this week in theater

CONFEDERATES

Siblings Sara (Kristolyn Lloyd) and Abner (Elijah Jones) fight for freedom in Confederates (photo by Monique Carboni)

CONFEDERATES
The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 24, $35-$80
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

Playwright Dominique Morisseau and director Stori Ayers magnificently interweave two parallel threads, one that takes place on a plantation during the Civil War, the other at a modern-day university, in the world premiere of Confederates, which opened tonight at the Signature’s Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre for an extended run through April 24.

The play begins with tenured Black poly sci professor Sandra (Michelle Wilson) speaking to school leaders — and the audience — projecting a picture of the real-life postcard Type de Negresse d’ADANA, which famously depicts a Black woman breastfeeding a white baby, from more than a hundred years ago. “Before this becomes a complete misinterpretation of intent, I’d like to say that I am not averse to images of slavery,” she announces. “There is nothing slavery that is off limits for me. No shame in my own enslaved heritage. No shame. And yet. . . .” She then switches to a doctored version of the photo, with her head photoshopped onto the Black body, a printout of which had been taped to her office door, and asks for an immediate investigation.

As she departs, the action switches to a slave cabin in the 1860s, where Sara (Kristolynn Lloyd) is stitching a wound suffered by her brother, Abner (Elijah Jones), a runaway slave who is fighting for the Union army. On a raised platform sits a bench chest on one side and a writing desk on the other, surrounded by columns evoking the front of a southern estate. (Rachel Hauck’s set remains the same throughout the play, equating the two time periods.)

Sara wants to join the army too and be useful to the cause, but Abner is having none of it. He tells her, “You good n’ safe with what you do right now. Fast picker. Keep out of the eye of the storm. You like the nighttime nobody seem to notice. That’s good n’ safe. I ain’t got to worry as much.”

Sara insists that Abner train her on how to hold a musket. “So I know what it feels like to have the power of freedom in my hands. ’Case I never see you again,” she says. He shows her and replies, “Now you’re a real man.”

Candice (Kenzie Ross) and Sandra (Michelle Wilson) discuss bias in Dominique Morisseau world premiere (photo by Monique Carboni)

Jones does a quick change and becomes Malik, a Black student arguing a grade with Sandra, his teacher. He is defending his paper, which got a B-, claiming that his unconventional interpretation of Lincoln, the Emancipation Proclamation, and affirmative action is valid. Sandra responds, “I’m saying there are loopholes in your overall analysis of the so-called modern-day plantation in the workforce and its parallel to slavery during the time of the Civil War,” a capsule summary of what the play is about.

“Neither of these policies originally targeted the people it was designed to protect,” he declares. “They both came with multiple side clauses and loopholes. The result, slaves still weren’t freed even after the proclamation, and so-called minorities weren’t employed equally after affirmative action. Paperwork and lies and bullshit and plantation by another name.” She ultimately gives him a chance to rewrite the paper and hand it in the next morning.

Back at the plantation, the master’s daughter, Missy Sue (Kenzie Ross), has returned from her brief, failed marriage with new insight into the condition of slavery; having grown up with Sara, she considers them close friends — Sara most certainly does not feel the same way — and now she wants to work with Sara to spy on her father, the master, and ultimately live together safely in the North. Abner is not happy about this prospect, and Luann (Andrea Patterson), a slave who is sleeping in the master’s bed, starts getting suspicious that something is going on under her nose.

Meanwhile, at the university, Sandra is being accused by numerous people of having bias — Malik thinks she is biased against him; her ditzy, talkative white assistant, Candice (Ross), believes she favors Malik; and her fellow Black professor, Jade (Patterson), has heard that Sandra will not support her tenure vote and feels she treats her more like a threat than a colleague. In addition, everyone has a different opinion, not all of them good, about Sandra having worn a Black Lives Matter T-shirt the other day. Issues of gender, class, and race explode in shocking ways as the poignantly beautiful finale approaches.

Sara (Kristolyn Lloyd) and Missy Ann (Kenzie Ross) confront each other in play that bounces between past and present (photo by Monique Carboni)

Morisseau is one of the most successful and busiest writers of the last decade. In the last ten years, she has given us the Detroit Projects trilogy (Detroit ’67, Paradise Blue, Skeleton Crew), Pipeline, and Ain’t Too Proud — The Life and Times of the Temptations, addressing inequities in housing, business, employment, education, and entertainment.

Inspired by Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2011 Atlantic article “Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War,?” Confederates is another sparkling triumph from Morisseau, ninety minutes that will dig into your soul while also making you laugh. In a program note, the playwright offers, “Just like in the present, the enslaved are multifaceted. We all carry snark and sarcasm. We are all expert navigators of the systemic fuckeries. And sometimes, navigating that shit is painful. And sometimes, navigating that shit is funny.” Amid all of the controversy over critical race theory and the 1619 Project, Morisseau sharply portrays how America’s racial history has brought us directly to this moment in time, where we must learn from our past and face hard truths.

To further the comparison of then and now, Patterson, Jones, and Ross play characters existing in each era, with direct similarities, while Lloyd’s and Wilson’s characters are mirrors of each other. For example, Candice is aware of her white privilege just as Missy Sue wants to do something to help Sara after all the awful things her family has done to her, even though they each still don’t quite get it; both women are played with humor by Ross. The connections between the dual roles are further established in the costume changes, in which the actors tear off their clothes to reveal their other character as light and sound bombard us; the costumes are by Ari Fulton, with lighting by Amith Chandrashaker and Emma Deane, sound by Curtis Craig and Jimmy Keys, and projections by Katherine Freer.

The cast is superb, led by Wilson (The House That Will Not Stand, Sweat), who mixes vulnerability with determination as Sandra, and Lloyd (Dear Evan Hansen, Paradise Blue), who unearths a dark fierceness as Sara. The line conjoining them is evident from the start and passionately fuses them together by the end, making a grand statement of how much America has to learn about race.

Morisseau wrote Confederates after being challenged by Penumbra Theatre founder Lou Bellamy to craft a theatrical response to one of the main points Coates made in that 2011 Atlantic piece: “For my community, the message has long been clear: The Civil War is a story for white people — acted out by white people, on white people’s terms — in which blacks feature strictly as stock characters and props.” She was also inspired by Toni Morrison’s discussion of the white gaze; she once told Charlie Rose, “I have spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the white gaze was not the dominant one in any of my books.”

In another program note, Morisseau explains, “I, too, have felt the lash of writing in a continuum that honors this gaze, even when I personally do not hold space for it in my own aesthetic. But there are other gazes as well. As a woman writer, I have also felt the male gaze. As a radical writer, I have felt the gaze of respectability politics. And as a Black writer, I have felt the gaze of Blackness that sometimes is only qualified as one myopic thing, rather than expansive and global as Blacknesss truly is. No matter the gaze, they all feel like one collective thing to me as an artist: oppression.” Confederates takes on all of those gazes in elegant and intensely clever ways. Morisseau’s Signature Residency 5 began with Paradise Blue and continues with Confederates; but no matter how much you enjoy it, don’t wait for the curtain call, because the play is about a whole lot more than just applauding a job well done.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT: AN AFTERNOON OF COMEDIC DELIGHTS

Blythe Danner and Bob Dishy team up again in one-act plays for Food for Thought

Who: Food for Thought Productions
What: In-person and livestreamed performance of three one-act plays
Where: Theatre 80 St. Marks, 80 St. Marks Pl. at First Ave., and online
When: Monday, March 28, free with RSVP for in-person (646-366-9340, info@foodforthoughtproductions.com), 2:00; available online March 28 and April 3
Why: Food for Thought Productions has presented more than a thousand one-act plays since 2000, featuring all-star casts in lesser-known works by major playwrights. Its twenty-second season kicks off March 28 at 2:00 with “An Afternoon of Comedic Delights,” three short plays featuring the incomparable Tony and two-time Emmy winner Blythe Danner and the inestimable Bob Dishy, directed by Antony Marselli, live in person at Theatre 80 St. Marks and online; you can also catch the stream on April 3. The Brooklyn-born eighty-eight-year-old Dishy (Lovers and Other Strangers, Sly Fox, Damn Yankees) and the Philadelphia-born seventy-nine-year-old Danner (Butterflies Are Free, Betrayal, Huff) will first team up for George S. Kaufman and Leueen MacGrath’s Amicable Parting, about a young couple, Bill and Alicia Reynolds, going through their possessions as they plan to separate; in the foreword, the authors explain, “This is meant to be high comedy. It should be played lightly, gayly. Never heavily. Never emotionally. Thank you.”

Early on, Alicia points out a specific painting. “I would like to have this one, if you don’t mind, Bill,” she says. “Suits me,” he replies. “Now, Bill, you’re sure? — I mean, that you don’t want it? Of course, I love it, but then you love it too,” she explains. Bill: “No, Sweetie — you saw it first — I remember very clearly. Paris, ’53. What was the name of the restaurant? Chez Something.” Alicia: “Nico.” Bill: “Chez Nico. Too much to eat, too much to drink, too much for this painting.” Ah, memories.

Bob Dishy and Blythe Danner deal with family issues in Brighton Beach Memoirs

Next up is Peter Stone’s Commercial Break, which has been previously performed by Lauren Bacall and Robert Preston and was initially written for Audrey Hepburn in Charade, then revised for Cary Grant in Father Goose, ending up on the cutting-room floor both times. In the play, Tony, Oscar, Emmy, and Edgar winner Stone (Kean, 1776, Woman of the Year) introduces us to Catherine and Harry Crocker; the couple finds itself in quite a predicament when she accuses him of being unfaithful. Dishy presented Stone’s My Doctor the Box with Judy Graubart at a 2007 FFT tribute to Stone, who passed away in 2003 at the age of seventy-three. The third relationship play is Tallulah Finds Her Kitchen, which Neil Simon, Danny Simon, and Joseph Stein wrote for the one and only Tallulah Bankhead, a monologue that takes place, well, in her kitchen. The festivities conclude with a Q&A with Danner and Dishy, who appeared together in Brighton Beach Memoirs in 1986 and in FFT’s December 2021 production of Arthur Miller’s I Can’t Remember.

UPLOAD

Soprano Julia Bullock and baritone Roderick Williams portray a daughter and father dealing with a digital afterlife in Upload (photo by Stephanie Berger)

UPLOAD
Park Ave. Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at Sixty-Seventh St.
March 22-30, $45-$150, 7:30 / 8:00
www.armoryonpark.org
www.vanderaa.net

Created specifically for Park Ave. Armory’s massive Wade Thompson Drill Hall, Dutch composer Michel van der Aa’s multimedia opera Upload is a haunting adventure into a near-future where people can choose to surrender their corporeal bodies and exist for eternity as digital beings. The process involves scanning the brain to make a map of the mind, implanting in the upload their family, social, and personal identities, pushing pain and trauma into the background.

The ninety-minute production begins in total darkness as a father (baritone Roderick Williams) and his daughter (soprano Julia Bullock) share many of the elements that make life unique; phrases such as “light – smile,” “struggle – grip,” “tingle – cheek,” “seek – calm,” and “carry – loss” emerge from speakers placed all around the drill hall. The darkness lifts to reveal lighting and set designer Theun Mosk’s stunning stage, which features three movable, translucent triptych screens in front of a larger movie screen. In the far right corner sits Ensemble Musikfabrik, an eleven-piece orchestra conducted by Otto Tausk; the powerful, immersive sound design, by Tom Gelissen and Paul Jeukendrup, lets van der Aa’s wonderful score, which often turns into scratchy electronic noise, echo gloriously in the cavernous space.

The daughter, in a red jumpsuit, converses with her father, who appears on the movable screens, wearing jeans and an unbuttoned shirt; his image is often blurry or pixelated, indicating the transmission is murky. Williams is actually performing from stage right, a camera projecting him onto the screens. The effective motion capture and graphics are by Darien Brito, with special effects by Julius Horsthuis.

A man is getting scanned to become a digital upload in Michel van der Aa’s multimedia opera at Park Ave. Armory (photo by Stephanie Berger)

The daughter is furious that her father has chosen to become an upload without consulting her; he assures her that he hasn’t left her. “Sweet smile of my child, / I still hear, / I see without knowing that I see. / It’s easier to feel than to explain. / My sense of touch is gone, / but no matter. / I can still think my own thoughts. I went on a journey to be what I must be. / I made this decision for us; / you can no longer lose me. . . . If you can’t live the way you want, there’s no point in living.” She angrily asserts, “Why didn’t you ask how I would feel about all this?”

The moments between father and daughter, which include footage of their home and garden projected onto the back screen, alternate with prerecorded scenes from the clinic that invented the procedure, from a sterile waiting room and laboratory to a fantastical Lego-like structure in shocking blue. The dialogue at the clinic is spoken, not sung. A psychiatrist (Katja Herbers) explains, “I think that what we do here can be regarded as a form of rebirth, analogous to the afterlife. I mean, haven’t we always tried to cheat death?” The smarmy CEO (Ashley Zuckerman) posits, “In the past, when a generation died, we would lose their collective wisdom. And that’s a great loss. . . . By digitizing the mind, removing it from the body, we’re removing it from these risks. Take one last trip in your biological body, and then you’ll live forever. . . . You just have to die first.”

The key to the transfer is a “memory anchor,” something the person being uploaded can think about to make the procedure go smoothly. The CEO notes that “memories are faulty,” but he believes that, technologically, the anchor “will always be reliable.” But as the daughter later tells her father, “No world they created for you can compete with the real one.”

Previously presented at the Dutch National Opera and the Bregenz Festival in Austria, Upload is like a live production of the popular anthology series Black Mirror directed by Ivo van Hove, along with a dash of the Amazon Prime show similarly titled Upload, which also involves a digital afterlife. Van der Aa previously explored what happens following death in his 2006 piece After Life, adapted from the film of the same name by Hirokazu Kore-eda; the opera featured Williams in a way station between heaven and hell.

Upload features dramatic staging at the armory (photo by Stephanie Berger)

The interplay between the live and prerecorded flashbacks, shot by cinematographer Joost Rietdijk, builds off the tension being experienced by father and daughter onstage; as the characters, sometimes assisted by others, push the vertical triptychs back and forth, the films depict nonstatic scenes outdoor, indoors, and underwater, the movement in multiple directions resulting in an uneasy 3D-like effect that matches the emotional mood of the narrative.

Bullock (Girls of the Golden West, Doctor Atomic, Zauberland) and Williams (Eugene Onegin, Billy Budd, Madam Butterfly) sound glorious together; I would have loved to have heard more from them. While there are English subtitles, you won’t need them for his vocals, which are sharp and pristine.

Written, composed, and directed by van der Aa — who was last at the armory with 2017’s Blank Out, in which Williams appeared onscreen in a story loosely based on the life and career of bilingual South African poet Ingrid Jonker — Upload can be confusing at times, but the overall production, complete with a breathtaking surprise near the end, is a genuine treat, a thrilling peek at the potential future of humanity while testing the boundaries of what opera can be.

ProEnglish THEATRE OF UKRAINE: THE NEW WORLD ORDER

Who: ProEnglish Theatre of Ukraine
What: Livestreamed fundraiser
Where: ProEnglish Theatre of Ukraine Facebook Live
When: Sunday, March 27, free with RSVP (donations encouraged), 11:00 am
Why: Shortly after the Russians began their invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the ProEnglish Theatre of Ukraine converted its black box space into a shelter for members of the theatrical profession and neighbors, creating a safe area where actors, directors, technicians, and others could gather together. The company, which is based in Kyiv, has been collecting food and medicine for the elderly while continuing to make art. It is also supporting an effort to train actors as medical personnel to make videos to show people how to care for injured citizens. As part of Boston-based Arlekin Players Theatre’s #Artists4Ukraine project, “a campaign of hope,” ProEnglish Theatre is presenting a livestreamed version of British playwright Harold Pinter’s 1991 drama The New World Order, which deals with imperialism, totalitarianism, and hegemony. The three-character, ten-minute play involves a blindfolded man about to be tortured for unknown reasons.

ProEnglish Theatre of Ukraine has converted its space into a shelter for the cast, crew, and community in Kyiv

Des: Do you want to know something about this man?
Lionel: What?
Des: He hasn’t got any idea at all of what we’re going to do to him.
Lionel: He hasn’t, no.
Des: He hasn’t, no. He hasn’t got any idea at all about any one of the number of things that we might do to him.
Lionel: That we will do to him.
Des: That we will.

After finding out about what ProEnglish Theatre was doing, Arlekin founding artistic director Igor Golyak, who was born in Kyiv, made a video in which he declared, “This could be us. This is us.” The play will be performed live over Facebook on March 27 at 11:00 in the morning; if you can give anything, donations will be accepted to help the cause of ProEnglish Theatre in these dire times, as the people of Ukraine demonstrate a profound resilience to protect their freedom.

HELP

April Matthis is fabulous as the only person of color in Claudia Rankine’s Help (photo by Kate Glicksberg for the Shed)

HELP
The Griffin Theater at the Shed
The Bloomberg Building at Hudson Yards
545 West 30th St. at Eleventh Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 10, $29-$77
646-455-3494
theshed.org

Poet, playwright, and professor Claudia Rankine wanted to know what white people were thinking, so she asked them. The results can be seen in the blistering new show Help, which opened last night at the Shed’s Griffin Theater.

Several recent plays by Black playwrights, including David Harris’s Tambo & Bones, Jordan E. Cooper’s Ain’t No Mo’, and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview, have used fictional narratives to address systemic racism, breaking the fourth wall and directly confronting the predominantly white audience.

But Rankine goes right to the facts in Help, which consists of verbatim dialogue from interviews with white men and white women conducted separately by Rankine, who is Black, filmmaker Whitney Dow, who is white, and civil rights activist and theologian Ruby Nell Sales, who is Black; responses to Rankine’s 2019 New York Times article “I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked”; and quotes from such politicians, writers, and other public figures as James Baldwin, Elon Musk, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Audre Lord, Donald Trump, Eddie Murphy, Bill Gates, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Dr. Richard Sackler, Mitch McConnell, Toshi Reagon, and Fred Moten.

Obie winner April Matthis hosts the evening as the Narrator, portraying a version of Rankine, speaking straight to the audience. “I am here — not as I — but as we — a representative of my category,” she says at the start. “The approximately eight percent of the U.S. population known as Black women.” After listing a few real names and epithets of Black women, she declares, “Ultimately, whatever name you use, all of them, begin with the letter N.”

She walks back and forth across the front of the long, horizontal stage, either holding a microphone or stopping at the stand near the middle, like a comedian performing a semiautobiographical one-person show. Although the ninety-minute play has plenty of laughs, it is also deadly serious when it comes to racism, white supremacy, reverse racism, and white privilege. And she’s not about to let the mostly white theatergoers off the hook because they have bought a ticket to see such a progressive show and clap at all the politically correct moments.

White men and women display their privilege through dance in Help (photo by Kate Glicksberg for the Shed)

Behind the Narrator is a glassed-in airport waiting room populated by nine white men and two white women in business attire, a stark contrast to the Narrator’s green jumpsuit. They often interact with her, either joining her at the front or welcoming her into their space. Actually, “welcoming” might not be the best word, because they usually don’t like what she has to say, even though she attempts to be neutral, not responding the way she wants to as they refuse to acknowledge the advantages their whiteness automatically brings them and turning it back on her.

In an early vignette, people are lining up to board a plane, in number order according to their ticket. The Narrator wants to make sure she is in the right spot but is not thrilled when one man (Jeremy Webb) says to another (Tom O’Keefe), “You never know who they’re letting into first class these days.” In a sidebar, her therapist (Tina Benko) tells her, “You didn’t matter to him. That’s why he could step in front of you in the first place. His embarrassment, if it was embarrassment, had everything to do with how he was seen by the person who did matter: his male companion. He made a mistake in front of his companion. You are allowing yourself to have too much presence in his imagination.”

The Narrator responds, “I want a new narrative, one that doesn’t demand, or require, or want . . . one that doesn’t accept my invisibility. I need a narrative that includes your whiteness as part of the diagnosis. . . . The limits of his world are the limits of your world too.” She’s not speaking to just the therapist but to everyone in the theater.

A few moments later, the Narrator assumes the man (Nick Wyman) in front of her voted for Trump, and he snidely replies, “You can stand in this line with me, but you’ll never be in line with me. That’s why I’ll vote for him again. And again.” And another (Rory Scholl) doesn’t hesitate to admit to her, “If the cost of my way of life is your life — that’s not my concern.”

It’s a war of words, interpretations, meanings, and intent that makes for an uneasy flight as she leads us through barrages of racist statements made by familiar names (identified specifically in the play’s online resources page) as well as a few brief chats in which the other person wants to be an ally but doesn’t know how to deal with their inherent privilege. She won’t even give her husband (O’Keefe), who is white, a break. “I’m not demonizing, I’m historicizing,” she tells us. “To stay alive, forget thriving, I need to negotiate whiteness.”

The white cast, which also includes Jess Barbagallo, David Beach, Charlotte Bydwell, Zach McNally, Joseph Medeiros, John Selya, and Charlette Speigner, occasionally breaks into group social dances, choreographed by Shamel Pitts, that sometimes involve the rolling waiting room chairs as the men and women put their whiteness on further display. The original music is by JJJJJerome Ellis and James Harrison Monaco, with sound by Lee Kinney, lighting by John Torres and costumes by Dede Ayite; Nicole Brewer is the antiracist coordinator.

The Narrator (April Matthis) navigates through a white world in Claudia Rankine play (photo by Kate Glicksberg for the Shed)

Over the last two years, Rankine (Just Us: An American Conversation, Citizen: An American Lyric) and Obie-winning director Taibi Magar (Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, Is God Is) reshaped and updated the play, which had to shut down during previews in March 2020 because of the pandemic, working in the January 6 insurrection, the murder of George Floyd, the Covid-19 crisis, and other recent events, although there is, unfortunately, a timeless quality to everything, as racism doesn’t look like it’s going away soon. They’re not teaching or preaching, but they steadily navigate so the audience doesn’t feel backed into a corner.

At the center of it all is Matthis (Toni Stone, Fairview), who is brilliant as the Narrator, guiding the interactions while making sure the audience remains uncomfortable even when laughing, since Rankine pulls no punches. “Imagine if my fellow travelers were to wrestle with their own privilege, instead of with my presence. For once,” she says. Once again, she’s not just referring to the characters in the play; we’re all in the waiting room together.

Tony winner Mimi Lien’s fab set matches the Narrator’s description of it as a “liminal space, a space neither here nor there, a space we move through on our way to other places, a space full of imaginative possibilities.” Clearly, it’s white people who are doing most of the moving as minorities face more of a stasis. “There’s no outrunning the kingdom, the power, and the glory,” the Narrator reminds us. Meanwhile, another white man (Beach) insists, “The dominant culture is colorless,” later adding that classic phrase, “I don’t see color.”

The program features several excellent essays, by Rankine, Dow, Simone White, and Sales, who, in “Can We Just Get Down to the Conversation About Whiteness?,” writes, “We must ask, is it a privilege to inherit a death driven system that predicates itself on the decimation of the potential and possibility of white men to reach the fullness of their humanities? Contrary to calling out the worst in them as the system does, we must see the good in them that they do not see in themselves. Our work must enable them to find new meaning in their lives and provide relief from their brokenness and fragmentation.” Help is no mere attack on whiteness but a declaration that things can and must change, with help from everyone.

The Narrator sums it up best when she says, “There is, after all, no racism without racists.” At its heart, the show is about the fear that pervades white people who are desperately trying to hold on to the past, and their power, as the world changes right before their eyes. They’re afraid they and their kids won’t get into the right schools, won’t get the good jobs, won’t have the same opportunities they’ve had for more than two hundred years since the birth of the nation.

At the end of her writer’s note, Rankine points out, “As Ruby Sales has said, ‘There’s nothing wrong with being European American; that’s not the problem. It’s how you actualize that history and how you actualize that reality.’” And that’s what Help is about.

COAL COUNTRY

The characters of Coal Country listen to Steve Earle sing about a horrific mining disaster (photo by Joan Marcus)

COAL COUNTRY
Cherry Lane Mainstage Theatre
38 Commerce St.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 17, $39-$77
212-989-2020
www.cherrylanetheatre.org
coalcountrymusical.com

Coal Country is a damning portrait of much that’s wrong in America today, a tale of corporate greed, corruption, union busting, an unequal justice system, and a lack of compassion for one’s fellow human beings. And it’s all true.

On April 5, 2010, more than two dozen men died in the Upper Big Branch Mine disaster in Raleigh County, West Virginia. Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen’s documentary play is set at the end of the trial of Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship, who ran the mine. The action begins as Judge Berger (Kym Gomes) has opened the floor for relatives and colleagues to share their stories of what happened before, during, and after the horrific event, the worst mining disaster in the United States in forty years. The audience serves as a kind of jury as the characters speak verbatim dialogue, word for word what the real men and women of Raleigh County said.

Patti Stover (Mary Bacon) talks about her chance at second love with Gregory Steven Brock, who went to the mine that day even though he wasn’t feeling well because he couldn’t afford to take time off. Tommy Davis (Michael Laurence) worked in the mines with his brother Timmy and nephews Cory and Josh; like many people who lived in the company town, mining went back generations.

Roosevelt Lynch Jr. (Ezra Knight) would pass by his father every morning, one having just finished a shift, the other about to start one. Dr. Judy Petersen’s (Deirdre Madigan) brother Dean did everything with his twin brother, Gene, but shortly after they both began in the mine, Gene quit while Dean stayed on.

Gary Quarles (Thomas Kopache) shares the story of his son in Coal Country (photo by Joan Marcus)

Gary Quarles’s (Thomas Kopache) son was tired of working off the dangerous longwall. “I’d say Massey ran outlaw from the day Blankenship brought ’em in,” Gary says about the hiring of nonunion employees. “We always said that Massey Energy was his third world country, and Don was the dictator.”

The de-facto leader of the group is Stanley Stewart, known as Goose (Carl Palmer), a third-generation miner whose grandfather was killed on the job. Goose told his wife, Mindi (Amelia Campbell), about how he could see trouble was brewing because of how the new ownership was dealing with basic health and safety issues. “My first twenty years was union. This was the strongest union place in the world before Massey came in,” Goose says. Gary adds, “And I’ll tell you what, you didn’t worry ’bout gettin’ fired by speakin’ up.”

Throughout the play, Grammy-winning folk-country-rock troubadour and activist Steve Earle plays related songs from his chair in the front right corner of the stage, switching between acoustic guitar and banjo. He sometimes gets up and joins the cast, who occasionally sing lines and choruses with him. Earle’s score ranges from the traditional folk song “John Henry,” about an African American “steel drivin’ man” battling a steam drill in the Big Bend Tunnel in West Virginia in the nineteenth century, to “Heaven Ain’t Goin Nowhere,” “The Devil Put the Coal in the Ground,” and “It’s About Blood.”

In “Union, God, and Country,” Earle asks the audience to sing along to these key lines: “Union, god, and country / West Virginia gold and blue / Union, god, and country / was all we ever knew.” Earle also performs his 2013 bluegrass song “The Mountain,” in which he explains, “I was born on this mountain / This mountain’s my home / And she holds me and keeps me from worry and woe / Well, they took everything that she gave / Now they’re gone / But I’ll die on this mountain / This mountain’s my home.” I’ve seen Earle numerous times over the years, from the Ritz and the Bottom Line to the Blue Note, the Lone Star Roadhouse, and Judson Church, and he is an inspired choice for Coal Country; he also served as composer and onstage narrator in Richard Maxwell’s existential Western Samara for Soho Rep. in 2017. On April 5, 2020, Earle played the songs of Coal Country in a free Facebook Live concert and has recorded them for the album Ghosts of West Virginia. (Wednesday night shows will be followed by a discussion with Earle on March 16 and 30 and Blank and members of the cast on March 23 and April 6.)

Dr. Judy Petersen (Deirdre Madigan) and Mindi Stewart (Amelia Campbell) wait for word of their relatives in Coal Country (photo by Joan Marcus)

An Audible production that had to cut short its premiere run at the Public in March 2020 because of the pandemic lockdown, the ninety-minute Coal Country has made a successful transition to the Cherry Lane. Richard Hoover’s wood-based set at times places the audience inside the mine, with David Lander’s lighting signaling trouble behind the slats of broken wood in the back. Movement director Adesola Osakalumi guides the actors on- and offstage as they rearrange various benches, providing much-needed breaks between emotional moments.

Married partners Blank and Jensen previously collaborated on such projects as The Exonerated, in which an ensemble reads the words of innocent men and women on death row, and The Line, a virtual Public Theater presentation from July 2020 in which an all-star cast told the verbatim stories of health-care workers and first responders in the early days of the Covid-19 crisis.

In Coal Country, Blank and Jensen do a magnificent job of integrating the individual stories, weaving them together to form a compelling narrative that will have you at the edge of your seat, even if you know exactly what happened. The scenes in which the characters are waiting on news of the fate of their loved ones are unforgettable, especially seen now, after two years of a global health crisis that has killed nearly a million Americans, many of whom died alone, their relatives forbidden to be with them. It’s a uniquely American tale, one that comes amid extreme partisanship, polarization, and divisiveness, but it doesn’t matter where you fall on the political spectrum to be deeply moved and infuriated by its overarching message.

As Earle sings, “It’s about fathers / It’s about sons / It’s about lovers / Wakin’ up in the middle of the night alone / It’s about muscle / It’s about bone / It’s about a river running thicker than water ’cause / It’s about blood.”

JANE ANGER, OR . . .

William Shakespeare (Michael Urie) is suffering from writer’s block during the plague in Jane Anger (photo by Valerie Terranova)

JANE ANGER
New Ohio Theatre
154 Christopher St.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 26, $25-$75
newohiotheatre.org
www.janeangerplay.com

Talene Monahon’s Jane Anger is a frenetic farce that believes if you hit the audience with a nonstop, relentless barrage of jokes, enough are going to stick to make the experience worthwhile. The laughs actually begin with the full title, which is: Jane Anger or The Lamentable Comedie of Jane Anger, that Cunning Woman, and also of Willy Shakefpeare and his Peasant Companion, Francis, Yes and Also of Anne Hathaway (also a Woman) Who Tried Very Hard. And I’m happy to say that more than enough jokes hit their target to make this a very funny evening.

It’s 1606, and London is in the midst of yet another plague. Addressing the audience directly at the start of the play, Jane Anger (Amelia Workman) immediately equates that time with recent global affairs. “It’s back, baby!” she announces. “The death carts are out, the plague screecher is running around screeching, the playhouses have closed, fleas are swarming the streets, people are freaking out.”

With the city in lockdown, including the theater, William Shakespeare (Michael Urie) is stuck in his home, suffering an extreme case of writer’s block. With no place to go, Francis Sir (Ryan Spahn), an apprentice actor with the King’s Men — who appears to be much older than the nearly sixteen years he claims to be — asks for shelter from the Bard, who agrees to let him live on the floor in his writing room. The quaint Elizabethan set, by Joey Mendoza, features a large window in the back that functions as an entrance, above where Francis sleeps.

“Sixteen? This seems most improbable to me,” the Bard says. “You seem somewhat older and uglier and more weathered in the face.” Francis replies, “The poverty, sir. It has coarsened me. I assure you I am a mere youth. A boy, a stripling, a youngker!”

Real-life partners Michael Urie and Ryan Spahn star in new play by Talene Monahon (photo by Valerie Terranova)

Feeling a ton of pressure — during the 1593 plague, Shakespeare wrote the poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece and worries that now he will be outpaced by the prolific Ben Jonson and even Thomas Middleton — the Bard ultimately decides to pen King Lear, even though there is already another play about the same monarch, purportedly written by Thomas Kyd, called King Leir. But to make the story his own, Shakespeare is going to change Leir to Lear and Cordella to Cordelia.

Soon the Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets, Jane, his muse, pays a surprise visit on her former lover. “You’re alive. You came!” the Bard declares. “Aw! Not any time that you would remember,” Jane ribaldly answers.

Jane has a favor to ask of Shakespeare: She needs him to sign a document endorsing a pamphlet she is trying to get published by William Jaggard. (In fact, a woman going by the name Jane Anger did publish a highly influential 1589 pamphlet entitled “her Protection for Women. To defend them against the SCANDALOUS REPORTES OF a late Surfeiting Lover, and all other like Venerians that complaine so to bee overcloyed with womens kindnesse.”) But Will wants to finish his new play before helping Jane — and he’s not exactly sure about woman writers, as an earlier exchange with Francis revealed.

Francis: Sir. You need not fret. This shall all pass. Your genius is surely not imperiled by the plague-writing of other men or women or anyone —
Will: Men or who?
Francis: . . . Women, sir . . . ?
Will: Frankie! Was that your sarcasm again? A woman writing? What, sitting at a little desk with her quill? Scribbling away in her skirt?? “Look at me! I’m a woman writing!”
Francis: “Look at me! I’m a woman forming words out of my mind and then making sentences out of them.”
Will: “Look at me! I’m a woman who can spell!” HA HA.
Will and Francis: HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.

When Francis asks, “What is a Cunning Woman? Is that like a physician? Or a Barber-Surgeon?” Shakespeare replies, “Yes, Frankie, it’s similar but the differences are the person has breasts and makes less money.”

Next to join in the fray is Shakespeare’s detested wife, Anne Hathaway (Monahon). He purposely hasn’t seen her in seven years and seemingly refuses to acknowledge the prior existence of their son, Hamnet, who died a decade before, most likely from the plague. Anne Hathaway is always referred to by her full name, Anne Hathaway, and yes, there are inside references to the current actress, Anne Hathaway, who portrayed Viola in Twelfth Night at the Delacorte in 2009.

“Simply put, Anne Hathaway is Death to a writer’s process,” Shakespeare declares, adding a moment later, “For whatever reason, people don’t seem to like Anne Hathaway. It’s a bit of a thing, actually.”

The high jinks speed up with four characters onstage as egos clash, revelations are made, and the silliness only increases, with Monty Python-esque humor.

Amelia Workman stars as the title character in Talene Monahon’s Jane Anger (photo by Valerie Terranova)

An earlier, shorter iteration of Jane Anger, called Frankie and Will, was streamed during the pandemic, with the action taking place in Urie (Angels in America, Buyer & Cellar) and Spahn’s (Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow, How to Load a Musket) Manhattan apartment; the real-life partners did numerous virtual presentations over the last two years, and they both starred in Michael Kahn’s eccentric production of Hamlet for Shakespeare Theater Company in 2018, with Urie as the title character and Spahn as his old friend Rosencrantz. Having acted together so often — in addition to cohabitating — the pair has an instant chemistry, in this case reminiscent of Abbott & Costello.

Director Jess Chayes (HOME/SICK, The Antelope Party) holds nothing back, letting the characters fire away at will, pun intended. Plenty of jokes miss their target — repeated references to the Pony Rule, the equivalent of social distancing, fall flat — but plenty nail the bull’s-eye.

Monahon, who previously wrote How to Load a Musket and starred in Widower’s Houses for TACT, is lithe and demure as the somewhat simpleminded, self-deprecating Anne Hathaway, while the ever-dependable Workman (Fefu and Her Friends, Tender Napalm) is bold and fierce as the unabashed, forward-thinking Jane.

In her pamphlet, Anger wrote, “At the end of men’s fair promises there is a Labyrinth, and therefore ever hereafter stop your ears when they protest friendship, lest they come to an end before you are aware whereby you fall without redemption. The path which leads thereunto, is Mans wit, and the mile’s ends are marked with these trees, Folly, Vice, Mischief, Lust, Deceit, and Pride. These to deceive you shall be clothed in the raiments of Fancy, Virtue, Modesty, Love, True meaning, and Handsomness. . . .” Monahon and Chayes capture that spirit in this madcap comedy.