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      ‘The Unbelieving’ Review: Life After Faith

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      In a probing new play from the Civilians, based on interviews from the book “Caught in the Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind,” current and former members of the clergy grapple with the reality of losing their religion.For Adam, not his real name, change started with curiosity and critical thinking. A Church of Christ minister and a creationist, he came to realize that his worldview was sheltered, so he set out to educate himself.“In nine months, I read over 60 books, listened to hundreds of hours of lectures and debates, watched 25 documentaries and movies,” he says. “Went through eight online courses on philosophy, evolution.”It didn’t occur to him that what he found would shake his faith. He thought, he tells a researcher, that God “can handle any questions I’ve got.”“Well, he didn’t measure up!” says Adam (David Aaron Baker), his voice rising with emotion that’s more wounded than angry. His belief in God has left him, and that threatens his job, his family, his friendships — every corner of his life. So when he speaks to the researcher, he insists on the protection of a pseudonym. He cannot afford for word to get out.“The Unbelieving,” a probing, interview-based new play from the Civilians, is about people like Adam: current and former members of the clergy who have lost their religion, even if they still publicly practice it.Written by Marin Gazzaniga and based on interviews conducted for Daniel C. Dennett and Linda LaScola’s 2013 book, “Caught in the Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind,” this smart and slender play listens to its characters without judgment. Not trying to hit its audience over the head with lessons, it is conducive to empathy.Like Linda (Nina Hellman), the researcher, Steve Cosson’s production at 59E59 Theaters is quiet, inquisitive and welcoming. Designed by Andrew Boyce and Se Hyun Oh, the setting for Linda’s interviews is as anonymous as can be: a hotel meeting room with beige walls and vertical blinds, drawn. (The lighting, by Lucrecia Briceño, heightens the atmosphere.)Linda interviews, among others, a Mormon bishop (Dan Domingues), an Orthodox rabbi (Richard Topol), a former Roman Catholic nun (Sonnie Brown) and a former imam (Joshua David Robinson), who allows himself a little smile when he boasts that he won “trophies at Quranic reading competitions” growing up.These are contemplative people, and they were sincere in their devotion once. Now each describes what is, to varying degrees, a crisis. Not a crisis of faith; they’re beyond that. Rather, it’s a crisis about faith: how to go on without it — practically, emotionally, socially.In documenting that dilemma, “The Unbelieving” becomes not only an examination of the power of religion in American culture. It’s also an even-keeled meditation on the link between conformity and community — the enormous fear of being cast out and the frantic desire to continue belonging, even if that means living dishonestly.Take Johnny (Jeff Biehl), an Apostolic Pentecostal pastor who works for his closest friend as a building inspector. His friend, Johnny says, is “a flaming Charismatic Pentecostal,” so Johnny has not confided in him about his own loss of faith.“Everyone knows me as a minister,” Johnny says. “So everybody who sees that he has hired me, they’re like, ‘You have got a jewel. This is a man of God.’ If all of a sudden I become the atheist, as far as they know, I’m going to forge reports and lie about inspections, and cheat people out of money.”To leave his church would be to risk his livelihood, his relationships, his reputation. Then there’s what the shift in his beliefs has already taken from him: the comforting prospect of spending the afterlife with people he loves.“It means,” he says, “that this pact that my grandmother and I made 20 years ago doesn’t mean anything: that we would do everything we could to both be in heaven together.”There’s a lot of anguish in “The Unbelieving.” As it turns out, there’s a lot of courage, too.The UnbelievingThrough Nov. 19 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 5 minutes. More

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      Review: Star-Crossed Lovers in Need of a Divine Assist

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      Andrew Rincón’s play about reigniting passions in the heavens and the bedroom is a jumble of genres at 59E59 Theaters.Tired of digesting all the world’s heartbreak, Cupid calls it quits in Andrew Rincón’s “I Wanna F*ck Like Romeo and Juliet.” The play, a New Light Theater Project production having its premiere at 59E59 Theaters, is experiencing a similar existential crisis. Despite appealing performances, smooth direction by Jesse Jou, and some touching moments, this cosmic look at the pains of love aims wobbly arrows at too many marks.Seeing his friend Cupid (Jacqueline Guillén), the goddess of love, so distraught, Saint Valentine (Greg Cuellar) tries to remind her of affection’s earthly charms by taking her to Hackensack, N.J., where a young couple in the middle of a breakup might provide the challenge she needs to get back in the spirit.That couple, Alejandro (a sturdy Juan Arturo) and Benny (Ashton Muñiz, a soothing presence with comedic chops), have decided to separate after six years together, but Valentine thinks the relationship is worth saving. Cupid and Valentine each pick one to take on a journey of self-discovery, with the goal of guiding them back to each other. These pilgrimages, however, lead to hastily mentioned histories of internalized shame and sexual abuse that overburden the play’s final 20 minutes.Rincón dabbles in the poetic, mixing the mortals’ sometimes self-help-sounding domestic discourse with grandiose statements of love everlasting from the divine duo, who are prone to endless arguments. (That said, it is Alejandro who speaks the childish title phrase, a romanticization of Shakespeare’s text not meant to read as satire.) The clash highlights the play’s confusion as to whether it wants to be a comedy about meddling powers, or a drama about a couple whose breakup undergoes divine intervention. Brittany Vasta’s two-level set, nicely split between the heavens and the bedroom, makes a stronger case for this duality.The same can’t be said for the script, which is untidy in its overuse of Spanglish. Aside from a great joke when a character is shocked to discover the love goddess is a Latina (“Did you really think Cupid could be anything but?”), the Spanish in the text, liberally sprinkled throughout, lacks cohesion because its significance hasn’t been established. When it is used to convey meaningful points, I wondered if non-speakers would be able to follow along, or what Hispanic viewers were supposed to gain. It’s maddening when another tongue is used as a crutch, a substitute for personality that winds up exoticizing the language it sets out to exalt, or “normalize.” If a sentiment lacks power when expressed without a show of bilingualism, it does not gain it through translation.At times it seems as if the play could have revolved around Betti (Elizabeth Ramos), a romantically inexperienced dental hygienist Benny befriends and starts dating, somewhat platonically. Ramos’s smallness during her first scene gives way to an explosive physical performance as Betti comes into her own and experiences first love (with Cupid, no less). Through sheer allure, the actress turns a character largely superfluous to the already jumbled story into the production’s most valuable, displaying the irresistibility of earnest hope in a work that too often dips into its bathos.I Wanna F*ck Like Romeo and JulietThrough Nov. 5 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More

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      In This Playwright’s Dystopia, Forgetting Is Forbidden

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      Steven Fechter’s “The Memory Exam” begins with a promising setup, our critic writes, while Grant MacDermott’s marriage story “Jasper” struggles for emotional resonance.Far from any humans who might report suspicious activity, or surveillance cameras that would record it, a tetchy little foursome emerges into a clearing deep in the woods. What they’re doing is forbidden, and if they are caught, they could be killed.In Steven Fechter’s dystopian thriller “The Memory Exam,” at 59E59 Theaters, the authorities keep tabs on older people’s recollection, abetted by neighbors who snitch on neighbors for lapses as innocuous as walking out of a store and forgetting a purchase. Slip up one too many times and you get called in for a brutally simple test: Remember the five objects they show you and you live. Miss even one and you die.The three septuagenarians who have followed Dale (Vernice Miller), a psychotherapist, into the woods for this clandestine cram session hope desperately that she can help them strategize their way through the exam, which is coming right up. Tom (Gus Kaikkonen), a retired professor who lives alone and doesn’t notice when he repeats himself, has no idea who ratted him out. Neither do Hank (Alfred Gingold), a retired minister whose recall is the most obviously degraded of this bunch, or his wife, Jen (Bekka Lindström), once a much beloved mayor, who recently became disoriented walking through her own neighborhood.“Why isn’t the town protecting you?” Dale asks.“People forget,” Hank says.That is the crux of this play, which Fechter explains in a program note was inspired by the deaths of so many older people early in the pandemic, and spurred on “when some politicians suggested that seniors should be willing to sacrifice themselves for the good of the economy.” Directed by Terrence O’Brien for Oberon Theater Ensemble, it’s a show about the value of life, and of memory.Though the setup is promising, the execution is clunky. When the characters start reciting quotations about memory, we sense the playwright’s voice instead of theirs. Likewise when Jen utters a line that sounds straight out of a male sexual fantasy as she recounts what was clearly a traumatic sexual assault.And while we might be able to suspend disbelief about Dale’s peculiar mnemonic method — she asks each of the others to resurrect a strong memory and tell the group a corrupted version of it, incorporating the five objects they’re trying to remember — the idea that Hank could wrap his clouded mind around granular detail, as he does in his monologue, is a stretch.Fechter does build in surprises, though, and suspense. If the play’s convoluted final scene goes on a bit too long, and is not wholly credible, at least you don’t see its resolution coming.That, unfortunately, cannot be said about Grant MacDermott’s schematic “Jasper,” at the Pershing Square Signature Center. Directed by Katie McHugh for Yonder Window Theater Company, the play opens on a quarrelsome, mercurial marriage strained by years of caring for an incapacitated child, whose perilous health is a nonstop emergency.Andrea (Jessica Pimentel) is the tenacious stay-at-home mom to the offstage Jasper, pursuing every slender thread of hope that he might be healed. For her and her husband, Drew (Dominic Fumusa), who works in construction, normal things like having friends — or having sex — are bygone luxuries. Loving their child, they live in a constant state of red alert. (Sound design, by John Gromada, evokes this potently.)Jessica Pimentel as Andrea and Dominic Fumusa as her husband, Drew, wrestle with parenthood and coupledom in “Jasper,” at the Pershing Square Signature Center.Russ RowlandBut while Andrea’s world has shrunk to encompass only home and hospitals, Drew still gets out and about. One day on the subway, he makes funny faces at a toddler in a stroller and falls into conversation with the child’s mother, Shayla (Abigail Hawk), who is beautiful, divorced and tastefully upscale.She’s not a hallucination, but she does seem like someone’s pipe dream. After she jokes that she’s “a high-end escort,” she and Drew banter flirtatiously about her being a “hooker” and “a whore.” That interaction is of a piece with the entire relationship that will blossom between them, in which she is ludicrously complimentary toward him about, oh, everything.Drew seeds it all with a lie, though. He’s honest about being married, but when Shayla asks if he has kids, he says no. In spending time with her and becoming a pal to her Tyler — who, like Jasper, is never seen by the audience — he acts out his wish to have a child who is verbal and ambulatory and expressive and well.Amid all of Drew’s tormented, longing domesticity with Andrea and his furtive quasi domesticity with Shayla (whose presence in Drew’s life Andrea eventually clocks), there is much mention of Tide laundry detergent. Why all the talk of detergent, and why this brand? No idea. In the script, Tide comes up 10 times.But that is just about the only mystery in “Jasper.” On a set by Michael Gianfrancesco in the Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theater, the play wants to plumb the dark, lonely recesses of parenthood and coupledom, but even its most fraught moments struggle for emotional resonance. The ending, when it comes, is visible from miles away.The Memory ExamThrough Sept. 25 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes.JasperThrough Oct. 6 at the Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; yonderwindow.co. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More

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      Review: In ‘On That Day in Amsterdam,’ a Traveler Becomes a Tourist

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      Two young men wander the city before they both must say farewell and return to very different lives.Sammy’s parents used to rhapsodize about the trip they took to Paris once, before he was born. Hearing their stories made the city shimmer in his imagination, but the closest he’s ever gotten to it was on a nonstop drive across France.Hidden in the back of a truck, peering through a hole in its side, he glimpsed a highway sign that said Paris. Then the driver blew past it, on through the darkness toward Amsterdam.In Clarence Coo’s play “On That Day in Amsterdam,” that’s where Sammy is on the night in 2015 when he meets Kevin at a club. They are young and beautiful, something sparks between them, and they wake together the next morning in a houseboat on a canal. Outside, snow is falling.Sammy is Syrian and without a passport, hoping to reach safety in England but terrified of the journey across the water to get there. Kevin is American, not wealthy but privileged anyway, a college student traveling on the credit card his mother pays for.While both are scheduled to leave the Netherlands that night, they have very different notions of how precious it is to be passing through, even briefly. Sammy (Waseem Alzer), who is sweet, eager and daring in his vulnerability, wants to grab this day with both hands and go on a tourist adventure. Kevin (Glenn Morizio), who is callow, arrogant and incurious in ways that he will come to regret, eventually acquiesces.It’s a bit of a Richard Linklater, “Before Sunrise” setup: just-met lovers with mere hours to spend together in a glamorous foreign capital. And on the largest stage at 59E59 Theaters, the set by Jason Sherwood (a two-time Emmy Award winner) conspires with projections by Nicholas Hussong (a 2022 Tony Award nominee for his spectacular projections in “Skeleton Crew”) and lighting by Cha See to bring visual texture and depth to Sammy and Kevin’s ramble through Amsterdam.There is the nagging sense, though, that design is the tail wagging the dog in this Primary Stages production from Zi Alikhan — that the set’s transparent downstage screen, which frames the action, constrains the performers somehow, and that the copious projections, on that screen and another upstage, could have used some editing. Yes to the moody, abstract and dreamy, emphatically yes to the striped blocks of color that represent evening windows; no to the drably literal, which only gets in the way of the poetry that Coo is reaching for.The playwright, too, has also overwhelmed the show, with a surfeit of ideas jostling for limited oxygen. This is a quasi-romance and coming-of-age story set inside a refugee crisis in a world awash in bigotry. But it’s also about art as a necessary solace, which is what it provides to Sammy, who wants to take his mind off the peril he’s in by popping into some museums. Kevin, though, is a tortured would-be writer; the making of an artist is much on Coo’s mind as well.The play might be able to manage all of that, yet it also collapses time to usher in three famous former residents of Amsterdam: Rembrandt (Brandon Mendez Homer), Vincent van Gogh (Jonathan Raviv) and Anne Frank (Elizabeth Ramos). Anne, at least, fits the principal themes: She was both an artist and a migrant fleeing — and hiding from — danger. But these characters’ interstitial-feeling scenes fit awkwardly with the whole.The result is a play too overcrowded for fullness. What sticks in the memory is Alzer’s lovely Sammy, grasping at a few hours of normalcy, cherishing the chance to lose himself in throngs of tourists who, with their documents in order, are free to come and go.On That Day in AmsterdamThrough Sept. 4 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      ‘Hooded; or Being Black for Dummies’ Review: A Tragic Pageantry

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      Tearrance Arvelle Chisholm’s ambitious and sometimes metaphysical comedy playfully tries to tackle thorny issues at 59E59 Theaters.What defines Blackness? The idea that there might be a clear answer is absurd. But skin color is all it takes to land two diametrically opposed teenagers in the same jail cell. In the eyes of the law, at least, the connotations of race are obvious.The laughable and at times deadly assumptions that attend Black men in America are the subject of “Hooded; or Being Black for Dummies,” an imaginative and occasionally metaphysical comedy of identity by the playwright Tearrance Arvelle Chisholm. The production at 59E59 Theaters has the playful mood and aesthetic of an insightful and ambitious school project, traversing thorny terrain with deceptive simplicity.Marquis (Lambert Tamin) is splayed out on the ground playing dead, a pose he calls “Trayvonning,” after Trayvon Martin. “It’s a meme,” he explains, like planking or owling. Though his cellmate, Tru (Tarrence J. Taylor), doesn’t see the point of it, he’s not surprised to hear that Marquis was caught doing such nonsense with some white friends (in a cemetery, no less) and that only Marquis was arrested.“Typical,” says Tru, who embodies certain conventions associated with Blackness — fly kicks, street smarts, bravado — that Marquis utterly lacks. Adopted by a white mother (Tjasa Ferme), an arrogant lawyer who easily springs both boys from the town slammer, Marquis lives in Achievement Heights, where he attends an all-white academy. His mom thinks Tru would be a good (that is, Black) influence on her son and invites him to live with them (assuming that Tru comes from poverty and lacks sufficient parental care).Marquis’s classmates are caricatures of whiteness, affluence and ignorance — the girls are all blond and selfie happy, and his best friends, Hunter (Zachary Desmond) and Fielder (Henry James Eden), are troublemakers who make him the scapegoat. Marquis fits right in with his peers, with their retro-preppy uniforms and lofty life goals (costume design is by Latia Stokes). But if racial identity is a performance, Tru considers that Marquis doesn’t have the right script. So Tru writes one, called “Being Black for Dummies,” that winds up in the wrong hands.“Hooded” demonstrates a voraciousness for forms and ideas. Chisholm deploys an array of devices — scenes that reset and repeat, a light-up laugh sign — that disrupt the narrative rhythm and provoke indirect associations. Greek theater looms large (the set design, of deconstructed cardboard columns, is by Tara Higgins), and Chisholm engages with Nietzsche’s theory of tragedy to illustrate the duality inherent to his young Black characters. “There’s a little bit of Apollo and Dionysus in all of us,” Marquis tells Tru. (In case you couldn’t tell, Marquis is the kind of teenager who reads Nietzsche in bed.)It’s a lot to pack into two hours, just as a dummy’s guide to being Black could hardly be contained between binder clips. “Hooded,” presented by Undiscovered Works, is evidence of a provocative and spirited writer whose inkwell overflows onto the page. The play’s exploration of race as a kind of tragic pageantry suits its current form, but there’s more style and substance here than ultimately coheres into a convincing theatrical argument.The director, George Anthony Richardson, gives the production a freewheeling assurance. It is pleasantly lo-fi, but for projections, designed by Hao Bai, that draw wry inspiration from European art, like the schoolyard that resembles Edvard Munch’s expressionist painting. The adult actors play their teenage characters with a touch of exaggeration, suggesting both the volatile eagerness of youth and that Chisholm is interested in the origins and politics of self-presentation.“I am Black, and so whatever I do is acting Black,” Marquis tells Tru. “Or not. Or whatever!” he says, growing flustered. As with any signifier, meaning is determined by the beholder as much as by the object itself. The question isn’t what defines Blackness, but who.Hooded; or Being Black for DummiesThrough July 3 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. More

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      With the Volt Festival, the Playwright Karen Hartman Comes Home

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      59E59 Theaters is putting a spotlight on a midcareer artist whose work has seldom been seen locally.“I’m feeling a tremendous sense of visibility,” the playwright Karen Hartman said. “And it’s not when I expected to be visible.”Visible through a Zoom window, Hartman was speaking from her Brooklyn home the morning after the world premiere of her play “New Golden Age.” Just a few days before, two of her other plays, “The Lucky Star” and “Goldie, Max and Milk,” had celebrated their New York premieres, as part of Volt, a new festival from 59E59 Theaters. (All three productions are being presented simultaneously through June 12.)Hartman, 51, a playwright with a robust career in regional theater, described being chosen as the inaugural playwright for Volt as “transformative.” The festival, intended to run yearly, is meant to highlight a midcareer artist whose work has seldom been seen locally.“It was really important that the playwright not be a usual suspect,” said Val Day, the artistic director of 59E59, who dreamed up the festival. “It had to be somebody who was more widely produced in the regions, who had a fairly large canon of work, which deserved to have eyes on it in New York.”Claire Siebers, left, and Mahira Kakkar in “New Golden Age,” about two sisters fighting for in-person connections in a big tech dystopia.James LeynseHartman fit the bill. Raised in San Diego, she studied literature at Yale and then enrolled at the Yale School of Drama. Shortly after graduation, several theaters produced her play “Gum,” including New York’s WP Theater, then known as Women’s Project. Reviews were mixed, and while she soon became a regular in the regionals, subsequent New York productions proved rare. In one week, Volt, which Hartman described as a “three-night Hanukkah,” changed that.“It has transformed my own story about what has been going on with my work all these years,” she said.From left, Nina Hellman, Mike Shapiro, Alexandra Silber, Dale Soules, Skye Alyssa Friedman and Alexa Shae Niziak in “The Lucky Star,” which premiered in 2017 as “The Book of Joseph.”Carol Rosegg“The Lucky Star,” which premiered in 2017 as “The Book of Joseph” and is presented here by the Directors Company, animates a trove of real letters written by a Polish Jewish family in the early years of World War II to the one member who escaped to America. “Goldie, Max and Milk,” from 2014 and produced here by MBL Productions, describes the unlikely bond between a queer single mother and an Orthodox Jewish lactation consultant in Brooklyn. “New Golden Age,” produced by Primary Stages and structured like a Greek tragedy, imagines the dark consequences of an extremely online future as two sisters struggle to connect IRL.Day, who had intended to debut Volt in 2020, felt that these plays resonated even more after the theatrical shutdown. “All of her plays are about people desperately trying to connect with each other and the difficulty in doing that, which we all can relate to,” Day said.Hartman put it differently, with a touch of knowing irony.“There is a thread of grief that runs through all these plays,” Hartman said. “It’s not the sexiest sell.”In a spirited hourlong chat, Hartman discussed her career, her plays, what the festival means to her and what it might mean to other writers. “What this festival is going to do over time is create these questions in the minds of people: Who else is out there? Who should be seen in New York? That’s the power of it,” she said.Shayna Small, left, and Blair Baker in “Goldie, Max and Milk,” about an unlikely bond between two women.Carol RoseggThese are edited excerpts from the conversation.How did you become a playwright?This displaced New Yorker named Deborah Salzer started the California Young Playwrights Festival, an offshoot of the National Young Playwrights Festival. She started it when I was 14 years old. I acted in the first season. Then I was like, “Oh, I could write a play.” I wrote two plays in high school that were produced in this festival. I got kind of mainline drugged as a playwright very early.What were the questions that animated you back then?Honestly, I was a kid who liked acting. And when I went to pick scenes for girls, there just weren’t any. I felt like the roles really sucked. And it felt so small, trying to center myself in the girls that existed, that I actually just started writing for there to be parts to play. My first play was about mothers and daughters. My second play was about a girl who gets obsessed with Sylvia Plath.Not long after you finished grad school, regional theaters began to stage “Gum.” The Women’s Project staged it, too. What was that like?I felt very excited and kind of raw. It’s a vulnerable thing to write about anything personal. And that play is about policing the sexuality of girls and women in a violent way. I’d written that play very swiftly, in my last year of graduate school. But it had come out of some real-life people I had encountered when traveling in Egypt, so it was a thrilling level of potential responsibility.You went on to have a thriving career in regional theater, but you had far fewer productions in New York, though you live in New York.Most writers don’t get their plays done at all. And almost nothing I’ve written has gone unproduced. I’ve worked with amazing people and been asked onto incredible projects. But in this sense of the cultural conversation, New York is an amplifier. So if I’m a mission-driven person, and my mission is to amplify voices, especially those of girls and women, and I myself am not amplified, then I am not doing my job. Also my work almost always involves getting on a plane and living by myself in artist housing. This festival is the first time that my own community, my friends, my writers’ group, my colleagues can see my work. On a personal level, that matters tremendously.Why do you think your plays haven’t found a home here?Generally, the one narrow path from the early-career buzz that I was fortunate to enjoy with “Gum” toward a steady midcareer presence in New York is a rave in The Times. “Gum” did not get that rave. So my road has been longer, and further afield. The sense I got was, “We don’t know where to put you.” The stories I tell, which are stories that I think a lot of people want to see, are off base, but not in a particularly cool way, in a way that’s emotional. I live in emotion. That’s my home.What is it like having two New York premieres and one world premiere all at once?The companies are exquisite — the level of artistry, these directors. I’ve described the nitty-gritty of it as like having triplets. They were all in previews at exactly the same time. I called Lucy Thurber, who had this festival of her plays at Rattlestick. She’s the only person I knew who had gone through something like this. She was like, “Trust. And check in with every director every day.”What do you think unites these plays?They’re all plays about how our intimate bonds meet our political moments and meet the laws of our time, but in very radically different times and contexts. How do we become the people in the relationships that we have capacity for? And how do our times work with us and against us? I keep coming back to this question of how do we get the deep, deep closeness that we need. Or maybe I’m the only person who needs this. More

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      ‘Barococo’ Review: Fop Till You Drop

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      Happenstance Theater traps five pretentious aristocrats in a comedy of bad manners that could use more luster and more bite.Playing parlor games, dancing the minuet, making snide comments — aristocrats sure do know how to party. But there’s always a chance that by the end of the night someone will lose their head …The dandies and dauphins of the 1 percent prance to 59E59 Theaters for Happenstance Theater’s “Barococo,” A satire of upper-class privilege zhuzhed up into an often absurd comedy of manners, “Barococo” has fun and laughs, but doesn’t always have the glamour you’d expect from this exaggerated snapshot of genteel life.The play’s title is a portmanteau of “Baroque” and “Rococo,” the 17th- and 18th-century periods of ornate European art, fashion, architecture and music. “Barococo” takes place during a soiree hosted by the noble Dauphine Marionette (Sarah Olmsted Thomas). In attendance are the self-important actor Astorio Cavalieri (Mark Jaster), the pretentious Duc Leslie Pamplemousse de Citron-Pressé (Alex Vernon), the petty elder Countess Olympia Stroganovskaya (Sabrina Selma Mandell) and the vacuous outsider Baroness Constance Blandford Plainview (Gwen Grastorf).Luccio Patatino von Dusselkopf (Caleb Jaster) serves as the entertainment, accompanying the party games with the sounds of Handel and Bach on harpsichord and cello.Happenstance, a Washington-based physical theater troupe, devises productions with its cast, and there’s no plot to speak of in this brief 65-minute show, directed by the company members Jaster and Mandell.We simply watch these daft noblemen and women play charades, dance and trade riddles in a desperate attempt to stave off ennui. Leisure is a trap — literally. It soon becomes clear that these aristocrats are unable to leave the party.So the surprise of “Barococo” is how it actually resembles Sartre’s “No Exit,” or, more fittingly, Luis Buñuel’s surrealist film “The Exterminating Angel,” which was recently adapted into an opera. There’s the same idiocy and, sometimes, cruelty beneath the fawning and posturing. Somewhere outside this room is the real world, where finery and foppishness won’t save these characters from an uprising of the plebs.The actors distinguish themselves through affectations: a raised eyebrow, a bow, a giggle, a swept leg, a daintily dropped handkerchief, a cleared throat. Pantomime and awkward silences are emphasized more than dialogue, and to great comedic effect — the show really takes off during an extended silent sequence in which the partygoers gorge on an unseen feast; outrageous feats of physical comedy soon devolve into violence and then total chaos.As the Dauphine and Cavalieri, Thomas and Jaster make starving for attention into a show of flamboyance — she tittering shamelessly and he performing a full actor’s warm-up for a simple game of charades. Grastorf is a worthy straight woman, her bearings painfully stiff and face twisted into an expression of constant bafflement.From left: Vernon as a pretentious duke, Mandell as a petty countess, Jaster as a pretentious actor and Thomas as the hostess of the soiree.Richard TermineAnd yet, for a show all about excess, the production is oddly spare. The set design is virtually nonexistent — unadorned floors and walls dotted with a harpsichord, some stringed instruments, a fencing sword mount and a table with quills and an inkwell. In a program note the directors write that they chose this minimalist approach “to focus on period restraint, manners and style,” but the empty space feels like too stark of a contrast; some embellishments would do the production good.The same can be said of Daniel Weissglass’s austere lighting and the costumes, designed by Mandell. The cuffs and collars and doublets, and curled and powdered wigs, are perfectly serviceable but could use more rococo ornamentation, with brighter colors, opulent fabrics and jewels.The script itself could use some trimmings, too. There is plenty of delicious humor to chew on at “Barococo.” But more context on the outside world, and the lives of these characters, might individualize the gossip and quibbles, and give the satire more bite. Right now the show is little more than rich people dawdling and preening on a stage.BarococoThrough March 6 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 5 minutes. More

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      ‘The Collision’ and ‘The Martyrdom’ Review: A Nun Ahead of Her Time

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      A classic text by the 10th-century Saxon nun Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim inspires two new plays being performed as a double bill at 59E59 Theaters.Three nuns hard at work at their convent look up to discover that the sky is falling …It could be the beginning of a joke, or a New Yorker cartoon. But it’s the opening scene in “The Collision and What Came After, or, Gunch!,” a play being presented alongside “The Martyrdom” by Two Headed Rep at 59E59 Theaters. Despite the comic potential of this setup, these works, inspired by the writing of the 10th-century nun and playwright Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim, are neither as funny nor — at two hours and 40 minutes — as snappy as they could be.In “The Collision,” written by Nadja Leonhard-Hooper, the patient Sister Gudrun (Emma Ramos) and the critical Sister Anise (Lizzie Fox) try to teach the young Sister Gunch (Layla Khoshnoudi) the responsibilities of the ideal nun: doing chores, praying, hand-copying Bibles — you know, the usual. But Gunch is foul-mouthed, blunt and curious about more than just God. “All of nature is vile and fecund and touching itself,” she says with lustful wonder, recounting a time she watched one goat mount another.When a giant meteorite lands near the convent, the abbess goes the way of the Wicked Witch of the East and Gunch suffers a fatal attack that she miraculously survives. The event forces the characters to reconsider the lessons in faith they’ve been taught — which messages are prophetic and which ones heretical, and why.The script has a few delicately written passages, for example, when Gudrun describes “gray-black clouds” that gather “as if trying to bind the sky like a wound.” The performers also have some standout moments: Halima Henderson, who plays a couple of secondary characters, has a priceless bit as a messenger with no grasp of social cues. And Khoshnoudi, with her dreamy glances and devilish grin, could have her own play, her own TV series, in fact, as the delightfully peculiar Gunch.As for the story itself, it’s zany, though to what end isn’t always clear; Lily Riopelle’s direction, which incorporates physical humor and playful props (a severed hand, a dead pigeon and a chicken called “little queen,” designed by Liz Oakley), often reads as amateurish. Though the play gets a lot of mileage from its narrative twists and turns, which pull the story into the realms of science fiction and absurdism, the script can’t successfully pull off its final maneuver, an explicit criticism of institutional religion and a grand statement on storytelling.“A story is a snake, and we are mice inside it, swallowed whole but still alive,” a character says at one point. That sentiment can be applied to this play, which swallows its characters — and some narrative logic — in its bizarre contortions.If “The Collision” is more enamored with its quirks than with cohesive storytelling, then “The Martyrdom” is its antipode, a play so procedural that it leaves little space for strangeness and wonder.After a brief intermission, the four actresses return for this second play, the full title of which is so long that reading it requires its own intermission: “The Martyrdom of the Holy Virgins Agape, Chionia, and Irena, by Hrotsvitha the Nun of Gandersheim, as Told Throughout the Last Millennium by the Men, Women, Scholars, Monastics, Puppets, and Theater Companies (Like This One) Who Loved Her, or: Dulcitius.”Layla Khoshnoudi, left, and Halima Henderson in “The Martyrdom.”Ashley Garrett“The Martyrdom,” directed by Molly Clifford, is based on Hrotsvitha’s play “Dulcitius,” about three pious sisters who try to remain chaste despite the intentions of lascivious politicians. “Dulcitius” appears throughout the course of “The Martyrdom,” though in different pieces and different forms.With translation by Lizzie Fox and new text by Amanda Keating, “The Martyrdom” is a history lesson, celebrating the legacy of Hrotsvitha, who is considered to be the first female playwright to have her work recorded, by providing a timeline of major incarnations of “Dulcitius.”So the show begins in a monastery during Hrotsvitha’s lifetime, where a council or monks reviews the playwright’s work. Then centuries later, Hungarian nuns write a modern, vernacular adaptation of “Dulcitius.” Then there are the French artists who use marionettes to tell the tale of the three sisters. Then the British suffragist in the 1800s, and an American nun at the University of Michigan in the 1950s. It’s a clever move for such dated material: In each scene the characters act out parts of the play, each version reflecting the changing context of the material over time. After each section, a fourth-wall-breaking educational moment occurs when the actresses provide more details about Hrotsvitha’s text and its various productions.The result, unfortunately, is colorless and, like “The Collision,” unnecessarily long. “The Martyrdom” tries to stretch out scenes of Hrotsvitha’s play across history to suit its structure, despite the fact that the play’s plot is already pretty anemic, so there’s not enough action to go around.It doesn’t help that Cate McCrea’s set design for the tiny theater, which seats about 50, is rather bland: a plain back wall, a long rectangular bar that bisects the length of the stage, serving as a table or desk or bench as needed.Somewhere between “The Collision” and “The Martyrdom” is a holy middle ground of oddity and structure, chaos and order, that would make even a Saxon nun from the 10th century say, “Amen.”The Collision / The MartyrdomThrough Feb. 5 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More