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    ‘The Refuge Plays’ Review: A Surreal Family Saga on the Homestead

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    A family in exile contends with its future, and its ghosts, in Nathan Alan Davis’s new Off Broadway play starring Nicole Ari Parker.The unnamed narrator of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” retreats, after an alienating odyssey through the South and Harlem, to live in a secret cellar. Underground is both an escape from oppression and a sanctuary where he can see himself on his own terms.Ellison’s 1952 novel is like gospel to the eldest matriarch in “The Refuge Plays” by the playwright Nathan Alan Davis. “Gotta make your own world in this world,” says Early (Nicole Ari Parker), a great-grandmother homesteading with her family. She can still chop firewood and hunt squirrels with a hammer, but when we first meet Early in this keen but unwieldy family saga, opening Wednesday at the Laura Pels Theater, her daily life has evolved beyond the need for such primal skills.Four generations of Early’s family are living together in the present-day Illinois wilderness, sharing a cabin built years ago by Early and her husband, Crazy Eddie (Daniel J. Watts). The too-small sofa and ratty armchair draped with quilts and crochet (the persuasively salvaged set is by Arnulfo Maldonado) indicate a modest home where her relatives choose to live out of kinship rather than necessity.Early’s great-grandson, Ha-Ha (J.J. Wynder), is the purest product of this social experiment: a 17-year-old who is deferential, bookish and comically naïve about girls. (Many of Davis’s character names are freighted with exaggerated symbolism.) Ha-Ha’s mother, Joy (Ngozi Anyanwu), tried striking out on her own when she was younger, but eventually returned. And Joy’s mother, Gail (Jessica Frances Dukes), the wife of Early’s deceased son, Walking Man, is the functional head of the household, though not for long: The spirit of Walking Man (Jon Michael Hill), a routine and welcome visitor, has just foretold her imminent death.Davis’s grand ambitions for “The Refuge Plays” are indicated by its running time — three hours and 20 minutes, with two intermissions — and by a title that suggests its three parts may not exactly cohere. The action rewinds to the past, revealing what drove Early into the woods, why others followed and what binds them together. (“If you don’t need me, leave me,” Early tells Walking Man.) Each act operates in a different mode: Sitcom conventions play out in the first (with Early as the armchair curmudgeon); surreal and Shakespearean elements dominate the second (with ghosts who incite an Oedipal revenge plot); and the third imagines a meet-cute in exile.Daniel J. Watts and Parker play a young couple who meet-cute in exile in an earlier section of the show.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThis Roundabout Theater Company production, directed by Patricia McGregor and presented in association with New York Theater Workshop (where McGregor is the artistic director), benefits tremendously from bold interpretations of Davis’s characters. McGregor accentuates the humor Davis weaves throughout, and even mines more from between the lines, giving the production a sustained momentum. But the pace lags when Davis’s airy lyricism occasionally tips toward the sentimental, as in the heavy-handed second act. Early, for example, insists she has cried a nearby river with her tears.Parker (“And Just Like That …”) has an innate gentility that would seem an odd match for Early’s wild fate, but there is frisson in the juxtaposition and Parker lends Early a poised ferocity. Her flinty exterior is a formidable match for Eddie, the World War II vet who becomes her husband. Slightly sideways and nursing his own wounds, he’s a philosophical jester (Watts can land punchlines with the whites of his eyes) and proof that civilization inflicts violence in many forms.“The Refuge Plays” is populated with gifted storytellers, whose language is sticky with associations (like “if all your worries was ice cream” that melted at death’s door), and who can clearly see the ills of the outside world from the safe distance of their own. They conceive their identities in relation to one another, reflecting an organic sense of human responsibility, yet rib and curse one another like the members of any family would.Davis, whose speculative 2016 drama, “Nat Turner in Jerusalem,” was also produced by New York Theater Workshop, takes a sweeping view of Black life while isolating his characters from the social contexts and systems that would otherwise shape them. Some, like Early and Eddie, have their memories to contend with, while Walking Man, who was born in the woods, encounters human injustice from an absurd angle (beneath a heifer he tries to slaughter with a switchblade).In an attempt to imagine alternative ways of being, the playwright has smashed existing artistic forms and created new ones along the way. The result is provocative but messy: While the three acts interlock, they don’t propel each other forward, and Davis’s surfeit of ideas ultimately comes at the expense of a dramatic throughline. But cumbersome as it is, “The Refuge Plays” suggests the potential for stories to exceed the world’s limitations. Ellison would have to agree.The Refuge PlaysThrough Nov. 12 at Laura Pels Theater, Manhattan; roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 3 hours 20 minutes. More

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      ‘Gray Matter’ Review: Unusual Abilities, the Usual Plot Possibilities

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      Things don’t go well when a teenage girl with mental superpowers ends up at a secret facility in this Max movie entirely devoid of suspense or character.Meko Winbush’s “Gray Matter” is the kind of run-of-the-mill sci-fi thriller that usually delights insomniac Tubi watchers at 3 a.m. Unfortunately, the movie is coming out under a harsh glare that does it no favors: Not only is it on the prestige streamer Max, but it premieres that same day as the 10-episode “Project Greenlight: A New Generation,” which documents its production process. This latest iteration of the docuseries created in 2001 has been rebooted under the aegis of Issa Rae, Kumail Nanjiani and Gina Prince-Bythewood; the show might end up being entertaining, but “Gray Matter” is by-the-numbers, by-committee product.Written by Philip Gelatt (the television series “Love, Death & Robots”), the movie follows the 16-year-old Aurora (Mia Isaac), who is sheltered from the outside world by her protective mother, Ayla (Jessica Frances Dukes, from “Ozark”). Ayla has been training her daughter to better control her “psionic” powers, which include telekinesis and telepathy (teleportation is advance-seminar level). One evening the teenager sneaks out to meet friends she’s made in secret and ends up losing control over her abilities, blowing the women’s careful constructed cover. The obligatory mysterious guy (Garret Dillahunt) whisks Aurora to a facility he describes as a safe haven for psionics — where this is going is predictable and dull.It’s not so much that “Gray Matter” is formula, but that it is clumsily made formula. Except, that is, for Isaac’s performance. The young actress projects a rare serious-mindedness that grounds the movie. Like a mentalist making a chunk of concrete magically levitate, Isaac almost keeps “Gray Matter” watchable.Gray MatterNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. Watch on Max. More

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      in Theater

      Review: A Darkly Satirical Glimpse Into Life ‘Off Broadway’

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      Torrey Townsend’s backstage fiction is an indictment of the real world’s overwhelmingly white, disproportionately male theatrical establishment.It is the fall of 2020, and the American National Theater is desperate to survive the pandemic.In Torrey Townsend’s blistering and hilarious satire “Off Broadway,” presented by Jeremy O. Harris and streaming free on Broadstream, this tenaciously middling nonprofit is millions of dollars in the red, and operating with only a skeleton crew.But it sees one route out of financial calamity. When it finally reopens, it will do so with a surefire smash: Al Pacino in “Othello,” playing the title role. In blackface.Andy, the company’s staggeringly underqualified artistic director, doesn’t recognize this as regressing to a shameful and banished tradition. Rather, he frames it as a brilliant provocation, a metatheatrical challenge to quaintly limited thinking.“Y’all are gonna get eaten alive,” Marla, his horrified associate producer, warns during a Zoom meeting, but no one pays the slightest heed. She is Black; the others are white. They are happy to rationalize the idea.And that, like most of what happens in “Off Broadway,” doesn’t seem at all far-fetched.Directed by Robert O’Hara, who also directed Harris’s “Slave Play” and is an accomplished satirist in his own playwriting (“Bootycandy”), this backstage fiction is both raucously funny and devastatingly on point. It is an indictment of the real world’s overwhelmingly white, disproportionately male theatrical establishment — not just in New York, but nationwide.This spiky critique arrives with perfect timing: as the industry begins to emerge from well over a year of shutdown, with many companies having publicly pledged their allegiance to the goals of the initiative We See You, White American Theater. Will this indeed be a reset to a more vital, inclusive theater, or merely a blip? “Off Broadway” wants to know.Structured as a series of Zoom calls, it’s powered by a top-notch ensemble. The company’s ailing founder, Daryl, is deliciously played by Richard Kind as a shambling, pretentious gasbag, untethered from reality. He is on the verge of retirement when a ticked-off letter writer mocks him as a “morally insensitive, artistically incompetent fraud.” His rage kills him before his cancer can.Andy, played by Dylan Baker, is his chosen successor. That casting is our first clue that Andy will turn out to be a deeply unnerving guy. (This is a compliment; no one does creepy like Baker.) At least as thin-skinned as Daryl, and just as aggressively certain of his own laudable intentions, Andy shuts down any internal criticism of the company’s racism — in hiring, in programming and in what Marla calls its “fusty, elitist, Anglo Saxon neoclassical fetish.”He sees himself as a hero for retaining two people of color, Marla (Jessica Frances Dukes) and Steph (Kara Wang), on his ravaged staff. He is thrilled at “the optics” of promoting Marla from literary manager, and when he promotes Steph to replace her, he promises a raise — eventually. “Fingers crossed,” he says.The surprising beauty of Zoom here is that the format doesn’t prioritize one character over another. Even when Andy monopolizes a meeting, steamrolling Marla and Steph, the eye of the camera in their little rectangles is unblinking. We see in their faces how strenuous it is to endure him silently.And when he is alone online with Steph, we also see that working from home is no barrier to sexual harassment. With that plot twist comes a new layer of grievance. The company’s managing director, Betty (Becky Ann Baker), reflexively defends Andy. And when Steph takes graphic evidence to The New York Times, no #MeToo article comes of it.Well paced at nearly two hours, but segmented to allow watching in shorter chunks, “Off Broadway” entreats us to notice whose voices, perspectives and experiences are dismissed, talked over, ignored. It asks who in the theatrical establishment is willing to listen, and who is willing to act — and act differently — based on what they hear.That is the question of the moment. Whether we get a healthier, more urgent and empathetic American theater depends on the answer.Off BroadwayThrough Sunday; broad.stream/off-broadway More

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      in Theater

      ‘A Level of Abuse’: Laying Bare Theater’s Dirty Secrets

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      Robert O’Hara and Torrey Townsend discuss their collaboration on “Off Broadway,” a biting satire about a company whose leaders are willfully oblivious of their racial and gender biases.One day in 2016, Torrey Townsend unexpectedly received a message from Robert O’Hara, a writer and director then on the rise thanks to his raucous, exuberantly provocative satires “Bootycandy” and “Barbecue.”The email was actually sent to Townsend’s boss, the artistic director of a respected New York theater, but he had access to the account as part of his administrative duties. O’Hara was not writing about some exciting new project, though.He was calling out the company, which both men declined to identify, for its failure to employ artists of color.“He really struck me as somebody who I felt aligned with politically,” Townsend said. He reached out and eventually invited O’Hara to his show “The Workshop,” in which an aging almost-was leads students in a playwriting class.Benja Kay Thomas, Jesse Pennington and Jessica Frances Dukes in Robert O’Hara’s 2014 play “Bootycandy” at Playwrights Horizons.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“I was enthralled and amazed,” O’Hara said. “It challenged sacred cows of our industry, and I think we all need to be held accountable for the work we do.” He agreed to direct Townsend’s new play, “Off Broadway,” a lacerating, wickedly funny portrait of a struggling New York company whose leaders are willfully oblivious of their racial and gender biases, which include stunt casting so preposterously offensive, you can only laugh at it. Enablers of the status quo, meanwhile, include a wealthy patron and, yes, The New York Times.O’Hara’s star rose further after he directed Jeremy O. Harris’s “Slave Play,” and an industry reading of “Off Broadway,” starring Dylan Baker as the white heir apparent to a white artistic director, took place in 2019. “If Robert wanted me to work on something, I was totally going to do it,” Baker said. “And as soon as I read the script I said ‘Who is this guy Torrey Townsend? He knows how to write.’ ”Yet the play wasn’t getting picked up, with only the Brooklyn incubator the Bushwick Starr expressing interest, according to Townsend.Eventually, he and O’Hara worked out a deal for a streaming iteration with Harris, who has been helping produce theatrical projects (including the recent Pulitzer Prize finalist and digital native “Circle Jerk”) with HBO seed money, and producers from “Slave Play.” The production — with Baker again, alongside his wife, Becky Ann Baker, Jessica Frances Dukes, Richard Kind and Kara Wang — has already been recorded, and will be free to stream on the new platform Broadstream Media from June 24-27. (Advance sign-up is required.)O’Hara and Townsend recently sat down for a joint video chat about the nonprofit theater world’s dysfunctions and the play’s comedic sneak attacks. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Austin Pendleton, center right, as a washed-up playwright who teaches a course in dramatic writing in Torrey Townsend’s “The Workshop.”Knud AdamsDo you think American theater is wary of scrutinizing itself too closely because it feels so beleaguered that it closes ranks?ROBERT O’HARA Yes, and we also take things much more personally: We think that if you talk about a play, you’re actually talking about the personal worth of the people who created it. And so if you criticize, it’s almost like you’re criticizing that person, as opposed to criticizing the institution and the systemic racism inside those choices.I am obliged to point out the obvious, which is that Torrey is a white man.O’HARA Well, racism was invented by white people [chortles] so I would love to know what white people think of their invention. It was exciting to see how a white guy would deal with their invention of racism in the American theater, and own it.Do you think theater has gotten away with so much for so long because it assumes artists can be judged by different rules?TORREY TOWNSEND I think there’s a quasi-religious component to this whole culture. There’s no other way to explain the level of exploitation that goes on unless it’s being sustained by an illusion of that kind. In 2018, Michael Paulson published a story [in The New York Times] about Gordon Edelstein and the Long Wharf Theater. [Edelstein, at the time the artistic director of the theater, had been accused by multiple women of sexual harassment.] About six months later, a firm in New Haven hired an attorney, Penny Mason, to write an independent review. In her concluding remarks she says that Edelstein’s mantra at the theater was “we are a family” — not a workplace, a family.O’HARA We’re always using words like “home” or “artistic home.” But there’s a level of abuse that happens in homes that we sort of allowed to happen: “Well, that’s just the way I was brought up.” We accept a level of trauma, I think, in our childhood and upbringing.Why tweak “Off Broadway” so it now also deals with theater during Covid-19, instead of simply transposing the 2019 version on Zoom?TOWNSEND The script lent itself to an update because it was already about the catastrophization of the theater. A lot of behavior that we witnessed in theaters during the pandemic has been totally absurd and deranged, and we wanted to honor that [laughs].O’HARA I feel that it would be ridiculous to create a new piece about Off Broadway that doesn’t acknowledge that it was gone for a year. That, to me, led to an even deeper sense of satire: you’re still holding on to these beliefs, but you don’t have a theater.The married couple Becky Ann Baker and Dylan Baker in a scene from Torrey Townsend’s new play, “Off Broadway.”via Torrey Townsend“Off Broadway” has dark undertones, but it also is, unabashedly, a comedy. Was it hard to refine what gets a laugh, considering some of the subject matter?TOWNSEND It requires constant effort, constant trial and error. It is very important to me that the work be funny.O’HARA There’s a comfort level where people can laugh, and then you can get behind them and show them some truths. Sometimes funny is painful; sometimes pain is funny. Sometimes the way I can deal with the institutionalized racism and homophobia and sexism and assault and harassment is to simply laugh. Because if I don’t, I will go out and harm something, or harm an individual, or say things that are harmful.Why focus on a small Off Broadway company?O’HARA When you think of the shows that address the theater, they’re usually about Broadway. But on Broadway you have to create your whole team every time, whereas Off Broadway and regional theater are set inside institutions. And what an institution does with creativity is never really examined.TOWNSEND It was important to me to weave the language about money into this play. The corporate world is more a part of the nonprofit theater world than we’re really aware of. There is a connection between this corporatization of American theater and the underlying abuse that ensues because we are conducting business as if we’re inside Trump Tower. I don’t think there’s a difference between the way Michael Cohen and Donald Trump are doing business and the way people are doing business inside an administrative office. It’s the dirty secret of the American theater: These theaters are run by bank managers, by accountants, and their donors are rich people working on Wall Street.O’HARA I have been head-hunted to see if I was interested in running an institution, and one of the most important skills they are looking for is an ability to fund-raise. For an institution to work, you have to know the lay of the land. And the lay of the land is that, although it says nonprofit, we are not trying to lose any more money — we’re trying to get as much money as possible.What is the solution: more public funding, more division of labor between artistic and fund-raising duties?O’HARA One of the things I think is necessary is diversity. Diversity will breed different people with different skill sets to show you different ways to run this institution. You need to disrupt the person in charge, you need to disrupt what power means and how power is distributed. That in itself will generate a new relationship to fund-raising. I don’t know very many happy artistic directors. There’s also a level of division that needs to be had: Am I going to be the artistic head and can that actually allow other people to deal with the educational and the finances and all this other stuff?The show points out how the system has long reproduced itself.O’HARA You have people who feel it’s OK to run an institution for 30 [expletive] years. “I’m against white supremacy but I want to run this [expletive] for 30 [expletive] years.” And I’m like, “No, get out! Go run something else!” They know who they are. And it’s unacceptable. They’re fossils.Off BroadwayJune 24-27; broad.stream/off-broadway More