"Indian Ink" Traces Links to the Elusive Past

Tom Stoppard has a rep, deserved or not, for writing plays that are brainy but cold-hearted. The wonderful thing about Indian Ink, which the Roundabout Theatre Company is giving an elegant revival at its Laura Pels Theatre, is that it is both intellectually challenging and emotionally rewarding.

In fact, there are so many appealing facets to this play, which originally opened in London in 1995 but is just getting its first major New York production, that I hardly know where to begin talking about it. 

 

Like Stoppard’s more famous play Arcadia, Indian Ink is set in two interrelated time periods and deals with some of this playwright's favorite subjects: love, art and the elusiveness of the past. 

It opens in 1930, the same year that Ghandi began his Salt March to protest colonial rule in India, as Flora Crewe, a free-spirited British poet who specializes in erotic verse, arrives in the country and meets Nirad Das, an Indian artist who loves all thing English. 

 

A companion narrative is set in the 1980s, primarily in England, where the sister of the now-late poet is keeping protective watch over Flora’s legacy as an American literary scholar and Das’ Anglicized son attempt to uncover secrets about her life, especially the true nature of her relationship with Das. 

 

During the play's nearly three-hour running time, the narrative flows back and forth between the two eras. The letters Flora composes to her younger sister Nell back home supply the exposition and the connective link, with characters from the past and present occasionally occupying the stage at the same time. 

I’ll confess to being more enchanted by the earlier period but I fell for the whole thing. That could be because although Stoppard was born in Czechoslovakia and has spent most of his life in Britain, he also lived in India for several years as a boy and the warmth of this play is infused with the passion he retains for that country on the cusp of change. 

 

Director Carey Perloff has put together a production that captures the magic of that time and place, from the vibrant colors of Neil Patel’s set and Robert Wierzel’s lighting to the subtle behaviors that mark the caste and class differences between the British and the Indians—and amongst the Indians themselves. 

 

The production also benefits from the performances of its leading ladies. Romola Garai, probably best known for the movie “Atonement” and the TV show “The Hour,” plays Flora. Garai seems to specialize in playing women who resist the constraints of society while maintaining the sensuality that draws the very men they’re challenging. 

 

A tall and commanding presence, Garai makes it easy to see why everyone is so enchanted with Flora.  But the poet is also supposed to to be suffering from tuberculosis and Garai is too robust to convey that fragility. She also sounded a little shrill in some early scenes. 

Still, Garai's overall performance is one of layered poignancy. She also looks fabulous in the beautiful costumes Candice Donnelly has created for Flora (click here to read more about the actress).

 

The rightly-revered Rosemary Harris plays Nell, now elderly and called Eleanor. Harris, who is now 87 but looks two decades younger, has lost none of her impressive skills. Her Eleanor is smart, prickly and because Harris, too, spent her girlhood in India where her father was stationed with the Royal Air Force, radiates an aura of authenticity that reflects Eleanor’s own complex feelings about that country.

 

The men in the show are good too. But it’s really the sum of all the parts that creates the magic. Some critics have found Indian Ink to be too melodramatic and call it second-tier Stoppard. They probably feel that way because it’s more accessible than some of his other plays. But its willingness to be open-heartedness is precisely why this one so works for me.

"This Is Our Youth" Seems Kind of Old

The four young men sitting in the row in front of my husband K and me were exactly the dream demographic the producers must have had in mind when they decided to do a revival of Kenneth Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth and cast it with the Millennial Generation icons Michael Cera (of the cult movies “Superbad” and “Juno”) Kieran Culkin (of a bunch of cool indies and the acting clan whose most famous member, at least until now, is “Home Alone’s” Macaulay Culkin) and Tavi Gevinson (the 18-year-old wunderkind fashion blogger and editor-in-chief of the online teen magazine “Rookie”—click here to read more about her).

And the play, which is running at the Cort Theatre through Jan. 4, apparently scored with our preppy fellow audience members, who, with their navy blazers, shawl-collared sweaters and carefully-tousled hair, might have been fugitives from a Ralph Lauren ad or the better behaved classmates of the characters in Lonergan’s dramedy about Reagan-era rich kids obsessed with sex, drugs and the lack of control from their clueless parents. But it fared less well with K and me.

 

Our somewhat muted response was certainly not the fault of the cast, who, despite their relative lack of theater experience, were terrific, especially the guys. Cera employs the awkward-but-endearing mannerisms that have become his trademark but he makes an impressive stage debut, seeming as comfortable on the boards as he is onscreen. 

Culkin, who has more stage credits, won an Obie back in 2005 for his performance as the survivor of a shooting tragedy in After Ashley but he is even better in this play’s flashiest role. Gevinson may not be quite up to her cast mates but she’s also much younger and less experienced than they are and her winsome performance is nothing for her to be embarrassed about. 

Nor can I shake a disapproving finger at director Anna D. Shapiro (who just last week was named the new artistic director of Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company). Shapiro keeps the action focused and the energy high (although I hated the haranguing incidental music by Rostam Batmanglij from the indie-pop band Vampire Weekend) but her direction also mines the play's undercurrent of melancholy (click here to read about how she did it).  

So why was I so lukewarm about the overall production?  Well, I’m not sure. It could be that I’m just not a Lonergan gal. 

I missed the original 1996 production of This Is Our Youth that made a star of Mark Ruffalo and an-easier-to-get-a-job name out of Josh Hamilton. And I was somewhat mystified by the praise that greeted Lonergan’s Lobby Hero but completely in sync with the disapproving reception for his Medieval Play which debuted at Signature Theatre two years ago (click here to ready my review). 

 

The problem could also be that I have a high bar for plays about the 1%. This Is Our Youth is centered around Warren (Cera) a rich kid who steals $15,000 from his wealthy dad after the old man has kicked him out of the house, and Dennis (Culkin), a low-level drug dealer who is also the son of a famous painter. Gevinson plays Jessica, an equally privileged young woman who has been set up on a date with Warren.

The play unfolds over a 12-hour period in which the guys indulge in emotional and physical one-upmanship, Warren and Jessica joust over whether they can have a relationship and Warren and Dennis try to figure out how to replace the money that Warren has taken from his dad.  

But, as one of the characters admits, these are rebels with safety nets, cushioned by family wealth and status. And although, there’s a whole lot of yelling and running around in the first act, I found myself drifting off. 

And it apparently wasn’t just me. I saw a gray-haired couple fleeing toward the exit during the intermission. But they might—as K and I did—have felt somewhat differently if they had stayed. Lonergan reveals his purpose in the second act of this two-hour-and-twenty-minute play, even if he also mars it with two monologs that spell out his intent a bit too clearly.

 

I can imagine how daring all this youthful disaffection must have seemed back in the Morning-in-America era of the ‘80s but a play about rich kids whose parents focus more on their own personal satisfaction than on that of their kids seems off in this era when helicopter parents are hovering everywhere and many kids now include their moms and dads high on the list of their best friends.  

Or maybe, unlike the preppy foursome who sat in front of me, I'm just the wrong demographic for this show.

Why "A Walk in the Woods" is Worth the Trip

Kathleen Chalfant sits high on my list of the actors who I will see in almost anything (click here to see the whole list). And she’s as amazing as ever in the Keen Company’s revival of A Walk in the Woods, the 1988 Lee Blessing play about arms negotiations that opened at The Clurman on Theatre Row this past week.

The two-hander, set in the days of the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, was both a Tony nominee for best play and a Pulitzer Prize finalist. But it seems a bit musty now, even though some of the old hostilities between the two countries are heating up and Putin is yearning to put the USSR back together again.

Director Jonathan Silverstein has smartly added some contemporary fizz to Blessing's talky drama by changing the Russian negotiator from a man to a woman, as if in acknowledgment of the growing presence of women at the highest levels of world affairs from the International Monetary Fund’s managing director Christine Lagarde to our own former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. 

The play's text seems the same, except for the necessary pronoun substitutions, but the gender change subtly affects both the personal and political dynamics between the characters. Chalfant is as menschy as the late Robert Prosky was in the original Broadway production but her Irina Botvinnik also displays the qualities that so many high-powered women amass in their arsenals. 

She makes Irina girlish and flirty one minute; tough and schoolmarmish the next. And she beautifully conveys the wistfulness of a woman who has made personal sacrifices for the sake of her professional career and an almost maternal compassion as she tries to mentor her younger American counterpart. (click here toread about how she created the role).

In fact, Chalfant's performance is so convincing that my husband K, who had never seen A Walk in the Woods before, said he couldn’t imagine a man playing the part. 

Paul Niebanck works hard and does a nice job with the role of the American negotiator (played by Sam Waterston in the original production) but he is, like his character, outclassed by his more experienced partner.

The rest of the production—the set (cardboard trees, a few video projections) and the costumes (simple suits and coats to signal the change of seasons)—is modest but effective. Chalfant supplies the magnificence.

Falling Back in Love with "Love Letters"

When A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters played at the old Promenade Theatre in the spring of 1989, the actors cast as its epistolary partners—the very wealthy and very WASPy Melissa Gardner and the equally WASPy but only well-to-to Andrew Makepeace Ladd III—changed every week. 

I went to see three, or maybe four, of those pairings and would have gone more if I’d had the money. For this two-hander about the 50-year relationship between a wild child and a straight arrow moved me to tears each time I saw it. And now the revival that has just opened on Broadway with Mia Farrow and Brian Dennehy has sent tears rolling down my cheeks again.

I think I so love Love Letters because it is theater at its most elemental. A female and a male actor sit at a table on a bare stage and read from a series of letters that begins when their characters are seven and, 90 minutes later, ends with the death of one of them. 

 

I know it doesn’t sound like much and as my theatergoing buddy Bill and I settled into our seats at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, even I had some qualms about whether this play, which hinges on the now quaint practice of writing letters, would live up to my memories of it, still hold my interest. But, under Gregory Mosher’s astute but unfussy direction, I once again fell completely under its thrall.

The letters exchanged are funny and gossipy but bits of more serious life—a stepfather’s unwanted touches, a son’s problems with drugs, an interracial affair, a return to rehab—sneak in between the lines and pierce the heart. 

All the while, Gurney and Mosher make it clear that the sustaining anchor point for Melissa and Andy is the love they share even as they drift into affairs and ultimately marriages with other people. 

 

Still, it’s the acting that sustains Love Letters. It offers a textbook lesson in the alchemy that can occur when talented actors bring their distinctive personalities to rich roles. And because the actors literally read the letters from the script and don't require much rehearsal, it’s always been easy to draw that top-shelf talent (click here to see a history of the play). 

A revolving cast for this production has already been set with Carol Burnett replacing Farrow when her run ends on Oct. 10. Then Alan Alda and Candice Bergen are scheduled to move into the chairs on Nov. 9, followed by Stacy Keach and Diana Rigg on Dec. 6 and Martin Sheen and Anjelica Huston on Jan. 10 (click here to read a feature in in which some of them share memories of personal love letters they've received or sent).

 

I’d expected the always formidable Dennehy to be terrific but he started out a little stiff at the performance Bill and I saw. It was almost as though he wasn't quite comfortable pretending to be the grade and prep school aged Andy. 

But as the character matured into manhood, Dennehy relaxed into the role and with the smallest of gestures—a halting intake of breath, the slump of his massive shoulders—masterfully conveyed the profound desperation of a man who always makes the choices society expects from him instead of the ones he yearns for. 

 

But it was Farrow who proved a revelation to me. Melissa, the poor little rich girl who never seems to do the right thing, is always the flashier part but this actress who last appeared on Broadway in 1980, digs deep into the marrow of the character. 

Combining her girlish voice and fluttery mannerisms along with the moxie that allowed her to be the consort of high-maintenance men from Frank Sinatra to Woody Allen, Farrow shows the fragility hiding behind the bravado as Melissa struggles to be accepted for who she is rather than what she should be or what she has. 

 

Even after having seen Stockard Channing, Joanna Gleason and Swoosie Kurtz (all magnificent) do the part in the ‘80s, I was knocked out by Farrow’s performance and can’t imagine a better Melissa.

 And yet, I've got to admit that I’m curious to see what all those others will do with the role when their turns come.

To the Bone Cuts to the Meat of Immigrant Life

As regular readers know, I’m a big fan of plays about poor and working class people. But I’m also a scourge about most of the ones I see because they tend to stereotype their subjects or condescend to the people they’re portraying. And that is why I so like To the Bone, the new play about undocumented immigrant women that treats its subjects with compassion and dignity.

The play, which is running at the Cherry Lane Theatre through Oct. 4, was written by Lisa Ramirez, whose last play Exit Cuckoo was a one-woman show about nannies based on her own experience of working as one.

For To the Bone, Ramirez got first-hand testimony from Latina women who work in the poultry farms that have sprung up in upstate New York over the past couple of decades and that are worked mainly by people who have made the long and dangerous trek from Central America for the chance to have a better life (click here to read some of their real-life stories). 

 

I had thought a show based on interviews would be one of those docudramas like The Exonerated, in which actors recite the comments of the interviewees verbatim. But Ramirez has written a traditional narrative, although it bristles with the kind of unabashed passion for social change that would make an old agitproper like Clifford Odets proud.  

 

And, like much of Odets’ work, the story she tells is melodramatic. That’s become a bad word for most critics and I’ve used it as a putdown too.  But I actually don’t mind melodrama if it’s put to good use and done well, as is the case here (click here to read about the making of the show).

 

What distinguishes To the Bone is that instead of viewing her subjects voyeuristically and harping on the alienating behaviors that poverty can provoke, Ramirez writes from the inside, underscoring the simple and complex human traits that her characters share with the rest of us.

 

At the center of her tale are four women who share a modest house in Sullivan County, the agricultural region about 75 miles from Manhattan. Olga (the playwright herself) is the dominant force. She’s a widow who owns the house, has a green card, and is the mother of a young-adult daughter Lupe (a vivid Paola Lázaro-Muñoz), who writes rap lyrics and aspires to go to NYU to study law so that she can better fight for rights for her people.  

 

The other two women, Reina and Juana, are in the U.S. illegally and rent rooms from Olga but have become like family. They all bicker, share meals, listen to one another’s dreams, rub one another’s aching muscles after 10-hour days on the assembly line at the nearby poultry factory, and chip in to pay a likeable guy named Jorge to drive them back and forth from the plant since none of the women can afford a car and public transportation is spotty.

 

The play kicks into action when Reina’s niece Carmen, who has abandoned her studies in Honduras to travel north for a job that will allow her to help her ailing mother back home, arrives to live with the others and to find work at the plant. But Carmen quickly catches the eyes of Jorge, the plant owner Daryl and, perhaps, of Lupe as well. 

 

Soon, a rape occurs. Reina and Juana, frightened of losing their jobs or being deported, advise Carmen to keep quiet about it. But Olga, who has a dangerously volatile temper, has other plans. 

 

The denouement may be predictable but director Lisa Peterson makes the journey there engrossing.  She and a design crew lead by set designer Rachel Hauck create the women’s hermetic world by lining the theater’s walls with chicken coops and positioning key fixtures—the time clock they have to punch, the lockers where they change into work clothes, the backyard picnic table where they eat on warm nights—within a playing space that is surrounded on three sides, bringing the audience in up close (click here to read about how they did it). 

 

Peterson adds additional theatrical flourishes that include choreographed routines that illustrate the soul-squelching monotony of spending hours on an assembly line and slowing down the action for poetic soliloquies.

 

The acting is first-rate, with each one of the eight-member cast giving a performance grounded in reality. The result is a nuanced portrait of the forgotten people behind the statistics in this country’s ongoing immigration debate.  Attention, to paraphrase another chronicler of the downtrodden, should be paid.

Why "Bootycandy" Seems Stale to Me

Judging by the raves it’s been getting, everybody seems to be eating up Bootycandy, Robert O’Hara’s satirical look at growing up black and gay. Everybody that is but me.

Sitting in the audience at Playwrights Horizon, where the show is running through Oct. 19, I had a feeling of déjà vu: been there, seen it before—  and seen it done better.

Coming of age plays about black gay men are becoming a genre unto themselves. We’ve recently had the fine works of Tarell Alvin McCraney and Colman Domingo. And next month will bring the world premiere of While I Yet Live, an autobiographical drama by Billy Porter, who won a Tony for starring in Kinky Boots, which deals with some of the same issues. 

 

O’Hara, who also directs, knows his way around the genre after having directed the world premieres of the plays by McCraney and Domingo. And like those earlier works, his Bootycandy is a bittersweet memoir based on the life of the guy who wrote it and accompanied by a soundtrack of music from the ‘70s.

I'll admit the show made me laugh at times but it seems to have pretensions of doing more than that. Which is where it falls down for me because Bootycandy doesn’t offer any original insights into the still-difficult passage of growing up as an effeminate boy in a working-class black world, except for some monologs that very graphically describe gay sex. 

 

Borrowing more than a page from George C. Wolfe’s 1986 classic The Colored Museum and the '90s-era TV sketch show “In Living Color,” Bootycandy is a series of skits that poke fun at various aspects of the African-American experience (one segment is even called “The Last Gay Play,” echoing The Colored Museum's “The Last Mama on the Couch”). 

But the objects this play chooses to mock have now been so often parodied—the black preacher dressing down his congregation, the swivel-necked, round-the-way girls putting down everyone else—that they’ve become clichés. And Bootcandy doesn’t find a way to make them fresh. 

Flipping back and forth between farce, drama and even tragedy, the play's scenes are also uneven in quality and tone—and nearly all go on far too long. The playwright himself says that he basically stitched together a group of unrelated pieces when the Woolly Mammoth Theater Company in D.C. asked him for a play (click here to read about his process).  And the rough seams show.

 

O’Hara attempts to cover them up and to add some underlying meaning with a postmodern twist at the end of the first act. But even it calls to mind a similar—and better rendered—scene in Lynn Nottage’s By The Way, Meet Vera Stark in which a panel of academics show up to comment on how African-Americans are portrayed in movies and plays. 

But none of this carping should take away from the fact that the hardworking cast O’Hara has assembled is terrific, particularly Phillip James Brannon, who plays the O’Hara stand-in, here called Sutter. 

 

I’ve seen Brannon in smaller parts before, but here he gets the chance to show off how truly talented he is, adeptly playing the character from his bewildering boyhood days (the source of the play’s comedy) into his more troubled manhood (the cause of the shakier dramatic moments).

Not far behind is Lance Coadie Williams, who so seamlessly transformed himself into five completely different characters that the play was halfway over before I realized those parts were being played by the same guy.

 

My theatergoing buddy Bill says I'm being too hard on the rest of the show and that O'Hara just wants the audience to have a good time. That's probably true and everyone in the audience at the performance we attended seemed to be doing just that. And, as I said, I joined in some of the laughter. Yet, it left a hollow taste in my mouth. 
 

"Dry Land" is Rich Terrain for Theater Lovers

Ruby Rae Spiegel is only 21 and just starting her senior year at Yale but she’s already had two plays professionally produced in New York and has gotten the kind of reviews that a playwright would kill for at any age.  

"Few things are as bracing as the shock of new talent,” is how the New York Post critic Elisabeth Vincentelli opened her review of Dry Land, Spiegel’s second play, which is running at Here, down in SoHo, through Sept. 27.  In his rave review, the New York Time’s Ben Brantley declared the play “remarkable.”

 

And you’re not going to hear much differently from me. I may not have been as gob-smacked by Dry Land as Brantley and Vincentelli were (the end was a bit fuzzy for me) but it’s clear that Spiegel has an ear for the way people talk and an eye for the inconsistencies in the way they behave that make them human. 

Now here’s where I must confess to a special rooting interest in Spiegel’s career: I wrote the first profile of Ruby when her first play debuted in the Summer Shorts festival back in 2011 (click here to read that earlier piece) and found the young playwright to be just as bright and winning as her work, which, at least so far, has focused on the lives of teen girls struggling to figure out who they are. 

 

The central characters this time out are Amy, a Queen Bee-type, who has gotten pregnant by a boy she says she no longer likes; and Ester, the insecure newcomer at their Florida high school that she’s recruited to help with a DIY abortion plan.

 

So all the elements are in place for Dry Land to be a drama about mean-girl bullying, a morality play about whether or not to have an abortion or a comedy about the silly ways in which the girls try to get rid of the baby only to discover that Amy isn’t really pregnant after all. Spiegel chooses none of these.  

 

Instead, she uses the unwanted pregnancy as a kind of McGuffin to explore the constantly shifting dynamics of friendship between girls on the slippery edge of young womanhood. But the smartest decision Spiegel and her director Adrienne Campbell-Holt made was to resist the temptation to make Ester the clichéd loser who'll do anything to hang with the cool kids. 

 

To the contrary, Ester’s the star of the school’s swim team (most of the action takes place in the girls’ locker room, nicely rendered by John McDermott). She’s also just as pretty as Amy. In the one scene outside the locker room, Ester has an encounter with a college guy who’s clearly into her. And in many ways she’s better prepared than Amy for the responsibilities of adulthood.

 

That becomes apparent in a climactic scene that comes near the end of this 90-minute piece. In the very capable hands of Sarah Mezzanotte, who plays Amy, and Tina Ivlev, who plays Ester, it’s as powerful as anything you’re likely to see on the stage this fall.  

 

In fact it’s so intense that an older patrician woman sitting near me clenched her eyes shut during the whole of it and then bolted out of the theater as soon as the play ended. I wandered out more slowly, ruminating on what I'd just seen and looking forward to what Spiegel might do next.