this week in theater

THE COMMONS OF PENSACOLA

A family faces some hard, cold truths in THE COMMONS OF PENSACOLA (photo by Joan Marcus)

Manhattan Theatre Club
New York City Center Stage 1
Extended through February 9, $105
212-581-1212
www.thecommonsofpensacola.com
www.nycitycenter.org

Earlier this year, Steven Levenson’s The Unavoidable Disappearance of Tom Durnin at the Roundabout examined the Bernie Madoff scandal through the eyes of a man returning from prison. Now Manhattan Theatre Club looks at the crisis from a very different point of view in Amanda Peet’s engaging and involving The Commons of Pensacola. Blythe Danner stars as Judith, a grandmother banished to live in shame in a low-rent Florida retirement community after her husband gets nailed by the Feds. With Thanksgiving approaching, Judith is visited by her forty-three-year-old daughter, Becca (Sarah Jessica Parker), and Becca’s twenty-nine-year-old boyfriend, Gabe (Michael Stahl-David). A fading actress, Becca wants to team up with Gabe, a photojournalist, to make a documentary series about Judith, focusing on her former extravagant lifestyle and what her days are like now, without any money or the luxury she grew to be so familiar and comfortable with. They are soon joined by Becca’s sixteen-year-old niece, Lizzy (Zoe Levin), who has snuck away to see her grandmother against her mother’s wishes. But soon Lizzy’s mom, Becca’s sister, Ali (Ali Marsh), who had sworn never to see their mother again, is there as well, and some damaging secrets and lies that have been bubbling just below the surface threaten to explode.

Lizzy (Zoe Levin) has a little too much in common with her aunt Becca (Sarah Jessica Parker) in Amanda Peets debut play (photo by Joan Marcus)

Lizzy (Zoe Levin) has a little too much in common with her aunt Becca (Sarah Jessica Parker) in Amanda Peet’s playwriting debut (photo by Joan Marcus)

Peet, who has appeared in such films as The Whole Nine Yards and Please Give and such television series as Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and The Good Wife, makes a more than admirable debut as a playwright with The Commons of Pensacola. Despite a few questionable plot twists, the dialogue is sharp and the characters wholly believable, propelled by MTC artistic director Lynne Meadow’s noninvasive direction and Santo Loquasto’s clean and tidy set, which features a glass door to the outside that is jammed shut. Danner and Parker make a natural mother and daughter team, playing off each other with a friendly ease; they previously teamed up in A. R. Gurney’s Sylvia, a 1995 MTC production in which Danner played a married woman and Parker played the stray dog her husband (Charles Kimbrough) just picked up in the park. Levin, who was in The Way, Way Back with Peet, fits right in as the niece who emulates her rather kooky aunt. Nihala Sun (No Child…) does what she can with the relatively predictable role of the black maid, Marsh is somewhat annoying as the annoying Ali, and Stahl-David (Cloverfield) is fine as Gabe, who becomes much more than just an innocent observer of this newly destitute clan. Continuing through February 9 at City Center, The Commons of Pensacola, which clocks in at a smooth, uninterrupted eighty minutes, might not be particularly deep, but it does offer a good balance of comedy and drama while depicting another side of the Madoff madness.

AND AWAY WE GO

The cast of Terrence McNally’s new play at the Pearl go through multiple time periods in a celebration of live theater (photo by Al Foote III)

The Pearl Theatre
555 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Extended through December 21, $35-$65
212-563-9261
www.pearltheatre.org

Last year, four-time Tony-winning playwright Terrence McNally (Master Class, Love! Valour! Compassion!) took audiences behind the scenes of the 1835 world premiere of Vincenzo Bellini’s I puritani in Golden Age. Now he’s backstage again, time traveling through six productions in six different time periods in the utterly delightful And Away We Go. Written specifically for the Pearl Theatre Company for its fortieth anniversary season, the one-hundred-minute intermissionless play begins as each of the six actors, four of whom are part of the regular Pearl ensemble, kiss the stage and introduce themselves on Sandra Goldmark’s set, which is littered with theatrical paraphernalia, from multiple chairs and lamps hanging from the ceiling to clothing and posters to a phrenology head and a skeleton in a bathtub. The play then moves to 458 BCE Athens, where a troupe is backstage, putting on Aeschylus’s The Oresteia as part of a theater-festival contest. “One day, Hector, an actor is going to tear his mask off and say to the audience, ‘This is what human suffering looks like,’” Pallas (Micah Stock) says to Hector (Dominic Cuskern) while Dimitris (Sean McNall) desperately awaits his handcrafted mask since it’s nearly time for him to make his entrance as Agamemnon. As in Golden Age, the action remains backstage as the six actors, staying in contemporary costume, shift to the Globe in 1610 London for The Tempest, the Royal Theatre in Versailles in 1789 for a new play by Christophe Durant (Stock), the Moscow Art Theatre in 1896 for the first reading of The Seagull, and finally the Coconut Grove Playhouse in South Florida in 1956 for closing night of the U.S. premiere of Waiting for Godot.

Donna Lynn Champlin is not thrilled that is sharing some inside secrets in AND AWAY WE GO (photo by Al Foote III)

Donna Lynn Champlin is not thrilled that Sean McNall is sharing some inside secrets in AND AWAY WE GO (photo by Al Foote III)

Along the way, McNally and the thirty-six characters skewer theatrical conventions, give away acting tricks and secrets, make inside jokes about donors, subscribers, critics, and open rehearsals, and take plenty of self-referential stabs at themselves as well, having a ball tearing the mask away from Theater with a capital T. “We need new plays. Classics aren’t the answer,” Kenny Tobias (Stock) says in Coconut Grove in an obvious reference to the Pearl itself, which specializes in the classics. “I love the theater,” Gretna (Donna Lynne Champlin) tells Lydia (Carol Schultz) in London, to which Lydia responds, “You attend the theater, which is something altogether different. Everyone loves the theater, very few are of the theater.” Meanwhile, Bert Lahr’s wife, Mildred (Champlin), calls playwriting “a dying profession” and playwrights “miserable sons of bitches.” And back in Moscow, actress Maya Nabokov (Rachel Botchan) tells her lover, set designer Yuri Goldovsky (McNall), “Scenery that frees the actor and doesn’t confine him. I can soar in such a space.” And indeed, the six performers soar in their multiple roles, effortlessly shifting characters under the smooth, fluid direction of the Transport Group’s Jack Cummings III (Queen of the Mist), although there are occasional loud explosions that shake things up a bit and keep the audience on its toes. Another small gem from McNally, And Away We Go, which continues at the Pearl through December 21, is a wonderful treat for people who love the theater, whether they are of the theater or not.

SHAKESPEARE’S MACBETH

Ethan Hawke stand alone in Jack O’Brien’s dark and blustery LCT production of MACBETH (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center Theater
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday – Saturday through January 12, $77-$157
212-362-7600
www.lct.org

There’s a whole lot of loud noises and shouting in Jack O’Brien’s blustery adaptation of Macbeth at the Vivian Beaumont, but it ends up being all sound and fury, not signifying enough of anything. A game Ethan Hawke stars as the Thane of Glamis, returning home with Banquo (Brian D’Arcy James in fine form) after a thrilling victory over Norwegian forces. He meets a trio of witches (an impassioned Byron Jennings, an undistinguished Malcolm Gets, and a creepy John Glover with quite a pair of boobs) who predict that he will be promoted to Thane of Cawdor and then become king of Scotland while also proclaiming that Banquo’s kin will ultimately gain the throne as well. Upon being named Thane of Cawdor by King Duncan (a surprisingly ineffective Richard Easton), Macbeth starts wondering about the rest of the prophecy, but his wife (a too-delicate Anne-Marie Duff) decides to take action, assuring his ascendancy by concocting a plan in which they murder the monarch in their house and place the blame elsewhere. But power corrupts and guilt haunts, making things very difficult for the paranoid new leader, who trusts no one, not even the loyal Macduff (Daniel Sunjata, delivering the show’s best, most heartfelt performance).

New MACBETH is all sound and fury (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

New MACBETH is too much sound and fury (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

O’Brien, who has scored success with The Coast of Utopia, Hairspray, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and The Nance but fallen short with Dead Accounts and Impressionism, bathes the production in a lurid black and red in the first act, adding white and gold in the second, courtesy of Catherine Zuber’s costumes and Scott Pask’s set, anchored by a large circle on the floor carved with alchemical symbols inspired by a late Middle Ages mandala known as the Seal of God’s Truth. The mandala serves as a symbol of all that is wrong with this production; O’Brien relies far too much on the magical aspects of Shakespeare’s play. Each of the three witches plays other characters as well, still costumed in their witch’s garb, and answer to Hecate (Francesca Faridany, who seems to have escaped from Game of Thrones). Their undue prominence makes it appear that they are manipulating the action, wresting human will and desire away from the characters, particularly Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, who are like puppets following a preordained curse. Hawke (The Coast of Utopia, Blood from a Stone) is bold and brave as Macbeth, but he never quite gets the Shakespearean rhythm down, and he shouts way too much. In her Broadway debut, Duff (Nowhere Boy, Saint Joan) is actually not given all that much to do, as her character fades away into the background. And poor Jonny Orisini (The Nance, An Early History of Fire) is a disaster as Malcolm, reciting his lines like he’s reading the morning paper. Mark Bennett’s overly loud sound effects, Jeff Sugg’s unnecessary video projections, and Steve Rankin’s slow-motion fight choreography all contribute as well to there being fewer people in their seats after intermission than there were at the start of the play.

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF MARINA ABRAMOVIC

Marina Abramović’s life — and death — takes center stage with the help of Willem Dafoe, Antony, Robert Wilson, and others

Park Avenue Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
December 13-21, $135, 7:30
212-933-5812
www.armoryonpark.org

Performance artist extraordinaire Marina Abramović has been undergoing a career renaissance this century, highlighted by an exciting, vibrant 2010 MoMA retrospective, “The Artist Is Present,” and the 2012 documentary about the making of the exhibition. The Serbian-born, New York-based Abramović is a regular at fancy galas, and she even recently performed at Pace Gallery with Jay-Z. So what does the sixty-seven-year-old artist do, just as her life and career have become rejuvenated? Well, she stages her own funeral, of course. Actually, Abramović has decided to hand her biography over to experimental theater maestro Robert Wilson, the man behind such innovative and unique collaborations as The Black Rider with William S. Burroughs and Tom Waits, Einstein on the Beach with Philip Glass and Lucinda Childs, and The Temptation of Saint Anthony with Bernice Johnson Reagon and Geoffrey Holder. In The Life and Death of Marina Abramović, the woman behind the “Rhythm” series and so many other cutting-edge works plays herself and her mother, with Willem Dafoe serving as narrator and songs by Antony Hegarty. Conceived and directed by Wilson, it is another audiovisual spectacle that has already had a documentary made about its creation; “Marina is the landscape, Bob the mind, Antony the heart, Willem the body,” director Giada Colagrande explains. The Life and Death of Marina Abramović will fill the Park Ave. Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall December 12-21; on December 15 at 6:15, armory artistic director Alex Poots will moderate an artist talk with Abramović and Dafoe in the Veterans Room as part of the Malkin Lecture Series.

AUGUST WILSON’S HOW I LEARNED WHAT I LEARNED

Ruben Santiago-Hudson was August Wilson’s personal choice to take over one-man show (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Extended through December 29, $55
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

August Wilson’s one-man show, How I Learned What I Learned, has arrived in New York at last, and like any Wilson work, it’s a very welcome event. When the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright passed away from cancer at the age of sixty in 2005, plans were already under way for a season of his works as part of the fifteenth anniversary celebration of the Signature Theatre. For that 2005 season, Wilson was going to present the New York premiere of his own one-man show and personal memoir, How I Learned What I Learned, which he premiered in Seattle in 2002. Following his death, the season turned into a tribute to Wilson’s vast legacy, with productions of Seven Guitars, Two Trains Running, and King Hedley II. Seven years later, How I Learned What I Learned is finally making its New York debut, in an intimate, intoxicating version running at the Signature through December 29, directed by Todd Kreidler, who conceived the project with Wilson and directed the original. Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Wilson’s personal choice to take over the play, gets to step into Wilson’s shoes and put on his hat and coat — the costumes were chosen by Wilson’s widow, Constanza Romero — for eighty thrilling minutes, sharing fascinating tidbits from Wilson’s life growing up as Frederick August Kittel Jr. in Pittsburgh’s Hill District.

HOW I LEARNED WHAT I LEARNED celebrates the genius of August Wilson (photo by Joan Marcus)

Longtime Wilson set designer David Gallo arranged the sparse stage, featuring just a desk, a chair, and a coat rack set against a backdrop of hundreds of pieces of paper dangling from the ceiling. Santiago-Hudson, who won a Tony as Canewell in Seven Guitars and directed last year’s stellar Signature revival of Wilson’s 1990 Pulitzer Prize winning The Piano Lesson, portrays Wilson with an easygoing, natural grace as he talks poignantly about episodes from his past, including quitting numerous jobs to preserve his dignity, meeting people who would help shape his future, and getting locked up in jail. He strolls amiably across the stage, sits on the desk, and watches as the title of each new section is projected onto the papers behind him, each letter accompanied by the sound of a typewriter stroke. As always, Wilson’s words shine; he doesn’t go out of his way to connect the dots, get heavy-handed about the racism and poverty he experienced, or lament what could have been. Instead, he lets the stories create a path for the viewer to follow to his majestic body of work, which he never brings up, as the play ends prior to his writing his first play. Everything about How I Learned What I Learned feels just right, a labor of love from his friends and colleagues that is a gift to the rest of us.

ALEC DUFFY: OUR PLANET

OUR PLANET (photo by Julie Lemberger / www.julielemberger.com)

Luna (Jenny Seastone Stern) and Terri (Julian Rozzell Jr.) take audience on multimedia journey through Japan Society and the universe in OUR PLANET (photo by Julie Lemberger / www.julielemberger.com)

Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
November 20-24, December 5-8, $28, 7:30
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

In the past few years, several site-specific shows have led audiences through historic, landmarked, and/or unusual buildings, going into rooms not otherwise open to the public. An adaptation of Joseph Roth’s Hotel Savoy took place throughout the Goethe-Institut, Sleep No More is still packing them in all over the McKittrick Hotel, and Manna-Hatta served as a guided tour not only of the history of Manhattan but of much of the James A. Farley Post Office as well. Now Our Planet, inspired by Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, uses the lobby, pond, offices, basement, exhibition rooms, stage, and more of Japan Society to tell its audiovisual story of the birth — and eventual death — of the world. “I think everyone should see this building . . . in a really peculiar, interesting way and have this text be the vehicle for that exploration,” director Alec Duffy, who fell in love with the building while working there for a year, explains in a promotional video for the site-specific show. And Our Planet, a Japan Society commission in celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of its performing arts program, is certainly peculiar and interesting.

Julian Rozzell Jr. stars as Terri, who leads thirty visitors through the beginning of the play; he is soon met by Jenny Seastone Stern as Luna, the moon. The two play house and discuss the state of the world in a fun scene that takes place inside Mariko Mori’s appropriately titled “Rebirth” exhibition. Speaking both metaphorically and metaphysically, Terri and Luna explore life on the micro level, involving Luna’s family, and on the macro level, involving the entire universe. In several of the locations, Nobuyuki Hanabusa’s motion graphics, consisting of geometric shapes and patterns, lines, stars, and more, are projected onto unique spaces, from elevator doors to a specially designed platform on the floor that reflects onto a ceiling mirror, taking the audience on a cosmic trip through the galaxy. The text, translated by Katsunori Obata and Miharu Obata and adapted by Aya Ogawa from Yukio Shiba’s award-winning Japanese production, Wagahoshi, is often mysterious and sometimes way out there, but just go with it, putting your faith in Rozzell J. and Seastone Stern, who are both beguiling and enchanting as they each deliver long monologues and take the audience on a multimedia journey through space, time, and the historic Japan Society building. Our Planet continues with six performances December 5-8, with each show limited to thirty people, so get your tickets now if you want to see this very peculiar, interesting work.

THE CONTENDERS 2013: CUTIE AND THE BOXER

Documentary tells the engaging story of a pair of Japanese artists and the life they have made for themselves in Brooklyn

CUTIE AND THE BOXER (Zachary Heinzerling, 2013)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Tuesday, November 26, 8:00
Series continues through January 16
Tickets: $12, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk beginning at 9:30 am
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
www.facebook.com/cutieandtheboxer

Zachary Heinzerling’s Cutie and the Boxer is a beautifully told story of love and art and the many sacrifices one must make to try to succeed in both. In 1969, controversial Japanese Neo Dada action painter and sculptor Ushio Shinohara came to New York City, looking to expand his career. According to the catalog for the recent MoMA show “Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde,” which featured four works by Ushio, “American art had seemed to him to be ‘marching toward the glorious prairie of the rainbow and oasis of the future, carrying all the world’s expectations of modern painting.’” Four years later, he met nineteen-year-old Noriko, who had left Japan to become an artist in New York as well. The two fell in love and have been together ever since, immersed in a fascinating relationship that Heinzerling explores over a five-year period in his splendid feature-length theatrical debut. Ushio and Noriko live in a cramped apartment and studio in DUMBO, where he puts on boxing gloves, dips them in paint, and pounds away at large, rectangular canvases and builds oversized motorcycle sculptures out of found materials. Meanwhile, Noriko, who has spent most of the last forty years taking care of her often childlike husband and staying with him through some rowdy times and battles with the bottle, is finally creating her own work, an R. Crumb-like series of drawings detailing the life of her alter ego, Cutie, and her often cruel husband, Bullie. (“Ushi” means “bull” in Japanese.) While Ushio is more forthcoming verbally in the film, mugging for the camera and speaking his mind, the pig-tailed Noriko is far more tentative, so director and cinematographer Heinzerling brings her tale to life by animating her work, her characters jumping off the page to show Cutie’s constant frustration with Bullie.

Ushio Shinohara creates one of his action paintings in CUTIE AND THE BOXER

During the course of the too-short eighty-two-minute film — it would have been great to spend even more time with these unique and compelling figures — the audience is introduced to the couple’s forty-year-old son, who has some issues of his own; Guggenheim senior curator of Asian Art Alexandra Munroe, who stops by the studio to consider purchasing one of Ushio’s boxing paintings for the museum; and Chelsea gallery owner Ethan Cohen, who represents Ushio. But things never quite take off for Ushio, who seems to always be right on the cusp of making it. Instead, the couple struggles to pay their rent. One of the funniest, yet somehow tragic, scenes in the film involves Ushio packing up some of his sculptures — forcing them into a suitcase like clothing — and heading back to Japan to try to sell some pieces. Cutie and the Boxer is a special documentary that gets to the heart of the creative process as it applies both to art and love, focusing on two disparate people who have made a strange yet thoroughly charming life for themselves. Cutie and the Boxer is screening November 26 at 8:00 as part of MoMA’s annual series “The Contenders” and will be followed by a discussion with Heinzerling. “The Contenders,” which consists of exemplary films that MoMA believes will stand the test of time and continues with such films as Haifaa Al-Mansour’s Wadjda, Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station, Alexander Payne’s Nebraska, and Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight.