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    Review: Seeking Purpose Among the Dead in ‘Spiritus/Virgil’s Dance’

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    Dael Orlandersmith’s slender new solo play is a meditation on living that seems also like a curveball response to loss.To Virgil, the audience’s guide through Dael Orlandersmith’s slender, searching new solo play, “Spiritus/Virgil’s Dance,” there is something hellish in the sight of the miserable masses commuting to dreaded jobs that bring them nothing more than the ability to survive.With the passion and cockiness of youth, Virgil at 20-something regards “these bitter, hard, close-to-dead people” with contempt, puzzlement and the certainty of escaping a similar fate.Yet finding a purpose in life proves harder than it looks. By middle age, Virgil feels “lost in a dark wood,” much like the narrator of Dante’s “The Divine Comedy.” Orlandersmith’s Virgil, however, is very much of this earth: a Bronx native transplanted to Manhattan, who has adolescent memories of hanging out among the dead at Woodlawn Cemetery.Performed by Orlandersmith at Rattlestick Theater in Greenwich Village, and directed by Neel Keller, her longtime collaborator, “Spiritus” is not shy about death or dying. It is, in fact, the rare play that will teach you something about embalming and other mortuary skills.Virgil’s journey toward a beneficent existence starts with a family member’s funeral, continues through another relative’s hospice stay and then achieves fulfillment with our hero’s compassion-driven decision to look after the dead.Whether that makes you lean in or recoil, any gruesomeness in “Spiritus” will depend on the vividness of your imagination. Takeshi Kata’s circle-inspired set and Nicholas Hussong’s crisp projections contribute elements of naturalism to the production, but Orlandersmith largely lets her language paint the images. (Understated costume design is by Kaye Voyce, aptly murky lighting by Mary Louise Geiger and sometimes surreal sound by Lindsay Jones.)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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      Rattlestick Theater Names Will Davis as Its Next Artistic Director

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      Davis will be the rare transgender theater artist to lead an Off Broadway nonprofit.Rattlestick Theater, a well-regarded Off Broadway company in the West Village, has decided to name Will Davis, a freelance director and choreographer, as its next artistic director.Davis will succeed Daniella Topol, the artistic director since 2016, who has decided to leave theater administration to pursue a career as a nurse. Davis, 40, is transgender, a distinction that he views as noteworthy.“One of the most important things I can do, as a very intentionally, very visible trans person, is offer a mirror to other emerging artists in all disciplines who may not feel like there is a space for them,” he said. “I’m very excited to be part of the group of people who can push this door open and leave it open.”Davis, who is particularly interested in developing new plays, previously served as artistic director of the American Theater Company in Chicago. He programmed experimental work there and box office revenue declined; his tenure ended with the shuttering of the theater company.Jeff Thamkittikasem, the chairman of the Rattlestick board, said the nonprofit had considered Davis’s experience in Chicago and was confident that the situation in New York was different.In Chicago, Thamkittikasem said, Davis “did what he could and produced great art.” In New York, Thamkittikasem said, “We are in a safer and stronger position that will allow him to flourish.”“Will is just an amazing artist with a beautiful eye, and we’re so excited for that aesthetic to be used for developing the culture of Rattlestick,” Thamkittikasem said.Davis said he was proud of the work he did in Chicago, and looking forward to the opportunity to lead in New York. “Rattlestick has always been a home for experimentation, and that has definitely been a part of what my work has been about,” he said. “There’s every possibility for us to make work that is exciting, that pushes the form, and that also feeds and sustains the theater.”Rattlestick, founded in 1994, is a small company with a penchant for adventurous work by emerging writers. This past week, the Obie Awards said it would honor a show the theater staged in 2021, “Ni Mi Madre,” by giving a prize for performance to the show’s creator and star, Arturo Luís Soria.The company has an annual budget of about $1.5 million, with five full-time and five part-time staffers. The company operates out of a theater, rented from a church, with about 93 seats; a $4 million renovation project is scheduled to begin at the end of this summer, and the company plans to stage its next season at locations around the city.Davis will start working alongside Topol in the coming weeks, and will assume the artistic director position full-time on May 1. More

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      ‘The Gett’ Review: Jewish History and a Woman’s Future

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      The ancient and contemporary swirl together in Liba Vaynberg’s ambitious, off-kilter play about life after a divorce.It is something of a shock to encounter Jennifer Westfeldt, as gorgeous and screwball-comedy perfect as ever, playing the mother of an actual grown-up — a daughter deep enough into adulthood that not only has she gotten married, but now she’s getting a divorce.Your brain may do some contortions as it attempts to adjust, but the effervescent Westfeldt — star of the classic rom-com movies “Friends With Kids” and “Kissing Jessica Stein” — has indeed taken up the Jewish-mother mantle. As Mama in Liba Vaynberg’s ambitious, off-kilter play “The Gett,” at Rattlestick Theater in Greenwich Village, Westfeldt handily steals the show.Mama’s daughter, Ida (pronounced EE-da), a poet with a day job at a library, is rather less interesting. This is unfortunate, given that she is the main character.One Dec. 25, en route to a friend’s party, Ida (Vaynberg) gets stuck in an elevator with a guy who is smolderingly hot despite his penchant for magic tricks. (The show’s magic consultant is Alexander Boyce.) The stranger is attracted to Ida even after she flosses her teeth in front of him, right there in the elevator.This is Baal (Ben Edelman), Ida’s future husband and eventual ex. His name, a note in the script explains, “is the Hebrew word for husband, master, and a false violent god who is eventually banished.” Romantically, Baal is not a healthy choice.Directed by Daniella Topol, “The Gett” is about his banishment, but its principal subject is Ida’s struggle to remake herself after their divorce. (A gett is a Jewish divorce decree.) Subtitled “One Woman’s Creation Myth,” the play borrows its seven-part structure from the seven-day creation of the heavens and Earth in the Book of Genesis. Within that framework, the first day is Ida and Baal’s meet-cute.The play slip-slides between the contemporary and the ancient, the real and the surreal. When Ida asks her divorce lawyer (Luis Vega) what the date is, he replies: “Well, there was light on the first day, and now we’re drawing a line that separates the heavens from the earth. So, the second day of creation.”It’s a difficult tone to strike, more so given the production’s unbalanced dynamic. Ida is curiously drab, lacking the pull of sympathy; scenes between her and a series of male characters (played by Vega) don’t breathe as deeply as they need to. But whenever Baal appears, things perk up — because the dark magnetism that makes it so hard for Ida to get him out of her head works on the audience, too. He is a beguiling presence, inhabiting a nearly spectral dimension.And Mama is all exuberance, with a delightful comic fizz. Rambling to Ida in voice mail after voice mail, she roots for her unconditionally.“You were so weird,” she tells Ida, remembering her as a child, and there’s no mistaking that this oddness was a good thing, worth cherishing.Produced in partnership with Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn, “The Gett” intends to work on two levels, as one woman’s divorce story and as a play laden with meaning from Jewish history and culture. The script contains plenty of layers. But in performance, flatness too often dominates.Then the scene changes, Ida’s voice mail beeps, and Mama returns, persistent in her love.“This is your mother,” she says, and for a few moments all is well again.The GettThrough Dec. 11 at Rattlestick Theater, Manhattan; rattlestick.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Daniella Topol of Rattlestick Theater’s New Calling: Nursing

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      The artistic director of Rattlestick Playwrights Theater is making an unusual career change after preparing the company for a major renovation.There’s been a lot of turnover in theater leadership lately. Some have been drummed out of their jobs. Others have quit to do something else in the arts. Many have retired.Daniella Topol, the artistic director of Rattlestick Playwrights Theater and a career-long theater director, is leaving to become a nurse.The unusual move arrives at a pivotal time for Rattlestick, a small Off Broadway company that, in addition to rejuvenating following the long pandemic shutdown, is about to embark on a much-needed renovation of its cozy but imperfect West Village home, located in a 19th-century church parish house.Topol, 47, has been leading Rattlestick since 2016, succeeding David Van Asselt, who co-founded the company. Just before assuming the leadership position, she directed at Rattlestick a production of “Ironbound” by Martyna Majok, who went on to win a Pulitzer Prize for “Cost of Living.”Marin Ireland played a Polish immigrant in New Jersey in Martyna Majok’s “Ironbound,” directed by Topol for Rattlestick in 2016.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThree years later, another production Topol directed at Rattlestick altered her trajectory. While working on “Novenas for a Lost Hospital,” a play that both chronicled and mourned the demise of St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village as patrons moved from location to location connected to the story, she consulted with nurses and nursing students, and something sparked.“A seed was planted and then we continued forward — a pandemic happened six months after that, and there was a lot of reflection around, ‘Where are we as a field?’ ‘Where are we as a city?’ ‘Where are we as a country?’ ‘Where are we going?’ ‘What role do we play or not play?’ ‘How do I as white woman hold power and privilege?’ ‘How don’t I?’ ‘Where do I fit in a constellation in a way that is productive?’” she said. “I have been doing, obviously, a lot of reflection about my own personal life, and meaningful and challenging experiences that I have had, on a very personal level, and many of them have centered inside of maternal care complexities, and so it sort of felt like it was aligning with the stars.”She said she is not sure exactly what she wants to do as a nurse, but she plans to stay in New York, and said that maternal health and birth equity — a term used to describe efforts to reduce racial and class inequities for new mothers and their infants — have become particular interests, intensified by the overturning of Roe v. Wade. “I’ve been pregnant many times — I’ve had a late-term loss, early term losses, and I have a child,” said Topol, who lives in Brooklyn with her husband and 10-year-old daughter. “I feel like it’s a way to hold the loss and let that help inform my next steps on a very personal level.”Ensemble members in “Novenas for a Lost Hospital,” a play marking the death of St. Vincent’s Hospital. “A seed was planted,” Topol said of her work on this 2019 production.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSo now, while preparing to direct a final play for Rattlestick this fall and working on other theater projects, she is taking prerequisite courses and volunteering at a hospital; Rattlestick is beginning a search for her successor, and she hopes that she will overlap with that person and then leave sometime next year, before starting nursing school next summer or fall.“I’ve only been a theater person,” she said. “Here I am, I’m waking up at 4:30 a.m. to study science and memorize muscles and bones and I’m dissecting a pig. It’s all kinds of things I never thought I would do.”Topol said there were other factors as well. She said that she has thought about “how long should anybody stay in any kind of leadership position,” and that the civil rights unrest of 2020 had intensified that thinking: “Part of the reckoning was about who is running companies, where does power lay, and how much power sharing is there — defining what the trajectory of the field is.”“There are other wonderful artists who can take over Rattlestick and do a beautiful job leading it and imagine things I haven’t been able to imagine,” she added.As the paths of Topol and Rattlestick diverge, she’s interested in highlighting the theater’s survival and growth, and its commitment to a smooth transition.Dael Orlandersmith in her one-woman show “Until the Flood,” which was produced at Rattlestick in 2018 during Topol’s tenure.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe company, founded in 1994, is small — its annual prepandemic budget was $1.2 million, of which 80 percent was raised from foundations and donors — but has consistently attracted attention for its ambitious work, including not only Majok’s early play, but also work by Annie Baker, Samuel D. Hunter, Dael Orlandersmith and Heidi Schreck. The theater describes its mission, in part, as prompting “social change,” and much of its programming reflects that; its first post-shutdown play was “Ni Mi Madre,” a much-praised autobiographical examination of culture and sexuality by Arturo Luís Soria, whom the theater has now commissioned to write a follow-up.“What I’ve loved about Rattlestick is we’re small and scrappy and authentic and take chances and aren’t burdened by huge institutional issues of massive unaffordable space — we’re like a motorcycle, not a cruise ship,” Topol said. “You don’t get the luxury of the cruise ship — you get the scrappy ride of the motorcycle — but you get the flexibility to be able to twist and turn as things go.”Topol said she feels comfortable leaving in part because the theater now has a fully financed plan to redo its performance space, which it rents harmoniously from St. John’s in the Village, an Episcopal church. The theater space, where it has been located since 1999, has had two serious challenges: The only way to get there is to climb a narrow stairway, which means the theater is not accessible to those who can’t navigate those stairs; and the only way to use the bathroom is to traverse the stage.Rattlestick has now raised the $4 million — about half from the city — to finance a project that will, at its most basic, add an elevator and patron bathrooms, but will also modernize the entrance and the theater itself by relocating the front door, adding a box office and a small lobby, and removing the raised stage so that the performance and seating areas are flexible, as well as accessible. The theater will be able to seat up to 93 people — about the same as it does now. “It’s not ‘bigger is better,’” Topol said. “It feels like we are really right-sized for the work that we are doing.”“I was shocked, but also, as I thought about it, I saw where there was a connection with who she was,” Jeff Thamkittikasem, the chairman of Rattlestick’s board, said of Topol’s move.Dana Golan for The New York TimesThe renovation will allow Rattlestick to stay in the West Village, which has become a very pricey area, but is the neighborhood where the theater has long been located and is determined to remain. Rattlestick also shares a rehearsal space on Gansevoort Street with three other theater organizations. “It is critical to maintain places for artists in our neighborhoods,” said the renovation’s architect, Marta Sanders.Construction, Topol hopes, will begin next summer, pending city approval, and would last a year; during construction, the theater would present work at other locations. The theater is continuing to raise money for programming and operations.The chairman of the theater’s board, Jeff Thamkittikasem, acknowledged surprise at Topol’s move, but said he had become supportive.“When I first heard about it, I tried to talk her out of it, but my mom is a nurse, and at some point it switched for me and I saw that connection about wanting to care for others in a much more direct, physical way,” he said. “I was shocked, but also, as I thought about it, I saw where there was a connection with who she was.”Thamkittikasem said the organization is healthy and that the board has retained a search firm to look for Topol’s successor. He added, “Rattlestick is in a very strong place since Daniella took over — we’re stronger financially, we have good connections to foundations and funders, we have an active board and a solid staff, and our reputation has grown.” More

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      ‘Mister Miss America’ Review: A Fight for the Crown

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      The first male contestant in his small-town beauty pageant is determined to win hearts, minds and the crown, in this solo play from the writer and performer Neil D’Astolfo.A boy forced to dim his flame discovers a local beauty pageant that sets off a spark in him again. For gay men of a certain stripe who make icons of tenacious pop divas and glamorous grandes dames, it’s a tale as old as Broadway. The self-proclaimed unicorn is now an unlikely contender in that contest, but he’s determined to win both the crown and the hearts of the town’s residents.In “Mister Miss America,” which opened on Monday night at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, the writer and performer Neil D’Astolfo takes us behind the scenes and into the Southern-fried confidence of Derek Tyler Taylor, a flamboyant and fast-tongued trailblazer. Derek, in his mid-20s, is the first male contestant in an old-fashioned Virginia pageant, and though the rules have been bent just enough to let him compete, the extent of his welcome remains uncertain.D’Astolfo turns the audience into Derek’s confessor and personal cheering squad, as the other beauty queen hopefuls in this solo play, produced by All For One Theater, are talked about but not seen. He enters his dressing room shrieking with excitement, but it soon becomes clear that not everyone is as thrilled with Derek’s participation.If a beauty pageant is just a dog show for people, this one is “tops-to-bottoms full of bitches,” quips Derek, who works as an assistant manager at a Petco. His competitors include a top-seeded rival whose bigotry and ultimate hypocrisy represent the obstacles in the way of the sashaying hero’s journey.Derek’s brashness is, of course, a cover for the hurt of rejection. His mom at least stopped throwing things at him when he learned to bottle himself up, he jokes. Like any savvy pageant participant, Derek is poised and in control even as he reveals the bruises beneath his bravado. In a menagerie of toy canines, Derek is a wolf in a sapphire tuxedo with the voracious will of Patti LuPone devouring “Rose’s Turn.”Derek’s elaborate obsession with LuPone, like many of the gay cultural touchstones in “Mister Miss America,” is not exactly original territory. Indeed, as much as Derek cuts a rebellious figure on the small-town stage, his allusions and affinities as a gay man are down-the-middle, almost to the point of cliché.Still, D’Astolfo’s writing crackles with delightful turns of phrase that slip by almost before they register. “Hand to Gaga, I didn’t know it would be such a fuss to enter this here competition,” he swears. But could anyone this fabulous be an abomination? “No way, Mary J!”D’Astolfo is also an immensely likable performer. As Derek, he is haughty but vulnerable, an unselfconscious and assured storyteller, whether tearing into his adversaries or recalling an ill-fated bus trip to see LuPone perform in “Gypsy.” He can land a punchline with his eyes alone.Under the direction of Tony Speciale, the production flips easily between backstage confessionals and the showdown out front, where Derek’s talent is the beloved gay art of lip-syncing. Lighting by Travis McHale does scene transporting work on an uncluttered gray set by the designer Se Hyun Oh, while costumes by Hunter Kaczorowski, sparkling on a rack to the side, lend Derek do-it-yourself flash and flair.As up-to-the-minute as D’Astolfo’s pop references may be, there’s a retro quality to both the setting and the character that feels a step behind the times. If a country boy were looking for inspiration, the only beauty pageant of any relevance he would find on TV in the past decade is one made especially for people like him and hosted by RuPaul.Turning trauma into opulent self-presentation has long been a favored form of queer artists, and it’s more popular than ever. The global “Drag Race” franchise has turned the act of defying gender norms through polished performance and the excavation of personal hardship into mainstream entertainment. That means there’s plenty of appetite for a show like “Mister Miss America” — and that it has a lot more to measure up to than a backwater dog and pony show.Mister Miss AmericaThrough Aug. 7 at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Manhattan; afo.nyc. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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      Review: ‘Addressless’ Is on the Streets and in Your Home

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      This hybrid of theater and game asks us to consider homelessness empathetically but can’t overcome the friction between education and entertainment.In June, after a series of court battles, 60-some men were moved out of the Lucerne, an Upper West Side hotel that had served as a shelter during the first year of the pandemic. Their presence had divided the neighborhood, with some residents starting a Facebook group to complain about how the men had decreased their quality of life, even as there was no discernible uptick in the local crime rate.One of the Lucerne’s residents, Shams DaBaron, who first became experienced homelessness as a child, found himself representing his fellows. At a rally in September 2020, he spoke up, saying: “Despite our being homeless we can do the right thing. Don’t criminalize us, don’t dehumanize us, let us all come together with both sides and make this thing work.”These days DaBaron has found a different way to get people to come together. A virtual one. He is a star of “Addressless,” a theater and video game hybrid presented by Rattlestick Playwrights Theater. DaBaron plays Wallace, a single father in the shelter system. (DaBaron is housed now, but the character’s experiences mirror his own.) The other homeless characters are Joey Auzenne’s Louis, a veteran with untreated back problems; and Bianca Norwood’s Josie, a queer teen runaway. The “games master” is Hope Beaver, a licensed social worker at a family shelter on the Lower East Side.A creation of Martin Boross, a Budapest-based director, and the playwright Jonathan Payne, “Addressless” has empathy in mind. Its subtitle is “A Walk in Our Shoes.” By splitting its audience into three groups, each assigned to a particular character, it asks us to participate in that character’s life choices. As often as not, all of the choices on offer are bad ones. The goal is to leave your character with enough money and enough health points to enter a housing lottery. Staged via Zoom, the show alternates live performances and breakout-room chats with amateurish filmed sequences.((“Joey Auzenne as Louis and Hope Beaver as Social Worker of “Addressless”))via The Chamber GroupThere’s an obvious tension between wanting to excite empathy for the homeless and making a game of the situation, reducing a person’s life to “health points” and a cash amount. (A subtler tension: participating in a show about the housing crisis from the comfort of your own home.) “Addressless” takes pains to show that people experiencing homelessness are more than just numbers on a caseworker’s docket. Then the show shrinks them down to numbers anyway.Winning becomes paramount, the unhoused person’s experience less so. Auzenne and Norwood are trained actors and able to disappear into character. That DaBaron and Beaver are not only intensifies this friction between entertainment and education.The game often doesn’t play fair. (Then again, a state that has enshrined the right to shelter into law and yet doesn’t provide it isn’t playing fair either.) More irksome, “Addressless” doesn’t follow through on its choose-you-own-adventure premise. In the show’s first section, participants can choose where characters sleep — on the streets, in a shelter, on a friend’s couch. After that, the characters choose for themselves. Not always wisely. But there’s poignancy in some of the dilemmas, like whether Louis, who is injured on the job during a trainee period, should go back to work, risking his health, or take time off to heal, risking his continued employment.For many housed New Yorkers, day-to-day interactions with homeless people will be defined by arm’s-length benevolence (donating to a food or coat drive) or inconvenience (panhandlers on the subway). Even if “Addressless” sometimes sacrifices deep identification to its game structure, it wants us to do better, and the show’s chat function provides a list of resources to enable that. Some participants seemed primed to use them.As a Sunday evening show concluded, one woman unmuted herself. “My heart just breaks for everyone who experiences this,” she said.AddresslessStreaming through Feb. 13; rattlestick.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      ‘In the Southern Breeze’ Review: A Dark Night of the Soul

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      In Mansa Ra’s heart-bruised new play, racism is a lethal force that menaces generations of Black American men.The script for Mansa Ra’s heart-bruised new play, “In the Southern Breeze,” at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, has two epigraphs — one from the Amiri Baraka poem “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note,” the other from Martin Luther King Jr.: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”Those opposing impulses — despair and perseverance — duel over the course of this dramatic dark night of the soul, which opens with a nameless contemporary American (Allan K. Washington), named simply Man, arriving home and stripping off the smile he wears, of necessity, in the hostile world outside.It’s the expression he calculates, as a Black man, to signal that he’s both nonthreatening and educated enough not to be messed with. “The Obama Deluxe,” he calls it.That little slam gets a big laugh. Only a few minutes in, humor is already a tension release in a show that will talk of suicide, slavery and the lethal force of racism in Black men’s lives throughout United States history. And Ra, like this show’s excellent cast of five, proves adept at lightning-quick switches between the crushing and the comical.Tormented by anxiety, depression and panic attacks, the isolated Man is struggling to carry on. Submission to the unseen, ever-present noose that hangs over him — “Every Black man’s boogeyman,” he calls it — has begun to seem like a comfort.“Sometimes it beckons me,” he says toward the end of that first scene, which, hearkening back to Baraka’s poem, Ra titles Volume 19. Volume 20 is this play’s other bookend. The longest of the three scenes — the surreal and moving center, in which Man does not appear — is Volume 1.In a handsome production by Christopher D. Betts, all of it takes place on a grassy expanse stretching into the distance, with a spiritual, “Fare Ye Well,” as a solacing aural motif. (The set is by Emmie Finckel, the lighting by Emma Deane, the costumes by Jahise LeBouef and the sound by Kathy Ruvuna.)As the play shifts into Volume 1, the wary, eager Madison (Charles Browning) enters, looking for the caravan that will take him north to meet his wife. It is 1780, as far as he knows, and he is running from slavery, barefoot.But the first person he encounters is Lazarus (Victor Williams), a Tennessee sharecropper from 1892. Then a 1970s Black Panther named Hue (Biko Eisen-Martin) stumbles in, followed shortly after by Tony (Travis Raeburn), a young AIDS activist from the early 1990s. It takes most of them a while to figure out why they’re all gathered there, under that unseen noose, and how many eras have collided.“Hold the phone,” an incredulous Hue says to Madison. “You really a slave?”“Hold the what?” a baffled Madison replies.“In the Southern Breeze” pays tender tribute to previous generations of Black Americans and bears unblinking witness to the white violence that has marred and menaced them. Hearkening back to that quote by Dr. King, it also acknowledges the progress toward justice through the ages.This play is a more formally ambitious, far-reaching work than “Too Heavy for Your Pocket,” with which Ra made his New York debut in 2017, when he was known as Jiréh Breon Holder.What stumps him here, in Volume 20, is how to let his unnamed 21st-century Man reject existential exhaustion in a way that doesn’t seem pat. Like Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s “Pass Over,” rewritten for its recent Broadway run to allow more space for joy, this play wants to illuminate an uplifting path out of pain. But its final section turns muddled and didactic, its poeticism forced.Finding hope, it turns out, is the tricky part.In the Southern BreezeThrough Dec. 12, in person and streaming, at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Manhattan; rattlestick.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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      ‘Ni Mi Madre’ Review: A Son’s Stinging Tribute to His Mother

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      Arturo Luís Soria wrote and stars in a forgiving, yet cleareyed solo show about parental damage done.Enter the playwright, bare-chested and barefoot in a white skirt that skims the floor. Then the skirt becomes an off-the-shoulder dress, and he becomes his mother, in an exuberant dance.It’s a simple transformation into the character, and utterly theatrical. Suddenly there she is, regaling us: Bete, an irresistibly charming, no-nonsense, twice-divorced Brazilian immigrant who, it’s fair to guess, has never won an award for parent of the year.There was, for example, the joke she used to play on her son Arturo when he was small. He would ring the doorbell, and she would answer as if he were a stranger: “I’m sorry, honey, but are you looking for your mother?” Then she would tell him to try next door.Arturo Luís Soria’s autobiographical solo show “Ni Mi Madre,” directed by Danilo Gambini at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in Manhattan, is remarkably unconventional. That’s not because it’s a queer narrative, though it is, or because its mostly English dialogue often slips briefly, without translation, into Portuguese and Spanish, though it does, and works just fine that way.A black-and-white floor in homage to the sidewalk in Ipanema, where Bete grew up. The set is designed by Stephanie Osin Cohen.Andrew Soria/Courtesy of The Rattlestick Playwrights TheaterWhat marks this play as extraordinary in these knee-jerk antagonistic times is its ease with emotional contradiction and discomfort, its willingness to let filial affection persist despite a cleareyed acknowledgment of parental damage done. (In the program, Soria thanks his mother “for not only living the life that I have bastardized on this stage, but for also enduring my retelling of it over and over again for the past decade and a half.”)At 60 minutes, the production is not quite as tight as it could be; its shifts into Bete’s childhood, and other, ghostlier realms don’t always persuade. But Soria, who appeared on Broadway in “The Inheritance,” is a charismatic actor. And it is lovely to return to Rattlestick, where the indoor air moves in a soft, reassuring breeze. (Masks and proof of vaccination are required.)“Ni Mi Madre,” which means “nor my mother,” is about legacy across cultures and generations: what Bete handed down to Arturo, intentionally or not, and what Bete’s mother, who Bete says never wanted to be a parent, handed down to her.But it is also about a straight woman and the queer son she has in some ways always championed — even if, when he came out as bisexual, she in effect told him to pick a side — trying to navigate a world in which straight men hold so much of the power and make so many of the rules.When Bete, an unapologetic believer in using corporal punishment on children, tells of the time she beat Arturo for something it turned out he hadn’t even done, she clings to her reasoning: that his behavior was going to embarrass her in front of her fiancé.“I had three kids, and I was about to marry my third husband,” she says. “What was this man going to think about me?”In keeping with Bete’s philosophy that walls should be the color of “suggestive foods,” “Ni Mi Madre” has a papaya-orange set (by Stephanie Osin Cohen). Its black-and-white patterned floor is in homage to the sidewalk in Ipanema, where she grew up, and the painting upstage center is of the mother goddess Iemanjá.Andrew Soria/Courtesy of The Rattlestick Playwrights TheaterAndrew Soria/Courtesy of The Rattlestick Playwrights TheaterAgainst this vivid backdrop, and beneath Krista Smith’s saturated lighting, Bete’s appearance is wisely almost unembellished: hair loose, little makeup, minimal jewelry (costume design is by Haydee Zelideth).Soria gives a performance of matching restraint, which is vital to safeguarding Bete’s humanity. As funny and over the top as she is, she never slips into caricature. And so we can feel for both her and her son.“Ni Mi Madre” is an aching heart wrapped in laughter and a long white dress — an offering of understanding and forgiveness, presented on the altar of bruised inheritance.Ni Mi MadreThrough Sept. 19, in person and livestreamed, at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Manhattan; 212-627-2556, rattlestick.org. Running time: 1 hour. More

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      Theater to Stream: ‘Wicked in Concert,’ Christopher Lloyd as Lear

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      An all-star lineup sings Stephen Schwartz’s indelible score, and Doc from “Back to the Future” is intriguing casting for a Berkshires production.Was there a “Hunger Games”-style backstage contest for who got to sing “Popular” and “Defying Gravity”?That was my first question when I saw the lineup for the PBS special “Wicked in Concert,” hosted by the original stars Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth, on Aug. 29. My personal pick for the first song is Alex Newell, who turns up alongside Mario Cantone, Gavin Creel, Ariana DeBose, Cynthia Erivo, Jennifer Nettles, Amber Riley, Ali Stroker and more. This tribute to Stephen Schwartz’s songs should keep fans happy until the show returns to Broadway (Sept. 14) and hits the big screen (eventually, one day, possibly-maybe, who knows).Quick: What performance so stunned Sheryl Lee Ralph that she described her reaction like so? “You ever see the cartoons where the lion roars, and the people are pinned to the wall? It was like that.” The answer — Jennifer Holliday’s in “Dreamgirls” — can also be found at PBS, where “Broadway: Beyond the Golden Age” is now streaming. The documentary covers musicals from 1959 to the early ’80s and includes interviews with Carol Burnett, Liza Minnelli and Dick Van Dyke. pbs.org.Lloyd as LearAdmit it: You are curious to know whether Christopher Lloyd, still best known for his comedic roles in “Taxi” and the “Back to the Future” trilogy, could pull off “King Lear.” Maybe not curious enough to travel all the way to Lenox, Mass., where the actor recently took on the daunting title role outdoors, but streaming the show from home is an easier way to find out what went down in the Berkshires. Nicole Ricciardi’s production for Shakespeare & Company earned wildly divergent reviews, which is often a sign that at least something is going on. Through Aug. 28; theatermania.stream.If you are really feeling adventurous, head to the Hollywood Fringe, which takes a “free-for-all approach,” unfettered by that tyrannical institution known as a “curative body.” Will it be exciting, terrifying, or both? Just select “streaming” as a filter, take a deep breath and dive in. Through Aug. 29; hollywoodfringe.org.‘George M. Cohan Tonight!’The title character of this biographical show is not a household name, unless the house hosts a coven of musical-theater experts. Yet if you have ever been on Times Square, chances are good you have at least glimpsed a representation of Cohan: It’s his statue next to the TKTS booth. Cohan was such an influential songwriter, director and producer in the Broadway of the early 20th century that he has earned two biopics, “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “George M!” — portrayed by James Cagney in 1942 and Joel Grey in 1970, respectively, which is a quite a range of actors — and this bio-show, which premiered at Irish Repertory Theater in 2006. The company is now bringing back an abridged digital version of Chip Deffaa’s musical, starring Jon Peterson. Through Aug. 29; irishrep.org.‘Bagdad Cafe’The indefatigable British director Emma Rice is a master at translating films to the stage — which is a lot harder than you might think. Only a few of those productions have crossed the Atlantic, most notably the lovely “Brief Encounter,” which made it to Broadway in 2010. Now comes her adaptation of “Bagdad Cafe,” Percy and Eleonore Adlon’s 1987 art-house staple, in which two women form a bond in a Mojave roadside joint. It was an unlikely project (a West German production set in America and starring the great CCH Pounder long before she found television fame), boosted by an unlikely hit song, “Calling You.” The show is in person at the Old Vic and streaming for a limited time as part of the company’s famed In Camera series. Aug. 25-28; oldvictheatre.com.‘The Blackest Battle’Emmanuel Kyei-Baffour, left, and Gary Perkins in “The Blackest Battle.”Theater AllianceIn this new hip-hop musical by Psalmayene 24 and nick tha 1da, Bliss (Gary Perkins) and Dream (Imani Branch) fall in love in a dystopian America. Unfortunately, they belong to enemy factions that engage in fiery rap battles, which goes to show that futuristic America is just like Shakespearean Verona of “Romeo and Juliet.” Raymond O. Caldwell’s production is presented by Theater Alliance, in Washington, D.C. Through Aug. 29; theateralliance.com.‘Ni Mi Madre’The intimate Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, in New York City, has decided to expand it footprint by making the shows in its new season available in person and online. First out of the gate is this solo, written and performed by Arturo Luís Soria (who was in the Broadway cast of “The Inheritance”). The story, inspired by Soria’s own mother, looks at the relationship between a parent and her queer son. Through Sept. 19; rattlestick.org.Two Leading Men Open UpBack in 1996, Adam Pascal brought some rock hunkiness to musical theater when he played a guitar-strumming bohemian who made shapeless sweaters look sexy in “Rent.” Pascal went on to build a solid career through shows as diverse as “Aida” and “Something Rotten!” Now he looks back in wonder in his concert “Adam Pascal … So Far.” Through Aug. 24; stellartickets.com.Another Broadway star exploring solo waters is Norbert Leo Butz, who a few months ago found himself in Vancouver, shooting the science-fiction series “Debris.” (He plays a C.I.A. operative, and if you think that’s a stretch for this amiable star, check out his expert turn as a loser marina owner in “Bloodline.”) The gig left Butz time to work out new arrangements for some of his favorite pop tunes, which he’s now performing in his acoustic concert “Torch Songs for a Pandemic” at Feinstein’s/54 Below. Happily, one of the performances is livestreaming. Aug. 21; 54below.com.‘Lava’The British press showered Ronke Adekoluejo with praise for her performance in Benedict Lombe’s “Lava,” a continent-spanning monologue that explores issues pertaining to identity via the travails of a British-Congolese woman. The show recently had an in-person run at the Bush Theater and worldwide audiences can now check out a streaming version. Aug. 16-21; bushtheatre.co.uk. More