We Had a World (Play)

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    8 New Shows Our Theater Critics Are Talking About

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    A British satirical comedy, a Tennessee Williams classic, a soundscape of Havana: These are productions worth knowing about.Critic’s PickAndrew Scott, Andrew Scott, Andrew Scott …‘Vanya’Directed by Sam Yates and adapted by Simon Stephens, this one-man “Vanya” — in which Andrew Scott delivers a tour-de-force performance — arrives Off Broadway after a run in London, where it won an Olivier for best play revival. Though faithful to the original material, the production offers not just modern touches, but also “a new way of seeing into the heart of its beauty,” our critic wrote.From Jesse Green’s review:What makes the production exemplary, like the play itself, is the emotion. I hate to think why Scott is such a sadness machine, but the tears (and blushes and glows and sneers) lie very shallow under his skin. He only rarely raises his voice. As the feelings are evidently coming directly and carefully from his heart, he narrowcasts them directly and carefully at yours.Through May 11 at the Lucille Lortel Theater. Read the full review.Critic’s PickThe lush sounds of Havana.“Buena Vista Social Club” at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater features choreography by Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘Buena Vista Social Club’The joyous horns and full-bodied voices that make up the beloved 1997 album come alive in this Broadway musical, with a book by Marco Ramirez, direction by Saheem Ali and choreography by Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck. Though the show offers a fictional back story for these veteran Cuban musicians who shot to global fame after recording the album, the thrill here is the music, exuberant and expansive, which fills in the beats of Cuba’s history, both in sorrow and in revelry.From Elisabeth Vincentelli’s review:The spirit of the musical “Buena Vista Social Club” is evident in its opening scene. … The music is center stage, and we immediately understand its power as a communal experience that binds people. Therein lies the production’s greatest achievement. For a place where music so often plays a crucial role, Broadway hardly ever highlights the thrill of music making itself.At the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater. Read the full review.A ferocious Paul Mescal in a Tennessee Williams classic.Downhill with no brakes: Patsy Ferran as Blanche and Paul Mescal as Stanley in “A Streetcar Named Desire” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘A Streetcar Named Desire’Paul Mescal and Patsy Ferran dance with violence and desire as Stanley and Blanche in Rebecca Frecknall’s gritty revival of Tennessee Williams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In the absence of beauty, brutality pervades in Frecknall’s darker production, which features a utilitarian set and exhilarating performances that ratchet up the fury. From Jesse Green’s review:Mescal is best known and deservedly praised for excruciatingly sensitive portrayals of hurting hunks who can barely acknowledge their pain. (I can’t speak for “Gladiator II,” but he is superb in “Normal People,” “Aftersun” and “All of Us Strangers.”) It was therefore not immediately evident that he could do justice to a character, first played by Marlon Brando, that Arthur Miller described as a “sexual terrorist.” I am sorry to report that he can.Through April 6 at the Harvey Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music. Read the full review.Critic’s PickThe vicious nature of the truth.Andrew Barth Feldman (on the floor) with Joanna Gleason in “We Had a World.”Jeremy Daniel 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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      “We Had a World” Review: A Poignant New Play From Joshua Harmon

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      Joshua Harmon’s new play features uniformly standout performances and tells a poignant story of family dynamics.At the onset of Joshua Harmon’s wonderfully textured new play, “We Had a World,” Josh (played by Andrew Barth Feldman) is in his tighty-whities, scribbling in a notebook with a mechanical pencil at a desk on a corner of the stage. Just then his Nana — his dying Nana, to be specific — shows up onstage with a request. She has an idea for a play her grandson should write, a vicious “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”-style work about their family.The play we’re seeing, in the intimate basement-esque New York City Center Stage II of the Manhattan Theater Club, is the playwright’s answer to his grandmother’s request. It’s not as vitriolic as Nana had asked for, but it is an all too relatable unpacking of the longstanding resentments and challenging dynamics of a family, particularly the ones between two of the central women in his life, his mother and his grandmother. If there’s viciousness here, it’s the complex, often vicious nature of the truth.“We Had a World” is a memory play in which Josh breaks the fourth wall to guide the audience through notable incidents of his childhood and adult life relating to his mother and grandmother. Though the play opens with a phone call between Josh and his Nana at the end of her life, he jumps back chronologically to explain growing up with his grandmother, Renee (Joanna Gleason), an eccentric Manhattanite who takes him to the theater to see “Medea” and to exhibitions of the work of Robert Mapplethorpe. She sneaks them in to catch movies for free and they make regular visits at the Met Museum. He credits his grandmother with helping him find his future vocation in the theater. But it’s not long before he discovers a secret about Renee: she’s an alcoholic, which is the source of years of animosity between her and Josh’s mother, Ellen (Jeanine Serralles), a tough lawyer with a chip on her shoulder.“We Had a World” gradually works its way back to, and a little bit past, Renee’s decline and death, though not in a way that’s at all predictable or even linear. Josh remembers and cleverly revises the story as he goes, with Renee and Ellen appearing onstage not just as puppets in his story, manipulated by his telling, but also as autonomous characters who express their own opinions (often, hilariously, at his expense) and intrude to offer their perspectives on events.Harmon’s script doesn’t feel as didactic or self-consciously stagy as many contemporary memory plays can be; it strikes an impressive balance of negotiating a story with many adverse emotional perspectives and moving parts while also maintaining a sense of honesty. I don’t just mean honesty in the sense of facts — though the verifiable biographical facts in Harmon’s story, and a bit of recorded material at the end, lend a gravitas to the characters and occurrences. I mean honesty in the sense of emotional transparency, the very real mix of love and resentment and insecurities and doubts that define all relationships, especially those within a family.Though the script successfully condenses several eras of Harmon’s life and captures the quirks and particularities of his mother’s and grandmother’s personalities, the performances really give the material its extra emotional heft. It takes less than 15 minutes to fall in love with Gleason as Renee, the native New Yorker with a dark sense of humor, a love for ornate French furniture and an inexplicable pseudo-British accent. And Serralles’s Ellen feels most real when she is at her most defensive and sardonic, though her shifts into the character’s more openly vulnerable moments still show some seams.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