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    ‘Amm(i)gone’ and ‘A Mother’: Sons Calling for Their Mothers

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    The maternal embrace of young men and their battles figures in two very different plays, one a solo work and the other a Brechtian riff starring Jessica Hecht.In Adil Mansoor’s “Amm(i)gone,” a tender solo play about the ache he feels for his lost closeness with his mother, we, the audience, never glimpse her clearly. That is not a criticism, only a truth, and it has nothing to do with a lack of love on his part or hers.Soul-baring and sweetly funny, “Amm(i)gone” — whose title blends “ammi,” the Urdu word for mom, with “Antigone” — is in fact remarkably respectful. As an adult, Mansoor has never found a way to be his whole gay self with his piously Muslim mother. But she held him in her lap when they emigrated from Pakistan when he was 3 months old, and as a young child in suburban Chicago, he clung to her, his best and sole friend.He remains protective of his mother’s privacy. When he shows us projections of family photographs from before the late 1990s, when she started wearing a hijab, he shields her image from us; in some pictures with darling little him, we see only her embroidered-over outline. But he is now, we sense, just as shrouded from her, albeit metaphorically.“If coming out to your mom means that you call her and you say, ‘Ammi, I’m gay,’ that is a thing I have never done,” he says. “I have never directly spoken to my mother about my queerness.”Which is not the same as saying that his mother — a social worker who, he tells us, “holds theater accountable” for changing him — doesn’t know.Directed by Mansoor and Lyam B. Gabel at the Flea, in TriBeCa, this is a richly designed co-production by PlayCo, Woolly Mammoth Theater, the Flea and Kelly Strayhorn Theater. (Set and lighting are by Xotchil Musser, sound design by Aaron Landgraf and media design by Joseph Amodei and Davine Byon.)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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      ‘Munich Medea: Happy Family’ Review: A Friendship Crushed by the Past

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      Themes of incest and sexual abuse of minors loom large in this strikingly becalmed play named after a legendarily vengeful Greek mother.“Munich Medea: Happy Family” carries the wrong trigger warning. Rather than cautioning us that Corinne Jaber’s debut play “addresses, but does not depict, sexual assault,” it should warn us that its tropes will be ploddingly predictable to just about anyone who has seen the #MeToo movement play out in recent years.On opposite sides of a sparsely furnished split-level stage, two women, Caroline and Alice, tell us about the dissolution of their childhood friendship after they were sexually abused by the same man. While the script seems to be pitched somewhere between a memory play and an exorcism, what unfolds onstage, under the director Lee Sunday Evans’s light touch, is as dry and sober as a deposition — with its mentions of consent (uttered 10 times in the play’s 75 minutes), forensic descriptions of rape and clockwork-like moments of catharsis. For a play named after a legendarily vengeful Greek mother, “Munich Medea” (a co-production of PlayCo and WP Theater) is a strikingly domesticated and becalmed production.This is not to say that mothers come off entirely well in this play. At one point, Caroline (a granite-faced Crystal Finn) — looking back on the abuse that her father (a louche Kurt Rhoads) inflicted on her best friend, Alice (Heather Raffo) — reflects that “none of this would’ve happened” without her mother’s consent, “which she gave, always, willingly and silently.” Her mother never materializes in the play. That the mother is effectively silenced could be a way for her daughter to exact poetic revenge, by silencing the person who wove a conspiracy of silence around her husband’s crimes. But the play is not wily enough to ambush the accomplice in her own trap.Alice’s own mother, a refugee from East Germany, is also conspicuously absent. A more sympathetic character, she’s described as a “virtuous, well-behaved Protestant” who once confronted Caroline’s father, asking him to leave her daughter alone, to no avail. As played by Rhoads, the father (he is given no proper name) is a silver-tongued theater actor who spends much of the play in his dressing room, elevated about 10 feet above the floor. Lines from Friedrich Schiller rain down on us from his lair, and even in old age, he has no trouble quoting Georg Büchner and Rainer Maria Rilke from memory. As with Vladimir Nabokov’s infamous pedophile, Humbert Humbert, the father in “Munich Medea” seems to believe that aesthetic ingenuity more than makes up for ethical lapses.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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      ‘Hound Dog’ Review: A Soul-Searching Journey Strays Off Course

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      Melis Aker’s new play with music, presented by Ars Nova and PlayCo., follows a musical prodigy without drive or passion.The young woman nicknamed Hound Dog might have studied musicology at Harvard, but all the panel members at her Royal Academy of Music audition seem to care about is that she’s from Turkey.“It’s like if Joni Mitchell had a bit of an orgy with a few Turkish folk musicians, and then had a very confused baby,” one of the panelists says of Hound Dog’s song. Another detects an “Americana” influence, “which is … surprising.” The first one wishes that she’d use “the traditional Turkish instrument,” though it’s unclear what that would be.What’s jarring about this scene is not so much that educators at the Royal Academy of Music would have such clichéd assumptions, but that their phrasing would be so clunky and vague — they’re deciding on admission to a prestigious institution, not a neighborhood after-school program. Unfortunately, this lack of focus and attendant lack of bite are fairly representative of Melis Aker’s new play with music, “Hound Dog,” which is being jointly presented by Ars Nova and PlayCo.When we meet her, Hound Dog (Ellena Eshraghi) is back in her hometown, Ankara, pondering whether to attend the conservatory (yes, she ended up being admitted), though the reasons for her hesitation are unclear. Complicating matters is her fraught relationship with her widowed father (Laith Nakli), with whom she is staying.Intertwined with his frustration and impatience with Turkey as a whole, Baba is a big rock ’n’ roll fan, with a particular fixation on Elvis Presley. Hound Dog sniffs at his taste with the dismissiveness of the newly enlightened. “I took a class called ‘Sound in the Uncanny Valley’ with this crazy professor,” she informs her childhood bestie, Ayse (the crackerjack Olivia AbiAssi, making the most of an underwritten role), before deriding “the appropriation and commercial simplicity” of her dad’s favorite bands.The dogmatism is amusing and on point. It is also contradicted by what we hear from Hound Dog’s own music. Her folk-rock audition number, “Only in Time” (performed, like the others in the show, by a live band headed by the coolly composed singer Sahar Milani), does sound like a Joni Mitchell pastiche, complete with vocal mannerisms, so who’s appropriating what now?But it’s hard to tell why Hound Dog writes in any particular style or even what animates her in general: This supposed prodigy is portrayed as lacking drive and passion. Mostly Hound Dog gabs with Ayse over some joints, argues with Baba, visits her dopey high school music teacher, Mr. Callahan (Matt Magnusson), and mopes as she attempts to deal with her unresolved grief over her mother’s death a year earlier.Aker had a promising subject in a woman who is deeply ambivalent about her life’s calling, and, by extension, herself. Hound Dog tries to navigate notions of authenticity and identity as she looks for her place in her family and in the world. The last is evoked by brief references to the ways social, political and cultural forces have long hurled against one another in Turkey, including an encounter with a cop who asks Baba, “Your folks never tell you about playing foreign music outside ’round here?”Because Hound Dog’s soul-searching remains blurry, Aker and the director, Machel Ross, can never quite make her equivocations compelling to watch — an ambiguous situation since the character is partly autobiographical, with stage directions that use the first-person singular whenever Hound Dog (referred to as “Me” in the script) is involved.Yet more unfulfilled promise comes from the musical numbers, written by Aker and the brothers Daniel and Patrick Lazour, who are credited as the Lazours. One wonders, for example, whose feelings the band’s frontwoman is meant to voice. She could be Hound Dog’s siren-like alter ego, or perhaps she is a half-fantasized vision of her late mother. Or a mix of both. No matter: It’s hard not to feel that Hound Dog is stuck on the outside of her own story, listening in.Hound DogThrough Nov. 5 at Greenwich House, Manhattan; arsnovanyc.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      ‘Will You Come With Me?’ Review: Love in the Age of Revolution

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      Set around protests in Istanbul that began in 2013, this play follows a couple as they circle, approach and retreat from each other over the years.In May 2013, a sit-in over the demolition of Istanbul’s Gezi Park gave rise to a nationwide movement after police intervened with tear gas and water cannons. Protests rocked Turkey for months as a flood of grievances against the government boiled over into the streets.Love in the age of revolution is the time-honored subject of “Will You Come With Me?” — a diaristic two-hander by the playwright Ebru Nihan Celkan that opened at MITU580 in Brooklyn on Monday night. Translated from Turkish by Kate Ferguson, the PlayCo production aims to put viewers on the ground of the Gezi Park conflict and into the hearts and heads of two women brought together and torn apart during its turmoil.The story begins with Umut (Layla Khoshnoudi) recording a video message for a distant lover on the occasion of their first anniversary, though it seems the pair has most often been apart. “They cut down the tree where we had our first kiss,” Umut says in a park like any other, her image projected on translucent panels angled around the black-box theater. We watch the screen as her friend behind the camera is arrested mid-shoot.Next it’s 2018, and Umut is awake in bed, wondering how long she’s been afraid of the dark. We meet her lover, Janina (Maribel Martinez), on the other side of the stage in Berlin, preparing to visit Umut in Istanbul. Later we learn that the two met while Janina was there on business, and she wants to bring Umut back to Berlin to live with her. Hasn’t Umut had enough of civil unrest? The two circle each other, dictating their experiences as if to bridge the distance between them and create a record for posterity.“I’m going to get her,” Janina says. “No more counting the days, the minutes, the seconds.”The bench where they fell in love sits center stage, beside a path cut through green turf that covers the floor. The peaceful artifice of the set design by Afsoon Pajoufar belies the strife Umut describes unfolding around her in Istanbul. Sound design by Avi Amon summons crowds and confrontation, while stark spotlights from the lighting designer Reza Behjat capture Umut’s disquiet and isolation.Scenes flip forward and back through time, like the ripped-out pages of a journal. If separation charges Umut and Janina’s fondness for each other, their reunion is marked by ambivalence. Khoshnoudi and Martinez are best when they’re in dialogue, working off each other with sincerity and grace. Unfortunately, the two characters don’t interact until nearly halfway through the 80-minute play, when we flash back to their dreamy first meeting and forward to the tensions that have arisen between them since.In a set designed by Afsoon Pajoufar, images are projected on translucent panels at either side of the black-box theater. Julieta CervantesThere’s a persistent sense of disorder to “Will You Come With Me?” that suits its formal experimentation, colliding the illogic shuffle of memory with documentary style. But even with supertitled dates between scenes, the chopped-up timeline is hard to follow. And the action, which is almost entirely described rather than enacted, can feel frustratingly opaque. Those unfamiliar with even a broad outline of the Gezi Park protests won’t find their impetus or consequences detailed here.Celkan is more interested in the sensory richness of love and civil disobedience, in hearts that heave “like a pair of bellows,” or eyes that “glow like embers” one minute and burn with tear gas the next. That poetry survives translation, and its focus on imagery is well complemented by projection design from Stefania Bulbarella and Dee Lamar Mills. But the production from the director Keenan Tyler Oliphant can’t fully theatricalize a text so weighed down by narration.If “Will You Come With Me?” wants to posit love as an act of resistance, it’s not exactly clear what gets in the way of it here. The social uprising makes for a chaotic backdrop, but its forces don’t seem to be what drives the pair apart. The play feels like a kind of battle-logue, of two people trying to escape themselves for each other and bend the arc of history. It’s a valiant effort at a worthy endeavor, even if the execution is a blur.Will You Come With Me?Through June 5 at MITU580, Brooklyn; playco.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More