this week in theater

FIVE TIMES IN ONE NIGHT

Mel (Darcy Fowler) and Djuna (Dylan Dawson) face the end of the world in postapocalyptic future (photo by Gerry Goodstein)

Ensemble Studio Theatre
549 West 52nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Wednesday – Saturday through March 21, $20-$25, 7:00
www.ensemblestudiotheatre.org

Playwright Chiara Atik takes audiences on a sensational romantic journey through time, from a postapocalyptic Earth to the Garden of Eden, in Five Times in One Night, one of the most thoroughly entertaining, original, and enjoyable shows I’ve seen on the subject of love in a long time. Everything about the production, part of Ensemble Studio Theatre’s Obie-winning EST/Youngblood program for playwrights under thirty, is just right, beginning with the old-fashioned freight elevator — outfitted with a bar — that brings you up to the intimate sixth-floor black-box space, where you can choose to sit on comfy couches and love seats that flank three sides of the “stage” or on folding chairs on a platform in the back. Actors Dylan Dawson and Darcy Fowler then travel across millennia in five vignettes in which their characters explore sex, love, and procreation, each story raising intriguing questions with intelligence and plenty of humor. “I’m happy! I’m happy with it. I thought this was fun! You had fun! I had fun!” Laura tells Tim in the third episode. “I fucking hate when we have to like. Have a conversation about it. Like that is so. Like it’s not sexy to talk about it, like, we don’t need to do a play by play.” But Atik and director R. J. Tolan prove that talking about it is thoroughly fun and sexy in this eighty-minute treatise on the rather complicated relationship between heterosexual men and women through the ages.

Laura (Darcy Fowler) and Tim (Dylan Dawson) examine their sex life in perhaps too much detail in FIVE TIMES IN ONE NIGHT (photo by Gerry Goodstein)

Five Times in One Night begins in 2119, as Djuna proposes that he and Mel have sex in order to try to repopulate the planet following a nuclear holocaust, but she is not so eager, a clever riff on the old adage, “I wouldn’t have sex with you if you were the last man on Earth.” In this case, Djuna is the last man on Earth, but Mel just isn’t in the mood. The time then shifts to “last week,” as Kacy and Stephen discuss an unexpected situation that has them on completely opposite sides. Next, in 1106, Heloise and Abelard exchange letters that begin as student and teacher, respectively, but lead to something more in this playful retelling of the true story of nun Héloïse d’Argenteuil and philosopher Peter Abelard. Then comes Laura and Tim, “next week,” as they delve into some hard truths about themselves after having made love. Atik saves the best for last, as a naked Adam and Eve discover themselves, and each other’s bodies, at the birth of the world. The five scenes range from the absurdist (2119) to the sublime (next week), from the serious (last week) to the hysterical (Garden of Eden), with each one sharing a little bit from all the others, resulting in ultra-smooth transitions that keep the narrative moving effortlessly despite the major shifts in era. At the end of each vignette, Dawson and Fowler go to their respective open dressing areas, where the audience can watch them change into costumes for their next pas de deux. Fowler can be seen practically bouncing with delight between scenes, her energy and charm spreading cheer and goodwill throughout the theater, while Dawson is clearly having a ball as well. Despite relatively minimal changes, Fowler and Dawson, especially the latter, are sometimes nearly unrecognizable from scene to scene, as each of the five characters they each play are very different, but they imbue them all with impressive originality; part of the fun is following these changes, watching how their performances shift as time goes back and forth, each iteration possessing unique characteristics. The small, spare set changes ever so slightly as well, with clever, resourceful uses of a fold-out couch and other furniture. The staging and acting are exceptional, but what makes Five Times in One Night really special is Atik’s perceptive, insightful dialogue, which handles a bevy of difficult, complex, at times controversial subjects with humor and grace, dodging and weaving beautifully before delivering knockout blows, preferring honesty and subtlety to cliché and status quo in this ultimate centuries-long battle of the sexes. It all comes together seamlessly in an unforgettable, wholly genuine evening of absorbing theater.

THE ICEMAN COMETH

Theodore “Hickey” Hickman (Nathan Lane) dispenses a whole lot more than just free drinks in THE ICEMAN COMETH (photo by Richard Termine)

Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St. between Ashland & Rockwell Pl.
Through March 15, $35-$180
BAM Talk with Brian Denney and Nathan Lane, moderated by Linda Winer, $25, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

You’d be hard-pressed to find a sorrier collection of forgotten men, real or fictitious, than the group of pathetic drunks populating Eugene O’Neill’s great American tragedy, The Iceman Cometh, now enjoying a stirring four-hour, forty-five-minute revival at BAM (if the word “enjoy” can be used in describing this staggering work in any way). Written in 1939 but not produced until after WWII, in 1946, the play opens with most of a ragtag bunch of bums asleep on tables in Harry Hope’s (Stephen Ouimette) Last Chance Saloon and rooming house on the Bowery, awaiting the annual arrival of Theodore “Hickey” Hickman (Nathan Lane), a traveling salesman who comes to the bar once a year to celebrate Harry’s birthday by buying drinks for everyone. While the other poor souls are passed out, former anarchist Larry Slade (Brian Dennehy), pouring himself another shot of whiskey, tells bartender Rocky Pioggi (Salvatore Inzerillo), “I’ll be glad to pay up — tomorrow. And I know my fellow inmates will promise the same. They’ve all a touching credulity concerning tomorrows. It’ll be a great day for them, tomorrow — the Feast of All Fools, with brass bands playing! Their ships will come in, loaded to the gunwales with cancelled regrets and promises fulfilled and clean slates and new leases!” A moment later, Rocky, who speaks in a tough dem and doze New Yorkese, says to Larry, “De old Foolosopher, like Hickey calls yuh, ain’t yuh? I s’pose you don’t fall for no pipe dream?” To which Larry explains, “I don’t, no. Mine are all dead and buried behind me. What’s before me is the comforting fact that death is a fine long sleep, and I’m damned tired, and it can’t come too soon for me.”

That mood of hopelessness sets the tone of the play, with Larry the leading “Foolosopher” of men whose pipe dreams have long since turned into nightmares, with nothing to look forward to except the next, preferably free, drink. Slowly but surely, the others awake, wondering where Hickey is. “I was dreamin’ Hickey come in de door, crackin’ one of dem drummer’s jokes, wavin’ a big bankroll and we was all goin’ be drunk for two weeks. Wake up and no luck,” gambler Joe Mott (John Douglas Thompson) opines. Also arising are Hope, circus man Ed Mosher (Larry Neumann Jr.), Harvard Law alum Willie Oban (John Hoogenakker), former Boer Commando General Piet Wetjoen (John Judd), former British Infantry Captain Cecil Lewis (John Reeger), former anarchist editor Hugo Kalmar (Lee Wilkof), young former anarchist Don Parritt (Patrick Andrews), and former war correspondent James Cameron, better known as “Jimmy Tomorrow” (James Harms). But these men — along with day bartender Chuck Morello (Marc Grapey), his prostitute girlfriend, Cora (Kate Arrington), and two streetwalkers who work for Chuck, Margie (Lee Stark) and Pearl (Tara Sissom) — have long ago run out of tomorrows. So they spend their days and nights slowly drinking themselves to death, some hanging on to those pipe dreams, waiting for Hickey like Vladimir and Estragon will do a few years later in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, except in this case, Godot/Hickey shows up, waving a wad of bills and waking everyone up — but it turns out to be not nearly as satisfying as they were anticipating.

Harry Hope (Stephen Ouimette) and Ed Mosher (Larry Neumann Jr.) are holding on to their pipe dreams in THE ICEMAN COMETH (photo by Richard Termine)

Harry Hope (Stephen Ouimette) and Ed Mosher (Larry Neumann Jr.) try to hold on to their pipe dreams in a downtrodden Bowery bar (photo by Richard Termine)

Dressed in a sharp suit and wearing an even more impressive smile, Hickey bursts in at the end of act one, but he is not quite the good-time guy they have all come to know. Instead, Hickey is no longer drinking, and he has arrived with a message for each and every one of his minions, determined to tell them the truth about their sad lives. He is like a boisterous Bill W., the traveling stock speculator who founded Alcoholics Anonymous. He’s going to buy them all drinks but make them pay in other ways, forcing them to look at what they’ve become. “If anyone wants to get drunk, if that’s the only way they can be happy, and feel at peace with themselves, why the hell shouldn’t they? They have my full and entire sympathy,” Hickey tells Harry. “I know all about that game from soup to nuts. I’m the guy that wrote the book. The only reason I’ve quit is — well, I finally had the guts to face myself and throw overboard the damned lying pipe dream that’d been making me miserable, and do what I had to do for the happiness of all concerned — and then all at once I found I was at peace with myself and I didn’t need booze any more. That’s all there was to it.” Of course, that’s not all there is to it, as is revealed during the next three acts.

Larry Slade (Brian Dennehy) is determined to drink himself to death in Eugene O’Neill’s classic American tragedy (photo by Richard Termine)

In 1990, Chicago’s Goodman Theatre staged a revival of The Iceman Cometh, directed by Robert Falls and starring Dennehy as Hickey. More than twenty years later, Dennehy told longtime collaborator Falls that he wanted to play Larry in a new production. Upon hearing that, Lane contacted Falls, explaining that he had always dreamed of playing Hickey. The show was a huge success in Chicago in 2012, and it is now a huge success at BAM, where it fits in wonderfully with the Harvey’s artfully distressed shabby chic interior. The Harvey doesn’t usually use a curtain, but it does so for The Iceman Cometh, revealing a different set for each act, designed by Kevin Depinet (inspired by John Conklin); there is actually an audible gasp when the third act begins in the main bar area, shown in an unusual narrow perspective leading to a doorway that offers a kind of freedom — and real life — that no one in the play seems to want. Natasha Katz’s lighting design often keeps things in the dark, echoing the lost dreams of these miserable characters. This nearly five-hour production, with three full intermissions, might be epic in scope, but it is beautifully paced by Falls, never dragging, instead moving with a sometimes exhilarating gait.

Dennehy (Love Letters, Death of a Salesman) fully captures the heartbreaking duality that exists inside Larry, a clearly intelligent man who has given up his reason for being, someone who could make a difference in the life of all those around him — especially Don, who is seeking him out as a father figure — but he has instead buried himself in the bottle. Lane (It’s Only a Play, The Nance) shines as Hickey, bringing an exuberance to the role that occasionally goes over the top, particularly in the final monologue, not quite hitting its darker quality, but he and Dennehy have a beguiling camaraderie together in these iconic roles. (The play premiered on Broadway in 1946 and has been revived on the Great White Way in 1973, 1985, and 1999; over the years, Hickey has been portrayed by James Barton, James Earl Jones, Dennehy, Lee Marvin, Kevin Spacey, and, most famously, Jason Robards onstage and on film, while Slade has been played by Robert Ryan, James Cromwell, Conrad Bain, Tim Pigott-Smith, and Patrick Stewart.) The Iceman Cometh has never been an easy show to put on or to sit through; don’t be surprised when you see a handful of people exiting the theater and hailing cabs at each intermission. But it’s their loss, as this is a staggering production that looks deeply into the heart of America with a raw honesty that compels audiences to look deep into their own hearts as well.

LET THE RIGHT ONE IN

Lonely Oskar (Cristian Ortega) is getting tired of being bullied in LET THE RIGHT ONE IN

St. Ann’s Warehouse
29 Jay St.
Extended through March 8, $50-$75
718-254-8779
www.stannswarehouse.org
www.nationaltheatrescotland.com

In 2007, the National Theatre of Scotland brought their highly touted Black Watch to St. Ann’s, sending theatergoers flocking to DUMBO, then came back for a pair of return engagements. The troupe is once again in Brooklyn, now scaring audiences with its thrilling adaptation of Let the Right One In, based on John Ajvide Lindqvist’s 2004 novel and Tomas Alfredson’s 2008 Swedish film (which was remade in English as Let Me In in 2010 by Matt Reeves). As the crowd filters in to St. Ann’s temporary home on Jay St., random characters start walking across the stage, a snowy woods featuring a metal play set off to one side. Things get going when a creepy old man named Hakan (Cliff Burnett) captures a passerby, strings him up upside down from a tree, and slices his throat, collecting the dripping blood in a container. The blood is for Eli (Rebecca Benson), a hungry vampire girl who prefers not to have to kill her own prey. New in town, she befriends Oskar (Cristian Ortega), an odd adolescent who is relentlessly bullied by two of his classmates, Micke (Andrew Fraser) and Jonny (Graeme Dalling). Eli and Oskar hang out on the play set, talking about life, sharing a Rubik’s Cube, and discussing her foul odor. She encourages him to stand up for himself, which he is loath to do, but soon the battle lines are drawn, and violence awaits.

Rebecca Benson is ferocious as a hungry vampire in National Theatre of Scotland production at St. Ann’s

Adapted by Jack Thorne (Stuart: A Life Backwards, The Borough) and directed with a dark, stark intensity by Black Watch helmer John Tiffany (Once, The Glass Menagerie), Let the Right One In is a fierce tale of loneliness, desperation, and finding one’s place in the world. Ortega gives Oskar a bittersweet tenderness, Burnett garners sympathy as the obsessed Hakan, Fraser and Dalling keep Micke and Jonny from becoming caricatures, Susan Vidler does a sensitive turn as Oskar’s mother, and Gary Mackay excels in multiple roles (including Oskar’s father). But they’re all at the beck and call of Benson (The Wheel, Little Otik), who is electrifying as the feral Eli, surviving any way she can while knowing exactly what she is; Benson is so riveting, her voice gruff and primal, that you can practically smell her from your seat. The staging is often breathtaking, with movement choreography by Black Watch veteran and assistant director Steven Hoggett (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Peter and the Starcatcher), concluding with the unforgettable water-tank scene. A riveting take on the vampire legend, Let the Right One In paints a bleak portrait of modern life, streaked in dripping red, with danger around every corner, but that shouldn’t prevent you from stepping inside, accepting its invitation.

RASHEEDA SPEAKING

Jaclyn (Tonya Pinkins) and Ileen (Dianne Wiest) get involved in racism and office politics in RASHEEDA SPEAKING (photo by Monique Carboni)

The New Group at the Pershing Square Signature Center
The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 22, $77-$97
www.thenewgroup.org
www.signaturetheatre.org

The New Group’s twentieth anniversary season, and first at the sparkling Pershing Square Signature Center, continues with Joel Drake Johnson’s clever, if straightforward, pared-down examination of race and office politics, Rasheeda Speaking. The white Ileen (Dianne Wiest) and the black Jaclyn (Tonya Pinkins) work for the white Dr. Williams (Darren Goldstein), taking care of patients and handling the bills and forms. As the show opens, the surgeon is wheedling Ileen into reporting on Jaclyn, whom he clearly doesn’t like; he wants Ileen, whom he is promoting to office manager, to write down all of Jaclyn’s faults so he can ultimately replace her through human resources. “I don’t think she fits in,” Dr. Williams tells Ileen. “Her attitude is terrible. And she hates me.” After five days out sick, Jaclyn returns, complaining about toxins, the sorry state of her plants, and poisonous rays. She mistreats elderly white patient Rose Saunders (Patricia Conolly), accuses Ileen of being in love with their boss, doesn’t speak well of Mexicans, and claims Dr. Williams “doesn’t think white people should socialize with black people.” But just when it seems that Jaclyn is somewhat of a conspiracy theorist, both Dr. Williams and Ms. Saunders make comments that show that Jaclyn might not be that crazy after all.

Dr. Williams (Darren Goldstein) and Jaclyn (Tonya Pinkins) are not exactly the best of friends in New Group production (photo by Monique Carboni)

Played beautifully by Tony winner Pinkins (Jelly’s Last Jam; Caroline, or Change) and two-time Oscar winner Wiest (All My Sons, Bullets over Broadway), Jaclyn and Ileen are an engaging odd couple, bantering back and forth with aplomb, the former a ball of fire who speaks her mind, the latter a gentle soul who loves life and prefers to avoid confrontation. Pinkins commands the stage, stomping around Allen Moyer’s splendid doctor’s office set, while the rest of the cast treads far more lightly. Wiest might smile a lot as Ileen, but there’s something lurking right below the surface, and Goldstein (Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, The Affair) is appealing as the pastry-munching, suspicious surgeon who lets others do his dirty work. First-time director Cynthia Nixon keeps it all moving fluidly despite the office furniture clutter, giving appropriate space for Chicago playwright Johnson’s (Four Places, The Fall to Earth) razor-sharp dialogue. The narrative is too often overly direct and explicit, but the hundred-minute play does reveal the latent racism that is still so prevalent in today’s supposedly postracial society, letting us know that each and every one of us has plenty of work to do.

CITY OF

Claude (Jon Norman Schneider), Eleanor (Suzanne Bertish), and Dash (Devin Norik) try to make their dreams come true in Paris in Anton Dudley’s CITY OF

Peter Jay Sharp Theater
416 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Daily through February 21, $10-$35
www.playwrightsrealm.org

Self-taught French artist and Customs agent Henri Rousseau never left Paris, but he often visited the city’s natural history museum, zoo, and botanical gardens, which influenced such famous paintings as his 1910 masterpiece, “The Dream,” in which a nude woman reclines on a sofa in the middle of a jungle. The painting serves as the jumping-off point of Anton Dudley’s second work for the Playwrights Realm, City of (following 2007’s Substitution, the Realm’s inaugural production). As the hundred-minute one-act opens, a young man named Claude (Jon Norman Schneider) is in MoMA, enraptured by “The Dream”; meanwhile, nearby, the tall, aristocratic Dash (Devin Norik), who turns out to be the wealthy owner of the work (now that his beloved mother has passed on), is enraptured by Claude. Soon the two are off to Paris, along with Cammie (Colby Minifie), who wants to sing on the stage of the Paris Opera House, and Eleanor (Suzanne Bertish), who is seeking out her dead father as she ventures into old age. Paris is represented by a pigeon with a sweet tooth (Cheryl Stern) and a gargoyle on the facade of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame (Steven Rattazzi, who also plays the ghost of Paul Verlaine and others). All of the main characters search for their dreams — or nightmares — as they make their way through a magical, haunted Paris. The play gets its name from how characters regularly are unable to finish descriptions of Paris, saying over and over again, “City of . . .” without filling in that last noun. Just as Claude, Dash, Cammie, and Eleanor can’t seem to quite put their finger on what makes Paris tick, Dudley and director Stephen Brackett (Buyer & Cellar) can’t seem to quite put their finger on what might make City of tick. Choppy dialogue has characters speaking on top of one another or sharing lines in unison as well as reading stage directions about themselves in the third person, confusing the action or reinforcing relationships to the point of overkill. Virtually everything is overstylized until it is understylized; the best scene in the play is Eleanor’s late soliloquy, passionately delivered by Royal Shakespeare Company veteran Bertish. Rousseau’s surreal painting can be interpreted many different ways by each viewer, deserving of extended attention; unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Dudley’s muddled theatrical homage.

CONSTELLATIONS

Manhattan Theatre Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West 47th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through February 28, $67-$125
www.manhattantheatreclub.com
www.constellationsbroadway.com

It takes several minutes to get into the flow and rhythm of Nick Payne’s Constellations, a two-character play set in the quantum multiverse, in the “past, present, and future.” Beekeeper Roland (Jake Gyllenhaal) and cosmologist Marianne (Ruth Wilson) meet in a bar, have a brief chat, the lights go out, then they do it again, and again. But each time, something changes — the tone of their voice, the movement of their bodies, their positioning onstage, a word here and there. What at first seems like it might be just a tiresome theatrical exercise turns out to be a captivating, sophisticated exploration of the many roads a relationship (and storytelling itself) can take. Over the course of seventy minutes, there are more than fifty short scenes as Roland and Marianne go through repeated iterations of hooking up and not, discussing their careers, being faithful and unfaithful, and, ultimately, facing mortality square in the face. Once you fall under the spell of the drama’s intellectual conceit, a scene won’t even be over before you’re eagerly anticipating how the next one will be slightly different. Constellations is no mere Sliding Doors rehash in which the protagonists have two choices that will take their lives in alternate directions, nor is it as black and white as the Star Trek episode “The Enemy Within,” in which each character has a good and evil version; instead, it posits that there are parallel universes in which Roland and Marianne are interacting at the same time, each one similar but unique — and each one, ultimately, ending in death, something that never changes.

In writing Constellations, Payne — who previously tackled climate change in If There Is I Haven’t Found It Yet, in which Gyllenhaal made his New York theater debut — was inspired by the work of Columbia physics and mathematics professor Brian Greene, the superstring theorist and author of the highly influential book The Elegant Universe, giving an intriguing, well-researched scientific edge to the play. While Marianne’s job has her studying the origin of the universe, Roland is a rooftop beekeeper, caring for insects whose very existence might determine the future of the planet. In her Broadway debut, Wilson, whose star has risen dramatically in just a few short years — the thirty-three-year-old actress has won two Olivier Awards and had starring roles in such well-received television series as Luther and The Affair — is sensational as Marianne, combining an innate intelligence with just the right amount of vulnerability. And in his Broadway debut, the thirty-four-year-old Gyllenhaal — who is currently up for an Oscar for his performance in Nightcrawler and has starred in such other films as Zodiac, Brokeback Mountain, and Proof — is a worthy partner as he keeps his character beguilingly unpredictable under the sure hand of Michael Longhurst, who previously directed Gyllenhaal in the Roundabout production of If There Is I Haven’t Found It Yet and Wilson in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, when the two were at the University of Nottingham together. The play, which originated in London with Rafe Spall (Life of Pi, Betrayal), who also originated the role Gyllenhaal played in If There Is, and Sally Hawkins (Happy-Go-Lucky, Blue Jasmine), features a fascinating set designed by Tom Scutt, with lighting by Lee Curran; the actors remain on a central rectangular platform that is surrounded on three sides and above by balloons that represent stars, with different orbs glowing on and off in each scene. Constellations is a challenging, intellectually stimulating and satisfying work, expertly written, directed, and acted, but even with all the thought-provoking science, when it comes right down to it, it’s really just a, er, universal love story, as boy meets girl, then boy meets girl, then boy meets girl….

SHESH YAK

Jameel (Zarif Kabier) and Haytham (playwright Laith Nakli) discuss troubles in Syria in SHESH YAK (photo by Sandra Coudert)

Rattlestick Playwrights Theater
224 Waverly Pl. between Eleventh & Perry Sts.
Wednesday – Monday through February 22, $30-$35
866-811-4111
www.rattlestick.org

At the beginning of Laith Nakli’s stagnant Shesh Yak, making its world premiere at the Rattlestick, thirtysomething Syrian American Jameel (Zarif Kabier) is much too happy that Haytham (Nakli), a scholarly older gentleman from his native country, has come to stay in his rather ratty New York City apartment for a few days in conjunction with Haytham’s arrival in town to participate in an important panel discussion. But it soon becomes apparent that Jameel has ulterior motives in welcoming Haytham into his home that go far beyond honoring him as a heroic figure fighting the power and publicly speaking his mind during Arab unrest. Set in pre-9/11 New York, Shesh Yak explores rebellion, repression, and retribution from a distinctly Syrian point of view, but it offers little that is new, instead relying on genre clichés, clumsy exposition, and familiar twists. The seventy-five-minute one-act most closely resembles Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden, but playwright Nakli (Aftermath, Food & Fadwa) and director Bruce McCarty (White Men with Afros, Running into Me) keep things far too straightforward and predictable right through to the ending. The title of the play comes from the name of a desirable dice roll in backgammon; unfortunately, the well-meaning but clunky and plodding Shesh Yak is about as exciting as watching two people play the traditional board game.