Caswell, John J Jr

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    Review: In ‘Scene Partners,’ Dianne Wiest Delivers Another Master Class

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    The transcendent Dianne Wiest stars in an absurd yet poignant new play about a 75-year-old woman who sets out to be a star.“Acting Like a Maniac” is not your typical acting class: You have to sign a personal injury waiver to join it. But then Meryl Kowalski, with that double whammy of a theatrical name, isn’t your typical student. Though 75, she’s no cute oldster; Hugo Lockerby, the guru-like teacher with a wandering accent, thinks she may even be a genius. Performing the autobiographical “blueprint” she’s been writing as an exercise, her fellow students are amazed and baffled by the tale (did she really get an agent at gunpoint?) but also the style. “Do you want it realism or should it be more like whoa,” one asks.“Scene Partners,” by John J. Caswell Jr., with the transcendent Dianne Wiest as Meryl, is definitely more like whoa.Twee, snarky, meta, manic, maddening and yet eventually poignant, the play is a moving target, its tone as hard to pin down as its facts. Take the setting, a maybe Hollywood in an iffy 1985. (Also, the Soviet Union and most of the 20th century.) In any case, it’s often impossible to tell whether what we’re watching is Meryl’s life, a film about her life, a dream about the film, a hallucination of the dream, or some other nesting doll of narration.If the authorial bait-and-switch too often feels like throat-clearing, it does serve a purpose, building around the story a border that is also a blur. In Caswell’s world, as in Meryl’s, limits are always permeable.“Scene Partners,” which opened on Wednesday at the Vineyard Theater in a top-drawer production directed by Rachel Chavkin, is part of a genre you might call the absurd picaresque. Meryl is a hardheaded Candide, a sharp-eyed Don Quixote. When we meet her just after the long longed-for death of her abusive husband, she is leaving Wisconsin for California so fast she doesn’t bother burying him. “Within the year I will rise to fame and fortune as an international film star,” she says in farewell to her drug addict daughter. Sure enough, she soon acquires not just her agent and acting coach, but also a contract to write the movie of her life.What makes her life a fit subject for a movie, or even this play, is a useful question. Surely it’s not the banal details: the stepfather, the trauma and the mother who looked away are all tossed off too lightly to stick. Caswell doesn’t at first seem very interested in them except as opportunities to create fascinating verbal spirals, cross-references and death drops, like a game of biographical Chutes and Ladders.Wiest and Josh Hamilton, as an acting teacher, are in top form in John J. Caswell Jr.’s play at the Vineyard Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYet the process of making the banal fascinating is, it seems, Caswell’s point. When Meryl becomes successful, it is not because her life has been special; hers is the stardom of the ordinary, built on perseverance not glamour, and on the recognition that the only thing keeping her from her life goals is her life. “We lose countless masters like this woman,” says Hugo (Josh Hamilton, hilarious yet also noble), “simply because they lacked a certain access at a certain time in history.” The play’s structural gymnastics, which also make room for the possibility of dementia, give Meryl that access, and elevate her.As does Wiest. It’s a little rich to have her play a character in an acting class, considering how many acting classes she’s given over the years, onstage and on film. Still, it’s a great pleasure to watch her make Meryl’s innocence and bloodthirstiness equally believable, equally fresh. The same age as her character, with more than 50 years of theater behind her, Wiest nevertheless seems to be discovering herself each moment, in material that can’t make that easy.The difficulty, though occasionally an indulgence — even at just 105 minutes, “Scene Partners” could stand a 10-minute trim — is also the play’s great distinction. And Chavkin, while maintaining the level of stylishness that has become her trademark in musicals like “Hadestown” and “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812,” is careful not to flatten its extremes. Her rigorous production commits to both cold stretches and warm ones, ripe satire (a nimble supporting cast covers dozens of characters) and barely spoken tragedy. Sometimes — as in scenes with Johanna Day (excellent) as Meryl’s sister — the crosscurrents shift so quickly you don’t know which kind you’re in.Perhaps what we feel tugging at us in those moments is the undertow of addiction and abuse in the story — subjects Caswell has also touched on in his two previous major New York outings, “Wet Brain” and “Man Cave.” Both embraced the surreal as a way of repairing and elevating what appear to be unimportant, unsalvageable lives. Yet by ricocheting off others, in an absurd plane if necessary, they may achieve a kind of magnificence.Indeed, when an interviewer, suspicious of Meryl’s story, asks if she’s ever heard of delusions of grandeur, she answers: “Oh yes, and they can be so helpful!” Without them, we might not have grandeur (or plays, or great actors) at all.Scene PartnersThrough Dec. 17 at the Vineyard Theater, Manhattan; vineyardtheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

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      ‘Wet Brain’ Review: A Vodka-Spiked Horror Show

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      The children of a severely alcoholic widower navigate his incapacity, and his legacy, in John J. Caswell Jr.’s pitch-black comedy about addiction.In the escalating series of calamities that constitute Joe’s misadventures with alcohol, his middle child, Ricky, has missed a lot.It’s been six gruesome years since Ricky last traveled back to Arizona for a family visit, after his father’s second arrest for driving drunk, and Joe has careened downhill in the interim. When he goes in search of vodka these days he goes on foot, but his sodden brain is shot: dementia, hallucinations, the kind of aphasia that means he can’t talk anymore. He grunts and lurches, vomits a lot, uses a corner of the TV room as a urinal.Ricky has kept a determined distance from it all. When he does show up one summer night — threatened into it by his exhausted sister, Angelina, their father’s live-in caretaker — the recriminations start immediately.“I can’t fly across the country every single time his organs start shutting down,” Ricky says, with the casual hyperbole of the repeatedly traumatized.“You could’ve at least come for the kidney!” she shoots back.This is a horror show, unequivocally. But John J. Caswell Jr.’s “Wet Brain,” at Playwrights Horizons, is also a very funny, pitch-black comedy about addiction and obligation, love and abandonment, and patterns of poisonous behavior lodged so deep they seem encoded. Also, Joe may or may not be in contact with aliens, so there’s some space travel along the way.Directed by Dustin Wills in a coproduction with MCC Theater, the play takes place in the rundown house in Scottsdale where Ricky (Arturo Luís Soria), Angelina (Ceci Fernández) and their brother, Ron (Frankie J. Alvarez), grew up, raised by their father (Julio Monge) after the death of their mother, Mona. The loss of her haunts them still, three decades later.The fallout of their father’s addiction and mother’s absence is everywhere in the lives of these siblings, each struggling with various compulsive behaviors, and possessed of a precision-honed ability to push the others’ buttons. Ron, the most like their father and the most protective of him, is also rancidly homophobic; he taunts his gay little brother, Ricky, relentlessly.As with Caswell’s political horror drama “Man Cave” last year, design is the flashiest element of “Wet Brain,” giving us a window into Joe’s hallucinations and a surreal means for the whole family to gather, Mona (Florencia Lozano) included. (The set is by Kate Noll, lighting by Cha See, projections by Nicholas Hussong, sound by Tei Blow and John Gasper, and costumes by Haydee Zelideth Antuñano.)“Why did you burn holes through your brain, Mr. Joe?” Mona asks her husband, gently.Both of them are past the point of no return. This play’s dearest wish is for their children: that they find a way to heal.Wet BrainThrough June 25 at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan; playwrightshorizons.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 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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      ‘Man Cave’ Review: Things That Go Bump in the American Night

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      John J. Caswell Jr.’s play is a political drama wrapped in the spooky pleasures of the horror genre.Late on a thundery monsoon evening in a well-appointed basement in Sedona, Ariz., the ghosts are restless. Or something is — thumping and scratching inside the walls of a congressman’s gated home, where Imaculada, the housekeeper, has been holding down the fort alone.When her friends Rosemary and Lupita show up unannounced, fleeing domestic danger, the noises don’t take long to creep them out.“You’re supposed to disclose your home’s paranormal status to guests upon arrival,” Rosemary chides, dryly.But this is just what she needs: a place rife with spirits that might be enlisted for vengeance on her live-in boyfriend, a police officer who has beaten her bloody yet again. On the internet she found “a little witchcraft” that she’s been wanting to try.“It’s called death walking,” she says. “Energy harnessing, engaging spirits in highly active spaces to do your bidding in exchange for eternal release from their own purgatory.”“Man Cave,” John J. Caswell Jr.’s new play at the Connelly Theater, is a political drama wrapped in the spooky pleasures of the horror genre, and it works on both levels. Its characters are Mexican American women on the economic fringes, and its concerns are theirs: work, love, heritage, survival; how to be safe, and feel at home, in their own country.Unfolding in the congressman’s man cave (designed by Adam Rigg), with its cowboy-movie posters and mounted elk head, the play is also a contemplation of what the United States was built on, what’s buried underneath — and which insistent, haunted voices it’s determined not to hear. (Lucrecia Briceno’s lighting is vital to the chilling of our spines.)Directed by Taylor Reynolds for the theater company Page 73, the show cultivates a scary mood even before it starts, thanks to Michael Costagliola’s supremely clever sound design, which thrums ominously as the audience settles in but cuts to an unnerving quiet in the opening scene. We are primed to be startled by the slightest noise, and so we are. And because the audience is expecting, even hoping, to be frightened, its attention has a tautness that’s sustained throughout the play.That’s helpful with a show that takes its time, as “Man Cave” does — sometimes to the point of bagginess — letting the friends bicker and snipe over the course of a fraught weekend. Why, Rosemary (Jacqueline Guillén) wants to know, is Imaculada “cleaning house for an overtly racist politician”? Is Imaculada (Annie Henk) right that something is trying to kill her? And where is her missing 20-something son?Why is Lupita (Claudia Acosta), Rosemary’s sober girlfriend — her tender romantic refuge from the abusive cop — suddenly drinking again? How gross is it, exactly, that Rosemary has brought a bag of the cop’s fingernail clippings for the spell she means to cast? What has drawn her to the spirit world, when that used to be her mother’s thing?Her mother, Consuelo (Socorro Santiago), an undocumented immigrant, raised Rosemary to assimilate. But when Consuelo arrives at the congressman’s house, she doesn’t need anyone to tell her its paranormal status. She has a supernatural sensitivity to the dead.“I can hear them screaming in my head,” she says.A program note explains that Caswell wrote “Man Cave” over the past five years — a time of immense social and political turmoil in the United States. If the play sometimes feels bloated, it may be from absorbing so much anger and anxiety from the air. But its shape also feels like an act of resistance to the constraints of theatrical convention.On a wall of the man cave, near the elk head, hangs a rack of vintage rifles, emblems of American cowboy culture. This isn’t Chekhov, though, and those guns never go off. They just stay in plain sight, silently menacing.Man CaveThrough April 2 at the Connelly Theater, Manhattan; page73.org. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. More