this week in theater

THE REAL THING

An all-star cast revive Tom Stoppard’s THE REAL THING on Broadway (photo by Joan Marcus)

American Airlines Theatre
227 West 42nd St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 4, $67-$142
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org

In 1984, Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing won the Tony for Best Play, with stars Glenn Close, Jeremy Irons, and Christine Baranski taking home Antoinette Perry statues as well. In 2000, the story of love and infidelity was named Best Revival of a Play, with Jennifer Ehle and Stephen Dillane also honored for their roles. Lightning is unlikely to strike thrice in the latest Broadway revival of The Real Thing, a strangely cold and dispassionate version running at the American Airlines Theatre. In their Great White Way debuts, Ewan McGregor and Maggie Gyllenhaal never catch fire together, while Josh Hamilton and Cynthia Nixon don’t warm up either in this play about playwrights and actors. Henry (McGregor) is a successful scribe married to hoity actress Charlotte (Nixon), but he has the hots for another actress, the more earthbound Annie (Gyllenhaal), married to Max (Hamilton), who is suspicious of his wife’s possible infidelity. The tale alternates between real life and scenes from Henry’s plays with overlapping story lines and self-referential banter that sometimes makes it hard to differentiate between the two. In between scenes, members of the cast happily sing pop tunes out of character, as if they’re gathered around a campfire sharing wine and roasting marshmallows. But then it’s right back to Stoppard’s innately clever, refreshingly adult dialogue, which unfortunately falls flat under Sam Gold’s rather standard direction on David Zinn’s icy set. Madeline Weinstein adds some life as Debbie, Henry and Charlotte’s daughter — a role originated on Broadway by Nixon, who at the time was also appearing in David Rabe’s Tony-nominated Hurlyburly, dashing between the Ethel Barrymore Theatre and the Plymouth — but no sparks ignite as Annie’s costar, Billy (Ronan Raftery), and daft playwright Brodie (Alex Breaux) enter the fray. A well-known soda company once had a jingle that proclaimed, “There ain’t nothing like the real thing, baby”; in the case of this Broadway revival, that’s unfortunately not quite true.

ALL FOR ONE: FOURTH ANNIVERSARY

Phebe’s Tavern & Grill
359 Bowery at East Fourth St.
Monday, November 11, free, 8:30
www.allforonetheater.org
www.phebesnyc.com

All for One, the nonprofit organization dedicated to “the art and craft of solo theater through education, performance, community, and advocacy,” is celebrating its fourth anniversary with a free party on November 11 at Phebe’s in the East Village. At the event, there will be appetizers and a cash bar, two-dollar raffle tickets to win two tickets to Sleep No More, 54 Below, the New York Neo-Futurists’ Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, Gazillion Bubble Show, and Metropolitan Playhouse, an announcement of next year’s programming, and the presentation of the 2015 All for One Pioneer Award to Cheryl King. Following the party, everyone is invited down the street to see a reading of founding artistic director Michael Wolk’s new musical at 64E4 Underground, GL9 (Ghostlight Nine), which is set in a haunted Broadway theater and features “book, music, lyrics, guitar playing, singing, and an attempt at acting” by Wolk, directed by Aaron Mark. The party is being held in conjunction with All for One’s SoloLab, which continues through November 16 with seven one-person solo shows in development, including Diana Oh’s {my lingerie play}: Installation 9/10, Katie Northlich’s Divine Chaos, Deb Margolin’s 8 Stops, Kim Morris’s We’re the Only Ones Left, and Antonia Lassar’s Post Traumatic Super Delightful.

THE OBJECT LESSON

Geoff Sobelle uses stuff to look back at his life in THE OBJECT LESSON (photo by Jeremy Abrahams)

2014 NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL
BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
November 5-8, $20
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.geoffsobelle.com

Geoff Sobelle is a modern-day Buster Keaton in his one-man show The Object Lesson, which had its New York premiere at the BAM Fisher on Wednesday night and continues through Saturday. Once the doors to the intimate Fishman Space open, lucky ticket holders — the run is sold out, although there is a standby line — enter a room filled with hundreds and hundreds of cardboard boxes of all sizes, some scattered across the floor to be used as seats, others piled high to the ceiling. Many of the boxes are open, inviting people to peruse their contents. They contain the stuff of a lifetime, a hoarder’s fantasy, from footballs and photographs to stuffed animals and trophies, from Christmas decorations and clothing to papers and toys. There’s also a large card catalog with drawers and drawers of smaller items, many of which hold surprises that reveal a wry sense of humor. (Be sure to check out the Hamlet compartment.) Eventually, Sobelle enters the room and creates a central space consisting of a carpet, chair, side table, and lamps, magically pulling the items out of boxes while David Byrne’s “Glass, Concrete & Stone” plays on a turntable; “It is just a house, not a home,” the former Talking Head sings, differentiating between physical things and a more emotional concept. For the next seventy minutes or so, Sobelle rummages through boxes, interacts with the audience, has cleverly created telephone conversations, makes a salad like no one else ever has, and encounters memories that he can’t decide whether he wants to forget or remember, prompted by particular, tangible pieces of his past. He does all this in a mostly deadpan manner, with plenty of sly nods to the audience, who occasionally need to shift position when he builds his next set. (In addition to the “box seats” on the floor, a more standard row of theater chairs in the balcony accommodates those who might be otherwise uncomfortable, but the floor is clearly the place to be.) It all leads to a dazzling finale in which Sobelle, the co-artistic director of rainpan 43 and longtime member of Philadelphia’s Pig Iron Theatre Company, gathers everyone around him as he — well, you have to see it to believe it.

Each box Geoff Sobelle rummages through bring back memories, both fun and heartbreaking (photo by Jeremy Abrahams)

Every movement, every step, is wonderfully choreographed by Sobelle’s collaborators, director David Neumann, set designer Steven Dufala, lighting designer Christopher Kuhl, and sound designer Nick Kourtides, each contributing to the immersive illusion of it all. Winner of three major awards at the 2014 Edinburgh Fringe, The Object Lesson is inspired in part by the wit and wisdom of George Carlin, who said in his famous “A Place for My Stuff” routine, “That’s all you need in life, a little place for your stuff. That’s all your house is — a place to keep your stuff.” Sobelle has turned BAM’s Fishman Space into his own house, his own storage facility, like the end of Citizen Kane, with boxes and boxes of the stuff he has accumulated over the years. (Yes, many of the items are actually his.) Call it what you want — junk, trash, flotsam and jetsam, garbage, debris, waste, crap — but each one has a particular meaning for him, each one a root that ties him down, and it will dredge up memories of your own as well, especially when you return home and look at your own stuff, opening that box at the back of your closet that you haven’t looked inside for years.

DISGRACED

A dinner party goes seriously wrong in Ayad Akhtar’s Pulitzer Prize-winning DISGRACED (photo by Joan Marcus)

Lyceum Theatre
149 West 45th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through February 15, $37.50 – $138
www.disgracedonbroadway.com

Ayad Akhtar’s searing Pulitzer Prize-winning Disgraced, which had its New York premiere in 2012 at Lincoln Center’s tiny 131-seat Claire Tow Theater, has made a terrifically successful transition to Broadway’s 950-seat Lyceum Theatre. Akhtar’s poignant and powerful drama about identity and racism feels right at home on the Great White Way, led by a strong cast, smart, energetic direction, and razor-sharp dialogue. Hari Dhillon stars as Amir Kapoor, a bold corporate lawyer who is hiding his Pakistani background to help him rise in his firm. His wife, Emily (Gretchen Mol), is a white painter using Islamic imagery in her work. Jewish curator Isaac (Josh Radnor) is considering including some of Emily’s canvases in an important upcoming show. Isaac is married to Jory (Karen Pittman), a black lawyer who works with Amir. Problems arise when Amir’s nephew, Pakistani-born Abe (Danny Ashok), who changed his name from Hussein in order to fit in better in America, asks his uncle to meet with his imam, who has been imprisoned for suspected ties to terrorism. At first, Amir resists becoming involved, but Emily helps convince him that it’s the right thing to do. Yet Amir’s attendance at a hearing for the imam is a serious mistake, setting in motion a cascade of events that culminates in a dinner party where all of the characters let loose on one another in a ricochet of revelations that surprises even themselves.

Abe (Danny Ashok) and his uncle Amir (Hari Dhillon) discuss heritage and assimilation in searing Broadway drama (photo by Joan Marcus)

As Disgraced opens, Emily is painting a portrait of Amir inspired by Velázquez’s portrait of Juan de Pareja, his slave of Moorish descent, immediately setting up the ethnocentric boundaries the play investigates. Dhillon, who starred in the West End production (the role was originated in Chicago by Usman Ally and in New York by The Daily Show’s Asif Maandvi), plays Amir with a fire building in his belly, ready to explode at any minute. Mol is warm and appealing as Emily, who might not really understand her deep-down motivations, serving as a kind of onstage stand-in for the liberal Caucasians who tend to populate Broadway theaters. Radnor (How I Met Your Mother) and Pittman (the only returning member from the LCT3 cast) do a splendid job playing a couple representing social factions that do not always get along very well, Jews and blacks. (Think Crown Heights, for example.) And in the middle of it all is Ashok as Abe/Hussein, debating the ultimate value of assimilation and its cost. John Lee Beatty’s Upper East Side apartment set is elegant and welcoming, even as the story turns angry, and Senior (Akhtar’s The Who & the What, 4000 Miles) keeps it all moving smoothly through a fast-paced eighty-five intermissionless minutes. Disgraced is one of those plays that hits you in the gut, forcing you to look inside yourself at your own biases and predispositions, and it’s not necessarily a pretty picture. The Staten Island-born Akhtar is clearly a writer to watch; he has also written a novel (American Dervish) and acted in several films, including one that he cowrote and was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Best Screenplay. His follow-up play, The Invisible Hand, begins previews November 19 at New York Theatre Workshop.

THÉÂTRE DE LA VILLE: SIX CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR

Théâtre de la Ville is back at BAM with an awe-inspiring production of Luigi Pirandello’s absurdist masterpiece (photo by Jean-Louis Fernandez)

Théâtre de la Ville is back at BAM with an awe-inspiring production of Luigi Pirandello’s absurdist masterpiece (photo by Richard Termine)

2014 NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL
Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St. between Ashland & Rockwell Pl.
October 29 – November 2, $20-$75
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.theatredelaville-paris.com

As audience members begin filing into the BAM Harvey to see Théâtre de la Ville’s awe-inspiring production of Luigi Pirandello’s absurdist classic Six Characters in Search of an Author, there is already a man onstage, suspended from above, painting a trompe-l’oeil blue sky backdrop; he is soon joined by a young woman who sits at a sewing machine, making costumes while quietly singing “O sole mio.” These two actions subtly announce that what we are about to see is artifice — what Pirandello called “the theater of the theater” — albeit multilayered artifice of the very highest order. For the next two hours, we are treated to a rapturous display of intensely clever stagecraft, filled with self-referential jokes about the theater, intellectual discussions of illusion vs. reality, and a search for nothing less than the very meaning of existence. A dictatorial director (Alain Libolt) is preparing his cast and crew to rehearse the second act of Pirandello’s The Rules of the Game when six mysterious people, all dressed in black, suddenly appear, claiming to be fictional characters abandoned by their author and now seeking a place where they can tell their story, which is the whole reason for their being. The director, the stage manager (Gérald Maillet), the actors (Charles-Roger Bour, Sandra Faure, Olivier Le Borgne, and Gaëlle Guillou), the carpenter (Pascal Vuillemot), and the assistant (Jauris Casanova) are at first dubious of the six strangers, but soon the father (Hugues Quester) convinces them to hear them out, so they delve into a soap-opera-like tale of faded love, mourning, incest, sibling rivalry, and horrific tragedy also involving the sexy stepdaughter (Valérie Dashwood), the grieving mother (Sarah Karbasnikoff), the estranged son (Stéphane Krähenbühl), the awkward teenager (Walter N’Guyen), and the adorable little girl (Sierra Blanco).

Glorious production seeks to life the veil on some of the many mysteries of the theater (photo by Richard Termine)

Glorious production seeks to lift the veil on some of the many mysteries of the theater (photo by Richard Termine)

No one onstage has a name, save for the surprise arrival of Madame Pace (Céline Carrère); everyone else represents a stock character determined to experience their individual purpose, their raison d’être, whether in the play, the play-within-a-play, or the play-within-a-play-within-a-play. There are no rules to this sly game directed by Théâtre de la Ville head Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota, who was last at BAM in October 2012 with another delightful absurdist classic, Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinocéros. This is his third time staging Six Characters in Search of an Author, and he clearly knows his way around this existential journey of life as theater, and theater as life, expertly translated and adapted by François Regnault. The cast is uniformly excellent, led by Libolt, Dashwood, and Quester, who won the Critics’ Award for Best Actor for Théâtre de la Ville’s original 2001 production. Throughout the play, which is itself, of course, set in a theater, various characters look out at the seats, which to them are empty but to the actors playing them are filled with onlookers, furthering the self-referential nature of the show and the relationships between actor and audience, creator and creation. The director even references the subtitles at one point, reminding everyone that this is, at its most basic, an Italian play put on by a French company in an American city. Every moment is pure genius, a palimpsest of metas that keep piling on in glorious ways, a celebration of just what the theater can do and be, from behind the scenes to the last row of the balcony.

NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL: SIX CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR

Théâtre de la Ville production of Luigi Pirandello absurdist classic will search for the meaning of existence in Brooklyn (photo by Jean-Louis Fernandez)

Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St. between Ashland & Rockwell Pl.
October 29 – November 2, $20-$75
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.theatredelaville-paris.com

“Unfortunately, there always has to be a third, unavoidable element that intrudes between the dramatic author and his creation in the material being of the performance: the actor,” playwright, novelist, and poet Luigi Pirandello wrote in his 1908 essay “Illustrators, Actors, and Translators.” That tenet is central to one of his most famous works, 1921’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, which is being presented at the BAM Harvey Theater October 29 to November 2 by Théâtre de la Ville, Paris, last at BAM in October 2012 with another absurdist classic, Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinocéros, Described by the playwright, who was born in Agrigento, Italy, in 1867, as a comedy “without acts or scenes,” Six Characters questions the very nature of its own being as a dramatic work as a half dozen abandoned characters appear onstage in need of a new author to define their existence. Adapted and translated by François Regnault and directed by Théâtre de la Ville head Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota, with set and light design by Yves Collet, music by Jefferson Lembeye, and costumes by Corinne Baudelot, this production once again stars Hugues Quester, who won the Critics’ Award for Best Actor for his performance in the play back in 2001. In conjunction with the show, BAM is teaming up with the Onassis Cultural Center NY for the discussion “On Truth (and Lies) in Authorship,” with Demarcy-Mota and host Simon Critchley, being held on October 30 at 6:00 at BAM Fisher Hillman Studio ($15), as part of the Hellenic Humanities Program.

THE LAST SHIP

A game cast is set adrift by a lackluster book in THE LAST SHIP (photo by Joan Marcus)

Neil Simon Theatre
250 West 52nd St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 29, $55-$147 (daily $30 lottery)
877-250-2929
www.thelastship.com

Watching The Last Ship, which opened last night at the Neil Simon Theatre, you’re likely to think you’ve seen this all before, as it rather precisely follows the pattern of 2013 Tony winner Kinky Boots: Both musicals feature music and lyrics by a pop star (Sting for The Last Ship, Cyndi Lauper for Kinky Boots), both are set in a British working-class community, and both involve a son debating whether he should follow in his father’s footsteps. And just as Boots was vastly overrated, the same is likely to happen with Ship. Based on Sting’s childhood experiences in the shipbuilding town of Wallsend in the northeast of England, The Last Ship focuses on Gideon Fletcher, first as a fifteen-year-old kid (Collin Kelly-Sordelet) wanting something more than his tough father (Jamie Jackson) has planned for him, then returning fifteen years later (now played by Michael Esper) for his dad’s funeral and trying to get back together with his old girlfriend, Meg (Dawn Cantwell, then Rachel Tucker). But the Wallsend he’s come back to is in the midst of a battle with corporate suit Freddy Newlands (Eric Anderson), whose company is taking over the docks and turning the shuttered shipyard into a scrap yard. With the help of former welder Arthur Milburn (Aaron Lazar), who is in love with Meg and is a surrogate father to her son, Tom (Kelly-Sordelet), Newlands tries to convince the unemployed shipbuilders to come work for him, but their leader, Jackie White (Jimmy Nail), wants no part of it. “You could die and hope for heaven / But you’d need to work your shift / And I’d expect ye’s all to back us to the hilt / And if St. Peter at his gate were to ask you why you’re late? / You’d tell him that you have to get a ship built,” he sings in “Shipyard,” in which all the men join in on the chorus, stamping their feet as they declare, “And the only life we’ve known is in the shipyard.” It’s the strongest song in the show, but it also emphasizes their refusal to face the facts that the world is changing while they’re not, adding to the many holes in the script.

A romantic triangle steers things out of control in musical based on Sting’s early life (photo by Matthew Murphy)

In the second act, the book, by Tony winner and Oscar nominee John Logan (Red, The Last Samurai) and Tony and Pulitzer Prize winner Brian Yorkey (Next to Normal), falls apart as Father James O’Brien (Fred Applegate), previously the comic relief, becomes the overly melodramatic sentimental inspiration, the love triangle between Meg, Gideon, and Arthur quickly turns stale and unbelievable, and the shipbuilders’ occupation of the yard is just plain ridiculous. Even the staging, by two-time Tony winner Joe Mantello (Take Me Out, Assassins) and choreographer Steven Hoggett (Once, The Glass Menagerie), can’t keep things afloat, as it also recalls Kinky Boots as the lads set out to build a ship for themselves. The cast is mostly excellent, particularly Tucker and Nail in their impressive Broadway debuts and another first-timer, Shawna M. Hamic, as Beatrice Dees, the owner of the Ship in the Hole pub, who offers “Mrs. Dees’ Rant” after intermission. While Sting’s score can be refreshing at times, steering clear of Broadway-fication, it can also be repetitive and preachy (“Life is a dance, a romance where ye take your chances / Just don’t be left on the shores of regretful glances”). As the two main narratives converge, the plot grows ever-more convoluted, getting lost in tired us-vs.-them themes that drain the show of any real depth, leaving The Last Ship bobbing on the surface, going nowhere.