Borinsky, Agnes

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    Review: Mining a Whimsical Absurdist Vein in ‘The Trees’

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    In Agnes Borinsky’s latest play, a brother and sister returning from a party suddenly find their feet stuck in the earth. But to what end?Change implies movement: from here to there, from then to now, from one thing to another and perhaps back again. But in Agnes Borinsky’s new play, “The Trees,” it is represented by immobility. After all, the two central characters are physically rooted to the ground. They do not evolve much over the course of the show — it’s those around them who do.Returning from a party with her brother, David (a one-note Jess Barbagallo), Sheila (the ever-engaging Crystal Dickinson) jokes that they should just stay where they are — that is, a Connecticut park — for 10 years, or maybe even 100. Suddenly, a drunken flight of fancy becomes reality as the pair sink into the floor down to their ankles and stay there for the entire show, stationary fixtures watching the friends, lovers, family members and even strangers drawn to their orbit.As fraught as the situation might conceivably be, Borinsky (“A Song of Songs,” “Ding Dong It’s the Ocean”) stays clear from existential dread à la Samuel Beckett, whose apocalyptic “Happy Days” famously centers on a woman half-buried in a mound of earth. Rather, she attempts to mine a whimsical absurdist vein that feels like a creaky Eugène Ionesco plot device filtered through the sensibility of the writer and performer Taylor Mac, whose queering of theater aesthetics and quasi-spiritual questioning of community looms large over “The Trees.”More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.The show, which opened Sunday at Playwrights Horizons, does not tell us much about David and Sheila besides the fact that she had been visiting from Seattle and he makes movies — sorry, “films,” as he is prompt to remind her and everybody else. Poor Sheila, stuck next to this humorless pedant. You can see why David’s boyfriend, Jared (a scene-stealing, amusingly arch Sean Donovan), would jump on this unexpected opening and break up with him. Well, sort of, because like several others, Jared keeps being pulled back to the siblings’ orbit — he even helpfully suggests they be classified as trees so they won’t be evicted for staying on public land overnight.The production by Tina Satter (“Is This a Room”) can be cryptic, from Enver Chakartash’s boldly colored costumes to a set, by Parker Lutz, evoking a Greek amphitheater stripped of adornments and thus left as a characterless husk.Similarly, practical details about David and Sheila’s daily existence are brushed aside like inopportune reminders of reality (so normie), including a fleeting reference to inheritance money and an even zippier one to how the siblings eat and defecate. Somebody mentions a Kickstarter campaign to help them, though one of the visitors, Tavish (Pauli Pontrelli), is critical of offering perks for donations: “It’s this fake-polite capitalistic masquerade and a total perversion of the spirit of mutual aid,” they say.An astute point from Tavish, but it is brought up and abandoned as quickly as, say, the references to the environment. Rachel Carson this is not.As a diverse ecosystem can thrive around trees, an ad hoc family of blood and affinity grows around Sheila and David. Borinsky alludes to a kind of utopia in which the world’s pedestrian rules are kept at bay, but mostly leans on a vagueness that might claim to be poetic but ends up noncommittal. The siblings did not choose their fate, or maybe they did. They are miserable in their spot, or maybe they’re weirdly thriving in their new community. You could say their grandmother (Danusia Trevino), who speaks only in Polish and Yiddish, represents a different type of rootedness, in this case to the past, just like a child (Xander Fenyes) embodies a young leaf off a tree that is hope in the future. Borinsky invites guesses; the problem is that we might not care enough for any of the people or ideas onstage to bother hazarding them.The TreesThrough March 19 at Playwrights Horizons; playwrightshorizons.org. Running time: 1 hour and 40 minutes. More

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      ‘Downstate’ and ‘Catch as Catch Can’ in Playwrights Horizons New Season

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      The company has announced five works for its 2022-23 lineup, which will include Agnes Borinsky’s “The Trees,” directed by Tina Satter.“Downstate,” a Bruce Norris play that The New York Times’s chief theater critic, Jesse Green, has called a “squirmy moral-thrill-ride,” will make its New York premiere in October as part of Playwrights Horizons’s new season, the company announced on Monday.As Adam Greenfield, the artistic director for Playwrights Horizons, put it: “If theater is here to catch us off guard, to shake our foundations, to make us rethink our values and realize the ways in which we’re hypocrites,” Norris can really point that all out.“I sometimes think he’s like the Molière of our time,” Greenfield said in a recent Zoom interview.The 2022-23 season will be Greenfield’s first full, in-person season since assuming the role of artistic director in 2020. And the five-show lineup, which features coproductions with Page 73 Productions, MCC Theater and WP Theater, is packed with themes emerging from the pandemic lockdown, including a variety of perspectives on “normalcy.”The lineup includes Mia Chung’s “Catch as Catch Can,” a drama in which two white, working-class New England families examine what Greenfield called “the slipperiness of identity and the way identity can fall apart or collapse,” and the debut of Agnes Borinsky’s “The Trees,” a parable of two siblings who fall asleep in the park and wake up literally rooted to the landscape.“Catch as Catch Can,” which, in 2018, The Times called a “tender horror story,” returns in October. This time, it is being staged with an all Asian cast playing the Irish and Italian working class — with actors also playing double roles of father and daughter, mothers and sons.“The Trees,” which will premiere in February 2023, is special to Greenfield. He knew this Borinsky play was the first work he wanted to program when he became artistic director.“She sees the world sweetly despite seeing all of the reasons not to,” he said. The play, which, Greenfield described as involving two people who turn into trees and the community that forms around them, will be co-produced with the incubator theater company Page 73 Productions (the company’s latest work was the spooky political drama, “Man Cave”).The earthy Off Broadway production will have plenty of shine from Broadway visionaries. “The Trees” will be directed by Tina Satter, whose fall 2021 Broadway docudrama “Is This a Room” received critical acclaim. And the last time Playwrights Horizons and Page 73 teamed up, it was to debut “A Strange Loop,” which won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for drama and opens on April 26 for its own Broadway run.The other shows, slated to debut in March 2023, are the world premiere of Julia Izumi’s “Regretfully, So the Birds Are,” (a coproduction with WP Theater), described by Greenfield as a surprise-filled “Swiss Army knife of a play” with “a delicious sense of goofy comedy” centered on three siblings making sense of unreliable parents.Also in March is John J. Caswell Jr.’s “Wet Brain” (co-produced with MCC Theater), a candid drama that follows siblings (also a set of three) struggling to find language for closure and grief — in outer space. It’s a science fiction version of the American family play that, Greenfield said, “explodes open.” More

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      Review: ‘A Song of Songs’ Makes a Sacrament of Remembrance

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      Grief for a lost love is the unhealed wound at the core of this play by Agnes Borinsky, which takes a disquieting turn into the underworld.A few sheets of colored tissue paper, weighted down by a trinket to keep them from fluttering off. This is what audience members find on their seats upon arrival at “A Song of Songs,” Agnes Borinsky’s new theater piece inspired by the biblical Song of Songs, and it’s something of a puzzle. What to do with them?The answer comes at the top of the show, when Borinsky — one of a cast of three in this production, staged in a former Roman Catholic church in Williamsburg, Brooklyn — mimes instructions to us for a quick craft project. Following along, we form our sheaves into simple offerings for the altar in front of us. Then row by row, we walk up and place them there, in a shrine to the dead.It feels awkward and uncertain, stumbling through these prescribed motions of lamentation. But grief for a lost beloved turns out to be the unhealed wound at the aching core of “A Song of Songs.” We are, it appears, merely re-enacting it.Directed by Machel Ross and presented by the Bushwick Starr and the playwright Jeremy O. Harris, this play-as-ritual is meant as a kind of remix of the Song of Songs, which my Oxford World’s Classics edition of the King James Bible calls “notoriously, the one piece of erotic literature in the Bible.” But its carnality is drenched in joy, and in the comfort of lavished affection. Its verses revel in love and cherishing.So does “A Song of Songs,” at least at first. Though it’s too stylized to be sexy, its lovers, Nadine (Borinsky) and Sarah (Sekai Abeni), fall for each other in an all-consuming way, besotted to the point of unreason.“I took a pair of your gym shorts so I could smell them at work,” Sarah confesses, hiding her face. “This is completely terrifying.”Their fragmented story, and the loss of their transformative love, constitute the main narrative of “A Song of Songs.” Performed in brief scenes of monologue and dialogue, with occasional voice-overs and snatches of song, it makes a sacrament of remembrance. The set (by Frank Oliva, who also designed the lushly atmospheric lighting) takes full advantage of the architecture of a once-sacred space, and the actors’ flowing robes hint at religious garb. (Ross also designed the costumes.)Agnes Borinsky, Ching Valdes-Aran and Abeni. The set, by Frank Oliva, takes full advantage of the architecture of a once-sacred space.Luke OhlsonIn Sarah’s steady love for her only child, and Nadine’s abundant love for her many friends, Borinsky’s script considers more than just romantic attachment. Nadine’s godmother, Trudy (Ching Valdes-Aran), a revolutionary who loves with abandon, represents a fourth and more diffuse kind of passion: for society as a whole.Onstage at El Puente’s Williamsburg Leadership Center, Trudy’s is the most tentative thread of a production that does not entirely cohere. Patches of it can be hard to follow, and the acoustics sometimes swallow lines before they can land. Yet “A Song of Songs” possesses a surprising ritual power.As the play takes a disquieting turn into the underworld of Greek mythology, it stealthily leads each person in the audience toward a meditative consideration of their own mourning for those they have lost, to death or otherwise.The evening’s first participatory moment, when we placed our offerings on the altar, was preparing us for this: a second interlude when we are all asked to join in — wordlessly, each adding a token of love and sorrow to the set. (I’m not telling you what.) Delicately done, it is far more personal this time, and because of that, deeply affecting.“A Song of Songs” is a communal rite about the void left by the absence of people we love, and the universality of the pain that brings. More consolingly, it’s also about the beauty that can grow because of love, even if that love comes to grief.A Song of SongsThrough March 27 at El Puente’s Williamsburg Leadership Center, Brooklyn; thebushwickstarr.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More