Eliana Willis

On Friday night at JACK, in Brooklyn, the audience was at a loss. At the end of James Ijames’s whip-smart satire “TJ Loves Sally 4 Ever” (which you would be wise to race to see), we in the audience waited for what felt like minutes. But there was no bow from the actors, who had already left the stage.That’s when it sank in. The beautiful dare the show had offered us in its final lines? We were expected to take it. Or not. Either way, we had a decision to make as we left the theater — voting, with our very bodies, for the kind of future we want to see.That’s mysterious, I know, but I won’t ruin the surprise of Jordana De La Cruz’s electrifying production, which offers an extraordinary, deeply moving payoff. The pinch of courage it demands of us — audience participation, like change, is frequently unnerving — proves more than worth it.Set on a college campus in the contemporary American South, where a whitewashed sense of tradition drips with nostalgia for the antebellum past, “TJ Loves Sally 4 Ever” is not a romance by any stretch. Despite the title, it isn’t TJ’s story either, though he does tend to think everything is about him.This play belongs to Sally (Sierra D. Leverett), our sensible, straight-talking narrator, and her fellow black students. As she informs us, “TJ” stands for Thomas Jefferson.“Not exactly the one that wrote the Declaration of Independence,” she notes.Still, you can see the resemblance, which only grows as TJ (John Bambery), the school’s white, middle-aged dean, develops a predatory obsession with Sally, his young research assistant, self-assured and certain of her own boundaries. (“Ever heard of Sally Hemings?” she asks us. “Yeah? No? Google her.”)Part of what Ijames (“Kill Move Paradise”) is interrogating is the inheritance that comes with a black body or a white body. And part of the power of his play, and of De La Cruz’s tone-perfect staging, is its very physicality.There are moments that make your skin crawl as TJ encroaches on Sally, but also scenes where she and her ferociously loyal sorority sisters (Aja Downing and Starr Kirkland) exult in their bodies, dancing together or parading in a marching band. Their bodies are emphatically their own, no rightful concern of his, and their joy is vivifying.Terrific moments of physical comedy include an absurdly long running-in-place chase between Sally’s activist friend, Harold (Drew Drake), who wants to rid the school of monuments to its racist history, and TJ, who doesn’t want to hear it. Later, their face-off in a tap-dance battle (the choreography is by Candace Taylor) is funny, furious and almost feral.This finely cast production’s heightened, sometimes hallucinatory feel (aided by Megan Lang’s lighting and Kathy Ruvuna’s sound design) is of a piece with the logical insanity of the world these students inhabit, where blackness and femaleness are enduringly alien to white men like TJ, with his sorghum-sweet accent and entrenched entitlement.But as much as this is a play about dismantling an ugly legacy, it is even more about constructing something better in its place.“You would think all of this would have been fixed by now,” Harold says, quietly.This confrontational, compassionate takedown of a host of social toxins is a step in that direction. Happy Presidents Day.TJ Loves Sally 4 EverThrough Feb. 29 at JACK, Brooklyn; jackny.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

Drew Droege’s new solo show — “Happy Birthday Doug,” at SoHo Playhouse — is packed with killer lines. Last Friday, people in the audience laughed pretty much nonstop. Yet it’s not all that funny on the page. What elevates the text is Droege’s supercharged performance as he brings to life a handful of the gay men attending Doug’s 41st birthday party at a Los Angeles wine bar. A simple “hello” becomes an elongated growl filled with sarcasm and a pinch of contempt. “Bitch” is a simultaneous attack and exclamation point. It can be glorious.“Happy Birthday Doug” is a natural follow-up to Droege’s breakout Off Broadway hit, “Bright Colors and Bold Patterns,” from 2016. Both plays are acid-etched satires of a certain type of middle- or upper-middle-class white gay man, often working or aiming to work in something creative, as he descends into whirlwinds of booze- and drug-fueled introspection and recrimination during a social event (a Palm Springs gay wedding in the earlier show).Droege’s favorite prop is a glass, from which the various characters of “Happy Birthday Doug” sip in between torrents of words: We’re eavesdropping not so much on conversations as narcissistic monologues. One of his funniest creations here is Jason, an actor who claims to be both retired and sober, and pats himself on the back for pseudo-provocative declarations like: “Instagram is so fake — hot take — sorry not sorry — I’ll say it — I’ll go there — Insta is fake, Mama.” Brian, a waiter-screenwriter-D.J., is so woke that he doesn’t play hip-hop “because it’s appropriation.”As the evening progresses — or rather, deteriorates — we start getting the guests’ perspectives on one another. Jackson calls Jason “the Beaujolais Bandit”; Doug himself refers to Jackson and his husband, Harrison, as “Valley trolls.” Droege and the director, Tom DeTrinis, keep the show moving so fast, you almost feel as though the production itself were on something illicit.Yet “Happy Birthday Doug,” unlike its predecessor, fails to move beyond the vignettelike social sendup. “Bright Colors” doubled as a sly commentary on the virtues and drawbacks of assimilation, puzzling over what it means to be a gay man in a world where homosexuality is no longer an obstacle to marriage, parenthood, social status.“Happy Birthday Doug” does introduce two characters who act as bridges between a seemingly rosy present and an outlaw past: Oscar Wilde (“I’m a ghost, bitch”) and Christopher, who is old enough to have lived through the worst years of the AIDS crisis.Christopher regales the crowd with stories of wild parties with Linda Blair, Natalie Wood and Roddy McDowall. “Honey, who knows if I was there and who cares if it was true,” he says. But he also marvels at the younger men’s hedonistic antics and their apparent freedom.As for Oscar, he is ambivalent about what he sees. “Everyone here looks the same,” he sniffs. “No, I used to find it tedious, but now I find it rather comforting.”Droege is onto something with these two interlopers, but Christopher and Oscar retreat quickly, and in the end it’s unclear what they are meant to say. That the dangerous days of yore were fun, but the “normal” present is at least somewhat safer? Droege’s previous show made pretty much the same point, and in a much sharper way.At least we are left with a series of comic diatribes, each of which could stand on its own as a stinging monologue. You might not want to spend a second with these men in real life, but an hour in their theatrical company is more than fine.Happy Birthday DougThrough March 1 at SoHo Playhouse, Manhattan; 212-691-1555, sohoplayhouse.com. Running time: 1 hour. More

A few years ago, a friend went to an academic conference and saw a reading of Anne Carson’s adaptation of “Antigone,” with the celebrated academic Judith Butler as the Theban king Kreon. “She was hilarious,” my friend, a theater professor, wrote to me. “Maybe she has a future onstage.”The future is now.Butler, a professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, currently stars in “Fragments, Lists & Lacunae,” a performance piece enjoying a brief run at New York Live Arts. Her role: A professor of comparative literature.Over the course of the semester, in a series of punchy, truncated lectures, the professor hips her undergrads to the idea that “absences are more than merely meaningful; rather, they are the material that governs that which is present.” Her examples include doughnut holes, the Nixon tapes, Sappho. Pay attention. This is going on the final.Divorced from an academic context, lectures have negative connotations. A lecture functions as a knuckle-rap, a don’t-do-it-again form of verbal deterrence. But lectures used to qualify as entertainment, with traveling speakers trekking from town to town, obliging a populace eager for diversion and instruction. P.T. Barnum built a lecture hall into his American Museum — alongside the trained bears and the mummified mermaid — as one more attraction.Theatrically, the form has come back into fashion, with works both esoteric, like the French artist Fanny de Chaillé’s re-creation of a Michel Foucault talk, and popular, like John Leguizamo’s “Latin History for Morons.” Last season’s “What the Constitution Means to Me,” nominated for a Tony Award, interleaved memoir with constitutional law analysis.There is something elemental, ascetic about the lecture and the way it strips performance to its simplest constituent forms — a speaker, an audience, a stool if you’re feeling fancy. Besides, you can only sit through so many kick-lines and dysfunctional family get-togethers before the idea that you might be made to think as well as to feel tantalizes.Intellectually, “Fragments, Lists & Lacunae” is a treat; theatrically, especially after the first hour, it’s less digestible. It’s not exactly theater, and Butler’s performance isn’t exactly acting, but it isn’t fully anything else either.The piece, written by Alexandra Chasin and directed by Zishan Ugurlu, takes place in a classroom with Butler, as the nameless professor, speaking to three onstage students — Hailey Marmolejo’s Noë, Aigner Mizzelle’s Quin, Jackie Rivera’s Wyler — and several hoodied young men seated in the front row.The rest of the audience is constituted, vaguely, as other students, and as the professor takes attendance, you may hear your name called. (Relax, no 15-page research paper is required.) As the professor lectures, cameras and large screens reveal the notes taken by the onstage students — doodles and all.Butler is a household name, provided that your household bookshelf buckles beneath critical theory texts. Put it this way: She gets a shout-out in the final season of “BoJack Horseman.” (Take that, Fredric Jameson.) “Fragments, Lists & Lacunae” does and doesn’t suggest what it must be like to sit in on her seminars. The words and habits of mind are not hers. Chasin, whose faculty bio notes an interest in “the limits of sense; white space; repetition; and fragments,” adapted the piece from one of her own courses.But I would bet that Butler lends the professor her own mannerisms. Her voice is low and gently burred, her affect is a funky mix of playfulness and precision. Clad in a trim black suit, clutching a laser pointer, she gestures lavishly from her elbows and wrists and sometimes wields a funny, Groucho-esque shrug — an intellectual who is down to clown.Chasin’s talks, as delivered by Butler, are brisk and deft, cognitive chew toys to worry as you walk or ride home. But where the piece falters is in its more theatrical aspects, especially its tawdry imagining of the students. At the end of several of the lectures, the classroom lights dim and silent scenes play out upstage — alcohol poisoning, an unplanned pregnancy, a bacchanal with shirtless dancing. Do these students ever go to the library? Or call their moms?By contrast, the off-hours glimpse of the professor shows her in a comfortable armchair, perusing a student’s presentation. The play also generally avoids professor-student interaction, though Butler had a nice improv as she handed a student a dropped earring. “A little fragment,” she said.The play runs two hours — about the length of a seminar meeting — and as it continues, the work of listening and reading, of thinking and watching, of trying to reconcile the romance of the classroom with the melodrama of the students’ lives, becomes more difficult and less pleasurable. Why couldn’t this just be a lecture, I scribbled, as I made my own fragments and lists and the occasional doodle in my notebook.Fragments, Lists & LacunaeThrough Feb. 15 at New York Live Arts, Manhattan; 212-691-6500, newyorklivearts.org. Running time: 2 hours More

Our guide to plays and musicals coming to New York stages and a few last-chance picks of shows that are about to close. Our reviews of open shows are at nytimes.com/reviews/theater.Previews & Openings‘ANATOMY OF A SUICIDE’ at the Atlantic Theater Company at the Linda Gross Theater (in previews; opens on Feb. 18). Alice Birch (“Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again.”) wants to know if trauma can be inherited. In this triptych, which won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, she organizes a grandmother, a mother and a daughter in conjoined stories across seven decades or so. Lileana Blain-Cruz directs a cast that includes Carla Gugino, Celeste Arias and Gabby Beans. 866-811-4111, atlantictheater.org‘BLUES FOR AN ALABAMA SKY’ at Theater Row (in previews; opens on Feb. 18). The Keen Company presents the long-delayed New York premiere of Pearl Cleage’s ensemble drama, set among a group of artists in the waning days of the Harlem Renaissance. Alfie Fuller stars, as the lounge singer Angel, alongside Jasminn Johnson, John-Andrew Morrison, Khiry Walker and Sheldon Woodley. LA Williams directs. 212-239-6200, keencompany.org‘COAL COUNTRY’ at the Public Theater (previews start on Feb. 18; opens on March 3). In 2010, a thousand feet underground, coal dust exploded, killing 29 of the 31 miners on site. The documentary playwrights Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen interviewed survivors and family members, learning how a community reckons with disaster and loss. Steve Earle supplies original music. Blank directs a cast that includes Mary Bacon and Michael Laurence. 212-967-7555, publictheater.org‘DRACULA’ at Classic Stage Company (in previews; opens on Feb. 17). What’s your type? O-positive? AB-negative? Kate Hamill’s adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel investigates the themes of gender and sexuality that course through its heart and major arteries. With Matthew Amendt as Dracula, Kelley Curran as Mina and Hamill as the insect-munching Renfield. The play is running in repertory with “Frankenstein.” 212-677-4210, classicstage.org‘ENDLINGS’ at New York Theater Workshop (previews start on Feb. 19; opens on March 9). On a Korean island, three elderly women — the last of their kind, known as “haenyeos” — dive for shellfish. A world away a Korean-Canadian playwright, now based in New York, wrestles with how to write about race and ethnicity. Sammi Cannold directs Celine Song’s aquatic comedy-drama, with Jiehae Park. 212-460-5475, nytw.org[Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead.]‘FRANKENSTEIN’ at Classic Stage Company (in previews; opens on Feb. 17). The monster is alive, and running in repertory. Joining Kate Hamill’s feminist “Dracula” at Classic Stage Company is Tristan Bernays’s adaptation of Mary Shelley’s science fiction chiller, directed by Timothy Douglas. Stephanie Berry plays both Victor Frankenstein and his murderous creature, with Rob Morrison as the chorus. 212-677-4210, classicstage.org[embedded content]‘MACK & MABEL’ at New York City Center (performances start on Feb. 19). A pair of silent movie stars find their voice. Encores! revives Michael Stewart and Jerry Herman’s 1974 Broadway comedy, with revisions by Francine Pascal, about the silent film king of comedy Mack Sennett (Douglas Sills) and his leading lady, Mabel Normand (Alexandra Socha). Josh Rhodes directs and choreographs. Send roses. 212-581-1212, nycitycenter.org‘SIDEWAYS THE EXPERIENCE’ at the Theater at St. Clement’s (previews start on Feb. 20; opens on Feb. 23). Napa comes to New York with a bibulously interactive theatrical version of Rex Pickett’s novel, which also inspired the 2004 movie. Before this tale of a wine-soaked bachelor weekend unfolds, patrons are invited to eat and drink. Glasses of wine are available throughout the show, too. Will it intoxicate? Dan Wackerman directs. sidewaystheexperience.com‘TUMACHO’ at the Connelly Theater (previews start on Feb. 17; opens on Feb. 22). Ethan Lipton’s mostly western musical, which Ben Brantley called an “impeccably inane horse opera,” rides back into town. Can the townspeople — and a three-legged coyote — survive a villainous man in black? Leigh Silverman directs a cast that features Phillipa Soo and John Ellison Conlee, who periodically dress as cactuses. clubbedthumb.org‘UNKNOWN SOLDIER’ at Playwrights Horizons (previews start on Feb. 14; opens on March 9). A late work by the composer Michael Friedman, who died in 2017, and the book writer and lyricist Daniel Goldstein comes to New York. Spread across three time periods and nearly a century, it follows a Manhattan obstetrician’s investigation of her family’s past. Trip Cullman directs a cast that includes Kerstin Anderson, Estelle Parsons and Margo Seibert. 212-279-4200, playwrightshorizons.org‘WEST SIDE STORY’ at the Broadway Theater (in previews; opens on Feb. 20). Does Broadway feel pretty? Does Ivo van Hove? The celebrated and sometimes controversial Belgian director revives this Stephen Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein and Arthur Laurents musical, with new choreography by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, and one song and one ballet extracted. Isaac Powell and Shereen Pimentel star. 212-239-6200, westsidestorybway.comLast Chance‘AMERICAN UTOPIA’ at the Hudson Theater (closes on Feb. 16). A knockout concert and an occasional meditation on civics and community, David Byrne’s musical theater experience, choreographed by Annie-B Parson, drops its chain curtain for the final time. The erstwhile Talking Head frontman’s show, Ben Brantley wrote, “repositions a onetime rebel as a reflective elder statesman, offering cozy cosmic wisdom.” 855-801-5876, americanutopiabroadway.com‘JACQUELINE NOVAK: GET ON YOUR KNEES’ at the Lucille Lortel Theater (closes on Feb. 16). As the encore run of Novak’s solo show ends, she can finally stand up. Ostensibly a history of fellatio, the one-hander is a fraught and dangerously funny piece about a straight woman’s embodied experience. “If someone gave me a bouquet of roses, and one of them looked like my vulva, I’d say I think someone stepped on one of the roses,” she says. All remaining performances are sold out, but the wait list opens at the box office two hours before curtain each night.866-811-4111, getonyourkneesshow.com‘MAC BETH’ at the Frederick Loewe Theater (closes on Feb. 22). A gaggle of teenage girls depart Dunsinane as Erica Schmidt’s reimagining of the Scottish tragedy closes. Laura Collins-Hughes wrote that the play’s power lies not in its true-crime-inspired violence, but in “watching a group of girls meet Shakespeare on their own electric terms — with ferocity, abandon and the occasional wild dance break.” 212-772-4448, huntertheaterproject.org More