Tag Archives: Sam Gold

JOHN

Everyone has a story to tell in world premiere of Annie Baker’s JOHN at the Signature (photo by Matthew Murphy)

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Irene Diamond Stage
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through September 6, $25-$55
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

“Tell me a story,” Jenny (Hong Chau) says to her boyfriend, Elias (Christopher Abbott), near the beginning of Annie Baker’s wonderful John, her follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Flick. It’s a direct reference to what we, the audience, are essentially saying when we take our seats in a dark theater, something that Baker makes abundantly clear throughout John’s smoothly paced three-hour-and-fifteen-minute running time. Jenny and Elias have arrived at a tchotchke-filled bed and breakfast owned by the sweetly doddering Mertis (Georgia Engel) in Gettysburg, where the guest rooms are named for Stonewall Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and Joshua Chamberlain. The Civil War setting is an apt metaphor for the battle between the sexes, as Elias and Jenny are tense and nervous, suffering through a rough patch in their relationship; Mertis, who prefers to be called Kitty, is on her second husband, although he is never seen or heard; and Kitty’s best friend, the blind Genevieve (Lois Smith), thinks that her ex-husband, John, has driven her legitimately insane, filling her brain with deadly scorpions. “Everyone knows someone named John,” Genevieve says, and indeed, we all do, with all the demons that implies. While Elias wants to explore the history of Gettysburg, Jenny complains that he chews his food too loud and that she is suffering through a bad period; more important, she is scared of one of Kitty’s myriad decorations, an American Girl doll named Samantha, the same model that terrorized her as a child. There is something unspoken between Elias and Jenny, a wall that is threatening to collapse all around them. Meanwhile, Genevieve believes that the house is haunted, as if personal ghosts, as well as those from the country’s deadliest war, are hovering in the air; although there are little touches of the supernatural amid Baker’s trademark hyperrealism, it’s really the characters themselves who are haunted.

Kitty (Georgia Engel), Elias (Christopher Abbott), and Genevieve (Lois Smith) riff on theater and real life in Annie Baker’s JOHN (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Baker and regular collaborator Sam Gold, who has directed nearly all of Baker’s plays, including Circle Mirror Transformation, The Aliens, and The Flick, which has been extended through January 2016 at the Barrow Street Theatre, reveal the artifice behind the theater and the art of storytelling in John, making it a central focus of the narrative. Kitty opens and closes the curtain before and after each act, pushing and pulling it across the stage, and she regularly moves the hands of a grandfather clock to indicate time shifts, as Mark Barton’s lighting increases or decreases with the passing hours. (The set design is by Mimi Lien.) Kitty calls the breakfast nook next to the living room “Paris,” alluding to the magic of the theater, which can turn a New York City stage into a foreign land. “Do you ever feel watched, Jenny?” Kitty asks. “Like someone is watching you?,” a direct reference to the audience. A later joke, in which one character says to another, “What are you still doing there?,” is a riff on the audience still in their seats after more than three hours, experiencing this play that unwinds at the mundane speed of life. At the end of the second act, after Kitty has closed the curtain and the house lights have come on, Genevieve takes the stage and explains, “I’m going to tell you a story but I’m going to do it in under five minutes,” another funny reference to the length of John. Near the end, Jenny says, “I want to hear the rest of the story,” but Elias responds, “The rest of the story doesn’t exist yet.” Those lines get to the heart of Baker’s play, which is about both fictional storytelling and real life; the former usually comes with everything wrapped up in a neat little bow, but the latter does not always provide easy answers, if any answers at all. The actors are uniformly excellent, particularly Engel (The Drowsy Chaperone, Baker’s Uncle Vanya) in a role written specifically for her, and Gold’s (Fun Home, The Realistic Joneses) direction makes the hours go by surprisingly smoothly. John is a beautifully rendered work by an extremely talented playwright who’s got her finger firmly placed on the pulse of modern existence, and contemporary theater.

FUN HOME

FUN HOME has been transformed into a whole new experience on Broadway (photo © Joan Marcus)

Circle in the Square Theatre
1633 Broadway at 50th St.
Tuesday – Sunday through September 13, $75-$150
funhomebroadway.com

The best off-Broadway musical of last season is now the best Broadway musical of this season. Fun Home hasn’t merely transferred from the Public’s Newman Theater downtown to Circle in the Square on the Great White Way; it has been positively transformed, with returning director Sam Gold and set designer David Zinn making ingenious use of the small, intimate space, the audience surrounding the famed Circle in the Square stage. Nominated for eight Drama Desk Awards last year, Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron’s magical adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s genre-defining graphic memoir is even better the second time around. The deeply personal story delves into the dysfunction of the Bechdel family: father Bruce (Michael Cerveris) is a high school English teacher, a restorer of old houses, and a funeral home director (which leads the kids to call it Fun Home); mother Helen (Judy Kuhn) plays the piano and has a yen for the theater; and younger children Christian (Oscar Williams) and John (Zell Steele Morrow) look up to their older sister, Alison, who is played as an eight-year-old by Sydney Lucas, as an eighteen-year-old by Emily Skeggs, and as a forty-three-year-old adult by Beth Malone. Malone is onstage for the full hundred minutes, watching her character’s life unfold before her. “I don’t trust memory,” she says early on, explaining why she is constantly drawing. When she goes off to college, she finds out something about herself that confuses and scares her — as well as a dark family secret that shakes her already complicated world.

Older Alison (Beth Malone) sketches her college-age self (Emily Skeggs) in FUN HOME (photo © Joan Marcus)

The staging is simply sensational, although there’s nothing simple about it. Furniture, from doors and tables to a console television, a bed, and a casket, rises up and down from beneath the floor as the scenes change, keeping the narrative flowing at a calm, even pace despite the building angst and turmoil. Tesori’s (Violet; Caroline, or Change) music and Kron’s (2.5 Minute Ride, Well) book and lyrics continue to soar, from the outrageously funny “Changing My Major” to the Partridge Family homage “You Are Like a Raincoat,” from the incredibly clever “Ring of Keys” to the mellifluous “Welcome to Our House on Maple Avenue,” with the crack band onstage (and enjoying the show as well when they’re not playing). The cast, once again, is outstanding, with Cerveris just the right bit on edge as Bruce; Kuhn splendidly tentative and nervous as Helen; Lucas a powerhouse as the creative small Alison; Skeggs terrific as the wide-eyed, curious middle Alison; Roberta Colindrez delightful as Joan, a lesbian who catches Alison’s eye at Oberlin; and Joel Perez as multiple characters, including Roy, a handyman who helps out around the house. But Gold’s (The Realistic Joneses, The Flick) revamped staging sheds more light on the adult Alison and Malone’s subtly beautiful performance; instead of existing on the periphery as an observer, she is now right in the middle of everything, sometimes sitting down next to one of her younger selves, getting a much more close-up look into her childhood without getting overly sentimental. (The same can practically be said about the audience.) The Broadway version of Fun Home is so extraordinary, it’s made me nearly forget about the marvelous original production.

THE MYSTERY OF LOVE AND SEX

Two generations deal with love, sex, and food in Lincoln Center production (photo by T Charles Erickson)

Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 26, $87
212-362-7600
www.lct.org

Bathsheba Doran’s The Mystery of Love and Sex explores the many facets of the title concepts in light but smart ways, touching on the complicated nature of friendship and family, romance and lust. Friends since they were nine years old, Charlotte (Gayle Rankin) and Jonny (Mamoudou Athie) are now going to the same Virginia college not far from where they were raised, and they have invited her parents, Lucinda (Diane Lane) and Howard (Tony Shalhoub), to come over for what Lucinda quickly decides is a “bohemian” dinner, on a makeshift table with salad, bread, no chairs, and cheap wine. While Lucinda gets right into the spirit of things, Howard has much more trouble, beginning with attempting to sit on the floor, then trying to serve himself some food. Soon the talk turns to the relationship between Jonny, a young black man with a sick mother, and Charlotte, a young Jewish woman preparing her own way in the world. Howard, a successful writer of detective fiction, might have been treating Jonny like a member of the family for the past decade, but now that he thinks that Jonny might become an official part of the family, he is not so happy. But the kids are still teenagers with their whole lives in front of them, and their undefined relationship grows more puzzling when Jonny starts dating another woman — and Charlotte says she has the hots for a fellow coed. Things heat up even further when the four main characters start debating such issues as racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, misogyny, religion — and food. (The show features a lot of eating, so you might want to be sure to dine beforehand.) The second act takes place five years later, as some matters have been settled, but most have not, as marriage and divorce enter the conversation.

Jonny (Mamoudou Athie) and Charlotte (Gayle Rankin) contemplate their future in THE MYSTERY OF LOVE AND SEX (photo by T Charles Erickson)

Returning to New York theater for the first time since 1977, when she was twelve, the now fifty-year-old Lane (A Little Romance, Unfaithful) is resplendent as Lucinda, her smile lighting up the entire theater, along with her rich southern accent, her character’s flair for life infectious. Shalhoub (Act One, Golden Boy) is terrific as Howard, a bundle of nerves and deeply hidden prejudices who fumbles fantastically in the opening dinner scene, showing a riotous mastery of physical comedy, while standing firm later when he gets into it with Jonny. Athie and Rankin are fine as Jonny and Charlotte, the former timid and withdrawn, the latter energetic and fancy-free, but the play slows down considerably when Lane and Shalhoub are not onstage. One of the busiest directors in New York, Sam Gold, who has helmed such delights as Fun Home, The Realistic Joneses, and Seminar, makes good use of the small Newhouse stage, keeping things moving proficiently on Andrew Lieberman’s minimalist sets, which generally consist of a few pieces of furniture and long drapes in the back. Doran, who has written such other plays as Kin and Nest and for such cable series as Boardwalk Empire and Masters of Sex, has a gift for creating unpredictable situations and taking them further than expected with a smooth calm, although she is occasionally too clever for her own good. The Mystery of Love and Sex is a perfectly pleasant piece of theater, a tasty morsel if not quite the gourmet meal it attempts to be.

THE REAL THING

An all-star cast revive Tom Stoppard’s THE REAL THING on Broadway (photo by Joan Marcus)

American Airlines Theatre
227 West 42nd St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 4, $67-$142
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org

In 1984, Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing won the Tony for Best Play, with stars Glenn Close, Jeremy Irons, and Christine Baranski taking home Antoinette Perry statues as well. In 2000, the story of love and infidelity was named Best Revival of a Play, with Jennifer Ehle and Stephen Dillane also honored for their roles. Lightning is unlikely to strike thrice in the latest Broadway revival of The Real Thing, a strangely cold and dispassionate version running at the American Airlines Theatre. In their Great White Way debuts, Ewan McGregor and Maggie Gyllenhaal never catch fire together, while Josh Hamilton and Cynthia Nixon don’t warm up either in this play about playwrights and actors. Henry (McGregor) is a successful scribe married to hoity actress Charlotte (Nixon), but he has the hots for another actress, the more earthbound Annie (Gyllenhaal), married to Max (Hamilton), who is suspicious of his wife’s possible infidelity. The tale alternates between real life and scenes from Henry’s plays with overlapping story lines and self-referential banter that sometimes makes it hard to differentiate between the two. In between scenes, members of the cast happily sing pop tunes out of character, as if they’re gathered around a campfire sharing wine and roasting marshmallows. But then it’s right back to Stoppard’s innately clever, refreshingly adult dialogue, which unfortunately falls flat under Sam Gold’s rather standard direction on David Zinn’s icy set. Madeline Weinstein adds some life as Debbie, Henry and Charlotte’s daughter — a role originated on Broadway by Nixon, who at the time was also appearing in David Rabe’s Tony-nominated Hurlyburly, dashing between the Ethel Barrymore Theatre and the Plymouth — but no sparks ignite as Annie’s costar, Billy (Ronan Raftery), and daft playwright Brodie (Alex Breaux) enter the fray. A well-known soda company once had a jingle that proclaimed, “There ain’t nothing like the real thing, baby”; in the case of this Broadway revival, that’s unfortunately not quite true.

THE REALISTIC JONESES

John Jones (Michael C. Hall) says farewell to a dead squirrel as Jennifer (Toni Collette) and Bob Jones (Tracy Letts) look on (photo by Joan Marcus)

Lyceum Theatre
149 West 45th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Through July 13, $29- $135
www.therealisticjoneses.com

In his first Broadway play, The Realistic Joneses, Will Eno is as much choreographer as writer, his words twirling, spinning, lifting, throwing, bouncing, and ricocheting among the four characters, performing an intoxicating dance of language. As in his previous two works, Title and Deed and The Open House, a kind of existential absurdity hovers over the proceedings, which delve into the deeply psychological natures of home and family. The Joneses live a rather isolated life up in the mountains, Bob (Tracy Letts) a curmudgeon suffering from a mysterious disease, Jennifer (Toni Collette) taking care of him while trying to deal with his sudden mood shifts. Their peaceful tranquility is somewhat shattered when a cheerful, energetic couple also named the Joneses move into the house down the way, John (Michael C. Hall) a repairman, Pony (Marisa Tomei) a sort of ditzy ingénue. Over the course of a few days, the four characters interact in different groupings, sharing their views on love and marriage, home and health while debating the meaning of language and communication in general and certain words and phrases specifically. “Nature was definitely one of the big selling points of here. Plus, the school system’s supposed to be good,” Pony says. “Oh, do you have kids?” Jennifer asks. “No, it’s just that John hates stupid children,” Pony responds. “We communicate pretty well, even without words,” Jennifer says about Bob, then later tells John, “I think you have a nice way with words.”

Pony (Marisa Tomei) and John Jones (Michael C. Hall) are looking forward to a new life in the mountains, but little do they know what awaits them (photo by Joan Marcus)

Eno, who was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for 2004’s Thom Pain (based on nothing), stealthily riffs on the old saw “keeping up with the Joneses” by equating the two couples in clever, understated ways, tantalizingly making one wonder whether they are actually different manifestations or younger and older versions of the same people. (Even though John and Pony appear more youthful than Bob and Jennifer, all four actors are in their forties, Tomei eight years older than Collette, Letts five years senior to Hall.) “We’re not so different, you and me,” John says to Bob, who responds, “I think we’re probably very different,” to which John adds, “Yeah, me too, actually.” And later, Pony tells John, “I don’t want to turn into those guys, next door.” Director Sam Gold (Fun Home, Seminar, Picnic) maintains a quick pace throughout the play’s fast-moving ninety minutes, another Eno specialty, with most scenes working well, although a meeting between John and Jennifer at the local market feels unsure of itself and falls flat. Otherwise, The Realistic Joneses is a smart, engaging comedy boasting an outstanding cast having a whole lot of deliciously infectious fun with the crazy English language.

FUN HOME

Small Alison (Sydney Lucas) and her father (Michael Cerveris) try to find common ground in FUN HOME (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Public Theater, Newman Theater
425 Lafayette St. by Astor Pl.
Extended through January 12, $81.50 – $91.50
212-967-7555
www.publictheater.org

In the opening scene of the Public Theater’s marvelous adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s 2006 graphic novel Fun Home, the forty-three-year-old Alison (Beth Malone) is watching her father, Bruce (Michael Cerveris), play with her eight-year-old self (Sydney Lucas). “Dad, I know you think cartoons are silly, but I draw cartoons,” she says. “And I need real things to draw from because I don’t trust memory.” That adult version of Alison is onstage throughout the 105-minute musical, standing at her drawing table or walking around David Zinn’s changing sets as she watches her younger selves, ages eight and eighteen (Alexandra Socha), deal with their difficult father and not-so-clueless mother, Helen (Judy Kuhn), who chooses to look the other way at her husband’s dangerous indiscretions. The award-winning graphic novel was subtitled A Family Tragicomic, and the show maintains that sensibility as it centers on Bechdel’s (Dykes to Watch Out For) complex relationship with her father, an English teacher and funeral home (“fun home”) director obsessed with historic restoration and, as it turns out, young men and boys. Composer Jeanine Tesori (Thoroughly Modern Millie; Caroline, or Change) and book writer and lyricist Lisa Kron (In the Wake, Well) have transformed Fun Home into a compelling musical that intelligently brings the intimate coming-of-age story to life, with plenty of charm and humor accompanying the anger and fear. When the teenage Alison goes off to college, she discovers that she is a lesbian, falling in love with the strong-minded Joan (Roberta Colindrez); “I’m changing my major to sex with Joan,” Alison sings in one of the show’s most entertaining numbers. As Alison learns more about herself, she also discovers her father’s big secret, leading to a tragedy that she is still trying to understand.

Current-day Alison (Beth Malone) watches in darkness as teenage self (Alexandra Socha) gets serious with her mother (Judy Kuhn) in stirring adaptation of graphic novel (photo by Joan Marcus)

Director Sam Gold (The Flick, Circle Mirror Transformation) does a terrific job navigating among the three Alisons, each one dealing with Bruce in different ways as they grow up, along with the various musical styles, which include the Partridge Family send-up “You Are Like a Raincoat” and Small Alison and her brothers’ (Griffin Birney and Noah Hinsdale) mock commercial “Come to the Fun Home.” Cerveris (Assassins, Nikolai and the Others) infuses his character with an edgy creepiness that is always threatening to explode, while Kuhn (Chess, Les Misérables) excels in her significantly smaller role. The three Alisons form a fascinating whole, with Lucas a bundle of positive energy in her off-Broadway debut, Socha (Spring Awakening) displaying a complex combination of dread and hope, and Malone remaining cool and calm as her childhood passes before her eyes. Fun Home, which has been extended through December 29, is a uniquely told, thoroughly satisfying story that examines those critical moments in life that help define who we are, and who we become.

PICNIC

Pulitzer Prize–winning PICNIC looks at a day in the life of small-town America (photo by Joan Marcus)

American Airlines Theatre
227 West 42nd St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Through February 24, $42-$127
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org

It’s been nearly sixty years since William Inge’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Picnic debuted on Broadway, with Ralph Meeker’s Hal and Paul Newman’s Alan battling over Janice Rule’s Madge; in the 1955 film, it was William Holden and Cliff Robertson with more than just their eyes on Kim Novak. So while the Roundabout’s current revival of Picnic at the American Airlines Theatre doesn’t boast quite the star power of those versions, it is still a charming and fun frolic through a bygone era. The two-hour play takes place in a small Kansas town in 1950s America that is preparing for the annual Labor Day picnic. Local beauty queen Madge Owens (Lost’s Maggie Grace) assumes she’ll be going to the picnic with Alan Seymour (Ben Rappaport), a relatively boring and self-satisfied college student from a wealthy family, along with her younger sister, the tomboy Millie (Californication’s Madeleine Martin), and their somewhat dowdy mother, Flo (Emmy winner Mare Winningham), whose husband walked out on her many years before, leaving her to raise her children on her own. The Owens family lives next door to Helen Potts (Oscar, Emmy, and Tony winner Ellen Burstyn), an older woman who has given up whatever life she could have had in order to care for her ailing mother. To get a cheap thrill, Helen hires a stranger, Hal Carter (Gossip Girl’s Sebastian Stan), to do some yard work for her, barely able to control herself when the Adonis-like man rips off his shirt, revealing his taut, sweaty chest. All of the other women notice as well, including spinster schoolteacher Rosemary Sydney (four-time Obie winner Elizabeth Marvel), who has been dating dull but reliable businessman Howard Bevans (two-time Obie winner Reed Birney). It turns out that Hal is a down-on-his-luck former fraternity brother of Alan’s who has come to town to get back on his feet, but after he is instantly attracted to Madge — and perhaps vice versa — things don’t exactly end up as planned.

Madge (Maggie Grace) shares her hopes and dreams with her mother, Flo (Mare Winningham), in Roundabout revival of William Inge’s PICNIC (photo by Joan Marcus)

In Picnic, Inge, who also wrote such plays as Bus Stop and Come Back, Little Sheba and won an Oscar for his screenplay for Splendor in the Grass, cleverly deals with people’s hopes, dreams, and expectations in this funny, tender, and tense drama that explores the soft underbelly lying beneath the old-fashioned values of small-town America. Surprisingly, the acting is a mixed bag, with Marvel overplaying her part, Winningham underplaying hers, and Burstyn at times seeming to be lost while Grace, Birney, and Martin are more effective. Director Sam Gold (Look Back in Anger, Seminar) makes excellent use of Andrew Lieberman’s charming set, a shared backyard that firmly sets the action in America’s heartland. When Madge is up in her room, applying her makeup in front of a window that looks out on the backyard, the audience is sneaking a peek at her just as several characters are doing, everyone dreaming of the possibilities life holds for us all. In a season dominated by revivals of long-ago Broadway classics, including Golden Boy, The Heiress, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Picnic is a fine addition.