#240317 - This Week (or so) in Review
Brian Eugenio Herrera's #TheatreClique Newsletter for March 17, 2024
WELCOME to #TheatreClique — my irregular newsletter dedicated to encouraging you to click out to some of the most interesting, intriguing & noteworthy writing about drama, theatre & performance (at least, so says me)…
This Week's #TheatreCliquery:
This installment of #TheatreClique brings my latest EXPERIMENT IN THEATRE COMMENTARY. We’ll see if this one takes. But to begin — I lift a recent and (to my spirit at least) quite lovely music video of a new song by pathbreaking music theatre composer/performer/visionary César Alvarez…
This Week (or so) in Review : March 2024, Part 1.
Capturing brief “capsule” commentaries on my recent theatregoing, with click-worthy links to others writing about the same shows or theatremakers.
The White Chip
Written by Sean Daniels. Directed by Sheryl Kaller. • Off-Broadway • The Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space (Susan & Ronald Frankel Theater), New York City • March 2024.
An exceedingly confident, skillful, and theatrically deft presentation of one guy's drunkalogue. It’s basically an AA story brought to theatrical life, with the support of a very energetic directorial conceit and an exceptional supporting cast of two (the reliably excellent Crystal Dickerson and Jason Tam). Considered as a drunkalogue, it’s not that interesting: moderately privileged straight white guy goes pretty hard and pretty fast as a risk-taker, which serves his impressive ascendance as a theatremaker and arts leader, only to have everything collapse as he hits that mid/late-30s moment when the body can't hold it together anymore and everything falls apart hard, fast and (near) fatally. As far as recovery stories told “in the rooms,” it’s a tale as old as drunken time — about 85% drunk and 15% sober — albeit one that reflects an extraordinary measure of privilege in terms of race, gender, sexuality and class. The casting of Dickerson and Tam — as people of color, with gender and sexual identities different than the protagonist (ably portrayed by Joe Tapper)— to portray everyone else blunts the overarching whiteness/straightness of the whole enterprise. Several staging conceits were quite effective; most notably perhaps, writing on the floor in chalk, then having the guy clean that up in the final moments was a nice way to visually map the drunken accumulation of clutter/havoc while also demonstrating how sobriety is in no small part about cleaning up the mess you’ve made. But perhaps the most interesting departure in this piece is how it manages god/science thing with the introduction of "The Jews" — a pair of AA folks who don't go in for the Christianity-inflected deity invocations that the 12steps often rely upon but instead offer the protagonist a way to understand "science" (or the physiology of drinking) as that power greater than himself. All told, however, The White Chip is a deftly crafted piece of theatre that ably accomplishes what it sets out to do.
see also…
at American Theatre, writer/editor Alexis Hauk talks to writer/director Sean Daniels about “his multi-pronged approach to fighting the stigma of addiction with theatre” [from 2023]
Sarasota Magazine’s Kay Kipling details how “Florida Studio Theatre’s The White Chip Is Part of a New Project That Helps Artists With Addictions”
Oh, Mary!
Written by Cole Escola. Directed by Sam Pinkleton. • Off Broadway • Lucille Lortel Theatre, New York City • March 2024.
A ridiculous, scandalous, counterfactual farce that briskly blasts through its eighty minutes with glee — think Charles Ludlam getting a makeover from a millennial. What I might have most enjoyed was how Cole Escola’s script exploited the dramaturgical anchor of the nineteenth-century "well made play.” Building upon the stealthily genius gag that this play basically follows the dramatic structure of nineteenth century chestnuts like, say, Our American Cousin, Escola’s Oh, Mary! adds a dash of Boucicault, a sprinkle of Ibsen, and a soupçon of Sardou while also drawing deeply from into the genealogical well of melodrama, all the way from its nineteenth-century roots through the big-shouldered-dames of 1940s film and 1980s primetime/daytime soaps and into the contemporary moment of reality tv housewifery. Escola's Mary Todd is a drunken boor who just wants to be a cabaret star and who vehemently resents her husband's attempts to confine and control her. (For his part, Conrad Ricamora's Abraham Lincoln has his hands full trying to manage a civil war, while also barely suppressing his homosexual horndoggery, especially his affair with a second-tier actor named John Wilkes Booth.) Escola’s performance as Mary Todd is mildly demonic and basically unhinged but actually ultimately quite effective, stirring the audience's dedication to Mary's fervent desire to realize her cabaret dreams which she does in (ahem) extraordinary fashion in the finale. Escola is clearly the star, and this is a great vehicle for their particular constellation of gifts/quirks, but Sam Pinkleton is brilliant here as well. (The sight gag of Mary needing help getting off the desk left me wheezing with laughter.) But I might be most impressed/surprised by the play itself — a deftly crafted little contraption, sturdy in its structure and rich with dramaturgical riffs, all of which makes for a rollicking bit of comedic genius.
see also…
Rolling Stone’s CT Jones digs into how Cole Escola is “revolutionizing queer comedy”
at Town & Country, publicist/writer Maxwell Losgar talks to Cole Escola about “why Mary Todd Lincoln, and why now?”
The Ally
Written by Itamar Moses. Directed by Lila Neugebauer. • Off Broaday • The Public Theater (Anspacher), New York City • March 2024.
For The Ally, the Public’s Anspacher stage is remade in monumentally mid-century magisterial style, complete with wood-paneling, wood columns, and soft-pile, soft-hued carpet, all of which is palpably reminiscent of so many libraries, reading rooms, and performing arts centers in large U.S. flagship institutions. This institutionally “neutral” design proves an aptly ambient background for Josh Radnor’s Asaf — a well-intentioned if self-involved playwright, working in a prestigious but incidental adjunct position at a well-heeled private college — as he finds himself tangled in the snarl of contradictions that define contemporary center-left institutional politics — specifically, how a student’s request to sign a petition forces Asaf to negotiate how his own Jewishness and connections to Israel don't fit easily with contemporary currents in anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist campus activism. The Ally shows Asaf engaged — with students, with peers — in a series of dialogues that reveal how Asaf's principled investment in nuance and free expression of contrary beliefs are challenged by the realities of the contemporary moment, wherein folks expect (or interpret) any action or inaction as taking a stand. Throughout these conversations, Asaf comes off as sincere, perhaps self-serving, definitely naive, and emphatically oblivious to the firestorm he himself is laying the kindling for. Then as the play’s second act begins, we see most of his prior interlocutors become a tribunal of sorts demanding that Asad name the principle he is unwilling to surrender — that Jews are vulnerable and Israel has the right to exist — an insistence that proves unexpectedly (at least to Asaf) explosive. Throughout, Asaf’s insistence that "it's complicated" in response to his interlocutors’s expression of certitude and clarity, positions him as a particular kind of (possibly hopelessly outmoded) intellectual, one who takes solace in appreciating complexity but who does not possess the courage (or even knowledge) of his own convictions. All told, a very interesting and surprisingly engaging play, deftly staged and compellingly performed, and — based on the audible reactions from the audience I saw it with — a play that will activate very different experiences of frustration/affirmation among its audiences. I also remain fascinated by the fact that, even though this play has apparently been in process since the Obama administration, The Ally feels profoundly of “the now” and/or the very recent past — with its setting "in late September and early October of 2023” — documenting the ideological fractures so deeply woven into the fabric of U.S. cultural and intellectual life long before October 7.
see also…
The New York Times’s Mark Tracy digs into how The Ally is “is a not abstract and none too brief chronicle of our times, a minestrone of hot-button issues”
at The Jewish Forward, writer/editor Dan Friedman talks to playwright Itamar Moses about why he “described [The Ally] — which features characters on five sides of the Palestine-Israel debate — as a ‘Russian Doll of Trojan horses.’”
Teeth
Book by Michael R. Jackson and Anna K. Jacobs, with lyrics by Jackson and music by Jacobs. Choreographed by Raja Feather Kelly. Directed by Sarah Benson. • Off Broaday • Playwrights Horizon (mainstage), New York City • March 2024.
A wild fever-pitched fury of a musical about how the toxicity of religious and gender ideology inflects our own experience of our bodies, our desires, and our sense of safety/security (ie bodily integrity). Teeth begins as Dawn, who leads an abstinence girl group (The Promise Keeper Girls, or PKGs) at her stepfather's church, struggles to maintain her "promise" to remain pure in spite of (a) the fact of her desire for her hunky boyfriend Tobey; (b) the intensity/insensitivity of her PKG sisters; and (c) by the weird incel vibe of her stepbrother Brad whose rage — at the fact that no one believes him that that Dawn's vagina bit off the tip of his finger when they were children — has propelled him deep into the "manosphere" to learn from some vaguely Australian godfather/guru figure about the dangers of the “feminocracy.” All of this spins toward Dawn's discovery that her vagina has teeth, or holds the power of the ancient myth of the dentata, which are activated whenever Dawn's bodily integrity is violated. So follows a battle of forces between Brad and Dawn, as Dawn's "member count" grows and the power of the dentata spreads among the PKGs, leading to a kind of apocalypse, with the Dentatas emerging as victorious but leveraging the same forms of power (fear, shame, etc) as the patriarchal authorities that preceded them. A shocking yet deeply gratifying genre experiment that might be Michael R. Jackson's clearest dramaturgical statement yet, with his intricate lyrics really soaring atop melodies and vocal arrangements by Anna K. Jacobs. [an aside: my understanding is that the ending has been changed since I saw the show, so I very much look forward to seeing Teeth again in late April.]
see also…
at The New York Times, writer Erik Piepenburg talks to the Teeth creative team about the process of bringing “a feminist awakening with a lethal bite, to the stage”
at The Atlantic, cultural critic Thomas Chatterton Williams profiles Michael R. Jackson and asks “How a Playwright Became One of the Most Incisive Social Critics of Our Time”
Dead Outlaw
Conceived by David Yazbek, with music and lyrics by David Yazkbek and Erik Della Penna. Book by Itamar Moses. Directed by David Cromer. • Off Broadway • Audible Tehater at Minetta Lane, New York City • March 2024.
Dead Outlaw anchors its “tall tale” musical narrative in two key points of knowable truth: first, Elmer McCurdy was a real person born in 1880; also, Elmer McCurdy’s mummified body was discovered almost 100 years later on display in a California amusement park. McCurdy is not a particularly likable or admirable hero (he’s mostly a self-serving middling bumbler) but, in Dead Outlaw, his story becomes a simultaneously cynical and sincere reckoning with questions of mortality — of what happens to us, who cares about us, and whether/why we might be remembered after we die. Produced by Audible.com to be effective as a work of “audio theatre,” the musical adopts a troubador-style approach to tell the McCurdy’s tale through a thrilling constellation of songs that reflect a pastiche of distinctly "American" musical styles (most in the "Americana" vibe but also including some serious rockabilly, torch, and Vegas crooner modes) all of which subtly chart the theatrical passage of historical time. This concert-conceit also allows for whoever happens to be singing lead in the onstage band to step in as narrator, thereby heightening the theatrical distance between the story and its telling and deftly preventing the show from dipping into the simplistic empathy-potholes that musicals as "affect machines" can be so prone to. A smart, interesting, surprising, moving, funny, haunting story about the American way of death, all bundled inside some excellent tunes.
see also…
Sara Holdren’s review at Vulture
Christopher Isherwood’s review at The Wall Street Journal
Five: The Parody Musical
Book and Lyrics by Shimmy Braun and Moshiel Newman Daphna. Additional Lyrics and Original Music by Billy Recce. Directed and Choreographed by Jen Wineman • Off Broadway • Theatre 555, New York City • March 2024.
A raucous (and raunchy) musical-comedy entertainment that stands as a fascinating time capsule of our historical moment, not just in terms of content (the perversities of Donald Trump’s tenure as an era-defining public/political figure) but also in terms of form. FIVE aptly bills itself as “a parody musical” and, for the entirety of its brisk and energetic 80 minutes, FIVE exploits the dramatic scenario (and some of the melodies) of the hit Broadway musical SIX to — in sketch-comedy style — comment on Trump’s antics while also, in the deep cut Forbidden Broadway tradition, jokily riffing on the excesses of Broadway musical styles, all executed with at the giddy crassness familiar to aficionados of later-night drag, cabaret, or underground comedy shows. While FIVE benefits from the ambitions, skill, and commitment (to the many bits) demonstrated by both its cast and creative team, it is tricky — exhausting? — to always have two (or three, or four, or more) lines of parodic commentary constantly running so many overlain references all the time. Billy Recce's original music was captivating, demonstrating a genuine flair for pastiche, and the cast — a mix of vets and newbies — all major musical comedy chops. (Veteran drag performer Jasmine Rice Labeija, as the unofficial sixth wife, is a standout leading the megashtik/megamix number toward the end.) A consistently diverting, if intermittently cringey, entry into the always evolving canon/tradition of deep-cut parody musical entertainments.
see also…
The Hill’s Miranda Nazzaro reports on the fact of a “Trump musical”
Our Town’s Michelle Willens reports on FIVE’s extension
Sunset Baby
Written by Dominique Morriseau. Directed by Steve H. Broadnax III • Off Broadway • Signature Theatre, New York City • March 2024.
A fascinating reminder of how Dominique Morriseau’s plays tease expectations of and for realism as a theatrical mode, and how Morriseau reliably mixes (and remixes) realism’s familiar ingredients in startlingly propulsive ways. In Sunset Baby’s story of a young woman’s fraught reunion with her recently-incarcerated/formerly-revolutionary father, we encounter realism’s most familiar triangle (two men vying to influence the decisions of a woman) in addition to a possibly lost but potentially life-changing inheritance; unresolved familial trauma; an as yet unfired gun; and any number of partially concealed motives and secrets and mysteries to stir the audience’s curiosity. (On the bus ride home after the show, I kept thinking of Sunset Baby’s three characters as steel balls unloosed within a pinball machine, bumping and bouncing and colliding, urgently seeking big reward but also always keenly alert to the risk of being fully sunk.) And though I longed for this production to lean further into Sunset Baby as a “history play” — so as to amplify Nina’s specificity as a black girl/woman who came of age in the 1980s/90s amidst the violent cultural backlash to the revolutionary promises of the 1960s/70s — the consistently compelling performances by Russell Hornsby, Moses Ingram, and J. Alphonse Nicholson deepened my experience of this particular (perhaps even peculiar) riff on realism by Morriseau.
see also…
Helen Shaw’s richly informative review in the New Yorker
playwright/writer Liz Appel in conversation with Dominique Morrisseau at Vogue
My Mama and the Full-Scale Invasion
Written by Sasha Denisova. Translated and with set design by Misha Kachman. Directed by Yury Urnov • Regional • Wilma Theater, Philadelphia • REMOTE (stream of previously recorded performance) • March 2024.
Ukrainian playwright Sasha Denisova (both playwright and character) flees Moscow for Poland at the outset of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and begs her 81 year old mother Olga to join her. But Olga refuses, insisting that her continued presence in Kyiv is somehow essential to the Ukrainian resistance. What follows is a wildly theatrical ride that is as experimental as it is political, as tenderly sentimental as it is incisively critical, with Olga's life story distilling the recent history of Ukraine, beginning the ravages of World War II, coming to maturity in the Soviet era, continuing through the dissolution of the USSR and to the rise of Putin. Onstage, Denisova's Olga ("my mama" — vividly portrayed by Holly Twyford) embodies the story of modern Ukraine even (or especially) when confronting the incomprehensible "full-scale invasion" that has, in some ways, been ongoing for the entirety of Olga’s life. A stirring mix of reality, history, and fantasy — twining the genuinely funny and deeply terrifying — that stages a memorably theatrical testimonial to Ukrainian resilience and resistance over the last century. [an aside: though I did have tickets to see My Mama and the Full-Scale Invasion in person in early February, my schedule interrupted my ability to do so. Thankfully, Wilma Theater has remained committed to providing remote access to their mainstage productions, both in partnership with the League of Live Stream Theatre, which streamed My Mama’s four final performances at Wilma, and by making a recorded performance available about a month after the production closes.]
see also…
freelance journalist Emily Couch’s Moscow Times review of the Woolly Mammoth production
this profile of the Wilma production at BillyPenn/WHYY by veteran Philly reporter Jane M. Von Bergen
PROGRAMMING NOTE: Attentive readers may have noted that my most recent post (indirectly) engaged my as yet unresolved ambivalence about using Substack as a hosting platform for #TheatreClique. I am still contemplating the possibility of migrating to another newsletter platform, but haven’t yet been able to identify one that feels right. That said, for the next few months, I have decided to prioritize the task of reactivating the #TheatreClique routine, with substantial format changes, as I also continue to explore the range of options of possible alternatives to this platform. Which is also to say: if you have recommendations or suggestions, I’m all ears… And thanks as always for your patience with my ongoing discovery process within and through this newsletter.
Until next time, dear #TheatreClique, please share this newsletter with those friends, colleagues and students who might appreciate the opportunity to encounter the many voices gathered in each week’s edition. Errors and oversights published in the newsletter will be corrected in the archival versions. And, in the meantime, keep clicking those links — good writing needs good readers and our theatre clicks count!