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

What Cornell Alston does in “Jack &amp;” is not as technically polished, but the charismatic Alston easily holds the stage in this piece by the experimental theatermaker Kaneza Schaal (“Go Forth”). He also brings a life story that adds a poignant depth to the production; whenever the show runs the risk of being too cerebrally, frustratingly abstract, Alston grounds it.

The first section of the tripartite “Jack &amp;” — which had a short run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in October and is now playing at New York Live Arts — is “The Monologues,” which begins with Alston’s Jack recalling conversations in a prison’s community room. The inmates are heatedly discussing the killing of Osama bin Laden. “Against my mother’s good advice never to argue with fools, I thought it important to add something to this debate,” our narrator says before jumping into the fray.

Alston relays these exchanges with a very funny mix of exasperation and a certain tenderness for the men. The line between theater and reality is blurred because he himself was incarcerated for 33 years — Schaal first saw Alston acting in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” at Fishkill Correctional Facility.

But the show is not a docudrama, and it has more on its mind than one-liners about Navy SEAL canine units.

As a poor goldfish swims about a small container onstage — sometimes calmly, other times in an unsettlingly frantic manner — Jack turns to a discussion of baking, perhaps as a method for order, a way to help with re-entry into the world after leaving his own fish bowl. (Alston works nights in an industrial bakery.)

Eventually the sound designer Rucyl Frison, mixing live, uses the Parliament song “Flash Light” to help the show segue into its second part, “The Sitcom.”

Jack is now paired with Jill (Stacey Karen Robinson), and he has a goofy friend (Modesto Jimenez, aka Flako) who is also called Jack. The universe is that of 1950s and ’60s television comedies and comes complete with a laugh track and canned applause. In addition to designing the show,artist and writer Christopher Myers contributed the text to the first segment, and wrote the second with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury. (Schaal, an accomplished performer in her own right, appeared in Drury’s “Really” three years ago.)

Despite being grounded in a heightened comic style, this second section has a surreal vibe that gets even more pronounced as we glide into the wordless third one, “The Cotillion.” Alston and Robinson, now in formal wear, perform a succession of dance moves while Jimenez accompanies them dressed in the style of John Canoe, an African tradition that has endured in the Caribbean.

Admittedly the play — which is paired with an installation by Myers, also called “The Cotillion,” featuring paintings and videos of the show’s inspirations — can be elliptical, and I am not sure I would have been able to parse Schaal’s intent without the program notes. “Jack &amp;” ends with the audience invited on stage for a slice of cake. By then maybe we are joining Jack — and by extension Alston — in the title, following the ampersand to help form a new community. It is a lovely, hopeful thought.

“Jack &amp;” with “The Cotillion”

Through Saturday at New York Live Arts, Manhattan; 212-924-0077, newyorklivearts.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/18/theater/jack-with-the-cotillion-review.html" id="ff8732dc-7076-383d-ad93-72283a7e4672">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — The avant-garde is not usually associated with star turns, but it has often relied on them — Kate Valk’s performances in Wooster Group productions immediately come to mind, or Scott Shepherd’s in “Gatz,” Elevator Repair Service’s adaptation of “The Great Gatsby.”

An Actor's Life Story Grounds 'Jack &' With 'The Cotillion'

NEW YORK — When “The Band’s Visit,” the Tony-winning musical by David Yazbek and Itamar Moses, closes on Sunday after much-lauded runs on and off Broadway, it will have had only one Dina: Katrina Lenk, who took on the role of the seemingly stern yet secretly romantic small-town restaurant owner and indelibly made it her own.

“Katrina’s been a rock,” director David Cromer said in a telephone interview. “She solved the problem of who’s going to play this part and she brought almost everything she did with her.”

The Tonys noticed, and she won the award for best actress in a musical last year.

Aside from scheduled vacations and some sick days, Lenk will have been with “The Band’s Visit” from its first performance at the Atlantic Theater, on Nov. 11, 2016, to its last on Broadway. Relaxing in her dressing room recently at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, she chatted about the highs and lows of the show’s run, and about her plans for life after this musical. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Q: Your performance of “Omar Sharif” at the Tonys introduced “The Band’s Visit” to a national audience. What was that like?

A: It was definitely the most nerve-racking thing I’ve ever had to do. All of your peers are watching or involved somehow. It was exciting and terrifying: If you mess up, it’s forever. So you’re going, “Please don’t forget the words don’t forget the words don’t forget the words.”

Q: Did you run into problems during the show itself?

A: Sometimes, yes. I could psych myself out. If it’s not busy, your brain will play little games with you: “Oh, do you know what’s coming next?”

Q: So it’s riskier toward the end of a run, when there’s a danger of autopilot?

A: As soon as you step out for a second, which happens more if you’re more comfortable with what’s happening, it’s scary. If you dare be aware of where you are and what you’re doing — the fact that you’re standing on a stage in front of people and you’re doing a show — then your brain is like, “Oh no!” There’s been a couple of snafus, like prop malfunctions. In the moment you are dying and you hate it, but after that it’s exciting. And to watch people deal with them is so fun and exciting and inspiring.

Q: You have played opposite three actors in the leading male role: Tony Shalhoub, Dariush Kashani and now Sasson Gabay — who actually created the character, Tewfiq, in the 2007 film on which the show is based. What were they like?

A: They’re all wonderful, generous actors — thank God. With Tony we had all those weeks of rehearsal and that whole process of bonding over time. Whereas with Dariush and Sasson we basically had to instantaneously connect in front of a thousand people, which was scary. I was completely star-struck with Sasson; I’d already been star-struck with Tony but kind of gotten used to it. Because I was so familiar with [Sasson’s] work in the movie, it was this very meta, weird, crazy thing. Which still kind of happens [laughs].

Q: Do you want to know when there’s somebody famous in the audience?

A: No, no, no. Hillary and Bill Clinton came, but they were very stealthy about it. They arrived during the blackout. They were all so down to earth, very neighborly, Chelsea showing me pictures of her kids on her phone. Meryl Streep came. Carol Burnett. Billy Crystal. You try really hard to listen and pay attention, but you’re just in awe of the person, kind of watching their mouth move. They seem pleased and you’re like, “Yay!” And you have to combat the impulse to start gushing.

Q: What’s on your mind as you enter the show’s last stretch?

A: We still have to do the show, and that’s the most important thing — to maintain the show. But then offstage we have little gatherings, little things to commemorate our time here. It’s a weird combination of keeping the show’s integrity and realizing that the group will soon dissolve. You learn that shows end very early, when you’re crying in high school after your one weekend of shows and you’re like, “I’ll never have this again!” I’m relishing being onstage with these incredible players, standing in the middle of this gorgeous music. I’d gotten so used to it: “Oh yes, of course they’re amazing,” with my cigarette. Now I’m really appreciating that again.

Q: What are your plans for your first week of freedom?

A: It really isn’t until after Tax Day — I’m singing at a concert at Carnegie Hall on April 15. It’s a night exploring the culture and music of Eastern European Jewish culture and how that sort of integrated and informed American culture. There’s a bunch of different performers, and I’m singing “Pirate Jenny” by Kurt Weill, some Irving Berlin.

Rodgers &amp; Hammerstein are doing modernized versions of their songs [for the “R&amp;H; Goes Pop!” project], and I’m doing “Something Good” from “The Sound of Music.” We laid the track down, but I was super sick at the time, so I’m doing the vocals next week. James Sampliner and I worked on the arrangements, and I wrote the string arrangement.

And after that I’m going to organize my closet. My house is sort of a disaster. I’m hoping to have a moment to assess. I haven’t really had a chance to think about what’s happening or what’s happened.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/03/theater/katrina-lenk-the-bands-visit.html" id="c590338f-b82d-3a03-af45-79dadf65a8e3">The New York Times</a>.

Goodbye, Omar Sharif: Katrina Lenk Reflects on 'The Band's Visit'

(Exit Interview)

A middle-aged, grouchily single man is bemoaning his fate. “Chilly, lonely breakfasts might be the worst first-world problem ever,” he complains.

A younger woman is not much happier, plaintively pointing out that “everyone thinks that if you look like me you have to settle for, you know, all the Steve Buscemis of the world.”

The pair, who fittingly are uncle and niece, are among a bunch of disgruntled folks who have gathered in a large house. They bicker with each other. They despair about frustrated loves and stalled careers.

We wouldn’t expect any less from a show called “Life Sucks.” Then again, Aaron Posner’s bitingly funny, unexpectedly touching play also delivers significantly more.

If the premise feels vaguely recognizable, it’s because the show, which is getting its New York premiere at the Wild Project, is “sort of adapted from ‘Uncle Vanya,’” as Posner puts it. (He had already gone to the Chekhov well three years ago with his well-received “Stupid _____ Bird,” based on “The Seagull.”)

Posner has kept the original play’s basic architecture. The grump is Vanya (Jeff Biehl), and he still shares a home with the plain Sonia (Kimberly Chatterjee), but now we appear to be in the United States since there is talk of dollars and student loans. Both Vanya and the brooding Dr. Aster (formerly known as Astrov, portrayed by Michael Schantz) still pine for Sonia’s stepmother, Ella (the new name of Yelena, played by Nadia Bowers).

As ever, Sonia feels overlooked by everybody, including her secret crush, Aster, and her own father (Austin Pendleton, confirming once more his status as a New York stage treasure), an academic who specializes in semiotics. “That’s the study of … big trucks?” asks the daffy Pickles (Stacey Linnartz), an artist manqué nursing a broken heart and who appears to be loosely based on Chekhov’s Waffles. The only well-adjusted person is Babs (Barbara Kingsley), a potter.

The characters and basic plot will be familiar to “Uncle Vanya” fiends. But at the same time, “Life Sucks.” will be familiar to just about anybody. Chekhov’s play has transcended the centuries because it is about timeless concerns: how hard it is to communicate with others, the vagaries — and unfairness — of love, the idea that life is something you must simultaneously endure and make the most of. And underneath the fourth-wall-breaking jokes and contemporary references, Posner has preserved those elements. He understands full well that there is no date stamp on feeling stranded between regrets and hopes, between fancy dreams and the banality of existence.

Briskly directed by Jeff Wise for the Wheelhouse company (“Happy Birthday, Wanda June”), the production keeps finding perceptive ways to rejuvenate the story. As portrayed by Biehl, for instance, this Vanya is a tightly coiled ball of frustration and pent-up fury rather than the embittered truth-teller we tend to get. Bowers’ Ella, pensive and kind, is uncomfortable with the fact that others see her as “the world’s sexiest ocelot,” while Chatterjee gives us a Sonia who is refreshingly bubblier than usual without losing any of her wistfulness.

Its mock-desultory title includes a period that gives it an air of finality, but flexibility and openness are part of the show’s DNA. The characters must adapt to their anxieties and confront what keeps them stuck in place. In a key scene, they challenge the self-pitying Vanya, as if conducting an intervention. “Spoiler alert,” Babs says. “Most of us won’t get everything we want.”

Flexibility is also baked in the text itself as Posner leaves a bit of wiggle room for improvisation and unobtrusive audience participation, down to the conclusion. The show’s ending was comically surreal at the performance I caught, last Friday night. Yours will be completely different. Life and theater — you just can’t tell how they will turn out.

Through April 20 at Wild Project, Manhattan; 866-811-4111, thewildproject.com. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/01/theater/life-sucks-review.html" id="823436e9-ea7e-3e16-ab96-0ecd8e9fdde4">The New York Times</a>.

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Review: Stranded Between Hope and Regret in 'Life Sucks.'

While the film is set among cops, it does not involve any crime solving.

Relying almost exclusively on single-take scenes and eschewing music, Ayr details the obstacles in Soni and Kalpana’s way with low-key, quasi-documentary detachment. At its best, that pace creates a trancelike feel, but a few scenes extend their welcome and become plodding.

In this world, men casually assume they are entitled to say or do whatever they want to women, and the slightest interactions can become fraught. After the biking episode, Soni is transferred to the police switchboard and watches as a caller asks an operatorfor her personal number. Even a women’s restroom becomes a contested space.

The pressure is less overt but just as constant at home. Soni’s ex-boyfriend (Vikas Shukla) sweetly but insistently tries to talk her into a reconciliation. Kalpana’s mother-in-law keeps asking how long she’ll have to wait for a grandchild.

Kalpana’s calm never wavers while Soni struggles, usually unsuccessfully, to control her temper amid the casual machismo. Ayr does not offer any tension-releasing catharsis, making his film efficiently disquieting in its own unassuming manner.

—

‘Soni’ is not rated. In Hindi, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/movies/soni-review.html" id="78da7a63-06f5-39b1-a4ad-c411dbcf08ba">The New York Times</a>.

The title of Ivan Ayr’s debut feature is a bit misleading: “Soni” is only partly about the titular cop (Geetika Vidya Ohlyan); her immediate superior in the Delhi police department, Kalpana (Saloni Batra), plays an equal role in this quiet character study. Despite their difference in rank, the two women forge a reserved friendship after Soni blows a fuse during an undercover operation — verbally harassed while biking at night, she gives the offender a piece of her mind, and her fists.

'Soni' Review: Two Delhi Policewomen Struggle Against Misogyny

Besides, those doing the disliking are LaBute’s characters, not him. Much of his work is about the power struggles between people who try to camouflage their mutual antipathy under the veneer of social graces. Inevitably, that veneer cracks.

And so it does in “Great Negro Works of Art,” the centerpiece of the three 30-minute plays that make up the “LaBute New Theater Festival,” a new anthology presented by the St. Louis Actors’ Studio at the Davenport Theater. (This is LaBute’s first major New York production — albeit a soft re-entry — since MCC Theater announced last February that it was terminating both their forthcoming collaboration and his position as playwright-in-residence, abruptly ending an association that had generated 10 shows, including “Fat Pig” and “Reasons to Be Pretty.”)

A two-hander sandwiched by a pair of solo pieces, “Great Negro Works of Art” is an ur-LaButian text, starting with a title that should inspire an anticipatory wince, but vague enough to make it difficult to pinpoint the issue.

After connecting online, Tom (KeiLyn Durrel Jones) and Jerri (Brenda Meaney) are meeting in real life for the first time at the titular museum exhibit. Jerri is white and Tom is black — it should not matter that he is light-skinned, but here it does.

Jerri toggles between dumb faux pas and haughty justifications. Tom starts by passive-aggressively nettling her — he then tries to deflate the tension by pretending he was just kidding — before revealing his irritation at Jerri’s ignorance. That he’s also handsy with her does not help his case.

Anybody with the remotest knowledge of LaBute’s M.O. knows that the encounter will not go well. LaBute’s writing is as skillful as ever, but Tom and Jerri’s date spins into a predictable downward spiral.

Directed, like “Great Negro Works,” by John Pierson, “The Fourth Reich” is a monologue by an amiable middle-aged man (Eric Dean White). He begins by suggesting that the one reason Hitler is “one of the most maligned people in the history of the world” is that he lost the war. “The man is dead,” our narrator says, “he paid for his sins, but he had some interesting things to say, along the way.”

It’s unclear what LaBute is trying to say, save for the obvious points that Nazi apologists don’t necessarily look like notorious white supremacist Richard Spencer and that soft-spoken, self-serving sophistry is a dangerous quality.

The evening concludes with another solo, this time directed by LaBute himself. In “Unlikely Japan,” a young bank manager (Gia Crovatin) revisits past decisions, prompted by the death of a former high school boyfriend in a mass shooting. She wonders if the turning point was the time she stood him up at the airport before a trip to Japan. What would her life be like if she’d accompanied him? What about his?

She runs what-if scenarios, only to reach a numbing conclusion: We are, she says, “stumbling forward through our lives, trying our best, sometimes failing, sometimes not, until we reach the end of it all — the very bitter end.”

This resignation makes a more lasting impression than anger. LaBute may be mellower, but that does not make him any more uplifting.

Through Jan. 27 at the Davenport Theater, Manhattan; 212-239-6200, stlas.org. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/theater/review-labute-new-theater-festival-neil-labute.html" id="a4d4ee10-1d85-3547-ac11-31efb7965726">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — Neil LaBute has long been accused of being a mean-spirited nihilist who does not like his characters. Yet for the past 15 years or so, reviews have been pointing out that he’s softened up — by now his reputation is more fearsome than his actual shows.

Elisabeth Vincentelli

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