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      ‘Lucy’ Review: There’s Something About the Babysitter

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      A workplace comedy set at home, this cleverly detailed production explores child care as both labor and primal instinct.Hiring a babysitter is a high-stakes leap of faith. How well can you really know someone before trusting them with your kids? And what’s going to happen when you’re not at home? Maybe she won’t quite be Mary Poppins, but let’s hope the glint in her eye doesn’t remind you of the unassuming villain in a psychological thriller.With her Pre-Raphaelite curls, plinking bangles and wide-eyed smile, the candidate who sweeps through the door in “Lucy,” which opened at the Minetta Lane Theater Monday night, appears closer to the former ideal. Ashling (she’s distantly Irish) calls herself a career nanny with 40 years of experience, despite seeming not quite as old herself. Played with a sly incandescence by Lynn Collins, Ashling colors her speech with generous emphasis, insisting that child care keeps her young and that she considers her role on par with a co-parent.The client, Mary, looks like she could give birth at any minute, and has let her search for help come down to the wire. Played with delicate, white-knuckled composure by Brooke Bloom, Mary is an overworked radiologist and single mother with a 6-year-old daughter (Lucy, for whom the play is named) and a son on the way. She is the sort of tightly wound person motherhood has only somewhat unraveled; when she offers Ashling the job, it comes with a stack of guidelines as thick as a novella.Written and directed by Erica Schmidt, “Lucy” is seamlessly layered, extraordinarily entertaining and tricky to classify. A cleverly detailed exploration of child care as both a kind of labor and a primal instinct, it is a workplace comedy set at home, where boundaries are porous and personal stakes are exceedingly high. When Mary discovers, for example, that she can smell Ashling’s perfume on her infant son at night, it feels like an intimate intrusion. But when Mary awkwardly confronts her, Ashling is breezily evasive.“Lucy” is also an irresistible, engrossing slow burn, as tension between the two builds under pressure. Laughs increasingly double as sighs of relief as the suspense of discovery escalates through the show’s taut two-hour running time. Mary is undoubtedly a micromanager. Ashling, meanwhile, relishes her freedom, reminding Mary of what she has sacrificed to become a mother. And though Ashling’s strangeness is undeniable, it’s also slippery to pin down. The most telling clues may come from Lucy (Charlotte Surak, adorable), but how reliable can a young child be?Schmidt, who recently adapted “Cyrano” into a stage musical and whose play “Mac Beth” recast Shakespearean tragedy among vicious high schoolers, has a way of uncovering and magnifying the profundity simmering underneath everyday conflict. On the surface, “Lucy” is a tug-of-war between opposing personalities. At its core, it confronts questions of power, possibility and human nature.Schmidt’s staging, produced by Audible, is a crisply orchestrated slice of Manhattan life, impeccably designed to reveal her precisely drawn characters. The tasteful austerity of Mary’s open-plan kitchen-living room aptly reflects her strict minimalism, as does her understated, mostly black wardrobe (the set is by Amy Rubin and costumes by Kaye Voyce). Cha See’s dynamic lighting underscores the play’s subtly eerie shifts in mood, and there’s unexpected humor in the music from sound designer Justin Ellington (perhaps a nod to the play’s future release as an audio play).“Lucy” is also a kind of inventory of the roles women are expected to play, whether they become mothers or not, and the systems that assign value to them accordingly. That draws even more attention to the fact that Bloom and Collins hardly seem to be playing roles at all; the actors are so thoroughly committed and convincing that any hint that things may not be as they seem feels all the more destabilizing. It’s the sort of feeling that might arise after trusting your life to someone else’s hands and then realizing they’re a total stranger.LucyThrough Feb. 25 at the Minetta Lane Theater, Manhattan; lucytheplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. More

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      ‘Heart’ Review: First a Starter Marriage, Then Real Love

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      In her new autobiographical solo play, the actress Jade Anouka recounts the joys and fears of falling for a woman after her marriage to a man ends.At 24, the actress and writer Jade Anouka got married. Had it been a movie, the first dance would have been set ominously to the theme from “Jaws.” Before the wedding, Anouka dismissed the fact that her fiancé had bought her a ring that did not fit. At 28, she got divorced.That relationship sounds like it had its share of drama — “he’s visited by the Beast,” Anouka says of her then-husband — but she evokes it only in passing in her new autobiographical solo play, “Heart,” which is presented by Audible at the Minetta Lane Theater in Manhattan. The brief marriage was only a preamble to what really matters: Anouka then fell in love with a woman. It was easy at first, even though she had never been in a lesbian relationship. Then it was hard. Then it was easy, or easier, again.The director Ola Ince’s production can be oddly heavy-handed at times, as when Anouka must climb up and down a very tall chair, perhaps meant to symbolize her being thrown back into romantic infancy, or love as a precarious balancing act. Mostly it is distracting. Jen Schriever’s expressive lighting design, on the other hand, does an incredible amount of effective work.Anouka occupies the stage with confident grace, despite the heavy-handed production.Trévon JamesIn truth, Anouka needs little, occupying the stage with confident grace as she toggles between naturalistic storytelling and a more rhythmic and poetic spoken-word flow.Obviously her love life’s unexpected turn has been a paradigm shift for her. But at this point, the coming-out tale is a well-trodden genre. Over the past decades, checkpoints have emerged, and obligatory scenes have surfaced, so venturing onto this familiar terrain in 2022 is tricky.“Heart” feels disconcertingly generic at times: Anouka, perhaps in an attempt to make the show feel more “universal,” tends to prefer bromides like “love is love” over the details that would have grounded the play.This starts with her job as an actress. She relates how she couldn’t bring herself to be open about her new relationship with a woman, fearing that it might impact her career. “I wanna stay working, and not just in gay roles,” she tells herself. “I don’t wanna be seen as different.”Putting aside the fact that nowadays stars as big as Kristen Stewart and Tessa Thompson can be openly queer and get cast as Princess Diana and Valkyrie in high-profile films, the complex relationship between an actor and an audience’s gaze deserves more scrutiny than Anouka gives it here.Oddly, this casually charismatic, effortlessly charming performer does not even reflect on her past roles that have scrambled gender expectations, like the powerful witch queen Ruta Skadi in the series “His Dark Materials.” Of her starring in Phyllida Lloyd’s hit Shakespeare trilogy, which was set in a women’s prison, Anouka simply says she lands “a good job, a dream role in a company I already love.” She accompanies those words with some brief shadowboxing, a reference to her Hotspur in “Henry IV.”Information about Anouka’s family is not forthcoming, either, which is especially frustrating since she demonstrates a quicksilver ability to bring her parents to life in a couple of brief scenes — in a classic move, for instance, her mother brings out the Bible when told of the new affair.As for the love interest, she remains frustratingly devoid of identifying details, as if she were in a witness protection program. Those who would like to know more are better off heading to YouTube to watch “Her & Her,” a lovely short film Anouka made on a smartphone in 2020, for the BBC’s Culture in Quarantine project. It is anchored in all the quotidian minutiae we so miss in the play.HeartThrough Aug. 14 at the Minetta Lane Theater, Manhattan; hearttheplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More

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      Radio Drama for a Podcast Age: How Amazon’s Audible Moved Into Theater

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      A company known for audiobooks is mounting starry live productions — and recording them, too.Elizabeth Marvel took off her shoes, stretched out her arms and started describing her horrible dreams. Ato Blankson-Wood offered thoughts on astrology. Bill Camp, cradling a guitar in his lap, asked if someone could go get coffee, while Jason Bowen adjusted his chair.Then, after a bit of banter about the sounds of snacking, the actors nimbly slipped into character, adapting the mien of the four troubled Tyrones in Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning classic, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”With just a few performances left of their intimate, searing revival at the Minetta Lane Theater, a small Off Broadway house in Greenwich Village, they were now a half mile east, at the Cutting Room Studios, futzing with headsets and repositioning microphones as they recorded the production for the company that had underwritten it: Audible.The cast staged an abridged version of the classic play before live audiences at the Minetta Lane Theater, then recorded an audio version for distribution by Audible.Amir Hamja for The New York TimesIn a move that echoes the radio dramas of yore, and at a moment when audio is enjoying an unexpected boom, Audible, a subsidiary of Amazon, is making a bold push into theater.The company, which created its theater division just five years ago, has already released 93 audio theater works, and this month it added a theater tab to its app.Along the way, it has become a big player in the theater world: commissioning new work from 55 playwrights; presenting 25 shows in person at the Minetta Lane, which it is leasing; and becoming one of the most active commercial producers in the city. In 2020, Audible took on the entire season of the prestigious Williamstown Theater Festival, remotely rehearsing and recording all seven shows when the pandemic made it impossible to stage them in person.It also has producing credits on two Broadway shows, “Sea Wall/A Life” and “Latin History for Morons,” both of which the company also recorded and released on audio.The pace of production has been quickening — Audible released 24 theater works last year, up from nine in 2018 — and the complexity of its theater work is increasing, as the company becomes more technically sure-footed and more confident in its audience’s openness to multicharacter soundscapes.From “Coal Country”This documentary play, written by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen and with songs by Steve Earle, explores the 2010 Upper Big Branch mine disaster through the words of survivors and family members. The Public Theater presented the play in person prior to the pandemic; then Audible recorded and streamed it, and now Audible is producing a return in-person engagement at the Cherry Lane Theater.The Audible effort is a descendant of the old-fashioned radio drama, which began in the 1920s and featured work from playwrights including Samuel Beckett and Arthur Miller and directors such as Orson Welles. The form has continued to thrive in Britain, thanks largely to the BBC, but it faded in America after the mid-20th century, becoming a niche sustained by organizations including National Public Radio, which aired Earplay from the 1970s through the 1990s, and L.A. Theater Works, which has more than 600 audio titles in an expanding catalog featuring works by Dominique Morisseau and Tom Stoppard, as well as Miller and Ibsen.The pandemic renewed flirtation with the form: When theaters were closed to protect public health, many turned to audio, as well as video, to continue making work and reaching audiences. But Audible, which says it has subscribers in 175 countries who listened to 3.4 billion hours of audio last year, has the potential to have much further reach because of its huge base of subscribers, and the deep pockets of Amazon.“There’s a lot of audio drama being made by independent people for love, not money, but Audible is able to invest a lot more than independent productions are,” said Neil Verma, an assistant professor of sound studies at Northwestern University who has written about radio drama. “They have the opportunity to experiment, to attract more expensive talent if they want, and they also have the ability to distribute in a way that other entities don’t.”Audible has released plays in Spanish and Hindi, as well as in English. “Our theater titles have been listened to by millions globally,” said Kate Navin, the artistic producer of Audible’s theater division, which has five full-time employees. “We end up getting in front of a lot of people.”Verma said that one looming question is how long Audible will stay committed to theater. “They’re a tech company, so they try a lot of new things that survive or dissolve,” he said. “Radio drama has never been central to the mandate of any of the entities that have made it — it’s always been a side element of whatever the larger project is — so in that sense it’s always a little vulnerable.”Ato Blankson-Wood, the fourth member of the cast, as seen from the control room.Amir Hamja for The New York TimesHeadquartered in Newark, Audible was founded in 1995 by Don Katz, and was purchased by Amazon in 2008 for $300 million. Katz is an avid theatergoer, and Audible quickly turned to actors to voice audiobooks; then, when Audible started creating original content, Katz thought playwrights were better suited than screenwriters to crafting purely narrative stories. And he knew they could use the money.“There was always a purely aesthetic vision, and also a business idea that lives in parallel, which includes the fact that theater is without a really sophisticated electronic analog to supplement its existence,” he said. “Because we were able to have the person in the seat be multiplied, we could inject a new revenue stream into the world, and one that would go directly to writers and actors.”Katz hired Navin, a former theater agent, to run Audible’s theater division. To begin, the company announced that it would allocate $5 million to commission audio plays from emerging writers; since then it has commissioned plays from established ones as well.From “Evil Eye”“Evil Eye” is one of dozens of audio plays commissioned by Audible. Written by Madhuri Shekar, it is an epistolary dramedy about a woman determined to find a husband for her daughter. Amazon, which owns Audible, adapted the audio play for film.“I had seen firsthand how hard it was for playwrights to stay in theater,” Navin said. “So many playwrights were leaving for film and TV. I was struck that this might be an opportunity that would give them more options.”Audible’s initial audio-bound, in-person productions were starry solo shows, including “Harry Clarke,” featuring Billy Crudup, and “Girls & Boys,” featuring Carey Mulligan. But the Williamstown season forced a faster-than-expected reckoning with complexity — the slate of productions included “Chonburi International Hotel and Butterfly Club,” a 13-performer play, and “Row,” a new musical.Some of Audible’s offerings, like “Long Day’s Journey,” are recorded in studios; others, particularly comedies like Faith Salie’s “Approval Junkie,” are recorded before live audiences.During the pandemic, when theaters were closed, Audible’s theater division employed more than 300 artists, Navin said. Now, she said, it must figure out what role to play in a post-lockdown world. “We don’t want volume for the sake of volume,” Navin said.For now, the company has been upgrading its technology, outfitting the Minetta Lane for 3-D audio recording. And it is beginning to imagine whether it could produce a musical. “Interest is high,” Navin said. “But that’s a post-pandemic conversation.”After the actors recorded the play, sound effects would be added in post-production.Amir Hamja for The New York TimesJason Bowen, shown here, and Ato Blankson-Wood played Jamie and Edmund, the two sons in the Tyrone family.Amir Hamja for The New York TimesAudible is an unusual player in the theater world because it is not primarily a theater company. The company’s main source of revenue is from members who pay to listen to audio titles.That means box office revenue is not a make-or-break factor for Audible’s theater productions, which allows the company to do risky work, and, even more distinctively, to stage short-run productions, which in turn allows them to attract film and television stars who have limited time in their schedules. The economics of most commercial play productions generally require stars to commit to runs of at least 15 weeks; because Audible isn’t looking to recoup costs from ticket sales, it can accept fewer. “Long Day’s Journey,” for example, had planned only a six-week run, which was shortened to five when the start of performances was delayed by concerns about the Omicron variant.“They don’t need to make a profit off of everything they do,” said Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater. “What they need is for each project to elevate the brand, and that means they can look with a less bottom-line-driving frame at the works they create.”The “Long Day’s Journey” director, Robert O’Hara, was piped in to the recording session to give feedback. Amir Hamja for The New York TimesAnother upside: Artists are paid more for shows that are recorded as well as staged in person.“The pay is wonderful, and the reach is grand,” said Robert O’Hara, whose planned Williamstown production of “A Streetcar Named Desire” wound up being made for audio by Audible, and who went on to direct the “Long Day’s Journey” at the Minetta Lane and on audio.O’Hara, like other artists interviewed for this story, said Audible has been admirably hands-off. “I’m not getting dramaturgical notes from Audible,” he said. “They don’t have a take on ‘Long Day’s Journey.’ They allow the artists to be the artists.”His “Long Day’s Journey” staging, although backed by an audio company, had a number of striking visual moments, from its quiet opening to projections used onstage. “For me, audio was not the end destination,” he said. “Audio was the gravy on top. I was doing a stage production.”Marvel, who compared Audible to the Medicis, the historic Italian banking family associated with arts patronage, said the shorter run of an Audible production was a plus for her: “It’s a wonderful time model, where you’re not giving four to six months of your life to a play. It’s a reasonable amount of time to give, which, as an actor who is a parent and has to make income in other ways, is realistic and helpful.”There were other pluses. Marvel said she wanted to be part of trying new forms for theatrical storytelling. “We all have to look forward and just keep opening the iris for new ideas and new ways to work and new ways for people to access work,” she said.Marvel and O’Hara also both said that they weren’t sure other producers, either commercial or nonprofit, would have taken on the risk of the abbreviated, contemporary version of “Long Day’s Journey” that Marvel had long wanted to make. “I don’t think there’s another place I could have gone,” O’Hara said. “No one in their right mind would let me cut this play and modernize it.”Kate Navin, center, the head of Audible Theater, conferred with Erik Jensen, one of the writers of “Coal Country,” as that play, already recorded for audio, rehearsed for an in-person production at the Cherry Lane Theater.Amir Hamja for The New York Times“Long Day’s Journey,” with four actors and a rich soundscape, is being followed by a live production of “Coal Country,” the first show Audible is presenting in-person outside the Minetta Lane. The show is an eight-actor documentary play, with music written and performed by the singer-songwriter Steve Earle, about the Upper Big Branch mine disaster in West Virginia. It was first produced by the Public and opened in March 2020, but a week later the pandemic cut short the run.“It was heartbreaking for us,” Earle said. “It was four years of work, and we got it up and had great reviews and were selling out, and then we opened and closed.”While live performances were almost entirely shut down, Audible reassembled the cast and recorded the show, to the relief of its creators. “For us, it has always been incredibly important that this play be seen, heard and experienced outside of New York, and particularly in Appalachia,” said Jessica Blank, the production’s director. “Audible immediately made the play accessible to people who wouldn’t have had access to it otherwise.”Now Audible is presenting a second in-person run of the Public’s “Coal Country” production at the Cherry Lane Theater, through April 17. Earle, who moved to New York hoping to break into the theater business, and who is working on a musical adaptation of the film “Tender Mercies,” said he was relieved to have Audible’s support.“I have long experience with taking corporate money to make art, because I come from the record business,” he said. “Anything that makes theater available to everybody, I’m all for.” More

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      A Reimagined ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’ for the Covid Era

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      Robert O’Hara directs a trimmed-down revival of Eugene O’Neill’s classic, with a colorblind cast and a weary eye on the pandemic and the opioid crisis.Of the time-honored classics of American theater, Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” is one that usually takes its own concept of time seriously. A four-act work based on the playwright’s own dysfunctional parents, it follows the disintegration of the Tyrone family — by disease, ego, addiction and codependency — through the course of a claustrophobic August day at their seaside home in Connecticut. Widely considered O’Neill’s masterpiece, it typically runs just under four hours.The writer and director Robert O’Hara, a Tony nominee for his direction of “Slave Play,” is doing it in under two.Presented without an intermission by Audible at the Minetta Lane Theater, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” has reunited O’Hara with fellow “Slave Play” alums, the actor Ato Blankson-Wood and the designer Clint Ramos, for a shortened production that confronts the play’s themes head on and brings them into 2022.“There is so much velocity in the writing that it moves at a fast clip, and with so much richness,” O’Hara said after a rehearsal last week. “The family doesn’t get an intermission throughout this one long day, so it’s quite interesting to get to sit with them in real time.”The decision to trim the material happened early and organically, O’Hara explained. “Once you put the knife in, you’re just like, ‘Are we going to pretend that we’re not editing this?’” he quipped. It was then bolstered by his wariness of having people gather for too long, given the latest Covid-19 variant.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“For me, it feels like a Covid production of ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night,’ built for right now,” he said. “We didn’t want to ask an audience to sit for four hours in a theater, just because that’s the way it’s usually done. If anyone’s coming in looking for that experience, they should know that it’s not this.”He began conceiving the production, now in previews and opening Jan. 25, before the pandemic. Initially he was hesitant to tackle the play because of the demands placed upon producing classics.“It’s difficult to get these big chestnuts if you’re going to do it Off Broadway,” he said, referring to the challenges of securing production rights. “You can ask, but someone’s usually holding them in order to bring them back in a big way.”O’Hara credits the actress Elizabeth Marvel, who portrays the morphine-addicted mother, Mary, as instrumental to getting the production off the ground.“We started just talking about this play, but then the world made its urgency all the greater,” Marvel said. “I’ve seen probably 11 or 12 productions in my lifetime, and it’s always the same: in the same drawing room with billowing curtains, and with period corsets.“But there’s absolutely no reason,” she continued, “it can’t be right here, right now. It very much speaks to this moment, when a lot of people are having to return home to their families, dealing with addiction and codependency during a crisis, while not being able to get out.”In addition to contemporary allusions to the opioid crisis, reflecting Mary’s own addiction, the production is set amid the coronavirus pandemic. The youngest Tyrone son, Edmund (Blankson-Wood), afflicted by what is traditionally hinted to be tuberculosis, now wears a face mask. Projections at the beginning of the play display C.D.C. announcements and news footage from the early days of the pandemic, including surreal revelations like the Bronx Zoo tiger testing positive for the virus.“We wanted projections to be a dreamlike window into Mary’s psychological space, especially when she succumbs to her addiction,” Ramos said on a video call. “The visual landscape, through Yee Eun Nam’s projections, gets very dreamy and dense to directly represent that.”Marvel, left, as the morphine-addicted mother, Mary, and Blankson-Wood as her sickly son Edmund.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMarvel’s husband, the actor Bill Camp, plays the family’s patriarch, James, and he was cast as the eldest son, Jamie, in a 1996 production at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass. The edited script, he said, “became about distilling the story’s actions rather than experiencing the longness of the situation.”“The family’s desires and dysfunctions are streamlined in a way that is already in the writing; we just hit it really fast,” he added. “It’s in your face, just like everything that is happening is in our faces now, and we don’t have time to sit around and meander our way into those things; they’re immediate.”Jason Bowen rounds out the Tyrone clan as Jamie: a colorblind casting choice (Bowen and Blankson-Wood are Black, Camp and Marvel are white) that O’Hara said is intentional, though not one he wanted to factor into the DNA of the production.“I was never going to do this play with all white people; it wasn’t anything that I had to think about,” O’Hara said. “Elizabeth had mentioned Ato, being a fan of his, so we only held auditions for Jamie, and Jason killed it. There was no manufacturing of the cast’s racial dynamics for any reason other than wanting the best actors we could find.”Bowen notes that the heft of the story’s themes, as written, override any possible racial interpretation the cast could’ve envisioned.“It’s a play about a family as they navigate addiction, and that’s something that transcends any racial aspect that we could even attempt to investigate,” Bowen said. “The play’s not about that. Robert could’ve come in with some conceptual idea he wanted to introduce, but it’s still going to boil down to these relationships.”Blankson-Wood, who was performing a return engagement of his Tony-nominated role in “Slave Play” while rehearsals for “Long Day’s Journey” took place during the day, said that being able to act in a production that did not take his own race into account was “liberating.”“The fact that I do not have to carry how I, as a Black person, fit into this family is just pure acting to me, because it focuses only on the imaginative truth of the work,” he said. “From an outsider’s perspective, I get the impulse to want to understand the racial dynamic, but that’s something I’m excited for the audience to do; that’s their job.”O’Hara, who directed an audio production of another American classic, “A Streetcar Named Desire,” as part of Williamstown Theater Festival’s Audible season in 2020, will direct an audio presentation of the production once the Minetta Lane run closes Feb. 20. He said Audible’s expansive reach helped in securing the rights to the radically altered production, which might have been denied to a regional theater.“What’s amazing about this turn to streaming and digital is the democratization of theater, so more people will be able to access it,” Blankson-Wood said. “Though I do feel pretty strongly about sitting in a dark room with other human beings. But, with an audio production like this, when you take all the scenery and stuff away, and there’s only talking and listening, it deepens the work.” More

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      Review: Getting a Moral Fix From ‘Approval Junkie’

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      The radio and television journalist Faith Salie stars in a one-woman show about the perils of striving for achievement and affirmation.A loosely drawn girl eyes a gold star near the top of an illustrated tree. She climbs up to reach it but tumbles to the ground and lands on her feet. The brief animation serves to introduce “Approval Junkie,” a one-woman Audible production that opened Tuesday at the Minetta Lane Theater, neatly encapsulating the whole of its familiar, and repeated, moral fable about chasing the highs of success.By some measures, the subject in this case is exceptional. “Approval Junkie” is written and performed by the radio and television journalist Faith Salie, in collaboration with the director Amanda Watkins. Fans may recognize Salie’s bright, even demeanor from her roles as a regular panelist on the NPR news quiz show “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!” and as a contributor to “CBS News Sunday Morning,” positions that reward gentle, authoritative relatability.But the anecdotes from her life that Salie recalls here, of striving for achievement and affirmation, reflect gendered expectations and social pressures that many women will recognize.After four years of competing in her high school pageant, Salie finally won by performing a Barbra Streisand song in a rainbow-sequin mini. She still has the tiara. (“It’s missing some stones … aren’t we all?”) Pursuit of the spotlight drew her to Los Angeles, where an acting coach once asked, “Why aren’t you as pretty as I want you to be?” adding that motherhood would soften her features.Salie’s quest for thinness led to early struggles with anorexia and a lasting fixation on appearance. “I don’t know who could tell me enough that I’m beautiful,” she says.Perhaps it’s no surprise then that Salie is not exactly an unselfconscious performer. With the exception of one truly unrestrained outburst (at an Ayurvedic healing center, no less), onstage she is poised and polished, watchfully reserved. This is not an unruly takedown of conventional womanhood’s narrow strictures from someone on the outside. In a navy silk jumpsuit and beige heels (the costume design is by Ivan Ingermann), Salie could stroll into an advertisement for no-makeup makeup, pointing to the beauty ideals she embodies as a trap.The production has an amiable, anodyne quality well tailored to its release as an Audible Original recording (“Approval Junkie” is based on Salie’s 2016 book of essays of the same name). Watkins’ minimal staging marks Salie’s incidental transitions with as little as the spin of a bar stool or a few steps to one side. A backdrop of fractured panels glows in shades of pastel (the set design is by Jack Magaw, and lighting by Amanda Zieve), and a buoyant piano composition by the sound designer Brandon Bush comforts listeners like a plush love seat.“Approval Junkie” wants to suggest a certain self-awareness about the fallacy of craving outside validation. But for all its pat wisdom — “Don’t change yourself for someone else,” Salie tells her kids, “change yourself for you” — the play still demonstrates the value of caring what other people think.“Seeking approval has not undone me,” Salie says. “It’s built me.” Even so, being put together is not nearly as interesting onstage as falling apart.Approval JunkieThrough Dec. 12 at the Minetta Lane Theater, Manhattan; audible.com/theater. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More