Theater

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. — The woman behind me was talking about her memories of McCarthyism, and I assumed she must be speaking of her childhood.But as I eavesdropped before the show at the New Brunswick Performing Arts Center, I heard her mention that she was 94. She had never liked the red-baiting Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, she said. She had been a fan, though, of his colleague and adversary Margaret Chase Smith.“Conscience,” Joe DiPietro’s new comic drama, displays a similar allegiance in recounting the fraught events of seven decades ago. A timely boxing match of a history play, it stars a deliciously piquant Harriet Harris as Smith, the principled, moderate, junior senator from Maine who in 1950 publicly stood up to McCarthy when most of their fellow Republicans were too cowed.In David Saint’s George Street Playhouse production, “Conscience” portrays Smith — the first woman elected to both houses of Congress and, at the time of the play, the only female senator — as a dry-witted hero with the rare courage to take on a lying bully who is sowing chaos, ruining reputations and threatening the very fabric of the nation.Assorted parallels to contemporary politics are there for the drawing, should you be so inclined.The fun of the play is partly in Smith’s withering contempt for the junior senator from Wisconsin — “the scoundrel Joe McCarthy,” she calls him. Also, given his incessant drinking: “an idiotic lush.”“He’s like the worst boy you went to high school with,” she marvels to her indispensable aide, William Lewis Jr. (Mark Junek).Smith and Lewis make a formidable, deeply sympathetic team. They are well matched by McCarthy — played by Lee Sellars as a sort of East-Coast-meets-Texas boor, without a whisper of Wisconsin to him — and his ruthlessly loyal young researcher, Jean Kerr (Cathryn Wake), who will become his wife.But DiPietro (“Memphis”), whose new musical “Diana” is in previews on Broadway, and Saint, George Street’s artistic director, haven’t figured out how to use Smith’s extraordinary “Declaration of Conscience” speech, which calls out McCarthy without ever naming him. Its delivery on the Senate floor is the climax of Act I.The address is fueled by righteous passion (“I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny — Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear,” Smith says), yet the abridged version here is a moment of witness, not drama. The tension and dread that are meant to rise do not.With Smith’s challenge thrown down, though, McCarthy in the second act is hellbent on her destruction, threatening to expose not only her secrets (her congressman husband was chronically unfaithful and died of syphilis) but also Lewis’s (he is gay and closeted). Frightened though Smith is, she is even more outraged that so many others knuckle under to McCarthy’s blatant thuggery.Smith went on to have a far longer career than McCarthy, and twice as long a life; for all the damage he wrought, he spent only a decade in the Senate and didn’t live to see 50. The play makes a point of the brevity of his terrorizing reign.It is acutely alert, too, to the egregious sexism that Smith and other women endured just to do their jobs. The exposition, though, is occasionally clumsy, as when Kerr expresses surprise at running into Smith in a regular women’s restroom at the Senate.“I just assumed you’d be in a senator’s washroom,” Kerr says, but would a whip-smart female staffer think that, really, when there wasn’t even a tiny one for female senators until the 1990s?Still, when Kerr mentions that Smith is being floated as a possible vice-presidential nominee, the senator speaks the stubborn Catch-22 out loud. Even if she were interested, Smith says, “it would be, well, unladylike for me to say so.”As programming for Women’s History Month, then, “Conscience” makes a lot of sense.Oddly, however, the deliberate male-female balance we see onstage is absent from the show’s creative team. Playwright, director, designers — all men. It’s as if the play’s lesson on gender equality weren’t applicable to the workplace that is professional theater.Yet it is. And when the creative team you’re assembling scores worse on female membership than the U.S. Senate in 1950, you might want to check your conscience.ConscienceThrough March 29 at the New Brunswick Performing Arts Center, New Brunswick, N.J.; 732-246-7717, georgestreetplayhouse.org. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. More

The work of translation that is theater — scripted dialogue and scored music transcribed via performance, design and direction — is tricky. That’s even more so when the original material is already a work in translation. Case in point: the Culture Project’s unsteady production of “About Love,” which awkwardly wrestles “First Love,” a novella by the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev, to the stage of the Sheen Center.Peter (Jeffrey Kringer), a 16-year-old vacationing with his parents in the Russian countryside, encounters the mesmerizing 21-year-old Zina (Silvia Bond). Trailed by a herd of male admirers, she is staying with her mother, a snuff-sniffing princess beleaguered by debts, in the shabby cottage next door. Peter spends the summer vying with other suitors for Zina’s attention, but soon discovers that her affections lie elsewhere. When he learns the truth, he reflects on the emotional hurly-burly of love and the injury of his first heartbreak.In his script, Will Pomerantz, who also directs, sticks to the plot but struggles to capture the most intriguing aspects of the novella.Taken alone, Turgenev’s story isn’t exactly awe-inspiring. But his similes and syntax — sentences that build tension through accumulation, creating a messy sense of overflow — conjure the tempestuousness of a teenage love.“My blood was in a ferment within me, my heart was full of longing, sweetly and foolishly; I was all expectancy and wonder; I was tremulous and waiting; my fancy fluttered and circled about the same images like martins round a bell-tower at dawn; I dreamed and was sad and sometimes cried,” reads one passage in the translation by Isaiah Berlin.In “About Love,” such sentiments are dimmed and ironed out: “I remember feeling the blood rushing through my veins, and I was often in a strange melancholy, which felt both delightful and absurd,” Peter announces.In a self-conscious touch that ultimately proves scattered, his and many other pieces of narration hot-potato from actor to actor as they crisscross the stage. Pomerantz may be attempting to shake up the written work, but the gesture is more gimmicky than complex. (At least Brian C. Staton’s stage design, a wooden-planked platform with a smattering of old furniture and trunks of dead birches littered around the space, doesn’t overstate itself.)Billed as “a play with songs and music” rather than a full-fledged musical, the production, with a cast of six plus four musicians, seems to want to have its Russian tea cake and eat it too. The six numbers, with music by Nancy Harrow, are short, more appetizers than entrees. A somber, trilling violin speaks to the Russian setting, but Harrow mashes up the Motherland with the Big Easy, abruptly inserting jazz-inspired numbers as well.[embedded content]Kringer’s Peter, adorable if a bit hokey in his youthfulness, has a fittingly romantic voice. Jazz may suit her character’s temperament, but Bond’s tidy rendition of “A Little Blue” lacks swing and swell.Otherwise, she is magnetic in the role: persuasive, mercurial and occasionally cruel. Dan Domingues, who appears both as a gruff Lurch-like butler and a wise doctor also courting Zina, is another standout.“What an exciting girl that Zinochka is!” Gustav Flaubert wrote in a letter to Turgenev, responding to the love object in the novella. “About Love,” by contrast, is mostly earnest. Something has been lost in translation.About LoveThrough March 22 at the Sheen Center for Thought & Culture, Manhattan; 212-925-2812, sheencenter.org. Running time: 1 hours 35 minutes. More

The scene is a staple of Broadway: After a show ends, its most ardent fans gather at the stage door, hoping for an autograph, an Instagrammable photo, or even a conversation with their favorite star.But this week, facing a widening coronavirus outbreak that threatens public health in New York and around the world, the theater industry’s leaders said they wanted to put a stop to the practice.“We are highly recommending that all stage door activities be eliminated for the time being,” the Broadway League, a trade organization representing producers and theater owners, said on Tuesday.The step is the latest in a series of actions the theater business has taken to keep its plays and musicals running while also protecting public health.Broadway, a hallmark New York industry that drew 14.8 million patrons and grossed $1.8 billion last season, is vulnerable to economic damage from the outbreak for multiple reasons: Its audience skews older, and older people seem especially vulnerable to this virus; its audience is heavily made up of tourists, and travel is drying up; and its events involve large numbers of people packed into tight spaces — a situation risky enough that it is being banned in some countries. On Wednesday, the owners of two theaters said that a part-time usher who worked for them had tested positive for the virus. No other worker had fallen ill, but the owners asked audience members and employees who were present at the same performances to monitor their health.Broadway’s leaders say they are determined to keep their theaters open if at all possible, and anticipate that they would collectively close only if ordered to do so by a government agency. That is not unthinkable: Some performance venues have been closed in Austria, Germany and Italy, among other places.On Thursday, Mayor Bill de Blasio said he was trying to avoid closing theaters, but also said they might need to cut down on audience size if they wanted to stay open.“What we’re trying to figure out is if there a way to reduce the capacity, reduce the number of people?” the mayor said on CNN. “If we cannot strike that balance, of course we can go to closure.”The scene at stage doors Tuesday night showed just how hard even small changes can be. At some shows — Disney’s “Frozen” and “The Lion King,” for example — theater employees made clear there would be no more stage dooring. But at other theaters, some actors obliged waiting fans.Outside the Shubert Theater, where “To Kill a Mockingbird” is playing, Ed Harris, the star who plays Atticus Finch, made a hasty exit with a wave to the crowd. But Nick Robinson, who plays Jem Finch, stayed to accept hugs, and stood in close, arms around shoulders, for pictures with a last handful of well-wishers. More

SHAKESPEARE IN A DIVIDED AMERICAWhat His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and FutureBy James ShapiroAmerica is massive. Shakespeare is massive. When two such cultural hyper-objects meet, they’re bound to create a black hole strong enough to suck in and warp just about anything around them. James Shapiro analyzes the effects of their collision in his terrific new book, “Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future.” If Jill Lepore and the late Tony Judt had collaborated, this taut, swift and insightful tract might have been the offspring. Yet Shapiro’s subtitle is misleading: His subject is us, the U.S., not Shakespeare plays. If you’re worried about the current state of the Republic, this is a book that will stoke your fears — while educating you on why you might justifiably be having them.Shapiro is already a master of creating Shakespeare treats for the literate common reader. His “1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare” and “Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?” are as entertaining as any nonfiction of recent years. Now he’s outdone himself — no surprise, given his qualifications for this new volume. He not only teaches English and comparative literature at Columbia, he serves on the board of directors of the Royal Shakespeare Company and is the Shakespeare scholar in residence at the Public Theater in New York. He also edited the comprehensive “Shakespeare in America” anthology. Here, his combined scholarship and theatrical experience help him examine — brilliantly — the notorious 2017 “Julius Caesar” in Central Park, in which a Donald Trump look-alike as Caesar was assassinated nightly to fierce outrage from the political right.Did you know there was an epidemic of men spanking women in movies in the decade after 1938? That young, pre-bearded Ulysses S. Grant was cast as Desdemona in an Army production of “Othello” and rehearsed but never went on because of what amounted to homosexual panic among the producing officers in a national manliness crisis? Did you know that Steve Bannon wrote a screenplay for a sci-fi “Titus Andronicus” as well as an alt-right “Coriolanus”? (Neither was produced.) That Abraham Lincoln’s favorite play was “Macbeth,” one that helped secure the reputation of John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s own Macbeth-to-be? It’s all here and much more.Each of the book’s eight chapters centers on a year with a different thematic focus. “1833: Miscegenation” examines contemporaneous reactions to “Othello,” almost all racist, some wildly screwy, like a female Shakespeare scholar’s attempt to prove that Othello was, as she effused, “a white man!” “1849: Class Warfare” provides a blistering account of New York’s deadly Astor Place riots, demonstrations against the English actor William Macready that were fueled by rising economic inequality and nationalistic fervor. When police forces fired into a massed crowd, more than 20 people died and dozens were wounded.“1916: Immigration” shows how Caliban got used as a token in arguments about assimilation at a moment when racism was intensified by support from fake “science” and the United States was closing its borders. The chapter details, among other things, wacky efforts to make Shakespeare into an American. Why not? Wasn’t he an “Anglo-Saxon,” like all true Americans? One Charles Mills Gayley of Berkeley published a popular book in 1917 arguing that Shakespeare should “be considered one of the founders of liberty in America” because of his connection to a “liberal faction” of Elizabethan capitalists. In an earlier poem, Gayley had saluted Shakespeare as “Born of the Mayflower, born of Virginia.” Such buffoons litter the book.In “1948: Marriage,” “Kiss Me, Kate” goes under Shapiro’s lens. The story of how Bella Spewack, the main book writer, wrestled the oft-reviled “Taming of the Shrew” into a musical, how the show shadowed gender-role preoccupations of the time, and how the change from the ’40s to the ’50s caused the politically bold Broadway show to be tamed for the Hollywood movie provides cultural history at its most diverting.The 1998 chapter is worth the price of the book alone. Examining American anxieties about adultery and same-sex love, it chronicles how “Shakespeare in Love,” originally a progressive script written by Marc Norman, got rewritten by Tom Stoppard so that elements of Shakespearean homosexuality, bisexuality and marital infidelity were fudged. Ironically, Stoppard had been hired to soften such areas by the producer Harvey Weinstein, the moral paragon with decades of alleged sexual assault and now a rape conviction behind him. We watch Weinstein trying to massage the film into a template of his own relationships with women by leaving its heroine as now-successful Will’s piece on the side. (Instead, she goes to America, of course.) As a bonus we’re privy to a “cringe-inducing” Stoppard skit at Miramax’s pre-Oscar party. Juicy? But to the point? Hell, yes.We meet a character of truly Shakespearean contradictions in John Quincy Adams, who plays the lead in the 1833 chapter on racial mixing. “Recognized as one of the leading abolitionists in the land” and a victim of death threats for his views, Adams nonetheless went into print twice to express at length his horror at the mere idea that a white woman, Desdemona, might fall for a black man. Indeed, he thought she got her just deserts by being murdered for it.It’s in the final chapter, “2017: Left | Right,” on the Public Theater’s Trump-as-Julius-Caesar production, where Shapiro really soars, analyzing the pitfalls of applying contemporary politics to a famously double-edged play. With “Julius Caesar,” Shakespeare strewed ambiguities like tacks on a highway, creating a play designed to multiply and complicate our responses. How are we to take Caesar? Or Brutus, or Cassius? If you don’t like Trump and Caesar is Trump, do you actually approve of seeing him butchered?When right-wing media screamed about the production (and why wouldn’t they? or shouldn’t they?), the Public realized it had set off a firestorm for which it was unprepared. A Shakespeare play is not a political statement, it’s a mosh pit of subjectivities, and here the audience was expected to sit back and rationally parse a theatrical Rorschach blot. This “Left | Right” chapter will feed annals of the Trump era a hundred years from now — if after the wildfires and the rising oceans anyone’s still here to write them.Shapiro’s book is history, but not past history. It’s ongoing and all too painfully still-relevant history. As he bounces back and forth between 1833 or 1916 and today, the similarities between Then and Now overwhelm the differences and Shapiro’s title resonates anew, reminding us how divided we’ve been since our very beginnings, with historical-tragical constantly muscling out pastoral-comical. Ultimately there rises the familiar suspicion that, for a country in love with the future, it’s always yesterday in America.Among all the fine words currently being spilled examining the American mess, James Shapiro has outshone many of our best political pundits with this superb contribution to the discourse. He upped the wattage simply by bouncing his spotlight off a playwright 400 years dead who yet again turns out to be, somehow, us. More

On his first date with Anita, Billy cooked tuna and noodles — not the suavest choice of entree, especially since he loaded it with mayonnaise.“It was terrible,” she reminisces on their anniversary, half a lifetime later. “The worst meal I ever had.”As she speaks, he recreates that dinner in their kitchen in Tucson, Ariz., where a vase of red roses adorns the table, lit by a single candle. But Billy is alone, Anita keeping him company by phone. Trapped on the other side of the U.S. border with Mexico, she is unable to get home to him and their children.It has been this way for many months, and if the government ever lets Anita back in, it won’t be for years. So they celebrate their marriage long distance, the easy intimacy of their conversation full of comfort and yearning. When she cajoles Billy into dancing with her, he dances with his phone.They are such ordinary people with such unremarkable dreams. And if Hilary Bettis’s “72 Miles to Go…” is a quiet, conventional drama with a penchant for endearingly cornball humor, that suits the story of a family that wants more than anything to blend in, to live regular American lives. The play’s poignancy lies in how mercilessly difficult that is, and how precarious for all of them.Billy and Anita first met in the desert — he an Arizonan out with his church group, bringing water to migrants, she a Mexican fleeing danger with her little boy, Christian, who will grow up not knowing Spanish and having no idea that he isn’t an American citizen like Eva and Aaron, the children Billy and Anita have together.Directed by Jo Bonney at Roundabout Theater Company’s Laura Pels Theater, “72 Miles” is not about the recent crisis at the border, or not directly anyway. Unfolding from 2008 to the spring of 2016, it encompasses a time of cautious optimism for young people like Christian, who called this country home and hoped the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy would allow them to stay.In the character breakdown in the script, Bettis (“Alligator”) describes each family member other than Anita as either Chicana or Chicano — an American of Mexican descent. This play is about various ways of being American, with or without the documentation to prove it.It is also about carrying a low-level fear inside you all the time, a worry that the authorities are coming for you, or your brother, or your mother. And about the pain of having to live without the physical presence of someone you need, someone who is 72 miles, one phone call and a world away.So there is teenage Eva (Jacqueline Guillén), bursting into tears on a prom night gone wrong, wanting so badly the solace of her mother (Maria Elena Ramirez), but having only her sweetly bumbling father (a terrifically winning Triney Sandoval) to drive her home.There is Eva’s little brother, Aaron (Tyler Alvarez), morphing from a tender, kindhearted boy into a man with a military-macho carapace. And there is her big brother, Christian (Bobby Moreno), stalked by terror that his life will disintegrate — that his American wife and the American family they made will have to do without him.Moreno is a fine actor, but Christian, when we first meet him, is just 23. Moreno, who is married to Bettis, looks at least a decade older — a distraction that makes you wonder how old Christian was when he got here and how he could have been pre-verbal then. It also throws off the intended dynamic between him and his siblings, particularly in a scene that dips into sentiment, calling back to the blanket forts and hot strawberry milk of their shared childhood.That moment, like a too-prophetic line that Billy speaks in early 2016 (“With a new president on the horizon, who knows what the laws will look like”), is an indulgence in a play that is otherwise thoughtful and restrained. Its power is in its simplicity, and in the vividly average Americanness of its characters.To its credit, “72 Miles” doesn’t go where you might think it will, but it does eventually bring us to Anita, with her family, in the flesh. And if that reunion is staged a little awkwardly, we are nonetheless awfully glad to see her. Over the phone, we’ve grown to know her voice so well.72 Miles To Go…Through May 3 at the Laura Pels Theater, Manhattan; 212-719-1300, roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

In the search for stories that have not been told before, the playwright Celine Song has turned up a good one: The lives of the haenyeos, or sea women, of Korea.These are “free” divers — they use no tanks or scuba gear — who for centuries have scraped together a living by harvesting seafood from the waters off a small island at the tip of the Korean Peninsula. A few thousand are still at it, and if they survive the sharks and the whirlpools and the bends, they may continue diving deep into old age.Still, the three (fictional) haenyeos in Song’s play “Endlings,” which opened on Monday at New York Theater Workshop, see themselves as the end of their line; hence the title. But so, it seems, does Song, who in trying to broaden the scope of her tale makes tenuous connections between the “last mermaids” of her native country and her own plight as an immigrant playwright. Living on another small island — Manhattan — she is, like the haenyeos, swimming between worlds.These two aspects of “Endlings” unfortunately feel like separate works, both worthy but neither complete. And the director Sammi Cannold’s two-tone production — which had its debut last year at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass. — only emphasizes the separation. The haenyeos are introduced during the first 20 minutes of the 90-minute play as if they were the subjects of a dopey documentary from the 1950s: “These proud matriarchs earn a living and provide for their families,” a disembodied announcer explains.The tone remains coolly presentational and mildly satirical even as the women speak for themselves. Sook Ja (Jo Yang), the youngest at 78, is “the fun one,” still primping in hopes of attracting sea creatures or perhaps the ghost of her long-dead husband. At 83, Go Min (Emily Kuroda) is the ferocious one, having been beaten by her own long-dead husband and beating their children in turn. “What do you do with them if you don’t beat them?” she asks with a shrug. The philosophical one, Han Sol (Wai Ching Ho), 96, has no answers, living only for television. “Hollywood forever,” she says, improbably.Into this diorama-like depiction of their habits and habitat — the wet suits, the plunges, the nets of abalone and seaweed — the playwright herself eventually wanders, or an obvious stand-in for her named Ha Young. A playwright herself, Ha Young (Jiehae Park) is in the midst of a theatrical crisis involving this very play, whose composition and especially completion have proved especially difficult.Like Song, Ha Young has previously found success writing what she calls “white plays”: the kind, often involving people talking on a couch, in which nationality and race are not pressing concerns. (Song’s “Tom & Eliza,” seen in New York in 2016, seems to be a model.) But having been “bribed” by the hungry attention of white sponsors to write about the “old Korean female divers,” she is drawn into the conundrum of identity as commodity. “I don’t want to sell my skin for theater,” she says — but she doesn’t want to ignore her skin either.Expressing that real and wrenching conflict through drama has long been a rite of passage for writers from all kinds of marginalized communities. But Song subverts her argument by pushing it too hard. At one point, Ha Young and her husband — who wears a sign around his neck that reads “WHITE HUSBAND (also a playwright)” — attend a “white play” so deliberately bad that its satire sails right past whatever mark it was meant to hit. “I white perceive something that white upsets me,” goes a typical line of its dialogue.That this “white play” is depicted as a production of New York Theater Workshop is a complicated meta-jab. Song has noted that most of the playwrights in her personal pantheon — Brecht, Beckett, Albee, Shawn — are white men. Is she mocking her work as unworthy of theirs? Or is she mocking theirs in order to make room for something more authentically hers?Maybe both, but it’s hard to say. As “Endlings” alternates between the young playwright’s self-absorption and the old divers’ self-abnegation, the tone eventually spirals into surrealism.The design team — especially Jason Sherwood (sets) and Linda Cho (costumes) — gives us haunting underwater vignettes involving a giant turtle and declaiming clams. The haenyeos swim by as if exhibits in an aquarium. Pretty as this may be, it takes us further from the facts of both stories; Song’s frantic attempts to hustle between them eventually give the play a bad case of the dramaturgical bends.That’s a shame, because the haenyeos, whose traditional role at the center of a matriarchal society goes unexplored, could have been more than prompts for a personal essay. As it is, they are mostly a subject in search of a theme — a theme the playwright never convincingly harvests from a sea that does not easily give up its treasures.EndlingsTickets Through March 29 at New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan; 212-460-5475, nytw.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

Love is a beautiful liar in “Unknown Soldier,” Daniel Goldstein and Michael Friedman’s gentle musical reverie on the deceptions of Eros and memory. Old-fashioned, mellifluous songs of courtship and marital bliss float beguilingly through Trip Cullman’s carefully assembled production, which opened at Playwrights Horizons on Monday night.But even at their prettiest, the songs in this multigenerational family portrait seem tainted by suspicion, a sense that the sweetness they extol could dissolve into nothingness, melting “like sugar into water,” as a recurring lyric has it. As for the beloved, those cherished beings who elicit all that enchanted poetry, can you really say you know them, once they’re gone from your sight?Such reflections of the elusiveness — and illusiveness — of human identity have acquired an unexpected and unwelcome poignancy since “Unknown Soldier” was first staged at the Williamstown Theater Festival, in Williamstown, Mass., in 2015. Only two years later, Friedman, its protean composer, died at 41 of complications from AIDS.As a consequence, it’s difficult not to see — and particularly hear — this show without perceiving it as a memorial to the man who wrote its music. A character sings hopefully in the opening scene that when we see a picture, or hear a song or read a letter, “a person that’s forgotten comes alive for a moment.” And every note that’s sounded here inevitably both summons Friedman’s presence and makes us all the more aware of his absence.To regard “Unknown Soldier” primarily as a sentimental work, however, is a disservice to the complexity of this imperfect musical and, above all, to Friedman as a songwriter. Built around the quest to identify the amnesiac World War I veteran of its title, the show celebrates the urge to fully know other people — in the present as well as in the past.But it is also steeped in a rueful awareness that such attempts are doomed to fail. Friedman has matched that sensibility here with songs that slide from lilting, gaslight-era melodiousness into a jagged, more contemporary anxiety.The plot is a multilevel, armchair detective story. At its center is Ellen Rabinowitz (Margo Seibert), an obstetrician who has returned to her childhood home in Troy, N.Y., after the death of Lucy, the grandmother who raised her (the incomparable Estelle Parsons, who turns out to be a creditable singer).At a crossroads in her marriage and career, Ellen finds herself obsessed with a past that Lucy never talked about much. An old newspaper clipping, showing Lucy as a young woman with a mysterious man in uniform, inspires Ellen to do some investigative digging. Most of this is done online, with the assistance of Andrew Hoffman (Erik Lochtefeld), a Cornell University librarian, with whom she initiates an email flirtation.A cavalcade of ghosts haunts the premises as well. They include Ellen’s 7-year-old self (a charmingly unaffected Zoe Glick), and the dewy young version of her grandmother, Lucy (the silver-voiced Kerstin Anderson).Then there’s the soldier in that photograph (Perry Sherman, impeccably blank and bewildered), who, having lost his memory, was given the provisional name Francis Grand. He is treated by a psychiatric doctor (an agile and witty Thom Sesma), who, in a bonus for the audience, lectures in vaudeville pastiche numbers about the nature of recollection.As the narrative shifts between past and present, parallels emerge between the young Lucy’s love for the soldier she never really knew and the developing semi-romantic relationship between Ellen and Andrew — given persuasive, unglamorous existence by Seibert and Lochtefeld — as they hide behind their online personas. Whatever the historical period, it seems, our lovers, and would-be lovers, remain strangers.As you may have gathered, many strands of plot are being spun here, a process further complicated by the unreliability of our narrators (and implicitly, of all narrators). Sung with conviction and lucidly staged, the production manages admirably to keep confusion at bay.Still, there’s an abiding sense that the creators have taken on too many elements to fit comfortably into the show’s 90 minutes, with so much to say, in so many voices, in so little time. Even with extensive recent revisions by Goldstein and Cullman, “Unknown Soldier” somehow feels both slender and overstuffed.But there’s no denying the care that has gone into every level of the production. That includes Mark Wendland’s pale gray, institutional-looking set, presided over by a glowing clock without hands, in which packing boxes morph into twinkling streetscapes; the century-spanning costumes by Clint Ramos and Jacob A. Climer; and Ben Stanton’s lyrical lighting (with gorgeous astral projections by Lucy Mackinnon).Under the direction of Julie McBride, a five-piece band eloquently mirrors the varied musical languages Friedman uses here. He was always a chameleon composer, with work that ranges from the emo-rock satire of “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” to the R&B-inflected wistfulness of “The Fortress of Solitude.”Here, he shows a graceful fluency in both the romantic and vaudevillian styles of the World War I era, neatly matched by Patrick McCollum’s period choreography. As immaculately sung by Anderson’s young Lucy, valentines of songs subversively careen off course into darker dissonance, evoking Stephen Sondheim’s pastiche numbers for “Follies.”For the grown Ellen, he has provided a charmingly wry and understated meditation on dating, in which she reflects that “a milkshake is never a milkshake.” The music that begins the show is disarmingly flat and simple, as the 7-year-old Ellen sings a report on World War I.The limited range of notes for this just-the-facts presentation will of course prove inadequate to the questions it generates. Friedman’s music subsequently takes off into myriad different directions, which swirl affectingly in their uncertainty.When Sherman’s amnesiac Francis gropes in song for words and definitions that now elude him, the pang of the unanswerable lingers in his uncompleted sentences. At such moments, it’s impossible not to mourn the uncompleted life and career of a composer who gave such resonant voice to even the unknowable.Unknown SoldierTickets Through March 29 at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan; 212-279-4200, playwrightshorizons.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

BERLIN — The same weekend that Italy locked down much of the country’s north, fears over the coronavirus didn’t stop the sold-out premiere of Kirill S. Serebrennikov’s “Decameron” from going ahead to a full house in Berlin.It seemed somewhat ironic, given that Giovanni Boccaccio’s collection of ribald tales is set against the background of a plague outbreak in 14th-century Florence.In this staging at the Deutsches Theater, Serebrennikov swaps out the Tuscan estate of Boccaccio for a contemporary aerobics studio, and the 10 tales that unfold over the course of the production are partly updated. There’s a Wall Street tycoon, but also a king and a queen. Some of Serebrennikov’s retellings bear little resemblance to their source material.Like so much of the director’s work, the production is never less than grippingly contemporary. Beyond the gym setting, the only other main staging elements are large video panels that display German subtitles when the dialogue is in Russian, plus the contents of online chats, stock tickers, ’80-style video games and trippy projections (by Ilya Shagalov) for several freaky sex scenes.Serebrennikov is perhaps the most prominent Russian theater and opera director working today, a distinction that owes as much, if not more, to politics as it does to art.A fraud trial that he currently faces has widely been interpreted as an ultimatum on artistic freedom in today’s Russia. The director spent 20 months under house arrest before being released in April, but he remains barred from leaving Moscow, which is where he developed “Decameron” with actors from the Gogol Center, the avant-garde theater he has run there since 2012, and the Deutsches Theater. (A Moscow premiere is set for June.)The Deutsches Theater has been a staunch ally during the director’s lengthy battle with Russia’s justice system. “Decameron” was originally planned to play there in 2018, but because Serebrennikov was still under house arrest, the Gogol Center presented other works.A year later, that company returned to the Deutsches Theater with Serebrennikov’s provocative “Who Is Happy in Russia.” (Berlin will see more Serebrennikov soon, when “Outside,” which premiered at last summer’s Avignon Festival, is performed at the Schaubühne theater’s FIND festival this week.)“Decameron’s” most impressive feat is how seamlessly it integrates the mixed Russian and German cast. Of the 10 principal actors, the Deutsches Theater’s Regine Zimmermann gets to show the widest range, playing a series of inventively unfaithful wives. The production’s most magnetic presence, she deftly moves between vulnerability and confidence, giving a performance that meets the stories’ physical and emotional demands.On the Russian side, Aleksandra Revenko is the most striking performer as she uses her hard stare to play a pitiless lover or comically snap to life as a personified bot advertising a beauty product to a gullible woman.Among the men, Marcel Kohler makes the best impression as a succession of cuckolded husbands. Many of the other male performers spend the evening in various states of undress, moving to Evgeny Kulagin’s erotic, aerobics-inspired choreography and live music that runs that gamut from Bach cello suites to Nina Simone (the latter, sung by the drag performer Georgette Dee, an alluring, if unexpected, presence here).The movement and music add definition to what would otherwise be a disjointed production, but the long evening ultimately seems less than the sum of its parts. There is greater sense of arc to the two-hour-long first act, but after intermission “Decameron” starts to fizzle out, with some poignant vignettes — a group of older women sharing their love stories with the audience — seeming out of place.Serebrennikov’s point of departure seems to be that human nature is essentially unchanged from Boccaccio’s age to our own. Like those Renaissance nobles and the tales they concoct, we are still bound and chained by the same drives and obsessions.Yet while the tales themselves are full of love and sex, this adaptation puts the focus elsewhere. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the director’s recent Kafkaesque experiences, “Decameron” is most interested in exploring existential states of confinement.We are all imprisoned and quarantined by our passions and foibles. Is there a way out? This German-Russian co-production seems to suggest that artistic collaboration and exchange is our best hope.Decameron.Through April 27 at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin; deutschestheater.de. More