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      ‘Demons’ Review: Grief Is the Thing with Red Fur

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      A family processes its bereavement in the midst of a demonic haunting in Keelay Gipson’s new play for Bushwick Starr.When Danily, a red-furred, purple-lipped beast, appears onstage, his giant eyelids fluttering and huge maw flapping, he is irresistibly adorable, like something from Jim Henson’s dreams.And did I mention he’s a demon?In “Demons,” presented by Bushwick Starr at the Connelly Theater, a family grieving the recent death of its complicated patriarch becomes the target of a haunting by a puppet ghoul, the unexpected star of an otherwise disorderly production.The story begins when a family gathers for a funeral. The loud, combative Sissy (Paige Gilbert) and her brother, the reserved Bubba (Donell James Foreman), are home, their respective partners in tow, to tend to their God-fearing mother (Gayle Samuels) and to mourn their late father. Mama and Sissy are always fighting, and Bubba is forced to swallow his mother’s homophobia, even in front of his partner (Ashton Muñiz). To top it off, Bubba must also contend with the death of a father who never recognized his son’s queer identity.The play, written by Keelay Gipson, who also directs, is divided into five parts, based on the stages of grief. Each section consists of three scenes, showing the relatives chatting, watching TV, playing spades, all while struggling to communicate their real feelings to one another. When the family’s unspoken secrets come out into the open, our demon appears to exacerbate the conflicts, watching with a pair of glowing eyes in the dark, or pulling poltergeist-like shenanigans during a late-night TV session.You could say Danily is more human than the human characters around him (the fantastic puppet design is by Cedwan Hooks, and Jon Riddleberger directs the puppetry). Because otherwise, Gipson’s two-dimensional direction leaves the cast’s performances transparent. Mama, as the stern but loving matriarch, is a stock character, and Sissy is written unsympathetically and almost exclusively speaks in the tenor of a whine. Sissy and Bubba’s partners aren’t even named.Minjoo Kim’s lighting design, however, is impressive, from the angular splash of light strewn over white roses in a vase to the hazy spotlight over a character’s face replicating the glow of a TV set.But other production elements muddle rather than clarify the storytelling. The set design, by Yu Shibagaki, with its black-and-white floral couches and slate-gray textured walls, works for a funeral parlor, but it can’t pull off doubling as Mama’s home. And the television switches between channels depicting “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” “Labyrinth,” a trailer for the 2001 movie “Kingdom Come” and then later a “Real Housewives” special, seeming to intentionally nod to several different decades and making the setting unclear.By the end, at least one character has faced his demons, literal and figurative. As for the play, much still bedevils it.DemonsThrough June 3 at the Connelly Theater, Manhattan; thebushwickstarr.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Arian Moayed Plays Creepy Men for Thoughtful Reasons

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      In roles in HBO’s “Succession” and “A Doll’s House” on Broadway, politics are never far from mind for the Iranian American actor.The actor Arian Moayed has an old passport photo that he usually keeps in his wallet: a black-and-white image of a small, darling boy with big dark eyes, wearing a whimsical sweater.We had been talking for nearly 90 minutes when he mentioned it. I’d asked if he remembered anything from his earliest childhood, in Iran in the 1980s.“The thing that I remember the most is fear,” he said. “The feeling of fear. Everywhere.”Then he told me about the picture. It’s him at 5 or so, shortly before his family immigrated to the United States in 1986. He described the look on his face — “real angry” — and his memory of sitting for the photo: how his mother, her hijab slipping, kept urging him in vain to smile.“And on the car ride back,” he said, “I told my mom that I thought that the camera was a gun and I was at a firing range. Because in Iran, on television, they would be showing public executions in the news.”So. The little guy in the sweater, trying to be brave, thought he was about to be shot.At 43, Moayed is a million miles from the fraught reality of that frightened child. He is widely known to fans of the HBO drama “Succession” for his recurring role as Stewy Hosseini, Kendall Roy’s old friend. And he is currently starring on Broadway as the ultra-controlling husband Torvald Helmer in “A Doll’s House,” opposite Jessica Chastain as Nora, the wife who walks out the door.Jessica Chastain, left, as Nora and Moayed as her ultra-controlling husband, Torvald, in “A Doll’s House” at the Hudson Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesStill, Moayed likes to keep the photo close.“I always want to remind myself that this is where it all came from,” he said.It was late April when we spoke at the Hudson Theater, on West 44th Street in Manhattan, and the show’s six Tony Award nominations were yet to come — the one for him, for best featured actor in a play, his second. His first was for his Broadway debut, as a sweet Iraqi topiary artist turned wartime translator, opposite Robin Williams in “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo” in 2011.Moayed’s Torvald could not be more different. A lawyer tapped to run a bank, he micromanages his wife, monitoring what she eats and spends. At once chilling and comical, he speaks to Nora in a voice soft as a cat’s paw, muscles and claws hidden just beneath the fur. He does not take her seriously as an adult human being, ever, yet he seems totally unaware of his own fragile vanity. He is the kind of man it is dangerous to laugh at, because ridicule infuriates him.It is an insidiously knowing portrayal of one of the great terrible husbands of the stage. But Moayed, who grew up in a suburb of Chicago and spent most of his career pigeonholed into Middle Eastern roles, hadn’t been sure he wanted to play Torvald at all.“I had no relationship with ‘A Doll’s House,’” he said. “When I moved to the city in 2002, the only roles available for me were being an ensemble member in some sort of Shakespeare regional theater thing, or playing a terrorist. ‘A Doll’s House’ and Ibsen was like: Oh, that is a category of things that’s never going to happen for me.”The British director Jamie Lloyd had other ideas. After seeing Moayed in “Bengal Tiger,” he noticed him over the years consistently giving standout performances — as the scheming Stewy in “Succession,” of course, but also in YouTube clips of the Off Broadway two-hander “Guards at the Taj” (Moayed won an Obie for that, in 2016), and in the film “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” as Peter Parker’s enemy Agent Cleary.“I had no relationship with ‘A Doll’s House,’” Moayed said. “When I moved to the city in 2002, the only roles available for me were being an ensemble member in some sort of Shakespeare regional theater thing, or playing a terrorist.”Erik Tanner for The New York TimesGearing up to stage Amy Herzog’s “A Doll’s House” adaptation on Broadway, Lloyd spotted Moayed on a list of possible actors for a different role, but sensed that he was “more of a Torvald than anything.”“My feeling was that he’s clearly someone who doesn’t mind being unlikable,” Lloyd said by phone. “Because he knows that there’s a reason for it. And he’s so compelling as these unlikable characters.”What initially intrigued Moayed about this version of “A Doll’s House” was Herzog, whose short play — “Gina From Yoga Two, Is That Your Boyfriend?” — he’d acted in at the Off Broadway incubator Ars Nova in 2010. Like Torvald, his character in that play was a species of creep, though in an interview Herzog described Moayed as “the menschiest person” and “definitely the furthest cry from the actual Torvald that you could find.”“His feminism is not a posture,” she said.When Lloyd asked her opinion of casting Moayed, she added, “I just knew, I knew he could do it.”What swayed Moayed about the role was the metaphor that leaped out at him from Herzog’s script. When he first read it last autumn, he was flying from Budapest, where he had been shooting a movie, to Berlin, where he was attending a protest against the Iranian government’s repression of women and girls — part of a movement led by Iranian women and girls.The story of Nora, freeing herself from the gilded cage of her marriage to a profoundly self-centered man, reverberated with him on a societal level.“I’m reading it, and all I see in this play is Iran,” he said.Aside from his stage work, Moayed is widely known to fans of the HBO drama “Succession” for his recurring role as Stewy Hosseini, an old friend of Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong, right).Peter Kramer/HBOMoayed stopped in London for a chemistry meeting with Lloyd, and they took a long walk through the city, where an Iranian protest was happening in Trafalgar Square. Moayed recalled saying that he didn’t want to play Torvald as a “chest-out” chauvinist, someone who would physically threaten his wife.“If you see that onstage, it’s very easy for a male to be like, ‘Well, that’s not me,’” he said.What interested him was subtler: investigating what he called “the micro cuts” that men inflict on women — in Torvald’s case, while cooing adoringly.“If you show humanistic qualities,” Moayed said, “you get a lot of people to look at it and be like, ‘Oh, I wonder if I do that.’”For the audience, the production can work on multiple levels: as a wake-up call for unwitting misogynists, as a catalyst for breakups, as an echo of awful exes. And, based on what Moayed has heard from Iranian friends and family, also as the metaphor he perceived.The parallel is so clear to his mother, he said, that she is convinced — albeit mistakenly, Lloyd confirmed — that his being Iranian is why he got the job.Moayed was born in 1980, the year after the Iranian Revolution ousted a secular, autocratic government and ushered in a theocracy. His oldest brother Amir was already in Illinois, and when Moayed’s family joined him there in 1986, his other brother Omid came along. But their beloved sister, Homeira, who had taken care of young Arian in Iran, had married there. It took 17 years to bring her over.Moayed’s initial interest in acting may have come from noticing how much his parents, middle-aged newcomers to a strange country, laughed at the classic Hollywood films they introduced him to, like Charlie Chaplin comedies and “Singin’ in the Rain.”“Subconsciously, I think I was trying to mimic that and just release a little bit of the tension that was inside of that traum—” He stopped himself before he finished the word. Then: “Well, it was traumatic. But that turmoil that was those first 10 years or so.”Moayed didn’t want to play Torvald as a “chest-out” chauvinist. “If you see that onstage, it’s very easy for a male to be like, ‘Well, that’s not me,’” he said.Erik Tanner for The New York TimesStewy, Moayed’s loose-cannon capitalist in “Succession” — a performance that got him an Emmy Award nomination last year — is also of Iranian descent. Early on, Moayed and Jesse Armstrong, the series’ creator, talked about which wave of immigrants Stewy’s family might belong to. Moayed, whose father was a banker in Iran, preferred his own.“I said, I think they came in the ’80s, which means that he came under duress, lost a lot of money,” he said. “I just like that trajectory, that Stewy climbed the ranks real fast. And was good at it, and went to a bunch of fancy private schools, got in somehow and became friends with Kendall, and then the rest is history.”Both Stewy and Torvald are centrally concerned with money and the acquisition of it. Moayed, in contrast, is intrinsically political. Around 2006, he decided that he wouldn’t play terrorists — insalubriously for his bank account in the heyday of “Homeland” and “24.”He believes passionately in the notion of artist as citizen, and in using art to “move the needle forward,” as he likes to say. For him, that applies to teaching and making theater with Waterwell, the New York City arts nonprofit he co-founded in 2002, but also to acting in shows like “A Doll’s House” and “Succession” — a series that, he said, demonstrates “how capitalism really is skewed and there shouldn’t be a few people that own all that money.”His perspective would come as a surprise to the finance-bro Stewy fans who, encountering Moayed in the real world, frequently, fruitlessly invite him to do cocaine with them.He is not that person — even if Stewy is the character who shook up casting directors’ perception that Moayed should play only Middle Easterners and humorless, heavy drama. A whole spectrum of creepy-guy roles has opened up to him, Torvald among them.He does get to channel his inner mensch, though, in the new Nicole Holofcener movie, “You Hurt My Feelings,” as he also did in “The Humans,” a hit on Broadway in 2016.But if Moayed could do something as an actor that he’s never had a chance to? He would dip into a genre he loves, ideally with his “A Doll’s House” co-star.“Jessica and I, we’re both like, ‘We should do a romantic comedy together,’” he said.His favorite is “When Harry Met Sally,” but he’s thinking more along the lines of “Romancing the Stone.”“A romantic comedy adventure,” he said, “would be some real friggin’ fun.” More

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      Review: In ‘Bees & Honey,’ Love Is Both Sweet and Sticky

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      In this play by Guadalís Del Carmen, a couple’s shared heritage is integral to their meeting and the ups and downs of their daily relationship.What draws two lovers together may be more obvious than what keeps them in sync. An inviting smile and smooth opening line can pierce the noise of a crowded club, but then what? In the case of “Bees & Honey,” which opened at MCC Theater on Monday, eyes lock and hips swivel to the plucky guitar and eight-count beat of bachata.This Dominican style of music and dance, with its sensual cadence and professions of heartache, is a foundational metaphor in this boy-meets-girl two-hander by the playwright Guadalís Del Carmen. After falling into step on a steamy night out, Johaira (Maribel Martinez) and Manuel (Xavier Pacheco) they begin a duet that soon finds them sharing an apartment in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan.She is a district attorney who ascends the ranks to prosecute high-profile cases; he’s a mechanic with plans to expand his auto-repair shop across the five boroughs.By the next scene they’re navigating the rhythms of a long-term romance. immersed in the tenor and flavors of their Afro-Dominican backgrounds. Instinctively, they sometimes slip into Spanish, teasing and rooting for each other as their lives continue to intertwine.The slice-of-life naturalism of “Bees & Honey,” presented in partnership with the Sol Project, is more interested in capturing culturally specific detail than in breaking ground with an original plot. The churn of daily ins and outs in this staging by the director Melissa Crespo, on a catalog-colorful living room set by the designer Shoko Kambara, has a familiar sitcom quality. And nearly every story development reflects an inevitable truism (sex lives dwindle, women get pregnant, elders require care). For a marital drama that runs two hours including an intermission, it feels light on substance and surprise.But what’s distinctive about Johaira and Manuel, and how their syncopation thrives and falters, is the texture of their shared heritage. Del Carmen skirts the edges of stereotype in underlining qualities variously associated with Dominican men and women, but ultimately succeeds in creating believable, if conventional, characters. Del Carmen betrays a heavy hand in how Johaira compels Manuel to read bell hooks, as an antidote to his inherited machismo. That she prosecutes sexual assault cases in court adds synthetic emotional fuel to the play’s highest-stakes climax, which happens offstage to people we never meet.Still, the ease and electricity between Martinez and Pacheco, whose performances deepen as the union predictably grows more complicated, lend the production a sticky-sweet appeal. Johaira is by turns headstrong, soft and a stranger to herself, inner tensions that Martinez embodies with luminous transparency. And Pacheco’s Manuel is spring-loaded with empathy and eroticism, reflexively attentive and affectionate, ready to respond to the slightest provocation. They seem to gibe perfectly until they don’t. So what happened? As Johaira says of dancing bachata: “You lose your footing and the moment is gone.”Bees & HoneyThrough June 11 at MCC Theater, Manhattan; mcctheater.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      Onstage in ‘An American Tail,’ a Family’s Jewishness Comes to the Fore

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      The Children’s Theater Company production, based on the animated film, elevates the depiction of its characters’ religious and ethnic backgrounds.The 1986 animated feature film “An American Tail” begins with a mouse family, the Mousekewitzes, forced to flee their home after men on horseback (and accompanying cats) set fire to their village in Russia in 1885. They travel to the United States, because, Papa sings, “there are no cats in America, and the streets are paved with cheese!”At the time, some critics said the film didn’t render the family’s Jewish background sufficiently. In his review, Roger Ebert complained that “only a few children will understand or care that the Mousekewitzes are Jewish.”In a new stage adaptation of that film at the Children’s Theater Company in Minneapolis, there is no mistaking the Mousekewitzes’ background. The show begins with them chanting the Hebrew blessing for Hanukkah as a menorah is lit. They recite two other Hebrew prayers. There is talk of a “bar mouse-vah” for the protagonist, the young Fievel.The musical also enhances the representation of the story’s Irish and Italian mice and adds mice from Sweden, China and the Caribbean. The female lead, an Irish mouse in the film, is now a Black mouse who quotes “the great Frederick Dormouse.” (Murine puns abound.)Like other recent historical shows, “An American Tail” sought to prioritize authentic depictions of each character, whether that was racial, ethnic or religious. The show’s creators felt it was important to dive deeper into the Mousekewitzes’ Jewishness and encompass other groups in order to reflect the contemporary understanding that Americans’ identities are not subsumed into a larger one.Luverne Seifert, left, with Lillian Hochman and Matthew Woody as the Jewish mouse family. The director, Taibi Magar, described wanting to “tell a deeper, richer, more truthful story.”Glen Stubbe Photography“We do have different experiences, and it shapes us differently,” said Itamar Moses, who wrote the show’s book and co-wrote the lyrics to roughly a dozen original songs. (A few were retained from the film, including “Somewhere Out There,” Fievel’s song of yearning that became a hit for Linda Ronstadt and James Ingram.) “The only way a diverse democracy can work is through both acknowledging and honoring our differences.”Jewishness and antisemitism are also foregrounded in several recent plays and musicals, including “Leopoldstadt,” which follows a family of Jewish Austrians before World War II; “Parade,” which tells the story behind the 1915 lynching of a Jew in Georgia; and “Just for Us,” about attending white nationalist gatherings in Queens.For “An American Tail,” the artists and the dramaturg, Talvin Wilks, sought to represent the different groups who resided in the close quarters of downtown Manhattan — for that is where the Mousekewitzes arrive — in the 1880s.“The story that came out in 1986 was not fully reflective of all the immigrant populations that were there and were intrinsic to making New York City what it is,” Taibi Magar, the director, said. “Is it about being woke? Yeah, sure. But it’s also about telling a deeper, richer, more truthful story.”The concept for “An American Tail” originated with one of its executive producers, Steven Spielberg, and the hero bears the name of Spielberg’s grandfather. By extolling the melting pot theory, the film, directed by Don Bluth, embodied its era’s attitude toward multiculturalism: that immigrant groups would abandon their individual cultures in an effort to assimilate.“They didn’t want to double down too much on the particularity of Fievel’s ethnicity, because I think they wanted to keep the story as relatable, as universal, as possible,” said Jonathan Krasner, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University.The decision to adapt the film for the stage arose from a conversation between Peter C. Brosius, the C.T.C.’s longtime artistic director, and Universal, which produced the film. It did not hurt that C.T.C., a past recipient of the regional theater Tony Award, has routinely produced shows that have traveled around the country. “A Year With Frog and Toad,” first produced by C.T.C., made its way to Broadway in 2003 and was nominated for three Tonys.The C.T.C. matched the songwriting partners Michael Mahler and Alan Schmuckler (who wrote the music and lyrics for the C.T.C. musical “Diary of a Wimpy Kid”) with Moses (a Tony winner for “The Band’s Visit”), and in 2018 they first met to begin developing the story.Becca Hart as Digit, a cockroach, with ensemble members in the show.Glen Stubbe PhotographyIn the movie, Fievel is separated from his family on the perilous voyage across the Atlantic Ocean, and ends up in one misadventure after another after he arrives in New York. When a varied assortment of mice fight a gang of cats known as the Mott Street Maulers, they are eventually — thanks to a scheme Fievel comes up with — driven onto a boat headed far away.“There was an opportunity to understand the points of view of these different groups of mice, why it’s difficult for them to come together, and have Fievel be the reason that they do,” Moses said.“What do the cats represent?” Moses continued. “In Russia they’re the Cossacks, in Italy they’re the Mafia. They get to America, and the cats have a scheme for exploiting the mice for their labor.”To bring the story to life onstage, the creators turned to vaudeville, which was coming into its own at the time and place of Fievel’s adventures. They built a small set and cast 20 actors, several of whom double roles. A six-piece band backs the company on 16 songs.In both the movie and musical, the cats are defeated and the Mousekewitzes reunited. Yet the musical adds a weighty finale, “There Will Always Be Cats,” which supersedes the earlier hope of no cats with an argument for solidarity in the face of eternal oppression — feline or otherwise. “An American Tail,” a positive review in The Minneapolis Star Tribune said, “offers a peephole into a past that doesn’t seem so far away.”During rehearsals this spring, the show’s musical director, Andrea Grody, hosted the writers and crew for a Passover Seder — a ritual whose message of sympathizing with less privileged forebears is echoed in the final number.“If we’re not careful,” Moses said, “we can become the cats by not remembering what our ancestors went through.” More

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      James de Jongh, Who Put Stories of Slavery Onstage, Dies at 80

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      His play “Do Lord Remember Me,” constructed from interviews with formerly enslaved people in the 1930s, was first staged in 1978 and has been revived multiple times since.James de Jongh, a scholar and playwright best known for fashioning oral histories left by formerly enslaved people in the 1930s into “Do Lord Remember Me,” a 1978 stage work that painted an unflinching picture of the human cost of slavery, died on May 5 in the Bronx. He was 80.Robert deJongh Jr., a nephew, said the cause was cardiac arrest.Professor de Jongh was a longtime member of the English department faculty at City College and the City University of New York Graduate Center, where he specialized in African American literature and the literatures of the African diaspora. But briefly in his early career he had been an actor, and he continued to maintain an interest in the theater. In 1975, together with Carles Cleveland, he wrote his first play — “Hail Hail the Gangs!” — about a Black teenager who joins a Harlem gang.“I wanted to go in a completely different direction for the second play,” he told the public-access cable channel Manhattan Neighborhood Network in a recent interview.He was drawn to a book called “The Negro in Virginia,” a collection of interviews with formerly enslaved people started by the Federal Writers’ Project, part of the Works Progress Administration under the New Deal, and completed in 1940 by the Virginia Writers’ Project. At first, he said, his idea was to construct a fictional story using that material as background, but as he delved further into archives of interviews at the Smithsonian Institution and elsewhere, his thinking changed.“Many of them were quite eloquent, were quite moving, were quite touching, and some of them were in, really, the voices of the people themselves,” he said. “In other words, the interviewers had actually recorded word for word, rather than simply summarizing the content of what they said. And those words were striking.”He realized that he could create a play made primarily of the recollections of the men and women who had experienced slavery firsthand, augmented by the words of Nat Turner, the leader of an 1831 slave rebellion, and by some gospel and work songs. The result was “Do Lord Remember Me,” which premiered in 1978 at the New Federal Theater on East Third Street in Manhattan, with a cast that included Frances Foster, a leading actress of the day.“The play, strongly felt and single-minded, has an impact far greater than one would receive from reading historical documents,” Mel Gussow wrote in his review for The New York Times. “The seven actors, portraying slave owners as well as slaves, transport us, showing us the auction block in our nation’s past — when people were a commodity for speculation — linking arms and embracing a collective consciousness.”Ebony Jo-Ann and Glynn Turman in the American Place Theater production of “Do Lord Remember Me” in 1982.Bert Andrews, via The New Federal TheaterA revised version was staged in 1982 at the American Place Theater in Midtown, with a cast that included Ebony Jo-Ann and Glynn Turman. In a fresh review, Mr. Gussow called it “a moving evocation of shared servitude.”The play, which has been restaged a number of times over the decades, has dashes of humor and a theme of triumphing over adversity. But it is also blunt in its language and its depiction of the cruelties of slavery, the kind of historical realism that is being erased from educational curriculums in some schools and libraries today. In one scene, a woman shares the back story of her facial disfigurement: As a child, she was punished for taking a peppermint stick by having her head placed beneath the rocker of a rocking chair and crushed.In the interview with Manhattan Neighborhood Network, Professor de Jongh said that although he was not a particularly religious man, he saw creating the play as a sort of calling.“Somehow, I felt I had a task,” he said, “and the task had found me.”James Laurence de Jongh was born on Sept. 23, 1942, in Charlotte Amalie on the island of St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. His father, Percy, was the commissioner of finance for the government of the Virgin Islands, and his mother, Mavis E. (Bentlage) de Jongh, was an assistant director for the U.S. Customs Service and ran a poultry farm and plant store.Professor de Jongh attended Saints Peter & Paul Catholic School on St. Thomas and then Williams College in Massachusetts, where he appeared in theatrical productions and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1964. He received a master’s degree from Yale in 1967 and a Ph.D. from New York University in 1983.Professor de Jongh continued to act for a time after his days at Williams College, but teaching was his vocation beginning in 1969, when he spent a year as an instructor at Rutgers University. The next year he joined the CUNY faculty; he remained there for decades and added the Graduate Center to his portfolio in 1990. He took emeritus status in 2011.Professor de Jongh wrote numerous academic articles on Black theater, the art scene in Harlem and related subjects, and in 1990, he published a scholarly book, “Vicious Modernism: Black Harlem and the Literary Imagination.” He also served on the board of the New Federal Theater, whose current artistic director, Elizabeth Van Dyke, called him “a quiet, gracious powerhouse.”Professor de Jongh, who lived in the Bronx, leaves no immediate survivors.The 1982 production of “Do Lord Remember Me” was also presented to inmates at Rikers Island — according to news accounts, it was the first complete professional production staged at the prison. Professor de Jongh attended and found the inmates more boisterous than traditional theatergoers.“There was an element of risk in the entire situation,” he told The Times that year. “The audience reacted with anger as well as humor. It was not just a play about remembering — their own freedom was circumscribed.” More

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      ‘The Fears’ Review: Group Therapy Was Never More Triggering

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      For the fragile souls in this new play, presented by Steven Soderbergh, a Buddhist group that once offered them solace loses its way.“This is the weather … and we’re just in it,” says Maia, the facilitator of a Buddhist trauma group at the center of Emma Sheanshang’s new play, “The Fears.” She’s talking about the mood in the room — a small, underwhelming one with mismatched office chairs set around a low wooden table — where she and six others regularly meet to talk through storms of rage, sorrow and panic. Or at least try to: interpersonal conflicts, clashing neuroses and a falling domino effect of triggers cause more breakdowns than breakthroughs, until even the group’s philosophical foundation starts to fall apart.From the first scene of this intriguing but lacking play, presented by the filmmaker Steven Soderbergh at the Pershing Square Signature Center, we get a clear window into the characters’ personalities. Dan Algrant’s direction is precise and telling, particularly in the entrances. Thea (Kerry Bishé), the newbie, drifts in skeptically. Rosa (Natalie Woolams-Torres), a stickler for rules, bustles in authoritatively. Fiz (Mehran Khaghani, comical even as a gay stereotype) bursts in with a declarative flourish, while the measured Suzanne (Robyn Peterson), always at odds with Fiz, strolls by demurely. Maia (Maddie Corman), overdressed in multiple layers, flutters in like a light breeze, and Mark (a stiff Carl Hendrick Louis) arrives late, flustered and eager. Katie (a painfully fragile Jess Gabor), a young goth, rushes in last, and withdraws into herself.Each person’s trauma is either explicitly spelled out, or hinted at through their individual triggers, which help explain, for example, why Fiz’s sister is a touchy subject, or why Thea has an encyclopedic knowledge of every traumatic event the world has endured.Sheanshang’s depiction of spiritualism has a satirical bite, with Maia’s performative shows of empathy — purrs and “mms” of affirmation — and the group members’ rigorous policing of one another’s responses, which is more about control than about support. But sometimes it seems as if “The Fears” is targeting Buddhism rather than the derivative school of thought — developed by a revered yet unseen male figure — practiced by the group. And the use of the characters’ quirks as punch lines verges on cruel (especially because several were victims of childhood sexual abuse) and undercuts the show’s emotional resonance.And so much of the story is about these characters trying to build a safe space within the room, within their practice, in order to find comfort in themselves. But the world keeps barging in (thanks to Jane Shaw’s stunning sound design): construction noise and shouting strangers seep in from outside the window, and there’s the sound of people chatting elsewhere in the Buddhist center.“The Fears” opts for a pat ending, and never makes a clear judgment on whether these broken souls can save one another or whether they are ultimately on their own. The questions at the center of its conceit remain unanswered: Are we all doomed to lives in which we barely manage our fears but instead let them rule us? Or is fear what draws out the most precious parts of ourselves?The FearsThrough July 9 at the Signature Theater, Manhattan; thefearsplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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      ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ Onstage, Lacks Some Intensity

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      A new West End adaptation, starring Lucas Hedges and Mike Faist, recasts Annie Proulx’s 1997 short story as a memory play.“This ain’t no little thing,” Jack Twist (Mike Faist) says of the depth of attraction he is experiencing in “Brokeback Mountain.”But the rodeo cowboy could equally be referring to the ongoing life of Annie Proulx’s celebrated short story. First seen on the pages of The New Yorker in 1997, Proulx’s distilled account of a tragically foreshortened affair has been an Oscar-winning film, an opera and now a self-described play-with-music.This latest iteration opened Thursday night in the @sohoplace theater in the West End, where it is scheduled to run through Aug. 12, offering a passing glimpse of some powerfully familiar characters. The bare bones of the narrative are there; the dramatically necessary flesh and blood and sinew are not.I was pleased to renew my acquaintanceship with the gregarious Jack and the more indrawn, troubled Ennis del Mar (Lucas Hedges), the two men who begin a furtive relationship in 1963 while herding sheep in the rural Wyoming locale of the title.But I’m not sure that the American writer Ashley Robinson’s adaptation actually deepens our understanding of material that many will inevitably associate with Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger in a lauded movie that lasts a good 45 minutes longer than the play (Jonathan Butterell’s atmospheric production clocks in at 90 minutes, no intermission).In the production, the Scottish singer-songwriter Eddi Reader performs original songs by Dan Gillespie Sells to give voice to the characters’ emotions. Manuel HarlanTold piecemeal across 20 years, the play comes punctuated with an attractive sequence of original songs by Dan Gillespie Sells, the English musician with whom Butterell collaborated on the (very sweet) homegrown stage and screen musical, “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie.”The seductive country twang of his music is punchily delivered here by the Scottish singer-songwriter Eddi Reader and an ace band visible at the side of the stage: look closely and you’ll see the pedal steel guitarist B.J. Cole, who has worked with Elton John and Joan Armatrading, among others.The music exists to express emotions to which the men, and the women they marry, are reluctant to give voice outright. Reader, billed as the Balladeer, is granted an articulacy missing from the characters nearby onstage who live in their bodies and not their minds.A standout number, “Sharing Your Heart,” comes at the point at which Ennis’s wife, Alma (a sympathetic Emily Fairn), realizes that her husband’s lasting affections lie elsewhere. In a separate track, lyrics describe “the lavender sky,” which a film can easily depict but which here has to be taken on faith. Tom Pye’s evocative set keeps closer to the ground, bringing to life kitchens, campfires and the tent inside which Ennis and Jack first allow themselves to be intimate.Alma (Emily Fairn) and her husband, Ennis, onstage.Manuel HarlanThe two seek shelter from the cold only to find further comfort in each other’s arms, and the tent shakes on cue to signal the carnal activity going on within it. What we don’t get, beyond stolen kisses, is the layered unfolding of a relationship with an intensity that takes the pair by surprise, so movingly evoked in both the original story and the film.It’s one thing for Jack to look on, clearly intrigued, near the start of the play as Ennis washes himself. But the writing is too synoptic and the action too abbreviated to allow the full weight of what is happening between them to be felt.“I ain’t no queer,” Ennis says early on, eager to disavow the feelings that will come to consume his life. What’s missing is time properly spent in the pair’s company, so that we feel the ebb and flow of this impossible romance. As it is, we get a sequence of highlights, a seeming annotation of the play rather than the thing itself, with the advancing years indicated by the ages of Ennis’s two daughters and Jack’s son. Mentions of the Vietnam War and the draft offer a perfunctory nod to the wider world beyond.Onscreen, of course, you can age up the actors on the way to the story’s bleak conclusion. The innovation here is to recast the story as a memory play, with the Older Ennis (a grieving Paul Hickey) on hand throughout to show the continued impact of Jack upon Ennis. The effect, at least for me, was to cast a glance back to Sam Shepard’s “Fool For Love,” another play about a combustible relationship defined by a character named solely as The Old Man.The two leads, in their West End debuts, acquit themselves well given the formidable challenge posed by their screen forbears. Hedges may not have the immediate physical command that Ledger had onscreen, but he shares his late predecessor’s furrowed brow and a sense of roiling anguish at society’s intolerance, and to some degree his own. This is someone who will never know peace.And Faist, so memorably springy and vital as Riff in the Steven Spielberg remake of “West Side Story,” is really wonderful: engaging and likable from the start, only to reach a psychic abyss on the way to Jack’s signature comment to Ennis: “I wish I knew how to quit you.” Pausing to play a mean harmonica, Faist more than justifies a play that can otherwise feel a tad superfluous.You may or may not weep at this “Brokeback” — I did not — but just as Jack is to Ennis, I expect Faist’s performance will be impossible to forget.Brokeback MountainThrough Aug. 12 at @sohoplace in London; sohoplace.org More

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      Our Theater is Fighting About Diversity. Who’s Right?

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      The magazine’s Ethicist columnist on how to cast an upcoming rendition of “Fiddler on the Roof.”I am involved with a well-regarded community theater that has made significant efforts to diversify its membership, casts and audience. A conflict has arisen over a proposed production of “Fiddler on the Roof.” (Yes, we know, “Fiddler” has been done to death in community theaters. A different issue.) The director proposing the production has committed himself to colorblind casting. Others involved say that, in view of the Jewish community the play is about, they would consider this to be a cultural appropriation. How should we approach this conflict in values? — Name WithheldFrom the Ethicist:“Cultural appropriation” is like one of those discarded medical diagnoses — throat distemper, the vapors — that derive from now-discredited theories, even though they were often applied to genuine ailments. As I’ve argued before, the habit of reducing the complexities of identity and culture to a matter of ownership is an artifact of our own property-rights-obsessed culture. We’ll do better to talk about “disrespect,” and disrespect isn’t the issue here. Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, the Jewish American duo behind “Fiddler,” certainly weren’t hung up on anything like cultural appropriation; early on, they were in touch with Frank Sinatra for the part of Tevye, and a previous musical of theirs centered on a crusading Christian clergyman.Still, readers will have noticed that controversies over casting — in filmed as well as live entertainment — have become commonplace. They enact a seeming clash between two ethical ideals. So it might be worth taking the time to get a clearer sense of the plot here.On the one hand, there’s a concern to create opportunities for nonwhite performers. Why shouldn’t Black people get to play Hamlet as well as Othello? On the other hand, people have asked for more demographic specificity in representation, often invoking authenticity. This approach — which rightly deplores, say, the old Hollywood tradition of whitewashing Asian roles — encompasses “color-conscious” casting and more, so that an Asian role belongs to an Asian actor, a lesbian role to a lesbian actor, a trans role to a trans actor. By the “mixing” logic of nontraditional casting, the performer’s identity doesn’t matter. By this “matching” logic of authenticity, a performer’s identity matters a lot.Each approach can uphold the value of inclusion, and each may present complications. Nontraditional casting can conjure fun imaginative spaces, modeling a world free of racism and, indeed, race. But casting for a colorblind utopia can be a problem when your aim is to depict racial injustice. The authenticity promised by the matching model, meanwhile, often implies that people who belong to superbroad categories of humanity are interchangeable. This talk of authenticity doesn’t explain why it’s a nonissue when a character of Chinese ancestry is played by an actor of Indonesian ancestry or, indeed, when an Ashanti character, from Ghana, somehow speaks like a Yoruba, from Nigeria.Nontraditional casting is of particular value where there’s a tradition to be bucked; familiar works or historical episodes can be experienced in fresh ways. I love that an open-access approach toward the classics has long been common, including in the amateur realm. In high school, I was cast as the menacing Goldberg in Harold Pinter’s 1957 play, “The Birthday Party.” (“Mazel tov! And may we only meet at simchas!”) It was relevant that the play had already been staged countless times; for variety’s sake, it was easy to discount a performer’s ancestry or age.There’s a useful analogy, speaking of Goldberg variations, in the “historically informed performance” movement in music. It’s a gift to be able to hear baroque works performed with original instruments, hewing to ornamentation styles thought to be characteristic of the period. But who would limit themselves to “authentic” performances of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations — and thus miss the marimba player Pius Cheung’s rendition? Within the realm of musical performance, happily, pluralism reigns.That’s the attitude to take with your “Fiddler.” When a show has been done to death, the task is to bring it to life, so that, in Bock’s own words, it’s “as if the audience were seeing it for the first time.” The truth is that this musical is a piece of American culture, not of shtetl culture; any appropriation was in the making of it in the first place.Mix or match? It depends on the particular ambitions of particular stagings. The ethical error is to suppose only one model is right. If the audience can get over the fact that the people on your musical stage are constantly dancing and bursting into song — as, sadly, people seldom do in real life — it can get over the fact that they might not actually look like villagers from the Pale of Settlement. If you have confidence in your director, let him fiddle with “Fiddler” as he prefers.A Bonus QuestionMy wife drinks heavily, to the point that she often repeats herself while drinking and forgets whole evenings. She already has high blood pressure, probably from drinking. She has a routine exam with a doctor soon. I know that she is not honest with her doctor about how much she drinks or her memory issues. I would like to express my concerns to her doctor, but I know it would anger my wife. What do you think? — Name WithheldFrom the Ethicist:You should express your concerns to your wife in a supportive way, and encourage her to be honest with her doctor. You might get helpful guidance in this by attending a support group for families affected by alcoholism. But the main guidance I have is negative: Inserting yourself into this doctor-patient relationship isn’t the way to go.Readers RespondThe previous column’s question was from a reader who had adopted a dog with her former partner. After their breakup, they agreed she would keep the dog since she was a veterinarian and the dog had various health issues. They also agreed her ex would be allowed to visit the dog. She wrote: “I have since started dating someone new, and he doesn’t like my ex spending time with the dog. I am at a loss about what to do.”In his response, the Ethicist noted: “You made an agreement with your ex about the dog, and though such agreements aren’t beyond renegotiation, you’re right to think that your word should have weight. What’s more, when you are starting a new relationship, it’s important to be clear about boundaries. I would be careful about just giving into your current partner. You’re worried about upsetting him. Equally, shouldn’t he worry about upsetting you?” (Reread the full question and answer here.)⬥A new partner putting up a fuss about honoring an important pre-existing commitment is an enormous red flag. The new partner’s behavior may seem innocuous now, but it is a classic sign of possessiveness that is likely to manifest in worse ways as the relationship progresses. The writer should seriously reconsider the speed with which she is investing in the new relationship. — Megan⬥A secure and healthy relationship allows one to maintain healthy contact with other people. The letter writer should decide what she prefers to do in this situation and see what happens when she makes a choice that goes against her new boyfriend’s wishes. His reaction will reveal everything she needs to know about their possible future together. — Stefanie⬥The Ethicist gave the correct response, but he didn’t state it strongly enough: This new guy is waving a giant red flag. He is asking you to break your word; go against your values (clearly you think of the dog as family deserving family visitation while he thinks of the dog as property) and he is demonstrating marked insecurity. I’m also a vet, and I have plenty of clients who share visitation. It’s unnecessarily cruel to cut off this contact — both to the dog and to the ex. — Maureen⬥Boundaries are definitely the key here. In addition to the boundaries around the new boyfriend controlling who visits her dog, it would also be appropriate to set boundaries with the ex around when he can visit. And clearly explaining to him that she has a new boyfriend may also eliminate the possibility that he’s hanging out with the dog in hopes that you two will get back together. — Brooke⬥I have been in this exact situation, and I loved the Ethicist’s response about boundaries. I was clear with my new boyfriend that I didn’t feel any tie or connection to my ex, but that the ex loved our dogs and allowing him visitation gave me a break and a trusted dog sitter. It was important to me to keep a promise I’d made. That my new boyfriend made this an issue was a big red flag, and I later ended up breaking up with him. — Molly More