this week in theater

THE SIGN IN SIDNEY BRUSTEIN’S WINDOW

Iris (Rachel Brosnahan) and Sidney (Oscar Isaac) get playful in long-overdue Lorraine Hansberry revival at BAM (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

THE SIGN IN SIDNEY BRUSTEIN’S WINDOW
Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Strong, Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St. between Ashland & Rockwell Pl.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 24, $84.50-$385
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

One of the first things you will ask yourself after seeing Lorraine Hansberry’s The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window is, Why haven’t I ever seen or read this before? Or even, Why have I never heard of it until now?

Hansberry changed theater forever with her 1959 masterpiece, A Raisin in the Sun. Five years later, her second play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, debuted on Broadway, starring Gabriel Dell as the title character and Rita Moreno as his wife, Iris. It ran for 14 previews and 101 performances; the last New York City revival was more than fifty years ago, playing nine previews and a paltry five performances at the Longacre, with Hal Linden as Brustein and Zohra Lampert as Iris. Whereas Raisin dealt with a Black family struggling to survive on the South Side of Chicago following the death of its patriarch, Sign is about a white couple in Greenwich Village trying to maintain their Bohemian lifestyle; racism and discrimination are only subplots to the central narrative.

The provocative play is now back in a stellar production at BAM’s Harvey Theater that continues through March 24 and stars Emmy nominee Oscar Isaac as Sidney, a New York City Jewish intellectual, and Rachel Brosnahan as his non-Jewish wife, Iris; the story is built around Sidney’s efforts to make a living and the travails of his friends and his wife’s family.

When the play opens, his latest business venture, a folk music café called Walden Pond, has failed, so he immediately decides to buy the local newspaper the Village Crier. The deal annoys Iris, a wannabe actress he has nicknamed Mountain Girl because of her Appalachian upbringing. “Where in the world are you going to get the money to pay for a newspaper?” a bewildered Iris asks. “It’s a small newspaper. A weekly,” Sidney explains. “Sidney, you can’t afford a yearly leaflet!” Iris declares.

Joining Sidney at the newspaper are his right-hand man, Alton Scales (Julian De Niro), and artist and designer Max (Raphael Nash Thompson), who has contempt for revolutionaries like Alton.

Alton (Julian De Niro) and Wally (Andy Grotelueschen) are a bit on edge in The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Sidney is a former idealist who no longer believes that he can save the world. “Since I was eighteen I’ve belonged to every committee to Save, to Free, to Abolish, Preserve, Reserve, and Conserve that ever was,” he tells Alton, who is a light-skinned Black man, and his friend Wally O’Hara (Andy Grotelueschen), a bushy haired white man running for local office as a reformer. Sidney goes on, “And the result — is that the mere thought of a ‘movement’ to do anything chills my bones! I simply can no longer bear the spectacle of power-driven insurgents trying at all cost to gain control of — the refreshment committee!”

Sidney calls Iris’s older sister, the bigoted and fashionable Mavis (Miriam Silverman), “the Bulwark of the Republic. The Mother Middleclass itself standing there revealed in all her towering courage.” Mavis responds, “I am standing here and I am thinking: how smug it is in bohemia,” blaming people such as Sidney for society’s ills, declaring, “Since you have all so busily got rid of God for us!”

Alton has fallen in love with Gloria (Gus Birney), Mavis and Iris’s younger sister, who works as a call girl in Miami, although Alton doesn’t know that. Because Mavis had difficulty accepting Iris’s marriage to a Jew, Iris and Sidney decide not to tell Mavis about Alton, assuming she’ll not respond well to the possibility of a Black brother-in-law, either. Meanwhile, gay playwright David Ragin (Glenn Fitzgerald), who lives upstairs from the Brusteins, occasionally drops by for some writing supplies or just to say hello and shake things up.

And things do indeed get shaken up immediately before and after the primary.

Obie-winning director Anne Kaufman (The Bedwetter, The Nether) gives Hansberry’s sharp dialogue and clever character development the room they need to breathe and grow, avoiding clichéd situations and stereotypes. The action unfurls on dots’ multifloor set, which is propped up from beneath as if it is floating in a mysterious space, a cramped Village apartment with a fire escape outside one window and a rooftop view. John Torres’s lighting and Bray Poor’s sound maintain the believability of it all.

Iris (Rachel Brosnahan) and Sidney (Oscar Isaac) can make only so much beautiful music together (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Isaac (Hamlet, Grace) is sensational as Sidney, completely immersing himself in this complex and unpredictable man who essentially wants to do the right things for the right reasons, who feels he is part of a bigger community that needs people like him. Brosnahan (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Othello) is a delight as Iris, who is ready to flower but is constantly thwarted. Silverman (Anatomy of a Suicide, A Delicate Ship) nearly steals every scene she’s in, representing how too many Americans feel toward people who are not like them but also how they are not innately evil and, perhaps, willing to adjust their views. Tony nominee Grotelueschen (Tootsie, Into the Woods) continues to prove he’s one of the best supporting players around as the politician seeking a newspaper endorsement. Birney brings a sweet innocence to Gloria, Fitzgerald is bold as the cocky David, De Niro is gentle as Alton, and Nash Thompson has a rousing good time as Max.

But at the center of it all, a daring humanity emanates from every moment. The play was inspired by a real election in Hansberry’s district in the Village; the Chicago native lived on Bleecker St. for many years prior to her death in 1965 at the age of thirty-four. BAM supplements the show with the biographical exhibit “‘Art Is Energy’: Lorraine Hansberry, World Builder” in the Rudin Family Gallery, consisting of photos, unpublished writings, recordings, drawings, Alison Saar’s sculpture To Sit a While, and more, lending insight into the playwright’s real life.

Theatergoers and critics might have been disappointed that The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window didn’t address racism directly like Raisin did as they tried to pigeonhole the Black woman writer, but her sophomore play has plenty to say about the human condition, and perhaps she was aware that the work would not be as successful as her first hit. About halfway through, Sidney and David have a key conversation in which Hansberry seems to be defending herself in David’s words.

Sidney: Tell me. What is your play about, David?
David: It’s not for me to say.
Sidney: Each person will “get from it what he brings to it?” Right?
David: To be real simple-minded about it — yes.
Sidney: Then, what makes you the artist and the audience the consumer if they have to write your play for you?
David: I know what it’s about. I told you, my plays have to speak for themselves.
Sidney: But to whom? For whom are they written and, above all, why are they written?
David: You hate my kind of writing because it goes beyond the walls of Ibsen’s prisons and Shaw’s lectures — that’s your problem, Sid.
Mavis: I just don’t know whatever happened to simple plays about simple people with simple problems.

Welcome to the wonderful world of Lorraine Hansberry and The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window.

THE SEAGULL/ WOODSTOCK, NY

Thomas Bradshaw moves Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull to modern-day Woodstock in New Group world premiere (photo by Monique Carboni)

THE SEAGULL/ WOODSTOCK, NY
The New Group at the Pershing Square Signature Center
The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 9, $38-$107
212-244-7529
thenewgroup.org
www.signaturetheatre.org

While sitting in the first row watching Thomas Bradshaw’s outrageously funny and psychologically insightful modern-day adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, called The Seagull/Woodstock, NY, I was reminded that I have never seen a traditional version of the play, one that uses the original dialogue and time period. And that’s just how the Russian playwright wanted it.

In John J. Desmond’s relatively serious and straightforward 1975 Williamstown production, which went straight from stage to film, Konstantin (Frank Langella), a young playwright whose mother, Irina (Lee Grant), is an aristocratic star, tells his uncle, landowner Sorin (William Swetland), about Irina, “She knows of course I haven’t got any use for the theater. She loves the theater. Seems to her she’s working for humanity and the sacred cause of art. But to me her theater today is nothing, nothing but a mass of routine and stale conventions.” Sorin responds, “Well, we can’t do without the theater, my dear boy.” A fanciful dreamer, Konstantin declares, “We need new forms, Uncle! New forms we must have. And if we can’t have those, we shall have nothing at all.”

Thus, Chekhov himself essentially demands new interpretations, and in New York City we have received them with such challenging works as Elevator Repair Service’s 2022 Seagull at Skirball and Aaron Posner’s 2016 Stupid Fucking Bird at the much-lamented Pearl.

Bradshaw tears down conventions in his 160-minute version (with intermission) for the New Group, in which the action has been moved from a late-nineteenth-century Russian country estate to a contemporary riverfront home in artsy Woodstock in Ulster County. The play begins with the actors warming up on a wooden proscenium platform, doing physical and vocal exercises; the audience sits on three sides of the stage as they get an advance glimpse of the cast and try to figure out who’s portraying who. After several minutes, everyone joins in a singalong of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s 1970 classic “Our House,” the lyrics of which will run counter to what we are about to experience: “Our house is a very, very, very fine house / With two cats in the yard / Life used to be so hard / Now everything is easy ’cause of you.” (CSNY appeared at the 1969 Woodstock festival but did not sing that song; the next year, however, they released the song “Woodstock,” written by Joni Mitchell, in which they proclaim, “Got to get back to the land / Set my soul free.”)

A close-knit, motley crew is gathering by the river on Darren (Daniel Oreskes) and Pauline’s (Amy Stiller) property to see a new play by Kevin (Nat Wolff), a twenty-six-year-old ne’er-do-well living in the shadow of his narcissistic mother, Irene (Parker Posey), a star of the stage. Before she says hello to her friends and relations, she is already loudly complaining that there is no soy milk for her coffee. Kevin has written the one-person, two-hour show for Nina (Aleyse Shannon), a twentysomething with no boundaries. Kevin is in love with Nina, who will soon take a liking to the older William (Ato Essandoh), a well-known writer who is Irene’s current partner. Meanwhile, Pauline and Darren’s daughter, Sasha (Hari Nef), pines away for Kevin. Also on hand are Sasha’s teacher husband, Mark (Patrick Foley), brain surgeon Dean (Bill Sage), and retired lawyer Samuel (David Cale), Irene’s best friend.

Mother (Parker Posey) and son (Nat Wolff) have an awkward relationship in The Seagull/Woodstock, NY (photo by Monique Carboni)

When Sasha ridicules Kevin’s set, which consists solely of a cast-iron bathtub and a curtain that goes around it, Mark needles her, saying, “Tonight their artistic souls will unite on this very stage.” Right before Kevin’s play starts, Samuel tells Nina, who lives nearby and whose banker father is not a fan of her interest in theater, “Woodstock nurtures the artistic soul. Bob Dylan and Van Morrison wrote some of their best music here. [Your father] should have bought a place in the Hamptons if he wanted you to be a banker.”

Bradshaw fills the show with contemporary references, from Dylan and Morrison to viagra, #metoo, Alec Baldwin, wokeness, the Wailers, Donald Trump, Bertrand Russell, Instagram, Stephen Colbert, Tracy Letts, dramadies, and Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive. He also takes on race, class, sexual identity, and truth but in subtler ways than he has in such previous works as Southern Promises, Intimacy, and Burning, or at least more subtle for him.

But Bradshaw and director Scott Elliott’s central target is art itself. “Hi, I’m Nina. I’m not a character in Kevin’s play. I’m me,” Nina says as the play-within-a-play kicks off. “Kevin hates artifice. So do I. I am myself, or I am no one. Who are you? Are you, you? Or are you hiding from yourself?” She adds, “The fourth wall tonight is broken. So that means I can see you just as clearly as you can see me. I can see everything about you. I can see things even you can’t see.” The fourth wall of Bradshaw’s play was broken immediately as well, when the actors got onstage and we all sang, and the lights stay at a level that allows us to see everyone in the audience.

Nina, who is biracial, then discusses “the N word,” actually saying it in full several times, which confronts her audience as well as Bradshaw’s, a writer who often strives to make his audience squirm in their seats. “I get that the historical legacy of the word is offensive. But does the word itself have any power?” she asks. Then, in true Bradshaw fashion, she switches to one of his favorite topics. “We recently went through a long period of isolation. Everyone in our society did. It was a period of intense loneliness for me. And for many of you, I bet. And what were we all doing during that time? Masturbating. Why can’t we talk about it? We all do it. I’d rather discuss masturbating than the weather.” Bradshaw understands that theater itself can be a kind of masturbation; in fact, in Intimacy, a character not only pleasures himself (using a prosthetic) in view of the audience but launches a sticky white substance into the crowd, some of which landed on the head of a major critic, who was none too happy. (One friend joked to me that Anton’s last name should be “Jackhov,” pronounced “jackoff.”)

Irene (Parker Posey) gets in the middle of Pauline (Amy Stiller) and Darren (Daniel Oreskes) in New Group world premiere at the Signature (photo by Monique Carboni)

After Kevin’s play ends, Irene tells Nina, “You were very good, in spite of my son exploiting you.” Nina replies, “Oh no. It was my choice. And he totally respected me, as an actress, and as a woman of color.” Irene says, “So you didn’t feel the least bit weird pretending to, uh, touch yourself, onstage?” Nina explains, “Oh, I wasn’t pretending. I had to really do it, in order to crack the artifice of normal theatrical conventions. There’s nothing real about realism. That’s Kevin’s philosophy. He believes in hiding nothing.” That is Bradshaw’s philosophy as well.

Throughout the show, the actors and stage crew bring chairs and tables on and off Derek McLane’s intimate set, which includes a narrow lower level around the platform where people in the first row can get comfy and put up their feet — until some of the actors walk across it. At times Elliott choreographs the play like it’s a dance, expertly guiding the cast of ten in the small space, who enter and exit through the aisles.

The cast seems to be having a lot of fun, and that feeling is infectious; the play moves at such an intoxicating pace that you might be disappointed when it’s over, wanting to spend more time with these well-developed, endearing, annoying, and frustrating people. “I think my character would feel more authentic if we knew more of her backstory. Right now the play feels abrupt,” Nina tells Kevin, who argues, “It is abrupt. That’s the point. We’re subverting typical American Theater. We’re getting right to the heart of the matter instead of making our audience suffer through an hour of incredibly dull backstory.”

Posey (Hurlyburly, Fifth of July) is a burst of summer sunshine as Irene, in flowery dresses, bobbed hairdo, and gloriously fake smiles. (The costumes are by Qween Jean, with lighting by Cha See and sound by Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen that keep the audience immersed in the show.) Wolff (Buried Child, The Naked Brothers Band) wonderfully captures the constant nervous wreck that is Kevin, while Shannon (Charmed, Black Christmas) glistens as a strong young woman ready to take charge of her life, especially sexually, and Nef (Des Moines, “Daddy”) is a bundle of fear as the disillusioned Sasha. Cale, Essandoh, Foley, Nef, Oreskes, Sage, and Stiller round out the uniformly solid cast.

Bradshaw (Thomas & Sally, Fulfillment) and New Group artistic director Elliott (Mercury Fur, Sticks & Bones) also take a hard look at aging, not just in theater but in life. Irene is well aware that it is getting more difficult for her to find roles because she is in her fifties, and Samuel is facing serious health issues that affect the elderly.

“Is there anything new anymore? Are there any new stories? New forms? Or is everything just a new spin on something old? A reinvention of the comfortable and familiar?,” Kevin asks William. The Seagull/Woodstock, NY provides just the right answers to those questions.

THE TREES

Sheila (Crystal Dickinson) and David (Jess Barbagallo) are stuck in a rut in The Trees (photo by Chelcie Parry)

THE TREES
Playwrights Horizons, Mainstage Theater
416 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 19, $46-$76
www.playwrightshorizons.org

In L. Frank Baum’s 1919 book The Magic of Oz, the thirteenth and next-to-last of the illustrated Oz novels, a little girl named Trot and grizzled former sailor Cap’n Bill suddenly get stuck in the ground, and their feet start growing roots. As Baum writes: “This is hard luck,” [Cap’n Bill] declared, in a voice that showed he was uneasy at the discovery. “We’re pris’ners, Trot, on this funny island, an’ I’d like to know how we’re ever goin’ to get loose, so’s we can get home again.”

That’s precisely what happens to Sheila (Crystal Dickinson) and her older brother, David (Jess Barbagallo), near the beginning of Agnes Borinsky’s The Trees, making its world premiere at Playwrights Horizons (coproduced by Page 73) through March 19. It’s also what happens to the play itself, which is stuck in the mud from the get-go.

Sheila and David are both drunk, returning from a party. Instead of going into their house, they gleefully run around the forest until their feet get trapped in large circles and their toes start growing roots. “There’s still so much to do,” David says. “Will anyone notice?” Sheila asks.

People will notice, but there appears to be nothing much they can do about it as life goes on around the siblings, including visits from their Polish grandmother (Danusia Trevino); their longtime friend Charlotte (Becky Yamamoto); David’s boyfriend, Jared (Sean Donovan); Norman (Ray Anthony Thomas), who is caught in some nearby bushes; Saul (Max Gordon Moore), a rabbi from Cleveland; Sheryl (Marcia DeBonis), from the Cleveland congregation Sisterhood; twinks Julian (Nile Harris) and Tavish (Pauli Pontrelli); street vendor Terry (Sam Breslin Wright), who immediately senses opportunity; and, later, a child named Ezra (Xander Fenyes).

Agnes Borinsky’s The Trees takes place in a candy-colored forest (photo by Chelcie Parry)

Among the topics of conversation are capitalism, religion, romance, and loneliness, with hints at environmentalism.

“I think there’s a certain threshold of love one needs to feel in one’s life,” Norman says. “And if you never meet that threshold you continue to be filled with longing. You can keep on — but you’re hungry. And that is me. Slightly hungry. To the bitter end.”

The rabbi admits, “I’ve felt a great sliding in the world. Like we’re all sliding off this planet into somewhere . . . dark and ugly and dead. It seems a little bit like it’s all on autopilot. Like God is off . . . somewhere . . . else. And the plane of the world is off, somehow, and we’re just sliding. . . . And so when I read about you two, it seemed to me like God might have returned. And that this was the hand of God, that rooted you here. That life isn’t the miracle, but staying put. Because if the world were to tilt and the rest of us were to slide, you’d still be right here.”

David and Sheila remain right there as life plods forward, evoking Didi and Gogo in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, but Borinsky (A Song of Songs, Ding Dong It’s the Ocean) is never able to establish much of a story aside from the central idea of two characters in search of an exit. In a “Playwright’s Perspective” program note, she admits, “I’m not great at writing plot. I end up writing logistics. . . . Plots are a bit ridiculous.” Unfortunately, a plot is precisely what The Trees needs, something to be nurtured, that can grow over the course of, in this case, a striking-looking but ultimately aimless 105 minutes. (The fun lighting is by Thomas Dunn, with sound by Tei Blow and puppets by Amanda Villalobos.)

Parker Lutz’s pristine white set is a glistening fairy-tale world with Greek columns, but the narrative is choppy and random. Enver Chakartash’s costumes can get wildly colorful, at times conjuring the rainbow Pride flag, but it’s primarily all for show, with not enough substance. Too often characters come and go without adding much, anecdotes that might be cute but are not critical. Director Tina Satter (Is This a Room, Ghost Rings) can only do so much with her two stars essentially cemented in place, and I’m still trying to figure out why David and Sheila occasionally go down into the ground and then come back up again; it’s a cool effect that does not have any apparent reason, fitting in with the rest of the play.

In Baum’s The Magic of Oz, the Kalidah reflects, “Our own Kalidah King has certain magical powers of his own. Perhaps he knows how to fill up these two holes in my body.” Perhaps he also knows how to fill up the two bodies in holes in The Trees.

PICTURES FROM HOME

Danny Burstein plays real-life photographer Larry Sultan in Pictures from Home on Broadway (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

PICTURES FROM HOME
Studio 54
254 West 54th St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 30, $65-$312
212-719-1300
picturesfromhomebroadway.com

Even an all-star cast and an award-winning director can’t prevent Sharr White’s Pictures from Home from feeling like you’re watching people you don’t know show you their home movies and vacation photos; you can only care so much. The play, continuing at Studio 54 through April 30, has its share of touching and funny moments, but it’s primarily a bumpy, inconsistent trip through strangers’ family albums.

The show is adapted from photographer Larry Sultan’s 1992 book of the same name, the result of an eight-year project in which Larry (Danny Burstein) took pictures of his parents, Jean (Zoё Wanamaker) and Irving (Nathan Lane), primarily at their home in the San Fernando Valley. Larry lives in the Bay Area with his pregnant wife and child but spends many weekends visiting his mother and father to take photos, most of which are posed.

The three characters are aware of the audience’s existence, occasionally addressing them directly. The play begins with Larry explaining that he is a distinguished professor of photography at California College of the Arts in San Francisco and that “this project will become one of my hallmark achievements — I know that’s not a modest thing to say. Regardless, this isn’t about me, it’s about them.” Irv interjects, “Larry may say it’s about us, but trust me. It’s about him.”

Larry admits, “My wife, Kelly, and I joke that no matter how much respect I get in the outside world, stepping inside these walls is my Kryptonite. I turn to mush when I try to get the shots I’m looking for.”

After finding a dusty box in his parents’ garage filled with hundreds of reels of Super-8 film, “thirty years of folktales,” Larry decides to start photographing Irv, who is not in favor of the project and hates nearly all the pictures his son takes of him, and Jean, who is not so upset but doesn’t quite understand why Larry is making such a fuss.

Larry (Danny Burstein) documents his parents’ (Zoё Wanamaker and Nathan Lane) life in Pictures from Home (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Asking the unseen projectionist to play a clip from one of the reels, Larry tells us, “You can’t watch this movie without getting the impression of, of . . . a family living in a small apartment in Brooklyn projecting its dreams onto film emulsion.” He adds, “Knowing the disparity between the actual circumstances of the movie versus the hopes you nurtured when you made the movie . . . can’t you then imagine the possibility that a home movie could be more than, as you call it . . . ‘a record of actual events?’” (The projections are by Ben Pearcy at 59 Productions.)

Irv doesn’t want the memories to be treated like some kind of psych evaluation, so he answers, “What I’m saying is, why am I not allowed to just have my home movies?” Larry responds, “I’m not saying you’re not! But did you ever think that my examining them is perhaps my way of getting to know . . . a different version of you?” Irv declares, “Larry, I think you know me perfectly well. And if you’d like, I’ll introduce you to a version of your mother.”

It’s a very funny exchange, but it’s an argument that runs throughout the play repeatedly, offering little that is new. Irv is a realist who did whatever he had to in order to support his family, from working in clothing stores to becoming an executive for Schick razors. Jean raised the kids and, later in life, began a successful career as a Realtor, which the retired Irv considers a hobby.

We don’t learn much about Larry’s siblings, or his wife and kids; it’s like they are an afterthought, not that important as Larry instead digs into his parents’ lives, whether they want him to or not. He tells his bewildered father, “What I’m doing, Dad? Is looking for the, the . . . life beyond the frame.” He wants to preserve them, particularly as they get older, but he appears to be sacrificing his own present to accomplish that.

Michael Yeargan’s set is a comfy, relatively spare California living room, with a flowery couch, a desk, and glass doors leading to a backyard where Irv gardens and barbecues. The space is cantilevered, with the back wall painted an ugly green. I initially thought that it was done that way for effect, a metaphor for their off-tilt, colorless life. (I can already hear Irv saying, “I don’t think that’s a metaphor,” which he barks at Larry early on.)

Irving (Nathan Lane) gives his son (Danny Burstein) another talking-to as his wife (Zoё Wanamaker) watches (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

But it turns out that it very much matches Irv and Jean’s actual home, which is not a candidate for House Beautiful; it’s more like my great-aunt Sylvia’s old Florida place from that same era. All the photos and videos are taken from Larry’s collection; they are of the real Irv and Jean, not Lane and Wanamaker, which is both good and bad. While it’s exciting to see the actual pictures, several of which are warmly Rockwellian, it also forces us to compare how much the actors do or don’t look like the people they are portraying, Lane in his white wig, Wanamaker in a poufy hairdo. Burstein, in an obviously fake ill-fitting wig, looks more like Jerry O’Connell than Larry.

Thus, it is hard to lose yourself in the production, as the artifice stands out. Complaining about one of the photos of him, Irv tells his son, “The picture shows how strained and artificial the situation was that you set up.” The play cannot escape that same feeling.

Three-time Tony winner Lane (It’s Only a Play, Angels in America) plays, well, Nathan Lane, using his trademark boisterous bravado. When he shouts at Jean, “I can’t interject? I’m just doing a little interjecting!,” we see Lane, not Irv. Four-time Tony nominee and two-time Olivier winner Wanamaker (Loot, Awake and Sing!) is underused, usually kept in the background except when they are discussing a photo of Jean in the garage. And Tony winner Burstein (Talley’s Folly, Fiddler on the Roof) is ever likable, but his character is severely underdeveloped, leaving too many holes about his life away from his parents. It’s also hard to believe he’s playing their son, as Lane and Wanamaker are only eight and fifteen years older than Burstein, respectively.

White (The Other Place, The True, The Affair) and Sher (My Fair Lady, Oslo) can’t get past the general stagnation of an audience watching actors look at photos on a wall. You keep wanting the show to go somewhere, to offer more than one man’s attempt to ensure his parents live forever, at least on film. Instead, it’s too slight, 105 minutes of studying a family album I had only mild interest in.

WOLF PLAY

Mitchell Winter is the wolf operating a young boy in Wolf Play (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

WOLF PLAY
Susan & Ronald Frankel Theater, the Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space
511 West 52nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 2, $68-$88
mcctheater.org

Hansol Jung’s Wolf Play is the most exhilarating hundred minutes you will spend in a theater right now, or at least through April 2, when its extended run at MCC’s Susan & Ronald Frankel Theater concludes.

Originally presented a year ago at Soho Rep in conjunction with Ma-Yi Theater Company, the production has transferred uptown to Hell’s Kitchen with all its joys, and all its horrors, fully intact, with the same cast and crew. Be sure to arrive early to check out You-Shin Chen’s set, which features a prop wall with hundreds of items, from baseballs, dolls, lights, and cabinets to an old stove, luggage, hat boxes, and a cast iron tub. Numerous items are used in the play, while others tantalizingly remain in place; they were carefully selected by director Dustin Wills and propmaster Patricia Marjorie from Wills’s personal collection or from previous shows of his, including a teddy bear, a pirate flag, two cacti, a wooden table with googly eyes, and an image of dancing Russian ladies, as detailed in a lobby display. It gives the show a homey feel; these things could be in anyone’s garage or attic, family mementos as well as junk.

While the house lights are still on, Mitchell Winter emerges from a surprise entrance and offers a prologue, speaking directly to the audience, which is seated on two opposite sides of the space, partially separated by a curtain. “What if I said I am not what you think you see,” he announces. He invites us to imagine that we are in a forest near a river, then tells specific audience members that they are a spider, or an eagle, or a drop of dew, riding on a giant turtle, before pulling the proverbial rug out from under us.

“The truth is a wobbly thing,” he says. “We shall wobble through our own set of truths like jello on a freight train, and tonight I add a bump to that journey and put to you my truth: I am not what you think you see. I am the wolf.” He then lets out a pair of howls and points out, “Wolves get a bad rep for being evil. . . . But you gotta understand these evil wolves are abandoned wolves. Solo wolves, not necessarily out on the prowl to steal your red riding hoods.” Just prior to becoming involved in the narrative, he tells us, “See, wolves suck at being alone. Wolves need family.” And it’s family the wolf will have, but not of its choosing.

The story begins as Peter (Christopher Bannow) arrives at the home of Robin (Nicole Villamil) and Ash (Esco Jouléy) to sell his adopted child. Ash isn’t there, but Robin’s brother, Ryan (Brian Quijada), is. Ash is Robin’s wife, a nonbinary person of color who is not in favor of the whole arrangement. Robin found out about Peter’s son, and how to acquire him, through a Yahoo! online group devoted to the exchange of adopted children; for a relatively small cash payment, Peter will sign over power of attorney to Robin and the deal will be done.

Ash (Esco Jouléy) sits down to breakfast with Jeenu and the wolf (Michael Winter) in Hansol Jung’s Wolf Play (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Peter is giving up Peter Jr., a Korean orphan whom he and his wife adopted several years earlier, because they have just had a baby of their own and believe they can no longer properly take care of both of them. Peter makes clear to Robin that the child is nonreturnable; she must sign an “affidavit of waiver of interest in child.” Peter insists, “We’re really not terrible people. We really want what’s best for him. We love him. So much. We do.”

The powerful scene also introduces us to the show’s unique conceit: The child, who is six, is a three-foot-tall wooden puppet operated by Winter, who interjects asides to the audience, as if in a PBS nature special. When Peter says, “Katie and I, we had such a great time together, as a family,” the wolf tells us, “Sometimes wolves will ally with another species for coexistence. Wolves are not above making friends if it means survival.” When Peter Jr. won’t let go of Peter’s leg, the wolf explains, “Wolves are an extremely adaptable species / wolf is one of the few that survived the last ice age.”

When the child announces that his name is actually Jeenu and becomes more attached to Ash than to Robin, things get even more complicated. Ash is a boxer preparing for their first professional bout, being trained by Ryan at the gym he runs. They want to concentrate on the match, not raising a kid. As the fight approaches, Peter starts contacting Ryan to find out how things are going with Jeenu, perhaps reconsidering what he has done.

There is nothing conventional about Wolf Play. Jung (Wild Goose Dreams, Cardboard Piano, Human Resources) and Wills (Montag, Plano) inject every action with something unusual and special, and not just for effect, as each detail enhances the development of the story and the characters. The movement, accompanied by Barbara Samuels’s lighting and Kate Marvin’s sound, is spectacularly choreographed with split-second precision and more than a bit of stage magic, as Winter reveals. On several occasions, Ryan is engaged in a phone conversation but his words also seem to be responses to another character doing something else; for example, when Peter, at the sink in his kitchen, asks his unseen wife, “Honey, do you have the email, of those people that you found?,” Ryan, on the phone with his mother, says, “There was no time to ask, the kid was crying like a siren,” as if answering Peter.

One constant on the set is a ramshackle door that is moved around depending on whether it is for Robin and Ash’s home, Ryan’s gym, or another location, but it also represents the different types of entry and exit that are elusive to children such as Jeenu. He’s not a puppet just because it’s cool to watch; he’s treated like an object, similar to the items in the prop wall except more foreign. Early on, after being chastised by Peter for cursing, Ash argues, “We can import him from Asia, we can put him up for auction the minute something doesn’t feel right, but hey now be careful of the f word coz that will really fuck him up.” Shockingly, Wolf Play is not complete fiction; Jung began writing it after reading Megan Twohey’s 2013 Reuters investigative report “The Child Exchange: Inside America’s Underground Market for Adopted Children,” parts of which the audience can read on boards on their way out.

Peter (Christopher Bannow) tries to explain himself in Wolf Play (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Winter (Frontières Sans Frontieres, Jung’s Romeo and Juliet) is remarkable as the wolf, bringing to life a wooden, thin-limbed puppet, imbuing it with emotion even though it has two black dots for eyes and no mouth, a performance reminiscent of how beautifully Kennedy Kanagawa operated Milky White in the recent Broadway revival of Into the Woods. Especially touching are breakfast scenes in which Ash and Jeenu bond at a long table.

Jouléy (The Demise, Interstate) and Villamil (How to Load a Musket, Network, Lessons in Survival) capture the fears and worries of a young couple suddenly faced with parenthood, while Quijada (Jung’s No More Sad Things, Oedipus El Rey) is the concerned uncle trying to find his place in this new situation. Bannow (Alamat, Oklahoma!) brings humanity to Peter, who could have been a straightforward villain, his name evoking Sergei Prokofiev’s 1936 symphonic fairy tale Peter and the Wolf.

Hovering over all the laughs and all the sighs is the very real issue of child trafficking, particularly of foreign-born children, recalling slavery as well as the current immigration crisis. Wolf Play is an endlessly imaginative and entertaining show, but it is also a cleverly layered examination of systemic problems that continue to haunt America.

A BRIGHT NEW BOISE

Will (Peter Mark Kendall) tries to make a connection with Alex (Ignacio Diaz-Silverio) in Signature revival of Samuel D. Hunter’s A Bright New Boise (photo by Joan Marcus)

A BRIGHT NEW BOISE
The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Irene Diamond Stage
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday-Sunday through March 19, $49-$139
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

Samuel D. Hunter’s most recent play, one of the best of 2022, is called A Case for the Existence of God. The Signature revival of one of his first works, 2010’s A Bright New Boise, could be retitled A Case for the Nonexistence of God.

The Obie-winning show was originally presented at the Wild Project in September 2010, two years before Hobby Lobby sued the government to allow the privately owned arts and crafts chain to prevent its employee health care plan from covering contraception, on religious grounds. “The Green family’s religious beliefs forbid them from participating in, providing access to, paying for, training others to engage in, or otherwise supporting abortion-causing drugs and devices,” the company said in a statement at the time.

A Bright New Boise takes place in a clean, windowless, nondescript Hobby Lobby break room in Boise, Idaho. Wilson Chin’s coolly efficient set features several tables and chairs, a refrigerator, vending machines, a microwave, a sink, a bulletin board with rules and regulations, and lockers. A television is mounted on the wall next to the door, playing either invasive, up-close medical procedures (a result of a problem with a satellite dish) or a never-ending Hobby Lobby TV program in which two men in white lab coats mutter on unintelligibly about corporate policy, their constant low drone suggesting a form of brainwashing.

Will (Peter Mark Kendall) is interviewing with store manager Pauline (Eva Kaminsky) for an open position, but she’s concerned about a specific period that’s missing from his resume; he tells her that he had an inconsequential second job as a bookkeeper for a church but is clearly uneasy talking about it. It won’t be long before she finds out why.

The main reason Will wants to work at Hobby Lobby, which he does not tell Pauline, is to reconnect with his seventeen-year-old son, Alex (Ignacio Diaz-Silverio), who works summers there; Alex was given up for adoption shortly after birth, and he is not excited when Will blurts out that he’s his father. The next morning, Alex grills Will to make sure he’s not just some creepy stalker. Mentioning his adoptive parents, Alex says, “Yeah, well, they’re assholes. If you are my father, then fuck you, because you gave me to assholes.” Whenever Alex doesn’t like what Will says, he chimes in, “I’m gonna kill myself” but assures Will that it’s “nothing, it’s just something I say.”

A Bright New Boise takes place in the break room of a Hobby Lobby store in Idaho (photo by Joan Marcus)

Will tries to begin a relationship with Alex, but Alex’s older brother, Leroy (Angus O’Brien), is suspicious of Will. Leroy is a tough-talking artist who wears homemade T-shirts with threatening slogans intended to upset the soccer moms, grade school kids, and little old ladies who shop at Hobby Lobby. Because he is the only employee who actually knows anything about art supplies, he gets away with it.

Will soon develops a friendship with fellow employee Anna (Anna Baryshnikov); they surprise each other in the break room after hours on his first day, both having hid in the store after closing time. Will does it for the wi-fi so he can continue writing his blog about the rapture; Anna does it so she can read books at night, which she’s not allowed to do at home, where she lives with her parents.

Pauline, an F-bomb dropper who runs a tight ship, is proud of how she “brought order to chaos,” turning a failing store into a profit center, so she’s not about to let any kind of family dysfunction affect her success. But when the truth emerges about that gap in Will’s resume, Pauline battens down the hatches.

“So you still believe in God?” Pauline asks Will. “Yes,” he answers. “After all that?” she says. “Yes,” he repeats. “Why?” she prods. “You’ll see,” he promises.

Hunter (Greater Clements, The Whale) was inspired in part to write A Bright New Boise from his personal experience attending a nondenominational Christian school that taught fundamental evangelical dogma and working as a cashier at Walmart as well as a documentary he saw about Westboro Baptist Church leader Fred Phelps. The play takes on such issues as adoption (Hunter and his husband adopted a girl six years ago), unionization, rampant consumerism, and the separation between church and state without getting overtly political, but there’s an underlying theme of religion’s ever-growing role in modern society, from the government to the church to the individual as extremism seeks to become the norm. In 2010, when the show debuted, words such as Hobby Lobby and Westboro Baptist Church weren’t so immediately fraught with meaning, dividing people into opposing camps, so Hunter doesn’t need to add anything to the inherent controversies. Nor does he focus on the dichotomies of capitalism itself, which is its own religion, although lacking a supreme being.

Pauline (Eva Kaminsky) has a chat with her new employee, Will (Peter Mark Kendall), in A Bright New Boise (photo by Joan Marcus)

But no matter their religious affiliation or lack thereof, all the characters are suffering from a kind of isolation, seeking connection to release them from their stagnation and boredom. The break room can be seen as a sort of purgatory where everyone is trying to figure out what comes next, whether they realize it or not.

Adroitly directed by Oliver Butler (What the Constitution Means to Me, GNIT), who effectively builds the expanding tension in the break room, the hundred-minute play features a strong cast led by Kendall (Blue Ridge, Mercury Fur), who splendidly portrays how awkward and squeamish Will is in his own skin; Kendall, who starred in Hunter’s solo microplay Brick in Theatre for One’s “Déjà Vu” at the Signature last year, makes it hard to like Will even as we root for him to find his place in life.

Kaminsky (Harry Potter & the Cursed Child, Hunter’s The Few) provides much-needed comic relief as the dedicated foul-mouthed manager, Baryshnikov (Time and the Conways, chekhovOS /an experimental game/) brings a warm innocence to Anna, and Diaz-Silverio (John Proctor Is the Villain) and O’Brien make superb off-Broadway debuts as two very different brothers. Jen Schriever’s lighting and Christopher Darbassie’s sound design spark each new scene with a jolt.

However, A Bright New Boise doesn’t know how to finish. I anticipated the lights going out for the last time twice before they actually did. Hunter raises important questions throughout this deeply compelling drama, but like the existence of God himself, he could have left a few more answers open-ended.

ANTHONY RAPP’S WITHOUT YOU

Anthony Rapp’s one-man show details the development of Rent (photo by Russ Rowland)

ANTHONY RAPP’S WITHOUT YOU
New World Stages
340 West Fiftieth St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Wednesday – Monday through June 11, $110-$399
withoutyoumusical.com
newworldstages.com

Anthony Rapp’s Without You is a sweet-natured, heartfelt true story about life’s ups and downs, about love, exhilaration, and loss, told by an engaging entertainer, even if it doesn’t go quite as deep as we might want it to.

Actor and singer Rapp was born in October 1971 in Chicago and raised with his older brother and sister in Joliet, Illinois, by their mother; his parents divorced when he was two. He knew from an early age that he wanted to be a performer; his big break came when, in September 1994, he got an audition for a show described as “a new rock opera based on La Bohème about a group of friends in the East Village,” to be workshopped for four weeks at New York Theatre Workshop. The semiautobiographical musical was called Rent, by little-known composer and lyricist Jonathan Larson (Superbia, Tick, Tick . . . Boom!). Adapted from Rapp’s 2006 memoir, Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical “Rent,” and first presented in 2012, the ninety-minute Without You follows the development of Rent — which turned out to be one of the most popular musicals of all time — alongside the concurrent illness of Rapp’s beloved mother.

In 1994, Rapp was working at Starbucks and sharing an apartment in the East Village with his brother, Adam, who would go on to become a successful playwright, director, screenwriter, and novelist (The Sound Inside, Blackbird). Anthony checked in regularly with his mother, who had always been supportive of “Tonio” and his career. In Without You, Rapp discusses meeting Larson, “a young curly-haired guy, with ears that stuck out a bit” who believed he was “the future of musical theater.” He talks about hanging out and working with his Rent colleagues, which included actors Adam Pascal and Daphne Rubin-Vega and director Michael Grief, and sings tunes from the show in addition to his audition song and several originals he wrote with David Matos and Joe Pisapia.

As the buzz around Rent and Larson’s tragic fate grows to deafening heights, Rapp, who plays Mark Cohen in the show, has to balance the success with his mother’s failing health. “I’ve known / All of my life / If I ever lost my way / She’d carry me home / She loved to / Carry me home,” he sings wistfully.

Anthony Rapp sings and shares personal stories in Without You at New World Stages (photo by Russ Rowland)

Set and lighting designer Eric Southern has transformed the stage into a cramped downtown New York apartment, complete with exposed brick walls and a fire escape. The five-piece band — cellist Clérida Eltime, bassist Paul Gil, drummer Jerry Marotta, guitarist Lee Moretti, and music director, orchestrator, and keyboardist Daniel A. Weiss — are situated in three separate places, including a few that seem to be under ever-present New York City scaffolding. David Bengali’s projections include photographs Rapp took during the Rent rehearsal process. The costumes are by Angela Vesco, with sound by Brian Ronan and additional arrangements by Tom Kitt.

Director Steven Maler (Suburbia, Starfuckers!) doesn’t add too much razzle-dazzle as Rapp walks across the stage sharing his story; he jumps on a table belting out one song and often talks to empty chairs that represent those people he has lost. He affects different accents for the various people in his life, from his mother to Jonathan to Jonathan’s parents. Understandably, he makes no mention of his sexual abuse allegations against Kevin Spacey, nor does he delve into other parts of his life (he is now engaged and has a child) and career, which comprises more than seventy-five appearances on film, television, and stage; most notably, he has been on Broadway in If/Then and You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown and, since 2017, has portrayed Lt. Paul Stamets on Star Trek: Discovery.

As likable and kindhearted as Rapp is, Without You lacks the necessary dramatic tension to lift it to the next level. While some of the tidbits he offers about Larson are appealing, most of them are not new, regardless of whether you’ve read Rapp’s book. The majority of the songs are well executed, but Rapp’s own “Wild Bill,” in which he dons a cowboy hat and stands in front of projections of the West, is too silly. And as touching as his relationship with his mother is, it’s not heavy enough to carry half the show.

As he sings in the title song from Rent, “How can you generate heat / When you can’t feel your feet? . . . / How do you leave the past behind / When it keep finding ways to get to your heart / It reaches way down deep and tears you inside out / ’Til you’re torn apart.” Without You is plenty heartfelt, but it won’t tear your insides out or generate heat the way Rent itself did.