Tag Archives: Mitzi E. Newhouse

THE CITY OF CONVERSATION

Georgetown hostess Hester Ferris’s (Jan Maxwell) carefully orchestrated dinner party doesn’t go quite as planned in new Anthony Giardina play (photo by Stephanie Berger)

Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday – Saturday through July 6, $87
212-362-7600
www.lct.org

Five-time Tony nominee Jan Maxwell gives a whirlwind performance as a Georgetown hostess trying to balance the personal with the political over the course of thirty years in Anthony Giardina’s The City of Conversation. Maxwell (Follies, Coram Boy) stars as Hester Ferris, an elegant liberal who hosts important dinner parties at her fancy home (the set is designed by the incomparable John Lee Beatty), where important men come to smoke, drink, and craft policy away from the craziness of Congress. The play begins in September 1979, as Hester and her sister, Jean Swift (Beth Dixon), prepare for the arrival of Kentucky senator George Mallonee (John Aylward) and his wife, Carolyn (Barbara Garrick); George, a Republican, has important business with Democrat Chandler Harris (Kevin O’Rourke), Hester’s married lover. But when Hester’s son, Colin (Michael Simpson), and his extremely ambitious right-wing girlfriend, Anna Fitzgerald (Kristen Bush), suddenly show up, Hester’s carefully planned party doesn’t go quite as expected, leading to a rift that grows as the play moves to October 1987, during the Reagan presidency, and then on to January 2009 as Barack Obama takes office.

Hester (Jan Maxwell) has more than a few words for Anna (Kristen Bush) as son Colin (Michael Simpson) looks on (photo by Stephanie Berger)

The City of Conversation — the title comes from a Henry James quip about D.C. — looks back at a disappearing past, when the nation’s capital operated very differently from today. “That’s the way it used to be,” Hester tells Anna, relating a story about John F. Kennedy soliciting advice from columnist Joe Alsop regarding Cuba. “A president was able to get out of the White House, come to Georgetown, and learn something just because someone brilliant happened to be at dinner.” Novelist and playwright Giardina’s (Living at Home, Scenes from La Vie de Boheme) first work not specifically drawn from personal experience, The City of Conversation is a superbly acted, well-paced drama about legacy and power, going behind the scenes of a changing Washington where partisanship has affected policy, ended friendships, and torn families apart. Maxwell gives a virtuoso performance, an expert balance of rampant energy and subtle mood shifts as she tries to maintain her relationship with her Republican son and her grandson (Luke Niehaus) while also standing up and fighting for her beliefs. Aylward (The Kentucky Cycle) is excellent as George Mallonee, eating up and spitting out the stereotype of the country-bumpkin southern senator, while O’Rourke (Spoils of War, Checkers) provides solid support as Hester’s significant other. Director Doug Hughes (Outside Mullingar, The Royal Family with Maxwell) knows Giardina well, having directed his works for thirty years, so the play moves seamlessly through the decades, revealing a Washington that has grown dysfunctional perhaps past the point of no return. Be sure to pick up a copy of the Lincoln Center Theater Review, which includes the long, well-researched article “The Doyennes of D.C.” by Sally Bedell Smith as well as contributions from Giardina, Christopher Buckley, Jane Stanton Hitchcock, James Schroeder, and John Guare.

DOMESTICATED

Laurie Metcalf and Jeff Goldblum play characters at opposite ends of the spectrum in Bruce Norris’s searing DOMESTICATED (photo by Joan Marcus)

Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday – Saturday through January 5, $87
212-362-7600
www.lct.org

In his previous play, the Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Clybourne Park, Bruce Norris presented an examination of race and community in two distinct halves, the first act taking place in 1959, the second in 2009. In his follow-up, Domesticated, Norris (The Pain and the Itch, The Parallelogram) again divides his story into two parts, but this time it’s a bitter battle of the sexes, with the wife stating her case in the first act and the husband making his in the second. The torn-from-the-headlines plot begins as a disgraced cabinet member, gynecologist Bill “the Pulverizer” Pulver (Jeff Goldblum), holds a press conference to announce his resignation because of a sex scandal, with his wife, Judy (Laurie Metcalf), by his side but looking none too pleased. For nearly the rest of the first act, Judy does not allow Bill to say a word as she lets him have it, reevaluating their life together as more of Bill’s extracurricular activities come out and a young woman lies in a coma. Their high school age daughter, the rather chatty and self-involved Casey (Emily Meade), is furious about the whole situation, while their adopted Asian daughter, asthmatic thirteen-year-old Cassidy (Misha Seo), speaks only to introduce certain scenes, discussing the mating habits of various animals as if delivering a school report, with the female of the species growing more and more powerful over the course of the play. “The purpose of this presentation is to examine the nature of sexual dimorphism and the advantages and disadvantages thereby conferred,” she says early on, speaking into a microphone as video images are projected onto small screens hanging from the ceiling. “Sexual dimorphism is the physical differentiation by gender within a given species, and may include such diverse manifestations as size, color, and the presence or absence of anatomical parts such as ornamental feathers, horns, antlers, or tusks.”

The Pulverizer (Jeff Goldblum) has a whole lot of explaining to do in tense family drama (photo by Joan Marcus)

By the end of the first act, Bill has pretty much been plucked clean, but in the second act he explains himself to anyone who will listen, from a bartender to a transgendered individual to a patient at the health clinic he cofounded. (The cast also includes Vanessa Aspillaga, Lizbeth Mackay, Mary Beth Peil, Karen Pittman, and Aleque Reid playing multiple roles, with Mia Barron as the Pulver family’s attorney and Robin De Jesus as the bar patron.) Judy and Bill then fight it out one last time in a brutal war of words that is both complex and surprising. For Domesticated, the Mitzi Newhouse has been arranged in a circle, with the action taking place in the small center space. Steppenwolf member Anna D. Shapiro, who’s directed five previous Norris plays in addition to winning a Tony for August: Osage County, has each scene overlap the next in the first act, creating a fast, fluid atmosphere that slows down considerably in the far more static second act. The show is set up like a classic courtroom drama, the prosecution presenting its case first, then the defense, and it holds up well despite the apparent one-sidedness of the argument. Some scenes fall flat, especially the ones involving an Oprah-like talk show host (Pittman), and the second act drags on too long as it documents Bill’s downfall, but it becomes alive again during its fiery conclusion. Metcalf (The Other Place) once more shows why she’s become one of New York’s most dependable, gifted, and eminently watchable stage actors, giving beautifully subtle nuances to a character who could have been one-note and repetitive. Goldblum is solid as well, easily transitioning from a silent film comedian in the first act to an overblown misogynist in the second, although the script occasionally lets him down as he does indeed grow repetitive. The play also features an important warning to all couples: Beware the triplewart seadevil. (On December 19, Goldblum and Metcalf will take part in a free Platform Series discussion in the Vivian Beaumont lobby at 6:00.)

NIKOLAI AND THE OTHERS

A group of Russian émigrés form an extended artistic family in Richard Nelson’s new play (photo by Paul Kolnik)

Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday – Saturday through June 16, $85
212-362-7600
www.lct.org

Over the last few years, Richard Nelson has been detailing the exploits of the Rhinebeck-based Apple family in such decidedly American, politically tinged works as That Hopey Changey Thing, Sweet and Sad, and Sorry. Nelson examines a very different kind of extended American family in the intelligent and engaging Nikolai and the Others, running at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater through June 16. It’s the spring of 1948, and a group of Russian immigrants has gathered at the Westport farmhouse of Vera and Igor Stravinsky (Blair Brown and John Glover) to honor elderly set designer Sergey Sudeikin (Alvin Epstein). Among the guests are choreographer George Balanchine (Michael Cerveris), actor Vladimir Sokoloff (John Procaccino) and his wife, Lisa (Betsy Aiden), Balanchine confidant and Stravinsky friend and translator Lucia Davidova (Haviland Morris), piano teacher Aleksi Karpov (Anthony Cochrane) and his fiancée, Natasha Nabokov (Kathryn Erbe), and composer Nikolai “Nicky” Nabokov (Stephen Kunken), Natasha’s first husband and a man who helps out his fellow Russian émigrés through secret connections. The men and women discuss life and love, art and politics while eating and drinking delicacies from the old country, proud of their heritage as well as having become American citizens. The evening’s centerpiece is to be the presentation of a pas de deux from Balanchine and Stravinsky’s upcoming ballet, Orpheus, performed by Balanchine’s wife, Maria Tallchief (Natalia Alonso), and Nicholas Magallanes (Michael Rosen), but the arrival of conductor Serge Koussevitsky (Dale Place) with U.S diplomat Charles Bohlen (Gareth Saxe) throws everything out of balance as suspicion and fear hover in the country air.

Vera Stravinsky (Blair Brown) and others reach out for help from Nikolai Nabokov (Stephen Kunken) during weekend in Westport (photo by Paul Kolnik)

Vera Strainsky (Blair Brown) and others reach out for help from Nikolai Nabokov (Stephen Kunken) during weekend in Westport (photo by Paul Kolnik)

Though featuring real characters and referencing many actual events, Nikolai and the Others is a fascinating creation of Nelson’s, an imaginary weekend that delves into the very nature of the creative process in a quickly changing world. (For example, Sudeikin died in 1946, two years before the play takes place.) But Nelson does an excellent job capturing the powerful emotions these Russian immigrants are experiencing as they attempt to continue their careers in America at the start of the Cold War, in search of personal and professional freedom that comes at a price. Nelson and director David Cromer (Tribes, When the Rain Stops Falling) have the characters speak unaccented English when they are conversing in their native Russian tongue, then in thickly accented English when they are talking in English itself, a conceit that is confusing at first but ultimately works very well. Glover, Brown, and Cerveris lead a strong cast that feels like they have formed a warm family of their own while inviting in the audience, which wraps around Marsha Ginsberg’s intimate set. The show takes on added meaning since it is in the midst of its world premiere at Lincoln Center, where Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein (who is mentioned often but is never seen) ultimately moved the New York City Ballet after founding the troupe in 1948 and including Orpheus in its inaugural season.

VANYA AND SONIA AND MASHA AND SPIKE ON BROADWAY

Vanya (David Hyde Pierce) and Sonia (Kristine Nielsen) look back at their sad lives in Christopher Durang’s Chekhovian mashup (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Golden Theatre
252 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 28, $62 – $142
www.vanyasoniamashaspike.com

When he was at Yale in the 1970s, Christopher Durang teamed with Albert Innaurato and Jack Feldman on The Idiots Karamazov, a musical about a Russian translator that begins with a song titled “O, We Gotta Get to Moscow,” as the translator confuses Dostoevsky with Chekhov and other writers. Going to Moscow shows up again in Durang’s delightful satire, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, which has made a successful transition from Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse to Broadway’s Golden Theatre. Durang sets his latest play in a Bucks County farmhouse by a lake where a blue heron stops by daily, based on the Bucks County farmhouse by a lake with a blue heron where Durang and his partner reside. Living in the fictional house are Vanya (David Hyde Pierce) and Sonia (Kristine Nielsen), a pair of fiftysomething siblings (one adopted) who have essentially sacrificed what lives they might have had by taking care of their ill, elderly parents while their sister, Masha (Sigourney Weaver), became a famous movie star gallivanting around the world with five husbands. Clearly, their parents had a thing for Chekhov; Masha is named after characters from The Seagull and Three Sisters, Vanya and the adopted Sonia from Uncle Vanya. Invited to a neighbor’s costume party, Masha arrives at the house in grand diva fashion, overemoting and unable to keep her hands off her hot new boy toy, Spike (Billy Magnussen), who enjoys taking off most of his clothes at a moment’s notice and striking muscular poses. Masha quickly grows jealous when Spike meets young, pretty ingénue Nina (played at Lincoln Center by Genevieve Angelson and now by Leisel Allen Yeager, the only cast change from the original production), a wannabe actress named after the young, innocent actress in The Seagull. Meanwhile, the cleaning lady, Cassandra (Shalita Grant), makes dire predictions that keep coming true, just like her namesake, the Greek mythological figure with second sight. As Vanya, Sonia, Masha, Spike, and Nina prepare for the party — Masha insists they all go as characters from Snow White, with Masha as the beautiful protagonist, slyly referencing Weaver’s portrayal of the evil stepmother in the 1997 television movie Snow White: A Tale of Terror — jealousy, fear, deception, childhood resentment, and more bubble to the surface and threaten to erupt, albeit in primarily wacky, hysterical ways.

Spike (Billy Magnussen), Masha (Sigourney Weaver), and Vanya (David Hyde Pierce) spend a crazy weekend together in Bucks County (photo by Carol Rosegg)

You don’t need to know anything about Chekhov and his searing dramas about seriously dysfunctional families to get a huge kick out of Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, which has a unique family feel itself — Weaver has been working with Durang since the Yale days, Hyde Pierce starred in the Broadway production of the playwright’s Beyond Therapy (as well as Peter Brook’s The Cherry Orchard), and Nielsen is Durang’s acknowledged muse, having appeared in many of his shows, in parts specifically written for her. Director Nicholas Martin, who previously helmed Durang’s Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them at the Public, keeps things relatively natural and grounded even with Weaver, Magnussen, and Grant playing things deliciously way over the top, as the story’s tender heart is wonderfully captured by the amazing Nielsen and Hyde Pierce, who agonize over their loneliness and advancing age, the importance of family, and, perhaps most Chekhovian, a world that seems to be passing them by. Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike is a thoroughly enjoyable if often goofy and now, on Broadway, even bigger and broader mashup from one of America’s most engaging satirists at the top of his game. (And be sure to go here to read the fall 2012 issue of Lincoln Center Review, which includes Durang’s “My Life with Chekhov,” an essay detailing seven encounters he had with the Russian playwright, dating back to when he was fourteen.)

VANYA AND SONIA AND MASHA AND SPIKE

Three siblings (Kristine Nielsen, David Hyde Pierce, and Sigourney Weaver) examine their lives and don’t necessarily like what they see in Christopher Durang’s delightful Chekhovian satire (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday – Saturday through January 13, $85
212-362-7600
www.lct.org

When he was at Yale in the 1970s, Christopher Durang teamed with Albert Innaurato and Jack Feldman on The Idiots Karamazov, a musical about a Russian translator that begins with a song titled “O, We Gotta Get to Moscow,” as she confuses Dostoevsky with Chekhov and other writers. That line shows up again in Durang’s delightful new satire, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, running through January 13 at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse theater. Durang sets his latest play in a Bucks County farmhouse by a lake where a blue heron stops by daily, based on the Bucks County farmhouse by a lake with a blue heron where Durang and his partner reside. Living in the fictional house are Vanya (David Hyde Pierce) and Sonia (Kristine Nielsen), a pair of fiftysomething step-siblings who have essentially sacrificed what lives they might have had by taking care of their ill, elderly parents while their sister, Masha (Sigourney Weaver), became a famous movie star gallivanting around the world with five husbands. Clearly, their parents had a thing for Chekhov; Masha is named after characters from The Seagull and Three Sisters, Vanya and the adopted Sonia from Uncle Vanya. Invited to a neighbor’s costume party, Masha arrives at the house in grand diva fashion, overemoting and unable to keep her hands off her hot new boy toy, Spike (Billy Magnussen), who enjoys taking off most of his clothes at a moment’s notice and striking muscular poses. Masha quickly grows jealous when Spike meets young, pretty ingénue Nina (Genevieve Angelson), a wannabe actress named after the young, innocent actress in The Seagull. Meanwhile, the cleaning lady, Cassandra (Shalita Grant), makes dire predictions that keep coming true, just like her namesake, the Greek mythological figure with second sight. As Vanya, Sonia, Masha, Spike, and Nina prepare for the party — Masha insists they all go as characters from Snow White, with Masha as the beautiful protagonist, slyly referencing Weaver’s portrayal of the evil stepmother in the 1997 television movie Snow White: A Tale of Terror — jealousy, fear, deception, childhood resentment, and more bubble to the surface and threaten to erupt, albeit in primarily wacky, hysterical ways, until Vanya lets loose in a tirade to end all tirades.

Spike (Billy Magnussen) and Masha (Sigourney Weaver) flaunt their sexual desire in thoroughly enjoyable Durang comedy (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

You don’t need to know anything about Chekhov and his searing dramas about seriously dysfunctional families to get a huge kick out of Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, which has a unique family feel itself — Weaver has been working with Durang since the Yale days, Hyde Pierce starred in the Broadway production of the playwright’s Beyond Therapy (as well as Peter Brook’s The Cherry Orchard), and Nielsen is Durang’s acknowledged muse, having appeared in many of his shows, in parts specifically written for her. Director Nicholas Martin, who previously helmed Durang’s Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them at the Public, keeps things relatively natural and grounded even with Weaver, Magnussen, and Grant playing things deliciously way over the top, as the story’s tender heart is wonderfully captured by Nielsen and Hyde Pierce, who agonize over their loneliness and advancing age, the importance of family, and, perhaps most Chekhovian, a world that seems to be passing them by. Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike is a thoroughly enjoyable, if often goofy, mashup from one of America’s most engaging satirists at the top of his game. (On November 30 at 6:00, there will be a Platform Series talk between Durang and Martin in the lobby of the Vivian Beaumont Theater, free and open to the public. And be sure to pick up a copy of the fall 2012 Lincoln Center Review, which includes Durang’s “My Life with Chekhov,” an essay detailing seven encounters he had with the Russian playwright, dating back to when he was fourteen.) [ed note: As of March 1, the production can now be seen on Broadway at the Golden Theatre, where it is running through the end of June.]

BLOOD AND GIFTS

BLOOD AND GIFTS looks at the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan through the eyes of an American operative who befriends a local warlord (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday – Saturday through January 8, $85
212-362-7600
www.lct.org

Sociopolitical playwright J. T. Rogers transported audiences to Rome in Madagascar and Rwanda in The Overwhelming, telling intimate stories of Americans abroad. In his latest work, the Lincoln Center commission Blood and Gifts, the Brooklyn-based writer examines the Soviet war in Afghanistan as seen through the eyes of CIA operative James Warnock (a strong, confident Jeremy Davidson). With his wife back in the States, Warnock heads to Islamabad as the new station chief, ready to offer cold, hard cash to Colonel Afridi (Gabriel Ruiz), a Pakistani military intelligence chief seeking to help Afghan freedom fighters, in particular the extremely dangerous and unpredictable Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Warnock joins with cynical British MI6 lifer Simon Craig (an appropriately twitchy and nervous Jefferson Mays), while their counterpart is the sly Dmitri Gromov (a very funny Michael Aronov), a Soviet agent trying to keep tabs on the American, since the United States has made it very clear that it is not getting involved in the conflict. Warnock quickly develops a close relationship with mujahideen warlord Abdullah Khan (Bernard White) and his right-hand man, Saeed (Pej Vahdat), eventually bringing them to Washington to attempt to pry more funding out of Senator Jefferson Birch (Robert Hogan) and the rest of Congress. With the cold war coming to an end, politics and family collide head-on, with the main characters taking a painful look at their own personal lives, measuring their public responsibility against their private needs as they contemplate the sacrifices they’ve made in the name of country.

Spies from America, England, and the Soviet Union are both friends and enemies in J. T. Rogers’s political thriller (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Blood and Gifts is a powerful drama about men playing war games, about fathers and sons, about superpowers invading seemingly vulnerable yet ultimately impenetrable foreign nations. Although it takes place between 1981 and 1991, it is as much about today (Iraq, Afghanistan) and tomorrow (Iran?) as it is about yesterday (Vietnam, Korea). Bartlett Sher directs with a swift hand, moving things quickly on Michael Yeargan’s small, sparse set, which consists of a tiled floor flanked on three sides by benches on which some of the actors sit while waiting for their next scene to come up, watching the action along with the audience. Davidson plays Warnock with a square-jawed determination, heading a solid cast that also includes a humorous turn by John Procaccino as blustery CIA head Walter Barnes. Beginning life as a one-act at the Tricycle Theatre’s “The Great Game: Afghanistan” series before making its full-length debut at London’s National Theatre, Blood and Gifts is a compelling spy thriller that takes audiences behind the scenes of the inner workings of the business of war and the high cost paid by the men and women on the sidelines, as well as those right in the middle of the action.