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    The Stage Combat Is Verbal in These Off Broadway Plays

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    Belarus Free Theater’s “KS6: Small Forward” and three other shows are reminders that there are many ways to portray conflicts and confrontations onstage.When feeling cornered by real-world drama, I catch myself thinking that theater should stand aside from time and space, like a self-contained capsule of pure art. But a recent tour of Off and Off Off Broadway offerings is a bracing reminder of how exhilarating a show can be when it connects one person — onstage, in the audience — with the world.Here are four plays around New York that are small (in scale and budget, not heart or ambition) and tackle political issues in imaginative ways.‘KS6: Small Forward’This is a show by the defiantly activist Belarus Free Theater, whose artistic directors, Natalia Kaliada and Nicolai Khalezin, fled their homeland’s dictatorship in 2011, so naturally dissension and discord form a crucial part of the story.In “KS6: Small Forward,” through Oct. 13 at La MaMa, the retired professional basketball player Katsiaryna Snytsina looks back on her path from a child in a then-Soviet Republic to the hardwood courts of Europe. Kaliada and Khalezin’s staging includes plenty of video footage of Snytsina in action, particularly of her last team, the London Lions, triumphing in a European final just a few months ago. Khalezin’s scenic design is delineated by a three-point semicircle and a basket used for a good-natured, mid-show shooting competition.Speaking in English, the lanky Snytsina, who is not a polished actor but has effortless charisma, describes growing up in a sports system based on bullying, living out of a suitcase and coming out as a lesbian (“my Instagram is considered extremist material by the Belarusian regime”). She also talks about what the violent repression of the pro-democracy protests of 2020 in Minsk meant to someone who had never voted — the episode is effectively staged with a basketball spurting out blood as it’s being pulverized.The one time Snytsina, who now lives in London, verbalizes thoughts that might occur to some American viewers is when she brings up ballot results: “The Belarusian dictatorship is over 30 years old,” she says. “Just imagine if you vote Trump in, and he falsifies the next 30 years of elections. What will happen? Just imagine that!”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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      ‘Arcadia’ Review: Artistic Ambition Gets Thrown Into Chaos

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      Bedlam’s revival of Tom Stoppard’s time-traveling mind-bender of a play is a meditation on uncertainty.If even commonplace matters of everyday life — weather, traffic, disease — can defy scientific expectations, what hope could there be in predicting human behavior? With “Arcadia,” his 1993 play, Tom Stoppard set out to explore the science of this uncertainty and how it can disrupt our understanding of history. A new staging presented by Bedlam makes a valiant effort to adapt Stoppard’s cerebral probes into chaos theory, Newtonian law, thermodynamics and metaphysics for a 2023 audience, but the result is a muddled one. And that may just demonstrate Stoppard’s frustrating but brilliant point.Act 1 introduces us to the play’s complicated narrative mechanics, as we jump back and forth between the Regency Period of the early 1800s and the early 1990s. The staging of the 1990s years feels even closer to our own when two primary characters — the independent-minded author Hannah (Zuzanna Szadkowski) and one of her love interests, the logic-driven mathematician Valentine (Mike Labbadia) — pull out smartphones and sleek laptops.Stoppard sets the play in Derbyshire, a county in the East Midlands of England, but Eric Tucker, the director, has his actors drop the British accents. So when Hannah and Valentine enter an academic arms race with a smarmy Byron scholar named Bernard (Ian Zafir) who values poetry above all other subjects, they spew hard consonants and short vowels. The North American Englishness of it all makes it slightly easier to hold on to Stoppard’s words.Even in a space as physically intimate as the West End Theater (located on the second floor of a century-old church, which provides an aptly haunting atmosphere), the production feels cold, caught up in its own profundity at the expense of our comprehension. The Bedlam company’s acting is void of real thrill so the bits of Stoppard’s playful wordplay and humor we do catch fall flat in both centuries.There are two exceptions: the luminous Caroline Grogan as Thomasina, a preternaturally wise student, and the stormy Shaun Taylor-Corbett as Septimus, her tenacious tutor. Together, they find themselves on the brink of a major discovery that Valentine will investigate in the 1990s. The pair find a seductive chemistry that blossoms as Septimus opens Thomasina’s mind to entropic (and erotic) possibilities.In Act 2, the eras blur. Timelines that were previously distinct are now stacked on top of one another. After intermission, we’re ushered back into the theater only to discover that Tucker has brazenly swapped the actors’ playing area for our seating area. By doing so, Tucker fulfills Bedlam’s mission statement to “reinvigorate traditional forms” and “collapse aesthetic distance.” But he’s also honoring one of Stoppard’s main provocations — that the unknowability of the past meets the unknowability of the here and now.ArcadiaThrough Dec. 23 at the West End Theater, Manhattan; bedlam.org. Running time: 3 hours 5 minutes.This review is supported by Critical Minded, an initiative to invest in the work of cultural critics from historically underrepresented backgrounds. More

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      Review: ‘The Good John Proctor’ Imagines Girlhood BFFs

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      The play, directed by Caitlin Sullivan at the Connelly Theater, focuses on two girls in the year leading up to the action depicted in “The Crucible.”Abigail Williams is described by Arthur Miller in “The Crucible” as a “strikingly beautiful girl” of 17 with “an endless capacity for dissembling.” Lusty and conniving, Miller’s Abigail has an affair with her former boss, John Proctor, and after she gets fired, tries to hex his wife out of jealousy by drinking blood and dancing naked with other girls in the woods. Her lies about that night serve as the catalyst for Miller’s 1953 dramatization of the Salem witch trials, which casts John as its tragic hero.Williams was, in fact, only 11 or 12 years old in 1692, when she and her 9-year-old cousin, Betty Parris, made their first accusations. “The Good John Proctor,” a dark comedy by the playwright Talene Monahon, imagines Abigail (Susannah Perkins) and Betty (Sharlene Cruz) as girlhood BFFs and bedfellows in the year leading up to the action depicted in Miller’s play. Speaking in modern vernacular, but wearing Puritan-style bonnets and white nightdresses (in costumes by Phuong Nguyen), the girls whisper about dreams of flying, playact as a king and a peasant maiden and recoil in paranoia as if they were under constant surveillance.There is a threat lurking in the rustling darkness that surrounds them in this Bedlam production, which runs through April 1 at the Connelly Theater, but it’s not the supernatural kind (the stunning chiaroscuro lighting is by Isabella Byrd, and arboreal sound design by Lee Kinney). Mercy (Tavi Gevinson), a seasoned housemaid of 14, calls it the devil, but what she really means is the power and whims of men. “There’s evil everywhere,” Mercy mordantly insists. Is it any wonder the girls assume Satan is to blame for the bloody parts of womanhood that no one else has explained?The Salem witch trials have been endlessly rehashed and reclaimed in pop culture, including onstage; Bedlam presented a stripped-down and pointedly political take on “The Crucible” in this theater in 2019, and Gevinson played Mary Warren in a stylized and bombastic Broadway revival in 2016. “The Good John Proctor” isn’t even the only Salem-inspired dark comedy to play Off Broadway this season; Sarah Ruhl’s “Becky Nurse of Salem” brought a descendant of the accused to Lincoln Center in the fall.So why take audiences to Salem again? Monahon’s playful and precise ear for the rhythms of adolescent dialogue is among the chief pleasures of “The Good John Proctor,” which draws a bit too heavily on its source material (a brief refresher on “The Crucible” and its creepy poppet would be advisable preshow reading). Beautifully staged by the director Caitlin Sullivan, the play is most engaging and provocative when at its most original — mining its characters’ messy, developing psyches, with contemporary and sometimes profane language, rather than placing them within existing narratives.The cast, including a doe-eyed Brittany K. Allen as Mary Warren, nimbly inhabit characters on the edge of innocence, or just beyond it, who belong not entirely to the past or the present. That shadowy ‌in between space opens up fertile ground for investigation, where the only ones who have any basis to be afraid are the girls who’ve been left in the dark.The Good John ProctorThrough April 1 at the Connelly Theater, Manhattan; bedlam.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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      ‘Fall River Fishing’ Review: So She Dated an Axe Murderer

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      A casually absurd play about the infamous Lizzie Borden, presented by Bedlam, cleverly undercuts the central dramatic event.There will be blood. And meat sauce. And dancing corpses. And Sharon Tate. Clarity? Not so much.Though, to be fair, if you aren’t ready for madness, perhaps a play about Lizzie Borden, presented by a theater company named Bedlam, isn’t your best bet.“Fall River Fishing,” written by Zuzanna Szadkowski and Deborah Knox, who also star, is a Rube Goldberg machine of a play: an entertaining spectacle of seemingly disparate parts that are actually interconnected. Yet this ornate display winds up feeling like a lot of show for an unimpressive payoff.But let’s begin with Lizzie Borden (Szadkowski), the woman from the gruesome children’s rhyme, who in 1892 took an ax and served 40 whacks in a double parricide that claimed the lives of her father and stepmother. Well, not an ax exactly, but a hatchet, as Bridget (Knox), the Borden family’s maid — and Lizzie’s kind-of lover — describes it. The weapon doesn’t actually appear until late in the first act, which comprises a series of domestic scenes in the Borden home, including interactions between Lizzie, Bridget, Lizzie’s father (Tony Torn), her young stepmother (Susannah Millonzi) and Uncle Nathan (Jamie Smithson), on the day of the murders.From left, Susannah Millonzi as Lizzie’s young stepmother, Jamie Smithson as Uncle Nathan and Tony Torn as the Borden patriarch in “Fall River Fishing.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesInstead of opting for an “American Psycho”-style gorefest, “Fall River Fishing,” directed by Eric Tucker, cleverly undercuts the central dramatic event, making the infamous real-life murders the anticlimax and continuing on from there. So from the start, we see onstage the bloodstained couch, the puddle of blood on the floor and red stains on the bed, though the characters sit and walk around the space as though everything is perfectly normal. Perhaps there is a touch of Bret Easton Ellis in this casually absurd play, which is packed from beginning to end with dark ironies. The most obvious being that the Bordens, despite wearing 19th-century fashion and sitting on 19th-century furniture, don’t just speak in contemporary English, but also make rather contemporary cultural references: to Cabbage Patch Kids, to the appeal of Greek yogurt, to the O.J. Simpson verdict.The dialogue is a constant stream of random quips, anachronisms, expletives, awkward gaffes and surprising non sequiturs. All of which is very funny — if that kind of quirkiness and drollery is your cup of tea. If not, you’ll struggle with the play’s humor, which may wear thin even for those enjoying it. After all, the play prioritizes its high-concept, heightened comedy over character building, plot or any of the usual forces behind a work’s momentum — so its engine runs out of steam almost immediately.It’s because of the no-holds-barred work of the cast and the director, however, that “Fall River” manages to stretch its charms for as long as it does (a nearly two-and-a-half-hour running time could have been cut by a full 60 to 90 minutes). Szadkowski proves to be an expert of deadpan humor from the first (unprintable) word she utters as Lizzie, who is both an insecure outcast and a selfish flirt with an endless need for attention. And, to make things worse, Lizzie is an aspiring actress who declares her performance as Nora in “A Doll’s House” — watch out, Jessica Chastain — her greatest feat.Knox’s Bridget makes a perfect pair with Szadkowski’s Lizzie, who strings the earnest maid along; Bridget follows Lizzie’s whims and bizarre scene studies, donning a wig and a pregnancy belly to play Sharon Tate (who makes an additional appearance). The Borden patriarch played by Torn is an unbearable misogynist, who wistfully recalls his first polyamorous marriage and the appeal of “foreign genitals, novel genitals,” courtesy of Tinder, with entertaining crudeness. Millonzi, as Lizzie’s alternately meek and vicious stepmother, performs her role with such otherworldly abandon that the character seems to have stepped out of her own universe, even within this already curious realm of weirdos and fools. Her physical performance is most impressive: She’s constantly draping herself over furniture, folding over suddenly and slouching around like a wet noodle. And Smithson is an utter delight as Uncle Nathan, a living, breathing cringe in the form of an adult man.After all of the jokes and the bloodshed and a brief waltz between the deceased, the play turns into a less interesting thought experiment in its second act, with Szadkowski and Smithson now playing a modern-day Nora and Torvald as they entertain some very bizarre guests. Soon everyone is digging into a bowl of spaghetti, hands-first, and rubbing it over their faces. By then “Fall River” has not only lost its steam, but also its appeal, and its last bit of sense.“This is nonsense!” Torvald/Nathan declares near the end of the production. True, but a little nonsense offers laughs and flights of imagination. Too much, and you leave the theater feeling mad.Fall River FishingThrough March 9 at the Connelly Theater, Manhattan; bedlam.org. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. More

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      ‘Hedda Gabler’ and ‘The Winter’s Tale’: 2 Takes That Shout Subtext

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      Irreverence can be illuminating. But Bedlam’s energetic productions of classics by Ibsen and Shakespeare lose insight in the process.Forgoing subtlety onstage has its advantages. Exaggeration leaves little room for doubt, obvious feelings burn hot, and in-your-face humor doesn’t‌ risk flying over your head. At least, that’s the idea. But in the Bedlam theater company’s productions of Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” and Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale,” now playing in repertory at the Irondale Center in Brooklyn, subtlety isn’t just dead, it’s the devil in need of exorcis‌ing.Take the newlywed Hedda Tessman, sunk low in a chair, coolly lighted at center stage as the 1891 play that bears her maiden name begins. Portrayed with viscous, palpable disaffection by Susannah Millonzi, she is a woman so unsuited to domesticity that her chair is leopard print. And when Hedda greets her doting, unrefined aunt (“Visiting us so early — that’s so very… kind of you”) her expression of good manners, which Ibsen soaked with subtext, becomes overtly sarcastic, subverting the play’s careful attention to the ways people use language to hide or reveal themselves.Bedlam, now in its 10th anniversary season, has built a reputation for reinterpreting classic texts, like “Sense & Sensibility” and “The Crucible,” with stripped-down, energetic stagings and a modern touch. Under the direction of the artistic director Eric Tucker, many of these revivals have sought to expose the essential bones of familiar works. Here, Tucker, who directs and acts in both productions, seems to be reacting against received ideas about the texts, resisting what’s expected of these classics with an exceptionally playful hand. But it’s a tricky gesture that, in each case, tends to obscure more than it illuminates.Using a colloquial adaptation of “Hedda Gabler” by Jon Robin Baitz, the production recasts the drama of betrayal in captivity as a daffy but dour comedy that happens to end in death. If Ibsen is known for his design of psychological interiors and subconscious intentions, here every room is turned inside-out, with feelings and attitudes sprung in the open. Rag-tag vintage furniture is pressed against the periphery of the stage (set design is by John McDermott), suggesting the drawing-room realism that Ibsen fathered has been deliberately cast aside.With a Hedda this sour and cunning from the start, her union with Tucker’s chipper, oblivious Tessman can only come off as a farce, its absurdity radiating outward. Line readings defy logic; one moment Tessman is shouting to Hedda as if she’s on the roof, the next he’s surprised to find her right beside him. Innuendo turns literal, as when Judge Brack (Ryan Quinn) all but humps the legs of Hedda’s chair. Dialogue and action are mismatched, as when Hedda claws meat off a roast chicken in the fridge, though she purports to be reading a letter. (She’s a woman of appetite, remember?) ‌‌The consequence of so much funny business is that there’s not much to ponder about the characters’ inner lives, which makes Ibsen far less interesting to watch. And the lighting (by Carolina Ortiz) and sound (by Jane Shaw) are heavy handed, indicating when the mood turns serious and sincere. With Hedda’s misery so loud and clear upfront, modulation also becomes a problem. By the time her foul deeds come to a head, she is throwing up, slapping the walls and hollering in a way that seems unsuited to a woman averse to public scandal.Lisa Birnbaum as Hermione and Eric Tucker as Leontes in “The Winter’s Tale,” the most unwieldy of Shakespeare’s plays, with a bear attack and a statue that comes to life.Ashley GarrettThe transgression of social bonds — between husbands and wives, fathers and sons, leaders and citizens — links the repertory pairing and seems to make Bedlam’s case for its resonance in the present.Suspicion of infidelity kicks off “The Winter’s Tale,” in which Tucker’s volatile, and obtuse, patriarch Leontes rules over a frat party-style royal court. With its swing from apparent tragedy to roving rom-com, and its grab bag of devices (a bear attack, a 16-year time jump, a statue that comes to life), Shakespeare’s play is an unwieldy beast to wrangle onstage, and one of the most amenable to bold and wacky interpretations. ‌‌Leontes and the neighboring king Polixenes (Elan Zafir) start out demonstrating their brotherly affection by slapping each other across the face with flour tortillas between shots of cheap liquor. But when Leontes suspects the queen Hermione (Lisa Birnbaum) is pregnant by Polixenes instead of him, the jig is up in a flurry of banishments and deaths that leaves him without his wife, child and friend.A cast of seven (some of whom appear in both productions) double and triple up roles in “The Winter’s Tale,” with only slight changes in the ’80s thrift-store costumes by Daniele Tyler Mathews to help viewers distinguish between them. The most impressive juggling act comes from Zafir, who plays both father and son in a confrontation at the altar of young love. Karen Alvarado, as faithful servant Camillo (and the ardent, naïve Thea in “Hedda Gabler”) is a standout in both, a rare anchor of earnestness and ease. But not everyone is as comfortable, especially with Shakespeare’s verse; under Tucker’s direction, some of the actors fall into the trap of gesturing at rather than conveying the meaning of words.There is something to be said for a company clearly having a blast — several, including Tucker, broke character cracking up at Mike Labbadia’s Clown (modeled after his pop culture moniker Chad, or loathsome alpha male), a laugh that might have been more fun were everyone in on the joke.Improvised bits of modern dialogue and a variety of acting styles give the productions a sense of a particularly collaborative rehearsal process. Challenging the form and style of revered material is what keeps them alive. But neither revival makes easy work of identifying cohesive or incisive arguments about the texts while also allowing the audience to follow along.If less can be more, as previous Bedlam productions have shown, “Hedda Gabler” and “The Winter’s Tale” suggest that more can also be too much. So much exuberance can demonstrate a breach of trust in the material, and the audience’s ability to understand it. As Ibsen and Shakespeare both point out, underestimating people comes at a cost.Hedda GablerThrough Nov. 19 at the Irondale Center, Brooklyn; bedlam.org. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes.The Winter’s TaleThrough Nov. 20 at the Irondale Center, Brooklyn; bedlam.org. Running time: 3 hours. More

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      ‘Mary Stuart’ Review: A Battle Royal in a Brooklyn Apartment

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      With four actors and a contemporary setting, Bedlam offers an audacious, if half-baked, take on the Schiller play about the fate of Mary, Queen of Scots.Two queens, a gaggle of self-serving politicians, a murder plot, a rivalry for regal dominance: George R.R. Martin has nothing on the annals of English history. That’s why the stories appeal to so many, from the writer and historian Philippa Gregory to the 18th-century German poet-playwright Friedrich Schiller, whose verse play “Mary Stuart,” about the imprisonment and final days of the famous Queen of Scots, has proved a steady stage draw, especially for zealous actresses.Sixteenth century England comes to 21st-century America in Bedlam’s new adaptation of Schiller’s play, a fleet though unkempt production performed by a trim cast of four and filmed inside a Brooklyn fourth-floor walk-up.Perhaps you already know the story from European history class, or one of the many fictionalized accounts of the tale. (I have Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie to thank for my most recent refresher, in 2018’s “Mary Queen of Scots.”)Mary Stuart (Violeta Picayo), who is accused of murdering her husband, is imprisoned in England for also claiming a right to the throne. Her cousin, Queen Elizabeth (Shirine Babb), is conflicted about how to handle Mary, who poses a threat to her power while she’s alive, but whose execution would weigh on her conscience.Then there’s the sway of public opinion and the perspectives of her various advisers to take into account — as they say, “uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”This “Mary Stuart,” adapted by Rachel Vail from the translation by Joseph Mellish, works a bold contrast between the aureate language and the home-cooked D.I.Y. vibe of the production, which has the same playful quality the scrappy and always inventive Bedlam is known for — albeit with a touch less polish.Mary is held captive beneath a kitchen island; a suicide happens behind a shower curtain in a bathtub; a queenly meeting takes place not in a forest, as we’re told, but on a rooftop overlooking the city.Such jarring contradictions occasionally feel compelling, but often read as kitschy, even amateurish. A French ambassador, for example, appears in the form of a blue sock puppet: Adorable, but — Mon Dieu! — dangerously close to something you’d find in a high school homework assignment.That also goes for the camerawork, which is as shaky and abrupt as a scene from “Cloverfield.” The sound, too, cuts in and out, leaving some of the dialogue behind.The four actors give generous performances, directed by Zachary Elkind with a snappiness that allows for each to contain multitudes: speedy, minute costume changes (a scarf, a pair of glasses, a blazer, a baseball cap) create the illusion of a whole English court without even the briefest interruption of a scene.However, Elkind’s direction also sits unsteadily between cartoony humor and stately drama. So Simon Schaitkin’s Lord Burleigh, a sniveling, slouching schemer with glasses perched at the tip of his nose, is too arch, and Shaun Taylor-Corbett’s Wilhelm Davison, the queen’s secretary, too dopey. And yet Taylor-Corbett’s selfish Earl of Leicester, caught between his love for each queen and his desire to save his own neck, lands with more punch.Picayo, left, taking the role of one of Elizabeth’s trusted advisers in this scene, consults with Shirine Babb’s queen.Zachary ElkindThe same for Picayo and Babb, whose contrasting stances — both headstrong and self-righteous in separate ways — bring fire. Babb makes a believable Elizabeth, firm and royally composed yet vulnerable beneath the surface, while Picayo embodies defiance, as when she hurls a throaty “I am your queen!” at her rival.“Before these strangers’ eyes, dishonor not yourself and me. Profane not, disgrace not the royal blood of Tudor. In my veins it flows as sure a stream as in your own,” Stuart declares to Elizabeth when they meet — a meeting that, in reality, never happened, by the way. And yet historical fiction loves to imagine it, understandably, because what could be juicier than a showdown between two powerful women?Still most versions of this story struggle to figure out how to handle these women. Often their personalities, strengths and fears become occluded by the machinations of the men around them, as happens occasionally here.Ultimately, despite the audacious contrasts that define this production, “Mary Stuart” also suffers from a case of “So what?” And by that I mean, “Why now?”One impulse seems to be the chance to talk about female power, or power in general. I could imagine a critique of our election fracas and all the recent chatter about the expectations placed on the royals of Buckingham Palace today.But for all the ways “Mary Stuart” asks us to see Elizabethan England in a Brooklyn apartment, it fails to show us what Elizabethan England can tell us about Brooklyn — and America, and contemporary England — now.Mary StuartThrough May 9; available on-demand at bedlam.org starting May 10. More