Tag Archives: Manhattan Theatre Club

THE LITTLE FOXES

Laura Linney and Cynthia Nixon alternate roles as Regina and Birdie in MTC Broadway revival of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes (photo by Joan Marcus)

Manhattan Theatre Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West 47th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 2, $89-$179
littlefoxesbroadway.com
www.manhattantheatreclub.com

Daniel Sullivan’s Broadway revival of Lillian Hellman’s 1939 drawing-room classic, The Little Foxes, is exquisitely rendered in every detail in this gorgeous Manhattan Theatre Club production, continuing through July 2 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. It’s an intricate tale of the business of family, and the family business, in the South in the spring of 1900, but it never feels old-fashioned or dated; instead it highlights the play’s freshness and relevance to today’s world. The conniving Hubbard clan — older brother Ben (Michael McKean), younger brother Oscar (Darren Goldstein), and sister Regina (portrayed alternately by Laura Linney and Cynthia Nixon) — are wining and dining Mr. Marshall (David Alford), a wealthy Chicago industrialist about to partner with Hubbard Sons in a cotton mill deal. “It’s very remarkable how you Southern aristocrats have kept together. Kept together and kept what belonged to you,” Mr. Marshall says. “You misunderstand, sir. Southern aristocrats have not kept together and have not kept what belonged to them,” Ben points out. “You don’t call this keeping what belongs to you?” Mr. Marshall asks, looking around the impressive room. “But we are not aristocrats. Our brother’s wife is the only one of us who belongs to the Southern aristocracy,” Ben explains, referring to Oscar’s wife, Birdie (alternately Nixon or Linney). In a classic new money/old money transaction, Oscar married the soft-spoken, timid Birdie for her bloodline and the family plantation, her beloved Lionnet. Once Lionnet and Birdie were both Hubbard property, he began beating and mistreating her, leading her to retreat into a haze of alcohol. Meanwhile, Oscar is grooming their bumbling, would-be-playboy son, Leo (Michael Benz), to join Hubbard Sons and to marry his first cousin, Alexandra (Francesca Carpanini), the teenage daughter of Regina and Horace (Richard Thomas). But to secure the deal with Mr. Marshall, Ben and Oscar need Horace, a seriously ill banker who has spent the past five months at Johns Hopkins, to contribute his share in the partnership; otherwise, they will have to bring in a stranger, something they are loathe to do. But Regina proves herself to be another shrewd Hubbard when she starts negotiating for her absent husband. Unable to execute the necessary partnership investment herself, Regina sends Alexandra to Maryland to bring back Horace, setting up an intense battle of wills over Union Pacific bonds owned by Horace, who just happens to be Leo’s boss at the bank. Watching everything unfold are the Hubbards’ servants, Addie (Caroline Stefanie Clay) and Cal (Charles Turner), who understand exactly what is going on as the post-Reconstruction South moves from its plantation slave agriculture economy to a mill-based industrial one — all the while keeping up its brutal foundation of labor exploitation. It all culminates in a spectacularly grand finale that is as wickedly funny as it is unpredictable.

talk family and business in The Little Foxes (photo by Joan Marcus)

Richard Thomas, Michael McKean, Darren Goldstein, and Michael Benz discuss family business in Daniel Sullivan’s Broadway revival of Lillian Hellman classic (photo by Joan Marcus)

A magnet for big stars, The Little Foxes was first presented on Broadway in 1939, with Tallulah Bankhead as Regina and Frank Conroy as Horace. William Wyler’s Oscar-nominated 1941 film starred Bette Davis as Regina, Herbert Marshall as Horace, and Teresa Wright as Alexandra. It was previously revived on Broadway in 1967 by Mike Nichols (with Anne Bancroft, Richard A. Dysart, E. G. Marshall, and George C. Scott), in 1981 by Austin Pendleton (with Elizabeth Taylor, Maureen Stapleton, and Anthony Zerbe), and in 1997 by Jack O’Brien (with Stockard Channing, Frances Conroy, and Brian Murray). The cast for the 2017 revival is simply brilliant: McKean (All the Way, Superior Donuts) is devilishly regal as the cigar-smoking, full-bearded Ben; Goldstein (Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Abigail’s Party) is deliciously devious as Oscar, the least well mannered of the siblings; and Thomas (Incident at Vichy, You Can’t Take It with You) is explosive as Regina’s ailing, henpecked husband who has some tricks up his sleeve. But the play’s real power lays in the roles of Regina and Birdie, two very different women, each with their own strengths and flaws, representative of both the past and the future of their gender. At Linney’s suggestion, she and Nixon alternate playing Regina and Birdie; I saw it with four-time Emmy winner, three-time Oscar nominee, and four-time Tony nominee Linney (Time Stands Still, Sight Unseen) as Regina and Tony, Grammy, and Emmy winner Nixon (Rabbit Hole, Wit) as Birdie. The two women are magical together, Linney strong and determined as the duplicitous, calculating Regina, who wants a better life for herself no matter how it impacts the others, while Nixon is delightful as the unassuming, fragile, abused Birdie, who knows more than she is letting on. Scott Pask’s set is divine, with lovely period furniture, a Hazelton Brothers piano, lush drapery, and a shadowy, ominous staircase in the back, while Jane Greenwood’s costumes are utterly transcendent, the men’s tuxes bold and impressive, the women’s dresses luxuriously elegant and revealing of their inner being. Tony winner Sullivan (Rabbit Hole, Proof) directs with impeccable attention to detail; nary the smallest matter is overlooked, and the pacing is wonderful, with two well-timed intermissions over two and a half hours. “I could wait until next week. But I can’t wait until next week,” Ben says at one point, referring to Horace’s delay in contributing his share of the investment, but he just as well could be talking to those who are still contemplating whether to see the show. “I could but I can’t. Could and can’t. Well, I must go now,” he concludes. The Little Foxes must go on July 2; don’t miss it.

COST OF LIVING

Ani (Katy Sullivan) and Eddie (Victor Williams) wonder if they have a future together in Cost of Living (photo by Joan Marcus 2017)

Manhattan Theatre Club
New York City Center Stage 1
Tuesday – Sunday through July 16, $79
212-581-1212
costoflivingplay.com
www.nycitycenter.org

Martyna Majok’s Cost of Living is a tender, emotional play about four lonely people seeking connections, which in and of itself is not an unusual scenario. But what is unusual about the play, which opened last night at Manhattan Theatre Club’s City Center space, is that two of the characters have disabilities and, per the playwright’s specific instructions, must be portrayed by actors with disabilities. Despite that setup, Cost of Living is not some kind of activist production trying to make a politically correct statement about people with disabilities; instead, it’s an intimate story about two men and two women facing the daily challenges that life brings them. The play begins with a long monologue by Eddie (Victor Williams), a poetic truck driver who has lost his license because of a DUI; he has also lost his wife, Ani (Katy Sullivan), who died as a result of some kind of accident that he might have been responsible for. Now sober, Eddie is in a bar, sitting in a chair and facing the audience, as if talking directly to us. Looking back at what he used to have, he says, “That life is good for people. I was thankful for every day they ain’t invented yet the trucker-robots. That life is good. The road. Sky. The scenery. Except the loneliness. Except in the case of all the, y’know, loneliness. This was what my wife was good for. Not that this was the only thing. . . . Cuz, y’know, you married a person. And a person’s gonna be a person even if they’re married. That’s a lesson. That’s a lesson for yer LIFE right there.” It’s critical that Eddie refers to Ani as a “person” here, because when we soon see her in a flashback, she is a quadriplegic confined to a wheelchair. She is a woman who is not defined by her physical situation, even though it is severe. Meanwhile, the secretive Jess (Jolly Abraham), a twenty-five-year-old bartender who has just graduated from Princeton, is interviewing for a job as caregiver to John (Gregg Mozgala), a hoity-toity Harvard man who has cerebral palsy and is also confined to a wheelchair. Jess’s main responsibilities are to help John shower and shave every morning, which turns out to be no easy task. “Why do you want this job?” John asks. “I thought, the experience and I — it’d be a very Meaningful Experience,” she replies. “Why do you want —” John starts to ask again but is cut off by Jess, who says, “The money.” “Good,” John adds, appreciative of the honesty. As the play goes back and forth between the two stories — which eventually come together in an unexpected way — subtle parallels are drawn between them, as Jess washes John as they grow closer, and Eddie washes Ani as they grow apart.

John (Gregg Mozgala) and Jess (Jolly Abraham) come to an understanding in Martyna Majok’s latest play (photo by Joan Marcus 2017)

Expanded from Majok’s short play John, Who’s Here from Cambridge, which debuted in Ensemble Studio Theatre’s Marathon of One-Act Plays in late spring 2015, Cost of Living is carefully constructed by Majok (Ironbound, Mouse in a Jar) and her “dream” director, Obie winner Jo Bonney (Father Comes Home from the Wars; By the Way, Meet Vera Stark). They avoid sentimentality or sympathy — although the drama is deeply involving — while treating all four people as equals. “Self-pity has little currency in these characters’ worlds,” Majok writes in her notes to the play. “Humor, however, has much.” Wilson Chin’s set rotates between John’s stylish apartment, the hipster bar, and Ani’s home, after she and Eddie have split. The cast is uniformly excellent — with a particularly moving performance by Williams (The King of Queens, Sneaky Pete) — as they face their unique challenges, all four making distinct connections. Majok, who was inspired by such writers as Danny Hoch, Raymond Carver, and Sarah Kane, also explores class, something that can be found in much of her work, influenced by her mother’s experience after immigrating to America from Poland when Majok was five. (Among other jobs, her mother was a caregiver for an elderly woman.) But most of all, Cost of Living is not about disabilities or about actors with disabilities; it’s not about race either, although of the two non-disabled characters, one is black and the other Latino in this production. It follows the lead of Deaf West Theatre’s 2015 revival of Spring Awakening, in which Ali Stoker, as Anna, became the first wheelchair-bound actor to ever appear on Broadway, and Sam Gold’s version of The Glass Menagerie, in which Madison Ferris, who has muscular dystrophy, portrayed Laura Wingfield, giving more opportunities to actors with disabilities, whether the role calls for it or not. The play also has one truly terrifying moment, causing the audience to gasp in unison and, most likely after the show, reconsider their initial thoughts regarding disabilities, especially during the curtain call, which features an added surprise. At one point, Ani asks Eddie, “If I weren’t like this right now, would you be here?” The reason to go to City Center to see Cost of Living is not because two of the actors are “like this right now”; it’s because it’s a well-written, well-directed, well-acted story about everyday life.

LINDA

Linda (Janie Dee) faces down older daughter Alice (Jennifer Ikeda) as younger daughter Bridget (Molly Ranson) looks on in LINDA (photo by Richard Termine)

Manhattan Theatre Club
New York City Center Stage 1
Tuesday – Sunday through April 2, $79-$90
212-581-1212
www.lindaplay.com
www.nycitycenter.org

I’m writing this on International Women’s Day, when women around the world came together “to help forge a better working world — a more gender inclusive world,” which is particularly relevant to Penelope Skinner’s Linda, making its New York debut at City Center Stage I through April 2. Two-time Olivier Award winner Janie Dee gives a breathless, whirlwind performance as the title character in an otherwise lackluster, kitchen-sink production from Manhattan Theatre Club. It appears that Linda, a fifty-five-year-old marketing executive at Swan with a devoted husband and two daughters, has it all. The play opens with her making an impressive multimedia pitch for a new campaign for an anti-ageing cream, aiming it at older women who are often overlooked by the beauty market, unless they’re Helen Mirren. “Let’s make these invisible women feel seen again,” she says. “Let’s say to them: ‘Ladies? We know you’re out there! We see you! You exist!’” However, the head of the company, Dave (John C. Vennema), decides instead to go with a campaign aimed at social-media-savvy millennials presented by Amy (Molly Griggs), an ambitious and aggressive twenty-five-year-old who has her eyes set on Linda’s office and job. Meanwhile, temp Luke (Maurice Jones) finds Linda quite attractive. Back at home, Linda’s daughter from her first marriage, Alice (Jennifer Ikeda), spends most of her time in her room, wearing a skunk costume to try to make herself invisible to others because of a cyber-shaming incident that occurred ten years before, when she was fifteen. Linda’s other daughter, fifteen-year-old Bridget (Molly Ranson), from her second marriage to Neil (Donald Sage Mackay), is agonizing over which monologue to deliver at an audition to get into a prestigious acting academy. Her parents want her to do Ophelia, but Bridget is more interested in a stronger role, perhaps Macbeth or Lear, instead of the suffering, victimized female character. And Neil is in a new band with inexperienced young singer Stevie (Meghann Fahy). “I’m an award-winning businesswoman. I’m happily married with two beautiful daughters and I still fit in the same size ten dress suit I did fifteen years ago,” Linda proudly says several times, but her carefully constructed world is about to come tumbling down. “I will not disappear!” she declares, even as she is becoming a footnote in her own life.

Linda (Janie Dee) encounters unexpected problems at the office with company founder Dave (John C. Vennema) (photo by Richard Termine)

Titling the play after the protagonist’s first name places the character front and center, as if she’s on her own, battling stereotypes all by herself. She’s threatened not only by men but by women who want what she has and knowingly or unknowingly undermine her to taste at least a little bit of her power. Dee (Carousel, Comic Potential) is exceptional as Linda, a role originated in London by Noma Dumezweni after Kim Cattrall had to drop out for health reasons. She looks sexy and glamorous in Jennifer von Mayrhauser’s sharp, boldly colored outfits, but she stands out too much, overwhelming the other characters, who are more like caricatures. Walt Spangler’s revolving set drags down the narrative, as does Fitz Patton’s uninspired music. MTC artistic director Lynne Meadow can’t find a natural pace to the proceedings, which stagger from scene to scene. Skinner (The Village Bike, The Ruins of Civilization) packs Linda with far too many subplots, taking on too many women’s issues in a mere two hours. Each one is important in its own way, but they get lost in the shuffle. “I used to be the protagonist of my life and now suddenly I’m starting to feel irrelevant,” Linda admits; that statement also relates to the play itself, especially in the shadow of the International Women’s Day marches also known as “A Day without a Woman.”

AUGUST WILSON’S JITNEY

Manhattan Theatre Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West 47th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 12, $79-$169
jitneybroadway.com
www.manhattantheatreclub.com

August Wilson’s Jitney, the first play he wrote in the American Century Cycle, also known as the Pittsburgh Cycle, is the last of the ten plays to reach Broadway, and all one can ask is, What took so long? Jitney is another masterpiece from the Pittsburgh-born playwright, whose cycle comprises ten plays, each set in a different decade of the twentieth century, capturing the black experience in America over one hundred years with grace, honesty, dignity, humor, and a soul-searching reality. Coincidentally, the film version of Wilson’s second play to hit Broadway, the Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning Fences, was released in December; the first movie based on a Wilson play, Fences garnered Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Actor (director Denzel Washington), Best Supporting Actress (Viola Davis), and Best Adapted Screenplay (Wilson). A Manhattan Theatre Club production at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, Jitney takes place in a ramshackle car service office in 1977 in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, where taxis won’t go. The gypsy cab company is run by the soft-spoken, straightforward Becker (John Douglas Thompson). His motley group of drivers consists of Turnbo (Michael Potts), a confrontational gossip who can’t stay out of other people’s business; YoungBlood (André Holland), an angry Vietnam vet trying to provide for his wife, Rena (Carra Patterson), and baby; Fielding (Anthony Chisholm), an aging, stumbling alcoholic who’s been separated from his wife for twenty-two years; and the practical, sensible Doub (Keith Randolph Smith), who is a kind of den father, keeping the peace while spouting such sage phrases as “Time go along and it come around.” Stopping by often is the sharply attired Shealy (Harvy Blanks), who takes phone calls at the station for his numbers racket, and Philmore (Ray Anthony Thomas), a regular customer who drinks himself into oblivion and then needs a ride home. Tensions rise when Becker eventually lets everyone know that the city will be tearing down the building soon, leaving them all jobless, and Becker’s son, Booster (Brandon J. Dirden), arrives after spending twenty years in prison, desperate to reestablish a relationship with his estranged father.

The Olivier Award-winning Jitney is a glorious play, a spectacular blending of poetic, incisive dialogue, powerful, soaring performances, and intimate, seamless staging by director Ruben Santiago-Hudson, who won a Tony for his role in Wilson’s Seven Guitars, later directed that work as well as the recent Signature revival of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Piano Lesson (starring Dirden), and was Wilson’s personal choice to portray him in the playwright’s autobiographical one-man show, How I Learned What I Learned. As with virtually every Wilson play, the cast is exceptional, bringing the beautifully developed characters to life in ways that make them feel like they’re your friends or acquaintances. Most of the actors have appeared in previous Wilson shows, including Thomas, who played Becker in Jitney at the Cincinnati Playhouse, and Chisholm, who has been playing Fielding since 1996 and once toured the Hill District with Wilson, who died in 2005 at the age of sixty. So every Wilson show has a welcoming family aspect surrounding it, and Jitney is no exception. When the play ended, I felt a tinge of sadness, wanting to spend more time with every one of these characters. The appropriately musty, messy set, by Tony-winning designer David Gallo (Wilson’s King Headley III, Gem of the Ocean, Radio Golf, 2000 production of Jitney at Second Stage), features ratty chairs and couches, newspaper clippings of Pittsburgh sports teams, an old pot-bellied stove, and large windows across the back of the stage that tantalizingly reveal who’s coming into the station next. Originally written in 1979 and rewritten in 1996, Jitney is very much about taking control of one’s life and being part of something bigger, regardless of the odds. At one point, Doub questions why Becker took so long to tell him about the station being torn down. “That ain’t what I mean, Becker,” Doub says. “It’s like you just a shadow of yourself. The station done gone downhill. Some people overcharge. Some people don’t haul. Fielding stay drunk. I just watch you and you don’t do nothing.” “What’s to be done?” Becker responds, adding “I just do the best I can do,” to which Doub boldly replies, “Sometime your best ain’t enough.” Like the rest of the dialogue, those words hit hard, resonating loud and clear in this stunning triumph.

VIETGONE

Quang (Raymond Lee) and Nhan (Jon Hoche) take readers on a wild ride in Qui Nguyen’s VIETGONE (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Manhattan Theatre Club
New York City Center Stage 1
131 West 55th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 4, $90
212-581-1212
vietgoneplay.com
www.nycitycenter.org

In such works as She Kills Monsters, Six Rounds of Vengeance, Alice in Slasherland, Aliens versus Cheerleaders, and Living Dead in Denmark, Arizona-born Vietnamese American playwright and screenwriter Qui Nguyen brings a fresh perspective to the stage, incorporating martial arts, horror, and irreverent humor within a comic-book sensibility. (He’s also a writer for Marvel Studios and founder of the New York-based Vampire Cowboys troupe.) He gets more serious, but no less wild, in his latest drama, Vietgone, a semiautobiographical look at the Vietnam War inspired by his family’s real experiences. “All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental,” the playwright (Paco Tolson) announces to the audience at the very beginning. “That especially goes for any person or persons who could be related to the playwright. Specifically his parents. Who this play is absolutely not about. Seriously, if any of you peeps repeat or retweet anything you’ve seen to my folks tonight, you’re assholes.” Nguyen and director May Adrales then tell the story of “a completely made-up man named Quang” (Raymond Lee), a former South Vietnamese soldier who is living in a refugee camp at the Fort Chaffee military base in Arkansas. A married man with two children he has not seen in several years, Quang is trying to get out of America and go back to Vietnam to be with them. “In Saigon / City in Vietnam / Shot up by the Viet Cong / They stole my peep’s freedom / so I’m coming to kill them / Call me their arch villain / Can’t stop me I’m willin’ / to die for this vision / Of a Vietnam that’s free / from those evil VC,” he raps. “You can’t stop me / I’m like a pissed off Bruce Lee / With a hi-ya, a kick, and a kung fu grip / We’ll come out swinging / We don’t give no shits.”

The cast of Qui Nguyen’s VIETGONE struts its stuff in Manhattan Theatre Club production at City Center (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Quang is heading to California on a motorcycle with his friend Nhan (Jon Hoche), where they’ll catch a flight home. The time shifts between April and July 1975, as Quang and Nhan get out during the fall of Saigon and Quang develops a sexual relationship at Fort Chaffee with the cold and carefree Tong (Jennifer Ikeda), despite the protests of her grandmother, Huong (Samantha Quan). But through it all, Quang just wants to reunite with his family. “We don’t belong here. We belong there,” he tells Nhan. “There, we’re heroes. We’re sons. We’re men. There, we count for something. Here, however, we ain’t shit.” On their travels, they encounter a hippie dude (Tolson), a flower girl (Quan), and a redneck biker (Tolson); meanwhile, flashbacks reveal the tough decisions Tong had to make when she chose to leave Vietnam for America. “The communists are going to be rolling into our streets any day now with the mind to make dead all of us who aren’t waving red flags and you’re going to stick around to get riddled with bullets?” she says to her brother, who won’t leave his girlfriend. “I’m not going to let you die here. I can’t. I can’t. That would destroy me. It would absolutely destroy me.” Quang and Tong might be sleeping together in America, but they are both after something they may not be able to find again.

Quang (Raymond Lee) and Tong (Jennifer Ikeda) have something to celebrate while Tong’s unhappy grandmother (Samantha Quan) looks on (photo by Carol Rosegg)

A production of Manhattan Theatre Club in association with South Coast Repertory, where the play debuted, Vietgone turns genre clichés inside out while toying with stereotypes, including who speaks with what accent. Passionately directed by Adrales with a frenetic warmth, the hip-hop immigrant tale — with a sweet nod to Hamilton — is colorful and energetic, taking place on Tim Mackabee’s impressive set, featuring a giant billboard, a horizon backdrop, and tiny telephone poles that represent the American road, creatively lit by Justin Townsend. Jared Mezzocchi’s projections, including graphic-novel-like drawings, set the time and the tone; the scene in which Quang and Nhan race for the helicopter to escape Saigon is absolutely breathtaking. Lee (tokyo fish story, Four Clowns) and Ikeda (Love and Information, Marie Antoinette) have a strong chemistry, while Vampire Cowboys artistic associate Hoche (Soul Samurai, The Inexplicable Redemption of Agent G), Quan (Masha No Home, An Infinite Ache), and longtime Nguyen collaborator Tolson (Fight Girl Battle World, Men of Steel) have a ball in multiple roles. The play is not as polished as it could be; several moments could be tightened up, and its clever but unusual storytelling techniques are not for everyone, obviously, as a chunk of older people left at intermission. But they should have stuck it out, as the rest of us did, who were caught up in this compelling love story about home that is both funny and moving, historical and contemporary, given the current debate over immigrants and refugees from around the world.

HEISENBERG

Butcher Alex Priest (Denis Arndt) and quirky Georgie Burns (Mary-Louise Parker) meet in a London tube station in HEISENBERG (photo © Joan Marcus 2016)

Manhattan Theatre Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West 47th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 11, $70-$150
heisenbergbroadway.com
www.manhattantheatreclub.com

Simon Stephens’s Heisenberg, which transferred to Broadway last month shortly after his extraordinary The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time ended a two-year run at the Ethel Barrymore, might reference the quantum theory uncertainty principle that proves the impossibility of precisely measuring position and momentum at the same time, but there’s no uncertainty that the British playwright is an exceptional storyteller bursting with both position and momentum. Stephens’s Tony-winning adaptation of Mark Haddon’s children’s book was turned into a multimedia marvel by Marianne Elliott. Heisenberg explores some of the same territory, the nature of establishing connections and communication between people, but could not otherwise be more different; it’s a spare, minimal tale directed with a graceful simplicity by Mark Brokaw (The Lyons, After Miss Julie). Mary-Louise Parker and Denis Arndt are magnetic as Georgie Burns and Alex Priest, respectively, two loners who meet one afternoon in a London tube station. Georgie is a forty-two-year-old fast-talking American with a tenuous grasp on the truth, while Alex is a seventy-five-year-old Irish butcher who just wants to be left alone. As the play opens, she kisses the back of his neck, mistaking him for someone else, then starts babbling to him. “Why are you talking to me?” he asks sternly. “I’m sorry. I’m really weird. I know. You don’t need to tell me. I’ll go,” she replies. But she can’t leave; she is drawn to him, sharing intimate details of her life that might or might not be true. When she shows up at his shop five days later, tracking him down through Google, he coldly declares, “My privacy has been violated.” She responds, “‘Violated’ is a bit strong. ‘Violated’ is a bit hyperbolic.” “Nice word,” he says. “Thank you. Ha. ‘Nice word.’ Patronizing fucker,” she answers. As these two extremely particular and rather odd strangers get to know each other, they attempt to fill in the missing parts of their lives.

heisenberg-2

The awe-inspiring technology behind Curious Incident is completely absent in Heisenberg, a streamlined production that relies on basic, almost workshoplike elements. Mark Wendland’s (Next to Normal, The Merchant of Venice) sparse stage features two chairs and two tables that the actors occasionally move around as the scenes change; there is a riser of seats behind the stage, placing the characters in the middle of the audience. Despite the show’s title, Stephens’s script does not delve deeply into physics, although at one point Georgie explains, “If you watch something closely enough you realize you have no possible way of telling where it’s going or how fast it’s getting there. Did you know that? That’s actually the truth. That’s actually scientifically been proven as the truth. By scientists. They all got together and they completely agreed on that. If you pay attention to where it’s going or how fast it’s moving, you stop watching it properly.” Those words also apply to how one can experience theater, including this Manhattan Theatre Club production. There’s no need to pay special attention to where this charming two-actor character sketch is going, or how fast it will get there; just watch it properly, immersed in the moment and the flow, in the lightning-quick pace and dizzying spectacle of Parker’s (Proof, Weeds) splendidly quirky performance or the subtle, sly, sublimely powerful work of Oregon Shakespeare Festival veteran Arndt (The Ballad of Soapy Smith, Basic Instinct) as he almost imperceptibly builds the quietly heartbreaking figure of Alex. “You need to follow it. The melody,” Alex tells Georgie when teaching her how to listen to a Bach sonata. “Try to predict what will happen to it next. It will completely take you by surprise.” The same can be said for this beautifully constructed show.

INCOGNITO

Morgan Spector, Geneva Carr, Heather Lind, and Charlie Cox play multiple roles in Nick Payne’s ingenious INCOGNITO (photo by Joan Marcus)

Manhattan Theatre Club
New York City Center Stage 1
Extended through July 10, $105
212-581-1212
incognitoplay.com
www.nycitycenter.org

Some entertainments let us check our brains at the door when we enter a theater, seeking mindless, feel-good entertainment to take us away from the drudgery and complications of modern life. However, thirty-two-year-old British playwright Nick Payne not only forces audiences to use their noggins but uses the human brain as the catalyst and centerpiece of his ingenious play Incognito, which has been extended at City Center through July 10. In such previous works as Constellations, If There Is I Haven’t Found It Yet, and Elegy, science plays a major role as Payne examines such topics as climate change, time, death, string theory, and the multiverse. Loosely inspired by several real stories, Incognito features four actors playing twenty parts built around three intertwining scenarios. Dr. Thomas Harvey (Spector) has performed the autopsy on Albert Einstein, cutting out his brain and bringing it home with him for further study. (Yes, this is based on fact.) “I got the professor in fronta me, I already opened him up and I’m looking at this . . . brain, and I’m thinking to myself: this could be the biggest moment of my life. So I took it,” the pathologist tells his incredulous wife, Elouise (Carr). Meanwhile, Dr. Victor Milner (Spector) is meeting with his patient, pianist Henry Maison (Cox), an epileptic who, following a brain operation to try to stop his seizures, now suffers from short-term memory loss, essentially restarting every forty-five seconds. His devoted wife, Margaret Thomson (Lind), is attempting to use musical therapy to help him, but Henry seems to have forgotten how to play the piano as well. In the third arc, Dr. Martha Murphy (Carr) is a divorced clinical neuropsychologist going on her first date with a woman, the free-spirited Patricia Thorn (Lind). Over the course of eighty-five breathless minutes, the stories overlap and intertwine either directly or conceptually as Payne explores love, grief, memory, identity, and time-and-space relativity.

Morgan Spector and Geneva Carr face off while Charlie Cox and Heather Lind watch in dazzling play by Nick Payne (photo by Joan Marcus)

Divided into three sections — Encoding, Storing, and Retrieving — Incognito takes place on Scott Pask’s essentially simple set, a circular platform with four chairs. The characters and multiple plotlines change instantly, like the firing of neurons in the brain, often in the middle of a conversation or sentence, the actors, wearing the same clothes throughout, using different accents and manners of speaking to indicate the sudden shifts in time and place, along with lighting cues from Ben Stanton. In addition, there is occasional abstract movement set to music by David Van Tieghem. It’s all seamlessly directed by Tony winner Doug Hughes (Doubt, The Father) and expertly acted by Carr, Cox, Lind, and Spector, who effortlessly slide from one role to another as the stories weave together in this Manhattan Theatre Club production. “Our brains are constantly, exhaustively working overtime to deliver the illusion that we’re in control, but we’re not,” Martha tells Patricia. “The brain builds a narrative to steady us from moment to moment, but it’s ultimately an illusion. There is no me, there is no you, and there is certainly no self; we are divided and discontinuous and constantly being duped. The brain is a storytelling machine and it’s really, really good at fooling us.” The same can be said for Payne’s marvelously constructed play, which makes audiences’ brains work overtime, but it’s well worth it. “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world,” one of Martha’s patients, Anthony (Spector), tells her, quoting Einstein. Incognito is riveting theater, with knowledge and imagination to spare.