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    ‘Arden of Faversham’ Review: An Elizabethan Noir Lost in the Fog

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    Red Bull Theater’s attempt to update this 1592 true-crime story falls flat.“Arden of Faversham,” a 1592 play that some speculate was written by Shakespeare, is an early example of a true-crime narrative, tracing the real murder of Thomas Arden by his wife and her lover. This production by Red Bull Theater aims for a contemporary parallel, but its staging, noirish and to the point, fumbles the original’s balladry and lands cold instead of coldblooded.The story, adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher and Kathryn Walat, has numerous gears, and they all seem to be turning in different directions. Shortly after being granted a lordly wealth of land, Arden (Thomas Jay Ryan) travels to London while bemoaning the fact that everyone knows his wife, Alice (Cara Ricketts), is cheating with the lowly tailor Mosby (Tony Roach). What’s less known, though not by much, is her plan to kill Arden, for which she separately recruits his servant, Michael (Zachary Fine, a comically anxious live-wire), and Clarke (Joshua David Robinson), a painter who knows of poison oils.For fun, Alice pits Michael and Clarke against each other; whoever kills Arden first will get to marry Susan (Emma Geer), her maid and Mosby’s sister. For overkill, Alice brings onboard the Widow Greene (a Medusa-eyed Veronica Falcón) who, smarting after the recent loss of her land (to Arden) and husband (to death), hires two bumbling henchmen to go after her new landlord as well.The plan humorously goes awry. And this production, staged by Jesse Berger at the Lucille Lortel Theater in Manhattan, doesn’t fare much better in its efforts to juggle Renaissance tragedy and crime noir, à la a Coen brothers-esque farce with feminist angles.Some of the thematic retooling pays off, like the flipping of Widow Greene’s gender (from the play’s original male Farmer), creating a kindred desire between Widow Greene and Alice to survive in a male-dominated world. Reza Behjat’s lighting nicely evokes Old Hollywood crime.Other updates, mainly playing up Alice’s agency and self-awareness, come with a price: We lose a caricature and gain a realistic portrayal, but cede the foundation upon which the initial narrative is built. In her portrayal of Alice, Rickett’s lust is palpable, but Alice and Mosby do not have a likable, or even pervertedly alluring, relationship, so their supposed crime of passion seems anything but that.There’s not only discordance in Greg Pliska’s music, which flips from jazz to period music, but also in Mika Eubanks’s costumes: a thematic free-for-all that, in one scene, throws Arden’s pinstripe suit into battle with his wife’s heavily corseted get-up. With its high wooden beams, Christopher and Justin Swader’s appealing single set recalls both a Western hunting lodge and an Elizabethan thrust stage.But in a story with as high a potential for farce, this “Arden” misses most opportunities to capitalize on its built-in momentum. Alice’s fits of rage, as she grows impatient with each failed murder attempt, should be funny for the audience. Yet Berger’s direction has little sense of comedic positioning or calibration. Alice’s outbursts, like the production, leave us feeling mostly indifferent.Arden of FavershamThrough April 1 at the Lucille Lortel Theater, Manhattan; redbulltheater.com. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. More

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      How Female Playwrights Are Adapting, and Revamping, ‘Macbeth’

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      With “Macbeth” adaptations like “Peerless,” the inner lives of young women come into focus.When the playwright Jiehae Park was in high school, applying for college was a competitive sport. One of her friends, she recounted recently, applied to every Ivy League college and only got into one: the University of Pennsylvania. Instead of feeling joy, her friend started weeping, bemoaning what she considered to be the inferior Ivy. “Which is a bananas thing to say,” Park noted.For her part, Park went to Amherst, not an Ivy League school. But that high school experience stayed with her, becoming the inspiration for “Peerless,” a “Macbeth” adaptation about twin sisters who are so determined to get into an elite college that they resort to murder. This Primary Stages production, onstage at 59E59 Theaters through Sunday, follows the major plot points of “Macbeth,” but the setting and story couldn’t be more different: the cutthroat environment of college admissions among the students at a Midwestern high school.Each year brings new stagings of Shakespeare’s plays, but a few recent works, inspired by “Macbeth,” have stood out because they were written by female playwrights who refocused the story on the inner lives of young women. In addition to “Peerless,” there are Sophie McIntosh’s “Macbitches,” about a group of college students who backstab one another in order to get the lead role in a school play, and “Mac Beth,” by Erica Schmidt, who condensed the text to 90 minutes and set her work in an all-girls high school.In “Peerless,” ruthless competition and the toxicity of the model minority myth are among the issues addressed. The twins, who are Asian American, decide to kill the competition: the Native American and Black students they believe unfairly got their spots. This scenario speaks to the objections to affirmative action, making the play especially timely as the Supreme Court considers race-based college admissions. Alexis Soloski called it a “sly and polished adaptation” in her review for The Times.The sisters “are the logical result of the system,” Park said. “It’s so effective at setting up ways in which groups that have less power, but perhaps more power than another group that has even less power, will stand against those less powerful groups. But the people with the most power? They’re just chilling.”From left, Caroline Orlando, Morgan Lui, Natasja Naarendorp, Laura Clare Browne and Marie Dinolan in “Macbitches,” Sophie McIntosh’s riff on “Macbeth” that ran at the Chain Theater this summer.Wesley VolcyThe actor Sasha Diamond said starring in “Peerless” — and previously in “Teenage Dick,” Mike Lew’s adaptation of “Richard III” — has helped her to feel included in a part of the literary canon that she’s always felt excluded from. “The way that we are educated as Americans is with a Western European literary history,” said Diamond, who is Chinese and white. “The texts that we draw from and the things that we learn are not about us. And so when these playwrights adapt the stories that have been taught to us as ‘the canon,’” she said, and then make them specific to “our cultures or the world that we live in, it is a reclaiming. And it is empowering.”Revisiting the Tragedy of ‘Macbeth’Shakespeare’s tale of a man who, step by step, cedes his soul to his darkest impulses continues to inspire new interpretations.On Stage: Earlier this year, Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga starred in Sam Gold’s take on the play. Despite its star power, the production felt oddly uneasy, our critic wrote.Lady Macbeth: In Gold’s revival, Negga, who was nominated for a Tony Award, infused the character, and her marriage to Macbeth, with intensity, urgency and vitality.Onscreen: In the “Tragedy of Macbeth,” Joel Coen’s crackling adaptation of the Scottish Play, Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand embodied a toxic power couple with mastery.Break a Leg: Shakespeare’s play is known for the rituals and superstitions tied to it. How does the supernatural retain its hold on the theater world?Schmidt said the mixture of magic and murders most foul led her to write “Mac Beth,” which Red Bull Theater produced. “Macbeth,” she said, is “so satisfying, and it has so much dark comedy in it that people keep coming back to it.” (In her Times review, Laura Collins-Hughes remarked on the “unusual immediacy” of a production that made the characters “we know from ‘Macbeth’ legible in new ways.”)The playwrights all agreed that a woman’s perspective is a natural fit for Shakespeare’s play about power and corruption. After all, Lady Macbeth is arguably the more ruthless of the pair: she encourages Macbeth to murder the king. “Lady Macbeth is the most interesting person. She’s the best part of the play,” said Park, whose “Peerless” has been produced around the country since its 2015 premiere at Yale Repertory Theater.For McIntosh, whose “Macbitches” was presented at the Chain Theater in August, these retellings consider what ambition can look like in women. “Male ambition is almost universally respected to a certain extent,” McIntosh said. “With female ambition, there’s almost an expectation of pettiness to it. And the expectation of, ‘She doesn’t know what she’s getting herself into. She’s being needy. She’s being catty. She’s being selfish.’”These adaptations also embrace the violence of the source material. Macbeth kills the king, then his rivals, and a child. Eventually, Macbeth is also killed and Lady Macbeth commits suicide. Schmidt wanted to examine young people’s susceptibility to violence, and drew inspiration from school shootings and the so-called Slender Man stabbing in 2014 (the case in which two 12-year-old girls stabbed a classmate multiple times after luring her to a park). In “Mac Beth,” a group of teenage girls meet in a field to do their own version of “Macbeth.” What begins as playacting becomes more gruesome, with the girls eventually killing a schoolmate.“I feel that we all have this capacity within us for killing people, that this is part of our nature as humans,” said Schmidt, whose play has also been performed around the country. “And I think that it’s really difficult for people to accept that or to believe that or to see that in themselves. And so when you have all these school shootings, or you have young women behaving in this extremely violent way, suddenly it forces you to think about what’s happening in a different way.”Lily Santiago in Erica Schmidt’s “Mac Beth,” which had an acclaimed run at Red Bull Theater in 2019.Richard Termine for The New York TimesWith “Macbitches,” McIntosh, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, wanted to deliver contemporary social commentary, citing the toxic power dynamics she said she witnessed between students and faculty members at the college. As she met other young artists after graduating, she said, “I was really surprised to hear that so many of their experiences paralleled ours so closely.”In her riff on “Macbeth,” McIntosh dispenses with plot points, instead evoking similar themes — abuse of power and the price of ambition. A group of young women audition for a college production of “Macbeth,” but when the freshman gets the coveted role of Lady Macbeth, the others become jealous. As the play escalates toward violence, it is clear that something is rotten in the state of the drama program, with abuses of power on the part of the faculty.It’s “Macbeth” by way of #MeToo. And Juan A. Ramírez, in his Times review, commended it for juggling “headier themes while remaining a lively college drama.” McIntosh, who served as dramaturge for a college production of “Macbeth,” said she wanted to highlight how ambition in the entertainment industry can be used to excuse all kinds of misbehavior. She also wanted to call out the sentiment that “art has to be suffering,” she said. “If you defy that, it means that you’re not a good actor, you don’t have what it takes, you’re not committed to the craft.”These reimagined productions of Shakespeare haven’t come without criticism, though. During a production of “Mac Beth” in Seattle, Schmidt recalls audience members laughing at the actresses playing male characters. “Another source of criticism was like, ‘Why isn’t there something explaining to us why they’re doing the play?’” Schmidt said, which to her feels like a “devaluing of the teenage voice, or the young woman.”Park said some audience members have issues with her protagonists being young Asian American women, and of her portrayal of Asian Americans who are unapologetically villainous. “It’s so tied up in the model minority expectation, of who’s allowed to be anything other than perfect,” she said. “It’s a legit question of, are we at the point culturally where there’s space for more complex representations? I hope so.” More

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      Review: ‘The Alchemist,’ a Play in Search of Comedy Gold

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      Red Bull Theater brings on the cons and their marks in this adaptation of the 17th-century Ben Jonson work.Let’s face it: Some people don’t just ask to be conned, they practically beg for it. Their greed, be it for money, sex or power, makes them vulnerable to the most extraordinary fabrications: the more outlandish the promises, the harder they fall for them. Conveniently, their hubris and self-confidence shelter them from the fact that they are gullible idiots.Such perfect marks are matched with perfect swindlers — shrewd, resourceful, prone to fart jokes — in the Ben Jonson comedy “The Alchemist,” now being revived by the Red Bull company. Naturally, shenanigans and slapstick ensue, spiced with an abundance of saucy double, and sometimes single entendres.For the occasion, Red Bull has reunited the team behind its 2017 hit adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s “The Government Inspector”: the playwright Jeffrey Hatcher, who translated Jonson’s dense Jacobean text into a vernacular that is easier on 21st-century New York ears, and the director Jesse Berger, who seems to have never met a door that could not be slammed in a hurry. The pairing is felicitous, though the result is not as consistently funny as their earlier show, especially in the slack second act. Admittedly, very little is.After his master leaves plague-infested London for his home in the country, “for he could well afford to,” the butler, Face (Manoel Felciano), and his accomplices Subtle (Reg Rogers) and Dol Common (Jennifer Sánchez) use the now-empty city house to entertain a series of visitors ripe for the fleecing.There is, for example, Dapper, who wants a good-luck charm to improve his gambling odds and is made to believe a simple flea, conveniently near-invisible, will do the trick. The expert comic actor Carson Elrod fleshes out Dapper with a veritable arsenal of mimicry and affectations that make his every appearance a delight.Other targets are more satirically pointed, like the pious Ananias (Stephen DeRosa), who is from “a Protestant sect banished to Holland for the crime of being perfect,” or the excellently named Sir Epicure Mammon (Jacob Ming-Trent, in fine form), who covets the philosopher’s stone that could turn any metal into gold — Jonson’s approach is here very similar to that of Molière.From left, Jacob Ming-Trent and Manoel Felciano in “The Alchemist.”Carol RoseggSir Mammon’s appetites are boundless, and he is bewitched by the suggestion that a single mystery word can trigger the comely Dol into a carnal frenzy. “He that makes the stone must be virtuous, he that buys it, not really,” he says. “Tis the genius of Capitalism.”Hatcher dispenses such anachronisms judiciously — a joke referring to the James Bond universe is milked for all it’s worth, especially visually — but mostly he avoids the trap of over-relying on them for easy laughs. (The modern model of a classic play being jolted into the present remains David Ives’s “The School for Lies,” a dizzying rewriting of Molière’s “The Misanthrope.”)The dialogue often zings, and Berger orchestrates the farcical comings and goings on Alexis Distler’s bi-level set at the requisite madcap pace — at the performance I attended, the excellent Rogers (who played the director of the musical-within-the-musical in “Tootsie”) ad-libbed a line about all the stairs he had to climb.But the show is better at setting up the plot than at resolving it when we return from intermission — it is, after all, easier to throw a bunch of pins up in the air than it is to juggle them.Luckily, the cast members continue to exert themselves relentlessly in the service of laughter, from mere exaggerated inflections to all-out clowning. If acting is a form of conning, theatergoers, too, are willing victims.The AlchemistThrough Dec. 19 at the Red Bull Theater, Manhattan; redbulltheater.com. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      Theater to Stream: 'Notes on Grief' and Russell Brand's Take on Shakespeare

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      An adaptation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Notes on Grief,” Russell Brand’s take on Shakespeare and a two-day event anchored by a Milo Rau film are among the highlights.Productions from the multidisciplinary Manchester International Festival often end up traveling around the world, making pit stops at well-heeled performing arts centers. This year, we don’t have to wait, as the festival is making some of its offerings available online — an approach we hope will become commonplace among international gatherings.Of particular interest to theater audiences is “Notes on Grief,” Rae McKen’s adaptation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s essay-turned-book about her father’s sudden death. The show is bound to be compared to the Joan Didion memoir-turned-play “The Year of Magical Thinking.”One day in June 2020, Adichie learned that her father — with whom she had chatted just a day earlier — died. “My brother Chuks called to tell me, and I came undone,” she wrote in an essay that The New Yorker published in September. McKen’s show stars Uche Abuah, Michelle Asante and Itoya Osagiede. Audience members lucky enough to be in Manchester can see it in real life through July 17, and the rest of us can watch from home from July 15-18. mif.co.uk.‘Our Little Lives: Shakespeare and Me’Those who associate Russell Brand only with his excesses and shock tactics may be surprised by his quieter mien these days — he’s become the kind of guy who occasionally finds life lessons in sonnets. He is now reprising a one-man show he conceived with the director Ian Rickson and developed in 2018, in which he uses Shakespeare’s writings to illuminate his own story. Brand promises an appearance by his dog, Bear (perhaps timed to his exit, so he can be pursued by Bear). Through July 14; live-now.com‘A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder’CollaborAzian is streaming an abridged version of this Tony Award-winning musical from 2013 with an all-Asian American cast and production team. Karl Josef Co takes on Monty Navarro, who sets out to kill multiple members of the D’Ysquith family, all of them to be portrayed — often in lightning-fast succession — by Thom Sesma. It should be interesting to see how the director Alan Muraoka and his actors handle the show’s high-farcical style online. Look also for a special appearance by Lea Salonga. July 15-22; collaborazian.com‘I Hate It Here’Last year, Studio Theater presented the Chicago playwright Ike Holter’s anthology of vignettes as an audio drama; now the Goodman Theater is producing it as a fully staged livestream, directed by Lili-Anne Brown. The stories cover various aspects of life during the peak of the pandemic year, touching on Covid-19, racism and activism, and possibly even hope. July 15-18; goodmantheatre.orgThe New Solidarity: Art, Organizing and Radical PoliticsPresented by various institutions and organizations across the country, including the Foundry Theater in New York, this two-day event is anchored by a streaming presentation of the Milo Rau film “The New Gospel.” Rau, an audacious Swiss director whose production company “for theater, film and social sculpture” is called the International Institute of Political Murder, set the Passion of Christ in the context of 21st-century conflicts about migration; the Jesus character is played by the activist and writer Yvan Sagnet, who was born in Cameroon and then later moved to Italy to study. Rau will also participate in a couple of panels: “How are artists seizing power today?” and “How are artists and organizers building solidarity between art and movements?” (Sagnet will participate in the latter one as well). July 9-10; howlround.com‘Lines in the Dust’Nikkole Salter emerged in 2005 with the play “In the Continuum,” which she and Danai Gurira wrote and starred in. Since then, Salter continues to make theater that inspires and engages, stirs and advocates. The New Normal Rep company is reviving her 2014 play “Lines in the Dust,” in which a working-class New Jersey mother alters her residency paperwork so her daughter can attend a good school. July 8-Aug. 8; https://www.newnormalrep.org/next-up‘Silent’Pat Kinevane in “Silent.” Ste MurrayThe respected Dublin company Fishamble celebrates the 10th anniversary of one of its biggest hits, “Silent,” from the writer-performer Pat Kinevane, with a virtual American mini-tour of a filmed version: It’s presented first by Odyssey Theater Ensemble in Los Angeles (July 9-11) then by Solas Nua in Washington (July 11-18). Kinevane portrays a mentally ill homeless man who emulates the silent movie star Rudolph Valentino. Praising “Silent” in The New York Times, Ben Brantley wrote that “there is breath and blood to spare in this carefully wrought production.” fishamble.comDiscover Imitating the DogThe explosion of streaming theater last year allowed us to discover many artists doing stellar work in their corners of the world. One such outfit is Britain’s Imitating the Dog, whose shows make inventive use of multimedia techniques and translate remarkably well online. Luckily the company remains proactive in making its catalog available. Check out, for example, “Dr Blood’s Old Travelling Show,” from October 2020, or the collection of shorts “Street,” which smartly spruces up the aesthetics of documentary theater. http://www.imitatingthedog.co.uk/at-home/2021 Short New Play Festival: RestorationRed Bull Theater, in New York, has made a name with such zippy revivals as “The Government Inspector,” which gave Michael Urie a golden opportunity to display his comic timing, but the company is not stuck in the past. For this year’s edition of its festival dedicated to short new plays, Red Bull commissioned a work from José Rivera (“Cloud Tectonics” and the Academy Award-nominated screenplay for “The Motorcycle Diaries”) and selected six entries from hundreds of open submissions. The winning playwrights are Constance Congdon, Rosslyn Cornejo, George LaVigne, David Lefkowitz, Abigail C. Onwunali and Charlotte Rahn-Lee, and their pieces should be in good hands with the directors Margot Bordelon and Timothy Douglas. July 12-16; redbulltheater.com‘Possible’The Welsh writer and performer Shôn Dale-Jones’s new solo show has been compared to Bo Burnham’s Netflix special “Inside”: both are autobiographical works that explore lockdown life while occasionally reaching further back in time. Dale-Jones refers to digital interactions he’s had in the past year, including WhatsApp group chats and Zoom calls, and includes tough discussions about his mother’s mental well-being. After a livestreamed run, the National Theater Wales production is available on-demand. Through July 13; nationaltheatrewales.orgEast to Edinburgh Goes VirtualEvery year, 59E59 Theaters in New York presents a showcase of productions headed to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. While the United States have made great steps toward a return to a theatrical normal (whatever that might be), the new edition of East to Edinburgh is still virtual, with nine shows you can watch from home. Among the titles that caught my eye is Priyanka Shetty’s docu-theater solo “#Charlottesville,” about the events that roiled the Virginia city in August 2017. Borrowing from Anna Deavere Smith, Shetty built her text from interviews. Other intriguing entries in the showcase include “Testament,” in which Tristan Bernays (“Frankenstein”) imagines what would happen if four biblical characters lived now; and Somebody Jones’s “Black Women Dating White Men,” whose title is an apt description of the show. July 15-July 25; 59e59.org More