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    Review: In Charles Busch’s ‘Ibsen’s Ghost,’ a Widow’s Work is Never Done

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    In Charles Busch’s satire of Henrik Ibsen’s plays, a widow faces a rather catty fight to save her husband’s legacy.Like “Oh, Mary!,” Cole Escola’s hysterical take on Mary Todd Lincoln, Charles Busch’s “Ibsen’s Ghost” follows a notable woman of yore — Suzannah Ibsen, the wife of the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen — whose corseted unknowability is mined for mischief. Subtitled “An Irresponsible Biographical Fantasy,” this Primary Stages production, in association with George Street Playhouse, at 59E59 Theaters takes what few details are known about Suzannah, a driving force in the playwright’s productivity, and turns her into a campy diva.The show opens with a widowed Suzannah, saucily played by Busch, mourning the loss of a “conjugal partner of inexhaustible pyrotechnics.” She soon learns how inexhaustible he really was: Hanna (Jennifer Van Dyck), one of Ibsen’s many apparent lovers, emerges and announces her intention to print her scandalous diaries.Let the catty turmoil commence.An affair is one thing, but Suzannah can’t abide Hanna’s claim that she — not Suzannah — inspired Ibsen’s feminist icon, Nora Helmer, in “A Doll’s House.” Hanna’s plan also interferes with Suzannah’s attempt to publish 50 years worth of the couple’s personal letters. But, in another blow, Ibsen’s publisher (Christopher Borg) finds their domestic contents too boring to print.Busch, a master of clutching pearls and fluttering eyelashes, has great fun playing varying states of dismay. Manic, glitch-like tics betray his Suzannah’s matronly composition, and she shocks herself with her indignity. As Hanna’s crusade moves forward, Suzannah becomes even haughtier, hurling vintage insults (“You brazen jezebel!”) across Shoko Kambara’s tasteful, turn-of-the-century drawing room set.Ibsen’s dramas, heavy on ruinous secrets his characters try to conceal, turn out to be perfect for Busch to cherry-pick in sketching this show. There’s a little bit of “Ghosts,” with the appearance of an illegitimate child (Thomas Gibson) and a bawdy, scene-stealing maid (Jen Cody) whose spinal disorder causes her to walk with a ridiculous pelvic thrust.Even Ibsen’s lesser known “Little Eyolf” receives some love when Borg returns as another character, a mysterious figure known as the Rat Wife. Pulling from Suzannah’s actual biography, Busch turns her stepmother (Judy Kaye, beautifully at home with Busch’s affected dialogue) into a vamp, a calculating governess who puts the moves on Suzannah’s father. And between the maid’s almost Transylvanian accent, Hanna’s British lilt and the publisher’s Swedish Chef garbles, a treasure trove of tonal absurdity fills the air.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Artificial Flavors’ Review: Blame ChatGPT for This Musical

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      Each performance culminates in a production, composed on the spot, with misguided help from artificial intelligence.Artificial intelligence can paint meddlesome monkeys, speak in the basso profundo of James Earl Jones and play a tune to suit a hall of mirrors. But it can’t write a musical that doesn’t feel canned (at least, not yet). That’s the argument put forward by “Artificial Flavors,” a live demonstration of A.I.’s creative capabilities — and tedious limitations — at 59E59 Theaters.The writer and director Steve Cosson, the artistic director of the restlessly curious company the Civilians, here assumes the role of a somewhat befuddled narrator, explaining that this project was born from his late-night tinkering with programs like ChatGPT. Cosson, who says he is not a performer, at times doesn’t seem to know where to stand or what to say next. Whether or not it’s an act (and I suspect that it is), Cosson’s apparent insecurity provides a stark contrast to the technology he is investigating.Cosson solicits Mad Libs-style audience input to show that generative A.I. merely needs prompting and a few seconds to spit out an unconvincing Picasso or write vaguely in the voice of Stephen King, examples projected on a screen. Six actors then step in to perform A.I.-generated skits, including a scene between socialist comrades quibbling over a Birkin bag on the night I attended. Cosson promises that each performance of “Artificial Flavors” will culminate in a brand-new musical, with text written by ChatGPT and melodies composed on the spot by the Civilians and the onstage music director Dan Lipton.The problem is that every example of A.I.-generated content proceeding it portends how bad that musical will be. That seems to be Cosson’s point, though it becomes tiresome as his experiment balloons to 90 minutes. What scant humor A.I. produces here is inadvertent and its metaphors are clichéd. (“We’re more than gears, circuits and wires,” one early sample lyric goes, “We are the spark igniting untamed fires.”)There is ingenuity in the varying parameters for a musical that Cosson feeds into ChatGPT, including conflict, setting and structure (for example, a pie-eating contest at a beachside resort). But by Cosson’s design, A.I. is squarely to blame for the resulting artistic failure. The cast does impressive impromptu work, singing on the fly and reading live text from hand-held tablets. Michael Castillejos and Trey Lyford add lo-fi percussion to Lipton’s electronic keyboard, while Heath Saunders appears to lead the ensemble’s unpolished vocals. But the songs and dialogue, though generated anew each night, are no doubt consistently inane.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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      Review: In Theresa Rebeck’s ‘Dig’, a Plant Shop Nurtures Weary Souls

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      Theresa Rebeck’s play, a Primary Stages production at 59E59 Theaters, is a beautifully acted dramedy exploring the truth and warped perceptions of it.Amid the thriving greenery of an indie plant shop called Dig, two living organisms are only tenuously clinging to survival.One is a neglected wreck of withering vegetation brought in for emergency care. The other is a woman huddled in the corner, her hood up to block out the world. She’s here with her father, Lou, who nearly killed that plant. But as he bickers amusingly with his old friend Roger, the kindly grump who owns the store, she is too bone-weary to engage.Her name is Megan, and one of the worst misfortunes has blanketed her in grief: the death of her little boy in a notorious accident, which the whole country knows was all her fault. Total strangers despise her for it, yet no one is blaming Megan more mercilessly than she is herself. After a suicide attempt, she is living with her father in the Ohio town where she grew up. So far, it isn’t going great.“I embarrass him,” she tells Roger after Lou steps out. Pre-empting any argument to the contrary, she adds: “The truth is the truth and if you try to get around it, it will come after you and take you down.”The truth and poisonously warped perceptions of it are major themes in Theresa Rebeck’s new play “Dig,” at 59E59 Theaters, and we’ll get to that. First let’s pause to run down the list of off-putting subjects mentioned so far: death of a child, grief, suicide.But this intelligent, compassionate, beautifully acted dramedy — directed by the playwright for Primary Stages — is not a downer. Rebeck has spiked her script with comedy, and enlisted a cast as nimble with laugh lines as with prickliness and pain.As Megan, Andrea Syglowski has a coiled, almost feral rage that snaps its tight leash more than once. Just watch her go after Molly (Mary Bacon), a chatty customer who has been trying to figure out why Megan looks so familiar. When the penny drops, Megan turns on her with a scorching intensity.Alongside mourning and self-reproach, repentance is a motif in Megan’s life; she is forever apologizing. But humor can coexist with all that, and in this hope-filled, distinctly non-Pollyanna-ish play, she is very funny, too.Swiftly feeling more comfortable at Dig than in her father’s house — Roger (Jeffrey Bean), an absolute geek for plants, has a nurturing vibe — she finagles her way into an unpaid job there, and flourishes a bit. (The set is by Christopher and Justin Swader.) Everett (Greg Keller), the stoner who is the shop’s only other employee, sees her as a rival for Roger’s esteem. And Megan nearly worships Roger, which Everett truly does not get.“No offense, but you’re like a larva,” she says. “You know, you’re like something that’s not even a bug yet. So I don’t actually expect you to understand.”One of the judgiest gossips in town, Everett cloaks aggressive cruelty in the guise of honesty. But he has Keller’s charisma and comic chops, so the audience loves him. In an Act II scene between Megan and Everett, he is faced with a choice so morally appalling that a bad decision could change everything we’ve thought about him. I have never felt an audience silently will a character to do the right thing the way it did in that moment.Hypocrisy and sexist double standards are fundamental to what Rebeck is contemplating in “Dig,” as feminist a play as any of her others. She is examining not just parental guilt — Lou (Triney Sandoval) feels this, too, about Megan — but also deeply ingrained notions about the sanctity of motherhood in particular, and the censoriousness that failing at it brings.Everett and the many others eager to condemn Megan think they know the truth about her son’s death. Even Lou holds her responsible, but he ought to listen to himself.“She was always a screw-up,” he tells Roger, “but never in a million years would anyone have believed that she could do something so grotesque.”Did she, though? Megan has taken the blame, heaped it on herself. She believes to her core that she deserves it.She confessed to the police. And no one dug any further: It is the mother’s fault.DigThrough Oct. 22 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      ‘A Eulogy for Roman’ Review: Farewell to a Friend, With Help From the Audience

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      Check your cynicism at the door: Brendan George is earnest and endearing as he mourns Roman in this one-man show.Delivering a eulogy is never easy at the best of times, and it’s an especially tough slog for Milo, whose best friend, Roman, has recently died. The pair had been close since childhood, and Milo, who is in his early 20s, appears especially shaken. It quickly becomes obvious that he will need a supportive hand from those attending the service.And that means us, the audience members at Peter Charney and Brendan George’s “A Eulogy for Roman,” a modest but sneakily affecting show that just opened at 59E59 Theaters.It is not long before we are roped into helping the flustered Milo (played by George, a graduate student at New York University who also wrote the play). He asks a theatergoer to help him sort index cards on which he has scribbled some thoughts about Roman. Then he wonders if anyone can share tips for dealing with loss. “Dogs,” a woman volunteered at the performance I attended.Of course, Milo’s gentle prompts serve to move around the show’s emotional building blocks, but he is such a charming presence that it feels as though he is including the theatergoers in a conversation rather than simply manipulating them to serve his storytelling needs.There is a bit of unease, however, as Milo’s emotion is decidedly self-centered — he doesn’t tell us anything very revealing about Roman. Then again, isn’t part of the grieving process the act of figuring out how one continues to live?To overcome his disarray, Milo decides to complete a project he had embarked on with Roman: getting through a “Life Points List,” a lengthy catalog of experiences “that would remind us that we are alive and make us feel alive.” A few of them still hadn’t been checked off when Roman died, and perhaps, Milo suggests, the memorial-goers might want to help him achieve closure. The remaining tasks include suggesting songs for a playlist (my fellow audience members spontaneously latched onto a candy theme) and teaming up with Milo to do 100 push-ups. As amusing as those scenes are, they can feel like activities at a children’s birthday party, even if the show tends to stay on the right side of that dangerous line.The use of a list as a way to deal with death, combined with audience participation, brings to mind Duncan Macmillan and Jonny Donahoe’s hit play “Every Brilliant Thing,” though “A Eulogy for Roman” does not weave the more discomforting sides of our existence into its fabric as effectively as that show did.Still, George has an endearing presence and Charney, who is credited with concept and direction, moves the action along at a steady pace. And there is something refreshing about the show’s commitment to earnestness. We have been so conditioned to expect a certain degree of cynicism that I spent a good portion of the evening wondering when we were going to discover that Roman or Milo or both were psychopaths. But no: The bravest thing about “A Eulogy for Roman” is its embrace of kindness, resilience and community.A Eulogy for RomanThrough Sept. 3 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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      ‘Invisible’ Review: Brown and British

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      As part of the Brits Off Broadway festival at 59E59 Theaters, Nikhil Parmar’s solo play is a drama-tinged satire that morphs into a grisly revenge parable.In the world of Nikhil Parmar’s funny, fantastical solo play “Invisible,” the mind-set of Britain has undergone a significant shift. One of the West’s favorite boogeymen — the Islamic fundamentalist — has vanished from the public imagination. Chinese terrorists are the designated bad guys now.For brown British actors like Zayan Prakash (Parmar), that is both good news and bad. On the one hand, strangers no longer look at him and assume that he’s a threat. On the other, that means the Muslim terrorist roles that were once so prolific have disappeared. So what’s left for him to play? Just “doctors, cabdrivers and corner shop owners.” He’s lucky if those characters get names.“Invisible,” at 59E59 Theaters as part of the Brits Off Broadway festival, is a drama-tinged satire that morphs into a grisly revenge parable, before shape-shifting into something close to reality. But first this play, directed by Georgia Green for London’s Bush Theater, is a sharp and lively comedy in which the charismatic Zayan recalls answering his door to find his ex-girlfriend, Ella, the mother of his toddler daughter, standing there.“Hello. Why do you look weird?” Ella asks, and Zayan — who’s looking weird because he’s just heard on the news about the demise of “brown terrorism” — pivots to the audience with a cliché-killing aside that won my heart: “I was going to do her bit in a really high-pitched voice but, (a), it sounded pretty offensive and, (b), she actually has a properly deep voice, so.”Ella has come to tell Zayan that she has a live-in boyfriend, Terrence, an old classmate of theirs from drama school whose career is flourishing; he’s Korean and playing a terrorist in a prestige drama, now that “East Asian fundamentalism” is supposedly a menace. Zayan can’t stand Terrence, but their ensuing rivalry makes for laughs, even as it drives home a point about jostling for position inside a white-supremacist system.The magnetic Parmar slips in and out of Zayan and the crowd of characters around him, each distinct. Though the play’s narrative becomes somewhat tangled and unruly, there is method in its muchness.What torments Zayan is a creeping sense of his own invisibility: Now that he isn’t perceived as a terrorist, he fails to register at all. Yet over the show’s 60-minute running time, we see Zayan for the multitude that he is: underemployed actor, reluctant cater waiter, incompetent weed dealer, doting father, inattentive son. He is also a grieving brother haunted by the ghost of his dead little sister, the person who looked at him and saw someone central to her story.It is disorienting, and infuriating, to be hampered by a culture’s — and an industry’s — blinkered perception of what a whole group of people is capable of. “Invisible” is a thoughtfully provocative, witheringly knowing response to that noxiousness.InvisibleThrough July 2 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour. More

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      ‘The Habit of Art’ Review: Theater of the Creative Drive

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      A play within a play about W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten structures this sex-spiked comedy for the Brits Off Broadway festival at 59E59 Theaters in Manhattan.The poet W.H. Auden is expecting a rent boy, not a journalist. So when he opens the door to his home in Oxford, England, to let the much younger man in, it takes a while to clear up the confusion. Once the visitor has explained that he is not there to take off his pants, he commences an interview.“Are you writing?” he asks the poet.“Am I dead?” Auden ripostes. “I work. I have the habit of art.”Such a smooth, substantial-sounding phrase — a bulwark against others’ intrusive questions and Auden’s own self-doubt. Still, he is telling the truth.In Alan Bennett’s delectably smart, gently moving, sex-spiked comedy “The Habit of Art,” the year is 1972 and Auden is nearing the end of his life. Suspecting that God has rescinded his genius, he keeps writing anyway.“I have to work, or else who am I?” he says.All this, by the way, is part of the play within the play in the excellent production that the Brits Off Broadway festival has brought to 59E59 Theaters in Manhattan. “The Habit of Art” is partially about an imagined meeting between Auden and his old friend, the composer Benjamin Britten. But Bennett frames it with a band of theater people finding their way through a script that tells this story — or, as he wrote in his diary in 2009, the year “The Habit of Art” made its premiere: “a group of differently fractured people coming together to present something whole.”Directed by Philip Franks for the Original Theater Company, “The Habit of Art” takes place in a dingy rehearsal hall (the set is by Adrian Linford) where a company is rehearsing a new play. The absent director has left in charge the savvy, ego-soothing stage manager (a wonderfully brisk Veronica Roberts), while the playwright (Robert Mountford) fends for himself, trying to shield his script from tinkerers who would make cuts or additions.The actor Fitz (Matthew Kelly) is a terrible snob, his dignity affronted by playing Auden — a role that requires him to be stained, stinky, squalid: a great man in unglamorous decline. Henry (Stephen Boxer), as the self-contained Britten, at least gets to look civilized.In the play within the play, the composer pays Auden a visit, seeking his help, though they haven’t seen each other in decades. Britten is writing “Death in Venice” — an opera about an older man obsessed with a beautiful boy, a theme that echoes in “The Habit of Art” — and it’s not going well.“I came because I feel so lonely,” Britten says.“Of course it’s lonely,” Auden reassures him. “It’s new. What do you expect?”That’s the voice of long experience speaking — Auden in his twilight, yes, and also Bennett, who this week turned 89. The playwright knows too that, in his chosen medium, a creator’s isolation eventually gives way to collaboration: maybe maddening, bickersome and chaotic, but at least not solitary.Such is the nature of theater. Such are the habits of that particular art.The Habit of ArtThrough May 28 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. More

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      ‘Breathless’ Review: Shopping Soothes an Anxious Mind

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      Laura Horton’s poignant comic monologue at 59E59 Theaters, part of the Brits Off Broadway festival, delivers a sympathetic portrayal of a sample-sale hoarder.Clothes can send Sophie into a rhapsody like nothing else does. Ever since she was a child, trawling thrift shops for secondhand style, her purchases have felt like victories.In those early years, some of the thrill came from finding name brands that would help her fit in better with the kids at school. But she has always had an eye for fashion, no matter how impractical.By the time she is a young adult, an aspiring writer living in London and stalking sample sales, the dresses and sweaters and shoes that she lugs home to her room in bulging bags have little to do with wearability. Does she need five ball gowns? Nope. But shopping is how Sophie soothes her increasingly anxious mind.Laura Horton’s poignant comic monologue “Breathless,” part of the Brits Off Broadway festival at 59E59 Theaters, finds Sophie at a breaking point. Played by Madeleine MacMahon, who gives her a nervous likability, Sophie would seem to have arrived at a joyous time in life. In her late 30s, she has a thoughtful, interesting new girlfriend, Jo, whom Sophie can envision as a long-term partner. Yet at the end of every date, she fabricates reasons Jo can’t come into her apartment.“There’s all the time in the world to see my place,” Sophie says, except there isn’t, because Jo is weary of being kept at a distance. Too mortified to confess that her apartment is stuffed with clothes — a dangerous, suffocating, hoarder quantity of clothes — Sophie gets dumped. She has, essentially, chosen Vivienne Westwood (Ah, that checkered dress!) and Stella McCartney (Oh, those silk-screened pants!) over a woman who’s into her.Stephanie Kempson’s production for Theater Royal Plymouth smartly lets us imagine Sophie’s labyrinth of apparel, her towers of shoes. The set and props are minimal: a couple of clothing racks hung with empty garment bags; a single shopping bag from Alexander McQueen. Throughout, Sophie wears the same casual outfit: loose overalls with sneakers. (Set and costumes are by Kempson, Horton and MacMahon.)The play takes vivid hold through MacMahon’s performance, which includes a small gallery of supporting characters. Among them are Sophie’s sweet, gruff father and her unflappably loving mother, whose warmth is as enveloping as a hug.There is also a journalist friend who (spoiler) promises Sophie anonymity in a story about hoarding, then splashes her name and photo all over a national newspaper. The betrayal hits so hard in performance that I wanted to implore the fictional Sophie not to believe her friend, as she does, that it’s all his editors’ fault.A program note says that the play is based on Horton’s “own experiences of hoarding disorder,” and quotes her as saying that she was “heavily influenced by ‘Sex and the City’ growing up.” It seems only right, then, that “Breathless” is onstage in a part of Manhattan — about midway between a Dior boutique and Bloomingdale’s — where luxury beckons, and the price is steep.BreathlessThrough May 7 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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      ‘Yes, I Can Say That!’ Review: The Freedom to Offend

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      The comedian Judy Gold’s new solo show at 59E59 Theaters is deliberately uncomfortable — and packed with laughs.The knuckle-dragging notion that women aren’t funny makes only a cameo in the comedian Judy Gold’s new solo show, “Yes, I Can Say That!” It’s tucked amid her homage to pioneering forebears like Totie Fields and Joan Rivers, who, Gold tells the audience, “said out loud what women whispered about when their husbands weren’t around.”The slur about unfunniness, she says, was handed down through generations of men “who did not want to see some brassy broad onstage making jokes about them and the part they played in their wives’ unhappiness.”Directed by BD Wong for Primary Stages, “Yes, I Can Say That!” is a deliberately uncomfortable, laugh-packed show seeded with stealth missiles like that one. Though Gold insists at the outset that a comedian’s only goal is to land the joke, this is not entirely true. As in her smart and impassioned book “Yes, I Can Say That: When They Come for the Comedians, We Are All in Trouble,” released in 2020, she wants at least as much to make us think.Onstage at 59E59 Theaters, Gold builds a vehement case for the vital importance of the freedom to offend in a healthy democratic society. For starters, she would like us to get over the kind of hair-trigger touchiness about language that leads to social media pile-ons, and focus on genuine threats.“They are taking away women’s rights, they are banning books, we have mass shootings, and people are furious if you mistakenly use the wrong pronoun,” she says. Then, urgently: “We had an insurrection, people!”As much as Gold is in favor of some general toughening up across the political spectrum, she’s not anti-sensitivity — “I [expletive] hate bullies,” she says — just anti-preciousness and anti-absurdity. What worries her is the freedom of expression that gets taken away when the freedom to outrage is banished.Written by Gold and Eddie Sarfaty, “Yes, I Can Say That!” interweaves a brief history of American comedy (Lenny Bruce is of course invoked) with Gold’s personal history, including comedy-club flashbacks, like the time she took rapid revenge on an M.C. who was witless enough to insult her just before she took the mic. She does some terrific impressions, including an uncanny Rudy Giuliani.What she doesn’t quite do is make palpable any current threat to comedians’ speech, so a moment when she explicitly frets about that — in the context of speaking truth to the president at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner — feels like a relic of the previous presidency, when Gold wrote her book. The show’s argument could gain strength by paying just a little more attention to some of the other First Amendment issues currently in the headlines.Gold’s larger point is that the ugliness of the past isn’t as long ago as we like to think. She notes, unnervingly, that her birth in 1962 was just 17 years after the death camp at Auschwitz was liberated.“Hashtag ObjectsInMirrorAreCloserThanTheyAppear,” she says, almost as if it’s a throwaway line.She gets a laugh, but the joke is a warning.Yes, I Can Say That!Through April 16 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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

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