A Punch in Nottingham

James Graham's new play Punch, which closes this weekend at Manhattan Theatre Club, takes place in the English midland city of Nottingham, and Nottingham itself could almost be a character in the piece.

I visited Nottingham in 2019 when I attended a conference by the British Association for Romantic Studies at the University of Nottingham. The famous Nottingham Castle was closed, but I walked around it, and I attended services at the Victorian Roman Catholic cathedral in the heart of the city.

Nottingham is known as a working-class city, with a long history of rebelliousness, particularly during the Industrial Revolution, when it was helping to remake the world into what we know it today. With the de-industrialization of Britain that occurred after World War II, the progress of the city's working class was stymied, as Graham's play makes clear.

Much of the action takes place in a housing project built in the 1970s that is described as inside out: all the residences face one another with their backs to the street. It was the type of utopian planning that flourished in the '60s and '70s and usually went horribly wrong. In this case, what was meant to be a bastion of community ended up making residents feel cut off from the rest of society.

As crime in the project increased, more and more security cameras were added, but this just led to young people figuring out how to take circuitous paths that avoided all of the cameras. The main character in the play, Jacob (performed by Will Harrison in his Broadway debut), likens taking the dodging path to being in a real-life video game. Everything, in fact, seems like a bit of a game to him, from picking fights at cricket matches to making pocket money by selling drugs.

All of this turns sour when he steps in to help out a friend in an argument with a stranger. He throws one punch--that's it--and the stranger falls back, hits his head, and subsequently dies. That stranger, as always is the case, had his own life. He was a paramedic. He had two loving parents. He had a bright future ahead of him. All of that was brought to an end by a single punch. (Though it didn't help that the doctors at the hospital dismissed him as a drunk and sent him home with a brain hemorrhage rather than giving him immediate care.)

Punch is based on a true story, and comes with all of the conventional tropes one would expect from a "real life" drama. Jacob puts on a tough facade, does a laughably short amount of time in prison after a murder charge is reduced to manslaughter, and then struggles to get his life back after incarceration. He gets a job packing boxes (since logistics has replaced making things in the post-industrial era), goes back to school, and renews a courtship with a young lady named "Clare without an 'i'" (Camila Canó-Flaviá).

More surprisingly, he agrees to meet with the parents of James, the young man he killed. All three of them are looking for answers, and they form an unlikely bond as they attempt to move on from a tragic and unnecessary death. The parents, Joan and David (played by Victoria Clark and Sam Robards), naturally attract our sympathy, but so does Jacob as he struggles to make some sort of atonement for what he's done.

One interesting plot thread involves Raf (played by Cody Kostro), who also bears responsibility for the tragic events but escapes legal if not moral consequences. The entire ensemble is deftly directed by Adam Penford. If you want to see the show, you'll have to catch it soon, though, as its final performance is on Sunday.

Shaw in New York... in Print!

The most recent issue of The Shaw Society's publication The Shavian arrived in the mail yesterday. I was pleased to see them include my article "Bumper Year for Shaw in New York."

I knew I wanted to write something for The Shavian after I saw Bedlam's wonderful production of Pygmalion last spring. Director Eric Tucker did a wonderful job making the century-old play fiercely relevant to contemporary America.

Of course, Bedlam wasn't the only company doing Shaw in New York last year. Saint Joan returned to Broadway in a production by the Manhattan Theatre Club. Being a huge fan of Joan of Arc (and having written my own play about the Maid, Dark Night of the Soul), I knew I would be seeing that as well.

Plus, Gingold Theatrical Group always does a great job with their Project Shaw readings, and I knew they were planning a full-scale production of Heartbreak House. I pitched the idea of an article on all three to The Shavian's editor, Anne Wright. She liked the idea. The only problem was that Heartbreak House wouldn't be opening for several months. Still, she asked me to go ahead an write the article, getting in my copy as quickly as possible after Heartbreak House opened so the whole issue could be laid out, printed, and mailed by the end of the year.

Well, GTG outdid themselves, and I ended up having nothing but good things to say about their production, in spite of not knowing how good it would be when I agreed to review it. Director David Staller reset Heartbreak House as a play-within-a-play happening during the blitz in London, and the concept worked beautifully.

Incidentally, this issue of The Shavian also includes articles by Philippa Parker, Stanley Weintraub, Kenneth McConkey, and others, so I'm in good company!

Saint Joan on Broadway

Last weekend, I saw Condola Rashad as the title role in George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan on Broadway. And yes, this Manhattan Theatre Club production definitely highlights the star power of Rashad, whose face adorns playbills, advertisements, and the theatre's marquee.

That doesn't mean that the supporting cast is anything to sniff at, though. This is one of the best ensemble casts you'll see doing a Shaw play. The show opens with Patrick Page as the irrepressible Robert de Baudricourt. Page is probably best known for his turn as the lord of the dead in the off-Broadway musical Hadestown. It should come as no surprise, then, when he returns in the second act as the chilling Inquisitor and dominates Joan's trial scene.

John Glover similarly dominates the second scene of the play as the Archbishop of Rheims, one of several advisors who bullies about the young Dauphin. Adam Chanler-Berat (the original Peter in Peter and the Starcatcher) plays the Dauphin with a goofy but lovable immaturity. Joan's miraculous picking out of the blood royal in a room full of nobles is hardly miraculous, given how much Chanler-Berat's Dauphin sticks out from the rest of the crowd, but as the Archbishop says, a miracle is simply an event which creates faith.

Daniel Sunjata shines as Dunois in the third scene, when the wind miraculously changes direction after Joan's arrival. The wind effect was achieved with projections across the set, which resembled a set of massive chimes hanging from the fly space of the theatre. Set designer Scott Pask (who also designed the sets for Something Rotten) managed to create an evocative abstract set that still conjured up the feel of the middle ages without looking explicitly medieval. Costume designer Jane Greenwood, on the other hand, strove to create period costumes, which I appreciated, as other productions I've seen of Saint Joan have all been in modern dress.

The fourth scene of the play came right before intermission, which was also the case with the production I saw last summer at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake. Though the scene is essentially just a conversation between the Earl of Warwick (played here by Jack Davenport) and Cauchon (Broadway director Walter Bobbie returning to acting for the role), it can produce fireworks when you have two great performers. That was the case here, where the characters' anachronistic discussion of Protest-ant-ism and Nation-al-ism drew howls of laughter from the audience.

In the scene that follows the Dauphin's coronation as King of France, a bitter pessimism set in, preparing the audience for the most famous scene in the play, Joan's trial. In Dark Night of the Soul, my own treatment of the Joan of Arc story, the trial takes up the entirety of the play, and Shaw understood that this must be the crux of any drama about the Maid. It is here that the actor playing Joan really has a chance to showcase her talent.

And what about Rashad, whose face adorns all of the publicity for the show? She's a rather unconventional Joan. Gone is the young innocence we typically associate with Joan, as Rashad gives us a much more cunning saint. In the first scene, as she fingers a chair in Baudricourt's quarters, we almost think she might be mad, but as Baudricourt's perception of her changes, so does ours. This is a woman who knows what she's doing and has no illusions about the dangers she is facing.

Rashad also isn't afraid to show the weakness of her character. She is battered down by the trial scene, and seems defeated when she declares that "only a fool will walk into a fire." Her freedom is more important to her than her life, though, and her embrace of martyrdom is paradoxically life-affirming in this production.

Director Daniel Sullivan also opts to keep the play's epilogue, which is perhaps the highlight of the show. It's delightful to see all the characters from the play scoot their way into the bedchamber of the sleeping king. When Glover returns, this time as a gentleman from the 1920s, his incongruous clothing makes an excellent contrast with the rest of the cast in their medieval garb, a joke of Shaw's that is lost in modern-dress productions.

Broadway's revival of Saint Joan, aided by Rashad's star power, will help to introduce a lot of playgoers to Shaw who might not generally see his work. Though this version is not as innovative as Bedlam's production of the play a few years ago, it does competently showcase Shaw's writing and will hopefully renew interest in Joan of Arc as we approach the 100th anniversary of her canonization.

The World of Extreme Happiness

Last night I went to see Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig's play The World of Extreme Happiness at Manhattan Theatre Club. I mainly went to see Jo Mei, a tremendous actress who appeared in my own play Foggy Bottom back in 2006. Jo was wonderful, as usual, but I was also impressed by the production as a whole.

When I walked in with my friend Susanna, we took one look at the bleak set designed by Mimi Lien and thought, "They're going to perform on THAT?" Yet the grey concrete walls of the onstage factory open up to reveal colorful visions of possibility, an apt metaphor for a play about the promises and realities of contemporary China.

Cowhig, who was born in the U.S. but was raised partially in Beijing, begins the play with a nightmarish depiction of all of the worst images Westerners have of China, as a baby girl is born and then promptly dropped into a slop bucket to die. Determined to survive, however, the child lives, and travels to the city in search of a new life.

After that opening scene, the play takes a delightfully comic turn. The protagonist, whose name is Sunny (played by Jennifer Lim), argues with her crotchety old boss (Francis Jue), meets a wacky new best friend (Jo Mei), and talks on her cell phone with her father (James Saito) and little brother (Telly Leung), who is obsessed with the story of the Monkey King.

The story of the Monkey King, which comes from the classic Tang Dynasty epic Journey to the West, is one of the most beloved stories in Chinese literature. In this play, however, the Monkey King becomes a metaphor for Chinese political dissidents. Able to transform himself into a succession of new identities in order to escape danger, the Monkey King escapes scrape after scrape, and Sunny, too, through her ability to remake herself into whatever others need her to be, moves ever higher in Chinese society.

As Ibsen's Peer Gynt tells us, however, one can only transform oneself so much. Eventually, we have to question if there is any core at all beneath the layer upon layer of onion skin. Sunny ultimately does take her stand, adding her voice to the chorus of other Chinese dissidents who demand to be heard, and she pays an awful price.

The ending is all the more chilling given how funny the play is. It gives us glimpses into the self-help culture (exemplified by the guru Mr. Destiny) prevalent in China as well as the U.S., and before we can dismiss this as idle dreaming, the play presents us with images of the newly rich Artemis Chang (played by Sue Jin Song) who shows us everything that Sunny could one day become.

But is Chang free? Or is she simply free to make money and buy trinkets, as she contends? The World of Extreme Happiness asks this and other important questions, but best of all it does so in a very entertaining fashion.

The play officially opens this month, so check it out here:

Manhattan Theatre Club