A Hip-Hop Aesthetic Infuses Hipness into Three New Shows: "Othello:The Remix," "Party People" and "Vietgone"

Intentionally or not, most shows that make their way to Broadway or the major off-Broadway stages are geared for people who usually go to the theater. Which usually means you get a lot of stuff about the problems of well-off white folks or based on the books ("Pygmalion" and "Anna and the King of Siam") music (jazz or classic rock) and old plays (Shakespeare, Chekhov, Ibsen) that those folks most appreciate.

So one of the truly great side effects of Hamilton's phenomenal success is the new willingness of more and more producers and artistic directors to experiment with shows that might never have made it onto a mainstream stage.  

Hip-hop was the dominant music when the twenty and thirty-year-olds who are beginning to make noise in the theater were growing up and, like Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, they're bring its aesthetic right along with them. In just the past week, I've seen—and really  enjoyed—three shows that use rap music, multi-ethnic casts and creative choreography to tell stories ranging from a Shakespeare classic to a history of Sixties radicals.

They're not to everyone's taste (a good friend told me she walked out of one of them) but I love that they're bringing new energy to our stages and may bring in some new audiences too. Here's more of what I thought about each of them:   

OTHELLO: THE REMIX, a retelling of Shakespeare's tragedy, playing at the Westside Theatre through March 15.

The Story: In this version, Othello is a Jay Z-like record producer who raises the ire of a hardcore rapper named Iago when he gives the spot the rapper coveted on an upcoming tour to a pop singer named Cassio. Iago pays his boss back by falsely insinuating that Cassio is having an affair with Othello's wife the singer Desdemona and... well, you know the rest.

The Staging: Gregory James Qaiyum and Jeffery Ameen Qaiyum, the Pakistani-American brothers known as GQ and JQ, wrote, composed and directed the show, which has been boiled down from a typical three hours to just 80 minutes. They've converted the remaining dialogue into rap couplets, a lot  of them quite clever and all performed to beats spun by DJ Supernova, who is already onstage working his turntable when the audience enters and stays there throughout the show.

The four-man cast zips around the stage, rapping, performing synchronized dance routines and playing all the parts, signaling their role changes by Velcro-ing on bibs decorated in the style of each character, with the exception of Desdemona, who appears only as an elusive recorded voice.

The Bottom Line:  Purists will miss the Bard's language but others will probably get a kick out of this high-spirited production. And even in the midst of all the zaniness, Postell Pringle still manages to convey Othello's nobility and his folly.

PARTY PEOPLE, a history of the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords devised by the theater collective known as UNIVERSES and playing at The Public Theater through Dec. 11

The Story: The millennial offspring of activists from the '60s organize a reunion for members of the Panthers and the Young Lords and in the process examine the legacy—good and bad—of those groups as well as the responsibility of today's young people who seek social justice.

The Staging: Director Liesl Tommy, herself the child of activists in her native South Africa, uses every theatrical device she can find to recreate 40 years of history: news footage is played on the screens hung all around the Public's Anspacher theater, songs from Spanish boleros to hip-hop boasts are performed, dance routines range from line dances to militaristic marches, a tribute is given to people killed in the struggle and a condemnatory shout-out is lobbed against Donald Trump.

A mostly excellent cast of black, brown and white actors, lead by longtime UNIVERSES members Willie Ruiz, Mildred Ruiz-Sapp and Steven Sapp, portrays a full panoply of characters that include the grieving widow of a white cop shot by the Panthers, a black infiltrator who betrays the party, the committed foot soldiers who created free breakfast programs for poor kids, the paranoid ones who turned to drugs and violence against their own and the children who felt abandoned when their parents placed the needs of the people ahead of the needs of their own families.

Bottom line: At nearly three hours, the show could use some pruning and yet there are many moments of sheer exhilaration, particularly for people unhappy with the current political situation.

VIETGONE, a story about Vietnamese refugees adjusting to life in the U.S. that is playing at Manhattan Theatre Club's City Center Stage I through Dec. 4.

The Story: Playwright Qui Nguyen, artistic director of the Vampire Cowboys Theatre Company, based this comic romance on the experiences of his parents who met in a relocation camp in Arkansas after fleeing Vietnam when Saigon fell and the Americans left in 1975.

The Staging: The setting is the past but, as in Hamilton, the vibe is totally contemporary. Graphic novel-style video projections are employed to indicate different locales. Characters break into soliloquies delivered entirely in rap verse. Stereotypes are constantly turned on their heads. The Vietnamese characters speak hip—and profanity laden—English, while the white characters mumble an almost incomprehensible pidgin English. Women usually portrayed as docile are sexually aggressive. And, layering real substance underneath all the hijinks, views of the 20-year-long war are similarly upended.

Bottom line: The AARP-aged couples on both sides of me left at intermission but the two hours and 20 minutes whizzed by for me and I can't wait to see what Nguyen does next.

"Plenty" Isn't Nearly Enough

Casting, they say, is half the job of putting on a successful play. In the case of Plenty, the revival of the David Hare drama that is running at The Public Theater through Dec. 1, the miscasting of the two ledes has thrown the entire production off-balance.

Like most theatergoers who saw the original 1982 production that also played at the Public and then moved to Broadway the next year, I was blown away by both the play and its performances.

Hare's drama is a gimlet-eyed metaphor for the decline of the British Empire after World War II told through the experience of a British woman named Susan, who slowly comes apart when her post-war life fails to equal the glories of her work supporting the French Resistance.

Susan was played by Kate Nelligan, whose all-nerves-exposed performance is still one of the best I've ever seen. As Susan grew impatient with the world around her, Nelligan became a woman increasingly volatile, at times tottering on the fevered brink of hysteria and at other moments, lashing out with chilling cruelty. You didn't know if you wanted to hug her or throttle her but you couldn't resist being fascinated by her.

I had thought that Rachel Weisz, the Oscar and Olivier awards-winning actress who has successfully burrowed into such fraught women as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire and Hester Collyer in Terence Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea, would make a great Susan.

But Weisz, under David Leveaux's listless direction, seemed unsure of how to play the role the night my husband K and I saw the show. Her Susan was far too confident at times, as though she could brush off annoyances with the flick of her hand. But at moments, she displayed far too little of the vulnerability that makes the character so truly tragic.

Corey Stoll was even less convincing as Susan's husband Raymond, a dull diplomat who is besotted by her beauty and brilliance even when she begins to undermine his career.

The great Edward Hermann brought an endearing gawkiness to the role when he played it and Charles Dance gave it an air of upper-class fecklessness in the movie opposite Meryl Streep. But Stoll, who'd struck me as an odd choice right from the start, plays Raymond as such a hapless frat boy that it's hard to care how Susan treats him.

The only one who truly hits the mark is Byron Jennings who plays Raymond's mentor with just the right existential fatigue that you'd expect from someone watching an empire slip away.

The scenes in Plenty unfold out of chronological sequence and so the plays ends on the last day of the war when all possibilities lie ahead of Susan. Her final line almost brought me to tears the first time I saw the show. But this time, I just shrugged.

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?