Tag Archives: Manhattan Theatre Club

SKELETON CREW

Dominique Morisseau’s Skeleton Crew takes place in an auto stamping plant on the brink in 2008 (photo by Matthew Murphy)

SKELETON CREW
Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West Forty-Seventh St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through February 20, $59-$159 ($49-$99 with code FAFCREW)
www.manhattantheatreclub.com

When the audience enters MTC’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre for the Broadway premiere of Dominique Morisseau’s Skeleton Crew, a sizzling tale of socioeconomic ills in 2008 Detroit, they see Michael Carnahan’s set, the dingy, dirty breakroom of an auto stamping plant, filled with handwritten and preprinted signs detailing various rules and regulations, advising employees that there is no smoking, when the next union meeting is, what their OSHA rights are, what they can and can’t do with the refrigerator, coffeemaker, and microwave. However, there are also multiple reminders, on paper and yellow caution floor signs, to wear a mask and turn off cellphones; those warnings are for the audience in 2022, of course, but the effect is an immediate feeling of equality between the performers and the characters they portray. We are them, and they are us, especially as we all continue to deal with a global pandemic.

The cast then heads onstage and removes all the contemporary signs with a resolute vigilance that, we soon find out, applies to the company admonitions that still remain. “I don’t abide by no rules but necessity. I do what I do til’ I figure out another thing and do that. And that’s all I got to say about it,” Faye (Phylicia Rashad) declares.

Rumors are swirling that the plant might be on the chopping block, which would wreak havoc in a city that we know is about to pay dearly during the coming subprime mortgage crisis. Faye, a divorced single mother, is the union leader with twenty-nine years on the job, intent on making it to thirty to receive more substantial retirement benefits. Despite having survived breast cancer, she smokes constantly; she also has a penchant for gambling with her much younger colleagues: Dez (Joshua Boone), a loose cannon hoping to start his own repair garage, and Shanita (Chanté Adams), a pregnant woman who is one of the line’s best workers. Both in their mid-to-late twenties, Dez ceaselessly flirts with Shanita, whose baby daddy is absent.

Their foreman, Reggie (Brandon J. Dirden), a close family friend of Faye’s since he was a child, used to be one of them before being promoted. He often finds himself in the middle, caught between the employees and his bosses upstairs, walking a tightrope that becomes even more tenuous when he admits to Faye that the plant will indeed be shutting down within a year.

Reggie (Brandon J. Dirden) and Faye (Phylicia Rashad) face a crisis in Broadway premiere of Skeleton Crew (photo by Matthew Murphy)

He tries to convince her to stay quiet about it, which she is hesitant to do. “It’s my job to protect these folks,” Faye says. Reggie responds, “Faye, I’m confiding in you. I’m putting myself on the line for you cuz I’m on your side. But I need you on mine. I need your guidance. Help me figure this out without sounding the alarm.” She agrees but feels guilty keeping the news from Dez and Shanita, who have their own issues with management.

“You youngins don’t have no respect for the blood been spilled so yo’ ass have some benefits,” Faye says to Dez, who she regularly calls “stupid.” Dez shoots back, “What benefits? I don’t hardly see no benefits.”

When materials start disappearing from the plant, Dez, who brings a gun to work and has been acting suspiciously, is a prime suspect. Meanwhile, Faye has hit some hard times and hides a secret from her colleagues. And Shanita shares her complex dreams with the others and plans on working as long as she can, piling on the overtime, before she gives birth. The tension is so thick that something has to eventually give, and when it does, everybody better stand back.

Skeleton Crew premiered at the Atlantic’s Stage 2 in January 2016, then moved to the bigger Linda Gross Theater in May of that year. It’s the first play of Morisseau’s to be produced on Broadway; she also wrote the book for Ain’t Too Proud to Beg: The Life and Times of the Temptations. The play completes her Detroit Projects trilogy, three works set in her hometown in the twentieth century, beginning with 2013’s Detroit ’67 and continuing with 2015’s Paradise Blue. Seen as a whole, the plays explore the Black experience in America in a way that evokes both August Wilson and Lynn Nottage; specific plays that immediately come to mind are Wilson’s Jitney and Nottage’s Sweat and Clyde’s as well as Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s recent Cullud Wattah, about the Flint water crisis.

Director Ruben Santiago-Hudson shows a firm confidence in Morisseau’s language and themes; he previously directed the world premiere of Paradise Blue at the Signature. He also was a close friend of Wilson’s and starred in and/or directed many of his plays, including Jitney and The Piano Lesson, both of which featured Dirden. In addition, Santiago-Hudson knows the Samuel J. Friedman well; his one-man show, Lackawanna Blues, was the previous production at the theater, completing its run in November.

Adesola Osakalumi dances between scenes in Dominique Morisseau’s Skeleton Crew (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Morisseau (Pipeline, Blood Rot) masterfully avoids any specific discussion about race, instead letting the story play out with that subtext hovering over everything like an ominous cloud. The audience knows that Detroit has had a history of race riots — from 1833 and 1849 to 1943 and 1967 — and in 2007-8, nearly twenty thousand Black men and women lost their jobs in car factories. “African Americans earn much higher wages in auto industry jobs than in other parts of the economy, and the loss of these solid, middle-class jobs would be a devastating blow,” the Economic Policy Institute reported at the time.

Tony winner and six-time Emmy nominee Rashad (A Raisin in the Sun, August: Osage County), who has directed three Wilson plays, is a powerhouse as Faye, a tired but strong-willed woman who is determined to not let a system she’s been fighting against her entire life beat her down. Rashad delivers her quips with an uncanny assuredness, her eyes revealing the wear and tear of years of battle, both personal and professional. Boone (Actually, All the Natalie Portmans) is a fireball as Dez, ready to explode at any moment but with a soft side underneath. Adams (Roxanne, Roxanne, Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, directed by Santiago-Hudson) is charming as Shanita, who is wise beyond her years. And Dirden, who played Sly in the original New York production of Detroit ’67, gives a rousing performance as Reggie, a kindhearted man who has to make hard decisions that rip him up inside.

In between scenes, choreographer Adesola Osakalumi (Cullud Wattah, Fela!) dances at the front of the stage or behind the breakroom windows, moving robotically to hip-hop music that mimics the motion of the machines in the plant, which are seen almost abstractly in projections by Nicholas Hussong lit by Rui Rita. (The sound and music is by Robert Klapowitz, with original songs by J. Keys.) It equates humans with automation, as if people are interchangeable with machines. It might not be a new idea, but it is beautifully laid bare in Morisseau’s searing, intimate drama.

(MTC is currently hosting Detroit Week on Broadway, beginning February 4 at 8:00 with “Detroit Comes to Broadway,” celebrating the people and culture of the Motor City. On February 6 at 5:00, Morisseau, Dr. Michael Eric Dyson, and Michael Dinwiddie will take part in the free virtual discussion “Black Theatre: Radical Longevity.” And on February 7 at 6:00, “Morisseau Moment” fêtes the playwright with proclamations and presentations from her three latest shows, Skeleton Crew, Ain’t Too Proud to Beg, and Confederates, livestreaming from the Harlem School of the Arts.)

PRAYER FOR THE FRENCH REPUBLIC

A Jewish family in Paris faces anti-Semitism in Joshua Harmon epic (photo by Matthew Murphy)

PRAYER FOR THE FRENCH REPUBLIC
Manhattan Theatre Club
MTC at New York City Center – Stage I
131 West 55th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 27, $99
212-581-1212
www.manhattantheatreclub.com

“Why do they hate us?” a Jewish character asks near the end of Joshua Harmon’s extraordinary Prayer for the French Republic, which opened tonight at MTC at New York City Center – Stage I for a limited run (now extended through March 27). The playwright’s characters answer the question without being preachy or, perhaps even more important, preaching to the choir. In this three-hour multigenerational time-traveling epic, Harmon explores the centuries-old scourge of anti-Semitism with exquisite skill through the experiences of one family.

The play goes back and forth between 1944–46 and 2016–17, narrated by Patrick Salomon (Richard Topol), part of a long line of Salomons who have been in France for more than a thousand years. In his fifties, Patrick is part stage manager from Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, part Woody Allen from Annie Hall, watching and interacting with characters from the past and present.

In 2016, Molly (Molly Ranson), a twenty-year-old college student from America, has come to visit her distant cousins in Paris while studying abroad in Nantes. She arrives on a day when Daniel Benhamou (Yair Ben-Dor), the twenty-six-year-old son, comes home beaten and bloodied after an anti-Semitic attack. His mother, Marcelle Salomon Benhamou (Betsy Aidem), wants to call the police and take Daniel to the hospital, but he refuses. His father, Charles Benhamou (Jeff Seymour) — both parents are successful doctors — is calmer, carefully checking his son’s injuries.

Elodie (Francis Benhamou), Daniel’s brilliant manic-depressive older sister, is incensed that Marcelle blames Daniel’s thrashing on his unwillingness to cover his yarmulke. Elodie doesn’t think Jews should have to hide who they are, while Marcelle is more fearful of the consequences. “You put a huge target on your back!” Marcelle shouts. “Oh, so Daniel’s asking for it now? Is that seriously your argument? He’s asking for it?” Elodie asserts.

The play uses that as a jumping-off point, with scenes marked by full-throated disagreements, quiet allusions, and an astonishing amount of smoothly integrated analysis of Israel, religious and secular Jews, and Judaism in France through the ages, encompassing such events as the People’s Crusade in 1096, the Valentine’s Day massacre of 1349 in Strasbourg, and the 1960s postcolonial exodus of Algerian Jews to France. Set pieces incorporate discussions of Israeli and American Jews and the mass shootings at Charlie Hebdo, the Bataclan theater, and a kosher supermarket in Paris. The characters are troubled by the rise of Marine Le Pen and the National Front in France while considering the fate of the family’s last piano store, a legacy that goes back to 1855.

Irma (Nancy Robinette) and Adolphe Salomon (Kenneth Tigar) wonder where their children and grandchildren are in 1944 Paris (photo by Matthew Murphy)

The play is deeply rooted in history, presented in both monologues and flashbacks, particularly to the mid-1940s, when Marcelle’s great-grandparents, the elderly Irma Salomon (Nancy Robinette) and her husband, Adolphe (Kenneth Tigar), are living in Paris despite the occupation, not about to evacuate their home or give up the life they’ve built together. They worry every minute about the fate of their children, Jacqueline, Robert, and Lucien (Ari Brand), and their grandchildren, including Lucien’s son, Pierre Salomon (Peyton Lusk); Jacqueline escaped to Cuba, but Robert and Lucien are missing.

As Irma and Adolphe, who runs the piano business, sit at the dinner table, Patrick wonders about his great-grandparents. “What were they like, as people?” he asks. “What did they talk about? I have to imagine it was hard not to talk about their children, their grandchildren. . . .” Irma responds as if Patrick is right there with them: “We don’t talk about our children that much.” Adolphe then regales his wife with a beautiful fairy tale in which every member of their family is happy, healthy, and safe, an unlikely fantasy.

Over the course of three hours (with two intermissions), Patrick, the son of a Catholic mother and nonreligious Jewish father, wanders between eras, sharing what details he knows, singing at the Salomon piano that his sister Marcelle inherited, and occasionally participating in the modern-day moments, highlighted by a Passover Seder that turns ugly fast.

Molly (Molly Ranson), Charles (Jeff Seymour), and Daniel (Yair Ben-Dor) make sufganiyot together in world premiere play from MTC (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Terrorism and fear are perpetually on their minds. In an early exchange, Molly, who represents the current battle over BDS and other Israel-related issues on American college campuses, and Marcelle, who represents, well, one of my mother’s best friends, get into it.

Molly: My parents didn’t want me to come to France at all, but . . .
Marcelle: Why not?
Molly: Just cause of all the, you know. The terrorism.
Marcelle: There’s terrorism everywhere.
Molly: That’s what I said, but they were scared.
Marcelle: Aren’t you from New York? What’s to be scared?
Molly: I agree.
Marcelle: The whole world has terrorism now. There’s nowhere to hide. Either you live in the world, or you live in a cave. Personally, I don’t want to be a caveman.

Charles, whose family escaped Algeria when it became too dangerous, admits, “I’m scared, Marcelle. You lay everything out, you lay it out so rationally, and I hear every word you’re saying, but, I’m scared. We are Jews. We are Jews. The only reason we’re still on this planet is because we learned to get out of dangerous situations before they got the better of us. Something is happening in the world, and it’s happening in our country too — I can feel it.” When he says “our country too,” it’s impossible not to think about how it’s happening in America today, with brutal assaults on Jews from Pittsburgh, Boise, and New York City to Colleyville, St. Petersburg, and Poway.

Francis Benhamou brings down the house in a dazzling monologue when Elodie, in a bar with Molly, rants and rages about American Judaism and misperceptions about Israel. “American Jews . . . feel pretty free,” she explains in a verbal barrage. “So when it comes to Israel, they either despise it, or they’re slavishly devoted to it because they have a deep-seated understanding in their bones that there has never been a country on Earth that hasn’t eventually at some point turned on its Jews, and even in America, that fate awaits them too. Then you have the American Jew who hates Israel or is highly critical of Israel and I would argue part of why they feel able to be so critical of Israel is because they feel so safe in America, because they’ve convinced themselves that they can stay in America forever and maybe that’s true now but if history is our guide and history must always be our guide then you have to ask, so you feel safe today but will that be the case a hundred years from now? Or ten?” It’s a discussion I know I’ve had many times with friends and relatives, and Harmon nails it.

Narrator Patrick Salomon (Richard Topol) goes back and forth in time in Prayer for the French Republic (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Takeshi Kata’s elegant set rotates between the Benhamous’ lovely home and the Salomons’ less-fashionable wartime apartment. Tony, Drama Desk, and Obie–winning director David Cromer, who mounted a groundbreaking adaptation of Our Town on Broadway in 2009 (as well as helming The Band’s Visit, The Sound Inside, Tribes, and many other well-regarded shows), seamlessly integrates the two eras, which are often onstage together, one in the background of the other like a ghost, with superb lighting by Amith Chandrashaker and sound by Lee Kinney and Daniel Kluger.

The cast is uniformly outstanding, with Topol’s (Anatomy of a Suicide, The Normal Heart) naturally calm, likable demeanor alleviating some of the palpable tension until there’s no stopping it; Topol previously starred as Lemml, the immigrant stage manager and narrator, in Paula Vogel’s Tony-nominated Indecent, about the making of Sholem Asch’s controversial 1907 Yiddish play, God of Vengeance. Ranson imbues Molly with an inner strength and confidence that has her going toe-to-toe with her cousins, who have a tendency to be loud and forceful; Ranson similarly portrayed Melody, Liam’s (Michael Zegen) shiksa goddess, in Harmon’s Bad Jews, which also dealt with the Holocaust and family legacy. Ranson and Ben-Dor have an immediate chemistry as they balance fighting and flirtation.

Even Daniel’s fondness for Bob Dylan is no mere affectation, as the Nobel- and Pulitzer-winning troubadour famously went from being Jewish to a born-again Christian and back to Jewish during his fabled career; his 1983 album, Infidels, features several songs about Israel.

But it’s Harmon’s (Significant Other, Admissions) impeccable dialogue and razor-sharp characterizations that take center stage. Every word, every action rings true and hits home; he gets the Jewish American experience just right, even if this is a Parisian family (that speaks English without the hint of a French accent). I’ve been involved in these arguments and know these people well; I’m planning on memorizing a bunch of lines in time for this year’s Seders.

MORNING SUN

Edie Falco, Marin Ireland, and Blair Brown are extraordinary as three generations of one family in Morning Sun (photo © Matthew Murphy 2021)

MORNING SUN
Manhattan Theatre Club
MTC at New York City Center – Stage I
131 West 55th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 19, $99-$109
212-581-1212
www.manhattantheatreclub.com

Tony winner Simon Stephens’s Morning Sun opened tonight at New York City Center’s Stage I, starring three sensational actresses: Tony winner and Emmy nominee Blair Brown, Emmy winner and Tony nominee Edie Falco, and Tony nominee Marin Ireland. They play three generations of women in the McBride clan: Falco is Charley McBride, Brown is her mother, Claudette, and Ireland is Charley’s daughter, Tessa. The script identifies them as 1, 2, and 3, respectively; while Falco is Charley throughout the hundred-minute Manhattan Theatre Club production, Brown and Ireland also portray numerous other characters, including friends, relatives, and lovers, reenacting moments from the past without changing costumes and altering their demeanor only slightly if at all. It sometimes takes a few lines for the audience to figure out one of these transitions, to discern who is speaking, but that’s part of the play’s attraction.

The structure can’t help but call to mind Edward Albee’s 1991 Pulitzer Prize–winning play, Three Tall Women, in which a trio of sensational actresses — most recently Glenda Jackson, Laurie Metcalf, and Alison Pill in the show’s 2018 Broadway debut — portrayed three generations of unnamed women who the script identifies as A, B, and C. From the very start of Morning Sun, however, Stephens references not only Edward Albee but also artist Edward Hopper, and it’s clear that these women live in a different social class than the triad of Three Tall Women and that Stephens’s project is very different from Albee’s.

The show begins with an obtuse conversation that sets the mood and signals what is to come next:

Charley: Am I safe?
Tessa: You ask yourself.
Claudette: And I can’t really understand your question.
Charley: I want to know if I’m safe.
Claudette: Please be quiet.
Charley: I’m very scared. I’m very confused it’s very bright here please just tell me whether or not I am safe.
Claudette: I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me.
Tessa: Here. Hold her carefully.
Claudette: The way your face scrunches up and the noise that you make and how I know I’m supposed to feel and the difference between that and how I actually do feel —
Charley: Just tell me.
Claudette: Here. Come here. Come here.
Charley: Am I safe? That’s all I’m asking. It’s not a very difficult question to understand, is it? Is it? It’s not. No. It isn’t.

Charley McBride (Edie Falco) and Brian (Marin Ireland) discuss Edward Hopper in Manhattan Theatre Club world premiere Morning Sun (photo © Matthew Murphy 2021)

In chronological order, Claudette, Charley, and Tessa discuss seminal moments in their lives, reflecting on their successes and failures, as one character often narrates what is happening to the other in the second person. Tessa tells her grandmother, “One morning at the end of summer you take a train to Penn Station walk two blocks up Seventh and get a job in the Macy’s haberdashery department. That night you find a rent controlled fifth floor walk-up on Eleventh Street in the West Village. Two bedrooms. A railroad apartment with a tub in the kitchen and a view of the courtyard to the south side of the building. And if you crane your neck you can see the Hudson.” Claudette says, “I love it completely. . . . And I never live anywhere else. . . . For the rest of my life.”

The women introduce us to Claudette’s brother-in-law, Stanley; her husband, Harold; Charley’s best friend, Casey; an airplane pilot in a bar; a museum guard named Brian; and others, looking back as if they are all ghosts. Indeed, the play takes place in a nonspecific time, a kind of way station, where some of the characters have already passed away. At one point, Uncle Stanley tells Charley that the Cherry Lane Theatre is haunted. “There’s no such thing as ghosts,” Charley says. “Don’t you think?” he responds. “No I don’t. And there’s no way of making me think otherwise. So don’t try,” she says. “If there’s no such thing as ghosts, then why do they need a ghost light?” he asks. Charley: “What’s a ghost light?” Stanley: “It’s a light they keep on in the theater all night to keep the ghosts away.” A moment later, Stanley adds, “A ghost is an interruption,” which evokes the eighteen months of the pandemic lockdown, when theaters were empty, ghost lights on.

Place is essential to the play, which is set in Claudette’s West Village apartment. To the left is a clothes closet, to the right a piano and a working kitchen with running water and electricity, and in the center is a large, open area with a couch, a chair, and a bench, backed by half a dozen high-set windows. (The set is by dots, with lighting by Lap Chi Chu, sound by Lee Kinney and Daniel Kluger, and costumes by Kaye Voyce.) The characters move about the space almost like ghosts, occasionally appearing like they’re in a Hopper painting. The show is named after Hopper’s 1952 canvas Morning Sun, in which a lonely woman (the model is Hopper’s wife, painter Jo Nivison, the only female who ever posed for him) sits on a bed facing an open window, her hands gripping her legs, feet in front of her, the light forming an ominous rectangle on the wall. She peers outside as if there’s something she’s lost, something she can’t get back. It’s reminiscent of such other Hopper works as Cape Cod Morning, Western Motel, Eleven A.M., Morning in a City, and A Woman in the Sun, which all feature women seemingly trapped in an isolation they can’t escape.

Claudette was born and raised in Nyack, Hopper’s hometown in Rockland County. The titular painting plays a key role in the narrative, such as when Charley meets Brian, the museum guard, while looking at it. Charley tells him, “I like finding Edward Hopper paintings and thinking this is where I came from. Morning Sun. I like the strange expression on the woman’s face and wondering what she’s staring at and if she’s thinking about what she’s staring at or if her face is just kind of frozen because she’s gone to somewhere in her head that she can’t ever talk about.” Referring to the edifice that can be seen through the window, Brian points out, “I like trying to figure out what that building is.” Charley offers, “It could be a prison.”

Impeccably directed by Lila Neugebauer (The Wolves, Edward Albee’s At Home at the Zoo, The Waverly Gallery), the show also made me think of Hopper’s New York Movie, in which a woman, bathed in light, hand on chin, stands just outside the seating area of a theater, perhaps contemplating whether she wants to sit down and join the crowd, be part of something. In the age of Covid, it now evokes the pandemic lockdown and the tentative return of audiences to theaters, but it also relates to the loneliness that Claudette, Charley, and Tessa experience in their daily lives; they might have one another in this surreal conversation happening onstage, but they each harbor fears of being alone.

Marin Ireland is extraordinary playing Tessa McBride and several other characters in latest Simon Stephens play (photo © Matthew Murphy 2021)

They rejoice in New York City — among the locations mentioned are the White Horse Tavern, Peter McManus, Shea Stadium, the old Penn Station, Wollman Rink, Washington Square Park the New School, and the High Line — but they bond to Joni Mitchell’s “Song to a Seagull,” in which Mitchell sings, “I came to the city / And lived like old Crusoe / On an island of noise / In a cobblestone sea / And the beaches were concrete / And the stars paid a light bill / And the blossoms hung false / On their store window trees.” The three women are together, but they are alone.

Brown (Copenhagen, Arcadia, Mary Page Marlowe), Falco (The True, Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune), and Ireland (Reasons to Be Pretty, Blue Ridge, On the Exhale) are exquisite, portraying their complex characters with a gentle ease that is intoxicating, as if we’re spending quality time in front of a great painting. The drama leisurely but compellingly proceeds at a calm pace as the characters move about the stage, sometimes gathering at the small table in the kitchen, other times sitting so far apart it is as if they are in separate canvases, hung nearby on a wall.

Stephens is a writer with breathtaking skill, whether penning a charming two-character drama about a pair of loners who meet at a London Tube station (Heisenberg), a major spectacle about the murder of a pooch (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time), an intimate one-man show dealing with horrific tragedy (Sea Wall), a postapocalyptic nightmare told with blindfolds and through headphones (Blindness), or a profound exploration into the lives of three generations of New York women. Morning Sun is a masterful artistic rendering of three ordinary, intertwined lives continually trying to find their unique path while battling solitude, like an Edward Hopper painting come to life, the subjects ever peering out the window, considering what is, what was, and what could have been.

Talking with Casey about Tessa, Charley says, “I want her to look back on me when she’s an adult and know that I did my best for her and that I always tried even if sometimes I let her down.” Casey replies, “We all let each other down,” to which Charley responds, “But that I did my very, very best.” What more can we ask of each other, in life and in art?

LACKAWANNA BLUES

LACKAWANNA BLUES
Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West Forty-Seventh St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 12, $59
www.manhattantheatreclub.com

In 2006, the HBO film of Lackawanna Blues earned John Papsidera an Emmy for Outstanding Casting for a Miniseries, Movie, or Special and S. Epatha Merkerson won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for her portrayal of Rachel “Nanny” Crosby. But in the Broadway debut of Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s one-man show, which premiered at the Public in 2001 and continues at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre through November 12, Santiago-Hudson proves once again that he can do it all by himself.

In the ninety-minute play, Santiago-Hudson, serving as actor, writer, and director, portrays more than two dozen characters that were part of his childhood growing up in the steel town of Lackawanna in upstate New York, focusing on his five-year-old self and the woman left in charge of his care, the beloved Miss Rachel, also known to the tight-knit community as Nanny. Ruben’s mother had financial problems stemming from drug abuse, and his father did not live with them. Through the age of eleven, he often lived with Miss Rachel, who ran a pair of boardinghouses, one at 32 Wasson Ave., where young Ruben met such fanciful figures as Numb Finger Pete, Sweet Tooth Sam, Ol’ Po’ Carl, Small Paul, Mr. Lucious, Freddie Cobbs, and Mr. Lemuel Taylor; Santiago-Hudson embodies each of them with shifts in his voice and physical movement as he relates funny and poignant anecdotes about fishing, baseball, and domestic violence.

He wanders across Michael Carnahan’s intimate set, consisting of a few chairs, a small table, the front door of 32 Wasson Ave., a hanging window, and a back wall that evokes the boardinghouse, beautifully lit by Jen Schriever (with several cool surprises). Sitting in one corner is New York Blues Hall of Fame guitarist and Grammy nominee Junior Mack, playing music composed and originally performed onstage by Bill Sims Jr.; Mack previously performed in Sims’s band, so it is a natural hand-off. He interacts well with Santiago-Hudson, sometimes coming to the forefront, other times whispering under Santiago-Hudson’s dialogue. Occasionally, Santiago-Hudson whips out a harmonica and blasts away with verve. (The warm sound design is by Darron L West.)

Lackawanna Blues is a celebration of a town that was enjoying the fruits of prosperity, not a dirge about marginalized people suffering hard times. The play begins with Santiago-Hudson declaring, “Nineteen fifty-six. Lackawanna, New York, like all Great Lakes cities, was thriving! Jobs everywhere, money everywhere. Steel plants, grain mills, railroads, the docks. Everybody had a new car and a conk. Restaurants, bars, stores, everybody made money. The smell of fried fish, chicken, and pork chops floating in the air every weekend. In every bar the aroma of a newly tapped keg of Black Label, Iroquois, or Genesee beer, to complement that hot roast beef-on-weck with just a touch of horseradish. . . . You could get to town on a Monday and by Wednesday have more jobs than one man can take. These were fertile times.” There were problems, but the people knew how to take care of one another, with Miss Rachel at the center. “Nanny was like the government if it really worked,” Santiago-Hudson says.

Santiago-Hudson is no stranger to one-man shows; in 2013 at the Signature, he portrayed his mentor and friend, the late August Wilson, in How I Learned What I Learned. He has directed and/or starred in numerous Wilson works, winning a Tony for his role as Cantwell in Seven Guitars and earning a Drama Desk Award for directing Jitney and an Obie for helming The Piano Lesson. He won an Obie Special Citation for the original production of Lackawanna Blues, while Sims earned an Obie for his music.

On Broadway, Santiago-Hudson makes you think you see every character, smell every smell, witness minute details of every scene even though he never changes his costume or introduces props. It’s a compelling, deeply personal performance that feels right at home in the 622-capacity theater as he marvelously succeeds in inviting the audience into his past. When asked at a talkback about what happened to his mother, he said that would be a show unto itself while sharing some of the specifics of her tragic yet hope-filled life. Sounds like a heckuva sequel.

MTC CURTAIN CALL: THE NICETIES

Lisa Banes and Jordan Boatman reprise their roles for online streaming version of The Niceties

Who: Lisa Banes, Jordan Boatman, Eleanor Burgess, Kimberly Senior
What: Virtual reading and discussion
Where: Broadway on Demand
When: Online streaming extended through June 27, free with RSVP
Why: “It’s a dangerous time, and this is a play that ignites those thoughts and makes you look at yourself and makes you look at your place in the world,” Lisa Banes says in a brief recorded conversation about Eleanor Burgess’s The Niceties, which is streaming in a sizzling online version through June 27. “I mean, every time we had talked to the audience after the play, we were asked as human beings, not just as actors, Where do you stand on this?” Sadly, Banes will no longer be answering these questions; she died on June 14 at the age of sixty-five after being hit by a scooter on the Upper West Side; the perpetrator has not been found. This production from MTC’s Curtain Call series and the Huntington Theatre Company in Boston is the last play featuring the extraordinarily talented Banes.

Banes and Jordan Boatman had reunited for the virtual reading; they starred in the two-character play when it premiered at MTC’s Studio at Stage II at City Center in 2018. The two-act, one-hundred-minute play has been moved from an American history professor’s office at a prestigious university to Skype, where Janine (Banes), a tenured teacher, is offering advice to one of her students, Zoe (Boatman), who’s working on a paper about radical revolutions. Janine is white; Zoe is black. The discussion does not go as expected; what was supposed to be a productive session turns into a ferocious confrontation about how the past and the present define and regard colonialism, slavery, political protests and marches, constitutional democracy, racial oppression, the concept of freedom, and the Supreme Court. “I love critical dialogue; I’m listening,” Janine says. But Zoe argues that she is not being heard.

“You have a contempt for your students, and particularly your students who think different from you,” Zoe explains.

“Differently,” Janine corrects.

Zoe: “You use your intelligence to critique and belittle people who have less power than you. Like your comments on my paper. Do you think that’s helpful? To take a person who’s trying to put forward an underrepresented point of view and criticize them until they feel like they might as well give up because you’ll never understand?”

Janine: “I didn’t tell you to give up. . . .”

Zoe: “Listen, there is one appropriate way of responding to a woman of color who says I have an idea to assert. And that is to shut up and listen, because she has experiences you cannot possibly know and insight you can learn from.”

Janine: “To shut up and listen, as you so rudely put it, would be doing you a disservice.”

Three weeks later, they are dealing with the aftermath of their fierce exchange, but while much has changed, much has not as they continue to disagree about personal and public aspects of dignity, equality, and compromise.

The Niceties is set in the spring of 2016, during the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Original director Kimberly Senior (Disgraced, Sweat) helms this virtual iteration, which is ablaze with passion while including artful little touches: Janine drinks out of a Hillary Clinton mug, even after Zoe expresses her fondness for President Obama, and Janine has a framed portrait of George Washington on her wall, whereas Zoe has a poster of The Color Purple behind her. And KRS-ONE’s “Sound of Da Police” plays during the five-minute intermission, preparing viewers for a highly volatile second act.

Obie winner Banes (Look Back in Anger, My Sister in the House, Isn’t It Romantic?) and Boatman (The Good Fight, The Path) are electrifying, picking up right where they left off at Studio at Stage II; this is no mere reunion reading but a thrillingly performed work that takes on issues that have only grown more complex since 2018. Banes is elegant and refined as the meticulous woman forced to defend her career, while Boatman is fervent and intense as a tenacious student fighting to be heard. If The Niceties doesn’t get your juices flowing, then you haven’t been paying attention to what has been happening across the country, and around the world, these past few years.

“I was so, so happy to do this,” Banes says in the talk. “It came at just the right moment. I feel like we started our engines and got ’em going, and now I can’t wait for the next thing.” Banes, who also appeared in such films as Cocktail and Gone Girl and the television series Son of the Beach and Royal Pains, is survived by her wife, Kathryn Kranhold. Anyone with information about the tragic hit-and-run that took her life is urged to call NYPD Crime Stoppers at (800) 577-TIPS.

MTC VIRTUAL THEATRE: THE NICETIES

Who: Lisa Banes, Jordan Boatman
What: Virtual reunion premiere
Where: MTC Virtual Theatre
When: May 27 – June 13, free with RSVP
Why: Originally presented at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Studio at Stage II in fall 2018, Eleanor Burgess’s The Niceties is making its virtual premiere in a new online staging, reuniting original cast members Lisa Banes and Jordan Boatman with director Kimberly Senior (Disgraced, Career Suicide). Boatman (Medea, The Path) plays a Black student at an East Coast college who is writing a paper about the American Revolution. Banes (Look Back in Anger, My Sister in This House) portrays her well-respected white professor. Their discussion of the work leads to issues of race, white privilege, and reputation involving the past and the present. The stream is available for free May 27 through June 13.

THE SHOW GOES ON: CASA VALENTINA

Harvey Fierstein and the cast of Casa Valentina will reunite for MTC’s “The Show Goes On”

Who: Harvey Fierstein, Reed Birney, John Cullum, Gabriel Ebert, Tom McGowan, Patrick Page, Nick Westrate, Mare Winningham
What: Cast reunion and watch party
Where: Manhattan Theatre Club YouTube
When: Thursday, March 18, free, noon
Why: In November, Manhattan Theatre Club kicked off a new monthly series, “The Show Goes On,” revisiting previous productions with members of the cast and crew watching filmed excerpts and talking about their experiences. In November, director Trip Cullman, narrator Rebecca Naomi Jones, music director Justin Levine, and costar Will Swenson looked at 2012’s Murder Ballad, which also featured Karen Olivo and John Ellison Conlee. In December, actors Jon Hoche and Paco Tolson explored 2016’s Vietgone, by Qui Nguyen. In January, writer-director John Patrick Shanley and star Timothée Chalamet discussed 2016’s Prodigal Son. And in February, Stephanie Berry, who played, Aunt Mama, shared insight into 2018’s Sugar in Our Wounds, written by Donja R. Love and directed by Saheem Ali.

The March edition of “The Show Goes On,” each of which runs between fifteen and twenty minutes, reunites the cast of 2014’s Casa Valentina, Harvey Fierstein’s first drama in more than a quarter century. The play, inspired by a true story, takes place in June 1962 at a Catskills bungalow where men spend weekends cross-dressing and acting like women, a safe haven where they can celebrate their feminine side. Joining in the watch party will be Fierstein and most of the original cast: Reed Birney, John Cullum, Gabriel Ebert, Tom McGowan, Patrick Page, Nick Westrate, and Mare Winningham. At the time, I wrote, “Cross-dressing might be somewhat de rigueur these days on Broadway (Kinky Boots, A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder, Cabaret, Hedwig and the Angry Inch), but Fierstein, [director Joe] Mantello, and an extremely talented and beautiful cast offer a very different take on this misunderstood culture, treating it with humor, intelligence, honor, courage, and, perhaps most important, dignity.” Like its title says, the show does go on, living on YouTube after its initial airing.