Category Archives: Theater

Death of a Salesman

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Having missed the opportunity to see a performance of Death of a Salesman in Portuguese last spring in Lisbon (I’m kidding), we eagerly bought tickets for the current Broadway version. It stars Wendell Pierce as Willie Loman and Sharon D Clarke as his wife, Linda. Both could not be better and gave affecting, memorable performances. Pierce was nominated for an Olivier award for his performance in a London production of the play.

I know I’ve seen this play several times, including when I was much younger, possibly even as a college student, as Arthur Miller had roots in Ann Arbor. The current version at the Hudson Theater offers whole new vistas of meaning for me now. I remember it being talky and, frankly, a little dull, but it shimmers with life in this version, almost as much as Willie shakes trying to pull his thoughts together. The themes of life disappointments, deluded parenting, and coming to the end of a road, all mean more to the older me, I suppose.

The New Yorker review wasn’t wild about the performances of Khris Davis as Biff Loman and McKinley Belcher III as his brother, Happy, young men in their late twenties. I found them energetic and mesmerizing. They carry out the stylized movements signaling events from their teens with verve. André De Shields appears as the ghost of Ben, haunting his younger brother Willie with his tales of brilliant success in “the diamond mines.” His mantra that all it took was hard work is a lesson that has failed Willie.

Director Miranda Cromwell has subtly updated the production of this 70-plus-year-old gem. There are a few references to its original era, but you don’t feel trapped in a time capsule. Plus, it fits the Black cast so well, you may think the Lomans should have been cast with Black actors all along. Certainly, some ways in which Willie is treated become freighted with new meanings.

So glad I saw it; you will be too!

Florence and Mojo

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These two short plays by pioneering Black playwright Alice Childress are now on stage in a riveting production at The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, under the direction of Lindsay Smiling. Premiering October 26, the show runs through November 13.

Childress wrote, produced, and published plays for forty years. Born in Charleston, she said “Coming out of the Jim Crow experience was what I and many others had to do,” and the first of the plays (Childress’s first play), Florence (1949), addresses this experience directly. It takes place in a small-town train station waiting room in the South. The room is divided into two sections, alike except for the “Colored Only” and “Whites Only” signs and the segregated bathrooms. Oh, and the whites are offered a battered standing ashtray.

Mama (played by April Armstrong), is waiting for a train to take her to New York to check on her daughter, an aspiring actress, whom Mama fears is near destitute. Her younger daughter Marge (Billie Wyatt) tries to persuade Mama to bring her sister home. After Marge leaves, a white woman, Mrs. Carter (Carey Van Driest) appears, and the two talk. The ingrained attitudes and structures of racism are revealed, made even more painful when Mrs. Carter makes a gesture she intends as kind, which is anything but.

Mojo (1970), the longer of the two plays, takes place twenty years later, near the tail-end of the U.S. Civil Rights movement. The setting is the mid-century modern Manhattan apartment of Teddy (Chris White). He’s preparing to meet his white girlfriend and make arrangements for a poker game he feels confident he’ll win. As he’s off-stage, a woman opens the door with a key. She’s laden with a suitcase and shopping bag of gifts. Clearly, she plans to stay a while.

Irene (played brilliantly by Darlene Hope) is Teddy’s ex-wife, and through the sparring between them, their backgrounds and secrets gradually emerge. When Renie divulges how she looked for the face of her lost daughter in every child she saw, Hope’s intensity brought tears to my eyes.

Childress was raised in Harlem by her grandmother, who encouraged her to write and challenged her to focus on people struggling to get by. She does exactly that in these two plays. She creates especially complex female characters in both Mama and Irene.

It would be interesting to know how today’s Black audiences regard Irene and Teddy’s attitudes toward the Civil Rights movement. They speak as if they are indifferent to it, yet in the two decades between the stories, much had changed and much hadn’t. In the fifty years since Mojo was written, you could say the same.

Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey productions are hosted at Drew University in Madison, N.J. (easily reachable from NYC by train). For tickets, call the box office at 973-408-5600 or visit the Box Office online.

The Wolves

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Photo Credit: © T Charles Erickson Photography

On stage at Princeton, NJ’s McCarter Theatre Center through Sunday, October 16, is the Sarah DeLappe play, The Wolves, directed by McCarter artistic director Sarah Rasmussen. Among its several award nominations, The Wolves was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2017.

“The Wolves” is the team nickname for a girls’ high school soccer team, and you see them in warm-ups and post-game chatter. As in any group of nine teenage girls, there’s a lot of talk, a lot of overlapping conversation, and a lot of feeling each other out and jockeying for status. The girls are identified only by their player numbers, DeLappe says, because she wants to emphasize the team as an organism, and thinks of their involvement as a kind of warfare, with “a bunch of young women who are preparing for their soccer games” instead of battle.

But of course, it’s the individual girls who stand out, and the cast does an excellent job at creating distinctive personalities—not just through the dialog, but also body language, voice, the whole package. Much as the girls want to be integral to this team, not everyone fits in. And some who think they do, don’t. If you remember high school at all, this can be painfully realistic.

The girls do more than gossip. They also engage in halting discussions of the news of the day. The trial of leaders in Pol Pot’s regime, for example. Oops, now the whistle blows and they’re off. Trying to connect with the realities of other lives and places is a lifelong challenge. The whistle of quotidian demands blows for each of us.

On the whole, I enjoyed it, and the scenic design by Junghyun Georgia Lee and lighting design by Jackie Fox put you right in harsh glare of an indoor stadium.

For tickets, contact the box office online.

On Stage: The Caretaker

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Fans of Harold Pinter should make a point of seeing The Caretaker at The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey. The production, directed by STNJ artistic director Bonnie J. Monte, opened September 23 and runs through October 9. Monte deserves considerable credit for bringing such a challenging play to the stage—and so successfully.

Like many absurdist plays, The Caretaker has its moments of commingled comedy and tragedy and a slapstick scene reminiscent of Godot or the Marx Brothers. Mick (played by Jon Barker) has set up his older brother Aston (Isaac Hickox-Young) in a derelict apartment, which Aston is supposed to be renovating, but clearly isn’t. One night Aston brings home the garrulous tramp, Davies (Paul Mullins), whom he rescued from a fight. Davies is full of complaints and always searching for an angle, trying desperately and unsuccessfully to get on the same wavelength with first one brother then the other.

Each brother, separately, suggests to Davies that he become the caretaker for the building, though, he admits, he “has no experience in caretaking.” The brothers each have a job description in mind, and both include tasks Davies is unable and unwilling to perform. His sole preoccupation is getting a roof over his head and doing as little work as possible.

The three actors’ performances are impeccable. Barker is always a master at physical movement and repartee, and Mullins—whining, wheedling, looking out for number one—is simultaneously endearing and repellant. Hickox-Young doesn’t come to the fore until the second act, when Aston describes his mental hospital experience in an affecting monologue.

All three characters spin their wheels in ways both familiar and outrageous, and their flashes of humor and insight illuminate a great many truths. As Pinter himself said, “These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other.” The Caretaker lets audience members pursue their own truths, amidst the clutter of Aston’s apartment.

Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey productions are hosted at Drew University in Madison, N.J. (easily reachable from NYC by train). For tickets, call the box office at 973-408-5600 or visit the Box Office online.

The Metromaniacs

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In case you thought “catfishing” was a phenomenon enabled by the anonymity of the Internet, the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey is here to disabuse (and amuse) you. The theater’s second main-stage production this season is David Ives’s wildly charming play, The Metromaniacs, adapted from Alexis Piron’s 18th century French farce, La Métromanie, directed by Brian B. Crowe. “Metromaniac” means a person addicted to poetry—think meter, as in metronome, not metropolitan—and the plot is based on a real-life scandal.

The action takes place in the yard of Francalou (Brent Harris), a wealthy playwright and poet. He’s seriously annoyed at the critical reception his work has been receiving from some young upstarts and begins writing poems for Parnassus, the local literary taste-setter, under the assumed name, Malcrais de La Vigne. His fictional Breton poetess becomes the toast of Parisian literary circles, though no one has actually met her, and Francalou’s biggest critic—would-be poet Damis (Christian Frost)—falls in love with La Vigne, sight unseen.

Meanwhile, Damis and his long-time friend Dorante (Ty Lane), who knows nothing about poetry, are incognito for various reasons. Dorante wants to woo Francalou’s romantically-inclined and poetry-loving daughter, Lucille (Billie Wyatt). He haltingly pretends to be poetic, only to see Lucille briefly wooed away by Damis’s servant, Mondor (Austin Kirk). Lucille’s maid Lisette (Deshawn White) has mischief up her sleeve too, and convinces Mondor that she is actually Lucille.

I could go on, but it may be sufficient to quote David Ives’s 2015 introduction to the play: “The Metromaniacs is a comedy with five plots, none of them important.” While the details of the plots are frothy as meringue, the skills of the actors (also including John Ahlin, who plays a judge intending to straighten out his nephew Damis) are such that you keep everyone straight.

Ives’s work is a witty, nonstop display of literary fireworks. The dialog is written in rhyming couplets, and before you think that might become tedious, it doesn’t. The rhymes are so inventive and the wordplay so apt that you can almost forget the degree of artifice. The entire cast enters into the antic spirit and embellishes the worldplay with entertaining physical comedy.

The seven characters are themselves rehearsing one of Francalou’s plays, involving suspiciously similar characters, akin to a hall-of-mirrors effect. And it gives Mondor several opportunities to claim “I’m not a servant, but I play one.” And play he does.

Francalou’s backyard, transformed into a stage set representing a woodland, is complete with painted cutout trees—perfect for lurking behind or stashing prop pistols. And the costumes are beautiful, perfectly reflecting the characters who wear them.

Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey productions are hosted at Drew University in Madison, N.J. (easily reachable from NYC by train). For tickets, call the box office at 973-408-5600 or visit the Box Office online.

Broadway Babies

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Two plays in two days hardly competes (except in price) with our five plays in four days sojourns at Niagara-on-the-Lake’s Shaw Festival. Still, last weekend we were on the go!

The room in our hotel near Penn Station was technically larger than the bed, as long as you crabbed along sideways. We didn’t plan to spend much time there, so hardly cared, until the middle of the night when . . .

Our first stop was the Museum of Arts and Design at 1 Columbus Circle. In its exhibits on now–“Garmenting” and art jewelry–some of the jewelry could technically be worn. The garments, probably not (see the teepee dress). Afterwards we had some time to kill so sat a while in Central Park. After several big inhales there, it’s possible we were stoned.

Off to our first play: Tracy Letts’s The Minutes! If you’ve ever sat through a public officials’ meeting that’s struggling to stay on track, you’ll totally get the humor in the play’s first hour. A new member of the Big Cherry City Council is trying to find out what happened at a meeting he missed and why a fellow-councilman has mysteriously been removed. No one wants to tell him. Once they do, the last 15 minutes could be from another play altogether. On the whole, it was entertaining, well acted, and we were glad we saw it. (Tracy Letts is in it.)

Lovely dinner at Trattoria Trecolori on 47th Street, very crowded with the pre-theater seating, but quieted as curtain time approached. Husband Neil has a broken toe, so we couldn’t walk to the restaurant and decided to grab a pedicab. We’d never ridden in one. I think he’s at the bank now trying to negotiate a second mortgage. We chalked it up to a nice “experience,” which, on such a lovely warm evening, it was.

Sunday morning, we saw the special Winslow Homer exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum. Really, really wonderful. Lots to like, including Maine seascapes you could drown in. As you probably know, he’s considered a greater artist with watercolor than with oils. On one occasion, he produced a watercolor, and when the buyer was told the price, he said, “But it only took you an hour to paint it!” “An hour to paint, a lifetime to learn how.” (Now you know my full repertoire of artists’ quips.)

Next up, the matinee of The Music Man with Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster. When the railway coach full of traveling salesmen appeared for the opening number, such an excited din arose, I thought I’d teleported to a high school football game somewhere in Texas. Then, when Hugh Jackman stood up at the rear of the train car, it was, wow, must be the championship game! Excellent singing, lively rendition of the score, choreography fresh and inventive, I liked the sets. The whole show is an exceedingly pleasant package.

During intermission, the drama continued in the long line for the men’s room. A belligerent man behind Neil complained loudly and incessantly, as if he were the only person who had to wait his turn. The usher tried to settle him down, but the man totally lost it. When Neil got back to our seats, he started to tell me about it, but I’d already heard the whole story from the two guys sitting behind us. Never a dull moment!

We topped all this off with a sushi dinner, made a 7:14 train. Arrived home, greeted by cats.

Enchanted April — Last Weekend!

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The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey leads off its 60th season with Matthew Barber’s charming romantic comedy, Enchanted April, directed by theater artistic director Bonnie J. Monte. You may be familiar with one of the story’s earlier adaptations, including the 2003 Broadway production, with its Tony Award nomination for Best Play, or with 1991’s star-studded British film. Perhaps you even read the 1922 book, The Enchanted April, by Elizabeth von Arnim, which made an Italian sojourn a rejuvenating aspiration for Britons. In creating the stage version, Barber adjusted some of the plot but lost none of the appeal.

It’s set in the early 1920s, when the devastating effects of the Great War and the ensuing Spanish Influenza epidemic have left their mark. The ebullient Lotty Wilton (played by Monette Magrath) and uptight Rose Arnott (Carey Van Driest) are very different in personality but alike in being trapped by unhappy marriages. Lotty’s husband Mellersh (Greg Jackson) is controlling and penny-pinching; Rose, a highly religious woman, is offended by the scandalous books her husband Frederick (Anthony Marble) writes. The sympathetic Magrath and Van Driest are the core of the story and carry it forward brilliantly.

Spying a newspaper advertisement for a month-long stay at a castle on the Italian Riviera—wisteria! sunshine!—sounds like paradise to Lotty, compared to the oppressive gloom and rain of London. She and Rose can’t quite afford the rent and recruit two additional women to join them, the waspish Mrs. Graves (Elizabeth Shepherd), firmly rooted in Victorian era mores, and her opposite, Lady Caroline Bramble (Samantha Bruce), a jazz age society star.

The first act powerfully demonstrates what Lotty and Rose are desperate to get away from. Mrs. Graves wants to join them and run the show according to her tastes, and Lady Caroline has her own ghosts. In Act Two, the bright and beautiful atmosphere of the castle retreat shows its transformative powers. In this optimistic play, every heart can be opened and healed, and the actors movingly portray their emergence from cocoons of resentment, fear, and grief.

Castle owner Anthony Wilding (Aaron McDaniel) also has a lacuna in his life, you discover. Meanwhile, the cook/maid, Costanza (Celeste Ciulla), whose dialog is almost wholly in Italian—as is her attitude—brings laughter to every scene she’s in. Impatient with the demanding Mrs. Graves, affectionate with the castle owner, she sees and understands all. It’s pleasant, upbeat summer fare, now in its last weekend. Don’t miss out! For tickets, call the box office at 973-408-5600 or visit the Box Office online.

Photo: Daniel Rader

A Walk on the Moon

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© T Charles Erickson Photography tcharleserickson.photoshelter.com

George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, New Jersey, is presenting the new musical, A Walk on the Moon, May 6 through May 21, based on the 1999 movie. The story takes place in the Catskills, summer of 1969. Neil Armstrong is set to take his iconic moonwalk, the Woodstock music festival is imminent, Civil Rights and anti-war demonstrations roil the nation’s streets, and second-wave feminism is on the rise. It’s a time of ferment, a time of questioning, a time when the old ways, the old ideas seemed disposable.

In the opening scene, Pearl Kantrowitz (a role superbly performed by the powerhouse Jackie Burns), her husband Marty (played by Jonah Platt), their teenage daughter Alison (Carly Gendell), young son, and Marty’s mother Lillian (Jill Abramovitz) arrive at their annual vacation destination, Dr. Fogler’s Bungalows.

The family spends every summer there with the same quartet of couples and the same routine. During the week, the women relax, cook the meals, and watch the kids, while the men return to the city to work. While the routine is comfortable, Pearl has glimmerings that life is passing her by.

Into these lazy, predictable days enters someone completely different, Walker Jerome (John Arthur Greene). He’s the Blouse Man, and the attraction between him and Pearl is immediate. You know she’s in trouble. Perhaps you can predict where her personal journey will take her, but plenty of drama and honest emotion awaits.

The musical is stuffed with song, and Pearl reveals her mixed guilt and desire through the heart-rending “Ground Beneath My Feet.” While I appreciated the live seven-piece orchestra and the clever and melodic songs, they tended toward the belt-it-out style, which might have worked even better interspersed with additional quieter numbers. Marty’s singing to his daughter, “We Made You” is a lovely example.

Even though the show’s run time is two and a half hours, there’s never a lag. The excellent cast of fourteen assures something is always going on, from the four couples’ fun dancing, to the energetic mahjongg games, to the teenagers testing their wings. The skillful use of projections establishes the verdant camp, the mesmerizing night sky, the psychedelia of Woodstock, and the blackness of a really black adolescent mood. Actual news footage of the moon landing provides an indelible sense of the moment.

A Walk on the Moon is on stage at the New Brunswick Performing Arts Center. Tickets available here or by calling 732-246-7717. Check the website for current information on NBPAC’s covid requirements.

The Chinese Lady

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The Chinese Lady, by Lloyd Suh, is on stage through April 10 at The Public Theater in Manhattan, directed by Ma-Yi Theater Company artistic director Ralph B. Peña. The play premiered in July 2018, but disturbing events over the past year have made it poignantly timely.

Based on real-life events, the story centers on Julia Foochee Ching-Chang King, called Afong Moy (played by Shannon Tyo). In 1834, Moy was brought to New York by a shipping magnate named Carnes who bought her from her parents. She was 14 (or so) and arrived at a time when few Chinese men and no (known) Chinese women had been seen in this country. Carnes put her on display, in order to promote the exotic trade goods he imported from the Orient. The exhibit was popular, and Moy was the first Chinese person to receive wide public acclaim and recognition in this country.

The room where Moy gives her performances is outfitted in “Chinese style,” and she describes her life there and her reaction to the New World. She demonstrates eating with chopsticks and the tea ceremony, and part of her act is to walk around the little room to show her audience how the practice of foot-binding inhibits her ability to walk. (The real-life Afong Moy toured America as a “living exhibit” for decades.)

Of course, in the beginning, Afong Moy cannot speak English, so she has a translator named Atung (Daniel K. Isaac), who is her servant and, as she says, “irrelevant.” He brings the food for the chopsticks demonstration and takes it away, he brings the tea service, and he shows audience members various artifacts that Carnes hopes they will buy. She is charming and funny.

Because the two of them talk naturally to each other, you don’t have a sense of how limited Atung’s English is until they meet President Andrew Jackson. You hear Afong Moy’s heartfelt sentiments about crosscultural communication and understanding and Atung’s translation (this is not word-correct, but you’ll get the idea), “She like it here.”

Afong Moy grows up before your eyes, evolving from a lively, optimistic teenager into a world-weary mature woman, now performing in P.T. Barnum’s American Museum. As time passes, the play references the anti-Chinese laws and violent attacks on Chinese in America of the late 1800s. It isn’t necessary to dwell on the sad irony that these prejudices still generate violence, especially against Chinese woman and elders, despite the determination of the first Chinese Lady to reach out and teach.

(Watching Moy, in her beautiful blue-and-white costume, and seeing how her life and dreams shattered reminded me of a 2015 Metropolitan Museum exhibit, “China: Through the Looking Glass.” One of the costumes from that exhibit, similar to the one pictured, was fashioned by contemporary artist Li Xiaofeng from pieces of Chinese porcelain, simultaneously beautiful and broken.)

Theater production credits to Junghyun Georgia Lee (scenic design), Linda Cho (costumes), Shawn Duan (projections), Jiyoun Chang and Elizabeth Mak (lighting), and Fabian Obispo (composer, sound design). Contact the box office.

Photo credit for The Chinese Lady: Joan Marcus

Sherlock Holmes at the Grolier Club

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This week my friend Nancy and I visited Manhattan’s Grolier Club, founded in 1884, a bibliophile’s paradise. On view there (until April 16) is the special exhibit, Sherlock Holmes in 221 Objects. Every mystery-lover will recognize the significance of that number.

Especially remarkable is that the 221 objects were selected from the riches of one obsessive collector, Glen S. Miranker, and a number of them are one-of-a-kind. His is a collection “rich in bibliographic rarities, manuscripts, books, correspondence, and artwork, all with intriguing stories to tell beyond their significance as literary and cultural landmarks.” Seeing Doyle’s small, careful handwriting as he makes notes about possible stories, or pens his drafts and writes to his publisher and Gillette, is truly a thrill.

If, as the Grolier Club flyer says, Conan Doyle’s creation became “a literary juggernaut,” it was a theatrical one, as well. London’s theater world wasn’t interested in the possibility of staging versions of Conan Doyle’s stories, but U.S. actor William Gillette (pictured) was, and he made it happen, playing the role of Holmes on US stages from 1899 to 1932.

The artwork from theater posters and programs, as well as the book covers of the many editions in which the stories appeared—both legitimately and pirated—often indelibly captures the Great Detective, sometimes in contemplation, pipe in hand, and sometimes on the hunt across the moors. And sometimes just in the Art Nouveau designs in vogue around the turn of the last century.

If you’re in New York in the next month, visit The Grolier Club, 47 East 60th Street. Call ahead for a timed reservation, because the number of visitors at any one time is controlled. Masks required.