this week in theater

THE WILDNESS

Lauren Worsham is the pregnant ringleader of Sky-Pony’s delightful indie-rock fairy tale, THE WILDNESS (photo by Ben Arons)

Ars Nova
511 West 54th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Monday – Saturday through March 26, $36
212-352-3101
arsnovanyc.com
www.sky-pony.com

Brooklyn-based eight-piece collective Sky-Pony presents a captivating treat for adventurous theatergoers with the DIY indie-rock opera The Wildness, which has been extended at Ars Nova through March 26. A collaboration with the Play Company, The Wildness is a multimedia fairy tale that filters such popular musicals as Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell through a Narnia-like aesthetic and video-game narrative that fantasy fans will go ga-ga over. The premise is that a group of “agnostic, generally apathetic millennials” is putting on its fifth annual ritual, known as the Wildness, in order to “purge out doubts and fears.” But their leader and founder, Michael, is missing, so they forge ahead without him. Everyone plays two characters, one a member of Sky-Pony, the other in the fable. Tony winner Lauren Worsham (A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder) serves as the host and plays Zira, a villager who accompanies Ada, the messianic princess (Lilli Cooper), on her dangerous travels through the Wildness, where they discover a mysterious cabin, belonging to “the builder,” filled with strange objects. We are told that the role of Ada is usually performed by Michael, but Lilli, his sister, has stepped in at the last minute, starting off by delivering the invocation: “Here’s to the artists, freaks, and wanderers too, we dedicate tonight to you.” The cast also includes Katie Lee Hill and Sharone Sayegh as handmaidens and backup singers, David Blasher as the cellist and the Powerful But Aging Ruler, and Obie winner Kyle Jarrow as the keymaster and the Voice from the Boombox, with Jamie Mohamdein on bass, Kevin Wunderlich on guitar, and Jeff Fernandes, wearing a Mr. Tumnus headpiece, on drums and playing villagers as well. Over the course of ninety minutes, the story explores faith and doubt, fear of death, sin and forgiveness, temptation and salvation, the coming rapture, wandering blind, and adherence to the old ways, haunted by a prophecy: “The spring turns foul when our faith falters / only the blessed heir can make it pure again. / On sunrise of the second day of the third week of the fourth moon, / Ada will lead us into a rapturous new era.”

Sky-Pony struts its stuff in multimedia indie-rock opera at Ars Nova (photo by Ben Arons)

Religious references abound throughout The Wildness, which is divided into twelve sections, although it is no mere tent revival. Ada is identified as “the blessed heir with the facial hair”; Ada and Zira have names that evoke the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end; several characters and two audience members deliver “overshares,” public confessions with a decidedly twelve-step edge; and Ada and Zira find a book in the cabin that changes everything. The Wildness is also very much about the fear of growing up, of the millennial generation staring adulthood in the face. Tony-nominated director Sam Buntrock (Sunday in the Park with George, Turn of the Screw at BAM) lets Sky-Pony strut its stuff, keeping up a rollicking, frolicking pace. The musical numbers, some of which appear on Sky-Pony’s debut album, December 2015’s Beautiful Monsters, include “The Lost Ones,” “The Waltz of the Inevitable Triumph of Doubt,” “Dragon,” and “Everyone Will Die,” with videos appearing on the many monitors throughout the space, which has been transformed by Kris Stone; a long, narrow stage (reminiscent of a cross?) cuts the theater in two, with the audience seated on both sides, either on ottomans or comfy couches. Tilly Grimes’s costumes are steampunk hip, Chase Brock’s choreography is fun, Sara Morgan’s props are utterly charming (oh, that miniature cabin on the ceiling!), and the clever text, by husband-and-wife Jarrow and Worsham (who, in a neat twist, is pregnant), is playfully self-referential. “I’m doubting whether I can pull off these sequin panties,” Lilli opines at one point. In the fifth section, Lauren says, “Ada’s mind was filled with questions. Her father had taught her about the Wildness that trapped them in their troubled village. But no one had actually seen a dragon. Could it be they weren’t there at all?” Lilli responds, “Zira didn’t wonder this. She knew we believe in many things we don’t see.” It’s a statement that sums up what the Wildness, and life itself, is really all about.

HUGHIE

Frank Wood and Forest Whitaker star in revival of Eugene O’Neill’s HUGHIE (photo by Marc Brenner)

Booth Theatre
222 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Wednesday – Sunday (and some Tuesday nights) through March 27, $25- $149
hughiebroadway.com

Written in 1941 but not staged until 1958, five years after his death, Eugene O’Neill’s one-act Hughie features a main character who seems to have walked right out of The Iceman Cometh. In the sixty-minute show’s fourth trip to Broadway, Forest Whitaker portrays Erie Smith, a role previously played by Jason Robards, Ben Gazzara, Brian Dennehy, Al Pacino, Richard Schiff, and Burgess Meredith, who originated the part in English in 1963. Erie is an alcoholic gambler who has returned to the ratty, formerly grand Broadway hotel where he lives following an extended bender, mourning the death of his beloved night clerk and sounding board, Hughie. As embodied by Whitaker, who is taking the stage for the first time since shortly after college, Erie is a hulking presence who speaks in fits and starts, sharing his hopes and dreams, failures and memories with the new clerk, Charlie Hughes (Frank Wood), who is not exactly thrilled at being bothered in the middle of the night. Erie rambles on about whatever comes into his head while Hughes barely says a word. Set in 1928 on the cusp of the Great Depression, Hughie is more a character study than a fully realized play; in fact, it was meant to be part of a cycle of one-acts, called By Way of Obit, that were essentially monologues about a dead person. In a letter to critic George Jean Nathan, O’Neill explained, “Via this monologue you get a complete picture of the person who died — his or her whole life story — but just as complete a picture of the life and character of the narrator.” O’Neill ultimately destroyed all of the other in-process one-acts but saved Hughie.

Forest Whitaker makes his return to the stage in HUGHIE (photo by Marc Brenner)

Oscar winner and UNESCO special envoy Whitaker (The Last King of Scotland, Fast Times at Ridgemont High) was rumored to have had trouble remembering his lines during previews (which has also been said of other recent Hollywood stars on Broadway, including Pacino and Bruce Willis), but he has settled into the role, taking command of the lovable loser, who represents an America about to hit free fall. Tony winner Wood (Side Man, Clybourne Park) is a fine foil for Erie, already onstage when the theater doors open, staring emptily into an abyss. Costume and set designer Christopher Oram, who has won Tonys for Red and Wolf Hall: Parts One & Two, has created a sensational hotel lobby, huge and dim, creaky and musty, its former splendor, perhaps like Erie’s, hovering in the dankness, enhanced by Neil Austin’s lighting and Adam Cork’s original music. Tony-winning director Michael Grandage (The Cripple of Inishmaan, King Lear) keeps it all from becoming boring, although even at a mere sixty minutes it feels repetitive and a little too long. Hughie was scheduled to run into July but recently posted an early closing notice of March 27 because of low advance ticket sales. Perhaps theatergoers were expecting more fireworks, or they were turned off by the preview problems, or maybe they don’t want to spend upwards of $149 on an hour-long show. Of course, we don’t pay to see movies by the minute, nor do we buy art by the yard, to paraphrase Max von Sydow’s character in Hannah and Her Sisters.

BOY

Dr. Wendell Barnes (Paul Niebanck) bonds with Samantha (Bobby Steggert) in Anna Ziegler’s BOY (photo by Carol Rosegg)

The Clurman Theatre at Theatre Row
410 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 9, $62.50
www.keencompany.org
www.ensemblestudiotheatre.org

Award-winning playwright Anna Ziegler takes a unique and imaginative approach to the timely issue of gender identity in the expertly written, inventively staged drama Boy. A joint production of Keen Company and Ensemble Studio Theatre, Boy was inspired by the real-life case of David Reimer as well as the birth of Ziegler’s first child. Bobby Steggert stars as Adam/Samantha, a twin born in Iowa in 1967. Shortly after a botched, unnecessary circumcision accidentally sears off his penis when he is eight months old, his mother, Trudy (Heidi Armbruster), and father, Doug (Ted Koch), seek out the help of eminent physician Wendell Barnes (Paul Niebanck), a doctor in the relatively new field of gender reassignment. “Sam will never lead a normal life. He will never be a father. He will never be normal,” Doug opines in a letter to Dr. Barnes, while Trudy adds, “We saw you on that program and you said that we are blank slates at birth. You said we are shaped by society and not biology.” Dr. Barnes, who is eager to treat the boy, convinces the parents that it is best for the child to be raised as a girl, receiving hormone shots and ultimately an operation to give her a vagina, but he insists that she must never find out that she was born with male genitalia. The play shifts back and forth between various years from 1968 to 1989 as Samantha learns about great literature from Dr. Barnes and Adam falls for a single working mother, Jenny (Rebecca Rittenhouse). Delivering a lecture in 1977, Dr. Barnes explains, “How do we become who we are? Is it a process that takes place entirely within the dark mysteries of the womb, so we emerge fully formed, our character, our future set? Or do we build ourselves, brick by brick, ‘sufficient to have stood though free to fall’? Do we make our house or do we simply inhabit it?” But as Boy shows, there are no easy answers to those questions, whether it’s 1968, 1977, 1989, or today, when such topics as nature vs. nurture and being born a certain way are still rife with controversy.

Jenny (Rebecca Rittenhouse) and Adam (Bobby Steggert) consider a relationship in BOY (photo by Carol Rosegg)

No matter the age, Adam/Samantha wears the same outfit in every scene, reaffirming that what matters is on the inside. Steggert (Mothers & Sons, Ragtime) does a marvelous job of depicting how uncomfortable Adam/Samantha is in his/her own skin, displaying a jittery awkwardness that keeps the audience on edge. Ziegler (The Last Match, A Delicate Ship) fills the play with a wide array of literary and pop-culture references, but each one has a critical connection to the story, from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre to Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future 2 and Marlo Thomas’s Free to Be You and Me. Even when Adam imitates Elmer Fudd, saying, “Shh . . . Be vewwy, vewwy quiet . . . I’m hunting wabbits!,” it relates to Jenny’s first appearance onstage, in a bunny costume at a Halloween party, where Adam quite adamantly tells her that he is not Frankenstein but Frankenstein’s monster. “Frankenstein was the guy who made the monster. I’m just the monster,” he points out. The cast is uniformly excellent, with Armbruster (Time Stands Still, Disgraced) and Koch (The Pillowman, Abundance) bringing just the right confusion to the parents, while Niebanck (A Walk in the Woods, Blood and Gifts) is quietly effective as the doctor who befriends Samantha but also stands to gain fame from their association. And Rittenhouse (The Commons of Pensacola) makes Jenny a kind of onstage representative of the audience, not quite understanding all of what is happening but compelled to find out more about Adam. Evoking such works as John Cameron Mitchell’s Tony-winning Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Emily Bentley Solomon’s award-winning adaptation of Daphne Scholinski’s memoir The Last Time I Wore a Dress, Boy also investigates doctors and parents playing god, which continues as science makes leaps and bounds in genetics. Sandra Goldmark’s living-room set features a close-but-not-exact duplicate of the furniture upside down on the walls and ceiling, as if Adam/Samantha is caught between two worlds, unable to settle into his/her place. Director Linsay Firman (Lucas Hnath’s Isaac’s Eye, Ziegler’s Photograph 51) cleverly navigates through the years, dealing with complex issues concerning traditional gender roles in a gentle, tender manner that threatens to explode at any moment. About halfway through the play, Jenny worries that Adam, who named himself after the first man on earth, is just like all the other men she’s met in her life. “I’m not like them,” he insists. No, he most certainly isn’t.

A ROOM OF MY OWN

Little Carl (Nico Bustamente) and Adult Carl (Ralph Macchio) go over old times in A ROOM OF MY OWN (photo by Ben Strothmann)

June Havoc Theatre, Abingdon Theatre Company
Abingdon Theatre Arts Complex
312 West 36th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 13, $65
212-868-2055
abingdontheatre.org

Playwright and director Charles Messina wishes everyone a merry frickin’ Christmas in the raucous and riotous, and poignant and bittersweet, A Room of My Own. Eight years in the making, the show, making its world premiere at the Abingdon Theatre Company through March 13, is based on Messina’s childhood, when he was a boy living with his family in a one-room tenement apartment on Thompson St. in Greenwich Village. Ralph Macchio stars as Carl Morelli, Messina’s alter ego, who serves as the play’s narrator and ostensible scribe, carrying around a MacBook Air along with the marble composition notebook he wrote in when he was a kid, referring to both as the play unfolds through his memory. It’s Christmas season in 1979, a time that Morelli describes as “after Stonewall but before AIDS. Post-Watergate and pre-Reagan. Our little corner of the world was still a staunch Italian American enclave, with the first wave of immigrants who had settled there around the turn of the century, now aging, and dying in the shadow of the church.” Morelli’s father, Peter (Johnny Tammaro), stays at home, collecting disability, while Morelli’s mother, Dotty (Joli Tribuzio), works at a local bakery and has a penchant for stealing things. At night, Peter shares the pull-out couch with ten-year-old Carl (Nico Bustamante), while Dotty sleeps on the sofa with teenage daughter Jeannie (Kendra Jain). Dotty’s gay brother, Jackie (Mario Cantone), lives upstairs with his beloved dog, Lil’ Pish. All six of the characters — including Little Carl — are about as foul-mouthed as they come. After Adult Carl’s introduction, the first words of the play he’s written flow like poetry from Dotty: “So I says, Go an’ f&*k yourself, ya guinea c*cksucka!” And that’s only the beginning, as everyone gets in on the action, even the kids. “Nobody knows how to f&*in’ talk in this family,” Jeannie says. The Morellis are experiencing tough times, as the church is after them for Little Carl’s past-due tuition, which they don’t have — for reasons that become clear later — but Dotty doesn’t hold back her wrath for the principal, who is a nun. “Not for nothin’ but she’s got some balls callin’ this house,” Dotty declares. “They’re supposed to take a vow of poverty or did she forget? Houndin’ workin’ people for a lousy $150.” Jackie soon enters the fray with a series of curse-laced rants, performed with breathless, showstopping glee by Cantone. With Christmas on the horizon, Little Carl asks Santa for a room of his own, but the Morellis are used to not getting what they want.

Joli Tribuzio, Mario Cantone, and Johnny Tammaro have a f&*kin’ field day in New York-set un-family-friendly comedy (photo by Ben Strothmann)

Set designer Brian Dudkiewicz places the Morellis’ drab, appropriately sloppy apartment within a picture frame, as if it’s a living snapshot of what once was. Macchio, the Karate Kid and My Cousin Vinny star — who still has those teen-idol good looks — is tender and charming as Adult Carl, who desperately tries to be cool, calm, and collected but usually ends up exasperated as the characters stray from the script or miss their cues. He sits on the edge of the stage, walks into the audience, and occasionally heads onto the set to talk to his family, but the only one who can see or hear him is his younger self. “Don’t do it,” Little Carl says. “Don’t do what?” Adult Carl asks. “Don’t write this,” Little Carl replies. “I have to write it,” Adult Carl answers. Messina then adds some real relish to the interaction between the two Carls, which gets to the heart of the story.

Little Carl: You’re gonna end up with a big problem on your hands. This is dangerous. Trust me.
Adult Carl: Trust you? Trust me.
Little Carl: Trust you? I am you.
Adult Carl: So then trust me.
Little Carl: Why should I trust you when you don’t trust me?
Adult Carl: I don’t trust you because I know me.
Little Carl: So what you’re saying is, you don’t trust yourself?
Adult Carl: That’s enough out of you. I’ll write you out of it.
Little Carl: Oh yeah, how ya gonna do that? I’m the main character, stupid!
Adult Carl: Oh, you think so, huh?
Little Carl: I know so!
Adult Carl: Just do this with me. Please. We need to go back, it’s the only way to go forward.
Little Carl: Lemme ask ya something. . . . Are you gonna tell the truth?
Adult Carl: I’m gonna tell my truth, yes.
Little Carl: Are you gonna tell the truth?!
Adult Carl: I’m gonna . . . fix . . . the truth. . . .
Little Carl: Fix my ass! You’re a liar!
Adult Carl: How am I a liar? Don’t ever call me a liar!
Little Carl: Only liars and writers say they’re gonna tell the truth, when deep down they know they’re gonnna change shit!
Adult Carl: Get back in there!
Little Carl: Are you ready?
Adult Carl: Am I ready for what?
Little Carl: Are you ready for the pain?
Adult Carl: I don’t know. . . .
Little Carl: You better be. You better be made outta steel, just like they were.
Adult Carl: Steel?
Little Carl: Steel. F&*kin’. Beams.
Adult Carl: That. F&*kin’. Mouth. Now would you just please go!
Little Carl: Oh, up yours!
Adult Carl: Up mine? Up yours!
Little Carl: Your mother!
Adult Carl: We have the same mother!
Little Carl: I gotta grow up to be this guy?

Adult Carl (Ralph Macchio) and Little Carl (Nico Bustamente) clutch their writing notebooks in Charles Messina’s raucous and touching memory play (photo by Ben Strothmann)

Messina’s (An Honest Woman, The Wanderer) sharp writing is evident throughout A Room of My Own, which he also directs with an electric, nonstop pace. The mostly Italian-American cast is exceptional, dressed in Catherine Siracusa’s fab period clothes (just wait till you see Jackie’s green shirt and Dotty’s brown velour pants). Bronx native Tribuzio and Brooklyn kid Tammaro, both veterans of Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding, clearly are having a great time as they lash out at each other with words you’re not likely to find in any dictionary, English or Italian, while getting every gesture and facial expression just right. Bustamente is a wonder in his stage debut, having acted before only in commercials; his interactions with Macchio could have been gimmicky but instead are gentle and heartfelt, even with the cursing, as they combine the past and the present with an eye to the future. And Cantone (Steve, Sex and the City), who, as it turns out, spent a lot of time when he was younger right across the street on Thompson St., visiting his sister (the building can be seen in the backdrop through a window), is a force of nature as Jackie, celebrating gay culture while fighting the loneliness of his closeted life. Much of the cast has been with the project since its inception, so the actors have developed a real feeling of family that translates beautifully to the stage. It’s a treat to be invited into the Morellis’ frantic world, which is sure at times to remind you of your own relatives, even if you’re not Italian and from New York City.

BRODSKY/BARYSHNIKOV

Mikhail Baryshnikov will interpret the poetry of his longtime friend, Joseph Brodsky, in multimedia one-man show (photo by Janis Deinats)

Baryshnikov Arts Center, Jerome Robbins Theater
450 West 37th St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
March 9-19, $35-$40
646-731-3200
bacnyc.org

Legendary ballet dancer, actor, photographer, and artistic director Mikhail Baryshnikov is a fixture at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, which he opened on West Thirty-Seventh St. in 2005. He can often be seen in the audience, watching the institution’s wide range of productions. But Misha, as he is affectionately known, will be assuming a different role March 9-19, taking the stage for the hotly anticipated U.S. premiere of Brodsky / Baryshnikov. Originally presented at the New Riga Theatre in Baryshnikov’s hometown of Riga, Latvia, in October, the show is part of the Boris and Ināra Teterev Foundation arts program TÊTE-À-TÊTE, which seeks to expand the art and culture available in the capital city. In Brodsky / Baryshnikov, the famed dancer will interpret the poems of Nobel Prize winner Joseph Brodsky through text and movement. Baryshnikov and Brodsky, who was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, were friends for more than twenty years; the latter died in Brooklyn in 1996 at the age of fifty-five.

The ninety-minute one-man show is directed by Alvis Hermanis, with a fascinating set by Kristīne Jurjāne, lighting by Gleb Filshtinsky, and video by Ineta Sipunova, all of which delves into Brodsky’s mind; Baryshnikov will perform the works in their original Russian, with English surtitles by Jamey Gambrell. “This will be a departure from normal theatrical plays. Instead, it will be something more akin to a spiritual séance,” Hermanis said prior to the show’s debut. “We spend our everyday lives on a horizontal level or dimension. This form of theater offers you the chance to spend [ninety minutes] in an exclusively vertical dimension in which people are confronted with nothing other than the big issues.” Baryshnikov added, “This project is important to us. Alvis is venturing into unknown territory, which he invariably does; otherwise, why bother? We are both greatly looking forward to our encounter with the audience.” Although the run is sold out, there will be a wait list at the box office beginning one hour before each performance.

CULTUREMART 2016

Purva Bedi, Kristin Marting, and Mariana Newhard’s ASSEBMLED IDENTITY is part of the 2016 edition of HERE’s CULTUREMART performance festival

Purva Bedi, Kristin Marting, and Mariana Newhard’s ASSEMBLED IDENTITY is part of 2016 edition of HERE’s CULTUREMART performance festival

HERE
145 Sixth Ave. at Dominick St.
March 2-12, $15
212-647-0202
here.org

We nearly forgot about HERE’s annual CULTUREMART performance festival, which usually is held in January/February, but fortunately we were reminded of this forward-thinking series just in time as March began. A project of the HERE Artist Residency Program, or HARP, the multidisciplinary festival features eleven workshop productions from March 2 to 12, with all tickets only $15. Things get under way March 2-3 with one of New York’s most innovative teams, Reid Farrington and Sara Farrington, who repurpose footage of old films to create something new with live actors. This year they are presenting CasablancaBox, in which they go behind the scenes of the making of Casablanca. In Things Fall Apart (March 5-6), Kate Brehm uses folding chairs to examine her place in the world; it’s on a double bill with Rob Roth’s audiovisual Soundstage. RADY&BLOOM Collective Playmaking explores the ocean in O (March 5-6), which is being shown with Adam J. Thompson / the Deconstructive Theatre Project’s live-cinema Venice Double Feature, which examines social media and voyeurism. Purva Bedi, Kristin Marting, and Mariana Newhard delve into the science behind identity in Assembled Identity, part of a March 8-9 double bill with Lanie Fefferman’s math-centric chamber opera, Elements. Also on March 8-9, Paul Pinto goes inside the mind of the political activist and philosopher in Thomas Paine in Violence; also on the bill is Leah Coloff’s ThisTree, stories and songs about family and legacy. CULTUREMART concludes March 11-12 with Amanda Szeglowski/cakeface’s Stairway to Stardom, a dance-theater work dealing withtalent and fame, teamed with Chris M. Green’s American Weather, which looks at our very questionable future.

CITY OF GLASS

A phone call sets everything in motion in theatrical adaptation of Paul Auster’s CITY OF GLASS (photo by Arthur Cornelius)

New Ohio Theatre
154 Christopher St. between Greenwich & Washington Sts.
Wednesday – Sunday through March 12, $25-$30
888-596-1027
www.untitledtheater.com
www.newohiotheatre.org

Untitled Theater Company No. 61’s theatrical adaptation of Paul Auster’s debut novel, City of Glass, took on another layer of meaning on opening night last week when the original creator himself, the Newark-born, Brooklyn-based Auster, was in the audience, watching the show for the first time. “I have no idea what to expect,” he said on his way into the New Ohio Theatre. But those audience members familiar with the book knew to expect a literary puzzle, an investigation of identity, authorship, and communication on multiple, sometimes dizzying levels. The story, the first in Auster’s New York Trilogy (which also includes Ghosts and The Locked Room), involves a mystery novelist named Quinn who tries on the identity of private detective Paul Auster after receiving several phone calls looking for Auster. Quinn, who himself writes detective novels under the name William Wilson, featuring protagonist Max Work, gets caught up in a case in which a man who may or may not be named Peter Stillman was imprisoned for years by his father, also Peter Stillman, in their apartment. The younger Stillman is frightened now that the father is being released after a long stay in a mental institution. Adapter and director Edward Einhorn focuses on novelist Auster’s exploration of language, individual identity, and artistic and biological creation, interpreting the main characters — Quinn (Robert Honeywell), the younger Stillman (Mateo Moreno), and Stillman’s wife, Virginia (Dina Rose Rivera) — as well as the omniscient third-person narrator, as manifestations of Auster, making the writer a kind of father-god who built this existential world and looms over it (an especially vivid effect with Auster in the crowd that night). To further that concept, Honeywell speaks all of the words in the play, and the three actors are always dressed identically, as if the same person. (The noirish costumes are by Carla Gant.) When Honeywell speaks the other characters’ dialogue, Moreno and Rivera hover around him, sometimes mouthing words, moving like in an experimental dance. They also go behind a glass wall on which their faces are projected. “In the triad of selves that Quinn had become, Wilson served as a kind of ventriloquist, Quinn himself was the dummy, and Work was the animated voice that gave purpose to the enterprise,” the narrator explains early on, adding, “In effect, the writer and the detective are interchangeable.” These lofty ideas are treated with an intriguing existential subtlety in the book, but Einhorn brings them front and center in the play, losing the gentler aspects that made the short novel such a success.

Character and identity are interchangeable in CITY OF GLASS (photo by Arthur Cornelius)

Einhorn (Money Lab, The Velvet Oratorio) appears to be trying to make us uneasy from the very start. The chairs at the New Ohio are rather uncomfortable, leading to a lot of shifting and squirming. For parts of the show, the brightest of the lights from Gil Sperling’s rear projections shined directly into my eyes (but not my companion’s), making it hard for me to look at the stage. Moreno portrays Stillman Jr. with annoying spastic sounds and gestures that are severely off-putting, and Moreno’s and Rivera’s shadowing of Honeywell, choreographed by Patrice Miller, often gets confusing. On one side of Christopher Heilman’s set is a chair and telephone, on the other an outdoor pay phone, emphasizing those now-disappearing items of communication. Einhorn chooses to highlight certain elements of Auster’s novel, such as the scene in which Quinn meets Stillman Jr., at the expense of other critical turning points, such as when Quinn follows Stillman Sr. through the streets of New York City, resulting in a disconcerting, head-scratching imbalance. The noir atmosphere benefits from Freddi Price’s cool score, performed live on keyboards and guitar, but the general pacing of the show is far too bumpy. In a program note, Einhorn explains, “With every adaptation I create, I ultimately reconceive the context and make it about myself and my art. Who am I, and how does it relate to the play? Who are you, the audience?” Those questions are desperately in need of answers in this stilted production, particularly on a night when at least one member of the audience towered over it all.