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    The Stage Combat Is Verbal in These Off Broadway Plays

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    Belarus Free Theater’s “KS6: Small Forward” and three other shows are reminders that there are many ways to portray conflicts and confrontations onstage.When feeling cornered by real-world drama, I catch myself thinking that theater should stand aside from time and space, like a self-contained capsule of pure art. But a recent tour of Off and Off Off Broadway offerings is a bracing reminder of how exhilarating a show can be when it connects one person — onstage, in the audience — with the world.Here are four plays around New York that are small (in scale and budget, not heart or ambition) and tackle political issues in imaginative ways.‘KS6: Small Forward’This is a show by the defiantly activist Belarus Free Theater, whose artistic directors, Natalia Kaliada and Nicolai Khalezin, fled their homeland’s dictatorship in 2011, so naturally dissension and discord form a crucial part of the story.In “KS6: Small Forward,” through Oct. 13 at La MaMa, the retired professional basketball player Katsiaryna Snytsina looks back on her path from a child in a then-Soviet Republic to the hardwood courts of Europe. Kaliada and Khalezin’s staging includes plenty of video footage of Snytsina in action, particularly of her last team, the London Lions, triumphing in a European final just a few months ago. Khalezin’s scenic design is delineated by a three-point semicircle and a basket used for a good-natured, mid-show shooting competition.Speaking in English, the lanky Snytsina, who is not a polished actor but has effortless charisma, describes growing up in a sports system based on bullying, living out of a suitcase and coming out as a lesbian (“my Instagram is considered extremist material by the Belarusian regime”). She also talks about what the violent repression of the pro-democracy protests of 2020 in Minsk meant to someone who had never voted — the episode is effectively staged with a basketball spurting out blood as it’s being pulverized.The one time Snytsina, who now lives in London, verbalizes thoughts that might occur to some American viewers is when she brings up ballot results: “The Belarusian dictatorship is over 30 years old,” she says. “Just imagine if you vote Trump in, and he falsifies the next 30 years of elections. What will happen? Just imagine that!”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: In ‘American Rot,’ the Painful Legacy of the Dred Scott Case

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      Kate Taney Billingsley’s play starts with a fictional apology, but then segregated choirs and a racist waitress create tonal dissonance.In a greasy spoon just off the New Jersey Turnpike, two men sit down for coffee. One, Walter Scott (Count Stovall), is a descendant of Dred Scott, and the other, Jim Taney (John L. Payne), is a great-great nephew of Roger B. Taney, the Supreme Court chief justice who, in 1857, wrote the opinion in the Dred Scott decision, which declared that Black people could never be citizens.Jim requested this meeting with Walter in hopes of apologizing for “arguably the worst decision in Supreme Court history.” As a premise for a story, one could scarcely ask for richer material. But something was lost in the execution of “American Rot,” a flat-footed play by Kate Taney Billingsley, who is an actual descendant of the former chief justice.That this La MaMa production, directed by Estelle Parsons, is based on Billingsley’s fleet audio play, starring Sam Waterston and John Douglas Thompson, is especially puzzling. In just 30 minutes, that audio production, titled “A Man of His Time,” effectively dramatized two descendants of historic figures locking horns, interrogating their own biases and seeking middle ground.In expanding the story for the version now running at the Ellen Stewart Theater, Billingsley added 12 supporting characters, most of whom make up Black and white choruses, representing the woke commentariat and unreconstructed racists. Stationed in segregated sections of Christina Weppner’s barely-there diner, the two factions are served by an insufferable waitress (Suzanne DiDonna), who has placed a feather in her hair after snatching it from a Native American man in the opening sequence. She then proceeds to toss off white nationalist comments with alarming frequency, and is eager for something called “the Appropriation Festival,” which promises “feathers, fringe, fentanyl!”Run, Walter, run! Yet Walter and Jim stay put, seemingly unbothered — unlikely for a Black customer or a white man who “preaches equal rights.”“American Rot” is tonally dissonant in other ways, too. Though the historic forefathers sit onstage — Dred Scott (Leland Gantt) is upstage on a stool and a cadaverous Roger Taney (Timothy Doyle) is situated downstage — they are mostly quiet throughout the show. Occasionally they break the space-time continuum — theater’s fifth wall — to menace their descendants or buffalo them into honoring their legacies. Yet the moral seriousness of the descendants’ conversations with each other and their ancestors is too often undercut by silliness, including burlesque skits. At one point, the white chorus sings a peppy number called “The Land of the Oblivious,” with lyrics like “We like to deny what’s really going on/Throughout this country and way beyond!/Social media is where we belong!”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At a Revamped Under the Radar, New York Greets a ‘Global Downtown’

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      No longer at the Public, the annual celebration of experimental theater disperses 17 productions across the city. About half are international works that are getting harder to import.The writer and performer Inua Ellams was born in Nigeria, is based in England and performs internationally. “As an immigrant, I’m most comfortable when I’m not at home,” he said during a recent conversation. “To go to another country and see if my concepts still stand the test of artistry, that’s what I love doing.”Ellams will take that test in early January, at Lincoln Center’s Clark Studio Theater, when he performs “Search Party,” during which the audience curates an evening of his poetry by shouting out words that Ellams enters into the search bar of an iPad already loaded with his works.“Search Party” is among the works included in this year’s Under the Radar Festival, a celebration of experimental performance. Having lost its longtime space at the Public Theater owing to the Public’s budget cuts, the 2024 festival will disperse 17 full productions (as well as symposia and a disco) across more than a dozen partner venues in Manhattan and Brooklyn.Of those full productions, about half of them are created by artists based outside the United States. In a year in which the festival, with its budget halved, had to scramble for new partners and new spaces, and considering the rising costs and difficulties of artists’ visas, a roster of local artists might have been an easier sell. But that would undercut the ethos of Under the Radar, which has always mingled international artists with local ones in pursuit of what the festival’s founder, Mark Russell, refers to as “the global downtown.”“I want for our artists to see these other artists from around the world and understand that they’re all part of a larger community,” Russell said.To bring an international show to New York is a process that must begin many months (or ideally, years) in advance. The work has to be scouted and deemed appropriate for an American, English-speaking audience and not so bulky — in terms of both cast size and production design — that the cost of importing it becomes prohibitive.Within these criteria, Ellams’s “Search Party” is especially attractive. It requires only Ellams, who had already received a visa as an individual of extraordinary ability, and his iPad. (“Of all the shows that I’ve had performed across the world, this is probably the most eco-friendly,” Ellams said.) The two other shows that Lincoln Center has brought over, “Queens of Sheba” and Pan Pan’s “The First Bad Man,” are also traveling without scenery, a deliberate simplicity.“International artists are getting smarter,” Jon Nakagawa, Lincoln Center’s director of contemporary programming, said.Funding for these shows must be secured, typically a collaboration between the sponsor theater and the international artists, who can apply in their home countries for government and private grants, which can be used to cover airfare and hotel costs. Visas have to be obtained, typically either a P-3, for an artist or entertainer traveling with a work of unique cultural significance, or an O-1 visa, like the one Ellams travels under, granted to individuals of extraordinary abilities. Each type requires both a stateside approval and an in-person interview, typically in the applicant’s country of origin. As wait times for visa approvals have grown exponentially, many arts institutions now work with law firms to expedite the process.Even so, there can be surprises, usually not welcome ones. The Japan Society, which has long imported experimental Japanese performance, ran into a hitch with “Hamlet/Toilet,” an absurdist, pop culture-inflected work from the playwright and director Yu Murai and Theater Company Kaimaku Pennant Race. As the work is based in part on Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” Yoko Shioya, the Japan Society’s artistic director, had to argue what made this work culturally unique to Japan. Asked by the consular official to submit further evidence, she focused on the production’s toilets. (Murai is also the author of “Romeo & Toilet.” Toilets are a recurring motif.)“Everybody who first goes to Japan, their jaws drop at the toilets,” she said. The official approved the application.The Japan Society will host “Hamlet/Toilet,” a work from the playwright and director Yu Murai and Theater Company Kaimaku Pennant Race.Takashi IkemuraOther productions have had to rely on U.S. senators and foreign officials to arrange timely appointments at American embassies. When none can be found, artists have been flown to other countries whose embassies are less backlogged. This year, the vice mayor of Milan helped to schedule an expedited appointment for a member of the Italian performance troupe Motus, which will perform “Of the Nightingale I Envy the Fate,” adapted from “The Oresteia,” at La MaMa. A cinematographer with Sister Sylvester’s “The Eagle and the Tortoise,” a work about the history of the aerial view that will play at BRIC, wasn’t so lucky. That colleague couldn’t secure an appointment until 2025 and won’t join the production.“It’s becoming more and more risky and more and more expensive,” Denise Greber, La MaMa’s director of artistic operations, said of importing international work. She noted that the cost of visa applications has nearly doubled in recent years. And she had just received word that the cost of one form was set to increase further. “But we still try. It’s important for people in New York City to have an opportunity to see work from other countries. It’s just really important to have cultural exchange.”It isn’t only New York City residents who benefit. Under the Radar, like other January events such as the Exponential Festival, Prototype and The Fire This Time, is in part a showcase that coincides with the annual conference of the Association of Performing Arts Professionals. Those professionals can reward artists with lucrative touring contracts, and artists can profit in other ways, too.Ellams was looking forward to the conversations among local and international artists, perpetuating his belief in what he called “the global village.”“New York is the concrete jungle of the world,” he said. “It’s where a lot of the world’s conversations begin.” More

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      Tales That Crackle With Vitality, With or Without a Puppeteer

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      La MaMa Puppet Festival and other stage works this fall highlight the power of storytelling through puppetry.In a crisp white gallery space on Great Jones Street, in Manhattan’s East Village, a large wooden box contains a meticulous mise-en-scène: a midcentury roadside motel room constructed at puppet scale, which means it’s half of human scale. Standing on a step built into the outside of the box, spectators can gaze down into the installation, a time-capsule environment called “Motel,” by the master puppet artist Dan Hurlin.It has just one puppet inside — a motionless woman in an armchair in the corner, dressed with almost ostentatious modesty, one dark strand of hair hanging loose from her ponytail, a crucifix dangling from the chain around her neck. On the tabletop beside her, the key to Room 15 lies next to an envelope spilling $20 bills. On one of the double beds, the rust-orange spread is rumpled; outside the door to the bathroom, there is water in the sink. And on the desk, near the room phone and a stamped envelope, a letter is balled up.“Motel,” by the master puppet artist Dan Hurlin, freezes an anonymous American moment. It can be viewed at La MaMa Galleria through Nov. 18.Zach HymanOrdinarily, nothing seems more lifeless than a puppet without a puppeteer. But in freezing an anonymous American moment from a decade that might as easily be the 1970s as the 2020s, “Motel” absolutely crackles with an intriguing, unsettling vitality.The installation, on view through Nov. 12 at La MaMa Galleria, is a standout at this year’s La MaMa Puppet Festival — for the fastidious detail of Hurlin’s motel-room re-creation (wall-mounted bottle opener; wood-grain-patterned paneling; lampshade gone cockeyed; Bible, of course) but also because it poses a challenge beyond puppetry’s usual ask that we conspire in the illusion. Hurlin and his sound designer, the superb Dan Moses Schreier, are inviting us to take in their clues and envision a story as well.From the clock radio on the bedside stand, we hear intermittent voices giving and eliciting testimony, but they are from different nation-rocking scandals: Watergate and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. What decade is the puppet woman stuck in? Is she in danger or distress? Perhaps on the run? And why does her prim, princess-sleeved dress seem from a different wardrobe than the clothes hanging up?Dogs bark, crickets chirp, cars zoom past — all in Schreier’s subtle soundscape — and we peer ever more closely at the drab little room, imagining what trouble might have brought her here, and what all might be going on out there.***Over at La MaMa proper, on nearby East Fourth Street, my favorite festival performance of last weekend was Tom Lee’s mesmerizing “Sounding the Resonant Path,” upstairs at the Ellen Stewart Theater. (Its brief run has ended, I regret to say.)The principal character is a puppet called the Woodcutter. Entering with an ax slung over one plaid-shirted shoulder, he walks slowly and deliberately along a curving wooden track, ostensibly alone. Never mind the puppeteer (Lee) seated just behind him, dressed in black and scooting along on a small, wheeled box. That is part of the Japanese kuruma ningyo style, a relative of bunraku.This charming, funny Woodcutter fells trees to carve and shape; in his studio, we see him transform blocks of wood into art. (Eventually, we also see him carrying an actual flaming torch, which is one way of getting us to worry about a puppet’s mortality, even if that is not the point.)Solitary and self-sufficient, the Woodcutter is possessed of the ineffable quality — a kind of projectability — that can make puppets profound and delicate vessels for embodying human vulnerability. His is the microcosmic life at the center of the show’s macrocosmic evocations.Because what “Sounding the Resonant Path” sets out to do is briefly, bountifully recap all of our planetary history. Its inspiration is the August 1977 launch of the Voyager 2 space probe, which carried the golden record of images, speech and music meant to explain Earth to any extraterrestrial life.Maria Camia’s ambitious musical, “The Healing Shipment,” features extraterrestrial puppets whose torsos frame the faces of the puppeteers inside. Richard TermineThis show’s version includes minimal speech but many intricate projections (by Chris Carcione) and shadow puppets (by Linda Wingerter), as well as live music (by Ralph Samuelson, Perry Yung, Julian Kytasty and Yukio Tsuji) whose bandura, drums and haunting shakuhachi flute reach in and grab you by the soul. To mimic exquisitely the deep, shivery sound of rushing water, the show uses the “Rain Making Machine,” a kinetic artwork by La MaMa’s longtime resident set designer Jun Maeda, who died of Covid in April 2020 and to whom the production is dedicated.The cavernous Ellen Stewart Theater is an excellent space for contemplating vastness — of space, of time — but Lee and his Woodcutter do it especially affectingly, under an impossibly huge, star-pricked sky. (Lighting is by Federico Restrepo.) There is, at show’s end, a clear and lingering consciousness of being minuscule in the universe, and terribly, beautifully human.***Puppet-wise, New York is having a strong fall. Up at City Center, in Manhattan Theater Club’s production of Qui Nguyen’s “Poor Yella Rednecks,” winsome child-size puppets (by David Valentine) play a principal character named Little Man — more than one being necessary to pull off a comic action sequence in particular.Later this month, at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, the venerable Handspring Puppet Company — known for “War Horse” and Little Amal — is slated to return with a puppet adaptation of J.M. Coetzee’s novel “Life & Times of Michael K.”And there is the rest of the La MaMa festival, part of the point of which is to nurture puppet artists at different stages of their careers.Last weekend I saw two other shows there whose runs have already ended. One was an ambitious puppet musical, Maria Camia’s “The Healing Shipment,” whose puppet design was a lot of fun: humans with Smurf-blue skin and shocking white hair; extraterrestrials whose bright yellow torsos framed the faces of the puppeteers inside. The plot, though — involving potato spaceships and intergenerational time travel — was overly complicated and insufficiently interesting. The other was Charlotte Lily Gaspard’s “Mia M.I.A.,” a work-in-progress shadow-puppet musical with some very clever 3-D puppets. Coincidentally, it also had a space-travel theme, making the shows three for three on that.Of all the elements for puppet pieces to have in common — outer space, really? Makes a person want to hunker down in some retro motel room and listen to the radio.La MaMa Puppet FestivalThrough Nov. 18 at La MaMa and La MaMa Galleria, Manhattan; lamama.org. More

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      ‘Helen.’ Review: A Restless Heroine Tired of Abiding by Gender Roles

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      At La MaMa, Caitlin George’s new play uses comedy to counter the legend of Helen of Troy.The play is called “Helen.,” as in Helen of Troy, but her twin sister, Klaitemestra, is the one who steals the show.You remember Klaitemestra, albeit maybe by a different spelling: the grief-enraged mother of Iphigenia, who is sacrificed to the gods by her father, Agamemnon — a betrayal that Klaitemestra avenges by murdering him upon his return from the Trojan War.So dramatic, isn’t it? Not like the humdrum contemporary-classical domesticity that Helen, Klaitemestra and their older sister, Timandra, inhabit at the start of Caitlin George’s “Helen.,” a new twist on the ancient tale in the downstairs theater at La MaMa, in Manhattan’s East Village.Yet for a long time, the bored and restless Helen (Lanxing Fu) is the only one who has a problem with their existence. Timandra (Melissa Coleman-Reed) is placidly happy to have a husband who brings her coffee in the morning and puts socks on her feet when she gets chilly, while Klaitemestra (Grace Bernardo) is so hot for Agamemnon (Jonathan Taikina Taylor) that she can barely contain herself.“That man is melt-in-your-mouth gods-be-damned-licious,” she says. “I love every little speck of him.”The arc of their coupledom — sexual pyrotechnics, cooling affection, grisly end — is the clearest, most affecting element of Violeta Picayo’s incohesive production for the SuperGeographics, presented by La MaMa in association with En Garde Arts.That is unfortunate news for Helen but also for the audience, because this is her story — a comic counter to the legend that she was abducted from her husband, Menelaus (Jackie Rivera), by the handsome Paris (Taylor), whereupon men waged the Trojan War over her. In “Helen.,” the catalyst for her fleeing is her own inchoate yearning.“I want to go on an adventure,” she tells her sisters. “I can’t stay here. I can’t.”Spurred on by Eris (Constance Strickland), the god of discord and the show’s gold-clad narrator, Helen leaves Menelaus and their daughter, meets Paris and takes up with him. (Costumes are by James Schuette.) But the brothers Menelaus and Agamemnon cannot grasp that her absence from home and family is voluntary, the way it might be for a man.“One time right after our daughter was born,” Helen says, “Menelaus disappeared for eight months. Never said anything. Although, to be fair, he did leave a note. ‘Gone out, comma, for glory. Kiss, kiss.’ I had no idea where he was. Then without warning he just rocked up one day and asked what was for dinner.”The struggle here is between a woman’s self-determination and a man’s entitled possessiveness — a world-shaping dynamic rooted in traditional gender roles. This staging mutes that essential resonance, though, with a clownish Menelaus who needs to but never does evoke masculinity. If Menelaus isn’t tethered to some kind of reality, neither is Helen’s stifling marriage. That undermines the urgency of her quest for a fulfilling life.“Helen.,” whose heightened tone sometimes recalls the plays of Sarah Ruhl and Charles Mee, is ultimately overcrowded, and the production largely lacks the ache that George has encoded in the comedy.But it does have that bleakly disillusioned Klaitemestra — and her elegantly choreographed, marriage-ending murder scene.Helen.Through Oct. 29 at La MaMa, Manhattan; lamama.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      In ‘Big Trip,’ an Exiled Russian Director Asks: What Makes Us Human?

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      Dmitry Krymov’s two shows at La MaMa thrillingly stress the porosity of the line between life and storytelling.The Russian theatermaker Dmitry Krymov’s “Big Trip,” two shows in repertory through mid-October at La MaMa, in Manhattan, is in love with the very essence of theater: how we tell stories, how we make art, how we live.The productions have no sets to speak of. The costumes and props look as if they have been sourced from thrift shops and Home Depot — one piece makes extensive use of cardboard. Yet we are far from the usual Off Off Broadway seen at incubators like the Brick. The framework here — Pushkin, Hemingway and O’Neill — is drawn from high art, or at least classics some might deem musty. Flares of whimsy, as when the actors don red clown noses, might feel rather European to locals more accustomed to irony. It is safe to say there is nothing else like this on New York stages right now.This is all very much of a piece for Krymov, but also new territory for him.Back in Moscow, this acclaimed writer, director and visual artist had access to fairly generous budgets, presented work at fancy institutions and taught his craft to avid students. He earned accolades and traveled the world, including to our shores to present “Opus No. 7” at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn (2013), “The Square Root of Three Sisters” at Yale University (2016) and “The Cherry Orchard” at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia. After that last production’s run ended in spring 2022, Krymov refused to return home because Russia had attacked Ukraine.Now living in New York, he runs Krymov Lab NYC, an iteration of his Moscow workshop, and collaborates with an English-speaking ensemble. “Big Trip,” their first official outing, consists of the distinct pieces “Pushkin ‘Eugene Onegin’ in Our Own Words,” a retooling of one of his Moscow productions; and “Three Love Stories Near the Railroad,” based on two of Hemingway’s short stories, “Hills Like White Elephants” and “A Canary for One,” and scenes from Eugene O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms.”Krymov does not so much stage classic works as filter them through prisms like memory, notions of cultural heritage and identity, and the very process of theatermaking. (It’s mind-boggling that, according to Tatyana Khaikin, a lead producer of Krymov Lab NYC, none of the city’s established companies have invited him to do a show.)In “Onegin,” the stronger of the two works, Russian immigrants (Jeremy Radin, Jackson Scott, Elizabeth Stahlmann and Anya Zicer) guide the audience through a retelling of Pushkin’s 19th-century masterpiece about high-society youths facing the demands of love.Kwesiu Jones, left, and Tim Eliot in “Three Love Stories Near the Railroad,” in a segment that adapts Eugene O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms.”Steven PisanoThey begin by explaining the basics of theater then re-enact scenes from “Eugene Onegin” while essentially annotating the text (throughout both shows, Krymov repeatedly breaks the fourth wall to stress the porosity of the line between life and theater). The central character is a dandy afflicted with spleen, which “is like having American blues,” we are told. “But even worse — it’s having the Russian blues.” (Reflecting on such differences is a Krymov forte: His astonishing memory play “Everyone Is Here,” which is on the streaming platform Stage Russia, intersperses scenes from “Our Town” with the impact a touring American production had on him in the 1970s.)The issue of watching an exiled Russian director’s work while his country is waging war against Ukraine is actually raised in “Onegin,” which is interrupted by a harangue directed at the cast: “You can’t hide behind your beautiful Russian ‘culture’ anymore. Your culture means destruction and death, and all of your Pushkins, your Dostoevskys and Chekhovs cannot save you.” The show resumes, but the trouble among theatergoers feels real, and so are the questions that have been raised. Should Thomas Mann not have been able to publish in America after he fled Nazi Germany, for example?The outburst is also representative of the constant interrogation of the source material, all the while reaching deep into its core and extracting the marrow — what makes us human.The trickiest of the three segments in “Three Love Stories Near the Railroad” is O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms,” which will be cryptic for those unfamiliar with the play’s premise and characters. Yet the action is magnetic because of the director’s ability to create absorbing theater in an elemental way, often through deceivingly simple devices. The father and son Ephraim and Eben (Kwesiu Jones and Tim Eliot), using stilts, tower over Abbie (Shelby Flannery), the woman who has upended their lives. It’s a stark representation of power and its often illusory appearance that peaks in a stunning visualization (that I won’t spoil) of Abbie and Eben’s tortured relationship.In the same show’s “A Canary for One,” the unrolling of a painted sheet suggests passing scenery seen from a train. It’s easy to get lost in the action, despite the fourth-wall breaking. Introducing “Desire,” Radin wondered where the train was. A whistle blew. “It’s very far away, and behind you,” he told us. I knew the train could not possibly be there, and yet I turned around and looked. I’d bought it all. More

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      ‘The Beautiful Lady’ Review: A Cabaret for the New Order

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      Artists and dreamers sing of revolution in a musical set on the cusp of the birth of the Soviet Union.A few minutes into “The Beautiful Lady,” you might find yourself thinking the show owes a little something to “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812”: After all, here are, again, a bunch of exalted Russians in a cabaret, singing of life, loss, hope and love.But “The Beautiful Lady,” a musical by Elizabeth Swados from 1984, is actually the artistic forebear of Dave Malloy’s “Great Comet,” even though it is only just now getting a New York premiere at La MaMa, under Anne Bogart’s evocative direction.Swados is best remembered for her 1978 show “Runaways” (briefly revived by Encores! Off-Center in 2016, a few months after her death); “The Beautiful Lady” adds to the mounting evidence that she was among the most idiosyncratic and creative composer-lyricists of her generation. (A few years ago Malloy joined the likes of Michael R. Jackson, Taylor Mac and Shaina Taub on the tribute album “The Liz Swados Project.”)More of a song cycle than a traditionally structured, plot-driven musical, “The Beautiful Lady” is set at the Stray Dog Café, a real-life St. Petersburg cabaret where the owner, Boris Pronin (Starr Busby), hosted such literary luminaries as Anna Akhmatova (Kate Fuglei), Osip Mandelstam (Henry Stram), Marina Tsvetaeva (Ashley Pérez Flanagan) and Alexander Blok (George Abud, from “The Band’s Visit”) in the years leading up to World War I. They’re high on ideas and ideals — and, for some of them, on each other — and dream of a political, sexual and artistic revolution.Swados and Paul Schmidt, who translated many of those writers’ poems (large chunks of which are incorporated into the show), wrote the book, which was revised by Jocelyn Clarke and serves mostly as a thread linking the songs. And, oh, what wonders those are: vibrant and funny, desperate and elegiac, with some so lovely they will shatter your heart.Bogart makes the most of La MaMa’s deep stage and creates striking tableaus with little more than a few chairs and tables (Andromache Chalfant did the scenic design) and bold lighting (designed by Brian H. Scott) that focuses on blue and red. The effect is powerfully stark and never overwhelms the humans at the heart of the story.When they change into gray jumpsuits about midway through, we are reminded how often dreams of revolution have ended in repressive regimes. In the musical’s dreamlike world, the Stray Dog remains open long enough that its denizens face that reality and must resort to gallows humor, telling each other jokes that mine the cruel absurdity of life under Stalinist rule, with its Orwellian Newspeak and thought crimes. (Some of those jokes have been repurposed for Putin; they still work.)“My lady made of silk and sighs,” Sergei Yesenin (Andrew Polec, a long way from “Bat Out of Hell”) sings in an ode to the American dancer Isadora Duncan, yearning and helpless as his world comes crashing down. “My lady full of laughs and goodbyes.” He might as well be describing — poetically, of course — the spirit of this show.The Beautiful LadyThrough May 28 at La MaMa, Manhattan; lamama.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      ‘Hong Kong Mississippi’ Review: The Bluesman Next Door

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      Wesley Du explores complex intersections of identity in a coming-of-age story about a Chinese American boy who finds escape in Black music.Wesley Du knows that a gawky Asian kid isn’t who you’d expect to wind up playing the blues. Pinkie, the character written and performed by Du in “Hong Kong Mississippi,” now running at La MaMa, in Manhattan, is 11 years old when he first hears the likes of Son House and Elmore James through the walls of the grubby San Francisco apartment he shares with his mother. They run the Chinese restaurant downstairs, but Pinkie’s wistful, adolescent mind belongs to the tunes from the club next door, with their echoes of pain and promise.Pinkie’s gravitation toward the blues, a genre defined by Black artists and legacies of racial injustice, is partly a product of circumstance and osmosis. A Chinese takeout counter abutting a music hall is typical of the Tenderloin district in the 1990s, when Du was listening to Michael Jackson on the radio and absorbing style cues from “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.” But Pinkie also describes “a certain oddness in being raised Chinese American” that generates his organic affinity with Black artists as fellow outsiders and their vibrant means of expression.When it comes to wooing girls, for example, he comically borrows a touch of hip-hop swagger; and when a woman grinds down his spirit, he channels his pain into soulful music, guitar strings offering a kind of transcendence. That woman, Pinkie’s formative heartbreaker, is his mother, affectionately played by Du with a lilting accent. Pinkie reveres her as his only family, but she sours on her son and his impractical pursuit of music. Pinkie’s unlikely father figure is a gruff bluesman next door known as Cannonball, who at first tries to dismiss him in a flurry of racially modified expletives before eventually becoming his mentor (the play is titled after Pinkie’s stage name).Du — who writes in the program that he was expelled from a playwright program at the University of California, Los Angeles, and now works as a therapist — is a deft and intuitive storyteller, crafting a witty and tender coming-of-age story in concise, vivid detail. Du’s rapport with the audience, as he plays more than a dozen characters in 75 minutes, favors high-fives over confessional hand-wringing, in the manner of a neighborhood kid shooting the breeze. In his writing, Du traces complex intersections of identity with easy assurance, allowing psychological weight to accumulate rather than spelling it out for emphasis.The director Craig Belknap finds ingenuity in simplicity, as with a dishcloth that, at one point, is wadded up into a basketball then later flattened against the waist into a too-tight dress. Fluid, vibe-setting lighting (by Eric Norbury), in Chinese reds and jazz club blues, and cleverly expressive sound (by Bill Froggatt) make the small black box theater fantastically versatile. Like Pinkie’s own escape into the blues, “Hong Kong Mississippi” proves what artists can do with modest means but an abundance of passion, pluck and reasons to play.Hong Kong MississippiThrough May 14 at La MaMa, Manhattan; lamama.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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      Megan Terry, Feminist Playwright and Rock Musical Innovator, Dies at 90

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      She wrote 70 plays, won an Obie Award and wrote and directed “Viet Rock,” a musical that predated “Hair” and is considered the first U.S. stage work to address the Vietnam War.Megan Terry, an Obie Award winner, a founding member of the Open Theater group and a prolific feminist playwright who wrote and directed a rock musical on the New York stage that predated “Hair,” died on April 12 at a hospital in Omaha. She was 90.Elizabeth Primamore, a writer who is working on a book about Ms. Terry and four other women writers, confirmed the death on Monday.Ms. Terry’s “Viet Rock: A Folk War Movie” opened at the Martinique Theater, an Off Broadway house, on Nov. 10, 1966, during the Vietnam War, after earlier performances at the Yale Repertory Company and La MaMa E.T.C., in the East Village.The rock numbers’ lyrics were poignant and pointed: “The wars have melted into one/A war was on when I was born.” One song advised against optimism: “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket/Baskets wear out and men die young/ Better to marry trees or elephants/Men die young.”The dialogue played with politics and popular culture. “Let’s all go gay with L.B.J.,” one character said, a twist on President Lyndon B. Johnson’s campaign slogan “All the way with L.B.J.” Others declared: “I lost my way with L.B.J.,” “March to doomsday with L.B.J.” and “I lost my green beret on the Road to Mandalay.”“Viet Rock” was believed to be the first American stage work to address the Vietnam War.“The piece ended with an image of rebirth,” the critic Dan Sullivan wrote in The Los Angeles Times, “but the image that stayed with the viewer was a mound of dead soldiers, male and female, muttering ‘Who needs this?’”The New York Times panned the production. Walter Kerr, the newspaper’s chief theater critic, dismissed it as “essentially thoughtless, from-the-gut-only noise.” The Village Voice called it extraordinary.A year later, one of its cast members, Gerome Ragni, and two partners presented their musical “Hair” at the Public Theater, which moved to Broadway in 1968 and found overwhelming international success.A 1966 poster for the Open Theater production of “Viet Rock” at La MaMa E.T.C. in the East Village. The musical received mixed reviews.LaMama ArchivesMs. Terry, in her mid-30s, went on to write “Approaching Simone” (1970), about Simone Weil, the French activist philosopher. It won the Obie Award for best Off Broadway play.Jack Kroll wrote in Newsweek magazine that “Simone” was “a rare theatrical event” filled with “the light, shadow and weight of human life and the exultant agonies of the ceaseless attempt to create one’s humanity.” Clive Barnes of The Times called it “a superb theatrical coup.”Marguerite Duffy was born on July 22, 1932, in Seattle, the daughter of Harold and Marguerite (Henry) Duffy. Her father was a businessman. Marguerite became fascinated with theater after seeing a play at age 7 — a passion that, by her account, her disapproving father ridiculed, giving her nicknames like Tallulah Blackhead and Sarah Heartburn, as opposed to Bankhead and Bernhardt.In high school, she worked with the Seattle Repertory Playhouse, learning early that politics and theater could be powerful but prickly bedfellows. The playhouse closed in 1951 under pressure from the House Un-American Activities Committee.Marguerite won a scholarship to the Banff School of Fine Arts in Canada, where she earned a certificate in acting, directing and design. Returning to her home state, she completed her bachelor’s degree in education at the University of Washington.She then took a teaching job at the Cornish School of Allied Arts, today Cornish College of the Arts, in Seattle. Her first plays, including “Beach Grass” and “Go Out and Move the Car,” were criticized for their frankness, which led her to take two drastic steps.She began doing her theater work under a pseudonym. Megan was the Celtic root of her first name, and Terry was a tribute to the 19th-century British actress Ellen Terry. And she moved to New York City.Her plays in New York included “The Magic Realist” (1960), “Ex-Miss Copper Queen on a Set of Pills” (1963), “When My Girlhood Was Still All Flowers” (1963), “Eat at Joe’s” (1964) and “Keep Tightly Closed in a Cool, Dry Place” (1967).“Plays by Megan Terry” is an anthology of three of her works, “Approaching Simone,” “Babes in the Bighouse,” and “Viet Rock.”Broadway Play PubOne of Ms. Terry’s most talked-about techniques with the Open Theater, an experimental New York company founded in 1963 by Joseph Chaikin, was known simply as transformation. An actor might begin speaking in one language and suddenly switch to another, having taken on a new character’s identity.In a scene in “Viet Rock,” one actor mimes being hit by gunfire and the others catch him. “Then, abruptly, the sounds change, the body is held high, and the group, rotating weirdly, has become a helicopter, transporting the wounded to Saigon,” the critic Michael Feingold wrote in The Times in 1966. Seconds later, he wrote, the actors became the hospital, and “shortly afterward turn it, without a qualm, into a Buddhist funeral.”The Open Theater’s last production was “Nightwalk” (1973), written by Ms. Terry, Sam Shepard and Jean-Claude van Itallie and performed in repertory with two other works. Mel Gussow of The Times called it “enormously enjoyable,” with a “strong and disquieting impact.”Ms. Terry also worked with the Firehouse Theater in Minneapolis. In her 40s, she moved to Nebraska to become the playwright-in-residence at the Magic Theater in Omaha and continued to produce experimental work.At the end of her career, she had written 70 plays. They include “Babes in the Bighouse: A Documentary Fantasy Musical About Life in Prison” (1974), “Sleazing Toward Athens” (1977), “15 Million 15-Year-Olds” (1983), “Dinner’s in the Blender” (1987) and “Breakfast Serial” (1991).Much of her work was intended, at least partly, for young audiences. “The Snow Queen” (1991) was a playful adaptation of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. “Headlights” (1990) was an examination of illiteracy.Ms. Terry was a founder, with five others, of the short-lived but influential Women’s Theater Council in 1972. She received the Dramatists Guild Award in 1983. Along with her wife, Jo Ann Schmidman, and Sara Kimberlain, she was an editor of “Right Brain Vacation Photos” (1992), an illustrated book of two decades of Magic Theater productions.Ms. Terry is survived by Ms. Schmidman.Saying goodbye was one of Ms. Terry’s least favorite activities. When she was getting her degree in education, she remembered the pain of losing the third-grade class she had student-taught all year. In her career, she found a way to avoid that kind of enforced separation.“I’ve always loved being in a theater company and being with people year after year,” she said in a 1992 interview at Wichita State University. “It satisfies my emotional needs and my intellectual needs. I come from a huge family, and theater gives you the chance to recreate the family in your own image.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More