Eliana Willis

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

Mart Crowley, whose 1968 play, “The Boys in the Band,” put gay characters and their stories front and center in a way that had rarely been seen in a mainstream New York theater, died on Saturday night in Manhattan. He was 84.His friend the actress Natasha Gregson Wagner said the cause was complications of heart surgery.Where previous plays and movies often tiptoed around a character’s homosexuality or, worse, demonized gay characters, Mr. Crowley’s play presented gay men talking forthrightly and in depth about their lives. It featured nine men at a birthday party in which alcohol flowed and conversation grew brutally honest as a result.“The power of the play,” Clive Barnes wrote in his review in The New York Times, “is the way in which it remorselessly peels away the pretensions of its characters and reveals a pessimism so uncompromising in its honesty that it becomes in itself an affirmation of life.”The play, opening more than a year before the Stonewall Inn uprising in Greenwich Village, a catalyst of the gay-rights movement, gave new visibility to the world it depicted, with the show drawing both gay and straight audience members, including high-profile ones like Jacqueline Kennedy and Mayor John V. Lindsay. Staged at Theater Four on West 55th Street in Manhattan, it ran for more than two years and more than 1,000 performances.Fifty years later, the play finally made it to Broadway, in a revival directed by Joe Mantello and with a cast that included Zachary Quinto. The production won the Tony Award for best revival.“I think that was the highlight of his life,” the actor Robert Wagner, Ms. Gregson Wagner’s stepfather and Mr. Crowley’s longtime friend, said in a phone interview.Although groundbreaking, “The Boys in the Band,” which was made into a movie directed by William Friedkin in 1970, was not universally embraced. With the gay-rights movement evolving quickly and vocally even as the play was still in the midst of its initial run, some critics attacked it as presenting an image of gay men that was unflattering and full of self-loathing.“I went to see ‘Boys in the Band’ several times,” Edward Albee said in the documentary “Making the Boys” (2011) by Crayton Robey, “and more and more I saw an audience there of straights, who were so happy to be able to see people they didn’t have to respect.”Yet over time it has come to be seen as pivotal to opening up dialogue.“The people who criticize the play,” Mr. Mantello told The Times in 2018, “have the luxury to do so because of the play.”Edward Martino Crowley was born on Aug. 21, 1935, in Vicksburg, Miss. His father, he said later, was an alcoholic, and his mother was a drug addict.“I always resented that Eugene O’Neill already had my best plots,” he told The San Francisco Chronicle in 2002.He attended an all-boys Roman Catholic high school and graduated from the Catholic University of America in Washington in 1957 with a degree in theater. While there he designed a production of a stage adaptation of Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd,” whose cast included Jon Voight, a fellow student.Mr. Crowley went to New York and was hired as an assistant by the director Elia Kazan. Kazan was filming “Splendor in the Grass,” and Mr. Crowley befriended one of its stars, Natalie Wood (Ms. Gregson Wagner’s mother). When she was cast in the film version of “West Side Story,” Ms. Wood — who was twice married to Mr. Wagner — hired Mr. Crowley as her personal assistant.In 1966, the critic Stanley Kauffmann wrote a provocative essay in The New York Times pointing out that although many leading playwrights were gay, their drama did not address their world directly.“In society the homosexual’s life must be discreetly concealed,” he wrote. “As material for drama, that life must be even more intensely concealed.”Mr. Crowley, who had dabbled unsuccessfully in television writing, was among those struck by the essay’s call for more open playwriting.“Kauffman’s article was, ‘Isn’t it about time that one of these homosexual writers writes a play that’s openly about his own experience?’” he said in a 2013 interview on the television program “Theater Talk.” “And I thought that was a very, very good point.”Mr. Crowley wrote “The Boys in the Band” in five weeks while house-sitting for the actress Diana Lynn. It was his first play. The New York production spawned productions in England and elsewhere.“I ran around the world on ‘Boys in the Band’ money,” he told The Washington Times in 1993.Mr. Crowley wrote several other plays, including “The Men From the Boys,” which looked in on the apartment and some of the characters from “The Boys in the Band” 30 years later.Another Crowley drama, “For Reasons That Remain Unclear,” involved an encounter between a priest and a younger man who share an unsettling past.“The play has its hard nugget of truth,” Lloyd Rose wrote in a review in The Washington Post when the play was staged at the Olney Theater in Maryland in 1993. “Crowley is more honest, and wiser about human nature, than many playwrights with more obvious and accessible writing skills.”Mr. Crowley leaves no immediate survivors.In 2010, when “The Boys in the Band” was being revived by the Transport Group Off Broadway, several playwrights spoke of the work’s influence on them. Larry Kramer had seen the play both in New York and in London.“It was the London one that was life-changing in a way for me,” he said, “because it showed me as a writer, as a gay person, as a gay writer, what was possible to do in the commercial theater. The theater in London was packed, and people loved the play and gave it a standing ovation.”Mr. Wagner, in the phone interview, said simply of his longtime friend, “He was his own man at a time when it was really, really difficult.” More

As the festive notes of a guitar fill the room, and smartly dressed men and women set up towers of tamales that threaten to overwhelm their containers, it feels for a moment as if nothing could go wrong in the world of Andrea Thome’s rapturous “Fandango for Butterflies (and Coyotes).”But the truth is that most of the characters in this En Garde Arts production are undocumented immigrants gathering in a church on the eve of an ICE raid that threatens their presence in the United States.They are there for a fandango, a traditional gathering in which musicians, dancers and guests take turns performing on a wooden platform surrounded by the others. Inspired by stories of real-life immigrants (including Sinuhé Padilla, who wrote the songs and portrays a musician), Thome’s play is a sensitive portrait of the in-between: characters balancing the small joys of everyday life with the fear of uncertainty.At the center of the festivities is Mariposa (Jen Anaya), who has become the unofficial leader of this immigrant community. As Anaya portrays her, Mariposa (the word for butterfly in Spanish) is the embodiment of Zen, all sweet smiles and softly spoken responses. But look closely at her careful movements and alert eyes and Anaya also reveals anxiety. She is not exempt from the terror.Still, she encourages others to let the music of the fandango transport them to a place beyond panic. And as they step up onto the platform, cast members both perform and share their stories of border crossing.Originating in Spain, fandangos gained prominence when the conquistadors brought the tradition to Mexico. They are common in Veracruz, where composers created the son, jarocho and jarabe, upbeat genres that revolve around guitars and tap dancing. Less common in Latin America, the musical gatherings have been adopted by Latinx immigrants in the United States, who use them to quench their thirst for the culture they left behind.When Rafaela (Silvia Dionicio) explains that she can’t stay for the fandango because she’s Dominican, Pili (a scene-stealing Frances Ines Rodriguez), who is of Mexican descent, counters: “You don’t have parties? With music, dancing and food?”Rafaela stays, of course; who would refuse an offer of such merriment? And we in the audience are invited to partake in the singing and dancing with the cast after the play is over. But under the astute direction of Jose Zayas, it is clear that this a bittersweet get-together: We tap our feet to the music but also to the unease of not knowing what awaits the characters.In between songs, dread fills the room, Beckett-style, as attendees wonder when their loved ones will arrive. Honduran cousins Rogelio (an extraordinary Carlo Albán, who you might remember from “Sweat”) and Elvin (Andrés Quintero) are expecting Johan (Roberto Tolentino), who just took the trip across the border.We hear Johan’s story in a riveting scene in which Marcelo Añez’s harrowing sound design, Lucrecia Briceno’s lighting and Johnny Moreno’s projections converge to show us the way in which the faintest light provides hope.The light here is music, as Johan remembers how the ominous sounds of the freight train in which he traveled started to sound like drumbeats.Following its premiere at La MaMa, where I saw it, “Fandango for Butterflies (and Coyotes)” will be presented in every borough of New York, in the hope of reaching immigrant communities and audiences who don’t always go to the theater. May they come to realize there are maladies that can only be healed by a guitar.Fandango for Butterflies (and Coyotes)Through March 28 at various locations; engardearts.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

In “Strange Fruit,” Billie Holiday’s protest song from 1939, the jazz singer evoked the gruesome imagery that haunted her: black bodies hanging from trees after being lynched by angry white mobs. Originally written as a poem by Abel Meeropol, Holiday’s rendition became an anthem of sorrow and anger, but from its endless pain also emanated a soulful wish, that the spirits of these wronged bodies would find solace in the world to come.One might draw a line connecting Holiday’s lament to the transcendent “Skinfolk: An American Show,” a play with songs by the writer and performer Jillian Walker and a co-production of the National Black Theater and the Bushwick Starr (where it’s currently running).Three black spirits, or perhaps nymphs (Walker allows audience members to interpret each character and symbol as they see fit), transport us to an underground cave where happiness and pain coexist, unable to distance themselves from each other. Here, they guide us through vignettes that retell Walker’s family history — and by extension, the history of America — in the hopes of reclaiming the joys of blackness in all its complexity.Walker plays one of the nymphs, a character inspired by her own life whom she calls Me. Me is a gracious host, using poetry and song (Walker wrote all of the songs with her co-composer, Kasaun Henry) to share her complex personal story and her views on the African-American experience.“An experience that no one has asked the right questions for,” exclaims Avery (an ethereal Tsebiyah Mishael Derry), who, along with the Smiling Tuxedoed Man (an impish Lori Sinclair Minor), helps Walker convey a sensuous evening filled with the promise of mutability, an existence without the restraints of what our skin color binds us to.That potential transformation is implied by the performance space itself. Scenic designer You-Shin Chen transforms the Starr into the cave beneath a tree, brimming with smaller alcoves filled with curlers, lotions and other domestic accouterments that create a sense of homeyness. But those small details also establish an atmosphere that this is a place where people have been stuck for a long time, waiting to leave.And Tuçe Yasak’s warm lighting, which sometimes peers from the ceiling from among the hanging roots, suggests cracks leading to the surface; the nymphs, along with their “skinfolk” — wronged black souls and their mortal descendants — might finally break through.The insightful writing and the play’s free-form structure have a jazzlike quality. Walker layers dialogue and songs so that the two engage in a multipurpose dance, filled with both conviction and questioning, while always staying grounded. A scene in which the trio sit one above the other, recreating the process of getting their hair braided, becomes a metaphor for the hierarchy in a matriarchy as well as a visual nod to the choreography of girl groups like Destiny’s Child or the Supremes.The director Mei Ann Teo cleverly balances the varying moods: When Walker recounts the brutalities of slavery and segregation, she conveys a sense of unearthing ancient artifacts while still maintaining the kind of urgency that makes the audience want to jump from the seats to demand justice.It’s in this duality and unwillingness to let audiences off the hook that “Skinfolk: An American Show” plants its seeds of hope. Although we never leave the cave under the tree, we have been granted a vision of the forest above. If we could only get there.Skinfolk: An American ShowThrough March 14 at the Bushwick Starr, Brooklyn; thebushwickstarr.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More