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    Review: Little Adds Up in the Elusive ‘Grief Camp’

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    Les Waters’s production for Atlantic Theater Company is marvelously realized, despite the limitations of the play’s often maddening script.The campers in Eliya Smith’s new play are not the happy kind. The show is called “Grief Camp,” after all — though Smith delays even mentioning what ails her characters. And when she finally gets to it, she parcels out information in fragmentary exchanges and scenes.This strategy does help the show steer clear of therapeutic bromides and conventional catharsis, but it creates a different problem: “Grief Camp,” which leans heavily on whimsy, feels unmoored, tentative.Les Waters’s staging of this play — Smith’s Off Broadway debut — for Atlantic Theater Company is marvelously realized, as much, at least, as Smith’s often maddening script allows. The set designer Louisa Thompson has recreated a cabin that feels so lived in, you can almost smell the wet towels and hear the soft creak of the bunk beds. The six teenagers who inhabit it can be tender or they can be aggressive. Sometimes they shut down and sometimes they open up. Always, communication proves slippery.Every morning, the kids are summoned to breakfast by P.A. announcements from the unseen Rocky (Danny Wolohan) that grow increasingly lengthy and surreal as the show progresses. Sometimes, a guitar player (Alden Harris-McCoy) comes in and strums a guitar by the side of the cabin. Is he a counselor? Do those teenagers really want to hear the country song “Goin’ Away Party”?Smith paints the campers in quick brush strokes as they go through their daily activities. The girls have a little more individuality than the boys — the underwritten Bard (Arjun Athalye) and Gideon (Dominic Gross) almost feel like payback for decades, if not centuries of malnourished female roles — but little adds up. The characters harbor emotions yet come across as numb, they have quirks yet are undifferentiated. You could consider this elusiveness as a commentary on grief itself, but it’s a challenge to bring an audience along.The most elaborate interactions take place between two characters whose shared scenes pique our attention: the counselor Cade (Jack DiFalco) and the camper Olivia (Renée-Nicole Powell), whose prickly relationship gives this nebulous show a source of narrative tension. He is not much older than his charges and like them he carries an emotional burden. But somehow he appears to incite tumultuous reactions in Olivia, who already has a tendency to hide her distress under a tough attitude and provocative statements — “Damn need to change my tampon,” she tells Cade, seemingly apropos of nothing. (Referencing Chekhov, the script describes Olivia as “a Yelena who thinks she’s a Sonya,” but she feels more like a Cady pretending she’s a Regina.)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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      5 Monologues, Each a Showcase for Asian American Actors Over 60

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      “Out of Time” at the Public Theater is intended to showcase the talents of older actors. “People want to dismiss your stories,” the show’s director says. Not here.They might be asked to play a person lying in bed, dying of a stroke, or someone’s horrible mother, or a beloved grandparent struggling with dementia.“Commercially speaking, ‘old Asian lady’ is a huge amount of my opportunity,” the actor Natsuko Ohama said recently. “I like being ‘old Asian lady.’ But it has its limitations.”The director Les Waters became even more acutely interested in those kinds of limitations as he was watching a dance performance choreographed by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker at the Skirball Center in 2020. The dancers in it, he recalled, were “older than usual.” He was struck by what he saw.Waters, who most recently directed Lucas Hnath’s “Dana H.” on Broadway, and Mia Katigbak, the co-founder of the National Asian American Theater Company, had met a few years back at a festival and had agreed to work together at some point. Three years later, they were together at dinner, and Waters could not help but share what he called “an insane directorial megalomaniac’s vision.”What if there was a show that started at night, ran until the morning, and featured a succession of talented older actors telling stories — demonstrating just how much they were capable of?“Out of Time,” which began performances Feb. 15 at the Public Theater, is not quite as ambitious as that original vision. But it is intended to showcase the talents of older actors all the same. It will feature five performers delivering five new monologues — centered on themes like memory, parenthood, and identity — in a show that will run roughly 150 minutes. All the playwrights and all the actors are Asian American. And all the performers are over 60.Ohama is performing a 40-minute monologue by the playwright Sam Chanse.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesKubota will perform Naomi Iizuka’s monologue, about a man much like the playwright’s father.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesIt is a first, officials at the Public maintain, even if the first is a tad specific: The first production in New York theater to be written by five Asian American playwrights for Asian American actors over the age of 60.“This is to say: ‘Older people in the theater exist,’” Waters, 69, said of the production’s purpose. “We’re here, we’re underused and we have experience.”“As an old person myself, I find people want to dismiss your stories — I did it to my parents all the time,” he added.“Hyper-consciousness” in casting these days means you’ll often see one old person featured in an ensemble, making for “its own kind of tokenism,” said Katigbak, who is 67.“This project addresses that,” she added, “because it centers the old character, the old actor.”The message will be purposefully reinforced by the fact that the actors will be giving long, demanding monologues, some of which run more than 40 minutes and approach 5,000 words.In her monologue, Anna Ouyang Moench, who wrote the 2019 Off Broadway play, “Mothers,” captures a grieving documentary filmmaker dealing with both personal loss and professional rejection.Naomi Iizuka’s piece features an elderly Japanese man who loves Scotch and hates jazz, while Sam Chanse introduces audiences to a novelist who is giving a speech at her alma mater despite (or in spite of) having apparently been canceled by the students she is addressing.“We’ve always had limitations — at every age — just being Asian American,” Leong said.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThe playwrights also include Jaclyn Backhaus, whose breakout work “Men on Boats” was a 2015 Off Broadway hit; and Mia Chung, whose “Catch as Catch Can” will return next season, after a 2018 New York premiere.Waters and Katigbak said the playwrights were not given specific prompts, except that their monologues should be “of the moment.” Given that they were created during the pandemic, isolation — and an examination of how loneliness metastasizes and manifests when family and friends all but abandon you — pervades almost all of the works.In a round-table discussion earlier this month, the actors said that living through the last few years has made them intimately familiar with the feeling.“My mother, who turned 97 in August, sits at home and watches TV all day because all her friends are gone,” said Glenn Kubota, who will appear in Iizuka’s monologue. “To see what she has to do on a daily basis just to amuse herself is really eye opening. I’m getting a glimpse of what maybe I will be facing 10, 20, years from now.”Many of the works are also at least somewhat autobiographical. And a few of the playwrights, who are all younger than 60, have created characters that resemble one of their parents. In some cases, in the process of acting, editing and rehearsing, the characters have evolved as their creators have reflected more deeply on themselves and those close to them.The monologue by Iizuka, whose well-regarded “36 Views” opened at the Public almost two decades ago, features a Japanese man who, in peeling back the layers of his life, recounts the time a bomb fell on his house leading him to wander around Tokyo and end up inside a candy shop.Iizuka said the character is strongly influenced by her father, who died in December 2020. “It’s about trying to find joy and pleasure, but also running up against your own mortality,” she said.She shared photos of him with the show’s creative team, who in turn provided them to Kubota. Iizuka said the actor has an “uncanny ability” to capture her father’s “feisty, tart-tongued humor.”“I’ve found this process incredibly nourishing,” she said.Kubota noted that the script had changed considerably — from a first draft he felt was filled with anger to the one he is now performing that mostly expresses love.“Hopefully I can do her work justice,” Kubota said, “because I’m going to be talking about her father in front of all of these people.”As co-founder of the National Asian American Theater Company, Katigbak helped get the project off the ground.Nina Westervelt for The New York Times“Every time I work on something new,” said Wolf, “I do think about generations of minority performers who, for whatever reason, were marginalized.”Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesSince the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic roughly two years ago, the number of documented episodes of race-based hate toward people of Asian descent have soared, leaving Asian Americans in New York and beyond to endure what has at times been daily dread about their own safety and also the well-being of their older parents.The monologues mostly avoid racial animus and lean toward more universal themes. Even still, Katigbak emphasized that in “Out of Time,” audiences will hear the universal stories through Asian American voices — a rarity in the theater, even in 2022.“We’ve always had limitations — at every age — just being Asian American,” Page Leong, who last performed at the Public in “Too Noble Brothers” in 1997, said of the roles that come to members of her community. “It’s also connected to being relegated to being the surgeon or the lawyer.”Rita Wolf, who has had roles in Richard Nelson’s recent plays, including “The Michaels,” said, “So much of it is about opportunity.” She added: “Every time I work on something new, I do think about generations of minority performers who, for whatever reason, were marginalized. And I think about how they did not have opportunities to do something like this.”Ohama is performing Chanse’s work, “Disturbance Specialist,” which recently clocked in at 40 minutes and 21 seconds and 4,998 words. She joked about doing such a piece at her “advanced age,” since it takes hours and hours of memorization.“When you are our ages, life is there inside of you, so we don’t have to worry about the acting so much,” Ohama said. “But what is concerning to the older actor generally is: Do I know my lines?”“We have dedicated ourselves to this art form,” she added, “and the thing about us older people is we don’t get a chance to show that very often.” 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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      Making Every Second Count in Plays Too Short to Miss

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      Theater shrank to tiny proportions during the pandemic. Sometimes that’s a big plus.Forever ago, in March 2020, a press agent handed me tickets before a show and said, “Ninety minutes, no intermission, thank God.”But those days of durational drama are gone. The pandemic has been whittling down running times as if attention spans, like paper towels, were running short. Even “Angels in America” caught the disease, showing up online in October at 50 minutes instead of the customary seven hours.So when I heard that the British playwright Caryl Churchill, already a master of concision, had upped (or lowered) the ante with a 14-minute play — not a doodle or a one-act meant for pairing with others, but a stand-alone event — I began to wonder what advantages might be found in the shorter forms that online theater made feasible. Or was the pandemic just an excuse for clearing out the small ideas that clutter every writer’s notepad and napping dreams?That Churchill play — “What If If Only,” presented by the National Asian American Theater Company — is the briefest of three I saw in the last week alone. “The Floor Wipers,” from the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, runs 15 minutes; “Ali Summit,” from the Actors Theater of Louisville, weighs in at 23.Paradoxically, their similar lengths — just a gulp, and they’re over — help to differentiate them, as the various ways in which they pack their brief time are highlighted instead of papered over.Churchill is not, in any event, a paper-overer. “What If If Only” is harrowing from nearly the first instant, as a woman begs her late husband, who may have committed suicide, to make contact from beyond.“Are you not trying?” she cries. “If you’d wanted to talk to me you could have stayed alive.”Soon the husband does appear, as the wisp of a ghost that could become real, he says, if only his wife would make him “possible.”Merging Churchill’s frequent themes of dread (“Escaped Alone,” “Far Away”) and duplication (“A Number,” “Love and Information”), “What If If Only” dismisses its speculative worlds as quickly as it creates them. The wife’s despair, tearing a hole in space-time, soon releases a multiplicity of possible versions of her husband, had he lived, crowding out the “real” one. Even when she shoos them away in terror, one remains stuck in her hair.“Just brush with your fingers,” her husband says gently. “All gone.”I call the main characters “she” and “her husband” because the livestreamed production, perfectly and creepily “realized” by the stage director Les Waters and the theater tech guru Jared Mezzocchi, casts the roles to suggest that the mourner is a woman (Mia Katigbak, superb as always) and the ghost is a man (Bernard White).But the play’s horror, which in Churchill is never just cosmological but also spiritual, comes from the combination of its radical relevance to any human and its freakish compression, in which 14 minutes becomes a literal deadline. The extreme brevity — typical one-acts more often last an hour or longer — serves as a tool, like a socket wrench, to make clear that grief is unbearable, even in small doses.One of Andy Perez’s collages from “Ali Summit.”via Actors Theater of Louisville“Ali Summit,” by Idris Goodwin, also feels usefully short, in the manner of a teaser designed to encourage deeper research and reflection. The subject is the June 1967 meeting at which major Black athletes — including Jim Brown, Bill Russell and Lew Alcindor (not yet known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) — questioned Muhammad Ali about his conscientious objection to military service.Though Ali’s justification now seems incontrovertible — “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs?” — he was nevertheless convicted of draft evasion, stripped of his heavyweight title, sentenced to five-years in a federal penitentiary and fined $10,000. Five years later, the Supreme Court overturned the conviction.None of that falls within the scope of “Ali Summit,” which limits itself to the disruptive and galvanizing effect Ali had on his colleagues that summer. In fact, Ali, though he is represented, like all the characters, in a series of beautiful collages by Andy Perez, does not speak in the play. Only the others do, voiced by actors who give full force to the confusion and anguish of men who are already questioning what it means, as Black athletes working for white “owners,” to fight.“We are soldiers, all of us really, enlisted since birth,” says the Griot, or narrator figure, portrayed by the playwright and rendered as a wide-eyed witness.The language, mixing earthy jargon with breakbeat poetics, is as much a collage as the visuals and does a good job of setting the tone of urgent reflection. But also like the visuals, which are filmed in the familiar documentary pan-and-scan style, it tends to flatten conflict that wants to be more argumentative and three-dimensional. (An immersive virtual reality element is scheduled to be added later this summer.) As if to make up for that, “Ali Summit,” directed by Robert Barry Fleming, mines emotion from the pressurized implications of its transitional moment, a moment we are somehow still living through.“I’m not worried about Muhammad Ali,” Russell says. “I’m worried about the rest of us.”Jaylene Clark Owens, left, and Taysha Marie Canales in “The Floor Wipers.”via the Wilma TheaterAthletes figure in “The Floor Wipers,” too — indirectly. Its two characters, Racine and Tiana, are members of an “elite squad” given the responsibility, during the N.B.A.’s coronavirus-bubble playoffs last year, of keeping basketball courts dry and sweat-free. (This is a real job.) An exaggerated, “Law & Order”-style introduction immediately identifies “The Floor Wipers” as quick-take comedy; in a handful of episodes of just a few minutes each, the women gossip and sass on the sidelines while waiting for their big moments.For Tiana (Jaylene Clark Owens), those moments are about furthering God’s plan that she marry one of the players; she’d prefer Jayson Tatum but would settle for Nikola Jokic. Racine (Taysha Marie Canales) has more modest goals: to work off her pandemic 15 and save money for her first trip “abroad” — to Texas.Conceived by Canales, directed by Akeem Davis and written by both along with Owens, “The Floor Wipers” is really just a sketch, but it does not ignore the way the outside world penetrates even a bubble. Tiana and Racine wear Black Lives Matter T-shirts, take note of the kneeling players and lose work when games are canceled in protest over the shooting of Jacob Blake. The sure touch of the writing and especially of the performing mean that the comedy isn’t canceled by the intimations of tragedy. Instead, you laugh with a catch in your throat, and the whole thing evaporates before you can ask too much of it.That’s smart, and something I wish other sketch shows, some of which are televised on Saturday nights, would learn from.For dread, though, a heavy boil may be best. That’s what Churchill gives us in “What If If Only,” and why it will likely stand on its own even when mounted live in a theater, as the Royal Court in London plans to do this fall. But be warned that Churchill, even at 14 minutes, doesn’t evaporate. When she leaves a kettle on the fire that long, it often bursts into flames.What If If OnlyThrough June 20; naatco.orgThe Floor WipersAt wilmatheater.orgAli SummitAt actorstheatre.org More