Tag Archives: Lila Neugebauer

THE WAVERLY GALLERY

A family faces a matriarch experiencing dementia in Kenneth Lonergan’s The Waverly Gallery (photo by Brigitte Lacombe)

Golden Theatre
252 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 27, $49 – $149
thewaverlygalleryonbroadway.com

Elaine May gives a career-topping performance as an octogenarian suffering from dementia in the Broadway debut of Kenneth Lonergan’s Pulitzer Prize finalist, the sensitive, bittersweet memory play The Waverly Gallery. Running through January 27 at the Golden Theatre — the same venue where May and her longtime comedy partner, Mike Nichols, staged An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May in October 1960 — The Waverly Gallery takes place between 1989 and 1991 in a small, inconsequential Greenwich Village art gallery operated by eighty-five-year-old Gladys Green (May) and the Upper West Side apartment where Green’s daughter, Ellen Fine (Joan Allen), lives with her second husband, Howard Fine (David Cromer), and their dog. Ellen’s son, Daniel Reed (Lucas Hedges), often comes over for dinner, along with Gladys. “I want to tell you what happened to my grandmother, Gladys Green, near the end of her life,” Daniel tells the audience early on in the first of a series of direct addresses looking back at the past. “I lived in her building — where I still live — in Greenwich Village, during the last couple of years when she was there. . . . For twenty-eight years she ran a tiny gallery on Waverly Place, around the corner from where we lived. And without being too depressing about it, she didn’t always have the best stuff in there. But some of it was pretty good. . . . It’s not that I didn’t like her. I did. It’s just that once you went in there, it was kind of tough getting out again. So I was pretty stingy with the visits.”

Art gallery owner Gladys (Elaine May) speaks with her daughter, Ellen (Joan Allen), as painter Don (Michael Cera) looks on in Broadway debut of Kenneth Lonergan play (photo by Brigitte Lacombe)

One day a somewhat egotistical artist from Massachusetts, Don Bowman (Michael Cera), walks into the gallery, which is connected to a hotel undergoing renovations, with his portfolio, and Gladys decides not only to give him a show but also to let him sleep in the back room, as he claims to have no money. Ellen, who becomes easily exasperated with her mother, and Howard, who practically yells at Gladys when he talks to her, thinking she is deafer than she is, are suspicious of Don’s motives as he insinuates himself into Gladys’s life. But when the hotel owner tells the family that he is taking back the gallery to turn it into a breakfast café, Ellen, Howard, and Daniel have to figure out a way to tell Gladys, whose Alzheimer’s is getting worse.

The play opens with Gladys saying, “I never knew anything was the matter.” Although she was specifically referring to Ellen’s first marriage falling apart, she could just as well be talking about her own life. Her memory lapses, hearing problems, and inability to truly understand what is going on around her are harrowing to watch, yet Lonergan, the writer-director of such award-winning films as You Can Count on Me and Manchester by the Sea and such hit plays as This Is Our Youth and Lobby Hero, injects plenty of humor into the strife. “We’re liberal Upper West Side atheistic Jewish intellectuals — and we really like German choral music,” Daniel tells Don. A dinner scene in which Ellen and Howard futz with Gladys’s hearing aid has a slapstick touch. And Gladys’s forgetfulness can be charming and funny — until it’s not. The eighty-six-year-old May, a National Medal of Arts winner who wrote, directed, and starred in A New Leaf and worked with the likes of Nichols, Warren Beatty, and Neil Simon in such films as The Birdcage, The Heartbreak Kid, and, yes, Ishtar, imbues Gladys with such honesty and sincerity that it’s heart-wrenching watching her decline.

Lucas Hedges, Elaine May, Joan Allen, David Cromer, and Michael Cera star in The Waverly Gallery (photo by Brigitte Lacombe)

In her first Broadway show, Drama Desk- and Obie-winning director Lila Neugebauer, who is building an impressive résumé with such works as Edward Albee’s At Home at the Zoo, Annie Baker’s The Antipodes, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Everybody, and Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves, superbly balances the humor and heartbreak, never letting melodrama take over and instead including numerous moments in which the audience feels appropriately uncomfortable going from laughing to tearing up as David Zinn’s sets alternate between New York City apartments to the quaint belowground art gallery. Grammy winner and Oscar nominee May, Tony winner and Emmy and Oscar nominee Allen (Burn This, The Contender), Tony-winning actor and director Cromer (The Band’s Visit, Tribes), Oscar nominee Hedges (Manchester by the Sea, Yen), and Tony nominee Cera (Arrested Development, Juno), in his third consecutive Lonergan play on Broadway, form a stellar ensemble, capturing the essence of an extended family facing a tragic situation. (The 1999 original cast featured a widely hailed Eileen Heckart as Gladys, Maureen Anderman as Ellen, Mark Blum as Howard, Josh Hamilton as Daniel, and Anthony Arkin as Don; Anderman is now May’s understudy on Broadway.) “Honey? Do you think the Village has changed much in the last five years?” Gladys asks Daniel, who responds, “Yes! It’s been changing for a lot longer than that!” But what hasn’t changed nearly enough is the brutal impact of Alzheimer’s disease on sufferers and their families, so aptly on display in this perceptive and humane production.

MARY PAGE MARLOWE

Twelve-year-old Mary Page (Mia Sinclair Jenness) looks up to her mother (Grace Gummer) in extraordinary Tracy Letts play (photo by Joan Marcus)

2econd Stage Theater
Tony Kiser Theater
305 West 43rd St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through August 19, $30-$89
2st.com/shows

“I am unexceptional,” the title character tells her shrink in Mary Page Marlowe, Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy Letts’s exceptional play, which opened tonight at 2econd Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater. The best play I’ve ever seen about the life and times of a woman written by a man, Mary Page Marlowe follows the protagonist, born in 1946, through eleven nonchronological stages of her rather ordinary existence, portrayed by six terrifically talented actresses and one doll (as the infant). Each scene reveals small but significant details about the character as she goes about her days as a daughter, a wife, a mother, a patient, an employee, and a retiree, trying to find her identity as her relationships — and her name — change. Whether she ever finds her true self — if there even is such a thing — is the question of the play. Mary Page is wonderfully performed by Mia Sinclair Jenness at twelve, Emma Geer at nineteen, Tatiana Maslany (in her New York stage debut) at twenty-seven and thirty-six, Susan Pourfar at forty and forty-four, Kellie Overbey at fifty, and Blair Brown at fifty-nine, sixty-three, and sixty-nine. The nonlinear time shifts are indicated primarily by the character’s clothing (the simple but effective costumes are by Kaye Voyce) and hairstyle as such basic props as beds, tables, couches, and chairs slide on and off Laura Jellinek’s intimate two-level set, making it clear this is about one woman’s interior and exterior changes, not about a changing America.

Fifty-nine-year-old Mary Page (Blair Brown) gets some bad news as Ray (Brian Kerwin) looks on in masterful production at 2econd Stage (photo by Joan Marcus)

From childhood to senior citizenship, Mary Page faces illness, divorce, alcoholism, infidelity, displacement, and more, all with the same attitude, as if various key moments in her life are no different from the rest of her days; sometimes the choices aren’t hers, but even when they are, she is often a spectator, much like the audience. “What do you want?” her teenage daughter, Wendy (Kayli Carter), asks at a Denny’s as her younger brother, Louis (Ryan Foust), plays with a map. “Why can’t you just say what you want?” Wendy repeats when her mother avoids the question. Throughout the ninety-minute intermissionless play, Mary Page says “I don’t know” two dozen times, although she also does provide some answers. When her shrink (Marcia DeBonis) asks her why she hasn’t brought up what she believes to be a certain important issue previously, Mary Page says, “Because it’s not relevant, that’s what I’m telling you, it feels like a different person who was going through that,” eliciting a laugh from the audience since each Mary Page is played by a different actress. She then adds, “I still live life even when you’re not watching me,” as if reminding the audience that there is even more to Mary Page than what is revealed onstage, just as there is more to any woman we see in real life. But even when she does — or doesn’t — take action for her own benefit, she shows a resilience to persist, a well-earned survival instinct that keeps her going despite what are sometimes formidable odds.

Thirty-six-year-old Mary Page (Tatiana Maslany) faces off against her shrink (Marcia DeBonis) in dazzling New York premiere (photo by Joan Marcus)

Letts (August: Osage County, Superior Donuts) and director Lila Neugebauer, who has excelled helming such ensemble pieces as The Antipodes, Everybody, The Wolves, and The Wayside Motor Inn, do a beautiful job moving from scene to scene; even though events happen out of order, Mary Page is in a constant state of progression. We might not ever see them together (at least not until the curtain call), but the six amazing women who play Mary Page flow into one another seamlessly, helping make her one person with many distinct aspects. The large cast also includes Grace Gummer as Mary Page’s mother and Nick Dillenburg as her father; Audrey Corsa and Tess Frazer as her high school friends, Connie and Lorna; David Aaron Baker and Brian Kerwin as significant others Ray and Andy; Maria Elena Ramirez as her nurse; Gary Wilmes as one of her lovers; and Elliot Villar as her dry cleaner, who wraps everything up as they talk about fixing a quilt in which “different women would sew the different panels and then stitch them all together,” just as Letts, Neugebauer, and the cast have so remarkably done in this extraordinary work.

PEACE FOR MARY FRANCES

A dysfunctional family receives important information about hospice care in Peace for Mary Frances (photo by Monique Carboni)

The New Group at the Pershing Square Signature Center
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 17, $30-$125
www.thenewgroup.org

Having recently lived through situations resembling those in Peace for Mary Frances, Lily Thorne’s debut play that opened tonight at the Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre at the Pershing Square Signature Center, it wasn’t easy for me to sit through the New Group production. Unfortunately, that wasn’t because the 155-minute play was right on target, offering me a cathartic experience. Thorne, who has worked on several documentaries and is currently getting her MFA in playwriting at Brooklyn College, has written a lifeless drama about end-of-life care. It feels more like an instructional primer on what to do when a loved one is dying than a dramatic work that sheds light on what can be a devastating time. Eighty-seven-year-old Lois Smith stars as Mary Frances, the matriarch of a dysfunctional West Hartford family. As her quality of life deteriorates, Mary Frances tells her Armenian-American family that she wants hospice care so she can be as comfortable as possible at home for whatever time she has left. It proves difficult for her two daughters, Fanny (Johanna Day), a divorced drug addict who works as a security guard at the Y and is estranged from her daughter, and Alice (J. Smith-Cameron), a divorced astrologist with no money and two grown children of her own, Helen (Heather Burns), a TV star, and Rosie (Natalie Gold), a married mom with two kids. While Fanny and Alice fight brutally, nonstop, Mary Frances’s son, Eddie (Paul Lazar), a divorced lawyer, comes by once a week, watches TV, and eats sushi, avoiding getting involved in anything of real importance. As Mary Frances hangs on longer than expected — “Typically, people don’t leave this life until their unfinished business is taken care of,” hospice nurse Bonnie (Mia Katigbak) says — the family relationships devolve into a crazy mess.

Mary Frances (Lois Smith) argues with daughter Alice (J. Smith Cameron) as granddaughter Helen (Heather Burns) looks on in New Group world premiere (photo by Monique Carboni)

Peace for Mary Frances takes place on Dane Laffrey’s two-level set, a suburban living room / kitchen and Mary Frances’s upstairs bedroom, all decked out in flowery designs. Director Lila Neugebauer has done sensational work, particularly at Lincoln Center and the Signature, with such plays as At Home at the Zoo, The Antipodes, Everybody, The Wolves, and The Wayside Motor Inn, showing an innate sense of narrative structure, choreographed movement, and cutting-edge staging that both challenges and entertains. But she has little to work with here, unable to bring life to Thorne’s deadening dialogue and forced conflicts. Early on, Rosie and Helen are unable to lift Mary Frances off the couch. But when the scene ends a few moments later, Smith gets up herself and walks up the stairs. It instantly destroys the theatrical illusion that Mary Frances is dying, taking the audience out of the story and damaging the empathy we are trying to have with the characters. In addition, throughout the play, there is a hard-to-identify noise that seems to be coming from the front left of the stage. My companion and I wondered whether it was an audience member who was breathing very loudly (or was snoring), the air-conditioning, or part of the show, sounds meant to represent Mary Frances’s oxygen machine, mimicking the rhythm of her breathing. I even asked an usher what it was during intermission and she was not sure. (The script does say, “The machines are on and pumping throughout the play.”) If it was indeed intentional, it was ridiculously distracting. The play also sadly wastes the talent of two-time Tony nominee and Obie winner Smith, who recently starred in the stage and film versions of Marjorie Prime and previously did excellent work at the Signature in Annie Baker’s John and Sam Shepard’s Heartless. Despite an extremely talented director and an acting legend, Thorne’s debut is on life support from the beginning, and it goes on far too long before the plug is pulled.

EDWARD ALBEE’S AT HOME AT THE ZOO

Peter (Robert Sean Leonard) and Ann (Katie Finneran) have settled into a comfortable existence in Homelife (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Irene Diamond Stage
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday-Sunday through March 25, $65-$85
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

“We should talk,” Ann (Katie Finneran) says to Peter (Robert Sean Leonard) at the beginning of Edward Albee’s At Home at the Zoo, a two-act play running at the Signature through March 25. “Do you mind if we talk?” Jerry (Paul Sparks) asks Peter in the second act. Every word matters in Albee’s minimalist play about language, communication, and loneliness. The second half of the work, The Zoo Story, began as a one-act play first performed in West Berlin in 1959. Nearly fifty years later, in 2004, Albee added a prequel, Homelife, in order to flesh out the character of Peter. Initially known as Peter and Jerry, the retitled Edward Albee’s At Home at the Zoo opens with Peter sitting in a chair with a matching ottoman, reading a book under a lamp. Andrew Lieberman’s set is otherwise bare, except for Cy Twombly–like pencil scribbles on the white walls and floor that could be editors’ marks (Peter works for a text-book publisher) while evoking a certain randomness. The forty-five-year-old Peter and the thirty-eight-year-old Ann live on the Upper East Side and have settled into a cozy, rather ordinary life. While that pleases Peter, Ann appears to want more. She leads their discourse from daydreams of public nakedness to contemplations of morality and mortality; before we know it, the two are deep in polite conversation about the mundane violence visited upon upper-middle-class sex organs: from prophylactic breast removal to infant circumcision. “Once you hear of an idea you never know where it will lodge itself, when it will move from something learned to something . . . considerable, something you might think about, which is not far from being thought about, if you wanted to, or needed to,” Ann says. “We all die of something,” Peter responds. Ann: “Sooner or later.” Peter: “Yes, but . . .” Ann: “Yes, but! Oh, you do love pedantry so . . . dying of not doing something can be carelessness!” Much of their conversation involves the semantic use of words; the couple exists together — and indeed is still happy — more through language than action. In the world they’ve created, being comfortable is not really a problem; in fact, Peter is so comfortable that he spends virtually the entire act seated in his chair. “I love you dearly,” Ann says. “But where’s the . . . the rage, the . . . animal? We’re animals! Why don’t we behave like that . . . like beasts?! Is it that we love each other too safely, maybe? That we’re secure? That we’re too . . . civilized? Don’t we ever hate one another?” That will have to wait until after intermission.

Peter (Robert Sean Leonard) and Jerry (Paul Sparks) talk it out in The Zoo Story (photo by Joan Marcus)

The second act, The Zoo Story, opens with Peter sitting on a park bench, reading. A stranger who later identifies himself as Jerry approaches him and says, “I’ve been to the zoo,” an ingenious transition from the first act, in which Ann was talking about animals and beasts. Speaking expressively in disjointed thoughts, Jerry is everything Peter is not; aggressive, unashamed, unfiltered, and, perhaps most important, potentially dangerous. “I don’t talk to many people,” Jerry tells Peter. “But every once in a while I like to talk to somebody, really talk, like to get to know somebody, know all about him.” Understandably uncomfortable, Peter responds, “And am I the guinea pig for today?” After a long, convoluted story about his landlady and her dog, Jerry does more than talk as he invades Peter’s space, leading to a shocking conclusion. Edward Albee’s At Home at the Zoo features fine performances from Tony winner Leonard (The Invention of Love, House) as the gentle, mild-mannered Peter and two-time Tony winner Finneran (Noises Off; Promises, Promises) as the curious and concerned Ann, but Albee saves the fireworks for Jerry, a bundle of nervous energy superbly embodied by Emmy nominee Sparks (House of Cards, Boardwalk Empire); he’s like a caged animal waiting to burst free, exacerbating a situation where anything can happen at any moment. (Perhaps the marks on the walls were made by human animals trying to escape their theatrical fate.) Drama Desk Award winner Lila Neugebauer (The Wolves, Everybody), who directed Albee’s 1959 one-act The Sandbox at the Signature in 2016, keeps the tension building in both sections of the play, which come together seamlessly. Of course, Albee, who was the Residency One Playwright at the Signature in 1993-94, is making a direct connection between theater and zoos, two places where humans pay money to watch others perform for them. Thus, Albee feels right at home at the Signature (as well as at the zoo; the author’s name in the title could be read as a possessive or as the subject of the sentence). And just like at the zoo, nobody likes to see sleeping animals; children and adults want to see some action, which is just what Albee gives them in the end.

THE ANTIPODES

A group of men and women gathers around a table telling stories in Annie Baker’s The Antipodes (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 11, $30 through May 14, $90 after
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

Near the beginning of Annie Baker’s first play for her Residency Five program at the Signature Theatre, John, a character declares, “Tell me a story.” Baker takes that conceit to a whole new level in her follow-up, The Antipodes, which has been extended at the Signature through June 11. The set-up is essentially fairly simple: a group of coworkers sit in ergonomic chairs around a table in an office, where they spend their days sharing deeply personal tales that might or might not lead to the one that their boss, Sandy (Will Patton), needs as he seeks material for a successor to their biggest hit, Heathens. The audience, sitting on two sides of Laura Jellinek’s pristine set, never learns what kind of company the seven men and two women work for — but it’s apparently at least somewhat bureaucratic and corporate, as Josh (Josh Hamilton) has to fill out forms over and over in an ongoing effort to try to get his ID. The tale they seek involves monsters, but no dwarves, elves, or trolls; they could be making movies, video games, apps, or an animated television series, although it doesn’t really matter, because it’s all about the stories themselves. “There are seven types of stories in the world,” Dave (Josh Charles) says, while Danny M1 (Danny Mastrogiorgio) claims there are thirty-six, Josh ten, and Brian (Brian Miskell) eighteen. They share intimate sexual episodes, moments that shaped their lives, and random tales that go nowhere. Josh philosophizes about the nature of time, Eleanor (Emily Cass McDonnell) doesn’t understand why she can’t use her cell phone, Danny M2 (Danny McCarthy) is hesitant to contribute, and Adam (Phillip James Brannon) remembers being hit by lightning. Scenes often end in the middle of a discussion, then pick up in the midst of a new topic, with no clear delineation of the time change except when Sarah (Nicole Rodenburg), Sandy’s assistant — who knows more than she’s letting on — arrives to take lunch orders, wearing a different chic outfit each time, courtesy of costume designer Kaye Voyce. While it doesn’t appear that they are accomplishing anything, Sandy, a straight shooter who is having some issues at home, pushes them to keep going. “I just wanted to remind all of you that what you’re doing is important. We need stories. As a culture. It’s what we live for. These are dark times. Stories are a little bit of light that we can cup in our palms like votive candles to show us the way out of the forest.” Even Brian, the note-taker and researcher, gets in on the action. But the team starts getting nervous when Sandy suddenly doesn’t show up one day.

Dave (Josh Charles) and Adam (Phillip James Brannon) listen to others’ stories in latest exceptional work by Annie Baker (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Antipodes, which sounds like a mythical monster but actually means “contrary” or “the exact opposite,” has all the makings of a pretentious play about the art of playwrighting, a work about the writer’s struggle to come up with a good idea, but Pulitzer Prize winner Baker (The Flick, Circle Mirror Transformation), who wrote the two-hour show specifically for the Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre, proves that it’s not that obvious. Instead, it’s a carefully crafted existential take on everyday existence, on the things humans do to get by, from eating and drinking to having sex, from going to work and communicating with others to dealing with life’s little problems. “We can do anything,” Sandy points out, as if he’s speaking for Baker the playwright, who is firmly in control. The show is also about the concept of time, which in a play can be manipulated by the writer. “There are two kinds of time. Vertical and horizontal. And if something happens in horizontal time, it can be . . . it’s not permanent,” Josh explains. “You can reverse it. Like one of them is the time that we think of when we think of normal time that’s moving forward and you can’t go back. But then there’s another kind of time and if you do something in that kind of time you can . . . uh . . . it’s more flexible.” Director Lila Neugebauer, who has done an extraordinary job navigating through time and space in such complex multicharacter dramas as The Wayside Motor Inn, The Wolves, and Everybody, makes every movement count, never allowing the narrative flow to drag, whether by way of a bit of magic about where lunch comes from or Adam lying on the floor to tell “the first story ever told.” The actors form an utterly believable group, fellow employees with unique personalities, some of whom bond while others remain outsiders, just as in real life. “The stories we create teach people what it’s like to be someone else on a visceral level,” Sandy tells his crew. “As storytellers we know how to shift perspective and inhabit different viewpoints. Imagine what would happen if everyone in the world could do every once in a while what we already do on a daily basis. It would be revolutionary.” The Antipodes is another exceptional play from one of the theater’s finest minds, a writer who is never afraid of going for the revolutionary in her work.

EVERYBODY

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Irene Diamond Stage
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday-Sunday through March 19, $30 through March 12, $40 after
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s endlessly inventive Everybody is a magical, mysterious theatrical experience that is a must-see for adventurous theatergoers who relish being challenged over and over again. Rising stars Jacobs-Jenkins (An Octoroon, War, Gloria) and director Lila Neugebauer (The Wayside Motor Inn, The Wolves) explore love and death, dreams and reality, the fear of G-d, the human need for companionship, and the value of each individual life in the ninety-minute play, which opened last night at the Signature Theater’s Irene Diamond Stage for an extended run through March 19. The less you know about Everybody, the more surprises are in store, and the Signature is helping out in several ways. The wall outside the theater, which is usually bedecked with wide-ranging information about whatever play is being performed inside, putting it into sociohistorical context, only contains reproductions of paintings about death by such artists as Rubens and Breugel the Elder, and the audience doesn’t receive a program until the show is over. What we do know and can say, without giving anything away, is that Everybody is an adaptation of the late-fifteenth-century morality/mortality play Everyman, which was an English translation of the Dutch Elckerlijc, which was inspired by a Buddhist fable. At each performance, five members of the cast — Brooke Bloom, Michael Braun, Louis Cancelmi, David Patrick Kelly, and Lakisha Michelle May — line up to find out which abstract, conceptual character they will play, so each show is very different. The wonderfully cheeky Marylouise Burke is always Death, while the terrifically energetic Jocelyn Bioh is always G-d. (The excellent cast also includes Lilyana Tiare Cornell and Chris Perfetti.) “How can it be / that of all my productions, / it is you who have deteriorated / so severely, so vastly disappointing? / And don’t you hear the remainder of my creation, / the wonder that is everything, / crying out for justice against you?” G-d declares early on. To paraphrase Shakespeare, the world is indeed a stage, and we men, women, and children are merely players, with only so much time to justify our existence and get our things in order.

Laura Jellinek’s set is just about as basic as it comes, although with a major twist, consisting of eighteen chairs, the same kind that ticket holders sit in, lined up on a narrow section of the stage in front of a dark wall, blurring the line between audience and performer. Every so often Matt Frey’s lighting goes pitch black and Brandon Wolcott’s sound design takes over as voices are heard throughout the theater; keep your eyes and ears ready, because just about anything can happen anywhere and with anyone as the surprises keep mounting. The second of three works that will make up Jacobs-Jenkins’s Residency Five stay at the Signature (following 2014’s Appropriate), Everybody is an ingenious piece of theater that is involving from the moment you step inside the Irene Diamond. Incorporating splashes of Brecht and Beckett, Jacobs-Jenkins delves into topics that will have you taking a good, long look at yourself, regardless of whether you believe in G-d and the afterlife. You’re also likely to want to go back and see the allegorical show again; there are 120 variations of actors and roles, and the emotional resonance is sure to be very different depending on who gets cast as whom; on any night the main character may be a young woman or an old man. Regardless, just keep your faith in Jacobs-Jenkins and Neugebauer, who take you on quite an existential journey; when the play’s over, facing its own demise, it will of course rise again, living on in more performances and in the memories of those who have experienced it. The Signature has scheduled numerous special events in conjunction with Everybody, including talkbacks with members of the cast and crew after the February 23, 28, and March 7 performances, a Backstage Pass talk with Jellinek before the March 2 show, and a book club gathering on March 16 discussing Paul Kalanithi’s memoir, When Breath Becomes Air, which asks the question, “What makes human life meaningful?”

THE WOLVES

Girls soccer team prepares for next game in Sarah DeLappe’s winning debut, THE WOLVES (photo by Daniel J. Vasquez)

The Playwrights Realm
The Duke on 42nd St.
Wednesday – Monday through December 24, $65-$85
www.playwrightsrealm.org

Sarah DeLappe’s sharply incisive debut play about a girls soccer team, The Wolves, is back for an encore engagement at the Duke on 42nd St., making a playoff run after a superb regular season in September. The Playwrights Realm production is set in the present in an unnamed middle America town, where the team is making a championship run of its own. The action takes place on Laura Jellinek’s rectangular AstroTurf set, with the audience seated bleacher-style on the two longer sides of the central green field. Over the course of ninety minutes and a handful of Saturday game warm-ups, the nine girls discuss menstruation, their perpetually hung-over coach, social media, religion, exercise, parents, abortion, political correctness, and making a difference in the world while stretching, jogging in formation, and kicking the ball around in predetermined practice routines (including the awesome spider). The sixteen- and seventeen-year-old students are more than a bit fascinated with aging and death; the play opens with a debate about whether ninety-year-old former Khmer Rouge leader Nuon Chea should be imprisoned or executed for horrific crimes he committed in the 1970s. When a few of the girls admit they don’t know anything about the Khmer Rouge, one says, “We don’t do genocide till senior year.” When they argue about the success of various types of feminine hygiene products, the same girl declares, “Score on me with my own baby blood? I think not!” The Wolves regularly passes the Bechdel test, as very few of the discussions have anything to do with boys. In addition, nearly everyone involved with the play is female; the only male listed in the program is one of the sound designers.

Sarah DeLappe’s award-winning play is back for an encore run at the Duke on 42nd St. (photo by Daniel J. Vasquez)

The Realm’s Page One Playwright, DeLappe, and director Lila Neugebauer (Signature Plays: The Sandbox, The Wayside Motor Inn) — both of whom played soccer and made playing the sport with the actors part of the audition process — serve up rapid-fire dialogue like a ball being passed around during a game, with multiple conversations going on at the same time, the audience swerving their heads back and forth to keep up with the fast pace and flow. After a victory, many an athlete has attributed success to that mundane sports cliché, Total Team Effort, but that is exactly what makes The Wolves such a winner; the nine young actors are individually excellent and even better as a unit, although they are later joined by a soccer mom (Kate Arrington) in a heartfelt but unnecessary coda. DeLappe’s clever writing prevents the girls from turning into stereotypes; in fact, for most of the play they are referred to by their numbers, not their names. (We don’t even learn everyone’s given appellation.) They all wear Ásta Bennie Hostetter’s blue uniform costumes except for the goalie, #00 (Lizzy Jutila), who dresses in yellow and purposely mismatched sneakers; she barely speaks but pays close attention to what the rest of the girls are saying. The team is led by #25 (Lauren Patten), the captain, who has learned various motivation techniques from her father. The rest of the cast, each of whom deserves kudos, features Sarah Mezzanotte as the skinny #2; Brenna Coates as the bold and brash striker, #7; Midori Francis as the childlike and innocent #8; Susannah Perkins as the elitist and morbid #11; Jenna Dioguardi as the wacky, filter-less #13; Samia Finnerty as the serious #14, who is best friends with #7; and Tedra Millan as the mysterious #46, an odd new girl who, according to #13, lives with her mother in a “yogurt.” (It’s actually a yurt.) All of their interactions feel honest and genuine, fully immersing the audience in their very believable private and public dramas. The play, which shared the inaugural Relentless Award (with Clare Barron’s Dance Nation), presented by the American Playwriting Foundation in honor of Philip Seymour Hoffman, makes us eager to see more from DeLappe. A wonderful and unique theatrical experience, The Wolves continues at the Duke through December 24, but it deserves a whole lot more extra time before that final whistle blows.