Forced to Turn on the Ghost Light

Yes, I'm dragging out the ghost light yet again. The reasons are the familiar ones: seeing shows non-stop (as a new awards nominator, I'm now averaging five a week and the busiest part of the season hasn't even started yet) and trying to keep up with an also unusually full schedule at my day job and refusing to take any more time away from my endlessly patient husband K. Luckily for me, my pals at BroadwayRadio's "This Week on Broadway" have invited me to join them this Sunday to talk about some of the shows I've been seeing. I hope you'll give us a listen, which you can do when you click here any time from Sunday afternoon on.

Getting Reacquainted with "Boesman and Lena" and "By the Way, Meet Vera Stark"

Revivals can be tricky for someone like me who loves discovering new playwrights and seeing new works by my favorite contemporary writers. And yet, there is the undeniable lure of seeing what different directors and actors will do with shows I’ve seen before. Sometimes these new incarnations bring a thrilling freshness to a familiar work. Other times they come off as pale imitations of the original. 

I recently had both experiences when I saw revivals of Athol Fugard’s Boesman and Lena and Lynn Nottage’s By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, each of which recently opened at Signature Theatre, the company that has made a name for itself by restaging the work of significant playwrights.

Signature’s relationship with Fugard dates back to the 2011-2012 season when it presented three of the South African playwright’s works and the company has continued to do a Fugard play at least every other year since then. Boesman and Lena, which was originally performed at a South African university in 1969, focuses on two days in the lives of a couple, categorized as “coloured” under South Africa’s apartheid system, who become refugees in their own land when government forces destroy the shanty town in which they lived.

A young me first saw Boesman and Lena when James Earl Jones and Ruby Dee played the eponymous couple in a 1970 production down at the old Circle in the Square. It’s one of those theatrical memories I’ve long considered sacrosanct. And yet I bought a tcket as soon as I heard that Signature had cast the dynamic actors Sahr Ngaujah and Zainab Jah in its production.

Ngaujah first caught my attention 10 years ago with his high-voltage performance as the Nigerian musician and activist Fela Kuti in the musical Fela! And I found myself mesmerized by Jah when I first saw her as a ferocious rebel fighter in Eclipsed, Danai Gurira’s 2015 play about the civil wars in Liberia. Neither actor disappointed me this time around either.

Director Yaël Farber’s production of Boesman and Lena opens with the weary couple trudging through the audience to the mournful sound of the clanging pots that are among their few remaining possessions. Lena’s ceaseless chatter—questions about where they will spend the night, complaints about the beating Boesman gave her that morning and musings about how her life has come to this point—provide the energy she needs to keep going. Boesman’s sullen silence underscores his desperate—and potentially dangerous—hopelessness.

The situation becomes even more volatile when they come across an ailing old Xhosa man and argue over whether they should take him into the makeshift camp they’ve set up on some barren mud flats along a river.

Jah is a joy to watch as she moves effortlessly from the puckishness of taunting Boesman to the pathos of comforting the old man to the friskiness of the improvised dance Lena breaks into when she needs to rally her spirits. Ngaujah is given a more limited palette to work with but he digs deep, revealing the intense sadness of a man so crushed by racism that the only relief he can find is to lash out at others.

  

Farber, herself South African, emphasizes the bleakness of these character’s lives with an intentionally hermetic production that eliminates the intermission and doesn’t even allow the actors to take a formal curtain call.

Some people I know have harrumphed that her approach is too unrelentingly grim but I think it perfectly captures the anguish that millions of refugees around the world continue to experience and to salute the resolve that allows them to persevere. 

This revival doesn’t surpass or erase my memory of Jones, Dee and the great Zakes Mokae as the old man but it does give the show a new and urgent relevance.

Nottage, a double Pulitzer Prize winner, is in the middle of her inaugural season at Signature, which she has so far devoted to her more comedic plays (click here to read her feelings about that). By The Way, Meet Vera Stark is her satirical look at the way Hollywood has treated black women. 

The play centers around the title character, an African-American actress in 1930s Hollywood whose only opportunities in the movies are roles as slaves or maids and whose day job is working as a real-life maid so that she can make ends meet.

The play's 2011 production at Second Stage featured a top-shelf cast that included Sanaa Lathan as Vera, Stephanie J. Block as the temperamental white movie star Vera works for and Karen Olivio as Vera’s friend who can and does pass for Brazilian so that she can get roles denied black actresses.

The current cast—with Jessica Frances Dukes, Jenni Barber and Carra Patterson assuming those roles—may be less starry but they’re equally game. The problem is in the direction. Jo Bonney directed the 2011 production with the same kind of brio that fueled so many Golden Age screwball comedies. 

Some of its scenes went over the top but, for the most part, they brought the audience along with them. And they did it without sacrificing the show's important message. For Nottage's play is simultaneously a comedy, a tragedy, a call to arms and, especially in its second act, structurally adventurous. I had some problems with that earlier production (click here to read my review) but I thought about the show for weeks after seeing it.

Kamilah Forbes, who directed the current production, has a tougher time finding the right rhythm. At times the pacing is too fast and jokes fly by before they can register. Other moments drag on, particularly a few of the segments that use video. And some of the costume choices, especially the dress Vera wears in the second act, try too hard.

My sister, who loves ‘30s movies, hadn’t seen the earlier production of the show and so I invited her to this one. She struggled to stay with it but eventually fell asleep.

“So what happened at the end?” she asked me as we walked down the block to the venerable West Bank Cafe for a quick post-show dinner. I started to tell her and then realized I’d already forgotten. Which kind of breaks my heart since remembering Vera is the whole point of the piece.

Rolling Along with "Merrily We Roll Along"

My 40s were my favorite decade. I suspect that’s because it’s when I got my dream job (editing the arts section of a major publication) and met my dream guy (my still totally-adored K). But it was also because I realized that I was old enough to learn from the mistakes I’d made but still young enough to do something about them. 

The characters introduced in the opening scene of the musical Merrily We Roll Along aren’t so lucky. But the ruefulness that accompanies them in their journeys from idealism to resignation has made this show one of Stephen Sondheim’s most admired and it’s never tugged at my heartstrings more than it does in the Fiasco Theater’s revival, which opened at the Roundabout Theatre Company’s Laura Pels Theatre this week.

Inspired by the identically-named 1934 play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, the musical chronicles the lives of three artists—a composer named Frank, a lyricist and playwright named Charley and their novelist friend Mary—but it tells their stories in reverse order, with the earlier scenes showing the compromises and disappointments the trio experience in middle age while the latter ones depicts the optimism of their youth.

The original 1981 production directed by Hal Prince famously miscast teenagers to play all the roles and ran for only 16 performances. (Lonny Price, who played Charley in that production, recently made a terrific documentary about it called “Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened,” which you can find by clicking here).

Noah Brody, Fiasco’s co-artistic director (click here to read more about him and his approach) has cast age-appropriate members from his troupe in this revisal (the playbill says Sondheim endorsed the trimming of the late Furth’s book to just 105 intermission-less minutes and the reassigning of some songs). But Brody's casting choices also have their plusses and minuses.

Six people play all the roles, compared to the two dozen in the Prince production. And on the up side, those actors, many of whom have been collaborating since their college days at Brown University, put to good use the comfortable familiarity and knowing frustrations that come from their own long association. 

They're also clever at integrating into their stagecraft the Fiasco trademarks of inventive stage business (in one delightful sequence mannequins fill in for the missing ensemble) and quick costume changes. But here's a significient negative: their vocal strengths vary from impressive (Manu Narayan in the role of the uncompromising Charley) to not-all-that-great. 

And not everyone is rolling along with this Merrily.  A group of my theater-savvy friends and I had a great debate about it via email last weekend, with me in the minority. 

Still, George Furth’s book, a series of significant moments spread across the decades of the friends’ lives; and Sondheim’s score, filled with both amusing patter songs and gorgeous ballads, ring with the doubts and insecurities familiar to all of us for whom our 40s are now just a memory.

And as I sat watching Merrily and thinking back over the people who have moved into and out of my life over the past few decades, the show’s wistful anthem “Old Friends” has never sounded more poignant.

Celebrating a Dozen Years of B&Me

As longtime readers know, I started this blog on Feb. 14, 2007, and so every year, I get to observe Valentine’s Day by celebrating the big loves of my life: my husband K (we had a great dinner at one of our favorite restaurants, although I may have overindulged on the Cosmopolitans) and seeing theater and writing about it here. So I’m taking time out to toast 12 years of doing the latter.

The last 12 months have been really great. I saw some terrific shows and I got to talk to several of the playwrights who created them for the “Stagecraft” podcast I do for BroadwayRadio (you can check out those interviews by clicking here). 

And I got to talk to other theater makers for stories I wrote for American Theatre magazine (click here to read that piece) Broadway News (click here for this one) and TDFStages (click here for it).

I also had the honor of being elected to the executive committee of the Outer Critics Circle and to the American Theatre Critics Association, for whom I moderated a panel at last fall’s New York conference whose timely theme was “Beyond Straight White Men: Diversity on Page and Stage.”

But all of that began here, with this blog. And I am so grateful to those of you who've been reading these posts over the past dozen years and to those of you who might be visiting for the first time today. 

My calendar is already filling up with all kinds of promising shows and I hope all of you will stick around so that I look can share my thoughts about them with you in the coming year. In the meantime, a belated Happy Valentine's Day and, of course, happy theatergoing too.