn as the queen, Oliver Ford Davies as the duke of York, Sarah Parks as the duchess of York, and Jasper Britton as John of Gaunt’s son, later to become Henry IV. Britton continues his role in Henry IV, Part I, and Henry IV, Part II, with Alex Hassell as Prince Hal, Martin Bassindale as Peto and Prince John, Antony Sher (Doran’s longtime partner) as Sir John Falstaff, Parks as Mistress Quickly, and Sam Marks as Ned Poins. And Hassell then takes the throne in Henry V, with Jim Hooper as the archbishop of Canterbury, Simon Thorp as King Charles VI of France, Jane Lapotaire as Queen Isobel, Quinn as lady-in-waiting Alice, and Marks as the French constable.

HENRY IV, PART I is one of four RSC plays running at BAM through May 1 (photo by Keith Pattison)

“The Henriad plays are a contemplation of power and leadership — how they are acquired, maintained, and lost,” BAM publicist Christian Barclay writes in a program essay. “A host of historical and fictional characters — both high- and lowborn — revolve around the monarchs in shifting alliances. . . . The Henriad is a study of the difficult personal and ethical choices that accompany political life.” In conjunction with the plays, the Mark Morris Dance Center is hosting the master class “Embodying Shakespeare” on April 5 with Owen Horsley, Hassell, and Quinn ($25, 2:00), Doran will be in conversation with Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro on April 7 at BAMcafé ($20, 6:00), Neil Kutner, Ryan Gastelum, and Ben Tyreman will participate in the seminar “Behind the Scenes: King and Country” at BAM Fisher on April 20 ($35, 5:00), astronomer Summer Ash will lead guided tours of the sky with telescopes in “A Look at the Stars: Shakespeare and the Cosmos” April 15-17 on the BAM Fisher rooftop terrace (free, 8:30 or 9:30), and the exhibition “King and Country: Treasures from the Folger,” consisting of rare paper artifacts from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, will be on view at the Harvey during the run of the performances. Tickets for the shows and the special events are going quickly, so act now if you want to catch any or all of what should be a glorious Shakespeare spectacle to covet.

DISASTER!

The audience and the cast have a swinging good time in DISASTER! (Jeremy Daniel Photography)

Nederlander Theatre
208 West 41st St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 3, $65-$179
877-250-2929
www.disastermusical.com

There has been many a disaster on Broadway; Disaster! is definitely not one of them. The delightful musical comedy, which began life as a one-night charity benefit in 2011 and then had off-Broadway runs at the Triad Theater in 2012 and St. Luke’s in 2013-14, has made a simply fabulous transition to the Great White Way, where it runs through July 3 at the Nederlander Theatre. The show has kept growing since initially conceived by Seth Rudetsky and Drew Geraci, with bigger and bigger stars and significant changes to the script and music; the Broadway version is by cowriter, music supervisor, song arranger, and costar Rudetsky and his best friend, cowriter and director Jack Plotnick, a longtime character actor in film and television. It’s 1979, and Tony Delvecchio (Roger Bart channeling Jack Black) is celebrating the opening of Barracuda, his floating casino and discotheque moored in New York Harbor. A chintzy showman and businessman, Tony has cut just about every corner possible, worrying journalist Marianne (Kerry Butler) and Professor Ted Schneider (Rudetsky), who is concerned that the ship could not survive a natural disaster, which is likely to occur shortly. Among those on deck are Sister Mary Downy (Jennifer Simard), who is protesting against the casino and its debauchery; Shirley (Faith Prince) and Maury (Kevin Chamberlin), an older couple with a fierce love of life; Levora (Lacretta Nicole), a down-on-her-luck former disco diva who goes everywhere with her beloved dog in her handbag; Chad (Adam Pascal), whom Marianne left at the altar and his now working as a waiter on the ship, and his goofy buddy, Scott (Max Crumm); and elegant but not-too-bright lounge singer Jackie (Rachel York) and her young twins, Ben and Lisa (both played in hilarious fashion by Baylee Littrell). The show pays tribute to the great, and not-so-great, disaster movies of the 1970s, ingeniously coupled with beloved, and not-so-beloved, pop songs from that era.

Jackie (Rachel York) prays for a morning after as Ted (Rudetsky) and Ben (Baylee Littrell) look on (Jeremy Daniel Photography)

The main target is The Poseidon Adventure, but there are also references galore to the Airport films, The Towering Inferno, Earthquake, Rollercoaster, Tidal Wave, Piranha, and even Airplane! Simard’s nun character, speaking in a killer deadpan voice, is pulled directly from Jim Abrahams and David and Jerry Zucker’s classic 1980 spoof, while Prince excels in her homage to Shelley Winters in Poseidon. Meanwhile, the melodrama involving Marianne and Chad feels like a terrifically nerdy subplot from The Love Boat. The score features more than three dozen period favorites, delivered with extremely firm tongues-in-cheek, including Mary MacGregor’s “Torn Between Two Lovers,” Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman,” Queen’s “You’re My Best Friend,” England Dan and John Ford Coley’s “I’d Really Love to See You Tonight,” Orleans’s “Still the One,” Carly Simon’s “Mockingbird,” and Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff,” many of which become riotous set pieces, especially as things start looking more and more bleak and Tobin Obst’s (Newsies, Jekyll & Hyde) set begins falling apart with deliciously low-budget panache. The cast, superbly dressed by William Ivey Long (Chicago, On the Twentieth Century), does an amazing job keeping a straight face while the audience explodes in pure glee over each new reference or song snippet, which Rudetsky and Plotnick nail again and again. Littrell, the son of former Backstreet Boy Brian Littrell, nearly steals the show playing the twin siblings, going back and forth between Ben and Lisa in side-splitting, nearly impossible ways. The fun choreography is by JoAnn M. Hunter (School of Rock, Broadway Bound), who has a blast with the fab soundtrack. No mere jukebox musical, Disaster! is hot stuff indeed, a love letter to a simpler time and place; about the only thing missing is Sensurround.

SOUTHERN COMFORT

Couples Robert (Annette O’Toole) and Lola (Jeff McCarthy) and Carly (Aneesh Sheth) and Jackson (Jeffrey Kuhn) deal with LGBTQ issues in SOUTHERN COMFORT (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Anspacher Theater at the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St.
Through March 27, $40-$65
212-967-7555
www.publictheater.org

At intermission of Southern Comfort, I was standing just outside the Anspacher Theater at the Public, next to a group of older men and women who were debating whether to go back inside for the second act. “Tell me, why are we seeing this again?” one gentleman asked. “We’re seeing this because it’s important,” one of the women answered. “It’s important for us to see and understand people who are different.” The man looked over at me with a shrug, and I couldn’t help but shrug back. I went back inside for the rest of the show; some of the people in that group opted to go home instead, which was not a bad decision. Southern Comfort is a sappy, treacly adaptation of Kate Davis’s award-winning 2001 documentary about ailing transgender Robert Eads and his close circle of friends, which he calls his “chosen family.” Ten years in the making, the musical, which was conceived by Robert DuSold and Thomas Caruso, with book and lyrics by Dan Collins and music by Julianne Wick Davis (who previously collaborated on Trevor and When We met), follows a dying Eads (Annette O’Toole) as he continues his monthly picnics at his wooded home in Georgia with transgender Jackson (Jeffrey Kuhn), who is considering getting a phalloplasty to physically complete his transition; Carly (Aneesh Sheth), Jackson’s new transgender girlfriend; burly transgender Sam (Donnie Cianciotto) and his girlfriend, Melanie (Robin Skye); and Robert’s new lover, transvestite Lola Cola (Jeff McCarthy), a man’s man who is nervously just starting to adjust to his preferred lifestyle. They are all considering whether to attend the annual Southern Comfort convention in Atlanta, a gathering place for the LGBTQ community, where they can be themselves without any of the usual consequences. (Southern Comfort is a real conference and symposium that recently relocated to Fort Lauderdale after twenty-four years in Atlanta; the convention boasts more than eighteen thousand attendees over its history and bills itself as “the largest gathering of the transgender community in the world.”)

Folk band plays music and gets involved in the narrative in rustic musical (photo by Carol Rosegg)

But while the documentary is a warm and intimate examination of Eads and his friends and family, the musical merely celebrates its own existence, with only the most tangential and, dare we say, dull and ordinary moments of conflict and drama. Will Melanie bring Sam to her company holiday party? Will Robert’s parents finally accept who he has become? (This relationship was changed from the film.) Will Lola go to the convention and join the greater LGBTQ community? While these are all valid questions, their treatment in Southern Comfort does not make for exciting or compelling theater; instead, they come off more like plot points in a Lifetime movie. Even the titles of the songs are rather plain and obvious (as are the lyrics): “Grace,” “Women,” “Bless My Heart,” “Walk the Walk,” “Chosen Family,” “Home.” James J. Fenton’s set is rustic and inviting, including a swing and a tree festooned with photos and other memorabilia from the characters’ lives. Around the tree, the band plays folksy music, and some of the musicians occasionally narrate brief bits or play small roles; the crack band consists of Lizzie Hagstedt on bass, Joel Waggoner on violin and piano, Morgan Morse on piano and guitar, Elizabeth Ward Land on piano and percussion, and musical director David M. Lutken on harmonica and various stringed instruments. The acting is solid if unspectacular, led by an unrecognizable O’Toole (Hamlet in Bed, Cat People) and a bold McCarthy (Urinetown, Side Show). Perhaps Southern Comfort would have been more effective ten or fifteen years ago, closer to the time when the film came out and made such an impact. Or maybe part of the problem is that the show is essentially preaching to the converted at the Public Theater, where the audience has no issues with who the characters are and what they want to do with their lives. Of course, horrible, unjust, and unfair treatment of the LGBTQ community continues around the world, and those stories need to be told; unfortunately, Southern Comfort is not the musical to do it.