"My Man Kono" Tweaks the American Story

A thank you to the National Endowment for the Arts is prominently displayed on the cover of the program for My Man Kono, the new show that Pan Asian Repertory Theatre opened this week at A.R.T./New York Theatres.  

I winced when I saw it because now that the Trump administration has ordered the NEA to eliminate its grant program for underserved communities, withhold funds from organizations that promote diversity, equity and inclusion and discourage projects that criticize America in anyway, it’s unlikely that the NEA will be funding shows like My Man Kono anytime in the near future.

For playwright Philip W. Chung’s drama chronicles the real-life story of Toraichi Kono who immigrated to this country around the turn of the last century, worked as a chauffeur and general factotum for Charlie Chaplin and then just before WWII, was accused of being a spy for Imperial Japan. It’s a piece of American history little-known to most of us and Chung has gone all in on the research. Maybe too much so. 

The play, told in flashbacks, unfolds like the term paper of a student determined to earn an A+ in AP History. Chung makes the grade (it is instructive to learn that being relocated to internment camps wasn't the only hardship Japanese-Americans experienced before, during and after WWII) but Chung scores considerably lower when it comes to crafting a dramatic narrative. 

Because the play covers six decades of Kono’s life, the incidents he encounters and the people he meets are only sketchily drawn. And because seven of the eight-member cast play multiple roles it’s hard to latch on to any of them, be it Kono’s long-suffering wife or the third-rate actor who becomes his nemesis.  

Charlie Chaplin does stand out but that’s probably because most people who see the play will already have their own ideas—mainly positive—about the silent-movie icon. Chung and his director Jeff Liu know this and so they drop Chaplin into as many scenes as they can (his image even dominates the show’s logo). 

Conlan Ledwith does a good job of capturing the comedian’s onscreen mannerisms and real-life vocal patterns but devoting less space to Chaplin might have made more room for Chung and Liu to develop Kono’s character. 

Brian Lee Huynh gives an earnest portrayal of Kono but the Wikipedia entry I read when I got home (and the somewhat  rakish photo that accompanied it) suggests that the real Kono was a more dynamic and complex guy who naturally charmed officials both here and in Japan and who also delighted in his proximity to celebrity and the power that comes with it. 

But Chung has other things on his mind. The show's second act focuses on the 1948 deportation hearing on Kono’s involvement in passing military secrets to the Japanese. Chung clearly wants to use the case to illustrate the bias against immigrants and the anti-Asian racism that have long been a part of the American story. But in doing that he tamps down Kono's personality and leaves the question of his culpability in the espionage up in the air. 

Which is a shame because Kono’s story and those of other people from underserved or under-observed communities whose experiences also played a role in shaping the America of today are worth fully exploring—despite flaws in the subjects or in the storytelling—and there may now be fewer opportunities to get them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

"The Antiquities" is Superbly Up-to-Date

History, they say, is written by the winners and the winners in Jordan Harrison’s thought-provoking new play The Antiquities are the artificial intelligence entities that the play imagines will eventually replace human beings. The time seems to be somewhere in the late 22nd century and the setting is a history museum that gives the play its full formal title: A Tour of the Permanent Collection in the Museum of Late Human Antiquities. 

And so each of the play’s scenes represents an exhibit centered on a distinct time period, ranging from 1816 to 2240, in which humans wrestle in one degree or another with technology. The first exhibit is a re-creation of the now legendary evening in which Mary and Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and their friend the physician John Polidori challenged one another to come up with the best horror story. Mary won with her tale "Frankenstein" about a scientist who uses his skills to give life to an inanimate creature.  

Other exhibits focus on rural 19th century laborers adjusting to factory work, a 20th century family getting its first dial-up computer, 21st century techies fine-tuning the voice for a Siri-like digital assistant and a writer a few decades later consulting with her doctor about a digital implant that will make her smarter.

In each case trade-offs are made. The humans in every era believe that the new technology will make life easier, longer and perhaps may even develop a way to make them immortal. But at the same time, they are also giving up more and more control to the inanimate but increasingly powerful entities they’ve created.

Now I don’t usually go in for this kind of speculative sci-fi stuff but Harrison is the author of Marjorie Prime, a drama about a future in which holograms of the dead serve as companions to those left behind. It was so finely and sensitively rendered that it was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize (click here to read my review of it).  

And Harrison is just as effective here, refusing to give in to the usual dystopian tropes that fuel so many current movies and TV series but also sidestepping the future-is-ours optimism that dominated so much of the last century.  Instead he asks what makes humankind believe that evolution stops with us? (click here to read more of what he has to say).

He's aided by a cast of nine incredibly ambidextrous actors, who, with the help of Brenda Abbandandolo’s sly costumes—and what must be an army of quick-change dressers—transform themselves into dozens of distinct characters, sometimes so completely that they’re not recognizable from one scene to the next.  

The show’s set design by Paul Steinberg is sleekly futuristic, its lighting by Tyler Micoleau is nimble and its sound design by Christopher Darbassie creates a subtle soundscape that is just slightly—but totally appropriately—off-kilter. 

Holding it all together is the sure-handed direction of David Cromer and Caitlin Sullivan. I have no idea how they divided their directorial duties but the result is seamless. Without undermining the seriousness of the questions Harrison’s script raises or fabricating feel-good answers, they find a way to make room for the humor and the sexiness he’s also tucked into it. 

It's anyone's guess what some entity in the future might make of this play, a co-production of Chicago's Goodman Theatre, the Vineyard Theatre and Playwrights Horizons that has just been extended at Playwrights Horizons through March 2, but right now it’s a superb demonstration of what humans can do.  

 

"A Knock on the Roof" Pushes too Hard

When the Palestinian playwright Khawla Ibraheem began working on her one-woman show A Knock on the Roof a decade ago, it was a 10-minute monologue. Now the show, which is currently playing at New York Theatre Workshop, runs about 85 minutes and I wish I could have seen the shorter version. I don’t mean that to be a slam against the current show’s message. I’m just lamenting how it goes about delivering it.

The title refers to the Israeli military’s practice of dropping a small “warning” bomb on the rooftop of a building in Gaza or the West Bank to alert the inhabitants that they have just a few minutes to get out before a larger bomb will destroy the entire structure and everything in it. 

This story about one woman's attempt to live an ordinary life in the face of such extraordinary circumstances is particularly resonant right now after 15 months of Israel’s scorched-earth response to Hamas' Oct. 7 assault has led to the deaths of over 45,000 Palestinians and the displacement of nearly 2 million others.  

Ibraheem’s character Mariam is the young middle-class mother of a six-year-old son who has become obsessed with how she might respond to the “knock.”  And so she begins to rehearse grabbing up her son along with whatever necessities she can stuff into a backpack and making practice runs to see how far away she can get from danger. 

It’s a compelling set-up. And it’s a welcomed reminder that there are real people behind the statistics we see on the news, people who worry about serious things like how to deal with aged parents and frivolous ones like which skin care regimens really work just the way those of us in far less fraught situations do.

But Ibraheem and director Oliver Butler who is credited with developing this longer version with her (click here to listen to an interview about how they did it) don’t seem to know what to say once they’ve gotten our attention and so they just keep repeating the same things over and over again. 

My friend Lisa suggests that the repetitions might represent Mariam's mounting mania. It's a good theory but if that's the case, I wish Ibraheem and Butler had been able to make that clearer.

Instead, they introduce some other characters—Mariam’s mother who further complicates things by moving in with her daughter and grandson, her husband whose constant calls from abroad where he's studying become another hassle and their young son—but since Ibraheem is the only performer, she has to portray all of them, and I'm afraid she doesn't always make them distinct enough. 

To be fair, Ibraheem is an engaging performer but her accent and the pitch of her voice can make it difficult to understand some of the dialog, regardless of who’s supposed to be speaking.  And I just got tired of watching her pretend to run on NYTW’s bare stage. 

There are a few attempts to more actively involve the audience (some members are seated onstage, the lights are often left up and Ibraheem occasionally asks questions like how many underwear should she pack and then waits for people to answer) but, at least at the performance I attended, those interactions were awkward. The show's surprise ending was strained too.

A story as intrinsically powerful as this one doesn’t need a lot of gimmicks. It doesn’t need to be drawn out either. As the saying goes, sometimes less can be more.

5 Shows I Most Want to See in Spring 2025

Some theater-goers lust after seeing big-name stars and there will be plenty of them for those folks to see in the upcoming spring season, from theater-grown ones like Idina Menzel in Redwood, the original eco-musical that she co-conceived; to Hollywood imports like George Clooney, making his stage debut in Good Night, And Good Luck, a theatrical version of the 2005 movie he co-wrote about the showdown between the newscaster Edward R. Murrow and the demagogue Senator Joseph McCarthy. 

I like seeing stars too, but only when they come with good acting as Rachel McAdams did with her impressive performance in last season’s Mary Jane. But, as anyone who has caught my podcasts Stagecraft and All the Drama can tell you, I’m most turned on by playwrights and so the shows I’m always most eager to see are those by smart writers who have interesting things to say about the ways in which we try to make sense of—and make connections in—this complicated world in which we all live. 

So my spring preview is a little different from others I’ve been reading. I do want to see the shows that so many of my colleagues are touting but below are five that I’m really desperate to see:

LIBERATION by Bess Wohl @ Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre, starting Jan. 31: One of the things I most admire about Wohl is her refusal to write the same kind of play twice. She’s written a romcom about young Nazi lovers, a musical about porn stars and a comedy about people at a silent retreat in which only a couple of lines of dialog are ever spoken. This time out she's given herself the challenge of looking at women’s attempts to figure out what they want for themselves in two separate time periods set 50 years apart and I can hardly wait to see what she makes of that. 

GRANGEVILLE by Samuel D. Hunter @ Signature Theater, starting Feb. 4: There have recently been a slew of works—Blood Quilt, The Hills of California, even the excellent movie “His Three Daughters”—about siblings coming together to mourn a dying parent but it’s hard to find a more thoughtful or sensitive playwright working today than Hunter and so I’m really curious about what spin his play centered on two half-brothers played by Brendan Fraser and Brian J. Smith will bring to that theme.

PURPOSE by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins in a Steppenwolf production @ the Helen Hayes Theater, starting Feb. 25: Although he’s been turning out one provocative work after another over the past 15 years, it was last season’s production of Appropriate that put Jacobs-Jenkins on many theatergoer’s radar. It featured a dysfunctional white southern family with some skeletons in their closet. This new work is switching the focus to an equally troubled midwestern black family who will be brought to life by such catnip performers as LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Henry Lennix, John Michael Hill and Kara Young.

WINE IN THE WILDERNESS by Alice Childress @ Classic Stage Company, starting March 6: Back in the 1950s and '60s, the theater world wasn’t quite ready for the nuanced ways that Childress insisted on portraying black people in plays like Trouble in Mind and The Wedding Band. But as the success of recent revivals of those works have shown, Childress, who died in 1994 at the age of 77, was a master storyteller and so I'm sure you'll understand why I'm over the moon about the fact that the actress and producer La Chanze is making her directorial debut with Childress' two hander about an artist and the model he believes will help him create his image of black womanhood. 

FLOYD COLLINS music and lyrics by Adam Guettel and book by Tina Landau @ Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, starting March 27: It’s not just writers who create straight plays who draw me in. I’ve been waiting for years for a revival of Guettel’s musical which I missed during its brief 25-show run in 1996. Its story, based on the true 1925 incident of a cave explorer who set off a media circus when he got trapped underground, sounds intriguing; Landau, who is also directing, is a whiz at staging shows and the role of the explorer seems almost tailor-made for Jeremy Jordan who left The Great Gatsby to take the part. But it’s the chance to hear Guettel’s score live that has me chomping at the bit because as he’s shown with The Light in the Piazza and The Days of Wine and Roses, he knows how to play to both the minds and hearts of theatergoers like me.   

 

 

 

 

The 10 Shows That Spoke to Me in 2024

It’s that time of year when people like me who are lucky enough to see lots of shows are supposed to look back and draw up a list of the ones we consider to have been the best. But that’s always been tricky for me because “best” is such a subjective word. I've always believed that art is a conversation between the people who make it and those of us who receive it. So below are 10 shows that may or may not have been the best that appeared on the boards over the last 12 months but are the ones that truly spoke to me.

DEAD OUTLAW: You might not think that a show—a musical no less—centered around a corpse could charm anyone but composer David Yazbek, book writer Itamar Moses and director David Cromer turned the macabre saga of a bumbling outlaw whose mummified remains ended up as a sideshow attraction into a nuanced commentary on today’s obsession with true crime stories and an even more valuable meditation on death itself. It also featured a terrific toe-tapping score and a you-gotta-see-it-to-believe-it performance by Andrew Durand as the titular cadaver that all left me grinning. A Broadway run was recently announced so there will be another chance for us all to enjoy this one in the spring.

GYPSY: I’ve seen three of the four previous revivals of this classic 1959 musical about a mother who pushes her kids into show business and I marveled each time at the music by Jule Styne, the lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and the book by Arthur Laurents but I’ve never been as moved as I was this time as I watched Audra McDonald play Madam Rose not as a monster or even a self-involved stage mom but as a woman simply desperate to make a way for her girls in an unforgiving world. There were moments when, although they don’t look at all alike, that I'd have sworn I was looking at the brave yet vulnerable single mother who raised me.  

THE HILLS OF CALIFORNIA: Jez Butterworth also beautifully rendered the ineffable bonds that bind mothers, daughters and sisters to one another in this drama about a working-class British mother whose ambitious dreams for her four daughters cause her to make a decision that will haunt all five of them for the next two decades. Two separate quartets of actors played the sisters as teens and as grown women and under Sam Mendes deft direction, they were all terrific, particularly so when the younger versions sang swing-era songs in perfect close harmony. It’s a real shame that this one closed last weekend, far earlier than it should have.

MARY JANE: Back in 2017, I was so knocked out by the New York Theatre Workshop production of Amy Herzog’s play about a single mother caring for a severely ill child that I was instantly dismissive when I heard that Rachel McAdams, a movie actress who hadn’t appeared on stage since high school, was bringing the play to Broadway this year. Boy, was I wrong.  McAdams turned in an exquisitely calibrated performance that drove home the sustaining power of love in even the most dire of circumstances. It won't be the same but an audio version has just been released on Audible.

MAYBE HAPPY ENDING: This surprisingly charming tale about two humanoid robots who fall in love features an unexpectedly jazzy score and a wholly original book by Will Aronson and Hue Park, witty performances by Darren Criss and Helen J Shen and clever direction by the always inventive Michael Arden, who has found really smart ways to use the trendy technology of cameras and screens without sacrificing good storytelling. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that more and more theatergoers give it a shot because this one is really a special treat and deserves a good run.

MEDEA: RE-VERSED: Greek dramas don’t get done as much as, say, Shakespeare's do but this very clever rap version of Medea is a reminder of why those stories have held on for thousands of years. The tale of the princess who betrays her own people to help the Greek warrior Jason find the Golden Fleece but later murders their young sons when he casts her aside for another woman remains the same as it is in the Euripides version but playwright Luis Quintero updated the storytelling and demonstrated his love for classic theatrical forms with smart rhyming couplets and hip-hop emcees stepping in as the chorus. 

MOTHER PLAY: By this time, you’re probably thinking that I’m obsessed with mothers and will give a pass to just about any show sympathetic to them. Maybe. But Paula Vogel’s semi-autobiographical three-hander totally earns its place on this list—and in my heart. With unusually forgiving grace, it tracks four decades in the life of a not very good single mother who copes by guzzling gin, chain smoking and browbeating her children, both of whom eventually come out as gay. Under Tina Landau’s sensitive direction, Jessica Lange, Jim Parsons and Celia Keenan-Bolger gave performances that balanced the pathos of the family’s struggles with the humor they employed to survive them. 

OH, MARY: Campy humor isn’t usually my thing but Cole Escola’s bizarro-world version of Mary Todd Lincoln’s activities in the weeks leading up to the assassination of her husband is so delightfully daffy that I found it impossible to resist. And I clearly wasn't alone in that. For the show has been packing them in for months after making the surprising move from the Lucille Lortel uptown to the Hudson on Broadway. Escola, who has been deservedly drawing the lion’s share of the praise, has been given invaluable support by Sam Pinkleton’s pitch-perfect direction and by a totally game cast, especially Conrad Ricamora as a horny Abe Lincoln.

OUR CLASS: Inspired by true events, this story of how the Holocaust affected a group of Jews and Christians in one small Polish village over seven decades—from their grade school years to their days in nursing homes for the few who survived that long—is innately powerful but director Igor Golyak’s inventive stagecraft turned it into a potent cautionary tale about how people can act when faced with truly horrendous choices. It kept me thinking for weeks about what I might or might not do in similar circumstances.

SUFFS: What does a woman have to do to make her voice heard in this country? Or on Broadway? Shaina Taub won this year's Tonys for both the book and the score for her musical about the struggle to get American women the right to vote. A diverse all-female identifying cast played the hell out of it. Audiences cried and cheered during its climactic anthem “Keep Marching.” And yet, the show is closing just eight months after it opened. Luckily PBS is filming the current production for its “Great Performances” series so it will able to inspire future generations to continue the fight.

 

 

 

Wishing you a theatrically merry little Christmas…

"Cult of Love" Fails to Keep the Faith

Leslye Headland has developed a following for her acclaimed Netflix series “Russian Doll” and for “The Acolyte,” the Disney Channel’s latest installment of the “Star Wars” saga. And if Cult of Love, her new show that just opened on Broadway, were a multi-episode TV soap like “Succession” or “Yellowstone” it might have worked better for me. 

For Cult of Love certainly has all the elements of those melodramas: a star-studded cast, a large dysfunctional family and clashes over issues like sex, money, drugs, what to do with difficult aging parents and who mom loves more. The problem for me is that Cult of Love doesn’t really dig into any of those subjects. Instead it devotes much of its energy to fooling around with—and making foolish fun of—religion and the people who have faith in it.  

And yet, the audience at the performance I attended was delighted with the show, literally cheering its slaps at religious faith. Headland famously grew up in a strictly religious household and so I suppose she is still working out her feelings about that. Fair enough. I don’t know how closely the Dahls, the family in the play, resemble her own parents and siblings but it’s clear why anyone would have conflicted feelings about being related to them.

Mom Ginny is a passive-aggressive control freak who deals with problems by pretending they don’t exist and downing a cocktail. One of those problems is her husband Bill, who is blithely slipping into dementia. But their grown children aren’t in much better shape.

The eldest son Mark studied at the Yale Divinity School but dropped out to become a lawyer, although he is now restless again even after having clerked for Supreme Court Justice John Roberts. And he’s also struggling with a failing marriage to his wife Rachel, a Jewish woman doubting her decision to convert to marry Mark and join a family that years later still regards her as a heathen.  

Evie, the oldest Dahl daughter is successful in her career as a chef but she’s resentful because the family hasn’t fully accepted her recent marriage to a woman. Younger brother Johnny is a heroin addict who’s in such shaky recovery that he’s brought the woman he’s sponsoring with him to the family’s Christmas Eve celebration for moral support (John Lee Beatty designed the Christmas-cardy set).  And then there’s the baby of the family, Diana, who is married to a timid Episcopalian priest and fanatically devout.

Ostensibly, the Dahls love one another but they don’t know how to talk to one another and so when they run out of things to say they pick up instruments and start to sing as though they were refugees from some old John Doyle musical. They sing a lot. I sighed when I realized they were going to go through all 10 verses of the spiritual “Children Go Where I Send Thee.”

Like most families, mine hasn’t been immune from holiday drama but I didn’t believe a bit of this one. That’s not because of the acting. The strong cast lead by Mare Winningham and David Rasche as the elder Dahls, Zachary Quinto as Mark, a scene-stealing Molly Bernard as Rachel and Shailene Woodley making an impressive stage debut as Diana (click here to read an interview with her) all work hard to create a semblance of both the family’s bonds and it fractures.  

But the play’s100-minute running time doesn’t leave enough time for them to do more than state their positions and then move on to the next plot point. A speech in the final moments tries to sum up the play’s themes but it's too late by then. I wanted more show and less tell and I resented that the serious questions about faith hadn't been treated seriously until then.

I also didn’t believe that the spouses and significant others would have stuck around while the Dahls were going at one another. And I really didn’t believe that they would have joined in with the singing.