Small Mouth Sounds

Small Mouth Sounds is an apt title for Bess Wohl’s new play, since the work explores a spiritual retreat where silence is the rule. The six characters on the retreat use mostly facial expressions and gestures to make themselves understood, and director Rachel Chavkin has cast the production at Ars Nova with wonderful faces, worthy of a silent film. They communicate much without words.

There’s Marcia Debonis as Joan, a middle-aged lesbian with an insistently worried look. Her partner, Judy (Sakina Jaffrey), slighter and dark-haired, appears more composed but also troubled. Babak Tafti is a conventionally handsome attendee whom Joan recognizes as a renowned yoga teacher named Rodney, a star of his own videos. Tall, bearded Erik Lochtefeld as Jan is annoyed by the bugs, especially mosquitoes, while Brad Heberlee’s pale Ned wears a kufi cap and is exasperated by rule-breakers, particularly the self-important Rodney. Lastly there is Jessica Almasy as the scattered Alicia, a young woman who arrives late, eats snacks, and uses her cellphone at will, ignoring the rules established by the Teacher, a disembodied voice (Jojo Gonzalez).

In Chavkin's unusual traverse staging, the action takes place between two banks of seats where the audience sits; in addition, there is a dais with chairs at one end where the six participants occasionally gather to listen to the Teacher. The effect is to bring us close to the actors, and though one side of the audience may briefly not see an actor’s face, Chavkin has used the space and the actors skillfully; one never feels that anything crucial has been missed.

Only Heberlee as Ned gets a long monologue. The rest of the communication is in fits and snatches, and occasional whispers, except for the Teacher, who begins the week with a parable about a well frog and a traveling frog; the latter takes the well frog out of his well and shows him the ocean, with disastrous results. Even with minimal dialogue, however, one can deduce a great deal. Alicia is clearly emotionally vulnerable after a disastrous relationship; her whispered cell calls to someone named Ben, who never picks up, affirm it. Joan becomes upset at the mention of cancer and weeps, and she flees the room when the Teacher says, “If you want to avoid pain, it is impossible.” But Wohl nicely upsets one’s expectations of why.

There are rituals involved. The group sleeps together, carrying lanterns, tatami mats and thin blankets to the sleeping area and awkwardly sorts out who sleeps next to whom. Wohl pokes gentle fun at them, but she’s never brutally satiric; one cares about the characters, in spite of whatever burdens have brought them to this pass and their inability to articulate at will. In addition to the parable, the Teacher asks the participants to follow the Asian practice of putting something on paper—in this case, the intention for the weekend; at the end, he instructs them to set it afire.

During the retreat we observe Judy and Joan at loggerheads, and Joan cries in the night. Judy, who is more composed, seems to click with Jan, possibly even romantically, as they “talk” about the bugs and he shows her a picture of his dead son. Rodney makes a play for Alicia, and Ned fumes jealously because he also is attracted to her.

Ned’s monologue is a nice payoff to the Teacher’s initial warning that he would answer questions but he didn’t want to hear their whole life stories. Heberlee negotiates the long litany of his woes with subtlety—he never pushes for the laugh that’s ready to break out in the only extended speech among the group. His kufi cap hides scars from a terrible fall, but he has emotional scars as well. And he’s worried about the fate of the planet—easy enough to satirize, but it grows organically from his experiences.

 

Effective projections by Andrew Schneider—panels of rain falling on leaves, or dawn rising over a lake—give one a sense of place. Wohl’s point is that sincere human connection is the real solution to dealing with life’s tribulations. Only the poignant ending, although emotionally satisfactory, doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. Left alone on stage, Jan echoes a moment from an early part of the play. It’s meant to tie up a loose thread, but it’s one he cannot possibly have understood, given what Wohl reveals about him. Still, Small Mouth Sounds—a nifty title for a play with so little talk—is a fine new work by a writer with a lot of talent.

Ars Nova presents Small Mouth Sounds through April 25 at 511 West 54th St. Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Monday through Wednesday and 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday. Matinees are at 2 p.m. on Saturday. Tickets are $35 and may be purchased by visiting www.arsnova.com or calling OvationTix at (866) 811-4111.

 

 

 

Artists on Trial

The lives of great playwrights have proved fodder for dramatists before Doug Wright. Edward Bond put Shakespeare on stage in Bingo (1973), and Christopher Marlowe was the main event in Peter Whelan’s The School of Night (1992) and David Grimm’s Kit Marlowe (2000). David Hare wrote about Oscar Wilde in The Judas Kiss (1998). 

But  Posterity, Wright’s thoughtful, rich meditation on fame and immortality, art and criticism, may be the first to make hay of Henrik Ibsen. Wright, who has also directed the Atlantic Theater production, has been inspired by a report of the dramatist’s annoyance at sitting for a bust by Norway’s greatest sculptor, Gustav Vigeland, in 1901, shortly before a series of strokes ended Ibsen’s writing career: he died in 1906.

Vigeland’s fame was ahead of him, however—he had conceived of but not found the patrons or funds to build an immense fountain in Kristiania, now Oslo. The conceit of the play is that the contrarian Ibsen, who lived in exile from 1868 to 1891, has been persuaded by the Cultural Ministry to sit for a sculptor. Ibsen has chosen Vigeland, whose work he admires. Vigeland doesn’t want to do it, but the hefty commission and the fame resulting from the sitting will spur donors to the fountain. For his part, Ibsen is disgusted: “It’s an insult,” he says. “Two dozen plays! Apparently that’s insufficient to guarantee me a place in the public’s memory.”

Vigeland (Hamish Linklater, by turns fiery, apologetic and proud) knows his worth, but so does the stern, prickly Ibsen (a booming-voiced John Noble), and the clash of the men provides the real drama, with subsidiary interest from three others. One is Henry Stram’s Sophus Larpent, a dapper agent for Vigeland—and a person who actually lived. The other two are invented by Wright: Dale Soules is Mrs. Bergstrom, a housekeeper to Larpent who loses her job when, in the first scene, Larpent discovers her naked in Vigeland’s studio, posing with Vigeland’s equally unclad assistant, the strapping young Mickey Theis as Anfinn Beck.

The priggish Larpent discharges Mrs. Bergstrom, whom Vigeland then hires. But this is just a prelude to the arrival of Ibsen, costumed beautifully by Susan Hilferty in a black vicuña frock coat and silver-topped walking stick—a notable contrast to the old coat and plain walking sticks the icon needs in the second half. Noble’s Ibsen is vain—and not only about his legacy. When Vigeland mentions the gaggle of young groupies that follow Ibsen, a rare smile creeps across the old sourpuss’s face.

It’s inevitable that the two strong-willed artists clash. They debate art and criticism, propriety and business, with a good deal of name-dropping: Donatello, Phidias, Henry James, Galileo, Shaw. To Wright’s credit, he expects literacy from his audience. When Larpent tries to ingratiate himself with the great man, he says, “I was there on that fateful night at the Kristiania Theater some twenty years ago when your leading lady slammed that fateful door” without naming either Nora or A Doll’s House. “Hundreds of people have made that claim,” Ibsen sniffs. Ibsen’s casual reference to a play he has written about a sculptor who dies in an avalanche is not specified, but it’s John Gabriel Borkman. (In one jarring lapse, though, Wright has Ibsen speak of “brinksmanship,” a Cold War term coined in the 1950s.) Even though there’s scant action, the ideas provide a satisfying meal.

“I’ll represent you as you are,” vows Vigeland.
“That’s a specious promise,” Ibsen responds.
“Why?” asks Vigeland.
“I’ve drawn characters from life,” says Ibsen. “I know what pinching and prodding—what ghastly surgeries—it takes to wedge human beings into the confines of art…. Don’t flatter yourself objective. The eye is selective in what it sees, and tainted by bias.”

The presence of Mrs. Bergstrom, who knows nothing about art but only about survival, and Anfinn, who hopes to make his mark by unseating his teacher, provide nice counterpoint to the high-mindedness. Both Linklater and Noble bring passion to their positions, with only an occasional dry patch. In the second act Ibsen suffers a reversal, and agonizes about some disgraceful behavior in his past. He asks Vigeland to make his bust something “kinder than he was in life.” Both men come across as vividly flawed humans in Wright’s meaty theatrical imagining.

Evening performances of Posterity, which runs through April 5, are at 7 p.m. Tuesday and Sunday and at 8 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday. Matinees are at 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. There will be additional 2 p.m. performances on March 25 and April 1, but no 7 p.m. performances on March 29 and April 5. Tickets may be ordered online at Atlantictheater.org, by calling OvationTix at 866-811-4111, or in person at the Linda Gross Theater box office, 336 West 20th St., between Eighth and Ninth Avenues.

Delusions Unto Death

After seeing the Goodman Theatre revival of The Iceman Cometh in Brooklyn, it’s tempting to wonder what Eugene O’Neill would have thought of purveyors of the modern 90-minute intermissionless play. Sloth-ridden pikers, perhaps? O’Neill’s late masterpiece runs four hours and 45 minutes at BAM, and it is surely one of the bleakest plays ever written. Don’t let that put you off, however. Robert Falls’s magnificent production may require a marathon sitting, but it’s worth it. 

The setting is 1912, in a combination saloon and rooming house filled with those who have hit rock bottom. The proprietor is Stephen Ouimette’s cantankerous Harry Hope (O’Neill’s sense of irony is not subtle), and the denizens are a collection of drunks, waking up gradually in the gloom. At first Natasha Katz’s remarkable lighting barely registers; then it slowly reveals the tables of inebriates. 

The group is awaiting Theodore “Hickey” Hickman (Nathan Lane), whose annual arrival for Harry’s birthday party is imminent. Among those on hand are ex-anarchist Larry Slade (Brian Dennehy); Hugo, a Russian-accented anarchist (Lee Wilkof); Ed Mosher (Larry Heumann Jr.), who is Harry’s brother-in-law and worked for the circus; and Joe Mott (John Douglas Thompson), an ex-gambler on the skids who cleans the bar. Other characters include two Boer War veterans from opposing sides and a correspondent in that war; two bartenders; and a trio of self-styled “tarts.”

During the next 48 hours the last vestiges of hope for any of them are stripped away. Before Hickey’s arrival the burnt-out Larry is approached by Don Parritt (Patrick Andrews), a young man whose mother is a firebrand anarchist more devoted to the movement than to him; Don has always looked up to Larry as a father, but now Larry wants Don to take a powder. Someone has sold out the movement, and Don’s mother has been arrested.

When Hickey shows up, he delivers a shock to the group. He’s no longer a drinker. He has faced himself and he has become an evangelist for truth-telling. The Hickey part doesn’t seem tailored to Nathan Lane’s acknowledged comic brilliance, but Lane not only finds comedy where it isn’t apparent, he proves himself a powerful dramatic actor (to be fair, he has done dramatic parts before, but nothing compared to this). The evangelist’s fire and the do-gooder’s brass, the glad-hander’s cheer and optimism—Lane has them all. He jokes around as a salesman must, and yet he also excoriates the others’ “pipe dreams.” You’ll be sick of that phrase by the end of the evening, with “take a hop off the fire escape” a close second—O’Neill overwrites, but he also supplies plenty of humor, and even the repetition, while trying one’s patience, gathers a cumulative, relentless force.

Over the course of the day, Hickey cajoles and browbeats several of the residents to leave the bar and face their demons. “Jimmy Tomorrow” (a fretful, nervous James Cameron), the former Boer correspondent, dresses up in a suit and is forced out to a job interview he has rattled on about. The Boer combatants (John Judd and John Reeger) rival each other to see who will have the gumption to leave and whose courage will falter. Even Harry is propelled onto the street, where he claims a car nearly ran him down. Ouimette, hollow-eyed and haunted, is a portrait of a dead man walking.

 

Brian Dennehy, who also played Hickey for Falls back in 1990, is a formidable presence as Slade, who’s waiting for death. Although the character is meant to be exhausted, Dennehy is occasionally vocally underpowered in conveying that. In fact, the opening scene only jumps into gear when Thompson, whose O’Neill credits include a terrific Emperor Jones, kick-starts the energy. As Mott, the only black man, he dreams of opening “a gambling house for colored men” and exhibits more fiery optimism than some of the others.

 

In the end, however, O’Neill makes clear that the lies these people tell themselves are the only thing keeping them alive. They have only their delusions and alcohol. Even the “tarts” tell themselves they’re not prostitutes (the distinction is lost in the mists of time), but they clearly are.

 

O’Neill’s play is not done often—it has 19 characters, for one thing. But it’s not as daunting as you might expect. If you can get a ticket, summon your stamina and don’t miss it. 

 

BAM presents the Goodman Theatre production of Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh through March 15. Performances are at 7 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and 2 p.m. on Sunday. Tickets may be purchased by calling BAM ticket services at (718) 6436-4100 or visiting BAM.org. The BAM Harvey Theater is at 651 Fulton St. in Brooklyn.

A Chilly Romance

Shakespeare’s late play The Winter’s Tale has always presented directors with difficulties, notably that Leontes, the Sicilian king who dominates the first half, becomes insanely jealous of the friendship of his pregnant queen, Hermione, and his best friend, Polixenes, king of Bohemia, some nine months after Polixenes has arrived for a visit. Indeed, on the eve of Polixenes’ departure, Leontes determines to kill his friend, who escapes. When Hermione delivers, Leontes orders the death of the newborn. He then learns of her innocence just as her death is reported. 

Michael Sexton’s production for the Pearl Theatre Company is stuffed with ideas, to mixed effect. In a first scene whose meta-theatricality is echoed later, the actors saunter on and tacitly acknowledge the audience before getting down to toasts, card tricks, and pouring Scotch. In short order, Peter Francis James’s well-spoken Leontes begins to voice his suspicions of the infidelity of Hermione (Jolly Abraham). James stands stiffly with his hands in his pockets, seemingly tight with emotion. If James cannot quite make Leontes’ jealousy credible, he suggests one of those people who snap suddenly and inexplicably kill their families. He tries to enlist his chief counselor, Camillo (an authoritative Tom Nelis), to poison Polixenes (Bradford Cover), but Camillo warns Polixenes and joins him in his escape.

Sexton has made judicious cuts, and some of his ideas are nifty. How does one approach Shakespeare’s most famous stage direction, Exit, pursued by a bear? It occurs when the courtier Antigonus (Dominic Cuskern) takes Hermione’s infant to the woods to dispose of it. Sexton’s solution is to have a visible attack and a stylish feeding frenzy. As one actor holds up a mounted bear’s head, several other actors, clad in fur coats, move as in a choreographed Noh drama and disembowel Antigonus (red cloths fly into the air).

Still, there's a disconcerting tricksiness to everything. Why does Bradley King (with the director’s blessing, surely) suddenly illuminate the actors as if they were in a 19^th-century melodrama? Or a 1940s film noir? When the Shepherd enters, the lights go up, and his scene starts from the audience for no apparent reason. 

There is also little sense of place. The action begins in a dining room, with formal service and a breakfront displaying dishes on one wall, a poster for a Ballets Russes production on another, and an upright piano against the wall of the inner stage. Designed beautifully by Brett J. Banakis, it nevertheless seems to be a royal hunting lodge rather than a full-time palace. That’s not impossible, but the uncertainty of locale continues throughout. Upended furniture is meant to convey a wilderness where Antigonus leaves the infant and a Shepherd finds her. This requires the Shepherd’s son, called simply Clown (a terrific Adam Green), to enter through the fireplace, which must now assume the role of a hole in the underbrush. The furniture cleared, the scene becomes a more effective grange hall for a potluck in rustic Bohemia. 

But a closet door serves as an antechamber to the court, a prison cell, an actual closet, and later a bizarre exit for the comic rascal Autolycus (Steve Cuiffo). At times one longs for an oral description of the setting akin to those supplied by the mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “In this same interlude it doth befall/That I, one Snout by name, present a wall/And such a wall as I would have you think/That had in it a crannied hole or chink…”

It has often been difficult to spark interest in the wooing of the grown Perdita (Imani Jade Powers) by Polixenes’ son Florizel (James Udom), and the actors here don’t overcome the problem. But Rachel Botchan as Hermione's lady-in-waiting Paulina, who becomes the conscience of the reformed Leontes, is excellent.

The final scene, in which Hermione’s statue comes to life and is reunited with a repentant Leontes, is written to produce sniffles at a minimum. Here, Hermione appears without "statue" makeup, as if she's just a woman standing still. There's no magic, no wonder or warmth, and the scene is played so lethargically, to a lightly plunked guitar, that the climax dwindles away. It’s a shame that a production that often wrestles interestingly with this tragicomedy should end so weakly.

Evening performances of The Winter's Tale are 7 p.m. on Tuesdays and 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday. Matinees are at 2 p.m. Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays through March 15. Tickets may be purchased by visiting pearltheatre.org or calling (212) 563-9261.

The Pain of a Folded Life

Rajiv Joseph is perhaps best-known as the author of Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, which gave the late Robin Williams his only Broadway role. Now an enterprising troupe is staging another Joseph play, Animals Out of Paper, with resources that make the description “shoestring” seem lavish. But the actors, under Merri Milwe’s precise and lovely direction, do justice to a fascinating script. 

The three characters in Joseph’s 2008 drama are all practitioners of origami, the ancient Japanese art of folding paper into objects, mostly animals. The play opens on a reclusive young woman, Ilana (Nairoby Otero), who is an acknowledged American master of the art. As her sudden visitor, Andy (David Beck), reminds her, she has written “the number 2 best-selling origami book in the country,” a collection of essays about folding.

Andy is treasurer of American Origami, a professional society, and his impromptu drop-in is ostensibly to collect dues. Ilana admits him reluctantly, and in spite of her irritation and rudeness, Andy clearly has a liking for Ilana. In fact, he has admired her at a distance at A.O. gatherings, and has even spoken to her, although she doesn’t remember. Andy is also president of a school calculus club where he teaches, and he keeps a list of things to be thankful for in a worn diary. If all that spells “nerd,” it’s true, but Beck manages to combine bashful gaucherie and yearning and self-knowledge without ever seeming weak, effeminate, or just foolish. It’s a beautifully modulated performance.

Beyond his desire to see Ilana, Andy has another motive for his personal call. One of his students, Suresh (Maneesh Sasikumar), is ultra-talented at origami, and Andy wants Ilana to tutor him. She declines because she never teaches. Then he shows her samples of Suresh’s work, and she decides to step outside her comfort zone. Almost immediately she has reason to regret it, because Suresh, who has just turned 18, is arrogant and oblivious to considerate behavior. (If there’s a weakness in the script, it’s that Ilana’s patience in the face of his rudeness strains credibility, and, equally, that Suresh, who carries the weight of adult responsibility in his personal life, is so deliberately offensive to her.) Suresh gets under Ilana’s skin when he cleans up her apartment—she typically has sheets and balls of paper strewn around the floor. It is, however, her typical working atmosphere. Sasikumar, by the way, dances to rap as he cleans up the space, and his movement is one of the offbeat joys of the play.

Joseph is writing about the dangers of being stamped too strongly by one’s past, and the need to welcome new experiences. His view is given eloquent voice by Ilana in a speech in Act II that connects origami to his theme: “Look at this paper. It has no memory, it’s just flat. But fold it, even once, and suddenly it remembers something. And then with each fold, another memory, another experience and they build up to make something complicated. The paper must forget that it was ever flat, ever a simple square. It probably can’t remember it’s still in one piece. … It’s all twisted into something so far from what it used to be.”

The characters in Animals Out of Paper are all marked by their history. Suresh’s mother has recently been killed in a car accident, and he’s trying to be parent to his family, including his father. When Andy takes Ilana out on a date (a scene that’s delicately staged and played), he becomes embarrassed that she knows everything about him—all his secrets were in his diary, including the women who broke his heart. He must woo her without the privacy that anyone else might have. He’s breaking ground where few have had to go before.

It’s at the dinner that Ilana reveals she has an invitation to an origami conference in Nagasaki, and that she intends to take Suresh, her student, rather than Andy. Beck shows Andy’s hurt and manfulness as he tries to recover from his disappointment, but the quiet tragedy of Animals Out of Paper is that, like the folds that cannot be erased in origami, the creases in one’s past prove just as complicated and indelible on the human soul.

Rajiv Joseph's Animals Out of Paper is performed at the McAlpin Hall at the West Park Church (165 W. 86th St.at Amsterdam Avenue). Performances are Thursday through Saturday evenings at 8 p.m, and Sundays at 5 p.m. Tickets are $18 for all performances and may be purchased online at SmarTix.com or by calling (212) 868-4444.

Ripped From the Headlines

Global power politics is the subject of Tom Dulack’s The Road to Damascus, an intriguing new play set in the near future. The time frame allows Dulack to invest his plot with thinly disguised current reality, or speculation that is not far-fetched: a female broadcaster, Nadia Kirilenko, works for the Pan-Arabya network, clearly modeled on Al-Jazeera, and a new Pope, Augustine, is from Africa.

The drama opens amid the confusion of major bombings in New York City, reported by Nadia. Were they the work of “a fourth-generation ISIS mutant,” the Army of God, or of the group suspected by the British, the Guardians of Mecca? Or perhaps the sect the French are inclined to blame, the Druze Freedom Party? Did the United Arab Emirates fund the terrorist attack?

Everyone expects the U.S. to retaliate against Syria, but Augustine intends to go to Damascus and offer himself as a shield against any bombing. What would the repercussions be if he does go? Will the U.S. or Israel bomb the Syrian capital if the Pope is there?

Although Dulack’s work has the tight construction of an Ibsen play, it feels more reliant on the coincidences of melodrama, although one that is compellingly Machiavellian. Happily, under Michael Parva's swift, precise direction, the actors provide vivid characterizations.

The linchpin is Nadia (Larisa Polonsky), who is having an affair with a State Department employee, Dexter Hobhouse (Rufus Collins). In Dulack's set-up, Nadia not only knows Augustine from his days as an activist in Darfur and Kinshasa, but she is a Chechnyan Muslim. The stunning actress has the looks of a newscaster, and she reveals the character's energy and ambition with persuasive television presence and diction. For his part, Collins has the dutifulness of a man who has sacrificed a personal life to his profession—he has three children, each by a different ex-wife.

The Pope’s right-hand man, Cardinal Medeiros (Robert Verlaque), secretly reports from the Vatican to the U.S. National Security Agency, embodied by Liza Vann’s utterly ruthless Bree Benson. And Benson gives marching orders to Ted Bowles, a State Department functionary who bridles at her overbearing attitude. Hobhouse also has his own contact in the Vatican, Bishop Roberto Guzman (Joris Stuyck), a college friend, who assists him in arranging a meeting with the Pope. But it seems everyone, including the Pope (given tremendous confidence and integrity by Mel Johnson Jr.), has a private agenda that involves using one of the other characters. 

Dulack’s plotting is clear if schematic, and the characters are compelling. But The Road to Damascus provides little enlightenment on the sticking points of  Middle East diplomacy, particularly the Palestinian question. Rather, it examines the assertion of power drenched in cynicism. It relies on its own rat’s nest of cross-purposes, which Dulack delineates effectively.

In spite of the solid craftsmanship, The Road to Damascus often feels like a first-rate TV show with overly familiar  elements. The Benson character is one of those unscrupulous women in power easily recognizable to anyone who watches The Good Wife or How to Get Away with Murder or State of Affairs. The rivalry with her counterpart at State, Joseph Adams’s world-weary, hangdog Bowles, who is Hobhouse’s boss, echoes any number of subplots on seasons of 24 or The West Wing. And Verlaque’s Cardinal Medeiros might have stepped from The Name of the Rose or The Da Vinci Code, or from a Jacobean tragedy (e.g., The Duchess of Malfi).

There may be those who take issue with the grim finale, in which the greatest power exerts its ruthless ability to have its way, though not without foreshadowing. But the climax clearly underlines the irony of the title. On this road to Damascus, positions are immutable, and nobody has a conversion.

Tom Dulack’s The Road to Damascus plays at 59E59 Theaters though March 1. Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday and 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Matinees are at 2 p.m. on Saturdays and 3 p.m. on Sundays. Tickets may be obtained by visiting www.59e59.org or calling Ticket Central at 212-279-4200 from noon to 8 p.m.

TV Stars in the Country

Thanks to Taylor Schilling, Emmy nominee for Orange Is the New Black, and Peter Dinklage, Emmy and Golden Globe winner for Game of Thrones, all performances of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country at Classic Stage Company (CSC) are sold out. The production, utilizing a new translation by American actor John Christopher Jones, is the first New York revival of Turgenev’s great play in 20 years. It’s overseen by the distinguished mid-career director Erica Schmidt, who previously directed Schilling and Dinklage in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya outside New York City and who happens to be married to Dinklage. Schmidt and her 13-member ensemble are discovering enormous humor, both subtle and ribald, in Turgenev’s complicated text, as well as the expected poignance.

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818–1883) was a contemporary of Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Unlike Tolstoy and Dostoevky, he was educated in western Europe and lived much of his adult life in France. His writing, though equally concerned with Russian characters in Russian settings, is markedly different in perspective and tone from that of his Russian peers and lacks their preoccupation with religion and the spiritual life.

A Month in the Country depicts the effect of an outsider — a callow but appealing student from Moscow — on a clique of leisured aristocrats. The play, which Turgenev originally called The Student, was written in the 1850s but ran afoul of the Russian censors and wasn’t performed until 1872. In many ways, it presages the subjects and serio-comedic tone of Chekhov’s major plays. Dramatist Brian Friel, who created an adaptation of A Month in the Country for the Gate Theatre in Dublin, suggests that, in this drama, Turgenev wrote “Chekhovian characters and situations forty-six years before Chekhov wrote his first fully Chekhovian play, The Seagull.”

Natalya Petrovna Islayev (Schilling), married to a man several years her senior, has been conducting a chaste romance with a neighbor, Rakitin (Dinklage). Deeply concerned about maintaining a reputation for virtue, Natalya has managed to hide her wayward emotions from husband Arkady (Anthony Edwards), his vigilant mother (Elizabeth Franz), their gossipy physician (Thomas Jay Ryan), and other hangers-on (Peter Appel, Frank Van Putten and Annabella Sciorra). When Belyaev (Mike Faist) arrives as summertime tutor for Natalya’s son Kolya (Ian Etheridge), Vera (Megan West), Natalya’s 17-year-old ward, falls hard for him, as do Natalya herself and a servant, Katya (Elizabeth Ramos). The sexual tension that results could fuel a French farce; but Turgenev, who didn’t go in for farce, depicts instead how (as phrased by Rakitin in the classic translation by Constance Garnett): “[L]ove of every kind … is a real calamity if you give yourself up to it completely.”

Schmidt, scenic designer Mark Wendland, and lighting designer Jeff Croiter work skillfully together to give Turgenev's five acts, retooled in American vernacular by Jones, a momentum that seems quite contemporary. Schmidt and her actors have added some between-scenes action (played — or almost danced — in soft light) that serves to comment on the narrative and what the playwright has left unspecified. The between-scenes activities do not appear in the typescript of Jones’s new version of the play, so it’s a fair assumption that they're liberties — defensible liberties — of an innovative director who's in sync with her modern audience.

Audience members attracted by the television stars may be astonished at how fresh and contemporary this 165-year-old comedy-drama feels. Schilling and Dinklage in particular handle their soliloquies, the most antiquated aspect of the text, with a light but never dismissive style that gives those speeches verisimilitude comparable to the “couch interludes” in an episode of Modern Family. But what's crucial is the power of Turgenev’s play, no matter the translation, to transcend its mid-19th century context, bridging the chasm between European Romanticism and modernity.

A Month in the Country by Ivan Turgenev presented by Classic Stage Company (136 East 13th Street between Third and Fourth Avenues), runs Tuesdays through Thursdays at 7 p.m., Saturdays at 3 p.m. and 8 p.m., and Sundays at 3 p.m. through Sunday, February 22. Tickets start at $75. Running time is two hours, including one intermission. Tickets may be purchased by visiting www.classicstage.org or calling 212-352-3101, 866-811-4111 or at the box office.

Shakespeare's Grand Guignol

Supply has a curious relationship to demand in New York theater, and it’s nowhere more perplexing than in the realm of Off and Off-Off Broadway Shakespearean productions. Last season, New York companies offered what must have been an unprecedented number of Shakespeare’s greatest hits (including four stagings of King Lear), but few, if any, of infrequently seen works such as Titus Andronicus. The current season, with its much lower Shakespearean quotient, has already yielded two Tituses. Go figure!

The first Titus was last autumn’s Puppet Titus Andronicus, an idiosyncratic entertainment, strictly for adults, in which plush, Henson-inspired puppets enacted episodes of sex and gore with generous amounts of “silly string” representing bodily fluids. Now the ambitious New York Shakespeare Exchange is presenting a more faithful, less fanciful version of the tragedy, adapted and directed by Ross Williams, the company’s artistic director.

Possibly written in collaboration with George Peele, Titus Andronicus follows the form and traditions of Jacobean revenge drama, with a plot that features all the feuding, murder, and rape one expects, plus some extra-gory embellishments such as dismemberment and cannibalism. Shakespeare’s most notable source for Titus is Ovid’s account of Philomela and her sister Procne, wife of King Tereus of Thrace. After raping his sister-in-law, Tereus cuts out her tongue to discourage disclosure of his dirty deeds. The mutilated Philomela outwits him by weaving her sad story into an accusing tapestry; and the sisters avenge Tereus’s villainy by slaughtering his sons, and then cooking and feeding their flesh to the unsuspecting father. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the sisters are transformed into birds to elude Tereus’s counter-vengeance. Shakespeare dispenses with the Ovidian magic, closing his tragedy on a body-strewn stage.

Titus Andronicus is clearly an early Shakespearean work: The dramatic construction follows closely the model of Senecan tragedy; the characters’ motivations are at times obscure; and the play’s violence rises to Grand Guignol gratuitousness. There’s little indication here that this playwright was destined, perhaps a mere decade later, to rework the raw materials of English revenge drama as Hamlet, the most masterful revenge play of all time.

Williams has set his adaptation in a carnival tent, with all the play’s action under the big top (imaginatively designed by Jason Lajka). The performance begins with a rambunctious, wordless prologue in which members of the company assail each other, killing one minute and being killed the next. It’s a dance of cruelty and death that sets the tone for everything that follows. At stage left is an old-fashioned livestock feed chute with a pull-cord that the actors jerk in order to punctuate violent attacks with the racket of corn kernels — thousands of them — rattling down the chute into a tin tub. The clatter from the noisy chute persists, accompanying each violent act, throughout the evening.

The youthful cast is headed by Brendan Averett, a formidable Titus, the Roman general whose pride and blind patriotism set the gruesome plot in motion. Gretchen Egolf, as Tamora, Queen of the Goths, and Warren Jackson as her lover, Aaron the Moor, give the evening's most extravagant performances, attacking the sinister lyricism of Shakespeare's verse with an operatic intensity that strays close to burlesque without quite crossing the line.

Last year, when Lucy Bailey’s production of Titus opened at Shakespeare’s Globe on the South Bank of the Thames, the London Times reported that “the stage blood and mutilation” were “so realistic” that “spectators were dropping like flies.” Such is not the case with the New York Shakespeare Exchange production. Here the violence, designed by fight choreographer Alicia Rodis, is stylized and largely bloodless; and costume designer Elivia Bovenzi manages to suggest mutilation and maiming imaginatively rather than explicitly. Nonetheless, the production is squirm-inducing throughout, as Williams and the rest of the creative team no doubt intend. It’s a powerful depiction of a realm in which cruelty is the norm and violence is inescapable. This Titus puts one in mind of video games and Hollywood action films — as well as much that's been chronicled on the front page of The New York Times during the first few weeks of 2015.

Titus Andronicus by William Shakespeare, adapted by Ross Williams, presented by New York Shakespeare Exchange, at the Main Stage Theater at HERE (145 Sixth Avenue; entrance on Dominick Street), runs through Sunday, February 8. Performances are from Tuesday to Saturday at 8:30 p.m., and Sunday at 4 p.m. Tickets: $18. Running time is two hours and 20 minutes, including one intermission. Tickets may be purchased online at www.here.org or by calling 212-352-3101.

Life with Father, Irish Style

Hugh Leonard’s Da is a painful coming-of-age story being given an engaging and rare revival by the Irish Repertory Theater in its temporary home at DR2 Theatre off Union Square.

Set in a rural town in Ireland, Leonard’s 1978 Tony winner deals with Charlie, a middle-aged man who has returned to his family home after the death of his father. The memories he has are painful, and it’s clear immediately in Charlotte Moore’s production that Charlie feels some relief at the recently severed tie to his father. But Da isn’t done with his son: his ghost, a boisterous and peremptory Paul O’Brien, shows up to harangue and browbeat Charlie. And Charlie, for his part, feels resentments bubble up in him once again. As the play unfolds, one learns about the origins of their friction, as well as Charlie’s adolescence and working life. He is, in fact, an adoptive son to Da and his Ma (Fiana Toibin).

Clues come early on about how difficult Charlie’s life was, as the family prepares for the arrival of a Mr. Drumm who will interview Charlie for a job. There’s a battle over the shirt that Charlie is supposed to wear. (Adam Petherbridge plays the younger Charlie with a mixture of rebellion and Catholic guilt, while Ciarán O’Reilly shines as the more confident and calmer adult observing his life.) He doesn’t want to wear the one that his mother has patched, and his resistance causes a squabble and earns him a slap. 

After Sean Gormley’s thin-lipped, priggish Mr. Drumm arrives, Da, though warned to speak minimally, launches into praise of Hitler. (Some Irishmen supported Hitler because he was at war with their historical enemy, England.) Drumm, judgmental and bloodless, has nothing but contempt for Da, and he expresses it bluntly. Drumm offers Charlie a job nonetheless, with the warning that he shouldn’t stay in it too long—a warning that Charlie, a budding writer, doesn’t heed for more than a decade. A nice irony is that Drumm, unsusceptible to sentiment, gives Charlie sounder advice than his parents offer: “You’ll amount to nothing until you learn to say no.”

Leonard’s story slips from memory to the present and back, sometimes a bit strangely: older Charlie doesn’t merely watch his younger self in scenes—they converse about what’s going on, with the older self advising the younger. O’Brien’s Da is by turns morose, cheerful, overbearing, and proud, and it’s clear he will never be a figure his son will worship. In spite of the cozy warmth suggested by James Morgan’s crockery-filled parlor, this autobiographical play is also rife with unhappiness, stupidity, and emotional abuse. 

Leonard’s rich language— “Old faces. They’ve turned up like bills you thought you’d never have to pay”—gets full weight from an excellent cast. Although men are the focus, two actresses in smaller parts make the most of their single scenes. Nicola Murphy plays Mary Tate, a reputed good-time girl that Charlie wants but who has more sweetness than he appreciates. Petherbridge is terrific in the scene, alternately bashful and on the make, and Murphy brings true poignancy to poor Mary, initially aloof, then warming to Charlie’s charms. It’s to Leonard’s credit that Charlie, his own stand-in, comes off poorly. As Da’s employer of decades, Kristin Griffith arrives late in the play to deliver a clueless, insulting pittance to the man who has served as her gardener for years, while she eagerly gathers the bounty he has cultivated. Da is ever the apologist for his poor treatment, too proud to claim more than others are willing to give him, and that gripes the older Charlie. It undoubtedly reflects Leonard’s own struggle to find confidence in himself that he is never destined to receive from either father or mother. Yet, as Charlie finally learns, "Love turned upside down is love for all that."

Performances of Da by the Irish Repertory Theatre take place through March 8 at the DR2 Theatre at 103 E. 15th St., off Union Square. Evening curtains are at 7 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays and 8 p.m. Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Matinees are at 3 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays.

Body of Words

In an author's note, dramatist Vincent Sessa says that his Body of Words is based on the homecoming of Odysseus. That may not be much help to anyone who knows The Odyssey, since there are only two characters, an older and a younger man, and as the play opens they’ve just completed a bout of sex. Is this a “gay play”? The older man, Norman, says that “being straight is what attracts one straight man to another. In fact, it’s what we see in each other.” If that viewpoint seems odd, it’s apparently common enough to have been used on an episode of the FX network’s animated series Archer, when Archer’s old chum is gay only for him.

The play opens at a sparely furnished beach house (by David L. Arsenault) on the heels of a fourth sexual encounter between Bruch Reed’s Norman and Boyd (Marek Pavlovski), the younger man. Norman has paid Boyd $1,000 for five acts of fellatio. Boyd—he’s purportedly 17, but Pavlovski looks a decade older—resists anything else, but Norman is offering another $500 for the whole nine yards, as it were.

In spite of their intimacy to this point, the men go at each other verbally in a way that seems preposterous but crucial, given the necessity of Sessa’s making some dramatic hay of it all. Boyd’s sudden threats of violence might make any sane person show him the door. They serve only to keep Norman interested. But if Norman and Boyd are so antagonistic before this last sexual encounter, is it because they skipped conversations between the first four? How else to explain the notion that Norman would not have noticed Boyd’s persistent threats of violence? During the play he and Boyd box and grapple intensely, and Boyd repeatedly explodes in a fury. Yet Norman calmly pursues him; perhaps it's an indication of his confidence in the power of words, but it is not credible.

Any relation to Homer beyond the invoked references to his epic is tenuous. Norman claims a varied work history: “Construction. Demolition. An oil rig. A year on the North Sea, about seven months in the Gulf of Mexico. I rebuilt levees. Put in an irrigation system. Counted the caribou on the tundra. Sometimes I just loafed. Beached the beach and the pretty beach girls. I taught native-American children once.” The adventures read as a modern parallel to those of Odysseus that delayed his return from Troy for 10 years. But the references to the “wine-dark sea” and the “rosy-fingered dawn” and even a cutesy “Ithaca Tool & Die Company” feel arbitrary. Those homages (there are also references to O. Henry and Moby-Dick) are meant to lend the story a weight it can’t bear.

At times sexual psychology is in play, as the men discuss whether they are straight or not. Boyd challenges Norman for keeping his clothes on during their sex: “How can you feel anything if you keep your clothes on!” There is a roiling element of pacifist politics as well. Boyd’s father is a military man who neglects his family but Boyd is planning to enlist the following morning, yet he has mixed feelings about his father. Norman, a Bronze Star recipient, says, “A soldier doesn’t die in glory—he dies in the blood that leaves him…” If the point seems muddled, Sessa’s writing at times includes fine isolated passages, notably one about the danger posed by a man running close rather than far back or far ahead.

The pace of director John Michael DiResta’s production is sometimes hasty, but he has gotten committed performances from both actors, who nonetheless have a struggle to make the diffuse story hang together and the characters credible. Reed delivers the more intellectual and literary references confidently, and he looks the part of a former decathlete. Pavlowski is by turns sullen, suspicious, cocky, and confident, and physically could be the wrestler he claims to have been. But the point of it all is unclear: even a classic Greek dramatic twist at the end doesn’t provide elucidation—or catharsis.

Body of Words plays through Jan. 25 at Theater for a New City (155 1st Avenue between 9th and 10th Streets). Evening performances are Wednesday through Saturday at 8 p.m.; there is also a Sunday matinee at 3 p.m. Tickets are $5–$18 and may be purchased by visiting www.theaterforthenewcity.net or www.smarttix.com.

The Lighter Side of Communism

It's probably safe to say that George Gershwin’s notion of Russian drama as he described it in his classic “But Not for Me” is probably what most people think of it: “I’ve found more clouds of gray/Than any Russian play could guarantee.” It's to Moira Buffini’s credit that her 2007 adaptation of Nikolai Erdman’s play The Suicide will come as a surprise to anyone who thinks Russians don’t write comedies.

Buffini, herself a playwright (Loveplay, Dinner), has dug out the laughs in Erdman’s 1928 satire, renamed Dying for It, while keeping the pointed social commentary on the desperation of ordinary Russians a decade after the Bolsheviks took power. Although the play is rarely revived, it is not completely obscure: it was seen on Broadway briefly in 1980, with Derek Jacobi starring.

As the play begins, life for the hero, Semyon Semyonovich Podeskalnikov (Joey Slotnick), and his wife, Masha (Jeanine Serralles), is anything but peachy. They’re poor, he’s hungry, and they sleep on a bed in the hallway of a tenement house, with blackened stairs, acutely peeling wallpaper, and no privacy. The Communist revolution hasn’t brought the prosperity hoped for by the poor. Moreover, Semyon’s mother-in-law, the opportunistic Serafima, inhabits the room off the landing.

The despairing Semyon complains of a lack of food, much like the tramps in Beckett's Waiting for Godot. When he finds an advertisement for playing the tuba under some floorboards, he thinks he has the ticket to wealth: he’ll learn it and be paid for playing. But just from looking at Slotnick, who brings a Sad Sack quality to the character, it's evident that things aren’t going to pan out. His struggle with the tuba comes to an amusing but bitter end. Semyon decides to commit suicide, and runs off to buy a gun, leading to a comic chase to rescue him that involves his upstairs neighbor, the bearish Kalabushkin (CJ Wilson); Kalabushkin's lover, Margarita, who owns a popular bar; and Yegor, a postman and devout Communist who lives upstairs.

Semyon returns with the gun, but before he can use it, Erdman introduces a variety of colorful characters eager to delay his promised death until they can further their own ends through influencing his suicide note. They include Aristarkh Grand-Skubik, a dispossessed landowner who wants Semyon's note to blame the government; Kleopatra “Kiki” Maximovna, a romantic who wants him to dispatch himself for her in the name of love; and Father Yelpidy, a dour Orthodox priest who wants Semyon’s death to stand for the godlessness of the current society, in hopes it will bring people back to the church. Civil servant Yegor steps in to urge Semyon to “do it for the Party…you owe them everything.” Last to put his two rubles in is Patch Darragh as Viktor Viktorovich, a poet (“I am the voice of the Russian man,” he declares); he wants Semyon to declare in his note that Russia needs art.

This string of visitors to Semyon might have become repetitive, but director Neil Pepe has cast some splendid comic actors in the roles, and they’re varied enough not to wear out their welcomes. The ever-reliable Robert Stanton is a dapper and high-minded Aristarkh; Clea Lewis is a squeaky-voiced, beckoning Kiki; Peter Maloney is a delightfully high-kicking, hard-drinking cleric; and Ben Beckley as the straight-arrow Yegor reveals some creepy sexual inclinations.

As Semyon, Slotnick uses his nebbishy looks and deadpan delivery to create a character floundering with neurotic bewilderment. But he is also an Everyman for these tough economic times of chronic unemployment: “I have no dignity, no labor, no value at all,” he says. Slotnick manages to keep a balance between hope and despair, so that one is always guessing whether he will or won’t shoot himself. Seralles has some comically explosive moments as Masha, and Mary Beth Peil as her manipulative mother has one of the slyest comic lines in the play, as she offers a bite to the priest: “Father, I poked around and found a little bit of meat. I know you’d rather have a biscuit, but it’s chicken-style stew.”

Erdman’s play was banned in the Stalinist era, and it’s easy to see why. But apart from its politics, it still has a lot to say about the importance of work and the effects of unemployment and poverty on people’s lives. With Buffini's refurbishment, Dying for It proves astonishingly apt for the times.

Dying for It plays at the Atlantic Theater Company, 336 W. 20th St., through Jan. 18, with evening performances at 8 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday, and at 7 p.m. on Tuesday. Matinees are at 2 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday. For tickets, which are $20 and $65, call OvationTix at (866) 811-4111.

In a Rut in Idaho

Samuel D. Hunter made a big splash—excuse the pun—with his play The Whale, for which he won a special Drama Desk Award in 2013. Earlier this year he was honored with a MacArthur “genius” award. His latest play is Pocatello, at Playwrights Horizons, where The Whale was mounted, and it takes place, as his plays usually do, in Idaho. But, although it starts out ambitiously, it falters midway.

Set in an Italian restaurant along the lines of Applebee’s or Old Country Kitchen, the play explores the bonds of families under stress. The opening scene sets the tone, as customers at two tables bicker and snipe. At one table is the family of the manager, Eddie (a trim, wry T.R. Knight), complaining about the lack of gluten-free pasta, among other things. At another are the wife, daughter and father of Troy (Danny Wolohan), a waiter at the restaurant. They’re the only diners during what a multicolored banner proclaims is Famiglia Week. And they’re all straight from hell.

The introductions of the characters, in the midst of chaos, are carefully choreographed by director Davis McCallum with overlapping dialogue and flurries of action all over Lauren Helpern’s inviting, pitch-perfect set, replete with hanging grapes. 

Meanwhile, Eddie strives to recreate the joyous meals of his childhood, but his family, already reluctant to meet, slinks away. Since Eddie is gay, at first it seems that Hunter is exploring the way that gay people must make their own families (a subtext of many Noel Coward plays, e.g. Present Laughter). After all, Eddie is also the patriarch of his "restaurant family," which, along with Troy, who used to work at a paper mill, includes Isabelle, a waitress, and Max (Cameron Scoggins), a waiter and former methamphetamine addict whom nobody else would hire. But unbeknownst to the staff, the restaurant is slated for closure, and Eddie hasn’t told them their jobs are in jeopardy.

The plot twists abound, and for a long while Hunter manages to juggle them skillfully. It is no easy thing to make decency interesting on stage, but Knight does it extremely well, usually wordlessly. He flashes a wry smile at times, or does subtle takes as other characters speak. He’s engaging and likable even as Hunter’s story starts to unravel.

The central conflict between Eddie and his family, in particular his mother, is related to his coming out. It’s simply inconceivable that a character as sensitive and intelligent as Eddie wouldn’t have traced the stress and estrangement from his mother to that event, especially since the behavior that we witness amounts to unvarnished emotional abuse. Her confession is written as a big revelation, but it feels like bogus pop psychology.

In an important scene, Eddie’s sister-in-law, Kelly (Crystal Finn), tries to explain that Nick and his mother want to run from Pocatello. “You’re trying so hard, with your family, with this place,” she tells him, but maybe you’re not gonna fix all this. Maybe it’s not worth fixing.” She echoes Nick’s exhortation: "Get out of town, make your own life.” It’s a suggestion that will probably have already occurred to the viewer, and it makes Eddie seem like a bit of a sap for not recognizing it.

The acting is generally fine. Scoggins and Jessica Dickey as Tammy enliven their addict characters with a variety of colors, and Wolohan and Hogan excel in a deeply touching exchange when Troy finds his father has escaped the assisted living home and made his way to the restaurant.

The last scene, in spite of its lack of credibility, does carry an interesting ambiguity—whether Eddie and Doris have made a pact to live in limbo, i.e., Pocatello, or whether they are at the start of a new phase of their lives. But by that time the viewer may not think it matters.

Playwrights Horizons presents Pocatello through Jan. 4. Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Monday and Tuesday; 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday; and 7:30 p.m. Sunday. Matinees are at 2:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. For tickets, visit playwrightshorizons.org or call Ticket Central at (212) 279-4200.

Back to Verona

William Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet early in his career, and it’s one of his most frequently performed works. During the past year, New York City has seen two high-profile presentations of the play, both of which were handsomely outfitted and disappointing. The youthful artists of What Dreams May Company (WDMC) are currently offering a frugal production of Romeo and Juliet that strikes fire where the efforts of those more affluent troupes fizzled.

Soon to observe its fourth anniversary, WDMC has been producing streamlined, penny-pinching Shakespeare in a tiny, upstairs space on West 133rd Street. For Romeo and Juliet, the company has moved to larger, though still modest, street-level quarters in the East Village. Scenic designer Joseph Sebring retains the black-box aesthetic of WDMC's Harlem productions. Director Chris Rivera and his 16 actors are making effective use of several additional square yards of playing area, especially in the soirée at which the lovers first encounter each other and the violent scenes, which have been skillfully choreographed by fight director Nicole Schalmo and assistant Justin Kirck.   

Rivera is working with a radically uneven cast, whom he guides through the play's complicated text with an assured directorial hand. His greatest asset is Jonathan Emerson, seen in 2013 as Macduff, the moral center of WDMC's Macbeth, and, earlier this year, as an unnervingly sour Don John in Much Ado About Nothing. Emerson has transformed himself, both in affect and physical appearance, from those prior roles. His Romeo isn't far beyond adolescence and, obsessed with romantic notions, he's at once sophomoric and sympathetic. With Juliet, he's earnest and shy; but, when he's in the company of his buddies (Casey Noble as Benvolio and Nicole Schalmo as Mercutio), a swaggering machismo testifies to his youthful insecurity. Emerson's every stance and gesture, though unmannered and seemingly unstudied, contributes to an arresting, thoroughly believable interpretation of one of English literature's most familiar characters.

As Juliet, Christina Sheehan embodies young love’s impatience in interesting ways: she’s audacious and, at times, downright pushy. There's a naughtiness about her that suggests she learned a lot that Renaissance maidens weren’t supposed to know from the bawdy jokes and unbridled recollections of her Nurse (Clare Solly). In Solly's hands, that Nurse (often treated as an Elizabethan stock comic) is full of verve and lusty humor with an undertone of profound melancholy. In the last moments of the play, Solly conveys complex grief -- she has previously spoken of the untimely death of her own daughter, Susan, and it's clear that, for her, the news of Juliet's sorry fate disinters all the pain of that earlier loss.

Since its founding in 2011, WDMC has been committed to counteracting the limitations of the Shakespearean canon by creating on-stage opportunities for women. Schalmo, who was a hyper-sexual Lady Macbeth last year, demonstrates her range as Mercutio, cousin of the Prince of Verona and close friend to Romeo. In Schalmo's nontraditional interpretation, Mercutio is a brazen, seemingly carefree, aristocratic young woman capable of becoming serious as soon as she's drawn into the Montague-Capulet feud. Schalmo proves herself adept at broad comedy, drunk scenes, and dying in clear view of the audience; and, in her duel with Tybalt (Marcus Watson), she demonstrates some graceful moves and convincing sword-handling.

On opening night, director Rivera stepped into the role of Friar Lawrence, replacing Matthew Healy who had been injured in an accident. Youthful in appearance, Rivera plays the good Friar as a well-meaning soul who fled the world for the monastery before gaining sufficient experience to make him a reliable aid to the hapless lovers seeking his guidance. In the second half of the performance under review, Rivera relied on a script disguised as a prayer book; both on script and off, he gave an assured, insightful reading of this pivotal character.

WDMC, which produces in association with the nonprofit Queens Shakespeare, is adept at operating on a shoestring. Sebring's simple scenic design for Romeo and Juliet utilizes three revolving panels for entrances and exits, boldly colored wall hangings by painter Matthew Emerson, and a couple of scarlet draperies. Like the set, the costumes (primarily white and black) feature bright red accents. Costuming is credited to Rivera but the actors are dressed in items that could come from their own closets. The Verona that this production conjures, like the themes of Romeo and Juliet, is at once timeless and up-to-date.    

Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare, presented by What Dreams May Co. in association with Queens Players, runs through Dec. 20 at The Kraine Theater (85 East 4th Street between the Bowery and 2^nd Avenue). It runs Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at 7 p.m. Tickets: $18. Running time is two hours and 20 minutes including one intermission. Tickets may be purchased by visiting http://wdmcstarcrossed.brownpapertickets.com or calling 1-800-838-3006.

Straight White Talking Heads

Playwright Young Jean Lee looks for a challenge in every new play, asking herself "what's the last show in the world I would ever want to make?" — and then making that show.  Indeed, Lee is known for her provocative, timely, and exciting productions.  Her newest play Straight White Men, however, is less effective in packing a cultural and philosophical punch than past pieces, such as Untitled Feminist Show and We’re Gonna Die.  While the production overall makes for an enjoyable evening, the majority of its content skirts the issue of straight white male privilege, opting to please rather than challenge the audience. 

The production excels in its sexy design, especially from a sound standpoint. Upon entering the Martinson Theater at the Public, aggressively loud rap music affronts audience members as they find their seats.  From the extreme pre-show music, to the transition songs, to a bacchanalian dude dance party, Lee and sound designers Chris Giarmo and Jamie McElhinney create meaningful moments of aesthetic bliss via their aural/visual collaboration. Visually, the production’s brilliant box set designed by David Evans Morris is fully visible when one enters the theatre space, the layout smacking of a network television sit-com recorded before a live audience. The set is a portrait of middle class American "game room" culture: a beige couch and armchair, white carpet everywhere, stacks of plastic tupperware stuffed with Christmas decorations, and book shelves bursting with paperbacks, board games, and assorted tchotchkes.

The comedic timing of the brothers’ endless quips also add to the middle-class white family charm. Lee's direction  establishes a nuanced family dynamic between Austin Pendleton (Ed), Pete Simpson (Drew), James Stanley (Matt), and Gary Wilmes (Jake). The physical timing of Wilmes and Simpson are especially polished, both of whom deliver physical gags and witticisms with expert alacrity. Towards the end of the play, however, actors seemed to struggle with the dialogue. This is perhaps because, in the final third of the play, the characters stylistically morph from sit-com buddy boys into existential talking heads. This transformation is awkward and somewhat disorienting, which could be productive except for the fact that their dialogue becomes miresome.  It is unfortunately at this point that Straight White Men fails to fill in the space between slapstick and heady cultural commentary, with the end feeling tacked-on rather than part of the world of the play.  All in all, while the production is part of a larger conversation about straight white male privilege, its ultimately value lies in the the charming performances and appealing design.

Straight White Men runs through Dec. 7 in the Martinson Theater at The Public Theater (425 Lafayette Street). Performances are Tuesdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Saturdays and Sundays at 2:30 p.m. and Sundays at 7 p.m. Member tickets are priced at $30, and single tickets are $35. To purchase tickets, call 212-967-7555 or visit www.publictheater.org.

Shared Truths and Lies

Is there anything more romantic than a tale of two writers falling in love in Paris? Probably not, but an opening with an argument over who or what was the greatest rock performance of all time is a bit more intriguing.

For their first performance, Play.Sing.Give. presented Fiction, a story of two successful writers who are thrown into an unsuspecting tragedy and decide to share their personal diaries. Written by Steven Dietz and directed by Zoe S. Watkins, the two have created a witty, yet intense play about what happens when a couple decides to share too much.  

Journals and diaries are reminders of thoughts that are ironically never revisited, with the idea that another will never read them. That thought alone is gut wrenching, but the result is that, “No life, it turns out, is an open book.” From the outset, Michael (Levi Morger) and Linda (Stacy Lynn Gould) bicker like an old married couple and remind the audience that there's no greater bond than a shared hatred. Linda is a very matter-of-fact, best-selling author turned professor that has been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. Michael is a caring husband living in the shadow of his wife’s success; that quotes Dante, only drinks beer from brown bottles, arranges his diaries in chronological order, and doesn’t like the idea of a door being ajar.

They have an unusually honest relationship, but after sharing each other’s coveted secrets, Michael and Linda’s bond is put to the test when they are forced to decipher between fact and fiction, past and present, and shared truths and lies. Add a third character to the equation, Abby (Alison Wien), and three becomes a crowd. Linda’s piercing facial expressions and Michael’s often discomfort leave the viewer confused on which character they feel the most sympathy for — the dying wife, or the could-be-lying husband?      

Dietz has written an extremely smart play, full of soliloquies — a performed novel, right down to an included plot twist. Wordy, but with hilarity that is so unexpected, it goes unnoticed. An intimate cast of three, Wien drops in with perfect timing, while Morger and Gould’s on-stage chemistry is so strong, the need for additional characters to complete their story isn’t necessary. The close proximity between actors and audience almost begs for audience involvement, with audible gasps and the occasional, “No way!”

It also helps that Fiction is a part of a “giving event.” In an effort to provide a creative platform for actors to showcase their talents and give back to the community, Play.Sing.Give offers one full-length play plus 12 cabaret performances for a two-week run in November. Their goal was to make self-sufficient performances, with all ticket sales going into the productions, and any additional profits given to charity.

With some amazing acting, the opportunity to give, and the sponsorship from the Dutch Kills Theater Company, the hope of a return of this production is very high. That's all truth, no lie. 

Fiction ran until Nov. 22 at The Producers’ Club (358 W 44^th St).

Unmasking the Fables

After reading the tales of Snow White, Thumbelina, Sleeping Beauty, or Belle, have you ever felt that something was missing? With the lyrics of Nick Luckenbaugh, director and choreographer Megan Mekjian uses the musical Royal Fables to fill in the gaps of these familiar fairy tales.

The musical begins with Scheherazade (Livie Castro), a young bride from One Thousand and One Nights, who sings her song about the murderous king and how she must sing a different song each night in order to persuade the king not to kill her on their wedding night.  From this song, she introduces and guides the audience through the tales of female protagonists from various fairy tales — each singing a song that relates to their own fable. The twist is that these songs have never been heard, and each song reveals an inner thought these women have never shared with anyone else before.

Although a cleaver plot, Royal Fables' creative story line is confusing to the audience members who haven't read the program prior to the show. With no dialogue, the audience is only left with the lyrics of the songs as they sort out the characters and plot. Although some of the women could not be heard over the three-person band (Ansel Cohen, Jimmy Lopez and Mike McGuckin), there were a few subtle hints that could be found within the technical aspects of the show such as the set and costumes.

Set on the wooden floors of a large room, the cardboard box inspired set added a child-like feel to the environment. The homemade bookcases added depth to the stage and created a convenient backstage for the actors. The images on the bookcases matched the images in the program and allowed the audience to figure out which fables would be included in the show.   

The short, whimsical-styled costumes left us with little to no clues at which fable the women came from, but instead created a loosely uniformed look for the princesses and allowed them to freely perform their choreographed routines. As stated in the libretto, each princess wore a mask until it was their time to sing their own song. In this sense, the masks became a symbol of taking off their guise to reveal their own truths. However, yet again, there wasn't an obvious distinguishing design on the masks to help the audience identify which female character was singing the song.

With a cast of 18 actors, Royal Fables' contained plenty of raw talent. The cast's dedication to the show was obvious in their flawless execution. Without the actors’ mesmerizing performances, the play would have fallen flat, especially since the musical had no clear climax. Although the songs were beautifully sung, there was no build in the plot and nothing to propel the story besides the actors’ high energy.

Royal Fables ran until Nov. 15 at the Access Theater (380 Broadway between Walker and White Sts.). For more information, visit www.libratheater.org.

One Note, A Thousand Stories

A picture might be worth a thousand words, but a note can tell a thousand stories — at least that is what Davy teaches us in the musical Found. The main character Davy is based on the real-life story of Davy Rothbart who created the magazine Found. By combining the book by Hunter Bell and Lee Overtree with the music and lyrics of Eli Bolin, the story of Davy’s life becomes a very quirky and enjoyable musical that can change how a person looks at a lost note or letter. 

Davy (Nick Blaemire) is a young man who finds a note on his windshield after a very bad day. With the discovery of this note comes the inspiration to create a magazine that he names Found — a collection of notes and letters that people have left behind. These notes range from children’s notes (“Dear Mom, summer camp is not fun anymore, everyone is dying”) to lovers (“You bring the paper bag, I’ll bring the handcuffs… let’s party”) to notes reflecting on one’s life (“With a baby in my dream all my life now, I’ll be questioning what it would be like with a child to call my own… just maybe this is a sign that I’m not meant to have a child…”).  With each note comes an unknown story that can be interpreted and read in different ways.

With the help of his lifelong friend Mikey D (Daniel Everidge) and his roommate Denise (Barrett Wilbert Weed), the magazine becomes extremely successful. Together they bring the magazine on tour, reading the notes to audiences across the United States. However, the plan to keep the original messages is challenged when Davy falls in love with a producer, Kate (Betsy Morgan). Davy loses himself in fame and fortune, which could potentially change the magazine forever.

With a 10-person cast, many of the actors successfully played multiple characters without confusing the audience. The brick walls and wooden stage created a comfortable atmosphere where the audience could laugh and emotionally connect with thousands of untold stories in the notes.

With the simple plot of a young man needing to venture out into the world before he realizes the girl back home and his old life was what he wanted all along — this play would appear to be very unoriginal. However, this play proves to be unique and entertaining by having this very basic story line propelled by interweaving the original notes published in Found into the script. The notes are used as the inner thoughts of characters or as side commentary on the scene that is unfolding. Sometimes, entire songs will be composed of a single note. For instance, while on tour, Davy sings the song “Pi Shop” — a note that is written by a mathlete and his friends about the wonders of Pi. Or even the heartbreaking love song, “Barf Bag Breakup,” which is based off of a note that was written on the back of a white paper barf bag. The use of notes to reveal inner thoughts, commentary and songs creates a connection between the audience, making them relate to the messages on the notes and think about all the thoughts they never wrote down. 

The connection between the audience and the notes could not have been successful without the use of projection. With various handwritings, crossed-out mistakes and irregular spelling, projection designer Darrel Maloney creates a visual representation of the notes that are found and displays them for the entire audience. These notes, projected on the walls of the set, create a realistic image of what these notes might look like when they were found.

Although the pop-rock music songs were catchy and enjoyable, they were often times overshadowed by the bizarre and heartfelt notes that the audience sees and hears. Although the playwrights go off on tangents with additional songs that do not add to the story arch or create scenes that reenact why a note was written, these tangents bring more laughs to the entire show. 

So maybe the next time you walk down the block and see a crumbled up note, read it, and see what story you find within the mystery of someone else’s thoughts. 

Found ran through Nov. 9 at the Atlantic Theater Company's Linda Gross Theater (336 West 20th St.). For more information, visit http://atlantictheater.org/playevents/found/.

What Would You Do For Sex?

In hopes to bring humanity to the story of the male consumers of prostitution, Nikkole Salter’s play Carnaval focuses on thee African-American men who travel to Rio, Brazil to honor the death of their friend. Once in Brazil, Demetrius (Bjorn DuPaty), Jalani (W. Tre’ Davis), and Raheem Monroe (Gabriel Lawrence) are immediately faced with the temptation of prostitution. However, this trip goes downhill when one person in the group disregards the “rules” of Rio and lands them all in trouble.

This coming of age story with a twist combines the need to escape the stereotypes and obligations an African-American man has to his brotherhood with the undeniably timeless lesson that one’s actions do have consequences — all with the backdrop of Brazil’s sexual tourism.

While there are some big gaps in the story line (such as the development of the dead friend, Jared, and the reason for his death), the actors' flawless execution made the audience forget that there are only three men on the stage. They successfully streamline the passing of time and convince the audience that what we see is a valid timeline of what has happened on their trip to Rio.

The camcorder projections by Emre Emirgil contain only images of scenery and short clips of the men. These images complimented the world of the play by reminding the audience that this play focuses only on the bodies of these men and excludes any images of the women that are in their lives or the women that these men cross paths with in Rio. This forces the audience to only imagine women through the eyes of the men. For example, the audience is only able to imagine the female prostitutes as “Full lips. Tiny waist… white girl hair. Spanish girl skin. Black girl booty. And southern girl attitude” courtesy of Jalani’s description given on the first day the three men arrive in Brazil.

According to the playwright in the traditional discussion after every show, the play purposefully excluded women from acting in the show or using the images of female bodies in the projections in order to limit the exploitation of women within her show. Instead, we are forced to make connections with the male consumers on stage. Throughout the show, these three characters' authentic personalities make you laugh at the cultural references they use, as well as draw you in emotionally with the sob stories they share with each other. These characters are three-dimensional and fit into the 1990's time period.

By the end of the play, there is no resolution or grievance towards the prostitutes and women they exploit on a daily basis. Instead, many audience members can be left with a dread in their heart and hopeless feeling that people don’t realize the mistakes they made or what the mistake even was.

However, to help ease the pain of the soul, dramaturges Ebony Noelle Golden and Sade Lythcott create a display in the lobby of the theater which offers the historical explanation of why people within our society are so detached and nonreactive to the sexualization and objectification of Black women’s bodies in the media and within our lives. Without this display, there would be an almost unsatisfying feeling to the play.

Overall, the play successfully takes a first step at bringing awareness to sexual tourism and sheds light on how the African American community are affected by international matters. It provides sufficient insight into understanding the demand side in the “demand and supply” of sexual tourism in countries such as Brazil. 

Carnaval ran until Nov. 16 at the National Black Theatre in Harlem (2031 5th Avenue between 125th and 126th Sts.). For more information, visit www.nationalblacktheatre.org.

Blessed Assurance (or Lack Thereof)

George Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara challenges Percy Bysshe Shelley’s assertion that poets are the "unacknowledged legislators of the world." So long as governments co-exist uneasily and individuals are unable to live in harmony with those sharing the planet, suggests Shaw in his 1905 play, munitions-makers will rule the global roost.

Major Barbara, currently revived at The Pearl Theatre Company, didn't arrive on Broadway until 1915, by which time World War I was well underway in Europe. The play begins as high comedy, shifts disconcertingly to naturalism in Act Two, and concludes with a fantastical debate in which the title character (Hannah Cabell), a Salvation Army officer, and her fiancé, Adolphus Cusins (Richard Gallagher), undergo changes of heart that strain credibility to a greater extent than usual in Shaw's work. Despite its structural flaws, Major Barbara is a perpetual crowd-pleaser; this comedy-drama and its heroine may be second only to Pygmalion and its principals, Liza and Professor Higgins, as Shaw's audience favorites. 

When the last prominent New York revival of Major Barbara opened (with Cherry Jones in the lead), the towers of the original World Trade Center still drew the eye to lower Manhattan; and Americans were enjoying the benefits of an extended era of peaceful (or relatively peaceful) relations abroad. Six days before the play’s scheduled closing, the Trade Center was attacked by air and both towers were destroyed. That tragedy moved the U.S. President to declare a Global War on Terror and to sign, two days after the play's closing, the Authorization for Use of Military Force. The years since have been marked by American combat in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, as well as fluctuating economic conditions, with an ever-widening gap between rich and poor. Shaw's concerns about poverty, privilege, war, and religion seem more urgent now than they did in the summer of 2001.

As always at the Pearl, an array of accomplished actors is on view. Dan Daily gives the evening’s most notable performance as Barbara's father, the fiendishly clever Andrew Undershaft, an armaments kingpin who believes poverty to be the world's most heinous crime. Undershaft riffs on the Republic: “Plato says … that society cannot be saved until either the Professors of Greek take to making gunpowder, or else the makers of gunpowder become Professors of Greek.” Daily is well-matched by Gallagher as the geeky Greek tutor who, against all odds, becomes Undershaft's heir both in the family and on the world's political stage.

Major Barbara is directed by David Staller, founding artistic director of the Gingold Theatrical Group which is co-producing with the Pearl. The stylish production is designed by James Noone (scenery), Tracy Christensen (costumes), Michael Gottlieb (lighting), and M. Florian Staab (sound). Six of the nine actors handle two roles (or, in one case, three), moving effectively up and down the social ladder. In a program note, Staller explains this doubling as inspired by a remark of Shaw’s that, “but for an accident of birth,” characters such as the aristocratic Lady Britomart and the middle-middle-class Mrs. Baines, the Salvation Army Commissioner (both played by Carol Schultz), or the prim, high-born Stephen Undershaft and the unemployed lout Snobby Price (played by Alec Shaw), “might have become one or the other.” Christensen’s resourceful costume designs aid the actors in shifting swiftly from one social stratum to another in plain view of the audience. It’s a dash of Brecht in an evening of Shaw.

The great Irish dramatist named his play for Barbara but, as he revised it, her father emerged as the most forceful of the dramatis personae. In the wrong hands, Undershaft can overwhelm the other characters (especially in the last scenes). Daily tempers his performance, a model of actorly restraint, so as to recalibrate the lopsided exuberance of Shaw's text and ensure balance among Undershaft, Adolphus, and Barbara in their memorable but tricky last-act trio.

Shaw called the conclusion of Major Barbara “terrible” and lamented that, despite a quarter century of post-premiere tinkering, he couldn't eliminate the flaws. In the 2001 revival, the principal actors made the final scene convincing with the emotional force of their performances. Under Staller's supervision, the Pearl's cast does justice to the wit of Major Barbara but seldom conveys the raw feeling that ought to animate the brainy talk. Without that, there's no accepting the conviction of Barbara and Adolphus that they can save the world by forsaking charity and classical learning for the armaments industry.

Major Barbara is playing through December 14 at the Pearl Theatre Co. (555 West 42nd St.). Performances are Tuesday at 7 p.m.; Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday at 2 p.m.; and Thursday–Saturday at 8 p.m. Tickets are $65 for regular admission; $39 for seniors; and $20 for students and rush Thursday. For tickets, please visit pearltheatre.org or by call 212-563-9261.