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

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

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      Review: In ‘Hang Time,’ Lynched Men Tell Finely Tuned Tales

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      Zora Howard’s new play at the Flea catches three men during a few moments of their breathless eternity.Walking into the Flea for Zora Howard’s “Hang Time” is like stepping into a horror film. Darkness pervades the black box theater, and cicadas carry on conversations in some unseen woods. A large obstruction — perhaps a statue? or installation? — interrupts the space. Then it becomes clear: Three Black men seemingly hanging from invisible ropes above an elevated round platform. Lights faintly illuminate their slumped heads and shoulders; their shadows are cast on the right wall, evoking Kara Walker’s silhouettes. You have to pass by them to get to your seat.Howard, who wrote and directed this production, certainly knows how to make an impression.In this hourlong premiere, produced by the Flea and WACO (Where Art Can Occur) Theater Center in Los Angeles in partnership with Butler Electronics, the three lynched men, named Bird (Dion Graham), Slim (Akron Watson) and Blood (Cecil Blutcher), have conversations about women, work, fatherhood and loss. The space is bare, and the play stops as suddenly as it starts — as if we’re catching just a few moments in a breathless eternity.Even though there are no visible signs of the men’s restraints, occasionally we hear the sound of ropes tightening, and the men jerk backward and stiffen into their signature pose. The limp lolls of their heads, the surfacing veins of an extended neck, even the synchronized eye movements: This dance of rigor mortis is a master work of small intricacies, even if it grows more gratuitous and less poignant with every reoccurrence.Bird, Blood and Slim are like three chapters in the life of a Black American man: Blood (as in “Young Blood”) is still coming into his own. Slim is the clown, who sings, jokes and brags about his machismo. Bird, the eldest, is the sanctimonious curmudgeon, who preaches a gospel of God, firm morals and hard work, but also has his own losses that have hardened him. Each of the perfectly cast actors manages to straddle the line between realism and the metaphorical space where “Hang Time” exists.Howard draws out every subtlety of her already fine-tuned dialogue, which renders innocuous expressions into brutal double entendres about the men’s hanging bodies (“Look at him getting all red in the face,” Slim jokes at Blood’s expense). But the men don’t just communicate with words; they also grunt, snort and chortle, and at times the wordless exclamations form their own harmony.To accentuate the emotional shifts, Megan Culley’s sound design — which brings the outside world into the space, from rustling leaves to the bellowing of a train — works in tandem with the portentous lighting (by Reza Behjat) and the script’s varied pacing and silences. And the jeans, sneakers and plaid button-down shirts (by Dominique Fawn Hill) worn by the men are discreetly shabby and tattered, so you may not notice the bullet holes and bloody tears until late.There are purposely unanswered questions, including how these men ended up here. Bird, Blood and Slim never mention their deaths; they seem only vaguely aware of their predicament. They repeat exchanges, never seem to grasp the time, and talk about the weather and their plans as if the future were someplace they could actually confront.In both this work and her captivating 2020 play “Stew,” a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize, Howard writes her characters into a Möbius strip of trauma and injustice that is Black American history.And while “Hang Time” offers a work of theater that’s undoubtedly moving, it’s also too static to leave a more lasting impression. Even the absurdist purgatories and in-between spaces of Beckett, whose language has the same kind of circuitousness, take us someplace, even if we ultimately end up back where we started.“Hang Time” begins with a visual declaration of horror but, amid its chitter and chatter, never seems to finish the conversation.Hang TimeThrough April 3 at the Flea Theater, Manhattan; theflea.org. Running time: 1 hour. More

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      Review: ‘The Good John Proctor’ Imagines Girlhood BFFs

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      The play, directed by Caitlin Sullivan at the Connelly Theater, focuses on two girls in the year leading up to the action depicted in “The Crucible.”Abigail Williams is described by Arthur Miller in “The Crucible” as a “strikingly beautiful girl” of 17 with “an endless capacity for dissembling.” Lusty and conniving, Miller’s Abigail has an affair with her former boss, John Proctor, and after she gets fired, tries to hex his wife out of jealousy by drinking blood and dancing naked with other girls in the woods. Her lies about that night serve as the catalyst for Miller’s 1953 dramatization of the Salem witch trials, which casts John as its tragic hero.Williams was, in fact, only 11 or 12 years old in 1692, when she and her 9-year-old cousin, Betty Parris, made their first accusations. “The Good John Proctor,” a dark comedy by the playwright Talene Monahon, imagines Abigail (Susannah Perkins) and Betty (Sharlene Cruz) as girlhood BFFs and bedfellows in the year leading up to the action depicted in Miller’s play. Speaking in modern vernacular, but wearing Puritan-style bonnets and white nightdresses (in costumes by Phuong Nguyen), the girls whisper about dreams of flying, playact as a king and a peasant maiden and recoil in paranoia as if they were under constant surveillance.There is a threat lurking in the rustling darkness that surrounds them in this Bedlam production, which runs through April 1 at the Connelly Theater, but it’s not the supernatural kind (the stunning chiaroscuro lighting is by Isabella Byrd, and arboreal sound design by Lee Kinney). Mercy (Tavi Gevinson), a seasoned housemaid of 14, calls it the devil, but what she really means is the power and whims of men. “There’s evil everywhere,” Mercy mordantly insists. Is it any wonder the girls assume Satan is to blame for the bloody parts of womanhood that no one else has explained?The Salem witch trials have been endlessly rehashed and reclaimed in pop culture, including onstage; Bedlam presented a stripped-down and pointedly political take on “The Crucible” in this theater in 2019, and Gevinson played Mary Warren in a stylized and bombastic Broadway revival in 2016. “The Good John Proctor” isn’t even the only Salem-inspired dark comedy to play Off Broadway this season; Sarah Ruhl’s “Becky Nurse of Salem” brought a descendant of the accused to Lincoln Center in the fall.So why take audiences to Salem again? Monahon’s playful and precise ear for the rhythms of adolescent dialogue is among the chief pleasures of “The Good John Proctor,” which draws a bit too heavily on its source material (a brief refresher on “The Crucible” and its creepy poppet would be advisable preshow reading). Beautifully staged by the director Caitlin Sullivan, the play is most engaging and provocative when at its most original — mining its characters’ messy, developing psyches, with contemporary and sometimes profane language, rather than placing them within existing narratives.The cast, including a doe-eyed Brittany K. Allen as Mary Warren, nimbly inhabit characters on the edge of innocence, or just beyond it, who belong not entirely to the past or the present. That shadowy ‌in between space opens up fertile ground for investigation, where the only ones who have any basis to be afraid are the girls who’ve been left in the dark.The Good John ProctorThrough April 1 at the Connelly Theater, Manhattan; bedlam.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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      Review: In ‘Dear World,’ Donna Murphy Leads a Righteous March

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      Jerry Herman’s rarely seen 1969 musical is revived in an Encores! production at New York City Center.If the composer-lyricist Jerry Herman loved one thing, it was a brassy dame who bulldozes past all obstacles in her quest for the best possible life for herself. The women at the center of his best-known shows, “Hello, Dolly!” and “Mame,” are pathologically positive, speaking directly to our vanities and vulnerabilities — and are celebrated for it.Who better to teach a larger-than-life lesson than a strident diva in a bold headpiece? Such is the case with Countess Aurelia, the protagonist of his 1969 flop, “Dear World,” which New York City Center’s Encores! has revived in a blissed-out concert production that opened on Wednesday.Led by Donna Murphy, and directed and choreographed by Josh Rhodes with laissez-faire humor, it presents a smaller, looser, but still effective Herman elixir.Based on a fable-like Jean Giraudoux play, “The Madwoman of Chaillot,” Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s book follows the Countess Aurelia (Murphy), a Parisian eccentric who spends her days al fresco at the Cafe Francis, learning to love all before her “through the bottom of the glass.” When clouds (whimsically rendered by Paul Tate dePoo III as sparse hangings above his bohemian set of chaises, trunks and old clocks) threaten her outdoor seating, she simply wills them away with folksy charisma.But her peace is disturbed when a young official, Julian (Phillip Johnson Richardson), is sent by the President (a swaggering, delectably petulant Brooks Ashmanskas) to blow up the cafe so they can drill into oil recently discovered beneath. With the water supply already affected, Aurelia leads the charge against the bureaucrats, aided by the friendly Sewerman (Christopher Fitzgerald) and her bosom buddies, Gabrielle (Ann Harada) and Constance (Andréa Burns), the Madwomen of Montmartre and of the Flea Market.From left: Andrea Burns, Murphy and Ann Harada in the revival of Jerry Herman’s 1969 musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt’s easy to see how this fantastical musical could float away from a less confident, cleareyed director. Here, Rhodes (who helmed Herman’s “Mack & Mabel” for Encores! in 2020) emphasizes the kookiness of his well-sketched characters in a spacey way that makes everything feel, if not logical, then natural. His choreography is similarly simple, and works well for the ensemble, save for a vaguely anti-war, ballet-inspired solo performed during the entr’acte by Kody Jauron, who shines in a miming role.The score is by far Herman’s most relaxed; if “Dolly” is a bottle of Champagne and “Mame” a speedball, “World” is a Shirley Temple (Aurelia herself only ever takes one sip of wine a day). It’s perhaps a side effect from having written new material for the film adaptation of “Hello, Dolly!” that same year, with songs tailored for the close-up rather than the chorus line.The new Encores! music director Mary-Mitchell Campbell’s conducting is mostly swooning and enlivens the work, though she often opts for arrangements that warmly dissolve each number into a Parisian haze rather than charge up a triumphant belt. (Campbell, who did extensive research on the score’s many variations, has directed Philip J. Lang’s orchestrations toward a calmer phrasing than the original.) Only the crystal-clear voiced Samantha Williams, as the yearning waitress Nina, is allowed to soar vocally past the end of her stunning “I’ve Never Said I Love You.”But the intoxicating strength of the show’s leading lady still pulsates throughout — even when, as is often the case with these concert stagings, Murphy had her book in hand for the dramatic scenes. (She had to miss the first five days of rehearsal after testing positive for Covid.) Before curtain, the Encores! artistic director Lear deBessonet made the announcement, almost anxiously, but it certainly didn’t alter Murphy’s ability to deliver what she always does: an endlessly reinvigorating voice at once worldly, incredulous, curious and confident.Murphy’s Countess is a dotty, conscientious woman awoken from her comfort and determined to claim it back. If anything, Murphy’s consulting of the script amounted to a more organically astonished character, searching for the best words of affirmation in the face of encroaching danger. She first breaks through that slumber in the frenzied “I Don’t Want to Know,” which Murphy sings with captivating vulnerability.Christopher Fitzgerald, center, leads the ensemble in a tale that pits locals against the “hoards of pretentious, power-hungry, self-serving men consumed by greed.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd Burns nearly steals the second act in her brief solo, “Memory,” a coquettish dream of past flames. She looks dazzling, as does everyone else, in Toni Leslie James’s lovingly fussy, belle epoque-tinged costumes, and Matthew Armentrout’s wigs, the best of which being Murphy’s powder-white hair to match her blanched makeup.Everyone’s a little loopy in “Dear World” (Aurelia feels the touch of her former beau, Constance hears voices, Gabrielle walks around an imaginary dog), but not as mad as the incoming corporate forces. In Sandy Rustin’s concert adaptation, and under Rhodes’ direction, these aren’t the dust-ridden old biddies for which the original script seems to call for — the three of them look radiantly alive, for starters — but headstrong women who rather mean it when they offer to kill the “hoards of pretentious, power-hungry, self-serving men consumed by greed.”Considering our current climate of reactive, out-loud politics, the melodramatic straightforwardness of Lawrence and Lee’s story doesn’t seem as far-out as it once did. Now, as then, Herman’s tuneful, yes-we-can score holds a steady beat for all to march to.Dear WorldThrough Sunday at New York City Center, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      Final Sondheim Musical Will Be Staged in New York This Fall

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      His long-gestating final show, now titled “Here We Are,” is coming to the Shed; it is inspired by two Luis Buñuel films.Stephen Sondheim’s long-in-the-works Luis Buñuel musical, which he described as unfinished just days before his death, will be staged in New York this fall, giving audiences the chance to see the final show by one of the most important artists in musical theater history.The musical, now titled “Here We Are,” is inspired by two Buñuel films, “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” and “The Exterminating Angel.” Sondheim wrote the music and lyrics; the book is by the playwright David Ives (“Venus in Fur”), and Joe Mantello (“Wicked”) will direct.The show, scheduled to begin performances in September, will be a commercial Off Broadway venture, produced by Tom Kirdahy (“Hadestown”) in a 500-seat theater at the Shed, a multidisciplinary arts venue in Hudson Yards. The Shed, a nonprofit, is being described as a co-presenter.It is not entirely clear when Sondheim began working on the show, but he first discussed it publicly in 2014, and there were delays and setbacks in the years following. He talked about it occasionally during public appearances; for a time it was called “Buñuel,” and then “Square One”; it was backed at various points by the commercial producer Scott Rudin and by the nonprofit Public Theater. And there were workshops over the years, including one in 2016, and one in 2021 featuring Nathan Lane and Bernadette Peters; casting for the production at the Shed has not been announced, but there are no indications that Lane and Peters have remained with the project.In an interview days before his death in late 2021, Sondheim described it this way: “I don’t know if I should give the so-called plot away, but the first act is a group of people trying to find a place to have dinner, and they run into all kinds of strange and surreal things, and in the second act, they find a place to have dinner, but they can’t get out.”Sondheim described the show as incomplete, as did some of his collaborators in the days following his death. It is not clear what state it was in when he died, and what kind of work has been done to it since.Sondheim’s posthumous career has been booming. This season has featured Broadway revivals of “Into the Woods” (which opened last summer) and “Sweeney Todd” (which opens this month), as well as Off Broadway revivals of “Assassins” and “Merrily We Roll Along.” The “Merrily” revival is scheduled to transfer to Broadway in September, the same month that “Here We Are” is now expected to begin at the Shed. More

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      Review: In ‘The Harder They Come,’ Innocence Lost to a Reggae Beat

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      A stage adaptation of the 1972 movie about a Jamaican singer turned outlaw hero sounds great but falls hard at the Public Theater.It looks like such a bright, sunshiny day as the lights rise on “The Harder They Come,” the reggae musical that opened on Wednesday at the Public Theater. The patchwork vibrancy of Kingston, Jamaica, where the story takes place, is efficiently and joyfully sketched in a tin-sided, palm-fronded, louvered and latticed streetscape, lit in happy yellows and purples and bursting with people wearing island florals. And when we meet our hero, the “country boy” Ivan, who has come to the city to seek his fortune as a singer, he is bubbly and hopeful, with a bubbly and hopeful opening number to match: “You Can Get It If You Really Want.”But can you?Alas, over the next two hours or so, the answer will prove to be no, not just for Ivan but also for the audience. Like the chaotic 1972 movie it’s based on, which helped introduce reggae to audiences beyond Jamaica through the songs and charisma of Jimmy Cliff, the musical, adapted by Suzan-Lori Parks, is yanked apart by irreconcilable aims. The uplift of the infectiously danceable tunes keeps obscuring what turns out to be a deeply unsunny story.Not that the movie, directed and co-written by Perry Henzell, was very clear to begin with. Though considered a landmark by many, and certainly a point of national pride for Jamaica, it cannot count narrative logic as one of its strong suits. Its fascination is more like that of a fable, tracing the quick, jagged course of Ivan’s descent. Barely off the bus to visit his mother, he’s robbed of his meager belongings; soon thereafter he’s robbed of his soul, forced to sell his first song for just $20.Conflicts with the church (he falls for Elsa, a preacher’s ward), the police (he’s punished with lashings for defending himself) and even the ganja trade (what do you know, it’s corrupt!) gradually turn his disillusion into derangement. By the time this Candide becomes a semi-psychotic outlaw idol, like the characters in spaghetti westerns, it’s hard to keep track of the chain of injustice or even just the genre.If it’s easy to see why Parks might have wanted to work with this rich material — the movie’s soundtrack is deservedly a classic — it’s also clear that it needed rethinking for the stage. Yet her adaptation is full of choices that, however sensible they seem at first, ultimately make the problems worse.To give the story larger and more legible implications, she pushes the loosely drawn characters of the movie toward greater extremes of badness and goodness. The preacher is not just a hypocrite but a full-blown Judge Turpin, all but slavering over Elsa. The payola-scheming music executive and the police officer who controls the drug cartel are not just grifters but sharky megalomaniacs.Jones as Ivan and Meecah as Elsa, lovers in the movie whose courtship in the musical takes a more conventional turn.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt the same time, Ivan (Natey Jones) is radically softened, as if the muddled moral middle ground were a dangerous place to locate a musical. His braggadocio is sanded down to mere optimism, his crimes minimized and justified to emphasize his essential innocence. This takes a bizarrely conventional turn in his courtship of Elsa, whom he doesn’t merely shack up with but marries.Evidently the idea is to downplay the characters’ complexity and culpability in favor of an overtly political interpretation of the story that the movie, in its laid-back way, was mostly content to suggest without comment. Parks’s script, and the staging by Tony Taccone and Sergio Trujillo, heavily underline the larger forces — colonialism, capitalism, racism — that help explain or even require Ivan’s bad choices.Though that’s perfectly valid in theory, the heavy-handedness is quite a surprise coming from Parks, whose greatest plays float at the midpoint between archetype and individual. “Father Comes Home From the Wars” superimposes Homer’s “Odyssey” on the tale of a Black man who buys his freedom by fighting for the Confederacy. “Topdog/Underdog,” which won the Pulitzer Prize and was recently revived on Broadway, pulls off a similar balancing act in telling the story of hustling Black brothers named Lincoln and Booth.That balance has been thrown off in “The Harder They Come.” One reason is that the original was a movie with songs, and the songs were all diegetic: They arose from situations in which characters were actually singing, in a church or nightclub or recording studio. But because Parks was writing a musical, the songs had to do and be much more. The movie’s short tunestack — really just four or five main numbers — would have to be expanded.Still, it was another reasonable idea that backfired to expand it quite this much: There are 33 numbers listed in the program. About a dozen are by Cliff, from the movie or elsewhere; several are by other songwriters of the period; and three quite good ones are by Parks herself. (In her non-playwriting life, Parks fronts a “Modern Soul, Black-Country, Psychedelic-Afro-Righteous” band.) They’re deftly arranged for eight musicians by Kenny Seymour.But to accommodate so many, most are reduced to mere atmospheric snippets, curtailing their effectiveness. Even when they are pushed toward more prominence, they tend to evaporate on contact, as they’re forced, like the songs in jukebox musicals, into uses for which they weren’t designed. The rhythmic groove that makes reggae so intoxicating prevents the kind of development that edges a character forward, just as the repeated chorus structure, usually with repeated lyrics to match, stalls when deployed as drama.J. Bernard Calloway rattles the rafters with “Let’s Come in the House,” our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt least the songs are sung well: Jones is as beamish as his music sounds; you can see and hear how his Ivan might be the star the show says he is. Meecah, as Elsa, and Jeannette Bayardelle, as Ivan’s mother — both roles greatly expanded to counteract the episodic nature of the underlying material — take full advantage of their brief vocal moments to shine. As the preacher, J. Bernard Calloway rattles the rafters with “Let’s Come in the House,” a terrific gospel shout. The rest of the ensemble backs them up appealingly, and dances Edgar Godineaux’s choreography even more so.Still, the promise of the show, like the promise of its opening imagery — sets by Clint Ramos and Diggle, lighting by Japhy Weideman, costumes by Emilio Sosa — goes largely unfulfilled. Neither its satire of criminal celebrity nor its tragedy of sullied innocence nor even the sonic pleasure of its catchy score escapes the distorting gravity of its oversized intentions. Instead, “The Harder They Come” falls right into the trap of the rest of that title lyric: “the harder they fall.”The Harder They ComeThrough April 2 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      ‘How to Defend Yourself’ Review: The Murkiness of Consent, and Friendship

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      In Liliana Padilla’s play at New York Theater Workshop, college students find empowerment and life lessons in a DIY self-defense class.If an attacker grabs you by the wrist, dip your elbow, turn your hand palm-up, twist and use leverage against the person’s thumb to extract yourself. If the attacker is straddling you, buck your hips, grab an arm and flip the person over.Though North Gym Room 2, with its drab walls and paltry set of yoga mats, aerobic steppers and stability balls, doesn’t look like much, at least the self-defense moves being taught there are legit.Because in Liliana Padilla’s “How to Defend Yourself” (winner of the 2019 Yale Drama Series Prize), none of the undergrads in the class really know what to do. They are still reeling from a peer’s beating and rape by two frat guys.The play, directed by Padilla, Rachel Chavkin and Steph Paul, opens a few minutes before the first session of a DIY self-defense class presented by Brandi (Talia Ryder) and Kara (Sarah Marie Rodriguez), sorority sisters of the victim, who has been hospitalized since the attack.Diana (Gabriela Ortega) and Mojdeh (Ariana Mahallati) arrive first. Diana, who is loud, tough and gun-obsessed, hopes to unleash her inner Tyler Durden in a real-world fight club; her friend Mojdeh is more concerned with how they’ll get into Brandi and Kara’s sorority. And there’s also Mojdeh’s upcoming date with James Preston, an Adonis of the college’s senior class. Nikki (Amaya Braganza), formerly known as Nicollette (“It’s a new thing,” she says meekly), creeps in late, shyly sliding her body into the room. Brandi, a practitioner of various martial arts, leads the group, including Kara, and, later, two well-meaning frat boys, Andy (Sebastian Delascasas) and Eggo (Jayson Lee), who also participate in the consent exercises and counter drills.The shots and blocks traded in the class are always martial but not always physical; rifts within the group are exposed during disagreements about how and when to safely express one’s sexuality with a partner and how to act in situations where the rules of consent seem to be a bit hairier. Diana worries about how Mojdeh, so desperate to lose her virginity, will fare in her dating life. Eggo and Andy fumble through an uncomfortable conversation about what one of them witnessed on the night of the assault. Brandi and Kara cruelly blame each other for what happened.But as the play progresses, almost exclusively in these defense classes, it feels as if the playwright is struggling to figure out where, and with whom, she should set the play’s highest stakes. At first it seems as if “How to Defend Yourself” will focus on Diana and Mojdeh, that their evolving relationship to their own bodies in this class will illuminate their friendship with each other, and vice versa. Then it seems perhaps we’ll land with Brandi and explore the origins of her own trauma.Ortega, left, and Mahallati as friends whose motivations for joining the class go beyond learning self-defense.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFor as much as the play aims to engage the audience in a fly-on-the-wall view of a group of people — several of whom are meeting for the first time, developing and changing in relation to one another in this contained space — it still neglects to provide the necessary context to make the pre-existing relationships and the character arcs feel real. Likewise, there are occasional throwaway plot twists, like that worn-out trope of a surprise same-sex kiss between friends, that detract from the show’s more novel reflections.There’s Nikki’s newfound courageousness, sparked by a few defense drills. Andy’s abstract theories on sex and, later, his stunned realization that he looks like, the kind of predator his peers are learning to defend against. Group conversations about what sexual autonomy looks like if what a woman finds most pleasurable is relinquishing her control; what control looks like; to what extent many young women and men define their relationship to sex by their relationship to shame.Like the script, the direction occasionally taps into what makes these characters unique. A handful of perfectly timed, expertly revealing line reads can be heartbreaking, hilarious and vicious. “Can you lick my forearm?” Eggo asks during a consent exercise, with Lee, hilariously unpredictable, as the awkward sexual reject.Ryder has a tough task with Brandi, trying to convey the vulnerability behind the character’s bravado and stilted dialogue, but she can also be downright scary when Brandi’s edge comes out. When Diana quips, that it’s just a class, Brandi retorts, too sharply: “Does that make you feel safe?” Among the standouts are Ortega as the wild Diana; Braganza, shrinking and ducking out of sight as Nikki; and Rodriquez, whose Kara is volatile yet wounded. But too often their characters are forced to fade away from the main action.The show’s stylistic breaks from reality — brief interludes of choreographed fighting or dance, like one character’s beautifully articulated dance to Beyoncé’s “Formation” — also bring color and vitality to the play but could be woven through more consistently. (The exciting technicolor-style switches from sickly, stuttering fluorescents to raging club neons are by Stacey Derosier, and the bumping sound design, including a playlist of Rihanna and the Weeknd, by Mikhail Fiksel.)“How to Defend Yourself” rushes through a random patchwork ending that allows the production to show off some fancy stagecraft but doesn’t provide a satisfying narrative conclusion.Before their first class begins, Diana, in the midst of hyperbolic ramblings, says they’re in a “fiction of safety.” She could be talking about the United States, or the town they live in, or the college campus, or even North Gym Room 2, where they shadowbox hypothetical rapists and kidnappers. Either way, I’ve felt that “fiction of safety” too — sometimes when I elbowed and kneed mats in taekwondo, when I’ve aimed punches at my reflection in the boxing gym — that, despite my having a black belt and solid stable of jabs and crosses, there are still limits to the autonomy I have over my own body. So is safety really just a fiction?And if so, how do you defend against a lie?How to Defend YourselfThrough April 2 at the New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan; nytw.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      Review: In ‘Misty,’ a Restless Artist Grapples With a Gentrifying City

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      At the Shed, Arinzé Kene mixes spoken word, music and comedy to tell a story of racial tension and male identity in a changing London.There are many ways to tell a story. Freestyle, direct address and a varied assortment of orange balloons are just a few of the expressive means deployed in “Misty,” which opened on Thursday at the Shed. This multidisciplinary piece, by the British writer and performer Arinzé Kene, uses an array of sights and sounds to toy with the perceptions of the people it presumes are watching.The onstage musicians, Liam Godwin (keys) and Nadine Lee (drums), criticize Kene’s opening rhymes, about a Black man who beats up a drunk passenger on the night bus. Will this be another play about, as Lee says, a “generic angry young Black man”? A story that meets the expectations of a mostly white audience and transforms Black trauma into a commodity? Maybe so, but it’s also a probing and restless self-portrait of the artist.In the show that Kene says he’s writing, he plays a Londoner navigating an increasingly hostile city, likening its rhythms to the inner workings of a living creature. (“Misty” was commissioned by the Bush Theater in London, where, in 2018, it transferred to the West End.) Accompanied by live beats and with microphone in hand, he delivers spoken verse as the Black man: He leaves the drunk passenger behind, visits a lover and later discovers that his mother has locked him out of their home and he’s being pursued by the police.The poetry-slam vibe of these scenes is regularly interrupted by Kene’s many critics: His older sister (played as a young girl by the child actor Braxton Paul at the performance I saw) hangs him out to dry over email. The play’s American producer (represented by an empty director’s chair and a lit cigarette resting in an ashtray) is voiced, hilariously, in snippets of speeches by President Barack Obama. “I feel like I’m outside myself, second-guessing what is expected of me,” Kene tells him.Kene’s “Misty” excels as an act of self-examination more than it coheres as a piece of narrative theater, our critic writes.Sara KrulwichKene is a versatile artist, who comes across onstage as strikingly honest and vulnerable; “Misty” is as much about the challenges of his creative process as the outcome (a bit of clowning that finds Kene encased in a giant balloon is an apt visual metaphor). The production, from the director Omar Elerian, is beautifully atmospheric, propulsive and often a sensory feat. But “Misty” excels as an act of self-examination more than it coheres as a piece of narrative theater.Audience comprehension may be strained, for example, by the time Kene clarifies that the man on the bus isn’t him, but a friend who inspired the show. It’s around the same time that Kene reverses the play’s central, and ultimately overworked, conceit, insisting that white gentrifiers, rather than Black men, are viruses infecting the city. (The police, however, remain antivirals.) Kene favors repetition, in his lyrics and broader thematic construction, a style that might benefit from a tighter running time (the show is two hours with an intermission).There is a meta irony to bemoaning gentrification from inside this Hudson Yards theater, and to confronting white audiences with what they expect to see there. Even in interrogating the conundrum Kene faces as a Black artist, “Misty” narrowly addresses itself to white perspectives. It’s a trap that settings like this one make even harder to escape.MistyThrough April 2 at the Shed, Manhattan; theshed.org. Running time: 2 hours. More