this week in theater

THE DANCE AND THE RAILROAD

Ma (Ruy Iskandar) and Lone (Yuekun Wu) discuss immigration, unions, life, and opera in THE DANCE AND THE RAILROAD (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Through March 24, $75
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

David Henry Hwang’s Residency One season at the Signature continues with an engaging revival of his second work, the short historical one-act The Dance and the Railroad. Written specifically for actors John Lone and Tzi Ma in 1981, the play was originally performed for children at the New Federal Theatre, but a rave review by Frank Rich helped it move to the Public, where it ran for six months to a more adult audience. The seventy-minute piece is set in California in 1867, where transcontinental railroad employees Lone (Yuekun Wu) and Ma (Ruy Iskandar) are taking a break on a mountaintop during a bold workers strike. The older, more experienced Lone, a master of Chinese opera, is practicing his discipline, which intrigues Ma, who only recently came over from China and thinks he can quickly learn to play Gwan Gung, a heroic mythical figure from the epic novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms. But Ma will have to learn a whole lot more about life, not just opera, before being able to earn such a challenge and honor. Mimi Lien’s set consists of rocks that offer numerous platforms at different heights — evoking architect Frank Gehry’s design of the Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theater itself — allowing director May Adrales (In the House, Whaddabloodclot!!!) to have the actors on the same level or above or below each other, changing the dynamic of their evolving relationship. Jiyoun Chang’s lighting changes night to day with projections on the background, while Huang Ruo’s score emphasizes the Chinese folk music tradition. The dance movements were choreographed by Chinese opera consultant Qian Yi, the star of the famous twenty-hour 1999 Lincoln Center Festival production of The Peony Pavilion. Wu and Iskandar make an excellent team in the two-person show, the former appropriately sly and serious, the latter wide-eyed and innocent. Despite its being more than three decades old and about an event that took place nearly 150 years ago, The Dance and the Railroad holds up extremely well, given America’s current battles over immigration and unions. Hwang’s residency at the Signature, which began with the disappointing Golden Child, will conclude next year with the world premiere of Kung Fu, about a Hong Kong martial artist who comes to America in the 1960s to become a movie star.

THE (*) INN

Strange things are happening in the shtetl in centennial production of Peretz Hirschbein’s THE (*) INN (photo by Erik Carter)

Abrons Arts Center Playhouse
466 Grand St. at Pitt St.
Thursday – Sunday through March 30, $25
212-598-0400
www.abronsartscenter.org
www.targetmargin.org

In the foreword to the 1921 English version of Peretz Hirschbein’s Yiddish-language play The Haunted Inn, translator Isaac Goldberg explains, “So much of the drama is written with Mr. Hirschbein’s sensitivity to subdued tones; . . . here color tends to subside into nuance, and action . . . is refined into the suggestions of impulse and mood.” Target Margin Theater has wonderfully captured that nuance, impulse, and mood in its hundredth anniversary presentation of the experimental Yiddish play, which they call The (*) Inn, the asterisk meaning “empty, vacant, abandoned; usually translated as ‘Haunted.’” Directed by David Herskovits (who also handles the sound design), the play, running at Abrons Arts Center through March 30, is set in a shtetl where local farmers are preparing for an arranged wedding while also contemplating the future of a nearby shuttered inn that might just be home to spirits. The show opens with a hyper-stylized scene in which characters in overemphasized accents discuss life and love while a man and a woman playfully pass by with cutouts of farm animals, evoking amateur high school productions.

Meg MacCary and David Greenspan consider the crazy goings-on in avant-garde Yiddish theater revival (photo by Erik Carter)

But things get a whole lot more adult during a wedding scene in which the bride, Meta (Rachel Claire), runs off with Itsik (Sam T. West) instead of marrying her arranged beau, Leibush (Susan Hyon), and winds up in a mysterious area, exploring both their lust and their fears. Meanwhile, Meta’s father, Bendet (Amir Darvish), begins to lose his mind as the show grows ever-more abstract, with nuance, impulse, and mood taking center stage. The (*) Inn is beautifully unconventional, offering unexpected surprise after unexpected surprise, with creative sets by Carolyn Mraz and intense lighting by Lenore Doxsee, ranging from the overly bright opening to the deep, dark conclusion. Performed by a cast that also includes Ugo Chukwo, David Greenspan, Meg MacCary, Julia Sirna-Frest, and J. H. Smith III, The (*) Inn is not your grandfather’s Yiddish theater. As dramaturg Debra Caplan writes in a program note, “When The (*) Inn first premiered in Vilna in 1913, critics and audiences had never seen anything quite like it before. One hundred years after the original production of this seminal Yiddish play, we at Target Margin are willing to bet that you’ve never seen anything quite like it either.” Target Margin Theater wins that bet, with a show that is part of its two-year “Beyond the Pale” exploration of Yiddish theater. (There will be a free panel discussion, “Yiddish Theater Lives!,” prior to the March 23 show, moderated by Caplan, as well as a discussion with Herskovits and other cast and crew members after the March 28 performance.)

LAST MAN CLUB

Poverty, destitution, and an overriding strangeness rule the day in Axis Company production of LAST MAN CLUB (photo by Dixie Sheridan)

Axis Company
One Sheridan Sq. between West Fourth & Washington Sts.
Thursday – Saturday through March 30, $20, 8:00
866-811-4111
www.axiscompany.org

Last October, the excellent Axis Company production of Last Man Club had to end its run early because of Hurricane Sandy. The show is now back, running Thursday through Sunday through March 30, giving people another chance to see Axis artistic director Randy Sharp’s unusual Grapes of Wrath meets The Road Warrior tale. In a depression-era middle America Dust Bowl that could double as a barren postapocalyptic landscape, a small family of ragged men and women tries to survive as sandstorms swirl around their deteriorating farm. Friends and kin took off with all the money, leaving the overly practical and far-too-trusting Major (David Crabb) in charge of the mumbling, OCD-riddled Pogord (Spencer Aste), who is waiting for the tank truck to show so that his dried-out sheets can be wetted down; the quirky, ultra-strange Wishful Hi (Lynn Mancinelli), who wears crazy goggles and sees ghosts; and would-be singer Saromybride (Britt Genelin), who wonders whether they should have all headed out to California with the others. As the worst dust storm in modern history approaches, two drifters arrive one at a time: first Middle Pints (George Demas), who has an idea he wants to present to the town’s local Last Man Club, then Henry Taper (Brian Barnhart), who says he’s a scientist on his way to the city to help figure out how to stop the terrible drought. “I can’t take it no more. I really can’t,” Pogord says. “It’s the end of the world,” Wishful Hi proclaims. Writer-director Sharp’s (Hospital) unpredictable dialogue and subtle plot shifts bring a compelling elegance to the proceedings while also making the play relevant to such twenty-first-century concerns as poverty, unemployment, climate change, the housing crisis, war, and a lack of faith in government. Karl Ruckdeschel’s costumes and the simple but effective set cast the production in browns and grays that emphasize the growing destitution, while solid acting all around gives the play an honesty despite the surreal craziness going on. Last Man Club might be set in the past and hint at the future, but it is, sadly, also firmly rooted in the here and now.

SHAHEED: THE DREAM AND DEATH OF BENAZIR BHUTTO

Anna Khaja takes on many roles in examining the life and death of Benazir Bhutto (photo by Hunter Canning)

Culture Project
45 Bleecker St. between Lafayette & Bowery
Friday – Monday through April 21, $25-$55
866-811-4111
www.cultureproject.org

In 2007, exiled two-time Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto returned to her native country to run for a third term, as a member of the Pakistan People’s Party. The party had been founded by her father, former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was hanged in Rawalpindi by the government under questionable circumstances in 1979. On December 27, 2007, during a political rally in Rawalpindi, Benazir Bhutto was assassinated, dead at the age of fifty-four. Half-Pakistani actress Anna Khaja examines the life, career, and impact the popular, controversial leader had in the compelling one-woman show Shadeed: The Dream and Death of Benazir Bhutto. Khaja (True Blood, Stuff Happens) plays eight characters who share their views on Bhutto on that fateful day in late December. Khaja begins by appearing as herself, a young woman trying to discover her identity in a very personal journey, for she is the daughter of a Pakistani man who walked out on his American family to perhaps become a terrorist. Over the course of eighty minutes, Khaja portrays Sara, a worshipful student; U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, who declares, “I have not sent you into a death trap, Miss Bhutto”; investigative journalist and confidante Daphne Barak; Quasim, a professor who was interrogated and tortured for his beliefs; Bhutto’s estranged niece and journalist Fatima; excited street vendor Shamsher; student revolutionary Afshan; and Bhutto herself. After each segment, Khaja changes costumes simply and effectively, behind a slatted wooden fence designed by Maureen Weiss while Pakistani music composed by Phillip Young and Colyn Emery plays and Steven Calcote projects related images onto a white sheet draped over the fence. A hit at the 2010 New York Fringe Festival, Shaheed: The Dream and Death of Benazir Bhutto, written by the multitalented Khaja and directed by Heather de Michele and being presented at the Culture Project’s Women Center Stage through April 1, offers a unique look — or, actually, several unique looks — at a horrific tragedy and its effect on a deeply troubled nation.

TICKET GIVEAWAY: SLEEPING ROUGH

SLEEPING ROUGH
The Wild Project
195 East Third St.
April 3-27, $25-$35
866-811-4111
www.page73.org

Unhappy with specific actions taken by her country, a divorced mother takes off for London just as the financial crisis kicks into full gear, forcing her to face a new reality in the world premiere of Kara Manning’s Sleeping Rough.. The show, which is directed by Tony nominee Sam Buntrock (Sunday in the Park with George) and features Kellie Overbey, Quentin Mare, and Renata Friedman, is the latest from Page 73 Productions, which has previously staged such plays as Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue, Dan LeFranc’s Sixty Miles to Silver Lake, and Heidi Schreck’s Creature.

TICKET GIVEAWAY: Sleeping Rough is scheduled to run April 3-27 at the Wild Project, and twi-ny has three pairs of tickets to give away for free. Just send your name, daytime phone number, and all-time-worst sleeping situation to contest@twi-ny.com by Friday, March 22, at 5:00 to be eligible. All entrants must be twenty-one years of age or older; three winners will be selected at random. All responses will be kept confidential.

TALLEY’S FOLLY

Matt Friedman (Danny Burstein) pleads his case to Sally Talley (Sarah Paulson) in new production of TALLEY’S FOLLY (photo by Joan Marcus)

Roundabout at Laura Pels Theatre
Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre
111 West 46th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through May 12, $91
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org

Danny Burstein gives one of the best performances of the season in the first-ever New York revival of Lanford Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Talley’s Folly. Burstein (Company, Golden Boy) stars as Matt Friedman, a Jewish accountant from St. Louis who has come to Lebanon, Missouri (Wilson’s hometown), in 1944 to declare his love for southern belle Sally Talley (Sarah Paulson), with whom he had a brief flirtation the previous summer. As the show starts, Friedman bursts down the aisle and onto the stage, directly addressing the audience. “If everything goes well for me tonight,” he says in a Jewish accent, “this should be a waltz, one-two-three, one-two-three; a no-holds-barred romantic story, and since I’m not a romantic type, I’m going to need the whole valentine here to help me: the woods, the willows, the vines, the moonlight, the band — there’s a band that plays tonight, over in the park. The trees, the berries, the breeze, the sounds: water and crickets, frogs, dogs, the light, the bees, working all night.” The crowd instantly on his side — he even promises that it will all take place within a brisk ninety-seven minutes — Matt is soon joined by Sally, a nurse’s aide who is helping take care of wounded soldiers at a local hospital. More than a decade younger than Matt, Sally is not thrilled to see him, begging him to leave before her anti-Semitic Ozark family does something bad to him, but Matt is not about to take off without speaking his mind — and trying to convince Sally that she feels the same way he does, which clearly won’t be easy. “You do not have the perception God gave lettuce,” she tells him. “I did not answer but one letter and in that one short note I tried to say in no uncertain terms that I didn’t want you to write to me. You have sent me an almost daily chronicle of your life in your office. The most mundane details of your accounting life. Why did you come back here?”

Matt experiences a bump in the road while wooing Sally in Roundabout revival (photo by Joan Marcus)

As he continues to woo Sally despite her protestations, Matt makes full use of designer Jeff Cowie’s dilapidated Victorian boathouse set, which has a nostalgic charm to it while also representing the changing of the Old South and the new America that will arise out of World War II. Little by little, the repressed Sally begins to open up and the captivating waltz grows ever-more complex, one-two-three, one-two-three, as it heads to its beautiful conclusion, exactly ninety-seven minutes after it started. Director Michael Wilson (Gore Vidal’s The Best Man, Enchanted April) keeps things moving at an engaging pace, with just the right balance of humor, warmth, and conflict, bringing a vibrancy and freshness to the thirty-three-year-old play, the middle part of a trilogy that began with Talley & Son and concludes with Fifth of July. Paulson (American Horror Story, Collected Stories) is excellent as Burstein’s shiksa dance partner, standing appropriately stiff and tall in her yellow dress and blonde hair, the prim-and-proper polar opposite of the dark-suited, thickly bearded, no-holds-barred Burstein, the two claiming as their own roles originated by Trish Hawkins and Judd Hirsch. This Roundabout Theatre production, immersed in a sweet, contagious innocence, is a fitting tribute to Wilson, who passed away in 2011 at the age of seventy-four, leaving behind a legacy that also includes The Hot l Baltimore and Burn This. (Wilson’s 1975 play, The Mound Builders, is currently being revived at the Signature Theatre, where it has been extended through April 14.)

THE MADRID

Mother (Edie Falco) and daughter (Phoebe Strole) have to reevaluate their relationship in THE MADRID (photo by Joan Marcus)

Manhattan Theatre Club
New York City Center Stage 1
131 West 55th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Extended through May 5, $95
www.themadridplay.com

It’s an intriguing proposition that many people probably consider at least once in their lives. In Liz Flahive’s The Madrid, Martha (Edie Falco) goes ahead and does it. One day, while teaching her kindergarten class, Martha simply gets up and walks out of her life, leaving her career and her family behind. Her gentle, loving husband, John (Tony nominee John Ellison Conlee), and their daughter, Sarah (Spring Awakening’s Phoebe Strole), are stunned and devastated by Martha’s disappearance, as are neighbors and best friends Becca (Heidi Schreck) and Danny (Darren Goldstein). However, Martha’s elderly mother, Rose (two-time Tony winner Frances Sternhagen), seems to take it a little more in stride. A recent college graduate who gets a job at Starbucks while contemplating her future, a confused Sarah is eventually contacted by her mother, who has moved into a ratty city apartment building called the Madrid; soon Sarah must decide whether she wants to have any kind of a relationship with her mother, who insists that Sarah tell no one, especially John, about where she is and what she is doing. Flahive and director Leigh Silverman (Chinglish, In the Wake), who previously teamed up on From Up Here, also for Manhattan Theatre Club, ask lots of questions but don’t necessarily provide the answers in the quirky, unpredictable 130-minute show that examines personal and familial identity and one’s place in the world. Martha never fully explains why she’s done what she’s done, and Falco plays her with an air of repressed mystery, like she’s not sure of the reasons either. Throughout the play, Flahive, a producer on Falco’s award-winning Showtime series Nurse Jackie, has John and Sarah prepare for a garage sale, trying to get rid of so many of the physical objects that remind them of Martha while also attempting to figure out how to deal with her desertion emotionally and psychologically. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it turns out that walking out on one’s life is not exactly a party, something Flahive handles in The Madrid with an at-times frustrating lack of clarity but also with sensitive care and humor. (Falco will be at the 92nd St. Y on April 7 for a Broadway Talks conversation and audience Q&A about the play and more with Jujamcyn Theaters president Jordan Roth.)