Will Harrison leads an excellent cast in harrowing true story (photo by Matthew Murphy)
PUNCH
Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West Forty-Seventh St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Through November 2, $94-$235.50 www.manhattantheatreclub.com
Will Harrison makes an electrifying Broadway debut as a young Nottingham man whose life changes forever on a wild night in James Graham’s Punch, continuing at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre through November 2 though deserving of a longer run. However, the final shows can be livestreamed with a twenty-four-hour replay for $75.
Harrison stars as Jacob in the true story, based on the memoir Right from Wrong by Jacob Dunne, which explores bullying, drugs, class, and restorative justice. One night, Jacob and his large gang of friends are out drinking and snorting as they barhop through Nottingham, Jacob in search of some action.
“This is the problem, no one likes to admit . . . Doing bad things . . . creates good feelings. It just does,” Jacob tells the audience. “Because there is no other high in the world, forget your fuckin’ skunk or spice or smack or scratch, none of it can beat the buzz that comes with beatin’ up a slippin’ bastard in defence of a mate. The look in their eyes when they’re impressed, grateful, respectful . . . and even a bit fuckin’ scared of you now too . . . Barrelling back to someone’s house, covered in blood and validation. . . . Being chased and chasing highs, rushing round, scoring drugs and doing deals, seeking out parties and pulling girls. People dancing, trance like, getting high, snogging. Problem for someone like me is that cause I’d lived on the outskirts, coz mum had kept our heads down . . . not a lot of people knew us. And thriving and surviving in this world is all about your reputation, who you are . . . Which means I . . . have to always go farther, drink faster, walk taller. And most importantly . . . fight. Fight harder. Harder than anyone else.”
Chasing those highs, nineteen-year-old Jacob unleashes a massive punch on a random stranger just for kicks, but when the young man, twenty-eight-year-old James Hodgkinson, dies as a result of the altercation, Jacob is sent to prison while James’s parents, David Hodgkinson (Sam Robards) and Joan Scourfield (Victoria Clark), deal with the tragic loss of their son and contemplate whether they should forgive Jacob.
The energetic, fast-paced first act shifts between the punch and its immediate aftermath and a group therapy session led by Sandra (Lucy Taylor, who also plays Jacob’s mother and a probation officer), where Jacob shares his story with others. Sandra describes it as a place for “talking and listening. Difficult conversations.” Those conversations center on restorative justice, as Jacob, Joan, and David decide if they are going to meet face-to-face.
Victoria Clark and Sam Robards star as parents facing a horrific tragedy in Punch (photo by Matthew Murphy)
The first half of Punch unfolds like a thrilling boxing match, with aggressive, breathtaking movement by Leanne Pinder as Jacob and his friends make their way across and under set and costume designer Anna Fleischle’s reimagining of Trent Bridge in Nottingham, propelled by Alexandra Faye Braithwaite’s scorching original music and sound design. Robbie Butler’s lighting is like a character unto itself, a large, nearly complete circle hovering above the stage, consisting of rows of chasing lights that change color; it made me think of a boxing ring even though it isn’t square.
Graham (Ink,Dear England) and first-time Broadway director Adam Penford slow things down after intermission, as if the fighters have tired out, their tanks running out. Yes, it’s based on what actually happened, but it involves a whole lot of sitting around and talking, falling short of the knockout blow. Two-time Tony winner Clark (Kimberly Akimbo,The Light in the Piazza) and Robards (The 39 Steps,Absurd Person Singular) are powerful as James’s parents, tenderly dealing with a situation that is every mother and father’s nightmare.
But the play belongs to Harrison, who was born in Ithaca and raised in Massachusetts. He fully inhabits the British Jacob, physically and psychologically; you can’t take your eyes off him. Harrison made an impressive off-Broadway debut in 2023 as a young navy medic in Keith Bunin’s The Coast Starlight at Lincoln Center and has followed that up with this Tony-worthy performance; he is a rising star with a bright future.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Martha@BAM — The 1963 Interview re-creates classic conversation with Martha Graham (photo by By Peter Baiamonte)
MARTHA@BAM — THE 1963 INTERVIEW
BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
October 28 – November 1, $55, 7:30 www.bam.org
On March 31, 1963, dance writer and educator Walter Terry interviewed legendary dancer and choreographer Martha Graham at the 92nd St. Y. Early in the seventy-seven-minute conversation, Terry asked Graham about her attraction to Greek history and mythology.
“There seems to be a way of going through in Greek literature and Greek history all of the anguish, all of the terror, all of the evil and arriving someplace. In other words, it is the instant that we all look for, or the catharsis, through the tragic happenings,” she responded. “Everyone in life has tragic happenings, everyone has been a Medea at some time. That doesn’t mean that you’ve killed your husband or that you’ve killed your children. But in some deep way, the impulse has been there to cast a spell — to use every ounce of your power, and that’s true of a man as well as a woman, for what one wants.”
It’s classic Graham; you can now catch a staged re-creation of the discussion in Martha@BAM — The 1963 Interview, running October 20 through November 1 at BAM’s intimate Fishman Space as part of the Next Wave Festival.
In 1996, dancer and choreographer Richard Move began the “Martha@” series, in which they portray Graham, combining text and movement. In 2003, they starred as Graham in the film portrait Ghostlight. In 2011, in commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of Graham’s passing in 1991 at the age of ninety-six, Move presented Martha@ — The 1963 Interview at New York Live Arts, with Move as Graham, and Tony-winning actress and playwright Lisa Kron (Well,Fun Home) as Terry, accompanied by dancers Catherine Cabeen and Katherine Crockett. For the 2025 revival, Move, Kron, and Cabeen are reprising their roles, joined by Taiwanese dance maker PeiJu Chien-Pott, who, like Cabeen, is a former Martha Graham Dance Company member.
Move, who has collaborated with MGDC as a choreographer and performer, conceived and directed the sixty-minute production, which takes place on Gabriel Barcia-Colombo and Roberto Montenegro’s relatively spare set, centered by two chairs, a small table, and two microphones where Graham and Terry talk. Barcia-Colombo and Montenegro also designed the props the dancers use in their performance, as well as the lush, elegant costumes, immediately recognizable as part of Graham’s oeuvre. Among the other works that are brought to life are Clytemnestra,Errand into the Maze, and Appalachian Spring.
There is no video of the original interview, only audio, which you can stream here.
At the end of the interview, after bringing up comedy, Terry says, “The great characteristic of movement with Martha Graham is not only her fabulous gallery of heroines of the theater but also characteristic is the movement of one of the great dancers of all time, and I’m so glad she could be with us today. Thank you, Martha.”
To which I add, thank you, Richard Move, Lisa Kron, Catherine Cabeen, PeiJu Chien-Pott, and BAM.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Ginger Twinsies is a parody of the 1998 remake of The Parent Trap (photo by Matthew Murphy)
GINGER TWINSIES
Orpheum Theatre
126 Second Ave. between Seventh & Eighth Sts.
Monday – Saturday through October 25, $49-$149 gingertwinsies.com
In Barry Levinson’s classic 1982 film Diner, Fenwick (Kevin Bacon) says to Boogie (Mickey Rourke), “Do you ever get the feeling that there’s something going on that we don’t know about?”
I get that feeling at times in theater, especially at shows based on books or movies. While you don’t need to have read E. L. Doctorow’s 1975 novel, Ragtime, or seen Miloš Forman’s 1981 film adaptation in order to enjoy the current Broadway revival at Lincoln Center, it doesn’t hurt. However, my knowledge of such films as Some Like It Hot and Sunset Blvd. did negatively impact my enjoyment of the stage musicals; while artistic license must be granted, certain changes from the original just seemed plain awful, altering motivations and important points.
At the curtain call for Sunset Blvd., as most of the audience stood and cheered with wild applause, I turned to my friend and said, “Did they see the same show we did?” She shrugged in agreement.
I had similar experiences at two recent shows, each of which I liked, but not nearly as much as my fellow theatergoers, who were watching them at a different level.
Continuing at the Orpheum through October 25, Ginger Twinsies is a farcical love letter to Nancy Meyers’s 1998 film, The Parent Trap, in which Lindsay Lohan portrayed identical eleven-year-old twins Hallie Parker and Annie James, separated at birth and ignorant of each other’s existence until they meet at summer camp and decide to switch places. It’s a remake of David Swift’s 1961 original, which made a star of Hayley Mills and was based on Erich Kästner’s 1949 children’s book.
The play features a lot of satirical music, inside jokes, and Easter eggs for those in the know; for example, one of the actors portrays Jamie Lee Curtis, who played Lohan’s mother in the body-switching 2003 remake of Freaky Friday, which was based on Mary Rodgers’s 1972 novel. Also appearing as characters in Ginger Twinsies are Shirley Maclaine, who had some choice words about Lohan after the younger actress had to be pulled out of a film they were working on together; Julianne Moore, whose daughter looks like she could be Lohan’s twin; and Demi Moore, who spoke with Lohan at the 2025 Oscars. Whether you get the references or not, the connections are confusing.
Russell Daniels and Aneesa Folds are hilarious as Annie and Hallie, respectively, from the get-go, as they don’t look anything alike. The show works best when it concentrates on the relationship between the two girls; numerous subplots with minor characters are overused as writer-director Kevin Zak attempts to squeeze too much into eighty minutes. I did eventually get into the flow once I realized there was no way I was going to get all of the jokes, but it’s still dispiriting to watch large portions of the audience laughing when you and others are scratching their heads.
Veronica joins the Heathers in musical adaptation of 1980s cult favorite (photo by Evan Zimmerman)
HEATHERS THE MUSICAL
New World Stages
340 West Fiftieth St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through September 6, $72-$195 heathersthemusical.com newworldstages.com
A different kind of cult fandom can be found at Heathers the Musical, a revival of the 2014 show based on Michael Lehmann’s 1988 teen romance-thriller. The iconic film featured Winona Ryder as Veronica Sawyer, a student at Westerburg High who joins the mean girls clique of Heather Duke (Shannen Doherty), Heather McNamara (Lisanne Falk), and Heather Chandler (Kim Walker) while falling for dangerous new guy J. D. Dean (Christian Slater, in his best Jack Nicholson impersonation).
I had seen the film some years back and was looking forward to the musical, which continues at New World Stages through January 25. But what I wasn’t expecting were the shrieks that rattled the theater for two and a half hours (with intermission). Huge screams accompanied the first appearance of many of the characters, and nearly every song, from “Beautiful” and “Candy Store” to “Veronica’s Chandler Nightmare” and “My Dead Gay Son,” turned into a sing-along, as all the young women around me blared the lyrics out loud, wearing huge smiles as they did.
Director Andy Fickman and choreographer Stephanie Klemons capture the essence of the film, although the book, by Kevin Murphy and Laurence O’Keefe (they also wrote the music and lyrics), takes too many liberties with the plot, making changes that didn’t improve on the original, from altering who did what and combining multiple characters into one to commercializing the generic candy store and modifying the ending. However, thank goodness they corrected the spelling of the high school, which is named after Paul Westerberg of the Replacements.
The cast, which includes a terrific Lorna Courtney as Veronica, Casey Likes as J.D., Olivia Hardy as Heather Duke, Elizabeth Teeter as Heather McNamara, McKenzie Kurtz as Heather Chandler, Xavier McKinnon as Ram Sweeney, Erin Morton as Martha Dunnstock, and Tony nominee Kerry Butler as Ms. Fleming and Ms. Sawyer, is first rate, and the music is fun.
The story takes on added meaning in the wake of so many school shootings the past twenty years while also tackling the subject of teen suicide, but it doesn’t dive deep enough and takes off in directions that can drain certain scenes of their potency. But like Ginger Twinsies, despite its flaws, Heathers the Musical is worth seeing, at least in part for watching everyone else in the audience have an absolute ball even when there’s something going on that you don’t know about — a status of exclusion the mean girls of Heathers and cult theater insiders might actually relish.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Jen Tullock cowrote and stars in one-person show at Playwrights Horizons (photo by Maria Baranova)
NOTHING CAN TAKE YOU FROM THE HAND OF GOD
Playwrights Horizons, the Peter Jay Sharp Theater
416 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday-Sunday through November 16, $63.50 – $118.50 www.playwrightshorizons.org
“Do you remember the first time you saw her, or I mean, has writing about it changed your memory of her?” a voice asks author Kristin Frances Reinhardt in Jen Tullock and Frank Winters’s Nothing Can Take You from the Hand of God. Frances doesn’t answer the question in this intense solo show about first love, childhood trauma, forgiveness, and what and how we remember our past, filtered through family and religious dynamics and time.
Tullock performs all eleven roles in the seventy-minute multimedia production, from Frances’s brother, Eli, and mother, Raelynn, to her animated literary agent, Aubrey, and Kenny Weaver, the pastor of the Northeast Missions Church in her hometown. The play begins at a literary event launching Frances’s latest memoir, Never the Twain Shall Meet: Losing God and Finding Myself, the follow-up to Sorry I’m Late, about queer dating in Los Angeles. The new book explores Frances’s battles with her parents and the church over her sexual orientation as they go to extremes to try to force the gay out of her.
The action starts when agent Aubrey informs Frances that an organization discussed in the book, the Northeast Christian Church, got hold of an advance copy and is threatening to sue unless the author removes sections the church deems libelous for “wrongful likeness.” Frances decides to return home, believing she can straighten things out with the people she wrote about, primarily one specific young Polish woman with whom she fell in love, now a single mother who does not want to speak to her.
The narrative weaves in and out of the past and the present as the plot moves to Eli’s Backyard Bible Study class, a talent show audition, a coffee shop, a popular creek, a barbecue at Raelynn’s house, and the church, all the while intercutting discussions between Frances and Aubrey and readings and questions at the book event. For example, at one point the play switches back and forth between the book launch, with the host and audience heard in voiceover, and Pastor Jeremy Young at the church, with Tullock seamlessly shifting from Frances to Jeremy, making it feel like it’s all one conversation:
Jeremy: You know what my dream is? With this place? I want to make it so nobody has to write a book like you did. Not ever again. That’s the work that we’re trying to do. Host: Wow. Jeremy: Would you agree with that? Host: Oh, gosh. That’s beautiful. Jeremy: Well, I am so glad to hear you say that; I’m relieved, frankly. That means the world to me. Now let me ask you a question. Do you ever worry if you made any of it up? Frances: Sorry, excuse me? Host: Do you ever think about who your work is reaching? Jeremy: Now, I’m not a lawyer — this may come as a shock to you, but I do know that even by the standards of Kentucky Common Law there is something called — let me see if I can get this right — Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress. I know, it’s wordy.
Nothing Can Take You from the Hand of God is a technical whirlwind (photo by Maria Baranova)
Tullock gives a tour-de-force performance, quickly changing accents and body language while also adjusting several onstage looping stations and small cameras that record real-time visuals of her that are projected onto screens around her, as if each character contains their own multitudes, going beyond stereotypes. The claustrophobic set, featuring two chairs, a small table, and the tech equipment, is by Emmie Finckel, with almost dizzying projections by Stefania Bulbarella, sharp lighting by Amith Chandrashaker, and expertly rendered sound by Evdoxia Ragkou.
The play is furiously directed by Jared Mezzocchi (Russian Troll Farm,On the Beauty of Loss), who previously collaborated with Tullock (On the Head of a Pin,You Shall Inherit the Earth!) on the marvelous site-specific Red Hook show The Wind and the Rain; there is so much going on at any one time that it takes a while to pick up its unique structure, which can get overwhelming and confusing at certain moments.
Inspired by events from her own life and her family’s involvement in the evangelical church, Tullock and cowriter Winters (On the Head of a Pin,Student Body) don’t sugarcoat the story by creating heroes and villains; each character in the play is complicated and well developed, flaws and all. In the book and the show itself, Frances is an unreliable narrator, one who is able to make the audience take a long, hard look at their own past and wonder how many of their memories might have wandered from the truth over the years.
“Do you still believe in anything?” an audience member asks Frances at the book event.
It’s a question many of us should be asking ourselves in these dark, troubled times.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Steven Rattazzi, Amara Granderson, and Lizzie Olesker star as three accidentally interconnected New Yorkers in Triplicity (photo by Maria Baranova)
TRIPLICITY
Mabou Mines@122CC
150 1st Ave. at Ninth St.
Wednesday – Monday through October 26, $30-$40 talkingband.org
I got so mad watching Triplicity, Talking Band’s latest fantastic foray into the experimental and the avant-garde. The legendary downtown troupe was founded in 1974 by Paul Zimet, Ellen Maddow, and Tina Shepard and has presented approximately sixty shows over the years. Embarrassingly, I discovered them only a few years ago and have been blown away by their last five productions but, oh, what I have missed over the decades.
In a program note, director Zimet writes, “I feel Triplicity is a quintessential Talking Band work: It uses music, the music of speech, and choreography to heighten the ordinary and allow us to appreciate it in a new way.” If you’ve never experienced a Talking Band work, then Triplicity is a great place to start. And if you have been to previous TB shows, well, what are you waiting for? Triplicity runs at Mabou Mines@122CC only through October 26.
Triplicity is a truly New York City tale, following the interconnected, overlapping lives of four strangers as they go about their regular, mostly mundane existence in the big metropolis.
Frankie Shuffleton (Lizzie Olesker) is a seventy-something widowed bookkeeper who walks around her Christopher Street block every day at noon, sits on a park bench, and picks up a salad in a plastic container on her way home, where she listens to the news on the radio at seven, catches a police procedural at ten, then goes to bed. In true Beckett fashion, her first words are “There’s nothing to say,” which sharply contrasts with her accidental acquisition of a “talk to me” phone in which people call seeking advice.
Danny Dardoni (Steven Rattazzi) is a fifty-something exterminator who lives in a large Italian household in Bay Ridge, reads the poems of Virgil, and is shocked to learn that there is an enormous beehive in the attic. Danny, who has an innate sense for details, specializes in killing mice and rats and, not necessarily happily, tells us that he “is responsible for the safety and well-being of my family, to provide a home, this house, that is a safe place in a dangerous world.”
Norma Linda Box (Amara Granderson) is a twentysomething wannabe writer with five roommates, four jobs, and a hatred of people saying her name. When she sees a snake on the sidewalk, she takes him home because his blue stripes match a tattoo on her left ankle. “No one has witnessed the event,” she says. “I own it. I can define it. It’s mine to define.”
And Calliope (El Beh) is a street singer who is kind of a Greek chorus in funky, wild clothing, singing songs related to the words and actions of Frankie, Danny, and Norma, picking up on their sound and movement. “Whatever the weather / Calliope sings to whoever will listen / That’s it / That’s it,” she warbles.
As they share their stories, they break out into formalistic dances and roll around on their chairs; the playful choreography by Sean Donovan and Brandon Washington evokes the independence, and loneliness, of so many New Yorkers.
Talking Band’s Triplicity features unique choreography by Sean Donovan and Brandon Washington (photo by Maria Baranova)
In astrology, triplicity is an essential dignity involving a group of three Zodiac signs belonging to one element. That definition fits the show well, as the worlds of three people intersect and become one through the participation of a fourth.
The play begins with Frankie telling her story three different ways, moving her chair and adding more detail each time, a dazzling introduction to how we talk about our lives and share them with others. The concept of numbers is key throughout the seventy minutes, a poetic leitmotif. “Suddenly everything is in two’s!” Frankie declares. Three girls ride scooters. At four, Frankie goes out for coffee. Norma has five roommates and writes six essays. There are seven shards of glass on a blue tile floor. They get ten inches of rain over three days. The barrage of numbers suggests the passage of time, in minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years on the journey from birth to death.
Anna Kiraly’s set consists of rolling chairs, doorways with windows on which she projects different color schemes, a mazelike path on the floor, and a corner with special props for Calliope. Olivera Gajic’s costumes feature Frankie in a quaint sweater and skirt, Danny in a white T-shirt and sneakers, Norma in blue-jean overalls and wearing a red bandanna, and Calliope in a series of wildly adorned outfits.
Triplicity is written and composed by Ellen Maddow and directed by Paul Zimet, the incomparable married team who have been collaborating as writer, director, composer, and/or actors for half a century, including on Talking Band’s recent surge of endlessly compelling and engaging works, which have made me nearly weep with joy as the company continues to push the limits of what theater can be: Shimmer and Herringbone at Mabou Mines, Existentialism and Lemon Girls or Art for the Artless at La MaMa, and The Following Evening at PAC NYC.
In Triplicity, they capture the essence of New York City, the heart and soul of everyday people, the music and energy, divided into such chapters as “Adagio,” “Allegretto,” and “Scherzo,” resulting in a beautiful mini-symphony performed by a magical quartet.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter star in Broadway smash version of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (photo by Andy Henderson)
WAITING FOR GODOT
Hudson Theatre
141 West Forty-Fourth St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 4, $98.56-$558.88 godotbroadway.com www.thehudsonbroadway.com
“There’s nothing to do,” Vladimir tells Estragon in Samuel Beckett’s 1953 masterpiece Waiting for Godot.
There’s plenty to do for Beckett fans in New York City right now, much but not all of it a most excellent adventure.
The talk of the town is Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter reprising — well, channeling? — their roles from 1989’s Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and the 1991 and 2020 sequels in Godot at the Hudson Theatre. Action star Reeves is making his Broadway debut as Estragon (Gogo) in Jamie Lloyd’s bumpy adaptation, while Winter returns to the Great White Way for the first time in forty-four years as Vladimir (Didi).
Reeves and Winter follow in the formidable footsteps of such duos as Michael Shannon and Paul Sparks, Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, and Robin Williams and Steve Martin and, for the most part, hold the audience’s attention. Gogo and Didi usually find themselves in a strange, dark wasteland, with only a single bare tree, a country road, and a solitary stone as they contemplate life and death, heaven and hell, and existence and humanity, but Lloyd and set designer Soutra Gilmour locate them inside a giant tube that is part tunnel, part circular skateboard ramp, part existential void in space. Resembling abandoned vaudevillians in all black, sporting impressive bowlers (the costumes are also by Gilmour), they sit at the edge of the tube, feet dangling, waiting for the mysterious Godot to arrive and, perhaps, bring meaning to their sad, pathetic lives.
They are visited instead by the loud, blustery Pozzo (Brandon J. Dirden) and his menial, an apparent servant named Lucky (Michael Patrick Thornton). Pozzo usually leads Lucky around by a rope around his neck — evoking master and slave, circus ringleader and animal performer while referencing the rope Gogo had mentioned earlier when he and Didi considered hanging themselves — but here Lloyd has the verbally abusive Pozzo pushing Lucky, who is in a wheelchair, altering their dynamic. Curiously, Lucky breaks the fourth wall several times, acknowledging the audience and encouraging them to clap after he does his dance (with his head and hands). In addition, a young boy (Eric Williams or Zaynn Arora) shares important information with Gogo and Didi.
Lloyd (A Doll’s House,Sunset Blvd.) has slimmed down the show to just over two hours including intermission, so the pacing works well. Lloyd’s decision to get rid of nearly all the usual props, including a key carrot that Gogo chews in an annoying manner, seems like overkill. There’s a perpetual droning hum of doom hovering over the proceedings (the sound is by Ben and Max Ringham), contrasting Jon Clark’s subtle lighting shifts, highlighted by dazzling surprises at the end of each act.
Reeves and Winter may not display a wide range of emotions, but they avail themselves well enough to keep the audience engaged. At one point Didi says, “This is not boring you I hope,” looking out at us, and we essentially answer no.
Bill and Ted enthusiasts may whoop when Gogo says, “Back to back like in the good old days,” and the two actors stand back to back and play air guitar, echoing what they do in the film series, but the reference feels out of place in a show that exists in a barren emptiness and is about nothing (and everything).
“The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing,” Bill says in the first movie, quoting Socrates. Ted responds, “That’s us, dude.”
Party on, dudes!
Stephen Rea is mesmerizing as a man listening to his past in Krapp’s Last Tape (photo courtesy Patricio Cassinoni)
KRAPP’S LAST TAPE
NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts
566 La Guardia Pl.
Through October 19, $83-$130 nyuskirball.org
“Nothing to say,” an old man declares in Samuel Beckett’s 1958 autobiographical classic, Krapp’s Last Tape, a fascinating kind of companion piece to Waiting for Godot.
In 2012, Irish actor Stephen Rea decided to go into a studio and perform the prerecorded sections of Krapp’s Last Tape, in case he was ever asked to do the one-man show, in which a dissatisfied man listens to tapes his younger self made thirty years before. Rea is now touring the play, which continues at the NYU Skirball Center through October 19.
Jamie Vartan’s spare set features a desk in the center, an overhead hanging light, and a door at the back, stage right. Paul Keogan’s shadowy lighting maintains an old-fashioned vaudeville black-and-white feel. The past is present in both Vicky Featherstone’s taut staging and the theme of the play.
The show begins with Krapp slowly opening a hilariously long drawer and removing a banana. He eats the fruit — the yellow of the banana stands out from the otherwise colorless gloom — and tosses the peel onto the floor, where, of course, he soon slips on it. He does not make the same mistake twice.
To celebrate his birthday, he is going to listen to one of his old reel-to-reel tapes, the one he made when he turned thirty-nine, discussing his life. He brings in the machine and a stack of tapes, carefully searching for box three, spool five, taking great delight in saying the word “spool” over and over again. “Thirty-nine today, sound as a bell, apart from my old weakness, and intellectually I have now every reason to suspect at the . . . crest of the wave — or thereabouts,” he listens to his old self explain. “Good to be back in my den, in my old rags. Have just eaten I regret to say three bananas and only with difficulty refrained from a fourth. Fatal things for a man with my condition. Cut ’em out! The new light above my table is a great improvement. With all this darkness round me I feel less alone. In a way. I love to get up and move about in it, then back here to . . . me. Krapp.”
Not much has changed in those thirty years; his loneliness in the darkness is palpable. He looks up the meaning of “viduity,” sings, and recalls a romantic evening on a lake. But the tape does not provide him with happiness; he barks out, “Just been listening to that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago, hard to believe I was ever as bad as that. Thank God that’s all done with anyway.”
What’s next? Well, the play’s French title is La Dernière Bande, or “The Last Tape.”
Krapp’s Last Tape has previously been performed by such actors as Patrick Magee, Harold Pinter, Brian Dennehy, and Michael Gambon; I’ve seen it with John Hurt at BAM and, earlier this year, F. Murray Abraham at the Irish Rep. The play, a haunting examination of time, memory, and the futility of language, works best in more intimate quarters; it gets a bit lost at the Skirball, even at only about fifty minutes.
Rea (A Particle of Dread,Cyprus Avenue) inhabits the character with a graceful elegance despite Krapp’s pathetic, sad-sack circumstances, at times recalling Buster Keaton, one of Beckett’s favorites. It’s a bravura performance that I would have loved to see in a significantly smaller venue.
Druid production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame comes to Irish Arts Center for monthlong run (photo by Ros Kavanagh)
ENDGAME
Irish Arts Center, JL Greene Theatre
726 Eleventh Ave. between Fifty-First & Fifty-Second Sts.
October 22 – November 23, $25-$86 irishartscenter.org
“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness,” Nell tells Nagg in Samuel Beckett’s 1957 chess-inspired Endgame, which takes place during some kind of apocalypse as four characters contemplate their fate in a dingy basement dungeon, two of them living in garbage cans.
In a conversation in the Skirball program for Krapp’s Last Tape, Stephen Rea tells director Vicky Featherstone and Dr. Tanya Dean, “Endgame is a tough thing. I remember Beckett saying he loved Endgame, and he didn’t like Waiting for Godot. And I said, ‘Well, it’s been absorbed.’”
Rea played Clov in the 1976 Royal Court production of Endgame; I’ve seen the show twice, in 2008 at BAM with Max Casella, Alvin Epstein, Elaine Stritch, and John Turturro, and in 2023 at the Irish Rep with John Douglas Thompson, Bill Irwin, Joe Grifasi, and Patrice Johnson Chevannes. From October 22 through November 23, Galway’s Druid theater company will be presenting Endgame at the Irish Arts Center, with Tony winner Marie Mullen, Bosco Hogan, Aaron Monaghan, and Rory Nolan, directed by Tony winner Garry Hynes. As with Soutra Gilmour’s set for Waiting for Godot on Broadway, Francis O’Connor’s scenic design for Endgame also emphasizes the circularity of life.
Monaghan, who plays Clov, previously starred as Estragon opposite Marty Rea (no relation to Stephen) in Druid and Hynes’s Waiting for Godot at Lincoln Center’s 2018 White Light Festival. Hynes also helmed a stunning Richard III starring Monaghan in 2019 as well as The Beauty Queen of Leenane at BAM in 2017, with Marty Rea and Mullen.
Endgame is part of Druid’s fiftieth anniversary celebration. In the play, Clov shouts, “The end is terrific!” But luckily for theatregoers, the end appears to be nowhere in sight for Druid, or for seeing Beckett in New York.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Valerie (Kate Abbruzzese) and Kyle (Brooks Brantly) face marital difficulties as Mia (Georgia Waehler) watches in (un)conditional (photo by Russ Rowland)
(UN)CONDITIONAL
SoHo Playhouse
15 Vandam St. between Varick St. & Sixth Ave.
Wednesday – Monday through October 26, $41-$72 www.sohoplayhouse.com
Ali Keller’s (un)conditional is an awkward, uncomfortable theatrical experience that will have you squirming in your seat, but not in a good way.
The ninety-minute play, continuing at SoHo Playhouse through October 26, is a decidedly adult look at sexual fantasy involving two couples. For their tenth anniversary, Valerie (Kate Abbruzzese) has convinced Kyle (Brooks Brantly) to participate in a robber-rapist role-play scenario in order to reinvigorate their love life, but when she reveals herself wearing a purple strap-on dildo and tells him what she wants to do with it, he freaks out. It gets even more complicated when they discover that their seven-year-old daughter, Mia (Georgia Waehler), has been listening at the door.
Valerie and Kyle have a brutal fight about each other’s needs, Valerie explaining that she has been feeling neglected for a long time. “You could’ve just told me you felt like that. You didn’t need to do all this. You are more than a bunch of holes, Val,” Kyle explains, holding her hand. Valerie replies, “I know.” Kyle clarifies, “I mean to me. You are more than a bunch of holes to me.” Valerie rips her hand away and declares, “This is not about you. It’s about me and something I want.”
In another part of town, Lenox (Annalisa Chamberlin) is making steak and potatoes for her husband, the somewhat older Hank (Nathan Darrow), in order to reinvigorate their love life and have children. “Even though I don’t like steak and potatoes as much as you like steak and potatoes, I know that you’ll get that look on your face where you’re all excited, and I know you’ll enjoy yourself and it makes me like steak and potatoes more than I normally would,” she says demurely, slyly letting him know that she will do everything she can to get him back in the sack, which he has been avoiding like the plague.
Valerie decamps to her parents’ house for a while; when Kyle takes Mia to the store to buy Halloween costumes, they bump into Lenox, Kyle’s coworker, and Hank, who quickly bonds with Mia. Behaving like a whiny brat, Mia insists that her father get her a pretzel — a metaphor for the twisted relationships becoming apparent among the five characters — but when she acts out, Hank puts on a magician outfit and magically makes the obnoxious girl happy.
He also makes himself happy; after Kyle and Mia leave, Lenox says to Hank, “Maybe we don’t need miracles. I told you role play would work. Let’s get the magician costume.”
Eventually everyone comes together at one of the most absurd New Year’s Eve parties ever, featuring a plot twist that elicited an enormous groan from the audience the night I went.
Lenox (Annalisa Chamberlin) and Hank (Nathan Darrow) face marital difficulties in (un)conditional (photo by Russ Rowland)
The ninety-minute (un)conditional is about as icky a show as I’ve seen for quite some time. There are a few good moments — the early dildo scene is poignant and hilarious — but director Ivey Lowe is unable to smooth out the bumps, both in the narrative, which ranges from ridiculously silly to darkly serious as it jumps from holiday to holiday, and the constant set changes, as white furniture is transformed between beds and couches while interstitial music shifts from cool rocking guitar and bass to more maudlin instrumentals. Given the uneven dialogue, the cast does what it can, although Waehler, who is twenty, portrays Mia in a ceaselessly annoying manner.
Winner of SoHo Playhouse’s 2024 Lighthouse Series for emerging talent in New York City, (un)conditional gets off to a rousing start but goes limp too soon and never recovers its mojo.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
