Tag Archives: Kaye Voyce

THE WELKIN

A jury of matrons must decide the fate of a convicted woman in Lucy Kirkwood’s The Welkin (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

THE WELKIN
Atlantic Theater Company
Linda Gross Theater
336 West 20th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 7, $56.50-$121.50
atlantictheater.org

Twelve Angry Men meets The Crucible by way of horrormeister Peter Straub and George Cukor’s The Women in Lucy Kirkwood’s gripping and intense, if messy and overlong, The Welkin, running at the Atlantic’s Linda Gross Theater through July 7.

Kirkwood’s previous works include Chimerica, in which a Chinese dissident and an American photojournalist attempt to find the Tank Man, who became an international symbol of resistance during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest, and The Children, which takes place shortly after a devastating nuclear accident on the East Coast of Britain. In The Welkin, Kirkwood contemplates female autonomy — the right of a woman to control her body — directly and indirectly bringing up such issues as capital punishment, abortion, gender identity, and sexuality while celebrating individuality over groupthink stereotypes. It’s set in March 1759 on the border of Norfolk and Suffolk in England, but it relates all too closely to what is occurring in America today in the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

The play opens with a harrowing scene, cast in shadowy darkness in front of the curtain. After an absence of four months, Sally Poppy (Haley Wong) has returned home to her laborer husband, Frederick (Danny Wolohan); she is naked and bloodied, soon pulling out a hammer. We instinctively assume something awful has happened to her, but it turns out that she has apparently done something awful herself: She tells Frederick that the blood is not hers but that of Alice Wax, a young girl her lover brutally murdered and she helped dismember and stuff up a fireplace. She demands ten shillings from her cuckolded husband to pay the midwife for the baby she claims she is carrying, which she coldly says is not his. Her lack of guilt or remorse is disconcerting — as well as rife with sociocultural complications.

The curtain then rises on widowed midwife Lizzie Luke (Sandra Oh) churning butter when bailiff Billy Coombes (Glenn Fitzgerald) arrives, informing her that the judge wants Lizzie to serve on the twelve-woman jury to determine whether the convicted Sally is truly with child, in which case she cannot be hanged for her crime and would instead be transported to Australia. Lizzie shows no immediate concern about the murder. “Expect that is the closest a Wax child ever got to sweeping a chimney,” she says.

The married Mr. Coombes flirts with Lizzie — it appears that they might have an undefined thing for each other — who first refuses to participate on the jury but eventually acquiesces, leaving her daughter, Katy (MacKenzie Mercer), to churn the butter, passing female responsibilities to the next generation, who might actually want more out of life.

The jurors, each doing some kind of traditional women’s work, are sworn in one by one, sharing an aspect of their personal story before kissing “the book.” It’s a ponderous scene, but we learn that Mary Middleton (Susannah Perkins) has five children and a haunted tankard in her home. Ann Lavender (Jennifer Nikki Kidwell) is married to a poet and is raising their four daughters in “peasant honesty.” The eighty-three-year-old Sarah Smith (Dale Soules) has twenty-one children with three husbands and until recently could do a handstand for one minute. Helen Ludlow (Emily Cass McDonnell) has had twelve miscarriages in eight years. Peg Carter (Simone Recasner) is married to the third-generation gardener for the family whose child was murdered and has “this thing he is able to do with his tongue which I find very amenable.” And Charlotte Cary (Mary McCann) is a stranger in town who has a dinner engagement at five that she would prefer not to miss.

Sally Poppy (Haley Wong) must prove she is pregnant to save herself from the gallows in 1759 England (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

The rest of the two-and-a-half-hour play (with intermission) unfolds in a dungeonlike room where the dozen women have been sequestered until they reach a verdict on Sally’s supposed pregnancy. At stage left is a fireplace, serving as a constant reminder of what Sally and her lover did to Alice; at stage right is a narrow window through which a sliver of at times heavenly light peeks in. When the window is opened, the sound of the unruly mob gathered outside to await Sally’s execution comes pouring in. Sally is there to be poked and examined, her hands bound by rope. Mr. Coombes is present to “keep this jury of matrons without meat, drink, fire, and candle” and to speak only when asking if the matrons have reached a verdict.

The women take sides, chastise one another, divulge secrets, and make accusations as they debate how to determine whether Sally is pregnant. Sally does herself no favors by being nasty and difficult. “Shut up Helen what are you even doing here everyone knows you’re barren,” she barks at the intimidated Helen. Meanwhile, Sarah Hollis (Hannah Cabell) is unable to contribute much because she hasn’t spoken in twenty years, since her son was born; Kitty Givens (Tilly Botsford) and Hannah Rusted (Paige Gilbert) believe Halley’s Comet might have something to do with all the strange goings-on; Judith Brewer (Ann Harada) is a nosy gossiper; and Emma Jenkins (Nadine Malouf) is clamoring for Sally to swing.

Being a midwife, Lizzie often finds herself in the middle of it all and has a unique perspective on the matter, determined to give Sally the benefit of the doubt, explaining in a monologue that is as relevant today as it was 265 years ago: “Because she has been sentenced to hang on the word of a cuckolded husband. Because every card dealt to her today and for many years before has been an unkind one, because she has been sentenced by men pretending to be certain of things of which they are entirely ignorant, and now we sit here imitating them, trying to make an ungovernable thing governable, I do not ask you to like her. I ask you to hope for her, so that she might know she is worth hoping for. And if you cannot do that for her sake, think instead of the women who will be in this room when that comet comes round again, and how brittle they will think our spirits, how ashamed they will be, that we were given our own dominion and we made it look exactly like the one down there,” referring to the courtroom.

“Please. This whole affair is a farce. We are cold, hungry, tired, thirsty women and all of us’ve had our housework interrupted. . . . It is a poor apparatus for justice. But it is what we have. This room. The sky outside that window and our own dignity beneath it. Mary’s view is as important as Charlotte’s, and together we must speak in one voice. It is almost impossible we should make the right decision.”

A shocking event at the end of act one leads to a riveting, wildly unpredictable second act that threatens to go off the rails at any moment.

A welkin is defined as the vault of the sky, the firmament separating heaven and earth. Genesis states, “And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years.’” In Act 5, Scene 5 of Shakespeare’s King John, Lewis, the dauphin, says, “The sun of heaven methought was loath to set, / But stay’d and made the western welkin blush.” Light is one of several themes underlying the play. The women are not allowed to use a candle or light the fireplace, but when Dr. Willis (Wolohan) comes to examine Sally and asks to use a candle, Mr. Coombes looks the other way.

The role of women is emphasized throughout, focusing on how they are essentially needed only for cooking, cleaning, mending, and having babies. “A woman is not a laundry list!” Lizzie declares. The only sexual pleasure mentioned in the filthy room is Mary’s enjoyment when Lizzie rubs her “down . . . there.”

The men are inept, incompetent, insensitive fools: Frederick initially wants to whip Sally; one of Mr. Coombes’s arms is in a sling and he has only one testicle, as if he has been castrated; and Dr. Willis has invented a speculumlike metal instrument to insert into Sally to examine her. When Sally says that her supposed pregnancy was not intended, that “the gentleman did not withdraw when I told him to,” Judith responds, “That’s not a method you can rely on; they’re senseless at the last post. With Mr. Brewer I always kept a piece of brick in a handkerchief under the bed; if you time your strike right you can save yourself a lot of trouble in the long run.”

Religion and truth are also on the docket as the characters argue over God’s authority. Frederick, explaining how he had to cover up Sally’s absence, admits, “At church I had to make out you’d gone to mind a sick cousin in Stowmarket. A lie, I told, in the house of God.” Later, Lizzie, discussing how twelve fetuses under her care have not survived in the past year, says, “I am the very first person they blame, God? No, they don’t blame God. Nobody blames God when there is a woman can be blamed instead.”

As the jurors continue their deliberations, Lizzie offers, “You cannot mean to ignore the truth simply cos that’s inconvenient to you.” And when Lizzie doesn’t understand why the other matrons won’t listen to her and want the male doctor to look at Sally, Sally says, “Are you dense? You have no authority here. If they must hear the truth from someone a foot taller with a deep voice, then let them.”

The always inventive director Sarah Benson, who has helmed such wide-ranging shows as Teeth, Fairview, Samara, In the Blood, and An Octoroon, throws too much at the wall in The Welkin, resulting in a choppy narrative in need of editing. In fact, at one point the women scrub the walls after the aforementioned shocking event. Now, I realize that this opinion is coming from a male member of the human species, but I hope it’s not interpreted as mansplaining.

The appropriately claustrophobic set is by dots, with splendid period costumes by Kaye Voyce, stark lighting by Stacey Derosier, creepy sound by Palmer Hefferan, and eerie special effects by Jeremy Chernick. The diverse ensemble cast is outstanding, led by Oh (Office Hour, Satellites), in a welcome return to the New York stage after eighteen years; her portrayal of Lizzie is dense and complex, instantly relatable to the modern era. Wong (Mary Gets Hers, John Proctor Is the Villain) is a force as Sally, Harada (Into the Woods, Avenue Q) offers comic relief (for a while) as Judith, Malouf (Grief Hotel, The School for Scandal) is vividly spirited as Emma, and the ever-dependable Soules (I Remember Mama, Hair) is as dependable as ever.

One of the most bizarre moments of the play occurs when the women start singing a contemporary pop song that deals with the drudgery of work and the release of sex. In the British premiere of The Welkin, it was Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God),” but here they sing a cheerful tune that was written by a man of musical royalty but performed by an all-female group, maintaining the idea that the women are speaking out and the men are remaining quiet. There’s a lot to be said for that.

The next perihelion of Halley’s Comet is expected on July 28, 2061, so be ready.

Oh, I’ll shut up now.

[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.]

DAEL ORLANDERSMITH: SPIRITUS/VIRGIL’S DANCE

Dael Orlandersmith’s Spiritus/Virgil’s Dance is a multimedia journey into fate and destiny (photo © HanJie Chow)

SPIRITUS/VIRGIL’S DANCE
Rattlestick Playwrights Theater
224 Waverly Pl.
Through March 9, $50, 7:00
www.rattlestick.org

In Dante Alighieri’s fourteenth-century epic The Divine Comedy, Publius Virgilius Maro, better known simply as Virgil, shepherds the Italian poet through the “Inferno” and “Purgatory,” two of the three realms of the dead. “Thou follow me, and I will be thy guide, / And lead thee hence through the eternal place, / Where thou shalt hear the desperate lamentations, / Shalt see the ancient spirits disconsolate, / Who cry out each one for the second death,” Virgil, who represents human reason, says to Dante. Virgil (70–19 BCE) was the author of The Aeneid, which tells the story of Trojan War hero and refugee Aeneas’s journey toward his fate and destiny.

In Spiritus/Virgil’s Dance, solo show master Dael Orlandersmith portrays a fictional character named Virgil who takes the audience at the Rattlestick Theater on a sixty-minute multimedia odyssey into death and destiny, fate and fulfillment.

The mood is set early, with such songs as Johnny Cash’s Nine Inch Nails cover “Hurt” and Mavis Staples’s “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” playing as the crowd enters the space, giving it a holy feel. Takeshi Kata’s set features six floor-to-ceiling string-curtained cylinders containing furniture: a chair, a table, a lamp on a stand. We soon learn that each one symbolizes a chapter in Virgil’s own epic narrative as they try to find their place in a world complicated by loss and loneliness.

“Have I done it right?” Virgil asks. “Have I used time — my time — right?” Have any of us?

Virgil wanders from cylinder to cylinder, sharing moments from their past. They grew up in the Bronx, hanging out at Woodlawn Cemetery and going to St. Barnabas. Their parents’ love of music led Virgil to become a deejay at a pirate radio station in the East Village. As the years pass, Virgil realizes they need something more. “I make a decision to make more money / Move to another part of downtown / Because / That must be the answer / Me / Thinking the money / Another place / Has got to be the answer,” they explain, but it takes their mother’s unexpected death and their father’s sudden illness for Virgil to take a long look at their life, significantly influenced by their friendship with funeral director Jimmy McHugh and hospice nurse Peggy Callahan.

Dael Orlandersmith looks at her past and future in beautiful one-person show at Rattlestick (photo © HanJie Chow)

Born in East Harlem, Orlandersmith has been staging one-person dramas, some semiautobiographical, most featuring the playwright performing multiple characters, since 1995’s Beauty’s Daughter, which earned her an Obie. She won the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize in 2003 for Yellowman. More recently, Forever was a deeply intimate show about the severely dysfunctional relationship between a daughter and her alcoholic mother, while Until the Flood explored the tragic story of the killing of Michael Brown at the hands of police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014.

Orlandersmith is masterful in Spiritus/Virgil’s Dance, a beautifully rendered production lovingly directed by Neel Keller, who has been working with Orlandersmith for four decades. As Orlandersmith says at one point in the play, it’s a “celebration of life and death.” She doesn’t make major shifts in tone or body as she switches among the characters, always wearing the same all-black outfit (the costume is by Kaye Voyce) as she walks slowly around the cylinders, which have a heavenly glow (the sensitive lighting is by Mary Louise Geiger), the people they represent prepared for the great beyond. Nicholas Hussong’s projections include leaves blowing in the wind and the subway speeding by, accompanied by Lindsay Jones’s tender original music and sound.

As Virgil discovers their true vocation, it’s like they have been given a giant hug from the universe, something we all seek — and something we all receive from Orlandersmith in this gently, enveloping experience. You’ll leave the theater thinking of the words Peggy shared with Virgil: “Live your life / Live it fully / Do not leave here regretfully.”

Spiritus/Virgil’s Dance continues at Rattlestick through March 9; the March 6 performance will be followed by the discussion “Music Lives On” with Javier Arau, Felice Rosser, Elliot Sharp, and Matt Stapleton.

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

JONAH

Teens Ana (Gabby Beans) and Jonah (Hagan Oliveras) explore their burgeoning sexuality in Roundabout world premiere (photo by Joan Marcus)

JONAH
Laura Pels Theatre
Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre
111 West 46th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 10, $76-$138
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org

“Why are you fixated on me?” Ana (Gabby Beans) asks two of three guys who are fixated on her in the world premiere of Rachel Bonds’s Jonah, continuing at Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre through March 10. It’s easy to become fixated on Ana, and on Beans, in the meticulously rendered production, which follows a woman through approximately three decades as she faces tragedy and trauma and wrestles with her faith.

The hundred-minute play takes place in Ana’s bedroom at three distinct times in her life. Wilson Chin’s set features a bed to the left, a small table where Ana works to the right, and a door in the middle where the men come and go but Ana never goes through, as if she is trapped. All the characters are damaged, but the men find solace in their relationship with Ana, fiercely dedicated to survival and her own solace.

In the first scene, the sixteen-year-old Ana meets the seventeen-year-old Jonah (Hagan Oliveras), who has a major crush on her. They both go to the same boarding school, and they both are virgins, soon sharing their sexual fantasies with each other.

Like the biblical figure, Jonah is questioning the existence of a higher power. Jonah asks Ana if she still believes in God, but she’s not sure. They might not believe in God, but Ana, who is Catholic, and Jonah, who is not, pepper their speech with references to God and Jesus, in frustration, anger, and joy as they contend with different types of pain.

Step-siblings Ana (Gabby Beans) and Danny (Samuel Henry Levine) try to cope with an abusive father in Rachel Bonds’s Jonah (photo by Joan Marcus)

The next male who shows up in Ana’s room is her protective stepbrother, Danny (Samuel Henry Levine), who is being physically and psychologically abused by his father. Whereas Ana is studying hard and wants to become a writer, Danny is a gruff dude who has no interest in books or school. Ana tells him that her “American dream” is “getting into college and getting the fuck out of here,” but Danny is just trying to survive day to day and doesn’t want Ana to leave. “Don’t you want to stay together?” he says, then asks her to hold him to help calm him down, perhaps a little too close.

Years later, at a writer’s retreat, Ana meets Steven (John Zdrojeski), a former Mormon who brings her food and can’t stop talking about his various physical ailments. Like Jonah, he asks her, “Do you still believe in God?” Steven has a unique perspective on religion, as well as on sex. “Can you still fantasize?” she asks him, and he admits, “There’s definitely still shame lurking around some corners, but —.”

A twist at the end not only furthers the links between Jonah, Danny, and Steven but explains the name of the play.

Bonds (Five Mile Lake, Sundown, Yellow Moon) writes sharp, incisive dialogue that crackles, sparks, and surprises. Director Danya Taymor (Pass Over, “Daddy”) expertly guides the play through its multiple time periods despite the set and Kaye Voyce’s costumes never changing. Amith Chandrashaker’s lighting and Kate Marvin’s sound reverberate to announce narrative shifts.

Steven (John Zdrojeski) is one of three young men obsessed with Ana (Gabby Beans) in Jonah at the Laura Pels Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

Zdrojeski (Heroes of the Fourth Turning, Before We’re Gone) channels Jimmy Stewart as the goofy Steven, Levine (The Inheritance, Kill Floor) gives just the right heft to Danny, and gamer and actor Oliveras is sweetly innocent as the tender-hearted Jonah.

But it’s Tony nominee Beans’s (I’m Revolting, Anatomy of a Suicide) show all the way. She’s extraordinary as Ana, onstage the entire show; you won’t be able to take your eyes off her as Ana deals with the lousy hand she’s been dealt.

Early on, she tells Jonah, “I don’t have to do anything. I do what I want,” and that’s the mantra she lives by. She’s not looking for sympathy, nor is she blaming anyone else for what has happened in her life. She keeps on fighting, even as she starts to realize that opening up and depending on someone else is not necessarily a bad thing. Beans captures these emotions with a powerful determination while also displaying the softer side that Ana hides.

Whether you believe in a supreme being or not, you’ll come away from Jonah believing in Ana, and in Beans.

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

LUCY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UNDER THE RADAR: FIELD OF MARS

Richard Maxwell’s Field of Mars explores the history of human existence from an Applebee’s in Chapel Hill, North Carolina (photo by Whitney Browne)

NEW YORK CITY PLAYERS: FIELD OF MARS
NYU Skirball
566 LaGuardia Pl.
January 19-22, 24-29, $60
publictheater.org
nyuskirball.org

“OMG.”

That three-letter digital exclamation is said throughout Richard Maxwell’s new play, Field of Mars, stated plainly by several characters as if it is just another article or preposition. As has been Maxwell’s style since he started his company, New York City Players, in 1999, all words are given similar treatment, delivered dryly, sans any deep emotion, all of equal weight and meaning. omg.

Named after an ancient term for a large public space or military parade ground, Field of Mars is about the beginning and the end of everything on Earth, with God himself portrayed by Phil Moore, who, with equal weight and meaning, also plays a manager at an Applebee’s in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, which serves as a kind of way station for humanity.

The audience sits on four rows of rafters onstage, facing the actors, in the otherwise empty NYU Skirball Center, which commissioned the piece for the Public’s Under the Radar Festival. The nonlinear story takes place on lighting designer Sascha van Riel’s relaxing set, a relatively featureless restaurant booth on one side, a bar/hostess station on the other, where Gillian Walsh is an alternate version of St. Peter at the gates of heaven, more concerned with her cover band and her BF than the future of the planet. The set is reminiscent of the one van Riel built and gets torn down in Maxwell’s The Evening, identified in that 2015 work as “a garbagey void” in “a lonely corner of the universe.”

Brian Mendes and Jim Fletcher rehearse for NYCP’s Field of Mars (photo courtesy New York City Players)

The show opens with Adam (Brian Mendes) and Eve (Walsh) in the Garden of Eden, disguised as a popular American chain eatery, and moves through various bizarre, seemingly unconnected scenarios involving music, invisible food, both evolution and creationism, and one hell of an orgy.

In the lengthiest segment, an early version of which I saw at the Clemente and is now more fully formed, two older musicians (Jim Fletcher and Mendes, the latter in his trademark Jerry Garcia T) are pitching their new song to a pair of younger producers (Nicholas Elliott and James Moore), one of whom is, well, an asshole who claims that punk rock never existed. The men’s long, Don DeLillo–like list of cool bands could have used some shortening — the play is too long at two and a half hours, with intermission — but Maxwell (The Vessel, Isolde, Paradiso) is not in a hurry here.

Characters in Kaye Voyce’s everyday costumes walk and squiggle slowly, the narrator (Tory Vazquez) has an extensive phone conversation about pigments with what sounds like a chatbot, early humans (Elliott, James Moore, Eleanor Hutchins, and Paige Martin) evolve, and three of the musicians, after discussing what their songs are really about, lamely “jam” on electric guitars, which are not plugged into amps, as life goes on around them. Meanwhile, the Applebee’s employees (Walsh, Moore, Martin, Lakpa Bhutia) wear masks around their chins as if understanding there’s a health crisis but not worrying about it.

So, what is Field of Mars really about? As one character notes, “Sometimes the confusion is part of it.” Perhaps we’re sitting onstage because we’re all part of this confusion, part of the problem as we potentially face the end times, masks around our chins.

There’s no program, just a glossy one-sheet with only the most basic of information, along with a free souvenir paper poster that features a drawing of a stick figure in a doorway on one side and advises on the other, “I promise I will not look to the natural world to make up for my lack of spirituality ever again.”

OMG. It all makes perfect sense to me.

ELEVATOR REPAIR SERVICE: SEAGULL

Elevator Repair Service puts its unique spin on Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull (photo by Ian Douglas)

SEAGULL
NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts
566 La Guardia Pl. between Third & Fourth Sts.
Through July 31, $50-$60 (use code FB25 for $25 tickets)
212-945-2600
nyuskirball.org
www.elevator.org

I’m beginning to think I might never see another traditional production of Anton Chekhov’s 1895–96 classic, The Seagull. Perhaps more than any other playwright, Chekhov’s works almost demand reinvention for the stage in the twenty-first century. His tragicomic take on human relationships and society’s ills invite modern, often extensive reinterpretation and experimentation.

As often as Shakespeare’s plays are reimagined, they almost always still contain the Bard’s original dialogue; it’s the staging that changes. The same is not necessarily true about Chekhov, as evidenced by such recent successes as Arlekin Players Theatre’s hybrid The Orchard (The Cherry Orchard), Aaron Posner’s Life Sucks. (Uncle Vanya), and Halley Feiffer’s Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow (Three Sisters).

As far as The Seagull goes, over the last ten years I’ve seen Posner’s Stupid Fucking Bird at the Pearl in 2016, a deliriously chaotic yet controlled rave-up sticking to the main plot but told with an intoxicating irreverence; Jeffrey Hatcher’s Ten Chimneys, at St. Clement’s in 2012, which goes behind the scenes of an upcoming Broadway revival of The Seagull starring Alfred Lunt and Lynne Fontanne; and Christopher Durang’s Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, a delightful all-star mashup of The Seagull, Three Sisters, and Uncle Vanya that ran on and off Broadway in 2013.

Elevator Repair Service, the downtown company whose literary adaptations include William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby — the much-admired eight-hour Gatz — now turns its unusual techniques on Chekhov with Seagull, continuing at NYU Skirball through July 31. Nearly three hours with one intermission, the play self-referentially refers to itself regularly, with actors occasionally speaking to the audience as themselves, not as their characters. It begins with a long monologue by company member Pete Simpson, who talks about the Skirball space itself. “One of these two corkscrew, fluted, gold leaf columns is structural and holds up the building above us. The other is hollow, insubstantial, and does nothing but sit there and look pretty in an attempt to make things look symmetrical.”

When he said that under each chair are three flags, a red one that “will tell us you feel physically threatened or uncomfortable,” a checkered one to use if you just “wanna talk,” and a third to order food, I saw the woman sitting across the aisle from me reach below her seat to see if the flags were really there. (They’re not.) But it signals that this production is going to veer wildly between the real and the imagined, although all of it turns out to be Chekhovian in one way or another, even if, as Simpson, who also plays the teacher Semyon, explains, “95% of tonight’s text both original and adapted has been written by our company’s own Gavin Price,” who portrays wannabe playwright Konstantin.

Director John Collins leaves the central plot intact: The twentysomething Konstantin has invited friends and family over to a lovely lake house to watch his latest play, to be performed by Nina (Maggie Hoffman), a nervous actress he is desperately in love with. Konstantin is hoping to prove to his mother, famous actress Irina (Kate Benson), that he has talent and a purpose in life; Irina, who chastises him regularly in front of everyone, has arrived with her new beau, well-respected and successful writer Boris Trigorin (Robert M. Johanson), who takes a liking to Nina.

Also at the presentation are Patricia (Laurena Allan), Irina’s ailing sister; farmer Ilya (Julian Fleisher), who is a big fan of Irina’s, and his wife, Paulina (Lindsay Hockaday); Masha (Susie Sokol), the farmers’ daughter who is in love with Konstantin but might be married off to Semyon; Yakov (John Gasper), who works at the lake house; and Gene (Vin Knight), a doctor who has an innate charm that lures the ladies, including Paulina.

In the middle of the play-within-a-play, Irina asks, “Is this supposed to be symbolic?” A moment later, she says, “Something smells. Is that part of the effect?” A disgusted Konstantin eventually has to stop the show because of his mother’s interruptions.

Shortly after Patricia has an asthma attack, Benson, Hoffman, and Susie have a discussion as themselves, commenting on how much they enjoyed the previous scene and what Chekhov’s play is about. The play resumes as Konstantin presents Nina with a seagull he just shot.

Masha (Susie Sokol) leads the characters in a strange game in Seagull (photo by Ian Douglas)

Following intermission, Sokol points out how long she has been with ERS, explains the set design, and expresses her disappointment that one of Masha’s key lines has been cut: “I’m in mourning for my life.” Soon various characters consider leaving the lake house, Irina insists she has no money to help anyone, and Konstantin sports a bloody bandage wrapped around his head. “You . . . Symbolist!” Irina again accuses her son. “Miser!” he replies. “You amateur!” she declares. It all goes downhill from there.

The set by dots, so ably described by Sokol, features a row of folding chairs in the front that the characters move about depending on the action. Downstage right is a table with electronic equipment, while upstage left is a cozy dinner table with pictures on the wall. The lighting is by Marika Kent, with sound by Price and Gasper and purposely mismatched costumes by Kaye Voyce, ranging from Nina’s elegant red dress to Irina’s short skirt, heels, and tights.

Collins’s direction may appear disordered as the fictional plot battles it out with the actors’ thoughts and some events happen either offstage or in the background — as when several characters sit down to eat but we can’t make out exactly what they are saying to one another, although it does turn into a terrific bingo-style dance number. But there is a method to his madness, even if it’s not necessarily always clear what he’s up to; numerous pieces of dialogue reflect back on the play we’re watching, as if ironically commenting on what is happening in Seagull at Skirball.

“It’s not easy, you know, acting in your play. There aren’t any ordinary people in it,” Nina tells Konstantin, who responds, “Ordinary people! We have to show life not the way it is, or the way it should be, but the way it is in dreams!” Nina retorts, “But nothing happens in your play! It’s all one long speech. And I think a play ought to have a love story.” Meanwhile, Collins emphasizes Chekhov’s Hamlet references, with Konstantin echoing the young prince, Irina a different kind of Gertrude, Boris representing Claudius, and Nina an embellished Ophelia.

“It was a strange play, wasn’t it?” Nina asks Boris about Konstantin’s show. Boris replies, “I’m afraid I didn’t understand a thing. But it was interesting to watch. You were wonderful. And of course, the set was magnificent!” Most people in the audience seemed to agree with that analysis of ERS’s production, although a handful walked out during the first act and others did not return after intermission; however, those who stayed, the vast majority of the crowd, gave the performers a standing ovation at the end.

Seagull is not for everyone’s taste. It is long — 173 minutes, as Simpson tells us — it is confusing, it is pedantic, and it can be self-referential to a fault, particularly as the cast passes around a microphone and cord, going in and out of character. And don’t get me started on the awful noise made when Patricia is pushed around in a chair. But it all continues founding artistic director Collins’s thirty-plus-year mission of experimenting with new theatrical forms, in original works and unique adaptations.

Hamlet asked himself, “To be or not to be.” In Seagull, Patricia answers, “Just go on living, whether you feel like it or not.” The same can be said for theater itself.