this week in theater

A CASE FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

Ryan (Will Brill) and Keith (Kyle Beltran) find out they have more in common than they think in Signature world premiere (photo by Emilio Madrid)

A CASE FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Irene Diamond Stage
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday-Sunday through May 29, $35-$70
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

Samuel D. Hunter’s brilliantly human A Case for the Existence of God itself makes a strong case for the existence of God. In the first work of his three-play, five-year residency at the Signature, the award-winning Idaho native has written an almost brutally realistic but gentle story of a down-to-earth bromance between two thirtysomethings facing single fatherhood with excitement and apprehension.

The ninety-minute play takes place in a small cubicle open at an angle to the audience; above it hovers a rectangular industrial office light. The cubicle is surrounded by a vast emptiness, as if alone in the universe. The two actors remain seated in the same chairs for nearly the entire show; time and location shifts are indicated by the dialogue and subtle changes in lighting. (The spare set is by Arnulfo Maldonado, with lighting by Tyler Micoleau and sound by Christopher Darbassie.)

Ryan (Will Brill) has come to see Keith (Kyle Beltran), a mortgage broker he met at their children’s daycare; Ryan, who is white and straight, works at the local yogurt plant in Twin Falls, Idaho, and is going through a divorce that involves a custody battle over his fifteen-month-old daughter, Krista. Keith is fostering to adopt Willa, who is the same age as Krista. Ryan is trying to get a loan to purchase a twelve-acre plot that used to belong to his family; he is desperate to recover a part of the past to ensure a better future for him and his daughter. Meanwhile, Keith, who is Black and gay and without many prospects for a partner, is frustrated by problems with the adoption process and Willa’s birth family.

The two men form a quick bond because neither of their lives is going as they’d planned or expected. “I hope this isn’t weird of me to say but — I think we share a specific kind of — sadness. You and me,” Ryan says to Keith in a deeply touching moment. Keith doesn’t respond at first but a few days later says, “I think you’re right. I think we share something, too.”

Samuel D. Hunter’s new play explores a growing friendship between two men trying to be single fathers (photo by Emilio Madrid)

As Keith works hard to find a way to get Ryan, who has no collateral, the loan, they become friends, hanging out together, watching movies, comparing their kids’ sleep habits, drinking whiskey, discussing mental illness and bullying, and growing more and more honest with each other. Keith explains his interest in early music, while Ryan doesn’t hesitate to admit that he doesn’t know what “harrowing” and “tacitly” mean but loves when his daughter says “popsicle.”

Embarrassed by his financial situation, Ryan tells Keith, “I just think there’s like a really specific kind of stress that I have about money? I mean I know everyone stresses out about money, but I’m not talking about that. It’s like . . . I guess I feel like having money is the only real permission I have to be alive? Like without it, I don’t have permission to exist.”

Meanwhile, Keith shares his innermost fears with Ryan. “I’m like the most anxious dad on the planet. I feel the phone in my pocket vibrate and I immediately think someone is calling me to tell me that my daughter is dead,” the broker says. Later he confesses, “I’m so scared, Ryan. I’m so fucking scared.” The anxiety both men experience is palpable and wholly relatable in the general sense of what we all have to deal with on a daily basis; it’s just unusual to see such remarks occur between two guys, especially a pair who are probably not used to divulging their feelings with anyone. “I feel like my life is so centered on being a dad right now, it’s actually just nice to have a conversation with another adult,” Ryan says. It’s actually just nice to hear these conversations as well.

Keith and Ryan are searching for what we all want, something that none of us ultimately can have: permanence. As we watch them struggle to get their lives in order, we can’t help but think about the impermanence in our own lives as well.

The forty-year-old Hunter’s previous plays all feature ordinary people up against ordinary situations, seeking companionship and connection, often with the past: The Whale is about a six-hundred-pound recluse; Greater Clements details an effort to save a former mining town from closing down; The Few focuses on a man and his former lover deciding if they should save the paper they run for lonely interstate truckers; A Bright New Boise warns against the dangers of blind faith; and Lewiston/Clarkston is a pair of one-acts in which the audience eats dinner together in between shows.

Samuel D. Hunter’s A Case for the Existence of God takes place in a small cubicle (photo by Emilio Madrid)

When Keith explains that harmony did not always exist in the Western musical tradition, Ryan is flummoxed. “That’s so sad,” he says. “I guess I feel guilty. I mean I’m trying to picture living in a world that only has music without harmony, I can’t even —. And I’m not like even a music guy. Jesus.” Keith asks, “But why does that make you feel guilty?” Ryan answers, “Because like — I’ve just been taking it for granted my entire life.” For him “harmony” means companionship and connection, an alternative to being alone.

Sensitively directed by Tony and Obie winner David Cromer (The Band’s Visit, A Prayer for the French Republic, The Sound Inside) with a sincere affection for both characters, A Case for the Existence of God beautifully explores the pain and pleasure of being a single father, balancing the constant angst and worry with the joy and love. In some ways it is reminiscent of Robert Benton’s 1979 Oscar winner Kramer vs. Kramer, one of the first major films to intelligently and fairly depict a father (Dustin Hoffman) fighting for custody of his son while going through a bitter divorce.

But the play, which Hunter wrote shortly after he and his husband adopted a child and sought to buy a two-bedroom apartment in a New York City co-op, is seen only through the eyes of the two men, flawed, complex human beings played with tenderness and understanding by Beltran (Blue Ridge, The Amateurs) and Brill (Oklahoma!, Tribes), who are used to being together in tight quarters; they were roommates while studying drama at Carnegie Mellon. Just as they don’t judge each other — well, they do, but then they don’t — we don’t judge them. There’s no toxic masculinity in the air, no homophobia or racism, no frat jokes, just an ever-deepening platonic friendship between a gay Black man and a straight white man.

“This feels like a chance to — hit the reset button,” Ryan says about buying the property. It’s a button we all reach for at one time or another in our lives. And if you’re searching for proof of the existence of a higher power, some kind of supreme being, Hunter’s play is a prime piece of evidence that there must be something bigger than us out there.

MACBETH

Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga star as a devious husband and wife in Sam Gold’s unusual take on the Scottish play at the Longacre (photo by Joan Marcus)

MACBETH
Longacre Theatre
220 West 48th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 10, $35-$425
macbethbroadway.com

As you enter the Longacre Theatre to see the latest conjuring of Macbeth, the thane’s first appearance on the Great White Way since Terry Hands’s 2000 version with Kelsey Grammer lasted just thirteen performances, the sparse stage is a scene of activity. On one side, three people are cooking soup while listening to a podcast. Various others wander about or are busy in the wings. Front and center, the ghost light glows — a superstition that is believed to keep at bay supernatural beings who haunt theaters and can curse shows, although it usually is turned on only after everyone has left and the venue is empty. During the pandemic lockdown, many theaters kept their ghost lights on in the hope of eventually returning. Thus, once inside the Longacre, you feel as if you’ve walked into some kind of rehearsal that is getting ready to close up for the night.

More than any other of his major works, Shakespeare’s 1606 tragedy invites experimentation of a high order. In the past fifteen years, I’ve seen no fewer than ten adaptations of the Scottish play, including an all-women version that took place at a contemporary girls school, a re-creation of Orson Welles’s radio production, a presentation that required the audience to make its way through a dark heath to get to their seats, one set during the cold war and prominently featuring a bevy of video projections, another occurring inside the head of an institutionalized man, and a mashup with a Japanese manga that moved the action to a blue boxing ring.

Like King Lear, it also attracts big-name star power; among those who have portrayed the thane of Cawdor in New York since 2006 are Sir Patrick Stewart, Ethan Hawke, Sir Kenneth Branagh, Alan Cumming, Liev Schreiber, and Corey Stoll. Now comes James Bond himself, Daniel Craig, in a production helmed by Tony and Obie winner Sam Gold, who is responsible for the much-derided 2019 Broadway revival of Lear with Glenda Jackson in the title role.

Macbeth (Daniel Craig) speaks with a pair of murderers (Danny Wolohan and Michael Patrick Thornton) in Shakespeare adaptation (photo by Joan Marcus)

While the trio, who turn out to be the three witches (portrayed alternately by Phillip James Brannon, Bobbi MacKenzie, Maria Dizzia, Che Ayende, Eboni Flowers, and Peter Smith), continue stirring the pot, Michael Patrick Thornton, who plays the nobleman Lennox, wheels onto the stage and provides a curtain speech about James I’s obsession with witches in the seventeenth century while also asking the audience to, all at once, shout out the name of the show, which is supposed to bring bad luck when spoken inside a theater. Very few people joined in.

Gold has pared down the production to the point where no single actor is the star; there’s an equality among the diverse cast that does not force us to swoon at either Craig or Oscar, Emmy, and Olivier nominee Ruth Negga as Lady Macbeth and instead allows the audience to appreciate the other participants. The text is delivered without many flourishes, as famous lines come and go at a regular pace, with some favorites getting cut; for example, the witches never say, “Double, double toil and trouble.” The actors are dressed in Suttirat Larlarb’s contemporary costumes; Macbeth’s succession from military jacket to paisley bathrobe to fluffy white fur coat is a hoot.

Christine Jones’s set is the antithesis of royalty; the “thrones” are two old, ratty chairs, and the banquet table lacks fancy dinnerware. The crown worn by King Duncan (Paul Lazar) is just plain silly, like a high school prop, but even funnier is when Lazar, following the monarch’s murder, removes his fat suit in front of us and proceeds to play other characters. There is much doubling and tripling of actors, so it’s not always clear who’s who. Amber Gray excels as Banquo and her ghost but is seen later as a gentlewoman. Danny Wolohan is Seyton, a lord, a murderer, and a bloody captain who has lost part of one leg. Emeka Guindo is both Fleance and young Siward. Downtown legend Lazar also shows up as old Siward and the porter, who, in front of the curtain, discusses with Macduff (Grantham Coleman, though I saw understudy Ayende) and Lennox how drink affects sexual prowess. To further the comparison, Macbeth later pops open a can of light beer.

Jeremy Chernick’s special effects feature lots of blood, some of which is added to the simmering soup (along with innards). As Macbeth warns, “Blood will have blood.”

Three witches (Phillip James Brannon, Bobbi MacKenzie, Maria Dizzia) stir up a cauldron of trouble in Macbeth (photo by Joan Marcus)

So what’s it all about? Though uneven, Gold’s adaptation subverts our expectations about stardom, Broadway, and Shakespeare. It’s hard to believe that this is the same story told with such fierce elegance by Joel Coen in his 2021 Oscar-nominated film, The Tragedy of Macbeth, with a dominating Denzel Washington as Macbeth and a haunting Frances McDormand as his devious partner. In fact, under Gold’s supervision, the real standout is Thornton, who relates to the audience with a sweet warmth and playful sense of humor. However, as Macbeth also says, “And nothing is, but what is not.”

Gold (Fun Home; A Doll’s House, Part 2) previously directed Craig (Betrayal, A Steady Rain) as Iago in an intimate and compelling Othello at New York Theatre Workshop and Oscar Isaac in Hamlet at the Public; Negga has played Ophelia at London’s National Theatre and Hamlet at St. Ann’s Warehouse. The ads for Macbeth might push the star draw of this new production, but that is not what Gold is focusing on.

He may not be making any grand statements about lust, greed, and power, but he is investigating the common foibles of humanity, the desires we all have and our considerations of how far we will go to achieve them. Is he completely successful? No, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t given us an intriguing, provocative, unconventional, absurdly comic, and, yes, highly entertaining production of one of the greatest tragedies ever written.

As Lady Macbeth advises, “What’s done, cannot be undone.”

CHASING ANDY WARHOL

Audience members chase Andy Warhol through the East Village in immersive production (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

CHASING ANDY WARHOL
Astor Plaza, Broadway at East Eighth St.
Thursday, Friday, and Sunday through June 12, $80
online slide show
www.chasingandywarhol.com
www.batedbreaththeatre.org

The world has spent more than half a century chasing Andy Warhol. Our obsession with Drella, as he was known to his close friends — a combination of Dracula and Cinderella — developed quickly from his carefully constructed public image, his genre-busting films and Pop art, his (and our) fascination with celebrity, and the beautiful and unusual people he surrounded himself with, beginning with his emergence as an art superstar and fashion icon in the 1960s and continuing well past his death in 1987 at the age of fifty-eight.

In the last few years alone, works by or about Warhol, born Andrew Warhola Jr. in Pittsburgh, have been part of such exhibitions and films as “Andy Warhol: Photo Factory” at Fotografiska, the Todd Haynes documentary The Velvet Underground, “Andy Warhol: Revelation” at the Brooklyn Museum, “Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure,”“Gillian Wearing: Wearing Masks at the Guggenheim,” and “Alice Neel: People Come First” at the Met in addition to the brand-new Netflix series The Andy Warhol Diaries.

Now comes Chasing Andy Warhol, a guerrilla-theater-like immersive presentation by the Manhattan-based Bated Breath company in which an audience of no more than sixteen at a time follows Andy Warhol through the streets of the East Village, not far from many of his old haunts. The show begins in Astor Plaza, where you are given an old red plastic View Master to look at some photo collages to get you in the mood. Then an excited young “tour guide” (Jmonet Hill, Annika Rudolph, or Fé Torres; I saw Rudolph, who was delightfully energetic), carrying a small suitcase and a boombox (through which she blasts the soundtrack) and identifying herself as the world’s biggest Andy fan, is surprised by a pair of Warhols in blue dresses and heels — one of whom pops a small balloon that has the word “art” on it. They run off, and she sets out to find him.

As she leads us down Lafayette and Bowery to Great Jones and Bleecker, there are wigged Warhols in blue, black, and white everywhere (Kat Berton, Grayson Bradshaw, Alysa Finnegan, Teal French-Levine, Youran Lee, Marisa Melito, Luca Villa), but she is after the “real” one in red (Jake Malavsky, Brandon P. Raines, or Kyle Starling). The multiple Andys evoke Warhol’s silkscreen style of printing multiple images of Marilyn Monroe, Mickey Mouse, flowers, Elvis Presley, and other subjects in different colors.

Along the way, as the tour guide shares snippets about Warhol’s life and art, we encounter a puppet of child Andy (operated by Taylor McKenzie or Kayla Prestel) watching Ginger Rogers (Finnegan) posing in an empty white frame; Warhol and the puppet looking into a mirror that describes one of his medical disorders, Saint Vitus’ dance, which affected his movement; Andy engaging in a flirtatious dance with a hot basketball player (Mitchell Ashe) involving a wheeled fashion rack; a movie star (Katherine Winter) posing for paparazzi in front of a Chase bank (Chase — get it?); a dance in an alcove of stone chess tables; and fated meetups with Valerie Solanas (Alessandra Ruiz, who also plays Warhol’s mother, Julia) — just wait till you see what she uses for a gun — and Edie Sedgwick (Antonia Santangelo) in a glittering short dress.

Andy is never without his camera, and the audience is encouraged to take photos and video, but don’t get too caught up in documenting it or you’ll miss lots of cute small touches and clever references. A significant part of the fun is also watching people on the street passing by, wondering what’s going on. Of course, they immediately know it’s Warhol — has there ever been a more recognizable figure in New York City? — and many of them stop and take pictures, big smiles on their faces. But as one of the lucky sixteen audience members, wearing a clearly visible yellow Andy sticker, you can’t help but feel special, like you’re part of Warhol’s inner Factory circle. And the cast, which performs the seventy-five-minute show in forty-five-minute overlapping intervals, deserves extra kudos for strutting their stuff on the sidewalks of New York, particularly during these fraught times, where anything can happen at any time.

Chasing Andy Warhol is created and directed by Bated Breath artistic director Mara Lieberman, with fanciful choreography by Rachel Leigh Dolan, jubilant costumes by Christopher F. Metzger, sets by Christian Fleming, Meg McGuigan, and Jerry Schiffer, lighting by Joyce Liao, and sound and projections by Mark Van Hare. I have to admit that I was disappointed in two of the company’s recent indoor productions, Unmaking Toulouse-Lautrec and Beneath the Gavel, but now I’m kicking myself for having missed its immersive, outdoor, on-the-move Voyeur: The Windows of Toulouse-Lautrec, which they staged during the pandemic.

Chasing Andy Warhol concludes in an empty bar, where Warhol’s legacy as the original social media superstar is briefly explored. Could there ever have been a Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or TikTok without Warhol’s obsession with public image and infectious celebration of celebrity and oneself? And, in turn, our obsession with Warhol, who managed his public persona like no one else?

“I am a deeply superficial person,” Warhol said. He also pointed out, “It’s not what you are that counts; it’s what they think you are.” In Chasing Andy Warhol, Lieberman and her talented team delve into the complex enigmatic character in unique, spirited ways, without avoiding his blemishes, as they pursue the mystery that was, and ever will be, Andy Warhol.

FIDDLER’S JOURNEY TO THE BIG SCREEN

Star Chaim Topol and director-producer Norman Jewison kid around on the set of Fiddler on the Roof

FIDDLER’S JOURNEY TO THE BIG SCREEN (Daniel Raim, 2022)
Angelika Film Center
18 West Houston St.
Opens Friday, April 29
www.angelikafilmcenter.com
zeitgeistfilms.com

Daniel Raim takes viewers behind the scenes of the making of one of the most beloved musicals of all time in Fiddler’s Journey to the Big Screen, opening April 29 at the Angelika. Raim follows the development of the 1964 Broadway smash Fiddler on the Roof, which ran for 3,242 performances and won nine of the ten Tonys it was nominated for, into the classic 1971 film that was up for eight Oscars and won three.

The documentary is anchored by a series of talks with Fiddler’s director and producer, Canadian filmmaker Norman Jewison, who had previously made The Cincinnati Kid, In the Heat of the Night, and The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming and would go on to direct and produce Jesus Christ Superstar, A Soldier’s Story, and Mooonstruck. One of the first things we learn about Jewison is that he isn’t Jewish.

Recalling the initial meeting he had with United Artists executives, Jewison recalls, “[Studio head] Arthur Krim looked at me and he says, ‘What would you say if we were to say we want you to produce and direct Fiddler on the Roof?’ And my heart came up into my mouth and I thought, Oh my G-d. And I looked over, waited, and they waited, and they all kind of leaned forward. They thought, What is he waiting for? And then I said, ‘What would you say if I told you I’m a goy?’” He got the job because, as Krim explained, “We want a film for everybody.”

Documentary goes behind the scenes of the making of Fiddler on the Roof

Raim incorporates old and/or new interviews with vibrant lyricist Sheldon Harnick, who turns ninety-eight on April 30 (the score was composed by Jerry Bock, who passed away in 2010); musical director and conductor John Williams, who is featured extensively; production designer Robert F. Boyle, who was Raim’s professor at AFI; cinematographer Oswald Morris; American film critic Kenneth Turan; and Israeli star Chaim Topol, who nabbed the role of Tevye from Zero Mostel, who played the anguished, deeply religious father on Broadway. The film is worth seeing just for the lovely interviews with the three actresses who portrayed the three oldest daughters, none of whom marry the men their parents prefer: Rosalind Harris (Tzeitel), Michele Marsh (Hodel), and Neva Small (Chava). “What a gift I was given,” Marsh, nearly in tears, remembers.

Discussing his approach to the cross-cultural nature of the story, which was based on the 1894 Yiddish tales of Tevye the dairyman by Sholem Aleichem, Jewison points out, “Themes of family is universal; everybody has a family — good or bad, right or wrong, we all have a family, and we all have our little problems. But we all end up sitting around the table. And I thought, this is so common, this is something people can understand. They can understand a family. They can understand Golde. They can understand Tevye; they can understand his problems with life and his relationship to G-d. I think all of these things, all put together, make the story of Fiddler on the Roof so compelling.”

More than a dozen years in the making, Fiddler’s Journey can be a bit scattershot and is supplemented with occasional narration by Jeff Goldblum that feels like filler, consisting primarily of excerpts from Jewison’s This Terrible Business Has Been Good to Me, Alisa Solomon’s Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof, and Morris’s Huston, We Have a Problem: A Kaleidoscope of Filmmaking Memories. Unfortuntely, these distract from the main narrative, which is packed with fabulous details about everything from the construction of the synagogue, Frank Sinatra’s desire to play Tevye, and the stocking Boyle placed over the lens of the camera to the influence of Marc Chagall’s paintings, Harris understudying Bette Midler onstage, and the involvement of Isaac Stern.

The wealth of material includes archival stills and film footage, Mentor Huebner’s storyboards, and photos by Roman Vishniac that inspired the look of the movie, which was shot in Lekenik in what was then Yugoslavia. There are also in-depth looks at such treasured songs as “Matchmaker, Matchmaker,” “If I Were a Rich Man,” “Sunrise, Sunset,” and “Do You Love Me?”

The Fiddler on the Roof movie might be fifty years old now, but its impact is as powerful and, sadly, as relevant as ever. “One of the things that Fiddler is about: Nothing is permanent,” Turan says. Long before the Russian invasion of Ukraine — Aleichem was born and raised in Kyiv — the show (most recently revived in Yiddish by the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene at the Museum of Jewish Heritage) and the film captured the pain of refugees forced to leave their home. Raim’s (Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story, The Man on Lincoln’s Nose about Boyle) documentary was completed prior to the invasion, but it’s impossible to watch it without thinking about all the Anatevkas we see on the news every day, in Ukraine and around the world.

(Raim will be at the Angelika on April 29 and 30 for Q&As following the 7:25 screenings, joined by Small and Harris.)

BIRTHDAY CANDLES

Ernestine (Debra Messing) lives a relatively simple life in Noah Haidle’s Birthday Candles (photo by Joan Marcus)

BIRTHDAY CANDLES
American Airlines Theatre
227 West 42nd St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through May 29, $39-$250
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org

“Have I wasted my life?” Ernestine (Debra Messing) asks her mother, Alice (Susannah Flood), at the beginning of Noah Haidle’s Birthday Candles, continuing through May 29 at the Roundabout’s American Airlines Theatre.

Haidle’s Broadway debut is a touching and bittersweet, if at times Hallmark-y, look at ninety years in the life of an average American woman in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The play is built around her annual preparation of her birthday cake, a recipe handed down from mother to daughter in their family. Each scene takes place in the same kitchen, which never changes. Ernestine wears essentially the same costume (by Toni-Leslie James) in every scene as she ages, the time shifts indicated only by a sharp chime that arrives in the middle of the action and contextual clues given by the dialogue and the outfits of the other characters, which range from her boyfriend and future husband, Matt (Tony nominee John Earl Jelks), to her numbers-obsessed neighbor, Kenneth (Enrico Colantoni), who has a serious crush on her, to a parade of children, their spouses, their children, etc. (Jelks, Crystal Finn, Susannah Flood, and Christopher Livingston play multiple roles, their character not always immediately apparent as the next generation arrives. I saw understudy Brandon J. Pierce stepping in for Livingston.)

Ernestine serves as a witness to birth and death, illness and infidelity, success and failure, devoid of any references to the outside world. Whereas Jack Crabb, portrayed by Dustin Hoffman in Arthur Penn’s 1970 epic revisionist Western Little Big Man, spends his 121-year life on the road, meeting famous people (General Custer, Wild Bill Hickok), encountering a diverse series of events (battles with Native Americans, saloon shootouts, getting married and operating a small store), and watching everything change around him, Ernestine lives in a self-contained bubble, with no inkling of what is happening in society at large; there are no references to politics, sports, entertainment, anything that can put us in a specific time and place, only what is occurring within the family at any given moment, and always on her birthday. Another signifier is Ernestine’s annual measurements penciled on a doorframe; she grows taller until she begins shrinking as an old woman. Birthday Candles also recalls Thornton Wilder’s 1931 The Long Christmas Dinner, a one-act play that covers ninety years of the Bayard clan without ever leaving the dining room.

The show opens as Ernestine is turning seventeen, filled with the excitement of all that life offers. “I am a rebel against the universe. I will wage war with the everyday. I am going to surprise God!” she announces to her mother, who is more concerned with teaching her daughter the basic but cherished recipe for the cake.

Ninety years pass by in ninety minutes in Birthday Candles (photo by Joan Marcus)

“Eggs, butter, sugar, salt. The humblest ingredients,” Alice tells Ernestine. “But when you turn back and look far enough, you see atoms left over from creation,” implying that the history of the family — perhaps of humanity itself — is embodied in the cake.

Ernestine responds, “Stardust. The machinery of the cosmos is all here, I get it. Will you help me with my audition?”

Ernestine is practicing for the lead in her high school’s gender-switching production of Queen Lear, signaling that Birthday Candles is going to be a matriarchal tale about mothers and children; the men play second fiddle. “Madam, do you know me?” Alice reads as Cordelia. Ernestine, as the queen, answers, “You are a spirit, I know. When did you die?” In King Lear, the elderly monarch starts losing his mind as he deals with his three daughters, the calculating Regan and Goneril and the youngest, Cordelia, the only one who truly loves him. By having Alice reading the part of Cordelia and Ernestine portraying Lear, Haidle is alerting us to the casting choices and plot that follow.

As time marches on, new characters enter and old characters depart, the future replacing the past. Jelks portrays Ernestine’s husband, Matt, and their son, Billy; Finn is Billy’s wife, Joan, and their daughter, Alex; and Flood is Ernestine’s mother, Ernestine’s daughter, Madeline, and Alex’s daughter, Ernie. Finn and Livingston also appear as a surprise couple. People discuss their jobs, their relationships, and their personal identities in a vacuum. At one point, Madeline tells her parents and brother, “I don’t have a definition anymore. There aren’t any. In me. Or in the world.”

The actors make only small adjustments as their characters age, except for Messing once she passes her real-life age of fifty-three. Her slow decline as she survives so many of the others is heartbreaking, but she’s not about to stop making that cake on her birthday, no matter how old she is or who is around to enjoy it with her.

Ernestine’s (Debra Messing) life flashes before our eyes in Noah Haidle’s Broadway debut (photo by Joan Marcus)

One who is always there with her is her pet goldfish, given to her by Kenneth when they were seventeen and named Atman, the Sanskrit word for an individual’s essence, or soul. Kenneth explains, “The Katha Upanishad is the first to use the concept of Atman as a beginning argument of achieving liberation from human suffering. I quote, and please forgive my basic translation. ‘Like fire spreads itself throughout the world and takes the shape of that which it burns, the internal Atman of all living beings, while remaining one fire, takes the form of what He enters and is at the same time outside all forms.’” He points out that goldfish have only three-second memories and “then the world begins anew.” That’s one way to forget the pain, although the pleasurable moments vanish as well; Ernestine’s life is filled with plenty of both.

Haidle (Vigils, Smokefall) has created an emotional, gripping tale that is haunted by the fear of death as it explores various concepts of love, between married couples, parents and children, siblings, owners and pets, and a devoted neighbor. Director Vivienne Benesch, who helmed the play’s world premiere at the Detroit Public in 2017, manages the time shifts with aplomb as characters come and go through several open doorways on Christine Jones’s welcoming kitchen set, over which hangs dozens of household objects — remnants of a long life — in addition to the phases of the moon, a reminder of time itself.

Emmy winner Messing (Will & Grace,Outside Mullingar) is enthralling as Ernestine, who could be any of us. The different paths her life takes, each twist and turn, lead to familiar small dramas that are fully relatable; as she ages, it is hard not to consider what your own future holds. I am not a crier, but I have to admit that I was wiping away tears in the final scenes, and I was not the only one.

Colantoni (The Distance from Here, Fear) is utterly charming in his Broadway debut as Kenneth, an oddball who spends more than half a century pining for Ernestine, a regular reminder of the things in life we want that are so close but can so often be just out of reach. The rest of the cast is excellent as well, with a memorable comic turn by Finn as Joan, who has no filter and talks to herself out loud.

At a 1974 press conference, Muhammad Ali said, “If a man looks at the world when he is fifty the same way he looked at it when he was twenty and it hasn’t changed, then he has wasted thirty years of his life.” Did Ernestine waste her life? It’s a question we all ask ourselves as our birthdays come and go.

TWO BY SYNGE: IN THE SHADOW OF THE GLEN / THE TINKER’S WEDDING

The Irish Rep’s Two by Synge features several musical interludes (photo by Carol Rosegg)

TWO BY SYNGE: IN THE SHADOW OF THE GLEN / THE TINKER’S WEDDING
Irish Repertory Theatre, W. Scott McLucas Studio Theatre
132 West 22nd St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Wednesday – Sunday through May 22, $50
212-727-2737
irishrep.org

I am here to sing — pun intended — the praises of the great John Keating, currently starring in the theatrical twinbill Two by Synge: In the Shadow of the Glen & The Tinker’s Wedding at the Irish Rep. It’s a rave long in coming. If you don’t know the name, you must not have visited the Irish Rep much in the last quarter century, during which time the Tipperary native has appeared in more than a dozen productions (as well as numerous Shakespeare adaptations at TFANA).

Keating, a wiry fellow who stands six-foot-three with wildly curly hair and an immediately recognizable face, portrayed the fearful, deeply religious Shawn Keogh in John Millington Synge’s Playboy of the Western World at the Irish Rep in 2002; he is not the same John Keating who illustrated a 1927 edition of the work.

Directed by Irish Rep founding artistic director Charlotte Moore, Two by Synge consists of a pair of early short works about Irish peasantry, which the Dublin-born Synge based on stories he heard and saw, then wrote about at the urging of his friend and colleague W. B. Yeats. They take place in the company’s downstairs W. Scott McLucas Studio Theatre, a tiny, intimate black box where you can practically reach out and touch the actors — while getting the sensational opportunity to revel in Keating’s extraordinary talent.

It begins with The Tinker’s Wedding, Synge’s bawdy tale of a poor couple, Sarah Casey (Jo Kinsella), the onetime Beauty of Ballinacree, and Michael Byrne (Keating), a tinker, who want to get married. Their relationship is more out of necessity than true love.

A couple of peasants want the local priest to marry them in The Tinker’s Wedding (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Sarah harasses Michael, arguing, “It’ll be small joy for yourself if you aren’t ready with my wedding ring. Is it near done this time, or what way is it at all?” He replies, “A poor way only, Sarah Casey, for it’s the divil’s job making a ring, and you’ll be having my hands destroyed in a short while the way I’ll not be able to make a tin can at all maybe at the dawn of day.” Sarah says, “If it’s the divil’s job, let you mind it, and leave your speeches that would choke a fool.” Michael retorts, “And it’s you’ll go talking of fools, Sarah Casey, when no man did ever hear a lying story even of your like unto this mortal day. You to be going beside me a great while, and rearing a lot of them, and then to be setting off with your talk of getting married, and your driving me to it, and I not asking it at all.”

Sarah tries to force the local priest (Sean Gormley) to perform the ceremony, but he is not about to do so without getting some form of payment, as Sarah and Michael are not church regulars and she does not live the life of a model Christian. “A holy pair, surely! Let you get out of my way,” the harried priest declares, attempting to leave them, but Sarah is adamant. Soon arriving is Michael’s mother, Mary (Terry Donnelly), a well-known drunk who has a way of ruining everything. She tells the priest, “Isn’t it a grand thing to see you sitting down, with no pride in you, and drinking a sup with the like of us, and we the poorest, wretched, starving creatures you’d see any place on the earth?” When the priest threatens again to not marry the couple, Sarah and Michael come up with a bizarre plan to ensure their union.

The Tinker’s Wedding — which Synge never got to see performed, as he died of Hodgkin’s lymphoma at the age of thirty-seven, more than seven months before its 1909 debut — is a bit too jumbled at first but eventually finds its legs. Daniel Geggatt’s set features stone walls, a fireplace, a small gate, and the facade of a house that resembles a huge Native American drum. Keating is a joy to watch, whether he is front and center or drifting off into the background, tinkering with the ring or a tin can. In full character, he follows the action with intricate gestures, from smiles and nods of agreement to frowns and head shakes. His eyes gape open in wonder and shudder in fear. While that might be what good acting is about, he takes it to another level, in the simplest moments as well as the turning points.

Keating (The Naturalists, The Winter’s Tale) is even better in the second play, the significantly superior In the Shadow of the Glen, the first of Synge’s works to be staged (in 1903). Keating plays a tramp in a shoddy coat (courtesy of costume designer David Toser) who has wandered in from a storm to seek temporary shelter in the home of Nora Burke (Kinsella) and her husband, Dan (Gormley), who is lying lifeless in the bed. (The set is essentially the same save for the “drum,” which has been rotated to reveal the bedroom.) She seems relatively nonplussed by the corpse, and the tramp is taken aback.

“It’s a queer look is on him for a man that’s dead,” the tramp points out. Nora responds, “He was always queer, stranger, and I suppose them that’s queer and they living men will be queer bodies after.” The tramp adds, “Isn’t it a great wonder you’re letting him lie there, and he is not tidied, or laid out itself?” She answers, “I was afeard, stranger, for he put a black curse on me this morning if I’d touch his body the time he’d die sudden, or let any one touch it except his sister only, and it’s ten miles away she lives in the big glen over the hill.” Tramp: “It’s a queer story he wouldn’t let his own wife touch him, and he dying quiet in his bed.” Nora: “I’m thinking many would be afeard, but I never knew what way I’d be afeard of beggar or bishop or any man of you at all. It’s other things than the like of you, stranger, would make a person afeard.”

The tropes of a classic ghost story turn on a fabulous plot twist and the arrival of the Burkes’ neighbor, young farmer Micheal Dara (Ciaran Bowling) — the character Keating played in his first professional performance in 1994 — in whom Nora sees a rescuer from her sudden predicament. “What way would I live and I an old woman if I didn’t marry a man with a bit of a farm, and cows on it, and sheep on the back hills?” she asks.

A tramp finds himself caught between a young farmer (Ciaran Bowling) and a woman (Jo Kinsella) mourning her husband in J. M. Synge’s In the Shadow of the Glen (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Keating (Autumn Royal, The O’Casey Cycle) is again magnificent in Glen, his body movements and shifting of his eyes utterly hypnotizing. He is an actor’s actor, making everyone around him better; watching him watching the other characters also offers another way into the play for the audience, no matter how successful it already is, and In the Shadow of the Glen is just that, a short but satisfying foray into the fear of death that hovers over Irish stories. Moore (The Streets of New York, The Playboy of the Western World) and lighting designer Michael O’Connor makes sure to never have Keating fade too far into the background as members of the rest of the fine cast take center stage.

The two shows, which total seventy-five minutes, also include six songs, two by Synge, three traditionals, and one original by Gormley, “A Smile upon My Face,” which comes between the two comedies. Yes, despite such lines as “It’s a cruel and a wicked thing to be bred poor,” said by Sarah Casey, Two by Synge is very funny.

In his preface to The Tinker’s Wedding, the playwright explained, “The drama is made serious — in the French sense of the word — not by the degree in which it is taken up with problems that are serious in themselves, but by the degree in which it gives the nourishment, not very easy to define, on which our imaginations live. We should not go to the theatre as we go to a chemist’s, or a dram-shop, but as we go to a dinner, where the food we need is taken with pleasure and excitement. . . . Of the things which nourish the imagination humour is one of the most needful, and it is dangerous to limit or destroy it. Baudelaire calls laughter the greatest sign of the Satanic element in man; and where a country loses its humor, as some towns in Ireland are doing, there will be morbidity of mind, as Baudelaire’s mind was morbid. In the greater part of Ireland, however, the whole people, from the tinkers to the clergy, have still a life, and view of life, that are rich and genial and humorous. I do not think that these country people, who have so much humor themselves, will mind being laughed at without malice, as the people in every country have been laughed at in their own comedies.”

Whenever you’re not sure if something is funny or not, just follow Keating’s lead and he’ll make sure you’re on the right path.

THEATER OF WAR: THE NURSE ANTIGONE

Who: Tracie Thoms, Taylor Schilling, John Turturro, Ato Blankson-Wood, Keith David, Craig Manbauman, Sandy Cayo, Elizabeth Hazlewood, Jumaane Williams, Bryan Doerries
What: Dramatic reading and community discussion
Where: Theater of War Zoom
When: Thursday, April 21, free with RSVP, 6:00
Why: Theater of War Productions teams up with the Greater NYC Black Nurses Association for its latest live, interactive presentation, exploring caregiving and death. On April 21 at 6:00, an all-star cast will deliver a dramatic reading of Sophocles’s Antigone, about one of the daughters of Oedipus and Jocasta who is determined to give a proper burial to her brother Polynices, who has been branded a traitor, his body left to rot.

The fifth-century play will be performed by actors Tracie Thoms, Taylor Schilling, John Turturro, Ato Blankson-Wood, and Keith David, joined by frontline nurses Craig Manbauman, Sandy Cayo, and Elizabeth Hazlewood and New York City public advocate Jumaane Williams; the discussion, which explores the themes of the play as they relate today to the coronavirus crisis and other health issues, will be facilitated by Theater of War artistic director Bryan Doerries and held in conjunction with the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, and the Resilient Nurses Initiative — Maryland.