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

THE BABYLON LINE

Teacher Aaron Port (Josh Radnor) and student Joan Dellamond (Elizabeth Reaser) get on board THE BABYLON LINE at Lincoln Center

Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday – Saturday through January 22, $87
212-362-7600
www.lct.org

The first words of Richard Greenberg’s latest play, The Babylon Line, are “The End,” referencing both the end of life and what might be the end of the literary dreams of Aaron Port (Josh Radnor), who then quotes Walter Benjamin: “Death sanctions all stories.” Unfortunately, the end of The Babylon Line can’t come quite soon enough. It’s 1967, and the thirty-eight-year-old Aaron, who has had one short story published, has been reduced to teaching an adult education Creative Writing class in Levittown for a trio of yentas who were disappointed that Contemporary Events and Politics, Flower Arranging, and French Cooking were already full, plus a drug-addled former valedictorian, a shell-shocked Korean War veteran, and a woman who apparently has stepped right out of a Tennessee Williams play. A reverse commuter who lives in Greenwich Village, Aaron takes the train from Penn Station to Wantagh for the class, managing to net fifteen bucks a week. At first he has little interest in teaching or in his odd students until southern belle Joan Dellamond (Elizabeth Reaser), who like him feels like an outsider, awakens a long-subdued passion in him. While Jack Hassenpflug (Frank Wood) keeps reworking his brief war memory and Marc Adams (Michael Oberholtzer) can’t say much more than hello, Frieda Cohen (Randy Graff), Midge Braverman (Julie Halston), and Anna Cantor (Maddie Corman as a character who has previously appeared in Greenberg’s Everett Beekin and Our Mother’s Brief Affair) gossip about the other students and Mr. Levitt, the founder of Levittown, forming a kind of Hadassah chorus. “I’m very excited about your potential,” Aaron hesitatingly tells the class, but not only doesn’t he mean it, he’s also sarcastically referring to his own potential, which he sees fading away fast. As Joan later remarks, “Levittown is not where people generally come seeking opportunities.”

Aaron (Josh Radnor) faces his creative writing class, and himself, in new Richard Greenberg play

Just as Aaron is bored with what his life has become, it’s hard to get excited about The Babylon Line. The format, framed by the memories of eighty-six-year-old Aaron examining a major part of his life nearly half a century earlier, plays out more like a short story than a fully realized theatrical work; it has some intriguing elements and a handful of fine moments, but it can’t sustain its 140-minute length (with intermission). Coincidentally, Greenberg (Take Me Out, The Assembled Parties), who was raised in East Meadow, has recently released Rules for Others to Live By: Comments and Self-Contradictions, a book that consists of fifty short stories, most of which run fewer than ten pages. Awkwardly directed by Terry Kinney (One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, reasons to be pretty) on Richard Hoover’s basic schoolroom set, the play also never quite captures the Long Island feel of the title; while there are references to suburbia, it lacks the rhythm of that oft-heard poem: “Rockville Centre, Baldwin, Freeport, Merrick, Bellmore, Wantagh, Seaford, Massapequa, Massapequa Park, Amityville, Copiague, Lindenhurst, and Babylon.” Originally produced by New York Stage and Film in 2014 and running at Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi E. Newhouse, The Babylon Line is one class, or train, you won’t mind missing.

SHOWS FOR DAYS

Phones become key for an unexpected reason in Douglas Carter Beane’s SHOWS FOR DAYS (photo by Joan Marcus)

Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through August 23, $87
212-362-7600
www.lct.org

Two-time Tony-winning diva Patti LuPone pulls off a little magical sleight of hand in Douglas Carter Beane’s otherwise slight memory play, Shows for Days. On the night I saw it, the stage diva, playing a stage diva, exited a scene in the second act by reaching out to an audience member; although it looked like a celebratory handshake or a low high-five, it turned out that LuPone had swiped away the woman’s cell phone, without most of the crowd, including me, noticing it. Only the next day did the story come out and deservedly go viral, following in the footsteps of the Long Island oaf who tried to charge his phone in a fake socket on the set of Hand to God. LuPone’s performance is the best thing about Beane’s play, based on his experiences as a fourteen-year-old boy from Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, who hooked up with Jane Simmon Miller’s Genesius Theatre in Reading, a local company that is still at it. Michael Urie (How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying, Buyer & Cellar) stars as Car, a shy teenager seeking more out of his dull suburban life. He wanders into the Prometheus Theatre one day and is almost immediately put to work by gruff bull dyke Sid (Dale Soules), the theater’s cofounder and production manager; by the time he meets the rest of the crew — needy actress Maria (Zoë Winters), oversized African American queen Clive (Lance Coadie Williams), sexy blonde hottie Damien (Jordan Dean), and Irene (LuPone), an Actress worthy of a capital A — he has found the second home he has been looking for. Unfortunately, not everything he discovers makes for compelling, entertaining theater for the rest of us.

Lincoln Center has assembled quite a remarkable creative team for Shows for Days. In addition to Beane (The Nance, The Little Dog Laughed), there’s director Jerry Zaks (Six Degrees of Separation, The House of Blue Leaves), set designer John Lee Beatty Sets (Other Desert Cities, The Most Happy Fella), costume designer William Ivey Long (On the Twentieth Century, Chicago), lighting designer Natasha Katz (The Coast of Utopia, The Glass Menagerie), and sound designer Leon Rothenberg (Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, The Nance); among them, they have earned a mound of Tony nominations and awards. The narrative, clunky at times, has Car going back and forth between 1973 Reading and 2015 Lincoln Center; the modern-day moments feel more like vanity scenes that aren’t really necessary. When the play focuses on the nitty-gritty aspects of community theater, a motley crew attempting to put on the best possible production with extremely limited resources, Shows for Days has a sweet charm, even though the characters are stereotypes. It’s fun watching them decide how they are going to approach an evening of Tennessee Williams one-acts. But when the plot explores romantic hanky-panky, it loses its focus and becomes far less interesting. The more real the play feels, the better it is, even as the props are revealed to be fake. When the 2015 Car first enters the Prometheus, he says, “Curtained off by the entrance is the tiniest of offices. Desk. A chair. All found in the street. With a telephone — that somehow still works.” He picks up the old rotary phone, showing the audience that it is not connected to anything, yet it soon rings, and Sid speaks into it. It’s a gag that is sure to get a different kind of laugh now, after the events of July 9, when a cell phone made Shows for Days the talk of the town. It’s too bad it couldn’t reach that level of fame for other reasons.

THE MYSTERY OF LOVE AND SEX

Two generations deal with love, sex, and food in Lincoln Center production (photo by T Charles Erickson)

Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 26, $87
212-362-7600
www.lct.org

Bathsheba Doran’s The Mystery of Love and Sex explores the many facets of the title concepts in light but smart ways, touching on the complicated nature of friendship and family, romance and lust. Friends since they were nine years old, Charlotte (Gayle Rankin) and Jonny (Mamoudou Athie) are now going to the same Virginia college not far from where they were raised, and they have invited her parents, Lucinda (Diane Lane) and Howard (Tony Shalhoub), to come over for what Lucinda quickly decides is a “bohemian” dinner, on a makeshift table with salad, bread, no chairs, and cheap wine. While Lucinda gets right into the spirit of things, Howard has much more trouble, beginning with attempting to sit on the floor, then trying to serve himself some food. Soon the talk turns to the relationship between Jonny, a young black man with a sick mother, and Charlotte, a young Jewish woman preparing her own way in the world. Howard, a successful writer of detective fiction, might have been treating Jonny like a member of the family for the past decade, but now that he thinks that Jonny might become an official part of the family, he is not so happy. But the kids are still teenagers with their whole lives in front of them, and their undefined relationship grows more puzzling when Jonny starts dating another woman — and Charlotte says she has the hots for a fellow coed. Things heat up even further when the four main characters start debating such issues as racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, misogyny, religion — and food. (The show features a lot of eating, so you might want to be sure to dine beforehand.) The second act takes place five years later, as some matters have been settled, but most have not, as marriage and divorce enter the conversation.

Jonny (Mamoudou Athie) and Charlotte (Gayle Rankin) contemplate their future in THE MYSTERY OF LOVE AND SEX (photo by T Charles Erickson)

Returning to New York theater for the first time since 1977, when she was twelve, the now fifty-year-old Lane (A Little Romance, Unfaithful) is resplendent as Lucinda, her smile lighting up the entire theater, along with her rich southern accent, her character’s flair for life infectious. Shalhoub (Act One, Golden Boy) is terrific as Howard, a bundle of nerves and deeply hidden prejudices who fumbles fantastically in the opening dinner scene, showing a riotous mastery of physical comedy, while standing firm later when he gets into it with Jonny. Athie and Rankin are fine as Jonny and Charlotte, the former timid and withdrawn, the latter energetic and fancy-free, but the play slows down considerably when Lane and Shalhoub are not onstage. One of the busiest directors in New York, Sam Gold, who has helmed such delights as Fun Home, The Realistic Joneses, and Seminar, makes good use of the small Newhouse stage, keeping things moving proficiently on Andrew Lieberman’s minimalist sets, which generally consist of a few pieces of furniture and long drapes in the back. Doran, who has written such other plays as Kin and Nest and for such cable series as Boardwalk Empire and Masters of Sex, has a gift for creating unpredictable situations and taking them further than expected with a smooth calm, although she is occasionally too clever for her own good. The Mystery of Love and Sex is a perfectly pleasant piece of theater, a tasty morsel if not quite the gourmet meal it attempts to be.

THE CITY OF CONVERSATION

Georgetown hostess Hester Ferris’s (Jan Maxwell) carefully orchestrated dinner party doesn’t go quite as planned in new Anthony Giardina play (photo by Stephanie Berger)

Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday – Saturday through July 6, $87
212-362-7600
www.lct.org

Five-time Tony nominee Jan Maxwell gives a whirlwind performance as a Georgetown hostess trying to balance the personal with the political over the course of thirty years in Anthony Giardina’s The City of Conversation. Maxwell (Follies, Coram Boy) stars as Hester Ferris, an elegant liberal who hosts important dinner parties at her fancy home (the set is designed by the incomparable John Lee Beatty), where important men come to smoke, drink, and craft policy away from the craziness of Congress. The play begins in September 1979, as Hester and her sister, Jean Swift (Beth Dixon), prepare for the arrival of Kentucky senator George Mallonee (John Aylward) and his wife, Carolyn (Barbara Garrick); George, a Republican, has important business with Democrat Chandler Harris (Kevin O’Rourke), Hester’s married lover. But when Hester’s son, Colin (Michael Simpson), and his extremely ambitious right-wing girlfriend, Anna Fitzgerald (Kristen Bush), suddenly show up, Hester’s carefully planned party doesn’t go quite as expected, leading to a rift that grows as the play moves to October 1987, during the Reagan presidency, and then on to January 2009 as Barack Obama takes office.

Hester (Jan Maxwell) has more than a few words for Anna (Kristen Bush) as son Colin (Michael Simpson) looks on (photo by Stephanie Berger)

The City of Conversation — the title comes from a Henry James quip about D.C. — looks back at a disappearing past, when the nation’s capital operated very differently from today. “That’s the way it used to be,” Hester tells Anna, relating a story about John F. Kennedy soliciting advice from columnist Joe Alsop regarding Cuba. “A president was able to get out of the White House, come to Georgetown, and learn something just because someone brilliant happened to be at dinner.” Novelist and playwright Giardina’s (Living at Home, Scenes from La Vie de Boheme) first work not specifically drawn from personal experience, The City of Conversation is a superbly acted, well-paced drama about legacy and power, going behind the scenes of a changing Washington where partisanship has affected policy, ended friendships, and torn families apart. Maxwell gives a virtuoso performance, an expert balance of rampant energy and subtle mood shifts as she tries to maintain her relationship with her Republican son and her grandson (Luke Niehaus) while also standing up and fighting for her beliefs. Aylward (The Kentucky Cycle) is excellent as George Mallonee, eating up and spitting out the stereotype of the country-bumpkin southern senator, while O’Rourke (Spoils of War, Checkers) provides solid support as Hester’s significant other. Director Doug Hughes (Outside Mullingar, The Royal Family with Maxwell) knows Giardina well, having directed his works for thirty years, so the play moves seamlessly through the decades, revealing a Washington that has grown dysfunctional perhaps past the point of no return. Be sure to pick up a copy of the Lincoln Center Theater Review, which includes the long, well-researched article “The Doyennes of D.C.” by Sally Bedell Smith as well as contributions from Giardina, Christopher Buckley, Jane Stanton Hitchcock, James Schroeder, and John Guare.