The Outer Critics Circle Nominations Wrestle With a Strange Theater Season

For the first time in years, I attended the announcement of the Outer Critics Circle nominations, which The Algonquin Hotel graciously hosted in its Blue Bar yesterday morning. I wanted to show my support since it's kind of a strange year for the OCC because two of Broadway's biggest shows aren't in the running for its awards.

The first is Hamilton. Since we (I've been a Circle member for several years now) recognize shows both on and off Broadway, we named Hamilton the Outstanding New Off-Broadway Musical of the 2014-2015 season when it debuted at the Public Theater last year. And that means the show (which just won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama Monday) can't be considered again this season under our double-jeopardy rules.

 

The other show sitting out this year is Shuffle Along, or as it's more formally being called Shuffle Along, Or the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed. This new meta-musical, written and directed by George C. Wolfe, choreographed by Savion Glover and featuring an all-star cast lead by Audra McDonald, Brian Stokes Mitchell and Billy Porter, is still being worked on in previews. So the show's producers sent a message saying it wouldn't be ready in time for our nominators to see.

Luckily, it's been a bustling year on and off Broadway and so there were plenty of other worthy productions to consider and reward. The much-lauded revival of She Loves Me and the opening-tomorrow new musical American Psycho lead the list with eight nominations each. 

The revival of Eugene O'Neill's semi-autobiographical Long Day's Journey into Night and Eclipsed, Danai Gurira's affecting drama about women struggling to survive during Liberia's civil wars, scored with five nods each. In fact, four of the five nominees for Featured Actress in a Play come from plays written by Gurira.

You may not agree with all the choices (I wish that Guards at the Taj, Rajiv Joseph's superb meditation on beauty and friendship; and Southern Comfort, the sweet musical about a community of transgender people, had gotten more love) but I think you're likely to admit that all the nominees are deserving.

The winners will be announced May 9. Between now and then, I've got a few more shows to see and a lot of hard decisions to make. Take a look at the full list of nominees below and try to figure out which you'd choose as the best:

OUTSTANDING NEW BROADWAY PLAY

Eclipsed

The Father

The Humans

King Charles III

Thérèse Raquin

OUTSTANDING NEW BROADWAY MUSICAL

American Psycho the Musical

Bright Star

On Your Feet!

Tuck Everlasting the Musical

Waitress

OUTSTANDING NEW OFF-BROADWAY PLAY

The Christians

Familiar

Gloria

Hold On to Me Darling

The Legend of Georgia McBride

OUTSTANDING NEW OFF-BROADWAY MUSICAL

Cagney

Daddy Long Legs

Dear Evan Hansen

Lazarus

Southern Comfort

OUTSTANDING BOOK OF A MUSICAL

(Broadway or Off-Broadway)

Bright Star

Daddy Long Legs

Dear Evan Hansen

Lazarus

On Your Feet!

OUTSTANDING NEW SCORE

(Broadway or Off-Broadway)

American Psycho the Musical

Bright Star

Daddy Long Legs

Dear Evan Hansen

Waitress

OUTSTANDING REVIVAL OF A PLAY

(Broadway or Off-Broadway)

Blackbird

The Crucible

Fool for Love

Long Day’s Journey Into Night

A View From the Bridge

OUTSTANDING REVIVAL OF A MUSICAL

(Broadway or Off-Broadway)

The Color Purple the Musical

Dames at Sea

Fiddler on the Roof

She Loves Me

Spring Awakening

OUTSTANDING DIRECTOR OF A PLAY

Evan Cabnet     Gloria

Mike Donahue     The Legend of Georgia McBride

Rupert Goold     King Charles III

Joe Mantello     The Humans

Ivo van Hove     A View From the Bridge

OUTSTANDING DIRECTOR OF A MUSICAL

Michael Arden     Spring Awakening

Walter Bobbie     Bright Star

Scott Ellis     She Loves Me

Rupert Goold     American Psycho the Musical

Michael Greif     Dear Evan Hansen

OUTSTANDING CHOREOGRAPHER

Joshua Bergasse   Cagney

Spencer Liff     Spring Awakening

Josh Rhodes     Bright Star

Randy Skinner     Dames at Sea

Sergio Trujillo     On Your Feet!

OUTSTANDING SET DESIGN

(Play or Musical)

Beowulf Boritt     Thérèse Raquin

David Korins     Misery

Mimi Lien     John

David Rockwell     She Loves Me

Walt Spangler     Tuck Everlasting the Musical

OUTSTANDING COSTUME DESIGN

(Play or Musical)

ESosa     On Your Feet!

Jane Greenwood     Bright Star

Katrina Lindsay     American Psycho the Musical

Jeff Mahshie     She Loves Me

Tom Scutt     King Charles III

OUTSTANDING LIGHTING DESIGN

(Play or Musical)
Donald Holder     She Loves Me

Natasha Katz     Long Day’s Journey Into Night

Kenneth Posner     On Your Feet!

Ben Stanton     Spring Awakening

Justin Townsend     American Psycho the Musical

OUTSTANDING PROJECTION DESIGN [a new category!]

(Play or Musical)
Lucy MacKinnon     Spring Awakening

Peter Nigrini     Grounded

Peter Nigrini     Dear Evan Hansen

Finn Ross     American Psycho the Musical

Tal Yarden     Lazarus

OUTSTANDING ACTOR IN A PLAY

Reed Birney    The Humans

Gabriel Byrne     Long Day’s Journey Into Night

Frank Langella     The Father

Mark Strong     A View From the Bridge

Ben Whishaw     The Crucible

OUTSTANDING ACTRESS IN A PLAY

Jayne Houdyshell     The Humans

Jessica Lange     Long Day’s Journey Into Night

Lupita Nyong’o     Eclipsed

Nicola Walker     A View From the Bridge

Michelle Williams     Blackbird

OUTSTANDING ACTOR IN A MUSICAL

Alex Brightman     School of Rock the Musical

Danny Burstein     Fiddler on the Roof

Robert Creighton     Cagney

Ben Platt     Dear Evan Hansen

Benjamin Walker     American Psycho the Musical

OUTSTANDING ACTRESS IN A MUSICAL

Laura Benanti     She Loves Me

Carmen Cusack    Bright Star

Cynthia Erivo     The Color Purple the Musical

Jessie Mueller     Waitress

Ana Villafañe     On Your Feet!

OUTSTANDING FEATURED ACTOR IN A PLAY

Sanjit De Silva     Dry Powder

Matt McGrath     The Legend of Georgia McBride

Jim Norton     The Crucible

Robert Sella     Sylvia

Michael Shannon     Long Day’s Journey Into Night

OUTSTANDING FEATURED ACTRESS IN A PLAY

Pascale Armand     Eclipsed

Zainab Jah     Eclipsed

Judith Light     Thérèse Raquin

Saycon Sengbloh     Eclipsed

Myra Lucretia Taylor     Familiar      

OUTSTANDING FEATURED ACTOR IN A MUSICAL

Nicholas Barasch     She Loves Me

Roger Bart     Disaster!

Michael Esper     Lazarus

Christopher Fitzgerald     Waitress

Terrence Mann     Tuck Everlasting the Musical

OUTSTANDING FEATURED ACTRESS IN A MUSICAL

Danielle Brooks     The Color Purple the Musical

Andrea Burns     On Your Feet!

Sophia Anne Caruso     Lazarus

Jane Krakowski     She Loves Me  

Heléne Yorke     American Psycho the Musical 

OUTSTANDING SOLO PERFORMANCE

Mike Birbiglia    Thank God For Jokes

Kathleen Chalfant     Rose

Anne Hathaway     Grounded    

James Lecesne     The Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey

Daphne Rubin-Vega     Empanada Loca

JOHN GASSNER AWARD

(Presented for an American play, preferably by a new playwright)

Lindsey Ferrentino     Ugly Lies the Bone

Lauren Gunderson     I and You

Martyna Majok     Ironbound

Marco Ramirez     The Royale

Anna Ziegler     Boy

SPECIAL ACHIEVEMENT AWARD

James Houghton     Signature Theatre Company

"Straight" Probes the Zigzags of Modern Love

Now that transgender people are popping up on TV shows ("Transparent," "Orange is the New Black") in plays (Hir, Southern Comfort) and even on fashion runways (click here), the one muted letter remaining in LGBT, is the B, which stands for bisexual. 

Coming out as "Bi" still doesn't rack up points in either the gay or straight communities. And that's one of the reasons, I was so intrigued by Straight, the new play about a man reluctant to define his sexual choices that is playing at The Acorn Theatre on Theatre Row through May 8.

Straight starts off in typical sitcom/romcom mode. Ben, a financial analyst; and Emily, a biology grad student, have been dating since college but live in separate apartments. They're a supportive and affectionate couple. She makes sure he eats regularly. He listens to her complaints about the lab. They canoodle comfortably.

But as their friends have begun to marry off, Emily has become angsty about their future. She wants them to at least live together. What she doesn't know, and what's initially played as farce, is that Ben likes living alone because he's also secretly dating Chris, a 20 year-old male college student, with whom he has hot sex.

Comedy is supposed to ensue as Ben tries to keep Chris and Emily apart. But Scott Elmegreen and Drew Fornarola, who are credited as the co-authors of Straight, have something else in mind. Ben falls in love with Chris but he's unable to end things with Emily. It's partly that he thinks life would be easier for a heterosexual couple but it's also that he loves her.

And then there's the fact that he doesn't want to identify as totally gay in the way that's easy for Chris to do or as completely straight in the way that Emily needs him to be. He just wants to follow his heart but he isn't sure that society will let him do it.

Ben's dilemma isn't new to the stage. The British playwright Mike Bartlett dealt with it in his superb play Cock back in 2012 (click here for my review) but the question remains relevant in these say-it-loud-say-it-proud gender fluid times: what to do with someone who just wants to be label free?

The Straight playwrights' answer is a little didactic. To underscore Ben's discomfort in the queer world, they make him a bro who loves basketball and beer. To bring in the fact that sexual orientation is predetermined, they make Emily's specialty biogenetics. And then they attempt to drive home both sides of the argument in a long, boozy debate between Ben and Chris.

Still, under the unfussy direction of Andy Sandberg, the three-member cast does a fine job of making you feel for each member in this romantic triangle. Most of the praise has gone to Thomas E. Sullivan, a recent NYU grad, who scores in the flashiest role as the witty and sexy Chris.

But I also have some love for Jake Epstein, who played Gerry Goffin opposite Jessie Mueller's Carole King in Beautiful and who is lovely here as a guy increasingly heartsick over the knowledge that he must hurt at least one person he loves.

Some critics have complained that the play is outdated. But the choice Ben finally makes caused several people at the performance I attended to cry out in dismay. A play that provokes such a visceral response deserves to be seen.

"Antlia Pneumatica" is as Odd as Its Name

Your mood when you walk into a theater can have a lot to do with what you think of a show when you walk out.  And so perhaps because I've been wrestling with some of the issues—the meaning of friendship, how to reconcile who I was in the past with who I've become and how to deal with the inevitability of death—that Anne Washburn is trying to work out in her oddly-named new play Antlia Pneumatica, I was willing to forgive the play's considerable shortcomings.

Running at Playwrights Horizons through April 24, Antlia Pneumatica (the name is taken from an obscure constellation that is said to resemble an air pump) has been likened to "The Big Chill" because, like that iconic 1983 movie, it deals with a group of college friends who have reunited some 20 years later for the funeral of one of their own.

None of the play's mourners have been in recent touch with the deceased but his will has requested that they come together and bury him at the remote family home of Nina and Liz, the two sisters who were once the center of their cluster.

The dominant piece in Rachel Hauck's simple but elegant set is a large kitchen island around which the erstwhile friends—the sisters, a spiky woman named Ula and a menschy guy named Len—gather to eat, drink, prepare more food (particularly pies; with the dessert-making title character in the new musical Waitress, this is a big season for pies) and to reminisce. In the background are pecan trees, whose nuts occasionally fall to the ground (click here to read more about the design).

The plot, such as it is, revolves around whether Nina, happily married and the mother of two young kids, whom we never see but whose voices we hear (kudos to Leah Gelpe's eerie sound design) will hook up with her old boyfriend Adrian, who has mysteriously arrived on foot, claiming car trouble down the road and faulty cellphone reception that kept him from calling for help.

The acting is uneven but it's always a pleasure to see Annie Parisse onstage and she anchors this production with a smart yet heartfelt performance as Nina. And Crystal Finn provides a blast of hilarity in the role of the high-energy Bama, even though she's given far more exposition than any character can comfortably carry.

But the real problem is that the play's aims are murky. Washburn lines up her issues but then she and her frequent collaborator director Ken Rus Schmoll allow them to meander through conversations about astronomy, philosophy, and grief (click here to read an interview with the playwright).

Knowing more about the guy who died and the relationship each of the mourners had to him might have helped to root us in the story. Leaving out the parts about the sisters' famous dad and eccentric mom might have kept the focus on the main topics at hand. In some ways, Antlia Pneumatica seems like a draft instead of a finished play.

As the characters nattered on about one thing after another, the audience at the performance my theatergoing buddy Bill and I attended got more and more restless. The man next to me noisily opened a pack of cookies and shared them with his wife. Another hissed loudly that he thought the play was nonsense.  And the elderly man next to him kept clacking his cane against his chair, as though he wanted to leave but didn't know if he could make it to the door in the dark.

The audiences at Playwrights have a reputation for being prickly. So many subscribers and members wrote to the company to express their annoyance with Annie Baker's equally non-conventional play The Flick (which later won the Pulitzer Prize) that the company's artistic director Tim Sanford actually issued a public explanation about why he'd chosen to do that play (click here to read what he said). 

Now, the reaction to Antlia Pneumatica makes me think that the company needs to program more conventional fare that will appeal to its subscribers and members or to amp up its marketing so that it can bring in the kind of theatergoers who are more likely to be in the mood for ambitious shows and willing to stick it out whether those shows succeed or, as in this case, disappoint.

Defeated by The Perils of "Pericles"

Pericles doesn't show up on the lists of Shakespeare's greatest hits. It didn't even make it into the First Folio. And most scholars say the Bard didn't actually write all of it anyway. This combination of negatives means that the play is only rarely done and so that alone might be reason to see the production that is running at Theatre for a New Audience's Polonsky Shakespeare Center through this weekend. 

But an even bigger draw has been the fact that this production was directed by Trevor Nunn, former artistic director of both the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, not to mention being the man who first staged Les Misérables and Cats. 

Now however, having seen this Pericles, all I can do is take some comfort in the fact that even geniuses like Shakespeare and near-ones like Nunn can turn out a flop.

The play, which follows the travails of an Odysseus-like prince named Pericles as he wanders through exotic locales and encounters one challenge after another, has all the attributes that mark those untidy mixtures of comedy and tragedy that we call Shakespeare's romances. 

So there are shipwrecks and storms, honorable virgins and hypocritical nobles, malevolent deeds and redemptive miracles. Even its playwright acknowledged that it's all too much and created a narrator who makes periodic appearances to recap the action.

Trying to do his part to keep the audience's attention, Nunn adds music (supplied by members of the Pigpen Theatre Co.) and spectacle (artful recreations of the shipwrecks, feats with real fire) and extravagant costumes (some of the outrageous hats deserve a show of their own). None of it worked for me but there were occasional murmurs of delight from other audience members.

The 22-member cast includes veteran actors like Philip Casnoff, Will Swenson and Christian Carmargo in the title role, looking like a '70s-era flower child and giving off the zoned-out aura of a recent convert to EST.  

They're joined by some notably less experienced players and at least one principal who has such a pronounced lisp that the meaning of those lines were lost. Luckily, I suppose, Pericles has only a little of the poetry we expect from a work of Shakespeare.  

Nunn, who's previously staged 33 of Shakespeare's 37 plays, has said he took on Pericles in part because he wants to complete the cycle and is already making plans for the remaining two (click here to read an interview with him). I suspect that only other completists will enjoy seeing what he's done with this one.

The Virile Appeal of "Hold On to My Darling"

Some men sit through plays with the resigned demeanor of boys serving detention and longing for the school bell to ring. But not the men at the performance I attended of Hold On to Me Darling, Kenneth Lonergan's new comedy that's been extended at the Atlantic Theater Company's Linda Gross Theater through April 17.

Before I even sat down, the man in the seat behind me leaned over to say that it was the second time he was seeing the show because he'd had so much fun the first time. And it apparently amused him all over again cause he roared with laughter throughout the next two hours and 40 minutes.

Lonergan, the author of This is Our Youth and The Waverley Gallery, usually writes about self-involved New Yorkers but this time out he's switched his gaze southward to focus on a self-involved country music star named Strings McCrane.

Strings has been living the high life for two decades, making hit records, starring in action movies and dating starlets and supermodels. But as the play opens, he's been devastated by the news that his mother has died.

By the time he gets to his small Tennessee hometown for her funeral, he's  decided he's going to give everything up, live a simple life and try to find his true self. The trouble is Strings has no clue who his true self is or how to live like anyone other than a big shot who expects to be adored and indulged at every turn.

Lonergan and director Neil Pepe have a good time taking shots at celebrity culture from all angles. Strings exudes faux empathy, calling everyone "darling" but turning every conversation to himself. His assistant Jimmy basks in his glory and fantasizes about the closeness of their relationship. 

Meanwhile, the women Strings meets, be it a masseuse at a hotel or his cousin at the funeral parlor, can't resist him or dreams about their future by his side. Only his blue-collar brother Duke remains unimpressed by the singer.

The actors who bring these folks to life are so all-around terrific that it would be unfair not to name check them all. Keith Nobbs is deadpan hilarious as the obsequious Jimmy, C.J. Wilson brings a dry wit to Duke, Adelaide Clemens and Jenn Lyon are winning as the two women who respond in different ways to Strings' considerable charms and Jonathan Hogan is moving in a cameo toward the end of the show.

At the center of it all is Timothy Olyphant, who has made a name for himself in cult TV series such as "Justified" and "Deadwood" and who is pitch perfect as Strings, radiating sensual charisma one minute, pouting like a five-year old the next. But Olyphant makes it clear that Strings isn't unaware of his shortcomings but is as exasperated with himself as everyone else eventually becomes (click here to read a Q&A with the actor).

This all makes for great fun, even though there are all kinds of holes in Lonergan's plot, with some of the developments (including a divorce and a marriage) impossible to pull off within what seems to be just a couple of weeks.

And the play is far too long (a special shoutout has to go to set-designer Walt Spangler and the crew of stagehands for pulling off a series of disparate settings that include the funeral home, a feed store, and an assortment of living rooms and bedrooms). As Hold On to Me Darling moved into its third hour, I began to wonder how Lonergan was going to wrap it all up.

The answer proves to be through an abrupt tonal shift and a literal manifestation of the title that didn't quite work for me but that had many of the men in the audience, including my new friend in the row behind me, sniffling. And at the curtain call, it was, again, the men who leapt up to lead the standing ovation.