this week in theater

MY BROKEN LANGUAGE

A cast of five extraordinary women share roles in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s My Broken Language (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

MY BROKEN LANGUAGE
The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 27, $49-$159
212-244-7529
www.mybrokenlanguage.net

Quiara Alegría Hudes’s My Broken Language is an exhilarating ninety minutes of love and loss among a close Puerto Rican family in North Philly over the course of sixteen years.

During the pandemic, Hudes, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2012 for her play Water by the Spoonful, about an Iraq War veteran returning to his home in Philadelphia, published a memoir, My Broken Language, detailing her childhood from 1988, when she was ten, to 2004, when she went to the Brown University Grad School for Playwriting. The book is divided into four parts: “I Am the Gulf between English and Spanish,” “All the Languages of My Perez Women, and Yet All This Silence . . . . ,” “How Qui Qui Be?,” and “Break Break Break My Mother Tongue.” At a public reading, Hudes, also known as Qui Qui, invited a group of actors to read different chapters, which sparked the development of the book into a play with multiple women sharing the lead role. The stirring result is at the Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre at the Signature, where it opened tonight for a limited run through November 27. Get your tickets now.

The audience sits on three sides of Arnulfo Maldonado’s beautifully bright, intimate set, a tiled courtyard with three porcelain bathtubs filled with plants, a shower, and steps leading to the door of a house with a facade of two long rows of windows, behind which is greenery, as if life is growing inside. Tucked next to the steps is a piano where Ariacne Trujillo Duran occasionally plays Chopin and original music by Alex Lacamoire.

The play, which Hudes calls “a theater jawn,” begins with Zabryna Guevara, Yani Marin, Samora la Perdida, Daphne Rubin-Vega, and Marilyn Torres declaring in unison, “My Broken Language. North Philly. 1988. I’m ten years old.” Each “movement” of the jawn kicks off with similar declarations as time passes, with a different actor taking over the lead role of Qui Qui, complete with singing, dancing, and poignant and prescient monologues; the rest of the cast play other roles as well.

Daphne Rubin-Vega plays the ten-year-old author in Signature world premiere (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

“Cousinhood in my big-ass family was a swim-with-the-sharks wonderland,” ten-year-old Qui Qui says on the way to an amusement park in New Jersey. “When Cuca invited me to Six Flags with the big cousins, I was Cinderella being invited to the ball. These weren’t the rug rats of the family, my usual crew. Five to ten years my elder, my big cousins were gods on Mount Olympus, meriting study, mythology, even fear.” A moment later, she adds, “Cuca, Tico, Flor, and Nuchi. Saying their names filled me with awe. They had babies and tats. I had blackheads and wedgies. They had curves and moves. I had puberty boobs called nipple-itis. They had acrylic tips in neon colors. I had piano lessons and nubby nails. They spoke Spanish like Greg Louganis dove — twisting, flipping, explosive — and laughed with the magnitude of a mushroom cloud.”

As 1988 becomes 1991 in West Philly, 1993 in North Philly, 1994 in Center City, 1995 back in West Philly, and 2004 in Providence, Qui Qui, identified as “Author” in the script, has her period, is fascinated by her mother’s mysterious Yoruba religious rituals, discovers great literature (Flannery O’Connor, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Sandra Cisneros, Esmeralda Santiago) and art (Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel, Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2, Fountain), and learns too much too quickly about death.

“One day I would dream of a museum, a library I might fit into. One with space to hold my cousins, my tías, my sister, mi madre. An archive made of us, that held our concepts and reality so that future Perez girls would have no question of our existence or validity,” sixteen-year-old Qui Qui fantasizes. “Our innovations and conundrums, our Rashomon narratives could fill volumes, take up half a city block. Future Perez girls would do book reports amid its labyrinthine stacks, tracing our lineages through time and across hemispheres. A place where we’d be more than one ethnic studies shelf, but every shelf, the record itself. And future Perez girls would step into the library of us and take its magnificence for granted. It would seem inevitable, a given, to be surrounded by one’s history.”

That soliloquy gets to the heart of My Broken Language, which is an inclusive celebration of who the Perez family is and what they can be. Despite the constant adversity, Hudes focuses on the individuality of the characters and the author herself, portrayed by five distinct women who represent the vast range of Puerto Rican women, in mind and body, washing away ethnic and gender stereotypes. Even as “asterisks” point out future tragedy, the play is life-affirming as the actors stand firm and bold, singing Lacamoire’s “La Fiesta Perez” and “Every Book, a Horizon,” Ernesto Grenet’s “Drume Negrita,” and Joni Mitchell’s “Hejira” and moving to Ebony Williams’s engaging choreography in Dede Ayite’s colorful, dramatic costumes that trace the development of young women. (Yes, that’s Daphne Rubin-Vega in pigtails!)

Tiled bathtubs figure prominently in My Broken Language (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

In her directorial debut, Hudes allows each actor the freedom to incorporate their own realities into their characters, including a wonderful moment in which all five line up on the steps and, one by one, grab the person next to them in their own way. Although a scene about Qui Qui’s favorite books feels didactic — the listing in the digital program, which also includes a glossary of terms and pop-culture references, would have sufficed — everything else flows together organically, immersing the audience in the story of the Perez family. Jen Schriever’s lighting never goes completely dark, allowing the audience to see the actors, the actors to see the audience, and audience members to see themselves, all part of an intimate, caring community.

The cast, led by the fabulous Rubin-Vega, who has also appeared in Hudes’s Daphne’s Dive at the Signature and Miss You Like Hell at the Public, and Guevara, who starred in the playwright’s Water by the Spoonful at Second Stage and Elliot, a Soldier’s Fugue at 45 Below, revels in the flexibility Hudes gives them; in the script, she notes, “No need for them to act, speak, or move like one cohesive character. The point is a multiplicity of voices, bodies, and vibez.” That advice works for the audience as well, during the play and as they exit back into real life.

[On November 13 at 5:00, the Bushwick Book Club will hold a special free event at the Signature, hosted by Guevara and featuring readings from Hudes’s memoir along with original music and movement by spiritchild, Patricia Santos, Anni Rossi, Susan Hwang and Troy Ogilvie.]

BAM NEXT WAVE: TRANSVERSE ORIENTATION

Dimitris Papaioannou returns to BAM with another extravaganza, Transverse Orientation (photo by Julian Mommert)

Who: Dimitris Papaioannou
What: US premiere of dance-theater work
Where: Brooklyn Academy of Music, BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, 30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
When: November 7-11, $44.50 – $144, 7:30
Why: In 2019, Greek painter, comics artist, director, choreographer, performer, and set, costume, makeup, and lighting designer Dimitris Papaioannou made his BAM debut with The Great Tamer, which was heavily influenced by the legacy of Pina Bausch; in fact, Papaioannou was the first person invited to create a piece for Tanztheater Wuppertal following Bausch’s passing in 2009. Papaioannou is back at BAM, in the Howard Gilman Opera House, for the US premiere of Transverse Orientation, running November 7-11.

The 105-minute work, which delves into concepts of myth and religion in unusual ways, is performed by Damiano Ottavio Bigi, Šuka Horn, Jan Möllmer, Breanna O’Mara, Tina Papanikolaou, Łukasz Przytarski, Christos Strinopoulos, and Michalis Theophanous, with music by Antonio Vivaldi, sets by Tina Tzoka and Loukas Bakas, sound by Coti K., costumes by Aggelos Mendis, lighting by Stephanos Droussiotis, sculptures and special constructions by Props Nectarios Dionysatos, and mechanical inventions by Dimitris Korres. Bausch fans, and other lovers of experimental dance theater, are sure to delight in what looks to be a mind-blowing experience.

GABRIEL BYRNE: WALKING WITH GHOSTS

Gabriel Byrne points to key moments in his life in Walking with Ghosts (photo by Emilio Madrid)

GABRIEL BYRNE: WALKING WITH GHOSTS
Music Box Theatre
239 West Forty-Fifth St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 30, $58-$288
gabrielbyrneonbroadway.com

Recounting a dream at the beginning of his one-man show, Walking with Ghosts, Gabriel Byrne remembers seeing himself as “the man I am now longing to see the world as a child again, when every sight and sound was a marvel.” He laments how the places of his youth, “the chapel, the cinema, the factory, the fields are all gone.” He admits, “And I feel like an intruder in my own past. Emigrant, immigrant, exile. Belonging everywhere but nowhere at all.”

Adapted from Byrne’s widely acclaimed 2021 memoir, the play affirms the Tony, Grammy, and Emmy nominee belongs on the stage and on the big and small screen, a humble actor of immense talent who is instantly likable, winning our hearts from the very start. If only he dug a little deeper, reaching for our souls.

Casually dressed in a button-down shirt, slacks, vest, and jacket (the costumes are by Joan O’Clery), Byrne takes us through several dozen episodes from his life organized as individual, chronological scenes that don’t always flow seamlessly one into the next. Byrne ambles slowly around Sinéad McKenna’s spare set, consisting of a desk, a chair, three large frames, and a shattered mirror as Byrne paints his verbal self-portrait taking a long, intimate look at himself. McKenna’s soft lighting occasionally creates an upside-down shadow of Byrne on the facade above the stage, immersed in an amorphous primordial cloud. As much as we learn about Byrne over the course of two acts and two hours and fifteen minutes (with intermission), there is much more we do not learn. He is a superb storyteller in the classic Irish tradition; early on, he recalls taking the bus on his first day of school and seeing a drunk man singing. “That man, my mother said, is a famous writer. His name is Brendan Behan, and he’s known all over the world. And he’s on the wrong bus, the poor creature.”

Behan had a wild abandon, but Byrne rarely breaks out of his steady demeanor, whether discussing sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of a priest, seeing a friend of his drown, drudging through a series of jobs, or having high tea with his mother at a fancy hotel. Each episode is given equal weight, although he does perk up when he talks about film and theater, going to the movies with his grandmother and joining a troupe of amateur actors. “I realized then I had been so lonely, and this new sense of belonging and purpose overwhelmed me to tears,” he wistfully explains. “You are welcome here, they had said. Welcome. I felt at last that I belonged.”

Gabriel Byrne considers the choices he’s made in one-man show (photo by Emilio Madrid)

Byrne doesn’t delve into his many successes — from Miller’s Crossing, The Usual Suspects, and Jindabyne on film to In Treatment, Madigan Men, and The War of the Worlds on television and his Eugene O’Neill Broadway trilogy of Long Day’s Journey into Night, A Moon for the Misbegotten, and A Touch of the Poet — but instead focuses on smaller key moments in his career, without name-dropping who he’s worked with or what movies or shows he has been in. He does ruminate on his breakthrough, on the popular Irish television series The Riordans, and he regales us with the night he spent drinking with Richard Burton, but he doesn’t mention the name of the eight-hour film they did together, 1983’s Wagner, or the other members of the cast, which included Vanessa Redgrave, Marthe Keller, Sir John Gielgud, Sir Laurence Olivier, and Sir Ralph Richardson.

The seventy-two-year-old Byrne also avoids most of his personal life as an adult, never bringing up his relationships with women (he’s been married twice) or his three children. Perhaps he didn’t want to rehash anything that was previously in his 1994 autobiography, Pictures in My Head, and Pat Collins’s 2008 documentary, Gabriel Byrne: Stories from Home, but the gaps are clear.

Directed by three-time Emmy winner Lonny Price (Sunset Boulevard, Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill), Walking with Ghosts has an elegance and charm about it, but in this case the whole is not greater than the sum of its parts; there are excellent chapters, but we don’t get enough of the bigger picture.

MONTHLY ANIME: MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO / CONTEMPORARY THEATER TALK: BEHIND-THE-SCENES

Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro wonderfully captures the joys and fears of being a child

MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO (TONARI NO TOTORO) (Hayao Miyazaki, 1988)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Film: Friday, November 4, $15, 7:00
Talk: Thursday, November 10, $20, 6:30
japansociety.org
www.nausicaa.net

The Royal Shakespeare Company is currently presenting a live-action stage adaptation of Hayao Miyazaki’s beloved My Neighbor Totoro at the Barbican, where it is receiving glowing reviews. The show was written by Tom Morton-Smith and is directed by Phelim McDermott, with a score by longtime Miyazaki collaborator Joe Hisaishi and puppetry by Basil Twist. As part of its monthly anime series, Japan Society will be screening a 35mm print of the 1988 film on November 4 at 7:00, followed November 10 at 6:30 by a discussion with Twist (Symphonie Fantastique, Dogugaeshi) about the making of the show.

In many ways a precursor to Miyazaki’s masterpiece, Spirited Away, the magical multi-award-winning My Neighbor Totoro is a fantastical trip down the rabbit hole, a wondrous journey through the sheer glee and universal fears of childhood. With their mother, Yasuko, suffering from an extended illness in the hospital, Satsuki and her younger sister, Mei, move to a new house in a rural farming community with their father, anthropology professor Tatsuo Kusakabe. Kanta, a shy boy who lives nearby, tells them the house is haunted, and indeed the two girls come upon a flurry of black soot sprites scurrying about. Mei also soon discovers a family of totoros, supposedly fictional characters from her storybooks, living in the forest, protected by a giant camphor tree. When the girls fear their mother has taken a turn for the worse, Mei runs off on her own, and it is up to Satsuki to find her.

Basil Twist will be at Japan Society to share behind-the-scenes stories of the Totoro stage show

Working with art director Kazuo Oga, Miyazaki paints the film with rich, glorious skies and lush greenery, honoring the beauty and power of nature both visually as well as in the narrative. The scene in which Satsuki and Mei huddle with Totoro at a bus stop in a rainstorm is a treasure. (And just wait till you see Catbus’s glowing eyes.) The movie also celebrates the sense of freedom and adventure that comes with being a child, without helicopter parents and myriad rules suffocating them at home and school. Twist’s talk will go behind-the-scenes of the RSC production, discussing the creation of puppets based on animated characters and sharing backstage images.

BAM NEXT WAVE: HAMLET

Thomas Ostermeier and Theater Schaubühne Berlin’ Hamlet continues at BAM through November 5 (photo © Stephanie Berger)

Who: Theater Schaubühne Berlin
What: Hamlet
Where: Brooklyn Academy of Music, Harvey Theater at the BAM Strong, 651 Fulton St.
When: October 27 – November 5, $74-$175
Why: Five years ago, Lars Eidinger electrified Brooklyn with his stunning portrayal of Richard III, the wildest and best I have ever seen, in Thomas Ostermeier and Theater Schaubühne Berlin’s ferocious adaptation at the BAM Harvey Theater. Eidinger, Ostermeier, and Schaubühne Berlin are back at the Harvey with their frantic take on the Bard’s Hamlet, running through November 5. The tragedy has been seen here in New York in numerous recent versions and reimaginings, from Robert Icke’s staging at Park Ave. Armory in repertory with The Oresteia and James Ijames’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Fat Ham at the Public to Potomac Theatre Project’s revival of Tom Stoppard’s Dogg’s Hamlet at Atlantic Stage 2, Dead Centre’s Hamnet at BAM Fisher, and Yaël Farber’s variation starring Ruth Negga at St. Ann’s Warehouse.

You can expect Eidinger to be a prince of Denmark unlike any other in this 165-minute adaptation, directed by Thomas Ostermeier and translated into German by dramaturg Marius von Mayenburg. The cast pairs Damir Avdic as Horatio and Guildenstern, Konrad Singer as Laertes and Rosencrantz, Robert Beyer as Osric and Polonius, amid other dual depictions, but it is Eidinger front and center, a mesmerizing actor who never holds anything back. You have been warned.

Lars Eidinger reinvents the prince of Denmark in Hamlet at BAM (photo © Stephanie Berger)

Update: It takes only minutes to realize that this Hamlet will resemble nothing you’ve ever seen. It opens with Eidinger, who at forty-six is about twice the age of his title character, beginning the “To Be, or Not to Be” soliloquy, which is supposed to unfurl in Act III. But he delivers only a few lines before joining the funeral of his murdered father, the former king, while his mother, Gertrude, and uncle, Claudius, stand under an umbrella at the burial. A cemetery worker has trouble with the coffin, water is sprayed from a hose, and the already unbalanced Hamlet, looking a bit doofy in his suspenders, falls face-first into the dirt over his father’s grave.

It’s Hamlet as vaudeville shtick, but with a camera that Hamlet uses to film himself and others as nefarious truths come out. Jan Pappelbaum’s set features lots of dirt and two white tables that move between the front and back of the stage, separated by a hanging curtain on which the live video is projected. (The costumes are by Nina Wetzel, music by Nils Ostendorf, video by Sébastien Dupouey, and lighting by Erich Schneider.)

A few moments later, when Claudius says, “But now, my nephew Hamlet, and my son — ,” a shocked Hamlet, unaware that his mother is betrothed to his uncle, does a double take and wonders aloud, “What? I didn’t get that,” then says to himself the more well known line, “A little more than kin, and less than kind.”

Eidinger is given free rein by Ostermeier, like an improv comic portraying the prince of Denmark. At one point, Eidinger jumped off the stage and approached a young man sitting front and center in the first row, wearing a black mask and a hoodie. Eidinger, who speaks German as Hamlet but English when he goes off-script, tried to get the man to interact with him, with no luck, leading to some yucks. Later, Eidinger tossed a shovel that accidentally bounced off the stage and landed near a woman in the audience. In the middle of his dialogue, Eidinger realized what happened and asked the woman if she was okay. It’s often hard to know what is scripted and when Eidinger is going with his instincts; just wait till you see his fencing battle with Laertes.

Even when he’s not lumbering across the stage (and off it), Hamlet is toying around, as if he has ADHD, banging on the table like a spoiled child and putting silly things on his face. The rest of the cast — Damir Avdic as Horatio and Guildenstern, Konrad Singer as Laertes and Rosencrantz, Robert Beyer as Osric and Polonius, Urs Jucker or Thomas Bading as Claudius and the ghost king, and Jenny König as Gertrude and Ophelia, a pairing that intensifies Hamlet’s cries of incest — is merely in service of Eidinger.

It can be a bit much in the 105-minute first act, which can get so chaotic it loses the narrative thread; if you’re not familiar with the story, you’re unlikely to know what’s going on all the time, especially with the doubling of characters who don’t change costumes. But the show comes together fabulously in the forty-five-minute second act — Eidinger even assures us that it’s much shorter than the first act — as the plot is more apparent and Hamlet (and Eidinger) is somewhat more focused if still as wildly unpredictable. There’s a method to his madness, even if Polonius’s classic pronouncement, “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t,” has been cut from the production. You also won’t hear anything about a “rogue and peasant slave,” “pernicious woman,” or “damned villain,” but Hamlet will command you to “please switch off your mobile phones!”

Hamlet explains, “It’s all just theater and yet also reality.” Throughout Shakespeare’s tragedy, Hamlet is battling reality, encountering ghosts and interpreting events through his own warped world view. But Ostermeier and Eidinger continually remind us that we are watching theater. And what theater it is, unique, original, flabbergasting, exciting, hilarious, and downright strange.

STRAIGHT LINE CRAZY

Ralph Fiennes as Robert Moses in David Hare’s Straight Line Crazy (photo by Kate Glicksberg)

STRAIGHT LINE CRAZY
The Griffin Theater at the Shed
The Bloomberg Building at Hudson Yards
545 West 30th St. at Eleventh Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 18
646-455-3494
theshed.org

David Hare’s sparkling, intense Straight Line Crazy, which opened Wednesday night at the Shed’s Griffin Theater, begins with Ralph Fiennes walking down Bob Crowley’s T-shaped stage, barefoot and wearing a suit. He does not need to introduce his character to the New York City audience; he is portraying infamous urban planner Robert Moses. Before he can say anything, the sold-out crowd erupts in entrance applause for the two-time Oscar and Emmy nominee and Tony winner. In a brief monologue, Moses says, explaining his penchant for swimming, “The further I swim the happier I am. At night, best of all. So how do I feel when people say ‘We were worried. You were gone so long. We called the coast guard.’ How do I feel? I tell them, ‘Why did you panic? Nothing’s going to happen to me.’”

A moment later, Helen Schlesinger, in frumpy attire — Crowley also designed the costumes — approaches, announcing, “I’m Jane Jacobs.” The audience again bursts into applause, but it’s not for the British television and theater actress as much as for her character, a woman whose name is instantly familiar to so many New Yorkers as Moses’s longtime archnemesis even though, as she points out, they never met. Explaining her original lack of interest in architecture, she states about her change of mind, “What made me think about architecture was that moment when I realized I was going to die. I remember thinking, what will be left of us? After we’re gone? And I remember reading that only two things remain. Cities and songs.”

Straight Line Crazy begins in 1926, as Moses, the chairman of the New York State Council of Parks (and later secretary of state and Parks and Recreation commissioner), is hard at work developing plans for the building of the Southern State and Northern State Parkways on Long Island. He sees the automobile as the future and is determined to bring access to Jones Beach to the masses, despite strong pushback from such wealthy landowners as the Morgans, the Whitneys, and the Fricks.

Jane Jacobs (Helen Schlesinger) won’t give up the fight against Robert Moses in Straight Line Crazy (photo by Kate Glicksberg)

“Every summer those few adventurous souls who dare to head this way are brought to a halt, as their overheated engines expire on badly maintained tracks,” Moses tells Henry Vanderbilt (Guy Paul). “Everything possible is done to discourage them. Well, no longer. My new parkways will make travelling as attractive as arriving.” Vanderbilt promises “impassioned and intransigent opposition to all your plans . . . unified, organized, and unyielding.” But there’s nothing Moses enjoys more than a good fight. When Vanderbilt calls him a revolutionary, Moses responds, “To the contrary. The very opposite. My aim is to forestall revolution, not to incite it.” However, his revolution is strictly for cars; he adamantly refuses to include any form of public transportation, no buses or trains.

Moses is a bold, severe man, unwilling to accept that he’s ever wrong, unable to consider compromises or concessions of any kind, unafraid of brazenly skirting the law. He speaks in aphorisms whether discussing plans with the two main members of his team, the fictional duo of Finnuala Connell (Judith Roddy) and Ariel Porter (Adam Silver), or the rambunctious, cigar-chomping New York governor, Al Smith (Danny Webb). “I made the mistake of thinking that if I proposed something which was logical, reasonable, and effective, people would at once see its merits and fall in behind it. . . . They blocked it at every turn,” Moses tells Porter. He says to Connell, “I’m a ditchdigger, I’m not an academic. I put academia behind me. It’s for the young. It’s for the inadequate. . . . The people lack imagination. The job of the leader is to provide it.”

In a swirling, exciting conversation with Smith, Moses explains, “I never ask favors. I ask my due.” On his way out, Smith tells Porter and Connell, “Hard to leave a meeting with Moses without feeling you’ve been robbed. But just as hard to know what the fuck you’ve been robbed of.”

Meanwhile, in the background, Jacobs starts making her case against Moses. “If you think fighting power is fun, I’d advise you to think again,” she says to the audience. The second act moves to 1955, as Jacobs is leading the battle against Moses’s plan to run a sunken highway right through the middle of Washington Square Park. While he claims it is to liberate traffic and offer a desperately needed throughfare into Lower Manhattan, Jacobs, along with fellow activists Shirley Hayes (Alana Maria), Sandy McQuade (Al Coppola), Carole Ames (Krysten Peck), Nicole Savage (Mary Stillwaggon Stewart), and Lewis Mason (Andrew Lewis), are arguing against the project.

Robert Moses (Ralph Fiennes) lets Gov. Al Smith (Danny Webb) know what’s on his mind in Straight Line Crazy (photo by Kate Glicksberg)

Also expressing her displeasure is one of Moses’s newest employees, Mariah Heller (Alisha Bailey), a Black architect with dreams of supporting the public good while harboring nightmares about how Moses’s destruction of the South Bronx negatively impacted her family. “You’re no different from anyone else, Mr. Moses,” she says to him. “Sometimes you’re right and sometimes you’re wrong. And in this particular instance, you’re handling things wrong.” Heller represents all the people of color who were seemingly cast aside by Moses through five decades of racist and classist public planning, as brought to light in Robert Caro’s seminal biography, The Power Broker, and by other historians.

But after all that time, Moses is as intransigent as ever. With Porter and Connell still at his side, Moses is even more cold and distant, ultimately a lonely, ill-tempered man whose reputation — for achievements that include Jones Beach, Lincoln Center, the West Side Highway, the United Nations, the state park system, and the Robert Moses Causeway — has been torn down by the wrecking ball of time, faster than it was built.

Directors Nicholas Hytner (Miss Saigon, The History Boys) and Jamie Armitage (Six, Southern Belles) manage to keep things interesting despite several stagnant scenes with lots of sitting and standing around as characters explicate and speechify. George Fenton’s original music, which is thankfully not used very often, is faint and distracting, complicating George Dennis’s sound design.

Webb (King Lear, Pennyworth) injects much-needed electricity as Smith, who is willing to go toe-to-toe with Moses, swilling bourbon, chomping on a stogie, and loudly pontificating on his relationship with the people of New York. You practically get swept up by the wind swirling around him as he marches across the stage.

Silver (Masters of the Air, Sons of the Prophet) and Roddy (Translations, Knives in Hens) are solid as two longtime Moses employees who understand their boss all too well and have remained loyal despite his failure to see them as individuals with lives outside the office. There’s not much Bailey can do in the thankless, anachronistic role of Heller, who openly calls Moses out on his racist tactics; her character seems forced, included primarily as a way for Hare (Plenty, Skylight) to address Moses’s biases.

Fiennes (Schindler’s List, The English Patient), who previously played architect Halvard Solness in Hare’s adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s The Master Builder and teamed with Hare and Hytner in Hare’s coronavirus play, Beat the Devil, is dazzling as Moses, a larger-than-life figure played by one of the greatest actors of his generation. Fiennes’s previous stage appearances in New York City came on Broadway in 1995 in Hamlet, at BAM in 2000 in Coriolanus and Richard II, and back on Broadway in 2006 in Brian Friel’s Faith Healer, all as the title character. When he stands atop an enormous layout of New York on the floor, a man bigger than the city itself, you can the sovereignty that is surging inside him is palpable.

Fiennes’s turn as the iconoclastic Moses was greatly anticipated here: The show’s entire run sold out and resale tickets are available online for between $800 and $1800. It is a giant of a performance; Fiennes, who played Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter films, commands the stage with a powerful authority and determination that matches that of Moses himself, although he is much more generous with the actors surrounding him than Moses was to his supporting cast.

It is also fitting that the show, a London Theatre production, takes place at the Shed, the entertainment venue at Hudson Yards, home to a chic, high-end mall and a tourist-attraction sculpture (the Vessel) with a sad history of attracting suicides, next to the West Side train lot, the High Line, and the Javits Center, where buses compete with car traffic. I think not even Moses would know what to make of it all.

BAM NEXT WAVE: A LITTLE LIFE

A LITTLE LIFE
Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
October 20-29, $45-$180
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
ita.nl/en

“You are so damaged,” Willem Ragnarsson (Maarten Heijmans) tells Jude St. Francis (Ramsey Nasr) in Ivo van Hove’s brilliant staging of Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 bestselling novel, A Little Life, continuing at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House through October 29. It’s 250 minutes — with one blessed intermission — of torture porn of the highest order, a tragic tale that takes the emotional tenor of Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves and Aki Kaurismäki’s The Match Factory Girl to another level.

Adapted by Koen Tachelet and translated by Kitty Pouwels and Josephine Ruitenberg, the play is presented in Dutch with English supertitles. The first act can be confusing as the story develops; as with many works by von Hove and his Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, you’re not always sure where to look. Jan Versweyveld’s set is a large room with a sink and doctor’s office on one side, a desk and couch at the other, a cast-iron sink standing at the center. A pair of videos by Versweyveld and Mark Thewessen, repeating, slow footage of narrow, empty New York streets, flank the stage, playing throughout the show. The only live video — a mainstay of van Hove’s productions — is of a record spinning on a turntable in the back, behind which sit five rows of audience members. Supertitles are projected above the stage and off to the right and left.

Thus, for the first hour or so, I wasn’t sure where to direct my vision. The matter was further complicated when there was a disturbance among several audience members in the back and an usher that lasted for several minutes. Ultimately, the usher escorted a few people off by walking across the length of the stage. At first I wondered if it was part of the play, van Hove adding to my confusion. It might have just been a sick person.

Eventually, I started figuring out who is who. Four close friends from college are hanging out, talking about life and love. Willem Ragnarsson (Maarten Heijmans) is a handsome actor. Malcolm Irvine (Edwin Jonker) is a talented architect deciding whether he should leave a small company and work for a corporate firm. Jean-Baptiste “JB” Marion (Majd Mardo) is an artist who takes photographs of his friends and paints them on canvas. And Jude St. Francis (Ramsey Nasr) is a lawyer under the tutelage of his mentor, Harold (Jacob Derwig). Their banter is reminiscent of Mart Crowley’s queer classic, The Boys in the Band.

But as the plot turns primarily to Jude and his horrific past, adversity piled on adversity at the hands of men he trusted, a darkness hovers over everything. Jude refuses to talk about what happened to him as a child except with his therapist, Ana (Marieke Heebink), who he imagines is almost always there with him. As he recalls in flashback his treatment by Brother Luke, Caleb, and a man named Traylor (all played by Hans Kesting), involving sexual abuse and brutal violence, he turns more and more inward, unable to face truths that can set him free from the prison he has built around himself, one in which he has to cut himself to fight off the inner pain. He seeks help from his doctor, Andy Contractor (Bart Slegers), but that is only for the physical damage inflicted on him, and inflicted by him.

In the far superior second act, Willem attempts to bring some kind of solace to Jude, who wears the same bloodied shirt throughout, except when he’s naked, which is often. As he digs deeper into his troubled existence, every time there is the possibility of hope, misfortune rears its ugly head. But it makes for gripping theater; it is intense and thrilling, anchored by a stunning performance by Nasr, who is also a poet, writer, and director. He portrays Jude with a yearning agony that echoes throughout the theater and into your soul.

But then the man sitting two rows in front of me annoyingly turned his phone on and held it up, and I saw that it was eleven o’clock. I am not a clock watcher at shows; I don’t want to know how much time is left, as it can impact my experience and expectations. But knowing that there were still about fifteen minutes till the end, I had no idea where von Hove could take it from there. In the short remaining span, I counted five places where I thought the play was over — wanted it to be over — but it kept going, even adding a completely unnecessary coda that angered me, manipulating my emotions, telling me how I was supposed to feel. Tony, Obie, and Oliveier winner van Hove (A View from the Bridge, Scenes from a Marriage, Kings of War) had trusted us until then, so the finale felt like he was piling on, in some ways echoing the constant torment that engulfed Jude.

In a program note, van Hove explains, “A Little Life is not a book, it is an excess, an excess of words, feelings, sexual abuse, automutilations, and heroic attempts at love and friendship.” It is all that and more, in a play with an excess of about fifteen minutes.