Tag Archives: Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse

GREATER CLEMENTS

Joe (Edmund Donovan) takes issue with his mother (Judith Ivey) in Samuel D. Hunter’s Greater Clements (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Through January 19, $92
212-362-7600
www.lct.org

Samuel D. Hunter takes a sharp snapshot of a downtrodden America in the poignant drama Greater Clements, which ends its run at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater on Sunday. The play is set in Hunter’s home state of Idaho, the site of many of his works (A Bright New Boise, Lewiston/Clarkston). It’s 2017, and Greater Clements is at the end of the line; the Dodson Mine suffered a horrific tragedy in 1972 and shut down in 2005, and now there’s a referendum to abolish the town as a civic entity, at least in part as a reaction to the flood of wealthy Californians moving in. Maggie (Judith Ivey), who owns the local mine museum, is closing up shop; she has just brought her mentally ill twenty-seven-year-old son, Joe (Edmund Donovan), back from a stint in Anchorage, where he went to get away from some trouble he caused but did not necessarily fully understand. Maggie is visited by her high school flame, the gentle and stoic Japanese-American Billy (Ken Narasaki), and his adventurous fourteen-year-old granddaughter, Kel (Haley Sakamoto); Maggie, who is divorced, and Billy, who is widowed, flirt around with the idea of perhaps getting back together. Meanwhile, Maggie’s friend and employee, Livvy (Nina Hellman), is leading the charge for the town to remain incorporated, and Wayne (Andrew Garman), the police chief, is keeping a close watch on Joe, who appears to have potentially dangerous tendencies.

Kel (Haley Sakamoto) tries to befriend Joe (Edmund Donovan) in Greater Clements (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Shrewdly and discerningly directed by Hunter’s longtime collaborator, Davis McCallum (Stupid Fucking Bird, London Wall), the nearly three-hour Greater Clements explores a wide range of issues, from Japanese internment camps and cancer to mental illness and gentrification, from corporate insensitivity and greed to fear and, perhaps most pointedly, loneliness. Dane Laffrey’s potent, active set, which includes a small part of the audience seated in a corner section virtually amid the action, features a second level that descends from above; unfortunately, the construction requires numerous poles that will occasionally block some of your view as the setting changes from the mine and the museum to a bedroom and living room. Yi Zhao’s lighting is supremely effective in the scenes that take place in the mine itself, putting us inside the dark underbelly of America. Tony and Obie winner Ivey (Steaming, Hurlyburly) is exquisite as Maggie, bringing an intimate, realistic warmth to a stalwart woman who deserves better out of life, but Donovan (Lewiston/Clarkston; Xander Xyst, Dragon: 1) steals the show with his powerful, in-your-face portrayal of a man all-too-aware of his situation but not necessarily capable of controlling it.

THE ROLLING STONE

The Rolling Stone explores the horrific treatment of homosexuals in Uganda (photo by Jeremy Daniel)

Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through August 25, $92
212-362-7600
www.lct.org

“No news is good news,” Joe (James Udom) says near the beginning of Chris Urch’s wrenching drama The Rolling Stone, which continues at the Mitzi E. Newhouse through August 25. The play is named after a short-lived paper in Kampala, Uganda, which in 2010 outed LGBTQ people, identifying them so that they would then be arrested, beaten, and/or murdered. A gutsy James Udom is Joe, a priest waiting to hear if he will be named pastor of his local church, which is filled with gossipers; he lives with his younger siblings, Dembe (Ato Blankson-Wood) and Wummie (Latoya Edwards), who are both preparing for admission exams that will allow them to attend medical school in London. In the wake of their father’s recent death, leaving them orphans, all three must make sacrifices. Joe gets the job, but he is beholden to church leader Mama (Myra Lucretia Taylor), who has her own agenda. Dembe, who has been expected to marry Mama’s daughter, Naome (Adenike Thomas) — who mysteriously hasn’t uttered a sound in six months — is hiding his relationship with Sam (Robert Gilbert), a doctor whose father is Irish and mother Ugandan. And Wummie is forced to work as a cleaning woman when it turns out their father did not leave behind the money they thought and Joe, who is fiercely antigay, decides that only Dembe can go to London. But as news and gossip spread about the gay outings, the siblings clash with one another as well as the church.

Naome (Adenike Thomas) and Dembe (Ato Blankson-Wood) hope for a brighter future in The Rolling Stone at Lincoln Center (photo by Jeremy Daniel)

The horrific treatment of the LGBTQ community in Uganda has been well documented, in such films as Call Me Kuchu and the recent uproar over a fundraising campaign to open the country’s first LGBTQ center, which has been denounced by the government. The Rolling Stone focuses on the relationship between Dembe and Sam, which is problematic in that Blankson-Wood and Gilbert lack the chemistry necessary to lift the drama. The play works much better when director Saheem Ali (Fireflies, Nollywood Dreams) turns his attention on the siblings, especially once Wummie discovers Dembe’s secret, which she knows would turn Joe violently against him. Meanwhile, Naome’s silence is representative of the terror and hypocrisy experienced by Ugandans every day. Arnulfo Maldonado’s set consists of a wavy, weblike curtain in the back and a rectangular gray block that rises from below the stage to serve alternately as a rowboat, a bed, and a bench. “I hear two arrests have already been made,” Mama says, referring to another outing in the newspaper. “Not that I say anything. It’s not my place to say. I just humbly hope and pray. Pray for every living soul need prayer now.” But in a society where people are expected to turn in their brothers and sons, praying that homosexuals be harshly dealt with, there is little hope until systemic changes are made.

NANTUCKET SLEIGH RIDE

Venture capitalist Edmund Gowery (John Larroquette) and his secretary (Stacey Sargeant) are about to receive some strange visitors in new John Guare play (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through May 5, $92
212-362-7600
www.lct.org

A one-hit-wonder searches for his long-lost identity in John Guare’s bizarre wild romp, Nantucket Sleigh Ride, a fabulistic memory play about a memory play that continues at the Mitzi E. Newhouse through May 5. Only Guare’s second play to premiere at Lincoln Center since 1992’sFour Baboons Adoring the Sun (the other being 2010’s A Free Man of Color), the witty and slyly urbane Nantucket Sleigh Ride is again charmingly directed by four-time Tony winner Jerry Zaks, who previously helmed Guare’s Tony-winning classics The House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation. Early in the play, not-too-successful venture capitalist Edmund Gowery (John Larroquette), known as Mundie, asks his therapist, Dr. Harbinger (Douglas Sills), if he’d like him to sign a copy of his only play, Internal Structure of Stars. “Why do you need to sign it?” the doctor says. “Because this play is me!” Mundie answers. “Who are you?” Dr. Harbinger responds. It’s a funny running gag that as Mundie meets a wide variety of people, almost all of them have been influenced by the play in one way or another, but nobody wants him to sign their beloved copy.

Schuyler (Douglas Sills) has reads a story to his kids (Adam Chanler-Berat and Grace Rex) in Nantucket Sleigh Ride (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

It’s 2010, and for the first time in a long time, Mundie, who wrote the play more than thirty-five years before, is back in the limelight, his name an answer to a clue in the Sunday Times crossword. While enjoying the sudden burst of attention, he is interrupted by two people, Poe (Adam Chanler-Berat) and Lilac (Grace Rex), who have tracked him down in order to fill in their missing memory of what happened to them on Nantucket in the summer of 1975. They appear as if it is still 1975, eager young children with supposed bright futures ahead of them, even though they are portrayed by adult actors. The narrative then returns to that faraway time and place, with Mundie often addressing the audience directly in the present, offering details and sharing the thoughts in his head as he traveled to Nantucket and encountered some very strange goings-on, involving blind Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (Germán Jaramillo), filmmaker and accused child molester Roman Polanski, a cryogenically frozen, cartoon-parent-killing Walt Disney (Sills), the book and movie versions of Jaws, painter Rene Magritte, kiddie porn, Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion, and a twelve-pound lobster.

The unmarried and childless Mundie is in love with Antonia (Tina Benko), the exotic mother of two — she’s a fiery flamenco dancer who speaks five languages and is working on her doctorate at Wharton — who is married to his lawyer, Gilbert (Jordan Gelber). Gilbert also represents Elsie (Clea Alsip), the daughter of famous children’s book writer Clarence Spooner and the mother of Poe and Lilac; her husband, Schuyler (Sills), is a devious sort who seems unconcerned that local dude McPhee (Will Swenson) is in love with his wife. Mundie also has to be careful what he says and does around police officer Aubrey Coffin (Stacey Sargeant), who appears to have it in for him. Whew; got all that?

New John Guare play at Lincoln Center has more than a touch of the surreal (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

David Gallo’s marvelous set is anchored by a back wall of rows of doors that open up to roll furniture in and out and reveal various characters on one upper level who interject at opportune, and inopportune, moments, delivering poetic lines, non sequiturs, key points, and random nonsense. “What if nightmares were true?” Borges declares. Tony and Emmy winner Larroquette (Night Court, How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying) is sensational as Mundie, a selfish man forced to face some questionable decisions he made in the past. The 110-minute intermissionless play, a rewrite of Guare’s Are You There, McPhee?, which ran briefly at Princeton’s McCarter Theatre in 2012, is a satisfying dish of magical surrealism, even though the labyrinthine plot goes a bit haywire in the second act, with a few annoying holes and absurdist diversions, although Guare harpoons most of it in by the end. (Be sure to pay close attention, as many of the little details are more significant and relevant than you might at first realize.)

Although the tale is centered around writing, from Mundie’s play and potential screenplay to Borges’s poems to Spooner’s kids’ books, it is about much more; Guare, who wrote his first plays when he was eleven, the same age as Mundie’s protagonist — and Mundie based Internal Structure of Stars on things that happened to him when he was eleven — is delving into issues of childhood dreams and how that leads to adult successes and failures. “Lightning struck me once. That’s once more than it strikes most people,” Mundie acknowledges. Guare is also equating writers with psychiatrists, both professions in which memories are excavated. “I have developed a revolutionary technique that can go deep into your subconscious and dredge up memory after memory, crying out to be transformed into plays,” Dr. Harbinger tells Mundie. A new play at Lincoln Center by New York City native Guare, a Pulitzer and Oscar nominee who has won the Tony, the Obie, and the Olivier and who recently turned eighty-one, is an event unto itself, and Nantucket Sleigh Ride lives up to those expectations. It will also have you searching to see if there are any key gaps in your childhood memories.

THE HARD PROBLEM

Spike (Chris O’Shea) and Hilary (Adelaide Clemens) discuss altruism, God, and the prisoner’s dilemma in latest Tom Stoppard masterpiece (photo by Paul Kolnik)

Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 6, $92
212-362-7600
www.lct.org

In his first new play since 2006’s Rock ‘n’ Roll, octogenarian genius Tom Stoppard takes a deep dive into nothing less than human consciousness. The opening of The Hard Problem lets us know just what we’re in for: An attractive young tutor and his student hotly debate “the prisoner’s dilemma,” preparing her for a major job interview. We are going to watch characters onstage swim in a British think tank where the big questions are asked. The “hard problem,” of course, is how the biochemistry of organic matter gives rise to consciousness, the realization of a “self” able to reflect on its own existence and concepts of goodness, self-sacrifice, and altruism. Another hard problem, of course, is how to make this cerebral subject work as live theater. Stoppard, who has explored issues of science, chaos theory, philosophy, history, and other intellectual endeavours in such previous works as Arcadia, The Invention of Love, and The Coast of Utopia, achieves his goal this time via a somewhat predictable though cleverly chosen cast of characters: the male “quant” with impeccable academic and professional qualifications who may lack human emotion, the female researcher with a tender heart, strong mind, and wrenching personal history, the overeager postdoctoral assistant, and an old school friend who remains resolutely sensible and cynical.

“It’s about survival strategies hard-wired into our brains millions of years ago. Who eats, who gets eaten, who gets to advance their genes into the next generation,” Spike (Chris O’Shea) tells Hilary Matthews (Adelaide Clemens), who is up for a job at the prestigious Krohl Institute for Brain Science. He continues, “Competition is the natural order. Self-interest is bedrock. Co-operation is a strategy. Altruism is an outlier unless you’re an ant or a bee. You’re not an ant or a bee; you’re competing to do a doctorate at the Krohl Institute, where they’re basically seeing first class honours degrees and you’re in line for a second, so don’t be a smart arse, and above all don’t use the word ‘good’ as though it meant something in evolutionary science.”

Hilary (Adelaide Clemens) listens in as Amal Admati (Eshan Bajpay) and Dr. Leo Reinhart (Robert Petkoff) have quite a disagreement in The Hard Problem (photo by Paul Kolnik)

Hilary has just about everything going against her: She went to the wrong schools, didn’t do the expected internships, didn’t ace the proper tests, and has different ideas about the mind and consciousness than does Amal Admati (Eshan Bajpay), who is seemingly the perfect candidate for the job — but Dr. Leo Reinhart (Robert Petkoff) chooses Hilary for the position because of her rather unique and somewhat unscientific thoughts on the relationship between the brain and consciousness. It all comes to a head when the fiercely ambitious Bo (Karoline Xu) joins Hilary’s team and takes the lead on a complex project that doesn’t go quite as planned.

Bo (Karoline Xu) complicates things for Hilary (Adelaide Clemens) in New York premiere of The Hard Problem at Lincoln Center (photo by Paul Kolnik)

Despite all the talk of statistical tendencies, evolutionary behavior, moral intelligence, computer programming, binary operations, egoism, and other high-falutin’ terms, Stoppard is not so much interested in science than in personality; the characters in the play are splendidly drawn, from Jerry Krohl (Jon Tenney), who Spike describes as “a squillionaire with a masters in biophysics who decided to try hedge-funding,” and Jerry’s bright young daughter, Cathy (Katie Beth Hall), to Julia Chamberlain (Nina Grollman), a former classmate of Hilary’s who runs Pilates classes at the institute — serving the body in a place built around the mind — and Julia’s partner, Ursula Tarrant (Tara Summers), who doesn’t shy away from discussing panpsychism. Stoppard also explores the idea of a supreme being among all this science. “How does God feel about your model of Nature-Nurture Convergence in Altruistic Parent-Offspring Behaviour?” Spike asks Hilary, who prays every night before she goes to bed. But Hilary and Stoppard are concerned with more down-to-earth subjects. “Who’s the you outside your brain? Where? The mind is extra,” Hilary says.

Three-time Tony-winning director Jack O’Brien (Hairspray, Hapgood), who has helmed such other major Stoppard works as The Coast of Utopia and The Invention of Love, has a clear handle on the material, never allowing the play to get overly pedantic, keeping it all real on David Rockwell’s cool set, in which props and furniture are wheeled on or off or drop from the ceiling. Various cast members sit on a couch watching when they’re not involved in the action, taking in every poetic phrase just as we are. Clemens (Hold on to Me Darling, Rectify) is a revelation as Hilary, an unpredictable, fascinating woman who in many ways is representative of the average, regular person facing a changing world. “Explain consciousness,” Hilary says early on to Spike, who doesn’t have an answer. In The Hard Problem, Stoppard isn’t seeking answers but is asking all the right questions.

ADMISSIONS

Sherri (Jessica Hecht), Bill (Andrew Garman), and Charlie (Ben Edelman) share a toast before things spiral out of control in new play at Lincoln Center (photo by Jeremy Daniel)

Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 29, $92
212-362-7600
www.lct.org

Joshua Harmon makes it three-for-three with his third professionally produced play, the timely and provocative Admissions, continuing at the Mitzi E. Newhouse at Lincoln Center through April 29. Harmon boldly skewers white privilege, a sizzling-hot topic in America today, in a work written by a white man, directed by a white man, performed by an all-white cast, and seen by a mostly white audience. Although criticized by some, it’s perversely critical that Harmon has included only white characters, because this kind of liberal racism and privilege is a specifically white problem that needs to be addressed by whites. Sherri Rosen-Mason (Jessica Hecht) and Bill Mason (Andrew Garman) both work at Hillcrest, a second-tier boarding school in New Hampshire where Sherri is head of admissions and Bill is headmaster. As the play opens, dyed-in-the-wool New Englander Roberta (Ann McDonough), who works in development, brings Sherri a draft of the admissions catalog, which infuriates Sherri when she sees very few people of color in the brochure. Her agenda is crystal clear: “When I first got to Hillcrest, the student body was ninety-four percent white, six percent students of color,” Sherri explains. “Now, I have worked like a dog the last fifteen years so that our school looks a little bit more like the country in which it is situated, and today, we’re eighteen percent students of color. Which is still an embarrassingly low number, but it’s three hundred percent better than where we were just fifteen years ago.” Roberta argues that she did her best and that she does not see color, that Sherri is overly concerned about race, leading to an uncomfortable discussion about just how black biracial student Perry Peters is. While Roberta says he is black, Sherri is worried that he doesn’t “read black” in the photo in the catalog. “He looks whiter than my son in this picture,” Sherri says, referring to Charlie (Ben Edelman), who, like Perry, is applying to colleges. But when Perry, whose mother, Ginnie (Sally Murphy), is good friends with Sherri, gets into Yale and Charlie gets wait-listed, Sherri starts singing a different tune, determined to do whatever she can to get her son back on the track of privilege and merit.

Sherri (Jessica Hecht) and Roberta (Ann McDonough) debate diversity at New Hampshire boarding school in Joshua Harmon play (photo by Jeremy Daniel)

Admissions is anchored by a long, show-stopping monologue by Charlie, marvelously delivered by Edelman, in which the angry student rails against the current politically correct climate that he believes favors women and people of color over white males. The speech infuriates Bill, who calls his son a “spoiled little overprivileged brat.” Later, when Charlie decides to take responsibility and do what he thinks is the right thing, Sherri admonishes him: “We’re not talking about diversity, we’re talking about you, Charlie, you.” And therein lies the NIMBY dilemma as Harmon harpoons liberal ideas of diversity, racial equality, quotas, and what used to be called affirmative action: It’s all well and good until it (maybe) affects their child. Sherri even goes at it with Ginnie, believing that Perry got into Yale primarily because he checked the “black” box on his application. But Ginnie fights right back, claiming that Bill has a better job than her husband, Don, because Bill is white and Don is black. Again, it’s evident that Harmon has included only the white people in his story, that Perry, Don, and any other black men or women exist offstage, as opposed to Dominique Morisseau’s hard-hitting Pipeline, which ran at the Newhouse last summer and was also set at a school dealing with race and class issues. White privilege is still rampant throughout the nation, no matter how many white people, liberal or conservative, think it’s not and find the whole idea offensive. Yet it is not the job of black Americans to “wake up” white Americans to their own racism; the oppressed do not need to appear before a white audience to explain themselves to their oppressors, and thus they are absent from Harmon’s play. White people need to clean up their own side, however messy and painful the process may be.

Ginnie (Sally Murphy) and Sherri’s (Jessica Hecht) friendship is tested in Admissions (photo by Jeremy Daniel)

Riccardo Hernandez’s open set serves as both the Masons’ kitchen and living room and Sherri’s office, equating the private and the professional. Director Daniel Aukin (4000 Miles, Bad Jews) navigates the tense, explosive dialogue seamlessly; theatergoers should pay close attention to the other characters when one is doing the talking, especially during the longer speeches. Tony nominee Hecht’s (The Assembled Parties, A View from the Bridge) hesitant style works well for Sherri, countering Garman’s (The Christians, Salomé) firmer, more direct approach. But it’s Edelman (Significant Other, The Idiot Box) who steals the show as Charlie, a confused kid trapped in the middle of an incendiary issue, a smart young man who has to find respite by running into the woods and screaming his head off. Harmon’s debut, 2012’s Bad Jews, was a dark comedy about three siblings fighting over a family heirloom; it began at the Roundabout’s subterranean Black Box before moving to the larger Laura Pels upstairs. His follow-up, 2015’s Significant Other, dealt with a gay twentysomething man who watches his three close girlfriends find love while he remains single; it started at the Laura Pels and then transferred to the Booth on Broadway. Admissions is about a lot more than just getting into college — and it certainly passes the test to qualify for a bigger house as well.

PIPELINE

Nya (Karen Pittman) desperately tries to protect her son, Omari (Namir Smallwood), in Dominique Morisseau’s riveting Pipeline (photo by Jeremy Daniel)

Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through August 27, $87
212-362-7600
www.lct.org

Pipeline is an up-to-the-minute, honest, and hard-hitting look at race, class, and the education system in the United States from Detroit native Dominique Morisseau. Continuing at the Mitzi E. Newhouse through August 27, the intensely intelligent, powerful play was created by Morrisseau shortly after completing her award-winning Detroit Projects trilogy (Detroit ’67, Paradise Blue, Skeleton Crew) and before she begins her Residency Five at the Signature Theatre in April 2018 with a revival of Paradise Blue. In this new work, Morisseau brilliantly introduces Nya (Karen Pittman), a divorced public-school teacher in an unidentified city facing a family crisis, as she leaves a complicated, heart-rending phone message for her ex-husband, Xavier (Morocco Omari), explaining in fractured sentences that their son, Omari (Namir Smallwood), is facing explusion from school. However, she decides to delete the message, replacing it with a blunt “Calling to talk to you about our son. Give me a call back when you get this. Thanks. Bye.” In the span of just a few minutes, Morisseau has set the stage beautifully, establishing character, plot, and mood. Omari is a dour teenager who has attacked one of his teachers during a discussion about Richard Wright’s Native Son, an incident that was captured on video and is about to go viral. Omari’s girlfriend, Jasmine (Heather Velazquez), is a whirling dervish of opinions who’s never afraid to say what she is thinking. Meanwhile, Nya’s fellow teacher, the bitter, old-fashioned Laurie (Tasha Lawrence), has returned to school after getting involved in a serious fight between two students. “A good old ass whipping can teach a lot,” she says. The teachers are sometimes joined by Dun (Jaime Lincoln Smith), a flirtatious school security guard who promises Nya and Laurie that he’ll do whatever he can to prevent further clashes with students. But when Omari runs off, Nya becomes desperate to find him before his future comes crashing down. It’s all summed up by Jasmine, who tells Nya, “Sometimes somebody mess with you on the wrong day. . . . It’s like THEY don’t know it’s your last straw. But they ain’t seen how many times you been sucked of everything you got. They go pickin’ at you like lint, and be lookin’ surprised when you knock ’em flat the hell out.”

Jasmine (Heather Velazquez) and Omari (Namir Smallwood) face a troubling situation in poetic Lincoln Center production (photo by Jeremy Daniel)

Nya occasionally addresses the audience directly, as if they are in class themselves, but Morisseau, a former teacher whose mother was a public school teacher, and Obie-winning director Lileana Blain-Cruz (War, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World) never allow the play to become overly preachy or pedantic. (There’s even a program insert, “Playwright’s Rules of Engagement,” which notes, “This can be church for some of us, and testifying is allowed.”) The set, by Matt Saunders, swiftly changes from office to lunchroom to dorm room to classroom to hospital waiting room, with occasional scenes taking place in what Morisseau, who is also a writer and executive story editor for the Showtime series Shameless, calls “undefined space.” Omari’s fight with his teacher is representative in many ways of the confrontations between police and black and brown men and the need for personal space, and it’s all sensitively portrayed by an exceptionally strong cast and exceptional writing. “It’s a gamble, Jasmine,” Nya says. “All the time. You send your young man out into the world everyday, or away for a weekend. A semester. A school year. But you don’t know . . . You have no idea if they’re safe. You have no idea if one day someone will try to expire them because they are too young. Or too Black. Or too threatening. Or too loud. Or too uninformed. Or too angry. Or too quiet. Or too everyday. Or too cool. Or too uncomposed. Or too mysterious. Or just too TOO. You don’t know, Jasmine.” The relationships between the characters are fully believable as Morisseau steers clear of genre clichés in making the many issues Pipeline raises a microcosm of what is happening in twenty-first-century America. And at the center of it all is Gwendolyn Brooks’s 1960 poem “We Real Cool,” which is projected onto a blackboard and adorns the cover of Lincoln Center Theater Review: “We real cool. We / Left school. We / Lurk late. We / Strike straight. We / Sing sin. We / Thin gin. We / Jazz June. We / Die soon.” Pipeline is a poetic indictment of institutionalized societal constraints, a lesson we all need to learn.

HOW TO TRANSCEND A HAPPY MARRIAGE

Polyamory is front and center in Sarah Ruhl’s HOW TO TRANSCEND A HAPPY MARRIAGE (photo by Kyle Froman)

Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday – Saturday through May 7, $87
212-362-7600
www.lct.org

“I think in the polyamory movement, you sort of just — accept — the person’s sexual predilections,” Jane (Robin Weigert) says early on in Sarah Ruhl’s How to Transcend a Happy Marriage. “Is it a movement now?” Paul (Omar Metwally) asks. “I think so. There’s a book — called The Ethical Slut. It tells you how to do it,” Michael (Brian Hutchison) replies (referring to an actual book). Two New Jersey couples learn quite a lesson about the “movement” when a polyamorous triad comes over for New Year’s Eve in this extremely clever play, running at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse through May 7. Married breeders Jane and Michael and George (Marisa Tomei) and Paul are best friends, but they’re not exactly Bob and Ted and Carol and Alice. When legal aid lawyer Jane tells the others about a polyamorous temp in her office who lives with two men and slaughters her own meat, they all decide that they have to meet. So on New Year’s Eve in a quaint suburban home, the beautiful, free-spirited Pip (Lena Hall), brash mathematician David (Austin Smith), and stoned slacker Freddie (David McElwee) discuss hunting, Pythagoras, music theory, Twelfth Night, “radical honesty,” impenetrable pistachios, harmony, and mermaids over vegan hash brownies that soon have Jane, Michael, George, and Paul so enraptured with the alluring Pip that they’re ready to do just about anything with her and her two lovers — but they’re not prepared for what they have to face the next morning, and potentially the rest of their lives.

Lena Hall stars as a polyamorous ingénue in new Sarah Ruhl play at Lincoln Center (photo by Kyle Froman)

As the audience enters the theater, a skinned animal hangs from the ceiling of David Zinn’s living-room set. A woman, whom we later learn is Pip, walks up to the sacrificial object, takes it down, and carries it offstage, cradling it like it’s a baby. It’s an apt metaphor for what follows, as the conventional world of straight married couples gets butchered, in a way. Paul is an architect relegated to bathroom renovation. George (short for Georgia) became a junior high school teacher instead of getting her PhD in classics. Michael used to be in a rock band but now writes jingles. And Jane regrets losing what she once was. “Life with a teenager is a series of reprimands until your personality disappears,” she says. Believing they’re all stuck in a rut, they are fascinated by the seemingly carefree world that Pip, David (pronounced dah-VEED), and Freddie live in, even if they don’t understand it. “Our language is limited and so our imagination is limited,” David explains, referring to most of humanity. George is particularly ready to break out; she wants to sing “Wild Thing” and compares the New Year’s Eve party to the “wild rumpus” in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, telling the audience directly, “It was dirty but I felt sort of gloriously clean.” George and Paul and Michael and Jane might have thought they were happy, but Pip represents a spirituality that has evaded them. (Even the brand name of the bow George uses in the forest is Spirit.) Pip is studying to be a body worker, but she gets inside people’s minds as well, with a touch of magic.

Two couples deal with the fall-out from a crazy New Year’s Eve party in HOW TO TRANSCEND A HAPPY MARRIAGE (photo by Kyle Froman)

“Really polyamory takes all the fun out of adultery,” Paul says playfully, but two-time Pulitzer finalist Ruhl (Stage Kiss, In the Next Room or the vibrator play) digs much deeper than that relatively simplistic aside. Ruhl and director Rebecca Taichman (Marie Antoinette, The Oldest Boy), who have previously collaborated on Stage Kiss, The Clean House, Dead Man’s Cell Phone, and Orlando, neither defend nor attack polyamory while dealing with such issues as personal and familial responsibility, shame, and sexuality throughout one’s life. The cast is uniformly strong, but Tony winner Hall (Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Kinky Boots) does the heavy lifting with an infectious lightness; in order for the play to work, the audience must fall in love with her just as all the characters do, and she makes it nearly impossible not to be drawn into her youthful enthusiasm. The second act is much darker than the first and sometimes goes astray, particularly when Pip takes George hunting and things don’t turn out quite as planned, and thank goodness the show doesn’t immediately end after Michael sings one of his songs. Ruhl still has a bit more to say, bringing it all back home with a sweetly meaningful finale.