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    Review: A Shady Documentary Becomes a Weapon of War in ‘Spain’

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    Jen Silverman’s noir play considers the role of artists in the making of propaganda.“Financing is complicated when it comes to the arts,” says a low-budget filmmaker in Jen Silverman’s “Spain.” That’s hardly news, but the clever if murky play, which had its world premiere on Thursday at Second Stage Theater, offers a solution: Let the Soviets foot the bill.In Silverman’s telling, the filmmaker, Joris Ivens, a Dutchman working in the United States, is already an undercover infiltrator for Soviet interests when the Spanish Civil War breaks out in 1936. Over bloody steak in a dim restaurant, his handler “offers” him the chance to make a big-budget pro-Republican documentary whose theme would be “The Noble Peasant Crushed by the Rich Fascist.” The goal: to end American neutrality, overthrow Franco and change the world. The part about communizing the emergent republic by any means necessary is left unsaid.Ivens was a real filmmaker, and his movie “The Spanish Earth,” released in 1937, was a real cause célèbre among leftists and artists. The frenemies Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos did write the screenplay, as Silverman relates. The financial role of Soviet intelligence is debatable, but then so is the intelligence of those who failed to perceive the threat of Stalinist terror in what was obviously propaganda.Despite the actual names, “Spain” behaves like a work of fiction. Much honored as an artist in his lifetime, Ivens (Andrew Burnap) could not have been as dim, especially about film, as Silverman makes him. (He imagines shooting part of the documentary from an ant’s point-of-view, or a raindrop’s.) Nor, for all his faults, was Hemingway (Danny Wolohan) so complete a buffoon, given to shouting such hollow nonsense. (“We are all Spain! But how?”) And though turning Dos Passos (Erik Lochtefeld) into a whiny milquetoast is a questionable liberty, it’s less problematic than the way he’s set up as the play’s firm moral center. His later support for right-wing causes suggests that his own moral center was movable.To correct for such blurriness, Silverman throws a largely invented (yet somehow truer) character into the mix. Helen (Marin Ireland) is another infiltrator, given the assignment of assisting Ivens under cover of being his girlfriend. In Ireland’s typically incisive performance, here colored with a touch of period archness, she is fascinating to watch even when seemingly stuck with Burnap in a Möbius strip of suspicion and self-doubt. The scenes in which they wrangle over their goals as artists and as citizens — wondering whether making the movie might be morally acceptable despite the compromises and risks involved — are the best in the play.“Can a false story be so good,” Helen asks, “that it does something true?”Danny Wolohan, left, as Hemingway and Andrew Burnap as the Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens in the play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRegarding “Spain,” a synthetic yarn with too many twists to follow in 90 minutes, the answer to that same question is no. I soon stopped trying to make sense of it, realizing that the story didn’t matter; ultimately Silverman is less concerned with Russian influence in the Spanish Civil War than with the permanent problem of art in the world. A final underwhelming gesture takes us even further from the facts to consider whether Soviet-style propaganda really died with the Soviet Union or merely moved elsewhere, co-opting more artists in the process.Dramatizing that airy premise by marrying it to a familiar entertainment template does neither spouse any favors. Silverman’s dialogue has the clipped rhythm of screwball comedy but not the wit — strange, because several earlier works, including “Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties,” “The Roommate” and “The Moors,” are so pointedly funny. Here, despite the quite palpable efforts of the actors, even the best lines seem unable to escape the dark gravity of Tyne Rafaeli’s staging.To be fair, that staging is faithful to Silverman’s instructions in the script, which emphasize the conventions of noir thrillers. Certainly, the clichés of the genre are reproduced too numerously and obviously not to be purposeful: Brutalist black boxes with sliding panels; shadowy figures in evening dress; slanting shards of chiaroscuro; reverberant amplification and portentous music cues. (Sets by Dane Laffrey, costumes by Alejo Vietti, lighting by Jen Schriever, sound and original music by Daniel Kluger.)The overall effect is heavy, and less clarifying than perplexing. When we finally see a bit of Ivens’s film — not projected on a screen but enacted live onstage — it is for some reason an opera, featuring an aria (“We Pray for Rain”) sung by the big-voiced bass Zachary James, who otherwise plays a Soviet agent.It may be that we are not meant to parse the scene’s meaning, or anything else in this overloaded effort. “Spain” is, after all, a play about propaganda, which is most effective when swallowed whole, if only that were possible.SpainThrough Dec. 17 at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater, Manhattan; 2st.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      ‘The Coast Starlight’ Review: Strangers on a Train

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      Keith Bunin’s gentle, rueful play at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater settles down among six passengers traveling from Los Angeles to Seattle.A northbound trip on the Coast Starlight, a gleaming Amtrak sleeper, lasts about 35 hours. The train leaves Los Angeles in mid morning and delivers its passengers to Seattle late the next day. By contrast, “The Coast Starlight,” Keith Bunin’s play at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, fills just a fraction of that time. A gentle, rueful play, directed with a steady and sympathetic hand by Tyne Rafaeli, it settles down among six passengers sharing a single coach. Narrow, nimble, self-contained, the ride it offers is as smooth as it is wistful. Because Bunin (“The Credeaux Canvas,” “The Busy World Is Hushed”) knows that any trip involves leaving something or someone behind.The narrative engine of “The Coast Starlight” is powered by T.J. (a jittery, ingenuous Will Harrison). T.J.’s journey is the most urgent and his secret, which he reveals a few minutes in, weighs the heaviest. The other characters suffer less insistent goads. Jane (Camila Canó-Flaviá) is going to visit her boyfriend, Noah (Rhys Coiro) to check in on his mother. Liz (Mia Barron, in a brazen, audacious performance that earns midshow applause) has fled a couples’ retreat. Ed (Jon Norman Schneider) is en route to his next meeting. Anna (Michelle Wilson) is returning to her family after performing a final obligation for her brother. They are strangers when they enter and strangers when they leave. Much of the play is written in the past conditional — “If I had told you,” “If I had known” — illuminating Bunin’s interest in the care that might have been tendered, the humanity that might have been shown if only the characters had been brave and vulnerable enough to reveal themselves to one another.The play moves between realism and symbolism as easily — depending on the quality of some train tracks, more easily — than a passenger might walk from one carriage to another, though the focus remains on the interior. It is largely a memory play (somewhat in the mode of Tennessee Williams or Brian Friel), so the characters frequently slip free of sequential time to comment on what they might have said and done and been. Sometimes they speak directly to the audience, at other times to imagined versions of each other, at other times in ordinary dialogue, though even these sequences have a delicate, dreamlike quality.The actors, half of whom have been with the play since its La Jolla Playhouse debut in 2019, assume their characters fluently and with deep feeling. The distinct energies and voices merge together, forming a finely calibrated ensemble. And Arnulfo Maldonado’s set, both practical and suggestive of the expanse of the Pacific beyond the train’s windows, Lap Chi Chu’s lighting and Daniel Kluger’s sound also work in concert, giving the impression of movement even when Rafaeli is wise enough to let the performers stay still.Not that they stay still for long. These are people with fidgety legs and restless hearts, most of whom are trying to figure out how they got here in the first place and where they might go next. At one point, T.J. voices an ambition that the characters share: “There’s got to be a better way to love people. A way that isn’t either a trick or a lie.”“The Coast Starlight” shows that kind of love, too. Even as Bunin deals in hypotheticals and relational failures, he also shows these people really, actually caring for each other. Liz pays for a round of drinks. Anna offers T.J. her sleeping car. T.J. talks a drunken Ed down. Jane gives T.J. a drawing. Yes, the play often strikes a melancholy tone, but its wheels also send up sparks of generosity and in Liz’s monologue, sharp humor. So let it do what any train should, which is to move you.The Coast StarlightThrough April 16 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Manhattan; lct.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      ‘Epiphany’ Review: A Holiday Party, but What Are We Celebrating?

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      In this heady Lincoln Center Theater production, Brian Watkins finds laughs and shivers in a pensive gathering of old friends.I could describe Brian Watkins’s “Epiphany,” which opened Thursday night at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, as an existential dinner-party play. Or a satire of academics, armchair psychologists and the general intelligentsia, always trying to find a common language for our ways of living in the world. It could be called a critique of our modern society of self-interest. A statement on grief. Or a ghost story.I could even call it a kind of poem, making music out of abstractions while traversing the past and the present, the real and the surreal. That this heady work, in a Lincoln Center Theater production directed by Tyne Rafaeli, evades any one definition is a testament to its grand ambitions. In one hour and 50 minutes, “Epiphany” astutely captures a wide swath of ideas without losing its grasp on the hilarious and heartbreaking experience of being a person in the world.On a January evening in a secluded old house in the middle of nowhere, Morkan (Marylouise Burke, perfect as a jittery sexagenarian) hastily prepares for the holiday known as Epiphany, her itinerary packed with drinks, speeches, poems, songs, dancing and a goose feast. Which would be fine if anyone had read the full dossier Morkan sent along beforehand — or if anyone, Morkan included, actually understood what this archaic, forgotten ritual is.Thankfully Gabriel — Morkan’s beloved nephew, a revered writer and public intellectual, and the guest of honor — will be arriving to lead the festivities, and also to explain them. When Gabriel fails to show, instead sending Aran (an ethereal Carmen Zilles) in his place, a night of awkward exchanges, misunderstandings and spirited debates evolves into a dreamlike meditation on mortality.Also attending this vaguely defined soiree are Loren (Colby Minifie, currently in the Amazon series “The Boys”), a sober, vegan 20-something, helping with the preparations; Freddy (C.J. Wilson), a middle-aged alcoholic teacher; Kelly (Heather Burns), a pretentious pianist; Charlie (Francois Battiste), a smartly dressed, self-important lawyer; Sam (Omar Metwally), a pedantic psychiatrist with many opinions; Taylor (David Ryan Smith), his comically snide and heavy-drinking husband; and Ames (the reliably dry-witted Jonathan Hadary), an old friend of Morkan’s and her conspicuously absent sister Julia’s.In a rapid series of processions and introductions, we hear the characters before we see them; they ascend from an unseen lower level and appear in the parlor room of an old house.John Lee Beatty’s antique set design, with the main flight of stairs leading up into an ominous darkness, establishes an unsettling mood, strangely removed from the present day. And Isabella Byrd’s ghostly lighting summons an eerie “Fall of the House of Usher” vibe before illuminating a stunning surprise backdrop: We are watching an evening gathering during a January flurry, snow fitfully descending past the gnarled fingers of tree branches outside the towering windows.Members of the company on the “Epiphany” set, designed by John Lee Beatty with lighting by Isabella Byrd.Jeremy DanielThere’s not much action in “Epiphany,” so the play’s dynamism is all in the controlled chaos of the dialogue: interruptions, overlapping voices, heavy pauses. Watkins (whose plays include “Wyoming” and who created the recent time-loop western series “Outer Range”) effortlessly extracts the humor from the partygoers’ pretensions and posturing, which are just a cover for the insecurities they feel in the modern world — and in their own lives.Absurd developments offer punctuation: One character makes inappropriate bathroom jokes, another performs a “purposefully untitled” piano composition, and after one of the guests suffers a dinnertime injury, the others debate which alcohol to use to sterilize the wound.While Watkins leans into scorn for the insufferable urbanites one-upping one another, he seems to treasure the more introspective figures of Morkan and Ames. And there is plenty of beauty in the play’s abstractions; at its heart “Epiphany” is a love letter to the indefinable and unnameable.“As soon as you try and define love as an empirical thing you’ve suddenly lost the essence of love itself,” Aran says at one point in the night. “It’s bigger than our connotations.” And in a rare moment of drunken insight, Freddy recalls how he heard a poet once explain how the creative process is an act of “creating time … that the space between seconds and minutes actually like widens and deepens … as if eternity was inhabiting you.”Empiricism, existentialism, solipsism — “Epiphany” sends a lot of -isms into space, just to laugh at the volley. (“Well now we’re just saying words,” Ames points out.) Occasionally the play seems to fall down the rabbit hole of its own philosophical musings, but “Epiphany” never remains there too long; the humor, which works at several different registers, from barbed irony to tragicomic lampoonery to wacky physical comedy, reins in the play’s haughtier inclinations.Speaking of haughty — audiences may or may not catch the specter of another work within “Epiphany,” James Joyce’s “The Dead,” from his collection “Dubliners.” “Epiphany,” which first premiered in Ireland in 2019, in a production from the renowned Druid Theater Company, replicates some of the characters’ relationships and exchanges in “The Dead,” uses many of the same character names and echoes the general existential theme.References and snippets of the original text may fly right past anyone unfamiliar with “The Dead,” or anyone who hasn’t picked up “Dubliners” since college. No matter. There’s more than enough in “Epiphany” for it to stand on its own. See it and ruminate; this is a play “bigger than our connotations.”EpiphanyThrough July 24 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Manhattan; lct.org. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. More

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      ‘Selling Kabul’ Holds Up a New Mirror After the Taliban Takeover

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      Sylvia Khoury’s play, which takes place over one night in Afghanistan in 2013, has only deepened after a pandemic postponement.In March 2020, “Selling Kabul” was just two weeks from starting previews when the theater industry suddenly went dark.The set — a modest living room in the Afghan capital — sat empty for over 19 months, another abandoned apartment in Midtown Manhattan. Still, the cast and crew stayed in touch, regularly video chatting and sharing their ongoing research.But in August, when the United States ended its longest war and the Taliban took over, their conversations changed. What did their play mean now, in this new geopolitical reality? Had their duty to their characters changed? What memories and frustrations would audiences now be bringing to the performance?“We were in almost daily contact about the changing situation in Afghanistan,” the director, Tyne Rafaeli, said, “and starting to understand and analyze how that changing situation was going to affect our play.”Sylvia Khoury, the playwright, also wrestled with the new resonance of her work. Ultimately, she decided not to alter the text, wanting to honor the historical moment and the individual experiences that had generated it.“The time that we’re in really colors certain moments of the play in different ways,” Khoury said in a video interview last month after the show began previews. “I haven’t changed them. A play is a fixed thing, as history continues.”“Selling Kabul” takes place in 2013, as the Obama administration began its long withdrawal of troops. Khoury wrote it in 2015, after speaking with several interpreters waiting for Special Immigrant Visas. And because that visa program, created by Congress to give refuge to Afghans and Iraqis who helped the U.S. military, requires rigorous vetting, many have been stuck in bureaucratic limbo for years. Now many American allies and partners remain in the country, potentially vulnerable to Taliban reprisals.“That time elapsed really speaks to a profound moral failure,” Khoury said. “That time elapsing, in itself, really showed us our own shame.”“Selling Kabul,” a Playwrights Horizons production that opened earlier this month and is scheduled to close Dec. 23, shines a light on the human cost of America’s foreign conflicts. It neither reprimands its audience nor offers catharsis. Instead, Khoury delivers an intense, intimate look at four people caught in a web of impossible choices.“If I still bit my nails I would have no nails left now,” Alexis Soloski wrote in her review for The New York Times..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}In the play, Taroon, who was an interpreter for the U.S. military, is waiting for a promised visa. He has just become a father — his wife had their son just before the play starts — but he cannot be with them. He’s in hiding at his sister Afiya’s apartment, where he has been holed up for four months hoping to evade the Taliban. But on this evening, they seem to be growing closer and closer.Taroon has to leave Kabul. And he has to leave soon.“A play is a fixed thing, as history continues,” the playwright Sylvia Khoury said about her decision not to update her play after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August.Elias Williams for The New York Times“Beyond the headlines, this play homes in on the detail, the intense detail of how this foreign policy affects these four people, on this day, in this apartment,” Rafaeli said.Told in real time, the 95-minute play is performed without an intermission. As fear intensifies and violence creeps closer, the four characters fight to keep secrets, and to keep one another alive, but they are also forced to make decisions that could endanger the others.“There’s not really one bad person, and they’re not just in a difficult circumstance; they’re in an impossible circumstance,” said Marjan Neshat, who plays Afiya. The coronavirus pandemic has changed the tone of the play, too. During an earlier run in 2019 at the Williamstown Theater Festival, audiences could only imagine Taroon’s claustrophobia. Now, they can remember. Khoury said she hopes that viewers come away with an understanding of how their individual actions can affect people they will never meet.“As Americans, we used to think it was enough to tend our own gardens,” Khoury said. “Now, I think we’re realizing: It’s not even close to enough.” Khoury wrote “Selling Kabul” while in medical school at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Pulling from conversations with Afghan interpreters, and from her own family history, she weaves a nuanced portrait of the myth of America.“No one that I ever spoke to was ever unclear that they wanted to come to America,” she said. “It was safer for them.”In the play, Afiya’s neighbor Leyla remembers the soldiers as fun, even handsome. Afiya — who speaks English better than Taroon does, despite being forced out of school when the Taliban took control in the 1990s — thinks Americans are untrustworthy. “To me, America is just the great abandoner,” said Neshat, explaining her character’s view. “Like, ‘You promised this thing that you could never fulfill. And, how dare you?’”And for Taroon, America is a promise. “America, their word is good,” he tells Afiya.When “Selling Kabul” was first performed at the Williamstown Theater Festival, Donald Trump was president. That was a laugh line. Now, there aren’t many chuckles, but Taroon’s conviction still stings.“Our word still is not good,” Khoury said. “That’s something that’s difficult to admit on this side of the political spectrum.”Dario Ladani Sanchez, left, as Taroon and Marjan Neshat as Afiya in the play at Playwrights Horizons.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRealizing that her play might leave audience members wondering what they can do to help, Khoury started a private fund-raiser for the International Refugee Assistance Project, which will follow the play as it moves to other cities. Information about the charity is tucked inside each Playbill.“Not giving people somewhere to go after felt like a missed opportunity,” Khoury said.The playwright also held up a moral mirror to audiences in “Power Strip,” a story about Syrian refugees at a migrant camp in Greece, which debuted at Lincoln Center in 2019. In “Selling Kabul,” her characters also stand on the precipice of leaving almost everything they know.“The stories of how we left are the fabric of my childhood, from country to country, in pretty extreme circumstances,” said Khoury, who is of Lebanese and French descent, and whose family has been affected by colonial and imperial shifts across the Middle East and North Africa.“Who are you, before you leave? Who is the person who makes the decision to go?” she said, adding, “And it’s without saying goodbye, in most of the stories I know. It’s immediately. It’s taking the first truck you can.”As audiences filed out of the theater after a recent performance, one friend turned to another. Where do you think they are now? she wondered. What happened to them?For Neshat, who was born in Iran and moved to the United States when she was 8, that’s almost too painful to think about. “How do you choose between your best friend neighbor and your brother?” she said of the play’s excruciating dilemmas. “Like, how do you do that?” More

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      ‘Selling Kabul’ Review: Trapped in a War, and an Apartment

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      In Sylvia Khoury’s suspenseful new play, the characters sometimes feel too much like wheels in a machine, but it’s a tense thrill to watch it work.Sylvia Khoury’s “Selling Kabul,” a 95-minute thriller that opened on Monday at Playwrights Horizons, is a play as tautly made as a military bed. You could bounce a quarter off it — or given its provenance, a five-afghani coin — and then throw yourself down to recover your nerves, which the drama will have absolutely mangled.The time is 2013, 12 years after the beginning of America’s “forever war” in Afghanistan, eight years before its unceremonious close and a moment in which the United States has radically reduced its troop presence. The setting, by Arnulfo Maldonado, is the nice enough Kabul apartment where Afiya (Marjan Neshat) lives with her husband, Jawid (Mattico David), a tailor and storekeeper. For months they have shared the apartment with a third roommate, Taroon (Dario Ladani Sanchez), Afiya’s brother, who spends many of his waking hours in the living room closet.At some point in the past, Taroon worked as a translator for the American forces, which has made him a target of the Taliban. Separated from his pregnant wife, he passes his days surreptitiously watching television and checking the status of his special immigrant visa — when the Wi-Fi works, anyway. As the play begins, Taroon’s wife is in labor and he must weigh the risk of seeing her.As directed by Tyne Rafaeli, “Selling Kabul” has elements of a Greek tragedy and an espionage thriller. As a suspense story that unrolls in real time, it also suggests stage chillers like “Rope.” Khoury has built her play like a puzzle box. Every detail of the wordless opening moments, even the offstage noises — a baby crying, an engine revving — will reverberate later on. (This is the rare play in which the sound design, by Lee Kinney, is absolutely crucial to the story.) Pay particular attention to the opening conversation between Afiya and Taroon, a tangle of truth and lies in which each word matters.A structural marvel, “Selling Kabul” can sometimes sound a little hollow at its core. Khoury sketches personalities for the characters — rounded out by Francis Benhamou as Leyla, a chatterbox neighbor — quickly and deftly. We immediately understand Taroon’s impetuousness, Jawid’s equivocation, Leyla’s bright anguish, Afiya’s fretful good sense. (Afiya is the play’s moral center; Neshat is its standout.) But these people mainly serve as devices to urge the drama toward crisis and their speech can seem stilted, as when Taroon reacts to the birth of his son: “He’ll think me a coward. Too scared to show my face in the light of day.”This would matter less in another play, located in an environment more familiar to American audiences, or if we had more plays, particularly plays by writers of Middle Eastern descent, set in this region. But we don’t have many. In terms of what has played in New York, only “Homebody/Kabul,” “Blood and Gifts” and “The Great Game: Afghanistan” come to mind, works by white British and American writers. At its best, theater can bring the faraway very close, personalize the abstract.Acknowledging that too few of us stateside will ever understand the civilian toll of conflicts like those in Afghanistan, I wish Khoury, a playwright of French and Lebanese descent, and Rafaeli had done more to make these characters feel fully human and not just wheels in a beautiful machine. Or maybe this is simply my own regret talking — my memory of seeing the images of the chaos at Kabul airport during America’s botched August exit and realizing that I should have been paying a lot more attention. But that’s the thing about a forever war waged a world away: I didn’t have to. It’s unfair to want “Selling Kabul” to have made me.So enjoy the play instead as a nimble entertainment and a first-rate workout for your sympathetic nervous system — if I still bit my nails I would have no nails left now. And appreciate, too, that while “Selling Kabul” could have ended tragically, it instead offers some morsel of hope to all of its characters, even if it perverts reason to keep that hope alive. (Honestly, there are a few other logical discrepancies, as when fastidious characters suddenly leave the door open. But when you’re tempted to yell, “For the love of all that’s holy, lock the door!” at the stage, clearly a play has got you.)After the lights come back on, you will find an insert in your program with information about the International Refugee Assistance Project, a charity that offers legal aid to people in Taroon’s situation, a way to make that hope more real. Maybe that’s a test of a play, not how well it works within a theater’s narrow walls, but how much it makes you want to act beyond them.Selling KabulThrough Dec. 23 at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater, Manhattan; playwrightshorizons.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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      Williamstown Theater Festival Tries to Weather the Storms

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      The annual summer festival in Massachusetts has tried to adapt amid the pandemic and calls for more diversity onstage.I hate getting caught in the rain. But lately, with the mercurial weather and my new dog-walking schedule, I’ve found myself caught in bright sun showers, swampy mists and downright tempests. In my humble opinion, rain is nothing to sing about — Gene Kelly be damned.After a sunny bus ride to Williamstown, Mass., walking with a pup, a tote and a backpack, I was caught again — soaked down to the soles of my Converse. Roughly 15 minutes later the skies settled as suddenly as they had erupted. It’s a problem the Williamstown Theater Festival, which I was attending for the first time, has had to contend with all summer. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, the usually indoor festival has tried to adapt with three outdoor productions. But the area has received an above-average amount of rainfall this season, disrupting these plans and leading the festival not to open its shows for reviews from critics.Adaptation, how the festival has successfully or unsuccessfully readjusted to the climate and the politico-cultural climate (namely the pandemic and the protests), was the theme of my weekend.One of the first sights I saw on my damp walk from the bus to the hotel was of a Black woman on a stage: delightful. This was an outdoor rehearsal for one of three 30-minute plays curated by the playwright-director Robert O’Hara for “Celebrating the Black Radical Imagination: Nine Solo Plays.” In “The Master’s Tools,” cleverly written by Zora Howard (“Stew”), a Black enslaved woman named Tituba (a wonderfully devilish Rosalyn Coleman), like the victimized slave from Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” recounts a treacherous storm that led to her mother’s decapitation. A storm is a “great equalizer,” she says, describing how nature howls “like it’s in heat” and how the trees shake “as though possessed.”It made me glance up to the sky again from my seat on the front lawn of the ’62 Center for Theater and Dance, where the production was presented. A clamshell arched over the stage where Tituba told her story. Just a few minutes before she stepped onstage, ushers had handed out rain ponchos to the audience; the forecast had predicted afternoon rain.Rosalyn Coleman in Zora Howard’s “The Master’s Tools.”Joseph O’Malley and R. Masseo DavisThe rain never came. But by that point the audience, who sat on the lawn without any covering, had already been exposed to the vicious midday sun for an hour while watching the two other short solos, all directed by Candis C. Jones, that were being featured in the last week of the anthology production’s run: “Mark It Down” by Charly Evon Simpson, and “The Last……(A Work in Progress),” by Ngozi Anyanwu.In “The Last,” a queer Black man (Ronald Peet) reflects on a relationship, reeling from his isolation — a literal quarantine — and sense of loss. And in “Mark It Down,” a Black woman (Naomi Lorrain) takes account of her grief over her grandmother’s death during the pandemic.These works by Black playwrights were another way the festival reacted to the moment — not to the coronavirus, but to the recent calls for more diversity onstage. But when the plays were taken within the context of the community where they were being staged, there was a disconnect. My mother, who had joined me, and I barely saw any Black people in town all weekend, with the exception of the festival’s Black cast members. What’s the point of producing new work about Blackness in America if there’s not a more concerted effort to attract Black audiences to receive it?I asked the same question when I attended the experimental “Alien/Nation,” from the director Michael Arden and his company, the Forest of Arden. An immersive experience, “Alien/Nation,” written and devised by Eric Berryman and Jen Silverman, begins as a walking tour through the Williams College campus. (There’s also a version by car.) The audience is split into groups of about eight, and each group is led, via an app, along a path dotted with performers who act out bite-size, dance-heavy scenes about real events that happened in Western Massachusetts and beyond in 1969.Not only does this first act — mostly about Black student protests at Williams College — ring out as particularly relevant right now, but so does the second, which takes place at a Covid-19 vaccination center. The third, which includes an odd but beautiful reproduction of the moon landing and a planetary fashion show, makes a sloppy effort to tie the ending back into the racial themes of the beginning.“Alien/Nation” is an immersive theatrical experience that takes audiences on a walking tour through Williamstown, Mass.Joseph O’Malley and R. Masseo DavisWhile some parts of the production connect (the site-specific format, the wondrously fluid synchronized choreography of Jeff Kuperman and Eamon Foley), others show how the festival’s attempts to adjust to an innovative, pandemic-friendly experience failed. The complicated tech — audience members need to download an app, and must forfeit their driver’s licenses in exchange for earbuds — was prohibitive to many, myself included. The app didn’t work well, the tour ate up more than half my data, and my audio kept going in and out. And the first part of the lengthy production, which one of the company members described, understatedly, as “a little bit of a walk,” wasn’t very accessible, especially given the ample hills of the Williams campus. (“This is too much for someone my age,” my 56-year-old mother testily complained to a company member. “Especially for someone who had a hip replacement.”)And, again, when looking at the makeup of the audience, my mother and I appeared to be the only Black people attending a play about Black civil rights and political action.It was my final show of the weekend, however, that best captured the festival’s attempts to adapt theater in unpredictable circumstances. With a book by Daniel Goldstein and music and lyrics by Dawn Landes, “Row,” directed by Tyne Rafaeli, is staged on wooden platforms in the beautiful reflecting pool at the Clark Art Institute.This musical was inspired by Tori Murden McClure’s memoir “A Pearl in the Storm,” about her effort to become the first woman to row solo across the Atlantic. By presenting “Row” outside at the Clark, the festival uses a local setting (the gorgeous views) to present a tale of resiliency. Led by Grace McLean as Tori with a soaring voice (best showcased in the cascading bellows of the classic-rock-inspired “Drowning”), the show intercuts Tori’s narrative account of her journey with scenes from her past. Her story — acting out, growing up in a difficult home, then finding herself in a fight against nature — hits many familiar notes but is still novel, if only for the site-specific setup and the fact that her quest really happened a mere 22 years ago.Grace McLean as the first woman to row solo across the Atlantic in “Row” at the Clark Art Institute.Joseph O’Malley and R. Masseo DavisBut the show has also been plagued by the poor weather, and some of the sound crew walked off the job one night, complaining of unsafe and unsatisfactory working conditions in the rain. In switching gears to deliver outdoor theater, the festival has been able to step up during a challenging time for the performing arts, but it has struggled to manage the logistics.“Bad weather’s on the way,” Tori says at one point in the show. During her long, treacherous time at sea, she constantly has to acclimate to the conditions in order to survive.The same could be said of theater during the pandemic; easier said than done.The morning after I returned from Williamstown, I got caught in the rain yet again. I’ve started wearing my rain boots, I just got a new raincoat, and at Williamstown I bought a blue rain poncho just in case. I’d rather be prepared for any bad weather on the way — not just run for cover.RowThrough Aug. 15 at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass.; 413-458-3253, wtfestival.org. Running time: 2 hours.Alien/NationThrough Aug. 15 in Williamstown, Mass; 413-458-3253, wtfestival.org. Running time: 2 hours and 25 minutes. More