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      Review: In ‘La Race,’ a Fight Back From the Margins

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      Bleu Beckford-Burrell’s play about a City Council campaign aims to catalog a gamut of social ills and how Black women rise to meet them.What does it take to speak up for your community? In “La Race,” which opened at the McGinn/Cazale Theater on Monday night, the question is both practical and personal. For a reluctant candidate running a grassroots campaign in the Far Rockaway neighborhood of Queens, the race is more of an impetus for self-reflection than a quest for power. In order to speak for anyone, the play suggests, you first have to find your voice.It’s 2017, liberal resistance is in the air and residents of the coastal district have been pushed so far to the margins that they are practically falling off the map. Beloved by beachgoing New Yorkers and encroached upon by developers, Far Rockaway is also home to low- and middle-income people feeling the creep of gentrification — represented here by the arrival of Le Sea Bean, a comically bougie cafe where a latte costs $13. That’s where Maxine (Naomi Lorrain) goes to do some enemy reconnaissance after she loses a personal assistant gig, leaving her searching for renewed purpose.Her devoted friend and roommate A.J. (Shaunette Renée Wilson), a staunch warrior against all manner of oppression, is urging Max to run for City Council and be an advocate for the area’s underserved constituents. Max’s knee-jerk hesitance gives way as A.J. rounds up a campaign team, including A.J.’s admirer Trey (Christopher B. Portley); Uriel (Auberth Bercy), a silly-sweet barista who works multiple jobs; and Dejani (Stacey Sargeant), who’s looking to earn goodwill points in a custody battle for her children. Each character’s investment in rallying around Max, and its relation to their personal back story, comes to light over the course of the play with varying degrees of clarity.Like Max, who articulates her platform in a broad-ranging spoken-word poem addressing everything from police violence and consumer capitalism to big pharma, the playwright Bleu Beckford-Burrell swings big, aiming to catalog a gamut of social ills by illustrating how they affect — and meet defiance from — Black women. Max’s visits to a psychologist (also played by Sargeant, in a skillful double turn) demonstrate the mental and emotional burdens she carries, as well as her tendency to bear responsibility for them, before a breakthrough helps her recognize the extent to which they are shared and systemic.Taking up untold stories can be unwieldy, and “La Race” would benefit from more streamlined character development and a sharper focus. At just over two and a half hours, the halting progress of community organizing starts to drag, while Max’s romantic involvement with a white man (Vince Nappo) feels like an easy contrivance to generate conflict neatly reflecting social tensions. Even Max herself can seem like a totem, despite disclosing her feelings in periodic therapy sessions, another on-the-nose device.The production, from Page 73 and Working Theater, is a feat of versatile and often witty design by Arnulfo Maldonado, whose set goes from a living room to an open-mic night to a day at the beach with clever ease, and with remarkable work from lighting designers Stacey Derosier and Bailey Costa. The director Taylor Reynolds, and the wholly appealing cast, create an engaging sense of place and affinity, such that “La Race” is perhaps, above all, a love letter to the very idea of a neighborhood. Take a step back, and it’s also an argument for coexistence and democracy, even at the edge of the world.La RaceThrough Dec. 23 at the McGinn/Cazale Theater, Manhattan; page73.org. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes. More

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      Amid Global Turmoil, Salzburg Festival Plans a Summer of Reflection

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      “Our present reality seems to be completely out of joint with universal bonds and perspectives,” the festival’s artistic director said.With the pandemic still lingering and the war in Ukraine raging on, the Salzburg Festival in Austria announced plans on Friday for a summer season that would seek to offer space for reflection.The festival, classical music’s most storied annual event, will stage two operas based on works by William Shakespeare: “Macbeth” and “Falstaff,” both by Verdi. There are also plans for more offbeat repertoire, including Bohuslav Martinu’s “The Greek Passion,” which tells the story of a Greek village staging a Passion play, in a production led by the conductor Maxime Pascal.“Our present reality seems to be completely out of joint with universal bonds and perspectives,” Markus Hinterhäuser, the festival’s artistic director, said in an interview, quoting from “Hamlet.” “Therefore, we have constructed a festival giving artists the opportunity to address these issues directly and indirectly.”The festival will feature more than 200 events — a mix of operas, spoken drama, orchestra concerts and recitals — over six weeks beginning July 20.The festival’s house band, the Vienna Philharmonic, will perform several concerts, including “Ein Deutsches Requiem” (“A German Requiem”), an hourlong choral work by Brahms, under the conductor Christian Thielemann. Among other prominent orchestras making appearances are the Berlin Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.The mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli will star in Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice”; the conductor John Eliot Gardiner will lead a concert performance of Berlioz’s “Les Troyens,” featuring his ensemble, the Monteverdi Choir; and the soprano Renée Fleming and the pianist Evgeny Kissin team up for a recital of works by Schubert, Liszt, Rachmaninoff and Duparc.Franz Welser-Möst, the music director of the Cleveland Orchestra and a Salzburg regular, will take the baton for “Macbeth,” which opens in July, in a production by Krzysztof Warlikowski. In August, Welser-Möst will lead the Vienna Philharmonic in a concert featuring works by Ligeti and Richard Strauss.The festival will again prominently feature the conductor Teodor Currentzis, who has faced scrutiny since the start of the war in Ukraine because of his ties to a state-owned bank in Russia. He will take the baton for a concert presentation of Henry Purcell’s opera “The Indian Queen” with his new ensemble, Utopia. Currentzis will also lead Utopia in performances of Mozart’s Mass in C minor.Currentzis announced the formation of Utopia, which is backed by European benefactors, in August, after he faced a wave of criticism for his longtime association with the Russian ensemble MusicAeterna, which is sponsored by VTB Bank, a state-owned institution that has been sanctioned by the United States and other countries. (Currentzis had been trying for several years to secure funding for Utopia.)While the pandemic has wreaked havoc across the performing arts, the Salzburg Festival, drawing on government subsidies and sponsorship deals, has managed to minimize the disruption.The festival never canceled a season during the pandemic. In 2020, it staged a robust program for limited audiences, before returning to relative normalcy in 2021.Even as turnout for many classical events around the world has been tepid since the return of live performance, the Salzburg Festival continues to attract an enthusiastic audience. Attendance was 96 percent last summer, the festival said. More

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      When Jewish Artists Wrestle With Antisemitism

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      In this unsettling moment, comedians, filmmakers, playwrights and others have been struggling against a long-ingrained American response to look away.Antisemitism has such a long, violent history that it seems absurd to claim it’s getting worse. Compared with when? And yet, there’s something about our current moment that feels different.Consider a recent Sunday. I woke up to news reports that two men were arrested at Penn Station with weapons, a swastika armband and a social media history of threats to attack a synagogue. After taking a shower, I opened my dresser to find my Kyrie Irving T-shirt. The Brooklyn Net was returning to the N.B.A. that evening after being suspended for tweeting a link to a documentary that cast doubt on the Holocaust.I didn’t expect getting dressed in the morning to turn into a test of loyalties between my favorite basketball team and my murdered ancestors, but here we are.That night, when I arrived at Barclays Center, scores of people belonging to what the Southern Poverty Law Center labels a hate group were handing out pamphlets with the blaring headline “The Truth About Antisemitism.” I opened Twitter and saw Elon Musk was making fun of the Anti-Defamation League and Ye was tweeting again. He had kicked off the recent cycle of discourse by leveling violent threats against Jews.Quantifying antisemitism right now by numbers of hate crimes is useful, but doesn’t capture the peculiar anguish and human complexities of its day-to-day pervasiveness. That’s a job better suited to artists, and more than any year in memory, some of our most accomplished ones have taken up the challenge, from the biggest names in comedy (Dave Chappelle, Amy Schumer) to the most celebrated storytellers in theater and film, like Tom Stoppard and Steven Spielberg. What resonates most in this impressive body of work are the Jewish artists exploring the challenge of antisemitism, and while they started these projects years ago, their hard-earned pessimism now seems uncomfortably prophetic.The thorniest recent work on these issues was the “Saturday Night Live” monologue by Dave Chappelle. He poked fun at Ye and Irving while speaking to the antisemitic idea of a Jewish conspiracy in Hollywood. In between myriad jokes, he shrugged off this stereotype as an understandable thought best not verbalized. One of the maddening traps of modern antisemitism is that it takes a source of pride — Jewish success in the arts, the rare field where we were welcome — and makes it seem sinister. This old tactic got a new hearing.There are a lot of Jews in Hollywood, Chappelle observed mischievously, before undercutting the comment with a joke that called the trope that they control show business “a delusion.” Unlike the blunt social media posts of Ye and Irving, this set was a work of art, elusive and layered, displaying finesse and paradox. It’s a prickly kind of funny with corkscrew punch lines that tickled the mind and bothered the conscience. (“If they’re Black then it’s a gang, if they’re Italian it’s a mob, but if they’re Jewish it’s a coincidence and you should never speak about it.”)Dave Chappelle on “Saturday Night Live.” His monologue was a prickly kind of funny that bothered the conscience.Will Heath/NBCArt can be formally beautiful and morally ugly. Despite what you have heard, good comedy can be built on lies as easily as on the truth. This is what makes Chappelle’s set so slippery: His storytelling and gravitas are so magnetic that you can miss how far he goes in making the old slur of a Jewish conspiracy seem reasonable. He whitewashed Irving’s tolerance for Holocaust denial with one good line. With another, he says you can’t “blame Black people” for Jewish pain, erecting a straw man with deftness. To suggest, as he does, that it’s dangerous for him to say “the Jews” is tiresome hyperbole.For as much controversy as this set provoked, it was also predictable. How often have we seen Chappelle bring up celebrity transgression, and then defend, mitigate and complicate it, while inviting us to admire the feat? This is his move. There’s no wondering where he will come down on the latest scandal. We know.Antisemitism in AmericaAntisemitism is one of the longest-standing forms of prejudice, and those who monitor it say it is now on the rise across the country.Perilous Times: With online threats and incidents of harassment and violence rising nationwide, this fall has become increasingly worrisome for American Jews.Donald Trump: The former president had dinner with Nick Fuentes, a prominent antisemite, at Mar-a-Lago, causing some of Mr. Trump’s Jewish allies to speak out.Kanye West: The rapper and designer, who now goes by Ye, has been widely condemned for recent antisemitic comments. The fallout across industries has been swift.Kyrie Irving: The Nets lifted their suspension of the basketball player, who offered “deep apologies” for posting a link to an antisemitic film. His behavior appalled and frightened many of his Jewish fans.EARLIER THIS YEAR, I wrote about the Jewish tendency to turn antisemitism into comedy. But there’s another coping mechanism that we like to talk about less: looking the other way. When asked about Chappelle’s monologue, Jerry Seinfeld diplomatically told The Hollywood Reporter that “the subject matter calls for more conversation.” When asked about it as a guest on “The Late Show,” Jon Stewart only became earnest when he pleaded for free speech. What’s striking about these responses from star comics is that they seem to be more interested in calling for debate than engaging in it.Then again, I get it. I’ve stayed quiet when peers wrote things that seemed, if not indifferent to Jewish pain, then at least to be applying double standards to it. I gave them the benefit of the doubt or concluded that a call-out would be counterproductive. But saying nothing in the face of such moments exacts its own cost. It eats at you. Several Jewish artists have been making work that explores such decisions with a skeptical eye.In “The Patient,” a sly, suspenseful FX series from Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg, creators of “The Americans,” a therapist played by Steve Carell awakens to find himself chained to the bed of a serial killer looking for help with his mental health. The title is a reference to this maniac as well as the way his therapist responds.The killer says he was looking for a therapist who is Jewish, a specific request that goes uncommented on. Small moments tip you off to a tolerated culture of antisemitism. In a flashback, the therapist, Alan, spots a swastika on a poster and, instead of making a fuss, keeps walking.Steve Carell as a therapist and Domhnall Gleeson as a serial killer in “The Patient,” which raises the urgent question of how to fight back.Suzanne Tenner/FXNow he has no such option. Imprisoned by a captor who wants something from him, he is faced with the urgent question of how to fight back. He chooses to use his skills in mental health to help his oppressor get better. The deeper he gets in dialogue, though, the more uncomfortable Alan grows, especially after he teaches the murderer the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, and then sees it being used to mourn his latest victims.In many ways, the relationship at the center of “The Patient” is a metaphor for both the lengths Jews will go to extend empathy toward their oppressors and for the existential toll that takes. Playing a man wracked by guilt, grief and doubt, Carell is extremely subtle illustrating how accommodation can be justified and yet wear you down. We also see scenes in his head of him talking to a shrink (David Alan Grier) who asks why he doesn’t fight back, attack the killer. To which Alan replies: “I’m using what I have.” Grier, a figment of his imagination, flashes a look that suggests he doesn’t believe that.Similarly, “The Fabelmans” and “Armageddon Time,” two personal movies by Jewish directors dramatizing their own childhoods, grapple with the question of what weapons Jews have. In both, sensitive boys facing antisemitism at school struggle with how to stand up for themselves.“The Fabelmans” isn’t a movie about being Jewish so much as it is suffused with Jewishness. But when its young protagonist, Sammy Fabelman, moves to California in the 1960s, he’s confronted with Aryan boys who mock his religion and with gentile girls intrigued by it. He happily prays with one girl but puts up a fight with the bullies, who at first seem like the cartoon villains from early Spielberg movies. The most dramatic way Sammy pushes back is by putting his antagonists in a movie. After filming his classmates on a trip to the beach, the footage, shown to the whole school, makes one bully look ridiculous and another glamorous, bigger than life. Oddly, being romanticized by the Jewish kid he beat up rattles the bully more than any insult. His discontent in the face of this attention is the most baffling section in the movie, one that has the ring of a point being made. But what is the point?Is the antisemite feeling shame? If so, Spielberg is working hard to extend empathy. But this exchange also rattles Sammy. When the bigot demands to know why Sammy made him look like a star, the response sounds pained and unsure: “Maybe I did it to make the movie better?”It’s a shockingly unsentimental moment to find in a Spielberg movie, one in which the young version of himself learns that pleasing the crowd might require turning an antisemite into the hero. No one loves the movies more than Spielberg, and in this intimate, morally probing film, he shows how they can move, inspire and reveal the truth. But in these more hardheaded scenes, he also makes it clear that their impact can be unpredictable, and like comedy, they can deceive just as deftly.Chloe East as a classmate intrigued by the religion of the Steven Spielberg stand-in, played by Gabriel LaBelle.Merie Weismiller Wallace/Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment, via Associated PressIn “Armageddon Time,” a humbler, realistic and affectingly bleak portrait of the struggles of a young Jewish kid, James Gray digs into his 1980s Queens upbringing in the story of an 11-year-old boy named Paul Graff whose grandfather is the son of a refugee who fled pogroms in Europe. The patriarch tells him that changing his name (from Grasserstein) will help him in life. This same man urges him to speak up when other students make racist comments to a peer. These are the competing messages he grows up with: assimilate or fight back.A friendship with a Black classmate also makes clear to Paul how not all inequities are the same, that his privilege protects him in a way that other minority groups don’t experience. In a time when Black and Jewish communities are pitted against each other by entertainers like Ye and others, this movie feels exceedingly topical and depressing. It painfully dramatizes how antisemitism can lead Jews to overlook other injustices, protect your tribe and harden your heart to the plight of others.As with Spielberg’s movie, the new play by Tom Stoppard, “Leopoldstadt,” is being described as his most personal as well as a reckoning with his Jewish identity, which in his case he didn’t understand until middle age. It’s also one of his worst plays: intellectually thin, overly familiar, blandly generic. If the way you tell the audience it’s the 1920s is by a woman dancing the Charleston, you’ve become too comfortable with cliché. And yet, this sprawling portrait of a half century in the life of a Jewish family from Vienna is drawing sold-out crowds of weeping audiences.I suspect the reason is the timely and heavy-handed portrait of Jewish complacency and denial. We see this most nakedly in the stand-in for the playwright, a comic writer born Leopold Rosenbaum who now goes by Leonard Chamberlin (a name that evokes the prime minister famous for appeasement). In 1955, Chamberlin is glibly naïve about the Holocaust, a patriotic fool set up for tears when remembering the horrors of the Nazis. The play ends with a roll call of the dead. Of course, the audience cries.TWO THINGS STAND OUT about these dramas, whether onscreen or onstage: The first is that none of the Jewish protagonists are exactly triumphant in the face of antisemitism. Therapy, the movies, assimilation — nothing saves them. These characters are ambivalent, morally compromised or far worse. When it comes to their ability to protest an antisemitic culture, pessimism reigns.The second is how much these works look to the past, exploring the current moment through a historical lens. (That includes Bess Wohl’s play “Camp Siegfried,” a drama about a 1938 Nazi youth camp on Long Island whose themes are clearly meant to echo with today.) Even the contemporary “The Patient” borrows its most blunt power from flashbacks to the moral simplicity of concentration camps. Looking at history can be a useful way to understand the present, but it can also be a way to evade it. One wonders what Stoppard would come up with if he dramatized the more subtle Jewish denial of the cultural world he came up in, where he flourished as a playwright whose religion never seemed to come up. Or how Spielberg or Gray would capture the conflicts of Jewish life now.As usual, comics are the artists taking the earliest and most direct approaches. David Baddiel, a British comic, is receiving glowing reviews this month for a BBC documentary version of his book “Jews Don’t Count” that castigates the double standards applied to prejudice against Jews in progressive spaces today. Marc Maron’s next special, which recently taped in New York, begins a series of jokes on the increased prominence of conspiracies about Jews by saying that in this polarized country, antisemitism is one thing that brings everyone together. At the Kennedy Center Honors, Sacha Baron Cohen, in character as the antisemite Borat, skewered Ye and sang a brief parody version of U2’s “With or Without You,” switching the lyrics to “With or Without Jews.”Amy Schumer is one of the few sketch comics to dig into antisemitism today, lampooning the tentativeness our culture has for calling it out in the new season of “Inside Amy Schumer.” She imagines a workplace harassment seminar where everyone is hypersensitive to all kinds of slights except antisemitic ones. It’s a premise that not only counters the trope of a Jewish conspiracy but also taps into the paranoia of being gaslit by an entire culture. It hints at what a Jewish “Get Out” could look like.Part of the resilience of antisemitism is its resistance to critique. Jewish artists are obviously not going to end the lie that they control show business by making more movies, plays, TV shows or sketches about it. But they can illuminate its impact and capture the complex damage it does to the psyche. That matters. For a certain kind of Jew, art can be its own religion. And one lesson we keep learning and forgetting is that the greatest art is much better at portraying conflicted minds than changing them. More

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      Review: Who Committed the ‘Ohio State Murders’? Who Didn’t?

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      Audra McDonald stars in Adrienne Kennedy’s 1991 play about the worst imaginable crime and the world that made it inevitable.Two 91-year-old titans made belated Broadway debuts this fall.In the case of the actor James Earl Jones, it was not in a play but on a marquee. In September, the Cort Theater, on West 48th Street, where he’d first performed in 1958, was renamed in his honor.And on Thursday, with the opening of a revival of “Ohio State Murders” on the same stage, Adrienne Kennedy finally had one of her works appear in what is, for better or worse, the center of American theatrical culture.Why it took so long in either case is a question you can answer in one word or many. In “Ohio State Murders,” Kennedy, an avant-gardist who deserves a place among our most honored and produced playwrights, does it in many, each of them a bullet.Not that the 75-minute play, first performed in 1991, is coldblooded or didactic. Rather, in Kenny Leon’s piercing production, starring Audra McDonald in another performance ripped from her gallery of harrowing women, it is painful both in the story it tells and in the immense effort expended to tell it properly.Or, better, improperly: “Ohio State Murders” is rigorously unconventional. The mystery suggested by its title is largely resolved in the first five minutes, when the crime and the criminal are almost casually (if incompletely) revealed. A middle-aged writer named Suzanne Alexander, who has come to Columbus in the play’s present tense to speak about the violent imagery in her work, quickly locates its source in the abduction and drowning of one of her infant twin daughters in 1952, when she was an unmarried undergraduate there.“That was later,” she says immediately after the out-of-sequence revelation, as if there was something yet more important to get back to.There is; Kennedy, who was herself an undergraduate at Ohio State in the early 1950s, uses the time that her tangled structure has bought her to assemble, collagelike, the atmosphere of dread and discrimination faced by Black students of the period. A white classmate accuses Sue, as the protagonist was then called, of stealing a watch, though Sue herself “owned beautiful possessions and jewelry that my parents had given me.” The English department will not allow her, or any other Black student, to declare that major without special consent, generally not forthcoming: “It was thought that we were not able to master the program.”McDonald as a college student and Bryce Pinkham as her professor in the play. It’s a lesson in itself to watch McDonald shift between her older and younger characters, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe older and younger characters are usually split between two actors, but Kennedy has given McDonald permission to play both. It’s a lesson in itself to watch her shift between them. Sue is innocent and trusting, until circumstances teach her not to be; she drinks in the literature she is reading as if with an endless thirst. Suzanne, though she has survived tragedy and fashioned a solid career for herself, is anxious and brittle, laughing inappropriately at times, reverting to a private language while furiously seeking the right words to convey the intensity of the forces at play.In neither role does McDonald have the support of ordinary dramaturgy. There is virtually no dialogue in “Ohio State Murders,” because what happened to Sue is less important than how Suzanne tries, as you feel she has tried for decades, to understand it. That the father of the babies was her white English professor (Bryce Pinkham) is merely a biological and later a forensic fact; that he admires her essays and teaches her to love Hardy (especially and relevantly “Tess of the d’Urbervilles”) are more salient pieces of the psychological puzzle.In a conventional drama, we might see the professor wooing or comforting or ultimately dismissing Sue; here we experience him only in small fragments, reading and lecturing and saying a few words in her general direction. The same technique keeps her roommate (Abigail Stephenson), aunt (Lizan Mitchell) and even her boyfriend (Mister Fitzgerald) at a distance, with Suzanne describing their interactions rather than Sue engaging in them.Kennedy, it seems, aims to forbid us the ease and release of a traditional scene, just as she has prescribed a conceptual set that in Beowulf Boritt’s rather stiff interpretation represents all locations and furniture as a tumble of library shelves full of law tomes. But McDonald is incapable of nonemotion; her performance builds to a shattering catharsis that may in some ways be unauthorized.Leon, too, works smartly against the grain of the play. In thoughtfully mimed vignettes, he shows us that the other characters, beautifully enacted if with little to say, are not just puppets of Suzanne’s memory but living creatures with their own struggles. They are lit (by Allen Lee Hughes) and costumed (by Dede Ayite) less forbiddingly than the script might lead you to expect, and accompanied by sound and music (by Justin Ellington and Dwight Andrews) that admits other emotions to the horror. Even the babies are touchingly represented: slips of pink fabric, delicate as scarves and as easily lost.In a demanding double role, McDonald conveys astonishing access to tragic feeling, our critic writes. Sara Krulwich/The New York. TimesThese warming, even sentimental additions do not detract from the intellectual integrity of Kennedy’s conception any more than McDonald’s astonishing access to tragic feeling diminishes the prickly oddness of the characters. To my mind these are instead enhancements, forcing us to experience the play’s central themes as internal conflicts and not just social ones.Not that society is in any way let off the hook. The racism at the heart of the murder mystery is also at the heart of everything else, making it unclear which is the cause and which the effect. So when Suzanne describes the white sorority houses as “columned mansions” sitting “like a citadel” off Columbus’s High Street, it’s impossible not to think of plantation architecture — a point that Sue, reading from a book about symbols, drives home at once:“A city should have a sacred geography,” she recites, “never arbitrary but planned in strict accord with the dictates of a doctrine that the society upholds.” In other words, Suzanne’s experiences of exclusion are no accident of racism, they are its goals.Just so with theaters — and what we see within them. If the balance is at last beginning to tip, both on the marquee and the title page, it’s not just luck, though we are lucky to get to experience it. It’s because our greatest artists, Kennedy, Jones and McDonald among them, have been using their artistry to argue the case for years.Ohio State MurdersThrough Feb. 12 at the James Earl Jones Theater, Manhattan; ohiostatemurdersbroadway.com. 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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      ‘Events’ Review: There’s Kool-Aid in the Water Cooler

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      Bailey Williams’s comedy is a sharp-toothed, sometimes bewildering satire of all-consuming workplace culture.“No one is being murdered before the gala.”It’s the kind of directive that wouldn’t be necessary at most companies — even, perhaps, most high-strung, high-design event-planning firms, even at the height of gala season. But nerves have been extra frayed lately at Todd David Design. People’s imaginations might be running away with them.Or maybe, when Todd — the company’s pseudo-visionary leader — was patched in on speakerphone from a beach in Miami, his team back in New York really did hear him start to get murdered. Hard to say. In any case, his second in command, the imperious Christine, is not having it. So: “No one is being murdered before the gala,” she tells them all. They have a deadline to meet. Back to the task, everyone.All-consuming workplace culture is the satirical target of “Events,” Bailey Williams’s sharp-fanged new comedy at the Brick in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Directed by Sarah Blush, this co-production with the Hearth is off the rails — and that’s both a compliment and a critique.The show is as vibrantly nuts as Todd’s own pretentious ridiculousness (“I am thinking already of florals,” he says airily, musing on the gala) but also tangled, occasionally bewildering and larded with too much corporate-speak. A little of that goes a long way; even when it’s being skewered, simply hearing it can have a deadening effect.On a set by the design collective dots that includes an absurd foam-encased chair with a tiny tag on one leg, ordering people not to sit in it because it is art, “Events” takes place in two divergent realities. There is the brightly lit, well populated world of the office, and then there is the skulking realm of a woman called Itchy, dimly lit with just a single hanging lamp. (Lighting design is by Masha Tsimring.)Itchy is part of Todd David Design, too, or at least she used to be. Played with soft, confiding intensity by Zuzanna Szadkowski, she speaks her series of monologues directly to the audience, and is a riveting storyteller. Itchy, we learn, has not been doing so well at the company. She is convinced that someone there has been poisoning her, which is what’s causing her terrible itch. And that’s why she’s gone to the empty office on a Friday night, dressed in a dollar-store version of hazmat gear — plastic rain poncho, goggles, multiple shower caps — to decontaminate the place.Itchy is disaffected and quite possibly delusional. She may also be dangerous. But in her raw and wounded certainty, she is human and entirely fascinating.The others — Todd (Brian Bock), Christine (Claire Siebers) and their beleaguered team (Dee Beasnael, Julia Greer, Derek Smith and Haley Wong) — have signed on to the office’s culture of surface-shininess, reflexive obeisance and total commitment, even when their guru-boss is objectively detached from reason. But what if, in their devotion to creating events for their clients, they’re missing the main event — their own finite lives? And what if they’re losing themselves in the process?“Girl,” one colleague says to another, cutting through the nonsense at last. “You shouldn’t have brought your soul here. That’s your well-being. That’s your meaning-making.”EventsThrough Dec. 18 at the Brick, Brooklyn; bricktheater.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More