New York Notebook

*****The Counter, Roundabout Theatre Company, to 11/17/24

 

Crack of dawn, nondescript coffee shop in the middle of nowhere – which is to say, upstate New York in the dead of winter (the windows are frosted over). The sole server, Katie (Susannah Flood), is pouring a cup for her first customer, a regular. That's Paul, played by Anthony Edwards, all but unrecognizable behind a bushy beard.

 

The two chat desultorily and engage in a bit of flirty badinage. He's not hitting on her, but there's some kind of bond, a tensile thread. He clearly feels it, even if she appears to be emotionally elsewhere. As Katie goes about her tasks, Flood's body language may appear loose, unconnected, but her eyes give onto a vast realm of pain.

 

Meghan Kennedy's script is a wonder of understatement, before and after it packs a few surprising wallops. The anodyne opening set-up begs the question: Who are these people, deep down, and what's their damage? Kennedy has taken on a dramatic challenge – especially timely now – which few playwrights would dare to attempt: how to depict profound, debilitating loneliness.

 

As designed by Walt Spangler in shades of defeated beige and chrome, this grim wedge of an eatery is a terminus, not a way station, and a pretty poor excuse for a "third place." There's little succor to be found here. Even Katie confesses that she brings her own lunch ("a Lean Cuisine"). But Paul is a devotee – of hers, if not of the place – and he has a big ask. He builds up to it by questioning Katie as to why she has chosen to dead-end here, in what he labels a "give-up life."

 

Then it's quid pro quo of the best sort: they nudge each other into small, incremental steps to disrupt their respective self-protective routines. Humor, lurking all along, has room to grow; backstories unfurl and loosen their grip. Surfacing amid the gradual thaw, the town physician (Amy Warren) turns up just long enough to radiate warmth and suggest succor waiting just out of reach.

 

The Counter is a profoundly humanistic work, and a balm for the kind of stasis that can come for us all at some point. It points the way to a "give more" life.

 

 

**** Baba Yaga and the Firebird, New Victory, to 11/17/24: Middle Europe, sometime in the folkloric past: A meanie grabs control of a kingdom. Sound familiar? Adult companions of the target audience (seven and up) may well find themselves verklempt watching this Story Theatre-style amalgam of Slavic legends. Mercurial author/actor/director/lyricist Anton Dudley plays most of the roles, with composer/accompanist Faye Chiso filling in as an orphaned princess who forfeits a doll containing the essence of her late mother's love to a scheming wannabe despot. (Dudley designed his own quick-change costumes, vaguely neofascistic in this guise.) From their own playground experience, kids will likely relate and take some comfort in the outcome.

 

 

**The Beacon, Irish Repertory Theater, to 11/24/24: Kate Mulgrew pulls out all the histrionic stops in this muddled would-be mystery festooned with an improbable bisexual subplot. Sean Bell holds his own as the Mellors-style handyman.

 

 

 

*McNeal, Lincoln Center, to 11/24/24: Beyond Robert Downey Jr.'s noble profile, there's no indication in Ayad Akhtar's portrait of a supposed Nobel Prize-winning author that we're watching a genius at work. Alcoholism, familial dysfunction, check. Jacqueline Susann would have probed deeper.

 

 

 

****Yellow Face, Broadway, to 11/24/24: Playwright David Henry Hwang's gift for self-mockery shines anew in this sprightly revival of a 2007 hit. Daniel Dae Kim is a smoothie in the role of the wry author. Francis Jue heartbreaking as the character's father, an immigrant boosted then broken by the American dream.

 

 

 

Bad Kreyòl

Signature Theatre/Manhattan Theatre Club

To 12/1/24

 

Kelly McCreary and Pascale Armand. Photo: Matthew Murphy

Dominique Morrisseau's latest tragicomedy sweeps in like an invigorating gust of spice-scented tropical wind. She has a born dramatist's gift for conveying weighty matters – here, the punishing turmoil that persists in post-colonial, post-earthquake Haiti – within a spirited drama packed with humor.

 

 The cast assembled and directed by Tiffany Nichole Greene could not be more winning. Kelly McCreary holds the center steady as Simone, a U.S.-educated business exec on temporary leave while she seeks a do-gooder cause in which she might actually do some good.

 

Long separated from her Haitian roots, Simone alights in the home/atelier of her elder cousin Gigi, an uptight, deadly-chic modiste (spot-on costumes and Riviera-aspirational stock by Haydee Zelideth). Gigi has an unpaid handyman on duty around the clock: Pita (Jude Tibeau), her grown-and-then-some one-time ward turned virtual indentured servant.

 

 Personalities immediately clash. We're primed to find Simone villainously over-controlling, but in the course of two acts Morrisseau manages to humanize her. Pita, for his part, may initially seem submissive. Encouraged by Gigi's interest, however, he's soon wielding the wit of a long-oppressed underling and trying on some true colors.

 

 Even the intractable poverty in which Port-au-Prince seems entrenched has, in this depiction, begun to show gradual signs of change.

 

 Simone thinks she may have found the ideal test case in the form of a struggling garment worker, Lovelie (Fedna Jacquet, memorable from Ain't No Mo). Lovelie spends her days designing and hand-sewing luxury throw pillows in a dimly lit, cramped cubicle (kudos to scenic designer Jason Sherwood for the revolving set, which contrasts Simone's chic little shop with rusting walls of corrugated tin).

 

Lovelie is a new recruit in a workers' cooperative intended to provide alternate employment for former sex workers. In exchange or her labors, she gets to retain a small percentage of the net – provided that she can get a middleman to market her handiwork.

 

 Some demand favors in return. Her semi-sympathetic overseer (Andy Lucien) may not choose to partake, but he turns a blind eye. Recalling his own childhood sleeping "on the cold hard concrete floors of someone else's home." he insists that there's no escaping the economic food chain: "Exploitation is nécessaire." Lovelie and her co-workers may have managed to come in from the streets, but it's a case of plus ça change.

 

Simultaneously earnest and wry, Simone comes across plenty of situations that spark her outrage, and each abreaction brings on a flourish of first-world guilt. Ultimately, against all odds, she finds an ally in a cousin whose designer-knockoff pumps are firmly planted in an oppositional worldview. There are lessons to be learned here, but they go down easy and are thus more likely to stick.

 

 

 

***Blood of the Lamb, 59E59, to 10/20/24: Often "timely" plays prove overly schematic. Such is the case with Arlene Hutton's one-actor set in the near future (not inevitably), when a woman suffering a miscarriage is detained at a Texas airport. Kelly McAndrew provides a nuanced portrait of a public servant plagued by private misgivings.

 

 

 

**Good Bones, Public Theatre, to 10/27/24: Contractor Earl (magnetic Khris Davis) is right to derogate his latest project: a bougie "monochromatic kitchen" in a transitional neighborhood. The wife, an urban renewal planner, is a revenant, having convinced her milquetoast star-chef spouse to relocate. It's thin gruel, this follow-up to James Ijames's Fat Ham – akin to a spec script for TV adaptation.**Dirty Laundry, WP Theater, to 10/27/24: The casting – Mary Bacon! Constance Shulman! –  outshines Mathilde Dratwa's overwrought, ultimately formulaic script, in which a young woman (identified in the cast list as "Me") learns of her father's long-term infidelity just as her mother succumbs to cancer. Me's outrage? Warranted – but blunted by the schematic framing.

 

 

 

**Forbidden Broadway, Theatre 555, to 11/3/24: In this comparatively lackluster incarnation, company regular Jenny Lee Stern gives good Bernadette Peters pout, and Nicole Vanessa Ortiz's powerful vocals could peel paint (replacing it with custard). It's gratifying to see Eddie Redmayne's grotesque turn in Cabaret drubbed. Another winner: "Great Gatsby for Dummies": "It's public domain. We can destroy it any way we want."** Strategic Love Play, Minetta Lane Theatre, to 12/7/24: You've probably enjoyed this duo on TV: Helène Yorke as the super-annoying social-climbing sibling Brooke Dubek on The Other Two, Michael Zegen as the hustling ex-spouse of Mrs. Maisel. In playwright Miriam Battye's brief two-hander (destined to become an Audible recording), Zegen plays nice as "Man," a patient, rather basic guy embarking on a swipe-right drinks date. Alternately imperious and self-demeaning, "Woman" proves to be an aggressively snarky whack job who laments repeatedly that, in the great game of marital musical chairs, she "wasn't chosen"—for good reason. Any one less temperate than Man would run for the hills. Run, Man, run.

 

 

 

**** Tammy Faye, Broadway, to 12/8/24: Barring an act of (lowercase) god, I can't imagine what – provincialism? anti-gay animus? anti-evangelical prejudice? – caused this British import to tank on arrival (it was meant to run through March). There's plenty to savor here. Delivering clever Holy Roller-derivative songs by Elton John, Katie Brayben channels Tammy Wynette at peak poignancy and top volume (brace yourself for a sonic boom whenever Brayben cranks her head past her right shoulder). Michael Cerveris serves up a repugnant, smug, but admirably resonant Jimmy Falwell. Christian Borle is miscast – which is to say wasted – as the venal grifter Jim Bakker. And yet: Tammy enfolding a man with AIDS at the height of the epidemic? Prepare to mist up: tangentially, the show summons an era of excruciating memories. And when she acquires some backbone and refuses to stand by her scandal-tainted man? Standing O.

 

 

 

*****We Are Your Robots, Theatre for a New Audience/Rattlestick Theatre, to 12/8/24: As profound as it is goofy, Ethan Lipton's latest cabaret has him and a trio of extremely talented musician/co-creators – Vito Dieterle, Ian Riggs, and Eben Levy – probing the inner workings and ultimate goals of our ubiquitous AI helpmeets even as they (the performers) embody these uncanny machines. (Costume designer Alejo Vietti adds a clue as to their mechanical nature: shiny zigzags appliquéd to standard-issue gray suits.) Lipton is sui generis: shambolic in performance (shades of Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed), scholarly at heart (you're unlikely to see many nightclub acts citing Noam Chomsky), and just plain cleverly companionable. He cites the widely circulated whale recordings of the early ʼ70s as a wakeup call for the kind of global "estate planning" we're called upon to do in these precarious times.

 

 

 

**Walden, 2nd Stage, to 12/4/24: Playwright Amy Berryman posits a sororal tug-of-war set in the – oooh, ominous – "Not-So-Distant-Future." The dominant twin, Cassie – short for Cassiopeia (Zoë Winters) – is a NASA superwoman assigned to wrest from Mars's lifeless dust some form of human sustenance. The other twin, Stella (Emmy Rossum, delicately depressive), has dropped out of the space race to live off the grid with her bar-owner boyfriend, Bryan (Motell Foster), a confirmed "Earth Advocate." The performers are all fine, Whitney White's direction celeritous, but would it be too punny a put-down to note that the sci-fi premise itself lacks gravitas? The siblings could just as easily be at odds over some earthly set of divergent life choices. As if to compensate for the thin plot, the design team goes all in: set designer Matt Saunders with a cosy (if not airtight) quonset-hut-slash-bougie-bunker, light designer Adam Honoré with an apocalyptic light show when the desert air turns volatile. The nesting pair rush to shelter their newly planted flowers, which look fresh from a 9th Avenue deli and not especially nutritious. The climate crisis, being real, merits a less soap-operatic approach.

 

 

 

***Shit. Meet. Fan., MCC Theater, to 12/15/24: Even if you manage to overlook the star casting, the second you spot Clint Ramos's ultra-luxurious penthouse set (we're talking eight digits' worth of Manhattan real estate, minimum), you can safely deduce that this show has Broadway aspirations. Does Robert O'Hara's cynically skewed, S&M-spiced adaptation of Paolo Genovese's charming 2016 film Perfetti Sconosciuti (Perfect Strangers) – about a party game involving cell-phone exposure gone awry – deserve or need to be ramped up? Admirers of the film may well balk, despite the production's bona fides. Almost without exception, the A-list actors – including Neil Patrick Harris (the very picture of WASP entitlement) and Jane Krakowski (flouting her endless, ageless legs) – deliver the goods as expected. However, the vanity and venality on display quickly grate despite the pros' best efforts. Only a newcomer to this overprivileged cabal – Hannah (Constance Wu, nicely conflicted) – succeeds in eliciting some empathy. It's a safe bet that every last scumbag will end up everted and exposed. The question to consider before booking: Are you prepared to emerge feeling schifo for the entire human species – or perhaps just its upper echelons?

 

 

 

**The Light and the Dark, 59E59, to 12/15/24: In portraying the not exactly obscure sixteenth-century painter Artemesia Gentileschi, the justly esteemed playwright/performer Kate Hamill is ill served by an uneven, perhaps premature production directed by Jade King Carroll. This tranche of feminist history arrives sketchy and yet overlong. The script centers on the artist's apprenticeship under her father (a solid portrayal by Wynn Harmon), and her rape at the hands of a colleague (Matthew Saldívar, palpably sleazy). Oddly, but perhaps true to the age, Gentileschi continues consorting with her despoiler, pacified by a promise of marriage. The result: a trial (complete with a torturous Medieval-style truthfulness test) overseen by an alternately sympathetic and fulminating judge (Carlo Albán, over the top). Are we due for a rousing cri de coeur curtain speech? Assuredly. Whenever the histrionics threaten to overwhelm, you can always bask in the golden Florentine glow provided by lighting designer Seth Reiser. And throughout the proceedings, keep an eye on Joey Parsons – you'd have a hard time not to – as she excels in a quartet of roles, from scheming housekeeper to courtesan with a plan.

 

 

 

***The Hills of California, Broadway, to 12/22/24: Playwright Jez Butterworth revels in solo riffs by extraneous characters, but the throughline here is monopolized by a mid-ʼ50s stage mother (Laura Donnelly), an Audrey Meadows ringer with the drive of Maria von Trapp. Will Veronica's four girls triumph á la McAndrews Sisters a decade after the latter's prime? They had better. Damage predictably ensues. Donnelly lacks authenticity in her secondary role as the 1976 revenant, a road-worn groupie, but the other three sisters in adult guise – especially Ophelia Lovibond – are magnificent throughout.

 

 

 

**Hold On to Me Darling, Lucille Lortel Theatre, to 12/22/24: In this intimate revival of a less-than-stellar 2016 trial run at the Atlantic Theatre, Adam Driver does his best to make Kenneth Lonergan's one-note hero, megastar country singer/writer "Strings McCrane," less of a narcissistic bore. He even manages to wring some empathy and an occasional laugh over Strings's seeming inability to come up with a single lyric-worthy metaphor. Worth the 2 ½-hour slog: the chance to watch Heather Burns, playing an ur-groupie, segue from simp to snake.

 

 

 

**Babe, New Group at Signature Center, to 12/22/24: It's not exactly breaking news that women coming up through the rock music industry over the past few decades haven't been accorded full credit for their contributions. In this intimate production, Marisa Tomei plays Abby, a 50ish exec trying to get some long-overdue props before her inevitable expiration date. Gracie McGraw is effective as Katherine, a gung-ho ladder-climbing newbie (Eve to Abby's Margo), and less so, in flashback, as the generic drug-doomed rock star "Kat Wonder," whom Abby promoted – and loved – decades ago (suitable musical interludes by the rock group Betty, still going strong). Somewhere along the way, Abby's contribution to the label got subsumed by credit-hogging Gus: Arliss Howard, sporting one of those droopy stocking caps reminiscent of Disney's cartoon dwarves. Having managed to climb the corporate ladder largely on Abby's back (perhaps profiting from her flagrant lack of chic: costumer Matthew Armentrout has her got up like a superannuated preteen, in baggy pants and long braids), Gus has proved a faithful friend, backstage at least. Their non-PC badinage way back when comes across as era-appropriate and rather cute, even if it wouldn't cut it with a contemporary scold like Katherine. Intricately structured as it is, Jessica Goldberg's script ultimately proves too pat and formulaic. Derek McLane's set is spot on and Scott Elliott's direction apt, within the given constraints. Ecstatic dancing will occur, along with a humiliating comeuppance and heavy doses of hovering mortality. Tomei deserves more depth than she's accorded here.

 

 

 

****The Blood Quilt, Lincoln Center, to 12/29/24: Sororal discord makes for such rich dramatic loam! Katori Hall digs deep in this study of four stepsisters deciding what to do with a family legacy, a cottage on an island off Georgia. As conjured by designer Adam Rigg, with mercurial lighting by Jiyoun Chang, the waterside setting – complete with tidal pool – may look idyllic but it might as well be a boxing ring. Mere weeks after the death of their mother, the half-siblings (different fathers) have gathered for their annual tradition: a quilting weekend. (The handiwork of past generations, going back centuries, festoons the rafters and staircase railings.) The prescribed activity may entail joining scraps of cast-off fabric; however, the house itself, as a tangible asset, is in danger of being ripped to shreds. For the eldest, Clementine (Crystal Dickinson, studiously placating), it represents home. Second sister Gio (Adrienne C. Moore), a cop, seems indifferent: mid-divorce, she's punch-drunk, aggressive and raunchy. Cassan (Susan Kelechi Watson), a nurse, exudes the weariness of the overworked; her daughter Zambia (Mirirai) is an effervescent tonic, playfully trying on new identities (the privilege of adolescence). Arriving late on the scene is the one that got away: chic Amber (Lauren E. Banks), who carved out a career as an entertainment lawyer in L.A. Cue the conflicting agendas! Despite a few lags in momentum and an unfortunate sound system which often muddies the dialogue, the clan's deliberations sustain interest to the very end, even if we can guess the likely fate of the accumulated artisanal stash (think Smithsonian). Specifics aside, the situation resonates universally: When a parent dies and long-standing rivalries resurface, how to divide the spoils?

 

 

 

**Swept Away, Broadway, to 12/29/24: After two mnths of previews and performances, this nautical disaster saga — framed on a suite of folk-rock songs by the Avett Brothers — is pulling in its sails prematurely (it was originally scheduled to run to May 25). Rachel Hauck's ship set is grand — all the more so when it starts to come apart mid-storm — and there's some fine singing to savor, if you've no objection to chanteys and a rickety script (book by John Logan). John Gallagher, Jr. plays a bad'un, a malevolent mate; Stark Sands and Adrian Blake Enscoe shine as a pair of farm boys in deeper than they could have imagined. The younger (Enscoe), not having read Melville and unaware that the right whales' dwindling population could mean a hunt lasting years, imagines that after this brief adventure he'll be home in time for spring planting and a sweet reunion with his betrothed. All are in for a grisly not-surprise.

 

 

**Left on Tenth, Broadway, to 2/2/25: Perhaps Delia Ephron's celebrated parents – in-demand screenwriters and, as she notes, dedicated alcoholics – never got around to counseling her that nobody likes a braggart. The opening scenes of this second-chance-at-love script, adapted from Ephron's 2022 memoir, are just about unbearable. Juliana Margulies, playing the playwright as a gamine post-ingenue (think Laura Petrie in New Rochelle), whirls about her book-lined Greenwich Village apartment – primo sets by Beowulf Borritt – while recounting the mystical coincidences that led her to a replacement spouse (Peter Gallagher, game and charming as ever). Is stage-Delia heading for a big comeuppance? You bet: a terrible illness, presumably terminal. We should all have the resources, when stricken, to receive such attentive, cutting-edge care (Kate MacCluggage and Peter Francis James nicely handle multiple roles) in a hospital suite as big as the Ritz.

 

***Cult of Love, Broadway, to 2/2/16: You'll need high Yuletide tolerance to get through great chunks of Leslye Headland's latest. With or without provocation, the members of this classic dysfunctional WASP clan – Mare Winningham (willfully oblivious tradmom), David Rasch (dad embarking on that rare, chummy version of Alzheimer's), Rebecca Henderson, Zachary Quinto, Christopher Sears, and Shailene Woodley (adult sibs, variously scarred) – tend to erupt in tight six-part harmony. Brushing aside oblique allusions to traumas past and present, they take regular breaks from their interpersonal skirmishes to burst into song: it's the Von Trapp Family tossed into a tarpit of grievances. The semi-outsiders present exhibit flashes of good sense: Molly Barnard as a sardonic wife who relinquished her Jewish faith to marry in but hasn't fully signed on; Roberta Colindrez as a chill new same-sex spouse, ironically bemused; and Barbie Ferreira as a young rehab regular who offers the clearest take on this weird in-house show choir. If saccharine song breaks are your cup of eggnog, glogg on. Many of us have familial scars of our own to cope with and — impressive performances aside — being force-fed the old familiar tunes can feel outright poisonous. Drenching the audience in perverse holiday cheer is perhaps Headland's intent. However, seasoned New Yorkers might well prefer the time-honored alt-tradition: dinner out and a movie.

 

***** Eureka Day, Broadway, To 2/16/25: