Tag Archives: Lincoln Center Theater

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.

TWI-NY TALK: BENJAMIN DREYER — DREYER’S ENGLISH

Ben Dreyer records the audio version of his debut book, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

Barnes & Noble
150 East 86th St. at Lexington Ave.
Thursday, January 31, free, 7:00
212-369-2180
stores.barnesandnoble.com
www.penguinrandomhouse.com

When Random House vice president, copy chief and executive managing editor Benjamin Dreyer agreed to do a twi-ny talk in conjunction with the publication of his phenomenal new book, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style (Random House, January 29, 2019, $25) I knew the interview had to be done via e-mail and not over the phone or in person, since Dreyer makes his living with the written word. (Yes, there is at least one error in the previous sentence; please see the paragraph below in bold to find out why.) Just like Ben, Dreyer’s English is a thoroughly engrossing read, both funny and expertly knowledgable. In the book, he covers such general matters of style as grammar, spelling, and punctuation along with more specific looks at what he calls “peeves and crotchets,” “confusables,” and “trimmables.” He lends insight to plural possessives, the serial comma, initialisms, parentheses, common mispellings, capitalization, and the “hoi polloi,” exploring certain items farther, more in depth, begging the question, “Do I need more than just autocorrect and spellcheck to write well”?

In the main text and detailed footnotes, Dreyer references such literary giants as Dickens, Fitzgerald, Hans Christian Anderson, J.R.R. Tolkien, George Bernard Shaw, and James Joyce; an avid theatregoer and old movie fan, the book also includes examples involving Katharine Hepburn, Liza Minnelli, Noel Coward, Joan Crawford, Abbot and Costello, Zoe Caldwell, Lon Chaney Jr., and Ingrid Bergman, among many others. The fact that Dreyer reserves his most deepest admiration for Shirley Jackson, the 20th century author of such novels as the Haunting of Hill House and such short stories as “The Lottery” is not surprising. Dreyer actually got a chance to copy edit previously-unpublished pieces by Jackson; in one of the best footnotes in his book, he admits to typing out the complete Jackson short story, “The Renegade” — “to see whether doing so might make me better appreciate how beautifully constructed the story was. It did.” I’m considering typing out some of Dreyer’s paragraphs to remind me of some of the style elements he espouses so entertainingly in the book, especially “lie/lay/laid/lain.”

A legend in the industry, I’ve known Dreyer since 1995, when I was a managing editor at Random House imprint Ballantine Books. He really sums up the primary responsibilities of a copy editor at the very start of Dreyer’s English (which has received praise from such literary stalwarts as Elizabeth Stout, George Saunders, Jon Meacham, Amy Bloom, and Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon): “I am a copy editor. After a piece of writing has been, likely, through numerous drafts, developed and revised by the writer and by the person I tend to call the editor editor and deemed essentially finished and complete, my job is to lay my hands on that piece of writing and make it . . . better.” He also recorded the audiobook, joined by his good friend and two-time Tony nominee Alison Fraser. (You can listen to a clip here.)

Dreyer will be at the Barnes & Noble at Eighty-Sixth & Lexington on January 31 at 7:00, signing copies of the book and speaking with award-winning Random House author Peter (Ghost Story) Straub. Its a great opportunity to join the Dreyer cult we’ve all been apart of for decades. He’ll also be taking copyediting questions on Twitter on February 1 from 12:30-1:30.

SIGNED BOOK GIVEAWAY: In the paragraphs above are at least a dozen grammatical errors that Dreyer deals directly with in his book; whoever correctly identifies the most will win a signed copy for free. Just send your name, daytime phone number, and list of mistakes to contest@twi-ny.com by Friday, February 1, at 3:00 pm to be eligible. All entrants must be twenty-one years of age or older; in case of a tie, one winner will be selected at random.

twi-ny: How long has this book been percolating inside you? Was there a final impetus that helped you go ahead with it?

benjamin dreyer: Back in the 1980s I’d written a bit of short fiction and was a regular contributor to Chicago’s then premier gay newspaper, Windy City Times, writing mostly on film and theater. Those writing aspirations fell by the wayside — I developed awful writer’s block, particularly insofar as writing fiction was concerned — and as I fell into freelance proofreading and then copyediting, I, happily, felt deeply satisfied that I was making a contribution to writing, even if I wasn’t writing myself, and I let the writing thing go. (As a friend said, “It’s too painful to be in a constantly anxious state of Not Writing. Better to let it go than to make yourself miserable on a daily basis.”) After I joined Random House as a production editor in 1993 and eventually became copy chief and managing editor, I pretty much stopped copyediting — there are only so many hours in the day, after all, and I have a lot of job. But: About six years ago I found myself invited to copyedit a novel — Elizabeth Strout’s excellent, to say the least, The Burgess Boys — and simply setting green pencil to paper again filled me with real joy; I’d forgotten how much I like to copyedit. And that sense of joy somehow rekindled my desire to write. I guess I was having a moment. So one afternoon I rather barged into the office of Random House publisher Susan Kamil and began to, well, burble at her about my desire to write a book about copyediting. She interrupted my burbling, suggested that if I wanted to write and particularly publish a book I might do well to have an agent, and — to make a longish story shortish — a few months later there I was, under contract to write the book that’s just now going on sale.

dreyers english

twi-ny: You have spent your entire career working on other people’s books, but now you’re the one whose words are being line edited, copyedited, proofread, and designed. What was that experience like? Did you enjoy being copyedited, or was it painful?

bd: That thing about “I hate writing, I love having written”? Well, if I didn’t quite hate writing, except when I did, I loved being edited. I’ve had the support of three great editors at Random House, plus my agent’s keen oversight, and they were all wonderful at encouraging me and challenging me — with of course a healthy dose of “Could you just finish it, please?” The funny thing is, it took me an awfully long time to find my voice, but once I found it, once I really let my writer freak flag fly, they were all “Yes, yes, yes, go, go, go.” Of course they asked me to expand on things they thought I wasn’t addressing fully enough, and occasionally I was asked to dial it down a bit. (If you’ve read the book, your response to that might be “And apparently you didn’t.” But truly, I did.) As to the copyediting, well, that was just amazing. I did request a particular freelance copy editor I used to hire constantly back in my production editorial days — I conceal her name here only to discourage people poaching her from RH, but she’s honored in the back of the book if you care to look in the acknowledgments — and she was superb, as I knew she would be. She called me out on any number of my bad habits, including a tendency to insert massive amounts of digression into the middle of a sentence, laughed at my jokes (in the margins, that is), and periodically would offer helpful/necessary rephrasings of text in such a precise imitation of my voice that I’d just pick up her suggestions and stuff them into the manuscript. In short, she did everything for me that I have always tried, as a copy editor, to do for the writers I was copyediting. I felt honored and protected and looked after and properly prodded, and she certainly substantively improved the book. (To answer a question you didn’t ask: A copy editor cannot turn a bad book into a good one, but a copy editor can certainly take a competent or better manuscript and make that thing shine. I think she polished me quite nicely.)

I’d also like to add that the book’s text designer — a colleague of mine for as long as I’ve been at Random House — absolutely, I think, nailed it. Writers often have lots of quibbles over and requests about their text design, but the first time I saw the proposed text design I almost cried, it was simply everything I had envisioned it might be. As a physical object, I think that the book is freaking gorgeous.

twi-ny: Your longtime colleague, Dennis Ambrose, who works for you, served as the production editor on your book. Did that make the process easier or more difficult, being so close to it, as opposed to it being handled by a different publishing company?

bd: Once we established departmentally that a lot of things I do for all our books as managing editor and copy chief I obviously couldn’t do for my own book, it was mighty smooth sailing. Dennis is an absolute pro and managed it all beautifully, and between the two of us we kept me in my lane. Of course it was easy to relax and know I was being taken proper care of because I’ve worked with Dennis for decades watching him take care of the likes of Edmund Morris and Jon Meacham, among others. He knows what he’s doing. And though indeed it’s a bit peculiar to be published by your own house, I wouldn’t have had it any other way. I’ve gotten a lot of love, from all departments, and I’m deeply grateful for it.

twi-ny: Was there a specific item that you really wanted in the book but either your editor editor, the production editor, or the copy editor convinced you otherwise?

bd: Everything’s basically as I set out to write it, and I never felt strong-armed to cut anything (or to add anything, for that matter). Maybe my agent and editors encouraged me to trim some of the book’s voluminous lists, and they were usually right, though every now and then my response to “Can we cut this?” was “Nah,” and there was no brawling about it. Though in typeset pages I did cut some things that even I was bored reading, and I’m glad I did.

twi-ny: In the book, you point out numerous cases in which you don’t follow such publishing bibles as the Chicago Manual of Style, Merriam-Webster 11, and Words into Type. You also noted in a 2012 Random House video that your department does not have a house style. As the copy chief, do you have one favorite choice that goes against generally accepted book publishing style?

bd: We really truly really truly don’t have a house style — except for the silent, don’t-query-it-just-do-it mandating of what some people call the Oxford comma, some people call the serial comma, and I call the series comma. And that doesn’t come from me; that was in place when I arrived at Random House. And that’s scarcely unusual: Almost everyone in book publishing favors that comma, even as many/most journalist types detest it. Maybe once a year, if that, an author objects post-copyediting to the comma, and you just grit your teeth and defer. But otherwise — and again, this is good copyediting practice as it was taught to me — every book gets the copyedit it specifically and uniquely needs, in support of what the author is attempting to do, not in support of what the copy editor or the house thinks is Good Writing. The thing I’m pleased to say about Random House books is that you can never tell by the copyediting that they’re Random House books — except that they’re well copyedited. To perhaps slightly misuse cardplaying terminology: We don’t have any house tells.

twi-ny: The book teaches the reader about grammar, punctuation, spelling, and style, and you often boldly, and with humor, defend your preferences. However, in the acknowledgments, you thank the copy editor for “calling out my worst habits.” Can you share one or two of them here?

bd: Aside from the aforementioned habit of overstuffing the middles of sentences so that on occasion by the time you get to the end of a sentence you can’t recall the beginning, I also violently overuse parentheses. And OK, their overuse reflects the way my brain works — constant digressions and by-the-ways — but after a while, enough is enough. All my editors encouraged me to take things out of parentheses; similarly, there’s a lot of stuff I’d initially relegated to the book’s ocean of footnotes that got moved up into the main text.

twi-ny: In the late 1990s, Random House had an in-house chat room called the Water Cooler on the company intranet, and, in retrospect, it was like an early iteration of social media, complete with controversies over language and political correctness. Since the forum was in a publishing house, the posts tended to be fairly well written, but in today’s world, grammar, punctuation, and style have taken quite a hit on social media. You are an avid user of Facebook and especially Twitter; what are your thoughts on social media’s impact on written language?

bd: Facebook is . . . well, it is what it is, to use a phrase that as a copy editor I’d throttle a writer for using. But I find the language of Twitter — and truly, it speaks its own language — endlessly amusing, and when I’m there I like to speak it. Questions without question marks (or, often, any terminal punctuation at all) make me chuckle, ditto all-cap shouting to express manic enthusiasm or mock alarm. To be quite honest — or, if you prefer, TBQH — as I worked on the book, and for a long time I couldn’t quite figure out what my writerly voice was supposed to sound like, I eventually realized that the voice I was cultivating on Twitter in my self-appointed role as Your Pal the Copy Chief was precisely the voice I wanted to bring to the page: succinct (ish), joshing in the service of making valid points, and mocking my own sense of seriousness, all in an attempt to, simply, try to get people to listen to what I was trying to say, and perhaps to appreciate it and learn something from it without their feeling they were being nagged or hectored.

Ben Dreyer and his husband, Robert, pose with their pooch, Sallie

twi-ny: With that in mind, you also aren’t shy about including your thoughts about our current spelling-challenged, Twitter-happy president in many examples in the book. Are you afraid that such references will date the book or anger readers who lean more to the right than you do?

bd: I think that there are so many things to despise about the current administration — everything, now that I think of it — and its degradation of the English language is, I suppose, scarcely the worst of it, but of course the English language is what I do for a living, and I take personally his (you know, that person whose name I’d just as soon not type) subliteracy and, worse, the endless lying and base distortion of the very meanings of words to suit his poisonous agenda. He has dishonored everything I hold dear as an American and as a human being, and I see no reason to dissemble to avoid angering his cult. Perhaps if we all live long enough and I’m given the opportunity a few years down the pike to revise the book for a second edition I’ll change things up a bit, but for the moment, here in the winter of 2019, I’m quite happy with what the book says, and about whom.

twi-ny: You’re a theater aficionado, and the book is filled with theatrical references, particularly regarding musicals. What have you seen lately that you’ve loved or hated?

bd: I saw Kenneth Lonergan’s The Waverly Gallery a few months ago and was riveted. For one thing, it’s a first-rate script, as one expects from Lonergan, and as a person of a certain age whose parents are of a certain age plus a few decades, I found it harrowing, and I like theater that’s harrowing. For another thing, Elaine May gave a titanically good performance. She’s so good at portraying a woman who’s losing her mental moorings that in the opening scene I found myself anxious for her as an actress; soon enough, to be sure, you realize that she’s doing what she’s supposed to be doing: She’s acting. (I was told afterward by people who were highly familiar with the play that she’s line-perfect down to the very commas.) Looking forward, I’m pleased that Lincoln Center Theater is about to mount a new John Guare play. I think that his Six Degrees of Separation is one of the greatest plays of my lifetime, and I’m always keen to see what he has on his mind.

twi-ny: The other night I saw a show called Say Something Bunny!, the title of which desperately needed a comma, especially since the script, which was given out to everyone as part of the show, has a comma when those words appear in dialogue. What theatrical grammatical error makes you the most crotchety?

bd: Everyone likes to make fun of Alan Jay Lerner’s inability to distinguish between “hanged” and “hung” in My Fair Lady, so let’s not do that one again. OK, the other day I was listening to the original cast recording of Hairspray — and of course we all know never to refer to theatrical cast recordings as soundtracks, right? — and as happens every time I listen to “Mama, I’m a Big Girl Now” (did I just google it to make sure that it’s not “Momma”? yes I certainly did), when Tracy sings that she “could barely walk and talk so much as dance and sing,” I mutter “No, not ‘so much as’; it’s ‘let alone.’” I mutter a lot. As my husband says — lovingly, I’m reasonably certain — “It must hurt sometimes to live in your brain.” Well, yeah.

twi-ny: At your book launch on January 31, you will be in conversation with one of Random House’s most successful authors, Peter Straub. How did that come about? What are your thoughts on his writing?

bd: When Ghost Story was published in 1979, I remember reading the review in the New York Times Book Review and literally — and by literally, I mean literally — running to my local bookstore to get a copy. And I think that it’s one of the great horror novels of our time. Cut to the mid-1990s, and I’m Peter’s production editor at Random House, first on The Hellfire Club, then on four subsequent books, including Black House, his second collaboration, after The Talisman, with Stephen King. And he’s simply the loveliest man, and a delight to work with and for, and very sharp and funny, so when I was asked with whom I’d like to be In Conversation, he immediately leapt to my mind. And he graciously agreed to support me for the evening. I’m looking forward to it hugely; I haven’t seen Peter in a few years, so it’ll be lovely. And I’m rereading Ghost Story right now, and good Lord I’d forgotten how scary it is.

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.

MY FAIR LADY

Lauren Ambrose excels in iconic role of Eliza Doolittle in Lincoln Center revival of My Fair Lady (photo by Joan Marcus)

Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center Theater
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday – Saturday through January 6, $97-$199
212-362-7600
www.lct.org

Revivals don’t get much better than Bartlett Sher’s absolutely loverly version of My Fair Lady at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater. Sher, who previously helmed widely acclaimed productions of South Pacific and The King and I at Lincoln Center, has created an inspiring My Fair Lady for the twenty-first century, honoring the original while bringing the female-empowerment aspect of the story to the fore. The musical adaptation of (George) Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, itself inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses, had thwarted Rodgers and Hammerstein as well as Frank Loesser, Irving Berlin, and Cole Porter until Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe reunited after a brief separation and took on the tale. Outside the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden in 1912, Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle (Lauren Ambrose) is selling violets. Dirty and shabbily dressed, she is nearly knocked over by the fashionable Freddy Eynsford-Hill (Jordan Donica), and her flood of Cockney outrage earns her a harangue from Professor Henry Higgins (Harry Hadden-Paton), a linguistics expert who is so offended by the way she talks that he declares, “A woman who utters such depressing and disgusting sounds has no right to be anywhere — no right to live. . . . Your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and the Bible; don’t sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon.” The next day, Eliza arrives at Higgins’s fancy Wimpole St. home, demanding vocal lessons to make her “more genteel.” Higgins, who has been joined by Col. Pickering (Allan Corduner), treats Eliza harshly, referring to her as “baggage,” but when Pickering offers to pay for her lessons as part of a bet that Higgins can turn her into a lady in time for the Embassy Ball in six months, the professor agrees to take her on. “She’s so deliciously low — so horribly dirty!” Higgins proclaims right in front of her. “I’ll make a duchess of this draggle-tailed guttersnipe!”

Professor Henry Higgins (Harry Hadden-Paton) and Col. Pickering (Allan Corduner) celebrate with Eliza Doolittle (Lauren Ambrose) in My Fair Lady at the Vivian Beaumont (photo by Joan Marcus)

It seems like an impossible task for Higgins, a misogynist of the first order. “I’m an ordinary man; / who desires nothing more / than just the ordinary chance / to live exactly as he likes / and do precisely what he wants,” he sings. “But let a woman in your life / and you are plunging in a knife! / Let the others of my sex / tie the knot — around their necks; / I’d prefer a new edition / of the Spanish Inquisition / than to ever let a woman in my life!” Before she is making any real progress, her drunkard of a father, Alfred P. Doolittle (Norbert Leo Butz), shows up at Higgins’s home, asking for money in exchange for Eliza, assuming there is something more than just speech lessons going on. “Have you no morals, man?” Pickering asks. “No, I can’t afford ’em, Governor. Neither could you if you was as poor as me,” Doolittle replies. They eventually come to an agreement, and Higgins gets back to work preparing Eliza for proper society. From the horse races at Ascot to the Embassy Ball and beyond, the relationship between Eliza and Henry further develops, taking both of them by surprise, especially the professor, who loses control over his creation. Meanwhile, Freddy begins courting Eliza, Alfred wants more money, and Higgins’s elegant mother (Diana Rigg) finds the whole thing rather funny.

Diana Rigg has earned her fourth Tony nomination (winning one) for playing Mrs. Higgins in Bartlett Sher’s outstanding production (photo by Joan Marcus)

My Fair Lady has featured such Eliza/Henry pairings as Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison (the 1956 Broadway original, directed by Moss Hart), Audrey Hepburn and Harrison (the 1964 film, which won eight Oscars), Christine Andreas and Ian Richardson (1978), Melissa Errico and Richard Chamberlain (1993), Martine McCutcheon and Jonathan Pryce (2001), and Errico and John Lithgow (2003), the difference in age between the man and the woman generally being twenty-five years or more. However, Ambrose (Six Feet Under, Exit the King) is actually three years older than Hadden-Paton (The Importance of Being Earnest, Downton Abbey), so Sher has them on more equal footing from the very start. Ambrose plays Eliza as a strong-willed, self-protective, astute woman who is determined to better herself, but on her own terms. Meanwhile, Hadden-Paton’s Henry has cracks in his armor that show up early, particularly as Eliza gains pride and power, right up through the gripping finale. Corduner is superb as the eminently likable Pickering (Titanic, Taken at Midnight), while Tony and Emmy winner Rigg (Medea, The Avengers) nearly steals the show as Mrs. Higgins, looking ever-so-chic in Catherine Zuber’s elaborate gowns and Tom Watson’s sophisticated coiffures. (How often does an actress who doesn’t sing a word get nominated for a Tony in a musical?)

Tony-winning choreographer Christopher Gattelli and Tony-winning music director Ted Sperling, who both collaborated on Sher’s South Pacific and The King and I, do fabulous jobs here too, particularly in the “Ascot Gavotte” and “Embassy Waltz” scenes but also during wonderful interpretations of “With a Little Bit of Luck,” “You Did It,” “Get Me to the Church on Time,” and “The Rain in Spain.” Michael Yeargan’s dramatic sets further the class division prevalent in 1912 London as well as today. Higgins’s ornate yet refined home slides toward the audience from backstage, revolving from the elegant study to the front hall to the bath and other rooms. When Wimpole St. recedes backstage, the ensemble wheels in rickety DIY-style fences, light poles, and storefront facades. In 1908, Oscar Straus adapted Shaw’s Arms and the Man into The Chocolate Soldier; in 1939, when Shaw was asked about letting Kurt Weill adapt The Devil’s Disciple, he responded, “Nothing will ever induce me to allow any other play of mine to be degraded into an operetta or set to any music except its own.” Shaw died in 1950 at the age of ninety-four; My Fair Lady, with book and lyrics by Lerner and music by Loewe, premiered six years later. We’ll never know what Shaw would have thought of it, but the rest of us can now delight in Sher’s magical 2018 production, which is a smashing success, a classic musical with a fresh, bright take on class and gender issues that is just right for these crazy times.

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.

JUNK

Ayad Akhtar and Doug Hughes shine a light on debt financing, leverage, disclosure violations, and the death of American manufacturing in Junk at Lincoln Center (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center Theater
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday – Saturday through January 7, $87-$147
212-362-7600
www.lct.org

Just because I graduated from Wharton in the 1980s doesn’t mean I understand every intricacy in Ayad Akhtar’s complexly layered Junk, his sizzling-hot excoriation of greed and hostile takeovers, set in 1985. But Akhtar makes the key elements easy to follow, even for me, as a group of men fight it out for control of an Allegheny steel mill — but the last thing on their mind is actually steel, because in this world, it’s money that matters. Akhtar — who won the Pulitzer Prize for Disgraced, a sharp play about race, assimilation, ambition, and bigotry, and whose 2014 drama, The Invisible Hand, put capitalism and religion on trial in Pakistan — refers to Junk as “a ritual enactment of an origin myth,” in this case that of debt financing at the expense of American manufacturing. “When did money become the thing — the only thing?” journalist Judy Chen (Teresa Avia Lim) asks at the beginning. “It was like a new religion was being born.” It might not sound like a sexy topic, but it’s a scorcher in the hands of Tony-winning director Doug Hughes (The Father, Incognito), who orchestrates all the back-room dealings on John Lee Beatty’s dazzling multilevel set, strikingly lit by Ben Stanton. Sacker-Lowell junk bond trader Robert Merkin (Steven Pasquale) is the mastermind behind a hostile takeover of Everson Steel and United, a family-owned business on the Dow. Merkin, who believes that “debt is an asset,” and Sacker-Lowell lawyer Raül Rivera (Matthew Saldivar), who claims that “nothing makes money like money,” are working with corporate raider Israel Peterman (Matthew Rauch) to gain control of Everson Steel, owned by Thomas Everson Jr. (Rick Holmes), who desperately wants to hold on to the Allegheny-based firm founded by his father. Merkin turns to his wife, numbers whiz Amy (Miriam Silverman), for advice while luring in arbitrageur Boris Pronsky (Joey Slotnick) and investor Murray Lefkowitz (Ethan Phillips) to raise the necessary funds and manipulate the market. When old-time private equity magnate Leo Tresler (Michael Siberry) gets wind of Merkin’s plan, he decides to throw his hat in the ring as well. Meanwhile, US attorney Giuseppe Addesso (Charlie Semine) and assistant US attorney Kevin Walsh (Philip James Brannon) are operating behind the scenes, building a case against Merkin and others.

Corporate raider Israel Peterman (Matthew Rauch) colludes with junk bond trader Robert Merkin (Steven Pasquale) in Broadway financial thriller (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

When Akhtar moved to New York City shortly after graduating from Brown, his father offered to pay his rent if he read the Wall Street Journal every day. He immersed himself in newspapers and magazines about business and came to believe that the players in this world were “not moral or immoral but amoral,” he tells co-executive editor John Guare in Lincoln Center Theater Review. In many ways Junk is like a Shakespearean history play about war, complete with lies, betrayal, spies, sex, and blood, where words and actions can be twisted to mean something else. Of course, Akhtar is not exactly the first person to write about how money became a kind of religion, with profit more important than product and people, humanity be damned, but he does so with a graceful style that turns clichés inside out while choosing no real heroes or villains. No one is safe from his skewer, but each man and woman gets to state his or her case free from editorial judgment. That doesn’t mean everyone is equal, that the audience can’t separate good from evil, or that viewers can’t feel sympathy for some characters and disdain for others. Akhtar reveals a socioeconomic level many of us will never be a part of, and most likely wouldn’t want to — although more than a few in the well-heeled Lincoln Center audience at the show we attended rustled uncomfortably in their seats. Talking about Merkin, Tresler tells Chen, “He’s a pawnbroker. And he’s got America in hock,” to which she replies, “Or he’s the new J. P. Morgan.” In many ways Akhtar has created an extremely extended dysfunctional family, with surrogate children, cousins, parents, and grandparents fighting over money, power, and values. “I don’t want to make you mad,” Lefkowitz tells Merkin, as if he doesn’t want to disappoint Daddy. Featuring a strong cast of twenty-three led by fine turns by Pasquale (The Bridges of Madison County, Rescue Me), Siberry (An Enemy of the People, Six Degrees of Separation), Phillips (My Favorite Year, Benson), Slotnick (Dying for It, Boston Public), and Holmes (The Visit, Matilda), Junk might be set thirty-two years ago, but it’s not out-of-date in the least, as income inequality grows around the world, President Trump has just signed a controversial overhaul of the US tax system, and cryptocurrency complicates the market and confuses the masses.

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.