Tag Archives: Hari Nef

THE SEAGULL/ WOODSTOCK, NY

Thomas Bradshaw moves Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull to modern-day Woodstock in New Group world premiere (photo by Monique Carboni)

THE SEAGULL/ WOODSTOCK, NY
The New Group at the Pershing Square Signature Center
The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 9, $38-$107
212-244-7529
thenewgroup.org
www.signaturetheatre.org

While sitting in the first row watching Thomas Bradshaw’s outrageously funny and psychologically insightful modern-day adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, called The Seagull/Woodstock, NY, I was reminded that I have never seen a traditional version of the play, one that uses the original dialogue and time period. And that’s just how the Russian playwright wanted it.

In John J. Desmond’s relatively serious and straightforward 1975 Williamstown production, which went straight from stage to film, Konstantin (Frank Langella), a young playwright whose mother, Irina (Lee Grant), is an aristocratic star, tells his uncle, landowner Sorin (William Swetland), about Irina, “She knows of course I haven’t got any use for the theater. She loves the theater. Seems to her she’s working for humanity and the sacred cause of art. But to me her theater today is nothing, nothing but a mass of routine and stale conventions.” Sorin responds, “Well, we can’t do without the theater, my dear boy.” A fanciful dreamer, Konstantin declares, “We need new forms, Uncle! New forms we must have. And if we can’t have those, we shall have nothing at all.”

Thus, Chekhov himself essentially demands new interpretations, and in New York City we have received them with such challenging works as Elevator Repair Service’s 2022 Seagull at Skirball and Aaron Posner’s 2016 Stupid Fucking Bird at the much-lamented Pearl.

Bradshaw tears down conventions in his 160-minute version (with intermission) for the New Group, in which the action has been moved from a late-nineteenth-century Russian country estate to a contemporary riverfront home in artsy Woodstock in Ulster County. The play begins with the actors warming up on a wooden proscenium platform, doing physical and vocal exercises; the audience sits on three sides of the stage as they get an advance glimpse of the cast and try to figure out who’s portraying who. After several minutes, everyone joins in a singalong of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s 1970 classic “Our House,” the lyrics of which will run counter to what we are about to experience: “Our house is a very, very, very fine house / With two cats in the yard / Life used to be so hard / Now everything is easy ’cause of you.” (CSNY appeared at the 1969 Woodstock festival but did not sing that song; the next year, however, they released the song “Woodstock,” written by Joni Mitchell, in which they proclaim, “Got to get back to the land / Set my soul free.”)

A close-knit, motley crew is gathering by the river on Darren (Daniel Oreskes) and Pauline’s (Amy Stiller) property to see a new play by Kevin (Nat Wolff), a twenty-six-year-old ne’er-do-well living in the shadow of his narcissistic mother, Irene (Parker Posey), a star of the stage. Before she says hello to her friends and relations, she is already loudly complaining that there is no soy milk for her coffee. Kevin has written the one-person, two-hour show for Nina (Aleyse Shannon), a twentysomething with no boundaries. Kevin is in love with Nina, who will soon take a liking to the older William (Ato Essandoh), a well-known writer who is Irene’s current partner. Meanwhile, Pauline and Darren’s daughter, Sasha (Hari Nef), pines away for Kevin. Also on hand are Sasha’s teacher husband, Mark (Patrick Foley), brain surgeon Dean (Bill Sage), and retired lawyer Samuel (David Cale), Irene’s best friend.

Mother (Parker Posey) and son (Nat Wolff) have an awkward relationship in The Seagull/Woodstock, NY (photo by Monique Carboni)

When Sasha ridicules Kevin’s set, which consists solely of a cast-iron bathtub and a curtain that goes around it, Mark needles her, saying, “Tonight their artistic souls will unite on this very stage.” Right before Kevin’s play starts, Samuel tells Nina, who lives nearby and whose banker father is not a fan of her interest in theater, “Woodstock nurtures the artistic soul. Bob Dylan and Van Morrison wrote some of their best music here. [Your father] should have bought a place in the Hamptons if he wanted you to be a banker.”

Bradshaw fills the show with contemporary references, from Dylan and Morrison to viagra, #metoo, Alec Baldwin, wokeness, the Wailers, Donald Trump, Bertrand Russell, Instagram, Stephen Colbert, Tracy Letts, dramadies, and Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive. He also takes on race, class, sexual identity, and truth but in subtler ways than he has in such previous works as Southern Promises, Intimacy, and Burning, or at least more subtle for him.

But Bradshaw and director Scott Elliott’s central target is art itself. “Hi, I’m Nina. I’m not a character in Kevin’s play. I’m me,” Nina says as the play-within-a-play kicks off. “Kevin hates artifice. So do I. I am myself, or I am no one. Who are you? Are you, you? Or are you hiding from yourself?” She adds, “The fourth wall tonight is broken. So that means I can see you just as clearly as you can see me. I can see everything about you. I can see things even you can’t see.” The fourth wall of Bradshaw’s play was broken immediately as well, when the actors got onstage and we all sang, and the lights stay at a level that allows us to see everyone in the audience.

Nina, who is biracial, then discusses “the N word,” actually saying it in full several times, which confronts her audience as well as Bradshaw’s, a writer who often strives to make his audience squirm in their seats. “I get that the historical legacy of the word is offensive. But does the word itself have any power?” she asks. Then, in true Bradshaw fashion, she switches to one of his favorite topics. “We recently went through a long period of isolation. Everyone in our society did. It was a period of intense loneliness for me. And for many of you, I bet. And what were we all doing during that time? Masturbating. Why can’t we talk about it? We all do it. I’d rather discuss masturbating than the weather.” Bradshaw understands that theater itself can be a kind of masturbation; in fact, in Intimacy, a character not only pleasures himself (using a prosthetic) in view of the audience but launches a sticky white substance into the crowd, some of which landed on the head of a major critic, who was none too happy. (One friend joked to me that Anton’s last name should be “Jackhov,” pronounced “jackoff.”)

Irene (Parker Posey) gets in the middle of Pauline (Amy Stiller) and Darren (Daniel Oreskes) in New Group world premiere at the Signature (photo by Monique Carboni)

After Kevin’s play ends, Irene tells Nina, “You were very good, in spite of my son exploiting you.” Nina replies, “Oh no. It was my choice. And he totally respected me, as an actress, and as a woman of color.” Irene says, “So you didn’t feel the least bit weird pretending to, uh, touch yourself, onstage?” Nina explains, “Oh, I wasn’t pretending. I had to really do it, in order to crack the artifice of normal theatrical conventions. There’s nothing real about realism. That’s Kevin’s philosophy. He believes in hiding nothing.” That is Bradshaw’s philosophy as well.

Throughout the show, the actors and stage crew bring chairs and tables on and off Derek McLane’s intimate set, which includes a narrow lower level around the platform where people in the first row can get comfy and put up their feet — until some of the actors walk across it. At times Elliott choreographs the play like it’s a dance, expertly guiding the cast of ten in the small space, who enter and exit through the aisles.

The cast seems to be having a lot of fun, and that feeling is infectious; the play moves at such an intoxicating pace that you might be disappointed when it’s over, wanting to spend more time with these well-developed, endearing, annoying, and frustrating people. “I think my character would feel more authentic if we knew more of her backstory. Right now the play feels abrupt,” Nina tells Kevin, who argues, “It is abrupt. That’s the point. We’re subverting typical American Theater. We’re getting right to the heart of the matter instead of making our audience suffer through an hour of incredibly dull backstory.”

Posey (Hurlyburly, Fifth of July) is a burst of summer sunshine as Irene, in flowery dresses, bobbed hairdo, and gloriously fake smiles. (The costumes are by Qween Jean, with lighting by Cha See and sound by Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen that keep the audience immersed in the show.) Wolff (Buried Child, The Naked Brothers Band) wonderfully captures the constant nervous wreck that is Kevin, while Shannon (Charmed, Black Christmas) glistens as a strong young woman ready to take charge of her life, especially sexually, and Nef (Des Moines, “Daddy”) is a bundle of fear as the disillusioned Sasha. Cale, Essandoh, Foley, Nef, Oreskes, Sage, and Stiller round out the uniformly solid cast.

Bradshaw (Thomas & Sally, Fulfillment) and New Group artistic director Elliott (Mercury Fur, Sticks & Bones) also take a hard look at aging, not just in theater but in life. Irene is well aware that it is getting more difficult for her to find roles because she is in her fifties, and Samuel is facing serious health issues that affect the elderly.

“Is there anything new anymore? Are there any new stories? New forms? Or is everything just a new spin on something old? A reinvention of the comfortable and familiar?,” Kevin asks William. The Seagull/Woodstock, NY provides just the right answers to those questions.

DES MOINES

Dan (Arliss Howard) and Marta (Johanna Day) are in for quite a night in Des Moines (photo by Hollis King)

DES MOINES
Theatre for a New Audience, Polonsky Shakespeare Center
262 Ashland Pl. between Lafayette Ave. & Fulton St.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 8, $97
866-811-4111
www.tfana.org

Denis Johnson’s Des Moines is a sly, beguiling black comedy about — well, I’m not quite sure what it’s about, but I couldn’t take my eyes off it, and not in a car-wreck sort of way. The 2007 play opened Friday night at TFANA’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center, but director Arin Arbus started working on the play with Johnson, the German-born novelist who died in 2017 at the age of sixty-seven, way back in 2013. In a program note, TFANA founding artistic director Jeffrey Horowitz explains that in 2015, after a week of workshopping with Arbus, the author, and dramaturg Jonathan Kalb, he told Johnson he “felt the play needed more clarifying. Denis said ‘no.’ Des Moines was finished.”

Now that I’ve seen its off-Broadway premiere, which continues through January 1 in Brooklyn, I am thrilled that Johnson refused to make any changes; clarification would have denuded the hundred-minute work of its endless charms and purposefully chaotic confusion. The characters speak in non-sequiturs, as if they are not listening to one another while engaging in what are generally called conversations. They go off on tangents or suddenly fall into silence. “It’s just kind of a little bit weird,” Marta (Johanna Day) understatedly says.

The play takes place in an upstairs apartment of a two-flat building in the capital of Iowa, whose caucuses have traditionally kicked off the presidential primary cycle, a city steeped in the insurance industry and whose name translates from the French as “of the monks.” The Online Etymology Dictionary posits that the name Des Moines grew out of the Native American word “Moinguena,” explaining, “Historians believe this represents Miami-Illinois mooyiinkweena, literally ‘shitface,’ from mooy ‘excrement’ + iinkwee ‘face,’ a name given by the Peoria tribe (whose name has itself become a sort of insult) to their western neighbors. It is not unusual for Native American peoples to have had hostile or derogatory names for others, but this seems an extreme case.” Now, I’m not claiming that Johnson knew any of this, but it feels like it fits in with the show’s exhilarating bathos.

The apartment hovers in midair, with space above and below it, as if it is a kind of floating bardo, way station, or purgatory. Riccardo Hernández’s comfy set includes a standard kitchen with a working sink, microwave, and coffeemaker, tchotchkes on the walls and counters, a small table in the center, two empty metal dog bowls, a garbage can, and a back room behind sliding French doors. Things are a little wilder and less ordinary in the back room, which is drenched in erotic red lighting.

The apartment belongs to the soft-spoken Dan (Arliss Howard), a twenty-year Army veteran who now drives a cab, and his wife, Marta, a relatively simple couple with simple needs, happy with leftover spaghetti and mediocre beer. They are taking care of their late daughter’s daughter, Jimmy (Hari Nef), who lives in the back room, confined to a wheelchair after a botched trans surgery.

Jimmy (Hari Nef) and Father Michael (Michael Shannon) get ready for a party in Denis Johnson’s final play (photo by Hollis King)

On this particular night, Marta has asked their parish priest, Father Michael Dubitsky (Michael Shannon), to come over and be there when she gives Dan some important news; Dan has some important news of his own about Michael, who he saw wearing lipstick outside a gay bar. Meanwhile, Dan is expecting the recently widowed Helen Drinkwater (Heather Alicia Simms) to stop by to pick up her late spouse’s wedding ring, which she left at the garage where Dan works. Her husband, a lawyer, died in a commuter plane crash; Dan had driven him to the airport, so Helen is hoping that the taxi driver will remember something that her husband said, what might have been his last words.

Once everyone is there, depth chargers — the drink in which a shotglass of alcohol is dropped into a mug of beer — are flowing, music is playing, and anarchy ensues as everyone and everything spirals out of control in a party to end all parties, the kind of crazy fete that is best experienced from a distance, like safely ensconced in seats in a theater, with additional physical space between the audience and the set.

Des Moines evokes the classic Twilight Zone episode “Five Characters in Search of an Exit,” in which a clown, a soldier, a ballerina, a hobo, and a bagpiper are trapped in an unknown, inescapable pit. The five characters in Johnson’s play seem trapped as well, if not in the apartment itself then in the city of Des Moines. Dan, who was stationed a few blocks from where he was born, has never been west of town, while it’s his job to take people to other places, including airports, where they travel away from Des Moines. Jimmy is confined to a wheelchair and appears to have no desire to go anywhere, especially after what happened to her when she went to the fictional Barrowville, West Virginia, where she got her problematic sex change operation.

And Ellen, who has lived in Des Moines “always and forever,” is widowed because her husband died on a commuter plane that only made it eight miles upriver before crashing, four miles from the fictional Sheller-Phelps factory, perhaps named after Phelps Sheller, a real-life Illinois farmer and military veteran who worked at the Sangamon Ordnance Plant, which manufactured ammunition during WWII.

It’s time for depth chargers and karaoke in off-Broadway premiere at TFANA’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center (photo by Hollis King)

Time is irrelevant in Des Moines. Father Michael forgot to turn his clock back to standard time. Ellen doesn’t know whether it’s Halloween or Christmas, confused by the holiday decorations in Jimmy’s room, which has both an antique phonograph with a large horn and a karaoke machine, mixing past and present. Dan and Marta can’t remember whether their dog ran away one winter ago or two, but they still leave two empty dog dishes on the floor as if the pooch just went out for a walk. Father Michael says several times that he hardly recognizes the old neighborhood even though he’s there all the time.

While no one in the apartment is living the American dream, dreams play a major role in the narrative, which is so helter-skelter, so disorganized that it sometimes seems like various scenes are actually dreams we are experiencing through the dreamer’s memories. Dreams are referenced throughout the show. Dan asks Father Michael to yell at him when he least expects it, “Wake up! You’re dreaming!” The first time we see Jimmy, she says, “I woke up. I was somewhere beautiful in a dream.” Ellen tells Dan and Marta, “I’ve been having some very strongly vivid dreams just lately.”

Not everyone likes listening to other people’s dreams. In the 2017 Scientific American article “Why You Shouldn’t Tell People about Your Dreams,” cognitive science professor Jim Davies delves into “why most of your dreams are going to seem pretty boring to most people.” But made-up dreams coming from the mind of Denis Johnson, well, there’s nothing boring about that.

Two-time Tony nominee Day (Sweat, How I Learned to Drive), Howard (Mank, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone), Nef (“Daddy,” Assassination Nation), Shannon (The Killer, Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune) and Simms (Fairview, By the Way, Meet Vera Stark have a field day in Des Moines, National Book Award winner Johnson’s (Jesus’ Son, Tree of Smoke, Hellhound on My Trail) last play. The actors appear to be having so much fun as the the story descends more and more into madness, and that energizes the audience. Obie winner and Shakespeare veteran Arbus (The Skin of Our Teeth, Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune) maintains an ecstatic anarchy throughout the proceedings, with gleeful choreography by Byron Easley.

“I dreamed I was in this weird place,” Dan says the morning after the party. “It was a strange place. I’m trying to remember the kind of place it was, but I can’t remember.” That’s kinda the way I feel about the show, which I will long remember.

THE HOMEBOUND PROJECT: THEATER FOR THE FRONT LINE

homebound

Who: Christopher Abbott, Glenn Davis, William Jackson Harper, Jessica Hecht, Marin Ireland, Raymond Lee, Alison Pill, Elizabeth Rodriguez, Thomas Sadoski, Amanda Seyfried, more
What: New online theatrical works to benefit No Kid Hungry
Where: Link supplied by the Homebound Project upon donation
When: May 6-10, 20-24, June 3-7, $10 or more, 7:00
Why: With audiences, playwrights, actors, directors, teachers, students, and most everyone else sheltering in place with theaters and schools closed, playwright Catya McMullen and director Jenna Worsham have come up with a unique program to bring works to a play-starved populace while also raising money for children in need. The Homebound Project pairs playwrights and actors in works created specifically for this time, performed from wherever everyone is hunkering down during the pandemic. From May 6 to 10, May 20 to 24, and June 3 to 7, ten short plays by ten playwrights performed by ten actors will stream for a limited time. To get the key to the virtual doorway, you have to make a minimum donation of $10 for each section; all proceeds go to the national nonprofit No Kid Hungry, which, as part of Share Our Strength, seeks to solve poverty and hunger issues around the country, and especially right now amid a terrible crisis. Worsham said in a statement, “The Homebound Project grew from a desire to support frontline organizations by doing what we artists do best: creating and gathering, in newly imagined ways. Our mission is to provide sustenance: critical provisions for those in need, an opportunity for isolated artists to collaborate, and (we hope) a way for audiences to access the communal empathy that theater provokes.”

The first ten actor/playwright combinations have been announced, and the list is beyond impressive, dealing with the theme of “home”: Christopher Abbott (James White, The Rose Tattoo)/Lucy Thurber (The Insurgents, Transfers), Glenn Davis (Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow)/Ren Dara Santiago (Siblings, Something in the Balete Tree), William Jackson Harper (An Octoroon, The Good Place)/Max Posner (Sisters on the Ground, Snore), Jessica Hecht (The Assembled Parties, Fiddler on the Roof)/Sarah Ruhl (In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play; How to Transcend a Happy Marriage), Marin Ireland (On the Exhale, Ironbound)/Eliza Clark (The Metaphysics of Breakfast, Edgewise), Raymond Lee (Tokyo Fish Story, Vietgone)/Qui Nguyen (Living Dead in Denmark, Vietgone), Alison Pill (Three Tall Women, Blackbird)/C. A. Johnson (All the Natalie Portmans, Thirst), Elizabeth Rodriguez (Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven, The Motherfucker with the Hat)/Rajiv Joseph (Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, Describe the Night), Thomas Sadoski (Other Desert Cities, reasons to be pretty)/Martyna Majok (Cost of Living, Ironbound), and Amanda Seyfried (Big Love, Mamma Mia!)/Catya McMullen (Everything Is Probably Going to Be Okay, A**holes in Gas Stations). Each section will be available from 7:00 pm of the first day to 7:00 pm of the last day, after which the link will be taken down. The participants for round two, which will examine “sustenance,” are Uzo Aduba/Anne Washburn, Nicholas Braun/Will Arbery, Utkarsh Ambudkar/Marco Ramirez, Betty Gilpin/Lily Houghton, Kimberly Hébert Gregory/Loy A. Webb, Hari Nef/Ngozi Anyanwu, Mary-Louise Parker/Bryna Turner, Christopher Oscar Peña/Brittany K. Allen, Zachary Quinto/Adam Bock, Taylor Schilling/Sarah DeLappe, and Babak Tafti/David Zheng; among those expected for the third segments are actors André Holland, Joshua Leonard, Ashley Park, and Will Pullen and playwrights John Guare and Daniel Talbott, so it’s hard to go wrong, especially for this cause and with donations starting at a mere ten bucks. (Feel free to give more if you can.) Rachel Sabella, director of No Kid Hungry in New York, explained, “In New York City alone, kids in need are missing nearly 850,000 school meals every day while schools are closed because of the coronavirus. We have a plan to feed kids, but the need is great, and it’s going to take all of us — actors, cafeteria staff, elected officials, everyday people — to offer the time, talent, and resources to reach them.”

“DADDY”

Franklin (Ronald Peet) has some slippery father issues in New Group / Vineyard Theatre world premiere (photo by Matt Saunders)

The New Group/Vineyard Theatre at the Pershing Square Signature Center
The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 31, $40-$135
www.thenewgroup.org
www.vineyardtheatre.org

Jeremy O. Harris’s “Daddy” is a monumental work of bold genius, a searing, audacious investigation into the creation and ownership of both art and people, constructed around the sins of the father. The play, a joint production of the New Group and the Vineyard that opened tonight at the Signature Center’s Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre, takes place in and around an infinity pool in a Bel Air mansion; Matt Saunders’s delightful set prominently features several chaise longues on a deck and a gleaming blue pool in the front that was inspired by David Hockney paintings, particularly Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), which sold at auction for more than ninety million dollars this past November, as well as A Bigger Splash, Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool, and Portrait of Nick Wilder. (In 1966-67, a twenty-nine-year-old Hockney lived with Wilder, an older art dealer, in the latter’s Hollywood home, although this is not their story.)

Ronald Peet stars as Franklin, a twentysomething black artist who has recently moved to Los Angeles. Following an opening at a hot new gallery, Franklin has come home with Andre (Alan Cumming), an absurdly wealthy fiftysomething white art collector. Andre worships Franklin’s lithe body, comparing his legs to Naomi Campbell’s, while a very high Franklin, who is preparing for his first gallery show, expounds on the intrinsic value of art, arguing that “art loses its worth the minute it can be bought. . . . It becomes worthless once its owned.” He’s not referring merely to Andre’s holdings — which includes works by Cy Twombly, Cindy Sherman, Diane Arbus, and Alexander Calder and a room of Basquiats — but also colonialism and slavery. Andre and Franklin debate the artistic value of Kara Walker’s A Subtlety installation of a giant white “mammy” figure in the old Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg, and it’s no coincidence that Andre purchases Basquiats, a black artist who gained fame through his close association with the white Andy Warhol.

Franklin (Ronald Peet) explains his art to his gallerist, Alessia (Hari Nef), in “Daddy” at the Signature (photo by Monique Carboni)

Franklin is soon at home in Andre’s place, inviting over his crew: fashion-obsessed Bellamy (Kahyun Kim) and struggling white actor Max (Tommy Dorfman), who supply comic relief through their jealousy of Franklin; each of them would love to have a “sugar daddy” too, although Franklin bristles at the term. He believes his relationship with Andre is something other than a clichéd fling. Nevertheless, Franklin has taken to calling Andre “Daddy” during sex, which occurs often throughout the play — there is ample nudity and graphic simulations. Absent fathers are everywhere: While Franklin never met his father, which haunts him, Andre’s father got him started collecting art, giving him a Degas. Franklin’s gallerist, the young, white Alessia (Hari Nef), also hails from a wealthy family (she took over the gallery from her father) and believes Franklin’s upcoming show will help put her on the map; it’s yet another example of a rich white person “owning” a black person, made all the more clear when we see the tiny soft-sculpture dolls Franklin is making for the exhibition. When Franklin’s Bible-thumping mother, Zora (Charlayne Woodard), arrives, she is not exactly thrilled about her son’s living situation or artwork. As Franklin tries to find his place in this superficial Hollywood world, he is accompanied by a kind of Greek chorus in the form of a three-woman gospel choir (Carrie Compere, Denise Manning, and Onyie Nwachukwu) that represents his heart and soul, which are up for grabs.

Andre (Alan Cumming) looks on as Max (Tommy Dorfman) moves closer to Bellamy (Kahyun Kim) in Jeremy O. Harris’s “Daddy” (photo by Monique Carboni)

In the script, Harris (Xander Xyst, Dragon: 1, WATER SPORTS; or insignificant white boys) explains, “When lost look to melodrama for direction (see: [Peter] Brooks’s Melodramatic Imagination), because this play moves from melodrama’s dream to melodrama’s nightmare.” Director Danya Taymor (Familiar, Pass Over) has no such problem delivering the melodrama, from dream to nightmare; it’s a phenomenal staging, with vibrant, colorful costumes by Montana Levi Blanco, glistening lighting by Isabella Byrd (especially when the reflection of the pool’s waves dance across the walls), lovely original music adapted from a standard ring tone by Lee Kinney, and inspirational vocal music and arrangements by Darius Smith and Brett Macias. Peet (Spill, Kentucky) makes a major breakthrough as Franklin, giving a brave performance in which he lets it all hang out, emotionally and physically, combining sex appeal with an overt neediness and a major father complex. Tony and Olivier winner Cumming (Cabaret, The Good Wife) is utterly charming as Andre, a commanding, cultured man who loves collecting pretty things. “Beauty is beauty is beauty, Franklin. No matter whose eyes are seeing it,” he tells his lover. And two-time Obie winner and Tony nominee Woodard (Ain’t Misbehavin’, The Witch of Edmonton) ratchets it up as Zora, especially in the third act, when Kim and Dorfman get to strut their stuff while the masterful Cumming unfortunately has a lot less to do.

Harris’s fierce, polarizing Slave Play recently ran at New York Theater Workshop, and the three-act, 165-minute “Daddy” (with two intermissions) deals with some of the same topics (race, sex, power) but takes them to a whole new level, exploring the concept of a father as reality and fantasy, metaphor and obsession, presence and absence: Andre spanks Franklin like he’s a child, Zora prays to the Lord for guidance, Franklin discusses the origin of his dolls, the choir sings, “Daddy won’t nothing but a ‘shhhhhhh,’” and several characters get in the pool and blast out a hysterically relevant George Michael song. The pool is more than a cool part of the set; it also serves as a baptismal font, making us all believe in the power of art and theater, which becomes even more palpable when the first few rows get splashed. Even though the ending is muddy, “Daddy” is an extraordinary piece of storytelling, a masterful work of art that demands to be seen.