Another Look at the Season's Biggest Transfers

So many shows opened in the final weeks of the theater season that officially ended on April 26 that I’ve had to scramble to catch up with all of them. There were 14 new shows on Broadway in April alone 

(I just saw the final one on my list last night) and maybe a half dozen more off-Broadway.   

There simply aren’t enough Wednesdays and Saturdays for me to tell you what I think about each one.  Luckily, I saw a few of the big Broadway shows when they played off-Broadway and I talked about them then. And since this is an unbelievably busy weekend for me (yes, I do have a life besides seeing shows and writing about them) I’ve decided to cheat a bit with just a small update on three shows that made the transfer to Broadway with their original casts fully intact:

Clybourne Park

Click here for my review of the production that ran at Playwrights Horizons two years ago and before this riff on Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and an Olivier Award for Best New Play when it ran in London last year. It’s now in residence at the Walter Kerr Theatre and although I still have some problems with it, the audiences are gasping with delight at its blunt talk about race and the production has been nominated for a shelf-load of awards, including four Tonys, among them Best Play.   

The Lyons

Click here for my review of the production that ran at the Vineyard Theatre just last October.  One scene has been cut since the production moved to the Cort Theatre but the play still offers the same sardonic look at a dysfunctional family as it prepares for the death of its cancer-ridden patriarch. My tepid feelings about the show are pretty much the same too, except that this time I was content to just sit back and marvel at the comic genius of Linda Lavin, who is deservedly a frontrunner for a Tony in a competitive pack that includes Venus in Fur’s wunderkind Nina Arianda, Tracie Bennett for her turn as Judy Garland in End of the Rainbow, Stockard Channing as the matriarch of a differently troubled family in Other Desert Cities and Cynthia Nixon as the dying poetry scholar in the revival of the Pulitzer-Prize winning  play Wit.

Peter and the Starcatcher

Click here for my review of the production that played at New York Theatre Workshop last spring.  Some of the anachronistic jokes have been toned down for the move to the Brooks Atkinson Theatre but I still don’t know who the target audience is for this fanciful prequel to the Peter Pan story.  Yet its low-tech storytelling is still great fun and the performances are delightful.  Christian Borle--whose performance as the songwriter on "Smash," NBC's behind-the-Broadway-curtains series, is the best thing about that show--is still a hoot as the villainous Black Stache but I’ve now also fallen in love with Celia Keenan-Bolger, who is not only believable as the show’s plucky tween heroine Molly but makes her the kind of role model that any 21st century girl should admire.  But the entire show has become the, ahem, darling of smart theater lovers, having picked up nine Tony nominations.

A Mixed Forecast for "When the Rain Stops Falling"

Science fiction is far from the first thing I think of when someone says theater. But there’s been so much time travel and other paranormal activity going on in some recent plays I’ve seen that I’ve started wondering if Rod Serling, the “Twilight Zone’s” master of the fifth dimension, had begun literally ghost-writing scripts from the grave.

Identically-named doppelgangers drift in and out as the scenes jump back and forth between 1958 and 2008 in Alexi Kaye Campbell’s The Pride, which is playing at the Lucille Lortel Theatre through the end of the month. Past and present collide over the same time span in the similarly bifurcated Clybourne Park, which ends its run at Playwrights Horizons this weekend. But the most Serlingesque of the group has got to be When the Rain Stops Falling, the new drama by Andrew Bovell that opened at Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi E. Newhouse last week. 

When the Rain Stops Falling is set in England and Australia during multiple time periods between 1959 and 2039 that, at least in this staging, flow into one another like puddles of water. There are nine actors but only seven characters since two sets of actors play older and younger versions of the same people.  Three of the characters have the same name. Several of them repeat—almost word for word—brainy references to the French philosopher Denis Diderot and the Spanish painter Francisco Goya's “Saturn Devouring His Children.”  And at the beginning of the play, in a dystopian future where the weather is always bad, a fish falls from the sky.  (Click here to read a fascinating blog about this production from the first read to the opening night)

The ringmaster of all this is David Cromer.  That name meant little to most theater mavens (with the exception of Wall Street Journal theater critic Terry Teachout, an early and ardent booster) until Cromer’s smart production of the musical Adding Machine won the Obie and Lortel awards in 2008 and his brilliant reimagining of Thornton Wilder’s classic Our Town, still playing at the Barrow Street Theatre, gave him the kind of superstar status that few theater directors even dream about.  The early closing—and never opening—of his two-part revival of Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs and Broadway Bound last fall hasn’t dimmed his wattage one bit. (Click here to read a profile that ran last month in the New York Times Magazine.) 

I confess it was Cromer’s name that had me begging for a ticket to When The Rain Stops Falling’s nearly sold-out run.  I confess, too, that I was baffled by much of what I saw, like many others in the audience (“Wait a minute now, let’s see whose son was he,” a man in the lobby wondered aloud after the performance I attended as he studied the family tree that’s included in the Playbill). The minimal sets and interchangeable costumes don’t help. Nor does the lighting—gloomy is pretty much gloomy.  Of course, bafflement isn’t always a bad thing. But I still don’t know if the confusion here enhances the experience of watching this play or is just a gimmick to make us think that it’s more intelligent than it really is. 

There’s no real question about Cromer’s smarts however.  His ability to create memorable stage pictures is as sharp as ever. But Cromer’s real gift is his ability to get performances from his actors that are so natural that audiences sometimes feel as though they’re eavesdropping.  He’s put together a crackerjack cast. Victoria Clark and Mary Beth Hurt are among its better known names but it’s unfair to single anyone out because they’re all excellent. And they all eat up the arias that Bovell gives each character. (Click here to read a short piece he wrote about the play on Broadway.com).  These are the kind of speeches that seemed destined to end up in many an audition portfolio.

And then there’s the fish.  Its symbolism almost knocks you upside the head but, like Serling’s old TV dramas, this is an unabashed morality tale.  When the Rain Stops Falling is about the baggage (literal as well as figurative here) that we carry around filled not only with the things we’ve done in the past but those our parents did as well, not to mention the burdens we’re bequeathing to the next generation. And I suppose learning how to bear that weight is a message that’s relevant for every time period.

Conversations about Race in "Clybourne Park"

How do we talk about race in the Age of Obama?  Well, this season, it seems that almost every other playwright—on and off Broadway—has something to say on the subject. David Mamet has his characters screaming about it in his new play Race. David Bryan and Joe DePietro have theirs singing about it in Memphis.  And now comes Chicago-based playwright Bruce Norris with Clybourne Park, a new work at Playwrights Horizons that offers an audacious riff on the ur-race play in the American theatrical canon: Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun.

The homage is divided into two very different acts.  The first, contemporaneous with Hansberry’s play, is set in the then all-white enclave of Clybourne Park in the home of the middle-aged couple whose house the black Younger family is preparing to move into when Raisin ends. The second act moves the action up 50 years to the present when an affluent young white couple is attempting to buy and renovate the same house in what during the intervening decades had become a poor black neighborhood. It’s the gentrification story that is playing out across the country as the children and grandchildren of white families that fled to the suburbs now flow back into the center city.

The seven members of the cast, well directed by Pam MacKinnon, play different roles in each act and it’s entertaining to watch such talented actors explore the varied colors in the their emotional palettes. Singling out one seems totally unfair to the others and yet I can’t help giving extra kudos to Frank Wood who changes so much from the first act to the second that I almost didn’t recognize him except that he was so good in both. 

The play’s subject is serious, and of course, sensitive. So Norris works hard to find common ground. There are no heroes or villains. There are a couple of emotional subplots so that everyone who’s ever felt oppressed—and really, who hasn’t—gets at least a nod of recognition. The characters form alliances across race and gender lines. Then break them and form others. Norris also throws in as many tension-relieving laughs as he can, particularly in the second act.

But long before the curtain call, I was feeling unsatisfied.  Very little gets resolved in either act and I found myself asking, “what’s the point?”  After the show, my theatergoing buddy Bill and I stood in the lobby debating the show as the rest of the audience filed out around us.  And who knows, maybe that’s the point of Clybourne Park: to get people talking—not arguing or lecturing or haranguing or justifying—just talking about race.