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    ‘Bodies They Ritual’ Review: Plush Robes and Cults

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    Angela Hanks’s new comedy is set in Santa Fe, N.M., where five women of color have traveled for some fancy R&R laced with New Age spirituality.The tapas party had not gone over well: “The food was so tiny,” the guest of honor, Faye, recalled. “And I was so hungry.”So for Faye’s 65th birthday, her daughter, Marie, has invited her mother and three friends for a relaxing stay at a fancy sweat lodge. The cantankerous Faye is not crazy about that, either. And that’s even before the cult members turn up.Angela Hanks’s bittersweet new comedy, “Bodies They Ritual,” is set in Santa Fe, N.M., where the five women (four are African American and one is Bengali American) have traveled from Dallas for some fancy R&R laced with New Age spirituality. There are hot stones and plush white robes, chats by the fire pit and periods of zoning out. There are also the uncomfortable revelations and colorful encounters that pop up whenever Americans’ fictional characters go on retreats (see: Bess Wohl’s play “Small Mouth Sounds,” which takes place at a silent retreat, or the book and series “Nine Perfect Strangers”).“Bodies They Ritual” — the third and final play in this year’s edition of the Clubbed Thumb company’s Summerworks series — revolves around a series of meetings between the visitors and assorted locals. Naturally, the locals help excavate a few truths, but somehow there don’t seem to be any earth-shattering changes for anybody. Whatever metaphorical splinter was lodged under a character’s skin at the start is pretty much still there at the end, a constant reminder of past choices and roads taken, or not.Marie (Ebony Marshall-Oliver), for example, prefers to keep her relationships free from romantic entanglements. Faye (Lizan Mitchell), a retired hairdresser, picks at what she sees as her daughter’s idiosyncrasies, like her taste in music as a kid, or Marie’s decision to focus on her career as the manager for a professional sports team and forgo children. While the relationship between the two women feels commonplace, Hanks adorns it with offbeat details that often materialize almost out of the blue, like Faye’s spur-of-the-moment rendition of the Sublime song “Santeria.”Similarly, when Faye’s friend Toni (Denise Burse) fantasizes about seeing her late husband again just so she can tell him how much she still loathes him, Hanks seeds her angry monologue with surreal specificity — “I want to hit him in the head with a candelabra.”Turquoise Sunshine (Keilly McQuail) and Dawn (Kai Heath) are acolytes in “Bodies They Ritual.”Marcus MiddletonThis technique applies to the locals, like a teenage barista (Bianca Norwood) who tells Toni that she was named for her mother’s “third favorite thrash metal band,” Sepultura. “I consider myself lucky my name isn’t Anthrax,” she tells Toni.Best, or at least strangest of all are Queen Harvest (Emily Cass McDonnell), the Galadriel of New Mexico, and her acolytes Dawn (Kai Heath) and Turquoise Sunshine (Keilly McQuail, coming up with some strikingly kooky line readings).Hanks, whose “Wilder Gone” was in the 2018 edition of Summerworks, has a dry, tart tone that is well served by the director Knud Adams. He wrings finely tuned performances from the excellent cast and never oversells the comedy, letting a raised eyebrow, a side glance or a throwaway line do a lot of work. This is especially effective since Hanks, to her credit, refrains from open conflicts and cathartic resolutions — Santa Fe may peddle enlightenment, but this playwright does not take the bait. Admittedly, “Bodies They Ritual” does not quite cohere into a whole, but its parts are wonderful. They may be tiny, but they add up to a full meal.Bodies They RitualThrough July 2 at the Wild Project, Manhattan; clubbedthumb.org. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. More

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      Review: Three Generations Awaiting Justice in ‘Cullud Wattah’

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      Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s play follows one family of women affected by the water crisis in Flint, Mich.Water can be a force for life or death. That the municipal supply of Flint, Mich., is slowly killing three generations of Black women living under one roof isn’t a dramatic revelation, but the grim, yearslong reality embodied in Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s “Cullud Wattah.”In a haunting and eye-opening production, directed by Candis C. Jones and which opened on Wednesday at the Public Theater, the playwright excavates the human costs behind familiar and devastating headlines.“Lead in thuh wattah,” five actors sing as the show opens. A riff on the spiritual “Wade in the Water” aligns present-day woes with Black traditions of perseverance. Emerging from the darkened periphery with jugs in hand, they recount the circumstances of the crisis like morbid poetry: When the city switched its water supply, who is responsible, how tea began to smell of sewage and rashes spread across their bodies.Urgency in the face of deadliness, “Cullud Wattah” points out, is not afforded to Black communities on the margins. The setting is November 2016, 939 days since Flint had clean water, and the repercussions continue to cascade.Marion (Crystal Dickinson) is a third-generation union assembly worker at General Motors, the city’s flagship employer. Her pregnant sister, Ainee (Andrea Patterson), is in recovery from crack addiction. The slight but indomitable Big Ma (Lizan Mitchell) keeps everyone in line, including Marion’s daughters, Reesee (Lauren F. Walker), a queer freethinking teenager with spiritual ties to the continent, and a sly 9-year-old named Plum (played by the adult actress Alicia Pilgrim), who has been undergoing treatment for leukemia.Out of both love and necessity, the women support and care for one another. Marion adjusts Plum’s wig before her first day back at school. Ainee applies lip liner to her sister when tremors in Marion’s hands flare up, from illness or nerves about dating again after her husband’s death.The set design, by Adam Rigg, suggests a house stripped to its raw wood foundations, with hundreds of bottles of murky water lined up and suspended in the air, one for each day it continues to flow from the tap. Bottles of clean water sit atop the refrigerator. (A filter promised by the city should arrive any day now.) The lighting design, by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew, is anxious and spectral, while Kara Harmon’s costumes lend the women an everyday earthiness.From left, Mitchell, Patterson and Dickinson in the play, which, our critic writes, excels most when generating heat from familial conflict.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHow many bottles of water are needed to do things that most people take for granted — washing Thanksgiving vegetables, for example (26) — is the kind of granular detail the play brings into focus.The plot stirs around the effect that toxins have had on the family, both internally and externally. “We all marked,” says Ainee, who walks in the house one day with a flier containing information about a class-action suit. Marion’s job at GM, and a potential promotion to management, means she would risk their livelihood if she were to get involved — the moral compromise of capitalism and the weight of personal responsibility coming to a head.Dickerson-Despenza’s lyrical prose is laced with humor, and she creates lively and warmhearted characters. Which makes it all the more enraging to watch them struggle against a steady poisoning. Her narrative mode is one of querying the past, not so much to expose fresh facts as to ensure that what should already be known is also deeply felt.While the playwright generates affecting emotion throughout, a fair portion of the dialogue is used to deliver exposition and impassioned proclamations about the impact of contaminated water, even when characters are relating to each other. Jones’ fluid and intimate direction mostly keeps the text from feeling too bogged down in these details.“Cullud Wattah” excels most when generating heat from familial conflict. Performances by the winning ensemble members are nimbly attuned to the language of mothers and sisters, from knowing shrugs and sideways glances to the straight-on withering glares. And in the hands of Dickinson and Patterson, fireworks light up the story at its climax, when long-silenced resentments finally detonate in the sort of blaze that only arises from love.Inseparable as real-world calamity has become from the realm of art, Dickerson-Despenza’s “Cullud Wattah” is especially suited to a moment of environmental unrest. After the play comes to an abrupt end, the cast stands in silence before leaving the stage. They don’t return for a bow, as if this had not been a performance but a call to account.Cullud WattahThrough Dec. 12 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More