Tag Archives: Erica Schmidt

ORPHEUS DESCENDING

Valentine Xavier (Pico Alexander) and Lady Torrance (Maggie Siff) are lost in the dark in Orpheus Descending (photo by Gerry Goodstein)

ORPHEUS DESCENDING
Theatre for a New Audience, Polonsky Shakespeare Center
262 Ashland Pl. between Lafayette Ave. & Fulton St.
Tuesday – Sunday through August 6, $97
866-811-4111
www.tfana.org

Imagine an entire season of a nighttime soap opera, set in the south in the 1950s, mercilessly squeezed into two and a half uncomfortable hours and you have Theatre for a New Audience’s adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s Orpheus Descending, which opened Tuesday night at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center.

A rewrite of 1940’s Battle of Angels and loosely based on the Greek legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, Orpheus Descending debuted on Broadway in 1957, arriving during Williams’s most fertile period, the seventeen years that brought the world The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Rose Tattoo, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer, Sweet Bird of Youth, and The Night of the Iguana. It ran for only sixty-eight performances and was revived on Broadway by Peter Hall in 1989; otherwise, it has been unseen onstage in New York City, with good reason: It’s a hot mess, particularly in a second act that deteriorates by the minute, and there’s nothing that talented director Erica Schmidt can do to save it.

The play takes place in the Torrance Mercantile Store in a small southern town in the 1950s. The dry goods shop is run by Lady Torrance (Maggie Siff), daughter of an Italian immigrant, a woman thoroughly disappointed with life, married to Jabe Torrance (Michael Cullen), an obstinate, much older racist who seems to be at death’s door. The show opens as Jake is returning from a Memphis hospital with his unpleasant caretaker, Nurse Porter (Fiana Tóibín). Lady’s tragic back story unspools immediately: Her Italian immigrant father died when his wine garden was burned to the ground by the Klan for serving Black customers. In his memory, Lady is building a confectionery adjoined to the store, trying to bring at least some sweetness into her sour existence.

The town is all abuzz when a handsome stranger, Valentine Xavier (Pico Alexander), mysteriously arrives, wearing a snakeskin jacket and carrying an acoustic guitar. The local gossips, Eva Temple (Kate Skinner), Sister Temple (Prudence Wright Holmes), Dolly Hamma (Molly Kate Babos), and Beulah Binnings (Laura Heisler), are all atwitter about Val, serving as a kind of judgmental Greek chorus. Carol Cutrere (Julia McDermott), a sad, oversexed twenty-seven-year-old hellraiser with too much mascara who walks around barefoot in a trench coat and has been banned from town, takes an immediate interest in Val, who asks Carol why she makes such a spectacle of herself. “I’m an exhibitionist!” she declares. “I want to be noticed, seen, heard, felt! I want them to know I’m alive! Don’t you want them to know you’re alive?” Her version of being alive mainly consists of driving up and down the local highway drinking and dancing in every juke joint along the way.

David Cutrere (James Waterston) and Lady Torrance (Maggie Siff) rehash the past in rare Tennessee Williams revival (photo by Gerry Goodstein)

Lady, who once upon a time was in love with Carol’s brother, David (James Waterston), is desperate to be free, in some ways jealous of Carol. When Val tells her about a type of bird that has no legs and so instead must remain perpetually in the air, never touching the ground, Lady is intrigued, as if there is a heaven out there where she can escape her hell on earth. “I don’t think nothing living has ever been that free, not even nearly,” she says.

Vee Talbott (Ana Reeder), the wife of the sheriff (Brian Keane), knows Val is alive, cuddling up to him and showing him her paintings, abstract religious works based on her visions. “I paint a thing how I feel it instead of always the way it actually is. Appearances are misleading, nothing is what it looks like to the eyes. You got to have — vision — to see!” she explains. But nobody in this community can see beyond what they already know.

The more Jabe abuses Lady — upstairs in his room, he often pounds the floor with his cane three times, the sound echoing like a missive from the devil — the more she falls for Val, setting up a space in the store where he can secretly sleep over. Meanwhile, Jabe’s henchmen, Dog Hamma (Matt DeAngelis) and Pee Wee Binnings (Gene Gillette), are ready to do his bidding, eagerly anticipating being able to use their fists and guns. They get their chance in a wildly uneven and incredulous finale that is reimagined by Schmidt, straying from the original with reckless abandon. Oh, and before I forget, and I wish I could forget, there is also a clown (DeAngelis), who is clearly the work of a demon, and a conjurer known as Uncle Pleasant (Dathan B. Williams), who appears from, well, I have no idea.

“Curiosity is a human instinct,” Beulah says at one point, and that’s essentially what this production of Orpheus Descending is, a curiosity. Schmidt has previously directed the unique and unforgettable Shakespeare adaptation Mac Beth for Red Bull, an uneven musical version of Cyrano and the powerful coming-of-age drama All the Fine Boys for the New Group, and the underappreciated and underseen Lucy for Audible. In each of those shows, she displayed a daring feel for narrative, willing to challenge herself and the audience, but her efforts go astray with Orpheus Descending, which is not among Williams’s finest.

Julia McDermott steals the show as Carol Cutrerein TFANA (photo by Gerry Goodstein)

As opposed to the legless bird flying free, the play never gets off the ground. Amy Rubin’s claustrophobic two-floor set features a ceiling and walls that can barely contain the cast; the large, empty spaces to the right and left apparently alternate between the confectionery and Val’s sleeping quarters and places for some actors to sit while waiting to reenter the scene. In addition, the entrances to these areas are inconsistent, with characters sometimes walking through a door and other times around it in what seems like an impossible geography.

The play might not have a great history, but it has attracted marvelous casts. Cliff Robertson was Val, Maureen Stapleton was Lady, and Lois Smith was Carol in its 1957 Broadway bow; Marlon Brando was Val, Anna Magnani Lady, and Joanne Woodward Carol in Sidney Lumet’s 1960 film version, The Fugitive Kind; and Kevin Anderson was Val, Vanessa Redgrave Lady, and Anne Twomey Carol in the 1989 Broadway revival.

At TFANA, only McDermott (Heroes of the Fourth Turning, Epiphany) and Reeder (In the Blood, Sight Unseen) distinguish themselves, the former portraying Carol with a dark sadness, the latter adding an innate, innocent charm to Vee. Alexander (The Portuguese Kid, Punk Rock) is too understated as Val, who barely plays his guitar, while Siff (Billions, Curse of the Starving Class) ably runs the gamut of emotions Lady goes through, but even as the text repeatedly makes her Italian heritage clear, the actress produces an Eastern European accent that befuddles the audience with its incongruity.

Throughout the play, Williams refers to one of his favorite topics, corruption. “I lived in corruption but I’m not corrupted,” Val says. Everyone in Orpheus Descending lives in corruption but most of them are not corrupted as they try to survive in a bardo between heaven and hell. Unfortunately, this version of the story is stuck in the bardo as well; for an irresistible show about Orpheus and Eurydice, you’re much better off heading over to Hadestown at the Walter Kerr on Broadway.

LUCY

Ashling (Lynn Collins) and Mary (Brooke Bloom) share a fun moment in Lucy (photo by Joan Marcus)

LUCY
Audible Theater’s Minetta Lane Theatre
18 Minetta Lane between Sixth Ave. and MacDougal St.
Monday – Saturday through February 25, $57-$97
www.audible.com

Writer-director Erica Schmidt’s latest work, Lucy, is one of the best plays of the season, a gorgeously rendered story about a single mother, a nanny, and a young girl. Her Mac Beth, a stirring adaptation of the Shakespeare classic reimagined with an all-female cast set at a girls school, was one of the best productions of 2019, and equally feminist. Schmidt now moves from the bloody battles of medieval Scotland to twenty-first-century upscale urban domesticity, but Lucy nevertheless references classic themes.

The nanny is a staple of literature, theater, and film, from Mary Poppins, Mrs. Doubtfire, Maria Reiner (The Sound of Music), and Becky Sharp to Nanny McPhee, Nanny Schuester (The Nanny Diaries), Anna Leonowens (The King and I), and Mrs. Baylock (The Omen). In the 1965 Hammer horror flick The Nanny, Bette Davis starred as the thoroughly wicked title character who remains unnamed; just calling her Nanny is frightening enough.

Lucy, which continues through February 25 at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre, opens with pregnant fortysomething Mary (Brooke Bloom) interviewing Ashling (Lynn Collins) to take care of Mary’s six-year-old daughter, Lucy (Charlotte Surak), and soon-to-be-born son, Max. Mary is desperate; she’s a radiologist with a complicated work schedule and is due to give birth in a week. Mary wants to find the right fit, but she overlooks a few possible warning signs during her meeting with Ashling. Both the character and the audience do a double take at several things Ashling says, but nothing seems too ominous.

“I get it. You need a coparent,” Ashling declares after Mary describes her hours. “Someone who is here when you’re at work.” Mary responds, “Who I pay to be here. A nanny,” asserting that she is the mother.

Mary hires Ashling — who is fifty-eight but looks at least two decades younger, and acts even younger than that — and at first everything appears to be great. The nanny goes above and beyond the call of duty, especially with Lucy, who immediately adores her. At one point Ashling is swinging Lucy around as they both sing to Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero,” belting out, “I should not be left to my own devices / They come with prices and vices / I end up in crisis (tale as old as time) / I wake up screaming from dreaming / One day I’ll watch as you’re leaving / ’Cause you got tired of my scheming / (For the last time) / It’s me, hi / I’m the problem, it’s me / At teatime, everybody agrees / I’ll stare directly at the sun, but never in the mirror / It must be exhausting always rooting for the anti-hero.”

Mary (Brooke Bloom) watches as Ashling (Lynn Collins) and Lucy (Charlotte Surak) dance to Taylor Swift (photo by Joan Marcus)

As time passes, there are more cracks in the mirror as Mary begins noticing some curious behavior by Ashling, who has a feasible explanation for everything. Is Ashling gaslighting Mary? Is Mary so overworked and stressed that her imagination is getting the best of her? It all comes to a head, leading to an utterly thrilling finale.

Lucy takes place in Mary’s kitchen/dining room/living room, with shelves filled with books, cabinets with dishes and bottles of wine, and a comfy couch and chair. There is no television anywhere — “I don’t do screens,” Mary tells Ashling. Mary’s bedroom is off stage right, while a hallway at the center back leads to Lucy’s and Max’s rooms. (The clean, mostly white, instantly Instagrammable set is by Amy Rubin.) Mary primarily wears tastefully minimal but obviously expensive black and cream outfits, while the tattooed Ashling is draped in layers of swirly boho prints, every arm and finger sporting inexpensive arty silver jewelry, courtesy costume designer Kaye Voyce.

The creepier the plot gets, the more Cha See’s lighting casts long, eerie shadows, while Justin Ellington’s sound includes plenty of crying and screaming.

Mary (Brooke Bloom) and Ashling (Lynn Collins) face off in Audible production at the Minetta Lane (photo by Joan Marcus)

Schmidt (Cyrano, All the Fine Boys) has her finger on the pulse of the relationships between Ashling and Mary, Mary and Lucy, and Lucy and Ashling, letting each play out in its own way. The underlying fear Mary has about having hired the wrong nanny is palpable; at least at the start, most mothers are terrified of leaving their children with a complete stranger, references or not.

Bloom (Everybody, Cloud Nine) embodies that fear, evoking the young mother in Rosemary’s Baby, who thinks the devil is after her infant. Collins (Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice) exquisitely captures the many mysteries of Ashling, who harbors plenty of secrets. Schmidt exploits our misgivings by imbuing Ashling with some tantalizing witchlike tendencies. When Mary asks her what she likes most about child care, Ashling proclaims, “It keeps me young!” and it’s an easy leap to the age-old idea that she is somehow sucking the youth from her charges. (Mary responds, “That’s funny. My daughter is definitely making me old. Fast.”)

When Mary asks if she ever wanted her own kids, Ashling replies, “I have kids!” There’s also a perfume that could be a magic potion, a curious substance around Max’s crib, and other subtle touches that make us question whether Ashling is really up to something or if it’s Mary’s paranoia. Mary might be a radiologist who peers inside people’s bodies, but that doesn’t mean she can assess what’s going on in Ashling’s head.

Most of Schmidt’s work has a strong feminist undercurrent, and Lucy is no exception, with Mary a doctor who cannot easily afford a nanny and who gets only four weeks’ maternity leave, which she has chosen not to fight in order to keep her job.

Finally, it’s intriguing that the play is named after the six-year-old girl, who is splendidly portrayed by Surak (Waitress) but has the least amount of stage time. It’s as if Schmidt is telling us that Lucy is the future while also hearkening back to the first fossil skeleton of a human ancestor ever discovered, which archaeologists named Lucy.

In the five years it has been producing plays at the Minetta Lane, Audible has concentrated primarily on one-person shows starring women, including Carey Mulligan in Dennis Kelly’s Girls & Boys, Lili Taylor in Wallace Shawn’s The Fever, Jade Anouka’s Heart, Faith Salie’s Approval Junkie, and DeLanna Studi’s And So We Walked: An Artist’s Journey Along the Trail of Tears. (Men have been represented by Aasif Mandvi’s Sakina’s Restaurant and Billy Crudup in David Cale’s Harry Clarke.) In addition, Laurie Gunderson’s two-character The Half-Life of Marie Curie told the inspiring story of Madame Curie and her friendship with fellow physicist Hertha Ayrton.

Lucy, which passes the Bechdel test with flying colors, follows in that tradition while also reaching the next level. As Swift sings in “Midnights”: “Ladies always rise above.”

RemarkaBULL PODVERSATION: EXPLORING LADY MACBETH WITH ISMENIA MENDES

Lady Macbeth (Ismenia Mendes) reaches out to her royal husband (Isabelle Fuhrman) in inventive reimagining of Shakespeare tragedy (photo by Richard Termine)

Who: Ismenia Mendes, Nathan Winkelstein
What: Livestreamed conversation about Lady Macbeth
Where: Red Bull Theater online
When: Monday, May 9, free with advance RSVP (donations accepted), 7:30
Why: Macbeth is all the rage now, with a much-derided version starring Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga currently playing at the Longacre on Broadway and Joel Coen’s film version with Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand having garnered three Oscar nominations. One of the best and most innovative adaptations in decades was staged by Red Bull Theater at the Lucille Lortel in 2019, directed by Erica Schmidt and set at a girls school. The fierce and furious, sexy and sinister ninety minutes starred Isabelle Fuhrman as Macbeth and Ismenia Mendes as Lady Macbeth.

In conjunction with the streaming release of the 2019 production, available on demand May 16-29, Red Bull is hosting its latest RemarkaBULL Podversation, “Exploring Lady Macbeth,” with Mendes (Troilus and Cressida, Henry V) and associate artistic director and host Nathan Winkelstein performing the “How now! what news?” scene, followed by a discussion and an audience Q&A. In the dastardly dialogue, Lady Macbeth tells her husband, “What beast was’t, then, / That made you break this enterprise to me? / When you durst do it, then you were a man; / And, to be more than what you were, you would / Be so much more the man. Nor time nor place / Did then adhere, and yet you would make both: / They have made themselves, and that their fitness now / Does unmake you. I have given suck, and know / How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me: / I would, while it was smiling in my face, / Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums, / And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn as you / Have done to this.” Previous RemarkaBULL Podversations, which are always a treat, have featured Kate Burton, André De Shields, Elizabeth Marvel, Chukwudi Iwuji, Patrick Page, Lily Rabe, Jay O. Sanders, Michael Urie, and others and can be viewed for free here.

CYRANO DE BERGERAC

Award-winning production of Cyrano de Bergerac swashbuckles into BAM April 5 to May 22 (photo by Marc Brenner)

Who: Jamie Lloyd Company
What: US premiere of award-winning production of Edmond Rostand play
Where: Harvey Theater at the BAM Strong, 651 Fulton St.
When: April 5 – May 22, $45-$310
Why: It’s not always clear why an old classic suddenly becomes sizzling hot; this time around, it’s Edmond Rostand’s 1897 favorite, Cyrano de Bergerac, about a relatively unattractive soldier in love with a beautiful woman who falls for a not-too-bright handsome gent who gets his poetic, romantic words from Cyrano. In 2012, the Roundabout staged a version at the American Airlines Theatre on Broadway directed by Jamie Lloyd and starring Douglas Hodge as the title character. In Theresa Rebeck’s 2018 Bernhardt/Hamlet, at the same theater, Rostand is a minor character who is rewriting Hamlet for Sarah Bernhardt but turns his attentions instead to Cyrano. Franco-British actor, writer, and director Alexis Michalik made Cyrano, My Love, in 2018, following his stage version of Edmond in 2016. In 2019, the New Group presented a musical version at the Daryl Roth Theatre starring Peter Dinklage as Cyrano, adapted and directed by his wife, Erica Schmidt, that was turned into a 2021 film directed by Joe Wright. Also in 2021, Andrey Cheggi Chegodaev performed My Cyrano, a melding of Cyrano de Bergerac and Tanya Lebedinskaya’s poem “My Cyrano,” at the Center at West Park.

Now the Dorset-born Lloyd, whose other acclaimed works include Betrayal, Macbeth, Three Days of Rain, Passion, and Evita, comes to BAM for the first time for the US premiere of his Olivier-winning production of Cyrano de Bergerac. This new adaptation by Martin Crimp stars Scottish actor James McAvoy (The Ruling Class, The Last King of Scotland) in the role previously performed by Ralph Richardson, Derek Jacobi, Richard Chamberlain, Christopher Plummer, Gérard Depardieu, Steve Martin, and Kevin Kline, among others over the last century-plus. Eben Figueiredo is Christian, with Michele Austin as Ragueneau, Adam Best as Le Bret, Sam Black as Armand, Tom Edden as De Guiche, Adrian Der Gregorian as Montfleury, and Evelyn Miller as Roxane. The set and costumes are by Soutra Gilmour, with lighting by Jon Clark and music and sound by Ben and Max Ringham. The 170-minute show, which won the Olivier Award for Best Revival (in addition to four other nominations), runs April 5 through May 22.

CELEBRATING MOLIÈRE’S 400th BIRTHDAY

Who: Lisa Gorlitsky, Margaret Ivey, Postell Pringle, Adam Gopnik, Erica Schmidt, Comédie-Française
What: Celebration of Molière’s quadricentennial
Where: FIAF, Florence Gould Hall and Skyroom, 55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
When: March 10-12, 24, 30, $20-$45 (three-event package $75)
Why: Jean-Baptiste Poquelin was born into a bourgeois family in early 1622 in Paris. Nicknamed “le Nez” because of his relatively large proboscis, he eventually became better known as poet, playwright, and actor Molière. In celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of his birth, the French Institute Alliance Française is hosting a trio of special events. Taking place March 10-12 at 7:30 ($45) at FIAF’s Florence Gould Hall, “Molière Turns 400: 17th Century Paris Meets 21st Century New York” consists of staged excerpts, complete with sets, costumes, and live music, from The Misanthrope, The School for Wives, and Tartuffe, with Lisa Gorlitsky, Margaret Ivey, and Postell Pringle and directed by Lucie Tiberghien, the founding artistic director of Molière in the Park, which performed livestreamed adaptations of all three works during the pandemic lockdown. The March 10 presentation will be followed by a reception.

Ivo van Hove’s adaptation of Molière’s uncensored Tartuffe screens at FIAF March 24

On March 24 at 7:00 ($25), New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik and director Erica Schmidt will be at the FIAF Skyroom for the talk “Modernizing Molière,” available in person and via livestream. Gopnik contributed the foreword to Molière: The Complete Richard Wilbur Translations, while Schmidt directed Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid at Bard SummerScape in 2012, starring her husband, Peter Dinklage. The fête concludes March 30 at 7:00 ($35) in Florence Gould Hall with a screening of Molière’s uncensored Tartuffe or the Hypocrite by Comédie-Française, directed by Ivo van Hove from the original script, which was censored by Louis XIV in 1664; the filmed version stars Christophe Montenez and features a score by Oscar-winning composer Alexandre Desplat.

THE NEW GROUP: WHY WE DO IT

why we do it

Who: Cynthia Nixon, Bobby Cannavale, Derek McLane, Edie Falco, Erica Schmidt, Donja R. Love, Scott Elliott
What: Weekly discussions about the draw and power of theater
Where: The New Group Facebook page
When: Wednesdays at 4:00, May 6 – June 10, free with advance RSVP, followed by limited Zoom Q&A for $100 donation
Why: Theater companies have been coming up with unique ways to stay in touch with their audiences now that all live, in-person staged productions have been postponed or canceled for the near future. The New Group is joining the online gatherings with “Why We Do It,” a weekly conversation series hosted by company founding artistic director Scott Elliott. Every Wednesday at 4:00, Elliott will speak live online with a member of the New Group family, beginning May 6 with Cynthia Nixon, who has directed Steve and Rasheeda Speaking for the troupe. The impressive lineup continues May 13 with Bobby Cannavale (Hurlybury), May 20 with set designer extraordinaire and board chairman Derek McLane, May 27 with Edie Falco (The True), June 3 with playwright and director Erica Schmidt (Cyrano, All the Fine Boys), and June 10 with playwright Donja R. Love (one in two). All conversations are free, but advance registration is necessary. Each talk will be followed by a smaller “Drinks with” Zoom Q&A with the main guest, limited to twenty participants who make a $100 tax-deductible donation and will get a recipe for an original drink from mixologist Sammi Katz.

RETURN ENGAGEMENT: MAC BETH

Lady Macbeth (Ismenia Mendes) reaches out to her royal husband (Isabelle Fuhrman) in inventive reimagining of Shakespeare tragedy (photo by Richard Termine)

Hunter Theater Project
Frederick Loewe Theater at Hunter College
East 68th St. between Lexington & Park Aves.
Monday – Saturday, January 6 – February 22, $49 ($15 for students)
www.huntertheaterproject.org

If you missed Erica Schmidt’s Red Bull Theater production of Mac Beth at the Lucille Lortel Theater in mid-2019, it will be back for a return engagement at the Frederick Loewe Theater at Hunter College as part of the Hunter Theater Project, running January 6 to February 22. Below is my original review of this inventive and engaging work, which features much of the original cast, with Brittany Bradford now as the title character and Dylan Gelula taking over for AnnaSophia Robb.

Erica Schmidt’s beautifully frenetic Shakespeare adaptation Mac Beth — yes, she has made the title two words, perhaps to emphasize the more feminine second half of the title — is an exhilarating demonstration of grrl power, ratcheted up to the nth degree. The Red Bull production is set at a girls school where seven students enact an all-female version of Macbeth. They are dressed in schoolgirl uniforms of buttoned white shirts under tartan tops and skirts, with bloodred socks reaching up to their knees; aggressively ominous and gender-neutral hooded capes are added for the Weird Sisters. (The costumes are by Jessica Pabst.) Catherine Cornell’s set juts into the audience, covered in fake grass with a partially overturned couch, an iron bathtub, a campfire, and water-filled craters, as if the aftermath of a wild sorority bash. (When the characters imbibe, they do so from red plastic cups, a party staple.) And although they speak in the traditional iambic pentameter, they don’t disguise their voices to be more adult, instead sounding like a bunch of kids invigorated by putting on a show exactly the way they want to.

The Weird Sisters (Sharlene Cruz, AnnaSophia Robb, and Sophie Kelly-Hedrick) stir the boiling cauldron in Mac Beth (photo by Richard Termine)

Macbeth (Isabelle Fuhrman) is returning from a successful military campaign with the loyal Banquo (Ayana Workman) when they come upon three witches (AnnaSophia Robb, Sophie Kelly-Hedrick, and Sharlene Cruz, who play multiple roles) who predict that Macbeth will become Thane of Cawdor, then king, while Banquo’s sons will one day rule. Fear, jealousy, and revenge take over as the power grab is on, but with delicious twists; in the Bard’s day, his plays were performed by an all-male cast, but this twenty-first-century all-woman cast — armed with smartphones — revels in the gender shifts without altering the original text. “Are you a man?” Lady Macbeth (Ismenia Mendes) asks her husband. Facing a ghost (hysterically played by Workman), Macbeth declares, “What man dare, I dare: be alive again, / And dare me to the desert with thy sword; / If trembling I inhabit then, protest me / The baby of a girl. Hence, horrible shadow! / Unreal mock’ry, hence!” It’s as if they are caught up in a teenage horror flick, with all the adolescent tropes in place but seen only from the girls’ point of view. Even one of the witches’ prophecies takes on new meaning when she predicts, “Be bloody, bold, and resolute: laugh to scorn / The power of man, for none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth.” At one point Lady Macbeth tells a witch, “Unsex me here.”

AnnaSophia Robb and Sophie Kelly-Hedrick play witches and other characters in Bard play set at a girls school (photo by Richard Termine)

Schmidt’s (A Month in the Country, Invasion!) breathlessly paced version flies by in a furious ninety minutes, both sexy and sinister, gleefully performed by the terrific cast led by Fuhrman’s (All the Fine Boys, Orphan) tortured Macbeth and Mendes’s (Marys Seacole, Orange Is the New Black) malevolent Lady Macbeth. Robb (The Carrie Diaries, Bridge to Terabithia), NYU Tisch freshman Kelly-Hedrick, and recent CCNY grad Cruz make strong off-Broadway debuts, playing the witches as well as Duncan, Malcolm, Fleance, Rosse, Angus, Lenox, and other minor characters; in particular, Kelly-Hedrick captures the essence of girlhood — tinged with menace — in her squeaky delivery. Schmidt’s inventive staging also boasts a thrilling storm, a creepy doll, and a touch of gymnastics, although if there was one more loud bang against the tub I was going to scream. Schmidt was inspired to revisit Macbeth by reading stories about girls being murdered in the woods. In Mac Beth, she takes back the power, putting the girls in charge in a gender swap that is as exciting as it is, in this day and age, necessary. Schmidt makes us look at the bloody power plays of Scottish kings as if they are the social dominance battles of high school — and vice versa — and every audience member comes out a winner.