Eliana Willis

Before “Sideways: The Experience,” Rex Pickett’s stage adaptation of his novel, begins, guests who have plunked down an extra $100, can participate in the experiential portion, a preshow cocktail party at the Theater at St. Clement’s. As waiters circulate with duck rillettes pot pie and tuna tartare tacos, two barmen pour wines meant to mimic those tasted by the play’s characters, old friends on a California spree. There is also merlot, though fans of Alexander Payne’s 2004 film version will remember a profane line arguing against that grape.The cocktail party — less an immersive experience than a digestive one — is a nifty idea. Enough passed hors d’oeuvres will improve almost anyone’s mood. And booze goggles, I would imagine, would help to soften the show’s unrepentantly male gaze. But since my head goes swimmy after the first drink, I spent the hour and a half nursing, neglectfully, a small rosé, and approached the show sober, which I would not recommend. Creaky, queasily sexist and directed by Peccadillo Theater Company’s Dan Wackerman with oblivious joie de vivre, the play, I’m afraid, is corked.Jack (Gil Brady), an actor turned director with a surfer dude drawl, and Miles (Brian Ray Norris), a pre-success novelist and unacknowledged alcoholic, have fled Los Angeles for Jack’s bachelor party — a week in the Santa Ynez Valley, low-key wine country. Miles envisions an orgy of rare vintages; Jack envisions an orgy. Inevitably, they meet Maya (Kimberly Doreen Burns), a waitress described in the script as “an earthy beauty” with her uniform shirt “provocatively unbuttoned,” and Terra (Jenny Strassburg), a tasting room manager, “like a wine geek’s most surreal fantasy.”Before you can knock back a pinot noir, they have all decamped to what everyone insists on calling a “hot tub spa.” Will Maya open up her best burgundy? Will Jack make it to the church on time? How much more should I have swilled to make this white male wish fulfillment even baseline palatable?Pickett has decanted his novel to the stage with an imperfect grasp of how stage plays work. He shoves observation into dialogue like a stepsister trying to stuff her feet into too-small shoes. How else to explain a scene in which Miles’s mother (Allison Briner-Dardenne) suddenly directly addresses the audience with her gripes about her son? “I just don’t understand why he won’t get his teaching credential,” she soliloquizes.Still, formal infelicities are easily forgiven. Less defensible: a show which dilates on men’s sexual and romantic needs with female characters only present to enable them; a story of a misanthropic schlub who lands a smart, beautiful lady, just because. On the night I saw it, “Sideways” performed for a mostly female audience, but the surreal fantasies only went one way. Miles describes wines as “young, fresh, nubile,” “pornographically good,” “tighter than a nun’s—.” The rest, like his metaphor for a silky pinot, is unpublishable.There are halfhearted attempts to endow Terra and Maya with interiority. (This is a problem of the script, not the actresses, who do what they can with the dregs afforded.) But when every woman is either a goddess or a problem, things start to feel ugly — then uglier still when the script asks Burns to remove her top (albeit with her back to the audience) and pour wine over her breasts. Suddenly, I wished I had drunk more — enough to black out, perhaps.In the days following, I tried to suss out why the movie, which scored Payne an Oscar for best adapted screenplay, worked so much better than the play. It might owe to a different cast or the play’s pointed lack of golf carts. But I would guess it’s because Payne recognized that these blinkered characters are awful, and Pickett and Wackerman can’t or won’t. Or because some stories, unlike fine wines, don’t age well.The merlot, a friend told me, was delicious.Sideways: The ExperienceThrough May 24 at Theater at St. Clement’s, Manhattan; 866-811-4111, sidewaystheexperience.com. Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes. More

Plenty of plays, from “Hamlet” to “Hamilton,” feature a restless title character itching for action. But “The Perplexed,” which opened on Tuesday at New York City Center Stage I, has six — and that’s not even counting the audience.In any case, six are way too many for Richard Greenberg’s hermetic family comedy, a modest story inflated to unwarranted size by what appears to be dramaturgical panic. “The Perplexed,” directed by Lynne Meadow for Manhattan Theater Club, wants so much to be important that it forgets to be plausible first.Or even followable; despite its generous running time and exhausting exposition, in which characters tell each other things they would already know, the play is mysterious to the point of perversity. You will hear dozens of disquisitions, in rich prose, on the moral gridlock of privileged people who can’t think of anything to do that won’t make the world worse. Yet you will barely grasp the basic architecture of their relationships.Those relationships are as bewildering as Santo Loquasto’s floor plan for the vast library, complete with endless niches and nooks, of the Fifth Avenue apartment in which the play is set. The owner is a hateful magnate named Berland Stahl, on whom evil has acted as a preservative. Though ancient, he is said to have “missed his window” for dying.Wouldn’t it have been fun, and dramatically useful, to meet him? But no, that would provide too clear an antagonist for a conflict that is built on internal muddle. Instead, assembled for a “Potemkin wedding” in the old man’s home, we meet — and meet and meet — the once-close but now long-warring families of the bride, Isabelle Stahl, who is Berland’s granddaughter, and the groom, Caleb Resnik. Friends in infancy, these idealistic yet cleareyed 20-somethings have been brought back together by fate, a force that Greenberg, in one of his overpolished quips, calls “coincidence with a publicist.”The adults, though, are mostly a mess. It’s not just the feud, which has something to do with a slumlord lawsuit once brought against Berland by Caleb’s father, Ted Resnik, and by Isabelle’s mother, Evy Arlen-Stahl, who is married to Berland’s son, Joseph. The suit, which failed, got Evy and Joseph written out of the old man’s will but in the process made Evy’s career; she’s now a crusading New York City councilwoman. It also, somehow, for a time, ruined Ted’s life.Or so I think; even after reading the play, which went through a lot of rewriting during previews, I cannot explain how being on the same side of the conflict provoked so much hostility from Ted’s wife, Natalie Hochberg-Resnik. (She is a familiar type in Greenberg’s plays: the passive-aggressive Jewish dilettante do-gooder.) Nor do we ever fully understand the nature of the trauma afflicting Joseph, who spends much of the play, when not in a stupor, drafting horribly inappropriate father-of-the-bride speeches. One is from the point-of-view of a fetus.That the wedding will take place at midnight — after the cocktails, dinner and dancing — is a laughable device justified lamely and late in the play. Likewise the crisis, such as it is, is resolved with a ludicrous technological trick.Fair enough; this is a comedy, after all. Plot contrivance is the name of the game.But character contrivance is deadly; too much makes a play’s engine start kicking and stalling. Isabelle’s brother, Micah, a medical student with a sideline in gay fetish porn, has no function except to heighten the hysteria. (He has recently been outed as a star of PrepBoyz.com.) Patricia Persaud, Berland’s Guyanese-born health attendant, has more of a role in the proceedings, but mostly exists to provide person-of-color contrast to the white characters by enjoying her work and smiling incessantly.If Greenberg were directly exploring socioeconomic privilege, would that be palatable? In any case, he’s not; he’s exploring instead the privilege of narcissism. The self-regarding adults, caught in the gap between the certainties of an older generation’s brutality and a younger one’s impatience for change, are free to spend their lives dithering and whining and finding excuses for themselves.So if they are perplexed, it is not in the theological manner suggested by the 12th-century tract from which Greenberg takes his title. In “The Guide to the Perplexed,” Maimonides sought to explain the nature of God; these characters barely believe in their own existence, let alone a deity’s. Even the rabbi, a family friend named Cyrus Bloom, is “self-defrocked,” another victim of moral restlessness.It’s not hard to spot Greenberg’s own perplexity here; three of his characters have writer’s block. James, Evy’s brother, is a novelist who has given up writing altogether. “It seems I’ve completed my trajectory,” he says. “From promising to successful to very successful to less successful to still less successful to a dismal sales track to being my sales track to goodbye.”It’s probably no coincidence that this character, though functionless in the plot, is the one who can’t stop talking about its themes. He asks how people no longer at the center of the culture can still do meaningful work. Evy, a public servant, at least gets stoplights installed at dangerous intersections. What can a formerly edgy, then mainstream, then beached writer do?If this is Greenberg’s plaint as well — the scent of despair does waft off the stage — I hope he has now worked through it. His career has been full of ups and downs; Manhattan Theater Club has produced 10 of his more than 30 plays, some bombs, some (like “The Assembled Parties,” in 2013) stunners. His best work doesn’t wallow, it strides, making no apologies for a style that is lofty, literary and unafraid of long trips around the barn to get to the point.“The Perplexed” feels needlessly ashamed of all that. It participates in James’s loathing for himself and his class — “The people I know congratulate themselves if they cope with a sad feeling” — yet ultimately lets them off the hook. The production is left to distract by ingratiation, with its comedy rhythms and clarinetty music. Even so, the cast, headed by the piquant Margaret Colin as Evy, can’t find a tone that works, though the always-ferocious Frank Wood, as Joseph, gets his teeth into some pathos and doesn’t let go.“The Perplexed” as a whole lacks the muscle for that. It might have worked better if it hadn’t tried so hard to be a major denunciation (and yet a loving excuse for) an entitled generation. The ambition is admirable, but a play can’t follow every road open to it. Sometimes installing a stoplight at a single intersection is the best thing anyone can do.The PerplexedTickets Through March 29 at New York City Center Stage I, Manhattan; 212-581-1212, manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More

At the very beginning of the new play “Coal Country,” we are told it is “a West Virginia story about 29 men and a big machine.” This is an understated way to inform the audience that what follows will be devastating.That story is true, and it happened in 2010, when those men all died in a devastating mining disaster. We learn a few things about some of the victims: that Cory was 5 when his dad took him out to shoot his first deer, and that Greg had been Patti’s neighbor for 22 years before he asked her out.But really, we don’t know all that much about those folks because the show is about the ones who were left behind: It’s Cory’s father, Tommy (Michael Laurence), who recounts that hunt, and it’s Patti (Mary Bacon) who talks about Greg’s courtship. Memories and grief are what they have now.Anger, too. Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen’s “Coal Country,” with live music by the rootsy singer-songwriter Steve Earle, is also about why what happened at the Upper Big Branch mine can be called a tragedy, but it can’t be called an accident. A terrible twist of fate defines an accident. What happened at U.B.B., as everybody calls it, was precipitated by greed and cost-saving negligence — embodied by Don Blankenship, the chief executive of the company that owned the mine, and whose trial figures in the show. Conditions had gotten so bad that months before the explosion, an experienced miner named Goose (Michael Gaston) had told his wife, Mindi (Amelia Campbell), that U.B.B. was “a ticking time bomb.”To assemble the script, Blank (who also directed) and Jensen traveled to West Virginia and conducted interviews with people who had lost loved ones that day in 2010. The couple are experienced practitioners of documentary theater, as evidenced in shows such as “The Exonerated” (about former death-row inmates, and in which Earle once appeared) and “Aftermath” (about Iraqi refugees living in Jordan). The testimonies in “Coal Country,” at the Public Theater, have a lean plainness that only makes them more heart-wrenching.The characters talk about their relationship with the dead, but also their relationship with the mine, which regulates everybody’s life. Driving to his day shift in the dispatch office, Roosevelt (Ezra Knight) would see his dad returning from his night shift underground. Then one day, the younger man did not pass his father’s car coming from the other direction; when he got to the mine, he learned his father had died. While coal mining has become a hot-button issue, from environmental concerns to political debates, the play offers gentle reminders that options are limited for many folks who were attached to their town and didn’t want to move. “People say why don’t you just quit, I’d rather work at McDonald’s and make $9 an hour,” Mindi says. “But you don’t understand, there weren’t no McDonald’s. Only jobs in this area are coal-related.”Yet the show is not blind to fault lines within a community that is closing ranks and shunning some of its own if they are deemed not working-class enough. Judy (Deirdre Madigan) may have lost a brother in the mine, but she feels estranged waiting for updates with other members of the community because she is a doctor. “There’s a class division,” she says. “For the first time in my life I was an outsider.”Earle’s songs (which will appear on his new album, “Ghosts of West Virginia,” due in May) are interspersed through the show at regular intervals. He performs them sitting on a stool, hunched over an old-fashioned microphone; the actors often join in.The spare numbers do not pretend to offer insights into the characters or move the story along: This is not a musical. Rather, they underline the show’s themes of community and transmission, contributing one more chapter in what feels like an ongoing oral history.This, after all, is the role music has played in Appalachia for generations. In “Coal Country,” the testimonies and songs cohere into a narrative of timeless exploitation, resistance and tragedy. Tellingly, the first number is about West Virginia’s most famous folk hero: “John Henry was a steel drivin’ man,” Earle sings. “Beat the steam drill down and then he died/And it didn’t change nothin’ but heaven knows he tried.”He tried, and he died. As for Blankenship, he was sentenced to one year in prison in 2016. Now, he is a presidential candidate for the Constitution Party.Coal CountryTickets Through April 5 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; 212-967-7555, publictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

The Jamie Lloyd Company’s West End revival of “Cyrano de Bergerac” is coming to the Harvey Theater of the Brooklyn Academy of Music for a limited run in May. Directed by the theater company’s namesake, Jamie Lloyd, the adaptation by Martin Crimp is a postmodern take on the Edmond Rostand love story, featuring beatboxing, silver-tongued characters in street clothes.“It’s not the most difficult role I’ve played onstage but I would say it’s the trickiest,” said James McAvoy, who plays the title role and was nominated for a best actor Olivier Award for it on Tuesday. “While its themes and narrative are universal, Rostand sets it in a heightened world where language and oratory ability are as powerful as weapons.”The classic version follows Cyrano, played by McAvoy, who is smitten with Roxane, played by Anita-Joy Uwajeh, but convinced he is too unattractive to win her affection. Instead, he helps the better-looking but inarticulate Christian, played by Eben Figueiredo, find the words to woo her. As the audiences will discover, the love triangle in this production has a modern twist to it.(The production also received Olivier nominations for best revival, best director and for best supporting actress, for Michele Austin.)“Jamie wanted us to be true to ourselves as much as possible,” McAvoy said in an interview. “In some way I feel as though I’m playing myself more than some idea of Cyrano and I suspect many of the cast feel the same way.”“So how will the American crowd take to that?” In Britain, he said, people “seemed to eat it up, so hopefully we’ll find the same thing at BAM.”The play is scheduled to run from May 8 through May 31. Tickets go on sale for members on March 10 and for the general public on March 20. More