Tag Archives: Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre

SIGNATURE PLAYS

A muscleman (Ryan-James Hatanaka) shows off his wares to Grandma (Phyllis Somerville) in Edward Albee’s THE SANDBOX (photo by Monique Carboni)

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 19, $25-$65
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

As part of its twenty-fifth anniversary celebration, the Signature Theatre has put together an evening of compellingly strange one-acts that were previously presented by the company as part of their authors’ Playwright-in-Residence seasons all of which involve unique looks at death. In Edward Albee’s 1959 The Sandbox, first mounted at the Signature in 1994 directed by Albee himself, a WASPy couple who refer to each other as Mommy (Alison Fraser) and Daddy (Frank Wood) relax on lounge chairs after having an impressively toned muscleman in a bathing suit (Ryan-James Hatanaka) deposit Grandma (Phyllis Somerville) in a child’s sandbox on a nearly blindingly yellow set (by Mimi Lien). While Melody Giron plays the cello, the man continues his calisthenics, slowly flapping his arms while standing firmly on the ground, Mommy and Daddy find that they have little to talk about it, and Grandma marvels at the young man’s body while expressing her dismay at her situation. “Honestly! What a way to treat an old woman! Drag her out of the house . . . stick her in a car . . . bring her out here from the city . . . dump her in a pile of sand . . . and leave her here to set. I’m eighty-six years old!” she tells the audience. All of the characters are aware that they are in a play, making comments about the music, the lighting, and the script, but only Grandma, who embodies the entire life cycle, from baby to sexual being to mother to old woman on her last legs, speaks like a real person; the others are more like clichéd stock characters reciting their lines with the sparest of genuine emotion. Director Lila Neugebauer keeps it all bright and cheery as the end nears, in more ways than one.

Roe (Sahr Ngaujah) teaches Pea (Mikéah Ernest Jennings) about life in María Irene Fornés’s DROWNING (photo by Monique Carboni)

María Irene Fornés’s 1986 Drowning, initially presented at the Signature in 1999, when John Simon declared in New York magazine that it was “the worst play I have seen all year,” was originally part of Orchards, in which seven contemporary playwrights (among them Wendy Wasserstein, David Mamet, and John Guare) wrote a one-act play inspired by a short story by Anton Chekhov. Cuban-American playwright Fornés chose “Drowning,” although her avant-garde approach was more than a little unusual. In a cafeteria, Pea (Mikéah Ernest Jennings) and Roe (Sahr Ngaujah), a pair of giant potato-like creatures (Kaye Voyce’s elaborate costumes are a certifiable riot), talk ever-so-slowly, almost like a Butoh dance, as the latter teaches the former about newspapers, snow, and flesh. Fornés evokes Beckett as Roe and Pea wait for Stephen (Wood), who actually does show up, and the immature, childlike Pea learns about love and pain. “He is very kind and he could not do harm to anyone,” Stephen says about Roe, who responds, “Yes. And I don’t want any harm to come to him either because he’s good.” Drowning is a bizarre yet captivating journey into what makes us human.

Adrienne Kennedy’s FUNNYHOUSE OF A NEGRO takes place inside of the mind of young woman facing a harsh reality (photo by Monique Carboni)

The Legacy Program evening concludes with Adrienne Kennedy’s Obie-winning 1964 Funnyhouse of a Negro, which was staged at the Signature in 1995. A complex exploration of slavery, racism, colonialism, and heritage, the entire story takes place inside the mind of Negro-Sarah (Crystal Dickinson) as she encounters Queen Victoria Regina (April Matthis), the Duchess of Hapsburg (January LaVoy), Patrice Lumumba (Ngaujah), and Jesus (Jennings) in addition to her roommate, Raymond (Nicholas Bruder), her landlady (Fraser), and the Mother (Pia Glenn). “My mother was the light. She was the lightest one. She looked like a white woman,” Victoria says. “Black man, black man, I never should have let a black man put his hands on me. The wild black beast raped me and now my skull is shining,” the Mother states. Negro (Sarah) adds, “As for myself I long to become even a more pallid Negro than I am now; pallid like Negroes on the covers of American Negro magazines; soulless, educated, and irreligious. I want to possess no moral value, particularly value as to my being. I want not to be. I ask nothing except anonymity.” And Sarah explains, “The rooms are my rooms; a Hapsburg chamber, a chamber in a Victorian castle, the hotel where I killed my father, the jungle. These are the places myselves exist in. I know no places. That is, I cannot believe in places. To believe in places is to know hope and to know the emotion of hope is to know beauty. It links us across a horizon and connects us to the world. I find there are no places only my funnyhouse.” Each scene takes place in a different, exquisitely designed set by Lien amid darkness and Voyce’s extravagant costumes. Like The Sandbox and Drowning, Funnyhouse of a Negro is a highly stylized, absurdist drama about death, and the death of the American dream, only this time with more overt targets and explicit, at times shocking action. It’s unfortunately still relevant a half century after its debut during the civil rights movement. It’s also a fitting finale to this Signature hat trick that looks back while also peering into the future.

THE SPOILS

Ben (Jesse Eisenberg) shares his bitter thoughts on the state of the world with Kalyan (Kunal Nayyar) in THE SPOILS (photo by Monique Carboni)

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 28, $75-$95
212-244-7529
www.thenewgroup.org
www.signaturetheatre.org

In the second act of Jesse Eisenberg’s third play, The Spoils, Eisenberg, as the deeply troubled and extremely obnoxious Ben, says, “Did you think she was too mean? I’m struggling to figure out who our protagonist is. You can’t have a mean protagonist, but if they’re too perfect then they have nowhere to go. You know?” Yes, we know; Ben is referring to a woman in a documentary he is purportedly making, but he just as easily could be talking about himself, a nasty, confused, and confusing character who dishes out streams of sharp barbs and insensitive jokes. It is the third consecutive unlikable part that Eisenberg has written for himself for the stage, following Asuncion and The Revisionist. (He’s more likable in his film work: He was nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network and has also starred in such underrated films as Adventureland and The Double.) Ben is a pot-smoking, jobless New Jersey Jew living in a New York City apartment with his roommate, Nepalese business student Kalyan (The Big Bang’s Kunal Nayyar). An all-around nice guy and good friend to Ben, Kalyan is dating Reshma (Annapurna Sriram), an Indian American doing her med school residency — and who can’t stand Ben. (Kalyan is based on a real-life Nepalese friend of Eisenberg’s who was in Indonesia during the recent earthquake and returned home to help with the disaster.) Ben’s slacker-like existence, supported by his parents’ money, turns when he bumps into an old grade school acquaintance, Ted (Michael Zegen of Boardwalk Empire and Rescue Me), a banker engaged to Ben’s first crush, the sweet, kind, and innocent Sarah (Erin Darke). Suddenly infused with a purpose in his life, Ben sets out to steal Sarah from Ted, but he is unaware of just how pathetic and unpleasant he really is.

A group of friends apologize to the rest of the world for their supposed success in Jesse Eisenberg’s THE SPOILS (photo by Monique Carboni)

The Spoils opens with Kalyan showing Reshma a PowerPoint presentation he has created called “American Football: An Introduction to the Ballet of Brutality,” asking the questions “Is it appropriate to withhold knowledge from someone even if you think it might hurt them? Is it ethical to deny someone information, even if disclosing that information might hurt them?” Eisenberg’s play is also a ballet of brutality centered around the vitriolic Ben, who is haunted by dreams and memories that he can’t hold within himself. Eisenberg gives a whirling, energetic performance as Ben, words flowing out of him like Barry Sanders racing toward the goal line. Nayyar is much more calm and subdued as Kalyan, whose nature is to find the good in all people, including Ben. The New Group world premiere, in the Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre at the Signature Center, is ably directed by Scott Elliott, making good use of Derek McLane’s traditional living room/kitchen apartment set with a balcony; one nice touch is that Ben and Kalyan use a print of Jasper Johns’s “White Flag” as a screen for their PowerPoint and video projections, a very subtle reference to both surrender and the whitewashing of the American Dream. At one point in the play, the five characters are drinking Nepalese beer, and Ben calls for a special toast. We gotta say ‘Cheers’ in Nepali!” he proclaims. “I don’t think I ever said anything that would be an equivalent to ‘Cheers,’” Kalyan says. “I guess when we’re drinking, we don’t really feel a need to congratulate each other.” Ben ultimately decides that they “should apologize to the world. Because they’re toiling away while we get to sit here and drink. . . . A Nepalese Cheers: To all the pathetic f—s breaking their back while we drink this beautiful beer: I’m sorry!” It’s a funny moment that perhaps best represents the bubble they are all living in. But The Spoils still has a hard time getting past just how contentious and ill-natured Ben is, even when he begins to reveal his true self. He’s just not someone you’ll ever want to share a beer with.

THE LIQUID PLAIN

Dembi (Ito Aghayere) and Adjua (Kristolyn Lloyd) threaten John Cranston (Michael Izquierdo) in THE LIQUID PLAIN (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 29, $25
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

As The Liquid Plain opens, two people find what they think is a dead body, but the supposed corpse comes back to life. Unfortunately, the play has no such luck, pretty much showing up DOA. Originally commissioned for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s ten-year “American Revolutions: The United States History Cyle” series, which also includes Lynn Nottage’s Sweat and Robert Schenkkan’s Tony-winning All the Way, Naomi Wallace’s The Liquid Plain is a disconcerting, bewildering look at slavery in the Atlantic region. The title comes from Phillis Wheatley’s 1773 poem “A Farewell to America,” in which she writes, “While for Brittania’s distant shore / We sweep the liquid plain, / And with astonish’d eyes explore / The wide-extended main.” The play begins on a section of ratty dock in 1791 Bristol, Rhode Island. Hiding in bleak surroundings, runaway slaves Adjua (Kristolyn Lloyd) and Dembi (Ito Aghayere) are trying to save enough money to get on a ship bound for Africa, but their plans are complicated by the arrival of John Cranston (Michael Izquierdo), a white man who has lost his memory after his near-murder by drowning. Against Dembi’s better judgment, Cranston joins the pair and starts helping them out, but when one-eyed scoundrel Balthazar (Karl Miller) and ship captain Liverpool Joe (Johnny Ramey) show up, truths are revealed that threaten Adjua and Dembi’s future. The second act takes place forty-six years later, as the well-spoken Bristol (LisaGay Hamilton) comes to Rhode Island from London, seeking her father. But when she meets up with Cranston, Dembi, the ghost of William Blake (Miller), and the wealthy and powerful former slaver and senator James De Wolfe (Robert Hogan), she discovers unsettling facts that tear her life apart.

Bristol (LisaGay Hamilton) searches for her past in Naomi Wallace play at the Signature (photo by Joan Marcus)

Although Wallace (Slaughter City, One Flea Spare) and director Kwame Kwei-Armah (Blues Brother Soul Sister, Elmina’s Kitchen), who previously collaborated on Wallace’s Things of Dry Hours, address some fascinating and lesser-known socioeconomic aspects of the slave trade in the North and the life of African Americans on the docks rather than on the plantation, the narrative is choppy and the dialogue befuddling. Meanwhile, the staging ranges from inventive to overstylized and confounding, and the plot twists feel forced when they’re not obvious. Influenced by Marcus Rediker’s book The Slave Ship: A Human History, Wallace tries to squeeze too much historical information into The Liquid Plain, which won the 2012 Horton Foote Prize for Promising New American Play. Perhaps it looked better on paper, but onstage, in this production running at the Signature through March 29, it’s all wet.

A PARTICLE OF DREAD (OEDIPUS VARIATIONS)

Oedipus (Stephen Rea) and a ragged traveler (Lloyd Hutchinson) discuss life and death in A PARTICLE OF DREAD (photo by Matthew Murphy)

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 4, $25 through December 23, $55 after
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Sam Shepard continues his Legacy residency at the Signature Theatre with A Particle of Dread (Oedipus Variations), a contemporary examination of the Oedipus myth first explored by Sophocles nearly twenty-five-hundred years ago. Presented with Brian Fiel and Stephen Rea’s Derry-based Field Day Theatre Company, where the ninety-minute play premiered in the fall of 2013, A Particle of Dread (Oedipus Variations) mixes two primary story lines, one taking place in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, the other set in the California desert. In the former, gangster kingpin Lawrence/Laius (Aidan Redmond) receives a prophecy from Uncle Del (Lloyd Hutchinson) that “any child born to you and your lovely queen, Jocasta, will turn out to be your killer and the husband of his mother,” so he locks his wife (Brid Brennan) in a cage. Meanwhile, out in the Far West of America, highway patrol officer Harrington (Jason Kolotouros) and forensic investigator RJ Randolph (Matthew Rauch) are on the case of a triple murder that the wheelchair-bound Otto (Rea) is obsessed with. “None of it makes any sense! Are you kidding? This is just — this is just plain old slaughter — butchery. Like the old days,” Harrington says. “Old days?” Randolph asks. “Disemboweling — hearts torn out — drawn and quartered — heads rolling. Blood dripping down the altar steps,” Harrington replies. Randolph: “Oh — ancient then?” Harrington: “Ancient, yes, but —” Randolph: “Everything has a history, doesn’t it? I mean, this stuff didn’t come out of thin air.” Everything does have a history, which Shepard delves into as the two stories echo each other and merge, “draped in mystery and confusion,” as Oedipus (Rea) says.

Aidan Redmond plays gangster kingpin Langos and ancient king Laius in Sam Shepard play (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Mystery and confusion abound in Shepard’s play, which reunites the two-time Tony nominee with longtime collaborators Rea (Geography of a Horse Dreamer, Kicking a Dead Horse) and director Nancy Meckler (Curse of the Starving Class, Buried Child), who have worked with one another on and off since the 1970s. The intersecting plots take place on Frank Conway’s clinically white-tiled set stained with blood, a clothesline of torn fabrics representing drying intestines in one corner, above which is an alcove where cellist Neil Martin and slide guitarist Todd Livingston contribute live music. It’s not always easy to know who is who and when is when as the story drags on, with several of the actors playing more than one role, occasionally addressing the audience directly, and the accents, American and Irish, eventually seem to intermingle. (Brennan plays Jocasta and Jocelyn, Judith Roddy plays Antigone and Annalee, Redmond plays Laius and Larry, and Hutchinson is Uncle Del, a traveler, Tiresias, and the Maniac of the Outskirts.) The Oscar-nominated Rea (The Crying Game) reveals the most depth as Oedipus, who is seeking revenge for a past wrong, and Otto, whose daughter, Annalee, is trying to protect her infant son, getting to the heart of Shepard’s own forensic investigation of fate and destiny, parents and children, and murder and duality, showing how little humanity has changed through the ages. It all makes for a rather uncomfortable experience. “Oh, tragedy, tragedy, tragedy, tragedy / Piss on it / Piss on Sophocles’ head,” Annalee says. “What’s it for? Catharsis? Purging? Metaphor? What’s in it for us?” Despite some intense moments amid lofty ideals, A Particle of Dread leaves us to ponder such critical questions, about the play itself.

THE WAYSIDE MOTOR INN

Ten people reevaluate their lives in a motel room in A. R. Gurney revival at the Signature (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through October 5, $55-$75
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

Award-winning playwright A. R. Gurney is currently represented by a pair of New York City revivals of two vastly different works. The Buffalo-born Gurney’s 1988 Love Letters, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, has recently begun a star-studded production at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, directed by Gregory Mosher and featuring five pairs of big-time actors in succession — Mia Farrow and Brian Dennehy, Carol Burnett and Dennehy, Candice Bergen and Alan Alda, Diana Rigg and Stacy Keach, and Anjelica Huston and Martin Sheen — as a couple examining their long relationship by sitting down and reading letters they wrote to each other. Meanwhile, a bit southwest at the Signature Theatre, five two-character stories are being told simultaneously in a revival of Gurney’s 1977 densely packed drama The Wayside Motor Inn. Set outside Boston in the 1970s, the entire play takes place in a motel room where ten people come and go, as five unique stories occur at the same time in the same space. The set, designed by Andrew Lieberman, is a basic motel room with two queen-size beds in the center, a bathroom on the left, and a glass door with a small balcony at the right; it actually represents five separate rooms, but Gurney and director Lila Neugebauer ably guide the individual, overlapping narratives skillfully. Frank (Jon DeVries) and Jessie (Lizbeth Mackay) are an elderly couple visiting their new grandchild. Vince (Richard Topol filling in for Marc Kudisch the night we went) is an obsessed father determined that his son, Mark (Will Pullen), will get into Harvard, no matter what the moody teen really wants. Ray (Quincy Dunn-Baker) is a slick computer salesman and unfaithful spouse making a play for motel maid Sharon (Jenn Lyon). Andy (Kelly AuCoin) and Ruth (Rebecca Henderson) are in the midst of a contentious divorce. And young Phil (David McElwee) and Sally (Ismenia Mendes) are ready to make love for the first time.

Five stories overlap in unique ways in THE WAYSIDE MOTOR INN (photo by Joan Marcus)

Over the course of two hours (with intermission), each character is forced to face some hard truths about their future while coming to terms with just what they want, expect, and, perhaps most important, need out of life. They reevaluate what they’ve done and where they’ve been as well as where they’re going. Some of the plots are more mundane and cliché-ridden than others, but Gurney, who was inspired by Verdi’s operas and the biblical parable of the sower and the seed in creating the play, makes them work as a uniform whole, with small elements from some relating to others as the actors from the different tales manage not to bump into one another or step on each other’s lines. In some ways, the five narratives can even be seen as events from a sixth, unseen life as couples first meet, fall in love, fall out of love, stick it out, send a child to college, have grandchildren, then face death. The Wayside Motor Inn might not accomplish all its lofty goals, but it is a compelling and entertaining exercise in formalist structure that always stays on track. The show, which runs through October 5, is part of Gurney’s Signature Residency, which continues in May 2015 with a revival of his 1981 play What I Did Last Summer, followed by the world premiere of a new play in the 2015-16 season.

APPROPRIATE

A dysfunctional family is forced to reassess the past — and the future — in New York premiere of APPROPRIATE (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Extended through April 13, $75
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

In working on Appropriate, his first production as part of the Signature Theatre Residency Five program, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins was inspired by specific family dramas by such previous Signature residency playwrights as Sam Shepard, Arthur Miller, and Horton Foote in addition to Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, and Anton Chekhov. He was also influenced by Hilton Als’s “GWTW” essay for the 2000 New-York Historical Society exhibition “Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America,” in which the art critic wrote about being asked to contribute to the catalog, surmising that it was primarily because he was black. “A black writer,” Als wrote, “is someone who can simplify what is endemic to him or her as a human being — race — and blow it up, to cartoon proportions, hereby making the coon situation ‘clear’ to a white audience.” That is precisely what Jacobs-Jenkins has done with Appropriate, the story of three white siblings who have returned to the family’s dilapidated southern plantation to sell it to pay off debts. Franz (Patch Darragh), the black sheep who disappeared shortly after a serious indiscretion with a minor, arrives with his easygoing, crunchy, and much younger girlfriend, River (Sonya Harum). Bo (Michael Laurence) shows up with his Jewish wife, Rachael (Maddie Corman), and their two kids, Ainsley (Alex Dreier) and Cassidy (Izzy Hanson-Johnston). And the divorced Toni (Johanna Day) brings her troubled teenager, Rhys (Mike Faist). As they brutally argue over money, the past, responsibility, and the Lafayette family legacy, they find a home-made book of photographs of lynched black men, forcing them to take a closer, far more painful look at who their father might have been as well as at themselves.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins meets with the cast of APPROPRIATE (photo by Gregory Costanzo)

Although it’s very much about the African American experience, there are no living black characters in Appropriate, a title that refers to both pronunciations and meanings of the word: “to take or make use of without authority or right” and “especially suitable or compatible.” In the Lafayette clan’s world, blacks exist only in the nearby slave cemetery and in the lynching photographs. They refuse to acknowledge that their father could have been a racist bigot (or worse), even as evidence keeps piling up. Meanwhile, they try to protect the younger generation from seeing the pictures, as if the past can just be buried, but, of course, it’s not that easy. Directed by Liesl Tommy (The Good Negro, A Stone’s Throw), Appropriate begins with solid character development while raising intriguing social and moral issues without getting didactic. But the story goes off the rails in the second act as various secrets emerge and the vitriol reaches even higher levels. Perhaps most unfortunate, there’s a moment that seems like the perfect ending; the lights go out, and just as the audience is ready to applaud, the play continues through a disappointing, unnecessary coda. In Appropriate, Jacobs-Jenkins (Neighbors, An Octoroon) clutters what is a fascinating premise with too many disparate elements. In an interview in Signature Stories, the theater’s free magazine, Jacobs-Jenkins says, “I ended up deciding I would steal something from every play that I liked, and put those things in a play and cook the pot to see what happens.” Although made up of some very fine ingredients, Appropriate is overstuffed, its subtle complexities gone well past the boiling point.

AUGUST WILSON’S HOW I LEARNED WHAT I LEARNED

Ruben Santiago-Hudson was August Wilson’s personal choice to take over one-man show (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Extended through December 29, $55
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

August Wilson’s one-man show, How I Learned What I Learned, has arrived in New York at last, and like any Wilson work, it’s a very welcome event. When the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright passed away from cancer at the age of sixty in 2005, plans were already under way for a season of his works as part of the fifteenth anniversary celebration of the Signature Theatre. For that 2005 season, Wilson was going to present the New York premiere of his own one-man show and personal memoir, How I Learned What I Learned, which he premiered in Seattle in 2002. Following his death, the season turned into a tribute to Wilson’s vast legacy, with productions of Seven Guitars, Two Trains Running, and King Hedley II. Seven years later, How I Learned What I Learned is finally making its New York debut, in an intimate, intoxicating version running at the Signature through December 29, directed by Todd Kreidler, who conceived the project with Wilson and directed the original. Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Wilson’s personal choice to take over the play, gets to step into Wilson’s shoes and put on his hat and coat — the costumes were chosen by Wilson’s widow, Constanza Romero — for eighty thrilling minutes, sharing fascinating tidbits from Wilson’s life growing up as Frederick August Kittel Jr. in Pittsburgh’s Hill District.

HOW I LEARNED WHAT I LEARNED celebrates the genius of August Wilson (photo by Joan Marcus)

Longtime Wilson set designer David Gallo arranged the sparse stage, featuring just a desk, a chair, and a coat rack set against a backdrop of hundreds of pieces of paper dangling from the ceiling. Santiago-Hudson, who won a Tony as Canewell in Seven Guitars and directed last year’s stellar Signature revival of Wilson’s 1990 Pulitzer Prize winning The Piano Lesson, portrays Wilson with an easygoing, natural grace as he talks poignantly about episodes from his past, including quitting numerous jobs to preserve his dignity, meeting people who would help shape his future, and getting locked up in jail. He strolls amiably across the stage, sits on the desk, and watches as the title of each new section is projected onto the papers behind him, each letter accompanied by the sound of a typewriter stroke. As always, Wilson’s words shine; he doesn’t go out of his way to connect the dots, get heavy-handed about the racism and poverty he experienced, or lament what could have been. Instead, he lets the stories create a path for the viewer to follow to his majestic body of work, which he never brings up, as the play ends prior to his writing his first play. Everything about How I Learned What I Learned feels just right, a labor of love from his friends and colleagues that is a gift to the rest of us.