Elisabeth Vincentelli

Yet in her adoptive France, the Polish-born Curie was not deemed a success or a role model, but a Jezebel — and a foreign one at that — whose affair with a married man became public the year of her second Nobel. Pierre had died a few years earlier, so if Marie could be accused of anything, it was to have fallen for the old “I swear we’re going to divorce soon” line.

And this is where Lauren Gunderson’s new play, “The Half-Life of Marie Curie,” finds the scientist. Hounded by prurient tabloids, Marie (Francesca Faridany) escapes Paris for the seaside abode of her British friend Hertha Ayrton (Kate Mulgrew), an electromechanical engineer.

Besides being widows and mothers, the women share a calling for scientific inquiry at a time when it was considered a male preserve. “We love our lovers and we adore our children, but our life’s passion is proof,” Marie says. “Knowing what’s true and proving it. Peering for just a moment into the heart of the universe and snatching some truth before the curtain closes.”

Hertha shares Marie’s cosmic calling but also knows that it extends outside the lab — she is fiercely committed to the suffragist cause, for instance.

Unbeknownst to many New Yorkers, Gunderson has been the most produced contemporary playwright in the United States for two of the past three seasons, and she knows how to build actors’ showcases that are sturdy, if not necessarily challenging for the audience. So this production — commissioned by the audiobook company Audible and directed by Gaye Taylor Upchurch — is at its best when it lets the two stars strut their stuff.

Faridany (who portrayed the teacher in “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”) pulls off a hybrid Polish-French accent that is miraculously unobtrusive, and she looks convincingly haunted as Marie fingers her radium pendant, glowing green with menace as the ominous rattle of a Geiger counter echoes in the background. (Curie often carried the lethal element and, unsurprisingly, died of radiation-induced anemia.)

And the tart, no-nonsense Hertha is a perfect fit for Mulgrew, a naturally commanding performer who is equally at ease playing the beloved, honorable Captain Janeway on “Star Trek: Voyager” and the beloved criminal Red on “Orange Is the New Black.”

Watching their Marie and Hertha bond, bicker, reconcile, share ideas and ideals — and whiskey — is always compelling, even as the show cruises along on predictable tracks or gets heavy-handedly demonstrative and repetitive. While pleasant and informative, the play does not scratch much deeper than boilerplate messaging about strength in sisterhood and how hard it was (and still is) for women in science.

Perhaps this is a case of familiarity breeding formula, since Gunderson has already dramatized the hardships and triumphs of early female scientists in such plays as “Ada and the Engine” (about the mathematics genius Ada Lovelace), “Emilie: La Marquise du Châtelet Defends Her Life Tonight” (about the Enlightenment scientist and philosopher) and “Silent Sky” (about the Harvard astronomer Henrietta Leavitt).

The play strives for an almost metaphysical note by the end as it loops back to its start, when Marie explained to the nonscientists in the audience what half-life means: “the moment an element transforms so fully that it is more other than self.” Unfortunately, the show does not undergo such a metamorphosis, and remains stubbornly tethered to a well-intentioned earnestness.

“The Half-Life of Marie Curie” runs throough Dec. 22 at Minetta Lane Theater, Manhattan; thehalflifeofmariecurie.com. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes.

This article originally appeared in

Review: Female Chemistry in 'The Half-Life of Marie Curie'

NEW YORK — In 1911, Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize in chemistry. That alone is a considerable achievement, especially for a woman, but Curie was actually doubling down: Seven years earlier, she, her husband, Pierre, and their colleague Henri Becquerel, had been honored by the Nobel committee for their discoveries in physics.

Complications follow, of course, and based on the title of James Sheldon’s play, the characters’ racial identities or the fact that we are at the historically African American Billie Holiday Theater, you may draw some conclusions about their general nature.

The play, however, is not about slavery itself. Red herring! Rather, Sheldon is interested in the cost of righting a wrong and what people are willing to do to get their due — and whether trying to overcome a dramatic event by blanking it out is a wise option.

The story does follow a relatively predictable path at first, outlining the lead characters’ differentials in politics and access to power.

Reg (Kamal Bolden) is a struggling freelance travel writer and aspiring novelist, while Ginny (Alexandra Neil) is a publishing executive. His networking technique and sexy banter involve playfully — but perhaps not so lightheartedly — needling Ginny about her attitude toward his race.

A proponent of the “Can’t we all just get along?” school of thought, this limousine liberal can be blithely insulting and decries what she sees as the atomization of society. “Why do we have to keep putting everyone into these neat little boxes?” Ginny asks Reg. “Blacks in this one, gays in that. Transgenders here, Muslims there. And don’t forget the white working class — they want their own little identity box, too.”

Just as you start to think race and class could actually help make sense of the situation at hand, Reg drops a bombshell that changes the show’s course. The pace of revelations only increases when Alistair (Gys de Villiers) and his Nigerian-born wife, Millie (Lisa Arrindell) — old friends of Ginny’s visiting from London — turn up for lunch after her night of passion with Reg.

From then on, “Reparations” fully commits to a melodramatic style in its portrayal of people caught in moral quicksands.

Yet, as overcooked as it gets, the show exerts a pulp-fiction-style pull, thanks in large part to the nimble pace set by director Michele Shay — who has staged several August Wilson plays and who earned a Tony nomination in 1996 for her turn as Louise in his “Seven Guitars.” Another asset is Bolden’s confident performance in the tricky role of Reg, an ambitious man whose decision to use trauma for material ends is both debatable and understandable.

“Reparations” gains extra traction from its production’s context: Part of the Billie Holiday Theater’s New Windows Festival, it is the first show in that venue’s 47-year history written by someone of non-African descent. According to a mission statement from the theater’s artistic and executive director, Indira Etwaroo, the festival aims to explore the intersectionality of identity but also “spotlight voices and perspectives that have not historically been presented at the Billie.”

The irony of a white male playwright benefiting from an inclusion initiative is unmistakable, yet fitting for a play that turns expectations on their heads.

“Reparations”: Through Nov. 24 at the Billie Holiday Theater, Brooklyn, New York; 718-636-6995, thebillieholiday.org. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes.

Review: In 'Reparations,' Righting Wrongs Comes With a Cost

NEW YORK — The new play “Reparations” gets underway in an innocuous enough manner. Two strangers meet at a book party; they end up at her Upper East Side condo, where they chitchat with flirtatious casualness before retiring to the bedroom; in the morning, she makes them breakfast. Reg is young and black, with the relaxed assurance of a guy about to score. Ginny is white and older, and ready to start dating again seven months after her husband’s death — Reg barely flinches upon learning she’s...

There often comes a point, however, when even visionaries must confront reality, and Theresa Rebeck’s new play, “Seared,” takes place at exactly that moment.

While Harry busies himself creating edible masterpieces — scenic designer Tim Mackabee’s working replica of a restaurant kitchen on MCC Theater’s smaller stage allows Esparza to actually cook — his business partner, Mike (David Mason, a master of the harried slow burn), is worried.

Two and a half years into their restaurant’s existence, the place is still on shaky financial ground, and the chef’s insistence on the finest, most rarefied ingredients does not help. So when New York magazine unexpectedly hails Harry’s scallop dish, Mike brings in a consultant, Emily (Krysta Rodriguez), to help turn the mollusks into foodie bait and monetize the hell out of them.

The problem is that Harry has lost interest in the scallops and pulled them from the menu. It’s as if Celine Dion had decided to stop singing “My Heart Will Go On” right after it became a hit.

Stuck in the middle is the amiable waiter, Rodney (W. Tré Davis), who sympathizes with Harry’s ambitions but also knows that there’s a real world out there, waiting for its order.

Rebeck has often considered the tensions generated by art-making, ambition and money, whether it was the maneuvers of aspiring writers and their mentor in “Seminar,” a stage manager’s attempt to wrangle high-maintenance actors in “The Understudy,” or the creation of a Broadway musical in the television series “Smash.”

Harry himself is not so different from the Sarah Bernhardt of her 2018 Broadway play “Bernhardt/Hamlet,” both chafing against expectations and fueled by exalted chaos of their own making.

But people’s self-dramatizing behavior does not necessarily make them interesting. And for the most part, everybody in “Seared” motors forward on a straight track: You get a pretty clear idea of who they are very early on, and they behave accordingly the whole way through.

Rebeck does allow for a modicum of ambiguity, but does not make much of it. Harry may have high standards when it comes to cooking but his ethics are shakier: Even though he’s on salary, he takes half of Rodney’s tips. Mike is obsessed with the bottom line but still tries to do right by his staff — he’s certainly tolerated Harry’s shenanigans long enough.

As for Emily, she is not just an operator with a publicist’s knack for saying exactly what people want to hear. She also appears to genuinely admire what our maestro of the stovetop puts on the plate. (The role makes good use of Rodriguez’s hard-edge hummingbird energy.)

The shading does not go deep, however — the show’s title is spot on in that respect — and really, the people onstage are not all that complicated.

To perhaps distract from both the play’s mechanical construction — a looming critic’s visit upsets the restaurant’s shaky equilibrium; lessons are learned — the production by Moritz von Stuelpnagel (“Hand to God”) goes all out on realism and energy.

The fresh smells wafting from the stage are mouthwatering, and when Esparza opens the second act by creating a new salmon concoction, the extended wordless scene works the same way a flashy number would in a musical.

The star has great fun playing the kind of guy tough enough to sport a tattoo of pig parts, and sensitive enough to experience rapture while slicing an onion with a handcrafted Japanese knife. More important, he resists the temptation to make Harry more sympathetic than he should be.

But as Rebeck shifts into even higher gear for a farcical, “Fawlty Towers”-esque episode and a predictable dramatic confrontation, the characters still feel as undernourished as the play is overcooked.

Production Notes:

Through Dec. 1 at the Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space, Manhattan; 646-506-9393, mcctheater.org. Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes.

'Seared' Review: For a Pompous Chef, Comeuppance on the Menu

NEW YORK — If you can’t stand my creative, manly heat, get out of my kitchen: This could be the unofficial motto of Harry, the temperamental chef at a tiny Brooklyn restaurant. But it’s OK for him to be a jerk because Harry — played by Raúl Esparza with knife-wielding, cocky charm — is not a cook, he is an artist.

That the goat is played by actor Mikel Murfi, wearing only underwear, doesn’t alleviate the creeping feeling of dread.

This opening of Irish choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan’s dance-theater piece “Swan Lake/Loch na hEala,” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, makes quite a statement, but of what? Even though I found myself constantly thinking back to that first scene throughout the show, no satisfying interpretation came to mind. Some viewers will find this open-endedness bracing; others may see it as fancy obfuscation.

The three men, billed as Watchers in the program, eventually help Murfi get dressed, and he starts narrating the story. Which, as you might have guessed by now, bears little resemblance to Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake.”

The closest we get to that beloved, if startlingly creepy, ballet is the presence of four dancers representing swans, wearing simple dresses and carrying large wings on their shoulders (Hyemi Shin designed the costumes). They are the most familiar sight in a tale that Keegan-Dolan, who wrote, choreographed and directed the show for his company, Teac Damsa, has reset to a bleak version of contemporary Ireland.

The narrator introduces us to Jimmy O’Reilly (Alexander Leonhartsberger), a hollow-cheeked man in baggy pants, tracksuit top and beanie who has sunk into a deep depression since the death of his father a year earlier. To celebrate Jimmy’s 36th birthday, his mother, Nancy (Elizabeth Cameron Dalman), who uses a wheelchair, gives him his father’s shotgun — a loaded gift, as it were.

The protean Murfi (hailed for his solo plays “I Hear You and Rejoice” and “The Man in the Woman’s Shoes”) also portrays the show’s take on the sorcerer Rothbart of the original “Swan Lake.” Here, he is a priest, who assaults the 17-year-old Finola (Rachel Poirier) and then tries to silence her and her sisters by cursing them; if they mention what happened, they turn into “a filthy animal.” And now here they all are, living by a lake represented by a giant black tarp in Sabine Dargent’s industrial-grim set.

The lake happens to be where Jimmy comes to contemplate death, only to be startled by Finola’s sudden appearance. A pas de deux ensues, tentative at first, then as confident as liberation can be.

Keegan-Dolan intermingles text and movement throughout the evening, yet the most effective mood-setter is the hypnotic acoustic score by the Dublin band Slow Moving Clouds. Performed live by three musicians, it is unrelenting in its spareness. The use of the nyckelharpa, a medieval hybrid of a hurdy-gurdy and a viol, adds the sense that despite the modern setting, we are witnessing an ageless folkloric morality tale about hypocrisy, moral rot and the oppression of women. (Finola shares a name with the daughter in the ancient Irish story “The Children of Lir,” in which a resentful stepmother turns four royal siblings into swans.)

For all that, the show, which feels rushed at 75 minutes, ends on a startling crowd-pleasing scene that attempts to insert an element of levity, suggesting perhaps that even age-old tragedy can be freed from fatalism.

It’s probably not a coincidence that “Swan Lake/Loch na hEala” has been chosen to open BAM’s Next Wave, the first season programmed by the new artistic director, David Binder. The show is an unclassifiable hybrid that remixes a classical ballet beyond recognition and makes the audience an active participant in constantly pondering not just the meaning of the story, but its very form. What are we watching: Woman or swan? Dance or theater? No matter the answer, it looks as if there are heady times ahead in Brooklyn.

‘Swan Lake/Loch na hEala’Through Oct. 20 at the Harvey Theater, Brooklyn; 718-636-4100, bam.org. Running time: 1 hour, 15 minutes.

Review: A Startling 'Swan Lake' That's Hard to Recognize

NEW YORK — A goat is tethered to a cinder block by a rope tied to its neck. As audience members take their seats, the poor animal paces in a circle, bleating miserably. It is a heartbreaking sight. Eventually three men dressed in black appear and begin to dance; the goat panics as they get closer and closer, its cries becoming increasingly shrill.

A man of impending middle age identified as Son (the longtime Wooster Group member Ari Fliakos) stands in a white bedroom (Marsha Ginsberg’s set gently suggests a transitional area between home, hospital and some kind of metaphysical limbo state).

The son, who is eventually referred to as Andy, is watching an older woman, Mother (Caroline Lagerfelt). She is dressed in a robe and nightgown and lying on a bed, propped up on pillows. Through most of the show, he describes his mother’s personality and routine in the present tense, as if providing a voice-over narration. Fliakos’ miking gives his voice a slightly disembodied quality. It’s a simple theatrical trick, and quietly effective, but it also inserts a slightly alienating distance. (Peter Mills Weiss did the sound design.)

The mother lives in the same East Village apartment where she raised her child (and a few blocks from this play’s venue). He’s still in the neighborhood so he visits regularly, and tells us what he sees: “Smoking. Reading. The weather channel is on, muted.” And later: “She draws the smoke in deep, then releases. She draws in and closes her eyes.” (The mother has a lifelong habit; we are told that even her books smell of smoke.)

The son always — well, almost always — speaks in soft, neutral tones as he guides us through his mother’s life. The pair chat, but not directly: It’s as if we were hearing one end of a phone conversation. The woman gives off an impression of calm, elegant composure, with a hint of impish humor. We learn she was a theater buff and is still capable of strong opinions: “Neil LaBute? Oh, come on now,” she says. “He is the worst.”

Knud Adams directs this production for the Play Company and Andy Bragen Theater Projects, which is presented by Next Door at New York Theater Workshop. The audience sits on both sides of the stage, adding intimacy to the already small venue. At the same time, the text’s observational tone and Fliakos’ dispassionate delivery maintain a sense of distance, which can feel overprotective of both characters. We are with them, but at a remove, as if they were in a documentary.

Inevitably, the mother deteriorates. “Her mind is going,” her son says, describing “some kind of softening, an inability to focus.”

It gets worse, and Bragen spares us few of the indignities of old age. By the end, the son’s emotions are harder to describe in tidy little sentences. The show comes alive just as death enters.

Additional Information:

“Notes on My Mother’s Decline”Through Oct. 27 at Fourth Street Theater, Next Door at New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan; 212-460-5475, nytw.org. Running time: 1 hour, 15 minutes.

A Son Mourns in 'Notes on My Mother's Decline'

NEW YORK — The title of Andy Bragen’s new autobiographical show, “Notes on My Mother’s Decline,” forecasts exactly what’s in store: It is just as collected, fatalistic and grief-stricken as you might expect. Perhaps those first two qualities, with their suggestion of emotional detachment, are what helped the playwright cope with the third. Or maybe that’s what Bragen (“This Is My Office,” “Don’t You _______ Say a Word”) would like us to think.

As if this weren’t enough, the action takes place on Christmas Eve, which can be the most jolly or the most depressing time of year; it’s almost immediately clear that “Dublin Carol” has picked the second option.

And there is more: We are in the back office of a funeral parlor, and the main character, John (Jeffrey Bean), is an alcoholic who works for the undertaker. The play, which has little conventional plot, is essentially a snapshot of this lost soul.

McPherson has deployed a string section made up of theater’s smallest violins. Yet John’s despair is not so much melodramatic as it is achingly banal. This has the merit of realism.

Irish artists have long made great use of drink and its natural habitat, pubs, as lubricants for storytelling. One of McPherson’s best-known plays, “The Weir” — the immediate predecessor to “Dublin Carol” — is even set in a barroom.

But “Dublin Carol,” which premiered in New York in 2003 and is now revived by the Irish Repertory Theater, eschews the verbal fireworks booze so often encourages and fuels. Alcohol did not make John a charismatic raconteur; it made him a lonely, self-pitying sad sack estranged from his wife and two grown children. The director Ciarán O’Reilly and Bean approach both the play and the part in a — excuse the pun — sober manner that underlines the material’s unsentimental perspective. (Even the aforementioned scenic design, by Charlie Corcoran, narrowly avoids turning into a parody of working-class kitsch.)

“I wish I’d never been born,” John, at one point, tells his daughter, Mary (Sarah Street), who has come by to inform him that her mother is dying of cancer. The pair engage in wistful chitchat and reminiscences, but this isn’t an easy reunion — she recalls how her dad once took her to a pub when she was a young child, and he drank so much that he got into a brawl and fell on top of her.

The conversation with Mary is bookended by two scenes with John’s young colleague, Mark (Cillian Hegarty). In the first, which takes place in the morning, the men are tentative, unsure of how to conduct small talk. John assures Mark that he still drinks, just not as much as he used to. Yet he is recovering from a hangover, and we see him hit the whiskey with Mary. By the third and final scene, when Mark returns in the late afternoon, John is so inebriated that he is staggering, and his mood has plummeted in parallel with the shrinking level inside the bottle of Jameson.

This is just one more day in a wrecked life, and ultimately the show wrings little out of John as a theatrical creation, proving that drinking can smother drama as well as people. Happily, it’s a fault McPherson corrected in his lovely Broadway-bound musical, “Girl from the North Country,” which, unlike “Dublin Carol,” draws a dark form of illumination and beauty out of loneliness and despair.

‘Dublin Carol’

Through Nov. 10 at Irish Repertory Theater, New York; 212-727-2737, irishrep.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes.

Review: 'Dublin Carol' Gets Lost in Its Drink

NEW YORK — You don’t need a single line of dialogue to feel the bone-deep malaise that pervades Conor McPherson’s “Dublin Carol”: The play’s set practically screams exhausted shabbiness, drenched in an orange-brown palette Pantone might call Tragic Rust — a monochromatic approach that is representative of the limited emotional landscape to follow.

As the title might suggest, the list includes various productions of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard.” The other selections cover a decidedly diverse range, including Disney’s “Bambi”; the 1975 Martha Rosler video “Semiotics of the Kitchen”; Lydia Lunch’s 1980 jazz-punk album “Queen of Siam”; Rachel Whiteread’s Turner Prize-winning sculpture “House”; and a Thrillist article about drinking a gallon of water a day for 30 days. Also listed as a major source — though I could not spot it onstage — is the psychedelic Japanese horror film “House,” which Manohla Dargis, in her review in The New York Times, described as “delirious, deranged, gonzo or just gone, baby, gone.”

None of those words apply to this new “House,” a high-concept, low-reward aggregate of undigested references. Conceived by 11 people, including nine actors and director Rubén Polendo, the show may have been exciting to create — but the experience is less rewarding for viewers.

The general idea is to evoke the changing ideas of house and home — a distinction the show does not make as evocatively, or succinctly, as Burt Bacharach and Hal David did in 1964. The ensemble wear snazzy matching outfits of black pants, mustard-yellow blazers and white rubber boots, and move around and inside of a house in the middle of the stage. The best idea of the evening is that the domestic and public spheres bleed in and out of one another: This particular abode is all frame and no walls. (Cast members Alex Hawthorn, Justin Nestor and Scott Spahr, as well as Polendo, are credited with “lead architectural install.”)

Like the previous Mitu production “Remnant,” “House” mixes live performance with video and sophisticated sound design. Audience members wear headphones the entire time, immersed in a soundscape in which the actors’ voices are processed and looped through electronic effects, or mixed live over the backing tracks for songs penned by rising writer and musician Ada Westfall (who is also in the cast).

The company owes a clear debt to the Wooster Group, but “House” does not move the needle forward from the benchmarks that experimental, multimedia-driven troupe set decades ago.

At times the actors quote from interviews they conducted, giving the show an “of the moment” quality with references to migration and displacement. There are snippets of vintage commercials, perhaps in an attempt to evoke the once vivid American dream, now supplanted by tales of mortgage default.

Eventually there is synchronized dancing, because why not?

“House” also borrows lines from “The Cherry Orchard,” though that play is mostly used as a referential beacon for the audience. The result is not as intellectually or emotionally engaging as the recent Chekhov remixes, including “Life Sucks” and “Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow,” which tackled the Russian author’s work with various degrees of success. But at least they tried.

As spooky as the high-tech mood of “House” can occasionally be (and it’s almost always when Westfall sings), the show mostly feels as if nobody could decide what it wanted to say and how, leading to an awkward mix of aesthetic ambition and unchallenging blandness.

“House (or how to lose an orchard in 90 minutes or less)”

Through Sept. 8 at MITU580, Brooklyn; 646-543-6488, theatermitu.org. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/25/theater/review-house-nods-to-chekhov-but-the-references-dont-stop-there.html" id="5eb6aeda-9e4e-35d3-aca1-85bd199262bd">The New York Times</a>.

Review: 'House' Nods to Chekhov, but the References Don't Stop There

NEW YORK — The folks at Theater Mitu did a lot of homework for their latest show, “House (or how to lose an orchard in 90 minutes or less)”: A “research bibliography” takes up three tightly spaced pages in the program.

Murphy’s play, which had its New York premiere in 2010 and is now revived at the Irish Repertory Theater, is structured as a series of interconnected monologues, with the women trading places center stage as they take turns holding forth.

The first one we meet is Amber (Lauren O’Leary), who is in her late teens and prone to hitting the sambuca. And the vodka. And the Coronas. And the cocaine and spliffs. “My hangovers are brutal lately,” Amber tells a colleague after throwing up.

We in the audience suspect something else, and lo and behold, Amber is pregnant by her casual boyfriend, who is more interested in going to Australia than in his new responsibilities.

Something not entirely dissimilar happened to Amber’s mother, Lorraine (Brenda Meaney), at about the same age, except that the father stuck around long enough to reveal himself to be a deadbeat junkie.

The only one with a solid track record in the relationship department is the matriarch, Kay (Marsha Mason in fine form), but unfortunately her beloved longtime husband has been incapacitated by a stroke. Her sadness and anxiety do not obscure more pragmatic needs: “I’m on the wrong side of 60, not dead,” Kay says. “I haven’t had sex in well over a year, and it’s killing me.”

Life goes on. Lorraine overlooks a bad first impression (“all I want to do is spray him down with Febreeze”) then a bad first sexual encounter to pursue a romance with Niall — and he turns out to be a good bloke. Amber gives birth to Little Gem, whose arrival helps assuage what’s happened to his great-grandfather, Gem Sr.

The script does not specify where the play takes place, so director Marc Atkinson Borrull has placed the trio of narrators in a waiting room — the posters on the walls of Meredith Ries’ set suggest an OB/GYN practice. This may be a reference to the play’s genesis: Murphy was inspired by some of the women she’d met working at a health organization.

At the same time, the show, a warm slice-of-life tale doesn’t follow suit on potentially ominous developments — an abortion? domestic violence? — the setting might suggest. Perhaps we have become too cynical as audiences.

While we can tell that they’ve had their differences over the years, the women circle the wagons in times of need. This depiction of matrilineal love and support feels bold in an era when dysfunction too often is the cheap fossil fuel of narrative engines — but not enough to entirely sustain our interest all the way through.

This is compounded by the show’s storytelling approach, which deprives it of the energy created by personal interactions. Seeing the women next to each other, it’s hard not to wish they’d actually connect. Relaying a story has its charms; living it is something else entirely.

Through Sept. 1 at Irish Repertory Theater, Manhattan; 212-727-2737, irishrep.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/31/theater/little-gem-review.html" id="3ed7570b-79b9-32cd-aca8-a59da896bc3f">The New York Times</a>.

Review: Motherhood Masters Dysfunction in 'Little Gem'

NEW YORK — Kay, Lorraine and Amber share a stage but not a single conversation in Elaine Murphy’s “Little Gem.” Yet as the show goes on, it becomes increasingly obvious that the women, who represent three generations of a Dublin family, are very close. When one speaks, the others look on, sometimes silently reacting: a raised eyebrow here, pursed lips there. They may not directly speak to each other, but they do look out for each other.

This is not like clicking a button to offhandedly add your name to a Change.org list: We are in 1970s communist Czechoslovakia and publicly supporting a singer imprisoned for telling a joke that displeased the authorities is no trivial matter. Stanekova, a successful writer, carefully weighs the pros and cons of signing. For instance, would her fame help or undermine the cause? The answer is yes.

Stanekova (Danielle Skraastad) games up scenarios in a running monologue while her friend Vanek (David Barlow), who brought the petition, silently waits. The scene goes on. It is terrific political theater, an absorbing presentation of moral dilemmas and practical tactics.

“Protest,” which runs about 30 minutes, was hatched in the heat of the moment by Vaclav Havel, the dissident Czech playwright who went on to become his country’s first president. It is the strongest offering in the Potomac Theater Project’s “Havel: The Passion of Thought,” an omnibus of five works under Richard Romagnoli’s sometimes shaky direction. (The company is presenting the show in alternance with Tom Stoppard’s “Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth” — the playwrights were friends and influenced each other.)

The core of the evening is Havel’s so-called Vanek plays, a trilogy composed in 1975 and 1978. The plays were banned in Czechoslovakia so they were performed in people’s living rooms and even recorded on vinyl.

What registers at first is Vanek’s passivity. Though accretion, you realize he is both sounding board and catalyst — a neat encapsulation of a writer’s role in an authoritarian community.

In “Interview,” Vanek faces the loutish manager (Michael Laurence) of the brewery where he has been assigned to work. The brewmaster, guzzling his own product, engages in an increasingly drunken soliloquy from which it emerges that he is trying to get Vanek to inform on himself. The play might work better were Laurence not overacting the brewmaster into googly-eyed caricature.

Next up is “Private View,” where Vanek is subjected to the antics of a well-off couple (Christopher Marshall and the very funny Emily Kron) working the system to their advantage. The humor is heavy-handed enough to make a dent against an Iron Curtain, and the piece descends into the type of absurdist farce that has not aged well.

If Vanek can’t find his place between the boorish worker of “Interview” and the arrivistes of “Private View,” he is a little bit more at ease with a fellow writer in “Protest,” even though she is accepted by the regime and he is not. Ably carried by the sober Skraastad (the character was originally a man named Stanek), this one-act is more formally traditional than the other two, and more effective.

The Havel trilogy is bookended by Harold Pinter’s “The New World Order,” from 1991, and Samuel Beckett’s “Catastrophe,” from 1982.

In the chilling amuse-bouche, two men (Laurence and Marshall) look over a third, who is wearing a hood (Barlow). The duo tease their prisoner by alluding to what they are going to do to him and his wife. It is psychological torture, short but definitely not sweet.

Beckett’s play, which he dedicated to the then-imprisoned Havel, centers on a mercurial director (Madeline Ciocci, in a ridiculous pseudo-noir getup) and her assistant (Emily Ballou) as they make a man (Barlow again) pose this way and that. He is reduced to a living doll devoid of thought and will, subjected to the whims of a tyrant. Sadly, the miscast young actresses are unable to impart any gravitas to the material, making for an unfortunate coda to the evening.

‘Havel: The Passion of Thought’: Through Aug. 4 at Atlantic Stage 2, Manhattan; 866-811-4111, ptpnyc.org. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/theater/havel-review.html" id="6d82b2d4-fc6e-3d28-a188-fba18d49759a">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — The suspense is a nail-biter: Will she sign the petition or not?

Review: A Vaclav Havel Trilogy Drives Evening of Political Theater

“Protest,” which runs about 30 minutes, was hatched in the heat of the moment by Václav Havel, the dissident Czech playwright who went on to become his country’s first president. It is the strongest offering in the Potomac Theater Project’s “Havel: The Passion of Thought,” an omnibus of five works under Richard Romagnoli’s sometimes shaky direction. (The company is presenting the show in alternance with Tom Stoppard’s “Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth” — the playwrights were friends and influenced each other.)

In the chilling amuse-bouche, two men ( Laurence and Marshall) look over a third, who is wearing a hood (Barlow). The duo tease their prisoner by alluding to what they are going to do to him and his wife. It is psychological torture, short but definitely not sweet.

Beckett’s play, which he dedicated to the then-imprisoned Havel, centers on a mercurial director (Madeline Ciocci, in a ridiculous pseudo-noir get-up) and her assistant (Emily Ballou) as they make a man (Barlow again) pose this way and that. He is reduced to a living doll devoid of thought and will, subjected to the whims of a tyrant. Sadly, the miscast young actresses are unable to impart any gravitas to the material, making for an unfortunate coda to the evening.

‘Havel: The Passion of Thought’

Through Aug. 4 at Atlantic Stage 2, Manhattan; 866-811-4111, ptpnyc.org. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes.

Review: A Václav havel trilogy drives evening of political theater

Jackson, 38, said that Phair, along with Tori Amos and Joni Mitchell, meant a lot to him when he was a teenager in Detroit. “All the white women rockers I grew up listening to helped me tap into my cultural blackness because they were so independently themselves,” he said in a conversation a few days later, quoting the opening of Phair’s song “Strange Loop”: “‘The fire you like so much in me/ Is the mark of someone adamantly free.’”

The title of Jackson’s acclaimed new musical, now playing off-Broadway, is very close: “A Strange Loop.” It refers to the song but also to a theory of consciousness and self by the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter.

This may sound like pretty much the opposite of a barrel of fun, but the show, for which Jackson wrote the book, music and lyrics, is equally hilarious and brutal, lacerating and tender, in its portrayal of Usher, a young, gay, black musical-theater writer working on a musical about a young, gay, black musical-theater writer.

The voluble, funny and self-examining Jackson clearly has much in common with his voluble, funny and self-examining protagonist. When we met at New York SongSpace, he was even wearing the same T-shirt as Usher, one that celebrated bell hooks, the African-American scholar and activist. Yet he describes “A Strange Loop” as self-referential rather than autobiographical — one reason he does not appear in it.

The director, Stephen Brackett, said that distinction was crucial in the show’s evolution. “It was very important for both of us to underline a sense of universality,” Brackett said in a phone interview. “We wanted to avoid the pitfall of only thinking about this as a loose-knit memoir.”

Jackson said he believes the distancing mechanism may also help audience members feel the story more and mentioned a lesson from early in his days at New York University.

“One of the first plays I saw as an undergrad was ‘Death of a Salesman’ with Brian Dennehy, and I remember crying my eyes out,” he said. “Not because I understood anything about being an older white man in the 1950s, but because of the message that in America you’re worth more dead than alive.”

By the same token, he said he asked himself, “‘What if I can make an old white man empathize with what it might be like to be a young, black, gay man and suffer — and not because he’s being killed by the police or destroyed in some way like that, but it’s actually an emotional journey from the inside?’”

When it was time to cast Usher, about four years ago, the role went to Larry Owens, who has a growing reputation of his own as a comedian. Owens recalled that Jackson posted on Facebook that he was seeking “an overweight black boy who could sing but was like Mary-Louise Parker.”

“I was like, ‘I think I can do this until you find the right person,’” Owens said in a phone interview. “Very humble,” he added, laughing. “Mary-Louise Parker meets Annie Baker, that was sort of the job description.”

“A Strange Loop” is essentially a torrential monologue by Usher, but it is rendered as agitated conversations with his “extremely obnoxious Thoughts,” portrayed by six versatile actors. In a further hall-of-mirrors twist, a couple of the Thoughts also act as Usher’s judgmental parents.

It’s worth noting that a sequel to “A Strange Loop” might have a rosier outlook: Jackson’s folks loved the show, for instance. “Their take on it was almost like I’d given them a Sardi’s caricature of themselves, and they were honored by it, in a weird way,” he said. And he is seeing someone new. “It was a surprise, but it’s good,” he commented in a rare bashful moment.

The self-loathing Usher is not there yet, however, and frequently directs pointed barbs at his inadequacies and malaise. He does save the sharpest attacks for the moralists who propagate hurtful misinformation and stereotypes — chief among them church leaders and the work of Tyler Perry, antipathies Jackson shares.

During our chat, he grew especially animated discussing Perry’s oeuvre — his customarily wide, gaptoothed grin receded temporarily; his brow furrowed. Jackson considers his films bad “on their own dramatic terms,” and says they have an irresponsible attitude toward sexuality and AIDS. He vividly remembers the rage triggered by the 2013 film “Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor,” a sentiment that made its way into a key song in “A Strange Loop” — a blistering, angry parody of a homophobic sermon.

“It’s just this core ignorance and this unwillingness to have self-inquiry or empathy,” Jackson said. “That’s where the first iteration of ‘AIDS Is God’s Punishment’ came from: I had to address it.”

The second time he became impassioned at SongSpace was when he discussed, at length, a close friend and collaborator who died of AIDS-related complications in February, after having hidden his HIV status for years.

“A lot of what I think killed him is what I call the four S’s: silence, secret, stigma and shame,” Jackson said forcefully. “Until HIV-negative people do the work of destigmatizing, I think that kind of thing is going to continue.”

In Jackson’s work, activism takes the form of truth-telling and is often delivered via the subversion of sexual and cultural tropes and their racial associations. Part of what makes “A Strange Loop” so giddily exciting is its wide range of references. The same is true of a discussion with Jackson as he veers from praising Erika Slezak’s work in the soap opera “One Life to Live,” to the 1973 musical “Raisin” and the fantasy writer Neil Gaiman — the last “a huge influence in terms of multilayered storytelling, especially on my next show, ‘White Girl in Danger.’”

That musical-in-progress uses as a springboard 1990s Lifetime original movies revolving around the titular predicament — except that it centers on an African-American teenager who decides it’s time to emerge from the “Blackground” in the town of Allwhite.

And Jackson has more on his plate. In October, the National Alliance for Musical Theater’s 31st annual Festival of New Musicals will present an excerpt from “Teeth,” with lyrics by Jackson and music by Anna K. Jacobs. They are collaborating on the book, which is based on a 2007 horror film about a young woman with a vagina dentata.

Then there is “Accounts Payable,” a commission from LCT3 (Lincoln Center Theater’s program for emerging artists) that Jackson describes as “a sort of dystopian comedy set 20 years in the future, in an office in a world that’s postliberal, postconservative, post-Republican.” (The show is partly inspired by his years working at an ad agency, an experience he remembers as “horriiiiiiiible.”)

“A Strange Loop,” in the meantime, runs at Playwrights Horizons, in association with Page 73, through July 28.

When Jackson talks about his projects, the dominant themes are curiosity, positivity and humor but also an irrepressible appetite for the possible.

“Bell hooks talks a lot about the imagination as a space for liberty, and I believe in that,” he said. “Black artists, our imaginations are limitless. I want to create an expansive world that isn’t just about my own potential destruction. I’m actually going to do the opposite of that: to talk about the potential for creation and for living and for dealing with the problems of the world, for laughing and for joy.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/14/theater/michael-r-jackson-strange-loop.html" id="b3eccc9a-455b-3e97-a2d4-0037f0232dcb">The New York Times</a>.

What makes Michael R. Jackson tick, and what ticks him off

NEW YORK — Michael R. Jackson — playwright, composer, lyricist and superfan — sang along to every single song at the recent Liz Phair concert in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. He even knew the obscure “Ant in Alaska.” He took photos and beamed, he offered learned asides about alternate lyrics. When Phair launched into “Divorce Song,” Jackson let out a piercing scream that may still be echoing in the wilds of Park Slope.

<h1>(Critic's Notebook): Recent Broadway revivals of “Angels in America,” “M. Butterfly,” “The Boys in the Band” and “Torch Song”— shows dealing with the gay experience — have attracted star power, awards and attention. This year, Tarell Alvin McCraney’s acclaimed Broadway debut, “Choir Boy,” focused on a charismatic gay youth who runs into trouble at his boarding school.</h1>

This season looks just as bountiful. Matthew Lopez’s six-hour-long “The Inheritance” is coming to New York after a London run that earned it comparisons to “Angels,” while “Take Me Out,” Richard Greenberg’s study of a baseball player’s coming out, is scheduled to return 17 years after it won the Tony Award for best play.

Wait, let me rephrase for maximum accuracy: It’s the gay-male experience we’re talking about. Lesbians are more elusive on America’s premier stages.

And last season wasn’t even that bad for us, considering that aside from Maureen and Joanne from “Rent,” lesbians are usually relegated to the supporting ranks, like the friendly neighbors in “Falsettos.”

Let’s rewind — it won’t take long.

We’ve had a teenager fighting for her right to bring her girlfriend to the titular event in the very funny musical “The Prom,” and a princess falling in love with her lady-in-waiting in the underrated Go-Go’s jukebox show, “Head Over Heels.”

Those productions followed in the footsteps of “Fun Home” (a lesbian coming-of-age story that devotes quite a bit of stage time to the heroine’s closeted father); “The Color Purple” (whose Sapphic content hinges on the way the show is directed and performed); and “Indecent” (which is partly about a real-life lesbian kiss that was the smooch of death for a 1920s Broadway show).

Grasping at straws, some theatergoers are projecting feels onto Janis in “Mean Girls” (an art nerd who’s not officially straight), Princess Elsa from “Frozen” (single, alienated) and Scout from “To Kill a Mockingbird” (wears overalls).

The recent supersize Pride celebrations allowed me to see work I had somehow never managed to catch. At the five-day “Pride Plays” reading series, which featured an equal number of gay and lesbian works, I finally saw a live version of Jane Chambers’ 1980 weepie “Last Summer at Bluefish Cove,” which is just as good, if not better, than Terrence McNally’s similarly themed “Love! Valour! Compassion!” (The McNally play won a Tony; “Bluefish Cove” has never been on Broadway. One senses a pattern.)

A curator with a good sense of humor had even programmed on the same day the Five Lesbian Brothers’ “Brave Smiles … Another Lesbian Tragedy,” a wickedly funny 1993 spoof of stories featuring tragic lesbian destinies like, well, “Last Summer at Bluefish Cove.” (Disclosure: Lesbian Brother Moe Angelos is a good friend.)

It’s telling that “Pride Plays” took place at the Rattlestick Theater, a slightly dingy downtown space not too dissimilar from than the ones where I used to see lesbian performance artists, musicians and spoken-word practitioners in the early 1990s — the pre-renovations La MaMa, WOW Café, P.S. 122 and Dixon Place. Watching the Five Lesbian Brothers’ plays in those rock ’n’ roll settings was revelatory and joyous: We could be funny!

And it was Dixon Place (now in a legitimate space after starting in founder Ellie Covan’s living room) that hosted the 25th-anniversary celebration of Lesbopalooza, a shambolic revue that was so tongue-in-cheekily old-school that it featured a prop labrys (the double-headed ax that was the emblem of 1970s feminist-lesbians).

Of that generation of brilliant women, only a precious few have made it to the limelight — most prominently Lesbian Brother Lisa Kron, who went from “Paradykes Alley” and “Paradykes Lost” at WOW Café in the late 1980s to Broadway with her own “Well” and as the co-author of the Tony-winning musical “Fun Home.”

The discrepancy between the visibility of gay men and the invisibility of gay women is frustrating, but sadly not all that surprising.

To begin with, if female writers, composers and directors are underrepresented on the biggest American stages, then gay ones have their work cut out for them. It’s like being hit by theatrical double jeopardy.

Then there is the common wisdom that Broadway, and by extension theater, is the province of gay men. This is partly because they are assumed to have a greater disposable income, and partly because of a perceived sense of ownership.

As Chicago Tribune critic Chris Jones recently wrote, in reference to McNally’s lifetime achievement award speech at the Tonys, “They were the ones who composed most of the musicals, choreographed most of the dance numbers, wrote a whole lot of the plays. They ran things, too. And they were most of the critics. (They still are.)”

Two gay playwrights made their Broadway debuts in spring 2017, for instance. But while it took Joshua Harmon a mere five years to go from “Bad Jews” at the pocket-size Roundabout Underground to “Significant Other” on Broadway, a quarter century elapsed between Paula Vogel’s first major production, “The Baltimore Waltz” (included in the Rattlestick series), and her finally being eligible for a Tony with “Indecent.” Many awards, including a Pulitzer Prize for “How I Learned to Drive,” did not speed the process.

This comparison is not meant to disparage Harmon, but to point out a galling discrepancy. Gay stories are assumed to have a relatable universality — and thus a commercial appeal — that is not as easily granted to lesbian stories.

Obviously, Broadway is not the be-all and end-all of American theater. But it does represent validation and awareness, the ability to put on big spectacles, and the opportunity to land regional productions, have a nationally televised platform with the Tonys and possibly make a living from your craft instead of trying to cobble an income from day jobs and grants.

It’s worth noting that lesbians are much better represented in mainstream comedy, from the trailblazing Sandra Bernhard, Carol Leifer and Ellen DeGeneres to such current popular acts as Wanda Sykes, Tig Notaro and Hannah Gadsby.

So gay women have to make the most of off- and off-off-Broadway. Lesbian writer María Irene Fornés’ single Broadway production, “The Office,” closed in previews in 1966, but that did not stop her from becoming one of the great innovators of American theater — for the relatively small circle of people aware of her work. (In November, Theater for a New Audience is giving Fornés’ “Fefu and Her Friends” its first off-Broadway revival since 1978.)

And lesbian stories have not stopped getting told around town.

Just this past year we saw Aziza Barnes’ gleefully, raunchily pansexual “BLKS”; Bekah Brunstetter’s “The Cake” (which featured one of the most awkwardly acted lesbian couples I have ever seen); Crystal Skillman’s melancholy “Open” (about an amateur magician attempting to summon her gravely injured girlfriend); and Madeleine George’s apocalyptic eco-comedy “Hurricane Diane,” whose ambition necessitated deeper pockets than New York Theater Workshop’s to be fully realized.

At the same time, it’s hard to deny that too many lesbian stories are stuck in arrested artistic development. It feels as if lesbians are still trying to build a theatrical house while gay men — having had a house, a two-car garage and a gazebo for years now — have moved on to deconstructing and repurposing the real estate they can afford to be tired of.

I can’t think, for instance, of a lesbian equivalent to the thrilling, savagely funny way Michael R. Jackson’s “A Strange Loop” and Robert O’Hara’s “Bootycandy” dismantled tropes and preconceptions associated with the gay-male identity and community (more specifically its African-American subset).

Similarly, gay men have the luxury to reconsider characters and plots once derided as destructively stereotypical, as with successive redemptive productions of Mart Crowley’s era-defining “The Boys in the Band” — once accused by some gay people of being self-loathing.

If only the same treatment could be applied to, say, “The Children’s Hour,” the Lillian Hellman drama about closeted teachers that has not been seen on Broadway since its original production closed in 1936. (A 2011 West End revival, starring Keira Knightley and Elisabeth Moss, never made it to New York.) Britain has even had two musical adaptations of women-in-prison TV series, “Prisoner Cell Block H” and “Bad Girls,” which dipped their toes in the barely charted waters known as lesbian camp.

Perhaps American lesbian theater will reach commercial maturity when it has the strength and confidence to look back at itself, and the community that spawned it, and maybe even laugh.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/05/theater/broadway-lesbian-theater.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Wait, let me rephrase for maximum accuracy: It’s the gay-male experience we’re talking about. Lesbians are more elusive on America’s premier stages.

Not just for the boys in the band

<h1>NEW YORK — Of course a story about the end times is going to be the centerpiece of any theatrical evening: How could it not?</h1>

It helps that Kate Attwell’s “Jesus in Manhattan” — in which the son of God’s return, in the form of a little girl, prefigures the apocalypse — is also the most ambitious of the five entries in this last installment of Ensemble Studio Theater’s marathon of one-act plays.

Attwell tries to conjure a mounting sense of doom through a fractured narrative: Confusion and awe turn into urgency and dread, then resignation and perhaps even acceptance as seven actors take turns playing various characters in brief, seemingly unconnected scenes.

A woman who speaks only Hindi tries to convince an American visa officer that she absolutely needs to see the brother she hasn’t bothered to visit in 20 years. Another woman panics because her farm’s animals have vanished while rats are everywhere. Eventually, we are told that humanity is condemned to 150 years of darkness — literal darkness that, naturally, includes the EST theater.

As memorable as isolated moments can be, however, “Jesus in Manhattan” is too scattershot, the sum of its parts adding up to less than a satisfying whole. It is also hampered by its short length, coming across like the kernel of a longer piece rather than as a self-contained one-act.

The other four plays in the omnibus, which is presented along with the Radio Drama Network, function better as stand-alones. This does not automatically make them any good, mind you.

Julia Specht’s “i believe in a republic in which money has a great deal to say.” and Stephen Brown’s “The Tourists” both mine a broad comic vein with their satirical aspirations.

In the first, a trio of Gilded Age socialites prepare for a forthcoming ball in Newport. They dream up outlandish festivities while belittling and humiliating the maid, Bess (Megan Tusing).

But Bess’ impulse is not to plot a revolution: All she wants is to one day become just like these women. It is a pointed observation, but the rich ladies’ outré cartoonishness dulls the blade.

Brown goes even bigger with two middle-aged Tennessee women on the loose in Paris, caricatures of the “ugly American” tourist complete with jokes about farting in front of the Mona Lisa. The extroverted Debra (Talaura Harms) is engaged back home but still flirts with the handsome, impossibly sweet French bellhop (Marshall Taylor Thurman). Debra’s friend, Peggy (Helen Coxe), watches the rosé-fueled evening devolve — Coxe’s awkward dance to Rod Stewart’s “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” is the single funniest thing in the entire show — and eventually comedy gives way to sentimentality. It is not an upgrade.

Attwell tries to conjure a mounting sense of doom through a fractured narrative: Confusion and awe turn into urgency and dread, then resignation and perhaps even acceptance as seven actors take turns playing various characters in brief, seemingly unconnected scenes.

Elisabeth Vincentelli

Articles written by the author

Review: Female Chemistry in 'The Half-Life of Marie Curie'

Review: In 'Reparations,' Righting Wrongs Comes With a Cost

'Seared' Review: For a Pompous Chef, Comeuppance on the Menu

Review: A Startling 'Swan Lake' That's Hard to Recognize

A Son Mourns in 'Notes on My Mother's Decline'

Review: 'Dublin Carol' Gets Lost in Its Drink

Review: 'House' Nods to Chekhov, but the References Don't Stop There

Review: Motherhood Masters Dysfunction in 'Little Gem'

Review: A Vaclav Havel Trilogy Drives Evening of Political Theater

Review: A Václav havel trilogy drives evening of political theater

What makes Michael R. Jackson tick, and what ticks him off

Not just for the boys in the band

A one-act marathon anchored by the Armageddon

Franco Zeffirelli: The 9 films and operas that defined a director

Review: In 'Open,' a love story told by sleight of hand

'The Haunting' has a big problem with 'Hamilton'

You've seen Mary Elizabeth winstead onscreen, get ready for her onstage

Review: 'The Pink Unicorn' leads a mother into unknown territory

Review: A lovingly rendered 'Plough and the Stars'

Review: Tribute or rip-off? 'Original Sound' looks at the line