The umpteenth snowstorm of the year and yet another fresh
coat of snow on the ground make it hard to believe that spring officially
arrived yesterday. But the New York theater season has been in full bloom for
weeks. And it’s been warming to see that so many of the shows have been written
by women and feature actors of color in leading roles, as opposed to the
supporting parts they’re so often given. Here is a summary of the highlights and lowlights
of four of those productions:
THE LIQUID PLAIN. The place is a port town on the coast of
Rhode Island and the time is the late 18th and early 19 centuries in Naomi
Wallace’s drama about two runaway slaves hoping to make their way back to
Africa. Their accomplices are a motley crew of seaman, including a dashing
black ship’s captain who goes by the name of Liverpool Joe. Their quest
bumps up against such 21st century issues as same-sex marriage and the meaning of
white privilege. The play, which is running at Signature Theatre’s The Griffin
stage through March 29, is clearly well intentioned but it's also unfocused.
Highlight: Still it’s great to see a white playwright wrestling
with such issues and Kristolyn Lloyd and Ito Aghayere are heartbreaking as the
runaways, as are Tara A. Nicolas and Lisa Gay Hamilton as the avatars of their
past and future.
Lowlight: The play is stuffed with so many ideas (the
ghost of the British poet and abolitionist William Blake even makes a cameo
appearance) that the central story gets lost.
THE MYSTERY OF LOVE & SEX. Everyone has secrets in Bathsheba
Doran’s meditation on the ties that bind us to one another. Lucinda and Howard
are an affluent middle-aged couple who have fallen into a routine life that
fully satisfies neither of them. Their college-age daughter Charlotte and the
love of her life Jonny are trying to figure out the life they want to share,
which is complicated by race (he’s black) and sexuality (she’s recently developed
a crush on another girl; he’s still a virgin). Doran’s resolutions in this
production at Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi Newhouse Theater through April 26
are messy, just like life.
Highlight: Tony Shalhoub, always a treasure to see
onstage, provides both hilarity and heart as Howard, a man who knowingly uses
his arrogance to mask his inadequacies. And Diane Lane, too long absent from
the New York boards, is poignant as a woman who realizes too late that
she has given up too much for love.
Lowlight: The plot meanders a bit as Doran repeats her
points and Jonny strays awfully close to being one of those Magical Negro
characters whose primary role is to help white people figure out how to embrace
their lives instead of just leading his own.
PLACEBO. Two separate stories unfold in Melissa James
Gibson’s wry and brainy romcom at Playwrights Horizons through April 5. In one, a female graduate student supervises
a scientific study of a drug that is supposed to boost the libido of women with
sexual arousal problems. In the other, she tries to buck up her boyfriend, a
Ph.D. candidate in the classics who is struggling to complete his dissertation
on Pliny the Younger.
Highlight: No mention is ever made of the fact that the
graduate student is white and her boyfriend black, which allows them to be just
people instead of political stand-ins. Carrie Coon, such a marvel in the 2012 revival
of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and William Jackson Harper, a powerhouse in The
Total Bent, Stu’s follow-up to Passing Strange, make their characters believably human.
Lowlight: Yet the strands of the play never really come
together and it never becomes clear what it is that Gibson is ultimately trying
to say.
THE WORLD OF EXTEME HAPPINESS: It will come as no surprise
that the title is ironic for Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s drama about the life of
Chinese factory workers. The play, which is running at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s City
Center stage through March 29, tracks the life of a woman named Sunny from
her unwanted birth in a rural China that only prizes boy babies through her
fateful decision 20 years later to challenge the rules at the factory
where she spends endless hours cleaning bathrooms to earn money to pay school
fees for the younger brother she loves above all else.
Highlight: Asian-American actors get even fewer chances to
strut their stuff than African-American actors do so it’s really great to see talented
vets like Francis Jue and James Saito showing what they can do in multiple
roles and even more rewarding to see Jennifer Lim turn in such a lovely
performance, particularly in the show’s final scenes, as Sunny.
Lowlight: Cowhig is so eager to make her case about the
problems in China that she forgets that she’s writing a play.
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