Wills, Dustin

Subterms

    Latest story

    125 Shares169 Views

    ‘Six Characters’ Review: Making the Case Against a White-Centric Theater

    by

    At Lincoln Center Theater, Phillip Howze’s daring new play offers a hefty critique but takes aim at more targets than it can accommodate. Nothing makes some theatergoers as skittish as the specter of audience participation. Toying with that apprehension, Phillip Howze has designed a pre-performance interaction for people coming to see his confrontational new play, “Six Characters,” at Lincoln Center Theater.As part of what his script calls the overture, each person entering the Claire Tow Theater is meant to be asked, “Would you like to participate?,” yet given no details on which to base their answer. The query turns out to provide a frame for “Six Characters.”A metatheatrical nod to Luigi Pirandello’s canonical 1921 drama, “Six Characters in Search of an Author,” Howze’s play is an indictment of the white-centric American theater and a warning about passivity in the face of looming fascism. Are you willing to participate in reshaping the theater and the country? “Six Characters” would like to know.Taking aim at more targets than it can accommodate, the play is scattershot but genuinely experimental and, as such, daring programming by Evan Cabnet, LCT3’s departing artistic director, who was recently named to the same role at Second Stage Theater. A principal theme — Black artists navigating overwhelmingly white traditions — is clear from the preshow and interstitial music: Italian opera sung by Black stars, including Leontyne Price and Pretty Yende.Dustin Wills’s production opens with a Director (Julian Robertson) alone on the bare stage, fumbling comically with lighting and ladders. He is the first of the play’s six Black characters: a Europhile whose elegant coat is from Italy, and who has a habit of bursting into Italian. (The set is by Wills, costumes by Montana Levi Blanco.)Scott plays a cleaner and Julian Robertson is the Director in Phillip Howze’s play, a metatheatrical nod to Luigi Pirandello’s canonical 1921 work.Jeenah Moon for 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

    More stories

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      As Heartbeat Opera Reaches a Milestone, So Does Its Musical Leader

      by

      Dan Schlosberg, who for 10 years has adapted opera classics for the company, has written its first world premiere.For the last decade, Heartbeat Opera has treated the classics like rough drafts: The scores of “Carmen” and “Madama Butterfly,” “Fidelio” and “Der Freischütz” have been starting points for something fresh, urgent and immediate.In New York, a city with fewer and fewer spaces for opera, Heartbeat sits harmoniously between the Prototype Festival, which stages new music theater at a chamber scale, and the grand tradition of the Metropolitan Opera. Heartbeat draws from the canon but reimagines it with an avant-garde spirit and an eye toward the issues of our time: gun violence, Black Lives Matter, the #MeToo movement.Performed on intimate stages, the resulting productions smartly elicit strong reactions, whatever those may be. I haven’t liked all of Heartbeat’s shows, but I’ve never walked away with a shrug, and I’ve never regretted going.Now, in its 10th year, the company is adding something truly new to the mix: a world premiere, “The Extinctionist,” which opened on Wednesday at the Baruch Performing Arts Center as part of Heartbeat’s 2024 repertory season, alongside Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin.”It’s fitting that “The Extinctionist,” an opera with good bones but a flawed presentation, is composed by Dan Schlosberg. He has been the musical soul of Heartbeat since its founding, adapting works by Puccini, Donizetti and more with a vision as creative as each production’s director.Schlosberg rehearsing with the company. He leads “The Extinctionist” from the piano.George Etheredge for 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

    • 88 Shares129 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Wet Brain’ Review: A Vodka-Spiked Horror Show

      by

      The children of a severely alcoholic widower navigate his incapacity, and his legacy, in John J. Caswell Jr.’s pitch-black comedy about addiction.In the escalating series of calamities that constitute Joe’s misadventures with alcohol, his middle child, Ricky, has missed a lot.It’s been six gruesome years since Ricky last traveled back to Arizona for a family visit, after his father’s second arrest for driving drunk, and Joe has careened downhill in the interim. When he goes in search of vodka these days he goes on foot, but his sodden brain is shot: dementia, hallucinations, the kind of aphasia that means he can’t talk anymore. He grunts and lurches, vomits a lot, uses a corner of the TV room as a urinal.Ricky has kept a determined distance from it all. When he does show up one summer night — threatened into it by his exhausted sister, Angelina, their father’s live-in caretaker — the recriminations start immediately.“I can’t fly across the country every single time his organs start shutting down,” Ricky says, with the casual hyperbole of the repeatedly traumatized.“You could’ve at least come for the kidney!” she shoots back.This is a horror show, unequivocally. But John J. Caswell Jr.’s “Wet Brain,” at Playwrights Horizons, is also a very funny, pitch-black comedy about addiction and obligation, love and abandonment, and patterns of poisonous behavior lodged so deep they seem encoded. Also, Joe may or may not be in contact with aliens, so there’s some space travel along the way.Directed by Dustin Wills in a coproduction with MCC Theater, the play takes place in the rundown house in Scottsdale where Ricky (Arturo Luís Soria), Angelina (Ceci Fernández) and their brother, Ron (Frankie J. Alvarez), grew up, raised by their father (Julio Monge) after the death of their mother, Mona. The loss of her haunts them still, three decades later.The fallout of their father’s addiction and mother’s absence is everywhere in the lives of these siblings, each struggling with various compulsive behaviors, and possessed of a precision-honed ability to push the others’ buttons. Ron, the most like their father and the most protective of him, is also rancidly homophobic; he taunts his gay little brother, Ricky, relentlessly.As with Caswell’s political horror drama “Man Cave” last year, design is the flashiest element of “Wet Brain,” giving us a window into Joe’s hallucinations and a surreal means for the whole family to gather, Mona (Florencia Lozano) included. (The set is by Kate Noll, lighting by Cha See, projections by Nicholas Hussong, sound by Tei Blow and John Gasper, and costumes by Haydee Zelideth Antuñano.)“Why did you burn holes through your brain, Mr. Joe?” Mona asks her husband, gently.Both of them are past the point of no return. This play’s dearest wish is for their children: that they find a way to heal.Wet BrainThrough June 25 at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan; playwrightshorizons.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      Review: A ‘Romeo and Juliet’ That Clowns Around With Tragedy

      by

      Directed by Hansol Jung and Dustin Wills, this sportive, vividly acted production fails to make a convincing case for its new gags and directorial flights.“Romeo and Juliet” is at its core a cautionary tale of young love: Kiss a boy at a party one day, marry him the next, inside of a week you’re both dead. Of Shakespeare’s tragedies it is more propulsive than most, funnier and more modern, too, an amalgam of sex and death and a masquerade ball that requires little improvement. Cast a couple of charismatic leads, wind them up and let the bodies fall.That doesn’t mean that playwrights and directors shouldn’t interrogate or adapt the text. Of course they should. But what’s puzzling about the “Romeo and Juliet” presented by the National Asian American Theater Company in partnership with Two River Theater is how little any of that adaptation adds.Directed by Hansol Jung and Dustin Wills, who recently collaborated on “Wolf Play” at Soho Rep, and with what’s billed as a “modern verse translation” by Jung, this is a sportive, vividly acted production that fails to make a convincing case for its many directorial flights and vernacular interventions. Jung and Wills have thrown much spaghetti at the “Romeo and Juliet” wall. The result is a lot of noodling around.At 136 East 13th Street, usually the home of the Classic Stage Company, the set, designed by Junghyun Georgia Lee and lit by Joey Moro, is a wooden circle. This gestures toward the Elizabethan, as do Mariko Ohigashi’s costumes, which combine long skirts and slashed doublets with T-shirts and jeans.Jung’s script walks this same line between early modern and contemporary, leaving some tranches of the play intact, but zhuzhing up other parts with new vocabulary and new jokes. In the first scene, for example, the prologue is delivered more or less intact, minus a “doth” here and there. Yet the first line of dialogue is “I swear, man, we can’t be no one’s suckers,” which leads into some very filthy puns. (Are they bad puns? Yes. But so are Shakespeare’s.)Brian Lee Huynh as Capulet and Daniel Liu as Lady Capulet.Julieta CervantesJung’s interpolations are perhaps an improvement on the real first lines — an elaborate play on “collier” and “choler” — though specificity of acting and direction would have put the language across. And some of the substitutions, like “thrilled” for “proud,” are even less necessary. Still, Jung is savvy enough to respect Shakespeare’s rhythms and to match his word play, so there’s pleasure in seeing her lively mind volley with his.The acting, from Major Curda’s sad boy Romeo to Dorcas Leung’s sweetheart Juliet to Mia Katigbak’s warm, blunt Nurse, is uniformly strong. (Daniel Liu, playing a servant and Lady Capulet, is an actor to keep an eye on.) As actors of Asian descent don’t always get equal opportunities to play classical roles, this alone justifies the production. Jung and Wills’s direction doesn’t always serve them, though. It’s broad and busy, inclined toward clowning and with a habit of brazening out every sex joke. There are Brechtian gestures and live looping and Groucho Marx glasses and plastic fish littering the stage, which rob the story of momentum. Tybalt (Rob Kellogg), at one point, does the worm. Tragedy recedes.Yet if you are or can remember being young and possessed of big, ungovernable feelings, “Romeo and Juliet” won’t seem far away to you. Making the language and the dancing and the streetwear mirror our own time hasn’t brought it any closer.Romeo and JulietThrough June 3 at the Lynn F. Angelson Theater, Manhattan; naatco.org. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes. More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Montag’ Review: A Dark Hymn to Female Friendship

      by

      Not quite a comedy and not quite a thriller, Kate Tarker’s play is an antic study of two women preparing for a game (or possibly an attack).In a basement apartment somewhere in Germany, Faith (Ariana Venturi) chain smokes cigarettes and drinks endless cups of coffee. Novella (Nadine Malouf) chomps her way through a bag of spicy chips. They argue, they dance, they try on clubwear, they play anxious games. Like lots of characters in lots of plays before them, they are waiting. But not for God or liberation or even a gentleman caller, not exactly. They are waiting for the man who is coming to kill them.This is the trap laid by Kate Tarker’s antic, frantic “Montag,” at Soho Rep, directed by Dustin Wills. Not quite a comedy and not quite a tragedy, sometimes a thriller and often something more bizarre, the play is a hymn to female friendship and, in harsher music, a study of the threat of intimate partner violence. No place, the show intimates, is safe. Not the kitchen table, not the stage.It takes time to figure all of this out, which may signal confidence in the audience on the part of Wills and Tarker, or brash unconcern. Lisa Laratta’s set, a box inside Soho Rep’s already petite stage, is an abstract rendering of a living room; Masha Tsimring’s lights suggest a perpetual midnight. Details about where we are and when we are and the contours of the women’s relationship are kept similarly shadowed. It’s exciting, in a way, this theater as jigsaw, and there’s satisfaction as each piece snaps together. But the murk of these early scenes can also feel like feints until the rules of the game come clear. Or nearly clear. Are these women’s sports and rehearsals preparations to meet death or to cheat it?There’s a realistic drama lurking inside “Montag,” a story of how a Turkish sex worker and an American military operative became friends, how they moved in together, whether this caused any ructions back on the base. That’s a drama I wouldn’t mind seeing, and it might have more geopolitical resonance, which this version gestures toward and then dismisses. But Tarker doesn’t trust that story, or she dreams bigger and weirder. Both, maybe. (The German setting, Novella’s job and the murderous inclinations of her common-law husband also indicate a dialogue with Büchner’s “Woyzeck,” a classic of German proto-expressionism.)Certainly “Montag” is more tethered to reality than Tarker’s previous play, the Alfred Jarry-ish farce “Thunderbodies.” Yet only in its late moments, when the two-character piece expands, careening into operatic hallucination, does it take on weight. The play makes sense as dreams make sense. When life feels like a nightmare, Wills’s production suggests, it should move like a nightmare, too.Malouf, always a welcome presence, infuses Novella with an unvarnished sensuality and a party-at-the-end-of-the-world abandon, born of having nothing left to lose. Novella can seem indolent, unconcerned, until she begins to scream. Venturi’s Faith holds herself more tightly, a jittery presence still trying to juggle odds, plans and probabilities even when logic has clearly failed. The less said about the characters played by Jacob Orr and Dane Suarez, an operatic tenor, the better, though they are played finely.If “Montag” conveys a stylistic restlessness, that puts it in good company. Two weeks ago, Sarah Benson, an artistic director of Soho Rep for the past 15 years, announced that she would step down at the close of this current season. Meropi Peponides, at Soho Rep since 2014, will depart as well. Under Benson’s tenure, the company has continued as a home for formal experimentation and audacious swings. In “Montag,” not all of those swings connect. But how wonderful that Soho Rep has made a space where artists can take them.MontagThrough Nov. 13 at Soho Rep, Manhattan; sohorep.org. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More

    • 88 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      New Soho Rep Season Spotlights Emerging Artists

      by

      A Bengali-English play and a meditation on the work of Whitney Houston are among the offerings.Soho Rep, a 65-seat Off Off Broadway theater in Lower Manhattan, has always been a home for experimental, formally inventive work. But a play in its new season is beyond anything one of the company’s three directors, Meropi Peponides, ever thought it would be able to support: A Bengali-English play.“I couldn’t have imagined in my wildest dreams when I started working at Soho Rep that that would be something we would ever be able to produce,” Peponides said. “It’s so exciting to be able to represent the experiences of South Asian Americans in the diaspora.”The play, “Public Obscenities” by Shayok Misha Chowdhury, is part of the theater’s 2022-23 season, which is set to run from October to July 2023. There will be three world premieres, two of which were written by artists who were members of the first class of the theater’s pandemic-era job creation initiative, Project Number One.The premieres “are emblematic of what Soho Rep does,” said Peponides, who directs the theater alongside Sarah Benson and Cynthia Flowers. “We commit to an idea when it’s still an idea and develop it all the way through to production.”First up is Kate Tarker’s “Montag” (Oct. 12-Nov. 13), a play about female friendship set in a basement apartment in a small German town near an American military base. The production, which is set to be directed by Dustin Wills (“Wolf Play”), is described as a “domestic thriller, a sleep-deprivation comedy and a rebellion celebration under threat of annihilation.”It will be followed by Chowdhury’s bilingual “Public Obscenities” (Feb. 15-March 26, 2023), which originated during his time as a member of Project Number One. The production is a co-commission and coproduction with the National Asian American Theater Company’s National Partnership Project. It tells the story of a queer studies doctoral student who returns to his family home in Kolkata, India, with his Black American boyfriend and makes an unexpected discovery. Chowdhury will also direct.Closing out the season is “The Whitney Album” (May 24-July 2, 2023). The play, by Jillian Walker (who also participated in Project Number One), explores Walker’s relationship to the life and death of Whitney Houston, as well as perceptions of her in the American imagination. Jenny Koons directs.And Project Number One returns, with its third class, this time with the stylist and costume designer Hahnji Jang and the lighting designer Kate McGee. The initiative brings artists into the organization as salaried staff members ($1,250 per week) with benefits, including a year of health insurance coverage and a $10,000 budget to create a new work. More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Wolf Play’ Review: What Keeps a Family From Falling to Pieces?

      by

      Hansol Jung’s new play looks at the broken adoption of a little boy who is plucked from South Korea and moved to one American home, then shunted to another.Sand-colored with beady black eyes and a throaty howl, the character at the center of “Wolf Play” is and is not what he seems. Wolf, who serves as the narrator, is a simple but expressive puppet made of wood, cardboard and papier-mâché in this probing and playful exploration of family by Hansol Jung.Loose-limbed and rising just a few feet off the floor of the tiny stage at Soho Rep, Wolf represents a 6-year-old boy who undergoes one wrenching separation after another. The American couple who adopt him from South Korea decide they can’t handle him and the demands of their newborn too, so they find another family for the boy by advertising on a Yahoo message board.An abandonment so awful and absurd calls for fierce survival instincts. Perhaps that goes to explain why the boy isn’t a boy at all, but a wolf who longs for a pack, as Mitchell Winter, the adult actor maneuvering the puppet, insists.Wolves get a bad rap, Winter tells the audience, which is seated on either side of the stage. The lone ones may snatch red hoods, but they don’t make mischief for its own sake. It’s a natural response for familial creatures left to fend for themselves, crouched defensively much of the time. “But stories need conflict,” he says, “and, boy, do wolves know how to fight.”“Wolf Play,” which opened on Monday, proposes that “the truth is a wobbly thing.” In Jung’s freely associative landscape, that means allowing a puppet to be a boy, a boy to be a wolf and a wolf to be an actor in a knit cap with pointy ears (costumes are by Enver Chakartash).The play directed by Dustin Wills and presented with Ma-Yi Theatre Company, portrays a traumatic situation, but with an antic disposition and a goofy heart. How would a boy respond to these wounds but with growls, howls and swinging paws? It seems too much for one being to process, yet there’s a lightness here that chases away the shadows.Wolf, a volatile and reactive jumble of joints, is handed off by Peter (Aubie Merrylees), the father who adopted him, to Robin (Nicole Villamil) and her wife, Ash (Esco Jouléy). Robin is eager to become a mother, while Ash is a boxer prepping to go pro and reluctant to take on a distraction like a child. Ryan (Brandon Mendez Homer), who is Robin’s brother and Ash’s coach, seems supportive of the adoption — until Wolf’s position in the pack seems to threaten his own.If the play has a love plot, it’s between Wolf and Ash, a prototypical fighter with a tough exterior and soft center. Ash is nonbinary, and is the first person to whom the boy speaks out loud. “Wolf Play” suggests there’s an animality connecting us that transcends gendered social scripts; kinship and love are wild and don’t play by any rules. Peter, however, objects to the absence of a conventional father in the boy’s new home.Performances from the ensemble are uniformly strong and suited to the production’s intimate scale. Winter’s double feat as an energetic narrator and a sensitive puppeteer is so nimble that the boy often appears to be a separate living thing, endearing one moment, a terror the next (Amanda Villalobos is the puppet designer).But casting a wolf as a protagonist becomes a tricky gesture when expressing inner feelings is limited to encyclopedic facts about the species. (“Wolves are cautious, the masters of survival.” “Wolves suck at being alone.”) Though Jung’s narrator seems to promise access to the story’s emotional core, there is only so much that taxonomy can illuminate.Wills’s production has the exuberant restlessness of a crayon drawing tacked to the fridge, chaotic but underlaid with a careful internal logic. A door on wheels, mismatched chairs and blue balloons (from Wolf’s “welcome home” party) are roving fixtures of You-Shin Chen’s set. Barbara Samuels’s lighting makes prodigious use of tone and darkness, while the sound design by Kate Marvin inspires the grating quality of a child’s crying.If stories need conflicts, as Wolf suggests, the climactic ones here — a bout in the ring, the inevitable custody battle — ultimately feel manufactured and somewhat beside the point. There’s an unruly quality to Jung’s idea of what theater can be, jagged and untethered, coy and dreamlike. It’s thrilling to see that potential unleashed on the vagaries of love, even if it’s not so easily tamed.Wolf PlayThrough March 20 at Soho Rep, Manhattan; sohorep.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More