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      ‘Lessons in Survival: 1971’ Review: The Past Echoes in the Present

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      The writer James Baldwin and the poet Nikki Giovanni are at the center of a crackling work of verbatim theater at the Vineyard Theater.If the year weren’t in the title, you might come close to guessing it from the architecture of the sunken space: a conversation pit lined with couches upholstered in burnt orange, with blood orange carpeting to match. There’s a comfort to the room, a midcentury modern hospitality that invites you to take your shoes off, have a drink, light one cigarette after another, and talk and talk as you try to set the world to rights.And so the writer James Baldwin and the poet Nikki Giovanni do in “Lessons in Survival: 1971,” a crackling work of verbatim theater starring Carl Clemons-Hopkins and Crystal Dickinson. A time-capsule excavation of a moment in 20th-century Black American activist-intellectualism, it recreates a sprawling interview that Giovanni did with Baldwin for the WNET television talk show “Soul!” when he was 47, famous and living in France, and she was 28 and just getting started.“Jimmy,” Giovanni says, in the play’s first line, “I’m — I’m really curious. Why did you move to Europe?”It’s so potent, that familiarity: calling him Jimmy, not Mr. Baldwin. Before he even opens his mouth, he becomes for us not a god visiting from the pantheon but a human being. And in the question that her question implies — Why did a continent an ocean away seem like a healthier place for you, a Black American, to live? — we hear her set up the framework for an ever-thoughtful, sometimes contentious, particularly American dialogue.Directed by Tyler Thomas at the Vineyard Theater, this engrossing 90-minute show arrives at the end of a season of civic and social reckonings on New York stages, which puts it at risk of seeming like an eat-your-vegetables experience. It is emphatically not.Conceived by Marin Ireland, Peter Mark Kendall, Reggie D. White and Thomas, and created with the theater collective the Commissary, it was presented in an earlier version online during the industry shutdown. In person, it is the kind of electric theater that charges audiences with energy: a meeting between public intellectuals wrestling rigorously with the culture, and clashing with each other along the way. The drama is built in. All we have to do is listen.The actors are listening, too, wearing earpieces that feed them the audio of the interview, whose words they speak with the original stammers and hesitations. We hear, briefly, the voices of the real Baldwin and Giovanni captured on that old recording, but the performance is about channeling their essence, not impersonating them.So it doesn’t matter, really, that Clemons-Hopkins — tall, broad-shouldered, bearded, familiar to fans of the HBO Max series “Hacks” as the endearing workaholic Marcus — has such a different physical presence than Baldwin. It’s the writer’s mind that this show is after.Dickinson is riveting as the lesser-known Giovanni, a poised young Black woman with a soft surface and a spine of steel. Respectful of Baldwin, she belongs to a different sex and generation than he does. And she challenges him on his stubborn sympathy for notions of Black manhood that she believes must change.“Be careful as a woman what you demand of a man,” he warns, but she is having none of it — a resistance that got her finger snaps of approval from the crowd at the performance I saw.Baldwin and Giovanni are united, though, in having no use for white critics, so take my admiration for this show with that grain of salt. But do go, and do pause in the lobby, where one corner has been turned into an installation by You-Shin Chen, the show’s set designer, and Matt Carlin, its props supervisor, with a loop of period video clips full of famous Black faces and retro advertising (by Josiah Davis and Attilio A. Rigotti) playing on a vintage console TV.It will transport you straight back to the era of the interview, when Giovanni and the expatriate Baldwin were determined that Black Americans should take rightful ownership of their white-run country.“I do know that we have paid too much for it to be able to abandon it,” he says, with an eye on the ancestors. “My father and my father’s fathers paid too much for it.”“I’ve paid too much for it,” she says. “I’m only 28.”Lessons in Survival: 1971Through June 30 at the Vineyard Theater, Manhattan; vineyardtheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Review: In ‘sandblasted,’ Seizing the Day. Also the Nose.

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      When their body parts start falling off, two women go on a spiritual journey with an Oprah-esque guru in Charly Evon Simpson’s new play.As the lights go up, we discover two women half-buried in sand — which is one more woman than stingy Samuel Beckett offered in “Happy Days.” But Beckett’s semi-subterranean Winnie faced only the terrors of eternity. For Angela and Odessa, the main characters in Charly Evon Simpson’s “sandblasted,” which had its world premiere Off Broadway on Sunday, the problem is closer to home.A lot closer: not even arm’s length, you might say. Because less than a minute into the action, it is that appendage that falls off Odessa’s body like an overripe fruit from a tree.Kudos to the prosthetic designer, Matthew Frew, for the lifelike limb, and to Simpson for the bolt of surreal humor at the start of a play that wants to be a Beckettian comedy about Black women in extremis. If it doesn’t succeed, it’s not for lack of trying.For me, it tries too hard. The central metaphor — that Black women are literally falling apart — is assiduously explored, but the issues that might give it heft are left, like Angela and Odessa, buried in the sand. Random racist violence and the increased rate of infant mortality are name-checked only.Which is not to say that every play about Black women must be a tragic news bulletin. In some ways it’s a relief that when Angela and Odessa do rise from the sand, there’s some enjoyable interplay between them. There’s not much development, though, unless you count the further shedding of body parts. Angela (Brittany Bellizeare) loses her nose and a toe; Odessa (Marinda Anderson) reglues her arm but drops the occasional finger.The women are, at first, strangers, having come to the same beach seeking the sand and fresh air they have heard might “slow the process” of their apparently epidemic condition. They both fit the at-risk demographic: stressed-out Black women, especially those living in big cities. Though joined by common disaster, they are meet-cute opposites: Odessa blingy, fatalistic and cool; Angela nerdy, anxious and eager to please. She calls herself a “safety cat” as opposed to a “scaredy cat.”Marinda Anderson, left, as Odessa, and Brittany Bellizeare, right, as Angela, join Rolonda Watts, as a guru named Adah, on a spiritual quest.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut with the beach treatment more or less a bust, they nevertheless set out together on a mad mission to seek the advice and care of an Oprah-like wellness guru named Adah. Adah, who says she is “somewhere below 100” in age, has not been afflicted by the disease, and has thus become a popular source of inspiration about it, writing books, giving lectures (“Girl, Stop Falling Apart!”) and preaching the murky gospel of self-help.Yet “sandblasted” is not a satire of Oprah or Oprah-ism; especially as played by the former newscaster and talk show host Rolonda Watts, Adah is at least as warm as she is sententious. You can’t help but like her even though she’s oblivious to the way her privilege provides insulation and her prescriptions turn out to be riddling and fickle. As she joins Angela and Odessa on a journey that seems more spiritual than medical, she suggests they travel east. Oh wait, no, west. Well, somewhere.The play is similarly wayward: its path sometimes random, its chronology scrambled for no reason. Angela and Odessa seem scrambled, too; they exchange positions in their arguments, perhaps to maintain the semblance of conflict where little exists. Lively disagreement comes into the picture only when Angela’s playboy brother does; Jamal (Andy Lucien) attends an Adah lecture so he’ll “seem more understanding when I go on dates” and tries to pick up the not-having-it Odessa, whom he meets too coincidentally at the bar where he works.The actors, under the direction of Summer L. Williams, are all enjoyable, making the most of characterful writing when it’s provided, and doing what they can with the big gulps of self-conscious poetry Simpson has otherwise asked them to deliver.And “sandblasted” — a coproduction of the Vineyard and WP theaters — looks handsome, too, its surreal landscape represented in Matt Saunders’s set by heaps of sand, a cotton-ball sky and doors and windows cut into the cycloramic horizon. The witty costumes (by Montana Levi Blanco) and alfresco lighting (by Stacey Derosier) help counter the vagueness of time and locale. Despite those felicities, the play, with 18 scenes totaling an hour and 40 minutes, is too long for its own good, a problem not ameliorated by stodgy pacing and shaggy transitions.Not everyone will feel that way. Some people in the audience on the night I attended were signifying with murmurs and finger snaps their appreciation for the well turned phrases and tender encomiums about caring for one another and seizing the day. And though I found the pileup of metaphors oppressive, I have to admit they were eye-opening. An especially elaborate one introduced me to the phenomenon of fulgurites: tubes of glass formed underground when lightning hits sand.In the context of “sandblasted,” they are clearly meant to symbolize Black women themselves, the lightning strike of disaster having fused with their own nature to make something beautiful and precious — and, all too often, buried.sandblastedThrough March 13 at the Vineyard Theater, Manhattan; vineyardtheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      Review: In the Disturbing ‘Dana H.,’ Whose Voice Is It Anyway?

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      Deirdre O’Connell brilliantly lip-syncs the testimony of a woman abducted by a white supremacist in a play by Lucas Hnath.Dana Higginbotham had recently lost her job as a chaplain in the psychiatric unit of a Florida hospital when, in 1997, she was abducted by one of her former patients, a methed-up ex-con named Jim.For the next five months she lived in captivity, in a blur of hide-outs and motel rooms, as Jim, called Cowboy by his associates in a white supremacist crime syndicate, dragged her along on his “jobs,” sometimes by the hair.Though she was “never not covered with bruises,” and often signaled her distress nonverbally, almost no one tried to help her; eventually, in a kind of transference or Stockholm syndrome, or what she calls adaptation to maladaptation, she came to see Jim as her “protector” because certainly “the cops weren’t.” Indeed, the police had little power, and thus little interest in, the world beneath our own she had somehow fallen into, a world where “everything that was suppose to be right was not.”I’m quoting Higginbotham verbatim, dropped d and all, because that’s the way her words come to us in “Dana H.,” the profoundly disturbing new play by Lucas Hnath that opened on Sunday at the Lyceum Theater on Broadway. It’s her voice, recorded over a period of several days in 2015, we hear on tape, telling the story of those five months in Jim’s thrall — and the two-and-a-half years hiding from him on a construction gang afterward.Yet this is not simply verbatim theater of the kind the Civilians, the “investigative” company that commissioned and developed “Dana H.,” has pioneered in works like “Gone Missing” and “This Beautiful City.” Nor is it like “Is This a Room,” the verbatim drama by Tina Satter that opened on the same stage last week and will now alternate performances with “Dana H.,” each playing four performances a week.In Hnath’s play, the transcript is not dramatized as it is in those others, with actors speaking and performing each role. Rather, just one actor, Deirdre O’Connell, embodying Higginbotham, lip-syncs the entire 75-minute text, brilliantly pulling off one of the strangest and most difficult challenges ever asked of an actor.Call it Thriller Karaoke, a form in which the story is almost as dangerous as the mode of storytelling. You worry that O’Connell will fall out of sync with the recording, which never stops once the play begins. Gradually, though, as her inerrancy becomes clear, you let go of that concern and switch to related ones: Why tell the story this way in the first place? What do you get from the astonishing feat, besides astonishment, that you wouldn’t get if the same material had been acted out as it might be in a typically effective television procedural?One thing you get, or rather don’t, is the violent imagery that in a literal representation can short circuit other values. Higginbotham’s tale is so brutal that, were it visualized, you would spend the entire play worrying about her survival.Instead, the director Les Waters, in his nerves-of-steel staging, offers just one spot of blood to stand for the rest. The story is still plenty savage, but by placing O’Connell, a beloved New York theater veteran, in a comfortable-looking club chair, in the middle of a generic motel room, he in some way abstracts and domesticates it. (The diorama-style set design is by Andrew Boyce, the shadowy-then-glary lighting by Paul Toben.) You are implicitly asked to focus not on the terror of her experience but on the terror of her survival.O’Connell lip-syncs most of the show nonstop.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd your own: While mimicking Higginbotham’s mental dissociation, the uncanniness of the lip-sync destabilizes most other notions of normalcy in the world as well. It suggests an underlife, parallel to the comfortable, familiar one, that threatens at any moment to erupt through the rather thin barrier of routine, just as Higginbotham’s voice seems to erupt through O’Connell’s body in the process of possessing it.The question of voice is obviously central to Hnath’s concern here, only in part because Higginbotham — it’s no spoiler to say — is his mother. At the time of the abduction, he was a thousand miles away, a freshman at New York University, apparently knowing nothing of what was going on in Florida. She did not want him to know: Jim held her son’s safety over her head, she says, to enforce compliance. “Everything I ever did was all based on what was for Lucas, you know?”In the silence that follows that line, you can almost hear the eternal maternal follow-up plaint: “But what has he done for me?”To say he has honored her story, though that’s true, is the skimpiest possible way to look at the achievement of “Dana H.” When the play ran Off Broadway at the Vineyard Theater in 2020, after productions in Los Angeles and Chicago, I was electrified by the way O’Connell turned herself into a kind of musical instrument, letting the recording of Higginbotham “play” her. With her own voice shut off, she emphasized the other tools at her disposal, so that even the smallest shifts of posture and expression became immensely expressive.Those effects have grown more complex in the Broadway production, shifting its weight in the process. More often now, O’Connell seems to work against the apparent veracity of the text: miming Higginbotham’s odd laughter a little more vividly, underlining moments in which she doubts her memory. Though I never previously questioned any aspect of the story, I now found myself wondering whether a woman so traumatized could be a reliable narrator and whether a play is “true” just because its words are.Hnath is at pains to signal that it is, in part by exposing his technique at every turn. We see O’Connell put on her earpieces at the beginning of the play and take them off at the end. Beeps indicate spots where the transcript has been edited. (The sound design and skin-crawly music are by Mikhail Fiksel.) The interview was conducted by Steve Cosson, the artistic director of the Civilians, rather than by Hnath because, as he explained to The Times, he wanted his mother to tell the story “to someone who knew nothing.” That way there would be no shortcuts that might introduce doubt.And yet it is the introduction of doubt, despite all those dams put in place to block it, that I find so wonderfully complicating now. Tiny strange moments Hnath chose to leave in the transcript — references to Higginbotham’s having “played around in” Satanism when she was young, or to her fantasy that converting Jim “would be a great addition” to her “ministry” — make you wonder about her reliability, and what even stranger material was cut.Through such holes in the storytelling, the play’s richest emotions seep. Near the end, when Higginbotham is contacted by Jim’s father, apologizing for what his son did to her, Cosson, on tape, asks if that “helped in any way.” She says it did: “It kinda felt almost like a family. The way a family should have reacted — if I had one.”You may well gasp louder than at the reveal of a corpse.That’s when I realized that “Dana H.” is not just the story of a woman brutalized by a psychopath; it is also the story of a mother abandoned by a son. What else would a playwright do to make reparations but write a play about just that, in the process returning to her what the world had stolen: her voice.Dana H.Through Jan. 16 at the Lyceum Theater, Manhattan; thelyceumplays.com. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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      ‘Is This a Room’ Review: A Transcript Becomes a Thrilling Thriller

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      Beneath the dry words of an F.B.I. interview, a new play unearths a world of interior terror.Short of grocery lists, raw transcripts may be the most boring things ever written. With their halts and hesitations and dust bunnies of fuzzy logic, they beg to be thoroughly tidied before use, and disposed of quickly after.Nevertheless, a 65-minute verbatim transcript has now become the basis for one of the thrillingest thrillers ever to hit Broadway. “Is This a Room,” which opened on Monday at the Lyceum Theater, turns the ums and stutters and bizarre non sequiturs of recorded speech into astonishing — and astonishingly emotional — theater.How does mind-numbing banality become heart-racing excitement? In “Is This a Room,” the transcript is only the starting point. More salient is the way the production, conceived and directed by Tina Satter, views the document through an expressionistic lens, allowing Emily Davis, in a heartbreaking performance, to make words into windows on a world of interior terror.Davis plays the ironically named (yet quite real) Reality Winner, who on June 3, 2017, returning from some Saturday chores, finds F.B.I. men waiting outside the barely furnished house she rents in Augusta, Ga. They have come, one of them tells her, “about, uh, possible mishandling of classified information.”“Oh my goodness,” she replies. “Okay.”At first you believe her when she insists she has “no idea” what the agents are referring to. In cutoff denim shorts, a white button-down shirt and yellow high-tops that perfectly replicate what Winner wore that day — the costumes are by Enver Chakartash — she seems like a teenager. She often sounds like one too, with a hiccuppy delivery and an excuse-my-existence upspeak.But she is 25, keeps three guns and, as she later confirms, has top-secret clearance with a local military contractor, where she works as a linguist specializing in Farsi, Dari and Pashto.If those languages of South and Central Asia make you think Winner has mishandled documents about the war in Afghanistan, that’s a red herring — or rather, a pink one; wherever the F.B.I. transcript redacts information as sensitive, as it does when the specific subject of the leak is discussed, the stage lights blink pink for a moment. A scary “Law & Order”-style thunk may also jolt you from your seat.Pink lighting punctuates moments when pieces of the actual F.B.I. transcript have been redacted. Becca Blackwell, left, portrays the third agent alongside Cobbs and Simpson. Davis is at right.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe superb lighting (by Thomas Dunn) and sound (by Lee Kinney and Sanae Yamada) are just two weapons in Satter’s arsenal of disorienting effects. Aiming, as she recently told The New York Times, to imagine what “Reality is feeling second by second,” she avoids naturalism, which would hide those feelings — there’s barely a set — in favor of an almost sculptural abstraction, increasing and abating tension by the shaping and massing of bodies in space.So as the interview zips along, and Winner, a CrossFit aficionado, realizes she has been caught in an action she can barely justify even to herself, we watch as she seems to decompose muscle by muscle. Her hands wring and flop, her hips give way and finally her torso drops perpendicular to the floor so her tears drip down as if from a leaky showerhead.It’s hard not to cry with her, especially when “Is This a Room,” named for a strange question asked by one of the agents, gets you there without gimmicks. It does not present Winner as a lefty firebrand or a noble whistle-blower but as a maddeningly squirmy, fed-up desk jockey.Nor are the agents demonized. Pete Simpson as the smiley one, Will Cobbs as the wary one and Becca Blackwell as a hilariously oblivious “unknown male” all excel at mitigating their implicit menace with varieties of insouciance. Still, their glad-handing and good ol’ boy chivalry barely disguise their own nervousness; they are just as lost in their absurd script as Winner is in hers, whether huddling in a pack as if to man up or getting right in her face with small talk.Yet has small talk ever seemed so big? Though at least half of the transcript finds the men aimlessly — almost flirtatiously — gabbing with Winner about their own CrossFit experiences and pets they have known, eventually they can’t help revealing a subtext too deep and cold for words. That subtext concerns gender, and part of the fear you feel for Winner comes from the unequal distribution of the sexes. She feels it too: When she offers the information that her dog and cat, both female, “don’t like men,” she adds, in a joke that curdles instantly, “Starting to see a trend here.”Davis (with Simpson) delivers a heartbreaking performance as a linguist who received a five-year prison sentence for leaking documents.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIndeed. Winner, who later admitted guilt in a plea bargain, was the first person sentenced under the Espionage Act after President Trump cracked down on leaks upon entering office. According to a Times report, hers was the longest sentence — more than five years — “ever imposed in federal court for an unauthorized release of government information to the media.” And even though she was granted an early release this June for “exemplary behavior,” she is still prohibited from making public statements or appearances.Plays based on transcripts would seem to face a similar prohibition, their verbatim nature acting as a hard brake on editorial indulgence. (Another transcript-based play, “Dana H.,” by Lucas Hnath, opens next week at the Lyceum, where it will run on an alternating schedule with “Is This a Room.”) Yet in practice, such works are sometimes richer than fiction, if not in words then in implication.For me, the implications of “Is This a Room” are clear. The documents Winner leaked to a publication called The Intercept contained proof of Russian interference in the 2016 election, interference President Trump was at pains to deny. However wrong her actions, I find it difficult not to connect the dots between her excessive punishment and Mr. Trump’s many other attempts to shame and silence women, whether Stormy Daniels, E. Jean Carroll or Christine Blasey Ford.Far from mitigating the play’s power, such hindsight deepens it; it’s a story that can’t be spoiled. Even if you saw “Is This a Room” when Satter’s company, Half Straddle, premiered it Off Off Broadway at the Kitchen in January 2019, or at the Vineyard Theater later that year, its drama would not be diminished now.That’s because, to the extent it is a mystery, the question is not what Winner did but what doing it did to her. “Is This a Room” asks whether it’s possible to live in a lawless world without becoming lawless ourselves. Is there a room for that? The answer, I’m afraid, is not in the transcript.Is This a RoomThrough Jan. 16 at the Lyceum Theater, Manhattan; thelyceumplays.com. Running time: 1 hour 5 minutes. More