Murfi, Mikel

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    ‘Mysterious Case of Kitsy Rainey’ Review: A Trilogy’s Bittersweet End

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    At Irish Arts Center, the actor delivers the final installment of his solo plays about the cobbler Pat and his eccentric beloved.Falling in love came as a surprise to Pat Farnon — a late-life development he hadn’t been looking for any more than he’d been looking for the marriage proposal that set that romance in motion. When a whirlwind of a woman named Kitsy Rainey asked him to marry her even though they’d never so much as dated, he acquiesced.“The most beautiful woman that ever water washed,” Pat called her, and Kitsy cherished him right back. But how well did she allow her husband to know her?In “The Mysterious Case of Kitsy Rainey,” the bittersweet final installment of Mikel Murfi’s trilogy of solo plays about the cobbler Pat and his eccentric beloved, it is 1987 and Kitsy has been dead two years. Holed up at home in their small Irish town, avoiding company, Pat gathers his courage to open a suitcase that Kitsy had forbidden him to look inside while she was alive.What he finds changes his understanding of her, and not just from the newspaper clipping suggesting her involvement in a long-ago crime, in the place where she was born and came of age. Or as their good friend Huby says, comically, after he reads the article: “It might be best, Pat, if we don’t try to put two and two together here.”Pat, though, has always had a quick and busy mind. The narrator of this play and its boisterously funny predecessors, “The Man in the Woman’s Shoes” and “I Hear You and Rejoice” (all currently running at Irish Arts Center, in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan), Pat can speak to us, the audience, inside his head, but he cannot speak in life, nor can he read.He is, however, an accomplished listener, and Murfi, the plays’ author, director and shape-shifting star, is a marvel of characterization and vocalization, his repertoire including uncanny instrumentals and animal sounds. This is what allows him to populate Pat’s world so richly.It is risky, then, for “The Mysterious Case” to spend as much time as it does with Pat in solitude, contemplating his own deterioration and intermittently listening to a cassette tape that Kitsy made for him and left in that suitcase.And as emotionally honest as it is to let us feel Kitsy’s absence, dramatically it is far less interesting to hear her recorded voice than to watch Murfi become her. When he embodies Kitsy in a memory, even fleetingly, the show zings with life.Irish Arts Center advises that each play works as a stand-alone, but that isn’t true of “The Mysterious Case,” which seems to know that, opening with a verbal montage of standout lines from the first two shows: a kind of “Previously on ‘Kitsy Rainey’” nudge to our recollection.It would be a mistake to come to this play without an existing affection for and curiosity about Kitsy. But if you have those, Murfi has answers to sate you — even as you watch Pat, in his anger and pain, try to reconcile her love with her tenacious secrecy.The Mysterious Case of Kitsy RaineyThrough Nov. 18 at Irish Arts Center, Manhattan; irishartscenter.org. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. More

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      Solo Shows in Theater This Fall: Patrick Page, Isabelle Adjani and More

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      For theatergoers who love uncrowded stages, the coming months bring a range of works, from musical comedies to Shakespearean dramas.Solo shows have been around as long as there has been theater — longer, actually, if we count storytelling by a campfire. There is an elemental intimacy about the format and, let’s face it, an economic appeal at a time of belt-tightening.Despite their seemingly restrictive approach, one-person productions come in many shapes and forms: tales told by a single narrator and ones in which the performer embodies many characters, for example; dramatic yarns; and comic efforts that can flirt with stand-up. The last hybrid seems to be enjoying a kind of golden age, illustrated by the successes of Mike Birbiglia (“The Old Man and the Pool”) and Alex Edelman, whose recent Broadway hit, “Just for Us,” will be at the Curran Theater in San Francisco, Oct. 26-28.The coming months are a boon for theatergoers who love uncrowded stages, starting with the fall iteration of the cornucopia known as the United Solo Theater Festival (through Nov. 19 at Theater Row). Here is a selection of notable shows.Interrogating biographySometimes, it takes one icon to take measure of to another. The French actress Isabelle Adjani (“The Story of Adèle H.,” “Camille Claudel”) engages with Marilyn Monroe, myth and woman, in “Marilyn’s Vertigo.” The show, presented in French with supertitles as part of the Crossing the Line Festival, is framed as a dialogue with the Hollywood star, and was written by Adjani and Olivier Steiner. Oct. 12-13; FIAF Florence Gould Hall, Manhattan.John Rubinstein in Richard Hellesen’s “Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground,” adapted from Eisenhower’s memoirs, speeches and letters.Maria BaranovaIn a different register, John Rubinstein returns for an encore of Richard Hellesen’s “Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground,” a dive into the life of the military leader-turned-president that has proved quite popular. Through Oct. 27; Theater at St. Clement’s, Manhattan.One’s a crowdThe formidable Patrick Page is a versatile actor, but let’s face it: He is best known for portraying antagonists, including the Green Goblin in “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” and Hades in “Hadestown.” Maybe it’s his basso profundo voice? In “All the Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the Villain,” directed by Simon Godwin, Page — whose command of his craft our critic described as “stupefying, effortless” — scrutinizes those classic characters. This might be the only time we ever see his take on Lady Macbeth. Through Jan. 7; DR2 Theater, Manhattan.Following his acclaimed solos “The Man in the Woman’s Shoes” (2015) and “I Hear You and Rejoice” (2018), the Irish writer and actor Mikel Murfi is bringing to New York the trilogy’s conclusion, “The Mysterious Case of Kitsy Rainey.” Murfi portrays a range of characters from County Sligo, and performs all three pieces in repertory. Audiences can see any of the shows, or all of them. Oct. 24-Nov. 18; Irish Arts Center, Manhattan.Lameece Issaq has written for ensembles in works like “Food and Fadwa,” but her new piece, “A Good Day to Me, Not to You,” is a solo. In the show, presented by the Waterwell company and directed by Lee Sunday Evans (“Oratorio for Living Things”), Issaq plays a 40-something former dental lab technician reconsidering her life as she moves into a rooming house run by nuns on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Nov. 8-Dec. 9; Connelly Theater, Manhattan.Stand-up or theater?The comedian Caitlin Cook returns to SoHo Playhouse with her show “The Writing on the Stall.”Mindy TuckerGabe Mollica and Caitlin Cook are usually called comedians, but their work blurs the line with theater. Both performers are returning to the stage with encore runs of pieces that have been building a buzz. In “Solo: A Show About Friendship,” Mollica explores his realization that he has buddies but no close friends, and tries to dig into the reasons for that. Our ideas and hangups about masculinity may well play a part. Oct. 10-28, Connelly Theater Upstairs, Manhattan.Cook’s “The Writing on the Stall” is inspired by the gold mine of comic material found on the walls of bar bathrooms. She has turned graffiti spotted over the years into a show integrating songs (a nice micro-trend among comedians; see also Catherine Cohen), bits of anthropology and autobiographical sharing. Oct. 16-17, SoHo Playhouse, Manhattan.Birth of a performerEdgar Oliver, a longtime fixture of the downtown New York theater scene, revisits his days at the Pyramid Club in his new work, “Rip Tide.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFour years ago, Ben Brantley described Edgar Oliver’s body of work as a “singular series of elegiac performance pieces,” which essentially amount to an oral history narrated by one person. Oliver’s new piece, “Rip Tide,” revisits his days performing at the Pyramid Club, the East Village boîte where renegade drag, rock, spoken word and performance art thrived in the 1980s and ’90s. Through Oct. 28; Axis Theater, Manhattan.In her review for The New York Times, Laura Collins-Hughes pointed out how Melissa Etheridge turns Circle in the Square into an intimate music club for her concert-cum-memoir show, “My Window,” now on Broadway. Some of the rocker’s most fun anecdotes cover her early years playing lesbian spaces from her native Kansas to California. Through Nov. 19, Circle in the Square, Manhattan.Table for how many?Geoff Sobelle most recently performed his dinner party as theater spectacle at the Edinburgh Festival.Iain MastertonTechnically speaking, Geoff Sobelle’s “Food,” which is part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, involves a lot of people. Sobelle (“The Object Lesson”) is the host of a dinner party at which audience members sit at a very large table for what is described as “a meditation on how and why we eat.” Since “Food” was created with the magician Steve Cuiffo (“A Simulacrum”), it is no spoiler to mention it involves entertaining trickery. Nov. 2-18, Brooklyn Academy of Music.Repertory of onesPlaywrights Horizons is making smart use of its space by presenting three solos in repertory. Drawing from years as a tutor, Milo Cramer wrote and performs in “School Pictures,” a play with music that looks at our education system via a range of New York students. The comedian Ikechukwu Ufomadu, who opened for Catherine Cohen at Joe’s Pub this summer, brings more of his surreal musings in “Amusements.” And Alexandra Tatarsky’s “Sad Boys in Harpy Land,” which involves clowning and nudity, looks to be the wild card of this bunch — emphasis on wild. Nov. 2-Dec. 3, Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan. More