No need to worry if you missed your chance to get tickets to the site-specific play The Voices in Your Head, running this month at St. Lydia’s storefront dinner church in Brooklyn.
Created by Grier Mathiot and Billy McEntee, the sixty-minute dark comedy about a support group with eight members who share an unusual bond has just added another performance and a pair of seats for each show, which is now limited to eighteen guests at a time.
The impressive cast features Christian Caro, Marcia DeBonis, Patrick Foley, Vanessa Kai, Tom Mezger, Daphne Overbeck, Erin Treadway, and Jehan O. Young. Ryan Dobrin directs for the collective Those Guilty Creatures, which he cofounded with movement director Carina Goebelbecker. The company’s previous productions include Courtship,The Homiesexuals: A Social Media Tragedy,Dutchman, and She’s a Witch!
HAMLET | TOILET
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
January 10-13, $35 japansociety.org
To go, or not to go? That is the multilayered question asked in Yu Murai and Kaimaku Pennant Race’s absurdist, scatological HAMLET | TOILET, continuing at Japan Society through January 13 as part of the Under the Radar festival.
As you enter Japan Society, you are greeted by a different kind of step and repeat; instead of posing in front of a show logo, you can snap a selfie with a glitteringly white Japanese Toto washlet on a red platform, a fancy toilet with such special features as a heated seat and a bidet. It sets the mood for what is to follow, ninety minutes of controlled chaos involving more flatulence than the beans scene in Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles.
Murai has previously reimagined works by William Shakespeare in Romeo and Toilet and Ashita no Ma-Joe: Rocky Macbeth, wildly unpredictable tales that incorporate dance, music, strange props, and bizarre costumes. HAMLET | TOILET sits comfortably within that oeuvre. The production takes place in and around a three-stall installation, an open cube with a back wall and no doors. The three actors, Takuro Takasaki, G. K. Masayuki, and Yuki Matsuo, are dressed in unflattering white body-hugging latex suits reminiscent of the spermatozoa in Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask).
The essence of the Bard’s tragedy is in there, somewhere: Hamlet’s (Takasaki) uncle, Claudius (Masayuki), has killed Hamlet’s father, married his mother, and become king. Hamlet is in love with Ophelia (Masayuki), whose brother, expert fencer Laertes (Matsuo), is not a Hamlet fan. Hamlet’s besties, Horatio (Masayuki) and Marcellus (Matsuo), have encountered the ghost of their friend’s father, who tells his son that his murder must be avenged. To do so, Hamlet has to face his conscience, which is not lodged in his brain or heart but in his painful belly — the load he is carrying is an intensifying bowel movement that his multidimensional constipation will not allow him to release.
For much of the show, the actors are in the middle stall, trying to take dumps, either squatting by themselves or sitting on a cushiony human bowl formed by the other two actors. They gleefully pass gas that is projected in colorful animation by Takashi Kawasaki, accompanied by the appropriate sounds. The characters discuss aspects of making number two in ways that no play or novel that I know of ever has; no bathroom subject or feces joke is off limits, regardless of how silly or lowbrow. Nobody can find relief, not even from Ophelia’s headdress, which consists of dozens of rolls of toilet paper.
Amid deep dives into the shape, consistency, aroma, and chocolatey nature of human waste, Murai also delves into cowardice, sanity, suffering, and revenge. The dialogue is similarly mixed; Hamlet veterans will appreciate such real Shakespearean lines as “That adulterate beast won to his shameful lust . . . my queen,” “Never make known what you have seen [and heard] tonight,” “[I am going to] put an antic disposition on,” and “I should have fatted all the region kites / With this slave’s offal: bloody, bawdy villain!”
Purists might grimace at the more coarse language, such as “Something must be born that will trace a single line / like a magnificent line of feces / straight through all of this wonderful society,” “Please, just this once / couldn’t it be soft and gently flow like water,” “You must cleanly and completely defecate me!” and “In a world that is moved by the strict laws of almighty God / that which should not have moved has passed / That’s why my movement will not pass!” Even the subtitles themselves are in on the fun, changing the spelling and capitalization of nec-ASS-arily and BUTT (instead of but).
The three actors occasionally break out into song and dance; the music is by DJ and hip-hop producer Tsutchie from Shakkazombie, with hilarious choreography by Shinnosuke Motoyama. There’s far too much repetition, as numerous jokes spew out like the preparation for a colonoscopy, and in one scene the play makes fun of that itself as repeated statements fill up the subtitles monitor in ever-smaller type. But just when you think the production is merely a fart-fantasy concocted by Eric Cartman or Beavis and Butt-Head, Murai slips in something ridiculously clever so you won’t lose your appetite; it’s not merely Shakespeare as bathroom reading, although that’s in there too. Murai is not claiming that Shakespeare, or theater in general, is full of shit, but it might be in need of a thorough cleansing.
Which brings us back to the original question: To go, or not to go? HAMLET | TOILET is certainly not for everyone; some gags were met with laughter and applause, while others received random chuckles or guffaws — or silence. If you do get a ticket — the January 12 performance will be followed by an artist Q&A — be sure to use the facilities, which have several washlets, in addition to doors to ASSure your privacy.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
A jubilant cast lifts Hell’s Kitchen at the Public Theater (photo by Joan Marcus)
HELL’S KITCHEN
Newman Theater, the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. at Astor Pl.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 14, $175 publictheater.org
Hell’s Kitchen, heading from the Public to the Shubert — it ends its run downtown January 14 and starts previews on Broadway on March 28 — (mostly) succeeds where New York, New York failed. Both stories take place in the city, use stage scaffolding to replicate fire escapes, follow the relationship between a man and woman involved in music, and are built around a hugely popular hit song about New York.
The latter, based on Martin Scorsese’s 1977 film, declares, “If I can make it there, I’d make it anywhere,” while the former proclaims that New York is a “concrete jungle where dreams are made of / There’s nothing you can’t do / Now you’re in New York!” But where New York, New York felt like a miscast movie shot in Toronto, Hell’s Kitchen, inspired by the life of Alicia Keys (who wrote the music and lyrics), has a far more legitimate feel, a more “empire state of mind,” flaws and all.
Maleah Joi Moon makes an explosive professional debut as Ali, a seventeen-year-old girl living with her extremely protective single mother, Jersey (Shoshana Bean), in a “one-bedroom apartment on the forty-second floor of a forty-four-story building on Forty-Third Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues, right in the heart of the neighborhood some people know as Hell’s Kitchen.” The building is filled with artists, including a trumpeter on thirty-two, a dance class on twenty-seven, opera singers on seventeen, poets on nine, painters on eight, a string section on seven through four, and a gospel pianist in the Ellington Room on the ground floor.
It’s summer in the 1990s, and Ali has decided it’s time for her to get busy with the older Knuck (Chris Lee), who drums on buckets in the street with his friends Q (Jakeim Hart) and Riq (Lamont Walker II). Ali and her homegirls, Jessica (Jackie Leon) and Tiny (Vanessa Ferguson), are sure the men are “up to no good,” but as Ali says, “We need that trouble in our lives.”
Knuck (Chris Lee) and Ali (Maleah Joi Moon) find themselves in trouble in Alicia Keys musical (photo by Joan Marcus)
That’s the last thing Jersey wants for her daughter, so she enlists her besties, Millie (Mariand Torres) and Crystal (Crystal Monee Hall), and jovial doorman Ray (Chad Carstarphen) to keep an eye on Ali’s comings and goings. Jersey does not want what happened to her — an early, unwanted pregnancy by an unreliable man, a jazz musician named Davis (Brandon Victor Dixon) — to happen to her stubborn daughter.
As she prepares for her potential sexual awakening, Ali becomes intrigued by Miss Liza Jane (Kecia Lewis), the elderly woman who plays the piano in the Ellington Room and soon becomes Ali’s mentor. But the trouble that Ali soon encounters is not the trouble she needs.
Hell’s Kitchen is structured around two dozen Keys songs, from such albums as 2001’s Songs in A Minor, 2003’s The Diary of Alicia Keys, 2007’s As I Am, 2012’s Girl on Fire, 2020’s Alicia, and 2021’s Keys, and three new tunes written specifically for the show, “The River,” “Seventeen,” and “Kaleidoscope.” The orchestrations by Tom Kitt and Adam Blackstone are lively, and Camille A. Brown’s choreography captures the energy of the street on Robert Brill’s set, enhanced by projections of the neighborhood by Peter Nigrini. The naturalistic costumes are by Dede Ayite, with effective lighting by Natasha Katz and sound by Gareth Owen.
The show is directed with a vibrant sense of urgency by Tony nominee Michael Greif (Dear Evan Hansen,Next to Normal), but the book by Kristoffer Diaz (The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity,Welcome to Arroyo’s) languishes in clichés, including several cringey scenes that don’t feel real, creating a choppy narrative that doesn’t flow like Keys’s music.
Moon is magnetic as Ali; you can’t take your eyes off her for even a second. Tony nominee Bean (Mr. Saturday Night,Waitress) is engaging as the overwrought mother, shaking things up with “Pawn It All,” while Obie winner Lewis (Dreamgirls,Ain’t Misbehavin’) nearly steals the show as Miss Liza Jane, channeling Maya Angelou when she says such lines as “I will not allow you to let the pain win,” then bringing down the house with “Perfect Way to Die.” Lee (Hamilton) has just the right hesitation as Knuck, acknowledging the obstacles he faces every step of the way, and Carstarphen (Between the Bars,Neon Baby) is eminently likable as the adorable doorman.
Get tickets to such shows as Volcano at the Under the Radar festival before time runs out (photo by Emijlia Jefrehmova)
UNDER THE RADAR 2024
Multiple venues
January 5-21 utrfest.org
There was quite an uproar in June when Public Theater artistic director Oskar Eustis announced the cancellation of the widely popular Under the Radar festival, which the Public had hosted since 2006. Held every January, the series featured a diverse collection of unique and unusual international theatrical productions, discussions, and live music and dance, from the strange to the familiar, the offbeat to the downright impossible to describe. Eustis followed that outcry with another message:
“Last week, difficult news was shared that the Under the Radar festival would not return for the Public’s 23–24 season. We made the painful decision to place the festival on hiatus. I understand and share the hurt that those who participated in and loved the festival have expressed over the past few days. . . . Unfortunately, these are exceptionally challenging times in our field. The Public, like almost every other nonprofit theater in the country, is facing serious financial pressure. . . . In the certainty that better times will come, we continue to work to preserve the health and mission of the Public. We look forward to a time when we can fully expand back into the robust and expansive theater we need to be.”
Festival founder and director Mark Russell was determined that the show must go on, and he brought it back to life. “Festivals are celebrations. They mark harvests and other moments of abundance or recognition,” he said in a statement. “Under the Radar is a festival that each year celebrates the vibrancy of new theater, in New York and internationally. At this moment, even in very challenging times, there is still innovative work rising from communities around New York and in far-reaching parts of the globe. Under the Radar aims to spotlight this work for audiences — not only those ‘in the know’ but from a wider stretch of communities, diverse in all respects, that could benefit by engaging with these creative leaders.”
The 2024 program includes two dozen presentations at seventeen venues, taking place from January 5 to 21. Below are my top five choices, which do not include two highly praised and strongly recommended works that are making encore appearances in New York, Dmitry Krimov/Krymov Lab NYC’s Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin: In Our Own Words at BRIC and Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s bilingual Public Obscenities at Theatre for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center. In addition, the UFO sidebar of works in progress consist of Matt Romein’s Bag of Worms at Onassis ONX Studio, Zora Howard’s The Master’s Tools at Chelsea Factory (with Okwui Okpokwasili as Tituba from The Crucible), Holland Andrews and yuniya edi kwon’s How does it feel to look at nothing at National Sawdust, Theater in Quarantine and Sinking Ship Productions’ live debut of the previously streamed The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy at the Connelly Theater, Jenn Kidwell and *the Blackening’s We Come to Collect [A Flirtation, with Capitalism] at the Flea, and Penny Arcade’s The Art of Becoming — Episode 3: Superstar Interrupted [1967-1973] at Joe’s Pub. In addition, a free symposium at NYU Skirball Center on January 12 at 9:30 am features Inge Ceustermans, Hana Sharif, Sunny Jain, Taylor Mac, Jeremy O. Harris, Ravi Jain, and Kaneza Schaal, hosted by Edgar Miramontes, looking at the future of independent theater.
A book club offers unique insight into Miranda July’s The First Bad Man (photo by Ros Kavanagh)
THE FIRST BAD MAN
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
Samuel Rehearsal Studio, 70 Lincoln Center Plaza
January 5-13, choose-what-you-pay (suggested admission $35) www.lincolncenter.org www.panpantheatre.com
Ireland’s Pan Pan Theatre has staged unique versions of Beckett’s Embers and Cascando as well as Gina Moxley’s The Patient Gloria. The company now turns its attention on a unique aspect of literature; for The First Bad Man at Lincoln Center’s Samuel Rehearsal Studio, audience members watch a book club dissect Miranda July’s wildly original 2015 novel, as characters and story lines intersect with reality.
A bouncy castle becomes more than just a fun children’s place in Nile Harris’s this house is not a home (photo by Alex Munro)
this house is not a home
Playhouse at Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand St. at Pitt St.
January 6-14, $30.05 www.abronsartscenter.org
A bouncy castle helps Nile Harris explore how the world has changed over the last two years, with the assistance of Crackhead Barney, Malcolm-x Betts, slowdanger, and GENG PTP along with a gingerbread minstrel, vape addicts, a movie cowboy, and others, in this house is not a home. Afropessimism is on the menu in this collaboration between Abrons Art Center and Ping Chong Company.
Hamlet | Toilet makes its NYC debut at Japan Society (photo courtesy Kaimaku Pennant Race)
HAMLET | TOILET
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
January 10-13, $35 japansociety.org
In 2019, Yu Murai and Kaimaku Pennant Race blew our minds with the outrageous Ashita no Ma-Joe: Rocky Macbeth, a bizarrely entertaining mashup of Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky Balboa. They’re now back with another mad mix at Japan Society; I’m not sure there’s much more to say that what’s in the press release: “Notoriously iconoclastic and scatological director Yu Murai’s Hamlet | Toilet runs the Bard’s highbrow tale of existential woe through the poop chute.” Each ticket comes with free same-day admission to the exhibition “Out of Bounds: Japanese Women Artists in Fluxus.”
VOLCANO
St. Ann’s Warehouse
45 Water St.
January 10-21, $54 stannswarehouse.org
Melding theater, dance, and sci-fi, Irish writer, director, and choreographer Luke Murphy (Slow Tide,Pass the Blutwurst, Bitte) introduces audiences to the mysterious Amber Project in this four-part miniseries of forty-five-minute multimedia segments starring Murphy and Will Thompson, exploring their past as they face an uncertain future.
OUR CLASS
BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
January 12 – February 4, $68-$139 www.bam.org ourclassplay.com
During the pandemic, Igor Golyak and Massachusetts-based Arlekin Players Theatre broke through with innovative, interactive livestreamed productions, attracting such stalwarts as Jessica Hecht and Mikhail Baryshnikov to join the troupe. Following shows at BAC and Lincoln Center, the company brings a timely new adaptation of Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s Our Class to BAM, about a 1941 pogrom in Poland that severely impacts the relationships of a group of students. Broadway veterans Richard Topol, Alexandra Silber, and Gus Birney star, alongside Jewish and non-Jewish cast and crew members from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Israel, Germany, and the US.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
The count makes a grand entrance in Dracula, A Comedy of Terrors (photo by Matthew Murphy)
DRACULA, A COMEDY OF TERRORS
New World Stages
340 West Fiftieth St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Wednesday – Monday through January 7, $134-$154 draculacomedy.com newworldstages.com
Rocky Horror meets What We Do in the Shadows and Dracula: Dead and Loving It in Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen’s deliciously frightful farce, Dracula, A Comedy of Terrors. Channeling Mel Brooks, Charles Ludlam, and Monty Python, they reimagine the terrifying tale of Count Dracula, written by closeted Irish homosexual Bram Stoker in 1897, as a hilarious low-budget send-up of horror tropes, gender identity, and theater itself.
The nuts and bolts of the story stick to the classic narrative, with clever twists and turns: English solicitor Jonathan Harker (Andrew Keenan-Bolger) ventures to Transylvania to finalize a deal with Dracula (James Daly) in which the count is purchasing five properties in London and the abandoned Withering Manor. Following a shipwreck, Dracula shows up unexpectedly at an engagement party for Harker and his fiancée, Lucy Westfeldt (Jordan Boatman). The count is instantly enraptured with Lucy’s beautiful skin and lovely neck, but it’s her sister, Mina (Arnie Burton), who is desperate for the count’s attention.
The party is being held at the Westfeldt home in Whitby, where the siblings’ father, Dr. Westfeldt (Ellen Harvey), treats mental patients, including kleptomaniac maid Kitty Rutherford (Boatman) and insect-eating butler Renfield (Ellen Harvey). Soon Renfield is doing Dracula’s bidding, the ailing Mina is being drained of blood, and Dr. Jean Van Helsing (Burton) from the University of Schmutz is hot on the vampire’s trail, which leads right to Lucy.
Dracula (James Daly) shows a special interest in Jonathan Harker (Andrew Keenan-Bolger) in hilarious farce at New World Stages (photo by Matthew Murphy)
Cowriter and director Greenberg and cowriter Rosen, who previously collaborated on The Secret of My Success,Ebenezer Scrooge’s BIG San Diego Christmas Show, and Crime and Punishment, A Comedy, go for the jugular every chance they can, sinking their teeth into every likely — or unlikely — pop culture trope around. When the carriage driver (Boatman) is taking Harker to the count’s castle, the horses neigh at precise moments, à la Young Frankenstein, in which they whinny at each mention of Frau Blücher’s name. When the count arrives at the party with babka, Dr. Westfeldt lets him know that his son-in-law-to-be has dietary restrictions, but Dracula is prepared, noting, “It’s gluten free, cruelty free, vegan, non-GMO, and certified organic. I also brought one for the rest of us that tastes good.” When Dracula declares his desire to Lucy and grabs her, Lucy says, “But . . . but . . .” as her hands clutch the count’s taut bottom.
This smashingly handsome Dracula is all-access: The homoerotic subtext isn’t very sub. The scene where the count leans in for a possible kiss with the nerdy, weaselly Harker goes wonderfully over the top. “You’re joking, right?” Harker asks. Dracula answers, “Not even a little. Are you not curious?” Harker responds, “Somewhat. But I could never see myself actually doing anything about it. . . . Do I have a choice?” Dracula asserts, “You always have a choice.”
The biggest laughs in the ninety-minute show are saved for Mina, who looks like the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz if the lion were a drag barrister. Mina is the ugly duckling to Lucy’s beautiful swan, desperate for any man. When she is introduced to Lords Cavendish, Windsor, and Havemercy (Keenan-Bolger and two puppets), they tell Dr. Westfeldt, “We prefer your other daughter. / Lucy. / The hot one.” When Lucy is concerned that Mina is looking “haggard and sickly,” Harker says, “Looks the same to me.”
Sisters Lucy (Jordan Boatman) and Mina (Arnie Burton) share a playful moment in horror comedy (photo by Matthew Murphy)
Daly (Damn Yankees,Grand Hotel) has a feast as the count, reveling in his bisexual gorgeousness while the other actors all play multiple roles, often with seemingly impossibly fast costume changes, sometimes accompanied by a knowing wink or nod at the audience. Tristan Raines’s costumes are a riot, from the count’s Village People black leather outfit to Harker’s professorial vest and bow tie and the Victorian splendor of Lucy’s and Mina’s dresses. Mina’s hair, courtesy of wig and hair designer Ashley Rae Callahan, is practically a character unto itself. Tijana Bjelajac’s gothic set features neon-framed windows, elegant bookshelves, and large double doors at the center back through which characters and objects, including a bed and a coffin, enter and leave. Rob Denton’s lighting and Victoria Deiorio’s original music and sound keep the atmosphere playfully eerie (along with numerous spray cans of fog).
Boatman (Medea,The Niceties) is cheerfully lovely as Lucy, Keenan-Bolger (Newsies,Tuck Everlasting) is adorably persnickety as Harker (Taylor Trensch will take over the role December 27 to January 2), Harvey (Little Women,Present Laughter) brings a firm dignity to Dr. Westfeldt and a touching indignity to Renfield, but Burton (The 39 Steps,The Government Inspector) steals the show, leaving no part of the scenery unchewed and digested. It’s a dazzlingly hysterical performance yet one that questions beauty, sexuality, and gender with an implicit understanding.
Dracula, a Comedy of Terrors was originally produced by Maltz Jupiter Theatre in 2019 and adapted into an all-star radio play for the Broadway Podcast Network with Annaleigh Ashford, Laura Benanti, Alex Brightman, James Monroe Iglehart, Richard Kind, Rob McClure, Ashley Park, Christopher Sieber, and John Stamos. This iteration, extended at New World Stages through January 7, is a must-see for lovers of camp, vamps, double and triple entendres, and pure, unadulterated fun.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Life & Times of Michael K tells a heart-wrenching story set in war-torn South Africa (photo by Richard Termine)
LIFE & TIMES OF MICHAEL K
St. Ann’s Warehouse
45 Water St.
Through December 23
718-254-8779 stannswarehouse.org
Lara Foot’s extraordinary adaptation of J. M. Coetzee’s 1983 Booker Prize–winning novel, Life & Times of Michael K, begins with a group of people huddling around a figure wrapped in a blanket on the ground of a dark, bombed-out area, like an infant left on its own to face a harsh struggle. The figure is lifted up to reveal a wooden puppet of a young man with a harelip, seemingly born from the earth. For the next two hours, he goes on an adventure that takes him across poor and desolate sections of South Africa during a fictional civil war in the time of apartheid.
He is part Josef K from Kafka’s The Trial, part Chauncey Gardiner from Jerzy Kosiński’s 1970 novel, Being There, and subsequent Hal Ashby film, with a bit of Jack Crabb from Thomas Berger’s 1964 novel, Little Big Man, made into a 1970 film by Arthur Penn. On his journey, he faces bureaucratic red tape, tragic loss, severe hunger, and violence as he survives scene after scene in which it is hard to tell the good people from the bad, all the while just wanting to tend to a garden, bringing new life to a dangerous world. “It is because I am a gardener, he thought, because that is my nature,” one of several narrators says. “The impulse to plant had been reawakened / now, in a matter of weeks, he found his waking life bound tightly to the patch of earth / he had begun to cultivate / and the seeds he had planted there.”
It’s a haunting tale told through puppetry — Michael K is a life-size wooden puppet operated by Markus Schabbing, Craig Leo, and Carlo Daniels, who voices the character, while Michael K’s mother, Anna K, is animated by Faniswa Yisa, Roshina Ratnam, and Nolufefe Ntshuntshe. Designed by Adrian Kohler, who cofounded Handspring Puppet Company with puppetry director Basil Jones, the puppets are magically imbued with emotion by the handlers, who are out in the open, not hidden from the audience; when Michael K is given a pie, the handlers actually eat it. However, the handlers also represent how Michael K and his mother are controlled, never free; when left to himself, Michael K crumples on the floor, unable to move. As he says, “I do not know what is going to happen. The story of my life has not been an interesting one; there has usually been someone to tell me what to do next; but now there is no one, and the best thing seems to be to wait.”
The journey starts with Michael K determined to bring his ailing mother back to their home in Prince Albert, a trip for which he constructs a special rickshaw cart for her. Along the way he encounters bullies, armed soldiers, a goat, work camps, thieves, children playing, and extreme poverty and hunger, which is made palpable when Michael K removes his shirt, revealing bones with nothing inside. Although race is never mentioned specifically, Michael K is treated differently, and often negatively, because of his harelip, a physical manifestation that makes him feel less than, a metaphor for his color.
The other, nonpuppet characters are portrayed by Sandra Prinsloo, Andrew Buckland, Wessel Pretorius, Billy Langa, Ntshuntshe, Yisa, and Ratnam, including cyclists, soldiers, bus passengers, guards, police officers, bullies, nurses, clerks, and others; Ntshuntshe excels making baby noises. They also serve as narrators, relating important plot developments with Coetzee’s poetic language: “Michael did not miss his mother. No, he did not miss her, he found, except insofar as he had missed her all his life.” “Because of his face Michael did not have women friends. He was easiest when he was by himself.” “The problem that had exercised him all those years ago behind the bicycle shed at Huis Norenius, namely, why had he been brought into the world, had finally received its answer: He had been brought into the world to look after his mother.”
The effective, naturalistic costumes are by Phyllis Midlane, with sound by Simon Kohler and lighting by Joshua Cutts that puts you right in the middle of the action on Patrick Curtis’s war-torn set, enhanced by Kyle Shepherd’s original music. Video projections feature extreme close-ups of Michael K in which his face and body dominate the back wall; the photography and film are by Fiona McPherson and Barrett de Kock, with videography and editing by Yoav Dagan and projection design by Kirsti Cumming.
Michael K encounters a goat in unique adaptation of novel by J. M. Coetzee (photo by Richard Termine)
One characters sums it up when he tells Michael K, “Why should we run away if we have nowhere to run?”
A collaboration between Foot’s Baxter Theatre Centre (Mies Julie,The Inconvenience of Wings), Handspring Puppet Company (Little Amal,War Horse), and the Dusseldorfer Schauspielhaus, Life & Times of Michael K is about trying to find one’s place in a world that is overwhelmed by sociopolitical ills, where one individual can get trapped in a system that refuses to acknowledge who he is and what his needs are. It might be set in South Africa, but it is a timeless, universal story, told here in a moving and poignant way.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
The tag line for Sandra Tsing Loh’s Madwomen of the West might be “Brunch Is Hell,” but that doesn’t mean it can’t be a whole lotta fun, especially with four heavenly actresses having a blast together. The play itself, if you can even call it that, is a mess, with plot holes galore, inexplicable tangents, confusing breaks of the fourth wall, and unimaginative direction. But spending one hundred minutes with this quartet of lovely seventysomethings is wonderful.
Madwomen of the West features four delightful talents; for the uninitiated, who should know better, they are: Caroline Aaron, a regular on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel who has appeared onstage in The Iceman Cometh,The Sisters Rosensweig, and Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean and in a bevy of films by Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Nora Ephron, Paul Mazursky, and Mike Nichols; Brooke Adams, the star of such films as Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Days of Heaven and such plays as Happy Days,Key Exchange, and Lend Me a Tenor; Marilu Henner, most famous for her role as Elaine Nardo on Taxi but who has also appeared on Broadway in Gettin’ the Band Back Together,The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife, and Chicago and in such films as Bloodbrothers,Perfect, and L.A. Story; and Melanie Mayron, who won an Emmy for thirtysomething, appeared in such plays as Godspell,Crossing Delancey, and The Goodbye People and such indies as Girlfriends and Sticky Fingers, and has directed nearly one hundred episodes of television series and movies. I’m not embarrassed to admit that I’ve had long crushes on three of them.
It’s Claudia’s (Mayron) birthday, and Jules (Adams) has invited her to her ritzy Brentwood mansion for a special brunch, along with Marilyn (Aaron). “Birthdays can be fraught — especially our dear friend Claudia’s,” Marilyn tells the audience. “She’s been feeling a little down — she needed a lift!” The three college friends are soon unexpectedly joined by another member of their old gang, the fabulously famous Zoe (Henner).
“Oh, for Pete’s sakes, Zoey! I’m happy for your mega-success but I haven’t read any of your books!” Marilyn declares. “I’m on this fucking sugar cleanse and I don’t know why you’ve suddenly turned up in our lives to make them look shitty when we’re just trying to mark Claudia’s sad ‘run out of condiments’ birthday and I’m just so hungry!”
College friends Jules (Brooke Adams) and Claudia (Melanie Mayron) share a happy moment at the Actors Temple Theatre (photo by Carol Rosegg)
Many of the characters’ attributes are based on the actors’ real lives. Marilyn is a growly voiced kvetcher who founded a private girls school for underrepresented minorities and has been married to Barry for thirty-five years (in actuality, Aaron teaches at HB Studio; the show begins with her telling a story about her and Shelley Winters at the Actors Temple Theatre); Zoey is a world-renowned actress and self-help guru with a perfect memory (Henner is renowned for her own memory skills and has written numerous wellness books); Claudia is a single mother and photographer who is “vaguely Jewish, vaguely lesbian” (Mayron played a Jewish photographer on thirtysomething and in Girlfriends and has twins with her ex, screenwriter Cynthia Mort); and Jules was a law partner who gave it up to start a family (the role was originally going to be played by JoBeth Williams, who was replaced by Adams in October).
Christian Fleming’s set looks like a special edition of an afternoon women’s TV chat show on location, featuring two comfy chairs, a matching couch, a large backdrop of a photo of palm trees, a piñata just waiting to be broken open, and a round, gold-plated circular table that is oddly misused. Sharon Feldstein and Erin Hirsh’s costumes do a good job helping define the four friends, with Zoe in a sexy, tight-fitting black bodysuit with a gold chain belt, Marilyn in black shirt and pants and a blue blazer, Jules in a long, elegant black Issey Miyake gown and boots, and Claudia in pajamas and sneakers. When Jules says, “No costume budget. I brought this from home,” it’s easy to believe her.
Loh, whose previous books and plays include The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones,Mother on Fire,Aliens in America, and Bad Sex with Bud Kemp, doesn’t give much of a chance for Caruso (Emojiland,Southern Comfort) to make sense of things, so the story is all over the place as the actors go in and out of character and the plot meanders. Meanwhile, the quartet’s first-wave feminism doesn’t do the show any favors as they discuss the women’s movement, Hillary Clinton, Mary Tyler Moore, motherhood, smoking, female bodies, sexual liberation, getting canceled, and what Marilyn calls the “trans wave.”
Spoiler alert: They never bust open that piñata, which is a shame.
“You really can’t have it all,” Jules says.
Maybe not, but these actors do deliver a lot of it.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
