Eliana Willis

In the winter of 1901 or 1902, Chekhov visited Tolstoy in the spa town of Gaspra. It may not have gone well. “I hate your plays,” Tolstoy whispered from his sick bed. “Shakespeare was a bad writer, and I consider your plays even worse than his.” But as Shakespeare said, time brings in his revenges. In the Mint Theater Company’s “Chekhov/Tolstoy: Love Stories,” the two are sharing a bill.What reconciles these writers is Miles Malleson, a 20th-century English theatrical polymath and the Mint Theater’s latest discovery. Having staged Malleson’s “Yours Unfaithfully,” a polyamorous comedy, and “Conflict,” a political romance, Jonathan Bank, the theater’s artistic director, has now paired two Malleson adaptations of short fiction: Chekhov’s “An Artist’s Story” and Tolstoy’s “What Men Live By.”The timing is right — seasonally, anyway. Once a New York winter hits February, everyone feels at least a little bit Russian and balalaika music goes down easy. So, despite some sloppy scenic art (Roger Hanna designed the set), it’s simple enough to enter the adaptation, called “The Artist,” and imagine yourself on a provincial Russian estate, alongside Nicov (Alexander Sokovikov), a painter on the wrong side of a midlife crisis.Genya (Anna Lentz), the teenage daughter of a local noblewoman, watches as he daubs. Because she’s pretty and half his age, he decides that she must be “a remarkably clever girl,” unlike her practical-minded sister Lidia (Brittany Anikka Liu), too busy running a local school and dispensary to spend much time mooning over landscapes or wearing Coachella-worthy flower crowns. (Oana Botez did the shawl-forward costumes.)Bank, who directs “The Artist,” seems to give this shambling, ursine Nicov the benefit of the doubt. The character resembles other Chekhov artists and thinkers — Trofimov, Trigorin, Vanya — though none of them go as far as Nicov, who calls for “a new religion founded on truth and love.” (Genya, run!) And Bank allows lines of Malleson’s own invention like “Where’s the little girl — the kiss of a lover is on my lips” (faster, Genya!), to pass without comment. The piece ends, abruptly, with typical Chekhovian irony.Tolstoy found irony indulgent. He thought that a play should have a purpose, tugging its spectator toward greater moral insight. “And where can I follow your character?” he once griped to Chekhov. “To the couch in the living room and back.” Accordingly, “Michael,” Malleson’s adaptation of “What Men Live By,” is a lot more didactic, a riff on “The Elves and the Shoemaker” shot through with Christian mysticism. No one kisses teenage girls.On a winter’s night, a bootmaker (J. Paul Nicholas), his wife (Katie Firth) and their elderly yet childlike servant Aniuska (Vinie Burrows), invite a tramp (Malik Reed) into the peasant hut they share, only to discover that he has a talent for cobbling and divination. The play’s message, articulated baldly, is this: “It seems to men,” the tramp says, “that they live by care of themselves, but in truth it is love alone by which they live.”If Nicov calls for a new religion, “Michael” promotes an old one, charismatic Christianity. This one-act marks the directorial debut of Jane Shaw, a beloved sound designer, who uses light and sound to situate the spiritual in the real.Chekhov and Tolstoy actually liked each other pretty well. They both laughed at that couch joke. But these stories, adapted for separate occasions and without particular elegance, don’t have much to say to one another. Love, the title suggests, is the unifying factor, but eros powers the first play, agape the second. Like mismatched matryoshka dolls, the plays knock together when they ought to nest.Chekhov/Tolstoy: Love StoriesThrough March 14 at Theater Row, Manhattan; 212-239-6200, minttheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

Charles Fuller is more surprised than anyone that his most celebrated play has finally made it to Broadway.After winning an Obie Award for “Zooman and the Sign” in 1980, he became only the second African-American awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, for “A Soldier’s Play” in 1982.He went on to write screenplays, a young adult novella and other dramas (most recently “One Night,” in 2015). Now 80, he is the first to admit that they were mainly for black audiences, and as a result, Broadway and the attention that comes with it was not what he was aiming for, much less needed.But there he was in a theater district hotel suite after flying in from Toronto for opening night, both straining to hear and eagerly trying to answer rapid-fire questions about “A Soldier’s Play,” directed by Kenny Leon for the Roundabout Theater Company.Set on a segregated Louisiana military base in 1944, “A Soldier’s Play” dramatizes the murder of Vernon Waters, an African-American sergeant, and the investigation of his death by Capt. Richard Davenport, a lawyer and one of the few highly ranked black officers in the entire United States military.Portraying the complex history of black soldiers and white segregationists, “A Soldier’s Play” also explores the effects of racism on African-American men and the resulting generational and ideological divisions.The original production, directed by Douglas Turner Ward for Off Broadway’s Negro Ensemble Company, featured Denzel Washington and Samuel L. Jackson in small roles, and was later made into an Academy Award-nominated film.But it wasn’t universally acclaimed. After the play won the Pulitzer, the Black Arts poet and playwright Amiri Baraka castigated Fuller as representing “the most backward sector of the black middle class.”Yet David Alan Grier — who played the likable Pvt. C.J. Memphis onstage in 1982, Cpl. Bernard Cobb in the 1984 film, and now stars on Broadway as the hateful Sgt. Waters — said the play endures precisely because it complicates monolithic images of African-American culture. “Usually you had one black person who spoke for the entire diaspora,” he said. “There is no godlike person.”In an interview, Fuller talked about the impact of the Pulitzer, his rejection of idealized black characters and why his current Korean War-set play might never make it to the stage. Here are edited excerpts.When you won the Pulitzer, there was talk of “A Soldier’s Play” coming to Broadway, but it never did. Why do you think it took so long?Roundabout wanted to do it out of the clear blue sky. It’s strange. Honestly, I never thought about Broadway because it wasn’t there to do things that came out of the Negro Ensemble Company. If the plays got done, I was very happy. It wasn’t something that I looked forward to or chased after.You’ve written many plays. Why do you think this one has had such a long stage life?Because it has a Pulitzer Prize. Really, that’s the reason. If it didn’t, I don’t know that it would be anything that anybody would want to do. I’m delighted that someone wants to, but I couldn’t imagine that it was on the road to Broadway. So what has happened now is nice.Why, when writing the play in 1982, did you set it in World War II?Whenever you think about World War II and World War I, you think about white people. Aren’t we worth some kind of interest — all those deaths of Africans, African-Americans, black people from all over the world? I think that they just forgot us, or if not forgot, didn’t feel like talking about the black people that fought in those wars and saved Europe and saved the United States as well. We have died, and they haven’t said thank you. So I say, thank you.You enlisted in the Army in the ’60s?Yes.Is it fair to say that by setting your play in the military you were able to show both desegregation and the way in which black people interact with each other at the same time?Yes, sure. We died for America. And no attention, or not a lot of attention, has been focused on the African-Americans and the Africans who died making Europe continue. The French thanked the Africans that fought for them. But America continued to have a policy that did not allow black men to go to Europe in the first place. Because I was in the Army [I knew] we die, too.But in your play, black characters also die at the hands of other black people.I grew up in a project in a neighborhood where people shot each other, where gangs fought each other. Not white people — black people, where the idea of who was the best, toughest, was part of life. We have a history that’s different than a lot of people, but it doesn’t mean that we don’t cheat on each other, kill each other, love each other, marry each other, do all that, things that really, people anywhere in the world do.Adolph Caesar, who played Sgt. Waters, said that he thought his character’s death was “a kind of mercy killing.” Did you see it that way?Well, there are rotten black people. To believe that that’s not true is nonsense. We are human, very human, and I like to write strong characters who are no better or worse than anybody else on earth. And when we hurt each other as the characters did in the play, I wanted to make sure that we understood that it is horrifying that we kill each other. We need to walk away from that completely.How did “A Soldier’s Play” shape your later writing?It’s not easy to write a play; believe me. That’s the reason I haven’t written a play since then, small things but not anything that would be two and a half hours. There’s some history things that I would like to do, but not right now. And I probably won’t do them, really.Why?It’s horrifying. I’m not thinking about some happy-go-lucky thing. It’s [set] after the Korean War. It needs to be done. But I don’t know if I’m going to do it. I’ve been playing with it for years. Right now, if I did what’s in my head, no one would come to see the play. More

The line is right there in the script, a brokenhearted lover’s puzzled lament at a relationship gone wrong.“We had such chemistry,” Louise, a Broadway actress on the rise, says after a breakup with her composer boyfriend, Harry — not their first.Yet one of the most glaring obstacles to Daniel Zaitchik’s ambitious and wonderfully tuneful new musical “Darling Grenadine,” at Roundabout Underground, is the utter absence of romantic chemistry between its leads, who play Harry and Louise. On the page, this show is effervescent. On the stage, for long stretches, it stays flat.Which is a shame, because Zaitchik is attempting some intriguing storytelling. Set in a fondly retro version of contemporary Manhattan, “Darling Grenadine” begins in a kind of Cole Porter present — a fantasy of New York where the music is lively, the dialogue is snappy and the constant flow of cocktails never impedes the elegance.Except that Harry, who has been coasting for years on the cash from his one hit commercial jingle, is a not-so-secret alcoholic. Deep in self-loathing, he almost believes the lies he tells about himself — almost believes, too, that life is a party, that all of those drinks are celebratory.Well, maybe not the ones he sneaks, topping up his morning coffee with a little something from the flask.At its dark core, “Darling Grenadine” is a musical about addiction, and about the lives caught up in an addict’s diligent self-destruction. It’s about the hope that loving someone can save him from himself, and the smashing of that illusion.But Zaitchik has written a deceptively fragile work, and Michael Berresse’s production treats much of it with surprising ham-handedness.This is, mind you, a good-looking production, performed in the round on a spare set (by Tim Mackabee), where clever line-drawing projections (by Edward T. Morris) do much to change the scenery. Tucked away in an alcove, the three-piece band (directed by David Gardos) sounds rich without overwhelming the small space.There are a few moments in the show so extraordinary that I suspect I will think about them for years. There is also a surprise at the end that you may regret ruining for yourself if you look too closely at the program before then. A credit in there is a dead giveaway.Yet this production is frustratingly flawed, in a way that does its stars no favors.Adam Kantor, who plays Harry, and Emily Walton, who plays Louise, seem to have been cast for their singing, which is gorgeous, and for the beguiling way that their voices twine around each other.But they are a mismatch with the kind of acting that is required. Harry and Louise’s early flirtation depends on a facility with wisecracking screwball style. Because the actors’ tone is off, lyrics and laugh lines with the potential to charm — as in Louise’s silly confessional “Every Time a Waitress Calls Me Honey,” or Harry’s ode to their home borough, “Manhattan” — read as corny or cloying, or both.It’s hard to tell, actually, why Louise even goes out with Harry after he waylays her at the stage door of her show, where she is in the chorus. For all the compliments he showers on her, he is merely persistent and awkward, not charismatic.Without that quality, we never like Harry even before he starts falling apart, and it’s crucial that we do. A complicated character with multiple layers to peel away, he isn’t sufficiently realized in Kantor’s portrayal for us to invest much in what happens to him. Neither is Walton’s Louise.Their acting is broader than it needs to be on such an intimate stage. At the same time, even with a cast of just six, the show feels too large for the low-ceilinged space, as if with a bit more air it might be able to breathe.There’s some fine acting, though, notably by Jay Armstrong Johnson as Paul, a sweetheart of a human being who is growing weary of getting Harry out of alcoholic scrapes. Mixing drinks at his bar, Standards, Paul is a genuine charmer, as pleasantly soothing as the covers that Harry sometimes plays on the upright piano there.“The idea,” Harry tells Louise, “is any night you walk in, someone’s playing a tune you know and love. It creates a certain mood.”That’s apparently the idea, too, behind Zaitchik’s score, which feels familiar yet not derivative, channeling an old-time texture into fresh new music, like the spirited bar anthem “Party Hat” or the effervescent almost-title song, “Grenadine.” A buoyant toast to the teetotal life, that number comes as something of a surprise if, like me, you interpreted the ambiguously staged final moment in Act I to mean the opposite of what Zaitchik intends.The Harry-and-Louise duet “Every Moon,” though, steps into cringe-cute territory with lyrics debating the pronunciation of “licorice.” Harry, absurdly, argues for “lico-riss.”Blatantly wrong though he is about that, he does have an adorable dog, who is also named Paul, and who loves Harry unfalteringly, no matter what a mess he becomes.Onstage, Paul the dog is invisible. We know he’s there because his little red ball bounces in, or his red leash appears, and because we hear him: trumpet notes, gruff or warbling or somewhere in between, played by Mike Nappi.Handled with great care, this is an exquisitely theatrical device, and it is at the center of the show’s most moving scene. Nappi, standing by clutching his trumpet, makes it quietly wrenching.It should not be that we care so much more about Paul the invisible dog than about Harry and Louise. But for about two hours, we do.Then, when the performance is almost done, they have a scene of such poignancy, with such well-modulated acting, that we wonder: What took so long?Darling GrenadineTickets Through March 15 at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theater, Manhattan; 212-719-1300, roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. More

The prince is, on first impression, a small person. The title character in the Gate Theater of Dublin’s thrilling production of “Hamlet,” which opened on Monday night at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn under the inspired direction of Yaël Farber, initially registers as a fine figurine of a man, delicate of frame and feature.Do not underestimate him. There is great stature in his sorrow and his rage. He can think circles around any hulking politician, and he moves as fast he thinks. You just know that he is always the smartest person in any room he occupies. And that this is both his blessing and his curse.Hamlet is portrayed by the Ethiopian-Irish actress Ruth Negga, and the double-sidedness of this most complex of Shakespeare’s heroes has rarely been better served. Negga, best known to American audiences for her Oscar-nominated role in the 2016 film “Loving,” has created a portrait of the theater’s most endlessly analyzed prince that is drawn in lines of lightning.Though the text places his age around 30, this Hamlet seems both younger and wiser than such a number would indicate. He has the outraged, childlike astonishment of someone surprised by hard grief for the first time in his life — and a concomitant disgust for the corrupt adult world that has shaped his existence.Yet there is a part of him that sees beyond his immediate feelings and sneers at them. Hamlet can’t help reveling in the sheer, artful nimbleness of his mind, nor can anyone who sees Negga’s remarkable performance in this fast, fluid production. At the same time, he aches with an awareness of how small such displays of intellect are in terms of the really big picture, the one dominated by the shadow of death.I started to write that the fact that this man is played by a woman is irrelevant. But there is one sense in which the basic disparity between this actress and this role feeds the quickening sensibility that infuses every aspect of Farber’s interpretation, which cannily condenses and rearranges the text for speed and focus.For what is conveyed here with glittering incisiveness is the work’s sense of life as theater, in which playing roles expands and constricts the possibilities in being human. In this world, Negga’s Hamlet rules as the Player Prince.That worldview is achieved without the winking, meta-theatrical touches that have become so familiar in contemporary Shakespeare. Farber — the South African-born creator of viscerally stirring reimaginings of classics like “Miss Julie” and “The Crucible” — understands that there is no need to add layers of directorial self-consciousness when your main character is the ultimate self-conscious auteur.Hamlet, you may recall, is the guy who — after he discovers his dad has been murdered by his uncle (and new stepfather) — decides to put on “an antic disposition,” the better to enact revenge under the cloak of assumed madness. He stages a whole play to “catch the conscience of the king.”He is never more relaxed than in the company of a traveling troupe of actors. More than with his girlfriend, Ophelia (Aoife Duffin) or best friend, Horatio (Mark Huberman); certainly more than with any member of his family, Hamlet feels close spiritual kinship with these journeyman thespians. They, at least, know they’re playing parts.Accordingly — as impeccably realized by Susan Hilferty (set and costumes) John Torres (lighting) and Tom Lane (music and sound) — the palace of Elsinore is not presented as the futuristic surveillance state so common to recent productions. Instead, its look is part fairy-tale playhouse (cascading curtains play a spectacularly evocative role), part Magritte-tinged surrealism (death assumes the implicit form of three vacant-eyed men in bowler hats, pulling corpses on gurneys).An awareness of an audience is also essential to this mise-en-scène. Hamlet’s first soliloquy is spoken to a confidante, Ophelia, whom at that point he feels he can trust. The wicked Claudius (Owen Roe, fabulous as a manipulative Fascist for the ages) delivers his aborted prayer of repentance not to an unseen God but to a very visible priest, whom the King winds up manhandling.When Hamlet stages his “mousetrap” play — in which performers replicate the murder of his father — the members of the court take their seats in an empty aisle in the audience. That means that all of us, not just Hamlet, are craning our necks to clock the reactions of Claudius and his queen, Gertrude (Fiona Bell).Negga’s Hamlet is never happier than when he’s masterminding such snares of illusions. That is, until he remembers why he’s doing what he’s doing to begin with. And beneath it all, always, lurks the awareness of death. Negga’s quicksilver performance keeps recalibrating all these levels of reaction.Too often, when a Hamlet is this good, I’m impatient whenever he’s not onstage. Not so this time. Everyone else — and I mean everyone, including the thunderous ghost of Hamlet’s father (Steve Hartland); a Polonius who postures like a matinee idol manqué (Nick Dunning); and his fire-breathing son, Laertes (Gavin Drea) — is filled with surprises and insights. Their relationships are defined in startling physical details, especially in how they touch one another. (Note the repeated coercive wrist grip in different contexts.)As incarnated by Duffin (who similarly exposed all nerves in the ravishing monologue play “A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing”), Ophelia is a young woman whose nascent sexual awakening makes her dangerously vulnerable to shame. Her relationship with Hamlet is painfully credible here, rendered in the heartbreaking terms of young lovers who feel they have only each other to stand against the world — and then realize they don’t have even that.Bell’s Gertrude is a hard pragmatist when we first meet her, seemingly able to live comfortably with her Faustian bargain for power. (Is it a coincidence that her dress for Claudius’s triumphal inaugural scene brings to mind Melania Trump?) But in the famous encounter in Gertrude’s bedroom, when Hamlet visits her after the play-within-the-play, something remarkable happens.Gertrude and Hamlet, who have been playing defensive roles with each other since we first met them, suddenly find themselves alone face to face, and their masks fall. For just a few beautiful, lacerating moments, they are the blood-bound mother and son, nurturer and child, that on some level they have always been. And that kind of emotional honesty forces them to see clearly the damage they have done in choosing to play unnatural parts.Such occasions — and there is a generous multitude of them here — gloriously confirm Hamlet’s statement that the role of acting is to hold “the mirror up to Nature.” In this “Hamlet,” that mirror gleams and dazzles.HamletTickets Through March 8 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn; 718-254-8779, stannswarehouse.org. Running time: 3 hours 15 minutes. More