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      ‘Off Peak’ Review: Caught in Limbo on the Northbound Track

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      Two passengers share more than just an eerie commute aboard a train headed upstate.The set of the new play “Off Peak” could have earned its own section in the Umberto Eco essay “Travels in Hyperreality” — doubly so since it is a hyperreal representation of travel. We are in a meticulous facsimile of a Metro-North car, three rows from the door. New Yorkers will be familiar with those blue and maroon vinyl seats, with that floor, encrusted with the grime of a million commutes. A newspaper and a paper coffee cup have been left behind, for good measure.This is so close to life that you expect a conductor to come in at any second. But that never happens, because despite intercom announcements letting us know that the train is the local to Poughkeepsie, Brenda Withers’s play feels as if it’s taking place in an almost ghostly limbo at odds with Sasha Schwartz’s lifelike replica of a set: “They don’t take our tickets, they don’t check on us, no one comes through,” a passenger named Sarita (Nance Williamson) says.She’s talking to Martin (Kurt Rhoads), the only other person in the play and, apparently, on the train — except for the unseen conductor (voiced by Doug Ballard), who gives intermittent updates on station arrivals. Soon enough, he informs Martin and Sarita that the train has to make an emergency stop.The pair, who are in their mid-50s, haven’t seen each other in almost 20 years and are catching up, a little awkwardly at first. After a few minutes of chit-chat, it’s obvious that they used to be a bit closer than mere acquaintances. The conversation continues — for longer than either would have expected, thanks to the delay — and whoa, Martin and Sarita are a lot more than near-strangers on a train.She is the livelier character, and there is a lovely quickness to Williamson’s performance, with a soupçon of neurosis and a touch of defensiveness (maybe that’s why Sarita tends to prattle a bit). Rhoads does whatever he can with a more stolid role. He and Williamson must be accustomed to spending time together in tight quarters: They have been married for almost four decades and regularly act together — they played the title characters in Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival’s production of “Romeo and Juliet” this summer. Jess Chayes’s production of “Off Peak,” currently at 59E59 Theaters, originated nearby, at the Westchester County home of the presenting Hudson Stage Company.If Martin appears to play offense, it’s because he has a past, and an agenda. After he whips out an envelope filled with $4,000, it takes Sarita way too long to realize that it was not chance that placed them in the same car of the same train at the same time. He cornered her — there is no other word for what he’s doing — because he wants to make amends. He has grown up since they were together, he tells Sarita (whose behavior when she first saw him now makes more sense), and he even starts bandying about words like “patriarchy” and “sexism.”To Withers’s credit, “Off Peak” does not veer into account-settling, because Sarita refuses to play Martin’s game. She is not swayed by his new allyship and its accompanying self-flagellation, does not want to be stuck in the role of victim he is trying to assign her. What Withers is less comfortable doing is making a good case for why Sarita sticks around and endures Martin when she could just move to another seat in another painstakingly detailed car.Off PeakThrough Dec. 23 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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      ‘Dick Rivington & the Cat’ Review: A Civic-Minded Holiday Treat

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      This wacky family show respects the codes of the British holiday tradition known as panto, which means playfully not holding anything back.New York City has a rat problem, but this holiday season one neighborhood is dealing with the menace: There is a new fearless cat on the Lower East Side, and he can take down an awful lot of vermin. He can also crack wise, twerk and land somersaults, because we are in the wacky land of pantomime, not the 6 o’clock news.The highly interactive, highly silly British holiday tradition known as panto has not made many inroads in the United States, but “Dick Rivington & the Cat” proves it can be done, respecting the genre’s codes while putting a local spin on them.The show borrows the structure of the panto classic “Dick Whittington and His Cat” and relocates it to the neighborhood surrounding Abrons Arts Center, where it is playing. Luckily the area has long been a haven for the downtrodden, so it welcomes the poor orphan Dick Rivington (Annette Berning) and his companion, Tommy the Cat (Tyler West), who have been wandering around looking for a place to call home. They introduce themselves to a rewrite of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song,” led by Tommy answering Robert Plant’s opening wail with “Meeeeeeeaoooow” — per panto formula, “Dick Rivington” features plenty of pop, rock and rap classic with new lyrics.Dick and Tommy make new pals — including Sarah the Cook (Michael Lynch), her son, Mitch (Matthew Roper), and the fetching Liliana (Jenni Gil) — and help them battle the rodent hordes (played by an ensemble of kids in furry outfits). The critters are led by King Rat (Bradford Scobie), who wants to extend his dominion from Chompkins Square Park “all the way from Corlears Hook to the very end of civilization, 14th Street!” (Is pizza involved, too? Do you need to ask?) Naturally, mayhem ensues, further boosted by the audience, which has been instructed to boo and hiss every time King Rat turns up. (New Yorkers, even children, need very little encouragement to loudly express their displeasure.)Bradford Scobie, center, as King Rat, with Muffy Styler, left, and Jonathan Rodriguez, right.Andrew T Foster for ONEOFUS/Abrons Arts CenterThe writer Mat Fraser and the director Julie Atlas Muz’s Panto Project had presented a very good “Jack and the Beanstalk” in 2017, but this second production, which had a curtailed run last year, is superior in every way. David Quinn created brilliantly inventive costumes on what must have been a tight budget (the cook’s outfit includes doughnuts and eggs over easy) and Steven Hammel’s sets make great use of Abrons’s relatively spacious stage.Most important, the action unfolds at a zippy pace and the jokes come nonstop. Parents will get a kick out of the double entendres involving Dick’s name (also a panto tradition) as well as the lighthearted allusions to the area’s gentrification — King Rat makes Dick and Tommy sleep with a potion so powerful that “a cookie in Essex Market could sell for less than 10 bucks and they wouldn’t wake up.”But what really elevates “Dick Rivington” is the acting, with a cast that perfectly understands that panto is no time for subtlety and “what’s my motivation?” interiority. West and Scobie, in particular, give some of the most exhilarating comic performances I have seen all year. West is tireless as Tommy — watch him chase a plastic bag — and manages to always be in the moment, reacting to whatever everybody around him is doing without coming across as obnoxious.As for Scobie, his King Rat is a ramshackle mixture of Alice Cooper and Adam Ant, prancing around with flamboyant assurance and unabashed glee at being a villain. (His big song is “The Phantom of the Opera,” of course.) He gets terrific support from Jonathan Rodriguez and Muffy Styler as the henchrats Scratchit and Ratchet. Too much of a good thing? Happily, this show does not believe in holding back.Dick Rivington & the CatThrough Dec. 18 at Abrons Arts Center, Manhattan; abronsartscenter.org. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More

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      ‘Your Own Personal Exegesis’ Review: Blessed Be the Young and Lustful

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      Julia May Jonas’s play-as-church service for LCT3 is imaginative, but falters as it nears the finish line.Heathens! Faithful! Come join a house of worship. Or, in the case of Julia May Jonas’s new play “Your Own Personal Exegesis,” the Claire Tow Theater will do just fine.Upon entering the theater, audience members are greeted with a selection of joyous carols and handed a program and church bulletin. A lectern stands at center stage, and a stiff-looking pew sits off to the side. But there aren’t any solemn sermons or routine parables in this play-as-church service by Jonas, who’s also the author of the fiery debut novel “Vladimir.” An imaginative though lopsided LCT3 production, which opened Monday, the show finds many instances of humor and insight in a story about a small-town youth group in 1996 New Jersey.Rev. Kat (Hannah Cabell) is this parish’s requisite fun, progressive pastor: She’s blunt and well-educated, and runs the youth group, whose members include a high school senior named Chris (Cole Doman) with an alcoholic father. He’s bright and, between his teenage dialect of sputters, mumbles and interjections, has downright poetic moments of wisdom.That’s what sparks a connection between him and Kat, who enthusiastically serves as both a theology teacher and his emotional sounding board. He’s not the only one struggling: Addie (Mia Pak), who likes Chris, has an eating disorder. As does Beatrice (Annie Fang), a new member of the group who often retreats to the background. And Brian (Savidu Geevaratne), whose parents are deacons, has been practically raised in the church but is overshadowed by the more popular Chris.The cast has excellent chemistry. And as directed by Annie Tippe, they capture the familiar posturing and insecurity of adolescence, the awkward exchanges and playfulness. This all plays out in short scenes at the church, which, courtesy of Brett J. Banakis’s set design, elicits the feel of a local church that doubles as a community center (retractable walls, portable stage).Though the use of the bulletin and structure of the play, meant to recall a church service, even with call-and-response, is more appealing in concept than in execution. The youth group’s big events mark the passage of time: a charity dance-a-thon, a liturgical play and a cross-carrying ceremony. Each interaction conveys the characters’ guilty rush of desire — whether for sex, food, connection or attention — or a type of abstinence, with Chris and Kat’s mutual attraction at the center.Doman, foreground left, and Cabell acting out a scene of Mary Magdalene washing Jesus’ feet. In the background are, from left: Annie Fang, Savidu Geevaratne and Mia Pak.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJonas’s “Your Own Personal Exegesis,” like Bess Wohl’s recent play “Camp Siegfried,” juxtaposes faith and sex as sibling hungers and balms. In “Camp Siegfried,” about two teens who fall in love at a Nazi youth camp in Long Island, that faith is in the cancerous myth of Aryan superiority. “Personal Exegesis,” however, embarks on a more philosophical examination of the topic, as when the skeptical Beatrice questions her peers about their beliefs. If Jesus is the place where divinity and humanity overlap, what’s in the spaces in between, Beatrice asks Addie?And yet, a fundamental “why” is left unanswered: Why are we seeing this? The script offers part of the answer: It’s a memory play. Whose memory? Beatrice’s, though it’s unclear if she’s the architect of what we’re seeing and why she’s brought us here.There are some signs that we may not be in an objective present: Rev. Kat introducing herself as a “youth minister at Redacted Church in Redacted, New Jersey,” and dreamlike sequences in which the characters act out tableaus of Renaissance artworks like the Pietà, or sing a song about lusting for “puffy nipples.” Some scenes and story lines are more blatantly allegorical than others, and initially it’s hard to tell whether these whimsical movements are from a single character’s perspective or just a characteristic of the work.Even when she seems like another background character, Annie Fang’s Beatrice is incisive, a little offbeat, always trying to play it cool — the kind of relatable teen heroine who seems adopted from a ’90s film.The whole ensemble is stellar: Doman’s Chris reads as a typical teenage boy but with such softness and grace that he’s elevated to a kind of messiah himself, a charismatic prophet who speaks the word and forgives sins. Cabell walks a fine line with Kat, whose authority figure is a welcome change from the go-to archetype of the predatory male pastor. As Kat she oscillates among the roles of devout mentor, shrewd academic and petty woman with a crush. Pak’s delicate performance as Addie is at turns adorable (“I had a rock in my shoe so I could feel Jesus’s pain,” she earnestly says of her participation in the Cross Carry) and wrenching, as when she tells the story of Jesus fasting in the desert, emphasizing his pious starvation. But ultimately Addie, who undergoes a fantastical transformation, is part of a story that feels like its own self-contained allegory that’s an awkward fit with the rest. Geevaratne’s wrings out the comedy from Brian’s tireless — and sometimes cringeworthy — efforts to be liked, but his character is noticeably less developed, written to serve just a limited function in the plot.The lighting design, by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew, gives intimate scenes a seductive candlelight feel and makes a bright overhead spotlight shine down like the eye of God. And Wendy Yang’s costume design, from baggy cargo pants with a chained wallet to a patchwork skirt and Doc Maartens, is an instant rewind to the time when millennials reigned.Jonas’s script begins with a definition of “exegesis”: “The critical explanation or interpretation of a text, especially of Scripture.” Her play succeeds at using biblical stories and religious traditions to illuminate its characters’ internal thoughts and feelings, but in blurring the line between a translation of dogma and a concrete truth, it leaves us to wonder: the Gospel according to — whom?Your Own Personal ExegesisThrough Dec. 31 at the Claire Tow Theater, Manhattan; lct.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      ‘Stomp’ to Close in New York in January

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      The long-running stage show has been a part of the city’s theatrical landscape for nearly 29 years.“Stomp,” the long-running show that repurposed mundane items like brooms and metal garbage can lids to create a gritty percussive stage spectacle, will close in New York on Jan. 8, the show announced on Tuesday. Its North American and European tours will continue to run.Created and directed by Luke Cresswell and Steve McNicholas, “Stomp” made an immediate splash when it opened at the Orpheum Theater in the East Village on Feb. 27, 1994.The wordless show “is banged, tapped, swished, clicked and clomped by eight choreographed percussionists,” Stephen Holden wrote in his 1994 review for The New York Times. “A modern vaudeville revue with a rock-and-roll heart, it is part tap-dance display (using some of the heaviest taps ever attached to shoes), part military drill, part swinging street festival.”The New York production is ending its run because of declining ticket sales, the show said.The news comes on the heels of the closings of long-running Broadway shows like “Come From Away” and “Dear Evan Hansen,” and the news that Broadway’s longest-running show, “The Phantom of the Opera,” will play its final performance in April. All of those shows cited the damage done by the lengthy pandemic lockdown, and the fact that audiences have not fully returned.When “Stomp” closes, it will have played 13 previews and 11,472 regular performances.“While we’re sad to see it close at the Orpheum Theater, we couldn’t be prouder of the impact that ‘Stomp’ has had — and will continue to have — as the tours run both here and in Europe,” the producers said in a statement announcing the closure.Few shows have had such staying power, let alone widespread popularity around the globe — with performances reaching the United Arab Emirates, Australia, Japan and Norway, among dozens of other locales. There was a time when it was difficult to escape the troupe of performers, who showed up at the Academy Awards, on TV in a “‘Stomp’ Out Litter” public service announcement filmed across New York City and at President Bill Clinton’s millennium New Year celebration on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.In 2019, the show celebrated its 25th anniversary. It shut down just over a year later, in March 2020, in response to the coronavirus and later became one of the first Off Broadway productions to resume performances when it returned to the stage in July 2021. More

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      Review: ‘Becky Nurse of Salem’ Brings the Witches but Forgets the Magic

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      Deirdre O’Connell shines as a modern-day descendant of an accused witch in Sarah Ruhl’s unfocused new play at Lincoln Center Theater.A wax statue of a 17th-century Salem woman stands at the center of the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater’s spare stage. We’re in the Salem Museum of Witchcraft, and this woman, wearing a fearsome scowl and a black frock, was one of the victims of the town’s infamous witch trials.If that brings to mind your English class lesson on Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” or what Becky, a Salem museum tour guide, dismissively refers to as her town’s “goddamn Christmas pageant,” that’s part of the intention of this new Sarah Ruhl play, “Becky Nurse of Salem.” The Lincoln Center Theater production, which was directed by Rebecca Taichman and opened on Sunday, brings in the witches but forgets the magic.Becky (Deirdre O’Connell), who introduces herself to the audience as descendant of the wax woman, Rebecca Nurse, goes off script delivering a colorful, expletive-ridden summary of Miller’s work to a tour group. On another tour, she sets the record straight on “The Crucible”: Abigail, the young woman who supposedly seduced the older, married John Proctor, wasn’t 17 as rendered in the play, but 11. And that one of Miller’s personal inspirations for the work was his lust for the younger Marilyn Monroe.After Becky is fired for her improvisations, she turns to a local witch (Candy Buckley) for help. One spell leads to another, and soon Becky is magically manipulating her interpersonal relationships, including those with her longtime friend (and crush) Bob (Bernard White) and her granddaughter, Gail (Alicia Crowder), who has been hospitalized for depression.When Becky isn’t dealing with the repercussions of using hocus-pocus to fix her life, she’s conversing with her dead daughter or stepping into Rebecca’s memories. And the play is strongest in these scenes, when it bridges Rebecca Nurse’s witch trial with Becky Nurse’s contemporary witchcraft.O’Connell, left, and Alicia Crowder as Gail. Riccardo Hernández’s spare set design leaves a lot to the imagination.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn her afterword to the play, Ruhl (“In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play,” “The Clean House”) writes, “I thought that I would end up writing my own historical drama about the Salem witch trials, but every time I tried to dip my toe into the 17th century my pen came back and told me to stay in my own era.” That bit of authorial indeterminacy, unfortunately, is apparent in the script, whose disparate elements are like individual puzzle pieces rather than one cohesive portrait.The technical elements also feel incongruous. The folky original music, composed by the singer-songwriter Suzzy Roche, is too sentimental for the show’s tone. And the lighting, a range of flashy disco-magic hues and otherworldly flickering designed by Barbara Samuels, comes across as too enchanting for a staging that is short on whimsy. Riccardo Hernández’s set design leaves a lot to the imagination — a large black feathered wing is suspended from the ceiling, while an unadorned stage with a cedar clapboard back wall evokes the forest.Set during the Trump presidency, “Becky Nurse of Salem” obliquely comments on the ways women are portrayed and judged in society. The most exciting part of this work is halfway through, when the cast, all in Puritan garb, circle Becky, now Rebecca, chanting “lock her up.” Suddenly the play becomes frightening, the stakes more immediate. But soon the references are dropped and the play moves on.Then there are Becky’s more existential issues: She feels trapped in her hometown, facing limited job prospects, being in love with her married best friend, and trying to raise a granddaughter. Also in the mix is opioid addiction, which has rocked Becky’s family.The more realistic bits of Becky’s story feel like little more than loose sketches of characters and circumstances, and there’s a lack of chemistry among cast members. Her boss at the museum, Shelby (Tina Benko), is a sneering academic with little empathy. Bob is the sweet friend who’s always loved her. Gail is the grieving teenager who wants to both connect with and liberate herself from Becky. And Stan (Julian Sanchez), Gail’s new morose, goth boyfriend, seems to be there to provide another conflict in Gail and Becky’s relationship.O’Connell, who won a Tony this year for her performance in Lucas Hnath’s “Dana H.,” elevates the not quite three-dimensional Becky, giving her a rough-around-the-edges New England charm — along with the nasal, r-dropping accent to match.The production, under Taichman’s tepid direction, is full of short scenes whose transitions have the cast quickly and unceremoniously rolling furniture on and off the set. O’Connell carries much of the humor, but otherwise the show’s comic timing is oddly off, and flat attempts at laughs, like the witch’s unique pronunciations of words like “oil” (“ull”), are unrelenting.In its final minutes, “Becky Nurse of Salem” tries to wrest its themes together via a heartfelt monologue and a cloying ritual. But by that time it’s too late. The play spends two hours dancing around a vaguely defined feminist message. That’s the very problem in this production: It hasn’t figured out the spell that will bring real magic to the stage.Becky Nurse of SalemThrough Dec. 31 at Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Manhattan; lct.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      Review: In ‘Sandra,’ a Search for a Friend Leads to Self-Discovery

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      In the playwright David Cale’s thriller, a woman looking for a vanished friend discovers a new sense of self.David Cale’s new play, “Sandra,” is packed with classic thriller tropes, as if he had challenged himself to cram as many of the genre’s staples as possible into a 90-minute show — I kept waiting for someone to transfer information from a computer to a USB key as seconds ticked by.Though this tale of a woman’s search for a missing friend is built using basic potboiler blocks, “Sandra,” which opened Sunday at the Vineyard Theater, is far from generic.Cale is operating, as he has been for over 35 years, within the parameters of the monologue — a style demanding of writer and actor, and not one usually associated with white-knuckle suspense. He also weaves in the themes that have long permeated his work, including the way people reinvent themselves, often to deal with trauma, and the need for transformation in the face of adversity.The playwright usually performs his own shows, but here he is lending his voice to another actor, as he did with his 2017 hit, “Harry Clarke,” which starred Billy Crudup and introduced Cale to a wider audience.Marjan Neshat (“English,” “Wish You Were Here”) plays all the characters, chief among them the narrator, Sandra Jones, a woman in her 40s who owns a cafe in Brooklyn and is vaguely dissatisfied with her life. One day, a close friend, a musician named Ethan, leaves for a trip to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico; he never returns. Ethan’s compositions live on with Sandra (the lovely piano score is by Matthew Dean Marsh, Cale’s collaborator on the 2019 play with music “We’re Only Alive for a Short Amount of Time”), who listens to them often. But physically, it’s as if he has vanished off the face of the earth.Our heroine decides to look for him, jumping on the first of several flights she will take over the course of the show. Once in Mexico, Sandra — who is separated from her husband and, perhaps, had not realized how emotionally and physically bereft she was — falls for Luca, a younger hunk. He says he’s a student, and glows with a magnetic, insouciant masculinity, with just the right amount of enticing mystery about his background. Luca is a male counterpart to the sultry sirens who have long lured film noir’s male protagonists, and at times it feels as if Cale is having great fun flipping the codes of the 1990s erotic thriller.Though the show’s plot can seem outlandish, Neshat acts as an anchor, infusing Sandra with a perfectly calibrated balance of effortless warmth.Sara KrulwichLeigh Silverman’s sober staging can dull the impact of the show’s suspenseful set pieces, as when Sandra surreptitiously searches a bag while its owner is in the shower, or when she stealthily records an incriminating conversation on her phone. Thom Weaver’s lighting is the great technical asset, romantically moody in the early stages of Sandra and Luca’s relationship, then suggesting the ominous chiaroscuro of film noir when the plot thickens.Neshat mostly stays rooted to a spot, sometimes standing and sometimes sitting, and the show feels uninterested in the body as a storytelling tool. The actress is literally at the center of it all, and has been handed a thorny gift of a role that requires the protean ability to portray a variety of characters, including the manager of Sandra’s cafe, an Australian surfer dude and an older gentleman straight out of a Tennessee Williams play. She struggles to differentiate them, and even Luca does not register much as Neshat goes in and out of his accented “potpourri of a voice.”But she shines as Sandra herself, a woman who was confident enough in her identity to name her cafe after herself but feels adrift, and defined mostly in relation to others. As far-fetched as the plot gets, Neshat is a steadying force, infusing Sandra with a perfectly calibrated balance of anxious hope and effortless warmth — her smile alone is a masterpiece of complexity, in turn melancholy, joyous, triumphant, bittersweet. We immediately understand, for instance, why Sandra throws herself into the relationship with Luca (the reverse is not as convincing).Early on, Sandra informs us that when Ethan was about to depart for Puerto Vallarta, he told her that they were “so simpatico, if I vanish you’d probably disappear from your life too.” Yet Sandra does build herself out of Ethan’s absence, and even, ultimately, her own.SandraThrough Dec. 11 at the Vineyard Theater, Manhattan; vineyardtheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More