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    ‘Bowl EP’ Review: Sessions in Love

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    Nazareth Hassan’s play follows the tender romance (and acid-fueled hallucinations) two skateboarders share.The play “Bowl EP,” written and directed by Nazareth Hassan, is really more of a double LP.The titles of its discrete scenes (25 in total!) are projected as track names onto the sunken, in-the-round skatepark set of this exuberant premiere at the Vineyard Theater in Manhattan, co-produced with the National Black Theater in association with the New Group. The first half conjures a fun flirtation between two queer aspiring rappers, while the second is a jagged refraction of its ideas. At 80 minutes, the whole play pulses with a concentrated immediacy.The main M.C.s, if you will, are the jovial Quentavius da Quitter (Oghenero Gbaje) and the seductively internal Kelly K Klarkson (Essence Lotus): two 20-somethings who skate absent-mindedly while spitting potential rhymes. While deciding on a name for their duo, they strike up a playful romance over an indeterminate period of time.The two are tender with each other, fooling around between skate tricks and occasionally revealing glimpses of inner turmoil. Hassan charts these low-key adventures through impish scene titles (projected in inventive typefaces by Zavier Augustus Lee Taylor) like “picking a name for their rap group attempt four” and “skating and drinking.” The drained swimming pool that is Adam Rigg and Anton Volovsek’s set, and the skateboarders’ “bowl,” often places the actors below the gaze of the audience, which is seated on all four sides, lending an analytical lens to the stage interactions.Substances, from the casual vape pen to MDMA, help the pair find inspiration and grow closer. But like most of what’s played off as typical youthful behavior, this recreational habit returns under a new light in the piece’s second half, which is triggered by an acid-fueled sex act between the couple.That jarring shift comes with the arrival of Lemon Pepper Wings, a pangender demon who haunts Quentavius’s mind, and is suggested to have once pestered Kelly. (Hassan, who is nonbinary, winks at the clunkiness of communicating gender by referring to the creature as every combination of “he/she/they.”)Lemon is played by Felicia Curry in a bravura psychedelic freakout of a commedia dell’arte performance that begins in full anime cosplay, plush head mask and all. (DeShon Elem’s costume design here wildly expands from D.I.Y. skater outfits.) Shattering the fourth wall — all four of them, in this case — as the “patron demon of the intimate,” Lemon cuts through the issues pushing the lovers together and pulling them apart.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      As Off Broadway Crews Unionize, Workers See Hope, Producers Peril

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      Workers say the move is overdue, but theater companies fear it will drive up costs in a wounded sector that has yet to recover from the pandemic.A unionization wave sweeping across Off Broadway is poised to reshape the economics of theater-making in New York — for workers as well as producers.Striking stage crews have idled the nonprofit Atlantic Theater Company — the birthplace of the musicals “Spring Awakening,” “The Band’s Visit” and “Kimberly Akimbo,” which all transferred to Broadway and won Tonys. The strike, which began last month, comes amid a drive to unionize stage hands and crews at Off Broadway theaters.Nonprofit companies and producers fear that the unionization push could drive up costs at a moment when many are running deficits and staging fewer, and smaller, shows. Second Stage Theater and Soho Rep both recently moved out of their longtime venues and opted to share space with other companies. Another measure of the sector’s shrinkage: In 2019 there were 113 shows eligible for the Lucille Lortel Awards, which honor Off Broadway work; there are just 59 eligible shows so far this season, which, for the Lortels, closes at the end of March.Many workers see the unionization of stage crews as long overdue, noting that the sector has come a long way from its scrappy origins. Now that many Off Broadway theaters have become mature institutions with elevated production values, workers say, it is time for them to pay better wages and offer benefits to their crew members.“The stakes are incredibly high,” said Casey York, the president of the Off-Broadway League, which represents theater owners, managers and producers, “not just for those directly involved, but for the future of this vibrant sector, which has always been a cornerstone of New York’s cultural identity.”“Grief Camp,” a new play by Eliya Smith, had begun previews at Atlantic when it was shut down by the strike. It has since been canceled, along with Mona Pirnot’s “I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Antiquities’ Review: Relics of Late Human Life in 12 Exhibits

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      According to Jordan Harrison’s museum piece of a play, we are long extinct by 2240. But the future has kept our Betamaxes.By a campfire on the shore of Lake Geneva in 1816, five friends take up the challenge of telling the scariest story. Mary Shelley is clearly the winner, with her cautionary tale (soon to be a novel) of an obsessed doctor whose electrified monster achieves sentience, then runs wild. So freaked out is her pal Lord Byron that his immediate, sneering response — “you’re demented” — quickly turns into a shiver and a prayer.“May we never be clever enough to create something that can replace us,” he says.A mere 424 years later, in 2240, two post-human beings look back on that vignette, and the whole of the Anthropocene, with wonder and pity. How could people have thought of themselves as the endpoint of evolution, one of these inorganic intelligences asks rhetorically, when mankind was obviously just “a transitional species” and “a blip on the timeline”?That timeline is the compelling if somewhat overbearing structural device of Jordan Harrison’s play “The Antiquities,” which opened on Tuesday at Playwrights Horizons. Starting with Shelley’s monster (which she counterfactually calls a “computer”) and ending with, well, the end of humanity, it could win a scary-story contest itself, as it maps one possible route, the Via Technologica, from Romantic glory to species demise.For the inorganics of 2240 are here not to praise mankind but to bury it. They are guides to “exhibits” in what the play’s alternative title calls “A Tour of the Permanent Collection in the Museum of Late Human Antiquities.” The Shelley scene is the first of 12 such exhibits, demonstrating how inventions gradually overtook natural intelligence and then, like Frankenstein’s monster, destroyed it.From left, Aria Shahghasemi, Sieh, Andrew Garman, Marchánt Davis and Amelia Workman in a scene, dated 1816, on Paul Steinberg’s set made up of matte metal panels.Richard Termine for The New York TimesAt first, the inventions seem useful or harmless or — to us, smack in the middle of the timeline — hopelessly obsolete. A woman in 1910 (Cindy Cheung) presents a wooden finger to a boy injured in a workhouse accident. A nerd circa 1978 (Ryan Spahn) shows off an awkward robot prototype that recognizes 400 English words. (The guy who is pleasuring the nerd is impressed.) In 1987, a mother (Kristen Sieh) whose grieving son (Julius Rinzel) cannot sleep agrees to let him watch one of her soaps, recorded on that magical yet soon-to-be-discontinued technology, the Betamax videotape.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Artists, Then (as in the 17th Century) and Now

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      “The Light and the Dark” dramatizes the life of Artemisia Gentileschi, while “300 Paintings” was born during the fever dreams of Covid.Quick! Which 17th-century female artist fought her way into the male-dominated art world, prevailed in a rape trial and alchemized her struggles into revolutionary art? If the name Artemisia Gentileschi doesn’t leap to one’s lips, Kate Hamill’s play “The Light and the Dark” at 59E59 Theaters offers a generous introduction.Heavy emphasis on “introduction.” Much of the information in the play’s 145 minutes will be familiar to anyone who has spent time reading Gentileschi’s Wikipedia page or has seen other recent plays inspired by her life.There are two Artemisias in the show: the historical Baroque painter and a docent-like narrator. Both are played by Hamill, who has unwisely asked the narrator to ride shotgun to the artist. Under the slack direction of Jade King Carroll, “The Light and the Dark” often feels more like an art history lecture than a play. The first act, especially, hews much too closely to biographical exposition. Standing next to a blank canvas on a set that evokes of an artist’s studio, Artemisia talks to us about the art of composition before taking us back in time to her youth.As a child, she idolizes first the work of her father, Orazio (Wynn Harmon, posed like an off-duty Greek statue), then Caravaggio, whose works of fleshy realism crack the world open for her. The entrance of Agostino Tassi (Matthew Saldivar), a papal painter who frequents Orazio’s studio, spells trouble. He contrives to spend more time alone with Artemisia; during one of his visits, after he has bribed the Gentileschi’s serving woman (a versatile Joey Parsons) to vacate the room, he rapes Artemisia.Strangely, no mention is made of her three younger brothers, who also trained as apprentices to Orazio and who might have served as dramatic counterpoints for the young female artist.More consequentially, Hamill, who is one of the most produced playwrights in the country, departs from the historical record in a trial scene. Court records of the rape trial preserved at the Archivio di Stato in Rome show that Artemisia averred that she threw a knife at Tassi after he raped her the first time; in the play, she simply lets it drop by her side. “I am not a heroine of some old story. I cannot hold the knife,” she says meekly.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Wind and the Rain’ Review: How Sunny’s Bar Weathered the Storm

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      On a barge in Brooklyn, the story of a beloved watering hole and a neighborhood’s recovery after Hurricane Sandy.How do we hold our shared history? Like a drink? Like a lover? Or does it slip through our fingers, like water from the bay? “The Wind and the Rain,” a new play by Sarah Gancher (“Russian Troll Farm”), which reclaims the recent past as pageant, offers one model.The play, which Jared Mezzocchi has staged on a barge that doubles as the Waterfront Museum and in the blocks of Red Hook, Brooklyn, just beyond, is ostensibly about Sunny’s, a bar that has occupied the ground floor of a brick building on Conover Street since 1907. Opened by Antonio Balzano and his wife, Angelina, each an immigrant from Italy, it survived world wars; prohibition; the building of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway; urban blight; Hurricane Sandy, which sent the basin surging into the bar; and legal challenges. Now presided over by Tone Balzano Johansen, the bar remains a neighborhood stronghold. (Johansen is the widow of Antonio Balzano, an actor and painter named for his grandfather, and affectionately known as Sunny.) Every Saturday it hosts a bluegrass jam session. Johansen often sings.From a window of the barge, Sunny’s can almost be seen. Out another window, the Statue of Liberty beckons. The Vineyard Theater produced this show with En Garde Arts, a pioneer of site-specific and site-responsive performance. As the actors strut and a bluegrass combo strums and sings, the barge lurches underfoot. The play, performed by four actors on a narrow strip of stage in the barge’s center, is mostly Johansen’s story. Much of the text derives from interviews with her (Gancher is a Sunny’s regular) and she is played by Jen Tullock with lucid good sense. (Pete Simpson plays Sunny; Jennifer Regan and Paco Tolson fill out the other roles. Ample audience participation is also a feature.) Other vignettes are based on research, some are wholly invented. In a corner the band plays.The whole is affectionate, emotive, playful, but with a fuzziness around the edges — the way the world looks after one too many Manhattans. Instead of focusing only on Tone or on Sunny’s more generally, the play also offers a deep history of the neighborhood (from the British to the Dutch to the Lenape to the Laurentide ice sheet, all the way back to the Big Bang) and it lingers for a long time, too long, with the fraught love stories of Sunny’s grandparents and Romeo (Simpson again), a longtime bar employee.These discursions and the script’s fondness for philosophical postulates (“How do you make a play where everything past and future exists at once?” “How do you talk about time?”) tend to distract from the play’s core — the place of the bar within the greater community, the bar’s recovery after Sandy. The story of the bar is the story of the neighborhood, about a community coming together in the face of something as indomitable as a hurricane. It is a kind of living history, a collective memory in Christmas lights and scuffed wood.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: In ‘Invasive Species,’ the Acting Bug Bites, Dramatically

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      Maia Novi stars in her play about a Hollywood-struck actress from Argentina who stops at Yale’s drama school and an inpatient psych ward on her way.Maia Novi’s “Invasive Species” is being marketed as an outrageous dark comedy, but it’s a quieter play than that: about being an Argentine immigrant with Hollywood ambitions, a graduate acting student at Yale and a psychiatric inpatient plagued by intrusive thoughts.“My name is Maia,” the play’s central character (Novi) tells the audience near the top of the show. “And this is a true story.”Well, true-ish, given that we’ve just seen her get bitten by the Acting Bug (Julian Sanchez), a human-size creature with a giant proboscis whose process of infecting Maia involves spitting voluptuously onto her face from above. A bit of hallucinatory license, then, has sometimes been taken.Directed by Michael Breslin at the Vineyard’s Dimson Theater, the play fragments into different worlds. The most realistic is the hospital in New Haven where Maia wakes up, in March 2022, to find she is a patient — admitted to a children’s ward, where suicide is a temptation for some of the adolescent patients.The play’s other worlds are more heightened and satirical, though they, too, have the whiff of veracity: the drama school, where a teacher says that Maia — trying to lose her accent by diligently imitating Gwyneth Paltrow — has a “lazy tongue”; the Connecticut dating scene, where a dimwitted American bro swallows every stereotype-laced lie that Maia concocts, prankishly, about her family in Argentina; a film set where a British director who casts her as Eva Perón has a blithely wrongheaded sense of authenticity.Partially inspired by the 1977 production of Spalding Gray’s theater piece “Rumstick Road,” an investigation into his mother’s suicide, “Invasive Species” carries the thrum of fear that can accompany a family history of mental illness. Maia worries — so does her father — about what she might have inherited from her own mother.Presented by a group of producers who include the playwright-provocateur Jeremy O. Harris (“Slave Play”), Breslin’s roommate when they studied drama at Yale, “Invasive Species” is crisply directed on a nearly bare stage. The supporting cast members (who include Raffi Donatich, Sam Gonzalez and Alexandra Maurice) are quicksilver-changeable in their multiple roles, and it’s always clear which reality or unreality the characters have stepped into, even when worlds overlap. (Yichen Zhou’s lighting is instrumental in that.)This is a well acted, neatly assembled, carefully modulated play with a cumulative force that is less than it might have been. The satire — of drama school, of xenophobia — isn’t the freshest, and the obliqueness of the hospital strand softens its impact, and ultimately the play’s.“Invasive Species” is a portrait of a young woman attempting, for the sake of ambition and survival, to force herself into various molds that do not fit who she truly is.“Pretend,” one of the teenage patients advises her, practically. “You should be good at that — you’re an actress, right?”Invasive SpeciesThrough June 30 at the Vineyard Theater, Manhattan; invasivespeciesplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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      ‘Russian Troll Farm’ Review: A Stream of Memes, Eroding Trust in Democracy

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      An unlikely dark comedy imagines the people pushing #PizzaGate, Donald Trump and who knows what next.No one misses the early days and dark theaters of the Covid pandemic, but the emergency workaround of streaming content was good for a few things anyway. People who formerly could not afford admission suddenly could, since much of it was free, and artists from anywhere could now be seen everywhere, with just a Wi-Fi connection.That’s how I first encountered “Russian Troll Farm,” a play by Sarah Gancher intended for the stage but that had its debut, in 2020, as an online co-production of three far-flung institutions: TheaterWorks Hartford, TheaterSquared in Fayetteville, Ark., and the Brooklyn-based Civilians. At the time, I found its subject and form beautifully realized and ideally matched — the subject being online interference in the 2016 presidential election by a Russian internet agency.“This is digitally native theater,” I wrote, “not just a play plopped into a Zoom box.”Now the box has been ripped open, and a fully staged live work coaxed out of it. But the production of “Russian Troll Farm” that opened on Thursday at the Vineyard Theater is an entirely different, and in some ways disappointing, experience. Though still informative and trenchant, and given a swifter staging by the director Darko Tresnjak, it has lost the thrill of the original’s accommodation to the extreme constraints of its time.Not that it is any less relevant in ours; fake news will surely be as prominent in the 2024 election cycle (is Taylor Swift a pro-Biden psy-op?) as it was in 2016. That’s when, as Gancher recounts using many real texts, posts and tweets of the time, trolls at the Internet Research Agency — a real place in St. Petersburg, Russia — devised sticky memes and other content meant to undermine confidence in the electoral process, sow general discord, legitimize Trumpism and vaporize Hillary Clinton.But the play is less interested in classics of the conspiracy genre like #PizzaGate and Frazzledrip than in the kinds of people who would dream them up. In the manner of sitcoms like “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “The Office,” “Russian Troll Farm” focuses on four such (fictional) trolls, neatly differentiated from one another and from their dragonish supervisor, Ljuba (Christine Lahti).King, left, and Lavelle as two of the trolls whose various schemes for advancement and connection end disastrously.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: In ‘Scene Partners,’ Dianne Wiest Delivers Another Master Class

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      The transcendent Dianne Wiest stars in an absurd yet poignant new play about a 75-year-old woman who sets out to be a star.“Acting Like a Maniac” is not your typical acting class: You have to sign a personal injury waiver to join it. But then Meryl Kowalski, with that double whammy of a theatrical name, isn’t your typical student. Though 75, she’s no cute oldster; Hugo Lockerby, the guru-like teacher with a wandering accent, thinks she may even be a genius. Performing the autobiographical “blueprint” she’s been writing as an exercise, her fellow students are amazed and baffled by the tale (did she really get an agent at gunpoint?) but also the style. “Do you want it realism or should it be more like whoa,” one asks.“Scene Partners,” by John J. Caswell Jr., with the transcendent Dianne Wiest as Meryl, is definitely more like whoa.Twee, snarky, meta, manic, maddening and yet eventually poignant, the play is a moving target, its tone as hard to pin down as its facts. Take the setting, a maybe Hollywood in an iffy 1985. (Also, the Soviet Union and most of the 20th century.) In any case, it’s often impossible to tell whether what we’re watching is Meryl’s life, a film about her life, a dream about the film, a hallucination of the dream, or some other nesting doll of narration.If the authorial bait-and-switch too often feels like throat-clearing, it does serve a purpose, building around the story a border that is also a blur. In Caswell’s world, as in Meryl’s, limits are always permeable.“Scene Partners,” which opened on Wednesday at the Vineyard Theater in a top-drawer production directed by Rachel Chavkin, is part of a genre you might call the absurd picaresque. Meryl is a hardheaded Candide, a sharp-eyed Don Quixote. When we meet her just after the long longed-for death of her abusive husband, she is leaving Wisconsin for California so fast she doesn’t bother burying him. “Within the year I will rise to fame and fortune as an international film star,” she says in farewell to her drug addict daughter. Sure enough, she soon acquires not just her agent and acting coach, but also a contract to write the movie of her life.What makes her life a fit subject for a movie, or even this play, is a useful question. Surely it’s not the banal details: the stepfather, the trauma and the mother who looked away are all tossed off too lightly to stick. Caswell doesn’t at first seem very interested in them except as opportunities to create fascinating verbal spirals, cross-references and death drops, like a game of biographical Chutes and Ladders.Wiest and Josh Hamilton, as an acting teacher, are in top form in John J. Caswell Jr.’s play at the Vineyard Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYet the process of making the banal fascinating is, it seems, Caswell’s point. When Meryl becomes successful, it is not because her life has been special; hers is the stardom of the ordinary, built on perseverance not glamour, and on the recognition that the only thing keeping her from her life goals is her life. “We lose countless masters like this woman,” says Hugo (Josh Hamilton, hilarious yet also noble), “simply because they lacked a certain access at a certain time in history.” The play’s structural gymnastics, which also make room for the possibility of dementia, give Meryl that access, and elevate her.As does Wiest. It’s a little rich to have her play a character in an acting class, considering how many acting classes she’s given over the years, onstage and on film. Still, it’s a great pleasure to watch her make Meryl’s innocence and bloodthirstiness equally believable, equally fresh. The same age as her character, with more than 50 years of theater behind her, Wiest nevertheless seems to be discovering herself each moment, in material that can’t make that easy.The difficulty, though occasionally an indulgence — even at just 105 minutes, “Scene Partners” could stand a 10-minute trim — is also the play’s great distinction. And Chavkin, while maintaining the level of stylishness that has become her trademark in musicals like “Hadestown” and “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812,” is careful not to flatten its extremes. Her rigorous production commits to both cold stretches and warm ones, ripe satire (a nimble supporting cast covers dozens of characters) and barely spoken tragedy. Sometimes — as in scenes with Johanna Day (excellent) as Meryl’s sister — the crosscurrents shift so quickly you don’t know which kind you’re in.Perhaps what we feel tugging at us in those moments is the undertow of addiction and abuse in the story — subjects Caswell has also touched on in his two previous major New York outings, “Wet Brain” and “Man Cave.” Both embraced the surreal as a way of repairing and elevating what appear to be unimportant, unsalvageable lives. Yet by ricocheting off others, in an absurd plane if necessary, they may achieve a kind of magnificence.Indeed, when an interviewer, suspicious of Meryl’s story, asks if she’s ever heard of delusions of grandeur, she answers: “Oh yes, and they can be so helpful!” Without them, we might not have grandeur (or plays, or great actors) at all.Scene PartnersThrough Dec. 17 at the Vineyard Theater, Manhattan; vineyardtheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

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      Review: In ‘This Land Was Made,’ Huey Newton Walks Into a Bar

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      Tori Sampson’s look at the Black Panther movement is a warm sitcom that becomes a jarring inquest into a real murder.In Oakland, Calif., in 1968, Huey P. Newton, the Black Panther leader, was convicted of killing a white police officer. In 1971, after two more trials and nearly two years in prison, he was cleared of all charges. So who pulled the trigger?That’s the question at the heart of “This Land Was Made,” the gutsy but murky new play by Tori Sampson at the Vineyard Theater. Part murder mystery and part counterfactual yarn, with generous helpings of sitcom and social drama thrown in, it doesn’t hold together in the largely naturalistic framework provided by Taylor Reynolds’s production. But several elements remain compelling on their own, especially when they acknowledge and repurpose familiar forms.Most successful is the sitcom element, which could be titled “Trish’s,” an Oakland bar where everybody knows your name. Miss Trish (Libya V. Pugh) is a New Orleans transplant with a sharp if loving tongue, serving beer and soul food to regulars who come for the schmooze as much as the fare. In one corner, her daughter, Sassy (Antoinette Crowe-Legacy), trims the Afros of old-timers and revolutionaries alike.For about 25 minutes, Sampson serves up something warm and piquant at Trish’s: an interplay of zingers, flirtations, spats and politics. Sassy is being romanced by Troy (Matthew Griffin). Her flashy friend Gail (Yasha Jackson) spars with the out-of-work Drew (Leland Fowler). Mr. Far (Ezra Knight), an avuncular mechanic, smooths everything over, with one affectionate eye on Trish and one on her fried chicken.Opinion on the Black Power movement is neatly divided among them. Troy, studying government in college and planning to be a judge, has no time for performative radicalism; Drew, who styles himself a “King Black Man” and is enamored of the Panthers, calls Troy a sellout. Mr. Far doesn’t like seeing “youngins stomping round with big chests” instead of working, but is sympathetic. And Trish, who lost a son in Vietnam, is fatalistic.“They gotta give up power for you to get some,” she says of white people. “Newsflash, that ain’t finna happen.”Antoinette Crowe-Legacy as the narrator, Sassy, and Matthew Griffin, left, as her boyfriend, Troy, in the play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat Newton himself then walks into the bar seems like the setup for a joke — and, indeed, at first, he is handled cheerfully. With his swagger and charisma, and despite the bandolier of bullets draped sash-like over his leather coat, he is, in Julian Elijah Martinez’s electrifying performance, way more exciting than scary. Later, Martinez will fill in the more troubling aspects of the character, but at this point even Troy finds him impressive and approachable enough, despite their antipodal politics, to accept his invitation to a rally.Whether this meet cute of radicalism and conservatism is historically plausible, it is compelling as part of the playwright’s mission. Sampson, who grew up in a Black Power household, recently told my colleague Naveen Kumar that in writing “This Land Was Made” she “wanted to talk about the lowercase-p Panthers, as people.” When she intermittently achieves that sort of conversation — and in the process dramatizes the ways some Black Americans responded to the uppercase-p Panthers — the play hits a sweet spot at the intersection of fact and fiction.Then it swerves. The officer is killed and Sassy, in her secondary role as present-day narrator, sets out to reveal, as history has not, whodunit. “This Land Was Made” offers three variations on the fatal confrontation. Unfortunately, the staging, with interstitial rewinds as seen in “Hamilton,” is so unclear you may have trouble following any of the outcomes, which all involve one of the regulars at Trish’s.A bigger problem is the meaning of the invention. Is it designed to counteract an un-nuanced and possibly racist judgment on the movement as extremist and anti-American? The play’s title — taken from the song “This Land Is Your Land,” Woody Guthrie’s bitter retort to “God Bless America,” suggests as much. But it’s one thing to probe the past and extrapolate some answers; it’s another to claim, as Sassy does, that the play depicts “the exact events” that the world has never known “until today.”Perhaps that magical yet iffy omniscience — Sassy calls herself a griot, or traditional keeper of stories — would have felt less jarring in a more abstract production. (Wilson Chin’s set, though handsome, is compulsively detailed, right down to the B.B. King showcards.) In 2019, the fable-like “If Pretty Hurts,” Sampson’s first professionally produced play, got an impressionistic staging at Playwrights Horizons that enhanced her rich language instead of fighting it. Another Sampson play that year, “Cadillac Crew,” about women workers in the Civil Rights movement, did not, and fell flat.A more ambitious work than either, “This Land Was Made” does not yet seem certain of what it wants to be. Its sitcom setup (Sampson credits Norman Lear as an inspiration) clashes with the deadly seriousness that comes later, reducing the effectiveness of both. With a killing still unsolved at its center, it can’t, as Sassy instructs, “tell it like you know it.” It can only hazard a few unsatisfying guesses.This Land Was MadeThrough June 25 at the Vineyard Theater, Manhattan; vineyardtheatre.org. Running time: 2 hours. More