Tag Archives: The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre

BOB & CAROL & TED & ALICE

Carol (Jennifer Damiano) and Bob (Joél Pérez) and Alice (Ana Nogueira) and Ted (Michael Zegen) are seeking some new sexual adventures in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (photo by Monique Carboni)

The New Group at the Pershing Square Signature Center
The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 22, $48-$133
thenewgroup.org

Paul Mazursky’s 1969 film Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice captured the zeitgeist of a nation high on the summer of love, glorying in the sexual revolution. Nominated for four Oscars, the film starred Robert Culp and Natalie Wood as Bob and Carol Sanders, an adventurous LA couple, while Elliott Gould and Dyan Cannon are their best friends, Ted and Alice Henderson, who are significantly more traditional. The New Group has now turned the script, written by Mazursky and Larry Tucker, into a fun, lighthearted play with music that opened tonight at the Pershing Square Signature Center for an extended run through March 22. (Mazursky’s daughter Jill served as a consultant on the show.)

The hundred-minute show opens with Bob (Joél Pérez) and Carol (Jennifer Damiano) on their way to a consciousness-raising weekend. Derek McLane’s set is arranged like an encounter group for the audience, which sits on three sides of a small stage that boasts a couch, several mod chairs, a pair of microphone stands and cushions, a beaded curtain at the back, and the band, consisting of music director and keyboardist Jason Hart, guitarist and bassist Simon Kafka, Noelle Rueschman on reeds, bassist and drummer Jamie Mohamdein, and the bandleader, wonderfully portrayed by iconic singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega, who took over after composer Duncan Sheik, who wrote the lyrics with Amanda Green, couldn’t take on the role in addition to his other responsibilities. Standing in the back, Vega also serves as emcee and narrator, talking to the characters and the audience as well as singing. Early on she says to Bob and Carol (and the audience): “Welcome to the Institute at Big Sur, home of the Human Potential Movement. . . . Don’t think. Feel. . . . Lose your mind. Come to your senses.”

Alice (Ana Nogueira) and the bandleader (Suzanne Vega) share an intimate moment in New Group world premiere at the Signature (photo by Monique Carboni)

Bob is primarily there to make a documentary about the institute, but he is ultimately coaxed into participating in a marathon group therapy encounter session. Bob and Carol closely examine their marriage in ways they never did before. “I always accuse you of hiding your feelings, but I hide my feelings, Carol,” Bob admits. Carol responds, “I do hide my feelings, Bob. You’re not the only one hiding your feelings. I hide my feelings all the time. I came here because I felt like it. I wanted to come for me. But I couldn’t tell you. I’m — I’m sometimes afraid of you.” A weepy Bob replies, “Afraid of me? I love you. I love you so much, baby.” When Bob confesses to having an affair, they take their relationship to another, unexpected level. The now swinging couple share their new outlook on love and life with Ted (Michael Zegen) and Alice (Ana Nogueira), who are not so keen on all this openness. Bob and Carol invite Ted and Alice to Vegas for the weekend to see Tony Bennett, but there’s a special surprise in store.

Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice is a sweet-natured period piece, featuring not only groovy dialogue but classic late-1960s-era costumes by Jeff Mahshie, highlighted by Ted’s turtlenecks and the women’s mini dresses. Pérez (Fun Home, Sweet Charity) plays drums and channels Will Ferrell (and a little Elliott Gould), Tony nominee Damiano (Spring Awakening, Next to Normal) ups the sexy quotient, and Zegen (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, A View from the Bridge) and Nogueira (Engagements, Mala Hierba) are right-on as the more buttoned-up couple who just might break free of their societal constraints at any moment. Jonathan Marc Sherman’s (Clive, Knickerbocker) book is endearingly playful, as is Scott Elliott’s (The True, Mercury Fur) direction, which involves several willing audience members. When the characters break into song, Kelly Devine’s musical staging can feel out of place, especially when compared to Vega, whose songs have a natural, effervescent flow, and she also reveals some fine acting chops. (Vega previously starred in her own one-woman show, Carson McCullers Talks About Love, playing the title character.) The movie was revolutionary for its time, but this New Group world premiere does not have such lofty ambitions. Instead, it’s a frisky and flirtatious look at a bygone era, a kind of last gasp right before America would lose its innocence.

FIRES IN THE MIRROR

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 15, $40 – $75
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

On August 19, 1991, seven-year-old Gavin Cato was struck and killed by a car driven by Yosef Lifsh in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The next day, riots broke out that pitted the black community against Orthodox Jews in a bloody battle that resulted in the murder of Yankel Rosenbaum, a visiting student from Australia. A year later, Baltimore-born actress and playwright Anna Deavere Smith staged Fires in the Mirror at the Public, a one-person show that explored the incendiary situation from multiple angles, consisting of verbatim dialogue taken from a series of interviews Smith conducted with more than one hundred people. With race still such a heated topic more than a quarter century later, the time is ripe for a revival; as part of her residency at the Signature, Smith has brought back the play, passing the torch to Michael Benjamin Washington, who will be performing the show, which opened tonight at the Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre, through December 15. Washington is heart-wrenching as he spends 110 uninterrupted minutes switching among more than two dozen men and women as racial issues, biases, anti-Semitism, and social justice take center stage and the events of August 19-21, 1991, unfold.

Washington portrays such public figures as writer Ntozake Shange, theater director George C. Wolfe, the Reverend Al Sharpton, activists Angela Davis and Sonny Carson, and author Letty Cottin Pogrebin as well as various rabbis and ministers, Crown Heights residents, and relatives of both Cato and Rosenbaum. He makes subtle costume changes to indicate each character, adding a bowtie or a necklace, putting on a jacket, or taking off a shirt. (The costumes are by Dede M. Ayite.) Similarly understated are his shifts in accent to identify different individual monologues, all of which sing with their own poetry. Each character is introduced by Hannah Wasileski’s projections, which bounce off the floor and onto the long mirror at the back of the stage. Each interview is titled: an anonymous Lubavitcher woman’s segment is called “Static” because she is trying to get a non-Jew to turn off her radio on Shabbos; Wolfe’s is “101 Dalmatians” because as a child he could not go to the movies to see the animated film because the theater was segregated; Rivkah Siegal’s is “Wigs” because she describes the rules for Orthodox wives’ hairstyles; and an anonymous young man’s is “Bad Boy” since he doesn’t believe that sixteen-year-old Lemrick Nelson could have killed Yankel Rosenbaum because Nelson was an athlete and thus cannot be bad.

Accusations are made, prejudices are revealed (on all sides), the mayor and the police are blamed, and belief systems are challenged and defended. In addition to tables, cabinets, and chairs, Arnulfo Maldonado’s set is backed by a large mirror in which the audience can see itself, implicating all of us in the conflict. Fluidly directed by Saheem Ali (Kill Move Paradise, Passage) to prevent narrative gaps, Fires in the Mirror offers a provocative look at who we were then and who we are now, anchored by a bravura performance by Washington (The Boys in the Band, La Cage aux Folles). Among her other one-person shows, Smith documented and dramatized the 1992 LA riots in Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (which the Signature is remounting in spring 2020), took on the health-care crisis in Let Me Down Easy, and examined the school-to-prison pipeline in Notes from the Field. As this revival of Fires in the Mirror reveals yet again, Smith is a master at verbatim theater and at taking the nation’s temperature, while Ali and Washington prove the timeless universality of Smith’s work.

OCTET

Eight characters share their fears of being unconnected in Dave Malloy’s Octet (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 23, $35 through June 9, $85 after
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

Dave Malloy’s Octet is a brilliant chamber choir musical about our obsession with technology, primarily the internet and smartphones. The Brooklyn-based Malloy, the Obie-winning, Tony-nominated mastermind behind Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, Ghost Quartet, and Beardo, and scenic designers Amy Rubin and Brittany Vasta have transformed the Signature’s malleable Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre into a church basement where eight addicts gather to share their personal dilemmas. The audience enters through a hallway with a bulletin board and announcements, then walks down a few stairs and across the stage, where several people are removing bingo tables and setting up a circle of chairs for the meeting. But it’s not alcohol, drugs, or sex that has brought these people together; it is their overdependence on digital connection with the rest of the world.

Friends of Saul gather in a church basement to talk about their smartphone addictions in Signature world premiere (photo by Joan Marcus)

Their meeting begins with a hymn that poetically sums up their predicament, as they sing in unison, “There was a forest / One time some time / I walked through a forest / One time some time / The forest was beautiful / My head was clean and clear / Alone without fear / The forest was safe / I danced like a beautiful fool / One time some time. . . . But now / The woods are dark and cold / Clogged with nettles and roots / There is a monster / And I am a monster / Addiction, obsession / Insomnia, depression / And the fear that I’ve wasted too much of my self / On rapid and vapid click-clicks / Isolation, anxiety / Inability to assimilate with society / And the fear that the monster will find me / Infect me and blind me / Butcher my heart and distort my soul.” Next, each addict reads aloud one of the Eight Principles (“There is a deep emptiness,” “Content is not connection is not consensus is not conformity is not contentment”), each principle foreshadowing that character’s emotional state of mind. Over the course of the next ninety minutes, which unfold in real time, each of the eight addicts gets the opportunity to sing about their personal strife, all performed in gorgeous a cappella melodies arranged by Malloy, who also wrote the sensational book, lyrics, and music.

They have been invited to the meeting, which takes place at a different location every time, by the unseen yet apparently all-seeing Saul, who may or may not exist. Each song is introduced by a blow into a pitch pipe, preparing everyone for the next confession, another journey into the troubled mind, body, and spirit. Henry (Alex Gibson) can’t break away from Candy Crush; Karly (Kim Blanck) keeps swiping on sex and dating apps; Toby (Justin Gregory Lopez) is hooked on conspiracy theories; Jessica (Margo Seibert) is an ego-surfer; Marvin (J. D. Mollison) is a scientist who thinks the World Wide Web might be God; first-timer Velma (Kuhoo Verma) has gone cold turkey for two days; Ed (Adam Bashian) loves porn; and Paula (Starr Busby) is haunted by the “stale pale glow” of the screen while in bed with her husband.

Splendidly directed by Annie Tippe (Ghost Quartet, Cult of Love), who doesn’t allow the audience to let its guard down for even a second in the relatively tight, intimate quarters, Octet delves into humanity’s psychological makeup and the neurological circuits that tie us to our phones, desperate for the constant connection that we think will alleviate our deep-seated fear of missing out and of being trapped inside our own heads for any period of time whatsoever. Karly explains, “Well, I would love to pay attention to you / But I simply can’t / I might have an invite / I might have a coupon / I might have a snippet / There might be a morsel or a nugget / A factoid, a zinger / A recap, a blurb / Why, there might be a tidbit! / I simply must check my tidbits / What if there’s a pause? / What if there’s a lull? / At dinner, at a movie / My God, even at the theater!” (Thankfully, no cell phones went off during the performance I attended.)

But it’s not just about technological addiction; it’s about all our obsessions, the things that keep us up at night, the inner and outer elements that prevent us from reaching our full potential as individuals and as an interdependent society. “I feel my body stretched between two cliffs / One side is fantasy / The other reality / I feel my fingers start to lose their grip / And I can’t hold on,” Karly sings, a feeling everyone has experienced. In writing the libretto, Malloy researched scientific and religious texts, Sufi poetry, and online comment boards, going far beyond mere social media to take a look at who we are today, and how we got to be that way. Christopher Bowser’s lights never go all the way down, as if we are part of the group; in fact, some audience members sit on the floor, in the same folding chairs the actors do. Octet is a mesmerizing work of genius, the first of three plays Malloy will be producing for his five-year residency at the Signature — and the company’s first musical in its thirty-year history. I have my pitch pipe at the ready for the next one.

“DADDY”

Franklin (Ronald Peet) has some slippery father issues in New Group / Vineyard Theatre world premiere (photo by Matt Saunders)

The New Group/Vineyard Theatre at the Pershing Square Signature Center
The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 31, $40-$135
www.thenewgroup.org
www.vineyardtheatre.org

Jeremy O. Harris’s “Daddy” is a monumental work of bold genius, a searing, audacious investigation into the creation and ownership of both art and people, constructed around the sins of the father. The play, a joint production of the New Group and the Vineyard that opened tonight at the Signature Center’s Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre, takes place in and around an infinity pool in a Bel Air mansion; Matt Saunders’s delightful set prominently features several chaise longues on a deck and a gleaming blue pool in the front that was inspired by David Hockney paintings, particularly Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), which sold at auction for more than ninety million dollars this past November, as well as A Bigger Splash, Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool, and Portrait of Nick Wilder. (In 1966-67, a twenty-nine-year-old Hockney lived with Wilder, an older art dealer, in the latter’s Hollywood home, although this is not their story.)

Ronald Peet stars as Franklin, a twentysomething black artist who has recently moved to Los Angeles. Following an opening at a hot new gallery, Franklin has come home with Andre (Alan Cumming), an absurdly wealthy fiftysomething white art collector. Andre worships Franklin’s lithe body, comparing his legs to Naomi Campbell’s, while a very high Franklin, who is preparing for his first gallery show, expounds on the intrinsic value of art, arguing that “art loses its worth the minute it can be bought. . . . It becomes worthless once its owned.” He’s not referring merely to Andre’s holdings — which includes works by Cy Twombly, Cindy Sherman, Diane Arbus, and Alexander Calder and a room of Basquiats — but also colonialism and slavery. Andre and Franklin debate the artistic value of Kara Walker’s A Subtlety installation of a giant white “mammy” figure in the old Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg, and it’s no coincidence that Andre purchases Basquiats, a black artist who gained fame through his close association with the white Andy Warhol.

Franklin (Ronald Peet) explains his art to his gallerist, Alessia (Hari Nef), in “Daddy” at the Signature (photo by Monique Carboni)

Franklin is soon at home in Andre’s place, inviting over his crew: fashion-obsessed Bellamy (Kahyun Kim) and struggling white actor Max (Tommy Dorfman), who supply comic relief through their jealousy of Franklin; each of them would love to have a “sugar daddy” too, although Franklin bristles at the term. He believes his relationship with Andre is something other than a clichéd fling. Nevertheless, Franklin has taken to calling Andre “Daddy” during sex, which occurs often throughout the play — there is ample nudity and graphic simulations. Absent fathers are everywhere: While Franklin never met his father, which haunts him, Andre’s father got him started collecting art, giving him a Degas. Franklin’s gallerist, the young, white Alessia (Hari Nef), also hails from a wealthy family (she took over the gallery from her father) and believes Franklin’s upcoming show will help put her on the map; it’s yet another example of a rich white person “owning” a black person, made all the more clear when we see the tiny soft-sculpture dolls Franklin is making for the exhibition. When Franklin’s Bible-thumping mother, Zora (Charlayne Woodard), arrives, she is not exactly thrilled about her son’s living situation or artwork. As Franklin tries to find his place in this superficial Hollywood world, he is accompanied by a kind of Greek chorus in the form of a three-woman gospel choir (Carrie Compere, Denise Manning, and Onyie Nwachukwu) that represents his heart and soul, which are up for grabs.

Andre (Alan Cumming) looks on as Max (Tommy Dorfman) moves closer to Bellamy (Kahyun Kim) in Jeremy O. Harris’s “Daddy” (photo by Monique Carboni)

In the script, Harris (Xander Xyst, Dragon: 1, WATER SPORTS; or insignificant white boys) explains, “When lost look to melodrama for direction (see: [Peter] Brooks’s Melodramatic Imagination), because this play moves from melodrama’s dream to melodrama’s nightmare.” Director Danya Taymor (Familiar, Pass Over) has no such problem delivering the melodrama, from dream to nightmare; it’s a phenomenal staging, with vibrant, colorful costumes by Montana Levi Blanco, glistening lighting by Isabella Byrd (especially when the reflection of the pool’s waves dance across the walls), lovely original music adapted from a standard ring tone by Lee Kinney, and inspirational vocal music and arrangements by Darius Smith and Brett Macias. Peet (Spill, Kentucky) makes a major breakthrough as Franklin, giving a brave performance in which he lets it all hang out, emotionally and physically, combining sex appeal with an overt neediness and a major father complex. Tony and Olivier winner Cumming (Cabaret, The Good Wife) is utterly charming as Andre, a commanding, cultured man who loves collecting pretty things. “Beauty is beauty is beauty, Franklin. No matter whose eyes are seeing it,” he tells his lover. And two-time Obie winner and Tony nominee Woodard (Ain’t Misbehavin’, The Witch of Edmonton) ratchets it up as Zora, especially in the third act, when Kim and Dorfman get to strut their stuff while the masterful Cumming unfortunately has a lot less to do.

Harris’s fierce, polarizing Slave Play recently ran at New York Theater Workshop, and the three-act, 165-minute “Daddy” (with two intermissions) deals with some of the same topics (race, sex, power) but takes them to a whole new level, exploring the concept of a father as reality and fantasy, metaphor and obsession, presence and absence: Andre spanks Franklin like he’s a child, Zora prays to the Lord for guidance, Franklin discusses the origin of his dolls, the choir sings, “Daddy won’t nothing but a ‘shhhhhhh,’” and several characters get in the pool and blast out a hysterically relevant George Michael song. The pool is more than a cool part of the set; it also serves as a baptismal font, making us all believe in the power of art and theater, which becomes even more palpable when the first few rows get splashed. Even though the ending is muddy, “Daddy” is an extraordinary piece of storytelling, a masterful work of art that demands to be seen.

FABULATION, OR THE RE-EDUCATION OF UNDINE

Undine (Cherise Boothe) faces some new challenges when an FBI agent (Marcus Callender) shows up at her office in Signature revival (photo by Monique Carboni)

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 30, $35; through January 13, $35-$60
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

To kick off her residency at the Signature Theatre, Lynn Nottage has pulled out her 2004 comedy, Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine, which has been extended at the Linney through January 13. Best known for the two plays that earned her Pulitzer Prizes — 2009’s Ruined, about sexually abused women in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and 2016’s Sweat, which explores economic strife in a dying Pennsylvania factory town — Nottage takes a different route in Fabulation, a consistently very, very funny play, but, like her later works, it also faces such issues as race, gender, and class head-on. Cherise Boothe stars as Undine, a highly motivated, high-powered businesswoman who thinks she has made it, with her own posh boutique public relations firm in Manhattan that, she tells the audience directly, “caters to the vanity and confusion of the African American nouveau riche,” and a hot husband, Hervé (Ian Lassiter), to escort her to just the right parties. But when Hervé cleans out her bank account and disappears, Undine is forced to go back to the family she abandoned fourteen years earlier, when she was Sharona Watkins living in the Walt Whitman Houses in Brooklyn. Her mother (Nikiya Mathis), father (J. Bernard Calloway), brother (Marcus Callender), and grandmother (Heather Alicia Simms) are not exactly thrilled to see her, but blood is blood, so they take her in, and she is soon overwhelmed by all she had fought to leave behind as she battles various addictions and anxieties.

Undine (Cherise Boothe) can’t believe what is happening to her in Lynn Nottage’s Fabulation (photo by Monique Carboni)

Fabulation is reminiscent of John Landis’s Trading Places, the 1983 comedy in which an upper-class white snob (Dan Aykroyd) gets an unexpected comeuppance when two old white brokers (Don Ameche and Ralph Bellamy) take everything away from him and give it all to a black man who has nothing (Eddie Murphy). Sharona tried extremely hard to get away from her past in the projects, creating a supposedly tony life as Undine — her chosen name evokes ambitious social climber Undine Spragg from Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country — but she learns some valuable lessons once back home; it’s no coincidence that both her parents work in security, something she desperately needs on several levels. But Nottage (Mlima’s Tale, Intimate Apparel) and director Lileana Blain-Cruz (The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, Actually) keep the belly laughs coming as Undine reevaluates who she is and where she came from.

In a role originated by Charlayne Woodard at Playwrights Horizons, Boothe (Ruined, When We Were Young and Unafraid) is, well, fabulous as Undine, beautifully handling her character’s fast fall from grace and her frantic desire to get back up again, if she possibly can ever face reality. The rest of the cast — MaYaa Boateng, Dashiell Eaves, Lassiter, Mathis, and Simms — excels in multiple small roles that represent and challenge the notion of black stereotypes with humor that is not meant to make the audience uncomfortable; Mathis and Boateng are a hoot, quickly changing characters and some pretty choice outfits, while Eaves switches among several white dudes with jocularity. (The costumes are by Montana Levi Blanco, with set design by Adam Rigg.) Nottage will follow up her Signature residency with a revival of her 2011 comedy, By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, and a brand-new comedy as well; Fabulation is a fab start.

PARADISE BLUE

P-Sam (Francois Battiste) has some harsh words for Blue (J. Alphonse Nicholson) as Corn (Keith Randolph Smith) and Pumpkin (Kristolyn Lloyd) look on in Dominique Morisseau’s Paradise Blue (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Extended through June 10, $30 through June 3, $65 after
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

Paradise Blue, which opened tonight at the Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre at the Pershing Square Signature Center, celebrates and extends the great tradition of exceptional sociopolitical American plays established by August Wilson. In 2013, actress, poet, and playwright Dominique Morisseau began “The Detroit Projects,” a three-play series centered on her Michigan hometown, inspired by Wilson’s “Century Cycle,” ten works set in each decade of the twentieth century in his native Pittsburgh. Paradise Blue, which comes after 2013’s Detroit ’67 and before 2016’s Skeleton Crew, takes place in the primarily black neighborhood of Black Bottom in Paradise Valley in 1949, on the eve of an urban renewal push. (Coincidentally, Wilson’s second Pittsburgh play was Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.) The tortured Blue (J. Alphonse Nicholson) is a trumpet player who owns the Paradise Club, following in the footsteps of his father. He has just fired the bassist, leaving his bandmates, ornery drummer P-Sam (Francois Battiste) and thoughtful, considerate pianist Corn (Keith Randolph Smith), in the lurch as he prepares a solo that is proving difficult for him and arranging for the sweet and innocent Pumpkin (Kristolyn Lloyd), his lover who works at the club, to sing a number in public for the first time.

Amid rumors that Blue is going to sell the club as part of Detroit mayor Albert Cobo’s gentrification plan for Black Bottom — “Ain’t nobody pullin’ no more favors outta me. I been pullin’ favors up to my ears and I’m goin’ tone deaf,” Blue explains — the mysterious Silver (Simone Missick) struts in, renting a room at the Paradise for an extended period of time, paying cash up front. “If it’s somewhere that Colored folks is doing more than sharecroppin’ and reapin’ White folks’ harvest . . . I ought to be there,” she says. Silver is the opposite of Pumpkin, wearing silky, revealing black clothing, instantly commanding the attention of every man in any room she enters. “Spiderwoman. That’s what they call her,” P-Sam says. “She go walkin’ like that. . . . some kinda sexy spider . . . lurin’ fellas into her web. And then just when you get close to her . . . she stick into you and lay her poison.” As the night of the show approaches, P-Sam questions Blue’s loyalties, Corn and Pumpkin are both getting close to Silver, and Blue has to face some deep, dark demons.

Blue (J. Alphonse Nicholson) takes hold of Pumpkin (Kristolyn Lloyd) in New York premiere at the Signature (photo by Joan Marcus)

Paradise Blue keeps the spirit of August Wilson alive while further confirming Morrisseau (Pipeline, Blood at the Root) as a rising star in her own right. The play is smoothly directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson, like a bandleader orchestrating a jazz number, albeit more of a nocturne than swing or bebop. A close friend of Wilson’s, Santiago-Hudson is the co-artistic director of a New York Public Radio project that is recording all ten plays in Wilson’s American Century Cycle; he won a Tony for Best Featured Actor for his performance in Seven Guitars, earned another Tony for directing Jitney last year, and took home an Obie for directing The Piano Lesson at the Signature in 2013. (He also portrayed the writer in Wilson’s one-man show, How I Learned What I Learned, at the Signature.) Neil Patel’s two-part set features Silver’s bedroom in one corner and the interior of the nightclub on the rest of the stage; the audience sits in rising rows on the horizontal sides. Above it all is a rusty marquee that spells out the club’s name in lights. The facade separating the floor from the balcony is plastered with concert posters of icons who supposedly played the Paradise, from Muddy Waters, Billie Holiday, and Duke Ellington to Jimmie Lunceford, Howlin’ Wolf, and Louis Jordan.

Rui Rita’s sensitive lighting focuses between the two rooms as well as, occasionally, on Blue’s horn, which resides on a trumpet stand on the club stage, as if it’s his soul haunting him, while Darron L West’s fine sound design lets the music soar. Wilson regular Smith (Jitney, Fences, King Hedley II) is superb as the gentle, caring Corn; Smith has such a calming presence that watching him onstage, no matter what he’s doing, is warm and comforting. Obie winner Battiste (Head of Passes, The Good Negro) portrays the suspicious P-Sam with a fire in his belly; Lloyd (Dear Evan Hansen, Invisible Thread) is adorable as the vulnerable Pumpkin, a wide-eyed young woman in love with poetry but frightened of taking charge of her life; and Missick (Misty Knight in Luke Cage and The Defenders) is sexy and alluring as Silver, who is no mere femme fatale. However, Nicholson (Seven Guitars, Caleb Calypso and the Midnight Marauders) can only do so much as Blue (a role originated at the 2015 Williamstown Theatre Festival by Blair Underwood), who is not as fully drawn and fleshed out as the other characters, his motivations not as evident throughout the play. But that turns out to be a minor quibble in what otherwise is an exciting and captivating work that evolves with the rhythm of the blues as it explores race, class, and family legacy. Paradise Blue is the first of three Morrisseau plays that the Signature will present during her five-year residency; I’m already hungering for the next one.

DOWNTOWN RACE RIOT

A drug-addict mother (Chloë Sevigny) and her troubled son (David Levi) prepare for battle in Downtown Race Riot (photo by Monique Carboni)

The New Group at the Pershing Square Signature Center
The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 23, $20-$100
www.thenewgroup.org
www.signaturetheatre.org

Not a whole lot of the New Group world premiere of Seth Zvi Rosenfeld’s Downtown Race Riot makes sense. Continuing through December 23 at the Signature Center’s Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre, the one-act play, set in an apartment in Greenwich Village in 1976, is dominated by its long, deep set by master designer Derek McLane, which stretches across the space, consisting of, from left to right, a bedroom, a living room / kitchen with a small cast-iron clawfoot tub, and another bedroom. The center section juts one row into the audience, assuming added intimacy, while many of the seats in the left and right sections offer limited, sharply angled views that require patrons to stretch their bodies to try to see what’s going on, which is not really that much, as most of the action takes place center stage. Oddly, many people in the first row placed their drinks and even a bag or hat on the stage itself while waiting for the rest of the crowd to enter; one of the theater employees had to tell them that doing that was a no-no. The individual rooms are splendidly decorated, with one bedroom filled with pictures and posters of 1970s celebrities and music groups, the kitchen capturing the feel of the schlocky era, and the far bedroom a tribute to a former flower child. I realize that I’ve gone on at length about the set, primarily because it’s the most interesting part of the play; the story, inspired by an actual 1976 riot in Washington Square Park, is slack and uninvolving, with unlikable characters and questionable plot developments.

New Group world premiere looks at real 1976 riot in Washington Square Park (photo by Monique Carboni)

Chloë Sevigny plays Mary Shannon, a thirty-nine-year-old drug addict and single mother living on disability and constantly coming up with new scams to bring in money. Her twenty-one-year-old daughter, Joyce (Sadie Scott), is a lesbian who is looking to move out, while her eighteen-year-old son, Jimmy, known as Pnut (David Levi), has no big plans except for hanging out. His best friend is Marcel “Massive” Baptiste (Moise Morancy), a Haitian American considered an acceptable black; Pnut is also acquainted with Italian troublemakers Jay 114 (Daniel Sovich) and Tommy-Sick (Cristian DeMeo). Later the family is visited by lawyer and former hippie Bob Gilman (Josh Pais), who just confuses the story, which takes place during one endless day as Joyce comes on to Massive, Pnut makes hamburgers, Mary shoots up, and the teenage boys get ready to hurt some people in the park. “The whole neighborhood is goin’ out there with pipes and bats and it’s open season on yans and piss-a-ricans,” Pnut tells his mother, who replies, “Are you demented? Did I bring you up to be a KKK member? We’re in Greenwich Village, for chrissakes. This is where people come to be free.” (There is also plenty of hatred for gays and Jews.) Director Scott Elliott, the New Group’s artistic director who recently helmed terrific productions of Mercury Fur, Evening at the Talk House, and The Whirligig, can’t do much with Rosenfeld’s (The Flatted Fifth, The Get Down) muddled, stilted dialogue or the inefficient acting, although it is a treat to see Oscar nominee Sevigny so up close and personal — she previously appeared onstage with the New Group in 1998 in Hazelwood Junior High and two years later in What the Butler Saw. And as fab as McClane’s set is, it ends up only adding to the problems of the hundred-minute play, as you won’t know where to look when all three rooms are occupied at the same time. Of course, if you are in one of the numerous partial-view seats, you might not have much of a choice, nor might you care.