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      ‘The Appointment’ Review: A Chorus Line at the Abortion Clinic

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      After its original New York outing in 2019, the trippy musical returns in the post-Roe era with an updated script and sharpened fangs.The singing fetuses giggle and taunt, adorable and naughty like a gang of baby clowns. Umbilical cords dangle from their bellies, and when the fetuses break into song, they like to hold those cords up like make-believe microphones.If you wanted to nudge someone’s memory of “The Appointment,” the wild and wily abortion musical that was first seen in New York in 2019, you’d start by mentioning those vividly imagined womb dwellers. In this show by the Philadelphia company Lightning Rod Special (“Underground Railroad Game”), they’re the rowdy, trippy part.What’s most arresting about “The Appointment,” though — even more now, in its current engagement at WP Theater on the Upper West Side — is the contrasting quiet calm of its realistic scenes set inside a clinic, where a composed, 30-something woman named Louise (Alice Yorke, credited as the show’s lead artist) has come to get an abortion.She actually has two appointments, as all the patients do: first an ultrasound, during which the doctor is required by law to ask if she wants to hear the fetus’s heartbeat. Then there’s some legally mandated medical misinformation — which he reassuringly debunks on the spot — and a compulsory 24-hour waiting period before she can end her pregnancy. The show follows her all the way through, demystifying the process with a keen straightforwardness. Nothing about Louise’s experience fits a trauma narrative.That is a major point of this daring, clear-eyed work of political theater, which pits the unambiguous humanity of Louise and the other clinic patients against a sentimental, fever-pitch fantasy of walking, talking fetuses — and briefly of unseen, hypothetical women who forever ruined their lives by aborting their pregnancies. (We hear their supposed voices in the show’s satirical song of female regret, “What Have I Done?,” which is performed by three male characters, channeling the popular idea of abortion as a source of everlasting anguish.)The creative team writes in a program note that “The Appointment” was “born of rage” at misogyny and paternalism. But in its previous New York outing, it was just possible to not quite pick up on the roiling fury beneath its surface — to come away thinking, perhaps, that it was deftly both-sidesing one of the culture wars’ most ferociously fought arguments.It would be hard to get that impression now. Directed by Eva Steinmetz from a smartly updated script (the book’s lead writers are Yorke, Steinmetz, Scott R. Sheppard and Alex Bechtel; the music and lyrics are by Bechtel), this new iteration of “The Appointment” is still the farthest thing from a polemic, but it is sharper, neater and more deliberate.In a run coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion until the Supreme Court struck it down last June, the show lands with more urgency than it used to. In one switched-out lyric from the anthemic “Tuesday Song,” a bracingly self-possessed Louise used to sing, with the other clinic patients, that activists’ screaming about abortion has “nothing to do with me.” It does now.None of which is to say that “The Appointment,” whose nutso musical numbers are choreographed by Melanie Cotton, is bummer theater. On a set by Oona Curley, with costumes by Rebecca Kanach and lighting by Masha Tsimring, it’s as unhinged as it always was, and as determined as ever to make the audience squirm — like when a long metal hook more than once appears from the wings, menacing the fetuses. By the way, there is also a hose.Distasteful? Arguably. But is it as unsettling as the ease with which a few of the female fetuses, looking for daddies in an interactive section of the performance, coax some men in the audience into opening their mouths when they should keep them shut? Arguably not. A tip: When they ask you to rate the hotness of one of them on a scale from 1 to 10, remember that she’s meant to be a fetus, not a grown woman — and that a woman is a person. So either way, what are you thinking, rating her?The AppointmentThrough Feb. 4 at WP Theater, Manhattan; wptheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      ‘Sugar Daddy’ Review: The Grief Comes Out in Laughs

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      In his show about mourning his boyfriend, the comedian Sam Morrison confronts overwhelming loss with punch lines and panache.In some cultures, keening over a casket promises cathartic release. For the writer and performer Sam Morrison, a self-identified “anxious, asthmatic, gay, diabetic Jew,” vocalizing his pain means barreling through punch lines at high speed, pumping the brakes every so often to split his heart open, in the solo show “Sugar Daddy,” now running at Soho Playhouse.Morrison, who at 28 calls himself “an old queen” by New York standards, admits that the recent death of his boyfriend of three years is all he can think about. Well, that and one other thing.“Sad gay men are objectively just the horniest people in the world,” Morrison says, citing a conversation with his therapist who assured him the combination of feelings is totally natural.Indeed, sex fuels much of Morrison’s observational humor throughout the 65-minute show, in bits that point to the absurdity of attraction to skinny people (“We’re always shivering and getting kidnapped!”), sex between straight people (“The creepiest part is that they only do it in private?”) and dirty talk near a partner’s rear end (“I don’t wanna get any words stuck up there!”).Morrison’s blue humor might seem almost juvenile, but he tells us it’s at least partly his way of facing an overwhelming loss. “Grief is disgusting,” Morrison says, and it erupts in unexpected combinations of impulses and bodily fluids. His partner, Jonathan, who was 26 years his senior and whom he calls “the hottest daddy” in Provincetown, where they met, died from Covid-19. (Based on audible guffaws and sniffles in the intimate venue, an older generation of gay men, who experienced the untimely deaths of loved ones to a different virus, may relate to Morrison on an especially personal level.) Candid details from Morrison’s relationship — Jonathan’s big belly laugh, the secret language they developed during quarantine — underline the absence it leaves behind.Amid a sometimes frenzied array of tangents, two confrontations anchor Morrison’s progress through mourning: the time he was mugged but refused to hand over his phone because his pictures of Jonathan were saved on it, and when he was chased by a hungry flock of gulls seeking the “gay little raisins” Morrison had pulled out to fix his blood sugar levels after he was crying on the beach. Both anecdotes, which Morrison weaves into a sort of narrative throughline, connect him to Jonathan in ways he’s found useful in trying to move forward.The quicksilver shifts from vulnerable sincerity, a tremble of heartache in Morrison’s voice, to arch sass and polished panache are remarkably fast and furious. Under the direction of Ryan Cunningham, Morrison’s favored rhythm is one of sustained escalation, his energy rising like the shriek of a teapot until it’s eventually deflected into a non sequitur. Set to boil, remove from heat, repeat. The crosscuts are familiar tools for comedians facing the unthinkable, even if Morrison often uses them to look away. Still, he is exceptionally present throughout, whether leaning into his self-ascribed signifiers — gay, millennial, Jewish — or describing the turmoil he appears to grapple with in real time.“Sugar Daddy” is a kind of group therapy, Morrison says; the only way he knows how to get through his experience is to talk about it. Turning his tragedy into comedy doesn’t mean it makes any more sense. But if joking can make grief less sacred and more profane, what’s a bit of laughter between tears?Sugar DaddyThrough Feb. 17 at SoHo Playhouse, Manhattan; sohoplayhouse.com. Running time: 1 hour 5 minutes. More

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      ‘Room’ Will Be Staged on Broadway, Starring Adrienne Warren

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      Emma Donoghue adapted the show from her best-selling 2010 novel; she also wrote the screenplay for the 2015 film.“Room,” Emma Donoghue’s harrowing story of a young boy raised in a shed where he and his mother are held captive by a sexual predator, was a best-selling novel in 2010, and then a much-praised film in 2015.Now a stage adaptation of the story is coming to Broadway with Adrienne Warren, a Tony-winning actress, starring as the boy’s mother. Warren, a founder of the antiracism organization Broadway Advocacy Coalition, won the Tony in 2021 for her electrifying performance as Tina Turner in the “Tina” biomusical. She has since appeared in the film “The Woman King” and the television series “Women of the Movement” and signed a development deal with a production company.The stage adaptation of “Room,” which is a drama with songs, has had several productions, starting in 2017 in the British Isles — at Theater Royal Stratford East in London, Abbey Theater in Dublin and National Theater of Scotland in Glasgow — and then last year in Canada, at Grand Theater in London, Ontario, and the Princess of Wales Theater in Toronto.Asked whether the production would be considered a play or a musical for awards purposes, Jim Byk, a spokesman for the show, said, “The producers have previously described ‘Room’ as a play with music, but as there has been considerable work done since the last production, they do not plan on making a definitive call on this until after the show is frozen, as is traditional for productions that could technically qualify for either category.”The Broadway production is scheduled to begin preview performances April 3 and to open April 17 at the James Earl Jones Theater. Donoghue, the Irish Canadian author of both the novel and the screenplay, has also written the stage adaptation; the songs are by two Scotswomen, Kathryn Joseph and Cora Bissett. Bissett is also directing the show.“Room” is being produced by Sam Julyan, James Yeoburn, ShowTown Productions and Hunter Arnold. More

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      ‘The Immortal Jellyfish Girl’ Review: A 26th-Century Love Story

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      Featuring a lobster telephone and a robot boy with wings, this puppet romance set in a future post-ecological collapse succeeds on its own weird terms.The first time Bug and Aurelia kiss is as romantic as can be, even if Bug has to get past his initial reaction. “That really hurts,” he says. “That stings so much!” Which is what you get when smooching a part-jellyfish humanoid.Aurelia is the title character of “The Immortal Jellyfish Girl,” though if 23andMe still exists in her postapocalyptic world, it might locate traces of kangaroo, frog, naked mole rat and other beasties in her makeup. Above all, “she is also 100 percent puppet,” as the narrator, a mischievous masked fox in shorts and red tails, informs us.Kirjan Waage and Gwendolyn Warnock’s play, devised with help from the ensemble and presented by Wakka Wakka Productions and the Norwegian company Nordland Visual Theater at 59E59 Theaters, is indeed a puppet show, and an ambitious one at that. It’s not just that the story is set in a poetically rendered 2555, but that Waage and Warnock, who also directed, blithely ignored the memo about coddling young audiences: Their show, for viewers age 10 and up, does not shy from the violence and death intertwined with life, and indeed several characters meet a tragic ending.We are on a future Earth that has been wrecked by ecological disaster and where humans have evolved into two groups at war with each other: the machine-enhanced Homo technalis and Homo animalis, who are mixed with animals. If you have any kind of familiarity with stories of star-crossed young lovers, it won’t come as a surprise to learn that Bug (voiced by Alexander Burnett at the performance I attended) is part of the first group while Aurelia (voiced by Dorothy James) is an Animalis. And not just any Animalis: She has the ability to generate polyps that grow into various animals, thus providing a ray of hope for a dying planet. The Fox (Waage) explains that “she is the first living DNA bank in the world.” (The title is inspired by the so-called immortal jellyfish, a real species that somehow can age in reverse.)As if ecological devastation weren’t enough, Bug and Aurelia must also deal with the machinations of the disembodied Technalis ruler, Doyenne, a featureless head floating above her lair.Like the earlier Wakka Wakka/Nordland collaboration “Baby Universe: A Puppet Odyssey” (2010), the production revolves around environmental concerns, which it mines with humor, emotion and storytelling verve — the Fox is prone to breaking the fourth wall and making jokes aimed at the adults in the crowd. (“Where are the clones? Send in the clones.”)Admittedly, it’s not always easy to follow, and the action hits some confusing potholes near the end, but “The Immortal Jellyfish Girl” does create an eerie, slightly morbid universe packed with bold strokes: a Lovecraftian squid and a lobster telephone that could have been dreamed up by Salvador Dalí; Bug suddenly sprouting a pair of wings from his back; Aurelia surrounded by odd animal forms floating in individual tanks. The sonic imagination is just as refined, with the composer and sound designer Thor Gunnar Thorvaldsson consistently delivering an array of expressive effects — he digitally assembled prerecorded vocals into a composite to create Doyenne’s voice, for example. Even if you can’t figure out what the heck that prophecy is all about or what’s meant to happen to Earth at the end, the show succeeds on its own weird terms.The Immortal Jellyfish GirlThrough Feb. 12 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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      Review: ‘Drama,’ at the Volksbühne, Contains Many Things. But Drama Isn’t One.

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      The choreographer Constanza Macras’s new work at the Volksbühne is a chaotic revue featuring dance, slapstick, spoken dialogue, pop music and heavy-handed monologues.The last thing the Volksbühne Berlin needs is more drama. That might sound like an odd thing to say about one of Germany’s most important theaters, but in recent years the company seems to have had all the histrionics it can take.It has been struggling to regain its artistic footing after the dismissal of its longtime leader Frank Castorf, in 2017, to make way for Chris Dercon, a tony Belgian impresario who didn’t last through his first season. Then Dercon’s replacement, Klaus Dörr, stepped down before the end of his term, after women in the company raised allegations of sexual harassment.When René Pollesch, one of Germany’s most acclaimed dramatists and a veteran of the Castorf years, was installed as artistic director in 2021, it was widely hoped he would be a purveyor of both stability and artistic excellence. However, Pollesch has struggled to restore the Volksbühne’s reputation as one of the most groundbreaking in Europe.Since Pollesch took the reins, the theater’s program has been a hot mess, with critical pans and poor box office returns. Against this background, it seemed inauspicious that the Argentine choreographer Constanza Macras titled her latest work for the theater “Drama.” The show had its premiere Thursday, and will run in repertory at the theater for the rest of the season.“Drama” is not a straightforward dance piece. Instead, Macras and her 10 performers — drawn from her own company, Dorky Park, plus some guest dancers — serve up a disjointed revue that is about theater itself, in the vaguest of senses. How is it that actors reciting lines written by someone else — often at a remove of centuries or millenniums — can ring true to audiences nowadays? Will they in the future? Using dance, movement — including Buster Keaton-esque slapstick — spoken dialogue and pop music, primarily in English and German, Macras’s intrepid and indefatigable troupe sets out to investigate.In the show’s opening minutes, Macras gives us a potpourri of Shakespearean scenes in a jittery pantomime. Toward the end, we get a three-minute version of Sophocles’s “Antigone.” In between, she treats us to a series of goofy scenarios, including a particularly zany one without dialogue, in which the dancers become life-size Playmobil figures with their helmet-like wigs and stiff limbs.In a zany scene from “Drama,” the players perform jerky movements, dressed as life-size Playmobil figures.Thomas AurinIn that scene, the performers’ controlled, jerky movements are impressive. Elsewhere, the cast display some startling physical feats. The most gob smacking is when the hunky dancer Campbell Caspary walks down a flight of stairs on his hands.The 10 performers that cavort across the large stage pretty much nonstop for two and a half hours are striking dancers, although the results are far more mixed when they are called on to recite texts or sing. With gusto but varying levels of musical skill, they belt out pop anthems backed by two onstage musicians, and when the entire cast launched into “I Sing the Body Electric,” from the 1980s musical “Fame,” joined onstage by a local amateur choir, that gaudy number felt like the show’s grand finale. Alas, we were only halfway through.As the evening wore on, cast members launched into heavy-handed soliloquies about cultural appropriation and artists’ poor pay. (“Dance is so intersectional,” is the worst line in a script with no shortage of clunkers.) Occasional self-deprecating references to the show’s own sloppiness come across as an unconvincing tactic to forestall criticism.From left: Caspary, Bas and Shoji in a musical number from “Drama.”Thomas AurinTaking in the entire spectacle is like following a sloppy brainstorming session through to its illogical conclusion. So why should we be surprised when Macras gives us a late-evening history lesson about Nélida Roca, the Argentine “vedette,” or showgirl, who held Buenos Aires enthralled from the 1950s to the 1970s. The real disappointment is that the burlesque show that follows is curiously low on razzle dazzle, despite all the feather headdresses and tassels.Here, as elsewhere in “Drama,” Macras’ choreography lacks distinction. It was deflating to watch the dancers give their all to exertions that hardly seemed worth the energy.As a chaotic vaudeville featuring dance, music, slapstick and confessional monologues, “Drama” bears more than a passing resemblance to Florentina Holzinger’s “Ophelia’s Got Talent,” a revue featuring an all-naked female dance troupe which is one of the Volksbühne’s only box office hits this season.Macras doesn’t go in for the shock tactics that are Holzinger’s stock in trade, but she still appears to take a page from the younger and more transgressive practitioner of dance theater. There’s even a monologue about suicide that will sound familiar to anyone who has suffered through “Ophelia’s Got Talent.” And although it’s blessedly shorter, “Drama” is similarly meandering, and feels endless.After two and a half hours, “Drama” leaves one exhausted, not exhilarated. It’s made up of many — far too many — ingredients, but drama isn’t one of them. More

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      Review: A Far-From-Revolutionary ‘Danton’s Death’ at the Comédie-Française

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      A passé take on Georg Büchner’s 1835 play about the French Revolution leans into the worst instincts of the Comédie-Française, our critic writes.It was a surprising oversight in the centuries-old repertoire of the Comédie-Française, France’s foremost theater company. Until now, it had never performed Georg Büchner’s 1835 “Danton’s Death,” arguably the best-known play set during the French Revolution.A new production by the French director Simon Delétang tried to right that wrong this week, but it may have come too late. Given the Comédie-Française’s affinity for prestige period dramas, the feuding revolutionaries of “Danton’s Death” should be an easy fit. Yet Delétang, who was until recently the director of the indoor-outdoor Théâtre du Peuple in the Vosges Mountains, plays into the company’s worst instincts, with a staging that eschews historical insight for endless grandstanding in front of candelabras.The Comédie-Française’s actors undoubtedly look good in knee breeches, but you’d be hard-pressed to know what they, or Delétang, make of the revolution, based on this production. Part of the issue is that, from a French perspective, Büchner’s play feels dated. Büchner, a German playwright, wrote it at age 21, using the historical sources available to him in the 19th century.The result, which is laced with literary references, dramatizes the rivalry between two revolutionary leaders, Georges Danton and Maximilien Robespierre. Formerly friends, they are at odds when “Danton’s Death” starts, at the height of the Reign of Terror, in 1794. In the play, Danton is as hedonistic as Robespierre is inflexible; Robespierre is also ready to sacrifice anyone to the virtuous new republic — starting with Danton, whose relative moderation he has grown to despise. These are undoubtedly meaty roles, and other important historical figures make appearances, including Louis Antoine de Saint-Just and Camille Desmoulins.In true 19th-century fashion, “Danton’s Death” is a clash between “great men,” heroes and antiheroes, who frequently launch into lyrical monologues about blood and death. Yet much work has been done in France in recent decades to examine the blind spots of this narrative, including the oft-forgotten role of women during the revolution.There are only a handful of women in “Danton’s Death,” and when they appear, they talk about men, or listen to them. That’s hardly surprising, because Büchner was a writer of his time, but Delétang appears uninterested in finding an angle that might resonate with current audiences. Even the people — so central to the revolution — are excluded from his production: Aside from a few supporting actors appearing at a window, there is no sense of a popular uprising.A number of French directors have done great work to remedy some of these biases, starting with Ariane Mnouchkine, who focused on the people’s role in her play “1789,” which premiered in 1970. More recently, Joël Pommerat’s plainclothes “Ça ira (1) Fin de Louis” (“It Will Be Fine (1) End of Louis”) captured the events of the early years of the revolution in all of their messy complexity, down to town-hall-style debates, with actors positioned in the auditorium as if audience members were 18th-century citizens, too. It was such a success that it toured for seven years, from 2015 to 2022.Loïc Corbery, who plays the title role in “Danton’s Death.”Christophe Raynaud de LageIn the wake of these works, Büchner’s Danton, a drunk with a death wish who wallows in self-pity and ends up guillotined, is hardly captivating. It doesn’t help that Delétang cast one of the Comédie-Française’s heartthrobs, Loïc Corbery, in the role. Danton, a lawyer by training, was notoriously unattractive after catching smallpox as a child and having his face mauled by a bull. Corbery is much too smooth and seductive a presence; it’s as if Timothée Chalamet turned up to play Winston Churchill.Opposite Corbery, Clément Hervieu-Léger is prissy and repressed as a bewigged Robespierre, with a dancer’s ramrod posture throughout. Guillaume Gallienne makes a suitably scary Saint-Just, and Gaël Kamilindi is a highlight in the role of Desmoulins, here a youthful dreamer whose life is cut short alongside Danton’s.The action takes place almost entirely in a cold semicircular room designed by Delétang himself, which stands in turn for a bourgeois salon, France’s revolutionary assembly and a prison. “Danton’s Death” culminates with the appearance, center stage, of a gold-rimmed guillotine that is almost as high as the walls around it. No heads roll onstage, but by that point, over two hours in, you just hope it ends the proceedings swiftly.“Danton’s Death” isn’t the first misfire on the biggest of the Comédie-Française’s three stages, the Salle Richelieu, since the company’s return from its pandemic-enforced break. And while a company director, Éric Ruf, has done much to work toward greater diversity since his appointment in 2014, men continue to dominate main-stage programming. Out of 12 productions this season, only four are directed by women, and no works by female playwrights are scheduled.On paper, it makes sense to have “Danton’s Death” in the Comédie-Française repertoire. After all, the company’s own history is tied to France’s fluctuating political governments, and some actors from the (formerly royal) troupe barely escaped the guillotine. But in Delétang’s passé production, the past never speaks to the now. More

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      When Monsters Make the Best Husbands

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      “Frankenstein’s Monster Is Drunk and the Sheep Have All Jumped the Fences” and “Heaven,” two plays in Origin’s 1st Irish Festival, offer two very different views of marriage.The monster is nestled in a glacier when the villagers dig him out, frozen but not dead, because he was undead already. Tall, broad-shouldered, hulking in his platform boots, he is instantly recognizable, and once he thaws, proves unpretentious despite his Hollywood fame.It is 1946 in a tiny European village, and he is the most endearing of monsters: awkward, uncertain, just wanting to help out. And in “Frankenstein’s Monster Is Drunk and the Sheep Have All Jumped the Fences,” a winsome cartwheel of a show that’s part of the Origin Theater Company’s 1st Irish festival, he finds lasting romance — with a local outcast who falls in love with him at first sight. Never mind that by his own account he is “constructed from the dismembered body parts of a number of different corpses”; their sex life is fabulous.Written and directed by Zoë Seaton for her Big Telly Theater Company, from Northern Ireland, this quick-witted frolic is adapted from Owen Booth’s short story of the same name. On the smallest stage at 59E59 Theaters, with a nimble and inventive cast of four, it is a fast-moving comedy that dares to tip into poignancy.The soulful, well-meaning monster (Rhodri Lewis) and his brisk, nameless wife (Nicky Harley) spend years finding a way to fit into their tiny village, whose populace is represented by the much-doubling Vicky Allen and Chris Robinson. With a large wooden cupboard as the movable centerpiece of its no-frills set (by Ryan Dawson Laight, who also designed the costumes), the play is the story of their marriage: passion, heartbreaks and all. Also mishaps — inevitable where a slightly bungling monster is involved.“One day he gets drunk and manages to lose her entire flock of 63 rare Italian blue sheep,” Robinson tells us, in narrator mode. “They spend years arguing about that.”With a dreamy, heightened air abetted by the lighting (by Blue Hanley and Sinead Owens), the play has tender depths. The monster and his wife can’t have children, and this grieves them terribly. But they get on with life, and with loving each other. And in their imaginations, they create together a whole secret world.In “Heaven,” Andrew Bennett plays a married man who fantasizes about a young man who looks like Jesus.Ste MurrayA very different kind of marriage awaits audiences at Eugene O’Brien’s two-hander “Heaven,” also part of Origin’s 1st Irish at 59E59. So does a helpful glossary of terms, stapled to the one-sheet program. “On the todd” means single; “up the duff” means pregnant; a “ride” is having sex; and so on.Mairead (Janet Moran) and Mal (Andrew Bennett) have been married for 20 years. In their 50s, the parents of a 19-year-old daughter who has never gotten along with Mairead, they haven’t slept together in quite some time. Still, Mal says: “We are the best of pals.”Back in Mairead’s hometown for a wedding, she kisses an ex-boyfriend — one of many she had before settling down with Mal, who lately has taken to indulging sexual fantasies about Jesus that he first had as an altar boy. A young man who looks like Jesus is a guest at the wedding, and now Mal has fantasies about him, too.Directed by Jim Culleton for the Dublin-based company Fishamble, “Heaven” is constructed as a series of alternating monologues by Mairead and Mal, narrating their alcohol- and drug-fueled adventures over the wedding weekend.It’s a well acted, reasonably entertaining play. But while “Heaven” might appear at first to be interested in shaking up the status quo, it turns out to have a drearily conventional spirit, certainly where Mairead is concerned.As the play nears its end, she makes a U-turn away from her own desire, abruptly keen instead on inhabiting one of the most selfless and desexualized of female roles. It’s an out-of-nowhere switcheroo, and it feels utterly imposed.Even so, O’Brien’s final line is perfect — in a shaggy-dog-story way.Frankenstein’s Monster Is Drunk and the Sheep Have All Jumped the FencesThrough Jan. 28 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes.HeavenThrough Jan. 29 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Review: ‘Not About Me’ Remembers Decades Shrouded by AIDS

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      Eduardo Machado’s autofictional play follows the playwright’s alter ego as he navigates gay life in the 1980s and ’90s.It’s one thing for a new show to take place, for the most part, in the downtown Manhattan of the 1980s and ’90s. It’s another to make audience members feel as if they are watching it contemporaneously: Eduardo Machado’s “Not About Me,” which just opened at Theater for the New City, could have been airlifted wholesale from that era.For New York theatergoers who lived through those times, the occasionally ramshackle acting and the endearingly primitive projections make for an experience akin to stepping into a hot-tub time machine. Younger people might think they have chanced upon a diorama of vintage East Village theater. Everybody is likely to agree that the eye-searing abundance of ill-fitting pants is pushing verisimilitude a pleat too far.The protagonist and narrator of “Not About Me” (take that title with a grain of salt) is a Cuban-born gay playwright named Eduardo (Mateo d’Amato) who bears a striking resemblance to Machado, a Cuban-born gay playwright. This autofictional bent is par for the course for an artist who has long drawn on his own story. Eduardo is even married to a Harriett, as Machado was in real life for nearly 20 years — “your wife who you have always made an offstage character in all your plays,” according to one of Eduardo’s friends, Frank (Ellis Charles Hoffmeister).Machado has acknowledged that “Not About Me” was prompted by the arrival of Covid, which reminded him of AIDS, “the first pandemic of my generation,” as Eduardo puts it. The show, which the playwright also directed, starts in the mid-1980s, when AIDS was still thought of as “the gay disease.” Dancing and cruising in clubs, Eduardo and his buddies are at first oblivious to the new viral threat, then mildly worried, then terrified. Complicating matters, he thinks of himself as bisexual. Eduardo spends most of the show flirting with men, especially Gerald (Michael Domitrovich, with whom, in another example of a real-life connection, Machado collaborated on the memoir “Tastes Like Cuba: An Exile’s Hunger for Home”), and going through an obsession with a troubled, temperamental actress named Donna (Heather Velazquez). He gets flak from both sides, as when his friend Tommy (Charles Manning) jokes that Eduardo should write a play titled “How to Go From Bisexual to Gay When It’s Convenient for Your Career.”Eduardo is almost always portrayed as the object of everybody’s desire, including, in a more platonic way, another actress, the Los Angeles-based Marjorie (Sharon Ullrick, stepping in for Crystal Field at the performance I attended). They are rehearsing a short Tennessee Williams play whose feverishness reflects Eduardo’s approach to life — swashbuckling, peacockish, omnivorous. More important, Marjorie has cancer, and Eduardo must learn to accept her looming death.The play can never settle on a tone, and many scenes land askew, teetering uneasily between earnestness and flamboyance — it often feels as if dramatic ones are played for laughs, and vice versa. It’s also never quite clear whether Machado, with cleareyed honesty, deliberately paints Eduardo as somewhat ruthless and a narcissist (after learning two of his friends have died, he wonders, “On my 40th birthday?”) or if he’s oblivious to how his alter ego comes across. This tension between intention and lack of polish — the show does not feel like it’s been workshopped to death — at least makes “Not About Me” stand out.The play slowly makes its way through the decades and ends in the present, with another pandemic that both crushes and spurs Eduardo. “To write, or not to write, that is the question,” he asks. Let’s rejoice that he chose to write.Not About MeThrough Feb. 5 at Theater for the New City, Manhattan; theaterforthenewcity.net. Running time: 2 hours. More