Serio, Jack

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    Review: The Fractious Family Ties in ‘The Animal Kingdom’

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    Conflicting ideas of guilt, identity and genetics do battle in this quietly galvanizing play by Ruby Thomas.An unexamined life may not be worth living, but an examined one can be ruinously expensive. As calculated by Sam, one of the characters undergoing therapy in “The Animal Kingdom,” the quietly galvanizing play by Ruby Thomas, “Dad has literally spent, what, hundreds of thousands just for me to exist.” That this young man has ended up in a clinic despite a cushy life of private tutors, private education and music lessons shows, he wryly notes, that his father made a “really bad investment.”“The Animal Kingdom” begins with Daniel (Calvin Leon Smith), a soft-spoken psychotherapist, patiently coaxing Sam (Uly Schlesinger) into more-than-monosyllabic conversation. Both are seated in posture-wrecking office chairs in a windowless space no larger than an escape room. Sam, a zoology major who is on hiatus from college, is a bright and observant young man, with a mind for a menagerie of animal facts. He compares his mother and sister to bonobos, whose female alphas “can be pretty aggressive”; his father, on the other hand, is a hippopotamus whose submerged heart beats once every five minutes. Taken together, they form the fractious animal kingdom that gives the play its title.As part of the treatment program, Daniel summons Sam’s business-minded father (David Cromer), spiritual-doula mother (Tasha Lawrence), and younger sister Sofia (Lily McInerny), to participate in six therapy sessions with the patient. Jack Serio’s direction puts us in thrilling proximity to the actors. Thrilling, but also cortisol-spiking; the sense of being trapped like animals in a zoo is intensified by an obsidian two-way mirror on Wilson Chin’s spartan set.For much of the play’s 80 minutes, Sam, his therapist and his family sit in a pentagram of chairs and, to Sofia’s growing dismay, pass the time talking about their childhoods, school bullies, their father’s affair, the migration pattern of certain birds — seemingly every topic except the one that precipitated their therapy sessions.Sam, it turns out, has a history of self-harm; his shoes don’t have laces, staff members have taken his razor and, when his compression sleeves come off, his arms are laddered with pink cuts. McInerny gives an especially strong performance as Sam’s dependable sister — a wallflower who delivers the most incendiary line of the play.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?  More

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      ‘Uncle Vanya’ Review: Candlelit With a High-Wattage Cast

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      Unrequited love swirls through this prestige-cast production of Anton Chekhov’s play, in a Manhattan loft.Leaning close in the flickering candlelight, Sonya and the man who makes her stomach flutter share a sneaky midnight snack. He is Astrov, her houseguest, and he is frankly a bit of a mess — drinks too much, is in fact drunk at the moment. He is also endearingly odd and smart and sweet, an eco-nerd physician who’s sending her some incredibly mixed signals.“We’re all alone here,” he says, sotto voce. “We can be honest with each other.”It is a scene so beguiling, so full of crushy hope on one side and obliviousness (or is it?) on the other, that it’s like watching Laura and the Gentleman Caller in “The Glass Menagerie.” But this is “Uncle Vanya,” and if Chekhov has never before made you want to match-make a couple of his characters on Tinder, this version — directed by Jack Serio in a loft in the Flatiron District of Manhattan — just might.“You’re a beautiful human being, more than anybody I know,” Sonya tells Astrov, and because she is portrayed by the magnificent Marin Ireland and he would obviously be ridiculously lucky to have her, your whole soul rises up in outrage: What is wrong with this likable doctor (beautifully played by Will Brill of sexy “Oklahoma!” and “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”) that he’s obsessed with Yelena, her stepmother, instead?So is Sonya’s Uncle Vanya, whose play this is meant to be. A nose-to-the-grindstone worker, he looks up in middle age and realizes to his horror and humiliation that he has wasted his life fattening the bank account and elevating the status of an unworthy man: Sonya’s father, the over-entitled professor, Serebryakov (a dapper Bill Irwin). Doomed to receive nothing better from Yelena, the professor’s wife, than a pathetic kiss on the forehead, Vanya doesn’t even have a woman to love him.David Cromer’s performance in the title role, though, suggests none of that swallowed fire and swirling torment. His Vanya is a blank, and it’s not a matter of simplicity or restraint; there is nothing to the interpretation underneath the words, even when Vanya gets loud. Certainly there wasn’t on Saturday night, when I saw the play. But a live show is an evolving organism. Cromer may yet fill up that hollowness.Using a warm, seamless, contemporary translation by Paul Schmidt, and performed for an audience of no more than 40 seated along two sides of the loft, this is an intimate production that’s strange as well — because of the unbalancing emptiness of Cromer’s Vanya, and because of the maturity and intelligence of its Yelena, played by Julia Chan.Reading as older than the 27 years that Chekhov specifies, but still clearly decades younger than her husband, she is no incurious ingenue. There is a wisdom to this Yelena, and a savvy; Astrov and Vanya’s rivalrous infatuation with her, then, is no mere response to dewdrop youth. Chicly dressed for the city life she has left behind (costumes are by Ricky Reynoso), she is the picture of pristine elegance, sure of herself and too lively minded to find happiness in the cosseted quiet of this country house.Jack Serio’s production of “Uncle Vanya,” with, clockwise from lower left, Virginia Wing as Marina, Will Brill as Astrov and David Cromer as Vanya. It’s performed for an audience of no more than 40 seated along two sides of the room.Emilio MadridNo one else is finding happiness, either, of course; at best, perhaps placid resignation. Vanya, in his resentment, comes nowhere near that, but a bouquet-smashing eruption of his temper is the catalyst for a mesmerizingly pretty stage tableau: soft orange rose petals fallen just so on the weathered teal table and the blond wood floor. (The set is by Walt Spangler, the props by Carrie Mossman.)“It was a scene worthy of an old master,” Vanya and Sonya’s adorable, guitar-strumming neighbor, Telegin (the wonderfully funny Will Dagger), says a short time later, and while he may be thinking less of the flowers than of the gunplay that ensued, the sentiment is absolutely right.Stunning visuals — like those petals and that candlelit tête-à-tête — are a hallmark of Serio’s work. The lighting designer Stacey Derosier, who was instrumental to the look of his “On Set With Theda Bara” early this year and “This Beautiful Future” last year, also designed “Uncle Vanya.”But what glows most tantalizingly in this production is the pulsing electricity between the tender, resilient Sonya and the tree-planting Astrov, who is far too casual with her heart. If only he could love her the way he loves the forest.Uncle VanyaThrough July 16 at a loft in the Flatiron District, Manhattan; vanyanyc.com. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes. More

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      ‘This Beautiful Future’ Review: Love Glows in War’s Shadow

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      Theaterlab stages a gimlet-eyed romance involving a girl and a young Nazi soldier in Occupied France by the playwright Rita Kalnejais.In the tiny lobby of Theaterlab, on West 36th Street, you need to show proof of a booster vaccine before you can get your tickets. You have to wear a high-grade mask, too, though if you show up unequipped, the person at the box office will cheerfully hand one over.If the wartime teenagers at the center of Theaterlab’s current play, “This Beautiful Future,” could project themselves across the decades to our time, they might recognize that spirit of getting on with things, carefully.Not that Elodie (Francesca Carpanini), a 17-year-old in Chartres, France, has much patience for caution herself. It is August 1944, a critical point in World War II, but she is smitten with a boy, and that overrides everything big and scary that the grown-ups have set in motion in the world.Otto (Justin Mark) is 16 and new in town, bashful and awkward and easy to tease. The first time they speak, Elodie razzes him reflexively. But there is a sweetness to him that she falls for, and on the night when they meet in an abandoned house with thoughts of sex and romance swirling in their heads, she wants him to dance with her.“I don’t usually dance,” he says.“Why not?” she asks.“’Cause the girls say no.”Smart girls.Despite the enchanting haze of wistfulness that hangs over “This Beautiful Future,” by Rita Kalnejais, an Australian playwright based in London, the play is a gimlet-eyed romance. Its lovers are as young and unworldly as Liesl and her Nazi boyfriend, Rolfe, in “The Sound of Music.”“This Beautiful Future” achieves a remarkable, aching alchemy, not because Elodie and Otto are star-crossed but because they’re ordinary, and because if not for the war, they might have retained their innocence.Carpanini and Mark, with Austin Pendleton and Angelina Fiordellisi in their karaoke booth on Frank J. Oliva’s set.Emilio MadridOtto is a Nazi, a member of the occupying force; Elodie pushes away her discomfort at that. She is too naïve to realize that her Jewish neighbors who were arrested will not be coming back, or that Otto — the kind of wide-eyed, easily led soldier who fanboys the strongman he calls “Mr. Hitler” — has shot local people dead.Kalnejais frames their story with a benevolent pair of elders, played in Jack Serio’s wonderfully cast production by Angelina Fiordellisi and a rumpled-to-perfection Austin Pendleton. From their upstage karaoke booth on Frank J. Oliva’s set, they watch over the young couple with sympathy and concern. Between scenes, they sing (or, in Pendleton’s case, speak-sing) songs from Elodie and Otto’s time and our own, and utter laundry lists of simple things they would change if they got a do-over in life.“I wouldn’t lose sleep over money,” he says. “Or being unlovable.”“I’d sleep knowing it all changes by morning,” she says.Elodie and Otto, just starting out, don’t have that kind of wisdom yet. But they do have hope, and you can hear it in their plans for a sunny future together. They have no idea how vulnerable they are, or how brutal the world is prepared to be.Otto might have some clue, though, if only he would listen to himself.“There’s nothing cruel about choosing who lives and who dies,” he says, defending his mission. “We’re not just randomly picking people off. I couldn’t do that. This is about choosing a future where everyone’s clean.”What might this morally warped boy have been — what might the world have been — if Hitler had taken an office job instead of going into politics? “This Beautiful Future” wants to know.With an ending that’s gentle and wondrous and fragile as new life, it is a play about choosing, step by step, a genuinely better future — and about what might have been, what never should have been and what can’t ever be taken back.This Beautiful FutureThrough Jan. 30 at Theaterlab, Manhattan; theaterlabnyc.com. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More