this week in theater

INTIMACY

A community takes a revealing look at itself in world premiere from the New Group (photo by Monique Carboni)

The Acorn Theatre at Theatre Row
410 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Through March 8, $25-$65
212-560-2183
www.thenewgroup.org
www.theatrerow.org

So what’s all the fuss about? Thomas Bradshaw’s latest play for the New Group, Intimacy, is a clever and comical, if occasionally cringeworthy, exploration of contemporary society that focuses on three families living in a close-knit, unidentified wealthy American suburb. James (Daniel Gerroll) found Jesus after his wife’s sudden death, retired from his successful Wall Street job, and is raising his eighteen-year-old son, Matthew (Austin Cauldwell), by himself. James has hired his neighbor Fred (David Anzuelo), an independent contractor, to renovate his house. Fred’s eighteen-year-old daughter, Sarah (Déa Julien), dreams of losing her virginity to Matthew on prom night. Meanwhile, Matthew, who wants to be a filmmaker instead of going to college, is spying on neighbor and fellow eighteen-year-old high schooler Janet (Ella Dershowitz), whose mother, Pat (Laura Esterman), talks to her extremely openly about sex and whose father, Jerry (Keith Randolph Smith), is a mild-mannered gentleman who wants only the best for his little girl. They gossip about who’s cheating on who, worry about school, argue over money, and share lawn tips. It might not quite be Peyton Place, but there’s nothing particularly strange or different about this community. But when one of the characters’ surprising sexual secret is exposed, a whole lot of other exposure follows.

A pair of fathers (Daniel Gerroll and Keith Randolph Smith) aren’t sure where things went wrong in Thomas Bradshaw’s INTIMACY (photo by Monique Carboni)

Bradshaw is no stranger to graphic portrayals of sex and violence onstage, as evidenced by such previous works as Burning for the New Group in 2011 and Job at the Flea in 2012. But with Intimacy, the sex and nudity — and there is plenty of both, including frottage, masturbation, footage of real sex, and expertly simulated acts that will have audiences wondering what’s actually going on right in front of them — are only a backdrop for a story about people’s fears and desires, their desperate need to connect with one another, and their deeply embedded addictions and overwhelming sense of shame and guilt. Bradshaw takes on religion, education, racism, the economy, personal privacy in the surveillance age, and other social and political mores in the show, skillfully directed by New Group founding artistic director Scott Elliott. Most of the characters are usually situated in Derek McLane’s suburban interior all at once, with Russell H. Champa’s lighting zeroing in on the specific action taking place on a couch, a bed, a video monitor, a toilet (which does indeed get used), and a desk where many of the characters watch porn and, well, take pleasure in it. And there’s a lot of pleasure being had, judging by all the erections and orgasms. The cast, featuring several members making their professional stage debuts, is, er, clearly having a ball with the edgy material, bravely going where few non-porn actors have gone before. So indeed, what’s all the fuss about? Intimacy is likely to catch people’s attention because of the overt naughtiness happening onstage — the production proudly announces, “This show contains nudity, sex, and bad language. Enjoy!” — but it deserves to get noticed more because it’s damn entertaining, erotic and titillating, realistic and absurd, and very, very funny, coming off as surprisingly natural despite the surreal turn it takes as the climax nears. As an added bonus, select seats in the first two rows are only $25, for those who want to get even more up close and personal with this revealing tale.

OUTSIDE MULLINGAR

Tony Reilly (Peter Maloney) shares his questionable plans with son Anthony (Brían F. O’Byrne) and neighbor Aoife Muldoon (Dearbhla Molloy) in OUTSIDE MULLINGAR (photo by Joan Marcus)

Manhattan Theatre Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West 47th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 16, $67-$135
www.manhattantheatreclub.com
www.outsidemullingarbroadway.com

Ten years ago, Manhattan Theatre Club presented Bronx-born playwright John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, starring Brían F. O’Byrne, directed by Doug Hughes, and with scenic design by John Lee Beatty. That group has teamed up again for the world premiere of Outside Mullinger, a charming little tale that opened last week at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. A dark romantic comedy, Outside Mullingar takes place in County Westmeath in the home of Tony Reilly (a wonderful Peter Maloney) and his ne’er-do-well son, Anthony (five-time Tony nominee O’Byrne). An elderly widower, Tony tells his neighbor, Aoife Muldoon (Dearbhla Molloy), that he is considering selling his farm to his nephew in America rather than leave it to Anthony. Aoife, who has just buried her husband, Christopher, can’t believe Tony would do that to his son, who is distressed when he is told of the possibility that he might not get the family land he has worked on his whole life. Discussion also turns to a forty-meter strip of land on the Reilly property that is actually owned by the Muldoons because of an old loan. The strip divides the front of the Reilly home so Tony and Anthony have to walk through a pair of gates to get from the road to their front door. Now that Christopher Muldoon has died, the Reillys believe they can get that narrow bit of land back, but Muldoon’s daughter, Rosemary (Debra Messing), is not about to hand it over, as it holds a very special memory for her. As the two families bicker both playfully and seriously, attention soon turns to Anthony and Rosemary, two lonely, difficult people who clearly don’t know what’s best for them.

Anthony Reilly (Brían F. O’Byrne) and neighbor Rosemary Muldoon (Debra Messing) battle it out during a soft rainstorm in new John Patrick Shanley play (photo by Joan Marcus)

Shanley, who won a Tony and a Pulitzer for Doubt and an Oscar for his screenplay for Moonstruck, keeps things simple in Outside Mullingar, which works as a timeless character study, performed by an engaging cast. Maloney (To Be or Not to Be, Judgment at Nuremberg) nearly steals the show as the crotchety old man, while Molloy (Dancing at Lughnasa, The Cripple of Inishmaan) is stalwart as the widow dressed in black. One of the genuine treasures of the New York stage, O’Byrne (Frozen, The Beauty Queen of Leenane) plays the unpredictable Tony with just the right mix of ambiguity and crazy. And in her Broadway debut — although she has performed often off Broadway, including as Mary Louise Parker’s understudy in Shanley’s Four Dogs and a Bone — Emmy Award winner Messing (Will & Grace, Smash) is a delight, employing an Irish brogue as she battles with Tony both in his house and outdoors in a gentle rainstorm. Here’s hoping it’s not another ten years before this talented team works together again.

GAME PLAY

Ars Nova
511 West 54th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
January 29 – February 8, $15, 8:00
212-352-3101
www.arsnovanyc.com

Eleven of the world’s most famous board games will take center stage at Ars Nova as the Play Group turns those heated contests into short theatrical works and live music as part of its annual winter celebration of pop culture. Following in the footsteps of “The Wikipedia Plays,” “Missed Connections NYC,” “The Wii Plays,” and “The Urban Dictionary Plays,” among others, “Game Play” will run January 29 to February 8, with all tickets $15, which is cheaper than the cost of most of the actual games these days. Each night will include all eleven pieces: Sofia Alvarez’s Taboo, directed by Sash Bischoff; Max Posner’s Risk, directed by Portia Krieger; Sarah Burgess’s Snakes & Ladders, directed by Peter James Cook; Nick Gandiello’s Candy Land, directed by Sash Bischoff; Brian Otaño’s Scattergories, directed by Cook; Bess Wohl’s Pictionary, directed by Andrew Neisler; A. Zell Williams’s Guess Who? directed by Cook; Erica Saleh’s Life, directed by Bischoff; Daniel Pearle’s Mousetrap, directed by Andrew Neisler; Stephen Karam’s Sorry! also directed by Andrew Neisler; and that childhood favorite, Settlers of Catan, written by Sarah Gancher and directed by Portia Krieger. The plays will be performed by Peter Benson, Marcia DeBonis, Dashiell Eaves, Brandon Gill, Ben Graney, Susan Heyward, Jessica Love, and Carmen Zilles, with costumes by Tilly Grimes and Daniel Dabdoub, lighting by Richard Chamblin, projections by Caite Hevner Kemp, and live music by Crossfire.

CULTUREMART 2014

HERE
145 Sixth Ave. at Dominick St.
January 28 – February 9, $15
212-647-0202
www.here.org

The January performance festival season might be winding down, but HERE’s annual CULTUREMART is just getting under way. From January 28 to February 9, the downtown arts organization will present thirteen multidisciplinary workshop productions from current and former participants in the HERE Artist Residency Program (HARP), with all tickets only $15. The festival kicks off January 28-29 with Bora Yoon’s Sunken Cathedral, a multimedia journey through several rooms, exploring the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. Matt Marks and Paul Peers’s Mata Hari, an opera-theater piece about the WWI spy’s last month, is paired with mezzo-soprano Hai-Ting Chinn’s Science Fair, which is told through songs, slides, and live experiments. In Restless Next, choreographer Rebecca Davis examines the body’s ability to change. Joseph Silovsky uses video, oratory, robotics, and puppetry to relate the story of Sacco and Vanzetti in Send for the Million Men. Stefan Weisman and David Cote’s multimedia opera of James Hurst’s The Scarlet Ibis will be stripped down to a concert version consisting of the piano and vocal score; at two hours and fifteen minutes, it’s the longest show of the festival. (Most run between twenty and sixty minutes.)

Soomi Kim’s CHANG(E) examines the performance artist and political activist Kathy Change’s bizarre end (photo by Hunter Canning)

Soomi Kim and Mei-Yin Ng’s Chang(e), a dance-theater work about controversial performance artist Kathy Change, shares a bill with Ng’s Lost Property Unit, which deals with surveillance and robotics. Dancer-choreographer Laura Peterson is back with The Futurist, a collaboration with the very busy composer Joe Diebes that uses sound and movement to investigate what lies ahead. In Genet Porno, Yvan Greenberg and Laboratory Theater update Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers into a contemporary tale about porn and a gay prostitute. Leyna Marika Papach’s opera/movement-theater piece Glass Mouth (Part 2) delves into the nature of personal identity, with visuals by Jerry Smith Jr. CULTUREMART concludes with LEIMAY’s Frantic Beauty, in which dancer choreographer Ximena Garcia and video installation artist Shige Moriya look at dreams and desires, and Michael Bodel’s there are caves and attics, which uses Michel Foucault’s Corps Utopique to probe the concept of place. As usual, CULTUREMART provides a potpourri of intimate, experimental works from creators who are willing to take chances while both entertaining and challenging audiences.

MACHINAL

A young stenographer (Rebecca Hall) imagines a bleak future ahead in Sophie Treadwell’s MACHINAL (photo by Joan Marcus)

American Airlines Theatre
227 West 42nd St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 2, $52-$127
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org

Inspired by the true story of Ruth Snyder, journalist and playwright Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal is back on Broadway for the first time since it bowed at the Plymouth Theatre in 1928. The highly mannered, expressionist work sets the tense tone from the very start, as a young woman (Rebecca Hall) feels trapped on a crowded subway train, pushing her way through the mass of mostly male straphangers to get out and catch her breath. Es Devlin’s sensational four-sided set then rotates to an office, where a quartet of workers (Ashley Bell, Ryan Dinning, Edward James Hyland, and Henny Russell, who all play multiple roles) are performing their menial tasks and gossiping about the young woman, Miss A, and the boss, George H. Jones (Michael Cumpsty), in rhythmic, staccato language. Mr. J, a boring blowhard who speaks in clichés and tells the same stories over and over again, has proposed to Miss A, and after arriving at work late, she soon lets loose a machine-gun soliloquy of inner turmoil that begins, “Marry me – wants to marry me – George H Jones – George H Jones and Company – Mrs George H Jones – Mrs George H Jones. Dear Madame – marry – do you take this man to be your wedded husband – I do – to love honor and to love – kisses – no – I can’t – George H Jones – How would you like to marry me – What do you say – Why Mr Jones I – let me look at your little hands – you have such pretty little hands – let em hold your pretty little hands – George H Jones – Fat hands – flabby hands – don’t touch me – please – fat hands are never weary – please don’t – married – all girls – most girls – married – babies – a baby – curls – little curls all.” Upon returning home, she discusses the marriage proposal with her mother (Suzanne Bertish). While the young woman admits she doesn’t love Mr. J, her mother blurts out, “Love! — what does that amount to? Will it clothe you? Will it feed you? Will it pay the bills?” Their debate occasionally fades into the background as a series of brief interludes play out to their right and left in which neighborhood couples are immersed in their own issues of love, romance, and fidelity. Ultimately, Miss A decides to go ahead with the marriage, and it isn’t long before she feels trapped yet again, now with a child to raise as well, and she considers cavorting with a hunky adventurer (Morgan Spector), a decision that ultimately leads to tragedy.

Miss A considers straying from her expected, straightforward path in Roundabout Revival (photo by Joan Marcus)

Machinal is told in nine episodes, which have such titles as “To Business,” “Home,” “Honeymoon,” “Prohibited,” and “Intimate,” essentially following the expected path of women in the 1920s, one that handcuffs Miss A. The play tries to contemporize the plight of women but, under the direction of Lindsey Turner (Chimera, Posh), it can’t break out of the overall feeling of being too dated and old-fashioned. In her long-awaited Broadway debut, Hall (The Town, As You Like It at BAM) plays the young woman with an elegiac tone, as if her life is already a lost cause simply because of her sex; born at the wrong time, she is likely to have thrived in the modern era. Cumpsty (The Winslow Boy, End of the Rainbow) gives the stuffed-shirt husband a sympathetic sadness, while Spector (Harvey, A View from the Bridge) is the polar opposite, bold and sexy as the potential lover, a role originated by Clark Gable. But the real star of the Roundabout revival is Devlin’s rotating set, which, as it turns, includes momentary interstitial scenes that immerse the audience in 1920s New York, along with costumes (by Michael Krass) and lighting (by Jane Cox) that bathe the production in black, white, and gray, illuminating Miss A’s drab, colorless life.

BEAUTIFUL: THE CAROLE KING MUSICAL

Don Kirshner (Jeb Brown) oversees intense songwriting competition between Goffin/King (Jake Epstein and Jessie Mueller) and Mann/Weil (Jarrod Spector and Anika Larsen) in BEAUTIFUL (photo by Joan Marcus)

Stephen Sondheim Theatre
124 West 43rd St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through October 5, $75 – $252
www.beautifulonbroadway.com

Theatergoers are in for treat after treat as the hits just keep on coming in the first act of Beautiful: The Carole King Musical. Rising star Jessie Mueller (The Mystery of Edwin Drood, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever) excels in the role of Manhattan-born, Brooklyn-raised Carole Klein, beginning as the teen dreams of becoming a successful songwriter (and changes her last name to King). That dream becomes a reality when she meets lyricist Gerry Goffin (Jake Epstein) at Queens College and soon the two have an office on Broadway, where they work for Don Kirshner (Jeb Brown), composing hit songs for such popular groups as the Drifters, the Shirelles, and others. The musical, directed by Marc Bruni (Old Jews Telling Jokes, The Explorers Club) and with a book by playwright and filmmaker Douglas McGrath (Bullets over Broadway, Infamous), soars as Goffin and King do battle with office neighbors Barry Mann (Jarrod Spector) and Cynthia Weil (Anika Larsen), competing over which team can top the Billboard charts more often. Derek McLane’s dazzling multilevel set feeds the Brill Building-era frenzy with nonstop action; the focus and the set narrow down when the talented ensemble performs full versions of songs the audience just watched Goffin/King or Mann/Weil put together, bringing their exacting craft to lovely life in scenes appealingly choreographed by Josh Prince.

Carole King and Gerry Goffin’s personal and professional partnership is the focus of new Broadway musical (photo by Joan Marcus)

Unfortunately, the second act is pretty much a bore, as Goffin and King suffer through marital problems and move to the suburbs as the audience waits and waits for the plot to finally get to King’s breakout masterpiece, Tapestry, but by the time it arrives, it’s too late, baby, it’s just too late. But that thrilling first act makes it all worthwhile, succeeding where such other jukebox musicals as Motown and A Night with Janis Joplin fail, combining a compelling (mostly true) story with electrifying music. The charming cast is led by engaging performances by Epstein, Larsen, Spector, and especially, of course, Mueller, who make palpable the excitement of creating a hit song, while Brown wonderfully captures Kirshner’s nuttiness running his musical asylum. Do yourself a favor and don’t read up on the hits that Goffin/King and Mann/Weil wrote, and skip the page in the Playbill that lists all the tunes in the show, because no matter how much you think you know about the songs, you’ll be surprised by the two duos’ vast, diverse catalog.

KING LEAR

Frank Langella stars as a physically powerful Lear at BAM (photo by Richard Termine)

Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St. between Ashland & Rockwell Pl.
Through February 9, $25-$125
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

Bayonne-born Frank Langella has some rather big shoes to fill as he steps onto the stage as King Lear at BAM’s Harvey Theater, site of two recent memorable productions, the 2007 Royal Shakespeare Company version starring Sir Ian McKellen and the 2011 presentation from the Donmar Warehouse boasting Sir Derek Jacobi in the title role. But the three-time Tony winner is more than up to the task in the Chichester Festival Theatre’s intense production of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy. Although there’s a sizable hitch in his gait when he first appears, hunched over a bit, Langella’s Lear is no feeble king at the start. There’s a strength and power to his body, the way he raises his arms and sits on the throne, that belies his seventy-six years. (In comparison, McKellen was sixty-eight when he played Lear at BAM, Jacobi seventy-four.) As he asks his daughters, Cordelia (Isabella Laughland), Goneril (Catherine McCormack), and Regan (Lauren O’Neil), to declare their love for him in return for their share of his kingdom, it’s clear Lear has not gone over the edge quite yet, even as he rails against his former favorite, Cordelia, who can only say she loves him as any daughter loves a father. But he soon feels his faculties starting to slip, begging the fool (a terrific Harry Melling), “Oh, don’t let me go mad; not mad, sweet heaven! Keep me sane. I don’t want to be mad!” But it’s too late. When Lear comes out for the second act, in tattered clothes and barefoot, wearing a ridiculous straw hat, it’s clear there’s no return from his downward spiral.

The fool (Harry Melling) and Kent (Steven Pacey) hold on to the king (Frank Langella) during brutal storm (photo by Richard Termine)

The closest Langella, who has not done a lot of Shakespeare in his long career, previously came to Lear was when Lee J. Cobb was playing the ill-fated king in 1968 at the Vivian Beaumont, in repertory with William Gibson’s A Cry of Players, in which Langella appeared as the Bard. But now that he has taken on the role himself, he attacks it with a hunger that energizes director Angus Jackson’s streamlined production. Robert Innes Hopkins’s spare set is backed by large wooden beams, some teetering, as if about to fall, like Lear. During the storm, a hard rain pours over Lear, bathed in a stunning blue light, the fool holding on to him as if trying to prevent him from melting away right then and there. Max Bennett is a splendidly conniving Edmund, while Sebastian Armesto excels as he transforms from the wronged Edgar to the wild creature Tom, leading his blinded father, Gloucester (Denis Conway), to his apparent doom. Langella’s early sturdiness makes his tragic fall all the more heartbreaking as he cradles Cordelia at the end, his body weak and frail, his mind realizing just what he’s done. It’s another memorable moment in yet another memorable Lear at the Harvey.