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      Shirley Jo Finney, 74, Dies; Addressed the Black Experience Onstage

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      After an acting career that included playing the Olympic sprinter Wilma Rudolph in a TV movie, she became known as a director for her work at regional theaters.The actor and director Shirley Jo Finney in 1974 in Sacramento, Calif., where she studied drama. “I have, basically, always been ‘the first African American,’” she once said.Frank Stork/Sacramento Bee, via the Center for Sacramento HistoryShirley Jo Finney, an actor who became a prolific and award-winning director of plays that dug deeply into the Black experience, died on Oct. 10 in Bellingham, Wash. She was 74.The cause of her death, in a hospital, was multiple myeloma, said Diana Finney, her sister and only immediate survivor.Ms. Finney worked for nearly 40 years at regional theaters, where she directed dramas like Pearl Cleage’s “Flyin’ West, which tells the story of late-19th-century Black female homesteaders in Kansas; Ifa Bayeza’s “The Ballad of Emmett Till,” about the 14-year-old boy who was kidnapped, tortured and shot by two white men in Mississippi in 1955; and Dael Orlandersmith’s “Yellowman,” which examines interracial prejudice through the story of two young lovers, one with a light complexion and one with a dark one.“She was very much drawn to material by great playwrights of color,” Sheldon Epps, the artistic director emeritus of the Pasadena Playhouse, where Ms. Finney directed twice, said by phone. “But it was also a result of the categorization that artists of color still suffer, where they are assigned to Black plays and not thought of for plays by other writers.”Ms. Feeney was, Mr. Epps said, “passionate and relentless in all the right ways.”When asked about her choice largely to direct plays about Black characters and themes, Ms. Finney recalled her background.“I have, basically, always been ‘the first African American,’” she told The Los Angeles Times in 1999, during the run of “Flyin’ West” at the Pasadena Playhouse. “My family was the first African American family to move into the neighborhood that I integrated, and then I had to go to the elementary school there — so I’ve always done that. At U.C.L.A., I was the first African American to be in their M.F.A. program.”She added: “How do you break out of the box, and where do you fit into society? How do we maintain the tradition of a tribe and still transcend our own humanity?”Among the many venues at which Ms. Finney worked were the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, the Cleveland Play House, the Actors Theater of Louisville and the Goodman Theater in Chicago. But if she had a professional home, it was the Fountain Theater in Los Angeles, where she had directed eight plays since 1997, including “The Ballad of Emmett Till.”In 2015, Ms. Finney was asked by Stephen Sachs, the Fountain’s artistic director, to direct his adaptation of “Citizen: An American Lyric” (2014), Claudia Rankine’s book-length poem and series of essays about race in today’s society.“I read it, and I went, ‘Oh, this is my life,’” she said in a 2017 interview featured on the website of the Center Theater Group, home to the Taper, Kirk Douglas and Ahmanson Theaters in Los Angeles. “Citizen,” she said reminded her of “walking through and navigating those torrential waters of mainstream America when you are a person of color or ‘other,’ and what you have to swallow in order to survive.”When the Fountain observed its 25th anniversary in 2015, Charles McNulty, The Los Angeles Times’s theater critic, wrote that Ms. Finney had infused “Citizen” with “the spirit of public reckoning” and added, “Her cast didn’t so much portray characters as stand in solidarity with the nameless voices reflecting, mourning and expressing outrage over the micro and micro aggressions (from a careless bigoted remark to police abuse) confronting Black people on a daily basis.”Shirley Jo Finney was born on July 14, 1949, in Merced, Calif., about 55 miles northwest of Fresno. Her mother, Ricetta (Amey) Finney, was a teacher and counselor. Her father, Nathaniel, sold auto parts. In 1959 she moved to Sacramento with her mother, her sister, her stepfather, Charles James, a municipal court judge, and her stepbrother, also Charles James.In high school, she was in the drama club. She then attended Sacramento City College for one semester before transferring to Sacramento State College (now California State University, Sacramento). At a party, she met Wilma Rudolph, the sprinter who had won three gold medals at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome and was teaching at the school. They became friends, and Ms. Finney became a babysitter for Ms. Rudolph’s children.“I told her, ‘One day, I’m going to make a film about you,’” Ms. Finney recalled in an interview with The Sacramento Bee in 2000.She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in drama in 1971 and earned a master’s degree in theater arts from the University of California, Los Angeles, two years later.After appearing in several television series and films, she was cast by the director Bud Greenspan in the TV movie “Wilma” (1977), which also starred Cicely Tyson as Ms. Rudolph’s mother. It received mixed reviews, but John J. O’Connor of The New York Times wrote that it was “given a touch of substance through a good performance by Shirley Jo Finney.”Ms. Finney as the sprinter Wilma Rudolph, who won three gold medals at the 1960 Summer Olympics, alongside Jason Bernard playing Ed Temple, her coach, in the 1977 television movie “Wilma.”Archive PL/AlamyShe continued to act occasionally into the 1990s, on series like “Lou Grant,” “Hill Street Blues” and “Night Court,” but by that time she had also begun to direct plays.“I love actors, and I love that process of bringing people who are strangers together, to work for a common purpose,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 1999. “I love creating an atmosphere where you feel comfortable enough to share who you are, to create. And then you can go within to give the best you can give.”She called that process “orgasmic.”Mr. Sachs of the Fountain Theater said that Ms. Finney developed her own shorthand to communicate with actors.“Actors had to learn to speak ‘Shirley Jo,’” Mr. Sachs said by phone. “She spoke a language unto herself, with body movement and her cackling laugh. She had a way. When she spoke, she’d stand up, pace around the room, or rock on a chair and say, ‘I’m feeling it, I’m feeling it.’ She was almost like a shaman.”Among the honors Ms. Finney received were three Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards for her direction of individual plays and the organization’s Milton Katselas Award for her career work.Although she worked around the country, Ms. Finney never directed on Broadway. Her only chance at it ended in 2008, when financial backing fell apart for a revival of Ntozake Shange’s play “For Colored Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf.”Ms. Finney received a Distinguished Alumni Award in 2012 from the University of California, Los Angeles. Eric Charbonneau/WireImage, via Getty ImagesIn 2010, shortly before rehearsals were to begin for “The Ballad of Emmett Till,” the play’s director, Bennett Bradley, was stabbed to death. Mr. Sachs asked Ms. Finney to take over.“She came into the rehearsal room that day, unprepared, and took over like she had been destined to do it,” Mr. Sachs recalled. “She delivered a benediction to the company; she brought the cast together to tell this story and said that what happened to Ben echoed what happened to Emmett Till. In five or 10 minutes, she turned us around.” More

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      MasterVoices Puts on a Starry Show With a Shoestring Budget

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      This essential organization gives fresh, entertaining life to music theater curiosities. What if it had more money?There’s a lot of Stephen Sondheim in New York at the moment: the premiere staging of his last musical, “Here We Are,” and star-studded revivals of “Merrily We Roll Along” and “Sweeney Todd” on Broadway.And for one weekend this month, there was also one more show of his on: “The Frogs.”This endearingly weird, Aristophanes-inspired musical — created with Burt Shevelove and famously premiered at a Yale University swimming pool in 1974 — hasn’t been onstage in New York since a heavily revised 2004 revival that Sondheim conceived with Nathan Lane, who also performed the role of Dionysos.Few local institutions have the skill or interest to pull off “The Frogs” — with its bookish references and ironic-then-impassioned music — but it’s typical, delightful fare for MasterVoices and its artistic director, Ted Sperling, who mounted and conducted a concert staging of the musical at the Rose Theater. (Lane was there, too, now as a host guiding the audience through the show.)MasterVoices, a nonprofit chorus that mounts theatrical productions of seldom heard repertoire, lends its performances generously sized orchestras, a rarity on Broadway, as well as its chorus, which for “The Frogs” consisted of an all-volunteer group of 130 singers. Sondheim’s ensemble material was in moments gleefully tongue-in-cheek, as when extolling Dionysos with a lightly psychedelic, 1960s-style tune; at others, it sounded genuinely serious about the role of art in wartime.Nathan Lane, who conceived a revised version of “The Frogs” with Sondheim in the early 2000s, returned to the show with MasterVoices.Erin BaianoSperling had a command of this material befitting his experience: His first professional gig in New York, after college, was as a rehearsal pianist for Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park with George.” (He also played synthesizer on the original cast recording: “All that harpsichord-sounding stuff is me,” he said with a self-effacing laugh during a recent interview.)In that conversation, shortly after the three-performance run of “The Frogs,” Sperling discussed how MasterVoices — previously known as the Collegiate Chorale — approaches its adaptations of rarely heard material.For starters, this scrappy organization can attract top talent like Lane because “we’re only asking them for two weeks of their time,” Sperling said, “not asking them to commit to a year’s run on Broadway.” As a result, “we are able to present all kinds of pieces that I don’t think other people can right now.”MasterVoices has independence and pluck: It managed to stay active during the pandemic by producing an online adaptation of Adam Guettel’s cult favorite song cycle “Myths and Hymns.” It has collaborated with the New York Philharmonic, as when it offered a thrilling performance of the Italian modernist Luigi Dallapiccola’s “Il Prigioniero” in 2013.At New York City Center in 2019, the group and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s put on an intoxicating performance of Kurt Weill and Ira Gershwin’s rarely heard “Lady in the Dark.”That range is a legacy of the original Collegiate Chorale — a group that, at its 1941 founding, was one of the first racially integrated classical ensembles. “Even the very early programs that I’ve been able to take a look at start with Bach and end with a Broadway tune,” Sperling said. “The DNA of the group has always been to try to be the people’s chorus, and something that represented a large swath of our community and that would have a broad appeal.”In recent seasons, I’ve heard MasterVoices give witty, precise accounts of George Gershwin’s political parody “Let ’Em Eat Cake” and Bizet’s original, comic opera version of “Carmen.” Any organization that can do justice to such a wide range of material has my immediate affection. But I’m far from the only fan: The “Frogs” run was sold out.But should more people have the opportunity to see them sing? The chorus’s budget for this season — in which they’ll also present Ricky Ian Gordon’s opera adaptation of “The Grapes of Wrath” next April — stands at a slight $1.9 million. Sperling, who is in his 10th year with the group, has some ideas of what he would do with more money, beyond simply expanding the number of performances.“I’d love to have a family of young singers who are professionals — and expert — who could be the backbone of our choral sound, and also step out and do smaller solo work,” he said. “And maybe also help us spread the joy of choral singing in our community, by being teaching artists.”The MasterVoices chorus is made up of volunteer singers, 130 of whom performed in “The Frogs.”Erin BaianoSperling wouldn’t mind a permanent home, either. In recent years, MasterVoices has bounced around from New York City Center to Carnegie Hall and Jazz at Lincoln Center, often renting spaces on its own. For “The Frogs,” Sperling noted, the crew loaded into the Rose Theater on Friday morning, just in time for a performance that evening. “I’d love to have a little more rehearsal time for everything we do,” he said. “It always seems like we’re doing it at the very edge of what we’re capable of.”Given those constraints, the group’s capability is all the more impressive. The MasterVoices version of Weill’s “Lady” included an updated book by Chris Hart and Kim Kowalke; that version has since been used in a celebrated production of the musical in the Netherlands. And because New York doesn’t have a comic opera company, MasterVoices fills a crucial, consistently entertaining niche. “I love that we can present these pieces that would not sustain a commercial Broadway run,” Sperling said, “or might not even fit in the opera house, necessarily, right now.”He added that he would like to add more projects to the season, which could raise MasterVoices’ visibility. They wouldn’t have to be at the scale of “The Frogs,” either: “I’d be interested in doing some smaller pieces that are part of that repertoire that I’m so eager to bring back to New York.”That might include William Bolcom’s early musical “Casino Paradise,” whose original production Sperling worked on. But, given the flexibility and inventiveness of MasterVoices, the possibilities are extensive.“I feel like there are a lot of operas out there that have been extremely popular around the country but have not found a home in New York yet,” Sperling said. “I’m on a mission to find out which ones of those would be a good fit for us.” More

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      “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding” Makes Black Women Feel at Home

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      “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding” is a play where the Black women in the audience are the ones who feel most at home.In a scene in Jocelyn Bioh’s “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding,” a man rolls in a cart of items to sell to the clients and stylists at the titular salon. I recognized the character immediately and sat up, anticipating the joke. I wasn’t the only one: A small contingency of the audience at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater started snickering and laughing before he had even fully stepped onstage.Those of us who have spent hours in salon chairs, amid the scent of coconut oil and the acrid aroma of bleach, moving in a circuit between stylist’s chair, sink and sweltering-hot dryer, know this vendor. In Bioh’s play he sells socks, and later another shows up selling jewelry. In the salons I went to as a child, I remember men peddling bootlegged movies and fashions to the clients with their hair wrapped or freshly sheened as they dug for cash in their purses. “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding” draws its comedy from this world — a world familiar to many Black women audience members like me.Bioh’s salon isn’t an abstraction or callback; it’s a Black business set in modern-day Harlem. In other words, this new Broadway production, directed by Whitney White, proves the value of a work by Black artists that recreates the appearance, tone and feel of a contemporary Black space. It feels great, for once, to be in on the joke.Bioh’s writing captures the quirks of a Black hair salon, and the characters who populate it: the unfortunate early-bird client who’s first to arrive when the shop’s late to open, the internal salon politics of stylists competing for clients, the inappropriate gossip, the sense of community. And always the one person — at Jaja’s, it’s a stylist sharply insulted by her colleague for her fish stew — who is only just now getting a chance to eat a late lunch of the most pungent food you can imagine.But then I wondered: How many people in this Broadway audience share my familiarity? And if that number is small, then is it the production’s responsibility to educate those who don’t?The production offered a talkback series called “A Part of Our Culture,” including discussions on the CROWN Act and salon life. At the talkback I attended, a former New York State assemblywoman, Tremaine S. Wright, recounted using her tenure to champion the CROWN (Create a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair) Act, and the celebrity stylist Susan Oludele (Hair by Susy), wearing a regal curtain of golden beaded braids, told the story of a client who spent $700 for a braided style but came back the next day distraught because her employer had demanded she take them out. Jamia Wilson, a writer-speaker and Random House executive editor whose locs curled into light brown tips, shared a story about a professor’s insistence that her hair would get in the way of her career.Though there were occasional gasps of disbelief in the audience, I wasn’t surprised by these stories; I know firsthand how draining it can be to answer ignorant questions about my hair from non-Black people or swallow microaggressions and rude remarks.Kalyne Coleman in “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesI wore my hair braided all through elementary school. I remember a white student in a younger grade regularly greeting me by pointing to my head and calling out “spiders.” In middle school, when I switched to cornrows with extensions, a frenemy repeatedly asked about my fake “horse hair.” I got questions about the different hairstyle lengths and about how “clean” my braids were.In high school, by which time I’d switched to relaxers, I found out that a boy I’d briefly had a crush on years earlier had been roasted for admitting to his buddy that he liked me. “But she looks like Whoopi Goldberg!” the buddy apparently said, though I neither had locs nor looked anything like Whoopi. But I was Black and had braids, and somehow, I understood, that meant I was less appealing.In the talkback, Wilson said Bioh’s play is accessible to everyone. I don’t disagree with her, but I suspect there’s plenty the typical Broadway theatergoer may not know or might overlook.I also don’t think it matters.In recreating a Black Harlem salon with all of its faults and charms, “Jaja’s” is, like our own salons, giving a specific demographic a welcome, familiar space where we call the shots and drive the conversations.When the clients of Jaja’s salon rose up from their chairs, one woman’s blonde Beyoncé braids cascading down her back, another woman’s Afro tidily plaited in playful zigzag cornrows, and a microbraids client’s TWA (teeny-weeny Afro) suddenly a veil of teeny-tiny jet-black braids, my audience cheered. I’ve never had a theater full of people cheer for me after hours of getting my braids done, but I’ve definitely felt like cheering, my stomach growling, my butt numb, my scalp tender and throbbing as I shakily stood up from the chair.“I feel like I moved in for the day,” the microbraids client said just before leaving Jaja’s shop.I know exactly how she feels. More

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      Curtains Down, Bottoms Up: When the Show Ends, the Night’s Just Getting Started

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      “Dead Letter No. 9,” “Cocktail Magique” and “Hypnotique” are offering theatergoers a taste of nightlife.A funny thing happened at Dead Letter No. 9, a new performance space in Brooklyn. It was just after 10 p.m. on a Saturday in late October. The evening’s show had finished, but the audience wouldn’t leave — crowding instead into the adjoining bar for cocktails, mocktails and flatbreads.Though New York City has its cabaret spaces and piano bars, theater and nightlife mostly occupy separate addresses. Blame temperament or real estate or the lingering effects of cabaret laws (finally repealed in 2017), which required a license to allow patrons to dance, but in general those who long for a drink and a show at the same time have had to settle for overpriced chardonnay in sippy cups. Ah, the glamour.New shows and new venues are blurring those lines. Though I am a lady with a hilariously low tolerance for alcohol who likes to be in bed just as the cable TV shows are getting good, I attended three of these performances over the last few weeks, trading a good night’s sleep for this superabundant approach (drinks, snacks, dance, card tricks, elaborate lingerie) to evening entertainment.Audience members sit facing the stage at “Cocktail Magique.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesStrong cocktails complement the dance routines at the show.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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      Tales That Crackle With Vitality, With or Without a Puppeteer

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      La MaMa Puppet Festival and other stage works this fall highlight the power of storytelling through puppetry.In a crisp white gallery space on Great Jones Street, in Manhattan’s East Village, a large wooden box contains a meticulous mise-en-scène: a midcentury roadside motel room constructed at puppet scale, which means it’s half of human scale. Standing on a step built into the outside of the box, spectators can gaze down into the installation, a time-capsule environment called “Motel,” by the master puppet artist Dan Hurlin.It has just one puppet inside — a motionless woman in an armchair in the corner, dressed with almost ostentatious modesty, one dark strand of hair hanging loose from her ponytail, a crucifix dangling from the chain around her neck. On the tabletop beside her, the key to Room 15 lies next to an envelope spilling $20 bills. On one of the double beds, the rust-orange spread is rumpled; outside the door to the bathroom, there is water in the sink. And on the desk, near the room phone and a stamped envelope, a letter is balled up.“Motel,” by the master puppet artist Dan Hurlin, freezes an anonymous American moment. It can be viewed at La MaMa Galleria through Nov. 18.Zach HymanOrdinarily, nothing seems more lifeless than a puppet without a puppeteer. But in freezing an anonymous American moment from a decade that might as easily be the 1970s as the 2020s, “Motel” absolutely crackles with an intriguing, unsettling vitality.The installation, on view through Nov. 12 at La MaMa Galleria, is a standout at this year’s La MaMa Puppet Festival — for the fastidious detail of Hurlin’s motel-room re-creation (wall-mounted bottle opener; wood-grain-patterned paneling; lampshade gone cockeyed; Bible, of course) but also because it poses a challenge beyond puppetry’s usual ask that we conspire in the illusion. Hurlin and his sound designer, the superb Dan Moses Schreier, are inviting us to take in their clues and envision a story as well.From the clock radio on the bedside stand, we hear intermittent voices giving and eliciting testimony, but they are from different nation-rocking scandals: Watergate and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. What decade is the puppet woman stuck in? Is she in danger or distress? Perhaps on the run? And why does her prim, princess-sleeved dress seem from a different wardrobe than the clothes hanging up?Dogs bark, crickets chirp, cars zoom past — all in Schreier’s subtle soundscape — and we peer ever more closely at the drab little room, imagining what trouble might have brought her here, and what all might be going on out there.***Over at La MaMa proper, on nearby East Fourth Street, my favorite festival performance of last weekend was Tom Lee’s mesmerizing “Sounding the Resonant Path,” upstairs at the Ellen Stewart Theater. (Its brief run has ended, I regret to say.)The principal character is a puppet called the Woodcutter. Entering with an ax slung over one plaid-shirted shoulder, he walks slowly and deliberately along a curving wooden track, ostensibly alone. Never mind the puppeteer (Lee) seated just behind him, dressed in black and scooting along on a small, wheeled box. That is part of the Japanese kuruma ningyo style, a relative of bunraku.This charming, funny Woodcutter fells trees to carve and shape; in his studio, we see him transform blocks of wood into art. (Eventually, we also see him carrying an actual flaming torch, which is one way of getting us to worry about a puppet’s mortality, even if that is not the point.)Solitary and self-sufficient, the Woodcutter is possessed of the ineffable quality — a kind of projectability — that can make puppets profound and delicate vessels for embodying human vulnerability. His is the microcosmic life at the center of the show’s macrocosmic evocations.Because what “Sounding the Resonant Path” sets out to do is briefly, bountifully recap all of our planetary history. Its inspiration is the August 1977 launch of the Voyager 2 space probe, which carried the golden record of images, speech and music meant to explain Earth to any extraterrestrial life.Maria Camia’s ambitious musical, “The Healing Shipment,” features extraterrestrial puppets whose torsos frame the faces of the puppeteers inside. Richard TermineThis show’s version includes minimal speech but many intricate projections (by Chris Carcione) and shadow puppets (by Linda Wingerter), as well as live music (by Ralph Samuelson, Perry Yung, Julian Kytasty and Yukio Tsuji) whose bandura, drums and haunting shakuhachi flute reach in and grab you by the soul. To mimic exquisitely the deep, shivery sound of rushing water, the show uses the “Rain Making Machine,” a kinetic artwork by La MaMa’s longtime resident set designer Jun Maeda, who died of Covid in April 2020 and to whom the production is dedicated.The cavernous Ellen Stewart Theater is an excellent space for contemplating vastness — of space, of time — but Lee and his Woodcutter do it especially affectingly, under an impossibly huge, star-pricked sky. (Lighting is by Federico Restrepo.) There is, at show’s end, a clear and lingering consciousness of being minuscule in the universe, and terribly, beautifully human.***Puppet-wise, New York is having a strong fall. Up at City Center, in Manhattan Theater Club’s production of Qui Nguyen’s “Poor Yella Rednecks,” winsome child-size puppets (by David Valentine) play a principal character named Little Man — more than one being necessary to pull off a comic action sequence in particular.Later this month, at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, the venerable Handspring Puppet Company — known for “War Horse” and Little Amal — is slated to return with a puppet adaptation of J.M. Coetzee’s novel “Life & Times of Michael K.”And there is the rest of the La MaMa festival, part of the point of which is to nurture puppet artists at different stages of their careers.Last weekend I saw two other shows there whose runs have already ended. One was an ambitious puppet musical, Maria Camia’s “The Healing Shipment,” whose puppet design was a lot of fun: humans with Smurf-blue skin and shocking white hair; extraterrestrials whose bright yellow torsos framed the faces of the puppeteers inside. The plot, though — involving potato spaceships and intergenerational time travel — was overly complicated and insufficiently interesting. The other was Charlotte Lily Gaspard’s “Mia M.I.A.,” a work-in-progress shadow-puppet musical with some very clever 3-D puppets. Coincidentally, it also had a space-travel theme, making the shows three for three on that.Of all the elements for puppet pieces to have in common — outer space, really? Makes a person want to hunker down in some retro motel room and listen to the radio.La MaMa Puppet FestivalThrough Nov. 18 at La MaMa and La MaMa Galleria, Manhattan; lamama.org. More

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      ‘Mysterious Case of Kitsy Rainey’ Review: A Trilogy’s Bittersweet End

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      At Irish Arts Center, the actor delivers the final installment of his solo plays about the cobbler Pat and his eccentric beloved.Falling in love came as a surprise to Pat Farnon — a late-life development he hadn’t been looking for any more than he’d been looking for the marriage proposal that set that romance in motion. When a whirlwind of a woman named Kitsy Rainey asked him to marry her even though they’d never so much as dated, he acquiesced.“The most beautiful woman that ever water washed,” Pat called her, and Kitsy cherished him right back. But how well did she allow her husband to know her?In “The Mysterious Case of Kitsy Rainey,” the bittersweet final installment of Mikel Murfi’s trilogy of solo plays about the cobbler Pat and his eccentric beloved, it is 1987 and Kitsy has been dead two years. Holed up at home in their small Irish town, avoiding company, Pat gathers his courage to open a suitcase that Kitsy had forbidden him to look inside while she was alive.What he finds changes his understanding of her, and not just from the newspaper clipping suggesting her involvement in a long-ago crime, in the place where she was born and came of age. Or as their good friend Huby says, comically, after he reads the article: “It might be best, Pat, if we don’t try to put two and two together here.”Pat, though, has always had a quick and busy mind. The narrator of this play and its boisterously funny predecessors, “The Man in the Woman’s Shoes” and “I Hear You and Rejoice” (all currently running at Irish Arts Center, in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan), Pat can speak to us, the audience, inside his head, but he cannot speak in life, nor can he read.He is, however, an accomplished listener, and Murfi, the plays’ author, director and shape-shifting star, is a marvel of characterization and vocalization, his repertoire including uncanny instrumentals and animal sounds. This is what allows him to populate Pat’s world so richly.It is risky, then, for “The Mysterious Case” to spend as much time as it does with Pat in solitude, contemplating his own deterioration and intermittently listening to a cassette tape that Kitsy made for him and left in that suitcase.And as emotionally honest as it is to let us feel Kitsy’s absence, dramatically it is far less interesting to hear her recorded voice than to watch Murfi become her. When he embodies Kitsy in a memory, even fleetingly, the show zings with life.Irish Arts Center advises that each play works as a stand-alone, but that isn’t true of “The Mysterious Case,” which seems to know that, opening with a verbal montage of standout lines from the first two shows: a kind of “Previously on ‘Kitsy Rainey’” nudge to our recollection.It would be a mistake to come to this play without an existing affection for and curiosity about Kitsy. But if you have those, Murfi has answers to sate you — even as you watch Pat, in his anger and pain, try to reconcile her love with her tenacious secrecy.The Mysterious Case of Kitsy RaineyThrough Nov. 18 at Irish Arts Center, Manhattan; irishartscenter.org. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. More

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      ‘Watch Night’ Review: For Spacious Skies, for Rancorous Waves of Hate

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      Conceived in part by Bill T. Jones, this multigenre work at the Perelman Performing Arts Center is interested in homegrown prejudice, but lacks dramatic focus.Entering the Perelman Performing Arts Center’s auditorium, you quickly notice detritus that looks as if it has been blown in from a bewildering protest: A few small American flags here, color copies of a Greetings From Hollywood postcard there, wrinkled fliers everywhere. Some of them are imprinted with the text of the Second Amendment, others a rallying cry: “We fight fascists.” Among the most eye-catching is an ad for N.R.A. memberships, with its promise of “$5,000 Accidental Death and Dismemberment insurance.”But what about intentional deaths? “Watch Night,” a new multigenre hybrid show, is interested in those, specifically the ones fueled by homegrown prejudice.Inspired, or maybe wrenched into existence, by the massacres at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., and the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, this Perelman center commission was conceived by the choreographer and director Bill T. Jones and the poet and librettist Marc Bamuthi Joseph, with a score by Tamar-kali.Joseph often draws directly from the news in his art: His collaboration with the composer Carlos Simon, “brea(d)th,” which the Minnesota Orchestra premiered in May, was informed by the life and death of George Floyd. He wrote the libretto for “We Shall Not Be Moved” (2017), an opera inspired by the police bombing in 1985 of a Philadelphia house occupied by Black activists, with an artistic team that included Jones and Lauren Whitehead, the “Watch Night” dramaturg. Unfortunately, those experiences have not helped focus this new production.The central figure in “Watch Night” is an ambitious Black journalist, Josh (Brandon Michael Nase). “American rage is my beat,” he says early on, “and man, business is boomin.’” Josh, who sounds almost grimly excited by the professional opportunities this anger could create, dreams of finding a story “ready-made for Hollywood.”Kevin Csolak as the Wolf, who orchestrates a shooting in a Black church.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHe maintains that stance of studied disaffection in the face of a pair of shootings: one in a Black church, orchestrated by a man nicknamed the Wolf (Kevin Csolak), the other a copycat rampage in a synagogue. Josh, whose mother is Jewish, finds himself involved in conversations about the issues roiling American society at large, and confronts people including his brother, Saul (Arri Lawton Simon).Much of the show consists of characters debating — sometimes amicably, often less so — contrasting philosophies of life and belief: Saul and Josh, who straddle two heritages; the church’s pastor (the excellent baritone Sola Fadiran) and the synagogue’s rabbi (Brian Golub). But the creative team struggles to musicalize and dramatize arguments about, say, forgiveness and repentance.Despite its weighty themes, “Watch Night” is strangely bereft of affecting tension. It would seem impossible that a plot point involving a congregant from the church, Shayla (Danyel Fulton), serving as a guard in the prison holding the Wolf could be unaffecting, but it is.What is most surprising about the production, besides its overreliance on perfunctory ensemble dance, is the awkwardness of Jones’s staging. The Perelman’s adaptable space has been configured so that the audience is split in two, with the halves facing each other. Whenever the music is in an operatic mode, the text is projected along the sides of the stage at an angle that makes it difficult to read while watching the actors. Select sentences and words are also projected to maximize their impact, but the two screens’ visual potential still feels underused. (Adam Rigg did the scenic design; Lucy Mackinnon handled the projections.)A scene from “Watch Night,” with choreography by its director, Bill T. Jones.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe performers often walk up and down the aisles amid the audience, an immersive move that makes them hard to see if they are in your section — a sizable portion of viewers will have a tough time catching a crucial scene toward the end. How can we expect focus from a piece that struggles to exert control over our gaze?Then again, it often feels as if this indecision is embedded in the very fabric of “Watch Night.” In his program note, Joseph says that the new show “doesn’t code ‘switch,’ it code ‘surfs’” among disciplines and styles. There again it comes up short, including musically.The bassist Corey Schutzer and his often jazzy lines drive the eight-piece orchestra led by Adam Rothenberg. But Tamar-kali — whose “Sea Island Symphony: Red Rice, Cotton and Indigo” premiered this summer at Lincoln Center — mostly sticks to a limited palette. (One of the few times your ears may prick up is when she nods to Luther Vandross’s “Never Too Much.”) The score feels as if it were paddling in place, never catching, let alone boldly surfing a wave that might transport us.Watch NightThrough Nov. 18 at the Perelman Performing Arts Center, Manhattan; pacnyc.org. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. More

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      ‘Sleep No More’ to Close in January

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      The Off Broadway production opened at the McKittrick Hotel in 2011, and helped to alter and expand the landscape of immersive theater.After more than a decade of performances, “Sleep No More” — the immersive, Hitchcockian riff on Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” — will close the doors of its cargo elevator for good when it plays its final performance on Jan. 28.Rising production costs drove the decision to close, said Jonathan Hochwald, a producer, who also cited an unwillingness to raise ticket prices commensurately. “It’s an enormous undertaking with hundreds of employees,” he said.Created by the English theater company Punchdrunk, “Sleep No More” had a short run in London in 2003 and a longer one in Brookline, Mass., in 2009, in partnership with the American Repertory Theater. The success of that outing encouraged the newly formed commercial production company Emursive to bring it to New York. Emursive found an ideal space: adjoining warehouses in Chelsea that had previously housed nightclubs such as Twilo, Home and Bed. Its 100,000 square feet were reimagined as the McKittrick Hotel. “Sleep No More” began performances there in March 2011, pausing for the pandemic, then reopening two years later, its sold-out performances driven by word of mouth.Reviewing the show in 2011 for The New York Times, Ben Brantley described it as a “movable orgy” and “a voyeur’s delight, with all the creepy, shameful pleasures that entails.”“None of us ever imagined we’d be here talking about the show in 2023 — it was only on sale for six weeks at first,” Felix Barrett, artistic director of Punchdrunk and a co-creator of “Sleep No More,” said on Wednesday. “Above all it was the audiences in New York who embraced our show and made it such a success.”Though it is hardly New York’s longest-running immersive theater event (that honor most likely belongs to “Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding”), “Sleep No More” helped to alter and expand the landscape of immersive theater in New York, encouraging new possibilities for design, environment and participation.Moody, dark and decadent, the wordless show attracted a legion of super fans, some of whom saw it dozens of times. Not all of those masked fans behaved appropriately. In 2018 Buzzfeed published an exposé in which performers and staffers detailed multiple instances of sexual misconduct. The postpandemic iteration addressed this, advising attendees to “please give your fellow patrons and the residents a bit of breathing room and keep a respectful distance.”When it closes in January, the show will have played 5,000 performances in its New York City incarnation, serving two million audience members, Hochwald and his producing partner, Arthur Karpati, estimated. For now, the producers plan to continue the McKittrick’s other late-night shows and its bars will remain open, but they are uncertain if they will host another major show. “We want more than anything to finish up strong and to leave a great legacy,” Hochwald said. More