Eliana Willis

Late in the evening, as the rest of the household sleeps, a woman tells her middle-aged son about the one who got away — the man she longed for throughout her marriage, whom she once sneaked off with overnight, leaving her children alone at home.In “Grand Horizons,” Bess Wohl’s clever truth bomb of a play, it is a scene that makes the Broadway audience roar. Nancy, a retired librarian played by Jane Alexander, has just asked her husband of 50 years for a divorce.Their son Brian, played by Michael Urie, is shellshocked by the split. His mother’s confession, sprinkled with explicit details that he is desperate not to hear, is a way of explaining to him that her passion was always elsewhere.“Mom, please,” he says, “I’m begging you.”But she won’t be stopped, and it’s terrific comedy: her unperturbed insistence, his escalating agony. Wohl is tapping a reflex, inviting us to enjoy the easy scandal of a proper, older woman being sexual, using raunchy words. And Nancy is accustomed to being laughed at by her grown-up boys — condescended to, affectionately minimized.Then, bam, she has had enough.“No,” she tells Brian. “You have to hear this. I will be a whole person to you. I will.”That bold, quick-change moment of asserted dignity is when I swooned for “Grand Horizons,” which for all its plot about a marriage’s unforeseen implosion has another matter urgently on its mind. Like Kate Hamill’s delicious “Dracula,” a feminist romp at Classic Stage Company, Wohl’s play is a powerful argument for the full humanity of women in our culture — a matter that’s not as settled as we might like to think.Nancy, for one, belongs to a generation of women raised to care-take and accommodate, never to make a fuss about themselves. She reminds me my aunt, who, riding shotgun on a road trip, temporarily lost her sight in one eye. Not wanting to trouble my uncle as he drove, she made not a peep about it. Nancy, I imagine, might have done the same.When she was a child learning how to canoe, Nancy says, her father taught her to “never to take my paddle out of the water, forward and back, forward and back, so that I wouldn’t even make the smallest splash, the tiniest sound. And now I think I lived my entire life that way — no splash. No impact.”“Grand Horizons” is the story of her comparatively clamorous awakening, in which she finds an ally in Jess, her heavily pregnant daughter-in-law. Jess looks at Nancy and glimpses a terrifying, imminent future in which she is viewed only as a mother — her own needs and desires permanently subjugated in a way that her husband’s will never be.The stuff of nightmares, of course, varies for each of us. But Jess would be right at home in the audience for “Dracula,” whose 19th-century women feel a more inchoate version of her fear. The world they inhabit in this loose, rollicking adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel is frightening precisely because it’s not so different from our own.The title page of the script calls it “A bit of a feminist revenge fantasy, really,” and that’s exactly how this female-centric reinvention feels. It scares us not with monsters, though it certainly has those, but with the sinister prospect of women’s dehumanization at the hands of men empowered by law and intractable custom.Its threats are both supernatural — Dracula, the bloodsucking Transylvanian traditionalist — and mortal: everyday Englishmen.“Your man can lock you away for being mad, you know,” cautions Renfield, a Dracula devotee written here as an Englishwoman who has indeed been locked away. “And they say what madness is! They define all the words! They make all the rules — and they don’t let you break them. And they try to break you if you try!”If, for the 21st century, her warning is not quite factually spot-on, it carries a certain metaphorical heft.True, Renfield (played by Hamill) is possessed of drolly alarming appetites; when she asks Seward, her doctor, for a “plump, juicy, crunchy little kitten,” she’s not hoping for a playmate. But this patient, a onetime poet, does seem to have cracked under the constraints of a world that demanded her submission to a cruel husband.A tale of domestic horrors — and perhaps an egalitarian manifesto, too, by a playwright who got married during previews — Hamill’s “Dracula” is about the expectation that women will bend themselves to the rigid frame of ladylike behavior, no matter how it deforms them. They mustn’t be brainy, lest their menfolk feel slighted; they mustn’t be willful; and they surely mustn’t let too much of their real personalities show.When a grieving Seward buries his fiancée, Lucy, he says: “She will be laid to rest, in peace, as she lived — an angel, beyond any reproach!”“An angel?” her best friend, Mina, erupts. “Lucy was vulgar — and funny — and clever — and complicated. She was not some porcelain idol for you to worship! You didn’t even know her.”What’s so offensive to Mina is that this intended compliment, calling Lucy an angel, is in fact a denial of her very humanity. Mina herself, in the meantime, is pregnant and thus assumed by those around her to be in a diminished state — physically delicate and mentally frail. One outlier: the vampire-hunting physician Van Helsing, a woman who takes no guff from anyone and taps Mina as a kindred spirit.If Mina suffers from any condition, it’s being female in a society designed and run by men, for men. She and Van Helsing do fight back, and they notch a win. Which is what makes this fantasy so much fun — because in the real world, theater being no exception, men still hold outsize power.So many plays, including whole acres of Shakespeare, are about struggles for dominance. “Grand Horizons” and “Dracula” wage a more elemental battle: to grant women their full personhood — not lesser than, but equal to.“You cannot tear down all of the old ways alone,” Dracula says menacingly.Wohl and Hamill are not alone, though. And those old ways are crumbling. More

Let us survey the many moods of Molly Brown: She is perky, chirpy, spunky, bubbly, cheerful. Even stranded on a raft after the Titanic sinks, she can’t help being, ahem, buoyant.The resilient heroine of the Meredith Willson musical “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” was always an upbeat go-getter, with an action-packed journey that took her from a hardscrabble Rockies mining town to the Denver upper crust. But the Transport Group revival that just opened at Abrons Arts Center has turned Molly (played by Beth Malone, a Tony nominee for “Fun Home”) into a human exclamation mark. The production is simultaneously busy and lifeless — a feat of sorts, if not a desirable one.The 1960 show was Willson’s follow-up to “The Music Man,” and lightning did not strike twice: There was a Hollywood adaptation four years later, but the stage steered clear, and “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” doesn’t appear to have been revived on Broadway or Off in nearly 60 years.The choreographer/director Kathleen Marshall and the book writer/lyricist Dick Scanlan must have seen an opportunity to give vintage material a fresh start, so they went back to the drawing board: According to the production notes, “none of the characters in the 2020 version appear in the 1960 version. Both have characters called Molly, but she says and does different things. The two versions share three lines of dialogue.”Fewer than half the songs are from the original show, including the fine “I Ain’t Down Yet” and “Belly Up to the Bar, Boys.” The rest are pulled from Willson’s catalog with a mix of tweaked and entirely new lyrics by Scanlan. (This revisal has been in the works for about 10 years, with productions in Denver and St. Louis.)The title character is based on the actual Molly Brown (1867-1932), though both Scanlan and his predecessor, Richard Morris, have played fast and loose with the facts. Which is fine, since musicals tend to believe that if the legend becomes fact, it’s best to sing the legend.The problem is that Scanlan and Marshall give us a one-note dynamo whose needle never leaves a positively aggressive red zone.Molly, née Tobin, is now a fearless, progressive woman speaking truth to power. The tone is set when, facing an all-male Senate hearing in an introductory scene, she is told, “You have been warned, nevertheless you persist: Settle down.”That is how the show rolls: with all the subtlety of a Hummer.And there is plenty more where that came from in this protracted tale of resilient feminist pluck.Newly arrived in Leadville, Colo., the young Molly wins over the local workers; befriends a pregnant widow, Julia (Whitney Bashor); and ends up marrying J.J. Brown, the manager of a silver mine (David Aron Damane).“I can be anyone I wanna be, why not be a queen?” Molly muses. She and J.J. don’t achieve royal status, but they do strike it rich. Her folksy, rough-hewed attitude appalls Denver’s ladies who lunch until — you guessed it — she charms them, with an assist from some spiked tea.And so it goes. Molly becomes a women’s suffrage activist. Molly fights for workers’ rights and helps the needy (“Why shouldn’t one of Denver’s ‘better families’ help Denver’s families do better?,” she says).Although Malone almost never leaves the stage, she is not given much to work with by either Scanlan or Marshall and compensates with unbridled “I’m auditioning for Peter Pan” enthusiasm.Eventually Molly learns J.J. had an affair (which took place offstage, lest the audience be subjected to anything vaguely resembling moral ambiguity or dramatic stakes) and decamps to Europe. Neither the decadent old continent nor the Titanic can bring her down, however. Soon she’s back in New York, where she stands up for an indigent immigrant whose entry is blocked by an immigration officer, while a repentant J.J. waits in the wings. You may never have yearned so much for a show’s heroine to calm down, even for a second.The Unsinkable Molly BrownThrough March 22 at Abrons Arts Center, Manhattan; 866-811-4111, transportgroup.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

When the cast of “To Kill a Mockingbird” filed into the arena on Wednesday, wearing suits and dresses reminiscent of Alabama in the 1930s, the crowd erupted as if the actors were Knicks coming out of the locker room.When Atticus Finch asked a barrage of tough questions of Mayella Ewell, the white teenager who had accused a black man of rape, they burst into applause, as if the tide had turned in the game. And when Scout Finch, one of the play’s central narrators, called out the man behind a white Ku Klux Klan hood, the crowd oohed as if their team had stolen back the ball.For the first time, Madison Square Garden opened its doors to Broadway, and with it came 18,000 New York City public school students and chaperones to watch a play that has only ever been performed on the Shubert Theater stage.The classic story of Atticus Finch, a small-town lawyer who defends a black man in a racist town, was told under the championship flags of the New York Knicks (who have played their own tragedy there for years) and the Rangers. And with a new venue and a younger audience came new standards of theater decorum: The middle and high school students groaned when things went badly for the protagonists and cheered shamelessly at insults lobbed at the town’s most virulent racists.“There’s such an intense energy,” said Jenna Weinberg, a theater teacher at M.S. 839 in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn. “It’s a room full of young people who don’t stop themselves from reacting out loud. They’re not worried about what they’re supposed to act like in a theater.”The intention was to reimagine the play — based on the Harper Lee classic and adapted by the Hollywood screenwriter Aaron Sorkin — for a contemporary audience. Scott Rudin, the main producer, said he wanted to find a way to ensure this drama about racial injustice reached a racially diverse audience.Last year, the production offered $10 tickets to schools, but Mr. Rudin said he imagined an even bigger gesture: one of New York’s largest spaces filled with students from across the city. So Barry Diller, a co-producer, called his friend James L. Dolan, the chief executive of the Madison Square Garden Company, who agreed to the plan for free. The staging had to be radically reimagined for the cavernous space. At the Shubert Theater, the various sets — the courtroom, the Finches’ porch — are moved in and out of view. At the Garden, the settings were laid out across a long, narrow deck, and the actors walked from scene to scene.The logistical concerns were endless. Mr. Rudin ticked through some: “Where does the cast go? How do the kids get in? How do you ticket it?”He added, “What happens if, of the 18,000 kids, 5,000 of them wanted to go to the bathroom?”(Some solutions: Part of the cast prepared in the visiting team’s locker room, and high school choirs were invited to sing during intermission to help keep students in the arena.)The play brought its regular cast, including the actor Ed Harris, who took over the role of Atticus Finch from Jeff Daniels in November. He wasn’t the only celebrity present. Spike Lee was M.C., opening with the story of his own education in New York public schools, and Mayor Bill de Blasio and his wife, Chirlane McCray, also spoke.As for the students, only about 3 percent of the public middle and high schoolers could fit, so the Department of Education granted admission to the first schools to respond to the invitations. The city intervened to make sure that all boroughs were well-represented, as well as schools that specialize in teaching students with disabilities, said Peter Avery, the director of theater for the department.Some students had been assigned to read the original novel, but the drama diverges in some ways from Lee’s work. The play is framed around the trial, while readers do not get there until about halfway through the book. And the story’s most prominent black characters — Calpurnia and Tom Robinson — are allowed more opportunity in the play to voice their frustrations about racial injustice.The racist lines in “Mockingbird” can sound much more jarring when spat out onstage as opposed to being words on a page. And the students didn’t hold back their shock.During a particularly odious rant from the play’s main villain, Bob Ewell, murmurs of disapproval swelled to gasps as he used a racist slur over and over. Then, when Scout’s brother, Jem, calls Ewell an “ignorant son of a bitch,” the reactions transformed into uproarious cheers.It was a performance where emotional reactions were let loose and actors had little privacy, as they were unable to fully exit a space surrounded on all sides by gazing students.On any given night, Taylor Trensch, who plays Dill, a friend of Scout and Jem’s, has to block out the reality around him and imagine he is in the small town of Maycomb, Ala.But this time, the audience was a dozen times bigger than usual, and the theater was not quite so intimate.“There’s one moment when I looked up and it said ‘Bud Light District’ over some of the seats,” Mr. Trensch said. “Kind of made it hard to keep yourself in 1930s Alabama.” More

Josephine Baker may be living in the lap of luxury in Paris, but a nightclub singer in 1930s Harlem, where “nobody’s working and nobody’s got prospects,” is just trying to survive. At least, that’s according to Angel Allen, the Cotton Club singer in Pearl Cleage’s murky “Blues for an Alabama Sky.”The play opens with a drunken Angel (Alfie Fuller) staggering down the street in a fuchsia gown, half-carried by two men. She got dumped and fired by her gangster boyfriend-slash-boss, and gigs are hard to come by, she says, because “everybody in Harlem is singing the blues.” Her friend Guy (John-Andrew Morrison), a self-described “notorious homosexual” who fled Georgia with her, also got the boot as a costume designer at the club.But Guy promises to take care of them. He’s just waiting for an invitation from Ms. Baker to join her in Paris and design her stage attire. Meanwhile, Guy and Angel’s neighbor, Delia (Jasminn Johnson), works to get a family planning clinic open and cautiously flirts with a neighborhood doctor, Sam (Sheldon Woodley). And a gentleman caller (Khiry Walker) from Alabama aims to save Angel from a life of scrapping.“Alabama Sky,” produced by Keen Company and directed by LA Williams, begins at a leisurely pace, full of entrances and exits, people stopping by for a drink and chat. (You-Shin Chen’s set design, featuring two parallel doorways center stage to create a hallway, spotlights the motion.) Harlem is referred to constantly, insistently, through clunky name-drops of local greats: Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and Langston Hughes, with whom the characters are conveniently on a first-name basis.But Harlem has lost its shimmy and shake, Guy swears; Amsterdam Avenue can’t hold a candle to the Champs Élysées. This, it initially seems, is where the play is headed — a glimpse of life in Depression-era Harlem through the eyes of its residents, a meditation on hopes and dreams. Instead, a pregnancy and conversations about the ethics of contraception and abortion reconfigure the play as a story about the choices women make.“Alabama Sky” wants to be about the relationship between Guy and Angel, but his character lacks dimension, and it’s her choices that are at the nexus of the action. And yet the play fails to commit its focus to its protagonist. At first styled as resourceful during a time of poverty, Angel is later drawn to be selfish and cutthroat at the expense of those around her. (Sam, Delia and Leland seem to exist as filler material to cushion Angel’s arc.) But the roots of her ruthlessness and Guy’s persistent loyalty to her aren’t accounted for by the play’s bread crumbs of a back story about their past lives in Georgia.Cleage’s script and Fuller’s performance serve Angel best when they lean into her diamond toughness, but we don’t see enough of it until the final act, when the stakes rocket upward. And despite her spunky appeal, Fuller can’t pull off a believable performance as a nightclub songbird in a thin rendition of “St. Louis Blues.”“I’m tired of Negro dreams,” Angel says, but the statement outweighs the play’s material, which approaches then crab-walks away from its would-be Pole Star. She must be talking about more than “the myth of the magical Josephine,” but we have no way to know. Paris is a long way away, but, here, so is Harlem, its residents and anything sounding like the blues.Blues For an Alabama SkyThrough March 14 at Theater Row, Manhattan; 212-239-6200, keencompany.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

I was enchanted by Claudia Rankine’s smile.Even though this was our second interview together (the first was by phone), and we have several friends in common, I was still surprised by her welcoming hug and warmth when we met at a conference room in the Shed three weeks before the world premiere of her play “Help” there on March 10. Forty minutes later, I realized that after years of teaching her poetry, especially “Citizen,” her book-length poem on American race relations, my mind somehow had constructed Rankine as reserved, scolding and confrontational.I left our conversation even more out of sorts as I asked myself: “If I, as a black woman, could so easily misread Claudia Rankine, what hope is there for any white man not to do the same?”This dilemma — between the racial and gender stereotypes that our society projects onto black women and how they have to reject those roles in order to assert their own identities — is the central conflict of “Help.” Commissioned by the Shed, New York City’s new $475 million arts center that is now in its second season at Hudson Yards, the play is partly based on Rankine’s New York Times Magazine article from last July, “I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked.”In that essay, Rankine described her repeated experiences being rendered invisible by white men as they waited in first-class lines together at the airport, and her attempts to ask other white men sitting next to her in the intimate and elite space of the airplane cabin how they perceive their own white privilege. “I wondered, what is this ‘stuckness’ inside racial hierarchies that refuses the neutrality of the skies?” she wrote. “I hoped to find a way to have this conversation.”Rankine explained why she chose the transitory setting of air travel. “It was the only time where I found myself sort of thrown in intimacy, if I wanted it, with random white men who were, just through proximity, there,” she said in our interview. “Sometimes you’re on these long flights, you’re exhausted, and you’ve done whatever you were going to do or you’re on your way to do it. And people are willing to just sort of launch, partly to let the time pass and partly because you’re drinking a lot. Both things are happening at the same time.”In response to the piece, Rankine received over 2,000 comments on the Times website and more than 200 letters or emails sent to her at Yale University. White men who wanted to engage in the debate or explain why they took offense to her characterizations made up the majority of the correspondence.“There are these letters that are three pages in which somebody sat down and wrote, ‘Dear Professor Rankine’ or ‘Dear Claudia Rankine,’ This is my life. This is what you’re not thinking about,” she said. “As I read through most of them, I realized that I’m talking about privilege as a way of being, period. The ability to live, the ability to be alive in the world. And they’re talking about privilege as making money. I hadn’t really understood that disconnect until I actually parsed all of those letters.”She went on, “It made me go back and think about what felt so offensive about ‘All Lives Matter.’ White people start with that as a given. And because they’re white, they don’t understand that black people are starting with, ‘Will my life matter? Can my life matter? Does my life matter?’ And so that step backward into nonbeing is not one they’ve had to take.”“So they don’t understand why you’re addressing it,” she concluded. “I don’t think it’s willful aggression. I think it is symptomatic of whiteness in and of itself, that they don’t have to think about it, so they don’t think about it, and they think you’re being presumptuous by asking them about their lives.”With “Help,” unlike her plays that were first conceived for performance — “The Provenance of Beauty” at the Foundry in 2009, and “The White Card” at American Repertory Theater in 2018 — Rankine had taken on the task of dramatizing an already well-circulated essay.To do so, she reinvented herself as the Narrator, a middle-aged black air traveler played by Roslyn Ruff (“Fairview”), and created 20 white male characters who are on the plane with her. Rankine said that “90 percent of what is spoken by the white men in the script” is taken from the letters she received.She drew the rest of the script from interviews and an assortment of writings and statements by the black feminist theorists Hortense Spillers and Saidiya Hartman, the Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, the civil rights activist Ruby Sales and President Trump, as well as a video of police diversity training in Plainfield, Ind.It then fell on Rankine, and a diverse artistic team led by the director Taibi Magar, to turn that prose into a full-fledged theater experience. Or, as Magar suggested to me in an interview, something else entirely.“Sometimes I come home from rehearsal and I’m like, ‘Is it theater?’ I’m not even sure,” Magar said. “‘Is it performance art?’ Sometimes she’s creating a poem onstage, sometimes we’re referencing a lot of stand-up. What has been exciting for me to embrace is that its form does not feel traditional.”She continued, “This is important to me in plays about confronting racism. We really have to shake up our narratives in order to see a black woman’s reality.”At the Tuesday afternoon rehearsal I attended, I caught a glimpse of what Magar meant. In a scene choreographed by Shamel Pitts, as the white male actors frenetically danced around an empty airline seat meant for the Narrator with movements that referenced everything from gyrated hips to Hitler salutes, it felt a bit like a vaudeville flash mob. And because both Rankine and Ruff were out at a photo shoot, I was one of two black women in the room, heightening my sense of being overtaken by the actors’ whiteness and maleness.In many ways, that is the point. Recent productions like “Slave Play,” “Fairview” and “Toni Stone” have all explicitly taken on the white gaze. By doing so, they risked reproducing the very racial hierarchy in the audience that they sought to criticize onstage.When I asked Magar if she was worried about focusing on whiteness at the expense of the Narrator or the black people in the theater, she said, “We’re not centering whiteness in the ways that it’s centered in our culture. Whiteness is the problem, and whites are the ones who need to fix themselves. So you sort of need to center them.”Before leaving, however, Magar reminded me that the play ultimately revolves around Rankine’s character, and that Magar and Ruff worked hard to always remind the audience that a black woman lies at the center of this work. In one scene, a white man steps in front of the Narrator without excusing himself or acknowledging her. By having Ruff stand next to her empty space in the line, her character’s invisibility is rendered hypervisible for the audience.Ruff admitted that at first she was hesitant to accept the part of the Narrator, the sole black woman among so many white men.“After having an intense two years with ‘Fairview,’ I really had to have a conversation with myself about taking on this narrative, subject matter, and this theme again,” she said, “because sometimes it can just be a bit much.”Ruff noted that she can’t just switch off the story when she leaves the Shed.“I am navigating that world as myself on a day-to-day basis,” she said. “This ‘work’ is my life, my personal life, when I go home, turn on the television, watch CNN or MSNBC, and deal with the climate that we’re in right now.”Ruff also recognized that much of what Rankine wanted in her essay — an honest interracial conversation about white male privilege — has already taken place among the cast and crew as they prepare for opening night. In the beginning, Ruff said, some of her castmates would offer “a defense” of one of the white men’s comments in the script, derived from the letters to Rankine.“That was fascinating,” she said, and sometimes led to “a reflective moment. An ‘OK. Wait a minute.’ And a real realization that in their defensiveness, that, too, is privilege at work.” More