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    Review: ‘You Will Get Sick’ Tells the Untellable, for a Price

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    In a new Off Broadway play, Linda Lavin shines as a woman paid to say what an ailing young man cannot.Disease, dying and death are usually depicted as wretched or bloody onstage. We’re meant to cry or recoil.As you might guess from its title, though, “You Will Get Sick,” which opened on Sunday at the Laura Pels Theater, is more matter-of-fact. It seems to promise a bald memento mori in the form of a fortune cookie.Yet the play, written by Noah Diaz, directed by Sam Pinkleton and starring the evergreen Linda Lavin, is far more than that. Neither prosaic nor clinical, it defies all expectations for a story in which the main character receives a fatal diagnosis, telling the tale in the most lively, surreal and surprising ways imaginable.For one thing, Lavin, who is 85, does not play the character who’s ill. Turning the template upside down, she instead plays the caregiver, Callan — if you can call someone a caregiver whose every act of care is minutely monetized. Never lifting a finger without naming a price, she’s more like an end-of-life TaskRabbit, having answered an ad from a man seeking someone to listen to him admit that he’s sick.That he can’t actually say the word reflects on the way his life as a millennial — he’s in his 30s — has failed to prepare him to envision such a fate. But for his initial payment of $20, he purchases the opportunity to practice his confession by telling Callan that his limbs are growing numb as his illness progresses. Soon he will be paying her more to break the news to his narcissistic sister (Marinda Anderson) and others in his orbit. Even his co-workers don’t know why he hasn’t been at work.The playwright, making his New York debut, is withholding too. He elects not to name the character (he’s simply called #1 in the script) or even the disease, which resembles multiple sclerosis. But in Daniel K. Isaac’s typically and appealingly restrained performance, we understand much more. This is a man who protects himself against too much feeling by keeping the flow of information to a minimum. The flow of money replaces it.From left, Marinda Anderson, Isaac and Lavin. All the actors except Isaac play multiple roles.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSuch omissions and substitutions are part of the play’s overall approach. We never do hear #1 say the things he wants said; that service is provided instead by a disembodied narrator (Dario Ladani Sanchez) and of course by Callan, who, aside from the paid-for retellings, turns the story into a monologue for her night-school acting class.If this Cubist approach sounds too clever, it is in fact functional. The second-person narration (“Your hand goes numb,” says the voice) reproduces in the audience the sensation of dissociation #1 feels as his body starts to operate independently of his will. And the third-person monologue (“His balance isn’t right,” Callan declaims) demonstrates how our stories, even when buried, may yet leach into the world.For Diaz, theater is clearly part of that process; the slightly indulgent acting class sequences engage in some affectionate if too easy satire. (“There is no can’t,” says the teacher. “There is sometimes cannot … There is mostly maybe … We call that do.”) Yet when #1 accompanies Callan to a session one evening, the trite instruction to “live inside our bodies” becomes, in a quietly joyful moment between them, profound, experienced from opposing side of wellness.Lavin’s wit is in full bloom playing a woman who, unlike herself, is a terrible actor and a worse singer. (When prompted to walk like a lion, she’s suddenly Gwen Verdon doing Fosse.) Callan is as rich as any role she’s had in years — and even richer in some ways, because it doesn’t trade, as her characters in “Our Mother’s Brief Affair” and “The Lyons” did, on her innate glamour. Far from it: Her Callan is that woman you see on the subway, pawing through a dirty tote bag, her auburn perm three inches grown out.And yet, as a foul-mouthed, don’t-mess-with-me urban lady with sincere if hopeless dreams in her head, Lavin has never seemed more vital, sly and fearless. When she admits that she wants to play Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” — to which #1 incredulously responds, “Did this Dorothy see the trials of war and age 60 years?” — you somehow feel the deep sense of the ludicrous self-casting.Such underground connections are at the heart of “You Will Get Sick”; Diaz is working a surrealist vein that doesn’t mean to make an argument so much as to plant the seeds of one you can have with yourself later. That all the actors except Isaac play multiple roles — Nate Miller plays seven, marvelously — suggests layers of correspondence among them. Most of Miller’s are fearful, for instance, and Anderson’s are all hilariously tin-eared. When #1’s body starts turning into hay, you may begin to see that they are familiar archetypes as well.Anderson, above center, leads Isaac, Lavin and Nate Miller in animal exercises during an acting class.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe hay — not to mention the marauding birds, “The Wizard of Oz” and the narrative legerdemain — could easily have made “You Will Get Sick” too self-consciously poetic, its spray of images dissipating too quickly. But Diaz, who is 29, has had time to refine and tighten the script since he wrote it in drama school in 2018. In any case, it flies by, feeling even shorter yet fuller than its 85 minutes, especially as the imagery coalesces in a neat pull of strings at the end.That a play in which sadness is always biting at your fingers comes off this light and funny in performance requires a great deal of discipline. Some of that clearly comes from Pinkleton, whose direction trusts the material deeply enough to ask the audience to come toward it instead of the other way around. No surprise that he is also a choreographer, nominated for a Tony Award for his work on “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812”; he’s alert to the play’s internal rhythms.The Roundabout Theater Company production is also alert technically, with a trick box of a set by the design collective dots, lighting by Cha See, costumes by Michael Krass and Alicia Austin, and — especially — a powerful sound design, both apocalyptic and psychological, by Lee Kinney. He helps you believe in the existence of the soul, and also the forces that threaten it.If this all makes “You Will Get Sick” sound avant-garde and difficult, that’s part of the problem Diaz is addressing. Disease, dying and death are the opposite of avant-garde; they’re old news. And they’re difficult only in the way old news is: They happen to other people, always in the past. When it comes to our own demise, we don’t want to talk about it. Perhaps that’s why, in “You Will Get Sick,” we gladly pay Diaz to do it for us.You Will Get SickThrough Dec. 11 at the Laura Pels Theater; roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. More

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      In ‘Once Upon a (korean) Time,’ Bedtime Stories to Keep You Up at Night

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      Daniel K. Isaac’s stylistically daring play at La MaMa doesn’t quite fulfill its promise, but it suggests the playwright has more stories to tell.Korean fairy tales can trend macabre; a few skew more grisly than even the Brothers Grimm. In the Korean version of “Cinderella,” for instance, Cinderella dies. (For a while, anyway.) Murder, starvation, and sacrifice form the dark heart of this folk tradition, at least in the tales that Daniel K. Isaac tells in “Once Upon a (korean) Time,” a production from Ma-Yi Theater Company that opened on Wednesday at La MaMa.Isaac is better known as a stage and screen actor (“The Chinese Lady,” “Billions”); this is his first produced play. And if the ambition of this drama, which spans nearly 100 years and two continents, often exceeds his grasp — and that of its practiced director, Ralph B. Peña — it does suggest a lively theatrical intelligence and a willingness to grapple with some outsize themes.The play begins in 1930, mid-battle, with gunfire and screaming. Out of water, out of rations and — apparently — out of time, two wounded soldiers (David Lee Huynh and Jon Norman Schneider) cower in a foxhole. They soothe themselves by telling a story about a cruel older brother, a kind younger brother and some magical gourds. In a scene set a decade or so later, during World War II, three adolescents (Sasha Diamond, Teresa Avia Lim and Jillian Sun), kidnapped and forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military, dissociate from their circumstances by recounting the story of Shim-Cheong, a woman who sacrifices herself to protect her blind father.David Lee Huynh, left, and Jon Norman Schneider as two wounded soldiers, with Jillian Sun, in “Once Upon a (korean) Time.”Richard TermineThese first scenes are the play’s most difficult. The circumstances are unimaginable in their horror, so it makes sense that Isaac and Peña struggle to envision them‌. In the scene with the soldiers, much of the initial dialogue comes down to screaming and moaning, with expletives flying around like‌ shrapnel‌. In the scene with the young women, Isaac keeps most of the sexual violence offstage, but there is a lot of screaming here, too, and one act of tremendous brutality. The actors do what they can, but they strain to convey the dread and the panic of the characters, and in neither scene does the staging feel sufficient. An extended drag sequence — with Schneider playing the Sea King in a ball gown and sparkles — offers variety and brief respite, but it is a strange and dissonant choice.After a confusing Korean War sequence, “Once Upon a (korean) Time” settles into a more confident mode, in a scene in which a daughter finds her birth mother — unfortunately, at a Korean-owned liquor store in the midst of the Los Angeles riots — and then another, set in present-day Koreatown, in which that same daughter, now a mother herself, meets up with her friends, all of them Korean American adoptees. At this point, it becomes clear — though, if you’re a savvy spectator, it was probably clear already — that these scenes and stories have been braided together to tell the story of one woman’s family.Under Peña’s direction, the shifts between time periods, and between realism and fairy tale, are not always fluid. Se Hyun Oh’s set, which is mostly two monoliths, labors to suggest everything from a cave to a convenience store. Despite evocative lighting from Oliver Wason, flexible projections from Yee Eun Nam, and Phuong Nguyen’s judicious costumes, these spaces rarely feel fully invoked. The final two scenes, in which stories are narrated but not fully enacted, are the most successful. And that could be either because these scenes are the least formally ambitious, or because they feel the most personal.Isaac is not an adoptee, but, as he explains in the program notes, he grew up without much knowledge of his ancestry or Korean folklore. He has had to seek that out on his own, as an adult. And so the play, for all its temporal and geographical sweep, is also Isaac’s own story, one of longing for connection with history and place. He could have rendered this tale a lot more simply, but who wants to fault a playwright for big swings and stylistic daring? “Once Upon a (korean) Time” doesn’t quite fulfill its promise, but it suggests that Isaac has more stories to tell.Once Upon a (korean) TimeThrough Sept. 18 at La MaMa, Manhattan; ma-yitheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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      Review: ‘The Chinese Lady’ Casts a Long Look at Hate

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      Lloyd Suh’s play is a riff on the arrival of the real Afong Moy, possibly the first woman from China in the United States, and a lens on contemporary racism.Afong Moy is known as “The Chinese Lady,” but really she is just a girl — 14 when she arrives alone in New York in 1834, brought by a pair of merchant brothers who struck a deal with her father in China to put her in a museum for two years, on display.Possibly the first Chinese woman in the United States, she is marketed as a curiosity. Crowds pay to ogle her as she brews tea, eats with chopsticks and walks around the room on her bound feet. It’s a performance of cultural identity, and she is happy to enact it — enthusiastic, even, at the start. Cheerfully naïve, unsuspecting of the world’s cruelty, she views herself as an educator, fostering understanding.“Thank you for coming to see me,” she says to her gawkers, who are also us: the audience at the Public Theater, watching Lloyd Suh’s play “The Chinese Lady,” a moving and often sharply funny riff on the story of the real Afong Moy, traversing 188 years of American ugliness and exoticization in 90 swift, heightened minutes. A two-hander, it hopes with all its battered heart that we will, by the end, see Afong in her full humanity, and through her see this nation with clearer eyes. But it is not optimistic.“The Chinese Lady” was first staged in New York in 2018, when Ralph B. Peña directed a profoundly affecting, smaller-scale production for his Ma-Yi Theater Company at Theater Row, on 42nd Street. That was of course before the pandemic — before an American president scapegoated an entire population by calling the coronavirus the “Chinese virus,” and before physical attacks on people of Asian descent became an ever-present threat in New York and across the country.Peña’s current Barrington Stage Company-Ma Yi production, presented by Ma-Yi and the Public, retains the same gorgeous cast, with Shannon Tyo as Afong and Daniel K. Isaac as Atung, her cynical, deadpan interpreter. (Cindy Im and Jon Norman Schneider play the roles at some performances.) On Junghyun Georgia Lee’s gilt-framed set — simpler and more capacious than the one she designed for Theater Row — the show is more anguished, more mournful, more urgent than before, and sometimes that makes it heavy-handed.History is told through the eyes of Tyo’s character, Afong Moy, who arrives in the United States to be on display at a museum.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTyo and Isaac’s chemistry, though, has only deepened. In their bickering, their loneliness, their not-quite-solidarity, they remain entirely winning and occasionally devastating. (From here, proceed with caution if you haven’t seen the show.)When they are cut loose from each other, after decades of symbiosis — and years at a P.T. Barnum museum — there is no more forlorn sight than Atung alone, a tiny cog in Barnum’s exploitative machine.Long gone by then are the glamorous days when Afong toured to far-flung American cities and met a president — “your emperor, Andrew Jackson,” she calls him, to us. (If that’s an endearing misunderstanding of his title, it’s also a pretty accurate read on his expansionism.) In a revolting re-enactment, we watch him touch her foot: a cowboy barbarian looking down on her even as he sexualizes her.Afong, for all her childlike naïveté when she first arrived, has always been hungry for knowledge of the United States. She speaks of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and Manifest Destiny; the Chinese men building the railroad out West; the people who were already living on these lands in 1492. She finds the country fascinating, and its self-mythologizing wildly overblown.It is not the place where she thought she would spend her life; she believed she would return to her family, not make a home in a place where she is not sure she belongs. When she realizes she will have to do that utterly on her own — breaking out of the box where American culture wants to keep her, under its hostile gaze — she becomes a roiling force of indignation and self-determination.That happens in the play’s penultimate scene, and Tyo absolutely kills it. So it’s unfortunate that the final scene undermines her with ill-conceived design.As Afong recounts horrific 19th-century acts of brutality against Chinese Americans, projections (by Shawn Duan) that had been subtle and mostly static throughout the show start flashing historical headlines and illustrations, then news coverage of contemporary anti-Asian attacks.The impulse is understandable — to make utterly clear that Chinese Americans, long the targets of racist violence, are still menaced as outsiders in their own country. But the intimate power of Suh’s text and Tyo’s performance would have made that connection potently on their own.The production’s final, upstaging image is a wall of disembodied eyes: a digital crowd, creepy and cold. It’s meant, presumably, to expand our sympathy into the wider world. But whatever moral reckoning the play sets in motion occurs between Afong — living, breathing avatar of generations — and the audience. Yet the lights go dark on her.We do, by the end of the play, fully see Afong Moy. In that last moment, let us look.The Chinese LadyThrough April 10 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      in Television

      Daniel Isaac, 'Billions' Actor, Cedes the Spotlight While Quietly Commanding It

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      Daniel K. Isaac, a theater actor with a steady gig on the series “Billions,” is appearing at the Public in Lloyd Suh’s play “The Chinese Lady.”“I’m the type of actor who won’t take up the most space in the room,” Daniel K. Isaac said.This was on a weekday morning, at the Public Theater, an hour or so before Isaac would begin rehearsal for “The Chinese Lady,” a play by Lloyd Suh that runs through March 27. Isaac perched at the edge of his chair — arms crossed, legs crossed, chest concave, occupying the bare minimum of leather upholstery.“It’s a big chair,” he said.Isaac, 33, a theater actor and an ensemble player on the Showtime drama “Billions,” combines that reticence with intelligence and warmth, qualities that enlarge every character he plays. (On this day, he was dressed as a New Yorker, all in navy and black, but his socks were printed with black-and-white happy faces.) With his sad eyes and resonant voice, he is an actor you remember, no matter how much or little screen time or stage time he receives.Isaac, left, and Shannon Tyo in Lloyd Suh’s “The Chinese Lady” at the Public Theater, in a production from Barrington Stage and the Ma-Yi Theater Company.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“The Chinese Lady” is inspired by the life of Afong Moy, a Chinese woman who came to America as a teenager in 1834 and was exhibited as a curiosity before disappearing from the popular imagination. Isaac plays Atung, her translator, who made even less of a dent in the historical record. “He exists as a side note,” Isaac said.Isaac created the role, in 2018, in a production from Barrington Stage and the Ma-Yi Theater Company. Even in a two-hander, he rarely takes center stage, ceding that space to Shannon Tyo’s Afong Moy.“I am irrelevant,” Atung says in the play’s opening scene.Isaac relates. In the first decade of his career, he felt ancillary, in part because of the roles available to Asian American men. He still feels that way. But now, in his 30s — and with his debut as a playwright coming later this year — he is trying to be the main character in his own life.“I don’t think I’ve ever had the big break or the large, hugely visible or recognizable thing,” he said. “My life has been a slow burn, a marathon rather than immediate sprint.” Isaac ought to know: He recently trained for his first marathon, and then posted cheerful selfies — of him in his NipGuards — to Twitter.Isaac with Tyo. “I just want somebody to give him the chance to be like, a small town hero cop,” she said. “There is a range of people I would love to see him take center stage doing.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesIsaac was born in 1988, in Southern California, the only child of a single mother who had immigrated from South Korea. At her megachurch, his mother heard a story of a pastor who suffered from stage fright. And because she imagined that Isaac might one day become a preacher — or a lawyer, or a doctor, who might have the occasional lecture — she signed him up for the church’s drama troupe.In high school, he participated for the first time in secular theater, playing a gambler in “Guys and Dolls.” He loved it. “There’s nothing like the community of theater, or what I still call the church of theater,” he said. This was also a time when he was struggling with his attraction to men and voluntarily undergoing conversion therapy. Theater, by contrast, allowed him to experiment with his identity, to try on different ways of being.“It became the safe space that allowed me to grow up, mature, open up more,” he said.He finished high school at 16 and went on to study theater at the University of California, San Diego, where he accepted his sexuality, which led to an estrangement from his mother. (They’re still working on it.) After graduation he moved to New York City and found restaurant work. He had set his sights on classical theater because peers had told him that, as an actor of color, he might find more parts there.“I was trying to imagine, could I be the token Asian in a project?” he said. “And would that be enough?”Seven years, some Off Broadway plays and a few episodes of television later, he landed a small part in the “Billions” pilot. He didn’t think much of it. He knew that plenty of pilots didn’t take. And he’d been killed or written off in ones that did. But “Billions” took, and his character, Ben Kim, an analyst who became a portfolio manager, remains alive. Isaac has appeared in every episode. (Still he didn’t quit his restaurant job until midway through Season 2. And technically, the restaurant told him to go.)Dhruv Maheshwari, left, and Isaac in “Billions.”Christopher Saunders/ShowtimeThe showrunners of “Billions,” Brian Koppelman and David Levien, hadn’t had huge plans for the Ben character. Once they understood Isaac’s intelligence and versatility, they expanded the role. “Daniel is a fearless actor, and that gives us huge freedom,” they wrote in a joint email.There’s a sweetness to his “Billions” character, which contrasts with the macho posturing of his colleagues at an asset management company. And that sweetness, as his co-star Kelly AuCoin said during a recent phone conversation, is all Isaac. “He could not be a more lovely or positive person,” he said. “He emanates love.” AuCoin broke off, worrying that his praise sounded fake. Which it wasn’t, he assured me. Then he broke off again. Isaac had just texted to wish him a happy birthday.For Isaac, who tries to do theater in between “Billions” shoots, taking on the role of Atung felt personal. And it felt important, not only as a way to explore who these characters were, but also as a means to reclaim their history.“Daniel understands the sacrifices made to get him where he is, and it imbues his work with a sense of purpose,” Ralph B. Peña, the play’s director, wrote in an email.Isaac says that theater “became the safe space that allowed me to grow up, mature, open up more.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesIn 2018, playing Atung, and reckoning with the weight of what men like him had suffered, felt painful. “I think I took it a lot more personally,” Isaac said. In the intervening years, anti-Asian prejudice, fueled by misinformation around Covid-19, seemed only to increase, which has made the work feel even more necessary.“If art has any capacity to make space for understanding, or empathy, or can be more than just entertainment, which I hope and live by, then I want to share that,” he said.Isaac has a way, in conversation and seemingly in his life, of taking the emphasis off himself and putting it onto the work, his colleagues, the world. That’s why he started writing plays.“Because then I could literally give the spotlight to others,” he said. “And sit in the shadows and still experience something and the joy of creation.” Ma-Yi will produce his first play in the fall, “Once Upon a (Korean) Time,” which explores the Korean War through the medium of Korean fairy tales.Tyo, his “The Chinese Lady” co-star, would like to see him find his light. They often help each other film auditions, so she has seen the range of what he can do. “I just want somebody to give him the chance to be like, a small town hero cop,” she said. “He’s very good at it. He’s very good at surfer bro. There is a range of people I would love to see him take center stage doing.”He is trying, he said. And at the risk of sounding what he called “extra woo-woo,” he thanks theater for helping him to try. “I credit the theater community because that’s where I felt safest and saw people being fearlessly themselves,” he said. “That gave me permission to try to step toward that in my own journey. And I’m still doing that.” More