Theater

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      Review: In ‘Bees & Honey,’ Love Is Both Sweet and Sticky

      by

      In this play by Guadalís Del Carmen, a couple’s shared heritage is integral to their meeting and the ups and downs of their daily relationship.What draws two lovers together may be more obvious than what keeps them in sync. An inviting smile and smooth opening line can pierce the noise of a crowded club, but then what? In the case of “Bees & Honey,” which opened at MCC Theater on Monday, eyes lock and hips swivel to the plucky guitar and eight-count beat of bachata.This Dominican style of music and dance, with its sensual cadence and professions of heartache, is a foundational metaphor in this boy-meets-girl two-hander by the playwright Guadalís Del Carmen. After falling into step on a steamy night out, Johaira (Maribel Martinez) and Manuel (Xavier Pacheco) they begin a duet that soon finds them sharing an apartment in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan.She is a district attorney who ascends the ranks to prosecute high-profile cases; he’s a mechanic with plans to expand his auto-repair shop across the five boroughs.By the next scene they’re navigating the rhythms of a long-term romance. immersed in the tenor and flavors of their Afro-Dominican backgrounds. Instinctively, they sometimes slip into Spanish, teasing and rooting for each other as their lives continue to intertwine.The slice-of-life naturalism of “Bees & Honey,” presented in partnership with the Sol Project, is more interested in capturing culturally specific detail than in breaking ground with an original plot. The churn of daily ins and outs in this staging by the director Melissa Crespo, on a catalog-colorful living room set by the designer Shoko Kambara, has a familiar sitcom quality. And nearly every story development reflects an inevitable truism (sex lives dwindle, women get pregnant, elders require care). For a marital drama that runs two hours including an intermission, it feels light on substance and surprise.But what’s distinctive about Johaira and Manuel, and how their syncopation thrives and falters, is the texture of their shared heritage. Del Carmen skirts the edges of stereotype in underlining qualities variously associated with Dominican men and women, but ultimately succeeds in creating believable, if conventional, characters. Del Carmen betrays a heavy hand in how Johaira compels Manuel to read bell hooks, as an antidote to his inherited machismo. That she prosecutes sexual assault cases in court adds synthetic emotional fuel to the play’s highest-stakes climax, which happens offstage to people we never meet.Still, the ease and electricity between Martinez and Pacheco, whose performances deepen as the union predictably grows more complicated, lend the production a sticky-sweet appeal. Johaira is by turns headstrong, soft and a stranger to herself, inner tensions that Martinez embodies with luminous transparency. And Pacheco’s Manuel is spring-loaded with empathy and eroticism, reflexively attentive and affectionate, ready to respond to the slightest provocation. They seem to gibe perfectly until they don’t. So what happened? As Johaira says of dancing bachata: “You lose your footing and the moment is gone.”Bees & HoneyThrough June 11 at MCC Theater, Manhattan; mcctheater.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Theater

      Onstage in ‘An American Tail,’ a Family’s Jewishness Comes to the Fore

      by

      The Children’s Theater Company production, based on the animated film, elevates the depiction of its characters’ religious and ethnic backgrounds.The 1986 animated feature film “An American Tail” begins with a mouse family, the Mousekewitzes, forced to flee their home after men on horseback (and accompanying cats) set fire to their village in Russia in 1885. They travel to the United States, because, Papa sings, “there are no cats in America, and the streets are paved with cheese!”At the time, some critics said the film didn’t render the family’s Jewish background sufficiently. In his review, Roger Ebert complained that “only a few children will understand or care that the Mousekewitzes are Jewish.”In a new stage adaptation of that film at the Children’s Theater Company in Minneapolis, there is no mistaking the Mousekewitzes’ background. The show begins with them chanting the Hebrew blessing for Hanukkah as a menorah is lit. They recite two other Hebrew prayers. There is talk of a “bar mouse-vah” for the protagonist, the young Fievel.The musical also enhances the representation of the story’s Irish and Italian mice and adds mice from Sweden, China and the Caribbean. The female lead, an Irish mouse in the film, is now a Black mouse who quotes “the great Frederick Dormouse.” (Murine puns abound.)Like other recent historical shows, “An American Tail” sought to prioritize authentic depictions of each character, whether that was racial, ethnic or religious. The show’s creators felt it was important to dive deeper into the Mousekewitzes’ Jewishness and encompass other groups in order to reflect the contemporary understanding that Americans’ identities are not subsumed into a larger one.Luverne Seifert, left, with Lillian Hochman and Matthew Woody as the Jewish mouse family. The director, Taibi Magar, described wanting to “tell a deeper, richer, more truthful story.”Glen Stubbe Photography“We do have different experiences, and it shapes us differently,” said Itamar Moses, who wrote the show’s book and co-wrote the lyrics to roughly a dozen original songs. (A few were retained from the film, including “Somewhere Out There,” Fievel’s song of yearning that became a hit for Linda Ronstadt and James Ingram.) “The only way a diverse democracy can work is through both acknowledging and honoring our differences.”Jewishness and antisemitism are also foregrounded in several recent plays and musicals, including “Leopoldstadt,” which follows a family of Jewish Austrians before World War II; “Parade,” which tells the story behind the 1915 lynching of a Jew in Georgia; and “Just for Us,” about attending white nationalist gatherings in Queens.For “An American Tail,” the artists and the dramaturg, Talvin Wilks, sought to represent the different groups who resided in the close quarters of downtown Manhattan — for that is where the Mousekewitzes arrive — in the 1880s.“The story that came out in 1986 was not fully reflective of all the immigrant populations that were there and were intrinsic to making New York City what it is,” Taibi Magar, the director, said. “Is it about being woke? Yeah, sure. But it’s also about telling a deeper, richer, more truthful story.”The concept for “An American Tail” originated with one of its executive producers, Steven Spielberg, and the hero bears the name of Spielberg’s grandfather. By extolling the melting pot theory, the film, directed by Don Bluth, embodied its era’s attitude toward multiculturalism: that immigrant groups would abandon their individual cultures in an effort to assimilate.“They didn’t want to double down too much on the particularity of Fievel’s ethnicity, because I think they wanted to keep the story as relatable, as universal, as possible,” said Jonathan Krasner, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University.The decision to adapt the film for the stage arose from a conversation between Peter C. Brosius, the C.T.C.’s longtime artistic director, and Universal, which produced the film. It did not hurt that C.T.C., a past recipient of the regional theater Tony Award, has routinely produced shows that have traveled around the country. “A Year With Frog and Toad,” first produced by C.T.C., made its way to Broadway in 2003 and was nominated for three Tonys.The C.T.C. matched the songwriting partners Michael Mahler and Alan Schmuckler (who wrote the music and lyrics for the C.T.C. musical “Diary of a Wimpy Kid”) with Moses (a Tony winner for “The Band’s Visit”), and in 2018 they first met to begin developing the story.Becca Hart as Digit, a cockroach, with ensemble members in the show.Glen Stubbe PhotographyIn the movie, Fievel is separated from his family on the perilous voyage across the Atlantic Ocean, and ends up in one misadventure after another after he arrives in New York. When a varied assortment of mice fight a gang of cats known as the Mott Street Maulers, they are eventually — thanks to a scheme Fievel comes up with — driven onto a boat headed far away.“There was an opportunity to understand the points of view of these different groups of mice, why it’s difficult for them to come together, and have Fievel be the reason that they do,” Moses said.“What do the cats represent?” Moses continued. “In Russia they’re the Cossacks, in Italy they’re the Mafia. They get to America, and the cats have a scheme for exploiting the mice for their labor.”To bring the story to life onstage, the creators turned to vaudeville, which was coming into its own at the time and place of Fievel’s adventures. They built a small set and cast 20 actors, several of whom double roles. A six-piece band backs the company on 16 songs.In both the movie and musical, the cats are defeated and the Mousekewitzes reunited. Yet the musical adds a weighty finale, “There Will Always Be Cats,” which supersedes the earlier hope of no cats with an argument for solidarity in the face of eternal oppression — feline or otherwise. “An American Tail,” a positive review in The Minneapolis Star Tribune said, “offers a peephole into a past that doesn’t seem so far away.”During rehearsals this spring, the show’s musical director, Andrea Grody, hosted the writers and crew for a Passover Seder — a ritual whose message of sympathizing with less privileged forebears is echoed in the final number.“If we’re not careful,” Moses said, “we can become the cats by not remembering what our ancestors went through.” More

    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in Theater

      James de Jongh, Who Put Stories of Slavery Onstage, Dies at 80

      by

      His play “Do Lord Remember Me,” constructed from interviews with formerly enslaved people in the 1930s, was first staged in 1978 and has been revived multiple times since.James de Jongh, a scholar and playwright best known for fashioning oral histories left by formerly enslaved people in the 1930s into “Do Lord Remember Me,” a 1978 stage work that painted an unflinching picture of the human cost of slavery, died on May 5 in the Bronx. He was 80.Robert deJongh Jr., a nephew, said the cause was cardiac arrest.Professor de Jongh was a longtime member of the English department faculty at City College and the City University of New York Graduate Center, where he specialized in African American literature and the literatures of the African diaspora. But briefly in his early career he had been an actor, and he continued to maintain an interest in the theater. In 1975, together with Carles Cleveland, he wrote his first play — “Hail Hail the Gangs!” — about a Black teenager who joins a Harlem gang.“I wanted to go in a completely different direction for the second play,” he told the public-access cable channel Manhattan Neighborhood Network in a recent interview.He was drawn to a book called “The Negro in Virginia,” a collection of interviews with formerly enslaved people started by the Federal Writers’ Project, part of the Works Progress Administration under the New Deal, and completed in 1940 by the Virginia Writers’ Project. At first, he said, his idea was to construct a fictional story using that material as background, but as he delved further into archives of interviews at the Smithsonian Institution and elsewhere, his thinking changed.“Many of them were quite eloquent, were quite moving, were quite touching, and some of them were in, really, the voices of the people themselves,” he said. “In other words, the interviewers had actually recorded word for word, rather than simply summarizing the content of what they said. And those words were striking.”He realized that he could create a play made primarily of the recollections of the men and women who had experienced slavery firsthand, augmented by the words of Nat Turner, the leader of an 1831 slave rebellion, and by some gospel and work songs. The result was “Do Lord Remember Me,” which premiered in 1978 at the New Federal Theater on East Third Street in Manhattan, with a cast that included Frances Foster, a leading actress of the day.“The play, strongly felt and single-minded, has an impact far greater than one would receive from reading historical documents,” Mel Gussow wrote in his review for The New York Times. “The seven actors, portraying slave owners as well as slaves, transport us, showing us the auction block in our nation’s past — when people were a commodity for speculation — linking arms and embracing a collective consciousness.”Ebony Jo-Ann and Glynn Turman in the American Place Theater production of “Do Lord Remember Me” in 1982.Bert Andrews, via The New Federal TheaterA revised version was staged in 1982 at the American Place Theater in Midtown, with a cast that included Ebony Jo-Ann and Glynn Turman. In a fresh review, Mr. Gussow called it “a moving evocation of shared servitude.”The play, which has been restaged a number of times over the decades, has dashes of humor and a theme of triumphing over adversity. But it is also blunt in its language and its depiction of the cruelties of slavery, the kind of historical realism that is being erased from educational curriculums in some schools and libraries today. In one scene, a woman shares the back story of her facial disfigurement: As a child, she was punished for taking a peppermint stick by having her head placed beneath the rocker of a rocking chair and crushed.In the interview with Manhattan Neighborhood Network, Professor de Jongh said that although he was not a particularly religious man, he saw creating the play as a sort of calling.“Somehow, I felt I had a task,” he said, “and the task had found me.”James Laurence de Jongh was born on Sept. 23, 1942, in Charlotte Amalie on the island of St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. His father, Percy, was the commissioner of finance for the government of the Virgin Islands, and his mother, Mavis E. (Bentlage) de Jongh, was an assistant director for the U.S. Customs Service and ran a poultry farm and plant store.Professor de Jongh attended Saints Peter & Paul Catholic School on St. Thomas and then Williams College in Massachusetts, where he appeared in theatrical productions and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1964. He received a master’s degree from Yale in 1967 and a Ph.D. from New York University in 1983.Professor de Jongh continued to act for a time after his days at Williams College, but teaching was his vocation beginning in 1969, when he spent a year as an instructor at Rutgers University. The next year he joined the CUNY faculty; he remained there for decades and added the Graduate Center to his portfolio in 1990. He took emeritus status in 2011.Professor de Jongh wrote numerous academic articles on Black theater, the art scene in Harlem and related subjects, and in 1990, he published a scholarly book, “Vicious Modernism: Black Harlem and the Literary Imagination.” He also served on the board of the New Federal Theater, whose current artistic director, Elizabeth Van Dyke, called him “a quiet, gracious powerhouse.”Professor de Jongh, who lived in the Bronx, leaves no immediate survivors.The 1982 production of “Do Lord Remember Me” was also presented to inmates at Rikers Island — according to news accounts, it was the first complete professional production staged at the prison. Professor de Jongh attended and found the inmates more boisterous than traditional theatergoers.“There was an element of risk in the entire situation,” he told The Times that year. “The audience reacted with anger as well as humor. It was not just a play about remembering — their own freedom was circumscribed.” More

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      ‘The Fears’ Review: Group Therapy Was Never More Triggering

      by

      For the fragile souls in this new play, presented by Steven Soderbergh, a Buddhist group that once offered them solace loses its way.“This is the weather … and we’re just in it,” says Maia, the facilitator of a Buddhist trauma group at the center of Emma Sheanshang’s new play, “The Fears.” She’s talking about the mood in the room — a small, underwhelming one with mismatched office chairs set around a low wooden table — where she and six others regularly meet to talk through storms of rage, sorrow and panic. Or at least try to: interpersonal conflicts, clashing neuroses and a falling domino effect of triggers cause more breakdowns than breakthroughs, until even the group’s philosophical foundation starts to fall apart.From the first scene of this intriguing but lacking play, presented by the filmmaker Steven Soderbergh at the Pershing Square Signature Center, we get a clear window into the characters’ personalities. Dan Algrant’s direction is precise and telling, particularly in the entrances. Thea (Kerry Bishé), the newbie, drifts in skeptically. Rosa (Natalie Woolams-Torres), a stickler for rules, bustles in authoritatively. Fiz (Mehran Khaghani, comical even as a gay stereotype) bursts in with a declarative flourish, while the measured Suzanne (Robyn Peterson), always at odds with Fiz, strolls by demurely. Maia (Maddie Corman), overdressed in multiple layers, flutters in like a light breeze, and Mark (a stiff Carl Hendrick Louis) arrives late, flustered and eager. Katie (a painfully fragile Jess Gabor), a young goth, rushes in last, and withdraws into herself.Each person’s trauma is either explicitly spelled out, or hinted at through their individual triggers, which help explain, for example, why Fiz’s sister is a touchy subject, or why Thea has an encyclopedic knowledge of every traumatic event the world has endured.Sheanshang’s depiction of spiritualism has a satirical bite, with Maia’s performative shows of empathy — purrs and “mms” of affirmation — and the group members’ rigorous policing of one another’s responses, which is more about control than about support. But sometimes it seems as if “The Fears” is targeting Buddhism rather than the derivative school of thought — developed by a revered yet unseen male figure — practiced by the group. And the use of the characters’ quirks as punch lines verges on cruel (especially because several were victims of childhood sexual abuse) and undercuts the show’s emotional resonance.And so much of the story is about these characters trying to build a safe space within the room, within their practice, in order to find comfort in themselves. But the world keeps barging in (thanks to Jane Shaw’s stunning sound design): construction noise and shouting strangers seep in from outside the window, and there’s the sound of people chatting elsewhere in the Buddhist center.“The Fears” opts for a pat ending, and never makes a clear judgment on whether these broken souls can save one another or whether they are ultimately on their own. The questions at the center of its conceit remain unanswered: Are we all doomed to lives in which we barely manage our fears but instead let them rule us? Or is fear what draws out the most precious parts of ourselves?The FearsThrough July 9 at the Signature Theater, Manhattan; thefearsplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

    • 75 Shares109 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ Onstage, Lacks Some Intensity

      by

      A new West End adaptation, starring Lucas Hedges and Mike Faist, recasts Annie Proulx’s 1997 short story as a memory play.“This ain’t no little thing,” Jack Twist (Mike Faist) says of the depth of attraction he is experiencing in “Brokeback Mountain.”But the rodeo cowboy could equally be referring to the ongoing life of Annie Proulx’s celebrated short story. First seen on the pages of The New Yorker in 1997, Proulx’s distilled account of a tragically foreshortened affair has been an Oscar-winning film, an opera and now a self-described play-with-music.This latest iteration opened Thursday night in the @sohoplace theater in the West End, where it is scheduled to run through Aug. 12, offering a passing glimpse of some powerfully familiar characters. The bare bones of the narrative are there; the dramatically necessary flesh and blood and sinew are not.I was pleased to renew my acquaintanceship with the gregarious Jack and the more indrawn, troubled Ennis del Mar (Lucas Hedges), the two men who begin a furtive relationship in 1963 while herding sheep in the rural Wyoming locale of the title.But I’m not sure that the American writer Ashley Robinson’s adaptation actually deepens our understanding of material that many will inevitably associate with Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger in a lauded movie that lasts a good 45 minutes longer than the play (Jonathan Butterell’s atmospheric production clocks in at 90 minutes, no intermission).In the production, the Scottish singer-songwriter Eddi Reader performs original songs by Dan Gillespie Sells to give voice to the characters’ emotions. Manuel HarlanTold piecemeal across 20 years, the play comes punctuated with an attractive sequence of original songs by Dan Gillespie Sells, the English musician with whom Butterell collaborated on the (very sweet) homegrown stage and screen musical, “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie.”The seductive country twang of his music is punchily delivered here by the Scottish singer-songwriter Eddi Reader and an ace band visible at the side of the stage: look closely and you’ll see the pedal steel guitarist B.J. Cole, who has worked with Elton John and Joan Armatrading, among others.The music exists to express emotions to which the men, and the women they marry, are reluctant to give voice outright. Reader, billed as the Balladeer, is granted an articulacy missing from the characters nearby onstage who live in their bodies and not their minds.A standout number, “Sharing Your Heart,” comes at the point at which Ennis’s wife, Alma (a sympathetic Emily Fairn), realizes that her husband’s lasting affections lie elsewhere. In a separate track, lyrics describe “the lavender sky,” which a film can easily depict but which here has to be taken on faith. Tom Pye’s evocative set keeps closer to the ground, bringing to life kitchens, campfires and the tent inside which Ennis and Jack first allow themselves to be intimate.Alma (Emily Fairn) and her husband, Ennis, onstage.Manuel HarlanThe two seek shelter from the cold only to find further comfort in each other’s arms, and the tent shakes on cue to signal the carnal activity going on within it. What we don’t get, beyond stolen kisses, is the layered unfolding of a relationship with an intensity that takes the pair by surprise, so movingly evoked in both the original story and the film.It’s one thing for Jack to look on, clearly intrigued, near the start of the play as Ennis washes himself. But the writing is too synoptic and the action too abbreviated to allow the full weight of what is happening between them to be felt.“I ain’t no queer,” Ennis says early on, eager to disavow the feelings that will come to consume his life. What’s missing is time properly spent in the pair’s company, so that we feel the ebb and flow of this impossible romance. As it is, we get a sequence of highlights, a seeming annotation of the play rather than the thing itself, with the advancing years indicated by the ages of Ennis’s two daughters and Jack’s son. Mentions of the Vietnam War and the draft offer a perfunctory nod to the wider world beyond.Onscreen, of course, you can age up the actors on the way to the story’s bleak conclusion. The innovation here is to recast the story as a memory play, with the Older Ennis (a grieving Paul Hickey) on hand throughout to show the continued impact of Jack upon Ennis. The effect, at least for me, was to cast a glance back to Sam Shepard’s “Fool For Love,” another play about a combustible relationship defined by a character named solely as The Old Man.The two leads, in their West End debuts, acquit themselves well given the formidable challenge posed by their screen forbears. Hedges may not have the immediate physical command that Ledger had onscreen, but he shares his late predecessor’s furrowed brow and a sense of roiling anguish at society’s intolerance, and to some degree his own. This is someone who will never know peace.And Faist, so memorably springy and vital as Riff in the Steven Spielberg remake of “West Side Story,” is really wonderful: engaging and likable from the start, only to reach a psychic abyss on the way to Jack’s signature comment to Ennis: “I wish I knew how to quit you.” Pausing to play a mean harmonica, Faist more than justifies a play that can otherwise feel a tad superfluous.You may or may not weep at this “Brokeback” — I did not — but just as Jack is to Ennis, I expect Faist’s performance will be impossible to forget.Brokeback MountainThrough Aug. 12 at @sohoplace in London; sohoplace.org More

    • 100 Shares109 Views

      in Theater

      Our Theater is Fighting About Diversity. Who’s Right?

      by

      The magazine’s Ethicist columnist on how to cast an upcoming rendition of “Fiddler on the Roof.”I am involved with a well-regarded community theater that has made significant efforts to diversify its membership, casts and audience. A conflict has arisen over a proposed production of “Fiddler on the Roof.” (Yes, we know, “Fiddler” has been done to death in community theaters. A different issue.) The director proposing the production has committed himself to colorblind casting. Others involved say that, in view of the Jewish community the play is about, they would consider this to be a cultural appropriation. How should we approach this conflict in values? — Name WithheldFrom the Ethicist:“Cultural appropriation” is like one of those discarded medical diagnoses — throat distemper, the vapors — that derive from now-discredited theories, even though they were often applied to genuine ailments. As I’ve argued before, the habit of reducing the complexities of identity and culture to a matter of ownership is an artifact of our own property-rights-obsessed culture. We’ll do better to talk about “disrespect,” and disrespect isn’t the issue here. Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, the Jewish American duo behind “Fiddler,” certainly weren’t hung up on anything like cultural appropriation; early on, they were in touch with Frank Sinatra for the part of Tevye, and a previous musical of theirs centered on a crusading Christian clergyman.Still, readers will have noticed that controversies over casting — in filmed as well as live entertainment — have become commonplace. They enact a seeming clash between two ethical ideals. So it might be worth taking the time to get a clearer sense of the plot here.On the one hand, there’s a concern to create opportunities for nonwhite performers. Why shouldn’t Black people get to play Hamlet as well as Othello? On the other hand, people have asked for more demographic specificity in representation, often invoking authenticity. This approach — which rightly deplores, say, the old Hollywood tradition of whitewashing Asian roles — encompasses “color-conscious” casting and more, so that an Asian role belongs to an Asian actor, a lesbian role to a lesbian actor, a trans role to a trans actor. By the “mixing” logic of nontraditional casting, the performer’s identity doesn’t matter. By this “matching” logic of authenticity, a performer’s identity matters a lot.Each approach can uphold the value of inclusion, and each may present complications. Nontraditional casting can conjure fun imaginative spaces, modeling a world free of racism and, indeed, race. But casting for a colorblind utopia can be a problem when your aim is to depict racial injustice. The authenticity promised by the matching model, meanwhile, often implies that people who belong to superbroad categories of humanity are interchangeable. This talk of authenticity doesn’t explain why it’s a nonissue when a character of Chinese ancestry is played by an actor of Indonesian ancestry or, indeed, when an Ashanti character, from Ghana, somehow speaks like a Yoruba, from Nigeria.Nontraditional casting is of particular value where there’s a tradition to be bucked; familiar works or historical episodes can be experienced in fresh ways. I love that an open-access approach toward the classics has long been common, including in the amateur realm. In high school, I was cast as the menacing Goldberg in Harold Pinter’s 1957 play, “The Birthday Party.” (“Mazel tov! And may we only meet at simchas!”) It was relevant that the play had already been staged countless times; for variety’s sake, it was easy to discount a performer’s ancestry or age.There’s a useful analogy, speaking of Goldberg variations, in the “historically informed performance” movement in music. It’s a gift to be able to hear baroque works performed with original instruments, hewing to ornamentation styles thought to be characteristic of the period. But who would limit themselves to “authentic” performances of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations — and thus miss the marimba player Pius Cheung’s rendition? Within the realm of musical performance, happily, pluralism reigns.That’s the attitude to take with your “Fiddler.” When a show has been done to death, the task is to bring it to life, so that, in Bock’s own words, it’s “as if the audience were seeing it for the first time.” The truth is that this musical is a piece of American culture, not of shtetl culture; any appropriation was in the making of it in the first place.Mix or match? It depends on the particular ambitions of particular stagings. The ethical error is to suppose only one model is right. If the audience can get over the fact that the people on your musical stage are constantly dancing and bursting into song — as, sadly, people seldom do in real life — it can get over the fact that they might not actually look like villagers from the Pale of Settlement. If you have confidence in your director, let him fiddle with “Fiddler” as he prefers.A Bonus QuestionMy wife drinks heavily, to the point that she often repeats herself while drinking and forgets whole evenings. She already has high blood pressure, probably from drinking. She has a routine exam with a doctor soon. I know that she is not honest with her doctor about how much she drinks or her memory issues. I would like to express my concerns to her doctor, but I know it would anger my wife. What do you think? — Name WithheldFrom the Ethicist:You should express your concerns to your wife in a supportive way, and encourage her to be honest with her doctor. You might get helpful guidance in this by attending a support group for families affected by alcoholism. But the main guidance I have is negative: Inserting yourself into this doctor-patient relationship isn’t the way to go.Readers RespondThe previous column’s question was from a reader who had adopted a dog with her former partner. After their breakup, they agreed she would keep the dog since she was a veterinarian and the dog had various health issues. They also agreed her ex would be allowed to visit the dog. She wrote: “I have since started dating someone new, and he doesn’t like my ex spending time with the dog. I am at a loss about what to do.”In his response, the Ethicist noted: “You made an agreement with your ex about the dog, and though such agreements aren’t beyond renegotiation, you’re right to think that your word should have weight. What’s more, when you are starting a new relationship, it’s important to be clear about boundaries. I would be careful about just giving into your current partner. You’re worried about upsetting him. Equally, shouldn’t he worry about upsetting you?” (Reread the full question and answer here.)⬥A new partner putting up a fuss about honoring an important pre-existing commitment is an enormous red flag. The new partner’s behavior may seem innocuous now, but it is a classic sign of possessiveness that is likely to manifest in worse ways as the relationship progresses. The writer should seriously reconsider the speed with which she is investing in the new relationship. — Megan⬥A secure and healthy relationship allows one to maintain healthy contact with other people. The letter writer should decide what she prefers to do in this situation and see what happens when she makes a choice that goes against her new boyfriend’s wishes. His reaction will reveal everything she needs to know about their possible future together. — Stefanie⬥The Ethicist gave the correct response, but he didn’t state it strongly enough: This new guy is waving a giant red flag. He is asking you to break your word; go against your values (clearly you think of the dog as family deserving family visitation while he thinks of the dog as property) and he is demonstrating marked insecurity. I’m also a vet, and I have plenty of clients who share visitation. It’s unnecessarily cruel to cut off this contact — both to the dog and to the ex. — Maureen⬥Boundaries are definitely the key here. In addition to the boundaries around the new boyfriend controlling who visits her dog, it would also be appropriate to set boundaries with the ex around when he can visit. And clearly explaining to him that she has a new boyfriend may also eliminate the possibility that he’s hanging out with the dog in hopes that you two will get back together. — Brooke⬥I have been in this exact situation, and I loved the Ethicist’s response about boundaries. I was clear with my new boyfriend that I didn’t feel any tie or connection to my ex, but that the ex loved our dogs and allowing him visitation gave me a break and a trusted dog sitter. It was important to me to keep a promise I’d made. That my new boyfriend made this an issue was a big red flag, and I later ended up breaking up with him. — Molly More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Television

      Stand-Up Comics Are Asking, What’s So Funny About Grief?

      by

      Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Stand-up comedy.Are these the new five stages of grief? It can seem that way to those following the comedy scene. The past year has brought us specials and solo theatrical shows with jokes sandwiched between deeply felt thoughts on the death of a father, mother, girlfriend, boyfriend and sister.Dead baby jokes were once a juvenile niche. Now comedy about the death of a child has become its own heartbreaking genre. Just this month, the comic Liz Glazer released her debut stand-up album, “A Very Particular Experience,” about the stillbirth of her daughter (“a comedy show meets shiva”) and Michael Cruz Kayne premiered his wrenching solo about the death of his son, “Sorry for Your Loss.” Early on, he warns us that we might cry. “If you don’t,” he adds, pausing, “that’s rude.”There are so many grief-stricken comedians these days that it invites the question: For an art form traditionally associated with punchlines about dating and airplane food, why is it mourning again (and again) in America?The pandemic certainly put grief on the minds of artists and audiences, and that also explains a boom in books, theater, podcasts and television on the subject. One way to look at the final season of “Succession” is as a cringe comedy about people who are terrible at grieving.But the growth of stand-up on this theme is rooted just as much in aesthetic changes in the form. One of the most exciting developments in popular culture over the past decade is the growing ambition of comedy. Not only has it produced some of the finest, most urgent art on the pandemic, #MeToo and other newsworthy topics, but comics have also displayed a broader emotional palette than they did a generation ago. They are after more than just laughs. These new shows illustrate how grief, precisely because it’s usually handled with solemnity, jargon and unsaid thoughts, is ripe territory for stand-up.Michael Cruz Kayne warns audiences at his show about the death of his son that they might cry, adding, “If you don’t, that’s rude.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt the same time, there’s so much grief comedy right now that it’s already developed its own clichés: Joan Didion references, bits about the phrase “He’s in a better place.” Striking the right balance between light and dark is also tricky. Several comics sink into an indulgence they can’t afford. Comedy doesn’t have to be only about jokes, but when it stops being funny, there had better be a good reason.A SIGNAL TURNING POINT in modern stand-up was the moment when Tig Notaro walked onstage at a club in 2012, grabbed the microphone and said, “Thank you. I have cancer. Thank you.” She revealed that she had just been diagnosed with breast cancer and that her mother had died. She wondered aloud, “What if I transitioned into silly jokes?”Then a funny thing happened: The crowd protested, loudly. Notaro sounded surprised, even mocking the interest in bad news, before adding: “Now I feel bad I don’t have more tragedy to share.”That storied set was eventually released as a special, called “Live,” to considerable acclaim. Many comics followed with raw tragedies to share. Laurie Kilmartin live-tweeted as her father died before turning that into a special. Doug Stanhope used his mother’s last days for a baroque routine.Comedy has always gravitated toward darkness. Richard Pryor and George Carlin broached the saddest subjects. But there is a difference in comedy today, in aim and overtness. An extreme example is “Red Blue Green,” a 2022 special from Drew Michael, who has produced some of the most formally experimental and artistically polarizing hours in recent years. Toward the end, he describes comedy as “mining sadness” and transforming it into a balloon animal to make it palatable for an audience. That was the setup to the twist, a long rant about his own failings and insecurities and miseries that ends without a punchline. The result was something more like therapy than art — a deflated balloon.This is the risk of comedy that lingers in tragedy. It can get stuck there. Hannah Gadsby had also toyed with the surprise of setting up tension without relieving it in the surprise hit “Nanette,” to make a point about how always going for the joke can stunt your growth. That success touched a nerve, and the backlash included loud complaints that it wasn’t comedy at all. Besides giving short shrift to Gadsby’s deft balancing act, this policing of genre boundaries does comedy no favors. A flexible, broad art form is a healthy one.Hannah Gadsby in their special “Nanette,” which set up tension without relieving it. NetflixThe push into melancholy territory can be found in more ingratiating work, including specials by the most commercial stars. In his 2018 special, Adam Sandler downshifted into melancholy and sang about the death of his friend Chris Farley. But the tone has changed most dramatically among a younger generation of comics who seem interested in more than mere escapist entertainment. It’s also probably no coincidence that little-known comics are more likely these days to get attention from producers and industry people if they build shows around a narrative or theme.“At this point in comedy, it’s not enough to be funny,” Ben Wasserman said in the Brooklyn funeral parlor where he staged his vaudevillian “Live After Death,” which explores the death of his father and grandfather (not to mention his tragic lack of an agent). “You have to make people feel.”MAYBE THAT WAS SAID with tongue in cheek, maybe not. Either way, there’s no question that in certain quarters of comedy, jokes are not enough.For instance, at shows around New York, the quirky, swaggering Gastor Almonte has been performing a hilarious 10 to 15 minutes about his hatred of oatmeal. In a previous era that might have added up to a debut special that resembled the work of Jim Gaffigan. But when Almonte turned it into an hourlong solo show, “The Sugar,” that material was beefed up with a soul-searching story about his diabetes diagnosis and how the prospect of mortality changed his family. Watching it, I confess I wondered what the Gaffigan version of this show would look like.“The Sugar” was staged downtown at Soho Playhouse, which has developed into a hub of weighty theatrical stand-up shows, many of which are transfers from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. One of that theater’s biggest hits of the year was Sam Morrison’s breakthrough, “Sugar Daddy.”Quick-witted and charismatic, Morrison delivered a tightly honed work about the pain of losing his boyfriend that is both a love letter to his partner and a self-deprecating satire of a culture of mourning, one that spoofs well-intentioned condolences and support groups. He argued that the difference between comedy and tragedy was thin, saying that in the plays of Shakespeare, “comedy is only tragedy with a marriage at the end.” He explained that grief was lonely and impossible and “nothing helps as much as this show,” before a pinpoint pause, “because you guys can’t talk.” And he flat out played the vain millennial fool. “What is trauma but unmonetized content?” he asks, echoing a line from “WandaVision,” a series that itself is a grief narrative.In contrast to Drew Michael, Morrison is uncomfortable going long without a laugh. I saw the show twice, and the second time the punchlines had become faster, more insistent, almost as if the best argument he came up with was to keep you laughing.Most of these comics share a belief that discussing the subject has become taboo, even stigmatized. “We don’t talk about grief: We keep our grief to ourselves,” Kayne says in “Sorry for Your Loss.” Glazer hit this same theme. “For that reason alone,” she says, “I want to talk about it.”There is an irony in so many comedians talking about grief by saying no one talks about grief. It evokes the parade of cancel culture-obsessed comics complaining about how you can’t joke about anything without getting canceled while doing that very thing. But the grieving comics are quicker to mock and undercut their own motivations.The fundamental hallmark of these shows is a meticulous self-awareness. The comics are constantly justifying their own work. There’s a defensiveness here, an anxiety that is understandable. Grief doesn’t sound like a fun night out. And there has been a backlash that you can detect from other comics, even ones practicing dark comedy. In his amusingly navel-gazing special “Blocks,” Neal Brennan poked fun at himself and others by terming this genre “stand-up traumedy.”In “Baby J,” John Mulaney mocked the idea of exploiting death. Marcus Russell Price/NetflixJohn Mulaney ridiculed the tendency to exploit death in his special, “Baby J,” by recalling how in elementary school he was jealous of a classmate whose grandfather had died because he became the center of attention. The recent movie “Sick of Myself” takes an even darker view in its scathing satire of the culture of victimhood. In one scene, the wildly self-involved protagonist fantasizes about her own funeral. It’s funny, if glib and uncharitable, in the way that biting satire often is.The truth is that death is too good of a straight man to ignore.So many of the opening jokes get their laughs by treating mortality with just the right amount of irreverence. (Glazer begins with “I hope you like stillbirth.”) The lightest touch is just enough. Witness the dry understatement of this line from the comic Rob Delaney’s wrenching memoir “A Heart That Works,” about the death of his young son: “In between Henry’s birth and his death was his life. That was my favorite part.”Another reason grief is an unexpectedly great subject for comedy is that in a fragmented, polarized culture, with a shrinking common collection of references, it’s universal and relatable in a way few other topics are. Even if we don’t know someone who has died, we will. Or as Kayne explained to his audience: “We’re all pre-dead.”When someone dies, the conversations follow a tight script. Sorry for your loss. There are no words. We are all afraid of saying the wrong thing, and those suffering don’t entirely know how to respond. It’s a relief to hear comics not just poking fun at the stale jargon of condolences, but also demystifying the hidden world of the grieving, which can be messy and petty. The competitiveness of grief is a frequent subject. Who suffers most? The consensus is it’s parents of children who die, but only in these shows might you hear someone weigh the levels of pain of a parent of a 2-year-old versus that of a 10-year-old (as Colin Campbell does in “Grief: A One Man Shitshow,” about the gutting experience of losing two teenage children in a car crash).While it might seem counterintuitive, the popularity of joking about death represents a welcome shift from pessimism about comedy that was popular among performers like Gadsby and Michelle Wolf during the Trump era. These more recent comics generally share a faith that comedy helps — even if only a little. There’s a joy in the performances of Morrison, Kayne and Alyssa Limperis (whose “No Bad Days” focuses on her late father) that takes you by surprise.It makes you question the seeming obviousness of the incongruity of this kind of comedy. Death is an integral part of life, one every great art form explores. It’s the existential elephant in every room. Why do comics joke about it? A better question: How can they avoid it?Ali Siddiq in “The Domino Effect 2: Loss.” He avoids self-aware jokes and instead leans into stories you can get lost in.via YouTubeThis may be part of the reason the most riveting special on grief spends no time analyzing the subject. In his eye-opening “The Domino Effect 2: Loss,” Ali Siddiq, a revelation of a performer, adopts a different approach. Instead of self-aware jokes, he leans into stories that are easy to get lost in, especially with his jaunty, magnetic delivery. Looking back on his childhood, he describes how he became a drug dealer and lost a girlfriend, a sister and eventually his freedom. He tells the story of his arrest with vivid, suspenseful detail, but also sadness at the cascading devastation of loss. It’s the rare comedy about grief that takes the advice, “Show, don’t tell.”THE BEST ART DOESN’T hit you over the head. It taps your temple with metaphor, allusion and maybe an oblique tease. Stand-up is so immediate, so direct in its relationship between the comic and the audience, that there’s a temptation to just be blunt, to tie up and underline your points with a punchline that calls back to an earlier one. But while there are only a limited number of subjects to joke about, there are infinite ways to do it. That variety is where art flourishes.One theme repeatedly voiced in these shows is the impossibility of overcoming sadness. We are told that time will not heal all wounds; that grief makes you want to get others to understand, even if they never will. The final stage of grief, the real one, is acceptance, and in one of his early jokes, Michael Cruz Kayne tells you that is the one you will never get to.You don’t need to have endured the death of a loved one to confront this problem, the one of failure. But you can try approaching it in different ways. This is what Kayne’s show is all about, how you can see the same thing from a radically different perspective. He cleverly illustrates this point by looking at examples in math, language and, most of all, comedy. The death of a child is the worst thing that has ever happened to him. It’s obscene to use it for comedy, to laugh at it.But by turning this experience into a show, he keeps the memory of his son alive. It’s a subtle, moving performance that finds beauty in the trying. You get the sense that it’s what allows him to laugh at things he shouldn’t. When he takes the body of his child to a funeral home for cremation, he pays the bill and receives a receipt, which is projected on the wall behind him. It reads: “Thank you please come again.” More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      In Broadway’s ‘Grey House,’ Something Nightmarish This Way Comes

      by

      Levi Holloway on his psychological thriller starring Laurie Metcalf: “It wears the jacket of horror. But I think it’s more heart than horror.”When it comes to plays that inspire fear, unsettle the audience or display horrific intensity, only a handful come to mind. Martin McDonagh’s gruesome “The Pillowman” is one. Tracy Letts came up with two: the gleefully nasty thriller “Killer Joe” and the paranoia tale “Bug.”This certainly makes Levi Holloway’s “Grey House,” now in previews at Broadway’s Lyceum Theater, an oddity. The premise is classic horror: Stranded in a blizzard, a couple (Tatiana Maslany and Paul Sparks) end up in an eerie house filled with rather unusual children and their minder (Laurie Metcalf).“It wears the jacket of horror,” Holloway said of his play, which premiered in Chicago in 2019. “But I think it’s more heart than horror.”Paul Sparks, center, as a stranded traveler who finds shelter in a house occupied by, clockwise from left: Colby Kipnes, Sophia Anne Caruso, Eamon Patrick O’Connell, Millicent Simmonds and Alyssa Emily Marvin in “Grey House.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe genre may be scarce onstage but none of the major players here are strangers to works investigating disturbing tensions or the boundaries of reality. Metcalf and Sparks share a Stephen King connection: she starred in “Misery” on Broadway, and he was in Season 2 of Hulu’s “Castle Rock,” which is set in King’s fictional universe. Maslany’s virtuosic portrayal of numerous clones in the series “Orphan Black” earned her an Emmy Award. Millicent Simmonds played Emily Blunt’s daughter, Regan, in “A Quiet Place” and “A Quiet Place Part 2,” while Sophia Anne Caruso played Lydia in the “Beetlejuice” musical on Broadway and starred in the Netflix fantasy film “The School for Good and Evil.”Even the director, Joe Mantello, has partaken, putting on his actor’s cap to play a reporter in “American Horror Story: NYC.”During a series of interviews that took place in the Lyceum’s appropriately atmospheric basement lounge, members of the show’s cast and creative team discussed what horror means to them, and the particular challenges and rewards of “Grey House,” which opens on May 30. These are edited excerpts from those conversations.Levi HollowayWhen Holloway was 5, his father took him to see “A Nightmare on Elm Street” in a movie theater. “The skin was taken off of me,” Holloway said, “I was so scared.”Undeterred, his father eventually bought him a subscription to the horror film magazine Fangoria, so young Levi could understand the mechanics of fear. To encourage his kid to read, Dad gave him books by Stephen King, starting with “The Stand.”As a playwright, he has embraced horror partly out of genuine love (he mentioned John Carpenter’s “The Thing” as a favorite, and don’t get him started on why “The Exorcist III” is the best of the series) but also as a way to process a major trauma: In 2016, his twin sister was killed at the age of 35. “It was so meaningless and pointless, and such a baffling event that it got me thinking about the why of it,” he said.“I started thinking about predestination and fate and how no matter what direction we’re going, we’re going to end up where we have to be,” Holloway continued. “So I wanted to write about that, and I wanted to write about grief, where you put it and the house that holds it.”Caruso, left, and Metcalf, who plays a minder of a group of children, in the play, directed by Joe Mantello.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSophia Anne Caruso“Mind games, manipulation, psychological thrillers in general are the scariest genre of quote horror to me,” Caruso said. “And I think that this play definitely sits in the ‘psychological thriller’ section of horror.”The young actress has her issues with the genre, in which she sees women as often losing power. “But throughout this story, we are holding a lot of power without people directly realizing it,” she said of the play’s women. (Well, maybe not all of them.)“What I love about my character is I feel like she’s always one step ahead,” Caruso said of her role, which makes the most of the actress’s gift for sardonic delivery. “She knows exactly where we’re going but she doesn’t show it, and that’s a fun frustration to play with.”Joe MantelloBefore rehearsals began, Mantello watched “The Shining,” in which he saw parallels with Holloway’s play. “It’s a psychological thriller and, yes, there are elements of gore in it, but I think it was the isolation of that family in a very wintry landscape,” he said of the Stanley Kubrick film. “And some presence that is altering the trajectory of their lives.”As one of Broadway’s most in-demand directors, Mantello is used to figuring out exacting scripts, but he initially found the one for “Grey House” to be elusive. So he asked Holloway what animated the play’s inner logic. “I think that it’s important in this genre that this world has a particular set of rules, this house has a particular set of rules,” Mantello said. “Though the audience may not ever completely comprehend exactly what those rules are, we all have to be crystal-clear about them and adhere to them.”The “grey house” is not just a physical place, either: it seems to connect to a generalized anxiety that feels very modern, even though the show is set in 1977. “I feel that the world is in an incredibly dangerous place right now, and I’m very connected to the idea of people in peril,” Mantello said. Laughing, he added, “In this particular case, the danger is seemingly benign children, mysterious children.”“Leading the audience through the laughs into where we’re headed is a real fun actors’ path to take,” said Metcalf, above right, with Holloway at the Lyceum Theater.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesLaurie Metcalf“The thing that shook me the most was ‘The Exorcist,’” Metcalf said of her earliest encounters with horror films. “I think I was in my early teens and that did me in for horror for the next 50-something years.”And now here she is, starring in “Grey House.” Metcalf was drawn by the prospect of working again with Mantello, her frequent collaborator, and she was curious as to how he would handle a script that, she admitted, she did not “completely understand” the first time she read it. “I knew that Joe saw something in it that I wanted to be in the room to discover also,” she said.The show has to balance a tricky combination of dark wit and unsettling atmosphere. “The audience is going to teach us that piece of the puzzle — their reactions will definitely tell us a lot,” Metcalf said of how the comedy and horror genres thrive on viewers’ feedback. “We’ll learn how far we can go with the humor and the thrills.”She added, “I had the same feeling in ‘The Beauty Queen of Leenane,’ which is horrific and funny,” Metcalf said, referring to performing in the Steppenwolf production of Martin McDonagh’s play, back in 1999. “Leading the audience through the laughs into where we’re headed is a real fun actors’ path to take.”Millicent SimmondsAs Caruso pointed out, genre cinema, especially horror, can be a fraught place for women. For Simmonds, who is deaf, there is an additional layer. “It’s rare to see Deaf people who actually have that kind of power and agency to navigate a world,” she said of her character, through an interpreter. “They’re often portrayed as victims, a pity creature, somebody to help. When I read the script,” she added, “it was about just a person, not necessarily that they’re a Deaf person.”Simmonds said that in general she has a hard time dealing with spiders and graphic violence in films, and cited Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” as having affected her “because you don’t know what’s real and what’s not” — something that also applies to “Grey House.”Cagey, like her colleagues, about discussing the play in detail, Simmonds allowed that she sees it as a maternal story. “It investigates this question of what is a mother,” she said. “What does a mother mean to each of us? What do you need to sacrifice to be a mother? How do you raise a family?”Paul SparksLike Mantello, Sparks connected the show to a larger sense of dread that is haunting our society, a sense that our world is unsettled. “There’s a lot of things that we can’t control and things that we don’t understand, and things that aren’t what we think they are,” he said. “All that stuff is in this play.”The actor pointed out that “Grey House” uses a major horror trope, the cabin in the woods. But Holloway spins it in a novel way, inserting a cryptic side to the story that made Sparks want to pick it apart, and decode it.But he hopes audiences show some restraint in how much they share after seeing it. “I’ve been really going out of my way to not tell people anything about what’s going on,” he said. “These actors, these kids — I think people are not going to know what to expect. And it’s not even going to be close to anything they can imagine.“I think you’re going to be shocked,” he added. “I really do.” More