Tag Archives: Heather Alicia Simms

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.

SHAKESPEARE IN THE PARK: RICHARD III

Robert O’Hara’s Richard III is set among moving gothic arches (photo by Joan Marcus)

RICHARD III
Central Park, Delacorte Theater
Tuesday – Sunday through July 17, free, 8:00
publictheater.org

There’s a moment early on in Robert O’Hara’s Shakespeare in the Park production of Richard III that defines the rest of the play. When Richard (playwright and actor Danai Gurira), the Duke of Gloucester, is wooing Lady Anne (Ali Stroker) after having murdered her husband, the prince, and her father, the king, he gives her his dagger so she can kill him. “If thy revengeful heart cannot forgive, / Lo, here I lend thee this sharp-pointed dagger, / Which if thou please to hide in this true breast / And let the soul forth that adoreth thee, / I lay it naked to the deadly stroke / And humbly beg the death upon my knee—” Richard says. She plunges the dagger into his chest, but alas, it is merely a prop that Richard takes back and fake stabs himself with a few times.

Richard smiles and the crowd laughs, but it prepares us for a different kind of Richard III, and a different kind of Richard. The scene is key to the success of the play; if Richard can woo Lady Anne, who passionately despises him, then he can in turn win over the audience to root him on while he treacherously lays waste to anyone and everyone in his way on his journey to acquiring the crown.

Richard is usually portrayed by a white man with a humped back and a menacing limp. But here he is played by a Zimbabwean American woman, looking magnificent in black leather with gold details and a closely shaved head with ominous designs. There’s no limp and no hunch, recalling Jamie Lloyd’s recent staging of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac at the BAM Harvey, where a stunning James McAvoy wore no embarrassing proboscis, perhaps the hottest Cyrano in history.

So it’s a hard sell when Gurira admits, “I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks, / Nor made to court an amorous looking glass; / I, that am rudely stamped and want love’s majesty / To strut before a wanton ambling nymph; I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion, / Cheated of feature by dissembling nature, / Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time / Into this breathing world scarce half made up, / And that so lamely and unfashionable / That dogs bark at me as I halt by them.”

Ratcliffe (Daniel J. Watts) has some stern words with Richard III (Danai Gurira) in Shakespeare in the Park production (photo by Joan Marcus)

Despite that anomaly, we are with Gurira’s Gloucester from the very start, in a prologue taken from the third part of Henry VI as he stabs the king. Gurira’s monologues to the audience are not as intense as we are used to; this is a more likable Richard, and that works, for the most part. Gurira, who is well known as Michonne on The Walking Dead and Okoye in Black Panther and has appeared on Broadway in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and at the Delacorte in Measure for Measure, has a charismatic mystique as she marches across Myung Hee Cho’s minimalist set, consisting of eleven large gothic arches that rotate around the stage and occasionally flicker with colored lights. (The lighting is by Alex Jainchill, with fashionable costumes by Dede Ayite and sound and music by Elisheba Ittoop.)

But O’Hara (Slave Play, Barbecue), who has previously directed Gurira’s Eclipsed and The Continuum, never finds the right pace as the show labors through its two hours and forty minutes (with a twenty-minute intermission). We are too often waiting for something to happen instead of it just happening; the electricity rarely sparks.

There are stylish moments, but too many scenes feel like set pieces that stand on their own but do not flow into one another. Tony winner Stroker (Oklahoma! Spring Awakening) is lovely as Lady Anne, especially when she shows up later in a blinged-out wheelchair. Monique Holt (Cymbeline, Romeo & Juliet), who is deaf, adds a unique aspect to the Duchess of York, but not everything she signs is translated. One of the assassins, played by Maleni Chaitoo, is also deaf. And Rivers is portrayed by Matthew August Jeffers, who has a rare form of dwarfism.

Danai Gurira and Matthew August Jeffers rehearse in masks for Richard III (photo by Joan Marcus)

Interestingly, while Gurira’s Richard has no physical disabilities, Richmond and King Edward IV are played by Gregg Mozgala (Cost of Living, Merchant of Venice), who has cerebral palsy, which affects how he walks; Mozgala starred as a high school version of Richard III in Teenage Dick at the Public in 2018.

Sharon Washington (Feeding the Dragon Wild with Happy), who portrayed Lady Anne at the Delacorte in 1990, brings down the house as Queen Margaret, who sees through Richard immediately. She lets loose after declaring, “I can no longer hold me patient,” making us yearn for her return after she exits. The cast also features Sanjit De Silva as Buckingham, Skyler Gallun as the Prince of Wales, Paul Niebanck as George, Michael Potts as Lord Stanley, Ariel Shafir as Lord Hastings, Heather Alicia Simms as Queen Elizabeth, Matthew August Jeffers as a standout among the ensemble, and Daniel J. Watts as Catesby / Ratcliffe.

Richard III kicks off the sixtieth anniversary season of Shakespeare in the Park at the Delacorte; the inaugural presentation, in 1962, was The Merchant of Venice with George C. Scott as Shylock and James Earl Jones as the Prince of Morocco. Richard III has been staged at the Delacorte in 1966 with Philip Bosco, 1983 with Kevin Kline, and 1990 with Denzel Washington. Among the others who have portrayed the devious duke onstage are Scott, Laurence Olivier, Ian McKellen, Kevin Spacey, Al Pacino, Benedict Cumberbatch, Alec Guinness, Peter Dinklage, Mark Rylance, and Lars Eidinger, who was spectacular in Thomas Ostermeier’s adaptation at BAM in 2017. Gurira is a worthy addition to that list, even if the production itself leaves too much to be desired in a hopefully glorious summer.

SOHO REP. SPRING GALA

Soho Rep. virtual spring gala features performances by Cynthia Erivo and many others

Who: Amber Tamblyn, Questlove, Uzo Aduba, César Alvarez, Jocelyn Bioh, Cynthia Erivo, Terrance Hayes, Marin Ireland, Hansol Jung, Raja Feather Kelly, Questlove, Roslyn Ruff, Beau Sia, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Heather Alicia Simms, Patricia Smith, TL Thompson, Darren Walker, Emily Wells, Marcus Samuelsson, Andrew Yang, Rick Kinsel
What: Virtual spring gala
Where: Soho Rep. online
When: Monday, May 24, free with RSVP, 7:00
Why: Founded in 1975 by Jerry Engelbach and Marlene Swartz, “Soho Rep. provides radical theater makers with productions of the highest caliber and tailor-made development at key junctures in their artistic practice. We elevate artists as thought leaders and citizens who change the field and society. Artistic autonomy is paramount at Soho Rep. — we encourage an unmediated connection between artists and audiences to create a springboard for transformation and rich civic life beyond the walls of our small theater.” The company, which presents shows at 46 Walker St., will be holding its spring gala on May 24, featuring musical performances and appearances by Uzo Aduba and Cynthia Erivo (performing a scene from Aleshea Harris’s Is God Is), César Alvarez (performing “Mandela” from The Potluck), Jocelyn Bioh, Marin Ireland, Hansol Jung, Raja Feather Kelly, Roslyn Ruff and Heather Alicia Simms (performing a scene from Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview), TL Thompson, and others; the evening will be hosted by Amber Tamblyn, with Questlove leading the afterparty. The event honors the Vilcek Foundation and Rick Kinsel, with presentations from previous Vilcek Prize winners Marcus Samuelsson and Andrew Yang.

BROADWAY’S BEST SHOWS: SPOTLIGHT ON PLAYS

BROADWAY’S BEST SHOWS
Discounted tickets available through March 21, $49
Streaming begins March 25 (each show available on demand for four days)
www.broadwaysbestshows.com
www.stellartickets.com

Last fall, Broadway’s Best Shows hosted “Spotlight on Plays,” a series of all-star staged virtual readings, taking actors out of Zoom boxes and filming them in more theatrical settings. Among the offerings, for $5 each, were Gore Vidal’s the Best Man with John Malkovich, Morgan Freeman, Vanessa Williams, Zachary Quinto, Phylicia Rashad, Reed Birney, and Elizabeth Ashley; Kenneth Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth with Lucas Hedges, Paul Mescal, and Grace Van Patten; David Mamet’s Race, with David Alan Grier, Ed O’Neill, Alicia Stith, and Richard Thomas; Mamet’s Boston Marriage with Patti LuPone, Rebecca Pidgeon, and Sophia Macy; Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya with Alan Cumming, Constance Wu, Samira Wiley, K. Todd Freeman, and Ellen Burstyn; Donald Margulies’s Time Stands Still with original cast members Laura Linney, Alicia Silverstone, Eric Bogosian, and Brian d’Arcy James; and Robert O’Hara’s Barbecue with Colman Domingo, S. Epatha Merkerson, Tamberla Perry, Kimberly Hebert Gregory, Heather Simms, Laurie Metcalf, Carrie Coon, David Morse, Kristine Nielsen, and Annie McNamara. Sorry you missed that, yes?

Fortunately, Broadway’s Best Shows is now back for another round of online productions, seven plays that can be purchased for $49 total through March 21, after which tickets can be bought individually, at a higher per-show cost. The presentations begin March 25, with each play available for four days. It’s another impressive lineup: Meryl Streep, Bobby Cannavale, Carla Gugino, Mary-Louise Parker, Kevin Kline, Debbie Allen, Ellen Burstyn, Keanu Reeves, Kathryn Hahn, Audra McDonald, Phylicia Rashad, Heidi Schreck, Alia Shawkat, Heather Alicia Simms, Stith, and others will be appearing in Larissa FastHorse’s The Thanksgiving Play, directed by Leigh Silverman (March 25), Pearl Cleage’s Angry, Raucous and Shamelessly Gorgeous, directed by Camille A. Brown (April 9), Lillian Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine, directed by Sarna Lapine, Adrienne Kennedy’s Ohio State Murders, directed by Kenny Leon, Sarah Ruhl’s Dear Elizabeth, directed by Kate Whoriskey, Paula Vogel’s The Baltimore Waltz, directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz, and Wendy Wasserstein’s The Sisters Rosensweig, directed by Anna D. Shapiro. All proceeds go to the Actors Fund, which provides “emergency financial assistance, affordable housing, health care and insurance counseling, senior care, secondary career development, and more . . . to meet the needs of our entertainment community with a unique understanding of the challenges involved in a life in the arts.”

THE BELLE’S STRATAGEM

Red Bull will delve into Hannah Cowley’s The Belle’s Stratagem, in latest benefit reading and Bull Session

Who: Red Bull Theater company
What: Livestreamed benefit reading of Hannah Cowley’s The Belle’s Stratagem
Where: Red Bull Theater website and Facebook Live
When: Monday, February 22, free with RSVP (donations accepted), 7:30 (available on demand through February 26 at 7:00); Bull Session, February 25, free with RSVP, 7:30
Why: In her plan “Staging the 18th-Century Prostitute for the 21st-Century: A Dramaturgical Approach to Teaching Cowley’s The Belle’s Stratagem,” professor Melinda C. Finberg wrote of Hannah Cowley’s 1780 work, “While The Belle’s Stratagem is set firmly in the fashionable society of late-eighteenth-century London, and its style is reminiscent of Cowley’s Restoration and Augustan predecessors, Cowley’s comedy demonstrates concerns about the laboring classes and their relationship to the moneyed elite. The title of Cowley’s comedy pays homage to one of her favorite Augustan playwrights, George Farquhar (1677-1707), and his The Beaux’s Stratagem (1707), and like many of these earlier comedies, The Belle’s Stratagem juxtaposes two story lines: Letitia Hardy’s ingenious plot to win the heart of her betrothed, Doricourt, against the marital problems of jealous Sir George Touchwood and his wife, the naïve Lady Frances. Both plots concern men learning to respect the women in their lives both before and after marriage, and are further connected by questions regarding the nature and fluidity of identity. Interwoven with these plots are transitional scenes among servants, tradesmen, and con artists who make their livings off the excesses of fashionable life.”

You can find out how relevant the play still is when Red Bull presents a benefit reading of The Belle’s Stratagem on February 22 at 7:30, directed by Gaye Taylor Upchurch and starring Cecil Baldwin, Jasmine Batchelor, Mark Bedard, Neal Bledsoe, Lilli Cooper, Peter Jay Fernandez, Santino Fontana, Tony Jenkins, Lauren Karaman, Aaron Krohn, Heather Alicia Simms, and Chauncy Thomas. The reading will be available on demand through February 26 at 7:00. On February 25 at 7:30, a live Bull Session on the play, which was advertised back in the day as “A Variety of Serious and Comic Songs,” will feature Upchurch, scholar Dustin D. Stewart, and members of the cast discussing the work and Cowley, who decided to take up playwrighting after a “dull night at the theater” and was involved in a professional rivalry with Hannah More (Percy, The Search after Happiness).

THE MANIC MONOLOGUES: A VIRTUAL THEATRICAL EXPERIENCE

Who: Tessa Albertson, Anna Belknap, Ato Blankson-Wood, Mike Carlsen, Maddy Corman, Alexis Cruz, Mateo Ferro, Wilson Jermaine Heredia, Sam Morales, Bi Jean Ngo, Armando Riesco, Jon Norman Schneider, Heather Alicia Simms, C. J. Wilson, Craig Bierko
What: Monologues about how real-life individuals are dealing with mental illness
Where: McCarter Theatre Center
When: Thursday, February 18, free, 7:00 am
Why: In May 2019, Zachary Burton and Elisa Hofmeister brought their show, The Manic Monologues, to Stanford University, an evening of true stories about people dealing with mental illness. The project was inspired by a psychotic breakdown Stanford University PhD geology student Zach suffered; he was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The play has now been reimagined for online viewing by director Elena Araoz with multimedia designer Jared Mezzocchi; it will start streaming through McCarter Theatre Center on February 18 at 7:00 am, performed by an all-star cast and featuring interactive design and technology, including sound, writing, and doodling. “With this digital endeavor, McCarter hopes to reinforce its role as a cultural organization dedicated to innovative projects that spark timely dialogue and strengthen community,” McCarter resident producer Debbie Bisno said in a statement. “In pivoting to virtual creation in Covid, we’ve uncovered exciting ways of combining art and ideas. And, we are excited to make this work, and the conversation around mental health, accessible to a wider and more diverse audience than we would have in a traditional live staged-reading format. These are silver linings!”

Presented in association with Princeton University Health Services, the 24 Hour Plays, and Innovations in Socially Distant Performance at the Lewis Center for the Arts, The Manic Monologues, originally planned for a staged reading prior to the pandemic lockdown, consists of twenty-one real-life tales told by actors Tessa Albertson, Anna Belknap, Ato Blankson-Wood, Mike Carlsen, Maddy Corman, Alexis Cruz, Mateo Ferro, Wilson Jermaine Heredia, Sam Morales, Bi Jean Ngo, Armando Riesco, Jon Norman Schneider, Heather Alicia Simms, C. J. Wilson, and Craig Bierko; in an effort to further reduce the stigma surrounding mental illness, there will also be links to a resource guide, video interviews with experts and advocates, the script, and other related material.

Soho Rep.’s FAIRVIEW

Beverly (Heather Alicia Simms) and Dayton (Charles Browning) get ready for a family affair in Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview (photo by Henry Grossman)

Theatre for a New Audience, Polonsky Shakespeare Center
262 Ashland Pl. between Lafayette Ave. & Fulton St.
Tuesday – Sunday through August 11, $55-$115
866-811-4111
www.tfana.org
sohorep.org/fairview

At the beginning of Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Fairview, which has successfully transitioned from Soho Rep. to the much bigger Theatre for a New Audience, a black woman onstage approaches the fourth wall as if it were a mirror, checking her hair and applying lipstick, but she’s not seeing herself, of course; what she is looking at is a space filled primarily with white people who have paid good money to watch her and the other actors/characters in the dark. It’s an incendiary concept that gets more radical — and openly angry and confrontational — as the story makes its way through four ever-more-antagonistic acts, taking a recent theme to a whole new level of supreme discomfort.

There might be an explosion of high-quality plays on and off Broadway by black men and women about the black experience — think Suzan-Lori Parks, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Lynn Nottage, Tarell Alvin McRaney, Dominique Morisseau, Jocelyn Bioh, Jeremy O. Harris, Lydia R. Diamond, and Dael Orlandersmith, among others, as well as such directors of color as Kenny Leon, Liesl Tommy, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Lileana Blain-Cruz, and Leah C. Gardiner — but the audience for these shows is still predominantly white, something that has not gone unnoticed by black artists. In the Flea’s 2015 interactive Take Care, written by the white Todd Shalom and the black Niegel Smith, who also directed, an audience member is given the job of pointing out all the black and brown people in the room and telling them to gather in a corner, as if being rounded up for nefarious purposes. (I had that responsibility when I attended.) In Jordan E. Cooper’s 2019 Ain’t No Mo’, in which all of the people of color in America are being sent back to Africa, a minister tries to get the mostly white audience to shout out the N-word, with no success save for one black woman the night I went.

Sisters Beverly (Heather Alicia Simms) and Jasmine (Roslyn Ruff) do battle in Pulitzer Prize winner (photo by Gerry Goodstein)

In Thomas Bradshaw’s 2019 revival of Southern Promises at the Flea, also directed by Smith, a mini-Roots-like tale is performed by an all-person-of-color cast, playing slaves as well as slave owners and a white preacher; at the curtain call, much of the white audience stood and applauded, but a handful of blacks were silent, appearing distraught by what they had just witnessed. And in Triptych (Eyes of One on Another), a multimedia production about Robert Mapplethorpe’s photos of, among other subjects, black male bodies, with a score by the white Bryce Dessner and a libretto by the black Korde Arrington Tuttle, a black actor watches from the front of the stage, never speaking, until at one point he sits down in the primarily white audience and claps and cheers by himself, leaving the crowd to wonder if they just aren’t getting it. All of the above incidents are deeply uncomfortable moments involving race and, more specifically, the “segregation” that still exists in the theater.

“In America you are obsessed with race, and you never never never think about class,” a character says in Fairview. “The rich profit from the racism. The poor get nothing from it.” The play takes place on Mimi Lien’s almost blindingly white stage, a huge, fancy dining room / living room that feels like The Jeffersons meets The Cosby Show by way of Edward Albee and Noël Coward. At the front of the stage is a black border, a few feet high, that makes it look like the Frasier family (a nod to Kelsey Grammer’s popular Frasier sitcom?) is on a television screen while also serving as a small barrier keeping actors and audience separate. At the start, Beverly (Heather Alicia Simms) sings along with Sly & the Family Stone’s 1971 disco hit “Family Affair” on the radio, but the station changes a few times by itself, as if reminding the audience — and Beverly — that someone else is in charge.

Keisha (MaYaa Boateng) and her aunt Jasmine (Roslyn Ruff) do some celebrating in Fairview (photo by Henry Grossman)

Beverly and Dayton (Charles Browning) are getting ready for a dinner celebrating her mother’s birthday; they are joined by their daughter, graduating high school senior Keisha (MaYaa Boateng), and Beverly’s gossipy sister, Jasmine (Roslyn Ruff). In the second act, the action is repeated, but silently, as four white people in voiceover (Hannah Cabell as Suze, Jed Resnick as Mack, Natalia Payne as Bets, and Luke Robertson as Jimbo) discuss the loaded question “If you could choose to be a different race, what race would you be?” It gets even whiter in the third act, when Beverly’s brother and his wife finally arrive and the matriarch comes downstairs, followed by a finale in which all hell breaks loose and theatrical conventions are turned inside out and upside down. What might be exhilarating at first quickly becomes something else as Drury (Marys Seacole,; We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South West Africa, from the German Südwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915), director Sarah Benson (In the Blood, An Octoroon), and Boateng/Keisha go where no play has gone before, particularly involving gender, class, and stereotyping in addition to race.

The stellar production, which has been extended at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn through August 11, is ingeniously directed by Benson, who navigates the changing emotional temperatures of the four distinct acts, with terrific lighting by Amith Chandrashaker, sound by Mikaal Sulaiman, and costumes by Montana Levi Blanco, fully immersing everyone in the ever-darker proceedings. Fairview — the name itself can be broken into two words, explaining part of Drury’s mission — offers a very different experience to white audiences as compared to black and brown theatergoers. Regardless of your color, however, there’s nothing you can do to prepare yourself for what happens, or for your ultimate reaction, as white privilege and white guilt take center stage without apology.