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      ‘Clyde’s’ Review: Sometimes a Hero Is More Than Just a Sandwich

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      In Lynn Nottage’s bright new comedy, cooks at a greasy spoon dream of remaking the menu — and their lives.We are living in Greek times — or so you might conclude from the preponderance of Greek tragedies turned out by today’s playwrights. The world they show us is too dark for anything but the cruelest of tales, the bleakest of forms.And no wonder. The systems that control our lives — institutional racism, predatory capitalism, the prison-industrial complex — seem as powerful and implacable as gods. What can humans do about fate, these playwrights suggest, but submit to it and hope to preserve the story?Lynn Nottage has sometimes been one of them. Her two Pulitzer Prizes are for works in which the world and its people are trapped in an abusive relationship. In “Ruined,” women prove to be the real targets in the Congolese civil war. In “Sweat,” steelworkers resisting their union-busting management inexorably wind up busting one another.But Nottage’s delightful new play, “Clyde’s,” which opened at the Helen Hayes Theater on Tuesday, dares to flip the paradigm. Though it’s still about dark things, including prison, drugs, homelessness and poverty, it somehow turns them into bright comedy. In Kate Whoriskey’s brisk and thoroughly satisfying production for Second Stage Theater, we learn that, unlike Oedipus and his mom, people who may have little else nevertheless have choices.Which is not to say the choices are easy. In the kitchen of the truck stop diner that gives the play its title, the cooks making the sandwiches have all served time. Letitia (Kara Young) “got greedy” and stole “some oxy and addy to sell on the side” after breaking into a pharmacy to obtain “seizure medication” for her daughter. Rafael (Reza Salazar) held up a bank but (a) with a BB gun, and (b) only because he wanted to buy his girlfriend a Cavalier King Charles spaniel. We don’t at first get the story of how Montrellous (Ron Cephas Jones) wound up behind bars, but he is so saintly that Letitia, called Tish, believes it must have been elective.In any case, like the others, he has paid the price, and keeps paying it. As the joint’s proprietor, Clyde (Uzo Aduba), enjoys pointing out, she’s the only employer in Reading, Penn., who will hire “morons” like them. She does so not because she too was once incarcerated; don’t accuse her of a soft heart. (Of the crime that landed her in prison the only thing she says is that the last man who tried to hurt her “isn’t around to try again, I made damn sure of that.”) Rather, Clyde has shady reasons to keep the overhead low and the morale even lower.Aduba, far left, as the shady restaurant proprietor Clyde, and her cooks, from left: Reza Salazar, Kara Young, Jones and Edmund Donovan.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn Aduba’s hilarious and scalding performance, Clyde, wearing a succession of skintight don’t-mess-with-me outfits by Jennifer Moeller, is a shape-shifting hellhound, all but breathing fire. (The pyrotechnics are by J&M Special Effects.) Though “not indifferent to suffering,” she tells Montrellous, she doesn’t “do pity,” which is an understatement. Popping up like a demon in a small window between the front and the back of the restaurant, she roars orders and insults; when she emerges, in full glory, among her minions, it is only to exert her fearful, foul-mouthed dominance.Into this uncomfortable equilibrium comes Jason (Edmund Donovan), recently out of prison and covered with white supremacist tattoos. (The other characters, in this production, are Black and Latino.) At first it seems that Jason’s integration into the kitchen will form the story’s spine: Tish quickly warns him that she knows all about “breaking wild white horses.” But it turns out to be less of a spine than a rib. Despite his tats and defenses, Jason is a puppy, fully domesticated before the play is half over.This conception of Jason worried me at first. People who have seen “Sweat” will recognize him as one of the perpetrators of a heinous attack on a Colombian American busboy at the climax of that play, also set in Reading. (Another character suffers a traumatic brain injury in the process.) If Nottage’s aim was to keep “Clyde’s” a comedy, even one about redemption, Jason had to be rebuilt; in the writing though not the performance — Donovan faultlessly negotiates the contradictions — the seams sometimes show.Even if you don’t know “Sweat,” though, “Clyde’s” may slightly cloy. The three other cooks, with their softball crimes, begin to seem a pinch too adorable. Tish, in Young’s superb performance, is a smart, sharp, heavily defended kitten; Rafael, a huggable romantic; Montrellous, an impeccably kind sage — “like a Buddha,” Rafael says, “if he’d grown up in the hood.” Jones fulfills that description perfectly, correcting for the character’s Zen imperturbability with subtle dashes of pain and sacrifice.Still, where’s the action? Another underdeveloped plotline explores the possibility of the diner becoming a destination restaurant. In yet another, a pro forma (but totally heartwarming) romance buds between two of the characters. And the series of fantastical sandwiches Montrellous creates, inspiring the others to make their own as a way of dreaming big, threatens to convert from a leitmotif into an annoyance when it is forced to bear too much meaning. All the cooks have served time. Young, left, plays Tish who stole “some oxy and addy to sell on the side.” And Salazar, as Rafael, held up a bank to buy his girlfriend a Cavalier King Charles spaniel.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYet in “Clyde’s,” Nottage does something shrewd with the obvious underlinings that can sometimes make her meticulously researched plays feel didactic. By putting them into a character whose goal is in fact to educate, and by blowing them up into amusing overstatements, she keeps the play itself from becoming gassy. When Montrellous says that sandwiches like his grilled halloumi on home-baked herb focaccia are “the most democratic of all foods” — or that “this sandwich is my freedom” — we see something about his personality, not just the playwright waving semaphore flags.It also helps that Takeshi Kata’s cleverly expanding set, lit for comedy by Christopher Akerlind, allows Whoriskey to hit the ground running and barely pause for 95 minutes. She leans beautifully into the sweetness of the cooks but also, bending the other way, into the sourness of Clyde, for whom Nottage has written great zingers. When Rafael complains about the rotting Chilean sea bass she expects him to cook, she responds, approximately, “You think Colonel Sanders didn’t fry up a couple of rats to make ends meet?”Playwrights sometimes do the same. In this case the shortcuts were totally worth it; that “Clyde’s” is a comedy does not mean it doesn’t have tragedy baked in. (It was originally called “Floyd’s” — until George Floyd was murdered.) Though it ultimately rejects the Greek model, it is still about gods and mortals. What is Clyde but a greasy-spoon Satan, the diabolical voice seductively whispering “Don’t get too high on hope” to people trying to escape their past?Still, the cooks are in purgatory, not hell. They are not merely victims of fate; they can use their moral imagination to resist the Clydes of this world. That they discover the power of that imagination in the most unlikely way, by making food, is what makes the play funny. The point would be much the same, though, if it weren’t: Sometimes, there’s a good reason you can’t stand the heat. When that happens, get out of the kitchen!Clyde’sThrough Jan. 16 at the Helen Hayes Theater, Manhattan; 2st.com. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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      Broadway Play “Clyde's” Will Be Livestreamed

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      The digital experimentation born of the pandemic shutdown is continuing: the final 16 performances of Lynn Nottage’s “Clyde’s” will be streamed, for $59.The coronavirus closures prompted many theaters around the country to experiment with online offerings. Now, even though theaters have reopened, a new Broadway play is planning to try streaming some performances.Second Stage Theater, a nonprofit that operates a small Broadway house, plans to sell a limited number of real-time, virtual viewings in January for the final 16 performances of “Clyde’s,” a dramedy about a group of ex-cons working at a sandwich shop. The show, by the two-time Pulitzer winner Lynn Nottage, opens Tuesday.The decision to stream some performances, which Second Stage views as an experiment, suggests that some of the survival strategies theaters embraced during the pandemic could have a lasting effect on the art form.“Over the 18 months when we had to pivot, and shift a lot of storytelling to Zoom, that opened up a new door of opportunity for many of us who make theater,” Nottage said. “What we’re hoping is that folks who are reluctant to come out because of the virus, or for whom theater is not accessible, will have access because of this streaming.”They are not aiming for a mass audience. The streams will cost $59, which is the same price as the least expensive ticket at the box office, so as not to undercut in-person sales. (There will also be a $30 ticket for people aged 30 and under, as with in-person performances.)The virtual tickets will be limited in number — probably to around 200 to 300 a performance — because as part of an agreement with labor unions, the theater will cap the number of streaming tickets sold so as not to exceed the total capacity of the theater over the course of the play’s run.The move is significant because, even though the Metropolitan Opera has been streaming performances to cinemas for years, and a number of leading symphony orchestras have long been streaming their concerts, Broadway has been resistant to such a step, in part because of quality concerns, in part because of the cost of compensating artists, and in part because of a fear of eroding the appetite for in-person attendance.In 2016, when BroadwayHD live-streamed a single performance of the Roundabout Theater Company’s revival of “She Loves Me,” the event was so unusual that it was recognized by Guinness World Records; a few months later, the same company also live-streamed a performance of Roundabout’s “Holiday Inn.”The pandemic prompted theaters to take digital work more seriously: with their buildings closed, many Off Broadway and regional theaters, as well as some prominent theaters in Britain, embraced streaming as one way to continue connecting to audiences. There were complications both mundane (which labor unions represent theater artists onscreen?) and existential (what is theater, anyway?), but one upside was increased access for people unlikely to attend in-person performances because of disability, geography or finances.For Broadway shows, there were some limited pandemic experiments with filmed performances, but not livestreaming. A “Hamilton” movie, using footage shot and edited in 2016, was released during the pandemic by a streaming platform, as was a filmed version of David Byrne’s “American Utopia”; the musicals “Come From Away” and “Diana” filmed invitation-only run-throughs during the pandemic, and those filmed performances were also released on streaming platforms.Now, as theaters reopen, some are discussing the pros and cons, as well as the feasibility, of a so-called hybrid model, in which stage shows can be seen either in-person or at home. Second Stage, working with the company Assemble Stream, earlier this fall offered its subscribers an opportunity to livestream some performances of an epistolary Off Broadway play, “Letters of Suresh”; encouraged by that experience, the nonprofit decided to try the hybrid approach for “Clyde’s,” which is its first post-shutdown Broadway show.“In-person activity is our priority, but we’ve learned a lot from the pandemic, as far as finding other ways of engaging with audiences,” said Khady Kamara, the executive director of Second Stage. There are a number of potential audiences — those still leery of public gatherings, those who live outside the New York area, those with a variety of accessibility concerns — and Nottage said she also hopes at some point that the play could be streamed in prisons.Kamara said the theater would livestream “Clyde’s,” which stars Uzo Aduba and Ron Cephas Jones, in real time during performances from Jan. 4 to Jan. 16 — it can’t be watched on demand.Is there a risk that the project will dissuade people from coming to see the show at the theater? “I really believe that the magic of being inside the theater, and being so close to the stage, is not something that goes away,” Kamara said. “I think that most people are still going to want to go with the in-person experience.”The performances will be captured by five to seven cameras mounted by Assemble Stream inside the Helen Hayes Theater; the footage will be edited, remotely, in real time, as with a live television broadcast, according to Katie McKenna, the company’s vice president of marketing and business development.Kamara and McKenna said the theater would not need to remove any seats to accommodate the cameras, and that the cameras would not obstruct any patron’s sightlines; the cameras will be operated remotely. “Our goal is to be as nondisruptive as possible,” McKenna said.Neither party would detail the financing arrangement, but Kamara said, “To begin with, we’re not looking at this as a revenue stream, as much as we’re looking at it as an additional avenue for us to provide access to the work that we put on our stages.”And will Second Stage seek to stream other Broadway shows in the future? Kamara described the “Clyde’s” streaming as a pilot project. “We are learning, and will continue to learn, and we’ll see what the future holds,” she said. “Certainly, if there is a market for it, hopefully we’re able to continue to offer it.” More

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      ‘Letters of Suresh’ Review: Returning to the Fold

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      Rajiv Joseph’s new drama revisits the protagonist, and the metaphoric possibilities of origami, of his earlier play “Animals Out of Paper.”We live in the age of the reboot: an era of reimaginings, spinoffs and sequels upon sequels upon sequels. Theater, with its dependence on adaptation and revival, got there first. But this impulse now extends to new plays, too — “A Doll’s House, Part 2,” Zoom installments of the Apple Family Plays, the way that “Pass Over” riffs on “Waiting for Godot.”So it’s surprising, yet not surprising at all, to sit down at Rajiv Joseph’s “Letters of Suresh,” which opened Tuesday night at Second Stage Theater, and discover a follow-up to “Animals Out of Paper,” his petite and practically perfect dramedy from 2008.A three-character play originally produced as part of Second Stage’s uptown series, “Animals Out of Paper” traced the relationships among Suresh, a teenage origami prodigy who is mentored by Andy, his calculus teacher, and Ilana, the professional origamist that both men fall for. It ended in an unresolved fashion. Joseph (“Guards at the Taj,” “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo”), a playwright who specializes in putting big ideas into small and sparsely populated spaces, isn’t big on resolution. Yet “Animals” had seemed complete enough. I have rarely wondered how Suresh’s life — forgive me, I can’t resist — unfolded. Joseph must have felt differently.Directed by May Adrales, “Letters of Suresh” is, as the title suggests, an epistolary play, with a script composed entirely of letters. Well, letters and one FaceTime conversation. It opens with a letter from Melody (Ali Ahn, frenetic and endearing), a 40-year-old writing teacher. Melody has inherited the worldly effects of her great-uncle, Father Hashimoto: a Bible, an origami bird, a box of letters from Suresh. She writes to him, asking if he wants them returned, narrating the text as she scribbles. Despite receiving no response, she keeps writing and narrating, marveling at the way she can reveal herself to a blank page.If narrating letters to nowhere seems like a writerly conceit, that’s because it is, though Ahn’s messy charisma puts it over. She soon disappears, replaced — within the set designer Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams’s false prosceniums — by Ramiz Monsef’s Suresh. He narrates the letters in the box, which take him from a confused boy of 18 to an equally confused man of about 30. Utkarsh Ambudkar created the role of Suresh in the earlier play, which means Monsef has some big high-tops to fill. Cocky, appealing and forlorn, he fits them just fine.Ramiz Monsef, left, as Suresh, and Kellie Overbey, as Amelia.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThere are two other roles, Father Hashimoto (Thom Sesma), and Amelia, a onetime colleague of Suresh’s, played by Kellie Overbey — who originated the role of Ilana, which makes her appearance in this different guise a little confusing. “Letters of Suresh,” sweet and even soppy, finds its characters in various stages of heartbreak, with no fracture fully healed. Mixing originality and cliché, the play surveys the near impossibility of connection, a theme reflected in its structure, in which everyone, more or less alone onstage, speaks their truths into a void. It offers up its metaphors — that paper bird, the heart of a whale — with a hand as heavy as an anvil. “Letters and origami,” Amelia muses. “These ancient, archaic art forms of folding paper into something else.”Adrales keeps the pacing sprightly, and the actors mostly resist the pull of sentiment. (Shawn Duan’s projections, which have the screen saver quality of most projections, don’t exactly help.) A play, though, is also a way of making paper (a script) into something else (a show), and “Letters of Suresh,” despite its adroit, layered performances, never executes that transformation fully, persisting as a literary work rather than an entirely theatrical one.Joseph wrote the play before the pandemic, which seems prescient. With everyone homebound and exhausted by Zoom, letter writing experienced a brief vogue. But we can see each other in person now. And as of late summer, we can see live theater, too. “Letters of Suresh,” though, mostly withholds the pleasures of dialogue and interaction. It gives us paragraphs, signed sincerely and very truly, instead.Letters of SureshThrough Oct. 24 at the Tony Kiser Theater, Second Stage Theater, Manhattan; 2st.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More