Tag Archives: Manhattan Theatre Club

AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE

Richard Thomas and Boyd Gaines star as brothers at odds in Broadway revival of Ibsen’s AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE (photo by Joan Marcus)

Manhattan Theatre Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West 47th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 11, $67-$120
www.anenemyofthepeoplebroadway.com

When Dr. Thomas Stockmann (four-time Tony winner Boyd Gaines) discovers that the water in the baths of his spa town is dangerously contaminated, he thinks he will be celebrated as a hero, a supreme protector of the public health. But he is shocked when his brother, Peter (Emmy winner Richard Thomas), the mayor, decides to cover up the findings, more interested in ensuring the future financial success of the small Norwegian coastal town than in saving lives, setting off an all-too-familiar battle between the government and the individual, the public welfare versus corporate greed, the rich against the poor, and the role of the media in the controversy. Written in 1882 by Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People is now running at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre in a streamlined, hackneyed adaptation by British playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz (The Night Season) that attempts to be relevant to modern-day concerns but instead, after a somewhat promising first act, falls flat on its clichéd bottom. Gaines is strong as the determined yet conceited doctor, refusing to believe that the truth will get buried, but Thomas is far too weaselly as the mayor, strutting about like Snidely Whiplash in his top hat, cape, and cane. Doug Hughes’s flaccid direction turns the proceedings into a ridiculous series of overblown, pedantic scenes that culminates in a cringe-inducing town meeting in which everyone piles on the good doctor.

Following 1878’s A Doll’s House and 1881’s Ghosts, Ibsen continued his scathing indictment of various aspects of contemporary society in An Enemy of the People, but it is not one of his better plays, as evidenced by how infrequently it turns up in major productions onstage and onscreen; in 1950, Arthur Miller’s adaptation ran on Broadway with Fredric March and Morris Carnovsky, and a little-seen 1978 film starred Steve McQueen and Charles Durning. This 2012 version also features Kathleen McNenny as the doctor’s wife, Catherine; Maïté Alina as their idealistic daughter, Petra; John Procaccino as newspaper publisher Hovstad; and Gerry Bamman as Aslaksen the printer, whose constant calls for “restraint” grow as tiresome as the production’s overwrought political statements. Lenkiewicz’s An Enemy of the People can’t decide whether it’s an ironic black comedy or a serious treatise on power and corruption, winding up as neither.

THE COLUMNIST

The Alsop brothers (John Lithgow and Boyd Gaines) toast to happier times in THE COLUMNIST (photo by Joan Marcus)

Manhattan Theatre Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West 47th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Through June 24, $67-$121
thecolumnistbroadway.com

Based on the real life of American journalist Joseph Alsop, David Auburn’s The Columnist is a rather sterile exercise in twentieth-century historical fiction. Multitalented Tony and Emmy winner and Oscar nominee John Lithgow, a Rochester-born Harvard grad who in recent years has played a serial killer on Dexter, published a series of popular children’s books, and penned his autobiography (An Actor’s Education), gives a wonderful performance as the erudite Alsop, an acerbic columnist who believes he is more powerful than the president. A staunch conservative, he is surprisingly delighted with JFK’s victory, celebrating with his wife, Mary (Margaret Colin), stepdaughter, Abigail (Grace Gummer), and brother and sometime writing partner, Stewart (Boyd Gaines), convinced that the new president will show up at his house on the night of the inauguration. But Alsop’s power and influence begin to wane as he very publicly pushes for greater U.S. involvement in Vietnam, directly challenged by such up-and-coming journalists as David Halberstam (Stephen Kunken), while Stewart tries to protect his brother from a potential scandal surrounding a sexual fling Joe had with a young Russian man (Brian J. Smith) several years before, depicted in a very strong scene that opens the play. Auburn, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2000 play, Proof, never quite gets below the surface in The Columnist, resulting in a series of predictable, clichéd moments that feel stale and unnecessary, particularly when delving into the Vietnam war, something in interviews he claimed to know very little about, which shows. He does somewhat better handling the practical marriage between Alsop, a closeted homosexual, and Mary, a respected DC party hostess, although he changes several important facts about their relationship, including its length, and turns Mary’s two daughters into one. Directed by Shakespeare veteran Daniel Sullivan, The Columnist, despite a terrific lede and a Tony-nominated lead actor, is still in need of significant editing.

VENUS IN FUR

Nina Arianda and Hugh Dancy are electrifying in David Ives’s VENUS IN FUR (photo by Joan Marcus)

Lyceum Theatre
149 West 45ht St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Through June 17, $76.50- $141.50
www.venusinfurbroadway.com

“Shiny, shiny, shiny boots of leather / Whiplash girlchild in the dark / Severin, your servant, comes in bells, please don’t forsake him / Strike, dear mistress, and cure his heart,” Lou Reed sang on the Velvet Underground’s 1967 S&M classic, “Venus in Furs.” The song was inspired by the 1870 novella of the same name by Austrian writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, which also serves as the basis for David Ives’s wickedly funny play, Venus in Fur. Following its recent run at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, the sizzling-hot two-character Manhattan Theatre Club production is back on Broadway, thrilling audiences at the Lyceum through June 17. In a small New York basement studio, Thomas (British actor Hugh Dancy) has just finished auditioning actors for his next play, Venus in Fur, when Vanda (breakout star Nina Arianda) suddenly storms into his life, a whirlwind of crazy energy who has come to try out for the role of Wanda von Dunajew in Thomas’s theatrical adaptation of Sacher-Masoch’s story-within-a-story about gender, sexuality, and degradation. Thomas tries to get rid of Vanda, but the two of them are soon reading the play, with Ives cleverly creating a developing story-within-a-story of his own as Thomas and Vanda start mimicking what is going on between Wanda and Severin von Kusiemski. What begins as a classic battle of the sexes turns into so much more as they seductively fight over power and dominance. Tony nominee Arianda (Born Yesterday) is a marvel as Vanda, effortlessly going back and forth between the nasal-voiced wacky ingénue and the strong, defiant characters she is portraying. Dancy, in a role originally performed by Wes Bentley in the show’s January 2010 Classic Stage Company debut, does an excellent job of keeping up with Arianda’s boundless energy as he plays both Thomas and the subservient Severin. Anita Yavich’s costumes are sensational, with Vanda continually reaching into her bag of tricks, pulling out erotically charged items, including to-die-for thigh-high leather boots. With Vanda and Thomas continually fighting over where to stand as they read the play-within-a-play, it is easy to forget that the show is actually directed by Walter Bobbie (Chicago, Footloose), who seamlessly weaves everything together. Venus in Fur is a breathless, electrifying drama that should not be forsaken; you’d have to be a masochist not to see it.

AFTER WORDS: A CONVERSATION WITH CYNTHIA NIXON

Cynthia Nixon will discuss WIT at the Greene Space on February 16 (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Greene Space
44 Charlton St. at Varick St.
Thursday, February 16, $20 ($15 with code GREENE), 5:00
www.thegreenespace.org
www.witonbroadway.com

After we recently saw Wit, Margaret Edson’s marvelous Pulitzer Prize–winning play that is making its Broadway debut at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, we wrote that “Cynthia Nixon is magnificent as Vivian Bearing; for all her eccentricities, Bearing should not be a sympathetic character, but Nixon turns the lonely, snarky woman, who has no real friends or family, into a delightful character who is not afraid to look death in the face.” The play deals with Bearing’s battle with stage IV metastatic ovarian cancer with both humor and seriousness. Following that matinee, cast members Greg Keller, Carra Patterson, and Jessica Dickey participated in a talk back with the audience, shedding illuminating light on the production’s creative process. On Thursday at 5:00, Keller (Dr. Jason Posner) and Patterson (nurse Susie Monahan) will join Tony and Emmy winner Nixon, herself a breast cancer survivor, for a special presentation at the Greene Space, going behind the scenes in a conversation moderated by WNYC’s Amy Eddings as part of the Manhattan Theatre Club’s “After Words” series. Tickets are $20, but if you use the code “GREENE,” they’re only $15.

WIT

Cynthia Nixon gives a remarkably uplifting performance as a terminal cancer patient in Broadway premiere of WIT (photo by Joan Marcus)

Manhattan Theatre Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West 47th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Through March 11, $57-$121
witonbroadway.com

It might at first seem odd that a play about a stern forty-eight-year-old teacher obsessed with the Holy Sonnets of John Donne and dying of stage IV metastatic ovarian cancer is called Wit. But as it turns out, kindergarten teacher Margaret Edson’s only play, which was written in 1991, was first performed in 1995, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999, and is now making its Broadway debut in a marvelous Manhattan Theatre Club production at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, is extremely funny, as well as being emotionally involving and exceedingly intelligent. Tony and Emmy winner Cynthia Nixon beautifully embodies Dr. Vivian Bearing, an English professor who has agreed to participate in an experimental cancer program at a university teaching hospital. The gaunt woman, wearing a hospital gown, a red baseball cap, and white socks, begins the play by directly addressing the audience, explaining that she is in fact a character in a play in which people should not necessarily expect a happy ending. For the next one hundred minutes, Bearing goes through several medical examinations — which harken back to tests she gave her classes — regularly interrupting the action to talk to the audience, mixing an appealing irony and sarcasm into her very serious condition, which she describes as “insidious cancer with pernicious side effects.” Bearing is a fascinating, complex character, whether debating the punctuation of Donne’s “Death Be Not Proud” (“And Death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die”) with her mentor, professor E. M. Ashford (Suzanne Bertish), discussing her options with nurse Susie Monahan (Cara Patterson), or dealing with young clinical fellow Dr. Jason Posner (Greg Keller), who has a lot to learn about bedside manner. Nixon is magnificent as Bearing, a role previously played onstage by Kathleen Chalfant and in an HBO movie by Emma Thompson; for all her eccentricities, Bearing should not be a sympathetic character, but Nixon turns the lonely, snarky woman, who has no real friends or family, into a delightful character who is not afraid to look death in the face. MTC artistic director Lynne Meadow guides the production with a steady, at times gleeful hand, with scenes cleverly changing via a revolving wall in the center of the stage. Nixon and Meadow, who are both breast cancer survivors, do a wonderful job of not allowing any overwrought melodrama to seep into Edson’s carefully composed, tightly constructed play, resulting in a mesmerizing exploration and even celebration of life, death, poetry, and the theater itself.

CLOSE UP SPACE

David Hyde Pierce plays a stodgy senior editor in CLOSE UP SPACE (photo by Joan Marcus)

Manhattan Theatre Club
New York City Center Stage 1
Through January 29, $80
www.closeupspacetheplay.com

As Close Up Space begins, senior editor Paul Barrow (David Hyde Pierce) is taking a red marker to letters he received telling him that his troublesome daughter is being expelled from school. Unfortunately, someone should have taken a red pencil to Molly Smith Metzler’s mess of a script. The Manhattan Theatre Club production, running at City Center’s lovely Stage I space, centers on Barrow, an old-fashioned editor more concerned with The Chicago Manual of Style than Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Raising Children in a Difficult Time. Following his wife’s tragic death several years earlier, Barrow has isolated himself from friends and relatives, immersing himself in his work instead of trying to fix his fractured relationship with his teenage daughter, Harper (Colby Minifie). He’d rather spend his time battling with his star author, the demanding, tough-talking Vanessa Finn Adams (Rosie Perez), than dealing with Harper, who suddenly shows up one day speaking only Russian, which unnerves intern Bailey (Jesssica DiGiovanni) while energizing office manager Steve (Michael Chernus), who has been sleeping in a tent at Tandem Books because of a breakup with his beloved pit bull. Barrow might know how to fix fiction, but he’s at a loss when it comes to repairing real life. Hyde Pierce does an admirable job trying to keep the ship steady with the support of director Leigh Silverman (Chinglish, Well), but even the Tony-winning actor (Curtains) seems dismayed by the cringe-inducing ending. Metzler (Elemeno Pea, Training Wisteria, Carve) tries to fill the eighty-five-minute show with absurdist comedy, but the Bailey character is superfluous (as Barrow would say, “Delete, close up space”) and Steve, though likable in general, is way too over the top (“Au — perhaps tone down?”). And though it’s fun to hear Perez (Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune) spout Shakespeare (“Au/Ed — relevance?”) and discuss fiddlehead ferns, her character often feels forced (“Au — necessary? cliché ok?”). Todd Rosenthal’s scenic design appropriately evokes an old publishing house holding on to the past in this modern age, but the rest of Close Up Space is in desperate need of a major revision.