this week in theater

UNDER YOUR SKIN: BUG ON BROADWAY

Agnes White (Carrie Coon) finds more danger inside than outside in Tracy Letts’s Bug (photo © Matthew Murphy)

BUG
Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West Forty-Seventh St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 8, $92-$407
www.manhattantheatreclub.com

It’s been several weeks since I saw the Broadway debut of Tracy Letts’s Bug, and I’m still feeling all itchy and out of sorts, scratching myself all over, thinking I’m being invaded by tiny killer insects.

Straight psychological horror plays don’t have a particularly impressive history on Broadway. While there have been plenty of successful spooky musicals, the same has not been true of legitimately frightening dramas. Recently, Levi Holloway’s thrilling Grey House got short shrift, closing early, and while Stranger Things: The First Shadow keeps going strong at the Marquis, it’s not pure horror, especially with its awkward Oklahoma! high school musical subplot. The last time I felt so shuddery after a Broadway play might go all the way back to watching Frank Langella from the front row of the Martin Beck Theatre in the 1977 smash Dracula.

Bug premiered in London in 1996 and came to New York eight years later, starring Shannon Cochran, Michael Shannon, Michael Cullen, Amy Landecker, Brían F. O’Byrne, and Reed Birney. It was adapted into a film in 2006, directed by William Friedkin (The Exorcist, The French Connection) and featuring Ashley Judd, Harry Connick Jr., and Michael Shannon.

Its Broadway bow at the Samuel J. Friedman is led by the sizzling hot Carrie Coon, Letts’s wife, a four-time Emmy nominee who has delighted in such series as The White Lotus, The Leftovers, Fargo, and, currently, The Gilded Age. In Bug she plays Agnes White, a forty-four-year-old woman living in a motel room outside of Oklahoma City. The opening moment is stark and beautiful: Agnes stands near the door, smoking a cigarette and holding a wineglass, looking outside as if the world is not for her. The phone rings but nobody says anything on the other end; Agnes assumes it’s her ex-husband, Jerry Goss (Steve Key), calling from prison. “I got a gun,” she warns the caller.

Next she’s having a crack, coke, and booze party with her best friend, the wild R.C. (Jennifer Engstrom), and a guy R.C. just met, a veteran named Peter Evans (Namir Smallwood). Agnes is suspicious of Peter, saying, “He’s a fuckin’ maniac, for all I know. . . . He’s a maniac DEA ax murderer, Jehovah’s Witness.” R.C. assures her he’s okay, as does Peter, whose first words are, “I’m not an ax murderer.” Agnes takes a liking to Peter and lets him stay while R.C. goes off to another shindig.

Peter explains to Agnes that he makes people nervous and uncomfortable with his talent for picking up on things, telling Agnes that he is a preacher’s son just looking for a connection to other people. When Peter starts hearing a chirping he can’t identify, Agnes at first thinks it’s a cricket. “Don’t kill him. It’s bad luck,” she says. It turns out to be the battery in the smoke alarm, which Peter claims is “more radioactive than plutonium.” He gets rid of it outside, disposing of a warning system that both of them will need as they go down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories centered around Peter’s insistence that the room is crawling with dangerous bugs that are immune to standard sprays. “They’re blood-sucking aphids,” he later tells R.C. and Agnes, “and we’re infested.”

By the time Dr. Sweet (Randall Arney) arrives, it might already be too late.

Agnes (Carrie Coon) and Peter (Namir Smallwood) get creeped out in Bug on Broadway (photo © Matthew Murphy)

A Steppenwolf production presented by Manhattan Theatre Club, Bug is a dark dive into paranoia, perhaps even more relevant today than it was in 1996 or 2006, given the vast reach of social media, where anyone can say anything about whatever they want and watch their beliefs, regardless of facts and the truth, spread across the internet and, potentially, into mainstream society — and the government.

The play is like the bizarre offspring of Francis Ford Coppola’s brilliant 1974 The Conversation, in which Gene Hackman stars as Harry Caul, a surveillance expert who soon thinks he himself is the target being bugged, and — stay with me, now — the 1941 Popeye cartoon Flies Ain’t Human, in which the spinach-gulping hero tries his darnedest to kill flies in his home, even using a rifle.

Takeshi Kata’s hotel-room set is appropriately claustrophobic, especially in the second act. Heather Gilbert’s lighting maintains the dark mysteries hovering over it all, while Josh Schmidt’s sound ranges from a chilling quiet to brash noises.

Tony winners Letts (The Minutes, Mary Page Marlowe) and director David Cromer (Meet the Cartozians, Prayer for the French Republic) allow the plot to slowly slither along until some major set changes during intermission — which the audience can watch — ratchet up the tension for the even creepier second act as the characters’ perspectives on reality shift dramatically.

Tony nominee and Obie winner Coon (Mary Jane, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) is hypnotic as Agnes, a strong-minded, independent woman who gets caught up in something she may not be able to get out of; you can’t take your eyes off her as her immediate future grows more and more ominous. Smallwood (Pass Over, Pipeline) portrays Peter with a keen ambiguity; you never know what he’s going to say or do. Their long nude scene together — the reason audience members must place their phones in Yondr pouches for the duration of the show — binds them to each other in a moving and emotional way. (The naturalistic costumes are by Sarah Laux.)

Bug is a taut, involving thriller, with authentic scares that get under your skin. It will also make you feel genuinely threatened the next time you’re itchy, searching for a creepy crawly creature — or following a military industrial complex conspiracy theory — with an unusual taste for human blood.

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

NOT JUST CLOWNING AROUND: MARCEL ON THE TRAIN AT CLASSIC STAGE

Ethan Slater cowrote and stars as a famous French mime in Marcel on the Train (photo by Emilio Madrid)

MARCEL ON THE TRAIN
Classic Stage Company, Lynn F. Angelson Theater
136 East 13th St. between Third & Fourth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 22, $66-$136
www.classicstage.org

In his 1997 film Life Is Beautiful, cowriter-director Roberto Benigni portrays a Jewish Italian bookstore owner who protects his young son from the horrors of the Holocaust and a concentration camp by bravely performing silent, physical comedy for him. Although fictional, the movie was inspired by the real experiences of Italian author Rubino Romeo Salmonì in Auschwitz. Life Is Beautiful was nominated for seven Oscars and won three, for Best Music, Best Foreign Language Film, and Best Actor.

In Marcel on the Train, making its world premiere at Classic Stage, cowriter Ethan Slater portrays Jewish French mime Marcel Marceau, who was part of the resistance during WWII, joining with his cousin Georges Loinger and the OSE (Oeuvre de Secours Aux Enfants) to help save Jewish children, bravely performing silent, physical comedy for them as they tried to escape the Nazis. However, Marcel on the Train sputters, a bumpy ride that loses gas while sharing its remarkable tale.

The hundred-minute play opens with the twenty-year-old Marceau — born Marcel Mangel in Strasbourg, son of a Polish kosher butcher and Ukraine-born mother — performing mime on a bare wooden platform stage. He plucks a flower and follows some butterflies before a train whistle blows, several benches rise up from the floor, and he is joined by four hungry, tired children disguised as boy scouts: the serious, intelligent Berthe (Tedra Millan), the knowledgeable but cynical Adolphe (Max Gordon Moore), the talkative Henri (Alex Wyse), and Etiennette (Maddie Corman), who never speaks.

“Sorry. I was having a dream,” Berthe says to Marcel. “I’ve had it before, I think. It’s the future and everyone I know is old. But I’m twelve still because I never got to get old.” Marcel can’t hear her because of the train noise, so he mimics slamming the window shut, then makes a joke that Berthe doesn’t laugh at. “Don’t worry, I have others,” he promises. The exchange sets the tone for the show, which explores the loss of childhood innocence, communication between children and adults, and courage in the fight against fascism.

Marcel Marceau (Ehan Slater) entertains four adolescents as they try to escape the Nazis in fictionalized play (photo by Emilio Madrid)

The drama switches, sometimes awkwardly, to the past and the future. The first such time shift is told from the point of view of Georges (Aaron Serotsky), who tells Marcel, who is expertly forging documents for the cause, “Ooh, we’d be fucked without you, cousin. . . . Your artistry is a gift.” Marcel replies, “I am gifting the resistance my skill, my attention to detail, not my artistry. Charlie Chaplin wouldn’t just forge thirty identification papers, he’d turn them into, I don’t know, thirty baby ducks farting on Hitler.” (Ouch.)

They design a plan to meet up in Roanne, then make their way through the woods into Switzerland. Back in the present, Marceau mimes juggling apples to keep the four twelve-year-olds’ minds off their dire situation. A second trip to the past introduces Marcel’s father, Charles, (Serotsky), who is not thrilled by his son’s heroic exploits. “You know what you should do? Return to Warsaw, play the Grand, could you imagine?” Charles says, but Marcel is determined to be part of the resistance, even as the present-day journey grows more serious when they discover Georges is not waiting for them at Roanne and a Nazi officer (Serotsky) is approaching on the train.

Marcel on the Train, begins and ends with Marceau alone, miming to the audience; the emotional impact has changed because of what has happened in between, but it feels outside of the play. While it’s a showcase for Slater’s talent and virtuosity as Marceau’s alter ego, Bip the Clown, both frame pieces go on too long. Tony nominee Slater (SpongeBob SquarePants, Wicked) and cowriter and director Marshall Pailet (Private Jones, Who’s Your Baghdaddy) never find quite the right track for the narrative, which presents a surprising, relatively new, and utterly fascinating part of Marceau’s life to explore, previously detailed in several books and films over the last fifteen years, including Jonathan Jakubowicz’s fictionalized 2020 Resistance, starring Jesse Eisenberg as Marceau.

The pace stops and starts and gets caught up in tangents that are difficult to recover from, and the tension is overly manufactured. Jill BC DuBoff’s sound, Studio Luna’s lighting, and Sarah Laux’s costumes create the right atmosphere on Scott Davis’s spare set, but adult actors Corman (Accidentally Brave), Millan (Leopoldstadt), Moore (Tammy Faye), and Wyse (Good Night, Oscar) are hamstrung as the four adolescents by the inconsistent dialogue, as is Serotsky (August: Osage County), who plays everyone else.

Marceau and his brother and cousin were members of the French resistance, rescuing children, but the play has been fictionalized into disparate elements that don’t form a solid whole. There’s a great story to be told, but unfortunately Marcel on the Train too often gets diverted as it shows that life can also not be beautiful.

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

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.]