Ensemble Studio Theatre | This Week in New York

Dr. Wendell Barnes (Paul Niebanck) bonds with Samantha (Bobby Steggert) in Anna Ziegler’s BOY (photo by Carol Rosegg)

The Clurman Theatre at Theatre Row
410 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 9, $62.50
www.keencompany.org
www.ensemblestudiotheatre.org

Award-winning playwright Anna Ziegler takes a unique and imaginative approach to the timely issue of gender identity in the expertly written, inventively staged drama Boy. A joint production of Keen Company and Ensemble Studio Theatre, Boy was inspired by the real-life case of David Reimer as well as the birth of Ziegler’s first child. Bobby Steggert stars as Adam/Samantha, a twin born in Iowa in 1967. Shortly after a botched, unnecessary circumcision accidentally sears off his penis when he is eight months old, his mother, Trudy (Heidi Armbruster), and father, Doug (Ted Koch), seek out the help of eminent physician Wendell Barnes (Paul Niebanck), a doctor in the relatively new field of gender reassignment. “Sam will never lead a normal life. He will never be a father. He will never be normal,” Doug opines in a letter to Dr. Barnes, while Trudy adds, “We saw you on that program and you said that we are blank slates at birth. You said we are shaped by society and not biology.” Dr. Barnes, who is eager to treat the boy, convinces the parents that it is best for the child to be raised as a girl, receiving hormone shots and ultimately an operation to give her a vagina, but he insists that she must never find out that she was born with male genitalia. The play shifts back and forth between various years from 1968 to 1989 as Samantha learns about great literature from Dr. Barnes and Adam falls for a single working mother, Jenny (Rebecca Rittenhouse). Delivering a lecture in 1977, Dr. Barnes explains, “How do we become who we are? Is it a process that takes place entirely within the dark mysteries of the womb, so we emerge fully formed, our character, our future set? Or do we build ourselves, brick by brick, ‘sufficient to have stood though free to fall’? Do we make our house or do we simply inhabit it?” But as Boy shows, there are no easy answers to those questions, whether it’s 1968, 1977, 1989, or today, when such topics as nature vs. nurture and being born a certain way are still rife with controversy.

Jenny (Rebecca Rittenhouse) and Adam (Bobby Steggert) consider a relationship in BOY (photo by Carol Rosegg)

No matter the age, Adam/Samantha wears the same outfit in every scene, reaffirming that what matters is on the inside. Steggert (Mothers & Sons, Ragtime) does a marvelous job of depicting how uncomfortable Adam/Samantha is in his/her own skin, displaying a jittery awkwardness that keeps the audience on edge. Ziegler (The Last Match, A Delicate Ship) fills the play with a wide array of literary and pop-culture references, but each one has a critical connection to the story, from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre to Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future 2 and Marlo Thomas’s Free to Be You and Me. Even when Adam imitates Elmer Fudd, saying, “Shh . . . Be vewwy, vewwy quiet . . . I’m hunting wabbits!,” it relates to Jenny’s first appearance onstage, in a bunny costume at a Halloween party, where Adam quite adamantly tells her that he is not Frankenstein but Frankenstein’s monster. “Frankenstein was the guy who made the monster. I’m just the monster,” he points out. The cast is uniformly excellent, with Armbruster (Time Stands Still, Disgraced) and Koch (The Pillowman, Abundance) bringing just the right confusion to the parents, while Niebanck (A Walk in the Woods, Blood and Gifts) is quietly effective as the doctor who befriends Samantha but also stands to gain fame from their association. And Rittenhouse (The Commons of Pensacola) makes Jenny a kind of onstage representative of the audience, not quite understanding all of what is happening but compelled to find out more about Adam. Evoking such works as John Cameron Mitchell’s Tony-winning Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Emily Bentley Solomon’s award-winning adaptation of Daphne Scholinski’s memoir The Last Time I Wore a Dress, Boy also investigates doctors and parents playing god, which continues as science makes leaps and bounds in genetics. Sandra Goldmark’s living-room set features a close-but-not-exact duplicate of the furniture upside down on the walls and ceiling, as if Adam/Samantha is caught between two worlds, unable to settle into his/her place. Director Linsay Firman (Lucas Hnath’s Isaac’s Eye, Ziegler’s Photograph 51) cleverly navigates through the years, dealing with complex issues concerning traditional gender roles in a gentle, tender manner that threatens to explode at any moment. About halfway through the play, Jenny worries that Adam, who named himself after the first man on earth, is just like all the other men she’s met in her life. “I’m not like them,” he insists. No, he most certainly isn’t.

Mel (Darcy Fowler) and Djuna (Dylan Dawson) face the end of the world in postapocalyptic future (photo by Gerry Goodstein)

Ensemble Studio Theatre
549 West 52nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Wednesday – Saturday through March 21, $20-$25, 7:00
www.ensemblestudiotheatre.org

Playwright Chiara Atik takes audiences on a sensational romantic journey through time, from a postapocalyptic Earth to the Garden of Eden, in Five Times in One Night, one of the most thoroughly entertaining, original, and enjoyable shows I’ve seen on the subject of love in a long time. Everything about the production, part of Ensemble Studio Theatre’s Obie-winning EST/Youngblood program for playwrights under thirty, is just right, beginning with the old-fashioned freight elevator — outfitted with a bar — that brings you up to the intimate sixth-floor black-box space, where you can choose to sit on comfy couches and love seats that flank three sides of the “stage” or on folding chairs on a platform in the back. Actors Dylan Dawson and Darcy Fowler then travel across millennia in five vignettes in which their characters explore sex, love, and procreation, each story raising intriguing questions with intelligence and plenty of humor. “I’m happy! I’m happy with it. I thought this was fun! You had fun! I had fun!” Laura tells Tim in the third episode. “I fucking hate when we have to like. Have a conversation about it. Like that is so. Like it’s not sexy to talk about it, like, we don’t need to do a play by play.” But Atik and director R. J. Tolan prove that talking about it is thoroughly fun and sexy in this eighty-minute treatise on the rather complicated relationship between heterosexual men and women through the ages.

Laura (Darcy Fowler) and Tim (Dylan Dawson) examine their sex life in perhaps too much detail in FIVE TIMES IN ONE NIGHT (photo by Gerry Goodstein)

Five Times in One Night begins in 2119, as Djuna proposes that he and Mel have sex in order to try to repopulate the planet following a nuclear holocaust, but she is not so eager, a clever riff on the old adage, “I wouldn’t have sex with you if you were the last man on Earth.” In this case, Djuna is the last man on Earth, but Mel just isn’t in the mood. The time then shifts to “last week,” as Kacy and Stephen discuss an unexpected situation that has them on completely opposite sides. Next, in 1106, Heloise and Abelard exchange letters that begin as student and teacher, respectively, but lead to something more in this playful retelling of the true story of nun Héloïse d’Argenteuil and philosopher Peter Abelard. Then comes Laura and Tim, “next week,” as they delve into some hard truths about themselves after having made love. Atik saves the best for last, as a naked Adam and Eve discover themselves, and each other’s bodies, at the birth of the world. The five scenes range from the absurdist (2119) to the sublime (next week), from the serious (last week) to the hysterical (Garden of Eden), with each one sharing a little bit from all the others, resulting in ultra-smooth transitions that keep the narrative moving effortlessly despite the major shifts in era. At the end of each vignette, Dawson and Fowler go to their respective open dressing areas, where the audience can watch them change into costumes for their next pas de deux. Fowler can be seen practically bouncing with delight between scenes, her energy and charm spreading cheer and goodwill throughout the theater, while Dawson is clearly having a ball as well. Despite relatively minimal changes, Fowler and Dawson, especially the latter, are sometimes nearly unrecognizable from scene to scene, as each of the five characters they each play are very different, but they imbue them all with impressive originality; part of the fun is following these changes, watching how their performances shift as time goes back and forth, each iteration possessing unique characteristics. The small, spare set changes ever so slightly as well, with clever, resourceful uses of a fold-out couch and other furniture. The staging and acting are exceptional, but what makes Five Times in One Night really special is Atik’s perceptive, insightful dialogue, which handles a bevy of difficult, complex, at times controversial subjects with humor and grace, dodging and weaving beautifully before delivering knockout blows, preferring honesty and subtlety to cliché and status quo in this ultimate centuries-long battle of the sexes. It all comes together seamlessly in an unforgettable, wholly genuine evening of absorbing theater.