Talented Women Take on Tough Topics in "Notes from the Field" and "Sell/Buy/Date"

One of the many things this week's election has revealed is that people in this country have very different beliefs about some very important subjects but tend to talk almost exclusively to people who agree entirely with them. 

I sensed that same preaching-to-the-choir quality in the new one-woman shows Notes from the Field and Sell/Buy/Date. Each deals with a really big issue but does so in a way that's likely to have blue staters nodding and red staters sneering.

Anna Deavere Smith is the creative force behind Second Stage Theatre's production of Notes from the Field, which makes the argument that failing schools push poor kids—especially those black, brown and male—into a downward spiral that can end in prison or sometimes death at the hands of police officers.

Smith is no stranger to tough subjects. Her breakthrough show Fires in the Mirror chronicled the 1991 clash between blacks and Jews in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. It was followed by Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, an account of the violent response to the acquittal of white cops who had been videotaped beating the black motorist Rodney King.

As she did with those shows, Smith has interviewed scores of people about her subject, excerpted some of their comments and, working with her frequent collaborator director Leonard Foglia, transformed what they said into verbatim performances that invoke the speaking style and mannerisms of each person.

She says she talked to over 250 people for Notes from the Field (click here to read more about her process) and the resulting 2-hour-and-15-minute show offers up observations from 17 of them who include a multicultural assortment of parents, school teachers, journalists, advocates and the civil rights icon Congressman John Lewis.

That's an impressive and often moving roster of witnesses but while the stories they tell are compelling, they fail to add up to a sustaining narrative or to offer any fresh insights.

Smith began working on this project long before the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement but she has clearly drawn inspiration from it. Interspersed with the monologues are video projections assembled by Elaine McCarthy that show incidents such as the police officer's violent removal of a black girl from a high school classroom in Columbia, South Carolina.

Most of us have seen these videos before but they still pack a visceral punch that is underscored by the comments in the monologues and the musical improvisations of the bassist Marcus Shelby. 

And as always, Smith, moving from one character to the next with the help of small costume changes devised by Ann Hould-Ward, throws herself into her impersonations, seeming to particularly enjoy the impassioned oration of the minister at the funeral of Freddie Gray who died after being detained by the police and whose death sparked days of turmoil in Smith's hometown of Baltimore.

 

Some audience members at the performance my theatergoing buddy Bill and I attended were so moved that they burst into cheers. But missing for me were the subtleties and complexities Smith offered in her earlier shows. Why, for instance, aren't cops given their say in this piece?

Instead, everything here is etched in black and white. Then the show ends on a "Kumbaya" moment that doesn't seem earned or, given the current political climate, likely.

The spotlight moves from race to gender in Sell/Buy/Date, which was created and is performed by Sarah Jones, who made her name with the 2004 show Bridge & Tunnel, in which she portrayed a group of fictional New Yorkers, diverse in age, race and gender but all participating in a poetry slam.

For this show which is currently in Manhattan Theatre Club's small black box theater at City Center, Jones too has gone the interview route. Having spent several years talking to female sex workers around the world, she has adapted those conversations into a series of monologues that are presented as part of a lecture given by a women's studies professor toward the end of the 21st century.

Jones, who coincidentally also grew up in Baltimore, is an even better mimic than Smith. It's a real treat to watch her bring her disparate characters (an entrepreneurial brothel owner, a Trinidadian dominatrix and a Valley Girl hostess at a sexual amusement park among many others) to life with sharp-edged artistry and a generous spirit that almost saves them from coming across as caricatures.

But the message they're supposed to be delivering isn't as successful. And a melodramatic subplot about the professor's pending promotion and her uneasy relationship with her mother merely distracts from the main subject.

Jones is clearly serious about that subject. She's larded the narrative with stats and other bits of information about the link between prostitution and the work available to poor and uneducated women. And inserted in the Playbill are lists of books and articles on the subject, movies and Ted Talks to watch and violence-against-women groups to support.

But Jones is also eager to entertain and, under Carolyn Cantor's light-handed direction, her vignettes are bubble-wrapped in humor (click here to read about their process). Jones has a quick imagination and a sly wit. It's hard not to laugh when a feminist studies major holds pole-dancing parties under the rubric "Don't Get All Pole-mical."

Still, it felt wrong to be laughing in the presence of the larger subject matter. It may be funny at first, when the dominatrix explains that she got into the business when she realized that she would spend less time and earn more money dealing with male bodies that way than she did in her old job as a home health aide. But then after second thought, it isn't funny at all.

And it wasn't clear what Jones wanted me to feel, other than outrage that women are oppressed, which seems again, like preaching to the converted. Although two men did walk out during the performance I attended. Without breaking character, Jones noted their exit and told them they'd still have to turn in the class homework.

And that may be the problem with both shows. They feel like homework, albeit assigned by very entertaining professors.  

The Day After the 2016 Election...

Politics as a Blood Sport in "Coriolanus"

The presidential campaign that will finally end on Tuesday has been particularly ugly but as the Red Bull Theater's kinetic—and often bloody—production of Coriolanus reminds us, politics is rarely pretty.

The play is the last tragedy Shakespeare wrote and he based it on the life of Gaius Marcius Coriolanus, the Roman general, who, legend has it, was so ruthlessly victorious on the battlefield that the city's infatuated citizens urged him to run for counsel and then fatally turned against him when his policies prove equally ruthless at home.

The Red Bull production jumps right into the midst of that chaos when a mob of Roman citizens, all in modern dress, rush into the aisles at the Barrow Street Theatre, where the show is playing through Nov. 20, carrying signs and bellowing for an end to the grain shortage that has fallen hardest on the poorest of them.

Director Michael Sexton has trimmed the play and the dialog sounds as though he's also contemporized the lines. I don't remember seeing Coriolanus before so I can't make a true comparison but I didn't hear much of the Bard's usual poetry or any memorable quotes.

Still, the production works on its own terms. Sexton uses all kinds of stagecraft to push the comparison to today's politics—or what they could lead to. At one point, some audience members are given ballots and allowed to vote in the consul election before that process is emphatically halted.

And although Sexton has assembled a cast with diverse acting styles, he's found a way to meld them into a potent force. Dion Johnstone, a Canadian actor whose bio includes a lot of Shakespeare, is as virile and commanding a Coriolanus as one could imagine.

The always-worth-seeing Patrick Page brings a southern twang to Coriolanus' ally Agrippa that somehow seems just right for this behind-the-scenes operator. Meanwhile, Lisa Harrow plays the general's scheming mother Volumnia with old-school hauteur. The rest of the cast is young, energetic, racially diverse and even includes a visibly pregnant woman in a traditionally male role.

But the moral of the tale remains the same as it was in Shakespeare's day: beware strongmen in politics.

"Love, Love, Love" Badmouths the Baby-Boomer Generation

Are we Baby Boomers really so selfish? I ask because over the last few years, young playwrights have been hinting at the resentment and anger they feel toward those of us born in the middle decades of the last century. And now the British playwright Mike Bartlett, who's 36, has come right out with it and branded us solipsistic in Love, Love, Love, which is running at the Roundabout Theatre Company's Laura Pels Theatre through Dec. 18.

Bartlett's dramedy spans 40 years in the life of Kenneth and Sandra, who meet in 1967 when young people around the world were declaring their independence from conventional society and wearing their hair long and their dresses short, smoking dope and sleeping around and listening to music like The Beatles' "Love is All You Need," which ushered in the Summer of Love and provides the play its ironic title (I confess to wondering about how much it must cost to pay for the rights to play that song each night).

The subsequent scenes take place in 1990 and 2011 and bring in the couple's children, first as teens and later as adults themselves. Kenneth and Sandra change with the years and yet they remain (literally) center stage and totally self-involved, which is the problem that Bartlett wants to explore (click here to read an interview with him).

Bartlett is a clever writer with an acute ear for dialog and, with the assistance of Michael Mayer's sharp direction, the play is undeniably witty and entertaining (who doesn't enjoy chuckling at yuppie foibles?) But I had expected it to be more—and to be more subtle.

I fell in love with Bartlett when I saw his play Cock, a stripped-down romantic triangle with a bisexual man at its center (click here to read my review) and I admired the pomp and circumstance of his King Charles III, an imagining of the reign of the current Prince of Wales written in iambic pentameter.

But be they royals or commoners, the characters in those earlier works come across as complex human beings who want to do the right thing and to be good people. Kenneth and Sandra, on the other hand, are almost pathologically oblivious to the needs of their children or anyone else around them.

The British actor Richard Armitage and the American actress Amy Ryan (click here to read a profile of her) bring their considerable personal charisma to the roles and make it fun to hang around with them and their cast mates Alex Hurt, Zoe Kazan and Ben Rosenfield who play Kenneth's proletarian brother (who was also Sandra's original boyfriend) and the couple's damaged children.

The creative team does its part too. Susan Hilferty's costumes are spot-on for each era and Derek McLane's sets showcase the couple's increasing affluence, although the scene changes take an awfully long time.

But none of it is enough to inflate the play's one-dimensional caricatures into full-bodied people or to refine its broad generalizations about the lives of those in the boomer generation into a convincing portrait of one specific family.

In a climactic speech that will probably be heard in audition rooms for years to come the daughter bitterly upbraids her parents:“You didn’t change the world, you bought it. Privatised it. What did you stand for? Peace? Love? Nothing except being able to do whatever the fuck you wanted.” 

Really? Call me defensive if you'd like but it seems churlish to say that the baby-boom generation didn't contribute anything of value to the world.  After all, where would Bartlett and his play be without The Beatles?

The Art of Making Art in "Sunday in the Park with George" and "Tick,Tick...Boom!"

In 1984, Stephen Sondheim had already created the game-changing shows Company and Follies but, feeling disillusioned by the failure of Merrily We Roll Along, he was thinking about leaving the business when instead he wrote Sunday in the Park with George. Half a decade later in 1990, Jonathan Larson was turning 30 and feeling anxious about ever making it in the business when he wrote the show that would eventually become known as Tick, Tick...Boom! 

Both shows reflect their makers' struggles with being innovative artists in a commercial world and so it was fascinating to see them within days of one another, as I did this past week when I got to see one of the four sold-out City Center performances of Sunday in the Park with George and caught the Keen Company's revival of Tick, Tick...Boom!, which has just been extended at Theatre Row's Acorn Theatre through Dec. 18.

Sunday in the Park with George won a Pulitzer Prize and heartened Sondheim enough that he went on to write Into the Woods, Assassins and Passion. The reception to his one-man version of Tick, Tick...Boom! encouraged Larson to write Rent, which won a Pulitzer of its own but famously also played its first performance on the evening that Larson, just 35, unexpectedly died from a tear in his aorta.

I'm moved each time I hear the score from either of these shows but particularly so in Tick's case because it drives home how great a loss Larson's death was for musical theater. Tick was posthumously expanded into a three-person show but its autobiographical plot remains the same as when Larson did it.  

A few days before his 30th birthday, a composer named Jon tries to decide if he should give up his dream of composing music for the stage and get a regular job. The rock-infused songs run from love ballads like 'See Her Smile" to a humorous number about working the weekend brunch shift at a diner that slyly references Sondheim's Sunday.

The cast in the Keen production, staged by the company's artistic director Jonathan Silverman, isn't as starry as the one in the Encores! production I saw two years ago, which boasted Lin-Manuel Miranda, Leslie Odom Jr. and Karen Olivo. But Nick Blaemire, who bears more than a passing resemblance to Larson, is totally winning as the conflicted Jon.

Blaemire made his Broadway debut in the ensemble of Cry-Baby and then crashed and nearly self-immolated with Glory Days, the musical for which he wrote the music and lyrics and which infamously closed on its opening night. 

But Blaemire, in part inspired by Larson's perseverance (click here to read his story) has persevered and he channels Larson with such authentic sincerity that his performance is as openly emotional as the best of of his idol's songs.

And although stars abound in City Center's Sunday in the Park with George (the ensemble cast includes Brooks Ashmanskas, Phillip Boykin, Carmen Cusak, Gabriel Ebert, Zachary Levi, Ruthie Ann Miles and Phylicia Rashad) but it too is anchored by the lead performances of Broadway favorite Annaleigh Ashford and the movie star Jake Gyllenhaal.

Sunday is actually a pair of linked stories. In the first act, the 19th century French painter Georges Seurat creates his masterpiece ”A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,'' and in the second, Seurat’s namesake great-grandson, an American multimedia artist, tries to succeed in the modern art world.

It will come as no surprise to anyone who saw Ashford in her Tony-winning turn in You Can't Take It With You or as the title character in last season's Sylvia, that she is wonderful as Seurat's mistress in the first act and as the younger George's grandmother in the second.  Ashford's performance pays homage to Bernadette Peters, who played those parts in the 1984 production, but her quirky charm and plangent voice make the roles entirely her own.

Gyllenhaal, who's becoming a regular presence on the New York stage and who wowed the critics in last year's Encores! production of Little Shop of Horrors, is a terrific actor and he was wonderful as both Georges in the show's book scenes, particularly with the comic bits. He's also got a sonorous voice and clearly worked hard to master Sondheim's tricky notes. 

Most critics raved. And yet, I couldn't get the sound of Mandy Patinkin, who originated the roles, out of my head. Unfair? Maybe but as both Sunday in the Park and Tick, Tick...Boom! attest, it's those little quirks that make art, art.

"Stuffed" Isn't Totally Filling

Stuffed, the new comedy by Lisa Lampanelli, is a perfect fit for the Women's Project Theater, now known as the WP Theater. It's written by a woman and deals with a subject that just about every woman has worried about at one time or another: her weight.

Lampanelli is a stand-up comedian who gained fame for making potty-mouthed zingers on the comedy roast circuit which led to a Grammy-winning comedy album, a series of comedy specials, an appearance on Donald Trump's reality TV show "The Celebrity Apprentice" and now this play, which is running at the McGinn/Cazale Theater through Nov. 13.

Stuffed is Lampanelli's first play (click here to read more about her) and it borrows from the same dramaturgical tradition as Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues and Nora and Delia Ephron's Love, Loss and What I Wore. All three offer up a diverse group of women who stand or sit on a stage and tell the audience stories related to the subject at hand.

But Ensler based The Vagina Monologues on the more than 200 interviews about sex and relationships that she did with women around the world. And the Ephrons based their show on Ilene Beckerman's bestselling memoir about the outfits she wore at significant moments in her life.

Lampanelli, who lost some 100 pounds after gastric sleeve surgery four years ago, uses her own experiences (the anger and shame she recalls feeling when a heckler in the audience referred to her as the "fat chick" is one of the most genuine moments in the show) but then fleshes out the rest of the 80-minutes with color-by--the-number observations about women with other size issues.

One has an eating disorder, another is naturally thin and resents the envy that engenders and the fourth is slightly chubby but has fought her way to body acceptance. Under the workman-like direction of Jackson Gay, each woman is literally given a moment in the spotlight to declaim her woes.

They talk about favorite foods and forbidden foods, the right and wrong ways to lose weight, the role parents and lovers play in a woman's body image and the tyranny of blue jeans. The bottom line is supposed to be that women should be allowed to love themselves no matter their shape. But that seems an odd message coming from a woman who's spent thousands of dollars to alter hers.

In addition to Lampanelli, the cast consists of Ann Harada, the original Christmas Eve in Avenue Q; Zainab Jah, the fiercest of the women in the Liberian war drama Eclipsed; and Jessica Luck, a newcomer making her off-Broadway debut.

They only succeed at varying levels. Still, more than a few of the jokes Lampanelli has written hit the mark. And the audience, made up primarily of middle-aged women, seemed quite satisfied with the evening.

All the food and weight talk made me a little self-conscious as my theatergoing buddy Bill and I sat down to dinner after the show. So I ordered two appetizers instead of a full meal. But then, I called the waiter back and ordered a big juicy pork chop. It was delicious. And I didn't feel bad about eating it. So maybe the play worked on me after all.

"The Cherry Orchard" is Too Arid

Actors, directors, playwrights and producers are now eager for ways to make theater more inclusive (which is a good thing) but the rules for how to do that are still being worked out. Which may explain how a well-intentioned production like the Roundabout Theatre Company's revival of The Cherry Orchard can go so awry.

This final play that Anton Chekhov wrote before his death in 1904 at the premature age of 44 centers on an aristocratic Russian family that has become so feckless that it loses its ancestral home, including the beloved orchard, to the son of one of the serf's who once worked their land.

The guiding impulse behind the Roundabout's new reinterpretation appears to have been a desire to draw a parallel between the descendants of the Russian serfs during Chekhov's time and the descendants of American slaves during our own. Four of the eight main male roles in this production are played by black actors. (Click here to read about the impetus for this approach.)

But instead of letting this casting speak for itself, Stephen Karam, the recent and deserved Tony award winner for The Humans who did the adaptation; and Simon Godwin, the celebrated young British director who's staged it, trivialize the analogy. 

These characters—and only they—high-five one another and utter contemporary catchphrases like "Get out!"  In one climactic scene one of them breaks into a dance that includes hip-hop moves.

The result is an insult to the intelligence of the audience (we can figured out what the show is going for without such nonsense, just as we do with the black and brown Founding Fathers in Hamilton). It's also an insult to the artistry and dignity of the actors involved.

Although the white actors don't fare much better. Perhaps too preoccupied with his political message, Godwin has neglected the inner lives of the people in the play and failed to create a cohesive environment in which actors of any color could develop them.

The period has been updated but it's not clear exactly when or why. The tone jerks from slapstick to melodrama, with stops along the way for a carnival interlude, complete with a dance number.

Meanwhile, the costumes hit a variety of decades, sometimes within the same scene. And it took me until the play was nearly over to realize that the abstract mobiles hanging over the stage were supposed to represent the cherry trees.

Understandably confused, the actors seem to have grabbed on to whatever style works best for them. The result is a mishmash. And if you haven't read or seen the play before, it can be difficult to keep track of who is related to whom and why it even matters.

This is a particular crime because the cast includes such usually terrific actors as Tina Benko, Celia Keenan-Bolger, Chuck Cooper, Tavi Gevinson, John Glover, Harold Perrineau and Joel Grey. 

The troupe is lead by Diane Lane, who made her Broadway debut as a child actress in the ensemble of the 1977 revival of the play (click here to read an interview with her) before going on to four decades of success in the movies, including an Oscar nomination.

Lane looks lovely in the outfits that Michael Krass has designed for her but she also looks somewhat lost, making Ranevskaya, the patrician but oblivious owner of the estate, recede into the doings instead of commanding center stage as she usually does.

My friend Ellie, a former actress who is given to taking a generous view of even the poorest production, said I was being too harsh as we discussed the play on our way out of the American Airlines Theatre, where the production is scheduled to play until Nov. 27. 

There were, Ellie said, things here and there that did work. She has a point. And among those things were the performances by Keenan-Bolger and Grey that managed to convey some of the poignancy that makes a Chekhov play Chekhov. 

But the thing that worked best for me was the trio of musicians—playing clarinet, violin and percussion—who sit in a box stage right for most of the evening and play incidental music composed by Nico Muhly. The melodies were lovely and haunting, creating their own poignant sense of what the rest of the show might have been.