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    ‘Lunar Eclipse’ Review: A Dark, Cloudy Night of the Soul

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    In Donald Margulies’s heavy-handed new play, Reed Birney is terrific as a farmer forced by his wife, played by Karen Allen, to face his grief.“We realize he’s crying” must be among the scariest stage directions an actor could find at the top of a script. How do you get from zero to tears with no context?That’s the challenge Donald Margulies puts before the actor playing George in “Lunar Eclipse,” his new two-character play at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Mass. And wait, it gets harder. As we will soon learn, George, a Midwestern farmer in late middle age, is stony and unsentimental, the opposite of a weeper. Yet as the lights slowly rise on his dark night of the soul, there he is anyway: a heaving, racking torrent of sobs.Is it thoughtless to say how lucky we are that the heaving and racking come from Reed Birney?It’s certainly lucky for Margulies and his somewhat overripe tear-jerker, which opened on Sunday. Often threatening to drown in a generalized wetness, the play benefits immensely from the detail and discipline of Birney’s superb performance. He doesn’t so much produce emotions as shed them.After nearly 50 years onstage, that’s no surprise; he’s won Obie, Drama Desk and Tony awards for his no-nonsense, full-sized approach, in which acting is the side effect of his insight and inhabitation of character. What’s surprising, and a bit scary, is that he has played such a variety of men so vividly: a vile journalist, a penitent philanderer, a conniving cross-dresser. How many feelings does he have inside him?And how many ways of turning them off? As soon as George’s wife, Em, arrives, the tears and all other signs of vulnerability get ruthlessly shut down. George is so ornery and curt that even after 50 years or so of marriage, Em (Karen Allen) must dance around him in search of some opening to his secret grief. Emotional intelligence has turned her into a spelunker.If you do not know such pairs from real life, you probably know them from the theater. “On Golden Pond” and “The Gin Game” both offer variations on the “crusty old man bickering with woman who knows better” template. Also like “Lunar Eclipse,” those plays try to corral their rambling contents within the bounds of a thematic fence: the months of a summer, the deals of a deck.Even more heavy-handedly, “Lunar Eclipse” uses the phases of planetary alignment as both plot and poetics. Its seven scenes (followed by a coda) are called “stages” and are described in pedantic voice-overs: “Stage 1. Moon enters penumbra. Penumbral shadow appears.”The framing adds nothing, in fact detracting from a story that could stand to be tighter and better grounded in reality. Margulies, so expert with urbane, artistic and moneyed characters — he won a Pulitzer Prize for “Dinner With Friends” and was a finalist for “Sight Unseen” and “Collected Stories” — is not as convincing with farm folk. (“Wild Turkey does a mighty fine job keeping you warm,” George says as if he were on “Hee Haw.”) I had to nod in agreement when I read a program note admitting that “astronomical liberties have been taken for dramatic purposes.”Astronomical in both senses. Yet despite the liberties, “Lunar Eclipse” remains affecting when its staging, by James Warwick, gets granular. In the middle of the night on which it takes place, George has come to a “sacred” spot on his farm (the needlessly rotating set is by John Musall) to watch the earth’s shadow eat up the moon. Em has followed him there with “provisions”: blankets he does not want and hot chocolate he reluctantly accepts only when she pours it into his tin cup of bourbon. She carefully applies bug spray to the neatly turned cuffs of her jeans (costumes by Christina Beam); he swats insects from his face throughout (crickets by the sound designer Nathan Leigh).These concrete details operate in helpful contrast to the back story revealed at regular intervals as the eclipse progresses over the next 90 minutes. We learn of beloved dogs buried nearby. Of a troubled sore-spot of a son. And of a new fear: that the early signs of dementia are beginning to cloud George’s mind.That the night is likewise too cloudy for a perfect viewing seems apt. (The very dim lighting is by James McNamara.) We see pretty well into George by observing his resistances, but Em, despite Allen’s astute performance, is underwritten and mostly reactive. Her one expressed grief, about a tragedy now years in the past, cannot stand up to George’s million pesky, present annoyances.Perhaps that’s Margulies’s point — and a way of making meaning of the eclipse, which otherwise seems like a McGuffin. “This may come as a shock to you,” George says with his usual asperity. “Even though we’ve been married forever, we’re two separate people.”In other words: We cannot know each other. Marriage, even if not loveless, is not equal. As with planets and moons, one spouse generally revolves around the other, doing more work and yet, come crunchtime, left in the obliterating shadow.Lunar EclipseThrough Oct. 22 at Shakespeare & Company, Lenox, Mass.; shakespeare.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Review: Unearthing the Late Curiosities of Tennessee Williams

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      “Hilton Als Presents,” from New York Theater Workshop, features three of the playwright’s overlooked and often disparaged works.Once mortals become immortal, it’s easy to forget how precariously they stumbled through life. That is certainly true of Tennessee Williams, who ensured his place in the pantheon of American playwriting with his early hits “The Glass Menagerie,” “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” but spent his last two decades — after “The Night of the Iguana,” in 1961 — in what Hilton Als calls “a kind of critical purgatory.”But critics at their most vital aren’t a baying wolf pack chasing weakened prey. They’re champions of the overlooked, the underpraised, the misunderstood. In that spirit, Als, a writer for The New Yorker who won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2017, is asking for a reconsideration of some late Williams works.In “Selections From Tennessee Williams,” the second episode of the two-part New York Theater Workshop podcast “Hilton Als Presents,” he plucks excerpts from three plays dismissed in their own time: “In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel,” from 1969; “The Red Devil Battery Sign,” which succumbed in 1975 en route to Broadway; and “Clothes for a Summer Hotel,” Williams’s final Broadway premiere in his lifetime. It opened in 1980 on his 69th birthday and was met with such a pile-on of viciously mocking reviews that it closed after just two weeks.These plays are not exceptional in Williams’s oeuvre as considerations of masculinity, sexuality or the divided self — though, as Als notes, each includes a male artist character.Directed by Als, and with skillful audio production and editing by Alex Barron, the podcast does not always succeed in conveying, with voice and stage directions, what we need to envision.The scene from “The Red Devil Battery Sign,” starring Raúl Castillo as a band leader and Marin Ireland as a sexually rapacious belle, feels too untethered from context to add up to anything. But each of the other plays is memorable for a standout performance and for glimmers of beauty in the text.The longest excerpt, from “In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel,” at first seems an airless exercise: an encounter between a brittle yet lascivious American woman (Nadine Malouf) and the Japanese barman (James Yaegashi) she is harassing. It comes to life only belatedly, with the entrance of Reed Birney as her husband, Mark, an exceedingly drunken painter struggling to maintain his dignity and harness his artistry. It is an utterly lived-in performance, edged with terror and mirth. (John Lahr, in his biography of Williams, calls this play “a fascinating dissection of the perversity of his psyche,” and he is correct.)“In the beginning,” Mark says, his hands shaky, paint all over his suit, “a new style of work can be stronger than you, but you learn to control it. It has to be controlled.”Williams, at that point, was not doing so well at controlling his art, his addictions or his emotional frailty.The other magnetic turn is by Michelle Williams in “Clothes for a Summer Hotel,” which the playwright labeled “a ghost play,” about Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. As Zelda — a role originated by Geraldine Page on Broadway — Williams evades the traps that lie in wait in Tennessee Williams’s women: the masks and artifices of gender and class that made him famous for writing diva roles, and that often expose those characters to ridicule. Against the odds, Michelle Williams locates a human being.“Are you certain, Scott, that I fit the classification of dreamy young Southern lady?” Zelda asks her husband (played by André Holland). “Damn it, Scott. Sorry, wrong size, it pinches! Can’t wear that shoe, too confining.”Tennessee Williams, too, felt pinched and confined by expectations. He was forever in competition with his younger self.Als’s production doesn’t persuasively argue for these late plays. But it does accomplish what a critic is meant to do when elevation is in order — to urge close examination of something that might otherwise escape our gaze.Perhaps, taking Als’s cue, some brilliant director will see a way.Hilton Als Presents: Selections From Tennessee WilliamsThrough July 31; nytw.org. At anchor.fm/nytw79 and major podcast platforms. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. More

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      Father and Son Return to the Stage, Together. Again. No Regrets.

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      Reed and Ephraim Birney are in the Berkshires, reprising their roles in “Chester Bailey.” They discuss what it’s like to play off — and fight — each other.In his Instagram profile, Ephraim Birney describes himself as “the black sheep out of work actor in a family of black sheep working actors.” Born and raised in New York, the 24-year-old actor is the elder child of Reed Birney (a Tony winner in 2016 for his performance in “The Humans”) and Constance Shulman (“Doug,” “Orange Is the New Black”). His little sister, Gus Birney, has appeared in the TV series “The Mist” and “Dickinson.” Ephraim Birney has booked jobs, too — “Gotham,” “The Americans” — but not quite as many.“The weird thing isn’t that I’m an actor,” he said during a recent video call. “The weird thing is that I’m not working as an actor.”But Ephraim Birney, who was seated next to his father in the kitchen of their summer home in the Catskills, is working now. On Friday, the father-son actors begin performances indoors (indoors!) of “Chester Bailey,” Joseph Dougherty’s heart-raking two-hander at Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Mass. (The show, running through July 3, is being advertised as this summer’s first indoor theater event in the Berkshires approved by the Actors’ Equity Association.) Ephraim Birney stars as the title character, a Navy Yard worker who suffers a devastating injury in 1940s Brooklyn, and his father plays the doctor assigned to his care. The drama explores illusion, reality and the comfort imagination can provide.“As sad as this play is, and it is deeply sad,” Reed Birney, 66, said, “there’s something so beautiful about how these two men have affected each other.”The Birneys first took on these roles two years ago, for the Contemporary American Theater Festival in West Virginia. After a long pandemic-prompted break, spent mostly swimming and gardening at their upstate house, they have returned to them, with the same director, Ron Lagomarsino. During our hourlong call, the Birneys spoke about the vagaries of the business, learning to treat each other as colleagues and getting back to theater, together. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.For “Chester Bailey,” were you recruited as father and son?EPHRAIM BIRNEY No, it was a thing that I had auditioned for, on my own.REED BIRNEY I knew Ron Lagomarsino, the director, because I’d done “Hay Fever” with him in 1982 at the Kenyon Festival Theater. We’d stayed friends. So I wrote Ron, and I said, “My boy’s coming in for your show.” Suddenly I got an offer. I was not really interested in doing a play again for a while. But then I thought, if I say no to working with Ephraim, I will regret it for the rest of my life.EPHRAIM And you’ve regretted it ever since.When you started rehearsing the play in 2019, what was it like to encounter each other as co-stars?REED We were both nervous about that. But we both were really impressed at how very quickly we became colleagues.EPHRAIM It’s like your second home, a rehearsal room. It’s what you’ve always said. And it feels very, very cool that I get to play in that same room.REED One of the last days we were in West Virginia, we were driving back from the theater. And he said to me, “Thank you for treating me as an equal.” He’s so beautiful in the play. It’s really something to see. It’s a beautiful, beautiful performance, really simple and heartbreaking.Reed, when did you know you wanted to be an actor?REED I was about 5. I remember saying to a group of grown-ups that I wanted to be an actor. They all laughed nervously and exchanged looks like, oh dear, oh dear. There might have been a week where I wanted to be a fireman. But the rest of the time, it was an actor.EPHRAIM I’m still looking forward to being a fireman.When you knew that Ephraim wanted to be an actor, did you ever try to talk him out of it?REED Not ever. Because everybody had tried to do that to me. Anybody who wants to do it should try it. They’ll figure it out on their own. If there comes a point where they say, “Oh, this isn’t for me,” I don’t think there’s any shame in leaving. But I also know it’s one of the greatest professions in the world. Ephraim and Gus, they were always aware of the times when you don’t work or you lose a part or you get a bad review. Certainly, they saw that stuff. But I think they also saw how fantastic the community is.EPHRAIM When I started expressing interest in acting, you said, “Well, don’t you see how miserable I am?” And I said, “But I see that you’re still doing it, despite being so miserable.”The father-son duo first performed “Chester Bailey” in West Virginia in 2019. For their return engagement, they will perform at Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Mass., starting Friday.Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesDid you try to give Ephraim any advice?REED Even now, I haven’t gotten that television series that suddenly takes me over the brink. So it’s an ongoing thing. If my career is an example, it’s a long ride. You have to keep your eye on the prize.EPHRAIM I remember getting [an audition] for that Hugh Jackman movie with the robots, “Real Steel.” I remember coming to you, and I was like, “I don’t think there’s a world where I get this. How do I even attempt to try?” And I remember you saying, “Because that’s the job, and one of those times, it’ll be your turn.Were there parts your dad played that really stood out for you?REED Most of the plays I did when they were little, they couldn’t come see. They never saw “Blasted” [a famously upsetting play by the English playwright Sarah Kane that involves nudity, rape and cannibalism]. Connie saw it and told them all about it. When I came home from the theater, our daughter said, “Do we see your heinie in that play?”EPHRAIM I was like, “I want to eat a baby in a play!”What is it like going back to “Chester Bailey”?REED Once we were finally back, I was like, “Oh, this feels incredibly familiar.” But I also am very aware that because the world has changed so much, the resonance of the play has changed, too, and the need for imagination and the need for the arts and the need for human contact, those things are much more profound in the production than they were before.“Chester Bailey” involves a physical altercation. What’s that like to perform?EPHRAIM That’s just a regular Tuesday for us!REED I don’t think Ephraim and I have ever had a fight. So it’s really interesting to suddenly be in the middle of one. That’s one of the things that acting does — it takes you places you don’t usually go. He’s pretty good at it, too. I wouldn’t want to get in a fight with him.What do Connie and Gus think of the play?EPHRAIM They love it. They really do. Mom is not someone who will pretend to like something.REED Yeah, Mom is a tough critic. And Gus couldn’t stop crying. There were a lot of tears.Is there a play the whole family could do together?REED People weirdly say, “You guys should do ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’” That would be incredibly weird. That’s kind of gross.EPHRAIM People forget what that play’s about. We could do a fun version of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” But I don’t think anyone wants to see us to do that.REED I don’t think the play has been written, honestly. More