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    ‘Crumbs From the Table of Joy’ Review: Dreams on the Cusp of Womanhood

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    In Keen Company’s revival of Lynn Nottage’s 1995 play, a Black girl comes of age amid the churn of social change in midcentury Brooklyn.If Ernestine Crump were a Hollywood actress, she would change her name to something suitably alluring.“Like ‘Sylvie Montgomery,’” she says. “Or ‘Laura Saint Germaine’ — that’s French.”At 17, on the verge of graduating from high school, Ernestine is given to celluloid dreams and other flights of fancy.“But don’t you worry yourself,” she says, all teasing practicality. “When I’m onscreen I sure can act very white. That’s why I’m a star.”In Lynn Nottage’s bittersweet memory play “Crumbs From the Table of Joy,” at Theater Row, the year is 1950. Ernestine (a terrific Shanel Bailey), our narrator, is a recent transplant to Brooklyn, where she lives in a basement apartment with her rigid father, Godfrey (Jason Bowen), and impish sister, Ermina (Malika Samuel). They are a Black family on a largely white block; few of the neighbors will even speak to them.The death of the girls’ mother was the catalyst for the Crumps’ move north from Florida. Each of them is still undone by grief, perhaps Godfrey most of all. A baker by trade, he is newly sober and celibate, clinging to the teachings of the messianic leader Father Divine, whose portrait hangs on the living room wall. (The set is by Brendan Gonzales Boston.)More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This Spring‘The Invisible Project’: The new show by the choreographer Keely Garfield at NYU Skirball is a dance, but it is also informed by her work as an end-of-life and trauma chaplain.Life in Photos: Larry Sultan’s photography, now starring in the play “Pictures From Home” and a gallery show, raise issues of who controls a family’s image.Musical 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.Asceticism is anathema to the girls’ glamorous Aunt Lily (Sharina Martin), their mother’s sister, who shows up unexpected from Harlem one day. Luggage in tow, flask ever-present, she announces that her own mother has asked her to take care of the girls.“She don’t think it’s proper that a man be living alone with his daughters once they sprung bosom,” Lily says, vividly.And that’s that, despite how objectionable Godfrey finds Lily’s fervent Communism and how disconcerting he finds her sexual availability.In Colette Robert’s quiet, mostly sure-handed production for Keen Company, “Crumbs From the Table of Joy” is a pleasure for several reasons: rarity, for one, this being the play’s first New York revival since its premiere in 1995.There’s also the fun of spotting — in a work that feels, improbable as it sounds, like a cousin to Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach Memoirs” — glimmers of plays to come in Nottage’s oeuvre. Ernestine’s silver-screen fantasies bring to mind the satire “By the Way, Meet Vera Stark” (2011), about a trailblazing Black actress in Golden Age Hollywood. And Ernestine’s dressmaker’s dummy, draped with her graduation gown in progress, prefigures “Intimate Apparel” (2003).That dress, prim and white with lace at the neckline, is as much an emblem of achievement and possibility as Lily’s elegant tailored skirt suit — though Lily’s outfit also serves as an armor of bravado over dented dreams. (Costumes are by Johanna Pan.) A revolutionary at heart, and a life-altering inspiration to Ernestine, Lily is a determined counterpoint to the version of Black womanhood that the cautious Godfrey tries to instill in his daughters: chaste, sober, grateful and with only the tamest of ambitions.Lily, alas, doesn’t have the necessary resonance in this production. There’s a hollowness to Martin’s interpretation that unbalances the otherwise strong ensemble and the dynamics of the Crump household, which Godfrey throws into turmoil when he abruptly remarries.Like Father Divine, he chooses a white woman — Gerte (Natalia Payne, excellent), who lived through the war in her native Germany. Their first meeting, by chance, on the subway, is intensely fraught: she, lost, hungry and alone; he, terrified to engage because, as he has told his daughters more than once, “I don’t want to wind up like them Scottsboro boys.”Such are the clamorous forces shaping Ernestine’s coming-of-age. In the middle of the 20th century, in a corner of the big city, she’s figuring out who she wants to be.Crumbs From the Table of JoyThrough April 1 at Theater Row, Manhattan; keencompany.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      Review: ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’ Gets Joan Didion’s Intention Just Right

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      A play based on the writer’s memoir about the death of her husband, in its first New York revival, goes small to powerful effect.The timeline of loss was mercilessly fast. On Dec. 30, 2003, Joan Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, died mid-conversation at the dinner table in their apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. In late August 2005, their grown-up only child, Quintana, died, less suddenly.Even mid-devastation, Didion did what writers do: observe and chronicle. First came her crystalline memoir of grief for Dunne, “The Year of Magical Thinking,” a best seller when it was published in October 2005, only weeks after their long-ailing daughter’s death. “Blue Nights,” Didion’s memoir of mourning Quintana, was that book’s counterpart, released in 2011.In between, with a rapidity that’s startling, Didion’s stage adaptation of “The Year of Magical Thinking” arrived on Broadway, in March 2007. A monologue directed by David Hare and produced by Scott Rudin, among others, it starred Vanessa Redgrave as Didion. This was a prestige cultural event: tasteful, literary, remote. Presumably, remote was not the goal.The scale of it was all out of whack — not the script, which Didion imbued with a soul-baring directness, but the production. The memoir’s starkly personal story, so intimate as a reading experience, was told now before a crowd of hundreds. We, the audience, were asked to accept one famous artist — the sturdy, statuesque Redgrave — as the stand-in for a highly recognizable other, the diminutive Didion, who was in her early 70s then, with a fragility about her. It was all too large. It did not capture the essence of the book.How thrilling, then, that the first New York revival of “The Year of Magical Thinking” does. Directed by Jonathan Silverstein, this Keen Company production goes small, and in doing so, gets the play sublimely right.Rejecting the distancing formality of a traditional theater setting, it is being performed around the city in living rooms and community spaces whose seating capacity ranges from 12 to 35. Its star is the esteemed Off Broadway actor Kathleen Chalfant, in what may be her best-matched role since Vivian Bearing in “Wit,” more than 20 years ago.The performance I saw took place in a private townhouse on the Upper East Side, about a dozen blocks from where Didion lived. Chalfant seated herself in front of a stone fireplace and slipped into the story of Didion’s discombobulated year, which started on a cozy evening, when, as was their habit, Didion and Dunne had a fire in their fireplace.“Fires said we were home, we had drawn the circle, we were safe through the night,” Chalfant-as-Didion said with a lightness of touch calibrated just right for the room, where we sat on comfortable chairs drawn in a circle, seemingly secure from the menace of the world.Didion and Dunne weren’t safe that night, of course, and neither are we in the long run. As she warns, “Life changes in the instant.” Her play means to gird us for when we, too, find ourselves plunged into grief for someone whose death we cannot bring ourselves to absorb.“The details will be different, but it will happen to you,” she says. “That’s what I’m here to tell you.”The play is a report back from an emotional abyss, yet for all its intensity, it isn’t grim or overwrought. It’s rigorously self-scrutinizing, dryly self-mocking, fairly stunned — somehow both unsentimental and consumed with love.Didion remembers her trauma-scrambled brain wanting to fend off an obituary for Dunne in The Los Angeles Times, because maybe on Pacific Time, he was still alive. She remembers “just playing along,” for quite a while, with the idea that he was dead.What she doesn’t remember — like precisely when the ambulance arrived at their apartment, or how long the E.M.T.s stayed — she fills in with research, because this is the kind of person she is: a woman with a razor-sharp intellect who armors herself with knowledge. Someone seemingly too firmly in control to become unmoored.Vivian Bearing, the dying professor in “Wit,” is that way, too, which is part of the brilliance of casting Chalfant here. She doesn’t physically resemble Didion, and she’s not attempting an impersonation. But her Didion has that same sharp cerebral quality and that same destabilized vulnerability, along with a subtle, charismatic warmth.Didion, who died in December, wanted so badly to protect her little family. She couldn’t, but she could alert the rest of us.“Life changes in the instant,” she says again. “The ordinary instant.”The Year of Magical ThinkingThrough Nov. 20 in various spaces around New York City (addresses will be shared with ticket holders on the morning of the performance); keencompany.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      ‘This Space Between Us’ Review: A Do-Gooder Faces a Chorus of Resistance

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      Peter Gil-Sheridan’s comedy for Keen Company raises a range of topical issues but fails to cover new ground.Liberals are often criticized for their hand-wringing and failure to walk the walk. But the progressive lawyer at the center of Peter Gil-Sheridan’s “This Space Between Us” intends to lead a life of purpose. “Maybe we could all stand to feel a little more guilty,” he says, without telling us exactly why.His career move from cushy corporate job to international aid work, which rattles his loved ones, could be a compelling, if familiar, indictment of modern-day complacency. But there is neither urgency nor bite in the fallout of his decision, which the playwright uses as a jumping-off point for tired topical debates that rarely get off the ground.“This Space Between Us,” an occasionally amusing but stalled new comedy that opened on Wednesday night at Theater Row, begins, ironically enough, at the races, where Jamie (Ryan Garbayo) delivers the news to his family. His dad (Anthony Ruiz), a conservative Cuban immigrant whose small business recently went bankrupt, doesn’t get how Jamie could give up easy money. Neither does his mom (Joyce Cohen), who says that if they fall on hard times she and her husband may have to work at Home Depot to get by without his help. His boyfriend, Ted (Tommy Heleringer), and his best friend Gillian (Alex Chester) selfishly don’t want to lose him when he is ultimately relocated to Nairobi. His aunt Pat (Glynis Bell), both supportive and wise, tells him to go with God (she’s a nun).Subsequent scenes offer different contexts for clashing opinions, mostly cross-generational, about what people are allowed to say these days and why others might be offended. The play’s title largely seems to refer to the gap in understanding that widens as history barrels forward and people scramble to keep up.“I’m from another time,” Jamie’s father says as he tinkers with his broken watch. “Why doesn’t anyone know how to laugh anymore?”Various points of view collide but these moments fail to generate tension or momentum. Ted is hospitalized with a bad cold, seemingly for the sake of revealing to Jamie’s family that Ted is H.I.V. positive, and explaining what it means that his viral load is undetectable. Jamie and Gillian, who are both mixed race, briefly argue about what it means to pass as white but not identify with white culture. Sister Pat is made to answer for the homophobia of the Roman Catholic Church.All the while, Jamie’s motivation for changing careers doesn’t seem to get much deeper than his vague desire to do good. He even goes as far as to ask, in so many words, how anyone could throw a party when there are people starving in Africa, the continent often serving here as a stand-in for global misfortunes.This Keen Company production, directed by its artistic director, Jonathan Silverstein, is pleasantly modest but almost too straightforward. Though the furniture changes, one hulking constant is a racetrack scoreboard that spans the back of the stage, limiting an already tight playing space with a too obvious metaphor. (The set design is by Steven Kemp.) Between scenes, chyrons on the scoreboard display an assortment of headlines — a natural disaster in Bangladesh, racist remarks from Mitch McConnell — that contribute to the generalized atmosphere of bad news.The theater sporadically goes dark as Jamie is spotlighted mid-action, looking out at the audience to the sound of a heart beating (lighting design is by Daisy Long, sound by Luqman Brown). It’s a play for drama and connection, for the audience to identify with someone who’s voiced a general dissatisfaction with the status quo.But real-world problems, overwhelming as they may be, have stakes, specificity and individual flavor. Bridging the space between us takes not just naming, but inhabiting them.This Space Between UsThrough April 2 at Theater Row, Manhattan; bfany.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      4 Things to Do This Weekend

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      Our critics and writers have selected noteworthy cultural events to experience virtually and in person in New York City.KIDSRides and More RidesFrom left, a metal swing ride with detachable riders (1906-20) and a Ferris wheel featuring six gondolas and a music box (1906-20), which are on view in the New-York Historical Society’s exhibition “Holiday Express: Toys and Trains From the Jerni Collection.”New-York Historical SocietyAlong with ice cream trucks and trips to the beach, amusement park fun tends to vanish when the weather turns cold. But Manhattan now offers one place where children can still enjoy some of the splendor of Ferris wheels, roller coasters, carousels and more: the New-York Historical Society.For the first time, its annual winter show, “Holiday Express: Toys and Trains From the Jerni Collection,” includes vintage 19th- and 20th-century carnival playthings. On view through Feb. 27, the exhibition includes such highlights as the collection’s largest toy Ferris wheel (1906-20), made in France with six gondolas, a music box and 17 tiny occupants; a miniature German roller coaster (1886-1917); and blimp rides from the early 1900s with little zeppelin-like compartments.Young visitors, who can pick up a guide to go on a scavenger hunt through the show, will also see the collection’s signature trains — some are chugging merrily — along with model stations.Want more vicarious time travel? Families can register for the society’s latest program in the Living History series, which, like the exhibition, is free with museum admission. At 12:30 p.m. on Sunday, it invites children to learn about 18th-century holiday traditions and make their own decorations.LAUREL GRAEBERClassical MusicFixing a Problem PieceA scene from Janacek’s “Osud” (”Destiny”) at National Theater Brno, a recording of which is available to stream on Operavision’s platform and YouTube channel through May.Marek OlbrzymekThanks to “Jenufa,” “Kat’a Kabanova” and “The Makropulos Case,” the music of the Czech composer Leos Janacek is a core part of the 20th-century repertoire in opera. However, another effort — “Osud” (“Destiny”) — is something of a problem piece. As a result, it has proved to be of interest mainly to scholars and hard-core fans.A new production overseen by Robert Carsen — one of the most consistent directors working — aids the dramatic arc, and thus allows viewers another encounter with Janacek’s masterly musical style. (The opera’s tricky narrative timeline is presented cleanly, but with two singers playing the central role of Zivny, the composer.) Carsen’s approach to this tale of snuffed-out love and throttled creativity was produced for the National Theater Brno, and is available to stream free on Operavision’s platform and its YouTube channel through May.SETH COLTER WALLSPop & RockA Pinc Louds ChristmasClaudi from Pinc Louds performing in Tompkins Square Park. The band will present its “Christmas Tentacular” at Elsewhere on Friday.Bob KrasnerThe Hall at Elsewhere is a more conventional concert space than Pinc Louds have recently been accustomed to. During the pandemic, the band — headed up by Claudi, a Puerto Rico-born singer and guitarist who writes punkish, jazzy songs inspired by love and city life — took up residence at Tompkins Square Park, where they played for fans and passers-by twice a week. Before that, Claudi, an avid busker, was a fixture at the Delancey Street subway station on the Lower East Side.A Pinc Louds show is anything but conventional, though. The audience at their “Christmas Tentacular,” which comes to Elsewhere’s main space on Friday, can expect a colorful, whimsical affair, complete with covers of holiday tunes, puppets and festive sets. Doors are at 6 p.m., and Tall Juan, whose music spans rock, cumbia and reggae, will start his opening set at 6:30. Tickets are $20 and available at elsewherebrooklyn.com.OLIVIA HORNTheaterAudio Drama RevealedFrom left, Jordan Boatman, Marcia Jean Kurtz and Lance Coadie Williams in Deb Margolin’s “That Old Perplexity,” one of two audio dramas featured in Keen Company’s “Hear/Now: LIVE!” Carol RoseggIf the expertly produced audio dramas that have flourished since the start of the pandemic have led you to ask, “How did the artists accomplish this?,” now you have the opportunity to solve that mystery with the Keen Company’s “Hear/Now: LIVE!”The 90-minute performance will feature two world premieres commissioned to be performed in what the company calls “an exciting live format,” showcasing original music and foley effects executed in front of the audience. In “The Telegram” by Mashuq Mushtaq Deen, two cowboys encounter the strange realities of the Wild West as they pay homage to a genre that captivated American listeners during the 1920s. In Deb Margolin’s comedy “That Old Perplexity,” two women develop a connection triggered by the turmoil and grief of a post-9/11 New York City.Tickets are $31.50 and available at bfany.org. Performances will take place at Theater Row on Thursday at 7 p.m., Friday at 8, Saturday at 2 and 8, and Sunday at 3.JOSE SOLÍS More

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      Theater to Stream: Star-Studded Digital Shorts and Escape Rooms

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeFall in Love: With TenorsConsider: Miniature GroceriesSpend 24 Hours: With Andra DayGet: A Wildlife CameraAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTheater to Stream: Star-Studded Digital Shorts and Escape RoomsThe past year has made us rethink the boundaries between theater and film. Many of these shows are a little bit of both.From left, Vicki Lee Taylor, Tom Bales, Marc Pickering, Ryan Pidgen and Kayleigh Thadani in a musical adaptation of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” at the Southwark Playhouse in London.Credit…Geraint LewisMarch 3, 2021It used to be easy to tell theater from film from streaming. The first was live, physical and by appointment; the others were not. But this past year has made us rethink definitions: Theater is not necessarily live or physical anymore, and film might be a little bit of both.Qui Nguyen, who is taking part in the New Ohio Theater’s NYC Indie Theater Film Festival. Credit…Bethany Mollenkof for The New York TimesIf anybody knows how to straddle the physical and virtual, it’s the playwright and screenwriter Qui Nguyen. On March 10, Nguyen, the author of the hit show “She Kills Monsters,” will participate in a Q. and A. for the New Ohio Theater’s NYC Indie Theater Film Festival — which will present over 30 pieces by theatermakers exploring new mediums. March 10-14; newohiotheatre.orgThe Young Vic in London inadvertently anticipated this change a few years ago by beginning to make digital companions to some of its shows, with crackerjack casts. Happily, they’re online for free. Directed by and starring Gillian Anderson, “The Departure” imagines Blanche DuBois in the few days before her fateful visit to Stella in “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Juliet Stevenson appears in “Mayday,” a postscript to Beckett’s “Happy Days”; while Hattie Morahan gives us a contemporary “Nora” in Carrie Cracknell and Nick Payne’s update of “A Doll’s House.” If you like Peter Brook jokes — and you well might if you are reading a column about theater — click on the dryly funny “The Roof,” whose cast includes Natalie Dormer, Noma Dumezweni, Jude Law and Ian McKellen as fans of the illustrious director. youngvic.org‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’During the past year, the Southwark Playhouse in London has emerged as a dynamic force in British theater, not letting lockdowns get in the way of new shows. After its well-received production of Philip Ridley’s “The Poltergeist,” Southwark is presenting the premiere of Richard Hough and Ben Morales Frost’s gender-flipped — and very, very loose — musical adaptation of the Goethe poem about a young inventor (now a girl, played by Mary Moore) who gets lost in magic. Through March 14; southwarkplayhouse.co.uk‘To the Moon’It’s unfortunate that Kathryn Grody has a lower professional profile than her husband, Mandy Patinkin, because she is a very fine actress in her own right. Here is a chance to watch her in action through the Creede Repertory Theater, a Colorado-based company with which Grody and Patinkin have a long history. She is slated to appear in Beth Kander’s docu-play about survivors of domestic violence. Live on March 5 and 6, then on demand March 15 through April 11; creederep.orgKathleen Chalfant, the star of “The Year of Magical Thinking.”Credit…Marc Deliz‘The Year of Magical Thinking’The pandemic has seen a surge in solo shows, for obvious reasons. Joan Didion’s adaptation of her memoir was a Broadway hit in 2007, starring Vanessa Redgrave. Now, Kathleen Chalfant tackles this haunting evocation of grief in a fund-raiser for the Keen Company. March 13-17; keencompany.orgFrom left, Saffron Coomber, Clare Perkins and Adelle Leonce in “Emilia.”Credit…Helen Murray‘Emilia’A recording of Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s “chiaroscuro fantasy of a bio-play,” as The New York Times put it last year, is available again. The Olivier Award-winning comedy is set in the Elizabethan theater scene, where men played women — except here women play the men playing the women, opening up a whole bunch of new opportunities. Through March 31; emilialive.comMax Chernin, center, in “Passing Through.”Credit…Diane Sobolewski‘Passing Through’Goodspeed, a company in Connecticut, is among the greatest champions of American musicals old and new, and it has finally set up an on-demand arm to offer archival recordings of its past productions. The first is this capture of the 2019 developmental production of Brett Ryback and Eric Ulloa’s show about a young man (Max Chernin) who walks from Pennsylvania to California. March 15 through April 4; goodspeed.orgTwo Playwrights Go CampingFood for Thought Productions continues its run at Theater 80 St. Marks with a double bill that should be catnip to connoisseurs of theatrical camp. The program includes the Tennessee Williams one-act comedy “Lifeboat Drill,” set on the Queen Elizabeth II, and Christopher Durang’s “For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls,” a wicked parody of “The Glass Menagerie” in which Laura becomes Lawrence, who collects glass swizzle sticks. Durang and the actress Carroll Baker are expected to turn up for a post-show Q. and A. March 8 and 13-14; foodforthoughtproductions.comPhoebe Hyder in “Dream.”Credit…Stuart Martin, via RSCInteractive ExperiencesAfter its concert of the 1930s Broadway flop “Swingin’ the Dream,” the Royal Shakespeare Company is involved in another experiment inspired by “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” A multimedia, choose-your-own-narrative, high-concept show — in other words, it’s unclear how this will look — “Dream” is led by Puck and the Sprites and involves motion-capture technology, as well as a score including the Gestrument, an app that allows for composition through movement. March 12-20; dream.onlineThe New York-based playwright Aya Ogawa’s 2015 play “Ludic Proxy” dealt with virtual reality and incorporated polling. And now Ogawa has adapted part of it for the new “Ludic Proxy: Fukushima,” presented by the Japan Society and PlayCo, with the audience polling conducted online. Live on March 6, 7 and 11, then on-demand March 12-26; japansociety.orgBathsheba Piepe in “Plymouth Point.”Credit…Matt HassThe London Stone TrilogySwamp Motel’s Clem Garritty and Ollie Jones (of Punchdrunk, the immersive-theater company behind “Sleep No More”) have created a tripartite project that is not so much theater as theatrical experience — think virtual escape room, but with actor Dominic Monaghan. In “Plymouth Point,” you and your friends must unravel a sprawling, maleficent conspiracy by summoning all your combined wits and the internet’s resources to crack passwords, solve riddles and search social media. (Full disclosure: My bumbling team put on a display of pitiful detective skills. Who would have thought watching hundreds of hours of cop shows could be so useless?) The next installments, “The Mermaid’s Tongue” and “The Kindling Hour,” will be available in the United States soon. You can already do the British versions; but they are live, so just keep the time difference in mind. plymouthpoint.co.ukAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More