this week in theater

CROSSING THE LINE — RYOJI IKEDA: SUPERPOSITION

(superposition, 2012 © Kazuo Fukunaga / Kyoto Experiment in Kyoto Art Theater, Shunjuza)

Metropolitan Museum of Art
Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
October 17-18, $35, 7:00
212-570-3949
www.fiaf.org
www.metmuseum.org

In the summer of 2011, Japanese multimedia artist Ryoji Ikeda dazzled New Yorkers with the immersive site-specific work the transfinite, which invited visitors to sit down in the Park Avenue Armory and merge with a two-sided monolithic wall, extended onto the floor, that came alive with a mind-blowing array of experimental digital music and mathematically based projections, as if welcoming people inside the mind of a cutting-edge computer. Things will be only slightly more contained for the U.S. premiere of superposition, Ikeda’s theatrical piece being presented October 17 & 18 in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium. Ticket holders may be sitting in seats, but what’s happening onstage will take them through mesmerizing sound and visuals that combine art and science, mathematics and human behavior in unique ways, exploring technology, philosophy, probability, and the future of existence, zeroing in on a single subatomic particle. The work is being presented as part of the French Institute Alliance Française’s annual Crossing the Line Festival, consisting of multidisciplinary projects and performances at locations throughout the city. In conjunction with superposition, Salon 94 on East Ninety-Fourth St. is hosting a solo exhibition of Ikeda’s work October 20-31, and his black-and-white test pattern [times square] is being projected on nearly four dozen digital screens in Times Square nightly from 11:57 to midnight for the October installment of “Midnight Moment,” the monthly program organized and supported by the Times Square Advertising Coalition in partnership with Times Square Arts; on October 16, the visuals will be accompanied by an Exclusive Sound Experience, with limited headphones available beginning at 11:00. (If you’re attending the October 17 performance of superposition, be sure to arrive at the museum early, as Icelandic cellist Hildur Guðnadóttir will be playing a special pop-up concert at 6:00 in the Carroll and Milton Petrie European Sculpture Court (Gallery 548) inspired by the Costume Institute’s upcoming “Death Becomes Her: A Century of Mourning Attire,” which opens October 21.)

YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU

Daily life at the Sycamore house is always an adventure, filled with madness and mayhem (photo by Joan Marcus)

Longacre Theatre
220 West 48th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday (and some Mondays) through January 4, $37 – $152
www.youcanttakeitwithyoubroadway.com

Earlier this year, Lincoln Center presented the world premiere of Act One, James Lapine’s engaging Broadway adaptation of Moss Hart’s 1959 memoir detailing his beginnings in theater, focusing on his first collaboration with writer-director George S. Kaufman. One of the many fruits of that partnership is now back on the Great White Way, a rousing revival of the Pulitzer Prize-winning You Can’t Take It with You. Set in Depression-era New York City, the three-act madcap farce follows the trials and tribulations of the eccentric Sycamore family, led by patriarch and grandfather Martin Vanderhof (James Earl Jones), who has enjoyed the simple pleasures of life ever since he suddenly walked out on his job more than three decades earlier and now lives contentedly, refusing to pay income tax and raising snakes. His daughter, Penny Sycamore (Kristine Nielsen), a quirky, perpetually pleasant would-be playwright and painter, is married to Paul Sycamore (Mark Linn-Baker), a goofy, unemployed tinkerer who spends most of his time in the basement inventing different kinds of fireworks with the oddball Mr. DePinna (Patrick Kerr) and playing with his Erector set. Penny and Paul’s younger daughter, Essie Carmichael (Annaleigh Ashford), is a wannabe dancer in endless motion, pirouetting her way through the day in tutus and making candies that her amateur printer husband, Ed Carmichael (Will Brill), goes out and sells when he’s not playing Beethoven on the xylophone for her to dance to. Essie’s ballet teacher, Boris Kolenkhov (Reg Rogers), is a blustery Russian émigré obsessed with Stalin and the revolution. Despite having little money — the Sycamores regularly eat corn flakes for dinner — the family has a well-treated maid, Rheba (Crystal Dickinson), who really runs things around the house; Rheba is dating Donald (Marc Damon Johnson), who hangs around doing odd jobs. Finally, there’s older daughter Alice Sycamore (Rose Byrne), a prim and proper young lady who is desperate to have a normal life despite her crazy, mixed-up family. (Think Marilyn in The Munsters, for example.) Alice is in love with Tony Kirby (Fran Kranz), her very wealthy boss at the Wall Street firm started by his mogul father (Byron Jennings), who raises extremely expensive orchids in his spare time. When the two families are brought together to celebrate Alice and Tony’s engagement, mayhem erupts, jeopardizing the lovebirds’ future.

Things don’t go quite as planned when the Kirbys and the Sycamores get together (photo by Joan Marcus)

You Can’t Take It with You, which was first produced on Broadway in 1936 and turned into an Oscar-winning film in 1938 by Frank Capra (with Jean Arthur, Lionel Barrymore, James Stewart, Eddie Anderson, Ann Miller, and others), is a lovable romp about 1930s New York City, a fun and fanciful riff on the very serious growing gap between the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots. David Rockwell’s living-room set is breathtaking, every nook and cranny occupied by paintings, photographs, masks, sculptures, trinkets, tchotchkes, toys, and other, often loony, paraphernalia. Director Scott Ellis (The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Harvey) keeps it all moving at a wickedly funny pace, a nonstop barrage of wacky high jinks, rapid-fire non sequiturs and double entendres, and over-the-top physical comedy, while never letting the audience forget that these are very hard times indeed for families such as the Sycamores, who live in the shadow of such tycoons as Mr. Kirby and his stuffy, genteel wife (Johanna Day.) The cast is superb, led by the humble Jones (who actually makes mention of the “dark side,” eliciting titters from Star Wars fans in the audience), the always welcome Nielsen (Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, The Killer), the ever-dapper and pristine Jennings (Ten Chimneys, Arcadia), and theater doyenne Elizabeth Ashley as the hash-slinging Grand Duchess Olga Katrina. Some of the physical comedy does grow stale, particularly Brill’s (Tribes, Not Fade Away) twisting mannerisms, Ashford’s (Kinky Boots, Masters of Sex) never-ending spins and twirls, and an unnecessary appearance by Julie Halston (The Tribute Artist) as a drunk actress, but those excesses can be forgiven amid all the boisterous merriment to be had in a play that combines an obviously old-fashioned sensibility with some social, political, and economic observations that are still relevant today, more than seventy-five years after its debut.

THIS IS OUR YOUTH

Dennis (Kieran Culkin) and Warren (Michael Cera) have some fast thinking to do in THIS IS OUR YOUTH (photo by Brigitte Lacombe)

Cort Theatre
138 West 48th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Thursday – Tuesday through January 4, $35 – $135
www.thisisouryouthbroadway.com
www.shubert.nyc/theatres/cort

After seeing the Broadway debut of Kenneth Lonergan’s 1996 black comedy, This Is Our Youth, I breathed a heavy sigh of relief, thankful that this was not my youth — although it could have been, since I’m the same age as two of the three characters and grew up in New York as well at the exact same time. It’s a lot funnier watching the antics onstage than having actually lived that life. It’s March 1982, and nineteen-year-old Warren Straub (Michael Cera) has arrived at the Upper West Side pad of his friend and drug dealer, twenty-one-year-old Dennis Ziegler (Kieran Culkin), with a suitcase stuffed with valuable collectible toys and records and fifteen grand in cash he stole from his abusive father. Dennis and Warren have an intense love-hate relationship, as the supposedly cool and calm dealer constantly insults his always nervous, twitchy buddy, who appears to suffer from ADHD and often thrusts his hands into his pockets to keep them from doing something strange as he tramps around the stage. “What kind of life do you lead?” Dennis says early on. “You live with your father — a psycho. . . . Nobody can stand to have you around because you’re such an annoying loudmouthed little creep, and now you’re like some kind of fugitive from justice? What is gonna happen to you, man?” Warren, who has a unique philosophical view of the world, replies, “What’s gonna happen to anybody? Who cares?” Dennis’s never-seen girlfriend, Valerie, and her friend, the fashionable Jessica Goldman (current It Girl Tavi Gevinson), are on their way over, so Dennis and Warren come up with a plan to lavish some of the stolen money — which Dennis insists Warren return to his father — on the two women, then make it back by reselling some coke. But nothing seems to go quite right for these two luckless losers.

Tavi Gevinson has style to boot in Broadway debut (photo by Brigitte Lacombe)

Originally produced by the New Group in 1996 with Josh Hamilton as Dennis, Mark Ruffalo as Warren, and Missy Yager as Jessica (later versions have featured such young stars as Matt Damon, Jake Gyllenhaal, Hayden Christensen, Freddie Prinze Jr., Anna Paquin, Summer Phoenix, Heather Burns, and Alison Lohman), This Is Our Youth is a searing comic portrait of three college-age kids trying to find their place in a not-so-warm-and-cozy world. Culkin (subUrbia, Lonergan’s The Starry Messenger) plays the sleazy but lovable Dennis with broad strokes, channeling Robert Downey Jr. from Less Than Zero; in fact, This Is Our Youth is sort of an extremely stripped-down, more low rent East Coast version of the 1987 film based on Bret Easton Ellis’s bestselling novel, with smart, razor-sharp, free-wheeling dialogue from Lonergan (The Waverly Gallery, You Can Count on Me). Gevinson, the teen powerhouse behind Rookie magazine, starts off a bit mannered before settling into her character, an FIT student who is (wisely) suspicious of Warren and is the only one of the three who actually cares about her family. But Cera steals the show in a bravura performance as the unpredictable Warren, imbuing him with a fidgety apprehension and a tense, jittery anxiety that is mesmerizing. He’s so wound up, it’s nearly impossible for anyone to have a conversation with him. “So how you doing, Jessica?” he asks when she shows up at Dennis’s apartment. “You’re looking very automated tonight,” to which Jessica replies, “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Anna D. Shapiro (Domesticated, August: Osage County) directs this Steppenwolf production with a controlled recklessness where anything can happen on Todd Rosenthal’s (Of Mice and Men, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) spectacular set, a walk-up studio surrounded by an apartment complex so realistic you’ll wonder why you’ve never noticed it in the Theater District before. Letting out another sigh of relief, I can again confirm that I am intensely glad to have experienced This Is Our Youth as an onstage drama instead of ever having to live this crazy kind of life myself.

THE COUNTRY HOUSE

An acting family rips into itself in Donald Margulies’s THE COUNTRY HOUSE (photo by Joan Marcus)

Manhattan Theatre Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West 47th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 23, $67-$125
www.manhattantheatreclub.com
www.thecountryhousebway.com

There’s something all too familiar about Pulitzer Prize winner Donald Margulies’s latest play, The Country House, which opened October 2 at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Broadway home, the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. The show, which deals with a close-knit group of friends and relatives gathering at a country house during the Williamstown Theatre Festival, resounds with echoes of such recent productions as the Tony-winning Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, the underrated Ten Chimneys, the Public’s Nikolai and the Others, and MTC’s own The Snow Geese. It’s a year after the tragic death of Kathy, a beloved and successful actress and, by all accounts, one of the most amazing women ever to step foot on the planet. Her family is honoring her memory at their country house, led by her mother, stage diva Anna Patterson (Blythe Danner); Anna’s cynical, ne’er-do-well son, Elliot Cooper (Eric Lange); her former son-in-law, schlock director Walter Keegan (David Raasche), who was married to Kathy; and Susie (Sarah Steele), Walter and Kathy’s twentysomething daughter. Walter has arrived with his new fiancée, the much younger and very beautiful — as we are told over and over again — Nell McNally (Kate Jennings Bryant), a struggling actress, and Anna has also invited TV superstar and heartthrob Michael Astor (Daniel Sunjata), a longtime family friend who is slumming by appearing at the festival in Ferenc Molnár’s The Guardsman. Margulies (Time Stands Still, Dinner with Friends) channels Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and The Seagull as all the women flirt with Michael, the cynical Susie chooses not to get involved in the family business, and the condescending and contemptuous Elliott takes issue with just about everyone, writing a play that doesn’t exactly endear him to the others.

The Country House might not shed new light on this somewhat tired subject, but the production itself is excellent, fluidly directed by Daniel Sullivan, who has helmed many of Margulies’s previous plays. John Lee Beatty’s living-room set is charming and inviting, enhanced by Peter Kaczorowski’s splendid lighting, which smartly signals each next scene and is especially effective evoking a lightning storm. The acting is exemplary, led by the always engaging Danner (The Commons of Pensacola, Butterflies Are Free) as the still-feisty family matriarch rehearsing for Miss Warren’s Profession, and Steele (Slowgirl, Russian Transport), who is a star on the rise. Rasche (Speed-the-Plow, Sledge Hammer!) is particularly effective as Walter, a character with a lot more depth than originally presented, and TV veteran Lange (Lost, Victorious), in his first play in seven years, will have you wondering why he doesn’t take to the stage more often. Originally produced this past summer at the Geffen Playhouse in L.A. (where Danner, Steele, Rasche, and Lange originated their roles), The Country House has a lot to offer, but it’s a place that’s been visited far too often.

LOVE LETTERS

Mia Farrow and Brian Dennehy are first pair to star in Broadway revival of A. R. Gurney’s Pulitzer Prize finalist LOVE LETTERS (photo © Carol Rosegg)

Brooks Atkinson Theatre
256 West 47th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Through February 15, $27-$137
877-250-2929
www.lovelettersbroadway.com
www.brooksatkinsontheater.com

A. R. Gurney’s 1988 play, Love Letters, is a joyous celebration of the written word that might look deceptively simple but is instead a complex and thrilling examination of life and love. A Pulitzer Prize finalist for drama, the ninety-minute show features a pair of actors sitting at a long rectangular table, with no bells or whistles; Tony-winning designer John Lee Beatty’s set is about as basic as can be. The epistolary play is told through decades of letters written between childhood friends Melissa Gardner and Andrew Makepeace Ladd III as they grow up together, head off to boarding school and college, experience romances, and choose very different life and career paths. While the privileged Melissa is a quirky free spirit interested in art, Andrew comes from a slightly less-moneyed family, maturing into a down-to-earth man seeking worldly achievement. Through the letters, they share their hopes and dreams, successes and disappointments, encapsulating two lives that don’t turn out quite as planned.

For more than a quarter century, Love Letters, in which the actors read directly from the script, has been performed around the world, with spectacular pairings as well as productions with stunt casting, including Gurney and Holland Taylor, Sigourney Weaver and Jeff Daniels, Kathleen Turner and John Rubinstein, Larry Hagman and Linda Gray (Dallas), Hagman and Barbara Eden (I Dream of Jeannie), Robert Wagner and Jill St. John, Wagner and Stefanie Powers (Hart to Hart), Jerry Hall and David Soul, Elizabeth Taylor and James Earl Jones, Samantha Bee and Jason Jones (The Daily Show), and, in Stanley Donen’s fleshed-out 1999 TV movie, Laura Linney and Steven Weber. For its current Broadway revival, directed by two-time Tony winner Gregory Mosher, five duos will be playing the roles through February 15. Mia Farrow and Brian Dennehy open the run, and they are mesmerizing. Farrow brings a beguiling eccentricity to the capricious, unpredictable, and often self-defeating Melissa, who travels the world but can’t find happiness. Farrow delivers her lines looking out at the audience, adding emotive physical flourishes, while Dennehy steadfastly reads from the script with appropriate earnestness. Farrow and Dennehy make a wonderful team, particularly when one writes multiple letters to the other without a response, their disappointment and pain palpable. The play stumbles as it approaches the end, with the events that befall each character way too over the top, but Andrew’s soliloquy on the glory of handwritten letters trumps all minor quibbles. And thankfully the play has not been updated; there are no mentions of cell phones or the internet, which have changed forever the way people communicate. Farrow and Dennehy will be followed by Dennehy and Carol Burnett, then Candice Bergen and Alan Alda, Stacy Keach and Diana Rigg, and Anjelica Huston and Martin Sheen, with more pairings to be announced.

DIRT

Christopher Domig returns to his award-winning role in new production of DIRT at the 4th Street Theatre

4th Street Theatre
83 East Fourth St. between Second Ave. & Bowery
Wednesday – Sunday through October 12, $20
212-780-9037
www.theplaydirt.com

Christopher Domig gives voice to illegal immigrants in the poignant one-man show Dirt, running through October 12 at the 4th Street Theatre. Domig plays Sad, a thirty-year-old Iraqi rose peddler who lives in a dingy apartment with an unseen Egyptian roommate. Although he is glad to be in America, he can’t forget that he’s not supposed to be there. “I basically love life even though I have no right to live here,” he says, a sentiment that he repeats often throughout the seventy-minute play. He’s like a caged man barely eking out existence in a dungeon, with no past and no future. The first English word he learned was Kodak, and as proof he pulls out a few pictures of his family, his only connection to his previous life. He stays under the radar because, he explains, “Don’t want to attract attention.” He talks about how he is different from the average American — his head is too large and flat in the back, his pores are too big, his skin too dark, his eyes too black. “The longer I observe you, the better I think I understand why you have such a deep-rooted hatred for us,” he acknowledges. But the generally soft-spoken Sad, who harbors a secret about his full name, can get angry as well about a situation that has him lost and lonely, treated without respect and dignity, leading to an unhealthy lack of self-respect in himself. And when he explodes, it’s hard not to wonder what the consequences might be.

Even at a mere seventy minutes, the play does get a bit repetitive, but Domig, who was named Best Actor at the 2007 New York International Fringe Festival for the role, is captivating as he makes nearly constant eye contact with the audience in the small, intimate theater. He moves around Edward K. Ross’s dreary apartment set with great care, waiting for that knock on the door that could take him away. Directed by Mary Catherine Burke, the director of programming for the New York Musical Theatre Festival, and translated from the German by Paul Dvorak — Austrian Robert Schneider wrote the original play in 1993 — Dirt explores the nature of prejudice and fear as seen by a humble man trapped between two worlds, with no apparent way out. It will leave you thinking about the current controversy over illegal immigration and border control and make you examine your own views about racism the next time you see a man such as Sad on the streets of the city.

TICKET GIVEAWAY: INNER VOICES, A MUSIC THEATER DOUBLE BILL

INNER VOICES: GRACE / THE OTHER ROOM
The TBG Theatre
312 West 36th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves., third Floor
October 4 – November 1 (official opening October 11)
www.premieresnyc.org

In 2008, Premieres NYC expanded its mission to support the expansion of new music theater in New York City by starting the Inner Voices program, in which specially selected teams collaborate on original monologues told through song. Over the last several years, the participants in Premieres NYC projects have included Hunter Foster, Shuler Hensley, Laura Osnes, Jack Cummings III, Nilo Cruz, Michael John LaChiusa, and Arielle Jacobs. The fourth Premieres presentation is another eagerly awaited double bill, beginning October 4 at the TBG Theatre. Grace, written by Tony nominee Charlayne Woodard (Ain’t Misbehavin’, The Night Watcher) with music by Kirsten Childs (Miracle Brothers), stars Andrea Frierson (Once on This Island, Me & Ella) as an award-winning novelist facing a critical moment in her life. The show is directed by Shirley Jo Finney, with music direction by Rona Siddiqui and live bass by Marc Schmied. Grace is paired with The Other Room, written by librettist Mark Campbell (The Inspector, Songs from an Unmade Bed) with music by Marisa Michelson (The Lovers, Tamar of the River), musical direction by Ian Axness, and live cello by Brian Sanders; in the show, directed by Ethan Heard, Phoebe Strole (Spring Awakening, The Madrid) plays Lena, a woman who deals with a crisis in a positive way when learning that a dear friend has AIDS.

TICKET GIVEAWAY: Inner Voices runs Monday through Saturday, October 4 to November 1, at the TBG Theatre, and twi-ny has three pairs of tickets to give away for free. Just send your name and daytime phone number to contest@twi-ny.com by Thursday, October 2, at 5:00 to be eligible. All entrants must be twenty-one years of age or older; three winners will be selected at random.