Tag Archives: Sarah Steele

PRE-EXISTING CONDITION

C (Sarah Steele) and A (Tatiana Maslany) discuss a difficult situation in Pre-Existing Condition (photo by Emilio Madrid)

PRE-EXISTING CONDITION
Connelly Theater Upstairs
220 East Fourth St. between Aves. A & B
Monday – Saturday through August 3, $49-$125
preexistingconditionplay.com
www.connellytheater.org

Don’t worry that the protagonist in Marin Ireland’s gripping and powerful major playwriting debut, Pre-Existing Condition, holds what appears to be a spiral-bound copy of the script throughout the play’s sleek and steady seventy-five minutes, sometimes glancing at the words, other times clutching it to her chest like Linus’s blanket in Peanuts. Known only as A, the character never lets go of the script, not because the actor has not yet learned all of the lines, but because it’s a constant reminder of a horrific, life-altering event in the character’s recent past. Over the show’s two-month run, A will be played by Emmy winner Tatiana Maslany (who I saw), Tony nominee and director Maria Dizzia, Tavi Gevinson, Tony winner Deirdre O’Connell, and Julia Chan — and each will hold that script.

It’s been seven months since A was brutally struck by her partner. No longer with the man, she speaks with an attorney, a psychiatrist, a few close friends, her parents, an old acquaintance, her parents, and others, but no one is able to help, instead only adding to her torment and confusion by subtly blaming her for first provoking the attack and then refusing to take her lover back.

She tries to date, but she’s clearly not ready, especially when the men she meets cannot, or will not, understand her situation. (All the men and A’s mother are played by Greg Keller, although I saw his understudy, Gregory Connors; the rest of the women are portrayed by Sarah Steele and Dael Orlandersmith.)

A finds some respite in group therapy run by two caring women who have developed a support program; during those sessions, the two facilitators talk directly to the audience, as if we are all part of this community, because when it comes down to it, we are; domestic violence can occur at any moment, in any family.

In one exchange with B, A questions her own responsibility.

B: do you still feel like it’s your fault?
A: yeah.
B: it’s not.
A: well.
B: you couldn’t have known.
A: but . . . couldn’t I? I mean, I’m not that stupid, right? I mean. I guess I’m realizing something kind of horrible about myself which is that I always thought that like women who got hit by their boyfriends were like . . . they were like . . .
B: (long pause) they were like what?
A: trash. They were like trash. (pause)
B: mmhm.
A: and the thing is that’s exactly what I felt like. Feel like. (pause) Trash. (pause) (pause) And there are days when I feel like maybe I always was trash and this experience just made me see that finally. Clearly. And it has really nothing to do with the, like, huge shame or guilt or any of that, anything even directly relating to this incident, it just starts to feel like a very very deep truth. That I’m trash. And I always was.
B: you believe that still? Right now at this moment?
A: Oh yeah yeah, of course. Sure. No, that hasn’t ever gone away since it started. It’s almost a peaceful thought, which I guess is what makes it feel like it must be true?

Dael Orlandersmith plays multiple roles in new play by Marin Ireland (photo by Emilio Madrid)

Later, A explores another aspect of her feelings that no one seems to get. “I’m so fucking exhausted by all of this. All of this. All of the taking it seriously and the. All of it,” she tells B. “I don’t — okay. I don’t want the big task of my life now to be ‘dealing with this.’ It’s fucking eating up everything.”

When a friend (C) mentions the possibility of her offering forgiveness, A states, “I don’t want to. Forgive. I don’t want to forget it. . . . I don’t want to also be guilty of forgetting it.”

As the healing process — whatever it encompasses — continues, the audience empathizes more and more with A, realizing that her pain and trauma could be anyone’s pain and trauma, that any one of us could be sitting in that chair in the middle of the room, being consumed by some type of tragedy.

The California-born, Obie-winning Ireland is one of New York’s finest actors, having appeared in such powerful plays as On the Exhale, Ironbound, Marie Antoinette, the intimate Uncle Vanya that took place in a Flatiron loft, and reasons to be pretty, which earned her a Tony nomination.

She was busy during the pandemic, acting in short virtual works for charity and conceiving “Lessons in Survival” at the Vineyard Theatre with Peter Mark Kendall, Tyler Thomas, and Reggie D. White, in which a company known as the Commissary reenacted historic speeches, interviews, and conversations by activists and artists from revolutionary times (including James Baldwin, Nina Simone, Angela Davis, Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni, Bobby Seale, and Muhammad Ali). Pre-Existing Condition is its own kind of lesson in survival, a deeply personal one.

Julia Chan, seen here with Greg Keller, is one of five rotating actors portraying the protagonist in gripping play (photo by Emilio Madrid)

In 2012, Ireland and her boyfriend at the time, Scott Shepherd, were in London, starring as the leads in the Wooster Group’s Cry, Trojans!, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Troilus & Cressida. One day she came to rehearsal with a black eye after Shepherd viciously hit her; he did not deny doing it. How Ireland was treated by the company and others following the event led her to lobby for systemic change in the theater.

“I continue to wonder where responsibility and accountability should be for what happened,” Ireland told the New York Times in 2015. “Many actors don’t know what to do when behavior — physical, sexual, harassment, bullying — crosses a line.”

Pre-Existing Condition is not a revenge drama, nor is it a self-help guide. It’s a brutally honest and provocative look at the psychological and bodily wounds that humans inflict and receive. Director Dizzia, an actor who has appeared in more than seventy movies and TV shows and theatrical productions, earning a Tony nomination for Best Performance by a Featured Actress for In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play), allows Ireland’s story to unfold at a modest pace, luring the audience at the Connelly’s tiny upstairs theater into its many intricacies. Louisa Thompson’s spare set consists of a handful of chairs that match those the people in the first row sit in, implicating all of us; the actors switch chairs, but some are left empty, evoking ghosts who cannot be there. In the back are piles of more chairs, representing other survivors to come.

Drama Desk winner Steele (The Humans, I Can Get It for You Wholesale) is charming in multiple roles, wearing a Patti Smith T-shirt and jeans as she engages with A from multiple points of view. Solo specialist Orlandersmith (Spiritus/Virgil’s Dance, Forever) is wonderfully gentle as various therapists. Understudy Connors (The Poisoner, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window), taking over this night for the always terrific Keller (Dig, Shhhh), is stalwart as the men in A’s life, the good and the bad.

Maslany (Grey House, Mary Page Marlowe) is sensational as the tormented A, searching for a way out of her lonely predicament. The Canadian actor’s expressive facial gestures and meticulous body movements, filled with uncomfortable pauses, are mesmerizing, daring us to try to find the way forward for A; in fact, it is not until the closing moments that Maslany makes any eye contact with the audience, bringing us further into her world, and concluding with an extraordinary coda.

A’s personal answers may not be in the pages she’s clinging to as if some kind of life line, but Ireland’s play does offer a fascinating blueprint of what we all should be paying a lot more attention to.

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

THE HUMANS ON BROADWAY

Stephen Karam explores the bright and dark sides of the American dream in beautifully humanistic Broadway drama (photo by Brigitte Lacombe)

Helen Hayes Theatre
240 West 44th St.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 24, $39-$145
www.thehumansonbroadway.com
www.roundabouttheatre.org

The most human off-Broadway show of the season is now the most human on Broadway. The Roundabout production of Pulitzer Prize finalist Stephen Karam’s The Humans, which ran at the Laura Pels from October 25 through January 3, has made a seamless transition to the Great White Way, where it is inhabiting the Helen Hayes Theatre through July 24. Karam has made minimal, virtually undetectable tweaks to the play, which features the same cast and crew and is just as good the second time around. Tony nominee and Drama Desk and Obie Award winner Reed Birney stars as Erik Blake, the patriarch of a Scranton family that is gathering for Thanksgiving in the new Chinatown apartment of younger daughter Brigid (Sarah Steele), which she and boyfriend, Richard (Arian Moayed) have just moved into. Erik and his wife, Deirdre (Jayne Houdyshell), have driven into the city with his ailing mother, Momo (Lauren Klein), who requires constant care. They are joined by older daughter Aimee (Cassie Beck), a Philadelphia lawyer who has recently broken up with her longtime girlfriend. Over the course of ninety-five intimate minutes, we learn about each character’s strengths and weaknesses, their hopes and dreams, their successes and their failures, as Scranton native Karam (Speech & Debate, Dark Sisters) and two-time Tony-winning director Joe Mantello (Take Me Out, Assassins) steer clear of clichés and melodramatic sentimentality, even when making direct references to 9/11. The acting, led by New York theater treasures Birney (You Got Older, Circle Mirror Transformation) and Houdyshell (Follies, Well) and rising star Steele (Slowgirl, Speech and Debate), is impeccable, making audience members feel like they’re experiencing their own Thanksgiving. Every moment of The Humans, which takes place on David Zinn’s spectacular two-floor tearaway set, rings true, a gripping, honest depiction of life in the twenty-first century, filled with the typical ups and downs, fears and anxieties, that we all face every day. Although things get very serious, including a touch of the otherworldly, the play is also hysterically funny as it paints a familiar yet frightening portrait of contemporary America, mixing in darkness both literally and figuratively. To find out more about the story and to read a short excerpt from the play, you can read my review of the off-Broadway run here, but by this point all you need to know is that this is a must-see production of a must-see show.

THE HUMANS

The Blake family gathers in a Chinatown duplex for a Thanksgiving to remember in THE HUMANS (photo by Joan Marcus)

Laura Pels Theatre
Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre
111 West 46th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 3, $99
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org

Stephen Karam, a Pulitzer finalist for his widely hailed 2011 play, Sons of the Prophet, should be up for the prestigious prize again for his follow-up, the beautifully told drama The Humans, running at the Laura Pels through January 3, after which it will be transferring to Broadway. The Roundabout commission is a gorgeous, bittersweet portrait of the fears and anxieties that ripple through the average American family in the twenty-first century. On Thanksgiving Day, the Blake clan has gathered at the duplex apartment in Chinatown just rented by Brigid Blake (Sarah Steele), a twenty-six-year-old composer and musician trying to make ends meet as a bartender, and her thirty-eight-year-old boyfriend, Richard Saad (Arian Moayed), a grad student who is preparing the holiday feast. Brigid’s parents, Erik (Reed Birney), who’s worked at the local Catholic high school for twenty-eight years, and Deirdre (Jayne Houdyshell), who has been the office manager at the same company for four decades, have driven into the city from their home in Scranton with Erik’s aged mother, Momo (Lauren Klein), who is suffering from severe dementia and is confined to a wheelchair. They are joined by Brigid’s older sister, Aimee (Cassie Beck), a Philadelphia lawyer who recently broke up with her longtime girlfriend and whose ulcerative colitis is acting up. Brigid and Richard are still in the process of moving in — the truck with most of their possessions is stuck in Queens — so there are some boxes on the floor, not much furniture, and no shades over the lone window, which looks out into a dark alley. But the members of the Blake family soldier on; they are a very close group that hide very few secrets as they talk about their lives, offer love and support, and take both playful and serious shots at one another, as one early exchange shows.

Stephen Karam’s follow-up to sonS OF THE PROPHET is a searing, and funny, portrait of the modern American family (photo by Joan Marcus)

Erik: “I hate that you moved a few blocks from where two towers got blown up and in a major flood zone. . . . I hate that.”
Brigid: “This area is safe —”
Erik: “Chinatown flooded during the last hurricane — it flooded —”
Brigid: “Yeah, that’s why I can afford to live here — it’s not like you gave me any money to help me out.”
Erik: “Wow . . .”
Brigid: “Hey, I’m — sorry, just . . . Chinatown is safe — you saw my block, Dad —”
Deirdre: “Of course it is . . .”
Brigid: “— no one’s going to steer a plane into a, a fish market on Grand Street —”
Aimee: “Brigid . . .”
Deidre: “Let it go . . .”
Erik: “I liked you livin’ in Queens, alright? I worry enough with Aimee on the top floor of the Cira Centre —”
Aimee: “Well, stop, Philly is more stable than New York —”
Brigid: “Aimee, don’t make him more —”
Aimee: “I’m just saying — it’s safer . . .”
Brigid: “Yeah, ’cause not even terrorists wanna spend time in Philly. Philly is awful —”
Aimee: “Oh, ha ha . . .”
Erik: “You think everything’s awful, you think Scranton is awful, but it’s the place that —”
Brigid: “We think it’s awful?!”
Aimee: “Dad, it is!”
Erik: “. . . yeah, well, what I think’s funny is how you guys, you move to big cities and trash Scranton, when Momo almost killed herself getting outta New York — she didn’t have a real toilet in this city, and now her granddaughter moves right back to the place she struggled to escape. . . .”
Brigid: “We know, yes . . . ‘return to the slums . . .’”

No topic is off limits as they discuss finance and economics, bowel movements, cockroaches, the correct pronunciation of Andrew Carnegie’s last name, texting, the odd noises coming from the apartment above, and general quality-of-life issues, but most of all they are searching for a sense of fairness in a world where that ideal is getting harder and harder to come by. Both men, Erik and Richard, are having trouble sleeping, experiencing weird dreams they can’t explain. Momo spits out supposed gibberish that contains such phrases as “You can never come back” and “Where do we go.” Meanwhile, Deirdre is volunteering to help Bhutanese immigrants in Scranton who are mired in poverty, having left a country that measures its success in Gross National Happiness. Scranton native Karam (Speech & Debate, Dark Sisters) is delving into the very nature of the modern-day human condition, which is not very pretty. “There’s enough going on in the real world to give me the creeps,” Deirdre says, leading Brigid to point out Richard’s obsession with a comic book called Quasar. “It’s about this species of, like, half-alien, half-demon creatures with teeth on their backs,” he explains. “On their planet, the scary stories they tell each other . . . they’re all about us. The horror stories for the monsters are all about humans.” Karam’s highly literate script was influenced by Federico García Lorca’s A Poet in New York, which deals with the city’s response to the 1929 economic crash, Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay, “The Uncanny,” about the strangely familiar, and Napoleon Hill’s six basic fears from his 1937 book, Think and Grow Rich — fear of poverty, criticism, ill health, loss of love, old age, and death — and all six can be found in The Humans.

Two-time Tony winner Joe Mantello (Take Me Out, Assassins) seamlessly directs the real-time story, which takes place on David Zinn’s two-floor tear-away set, like a dollhouse ripped open for us to witness the actual life going on inside. The exquisite cast is just as seamless, each character authentic and believable, led by the always wonderful Houdyshell (Follies, Well) as the excitable, nervous mother, rising star Steele (Slowgirl, Speech and Debate) as the prodigal younger daughter trying to make it on her own, and, front and center at both the beginning and the end of the play, a heartfelt Birney (You Got Older, Circle Mirror Transformation) as the steadfast patriarch, desperate to hold it all together even as things threaten to fall apart, with just a touch of the supernatural hovering as well to complicate matters and to heighten the many terrors of everyday existence. As laugh-out-loud funny as it is heartbreakingly honest, The Humans offers up a Thanksgiving to remember, two spectacularly thought-provoking and entertaining hours that encapsulate the state of the American family in this tough, fearful post-9/11 world.

THE COUNTRY HOUSE

An acting family rips into itself in Donald Margulies’s THE COUNTRY HOUSE (photo by Joan Marcus)

Manhattan Theatre Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West 47th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 23, $67-$125
www.manhattantheatreclub.com
www.thecountryhousebway.com

There’s something all too familiar about Pulitzer Prize winner Donald Margulies’s latest play, The Country House, which opened October 2 at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Broadway home, the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. The show, which deals with a close-knit group of friends and relatives gathering at a country house during the Williamstown Theatre Festival, resounds with echoes of such recent productions as the Tony-winning Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, the underrated Ten Chimneys, the Public’s Nikolai and the Others, and MTC’s own The Snow Geese. It’s a year after the tragic death of Kathy, a beloved and successful actress and, by all accounts, one of the most amazing women ever to step foot on the planet. Her family is honoring her memory at their country house, led by her mother, stage diva Anna Patterson (Blythe Danner); Anna’s cynical, ne’er-do-well son, Elliot Cooper (Eric Lange); her former son-in-law, schlock director Walter Keegan (David Raasche), who was married to Kathy; and Susie (Sarah Steele), Walter and Kathy’s twentysomething daughter. Walter has arrived with his new fiancée, the much younger and very beautiful — as we are told over and over again — Nell McNally (Kate Jennings Bryant), a struggling actress, and Anna has also invited TV superstar and heartthrob Michael Astor (Daniel Sunjata), a longtime family friend who is slumming by appearing at the festival in Ferenc Molnár’s The Guardsman. Margulies (Time Stands Still, Dinner with Friends) channels Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and The Seagull as all the women flirt with Michael, the cynical Susie chooses not to get involved in the family business, and the condescending and contemptuous Elliott takes issue with just about everyone, writing a play that doesn’t exactly endear him to the others.

The Country House might not shed new light on this somewhat tired subject, but the production itself is excellent, fluidly directed by Daniel Sullivan, who has helmed many of Margulies’s previous plays. John Lee Beatty’s living-room set is charming and inviting, enhanced by Peter Kaczorowski’s splendid lighting, which smartly signals each next scene and is especially effective evoking a lightning storm. The acting is exemplary, led by the always engaging Danner (The Commons of Pensacola, Butterflies Are Free) as the still-feisty family matriarch rehearsing for Miss Warren’s Profession, and Steele (Slowgirl, Russian Transport), who is a star on the rise. Rasche (Speed-the-Plow, Sledge Hammer!) is particularly effective as Walter, a character with a lot more depth than originally presented, and TV veteran Lange (Lost, Victorious), in his first play in seven years, will have you wondering why he doesn’t take to the stage more often. Originally produced this past summer at the Geffen Playhouse in L.A. (where Danner, Steele, Rasche, and Lange originated their roles), The Country House has a lot to offer, but it’s a place that’s been visited far too often.

THE NETFLIX PLAYS

netflix plays

Ars Nova
511 West 54th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
January 30 – February 9, $15, 8:00
212-352-3101
www.arsnovanyc.com

Since 2007, Ars Nova’s Play Group has been putting together festivals of short works and live music dedicated to pop-culture themes and internet memes, beginning with “The Wikipedia Plays” and continuing with “Playlist,” “Missed Connections NYC,” “The Wii Plays,” and “The Urban Dictionary Plays.” This year the Play Group turns its attention to online movie streaming with “The Netflix Plays,” twelve works inspired by Netflix’s recommendation categories and people’s guilty pleasures. The queue consists of Josh Koenigsberg’s Because You Watched Weekend at Bernie’s 2: A Kantian Morality Tale directed by Wes Grantom, Rachel Bonds’s Because You Watched Sherlock: Jack of Hearts directed by Portia Krieger, Sarah Gancher’s Understated Foreign Coming of Age: December 2011, Budapest directed by Jess Chayes, Sarah Burgess’s Inscrutable European-Set Thrillers: Bolzano directed by Jesse Jou, Dipika Guha’s Because You Watched Downton Abbey: Violently Overstated British Period Drama for Ages 19-100 directed by Jou, Bess Wohl’s Watch It Again: Happy New Year directed by Chayes, Sharyn Rothstein’s Heartfelt Noncontroversial Political Tearjerkers: October Surprise! directed by Chayes, A. Zell Williams’s Emotional Foreign Father-Daughter Films: The Foreign Affair, directed by Jou, Nick Gandiello’s Hip-Hop Documentaries: How I Feel directed by Krieger, Stephen Karam’s Watch It Again! directed by Grantom, Michael Mitnick’s Because You Watched Frasier: BECAUSE YOU WATCHED FRASIER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! directed by Krieger, and Jon Kern’s Inspiring Fight-the-System Movies Based on Real Life: The Cable Bill directed by Grantom. But you need not worry too much about the bill, as the evening, in which all the plays are performed, is a mere fifteen bucks. The cast, which, based on the plays’ titles, should be having a lot of fun themselves, includes Kyle Beltran, Deonna Bouye, Nadia Bowers, Megan Byrne, Ben Graney, Drew McVety, Sarah Steele, and Eddie Kaye Thomas.

SLOWGIRL

Željko Ivanek and Sarah Steele make a powerful team in Greg Pierce’s beautifully done SLOWGIRL (photo by Erin Baiano)

Claire Tow Theater
LCT3/Lincoln Center Theater
150 West 65th St.
Extended through August 5, $20
www.lct.org

Lincoln Center has inaugurated its new low-price, 112-seat Claire Tow Theater, which sits above the Vivian Beaumont and Mitzi E. Newhouse, with the world premiere of Greg Pierce’s wonderful two-character Slowgirl. After being blamed for a high school tragedy back home, seventeen-year-old Becky (Sarah Steele) is sent off to spend a few days with her reclusive uncle Sterling (Željko Ivanek), a divorced lawyer who has been living by himself in a shack in the jungles of Costa Rica for nine years. Whereas Becky is outgoing and seems to never be able to shut up and relax, Sterling chooses his words far more carefully, as if each one pains him to say out loud, while wincing at Becky’s openness and questionable language. The two very different people eventually bond over smoothies and iguanas as Becky talks about what happened to her somewhat off classmate known as Slowgirl, who was seriously injured at a graduation party, and Sterling discusses the events that ultimately led him into the jungle.

The reclusive Sterling (Željko Ivanek) is forced to face some dark secrets in SLOWGIRL (photo by Erin Baiano)

Emmy winner and multiple Tony nominee Ivanek, most well known for recurring roles on such television series as Homicide, Damages, and Oz in addition to stage appearances in such shows as The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial and Brighton Beach Memoirs, is mesmerizing as Sterling, a pent-up bundle of nerves who can barely get the words out of his mouth, while Steele (All-American, Russian Transport) is delightful as Becky, a fast-talking teen with no filter, spitting out whatever’s on her mind. Rachel Hauck’s main set, Sterling’s open-air shack, rises at one point to reveal a labyrinth Sterling built to help him silently concentrate and focus, something Becky seems incapable of doing. Leah Gelpe’s sound design includes animal and bird noises that make the audience feel like they’re in the middle of the jungle, while Anne Kauffman’s (This Wide Night, Thugs) direction seamlessly weaves the characters and story together. Pierce (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle) has written a compelling, intelligent, splendidly nuanced hundred-minute drama that is filled with small surprises and little touches that serve as a terrific introduction to Lincoln Center’s intimate new theater, which is dedicated to works by emerging playwrights, directors, and designers, with tickets for all productions only $20.

RUSSIAN TRANSPORT

RUSSIAN TRANSPORT explores the immigrant experience of a wacky family in Brooklyn (photo by Monique Carboni)

The Acorn Theatre at Theatre Row
410 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
January 30 through March 24, $61.25
212-560-2183
www.thenewgroup.org
www.theatrerow.org

When her grown-up baby brother, Boris (Morgan Spector), finally immigrates to America from his native Russia, Diana (Janeane Garofalo) can’t be happier. The mother of two teenagers, eighteen-year-old Alex (Raviv Ullman) and fourteen-year-old Mira (Sarah Steele), and wife to Misha (Daniel Oreskes), Diana kicks Mira to an air mattress on the living-room floor, giving her daughter’s upstairs bedroom to Boris, who, she says, “makes the girls pregnant only from looking. Always, he is like this.” It quickly turns out that Boris Fodorovsky is not quite the innocent, fresh-off-the-boat émigré he first appears to be, bringing mystery and danger to the family’s wacky Sheepshead Bay home. In fact, everyone has secrets they’re hiding in Erika Sheffer’s delightful off-Broadway debut, Russian Transport, which is having its world premiere at the Acorn Theatre at Theatre Row in a New Group production directed by Scott Elliott. Garofalo, in her first major dramatic theatrical role, does a fine job as the foul-mouthed matriarch, seamlessly going back and forth between English and Russian as she takes care of Mira, who is just discovering boys and wants to spend the summer in Europe; Alex, who is not exactly the mobile-phone salesman he claims to be; and big and burly Misha, who runs a car service from a small office connected to the house. Insults and jokes in two languages fly fast and furious on Derek McLane’s bilevel stage, but things get serious in a hurry when Alex and Mira discover some unsavory things about their uncle Boris. The acting is uniformly solid in this involving exploration of the immigrant experience, which unfolds in Russian Transport like the matryoshka dolls that Mira collects.