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      Review: ‘Confederates’ Talks Race in Double Time

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      In Dominique Morisseau’s promising new play, the action is in the ideas and the setting bounces between the Civil War era and the present.“This play is not like all of my others,” Dominique Morisseau writes in an author’s note in the script for “Confederates.” The new play, about two Black women living in different times but dealing with similar oppression, carries several signatures of Morisseau’s work and yet uses narrative techniques that are departures for her. It makes sense then that “Confederates,” which opened on Sunday at the Pershing Square Signature Theater, feels like an elegant experiment, thoughtful and put-together but not quite realizing its full potential.“Confederates,” which was commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Penumbra Theater, begins with Sandra (Michelle Wilson), a political science professor who has just found an offensive photoshopped image of an enslaved woman on her office door. A few minutes later she’s gone and we’ve stepped back in time to the Civil War, where we meet Sara (Kristolyn Lloyd), a fierce young enslaved woman who will become a spy for the Union.These women and their contemporaries are the alternating focal points of the play, directed by Stori Ayers. The attention shifts so rapidly from one story to the other that they become two halves of a dialogue.Michelle Wilson as Sandra, a college professor, in “Confederates.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesKristolyn Lloyd as Sara, an enslaved woman and Union spy in the Civil War era.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRachel Hauck’s scenic design — two antique chairs, a bench and a side table with drawers, surrounded by the towering white columns and high balcony of a plantation house — is neutral and, at eye-level, uninspiring. But through the heights of the house’s architecture and the spaces between the columns, the set creates a dimension and depth that makes it seem as if the background extends into the ornate corridors and rooms of a Southern home.Known for her Detroit cycle, including “Skeleton Crew,” which just completed its debut Broadway run last month, Morisseau typically opts for realism and traditional, chronological storytelling. In fact, she excels at it; she examines the intersections of race, class and gender through characters that feel as real as a neighbor you hear kicking off his boots at the end of a workday.This play’s structure, however, is different. There’s a textbook quality to it; every scene baldly illustrates a theme, whether it’s the sexualization of Black women, the ways institutions turn Black women against one another, or how expectations of Black men and Black women differ. What action there is consists of arguments and discussions usually involving two or three people, with everything else taking place in the background. For Sara, that means the usual toils of the plantation and the not-so-distant gunshots of the war, which she imagines spells freedom. For Sandra, it’s her search for the perpetrator of the photo and her troubled relationships with her colleagues and students.Morisseau blurs this binary by having the three other characters in the play double-cast: Abner (Elijah Jones), Sara’s brother who escaped the plantation to fight for the Union, is also Malik, one of Sandra’s students. In the past there’s Missy Sue (Kenzie Ross), the plantation owner’s daughter and Sara’s childhood friend; in the present, she is Candice, Sandra’s talkative student assistant. LuAnne (Andrea Patterson) is a house slave when she isn’t Jade, in the present day a colleague of Sandra’s. Morisseau cleverly mirrors the conversations between story lines, so, for example, Missy Sue naïvely adores her slave friend the way Candice idolizes her Black professor.Jones, left, as Malik, a student of Sandra, right.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAyers’s direction, along with Ari Fulton’s clever tear-away costumes and Nikiya Mathis’s chic array of wigs and hairstylings, is liveliest in the transitions from the past to present, and in the production’s tiny anachronisms, like a slave giving dap. It appears that the play is going into more experimental territory as the characters’ entrances and exits begin to overlap across the timelines, but Ayers seems wary of doing anything more than having them pass like anonymous commuters at Port Authority. Too often her approach seems procedural, but there are moments when the direction shows spunk, as in the flashier transitions, when someone marches or struts to the music, which switches between old racist ballads like “Dixie” and “Oh! Susanna” to rhythmic original songs arranged by Jimmy Keys (a.k.a. J. Keys).Though the show uses the ancillary characters as the points of contact between Sara’s world and Sandra’s, the two women themselves don’t actually meet. “Confederates” creates this tension between its two parts but doesn’t do anything with it. If Morisseau has built her stories with this inherent magic of alternating settings, allowing us to time-travel with her through a discussion of racial politics then and now, why not try to allow the worlds of the two protagonists to extend a bit more? Why not go bigger? Get more bizarre?Because there’s a certain isolation to the story; we’re in the Big House or Sara’s cabin or we’re in a university office. “Confederates” wants to keep our eyes on the two main institutions here (slavery, academia), each of which breeds or fosters its own forms of oppression. Each scene so clearly illustrates a point in the play’s thesis on race that the stakes don’t seem real; we’re just in the realm of discourse.At least Morisseau doesn’t let the pedagogic obscure the poetic. Her language is as gorgeous as always — and just as sharp. So a conversation about sexuality leads LuAnne to say, “Nature ain’t no slave. It move to its own rhythm,” using the terms of enslavement as a way to talk about the untamable lusts of the body. And Morisseau can dress up an atrocity in a metaphor without obscuring the horror beneath the surface, as when Sara describes seeing slaves “whipped so bad looked like their skin came alive and was crawling on they own flesh.”Beautiful language that’s wedded to tales of adversity — the play is full of such paradoxes, another one being that “Confederates” is a work about racism that is truly funny. There’s a lightness to the satire, but it’s not in the writing alone; the roughly 90-minute production has a nimble cast.From left, Kenzie Ross as the master’s daughter, Missy Sue, with Lloyd, as Sara. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJones brings an animated repartee to his characters’ interactions, and Ross successfully plays up the cluelessness of her white characters (“OMIGOD. I was completely racist just then,” she exclaims as Candice, owl-eyed in shame with mouth agape). Patterson oozes cool as the brusque, sharpshooting Jade but has less heft to her characters.Wilson embodies the poised and self-assured academic in a red power suit, but the character doesn’t allow her to show much range, while Sara is the play’s most rewarding role, incorporating both a brassy brand of satire and ferocious politico-historical oration. Lloyd easily hits the comic notes and channels a Harriet Tubman-esque bearing in Sara but isn’t as comfortable holding the deeper emotions of the character.Morisseau is a fabulous playwright, so much so that even in her plays’ flaws her brilliance still shines through. And seeing an artist try something new in her art is exciting. What’s even more exciting than that? Anticipating how much further — in her settings, in her stories — she can go.ConfederatesThrough April 17 at the Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; signaturetheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      Dominique Morisseau Asks: ‘What Does Freedom Look Like Now?’

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      Her new play, “Confederates,” straddles two eras, exploring what liberation means to a present-day academic and an enslaved woman in the 1860s.In 2016, Penumbra Theater and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival commissioned Dominique Morisseau to write a play as part of the American Revolutions: the United States History Cycle. The remit: to create a work about the Black experience of the Civil War.Morisseau had one question: “What were the Black women doing?”“Confederates,” her new play at the Signature Theater, is one answer. Toggling between the present day and the 1860s, the play — now in previews, with a premiere on March 27 — follows Sandra, a superstar academic played by Michelle Wilson, and Sara (Kristolyn Lloyd), an enslaved woman who spies for the Union Army. While the title evokes the Confederacy, it also teases a bond between the two women.“This is what it means to be at this institution,” Sandra says. “To know deep in your core that there will never be justice for you here.”From left: Andrea Patterson, Kristolyn Lloyd and Elijah Jones in “Confederates,” opening March 27 at the Signature Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSara echoes her: “This what it means to be in a peculiar institution. Under its boot, everybody yo’ enemy.”Even as “Confederates” evokes dramatic works as varied as Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s postmodern drama “An Octoroon,” Adrienne Kennedy’s devastating tragedy “The Ohio State Murders” and David Mamet’s academic two-hander “Oleanna,” Morisseau renders each scene in her distinctive empathetic, tragicomic style.Rather than focusing on oppression, the play explores Black women’s agency and the different forms that liberation can take from one era to the next.“Getting free in the past, it’s just getting free,” Morisseau said. “Like, you’re literally in bondage. Getting free in the present is a very different thing. What does freedom look like now?”Morisseau was speaking from an apartment in Midtown Manhattan, near both the Signature and Broadway’s Samuel J. Friedman Theater, where her play “Skeleton Crew,” part of a trilogy of works set in her native Detroit, recently wrapped. Her 15-month-old son napped in the next room.During a 90-minute video call, she discussed “Confederates,” which will also be presented at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in August, as well as microaggressions, macroaggressions and what empowerment looks like for her. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.In “Confederates,” Sandra and Sara are living about 160 years apart. What joins them?They’re united in the history of Black women fighting for freedom. They’re united in being the most socially expendable.Sandra, the professor, is subject to frequent microaggressions. For Sara, the enslaved woman, the danger is physical and more overt. Do you understand these threats as related?The kind of racism that Sara experiences — you could be hanged, you could be dragged, you could be murdered — that overt racism is not most people’s experience of racism. There is the kind of racism that breaks the body, that attacks the body. Then there’s the other kind that kills the spirit. The one I engage with the most often is the latter. But the micro always leads to the macro. Microaggressions lead into aggressive actions.Eventually, all of these are harmful and deadly.In your research, did you find many examples of Black women spying for the Union?I did not find lots of examples. I would find little pieces. Those kinds of stories are under-told. But they tell me that we were not passive. We were never passive.Brandon J. Dirden and Phylicia Rashad in Morisseau’s “Skeleton Crew,” whose run just ended at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYou have written plays set in the 1940s, the 1950s, the 1960s, the ’00s. Did you know that you would eventually write about the 1860s?I never thought about it, to be honest. When I was approached to specifically write about this era, I said to myself, I don’t want to just write about slavery. That’s not what I’m interested in. I am, however, interested in Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, the phrase coined by Dr. Joy DeGruy, which is the impact of being descendants of the enslaved and the traumas that have happened since, without treatment or healing.When you accepted the commission, were there certain stories or stereotypes that you wanted to avoid?I didn’t want to show defeat or agreement with the enslaved culture. There is no agreement.As an undergraduate, did you experience institutional racism?My experience at school taught me that no one’s here to protect me. There’s no agency for me here. I’m going to have to do for me in school, if I want to not be squashed, if I want to see myself as an artist.Theater can also be a racist space. I remember an essay you wrote in 2015 about white privilege, with the headline: “Why I Almost Slapped a Fellow Theater Patron, and What That Says About Our Theaters.” Has theater changed since then?I have actively worked to shift that culture at least around my own work. I have a Playwright’s Rules of Engagement insert that I put inside the program of every show that I do. Because I was policed for my own laughter. [The insert includes instructions such as, “You are allowed to laugh audibly” and “This can be church for some of us, and testifying is allowed.”]I have seen attempts to diversify boards, to have a wider outreach to donors. Then there’s the bottom-up approach: I would like to see more artists taking more agency over themselves and their art. There’s a culture of silence that has been perpetuated. There’s this feeling of expendability that artists get. Like, you cannot speak up, because you will then not have jobs anymore. And that’s crazy.“There are young artists looking at me, watching me. I’m trying to bring up those artists,” Morisseau said, referring to efforts she’s made to counter harmful behavior in the industry.Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesLate last year, you spoke up. You pulled your play “Paradise Blue” from the Geffen Playhouse, saying that Black women who worked on the show had been “verbally abused and diminished.” What empowered you to do that?I’ve always been an activist. I just inherently have not ever been OK with things that aren’t right. What made me feel even more empowered in this moment is that I am now visible. And there are young artists looking at me, watching me. I’m trying to bring up those artists. So there is not a chance in hell that I can watch harmful behavior happen and be unaccountable. I will not write about Black women being harmed and learning to take agency for themselves — that’s what “Paradise Blue” is about — I’m not going to have that onstage and the opposite happening for them offstage.I’m not trying to create a culture of people pulling their plays. This is one of the hardest decisions you should have to make as a playwright. It was brutal. It was exhausting for me. I never want to have to do that again.Before the pandemic you made your Broadway debut, writing the book for “Ain’t Too Proud.” Did that change anything for you?“Ain’t Too Proud” happened, a MacArthur happened, quite a few things happened, right at the same time. It’s brought more faith about me as an artist from institutions. I don’t know if I’m a safe bet. I don’t think I’m a safe bet. But I’m worthy of a bet in general. I’m enough of an interesting voice. I’m definitely asked to write more musicals.And what did it mean to have “Skeleton Crew” move to Broadway?With Broadway comes more resources behind your work. I remember when I first saw “Ain’t Too Proud” staged, I was like, everybody deserves all those resources behind their imaginations, just once in their life. To be able to get it twice in my life is amazing.“Skeleton Crew” will always be one of my favorites because I know where it came from. I know where I was when I wrote it and I know who I wrote it for. The biggest thing for me, as a Detroiter, is to make Detroit visible. We had Detroit night on Broadway. It was like a family reunion up in there. It was the most Detroit behavior I’ve ever seen on Broadway. It was epic. More

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      Review: Embodying Justice in ‘Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992’

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      Anna Deavere Smith’s one-woman play about the aftermath of the Rodney King case gets a cast of five in an updated Off Broadway revival.For Anna Deavere Smith, the transcript is the tool. A fine tool, certainly: Her brand of verbatim theater, perfected in a series of documentary plays since the early 1980s, duplicates the expressive peculiarities of real speech, making every defensive stammer and evasive curlicue count.But thrilling as it is, mere mimicry is never the point. In an essay Smith describes actors as “cultural workers” reaching out, through words, into “that which is different from themselves.” Her goal is ambitious: to undo tribalism by modeling the innately human ability to empathize even with enemies.This makes for some very complex drama when you don’t know who the enemy is. In “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” which opened in a watered-down yet still urgent revival by the Signature Theater Company on Monday evening, Smith juggles excerpts from 320 interviews with people on all sides of the riots that broke out in the city’s South Central neighborhood that year. Arranging them in kaleidoscopic patterns, she keeps your sympathies switching so fast you find yourself experiencing a kind of moral whiplash.Smith often plays every character in the first major productions of her plays. In “Twilight,” that means swiftly embodying some 40 people of various ages, genders and ethnicities. Talking about the uprising that followed the acquittal of the police officers who viciously beat King in 1991, they try to explain what happened, no two having the same point of view.Some see the events through a professional lens, whether as politicians, reporters, academics or activists. But most of the interviewees are emotional rather than analytical, as members of the Black, white, Hispanic and Asian American communities — whether they participated in the post-verdict mayhem or were beaten as bystanders or hid out in horror in Beverly Hills — poke through the rubble for clues to the cause. Is it to be found as far back as the Watts riots of 1965? Or as recently as the fatal shooting of a local 15-year-old Black girl by a Korean American store owner two weeks after King was beaten?When the store owner receives a sentence of five years’ probation, and then King’s attackers are likewise let off without prison sentences, justice seems like a zero-sum game to the play’s Black characters: What privileges one community is taken from another. Yet when everyone is embodied by one actor, as was the case when “Twilight” debuted in Los Angeles in 1993, followed by runs at the Public Theater and on Broadway in 1994, the audience is led to a different conclusion: Justice is all or nothing. It can’t exist anywhere if it doesn’t exist everywhere.Unfortunately, the power of that idea is attenuated in the Signature production, directed by Taibi Magar in the 294-seat Irene Diamond auditorium. As part of Smith’s multiyear residency at the theater, “Twilight” has been staged as an ensemble piece, the roles divvied among five actors. Smith has also revised the script heavily, mostly in ways that support the casting at the expense of the drama.This is less noticeable when, in the more substantial monologues, characters describe, with pathos and unintentional poetry, what they saw or what they felt. Among several others, King’s aunt (Tiffany Rachelle Stewart), a city clerk who witnessed the beating (Elena Hurst) and the wife of a Korean American shopkeeper shot during the unrest (Francis Jue) get enough time to create affecting portraits.But when the script calls for shorter snippets and quicker alternation, too much energy is dissipated in the handoffs, sometimes involving the donning or shedding of Linda Cho’s sociologically precise costumes. Even so, they remind you how Smith could switch sides in milliseconds, with the help of just a scarf or a tie or a cup of tea.From left, Tiffany Rachelle Stewart, Francis Jue, Elena Hurst, Karl Kenzler and Jones.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesIt is something of a paradox that the divided casting also results in caricature, as the actors overcompensate, in a way Smith never did, for the difficulty of achieving contrast. The story told in the published script by a juror in the federal trial of the King assailants is here reframed as a self-conscious scene involving the whole cast; it still has powerful elements, to be sure, yet unintentionally broad results. And in a passage called “A Dinner Party That Never Happened” — projections by David Bengali help keep the audience oriented on an otherwise neutral stage — the piercing opinions of characters at an imaginary soiree hosted by the chef Alice Waters now come off as bon mots.Also not helping: the appearance of a cheap-laugh Charlton Heston, twitting his liberal friends who suddenly want a gun.Experimentation in the production of classics is crucial, especially in that difficult passage after their debut when most new works disappear. Smith, who is 71, no doubt hopes to see her work performed in the future as much as possible and is exploring ways to ensure that.Still, I found myself wondering why she, and Magar, whose staging is caught between the simplicity of the original premise and an unachieved larger one, chose this form of experiment.In light of recent discussions about representation in the theater, perhaps it seemed wise to give actors whose identities in some ways match that of the characters the chance to portray them. This is handled well by being handled unstrictly: Jue, the great-grandson of Chinese immigrants, plays several Asian American characters, both male and female, but also (with great depth) the Black soprano Jessye Norman. Yet other times, the matchups feel too obvious or, as in the mostly similar roles performed by Karl Kenzler and Wesley T. Jones, too blurry.Jue plays several Asian American characters, both male and female, and also Jessye Norman.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAnd perhaps there was concern that the story itself, now nearly 30 years old, needed the punch of physical confrontation that more bodies allow. That too strikes me as a mistake. The Signature’s 2019 revival of Smith’s “Fires in the Mirror,” about the unrest between Blacks and Hasidic Jews in Crown Heights in 1991, proved that her plays are vigorous enough to stand as written, and that one very flexible and compelling actor — in that case, Michael Benjamin Washington — could walk in Smith’s shoes as successfully as she walked in her characters’.Though I wish “Twilight” had taken the same approach, it nevertheless demands attention in any format. Its nuanced portrayal of the cycle of violence — and its exploration of the means of breaking it — are obviously just as necessary now as when Los Angeles was actively smoldering. If the production makes the play more of a lesson than it needs to be, Smith’s notion that history depends on individuals more than groups, a notion best dramatized with one body, still comes through with five.Or with 294; we are all, in a way — and whether we want to be or not — cultural workers. “Twilight” doesn’t just ask us to build empathy but also demonstrates how.Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992Through Nov. 14 at Signature Theater, Manhattan; signaturetheatre.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      Virus Fears Prompt a Major New York Theater to Postpone Its Return

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      As the Delta variant spreads, Signature Theater delayed its planned October opening of “Infinite Life,” a new play by Annie Baker.Signature Theater, a prominent Off Broadway nonprofit, has postponed its return to the stage over concerns about the persistent coronavirus pandemic, becoming the first major New York theater to take such a step.The theater’s leadership announced the postponement Friday afternoon, just days before rehearsals were to begin for “Infinite Life,” a new play by the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker, who was also planning to direct the work. The production was supposed to run from Oct. 5 to Nov. 7.“Due to ongoing health and safety concerns, Signature Theater and Annie Baker have decided to postpone the upcoming production of ‘Infinite Life,’” the theater said in a statement. “Signature will continue, in discussion with artists, to evaluate on a case-by-case basis how to proceed with other programming planned for this season. The company and artist agree that this is the best choice for this show at this time.”Around the country, there have been a number of cancellations and postponements of pop music tour dates and festivals because of the rise in coronavirus cases caused by the spread of the Delta variant. There have been several theater postponements in California, including at Berkeley Repertory Theater, which recently cited the Delta variant in delaying until next year a Christina Anderson play that had been scheduled to begin in October.It is unclear whether the postponement of “Infinite Life” is an outlier or a first indication that the theater industry is getting cold feet about the many reopenings planned in New York this fall, on Broadway and off. Two Broadway shows, “Springsteen on Broadway” and “Pass Over,” are already running, and 15 more plan to start next month; there are also some plays already running in commercial and nonprofit venues around the city, and many of the city’s larger nonprofits plan to resume presenting shows during the fall.Broadway theaters are requiring audience members to show proof of vaccination and wear masks. And Mayor Bill de Blasio has declared that all performing arts theaters must require proof of vaccination as part of a mandate that applies to indoor dining, entertainment, and fitness.Signature said it was still hoping to stage a revival of Anna Deavere Smith’s “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” in October. Although “Infinite Life” would have been its first stage production since the start of the pandemic, it would not have been the first use of its building: This summer, the nonprofit featured an installation called “The Watering Hole,” conceived by Lynn Nottage and Miranda Haymon, in its Frank Gehry-designed home, the Pershing Square Signature Center, a few blocks west of Times Square.Baker, who won a Pulitzer in 2014 for “The Flick,” writes plays that are sometimes hard to describe, and very little has been released about this one, but a spokesman said there was a six-person cast. In news releases, the theater has described “Infinite Life” as “a play about no end in sight” and “a new play that tackles persistent pain and desire.” More

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      Review: ‘The Watering Hole’ Can’t Quite Quench a Thirst

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      The collaborative project conceived by Lynn Nottage is too heterogeneous and muddled to rally around one clear theme or concept.The day I went to the Signature Theater it was so hellishly hot out that it felt as if the air was clinging to my skin. So I stepped into the air-conditioned coolness of the Pershing Square Signature Center for “The Watering Hole,” a theatrical installation conceived and curated by the Pulitzer Prize-winner Lynn Nottage and Miranda Haymon. What I’d hoped for was refreshment. What I left with was a thirst for a more memorable and neatly composed offering.“The Watering Hole,” directed by Haymon, is a collaborative project featuring work by Haymon and Nottage along with Christina Anderson, Matt Barbot, Montana Levi Blanco, Stefania Bulbarella, Amith Chandrashaker, nicHi douglas, Iyvon E., Justin Ellington, Emmie Finckel, Vanessa German, Ryan J. Haddad, Phillip Howze, Haruna Lee, Campbell Silverstein, Charly Evon Simpson and Rhiana Yazzie. For each 80-minute show, a small audience is split into two groups and led through the lobby, dressing rooms, theaters and backstage areas, where they encounter sculptures, audiovisual installations and interactive activities.Part of the conceit, after all, is locating the theater as a gathering space — a place for collaboration. At least I think it is. The production is too heterogeneous and muddled to rally around one clear theme or concept.The grand staircase of the Signature Center is the first stop. The whole space is outlined with sea-blue walking paths and water drop stickers marking where to stand at a safe social distance. Audio interviews from the artists, in which most of them talk about ancestry, play through speakers. So this show is about heritage and ancestry? Well, no. Because there’s all of the water, like a video of Haddad in which he talks about how he, as a disabled man, learned how to swim. So perhaps it’s about independence and resiliency? Then what about German and Lee’s original song, “This Room Is a Broken Heart,” which plays on a mind-numbing loop in the lobby and talks about water as a symbol of grief? And Anderson and Haymon’s karaoke-inspired piece in a dressing room, where there’s a “Big”-style floor piano that you’re invited to use to accompany a song playing on the TV?These are the parts of the show that fly off into the theater ether, like the piece that shows a projection of a figure in a lotus pose who talks about energies, frequencies and chakras. But then this is paired with more literal meditations on water: In one part of the show, in some back hallway, there’s a corner set up for a “dance break,” with a mound of sand, blue and pink fluorescent lights and some slightly deflated beach balls. In that same hallway there’s a corkboard with beach photos and water-themed poems by Langston Hughes, Lucille Clifton, Ada Limón and Natalie Shapero, among others.The most traditional theater piece, “Spray Cap” (created by Barbot and Chandrashaker with Colon-Zayas), a monologue about yearning to come together and celebrate summer after a time of pandemic and isolation, is also the strongest. It’s not just the straightforward approach but the cohesion of it — the clarity of voice and themes, and the clear tie to the installation at large — that highlights what the rest of the production lacks. Even the set design — a stage with two park benches and some crates arranged around a giant hydrant that puffs out steam — fits perfectly with the speaker’s desire for everyone to “come out” and let themselves go in the brutal heat of a summer when people can finally meet up and touch.“Spray Cap” has one of the few designs that actually work in the installation, unlike the handwritten notes and scrolls with words and reflections taped on the walls throughout the complex. Haddad’s video is played in a dark room with a ceiling that projects water scenes and a reflective floor that matches the same cool blue of the pool. And one of three lobby sailboat sculptures — an ornate medley of trinkets and knickknacks like bird figurines, shells and water bottles, along with a white baby piano — is a stunning visual work by German and Lee.But all this still fails to illuminate the upshot. Because “The Watering Hole” also seems to have an interest in a kind of community service. Nottage has said that the “inspiration and organizing principle” of the project came from a collaborative reflection on the Signature as a meeting place. And so one part of the show invites the audience to write on little “sails” what makes them feel safe and add them to a boat in the lobby. And another boat in the lobby holds postcards that audience members are prompted to fill out and write to incarcerated people. Though well-intentioned, it’s hard to find the connective tissue here or, as Nottage says, the organizing principle.Whatever “The Watering Hole” means to express, it’s drowned in this sea of artists.The Watering HoleThrough Aug. 8 Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; 212-244-7529, signaturetheatre.org. More