Tag Archives: Nadine Malouf

THE WELKIN

A jury of matrons must decide the fate of a convicted woman in Lucy Kirkwood’s The Welkin (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

THE WELKIN
Atlantic Theater Company
Linda Gross Theater
336 West 20th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 7, $56.50-$121.50
atlantictheater.org

Twelve Angry Men meets The Crucible by way of horrormeister Peter Straub and George Cukor’s The Women in Lucy Kirkwood’s gripping and intense, if messy and overlong, The Welkin, running at the Atlantic’s Linda Gross Theater through July 7.

Kirkwood’s previous works include Chimerica, in which a Chinese dissident and an American photojournalist attempt to find the Tank Man, who became an international symbol of resistance during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest, and The Children, which takes place shortly after a devastating nuclear accident on the East Coast of Britain. In The Welkin, Kirkwood contemplates female autonomy — the right of a woman to control her body — directly and indirectly bringing up such issues as capital punishment, abortion, gender identity, and sexuality while celebrating individuality over groupthink stereotypes. It’s set in March 1759 on the border of Norfolk and Suffolk in England, but it relates all too closely to what is occurring in America today in the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

The play opens with a harrowing scene, cast in shadowy darkness in front of the curtain. After an absence of four months, Sally Poppy (Haley Wong) has returned home to her laborer husband, Frederick (Danny Wolohan); she is naked and bloodied, soon pulling out a hammer. We instinctively assume something awful has happened to her, but it turns out that she has apparently done something awful herself: She tells Frederick that the blood is not hers but that of Alice Wax, a young girl her lover brutally murdered and she helped dismember and stuff up a fireplace. She demands ten shillings from her cuckolded husband to pay the midwife for the baby she claims she is carrying, which she coldly says is not his. Her lack of guilt or remorse is disconcerting — as well as rife with sociocultural complications.

The curtain then rises on widowed midwife Lizzie Luke (Sandra Oh) churning butter when bailiff Billy Coombes (Glenn Fitzgerald) arrives, informing her that the judge wants Lizzie to serve on the twelve-woman jury to determine whether the convicted Sally is truly with child, in which case she cannot be hanged for her crime and would instead be transported to Australia. Lizzie shows no immediate concern about the murder. “Expect that is the closest a Wax child ever got to sweeping a chimney,” she says.

The married Mr. Coombes flirts with Lizzie — it appears that they might have an undefined thing for each other — who first refuses to participate on the jury but eventually acquiesces, leaving her daughter, Katy (MacKenzie Mercer), to churn the butter, passing female responsibilities to the next generation, who might actually want more out of life.

The jurors, each doing some kind of traditional women’s work, are sworn in one by one, sharing an aspect of their personal story before kissing “the book.” It’s a ponderous scene, but we learn that Mary Middleton (Susannah Perkins) has five children and a haunted tankard in her home. Ann Lavender (Jennifer Nikki Kidwell) is married to a poet and is raising their four daughters in “peasant honesty.” The eighty-three-year-old Sarah Smith (Dale Soules) has twenty-one children with three husbands and until recently could do a handstand for one minute. Helen Ludlow (Emily Cass McDonnell) has had twelve miscarriages in eight years. Peg Carter (Simone Recasner) is married to the third-generation gardener for the family whose child was murdered and has “this thing he is able to do with his tongue which I find very amenable.” And Charlotte Cary (Mary McCann) is a stranger in town who has a dinner engagement at five that she would prefer not to miss.

Sally Poppy (Haley Wong) must prove she is pregnant to save herself from the gallows in 1759 England (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

The rest of the two-and-a-half-hour play (with intermission) unfolds in a dungeonlike room where the dozen women have been sequestered until they reach a verdict on Sally’s supposed pregnancy. At stage left is a fireplace, serving as a constant reminder of what Sally and her lover did to Alice; at stage right is a narrow window through which a sliver of at times heavenly light peeks in. When the window is opened, the sound of the unruly mob gathered outside to await Sally’s execution comes pouring in. Sally is there to be poked and examined, her hands bound by rope. Mr. Coombes is present to “keep this jury of matrons without meat, drink, fire, and candle” and to speak only when asking if the matrons have reached a verdict.

The women take sides, chastise one another, divulge secrets, and make accusations as they debate how to determine whether Sally is pregnant. Sally does herself no favors by being nasty and difficult. “Shut up Helen what are you even doing here everyone knows you’re barren,” she barks at the intimidated Helen. Meanwhile, Sarah Hollis (Hannah Cabell) is unable to contribute much because she hasn’t spoken in twenty years, since her son was born; Kitty Givens (Tilly Botsford) and Hannah Rusted (Paige Gilbert) believe Halley’s Comet might have something to do with all the strange goings-on; Judith Brewer (Ann Harada) is a nosy gossiper; and Emma Jenkins (Nadine Malouf) is clamoring for Sally to swing.

Being a midwife, Lizzie often finds herself in the middle of it all and has a unique perspective on the matter, determined to give Sally the benefit of the doubt, explaining in a monologue that is as relevant today as it was 265 years ago: “Because she has been sentenced to hang on the word of a cuckolded husband. Because every card dealt to her today and for many years before has been an unkind one, because she has been sentenced by men pretending to be certain of things of which they are entirely ignorant, and now we sit here imitating them, trying to make an ungovernable thing governable, I do not ask you to like her. I ask you to hope for her, so that she might know she is worth hoping for. And if you cannot do that for her sake, think instead of the women who will be in this room when that comet comes round again, and how brittle they will think our spirits, how ashamed they will be, that we were given our own dominion and we made it look exactly like the one down there,” referring to the courtroom.

“Please. This whole affair is a farce. We are cold, hungry, tired, thirsty women and all of us’ve had our housework interrupted. . . . It is a poor apparatus for justice. But it is what we have. This room. The sky outside that window and our own dignity beneath it. Mary’s view is as important as Charlotte’s, and together we must speak in one voice. It is almost impossible we should make the right decision.”

A shocking event at the end of act one leads to a riveting, wildly unpredictable second act that threatens to go off the rails at any moment.

A welkin is defined as the vault of the sky, the firmament separating heaven and earth. Genesis states, “And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years.’” In Act 5, Scene 5 of Shakespeare’s King John, Lewis, the dauphin, says, “The sun of heaven methought was loath to set, / But stay’d and made the western welkin blush.” Light is one of several themes underlying the play. The women are not allowed to use a candle or light the fireplace, but when Dr. Willis (Wolohan) comes to examine Sally and asks to use a candle, Mr. Coombes looks the other way.

The role of women is emphasized throughout, focusing on how they are essentially needed only for cooking, cleaning, mending, and having babies. “A woman is not a laundry list!” Lizzie declares. The only sexual pleasure mentioned in the filthy room is Mary’s enjoyment when Lizzie rubs her “down . . . there.”

The men are inept, incompetent, insensitive fools: Frederick initially wants to whip Sally; one of Mr. Coombes’s arms is in a sling and he has only one testicle, as if he has been castrated; and Dr. Willis has invented a speculumlike metal instrument to insert into Sally to examine her. When Sally says that her supposed pregnancy was not intended, that “the gentleman did not withdraw when I told him to,” Judith responds, “That’s not a method you can rely on; they’re senseless at the last post. With Mr. Brewer I always kept a piece of brick in a handkerchief under the bed; if you time your strike right you can save yourself a lot of trouble in the long run.”

Religion and truth are also on the docket as the characters argue over God’s authority. Frederick, explaining how he had to cover up Sally’s absence, admits, “At church I had to make out you’d gone to mind a sick cousin in Stowmarket. A lie, I told, in the house of God.” Later, Lizzie, discussing how twelve fetuses under her care have not survived in the past year, says, “I am the very first person they blame, God? No, they don’t blame God. Nobody blames God when there is a woman can be blamed instead.”

As the jurors continue their deliberations, Lizzie offers, “You cannot mean to ignore the truth simply cos that’s inconvenient to you.” And when Lizzie doesn’t understand why the other matrons won’t listen to her and want the male doctor to look at Sally, Sally says, “Are you dense? You have no authority here. If they must hear the truth from someone a foot taller with a deep voice, then let them.”

The always inventive director Sarah Benson, who has helmed such wide-ranging shows as Teeth, Fairview, Samara, In the Blood, and An Octoroon, throws too much at the wall in The Welkin, resulting in a choppy narrative in need of editing. In fact, at one point the women scrub the walls after the aforementioned shocking event. Now, I realize that this opinion is coming from a male member of the human species, but I hope it’s not interpreted as mansplaining.

The appropriately claustrophobic set is by dots, with splendid period costumes by Kaye Voyce, stark lighting by Stacey Derosier, creepy sound by Palmer Hefferan, and eerie special effects by Jeremy Chernick. The diverse ensemble cast is outstanding, led by Oh (Office Hour, Satellites), in a welcome return to the New York stage after eighteen years; her portrayal of Lizzie is dense and complex, instantly relatable to the modern era. Wong (Mary Gets Hers, John Proctor Is the Villain) is a force as Sally, Harada (Into the Woods, Avenue Q) offers comic relief (for a while) as Judith, Malouf (Grief Hotel, The School for Scandal) is vividly spirited as Emma, and the ever-dependable Soules (I Remember Mama, Hair) is as dependable as ever.

One of the most bizarre moments of the play occurs when the women start singing a contemporary pop song that deals with the drudgery of work and the release of sex. In the British premiere of The Welkin, it was Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God),” but here they sing a cheerful tune that was written by a man of musical royalty but performed by an all-female group, maintaining the idea that the women are speaking out and the men are remaining quiet. There’s a lot to be said for that.

The next perihelion of Halley’s Comet is expected on July 28, 2061, so be ready.

Oh, I’ll shut up now.

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

GRIEF HOTEL

Aunt Bobbi (Susan Blommaert) shares her concept for a new kind of place to seek healing in Grief Hotel (photo © Maria Baranova)

GRIEF HOTEL
The Shiva Theater at the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St.
Monday – Saturday through April 27, $57.50
212-539-8500
publictheater.org
www.clubbedthumb.org

Don’t let the title of Clubbed Thumb’s Grief Hotel scare you off; the play, which has returned to the Public Theater after a 2023 Summerworks presentation, is much more than yet another show about death and healing. Instead, it’s a uniquely entertaining, thought-provoking, and darkly funny exploration of how humans deal with loneliness, lack of connection, and loss, of many kinds, from friends and lovers to jobs and homes. The night I went, the audience was packed with a college drama class of mostly female-identifying and nonbinary students who were loving every minute of it, a few calling out, snapping, and sharing their enjoyment, which was infectious.

A collaboration with New Georges, Grief Hotel is structured around a proposal by Aunt Bobbi (Susan Blommaert), who, for an assignment from a hotel chain, has made a picture book that encourages young people to come to what she calls the grief hotel, inspired by the case of Penelope, whose baby suffered a horrific injury. A fussy woman who looks like an old-fashioned librarian, Aunt Bobbi explains, “You can go there if your sibling gets deathly sick, or if you find out that the person you love doesn’t love you back, or if you commit manslaughter, et cet-ra. And so everything there — okay, so these are just my guesses — everything there is meant to heal you and this all has to be based on science. So the colors of the walls. Here’s a picture of green. The chairs. Some crystals. The beds. You can go on a walk. Or not. You have activities to heal you. Little. Animals.”

The one-room set, by Kimie Nishikawa of the dots collective, is influenced by the interior pictures of American photographer Todd Hido and echoes Aunt Bobbi’s description: It’s an obtuse trapezoid with three plainly papered walls, one open doorway, a window covered by a long shade, ordinary carpeting, a comfy chair, a floor lamp, and a small table. The room is slanted, larger stage left than right, where it is like a corner for time-outs. (At several points, characters stand still, facing the wall, punishing themselves by briefly hiding from the world.)

The white fabric ceiling helps produce compelling shadows of the characters that seem to live and breathe on their own, like doppelgängers or looming souls, furthering the mysteries of the narrative. The stunning lighting is by Masha Tsimring, with suburban-style costumes by Mel Ng and adept sound and music by Jordan McCree.

Aunt Bobbi continues, “There’s no alcohol at the grief hotel and there’s no Instagram. It really is getting better the Hard Way but it’s also an exclusive luxury bespoke experience. Beaucoup beaucoup expensive. Anyway, so this is a picture of Penelope feeling better because after her good bespoke activities and foods and all that she is ah. Healed. And other people paid for it. So that’s my creative expression.” The word “bespoke” is used numerous times throughout the play, referring to the “custom-made” experience of each person’s life.

Em (Nadine Malouf) and Winn (Ana Nogueira) explore their unique relationship in Clubbed Thumb’s Grief Hotel (photo © Maria Baranova)

The liminal space is populated by a half-dozen individuals who are often not at the same location but communicating over the phone or online; dialogue overlaps and intersects so it’s not always immediately clear when two or more people are actually physically together, as if we’re eavesdropping on more than one conversation at a time. For example, Aunt Bobbi, reading from her proposal, says that the name grief hotel “sounds a little sad.” Asher (Bruce McKenzie), texting Winn (Ana Nogueira), states as if in response to Aunt Bobbi, “Not cool.”

Winn, who describes herself as “a fundamentally unemotional person,” lives with the nonbinary Teresa (Susannah Perkins) but becomes interested in Asher, an older married man she has met on dating apps. Em (Nadine Malouf), Winn’s constantly perturbed college lover, is now with Rohit (Naren Weiss), a man who prefers life to be uncomplicated although he is afraid of death.

“I just want to bleed from my face until I die,” Em tells Winn. “I’m panicked about mortality actually. Incredibly panicked,” Rohit says to Aunt Bobbi.

The characters discuss love and sex, work and death, empty malls and AI, and queerness and sleeping through earthquakes over the course of eighty thoroughly charming and stimulating minutes. You’ll find yourself rooting for Winn and Asher to hook up, Em to be kind to Rohit (and herself), Teresa to be treated fairly by Winn, and Aunt Bobbi to keep sharing her unique impressions of the human condition.

Meanwhile, a horrific accidental death from twenty years before hovers over the sudden disappearance of an old high school friend, Stanley Chi — whose last name means “vital energy,” something all the characters could use.

Winn (Ana Nogueira) and Asher (Bruce McKenzie) contemplate what kind of relationship they might have, if any (photo © Maria Baranova)

Liza Birkenmeier’s (Dr. Ride’s American Beach House, F*ck7thGrade) dialogue crackles with ingenuity and wit as the plot continually surprises; the story is based on a real plan she offered in an ideation session for an innovation agency. Director Tara Ahmadinejad (Lunch Bunch, Karen, I Said) masterfully handles the distinct characters in the tight quarters, as if they’re in a sort of bardo, weighing their future against their nostalgic past.

The wonderful cast is led by Nogueira (Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Which Way to the Stage), whose Winn is afraid to face what she feels deep inside. McKenzie (STET, White Noise) has an offbeat charm as a famous person in search of privacy, his dry delivery yearning for things to be simpler than they are. Obie winner Malouf (The School for Scandal, A Bright Room Called Day) is a powder keg as Em, who is filled with rage that hides her insecurities. Weiss (Over Here, Letters of Suresh) is sweetly innocent as Rohit, a well-meaning man who walks around with his head in the clouds.

Obie winner Perkins (The Wolves, The Good John Proctor) excels as Teresa, who is the most sensible one of the group. “It’s damp in here and I’m worried it’s cognitively damaging,” they opine. And Blommaert (Dr. Ride’s American Beach House, 4000 Miles) has a ball with the pleasantly persnickety Aunt Bobbi, who shares all the right buzzwords — sustainability, wellness, intimacy, holistic well-being, community, empowerment, body-positivity, ethically sourced food origin stories — as she seeks to heal those in need of support.

Early on, Rohit lets Em know that he’s considering doing a cleanse. Later, after Rohit asks if she believes in any sort of god, Em replies, “My parents got an exorcism on my house,” a rather extreme cleanse. Grief Hotel requires no such cleansing.

In her proposal to the hotel chain, Aunt Bobbi offers, “You might wanna change that name because it doesn’t exactly sound delightful.” But as everyone declares in the stirring participatory finale, “Lord only knows where the road’s gonna go (go!).” In this case, the road goes to the delightful Grief Hotel at the Public’s Shiva Theater.

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

MONTAG

Novella (Nadine Malouf) and Faith (Ariana Venturi) face an uncertain future in Montag (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

MONTAG
Soho Rep
46 Walker St. between Broadway & Church St.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 20, $55
sohorep.org

In German, Montag, the name of Kate Tarker’s new play, making its world premiere at Soho Rep through November 20, means “Monday,” a day that is critical to the plot of the eighty-minute show. But it also made me think of Guy Montag, the protagonist of Ray Bradbury’s sci-fi classic Fahrenheit 451. Named after a paper company, Montag is a firefighter in charge of finding books in people’s homes and burning them, at 451 degrees Fahrenheit.

In the first chapter, Bradbury writes, “The last few nights he had had the most uncertain feelings about the sidewalk just around the corner here, moving in the starlight toward his house. He had felt that a moment before his making the turn, someone had been there. The air seemed charged with a special calm as if someone had waited there, quietly, and only a moment before he came, simply turned to a shadow and let him through. Perhaps his nose detected a faint perfume, perhaps the skin on the backs of his hands, on his face, felt the temperature rise at this one spot where a person’s standing might raise the immediate atmosphere ten degrees for an instant. There was no understanding it. Each time he made the turn, he saw only the white, unused, buckling sidewalk, with perhaps, on one night, something vanishing swiftly across a lawn before he could focus his eyes or speak. But now tonight, he slowed almost to a stop. His inner mind, reaching out to turn the corner for him, had heard the faintest whisper. Breathing? Or was the atmosphere compressed merely by someone standing very quietly there, waiting? He turned the corner.”

That same feeling pervades Montag, which takes place in set designer Lisa Laratta’s dark box in the middle of the stage. A lone light dangles from the ceiling. (The appropriately dingy lighting is by Masha Tsimring.) Faith (Ariana Venturi) and Novella (Nadine Malouf) sit opposite each other at a small table, the former smoking a cigarette, the latter crunching loudly on chips and crinkling the plastic snack bag. It’s live, in-person ASMR for the audience, experienced in a mysterious claustrophobic space instead of an online video. In the back is a wall filled with random, mostly unidentifiable objects, like remnants from a life shuttered away. Next to that is a doorway through which light can be seen, reminiscent of that corner Montag eventually turns onto.

It’s April 2014, and Faith and Novella live together in a basement apartment on a US army base in Germany; the former is a lead systems analyst from America, while the latter is a comfort woman for the soldiers, a Turkish immigrant who is now a German citizen. They are contemporary versions of the Gastarbeiter, or guest workers, who moved to Germany between 1955 and 1973; each one is married and has a child, none of whom the audience ever sees.

Two friends (Ariana Venturi and Nadine Malouf) search for meaning in Soho Rep world premiere (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

On this evening, Novella is ready to party. “We go all night?” Novella asks. “That’s the deal,” Faith says. “The deal we made with the devil.” They are in day seven of some kind of weeklong deprivation. During that time, a colleague of Faith’s named Clifford Andrews has gone missing. Faith interviews Clifford, channeled by Novella, who, when asked why he stopped coming to work, replies, in a nod to the Boomtown Rats, “Maybe I just don’t like Mondays.” He eventually gets extremely angry, which adds to the sense of danger that surrounds the somewhat existential situation. “Are you planning anything, Cliff?” Faith asks. (The Boomtown Rats’ 1979 hit “I Don’t Like Mondays” was based on a school shooting that year in San Diego.)

But even as they worry about what might happen next, they occasionally break out into song and dance, putting on glittering costumes (by Montana Levi Blanco) and moving and grooving to Beyoncé as well as Rupert Holmes’s “Piña Colada Song,” the real name of which is actually “Escape.” Several characters who enter late, played by Dane Suarez and Jacob Orr, add further confusion to an abstruse plot that is never fully revealed while also providing a sense of finality.

Director Dustin Wills (Wolf Play, Plano) has trouble finding a narrative flow to the proceedings, which too often feel jumpy and random, although he does capture the overall sense of impending doom. Venturi (Mary Page Marlowe, These Paper Bullets!) and Malouf (A Bright Room Called Day, Intractable Woman: A Theatrical Memo on Anna Politkovskaya) form an engaging bond as the friends trapped in a dystopian near-future.

Tarker (Thunderbodies, Laura and the Sea), who grew up on the outskirts of an army base in Germany, has cited such wide-ranging influences on the play as Carrie Mae Weems’s “Kitchen Table Series,” Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen, and Ridley Scott and Callie Khouri’s Thelma & Louise, which accounts for the show’s unpredictable course and what it is inherently about, although it’s no coincidence that in August 2014, four months after Montag is set, authoritarian Recep Erdoğan will be elected president of Turkey.

Faith sums it all up when she says, “Most people — they have no idea. How scary the world is.”

Ray Bradbury’s Montag would no doubt agree.

A BRIGHT ROOM CALLED DAY

Xillah (Jonathan Hadary) and Zillah (Crystal Lucas-Perry) flank Agnes Eggling (Nikki M. James), in Tony Kushner’s revisiting of A Bright Room Called Day (photo by Joan Marcus)

Anspacher Theater, the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. at Astor Pl.
Tuesday through Sunday through December 22, $85
212-539-8500
publictheater.org

In October 1987, Tony Kushner’s first play, A Bright Room Called Day, premiered in San Francisco, directed by Oskar Eustis. Inspired by Bertolt Brecht’s 1938 anti-Nazi work The Private Life of the Master Race, Kushner’s play compared the rise of fascism in Germany in 1932–33 with the right-wing Reagan Revolution of the mid-1980s. With fascism and authoritarianism again on the march throughout the world — and, according to many, here in America as well under President Donald J. Trump — Kushner and Eustis are revisiting the drama in an enticing new version continuing at the Public’s Anspacher Theater through December 22. In the original production, the character of Zillah, a young Long Island black woman from the mid-1980s, interrupts the story of a group of bohemians in 1932–33 who are worried where Germany is heading. For this updated iteration, Kushner has drastically rewritten the part of Zillah and has added his alter ego, Xillah, an older white man representing Kushner himself in 2019.

The three-hour play begins with a prologue on January 1, 1932, at a small New Year’s Eve party with actress Agnes Eggling (Nikki M. James), her Hungarian Trotskyite partner, Vealtninc Husz (Michael Esper), opium-smoking actress Paulinka Erdnuss (Grace Gummer), avowed communist Annabella Gotchling (Linda Emond), and the gay Gregor Bazwald (Michael Urie), who may or may not be sleeping with Nazis. Xillah (Jonathan Hadary) first appears in scene two, as Agnes and Paulinka discuss Nazi filmmaking and politics. Xillah walks onto David Rockwell’s cramped, appropriately dingy living room set and says directly to the audience, “Ignore me. I’m not here.” He points at Agnes, who cannot see him, and adds, “She’s about to tell her friend about a meeting she went to, she’s very excited, she — Just watch the scene.” A moment later he explains, “This play, it’s my first play. I wrote it thirty-four years ago. I made this up: the inhabitant of this room, her friends, the room itself, this German room, where it’s 1932 and 1933, and” — he pauses as Zillah (Crystal Lucas-Perry) enters. “Long time no see,” she says to him. He goes on, “I made her up too. She’s this . . . woman in New York, in Reagan America, 1984, 1985. She interrupts the play, at certain intervals she —.” Zillah then cuts Xillah off and tells the audience, “I’m this author-surrogate interruptive-oppositional someone-or-other to whom the playwright neglected to give even a trace of a backstory or anything oppositional to do, to actually do except creep in between the Berlin scenes.” They keep on bickering about whether the original play worked. “Are you here to fix it? Finally?” asks this more potent Zillah, who does a lot more than just creep around.

Baz (Michael Urie) and Husz (Michael Esper) have a disagreement as Agnes (Nikki M. James) looks on in Tony Kushner play at the Public (photo by Joan Marcus)

The answer, of course, is yes. Although I haven’t seen the play before, this new version feels like it has been fixed — in fact, Kushner might have overplayed his hand, as Xillah and Zillah steal the show. While the Weimar Germany characters discuss how to proceed, joined by communist party representatives Rosa Malek (Nadine Malouf) and Emil Traum (Max Woertendyke), an old ghost from Agnes’s dreams (Estelle Parsons), and the devilish Gottfried Swetts (Mark Margolis) — you’ll be eagerly awaiting Xillah and Zillah’s next interruption. The 1930s material is okay but needs the thrilling energy that the anachronistic characters bring to break up the narrative, especially as performed by the wonderful, grandfatherly Hadary (Gypsy, As Is), who is wise and gentle as Xillah, and the powerful, unstoppable force that is Lucas-Perry Ain’t No Mo’, Bull in a China Shop), a charismatic dynamo as Zillah, taking over the stage every time she appears, injecting humor and potent insight.

“It’s 1932, and they’re placing power above the rule of law. It’s 1985, and they’re cynically exploiting racism and economic anxiety and fear of change,” she declares. “It’s 1932, it’s 1985, and they’re propagating a politics of anti-politics, a hatred of the idea of government itself. They’re replacing history with myths of new mornings, dreams of blood purity, of race and gender and sexual purity. It’s 1932, and it’s 1985, and we are in danger.” Left unsaid is that all of that is true again in 2019, and we are in danger once more.

Director Oskar Eustis and playwright Tony Kushner take a break during reboot of A Bright Room Called Day after thirty-four years (photo by Joan Marcus)

Kushner (The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures; Caroline, or Change), who won the Pulitzer and two Tonys for Angels in America, and Eustis, the artistic director of the Public who helmed the world premieres of Angels and Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul in addition to the controversial anti-Trump adaptation of Julius Caesar at the Delacorte in the summer of 2017, keep politics at the forefront of their work, but here they successfully avoid didacticism, allowing the audience to figure out most of the parallels between the 1930s, the 1980s, and today, but they do get their digs in. Early on, Xillah says, “Most likely Donald Trump — and this is the last time his name will be mentioned tonight because it is a name that is hateful to God — most likely when you leave the theater in a reasonably little while, he will still be president and you will go to bed unhappy.” When you wake up the next morning, Trump will indeed still be president, but A Bright Room Called Day is likely to have given you a fresh new perspective.

INTRACTABLE WOMAN: A THEATRICAL MEMO ON ANNA POLITKOVSKAYA

Nicole Shalhoub, Nadine Malouf, and Stacey Yen portray Anna Politkovskaya and other characters in US premiere of Intractable Woman: A Theatrical Memo on Anna Politkovskaya (photo © Julieta Cervantes)

Performance Space New York
122CC Second Floor Theater
150 First Ave. at East Ninth St.
Tuesday – Sunday through October 14, $35-$45
212-352-3101
playco.org

Heroic Russian journalist and activist Anna Politkovskaya dedicated her life to reporting the truth about what was going on in Russia and in particular Chechnya. In writing Intractable Woman: A Theatrical Memo on Anna Politkovskaya, Italian playwright Stefano Massini explains, “I wrote this text to go against the plan of those that decided to silence and muffle her voice.” Translated into English by Paula Wing, the 2008 play is now being given its US premiere by PlayCo, opening tonight at the 122CC Second Floor Theater at Performance Space New York in the East Village. The eighty-minute work features a cast of three women, Nadine Malouf, Nicole Shalhoub, and Stacey Yen, dressed in the same black pants, white collared shirt, and black jacket as if they are state officials or investigators (the costume designer is Junghyun Georgia Lee), portraying multiple characters, including Politkovskaya and various subjects she interviewed. In the prologue, the three women directly address the audience, interchanging lines as they share something that senior Kremlin official Vladimir Surkov wrote in an internal memo. “Enemies of the state are divided into two categories: the kind you can reeducate and the intractables. Discussion is not possible with the second kind and this makes reeducation impossible. The State requires us to clear our territory of these intractables.” Politkovskaya was considered an intractable.

The show consists of nineteen episodes of Politkovskaya’s reporting, involving a decapitated head put on public display; a nineteen-year-old soldier suffering from hunger who enlisted in the military, where he kills Chechens in “human bundles”; the Beslan massacre; a typical journalist’s day in Grozny, where citizens “get used to the idea of death”; and Ramzan Kadyrov, the corrupt thirty-year-old prime minister of Chechnya, installed by his father. “I find the behavior of this journalist unacceptable,” he says a day after the interview is published. “Doesn’t she know it’s the interviewer’s job to make the interviewee look good? What right did she have to publish my responses exactly as I gave them? Clearly this woman doesn’t want to be one of us.”

Stefano Massini’s Intractable Woman features fictionalized re-creations of Russian journalist and activist Anna Politkovskaya interviewing subjects (photo © Julieta Cervantes)

Indeed, Politkovskaya never wanted to be one of “them.” Instead, she fearlessly wrote about hate crimes, imprisonment and torture, widespread rape, mass graves, and other degradations of humanity, risking her job and her life with her husband and two children. Marsha Ginsberg’s pristine press-room set contains carefully arranged rows of red chairs facing a table with microphones. A portrait of Vladimir Putin hangs on a wall. One of the most frightening aspects of Intractable Woman — which marks Massini’s US debut, to be followed in March with The Lehman Trilogy at the Park Avenue Armory — is how Politkovskaya and other reporters are considered propagandists and enemies of the state, echoing President Trump’s views of the free press. “Journalists like you write lies,” a colonel in command of an airborne unit tells Politkovskaya. “What should I write?” she asks him. He replies, “That we’re fighting for the motherland. Against enemies of the people and traitors.”

Stacey Yen, Nicole Shalhoub, and Nadine Malouf star in English-language adaptation of powerful political play (photo © Julieta Cervantes)

Director Lee Sunday Evans (Dance Nation, HOME) does a superb job preventing the play from becoming didactic, pedantic, or just plain boring; the dialogue interplay among the three equally excellent actresses, who move chairs around in various scenes, keeps things proceeding at a fluid pace. The text does not necessarily quote Politkovskaya exactly; Massini, a novelist and the artistic director of the Piccolo Teatro of Milano, rewrote her words for dramatic impact, although the facts themselves are true. After the show is over, a curtain is opened at the back of the stage and the audience is invited to look inside, at a shelf of such items as Politkovskaya’s books, family photographs, and, most tellingly, a picture of a room of the same red chairs used in the production, on each one a photo of a murdered Russian journalist. The lobby is filled with posters of quotes from Politkovskaya, along with photographs. “I never write commentary, or speculation, or opinions. I have always believed – and I continue to believe – that it is not up to us to make judgements,” she wrote. “I am a journalist, not a court of law or a magistrate. I limit myself to reporting the facts. The facts: As they stand, as they are. It seems like the easiest thing, but here it’s the most difficult. And it exacts the highest price.”

THE SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL

Mrs. Candour (Dana Ivey), Lady Sneerwell (Frances Barber), and Lady Teazle (Helen Cespedes) take part in idle chatter in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s THE SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL

Red Bull Theater at the Lucille Lortel Theater
121 Christopher St. between Bleecker & Hudson Sts.
Tuesday – Sunday through May 8, $80-$100
212-352-3101
www.redbulltheater.com

Red Bull Theater’s wonderfully playful adaptation of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s classic 1777 farce, The School for Scandal, offers a master’s course on the subject of malicious idle chatter. The headmistress of this unofficial institution is Lady Sneerwell (Frances Barber), a wealthy widow with an ax to grind. “I am no hypocrite to deny the satisfaction I reap from the success of my efforts,” she tells her vitriolic star pupil, gossip columnist Snake (Jacob Dresch), continuing, “Wounded myself, in the early part of my life by the envenomed tongue of slander, I confess I have since known no pleasure equal to the reducing others to the level of my own injured reputation.” Joined by single heiress Maria (Nadine Malouf) and aristocratic gadfly Joseph Surface (Christian Conn), the group discusses the nature of gossip. “For my part, I confess, madam, wit loses its respect with me, when I see it in company with malice. What do you think, Mr. Surface?” the prim and proper Maria asks, to which Joseph replies, “Certainly, madam. To smile at the jest which plants a thorn in another’s breast is to become a principal in the mischief.” Lady Sneerwell chimes in, “Pshaw, there’s no possibility of being witty without a little ill nature. The malice of a good thing is the barb that makes it stick. What’s your opinion, Mr. Surface?” Joseph again shares his barbed judgment, explaining, “To be sure, madam, that conversation where the spirit of raillery is suppressed will ever appear tedious and insipid.” But the gossip they spread is anything but good-natured teasing, carefully aimed at directly affecting its targets. Referring to the never-seen Mrs. Clackit, Snake boasts, “To my knowledge, she has been the cause of six matches being broken off and three sons being disinherited, of four forced elopements, as many coerced confessions, and two divorces.” One of their current targets is Sir Peter Teazle (Mark Linn-Baker), an older city knight and avowed bachelor who has married the much younger Lady Teazle (Helen Cespedes), who is happily going through his money while flirting with Joseph, who prefers Sir Peter’s ward, Maria, who has a hankering for Joseph’s younger brother, Charles (Christian DeMarais), who is drinking away his fortune. The silly dandy and ersatz poet Sir Benjamin Backbite (Ryan Garbayo) also has his heart set on Maria. The Surface brothers have been receiving funds from their uncle, Sir Oliver (Henry Stram), who has been traveling the world for sixteen years but at last returns, deciding to test his nephews’ loyalty by appearing in disguise to determine whether they are still worthy of his financial support. And ruling over it all is the master gossip herself, Mrs. Candour (Dana Ivey), who declares without a hint of irony, “Tale-bearers are just as bad as the tale-makers — but what’s to be done, as I said before — how will you prevent people from talking?”

Charles (Christian DeMarais) and his disguised uncle, Sir Oliver (Henry Stram), frame their immediate future in THE SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL

In his directorial debut, Marc Vietor assuredly guides all the delicious madness, but he has to play second fiddle to Andrea Lauer’s sensational period costumes and Charles G. LaPointe’s outrageous wig and hair design; Dresch’s green reptilian getup as Snake is worth the price of admission alone, as is the way he marvelously squirms and slithers onstage, and Ivey’s wig is like a character unto itself. The excellent cast has tons of fun on Anna Louizos’s set, which folds into drawing rooms in various residences. Ivey and Barber are particularly adroit at chomping on the scenery and spitting out their wickedly delicious calumny. Several characters present asides directly to the audience, which works for the most part except for Stram, whose attempts are hard to understand. The Dublin-born Sheridan, who wrote such other plays as The Rivals, A Trip to Scarborough, and Pizarro and was also a politician who served in the British Parliament for more than three decades, doesn’t hold anything back in this consistently engaging satirical comedy of manners, beginning with the names of the characters themselves; in addition to Candour, Snake, Sneerwell, Backbite, Surface, and Teazle, there are Crabtree, Midas, Bumper, and Careless onstage as well as references to Prim, Brittle, Clackit, Knuckle, Kumquat, and Gadabout. In his diary entry for December 17, 1813, Lord Byron wrote, “Lord Holland told me a curious piece of sentimentality in Sheridan. The other night we were all delivering our respective and various opinions on him and other hommes marquans and mine was this: — ‘Whatever Sheridan has done or chosen to do has been, par excellence, always the best of its kind. He has written the best comedy (School for Scandal), the best opera (The Duenna — in my mind, far before that St. Giles’s lampoon, the Beggars’ Opera), the best farce (The Critic — it is only too good for an after-piece), and the best address (Monologue on Garrick); and, to crown all, delivered the very best oration (the famous Begum Speech) ever conceived or heard in this country.” It is with no mere prattle that I say that Red Bull Theater has done us all a service by resurrecting this play that is nearly as old as our country, which itself has never stopped loving and spreading gossip, which can now go viral over the internet in the matter of minutes. “There’s no stopping people’s tongues,” Mrs. Candour says. “The license of invention some people take is monstrous indeed,” Joseph adds. Thank goodness those sentiments are true, for they result in such a rich and savory treat as The School for Scandal.