CLOSED Older Reviews
Yellowman closed May 20
@ the Billie Holiday Theater
Written by Dael Orlandermsith and directed by Timothy Douglas, staring Jessica Frances Dukes and Tyrone Mitchell Henderson. WOW ! - I saw the last performance of this and I can only say that I wish I had seen it earlier so that I could have told everyone I know to go see it. The plot centers on the corosive nature of colorism inside Black family and community - it claws into the deep center of racism and examines how people see and value themselves as less than or more than based on the shade of their skin. It is one big messy wound and the actors are on fire - shifting amoung multi-generations of characters. The writing brings moments of pure joy and exhileration with live to deep disoultion and despair.
Miss You Like Hell closed May 14
@ The Public
Daphne Rubin-Vega, Gizel Jimenez and Latoya Edwards were all wonderful, the with one caveat that while Ms. Rubin-Vega is an amazing and powerful actor - her singing voice is too soft to carry through a large performance space. I was seated on the stage - so not a huge problem for me but I felt bad for the people in the regular audience.
This had terrific staging & choreography - making the most of one of those spinning stages with lots of nimble movement by Gizel Jimenez !!
Ms. Hudes plays: Water by the Spoonful & Daphne's Dive are real tearjerkers - which I love but Miss You Like Hell is a musical and it couldn't be all depressing all the time. The result is something perhaps a but more like real life - it's great disappointments, it's triumphs, it's simple joys and small resentments. Jesse Green, the NYTimes reviewer seemed to find that irrirating. I don't really get that as even in the midst of pain there are moments of kindness, or levity and this script captures that.
The story itself is timely in many ways - not just in terms of our debate about immigration but also in how it illustrates the way that structural racism intersects with the criminal justice system. The story is very common, immigrants deported because of an old and small infaction that many White people would have been able to avoid or make go away. Also timely given New York State debate regarding legalization of recreational marijuana.
Given that it has closed - here is the primary Spoiler Alert - It ends with a large WALL sliding down the middle of the stage and seperating mother and daughter.
Overall very powerful stuff !!
Go to my ShowScore Page
https://www.show-score.com/i/71646-mary-siobhan
for reviews for other recently closed shows including:
- Trifles - excellent
- The Rainmaker - solid
- Replay - impressive and a surprise
- The Lucky Ones - intense & uneven
- Detained - good amateur production
- Dido of Idaho - good acting but over-wrought script
YERMA closed April 21, 2018
A Park Avenue Armory and Young Vic Production of Simon Stone's reimagined Federico GarcÃa Lorca’s 1934 play.
Stone directs at the Seventh Regiment Armory at 643 Park Avenue between 66th and 67th Streets
As the play ended the audience stood slowly as if they were stunned - in a good way. The clapping while lasting quite long was somehow subdued. I felt as though the performances by Billie Piper and Brendan Cowell were so amazing, so shattering that it somehow wasn't respectful enough to be rowdy with our appreciation.
If you enjoy intense drama - this is absolutely the play of the year
When my friend suggested we go see a Garcia Lorca play - I was not too hip to it . I was expecting dated melodrama and instead what we got was an amazing modern interpretation - a new play - inspired by Lorca.
It is a hard to find enough superlatives to describe how I feel. I left the theater with the kind of pained rush that I am both glad I no longer suffer (too many dramatic misadventures of youth & bad relationships ) but that I also miss for their pure intensity & addictive nature.
How did they do this ? How do they go on stage every day and survive these performances ? It's a MUST SEE
Dutch Masters closed April 21st
by Greg Keller, Directed by André Holland
@ the Wild Project 195 east 3rd Street
This play challenges stereotypes - but not in the way you would expect. Maybe it's racist unconscious bias that is feeding apprehension on the part of the White charcater and the audience Or... wait up maybe it's good judgement to be apprensive in this set of circumstances ?? What is the balance ? Then again maybe it's the whole backstory and how that's embedded in a racist economic system - but wait ?? maybe I'm trying to hard to justify the scenario. Go to the play and I me - you may spend the next few days figuring out what you think, going over & over it in your head & debating with friends who may have joined you at the theater.
You will laugh, cry & get tense and you will appauld the performances, the direction and the writing. Ian Duff is awesome !!
The time & place is well chosen to underscore racial tension & hurt. Sitting in the theater the racially motivated deaths of
Michael Stewart in police custody with spray paint
Michael Griffith's death in Howard Beach
& Yusef Hawkins's murder in Bensonhurst all came rushing back.
I remember being that lone white girl in the back of Reverand Daughtry's church at the meetings about Stewart's death and police violence. The play brought back the anger and confusion I felt about the veiw that Dave Dinkins was messing up - that seemed to be held so widely. It was a while before I could clearly name the racial bias that allowed him to be so easily labeled as ineffective and that created the space for Rudy Giuliani to wreck havoc with City government and all the Dinkins accoplishments - still so vastlty underappreciated.
I also loved the references to John Sayles's "Brother From Another Planet" (Watch all the White people disappear at 59th street on the D )
& Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing" & "Jungle Fever".
This Flat Earth closed April 29th
@ Playwright Horizons
by Lindsey Ferrentino
Directed by Rebecca Taichman
The play takes place a few days after is set a school shooting - and is set in some northeastern town presumably a suburb of Boston.
The author. Lindsey Ferrentino, does a great job with the erratic emotions that the school shooting survivors and their families are struggling to get through:
- Guilt that life goes on
- Fear of slowing down & letting grief immobilize you
- The blurry lines of class divisions in a time of loss and the way they re-emerge to separate us and make the ability to grieve together that much more difficult
The audience was in tears and then laughing and then again in tears as we rode the wave of emotions that the great cast made so authentic.
- Cassie Beck as a mom who has lost her daughter is one giant ball of anxiety and pain. Her skill and experience dominated scenes she was in.
- Lucas Papaelias as a committed dad who convey's the character's apprehension and bravery as he moves through hard and uncomfortable situations.
- Ella Kennedy Davis as a teenage survivor who can't align the way she feels with how she thinks she should - Wonderful new talent
The one disappointment was the ending which didn't work for me. Without describing it in detail - the author relies on a narrator to suggest future scenarios for the young protagonist - something that felt very unnecessary.
Harry Clarke with Billy Crudup at Minetta Lane
closed May 13th
Written by David Cale and Directed by Leigh Silverman
I understand the appeal of this role for Crudup as it demands that he transition rapidly between characters demonstrating his ability to shift much more than accents - body language, disposition etc. BUT the script just doesn't give him the ability to delve into the pain or joy of either the primary or secondary characters. God knows he does what he can with this material but the rapid fire transitions without any real probing leave us with a series of superficial observations.
The Stone Witch closed April 29th
@ the West Side Theater Upstairs
By Shem Bitterman, Directed by Steve Zuckerman
I saw the Stone Witch on the first night of previews. The dynamic between Dan Luria & Rupak Ginn needed more work to realize the play's emotional potential. If they can integrate their performances by the opening - it will be quite worthwhile.
The play take us on a dizzying journey with ups and downs of Lauria's character, Simon Grindberg - a renown children's picture maker and story teller. Think Maurice Sendak.
Simon has lost his ability to translate ideas, or find them out of his maze of thoughts. He vacillates between taunting and teaching the young artist who is sent to bring him out of himself. He fears the young man's fresh talent at the same time that he is able to challenge the young artist to be less conventional and more creative.
I wanted to care about Simon the way that the other characters do with their love of his past artistry & their forgiveness but ...........I couldn't get there with the cranky & selfish old man whose self-discipline and compassion was wanting.
Beautiful Magical STAGING
The Fall - St. Anne's Warehouse - closed March 25th
The plot centers on students fight for culturally competent curriculum, unbiased performance evaluation and worker rights at the University of Capetown post Apartheid.
Maybe it's because I am a professional organizer that I had such a bad reaction to this play. I have participated in every one of the internal debates that form the center of the story & watched them evolve & play out generation after generation. I can appreciate either parody of the left or honest stories of struggle but this is a story telling format that relies on a set of representational stereotypes: "the class privileged person of color" who doesn't quite get it, "the macho guy from a poor family" who wants to fight the man but doesn't respect women, etc. The list goes on and it is way too predictable. Honestly I found this clearly well-intentioned play to be sort of offensive and demeaning to the organizers & activists that actually undertook these efforts.
The only thing was real interest to me was using this as a way to begin contrasting & comparing the struggles depicted here from post apartheid South Africa to similar periods of campus organizing in the US over the last 50+ years.
The Low Road @ The Public Theater
closed April 1st
Written by Bruce Norris ( Clybourne Park )
Directed by Michael Greif ( Dear Evan Hansen, Next to Normal)
Bruce Norris's The Low Road takes on the premise of modern capitalism and lays it's cruelty bare in two and a half hours of well constructed and silly humor - as narrated by Adam Smith.
Over the last 2 years New York theatergoers have seen a wonderful series of plays exposing structural systems of racial oppression, and the persistence of sexism. For the most part these plays have also tackled class but none as directly as The Low Road.
The Low Road situates white supremacy and male superiority inside capitalism, as natural and cruel outcomes of a system built on raw self-interest. While class may be over-emphasized here, we are overdue for a play that so clearly makes the connection between the lack of humanity in Adam Smith's philosophy and today's wealth imbalance and inequality.
A young man "Jim" is the lead role, the anti-hero. It's hard not to want a more clearly vile character from the writer, the director, and the actor. I suppose that would be easier - too easy. The Low Road isn't letting us off - it's making us confront that the evil in this story - in our society - results from embracing a purely self-interested way of being. So Norris does not give us an inherently and unusually sinister character. It is the philosophy and the system built on those ideas that are the root of all evil. When a person & a society - embrace the premise of pure self-interest than that person & that society is ensuring that some will suffer so that others can succeed as they say in the play notes: "One person's profit is another person's loss"
Believe it or not Norris keeps a healthy sense of humor through-out - at one point jesting about the utility of critiquing capitalism with the an affluent audience
Truly fantastic ensemble cast with some great fresh talent and many serious veterans.
Chris Perfetti -as Jim (seen in Cloud Nine - fantastic performance at the Atlantic Theater company's 2015 production) Six Degrees of Separation, Everybody) strikes an interesting combination of making us despise his character and feel sorry for his clueless nature.
Susannah Perkins as Constance & other roles (Rape Of The Sabine Women and The Wolves) really captured my attention - her energy sort of jumped off the stage !
Harriet Harris - multiple roles - Tony Winner for performance in Thoroughly Modern Millie
Kevin Chamberlin - multiple roles - 3 time Tony Nominee Charlie in Dirty Blonde, Horton in Seussical , Uncle Fester in The Addams Family.
Daniel Davis as Adam Smith - recognizable from countless roles - theater, film and TV. Known for the character of Niles in The Nanny.
An Ordinary Muslim
New York Theater Workshop
written by Hammaad Chaudry
Directed by Jo Bonney
The cast has no weak spots with an absolute knock out performance by Sanjit De Silva in the lead role of Azeen Bhatti.
Azeem's struggle to find dignity and his own voice is pained and beautiful and perfectly realized by De Silva.
The writing is exquisite - there are layers upon layers of motivations and dilemmas. You becomes deeply involved with the characters.
It would be possible to remove the characters from this specific setting and traditions. They could be plopped down in a myriad of other racial and religious contexts & the same dynamics of power imbalance in gender roles and tension between the community and the confinement of organized religion could ring true.
BUT the real power of this play is the way that the author examines these more universal problems inside the specific legacy of colonization & partition of India and the decades of modern racism and Islamophobia.
Closed March 25th
the US Premiere of the Royal Court Theatre production of
HANGMEN
Atlantic Theater Company - closes March 25th
Written by MARTIN MCDONAGH, Directed by MATTHEW DUNSTER
Linda Gross Theater, 336 West 20th Street
Run time: 2 hours and 15 minutes with 1 brief intermission
HANGMEN is going to have a hard time living up to the hype, the expectations set for the next outing from Martin McDonagh are steep - but it's a fine night out with a good twisted sense of humor and an amazing ensemble cast.
This is not tremendously deep nor is it intended to be but it's setting in the sixties is both honest and critical about the era's prevalent sexual and racial bias and that is accomplished through dialogue without any great plot points.
This is a really accessible and yes - formula script - but hey - that's why it works. At this stage in his career McDonagh doesn't have to prove anything - just sit back and enjoy.
Big staging !!! - Truly more than you would expect at an off Broadway venue & best I have ever seen at the Atlantic
Johnny Flynn gives a truly fantastic performance - right down to the way he holds his jacket ! - Closed on March 25th - but expect a Broadway run in 2019
A Small Oak Tree Runs Red
Billie Holiday Theater - closed March 4th
Written by Lekethia Dalcoe and Directed Harry Lennix
The plot centers on the horrific lynching of Mary Turner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Turner
It is set in a purgatory that represents our country's inability to overcome it's racist past because of our inability to confront the cruel facts of white supremacy and it's consequences for the soul of America
The staging is eerie and beautiful.
The actors were magnificent! - They each gave deeply felt performances that displayed a full range of emotion & the male parts required tremendous physical endurance and agility.
The play is just a bit over-written & the direction was a bit too loud - there were points where either less dialogue or a quieter agony and anger would have been more effective
I appreciated the direct call for reconciliation if not reparations as I am tired of the "polite subtlety" of many works of art that let the viewer off the hook.
So privileged to have been there as the actors and playwright acknowledged some of Mary Turner's family was in the audience
Assassins by THEATER 2020
Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim
Book by John Weidman - Closed March 25th
This low cost production ( no staging ) will make you marvel at the talent here in New York. The premise is a historical review of assassins and would be assassins of US Presidents. The story line puts entertainment above some of the more complicated and politicized aspects of these events and while that troubled me a bit .....it is after-all a silly musical & a very good one.
The songs are great but the truly amazing thing about this production was how strong the cast was. There were several performers who belong on the big stage - not in a college auditorium. Closed March 25th - but clearly productions by this surprising Theater group are worth getting to THE HOMECOMING QUEEN
Atlantic Theater Company - closed Feb 18th!
Written by NGOZI ANYANWU & Directed by AWOYE TIMPO
Atlantic Stage 2, 330 W 16th Street between 8th & 9th avenues.
Run time: 1 hour and 45 minutes, no intermission
Ngozi Anyanwu's story begins with the uncomfortable arrival of Kelechi, an americanized Nigerian woman, to her affluent but traditional African home. The culture clash just scratches the surface of what lays beneath her trepidation and anxiety. Unfolding in layers the script gives the lead, played by Mfoniso Udofia, the ability to show many parts of who Kelechi is, might have been and would like to be.
This is some intense drama exploring regret, fear, vengeance, longing - it will leave you considering how trauma has shaped your life choices and how you might better resolve painful memories.
The play is particularly relevant as the Me Too movement explodes and many of us are revisiting painful memories of sexual violence.
The four primary actors are tremendous. I hope to see much more of Segun Akande - his performance had a kind of power and depth that I feel days later.
The use of a chorus is a great choice - fantastic vehicle for setting the location & culture without unnecessary dialogue or elaborate staging.
PlayBill says Mfoniso Udofia is "truly excited to make a return to acting" - She is the author of Sojourners & Her Portmanteau - two incredible plays about a Nigerian-American family's experience of migration.
Be the look out for the rest of her Ufot cycle !!
HINDLE WAKES
Mint Theater Company - closed February 17th
by Stanley Houghton, Directed by Gus Kaikkonen
at the Clurman at Theater Row - 410 W 42nd Street
Sexual freedom for women has changed dramatically - but has it?
Depending on your own experience you may see the subject matter as mundane or immediately relevant. This is one in a series of plays tackling the subject of economic dependency of women that the Mint has show cased over the last several years.
Jonathan Hogan gives another brilliant turn here in the role of Nathaniel Jeffcote. I was lucky enough to see him in the Mint production of LONDON WALL and the Atlantic's production of HOLD ON TO ME DARLING. His character here is not entirely unlike that of Mr. Walker from "London Wall" but the way he brings two really different interpretations to similar characters - well - that's what acting is about.