The Jew of Malta

I hadn't planned on seeing Red Bull Theater's reading of The Jew of Malta by Christopher Marlowe, but when my friend Susan told me she had an extra ticket, how could I resist?

Matthew Rauch starred as Barabas, the titular character who might have influenced not just William Shakespeare's Shylock, but also a slew of villains from Aaron the Moor to Richard III to Iago.

Like Shylock, Barabas is a victim of unfair treatment, but his quest for revenge goes outside the bounds of what can be considered reasonable. At the beginning of the play he is stripped of all his possessions by Ferneze, the Governor of Malta. Ferneze was played in the reading by Derek Smith, who gave a memorable performance as Lodovico in Red Bull's previous production of the John Webster tragedy The White Devil.

While Barabas and Ferenze give unflattering depictions of leaders of the Jewish and Christian worlds, the Islamic world is represented by Selim-Calymath, the son of the Ottoman Emperor. While Marlowe doesn't make any of these leaders come off very well, I found Calymath to be the least odious, at least as portrayed by Jason Bowen, who was excellent a couple of years ago in Lynn Nottage's Crumbs from the Table of Joy.

By far, however, the most sympathetic character is Barabas's daughter Abigail, played by Priyanka Kedia. Her father first forces her to become a nun so that she can retrieve a treasure hidden in a convent, then makes her the center of a love triangle that kills two young men, including Ferneze's son Don Lodowick, played by Samuel Adams. Distraught, Abigail converts to Christianity so she can enter a convent for real, earning the scorn of her father.

Barabas's partner in crime (who later foolishly betrays him) is a slave from Thrace named Ithamore. Steven Boyer, who is perhaps best known for playing an emotionally disturbed teenager with a penchant for puppetry in the Robert Askins play Hand to God, was delightfully evil in the reading as Ithamore.

The play, which had its first recorded performance in 1592, is famous for its use of a cauldron in which the protagonist is boiled alive. Philip Henslowe's prop list for the Lord Admiral's Men listed a cauldron that was likely used in the play's premiere and subsequent revivals.

Red Bull is not slated to revive the play in a full production anytime soon, but they will be presenting a new adaptation of Molière's The Imaginary Invalid beginning this May. It's on my list of things to see!

Top Plays of 2023

Once again, I'm compiling a list of the top ten plays I saw in New York City that opened in 2023.

Last year, the musical Paradise Square topped my list, though critics were mixed in their reviews of the show, and it ended up closing at a financial loss.

Alas, I can't claim that this is the year theatre came back in New York, but a number of good shows did open in 2023, a couple of which are still running, so see them while you can!

10. The Smuggler - Irish Rep had an ambitious season this year, but the best thing I saw there was a very small show, Ronán Noone's one-man verse drama about a Massachusetts bar tender who ends up getting involved in human trafficking.

9. The School for Scandal - Hudson Classical Theatre Company continued its tradition this year of bringing solid productions of classical plays to the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument in Riverside Park. This year's staging of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The School for Scandal brought together delightful acting with a creative costume design.

8. The Mind Mangler - This year the team that brought us The Play That Goes Wrong opened a new show in their franchise featuring Henry Lewis as an inept mentalist. The show is funny, which I expected, but also successfully pulls off a couple of brilliant magic tricks, which I wasn't expecting. Best of all, though, it has a tremendous heart that is no illusion at all. (Still playing!)

7. Crumbs from the Table of Joy - Keen Company's revival of Lynn Nottage's break-out play from 1995 was another unexpected delight, in part due to the performance of Shanel Bailey as Ernestine, a young woman in 1950s New York struggling to deal with changes both in the world and in her own family. Bailey definitely had a good year in 2023, as she appeared in another great revival on my list as well.

6. The Knight of the Burning Pestle - I directed this Jacobean classic when I was in college, so I knew I'd have to see a co-production by Red Bull and Fiasco Theater. Paco Tolson led the cast as a grocer's apprentice who becomes the titular Knight of the Burning Pestle. What made the piece a sheer joy, however, was the interaction of the ensemble, including Ben Steinfeld, Royer Bokus, and Teresa Avia Lim.

5. Here We Are - Stephen Sondheim's collaboration with David Ives finally made it to the stage this year. Even with flawed direction, the piece soars with a cast that includes Jeremy Shamos, Amber Gray, Bobby Cannavale, Rachel Bay Jones, Steven Pasquale, Micaela Diamond, and David Hyde Pierce. Whether or not you've seen any of the surrealist films of Luis Buñuel that inspired the piece, you should be able to appreciate the play's existential musings on modern life. Hurry to see the show before it closes on January 21st.

4. Arms and the Man - Shanel Bailey came back to Theatre Row this fall to appear as Raina in Gingold Theatrical Group's magnificent production of Shaw's anti-war classic Arms and the Man. Director David Staller brought together a wonderful cast that also included Keshav Moodliar, Ben Davis, Delphi Borich, Thomas Jay Ryan, Evan Zes, and Karen Ziemba. As someone who is a fan of toy theatres, I also loved the set designed by Lindsay G. Fuori to resemble a paper stage from the Victorian era. I'm looking forward to seeing what GTG does next in 2024!

3. Hamlet - The Public Theater chose Kenny Leon to direct the last production of Shakespeare in the Park before the Delacorte Theatre is shut down for renovations. Beowulf Boritt's set playfully echoed the one he previously designed for Leon's Much Ado About Nothing. The biggest joy, though, was seeing famed Shakespearean actor John Douglas Thompson play the most engrossing Claudius I've ever seen. Ato Blankson-Wood was able to hold his own as young Prince Hamlet, and the cast also included Lorraine Toussaint as Gertrude, Daniel Pearce as Polonius, and Solea Pfeiffer as Ophelia.

2. The Great Gatsby - The immersive production of The Great Gatsby was criminally underrated. The piece contained a couple of more traditional scenes, such as the tea Jay Gatsby prepared for Daisy, where the entire audience was assembled in one place. What was most interesting, though, was the way we were all divided into small groups to wander through side scenes, having interactions with various characters, sometimes with other audience members, and sometimes one-on-one. The live music was an added bonus. Sadly, the show closed in New York, but there's a chance it might come back, if not here, in another city.

1. Becomes a Woman - My top choice this year is likely to surprise a lot of people, but the Mint Theater Company performed an immense service in bringing Betty Smith's long forgotten play to the stage at last. Before Smith penned her 1943 novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, she wrote Becomes a Woman, but this was 1931, and no theatre wanted to touch a play with a feminist bent so far ahead of its time. In the Mint's long overdue production, Emma Pfitzer Price starred as Francie Nolan, a character whose name Smith later used as the heroine of her classic novel. Other strong performances were delivered by Jeb Brown, Peterson Townsend, Gina Daniels, Jason O'Connell, and Duane Boutté.

So that's my list! I'm looking forward to more great theatre in 2024.

Arms and the Man

I just got back from seeing Gingold Theatrical Group's magnificently fun production of Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man on Theatre Row.

The set, splendidly designed by Lindsay G. Fuori, is meant to resemble a Victorian toy theatre, something I've written about on this blog in the past. When Shaw later wrote a screenplay based on his play, he imagined a filmed version that looked like it was taking place on a toy stage, and that is what you'll see in the present production.

Shanel Bailey, who was wonderful earlier this year in the revival of Lynn Nottage's Crumbs from the Table of Joy, plays Raina, the romantic young woman who hides a soldier in her bedroom in the aftermath of a battle. Keshav Moodliar plays the soldier, who drives much of the action of the play, and gains the affections of Raina in spite of her engagement to a dashing but dim Major Sergius Saranoff, played by Ben Davis.

Other strong performances are delivered by Delphi Borich, Thomas Jay Ryan, Evan Zes, and Karen Ziemba, the last of whom previously played the title role in GTG's Mrs. Warren's Profession in 2021. Director David Staller brings the whole thing together with style and grace.

The production closes on Saturday, so see it while you can!

Crumbs from Pensacola

Tonight I saw the first preview performance of Crumbs from the Table of Joy, a revival of an early Lynn Nottage play by the Keen Company.

The play takes place in the 1950s and follows a family that relocates from a small town in the South to Brooklyn to begin a new life. While I knew that in advance, I did not know that the town they left behind was Pensacola, Florida, where I spent much of my childhood.

I don't know that Nottage has any connections to Pensacola, or has even visited, but that didn't seem to matter, since the play contains few details about the place the family left, and it could very well have been from any number of Southern towns. The impetus for the move in the play was the father's conversion by a dodgy preacher, which certainly rings true for Pensacolans....

Jason Bowen plays the father, Godfrey Crump. (There's a Bowen family with deep roots in Pensacola, whose papers I studied while interning in the archives at the University of West Florida, but that's another story.) Bowen does an excellent job, particularly when sharing the stage with Sharina Martin, who plays his sister-in-law Lily. I anticipated sparks between those two characters, but I was not prepared for what would happen after Godfrey shares a memorable subway ride with a German woman named Gerte, played by Natalia Payne. This takes the play in a whole new direction in the second act.

The real focus of the story, though, is Godfrey's two girls, who after losing their mother and moving north to New York City struggle to find themselves, all while coming of age in post-war America. The point-of-view character is Ernestine, played admirably by Shanel Bailey. Ernestine narrates the story, occasionally breaking from reality to show the audience how she wished certain moments would have gone. Her younger sister Ermina is played by Malika Samuel, who adds a youthful vigor to the stage.

If you'd like to see the show yourself, you can use the code TRKWOM to get $40 tickets. (Don't worry--I'm sharing that with the permission of the producers, who included it in a program insert.) The show's playing on Theatre Row and deserves to be seen by more people.

Lynn Nottage

Today the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage came to City College where I teach. She was being honored at the Langston Hughes Festival, but she also took time to speak with students in the theatre department.

Nottage is known for a number of plays she's written, including Fabulation, Ruined, By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, and Sweat. However, she is also an activist and formerly worked for Amnesty International. While she views her art as activism as well, it tends to be more subtle in how it calls for social change.

For instance, when Nottage wrote Intimate Apparel at the beginning of this century, most political plays were filled with fiery anger. (It was during the administration of George W. Bush, after all.) However, Nottage chose to instead write a simple, quiet play about a seamstress at the beginning of the 20th century with few opportunities to pursue her dreams.

Being subtle doesn't mean having to give up ambitions, though, and there is a form of protest in the play's depiction of its central character. Sometimes, simply providing representation on the stage can be a potent political act, as is the case with an intimate portrayal of a disempowered character.

Speaking to the students today, Nottage gave an example of the power or representation. Recently, she said, she noticed she was getting numerous friend requests over Facebook from people in Iran. She had no idea why, as she had never even been to the country.

It turns out that her short play Poof! which premiered originally in 1993 had recently been performed by a famous Iranian actress who appeared in the play without a hijab. That was enough to win her fans half way around the world!

Thank you, Lynn Nottage, for coming to City College and for speaking with our students. It was a day to remember!

Fabulation

Last night, I saw Lynn Nottage's play Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine at the Signature Theatre. This exciting production keeps the audience guessing throughout the first act, and finds emotional resonance in the second. You'll want to see it.

Fabulation originally premiered at Playwrights Horizons in 2004. Since then, Nottage has become known for extremely heavy dramas like Ruined and Sweat. This revival at the Signature reminds audiences that it was Nottage's flair for comedy that originally attracted the theatre world's attention.

And that comedy can be wild. In Fabulation, we see a ridiculously successful publicity maven named Undine (played by Cherise Boothe) treat other people abominably, though she is rewarded for it with money, fame, and power. We also learn that Undine is not her real name, but an identity she assumed later in life, even telling people her family had died in a fire so she could break all ties to the past. The name is fitting, since in mythology an undine is a soul-less water spirit that like water is capable of infinite change.

Undine does not get the change she bargained for, though. In the opening scene she finds out that her husband left her and absconded with everything she owned. A visit to the hospital reveals more unpleasant surprises, and soon Undine finds herself living back with the family that supposedly perished in a fire. Her brother's a frustrated poet, her grandmother's a smack addict, but worst of all her parents are so aggressively normal that she doesn't know what to do. An unfortunate encounter with the police then turns her from the apex of success to just another slob trying to navigate the Kafka-esque inanity of "the system."

Boothe does a wonderful job as Undine, but the success of the piece is largely reliant on the strength of the supporting cast. While they are all excellent, I have to single out Mayaa Boateng, who among other roles plays Undine's wacky assistant Stephie, and Dashiell Eaves, who we meet as Undine's accountant, but shines brightest as a drug-addled professor in the second act.

Fabulation has been extended through January 6th, but it's selling out fast, so get your tickets now.