Tag Archives: Mia Katigbak

TOMORROW WILL BE SUNDAY (working title) READING AND Q&A

working title

Who: Heather Raffo, Jenny Koons, Bill Buell, Laura Crotte, Carol Halstead, Mia Katigbak, CTC 2020 conservatory members
What: Online workshop reading of new play with Q&A
Where: CHQ Virtual Porch On Demand
When: Wednesday, July 22, free with RSVP (donations encouraged), 8:15
Why: During the pandemic, Chautauqua Institution in southwestern New York State has been hosting virtual events via its CHQ Virtual Porch hub, including the “Cocktails, Concerts & Conversations” series with members of Chautauqua Opera Company and Chautauqua Dance, master classes, lectures, and music recitals. On July 22 at 8:15, Chautauqua Theater Company will present a virtual reading of Tomorrow Will Be Sunday, a new play by Heather Raffo (Palace of the End, 9 Parts of Desire), directed by Jenny Koons (A Sucker Emcee, Queen of the Night). Performed by Bill Buell, Laura Crotte, Carol Halstead, Mia Katigbak, and members of the CTC 2020 conservatory, the play (with a working title) is a thriller that explores migration and the global economy. The reading will be followed by a live Q&A.

PEACE FOR MARY FRANCES

A dysfunctional family receives important information about hospice care in Peace for Mary Frances (photo by Monique Carboni)

The New Group at the Pershing Square Signature Center
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 17, $30-$125
www.thenewgroup.org

Having recently lived through situations resembling those in Peace for Mary Frances, Lily Thorne’s debut play that opened tonight at the Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre at the Pershing Square Signature Center, it wasn’t easy for me to sit through the New Group production. Unfortunately, that wasn’t because the 155-minute play was right on target, offering me a cathartic experience. Thorne, who has worked on several documentaries and is currently getting her MFA in playwriting at Brooklyn College, has written a lifeless drama about end-of-life care. It feels more like an instructional primer on what to do when a loved one is dying than a dramatic work that sheds light on what can be a devastating time. Eighty-seven-year-old Lois Smith stars as Mary Frances, the matriarch of a dysfunctional West Hartford family. As her quality of life deteriorates, Mary Frances tells her Armenian-American family that she wants hospice care so she can be as comfortable as possible at home for whatever time she has left. It proves difficult for her two daughters, Fanny (Johanna Day), a divorced drug addict who works as a security guard at the Y and is estranged from her daughter, and Alice (J. Smith-Cameron), a divorced astrologist with no money and two grown children of her own, Helen (Heather Burns), a TV star, and Rosie (Natalie Gold), a married mom with two kids. While Fanny and Alice fight brutally, nonstop, Mary Frances’s son, Eddie (Paul Lazar), a divorced lawyer, comes by once a week, watches TV, and eats sushi, avoiding getting involved in anything of real importance. As Mary Frances hangs on longer than expected — “Typically, people don’t leave this life until their unfinished business is taken care of,” hospice nurse Bonnie (Mia Katigbak) says — the family relationships devolve into a crazy mess.

Mary Frances (Lois Smith) argues with daughter Alice (J. Smith Cameron) as granddaughter Helen (Heather Burns) looks on in New Group world premiere (photo by Monique Carboni)

Peace for Mary Frances takes place on Dane Laffrey’s two-level set, a suburban living room / kitchen and Mary Frances’s upstairs bedroom, all decked out in flowery designs. Director Lila Neugebauer has done sensational work, particularly at Lincoln Center and the Signature, with such plays as At Home at the Zoo, The Antipodes, Everybody, The Wolves, and The Wayside Motor Inn, showing an innate sense of narrative structure, choreographed movement, and cutting-edge staging that both challenges and entertains. But she has little to work with here, unable to bring life to Thorne’s deadening dialogue and forced conflicts. Early on, Rosie and Helen are unable to lift Mary Frances off the couch. But when the scene ends a few moments later, Smith gets up herself and walks up the stairs. It instantly destroys the theatrical illusion that Mary Frances is dying, taking the audience out of the story and damaging the empathy we are trying to have with the characters. In addition, throughout the play, there is a hard-to-identify noise that seems to be coming from the front left of the stage. My companion and I wondered whether it was an audience member who was breathing very loudly (or was snoring), the air-conditioning, or part of the show, sounds meant to represent Mary Frances’s oxygen machine, mimicking the rhythm of her breathing. I even asked an usher what it was during intermission and she was not sure. (The script does say, “The machines are on and pumping throughout the play.”) If it was indeed intentional, it was ridiculously distracting. The play also sadly wastes the talent of two-time Tony nominee and Obie winner Smith, who recently starred in the stage and film versions of Marjorie Prime and previously did excellent work at the Signature in Annie Baker’s John and Sam Shepard’s Heartless. Despite an extremely talented director and an acting legend, Thorne’s debut is on life support from the beginning, and it goes on far too long before the plug is pulled.

JAPAN SOCIETY PLAY READING SERIES: MANHOOD

Japan Society Play Reading Series continues March 26 with Hideto Iwai’s Manhood

Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Monday, March 26, $15, 7:30
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

Japan Society’s 110th anniversary season continues March 26 with the thirteenth installment of its popular Play Reading Series, which features staged readings of works by up-and-coming Japanese playwrights translated into English. The latest is Hideto Iwai’s Manhood, which follows four men facing the natural aging process. The play is directed by Sarah Hughes (Wood Calls Out to Wood, Afterward) with a gender-swapped cast of Kate Benson, Ugo Anyanwu, Zoë Geltman, Daniel K. Isaac, Kristine Haruna Lee, and Mia Katigbak. Playwright, actor, director, and Kishida Kunio Award winner Iwai (A Certain Woman, The Husband and Wife), a former hikikomori who spent four years as a recluse because of violence he suffered at the hands of his father and brother, and Hughes, who directs and produces theater and new media, will participate in a Q&A following the reading. Previous works in the Japan Society series include Ai Nagai’s Women in a Holy Mess, directed by Cynthia Croot, Suguru Yamamoto’s Girl X, directed by Charlotte Brathwaite, and Seiji Nozoe’s Dancing with the Bird, directed by James Yaegashi.

AWAKE AND SING!

Ralph (Jon Norman Schneider), Uncle Morty (Andrew Ramcharan Guilarte), and Grandpa Jacob (Alok Tewari) face a series of crises in all-Asian revival of Clifford Odets’s AWAKE AND SING! (photo by William P. Steele)

Walkerspace
46 Walker St.
Tuesday – Sunday, through September 8, $25
866-811-4111
www.naatco.org

It’s been fifty years since writer and director Clifford Odets died of stomach cancer at the age of fifty-seven, and it is thrilling to see his work currently undergoing a kind of renaissance. Late last year, a seventy-fifth anniversary production of Golden Boy opened on Broadway and was nominated for a Tony, and this past spring brought the first Broadway revival of the 1949 Hollywood drama The Big Knife. But the National Asian American Theatre Co. (NAATCO) takes a somewhat different approach in its wonderfully small-scale, deeply intimate version of Odets’s first, and one of his best, plays, Awake and Sing! Written for Odets’s Group Theatre in 1935, the play follows the exploits of the Berger family, who live together in a cramped Bronx apartment. It’s 1933, and the Great Depression is continuing to take its toll. The household is run by domineering mother Bessie (NAATCO cofounder and artistic producing director Mia Katigbak), who is married to the meek and often clueless Myron (Henry Yuk). Son Ralph (Jon Norman Schneider) has no career direction and a girlfriend his mother disapproves of, while daughter Hennie (Teresa Avia Lim) has just gotten knocked up, with the man who did it out of the picture. While Bessie tries to orchestrate and control everyone’s lives, her father, Jacob (Alok Tewari), spouts Marxist doctrine and her well-dressed brother, Morty (Andrew Ramcharan Guilarte), waxes poetic about success in business. Also hanging around is Moe Axelrod (Sanjit De Silva), a street-smart character who offers his own take on the future.

Bessie Berger (Mia Katigback) will do whatever it takes to protect the honor of her family in NAATCO revival of Clifford Odets’s first play (photo by William P. Steele)

As opposed to its two big-time Broadway productions — Awake and Sing! premiered on the Great White Way in 1935, directed by Harold Clurman and starring Luther Adler, Stella Adler, Morris Carnovsky, John Garfield, and Sanford Meisner, while the Tony-winning 2006 revival was directed by Bartlett Sher and featured Ben Gazzara, Zoe Wanamaker, Mark Ruffalo, Lauren Ambrose, and Pablo Schreiber — NAATCO’s three-act production takes place in the reconfigured Walkerspace theater in SoHo, where Anshuman Bhatia’s set design consists of a dining-room table, a couch, and some chairs in a narrow rectangular center area, with the fifty-member audience seated in two rows on the longer sides, making them feel like part of the family. The all-Asian cast gives splendid performances as the Jewish clan, a conceit that lends additional insight into the general themes of poverty, class, and pride, resulting in a more universal scope. Katigbak is particularly effective as the manipulative mother, while De Silva stands out as Axelrod, a voice of reason amid the escalating chaos. Directed by Shakespearean Stephen Fried, the play benefits strongly from the intense eye contact the characters make with one another, something that gets lost on larger stages but is powerful and dramatic here. The Bergers might not find that the streets of America are paved with gold, but this production of Awake and Sing! is very rich indeed.