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      ‘Breathless’ Review: Shopping Soothes an Anxious Mind

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      Laura Horton’s poignant comic monologue at 59E59 Theaters, part of the Brits Off Broadway festival, delivers a sympathetic portrayal of a sample-sale hoarder.Clothes can send Sophie into a rhapsody like nothing else does. Ever since she was a child, trawling thrift shops for secondhand style, her purchases have felt like victories.In those early years, some of the thrill came from finding name brands that would help her fit in better with the kids at school. But she has always had an eye for fashion, no matter how impractical.By the time she is a young adult, an aspiring writer living in London and stalking sample sales, the dresses and sweaters and shoes that she lugs home to her room in bulging bags have little to do with wearability. Does she need five ball gowns? Nope. But shopping is how Sophie soothes her increasingly anxious mind.Laura Horton’s poignant comic monologue “Breathless,” part of the Brits Off Broadway festival at 59E59 Theaters, finds Sophie at a breaking point. Played by Madeleine MacMahon, who gives her a nervous likability, Sophie would seem to have arrived at a joyous time in life. In her late 30s, she has a thoughtful, interesting new girlfriend, Jo, whom Sophie can envision as a long-term partner. Yet at the end of every date, she fabricates reasons Jo can’t come into her apartment.“There’s all the time in the world to see my place,” Sophie says, except there isn’t, because Jo is weary of being kept at a distance. Too mortified to confess that her apartment is stuffed with clothes — a dangerous, suffocating, hoarder quantity of clothes — Sophie gets dumped. She has, essentially, chosen Vivienne Westwood (Ah, that checkered dress!) and Stella McCartney (Oh, those silk-screened pants!) over a woman who’s into her.Stephanie Kempson’s production for Theater Royal Plymouth smartly lets us imagine Sophie’s labyrinth of apparel, her towers of shoes. The set and props are minimal: a couple of clothing racks hung with empty garment bags; a single shopping bag from Alexander McQueen. Throughout, Sophie wears the same casual outfit: loose overalls with sneakers. (Set and costumes are by Kempson, Horton and MacMahon.)The play takes vivid hold through MacMahon’s performance, which includes a small gallery of supporting characters. Among them are Sophie’s sweet, gruff father and her unflappably loving mother, whose warmth is as enveloping as a hug.There is also a journalist friend who (spoiler) promises Sophie anonymity in a story about hoarding, then splashes her name and photo all over a national newspaper. The betrayal hits so hard in performance that I wanted to implore the fictional Sophie not to believe her friend, as she does, that it’s all his editors’ fault.A program note says that the play is based on Horton’s “own experiences of hoarding disorder,” and quotes her as saying that she was “heavily influenced by ‘Sex and the City’ growing up.” It seems only right, then, that “Breathless” is onstage in a part of Manhattan — about midway between a Dior boutique and Bloomingdale’s — where luxury beckons, and the price is steep.BreathlessThrough May 7 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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      Review: In ‘Plays for the Plague Year,’ the Soundtrack of Our Lives

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      Suzan-Lori Parks wrote one play a day for 13 months during the pandemic. Those stories come to life onstage in the form of monologues, dialogues and songs at Joe’s Pub.Upon entering Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater for Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Plays for the Plague Year,” audience members are handed a Playbill, a pencil and two yellow notecards, each with a question about the pandemic: “What would you like to remember?” “What would you like to forget?” The responses are placed in a basket from which they are picked and read during the show. At my performance, someone wrote that they’d like to forget “fear and worry, foreground and background.” People in the audience murmured in assent.We’d all probably like to forget our own experiences of fear and worry during that first year of zealous hand-washing and ever-changing mask mandates. Parks, however, made a project of remembering: For that first pandemic year, she resolved to write a play a day about “whatever happens,” including the mundane goings-on in her apartment, the deaths of friends and strangers, and the Black Lives Matter protests.Here, Parks performs a version of herself called the Writer, who creates plays each day while quarantining with her husband (played by Greg Keller) and their 8-year-old son (Leland Fowler) in their one-bedroom apartment.What unfolds is some configuration of those plays, though “play” is too restrictive a word for these micro-performances, which take the forms of monologues, dialogues and songs. Parks, who also plays the guitar here, is joined onstage by seven other cast members in various roles and a band (Ric Molina, guitar; Graham Kozak, bass; Ray Marchica, percussion).An accounting of each day — an electronic placard hanging above the stage flashes the date and title of each section, presented chronologically from March 19, 2020, to April 13, 2021 — provides the show with a built-in structure to link what often feels like a hodgepodge.Parks wisely uses a series of shorthands to quickly bring us back to specific moments in those early pandemic days — an actor, for example, gliding past Parks in an ornate doublet and Tudor-style cap to signal theater closures, the cast hollering and clapping for a brief moment to signal the daily 7 p.m. cheer for frontline workers.In the plays in which Parks isn’t writing or with her family, she’s talking to a dead Little Richard or negotiating with her Muse who, fed up with Covid, threatens to abandon her. In another, a character named Bob looks for a job. There’s one in which Earth, embodied by a woman wearing a crown of branches and holding a scepter, warns that the pandemic is only the beginning of the world’s disasters.From left: Orville Mendoza, Martín Solá, Danyel Fulton and Rona Figueroa in a short play about Breonna Taylor, a Black medical worker who was shot and killed by police officers in Louisville, Ky.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRuth Bader Ginsburg appears, on the day of her death, as a triumphant Lady Liberty, and the virus, personified as a horror movie villainess named Corona, wheezes and stalks the stage in a black-gray-white ombré dress and virion headpiece with red “spikes.” The costume design, by Rodrigo Muñoz, is as imaginative and visually stunning as runway couture, especially the layered fabrics of the Muse’s handkerchief hem skirt, made to resemble scraps of paper with scribbled writings, and the 3-D elements, like the butterflies on Earth’s chiffon dress.But not all days are created equal, and this three-hour production does feel as if we’re reliving a year’s worth of material. At least the variety in Parks’s script keeps things unpredictable enough to hold our attention.The direction, by Niegel Smith, occasionally gets too darling, like the first scene, when the family members introduce themselves (“I am the writer. I am the hubby. I am the son.”) while passing a red paper heart to one another. But Smith, who also choreographed the show, does make organized chaos in the intimate space (design by Peter Nigrini), rotating characters on a tiny stage adorned with a few pieces of low-sitting furniture — table, armchair, dresser, lamp, rack covered in books.The show’s music is as eclectic as the storytelling; the songs are short, plucky, with hints of folk, jazz and R&B. The surprising mash-up of genres include the doo-wop style of “Bob Needs a Job,” and the bluesy “Praying Now” soon picks up tempo, turning into an upbeat clap-and-stomp. Most aren’t particularly memorable, but the strongest songs — “RIP the King” and “Whichaway the World” — build with an alternating mix of spoken word/rap and soulful crooning from two performers in particular, Fowler and Danyel Fulton.Sometimes it seems as if Parks is overreaching, as when she speaks to her former mentor, James Baldwin (perfectly embodied by Fowler, who replicates his posture and cadence of speech), so he can muse about American history. Or in a long ceremony during which the cast hands flowers to the audience at the end of a section about Breonna Taylor, played by Fulton; but Fulton’s performance is poignant enough on its own.The playwright’s conversations with the dead, however, many of whom begin their scenes unaware or in denial of their demise, is the show’s most compelling motif. She speaks to several who are Black, especially those lost to Covid and those to police brutality. Through these post-mortems, Parks is asking trenchant questions about how we memorialize Black bodies. What would the dead say? How would they want to be remembered, if at all? So the Brooklyn educator Dez-Ann Romain, who died from complications of the coronavirus, snapping “Don’t make me speak of myself in the past tense,” and George Floyd asking, “Would I be safe if Harriet Tubman was on the 20?” become tragic self-written elegies. We’re watching the dead mourn themselves.Then there’s Parks, who, even playing this version of herself, always feels earnest, as when she listens to the speeches of her characters, while sitting off to one side of the stage, leaning forward attentively. You can easily imagine this being the way Parks sees the world refracted back to her, conversing with the dead, building abstractions.Unfortunately, her own domestic narrative feels flat by comparison. So “What’s the takeaway? What’s the concept? What’s the tone,” as the Writer’s TV producer asks her at one point during a conversation about the Writer’s plays project.“Plague Year” never answers these questions; the Writer ultimately discovers that the plays “didn’t save us.” But this isn’t Parks renouncing her ambitious undertaking. She’s offering another way to think about the production, which isn’t always a cohesive work of theater: Perhaps it doesn’t have to.Theater doesn’t save us, the Writer says, “but it does preserve us somehow,” so this piece still is a record. This is catharsis. It’s preservation.Plays for the Plague YearThrough April 30 at Joe’s Pub, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 3 hours. More

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      Review: ‘White Girl in Danger’ Flips the Script on Soap Operas

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      Michael R. Jackson’s wild new musical satire is packed with a thesis’ worth of insight about fate and representation.What comes to mind when you think of soap operas? Amnesia, murders, cliffhangers, catfights?Think bigger.Even judged by the standards of “All My Children” and “Dynasty,” Michael R. Jackson’s satirical soap musical “White Girl in Danger,” which opened on Monday at the Tony Kiser Theater, is a wild, raunchy, overstuffed tale.Sure, it features amnesia and the rest, and mile-a-minute jokes, but the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Strange Loop” has also packed the nearly three hours of “White Girl” — way too long — with a thesis’ worth of insight and argument. By the time you get to the dildo slapping and the “Hairspray” parody, followed by the anguished yet hopeful finale, you no longer know what hilarious, despairing, muddle of a planet you’re on.Surely that was the plan. “White Girl in Danger,” directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz, is simultaneously set in a fictional soap opera world called Allwhite and a metaphorical one inhabited by ideas. Allwhite is dominated, of course, by its white characters: the high-school mean girls Meagan, Maegan and Megan (abused, bulimic, druggy), their mothers (smothering, manipulative, viperish) and their boyfriends (psychotic, supportive, dissolute). Among the girls especially, privilege is assumed; it allows them to “choose their own adventures.”Their priorities are a little off, though. The most pressing issue they face as the insanely catchy title song kick-starts the action is not so much the discovery, every few minutes, of another white schoolmate’s body in the Allwhite woods. It’s the way the deaths threaten their hopes of winning an upcoming battle of the bands. Who will be left to play autoharp?The Black inhabitants of Allwhite have different problems. The Allwhite Writer (represented at first by thunderbolts and a voice-over) has consigned them to the “Blackground,” there to serve as friends, helpers and (in inexplicable historical flashbacks) enslaved people picking cotton. Mostly they are resigned to their fate; it may not be very fulfilling but, except for “Police Violence Story Time,” it’s relatively safe.Latoya Edwards, center, as Keesha Gibbs, a soap opera “Blackground” player who wants a bigger role.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat’s not good enough for Keesha Erica Kane Gibbs (Latoya Edwards). Her ambition is to transcend the Blackground and get an Allwhite story of her own, even if it means becoming a victim or a villain: “whichever one works.”This puts Keesha in conflict with the other Black characters, especially her mother, Nell Carter Gibbs (Tarra Conner Jones), who takes a more conservative approach as she rises from cafeteria lady to nurse and beyond. Also disapproving is Keesha’s D’Angelo-like ex-boyfriend, Tarik Blackwell (Vincent Jamal Hooper), who says she’s “hooked on that assimilation crack.” More fatefully, her schemes set her on a collision course with the Allwhite Writer himself.In Jackson’s complex and cross-linked encyclopedia of ideas, Nell and Keesha stand for a multitude of distorted representations of Black women in white culture, soap operatic or otherwise. He loves those representations but also loathes them, usually in the same breath; the ambivalence is the motor of the show’s satire, which scathes and kisses.Nell is the more familiar case: She’s the “Mammy” figure from “Gone With the Wind” and the title character from “Caroline, or Change,” even though they are nothing alike. The 11 o’clock number Jackson gives her, a ringer for “I Know Where I’ve Been” from “Hairspray,” provides the same full-throated thrill (in Jones’s titanic performance) as Motormouth Maybelle’s did in the earlier show, even as Jackson punctures its uplift by recasting it as “That’s Why I Kill.”And in Keesha’s quest for “an interblacktional bleminist movement that will liberate all Blackgrounds,” Jackson needles the jargon of trauma and revolution — and the bourgeois appropriation of victimhood he suggests it represents. Yet Keesha, as portrayed by the tireless Edwards, is also the eternal spirit of Black advancement spurred by bright young women from Beneatha Younger onward. It is not, we soon learn, just the Allwhite Writer who can’t make up his mind.If that leaves the characters confusing and hard to follow, well, they can join the club. Everything about “White Girl in Danger” is confusing and hard to follow. In the manner of soap operas, but with an absurdly fast twitch rate, personalities and plots get rewritten without notice. There’s very little for the actors to act except the twitch itself, which quickly grows tiresome through no fault of their own. Since most of them play three or more roles — Liz Lark Brown as all the white mothers, Eric William Morris as all the white boyfriends — they tend to blur into archetypes when they don’t whirl into inconsequence.Yet somehow the show remains compelling. Not because of the staging, which flags and — other than Montana Levi Blanco’s parade of laugh-out-loud costumes — is visually underpowered. (Even the constantly slamming doors wobble.) From Blain-Cruz and her set designer, Adam Rigg, who in last season’s “The Skin of Our Teeth” delivered many astonishments for the eyes, that comes as a surprise. Perhaps “White Girl,” despite being a coproduction of the Vineyard and Second Stage theaters, could not, on an Off Broadway budget, afford all its ambitions.In Jackson’s complex and cross-linked encyclopedia of ideas, Nell and Keesha stand for a multitude of distorted representations of Black women.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhat keeps your attention most of the time as you watch, and certainly when thinking about it later, is the bounty and electricity of Jackson’s ideas, which derive as much from his long history as a soap opera lover as from his complex approach to the underlying conflicts of race and gender.Those conflicts, expressed in “A Strange Loop” through the voice and thoughts of just one character, are distributed more broadly in “White Girl,” a typical sophomore play problem (it’s chaotic and exhausting) but also an opportunity. Whether the opportunity can be exploited without exacerbating the problem, we must leave for future productions to discover. Stay tuned!It was in any case an opportunity worth taking. A glance at some of the “special thanks” in small type in the program gives you a sense of the fascinating breadth of Jackson’s high-low influences: Jackie Collins, Black musicals, “Fine-Ass Oiled Up Mens,” Soap Opera Digest, “PC/un-PC/woke/anti-woke” story lines, cultural neoliberalism and childhood loneliness.You can pretty much feel them all in “White Girl,” especially when a figure whose identity I won’t spoil (but is played beautifully by James Jackson Jr., one of the “thoughts” in “A Strange Loop”) arrives near the end as a kind of deus ex mess to untangle the show’s themes. Though that proves impossible, his attempt reminds us that ambivalence of all kinds, about people and love and stories and theater, is not a failure no matter what world you live in. Nor is it a success. It’s a start.White Girl in DangerAt the Tony Kiser Theater, Manhattan; 2st.com. Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes. More

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      Review: In ‘The Wife of Willesden,’ a Literary Marriage Falters

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      Zadie Smith brings her first play, an adaptation of Chaucer’s the Wife of Bath tale, to the Brooklyn Academy of Music.This April, in New York, when the rains have come and the winds have calmed and the cherry trees and hyacinths have hustled into bloom, theatergoers might find themselves making a pilgrimage to the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater, for the New York premiere of “The Wife of Willesden,” the novelist Zadie Smith’s adaptation of a lusty wedge of Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales.” And despite the punch and panache of the play’s language, they might find themselves going nowhere.As literary marriages go, one between Smith (“White Teeth,” “On Beauty,” “Swing Time”) and Chaucer, is in theory, of true minds. Though separated by some 600 years, both are keen stylists, eager comedians and dyed-in-the-worsted-wool humanists with a consuming interest in the varieties of emotion and experience. But marriage is hard and somehow Smith’s rendering — presented by BAM in association with A.R.T. — never quickens into life. “The Wife of Willesden,” Smith’s first play, is bookish bed death.Smith, aided by the director Indhu Rubasingham, has updated the action to the present and the setting a few miles north, from a South London tavern to a pub on the Kilburn High Road. (Rubasingham is the artistic director of Kilburn’s Kiln Theater, where the play debuted in 2021.) In Robert Jones’s design, the pub expands across the whole stage floor with lamps and lanterns flickering high above. Chaucer’s text, even unfinished, extends to 29 pilgrims and a host. Here the cast runs to just 10, though audience members seated onstage at wooden tables, swell those numbers.A prologue delivered by a character identified as Author (Jessica Murrain, charming in Smith drag), explains the circumstances. These pilgrims aren’t religious. (Unless drinking is your religion?) Instead, they are locals, out for a beer and a laugh and committed to a “lock-in,” a way to keep the party going long after closing time.In Smith’s rendering, Chaucer’s tapestry has shrunk to just one thread, though arguably its most vivid. If you have read “The Canterbury Tales,” from the cheerful bawdry of the Miller’s tale to the formalities of the Knight’s tale, the Wife of Bath will have leaped off the page in her scarlet stockings. Earthy, contradictory, impulsive and self-aware, she seems effortlessly and shockingly modern.The Wife, or Alison as Chaucer calls her, advocates for female pleasure and female autonomy and has some tart words regarding the prowess of her elderly husbands. What does it mean to offer her a modern vernacular and wardrobe? Extrapolating from “The Wife of Willesden,” not that much.Alison has been renamed Alvita. She is played with archness and authority and hip-swinging sass, shot through with vulnerability, by Clare Perkins, who has traded in those red stockings for a cold-shoulder dress and some very high heels. In Chaucer she is introduced as, “a worthy woman all her life.” Here: “She’s been that bitch since 1983.”Story within the story: Troy Glasgow and Ellen Thomas in the tale Alvita tells about a soldier who rapes a young woman and is forced to learn what women really want.Stephanie BergerAs in Chaucer’s poem, she prefaces her tale with what is essentially her life story, enlisting the pub’s patrons as her many husbands and various friends and acquaintances. (The ensemble is nimble throughout.) Smith’s language is jewel-bright, particular and lively, and Perkins’s performance is brassy and expressive. But every time the Wife addressed the Brooklyn audience — sometimes rhetorically, sometimes seeking an actual reply — there was no response to her call.How to explain these connectivity issues? Smith’s vocabulary, which mixes North London vernacular and Jamaican patois, may be one problem. And the accents, however mild, might rattle unfamiliar ears. Then there’s the form, which attempts to expand the monologue into something more communal and multivocal. Rubasingham’s direction is busy. Maybe it’s too busy (there are disco songs and a haloed Black Jesus). And yet these efforts fail to lift this literary exercise to drama.But the principal problem is the way that Smith has collapsed the now and the then. In the general prologue, the Author warns that audience members might feel surprise or offense at Alvita’s thirsty frankness:“It’s worth remembering — though I’m sure you know —When wives spoke thus six hundred years agoYou were all shocked then. The shock never endsWhen women say things usually said by men”Yet there’s no shock here. Alvita has been married more than most, sure, but her advocacy for equality, for freedom, for great sex is hardly radical now. Maybe it wasn’t even so extreme back then; the Wife became a favorite of balladeers. Her speech still has moments of ambivalence, as when she says that she found great happiness with a man who abused her. (Yes, he repented, but still.) And in the tale Alvita tells, about a soldier who rapes a young woman and is forced to learn what women really want, there remains no genuine justice for the victim. But Smith leaves this tension mostly unexplored and unresolved.The play ends with Alvita and her husbands singing along to Chaka Khan’s “I’m Every Woman,” which is both apposite and wrong. The Wife of Bath is an everywoman, but she’s also a singular literary creation, a character who transcends her moment. She doesn’t really need the updates — or the knockoff Jimmy Choos — to speak to ours.The Wife of WillesdenThrough April 16 at the Harvey Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music; bam.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      Review: Laughing, and Crying, in the Face of ‘Grief’

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      In his solo show about the death of his teenage children, Colin Campbell recounts his calamitous relationship with the darkest of emotions.Death is often described as a loss, but for Colin Campbell and his wife, it was a theft. On June 12, 2019, the couple’s children, Ruby and Hart, were killed by an inebriated driver in a horrific crash. Ruby was 17 and loved anime; Hart was 14 and worshiped hip-hop. A photograph of them even younger — bright-eyed and golden-haired — rests on a table like a shrine, one of the few props in Campbell’s brusque tragicomedy, “Grief: A One Man ShitShow.”In “Grief,” directed by Michael Schlitt, Campbell recounts his relationship with the emotion. Before the bleak canvas of a back wall, Campbell, a writer and director of theater and film, begins his solo show with a warning of the semi-macabre journey to come: “Tonight, you are going to get taken to some uncomfortable places.” Seconds later, the lights dim and Campbell begins detailing that fatal night.Campbell knows that memories aren’t kept only in the brain; they are also conjured by the tongue. So the remainder of “Grief” unfolds like a talking book of essays (Campbell recently wrote “Finding the Words: Working Through Profound Loss with Hope and Purpose”), weaving together the many ways friends and family fumble grief-talk with stories about Ruby and Hart. Campbell’s blunt delivery of the former often conflicts with his deeply felt recollections of the latter, but what is lost in his uneven performance is more than made up for by his vulnerability.Campbell insists that “Grief” is not an act of sadomasochistic indulgence, nor is the act of dramatizing pain anything new. Sophocles and Aeschylus did it first. Campbell calls back to the Ancient Greek practice of gathering for the sole purpose of communal catharsis through theater, reminding us that “Oedipus” and “Agamemnon” would play out over a full day in 20,000-seat venues. “Grief” simply asks for 75 minutes in a black box.Campbell is not concerned with niceties or palatable jokes. His script acknowledges its brazenness, but only after taking combative jabs at religion, grief books, group counseling and other restorative practices friends dare suggest. He dedicates entire passages to the messy parts of the healing process: how to explain to friends the differences between not wanting to live and being suicidal; how to empathize with other bereaved parents who still have living children; at what point during mourning is morning sex acceptable.I could never answer Campbell’s questions. I’ve never had a child, let alone lost two. But I have said eternal goodbyes. “Grief” opened on what would have been my grandmother Adina’s birthday, April 2. She turned 84 on that day in 2010, and died the next. I imagine that Campbell — adamant that no grief compares with that of losing all your children — might roll his eyes at that anecdote, but including her is the same act of remembrance he spent his unforgettable performance showing me how to do.GriefThrough April 16 at Theater Row, Manhattan; griefaonemanshitshow.com. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes.This review is supported by Critical Minded, an initiative to invest in the work of cultural critics from historically underrepresented backgrounds. More

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      ‘Yes, I Can Say That!’ Review: The Freedom to Offend

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      The comedian Judy Gold’s new solo show at 59E59 Theaters is deliberately uncomfortable — and packed with laughs.The knuckle-dragging notion that women aren’t funny makes only a cameo in the comedian Judy Gold’s new solo show, “Yes, I Can Say That!” It’s tucked amid her homage to pioneering forebears like Totie Fields and Joan Rivers, who, Gold tells the audience, “said out loud what women whispered about when their husbands weren’t around.”The slur about unfunniness, she says, was handed down through generations of men “who did not want to see some brassy broad onstage making jokes about them and the part they played in their wives’ unhappiness.”Directed by BD Wong for Primary Stages, “Yes, I Can Say That!” is a deliberately uncomfortable, laugh-packed show seeded with stealth missiles like that one. Though Gold insists at the outset that a comedian’s only goal is to land the joke, this is not entirely true. As in her smart and impassioned book “Yes, I Can Say That: When They Come for the Comedians, We Are All in Trouble,” released in 2020, she wants at least as much to make us think.Onstage at 59E59 Theaters, Gold builds a vehement case for the vital importance of the freedom to offend in a healthy democratic society. For starters, she would like us to get over the kind of hair-trigger touchiness about language that leads to social media pile-ons, and focus on genuine threats.“They are taking away women’s rights, they are banning books, we have mass shootings, and people are furious if you mistakenly use the wrong pronoun,” she says. Then, urgently: “We had an insurrection, people!”As much as Gold is in favor of some general toughening up across the political spectrum, she’s not anti-sensitivity — “I [expletive] hate bullies,” she says — just anti-preciousness and anti-absurdity. What worries her is the freedom of expression that gets taken away when the freedom to outrage is banished.Written by Gold and Eddie Sarfaty, “Yes, I Can Say That!” interweaves a brief history of American comedy (Lenny Bruce is of course invoked) with Gold’s personal history, including comedy-club flashbacks, like the time she took rapid revenge on an M.C. who was witless enough to insult her just before she took the mic. She does some terrific impressions, including an uncanny Rudy Giuliani.What she doesn’t quite do is make palpable any current threat to comedians’ speech, so a moment when she explicitly frets about that — in the context of speaking truth to the president at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner — feels like a relic of the previous presidency, when Gold wrote her book. The show’s argument could gain strength by paying just a little more attention to some of the other First Amendment issues currently in the headlines.Gold’s larger point is that the ugliness of the past isn’t as long ago as we like to think. She notes, unnervingly, that her birth in 1962 was just 17 years after the death camp at Auschwitz was liberated.“Hashtag ObjectsInMirrorAreCloserThanTheyAppear,” she says, almost as if it’s a throwaway line.She gets a laugh, but the joke is a warning.Yes, I Can Say That!Through April 16 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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      Michael R. Jackson on the Soap Opera Origins of ‘White Girl in Danger’

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      The musical’s creator and creative team discuss their influences, including “Days of Our Lives,” “Showgirls” and D’Angelo.Hearing Michael R. Jackson, the Pulitzer- and Tony-winning playwright of “A Strange Loop,” speak about soap operas is like getting lost in a Wikipedia wormhole. With nary a pause, he rolls through the details of characters’ yearslong arcs, including every stolen identity, forbidden romance and vicious backstabbing — literal and figurative.He’s amassed decades of knowledge: He became hooked at 5 years old, when he started camping out in front of a “gigantic” wooden television set with his great-aunt. “I would watch ‘The Young and the Restless’ at 12:30, ‘Days of Our Lives’ at 1, ‘Another World’ at 2, ‘Santa Barbara’ at 3. And I would do that every day — Monday through Friday,” Jackson, 42, said in a recent interview. “The more I sat and watched with her, the more engrossed I got in these characters’ lives and the story lines. I sort of grew up obsessed with them.”So it’s not surprising that these shows, which he began recording on VHS when he was older, would eventually become a source of inspiration for Jackson: His new musical, “White Girl in Danger,” is rooted in soap opera themes and tropes. It’s now in previews in a joint production of Second Stage and Vineyard Theater, and is scheduled to open April 10 at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater.Latoya Edwards, center, as Keesha, a character who is trying to transcend racial stereotypes and get a more prominent story line.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe show takes place in Allwhite, a world defined by soap tropes and ruled by three white teen-girl stereotypes: Megan, Meagan and Maegan (pronounced MEG-an, Mee-gan and MAY-gan, FYI). Much of the show’s action takes place in and around Allwhite’s high school, where “the Megans” are preparing for a battle of the bands competition. Then there’s a Black girl named Keesha, who is trying to get her own story line and level up from being a forgettable Blackground character, forever stuck in slave narratives and police brutality stories. Meanwhile, the town’s residents are reeling from a mysterious spate of murders.In separate interviews, Jackson, along with the director, Lileana Blain-Cruz; the choreographer, Raja Feather Kelly; the set designer, Adam Rigg; and the costume designer, Montana Levi Blanco, spoke about the show’s many influences (including romance novels, Lifetime movies and Black girl groups) and how those influences were reimagined for the stage.Gothic melodramaJackson described “Days of Our Lives” as the soap opera that most shaped his understanding of and love for melodrama — specifically a 1993 episode in which the rich socialite Vivian Alamain (Louise Sorel) drugs her nemesis, Carly Manning (Crystal Chappell), and buries her alive. Jackson gushed about the scene, which begins with Vivian plucking the petals from a bouquet of roses, maniacally chanting “She loves me, she loves me not” atop Carly’s grave; he called Sorel’s “incredible” performance downright Shakespearean. “I was 12 years old and it was, to this day, one of the most seminal soap moments; it’s burned into me because I had never seen something so Gothic and terrifying happen,” Jackson said. “I was like ‘This is my form.’”There are many other iconic soap moments that are alluded to in “White Girl in Danger”: Adam Rigg designed a curtain inspired by a pink beaded rhinestone gown that Joan Collins, as Alexis Carrington Colby, wears in “Dynasty,” and looked back at a famous fight scene from the show between Alexis and Diahann Carroll’s Dominique Deveraux that leaves both characters — and the room they’re in — in tatters. Rigg used some of the background details of that scene — a vase, the peach and coral color palette of the room and furnishings — in the show’s set design.When it comes to characters and their roller-coaster arcs, Jackson’s favorites are Viki Lord (Erika Slezak), the “One Life to Live” matriarch with dissociative identity disorder whose alter egos emerge to dictate her romantic life, blackmail people, murder people and trap her enemies in secret rooms, and Kristen Blake (Eileen Davidson), the good-girl-turned-bad girl who also kidnaps and hides her enemies in secret rooms.Jackson’s love of these soaps runs deeper than the cloak-and-dagger plots and mustache-twirling villains. He even layered in musical references: The show’s opening number includes musical allusions to Peabo Bryson’s “One Life to Live” and the opening of “Another World,” sung by Gary Morris and Crystal Gayle.Three sides of Mark-Paul GosselaarMark-Paul Gosselaar, right, as the mischievous Zack Morris, with Mario Lopez as Slater, left, and Dustin Diamond as Screech, in “Saved by the Bell.”NBCThere are footprints of the late ’80s and early ’90s high school sitcom “Saved by the Bell” all over the musical, from Rigg’s kitschy Memphis-style design of the Allwhite school to Keesha’s colorblock windbreaker.And then there’s that show’s beloved Zack Morris, played by Mark-Paul Gosselaar. In “White Girl in Danger,” Jackson pulled from boyfriend tropes — not only Zack but also some of the other roles Gosselaar has played in his career — to mold a boyfriend character (known as Matthew Scott, Scott Matthew and Zack Paul Gosselaar, and played by one actor) opposite “the Megans.” Jackson cited as inspirations Gosselaar’s roles as a frat boy who sexually assaults a college freshman played by Candace Cameron in the TV movie “She Cried No” and as a loving, supportive brother in “For the Love of Nancy.”“This concept of three different boyfriends in one was born out of that, and Mark-Paul Gosselaar specifically, because he played all these parts really well,” Jackson said.Teen queen dreamsFrom left, Tara Reid, Rachael Leigh Cook and Rosario Dawson as small town musicians vying for a big break in the 2001 film “Josie and the Pussycats.”Universal Pictures, via Associated PressThe female clique atop the teen social hierarchy is a well-loved trope. For Kelly, the groups of alpha it-girls in movies like “Clueless,” “Jawbreaker” and “Heathers” greatly influenced how he choreographed “the Megans.”“The opening number, for me, is kind of like ‘Josie and the Pussycats,’” he said. “Everything they do is super cute and super meticulous.” There’s duality to their gestures, Kelly added, which can “flip from being really cute to being insidious.”Blain-Cruz mentioned “My So-Called Life,” and shows “about young women trying to navigate that in-between space of childhood and adulthood, but also claiming their own space.”“And those spaces generally tended to be occupied by white women or white girls,” Blain-Cruz said, noting that one of her favorite scenes to develop was a band rehearsal in which each of the girls’ performance styles recalls that of ’90s pop starlets.‘Hollywood, sex and murder’Gina Gershon, left, and Elizabeth Berkley in the 1995 film “Showgirls.”Murray Close/United ArtistsAffairs, dalliances and general sexcapades are hallmarks of soap operas, so “White Girl in Danger” follows suit with kooky seduction scenes, surprising bedfellows and sprays of bodily fluid. For the choreography of a scene featuring a sudden sexual reveal, Kelly enthusiastically references one of his favorite movies, the erotic 1995 drama “Showgirls.” He described it as “the wild and crazy cat-fight-love-festival that was between Elizabeth Berkley and Gina Gershon.”For Jackson, it wasn’t just the sexy daytime and prime time dramas that left an impression, it was also the work of the romance writer Jackie Collins.“I was like 10 years old and my older cousin gave me a copy of ‘Chances,’” Jackson said. “I devoured it, because it was so dirty. It was like my form of pornography, because I lived in a pretty strict religious home,” he continued. “That took me into this world of Hollywood, Vegas, gangsters, sex and murder.”Black music in the BlackgroundThere’s no “White Girl in Danger” without the Black characters who try to escape the racist, stereotypical Black stories in the Blackground. Three of the show’s Blackground women — Florence, Caroline and Abilene — serve as a kind of Greek chorus. For their fashion and choreography, Blanco and Kelly channeled the Pointer Sisters, the Mary Jane Girls, the Dreams, the Ronettes, even the trio of singer-narrators in “Little Shop of Horrors.” Kelly said the Blackground women represent “the trope of the three women 30 feet from stardom on the outskirts of every story.”For Tarik, a Blackground character whose roles are exclusively getting killed and going to jail, Black music was also prominent influence. “Tarik is every Black male stereotype from ‘Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’ to its counterpart; he’s also D’Angelo. He’s also Ginuwine. He’s also Usher,” Kelly said, specifically calling out D’Angelo’s bare-chested video for “Untitled (How Does It Feel).” Though Tarik has his own deliberately underdressed jacket-open moment, Blanco’s costume design for him includes a “Fresh Prince”-style cap and Hammer pants. More

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      Review: In ‘Día y Noche,’ Opposites Intertwine

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      David Anzuelo’s generous, unwieldy play about an oil-and-water friendship between two high school boys opens at 59E59 Theaters.Let’s get this out of the way: The highlight of David Anzuelo’s new play, “Día y Noche,” is a wild, riotously funny sex scene that brings Act 1 to, well, a climax. It involves a trio of teenagers, Martin, Danny and Edna, enacting an unconventional scenario punctuated by Edna yelling encouragements in a fake French accent as she writhes in ecstasy, looking feral and her eyes bulging.Any show would have a hard time living up to this memorable sight, and unfortunately so does the LAByrinth Theater Company production “Día y Noche,” which is currently at 59E59 Theaters in Manhattan. The play is ambitious and generous but also unwieldy — the overlong sum of individual moments that often feel rushed.The show focuses on Danny (Freddy Acevedo) and Martin (Neil Tyrone Pritchard), who meet in their high school practice room in El Paso, Tex. — the first plays the guitar, the second the oboe. They form a bond that, despite Martin’s initial wishes, is not romantic but just as complex: an enduring friendship between oil-and-water boys.We are in 1984, and Danny, who is from a lower-middle-class Chicano family, is cooler than cool — he likes Patti Smith and David Lynch, girls and theater. Martin, one of the few Black students at their school, is a shy, bumbling nerd who is more well-off. He is just coming out as gay and wants to major in computer science in college.They should not get along, but they do.Anzuelo, who grew up in El Paso in the 1980s and also has a long career as an actor, is best at mapping out the way kids outside the mainstream found and supported each other in the pre-internet days — he is attuned to what can bind people over differences of class, ethnicity and temperament.It takes a little while for both the play and Carlos Armesto’s production to settle into a groove. The show is divided in “tracks” of various length, with projected titles, as if we were listening to an album, though this format also gives a choppy feel to the proceedings. Punk and proto-punk numbers punctuate key moments (the mood music in that teenage ménage: the Stooges’s “I Wanna Be Your Dog”), but Anzuelo forgot that brevity was one of the genre’s signatures: The Ramones’ debut album lasted just 29 minutes; “Día y Noche” goes on for close to three hours.After the intermission, the momentum evaporates into a succession of disjointed scenes filled with enough for two more plays, though the twin narrative helixes are that Martin finds a boyfriend (Peter Collier) and deals with the specter of AIDS, while Danny falls under the spell of a manipulative older theatermaker (Joe Quintero) with a taste for the stage director Peter Brook and drugs.To his credit, Anzuelo also gives us a couple of distinctive female characters, Edna (Emma Ramos) and Jessica (Viviana Valeria), though we learn just enough about them to be left wanting more — especially of Ramos, whose quirky, ferocious performance is downright electrifying. The lesbian Jessica is mostly an accessory to Martin’s gay baby steps, and is rewarded with a brief, wordless scene with a girlfriend, which is worse than no scene at all. Sometimes, more is just less.Dia y NocheThrough April 15 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More