this week in theater

PHOENIX

Julia Stiles and James Wirt deal with the aftereffects of a one-night stand in PHOENIX

Cherry Lane Mainstage Theatre
38 Commerce St.
Monday – Saturday through August 23, $56-$66
212-989-2020
www.phoenixtheplay.com
www.cherrylanetheatre.org

At the beginning of Phoenix, Scott Organ’s two-character, one-act play, Sue (Julia Stiles) and James (James Wirt) meet up for the first time after what both agree was a fun one-night stand a month earlier. But Sue has some surprising news for James, something that shocks, confuses, and delights him. For ninety minutes, the two very attractive people examine the central issue from all angles as they contemplate whether they have any kind of a future together. Clearly, there appears to be a future for the play itself. There was major buzz in the air at one of the early previews as Al Pacino took an aisle seat in the intimate Cherry Lane Mainstage to check it out. (One of the producers, Poverty Row Entertainment, is run by filmmakers Julie Pacino, Al’s daughter, and Jennifer DeLia, the director of Phoenix ; the other producers are Rian Patrick Durham and Rattlestick Playwrights Theater.) The show officially opens on August 7 for a limited run through August 23, and it is being turned into a film as well, directed by Amy Redford, daughter of Robert. Stiles and Wirt are also set to appear in Poverty Row’s The First, a biopic about Mary Pickford in which Stiles plays Frances Marion and Wirt is Charlie Chaplin; Lily Rabe stars as Pickford.

PIECE OF MY HEART: THE BERT BERNS STORY

The forgotten legacy of Bert Berns is brought to colorful life in new musical (photo by Jenny Anderson)

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Irene Diamond Stage
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through August 31, $31.50 – $99.50
212-244-7529
www.pieceofmyheartmusical.com
www.signaturetheatre.org

Art imitates life in the engaging, bittersweet off-Broadway musical Piece of My Heart: The Bert Berns Story. In a prolific period between 1961 and 1967, Bert Berns wrote and/or produced more than two dozen big-time pop hits, recorded by such singers and bands as the Beatles, David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, the Drifters, Janis Joplin, the Animals, Solomon Burke, the Isley Brothers, and Van Morrison, while also founding the seminal Atlantic offshoot BANG Records. Born and raised in the Bronx, Berns died in 1967 at the age of thirty-eight, and today his legacy is all but nonexistent, although his surviving family is in the midst of rebuilding his reputation with this show; the first major authorized biography, Joel Selvin’s Here Comes the Night: The Dark Soul of Bert Berns and the Dirty Business of Rhythm and Blues; and the upcoming documentary BANG — The Bert Berns Story. In Piece of My Heart, Leslie Kritzer stars as Jessie, Berns’s fictional daughter who receives an unexpected call that her mother, Ilene (Linda Hart), is going to close up Bert’s Broadway office and sell the rights to all of his songs. Disturbed by her mother’s intentions, Jessie, who didn’t know anything about the office, heads to New York City, where she finds her father’s former manager and right-hand man, Wazzel (Joseph Siravo), waiting for her. Wazzel tells Jessie how Bert (Zak Resnick), vocalist Hoagy Lands (Derrick Baskin), and the young Wazzel (Bryan Fenkart) got started, with the events unfolding right in front of them. Jessie sees her father going to Cuba and working with a revolutionary named Carlos (Sydney James Harcourt), meeting high-powered producer Jerry Wexler (Mark Zeisler), challenging the legendary Phil Spector, and falling in love with Ilene (Teal Wicks), a blonde dancer who would become Bert’s wife and Jessie’s mother. But when the current-day Ilene shows up at her husband’s office, she kicks out Wazzel and has a somewhat different tale to tell Jessie while trying to convince her that signing over the songs is the right thing to do, leaving Jessie trapped in the middle as she learns more and more about her father.

Jessie (Leslie Kritzer) wonders what her father (Zak Resnick) was really like in PIECE OF MY HEART (photo by Jenny Anderson)

For much of its two hours and twenty minutes (with intermission), Piece of My Heart walks that fine line between bio show and vanity project. As pointed out numerous times in Daniel Goldfarb’s fairly standard book, Berns was determined to become famous; also, knowing that he was living on borrowed time because of a heart problem, he often said, “My children will know me by my music.” The show is produced by Berns’s son, Brett, and daughter, Cassandra, with the express purpose of finally bringing fame to their father, and the narrative sometimes gets bogged down with whitewashed scenes that turn Berns into a kind of heroic, misunderstood figure. It’s not helped by the casting of Resnick (Mamma Mia!, Disaster!) in the title role; while his singing packs a powerful punch, his acting is akin to a David Wright press conference, all white-bread clichés with no nuance. However, the rest of the cast of seasoned pros is outstanding, including Hart (Hairspray, Anything Goes) and Wicks (Wicked, Jekyll & Hyde) as the feisty Ilene, Siravo (Conversations with My Father, The Light in the Piazza) and Fenkart (Memphis) as the tough-talking Wazzel, De’Adre Aziza (Passing Strange) as Candace, Berns’s sexy first love, and Kritzer (A Catered Affair, Legally Blonde) as a kind of onstage stand-in for the audience. Oh, and let’s not forget about the music, which is performed admirably by a live band led by Lon Hoyt; the songs range from the somewhat obscure to the familiar to the super famous, but it’s best if you go without knowing what they are so you can be surprised by each new well-choreographed musical number (by director Denis Jones) on Alexander Dodge’s simple but effective sets, energized by Ben Stanton’s colorful lighting. The songs are listed in the Playbill and detailed on a large board outside the Signature’s Irene Diamond theater, but it’s better to read about them after the show, which got an instant and rousing standing ovation the night we went.

HOT! FESTIVAL: KIDNAP ME

Tyler Ashley’s KIDNAP ME premieres July 21 at the HOT! Festival at Dixon Place (photo by Catherine Sun)

Dixon Place
161A Chrystie Street
Monday, July 21, $12-$15, 7:30
Festival continues through August 5
www.dixonplace.org
www.tylerashleyinfo.tumblr.com

Things are liable to get even hotter when Tyler Ashley premieres his latest work, Kidnap Me, at the twenty-third annual HOT! Festival: The NYC Celebration of Queer Culture. Last summer, the Brooklyn-based choreographer and dancer shed his clothes for Swadhisthana: The Event at NYPAC; the multidisciplinary genderqueer artist has also presented pieces on the High Line and Times Square while also dancing with STREB, Walter Dundervill, and others. His first evening-length work, the ninety-minute Kidnap Me, is a durational performance, inspired by Béla Tarr’s 2011 film The Turin Horse and the music of the late African American composer and performer Julius Eastman, that examines hunger, family, and stardom, focusing on the creative process. In his artist statement for New York Live Arts, Ashley explains, “I conduct experiments in desire, endurance, vulnerability, and determination by creating image-based dances inspired by sport, nightlife, physical labor, and excessiveness. . . . I work to push myself closer to the audience, challenging what they may expect and unsettling the performance space. I exploit the chaos present in the search for resolution.” Kidnap Me premieres July 21 at Dixon Place and will be performed by Ashley, Aranzazu Araujo, Sarah McSherry, Diego Montoya, Shane O’Neill, Rakia Seaborn, and Gillian Walsh. HOT! continues at Dixon Place through August 5 with such other programs as Lucas Brooks’s Cootie Catcher, Vincent Caruso’s Clueless, Joe Castle Baker’s Just Let Go, Anna/Kate’s Fear City / Fun City, Jack Feldstein’s Three Months with Pook, and J. Stephen Brantley’s Chicken-Fried Ciccone: A Twangy True Tale of Transformation.

THE GYRE: THE QUALIFICATION OF DOUGLAS EVANS

Playwright Derek Ahonen stars as alcoholic playwright and anti-Marcello Mastroianni Douglas Evans in Amoralists world premiere (photo by Russ Rowland)

Walkerspace
46 Walker St. between Church St. & Broadway
Through August 9, $40 ($65 Gyre ticket package with Enter at Forest Lawn)
www.theamoralists.com

Amoralists cofounder and associate artistic director Derek Ahonen pays homage to Blake Edwards’s Days of Wine and Roses in his latest play, The Qualification of Douglas Evans. “Alcoholism isn’t funny,” Cara (Samantha Strelitz) says to Douglas (Ahonen), who responds, “I know, but it is when it is.” A moment later, she adds, “So booze is tragic,” to which Douglas replies, “Except when it’s not.” Writer and star Ahonen, who appeared in last year’s Rantoul and Die and has previously written and/or directed such works as The Bad and the Better and The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side for the always adventurous Amoralists, plays a kind of alternate-universe Marcello Mastroianni from Federico Fellini’s City of Women and 8½ in the two-and-a-half-hour tragicomedy about a wannabe playwright and his involvement with a series of women. Tormented by his mother (Barbara Weetman) and father’s (Penny Bittone) confusing relationship, Douglas first meets Jessica (Kelley Swindall), his sexually liberated acting-school classmate who has a fondness for oral sex. Next up is the cute and tiny Kimmy (Mandy Nicole Moore), his best friend’s (Bittone) girlfriend, who introduces Douglas to the bittersweet pleasures of alcohol. Third in the procession is Cara, who is playing Kimmy in Douglas’s first play, in which Douglas is starring as himself. The second act opens with Douglas on a blind date with the cheery and chipper Robin (Agatha Nowicki). And finally there’s Holly (Weetman), an agent played by the same actress portraying his mother. (Now, that’s casting.)

The Qualification of Douglas Evans takes place on David Harwell’s sparse stage, featuring a single object surrounded by doorways: a bed that swivels around and turns into a bench. Directed by company cofounder and artistic director James Kautz, the play roams between heightened levels of surreality and scenes of intense believability as Ahonen struggles through his alcohol-fueled life. The narrative delves further and further into the self-reflexive nature of art and the creative process, as playwright and actor Ahonen plays playwright and actor Douglas Evans, who at one point is playing himself in a play he wrote. Not everything works; Douglas occasionally experiences random, perplexing lightning flashes that scream through his head—but are never explained to the audience—and Ahonen and Kautz don’t know quite how to end the story, as the play goes on about twenty minutes too long. But Qualification is another triumph for the Amoralists, a unique and compelling look inside the bottle, love and sex, and theater itself, performed by an engaging cast. “You wrote a masturbatory play about your stupid relationship with some stupid girl and then you stupidly starred in it and were equally as bad at playing yourself as you were at writing about yourself,” Cara tells Douglas, continuing, “What do you want me to say? The truth hurts.” It’s all very funny, insightful, upsetting, freakishly weird, thought-provoking, and damn entertaining. Yes, the truth hurts. Part of “The Gyre” — “a two play repertory exploring man’s vicious cycles” — The Qualification of Douglas Evans is being performed in repertory with Mark Roberts’s Enter at Forest Lawn at Walkerspace through August 9.

THE GYRE: ENTER AT FOREST LAWN

Jack (Mark Roberts) proves to Jessica (Sarah Lemp) that there’s no business quite like show business in ENTER AT FOREST LAWN (photo by Russ Rowland)

Walkerspace
46 Walker St. between Church St. & Broadway
July 14 – August 9, $40 ($65 Gyre ticket package with The Qualification of Douglas Evans)
www.theamoralists.com

Last year, playwright Mark Roberts and director Jay Stull teamed up with the Amoralists for one of 2013’s best shows, the outrageously funny black comedy Rantoul and Die, which we called “a brilliantly conceived and executed play that examines the darker side of human nature in beautifully bizarre ways.” Pretty much the same can be said about their latest collaboration, Enter at Forest Lawn, which opened at Walkerspace on July 14, kicking off the Amoralists’ (HotelMotel, The Bad and the Better) eighth season as part of “The Gyre,” which is being billed as “a two play repertory exploring man’s vicious cycles.” (The second work is Derek Ahonen’s intricately self-reflexive and complex The Qualification of Douglas Evans, which opens July 15.) In Enter at Forest Lawn, Roberts delves into something he knows rather well, network television — he is the creator of the CBS comedy Mike & Molly — starring as Jack Story, the show runner for a hit comedy on the verge of a major syndication deal. But the program’s star, Uncle Danny, a Charlie Sheen-like madman prone to violence, drugs, alcohol, and underage women, is out of control, turning publicist Stanley (David Lanson) into a whimpering fool. Jack sends his mousey assistant, Jessica (Sarah Lemp), to get Danny’s signature on the syndication contract, giving her explicit instructions on how to approach him. Meanwhile, Jack’s former assistant, Marla (Anna Stromberg), now a network executive, wants Jack to find a job for her nephew, Clinton (Amoralists cofounder and associate artistic director Matthew Pilieci), which turns out to be a little more complicated than expected, leading to a surprising conclusion for all involved.

Roberts and Stull (The Capables) pack a whole lot into seventy edge-of-your-seat minutes, highlighted by the actors’ heavily stylized, exaggerated movements that define their characters. Roberts, a former stand-up comedian, is sensational as Jack, dancing around David Harwell’s spare set — essentially an odd desk surrounded by doors — like a herky-jerky boxer, ready to throw proverbial punches at every chance, willing to do whatever it takes to get the syndication deal done. The rest of the cast also works with oversized physical presentation and quirky motion: Stanley is bent over protecting his balls and looking like he has to go to the bathroom; Jessica holds her hands like little paws, evoking a frightened forest creature, and occasionally twirling like a young innocent; Clinton is stooped as if ready to pounce at any moment; and Marla sinuously winds about the set, a strong sexual being who knows the power her body holds and is not afraid to use it. Enter at Forest Lawn is a biting, cynical behind-the-scenes look at Hollywood, confirming some of our worst nightmares about what really goes on backstage. “Stanley, I have been in this business, man and boy, for over twenty-five years,” Jack says early on, “and one of the few undeniable facts I’ve learned is that if it ain’t on the screen, it never fucking happened.” Thankfully for those of us not in the business, Roberts, Stull, and the ever-adventurous Amoralists have brought this frantic craziness to the stage for all of us to experience.

THE LONG SHRIFT

THE LONG SHRIFT
Rattlestick Playwrights Theater
224 Waverly Pl. between Eleventh & Perry Sts.
Thursday – Tuesday through August 23, $20-$30
866-811-4111
www.rattlestick.org

It would be easy to give short shrift to The Long Shrift, the latest project in James Franco’s seemingly endless though admirable quest to rule the world. The play was written by one of his grad school professors (Robert Boswell) and stars a former girlfriend (Ahna O’Reilly) as well as a pair of longtime collaborators (Scott Haze and Brian Lally); Franco, who is currently portraying George in Anna D. Shapiro’s powerful Broadway revival of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men at the Longacre, is even on the Long Shrift promotional poster, joining the cast and Boswell. But there’s much to appreciate in the Rattlestick world premiere, which opened July 13 and runs through August 23, and not just its price, which tops out at a mere thirty bucks. Novelist, short story writer, and playwright Boswell’s (The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards, The Geography of Desire) intermissionless hundred-minute drama takes too many unnecessary detours, leaving Franco to scramble, but the heart of the work is deeply compelling and involving. The story begins in 1999 as Vietnam veteran Henry Singer (a soft-spoken Lally) and his younger wife, Sarah (an underutilized Ally Sheedy), are moving into a small, disappointing new home in Houston so they can be closer to their son, Richie (Haze, who is solid if one-note here but gives a remarkable performance in Franco’s Cormac McCarthy adaptation Child of God,), who has recently begun serving a ten-year sentence for raping and beating one of his high school classmates, Lizzie (O’Reilly). While Henry is convinced that his son is innocent, Sarah is not so sure and, deeply conflicted, chooses not to visit Richie. After Richie’s been in prison for five years, accuser Lizzie (who’s now calling herself Beth, seeking escape from her notoriety) suddenly recants her testimony, becoming a town pariah. On the day of their tenth high school reunion, Beth unexpectedly shows up at Richie’s house, accompanied by giddy current student body president Macy (Allie Gallerani), who is determined to get Richie, whom she considers a local celebrity, to be the star of the reunion she’s in charge of, which she sees as a real resume builder. But the bitter Richie doesn’t want anything to do with Beth, until he comes up with a plan that is not about to make everything right.

Richie (Scott Haze) and Macy (Allie Gallerani) discuss reunion plans and more in Rattlestick world premiere of THE LONG SHRIFT (photo © Joan Marcus)

The central crisis of what really happened behind closed doors a decade ago drives the overly talky show, which is hampered by inconsistent pacing and stretches credulity when it comes to the reunion subplot. Although Gallerani (My Children! My Africa!) is utterly delightful as Macy, all smiley, sexy, and full of hope, it feels like she’s walked in from a completely different play. A late reveal of a key part of the relationship between Harry and Sarah seems forced and needlessly detrimental, and the one scene that does not take place on Andromarche Chalfant’s effective home interior set (which closely resembles a cleaned-up version of Dane Laffrey’s set for the previous Rattlestick show, The Few) borders on the edge of cringeworthy. But when Boswell and Franco zero in on Richie and Beth as they explore their inner demons and try to deal with a complex and heartbreaking past, The Long Shrift rewards your attention.

LINCOLN CENTER FESTIVAL 2014

Houston Grand Opera sails into the Park Avenue Armory with THE PASSENGER as part of Lincoln Center Festival (photo by Stephanie Berger)

Lincoln Center and other locations
July 7 – August 16, $45-$175
212-721-6500
www.lincolncenterfestival.org

Although there are only five companies presenting at this year’s Lincoln Center Festival, there is plenty to see at this annual summer event that makes creative use of the otherwise vacated spaces usually inhabited by the Metropolitan Opera, the New York City Ballet, American Ballet Theater, and previously, the New York City Opera, in addition to other locations. The festival kicks off with the welcome return of Japanese Kabuki theater company Heisei Nakamura-za for the first time since the 2012 death of star actor Nakamura Kanzaburō XVIII, but the centuries-old family legacy continues with his two sons, Nakamura Kankuro VI and Nakamura Shichinosuke II, leading a rare revival of the nineteenth-century samurai ghost story Kaidan Chibusa no Enoki (The Ghost Tale of the Wet Nurse Tree) at the Rose Theater July 7-12 ($45-$175). To heighten the atmosphere, Josie Robertson Plaza will be home to a Japanese Artisan Village through July 13, selling such items as nihon ningyo (hand-painted dolls), tenugui (cotton towels), and kanzashi (traditional hair ornaments). Award-winning Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker looks back at her past with four of her earliest pieces, 1982’s Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich, 1983’s Rosas danst Rosas, 1984’s Elena’s Aria, and 1987’s Bartók/Mikrokosmos, running July 8-16 at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater ($35-$75). Now in her mid-fifties, De Keersmaeker will dance in two of the shows; she will also participate in a talk-back following the July 8 performance, a book presentation with Bojana Cvejić and moderator André Lepecki on July 12 (free and open to the public), and a discussion with Anna Kisselgoff on July 15 in the Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse (free with advance tickets).

Isabelle Huppert and Cate Blanchett team up in Lincoln Center Festival presentation of THE MAIDS (photo © Lisa Tomasetti)

The Houston Grand Opera sails into the Park Avenue Armory July 10-13 ($45-$250) with director David Pountney’s English-language adaptation of Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s The Passenger, the story of a former Nazi concentration camp overseer trying to escape her past; the impressive two-floor set consists of an ocean liner above and a prison camp below. Each performance will be preceded by a chamber concert by the ARC Ensemble playing works by Weinberg; in addition, there will be a special screening of Andrej Munk’s 1963 cinematic adaptation of Zofia Posmysz’s source novel on July 8 at 6:00 in the SHK Penthouse (free with advance tickets), followed by a discussion with Holocaust survivors and others. For the first time ever, the Bolshoi’s ballet, opera, orchestra, and chorus will appear together in New York City, beginning with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tsar’s Bride July 12-13 at Avery Fisher Hall ($35-$100) and continuing with Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake July 15-20 ($35-$125), Ludwig Minkus’s Don Quixote July 22-23 (with new choreography by Alexei Fadeyechev), and Aram Khachaturyan’s Spartacus July 25-27, all at the David H. Koch Theater. The festival concludes in a big way with the Sydney Theatre Company’s adaptation of Jean Genet’s The Maids, directed by Benedict Andrews and starring Cate Blanchett, Isabelle Huppert, and Elizabeth Debicki, playing August 6-16 at New York City Center ($35-$120, partial view seats still available).