this week in theater

THE SEVEN YEAR DISAPPEAR

Taylor Trensch and Cynthia Nixon star in The Seven Year Disappear at the Signature (photo by Monique Carboni)

THE SEVEN YEAR DISAPPEAR
The New Group at the Pershing Square Signature Center
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through March 31, $37-$72
thenewgroup.org

I’m a performance art junkie. Throw in some inventive video and I’m even more hooked. But not even those two elements could save me from the train wreck that is The Seven Year Disappear.

As the audience enters the Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre at the Pershing Square Signature Center for the New Group world premiere of Jordan Seavey’s play, Cynthia Nixon and Taylor Trensch are silently but intently staring at each other from opposite sides of a long table, wearing dark, militaryesque jumpsuits, surrounded by more than half a dozen monitors. A timeline crawl goes from 2009 to 2016 with such words as “Thanksgiving,” “Return,” “Art Basel,” and “MoMA.” It quickly becomes clear that they are re-creating Marina Abramović’s durational performance The Artist Is Present, which debuted at the Museum of Modern Art in 2010 and was documented in a 2012 film.

I visited Abramović’s MoMA show, which re-created many of her most famous pieces along with various video projects, several times. I saw her unique theatrical production, The Life and Death of Marina Abramović, at Park Avenue Armory in 2013. I experienced her gallery show “Generator,” in which visitors had to put on blindfolds and noise-canceling headphones.

But my Abramović obsession pales in comparison to Miriam’s in The Seven Year Disappear.

Miriam (Cynthia Nixon) is a performance artist whose work exists in the shadow of Abramović’s worldwide popularity. It’s 2009, and she’s furious that her rival has just received a major commission from the Whitney. “She’s such a fucking hypocrite,” Miriam tells her twenty-three-year-old son, Naphtali (Taylor Trensch). “I love Marina, she’s a friend . . . But God, this makes me so fucking mad.”

She rails against Abramović’s 2005 presentation of “Seven Easy Pieces” at the Guggenheim, arguing, “Re-creating seven famous performance pieces over seven nights, seven hours each night — how original!” Naphtali says, “Well — two of them were her own,” to which Miriam replies, “And five of them were not. ‘Seven Easy Pieces’ . . . yeah, art is easy when you just copy it.”

When Naphtali tells his mother that MoMA is going to commission a new work from her, Miriam is overjoyed. “I never liked the Whitney anyway,” she says. “Let them have Marina.”

New Group world premiere is its own performance art piece (photo by Monique Carboni)

Abramović doesn’t have any children, so Miriam has incorporated Naphtali into much of her work, perhaps as a kind of dig. (An epigraph in the script quotes Abramović: “I had three abortions because I was certain that [having a child] would be a disaster for my work. One only has limited energy in the body, and I would have had to divide it.”) For the MoMA piece, Naphtali will again be part of it, whether he wants to or not; Miriam has decided to disappear for seven years and seven months, without telling a soul where she will be or what she’ll be doing. Attempting to top Abramović, in this case the artist will not be present.

For ninety-five minutes, the narrative goes back and forth between 2009 and 2016, as Naphtali, who is a gay addict, meets with seven characters, all played by Nixon in different accents (and/or adding a small prop like glasses), from Miriam’s agent, Wolfgang, and MoMA curator Brayden to teenage manicurist Kaitlyn, private detective Nicole, and Tomás, who works with Naphtali on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Claiming that Naphtali is obsessed with Clinton, Tomás warns him, “She’s not your mom, ya know.”

Performance art is, by its very nature, conceptual and nonnarrative; theater, even the most experimental type, requires some form of storytelling, no matter how abstract or opaque.

In The Seven Year Disappear, Seavey (Homos, or Everyone in America; The Funny Pain) and director Scott Elliott (The Seagull/Woodstock, NY; Mercury Fur) try to have it both ways, and it fails miserably.

I remember eagerly walking through “The Artist Is Present,” a well-curated, well-designed exhibit that provided viewers a chance to breathe while experiencing the numerous, often participatory works. The Seven Year Disappear is an overstuffed muddle, throwing everything it can at the audience, which often doesn’t know where to look as live projections fight for attention with the two actors, who seem trapped by Qween Jean’s costumes and who occasionally bring out microphones for mostly unknown reasons. The set is by the usually innovative Derek McLane, with lighting by Jeff Croiter, sound by Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen, and projections by John Narun that contribute to the confusion.

Early on, Trensch (Camelot, Hello, Dolly!) and Nixon (Rabbit Hole, The Little Foxes) rest at the front of the stage, their legs dangling over the lip, intimately connecting with the audience. But it’s not long before it all turns icy as Naphtali grows cold and distant, overwhelmed by a barrage of Lifetime-esque personal problems, and Nixon gets lost in a flurry of annoying characters doing annoying things in a hard-to-follow back-and-forth timeline.

I never got the opportunity to sit and stare with Abramović at MoMA, but, while watching The Seven Year Disappear, all too often I found myself staring in disbelief at her fictional archrival, which is not at all the same thing.

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

I LOVE YOU SO MUCH I COULD DIE

Mona Pirnot sits with her back to the audience throughout I Love You So Much I Could Die (photo by Jenny Anderson)

I LOVE YOU SO MUCH I COULD DIE
New York Theatre Workshop
79 East Fourth St. between Second & Third Aves.
Monday – Saturday through March 9, $65-$75
www.nytw.org

Almost forty years ago, I composed a eulogy for my father’s funeral but was unable to read it because I was too distraught; instead, one of my best friends read it for me. So I understand why Mona Pirnot performs her solo show, I Love You So Much I Could Die, about a family tragedy with her back to the audience and has a Microsoft text-to-speech tool read her story, interspersed with five songs she sings with an acoustic guitar without turning around. However, I’m not convinced that it’s the best way to share this specific narrative, which doesn’t live up to the technical aspects of the production.

The play starts with Pirnot walking down one of the aisles and onto Mimi Lien’s spare set, where she takes a seat on a ladderback chair at a folding table with a laptop, a water bottle, a microphone, and a lamp; a floor speaker and monitor are nearby. She opens the computer and pushes the space bar; a disconcerting, disembodied male AI voice begins, “I’ve been trying out different support groups. It has not been going well. I can’t seem to find the right group for me. And everything is on zoom. Which makes everything sadder than it already was. And everything was already sad.” The voice adds a moment later, “[The leader] asked if I wanted to share first. I did not. But I said okay. I shared my story and when I was done, the guy was like, oh my god that’s awful. And I was like, yep. And he was like, oh my god. And I was like . . . yeah.”

As the voice recites the text, audience members with sharp eyesight can follow along as each word is highlighted on the screen as it’s spoken, reminiscent of karaoke, especially when the amateur warbler might be a bit tipsy and/or tone deaf. The delivery is bumpy, with unexpected pauses and mispronunciations, particularly involving the name Shia LaBeouf.

Pirnot, wearing a comfortable jumpsuit (the costume is by Enver Chakartash), stops the program five times to perform melancholic songs, including “happy birthday whatever who cares,” “good time girl,” and “Home to You.” The tunes are slow, mournful, and self-deprecating; she introduces “good time girl” by explaining it is much better with a hardcore electric guitar solo, which she instead will perform with her mouth, and proceeds to sing, “I fell back into that hole I forgot was there / My ride drove off and left me in the middle of nowhere / mmm I’m gone / Don’t even know where I went.”

The story also goes back ten years, when Pirnot first met a playwright who “would later become quite famous. As famous as a playwright can get ha ha if playwrights can ever really get famous.” Although she never mentions him by name, it is the man she would eventually marry, Lucas Hnath, who has written such plays as Red Speedo, The Christians, A Doll’s House Part 2, and The Thin Place. Hnath is the director of I Love You So Much I Could Die and has noted in interviews that one of the reasons he opted for Pirnot to sit with her back to the audience because that is how he saw her when she was writing the piece. For added intimacy, the lamp on the table is from their home.

I Love You So Much I Could Die is part of an unofficial trilogy (with maybe more to come?) in which Hnath explores unique methods to tell stories using old and new sound technology in one-person shows. In Dana H., Deirdre O’Connell won a Tony without speaking a word, instead lip-synching to an interview Hnath’s mother gave about her abduction by a member of the Aryan Brotherhood. In A Simulacram, actor, magician, and illusion designer Steve Cuiffo discusses his life and career by using an in-ear device to communicate live with a cassette recording of Hnath, re-creating exact conversations they had over the course of more than fifty hours of workshopping.

Dana H. and A Simulacram were both fascinating plays with compelling, entertaining stories to tell; unfortunately, I Love You So Much I Could Die falls short in that respect. Perhaps Hnath is too close to this one; the play might be a great way for Pirnot (Private, the world is full on) to deal with her personal situation, but it’s not an unusual one, even though she does not give specific details of what happened. In addition, the final section feels manipulative, tossed in to elicit a last surge of emotional melodrama.

While the AI’s voice is clear and crisp, it is often difficult to make out everything Pirnot is singing in her slow, eerily quiet tunes. (The sound design is by Mikhail Fiksel, with music direction by Will Butler.) Throughout the play’s sixty-five minutes, Oona Curley’s lighting dims nearly imperceptibly throughout the theater, ending in complete darkness.

I was hoping that at the conclusion, Pirnot would get off the chair and make her way to the door at the back left of the theater, never showing herself to the audience, but instead she turned around and smiled as she bowed. It’s not that didn’t deserve applause, but I thought it was a lost opportunity to add a special coda to this very private play.

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

PUBLIC OBSCENITIES

Jakeem Dante Powell (Raheem) and Abrar Haque (Choton) uncover a family secret in Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s Public Obscenities (photo by Hollis King)

PUBLIC OBSCENITIES
Theatre for a New Audience, Polonsky Shakespeare Center
262 Ashland Pl. between Lafayette Ave. & Fulton St.
Tuesday – Sunday through February 25, $97-$132
866-811-4111
www.tfana.org

Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s bilingual Public Obscenities is the surprise hit of the season. Following its sold-out run at Soho Rep, it moved to Theatre for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center, where it’s been extended through February 25.

Writer-director Chowdhury immerses the audience in Indian culture from the very beginning, as commercials for Indian products are projected onto a large screen like ads before a movie. Behind the screen is Peiyi Wong’s set, the interior of a house in South Kolkata with a mattress on the floor to the left, a refrigerator in the back, a table and chairs at the right, and a curtained-off kitchen (one character calls it “a mausoleum”); you can almost smell the Indian spices simmering throughout the family drama.

Choton (Abrar Haque), a Bengali American PhD student, has returned to South Kolkata with his boyfriend, Raheem (Jakeem Dante Powell), a Black cinematographer from America. They are staying with Choton’s aunt Pishimoni (Gargi Muhkerjee) and uncle Pishe (Debashis Roy Chowdhury), who are caring for Choton’s ailing, bedridden paternal grandmother, Thammi; Jitesh (Golam Sarwar Harun) runs the household and cares for Thammi. Looming over everything is a stern-looking portrait of Choton’s late grandfather, Dadu.

Choton is in Kolkata because he is applying for a dissertation fellowship at the University of Chicago. He’s working on a queer archiving project, planning to interview people he finds over Grindr, eventually meeting with Tashnuva Anan (Shou), who is kothi, and Sebanti (NaFis), who is hijra, two types of nonbinary and/or transgender identities in India. Meanwhile, Pishe is secretly chatting with a much younger single mother who lives in Minnesota.

Acknowledging Raheem’s interest in photography, Pishimoni asks Jitesh to show Raheem an old Rolleicord camera owned by Dadu. Raheem notices that there is still film in the camera, and when they examine it, they make a shocking discovery.

Pishimoni (Gargi Muhkerjee) makes a point to Raheem (Jakeem Dante Powell) in Public Obscenities (photo by Hollis King)

The Soho Rep and NAATCO National Partnership Project’s production of Public Obscenities, copresented by TFANA and Woolly Mammoth, might be three hours long (including intermission), but it flies by; Chowdhury makes the audience feel like it’s part of the family, even when the Hindi is not translated into English.

The intergenerational drama not only smartly explores gender identity and sexual orientation but uses technology to advance the plot and define the characters. Choton has trouble operating Raheem’s camera on his own. Raheem uses the sixty-year-old Rolleicord to show us Thammi, while we see Choton’s father only over FaceTime. Old printed-out photos reveal another side of Dadu. Meanwhile, Johnny Moreno’s cinematic projections move the action from the house to a riverbank, and one scene plays out as a prerecorded film.

The ensemble is terrific, led by Haque in his impressive New York City debut, Muhkerjee (Women on Fire: Stories from the Frontlines, The Namesake) as the inquisitive Pishimoni, Harun (Marat-Sade, Mrichchakatikam) providing occasional comedy as Jitesh, and Anan, who is a revelation as Shou. Enver Chakartash’s costumes, Barbara Samuels’s lighting, and Tei Blow’s sound, which includes outdoor nature tones echoing through the theater, further immerses the audience into Indian culture.

Public Obscenities moved from Soho Rep to TFANA as part of the Under the Radar festival, but the secret is out; the show is no longer flying under the radar.

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

SUNSET BABY

Nina (Moses Ingram) and her father, Kenyatta (Russell Hornsby), meet for the first time in years in Sunset Baby (photo by Marc J. Franklin)

SUNSET BABY
The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 10, $49-$119
212-244-7529
signaturetheatre.org

“History is bullshit. Only thing matters is the present. The past don’t do a damn thing but keep you chokin’ on bad memories,” Damon (J. Alphonse Nicholson) says in Steve H. Broadnax III’s blistering revival of Dominique Morisseau’s Sunset Baby at the Signature.

Family legacy is at the heart of the play, which debuted in 2013 from the LAByrinth Theater Company. It’s the early 2000s in East New York, where Nina (Moses Ingram), teaming up with Damon, dresses up like a street hooker to sell drugs and steal from people. Nina’s mother, 1960s radical civil rights activist Ashanti X, has died, leaving behind a stack of love letters she wrote but never sent to Nina’s father, Kenyatta Shakur (Russell Hornsby), while he was in prison. Academics, publishing companies, and the press are after the letters and are willing to pay good money for them, but then Kenyatta shows up at his daughter’s doorstep, claiming he just wants to read them.

Nina, who was named after singer, composer, and activist Nina Simone, doesn’t trust this man, whom she considers a stranger; they haven’t seen each other in decades since he left. But Damon, always on the lookout for a deal, is interested in hearing what Kenyatta has to offer.

Several times during the play, Kenyatta stands alone, making a camcorder video that is projected on three screens. (The stark projections are by Katherine Freer.) In the first one, he essentially introduces the topics that the story will touch on. He says, “Fatherhood. Complex. Complicated. An abstract concept. Not clearly definable. Stages. For sure there are stages. Levels of its affectiveness. Affectionless. Manhood. Confusion. Preparedness. Lack of preparation. Funding. Resources. Instructions. No instructions. Child support. Life being run by child support. Drama. Suffocation. Lots of suffocation. Guilt. Lots of guilt. Incompetency. Freedom. Freedom lost. Freedom never acquired. Fear. Lots of fear. Decades and decades of fear. Lifetime of fear. Lifetime of fear. Fear. Fear.”

Damon praises Kenyatta’s activist past and sees the two of them as somewhat similar, telling him, “The fuck-the-government, disrupt capitalism, develop-our-own-economy type shit. I’m with it. Believe in that cause myself. My line of work is a little different, but same principles.”

Damon has a son of his own with another woman; the relationship is one of potential abandonment, echoing Kenyatta’s abandonment of Nina. “When a man wants to spend time with his child, shouldn’t be not a goddamn thing that gets in his way,” she tells Damon. She dreams of saving enough money to leave New York City for Europe, and Damon seems ready to go anywhere with her, thinking they are an inseparable Bonnie and Clyde. But nothing for Nina has ever been easy.

Nina (Moses Ingram) and Damon (J. Alphonse Nicholson) make plans for a better life in Signature revival (photo by Marc J. Franklin)

Sunset Baby recalls Suzan-Lori Parks’s 2001 Pulitzer Prize–winning Topdog/Underdog, in which two brothers contemplate their fate in their cramped, tiny apartment in a rooming house, one a petty thief, the other a bluesman portraying Abraham Lincoln at an arcade, both holding on to a small inheritance their mother left them. Nina lives in a tiny, cluttered studio apartment with decaying walls and the bathroom down the hall; however, where Arnulfo Maldonado’s set for the recent Broadway revival of Topdog/Underdog was claustrophobic, penning the characters in like a kind of prison, Wilson Chin’s set for Sunset Baby is more open, suggesting that Nina may be able to escape and seize the freedom she so desires. Emilio Sosa’s costumes delineate Nina from the two men in her life; Kenyatta and Damon wear ordinary, everyday jeans, shirts, and jackets, while Nina puts on glittery and shiny red and blue tight-fitting outfits, fancy boots, and any of a number of long wigs, only occasionally relaxing on her couch without all the glitz of the street.

Songs by Simone, who died in 2003 at the age of seventy, are scattered throughout the show, including “Love Me or Leave Me” (“My baby don’t care for shows / My baby don’t care for clothes / My baby just cares for me”), “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” (“I’m just a soul whose intentions are good / Oh, Lord, please, don’t let me be misunderstood”), and “Feeling Good” (“Stars when you shine, you know how I feel / Scent of the pine, you know how I feel / Oh, freedom is mine / And I know how I feel”), the tunes moving from the background to the foreground, lifting through the theater, courtesy of co–sound designers Curtis Craig and Jimmy “J. Keys” Keys.

Kenyatta (Russell Hornsby) tries to explain himself in a series of videos in Dominique Morisseau revival (photo by Marc J. Franklin)

Broadnax III (Thoughts of a Colored Man, The Hot Wing King) lets Morisseau’s (Skeleton Crew, Confederates) rhythmic, potent dialogue sing; words flow out of Nicholson (Paradise Blue, A Soldier’s Play) like music. Hornsby (King Hedley II, Fences) is convincing as the complicated Kenyatta, who always seems to be holding something back. And Emmy nominee Ingram (The Queen’s Gambit, The Tragedy of Macbeth), in her off-Broadway debut, is a powerhouse as Nina, a woman desperate to break free of the legacy that weighs her down.

In a program note, the Detroit-born Morisseau writes that when Sunset Baby debuted at the LAByrinth, it was only her second professionally produced play in New York City, her father was still alive, and she was “not yet a mother. Only a daughter.” But this revival has given her new insight into herself and activist movements, “that they are complex and most people can only understand the trauma from the side they are on, never from the assumed opposition.” She also points out, “My father believed in revolution so much that he espoused it on a daily. Our answering machine message would end with ‘long live the revolution.’ It took many years for me to understand what that meant to him. And then what it meant to me.”

That explanation lends underlying meaning to the relationship between parents and children when Nina declares to Damon, “I don’t need to be part of a revolution. I don’t want a movement or a cause. I don’t want a hustle or no fast money. I want a home. I want somewhere I can walk into my space and not have to look over my shoulder or hold my breath. I want some kids of my own. . . . I wanna sit in the horizon somewhere and watch the sun rise and set. I never even saw a fuckin’ sunset! I am not alive here. I am not alive in this chaos — you hear me? I do not want this shit no more.”

Nina just wants to be understood in a world that insists on defining her, but in Sunset Baby, Morisseau gives her voice and has it rise to the rafters and beyond.

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

DAEL ORLANDERSMITH: SPIRITUS/VIRGIL’S DANCE

Dael Orlandersmith’s Spiritus/Virgil’s Dance is a multimedia journey into fate and destiny (photo © HanJie Chow)

SPIRITUS/VIRGIL’S DANCE
Rattlestick Playwrights Theater
224 Waverly Pl.
Through March 9, $50, 7:00
www.rattlestick.org

In Dante Alighieri’s fourteenth-century epic The Divine Comedy, Publius Virgilius Maro, better known simply as Virgil, shepherds the Italian poet through the “Inferno” and “Purgatory,” two of the three realms of the dead. “Thou follow me, and I will be thy guide, / And lead thee hence through the eternal place, / Where thou shalt hear the desperate lamentations, / Shalt see the ancient spirits disconsolate, / Who cry out each one for the second death,” Virgil, who represents human reason, says to Dante. Virgil (70–19 BCE) was the author of The Aeneid, which tells the story of Trojan War hero and refugee Aeneas’s journey toward his fate and destiny.

In Spiritus/Virgil’s Dance, solo show master Dael Orlandersmith portrays a fictional character named Virgil who takes the audience at the Rattlestick Theater on a sixty-minute multimedia odyssey into death and destiny, fate and fulfillment.

The mood is set early, with such songs as Johnny Cash’s Nine Inch Nails cover “Hurt” and Mavis Staples’s “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” playing as the crowd enters the space, giving it a holy feel. Takeshi Kata’s set features six floor-to-ceiling string-curtained cylinders containing furniture: a chair, a table, a lamp on a stand. We soon learn that each one symbolizes a chapter in Virgil’s own epic narrative as they try to find their place in a world complicated by loss and loneliness.

“Have I done it right?” Virgil asks. “Have I used time — my time — right?” Have any of us?

Virgil wanders from cylinder to cylinder, sharing moments from their past. They grew up in the Bronx, hanging out at Woodlawn Cemetery and going to St. Barnabas. Their parents’ love of music led Virgil to become a deejay at a pirate radio station in the East Village. As the years pass, Virgil realizes they need something more. “I make a decision to make more money / Move to another part of downtown / Because / That must be the answer / Me / Thinking the money / Another place / Has got to be the answer,” they explain, but it takes their mother’s unexpected death and their father’s sudden illness for Virgil to take a long look at their life, significantly influenced by their friendship with funeral director Jimmy McHugh and hospice nurse Peggy Callahan.

Dael Orlandersmith looks at her past and future in beautiful one-person show at Rattlestick (photo © HanJie Chow)

Born in East Harlem, Orlandersmith has been staging one-person dramas, some semiautobiographical, most featuring the playwright performing multiple characters, since 1995’s Beauty’s Daughter, which earned her an Obie. She won the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize in 2003 for Yellowman. More recently, Forever was a deeply intimate show about the severely dysfunctional relationship between a daughter and her alcoholic mother, while Until the Flood explored the tragic story of the killing of Michael Brown at the hands of police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014.

Orlandersmith is masterful in Spiritus/Virgil’s Dance, a beautifully rendered production lovingly directed by Neel Keller, who has been working with Orlandersmith for four decades. As Orlandersmith says at one point in the play, it’s a “celebration of life and death.” She doesn’t make major shifts in tone or body as she switches among the characters, always wearing the same all-black outfit (the costume is by Kaye Voyce) as she walks slowly around the cylinders, which have a heavenly glow (the sensitive lighting is by Mary Louise Geiger), the people they represent prepared for the great beyond. Nicholas Hussong’s projections include leaves blowing in the wind and the subway speeding by, accompanied by Lindsay Jones’s tender original music and sound.

As Virgil discovers their true vocation, it’s like they have been given a giant hug from the universe, something we all seek — and something we all receive from Orlandersmith in this gently, enveloping experience. You’ll leave the theater thinking of the words Peggy shared with Virgil: “Live your life / Live it fully / Do not leave here regretfully.”

Spiritus/Virgil’s Dance continues at Rattlestick through March 9; the March 6 performance will be followed by the discussion “Music Lives On” with Javier Arau, Felice Rosser, Elliot Sharp, and Matt Stapleton.

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

MUNICH MEDEA: HAPPY FAMILY

Caroline (Crystal Finn), Alice (Heather Raffo), and Caroline’s Father (Kurt Rhoads) explore an incident from their past in Munich Medea: Happy Family (photo © Julieta Cervantes)

MUNICH MEDEA: HAPPY FAMILY
WP Theater
2162 Broadway between Seventy-Sixth & Seventy-Seventh Sts.
Through February 25, $30-$100
wptheater.org

An undercurrent of Greek tragedy winds its way through Corinne Jaber’s debut, Munich Medea: Happy Family, a compelling but ultimately unsatisfying drama.

The seventy-five-minute play is told in a series of monologues delivered to the audience by Alice (Heather Raffo), her childhood bestie, Caroline (Crystal Finn), and Caroline’s Father (Kurt Rhoads), a well-known stage actor. They each have their place on Kristen Robinson’s two-level set: Alice stays on the right side, which has a chair and a sink; Caroline is on the left, with a chair and a bench; and Father hovers over them literally and figuratively, his curtained private room in his house above his daughter, his open theater dressing room above Alice. A staircase looms in the back middle, separating all three characters except when Father, who has been sleeping with Alice since the girls were sixteen, comes down.

They all live in Germany, where Father is starring as Jason in a production of Medea, the character who cheats on his wife, their two young children paying the price for his infidelity.

“When I got to the theater the show had already started / I waited / And watched / Jason abandon his wife / And Medea plot on vengeance / Torn by pain, all of them / Too much love, I thought,” Alice says.

Alice initially believes she is a willing participant in the sordid proceedings, while Father is unrepentant: “Why did you tell them about our secrets? Why share things with them that they cannot understand? / Throwing pearls in front of sows / Why tell them what is precious and daring and other? / This otherness that disrupts their little middle-class lives / That scares them / And fascinates them / Why? / When I was here to protect you / To hold on to our stories / To hold on to this world of ours / To not let them tear it apart / We need to shield ourselves from them / We are not like them / We are made from other stock.”

Meanwhile, Caroline recalls her terror of Father, with good reason. She remembers, “My mother would go to bed very early / Once my sister had been put to sleep / My father was at the theater / And when he wasn’t / He was in his room / His sanctuary, as he called it / Locked up / Not to be disturbed / His room next to my room / Far away from my parents’ bedroom / His room where he worked his lines and read / I’d hear him recite / Loud and strange noises / And then go quiet again / I don’t really know what he did in there / I was frightened by the mysterious room / And his presence next to me / Invisible / At eight pm he’d watch the Sportschau / I could always hear the introductory tune of the Sportschau / I hated that tune / It meant that we were alone now / My father with his television and me with my book in bed / Only a wall between us / All I wanted was to be at the other end of the corridor / Where my mother was / In another world / A world of happy family / I still don’t know what that is / Happy family / But it does exist / I know it does.”

Father quotes Friedrich Schiller, Georg Büchner, and Rainer Maria Rilke, cleans his feet as if he is some kind of Jesus, and insists that anyone in his situation would have done the same thing; he defends his love of Alice by using Jason’s words, specifically misogynistic ones at that: “There should be some other way for men to produce children. Women would not have to exist at all. And then humanity would be saved a lot of trouble.”

Twenty years after everything went down, Alice and Caroline meet up again, but they still speak only to the audience and never to each other. Throughout, there is not a single scene in which the characters interact.

Munich Medea: Happy Family is a coproduction of PlayCo and WP Theater, the latter specializing in the work of Women+. The title is misleading; it feels like the play could have been set anywhere, not necessarily in Germany, and the Medea references might make one expect a different kind of ending.

Finn (Birthday Candles, Plano) ably portrays the tightly wound Caroline, Rhoads (Julius Caesar, Off Peak) is appropriately beastly as Father, and Raffo (Noura, 9 Parts of Desire) is riveting as Alice, but Jaber and director Lee Sunday Evans (Oratorio for Living Things, Dance Nation) can’t bring the disparate parts together. Just as the characters never connect onstage, the play never connects with its title or its promise and feels strangely unfulfilled, neither adding to the contemporary dialogue surrounding sexual abuse nor adequately exploring its namesake’s theme of parents killing their children with their own unbridled desire.

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

THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA

Emmy nominee Tim Daly and Tony winner Daphne Rubin-Vega star in new production of The Night of the Iguana (photo by Joan Marcus)

THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA
The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Irene Diamond Stage
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Wednesday-Sunday through February 25, $81-$161
iguanaplaynyc.com

On “Night of the Iguana,” from her last album, 2007’s Shine, Joni Mitchell sings, “The tour bus came yesterday / The driver’s a mess today / It’s a dump of a destiny / But it’s got a view . . . / Now the kid in the see-through blouse / Is moving in hard on his holy vows . . . / Since the preacher’s not dead / Dead drunk will have to do!”

Tennessee Williams’s 1961 play, The Night of the Iguana, has always attracted star power. It began as a 1948 short story, then developed from a one-act to a two-act to a 1961 three-act Tony-nominated play starring Patrick O’Neal, Bette Davis, and Margaret Leighton, followed by a 1964 John Huston film with Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, and Deborah Kerr.

The play is now back in a messy revival at the Signature Center from La Femme Productions that makes it clear why the show has not previously been performed in New York City this century: It’s not very good.

Directed by Emily Mann, the show centers on Rev. Shannon (Tim Daly), a defrocked priest who is now an alcoholic tour guide exhausted with life. It’s the summer of 1940, and he brings his busload of Texas Baptist female schoolteachers to the ramshackle Costa Verde Hotel in Acapulco, run by recent widow Maxine Faulk (Daphne Rubin-Vega), who is more than ready to get back in the action. The leader of the teachers, Judith Fellowes (Lea DeLaria), is angry at the shoddy tour while also trying to keep the teenage Charlotte (Carmen Berkeley) away from Shannon. Also at the hotel are aging poet Jonathan Coffin (Austin Pendleton) and his granddaughter, Hannah (Jean Lichty), who is caring for him; Pedro (Bradley James Tejeda) and Pancho (Dan Teixeira), who work for Maxine; and Frau Fahrenkopf (Alena Acker) and Herr Fahrenkopf (Michael Leigh Cook), a pair of Nazis traipsing around the place. Shannon has the bus keys, so Hank, the bus driver (Eliud Garcia Kauffman), can’t take off without the guide, who might be replaced by his colleague Jake (Keith Randolph Smith).

The Night of the Iguana takes place at a ramshackle Acapulco hotel (photo by Joan Marcus)

It’s a hot and sweaty day, but the play is cold and distant. The actors feel like they’re in different shows, never forming a solid whole. Beowulf Boritt’s invitingly decrepit set is wasted.

The Night of the Iguana came at the end of Williams’s most fertile period, the fifteen years in which he wrote The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Orpheus Descending, Suddenly Last Summer, and Sweet Bird of Youth. It was part of a downward spiral of poorly reviewed and attended shows that still attracted big stars but often had to cut their runs short. The Night of the Iguana is one of those Williams plays that everyone has heard of but does not live up to the hype.

Mitchell’s lines capture it best: “The night is so fragrant / These women so flagrant / They could make him a vagrant / With the flick of a shawl. / The devil’s in sweet sixteen / The widow’s good looking but she gets mean / He’s burning like Augustine / With no help from God at all.”

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