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      ‘The Immortal Jellyfish Girl’ Review: A 26th-Century Love Story

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      Featuring a lobster telephone and a robot boy with wings, this puppet romance set in a future post-ecological collapse succeeds on its own weird terms.The first time Bug and Aurelia kiss is as romantic as can be, even if Bug has to get past his initial reaction. “That really hurts,” he says. “That stings so much!” Which is what you get when smooching a part-jellyfish humanoid.Aurelia is the title character of “The Immortal Jellyfish Girl,” though if 23andMe still exists in her postapocalyptic world, it might locate traces of kangaroo, frog, naked mole rat and other beasties in her makeup. Above all, “she is also 100 percent puppet,” as the narrator, a mischievous masked fox in shorts and red tails, informs us.Kirjan Waage and Gwendolyn Warnock’s play, devised with help from the ensemble and presented by Wakka Wakka Productions and the Norwegian company Nordland Visual Theater at 59E59 Theaters, is indeed a puppet show, and an ambitious one at that. It’s not just that the story is set in a poetically rendered 2555, but that Waage and Warnock, who also directed, blithely ignored the memo about coddling young audiences: Their show, for viewers age 10 and up, does not shy from the violence and death intertwined with life, and indeed several characters meet a tragic ending.We are on a future Earth that has been wrecked by ecological disaster and where humans have evolved into two groups at war with each other: the machine-enhanced Homo technalis and Homo animalis, who are mixed with animals. If you have any kind of familiarity with stories of star-crossed young lovers, it won’t come as a surprise to learn that Bug (voiced by Alexander Burnett at the performance I attended) is part of the first group while Aurelia (voiced by Dorothy James) is an Animalis. And not just any Animalis: She has the ability to generate polyps that grow into various animals, thus providing a ray of hope for a dying planet. The Fox (Waage) explains that “she is the first living DNA bank in the world.” (The title is inspired by the so-called immortal jellyfish, a real species that somehow can age in reverse.)As if ecological devastation weren’t enough, Bug and Aurelia must also deal with the machinations of the disembodied Technalis ruler, Doyenne, a featureless head floating above her lair.Like the earlier Wakka Wakka/Nordland collaboration “Baby Universe: A Puppet Odyssey” (2010), the production revolves around environmental concerns, which it mines with humor, emotion and storytelling verve — the Fox is prone to breaking the fourth wall and making jokes aimed at the adults in the crowd. (“Where are the clones? Send in the clones.”)Admittedly, it’s not always easy to follow, and the action hits some confusing potholes near the end, but “The Immortal Jellyfish Girl” does create an eerie, slightly morbid universe packed with bold strokes: a Lovecraftian squid and a lobster telephone that could have been dreamed up by Salvador Dalí; Bug suddenly sprouting a pair of wings from his back; Aurelia surrounded by odd animal forms floating in individual tanks. The sonic imagination is just as refined, with the composer and sound designer Thor Gunnar Thorvaldsson consistently delivering an array of expressive effects — he digitally assembled prerecorded vocals into a composite to create Doyenne’s voice, for example. Even if you can’t figure out what the heck that prophecy is all about or what’s meant to happen to Earth at the end, the show succeeds on its own weird terms.The Immortal Jellyfish GirlThrough Feb. 12 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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      Review: ‘Drama,’ at the Volksbühne, Contains Many Things. But Drama Isn’t One.

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      The choreographer Constanza Macras’s new work at the Volksbühne is a chaotic revue featuring dance, slapstick, spoken dialogue, pop music and heavy-handed monologues.The last thing the Volksbühne Berlin needs is more drama. That might sound like an odd thing to say about one of Germany’s most important theaters, but in recent years the company seems to have had all the histrionics it can take.It has been struggling to regain its artistic footing after the dismissal of its longtime leader Frank Castorf, in 2017, to make way for Chris Dercon, a tony Belgian impresario who didn’t last through his first season. Then Dercon’s replacement, Klaus Dörr, stepped down before the end of his term, after women in the company raised allegations of sexual harassment.When René Pollesch, one of Germany’s most acclaimed dramatists and a veteran of the Castorf years, was installed as artistic director in 2021, it was widely hoped he would be a purveyor of both stability and artistic excellence. However, Pollesch has struggled to restore the Volksbühne’s reputation as one of the most groundbreaking in Europe.Since Pollesch took the reins, the theater’s program has been a hot mess, with critical pans and poor box office returns. Against this background, it seemed inauspicious that the Argentine choreographer Constanza Macras titled her latest work for the theater “Drama.” The show had its premiere Thursday, and will run in repertory at the theater for the rest of the season.“Drama” is not a straightforward dance piece. Instead, Macras and her 10 performers — drawn from her own company, Dorky Park, plus some guest dancers — serve up a disjointed revue that is about theater itself, in the vaguest of senses. How is it that actors reciting lines written by someone else — often at a remove of centuries or millenniums — can ring true to audiences nowadays? Will they in the future? Using dance, movement — including Buster Keaton-esque slapstick — spoken dialogue and pop music, primarily in English and German, Macras’s intrepid and indefatigable troupe sets out to investigate.In the show’s opening minutes, Macras gives us a potpourri of Shakespearean scenes in a jittery pantomime. Toward the end, we get a three-minute version of Sophocles’s “Antigone.” In between, she treats us to a series of goofy scenarios, including a particularly zany one without dialogue, in which the dancers become life-size Playmobil figures with their helmet-like wigs and stiff limbs.In a zany scene from “Drama,” the players perform jerky movements, dressed as life-size Playmobil figures.Thomas AurinIn that scene, the performers’ controlled, jerky movements are impressive. Elsewhere, the cast display some startling physical feats. The most gob smacking is when the hunky dancer Campbell Caspary walks down a flight of stairs on his hands.The 10 performers that cavort across the large stage pretty much nonstop for two and a half hours are striking dancers, although the results are far more mixed when they are called on to recite texts or sing. With gusto but varying levels of musical skill, they belt out pop anthems backed by two onstage musicians, and when the entire cast launched into “I Sing the Body Electric,” from the 1980s musical “Fame,” joined onstage by a local amateur choir, that gaudy number felt like the show’s grand finale. Alas, we were only halfway through.As the evening wore on, cast members launched into heavy-handed soliloquies about cultural appropriation and artists’ poor pay. (“Dance is so intersectional,” is the worst line in a script with no shortage of clunkers.) Occasional self-deprecating references to the show’s own sloppiness come across as an unconvincing tactic to forestall criticism.From left: Caspary, Bas and Shoji in a musical number from “Drama.”Thomas AurinTaking in the entire spectacle is like following a sloppy brainstorming session through to its illogical conclusion. So why should we be surprised when Macras gives us a late-evening history lesson about Nélida Roca, the Argentine “vedette,” or showgirl, who held Buenos Aires enthralled from the 1950s to the 1970s. The real disappointment is that the burlesque show that follows is curiously low on razzle dazzle, despite all the feather headdresses and tassels.Here, as elsewhere in “Drama,” Macras’ choreography lacks distinction. It was deflating to watch the dancers give their all to exertions that hardly seemed worth the energy.As a chaotic vaudeville featuring dance, music, slapstick and confessional monologues, “Drama” bears more than a passing resemblance to Florentina Holzinger’s “Ophelia’s Got Talent,” a revue featuring an all-naked female dance troupe which is one of the Volksbühne’s only box office hits this season.Macras doesn’t go in for the shock tactics that are Holzinger’s stock in trade, but she still appears to take a page from the younger and more transgressive practitioner of dance theater. There’s even a monologue about suicide that will sound familiar to anyone who has suffered through “Ophelia’s Got Talent.” And although it’s blessedly shorter, “Drama” is similarly meandering, and feels endless.After two and a half hours, “Drama” leaves one exhausted, not exhilarated. It’s made up of many — far too many — ingredients, but drama isn’t one of them. More

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      Review: A Far-From-Revolutionary ‘Danton’s Death’ at the Comédie-Française

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      A passé take on Georg Büchner’s 1835 play about the French Revolution leans into the worst instincts of the Comédie-Française, our critic writes.It was a surprising oversight in the centuries-old repertoire of the Comédie-Française, France’s foremost theater company. Until now, it had never performed Georg Büchner’s 1835 “Danton’s Death,” arguably the best-known play set during the French Revolution.A new production by the French director Simon Delétang tried to right that wrong this week, but it may have come too late. Given the Comédie-Française’s affinity for prestige period dramas, the feuding revolutionaries of “Danton’s Death” should be an easy fit. Yet Delétang, who was until recently the director of the indoor-outdoor Théâtre du Peuple in the Vosges Mountains, plays into the company’s worst instincts, with a staging that eschews historical insight for endless grandstanding in front of candelabras.The Comédie-Française’s actors undoubtedly look good in knee breeches, but you’d be hard-pressed to know what they, or Delétang, make of the revolution, based on this production. Part of the issue is that, from a French perspective, Büchner’s play feels dated. Büchner, a German playwright, wrote it at age 21, using the historical sources available to him in the 19th century.The result, which is laced with literary references, dramatizes the rivalry between two revolutionary leaders, Georges Danton and Maximilien Robespierre. Formerly friends, they are at odds when “Danton’s Death” starts, at the height of the Reign of Terror, in 1794. In the play, Danton is as hedonistic as Robespierre is inflexible; Robespierre is also ready to sacrifice anyone to the virtuous new republic — starting with Danton, whose relative moderation he has grown to despise. These are undoubtedly meaty roles, and other important historical figures make appearances, including Louis Antoine de Saint-Just and Camille Desmoulins.In true 19th-century fashion, “Danton’s Death” is a clash between “great men,” heroes and antiheroes, who frequently launch into lyrical monologues about blood and death. Yet much work has been done in France in recent decades to examine the blind spots of this narrative, including the oft-forgotten role of women during the revolution.There are only a handful of women in “Danton’s Death,” and when they appear, they talk about men, or listen to them. That’s hardly surprising, because Büchner was a writer of his time, but Delétang appears uninterested in finding an angle that might resonate with current audiences. Even the people — so central to the revolution — are excluded from his production: Aside from a few supporting actors appearing at a window, there is no sense of a popular uprising.A number of French directors have done great work to remedy some of these biases, starting with Ariane Mnouchkine, who focused on the people’s role in her play “1789,” which premiered in 1970. More recently, Joël Pommerat’s plainclothes “Ça ira (1) Fin de Louis” (“It Will Be Fine (1) End of Louis”) captured the events of the early years of the revolution in all of their messy complexity, down to town-hall-style debates, with actors positioned in the auditorium as if audience members were 18th-century citizens, too. It was such a success that it toured for seven years, from 2015 to 2022.Loïc Corbery, who plays the title role in “Danton’s Death.”Christophe Raynaud de LageIn the wake of these works, Büchner’s Danton, a drunk with a death wish who wallows in self-pity and ends up guillotined, is hardly captivating. It doesn’t help that Delétang cast one of the Comédie-Française’s heartthrobs, Loïc Corbery, in the role. Danton, a lawyer by training, was notoriously unattractive after catching smallpox as a child and having his face mauled by a bull. Corbery is much too smooth and seductive a presence; it’s as if Timothée Chalamet turned up to play Winston Churchill.Opposite Corbery, Clément Hervieu-Léger is prissy and repressed as a bewigged Robespierre, with a dancer’s ramrod posture throughout. Guillaume Gallienne makes a suitably scary Saint-Just, and Gaël Kamilindi is a highlight in the role of Desmoulins, here a youthful dreamer whose life is cut short alongside Danton’s.The action takes place almost entirely in a cold semicircular room designed by Delétang himself, which stands in turn for a bourgeois salon, France’s revolutionary assembly and a prison. “Danton’s Death” culminates with the appearance, center stage, of a gold-rimmed guillotine that is almost as high as the walls around it. No heads roll onstage, but by that point, over two hours in, you just hope it ends the proceedings swiftly.“Danton’s Death” isn’t the first misfire on the biggest of the Comédie-Française’s three stages, the Salle Richelieu, since the company’s return from its pandemic-enforced break. And while a company director, Éric Ruf, has done much to work toward greater diversity since his appointment in 2014, men continue to dominate main-stage programming. Out of 12 productions this season, only four are directed by women, and no works by female playwrights are scheduled.On paper, it makes sense to have “Danton’s Death” in the Comédie-Française repertoire. After all, the company’s own history is tied to France’s fluctuating political governments, and some actors from the (formerly royal) troupe barely escaped the guillotine. But in Delétang’s passé production, the past never speaks to the now. More

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      Interview: Returning To The University of Colloquium

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      Katherine Stockton and Sean Bennett talk about Colloquium

      Back in July we had a wonderful and insightful chat with Katherine Stockton about Colloquium, her play that explores the lives of stuffy Professors, pompous Candidates, and struggling Students, all suffering under the regime of pressuring higher education. Since then the play has had a rather successful run at Camden Fringe (see our four star review here), undergone some rewrites, played a few additional dates and is now on its way back, first to Sewell Barn Theatre, Norwich and then Queen’s Theatre, Hornchruch.

      So it seemed a good time to sit down with Katherine once more to ask about the play’s journey since last July. And this time we were joined by producer Sean Bennett to help out.

      We originally spoke last July just ahead of Camden Fringe, how did you feel the festival run went?

      Katherine: The Camden Fringe was a great step in the writing process for me. Fringe slots usually allow for an hour-long show, which was a great basis for expanding into the 95-minute production we are currently showing. One of the best things about the Camden Fringe is the opportunity for my emerging actors to display their talents – and I have a fantastic cast that deserve that stage time.

      Sean: Fringe runs are always an intense process, but the cast and crew really pulled it out of the bag. Moving from theatre to theatre allowed us to explore different staging, different movements, and generally put the play through its paces and learn as we went along.

      The result? A range of great performances with some really positive audience and critic reviews, not to mention an OffFest nomination to boot. Of course, there is always room to improve and we will be taking everything we have learnt into our next performances.

      Given that the play is coming back in 2023, we assume there was plenty of positive reactions then?

      Katherine: Our run had great reception from agents, critics, producers and, most importantly, the general audience members. Getting a great review is one thing, but it will always pale in comparison to the sound of an audience enjoying themselves in the moment.

      Sean: Productions of this play have been going, in one form or another, for almost five years now, so we have built up a healthy backlog of reviews and reactions. Each time a run ends, we have taken advice and criticism on board, made changes, and gone into another run, each one receiving better reactions than the last.

      Our Camden Fringe run was by far our most successful run to-date, with healthy attendance, plenty of reviews, and lots of positive reactions. There are still some changes to be made as we head towards our 2023 shows, but we were overwhelmed by the support and congratulations we received in 2022, so weare confident that our audience this year will love what we have to offer.

      What did you learn from the Camden Fringe run then? And has that led to further changes?

      Katherine: Absolutely. We had responses that responded very strongly to the dialogue and intellectual debates, but less so about the overarching structure of the play. This was partly due to the hour slot we had to work with. Since, I have been able to write 35 minutes of new material that addresses this issue. I believe I have been able to construct a well-balanced play that ties up all its ends.

      Sean: Colloquium is a play that, at the very beginning, started out as a pretty comedic piece. Over the years, it has evolved into more of a drama with comedic elements. Reviews and feedback from Camden showed us where that arc hasn’t quite been perfected yet, with some changes from funny to dramatic being quite stark and sudden. The script has therefore been changed to account for this and hopefully give audiences a smoother experience of the story line, ensuring they stay enthralled from beginning to end. Our staging, too, has been tweaked based of some critics’ suggestions, adding to the realism of the piece and ensuring that nothing happens on stage that could distract audiences from the story.

      Theatre, in the end, is a collaborative process. Not just between actors, producers, and directions, but also between the production and it’s audiences and critics. They want to see the best bit of theatre they can find, just as we want to give the best performances we can. Learning from each other is what makes great theatre, and so that’s what we have done.

      You also did some dates later in 2022, where these always part of the plan or did they come about from Camden Fringe?

      Sean: A mix of both. As the play gained more recognition, theatres started to approach us with dates and performance offers, but some of the shows later in 2022 had already been set. This gave us the opportunity to put our learning from the Fringe into practice quickly, while it was all still fresh in our minds, and the minds of audiences and critics.

      And how much will have changed by the time the play hits the stage again in February? Are you constantly rewriting sections?

      Katherine: The show won’t feel like a brand-new play. The six characters: the retiring professor, the ambitious second-hand man wanting his role, the Eton boy, the Welsh applicant out of her depth, the struggling PhD student and the PhD student who refuses to engage with the world of Oxford in a way that will ruin her – they will all still be there. But the writing has been workshopped and had many eyes on it, so it will be a perfected and expanded version. I think it is important for developing writers to always be editing.

      You were meant to be taking the show to the drama school at UEA Norwich, do you feel the play’s themes are perfect for taking to other universities?

      (Due to issues with the venue at UEA the show has now moved to Sewell Barn Theatre)

      Sean: Even though Colloquium focuses on Oxford University there are elements in the story that are applicable across all higher education settings. Anyone who has been to university, or is there now, will see parts of their own experience reflected on stage, so we’re confident that all university audiences will enjoy the play and resonate with it.

      Katherine: This show speaks to any person who has suffered from the hoop-jumping regime of further education. The show was also first staged at UEA, so it was going to be a homecoming for me and other UEA alum’s on the cast.

      And then it’s down to Queen’s Theatre, Hornchurch, how did these dates come about?

      Sean: Our actors are spread across London and the East of England, so the Queen’s Theatre in Hornchurch was initially a rehearsal space that we used due to its geographic placement between our two camps of performers.

      We loved the space, and the theatre in general, and our director has worked there before and was keen to utilise the space as a venue for performances rather than just rehearsals. Based on these existing relationships with Queen’s, we were offered the chance to perform there and jumped at it.

      Is it the same cast for the 2023 dates? Does changing actors alter the play in any way?

      Sean: Small changes have been made to the cast in 2022 and 2023, mostly due to actors finding other employment or due to schedule clashes. This is the nature of Fringe Theatre, and we knew this going in. However, the core of the play has always been consistent due to the majority of the cast staying the same and the steady guidance of the director and writer throughout all runs.

      Characters change when a new actor takes on a role, that is unavoidable. But it’s also a good thing. Every time a new actor has joined the cast, it has been a positive experience for the play, without question. The key is that we always ensure that our audition process is rigorous and that there are always plenty of rehearsals for new actors to find their feet, embed themselves in the story, and bond with the existing cast.

      Katherine: I love and admire the actors we have kept, but a new actor can bring in a whole new energy to the production, and find new ways into the text. It’s fantastic to have new blood. We also have an excellent director, Molly, who folds any new cast member well into the net of our show with ease.

      Do you see Colloquium being developed further throughout 2023? Or do you feel it would have reached a point that you want to move on to a new project after all this time with this one?

      Katherine: I can’t really let go of the play. I am very emotionally tied to both its characters and themes. And I am passionate about the fact that it speaks to an experience of British culture that isn’t addressed by another great play that we have currently; the University interview experience. So, I will be sticking with this project and developing it – potentially with a regional tour.

      Sean: Colloquium has developed a lot since its first run, and we intent to give it a long life past 2023, hopefully being published and moving into long-run or touring professional productions. This is a play that we believe would resonate with audiences up and down the country, and so we would like to test that theory in the coming years.

      New projects are being talked about, as eventually the time will come for Colloquium to get published and released into the world for other casts and companies to license and perform. But, for now, we’re focusing on perfect our lay during 2023 and making it the best it can be, and putting it in front of as many audiences as we can.

      Thanks to Katherine and Sean for their wonderful insight into what it’s like to further devleop a play in this way.

      You can catch Colloquium at Sewell Barn Theatre, Norwich (3 & 4 February) and then Queen’s Theatre, Hornchurch (26 & 27 February). Further information on these dates and to keep up to date with any further dates, check out Katherine’s website here. More

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      When Monsters Make the Best Husbands

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      “Frankenstein’s Monster Is Drunk and the Sheep Have All Jumped the Fences” and “Heaven,” two plays in Origin’s 1st Irish Festival, offer two very different views of marriage.The monster is nestled in a glacier when the villagers dig him out, frozen but not dead, because he was undead already. Tall, broad-shouldered, hulking in his platform boots, he is instantly recognizable, and once he thaws, proves unpretentious despite his Hollywood fame.It is 1946 in a tiny European village, and he is the most endearing of monsters: awkward, uncertain, just wanting to help out. And in “Frankenstein’s Monster Is Drunk and the Sheep Have All Jumped the Fences,” a winsome cartwheel of a show that’s part of the Origin Theater Company’s 1st Irish festival, he finds lasting romance — with a local outcast who falls in love with him at first sight. Never mind that by his own account he is “constructed from the dismembered body parts of a number of different corpses”; their sex life is fabulous.Written and directed by Zoë Seaton for her Big Telly Theater Company, from Northern Ireland, this quick-witted frolic is adapted from Owen Booth’s short story of the same name. On the smallest stage at 59E59 Theaters, with a nimble and inventive cast of four, it is a fast-moving comedy that dares to tip into poignancy.The soulful, well-meaning monster (Rhodri Lewis) and his brisk, nameless wife (Nicky Harley) spend years finding a way to fit into their tiny village, whose populace is represented by the much-doubling Vicky Allen and Chris Robinson. With a large wooden cupboard as the movable centerpiece of its no-frills set (by Ryan Dawson Laight, who also designed the costumes), the play is the story of their marriage: passion, heartbreaks and all. Also mishaps — inevitable where a slightly bungling monster is involved.“One day he gets drunk and manages to lose her entire flock of 63 rare Italian blue sheep,” Robinson tells us, in narrator mode. “They spend years arguing about that.”With a dreamy, heightened air abetted by the lighting (by Blue Hanley and Sinead Owens), the play has tender depths. The monster and his wife can’t have children, and this grieves them terribly. But they get on with life, and with loving each other. And in their imaginations, they create together a whole secret world.In “Heaven,” Andrew Bennett plays a married man who fantasizes about a young man who looks like Jesus.Ste MurrayA very different kind of marriage awaits audiences at Eugene O’Brien’s two-hander “Heaven,” also part of Origin’s 1st Irish at 59E59. So does a helpful glossary of terms, stapled to the one-sheet program. “On the todd” means single; “up the duff” means pregnant; a “ride” is having sex; and so on.Mairead (Janet Moran) and Mal (Andrew Bennett) have been married for 20 years. In their 50s, the parents of a 19-year-old daughter who has never gotten along with Mairead, they haven’t slept together in quite some time. Still, Mal says: “We are the best of pals.”Back in Mairead’s hometown for a wedding, she kisses an ex-boyfriend — one of many she had before settling down with Mal, who lately has taken to indulging sexual fantasies about Jesus that he first had as an altar boy. A young man who looks like Jesus is a guest at the wedding, and now Mal has fantasies about him, too.Directed by Jim Culleton for the Dublin-based company Fishamble, “Heaven” is constructed as a series of alternating monologues by Mairead and Mal, narrating their alcohol- and drug-fueled adventures over the wedding weekend.It’s a well acted, reasonably entertaining play. But while “Heaven” might appear at first to be interested in shaking up the status quo, it turns out to have a drearily conventional spirit, certainly where Mairead is concerned.As the play nears its end, she makes a U-turn away from her own desire, abruptly keen instead on inhabiting one of the most selfless and desexualized of female roles. It’s an out-of-nowhere switcheroo, and it feels utterly imposed.Even so, O’Brien’s final line is perfect — in a shaggy-dog-story way.Frankenstein’s Monster Is Drunk and the Sheep Have All Jumped the FencesThrough Jan. 28 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes.HeavenThrough Jan. 29 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Review: ‘Not About Me’ Remembers Decades Shrouded by AIDS

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      Eduardo Machado’s autofictional play follows the playwright’s alter ego as he navigates gay life in the 1980s and ’90s.It’s one thing for a new show to take place, for the most part, in the downtown Manhattan of the 1980s and ’90s. It’s another to make audience members feel as if they are watching it contemporaneously: Eduardo Machado’s “Not About Me,” which just opened at Theater for the New City, could have been airlifted wholesale from that era.For New York theatergoers who lived through those times, the occasionally ramshackle acting and the endearingly primitive projections make for an experience akin to stepping into a hot-tub time machine. Younger people might think they have chanced upon a diorama of vintage East Village theater. Everybody is likely to agree that the eye-searing abundance of ill-fitting pants is pushing verisimilitude a pleat too far.The protagonist and narrator of “Not About Me” (take that title with a grain of salt) is a Cuban-born gay playwright named Eduardo (Mateo d’Amato) who bears a striking resemblance to Machado, a Cuban-born gay playwright. This autofictional bent is par for the course for an artist who has long drawn on his own story. Eduardo is even married to a Harriett, as Machado was in real life for nearly 20 years — “your wife who you have always made an offstage character in all your plays,” according to one of Eduardo’s friends, Frank (Ellis Charles Hoffmeister).Machado has acknowledged that “Not About Me” was prompted by the arrival of Covid, which reminded him of AIDS, “the first pandemic of my generation,” as Eduardo puts it. The show, which the playwright also directed, starts in the mid-1980s, when AIDS was still thought of as “the gay disease.” Dancing and cruising in clubs, Eduardo and his buddies are at first oblivious to the new viral threat, then mildly worried, then terrified. Complicating matters, he thinks of himself as bisexual. Eduardo spends most of the show flirting with men, especially Gerald (Michael Domitrovich, with whom, in another example of a real-life connection, Machado collaborated on the memoir “Tastes Like Cuba: An Exile’s Hunger for Home”), and going through an obsession with a troubled, temperamental actress named Donna (Heather Velazquez). He gets flak from both sides, as when his friend Tommy (Charles Manning) jokes that Eduardo should write a play titled “How to Go From Bisexual to Gay When It’s Convenient for Your Career.”Eduardo is almost always portrayed as the object of everybody’s desire, including, in a more platonic way, another actress, the Los Angeles-based Marjorie (Sharon Ullrick, stepping in for Crystal Field at the performance I attended). They are rehearsing a short Tennessee Williams play whose feverishness reflects Eduardo’s approach to life — swashbuckling, peacockish, omnivorous. More important, Marjorie has cancer, and Eduardo must learn to accept her looming death.The play can never settle on a tone, and many scenes land askew, teetering uneasily between earnestness and flamboyance — it often feels as if dramatic ones are played for laughs, and vice versa. It’s also never quite clear whether Machado, with cleareyed honesty, deliberately paints Eduardo as somewhat ruthless and a narcissist (after learning two of his friends have died, he wonders, “On my 40th birthday?”) or if he’s oblivious to how his alter ego comes across. This tension between intention and lack of polish — the show does not feel like it’s been workshopped to death — at least makes “Not About Me” stand out.The play slowly makes its way through the decades and ends in the present, with another pandemic that both crushes and spurs Eduardo. “To write, or not to write, that is the question,” he asks. Let’s rejoice that he chose to write.Not About MeThrough Feb. 5 at Theater for the New City, Manhattan; theaterforthenewcity.net. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      Interview: Delving into the darker side of hospitality

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      Lia Burge on her Vault Festival show, Crying into Bins

      Our latest interview for the upcoming Vault Festival is with Lia Burge. In February Lia is bringing her show Crying into Bins to the Festival, which is all about working in hospitality. The show is a spoken word performance full of the horrors Lia has seen first hand. We’re sure it’s one that will resonate with many people who have found themselves in the service industry at one time or another, and even if you don’t have that experience, we reckon it could be a real eye opener! If nothing else, we reckon you should go just to find out about the Margaret Thatcher memorial dinner!

      Crying Into Bins is playing 11, 12 and 18 February and you can book those tickets here.

      Crying into Bins is quite the title. What was the inspiration behind it?

      My friend had a full-on nervous breakdown at the end of a shift one night – just cracked. She was fingering béarnaise sauce out of ramekins into a food waste bin at the time (an activity anyone who’s worked in hospitality will recognise with a withering groan). The next think we knew she was on the floor sobbing, shaking – the works. It was simultaneously one of the funniest and most disturbing things I’ve ever witnessed. 

      And what can people expect if they get along to see the show in February?

      Something a bit different in terms of style I think. Somewhere between theatre and spoken word poetry. In any case, plenty of laughs and a lot to think about. I wrote it to offer a bit of catharsis to hospitality workers, and to explore how working in service can change and shape you as a person. 

      So, is it all based on things you really saw and experienced whilst working in hospitality or have you used some creative licence to embellish a few events?

      There are things in the piece that people will think I’ve made up. But I’m sorry to say that every single story, quote and moment of Crying into Bins is true and happened either to me or one of my colleagues.

      Care to share any of the real horror stories you experienced then which we might hear about in the show?

      If we’re talking tangible horror, my first thought is the time a pigeon got into the venue and was shot down with a BB gun just before the guests arrived. Its blood and guts smattered over 1500 champagne glasses we’d just laid out to pour. But if we’re talking psychological horror, I’ll just say these four words: Margaret Thatcher memorial dinner… You’ll have to come to the show to find out what happened with that one.

      Is it your first time performing in something you’ve written then? What made you decide it was time to write your own show?

      It is. I’ve been avoiding the obligatory ‘one woman show’ for years. I love being in a company, and I could never seem to write a decent play anyway, so it never appealed. But when I got into spoken word in 2018, I found a format that made sense for the way I write, and people really seemed to respond to the way I performed my poetry. It’s just storytelling really, but it has an extra bit of magic that brings it to life. I realise now all the training and my experience with Shakespeare and modern rhythmical plays must have sunk into my soul over the years!

      We’re big fans of spoken word – do you feel this is a theatre genre that is getting more popular at the moment?

      I do think spoken word is getting more popular, and it’s a real mixed bag out there. There are incredible life changing poets like Salena Godden and Kae Tempest, and then there are just people getting up and speaking their truth into a microphone. The latter isn’t often high art, but I think it’s popular because it facilitates creative expression. I’m sort of playing around with the standard ‘spoken word’ delivery and pushing back a little against the penchant poets seem to have for trying to imitate Kae – who is extraordinary… but inimitable. I love poets who use their own voice to tell their story – that’s what’s interesting to me. 

      You have taken part in Hammer & Tongue’s National Slam competitions. What are they then and how does taking part in those compare to putting on your own show?

      Well, a poetry slam is where competitors have three minutes to speak their poem – no singing, no props, no music. Usually the audience will be doing the scoring, so whether you win or not can have a lot to do with who’s out there! For me, it all started by accident when I told a poet friend of mine a story about an unfortunate toilet accident on the back of a horse during the Euros in 1996. She said “that’s a slam winning poem, write it!” I wrote it, I won my first slam, and then I was off! There is of course something more terrifying about getting up there as yourself as opposed to a character in a play. But once you’ve done your bit you can sit down again! Putting on your own show is a massive pressure in so many ways, but I’m looking forward to bringing the two worlds together and seeing what happens.

      Are the Vault dates the first outing for the show or have you been testing it out elsewhere?

      I’ve tested out bits and pieces at poetry nights and at a brilliant scratch night called Scratch Meet in Brighton, which I highly recommend. To be honest I did it to get my friends off my back about writing the piece in full, but the response was great – I think that’s because so many people have worked in hospitality over the years, which makes it highly relatable.

      And as the show is about hospitality, when you are a big star of the stage what would you like included in your own rider?

      Hahaha! I’m not sure… sparkling water? Whatever it was, I’d thank the person who brought it to me effusively.

      Thanks to Lia for taking time out of her day to chat to us. Crying into Bins plays at Vault Festival on 11, 12 and 18 February, at 3.10pm each day. More information and bookings can be found here.

      You can also keep up to date with Lia and hear about forthcoming shows via her Twitter account here. More

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      in Theater

      At Under the Radar, Family Histories Bubble Up With No Easy Answers

      by

      The Public Theater’s experimental theater festival is back in person for the first time since 2020. Here, our critics review a second selection of the works on display.‘Otto Frank’Through Sunday. Running time: 1 hour.It’s unnerving how seldom Otto Frank blinks in Roger Guenveur Smith’s hourlong “Otto Frank.” But then why would he? Having for 35 years tended the posthumous flame of his murdered daughter Anne — while doing the same for her sister and mother and six million others — Otto might well have had to force himself to keep seeing.You may need to blink, though. Not because the story Smith tells in his crushing, exhausting monologue, part of the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival, can come as a surprise. Anne’s diary, prepared for publication by Otto in 1947, has been outsold among nonfiction books, Smith tells us, only by the Bible. It was adapted for Broadway in 1955, and Hollywood in 1959.Yet we have rarely been asked, as we are here, to view the horror through a double tragic lens. Watching Smith inhabit Otto and endure his unrelenting memories feels like watching someone die in pain — and then keep dying over and over.That must be what Smith is going for. As has often been the case in his earlier monologues — about Huey Newton, Bob Marley and Rodney King, among others — he does not settle for dry narration. In lightly rhymed, intensely poetic cadences that sometimes spill into a kind of keening song (the live sound design is by Marc Anthony Thompson), he instead reaches out from history to make broader connections, beyond territory and time.Beyond race and religion, too. References to “the congregations in Charleston and Pittsburgh and Christchurch and Poway” mix synagogue shootings with murders in a mosque and a Black church. Otto also mourns enslaved Africans who were “marched to their death” during “the great middle passage” and name-checks massacres in Bosnia, Rwanda, Wounded Knee and Tulsa. (“Otto Frank” will be performed at the Oklahoma City Repertory Theater Jan. 27-28.) He even suggests that Anne “would be proud” of “the young American woman in a hard hat” — Bree Newsome Bass — who in 2020 climbed a flagpole in Columbia, S.C., to remove its confederate flag.Comparing atrocities (and braveries) is a tricky business, and the entire project of dramatizing the Holocaust is fraught with problems of scale. As was also the case with Tom Stoppard’s Broadway hit “Leopoldstadt,” I sometimes felt in “Otto Frank” that the names of the camps and the litanies of loss were being dragooned into dramatic service illegitimately. That doesn’t invalidate the sincerity and even the occasional beauty of the effort. But what Smith apparently felt forced to see sometimes made me want to look away. JESSE GREEN‘KLII’Through Sunday. Running time: 65 minutes.Drawing on works including Patrice Lumumba’s Congolese independence address, Kaneza Schaal evokes King Leopold II, the Belgian monarch who brutally reigned over the Congo Free State in the late 19th century.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs audience members take their seats for Kaneza Schaal’s “KLII,” they are offered bars of soap with which they can wash their hands in water buckets. Schaal is already onstage, sitting on a luxurious throne-like chair in the semi-darkness. A long beard spreads to the top of her red-and-gold uniform jacket. The figure she is evoking is King Leopold II, the Belgian monarch who, in the late 19th century, owned the Congo Free State (what is now, for the most part, the Democratic Republic of Congo).This dimly lit, moody prelude is quietly unsettling — quite a theatrical feat since nothing much is happening.Eventually, Schaal climbs a steep metal ladder to part-declaim, part-lip-sync a speech. This part of “KLII,” before the show makes a sharp turn in terms of artistic approach and content, is cobbled together from sources like Mark Twain’s satirical “King Leopold’s Soliloquy,” from 1905, and a 1960 address from the independence leader Patrice Lumumba, but Camila Ortiz and Ian Askew’s sound is so blurred by industrial-strength reverb and booming echo that little besides stray words and sentences emerge from the sonic murk. There is something Leni Riefenstahl-esque about the vision of a despot authoritatively spouting unintelligible — either by design or accident — verbiage, but a little goes a long way, and the scene overstays its welcome.After climbing down from her perch, Schaal, who conceived “KLII” and directed it with the designer Christopher Myers, takes off her makeup — literally wiping Leopold off her face — and tells us, in a conversational voice now free of distortion, about her young daughter’s passion for “Fiddler on the Roof.” Other topics in that monologue (which is credited to Myers) include a brief on what happened when soap manufacturers transitioned from animal fat to palm oil and a peek at her family history with the tale of her Grandpa Murara, who fled Rwanda and opened a guesthouse in Burundi.In a note, Schaal describes “KLII” as “an exorcism, in theater.” This implies a certain amount of release, but even in its intimate, more directly autobiographical second half, the show does not deliver, or even aim for, easy catharsis.Avoiding the obvious is to be commended, but Schaal does not connect the dots into a convincing whole. “KLII” is most effective on a purely aesthetic, visceral level, down to small details that linger, like the cups of hibiscus tea that are handed to theatergoers on their way out. Printed inside the cups is a hand, which feels like a symbol of extended hospitality, until you remember that Leopold would casually order Congolese folks’ limbs to be hacked off. ELISABETH VINCENTELLI‘Our Country’Through Sunday. Running time: 65 minutes.Annie Saunders carries Jesse Saler, who plays her brother in the semi-autobiographical “Our Country,” which probes Wild West myths about freedom and the erosion of a sense of national identity.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn the canon of dramatic siblinghood, Antigone may be the most heroic sister. A mythic rebel drawn by Sophocles, she risks her life to bury her disgraced dead brother, an enemy of the state.The experimental writer-performer Annie Saunders does not dispute the bravery of that act of devotion. But in “Our Country,” a somewhat ungainly examination of Saunders’s bond with and duty toward her own legally beleaguered younger brother, she suggests there might be another way of looking at Antigone’s self-sacrifice.“I just wonder, has it ever occurred to anybody that maybe that was not her job?” she says. “Like maybe she could have just lived her life?”Saunders, who created “Our Country” with its director, Becca Wolff, knows it isn’t that simple — that love, a shared past and the pull of familial obligation can conspire otherwise. When the age gap between siblings is wide enough, as it is between her and her brother, Rafe (Jesse Saler), the older one has memories stretching back to the younger’s arrival.“When you were a baby I took you for show and tell, when you were born,” Saunders says. “Did you know that?”“‘This is my brother. Everybody line up and pet him,’” Rafe says, teasing her gently, disarmingly.“Our Country,” at the Public Theater, takes much of its dialogue from recordings that Saunders made, with her brother’s consent, of conversations between them. She, a Los Angeles artist, tries to understand him, an anti-establishment, pro-gun, Northern California marijuana farmer with a checkered legal past cleaned up by clever attorneys. Now he’s “in hotter water than usual,” she says: facing charges that might put him in prison. She’s been asked, by their lawyer mother, to write a letter in support of him.“Do you concede that you are having a particularly Caucasian experience of our criminal justice system?” Saunders asks, and Rafe pushes her off her high horse immediately.“Would you like to talk about privilege now in your play?” he says.On Nina Caussa’s rustic set, the siblings assemble a giant play fort — a patchwork tent whose awning stretches over the first rows of the audience. Sister and brother talk and tussle, their physicality almost balletic as Saunders, who is smaller than Saler, repeatedly carries him, though sometimes it’s the other way around. (Movement direction is by Jess Williams.)As the title suggests, “Our Country” means to be about more than one pair of siblings. Saunders and Wolff are also poking at Wild West myths about freedom, and at the widening chasm where some semblance of national identity used to be.Inside the fort, recollections of family history vary. Maybe, it seems, that longed-for collective past was partly imagined even at the time. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES More