Tag Archives: Greg Keller

BIG & SMALL SCREEN STARS ON BROADWAY: YELLOW FACE / THE ROOMMATE / McNEAL

Francis Jue and Daniel Dae Kim play father and son in Yellow Face (photo by Joan Marcus)

YELLOW FACE
Todd Haimes Theatre
227 West Forty-Second St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 24, $70-$348
212-539-8500
www.roundabouttheatre.org

Three recently opened shows on Broadway feature television and movie stars either making their Great White Way debut or returning after a long absence, but, was we learn, success on the big and/or small screen does not always guarantee onstage triumph.

In an April 2021 interview in Vulture, actor and anti-Asian-hate activist Daniel Dae Kim said, “I take a great deal of pride in being Korean American. I know that not every representation is 100 percent something we can stand behind all the time, but I choose to look at things as whether they’re moving the needle of progress on a larger scale.” Talking about his and Grace Park’s departure from the successful Hawaii Five-O reboot in 2017 after the seventh season following a contract dispute — the two Asian Americans wanted equal pay with their Caucasian costars — Kim explained, “I had hopes that Hawaii Five-0 would be different because it was a show set in Hawaii, where the majority of people are not white. I thought it was going to be more of an ensemble show, and if you look at the early marketing and promotion for the show, where Grace Park and I were featured equally as prominently as anyone else, it led me to believe that it could be. I was proven to be wrong.”

In the article, he also discusses initially wanting to cast an Asian lead in the American version of the Korean television drama The Good Doctor, which his 3AD company produced, but eventually agreeing with showrunner David Shore and hiring white English actor Freddie Highmore.

Kim, who was born in South Korea, is now back on Broadway in the Great White Way debut of David Henry Hwang’s semiautobiographical 2007 Obie-winning Pulitzer finalist, Yellow Face, at the Todd Haimes Theatre through November 24. Kim plays a version of Hwang, known as DHH, a first-generation Chinese American playwright and activist who gets involved in a series of casting controversies. DHH makes a public stand against producer Cameron Mackintosh’s insistence on casting English actor Jonathan Pryce as a French-Vietnamese pimp known as the Engineer, altering his eyes and skin color to make him look more Asian; Pryce went on to win a Tony for his performance.

DHH, who won a Tony for his 1988 play, M. Butterfly, decides to write about “yellow face” in his next play, Face Value, choosing unknown actor Marcus G. Dahlman (Ryan Eggold) as the lead, believing he is at least part Asian. But when it turns out that the renamed Marcus Gee probably has no Asian blood in him at all, DHH convinces the actor that he must have had a Siberian Jewish ancestor, and things go haywire from there.

Yellow Face is told in flashback, with DHH often directly addressing the audience, guiding the tale while freely admitting the many mistakes he made. It starts with various public figures commenting on the Marcus Gee situation.

“Wow. That is one of the strangest stories I’ve ever heard,” Vice President Al Gore (Marinda Anderson) says.

“David Henry Hwang is a white racist asshole,” playwright Frank Chin (Kevin Del Aguila) declares.

“This is a tempest in an Oriental teapot,” Mackintosh (Shannon Tyo) insists.

DHH (Daniel Dae Kim) and Marcus Gee (Ryan Eggold) have different ideas of ethnic representation at Todd Haimes Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

Among the other real-life famous and not-so-famous people chiming in at one point or another are casting director Vinnie Liff, author Gish Jen, theater critics Frank Rich and Michael Riedel, New York City mayor Ed Koch, columnist George F. Will, talk show host Dick Cavett, Taiwanese American computer scientist Wen Ho Lee, actors B. D. Wong, Mark Linn-Baker, Lily Tomlin, Gina Torres, Jane Krakowski, and Margaret Cho, politicians Fred Thompson, Sam Brownback, Tom Delay, and Richard Shelby, and theater luminaries Bernard Jacobs, Joe Papp, and Jerry Zaks, all played by Anderson, Del Aguila, Tyo, and Francis Jue; Jue also portrays DHH’s father, HYH, an immigrant immensely proud of his success in the financial sector but whose bank finds itself in a bit of hot water with a congressional committee as the opening of Face Value approaches.

Kim is most well known for playing Jin-Soo Kwon on the seven seasons of Lost and Chin Ho Kelly for seven years on the Hawaii Five-O reboot; he has also appeared onstage in New York City, Los Angeles, and London since 1991, including Romeo and Juliet, A Doll’s House, The Tempest, The King and I, and Hwang’s Golden Child. He is amiable and confident as DHH, instantly gaining the audience’s faith as he balances the sublime and the ridiculous with acute self-awareness and self-deprecation; he’s particularly strong as DHH digs himself into a deeper and deeper hole. His casting in and of itself is fascinating; there’s been a recent movement for people of Asian descent not to be called “Asian” but to be identified by the specific country they or their ancestors come from; in this case, the South Korean Kim is playing the Chinese American Hwang.

Eggold (Dead End, All My Sons) is hilarious as Marcus, a regional actor who can’t believe how his stature has changed once he agreed to pretend to be Asian, getting hooked on the hoopla. Keller (Dig, Shhhh) excels as the announcer and a reporter identified as “Name withheld on advice of counsel,” Jue, who originated the role of HYH at the Public and played an alternate version of DHH in Hwang’s autobiographical soft power, is gleeful as the father, and Tyo (The Comeuppance, The Chinese Lady), del Aguila (Some Like It Hot, Frozen), and Anderson (Merry Me, Sandblasted) shift seamlessly from role to role.

Arnulfo Maldonado’s changing sets and Yee Eun Nam’s projections keep the audience fully engaged under the smooth-flowing direction of Leigh Silverman, who helmed the original production of Yellow Face as well as Hwang’s Chinglish, Kung Fu, and Golden Child, her familiarity with the material delivering a fun experience while making its important points.

Mia Farrow and Patti LuPone return to Broadway in Jen Silverman’s The Roommate (photo by Matthew Murphy)

THE ROOMMATE
Booth Theatre
222 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 15, $48 – $321
theroommatebway.com

The Broadway premiere of Jen Silverman’s 2015 play, The Roommate, dooms itself from the very start. Longtime friends Mia Farrow and Patti LuPone take the stage together, their names projected across the top of the set, and they bask in the uproarious applause of the audience. They exit, then return seconds later in character. While the laudatory moment removes the need for applause at the beginning of the actual narrative, it also makes sure we never forget we are watching a pair of superstar performers, even though the success of the play — any play — depends on our believing in the fiction that is about to unfold before us.

Two years ago, LuPone, who has won two Grammys and three Tonys, announced she was retiring from the Great White Way because of Actors’ Equity’s lack of support of its union members, writing on Twitter, “Quite a week on Broadway, seeing my name being bandied about. Gave up my Equity card; no longer part of that circus. Figure it out.” She later told People magazine, “I just didn’t want to give them any more money. . . . And I don’t know when I’m going to be back on stage.”

Meanwhile, Farrow, who has never been nominated for an Oscar or Tony, last appeared on Broadway in 2014 in Love Letters, sitting at a table with Brian Dennehy and reading A. R. Gurney’s epistolary play. Here only other Broadway appearance was costarring with Anthony Perkins in Bernard Slade’s 1980 Romantic Comedy. (She made her off-Broadway debut as Cecily Cardew in The Importance of Being Earnest in 1963.)

So there was a lot of buzz surrounding LuPone and Farrow teaming up at the Booth Theatre for a play about an odd couple living together in rural Iowa. Unfortunately, they lack any kind of chemistry, and three-time Tony-winning director Jack O’Brien (Shucked, The Invention of Love) can’t get around Jen Silverman’s inconsequential, clichéd script.

Farrow is Sharon, a divorced mother from Illinois who has made a peaceful life for herself in a large home in Iowa City. She likes things as they are, simple, without complications, but she seeks out a roommate, both for financial reasons and, perhaps, friendship.

LuPone is Robyn, a divorced mother from the Bronx who is ready for a major change. She is not exactly what Sharon expected: a tough-talking vegan lesbian whose black leather provides a sharp contrast to Sharon’s loose-fitting sun dresses. (The costumes are by Bob Crowley, who also designed the set, a skeletal house with a kitchen and a small staircase leading up.)

After learning these facts about Robyn, Sharon declares, “I mean. A roommate! I’ve never had a roommate. I’m sixty-five years old. A roommate!”

While there is no reason an actor can’t play well above or below their age, the line gets a curious stare from the audience, who know Farrow cannot be sixty-five. (In actuality, Farrow is seventy-nine and LuPone is seventy-five). In a script note, Silverman suggests, “In terms of age, you should feel free to adjust the character’s age to fit the actor.” Because the production made such a big deal of Farrow and LuPone’s star power when they first took the stage, the number sticks out as false.

Robyn (Patti LuPone) and Sharon (Mia Farrow) form an odd couple in The Roommate (photo by Matthew Murphy)

As the play continues, we learn more about both women, their prejudices, their pasts, and their futures. Each is dealing with not being on the closest of terms with their children. While Robyn knows about what’s going on around the world, Sharon seems to be happily stuck in an old-fashioned bubble straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting, oblivious to what is happening right outside her door, although that changes as she grows more and more intrigued with what she at least initially considers Robyn’s vices.

The Roommate is in part a riff on The Odd Couple, with Sharon a fuddy-duddy like Felix Ungar, Robyn a more coarse figure like Oscar Madison. (At the 2017 Williamstown Theater Festival, S. Epatha Merkerson was Sharon, and Jane Kaczmarek was Robyn.)

But the effects they have on each other are difficult to believe, not fully formed. Silverman (Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties, Spain) might have a lot to say about human vulnerability and morality and female friendship, but she goes too far off the rails in the play’s slow-moving ninety minutes.

Farrow is lovely as Sharon, every line delivered with a touch of wonder, going especially high and squeaky when something Robyn reveals surprises her. She handles Sharon’s absurd shifts in right and wrong with aplomb, just going with the flow, but LuPone (Company, Shows for Days) looks like she’d rather be just about anywhere else, as if she knows she made a mistake choosing this play as her return to the stage. Hopefully Farrow and LuPone will join forces again, only next time in a better piece of theater.

“There’s a great liberty in being bad,” Robyn tells Sharon, who repeats the line later on.

It’s a catchy phrase that never comes to fruition in The Roommate.

Jacob McNeal (Robert Downey Jr.) gets good and bad news from his doctor (Ruthie Ann Miles) in McNeal (photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)

McNEAL
Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center Theater
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday – Saturday through November 24, $195.50-$371
212-362-7600
www.lct.org

The night before I saw Ayad Akhtar’s McNeal at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center, I watched Dario Argento’s 1982 giallo cult classic, Tenebrae, starring Tony and Oscar nominee and New York City native Anthony Franciosa as Peter Neal, a popular American novelist on a book tour in Italy, accompanied by his agent, Bullmer (John Saxon), and his assistant, Anne (Daria Nicolodi). One critical scene involves Neal sitting down for a television interview with superfan Christiano Berti (John Steiner). Fact and fiction start weaving in and out of the plot as violent scenes from his books come to life in a series of murders.

In McNeal, Tony and Emmy winner and New York City native Robert Downey Jr. is the title character, Jacob McNeal, a popular American novelist who, while being examined by his doctor, Sahra Grewal (Ruthie Ann Miles), gets notified that he has won the Nobel Prize in Literature, an award he feels he deserved many years ago. His agent, Stephie Banic (Andrea Martin), immediately contacts his publisher to negotiate a new contract, and the Times finally agrees to do a front-page magazine profile of him, sending over New York Times journalist Natasha Brathwaite (Brittany Bellizeare), who is not planning on doing a puff piece. “Were you a diversity hire?” he asks her, kicking off an awkward interview. McNeal flirts with using AI for his Nobel acceptance speech, but soon he is counting on AI for much more as fact and fiction intermingle.

I prefer Tenebrae.

Jacob McNeal (Robert Downey Jr.) says way too much in interview with journalist Natasha Brathwaite (Brittany Bellizeare) (photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)

In his Broadway debut, Downey, who first acted on the stage in Alms for the Middle Class in Rochester in 1983, delivers a solid performance as the self-destructive McNeal, who has a serious kidney issue but can’t stop going back to the bottle. (Downey himself has had problems with drugs and alcohol and has been drug-free for more than twenty years.) He looks completely comfortable in McNeal’s skin, playing a character who is adorable and unlikable at the same time, as it’s difficult to dismiss his misogyny as just exemplary of the way things used to be. The sets by Michael Yeargan and Jake Barton rise and lower from above and below as Barton’s projections beam out visual stimuli, from texts and close-ups to the spewing of words and letters.

In such previous works as Junk, The Invisible Hand, Corruption, and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Disgraced, Akhtar has proved to be a master of complex plots, tackling such issues as politics, race, religion, the financial industry, capitalism, and personal ambition. In McNeal, however, he takes on too much, straying from the central focus on the future of AI and its impact on literature and humanity itself to include scenes that feel like they’re from another play; even director Bartlett Sher (The King and I, Oslo), who has been nominated for eight Tonys and won one, is unable to weave together subplots involving McNeal’s son, Harlan (Rafi Gavron), with its bizarre revelation; McNeal’s flirtations with Banic’s assistant, Dipti (Saisha Talwar), and fondness for Harvey Weinstein, as his agent’s actions confound believability; his liberal use of the lives of his friends and relatives in his plots; and his relationship with journalist Francine Blake (Melora Hardin).

The 105-minute show does have a magical finale, but it’s not enough to save it. Near the end, a typing prompt acknowledges that the audience is “confused by what is real and what isn’t.”

There was no such problem in Tenebrae.

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

PRE-EXISTING CONDITION

C (Sarah Steele) and A (Tatiana Maslany) discuss a difficult situation in Pre-Existing Condition (photo by Emilio Madrid)

PRE-EXISTING CONDITION
Connelly Theater Upstairs
220 East Fourth St. between Aves. A & B
Monday – Saturday through August 3, $49-$125
preexistingconditionplay.com
www.connellytheater.org

Don’t worry that the protagonist in Marin Ireland’s gripping and powerful major playwriting debut, Pre-Existing Condition, holds what appears to be a spiral-bound copy of the script throughout the play’s sleek and steady seventy-five minutes, sometimes glancing at the words, other times clutching it to her chest like Linus’s blanket in Peanuts. Known only as A, the character never lets go of the script, not because the actor has not yet learned all of the lines, but because it’s a constant reminder of a horrific, life-altering event in the character’s recent past. Over the show’s two-month run, A will be played by Emmy winner Tatiana Maslany (who I saw), Tony nominee and director Maria Dizzia, Tavi Gevinson, Tony winner Deirdre O’Connell, and Julia Chan — and each will hold that script.

It’s been seven months since A was brutally struck by her partner. No longer with the man, she speaks with an attorney, a psychiatrist, a few close friends, her parents, an old acquaintance, her parents, and others, but no one is able to help, instead only adding to her torment and confusion by subtly blaming her for first provoking the attack and then refusing to take her lover back.

She tries to date, but she’s clearly not ready, especially when the men she meets cannot, or will not, understand her situation. (All the men and A’s mother are played by Greg Keller, although I saw his understudy, Gregory Connors; the rest of the women are portrayed by Sarah Steele and Dael Orlandersmith.)

A finds some respite in group therapy run by two caring women who have developed a support program; during those sessions, the two facilitators talk directly to the audience, as if we are all part of this community, because when it comes down to it, we are; domestic violence can occur at any moment, in any family.

In one exchange with B, A questions her own responsibility.

B: do you still feel like it’s your fault?
A: yeah.
B: it’s not.
A: well.
B: you couldn’t have known.
A: but . . . couldn’t I? I mean, I’m not that stupid, right? I mean. I guess I’m realizing something kind of horrible about myself which is that I always thought that like women who got hit by their boyfriends were like . . . they were like . . .
B: (long pause) they were like what?
A: trash. They were like trash. (pause)
B: mmhm.
A: and the thing is that’s exactly what I felt like. Feel like. (pause) Trash. (pause) (pause) And there are days when I feel like maybe I always was trash and this experience just made me see that finally. Clearly. And it has really nothing to do with the, like, huge shame or guilt or any of that, anything even directly relating to this incident, it just starts to feel like a very very deep truth. That I’m trash. And I always was.
B: you believe that still? Right now at this moment?
A: Oh yeah yeah, of course. Sure. No, that hasn’t ever gone away since it started. It’s almost a peaceful thought, which I guess is what makes it feel like it must be true?

Dael Orlandersmith plays multiple roles in new play by Marin Ireland (photo by Emilio Madrid)

Later, A explores another aspect of her feelings that no one seems to get. “I’m so fucking exhausted by all of this. All of this. All of the taking it seriously and the. All of it,” she tells B. “I don’t — okay. I don’t want the big task of my life now to be ‘dealing with this.’ It’s fucking eating up everything.”

When a friend (C) mentions the possibility of her offering forgiveness, A states, “I don’t want to. Forgive. I don’t want to forget it. . . . I don’t want to also be guilty of forgetting it.”

As the healing process — whatever it encompasses — continues, the audience empathizes more and more with A, realizing that her pain and trauma could be anyone’s pain and trauma, that any one of us could be sitting in that chair in the middle of the room, being consumed by some type of tragedy.

The California-born, Obie-winning Ireland is one of New York’s finest actors, having appeared in such powerful plays as On the Exhale, Ironbound, Marie Antoinette, the intimate Uncle Vanya that took place in a Flatiron loft, and reasons to be pretty, which earned her a Tony nomination.

She was busy during the pandemic, acting in short virtual works for charity and conceiving “Lessons in Survival” at the Vineyard Theatre with Peter Mark Kendall, Tyler Thomas, and Reggie D. White, in which a company known as the Commissary reenacted historic speeches, interviews, and conversations by activists and artists from revolutionary times (including James Baldwin, Nina Simone, Angela Davis, Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni, Bobby Seale, and Muhammad Ali). Pre-Existing Condition is its own kind of lesson in survival, a deeply personal one.

Julia Chan, seen here with Greg Keller, is one of five rotating actors portraying the protagonist in gripping play (photo by Emilio Madrid)

In 2012, Ireland and her boyfriend at the time, Scott Shepherd, were in London, starring as the leads in the Wooster Group’s Cry, Trojans!, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Troilus & Cressida. One day she came to rehearsal with a black eye after Shepherd viciously hit her; he did not deny doing it. How Ireland was treated by the company and others following the event led her to lobby for systemic change in the theater.

“I continue to wonder where responsibility and accountability should be for what happened,” Ireland told the New York Times in 2015. “Many actors don’t know what to do when behavior — physical, sexual, harassment, bullying — crosses a line.”

Pre-Existing Condition is not a revenge drama, nor is it a self-help guide. It’s a brutally honest and provocative look at the psychological and bodily wounds that humans inflict and receive. Director Dizzia, an actor who has appeared in more than seventy movies and TV shows and theatrical productions, earning a Tony nomination for Best Performance by a Featured Actress for In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play), allows Ireland’s story to unfold at a modest pace, luring the audience at the Connelly’s tiny upstairs theater into its many intricacies. Louisa Thompson’s spare set consists of a handful of chairs that match those the people in the first row sit in, implicating all of us; the actors switch chairs, but some are left empty, evoking ghosts who cannot be there. In the back are piles of more chairs, representing other survivors to come.

Drama Desk winner Steele (The Humans, I Can Get It for You Wholesale) is charming in multiple roles, wearing a Patti Smith T-shirt and jeans as she engages with A from multiple points of view. Solo specialist Orlandersmith (Spiritus/Virgil’s Dance, Forever) is wonderfully gentle as various therapists. Understudy Connors (The Poisoner, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window), taking over this night for the always terrific Keller (Dig, Shhhh), is stalwart as the men in A’s life, the good and the bad.

Maslany (Grey House, Mary Page Marlowe) is sensational as the tormented A, searching for a way out of her lonely predicament. The Canadian actor’s expressive facial gestures and meticulous body movements, filled with uncomfortable pauses, are mesmerizing, daring us to try to find the way forward for A; in fact, it is not until the closing moments that Maslany makes any eye contact with the audience, bringing us further into her world, and concluding with an extraordinary coda.

A’s personal answers may not be in the pages she’s clinging to as if some kind of life line, but Ireland’s play does offer a fascinating blueprint of what we all should be paying a lot more attention to.

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

STAFF MEAL

Mina (Susannah Flood) and Ben (Greg Keller) explore a possible relationship as doomsday approaches in Staff Meal (photo by Chelcie Parry)

STAFF MEAL
Playwrights Horizons, Peter Jay Sharp Theater
416 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through May 24, $71-$91
www.playwrightshorizons.org

Abe Koogler’s Staff Meal kicks off with a tasty amuse bouche, continues with a delicious appetizer, then serves up a tantalizing main course before getting off track with a few awkward sides and an erratic dessert. But that doesn’t mean it ultimately isn’t a meal worth savoring.

Written between January and April 2020, just as the pandemic was starting to take hold of the world, Staff Meal is set in an absurdist time and place where lonely people are desperate for connection. Mina (Susannah Flood) and Ben (Greg Keller) meet-cute in a coffee shop, where they slowly begin speaking with each other while working on their laptops. The first day, Ben says, “Hey,” and Mina answers, “Hey.” The second day, Ben says, “Hey!” and Mina answers, “Hey!” The third day, Ben says, “Hey,” and Mina answers, “Oh hey!,” adding, “All’s well?”

Their less-than-scintillating conversation — Ben: “We had a dog who I used to throw the ball to a lot.” Mina: “Hey, I had a dog too! We used to throw the ball to him too.” — gets a little longer each day until Ben doesn’t show up, which worries Mina. On a trip to the bathroom, she asks an audience member to keep an eye on her computer. A nattily dressed vagrant (Erin Markey) appears from the theater aisle and tries to snatch the laptop just as Mina returns and stops her, shooting the audience member/guard a nasty look. The fourth wall has been broken — and will be again and again — in a nontraditional play overstuffed with convention-defying moments that range from brilliant and hilarious to baffling and confusing.

Ben and Mina decide to grab a bite and wander into a strange restaurant where no one comes to take their order as they delve deeper into who they are. Discussing past lives, Ben says he believes he was a passenger on a ship like the Titanic, but definitely not the Titanic, that sunk around the same time, while Mina thinks she was the rat in the animated film Ratatouille. The waiter (Hampton Fluker) eventually shows up, but only to deliver a monologue to the audience about the restaurant’s mysterious owner, Gary Robinson, and the expansive wine cellar, which is far away in a kind of hellish basement dungeon.

The action then shifts into the past, to the waiter’s first day, when he sat down with two other servers (Jess Barbagallo and Carmen M. Herlihy) to have a staff meal made specially by the chef, Christina (Markey). They rave poetically about the fabulous spread, even though it is clearly only green grapes.

The servers give the waiter advice on how to do his job, including not offending Christina — oops, too late — while the waiter wants to know why everything takes so long to happen in the restaurant, especially the journey to the wine cellar. The servers explain that the establishment is based on Flights of Fancy followed by Acts of Service dedicated to making connections, clear metaphors for life itself with indirect references to the Bible. Gary Robinson is referred to as a “legend” no one ever sees, like a supreme being, with Christina — it’s unlikely the first six letters of her name are mere coincidence — as the earthbound figure precisely following the recipes in his books.

In fact, the servers call out iterations of “Oh god” four times while partaking of the duck, which is actually grapes, the biblical fruit about which Jeremiah said, “But every one shall die for his own iniquity; every man who eats the sour grapes, his teeth shall be set on edge.” It also evokes how the public can lift a chef to godlike status and their restaurant to a kind of holy space, complete with scallop shell wallpaper, the emblem of St. James that relates to the physical and spiritual aspects of the human condition.

In case you’re getting lost at this point, Rita (Stephanie Berry) declares, “I’m sorry, WHAT IS THIS PLAY ABOUT???????!?!?!?!?!”

Things only get more bizarre and existential as the characters seek “sweet relief” in a city endangered by e-commerce, empty streets, and the breakdown of the social contract as everything literally falls apart around them.

Chef Christina (Erin Markey) serves up a meal of biblical proportions in Playwrights Horizons production (photo by Chelcie Parry)

Early on, Ben asks Mina if she eats out a lot. She responds in a way that captures how so many people feel all the time about going out anywhere — to a restaurant or even the theater itself — and not just during a pandemic: “I do!” she says. “I mean, no not really; it’s often hard to hear, and the food is often overpriced, and I often feel disappointed, and a big part of me honestly wishes we were just at someone’s house being hosted warmly by someone who was making us all different kinds of food and there was sort of a fire and wine was passed around to the sound of laughter and I was sort of sandwiched on the couch after dinner between two close friends and there was a third kneeling in front of me who I could rustle their hair.”

Jian Jung’s set morphs from the spare coffee shop to the fancy restaurant to an apocalyptic scenario as Masha Tsimring’s lighting grows ever darker and Tei Blow’s sound becomes more ominous, with illusions by Steve Cuiffo. Kaye Voyce’s costumes include everyday casual wear, restaurant uniforms, and the vagrant’s ratty clothing.

Koogler (Deep Blue Sound, Fulfillment Center) and director Morgan Green (School Pictures, Minor Character) keep the audience on its proverbial toes for most of the hundred-minute show before going haywire in the end, overfilling the plate with an abundance of effluvia. When Rita asks, “Do you ever get this feeling with young writers, or early writers, writers who are developing . . . do you ever wonder: When will they develop?” Koogler is an established playwright, but Staff Meal could benefit from some further development.

Keller (The Thanksgiving Play, Shhhh) and Flood (Make Believe, The Comeuppance) are adorable as the young couple who may be falling in love, while Barbagallo (The Trees, Help) and Herlihy (The Apiary, Scene Partners) are cryptic and charming as the servers, Markey (Dr. Ride’s American Beach House, A Ride on the Irish Cream) chews up the scenery in her two roles, Berry (On Sugarland, Sugar in Our Wounds) devours her soliloquy, and Fluker (All My Sons, Esai’s Table) is cool and calm as the waiter, who is a stand-in for the audience’s psyche.

Although dealing with issues that were exacerbated during the coronavirus crisis, Staff Meal is not a pandemic play. It’s a funny and frightening satire about attempting to make connection and build community even when the planet might be in a doom-spiral, about humans needing nourishment by being with others, in coffee shops, restaurants, or a theater. Like life, it’s not perfect, with its ups and downs, but it provides fine fare that may not go down easy but feeds the soul in these harried times.

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

DIG

Roger (Jeffrey Bean) sees his easygoing life uprooted in Dig (photo by Justin Swader)

DIG
Primary Stages, 59E59 Theaters
59 East 59th St, between Park & Madison Aves.
Wednesday – Sunday through November 5, $65.50-$85.50
212-279-4200
www.59e59.org

Theresa Rebeck fertilizes the soil with a nearly endless stream of plant-based metaphors in her emotional, hard-hitting Dig, which is blossoming at 59E59 through November 5. Rebeck fills the dialogue with continual references to growth and growing, water, soil, roots, and pots, as characters dig deep to take stock of their lives. It’s not a question of nature vs. nurture so much as an exploration of the nurturing of nature, both foliage and family.

Inspired by a plant business co-owned by her husband, Rebeck’s play is set in a local plant store run by Roger (Jeffrey Bean), a persnickety man in his mid-fifties who is not in the habit of being agreeable with anyone, including customers and personal acquaintances. Roger lives alone in an apartment upstairs, caring more about plants than people. At the start, he is furious that his close friend Lou (Triney Sandoval) has nearly killed a plant he gave him. Roger had given him clear instructions on what to do with it, but Lou didn’t follow them.

“Okay, there was a period where watering was not my central focus,” Lou admits. “‘Focus,’” Roger repeats with scorn. “Focus is the wrong word,” Lou answers. “Focus is no word, it doesn’t apply at all; there is no indication that focus had anything to do with the care of this plant,” Roger argues.

In the corner by the front door, a woman listens to the two men quarreling. “I brought it to you for help. I understand this is not ideal. I did not neglect this plant,” Lou asserts. “I don’t want, I don’t — never mind. It’s fine. I will save this plant,” Roger declares.

We soon learn that the woman in the corner is Megan (Andrea Syglowski), Lou’s thirty-four-year-old daughter who has returned to town after an attempted suicide, a nationally publicized crime, and ensuing imprisonment. Lou and Roger are not so much squabbling over a plant as they are about Megan; Lou is unable to accept the idea that his child-raising could have anything to do with her situation.

Everett (Greg Keller) shares his thoughts on certain types of plants with Roger (Jeffrey Bean) and Megan (Andrea Syglowski) in Dig (photo by James Leynse)

Megan asks for a job from Roger, who is hesitant at first — he prefers things exactly as he has them, viewing change as some kind of enemy — but when Megan insists she doesn’t need to get paid, that she’s just looking for something to do to get her out of her rut, Roger essentially has no choice. The first lesson Roger teaches Megan is repotting, moving a plant to a bigger pot because it has outgrown its space. “It’s too healthy; it just kept growing. It’s something that happens to plants. The roots eat up everything around them. They take in the light and the soil and the air and the leaves, through photosynthesis,” Roger explains, calling photosynthesis “the most important chemical reaction on the face of the planet earth.” Once again, Roger opts for science over relationships with humans.

Meanwhile, Roger’s current assistant, Everett (Greg Keller), is a pot-smoking, video-game-playing dude who drives the delivery truck. Everett wants more responsibilities, but Lou, who does Roger’s books, thinks Everett should be fired.

“I love plants. And I love the truck, I love driving that truck,” Everett pleads with Roger. “You’re driving that truck stoned!” Roger proclaims. “Oh, now listen. The truck — that truck is a holy thing to me,” Everett argues, adding, “I’m good at selling plants, at talking to people about plants.” Roger responds, “You’re good at smoking plants,” to which Everett shoots back, “I don’t apologize for that. The organic world makes sense to me.”

Holiness also comes to the fore through Molly (Mary Bacon), a churchgoing woman looking for bulbs who gets into a tiff with Megan when she recognizes her. Molly returns later to offer forgiveness to Megan and invite her to join their prayer group. Although not religious, Megan checks out the group and finds some comfort there, which doesn’t make her father happy. Each character — including a late-arriving surprise figure (David Mason) — faces their own battle of being “pot bound,” in need of their own form of photosynthesis as they seek happiness in a world in need of cultivation.

Lou (Triney Sandoval) and Megan (Andrea Syglowski) have a tense father-daughter relationship in Dig (photo by James Leynse)

Over her thirty-year career as a playwright, the Ohio-born Rebeck has tended quite a garden; in the past dozen years alone, she has had five plays on Broadway (Dead Accounts with Katie Holmes, Bernhardt/Hamlet with Janet McTeer, Seminar with Alan Rickman, Mauritius with F. Murray Abraham and Bobby Cannavale, and the new I Need That with Danny DeVito) along with several gems off Broadway (Seared with Raúl Esparza, Downstairs with Tim and Tyne Daly). Dig, the New York City debut of which was delayed by the pandemic, is a splendid addition to her hothouse, a tense exploration of rebirth that Rebeck has admirably directed herself.

Christopher and Justin Swader’s cramped set teems with life, primarily green plants with occasional bursts of color. Fabian Fidel Aguilar’s costumes, Mary Ellen Stebbins’s sharp lighting, and Fitz Patton’s incidental music and sound design contribute to the overall realistic feel of the drama. The cast is exceptional, led by a revelatory performance by Syglowski (Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven, queens), who is a whirling dervish of rollercoaster emotions. Sandoval (The Thin Place, 72 Miles to Go . . .), Bacon (Harrison, TX; Women without Men), Bean (About Alice, The Thanksgiving Play), Keller (Shhhh, The Thanksgiving Play), and Mason (Seared, Trick or Treat) provide expert supportive landscaping as the roots of the shop start spreading at a potentially uncontrollable rate.

They all combine to avoid neglect, focusing on properly watering this germinating story of tragedy, responsibility, hope, and redemption.

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

SHHHH

Shareen (Clare Barron) and Kyle (Greg Keller) have an unusual relationship in Shhhh (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

SHHHH
Atlantic Stage 2
330 West 16th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through February 13 (extended through February 20), $61.50-$81.50
atlantictheater.org

ASMR meets S&M in Clare Barron’s latest dark comedy, Shhhh, which opened tonight at Atlantic Stage 2 for a woefully limited run through February 13 (now extended to February 20). The semiautobiographical play touches on all five senses, beginning with a physical and metaphorical cleansing that concludes with ASMR podcaster Sally, aka Witchy Witch (Constance Shulman), whispering to her listeners, “Indulge yourself. . . . You deserve it.” And for the next ninety minutes, that’s exactly what the six characters do, indulging themselves amid sex, spit, sperm, snot, STDs, and shit as Barron, who wrote and directed the work and stars as Shareen, explores pain, power, penetration, and privilege along with consent, condoms, communication, and control. It’s a feminist reversal of stories by such authors as Charles Bukowski, Henry Miller, and Ernest Hemingway, putting women in charge of an unexpected narrative that goes places where primarily only men have gone before, diving headfirst (or, in one case, toe first) into sex, sadism, and blood and guts.

Shareen is a thirtysomething writer who is sick with an undiagnosed illness. “It’s like the inside of my mouth is one of those fast-forward flowers from the movie Planet Earth?” she tells Kyle (Greg Keller), a neighbor and former lover as she brushes her teeth and he sits on the toilet. “Except instead of flowers. I’m blossoming snot. And then I just swallow.” Kyle isn’t the only one in the theater who lets out an “ew.” It’s a terrific scene that lets the audience know that they are in store for something more than a little bit different.

All the characters speak frankly about bodily functions, about things entering and leaving their various orifices, incorporating pain and pleasure, often at the same time. Sally, a postal worker who is considering transferring to the forensics department — just the word “forensics” makes one think of cop shows in which the forensics unit is usually tasked with investigating the brutal murders of women — takes her date, a gender-fluid dog walker named Penny (Janice Amaya), to the Morbid Anatomy Museum, which includes an encased, full-size anatomical Venus, complete with death mask and innards sticking out. Sally offers Penny the chance to try out an electric device with her that can either “tickle or hurt.”

Francis (Nina Grollman) and Sandra (Annie Fang) talk about sex in graphic detail in Atlantic world premiere (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

Greg uses a graphic description of a horrific accident as foreplay to a perhaps unwanted intrusion. Shareen discusses the hairs on her chin and her inability to orgasm. Two young women in gloriously kinky glittering finery, Francis (Nina Grollman) and Sandra (Annie Fang), eat pizza while delving into their numerous sexual partners and the men’s insistence on not using protection.

Francis admits, “Sometimes I think if someone were to give me a button and say: If you push this button you could kill all the heterosexual men in the world, I would be ethically obligated to push that button. . . . But then here I am, a very privileged white woman. So maybe someone would be obligated to push the button for me as well.” Meanwhile, Sandra says about herself, “Wow. You are so happy You have never been so alone,” considering that she doesn’t necessarily need to be with a man to be satisfied.

Arnulfo Maldonado’s set is a kind of gothic museum, from mattresses strewn on the floor (one of which audience members can sit on) and glass jars of creepy items to a dingy bathroom and a barely visible kitchen in the entryway. The eerie lighting is by Jen Schriever, with sound by Sinan Zafar; Unkle Dave’s Fight House provides intimacy and fight direction.

Shhhh is extremely satisfying, alternating myriad laughs with an abundance of winces and cringes. Its inherent feminism comes equipped with a whip ready to do battle and draw blood, but it also has an innate charm that makes you welcome the thrashing. Every scene takes the complex narrative to another level where the audience better be ready for anything, because the play is wholly unpredictable from start to finish. Every time you think, no, it’s not gonna go there, it does, and then goes even further. Kudos to the brave actors who aren’t afraid of the journey.

Constance Shulman and playwright-director Clare Barron star as sisters in Shhhh (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

Shareen, wearing a tiny, shiny summer slip dress — the superb costumes are by Kaye Voyce — is tired of having to make decisions for herself. “I just want somebody to tell me when and where I can go to the bathroom,” she says. It’s a strong moment, especially when taken in the context of Barron’s personal and professional life. In “Not Writing,” a revealing piece she posted in August 2020 in the inaugural issue of Playwrights Horizons’ online “Almanac: Pasts, Nows, Futures,” she discussed her early success, mental breakdown, and struggle with bipolar disorder.

Alongside pictures of her cats and messy apartment, she explained, “The American Theater gets a real hard-on for a twenty-seven-year-old debut, and it’s impossible to separate the art from this world-premiere fanfare. I’ve played with this whole sexualized image of youth my whole career. It is authentically who I am, but I’m also using it because I know that as a young, white woman in America, this is one reliable way in which I can have power. My youth, my whiteness, my thinness, my Yale degree have all given me permission and protection to talk about whatever the fuck I want and still be taken seriously. These aspects of my identity have gotten me attention, gotten me jobs . . . They’ve made me palatable to people in power.”

More than merely palatable, Barron has been duly praised for her previous work, winning an Obie for 2015’s You Got Older and the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for Dance Nation, which was also a Pulitzer finalist. Shhhh was written in 2016 but is only now having its world premiere at the Atlantic.

Barron indeed talks about whatever the fuck she wants in this world-premiere production. One of the most critical lines in the play is when Francis, talking about how men judge women’s bodies, says, “I don’t fucking dissect his body into fucking pieces like a fucking dead animal.” It’s made even more effective with the anatomical Venus hovering just behind her.

In “Not Writing,” Barron also opines, “I haven’t written a play in four years. I don’t know if I’ll write a play ever again. Who cares.” A whole lot of people do.

RUSSIAN TROLL FARM: A WORKPLACE COMEDY

Who: TheaterWorks Hartford, TheatreSquared, the Civilians
What: Live site-specific theatrical digital experience
Where: Zoom
When: October 20-24, $20.20, 7:30 (available on demand October 25 – November 2)
Why: I’ve just watched the first part of Alex Gibney’s Agents of Chaos, a frightening documentary about Russian interference in American elections, primarily through troll farms spreading misinformation and disinformation over social media. Award-winning American playwright Sarah Gancher delves into that ever-growing issue in her new play, Russian Troll Farm: A Workplace Comedy. Production on the show began prior to the pandemic, so Gancher (The Lucky Ones, Hundred Days) has reimagined it as a “site-specific work for the internet,” with TheaterWorks Hartford in Connecticut and TheatreSquared in Fayetteville, Arkansas, in association with the Brooklyn-based troupe the Civilians. The play, inspired by actual transcripts from the government-owned Internet Research Agency, aka Glavset, will be performed live on Zoom October 20-24, with tickets going for an appropriate $20.20; the five performances will then be archived for on-demand viewing October 25 – November 2, the eve of the election. “The trolls are out in full force right now,” Gancher said in a statement. “I want everyone on the right and the left to be able to spot them and to see what they’re doing — or at least wonder: What happens to a democracy when the voices of real citizens are drowned out by fictional characters?” The fab cast features Danielle Slavick as Masha, Mia Katigbak as Ljuba, Haskell King as Egor, Ian Lassiter as Steve, and Greg Keller as Nikolai; the play is directed by Jared Mezzocchi and Elizabeth Williamson, with sets and costumes by Brenda Abbandolo, sound and music by Andre Pluess, and lighting by Amith Chandrashaker. In the meantime, I’ll be sitting down for the second part of Agents of Chaos; wish us all luck.

HALFWAY BITCHES GO STRAIGHT TO HEAVEN

Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven features another large cast of well-drawn characters (photo © Monique Carboni)

Atlantic Theater Company
Linda Gross Theater
336 West 20th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 29, $81.50
866-811-4111
atlantictheater.org

New York City native Stephen Adly Guirgis has spent much of his career creating wickedly funny, socially relevant plays set in minority communities where the underrepresented, the underserved, and the marginalized confront religion, law enforcement, poverty, racism, systemic institutions, and family dynamics as they battle against a system set up to keep them down. Most of his plays, including Our Lady of 121st Street, In Arabia, We’d All Be Kings, and The Little Flower of East Orange, feature large ensembles that form tight-knit communities onstage. Such is the case with Guirgis’s return to the Atlantic, where his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Between Riverside and Crazy, debuted in 2014, with the world premiere of the fiendishly hilarious and hard-hitting Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven, which opened last night at the Linda Gross Theater.

The three-hour LAByrinth Theater coproduction, which flies by with one intermission, takes place in Hope House, a government-funded women’s residence for addicts, the abused, the mentally ill, and survivors of domestic violence. It is run by the strict, serious Miss Rivera (Elizabeth Rodriguez) and Nigerian social worker Mr. Mobo (Neil Tyrone Pritchard). Among those who find shelter at the home are the tough-talking Sarge (Liza Colón-Zayas); her single-mother girlfriend, Bella (Andrea Syglowski); teenage poet Little Melba Diaz (Kara Young); the foul-smelling Betty Woods (Kristina Poe); ex-con Queen Sugar (Benja Kay Thomas) and her bestie, Munchies (Pernell Walker); the lonely, alcoholic Rockaway Rosie (Elizabeth Canavan); the wheelchair-bound rule-breaker Wanda Wheels (Patrice Johnson Chevannes); the trans Venus Ramirez (Esteban Andres Cruz); and the twentysomething Taina (Viviana Valeria), who takes care of her mentally ill mother, Happy Meal Sonia (Wilemina Olivia-Garcia). Also on the staff are eager white millennial social worker Jennifer (Molly Collier); ex-con janitor Joey Fresco (Victor Almanzar); and Father Miguel (David Anzuelo), who has a dark secret in his past. Seventeen-year-old Mateo (Sean Carvajal), whose mother is staying at the home, often helps out, allowed to hang around as the women share their often very private concerns about their troubled lives.

Narelle Sissons’s bilevel set consists of the main gathering room, a stoop, an outdoor bench, a dark alley, a balcony, and a concrete front space where the residents gossip and drink and smoke in defiance of the regulations. LAByrinth artistic director John Ortiz (Guinea Pig Solo, Jack Goes Boating) infuses the proceedings with tremendous vitality as Guirgis’s well-developed characters fight for survival. Taina has a chance to go back to school but is terrified of leaving her mother. Venus insists on staying even though several residents cruelly reject her claim to female identity, accusing her of unfairly invading their safe space. Father Miguel jostles with a man (Greg Keller) who demands to see his wife, who has a restraining order against him. Miss Rivera isn’t sure that Jennifer has what it takes to deal with the residents, who can be harsh and unforgiving. Wanda Wheels seems determined to drink herself to death. And at the center of it all is Sarge, superbly played by Guirgis regular and Tony nominee Rodriguez (Orange Is the New Black, The Motherf**ker with the Hat). A veteran with PTSD, Sarge is fierce and unrelenting, quick to brutally insult people, especially Venus and Betty, but she sometimes lets her more tender and loving side show through. She tells Bella, “I commanded a platoon. I survived combat. Kept my people safe. Took care of the villagers as much as I could. I looked death in the eye — twice — and I didn’t flinch. I can do this, Bella. I can do this with you. If you let me.” Sarge approaches her life like she’s embroiled in a never-ending war, which is true of many of the women living there.

Ex-cons Queen Sugar (Benja Kay Thomas) and Joey Fresco (Victor Almanzar) face off in Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven (photo © Monique Carboni)

The title comes from a poem Little Melba Diaz reads that sums up much of what the play is about, the difficulties and challenges these women can’t break free from: “Halfway Bitches go straight to Heaven / I ex-caped foster care and met a boy named Kevin / He was the apple of my eye but nigga turned into a lemon . . . No money in my pocket, I was feeling kinda low. . . . Words are turds and rhymes are crimes / Memories mere summaries, / Though I might some day share some of these,” she declares. Despite getting a little syrupy as it winds down, Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven is another deeply affecting, honest, and gutsy work that lays bare the lives of too many women who rightfully doubt there’s any light at the end of the tunnel for them.