Eliana Willis

On his first date with Anita, Billy cooked tuna and noodles — not the suavest choice of entree, especially since he loaded it with mayonnaise.“It was terrible,” she reminisces on their anniversary, half a lifetime later. “The worst meal I ever had.”As she speaks, he recreates that dinner in their kitchen in Tucson, Ariz., where a vase of red roses adorns the table, lit by a single candle. But Billy is alone, Anita keeping him company by phone. Trapped on the other side of the U.S. border with Mexico, she is unable to get home to him and their children.It has been this way for many months, and if the government ever lets Anita back in, it won’t be for years. So they celebrate their marriage long distance, the easy intimacy of their conversation full of comfort and yearning. When she cajoles Billy into dancing with her, he dances with his phone.They are such ordinary people with such unremarkable dreams. And if Hilary Bettis’s “72 Miles to Go…” is a quiet, conventional drama with a penchant for endearingly cornball humor, that suits the story of a family that wants more than anything to blend in, to live regular American lives. The play’s poignancy lies in how mercilessly difficult that is, and how precarious for all of them.Billy and Anita first met in the desert — he an Arizonan out with his church group, bringing water to migrants, she a Mexican fleeing danger with her little boy, Christian, who will grow up not knowing Spanish and having no idea that he isn’t an American citizen like Eva and Aaron, the children Billy and Anita have together.Directed by Jo Bonney at Roundabout Theater Company’s Laura Pels Theater, “72 Miles” is not about the recent crisis at the border, or not directly anyway. Unfolding from 2008 to the spring of 2016, it encompasses a time of cautious optimism for young people like Christian, who called this country home and hoped the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy would allow them to stay.In the character breakdown in the script, Bettis (“Alligator”) describes each family member other than Anita as either Chicana or Chicano — an American of Mexican descent. This play is about various ways of being American, with or without the documentation to prove it.It is also about carrying a low-level fear inside you all the time, a worry that the authorities are coming for you, or your brother, or your mother. And about the pain of having to live without the physical presence of someone you need, someone who is 72 miles, one phone call and a world away.So there is teenage Eva (Jacqueline Guillén), bursting into tears on a prom night gone wrong, wanting so badly the solace of her mother (Maria Elena Ramirez), but having only her sweetly bumbling father (a terrifically winning Triney Sandoval) to drive her home.There is Eva’s little brother, Aaron (Tyler Alvarez), morphing from a tender, kindhearted boy into a man with a military-macho carapace. And there is her big brother, Christian (Bobby Moreno), stalked by terror that his life will disintegrate — that his American wife and the American family they made will have to do without him.Moreno is a fine actor, but Christian, when we first meet him, is just 23. Moreno, who is married to Bettis, looks at least a decade older — a distraction that makes you wonder how old Christian was when he got here and how he could have been pre-verbal then. It also throws off the intended dynamic between him and his siblings, particularly in a scene that dips into sentiment, calling back to the blanket forts and hot strawberry milk of their shared childhood.That moment, like a too-prophetic line that Billy speaks in early 2016 (“With a new president on the horizon, who knows what the laws will look like”), is an indulgence in a play that is otherwise thoughtful and restrained. Its power is in its simplicity, and in the vividly average Americanness of its characters.To its credit, “72 Miles” doesn’t go where you might think it will, but it does eventually bring us to Anita, with her family, in the flesh. And if that reunion is staged a little awkwardly, we are nonetheless awfully glad to see her. Over the phone, we’ve grown to know her voice so well.72 Miles To Go…Through May 3 at the Laura Pels Theater, Manhattan; 212-719-1300, roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

In the search for stories that have not been told before, the playwright Celine Song has turned up a good one: The lives of the haenyeos, or sea women, of Korea.These are “free” divers — they use no tanks or scuba gear — who for centuries have scraped together a living by harvesting seafood from the waters off a small island at the tip of the Korean Peninsula. A few thousand are still at it, and if they survive the sharks and the whirlpools and the bends, they may continue diving deep into old age.Still, the three (fictional) haenyeos in Song’s play “Endlings,” which opened on Monday at New York Theater Workshop, see themselves as the end of their line; hence the title. But so, it seems, does Song, who in trying to broaden the scope of her tale makes tenuous connections between the “last mermaids” of her native country and her own plight as an immigrant playwright. Living on another small island — Manhattan — she is, like the haenyeos, swimming between worlds.These two aspects of “Endlings” unfortunately feel like separate works, both worthy but neither complete. And the director Sammi Cannold’s two-tone production — which had its debut last year at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass. — only emphasizes the separation. The haenyeos are introduced during the first 20 minutes of the 90-minute play as if they were the subjects of a dopey documentary from the 1950s: “These proud matriarchs earn a living and provide for their families,” a disembodied announcer explains.The tone remains coolly presentational and mildly satirical even as the women speak for themselves. Sook Ja (Jo Yang), the youngest at 78, is “the fun one,” still primping in hopes of attracting sea creatures or perhaps the ghost of her long-dead husband. At 83, Go Min (Emily Kuroda) is the ferocious one, having been beaten by her own long-dead husband and beating their children in turn. “What do you do with them if you don’t beat them?” she asks with a shrug. The philosophical one, Han Sol (Wai Ching Ho), 96, has no answers, living only for television. “Hollywood forever,” she says, improbably.Into this diorama-like depiction of their habits and habitat — the wet suits, the plunges, the nets of abalone and seaweed — the playwright herself eventually wanders, or an obvious stand-in for her named Ha Young. A playwright herself, Ha Young (Jiehae Park) is in the midst of a theatrical crisis involving this very play, whose composition and especially completion have proved especially difficult.Like Song, Ha Young has previously found success writing what she calls “white plays”: the kind, often involving people talking on a couch, in which nationality and race are not pressing concerns. (Song’s “Tom & Eliza,” seen in New York in 2016, seems to be a model.) But having been “bribed” by the hungry attention of white sponsors to write about the “old Korean female divers,” she is drawn into the conundrum of identity as commodity. “I don’t want to sell my skin for theater,” she says — but she doesn’t want to ignore her skin either.Expressing that real and wrenching conflict through drama has long been a rite of passage for writers from all kinds of marginalized communities. But Song subverts her argument by pushing it too hard. At one point, Ha Young and her husband — who wears a sign around his neck that reads “WHITE HUSBAND (also a playwright)” — attend a “white play” so deliberately bad that its satire sails right past whatever mark it was meant to hit. “I white perceive something that white upsets me,” goes a typical line of its dialogue.That this “white play” is depicted as a production of New York Theater Workshop is a complicated meta-jab. Song has noted that most of the playwrights in her personal pantheon — Brecht, Beckett, Albee, Shawn — are white men. Is she mocking her work as unworthy of theirs? Or is she mocking theirs in order to make room for something more authentically hers?Maybe both, but it’s hard to say. As “Endlings” alternates between the young playwright’s self-absorption and the old divers’ self-abnegation, the tone eventually spirals into surrealism.The design team — especially Jason Sherwood (sets) and Linda Cho (costumes) — gives us haunting underwater vignettes involving a giant turtle and declaiming clams. The haenyeos swim by as if exhibits in an aquarium. Pretty as this may be, it takes us further from the facts of both stories; Song’s frantic attempts to hustle between them eventually give the play a bad case of the dramaturgical bends.That’s a shame, because the haenyeos, whose traditional role at the center of a matriarchal society goes unexplored, could have been more than prompts for a personal essay. As it is, they are mostly a subject in search of a theme — a theme the playwright never convincingly harvests from a sea that does not easily give up its treasures.EndlingsTickets Through March 29 at New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan; 212-460-5475, nytw.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

Love is a beautiful liar in “Unknown Soldier,” Daniel Goldstein and Michael Friedman’s gentle musical reverie on the deceptions of Eros and memory. Old-fashioned, mellifluous songs of courtship and marital bliss float beguilingly through Trip Cullman’s carefully assembled production, which opened at Playwrights Horizons on Monday night.But even at their prettiest, the songs in this multigenerational family portrait seem tainted by suspicion, a sense that the sweetness they extol could dissolve into nothingness, melting “like sugar into water,” as a recurring lyric has it. As for the beloved, those cherished beings who elicit all that enchanted poetry, can you really say you know them, once they’re gone from your sight?Such reflections of the elusiveness — and illusiveness — of human identity have acquired an unexpected and unwelcome poignancy since “Unknown Soldier” was first staged at the Williamstown Theater Festival, in Williamstown, Mass., in 2015. Only two years later, Friedman, its protean composer, died at 41 of complications from AIDS.As a consequence, it’s difficult not to see — and particularly hear — this show without perceiving it as a memorial to the man who wrote its music. A character sings hopefully in the opening scene that when we see a picture, or hear a song or read a letter, “a person that’s forgotten comes alive for a moment.” And every note that’s sounded here inevitably both summons Friedman’s presence and makes us all the more aware of his absence.To regard “Unknown Soldier” primarily as a sentimental work, however, is a disservice to the complexity of this imperfect musical and, above all, to Friedman as a songwriter. Built around the quest to identify the amnesiac World War I veteran of its title, the show celebrates the urge to fully know other people — in the present as well as in the past.But it is also steeped in a rueful awareness that such attempts are doomed to fail. Friedman has matched that sensibility here with songs that slide from lilting, gaslight-era melodiousness into a jagged, more contemporary anxiety.The plot is a multilevel, armchair detective story. At its center is Ellen Rabinowitz (Margo Seibert), an obstetrician who has returned to her childhood home in Troy, N.Y., after the death of Lucy, the grandmother who raised her (the incomparable Estelle Parsons, who turns out to be a creditable singer).At a crossroads in her marriage and career, Ellen finds herself obsessed with a past that Lucy never talked about much. An old newspaper clipping, showing Lucy as a young woman with a mysterious man in uniform, inspires Ellen to do some investigative digging. Most of this is done online, with the assistance of Andrew Hoffman (Erik Lochtefeld), a Cornell University librarian, with whom she initiates an email flirtation.A cavalcade of ghosts haunts the premises as well. They include Ellen’s 7-year-old self (a charmingly unaffected Zoe Glick), and the dewy young version of her grandmother, Lucy (the silver-voiced Kerstin Anderson).Then there’s the soldier in that photograph (Perry Sherman, impeccably blank and bewildered), who, having lost his memory, was given the provisional name Francis Grand. He is treated by a psychiatric doctor (an agile and witty Thom Sesma), who, in a bonus for the audience, lectures in vaudeville pastiche numbers about the nature of recollection.As the narrative shifts between past and present, parallels emerge between the young Lucy’s love for the soldier she never really knew and the developing semi-romantic relationship between Ellen and Andrew — given persuasive, unglamorous existence by Seibert and Lochtefeld — as they hide behind their online personas. Whatever the historical period, it seems, our lovers, and would-be lovers, remain strangers.As you may have gathered, many strands of plot are being spun here, a process further complicated by the unreliability of our narrators (and implicitly, of all narrators). Sung with conviction and lucidly staged, the production manages admirably to keep confusion at bay.Still, there’s an abiding sense that the creators have taken on too many elements to fit comfortably into the show’s 90 minutes, with so much to say, in so many voices, in so little time. Even with extensive recent revisions by Goldstein and Cullman, “Unknown Soldier” somehow feels both slender and overstuffed.But there’s no denying the care that has gone into every level of the production. That includes Mark Wendland’s pale gray, institutional-looking set, presided over by a glowing clock without hands, in which packing boxes morph into twinkling streetscapes; the century-spanning costumes by Clint Ramos and Jacob A. Climer; and Ben Stanton’s lyrical lighting (with gorgeous astral projections by Lucy Mackinnon).Under the direction of Julie McBride, a five-piece band eloquently mirrors the varied musical languages Friedman uses here. He was always a chameleon composer, with work that ranges from the emo-rock satire of “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” to the R&B-inflected wistfulness of “The Fortress of Solitude.”Here, he shows a graceful fluency in both the romantic and vaudevillian styles of the World War I era, neatly matched by Patrick McCollum’s period choreography. As immaculately sung by Anderson’s young Lucy, valentines of songs subversively careen off course into darker dissonance, evoking Stephen Sondheim’s pastiche numbers for “Follies.”For the grown Ellen, he has provided a charmingly wry and understated meditation on dating, in which she reflects that “a milkshake is never a milkshake.” The music that begins the show is disarmingly flat and simple, as the 7-year-old Ellen sings a report on World War I.The limited range of notes for this just-the-facts presentation will of course prove inadequate to the questions it generates. Friedman’s music subsequently takes off into myriad different directions, which swirl affectingly in their uncertainty.When Sherman’s amnesiac Francis gropes in song for words and definitions that now elude him, the pang of the unanswerable lingers in his uncompleted sentences. At such moments, it’s impossible not to mourn the uncompleted life and career of a composer who gave such resonant voice to even the unknowable.Unknown SoldierTickets Through March 29 at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan; 212-279-4200, playwrightshorizons.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

BERLIN — The same weekend that Italy locked down much of the country’s north, fears over the coronavirus didn’t stop the sold-out premiere of Kirill S. Serebrennikov’s “Decameron” from going ahead to a full house in Berlin.It seemed somewhat ironic, given that Giovanni Boccaccio’s collection of ribald tales is set against the background of a plague outbreak in 14th-century Florence.In this staging at the Deutsches Theater, Serebrennikov swaps out the Tuscan estate of Boccaccio for a contemporary aerobics studio, and the 10 tales that unfold over the course of the production are partly updated. There’s a Wall Street tycoon, but also a king and a queen. Some of Serebrennikov’s retellings bear little resemblance to their source material.Like so much of the director’s work, the production is never less than grippingly contemporary. Beyond the gym setting, the only other main staging elements are large video panels that display German subtitles when the dialogue is in Russian, plus the contents of online chats, stock tickers, ’80-style video games and trippy projections (by Ilya Shagalov) for several freaky sex scenes.Serebrennikov is perhaps the most prominent Russian theater and opera director working today, a distinction that owes as much, if not more, to politics as it does to art.A fraud trial that he currently faces has widely been interpreted as an ultimatum on artistic freedom in today’s Russia. The director spent 20 months under house arrest before being released in April, but he remains barred from leaving Moscow, which is where he developed “Decameron” with actors from the Gogol Center, the avant-garde theater he has run there since 2012, and the Deutsches Theater. (A Moscow premiere is set for June.)The Deutsches Theater has been a staunch ally during the director’s lengthy battle with Russia’s justice system. “Decameron” was originally planned to play there in 2018, but because Serebrennikov was still under house arrest, the Gogol Center presented other works.A year later, that company returned to the Deutsches Theater with Serebrennikov’s provocative “Who Is Happy in Russia.” (Berlin will see more Serebrennikov soon, when “Outside,” which premiered at last summer’s Avignon Festival, is performed at the Schaubühne theater’s FIND festival this week.)“Decameron’s” most impressive feat is how seamlessly it integrates the mixed Russian and German cast. Of the 10 principal actors, the Deutsches Theater’s Regine Zimmermann gets to show the widest range, playing a series of inventively unfaithful wives. The production’s most magnetic presence, she deftly moves between vulnerability and confidence, giving a performance that meets the stories’ physical and emotional demands.On the Russian side, Aleksandra Revenko is the most striking performer as she uses her hard stare to play a pitiless lover or comically snap to life as a personified bot advertising a beauty product to a gullible woman.Among the men, Marcel Kohler makes the best impression as a succession of cuckolded husbands. Many of the other male performers spend the evening in various states of undress, moving to Evgeny Kulagin’s erotic, aerobics-inspired choreography and live music that runs that gamut from Bach cello suites to Nina Simone (the latter, sung by the drag performer Georgette Dee, an alluring, if unexpected, presence here).The movement and music add definition to what would otherwise be a disjointed production, but the long evening ultimately seems less than the sum of its parts. There is greater sense of arc to the two-hour-long first act, but after intermission “Decameron” starts to fizzle out, with some poignant vignettes — a group of older women sharing their love stories with the audience — seeming out of place.Serebrennikov’s point of departure seems to be that human nature is essentially unchanged from Boccaccio’s age to our own. Like those Renaissance nobles and the tales they concoct, we are still bound and chained by the same drives and obsessions.Yet while the tales themselves are full of love and sex, this adaptation puts the focus elsewhere. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the director’s recent Kafkaesque experiences, “Decameron” is most interested in exploring existential states of confinement.We are all imprisoned and quarantined by our passions and foibles. Is there a way out? This German-Russian co-production seems to suggest that artistic collaboration and exchange is our best hope.Decameron.Through April 27 at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin; deutschestheater.de. More