this week in theater

PMA: JESSE MALIN’S SILVER MANHATTAN AT BOWERY PALACE

Jesse Malin makes a triumphant return to the Bowery in Silver Manhattan (photo by Ehud Lazin)

SILVER MANHATTAN
The Bowery Palace
327 Bowery
Wednesday – Sunday through March 29, $52-$187
www.silvermanhattan.com
www.jessemalin.com

Upon entering the downstairs theater at the new Bowery Palace, audience members are greeted by an unusual sight: At the front and center of the small, crowded stage, surrounded by various chairs, tables with lamps, a drum kit, and vertical white fluorescent lights on a shimmering curtain, is an empty wheelchair.

It’s a haunting image, made all the more palpable when singer-songwriter Jesse Malin makes his grand entrance, carried down the aisle on a stretcher, his hands folded across his chest as if dead. But the Queens native, along with the crowd, is about to be resurrected by the power and glory of rock and roll in the heart-wrenching yet exhilarating Silver Manhattan.

“I love walking in New York,” Malin says after being placed in the wheelchair. “You hit the street, no plan, no agenda — then you bump into someone, talk to a stranger, make a new friend. You see a poster, you run into a show, a movie — you hear music from a bar, it draws you in. Next thing you know, you’ve danced all night, fallen in love, learned a good joke from a homeless person, fed a stray cat, and jumped back into bed as the sun comes up and the last garbage truck rolls by. Anything’s possible here.”

Some of those things might never be possible for Malin again, but that’s not preventing him from living his life to the fullest he can.

“The last time I walked down a New York street was May 4, 2023,” he says shortly before launching into his 2015 song “Turn Up the Mains” while sharing the story of the day he suffered a spinal stroke on his way to a one-year memorial party he was hosting and DJing for his late friend and former bandmate Howie Pyro, who he calls an “occasional Satanist.” Malin describes the event in graphic detail as the pain shot through his legs, he got down on the ground, and then was taken by ambulance to the hospital, where he received the awful diagnosis and was told that he’s “effectively paraplegic,” that he might never walk again without assistance.

The band — keyboardist Rob Clores, bassist James Cruz, drummer Paul Garisto, and musician and vocalist Bree Sharp — then kicks into the Rolling Stones’ 1971 track “Sway” and Malin picks up a guitar.

Doctor: Did you ever wake up to find / A day that broke up your mind? / Destroyed your notion of circular time.
Band: It’s just that demon life / Got you in its sway / It’s just that demon life / Got you in its sway.
Malin: Ain’t flinging tears out on the dusty ground / For all my friends out in the burial ground / Can’t stand this feeling, getting so brought down.

Malin, who was born in 1967, then returns to his childhood in Whitestone, where his single mother raises him and his sister. He recounts jumping on his bed to songs by Elton John and Paul Simon, being bullied because he has to wear an eye patch, and discovering such bands as KISS, the Sex Pistols, the Dead Boys, and the Ramones.

He sings, “Waiting on a midnight bus / To get me to the 7 train / Running from the chicken hawks / And I never went back . . . never went back . . .” in “Whitestone City Limits.”

As a teenager, he first forms the band Heart Attack (“Trendies”), then downtown punk legend D Generation (“No Way Out”). He goes solo in 2000, releasing such albums as Glitter in the Gutter, Love It to Life, and New York Before the War. He collaborates with Bruce Springsteen, Billie Joe Armstrong, Ryan Adams, and Lucinda Williams. He opens a club in the city.

And then, at the age of fifty-six, he learns that he might lose everything.

Jesse Malin is joined by his bandmates while telling his poignant story (photo by Ehud Lazin)

The preshow setlist blasting through the speakers sets the stage for the music that follows, from the Dead Boys’ “Sonic Reducer” and the Ramones’ “She’s the One” to Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” and Simon & Garfunkel’s “My Little Town,” letting the audience know that this is not going to be just a punk concert. Over the course of ninety pulsating minutes, Malin reaches deep into his back catalog, performing songs not in chronological order but how they relate to the narrative, which switches between his history and his efforts to not give in to his diagnosis, including seeking out special treatment in Argentina. He is joined several times by Satish Indofunk and Danny Rey on horns, adding another dimension to the songs. The often warm lighting is by Brian Scott, with propulsive sound by Angela Baughman.

Just as Marsha Ginsberg’s scenic design is cramped, so is the audience, seated in folding chairs on the floor or balcony and on narrow benches or standing in the back; it’s not the most comfortable way to enjoy music, but it works here, especially as Malin makes eye contact with as many audience members as he can as he chronicles his wild adventures, baring his heart and soul. And he never becomes treacly, even when adopting a mantra from his friend HR of Bad Brains: PMA, or Positive Mental Attitude. “Before him, I never thought how my outlook might effect where I end up,” Malin acknowledges.

He doesn’t wallow in self-pity or ask for sympathy but instead forges ahead, determined to beat the odds and, primarily, keep making music. His band doubles as characters from his life: DJ Jonathan Toubin, his doctor, his mother, Jack Flanagan, his physical therapist. As the evening progresses, he gets more and more pumped, waving his arms in the air and shaking his body in the chair. He has an infectious enthusiasm that dances over the room like a swirling disco ball. You don’t have to know anything about Malin or his music to fall for him and the presentation, which is reminiscent of Springsteen on Broadway and Bono’s Stories of Surrender, both of which were tied to memoirs; Malin’s Almost Grown (Akashic Books, $28.95) will be published on April 7.

Passionately directed by Ellie Heyman (Space Dogs, The Tattooed Lady), Silver Manhattan — named for Malin’s 2004 song that does not appear in the show; nor does his 2002 track “Almost Grown” — is an intimate journey into one man’s refusal to take no for an answer, through his entire life. It’s a thrilling, no-holds-barred celebration, tinged with loss and sadness, but ultimately it’s a triumphant homecoming for a man who has been part of the New York City music scene for five decades and is not about to stop now.

He saves some special surprises for the very end, then, as an encore, brings out a different friend each night; I saw Tony-winning actor and musician John Gallagher Jr. (American Idiot, Spring Awakening) playing the Replacements’ hit “Alex Chilton,” which features the line “I’m in love / with that song.”

Well, I’m in love / with this show.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

EVERY ROSE HAS ITS THORN: THE MINT RESURRECTS ZACK

Zack (Jordan Matthew Brown) finds himself caught between two women (Cassia Thompson and Grace Guichard) in Mint revival at Theatre Row (photo by Todd Cerveris)

ZACK
Theatre Row
410 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 28, $39-$95
www.theatrerow.org
minttheater.org

Jordan Matthew Brown and Cassia Thompson are terrific in the Mint’s adaptation of Harold Brighouse’s 1916 Edwardian parlor comedy of manners, Zack; unfortunately, it’s not enough to lift the play out of the doldrums.

Last year, the Mint, which has been staging lost or forgotten plays for more than thirty years, presented Brighouse’s savvy 1914 political satire Garside’s Career, which earned a well-deserved Drama Desk nomination for Best Revival. Brighouse is most well known for Hobson’s Choice, the 1915 play that was adapted into an Oscar-winning 1954 film, the 1966 Broadway musical Walking Happy, and a 1989 ballet. While Zack has seen several British productions over the last fifty years, it is virtually unknown in America. Perhaps it should have stayed that way.

The 105-minute play is set in the Munning home in the quaint, close-knit village of Little Hulton, a suburb of Lancashire. Mrs. Munning (Melissa Maxwell) and her older son, Paul (David T. Patterson), run the late Mr. Munning’s joinery company but have had to add a catering business to try to make ends meet. They try to keep Paul’s younger brother, Zack (Jordan Matthew Brown), hidden, considering him a hapless fool who only hurts their reputation, which is so critical in their small community. When their young cousin Virginia Cavender (Cassia Thompson) needs a place to convalesce, Mrs. Munning agrees to take care of her for about a month, devising a plan to cash in on her wealth.

“There’s money in that family, and when my cousin writes to me and says Virginia’s not been well and needs the country air, I say it’s folly not to have her here, cost what it may,” Mrs. Munning tells the penny-pinching Paul, who is aghast. “She’s not an invalid. She’s just run down,” Mrs. Munning says. Paul responds, “And Lord knows what it’ll cost in fancy goods to wind her up.”

Mrs. Munning hires Sally Teale (Caroline Festa) to serve as a maid during Virginia’s stay in an attempt to convince Virginia that all is well with them, that they are not facing dire straits and still have a fine reputation, even as they are losing business to rival caterers the Wilsons. Not used to being a maid, Sally may not have been the best choice, full of cheeky responses and disinclined to work.

When the resplendently dressed Virginia arrives, she explains that she prefers being called Jenny, immediately giving her a more casual, less finicky presence. Much to Mrs. Munning and Paul’s chagrin, Zack joins them for tea; he’s a nebbishy sort, with unkempt hair and a full beard and mustache, wearing old, ill-fitting clothes and not displaying the best manners. When Jenny puts out her hand to greet him, Mrs. Munning chastises him, declaring, “You’ll wash your hand before you touch Jenny’s.” Zack says, “Maybe I ought, I’m not so frequent at the soap as I might be.” To which Jenny replies, “I think we’ll shake hands as you are.”

Soon Mrs. Munning and Paul are scheming to convince Jenny that Paul loves her and that they should wed, a plan they kick into high gear as Zack grows closer to Jenny.

Soon Martha Wrigley (Grace Guichard) arrives and finds Zack, to whom she delivers the news that her father, Joe (Sean Runnette), who works for Paul, has broken his arm and will not be available for the next day’s wedding — but asks if her father can be paid nonetheless. Zack, a big Teddy bear of a man, is sympathetic; he gives her a shilling that he had just earned as well as some food from his pocket, where he absentmindedly stuffs leftovers and half-eaten snacks. He consoles her as she cries, and, just as Mrs. Munning enters the room, Martha kisses Zack. “Oh? When’s the wedding, Zack?” Mrs. Munning says, to which Zack playfully answers, “Oh, I dunno. In about a month, eh, Martha?” It isn’t long before Joe, who was fired by Paul because of the injury, is demanding that they go through with the nuptials unless the Munnings want to be embroiled in scandal, their catering business ruined.

Paul is furious, but Zack, kind and likable schlemiel that he is, offers to fill Joe’s duties, an offer that his brother at first rejects but eventually agrees to, even though he expects it to be a disaster, already envisioning Zack breaking cups and dishes and disrupting the party. Unable to stand up for himself and fearful of any type of conflict or confrontation, Zack agrees to marry Martha although he loves Jenny but is afraid to tell anyone, believing that he is a worthless person who is an embarrassment to his mother and brother, who even forget his birthday.

Paul and Mrs. Munning get a taste of their own medicine when they grab some roses for Jenny and are pricked by the thorns, but it looks like nothing will get in the way of their nefarious doings.

Harold Brighouse’s 1916 Zack is an Edwardian parlor comedy of manners (photo by Todd Cerveris)

Brown (Book of Mormon, All Shook Up) is delightful in the title role, channeling a little Zach Galifianakis here, a bit of Richard Dreyfuss there, as he inhabits the gentle angst that makes Zack uncomfortable in his own skin; you want to just wrap him up in a big hug and tell him everything will be all right. Thompson (Murder on the Orient Express, The Wolves) is charming in her off-Broadway debut as Jenny, a perceptive young woman who does not put on airs, tries to find the good in people, and has a mind and will of her own.

However, Festa (1999, Peter Pan), Guichard (Straight Icons, The Woman in Black), Patterson (Picnic, Les Liaisons Dangereuse), Runnette (Animal Magnetism, The Changeling), and Maxwell (The Trial of Donna Caine, The House of Bernarda Alba), along with Đavid Lee Huỳnh (Bus Stop, The Merchant of Venice) and Mint regular Douglas Rees (The New Morality, Mary Broome) in minor parts, all come off as cardboard cutouts, clichéd characters who range from mustache-twirling villains and not-so-innocent maidens to sarcastic, inefficient servants and greedy, conniving relatives; each lacks the necessary nuance, instead trending too far into cartoon territory. In addition, no one even attempts a British accent.

Brittany Vasta’s parlor room set is lovely, but the stacks of chairs piled in the corner in the second half, which come into and out of use as scenes change, belie the pseudo perfection Mrs. Munning is striving for; the stage business that felt organic in the Mint’s Garside’s Career feels forced here, running counter to an important plot point. Kindall Almond’s costumes are fashionable, Mary Louise Geiger’s lighting is efficient, but Jane Shaw’s sound, which includes outdoor bird chirps, found itself in at least one scene competing with music from one of the other theaters in the complex.

Directed by Britt Berke (Antigonick, I Don’t Trust Adults), who did such a wonderful job with the world premiere of Betty Smith’s Becomes a Woman in 2023, Zack is a missed opportunity, a tedious romcom that feels like it’s a hundred years old, a farce that is not nearly as funny as it needs to be while exploring social mores and norms of the past, hard to relate to in the modern day.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

LIKE MOTHS TO A FLAME: WALLACE SHAWN AND ANDRÉ GREGORY REUNITE FOR THREE-HOUR PLAY

Hope Davis, Josh Hamilton, Maria Dizzia, and John Early star in Wallace Shawn’s What We Did Before Our Moth Days (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

WHAT WE DID BEFORE OUR MOTH DAYS
Greenwich House Theater
27 Barrow St. at Seventh Ave. South
Wednesday – Monday through May 10, $144-$174
mothdays.com

“OK. Yes, we are bored. We’re all bored now,” André Gregory says to Wallace Shawn in Louis Malle’s classic 1981 film, My Dinner with André, in which the two protagonists sit in a restaurant, eating, drinking, and talking for what was initially supposed to be three hours. Some professional and amateur critics agreed with Gregory.

Director Gregory, now ninety-one, and playwright Shawn, who is eighty-two, have been collaborating for more than fifty years, beginning in 1975 with Our Late Night and continuing with such other plays as Grasses of a Thousand Colors in 2009 and The Designated Mourner in 2013. They have reunited again for What We Did Before Our Moth Days, a three-hour absurdist comedy in which four characters sit in chairs and deliver monologues. Yes, for three hours (including two intermissions).

It’s worth every minute.

Riccardo Hernández’s set essentially announces what the audience is in for; there are four plain chairs onstage, three with a small wooden table to their right, one to the left. Behind them are three large windows onto which, before and after the show and during intermission, Oscar-nominated documentarian Bill Morrison projects moths flitting about to original music by sound designer Bruce Odland. There’s a religious atmosphere to the space, like an open confessional, and that soon becomes the case as the characters bare their souls — each in their own way — to the audience, which serves as a kind of priest or rabbi.

The characters enter one at a time, in naturalistic costumes by Hernández that look like they could have come from the actors’ closets. Tim (John Early) sits stage left, followed by Elle (Maria Dizzia), Dick (Josh Hamilton), and Elaine (Hope Davis), the only one without a cup of tea. Since there is little physical movement in the play, details such as who is drinking what can assume outsize importance, although one cannot track every minor change as a major metaphorical statement.

Since nearly the entire play unfolds with the actors seated — making their silent entrances and exits for each act downright thrilling — the dialogue has to sparkle and shine, and the performances must bring it vividly to life, defining the characters and laying out the plot. All the participants do so with expert precision. The initial interaction between actor and audience is key, and Shawn and Gregory pull it off with grace and elegance — and plenty of sardonic humor.

Hope Davis, Maria Dizzia, and Josh Hamilton chat in the dressing room of the Greenwich House Theater (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

The first to speak is Tim, who delivers a long, satirical monologue about his relationship with a teenage girl. He shares his story with a benign innocence that is both funny and awkward, shifting somewhat uncomfortably in his seat while attempting to gain the audience’s trust, searching the crowd for sympathetic eyes. Describing his situation, he says, “I got back in my car, but just before setting off for the familial apartment where my mother was now waiting alone with my father’s body, I made a quick phone call to my best friend, a girl called Rapunzel whose house was just down the street from mine in the little town where I lived. I just had to tell her that my father had died. Rapunzel was a tall girl with a deep voice and a big face that looked partly like the face of a wolf and partly like the face of a calf, and as I was twenty-five and she was thirteen, there was an age difference there. Her parents were divorced, and she lived with her father, a disturbed and horrible man who would often pull me into his bedroom when I’d come to visit his daughter and keep me more or less imprisoned there as he passed on to me the latest facts about his love affair with a wealthy married woman whose frightening gluttony in regard to sex, he would explain to me rather frantically, his eyes darting wildly around the room, was so extreme as to be, he thought, possibly dangerous, medically, to him.”

Next up is Elaine (Hope Davis), who is far more precise in her deportment, looking straight ahead, more matter-of-fact as she recalls visiting the body of her dead lover, Dick, in his bedroom, explaining, “I’d called Dick on the phone that [his wife] never answered, and, when she picked up, I knew what she would say, though her voice was different from the voice I’d always imagined she’d have. Now I felt sick, but all the same I went up to her, and I touched her arm, and I said, ‘Please, I’m sorry, I need to see him.’ She caught her breath and took a step back. I went into the room, and then she closed the door, or maybe she slammed it in a stifled sort of way. And there on an unmade bed in his wife’s apartment my lover lay before me, face up in his pajamas, partly under the covers, but the expression on his face was one I’d never seen, a sort of half-grimace, that weird ‘snapshot’ look people have when a photograph catches them at the wrong moment, and yes, he was dead, all right. There was no ambiguity about it, as perhaps I’d expected there to be. He was simply a corpse.”

Moments later, Elle (Maria Dizzia), Dick’s wife, speaks for the first time, sharing a strange memory: “There was a story I read to Tim at bedtime more than once when he was a very young boy about the monkey god Hanuman, and I remembered how I’d felt when I read him the section in which Hanuman tore open his own chest with his bare hands to show the image that stood in his heart. And I remembered saying to Tim, ‘You know, your father’s image stands in my heart.’” Elle is constantly making prolonged eye contact with individual members of the audience, even when she’s not speaking, as if making sure they understand what has happened, particularly to her, but not in a self-centered way.

Finally, we hear from Dick (Josh Hamilton), who stares into the distance, avoiding eye contact, sitting rigidly upright, like a deer in the headlights — or a moth drawn to a flame. He states, “I’d probably figured out by the age of eight that everybody had many birthdays in the course of their life but only one day on which they died, and, as I sometimes made up my own private names for things, for some reason that I don’t remember I decided to call the day on which a person died not their death day but their ‘moth day’ — partly I’m sure because I always found moths to be quite unpleasant — they were vague and powdery and fluttery — and they weren’t horrible or terrifying, but they seemed to be blind, and I didn’t like the way that they would suddenly appear and bump into me — and I guess I sort of pictured that when people died, they were sort of gently and vaguely and flutteringly escorted into death by a flock of blind moths. Well, this is all by way of saying that my own moth day, to everyone’s surprise, turned out to take place only a few days before what would have been my forty-fifth birthday.”

Three hours of watching four actors deliver monologues in chairs fly by in Moth Days (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Those first “confessions” beautifully set the stage for everything that follows as we learn more about the characters, their strengths and insecurities, and, perhaps most critically, how they view themselves, their self-worth after an unexpected tragedy. There has been a surfeit of plays about grief since the pandemic, but Moth Days attacks the theme in a unique and affecting way, avoiding sentimentality or melodrama. While the play is certainly not interactive or immersive, the connection between each character and the audience is so palpable, so intense, that you’ll feel like you’re experiencing the events being described as they unfurl in Shawn’s unique language. Jennifer Tipton’s lighting may focus on the speaker, a spot illuminating them from above, but be sure to gauge the other characters’ reactions, or lack thereof, to what is being said. It’s utterly fascinating to watch, making it all the more breathtaking when that structure is broken for a few exhilarating minutes.

Tony nominee Davis (God of Carnage, Pterodactyls), actor, comedian, writer, singer, director, and producer Early (Showgasm, Search Party), Tony nominee Dizzia (Pre-Existing Condition, If I Forget), and Independent Spirit Award nominee Hamilton (The Antipodes, The Coast of Utopia) maintain just the right balance among their characters, calmly waiting their turn to convey their point of view, revealing their psychological makeup as they carefully avert judging the others.

According to the January 2024 Nature magazine article “Why flying insects gather at artificial light,” “Under natural sky light, tilting the dorsum towards the brightest visual hemisphere helps maintain proper flight attitude and control. Near artificial sources, however, this highly conserved dorsal-light-response can produce continuous steering around the light and trap an insect.” Each of the characters in What We Did Before Our Moth Days is trapped in their own way, drawn to a flame whether they want to or not, attempting to steer around the light. It can also be interpreted as a metaphor for theater itself, whether it takes place in complicated changing sets or four people just sitting around drinking and talking, testing the audience’s comfort level for three hours.

In My Dinner with André, the original script of which was cut by Malle to a more amenable 110 minutes onscreen, Gregory says, “Wally, don’t you see that comfort can be dangerous? I mean, you like to be comfortable and I like to be comfortable too, but comfort can lull you into a dangerous tranquility.”

Prepare to be comforted by this extraordinary, and safely tranquil, production.

[For those who, like me, cannot get enough Wallace Shawn, he will be performing his Obie-winning 1991 solo play The Fever on Sunday and Monday nights at Greenwich House. Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]

FROM PONG TO AI: CHILLING DATA AT THE LUCILLE LORTEL

Maneesh (Karan Brar) and Jonah (Brandon Flynn) take a break from work by playing ping-pong in Data (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

DATA
Lucille Lortel Theatre
121 Christopher St.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 29, $61-$126
www.datatheplay.com
lortel.org

The New York debut of Matthew Libby’s chilling Data feels like it’s been ripped from today’s headlines, but the playwright first started thinking about it in 2017, after interviewing for and not getting an internship at Palantir — one of the tech companies at the center of the current massive expansion of artificial intelligence — then reading an Intercept article about the firm’s plans, the title of which would be a major spoiler.

Data premiered in the fall of 2024 at Arena Stage in Washington, DC, directed by Margot Brodelon; director Tyne Rafaeli’s skillful adaptation opened at the Lucille Lortel on January 25 and has been extended through March 29. Karan Brar reprises his role as Maneesh Singh, a twenty-two-year-old Indian American working in the User Experience (UX) department of the fictional, highly prestigious Silicon Valley company Athena Technologies.

The play begins with Maneesh playing ping-pong in the almost blindingly white break room with fellow UX employee Jonah (Brandon Flynn), who has been assigned to be his mentor. They are not competing at championship-level table tennis but instead are hitting the ball back and forth slowly and casually, reminiscent of Pong, the 1972 Atari video game that brought digital technology into the mainstream and people’s homes. While the somewhat goofy Jonah gossips about secrecy, cutting-edge software, potential layoffs, Taco Tuesday, and an engineer in Data Analytics who left the company under mysterious circumstances, the very serious Maneesh has no interest in networking, listens to what his parents tell him to do (or not do), and, despite his obvious abilities, seems happy to stay in UX and not be promoted to Data Analytics, where the real work is being done.

When he bumps into Riley (Sophia Lillis), a college classmate now in Analytics, she is shocked that he is in UX. Next he is meeting with Alex Chen (Justin H. Min), the charming, fast-talking analytics head who used to work with Maneesh’s brother and now wants Maneesh to team up with Riley on a special project that involves signing an NDA. Maneesh is hesitant and uncomfortable, especially when Alex insists on knowing more about his breakthrough predictive algorithm, which Maneesh developed as a way to anticipate the success of baseball players and has since made it closed source, preventing access to it.

“Talk to me, bro. Cone of silence,” Alex says. Maneesh responds, “Look. As I got further and further into my thesis, and I realized what exactly it was I was creating . . . I, like, saw this conversation. Like, this exact conversation we’re having right now. Right down to the joking about baseball, because of course, the algorithm has nothing to do with baseball. The rare event model can be applied, hypothetically, to predict . . . anything, really. And so, after I presented the initial results, I started getting emails. But not from sports teams. They were from headhunters, trying to poach me, poach the project — investment firms, lobbying groups, even an oil company. And that . . . I guess I realized that scared me. I just mean — I felt it. That it’s not what I wanted.”

But it’s exactly what Alex and Athena want.

Riley (Sophia Lillis), Maneesh (Karan Brar), and Alex Chen (Justin H. Min) have different grand plans in New York City premiere (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

According to the script, the story takes place in the mid-2020s, but “it might already have happened.” The plot will make you think not only of Palantir but also about Mantic, Anthropic, OpenAI, Cambridge Analytica, and other such tech firms in the news. One of the script’s epigraphs is a quote from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman: “AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies.” Last month, Anthropic safety researcher Mrinank Sharma quit, writing in an open letter, “The world is in peril. . . . We appear to be approaching a threshold where our wisdom must grow in equal measure to our capacity to affect the world, lest we face the consequences.”

Data marks Libby’s off-Broadway debut, and it’s an exciting one. The dialogue is keenly pointed, the characters believable, and plot twists and surprises abound in a taut hundred minutes. Only Jonah’s sexual pursuit of Riley rings false and feels forced, but otherwise Rafaeli (Weather Girl, Becoming Eve) maintains a deft touch.

Marsha Ginsberg’s set morphs from the break room to Alex’s spare, pristine office to a fascinating late shift; the whiteness recalls the streaming hit Severance, where employees are not sure what their jobs are for or what the company does while they keep their working and personal lives completely separate, one knowing nothing about the other. Scene changes are made in darkness as fluorescent lights speed around a rectangular frame accompanied by 8-bit digital music. (The lighting is by Amith Chandrashaker, with sound and music by Daniel Kluger and contemporary casual costumes by Enver Chakartash.)

Brar makes a terrific theatrical debut as Maneesh, capturing his deep unease at where his life appears to be going against his better judgment. Despite his vast tech knowledge and abilities, he represents all of us who are more concerned about the future of humanity than the success of a business, or a government. Lillis (Heroes of the Fourth Turning, A Midsummer Night’s Dream) brings a beguiling nuance to the complicated Riley, Min nails the bold, forward-thinking, eminently likable but ethically questionable tech boss, and Flynn (Kowalski, Kid Victory) lends Jonah the right balance, aside from the pervy subplot.

Libby studied cognitive science and symbolic systems at Stanford, so he knows what he’s talking about when Alex says, “It’s a geopolitical reality. Data is the language of our time. And like all languages, its narratives will be written by the victors.” But he’s also on target when Maneesh considers that AI can make “the world a worse place.”

It may have taken more than a half century to proceed from Pong to today’s video games, but so many elements of AI are moving so fast, Data could potentially be an ancient relic — like Pong — by the time it completes its run at the Lortel.

Thus, it’s better to see it now, while it’s still a legitimate cautionary tale and not a portent that the end is near, brought on by humanity itself.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]

THANKS, OBAMA: CHINESE REPUBLICANS GOES OFF-MENU

Four businesswomen toast to their success in Alex Lin’s Chinese Republicans (photo by Joan Marcus)

CHINESE REPUBLICANS
Laura Pels Theatre
Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre
111 West 46th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 5, $69-$102
www.roundabouttheatre.org

Despite an intriguing title and a promising premise, Alex Lin’s Chinese Republicans turns out to be a disappointing, clichéd, problematic melodrama with ill-defined characters and subplots.

In a September 2022 study, the Association of Asian American Investment Managers reported that “more than 80% of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) women say the bamboo ceiling effect is real. Additionally, 65% of AAPI women disagree that opportunities for advancement are equitable regardless of race or gender. This new report aims to reveal the unique challenges faced by AAPI women who struggle to break through the ‘bamboo glass ceiling.’”

In the ninety-five-minute Roundabout production, making its world premiere at the Laura Pels Theatre through April 5, it’s 2019, and four politically conservative women who work at the Friedman Wallace investment bank meet every third Tuesday of the month at the Golden Unicorn in Chinatown in an “affinity group” one of the members calls “Asian Babes Changing the Game.” Phyllis Ong (Jodi Long) is an elegant but tough-talking sixty-five-year-old bad-ass who was the first Chinese woman to be managing director in New York City and has no time for bleeding-heart liberals. Her protégée, forty-eight-year-old Chinese American Ellen Chung (Jennifer Ikeda), initially joined the firm to help Chinese people who don’t speak English, like her parents, with loans, mortgages, credit, and other financial needs; she is divorced and childless, concentrating fully on her career, even Anglicizing her name from Ailin in order to fit in and eventually make partner. Iris (Jully Lee) is a thirty-one-year-old Chinese immigrant and software engineer in America on an H1b visa who’s preparing to apply for a green card, so she is not seeking any trouble. Twenty-four-year-old Chinese American Katie Liu (Anna Zavelson) is the new kid on the block, a former intern who is eagerly and excitedly on the fast track to success.

They sit at a table in front of a black-and-white calligraphic painting and show they can be just as snarky and vindictive as their male counterparts, needling one another on their Mandarin, their personal lives, and even how they treat the waiter (Ben Langhorst). An early exchange sets the tone.

Iris: Oh my god, your Mandarin is so bad. It sounds like diarrhea in your mouth —
Ellen: Just get it —
Iris: Why —
Ellen: Katie’s a vegetarian now.
Iris: Since when?
Phyllis: Are animal products slowing her down?
Ellen: No, she’s on the up and up! Hired straight from intern to research associate level two last year — and already up for a promotion — doesn’t happen every day. Get the turnip cake, too, that’s her favorite.
Iris: Turnip cake has meat, Ellen.
Phyllis: Just don’t tell her.
Ellen: Tricking a vegetarian into eating meat, sounds real ethical.
Phyllis: She needs to build strength. Or her annual review will grind her to dust.

Ellen takes Katie under her wing, much as Phyllis did with her, stressing the important tenet, “You can’t help others if you can’t help yourself.” But where Ellen envisions a future in which the firm is renamed Friedman Wallace Chung Liu, Phyllis is critical of Katie’s desire to have a life and a boyfriend along with her career.

“Honestly, I feel bad for your generation. All you want is instant gratification — ‘You can have it all!’ Yeah, they pulled the same stunt with me,” Phyllis tells Katie. “They’ll throw you a bone by paying you a little more or make you feel safe with these little affinity groups. But you still have to wear makeup, don’t you? You still have to fix your hair, wear the right shoes, be feminine enough without being a woman — and don’t even get me started on having kids. . . . The moment you think the world is making progress is the moment you become outdated.”

In addressing that progress, the play itself is outdated.

A game-show dream sequence tests the proper usage of Mandarin (photo by Joan Marcus)

The title, Chinese Republicans, feels more like click bait than a good name for the play. The women do praise Ronald Reagan and Rudy Giuliani and disparage Barack Obama, Bill de Blasio, and “weird PC crap,” and Phyllis notes, “Once a Democrat, always a Democrat,” when Ellen admits that she was blue until 2001, but Lin (Laowang: A Chinatown King Lear, Bad Chinese Daughter), who made 2026’s Forbes “30 Under 30” list in the Hollywood & Entertainment category (along with Mikey Madison, Chase Infiniti, and Emma Myers) focuses far more on their being Chinese than GOP cheerleaders. And the plot takes a bizarre diversion when Katie becomes a rabble-rousing Libertarian-Socialist Conservative intent on unionizing the company. “You guys, all of the greatest Republicans in America have been Socialists!” she declares.

Oddly, there is no mention of Donald Trump, who had a lot to say about the financial sector and, particularly, China even before the pandemic.

Director Chay Yew (Mojada, Good Enemy) stumbles through Lin’s choppy narrative as Wilson Chin’s set revolves between the restaurant — which recalls David Mamet’s toxic-masculinity-heavy Glengarry Glen Ross, although the women here are not so profane and desperate — and inside and outside Friedman Wallace, where one-on-one discussions take place. The four women are sharply dressed in Anita Yavich’s costumes, with unobtrusive lighting by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew and original music and sound by Fabian Obispo. Hanah Kim’s projections get out of hand during a surreal game-show scene about Mandarin usage that takes place inside Ellen’s mind. That strange dream sequence and several moments involving some of the women going into the kitchen to chastise the waiter are unnecessary, adding to the erratic structure.

The quartet of Ikeda (Vietgone, BAD NEWS! I was there . . .), Lee (KPOP The Musical, Hannah and the Dread Gazebo), Emmy winner Long (Flower Drum Song, Fern Hill), and Zavelson (The Notebook, Masquerade) never achieve the kind of rhythm or balance among the characters; it’s difficult to understand what the women get out of the meeting, except for Phyllis, who revels in dishing out verbal abuse.

While the play attempts to tackle such issues as bigotry, misogyny, partisan politics, assimilation, and intergenerational conflict, it runs roughshod over itself as it loses control and becomes more and more scattershot and disorganized.

As Phyllis likes to say, “Thanks, Obama.”

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]

UNDER YOUR SKIN: BUG ON BROADWAY

BUG
Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West Forty-Seventh St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 8, $92-$407
www.manhattantheatreclub.com

It’s been several weeks since I saw the Broadway debut of Tracy Letts’s Bug, and I’m still feeling all itchy and out of sorts, scratching myself all over, thinking I’m being invaded by tiny killer insects.

Straight psychological horror plays don’t have a particularly impressive history on Broadway. While there have been plenty of successful spooky musicals, the same has not been true of legitimately frightening dramas. Recently, Levi Holloway’s thrilling Grey House got short shrift, closing early, and while Stranger Things: The First Shadow keeps going strong at the Marquis, it’s not pure horror, especially with its awkward Oklahoma! high school musical subplot. The last time I felt so shuddery after a Broadway play might go all the way back to watching Frank Langella from the front row of the Martin Beck Theatre in the 1977 smash Dracula.

Bug premiered in London in 1996 and came to New York eight years later, starring Shannon Cochran, Michael Shannon, Michael Cullen, Amy Landecker, Brían F. O’Byrne, and Reed Birney. It was adapted into a film in 2006, directed by William Friedkin (The Exorcist, The French Connection) and featuring Ashley Judd, Harry Connick Jr., and Michael Shannon.

Its Broadway bow at the Samuel J. Friedman is led by the sizzling hot Carrie Coon, Letts’s wife, a four-time Emmy nominee who has delighted in such series as The White Lotus, The Leftovers, Fargo, and, currently, The Gilded Age. In Bug she plays Agnes White, a forty-four-year-old woman living in a motel room outside of Oklahoma City. The opening moment is stark and beautiful: Agnes stands near the door, smoking a cigarette and holding a wineglass, looking outside as if the world is not for her. The phone rings but nobody says anything on the other end; Agnes assumes it’s her ex-husband, Jerry Goss (Steve Key), calling from prison. “I got a gun,” she warns the caller.

Next she’s having a crack, coke, and booze party with her best friend, the wild R.C. (Jennifer Engstrom), and a guy R.C. just met, a veteran named Peter Evans (Namir Smallwood). Agnes is suspicious of Peter, saying, “He’s a fuckin’ maniac, for all I know. . . . He’s a maniac DEA ax murderer, Jehovah’s Witness.” R.C. assures her he’s okay, as does Peter, whose first words are, “I’m not an ax murderer.” Agnes takes a liking to Peter and lets him stay while R.C. goes off to another shindig.

Peter explains to Agnes that he makes people nervous and uncomfortable with his talent for picking up on things, telling Agnes that he is a preacher’s son just looking for a connection to other people. When Peter starts hearing a chirping he can’t identify, Agnes at first thinks it’s a cricket. “Don’t kill him. It’s bad luck,” she says. It turns out to be the battery in the smoke alarm, which Peter claims is “more radioactive than plutonium.” He gets rid of it outside, disposing of a warning system that both of them will need as they go down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories centered around Peter’s insistence that the room is crawling with dangerous bugs that are immune to standard sprays. “They’re blood-sucking aphids,” he later tells R.C. and Agnes, “and we’re infested.”

By the time Dr. Sweet (Randall Arney) arrives, it might already be too late.

A Steppenwolf production presented by Manhattan Theatre Club, Bug is a dark dive into paranoia, perhaps even more relevant today than it was in 1996 or 2006, given the vast reach of social media, where anyone can say anything about whatever they want and watch their beliefs, regardless of facts and the truth, spread across the internet and, potentially, into mainstream society — and the government.

The play is like the bizarre offspring of Francis Ford Coppola’s brilliant 1974 The Conversation, in which Gene Hackman stars as Harry Caul, a surveillance expert who soon thinks he himself is the target being bugged, and — stay with me, now — the 1941 Popeye cartoon Flies Ain’t Human, in which the spinach-gulping hero tries his darnedest to kill flies in his home, even using a rifle.

Takeshi Kata’s hotel-room set is appropriately claustrophobic, especially in the second act. Heather Gilbert’s lighting maintains the dark mysteries hovering over it all, while Josh Schmidt’s sound ranges from a chilling quiet to brash noises.

Tony winners Letts (The Minutes, Mary Page Marlowe) and director David Cromer (Meet the Cartozians, Prayer for the French Republic) allow the plot to slowly slither along until some major set changes during intermission — which the audience can watch — ratchet up the tension for the even creepier second act as the characters’ perspectives on reality shift dramatically.

Tony nominee and Obie winner Coon (Mary Jane, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) is hypnotic as Agnes, a strong-minded, independent woman who gets caught up in something she may not be able to get out of; you can’t take your eyes off her as her immediate future grows more and more ominous. Smallwood (Pass Over, Pipeline) portrays Peter with a keen ambiguity; you never know what he’s going to say or do. Their long nude scene together — the reason audience members must place their phones in Yondr pouches for the duration of the show — binds them to each other in a moving and emotional way. (The naturalistic costumes are by Sarah Laux.)

Bug is a taut, involving thriller, with authentic scares that get under your skin. It will also make you feel genuinely threatened the next time you’re itchy, searching for a creepy crawly creature — or following a military industrial complex conspiracy theory — with an unusual taste for human blood.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]

NOT JUST CLOWNING AROUND: MARCEL ON THE TRAIN AT CLASSIC STAGE

Ethan Slater cowrote and stars as a famous French mime in Marcel on the Train (photo by Emilio Madrid)

MARCEL ON THE TRAIN
Classic Stage Company, Lynn F. Angelson Theater
136 East 13th St. between Third & Fourth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 22, $66-$136
www.classicstage.org

In his 1997 film Life Is Beautiful, cowriter-director Roberto Benigni portrays a Jewish Italian bookstore owner who protects his young son from the horrors of the Holocaust and a concentration camp by bravely performing silent, physical comedy for him. Although fictional, the movie was inspired by the real experiences of Italian author Rubino Romeo Salmonì in Auschwitz. Life Is Beautiful was nominated for seven Oscars and won three, for Best Music, Best Foreign Language Film, and Best Actor.

In Marcel on the Train, making its world premiere at Classic Stage, cowriter Ethan Slater portrays Jewish French mime Marcel Marceau, who was part of the resistance during WWII, joining with his cousin Georges Loinger and the OSE (Oeuvre de Secours Aux Enfants) to help save Jewish children, bravely performing silent, physical comedy for them as they tried to escape the Nazis. However, Marcel on the Train sputters, a bumpy ride that loses gas while sharing its remarkable tale.

The hundred-minute play opens with the twenty-year-old Marceau — born Marcel Mangel in Strasbourg, son of a Polish kosher butcher and Ukraine-born mother — performing mime on a bare wooden platform stage. He plucks a flower and follows some butterflies before a train whistle blows, several benches rise up from the floor, and he is joined by four hungry, tired children disguised as boy scouts: the serious, intelligent Berthe (Tedra Millan), the knowledgeable but cynical Adolphe (Max Gordon Moore), the talkative Henri (Alex Wyse), and Etiennette (Maddie Corman), who never speaks.

“Sorry. I was having a dream,” Berthe says to Marcel. “I’ve had it before, I think. It’s the future and everyone I know is old. But I’m twelve still because I never got to get old.” Marcel can’t hear her because of the train noise, so he mimics slamming the window shut, then makes a joke that Berthe doesn’t laugh at. “Don’t worry, I have others,” he promises. The exchange sets the tone for the show, which explores the loss of childhood innocence, communication between children and adults, and courage in the fight against fascism.

Marcel Marceau (Ehan Slater) entertains four adolescents as they try to escape the Nazis in fictionalized play (photo by Emilio Madrid)

The drama switches, sometimes awkwardly, to the past and the future. The first such time shift is told from the point of view of Georges (Aaron Serotsky), who tells Marcel, who is expertly forging documents for the cause, “Ooh, we’d be fucked without you, cousin. . . . Your artistry is a gift.” Marcel replies, “I am gifting the resistance my skill, my attention to detail, not my artistry. Charlie Chaplin wouldn’t just forge thirty identification papers, he’d turn them into, I don’t know, thirty baby ducks farting on Hitler.” (Ouch.)

They design a plan to meet up in Roanne, then make their way through the woods into Switzerland. Back in the present, Marceau mimes juggling apples to keep the four twelve-year-olds’ minds off their dire situation. A second trip to the past introduces Marcel’s father, Charles, (Serotsky), who is not thrilled by his son’s heroic exploits. “You know what you should do? Return to Warsaw, play the Grand, could you imagine?” Charles says, but Marcel is determined to be part of the resistance, even as the present-day journey grows more serious when they discover Georges is not waiting for them at Roanne and a Nazi officer (Serotsky) is approaching on the train.

Marcel on the Train, begins and ends with Marceau alone, miming to the audience; the emotional impact has changed because of what has happened in between, but it feels outside of the play. While it’s a showcase for Slater’s talent and virtuosity as Marceau’s alter ego, Bip the Clown, both frame pieces go on too long. Tony nominee Slater (SpongeBob SquarePants, Wicked) and cowriter and director Marshall Pailet (Private Jones, Who’s Your Baghdaddy) never find quite the right track for the narrative, which presents a surprising, relatively new, and utterly fascinating part of Marceau’s life to explore, previously detailed in several books and films over the last fifteen years, including Jonathan Jakubowicz’s fictionalized 2020 Resistance, starring Jesse Eisenberg as Marceau.

The pace stops and starts and gets caught up in tangents that are difficult to recover from, and the tension is overly manufactured. Jill BC DuBoff’s sound, Studio Luna’s lighting, and Sarah Laux’s costumes create the right atmosphere on Scott Davis’s spare set, but adult actors Corman (Accidentally Brave), Millan (Leopoldstadt), Moore (Tammy Faye), and Wyse (Good Night, Oscar) are hamstrung as the four adolescents by the inconsistent dialogue, as is Serotsky (August: Osage County), who plays everyone else.

Marceau and his brother and cousin were members of the French resistance, rescuing children, but the play has been fictionalized into disparate elements that don’t form a solid whole. There’s a great story to be told, but unfortunately Marcel on the Train too often gets diverted as it shows that life can also not be beautiful.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]