Cymbeline, By Jove

Last night I saw New York Classical Theatre perform Cymbeline in Central Park. Last summer, the company performed Nahum Tate's adaptation of King Lear, but now they are back to sticking (more or less) to Shakespeare's original text.

The plot of Cymbeline is intentionally complicated, blending together legendary history with one of the folk tales that appears in The Decameron. This production has the potential to add to the confusion by having a small cast double in multiple roles.

Fortunately, the doubling adds to the production rather than taking away from it. In some productions, the actor who plays Posthumous doubles as the villain Cloten. That was how the Public Theater did it in 2015 when Hamish Linklater played both roles. In this case, however, Brandon Burk plays both Posthumous, Imogine's husband, and Guiderius, her long-lost brother. The delightfully comic Evan Moore-Coll instead plays Cloten, as well as assorted other roles.

One of the highlights of the show is when Aziza Gharib, who plays Imogine, appears in Posthumous's dream as (according to the stage directions) "Jupiter descends in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle." Unlike the Jacobean stage, Central Park is not equipped with machinery to lower giant eagles from the Heavens. Instead, Gharib appears with huge wind-swept pieces of fabric, while two other cast members hold them out and provide other-worldly sound effects.

The supporting cast is in fact quite good. Jenny Strassburg plays the evil queen, a delicious role, though the character disappears toward the end of the play. Perhaps to compensate for that, she also plays Belarius, who fosters the king's lost sons. (The second son is played by Christian Ryan, who doubles as the deceitful Iachimo.) Terrell Wheeler (who also appeared in The Assembly's wonderful production of That Poor Dream) plays the important supporting roles of Pisanio and Caius, while the king himself is played by Nick Salamone.

If you want to see the production, it will be in Central Park until June 26th, after which it will move to Carl Schurz Park, and then Brooklyn Commons Park at MetroTech.

Seagullmachine

Last night, I went to the first preview of The Assembly's new piece, SEAGULLMACHINE, at La MaMa. According to the company's website:

The Assembly’s newest performance smashes together two iconic riffs on the Hamlet story – Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull and Heiner Muller’s Hamletmachine – combining theatrical realism, immersive staging, live video, poetry, comedy and tragedy to excavate the legacy of 20th-century drama in the light of the present-day, and ask: What’s the good of making theater anyway?

If you're expecting a full-on mash-up of The Seagull and Hamletmachine, however, that's not what this is. The audience is led into the Ellen Stewart Theatre at La MaMa, past the risers where they would usually sit, into a specially built mini-theater, with a three-quarters-round seating area at the back of the regular stage.

Sitting here for the first half of the show, they watch what is a pretty traditional production of the first three acts of The Seagull. There are a few avant-garde touches, such as a chrome-looking sculpture being used for the seagull that Konstantin shoots, and some video monitors showing the area behind the stage, but for the most part, it's not too different from any production of The Seagull you would expect to see in the Village these days.

After the intermission break, the audience returns to their seats for the final act of The Seagull, which is performed in roughly the same style, until we get to the last line, and the performance transforms into Muller's Hamletmachine. The two plays might seem to be an odd pairing, but the pieces are both variations on Hamlet. As a program note for the performance argues:

Both plays are, of course, haunted by Shakespeare's Hamlet. In The Seagull, a young artist-intellectual unsettled by his mother's new partner and his own troubled relationship, utilizes a boldly experimental play-within-a-play as a weapon against the mores of his parents' generation. In Hamletmachine, the figure of Hamlet reckons with the failures of his art and idealism to transform the world, and endeavors to destroy the theater once and for all.

Muller's Hamletmachine is notoriously open to interpretation in terms of how it should be performed, but The Assembly uses this to their advantage, having Konstantin (Jax Jackson) double as the Hamlet figure, Nina (Layla Khosh) as Ophelia, Trigorin (Ben Beckley) as Claudius, and Arkadina (Nehassaiu deGannes) as Gertrude.

For the end of the show, the audience is also led out of the mini-theater where they had been sitting into a space where the performance can truly become immersive. Wear comfortable shoes, and don't be afraid to leave your bags and coats at your seat. (They'll let you get back to them. I promise!)

SEAGULLMACHINE is running until May 5th. If you're interested in going, check out The Assembly's website here:

The Assembly

Best Plays of 2017

It's that time again when I look back on the best new productions that opened in New York City over the past year.

This list is only for plays in the five boroughs, so great productions farther afield like The Secret Theatre and Romeo and Juliet as well as the productions at the Shaw Festival are ineligible. My own play Capital which opened in Detroit this year doesn't qualify either, even though it was named one of the Best of the Season for southeastern Michigan.

Also not included are shows that opened in 2016 but that I didn't get to see until this year, like Dear Evan Hansen and the Broadway production of Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812. Last year, A Doll's House, Butler, and Hadestown topped the list. But what were the best productions of 2017? Read on to find out!

10. The Liar - Truth is, this adaptation by David Ives of the classic comedy by Pierre Corneille was one of the best (and first) plays I saw in 2017.

9. Fucking A - Of the three Suzan-Lori Parks plays the Signature Theatre Company produced this year, this was by far the best. A riff off of The Scarlet Letter, the play had its first off-broadway run back in 2003, but its dystopian view of a society where abortion is legal but practitioners are literally branded seems all-too prescient.

8. Once on This Island - This beloved Ahrens-Flaherty musical is currently getting an amazing production, so get your tickets now. Lea Salonga is excellent as Erzulie, the goddess of love and beauty, but the rest of the cast is strong as well, and Dane Laffrey's set makes the most of Circle in the Square's intimate space. If you're concerned about seeing a play in the round, don't worry. Director Michael Arden makes sure there isn't a bad seat in the house.

7. The Government Inspector - The Red Bull Theater Company is dedicated to the aesthetic of Jacobean drama, but this year they put on Nikolai Gogol's nineteenth-century farce about a minor bureaucrat mistaken for the Inspector General from the capital. The split-level set was best viewed from further back in the audience, but even if you sat up front like I did, you got to see some amazing performances from the likes of Michael Urie, Mary Testa, Michael McGrath, and Talene Monahon.

6. A Midsummer Night's Dream - It wasn't too long ago (ten years) that The Public Theater previously did Shakespeare's supernatural romantic comedy in Central Park, but the 2017 production was indeed a dream. Annaleigh Ashford gave a stand-out performance as Helena, which is saying a lot, considering that the show's headliner was Phylicia Rashad as a queenly Titania. The most memorable aspect of this production was having the attendant fairies played by older actors wandering around the forest in what looked like their pajamas. It was creepy in all the right ways.

5. Ernest Shackleton Loves Me - Two-person musicals are hard to pull off, and it's difficult to imagine this one with anyone else in the lead but Val Vigoda, the show's lyricist who also acts, sings, and plays the drums, keyboard, banjo, and electric violin! The book by Joe DiPietro tells the story of a sleep-deprived single mom composing music for video games who tries Internet dating and ends up being matched with the early-twentieth-century explorer Ernest Shackleton. Who cares that they're 100 years apart and he's currently in Antarctica? This witty and wonderful piece was a ray of sunshine in a dark year.

4. Desperate Measures - Speaking of witty and wonderful new musicals, the surprise hit of 2017 was Peter Kellogg and David Friedman's Desperate Measures, which sadly closes today at the the York Theatre Company. Based very loosely on Shakespeare's problem comedy Measure for Measure, the play is reset in the Old American West, where an un-elected governor is able to abuse his power and try to force a virtuous young woman about to enter a convent to sleep with him. If she refuses, her brother will hang. That might not seem like the stuff of musical comedy, but joyous music and dialogue in perfect rhyming couplets keep the laughs coming even through bleak material.

3. Julius Caesar - No doubt the most controversial production in New York this year was also one of the best. Conservative snowflakes cried foul over a play showing a Trump-like figure being assassinated. (Never mind the numerous past productions of Julius Caesar with Clinton and Obama stand-ins as Caesar.) Few--if any of them--actually saw the production. Had they gotten off of their hypocritical high horses long enough to actually see the show, they would have witnessed a biting critique of the left, and a warning that political violence, as tempting as it may seem, only leads to more violence, and ultimately despotism. The brutal assassination scene left some audience members physically sick to their stomachs. Julius Caesar was truly visceral theatre.

2. HOME/SICK - This collaborative project by The Assembly has been around for a while. (The group first workshopped it in 2010.) However, the production that opened this year at JACK in Brooklyn benefited from a long incubation process and past exploratory runs across the country. The story it tells of the Weather Underground in no way romanticizes the movement. Instead, much like the Public's Julius Caesar, HOME/SICK presents a cautionary tale of what happens when well meaning people turn to violence. During intermission, the audience watched a recreation of an event members of the Weather Underground had planned to bomb. It was chilling. Director Jess Chayes deftly led her cast to explore the complexities of taking on the injustices of the world when you yourself might through your own strident militancy become part of the problem.

1. Sweeney Todd - While Ernest Shackleton Loves Me and Desperate Measures were massively entertaining, and Julius Caesar and HOME/SICK were deeply disturbing, the Tooting Arts Club production of Sweeney Todd at the Barrow Street Theatre managed to be both. The show is still playing through the end of May, though sadly not with Norm Lewis, who opened this New York production as Sweeney. Fortunately, you can still catch Carolee Carmello as a hilarious and horrifying Mrs. Lovett. The Stephen Sondheim musical has a brilliant score, and you might think a stripped-down version in a reproduction of an actual London pie shop would lose something. Instead, this intimate production allows you to appreciate the music in a deeply personal way. Having the actors literally leap up onto tables right in front of you is shocking, but no more so than some of the acting choices, which remind you of the true trauma some of the characters suffer in this story.

So those are my picks for this year. Honorable mentions go to The Tempest at St. Ann's Warehouse, Everybody at the Signature, and the Metropolitan Opera's production of Fidelio. Hopefully 2018 will be an even better year for theatre in New York City!

HOME/SICK

Last night I saw The Assembly's play HOME/SICK about the Weather Underground. If you haven't seen it yet, go now, as it's only running until March 25th.

I'm a big fan of The Assembly. That Poor Dream, their modernized adaptation of Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, was one of the best plays I saw in 2014.

HOME/SICK, which was devised by the actors under the direction of Jess Chayes, tells the story of how the Weather Underground faction first split apart the anti-Vietnam War movement, then turned deadly with a series of bombings and robberies, and eventually fell apart in chaos.

In a talkback last night, Mark Rudd, a former member of the Weather Underground, spoke with the actors about what they, and we as a society, have learned from the group's failure. Far from romanticizing the Weathermen, HOME/SICK deals directly with the problems of using violence to counter violence, an issue Rudd has taken up later in life.

The actors include Edward Bauer (who played Pip in That Poor Dream) as one of the few Weathermen who actually knew how to get things done. Ben Beckley (who gave a magnificent performance in The Assembly's I Will Look Forward To This Later) plays a charismatic radical who later alienates those who once most admired him. Kate Benson, who bears a certain resemblance to former Weatherman Bernardine Dohrn, plays the clear leader in this collective that supposedly renounces leadership.

Though I'm familiar with a number of The Assembly's regulars, this was my first time seeing Anna Abhau Elliot and Luke Harlan, but they both gave complex and moving performances as idealistic but misguided young people who eventually had to face questions about whether their actions had ever done any good.

Perhaps the most growth came in the character played by Emily Louise Perkins (Jaggers from That Poor Dream) who transformed herself over the course of the play from a naive, girlish college student into a hardened realist doing whatever she has to in order to get by in the world.

HOME/SICK is currently playing at JACK in Brooklyn. For tickets, go here.

I Will Look Forward To This Later

One of the best plays I saw last year was That Poor Dream, a modern take of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations by The Assembly, one of the best young artist collectives in New York. Well, that company has struck again, and their new production, I Will Look Forward To This Later, is theatrical magic.

Currently playing as part of the New Ohio Theatre's Ice Factory Festival, I WIll Look Forward To This Later was commissioned as a part of an archive residency. Those roots show in audio clips played between scenes, in which the audience hears interviews with some great theater artists, including Andre De Shields and Judith Malina.

Like with That Poor Dream, however, the play's meditations nicely coalesce together around a compelling plot, in this case the story of a recently departed author and the friends and family he has left behind him. A coffin is the centerpiece of Nick Benacerraf's wildly imaginative set, at first setting an ominous mood, but then transforming comically into... well, you'll just have to see it!

An inter-generational cast performs the play, which explores issues of mentorship, be it nurturing, exploitive, or a bit of both. Edward Bauer and Ben Beckley portray two very different sons of the same man, reacting to their father's fame and talent in opposite ways. Emily Louise Perkins plays the great man's mistress, but if we think we know what was going on with their May-December romance, the play has a few surprises for us.

Joining these three regular company members of The Assembly are Linda Marie Larson as the both sinned-against and sinning widow of the novelist, Vinie Burrows as a sculptor who molds more than just clay, and James Himelsback, who is billed as "The Man in the Overcoat" but is quickly identifiable as a visitor from the Great Beyond.

The website for the Ice Factory describes the play as "Kabuki-inspired" but other than an Asian influenced set, there is little that ties the play directly to non-Western theater. One possible exception is the appearance of remembered characters in a robe that has an air of sacred vestments about it.

I Will Look Forward To This Later is playing Friday and Saturday at 7:00 at the New Ohio Theatre, 154 Christopher Street. Try to make it, but if you miss this production, it will hopefully be back in the spring!

That Poor Dream

Tonight, everyone should be heading out to the Treehouse Theater to see my short play THE STATE OF COLORADO v. TENNESSEE WILLIAMS as part of the Bad Theater Fest. However, tomorrow, if you haven't seen it yet, you need to check out The Assembly's production of That Poor Dream, a brilliant new modern adaptation of Great Expectations.

I saw That Poor Dream last night, and I must say, it's one of the best pieces of theater I've seen all year, and it's also one of the most memorable adaptations of a Dickens novel you'll find. It uses much of the original dialogue from Great Expectations, but also tweaks certain details to update the story for the 21st century. Magwitch's sheep herding becomes metaphorical rather than literal, for instance, and the forge becomes Joe Gargery's "Tech Forge" computer shop.

The play takes place on a train on its way from Grand Central to Connecticut. Pip, on a cell phone, explains that his name is Pirrip. "P-I-R-R-, oh, just call me Pip!" The playful opening quickly turns darker, as he is confronted by a stranger, soon revealed to be Magwitch. The rest of the play occurs largely in flashback as Pip explains his tale to this mysterious figure from his past.

Nick Benacerraf designed the magnificent set, which consists of a realistic-looking train car with three windows. Those windows become the home of some spectacular video projections designed by Ray Sun. At times, we see the passing scenery outside the car, at others, close-ups of the actors, at others, background scenery for the flashback scenes. At key moments, the walls of the train car melt away, and we see images of club dancers, wedding guests, or sometimes homeless beggars.

That Poor Dream was developed in part at the New Ohio Theatre's 2013 Ice Factory festival, and it has returned to the New Ohio for this brief run. You can find out more about the production here:

That Poor Dream
http://assemblytheater.org/

I regret that I didn't get to see this earlier in the run so I could tell everyone to go and see it. But I'm telling you now: GO! Unlike Pip, you won't regret it.