this week in theater

DES MOINES

Dan (Arliss Howard) and Marta (Johanna Day) are in for quite a night in Des Moines (photo by Hollis King)

DES MOINES
Theatre for a New Audience, Polonsky Shakespeare Center
262 Ashland Pl. between Lafayette Ave. & Fulton St.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 8, $97
866-811-4111
www.tfana.org

Denis Johnson’s Des Moines is a sly, beguiling black comedy about — well, I’m not quite sure what it’s about, but I couldn’t take my eyes off it, and not in a car-wreck sort of way. The 2007 play opened Friday night at TFANA’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center, but director Arin Arbus started working on the play with Johnson, the German-born novelist who died in 2017 at the age of sixty-seven, way back in 2013. In a program note, TFANA founding artistic director Jeffrey Horowitz explains that in 2015, after a week of workshopping with Arbus, the author, and dramaturg Jonathan Kalb, he told Johnson he “felt the play needed more clarifying. Denis said ‘no.’ Des Moines was finished.”

Now that I’ve seen its off-Broadway premiere, which continues through January 1 in Brooklyn, I am thrilled that Johnson refused to make any changes; clarification would have denuded the hundred-minute work of its endless charms and purposefully chaotic confusion. The characters speak in non-sequiturs, as if they are not listening to one another while engaging in what are generally called conversations. They go off on tangents or suddenly fall into silence. “It’s just kind of a little bit weird,” Marta (Johanna Day) understatedly says.

The play takes place in an upstairs apartment of a two-flat building in the capital of Iowa, whose caucuses have traditionally kicked off the presidential primary cycle, a city steeped in the insurance industry and whose name translates from the French as “of the monks.” The Online Etymology Dictionary posits that the name Des Moines grew out of the Native American word “Moinguena,” explaining, “Historians believe this represents Miami-Illinois mooyiinkweena, literally ‘shitface,’ from mooy ‘excrement’ + iinkwee ‘face,’ a name given by the Peoria tribe (whose name has itself become a sort of insult) to their western neighbors. It is not unusual for Native American peoples to have had hostile or derogatory names for others, but this seems an extreme case.” Now, I’m not claiming that Johnson knew any of this, but it feels like it fits in with the show’s exhilarating bathos.

The apartment hovers in midair, with space above and below it, as if it is a kind of floating bardo, way station, or purgatory. Riccardo Hernández’s comfy set includes a standard kitchen with a working sink, microwave, and coffeemaker, tchotchkes on the walls and counters, a small table in the center, two empty metal dog bowls, a garbage can, and a back room behind sliding French doors. Things are a little wilder and less ordinary in the back room, which is drenched in erotic red lighting.

The apartment belongs to the soft-spoken Dan (Arliss Howard), a twenty-year Army veteran who now drives a cab, and his wife, Marta, a relatively simple couple with simple needs, happy with leftover spaghetti and mediocre beer. They are taking care of their late daughter’s daughter, Jimmy (Hari Nef), who lives in the back room, confined to a wheelchair after a botched trans surgery.

Jimmy (Hari Nef) and Father Michael (Michael Shannon) get ready for a party in Denis Johnson’s final play (photo by Hollis King)

On this particular night, Marta has asked their parish priest, Father Michael Dubitsky (Michael Shannon), to come over and be there when she gives Dan some important news; Dan has some important news of his own about Michael, who he saw wearing lipstick outside a gay bar. Meanwhile, Dan is expecting the recently widowed Helen Drinkwater (Heather Alicia Simms) to stop by to pick up her late spouse’s wedding ring, which she left at the garage where Dan works. Her husband, a lawyer, died in a commuter plane crash; Dan had driven him to the airport, so Helen is hoping that the taxi driver will remember something that her husband said, what might have been his last words.

Once everyone is there, depth chargers — the drink in which a shotglass of alcohol is dropped into a mug of beer — are flowing, music is playing, and anarchy ensues as everyone and everything spirals out of control in a party to end all parties, the kind of crazy fete that is best experienced from a distance, like safely ensconced in seats in a theater, with additional physical space between the audience and the set.

Des Moines evokes the classic Twilight Zone episode “Five Characters in Search of an Exit,” in which a clown, a soldier, a ballerina, a hobo, and a bagpiper are trapped in an unknown, inescapable pit. The five characters in Johnson’s play seem trapped as well, if not in the apartment itself then in the city of Des Moines. Dan, who was stationed a few blocks from where he was born, has never been west of town, while it’s his job to take people to other places, including airports, where they travel away from Des Moines. Jimmy is confined to a wheelchair and appears to have no desire to go anywhere, especially after what happened to her when she went to the fictional Barrowville, West Virginia, where she got her problematic sex change operation.

And Ellen, who has lived in Des Moines “always and forever,” is widowed because her husband died on a commuter plane that only made it eight miles upriver before crashing, four miles from the fictional Sheller-Phelps factory, perhaps named after Phelps Sheller, a real-life Illinois farmer and military veteran who worked at the Sangamon Ordnance Plant, which manufactured ammunition during WWII.

It’s time for depth chargers and karaoke in off-Broadway premiere at TFANA’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center (photo by Hollis King)

Time is irrelevant in Des Moines. Father Michael forgot to turn his clock back to standard time. Ellen doesn’t know whether it’s Halloween or Christmas, confused by the holiday decorations in Jimmy’s room, which has both an antique phonograph with a large horn and a karaoke machine, mixing past and present. Dan and Marta can’t remember whether their dog ran away one winter ago or two, but they still leave two empty dog dishes on the floor as if the pooch just went out for a walk. Father Michael says several times that he hardly recognizes the old neighborhood even though he’s there all the time.

While no one in the apartment is living the American dream, dreams play a major role in the narrative, which is so helter-skelter, so disorganized that it sometimes seems like various scenes are actually dreams we are experiencing through the dreamer’s memories. Dreams are referenced throughout the show. Dan asks Father Michael to yell at him when he least expects it, “Wake up! You’re dreaming!” The first time we see Jimmy, she says, “I woke up. I was somewhere beautiful in a dream.” Ellen tells Dan and Marta, “I’ve been having some very strongly vivid dreams just lately.”

Not everyone likes listening to other people’s dreams. In the 2017 Scientific American article “Why You Shouldn’t Tell People about Your Dreams,” cognitive science professor Jim Davies delves into “why most of your dreams are going to seem pretty boring to most people.” But made-up dreams coming from the mind of Denis Johnson, well, there’s nothing boring about that.

Two-time Tony nominee Day (Sweat, How I Learned to Drive), Howard (Mank, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone), Nef (“Daddy,” Assassination Nation), Shannon (The Killer, Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune) and Simms (Fairview, By the Way, Meet Vera Stark have a field day in Des Moines, National Book Award winner Johnson’s (Jesus’ Son, Tree of Smoke, Hellhound on My Trail) last play. The actors appear to be having so much fun as the the story descends more and more into madness, and that energizes the audience. Obie winner and Shakespeare veteran Arbus (The Skin of Our Teeth, Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune) maintains an ecstatic anarchy throughout the proceedings, with gleeful choreography by Byron Easley.

“I dreamed I was in this weird place,” Dan says the morning after the party. “It was a strange place. I’m trying to remember the kind of place it was, but I can’t remember.” That’s kinda the way I feel about the show, which I will long remember.

AIN’T NO MO’

Jordan E. Cooper has a lot to say about Ain’t No Mo’ at the Belasco (photo © Joan Marcus)

AIN’T NO MO’
Belasco Theatre
111 West 44th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through December 18, $58 – $318
aintnomobway.com

At the end of the uproarious curtain call at the December 11 matinee of Ain’t No Mo’ at the Belasco, playwright and actor Jordan E. Cooper grabbed a microphone and gave a short speech about “turning the tide” and “changing Broadway,” announcing to the crowd, in case they hadn’t already heard, that the show was closing early, on December 18, after a mere twenty-two previews and twenty-one performances. The news was so sudden and unexpected, following very positive opening reviews, that as of Monday morning, December 13, Telecharge was still selling seats through February 26.

Cooper plays African American Airlines flight attendant Peaches, a boisterously dressed character trying to make sure that every Black person makes it onto the last plane out of the United States, which has offered free one-way reparation flights back to Africa (from gate 1619) to get rid of all the Black people in the country. Peaches tells someone over the phone, “Well, bitch, I don’t know what to tell you ’cause if you stay here, you only got two choices for guaranteed housing and that’s either a cell or a coffin. After this flight, there will be no more Black folk left in this country, and I know ya’ll don’t wanna be the only ones left behind because them muthafuckas will try to put you in a museum or make you do watermelon shows at SeaWorld and shit. Hurry up or I will give your seat to some of the Latinos on stand-by.”

At the curtain call, the twenty-seven-year-old Cooper, the youngest Black American playwright to have a show on Broadway (a designation previously held by Lorraine Hansberry, who was twenty-nine when A Raisin in the Sun opened at the Ethel Barrymore in March 1959 before traveling to the very same Belasco that October), called for the audience to spread the word about Ain’t No Mo’, by mouth and social media. “We won’t go down without a fight,” he declared, also referencing the early closing notice of the Korean musical KPOP, which was playing its final performance that afternoon.

Pastor Freeman and his flock look toward a supposedly bright future in Ain’t No Mo’ (photo © Joan Marcus)

The response to the Ain’t No Mo’ closing notice has been swift (notably, Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith bought out a performance, and the line to get in wrapped around Forty-Fifth St. at the matinee I attended), echoing the movement this past May to keep for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf running at the Booth after it announced it was closing three months early. The effort earned the show an additional two weeks but no more. While I had raved about the off-Broadway versions of KPOP and for colored girls, I was not a fan of either Broadway iteration, each of which had been changed dramatically, in my opinion not for the better.

Still, these voices need to be heard and these bodies seen, on and off Broadway. In an open letter on Instagram, Cooper wrote, “Ain’t No Mo’ needs your help! Now they’ve posted an eviction notice, we ‘must close’ December 18. But thank God Black people are immune to eviction notices. The Wiz got one on opening night in 1974, but audiences turned that around and it ended up running for four years. . . . We need all hands on deck with urgency. In the name of art, in the name of resistance, in the name of we belong here too, in the name of every storytelling ancestor who ever graced a Broadway stage or was told they never could, please support this production and buy a ticket and come have church with us. Radical Black work belongs on Broadway too.”

https://twitter.com/JordanECooper_/status/1602144592081879040?s=20

Ain’t No Mo’ has been tweaked since its 2019 debut at the Public, with the same wonderful cast and only minor changes to its zany yet poignant narrative, which is divided into interrelated sketches taking place at the aforementioned gate 1619; a funeral service for the dear departed Brother Righttocomplain’ in 2008 upon the election of the first American Black president, Barack Obama; an abortion clinic where millions of Black women are terrified of bringing a son into this dangerous racist world; a television gossip show in which a white woman is transitioning to Black; and a mansion where a wealthy Black family discovers their late patriarch has been keeping a secret in the basement.

Munching on Scott Pask’s imaginatively playful sets are Cooper, Fedna Jacquet, Marchánt Davis (I saw understudy Michael Rishawn in his Broadway debut), Shannon Matesky, Ebony Marshall-Oliver, and Crystal Lucas-Perry, in hysterical and, in one case, terrifying costumes by Emilio Sosa and fab wigs by Mia M. Neal. I wrote about the Public original, and it applies to the Broadway iteration as well (both of which were directed by Stevie Walker-Webb, now making his Broadway debut): “Cooper gets right to the point when a woman at the clinic tells a reporter, ‘The problem is we’re racing against a people who have never had to compete, and people who have never had to compete are fearful of competition and they will annihilate any being that challenges their birth-given promise of a victory.’ As wildly funny, if occasionally over the top and too scattershot, Ain’t No Mo’ can be, it’s also a bitter pill to swallow.”

Since coming out of the pandemic lockdown, there has been an encouraging increase in the number of Broadway shows by BIPOC creators about the Black experience, including Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s Lackawanna Blues, Death of a Salesman, The Piano Lesson, Chicken & Biscuits, Thoughts of a Colored Man, Trouble in Mind, Pass Over, Clyde’s, and Caroline, Or Change, all of which had limited runs. That progress needs to continue apace, with plays running longer.

The hootin’ and hollerin’ on- and offstage is coming to an end at the Belasco (photo © Joan Marcus)

At one point in Cooper’s show, Pastor Freeman proclaims, “Aint no mo’ blueish red light in the rearview mirror when you taking your family to the church picnic and all you got in yo’ trunk is three Dollar Store aluminum pans of sister Threadgill’s chitlins, cornbread, and collard greens. Ain’t no mo’ waiting for FEMA while the Louisiana sun is stabbing at yo’ back on the interstate and your grandmama is backstroking in a river of expired bodies. Ain’t no mo’ massa’ tiptoein’ in yo’ mama’s room to rock the shack into the midnight hour. Aint no mo’ shotdown dreams with its blood soaking the concrete outside room 306. Ain’t no mo’ Riots. Ain’t no mo’ Rosewood. Ain’t no mo’ Jasper, ain’t no mo’ Jiggin’, ain’t no mo’ Shufflin’, ain’t no mo’ Shuckin’, ain’t no mo’ Amos, ain’t no mo’ Andy, ain’t no mo’ Emmett Till, ain’t no mo’ Rodney King, ain’t no mo’ Jena 6, ain’t no mo’ Stop, ain’t no mo’ Frisk. Ain’t no mo’ getting followed around by the tall white lady in the Kmart on Jones Street. There ain’t no mo double locking they car when you walk by, they thinking you gonna hot wire they car and drive it out the parking lot, when they know they just saw you pulling up in a car they can’t even afford. That’s all over . . . that’s all done.”

Sadly, you can add to that list “ain’t no mo’ Ain’t No Mo’,” which isn’t good news for anyone.

TOPDOG/UNDERDOG

Siblings Lincoln (Corey Hawkins) and Booth (Abdul-Mateen II) face hard times in Topdog/Underdog (photo by Marc J. Franklin)

TOPDOG/UNDERDOG
Golden Theatre
336 West 20th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 15, $84-$248
topdogunderdog.com

“Theater will save the universe!” the writer, portrayed by Suzan-Lori Parks, declares in Parks’s theatrical concert Plays for the Plague Year, a sensational three-hour show that recently concluded a Covid-shortened run at Joe’s Pub. Later, she adds, “Yeah, maybe when I started I had this belief that theater would save us. But it won’t. Not in the way I thought it would. But it does preserve us, somehow.”

In honor of its twentieth anniversary, Parks’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Topdog/Underdog is being revived on Broadway at the Golden, just in time to preserve us.

Topdog/Underdog takes place in the here and now, as two brothers contemplate their fate in their cramped, tiny apartment in a rooming house. Older sibling Lincoln (Corey Hawkins), the topdog, was dumped by his wife, Cookie, and works at an arcade, where he dresses up as President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre, slouching over and over again as patrons pay to shoot him with a fake pistol.

Booth (Abdul-Mateen II), the underdog, is a petty thief who is attempting to get back together with his ex-girlfriend, Grace, and learn how to master three-card monte, a con game in which people are duped into thinking they can pick a specific card as the dealer, aided by carefully placed accomplices, magically shuffles three cards. Lincoln was a three-card monte master, but he gave it up after one of his partners was shot and killed. Booth wants his brother to teach him, but Lincoln refuses, even though his job is in jeopardy. “They all get so into it. I do my best for them,” he says about the arcade patrons. “And now they talking bout replacing me with uh wax dummy. Itll cut costs.”

The brothers were abandoned first by their mother, who gave them each a small “inheritance,” then by their father, leaving them on their own when Lincoln was sixteen and Booth thirteen. Booth looks up to Lincoln’s three-card monte prowess and begs him to teach him to become a dealer; he doesn’t understand why Lincoln won’t help him out with the game.

They might live in squalor, but they both dream of a better life. There’s only one bed, so Lincoln sleeps in a recliner; the bathroom is down the hall, and their sink, which has no running water, is instead a storage space for Lincoln’s guitar; their phone has been turned off; and they have no table, so they use a large piece of cardboard atop milk crates to eat on. That arrangement doubles as Booth’s three-card monte table, except he angles the cardboard down for the game, as if everything is on the precipice of slipping away. (The claustrophobic set is by Arnulfo Maldonado, with costumes by Dede Ayite, lighting by Allen Lee Hughes, and sound by Justin Ellington.)

Lincoln (Corey Hawkins) and Booth (Abdul-Mateen II) consider teaming up for three-card monte in Pulitzer Prize–winning play by Suzan-Lori Parks (photo by Marc J. Franklin)

At one point Lincoln picks up his guitar and plays an improvised blues song. “My dear mother left me, my fathers gone away / My dear mother left me and my fathers gone away / I dont got no money, I dont got no place to stay. / My best girl, she threw me out into the street / My favorite horse, they ground him into meat / Im feeling cold from my head down to my feet,” he sings. “My luck was bad but now it turned to worse / My luck was bad but now it turned to worse / Dont call me up a doctor, just call me up a hearse.” The luck of the draw is an underlying theme of the show; Lincoln is adamant that three-card monte has nothing to do with luck but only skill, and when he celebrates a little victory, he goes to a bar named Lucky’s.

It all leads to a shocking ending that will echo in your head long after the show is over.

Topdog/Underdog pulsates with an electrifying energy as a cloud of doom hovers over the proceedings. Parks’s (Fucking A, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World AKA the Negro Book of the Dead) dialogue is pure poetry as she explores the Black experience in America from slavery to the present day, every sentence loaded with significance as it challenges stereotypes and selective history. The play reestablishes itself as part of the pantheon of outstanding works about two siblings at odds, along with such plays as Sam Shepard’s True West, Lyle Kessler’s Orphans, and August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson.

Tony winner Kenny Leon (A Raisin in the Sun, A Soldier’s Play) directs the play like a modern-dance choreographer, with nary a stray movement and gesture. Tony nominee Hawkins (In the Heights, Six Degrees of Separation) and Emmy winner Abdul-Mateen II (Watchmen, Candyman) are a formidable duo in roles originated by Jeffrey Wright and Don Cheadle at the Public in July 2001 (and on Broadway in April 2002). In his Broadway debut, Abdul-Mateen II portrays Booth with an edginess and a false bravado, his relationship with the world off kilter, while Hawkins offers up a Lincoln who is exhausted but unwilling to give up as he tries desperately to go straight.

In Plays for the Plague Year, the writer points out that she celebrates January 6 as Topdog Day, when she began writing Topdog/Underdog, but now it will go down in history as the date that MAGA rioters stormed the Capitol. Shows like Topdog/Underdog might not save us from such horrific events, but they do extend life preservers that help us survive them. “‘Does thuh show stop when no ones watching or does thuh show go on?’” Lincoln recalls one of his customers asking. The show must always go on.

A MAN OF NO IMPORTANCE

Jim Parsons stars as a parishioner directing his church’s next play in A Man of No Importance (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

A MAN OF NO IMPORTANCE
Classic Stage Company, Lynn F. Angelson Theater
136 East 13th St. between Third & Fourth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 18
www.classicstage.org

Tony winner John Doyle says farewell to Classic Stage after six years as artistic director with the humbly titled A Man of No Importance. At a talkback following the performance I saw, six of the actors couldn’t stop gushing about Doyle’s unique style and, of course, his importance.

At St. Imelda’s, a small parish church in Dublin in 1964, fortysomething Alfie Byrne (Jim Parsons) has decided that instead of staging Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest again, he and the amateur church theater company will put on Wilde’s controversial 1891 play, Salome, which troubles Father Kenny (Nathaniel Stampley, but I saw Benjamin Howes).

Talking about the choice of play, Father Kenny tells Alfie: “I went to the archbishop myself.” “‘Don’t put him out,’ I said. ‘That little theater is a holy place to Alfie Byrne. He loves Saint Imelda’s the same way some men love women.” Alfie, who is a bus conductor, replies, “I’m sure he had a fine smirk on him when he heard that one.” Father Kenny answers, “The truth be told: You brought this on yourself, Alfie, no one else did. You should have told me this Salome was a dirty play.” Alfie retorts, “It’s not. It’s art, Father, art!”

Father Kenny’s analogy will resonate later when Alfie brings up “the love that dare not speak its name” with an apparition of Oscar Wilde himself.

Characters hang out in the back as the action happens out in front at Classic Stage (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

In a rousing first musical number, we meet the rest of the cast on the bus driven by Robbie Fay (A. J. Shively), including Mr. Carney the butcher (Thom Sesma), mother-of-nine Mrs. Curtain (Kara Mikula) former all-Ireland gymnast Ernie Lally (Joel Waggoner), Peter Pan portrayer Miss Oona Crowe (Alma Cuervo), onetime Saint Joan star Mrs. Grace (usually played by Mary Beth Peil but I saw Beth Kirkpatrick), acting newbie and temporary church janitor Peter Linehan (Da’Von T. Moody), Sodality stalwart Mrs. Patrick (Jessica Tyler Wright), and stage manager Baldy O’Shea (William Youmans).

Everything stops when a fresh face boards the bus, the young, shy, and beautiful Adele Rice (Shereen Ahmed), a country lass arriving from Roscommon; she especially captures the attention of Alfie, who instantly decides she must play Salome, a casting choice that takes a lot of convincing, as Adele has never acted before and appears to be escaping a past she prefers not to discuss.

Alfie lives with his sister, the matronly Lily (Mare Winningham), who is being courted by Mr. Carney. But she refuses to settle down with a man until Alfie weds. When Alfie tells her about Adele, Lily erupts with happiness, singing, “The girls at Sodality / Call me a martyr / But that’ll be all in the past / Now heaven has lifted / The burden of life: / And has brought you a sweetie at last! / Oh . . . / You had better propose to her fast!” Little does Lily know but Alfie has his heart set on someone very different.

As opening night approaches, the revelation of deep-held secrets threatens the production and various characters’ personal lives.

Several actors also play instruments in A Man of No Importance (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

A Man of No Importance features a terrific book by Terrence McNally, who wrote several plays about theater making, including It’s Only a Play, And Away We Go, and Golden Age. McNally captures just the right impression of amateur theatrics, focusing on people for whom theater might not be central to their lives but absolutely necessary.

Composer Stephen Flaherty and lyricist Lynn Ahrens, who have previously collaborated on such musicals as Once on This Island, Anastasia, and Ragtime, contribute lovely songs that celebrate theater (“Going Up” “First Rehearsal”), examine everyday Irish life (“The Streets of Dublin,” “Princess”), and delve into the power, and intolerance, of religion (“Books,” “Our Father,” “Confession”). The unerlying theme is professed by Alfie in “Love Who You Love.”

The score, orchestrated by Bruce Coughlin, is performed by conductor Caleb Hoyer on keyboards, Michael Blanco on bass, Justin Rothberg on guitars and mandolins, and Tereasa Payne on flutes, Irish flutes, recorders, and pennywhistles, playing at the back of the stage balcony; they are joined by many of the actors on acoustic guitar, accordion, violin, drum head (which also double as plates of invisible food), and other instruments on Doyle’s thrust set, where the cast constantly rearranges chairs and other furniture as the story moves from the church and the bus to a bar and a kitchen. At times it is like Doyle is navigating everyone in an adult version of musical chairs.

Parsons is an exceptionally warm and amiable actor, whether he is playing a man throwing a snarky gay party in The Boys in the Band, a gentle soul living in his own alternate reality in Harvey, or the Supreme Being himself in An Act of God. His natural demeanor is so appealing in A Man of No Importance — which debuted at Lincoln Center in 2002 with Roger Rees as Alfie, based on the 1994 film starring Albert Finney — that you want to be his friend, even giving him a break when he occasionally loses his Irish accent. Throughout the show, several actors go into the audience, taking a seat, walking up the aisle, or hanging out in a landing; I was actually disappointed when Alfie did not come up to my row, but I did get a close-up look at Moody and his guitar.

Although all casts attempt to achieve this, this one feels like an inclusive family, with Oscar/Tony nominee and Emmy winner Winningham and Tony nominee Shively standing out; at the talkback, a half dozen of the other actors spoke about how well they were getting along and that Parsons might be the star but he insists on being treated just like everyone else. Saying goodbye to CSC, Doyle makes the audience feel that they’re all part of something important as well.

KPOP

The flashy KPOP is closing early on Broadway (photo by Matthew Murphy & Evan Zimmerman)

KPOP
Circle in the Square Theatre
1633 Broadway at 50th St.
Through December 11
kpopbroadway.com

On Saturday night, December 3, I was at Circle in the Square, watching KPOP. I had loved Ars Nova’s 2017 immersive production at A.R.T./New York and was looking forward to the Broadway incarnation. Alas, lightning did not strike twice.

I was supremely disappointed in the revised book, which eschewed most of the behind-the-scenes drama and the progression of the plot — in the original, small groups of audience members were led through a series of rooms in which the action played out, exploring how K-pop stars are made through vocal and dance lessons, press training, makeup, and costumes, following along as a South Korean record company prepares for its major introduction to the US market. Instead, the new version concentrates on big, glittering production numbers centered around a white filmmaker documenting the rehearsals. The central creative team has not changed — the book is by Jason Kim, with music and lyrics by Helen Park and Max Vernon, music production and arrangements by Park, choreography by Jennifer Weber, and direction by Teddy Bergman. But the feeling has.

While I sat in my seat, missing all the nuance of the original story, the soul of which has been sucked dry, I looked around at the Saturday night crowd, nearly all of whom were having a great time. At Circle in the Square, the audience sits on three sides of the thrust stage, and the lighting is so bright that you can see everyone in the theater. Aside from a few pockets of empty seats in the upper corners, the house was packed, and nearly everyone was eating up every minute of the show; a colleague of mine had a huge smile on his face throughout the two hours and ten minutes (with intermission); he emailed me afterward to say that he “fucking loved” it. (Another colleague of mine said that the night he went, there was an embarrassing amount of empty seats.) People were dancing in their seats, clapping along, eyes sparkling wide at Clint Ramos and Sophia Choi’s dazzling costumes, Jiyoun Chang’s flashy, colorful lighting, Peter Fitzgerald and Andrew Keister’s propulsive sound design, and Peter Nigrini’s constant barrage of cool projections on Gabriel Hainer Evansohn’s set, which includes a mobile platform, video monitors with live footage from multiple angles, and a stage lift with a trap door where a character’s past is explored.

So the last thing I expected was, a few days later, to find out that the show was closing extremely early, on December 11, a mere three weeks after opening, having played forty-four previews and only seventeen performances.

KPOP found itself mired in controversy when Jesse Green used some highly questionable language in his negative New York Times review, leading to the producers of the show and several cast members to take to social media, demanding an apology.

Real-life K-pop star Luna takes center stage at Circle in the Square (photo by Matthew Murphy & Evan Zimmerman)

But was that enough to lead to the surprising closing notice? Plenty of Broadway musicals survive bad reviews and thrive, sometimes for years. Was there not enough interest in K-pop, the music phenomenon that has given rise to such groups as BTS, Blackpink, and Monsta X, who play well-attended concerts around the country? KPOP tries to capitalize on that success, following the fictional girl group RTMIS (pronounced like “Artemis,” featuring its young female stars often posing as if shooting a bow and arrow) and the boy band F8 (“Fate”), a mixed bunch of young men dealing with a new member hogging the spotlight and accused of not being Korean enough. The fictional label’s star, MwE, wants to move away from her highly stylized image and be more real — maybe even become a singer-songwriter (gasp!) — and is portrayed by Luna, an actual Korean pop star who was in the hugely popular troupe f(x).

Even though it’s my job to critique theater, I don’t take pleasure when poorly reviewed shows close, even one that has spurred such nicknames as OKpop, KPOOP, and KFLOP. It might not be to my taste, but a whole lotta people were having a great time the night I was at Circle in the Square, and the audience was far more varied than the usual Broadway crowd, which is a good thing.

I just hope this experience doesn’t sour producers from taking chances on shows that bring a more wide-ranging diversity onstage and in the seats.

I called the original “an awesome journey into music making, promotion, assimilation, the desire for fame, and more,” pointing out, “Early on, Jerry [a marketing expert not in the Broadway production] explains that the mission of his agency ‘is to launch rockets into American markets.’”

Unfortunately, this rocket barely lifted off the ground.

THE RAT TRAP

Sheila Brandreth (Sarin Monae West) and Keld Maxwell (James Evans) toast to their upcoming marriage in Mint production of Noël Coward’s The Rat Trap (photo © Todd Cerveris)

THE RAT TRAP
New York City Center Stage II
131 West 55th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 10, $45-$90
minttheater.org
nycitycenter.org

There’s a reason why Noël Coward’s first “serious play,” The Rat Trap, has never before been performed in the United States: It’s not all that good. In fact, not even the Mint, the finest purveyors of lost and forgotten theater, can save the drawing-room comedy of manners in its sharp production running at City Center’s Stage II through December 10.

“For years I have mourned the fact that The Rat Trap never saw the light of day,” Coward wrote in 1924’s Three Plays, consisting of The Rat Trap and the more successful Fallen Angels and The Vortex. “But now the time for it is past, the sterling merits I saw in it when it was first written in 1920 have faded.” Coward wrote the play when he was eighteen, reportedly for Meggie Albanesi, who died in December 1923 from the aftereffects of a botched abortion.

Coward didn’t attend the play’s 1926 debut in London; he wrote in his 1937 autobiography, Present Indicative, “In spite of the effulgence of the cast, the play fizzled out at the end of its regulation two weeks. I was not particularly depressed about this; The Rat Trap was a dead love.” He particularly called out the big scene in the last act, which “made me shudder, nostalgically, but with definite embarrassment. It was neither good enough nor bad enough to merit a West-End run, and it was perhaps a mistake to have allowed it to be produced at all; however no harm was done, and I am sure that it was admirable exercise for the actors.”

It is indeed admirable exercise for the splendid Mint actors and director Alexander Lass, but the story grows quickly tedious. It begins in Olive Lloyd-Kennedy’s (Elisabeth Gray) apartment in West Kensington, where she lives with young writer Sheila Brandreth (Sarin Monae West), who is about to marry burgeoning playwright Keld Maxwell (James Evans). Olive is not a fan of the wedding ritual; she tells Sheila and Keld, “Marriage nowadays is nothing but a temporary refuge for those who are uncomfortable at home.”

Olive has invited over another couple, the decadent author Naomi Frith-Bassington (Heloise Lowenthal) and the would-be poet Edmund Crowe (Ramzi Khalaf), Bohemian lovers who refuse to get married because that would be too conventional. “Miss Brandreth, how courageous it is of you to marry! I should never dare,” Naomi says. “Edmund and I realise the value of love, perhaps better than anyone; it seems sacrilege to fetter it down with chains of matrimony.”

Naomi (Heloise Lowenthal) and Ruby (Claire Saunders) share a moment as Edmund (Ramzi Khalaf) looks on in The Rat Trap (photo © Todd Cerveris)

Six months after their marriage, Sheila and Keld are living in their house in Belgravia, she working on her next book in her bedroom, he on his play in the far more comfortable study. There are already signs of strain as they argue over a pencil and the value of their ornery maid, Burrage (Cynthia Mace). Sheila tells Keld, “I mean to discover what the trouble is; it’s getting on my nerves terribly, so it is on yours. We’re not being happy together, Keld, we’re not being happy together. Don’t you realise it — isn’t it awful?” He unconvincingly tries to push it aside and declare it’s all “trivialities,” but when his play is an instant hit and he is spending more time with one of the stars, the ambitious ingénue Ruby Raymond (Claire Saunders), trouble is not far off.

The Rat Trap is impeccably rendered by director Alexander Lass (in his New York debut) on Vicki Davis’s ever-changing set, as stagehands move around furniture between scenes and a yellow semicircular curtain occasionally opens in the back to introduce a larger space. Hunter Kaczorowski’s period costumes capture the era, and the lighting, by Christian DeAngelis, and the sound, by Bill Toles, are meticulous and precise, as always with the Mint. And the cast is excellent, particularly West (The Skin of Our Teeth, Merry Wives) as Sheila, her initially dreamy eyes turning sour over time; Khalaf as Edmund, who makes what he believes to be profound statements that get no reaction from the others; and Mace as Burrage, whose displeasure with her life is apparent in her every word and move.

The problem is that The Rat Trap is very much an early play by a writer still sowing his oats; Coward would go on to pen Private Lives, Cavalcade, Design for Living, Present Laughter, and Blithe Spirit, all within a spectacular twelve-year span from 1929 to 1941. While impressive for a teenager, The Rat Trap ultimately falls apart as Coward drifts into melodrama with soap-opera twists and turns. A late revelation actually made my jaw drop and my face wince.

Sharing yet another rave review of his aptly titled play Stress, Coward’s protagonist Keld, a kind of stand-in for the author himself, reads: “‘There was none of that forced appreciation one generally sees at first nights nowadays; the debonair author made a witty speech in response to the ecstatic calls for him. He should indeed be proud of a really great achievement. . . .” In this case, Coward’s own really great achievements lay in the future, with at least one clunker to help pave the way.

THE GETT

Ball (Ben Edelman) and Ida’s (Liba Vaynberg) relationship kicks off in an elevator in The Gett (photo by Bronwen Sharp)

THE GETT
Rattlestick Playwrights Theater
224 Waverly Pl.
Wednesday – Monday through December 11, $45
www.rattlestick.org

When was the last time you saw a new show that was accompanied by a sixty-three-page dramaturgy packet? You’ll find one for The Gett, an offbeat, extremely clever — almost too much so for its own good — and ultimately satisfying play in which a young woman imagines her relationship with men through the lens of the creation of the world.

The ninety-minute work, written by and starring the charming Liba Vaynberg and continuing at the Rattlestick through December 11, is divided into seven sections that essentially follow the biblical seven-day creation story. Vaynberg, in a modest wedding dress, takes the stage, holding up a sheet of parchment, explaining what a gett is. “The gett is technically just an old religious document of divorce,” she says. “An old text on a piece of paper / That needs a rewrite — / Revision / Re-creation.”

Vaynberg is Ida — pronounced EE-dah, not eye-dah like my own grandmother, who had unique, freethinking views about a woman’s sexuality. Ida tells us, “Six thousand years ago I fell in love with a man. / I mean, sometimes it feels like a week ago. / Depends on when you ask me. And how.” She also sets up one of the play’s key themes when she says, “None of this is real. Or true. / It’s just what I believe.” The Gett is about faith — in G-d and religion, in family, in love, and, perhaps most important, in oneself.

On her way to a Christmas party at her friend Lilah’s apartment on the twenty-third floor, Ida, a poet who works in a library, gets stuck in an elevator with Baal (Ben Edelman), a tall, lanky man who is also going to the fête, bringing Chinese food. Vaynberg has painstakingly made nearly every single detail of the play relevant, every name, every prop, every number, nearly all of which are pointed out in the dramaturgy packet.

Ida means “witness” in Hebrew and has a numerological value of two; a gett would make a couple into a pair of ones. Baal means “husband,” “owner,” “false, violent god,” or “slavemaster” in Hebrew, is the name of the Canaanite god of fertility, and evokes the Baal Shem Tov, the eighteenth-century Ukrainian rabbi, mystic, and healer who founded Hasidic Judaism and whose name means “Master of the Good Name”; just as human beings cannot know or pronounce the full name of G-d, Baal, who is a magician and inventor, says to Ida, “I have a weird name no one can pronounce.” The floor number conjures Psalm 23, which includes the lines “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. . . . He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.” Lilah, derived from Delilah, the Philistine beauty who betrayed Samson, has been interpreted to be the angel of conception and the opposite of Lilith, Adam’s first wife (and Baal’s second wife in the play). And Baal and Ida meet on Christmas Day, celebrated as the day Jesus Christ was born.

Ida’s mother (Jennifer Westfeldt) chats away on the phone throughout new play (photo by Bronwen Sharp)

As Ida meets with a divorce attorney and starts dating other men (all unnamed, all played by Luis Vega with different accents), Baal occasionally watches from the corners, an all-seeing figure hovering over her life. During one of her dates, Baal appears in her mind, magically pulling a condom for her out of thin air, then making it disappear. (Alexander Boyce serves as magic consultant.) Baal later shows up for real, asking Ida to give him a gett.

Meanwhile, Ida’s mother (Jennifer Westfeldt) incessantly calls her daughter, leaving long, gossipy messages when Ida doesn’t pick up, going on and on about Ida’s future, how friends’ kids are doing, and how her father has taken up kabbalah, the esoteric discipline involving mysticism. In a script note, Vaynberg explains about Mama, “No Jewish woman is complete without her.” We never see the father, as Judaism is a matriarchal religion, passed through the mother. “It’s never too early to procreate. No one thinks produce is going bad in the fridge,” Mama says. “I can say these things; I’m your mother.” Ida is petrified when her mother tells her to go to a sex store and find out where her G-spot is, then discusses some of the sexual role-playing she and Ida’s father engage in, things no child should know about their parents. But Jewish mothers have no boundaries.

Vaynberg (Scheiss Book, The Oxford Comma) has no boundaries as well, and that’s one of the elements that makes The Gett so successful. She is immediately likable as Ida; it’s impossible not to root for her even when she goes off track. Director Daniella Topol (Novenas for a Lost Hospital, Ironbound) smooths out some of the rough edges, but the narrative is still too choppy. The set, anchored by a screen of what looks like vertical filmstrips that open up to reveal other spaces (an elevator, a living room, a lawyer’s office), is by Misha Kachman, with costumes by Johanna Pan, lighting by Paul Whitaker, and extensive sound effects by Megumi Katayama.

Edelman (The Chosen, Admissions) is a fine foil as Baal, Vega (The Underlying Chris, Change Agent) effectively portrays a series of non-Jews, and Tony nominee Westfeldt (Wonderful Town, Kissing Jessica Stein) has a field day as Ida’s mother, who I can practically still hear chatting away on the phone.

Like Ida’s mother’s phone messages, Vaynberg can get caught up in trivialities, but the majority of the story is delightfully appealing and relatable whether you’re Jewish or not, exploring universal truths about family, faith, and love. You might not believe in religion, and rituals might not be your thing, but you will leave the theater believing in Vaynberg.