Tag Archives: Miriam Buether

THE FRAGILITY OF LIFE AND THE PASSAGE OF TIME: FOUR BY CARYL CHURCHILL

Caryl Churchill’s Glass. takes place on a glowing, floating platform (photo by Joan Marcus)

GLASS. KILL. WHAT IF IF ONLY. IMP.
Martinson Theater, the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. at Astor Pl.
Tuesday through Sunday through May 25, $89
212-539-8500
publictheater.org

British playwright Caryl Churchill burrows into the fragility of human life and the concept of impermanence in Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp., four short works being performed together at the Public’s Martinson through May 25.

For more than fifty years, Churchill, now eighty-six, has been writing inventive, experimental plays that challenge audiences through abstract narratives and unique, unexpected stagings, from Cloud Nine and Top Girls to Vinegar Tom and Love and Information, creating her own genre, with flourishes of Beckett, Pinter, and Brecht mixed in. The four-time Obie winner has penned more than fifty works for the stage, radio, and television; three of the pieces at the Public were written in 2019, the fourth in 2021. (Glass., Kill., and Imp. were originally performed with Bluebeard’s Friends at the Royal Court Theatre in September 2019 but has been replaced here by What If If Only, her latest play.)

The 135-minute show (with intermissions) is a triumph for both Churchill and Miriam Buether, whose breathtaking sets lift Churchill’s themes to the next level, along with stunning lighting by Isabella Byrd and compelling sound by Bray Poor, making it a visual and sonic treat. First up is Glass., which unfolds on a glowing rectangular platform hanging in the middle of the space, surrounded by darkness. It’s a kind of mantel where a Girl Made of Glass (Ayana Workman), a Clock (Sathya Sridharan), a Vase (Japhet Balaban), and a Red Plastic Dog (Adelind Horan) interact, attempting to define their existence and importance.

“She doesn’t want to be touched. She’s afraid of being broken,” the Girl’s protective mother says, explaining how there are many cracks in her daughter, who needs bubble wrap to go out.

The defensive Clock tells the Girl, “You’re beautiful but I’m also useful.” The Girl responds, “A clock isn’t useful anymore. Who looks at you? Time’s on the phones.” The Clock answers back, “They look at me because I’m worth looking at. Time from me is richer because I’m old and time’s run through me since before their parents were born. And you see it flow because my second hand goes round and my minute hand goes round and my hour hand goes slowly round and there’s none of this digital jumping. You gaze at me and think how long a minute lasts. Pain for a whole minute would be torture. Joy for a whole minute would be exceptional. And even if I stopped I’d be kept as an object because my history is intriguing and my shape is graceful and my value is unquestioned.”

The Dog says she is a reminder of happy times, even if she’s dusty and hasn’t been played with in years. The Vase is thrilled when the Girl says he is beautiful even without flowers. A group of schoolgirls stop by and taunt the Girl. A friend tells her a secret.

The play ends with a moving monologue in which the Girl expresses her fears in a way we can all relate to, how easy it is to become physically and emotionally damaged.

During the first break, hand balancer Junru Wang performs remarkable feats on canes in the pit in front of the stage as the set is changed behind the red velvet curtain. Wang pushes herself high into the air, stretching, switching hands, and contorting her limbs, a dazzling display of what the human body is capable of, a thrilling counterpoint to the delicate Girl Made of Glass.

Deirdre O’Connell relaxes on a cloud while talking about death in Kill. (photo by Joan Marcus)

In the solo Kill., Tony winner Deirdre O’Connell, wearing all white, sitting comfortably on a floating cloud in a black sky, delivers a treatise on the gods’ power over humans, treating them as playthings as they watch them murder one another as if orchestrating a Greek tragedy for fun. Fathers, mothers, husbands, brothers, cousins, lovers, and kings are brutally murdered, sent to hell, eaten, brought back for more punishment — it’s a vicious cycle of death and destruction put on for pleasure, a sly comment on the theater itself as well as the violence inherent in everyday life.

She begins, “We take this small box and shut the furies up in it, they’re furious and can’t get out, they say let us out and we’ll be kind. We gods can do that sometimes, quieten the furies, we can’t do everything, we don’t exist, people make us up, they make up the furies and how they bite. They’re after the boy, they won’t let him sleep or wake or sleep and he suffers. He suffers and suffers because he kills his mother, which we’re against and so is everyone but he has his reason so he’s right and wrong. He kills his mother, hoping she’ll die quickly, it can’t be over quickly enough, he doesn’t want her unrecognisable but still here, both slipping in the blood, his duty to do it, everyone thinks that and so do we, and he kills her lover happy to kill him but taking out the knife he remembers loving his mother and the nonsense words they’d say to each other though he still has the same hate in his heart coming home as when he’s little and runs away when she’s killing his father.”

It’s a tour de force for O’Connell, the words spilling out in a nonstop poetic assault that underlines humanity’s penchant for real and fictional violence; Churchill also questions the notion of faith, people’s belief that someone else is pulling the strings, be it a supreme being or, perhaps, a playwright, from Ancient Greece or twenty-first-century England. As the god says multiple times, “We don’t exist.”

During the second break, Maddox Morfit-Tighe juggles clubs, involving a few audience members; it’s not as awe-inspiring as what Wang did, and the metaphor is more obvious, but it is still entertaining as the stage is prepared for the third tale.

A man (Sathya Sridharan) faces loss in What If If Only. at the Public (photo by Joan Marcus)

What If If Only. is set in a mysterious large white cube reminiscent of Churchill’s Love and Information. A man identified in the script as Someone on Their Own (Sridharan) is sitting at a small table with a bottle of wine and two chairs; it is apparent that he is waiting for a person who is unlikely to come.

“If I was the one who was dead would you still be talking to me? We once said if one of us died if there was any way of getting in touch we should do it, I thought we’d be old. Are you not trying?” he says. “If you’d wanted to talk to me you could have stayed alive. I’ve nothing to say really, I just miss you. I once thought I saw a ghost, not spooky like Halloween, just a wisp of something standing in the door. I’ve told you this already, do you remember? Is remembering something you can do or has it all gone now? I miss you I miss you I miss you I miss you. I miss you. Please, can you? Just a wisp would be fine. If you can, please. Please, I miss you. A small thing, just any small thing, let me know you’re there somewhere. If you can.”

A woman (Workman) does arrive, but the man is not sure what or who she is. They agree she is at least a little like his lost love, then talk about regrets and possibilities, living and dying. She tells him, “I’m the ghost of a dead future. I’m the ghost of a future that never happened. And if you can make me happen then there would be your beloved real person not a ghost your real real living because what happened will never have happened what happened will be different will be what you want will be a happy happy.”

Soon the walls of the white cube rise and others enter, including a young girl (Cecilia Ann Popp), Asteroid, Empire, Silver, Nature, Small, and a calm, supportive older man (John Ellison Conlee) who tries to help the younger man face the reality of his situation, that there are so many futures but only one that will happen. It’s a gorgeous existential conversation with a surprise conclusion.

Imp. concludes quartet of existential works by Caryl Churchill (photo by Joan Marcus)

Imp. follows a full intermission (without acrobatics), featuring another brilliant set, this time a raggedy living room with a couch, a comfy chair, a floor lamp, and a red oriental rug on a slanted platform. It is the home of nonkissing cousins Jimmy (Conlee) and Dot (O’Connell), who bicker like an old married couple with nothing better to do. While the widowed Jimmy occasionally gets up to go running, training for a half marathon, the divorced Dot never leaves her chair.

Their several-times-removed Irish niece, Niamh (Adelind Horan), was recently orphaned, so she is visiting Jimmy and Dot while making a new life for herself in England. When Niamh says she needs to lose a stone by summer, Dot disagrees and says, “You’re lovely how you are. Don’t do it.” Jimmy argues, “Leave her alone, goals are good, you want everyone not to be fit so they’re no better than you. Just like you want everyone to be miserable.” Dot barks back, “You’re fattist is what he is, not he’s the fattest, Niamh, I mean like racist.” It’s rarely easy to parse Dot’s logic.

Another day they are speaking with the homeless Rob (Sridharan), a world traveler who’s been sleeping in a cemetery, wanting to go back to his son and estranged wife. The ever-suspicious Dot worries that if they let him stay in their house, he might kill them and take the residence for himself. “Why would he want to do that? He’s not stupid,” Jimmy says. Dot replies, “But if he could get away with it and have the flat. Don’t tell me you’ve never thought it.” Rob deadpans, “I’ve never thought it.” Soon Dot and Jimmy are hoping that Niamh and Rob get together.

They delve into faith and religion, with Niamh wondering what being Catholic ever did for her except make her terrified of sin and hell. Dot, a former nurse, is afraid of her temper, which might have cost her her marriage and career. Rob is deeply worried about his immediate future. Meanwhile, Jimmy is an eternal optimist.

But when Jimmy tells Rob about the bottle Dot keeps that she claims has a wish-giving imp in it, new questions arise about what’s next.

There might be a period after the name of each part of Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp., but they form a cohesive whole in this stellar production, gorgeously directed by longtime Churchill collaborator James Macdonald (Infinite Life, Escaped Alone). In three of the four plays, the characters wear Enver Chakartash’s casual, naturalistic costumes (O’Connell is in heavenly garb in Kill.), equating them with the audience, making the otherworldliness more believable. The pain of loss, the brittleness of life, the lack of power humans have over their destiny hover over all four plays. In each one, there is also trepidation about the future of each character, the sets tilted and suspended in ways that make it seem like the actors could at any moment fall off into the darkness or be trapped in blazing white light.

Churchill and Macdonald practically implore us to take a look at ourselves and examine how we deal with faith, grief, and, perhaps most important, time. “I sit on the mantelpiece and time goes by,” the Girl says in Glass. The characters in the other three works also are often sitting down, not taking action but watching and waiting.

It’s enough to force you to face your own future once you get out of your theater seat and venture back into the real world.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

A TALE OF TWO ACTORS: STEVE CARELL AND MICHAEL STUHLBARG ON BROADWAY

Steve Carell did not receive a Tony nod for his Broadway debut in Uncle Vanya (photo by Marc J. Franklin)

UNCLE VANYA
Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center Theater
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday – Saturday through June 16, $104-$348
212-362-7600
www.lct.org

PATRIOTS
Ethel Barrymore Theatre
243 West Forty-Seventh St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 23, $49–$294
patriotsbroadway.com

When the 2024 Tony nominations were announced on April 30, there were several notable names missing, particularly that of Steve Carell. The Massachusetts-born Carell, sixty-one, is currently finishing up his Broadway debut as the title character in Heidi Schreck’s muddled new translation of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, running at the Vivian Beaumont through June 16. The show received a single nomination, for Carell’s costar William Jackson Harper as Best Actor in a Play, for his portrayal of Dr. Astrov; Schreck and director Lila Neugebauer focus so much on the doctor that the play ought to be renamed Dr. Astrov.

Carell, who cut his comic chops at Second City in Chicago and on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, has been nominated for an Emmy eleven times for his role as Michael Scott on The Office, and he received a Best Actor Oscar nod for his portrayal of the real-life multimillionaire and murderer John Eleuthère du Pont in Foxcatcher. Carell has also appeared in such films and television series as The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Little Miss Sunshine, The Big Short, and The Morning Show as well as the very dark limited series The Patient.

One name that might have been a surprise was that of Michael Stuhlbarg. The California-born Stuhlbarg, fifty-five, is currently finishing up his role as the real-life Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky in Peter Morgan’s bumpy but ultimately satisfying Patriots, running at the Ethel Barrymore through June 23. The nomination was the only one for the play, which is directed by Rupert Goold.

All five of the nominees are known for their work on television; in addition to theater veteran Harper, who played Danny Rebus on the reboot of The Electric Company and Chidi Anagonye on The Good Place, the nominees include Emmy winner Jeremy Strong of Succession for An Enemy of the People, nine-time Emmy nominee and Tony winner Liev Schreiber of Ray Donovan for Doubt: A Parable, and Tony and Grammy winner and Emmy and Oscar nominee Leslie Odom Jr. of Smash for Purlie Victorious (A Non-Confederate Romp through the Cotton Patch).

A two-time Emmy and Tony nominee and Obie and Drama Desk winner, Stuhlbarg has appeared in such films as A Serious Man, Call Me by Your Name, and The Shape of Water; has portrayed such villains on TV as Arnold Rothstein in Boardwalk Empire, Jimmy Baxter in Your Honor, and Richard Sackler in Dopesick; and has seven Shakespeare plays on his resume in addition to Cabaret, The Pillowman, and The Invention of Love on Broadway.

Michael Stuhlbarg received his second Tony nomination for his role as Boris Berezovsky in Patriots (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Uncle Vanya and Patriots are both set in Russia after the fall of the Berlin Wall, around the time of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika program, although the exact time of Schreck’s narrative is never specifically stated. Vanya has sacrificed happiness in order to manage the family estate with Sonia (Alison Pill), his niece. When professor Alexander (Alfred Molina) — who was married to Vanya’s late sister, Sonia’s mother — and his younger, sexy wife Elena (Anika Noni Rose), arrive at the estate with plans to sell it, Vanya, who is in love with Elena and is not a terrific businessman, is forced to take stock of his life, and he doesn’t like what he sees.

Boris of Patriots is a stark contrast: He seeks out the many pleasures the world has to offer, determined, since childhood, to be a success with power and influence, unconcerned with the bodies he leaves in his wake. Cutting a deal with Alexander Stalyevich Voloshin (Jeff Biehl), Boris assures the politician that he is going to be a rich man. “No good being rich if I’m dead,” Voloshin says, to which Boris responds, “It’s always good being rich.” Boris believes he is in control of Russia when he chooses to groom a minor functionary as president, intending to make him his puppet, but the man, Vladimir Putin (Will Keen), ultimately has other ideas and soon becomes Boris’s hated enemy.

Carell hovers in the background of Uncle Vanya, giving the stage over to the other characters, similar to how Vanya has surrendered taking action in his life. He often sits and mopes on a couch in the back, fading into the shadows; even when he pulls out a gun, he is too meek and mild. For the play to work, the audience needs to connect emotionally with Vanya, but Carell can’t quite carry off the key moments.

Stuhlbarg leaps across Miriam Buether’s multilevel stage with boundless energy in Patriots as Boris battles Putin over the heart and soul of Russia. Boris has no fear, until he realizes that Putin is a lot more than he ever bargained for. “I will make sure the Russian people learn to love our little puppet,” Boris says, but it’s too late. “The fact is I am president,” Putin declares. Boris responds, “And I put you there!!!!!” To which Putin replies, “That’s opinion. Not fact.”

Carell may be more of a household name than Stuhlbarg, but the latter gained notoriety when, on March 31, a homeless man struck him with a rock near Central Park, and Stuhlbarg, much like Boris most likely would have done, chased after him until the police caught up with the attacker outside of the Russian consulate on East Ninety-First. The consulate was a fitting location for the two-time Tony nominee.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

JUNGLE BOOK REIMAGINED

Akram Khan reimagines The Jungle Book for contemporary audiences at Lincoln Center (photo © Ambra Vernuccio)

JUNGLE BOOK reimagined
Rose Theater, Frederick P. Rose Hall
Broadway at 60th St.
November 16-18, pay-what-you-wish (suggested price $35), 7:30
www.lincolncenter.org
www.akramkhancompany.net

“We are now living in unprecedented and uncertain times, not only for our species but for all species on this planet,” artistic director, dancer, and choreographer Akram Khan notes. “And the root cause of this conundrum is because we have forgotten our connection to our home, our planet. We all inhabit it, we all take from it, and we all build on it, but we have forgotten to return our respect for it.”

Khan takes a new look at The Jungle Book, which was first an 1894 collection by Rudyard Kipling and then a popular 1967 Disney animated musical film, in Jungle Book reimagined, a two-hour show that focuses on colonization, refugees, gender, and climate change. The story is written by Tariq Jordan, with music by Jocelyn Pook; Khan is the director and choreographer, with sound by Gareth Fry, lighting by Michael Hulls, visual stage design by Miriam Buether, art and animation direction by Adam Smith, and video design by Nick Hillel.

The work is performed by Maya Balam Meyong, Tom Davis-Dunn, Harry Theadora Foster, Filippo Franzese, Bianca Mikahil, Max Revell, Matthew Sandiford, Pui Yung Shum, Elpida Skourou, Holly Vallis, Jan Mikaela Villanueva, and Luke Watson.

Tickets are pay-what-you-wish, with a suggested price of $35, to see this multimedia production appropriate for children ten and up.

PRIMA FACIE

Jodie Comer makes a scintillating Broadway debut in Prima Facie (photo by Bronwen Sharp)

PRIMA FACIE
Golden Theatre
252 West Forty-Fifth St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 2, $31-$335
primafacieplay.com

Jodie Comer is scintillating in her Broadway debut as a British barrister who has the tables turned on her in Suzie Miller’s Prima Facie, continuing at the Golden Theatre through July 2. In fact, it’s only the second professional stage appearance ever for the thirty-year-old Liverpool-born native, who had a supporting role in Fiona Evans’s The Price of Everything in 2010 but gained fame portraying assassin Villanelle in the television series Killing Eve.

In the Olivier-winning Prima Facie — which means “on the face of it” and is pronounced PRIME-ah FAY-see by the author, a former human rights and criminal defense lawyer herself— Comer portrays Tessa Ensler, a hotshot member of the Kings Counsel who specializes in sexual assault cases, often defending men accused of attacking women. For the first half of the ninety-minute play, she prowls across Miriam Buether’s caged set, contained within a neon frame that flashes bright light; Comer rearranges two tables and a handful of rolling chairs as she goes from law school and a courtroom to a bar, her office, her apartment, and her childhood home, where her mother and brother live. A ceiling-high bookshelf surrounds her on three sides, packed with white law journals.

In a fury of words and movement, she boasts about how the law to her is all about winning, doing whatever is necessary for her client. “It’s not emotional for me. It’s the game. The game of law,” she proclaims. She describes her cat-and-mouse legal style with relish. “There’s blood in the water and I let the witness swim on. No one can help him. And he swims right into it,” she explains. “I fire four questions like bullets. Bang. Bang. Bang bang,” she exults with glee. She makes it clear that it’s not about guilt or innocence, telling her colleagues that whether her clients did what they’re accused of or not is none of her concern. “You don’t play God, you don’t decide, or judge,” she says. Later, she explains, “The only way the system works is because we all play our roles. My role is defense, the prosecutor prosecutes; we each tell a story and the jury decide which story is the one they believe. They take the responsibility. . . . If a few guilty people get off, then it’s because the job was not done well enough by the prosecutor and the police.”

But Tessa’s world is rocked when she is sexually assaulted by her coworker Julian Brookes, a man she might have been building a relationship with and who she had previously slept with. Suddenly she is in the witness stand, being grilled by an attorney whose job it is to find holes in her story and to make it look like the act was not a crime but consensual. Even as she spots some of the same tricks she uses when she is the barrister, she realizes that the law is not necessarily about finding out what really happened. “The system I’ve dedicated my life to is called upon, by me, to find the truth. To provide justice,” she says as the prosecution starts its case.

Tessa Ensler (Jodie Comer) watches herself being interviewed in play about sexual assault and the law (photo by Bronwen Sharp)

Originally presented in Australia in 2019, Prima Facie arrives in New York at a watershed moment in American history. On May 9, 2023, a jury found former president Donald Trump liable for sexual assault, battery, and defamation, ordering him to pay $5 million in damages to journalist E. Jean Carroll, who he quickly defamed again. Last month, US Supreme Court associate justice Clarence Thomas was accused of numerous financial ethics violations; his 1991 confirmation hearings were delayed when Anita Hill accused him of sexual harassment. In October 2018, Brett Kavanaugh started serving as an associate justice on the Court following a contentious confirmation hearing that focused on sexual misconduct claims made by Christine Blasey Ford.

Those episodes called into question if, when, and how women’s accusations against men should be believed, bitterly dividing the nation along political lines, with people supporting the man or the woman depending on party. Meanwhile, public confidence in the justice system has been dropping, with approval ratings for state and federal courts and the US Supreme Court all trending downward.

Prima Facie is not a comeuppance for a lawyer who suddenly finds herself a wronged survivor but a cautionary tale warning that all women are susceptible to such treatment, no matter how knowledgeable about the law and regardless of the truth itself. Miller (Sunset Strip, Caress/Ache) puts everyone on notice, showing that the legal system is no game, despite what Tessa was taught in law school and as Kings Counsel, what happens when “a woman’s experience of sexual assault does not fit the male-defined system of truth.”

The fight is relentless; there’s a reason why Miller gave Tessa the last name Ensler, after playwright and activist Eve Ensler, now known as V, who was sexually and physically abused by her father and since 2011 has led V-Day, a global organization dedicated to ending violence against all women and girls on the planet.

Director Justin Martin (The Jungle, Low Level Panic) lets Emmy winner Comer cut free in the first half of the play but slows things down once Tessa reports the crime and is questioned at the police station and later in court. Comer is a whirling dervish at the start, dancing on tables, quickly changing costumes (by Buether) from suit to robes to party outfit, and tossing her peruke (legal wig) like it’s both a charm and a burden she fully controls.

But once Tessa is raped by Julian and decides to pursue charges, Comer explores the character’s self-doubt as Tessa’s grip on the law loosens amid systemic pitfalls that make sexual assault so difficult to prove, beginning with the distrust of the survivor’s claim that it was not consensual. At one point, we observe Tessa watching a video of her interrogation by police, stunned by her lack of confidence in relating her story. “I’d only ever seen video footage of rooms like this one,” she says. “Watching a client’s interrogation while sitting with my feet on the desk in chambers. All my sass and outrage at the tricks the police play. It’s different when you’re in here.”

Natasha Chivers’s lighting illuminates the bookshelves in soft blues and glowing white before suddenly turning to complete darkness; the video design, by William Williams for Treatment Studio, features a monitor suspended from above like a ghost. Ben and Max Ringham’s effective sound highlights an underlying propulsiveness and British musician Rebecca Lucy Taylor’s (aka Self Esteem) cinematic score.

The play, which has partnered with the Schools Consent Project and other organizations, does get preachy as the conclusion approaches and doesn’t hide its point of view — the program comes with a pull-out poster that lists disturbing facts about sexual assault and proclaims, “On the Face of It, Something Has to Change” — but Comer rises above the occasional didacticism by her sheer force of will. It’s a remarkable stage debut for a vastly talented television, film, and now theater actor on the rise.

During Carroll’s civil case against Trump, she was asked why she didn’t scream when he allegedly attacked her; it became a core issue of discussion. During the trial in Prima Facie, Tessa is asked, “Did you say anything else? Scream?” It’s a chilling moment that is likely to make you want to scream yourself.

THE JUNGLE

Salar (Ben Turner) makes his case to Sam (Jonathan Case) in The Jungle (photo by Teddy Wolff)

THE JUNGLE
St. Ann’s Warehouse
45 Water St.
Through March 19, $39-$149
718-254-8779
stannswarehouse.org
www.goodchance.org.uk

Amid an ever-growing global immigration crisis, Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson’s bold, breathtaking The Jungle makes a triumphant return to St. Ann’s Warehouse before heading to Washington, DC. It’s political theater of the highest order, avoiding preaching while immersing audiences in all-too-real and frightening situations.

In 2015, Murphy and Robertson visited the Calais Jungle, a makeshift refugee camp where thousands of men, women, and children temporarily lived, erected on a former landfill. Over their seven months at the site, they helped construct a geodesic dome where the people could gather as a community and present plays and poetry. The two writers document the story in The Jungle, which ran at St. Ann’s in 2018–19 but had to delay its encore engagement, scheduled for March 2020, because of the coronavirus pandemic. But it’s now back, and it’s as thrilling as it is heart-wrenching.

St. Ann’s has transformed itself into Zhangal, or the Jungle, with geographical markers, the Good Chance Dome (filled with photographs and artwork from camp residents), tents, graffiti, and a re-creation of Salar’s (Ben Turner) restaurant, which actually received a starred review from food critic AA Gill in the Sunday Times. The large central area features long communal tables and an interconnected series of raised platforms; the diverse cast of twenty-two (some of whom were migrants themselves) weave in and out of the audience, which is seated in sections designated by the countries the refugees escaped from. The framing premise is that we are all attending an emergency meeting “to talk about another proposed eviction of the Jungle.” The narrative then unfolds in flashback.

Beth (Liv Hill) and Safi (Ammar Haj Ahmad) try to help Okot (Rudolphe Mdlongwa) in immersive show at St. Ann’s (photo by Teddy Wolff)

“When does a place become a place?” asks the Aleppo-born Safi (Ammar Haj Ahmad), one of the leaders of the camp and the show’s narrator. “By November in the Jungle I could walk from Sudan through Palestine and Syria, pop into a Pakistani café on Oxford Street near Egypt, buy new shoes from the marketplace, Belgian cigarettes from an Iraqi cornershop, through Somalia, hot naan from the Kurdish baker, passing dentists, Eritrea, distribution points, Kuwait, hairdressers and legal centers, turn right onto François Hollande Street, turn left onto David Cameron’s Avenue, stop at the sauna, catch a play in the theater, service at the church, khutba in a mosque, before arriving at Salar’s restaurant in Afghanistan.” He then poignantly adds, “When does a place become home?”

The dome is named the Good Chance because the refugees believe they have a “good chance” of making it to the promised land, England, either via boat or truck, often arranged by Ali (Waleed Elgadi), a smuggler who charges exorbitant rates for his services. Several Caucasian British citizens work at the camp to help the migrants: Derek (Dominic Rowan), who almost always carries a clipboard with him, trying to organize things; Beth (Liv Hill), who pours her heart and soul into the camp; Paula (Julie Hesmondhalgh), who takes a more practical approach; and Sam (Jonathan Case), who is committed to build as many housing shelters as possible.

They treat the people of the Jungle with dignity, but there are limits to what they can accomplish. They also have the option at any time to go back to their homes, a choice not available to the migrants, who have left because of violence, extreme poverty, religious persecution, military juntas, and other reasons, seeking a better, safer life in the west.

Amal (Aisha Simone Baez) seeks a new life filled with hope and promise in The Jungle at St. Ann’s (photo by Teddy Wolff)

Among the key subplots are Okot’s (Rudolphe Mdlongwa) attempt to be smuggled into London; a deal between French journalist Henri (Max Geller) and Sam to exchange important information; the bitter Norullah’s (Twana Omer) racism; the plight of the adorable Amal (alternately Aisha Simone Baez or Annabelle Tural), a nine-year-old girl from Syria who has been separated from her family; and Salar’s refusal to let his restaurant be torn down when the French government announces that the southern half of the camp will be evicted. Boxer (Pearce Quigley) and Helene (Mylène Gomera) sing; Omar (Mohamed Sarrar) plays the drums; Amin (Habib Djemil) performs daring gymnastics; Maz (Fedrat Sadat) is desperate to get out. Amid all the horror and pain, the ragtag community still finds ways to celebrate life and their unique heritages through music, dance, food, and clothing.

“Great is the hope that makes man cross borders. Greater is the hope that keeps us alive,” Safi says.

Miriam Buether’s set, which extends into the garden outside St. Ann’s, also includes flags, a working kitchen, wall hangings, and other deft touches; there’s a ketchup bottle on every table, but don’t expect to get anything to eat. Catherine Kodicek’s costumes alternate between functional and traditional, highlighting the similarities and differences among the nations. The lighting by Jon Clark and sound by Paul Arditti further immerse the audience into the Jungle, especially at night when the characters use flashlights and whisper in the darkness. The music, ranging from celebratory to mysterious, is by John Pfumojena, with video by Tristan Shepherd and Duncan McLean of real-life news reports projected on several small monitors, instilling a chilling dose of reality.

The cast is extraordinary, embodying the fear that the refugees experience on a daily basis, never knowing what tomorrow might bring. Turner is bold and defiant as Salar, a man who has lost nearly everything but refuses to surrender his restaurant. Haj Ahmad is cool and calm as Safi, who is desperately trying to hold things together but knows it might be a lost cause. Hill excels as the emotionally involved Beth, who represents rescue workers who invest so much of themselves to save others. Omer is stalwart as Norullah, who is balancing that fine line between wanting to escape to England and doing the best one can in the meantime. And Baez is delightful as the little girl who can’t help but smile as chaos surrounds her.

Directors Stephen Daldry (Skylight, Billy Elliot) — who has won two Emmys, an Olivier, and three Tonys and has been nominated for three Oscars — and Justin Martin (Low Level Panic, Prima Facie), who previously collaborated on the 2021 pandemic film Together and are used to working with proscenium stages, do a marvelous job orchestrating the nonstop action, maintaining a furious pace as the injustice builds over nearly three hours (with one intermission). Murphy and Robertson’s dialogue is distinct and powerful, creating well-drawn characters who will touch your soul.

A program insert contains information about how to donate to Good Chance Theatre and the Brooklyn Community Foundation’s Immigrant Rights Fund as well as additional resources about immigration services. (The show is a coproduction of the National Theatre and the Young Vic with Good Chance.)

The artistic directors of Good Chance, Murphy and Robertson also turned the young girl in The Jungle into Little Amal, a twelve-foot-tall puppet that traveled around the world in The Walk, spreading her message about refugees: “Don’t forget about us.” It’s impossible to forget about Little Amal, just as it’s impossible to forget about The Jungle.

HYMN

Danny Sapani and Adrian Lester rehearse Hymn with director Blanche McIntyre for livestream (photo by Marc Brenner)

HYMN
Almeida Theatre
Available on demand through March 9, £15-£40
almeida.co.uk

Last month, London’s Almeida Theatre streamed several live performances of Lolita Chakrabarti’s new play, Hymn, followed by two discussions, all held with no audience. A recorded version of the sizzling two-character show is now available on demand, but only through March 9, so act quickly if you want to catch this stellar production. (You can watch the discussions any time here.)

The play starts with the two actors, Adrian Lester and Danny Sapani, walking onto the long, vertical wooden thrust stage wearing masks. They stop on opposite sides of a piano, turn off the house lights, click on a metronome, walk down the set, and circle around a small bottle of booze and a Bible, two items that men turn to in times of strife. Gil (Lester) picks up the latter, while Benny (Sapani) scoops up the former. They determinedly remove their masks, and the sound of shattering glass kicks off the dialogue.

“What the hell?” a surprised Benny, wearing a dark T-shirt, shouts at an unseen barman. “Get off me! Move your fuckin’ hands! . . . Been a shit day; I just’ wanna drink! People to stand next to. Nothing wrong with that, is there?” Actually, in the era of Covid-19, there is a lot wrong with that, and although the coronavirus is not part of the play, it is central to director Blanche McIntyre’s compelling staging.

Gil and Benny meet each other at the funeral service for Gil’s beloved, well-respected father, Augustus Clarence Jones, a successful stationer and family man known affectionately as “Gus.” But Gil is forced to reevaluate his father’s image after learning that Benny is his half-brother, only six days younger, the product of an affair between Gus and Benny’s mother. Gil rejects Benny’s claim outright at first, but soon they are having an exhilarating bromance, living a kind of fantasy, until reality takes hold again.

Hymn is beautifully written, directed, acted, and, perhaps most important, filmed. Even though this version is prerecorded with no audience, it has the feel of live theater, as photographed by screen director Matt Hargraves and his team of camera operators. McIntyre (The Writer, Women in Power) does a terrific job of keeping the two actors apart — they never come into contact with one another, never touch the same objects, keep at least six feet apart when standing still, even as they grow very close emotionally on the narrow stage. Chakrabarti (Last Seen, Life of Pi), who is married to Lester — the playwright and actors have all worked together previously, and Chakrabarti wrote Hymn specifically for her husband and Sapani — has created a fascinating relationship between the two men, who, despite sharing the same father, are very different people, neither exactly what they first appear to be. There’s nothing new about the plot itself — someone shows up at a funeral to claim they are a long-lost or hidden-away relative — but it’s treated with such care and humor that you’ll be sucked in immediately.

The spare set and costumes, which come into play big-time in one exhilarating scene, are by Miriam Buether, with lighting by Prema Mehta, sound by Gregory Clarke, and musical direction by D. J. Walde. The show features a handful of songs sung by Lester and Sapani, including Bill Withers’s “Lean on Me” and the Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” which easily could have been schmaltzy but instead point at how much the half-siblings need each other.

Hymn is a moving, powerful ninety-minute piece that, though a product of its time — it also delves briefly but critically into the BLM protests — well deserves to be brought back post-lockdown, when audiences will be able to absorb its elegance and artistry in person. Lester (Company, Sweeney Todd), who battled the coronavirus with Chakrabarti over Christmas, and Sapani (Invisible Cities, Big White Fog) capture their evolving feelings of brotherly love with intelligence and grace, fully immersed in the characters’ ever-more-complicated lives, sharing what Benny calls “sympathetic resonance.” In his eulogy at the beginning, Gil remembers his father telling him, “Music is silence, sound, and time. If you listen, Son, you’ll hear it too.” You can experience all that and more in this special production.

KING LEAR ON BROADWAY

Glenda Jackson wonders where it all went wrong in King Lear revival on Broadway (photo by Brigitte Lacombe)

Cort Theatre
138 West 48th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 9, $35-$129
www.kinglearonbroadway.com

Theater aficionados would likely pay good money to watch the inimitable Glenda Jackson read the phone book, as the proverbial platitude goes. But director Sam Gold challenges that now-outdated cliché with his misguided production of King Lear, which boasts the remarkable actress and former longtime British MP as Shakespeare’s declining ruler. On the night I attended, early in the show a valet bringing Lear the crown stumbled and dropped the prop. Jackson let out an angry howl that echoed throughout the Cort Theatre in what looked to be an ad-lib, but it summed up everyone’s frustration with Gold’s handling of the tragedy. The usually dependable and insightful Tony and Obie winner (Fun Home, Circle Mirror Transformation) seems to be going out of his way to unnecessarily complicate virtually every aspect of this consistently awkward staging.

King Lear (Glenda Jackson) has something to say to his youngest daughter, Cordelia (Ruth Wilson) (photo by Brigitte Lacombe)

The story takes place in a gold-plated rectangular, horizontal space, with characters in relatively modern dress. (The set is by Miriam Buether, with costumes by Ann Roth.) Ruth Wilson is excellent as both Cordelia and the Fool, although it is sometimes hard to tell when she is one or the other. John Douglas Thompson is stalwart as Kent, his authoritative voice booming, but the rest of the cast seems lost, seeking Gold to guide them not unlike poor Tom (Sean Carvajal) leading his blinded father, Gloucester (Jayne Houdyshell), to the edge of a precipice. The Duke of Cornwall is portrayed by Russell Harvard, a deaf actor who is followed around by Michael Arden, who translates for him in American Sign Language. Philip Glass has composed a lovely score, performed by violinists Cenovia Cummins and Martin Agee, violist Chris Cardona, and cellist Stephanie Cummins; when they unobtrusively play in the far back corner, all is well, but later they come to the front and mingle with the actors, which is unnerving and off-putting. Goneril (Elizabeth Marvel) at first shows empathy for Cordelia, but that changes fast, leading to a sexual expression that made the audience gasp in horror. Pedro Pascal is ineffective as the devious Edmund, while Carvajal is too plain as his too-trusting half-brother, Edgar. The cast also includes Dion Johnstone as the Duke of Albany, Aisling O’Sullivan as a vicious Regan, Ian Lassiter as the King of France, and Matthew Maher as a creepy Oswald. Oh, and there are gunshots.

Ruth Wilson, Glenda Jackson, and John Douglas Thompson are the bright spots in Sam Gold’s revival of King Lear (photo by Brigitte Lacombe)

Fortunately, watching Jackson for nearly three and a half hours — she does take that long break at the beginning of the second act, and the play suffers even further in her absence — makes this Lear worth it; Jackson, now eighty-two, might be a wisp of a thing, but she radiates intense strength and greatness every step of the way. But be advised that this is not Deborah Warner’s 2016-17 version that took London by storm. I am no traditionalist by any means — for example, I adore what Daniel Fish has done with Oklahoma! — but Gold has deconstructed the play only to reconstruct it with, dare I say, a Lear-like madness that just too often is baffling if not downright annoying. New York has seen many a Lear over the last dozen years — Sir Ian McKellen, Sir Derek Jacobi, John Lithgow, Frank Langella, Sir Antony Sher, Michael Pennington, and Sam Waterston — and Jackson is a worthy addition to that list, but it is telling that she received neither a Tony nor a Drama Desk nomination for her performance, and the production also did not get nods for Best Revival. It’s like an imperfect storm, with Jackson at the center, trying to survive the downpour, along with the rest of us.