Tag Archives: Bray Poor

DAKAR NOIR: PLAYING CHARADES AROUND Y2K

Dina Stevens (Mia Barron) involves Boubs (Abubakr Ali) in a complicated government plot as Y2K approaches (photo by Matthew Murphy)

DAKAR 2000
Manhattan Theatre Club
New York City Center Stage 1
Tuesday – Sunday through March 23, $79-$99
www.manhattantheatreclub.com
www.nycitycenter.org

“If we both describe the same thing at the same time, will one of our descriptions be more true than the other?” Isaac says to Nikolai in Rajiv Joseph’s 2017 time-leaping play Describe the Night. Later, Feliks tells Mariya, “You love to make up stories that are more interesting than what the truth is.”

The concept of “the truth” is also central to Joseph’s latest work, Dakar 2000, a gripping cat-and-mouse contemporary noir presented by Manhattan Theatre Club at New York City Center’s Stage 1 through March 23.

It’s December 31, 2024, and a fifty-year-old man (Abubakr Ali) walks onstage and delivers a monologue detailing a series of life-altering events that happened to him twenty-five years earlier, during the last few days leading up to Y2K, when some people thought the world might end.

Standing on a swirling ramp, he begins, “This is a story within a story, about a person within a person, in a time within another time. In a galaxy far, far away. All of it . . . is true. Or most of it, anyway. Names have been changed. Some of the places have been changed. Some of the boring parts snipped away. Some other stuff has been added to make it . . . theoretically more interesting. But otherwise all of it is almost entirely true.”

After telling us about a secret job he had that has taken him across the globe, he concludes, “The truth — the dumb, boring truth — is that this is mostly the story of a kid who just wanted to make a difference. And the truth is . . . he didn’t. I mean, I didn’t. Or I hadn’t . . . I hadn’t done much of any consequence, ever. Until I flipped my truck, just before the millennium . . . And met a woman who worked at the State Department.”

The narrative shifts to late December 1999, and Boubacar (Ali), known as Boubs (pronounced “boobs”), is a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal, stationed in Kaolack and building a fenced-in community garden in the nearby village of Thiadiaye. Sporting a bandage around his injured head following the accident, he has been called in to meet with Dina Stevens (Mia Barron), who identifies herself as the Deputy Regional Supervisor of Safety & Security for Sub-Saharan Africa. Dina watches Boubs carefully as he shares the details of what led to the crash; she then starts asking pointed questions that tear holes in his story. He keeps up what turns out to be a ruse until she accuses him of lying about his situation, and he ultimately admits to repurposing materials that were meant for other projects.

Threatening to send him back home to America, Dina, who is hell bent on avenging the murder of several of her friends in the 1998 embassy bombing in Tanzania, offers Boubs the option of performing an odd task for her instead, which leads to another task, and another, each one more mysterious and perilous — and bringing Boubs and Dina closer and closer. As Y2K approaches, Boubs doesn’t know what to believe, and neither does the audience.

Boubs (Abubakr Ali) and Dina Stevens (Mia Barron) grow close working together in Rajiv Joseph’s Dakar 2000 (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Dakar 2000 is a riveting thriller reminiscent of Stanley Donen’s 1963 Hitchcockian favorite Charade, in which Audrey Hepburn stars as an American expat unexpectedly caught up in a dangerous spy drama in Paris after her husband is killed and she is pursued by multiple men, one of whom (Cary Grant) claims he is trying to help her even though she catches him in lie after lie. Which is not to say that Barron and Ali have the same kind of chemistry as Hepburn and Grant, but the quirky relationship between Dina and Boubs is appealing. At one point, when they’re on Boubs’s roof, face-to-face, you want them to kiss but also want them not to, as neither one is ultimately trustworthy.

Two-time Obie winner Rajiv Joseph (Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, King James) and director May Adrales (Vietgone, Poor Yella Rednecks) keep us guessing all the way to the finale. Tim Mackabee’s turntable set moves from Dina’s office and a restaurant to the roof and a hotel bedroom, with small props occasionally surreptitiously added when it rotates from scene to scene. Shawn Duan’s projections range from a starry sky and outdoor African locations to text that establishes the precise time and location. A metaphor linking the 1997 Hale Bopp Comet to fate is confusing, but the choice of Culture Club’s 1983 hit “Karma Chameleon” as the song connecting Boubs with his ex-girlfriend is inspired, with Boy George singing, “There’s a loving in your eyes all the way / If I listen to your lies, would you say / I’m a man without conviction / I’m a man who doesn’t know / How to sell a contradiction / You come and go, you come and go.”

Ever-dependable Obie winner Barron (The Coast Starlight, Dying for It) effectively captures Dina’s enigmatic nature, representing an unethical government that holds all the cards. Ali (Toros) portrays Boubs’s younger self with a tender vulnerability that makes his actions understandable, although his overall characterization is ultimately a bit uneven, his voice too often switching pitches, his youth making him less than convincing as the modern-day Boubs.

Joseph has noted that Dina and Ali are based on actual people, but that doesn’t mean Dakar 2000 is a documentary play, particularly as words such as truth and lie show up over and over again. During the course of the work’s brisk eighty minutes, Dina tells Boubs, “You’re a good liar,” “Trust me, I wouldn’t lie to you about this,” and “Do you ever wonder if it’s all a big lie?” Meanwhile, Boubs wonders, “How could it be a lie?” when Dina questions humanity’s general consciousness.

Theater by its very definition presents a fictional version of reality, no matter how factual it might be. But in the case of Dakar 2000 and other plays by Joseph, we should be grateful that he “loves to make up stories that are more interesting than what the truth is.”

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

INFINITE LIFE

Annie Baker’s Infinite Life takes place at a pain clinic in Northern California (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

INFINITE LIFE
Atlantic Theater Company
Linda Gross Theater
336 West 20th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through October 14, $50-$127
atlantictheater.org

“This is agony in its purest form,” Eileen (Marylouise Burke) says in Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Baker’s exquisite new play, Infinite Life, which opened this week at the Atlantic. “A minute of this is an infinity.”

It is never agony watching anything by Baker, whose previous wide-ranging and insightful works include The Flick, Circle Mirror Transformation, The Antipodes, John, and The Aliens. She made her off-Broadway debut at the Atlantic in 2008 with Body Awareness, about which she told the New York Times, “My goal for the play is to not judge anyone, to get at that point where everyone is equally right and equally wrong, so the humor comes from that.” The same can be said for Infinite Life, about six characters who are deeply aware of their bodies, riddled with pain.

The play takes place in 2019 at a Northern California clinic run by an unseen man named Erkin, who treats chronic pain sufferers, mainly women, with water or juice fasts for days or weeks at a time. Eileen, Yvette (Mia Katigbak), Ginnie (Kristine Nielsen), and Elaine (Brenda Pressley) spend most of their time lying on deck chairs and gossiping, but this is no day at the beach. When they are joined by younger newcomer Sofi (Christina Kirk), they are intrigued and pepper her with questions; at first Sofi doesn’t want to share too much but soon reveals more, which tickles the other women’s curiosity. She is reading George Eliot’s final novel, Daniel Deronda, which deals with culture and identity, class and morality, centered by a seemingly heroic male figure and written by a woman who had to pretend she was a man in order to get published.

Eileen (Marylouise Burke) and Sofi (Christina Kirk) discuss life in Atlantic world premiere (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

Ginnie is a flight attendant from the local area who has “auto-immune thyroid stuff,” vertigo, and no filter, freely discussing pornography, carbonation, cantaloupes, rape, and how many sphincters humans have. Elaine, from New Hampshire, is a grandmother who has chronic Lyme disease and likes to draw. Yvette is a Michigander who is in surprisingly good spirits given her severe bladder issues and other health problems. Eileen, the oldest, is a Christian from Wichita who doesn’t appreciate cursing and walks very slowly, her constant pain palpable.

The women are thrown off balance when Nelson (Pete Simpson) arrives, a hunk of a fortysomething man, barefoot and bare-chested, surrounded by an air of mystery. “Who’s Daniel Deronda?” he asks Sofi. “Yeah, I think he’s actually the main character — we met him at the very beginning of the book — but he hasn’t reappeared yet so I don’t know that much about him.” The two of them build a flirtatious relationship that somewhat echoes Eliot’s book as each of the characters delve deeper into their personal situations.

A coproduction with London’s National Theatre, Infinite Life is not just about pain; it specifically focuses on the psychological, emotional, and physical pain inflicted on women by society. When Nelson ultimately shares his illness with Sofi and describes his most painful night, he explains, “I don’t know if you’ve been through childbirth but I met this lady who had the same thing happen to her and she said it was way worse than childbirth.” Sofi, who does not have children, replies, “You don’t actually know if your level of pain that night was worse than my level of pain on my worst night. It’s like impossible to know.” It’s also insulting for a man to compare his pain to a woman’s; Sofi later tells Eileen, “You know, I always feel like I’m lying when I say I’m in pain,” as if it’s just part of her existence that she has to accept. But Eileen counters, “The pain is an error. . . . We have to resist pain because resisting pain is resisting what isn’t true. The only true thing is the Infinite Idea, forever repeating itself.”

Earlier, in one of the many voice messages Sofi leaves for her silent husband, she says, “You must think I’m a monster. Maybe I am a monster. My body is monstrous. My mind is monstrous. So I’m a monster. Congratulations. You married a monster.” In Daniel Deronda, the protagonist, Gwendolen Harleth, argues, “People talk of their motives in a cut and dried way. Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster. I am not a monster, but I have not felt exactly what other women feel — or say they feel, for fear of being thought unlike others.” Eliot’s novel might be set in Victorian England, but the sentiments still ring true today regarding societal expectations of women.

Yvette (Mia Katigbak) shares her astounding health history in Infinite Life (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

Director James Macdonald (Cloud Nine, The Children, Escaped Alone) masterfully guides each scene with with an intoxicating confidence that illuminates every moment. The comfy set by dots features seven chaises longues, ensuring that at least one is always empty, leading audience members to wonder what it would like to occupy one. Ásta Bennie Hostetter’s costumes are casual but not relaxed; only Ginnie and Nelson are dressed as if they are poolside, while the others are fully clothed and wear shoes. Isabella Byrd’s sharp lighting delineates the time of day, with Sofi calling out the shifts: “Twenty minutes later,” “Five hours later,” “Two days later. Maybe three days later?” Bray Poor’s sound includes crickets in the background, as if no one is listening to the women’s problems.

The fantastic cast is led by Kirk (Clybourne Park, Knickerbocker), who mixes sadness with a certain sex appeal, and Burke (Ripcord, True West), whose character offers a moving epiphany at the end. Katigbak (Out of Time, Awake and Sing!) and Nielsen (Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike) give their characters a poignant warmth and charm, while Pressley (The Lyons, Dreamgirls) brings a strong practicality to Elaine. Simpson (Is This a Room, Measure for Measure) clearly relishes his role as the easygoing object of desire.

“I had to accept being in pain all the time,” Yvette says early on, as if speaking for all women. That acceptance, passed on from generation to generation, is questioned by Baker in the gorgeous finale, which, if it doesn’t promise relief, at least promises a more generous way to hold our human suffering.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

THE SIGN IN SIDNEY BRUSTEIN’S WINDOW

Iris (Rachel Brosnahan) and Sidney (Oscar Isaac) get playful in long-overdue Lorraine Hansberry revival at BAM (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

THE SIGN IN SIDNEY BRUSTEIN’S WINDOW
Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Strong, Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St. between Ashland & Rockwell Pl.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 24, $84.50-$385
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

One of the first things you will ask yourself after seeing Lorraine Hansberry’s The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window is, Why haven’t I ever seen or read this before? Or even, Why have I never heard of it until now?

Hansberry changed theater forever with her 1959 masterpiece, A Raisin in the Sun. Five years later, her second play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, debuted on Broadway, starring Gabriel Dell as the title character and Rita Moreno as his wife, Iris. It ran for 14 previews and 101 performances; the last New York City revival was more than fifty years ago, playing nine previews and a paltry five performances at the Longacre, with Hal Linden as Brustein and Zohra Lampert as Iris. Whereas Raisin dealt with a Black family struggling to survive on the South Side of Chicago following the death of its patriarch, Sign is about a white couple in Greenwich Village trying to maintain their Bohemian lifestyle; racism and discrimination are only subplots to the central narrative.

The provocative play is now back in a stellar production at BAM’s Harvey Theater that continues through March 24 and stars Emmy nominee Oscar Isaac as Sidney, a New York City Jewish intellectual, and Rachel Brosnahan as his non-Jewish wife, Iris; the story is built around Sidney’s efforts to make a living and the travails of his friends and his wife’s family.

When the play opens, his latest business venture, a folk music café called Walden Pond, has failed, so he immediately decides to buy the local newspaper the Village Crier. The deal annoys Iris, a wannabe actress he has nicknamed Mountain Girl because of her Appalachian upbringing. “Where in the world are you going to get the money to pay for a newspaper?” a bewildered Iris asks. “It’s a small newspaper. A weekly,” Sidney explains. “Sidney, you can’t afford a yearly leaflet!” Iris declares.

Joining Sidney at the newspaper are his right-hand man, Alton Scales (Julian De Niro), and artist and designer Max (Raphael Nash Thompson), who has contempt for revolutionaries like Alton.

Alton (Julian De Niro) and Wally (Andy Grotelueschen) are a bit on edge in The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Sidney is a former idealist who no longer believes that he can save the world. “Since I was eighteen I’ve belonged to every committee to Save, to Free, to Abolish, Preserve, Reserve, and Conserve that ever was,” he tells Alton, who is a light-skinned Black man, and his friend Wally O’Hara (Andy Grotelueschen), a bushy haired white man running for local office as a reformer. Sidney goes on, “And the result — is that the mere thought of a ‘movement’ to do anything chills my bones! I simply can no longer bear the spectacle of power-driven insurgents trying at all cost to gain control of — the refreshment committee!”

Sidney calls Iris’s older sister, the bigoted and fashionable Mavis (Miriam Silverman), “the Bulwark of the Republic. The Mother Middleclass itself standing there revealed in all her towering courage.” Mavis responds, “I am standing here and I am thinking: how smug it is in bohemia,” blaming people such as Sidney for society’s ills, declaring, “Since you have all so busily got rid of God for us!”

Alton has fallen in love with Gloria (Gus Birney), Mavis and Iris’s younger sister, who works as a call girl in Miami, although Alton doesn’t know that. Because Mavis had difficulty accepting Iris’s marriage to a Jew, Iris and Sidney decide not to tell Mavis about Alton, assuming she’ll not respond well to the possibility of a Black brother-in-law, either. Meanwhile, gay playwright David Ragin (Glenn Fitzgerald), who lives upstairs from the Brusteins, occasionally drops by for some writing supplies or just to say hello and shake things up.

And things do indeed get shaken up immediately before and after the primary.

Obie-winning director Anne Kaufman (The Bedwetter, The Nether) gives Hansberry’s sharp dialogue and clever character development the room they need to breathe and grow, avoiding clichéd situations and stereotypes. The action unfurls on dots’ multifloor set, which is propped up from beneath as if it is floating in a mysterious space, a cramped Village apartment with a fire escape outside one window and a rooftop view. John Torres’s lighting and Bray Poor’s sound maintain the believability of it all.

Iris (Rachel Brosnahan) and Sidney (Oscar Isaac) can make only so much beautiful music together (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Isaac (Hamlet, Grace) is sensational as Sidney, completely immersing himself in this complex and unpredictable man who essentially wants to do the right things for the right reasons, who feels he is part of a bigger community that needs people like him. Brosnahan (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Othello) is a delight as Iris, who is ready to flower but is constantly thwarted. Silverman (Anatomy of a Suicide, A Delicate Ship) nearly steals every scene she’s in, representing how too many Americans feel toward people who are not like them but also how they are not innately evil and, perhaps, willing to adjust their views. Tony nominee Grotelueschen (Tootsie, Into the Woods) continues to prove he’s one of the best supporting players around as the politician seeking a newspaper endorsement. Birney brings a sweet innocence to Gloria, Fitzgerald is bold as the cocky David, De Niro is gentle as Alton, and Nash Thompson has a rousing good time as Max.

But at the center of it all, a daring humanity emanates from every moment. The play was inspired by a real election in Hansberry’s district in the Village; the Chicago native lived on Bleecker St. for many years prior to her death in 1965 at the age of thirty-four. BAM supplements the show with the biographical exhibit “‘Art Is Energy’: Lorraine Hansberry, World Builder” in the Rudin Family Gallery, consisting of photos, unpublished writings, recordings, drawings, Alison Saar’s sculpture To Sit a While, and more, lending insight into the playwright’s real life.

Theatergoers and critics might have been disappointed that The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window didn’t address racism directly like Raisin did as they tried to pigeonhole the Black woman writer, but her sophomore play has plenty to say about the human condition, and perhaps she was aware that the work would not be as successful as her first hit. About halfway through, Sidney and David have a key conversation in which Hansberry seems to be defending herself in David’s words.

Sidney: Tell me. What is your play about, David?
David: It’s not for me to say.
Sidney: Each person will “get from it what he brings to it?” Right?
David: To be real simple-minded about it — yes.
Sidney: Then, what makes you the artist and the audience the consumer if they have to write your play for you?
David: I know what it’s about. I told you, my plays have to speak for themselves.
Sidney: But to whom? For whom are they written and, above all, why are they written?
David: You hate my kind of writing because it goes beyond the walls of Ibsen’s prisons and Shaw’s lectures — that’s your problem, Sid.
Mavis: I just don’t know whatever happened to simple plays about simple people with simple problems.

Welcome to the wonderful world of Lorraine Hansberry and The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window.

TAKE ME OUT

Much of Take Me Out happens in the locker room — with and without uniforms (photo by Joan Marcus)

TAKE ME OUT
Helen Hayes Theater
240 West 44th St.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 11, $79-$199
2st.com/shows

Scott Ellis’s hit Broadway revival of Richard Greenberg’s Tony-winning Take Me Out is well on its way to the playoffs (Tony nominations) and the World Series (Tony wins), but you don’t have to know anything about baseball to root for this compelling tale of ego, homophobia, and winning and losing.

It all starts with the brilliant title itself, which refers to: the traditional 1908 tune “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” sung by fans during the seventh-inning stretch of every contest; a reverse riff on the chorus of John Fogerty’s 1985 hit, “Centerfield,” in which the former CCR leader declares, “Put me in, coach / I’m ready to play, today”; going out on a date; the public revelation that someone is gay; and the slang for a mob hit, as in “take him out.”

It’s 2002, and the world champion Empires, a stand-in for the Yankees — one backdrop features a silhouette of the Yankee Stadium wooden facade — are off to another good season. The story is narrated in flashback by shortstop Kippy Sunderstrom (Patrick J. Adams), a good friend of superstar Darren Lemming (Jesse Williams), a five-tool centerfielder who comes out of the closet with a sudden, unexpected announcement that he is gay. Darren did not do it to become a role model, to fight for gay rights, or to make a sociocultural statement; throughout the play, Darren’s motivations are private, driven primarily by ego and self-importance.

“Now, I’m not a personal sort of guy, really, and that’s not gonna be any different,” Darren, a handsome mixed-race player reminiscent of Bronx Bomber legend Derek Jeter, tells his teammates. “I mean, don’t expect the free flow of information. Don’t expect the daily update. I’m just here to play ball. I’m just here to have a good time. That’s no different. . . . And if, incidentally, there’s any kid out there who’s struggling with his identity, I hope this sends a message that it’s okay. They can follow their dream, no matter what. Any young man, creed, whatever, can go out there and become a ballplayer. Or an interior decorator.”

But he also tells Kippy, “You think you know me? You think you know my secret? Shit, that wasn’t a secret — that was an omission. I’ve got a secret — but that’s not it.” Even his last name, Lemming, is a warning for others not to follow him.

Friends and rivals Darren Lemming (Jesse Williams) and Davey Battle (Brandon J. Dirden) sit down for a chat in Take Me Out (photo by Joan Marcus)

As one would expect, his declaration creates significant problems in the locker room. Emerging from the shower to find a naked Darren, Toddy Koovitz (Carl Lundstedt) complains, “So now I gotta go around worrying that every time I’m naked or dressed or whatever you’re checking out my ass.” Because, of course, every gay man immediately wants to sleep with every male he sees. But Darren always gives better than he gets, telling Toddy, “Why’re ya lookin’ at it’s the question.” As the quippy Kippy noted earlier, after Darren confirmed, “I don’t want to fuck any of you,” he responded, “It’s not about that, Darren. It’s about us wanting to fuck you.”

When their ace pitcher, Takeshi Kawabata (Julian Cihi), slumps, they call up hard-throwing closer Shane Mungitt (Michael Oberholtzer) from Double A, who leads them back on track until he opens his mouth one day and spews forth bigoted remarks that would make even former Braves reliever John Rocker wince.

The tension in the locker room grows to epic proportions as no one can have a civil conversation, exacerbated by Kawabata’s, Martinez’s (Hiram Delgado), and Rodriguez’s (Eduardo Ramos) inability to speak English, a sports trope that enrages more conservative fans who believe that if you play ball in America, you need to speak the language — and the same fans are likely to have problems with a gay player.

“We were Men,” Kippy slyly philosophizes to his teammates. “This meant we could be girlish. We could pat fannies, snap towels; hug. Now . . . What do we do with our stray homosexual impulses?” After not-too-bright new catcher Jason Chenier (Tyler Lansing Weaks) asks if he was talking specifically to him and then turns red out of embarrassment because of the topic, Kippy adds, “We’ve lost a kind of paradise. We see that we are naked.” It’s as if they have taken a bite out of that apple and are being cast out of the garden.

Meanwhile, Darren keeps meeting with his new business manager, Mason Marzac (Jesse Tyler Ferguson), a gay accountant who at first knows nothing about baseball except that Darren is also gay, which makes him fall in love with the sport and worship his client. “A couple of weeks earlier I would have barely recognized the name! Then the announcement — that incredible act of elective heroism — and it was as if I’d known him my whole life — as if he’d been something latent in my subconscious.”

As the Empires prepare for a big game against the club that Darren’s best friend, Davey Battle (Brandon J. Dirden), is on, the world around Darren and the Empires turns into a lot more than just “the mess” Kippy alluded to at the start of the show.

Shane Mungitt (Michael Oberholtzer) has a rude awakening in store in Broadway revival of Richard Greenberg play (photo by Joan Marcus)

Take Me Out is an exceptional drama that uses baseball as an apt analogy for the state of the country. “I have come (with no little excitement) to understand that baseball is a perfect metaphor for hope in a Democratic society,” Mason says. “It has to do with the rules of play. It has to do with the mode of enforcement of these rules. It has to do with certain nuances and grace notes of the game. . . . Everyone is given exactly the same chance. . . . And baseball is better than Democracy — or at least than Democracy as it’s practiced in this country — because unlike Democracy, baseball acknowledges loss.”

In the history of the four major sports leagues, only one NBA player and one NFL player have revealed they were gay and kept playing: Brooklyn Nets center Jason Paul Collins in 2013 and current LA Raiders defensive end Carl Nassib in 2021. The revelation that a baseball superstar in his prime is gay would be a major deal today, but in the twenty years since Take Me Out premiered at the Public, no MLB player and only one umpire, Dale Scott, has come out and stayed on the diamond. Greenberg’s (The Assembled Parties, Three Days of Rain, The Perplexed) play feels fresh and alive in 2022, like it could have been written yesterday, save for the lack of cellphones onstage (and, thanks to strict rules, in the audience as well).

The two-hour play (plus intermission) moves much faster and more smoothly than baseball games. Ellis (On the 20th Century, The Elephant Man) is a superb manager, guiding the actors through David Rockwell’s splendid sets, which range from the ballpark and the locker room to a lounge and actual showers. Linda Cho’s costumes, primarily baseball uniforms, spend nearly as much time off the actors as on. (The nudity is the reason audience members must have their phones sealed in a Yondr pouch that the staff will open for you during intermission and then upon exiting.)

In their Broadway debuts, Adams (Suits, Equivocation) displays an easygoing, likable charm as Kippy, earning the audience’s devoted attention from his very first words, while Williams (Grey’s Anatomy, The Sandbox) shows off his numerous tools as the secretive hotshot Darren. (He will reprise the role in an upcoming television series, according to Deadline.) Dirden (Skeleton Crew, Jitney) excels in his supporting role, like a solid, dependable DH who always gets good wood on the ball and comes through in the clutch.

But the MVP might just be Ferguson (Modern Family, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee), who knocks it out of the park every chance he gets. Mason is the glue that holds it all together, the only one who seems to really understand Darren as both a wealthy athlete and a gay man. Ferguson’s growing enthusiasm is infectious, spreading throughout the theater; he’s just the kind of person every locker room needs.

SARAH JONES: SELL/BUY/DATE

New York Live Arts
219 West 19th St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
September 12-15 & 18-21, $15-$50, 7:30
212-924-0077
newyorklivearts.org
www.sarahjonesonline.com

Following its 2016 Manhattan Theater Club presentation, Sarah Jones’s Sell/Buy/Date is back in the city for an encore engagement at New York Live Arts. Below is an update of twi-ny’s original review, with relevant information added.

In 2006, British playwright and actress Sarah Jones won a Special Tony Award (and an earlier Obie) for her one-woman show Bridge and Tunnel, in which she played multiple characters, shining a light on New York City’s immigrant population. It took a decade, but she returned three years ago with her follow-up, another one-woman multiple-identity tour de force, Sell/Buy/Date, which revives some characters from her previous works while adding new ones; the production is now back by popular demand, running at New York Live Arts September 12-15 and 18-21. It’s late-twenty-first-century America, and Dr. Serene Campbell is teaching a class on the sex business, leading her students through a series of BERT modules, bio-empathetic resonant technology that dates back to 2017. Using this imaginary technology like oral histories, she tells her students, “We will be experiencing different bodies, different ages, what were then called ‘races’ or ‘ethnic groups,’ as you’ll remember from Unit One, and along the gender continuum, we’ll be encountering males as well as females — it was quite binary at that time. Remember, these are Personal History modules — the focus today is on feeling each person’s experience, so, before we begin, how many people have your emotional shunts engaged?”

She then proceeds to embody seventeen characters interviewed throughout the decades about the commercial sex trade, examining the reaction in the recent past to prostitution, pornography, and exotic dancing. “Chronologically advanced” Jewish bubbe Lorraine L. talks about trying to enhance her sexual relationship with her husband by searching for porn on the internet. Post–Valley Girl Bella, named after feminist activist Bella Abzug, is a “sex work studies major, minoring in social media with a concentration on notable YouTube memes” who cohosts “the biweekly pole-dancing party . . . called ‘Don’t Get All Pole-emical.” Jamaican No Fakin’ is a Caribbean prostitute at a sex workers rally who is carrying an unseen sign that says “No Justice, No Piece.” She defends what she does, noting, “You find me somebody who don’t hate some part of their job. There’s a lotta things I hate about doing this, but the money is not one of them.” And New York Domini-Rican Nereida angrily declares, “It just makes me so sick that we are all supposed to care about the same human rights, at least, that’s why we’re all here for this Feminist Plenary, but I mean, if one more of these so called ‘sex work advocates’ calls me anti-sex, I swear to god. I’m gonna be, like, first of all, I love sex. Sex is amazing. But what you are having is not sex.”

Dr. Campbell also calls up interviews of members of the male species as she walks around Dane Laffrey’s futuristic set, a spare, antiseptic classroom with a podium, a file cabinet, a floor sparsely outlined with lights, and a projection screen at the back. “Yes, of course men were having sex as well, but you’ll remember from the reading, what were male sluts called?” she asks the class. “Very good, they were called ‘men.’” Among the male characters in the show are frat boy and Grand Theft Auto fan Andrew “AV” Vanderbeek, Russian raunchpreneur Sergei Ledinov, Los Angeles pimp Cookie Chris (“Even with what I was doing, you know, exploiting women and whatnot, I had a rep for being real sweet about it”), and Native American comedian Gary (“I’m usually most popular on college campuses, whenever they wanna do their Diversity Day or Hey, We’re Not All White week”). But as much as the treatment of women and sex workers needs to change, not all change turns out to be progress.

Sarah Jones explores the history of the (photo © Joan Marcus 2016)

Jones (The Foundation, Surface Transit), who was born in Baltimore and raised in Boston, DC, and Queens in a multiracial family, has created a fascinating future devoid of organized religion, bachelor parties, unpaid internships, personal security guards, violent video games, a livable New Jersey, and mobile phones, where people can travel freely between countries and there is no discrimination of any kind. “They did not believe one has an automatic right to live equally,” Dr. Campbell says about people from the past. It’s a potent point, especially given the vitriol present in this year’s lurid presidential election campaign. In researching Sell/Buy/Date, Jones met with sex workers around the world, visiting Sweden, Germany, Korea, India, Las Vegas, France, Ireland, Scotland, the Netherlands, and the Dominican Republican, helping her create believable men and women who share a wide range of thoughts about commercial sex. She smartly captures the humanity in the industry, even if it is a bit lighthearted at times for such a serious topic, while Drama Desk–nominated director Carolyn Cantor (Fly by Night, Indian Summer) ably uses sound (by Bray Poor) and light (by Eric Southern) to smoothly transition between time periods. However, a subplot involving Dr. Campbell’s mother’s identity as a “survivor” feels like a forced tribute to those who have paved the way for gender equality. Jones, who once declared, “The revolution will not happen between these thighs” (the late Gil Scott-Heron was a family friend), gives a superb performance, instantly taking control of the audience; she has a natural confidence as a teacher that is intoxicating. Sell/Buy/Date offers a lively and timely look at a controversial subject that has continued to raise eyebrows throughout the centuries.

ANNA ZIEGLER: LOVE, ACTUALLY

Tom (Joshua Boone) and Amber (Alexandra Socha) cannot quite agree what happened one night in Actually (photo © Matthew Murphy)

ACTUALLY
Manhattan Theatre Club
New York City Center: The Studio at Stage II
Tuesday – Sunday through December 10, $30
212-581-1212
manhattantheatreclub.com
actuallyplay.com

Watching a talky play with relatively few characters, say, only two or four, can be like watching a tennis match. When the writing and directing is exceptional, it’s like seeing a championship bout between Nadal and Federer, Borg and McEnroe, Evert and Navratilova, your head going back and forth as the shifting dialogue consists of aces, expert passing shots, exciting net play, and thrilling overhead smashes. Of course, just as every play is not going to qualify for award status, not every tennis match is going to be memorable, something I can vouch for, having attended the U.S. Open for more than twenty years. Brooklyn-born playwright Anna Ziegler serves up both ends of the spectrum with two current off-Broadway shows, Actually and The Last Match, both of which involve the characters breaking the fourth wall and speaking directly to the audience, with very different results. The Manhattan Theatre Club production of Actually, continuing at City Center’s Stage II through December 10, is a timely, intense look at what actually happened the night two Princeton freshmen, Tom (Joshua Boone) and Amber (Alexandra Socha), hooked up at a party. While Tom believed their coupling was completely consensual, Amber thinks it turned into rape and reported it to the university.

Alexandra Socha and Joshua Boone star in gripping play by Anna Zielger

Tom is a black classical pianist who says, “In some ways, I’ve been on trial my entire life.” Amber is white and Jewish, a mediocre squash player who explains, “We all fill some stupid niche, which reduces us to something much less than what we are, but that’s the way it goes.” The play begins with them playing the game Two Truths and a Lie; Tom is reluctant, but Amber demands he participate if he wants to sleep with her. For ninety taut minutes, they reenact events from that night and share their thoughts with the audience, discussing consent, race, religion, Title IX, gender, and other key topics, turning viewers into a kind of jury of public opinion. When Amber says that her default state is “this zone of wanting something and not wanting it at the same time,” it really hits home, getting to the core of how so many people feel. Boone (Holler If You Hear Me, Mother Courage and Her Children) and Socha (Spring Awakening, Fun Home) are outstanding caught up in a long deuce, each one taking, then losing, the advantage as they volley back and forth. Ziegler’s (Photograph 51, Boy) dialogue is sharp and focused, while Obie winner Lileana Blain-Cruz (Pipeline, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World) directs with pinpoint accuracy on Adam Rigg’s spare set. Actually is no mere Bobby Riggs vs. Billie Jean King, he said / she said contest; it is a powerful exploration of possible sexual misconduct in an age when Americans learn more and more about the issue every day, as more and more predators are revealed.

The Last Match takes place during the semifinals of the U.S. Open (photo by Joan Marcus)

THE LAST MATCH
Laura Pels Theatre
Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre
111 West 46th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 23, $79
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org

Unfortunately, the Roundabout production of The Last Match, running at the Laura Pels Theatre through December 23, is not nearly as incisive and gripping as Actually. It’s the semifinals at the U.S. Open, and six-time champion Tim Porter (Wilson Bethel), who might be on the downside of his career at the tender age of thirty-four, is playing younger up-and-comer Sergei Sergeyev (Alex Mickiewicz), a hotheaded Russian who wants to dethrone the even-tempered American star and crowd favorite. They serve and volley on Tim Mackabee’s tennis court set, with the familiar blue, white, and green colors of the Open and scoreboards on either side, while Bray Poor’s audio design includes the sound of imaginary swinging rackets striking imaginary yellow balls. In between and during points, Tim and Sergei argue with each other in ways that don’t feel real during a live match; share their thoughts directly with the audience; and reenact scenes from their past, primarily Tim’s relationship with fellow tennis player Mallory (Zoë Winters) as they marry and try to have a baby, and Sergei’s courtship of the fiery Galina (Natalia Payne). The women cheer their partners on from the sides of the stage as the men fight it out. But whereas Amber and Tom in Actually were complex characters who had their charms along with their shortcomings, both gaining the audience’s sympathy at different times, only Mallory is able to elicit much catharsis in The Last Match.

Tim Porter (Wilson Bethel) and Sergei Sergeyev (Alex Mickiewicz) battle it out on court and off in Anna Ziegler play (photo by Joan Marcus)

“You don’t want people to know you’re an asshole. But anyone who does this sport at this level is gigantic asshole of worst gigantic asshole variety,” Sergei says early on, adding, “You have to care only for yourself.” It’s hard to care about Sergei, Galina, and Tim, who are self-obsessed; Ziegler (A Delicate Ship, The Wanderers) and director Gaye Taylor Upchurch (Animal, The Year of Magical Thinking) give them back stories that don’t help humanize them but turn each one into more of a caricature. While Actually made smart, subtle references to societal issues and did not proclaim any grand statements about who was right, The Last Match is melodramatic and obvious, like a love match in tennis. “So many game points, on my racquet,” Sergei says. “This should be my game so many times over. I have earned it! But life does not actually work that way. You actually have to win.” But you’re likely to decide who you want to win from the very start, rendering the competition relatively mute. “Some people don’t even love their babies right away so it’s just relentless and boring. And we already have tennis for that, right?” Mallory asks Tim, who replies. “Well, I don’t find tennis boring.” But any tennis match, like any sporting event, can be relentless and boring. Just like any play.

SELL / BUY / DATE

Manhattan Theatre Club
New York City Center: The Studio at Stage II
Tuesday – Sunday through December 3, $30 through October 30, $75 after
212-581-1212
manhattantheatreclub.com
www.nycitycenter.org

Ten years ago, British playwright and actress Sarah Jones won a Special Tony Award (and an earlier Obie) for her one-woman show Bridge and Tunnel, in which she played multiple characters, shining a light on New York City’s immigrant population. It took a decade, but she is now back with her follow-up, another one-woman multiple-identity tour de force, Sell/Buy/Date, which revives some characters from her previous works while adding new ones. It’s late-twenty-first-century America, and Dr. Serene Campbell is teaching a class on the sex business, leading her students through a series of BERT modules, bio-empathetic resonant technology that dates back to 2017. Using this imaginary technology like oral histories, she tells her students, “We will be experiencing different bodies, different ages, what were then called ‘races’ or ‘ethnic groups,’ as you’ll remember from Unit One, and along the gender continuum, we’ll be encountering males as well as females — it was quite binary at that time. Remember, these are Personal History modules — the focus today is on feeling each person’s experience, so, before we begin, how many people have your emotional shunts engaged?” She then proceeds to embody seventeen characters interviewed throughout the decades about the commercial sex trade, examining the reaction in the recent past to prostitution, pornography, and exotic dancing. “Chronologically advanced” Jewish bubbe Lorraine L. talks about trying to enhance her sexual relationship with her husband by searching for porn on the internet. Post–Valley Girl Bella, named after feminist activist Bella Abzug, is a “sex work studies major, minoring in social media with a concentration on notable YouTube memes” who cohosts “the biweekly pole-dancing party . . . called ‘Don’t Get All Pole-emical.” Jamaican No Fakin’ is a Caribbean prostitute at a sex workers rally who is carrying an unseen sign that says “No Justice, No Piece.” She defends what she does, noting, “You find me somebody who don’t hate some part of their job. There’s a lotta things I hate about doing this, but the money is not one of them.” And New York Domini-Rican Nereida angrily declares, “It just makes me so sick that we are all supposed to care about the same human rights, at least, that’s why we’re all here for this Feminist Plenary, but I mean, if one more of these so called ‘sex work advocates’ calls me anti-sex, I swear to god. I’m gonna be, like, first of all, I love sex. Sex is amazing. But what you are having is not sex.”

Sarah Jones explores a controversial aspect of human sexuality in Manhattan Theatre Club production at City Center (photo © Joan Marcus 2016)

Jones, who was born in Baltimore and raised in Boston, DC, and Queens in a multiracial family, has created a fascinating future devoid of organized religion, bachelor parties, unpaid internships, personal security guards, violent video games, a livable New Jersey, and mobile phones, where people can travel freely between countries and there is no discrimination of any kind. “They did not believe one has an automatic right to live equally,” Dr. Campbell says about people from the past. It’s a potent point, especially given the vitriol present in this year’s lurid presidential election campaign. In researching Sell/Buy/Date, Jones met with sex workers around the world, visiting Sweden, Germany, Korea, India, Las Vegas, France, Ireland, Scotland, the Netherlands, and the Dominican Republican, helping her create believable men and women who share a wide range of thoughts about commercial sex. She smartly captures the humanity in the industry, even if it is a bit lighthearted at times for such a serious topic, while Drama Desk–nominated director Carolyn Cantor (Fly by Night) ably uses sound (by Bray Poor) and light (by Eric Southern) to smoothly transition between time periods. However, a subplot involving Dr. Campbell’s mother’s identity as a “survivor” feels like a forced tribute to those who have paved the way for gender equality. Jones, who once declared, “The revolution will not happen between these thighs” (the late Gil Scott-Heron was a family friend), gives a superb performance, instantly taking control of the audience at the intimate and comfortable Studio at Stage II at New York City Center; she has a natural confidence as a teacher that is intoxicating. Part of the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Harold and Mimi Steinberg New Play Series, Sell/Buy/Date offers a lively and timely look at a controversial subject that has continued to raise eyebrows throughout the centuries.