this week in theater

THE MERCHANT OF VENICE

John Douglas Thompson is extraordinary as Shylock in TFANA production of The Merchant of Venice (photo by Henry Grossman)

THE MERCHANT OF VENICE
Theatre for a New Audience, Polonsky Shakespeare Center
262 Ashland Pl. between Lafayette Ave. & Fulton St.
Through March 6, $75-$85
866-811-4111
www.tfana.org

Arin Arbus reimagines a Merchant of Venice for this moment in time in her ingenious adaptation of the Bard’s challenging tragedy, continuing through March 6 at TFANA’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center. A coproduction with DC’s Shakespeare Theatre Company, the play is Arbus’s fourth collaboration with classical treasure John Douglas Thompson, following Macbeth, Othello, Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, and Strindberg’s The Father. Thompson is heart-wrenching as Shylock, the first professional Black actor to play the role in New York City since Ira Aldridge in the 1820s.

When the lights go out, the full ensemble comes out in regular dress, signaling they are performers, not the characters they are about to portray. A moment later the show begins, with the cast in contemporary costumes by Emily Rebholz — blazers, jeans, sneakers, gym clothes, suits. Riccardo Hernandez’s set is an imposing faux marble wall and steps, with a large black hole in the upper center, as if the sun and moon are both gone. The characters enter and leave through two doors, the wings, or the aisles, almost as if they’re part of the audience.

In order to woo the wealthy, beautiful heiress Portia (Isabel Arraiza), the noble Bassanio (Sanjit De Silva) asks his close friend, Venetian merchant Antonio (Alfredo Narciso), to borrow three thousand ducats from respectable Jewish moneylender Shylock. Shylock is tired of being mocked because of his religion, and he lets Antonio know it. He tells the brash Antonio, “Many a time and oft / In the Rialto you have rated me / About my moneys and my usances: / Still have I borne it with a patient shrug, / For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe. / You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog, / And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine, / And all for use of that which is mine own. / Well then, it now appears you need my help: / Go to, then; you come to me, and you say / ‘Shylock, we would have moneys:’ you say so; / You, that did void your rheum upon my beard / And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur / Over your threshold: moneys is your suit / What should I say to you? Should I not say / ‘Hath a dog money? is it possible / A cur can lend three thousand ducats?’ Or / Shall I bend low and in a bondman’s key, / With bated breath and whispering humbleness, Say this; / ‘Fair sir, you spit on me on Wednesday last; / You spurn’d me such a day; another time / You call’d me dog; and for these courtesies / I’ll lend you thus much moneys’?”

Portia (Isabel Arraiza) works out with her servant Balthazar (Jeff Biehl) in The Merchant of Venice (photo © Gerry Goodstein)

It’s a powerful speech that sets the stage for the relationship between Shylock and the others; he is clearly well educated and eloquent, but despite his passionate entreaty, the Christians treat him with scorn and disdain. Antonio needs to obtain the money for Bassanio, but he cannot help but still belittle Shylock.

“I am as like to call thee so again, / To spit on thee again, to spurn thee too,” he tells him. “If thou wilt lend this money, lend it not / As to thy friends; for when did friendship take / A breed for barren metal of his friend? / But lend it rather to thine enemy, / Who, if he break, thou mayst with better face / Exact the penalty.”

The penalty is a harsh one: Instead of charging Antonio interest, Shylock says he will take a pound of Antonio’s flesh if he doesn’t return the three thousand ducats in three months’ time. Certain that his merchant ships will come back successfully a month before the agreement ends, Antonio signs the contract.

Antonio and Bassiano are often accompanied by their sycophantic bros: snarky, sunglasses-wearing, cocktail-swilling yuppie Gratiano (Haynes Thigpen), who is funny until he isn’t; Solanio (Yonatan Gebeyehu) and Salerio (Graham Winton); and Lorenzo (David Lee Huynh), who wants to elope with Shylock’s daughter, Jessica (Danaya Esperanza), and convert her to Christianity to further her father’s shame. In addition, Shylock’s servant, the goofy Lancelot Gobbo (Nate Miller), who wears his jeans very low, quits his job with the moneylender and moves on to Bassiano. “For I am a Jew, if I serve the Jew any longer,” Lancelot says.

Meanwhile, two suitors beat Bassanio to try to win Portia’s hand. First Prince Morocco (Maurice Jones), then Prince of Aragon (Varín Ayala), must choose wisely among three caskets, one of which holds the key to Portia’s heart — and fortune. On the gold one is inscribed, “Who chooseth me shall gain what many men desire,” on the silver “Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves,” and on the lead “’Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath.”

Portia is attended by her servant Balthazar (Jeff Biehl) and her maid, Nerissa (Shirine Babb); the latter is supremely efficient, while the former offers comic relief, flirting hysterically with many of the men he meets and, when Portia asks for music, uses his iPhone. (The sound and original music is by Justin Ellington.)

Shylock (John Douglas Thompson) demands a pound of flesh from Antonio (Alfredo Narciso) in Shakespeare tragedy (photo © Gerry Goodstein)

It all leads up to one of the great trial scenes in all of theater, a brutal battle of wits in which Shylock, who is suing Antonio for his pound of flesh, represents not only Jews and Blacks, both of whom have histories of being enslaved and discriminated against up to the present day, but, in essence, all of humanity who have suffered hatred and oppression at the hands of tyrants and bigots.

Throughout its four-century existence, The Merchant of Venice has likely been performed by troupes that glorified anti-Semitism and was cheered on by audiences that agreed with Antonio and his friends’ views of Jews, as well as by companies and audiences that had deep sympathy for Shylock’s plight. But Arbus achieves something different.

The casting is diverse but not random; by having Shylock and Jessica portrayed by Black actors, Arbus is making a powerful statement, particularly in the socioeconomic reckoning that has taken hold in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd. With his gentle cracked whisper of a hoarse voice that comes from deep in his soul, the British-born Thompson (Jitney, The Iceman Cometh) is unforgettable as Shylock, not merely following in the footsteps of Laurence Olivier, F. Murray Abraham, George C. Scott, Al Pacino, Jonathan Pryce, and Patrick Stewart but making the role his own.

When Shylock, who is repeatedly referred to as a dog, a villain, a cur, and the devil, asks, “If you prick us, do we not bleed? / If you tickle us, do we not laugh? / If you poison us, do we not die? / And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” Thompson is speaking for all the downtrodden; Shakespeare’s words echo down the ages: Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech leaps to mind as well. When Shylock tells the court, “Proceed to judgment: by my soul I swear / There is no power in the tongue of man / To alter me: I stay here on my bond,” Thompson speaks for all who resist injustice.

Arraiza shines as Portia, whether working out, dressed in an elegant gown with stiletto heels, or disguised as a learned doctor. Arbus ratchets up the homoeroticism by having Bassanio and Antonio be very good friends, while Biehl practically waves the Gay Pride flag as Balthazar. As serious as the subject matter is, Arbus includes plenty of fun and good humor; Biehl and Miller in particular often make vocal and gestural asides that are hilarious and certainly not in the original script.

“The quality of mercy is not strained, / It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven / Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest: / It blesseth him that gives and him that takes,” Portia says in Act 4. We are blessed to have such a thrilling production of this dark tragedy; if only all were blessed equally with mercy in these dark times.

OUT OF TIME

A documentary filmmaker (Page Leong) looks back at her life in Anna Ouyang Moench’s My Documentary (photo by Joan Marcus)

OUT OF TIME
Martinson Theater, the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. at Astor Pl.
Tuesday through Sunday through March 13, $60
212-539-8500
publictheater.org
www.naatco.org

In Sam Chanse’s Disturbance Specialist, the last of five monologues comprising Out of Time, author Leonie Z. (Natsuko Ohama) says, “You know nothing of what it is to live when you haven’t yet understood that you will die. And none of you really understands that. You get the concept maybe but you don’t actually believe it.”

Out of Time, which opened last night at the Public’s Martinson Theater, is an extraordinary concept: Five Asian American playwrights have written monologues for five Asian American actors over the age of sixty, directed by Les Waters, who is also over sixty. The five stories don’t always focus on aging, although getting older, with fewer years ahead than behind, is an inherent theme throughout the works, as is the call for respect for the elderly from family, friends, colleagues, and strangers. Isolation, loss, and loneliness abound, along with deep pockets of hope and defiance.

Speaking about her longtime producer, the unnamed documentary filmmaker (Page Leong) in Anna Ouyang Moench’s My Documentary explains, “Neil, who hugged me hello and then listened to my carefully crafted pitch about my just-dead husband and passed and hugged me goodbye as though he hadn’t just told a widow in no uncertain terms to go fuck herself because she’s old and no one cares when old people grieve other old people.”

Ena (Mia Katigbak) knows getting older is no mere game in Mia Chung’s Ball in the Air (photo by Joan Marcus)

In Mia Chung’s Ball in the Air, Ena (Mia Katigbak) walks onto the stage playing with a kids’ paddle ball, bouncing a little red ball against a wooden paddle, the two held together tenuously by a thin rubber band. She displays a childlike desire to succeed at the game shortly before describing a horrible accident she was involved in. She worries about feeling confused as different stories merge together in her mind. “Time is no guarantee,” she says. “These moments — when someone sees red when you see blue — well, it can be a stunner. It can seem as if something has vanished. In an instant.”

Glenn Kubota is the only male in the cast, portraying Taki in Naomi Iizuka’s Japanese Folk Song. The Scotch- and cigar-loving, jazz-hating Taki details how he nearly died in every decade from his teens to his seventies — “I must be pretty tough,” he acknowledges. “And lucky. I must be lucky.” — before telling a version of the Japanese ghost story “Yuki-onna,” which was famously retold in Masaki Kobayashi’s classic film Kwaidan. Taki is straightforward and practical even as he ventures into the realm of the fantastic.

Carla (Rita Wolf) is a voice from the past discussing the history of cancer among the women in her family in Jaclyn Backhaus’s Black Market Caviar. The piece is structured as a video the character made on December 31, 2019, offering advice to a descendant watching decades later. “Time is moving more quickly than I’d like,” she says. Carla is sitting behind a translucent curtain; we watch her on a video monitor at the corner of the stage. Ena, Taki, and the documentarian all sit in chairs front and center, evoking Waters’s direction of Lucas Hnath’s Dana H., in which Deirdre Connell performs the play sitting down (and lip-syncing the dialogue). Leonie Z. stands at a podium, delivering a fiery lecture to students who have already canceled her. (The spare scenic design is by dots.)

Leonie Z. (Natsuko Ohama) fights back in Sam Chanse’s Disturbance Specialist (photo by Joan Marcus)

Commissioned and produced by NAATCO, Out of Time is a play for the ages. Inspired by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Mitten wir im Leben sind/Bach6Cellosuiten, a piece choreographed for older dancers (including De Keersmaeker herself, who is in her early sixties), Waters (Big Love, The Thin Place) gives agency to each of the actors, and each of the characters, who look back at their lives in personal ways that are poignant and gripping, especially amid a rise in anti-Asian hate crimes and during a pandemic in which nursing home deaths related to Covid-19 were seen by many as the cost of doing business as a society.

The basic conceit of the play itself is a bold act of resistance, proving that actors over sixty are fully able to present long monologues and inhabit complex characters who are a lot more than elderly grandparents ready to be put out to pasture. Each of these characters is imbued with an inner strength and purpose even as they recognize their approaching fate — and we know the same is in store for the rest of us.

“Think about death, but remember life: our long lineage,” Carla says. “Because of you, our mother, our grandmother, I am here. Today. Today I am alive. I revel in all of it.” The titular “disturbance specialist” in Leonie Z.’s lecture is a volcano mouse “that flourishes, revels, in ruined environments.” The canceled author sternly proclaims, “And in all this, what you have to tell me is that I’m not welcome. I, Leonie Z., am not welcome here, that I should go home. Delete my account. Shut up and erase myself. Roll over and quietly die?” In Out of Time, none of those are acceptable options.

ARDEN — BUT, NOT WITHOUT YOU

Flea artistic director Niegel Smith faces a reckoning with Jack Fuller in return to live performances in front of an audience (photo © Hunter Canning)

ARDEN — BUT, NOT WITHOUT YOU
Flea Theater, the Sam
20 Thomas St. between Broadway & Church St.
Wednesday – Sunday through March 6, $17-$37
theflea.org

Arden — But, Not Without You is a ritual cleansing of the Flea, a messy, scattershot baptism looking toward a new era. Named for the forest in Shakespeare’s comedy As You Like It, which itself was named for the Bard’s mother-in-law, the show is described by standout performer Diana Oh in the program as “Four Generations of Deeply Intimately Bound All-Kinds-of-Doing-Shit Artists sharing of themselves in a Tender-Ass Room full of Queer Femme Shamanic Energy who Genuinely and Gently Welcome You: Social Anxieties, Yummy Freakiness, and All.”

In June 2020, Flea performer Bryn Carter had a public exchange with the theater’s artistic director, Niegel Smith, and producing director, Carol Ostrow, accusing the Flea of racism, sexism, nonpayment of actors, BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ ignorance, bullying, and body shaming. Ostrow left the company, and the resident troupe, the Bats, was eliminated. Smith and the Flea have pledged a “new path forward,” promising “a dedicated focus on Black, brown, and queer artists in experimental theater [that] comes at a moment in which a national spotlight is shining widespread — and longstanding — on the inherent value of BIPOC voices.”

Founded in a Tribeca storefront in 1996 by Jim Simpson and Sigourney Weaver, the Flea moved first to White St. and now Thomas, where it has several theater spaces. Its inaugural production following the pandemic lockdown and its new guidelines and mission is Arden, a slapdash collaboration, codirected by Smith and Nia Witherspoon, that boasts all-star talent while also serving as a communal acknowledgment and mass healing. While the beginning and ending are moving and powerful, most of what comes in between feels dogmatic and exhortative, as if we’re listening in on the Flea making confession, something that needs to be done in private.

When you check in, you are given a card to fill out with two prompts: “1. Describe the last time someone touched you. 2. What is a question that you want to find the answer to?” As you approach the upstairs Sam, you can first stop at “Journey to the Clearing,” an empty chair with fluorescent lighting and a tree branch seemingly floating, and an altar featuring items and offerings from the company. Once inside the theater, you bring your card to a table where the masked Peter Born and Okwui Okpokwasili turn the comments into song as audience members find their seats, which surround the central floor space except for the far corner, where a band will later play. It’s an engaging way to form everyone into a kind of collective, which is further enhanced by Born’s sparse set that features four hanging light fixtures, bulbs surrounded by family photos and mirrors.

Diana Oh steals the show in Arden — But, Not Without You (photo © Hunter Canning)

The singing morphs into “Do Not Let Go,” in which Born and Okpokwasili, who are married and have previously worked together on such projects as Pent Up: A Revenge Dance, Poor People’s TV Room, and Bronx Gothic, proclaim, “I want to know / Who stands beside me / When I tell you / this house is in ruins. / total collapse / is looming. / The storm is surging / The walls are caving in. . . . Will you / Welcome the storm? / Will you / Praise the bones / wrested from the wreckage / And build anew?”

Smith and Harlem MC, composer, and musician Jack Fuller next take a backward “spirit walk” following a rectangular chalk outline. “This place is fraught,” Smith declares. “This place has celebrated a vision of Black and brown folks / dependent on white saviors. / This house is in ruins. . . . I choose to fight / I fight for this artistic home.” This section proves flat and didactic, overemphasizing the theme of the rededication of the Flea.

Other company members join in the walk as the soundtrack turns to a captivating story by multidisciplinary artist Carrie Mae Weems detailing a powerful childhood memory, accompanied by footage of her mother giving a speech. It’s a gripping story about secrets and deception, love and betrayal. Following a trance dance, Diana Oh takes over, becoming our host while blasting out a few raucous, energetic songs, joined by guitarist Viva Deconcini, percussionist Bernice “Boom Boom” Brooks, bassist and cellist Serena Ebony Miller, and Fuller on keyboards. Linda Cho dresses them all in flowing white costumes that harken back to Greek statuary.

Oh, a multidisciplinary artist, takes hold of the room, getting the audience to hum along with her, improvising a recommendation letter supporting a creator of color, and singing like she’s leading a revival meeting. She seemed to be genuinely shocked when one person in the audience essentially professed their love for Oh; otherwise, she was firmly in command. The show would have benefited from more Oh and less Smith.

In As You Like It, Touchstone the fool tells Rosalind and Celia, “Ay, now am I in Arden; the more fool I; when I was at home, I was in a better place: but travellers must be content.” In the Flea’s Arden — But, Not Without You, not everyone can see the forest through the trees.

INTIMATE APPAREL

Esther Mills (Kearstin Piper Brown) checks out special fabric saved for her by Mr. Marks (Arnold Livingston Geis) in Intimate Apparel (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

INTIMATE APPAREL
Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 6, $92
212-362-7600
www.lct.org/shows

It takes a special kind of play to become a special kind of opera, but that is just what has happened with two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel, continuing at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse through March 6. The original play debuted at Baltimore’s Center Stage in 2003 and moved the next year to the Roundabout, winning numerous Drama Desk, Obie, Outer Critics Circle, and Lucille Lortel awards.

The new show is a profound transformation, part of the Met/LCT Opera/Musical Theater Commissioning project, the first-ever collaboration between the Metropolitan Opera and Lincoln Center Theater. It began at the Met in 2014 with Nico Muhly and Craig Lucas’s Two Boys and was followed last year by Matthew Aucoin and Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice. Intimate Apparel features a lovely score by Ricky Ian Gordon and a superb libretto by Nottage that deals with race, class, misogyny, and poverty.

The poignant drama takes place in Lower Manhattan in 1905, where Esther Mills (Kearstin Piper Brown), the daughter of slaves, toils as a seamstress, saving up to someday open her own salon; she has amassed a small fortune, $1700, over seventeen years. At thirty-five, she worries that she is a spinster who will never find true love. She makes clothes for a wealthy white woman, Mrs. Van Buren (Naomi Louisa O’Connell), and lives in a boardinghouse run by Mrs. Dickson (Adrienne Danrich), an older Black widow who feels successful whenever one of her residents leaves to get married.

She asks, “How many girls have left here? / I can’t count them anymore. / They come as mere babies, / And I teach ’em all I know, / So when they leave, / And leave they must, / They leave here as refined ladies.” At the wedding of one of her residents, Corinna Mae (Jasmine Muhammad), Mrs. Dickson encourages Esther to consider Mr. Charles (Errin Duane Brooks) as a potential match, but she’s having none of it. “He been comin’ to these parties for two years, / And if he ain’t met a woman, / It ain’t a woman he after, I fears,” Esther answers. “Pride’ll leave you lonely,” Mrs. Dickson reasons. But Esther doesn’t believe in romance. “Love!? / I hate that word! / Love doesn’t come to no featherless bird. / Love is a music that I never heard,” she opines.

Esther is shocked to learn that George Armstrong (Justin Austin), a Barbadian working on the Panama Canal, has heard about her from the deacon’s son at her church and wants to correspond with her. Esther can’t read or write, but she begins an epistolary relationship with George with the help of Mrs. Van Buren.

Esther occasionally goes to the fabric seller, Mr. Marks (Arnold Livingston Geis), an Orthodox Jew who saves special bolts of cloth for her. There is obvious electricity between them, but when Esther puts her hand on him affectionately, he pulls away. “The color won’t rub off on you!” she declares angrily. Mr. Marks explains that his religion forbids him from touching any woman who isn’t his wife.

When George finally arrives in New York, he and Esther wed, but married life is not a bed of roses for her, as George seems to prefer hanging out with Mayme (Krysty Swann) in a saloon and not working. He wants to buy a dozen draft horses from a guy in the bar, but he needs Esther’s cash to make the purchase. Mayme, who gets her sexy outfits from Esther, dreams of being a pianist performing at Carnegie Hall. “We all wishing on something,” she says. “I smash all social rules. / ’Cause no one does it for us.” It’s not long before Esther, who has never been one to smash social rules, finds herself reevaluating what, and who, she wants in life.

Beautifully directed by Tony winner Bartlett Sher (My Fair Lady, South Pacific), Intimate Apparel is an intimate sung-through chamber opera that feels right at home at the Newhouse. The music is performed by two pianists, associate conductor Nathaniel LaNasa and Brent Funderburk, facing each other on high platforms, with the words projected onto the walls (along with archival footage and photographs from the early 1900s). Gordon, whose previous opera adaptations include The Grapes of Wrath, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and the just-concluded Yiddish version of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, has created a moving score that floats through the theater.

Things get intimate at opera adaptation of Lynn Nottage play (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Michael Yeargan’s spare set is centered by a circular wooden floor that rotates, with standing doors, a sewing machine, beds, and other pieces of furniture whisked on and off between scenes, blending in with Dianne McIntyre’s choreography. Catherine Zuber’s period costumes range from ravishing to appropriately dour; Esther sews daring outfits for others but allows herself only boring frocks.

The narrative was inspired by Nottage’s great-grandmother, who was a seamstress, and was written shortly after the death of Nottage’s mother; several characters feel imbued with a haunting loneliness. It also is a sharp representation of the immigrant experience, as men and women with roots from Eastern Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa try to make lives of their own in difficult times, lacking the opportunities available to wealthier white families.

Piper Brown, who has appeared is such operas as Aida, La Traviata, and Carmen and such musicals as Ragtime and Caroline, or Change, has the acting chops to match her wonderful voice. Her expressive eyes and movement display how tired and beat down Esther is, wanting desperately to believe in herself without having to rely on anyone else, especially a man. (Chabrelle Williams performs the role at Wednesday and Saturday matinees.) The rest of the cast, which also includes Tesia Kwarteng, Anna Laurenzo, Barrington Lee, Indra Thomas, and Jorell Williams, is exemplary.

With this new version of Intimate Apparel, Nottage again proves that she is one of America’s most talented and important writers. She has explored the human condition, often through the lens of race, class, and socioeconomic injustice, in such stalwart works as Sweat, Ruined, Mlima’s Tale, and By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, compiling a kind of American quilt of powerful stories that has reached yet another level.

SANDBLASTED

Odessa (Marinda Anderson) and Angela (Brittany Bellizeare) try to keep things together in sandblasted (photo by Carol Rosegg)

SANDBLASTED
Vineyard Theatre
Gertrude and Irving Dimson Theatre
108 East 15th St. between Union Square East & Irving Pl.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 13, $26.25-$103.95
www.vineyardtheatre.org

Charly Evon Simpson’s engaging, if undercooked, sandblasted is no mere day at the beach or breath of fresh air in a freezing cold winter, with Covid still upon us and masks necessary at the theater. The hundred-minute play, which opens today at the Vineyard, takes place on a stage filled with more than seventeen tons of sand, alternately representing the beach or the desert; there are doors in the back and stage right, a window stage left, and a ceiling of fluffy white clouds and blue sky. Matt Saunders’s set offers the characters warm and sunny relaxation, where they can sit in a chair and have a cold drink, as well as a space for unsteady traction, an arid, treacherous landscape. In both locales, Black women struggle to keep themselves together, literally and figuratively.

Thirtysomethings Angela (Brittany Bellizeare), a bundle of fear and anxiety, and the much cooler and hipper Odessa (Marinda Anderson) meet at the beach; brushing off sand, Odessa sees her left arm fall off. She is more disappointed than horrified; it turns out that women, particularly as they age, start losing pieces of their body. They are soon joined by the older and wiser Adah (Rolonda Watts), who offers perspective.

“I thought it would take a while longer for the larger parts of us to . . . to fall,” Angela says almost matter-of-factly. “Longer?” Adah asks. Angela replies, “Yeah, a lot of breaths, months of stewing, soaking, simmering, months of incubation. I thought it would take a large number of sleepless nights for a part so large to . . .” Adah says, “Just like you to trust in something like time and sense.” Angela concludes, “I just trust that time will get us, that time will outlive us.”

Rolonda Watts excels as a celebrity wellness guru in Vineyard/WP world premiere (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Adah is a famous celebrity wellness guru who may or may not have Black lady magic, supplying answers to many of the questions Black women have. When Angela mentions how inconvenient so much of their lives are, Adah explains, “But isn’t it always inconvenient? Isn’t it always the wrong place, wrong time?”

Angela and Odessa, a sort of Alpha and Omega themselves, believe it will take more than sun, tape, glue, spinach, and exercise to hold them together. Thinking that it might be easier to just hide her head in the sand, Angela says, “Sometimes I want to walk around in like one of those bubbles, just be a bubble walker.” Odessa responds, “No life that way, just a bubble life. What’s the point in living?” The allusion to Covid-19, which inequitably affects communities of color, is not lost on the audience. (And there are a few more to come.)

Angela’s hunk of a brother, Jamal (Andy Lucien), accompanies her to an Adah seminar entitled “Girls, stop falling apart!” but Adah doesn’t show up. Angela and Odessa decide to find her, hoping she can provide a cure; they set off on a journey seeking hope, understanding, and resolution, but it’s not going to be easy.

A coproduction with WP Theater, sandblasted evokes Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days and Waiting for Godot and Edward Albee’s Seascape and The Sandbox as well as Chiori Miyagawa’s America Dreaming, the 1994-95 Vineyard play that also took place on sand and dealt with otherness. Simpson’s (Behind the Sheet, Jump) writing is often poetic and works best when the story has a more existential, nonspecific nature, making references to skin color, grief, isolation, and systemic misogyny instead of putting them front and center.

Angela (Brittany Bellizeare) and her brother, Jamal (Andy Lucien), attend a seminar in sandblasted (photo by Carol Rosegg)

There are many beautiful, penetrating lines: “I think getting older isn’t about losing the fears you had as a kid. I think it is about having new fears that overtake them,” Angela theorizes. “Some say they don’t want to learn any new names, meet any new people, because then it is just another person to miss, to worry about, to grieve,” Odessa asserts. “I don’t know which of the many possible fights we’re in the middle of. Is the fight we should be fighting to heal? And no one else seems to know either,” Angela explains. And Odessa admits, “Some nights I think I’m the epitome of Black girl magic, and other nights I think I’m just another version of a magical negro and I wonder what it would be like to just live between the two.”

Anderson and Bellizeare make a classic comic duo, albeit with a very serious edge, as the fun and fancy-free Odessa and the tightly wound Angela, respectively, two women who might not have become friends at another time or another place. Watts, the longtime New York City television journalist and talk show host, is extraordinary as Adah, displaying an infectious confidence that glitters at every turn; she adds sparkle every time she’s onstage. Lucien does what he can as Jamal, a character who quickly becomes superfluous; I’m not sure he was necessary at all, save for providing a forced link between Angela and Odessa.

In her NYC debut, director Summer L. Williams can’t quite steady herself in the sand. The jumps back and forth in time are confusing, and several subplots never come full circle, falling away like body parts that are never reattached. In addition, Simpson can’t quite figure out how to end the show, which feels about ten or fifteen minutes too long; several of the last scenes feel extraneous, as they turn from the existential aspects of the story to provide more specific pathways for the future.

At one point, Angela talks about fulgurites, fragile tubes of glass that are formed when lightning strikes sand; some believe they have magical qualities. “I spent all this time being careful, treated myself like a fucking fulgurite for god’s sake,” Angela says. “So I’d live long, so I’d succeed, so I’d . . . and now this.” The resolution of the fulgurite thread in the play is too firm, too solid; some things are better left unsaid, onstage and on sand.

ENGLISH

Sanaz Toossi’s English takes place in a TOEFL class in Iran (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

ENGLISH
Atlantic Theater Company
Linda Gross Theater
336 West 20th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 20, $76.50
866-811-4111
atlantictheater.org

Concepts of home and personal identity lie at the heart of Sanaz Toossi’s poignant and involving English, which opens tonight at the Atlantic’s Linda Gross Theater. A coproduction with Roundabout Underground, the play is set in a small classroom in Karaj, Iran, in 2008, where Marjan (Marjan Neshat) is teaching basic English to four students who are planning on taking the TOEFL, the Test of English as a Foreign Language, for very different reasons. Marjan insists that they speak only English in the class rather than Farsi, their native tongue.

Roya (Pooya Mohseni) wants to be able to speak with her new granddaughter, who lives in Canada with Roya’s son and his wife and is not being raised to speak Farsi. “I hope you not forget. Nate is not your name,” she tells her son, who used to be known as Nader.

Elham (Tala Ashe) has passed her MCATs but needs to learn English so she can study gastroenterology in Australia. “My accent is a war crime,” she angrily admits.

Omid (Hadi Tabbal) has an upcoming green card interview in Dubai, but his English is already excellent, nearly accentless. When asked why people learn language, he says, “To bring the inside to the outside.”

Goli (Ava Lalezarzadeh) is an eighteen-year-old girl who wants to speak like Shakira. “People like accent,” she says, not ashamed of who she is.

After a presentation by Goli doesn’t go particularly well, Marjan, a married woman who spent nine years in Manchester before moving back to Iran with her family, says, “Don’t be sorry! We were speaking English with each other. I think it’s one of the greatest things two people can do together.”

Four students and a teacher learn about life and language in English (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

They play word games, do show-and-tell, and discuss English vs. Farsi. “I want to speak English. Before I speak Farsi good, I know I want to speak English,” Goli says. “English does not want to be poetry like Farsi. It is like some rice. English is the rice. You take some rice and you make the rice whatever you want.”

Roya resents having to learn English and is furious that her son has turned away from his culture, projecting that rage onto her teacher. “You talk about Farsi like it’s a stench after a long day’s work. Tell me, Marjan, what is it about where we’re from that you find so repulsive?” she argues.

As Elham’s frustration with English builds — she repeatedly uses Farsi in class, accumulating negative points — she gets into disagreements with everyone else, speaking frankly, without apology. “Goli, people hear your accent and they go oh my god it is so funny you are so stupid. . . . Okay if I have accent, bad TOEFL score. Omid has accent, no green card. Roya’s accent? Disaster.” Some of them equate the attempted erasure of their Iranian accent when speaking English with the loss of who they are, as if they are surrendering their unique culture. “Don’t you think people can do us the courtesy of learning our names?” Elham says to Marjan, who went by “Mary” when she lived in England.

“English isn’t your enemy,” Marjan insists. “English is not to be conquered. Embrace it. You can be all the things you are in Farsi in English, too. I always liked myself better in English.” But Marjan won’t acknowledge to herself that that is exactly the problem. “I feel like I’m disappearing,” she says later to Omid.

Goli (Ava Lalezarzadeh), Elham (Tala Ashe), and Roya (Pooya Mohseni) think about their futures in Atlantic world premiere (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

English is beautifully written by Toossi and gracefully directed by Knud Adams (Paris, The Headlands), giving each character room to develop. Although they go back and forth between English and Farsi, the latter is never heard; whenever they speak English, the actors use Iranian accents, but when they talk in Farsi, they lose the accent, sounding like plain old longtime Americans, a device that serves as a metaphor for colonialism, nation-building, and ethnocentrism. It’s no coincidence that the song Goli plays for show-and-tell is Shakira’s “Whenever, Wherever,” in which the Colombian-born singer and dancer proclaims, “Lucky you were born that far away so we could both make fun of distance / Lucky that I love a foreign land for the lucky fact of your existence.”

Marsha Ginsberg’s revolving cube set is open on two sides, evoking the inside and the outside. Enver Chakartash’s costumes meld traditional Iranian clothing, like head scarves, with American accents. The cast is exceptional, quickly forming a cohesive unit; it probably wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to assume they have each had to deal with the issue of making sacrifices to learn a new language and culture in some way, as all of them, in addition to the bilingual Toossi, were either born in Iran or Lebanon or their parents were. English was actually Toossi’s NYU thesis, written in response to Donald Trump’s Muslim travel ban and anti-immigration policies.

About halfway through the play, Marjan tells the class, “If you are here to learn English, I am going to ask you to agree that here in this room we are not Iranian. We are not even on this continent. Today I will ask you to feel any pull you have to your Iranian-ness and let it go. Keep it outside the wall of this classroom. In this room, we are native speakers. We think in English. We laugh in English. Our inhales, our exhales — we fill our lungs in English. No more Farsi. Can we agree to that? Yes? Thank you.” Toossi understands the kind of sacrifices it takes to make a new life in a new country while also realizing that the play’s audience is likely to be predominantly white non-Farsi speakers.

English continues at the Atlantic through March 20; Toossi’s Wish You Were Here, about a group of women (including one played by Neshat) facing tough choices as the 1978 revolution approaches, begins previews April 13 at Playwrights Horizons.

THE DAUGHTER-IN-LAW

The strained marriage between Minnie Hetherington (Amy Blackman) and Luther Gascoyne (Tom Coiner) is at center of D. H. Lawrence tale (photo by Maria Baranova)

THE DAUGHTER-IN-LAW
New York City Center Stage II
131 West 55th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 20, $35 – $80
minttheater.org
www.nycitycenter.org

D. H. Lawrence was best known for such novels as Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, but he was also a poet, a painter, and a playwright. The Mint, which specializes in resurrecting long-forgotten, seldom-performed works, returns to the postlockdown stage with a revival of its 2003 adaptation of Lawrence’s 1913 drama, The Daughter-in-Law, which opened tonight at New York City Center Stage II, where it runs through March 20.

The two-act, two-and-a-half-hour show is part of the Nottingham-born Lawrence’s Eastwood Trilogy, which also includes 1909’s A Collier’s Friday Night and 1911’s The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd. Collier’s and The Daughter-in-Law were not performed in his lifetime; Lawrence died in France in 1930 at the age of forty-four.

Most of the play is a gossipy delight. It takes place during the Great Unrest, as a strike threatens to close down a coal mine in Eastwood (Lawrence’s hometown in Nottingham). Joe Gascoyne (Ciaran Bowling) has broken his arm at the mine fooling around — there’ll be no disability pay for him. He lives with his mother, the domineering Mrs. Gascoyne (Sandra Shipley), who is no fan of marriage, instead preferring to have her boys around her. “Marriage is like a mouse trap, for either man or woman — you’ve soon come ter th’ end o’ th’ cheese,” she tells Joe, who responds, “Well, ha’ef a loaf’s better’nor no bread.” To which his mother advises, “Why, wheer’s th’ loaf as tha’d like ter gnawg a’ thy life.”

Mrs. Gascoyne (Sandra Shipley) and Mrs. Purdy (Polly McKie) have some unpleasantries to discuss in The Daughter-in-Law (photo by Maria Baranova)

Prim and proper Mrs. Purdy (Polly McKie) stops by the Gascoynes, where she beats around the bush before announcing that Mrs. Gascoyne’s oldest son, Luther (Tom Coiner), has impregnated her daughter, Bertha. An engaging conversation ensues, with the upshot being that Mrs. Purdy will get a payoff to save everyone’s reputation and preserve Luther’s weeks-old marriage to Minnie Hetherington (Amy Blackman). Minnie has what is considered a small fortune, acquired from a deceased uncle, and the Gascoynes believe she will have no choice but to cough up the cash for them.

The brutish Luther, covered in dirt and grime from the mine, comes home to Minnie, who likes pretty things and wants everything in its place, from the table and chairs to the silverware and fancy dishes. She has settled for Luther because no one else asked for her hand; she tells her husband, “You’ll be a dayman at seven shillings a day till the end of your life — and you’ll be satisfied, so long as you can shilly-shally through. That’s what your mother did for you — mardin’ you up till you were all mard-soft.” Luther replies, “Tha’s got a lot ter say a’ of a suddin. Thee shut thy mouth.” Minnie: “You’ve been dragged round at your mother’s apron-strings, all the lot of you, till there isn’t half a man among you.” Luther: “Tha seems fond enough of our Joe.” Minnie: “He is th’ best in the bunch.” Luther: “Tha should ha’ married him then.” Clearly, their union is not all sunshine and roses.

Over the course of two weeks, the Gascoynes bicker among themselves as they assume that Minnie will just pay the money and all will be well, with Joe, Luther, and their mother refusing to take responsibility for any of their actions while Minnie recalculates her future. It all leads to a ridiculously overblown, unbelievable, sentimental finale that turns the tables on just about everything that led up to it.

Joe (Ciaran Bowling) explains his situation to this mother (Sandra Shipley) in Mint revival of Lawrence play (photo by Maria Baranova)

Directed again by Martin Platt (The Power of Darkness, A Bold Stroke for a Wife), the production is pristine, a staple of the Mint. Bill Clarke’s set changes neatly from Mrs. Gascoyne’s rickety kitchen and dining room to Minnie’s far more presentable home. Holly Poe Durbin’s period costumes set the mood, along with Jeff Nellis’s soft lighting and Lindsay Jones’s sharp sound design. The play, performed with one intermission, is told primarily in the Ilson dialect, featuring such words as “blackleg,” “butty,” “clunch,” “wringer,” “mard,” “morm,” and “wallit”; it’s worth checking out the glossary in the program in advance.

The Daughter-in-Law often crackles, with a fine cast led by Blackman portraying a kind of early working-class feminist. The story is not complicated, nor is it clichéd; Lawrence told his editor, “It is neither a comedy nor a tragedy — just ordinary.” While the play is not autobiographical, Lawrence’s father was a miner, and his mother died of cancer in 1910; in 1912, he eloped with a married woman who had three children. Thus, the relationships of a son with his mother and lover are an interesting side note while not being definitive. And then comes the ending, which will have you feeling icky as you leave the theater, covered in dirt and grime that you won’t be able to easily wash off.