Tag Archives: Victor Almanzar

BETWEEN RIVERSIDE AND CRAZY

Stephen McKinley Henderson is unforgettable as Pops in Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Between Riverside and Crazy (photo by Joan Marcus 2022)

BETWEEN RIVERSIDE AND CRAZY
Hayes Theater
240 West 44th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through February 19, $68-$210 (live simulcast $68)
2st.com/shows

At the 2015 Drama Desk Awards, I had the option of being seated in the audience with the cast and crew of any nominated show; without hesitation, I chose Stephen Adly Guirgis’s searing dark comedy Between Riverside and Crazy. The Atlantic Theater production had three nominations: Best Play, Outstanding Actor in a Play for the amazing Stephen McKinley Henderson, and Outstanding Director of a Play for legendary actor, teacher, and director Austin Pendleton. The show, which had just won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, was up against such staunch competition as The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Airline Highway, and Let the Right One In; among those competing for Best Musical were An American in Paris, Hamilton, and Something Rotten!

As the evening progressed, Pendleton slumped lower and lower into his chair as he, Henderson, and Guirgis failed to take home a trophy, losing each time to Curious Incident (Simon Stephens for Best Play, Alex Sharp for actor, and Marianne Elliott for director). In January 2015, Between Riverside and Crazy received an encore run at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater, with nearly the full original cast. Last month, the show opened at Second Stage’s Hayes Theater on Broadway, where it has been extended through February 19. It still packs the same punch it did almost nine years ago at the Atlantic.

The extended family of Between Riverside and Crazy makes a toast (photo by Joan Marcus 2022)

The 130-minute show (with intermission) unfolds in a cramped rent-controlled apartment and rooftop on Riverside Drive (the rotating set is by Walt Spangler), where the recently widowed Walter “Pops” Washington (Henderson) lives with a motley crew of younger folks, including his ne’er-do-well son, Junior (Common), who is on parole; Junior’s scantily clad girlfriend, Lulu (Rosal Colón); and Oswaldo (Victor Almanzar), a tough-talking young man in recovery who Pops has taken in. All three call Walter either Pop, Pops, or Dad, even though he’s hardly the loving, nurturing type. Pops spends most of his time in the kitchen, eating pie, taking swigs of alcohol, and sitting in his wife’s wheelchair, pontificating on life.

His daily reflections don’t exactly reflect popular psychology. As Oswaldo discusses his health and why he no longer eats Ring Dings and baloney, which he ate because he didn’t feel safe or cared for by his parents, Oswaldo tells Pops, “I’m not trying to get all up in your business, but maybe that’s also the reason you always be eating pie — because of, like, you got emotionalisms — ya know?” Pops replies, “Emotionalisms.” Oswaldo continues, “I know — it sounded funny at first to me too — but emotionalisms is real, and pie — don’t take this wrong, but they say pie is like poison.” To which Pops concludes, “Pie ain’t like poison, Oswaldo — pie is like pie!”

A retired cop facing eviction, Pops is in a major fight with the city and the NYPD, demanding more cash in compensation for his shooting by a white rookie officer eight years earlier. One night his former partner, Det. Audrey O’Connor (Guirgis regular Elizabeth Canavan), and her fiancée, Lieutenant Caro (originally played by Michael Rispoli, though I saw understudy J. Anthony Crane, who was excellent; the role has now been taken over by Gary Perez), come over for dinner. They try to convince him to take the deal, as time is running out, but Pops stands by his principles while also understanding Caro’s motive in urging him to sign off. “An honorable man can’t be bought off,” he previously explained to Junior. “An honorable man doesn’t just settle a lawsuit ‘No Fault’ and lend his silence to hypocrisy and racism and the grievous violation of all our civil rights.”

Pops changes some of his views on life — and death — after a visit from the new church lady (Maria-Christina Oliveras) ends up sending him to the hospital.

Pops (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and Lulu (Rosal Colón) share a moment in powerful New York play (photo by Joan Marcus 2022)

I called Between Riverside and Crazy one of the best plays of 2014, and currently it’s the best nonrevival on Broadway. (The best new musical on Broadway, Kimberly Akimbo, also got its start at the Atlantic.) Seventy-three-year-old Tony nominee Henderson (A Raisin in the Sun, Guirgis’s The Last Days of Judas Iscariot), a longtime staple in the work of August Wilson, is unforgettable as Pops, a character who’s hard not to love even as you learn some questionable things about him. Henderson has an endearingly round face, gentle eyes, and an infectious smile that makes you want to call him Pops too. The play is very much about fathers and sons: Pops’ relationship with Junior, Oswaldo’s troubles with his dad, and Pops’ feelings about his own father. Even Det. O’Connor tells Pops, “You’re like my father.”

The set includes a rooftop veranda where Henderson gets even closer to his adoring audience. The rest of the cast is terrific under Pendleton’s (Gidion’s Knot, Orson’s Shadow) expert direction. Guirgis (Our Lady of 121st Street, Jesus Hopped the “A” Train), who grew up on Riverside Drive, writes gritty, believable dialogue and creates hard-hitting situations that are quintessentially New York, mixing comedy and tragedy with subtle, and not-so-subtle, narrative shifts.

If I were going to the 2023 Tony Awards and had the choice of which show to sit with, I just might choose Between Riverside and Crazy again. In the meantime, get yourselves to the Hayes and become part of this beautiful extended family.

MEDEA

Real-life partners Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale star in Simon Stone’s sizzling Medea at BAM (photo by Richard Termine)

Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St. at Ashland Pl.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 8, $45-$195
718-636-4100
www.bam.org/medea

As you enter BAM’s elegantly shabby chic Harvey Theater to see Simon Stone’s Medea, there are two young boys already onstage, one stretched out on the floor, on his laptop, the other leaning against a wall, on his smartphone. Bob Cousins’s dramatic cyclorama set is blindingly white, evoking a heavenly way station, making it look as if the unconcerned brothers are floating in a mysterious void. In this riveting adaptation, inspired by Euripides’s 431 BC original and the true story of Dr. Debora Green, who committed horrific crimes against her family in Kansas in 1995, Stone instantly puts us in the kids’ shoes. It’s a thrillingly uncomfortable moment since, of course, this is Medea, and we know it will not end well for the siblings. And getting there is indeed heart-wrenching.

Contemporary stand-ins for Jason and Medea, Lucas (Bobby Cannavale) and Anna (Rose Byrne) are married pharmaceutical scientists facing a crisis. Anna has just been released from a psychiatric facility after having done something bad to Lucas, who is in a relationship with a woman half his age, Clara (Madeline Weinstein), the daughter of their boss, Christopher (Dylan Baker). Anna plans to simply walk back into their old life with their two sons, Edgar (Gabriel Amoroso or Jolly Swag) and (Gus Emeka or Orson Hong Guindo), but Lucas has other ideas. “I know your trust will be hard to regain. What I did to you,” Anna says. “We don’t need to talk about it now,” Lucas replies. Anna: “No, I want to. It was a breach of trust. Most importantly it was trust that we lost.” Lucas: “I’m not —” Anna: “In all those messy months we lost sight of everything we’d promised to be to each other and both of us did that but I overstepped the line —” Lucas: “We should never have stayed together this long.” A determined Anna later adds, “I’m going to win you back.” That does not go so well either.

Social worker Elsbeth (Jordan Boatman) does not have the easiest of jobs monitoring Anna (Rose Byrne) and her two young sons (photo by Richard Termine)

Medea is ripe for reinterpretation, particularly in a world rife with misogyny and violence. In the past ten years I have seen Aaron Mark’s Another Medea, Limb Hyoung-taek’s Medea and Its Double, and Luis Alfaro’s Mojada, all of which took the central story and reimagined it in unique and compelling ways. Born in Basel and raised in England and Australia, Stone, who moves all around the globe, rarely settling down for an extended period of time, has previously adapted such classics as The Wild Duck, Miss Julie, John Gabriel Borkman, Peer Gynt, Three Sisters, and Hamlet and dazzled New York audiences with his sizzling Yerma at Park Avenue Armory in 2018, infusing his work with personal experience, as he does again with Medea.

The set features one large rectangular white wall that occasionally rises to serve as a projection screen, showing either extreme close-ups of the action, primarily a spellbinding Byrne, her evocative eyes searching for meaning, or live-stream shots by Edgar, who is making an autobiographical film for school. (The video design is by Julia Frey, with bright lighting by Sarah Johnston.) The play was originally performed at live-streaming master and BAM fixture Ivo van Hove’s Internationaal Theater Amsterdam (formerly Toneelgroep Amsterdam); the video footage can get to be a bit too much, so it’s a relief when the device goes away in the latter parts of the eighty-minute production, when things really heat up.

The cast is all new for this US premiere, with solid support led by Tony and Emmy nominee Baker (La Bête, Happiness, The Americans) and Weinstein (The Real Thing, Mary Page Marlowe) in addition to Victor Almanzar as bookstore owner Herbert, who offers Anna a job, and Jordan Boatman as Elsbeth, the social worker in charge of her case, keeping a close watch on her treatment of Gus and Edgar. At one point Stone makes a tongue-in-cheek reference to the finale of The Sopranos that is a wry riff on what ultimately happens in his take on Medea, as two famous families meet their fate.

Anna (Rose Byrne) is none too happy that her husband, Lucas (Bobby Cannavale), is now with Clara (Madeline Weinstein) in contemporary update of Medea (photo by Richard Termine)

Byrne (Bridesmaids, You Can’t Take It with You) plays Anna with a strong-willed vulnerability; she is no mere woman scorned, seeking revenge, but an intelligent wife, mother, and scientist who had the deck stacked against her and refuses to sit back and let everyone walk over her. She has a fiery, passionate chemistry with Cannavale (The Hairy Ape, The Lifespan of a Fact), who also displays a strong-willed vulnerability, allowing the cracks in Lucas’s armor to show through. “She created this instability,” Clara argues to Lucas. “I did too,” he readily admits. This is a Medea that could only be created in today’s #MeToo sociopolitical climate.

The Australian Byrne and New Jersey native Cannavale are real-life partners with two young boys of their own; after going through hell onstage, they head back to their nearby Gowanus apartment to be with their kids. Byrne and Cannavale work together often on television and in film, but this is the first time they are acting opposite each other onstage; later this year they will portray another married couple in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge for the Sydney Theatre Company. At the start of Medea, Anna shows Lucas a painting she made while at the asylum, depicting Noah’s ship in a storm, in which all the animals are drowning. “They thought they were safe and then another storm whipped up and capsized the ark,” Anna tells a confused Lucas. She continues, “You see the dead dove floating on the swell over there? With the olive branch still in its mouth?” It’s a metaphor for Anna’s state of mind, but one can also think of it as a kind of peace offering between Byrne and Cannavale as they return to a normal life following the searing heartbreak their characters experience night after night.

HALFWAY BITCHES GO STRAIGHT TO HEAVEN

Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven features another large cast of well-drawn characters (photo © Monique Carboni)

Atlantic Theater Company
Linda Gross Theater
336 West 20th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 29, $81.50
866-811-4111
atlantictheater.org

New York City native Stephen Adly Guirgis has spent much of his career creating wickedly funny, socially relevant plays set in minority communities where the underrepresented, the underserved, and the marginalized confront religion, law enforcement, poverty, racism, systemic institutions, and family dynamics as they battle against a system set up to keep them down. Most of his plays, including Our Lady of 121st Street, In Arabia, We’d All Be Kings, and The Little Flower of East Orange, feature large ensembles that form tight-knit communities onstage. Such is the case with Guirgis’s return to the Atlantic, where his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Between Riverside and Crazy, debuted in 2014, with the world premiere of the fiendishly hilarious and hard-hitting Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven, which opened last night at the Linda Gross Theater.

A woman’s residence is the setting for new play by Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Adly Guirgis (photo © Monique Carboni)

The three-hour LAByrinth Theater coproduction, which flies by with one intermission, takes place in Hope House, a government-funded women’s residence for addicts, the abused, the mentally ill, and survivors of domestic violence. It is run by the strict, serious Miss Rivera (Elizabeth Rodriguez) and Nigerian social worker Mr. Mobo (Neil Tyrone Pritchard). Among those who find shelter at the home are the tough-talking Sarge (Liza Colón-Zayas); her single-mother girlfriend, Bella (Andrea Syglowski); teenage poet Little Melba Diaz (Kara Young); the foul-smelling Betty Woods (Kristina Poe); ex-con Queen Sugar (Benja Kay Thomas) and her bestie, Munchies (Pernell Walker); the lonely, alcoholic Rockaway Rosie (Elizabeth Canavan); the wheelchair-bound rule-breaker Wanda Wheels (Patrice Johnson Chevannes); the trans Venus Ramirez (Esteban Andres Cruz); and the twentysomething Taina (Viviana Valeria), who takes care of her mentally ill mother, Happy Meal Sonia (Wilemina Olivia-Garcia). Also on the staff are eager white millennial social worker Jennifer (Molly Collier); ex-con janitor Joey Fresco (Victor Almanzar); and Father Miguel (David Anzuelo), who has a dark secret in his past. Seventeen-year-old Mateo (Sean Carvajal), whose mother is staying at the home, often helps out, allowed to hang around as the women share their often very private concerns about their troubled lives.

Narelle Sissons’s bilevel set consists of the main gathering room, a stoop, an outdoor bench, a dark alley, a balcony, and a concrete front space where the residents gossip and drink and smoke in defiance of the regulations. LAByrinth artistic director John Ortiz (Guinea Pig Solo, Jack Goes Boating) infuses the proceedings with tremendous vitality as Guirgis’s well-developed characters fight for survival. Taina has a chance to go back to school but is terrified of leaving her mother. Venus insists on staying even though several residents cruelly reject her claim to female identity, accusing her of unfairly invading their safe space. Father Miguel jostles with a man (Greg Keller) who demands to see his wife, who has a restraining order against him. Miss Rivera isn’t sure that Jennifer has what it takes to deal with the residents, who can be harsh and unforgiving. Wanda Wheels seems determined to drink herself to death. And at the center of it all is Sarge, superbly played by Guirgis regular and Tony nominee Rodriguez (Orange Is the New Black, The Motherf**ker with the Hat). A veteran with PTSD, Sarge is fierce and unrelenting, quick to brutally insult people, especially Venus and Betty, but she sometimes lets her more tender and loving side show through. She tells Bella, “I commanded a platoon. I survived combat. Kept my people safe. Took care of the villagers as much as I could. I looked death in the eye — twice — and I didn’t flinch. I can do this, Bella. I can do this with you. If you let me.” Sarge approaches her life like she’s embroiled in a never-ending war, which is true of many of the women living there.

Ex-cons Queen Sugar (Benja Kay Thomas) and Joey Fresco (Victor Almanzar) face off in Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven (photo © Monique Carboni)

The title comes from a poem Little Melba Diaz reads that sums up much of what the play is about, the difficulties and challenges these women can’t break free from: “Halfway Bitches go straight to Heaven / I ex-caped foster care and met a boy named Kevin / He was the apple of my eye but nigga turned into a lemon . . . No money in my pocket, I was feeling kinda low. . . . Words are turds and rhymes are crimes / Memories mere summaries, / Though I might some day share some of these,” she declares. Despite getting a little syrupy as it winds down, Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven is another deeply affecting, honest, and gutsy work that lays bare the lives of too many women who rightfully doubt there’s any light at the end of the tunnel for them.

THE LAST DAYS OF JUDAS ISCARIOT

Henrietta Iscariot (JoAnna Rhinehart) watches her son, Judas (Gabriel Furman, left), play as a child in Stephen Adly Guirgis revival (photo by Shashwat Gupta)

Ellen Stewart Theatre, La MaMa
66 East Fourth St. between Bowery & Second Ave.
Thursday – Saturday through March 26
lamama.org

In 2015, New York City native Stephen Adly Guirgis won the Pulitzer Prize for his off-Broadway hit Between Riverside and Crazy. In January, he was named a Residency One Playwright at the Signature Theatre, for which he will produce a series of old and new plays for the 2018-19 season. So the time is ripe for a look back at some of his earlier work, beginning with his time as coartistic director of the LAByrinth Theater Company. As part of its “Theatre and Social Justice” series, the Actors Studio, in conjunction with La MaMa, is presenting a rare revival of Guirgis’s The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, which debuted in 2005 at the Public Theater, where it was directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman and starred Eric Bogosian as Satan, Stephen McKinley Henderson as Pontius Pilate, John Ortiz as Jesus of Nazareth, Deborah Rush as Henrietta Iscariot, and Sam Rockwell as Judas. The cast of the revival, made up of members of the Actors Studio, might not be quite so well known, but Oscar winner Estelle Parsons directs this new version with a dynamic unpredictability and an intimate edge as Judas’s lawyer appeals his conviction for betraying Jesus and being sentenced to Hell.

Mary Magdalene (Burnadair Lipscomb-Hunt) makes her case in THE LAST DAYS OF JUDAS ISCARIOT (photo by Shashwat Gupta)

“No parent should have to bury a child . . . No mother should have to bury a son,” Henrietta Iscariot (JoAnna Rhinehart) says in the prologue, standing under an umbrella, the sound of rain cascading through the Ellen Stewart Theatre. “I buried my son. In a potter’s field. In a field of Blood. In empty, acrid silence. There was no funeral. There were no mourners,” she adds, immediately humanizing a figure who has been considered the worst of all villains through the centuries. The stage then becomes a makeshift courtroom (the set is by Peter Larkin) in a place called Hope in downtown Purgatory ruled over by cynical judge Frank Littlefield (Jay Johnston), who has little patience for his young bailiff, Julius of Outer Mongolia (Liana Jackson), or with the proceedings in general. Defense attorney Fabiana Aziza Cunningham (Suzanne DiDonna) seeks mercy and forgiveness for Judas (Gabriel Furman), who is catatonic, unable to speak for himself. The prosecutor is butt-kissing blowhard shyster Yusef Akbar Azziz Al-Nassar Gamel El-Fayoumy (Daniel Grimaldi), who, when given permission to approach the bench, declares, “It is a lovely bench! Splendid and sturdy like the great derriere that rests upon it!” Among the witnesses called to testify are Pontius Pilate (Leland Gantt), Caiaphas the Elder (Count Stovall), Simon the Zealot (Gabe Fazio), Mother Teresa (Bob Adrian), Sigmund Freud (Timothy Doyle), and Satan (Javier Molina) as the jury looks on, headed by foreman Butch Honeywell (Stephen Dexter). Saints such as Matthias of Galilee (Lash Dooley) and Peter (Con Horgan) chime in from the rafters, while Jesus (Michael Billingsley) wanders around seriously but quietly, carefully observing the trial.

Prosecutor El-Fayoumy (Daniel Grimaldi) grills Mother Teresa (Bob Adrian) as judge Frank Littlefield (Jay Johnston) looks on (photo by Shashwat Gupta)

Despite its nearly three-hour length (with intermission), the play flies by, anchored by several stirring monologues, including a sensational bit by Delissa Reynolds as Saint Monica, speaking in hip-hop, who proclaims, “I was axed to look into the case of Judas Iscariot by this Irish gypsy lawyer bitch in Purgatory named Cunningham. She wanted me to do some naggin’ to God on Judas’ behalf, and, quite frankly, I was impressed by her nagging abilities — cuz that bitch nagged my ass day and night for forty days . . . But I don’t nag for juss anybody, and I definitely don’t nag for no mothafuckah I don’t know, so I went down to check out Judas for my own self — he looked fuckin’ retarded.” The night we saw the play, two of the main actors stumbled over too many lines, but in general the cast, which also features Burnadair Lipscomb-Hunt as Mary Magdalene, Richarda Abrams as Gloria, and Beth Manspeizer as Loretta, a young woman on life support, is strong; many of them will also appear in the next Guirgis revival, Our Lady of 121st Street, as the Actors Studio plans to remount most of his plays. In The Last Days, Guirgis explores blasphemy, faith, selling out, abortion, anti-Semitism, a New York City overrun by “violent devil-worshipping cannibals,” the crucifixion, justice, and personal responsibility that is addressed in a long, heartfelt, and melodramatic monologue by Honeywell about remorse and regret. The play examines why, at least in theory, Jesus offered forgiveness to everyone except Judas, his onetime bestie, while also holding out hope that he will indeed grant atonement to us all.

TELL HECTOR I MISS HIM

Relationship between Mostro (Juan Carlos Hernández) and Samira (Selenis Leyva) is tested in TELL HECTOR I MISS HIM (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

Atlantic Stage 2
330 West 16th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through February 19, $35-$60
atlantictheater.org

Paola Lázaro’s debut play, Tell Hector I Miss Him, comes alive with the rhythms of real life, moving to the energy of salsa music. Inspired by actual events, Lázaro, who was born and raised in San Juan and has degrees from Purchase and Columbia, explores love and hope, machismo and girl power in a tight-knit Puerto Rican slum centered around a bodega run by the highly principled and old-fashioned Mostro (Juan Carlos Hernández) and his wife, Samira (Orange Is the New Black’s Selenis Leyva). As the play opens, an offstage couple is going at it heavily, the woman calling the shots. “Fuck me like I’m a trash bag. Like I don’t mean nothing to you. Like you don’t like me,” she cries out. “But you do mean something to me and I do like you,” the man responds. “But I don’t want you to like me! So fuck me like you don’t like me,” she demands again. The play follows twelve people as they go about their days, hitting various highs and lows. Sixteen-year-old Isis (a dynamic, scene-stealing Yadira Guevara-Prip) declares her undying passion for twenty-six-year-old Malena (OITNB’s Dascha Polanco), who is not gay but does not mind the unexpected attention. The not-too-bright Palito (Sean Carvajal) sells drugs with his hardheaded brother, Jeison (Victor Almanzar), while devoting himself to Malena’s best friend, Tati (Analisa veleZ), who is just using him. The simple-minded Toño (Alexander Flores), whose Mami (Lisa Ramirez) is a junkie, has been thrown out of high school for making the moves on a teacher. And the deeply depressed Hugo (Flaco Navaja), whose wife has moved out, develops an unusual friendship with El Mago (Luis Vega), a hippie magician who lives on the streets. Meanwhile, a mysterious young white woman called La Gata (Talene Monahon) roams around like an alley cat, saying nothing except “Meow.”

Malena (Dascha Polanco) is wooed by Isis (Yadira Guevara-Prip) in Paola Lázaro’s debut play (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

The play unfolds in a series of vignettes on Clint Ramos’s appropriately dank set, where the bodega is down the stairs of an old fort, between stone walls that form a kind of dungeon, trapping the residents of this community; above is a horizontal row of eight monitors showing the gentle waves lapping at the Puerto Rican shore, an effect that is both calming and representative of a bigger world outside that most of the characters might never get to know. Director David Mendizábal (Look Upon Our Lowliness, Locusts Have No King) pays heed to Lázaro’s stage directions in the script, which include such notes as “Fast as fuck” and “Fast, but not as fuck.” A protégée of Stephen Adly Guirgus’s, Lázaro, who is also an actress — she was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play for Ramirez’s To the Bone in 2015 — leaves some of the dialogue in Spanish, without translation, but audiences will get the point; much of the English dialogue crackles. “That’s why I stopped shaving my ass. That shit itches,” Tati tells Malena. Commenting on Malena’s aroma, Isis says, “It smells like a walk through the most beautiful botanical garden in the most exotic place in the world. It smells like the whole world, all the races, united to create a floral scent and not because they were forced to by a government, but because they wanted to. The races wanted to unite and create the scent of the world.” At 140 minutes with an intermission, the play is probably about twenty minutes too long; a few scenes could use some trimming, and the ending could come sooner, but Lázaro thankfully never provides any easy answers while avoiding genre clichés, and the ensemble is solid throughout. Tell Hector I Miss Him, which has been extended at the Atlantic’s Stage 2 through February 19, introduces a vibrant, exciting new voice to New York theater.

SECOND STAGE THEATRE: BETWEEN RIVERSIDE AND CRAZY

BETWEEN RIVERSIDE AND CRAZY is making a return engagement at Second Stage (photo by Kevin Thomas Garcia)

Who: Second Stage Theatre
What: Between Riverside and Crazy
Where: Tony Kiser Theatre, 305 West 43rd St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
When: January 16-31, $79-$125
Why: One of the best plays of 2014, the Atlantic Theater Company’s splendid production of Between Riverside and Crazy is back for another run, transferring to Second Stage January 16-31. Nearly the entire cast is returning for the play, written by Stephen Adly Guirgis and directed by Austin Pendleton, which deals with an ornery former beat cop who was shot by a fellow police officer and is refusing to accept a settlement from the city. The wonderful Stephen McKinley Henderson is back as Pops, with Victor Almanzar as Oswaldo, Rosal Colón as Lulu, Elizabeth Canavan as Audrey, Michael Rispoli as Lt. Caro, and Liza Colón-Zayas as the new church lady; the always excellent Ron Cephas Jones replaces Ray Anthony Thomas as Junior. The first time around, we noted that “Between Riverside and Crazy again demonstrates [Guirgis’s] sharp ear for dialogue and his keen sense of characterization as he creates complex, realistic situations filled with surprise twists and turns.” You can read our full review of the original production here.

BETWEEN RIVERSIDE AND CRAZY

BETWEEN RIVERSIDE AND CRAZY features a stellar cast led by the wonderful Stephen McKinley Henderson (photo by Kevin Thomas Garcia)

Atlantic Theater Company
Linda Gross Theater
336 West 20th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Monday – Saturday through August 23, $20-$65
866-811-4111
www.atlantictheater.org

Longtime character actor Stephen McKinley Henderson, a staple in the work of August Wilson, finally gets the big-time starring role he deserves in Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Between Riverside and Crazy. In the Atlantic Theater Company production, which has been extended through August 23, Henderson, who was nominated for a supporting actor Tony in 2012 for his role as Bono in Fences and more recently played Bobo in the Tony-nominated revival of A Raisin in the Sun, both opposite Denzel Washington, stars as Walter “Pops” Washington, a former beat cop whose career ended after a fellow police officer shot him multiple times. As the play opens, the portly Pops is sitting in a wheelchair at the kitchen table in his broken-down, rent-stabilized Riverside Drive railroad apartment. But it turns out that he can walk fine; the wheelchair belonged to his wife, who passed away just before Christmas. Meanwhile, the much-coveted apartment has been falling apart ever since his wife’s death, as evidenced by a wobbly Christmas tree still in the living room. Pops lives with his grown son, the recently paroled Junior (Ray Anthony Thomas), who is secretive and argumentative; Oswaldo (Victor Almanzar), a tough-talking young man in recovery who Pops has taken in; and Lulu (Rosal Colón), Junior’s pregnant girlfriend. It’s been eight years since Pops was shot in a controversial off-duty incident that he claims was racially motivated; over that time, the city has made financial offers to settle the case, but Pops has rejected every one on principle. “An honorable man can’t be bought off,” he tells his son. “An honorable man doesn’t just settle a lawsuit ‘No Fault’ and lend his silence to hypocrisy and racism and the grievous violation of all our civil rights.” His former partner, Audrey (Guirgis regular Elizabeth Canavan), and her fiancée, Lieutenant Caro (The Sopranos’ and Nurse Jackie’s Michael Rispoli) come for dinner and try to persuade him to take the deal, but Pops is a stubborn, unpredictable man with a unique view of the world. Nevertheless, he sees a different light after a visit from the new church lady (Liza Colón-Zayas).

Pops (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and Lulu (Rosal Colón) share a moment in new Stephen Adly Guirgis play at the Atlantic (photo by Kevin Thomas Garcia)

Guirgis, who grew up on Riverside Drive, is the former co-artistic director of the LAByrinth Theater Company, for which he wrote five plays directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman (including Our Lady of 121st Street and Jesus Hopped the “A” Train), followed by his Broadway debut, The Motherf**ker with the Hat. Between Riverside and Crazy again demonstrates his sharp ear for dialogue and his keen sense of characterization as he creates complex, realistic situations filled with surprise twists and turns. Henderson is fabulous as Pops, alternating between a sweet gentleness and a selfish anger, both populated with four-letter words that emerge poetically; the audience never knows what he’ll say or do next, making the play wonderfully uncomfortable. The supporting cast is excellent as well, as Guirgis and director Austin Pendleton (Gidion’s Knot, Orson’s Shadow) give each character his and her moment to shine on Walt Spangler’s rotating, somewhat ramshackle set. But best of all, everyone keeps the spotlight centered on Henderson as Pops, a lovable yet intensely frustrating individual played by an actor of tender and intelligent depth and charm.