Tag Archives: Tina Benko

DESCRIBE THE NIGHT

Nikolai Yezhov (Zach Grenier) and Isaac Babel (Danny Burstein) begin a dangerous friendship in Describe the Night (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

Atlantic Theater Company
Linda Gross Theater
336 West 20th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 24, $51-$86.50
866-811-4111
atlantictheater.org

At the beginning of Rajiv Joseph’s extraordinary Describe the Night, Isaac Babel (an almost unrecognizable Danny Burstein), a military journalist covering the Polish-Soviet War in 1920, has stopped in the Polish countryside and says to himself, “Describe the night . . . Describe the air . . . Describe the field . . .” as he unsuccessfully tries to capture their essence in his diary. He is soon joined by Russian captain Nikolai Yezhov (Zach Grenier). “The night. Describe it,” Isaac says. “Why?” Nikolai asks, dumbfounded. Isaac explains, “I just described it in my journal. I’m wondering how you would describe it. And if we both describe the same thing at the same time, will one of our descriptions be more true than the other?” Joseph’s follow-up to Guards at the Taj and Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo is a glorious, difficult-to-describe work that searches for the truth amid many lies, melding fact and fiction in creating a wildly unpredictable, endlessly adventurous tale that is as historical as it is contemporary. (At one point, a character says, “Go ahead, write your fake news story.”) The swiftly moving 165-minute play is told in three acts of four scenes each, featuring such titles as “Lies,” “Fate,” “Blood,” “Asylum,” and “Freedom,” shifting back and forth between 1920, 1937, 1940, 1989, and 2010, from Smolensk to Moscow to Dresden. As Isaac becomes a successful and well-respected writer, he maintains an odd friendship with Nikolai, who rises in the ranks of Stalin’s secret police; Isaac also has an extra-close relationship with Nikolai’s wife, Yevgenia (Tina Benko). Meanwhile, in 1989 Dresden, Russian KGB agent Vova (Max Gordon Moore) is determined to not let young Polish immigrant Urzula (Rebecca Naomi Jones) defect to the West, for both personal and political reasons. And in 2010, a plane flying from Poland to Russia to honor the seventieth anniversary of the Katyn Massacre in WWII crashes in Smolensk, setting journalist Mariya (Nadia Bowers) on the run, where she encounters young Feliks (Stephen Stocking), who just wants to avoid trouble. Through the years, various characters and their stories intersect in unexpected ways as Isaac’s diary makes its way around the world.

Rajiv Joseph’s Describe the Night climbs high at the Atlantic (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

Continuing at the Atlantic through December 24, Describe the Night is a gorgeously ambitious play, continually challenging the audience with its unconventional twists and turns. Director Giovanna Sardelli, who has previously collaborated with Joseph on Archduke and Guards at the Taj, brilliantly navigates through the multiple time periods and Tim Mackabee’s mostly simple but effective changing sets. Six-time Tony nominee Burstein (Fiddler on the Roof, The Drowsy Chaperone) is gentle and touching as Isaac, a man who believes that his principles will triumph over tyranny; Tony nominee Grenier (33 Variations, The Good Wife) is an excellent counterpoint, loud and blustery as Nikolai, a proud but uncomplicated man who is able to overlook friendship when necessary for the sake of the party. Benko (Scenes from a Marriage, Desdemona) excels as the strangely mysterious Yevgenia, while Stocking (Archduke, Dance Dance Revolution) embodies all of our everyday fears with an intense quirkiness. The Playbill comes with an extra sheet that details the true stories of Isaac, Nikolai, Yevgenia, and the Smolensk crash; be sure not to read it until after the show to fully appreciate the artistic license Joseph takes in transforming this tale into so much more. “You’re a media person, and so you you you love to make up stories that are more interesting than what the truth is and what the truth is that sometimes planes try to land in a heavy fog over a forest and then hit trees and crash,” Feliks tells Mariya. So how to succinctly describe Describe the Night? Truthfully, it’s indescribable.

SHAKESPEARE IN THE PARK: JULIUS CAESAR

Marc Antony (Elizabeth Marvel) bows down to Julius Caesar (Gregg Henry) in controversial Shakespeare in the Park staging (photo by Joan Marcus)

Central Park
Delacorte Theater
Through June 18, free, 8:00
shakespeareinthepark.org

In his October 14, 2016, opinion piece “Donald Trump is America’s Julius Caesar” for the Daily Caller, Moses Apostaticus wrote, “Every so often in history a man comes along who overthrows a corrupt elite and resets the political establishment. We live in such a time. In our time that man is Donald Trump.” Freelance writer Apostaticus came to praise Trump, not to bury him, explaining, “Trump’s similarities to Caesar are striking. . . . Like Caesar, Trump has become a lightning rod for the growing discontent of the American people.” In 1864, in a one-time-only benefit to raise funds for a statue of William Shakespeare to be placed in Central Park, the three Booth brothers staged the Bard’s 1599 tragedy, Julius Caesar. John Wilkes Booth wanted to play Brutus, but the meaty part went to Edwin; John played Marc Antony, while Junius portrayed Caius Cassius. John Wilkes Booth might not have gotten to stab the Roman leader onstage, but the following year he assassinated President Abraham Lincoln in Ford’s Theatre. Which brings us to Public Theater artistic director Oskar Eustis’s controversial Shakespeare in the Park version of Julius Caesar, which opened tonight at the Delacorte a day after Delta Airlines and Bank of America pulled their sponsorship of the beloved Public Theater summer series. Eustis has transformed Caesar into Trump: Gregg Henry, who portrayed Trump-like presidential contender Hollis Doyle on Scandal, wears a blue suit with an overlong red tie and is accompanied by his wife, Calpurnia (Tina Benko), who swats his hand away when he tries to hold it. Calpurnia looks and speaks like Melania but has Ivanka’s blond hair, while tribune Marullus (Natalie Woolams-Torres) resembles Trump aide Omarosa Manigault. This Caesar tweets from the bathtub, but his smart, strong right-hand woman, Marc Antony (Elizabeth Marvel), is no mere Kellyanne Conway in a track suit.

Brutus (Corey Stoll) and Cassius (John Douglas Thompson) conspire in Julius Caesar at the Delacorte (photo by Joan Marcus)

In some ways, the play recalls Orson Welles’s 1937 Mercury Theatre production, in which Caesar was based on Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini ruling in modern-day Rome. Eustis sets his story in the Occupy world; before the show starts, the audience is invited up to the stage to add their views on the state of the country on a post-it and stick it onto a kind of anarchist wall. In the back of David Rockwell’s stage are three large depictions of the U.S. Capitol, a piece of the Constitution, and George Washington, along with two broken, movable sections of what could be a large crown or ancient architectural structure. The cast is dressed in contemporary clothing designed by Paul Tazewell. Caesar has just taunted the Roman rabble with the possibility he may accept their adulation and become emperor of Rome, leading a group of powerful senators — Marcus Brutus (Corey Stoll), Caius Cassius (John Douglas Thompson), Casca (Teagle F. Bougere), Decius Brutus (Eisa Davis), Cinna (Christopher Livingston), Metullus Cimber (Marjan Neshat), Trebonius (Motell Foster), and Ligarius (Chris Myers) — to bring him down in order to save the republic. So, about halfway through the intermissionless two-hour play, Caesar is brutally murdered, lying on his back as the killers wash their hands in a pool of his blood. It’s a horrifically difficult scene to watch, since Eustis is so clear that his Caesar represents Donald Trump. (A line of dialogue is even changed to include Fifth Ave., where Trump Tower is.) Like Kathy Griffin holding up an art piece of Trump’s bloodied head, Eustis has gone too far, past the bounds of thoughtful, provocative theater into a dangerous and extremely disconcerting realm. Staging such a blatant mock assassination of the president of the United States is completely unjustified and indefensible.

Brutus (Corey Stoll) addresses the people of Rome in Oskar Eustis adaptation of Shakespeare tragedy (photo by Joan Marcus)

Brutus (Corey Stoll) addresses the people of Rome in Oskar Eustis’s adaptation of Shakespeare tragedy (photo by Joan Marcus)

Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln? Well, in the first half, when Caesar is offstage, it is very good. The relationship between Brutus and Cassius is well developed by a calm, soft-spoken Stoll and a bold, dynamic Thompson. Nikki M. James is moving as Brutus’s concerned wife, Portia, and Nick Selting is engaging as Lucius, Brutus’s dedicated servant. Even the murder scene itself is splendidly choreographed, were it not for whom the victim represents. And once Caesar is dead, the play falls apart, and not only because of the Trump references. Marvel’s delivery of Marc Antony’s famous speech gets lost in a murmuring crowd that is dispersed throughout the Delacorte, Roman guards have been turned into evil, robotlike cops running rampant on protesters, and, for some reason, Brutus sleeps in an insipid yellow college dorm room. In a promotional statement before previews began on May 23, Eustis, who last directed Hamlet at the Delacorte in 2008, said, “Julius Caesar can be read as a warning parable to those who try to fight for democracy by undemocratic means. To fight the tyrant does not mean imitating him.” It also does not mean staging his assassination, even in the name of art.

THE CHERRY ORCHARD

John Glover, Joel Grey, Diane Lane, and Chuck Cooper squeeze into new Broadway adaptation of THE CHERRY ORCHARD (photo by Joan Marcus 2016)

American Airlines Theatre
227 West 42nd St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 4, $59-$149
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org

Rising Roundabout scribe Stephen Karam takes a curious pause in his soaring career with a misbegotten adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s classic comic drama, The Cherry Orchard. Karam’s two previous plays, 2011’s Sons of the Prophet and 2014’s The Humans, were both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, and the latter won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play when it was off Broadway and then the Tony for Best Play after transferring to the Great White Way. But his new version of The Cherry Orchard, in an exasperating production helmed by National Theatre associate director Simon Goodwin (The Beaux’ Stratagem, Routes), is sour from the very start. Chekhov’s plot is familiar to most theatergoers: After living in Paris for five years following the death of her husband and the tragic drowning of her seven-year-old-son, Grisha, Madame Lyubov Andreyevna Ranevskaya (Diane Lane) returns to the family home with her entourage, only to find that the entire estate, including her beloved cherry orchard, is going to be sold at auction because of failure to pay off massive debts. Yermolai Alekseyevich Lopakhin (Harold Perrineau), a successful businessman whose father and grandfather worked as serfs on the estate, offers a plan to save the house by cutting down the orchard and replacing it with vacation villas, but Lyubov and her arrogant brother, Leonid Andreyevich Gaev (John Glover), will have none of it, acting like spoiled children, refusing to face the direness of their situation. Also refusing to accept reality is Lyubov’s daughter, Anya (Tavi Gevinson), and her adopted daughter, Varya (Celia Keenan-Bolger). The family circle is filled out by governess and magician Charlotta Ivanovna (Tina Benko), family friend and landowner Boris Borisovich Simeonov-Pischik (Chuck Cooper), local clerk Semyon Panteleyevich Yepikhodov (Quinn Mattfeld), Grisha’s former teacher and current student Pyotr Sergeyevich Trofimov (Kyle Beltran), maid (Dunyasha), young servant Yasha (Maurice Jones), and doddering old servant Firs (Joel Grey). In addition, violinist Bryan Hernandez-Luch, clarinetist Liam Burke, and percussionist Chihiro Shibayama add cinematic music first from the sidelines, then from the back of the stage. But it’s all for naught.

Lopakhin (Harold Perrineau) tries to convince Madame Lyubov (Diane Lane) of the fate of the cherry orchard in Roundabout revival (photo by Joan Marcus 2016)

Chekhov’s plays are ripe for reinterpretation. This year alone has brought the Pearl’s Stupid Fucking Bird and Peter Pan Theatre’s The Seagull and Other Birds, two wildly inventive reimaginings of The Seagull, while the Maly Drama Theatre of St. Petersburg’s production of The Cherry Orchard at BAM was a brilliant, immersive take on the tragicomedy. But Karam and Godwin throw too much into the mix, getting trapped in a no-man’s land between traditional and experimental, classical and contemporary, realistic and metaphorical. Michael Krass’s costumes are all over the place, from sharp, modern-day suits to old-fashioned Eastern European garb, as is Karam’s dialogue. “What is it you’d say . . . ?” Madame Lyubov asks Gaev early on. “What’s the lingo?” And stage directions such as “Varya and Anya share a moment of ‘What the hell was that?!’” certainly don’t help. Karam also shifts the idea of serfdom into slavery, which Godwin overdoes by casting black actors as Lopakhin, Trofimov, and Pischik. Most of the play takes place in the nursery, which set designer Scott Pask has outfitted with tiny chairs and tables, Alexander Calder-like mobiles hanging from the ceiling, a toy village, and a mobile of small hot-air balloons hovering over a child’s bed. Yes, we get it; virtually all of the characters are acting like children. And it turns out to be more cringe-worthy than funny when the rather large Cooper wiggles into one of the chairs. The floor is an enormous trunk of a tree that has been chopped down, its myriad rings representing the changing times and generations, evoking the eventual fate of the cherry orchard and the Russian aristocracy — as well as this production itself.

THE CRUCIBLE

Walter Kerr Theatre
219 West 48th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 17, $42-$228.60
www.thecrucibleonbroadway.com

Director-of-the-moment Ivo van Hove follows up his riveting version of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge with a strange, powerful, problematic take on Miller’s Tony-winning 1953 play, The Crucible. Part of the centennial celebration of Miller’s birth that also included last year’s production of Incident at Vichy at the Signature, The Crucible explores the 1692 Salem witch trials through a context informed by the communist witch hunt of the House Un-American Activities Committee led by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1940s and ’50s. Miller based the play on actual events recorded in the seventeenth century, although he changed many of the details of the real-life characters. In Salem, Betty Parris (Elizabeth Teeter) is in a catatonic state following an evening that might have involved magic and witchcraft in the woods with her friends Abigail Williams (Saoirse Ronan), Susanna Walcott (Ashlei Sharpe Chestnut), Mercy Lewis (Erin Wilhelmi), and Mary Warren (Tavi Gevinson). “There be no unnatural cause here,” claims Reverend Samuel Parris (Jason Butler Harner), the local priest and Betty’s uncle, who does not want to believe that this was the devil’s work. He sends for Reverend John Hale (Bill Camp) to back him up. “A precaution only,” Parris says. “He has much experience in all demonic arts.” However, wealthy landowner Thomas Putnam (Thomas Jay Ryan) and his wife, Anna (Tina Benko), who have lost seven babies, are sure that “vengeful spirits” are at work and insist that Parris investigate it as such. Meanwhile, town curmudgeon Giles Corey (Jim Norton) thinks that the Putnams are merely after his land, while Corey’s friend, John Proctor (Ben Whishaw), gets caught in the maelstrom of accusation and emotion, as the otherwise steadfast gentleman may or may not have had an affair with Abigail, his former maid, who was let go by his wife, Elizabeth (Sophie Okonedo). And many eyes turn toward Tituba (Jenny Jules), Parris’s slave from Barbados. “You are God’s instrument put in our hands to discover the Devil’s agents among us,” Hale tells her. When the judge, Deputy Governor Danforth (Ciarán Hinds), arrives, he’s sure that evil is at hand, boasting that four hundred witches are in jail because of him, seventy-two condemned to hang. Even as evidence comes out that supports that there was no witchcraft, Danforth remains determined to force people to name names so he can have them arrested and hanged. “There is a prodigious guilt in the country,” he boldly declares. “Reproach me not with the fear in the country; there is fear in the country because there is a moving plot to topple Christ in the country!”

John Proctor (Ben Whishaw) tries to get the truth out of Mary Warren (Tavi Gevinson) in Ivo van Hove adaptation of Arthur Miller classic (photo © Jan Versweyveld)

Belgian director van Hove is often hit-or-miss with his shows, which in the last few years in New York City have included David Bowie and Enda Walsh’s Lazarus, adaptations of Ingmar Bergman’s Antigone. While A View from the Bridge was innovative and dynamic, Antigone was confusing and surprisingly lifeless; The Crucible falls somewhere in between. The set, by longtime van Hove collaborator Jan Versweyveld, is head-scratchingly odd, an old schoolroom with twentieth-century overhead lighting and a blackboard on which Tal Yarden’s abstract images are projected at one point. Wojciech Dziedzic’s costumes also mix the seventeenth century with the modern era; if the goal is to relate the witch trials to what is going on in the world today, it doesn’t quite work, since those elements are already part of Miller’s words and don’t benefit from such further obscuration. Philip Glass’s music is pleasurable but unnecessary, and the acting is inconsistent; while Ronan (Brooklyn, The Seagull), Camp (Death of a Salesman, Homebody/Kabul), Norton (The Mystery of Edwin Drood, The Seafarer), and Gevinson (This Is Our Youth, Enough Said) excel in their roles, Whishaw (His Dark Materials, In the Heart of the Sea) is rather static, Michael Braun (War Horse, Bad Guys) as Danforth’s right-hand man, Ezekiel Cheever, is too one-note, and Hinds (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Closer) seems lost at times, courtesy of Steven Hoggett’s crowded movement, often speaking with his back or side to the audience, making it hard to hear what he is saying. Fifty-three years after its Broadway debut, in a Tony-winning production starring E. G. Marshall, Beatrice Straight, and Arthur Kennedy, and fourteen years after its Tony-nominated 2002 Broadway revival with Laura Linney, Liam Neeson, and Kristen Bell, The Crucible feels today most relevant in its depiction of the religious nature of evil, with fundamentalists around the world responsible for so much violence and hatred and America in a constant debate over church versus state. Van Hove’s staging muddies various themes, resulting in a somewhat lukewarm rendering of a heated tale.

TALES FROM RED VIENNA

A war widow (Nina Arianda) and a Hungarian journalist (Michael Esper) consider a dangerous romance in TALES FROM RED VIENNA (photo by Joan Marcus)

Manhattan Theatre Club
New York City Center Stage 1
Through April 27, $89
212-581-1212
www.talesfromredvienna.com
www.nycitycenter.org

Inspired by the real-life story of desperate German war widows who turned to prostitution in the 1920s, David Grimm’s Tales from Red Vienna begins with a powerful scene: From behind a loose black curtain that evokes a widow’s veil, a gentleman enters a woman’s living room and promptly has sex with her against a table; he leaves money for her, but her distaste is clear. The curtain is then pulled back and we learn that she is Heléna (Nina Arianda), a formerly well-off married woman who has taken to extremes to earn money after her husband was killed in WWI. Instead of a mansion, she now lives in a small apartment but still manages to be served by her longtime housekeeper, the quick-witted and cynical Edda (Kathleen Chalfant). When Heléna’s best friend, society doyenne Mutzi von Fessendorf (Tina Benko), hatches a plan in which Heléna will join her on what is supposed to be a blind date but is really a way for the married Mutzi to meet with her potential lover, Heléna is shocked when the fix-up turns out to be her most recent customer. Hungarian journalist Béla Hoyos (Michael Esper) instantly takes a liking to Heléna, and her eventual reciprocation leads to major problems as the story takes an unexpected yet utterly clichéd and extremely disappointing turn.

Kathleen Chalfant and Michael Goldsmith offer support in TALES FROM RED VIENNA (photo by Joan Marcus)

Directed by Kate Whoriskey (Ruined, Magdalena) with procedural attention across three acts with two intermissions, the Manhattan Theatre Club production at City Center is highlighted by John Lee Beatty’s (The Nance, Other Desert Cities) inventive sets, particularly the middle-section cemetery where Heléna and Bela have their secret rendezvous. But the promise of the first act slowly falls apart as predictable scenes mix with overacting (Benko, Hoyos) and underacting (Arianda, who was such a force in her Tony-winning role in Venus in Fur). Meanwhile, a subplot involving a Jewish grocer’s son (Michael Goldsmith) as a portent to the rise of Nazism essentially just fades away, emblematic of the play as a whole.