this week in theater

THE PATIENT GLORIA

Gina Moxley makes a phallic point in The Patient Gloria (photo by Teddy Wolff)

THE PATIENT GLORIA
St. Ann’s Warehouse
45 Water St.
Through December 4, $49-$59
718-254-8779
stannswarehouse.org
www.panpantheatre.com

I never want to end up on Gina Moxley’s shitlist.

In 1964, a thirty-one-year-old chain-smoking divorced mother of a young girl sat down with three distinguished psychotherapists to discuss various aspects of her personal life. The sessions were filmed; the woman, Gloria Szymanski, was told that the recordings were to be used for educational purposes — astonishly, they ended up being shown in theaters. Three Approaches to Psychotherapy, which became more familiarly known as The Gloria Films, documented Gloria speaking with Dr. Carl Rogers, whose specialty was client-centered therapy; Dr. Frederick Perls, founder of Gestalt therapy; and Dr. Albert Ellis, whose discipline was rational-emotive therapy.

Dublin-based actor and playwright Moxley shares Gloria’s story in The Patient Gloria, a stirring seventy-five-minute work making its US premiere at St. Ann’s Warehouse. Focusing on the misogyny inherent in the field of psychology and society at large, it may have taken place more than half a century ago, but the attitudes remain all too contemporary.

As the audience enters the theater, Moxley is sitting at a small table at the front of the stage to the right. Behind her, Gloria (Liv O’Donoghue), in a pouffy hairdo and an elegant white dress that shows off her long legs, tries to relax on a couch. She might look like the wife straight out of an early 1960s sitcom, except she is about to talk about sexual desire in a way that Donna Reed (The Donna Reed Show) and June Cleaver (Leave It to Beaver) never dreamed of.

As the play begins, Moxley, in tight-fitting men’s pants, a white button-down shirt, and awesome gold shoes (the costumes are by Sarah Bacon), asks the audience if they can hear her. She then gets up and says, “Can you see me? That any better? Can you see me now? You can? Wow. Yes. Miraculous. You should not be able to see me at all. Seriously, I’ve been fading for years and am technically invisible by now.” She reveals the item that she was sewing to be a fabric phallus, which she gleefully swings around. “I’m about to play three men — yeah, because I want to — so I felt I needed to get a true feeling for the apparent sense of authority and entitlement that comes with this lump of meat, of manhood,” she says, offering an alternate interpretation of Sigmund Freud’s theory of penis envy. “Since I’ve always been good with my hands I thought I’d make myself a nice, muscular dick to help me get into character.” The male member is a humorous motif that continues throughout the play.

Gloria (Liv O’Donoghue) and one of her psychotherapists (Gina Moxley) are exasperated in US premiere at St. Ann’s (photo by Teddy Wolff)

Moxley proceeds to portray each of the three doctors, with slight adjustments to her costume, accent, and demeanor, as Gloria explains that her major concern is how to tell her nine-year-old daughter, Pammy, that since the divorce she has been having sex with men other than Pammy’s father. She tells Dr. Rogers, “The other day she asked, ‘Mommy, did you ever go to bed with anyone besides Daddy?’ And I lied to her. I looked straight into her eyes and lied, ‘No, honey.’ I mean, what was I meant to say? ‘Sure, honey, everyone does.’ Oh shit. It keeps coming into my mind. I feel so guilty having lied to her. I never lie, I hate liars. I want — I can’t help wanting . . . I remember when I was a little girl and found out my parents made love, oh, it was dirty, terrible. I was particularly disgusted by my mom.”

The idea of a woman, no less a mother, admitting to having and enjoying sex for pleasure has always been frowned upon by much of America, yesterday and today, and the psychotherapists aren’t hesitant to demean Gloria by displaying their own sexual desires for her, thinking with their dicks. Just as Moxley announced at the beginning that she assumed she couldn’t be heard or seen, Gloria is not truly being listened to by the doctors.

To assert themselves and celebrate their quest for individuality and freedom, Gloria and Moxley occasionally break out into joyous dancing (O’Donoghue is also the choreographer), sometimes joined by experimental Irish bassist Jane Deasy, who participates in several dialogues. Feeling like a devil, Gloria says, “I want to get rid of my guilt. But I don’t want to put it on Pammy. Guilt kills.” “Guilt kills,” Moxley agrees. “Guilt kills. Ain’t that the truth,” Deasy adds. A few minutes earlier, Deasy had come to the front of the stage, stood at a microphone, and performed a version of the all-female rock band L7’s “Shitlist,” declaring, “For all the ones / Who bum me out / Shitlist / For all the ones / Who fill my head with doubt / Shitlist / For all the squares who get me pissed / Shitlist / You’ve made my shitlist.”

Presented by Beckett experts Pan Pan (Cascando, Embers), The Patient Gloria is directed by John McIlduff (The Scorched Earth Trilogy, Fatal System Error) with a mix of chaos, absurdity, and exhilaration. Andrew Clancy’s open set counters the claustrophobic design of The Gloria Films, where the subject was mostly seen in the shadow of the supposedly brilliant, much more powerful men. Adam Welsh’s sound and Sinéad Wallace’s lighting maintain the overarching welcoming atmosphere, which often has more of a feel of a party than conversations with a shrink. Projections of photos from the original sessions, words, drawings of phalluses, and other imagery appear on the folded red curtain in the back, not always clear, contributing to the at-times disorienting atmosphere.

O’Donoghue (Good Sex, Lippy) portrays Gloria with a subtle fierceness; the character might be nervous and off balance speaking with the psychotherapists, but she also is not ashamed of the choices she has made. Moxley (Danti-Dan, Endgame), here a dynamic sprite who, dressed as a man, resembles a cross between Mike Pence, Jeff Sessions, and Lindsey Graham, is bursting with an infectious, confident energy that fills St. Ann’s. And the tall, thin Deasy adds just the right flourishes, including a rousing finale. Together they don’t just take the power back but revel in it. It’s the kind of play that needs to be performed for the US Congress and at psychiatric conferences around the world.

The real Gloria Szymanski got married and divorced again before dying from leukemia in 1979 at the age of forty-six. In 2008, her daughter, Pamela J. Burry, wrote the book Living with ‘The Gloria Films,’ sharing the effects Three Approaches to Psychotherapy had on her and her mother, who essentially starred in one of the first reality shows. Nearly sixty years after the events of The Patient Gloria, the rights of women to control their bodies are under siege, an undercurrent of the play, which, in its extremely entertaining way, demands that things must change, yet again, as more people make Moxley’s shitlist.

KEEN ON NEW WORK: 2022 KEEN PLAYWRIGHTS LAB READINGS

Who: Keen Company
What: Free readings of three new plays
Where: ART/NY Conference Room, 520 Eighth Ave. at Thirty-Sixth St., third floor
When: Friday, December 2, free with RSVP, 3:00; Monday, December 12, free with RSVP, 3:00; Monday, January 9, free with RSVP, 3:00
Why: Started in October 2013, Keen Company’s “Keen on New York” features readings of works-in-progress by three midcareer playwrights, with impressive casts. The 2022 edition begins on December 2 with Anna Ziegler’s (Photograph 51, Boy) Antigones, a contemporary reimagining of Sophocles’s family and political drama, directed by Tyne Rafaeli and read by Santino Fontana, Celia Keenan-Bolger, Maria-Christina Oliveras, Marianne Rendón, and Armando Riesco. On December 12, Things with Friends, written and directed by Kristoffer Diaz (Hercules, The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity), invites guests into a fateful dinner party. And on January 9, Sarah Schulman’s (Manic Flight Reaction, The Lady Hamlet) Free Ali! Free Bob! takes on political hierarchies surrounding a gay art clique.

“I am thrilled to announce the details for this year’s Playwrights Lab readings, the first in-person sharing from our lab since the pandemic,” Keen artistic director Jonathan Silverstein said in a statement. “It has been an honor to be in the room with these three exceptional and seasoned artists throughout the year, under the leadership of Keen’s director of new work, Jeremy Stoller. Anna, Kris, and Sarah are all unique voices, yet they share a common sense of compassion and a deep understanding of the world we live in while also reveling in the joy of the human condition.” The readings take place in the ART/NY Conference Room in the Garment District and are free with advance registration.

JACK WAS KIND / SANDRA

Mary (Tracy Thorne) explains why she chose to just sit there in Jack Was Kind (photo by Carol Rosegg)

JACK WAS KIND
Irish Repertory Theatre, W. Scott McLucas Studio Theatre
132 West 22nd St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Wednesday – Sunday through December 18, $50
212-727-2737
irishrep.org

“How could I just sit there?” Mary asks at the beginning of Jack Was Kind, a one-woman show at the Irish Rep written by and starring Tracy Thorne. Thorne spends the entire seventy-minute show seated in a chair at a small table, relating critical choices she made to maintain the life she has; in fact, as the audience enters the downstairs W. Scott McLucas Studio Theatre, she’s already in place, deep in contemplation.

Meanwhile, over at the Vineyard Theatre, Marjan Neshat spends most of the eighty-minute, one-woman Sandra in a comfy easy chair, relating critical choices she made to get back at least part of the life she had. Both characters construct their own reality concerning a close male figure, with very different results, as one remains seated and the other takes to the road.

“Some people want me to stop . . . telling stories . . . to cease and desist,” Mary explains. “I don’t think those people will like this very much.” Married with two children, Mary is speaking into an iPhone, delivering a kind of public confession, or at least an explanation, of why she did what she did involving her husband, Jack, a famous, or, perhaps, infamous, public figure. On the table is a pile of photo albums, a reminder of their family life. Behind the table is a long, horizontal window that marks the passage of time as leaves blow gently in the wind. (The spare but effective set is by David Esler.)

Mary shares details of Jack’s life, as well as her own; her “beat up childhood” included sexual, psychological, and emotional abuse. She and Jack want only the best for their kids, Eli and Flo, but Flo in particular has issues with what her parents have done.

Tracy Thorne wrote and stars in one-woman show at the Irish Rep (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Mary tentatively admits, “Nearly two years of a nonsensically overpriced education results in our daughter having no observable intellectual curiosity, then boom, the match ignites, when it’s personal it ignites, and now she wants to know, but I don’t want her to know, I don’t know, though sometimes I wonder if I do, that’s a thing, right? ‘Really, Mom, you don’t know how you could just sit there?’ That’s what she says to me. So I guess this is how it starts for my daughter, maybe for me too, funny it starts at the end. But then I don’t know if it’s the end, or do I know if it’s the end, I don’t know what I know and now I’m threatening myself. ‘Don’t you think you should know, Mom.’ Frankly I’m appalled you don’t.’ She says that, too.”

The truth of what Jack did, and Mary’s complicity, slowly emerges; even if you guess it early on, the revelation is poignant, and timely. Thorne (Here We Are, Quick Bright Things), who was inspired by actual events and the writings of Elena Ferrante, delivers the monologue in a consistently even-paced manner, save for one loud moment; she’s trying to convince herself as much as her fictional virtual audience that she really couldn’t have done anything else, taking full advantage of her white privilege. Director Nicholas A. Cotz (My Name Is Gideon, rogerandtom) ensures that the play never gets boring; Thorne shifts in her seat, pauses, twiddles nearly incessantly with her hands, displaying how uncomfortable this whole situation is for her.

Jack Was Kind was first performed live on Zoom for several weeks during the pandemic, with each show followed by a discussion with a special guest. Essentially, home viewers were seeing Mary in her house, looking directly into her smartphone. At the Irish Rep, there’s a different kind of intimacy, as we watch Mary talking to the anonymous rabble on the other side of the camera. Physically, we are on her side, in the same space, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we are on her ethical side, especially as we discover who her husband is and what he did.

Marjan Neshat remains seated for much of one-woman Sandra at the Vineyard (photo by Carol Rosegg)

SANDRA
Vineyard Theatre
Gertrude and Irving Dimson Theatre
108 East 15th St. between Union Square East & Irving Pl.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 18, $37-$85
vineyardtheatre.org

Marjan Neshat caps off quite a year with Sandra, a one-woman show in which she spends most of the eighty-five minutes seated, telling her story directly to the audience. Last December, Neshat appeared in Sylvia Khoury’s Selling Kabul at Playwrights Horizons, followed by Sanaz Toossi’s English at the Atlantic and Wish You Were Here at Playwrights, a trio of unique and moving performances in which she displayed her range and proved herself to be a compelling stage presence.

David Cale’s world premiere at the Vineyard further solidifies Neshat’s standing as a rising star, even if she towers over the material. Wearing an attractive knee-length red dress and supremely unflattering sandals, Sandra Jones shares a Lifetime-worthy neo-noir about her best friend, Ethan, who has gone missing. (The costume is by Linda Cho.) Rachel Hauck’s imposing set features large standing walls on either side of Sandra’s chair, each with a big glassless window that she occasionally approaches, as if offering a way out. Behind her is a somewhat dilapidated wall with a grid of hundreds of fading small squares. It’s as if Sandra is trapped, both physically and psychologically, but egress is within reach.

A burgeoning pianist who works behind the counter at Sandra’s café in Crown Heights, Ethan has dinner with Sandra the night before going on vacation to Puerto Vallarta. She remembers, “At the door, I hugged him goodbye and he said, ‘I feel like disappearing from my life. Part of me just isn’t in the world. I’m at a remove.’ I said, ‘Even from me?’ ‘No, not you,’ he said, ‘But you and I are so simpatico, if I vanish you’d probably disappear from your life too. I love you, Sandra. I love you so much.’ I said, ‘I love you too, Ethan. Have fun in Mexico.’ We hugged again and he left.”

Their relationship is purely platonic, as Ethan is gay and Sandra is married, although she is separated from her husband. Two and a half weeks later, two detectives visit her, as Ethan has indeed disappeared and Sandra is his emergency contact. Determined to find him herself, she quickly packs up and flies south to investigate. She considers, “The first day in Puerto Vallarta my thoughts run the gamut . . . to thinking, maybe he’d planned this. And becoming furious with him. To stopping on the street and thinking, what the hell am I doing here?”

Marjan Neshat caps off quite a year with David Cale’s Sandra (photo by Carol Rosegg)

The audience might ask the same, as Sandra immerses herself in an ever-more-absurd plot involving a couple that frequents her café, bottles with messages being thrown into the ocean, a wild and sexy Italian named Luca Messina, a federal agent named Stephen McCourt who dismisses Sandra’s ideas, and various other characters, all of whom Sandra portrays with different accents. Even as the evidence mounts, Sandra feels in her gut that he’s still alive, so she continues playing Nancy Drew.

While watching Neshat makes the play worth seeing all by itself, the narrative, accompanied by music by Matthew Dean Marsh, careens downhill. After learning of some very dangerous doings in Cozumel, Sandra announces that she flew down there, and the audience groaned in unison. But it was not the kind of groan audiences make when a person decides to go down into the basement or up to the attic in a horror movie; this was a you-gotta-be-kidding-me scolding. However, even as we lose faith in Cale and Sandra, we just can’t give up on Neshat, especially when she finally takes off those terrible shoes.

As she did with Cale’s 2017 one-man Harry Clarke, in which an often-seated Billy Crudup excelled as the title character in a thrilling yarn, director Leigh Silverman (Grand Horizons, Chinglish) keeps us actively engaged despite the script’s ludicrousness. Obie winner Silverman knows her way around solo shows; she has also helmed the harrowing On the Exhale with Marin Ireland and the charming The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe with Cecily Strong.

At times you’re likely to ask yourself, “How could I just sit there?” But with such talented actors as Thorne and Neshat, the answer is simple.

LEOPOLDSTADT

You might experience déjà vu when watching Sir Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt on Broadway (photo by Joan Marcus)

LEOPOLDSTADT
Longacre Theatre
220 West 48th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 12, $74-$318
leopoldstadtplay.com

The Broadway premiere of Sir Tom Stoppard’s Olivier Award–winning Leopoldstadt has just about everything going for it: The exquisite production features a terrific cast of more than thirty actors, stunning sets by Richard Hudson, elegant costumes by Brigitte Reiffenstuel, superb lighting by Neil Austin, strong sound and original music by Adam Cork, and powerful direction by Patrick Marber. So why is it ultimately unsatisfying?

Named for the second municipal district of Vienna where a tight-knit community of Jews lived, the play is based on real events that Stoppard’s family experienced. Yet it was not until 1993 that Stoppard, born Tomáš Sträussler in the Czech Republic in 1937, learned that he had several Jewish relatives who had been killed in concentration camps during the Holocaust. The play’s narrative runs from December 1899 to January 1890, the spring of 1924, November 1938, to 1955 as the Merz-Jakobovicz clan goes from prosperity to persecution.

The story begins with family and servants readying for Christmas, including decorating the tree. Prophetically, the first lines uttered are “That’s mine!” by young Rosa (Pearl Scarlett Gold), followed by young Pauli (Drew Squire) declaring, “And that’s mine!” In a span of a few decades, the family will lose nearly everything.

The men discuss Freud, religion, and marrying out of the faith. Assimiliation is clearly the theme. Eva Merz Jakobovicz (Caissie Levy) says, “We’re Jews. Bad Jews but pure-blood sons of Abraham, and Ludwig’s parents would have nothing to do with us if their grandson didn’t look Jewish in his bath. In fact, if I’d had myself Christianised like my brother, Ludwig wouldn’t have married me, would you, be honest.” Erudite mathematician Ludwig (Brandon Uranowitz), Eva’s husband, responds, “I would when they were dead.” Eva asks, “Is that a compliment?”

The Jewish Merz-Jakobovicz family decorates their Christmas tree in Leopoldstadt (photo by Joan Marcus)

A moment later, Hermann Merz (David Krumholtz), Wilma Jakobovicz Kloster (Jenna Augen) and Ludwig’s brother, married to the Christian Gretl, (Faye Castelow), tells Ludwig, “You seem to think becoming a Catholic is like joining the Jockey Club.” Ludwig quickly retorts, “It’s not unlike, except that anyone can become a Catholic.”

To fill in the family’s background further, Stoppard has Wilma accuse Hermann of disdaining Grannie and Grandpa Jakobovicz. “You’re snobby about their accent and using Yiddish words, and dressing like immigrants from some village in Galicia,” she proclaims. “There’s too much of the shtetl about them for you.”

As the years pass by, there are affairs and betrayals, the birth of new generations, key business decisions, such Jewish rituals as a Passover Seder and a bris, the coming of the Nazis, and a gathering of Holocaust survivors.

While the discovery of his Jewish heritage deeply affected Stoppard (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Invention of Love, The Coast of Utopia), who has won four Tonys, three Oliviers, and an Oscar, Leopoldstadt adds nothing new to the genre of Holocaust-related dramas. Most of the scenes are nobly rendered, but I felt like I had seen too many of them before, especially when Umzugshauptmannsleiter Schmidt (Corey Brill) invades the family home and, dare I say, a word entered my mind that it rarely does in Stoppard’s work: cliché.

From Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, Ken Burns’s The U.S. and the Holocaust, and the 1978 Holocaust television miniseries to Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful, Arthur Miller’s Incident at Vichy, and Jane Campion’s The Pianist, the oppression of the Jews by the Third Reich has been explored from multiple angles and emotions, each adding fresh insight, which is disappointingly lacking in Leopoldstadt.

In 1938, Ernst (Aaron Neil), who is married to Wilma, discusses a trio of paintings by Gustav Klimt (one of which the family owns): “A dream is the fulfilment in disguise of a suppressed wish. The rational is at the mercy of the irrational. Barbarism will not be eradicated by culture. The last time I saw Freud, the most profound man I know, I asked him, ‘Yes, but why the Jews?’ He said, ‘I don’t know, Ernst. I wasn’t going to ask you, but — why the Jews?’” It’s a question that’s been asked over and over, and answered; I was expecting more from Stoppard.

While technically a marvel and certainly worth seeing, the widely hailed Leopoldstadt does not reach the pantheon of its predecessors, neither in its genre nor its author’s oeuvre. Even midlevel Stoppard is an event to be treasured, but don’t be surprised when you have déjà vu at the Longacre Theatre.

A RAISIN IN THE SUN

Ruth (Mandi Masden) and Lena (Tonya Pinkins) look on as Travis (Toussaint Battiste) is filled with hope in Public revival of A Raisin in the Sun (photo by Joan Marcus)

A RAISIN IN THE SUN
Newman Theater, the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. at Astor Pl.
Through November 20, $80
publictheater.org

Tonya Pinkins rules the roost as Lena Younger in Robert O’Hara’s uneven adaptation of Lorraine Hansberry’s American classic, A Raisin in the Sun, continuing at the Public’s Newman Theater through November 20. Lena is the matriarch of the Younger family, who live in a cramped, paint-peeling, walls-cracking apartment on Chicago’s South Side. It’s the early 1950s, and she is waiting for a ten-thousand-dollar check to arrive, insurance money from the recent death of her husband (Calvin Dutton). Her thirty-five-year-old ne’er-do-well son, Walter Lee (Francois Battiste), is a chauffeur for a wealthy white man and dreams of using the money to put a down payment on a liquor store with his unreliable friends Bobo (Dutton) and Willy.

Walter Lee’s wife, Ruth (Mandi Masden), is doing her best to try to keep everything together, managing the finances as she and her husband raise their ten-year-old son, Travis (Toussaint Battiste or Camden McKinnon), who sleeps on the couch in the middle of the apartment. Lena’s twenty-year-old daughter, Beneatha (Paige Gilbert), shares a bedroom with her mother and is hoping to go to medical school; Beneatha has two suitors, the rich but dull George Murchison (Mister Fitzgerald) and Joseph Asagai (John Clay III), a university student from Nigeria who Beneatha believes can help connect her to her African roots. Every morning the Younger clan wakes up and hustles off to the bathroom, which is down the hall, used by all of the floor’s tenants.

When Lena buys a house in the white neighborhood of Clybourne Park, Walter Lee feels betrayed. The plot gets more complicated when Karl Lindner (Jesse Pennington), from the Clybourne Park Improvement Association, arrives to attempt to convince the Youngers not to move there, barely disguising his racism with pointed threats. (Lindner also appears in Bruce Norris’s Pulitzer Prize winner Clybourne Park, which examines things from the opposing point of view, as the association decides how to discourage a Black family from moving in.)

But Lena is determined to raise her family’s station in life, having earlier told Ruth in one of the play’s most poignant moments: “‘Rat trap’ – Yes, that’s all it is. I remember just as well the day me and Big Walter moved in here though. Hadn’t been married but two weeks and wasn’t planning on living here no more than a year. We was going to set away, little by little, don’t you know, and buy a little place out in Morgan Park. We even picked out the house. Looks right dumpy today. But Lord, child, you should know all the dreams I had ’bout buying that house and fixing it up and making me a little garden in the back. And didn’t none of it happen.” The play’s focus on real estate seems sadly prescient considering the ongoing issue of housing in the US, an issue that’s never been resolved and has exploded into a full-blown crisis in recent years.

Walter Lee (Francois Battiste) has something to say to his wife, Ruth (Mandi Masden), in new version of Lorraine Hansberry classic (photo by Joan Marcus)

Tony winner Pinkins (Caroline, or Change; Red Pill) commands the audience’s attention with a dazzling presence as she and O’Hara make Lena the central character in a role previously portrayed by such actors as Claudia McNeil, Juanita Moore, Esther Rolle, Phylicia Rashad, and LaTanya Richardson Jackson. The focus of A Raisin in the Sun is usually on Walter, who has been played by Sidney Poitier, Earle Hyman, Danny Glover, Sean Combs, and Denzel Washington; Washington, for example, dominated in Kenny Leon’s 2014 Broadway revival, but Battiste’s Walter is not as imposing, though it is touching that his real-life son alternates as Travis. Gilbert (School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play, The Rose Tattoo) gives Beneatha an underlying strength, representing the future of Black America, while Masden (Saint Joan, Our Lady of Kibeho) is affecting as a realistic woman who can’t find the time for her own dreams. “Honey, you never say nothing new,” she tells Walter Lee. “I listen to you every day, every night and every morning, and you never say nothing new. So you would rather be Mr. Arnold than be his chauffeur. So – I would rather be living in Buckingham Palace.”

Clint Ramos’s set, Karen Perry’s costumes, Alex Jainchill’s lighting, and Elisheba Ittoop’s sound are effective, setting the right mood for Hansberry’s powerful commentary on race, class, and housing in America, which is as relevant as ever more than sixty years after its debut. Unfortunately, O’Hara fiddles around too much to put his mark on the production, as he has done recently with revivals of Long Day’s Journey into Night, a streamlined version set in the Covid era, and Richard III at the Delacorte, with Danai Gurira as the conniving title character.

O’Hara has much more success with new plays, including Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play, Gurira’s Eclipsed and The Continuum, and his own Bootycandy. His 2010 play The Etiquette of Vigilance imagines where the Younger family is fifty years after Raisin.

Karl Lindner (Jesse Pennington) tries to talk the Younger family out of moving to his white neighborhood (photo by Joan Marcus)

Perri Gaffney injects a burst of energy as the gossipy Mrs. Johnson, but there’s a reason why that scene is usually cut, as it feels out of place and unnecessary. The occasional presence of Lena’s husband’s ghost seeps into melodrama, while a key speech by Walter Lee near the end of the play shatters the fourth wall as it accuses the (mostly white) audience directly of its complicity in his situation.

When Raisin (the title comes from the Langston Hughes poem “A Dream Deferred,” in which the Harlem Renaissance writer and activist asks, “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun? / Or fester like a sore — / And then run?”) began its run at the Newman, the Public was also presenting Elevator Repair Service’s Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge at the Anspacher, complete with a coda that also broke the fourth wall and involved Baldwin (Greig Sargeant) and his good friend Hansberry (Daphne Gaines). It’s possible to try too hard with classic material; it’s better to trust the play more even while adding your imprimatur.

CAMP SIEGFRIED

A seventeen-year-old boy (Johnny Berchtold) chops wood as a sixteen-year-old girl (Lily McInerny) watches (photo by Emilio Madrid)

CAMP SIEGFRIED
Tony Kiser Theater
305 West 43rd St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 4, $56-$107
2st.com/shows

Tony-nominated playwright Bess Wohl has a penchant for setting her plays in singular, fictional locations where the characters are cocooned from the rest of the world, oddly constructed outdoor microcosms that also comment on society at large. Her 2015 hit Small Mouth Sounds takes place at a silent retreat in the woods, while Continuity unfurls on an isolated movie set in the New Mexico desert re-created to look like a doomed Arctic glacier.

Her latest play, Camp Siegfried, making its US premiere at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater, transpires at a 1930s summer camp on Long Island run by the German American Bund. Incredibly, it’s based on reality. During the pandemic lockdown, Wohl and her family escaped their Brooklyn home and stayed near Yaphank. Surfing the web to find things to do with her three children, Wohl learned about Camp Siegfried, which from 1936 to 1941 served as a gathering place in Yaphank for German Americans to support the Third Reich, holding Nazi indoctrination programs and encouraging young men and women to hook up and create the next generation of Aryans.

It’s 1938, and a shy, mousy sixteen-year-old girl (Lily McInerny) is standing by herself, holding a large mug of beer. She is approached by a bold seventeen-year-old boy (Johnny Berchtold) who instantly chats her up. (The two are never given names.) She is from Baltimore, attending the camp for the first time, while he is a regular, his father a bigwig in the Bund. Brett J. Banakis’s marvelous set is a large grassy hill with a deep valley, tree branches overhead, and a narrow dirt path running from bottom to top across the stage.

He (Johnny Berchtold) and she (Lily McInerny) grow close in new Bess Wohl play (photo by Emilio Madrid)

“My aunt / She thinks I need to get more physical exercise / Move around more,” she explains. “Things fester in dark spaces is what she says / And I think by dark spaces she just means Baltimore.” Wohl is referring to a lot more than just a city in Maryland.

She says she doesn’t dance, can’t swim, and doesn’t like crowds, ghost stories, or the ocean; she’s scared of just about everything. He is intent on displaying his strength and superiority, feeling he has something to prove because he’s the runt of his family. He calls her “dummy,” since she has so much to learn. When she doesn’t express pride in her heritage, he gets mad at her, decrying, “Being German / You look all hangdog about it / ‘My mom is . . .’ / What are you ashamed of / We’ve got Oktoberfest / Beer / Hamburgers / Hot dogs.” He claims that Christmas, Santa Claus, and kindergarten are all German inventions, but since WWI, Germans have been mistreated, stigmatized as “Barbarians” and “Huns.”

While he splits logs and shows off his muscles, determined to demonstrate to his father that he has “Kampfgeist” — “Kampf is struggle / Geist is spirit / The spirit of the fight / We’re supposed to have it” — she accumulates cuts and bruises on her legs, gossips about the boys and girls who disappear in pairs into the woods at night, and expresses her admiration for the romantic story of Siegfried and Brunhilde in Valhalla that ends with a funeral pyre. Wohl does not have to remind us that the tale was made famous in the epic opera Der Ring des Nibelungen by renowned German anti-Semite Richard Wagner.

They start growing closer as they work together to build a wooden platform where specially selected youths will give speeches on German Day, in front of tens of thousands of people. He thinks she would be a great choice to represent the girls as they all await what her aunt Linda calls “the Day of Freedom . . . When we storm the government / And fight back.” The two teens share stories with each other that indicate there is more to them than what is on the surface while also revealing vulnerabilities that make them ripe to fall under the lure of Hitler-style extremism. But each of them undergoes a transformation that alters the dynamics of their relationship and just what they are building together.

An unnamed pair of teenagers (Johnny Berchtold and Lily McInerny) work together at Camp Siegfried (photo by Emilio Madrid)

In their professional New York stage debuts, McInerny and Berchtold are thoroughly engaging, superbly capturing the many changes their characters undergo in a short period of time, as weakness becomes strength and vice versa. Christopher Darbassie’s sound design includes offstage chattering of the other camp attendees as well as the chirping of birds and other nature elements, in addition to the blasts of guns during target practice; Tyler Micoleau’s lighting creates long shadows that hover over the teens, who wear summery costumes by Brenda Abbandandolo.

Camp Siegfried is a modest play by Tony nominee Wohl, who is a mix of Jewish, Mormon, and Irish Catholic; her husband is Jewish, and they are raising their children Jewish. The eighty-five-minute narrative unfolds quietly under the almost elegiac direction of Tony winner David Cromer (Our Town, The Band’s Visit), a mostly secular Jew from Skokie, Illinois, where a Nazi group famously marched in 1977; Cromer confronted his own feelings about anti-Semitism when he directed Joshua Harmon’s Prayer for the French Republic earlier this year, as he told the Forward.

Prayer travels back and forth between 1944–46 and 2016–17, as a family deals with the Nazi occupation of Paris seventy years before as well as the growing anti-Semitism in the twenty-first century. Camp Siegfried tackles similar themes; the play ends a few months before Kristallnacht, which is unleashed in November 1938, leading the way to the Holocaust.

An extraordinarily talented writer, Wohl (Grand Horizons, Make Believe) makes subtle hints that bring the story into modern times, as much of the camp rhetoric evokes QAnon-type conspiracy theories involving racism, anti-Semitism, militia training, and plans to overthrow the government by force. As the girl is told in the play, “Anybody can fall into anything really / Anyone can be seduced. . . . Never underestimate your / Infinite capacity for delusion.” As we’ve seen from the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol to heavily armed Brownshirt-like figures hanging around ballot boxes this month, such seduction and delusion can happen anywhere, at any time.

BAM NEXT WAVE: TROJAN WOMEN

Ong Keng Sen and the National Changgeuk Company of Korea make their BAM debut with Trojan Women (photo courtesy NTOK)

TROJAN WOMEN
Brooklyn Academy of Music, BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Friday, November 18, and Saturday, November 19, $44-$125 (use code COURAGE to save 20%), 7:30
www.bam.org
www.ntok.go.kr/en

In 2011, as part of the thirtieth Next Wave Festival, BAM presented SITI Company’s Trojan Women (After Euripides), Jocelyn Clarke’s adaptation of Euripides’s 415 BCE play, the conclusion of a Trojan War trilogy that began with Alexandros and Palamedes.

In 1991, Singaporean director Ong Keng Sen staged Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1965 adaptation of Trojan Women in a granite quarry. In 2016, Ong revisited the tale, this time with the National Changgeuk Company of Korea, combining classical Greek tragedy with contemporary K-pop and the Korean storytelling form known as pansori, which dates back to the seventeenth century and features each solo singer accompanied by one instrument.

Now Ong brings Hecuba (Kim Kum-mi), Cassandra (Yi So-yeon), Andromache (Kim Mi-jin), Helen (Kim Jun-soo), and the rest of the Trojan men and women (Lee Kwang-bok as Talthybios, Choi Ho-sung as Menelaus, Yu Tae-pyung-yang as Soul of Souls, an eight-woman chorus, and a nine-piece orchestra) to BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House November 18 and 19 as part of the fortieth Next Wave Festival. The production, which has traveled around the world, melds text by playwright Bae Sam-sik, traditional pansori music by South Korean Living National Treasure master singer Ahn Sook-sun, K-pop music by Parasite and Squid Game composer Jung Jae-il, a surreal set by Cho Myung-hee, bold lighting by Scott Zielinski, exciting video design by Austin Switser, and white costumes by Kim Moo-hong.

“My style of distilled yet rich storytelling is often expressed through a strong concept, integrated gesamtkunstwerk, and bold visuality,” Ong explains in a program note. “When I was invited by the National Changgeuk Company of Korea to direct Trojan Women, I yearned to return to the minimalism of pansori, where a solo storyteller sings all the parts with only one drummer. Thus began the task of removing the layers which had been overlaid in time over changgeuk (a musical theater genre formed in the early twentieth century from pansori), like stripping off layers of paints and renovations to get to the base architecture of an old house. . . . From the beginning I felt that Helen, who stands between the Greeks and the Trojans, is a character between binary opposites. In our production, the voice of Helen exists in the space between masculine and feminine — she is an outsider who launched the war between Greece and Troy. With the chorus, I drew inspiration from the music of enslaved peoples transported from Africa to the Americas. Similarly to how African music became the music of spirituals, blues, jazz, rap, it would be wonderful if the chorus of Trojan Women could express the vibrant potential future of pansori. Hence the invitation to Jang Jae-Il to write the music for the chorus in the genre of K-pop, where the emotionalism of pansori infuses contemporary pop elements. ”

This show marks the BAM debut of the National Changgeuk Company of Korea, which is celebrating its sixtieth anniversary. The 110-minute multimedia drama incorporates music, dance, and theater, with a cast of more than dozen singers, actors, and musicians exploring the effects of battle on women, particularly the Korean War. “Trojan Women deals with human dignity and self-respect,” Ong said in an October 2016 interview with the Financial Times. “Most of all, it is focused on women’s strong will to live. I also hope that this work would remind the audience of the pain and sorrow Korean women had suffered after the war.”