this week in theater

THE ONLY THING MORE POWERFUL THAN HATE IS LOVE: KRAMER/FAUCI AT SKIRBALL

Thomas Jay Ryan, Jennifer Seastone, Will Brill, and Greig Sargeant bring a C-Span discussion to vivid life in Kramer/Fauci (photo by Maria Baranova)

KRAMER/FAUCI
NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts
566 La Guardia Pl.
February 11-21, $60-$90
nyuskirball.org

Daniel Fish again proves his genuine creative genius with the wildly entertaining and unpredictable Kramer/Fauci, running at NYU Skirball through February 21.

On November 30, 1993, C-Span host Steve Scully spoke about the AIDS crisis with Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, and playwright and activist Larry Kramer, author of the novel Faggots and the play The Normal Heart and cofounder of Gay Men’s Health Crisis and ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). For sixty minutes, while Fauci was in the studio with Scully and Kramer was beamed in onscreen from New York City, they discussed government funding, drug research, bigotry, public awareness, and more, in addition to taking phone calls from viewers.

Fish has transformed that visually dry program into an exciting, rich theatrical experience with such unusual elements as a woman on roller skates, a hilarious colorful costume, and a whole lot of bubbles.

As audience members enter the auditorium, six rows of nine lights apiece are blazing from the back of the stage, reminding me of a flag too bright to bear looking at — except for a colleague of mine who had (knowingly?) brought sunglasses. The show starts slowly in the empty space: Scully (Greig Sargeant) sits in the middle in a chair, Dr. Fauci (Will Brill), in a crisp suit, stands closer to the front to Scully’s right, and Kramer (Thomas Jay Ryan), in a turtleneck, hovers against the back wall to Scully’s left. The three begin reciting the exact transcript from the interview, as Scully raises a question about President Clinton’s formation of a new task force. Fauci provides a relatively straightforward bureaucratic response, but Kramer gives a hint of what’s to come when he criticizes the technology C-Span is using — he is unable to see Scully or Fauci but can only hear them, although he complains about the earpiece as well — and says, “This is a task force to identify what the stumbling blocks are, we know what they are: a lot of bureaucracy, a lot of red tape, a lot of stupid laws by Congress, and a lot of idiots, uhhhhhhh, putting their two cents worth, uh uhhh, how are you gonna get rid of all of these things is what I want to know and I have yet to hear a task force form to tell me that.”

After several minutes of physical stasis, Fauci and especially Kramer start moving around the stage as they argue over how recent administrations dealt with AIDS, what the real number of people afflicted with the disease are (and will be), how much money is needed for research, and why more is not being done. When Scully brings up the topic of the AIDS epidemic being normalized, Fauci begins, “Larry and I have had conversations about this many, many times over the years, and I a-appreciate it and in many respects, remire . . . admire the, the rage that he has about a very, very difficult problem. But I think you have to . . .” Kramer cuts him off, proclaiming, “Tony, if you start that business about science isn’t done that way, I’m gonna come on there and slap your face.” Fauci peacefully responds, “Nah . . . nah . . . All right, Larry, hang on for a sec. I love you, Larry . . . Uh . . . The fact is that the real solutions will in fact, come from the science.”

Scully occasionally cuts away to play audio footage of news conferences and to take calls, each of which is delivered by Jennifer Seastone in a few different voices, first riding in circles on roller skates and later donning an oddball costume. (The costumes are by Terese Wadden, with set by Jim Findlay, lighting by Scott Zielinski, and sound by Tei Blow.) Movement director Beth Gill soon has Kramer making his way over to Fauci and the roving callers, hugging one of Skirball’s golden pillars, and approaching the audience. It ranges from absurdly comical to substantially confrontational, all of it fascinating and compelling.

And then, the bubbles.

Expect the unexpected in Daniel Fish’s inventive re-creation of a C-Span program on AIDS (photo by Maria Baranova)

In A (radically condensed and expanded) Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, the New Jersey–born, New York City–based Fish used tennis balls and existing text in a play about the work of Infinite Jest author David Foster Wallace. Fish earned a Tony for his unique staging of Oklahoma!, in which the audience was served chili at intermission. In White Noise, he used bold, giant projections and an actor sitting in a large, dark circle in the middle of a screen to tell part of Don DeLillo’s treatise on consumerism gone mad. And in Elektra, Sophocles’s title character, played by Brie Larson, was a kind of punk goddess spitting out some of Beyoncé’s “Daddy Lessons” while an unexplained blimp floated nearby.

For Kramer/Fauci, the actors wear earpieces that feed them the lines in order to maintain the precise pace and tone of the original program. Tony winner Brill (Stereophonic, Oklahoma!) is cool, calm, and collected as the cool, calm, and collected Fauci, who might not have gained as much fame for his work on AIDS but became a divisive and highly public figure during the Covid-19 pandemic. Two-time Drama Desk Award winner Ryan (Eureka Day, Dance Nation) is sensational as Kramer, a deeply concerned, knowledgeable, and emotional activist who is fed up with the government’s response to what he insists is a plague, not merely an epidemic or crisis.

The play centers on the complex friendship between Fauci and Kramer, who strongly disagree on how to deal with AIDS. It is summed up best in this exchange, which, like everything else, is taken verbatim from the transcript, with every pause and repetition:

Kramer: It’s all of this rhetoric of yours and everybody else in the bureaucracy. You know, I want to say something about, about Tony Fauci because I think the world must think I ha—, I hate him or something the way I’m going on tonight. I love Tony, actually I d—, I think I probably have a more complicated relationship with Tony than anybody in my entire life. He is a man, an ordinary man who was being asked to play God and he is being punished because he cannot be God. And that is a terrible situation to be in to be the lightning rod for all of us. Uhhhh . . . he has had to deal with Reagan and Bush and defend those monsters, for all we know he probably kept the labs open when John Sununu and Gary Bauer, and other awful bigots, probably wanted them closed, and he had to do it at a price, probably uh at a price for his own soul that we’ll never know that that he had to say things that in his heart he never believed. But he is there and he has been the, this this this incredible fighter for us and for AIDS. I just get angry when he puts on this bureaucratic suit and out comes this boilerplate, uhhhhh, that like Donna Shalala said the same, they, all his rhetoric that doesn’t mean anything. Tony, more than anyone in this world, knows how awful everything is, knows what has to be done, knows that he should have been given a lot more money to do it, knows who all these terrible people are, and yet he can never say it in public like I can say it in public.
Scully: Dr. Fauci, let me go back to an earlier question . . .
Kramer: Why don’t you respond to that, Anthony?
Scully: Oh, go ahead, Doctor.
Fauci: I love you, Larry. [Laughs.]

The play is eerily prescient of so much of the ensuing debate about public health. Most of us well remember what happened during Covid-19, when Fauci was at odds with the Trump administration, and today the battle over vaccines rages on with new updates every day, while the LGBTQ community has a growing fight on its hands, about a lot more than just the taking down of a Pride flag. However, Fish doesn’t reference any of that, instead keeping his focus on communicating the drama of this extraordinary debate between two dedicated, extremely intelligent men trying to do what’s best for an ailing population. How he chooses to punctuate and illustrate the power of their conflict with stunning, dumbfounding, and yet somehow near-perfect staging is where his genius lies.

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

EXTINCTION TIME: THE DINOSAURS AT PLAYWRIGHTS HORIZONS

Jacob Perkins’s The Dinosaurs takes place at a basement AA meeting (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

THE DINOSAURS
Playwrights Horizons, the Judith O. Rubin Theater
416 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 8, $83.50 – $103.50
www.playwrightshorizons.org

If I never see another play set entirely at an AA or grief counseling meeting consisting of a group of people sitting on folding chairs near some coffee and donuts, it will be too soon.

Now, it’s not that I’m unsympathetic or lack compassion for people facing real problems, but the format has just been worn down with too many similar shows, particularly since the pandemic.

The topic of addiction can be treated magnificently, as it was in Joe White’s recent Blackout Songs, a scintillating story about a man and a woman who fall in and out of love and lust after meeting at an AA gathering. And spit&vigor’s Anonymous, which is back for a well-deserved encore run in its tiny black-box space on Macdougal St., cleverly immerses the audience in its addictive tale of addiction held in a circle of chairs, some occupied by audience members. In addition, such works as Dave Malloy’s Octet and Bess Wohl’s Liberation practically reinvented the use of the physical arrangement, though neither was about alcoholism.

However, Jacob Perkins’s The Dinosaurs, making its world premiere at Playwrights Horizons through March 1, wastes a terrific cast in a stale, seemingly unfinished production about six women dealing with the disease.

The seventy-five-minute play begins as Jane (April Matthis) enters an empty white room, its black ceiling hung with rows of bright fluorescent lights, a dark alcove in the back with random items. As Jane stands deep in thought, a hesitant, uncomfortable-looking woman named Rayna but known as Buddy (Keilly McQuail) arrives and talks to Jane about how she spills the inside of donuts on her clothing but never gives up the sweet treat. “I guess we just can’t help ourselves,” Jane says. “We always keep on going back for more.” Buddy discusses the etymology of the word “cupcake,” then leaves, apparently not ready for this kind of meeting.

Jane starts bringing out folding chairs from a back room, arranging them in a semicircle. Joan (Elizabeth Marvel) comes in with the coffee and helps with the chairs and table. She checks that the milk has not reached its expiration date. Jane hears chirping that Joan doesn’t. There are numerous such pronouncements throughout that serve as supposed insight.

Next, eighty-year-old Jolly (Kathleen Chalfant) breezes in with a box of donuts and scones, which surprises Jane and Joan, who assumed Jolly would be late and/or forget the snacks. “It must’ve taken you a lifetime,” Joan says, to which Jolly replies, “‘It always takes the time / it needs to take,’” paraphrasing Pulitzer Prize winner Mary Oliver, a poet whose quotes are a favorite of recovering addicts.

They are soon joined by Joane (Maria Elena Ramirez), who gossips about a teenage boy at her son’s school who “bagged an older woman,” and they debate whether charges should be brought. While Jane tries to understand the loneliness that must have made the woman do what she did, Joan argues, “Empathy has its limits.”

At last, Janet (Mallory Portnoy) pops in and the Saturday Survivors meeting officially gets underway, as Jolly recites the preamble, which concludes, “Our primary purpose is to stay sober and help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety.”

The rest of the play awkwardly moves through time and space as the participants make shares that are abruptly cut off, unfinished; Buddy returns, questioning the existence of a higher power, but only Jane can see and hear her; Janet relates a dream she had that is overloaded with obvious symbolism; and Joan recounts in an unwieldy manner a series of sobriety dates she has experienced, a clunky way to point out how addicts can fall on and off the wagon.

A small group of women gossip and share personal stories in The Dinosaurs (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Each time one of the women says, “My name is [—] and I’m an alcoholic,” the others annoyingly shout out the name in unison. Perhaps that is linked to why the five regulars all have names that begin with the same letter, as if they are parts of the same person. (Or maybe not.) They also make plans for the following week’s fifty-second annual anniversary party, the theme of which is gratitude and will feature live performances by several group members.

Hovering over it all is a broken clock on the wall that is perpetually at 2:13, not only representing the importance of time when it comes to recovery but also, perhaps, referring to Bible verses about faith (Timothy 2:13, Philippians 2:13, Titus 2:13, Proverbs 2:13).

Perkins (The Gold Room, The Interview) is a writer, actor, and clinical mental health counselor and researcher who was inspired to write The Dinosaurs based on his own experiences “in a church basement on East 22nd Street on a Saturday morning” as well as by Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, spurred on by a biennial prize sponsored by the Clubbed Thumb theatrical company for works inspired by Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century epic about the Black Death. In his “Playwright’s Perspective” essay, he explains, “This is a play about an internal plague and the renaissance that came from a group of people telling each other stories; the kinds of stories that have saved my life again and again.”

Unfortunately, The Dinosaurs feels like a work-in-progress in need of more structure and balance. Tony-nominated, Obie-winning director Les Waters (The Thin Place, Grief Camp) can’t get a handle on the narrative, which is wobbly and uneven, and the actors occasionally seem lost in a fog.

The play also doesn’t succeed as an advertisement for AA, which it too often appears to aspire to; I don’t envision returning to it, nor can I recommend it to others.

There’s a case to be made that these kinds of plays should go extinct.

“Not everyone gets this,” Joan says at one point.

Count me among the confused.

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

A THEATRICAL TRAGEDY: CORIOLANUS AT TFANA

General Caius Martius (McKinley Belcher III) faces a political crisis in The Tragedy of Coriolanus (photo by Hollis King)

THE TRAGEDY OF CORIOLANUS
Theatre for a New Audience, Polonsky Shakespeare Center
262 Ashland Pl. between Lafayette Ave. & Fulton St.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 1, $95-$125
www.tfana.org

The Tragedy of Coriolanus has never been one of William Shakespeare’s most popular plays. It has never made it to Broadway, had been presented at the Public’s free Shakespeare in the Park summer series only twice (in 1965 and 1979), and has been adapted into a film just once, by Ralph Fiennes in 2011.

But then the Trump era started taking shape, and the problem play found new life. In 2016, Michael Sexton and Red Bull set the story amid the Occupy movement and involved the audience in the tale of the shifting power relationship between a conquering hero and the common people. In 2019, Daniel Sullivan directed a riveting version at the Delacorte, making it feel deeply relevant to what was happening in the United States without wearing its heart on its sleeve.

Now Ash K. Tata takes it on for Theatre for a New Audience at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center, in a bewildering production that had a not-insignificant number of theatergoers leaving at intermission at the preview I attended.

Afsoon Pajoufar’s set features an angled one-story facade, partially torn protest signs pasted all over it, declaring, “Corn at Cost” and “Price of Grain Is Too High.” Under a balcony and inside a narrow hallway is the unseen Roman senate, where General Caius Martius (McKinley Belcher III) is welcomed home as a champion for defeating the Volscians at Corioli and is christened Coriolanus; he is supported by his loyal right-hand man, the Roman consul Menenius Agrippa (Jason O’Connell), who watches his interaction with the people carefully, as Rome is undergoing plebeian reforms. Coriolanus suddenly and inexplicably is unwilling to treat the commoners, or rabble, with any kind of respect and refuses to pay heed to Menenius’s warnings.

Volumnia (Roslyn Ruff) tries to instill sense in her son (McKinley Belcher III) in confusing adaptation (photo by Hollis King)

Coriolanus alienates the people, who are led by Sicinius Velutus (William DeMeritt) and Junius Brutus (Zuzanna Szadkowski), as well as the senate and military, under commander in chief Cominius (Barzin Akhavan), resulting in his banishment. Meanwhile, his family — devoted mother Volumnia (Roslyn Ruff), wife Virgilia (Meredith Garretson), and son Martius (Merlin McCormick) — is confused by his choices, especially when it is reported that he may have joined forces with his archenemy, Tullus Aufidius (Mickey Sumner), the spy Adrian (Kevin Alicea), and the traitor Nicanor (Jack Berenholtz).

Despite Coriolanus’s potential treachery, Menenius continues to defend him, believing he will ultimately do what’s best for Rome.

“His nature is too noble for the world. / He would not flatter Neptune for his trident, / Or Jove for’s power to thunder. His heart’s his mouth. / What his breast forges, that his tongue must vent, / And, being angry, does forget that ever / He heard the name of death,” Menenius tells a fellow senator (Pomme Koch), Sicinius, Brutus, and a group of other citizens. Sicinius asks, “Where is this viper, / That would depopulate the city, and / Be every man himself? . . . He shall be thrown down the Tarpeian rock / With rigorous hands. He hath resisted law, / And therefore law shall scorn him further trial / Than the severity of the public power, / Which he so sets at nought.”

Tata tries to make the story of one man’s descent into ego and power, being above the law, relate to today’s America, but instead of delving further into the characters and celebrating Shakespeare’s language, he attempts to transform the play into a living, breathing video game; through the entire show, surveillance cameras project the action on a central three-sided mini-Jumbotron, although the images are blurry and the pixels often break up, accompanied by digital text and targets that are nearly impossible to decipher. In addition, all military maneuvers are projected across the stage and onto the building, accompanied by screeching noise, which quickly becomes repetitive and invasive. (The lighting is by Masha Tsimring, sound by Brandon Bulls, original music is by David T. Little, and projections by Lisa Renkel and POSSIBLE.)

Coriolanus (McKinley Belcher III) and Aufidius (Mickey Sumner) are at each other’s throats in gimmicky Bard production (photo by Hollis King)

Among the other puzzling elements are the wide range of Avery Reed’s costumes, from Virgilia’s striking, sexy red dress and Volumnia’s half-modern, half-ancient-Greek outfit to the armies’ paramilitary uniforms and the dress of the rabble, with bright reds, yellow, and blues popping out as if part of the play is in Technicolor; the inconsistent use of either knives or rifles in combat; the switching of Aufidius’s gender to create an unlikely romance; how some characters use a passage in the back to enter and exit while others go through a cutout in a long curtain; and the green-and-white beach chair Coriolanus sits in as he tosses cans of PBR to the commoners.

Tata never achieves a steady flow to the narrative; instead it stops and starts, with bumps and lags that drag it down. During intermission, messages are projected on the mini-Jumbotron as if there is a live chat going on, with such posts as “So glad the Tribunes stood up to this clown,” “Give us the grain and leave, patrician trash,” and “He literally called us rats. I’m done.”

I wish I cared enough to add my own contribution.

Though I guess I have here.

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

FIGHTING FATE: THE OTHER PLACE AT THE SHED

Alexander Zeldin’s The Other Place was inspired by Sophocles’s Antigone (photo by Maria Baranova)

THE OTHER PLACE
The Shed’s Griffin Theater
545 West 30th St. at Eleventh Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 31, $24-$124
theshed.org

British dramatist Alexander Zeldin follows up his staggering 2023 Love at Park Ave. Armory, about the homeless crisis being experienced by English citizens and refugees, with the intense dysfunctional-family drama The Other Place at the Shed’s Griffin Theater, in which he explores the many forms of grief.

The play is set in the present day, in a lavish home amid a major renovation. It’s been ten years since successful businessman Chris’s (Tobias Menzies) brother, Adam, died, and Chris has decided that it is time to scatter Adam’s ashes in a garden in St. Margaret’s Park. Chris’s wife, Erica (Lorna Brown); their son, Leni (Lee Braithwaite); Chris’s best friend and contractor, Tez (Jerry Killick); and Chris’s niece, Issy (Ruby Stokes), are all waiting for Issy’ sister, Annie (Emma D’Arcy), to join them. Annie and Issy are Adam’s daughters, and Annie has been long estranged from the family, facing her own demons. She is particularly at odds with her uncle Chris, who she believes has wrongly usurped her father’s estate and exploited her delicate mental health. When Annie arrives, there is almost instant conflict.

Annie believes her father’s ashes should remain in the house that he loved, and she goes to extremes to prevent the scattering from happening.

“Are you unwell again?” Chris asks her, continuing, “Are you on medication? . . . I paid for a very expensive psychiatrist —” Annie shoots back, “Didn’t ask you to.”

Soon the two are cursing at each other as they fight over the ashes, with Issy caught in the middle, Erica upset with what’s happening, Leni paying little attention, and Terry trying to calm everyone down. And it only gets worse when Annie decides to sleep in a tent in the backyard, under the tree where her father hanged himself.

Sisters Issy (Ruby Stokes) and Annie (Emma D’Arcy) fight for the family legacy in The Other Place (photo by Maria Baranova)

The eighty-minute play is loosely inspired by Sophocles’s Antigone, the Greek tragedy about honor and shame involving sisters Antigone and Ismene; their brothers, Polynices and Eteocles, who were killed on opposite sides of a civil war; and their uncle Creon, who becomes king and declares that while Eteocles will receive a hero’s burial, Polynices’s body will be left to decay in the desert in disgrace, a fate Antigone refuses to accept and the blind prophet Tiresias predicts will be a mistake. (The siblings’ parents were Oedipus and Jocasta, who suffered their own horrible deaths.)

Writer-director Zeldin (Beyond Caring, Faith Hope and Charity) makes few specific references to Antigone, although he gives the characters names that start with the same letter as in Sophocles’s classic, but several of the underlying themes are the same, from family responsibility and legacy to pride and loyalty. At the center is the fraught relationship between Chris and Annie and how it affects the others, leading to a shocking twist, followed by a tragic conclusion.

“What I think is there are people who are suffering and you can’t go through your life as if they aren’t there and you don’t help them. If everyone did that, what kind of world would that be?” Erica asks early on. “Euh, like this one,” Leni responds. “That’s funny,” Annie says. “Thanks, Leni,” Chris adds sarcastically.

Rosanna Vize’s set is an open living room and kitchen, with newly installed sliding glass doors in the back that both reflect the actors and provide views of the forestlike backyard, depending on the positioning of a large, overhead rectangular lightbox that at one point rotates until it magically disappears. (The lighting is by James Farncombe; Vize also designed the contemporary costumes.) Josh Anio Grigg’s sound features one unnecessary jump scare while regularly competing with Yannis Philippakis’s original synthesizer score, which ranges from an ominous, ghostly drone to more cinematic flourishes that can become intrusive.

The play was written specifically for D’Arcy (House of the Dragon, Bluets), who is fearless as Annie, who resents having to return home but feels the need to protect what was hers and her father’s. Menzies (Outlander, The Hunt) is an excellent foil as the dark, determined Chris, who wants to finally move on from his brother’s death, exemplified by the changes he is making to the inside and outside of the house, rebuilding the family psyche.

Stokes (The Habits, Till the Stars Come Down) provides solid support as Issy, who finds herself in a bad situation with no easy way out. Braithwaite’s (Pinocchio, Laughing Boy) and Brown’s (Two Ladies, Wings) characters are underdeveloped and feel extraneous, while Killick (The Confessions, Bloody Mess) does what he can with Tez, who seems to be in a different play. (Perhaps that’s “the other place” in the otherwise unclear title?)

When Erica declares, “Sorry, it’s just such a mess, the bloody builders. Honestly it’s a been a warzone in here, like Iraq or I don’t know!,” she’s not referring only to the renovation. A few minutes later, Annie says, “More people are harmed from within the family than outside of it. That’s literally a fact.” Meanwhile, Issy keeps up hope, telling everyone, “The scattering will be healing and we can all come back here and have years of peace.”

But as Creon says in Antigone, “To yield is grievous, but the obstinate soul / That fights with Fate, is smitten grievously.”

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

INCIPIENT INTIMATIONS AND PROVOCATIVE MELONSMELLONOUS OSCULATION: ERS’S ULYSSES AT THE PUBLIC

Elevator Repair Service adaptation of Ulysses is fun frolic through 1920 masterpiece (photo by Joan Marcus)

ULYSSES
The Public Theater, Martinson Hall
425 Lafayette St. by Astor Pl.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 1, $109
www.publictheater.org
www.elevator.org

Who knew that Ulysses was such raunchy fun? Certainly not me, who, like many others, have cracked open but never fully read James Joyce’s 1920 masterpiece.

Since 1991, the downtown avant-garde theater troupe Elevator Repair Service has been staging unique adaptations, from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and Chekhov’s The Seagull to Euripides’s The Bacchae and Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The daring company now continues its reinterpretations of classic literature, which include William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, The Select (Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises), and Gatz, an eight-hour extravaganza featuring every single word of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, with a frisky frolic through what is considered to be one of the greatest books ever written.

“Hello and welcome to Ulysses,” longtime ERS cast member and codirector Scott Shepherd announces at the beginning. “Get ready. As one critic said, not much happens in Ulysses, apart from everything you can possibly imagine.” Shepherd prepares the audience by explaining that Joyce purposely filled the novel with enigmas and puzzles and experimental turns, writing many chapters in different styles, in order to “keep the professors busy for centuries arguing about what he meant, and that’s how he would insure his immortality. And like many things Joyce said, it’s a joke, but also not a joke, because here we are, more than a hundred years later, and the professors are still arguing.”

The set, by the collective known as dots, is centered by a long table in the front, where seven actors playing forty characters often sit before getting up and participating in absurdist scenes. A clock on a far wall keeps track of the time, which goes back and forth on Thursday, June 16, 1904, in Dublin. Shepherd and codirector John Collins have trimmed the story down to a lean 165 minutes with intermission; whenever they skip a few sentences, paragraphs, or pages, the words are speedily projected on the table and/or wall, initially accompanied by screeching sounds that eventually calm down a bit as the actors grab on to the table, as if the time jumps have them holding on for dear life.

Dr Malachi Mulligan (Scott Shepherd) examines “bisexually abnormal” asylum escapee Dr Bloom (Vin Knight) in Ulysses (photo by Joan Marcus)

The narrative consists of eighteen episodes, from “Telemachus” and “Nestor” to “Ithaca” and “Penelope,” reimagining Homer’s eighth-century BC saga The Odyssey, adding references to King Lear and Hamlet. The action travels from Eccles St., Essex Bridge, and the post office to Davy Byrne’s pub, the library, and the Ormond Hotel, following the (mis)adventures of protagonist Leopold Bloom (Vin Knight), a simple man married to Marion, also known as Molly (Maggie Hoffman), a singer who is having an affair with her goofy manager, Blazes Boylan (Shepherd), who struts around with his silly locks of hair spewing out from under his straw hat, and Stephen Dedalus (Christopher-Rashee Stevenson), who previously appeared in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and returns here as a deeply pensive history professor mourning the loss of his mother (Stephanie Weeks) while avoiding his father, Simon (Kate Benson).

Among the other figures who pop in and out of the less-than-neatly-laid-out plot are university students Armstrong (Dee Beasnael) and Haines (Benson), Dr Punch Costello (Weeks), the expert spitter known as the citizen (Benson), newspaper editor Myles Crawford (Benson), antisemitic headmaster Mr Deasy (Knight), pub gossipers Joe Hynes (Stevenson) and John Wyse Nolan (Weeks), Nosey Flynn (Weeks) from Dubliners, and medical student Buck Mulligan (Shepherd), who is the subject of Joyce’s beloved opening: “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned: ‘Introibo ad altare Dei.’”

Don’t try to get caught up in the plot, as it’s not the point, although Odyssey fans are likely to spot numerous similarities between Homer’s and Joyce’s characters; instead, Ulysses, in the book and in this vastly entertaining ERS staging, is about human consciousness and the love of language, with tongues firmly in cheeks. Exquisite verbiage pours forth at any moment — “Ah! Godblazeqrukbrukarchkrasht!” Boylan declares to Marion, who responds, “O! Weeshwashtkissinapooisthnapoohuck?” — as well as spectacular, unforgettable lines, such as when Stephen says, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” Also showing up are such fab phrases as “the scrotumtightening sea,” “ineluctable modality of the visible [and the audible],” “Shut your eyes and see,” “the incipient intimations of proximate dawn,” and “the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.” Oh, and let’s not forget “He kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on each plump melonous hemisphere, in their mellow yellow furrow, with obscure prolonged provocative melonsmellonous osculation.”

Here is an exemplary passage, the narration divided between two of the performers:

SW: Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.
KB: He liked thick giblet soup,
SW: nutty gizzards,
KB: a stuffed roast heart,
SW: liverslices fried with crustcrumbs,
KB: fried hencods’ roes.
SW: Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.

Leopold Bloom (Vin Knight) takes a gander at the dirty Sweets of Sin in ERS adaptation (photo by Joan Marcus)

“The pity is, the public will demand and find a moral in my book — or worse they may take it in some more serious way, and on the honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious line in it,” Joyce told Djuna Barnes in a 1922 interview for Vanity Fair. “In Ulysses I have recorded, simultaneously, what a man says, sees, thinks, and what such seeing, thinking, saying does, to what you Freudians call the subconscious — but as for psychoanalysis, it’s neither more nor less than blackmail.”

ERS takes that spirit and runs with it, from Enver Chakartash’s playful costumes, Marika Kent’s mischievous lighting, and Ben Williams’s brash sound to Matthew Deinhart’s text projections and Patricia Marjorie’s hilarious props, which range from paper airplanes to doll babies. The six actors hit just the right note throughout as they switch in an instant from one character to narrator to another character, never missing a beat.

You don’t have to have read the book or seen Joseph Strick’s 1967 film adaptation to understand what is going on, since nothing happens, and everything. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy the wild, unpredictable shenanigans as ERS celebrates another literary treasure as only it can.

As Stephen says early on, “When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once . . .”

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

CHAIN LINKS: ONE-ACT WINTER FESTIVAL RETURNS WITH BEVY OF STARS

CHAIN WINTER ONE-ACT FESTIVAL
Chain Theatre
312 West Thirty-Sixth St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
February 5 – March 1, live and virtual, $24–$35
www.chaintheatre.org

The Chain Winter One-Act Festival is back with an impressive lineup of plays through March 1, featuring twenty-eight programs consisting of between two and four works totaling sixty to eighty minutes. Soap opera fans will be especially excited, as many of the participants come from that genre (As the World Turns, All My Children, One Life to Live, Falcon Crest).

This year is highlighted by Jeryl Brunner’s Sweet Tart, directed by two-time Oscar nominee Jesse Eisenberg and starring Emmy nominee Ralph Macchio and his daughter, Julia Macchio, who played Vanessa on Cobra Kai. Sweet Tart is on a can’t-miss bill with Lyle Kessler’s Shit Kickers, starring two-time Emmy winner and Oscar nominee Carol Kane and Margaret Ladd, and John Arthur Long’s The Fusion Experiment, with David Rey and Christina Elise Perry, helmed by Chain artistic director Kirk Gostkowski. [Ed. note: It was announced on February 23 that Carol Kane will no longer be appearing in Shit Kickers; she will be replaced by Sachi Parker.]

“We don’t do safe — we do real,” Gostkowski said in a statement. “This is where audiences and artists meet on equal ground to explore the world as it is, and imagine what it could be.”

Two-time Obie-winning playwright José Rivera presents the world premiere of the fabulously titled Look What Crashed through the Portal and Ended up in Brooklyn, Emmy winner Jennifer Pepperman writes and directs Ray, David Zayas Jr. directs Diego Aguirre, Joseph Russo, and Jacob Lumet Cannavale in Aguirre’s Stalled, and three-time Emmy winner Cady McClain takes the lead in three-time Emmy-winning director Christopher Goutman’s The Oblique. Other shows to watch out for are Annabel McConnachie’s Waiting for Gadot, Sarah Swift’s True Crime, John Corins’s Brad Pitt and the Exploding Head, and Melanie Acampora’s Too Much Fondant.

General admission tickets begin at $24; if it’s too cold for you to venture outside, four of the programs will be livestreamed.

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

SIGHING AND SWOONING AT THE MOON: JOE WHITE’S BLACKOUT SONGS

Abbey Lee and Owen Teague star as a couple seeking escape from the world in Blackout Songs (photo by Emilio Madrid)

BLACKOUT SONGS
Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space
Susan & Ronald Frankel Theater
511 West Fifty-Second St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through February 28, $59-$129
www.blackoutsongs.com

“I spoke about wings / You just flew / I wondered, I guessed, and I tried / You just knew / I sighed / But you swooned / I saw the crescent / You saw the whole of the moon,” Mike Scott sings in the 1985 Waterboys tune “The Whole of the Moon.” The propulsive song appears several times in Joe White’s scintillating, Olivier-nominated Blackout Songs.

Running at the Susan & Ronald Frankel Theater through February 28, the show stars Owen Teague and Abbey Lee as an initially unnamed American college student studying painting and a free-spirited British wannabe poet who meet at their first AA meeting. While she looks stylish in jeans, a faux fur coat, a belly-revealing shirt, and sunglasses, he is ragged and unsteady, with torn pants and a denim jacket. (The costumes are by Avery Reed.) He speaks in a stammer, wearing a neck brace that he can’t explain.

Finding a tooth in her pocket, she says, “Some people might (panic), you know, but my brain, my brain’s just gone ‘pfff, don’t worry about it.’ Gone. And that’s — Well, that’s what, exactly? That’s mercy, isn’t it? This is what mercy looks like, you go out, get pissed, get hurt, fall in love, whatever, doesn’t matter, in the morning it’s gone anyway, new day — do you know you’re shaking?” He doesn’t.

That opening sets the stage for the rest of the play, in which the two alcoholics fall in and out of love, disappear for extended periods, and remember and forget significant parts of their toxic relationship. They are both completely right and completely wrong for each other; you can’t help but root for them even when it’s clear they are caught on a dangerous downward spiral, unable to avoid the “medicine” they still think can help them. They role-play, attend a funeral, and dance in a bar, as beautiful moments intersect with bad decisions. One night, when he shows up bleeding from the mouth, she says, “I think it’s sexy, actually. Desperately romantic. You’re so doomed, aren’t you.” He later professes, “There’s no life without you.”

They exist in an amorphous time and space, where no one else is ever around, just the two of them reveling in and falling prey to their inner demons. When she talks about her father, who essentially abandoned her when she was six, he asks, “Don’t you think you’re memorable? Is that what you think — Cos he — Cos he sent you away, that means he tried to forget you?” She responds, “OK, alright, thanks, Dr. Freud, but I’m done here — Let’s go get a drink.”

The past and the present intertwine as the man and the woman contemplate their future, minute by minute, depending on what they can remember.

Stacey Derosier’s extraordinary lighting nearly steals the show in Blackout Songs (photo by Emilio Madrid)

Blackout Songs unfolds in a mostly empty space designed by three-time Tony winner Scott Pask, with a small pub table on one side against the wall, a folding table with coffee and snacks on the other, and a church pulpit near a far corner, next to large windows that later reveal a glowing cross. In the first scene, the woman is convincing the man to leave the meeting and get some medicine; looking directly at the audience, she says to him, “Don’t look at them,” as if we’re not only watching the play but are also fellow recovering addicts at the meeting — and we have no right to judge them because we all have our failings.

The concept of the moon is a theme throughout the story; in addition to the Waterboys song, the man recalls the beauty of the moon when showing the woman one of his paintings, and he later says, “Won’t forget this, will you. Full moon, holy wine, it’s like a song or something. You know the world is different under a full moon? People are. People fall in love. Cos it pulls liquid around, doesn’t it. Tides. And there’s liquid in us too. Blood and. Other liquids. Chemicals. The brain is the moistest organ in the body. Moon drunk is different.”

Brian Hickey’s striking sound and original music and Stacey Derosier’s extraordinary lighting — almost a character unto itself — help define the shifts in time to startling effect. The production, under Rory McGregor’s (The Wasp, Buggy Baby) expert direction, evokes such other complex works as Nick Payne’s Constellations, in which a couple’s relationship constantly changes in the quantum multiverse, Philip Ridley’s Tender Napalm, about an unnamed man and woman whose intense passion leads them on mysterious mini-adventures, and David Ives’s Venus in Fur, in which a theater director and an actor turn an audition into a reality-bending treatise on gender, sexuality, and degradation, as well as Blake Edwards’s 1962 film Days of Wine and Roses, about a married couple who trap themselves in a haze of alcohol. (McGregor directed Tender Napalm at Theaterlab in late 2024, with a crew that included Reed, Hickey, and Derosier.)

Blackout Songs boasts a trio of firsts: Two-time Olivier nominee White’s (The Little Big Things, Mayfly) and Lee’s (Florida Man, Black Rabbit) American stage debuts and Teague’s (Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, You Hurt My Feelings) US debut. Lee is a force of nature in the play, her character never slowing down, always on the move, while Teague lends a sensitive air to the man, who thinks he knows what he wants but keeps making choices that hold him back. It’s a beguiling, heart-wrenching ninety-minute pas de deux as two lost souls try to find love and escape together.

The play does have a hard time figuring out how to end, but by then you’ll be so entranced by the two characters, and the two actors, that you won’t mind, especially if you’re addicted to good theater.

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