All That Jazz

For many Americans, the height of the Jazz Age undoubtedly reached its apex in the Roaring Twenties; particularly, when the Harlem Renaissance had both black and white night owls of the country flocking to the neighborhood's mysterious speakeasies and smoky basement-level dens for some of the best live music New York City had to offer. However, for playwright John Attanas, the very new, percussive sounds of jazz was only just beginning to find its groove, as the country moved into the early 1950s. Such is the world of Attana's newest work, All Gone West.

Set in post-war New York City, we meet Sam Samos (Joseph Robinson), a young and handsome war vet who learns about the fast-paced rhythms of the city—and of course jazz—from his fellow vet and black saxophone player Sonny Green (Jesse Means). Not long after settling in the city, Sam finds himself falling for Mary (Kristen French), a beautiful secretary at City College, whom he encounters one night when she walks into his bar with an older man, Joe (Glen Williamson), a professor at the college with alcoholic tendencies. They hit it off, and after Sam's persistence, Mary gives in and they begin a courtship, leaving Joe to his own devices.

The two lovebirds eventually marry despite their clear differences: Sam, an idealistic modern, is intent on one day opening his own jazz club, while Mary leans towards the conventional, with no high ambitions and generally happy with the lot she is given. These differences start to strain their marriage as Sam finally makes his dream come true, with the help of his friend Willie (Anthony Bosco), a fellow gambler whose questionable connections provides Sam's dream the financial help it needs. His club—christened The Blind Spot—starts off smoothly enough until Sam has trouble booking jazz acts that would draw crowds. He looks to Sonny, who by now has been approached with a record deal, but also has been nursing a drug addiction. As the bills start piling up, Sam desperately attempts to get by with some further help from Willie, as well as the hire of a prostitute (Kristen Booth). Ultimately, their business folds, and the two decide to follow the national pilgrimage West, where better—if only practical—prospects lay ahead.

Told in a magical realist-style, with the two lovers narrating between scenes, West's mood is evocative of the film noir genre that was popular during that era, and particularly called to mind films like Sweet Smell of Success and The Big Sleep. Just as the genre plays with contrasts, so does the thematic through-line of the play itself: the conventional versus the unconventional, new versus old. This is reflective not only in the fact that jazz inherently defies convention, but also in the differences between the characters—in particular, that of the ambitious Sam, and the content Mary. In their respective leading roles, both Robinson and French seem plucked straight out of the period. From the way Robinson's cool vibe to French's spot-on "New Yawk" accent, they embody stars of a bygone era. Cementing these solid performances were the supporting cast. Means' Sonny is confident and cool, yet belies a vulnerability. Another vulnerable portrayal was that of Williamson, whose alcoholic Joe displayed his weaknesses from the very beginning. Both characters each succumbed to their addictions, but their respective arcs are buoyed by the performances of both actors. Finally, Booth, whom perhaps had the most difficult task of the night, portraying multiple characters, also proved to be another strong presence onstage.

Also vital in setting the overall mood of the play was the presentation itself: the set designed by Andrew Diaz was naturally minimal in the modest performance space. Despite these limitations, the audience was nevertheless transported in time. Furnished by a simple brick wall structure, plastered onto which are various vintage posters, featuring advertisements for department store Gimbels and the Aqueduct racetrack. The use of various props—which include a dining table set and other pieces such as vintage glass soda bottles, newspapers and telephones—also help in differentiating between locales and situations. Nicholas Staigerwald's costumes added another dimension dressing the actors in various sartorial styles that were typically in vogue at the time, and worthy of any Modcloth shopper's envy today—particularly, a monochrome polka-dot one-piece bathing suit Mary dons towards the end. Of course, the element that perhaps had the most impact was the live jazz band, which brought to life the era in which the characters lived, and provided a romping soundtrack to the story.

A play about all kinds of losses—from the old to the new; the death of New York and the rise of the East Coast—All Gone West is certainly anything but your average show.

All Gone West ran from March 28 to April 18 at Teatro Circulo (64 East 4th St. between 2nd Ave. and Bowery). For more information on this production, visit the show's website: http://allgonewest.org/.

A Visit to the Underworld

There’s a subtle clue on the chairs: the packet of two Saltines. As the audience enters the low-ceilinged basement space, with its molded, convex design, the crackers sit on each chair, along with an odd token—perhaps an old postcard, or an old photograph, or an object such as a miniature sewing machine. To the left of the seating area for Jarring, the peculiar and unsettling solo show written and performed by Tracy Weller, is an L-shaped room with an industrial sink. Trays of dirt sit in the sink as Weller’s character silently uses a mortar and pestle to grind powders and pour them gingerly into clean Mason jars. She pours milk into the dirt.

After preparations, she takes a frayed ledger, clutches it to her bosom, and walks to the front playing space. Smiling with satisfaction, she says, “Good morning.” And then she pulls back the curtain on the space to reveal metal shelves full of Mason jars with powder in them, all neatly aligned. She begins a hasty, breathless lecture: “To begin: CANNING. But not a can. The act of. ‘To can is just the verb. BUT, they are not cans, obviously. There’s an enormous difference.” Her lecture becomes more disjointed and emphatic. The cans, of course, are glass: “the Mason jar, an elusively simple and elegant preservation system.” We are told that the jar was patented by John Landis Mason in November 1858.

The woman goes off on tangents rather easily. “Footnote, yes. There were others with their patents we need to acknowledge. Yes, fine. Kerr with his wide-mouth jars. The Ball Brothers (cutthroat entrepreneurs, latched on like ticks, launched into high-gear mass production). Those Ball boys, of course, were thieves and drunks….” It soon becomes apparent that she is unbalanced, doctrinaire, obsessed with the history of food preservation, jars, and canning. She assumes various identities as she describes the history. She’s dismissive, overeager, pained—in short, the part is a tour de force for Weller, and she makes the most of it.

Soon her lecture is finished; she returns to the sink area; then it begins again. Gradually, though, her demeanor changes. Slowly we are able to piece together what has happened to her in this forgotten basement. Although this solo show is more challenging to follow than many plays, it’s theatrical nonetheless. The plot here takes a back seat to character. At times, it is frustrating to follow her diseased mind—the crackers are descriptive, if you manage to make the connection—and sometimes the repetition is wearying, but Justin and Christopher Swader’s sets and lighting create an unsettling mood, and Joel Bravo’s sound design contributes eerie, distant clanks of metal. They help on this journey to a strange underworld with a lunatic as guide.

The production is the first by Mason Holdings, a company that describes itself as dedicated to preservation of all kinds" and which preserves "stories, people, places and moments and ideas—before they vanish into oblivion." That may sound didactic, but director Kristjan Thor keeps the pace varied. Weller’s obsessed figure apostrophizes to Mason (“Oh, Dr. Mason, you make a very elusive jar!"), and to the imaginary audience (“Our hero’s favorite color? Great question!”), delivers the history of preservation and contamination, and becomes both more distraught and ecstatic. “Ball and Kerr and other smiling wide-mouthed thieves in the night,” she exclaims, “but never another, any, any other, holding and sealed, tending and taking care, our little lives—in a jar! All in a jar! A Mason jar!” 

The drama provides Weller with a wide range of emotions to encompass. The disjointed exclamations, the leaps of imagination and changes of subject, the addresses to the audience and the drifting into reverie, give the experience an unsettling and impressionistic air. Although the plot is simple, there’s lots of information to process. Is there an important point? Perhaps not, but like all good theater, Jarring will leave you haunted by the experience.

The Mason Holdings production of Jarring plays through May 17, with evening performances at 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday and on Monday; matinees are Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $35 and may be purchased online at http://jarringnyc.eventbrite.com.

Troubles in Mind

Catholicism and politics are at the forefront of Nate Rufus Edelman’s bittersweet drama The Belle of Belfast, being given a compelling production at the Irish Repertory Theatre. Edelman follows a small Catholic community in the Northern Ireland capital in 1985 as they negotiate the dominant strands of the troubles and how deeply they are ingrained in people’s lives.

The focus is on Father Ben Reilly (Hamish Allan-Headley), a 35-year-old priest, and his relationship to parishioners, two in particular. One is Emma Malloy, an elderly lady with a shaky grasp of sin. Embodied with warmth and earnestness by Patricia Conolly, the befuddled Emma stretches herself trying to find mistakes in her behavior, as Reilly repeatedly assures her that she hasn’t sinned. Her confession of taking a sip of whisky—Bushmills, she says—falls flat after Reilly assures her that a sip of whiskey doesn’t require penance. Then, conscious of the smallest political error, Emma makes a further clarification: it was poteen, not Bushmills. “I would never touch a Protestant whiskey,” she says.

Under director Claudia Weill, the wry humor of these scenes is a welcome contrast to the main event, which involves Emma’s great-niece, Anne (Katy Lydic), a red-haired knockout who has little use for Catholicism, let alone the church. Anne attends confession at her aunt’s instigation with great reluctance and scorn. She swears and makes clear to Reilly that she does drugs, has sex, and generally ignores church teachings. Her drifting moral compass is a result of the killing of both her parents in a bombing. That alone isn’t the most hurtful part—it’s that people regarded her parents as martyrs, although they were innocent bystanders. Anne loathes the politics that elevate her parents to political heroes and override her personal loss.

Reilly feels kinship toward Anne because he was also orphaned. After his parents were killed in a car accident, Reilly was determined to become a priest to make them proud. Unfortunately, Anne knows no boundaries. “Do you have anything to confess?” asks Reilly, and she responds, “No, I just came here to give you a blow job.” It’s the kind of thing an unruly teenager would say, but Lydic looks about 10 years older than the 18-year-old character, and it hampers some of the credibility of the play. However, Allan-Headley as Reilly is a compelling presence: sympathetic, vulnerable and masculine. The actor conveys the cleric's internal struggles, and he has the gift of charisma that makes it clear why Anne falls for Reilly. (All the actors, incidentally, have persuasive Irish accents.) 

John McDermott’s set nicely echoes the compartmentalization of emotions that are hemming in the principals. When the characters are not in the confines of the confessional, there are two primary playing areas. One is the small parish apartment that Reilly shares with Father Dermott Behan (Billy Meleady), a firebrand Sinn Fein partisan who has made peace with abnegation—no sex, but plenty of alcohol—and  expects to find a heaven where he can surf. The other half of the stage shows a concrete dock and a high wall topped by barbed wire, where Anne frequently meets her friend Ciara (Arielle Hoffman) to talk about boys and sex. Both spaces are prisons for their respective characters.

Ultimately, Anne (her nickname provides the title of the play) leads Reilly astray, but not for long, and the aftermath isn’t what one might expect. The doctrinaire Behan, who hears Reilly’s confession, holds fast to the outlook that plagued Belfast in 1985: “I’ve dedicated ma entire existence to a united Catholic Ireland and you have the gall to betray your church and your country…” But Reilly understands that political and religious doctrine can stand in the way of success as a priest. In a lovely coda, Anne and Reilly meet a few years later, and each has moved on from the experience, both physically and mentally. Anne has found happiness. Reilly has found solace. It’s a satisfying close to this poignant tragedy.

Nate Rufus Edelman’s The Belle of Belfast plays through June 7 at the Irish Repertory Theatre’s temporary home at DR2 Theaters (103 East 15th St.) off Union Square. Evening performances are at 7 p.m. on Tuesday through Thursday and 8 p.m. on Friday and Saturday. Matinees are at 3 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday. For tickets, visit www.irishrep.org or call the box office at 212-727-2737.

Middle-Class Morality on the Block

Compared with A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler, Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts usually has gotten short shrift as a dramatic document about women’s rights, even though its protagonist, Mrs. Alving, is as modern and self-sufficient as any Ibsen heroine. Richard Eyre’s astonishing adaptation, which runs only 90 minutes without intermission at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, confirms that Ibsen’s 1882 play is as timely as ever. None of the three acts feels foreshortened—it’s a full meal. It is also a magnificent production.

Both Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw, who championed the Norwegian playwright’s work in England, kicked Victorian melodrama to the curb, as it were, and introduced politically and socially conscious realism to the stage. At BAM, Eyre makes one feel the full weight of the change.

With only five characters, Ghosts also displays Ibsen’s characteristically tight plotting. Lesley Manville’s Helene Alving has welcomed her son Oswald (Billy Howle) home to Norway after has lived abroad for years. His father has died, and a new orphanage named for him is to be dedicated by Pastor Manders, a family friend, and, it turns out, someone with whom Helene had been in love. Indeed, she had left her husband, Captain Alving, with the intention of taking up with Manders, then a divinity student. Though the spark between them might easily have been fanned into a flame, he persuaded her to return to her home, where she remained as Alving’s seemingly loyal wife, though she eventually sent Oswald away to boarding school. Two additional characters, old Jacob Engstrand, a coarse and brutal carpenter with the idea of opening a “home away from home” for sailors, and his daughter, Regina, who works at the orphanage and loathes her father, are on hand as well.

As Mrs. Alving, Manville, a veteran of gritty realism in many Mike Leigh films, shows a character with personal composure and limited patience for cant. When Will Keen’s straight-laced, judgmental Manders notices pamphlets about feminism and free love on her parlor table, he takes her to task, but she challenges him—has he read them? “One must rely on the views of others,” he says, a response that echoes today in arguments involving morality and the church.

An early contretemps over whether the new orphanage should be insured provides an example of Ibsen’s mordant humor—something that director Eyre doesn’t stint on, in spite of the playwright’s reputation for seriousness. Manders understands the importance of insuring the new building, but he’s afraid that taking out insurance will imply that God can’t be trusted to protect the structure. When Helene finally acquiesces to his foolish view, Manville unveils the character’s frustration in the way she opens a desk drawer and tosses her spectacles and a blotter in. And Keen brings out every bit of Manders’s cluelessness, yet draws sympathy for a man who adheres to his hidebound principles, whose so-called morality has exposed his venality. The ghosts of the title, says Helene to Manders, are “the things that come out of the past…not just the people that haunt us, but what we inherit from our parents: dead ideas, dead customs, dead morals. They hang around us and we can’t get away from them.”

The strong stream of anticlericalism that runs through Ghosts (along with mentions of incest, syphilis, and sexual freedom) made it as big a target for condemnation as A Doll's House, and even today one can feel the earth tremble as Oswald excoriates Manders and his views. Oswald, who has lived in Paris among bohemians, espouses free love and expresses his disdain of Norwegian “worthies” who come to Paris looking for the sexual indulgences that they disapprove of at home. (One feels at times that Ibsen, who lived abroad for more than 20 years and carried on with a much younger woman, is speaking through Oswald.)

Bourgeois morality is also represented by Charlene McKenna’s Regina. She is ready for middle-class morality, and is attracted to Oswald—and vice versa. She wants the orphanage job to support herself and stay away from her father, who’s a drinker and a laborer. Old Jacob, too, schemes for advancement, but he also suspects that society would rather keep him in his place, so he latches on to Manders as an ally. One of the open questions in Eyre’s production concerns whether Manders or Engstrand is responsible for a disaster that upsets everyone’s plans.

The production, from the Almeida Theatre in London, looks terrific. Peter Mumford supplies crucial lighting, at two points a saturated red, and Tim Hatley’s set points up the compartmentalized lives of the people involved. Most important, Manville’s last scene shows that Ibsen still has the power to deliver a kick to the gut. 

Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts runs through May 3 at BAM, Harvey theater. Evening performances are at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, and matinees are at 3 p.m. on Sunday. Tickets may be obtained by calling 718-636-4100 or at the BAM box office at 651 Fulton St. in Brooklyn.

O Most Dread Dane

If you have seen Hamlet several times and are likely to be bored with a straightforward rendering, then perhaps the Classic Stage Company’s new modern-dress production, directed by Austin Pendleton, is the one for you. It’s full of bizarre ideas to a fault.

Where to begin? Well, one of the great revenge tragedies no longer has a hero who kills his enemies. This Hamlet is not directly responsible for the deaths of Laertes or Claudius. In the duel between Hamlet and Laertes, the latter cuts Hamlet with the poisoned rapier, then lays it down on the floor. Hamlet charges him like a bull; they wrestle; and Laertes accidentally rolls on top of his sword and wounds himself on the poisoned tip. As for Claudius, the action of Hamlet stabbing the king is omitted. After Gertrude lies dead, Hamlet hands the king the poisoned cup and commands: “Here, thou incestuous, murderous, damnèd Dane/Drink off this potion.” Claudius, berated into suicide, quaffs the drink.

The one person this Hamlet does kill is Polonius, but that’s an accident. Still, weirdness is injected here too. Polonius’s ghost walks out from behind the arras, crosses the stage, and then exits. By comparison, the Ghost of Hamlet’s father—a character who actually has lines—is invisible in this production. Invisible ghosts have been used in tandem with dialogue spoken on tape, but here the Ghost’s words are eliminated as well, as if it were entirely in Hamlet’s imagination (although Francisco, Bernardo, and Marcellus speak of seeing it). And Ophelia’s ghost appears unexpectedly to hover around her own gravesite. So extra-textual ghosts are real, but Shakespeare’s real Ghost doesn’t exist?

If Pendleton has a concept, it appears to be that Hamlet is insane from the get-go, that his imagination is working overtime. That might explain why an uncut, multi-tiered wedding cake sits upstage, some two months after "the funeral meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage table.” Either the clean-up crew has been on strike, or it’s a symbol weighing on Hamlet’s diseased mind.

Still, troublesome ideas can sometimes be overcome by outstanding acting. But Peter Sarsgaard seems determined to sledgehammer the meter of the verse into little pieces. Actors such as John Gielgud, accounted one of the great 20^th-century Hamlets, and directors such as John Barton have advised that if one follows the scansion of Shakespearean verse, it will buoy the actor and the sense will reveal itself. Sarsgaard doesn’t, and he sinks like a stone. He puts in pauses every three words or so. On “a little more than kin…and less than kind,” the delay kills the pun. Moreover, his delivery is so halting throughout that one suspects he hasn’t got the words down. Certainly he’s not letter-perfect in the crucial “To be or not to be,” and lyricism is repeatedly sabotaged.

Gielgud, who directed Richard Burton in the role on Broadway, wrote in Stage Directions that “a Gertrude older than 50 must surely be unconvincing on the stage.” Pendleton has chosen Harris Yulin and Penelope Allen as Claudius and Gertrude. With the Internet at one’s fingertips, it gives nothing away to say that both are in their eighth decade. When Yulin’s skillfully spoken but lethargic Claudius tells Hamlet he wants him to stay at court rather than leave for Wittenberg, you might suspect that it’s because he has his eye on Hamlet as a caregiver.

Pendleton’s casting repeatedly creates inconsistencies. Hamlet’s school chums, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, are considerably younger, and Rosencrantz (Scott Parkinson) doubles as the Gravedigger, even though Jim Broaddus, an actor closer to the right age who is superb in smaller parts such as the Player King, would have been more apt. Glenn Fitzgerald as Laertes has a resonant voice and a presence that make one wish he had more to do. Unfortunately, although Hamlet claims to be “fat and scant of breath,” Sarsgaard is clearly in good shape. It’s Fitzgerald’s Laertes, supposedly an athletic and practiced swordsman, who is carrying a few extra pounds.

Ultimately, it’s Stephen Spinella’s Polonius who feels like the best-rounded character. He’s a dapper, instinctively shrewd courtier with warm feelings for his family. Still, the play isn’t called Polonius—though in the hands of Pendleton and Sarsgaard, it’s not so much Hamlet either. 

The Classic Stage Company production of Hamlet runs through May 10; evening performances are at 7 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday and Sunday, and 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Matinees are at 3 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Tickets are $65 and may be purchased by visiting www.classicstage/.org.

Folk Song Flashback

Anyone who wants a nostalgic journey into the history of folk music in America can find it in James O’Neil’s Lonesome Traveler, a generous program of famous songs (and some lesser-known ones) delivered in the personae of their most renowned performers, including Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Woody Guthrie, the Weavers, and the Kingston Trio. Subtitled A Journey Down the Rivers and Streams of American Folk, the show draws on music from a variety of native sources: gospel and spirituals, blues and folk, workers’ protests songs. Those from the baby boom generation will find much that’s familiar, as well as lesser-known works. 

As you might expect, the standards abound: “This Land Is Your Land,” “The Wabash Cannonball,” “John Henry” and “If I Had a Hammer,” “Hallelujah I’m a Bum,” and “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore.” The Kingston Trio sings “Tom Dooley” and their loony calypso hit “Zombie Jamboree.” (Pamela Shaw’s costumes nail the button-down, short-sleeve look for Justin Flagg, Nicholas Mongiardo-Cooper, and Matty Charles.) Singers from Lead Belly (Anthony Manough) to Odetta (Jennifer Leigh Warren) pop up in the wide-ranging retrospective.

Many of the singers accompany themselves on guitar, banjo, mandolin, and even washboard and spoons. First among them is Flagg, a.k.a. The Lonesome Traveler (all the performers have nicknames listed in the program, such as The Muse, The Activist, The Lady, The Man). The clean-cut Flagg brings energy and an aw-shucks demeanor to his roles: he’s initially Pete Seeger, and later a member of the Kingston Trio and the Limeliters, and he has a strong tenor voice. As the unofficial emcee for the evening, he makes a splendid host.

The musicianship in the Rubicon Theatre Company production can’t be faulted, and Dave Mickey, the multimedia designer, has rounded up iconic projections to accompany the songs: the Dust Bowl, Okies on the road, black churchgoers from early in the 20^th century, the civil rights marches of the 1960s, and a kaleidoscope of historical figures—LBJ, Nixon, Carter, JFK and Jackie in Dallas—and venues, such as the Hungry i, the Village Gate, Café Wha?, and various Newport Folk Festivals.

Mickey’s work is a huge help in locating when and where the singers are, since the script by O’Neil, who has also directed, jumps around in time, sometimes irritatingly. The show almost takes on the aspect of a collage with all the bits and pieces of information offered: mentions of McCarthyism, blacklisting, and cheating songwriters of royalties are thrown out casually. At one point Judy Collins explains that she’s singing a song with the Weavers that she won’t actually cover for another decade, in the 1960s. Later, Joan Baez (Jamie Drake, in a brown wig and a headband) pops up without being identified at all—the audience makeup skewed to older baby boomers, so perhaps it was judged unnecessary because Baez's outfit was recognizable, but one suspects that younger people with a liking for folk music would have appreciated some kind of introduction.

The performers seem to have been directed to continually ingratiate themselves, but at times it makes the tone excessively precious. Sing-alongs—and there are a few—are fine and engaging. But when Flagg announces meta-theatrically that a costume change is going to happen onstage during an instrumental interlude, it’s a postmodern intrusion. And during “Tom Dooley,” Mongiardo-Cooper grins unaccountably—outright jarring during a song about a man who’s going to be hanged, after all. 

But these are quibbles. This is fascinating musical history, the songs are gold, and the singer-actors inhabit their characters well. We’re told that Dylan’s introduction of an electric-guitar set at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 occasioned a violent outburst by Pete Seeger, who claimed it was the end of folk music. Seeger was right: an electric-guitar performance of "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" by Dylan impersonator Trevor Wheetman is all screeching emotion and scarcely intelligible, compared with the gentle melodies and the clear lyrics of the classic folk songs. Lonesome Traveler makes one long for the time when singers had something to say and wanted lyrics to be understood.

The Rubicon Theatre Company production of Lonesome Traveler plays at 59E59 Theatres through April 19. Evening performances are 7 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday, and Sunday (no evening performance April 19). Matinees are at 2 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday. To purchase tickets, call Ticket Central at 212-279-4200 or visit www.59E59.org.

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.