Tag Archives: the Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre

BLACK HOLES: ESTRANGED SIBLINGS CAN’T CONNECT IN HUNTER’S LATEST GEM

Paul Sparks and Brian J. Smith play half brothers facing a family crisis in Samuel D. Hunter’s Grangeville (photo by Emilio Madrid)

GRANGEVILLE
The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 23, $69-$144
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

In a short period of time, NYU grad Jack Serio has established himself as an exciting director of intimate dramas; since 2021, he has helmed Bernard Kops’s The Dark Outside at Theater for the New City, Rita Kalnejais’s This Beautiful Future at the Cherry Lane, Joey Merlo’s On Set with Theda Bara at the Brick, Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in a Flatiron loft, and Ruby Thomas’s The Animal Kingdom in the Connelly’s tiny upstairs theater. His unique stagings foster particularly visceral connections with small audiences in these constrained spaces.

Since 2010, Idaho native Samuel D. Hunter has proved to be one of America’s most consistently thoughtful and intelligent playwrights, penning such poignant and involving works as A Bright New Boise, The Whale, Lewiston/Clarkston, Greater Clements, and A Case for the Existence of God, demonstrating an unfailing ear for dialogue while exploring the contemporary human condition.

The Signature has wisely teamed up Serio and Hunter for Grangeville, a moving and powerful story about a pair of estranged half brothers forced together when their mother becomes seriously ill.

The play opens in near darkness, with Jerry (Paul Sparks) sitting stage right, on a stoop in front of a door in the corner, and Arnold (Brian J. Smith) on a bench far away on the opposite side. The distance between them is palpable, and not only physically. Jerry, wearing a flannel shirt, vest, and baseball cap, looking like a down-on-his-luck farmer, is still living in Grangeville, the Idaho town the siblings — sired by different fathers — grew up in. Jerry and his wife are raising their two children there, and he’s also taken on the responsibility of caring for their ailing mother, who lives in a trailer park. (The costumes are by Ricky Reynoso, with lighting by Stacey Derosier and set design by dots.)

Jerry has called Arnold, a fashionably dressed queer artist living in Rotterdam with his husband, Bram, because their mother’s health bills are piling up and the money is running out. Rejected by the family because they would not accept his sexual orientation, Arnold has cut himself off from them, so he is surprised to get the call but even more shocked when he is told that their mother has named him executor in her will.

Arnold (Brian J. Smith) and Jerry (Paul Sparks) find themselves at a distance in gripping new play (photo by Emilio Madrid)

“That doesn’t make any sense!” Arnold argues. “I live in the Netherlands, we haven’t spoken in years! Why would she do this?!”

“Yeah, I mean when she had this drawn up she knew I was going through some — shit, so maybe she just figured you’d be better at this,” Jerry responds. “I mean you’re the smarter one! Maybe it’s a compliment!”

Jerry and their mother were counting on a supposed treasure she had bought on the cheap.

“She was convinced she found a long-lost piece of art by that famous artist — Jack something? Anyway, it’s this sculpture of a real tall skinny guy, all stretched out. Famous sculptor. Jack something,” Jerry explains.

“Wait — are you talking about Giacometti?” Arnold asks.

“That’s it. She was convinced that she found a long-lost Giacometti at this pawn shop in Burley,” Jerry answers.

“Okay, I — don’t know what to do with that,” Arnold says.

Over a brief period of time, the half brothers confront some of their personal failings and make unexpected admissions, but neither is anticipating any grand, sentimental rapprochements.

Serio expertly keeps the tension mounting without costume or set changes or dramatic narrative shifts, primarily only with dialogue. However, as the characters’ conversations switch from telephone to computer to in person — in one scene, Sparks becomes Bram, while in another, Smith is Stacey, his brother’s wife — the actors slowly get closer across the liminal space, eventually standing face-to-face, which packs a powerful punch. In addition, Chris Darbassie’s sound shifts with the changes in technology, at first high-pitched and squeaky, later clear and crisp.

Replacing the originally announced Brendan Fraser — who won an Oscar for starring in The Whale, the 2022 film adaptation of Hunter’s 2012 off-Broadway play — Emmy nominee Sparks (At Home at the Zoo, Grey House, Waiting for Godot) is sensational as Jerry, the ne’er-do-well older brother whose life is falling apart while he has no idea how to stop the avalanche. Every minor gesture, every movement is so carefully choreographed that the audience understands who Jerry is, not some mere country bumpkin with no future.

Tony nominee Smith (The Glass Menagerie, The Columnist, Three Changes) holds his own as Arnold, a conflicted man who has been harboring inner pain since he was a child and is not quite as grounded as he initially appears to be. Both men need help, the kind they never received from their parents or, sadly, from each other.

Jerry (Paul Sparks) and Arnold (Brian J. Smith) face off in Samuel D. Hunter’s Grangeville at the Signature (photo by Emilio Madrid)

But at the center of it all is Hunter’s razor-sharp, laser-focused language. There is not a word out of place, not a sentence that languishes in mediocrity. The story takes place in Grangeville, a town of approximately three thousand people in Idaho County, but it’s about America, with its troubled health-care system, rampant homophobia, fast-moving technology that leaves so many behind, and endless political battles between red and blue geographical locations as well as escalating issues over how we communicate with one another.

The play has a brutal yet subtle honesty as it reveals the dark underbelly of the American dream, laid to waste in the complexities of one family that refuses to blame the system.

“So what happened?” Arnold asks when Jerry explains that his decades-long marriage is in trouble.

“I think Stacey just — realized she wasn’t happy,” Jerry answers.

“What about you?” Arnold responds.

“Oh, I’ve never been happy. Heh,” Jerry admits matter-of-factly.

Arnold has not found happiness either, later telling his brother, “It’s like no matter what memory it is, no matter how seemingly innocuous it is, it always leads straight to shit. It’s like being stuck in a maze and no matter what path you choose there’s just black holes everywhere that you keep falling into.”

In Grangeville, there’s no escaping those black holes, no matter how far you try to run from them.

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

THE SEVEN YEAR DISAPPEAR

Taylor Trensch and Cynthia Nixon star in The Seven Year Disappear at the Signature (photo by Monique Carboni)

THE SEVEN YEAR DISAPPEAR
The New Group at the Pershing Square Signature Center
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through March 31, $37-$72
thenewgroup.org

I’m a performance art junkie. Throw in some inventive video and I’m even more hooked. But not even those two elements could save me from the train wreck that is The Seven Year Disappear.

As the audience enters the Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre at the Pershing Square Signature Center for the New Group world premiere of Jordan Seavey’s play, Cynthia Nixon and Taylor Trensch are silently but intently staring at each other from opposite sides of a long table, wearing dark, militaryesque jumpsuits, surrounded by more than half a dozen monitors. A timeline crawl goes from 2009 to 2016 with such words as “Thanksgiving,” “Return,” “Art Basel,” and “MoMA.” It quickly becomes clear that they are re-creating Marina Abramović’s durational performance The Artist Is Present, which debuted at the Museum of Modern Art in 2010 and was documented in a 2012 film.

I visited Abramović’s MoMA show, which re-created many of her most famous pieces along with various video projects, several times. I saw her unique theatrical production, The Life and Death of Marina Abramović, at Park Avenue Armory in 2013. I experienced her gallery show “Generator,” in which visitors had to put on blindfolds and noise-canceling headphones.

But my Abramović obsession pales in comparison to Miriam’s in The Seven Year Disappear.

Miriam (Cynthia Nixon) is a performance artist whose work exists in the shadow of Abramović’s worldwide popularity. It’s 2009, and she’s furious that her rival has just received a major commission from the Whitney. “She’s such a fucking hypocrite,” Miriam tells her twenty-three-year-old son, Naphtali (Taylor Trensch). “I love Marina, she’s a friend . . . But God, this makes me so fucking mad.”

She rails against Abramović’s 2005 presentation of “Seven Easy Pieces” at the Guggenheim, arguing, “Re-creating seven famous performance pieces over seven nights, seven hours each night — how original!” Naphtali says, “Well — two of them were her own,” to which Miriam replies, “And five of them were not. ‘Seven Easy Pieces’ . . . yeah, art is easy when you just copy it.”

When Naphtali tells his mother that MoMA is going to commission a new work from her, Miriam is overjoyed. “I never liked the Whitney anyway,” she says. “Let them have Marina.”

New Group world premiere is its own performance art piece (photo by Monique Carboni)

Abramović doesn’t have any children, so Miriam has incorporated Naphtali into much of her work, perhaps as a kind of dig. (An epigraph in the script quotes Abramović: “I had three abortions because I was certain that [having a child] would be a disaster for my work. One only has limited energy in the body, and I would have had to divide it.”) For the MoMA piece, Naphtali will again be part of it, whether he wants to or not; Miriam has decided to disappear for seven years and seven months, without telling a soul where she will be or what she’ll be doing. Attempting to top Abramović, in this case the artist will not be present.

For ninety-five minutes, the narrative goes back and forth between 2009 and 2016, as Naphtali, who is a gay addict, meets with seven characters, all played by Nixon in different accents (and/or adding a small prop like glasses), from Miriam’s agent, Wolfgang, and MoMA curator Brayden to teenage manicurist Kaitlyn, private detective Nicole, and Tomás, who works with Naphtali on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Claiming that Naphtali is obsessed with Clinton, Tomás warns him, “She’s not your mom, ya know.”

Performance art is, by its very nature, conceptual and nonnarrative; theater, even the most experimental type, requires some form of storytelling, no matter how abstract or opaque.

In The Seven Year Disappear, Seavey (Homos, or Everyone in America; The Funny Pain) and director Scott Elliott (The Seagull/Woodstock, NY; Mercury Fur) try to have it both ways, and it fails miserably.

I remember eagerly walking through “The Artist Is Present,” a well-curated, well-designed exhibit that provided viewers a chance to breathe while experiencing the numerous, often participatory works. The Seven Year Disappear is an overstuffed muddle, throwing everything it can at the audience, which often doesn’t know where to look as live projections fight for attention with the two actors, who seem trapped by Qween Jean’s costumes and who occasionally bring out microphones for mostly unknown reasons. The set is by the usually innovative Derek McLane, with lighting by Jeff Croiter, sound by Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen, and projections by John Narun that contribute to the confusion.

Early on, Trensch (Camelot, Hello, Dolly!) and Nixon (Rabbit Hole, The Little Foxes) rest at the front of the stage, their legs dangling over the lip, intimately connecting with the audience. But it’s not long before it all turns icy as Naphtali grows cold and distant, overwhelmed by a barrage of Lifetime-esque personal problems, and Nixon gets lost in a flurry of annoying characters doing annoying things in a hard-to-follow back-and-forth timeline.

I never got the opportunity to sit and stare with Abramović at MoMA, but, while watching The Seven Year Disappear, all too often I found myself staring in disbelief at her fictional archrival, which is not at all the same thing.

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

PAY THE WRITER

Marcia Cross, Bryan Batt, and Ron Canada star in world premiere of Pay the Writer (photo by Jeremy Daniel)

PAY THE WRITER
The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday-Sunday through September 30, $40-$149.50
www.paythewriterplay.com
www.signaturetheatre.org

Tawni O’Dell’s Pay the Writer doesn’t do itself any favors. The title of the world premiere play, which opened August 21 at the Pershing Square Signature Center, is both elusive — after having seen it, I cannot figure out why it’s named for one minor line of dialogue — and, unfortunately, misleading through no fault of its own, as it has nothing to do with the current Writers Guild of America strike, which has shut down film and television production. The script is overstuffed with clichés, and the pace is choppy, with slow, awkward set changes. At two hours without a break, it is desperately in need of significant cutting or at least a brief intermission.

So why then am I still recommending it?

Despite all of the above, I had a good time at the show, as did the entire audience the night I went, erupting in a well-deserved standing ovation at the conclusion, cheering on the three excellent leads, Ron Canada, Marcia Cross, and Bryan Batt. While standing ovations have long been de rigueur on Broadway, they are not nearly as obligatory off the Great White Way.

The show is structured as a series of two-character scenes — save for one involving the three leads — that go back and forth in time over forty-five years, from present-day New York City to 2000s Los Angeles, 1990s Paris, and late 1970s Manhattan. It traces the long relationship between gay white literary agent Bruston Fischer (Bryan Batt) and his most famous client, the award-winning Black writer Cyrus Holt (Ron Canada), from their initial meeting outside a bar to Cyrus’s most recent novel. Cyrus has always let Bruston — who serves as narrator, regularly speaking directly to the audience — read his work before anyone else, but he has given his latest manuscript first to his French translator, Jean Luc (Steven Hauck), which has upset Bruston greatly. Bruston is hurt by what he considers a deep affront by a man he calls his friend, while Cyrus seems more concerned that neither of them can find Jean Luc and find out what he thinks of the book.

“You’re still mad at me,” Cyrus says. Bruston replies, “I’m always the first person to read your work. I don’t understand why you chose to send it to someone else before me.” Cyrus curtly says, “I have my reasons.” Bruston responds, “And to send it to that . . . that . . . ridiculous, arrogant, narcissistic . . .” To which Cyrus explains, “He can’t help any of that; he’s French.”

One night Cyrus, a Vietnam veteran who has won two National Book Awards and a Pulitzer Prize for a novel about racism in the military during the war, accidentally calls his first wife, the white Lana (Cross), with whom he has two children, Leo (Garrett Turner, who also plays the young Cyrus) and Gigi (Danielle J. Summons). Lana, who he hasn’t seen in two decades, shows up unexpectedly at a restaurant where Cyrus and Bruston are having dinner, and she and Cyrus go at it, arguing over their parental skills, Lana giving up her dreams to raise the kids, and Cyrus’s drinking and philandering. But underneath it all is an obvious connection that cannot be broken.

“Believe it or not, those crazy kids were in love once. I think, on some level, they still are,” Bruston tells us. “Cyrus continues to sit blazing in the center of Lana’s orbit while she struggles to break free from his gravitational pull. She’s his Venus; the most beautiful of planets but not necessarily the easiest one to inhabit.”

Cyrus (Garrett Turner) and Bruston (Miles G. Jackson) meet outside a club in Pay the Writer (photo by Jeremy Daniel)

Cyrus is ill, but he doesn’t want to make a big deal about it, keeping it from Lana and their kids, who he thinks don’t care about him. But he’s soon face-to-face with each one of them, confronting harsh realities about his legacy as a husband and a father.

Canada (The Invested, Lights Up on the Fade Out) is terrific as a tough-minded, unapologetic man with a big ego who shifts between his serious ethics as a writer and his loose morals as a human being; it’s a hard character to make likable, but Canada pulls it off. Emmy nominee Cross (Desperate Housewives, Melrose Place), a Juilliard graduate making her return to the stage, shines as Lana, rising above some tepid dialogue to portray a strong woman who has overcome the mistakes of her past. And Batt (Mad Men, Jeffrey) is charming as Bruston, who shares his own personal problems while managing those of others. “Divorces. People have to pick sides,” Lana says to Bruston, who responds, “You got custody of Leo and Gigi, and I got custody of Cy.”

Director Karen Carpenter (Harry Townsend’s Last Stand; Love, Loss, and What I Wore) strains to find a flow to O’Dell’s (When It Happens to You, Coal Run) narrative, which can resemble a Lifetime movie made from a melodramatic novel while taking on homophobia and racism. In fact, O’Dell has written six novels including Back Roads, which was an Oprah Book Club selection that O’Dell adapted into a film.

David Gallo’s sets and David C. Woolard’s costumes are functional (although Lana’s dresses are divine), as are the lighting by Christopher Akerlind and sound by Bill Toles. The supporting cast, including Turner, Summons, Hauck, Miles G. Jackson as the young Bruston, and Stephen Payne as a homeless man in a completely unnecessary scene, is inconsistent, unable to keep up with the leads.

Meanwhile, I’m still trying to figure out the title of the play, which is essentially about a writer who has to pay for what he has wrought in the end.

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

THE COMEUPPANCE

Old friends gather for a pre-reunion reunion in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s The Comeuppance (photo by Monique Carboni)

THE COMEUPPANCE
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
The Pershing Square Signature Center
480 West Forty-Second St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 9, $49-$159
thecomeuppance.net/info

At the end of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s The Comeuppance, making its world premiere at the Signature, there were tears in my eyes. I wasn’t sobbing because of something that had happened in the plot or to any specific character but because of how brilliant the play is; its sheer beauty, from the writing and staging to the acting and directing, simply overwhelmed me, and I needed time to gather myself before heading home.

The Comeuppance is a fiercely intelligent, diverse revision of the Breakfast Club for the twenty-first century, an alternate version of the Athlete, the Brain, the Criminal, the Princess, and the Basket Case looking back at their lives two decades later and not necessarily liking what they see. A small band of high school friends have gathered for a pre-reunion twentieth reunion — Emilio (Caleb Eberhardt), an ex-pat artist living in Berlin returning to the US with a piece in the Whitney Biennial; Caitlin (Susannah Flood), the smartest student in school, who married an older man with two kids; Kristina (Shannon Tyo), a military doctor with five children; and Ursula (Brittany Bradford), the host of the party who spent years taking care of her elderly grandmother and now lives alone in her grandmother’s house. As the characters slowly congregate on Ursula’s porch, they reveal hints about their past and foreshadowings of the future. The simmering conflicts are ignited when Kristina surprises everyone by bringing along Paco (Bobby Moreno), whose traumatic five tours of duty in the Marines have left him heavily medicated, which does not stop his boisterousness.

The acerbic and direct Emilio makes his displeasure known, arguing that Paco was not in the same class with them and was not a member of their outsider “gang,” M.E.R.G.E., which stands for Multi-Ethnic Reject Group. “Does that spell ‘Merge’ or ‘Merg?’” Paco asks. “It’s a soft G,” Emilio, Ursula, and Kristina quickly bark out in unison. Kristina claims that Paco was an associate member because he was dating Caitlin, but that explanation doesn’t satisfy Emilio, who starts alluding to an incident that occurred between the couple. Meanwhile, Ursula, who has recently lost an eye so has difficulty with depth perception, is adamant that she will not be going to the reunion, and they are all upset that Simon has just canceled via text message. They also debate whether it is a good idea to arrive in a limo, which Kristina ordered, further establishing that the reunion has a different meaning for each of them.

“In high school, every stupid prom, every homecoming, we were always randomly showing up in a limo like somehow it was a thing that people did in real life,” Emilio says. “But we’re not teenagers anymore. Now we’re just adults showing up in a limo,” Caitlin contends. “But isn’t the point of this dumb event reliving high school for the night? I think people will think it’s funny. Maybe it is a little conceptual,” Emilio replies. Caitlin: “‘Conceptual?’ What does that mean?” Emilio: “Don’t worry about it. Listen: It’s just a little nostalgia.” Caitlin: “Well, you don’t still live around these people. I do.” Emilio: “So?” Caitlin: “So, for some of us, it may not be in our best interest to show up looking like shitheads.”

An ensemble cast excels in gorgeous world premiere at the Signature (photo by Monique Carboni)

They gossip about other students, talk about Zoom happy hours, defend the life choices they’ve made, and down glass after glass of spiked jungle juice as the late limo gives them time to explore who they were and who they are, while Emilio stirs the pot with his willingness to brutally criticize the others, loudly pointing out what he believes to be their flaws and their bad decisions. Early on, he shares three German words with Ursula: schadenfreude, torschlusspanik, and kuddelmuddel, which all come home to roost.

They also bring back an old method they used to cut off someone when they were rambling: pretend to snap their neck with a “KRK.” Little do they know how relevant that is, as throughout the 130-minute intermissionless play, every character delivers a monologue from Death, who lurks inside each of them. Their regular voices are joined by an otherworldly echo as Death, lit as if it is glowing from inside the body, directly addresses the audience, offering tidbits about its responsibilities and personal preferences.

The show begins with Death announcing from inside Emilio, “Hello there. You and I, we have met before, though you may not recognize me. People have a tendency to see me once and try hard to forget it ever happened — though that never works — not for very long.”

Later, inside Ursula, Death admits, “You’ll have to pardon me. I come and go. I get shy. Historically, I’ve been rarely met with anything other than fear or anger or regret and, as I’m sure you can imagine, that sort of energy gets . . . taxing. So I chose long ago to abandon any material form of my own and err on the side of the covert. I prefer now to move in and out of whatever vessel inspires me because, when I’m not working, I, like you, am a watcher. I like to watch. . . . I inhabit a body like this if my desire is to speak and, if I have one weakness, it’s for gossip. I suspect you share it. I don’t know what it is, but I find all creatures so interesting, their idiosyncrasies, their interiorities, their secrets. Their stories. These machines of will. And, like any good gossip, I’m always wanting to talk but, you know, finding the right listeners can be a challenge. So you should know you are very special.”

Death serves not only as a character in the play but as a vessel for Jacobs-Jenkins to espouse on the art of theater itself, the playwright as psychopomp. Jacobs-Jenkins, a two-time Pulitzer finalist and Obie winner whose previous works include Girls, Everybody, War, Gloria, Appropriate, Neighbors, and An Octoroon, tells stories that examine humanity’s idiosyncrasies, interiorities, and secrets, in search of an audience of watchers and listeners who are critical to the success of his craft. When Death says, “You should know you are very special,” it is Jacobs-Jenkins telling that to us.

In fact, the playwright continued to make changes throughout the rehearsal and preview process based on audience response; while that is not unusual, it was extensive in this case, and it shows. It’s a masterful production, radiantly directed by Obie winner Eric Ting (The Far Country, Six Apples), who maintains a steady, absorbing pace; you won’t even remember that there’s no intermission, not wanting to leave these characters even for a minute.

Ursula (Brittany Bradford) and Emilio (Caleb Eberhardt) wonder what could have been in The Comeuppance (photo by Monique Carboni)

Arnulfo Maldonado’s intimate set is practically in your lap, a cozy front porch with a few steps, a swing, a big chair, and wooden railings; a screen door leads into the house. Amith Chandrashaker’s lighting and Palmer Hefferan’s sound keep it all real, as do Jennifer Moeller and Miriam Kelleher’s naturalistic costumes.

Bradford (Fefu and Her Friends, Wedding Band) has a subtle power as Ursula, Flood (Make Believe, Plano) has a sensitive edge as Caitlin, Moreno (72 Miles to Go . . . , Lazarus) carries an impending sense of doom as Paco, Tyo (Regretfully, So the Birds Are, The Far Country) has a firm determination as Kristina, and Eberhardt (Choir Boy, On Sugarland) is a force as the sardonic, insensitive Emilio, who doesn’t know when enough is enough, especially when he’s right. Ursula might have studied mixology, but this group is like a toxic cocktail.

The Brooklyn-based Jacobs-Jenkins was born in DC in 1984, the year before John Hughes’s The Breakfast Club came out. He is the same age as the characters in The Comeuppance, who were rocked by Columbine and whose adulthood essentially began with 9/11, continued with the Iraq and Afghan wars, and then hit a peak with the Covid pandemic, death surrounding them every step of the way. Their youthful innocence is gone, even though a few of them are still trying to hold on to it.

But going back is not the answer, no matter how tenuous the immediate future might be, and just because you were friends in high school doesn’t mean you have to be friends now, in real life or on social media. The twenty years that have passed since prom were good to some and not so good to others, but all five M.E.R.G.E.rs have soul searching to do in order to face the personal demons buried deep within them.

The show is also likely to make you do some soul searching as well. All I know is that, while I wipe away these tears, I’m rethinking going to my next high school reunion.

CONFEDERATES

Siblings Sara (Kristolyn Lloyd) and Abner (Elijah Jones) fight for freedom in Confederates (photo by Monique Carboni)

CONFEDERATES
The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 24, $35-$80
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

Playwright Dominique Morisseau and director Stori Ayers magnificently interweave two parallel threads, one that takes place on a plantation during the Civil War, the other at a modern-day university, in the world premiere of Confederates, which opened tonight at the Signature’s Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre for an extended run through April 24.

The play begins with tenured Black poly sci professor Sandra (Michelle Wilson) speaking to school leaders — and the audience — projecting a picture of the real-life postcard Type de Negresse d’ADANA, which famously depicts a Black woman breastfeeding a white baby, from more than a hundred years ago. “Before this becomes a complete misinterpretation of intent, I’d like to say that I am not averse to images of slavery,” she announces. “There is nothing slavery that is off limits for me. No shame in my own enslaved heritage. No shame. And yet. . . .” She then switches to a doctored version of the photo, with her head photoshopped onto the Black body, a printout of which had been taped to her office door, and asks for an immediate investigation.

As she departs, the action switches to a slave cabin in the 1860s, where Sara (Kristolynn Lloyd) is stitching a wound suffered by her brother, Abner (Elijah Jones), a runaway slave who is fighting for the Union army. On a raised platform sits a bench chest on one side and a writing desk on the other, surrounded by columns evoking the front of a southern estate. (Rachel Hauck’s set remains the same throughout the play, equating the two time periods.)

Sara wants to join the army too and be useful to the cause, but Abner is having none of it. He tells her, “You good n’ safe with what you do right now. Fast picker. Keep out of the eye of the storm. You like the nighttime nobody seem to notice. That’s good n’ safe. I ain’t got to worry as much.”

Sara insists that Abner train her on how to hold a musket. “So I know what it feels like to have the power of freedom in my hands. ’Case I never see you again,” she says. He shows her and replies, “Now you’re a real man.”

Candice (Kenzie Ross) and Sandra (Michelle Wilson) discuss bias in Dominique Morisseau world premiere (photo by Monique Carboni)

Jones does a quick change and becomes Malik, a Black student arguing a grade with Sandra, his teacher. He is defending his paper, which got a B-, claiming that his unconventional interpretation of Lincoln, the Emancipation Proclamation, and affirmative action is valid. Sandra responds, “I’m saying there are loopholes in your overall analysis of the so-called modern-day plantation in the workforce and its parallel to slavery during the time of the Civil War,” a capsule summary of what the play is about.

“Neither of these policies originally targeted the people it was designed to protect,” he declares. “They both came with multiple side clauses and loopholes. The result, slaves still weren’t freed even after the proclamation, and so-called minorities weren’t employed equally after affirmative action. Paperwork and lies and bullshit and plantation by another name.” She ultimately gives him a chance to rewrite the paper and hand it in the next morning.

Back at the plantation, the master’s daughter, Missy Sue (Kenzie Ross), has returned from her brief, failed marriage with new insight into the condition of slavery; having grown up with Sara, she considers them close friends — Sara most certainly does not feel the same way — and now she wants to work with Sara to spy on her father, the master, and ultimately live together safely in the North. Abner is not happy about this prospect, and Luann (Andrea Patterson), a slave who is sleeping in the master’s bed, starts getting suspicious that something is going on under her nose.

Meanwhile, at the university, Sandra is being accused by numerous people of having bias — Malik thinks she is biased against him; her ditzy, talkative white assistant, Candice (Ross), believes she favors Malik; and her fellow Black professor, Jade (Patterson), has heard that Sandra will not support her tenure vote and feels she treats her more like a threat than a colleague. In addition, everyone has a different opinion, not all of them good, about Sandra having worn a Black Lives Matter T-shirt the other day. Issues of gender, class, and race explode in shocking ways as the poignantly beautiful finale approaches.

Sara (Kristolyn Lloyd) and Missy Ann (Kenzie Ross) confront each other in play that bounces between past and present (photo by Monique Carboni)

Morisseau is one of the most successful and busiest writers of the last decade. In the last ten years, she has given us the Detroit Projects trilogy (Detroit ’67, Paradise Blue, Skeleton Crew), Pipeline, and Ain’t Too Proud — The Life and Times of the Temptations, addressing inequities in housing, business, employment, education, and entertainment.

Inspired by Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2011 Atlantic article “Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War,?” Confederates is another sparkling triumph from Morisseau, ninety minutes that will dig into your soul while also making you laugh. In a program note, the playwright offers, “Just like in the present, the enslaved are multifaceted. We all carry snark and sarcasm. We are all expert navigators of the systemic fuckeries. And sometimes, navigating that shit is painful. And sometimes, navigating that shit is funny.” Amid all of the controversy over critical race theory and the 1619 Project, Morisseau sharply portrays how America’s racial history has brought us directly to this moment in time, where we must learn from our past and face hard truths.

To further the comparison of then and now, Patterson, Jones, and Ross play characters existing in each era, with direct similarities, while Lloyd’s and Wilson’s characters are mirrors of each other. For example, Candice is aware of her white privilege just as Missy Sue wants to do something to help Sara after all the awful things her family has done to her, even though they each still don’t quite get it; both women are played with humor by Ross. The connections between the dual roles are further established in the costume changes, in which the actors tear off their clothes to reveal their other character as light and sound bombard us; the costumes are by Ari Fulton, with lighting by Amith Chandrashaker and Emma Deane, sound by Curtis Craig and Jimmy Keys, and projections by Katherine Freer.

The cast is superb, led by Wilson (The House That Will Not Stand, Sweat), who mixes vulnerability with determination as Sandra, and Lloyd (Dear Evan Hansen, Paradise Blue), who unearths a dark fierceness as Sara. The line conjoining them is evident from the start and passionately fuses them together by the end, making a grand statement of how much America has to learn about race.

Morisseau wrote Confederates after being challenged by Penumbra Theatre founder Lou Bellamy to craft a theatrical response to one of the main points Coates made in that 2011 Atlantic piece: “For my community, the message has long been clear: The Civil War is a story for white people — acted out by white people, on white people’s terms — in which blacks feature strictly as stock characters and props.” She was also inspired by Toni Morrison’s discussion of the white gaze; she once told Charlie Rose, “I have spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the white gaze was not the dominant one in any of my books.”

In another program note, Morisseau explains, “I, too, have felt the lash of writing in a continuum that honors this gaze, even when I personally do not hold space for it in my own aesthetic. But there are other gazes as well. As a woman writer, I have also felt the male gaze. As a radical writer, I have felt the gaze of respectability politics. And as a Black writer, I have felt the gaze of Blackness that sometimes is only qualified as one myopic thing, rather than expansive and global as Blacknesss truly is. No matter the gaze, they all feel like one collective thing to me as an artist: oppression.” Confederates takes on all of those gazes in elegant and intensely clever ways. Morisseau’s Signature Residency 5 began with Paradise Blue and continues with Confederates; but no matter how much you enjoy it, don’t wait for the curtain call, because the play is about a whole lot more than just applauding a job well done.

THE HOT WING KING

A close-knit group of friends prepares for a big contest in Katori Hall’s The Hot Wing King (photo by Monique Carboni)

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 22, $35-$55
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

Katori Hall’s The Hot Wing King is a tantalizingly spicy, robust and savory contemporary comedy that sticks to your ribs like only the best, well, hot wings. The play, which opened tonight at the Signature, has a familiar setup — a group of friends and family trying to win a cooking contest — but fresh ingredients and high style take these hot wings to the next temperature level. In Memphis, Cordell (Toussaint Jeanlouis) is getting ready to marinate 280 pounds of chicken for an annual hot wing contest, confident that he has a good chance of winning the $5,000 prize this year with a new recipe. Two months prior, he left his wife, kids, and job in St. Louis to be with Dwayne (Korey Jackson), an efficient and pragmatic hotel manager. Cordell’s prepping for the contest with his special team, the New Wing Order, which consists of him, Dwayne, the fabulously swishy Isom (Sheldon Best), and the basketball-loving Big Charles (Nicco Annan); the latter two men had hooked up once but now mostly poke fun at each other. Meanwhile, Cordell’s been frustrated by his lack of professional success since coming to Memphis, so the contest has become a benchmark for him. The Anchor Bar in Buffalo might claim that hot wings were invented there in 1964, but Cordell argues that his secret family recipe dates back to 1808.

“I ain’t move all the way down from St. Louis to be left in the house every chance he get,” Cordell says about Dwayne. Big Charles replies, “Number one, St. Louis ain’t all the way from nowhere. Two, this big old castle y’all done got fuh yuh self ain’t necessarily a cage, Cordell.” Cordell: “I gave up a lot for this. For him.” Big Charles: “And for yourself. You ain’t living a lie no more. Shackled by somebody else’s expectations of you.” Cordell: “Oh, I’m still shackled. Vanessa still ain’t signed them papers.”

EJ (Cecil Blutcher) and Cordell (Toussaint Jeanlouis) go one-on-one in world premiere play at the Signature (photo by Monique Carboni)

Everything is proceeding as scheduled until the drug-dealing TJ (Eric B. Robinson Jr.), Dwayne’s former brother-in-law (Dwayne’s sister tragically died), stops by to leave a package for his son, sixteen-year-old EJ (Cecil Blutcher), who soon arrives himself with two bags of clothing. The teen is looking for a place to stay, throwing a wrench into Cordell’s intensely managed strategy to make the wings. “Just know that when that bell ring we all gone be led by God’s will cause He gone guide us through the sauce and the fire for that whippin’ and whippin’ and whippin’,” Cordell says early on, but the Lord might have other plans.

Hall, whose previous plays include Our Lady of Kibeho and Hurt Village as part of her Signature residency and The Mountaintop and Tina: The Tina Turner Musical on Broadway (Hall wrote the book), was inspired to write The Hot Wing King by her brother’s relationship with his male partner and the real hot-wing festival held annually in her hometown of Memphis. Her dialogue is slick and smart (“I can smell shade a mile away — I’m a walking umbrella,” the gossipmongering Isom says), moving at an infectious velocity that practically sings; you might not understand all the colloquialisms, but they reverberate like music.

Dwayne (Korey Jackson) dishes out some advice to his nephew, EJ (Cecil Blutcher), in new Katori Hall play (photo by Monique Carboni)

The show is not specifically about gay men, or black men, or gay black men; it’s about four friends coming together to reach a goal, attempting to fight off various obstacles that are out of their control. Director Steve H. Broadnax III (The Hip Hop Project, Blood at the Root) keeps it all hopping on Michael Carnahan’s set, a comfy house with a living room, kitchen, upstairs bedroom, and outdoor basketball hoop. There are no women to be found here; this is a bunch of guys, superbly played by an outstanding ensemble cast that makes you want to hang with them as they goof around, needle one another, and, in the case of Cordell and Dwayne, explore their deepening but still new love.

The show continues through March 22 at the Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre; on Fridays and Saturdays, the Signature is serving Memphis-style wings (both chicken and vegan, with house beer); if you eat twenty in one sitting, your photo will be added to a lobby display so you can become a “Hot Wang Kang” yourself. “Everything always a contest with you,” Big Charles says to Cordell. But isn’t that true of all of us?

one in two

Edward Mawere, Leland Fowler, and Jamyl Dobson star in Donja R. Love’s New Group world premiere, one in two (photo by Monique Carboni)

The New Group at the Pershing Square Signature Center
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Through January 12, $33-$63
thenewgroup.org

Donja R. Love’s one in two presents the human side of numbers and elements of chance that are staggering: According to the CDC, fifty percent of queer and bisexual black men will contract HIV. Yes, one in two. The eighty-five-minute New Group world premiere takes place on Arnulfo Maldonado’s brilliant set, a blindingly white otherworldly waiting room that wittily morphs into a bar, a bedroom, a hospital room, and other locations. At the top of the back wall, three windowlike panels display numbers that move sequentially, reminiscent of the countdown clock in Lost, except here they go up, tallying the HIV toll second by second. But Love, who wrote the play in his notes app as he approached the tenth anniversary of his testing positive — and “experiencing suicidal ideations,” he explains in a program pamphlet — has not created a somber melodrama about disease. Instead, under the superbly inventive direction of Stevie Walker-Webb, one in two is as funny as it is serious, making its points in complex, intricate scenes filled with humor and intelligence.

As you enter the Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre at the Pershing Square Signature Center, there are three shirtless men onstage, lounging about as if in a sauna that is not quite right. They take numbers from a ticket dispenser and then play Rock Paper Scissors to determine who will be #1, #2, and #3. (The actors have to know the lines for each character, since their part could change from one night to the next, the chances one in three.) At the show I saw, Leland Fowler was #1, who becomes Donté Hart, a young man who has just learned that he has HIV and the only character to have an actual name. Edward Mawere was #2, and Jamyl Dobson #3; they both play multiple roles, including a nurse, a bartender, Donté’s mother, Kinda Ex-Boyfriend, Married Man at the Center, Trade Hung Like Horse Underscore 99, and Man of Your Dreams. Fowler, Mawere, and Dobson have an intoxicating camaraderie that is a joy to watch, perhaps because each one so well understands the other men’s roles, since they have played them numerous times as well.

#1 (Leland Fowler) gesticulates wildly while facing a positive diagnosis in brilliantly realized play at the Signature (photo by Monique Carboni)

The trio goes back and forth in time, performing key moments from Donté’s life, fully aware that they are play-acting, occasionally breaking away to express their displeasure about what is happening onstage. “I don’t want to be the mom,” #3 says as a scene ends with him as the nurse. “If you don’t have to then neither, neither do I,” #2 replies. “Well, somebody’s gotta do it,” #1 argues. The one who becomes the mom puts on a colorful flowing wrap that is turned inside out for another role, the name of which can’t be printed here. (Andy Jean’s costumes also feature black T-shirts with the numbers 1, 2, and 3 on them to help identify who’s who.) The play has a powerful conclusion that resonates deeply; Love (Sugar in Our Wounds, Fireflies) and Walker-Webb (Ain’t No Mo’) avoid proselytizing and are not seeking sympathy; instead, they have an important narrative to share, and they do so with great skill and compassion while breaking through theatrical conventions. “I’m not just a number. I’m flesh. I’m blood. I feel,” #1 says early on. He’s not just a number, and as the play demonstrates, he might be number one, but his positivity affects so many others in his life. As Love writes in the pamphlet, one in two is “the story of a community — a community that’s in a hidden state of emergency.”