this week in theater

SigSpace: EMANCIPATED STORIES

Who: Quiara Alegría Hudes, Sean Ortiz, Sean Carvajal, Dominic Colón, Kenyatta Emmanuel, Suave Gonzales, Renee Goust, David Zayas, Kenyatta Emmanuel, Renee Goust, Jamie Maleszka, more
What: Installation and pop-up events
Where: Signature Theatre, the Pershing Square Signature Center Lobby, 480 West Forty-Second St. at Tenth Ave.
When: June 29 – July 24, Tuesday – Sunday, noon – 5:00, free
Why: Last summer, the Signature Theatre reopened with the immersive installation The Watering Hole, which included Vanessa German and Haruna Lee’s “This Room Is a Broken Heart,” part of which involved choosing a postcard designed by an incarcerated individual and sending a note to someone living behind bars. This summer the Signature has taken that a step further by teaming with the Fortune Society and Emancipated Stories to present an installation focusing on words and art by incarcerated people. Founded in 1967, the Fortune Society’s mission is “to support successful reentry from incarceration and promote alternatives to incarceration, thus strengthening the fabric of our communities . . . through believing, building lives, and changing minds.” Emancipated Stories was started by prison reform activist and playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes and her cousin Sean Ortiz, who spent ten years behind bars, as a way for incarcerated people to have their voices heard through handwritten letters that are shared on Instagram and in special installations.

Hudes, the Signature’s premiere writer-in-residence and author of such works as In the Heights, Water by the Spoonful, Daphne’s Dive, and Miss You Like Hell, explained in a statement, “The thing that’s fun and safe about theater is that the basic rule of engagement is one of listening. The fundamental contract is: I’m going to listen, I’m going to pay attention. Similarly, what we’re seeking to create is a communal space of sharing and openness. Within this installation and the events we’ve planned, the lines between audience and performer are more porous; it’s more of a gathering, and there’s no fourth wall, and we put the original letters in people’s hands. When you hold someone’s piece of paper and it’s handwritten — and you feel the grooves — it’s like holding someone’s hand. It’s an instant connection that’s part of the liveness of it. Surprising heart doors come open in these moments.”

“The Fortune Society is thrilled to be in community and collaboration with Signature Theatre and Quiara Alegría Hudes to help bring this insightful and moving project to life,” Fortune Society director of creative arts Jamie Maleszka added. “The goal of Emancipated Stories is to center and celebrate the full humanity of community members who are currently and formerly incarcerated and to grow meaningful connections through storytelling. The project perfectly aligns with our mission to build people, not prisons, and invest in more just collective futures.”

“SigSpace: Emancipated Stories” will be open in the theater lobby Tuesday through Sunday from June 29 through July 24, from noon to 5:00; admission is free. In addition, there will be four pop-up events, free with advance RSVP, featuring actors, artists, activists, musicians, writers, and members of the Fortune Society activating the installation, which was designed by Yazmany Arboleda with Emmanuel Oni, through music, discussions, readings, and writing letters in response to those from incarcerated individuals.

Wednesday, June 29
Kick-off, with actors David Zayas and Sean Carvajal, artist and activist Suave Gonzales, and Felix Guzman and Daniel Kelly of the Fortune Society, hosted by playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes, free with RSVP, 5:00 – 7:00

Wednesday, July 13
Music Night, with composer Kenyatta Emmanuel, singer-songwriter Renee Goust, writer and actor Dominic Colón, and others, hosted by Quiara Alegría Hudes, free with RSVP, 5:00 – 7:00

Sunday, July 17
Family Day, with Fortune Society community members and actor Sean Carvajal, moderated by Fortune Society director of creative arts Jamie Maleszka and Quiara Alegría Hudes, free with RSVP, noon – 2:00

Wednesday, July 20
Quiet Writing Time, free with RSVP, 5:00 – 7:00

FAT HAM

Marcel Spears stars as a different kind of Hamlet in James Ijames’s Pulitzer-winning Fat Ham (photo by Joan Marcus)

FAT HAM
Anspacher Theater, the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. at Astor Pl.
Tuesday through Sunday through July 31, $50-$80
212-539-8500
publictheater.org

There’s no “To be or not to be” in James Ijames’s rousing, spirited adaptation of one of William Shakespeare’s most famous tragedies, Hamlet. In the Pulitzer Prize–winning Fat Ham, continuing at the Public’s Anspacher Theater through July 31, there’s no “To thine own self be true,” no “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio,” no “Good-night, sweet prince,” no “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” But to give you the tasty flavor of Ijames’s big queer Black take on the familiar tale, his Hamlet, known as Juicy (Marcel Spears), says, “Ah, there’s the rub” only after Rev (Billy Eugene Jones) shares the secret to smoking pork.

The ninety-five-minute show, coproduced by the National Black Theatre and the Public, takes place in the backyard of, according to the script, “a house in North Carolina. Could also be Virginia, or Maryland or Tennessee. It is not Mississippi, or Alabama or Florida. That’s a different thing all together.” The time is “a kind of liminal space between the past and the present with an aspirational relationship to the future that is contingent to your history living in the south. All that to say . . . I’m writing this play from inside the second decade of the twenty-first century. This world aesthetically sits anywhere in the four to six decades preceding the current moment.”

At its core, the story echoes the original. Juicy’s father, the king (Claudius; Jones), has been murdered by his brother, Rev, who then married his brother’s widow, Tedra (Gertrude; Nikki Crawford). Juicy hangs out with his best friend, Tio (Horatio; Chris Herbie Holland). Everyone assumes that Juicy is destined to wed his supposed true love, Opal (Ophelia; Adrianna Mitchell). Her very protective brother, Larry (Laertes; Calvin Leon Smith), is in the military and suffers from PTSD. Tedra’s best friend, Rabby (Polonius; Benja Kay Thomas), Larry and Opal’s mother, loves drinking and celebrating the Lord.

The play opens with Juicy on the back porch of a suburban home helping prepare for a barbecue party for Rev and Tedra’s bethrothal as Tio watches porn on his phone. “Your daddy ain’t been dead a week and he already Stanley steamering your mom. Cold,” Tio says. “Stanley steamering your mom . . . ,” Juicy quizzically repeats. Tio clarifies, “Eating your momma’s box? Doing the nasty with your mom? That better?” This is not your grandparents’ Hamlet.

Rev (Billy Eugene Jones) leads a prayer before family and friends partake of barbecue in Fat Ham (photo by Joan Marcus)

A few minutes later, Juicy is visited by the ghost of his father, Pap, dressed in white, eerie smoke drifting around his neck and shoulders. Pap wants his son to avenge his death — and to stop eating candy bars unless he wants to get “the suga,” which runs in the family. Pap orders Juicy to split Rev open: “Make his thighs into hams. His intestines into chitlins. Pickle his feet and boil his head down to a skull! Crisp up his belly and dry out his balls and grind them up into a fine powder. Lay that all out on the table, invite over your nearest and dearest, and feast. And then make me a plate.” Pap also belittles his son’s education choices, studying human resources at the University of Phoenix. “Scam. Who goes to college online to learn how to manage human beings. Them things don’t go,” he scolds.

The potential relationship between Juicy and Opal has a bit of a problem that only the two of them are aware of: They are both gay. Meanwhile, Larry has a dark secret of his own. But the party goes on, as Rev sings Teena Marie and Juicy warbles Radiohead’s “Creep,” a kind of replacement for the “To be or not to be” soliloquy: “I don’t care if it hurts / I wanna have control / I want a perfect body / I want a perfect soul / I want you to notice / When I’m not around / So fuckin’ special / I wish I was special / But I’m a creep / I’m a weirdo / What the hell am I doin’ here? / I don’t belong here.” The lyrics represent what so many young queer Black men experience, not wanting to be made to feel invisible and less than.

Juicy uses charades to tell his uncle he knows what he did: “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of . . . the . . . King. Cook. He is a cook in this play,” he tells the audience. The game is on as Rev and Juicy battle it out.

Juicy (Marcel Spears) and Opal (Adrianna Mitchell) are not destined to fall in love in reimagining of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (photo by Joan Marcus)

Fat Ham is outrageously funny, featuring superb over-the-top performances by the ensemble. Spears (Othello, A Midsummer Night’s Dream) has a tender gentleness, a softness, to his every move; dressed in all black (the contemporary costumes are by Dominique Fawn Hill), he would fit right in as Usher in Michael R. Jackson’s A Strange Loop, another “big Black queer” character with a complicated relationship with his family and other people who’s trying to figure out just who he is and what he wants out of life. Human resources is probably not Juicy’s best career path. Perhaps Ijames named him after the Notorious B.I.G. song “Juicy,” in which Biggie Smalls declares, “You know very well / Who you are / Don’t let ’em hold you down / Reach for the stars / You had a goal / But not that many / ’Cause you’re the only one / I’ll give you good and plenty.”

Ijames (White, Kill Move Paradise) interjects Shakespeare at just the right moments, as when, after Larry and Juicy share an intimate moment, the latter turns to the audience and delivers one of the Bard’s masterpieces, the poetic speech that begins “What a piece of work is a man!” But Ijames keenly changes one pronoun, and the meaning of the prose is altered following the scene we just watched,

Stacey Derosier’s lighting keeps things bright and cheery, as does Darrell Grand Moultrie’s choreography on Maruti Evans’s backyard set. Director Saheem Ali (Nollywood Dreams, Merry Wives) ably balances the wackiness with the serious nature of so much of Ijames’s dialogue alongside whimsical references to Ms. Cleo, OnlyFans, and sexy muppets. But it’s not all lighthearted fun.

At one point, Tio, talking about what he is learning from his therapist, explains to Juicy, “He said . . . These cycles of violence are like deep. Engrained. Hell, engineered. Hard to come out of. Like, your Pop went to jail, his Pop went to jail, his Pop went to jail, his Pop went to jail, and what’s before that? Huh? Slavery. It’s inherited trauma. You carrying around your whole family’s trauma, man. And that’s okay. You okay. But you don’t got to let it define you.”

Juicy is determined not to follow in his father’s footsteps, trying to overcome the systemic institutional racism that dooms so many Black men and tears apart families. That’s not exactly the same thing as the handing down of the crown from generation to generation of white men and boys —but it has the potential to become the half-million-dollar crown Biggie was famous for wearing.

CORSICANA

Justice (Deirdre O’Connell), Christopher (Will Dagger), and Ginny (Jamie Brewer) watch Mariah Carey in Glitter in Corsicana (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

CORSICANA
Playwrights Horizons, Mainstage Theater
416 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 17, $35-$99
www.playwrightshorizons.org

In her acceptance speech for winning the Tony for Best Actress for her performance in Dana H., Deirdre O’Connell said, “I would love this little prize to be a token for every person who is wondering, ‘Should I be trying to make something that could work on Broadway or that could win me a Tony Award? Or should I be making the weird art that is haunting me, that frightens me, that I don’t know how to make, that I don’t know if anyone in the whole world will understand?’ Please let me standing here be a little sign to you from the universe to make the weird art.”

O’Connell has followed up Dana H., in which she never speaks but instead remarkably conveys a prerecorded true story told by playwright Lucas Hnath’s mother, with Will Arbery’s Corsicana, which has its fair share of weird, starting with the word itself, which is spoken two dozen times by the four characters, each of whom lives in their own reality.

Corsicana takes place in the Texas town named after the island of Corsica. Thirty-three-year-old Christopher (Will Dagger) is a teacher and an aspiring filmmaker who lives with his thirty-four-year-old half sister, Ginny (Jamie Brewer), in the family’s ranch house. They are often visited by the sixtysomething Justice (Deirdre O’Connell), who was best friends with their recently deceased mother.

After her mom’s death, Ginny, who has Down syndrome, is looking for something new to do. She doesn’t want to go back to her job at the nursing home or rejoin the choir because she feels she doesn’t belong. “I’m worried. I can’t find my heart,” she tells her brother.

Ginny had suggested that Ginny meet her friend Lot (Harold Surratt), a sixtysomething reclusive artist and musician who has just been “discovered” via a magazine article; Christopher thinks it might be good for Ginny to write a song with Lot, who previously played an original song for Christopher called “Weird.” (The original music is by singer-songwriter and visual artist Joanna Sternberg.)

A self-taught outsider artist, Lot is a loner who has trouble communicating directly with others, speaking in a sharp, straightforward manner, using few words and prone to non sequiturs; he has no phone or computer. He doesn’t want to interact with either the virtual or real world. And although he believes he may be neurodivergent, he is not about to be a babysitter for a woman with special needs.

Justice (Deirdre O’Connell) pleads with Lot (Harold Surratt) in new Will Arbery play (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

He tells Christopher: “Yeah, I know ‘special needs.’ Why’d you come here? I know the place in the high school. The hallway in the high school. You know I’m not one of them, right?” Christopher replies, “What?” Lot: “I’m not special needs.” Christopher: “Oh — I didn’t think you were. I assumed the opposite.” Lot: “What’s the opposite? I was only a couple years in that hallway. And they knew I didn’t belong. Got a graduate degree in my forties. So don’t worry about me.” Christopher: “Oh, cool. In what?” Lot: “Experimental mathematics. I proved the existence of God.” Christopher: “Are you serious? Can I see?” Lot: “I threw it away. Art’s a better delivery system.”

Art may be a better delivery system, but Lot prefers not to show anyone his work or exhibit in a gallery, or to even sell it. When Justice, who believes she is being trailed by a ghost, asks to see his latest sculpture, he declares, “No, it’s not ready! You’re not allowed to look back there.” The audience is not allowed to look either; none of Lot’s work is ever revealed. He later compares capitalism and consumption as a “prison . . . a man-made evil.” He also claims that they are all surrounded by dinosaur ghosts.

As the characters continue to interact with one another, Lot is fearful about becoming part of something. “You trying to get me to believe in community?” he asks Justice, who replies, “No. I have no agenda.” Lot: “Uh-huh.” Justice: “What do you have against community?” Lot: “I don’t have to have all the same opinions as you,” as if choosing to spend time with people is an opinion.

But he does find common ground with Ginny, explaining that the two of them are “so complicated, people don’t want to think about it. So they make us more simple. In their brains. They don’t think about it, and they call us simple. And everything is about our needs. All our little needs. Our special needs. Everyone around us becoming burdened by our constant need. And if there’s something that we want? Well, it’s for them to decide if we really need it.”

Over the course of the play, all the characters find some form of commonality with the others while also maintaining barriers, particularly when it comes to physical contact of any kind. “People have to understand touch, and ask for permission, and respect boundaries,” Ginny tells Lot. “Touch can cause problems.”

Obie- and Tony-winning director Sam Gold, who has helmed such marvelously inventive productions as Fun Home, John, and A Doll’s House, Part 2 in addition to critically lambasted versions of King Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth, injects Corsicana with, well, a weird edge throughout. Laura Jellinek and Cate McCrea’s stage consists of a pair of rotating brown couches set against a white backdrop and ceiling, but Justice and Lot spend time sitting on the floor. Often, when two characters are interacting, one or both of the other actors watch from the far corners. Several times, two of the actors push poles to move part of the set toward the audience in order to change Isabella Byrd’s canopy lighting. Meanwhile, the long, horizontal, slanted back white wall serves as the entrance to Lot’s studio, which he often locks to keep people out of his space — and head.

Christopher (Will Dagger) and Ginny (Jamie Brewer) seek connections in Corsicana (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

There is a lot of repetition in the play, which could use a significant amount of trimming from its two-and-a-half-hour length (including intermission). The terrific cast is led by Surratt’s (Familiar, Serious Money) powerful performance as the antisocial Lot — evoking the biblical figure who lived in Sodom, “a righteous man who was tormented in his soul by the wickedness he saw and heard day after day” — primarily standing stiffly upright when talking as he, Justice, Christopher, and Ginny form a kind of found family. Arbery (Pulitzer finalist Heroes of the Fourth Turning, Plano), who is from Texas and Wyoming, based Christopher and Ginny on himself and one of his seven sisters, who has Down syndrome. He also knows about unique families, having served as executive consultant on the third season of Succession.

Brewer (American Horror Story, Amy and the Orphans) brings an unfettered honesty to Ginny, Dagger (Among the Dead, The Antelope Party) is appropriately offbeat as Christopher, and O’Connell (Circle Mirror Transformation, In the Wake) is just the right kind of quirky as the, um, weird Justice, who is writing a book that echoes the subject of Arbery’s play. She explains to Christopher:

“Well, it’s about anarchism and gifts. About the belief that humans are fundamentally generous, or at least cooperative. That in our hearts, most of us really do want the good. It’s about the evils of centralized power, specially in a country as massive as the USA, let alone a state as big as Texas. It’s about an unforgiving land. It’s about unrealized utopias. It’s about how failing is the point. It’s about surrender. It’s about small groups. It’s about community. It’s about the right to well-being. It’s about family. It’s about the dead. It’s about ghosts. It’s about gentle chaos. It’s about contracts of the heart. And the belief that when a part of the self is given away, is surrendered to the needs of a particular time, in a particular place, then community forms. From the ghosts of the parts of ourselves we’ve given away. A new particular body. Born of our own ghosts. I don’t know. It’s about Texas.”

And there’s nothing weird about that. (Is there?)

SIGSPACE X THEATRE FOR ONE: DÉJÀ VU

Kareem M. Lucas portrays a man sharing a terrible moment from his past in Lynn Nottage’s #Five (photo by Jonathan George)

SIGSPACE X THEATRE FOR ONE: DÉJÀ VU
The Pershing Square Signature Center
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Thursday – Sunday through June 26, free with advance RSVP
www.signaturetheatre.org
theatreforone.com

“It’s déjà vu all over again,” Yogi Berra famously said. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing, as evidenced by the welcome return of Theatre for One.

Since 2010, Christine Jones’s Theatre for One has been on the move in New York City, offering microplays performed by one actor (“performer”) for one audience member (“audiencer”) at a time in a mobile four-by-eight-foot repurposed equipment container (with the addition of a floor-to-ceiling plexiglass barrier added because of the pandemic). The specially commissioned works, generally running between five and seven minutes each, have been presented in Times Square, Brookfield Place, the Signature Theatre, and Manhattan West Plaza (“Here Is Future”) as well as at the University of Arkansas, Princeton, Fairfield University, Cork in Ireland, the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, and NYU Abu Dhabi. During the pandemic, “Here We Are” provided a thrilling, much-needed live, online connection between performer and audiencer, both able to see and hear the other and interact.

Theatre for One is now back at the Signature with its latest iteration, “Déjà Vu,” featuring five previously presented short works and one world premiere that can be experienced June 23–26; reservations can be made starting June 21, but you won’t know which play you’ll see until you arrive. (If you’ve already seen at least one play, the friendly staff will try to make sure you see something different if at all possible.) The small booth is bathed in red, with red flowers behind the performer, who often is seated in a chair. (The sets and costumes are by Camilla Dely, with lighting by Domino Mannheim and sound by Matt Stine.) There are no rules, as there are at Broadway and off-Broadway houses; if you want to interact with the performer, you can do so, within limits, of course, always respecting the actor and the playwright.

Stephanie Berry is electric as Pearl in Regina Taylor’s Déjà Vu, an expansion on Taylor’s previous Vote! (The Black Album). “You ever get the feeling that you’ve been here before,” Pearl says. She relates that feeling to the history of women’s voting rights in America after learning that her twenty-one-year-old great-great-granddaughter chose not to cast a ballot in the 2020 presidential election. She recalls the struggle to achieve the right to vote for women, then Blacks, and puts that in context with other societal ills that discriminate against women and people of color. “Time is funny,” she says. “It moves forward and sideways and bends back — over and around again — and again.” Director Tiffany Nichole Greene can barely keep Berry inside the small space as the actor’s voice echoes into the lobby.

“Do you remember the first time you understood the significance of voting? I’m not talking about the first time you voted, but the first time the weight of it hit you?” Sequoyah Jolene Sevenstar (Wyandotte writer, fundraiser, and consultant Maddie Easley) asks in DeLanna Studi’s Before America Was America, an earlier version of which was part of the online “Here We Are.” Directed by Rudy Ramirez, the play discusses women’s rights and equality going back to the Cherokees in the eighteenth century.

Tony winner and two-time Pulitzer finalist David Henry Hwang revisits a terrifying moment from his past, which he also dealt with in his 2019 play Soft Power, in My Anniversary, smartly directed by Greene. Ariel Estrada portrays Hwang, who shares what happened to him on November 29, 2015, and the harrowing aftermath. “I turned around, and thought I saw the shadow of someone, across the street, on the better-lit corner running away,” he remembers. “But as I started in that direction, I noticed something strange. I couldn’t walk straight. . . . I put my hand up to where I’d been hit. When I pulled it away, I saw my palm covered in blood.” The play is particularly potent with the current rise in anti-Asian hate crimes in New York City.

Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage also deals with an unprovoked act of horrific violence in #Five, directed by Greene with a tense foreboding. Kareem M. Lucas portrays an unsteady man on a job interview, clarifying why there are five unaccounted-for years on his resume. “I just wanna be upfront,” he says to the audiencer, who is a stand-in for the interviewer. “Things happen, sometimes with little explanation, but I promise you I’m a worker. And to be straight, I’m unhoused, but not for the reasons you probably imagine. I’m telling you, cuz folks are quick to jump to crazy conclusions.” You’re likely to jump to conclusions as well until you hear the full, captivating story.

Theatre for One welcomes one audience member at a time to a live microplay at the Signature (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

José Rivera’s Lizzy, directed by Ramirez, puts you opposite the title character (Sara Koviak) at a restaurant as you both prepare to order. “A lot’s happened that you missed,” she says. “I’m not blaming you for missing anything, I know it’s not your fault, but, you know, it was so sudden. No one told me how sick she really was. Not for a long time.” Although she never specifically mentions Covid-19, it is a potent reminder of how many older people have been lost during the coronavirus crisis. Lizzy focuses on her mother’s hands, on the human need for physical touch, which was not permitted during the height of the pandemic — and, of course, is not allowed between performer and audiencer.

Samuel D. Hunter follows up his extraordinary A Case for the Existence of God, which ran at the Signature this past spring, with the brand-new, gentle Brick, directed by SRĐA. Peter Mark Kendall plays Brick, who holds up an old photograph from the 1940s as he recalls his time in the army and when he found out that Hunter was gay. He self-referentially explains why the microplay exists: “I’m just saying it now in this monologue that my grandson Sam wrote, trying his best to remember how I talked, ’cause I always believed that when you go through something bad you just never talk about it and eventually you feel better — which, this is Sam talking now, is a multigenerational toxic trait that I hope to end with my own daughter.” Kendall delivers the lines in a near-whisper, emphasizing how unsure the character is of wanting to share his personal tale. But Sam and Brick leave you with a final, compassionate thought about how we all should approach life in these difficult times.

In his 2001 novel, Choke, Chuck Palahniuk wrote, “There’s an opposite to déjà vu. They call it jamais vu. It’s when you meet the same people or visit places, again and again, but each time is the first. Everybody is always a stranger. Nothing is ever familiar.” In many ways, this iteration of Theatre for One is a kind of unique melding of déjà vu and jamais vu, offering an unforgettable experience, like the best of theater can do.

THE ORCHARD

Arlekin Players Theatre presents a hybrid multimedia adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (photo by Maria Baranova)

THE ORCHARD
Baryshnikov Arts Center, Jerome Robbins Theater
450 West 37th St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 3, $39-$125 in person, $29 virtual
646-731-3200
bacnyc.org
www.theorchardoffbroadway.com

During the pandemic lockdown, Arlekin Players Theatre reinvented what online theater could be. The Needham, Massachusetts–based company presented three works that offered people sheltering in place the opportunity to experience and participate in live productions incorporating videogame technology: State vs. Natasha Banina, a one-woman Zoom play in which the audience votes on the ultimate verdict; Witness, which takes viewers on board the MS St. Louis, the German ship carrying nearly a thousand Jewish refugees in May 1939 escaping the approaching Holocaust; and chekhovOS /an experimental game/, a virtual, interactive reimagining of scenes from The Cherry Orchard, a combination of live and prerecorded segments and an integral live chat, with Tony nominee Jessica Hecht as Madame Lyubov Andreievna Ranevskaya and Mikhail Baryshnikov as Anton Chekhov.

Arlekin founding artistic director Igor Golyak has steered full steam ahead with The Orchard, a bumpy two-hour intermissionless adaptation of Chekhov’s tragicomedy that can be seen live and in person through July 3 at the Baryshnikov Arts Center’s Jerome Robbins Theater and/or livestreamed with interactive elements. The best way to experience The Orchard is to first go to the theater, then follow it up virtually, as the two iterations feed off each other, filling in gaps that can form if you see only one of the formats. Yes, it’s a four-hour commitment, but seeing both brings it all together; viewing only the in-person version is likely to leave you impressed but scratching your head too much.

Hecht is phenomenal as Ranevskaya, a lost soul who has returned from Paris to try to save her beloved cherry orchard and estate, which is being put up for auction because the family is in debt. Also back from chekhovOS are Mark Nelson as Gaev, Ranevskaya’s brother, who, like his sister, doesn’t seem to understand the situation they’re in, and Nael Nacer as Lopakhin, whose father and grandfather were serfs toiling for the siblings’ ancestors and who is now trying to convince these faded nobles that their only option is to cut down the orchard and sell off plots for summer vacation homes, which will make them rich again.

But Ranevskaya and Gaev are like children, stuck in the past, refusing to acknowledge reality. They play with balls and spinning tops, marvel at governess Charlotta’s (Darya Denisova) magic shows, and pretend they’re playing billiards. The estate itself is represented by a tiny model of a house, as if everyone is living inside a toy. Ranevskaya is hoping that her teenage daughter, Anya (Juliet Brett), will marry perpetual student and tutor Trofimov (John McGinty) and that her adopted daughter, Varya (Elise Kibler), who manages the estate, will become betrothed to Lopakhin, who is actually in love with Ranevskaya herself. Meanwhile, the aging, ever-more-feeble servant Firs (Baryshnikov) putters about, mumbling to himself and attempting to carry out his longtime duties.

Firs (Mikhail Baryshnikov) and Madame Ranevskaya (Jessica Hecht) watch over the family estate in The Orchard (photo by Maria Baranova)

Carol Rocamora’s translation has eliminated landowner Boris Borisovich Simeonov-Pishchik, estate clerk Yepikhodov, maid Dunyasha, servant Yasha, and other minor characters to focus on the main figures as Chekhov explores the changing sociopolitical times that are going to leave the family behind. Meanwhile, the homeless passerby has been turned into a tough-talking soldier who threatens the others in Russian, evoking the current war in Ukraine. (Earlier references to Mariupol, Kharkiv, and Kyiv also remind the audience of the invasion; Golyak was born in Ukraine and has done charitable work with the company to help the people in his native country.)

But Golyak, who has also established the Zero Gravity (zero-G) Virtual Theater Lab, has added two key “characters”: a robot dog that sticks around Charlotta and, just off center, a large white Clicbot robot, resembling some kind of newfangled medical machine, that serves as a tree, a bookcase, and a mobile camera. It is big and bulky and sometimes gets in the way of the story, but it also is a kind of omniscient narrator, disruptor, and even safe haven. When the soldier confronts the others, they huddle on the robot’s platform, as if that will protect them. (Tom Sepe is the robotics designer.)

Once the auction is over, the family still won’t face the truth as the end of their legacy approaches.

Anna Fedorova’s set consists of robin’s-egg-blue benches and thousands of blue cherry blossoms scattered across the floor. The backdrop is reminiscent of thin, interconnected tree roots reconfigured as lightning strikes. Words and images are projected onto a front translucent screen, but they are often unnecessary, repeating what we are already seeing or confusingly blurry. (The projections are by Alex Basco Koch, with dramatic lighting by Yuki Nakase Link, fine period costumes by Oana Botez, music by Jakov Jakoulov, and sound by Tei Blow.)

Family and friends huddle as the end approaches in hybrid world premiere at BAC and online (photo by Pavel Antonov)

Several scenes feel extraneous, but their inclusion becomes clearer when you watch the livestream, which kicks off with a virtual tour of BAC rechristened as the Orchard and up for sale; a Zillow page shares the details of the property, which you can navigate through as a 360-degree environment. Amid rain and thunder, a prerecorded Chekhov, portrayed by the seventy-four-year-old Baryshnikov, enters the building. You move through hallways and enter various doors, behind which are six rooms, three of which you should have time to wander in: The Operation Room allows you to remove items from Chekhov’s body as he suffers from tuberculosis; peepholes let you see inside the Orchard Room, where Chekhov and his wife, Olga Knipper (Hecht), converse, in text from actual letters; and the Labyrinth Room is a kind of maze with numerous Chekhovs speaking in different videos. There are also the Winter Fishing Room, the Train Room, and the Space Room, where Chekhov/Baryshnikov cheekily notes, “I am tired as a ballet dancer after five acts and eight tableaux.” (Chekhov completed The Cherry Orchard while facing serious illness; he died of TB in 1904, six months after the show opened.)

Soon the stream links up with the live action occurring in the theater, which is shown through multiple static cameras as well as the soldier’s helmet cam, Charlotta’s handheld camera, and, mostly, the robotcam positioned at the end of the robot’s head. During these moments, you can choose which camera to watch through, offering varying perspectives of what’s happening onstage, with differing levels of visual quality. (Adam Paikowsky is the designer of emerging technologies, Alexander Huh the interactivity designer, Athomas Goldberg the technical designer, Alexey Prosvirnin the virtual sound designer, Daniel Cormino the 3D environment artist, and Yu-Jun Yeh the Unreal technical artist.)

In the scene in which Varya asks Trofimov to tell everyone about the stars and the planets, images are visible on the scrim, but online the effect is far more dynamic, as if the characters are surrounded by these colorful orbs and constellations. While Charlotta performs magic tricks onstage, which feels superfluous, it is relegated to the backdrop of the stream, where Ranevskaya, in real time, is responding to bidders’ questions about the estate and cherries.

This Orchard is very much about communication and connection, particularly at the intersection of major technological advances. In three successive scenes, the in-person audience is left at least partially in the dark as Lopakhin converses in untranslated French, the soldier speaks in untranslated Russian, and Trofimov, portrayed by the deaf McGinty, uses sign language that might not be interpreted perfectly by Anya. Ranevskaya gets a series of letters from Paris but chooses to rip them up instead of reading them. Meanwhile, throughout the play, Firs often speaks in non sequiturs, not always making sense although occasionally sharing the wisdom of a life long-lived.

Shortly after returning from Paris, Raneveskaya says, “Thank you, Firs, thank you, my darling old man. I’m so glad you’re still alive.” Firs responds, “The day before yesterday.” Gaev explains, “He’s hard of hearing.” But when Charlotta asks, “Who I am, and where I’m from — I don’t know . . . Who were my parents, were they ever married — I don’t know that, either. I don’t know anything,” Firs says, “You know more than you think you know.”

The deep dive into how we communicate is an issue that emerged during the coronavirus crisis as people used Zoom, social media, and other platforms to stay in touch when actual touch was either not allowed or too risky. Golyak and Arlekin came up with unique ways to stay connected with audiences by employing and expanding on cutting-edge technology to present interactive productions to a population starving for live entertainment. In trying to walk the fine hybrid line, The Orchard has its stumbles, particularly in its ambitious in-person staging, but the virtual aspect prepares us for what might come — and don’t forget to scan that final barcode for an AR bonus.

soft

Donja R. Love’s soft takes place in a juvenile correction center (photo © Daniel J. Vasquez)

soft
Susan & Ronald Frankel Theater, the Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space
511 West 52nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 17, $39-$68
mcctheater.org/tix/soft

As Donja R. Love’s gorgeous, hard-hitting soft began, I couldn’t help but notice that the crowd at MCC’s Susan & Ronald Frankel Theater was about eighty percent Black and brown, which thrilled me, a white cis male. For the last ten years, I have been closely observing the racial makeup of New York City audiences, particularly as the breakthrough success of so many Black and brown playwrights and directors is helping theater become more diverse. In such works as David Harris’s Tambo & Bones, Jordan E. Cooper’s Ain’t No Mo’, and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Fairview, the fourth wall gets shattered as the characters acknowledge and confront, in serious and/or comic ways, what is most often a significantly majority white audience.

Love’s play transpires over the course of a semester in a classroom in a correctional center for juveniles, offering them the opportunity to excel in schoolwork and avoid going to prison. Mr. Isaiah (Biko Eisen-Martin) is the caring teacher, determined to help his students thrive. Antoine (Dharon Jones), Dee (Essence Lotus), Bashir (Travis Raeburn), Kevin (Shakur Tolliver), Jamal (Dario Vazquez), and Eddie (Ed Ventura) are realistic Black, Afro-Latino, and Dominican teenagers dealing with drug and alcohol abuse, homophobia, poverty, systemic racism, and other societal ills. Mr. Cartwright (Leon Addison Brown) is the no-nonsense superintendent who advises Mr. Isaiah not to get too involved with the kids.

Mr. Isaiah is returning their papers on Othello, noting that several students are improving by being tutored by Kevin. Antoine gets lost in his drawings — “I’m Picasso out this bitch,” he tells Mr. Isaiah — while Eddie sleeps in the back and Bashir gets angry at just about everything. Jamal is disappointed when he doesn’t get the highest grade on the essay; that honor belongs to Kevin, who brags, “I’m so smart my genius transcends. Like, I prolli analyzed Othello better than Shakespeare dead ass could ever analyze Othello.”

When Mr. Isaiah asks Mr. Cartwright for new textbooks to replace the dilapidated old ones, even suggesting to dig into his own salary to afford them, the latter explains, “I’ve seen your paychecks. So no pay cuts for you, kid. Look, I know we call this place a juvenile boarding school to try and get whatever grants we can but don’t be fooled; this is a correctional center that houses delinquents. . . . Just like you are now, every teacher here, at some point, was . . . hopeful. But hope, Isaiah, can be a very dangerous thing if you let it. It can blind you from reality. You can get lost in hope.”

That sense of hope changes dramatically after one of the students commits suicide, causing the others to reevaluate who they are and where they are going in life as Mr. Isaiah desperately attempts to hold it all together, for him and them.

Mr. Cartwright (Leon Addison Brown) and Mr. Isaiah (Biko Eisen-Martin) have a difference of opinion in marvelous play at MCC (photo © Daniel J. Vasquez)

The play is beautifully directed by Whitney White (On Sugarland, Our Dear Dead Drug Lord), allowing each character to develop at their own pace and making room for Love’s poetic language to build organically; at times it is choreographed like a dance, with aggressive movement juxtaposed with tender moments. The cast is exceptional, from the six young students to the steadfast Eisen-Martin (In the Southern Breeze, Strange Courtesies) and the unshakable Addison Brown (“Master Harold” . . . and the boys, The Train Driver).

Adam Rigg’s set is a horizontal classroom, with the audience sitting in three rows of seats facing each other across the two long, open sides. This is the third play this year I’ve seen that takes place in an open-sided classroom, all exploring racial and ethnic identity and broken-down systems: Sanaz Toossi’s English deals with four Iranians learning English for various reasons, while Dave Harris’s Exception to the Rule is a Beckett-esque twist on The Breakfast Club as six Black teenagers are trapped in detention.

In soft, flowers separate the stage from the seats, as if a barrier of love, inspired by Kehinde Wiley’s series of paintings of young Black men stretched out on beds and couches, surrounded by colorful flowers on the wallpaper and sheets and floating through the air (Femme Piquée par un Serpent II, The Virgin Martyr St. Cecilia). Love writes in the script, “They stretch as far as the eyes can see. It’s all we see. We should get so lost in their beauty that we forget this is a play. Until . . . Flower petals start to fall from the sky.”

Cha See’s lighting allows everyone to see each other in the theater, which in a play such as soft is an added bonus, especially the night I went, when there was a clear divergence between the white and Black/brown audience members; the latter were vocal in response to numerous sharp lines and powerful situations, calling out in agreement — or disagreement — and snapping when a character made an important point. When I saw MJ on Broadway, I was not happy that the family sitting behind me was munching away on noisy potato chips and talking throughout the first act, but what was happening at soft felt so right, so natural. I also knew that I should not participate in the snapping and vocalizing, that it was definitely not my place. (The sound is by Germán Martínez, with original music by Mauricio Escamilla.)

Mr. Isaiah (Biko Eisen-Martin) and Bashir (Travis Raeburn) don’t always see eye to eye in soft (photo © Daniel J. Vasquez)

That feeling was increased during a fourth-wall-breaking magic-realism coda in which the racial makeup of the audience was made central and magnified. It was only during the postshow talkback with White that I realized it was Black Theater Night; White pointed out that the coda is very different on other nights, when there are far fewer Black and brown people in the audience. The sense of exclusion of the white playgoers was made even more palpable when White explained that they should not speak during the discussion, should not ask a question or share their experience of the play. (The next Black and Brown Theater Night is June 17; the June 18 matinee will be followed by a mental health awareness conversation, and there will be a free Spoken Word Open Mic on June 18 at 5:30 addressing the question “What does softness mean to you?”)

It reminded me of an earlier work directed by White to which only Black and brown critics were invited because of the subject matter. It also brought me back to one of my most unforgettable nights at the theater, at the Flea in 2015, during the Bats’ participatory Take Care. Audience members were assigned varied actions, and I was given the task of telling all the Black and brown people in the audience to gather in a corner. You can only imagine how that went.

There’s a reckoning happening in theater, and it’s long overdue. I’m not about to complain about feeling excluded, given the shameful history of racial injustice and LGBTQIA+ discrimination in this country. I’m also not going to complain when the reparative work results in such marvelous and meaningful productions as soft, the title of which refers to the hope and joy, the basic humanity, that can be found even in hard times. Love, a queer Black Philadelphia native living and “thriving” with HIV, is a phenomenal playwright with his finger on the pulse of this transformation, as shown in such previous impressive works as one in two and Fireflies. I’m excited to see whatever Love and White do next, no matter how inclusive or exclusive it may be.

ULYSSES: ELEVATOR REPAIR SERVICE TAKES ON BLOOMSDAY

Elevator Repair Service will celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Ulysses at Symphony Space on June 16

Who: Elevator Repair Service
What: Bloomsday on Broadway
Where: Symphony Space, Peter Jay Sharp Theatre, 2537 Broadway at Ninety-Fifth St.
When: Thursday, June 16, $17-$28, 8:00
Why: Last year, walking on the Lower East Side, I bumped into Scott Shepherd, longtime member of Elevator Repair Service (ERS), which has been presenting unique, experimental theatrical works since 1991. I asked him what he was up to and he said, “Just wait to see what we’re doing for Bloomsday at Symphony Space.” That day has arrived. On June 16, in honor of the centennial of the publication of James Joyce’s masterpiece, Ulysses, ERS will be doing something different at Symphony Space, which has been celebrating the novel for decades by having all-star marathon lineups reading the book on June 16, the day in 1904 in which the story takes place.

Helmed by ERS artistic director John Collins, the two-hour presentation features ERS ensemble members Shepherd, Dee Beasnael, Kate Benson, Maggie Hoffman, Vin Knight, Christopher-Rashee Stevenson, and Stephanie Weeks performing excerpts from each of the book’s eighteen episodes, bringing the tale to life as only ERS can. ERS has previously brought its unpredictable style to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (the eight-hour Gatz), William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (The Select). The set design is by dots, with costumes by Enver Chakartash, lighting by Mark Barton, sound by Ben Williams, and props by Patricia Marjorie. It all begins with “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.” For more on the centenary of the novel, be sure to head over to the Morgan Library to see the new exhibit “One Hundred Years of James Joyce’s Ulysses.”