Theater

Where would plays go if they died? I could imagine “A Streetcar Named Desire” frolicking with “Mother Courage” in the Elysian fields, while David Mamet’s recent works would most likely be getting toasty in the underworld.But what about those that weren’t good enough for heaven, but not bad enough to deserve hell? If there is a purgatory for them, that’s surely where Tom Dulack’s “Paradise Lost” will reside.The play is inspired by John Milton’s epic poem imagining a history before history, with God and his angels waging a battle for heaven and, eventually, for the souls of Adam and Eve. But unlike Milton’s work, this is neither epic nor particularly poetic.We all know how the story went: Eve couldn’t resist the forbidden fruit, Adam followed her lead, and humanity ended up destined to feel shame and die. But Milton evoked complex inner worlds for his characters. “The mind is its own place,” he wrote, “and in itself, can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n.”In the Fellowship for Performing Arts production at Theater Row, Dulack’s paradise is reduced to pure plot.Banished from heaven, Lucifer (David Andrew Macdonald, with the gravitas of George C. Scott) and Beelzebub (Lou Liberatore, like a villainous Disney sidekick) scheme over how to ruin God’s plans.The delicious opening scene is made all the better when Alison Fraser’s Sin arrives, dressed as Lady Gaga on her way to prom. (Sydney Maresca did the imaginative costumes, which include a skirt made of hanging intestines for Sin.)The idea that villains have all the fun comes to life when Adam (Robbie Simpson) and Eve (Marina Shay) show up, to name creatures, talk about angels and praise creation. They play the first man and woman as wide-eyed blank canvases — childlike, but without the playfulness.They mostly share scenes with the archangel Gabriel (Mel Johnson Jr.) who reveals plot points we know by heart, making for quite a laborious experience. Scenes in Eden feel more lifeless than joyful in this production by a company dedicated to “producing theater from a Christian worldview to engage a diverse audience.”It’s in the especially dull moments that the eye wanders to Harry Feiner’s detailed set design, his Botticelli trees in beautiful contrast with John Narun’s rich projections. Nighttime scenes, where we watch Adam and Eve sleep, are given depth by Phil Monat’s lighting, which through its soft hues suggests divine protection.The director, Michael Parva, doesn’t stray from the flat tone of the script, giving “Paradise Lost” the feel of a school production that students were forced to attend.Paradise LostThrough March 1 at Theater Row, Manhattan; 212-239-6200, fpatheatre.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

PARIS — Can you admire a stage production if its director’s choices hardly register? In France, where directorial vision is generally considered the driving force in theater, it’s a conundrum.By local standards, the Comédie-Française debut of “Angels in America,” Tony Kushner’s epic play about the AIDS crisis in the United States, is a curious success. Onstage, a chorus of voices — including both the actors’ and the playwright’s — converge with clarity yet also seem unfiltered, as if the director had taken a back seat.Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise: The director, Arnaud Desplechin, whose background is in film, is essentially new to theater. Although he has released a dozen highly individual screen dramas since the early 1990s — including “A Christmas Tale” and last year’s “Oh Mercy!” — “Angels in America” is only his second project for the stage after a rather staid 2015 production of August Strindberg’s “Father,” also for the Comédie-Française.With its modern setting and sprawling story lines, “Angels in America” was always going to look different from “Father,” which relied on period costumes and static sets. Still, Desplechin’s reading of Kushner’s play is similarly literal. When characters wander around New York City, the city’s skyline, Central Park and the Brooklyn Bridge appear in graceless video projections. As soon as the action moves inside someone’s home, walls are dutifully wheeled in.Desplechin has little instinct for theater’s visual shortcuts and never quite finds an overall concept to tie the production together. Even the play’s fantastical apparitions don’t spark his imagination. In case the audience doesn’t realize there are angels in Kushner’s America, Desplechin spells it out: Florence Viala is lowered from the ceiling while wearing a long white robe and unwieldy wings.Add to that an abridged text, and it feels a little like watching a CliffsNotes version. Kushner’s play — in two parts, “Millennium Approaches” and “Perestroika” — typically runs to nearly eight hours. Under the Comédie-Française’s rotating repertoire system, however, productions are limited to three hours to allow for quick turnover. And instead of staging the diptych over two days, Desplechin has condensed it into one evening.From a storytelling perspective, it works. The pace precludes boredom, and the loss of Kushner’s digressions about American history won’t be felt too keenly by French viewers.The Comédie-Française is also the right environment for Desplechin’s self-effacing approach to stage direction. For much of the company’s history, directors played second fiddle to playwrights and actors. While stars of the field, including Thomas Ostermeier and Ivo van Hove, have made their house debuts in recent years, “Angels in America” harks back to a model that has its merits.For starters, it may afford the cast greater freedom: They bring a sense of individual spontaneity to the protagonists’ inner lives and contradictions. As Joe, the closeted gay Mormon, Christophe Montenez is oblivious to his own pain and that of others, including his wife, Harper (Jennifer Decker, who veers between childlike torpor and lucidity). The verbal sparring between the hateful Roy Cohn (Michel Vuillermoz, on blistering form), who hides his AIDS diagnosis, and his gay nurse, Belize (Gaël Kalimindi), isn’t just brutal: Somehow, it carves a space for empathy.Most of the characters are frustratingly complex rather than likable, and morality is far from black and white in their world. “Angels in America” paints a murkier reality, and if nothing else, Desplechin proves that the play deserves a spot in the hallowed repertoire of the Comédie-Française.While the treatment of Kushner’s “gay fantasia” remains fairly conventional, other French directors are taking more radical cues from the L.G.B.T.Q. world. Two productions currently playing in Paris — Johanny Bert’s “Hen” and Joël Pommerat’s “Tales and Legends” (“Contes et légendes”) — take gender fluidity as a starting point to bring unsettling creatures to the stage: a shape-shifting puppet, and humanoids that may be just a little too friendly.The acclaimed Pommerat, who returns to theater for the first time since his runaway 2015 hit, “Ça ira (1) Fin de Louis” (which translates roughly as “It Will Be Fine (1) End of Louis”) can’t be accused of lacking a directorial stamp. The shadowy aesthetic and self-contained vignettes of “Tales and Legends,” which had its premiere at the Théâtre de Nanterre-Amandiers, are unmistakably his, yet he also explores intriguing new ground. In the production’s world, children grow up alongside robots who act as their companions and learning aids.The result is futuristic and eerily intimate. Teenagers become highly attached to these “artificial people” and can’t let them go when adulthood nears. Flickers of emotion pass across the humanoids’ faces. And Pommerat adds another layer of illusion to these stories through the casting, since nearly all of the roles — humans and robots, adults and children — are played by adult women.Their transformation into boys is especially impressive, and allows “Tales and Legends” to take on the social roots of male violence with sensitivity.In one scene, a teacher tries to “reprogram” a group of teenagers into warriors by goading them to be bolder and angrier. Yet the audience knows he’s addressing female actors, fostering critical distance. Much like the robots, who can turn male or female at the flick of a switch, the episode shows gender stereotypes for the performance they are.Bert’s “Hen” achieves the same result without a single human actor. Presented on the small stage of Le Mouffetard, a venue specializing in puppetry, it is a witty, playful one-puppet cabaret performance. Its star character is named after a gender-neutral Swedish pronoun, and their bald head (save for a thin ponytail) is alternately attached to a feminine or masculine body from one number to the next.The distance that puppetry creates from real bodies makes it ideal to defuse any tension around sexuality, and “Hen” is painstakingly articulated by two puppeteers (Bert is one of them) who remain hidden in black clothes. Bert also sings the musical numbers, whose lyrics, while uneven, are often amusingly, bluntly sexual. There is a “Clitoris Tango,” an army of dildos of all shapes and sizes, and even a handful of introspective moments that serve to lend the character depth.Gender fluidity in “Hen” mostly means seesawing between extremes, with the puppet moving from hyper-feminine to muscleman looks, and some of the political commentary feels didactic. Still, on the night I attended, the young audience included a class of high school students who guffawed in disbelief throughout, before giving the performers a standing ovation.Sex education classes are so passé: Just take teenagers to see “Hen,” and throw in “Tales and Legends.”Angels in America. Directed by Arnaud Desplechin. Comédie-Française, through March 27.Contes et légendes. Directed by Joël Pommerat. Nanterre-Amandiers, through Feb. 16.Hen. Directed by Johanny Bert. Le Mouffetard — Théâtre des arts de la marionnette, through Feb. 8. More

Dan Hoyle, you should know, can act the pants off his characters. (Relax; that’s figurative.) In his show “Border People,” produced by Working Theater at A.R.T./New York Theaters, he hopscotches among ages, races, ethnicities and genders. His subject is boundaries, most of them national. The show takes him to either side of the United States’s northern and southern limits, with stops in the Bronx.Hoyle (“The Real Americans,” “Tings Dey Happen”) practices a loose form a documentary theater that he calls “the journalism of hanging out.” He meets people, in encounters that are sometimes planned and sometimes random, records conversations with their permission, then fashions characters and monologues from the audio. His style drifts from verbatim, but he does, he says, try to meet with his subjects again, showing them the speeches they inspired, which likely keeps him honest.At rest, Hoyle has an affable, everydude quality. Yet his voice and face are unusually plastic. He can raise and lower pitch, narrow and widen eyes and lips as each role demands. Working without props or changes of costume, he plays Jarret, a navy veteran who owns an Upper West Side juice cart and describes the “back male crisis of authenticity”; Mike, a former marine deported to Ciudad Juárez; Jawid, an Afghanistan-born high school student who follows his family to Canada; Zainab, an Iraqi woman who now lives in Amish country (“I may have hijab but at least I have cellphone and refrigerator! I’m not the weirdest one!”); and half a dozen others. If he struggles occasionally with the Middle Eastern accents, he crafts each portrait with care and occasional athleticism. As the show goes on, his nose pinks; his hair dampens.But in “Border People” the dexterous acting and deft writing tend to eclipse the larger themes, in part because those themes keep eluding Hoyle. The script feels like two plays roughly sewn together, one about external borders and another about internal, identitarian ones. With Hoyle as the thread, the work becomes increasingly self-congratulatory, a pat on the back for his empathy and cultural border crossing.“Dang,” he has a border patrol officer named Lopez say, admiringly, “you been to all types of borders.” Larry, a black janitor who lives in the South Bronx, tells him he isn’t like other white guys: “You comfortable, you got your black past, you part of the community.” Yet it’s largely that whiteness and that maleness and that United States passport that allows him to hang out in the first place. In the play, directed unobtrusively by Nicole A. Watson, Hoyle fails to reckon with this privilege or explore how it colors his interactions with others.“Border People” feels like a master class, but I’m unsure about what it’s meant to teach, other than an admiration for Hoyle’s craft. Yes, there’s a through line about shared humanity and shared desires — for safety, for respect, for love. Larry says it best: “We all one in the same.” But the solo form risks flattening individual identity into a kind of performance, which might not sit well with the characters who take ethnicity to heart. And the tidy monologues are overwhelmingly sympathetic. Hoyle has already done the work, hard or easy, of negotiating difference. What’s left for us but to sit back and applaud him?Border PeopleThrough Feb. 22 at the Gural Theater, A.R.T./New York Theaters, Manhattan; 866-811-4111, theworkingtheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

Encountering a piece of dystopian fiction, it’s always fascinating to see what an author imagines the human race will be able to do without. (If there is a human race, of course.) A few minutes into Nick Mecikalski’s timely, if somewhat by the numbers, satire “Really Really Gorgeous,” we learn that a catastrophic flood has left Washington, the entire Pacific time zone and New York City underwater.The government and media have moved to Cleveland, where the White House now stands. The new capital is surrounded by a border wall, and no unauthorized guests may enter unless they’re invited by the president.Such invitations are rare, but on the night the play begins, one is being offered to a lucky poet, like a golden ticket from Willy Wonka. Pen (Sophie Becker) is particularly proud of her poem, with a name like that who can blame her? Her partner, Mar (Amber Jaunai), isn’t much of a writer but is always there to be supportive.The two fall asleep in front of “American Idol.” (Televised music contests are one thing that hasn’t disappeared.) Pen wakes up in a panic, realizing she forgot to submit her poem. She thinks she’s still dreaming when it’s announced that Mar has won and will be going to Cleveland.The perceived betrayal, and its unspoken racial dynamic — Mar is black, and Pen is white — would have made for a compelling play on its own. Instead Mecikalski wants to cover too many hot topics in 90 minutes. The richness of detail, including digs at TV series, like “60 Minutes” and “Meet the Press,” that never cease to exist, add layers to the world but little to the plot.As we watch Mar go from prizewinner to poet laureate to an official in the chaotic government (that poets are necessary is the play’s grandest contention) Pen has ideas of her own. Believing herself the Everyman destined to correct the corruption of the elites, she intends to sneak into Cleveland and share her poetry.Presented on a small stage at the Tank, “Really Really Gorgeous” benefits from the deft directorial hand of Miranda Haymon, who showed her ability to carefully set entire universes in tiny spaces in her 2019 adaptation of Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony.”The efficient set design — two living rooms, one modest and the other modern — is by Crushed Red. Taylor Lilly’s lighting is stark and eerie, especially when it emphasizes the subtle but striking differences in Alice Tavener’s costumes.Becker brings a sincerity to Pen that makes for a delightful contrast with the aloof charm Jaunai provides Mar. A hilarious Giselle LeBleu Gant plays the Announcer, who fulfills the role of presenter on every possible occasion. The three actors populate the drowned and new worlds, seeming to multiply and appear out of nowhere.If only more of “Really Really Gorgeous” were more like its tensest scene, with Pen and Mar in a video chat: They begin looking at screens and end staring straight at each other, as if preparing for a duel.Instead the play comes to an abrupt conclusion. We are left adrift, as if waiting to find that safe spot of dry land.Really Really GorgeousThrough Feb. 9 at The Tank, Manhattan; thetanknyc.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

LOS ANGELES — The composer Matthew Aucoin began working on “Crossing,” his first opera, when he was in college. It was a work of enormous talent, exciting promise and considerable hubris: Mr. Aucoin wrote his own libretto, inventing a story about Walt Whitman’s work with wounded soldiers during the Civil War.If “Crossing” (2015) lacked “a certain kind of unity” — as Mr. Aucoin, now 29, said in a recent interview — it was still taut, intense and audacious. What would he do next?The answer came on Saturday, with the premiere of “Eurydice” at Los Angeles Opera, where it runs through Feb. 23 before traveling to the Metropolitan Opera next year. This project demanded a very different approach. Mr. Aucoin didn’t write the libretto; instead, the text was a collaboration with the playwright Sarah Ruhl, closely hewing to her 2003 play, a modern-day take on the Orpheus and Eurydice myth which tells the story from the woman’s perspective.The play is meditative and surreal, fantastical and funny. Mr. Aucoin said in the interview that he thought he needed to do remarkably little: He wanted just to “tap” the words, to release the wells of emotional undercurrents in Ms. Ruhl’s clean, simple phrases. Throughout this three-act opera, you sense Mr. Aucoin honorably striving to serve the play.He may have been overly deferential. Ms. Ruhl’s libretto called for a lighter, more enchanting score than “Crossing.” But the musical language of “Eurydice” is at times curiously tame.I liked the opera most when, during fraught episodes, the music turns jagged and dangerous. Whenever Mr. Aucoin gives vent to his liveliest voice — with hints here of Ravel, Britten and Thomas Adès — the opera takes off.I sat up every time he seemed to push the libretto aside briefly to let some gnarly, skittish music take charge, especially in the incisive performance he conducted. And the director Mary Zimmerman’s inventive production conveys the right mix of whimsical fairy tale and disturbing morality play through a simple, colorful staging, with sets by Daniel Ostling and costumes by Ana Kuzmanic.After a short, quizzical overture, we meet Orpheus and Eurydice, dressed for fun at the beach. The vivacious Eurydice (the soprano Danielle de Niese) seems smitten with the hearty Orpheus (the baritone Joshua Hopkins). Yet you soon sense her doubts. A self-absorbed — if supernaturally talented — musician, Orpheus doesn’t share her passion for books and words. When he looks distracted and Eurydice asks him what he’s thinking about, he answers: “Music.”In the opera’s boldest stroke, Mr. Aucoin, who sees Orpheus as a divided character, gives him a double. Orpheus the everyday guy — clueless if also endearing — is sung by Mr. Hopkins, with firm voice and youthful swagger. But Orpheus also has a godlike dimension, represented here by a countertenor, John Holiday, who appears in moments when Orpheus’s questing nature comes out. Eurydice doesn’t see Orpheus’s double, but panicky outbursts in the orchestra and her sputtered vocal lines suggest that she senses him.Eurydice readily accepts Orpheus’s marriage proposal. But soon after, in the underworld, we see her deceased father, a sad, reflective man who still adores his daughter. (He is sung by the mellow-voiced baritone Rod Gilfry — an old Aucoin hand, having originated the role of Whitman in “Crossing.”)He writes a letter to Eurydice, offering the fatherly advice he would have shared at the ceremony. Mr. Aucoin shows respect for the tender, charming words by setting them to somber music of lyrical pining over restless orchestral stirrings. But I wanted less reverence, and more intensity.The wedding scene is wonderful, with guests dancing to gyrating music; at one point the orchestra becomes a riot of squiggly riffs. But Eurydice is somehow dissatisfied. “I always thought there would be more interesting people at my wedding,” she says.Well, an interesting person appears: Hades, a character Mr. Aucoin clearly relished, written for high-lying tenor and sung fearlessly by Barry Banks. The god of the underworld, Hades first seems courtly, snaring Eurydice by telling her he has a letter for her from her father. Mr. Aucoin has a penchant for using the orchestra to hug vocal lines. He takes this to arresting extremes with Hades: Groups of instruments buttress, enclose, mimic and sometimes needle every syllable.Ms. de Niese, though strained at times, sang with fullness and richly expressive shadings. She was riveting — a young woman tortured with indecision — as she went off with Hades then tumbled into the underworld.The darkest element of the play and opera is how the underworld is depicted: The dead pass through a river of forgetfulness, where they lose their memories, and even language. Eurydice’s father has secretly kept possession of a pen — forbidden below — and his English. In a heartbreaking moment, the dead Eurydice arrives, holding an umbrella that has not protected her from the waters. She mistakes her beloved father for a porter.Almost every musical telling of this myth has a moment when Orpheus sings a song that so enchants the gatekeepers of the underworld that he is given permission to enter and reclaim his wife. Mr. Aucoin’s version, with Orpheus joined by his double, is more a stentorian demand that an aria of lyrical persuasion. I thought the music, for all its stern fortitude, needed more threatening fervor.The emotions of the characters are poked at throughout by a trio of bizarre figures: Little Stone (Stacey Tappan), Big Stone (Raehann Bryce-Davis) and Loud Stone (Kevin Ray). Like an irreverent Greek chorus, they laugh at human pretensions and encourage people to feel nothing. (No one gets hurt that way.) As they trade phrases and boisterously overlap, Mr. Aucoin’s music for them is aptly snide and harmonically slippery.A chorus of nearly 40 voices provides harmonic plushness and ethereal sounds during crucial episodes. But Ms. Zimmerman, with the blessing of Mr. Aucoin, keeps the chorus backstage in an effort to focus on the main characters. This seemed a major miscalculation. The choral writing added pungency to the score. And the drama, which sometimes felt static, could have benefited from the presence of witnesses onstage. Ms. Zimmerman might reconsider this before the production travels to the Met, which co-commissioned the work.When Orpheus is poised to lead his wife up to earth’s surface — agreeing not to look back as he does so — this Eurydice, her memory still fuzzy, is uncertain. Her husband is waiting, the three stones tell her. “That’s a stranger,” she answers: And when you think about it, wasn’t Orpheus, wrapped in his art, always a kind of stranger to this thoughtful woman?After she has died a second time, Eurydice writes a sisterly letter to Orpheus’s future wife, giving Ms. de Niese a poignantly fragile final aria. Mr. Aucoin’s music lifts her vocal lines while shimmering tremulously in the background. Here this still-young, extravagantly gifted composer grabbed the dramatic moment and met it with energy and originality. If only he had done so more often.EurydiceThrough Feb. 23 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles; laopera.org. More

Everyone who has helped Justin Bieber’s “Love Yourself” video rack up 1.5 billion views knows that Keone and Mari Madrid can dance. And charm. Unlike some performers married to each other, they have plenty of onscreen chemistry — his happy-go-lucky manner rubbing against her more sober guardedness. They exhibit masterly ease in the style they call West Coast urban dance, with the quick precision to register a pop song’s every beat. As choreographers, they are clever and inventive but also sweet and sincere in their storytelling.The question raised by “Beyond Babel,” which just opened an ambitious 10-week run at the Gym at Judson Church, is whether they can sustain a 100-minute dance drama.The answer, with qualifications, is yes.The story is a “Romeo and Juliet” update. Mr. and Ms. Madrid meet at a dance club and fall in love during one of those everyone-else-disappears, time-stands-still moments. He has a cocky, loyal, hot-tempered friend (the agile, rascally Mikey Ruiz). Rather than a nurse, she has a devoted sister (Selene Haro). Less easily identifiable is an initially masked character (the forceful yet decent-seeming Fabian Tucker), a tortured authority figure who hands out armbands in red and blue.By the end of the first act, the stage is divided by a fence, those with red armbands on one side, those with blue on the other. This vaguely topical obstacle is what keeps these lovers apart.The story is pretty simple, and it needs to be, because it’s told exclusively through a series of dance numbers set to borrowed pop songs. The show, conceived and directed by the Madrids along with Josh and Lyndsay Aviner of the production company Hideaway Circus, is a kind of jukebox musical without dialogue. Tracks by dozens of artists — mostly recent stuff by the likes of Billie Eilish, Chance the Rapper and Mumford & Sons, with a few throwbacks (A Tribe Called Quest, Busta Rhymes) to make Gen Xers feel at home — are shoehorned into the narrative.Many of the numbers seem stuck between advancing story or character development and delivering a knockout routine that could ace a TV dance competition. The choreography is engaging and extremely detailed; it keeps showing new ways of hitting the beat, irresistibly, while tossing off astonishing moves. But part of the detail is an acting out of lyrics, and the Madrids habitually rely on the words of the songs to put across their meanings, to both cute and clunky effect. The production has the feel of a pop concert, with the ingratiating performers dancing up the aisles and exhorting the audience to respond. (The young audience surrounding me responded enthusiastically.)Yet, despite a textbook trough at the start of the second act, the show mostly flows — sometimes in advanced patterns, pausing to enter a character’s mind for a number, then rewinding to pick up the tale. Although the story tilts tragic (as in the Shakespeare template, people die), it’s least convincing when reaching for darkness. The guns look like toys, and characters and creators alike seem not to know what to do with them. The emotions, as well as the humor and politics, are all adolescent; they would not be out of place on a Disney teen program. But unpretentious innocence is the core of the Madrids’ appeal, and that kind of love triumphs here.As the shapes crocheted (yes, crocheted!) around the proscenium frame by London Kaye unsubtly declare, this show has lots of heart. That spirit, channeled through dancing of high talent and skill, is enough to make it a winner.Beyond BabelThrough March 25 at the Gym at Judson Theater, Manhattan; beyondbabelshow.com. More

It’s early on a Saturday morning, but Mama has already had time not just to make stew, but to let it burn when she was momentarily distracted by a noise outside the house — a shot or a tire blowing out, she can’t be sure.So now Mama is annoyed and stressed, because one way or another, she needs to help feed up to 50 people at a church event later that day.The titular dish is never far from the whirlwind action in Zora Howard’s new drama, “Stew,” at Walkerspace, even when it’s on the back burner — both figuratively and literally, as Lawrence E. Moten III’s set faithfully reproduces a lower-middle-class kitchen, a little worn but loved. The characters often cut and prep vegetables, and the play highlights the kitchen as a haven in the Tucker family’s life, but also a place where skirmishes erupt.Mama (Portia) is matriarch and benevolent dictator rolled into one, and her rules must be followed by those who share her domain. They include her two daughters: 17-year-old Nelly (Toni Lachelle Pollitt) and Lillian (Nikkole Salter), who is in her 30s and appears to have moved back, if only temporarily, with her tween daughter, Lil’ Mama (Kristin Dodson), and her son, Junior (who remains unseen, like all the men in the characters’ lives).Every sign of rebellion is quickly snuffed with a snappy comeback. When Lillian accuses her of always being late, Mama retorts, “I’m always held up is what it is.”The first half of “Stew” is dominated by comic broad strokes and rapid-fire dialogue as the characters banter with practiced zest. The excellent cast and the director Colette Robert handle the material deftly, but it also wears thin and can verge on caricature. The tone feels a bit too obvious for a production by Page 73, the company that nurtured such distinctive recent offerings as “A Strange Loop” and “Catch as Catch Can.”And indeed, Howard is up to something.While the kitchen appears to be where these women reveal their bickering-but-loving true selves, you eventually realize that the hustle and bustle, while obviously heartfelt, also has a performative element — which finds its most striking illustration when Lil’ Mama reveals she’s auditioning for the role of Queen Elizabeth in a school production of “Richard III.”Acting runs deep in the family, and Lil’ Mama’s female relatives have dabbled in the past. Howard, who is also an actor (she co-wrote and stars in the upcoming feature “Premature”), suggests that acting may be part of what keeps a family together by helping to process conflict and hardship.Naturally, Mama — “founder and director emeritus of the Mt. Vernon High Dramatic League as well as the first soloist at the Greater Centennial A.M.E. Zion Church, lead pastor Reverend Winston Rice, for the past 15 years” — takes the lead once again, drastically dialing down the theatrics when she coaches her granddaughter through the scene in which Elizabeth mourns her son.Her emotion comes from somewhere deeper than the High Dramatic League, though — it’s easy to miss the split second when Mama mentions a son who is not around anymore. Howard can be a little heavy-handed when alluding to cycles that keep repeating: the marital frustration, Tucker women getting pregnant at 17.And then there is that loud noise that took Mama’s attention away from her cooking. The world has encroached on the kitchen. A neglected kettle boils, its whistle piercing ears and hearts.StewThrough Feb. 22 at Walkerspace, Manhattan; 866-811-4111, page73.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More