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      ‘Memorial’ Review: An American Story, Set in Stone

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      The national controversy surrounding Maya Lin’s design for the Vietnam War Memorial is the subject of Livian Yeh’s nimble, process-driven play.Maya Lin was still a college student when her design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was selected through an open-submission process. Built in 1982 on the National Mall in Washington, the memorial features a wide-angle pair of black granite walls engraved with the names of lost soldiers, and it descends below ground like a tomb. Opponents called it a monument to shame and defeat.The controversy surrounding its construction — veterans decrying Lin and her design, the congressional hearings that followed and the addition of a statue nearby depicting three soldiers as a compromise — is the subject of “Memorial,” a nimbly drawn and elegantly executed new play by Livian Yeh that opened on Sunday at the Mezzanine at A.R.T./New York Theaters.The winning design, a scrawl of black pastel that resembles a bat, represents a stark contrast from the Washington and Lincoln Monuments that dominate the National Mall, massive, gleaming-white shrines to America’s founding ideals. When Maya (Angel Lin) shares her proposed memorial with committee members, she describes it as a wound cut into the meadow between the two monuments, one that’s intended to inspire reflection — a fraught idea in those days, given that the subject of contemplation is the Vietnam War.Yeh’s retelling is fictionalized but includes some of the young artist’s real-life supporters as characters: Wolf Von Eckardt (Robert Meksin), an architecture critic who defends her in the press, and Hideo Sasaki (Glenn Kubota), a Japanese American architect, interned during World War II, who becomes a mentor to Maya, particularly after detractors start attacking her race (Ross Perot, a donor on the project, once called Lin an “egg roll”).In “Memorial,” Maya’s opposition takes the form of Colonel Becker (James Patrick Nelson), who spearheads funding for the project but eventually turns against her, and whom Yeh notes is an amalgam of veterans with objections to Lin’s design. Becker asks about Maya’s background upfront, ostensibly to ensure she can withstand national scrutiny. Though she tells him her parents fled Communist China and have no affiliation to the party, her heritage nonetheless becomes a target for racist backlash.Yeh imagines Maya as a headstrong idealist, committed above all to the purity of her design. And Angel Lin’s assured and anchoring performance toes a delicate line, presenting Maya as neither a babe in the woods nor a wunderkind fully prepared for the magnitude of her mission. There’s admirable strength to Maya’s convictions, and philosophical intrigue to her aesthetic arguments. But while the colonel’s side of their conflict is rooted in trauma and memory, Maya’s is purely theoretical. (It’s Maya’s mother, played by a wonderfully flinty Rachel Lu, whose back story illustrates the idea that a memorial ought to feel inclusive, recalling her sister’s — Maya’s aunt’s — design for a shrine to Communist China.)That Maya’s argument for her blueprint is conceptual instead of personal can make her seem as if she’s no more than the sum of her artistic principles, and less sympathetic than the colonel in making her case. Nor is there much talk of the social or political debates over the Vietnam War itself, which might have helped trace a throughline to the present, when U.S. military operations are more often addressed in public discourse with the kind of moral ambiguity Lin’s design confronts. Still, Yeh covers an extraordinary amount of ground in the 95-minute show, and has a draftsman’s keen eye for concision.The director Jeff Liu’s graceful staging, for the Pan Asian Repertory Theater, reflects Yeh’s focus on the rich potential of quietly expressive architecture. The sloped white panels of Sheryl Liu’s set suggest both a venerated graveyard and a row of blank canvases, and serve as a backdrop for evocative projections by Gregory Casparian and lighting by Victor En Yu Tan. The production’s attention to detail, including the impressively subtle 1980s costumes by Karen Boyer and scene-setting sound by Da Xu, lend texture and dimension to the largely process-driven plot.How a country chooses to remember is a clear indication of its values. So what does it say that Lin’s distinctly American success story isn’t more widely known? “Memorial” does for Lin’s legacy what she has striven to do in her work — invite people to consider uncomfortable truths.MemorialThrough Feb. 19 at A.R.T./New York Theaters, Manhattan; panasianrep.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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      ‘Modern Swimwear’ Review: The Designer and the Murderer

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      Depicting the final hours of a young fashion designer’s life, Caitlin Saylor Stephens’s play lacks the sturdiness to make its connection to real events believable.The murder of the swimsuit designer Sylvie Cachay in 2010 cut short the life of a promising fashion star at the young age of 33. “Modern Swimwear,” a new play by Caitlin Saylor Stephens, imagines the events of her final night. A one-act, (almost) two-hander now in performance at the Tank, it features a strong central performance from Fig Chilcott, but is incurious about its subject to the point of feeling arbitrary, with the choice to turn this particular woman’s tragic end into dramatic fodder unjustified.At a glance, it’s an almost ideal setup: one night, one hotel room, one failing relationship — with Nick Brooks (Frank Zwally), a trust fund baby, then 24, with whom Cachay had a stormy monthslong affair. The two checked into the Meatpacking District’s Soho House late one December night after the candles he’d lit accidentally set her apartment on fire. Hours later, her body was found strangled and drowned in the bathtub.Anyone unfamiliar with this story would most likely be shocked and confused when Nick, who is otherwise written and performed as a lazy, garden-variety 20-something narcissist, attacks the bright and bubbly Sylvie in the play’s final minutes. Though Stephens offers some compelling insights into the crossfire of a doomed coupling, her characters are neither sturdy enough for an ordinary relationship drama to stand on its own, nor specific enough to be tied to real events. Their arguments about wandering eyes and miscommunication are relatable to a fault, yet their end is anything but, and arrives too abruptly.The couple seem at odds on everything from professional ambitions (he has none) to sex; not only is Nick uninterested in the intimacy of “making love” (it’s more of a four-letter word for him), but he is tormented by sensory hallucinations whenever the two come in contact (an invention of Stephens’s). Spookily rendered through Marcelo Añez’s staticky sound design and the way Sarah Johnston’s lights flicker across Christopher and Justin Swader’s true-to-life set, these manifest mainly as intrusive snippets of a song his songwriter father once wrote. But the plot avoids a real-life detail that might have brought Nick’s fraught relationship with women into higher relief: The elder Brooks, Joseph, was charged with multiple counts of sexual assault in 2009.The play does not explore these histories, nor does it spend much time investigating Cachay’s passion for swimwear, aside from one very effective, if simple, sequence. Locked in the bathroom, Sylvie hypes herself up ahead of a meeting with investors scheduled for the next day, speaking poetically and convincingly about the value of style and vision, fashion’s triumph over nakedness. When she then tries to spice things up with Nick by modeling her newest line, he shrugs and mumbles that there should be more nude beaches.It’s a subtly gutting moment, made especially persuasive by the warmth radiating from Chilcott. Right from the opening scene, the actor’s liveliness embodies someone who hasn’t entirely dimmed her light for an unresponsive boyfriend — though Stephens frustratingly leaves unsaid any reason that Sylvie should stick around. As a scene partner, Zwally isn’t so much one-note as he is perhaps misguided by Meghan Finn, whose direction matches the play’s uneasy mix of the momentous and the routine.Chad Pierre Vann appears briefly as a room-service waiter, threatening to steal the show with an entirely out-of-place flash of comic relief. It’s hard to wish away such a deftly farcical performance, but even tougher to argue for its inclusion. As the couple’s only onstage witness, his reappearance to discover Sylvie’s body is inevitable and unfortunately clumsy. Like Stephens’s play, it’s not exploitative — there is palpable care for the fallen woman — but feels unwarranted and unearned.Modern SwimwearThrough Feb. 12 at the Tank, Manhattan; thetanknyc.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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      Monica Bellucci Tries on the Dress, and Life, of Maria Callas

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      The film star embodies one of opera’s greatest divas in the solo show “Maria Callas: Letters & Memoirs,” coming to the Beacon Theater.There are opera stars, and then there is Maria Callas.Birgit Nilsson or Luciano Pavarotti may have been great, but they haven’t sung posthumously. Callas, on the other hand, has toured — as a hologram — decades after her death. Few have heard of the William Luce play “Bravo, Caruso!,” about that classic tenor, but Terrence McNally’s “Master Class,” which revolves around Callas’s exacting methods as a teacher, won a Tony Award in 1996 and is regularly revived.This soprano’s fans — the fiercest of whom the critic Anthony Tommasini affectionately dubbed “Callas crazoids” — will be kept busy this year, which marks the 100th anniversary of her birth. Early out of the gate, in New York, is the actress Monica Bellucci, who is bringing her solo show, “Maria Callas: Letters & Memoirs,” to the Beacon Theater on Friday.Bellucci, 58, has been performing the piece, in which she reads selections from Callas’s writings, on and off since 2019. Yet she still finds it hard to explain the peculiar, enduring hold that the soprano often referred to as La Divina still has on the collective imagination.“She had an aura,” Bellucci said during a recent visit to New York.Bellucci herself was regally resplendent that day, projecting the kind of smoky-voiced elegance often associated with marquee names of Golden Age Hollywood. But her résumé is less predictable than that reference might suggest: She has leapfrogged from intimate dramas to the James Bond movie “Spectre,” from Mary Magdalene in Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” to the victim of a brutal rape in the French “provoc-auteur” Gaspar Noé’s “Irréversible.” Her reputation as a symbol of European glamour and sophistication is so firmly established that she made fun of it in an episode of the series “Call My Agent!” (One crucial difference from that guest appearance: “I never had a relationship with my agent,” she clarified with a laugh.)Maria Callas, one of the most storied sopranos in opera, greeting fans at Carnegie Hall in 1974.: Larry C. Morris/The New York TimesStill, as open to new adventures as Bellucci has been, she had steered clear of theater. Undaunted, the director, writer and photographer Tom Volf, who had made the 2018 documentary “Maria by Callas,” trekked to her apartment to pitch a project based on his book “Maria Callas: Lettres & Mémoires.”“I remember we were in the living room, and she opened the book randomly and started reading out loud,” Volf, 37, said in a video interview. “That’s when I really saw the alchemy right away. Suddenly her physique, her attitude, her emotion were matching the one that I sensed was Callas’s, especially in some specific letters where you can see the woman and not the artist or the public figure.“I call it an alchemy; I think it’s beyond resemblance,” he continued. “I believe in destiny, like Callas did.” (Whenever Callas comes up, quasi-spiritual references to “aura” and “destiny” have a way of seeping into the conversation.)Equally bowled over, Bellucci forgot her longstanding reservations about appearing onstage. “The sense of beauty I felt was stronger than being scared,” she said. “I wanted to share what I felt with other people. It was through theater that I could get into that.”It’s hard to deny that a Callas-Bellucci pairing feels like it was predestined. Bellucci even played a Callas-like Italian opera star nicknamed La Fiamma in Season 3 of the series “Mozart in the Jungle.” Beyond their physical resemblance, Bellucci, an Italian-born Parisian, has led a border-crossing, multilingual international career, just like Callas, a Greek, New York-born singer decades earlier.Both had to navigate the specific tests that greet famous female celebrities. “I think that Monica can very instinctively and strongly relate to Callas as a woman,” Volf said. “Perhaps because she understands the duality between trying to lead a life as a woman and an artist with worldwide fame, and all the difficulties and the challenges that come with it.”The Callas mystique, beyond her acting and singing talent, was fed by an agitated, to put it mildly, personal life. She was rumored to have bitter rivalries with colleagues; was crushed by a torrid and unhappy affair with the Greek tycoon Aristotle Onassis; and had a conflicted relationship with her body. (She lost a considerable amount of weight in a crash diet, which some blame for her eventual vocal issues.)“She’s someone who had the courage to follow her heart, so that’s why when people say she had a tragic life. …” Bellucci said, trailing off. “She had a brave life. She wanted to divorce in a moment when, in Italy, divorce was forbidden. She’s still inspiring today because she had everybody against her and she was a fighter.”Callas’s physical reinvention can be also be seen as a sign of autonomy rather than of weakness. “She created what she wanted to be, like many, many, many people in the business,” Bellucci said sympathetically. “Marilyn Monroe wasn’t the blonde bombshell when she started. We call this ‘les femmes du spectacle’: They know how to create illusion. An artist uses her own body as a transmitter, as a way to show themselves. The body becomes an instrument.”At the Beacon, Bellucci’s instrument will be sheathed in one of Callas’s actual dresses, a black Saint Laurent number that Volf borrowed from a private collection in Milan. The couch that plays a central role, however, is only a replica of one Callas had at her apartment on Avenue Georges-Mandel in Paris.“The idea was a ghost of Callas is coming back to her house,” Bellucci said. “So I move to different places on the sofa, as if it represents this circuit of her life, from when she’s young, full of excitement, and then when she was more mature, finding a balance between work and private life. And then the end, when she was in her sadness and melancholy, but so elegant in that.”Because this is not a biographical show per se, but rather a peek into the singer’s more intimate side, in conversation Bellucci and Volf often differentiated between Callas and Maria, as a way to separate her public and private personas. They also pointed out that “Master Class,” for example, focused on a very specific element of her life: “This was the hard part of her,” Bellucci said. “People used to say that she had a temper. Actually, she was uncompromising and completely dedicated to her work with her soul, her heart.“But the more intimate part of her,” Bellucci continued, “the one that nobody knows, was so fragile and sensitive. And this sensitivity was also the base of her talent: She had the capacity to perceive things like a child. But nobody protected this child — not her mother, not her family. No men protected this child. So the child gets destroyed, and the artist as well.”As rich as her experience with “Letters & Memoirs” has been, Bellucci is not sure she will stick with theater. She said she had turned down, at least for now, an offer to play Medea — not coincidentally, perhaps, the role that gave Callas her sole movie experience, under the direction of Pier Paolo Pasolini.“I think maybe Callas did the one film, and I’m going to do one experience in theater,” Bellucci said. “I’m very thankful for the experience, and I’m going away like I came.” More

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      Review: In ‘Field of Mars,’ a March Toward Oblivion

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      Presented by Richard Maxwell’s New York City Players as part of this year’s Under the Radar Festival, the two-act play tries to measure humanity’s progress.“Field of Mars,” written and directed by the experimental playwright Richard Maxwell, is mainly set in a chain restaurant with a menu globalized to the point of comedy, where a character is asked if he’d like to upgrade his “Blue Hawaiian” drink to “mucho” size.The play, titled after an ancient Roman training area, gestures blandly and indistinctly at themes of mankind’s history across two very long acts at NYU Skirball. Presented by Maxwell’s New York City Players as part of this year’s Under the Radar Festival, the play, starring 11 actors with mostly unnamed roles, offers a number of themes and variations without cohesion or novelty.It begins with two Adam and Eve figures waking up before the setting shifts (helped with Sascha van Riel’s lighting) to a generic, present-day eatery in Chapel Hill, N.C., where Kaye Voyce costumes its employees in half-worn face masks and van Riel’s set recalls the insipidness of a Panera Bread. There, three staff members discuss its music playlist while, in a nearby booth, two songwriters (Jim Fletcher and Brian Mendes) attempt to collaborate with two younger industry figures (Nicholas Elliott and James Moore). Both groups are prone to lengthy discussions about music, the reactions specific genres have inspired, the way they’ve made them feel, and how the songs have advanced our culture. It’s through these chats that Maxwell’s main theme is laid bare: how have humans grown from, subverted, or undermined their past, and what will come from it?But the theme remains a blank evocation, as these conversations, with their glacial, incongruous tempos, are more Maxwell’s excuse for distancing experiments than actual meditations. He compellingly blurs lines between the mundane and grander visions of our origins, but haphazardly sprinkles religious imagery and scientific theory into the dialogue. The vague suggestion of these ideas and their presentation are banal enough already, let alone stretched to two-and-a-half hours with intermission, and the interminable listing of musical acts, from The Beatles to Tina Turner to Throbbing Gristle, doesn’t seem to make any larger point. We are creatures of and obsessed with lineage, yes; next.The cast is a Who’s Who of downtown New York performers, including Eleanor Hutchins and Tory Vazquez, but they are cornered by the work’s pretensions and forced, experimental aesthetic. They deliver their lines in an emotionless, crystal-clear manner that verges on the unrehearsed; not entirely affectless, but rather with the slightly enunciated flatness of an audio tutorial.The strongest sign of life comes from the restaurant’s young bartender, played by the choreographer Gillian Walsh. We learn the most about her life — she plays in a cover band with her married boyfriend, to whom she refers as her “BF” because she is also the play’s stand-in for the internet age — and Walsh delivers her lines with a droll mix of bemusement and resignation reminiscent of Aubrey Plaza. With a certain amount of emotion finally at play, her blunt admission that, “It feels about 200 years too late to sing the praises of the natural world, and that’s fine,” even as it comes with little preparation, makes one of the play’s few direct strikes toward something beyond rudimentary icebreakers.The rest is a loosely assembled medley of purposefully alienating silences and conversations about human advancement, one of which brings together Roe v. Wade, Black Lives Matter and the coronavirus in one speech. It’s meant to shrink monumental events into the galactic blip they truly are, but the play is too intent on being experimental to make an effect. Here, what Ben Brantley once called Maxwell’s “Olympian calm of a playwright with a god’s-eye view” seems to bump its head on the ceiling, repeating its distant observations from a cold distance.Field of MarsThrough Jan. 29 at NYU Skirball, Manhattan; nyuskirball.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes, including an intermission. More

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      ‘Small Talk’ Review: The Art of Meaningless Banter

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      In his brisk, low-maintenance Off Broadway show, the workhorse comic Colin Quinn extols the virtues of idle chitchat.After creating solo shows on the American constitution (“Unconstitutional”), the looming civil war (“Red State Blue State”) and the history of the world (“Long Story Short”), the workhorse comic Colin Quinn has decided to take on a subject of real consequence: small talk.It’s not as sharp of a pivot as you might think. Small talk is dismissed as shallow, but I was persuaded by Ruth Graham’s defense of it in Slate as a social glue in an increasingly divided world, or as she puts it, the “solid ground of shared culture.” Quinn clearly believes this, too. Whether you agree or not, there is little doubt we are currently facing a chitchat crisis. As Quinn deadpans in “Small Talk,” a brisk mix of charming comedy, thin history, self-help guide and various digressions that runs through Feb. 11 at the Lucille Lortel Theater, “Between phones, air pods and self-checkout, small talk is down 87 percent.”That doesn’t even account for the isolation of the pandemic that made us all rusty at saying hello to neighbors and jawing about the weather. Meaningless banter, a subgenre of small talk according to Quinn, is its own art. Ease into conversations, and don’t be abrupt, Quinn advises; he also suggests beginning with an exhale and “whoo.” Dressed casually in button-down shirt and sneakers, Quinn is big on the virtue of long vowel sounds. He also likes nicknames, nodding and starting conversations with “Is it me, or …”Part of his take on America is that while we may not be the most astute, we are the country with the best, or at least the most, personality, an empire built on charm, talk and salesmanship. This is why the decline of small talk matters. Quinn has no time for the idea it’s inauthentic. Its fakery is part of the appeal. Small talk has rules, and following them is more important than being your true self. Like improv, you need to listen and agree. Unlike improv, never escalate.This might be where Quinn runs into problems, because after a promising start, he can’t help but move outside the lines of his framework to ride hobby horses. He digs into social media, how the left and right are their own cults and the distorting dangers of technology. It’s almost as if he doesn’t believe small talk is big enough.Quinn has always been a wandering performer, with an intuitive grasp of openings and closers, but structurally messy in between. James Fauvell directs this piece with a light hand, and the production, on a bare stage, has a stripped-down aesthetic of a comedy club.Quinn once sarcastically mocked those who tell comics to evolve with the times. But he’s done just that, moving from game show hosting to political chat (“Tough Crowd”) to “Saturday Night Live” to Twitter. He has now settled into an essential part of the Off Broadway landscape, adding a much-needed bounty of jokes to the regular theatrical menu. His material doesn’t tend to be personal, though you see hints of a shift in the end of this show, when he movingly brings up Norm Macdonald, whom Quinn rightly describes as a “master small talker,” and briefly mentions a heart attack he suffered a few years ago that nearly killed him. He’s not one to get sentimental (is it me or does that kill small talk?), but, like his last solo show, he ends by imagining how people will look back on us as a civilization when we’re gone.He also speculates that if our country ended tomorrow, our epitaph might sound like something on a Myrtle Beach T-shirt: “America: If you can’t handle me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best.”It’s a reminder that while Quinn favored sweeping ambitious subjects, his real gift, and greatest comic subject, is the comedy of language: clichés, slogans, slang. Is this stuff small? It depends on how you look at it.Small TalkThrough Feb. 11 at Lucille Lortel Theater, Manhattan; colinquinnshow.com. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More

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      ‘The Appointment’ Review: A Chorus Line at the Abortion Clinic

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      After its original New York outing in 2019, the trippy musical returns in the post-Roe era with an updated script and sharpened fangs.The singing fetuses giggle and taunt, adorable and naughty like a gang of baby clowns. Umbilical cords dangle from their bellies, and when the fetuses break into song, they like to hold those cords up like make-believe microphones.If you wanted to nudge someone’s memory of “The Appointment,” the wild and wily abortion musical that was first seen in New York in 2019, you’d start by mentioning those vividly imagined womb dwellers. In this show by the Philadelphia company Lightning Rod Special (“Underground Railroad Game”), they’re the rowdy, trippy part.What’s most arresting about “The Appointment,” though — even more now, in its current engagement at WP Theater on the Upper West Side — is the contrasting quiet calm of its realistic scenes set inside a clinic, where a composed, 30-something woman named Louise (Alice Yorke, credited as the show’s lead artist) has come to get an abortion.She actually has two appointments, as all the patients do: first an ultrasound, during which the doctor is required by law to ask if she wants to hear the fetus’s heartbeat. Then there’s some legally mandated medical misinformation — which he reassuringly debunks on the spot — and a compulsory 24-hour waiting period before she can end her pregnancy. The show follows her all the way through, demystifying the process with a keen straightforwardness. Nothing about Louise’s experience fits a trauma narrative.That is a major point of this daring, clear-eyed work of political theater, which pits the unambiguous humanity of Louise and the other clinic patients against a sentimental, fever-pitch fantasy of walking, talking fetuses — and briefly of unseen, hypothetical women who forever ruined their lives by aborting their pregnancies. (We hear their supposed voices in the show’s satirical song of female regret, “What Have I Done?,” which is performed by three male characters, channeling the popular idea of abortion as a source of everlasting anguish.)The creative team writes in a program note that “The Appointment” was “born of rage” at misogyny and paternalism. But in its previous New York outing, it was just possible to not quite pick up on the roiling fury beneath its surface — to come away thinking, perhaps, that it was deftly both-sidesing one of the culture wars’ most ferociously fought arguments.It would be hard to get that impression now. Directed by Eva Steinmetz from a smartly updated script (the book’s lead writers are Yorke, Steinmetz, Scott R. Sheppard and Alex Bechtel; the music and lyrics are by Bechtel), this new iteration of “The Appointment” is still the farthest thing from a polemic, but it is sharper, neater and more deliberate.In a run coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion until the Supreme Court struck it down last June, the show lands with more urgency than it used to. In one switched-out lyric from the anthemic “Tuesday Song,” a bracingly self-possessed Louise used to sing, with the other clinic patients, that activists’ screaming about abortion has “nothing to do with me.” It does now.None of which is to say that “The Appointment,” whose nutso musical numbers are choreographed by Melanie Cotton, is bummer theater. On a set by Oona Curley, with costumes by Rebecca Kanach and lighting by Masha Tsimring, it’s as unhinged as it always was, and as determined as ever to make the audience squirm — like when a long metal hook more than once appears from the wings, menacing the fetuses. By the way, there is also a hose.Distasteful? Arguably. But is it as unsettling as the ease with which a few of the female fetuses, looking for daddies in an interactive section of the performance, coax some men in the audience into opening their mouths when they should keep them shut? Arguably not. A tip: When they ask you to rate the hotness of one of them on a scale from 1 to 10, remember that she’s meant to be a fetus, not a grown woman — and that a woman is a person. So either way, what are you thinking, rating her?The AppointmentThrough Feb. 4 at WP Theater, Manhattan; wptheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      ‘Sugar Daddy’ Review: The Grief Comes Out in Laughs

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      In his show about mourning his boyfriend, the comedian Sam Morrison confronts overwhelming loss with punch lines and panache.In some cultures, keening over a casket promises cathartic release. For the writer and performer Sam Morrison, a self-identified “anxious, asthmatic, gay, diabetic Jew,” vocalizing his pain means barreling through punch lines at high speed, pumping the brakes every so often to split his heart open, in the solo show “Sugar Daddy,” now running at Soho Playhouse.Morrison, who at 28 calls himself “an old queen” by New York standards, admits that the recent death of his boyfriend of three years is all he can think about. Well, that and one other thing.“Sad gay men are objectively just the horniest people in the world,” Morrison says, citing a conversation with his therapist who assured him the combination of feelings is totally natural.Indeed, sex fuels much of Morrison’s observational humor throughout the 65-minute show, in bits that point to the absurdity of attraction to skinny people (“We’re always shivering and getting kidnapped!”), sex between straight people (“The creepiest part is that they only do it in private?”) and dirty talk near a partner’s rear end (“I don’t wanna get any words stuck up there!”).Morrison’s blue humor might seem almost juvenile, but he tells us it’s at least partly his way of facing an overwhelming loss. “Grief is disgusting,” Morrison says, and it erupts in unexpected combinations of impulses and bodily fluids. His partner, Jonathan, who was 26 years his senior and whom he calls “the hottest daddy” in Provincetown, where they met, died from Covid-19. (Based on audible guffaws and sniffles in the intimate venue, an older generation of gay men, who experienced the untimely deaths of loved ones to a different virus, may relate to Morrison on an especially personal level.) Candid details from Morrison’s relationship — Jonathan’s big belly laugh, the secret language they developed during quarantine — underline the absence it leaves behind.Amid a sometimes frenzied array of tangents, two confrontations anchor Morrison’s progress through mourning: the time he was mugged but refused to hand over his phone because his pictures of Jonathan were saved on it, and when he was chased by a hungry flock of gulls seeking the “gay little raisins” Morrison had pulled out to fix his blood sugar levels after he was crying on the beach. Both anecdotes, which Morrison weaves into a sort of narrative throughline, connect him to Jonathan in ways he’s found useful in trying to move forward.The quicksilver shifts from vulnerable sincerity, a tremble of heartache in Morrison’s voice, to arch sass and polished panache are remarkably fast and furious. Under the direction of Ryan Cunningham, Morrison’s favored rhythm is one of sustained escalation, his energy rising like the shriek of a teapot until it’s eventually deflected into a non sequitur. Set to boil, remove from heat, repeat. The crosscuts are familiar tools for comedians facing the unthinkable, even if Morrison often uses them to look away. Still, he is exceptionally present throughout, whether leaning into his self-ascribed signifiers — gay, millennial, Jewish — or describing the turmoil he appears to grapple with in real time.“Sugar Daddy” is a kind of group therapy, Morrison says; the only way he knows how to get through his experience is to talk about it. Turning his tragedy into comedy doesn’t mean it makes any more sense. But if joking can make grief less sacred and more profane, what’s a bit of laughter between tears?Sugar DaddyThrough Feb. 17 at SoHo Playhouse, Manhattan; sohoplayhouse.com. Running time: 1 hour 5 minutes. More

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      Filming Eugene O’Neill When the Elements (and Investors) Don’t Cooperate

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      Starring Jessica Lange and Ed Harris, Jonathan Kent’s adaptation of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” started production, only to lose key financing.WICKLOW, Ireland — “Strong winds, gradually subsiding” read the call sheet.Jessica Lange, Ed Harris and Jonathan Kent, the director of the forthcoming film version of Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” were standing in a rehearsal room here in early November, listlessly running through lines. Harris, playing James Tyrone, an aging former matinee idol, touched his toes and did squats as he spoke, while Lange, playing his fragile, morphine-addicted wife, Mary, flitted distractedly around the room.Producers and assistants, phones glued to ears, bustled in and out, anxiously monitoring the stormy weather that prevented the cast and crew from heading to the set: a house modeled on the Monte Cristo Cottage in Connecticut, the seaside home of O’Neill’s family that provides the setting of this autobiographical play. The go-ahead came several hours later. The shoot finished close to midnight as Kent and the cast tried to push through the day’s packed schedule.It wasn’t the first storm the production had weathered, literally and metaphorically. One day after filming began on Sept. 19, the lead producer, Gabrielle Tana, discovered that their biggest chunk of financing had fallen through. “I had to go to the set and tell them we were shutting down,” she said.On location in Ireland, the Tyrones’ home is based on Eugene O’Neill’s seaside family home in Connecticut.Patrick RedmondTana (whose credits include “Thirteen Lives” and “The Dig”) said it was one of the worst moments of her long career. “I let them know I wasn’t giving up, and was already in conversations with investors,” she said.During the nail-biting weeks that followed, she spent endless hours in meetings trying to drum up the money. Remarkably, the cast — including Ben Foster and Colin Morgan, playing the Tyrone sons — as well as most of the crew and production team, never wavered in their commitment to the project. A handful of staff members, including the director of photography and some production design workers, weren’t able to stay with the production. The rest waited it out in this coastal region about an hour south of Dublin.The Projectionist Chronicles the Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. 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We really became friends and cared deeply for one another, because we were going through the same thing.” She added, “I think that in some way it added to our intensity and passion for doing this.”Three weeks of waiting to restart, Harris said, allowed him “to sit back, think about the character, calm down, and just be this dude rather than worrying about playing such a classic, important role.”The actors also made calls. Foster made a connection to the British theater producer Bill Kenwright, who had worked with Lange on productions of “Long Day’s Journey,” “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “The Glass Menagerie” in the West End and on Broadway.Ben Foster, left, with Colin Morgan, helped make calls when crucial financing fell through.MGM“I knew we would figure it out,” Foster said. “If we had to do it as a sock puppet show, we’d do that till we raised the money.”The sock puppet show was averted; Kenwright came through. “He was our knight in shining armor,” Tana said. A few other knights had to be found too, including the film producer Gleb Fetisov.First adapted for the screen in 1962, “Long Day’s Journey” is Kent’s debut feature. “This is, probably, the greatest American play, the invention of the dysfunctional family drama, and when you do it in the theater, there is a sort of reverence from the audience,” Kent said. “I thought that perhaps with film, one could shred that reverence a bit and allow its rawness and immediacy through.”Then he factored in current events that coincided, like the opioid epidemic and the coronavirus lockdown. “Here are these four, addicted not just to drugs and alcohol, but to each other, endlessly going over the past, the missed opportunities and failure, trapped in a house by the sea,” he said. “Somehow it felt resonant.”Lange said that she and Kent first talked about a film version during the Broadway run. “I immediately thought, yes!” she said, adding that Mary Tyrone “gets under your skin like no other character I have ever played; you never come to the end of it. And because of the nature of filmmaking, there is so much more subtlety that can be brought to light: the expression in the eyes, the subtle shift in the voice.”Tana first heard about the idea when the actor Ralph Fiennes, a friend of Kent’s, asked her to help with the project, which is scheduled for release this fall. She was intrigued and engaged the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Lindsay-Abaire — his “Good People” had been directed by Kent — to adapt the drama, which needed to shrink from an almost-four-hour theatrical event to an under-two-hour film.“There was never an agenda of ‘Let’s improve this,’” Lindsay-Abaire said in a video call from New York, adding that there isn’t a word of text in the film that wasn’t written by O’Neill. “It was the opposite: Let’s maintain what we love while telling the story in a different medium. It wasn’t using a machete as much as a scalpel. We took the dramatic Hippocratic oath: Do no harm to O’Neill!”Film, he pointed out, has communication tools that the stage doesn’t have. “You can sometimes replace four lines with a close-up,” he said. “We kept asking, does the character need to say that, or can they just act it?” He and Kent also discussed ways to make the drama more cinematic, by withholding some information that O’Neill reveals early. “Ghosts, hauntings, what is Mary doing up there? We wanted to lean into some mystery, to hint at things and reveal them more slowly,” Lindsay-Abaire said.Ed Harris joined the production when Gabriel Byrne had a scheduling conflict. Jessica Lange first discussed the idea of an adaptation when she performed the play on Broadway.MGMGabriel Byrne, who had starred opposite Lange onstage, was slated to reprise the role, but he fell out due to scheduling conflicts. Tana emailed Ed Harris, who had appeared with Lange in the movie “Sweet Dreams” almost 40 years earlier. He said yes immediately. “As tough as it was when the money fell out, it was the most rewarding film acting experience I’ve had in quite a while,” Harris said. Kent, he added, “gave us the freedom to just be those people — that it wasn’t a sacred text, that this was about human beings, not a dried-up historical piece.”Kent said that he had considered updating the 1912 setting, but had decided that too many fundamental details would have to be altered. Still, “to the designer’s chagrin, I asked that the costumes not be too ‘period,’” he said. “Whatever the setting, the text makes it a living, contemporary thing.”Two weeks of rehearsal before the start of the shoot allowed the four main actors to begin to build a family dynamic. “I immediately fell head over heels for my parents,” Foster said, adding that he had brought some foraged greenery from the actual Monte Cristo cottage as a talisman.“The rehearsal time was all about finding out what might work for character,” Morgan said. “A director who isn’t as theater-versed as Jonathan might work out camera angles first, then what the character does within. But I think the best directors work so that the camera is actor-led, and that’s how Jonathan approached it.”Then, almost immediately, came the hiatus and a roller coaster of emotions. “The bonding of that time was actually wonderful,” Foster said. “Historically I don’t socialize a lot with fellow actors. But in this case, it really did become a family.”The difficulty of making the film, Tana said, is indicative of the changing cinematic landscape. “It’s really hard now to make this kind of literary, straightforward, old-school independent movie,” she said. “There is so much value to this: these great, great actors doing a great American play that every kid studying literature will be able to watch. But it’s a sea change moment in our field in the way we access content, how it is monetized, where the resources are.”Kent agreed that the film goes against the current grain, but added: “We all have mothers, fathers, our terrible sense of failures and disappointments and guilt. I think what we crave from film or theater is truth about our human experience. There is an audience for that.” More