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    Review: In ‘La Race,’ a Fight Back From the Margins

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    Bleu Beckford-Burrell’s play about a City Council campaign aims to catalog a gamut of social ills and how Black women rise to meet them.What does it take to speak up for your community? In “La Race,” which opened at the McGinn/Cazale Theater on Monday night, the question is both practical and personal. For a reluctant candidate running a grassroots campaign in the Far Rockaway neighborhood of Queens, the race is more of an impetus for self-reflection than a quest for power. In order to speak for anyone, the play suggests, you first have to find your voice.It’s 2017, liberal resistance is in the air and residents of the coastal district have been pushed so far to the margins that they are practically falling off the map. Beloved by beachgoing New Yorkers and encroached upon by developers, Far Rockaway is also home to low- and middle-income people feeling the creep of gentrification — represented here by the arrival of Le Sea Bean, a comically bougie cafe where a latte costs $13. That’s where Maxine (Naomi Lorrain) goes to do some enemy reconnaissance after she loses a personal assistant gig, leaving her searching for renewed purpose.Her devoted friend and roommate A.J. (Shaunette Renée Wilson), a staunch warrior against all manner of oppression, is urging Max to run for City Council and be an advocate for the area’s underserved constituents. Max’s knee-jerk hesitance gives way as A.J. rounds up a campaign team, including A.J.’s admirer Trey (Christopher B. Portley); Uriel (Auberth Bercy), a silly-sweet barista who works multiple jobs; and Dejani (Stacey Sargeant), who’s looking to earn goodwill points in a custody battle for her children. Each character’s investment in rallying around Max, and its relation to their personal back story, comes to light over the course of the play with varying degrees of clarity.Like Max, who articulates her platform in a broad-ranging spoken-word poem addressing everything from police violence and consumer capitalism to big pharma, the playwright Bleu Beckford-Burrell swings big, aiming to catalog a gamut of social ills by illustrating how they affect — and meet defiance from — Black women. Max’s visits to a psychologist (also played by Sargeant, in a skillful double turn) demonstrate the mental and emotional burdens she carries, as well as her tendency to bear responsibility for them, before a breakthrough helps her recognize the extent to which they are shared and systemic.Taking up untold stories can be unwieldy, and “La Race” would benefit from more streamlined character development and a sharper focus. At just over two and a half hours, the halting progress of community organizing starts to drag, while Max’s romantic involvement with a white man (Vince Nappo) feels like an easy contrivance to generate conflict neatly reflecting social tensions. Even Max herself can seem like a totem, despite disclosing her feelings in periodic therapy sessions, another on-the-nose device.The production, from Page 73 and Working Theater, is a feat of versatile and often witty design by Arnulfo Maldonado, whose set goes from a living room to an open-mic night to a day at the beach with clever ease, and with remarkable work from lighting designers Stacey Derosier and Bailey Costa. The director Taylor Reynolds, and the wholly appealing cast, create an engaging sense of place and affinity, such that “La Race” is perhaps, above all, a love letter to the very idea of a neighborhood. Take a step back, and it’s also an argument for coexistence and democracy, even at the edge of the world.La RaceThrough Dec. 23 at the McGinn/Cazale Theater, Manhattan; page73.org. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes. More

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      ‘Man Cave’ Review: Things That Go Bump in the American Night

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      John J. Caswell Jr.’s play is a political drama wrapped in the spooky pleasures of the horror genre.Late on a thundery monsoon evening in a well-appointed basement in Sedona, Ariz., the ghosts are restless. Or something is — thumping and scratching inside the walls of a congressman’s gated home, where Imaculada, the housekeeper, has been holding down the fort alone.When her friends Rosemary and Lupita show up unannounced, fleeing domestic danger, the noises don’t take long to creep them out.“You’re supposed to disclose your home’s paranormal status to guests upon arrival,” Rosemary chides, dryly.But this is just what she needs: a place rife with spirits that might be enlisted for vengeance on her live-in boyfriend, a police officer who has beaten her bloody yet again. On the internet she found “a little witchcraft” that she’s been wanting to try.“It’s called death walking,” she says. “Energy harnessing, engaging spirits in highly active spaces to do your bidding in exchange for eternal release from their own purgatory.”“Man Cave,” John J. Caswell Jr.’s new play at the Connelly Theater, is a political drama wrapped in the spooky pleasures of the horror genre, and it works on both levels. Its characters are Mexican American women on the economic fringes, and its concerns are theirs: work, love, heritage, survival; how to be safe, and feel at home, in their own country.Unfolding in the congressman’s man cave (designed by Adam Rigg), with its cowboy-movie posters and mounted elk head, the play is also a contemplation of what the United States was built on, what’s buried underneath — and which insistent, haunted voices it’s determined not to hear. (Lucrecia Briceno’s lighting is vital to the chilling of our spines.)Directed by Taylor Reynolds for the theater company Page 73, the show cultivates a scary mood even before it starts, thanks to Michael Costagliola’s supremely clever sound design, which thrums ominously as the audience settles in but cuts to an unnerving quiet in the opening scene. We are primed to be startled by the slightest noise, and so we are. And because the audience is expecting, even hoping, to be frightened, its attention has a tautness that’s sustained throughout the play.That’s helpful with a show that takes its time, as “Man Cave” does — sometimes to the point of bagginess — letting the friends bicker and snipe over the course of a fraught weekend. Why, Rosemary (Jacqueline Guillén) wants to know, is Imaculada “cleaning house for an overtly racist politician”? Is Imaculada (Annie Henk) right that something is trying to kill her? And where is her missing 20-something son?Why is Lupita (Claudia Acosta), Rosemary’s sober girlfriend — her tender romantic refuge from the abusive cop — suddenly drinking again? How gross is it, exactly, that Rosemary has brought a bag of the cop’s fingernail clippings for the spell she means to cast? What has drawn her to the spirit world, when that used to be her mother’s thing?Her mother, Consuelo (Socorro Santiago), an undocumented immigrant, raised Rosemary to assimilate. But when Consuelo arrives at the congressman’s house, she doesn’t need anyone to tell her its paranormal status. She has a supernatural sensitivity to the dead.“I can hear them screaming in my head,” she says.A program note explains that Caswell wrote “Man Cave” over the past five years — a time of immense social and political turmoil in the United States. If the play sometimes feels bloated, it may be from absorbing so much anger and anxiety from the air. But its shape also feels like an act of resistance to the constraints of theatrical convention.On a wall of the man cave, near the elk head, hangs a rack of vintage rifles, emblems of American cowboy culture. This isn’t Chekhov, though, and those guns never go off. They just stay in plain sight, silently menacing.Man CaveThrough April 2 at the Connelly Theater, Manhattan; page73.org. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. More

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      ‘A Strange Loop’ Won the Pulitzer. Now It’s Coming to Broadway.

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      The playwright Michael R. Jackson describes his musical as “a big, Black and queer-ass American Broadway show.”“A Strange Loop,” Michael R. Jackson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning meta-musical, is coming to Broadway this spring.The show’s producers announced on Monday that the musical would run at the Lyceum Theater; they did not announce specific dates, but it is planning to open before the eligibility deadline for this season’s Tony Awards, which is expected to be in late April.The show is a self-referential musical comedy about a Black gay musical theater writer trying to write a musical about a Black gay musical theater writer. Unsparingly introspective and sexually straightforward, it was staged Off Broadway in 2019 at Playwrights Horizons in a collaboration with Page 73 Productions. The New York Times critic Ben Brantley called it “jubilantly anguished” and said it featured “an assortment of the kind of infectious, richly harmonic melodies that would have your grandparents leaving the theater humming. That is, if they hadn’t walked out before.”The musical went on to win the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in drama, and was described by the Pulitzers as “a meditation on universal human fears and insecurities.”Since November, “A Strange Loop” has been running at the Woolly Mammoth Theater in Washington, where it received a rave review from The Washington Post. The critic Peter Marks called it “marvelously inventive” and “exhilarating.”Jackson said he was delighted to see the musical find a home on Broadway. “I think it’s significant because this show is one that made its way out of nowhere, and stuck to its guns and to itself,” he said. “That doesn’t happen often with new musicals.”And does he believe the musical can succeed in a Broadway dominated by jukebox musicals and adaptations of movies? “The challenge I laid out for myself is that ‘A Strange Loop’ is a big, Black and queer-ass American Broadway show,” he said. “I believe we can entice audiences from all over to come take part.”The musical is directed by Stephen Brackett and choreographed by Raja Feather Kelly; the Broadway cast has not yet been announced. The Broadway run will be produced by Barbara Whitman. More