Civilians, The (Theater Co)

Subterms

    Latest story

    75 Shares179 Views

    ‘The Unbelieving’ Review: Life After Faith

    by

    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

    More stories

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Theater

      Review: In ‘What You Are Now,’ Memory Is a Dangerous Thing

      by

      In Sam Chanse’s affecting play, a daughter tries to understand her mother, who resists any reminder of her escape from the Khmer Rouge.Trying to understand our parents’ past lives can feel like fumbling through the dark, especially for the children of immigrants. Recollections are selective, and many people have lived through things they’d rather forget. The challenge — and heartbreak — of bridging that chasm is the subject of “What You Are Now,” an affecting study of memory and migration by the playwright Sam Chanse that opened on Thursday night at the Ensemble Studio Theater in Manhattan.Pia (Pisay Pao) knows hardly anything about her mother’s experience fleeing Cambodia in 1975, amid the country’s deadly takeover by the Khmer Rouge. But the pain of her mother’s experience has shaped Pia’s life, like an imprint, she says, seared into her cells. It’s why Pia is pursuing neurological research, looking for a scientific solution to her mother’s mental suffering.Pia’s mother (Sonnie Brown) carries herself like a ghost, looking lost behind the eyes and staunchly resisting any reminders of Cambodia. She’s also held herself at arm’s length from Pia and her brother Darany (Robert Lee Leng), whom she raised on her own in small-town Massachusetts. (The height of their mother’s physical affection is a stiff-elbowed pat on the shoulder.) If Pia can’t enter or soothe her mother’s mind, she channels that desire into studying the brain.Chanse’s play shifts back and forth over a 10-year span in Pia’s study of memory and its potential for manipulation. When she speaks to her mom on the phone from the lab, their conversations are limited to the mundane, like what’s for dinner and how Pia’s career is advancing. But when Darany’s ex-girlfriend (Emma Kikue) comes around gathering testimony for a nonprofit from survivors of the Khmer Rouge, Pia’s mother refuses to open up about the past.“What You Are Now” isn’t propelled by incidents or dramatic action, but ideas about how the mind works and the gradual revelation of personal histories. Pia dates and breaks up with a co-worker (Curran Connor) with whom she cleans rat cages. Darany and his girlfriend, who is half white, smoke pot and swap stories of how they relate to their shared Cambodian heritage. Pia’s mom loses her temper when she walks in on her kids dancing to Cambodian rock.As Pia, Pao is spiky and guarded, observing and responding to her mother’s behavior with the cool remove that a scientist might keep for her subject. As her chill (and way cooler) older brother, Leng makes for a loose and grounded contrast, all street-slang and curious heart. And Brown is quietly arresting as a woman both fragile and imperious, slouched like a comma but with a will of steel.Directed by the Civilians artistic director, Steve Cosson, the smartly minimal production unfolds against a cool-gray monochrome interior, like a slate wiped clean. Frames that might display family portraits hang empty, and what could be a wall clock has no markings of time (the set design is by Riw Rakkulchon). Characters appear isolated in the dark, as they connect at a distance on the phone or retreat into their own perspectives (the lighting design is by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew).Pia explores whether it’s possible to alter what we remember, and memory’s relationship to identity, by delving into empirical study rather than excavating and sorting through emotions. The play includes perhaps one too many descriptions of real-life experiments, which are limited in dramatic potential.But “What You Are Now” excels in unforced revelations about the human struggle to connect, and to share the messy and sometimes painful stories that make us who we are. Everything we hear and experience, and how we remember it, reshapes our brains, Pia says. It’s a scientific testament to the power of storytelling to change minds.What You Are NowThrough April 3 at the Ensemble Studio Theater, Manhattan; ensemblestudiotheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      Review: In ‘Whisper House,’ the Living Are the Pawns of the Dead

      by

      A lighthouse keeper, the nephew living with her and a Japanese employee are on alert for U-boats and graver threats in this chamber musical set in 1942.The ghosts, at least, are having fun.Sunken eyed, in moldering Jazz Age whites, they slink and shimmy around 59E59 Theater’s petite stage — about the size of a backyard swimming pool — luring characters to their various dooms. There are only four living characters and a limited supply of calamity, but still these spirits put in overtime. In Duncan Sheik and Kyle Jarrow’s pocket Gothic, “Whisper House,” the ghosts (Alex Boniello and Molly Hager) deliver 12 of the 14 songs, each a hymn to a wicked hereafter.“It’s good to be a ghost,” they sing. “It’s better to be dead.”A chamber musical planted in Maine’s stony soil in the early 1940s, “Whisper House” had its world premiere in 2010 at the Old Globe in San Diego and played London in 2017. It has spent the past couple of years in a kind of limbo, having clocked a single 59E59 performance before the 2020 theater shutdown. It returns, tentatively, in a moment of renewed anxiety and upgraded face masks.The show, about the fear of the unknown and the trust that love requires, can feel indefinite, too. Directed by Steve Cosson, the artistic director of the cherished theater company the Civilians, it has mood for days. (All credit to Jorge Arroyo and Jeff Croiter’s sepulchral lights and a surfeit of stage fog.) And the music haunts prettily. When the ghosts are singing, anyway. But none of the living characters feel precisely real and the book scenes totter under the weight of metaphor.“Whisper House” opens with a boy named Christopher (Wyatt Cirbus, who looks as if he has never seen the sun), a near-orphan sent away to live with his aunt, Lily, a lighthouse keeper in coastal Maine.Lily (Samantha Mathis) has a Japanese employee, Yasuhiro (James Yaegashi), and a nodding friendship with the local sheriff, Charles (Jeb Brown). This is 1942. Roosevelt’s executive order and the threat of nearby U-boats mean that Yasuhiro has to go. But he wants to stay and Lily wants that, too. The ghosts, with Christopher as their pawn, have other ideas.That sets the lighthouse table for tragedy. But the trouble with the story, conceived with Keith Powell, is that you have to abandon psychology to make it happen. Would a woman with Lily’s stoic good sense trust a traumatized child with a secret? Would Yasuhiro try to bribe him? The more you think about the living characters, the flimsier they seem. If your ghosts are your most substantial creation, what has gone wrong?“We don’t believe in you,” the ghosts sing to the living. They have a point. The plot also absolutely depends on ignoring the wet and the weather.Wyatt Cirbus, left, and Samantha Mathis as the nephew and aunt in the musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut the music is mostly lovely, if unvaried. As in Sheik’s score for “Spring Awakening,” it melds pop balladry with folk and it carries his very particular mix of romanticism and cynicism. (Sheik has a reputation for one-hit wonders, but this ignores some fine if piecemeal work over the years, as well as his lush Gullah-inflected score for “The Secret Life of Bees.”) The lyrics, co-written with Jarrow (“SpongeBob SquarePants the Musical”), are clever for the ghosts and pallid for everyone else, freighting Yasuhiro with the awkward solo “The Art of Being Unseen.” That neither Yaegashi, always a welcome presence, or Mathis, stuck with a costume-party Katharine Hepburn accent, are vocal powerhouses probably doesn’t help. The orchestrations, credited to Sheik, Jason Hart, Simon Hale and Wiley DeWeese, contain some fine surprises, like the bright blare of a horn. The choreography, from Billy Bustamante, mostly seems an afterthought.If the show spends about 85 of its 90 minutes inclining toward tragedy, its creators have something gentler in mind. The ultimate theme of “Whisper House” is that we must love another or die, a comforting thesis in a moment that demands — in every auditorium — so much mutual faith and care. Then again, there are the paired, smirking ghosts to imply the contrary. Turns out you can love another and die.Whisper HouseThrough Feb. 6 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Theater

      Review: In the Disturbing ‘Dana H.,’ Whose Voice Is It Anyway?

      by

      Deirdre O’Connell brilliantly lip-syncs the testimony of a woman abducted by a white supremacist in a play by Lucas Hnath.Dana Higginbotham had recently lost her job as a chaplain in the psychiatric unit of a Florida hospital when, in 1997, she was abducted by one of her former patients, a methed-up ex-con named Jim.For the next five months she lived in captivity, in a blur of hide-outs and motel rooms, as Jim, called Cowboy by his associates in a white supremacist crime syndicate, dragged her along on his “jobs,” sometimes by the hair.Though she was “never not covered with bruises,” and often signaled her distress nonverbally, almost no one tried to help her; eventually, in a kind of transference or Stockholm syndrome, or what she calls adaptation to maladaptation, she came to see Jim as her “protector” because certainly “the cops weren’t.” Indeed, the police had little power, and thus little interest in, the world beneath our own she had somehow fallen into, a world where “everything that was suppose to be right was not.”I’m quoting Higginbotham verbatim, dropped d and all, because that’s the way her words come to us in “Dana H.,” the profoundly disturbing new play by Lucas Hnath that opened on Sunday at the Lyceum Theater on Broadway. It’s her voice, recorded over a period of several days in 2015, we hear on tape, telling the story of those five months in Jim’s thrall — and the two-and-a-half years hiding from him on a construction gang afterward.Yet this is not simply verbatim theater of the kind the Civilians, the “investigative” company that commissioned and developed “Dana H.,” has pioneered in works like “Gone Missing” and “This Beautiful City.” Nor is it like “Is This a Room,” the verbatim drama by Tina Satter that opened on the same stage last week and will now alternate performances with “Dana H.,” each playing four performances a week.In Hnath’s play, the transcript is not dramatized as it is in those others, with actors speaking and performing each role. Rather, just one actor, Deirdre O’Connell, embodying Higginbotham, lip-syncs the entire 75-minute text, brilliantly pulling off one of the strangest and most difficult challenges ever asked of an actor.Call it Thriller Karaoke, a form in which the story is almost as dangerous as the mode of storytelling. You worry that O’Connell will fall out of sync with the recording, which never stops once the play begins. Gradually, though, as her inerrancy becomes clear, you let go of that concern and switch to related ones: Why tell the story this way in the first place? What do you get from the astonishing feat, besides astonishment, that you wouldn’t get if the same material had been acted out as it might be in a typically effective television procedural?One thing you get, or rather don’t, is the violent imagery that in a literal representation can short circuit other values. Higginbotham’s tale is so brutal that, were it visualized, you would spend the entire play worrying about her survival.Instead, the director Les Waters, in his nerves-of-steel staging, offers just one spot of blood to stand for the rest. The story is still plenty savage, but by placing O’Connell, a beloved New York theater veteran, in a comfortable-looking club chair, in the middle of a generic motel room, he in some way abstracts and domesticates it. (The diorama-style set design is by Andrew Boyce, the shadowy-then-glary lighting by Paul Toben.) You are implicitly asked to focus not on the terror of her experience but on the terror of her survival.O’Connell lip-syncs most of the show nonstop.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd your own: While mimicking Higginbotham’s mental dissociation, the uncanniness of the lip-sync destabilizes most other notions of normalcy in the world as well. It suggests an underlife, parallel to the comfortable, familiar one, that threatens at any moment to erupt through the rather thin barrier of routine, just as Higginbotham’s voice seems to erupt through O’Connell’s body in the process of possessing it.The question of voice is obviously central to Hnath’s concern here, only in part because Higginbotham — it’s no spoiler to say — is his mother. At the time of the abduction, he was a thousand miles away, a freshman at New York University, apparently knowing nothing of what was going on in Florida. She did not want him to know: Jim held her son’s safety over her head, she says, to enforce compliance. “Everything I ever did was all based on what was for Lucas, you know?”In the silence that follows that line, you can almost hear the eternal maternal follow-up plaint: “But what has he done for me?”To say he has honored her story, though that’s true, is the skimpiest possible way to look at the achievement of “Dana H.” When the play ran Off Broadway at the Vineyard Theater in 2020, after productions in Los Angeles and Chicago, I was electrified by the way O’Connell turned herself into a kind of musical instrument, letting the recording of Higginbotham “play” her. With her own voice shut off, she emphasized the other tools at her disposal, so that even the smallest shifts of posture and expression became immensely expressive.Those effects have grown more complex in the Broadway production, shifting its weight in the process. More often now, O’Connell seems to work against the apparent veracity of the text: miming Higginbotham’s odd laughter a little more vividly, underlining moments in which she doubts her memory. Though I never previously questioned any aspect of the story, I now found myself wondering whether a woman so traumatized could be a reliable narrator and whether a play is “true” just because its words are.Hnath is at pains to signal that it is, in part by exposing his technique at every turn. We see O’Connell put on her earpieces at the beginning of the play and take them off at the end. Beeps indicate spots where the transcript has been edited. (The sound design and skin-crawly music are by Mikhail Fiksel.) The interview was conducted by Steve Cosson, the artistic director of the Civilians, rather than by Hnath because, as he explained to The Times, he wanted his mother to tell the story “to someone who knew nothing.” That way there would be no shortcuts that might introduce doubt.And yet it is the introduction of doubt, despite all those dams put in place to block it, that I find so wonderfully complicating now. Tiny strange moments Hnath chose to leave in the transcript — references to Higginbotham’s having “played around in” Satanism when she was young, or to her fantasy that converting Jim “would be a great addition” to her “ministry” — make you wonder about her reliability, and what even stranger material was cut.Through such holes in the storytelling, the play’s richest emotions seep. Near the end, when Higginbotham is contacted by Jim’s father, apologizing for what his son did to her, Cosson, on tape, asks if that “helped in any way.” She says it did: “It kinda felt almost like a family. The way a family should have reacted — if I had one.”You may well gasp louder than at the reveal of a corpse.That’s when I realized that “Dana H.” is not just the story of a woman brutalized by a psychopath; it is also the story of a mother abandoned by a son. What else would a playwright do to make reparations but write a play about just that, in the process returning to her what the world had stolen: her voice.Dana H.Through Jan. 16 at the Lyceum Theater, Manhattan; thelyceumplays.com. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Black Feminist Video Game’ Review: Pixels and Polemics

      by

      Live performances via Zoom mix with actual game footage in this well-intentioned but preachy play by the poet Darrel Alejandro Holnes.Audre Lorde isn’t going to save you. She’s too busy resting in the heavens of legendary artist-activists to be your personal Black feminist guru. That’s what a teen gamer named Jonas finds out in the Civilians’ well-intentioned but clumsy “Black Feminist Video Game.” Jonas (Christon Andell), our Player 1, is a biracial, autistic high school student with a single working mother (Constance Fields) who has tried to teach her son lessons from the great Black feminists, like bell hooks. However, Jonas learns how hard it is to internalize those lessons when a girl he’s dating, Nicole (Starr Kirkland), breaks it off. In an attempt to win her back, he, with the help of his gamer friend Sabine (Kyla Butts), seeks guidance from an old gift from his mother: the 2-D video game that gives the play its title.Written by the poet Darrel Alejandro Holnes and directed by Victoria Collado, “Black Feminist Video Game” incorporates live performances via Zoom, actual video game footage and some light audience interaction through YouTube chat. We watch Jonas as he conducts livestreamed video diaries — and Andell does interact with the audience minimally, responding to audience comments and asking for advice, though the improvised prattle slows the show’s pacing and feels inorganic.The script, too, labors through attempts to smoothly and naturally be its most intersectionally woke self, but diversity feels downgraded to a checklist. (Black? Mixed-race? Queer? Autistic? Check, check, check, check.) And when it comes to the play’s message, with Jonas slowly understanding when he’s mansplaining and failing to truly listen to and respect Black women, “Black Feminist Video Game” gets unbearably preachy — and the performances don’t do much to help.As part of the production, Jonas (Andell) and Sabine (Kyla Butts) play through an actual game created for the show.via The CiviliansAt least there’s the game itself, created by Ché Rose and Jocelyn Short of Cookout Games, which is a fun, pixelated blast from the past. Adorable avatar versions of Jonas and Sabine run through the levels: the Forest of Feminist Angst, the Coven of the Many-Faced Mirrors, the Realm of Colorism, and Peak Patriarchy, where waits the final boss. Just like the rules of the game — which is psychic, by the way — confound Jonas, so, too, was I confused by its logic, even as Lorde showed up to impart wise words to our wannabe Black feminist protagonist.Though a notoriously bad crash-and-burn gamer myself, I enjoy the idea of them — video games, but also games built into theatrical experiences, especially those related to race. The tension between politics and play is exciting — think “The Colored Museum,” “Underground Railroad Game” and “Black History Museum.” I even thought of Kekubian Assassin, a real mobile game based on an episode of Terence Nance’s HBO series “Random Acts of Flyness,” in which a Black woman plays a first-person-shooter-style game where she fights back against racist and sexist street harassment. “Black Feminist Video Game” aspires to this same degree of poignancy and ingenuity, but despite its cute gameplay, it can’t get past Level 1.Black Feminist Video GameLive performances through May 2; on-demand May 3-9; thecivilians.org. (The Oregon Shakespeare Festival will present performances of “Black Feminist Video Game” May 11-16, with on-demand access available May 17-23; osfashland.org.) More