Jesse Green

NEW YORK — In one play, Eddy is beaten up, spat upon, called a faggot by schoolmates and family. In the other play, he is raped on Christmas Eve.

And yet homophobia is not really the subject of either.

“The End of Eddy” and “History of Violence,” both of which opened in Brooklyn on Monday, are based on autobiographical novels by Édouard Louis. “The End of Eddy” describes the author’s miserable childhood from age 10 through 15 in the impoverished, postindustrial town of Hallencourt, some 100 miles north of Paris. “History of Violence” has a much narrower focus: the rape that took place in 2012, when he was 20, after he’d moved to the capital for graduate school.

The books naturally differ in tone, and the plays — one soothingly jolly, the other brilliantly harrowing — exaggerate that difference. Seeing them on subsequent nights, as produced by companies from England and Germany, I experienced a kind of whiplash. Or perhaps it was more like post-traumatic stress disorder, as I was forced to rethink the meaning of violence against gay people, including the kind I endured for a time, in terms that felt foreign to me. Because the plays are based on works by a French intellectual, those terms are inevitably political.

“The End of Eddy,” which runs through Nov. 21 at BAM Fisher as part of the Next Wave festival, is a boy’s survival story, picaresque like David Copperfield but with a hip-hop soundtrack. Following Louis’ novel, it chronicles Eddy’s attempts to make peace with his gayness in a community that considers that “choice” a form of class betrayal.

In Hallencourt it’s not homosexuality itself but the identification as different that seems to stir hatred. When Eddy, long since marked as effeminate, starts “playing the woman” with a bunch of boys having sex in a barn, only he is outed and made to pay a price in shame. Schoolmates torment him; his out-of-work father slaps him around and shouts, “If you ever do that again, things will go very badly for you.”

Not that you see the abuse directly in Pamela Carter’s theatrical adaptation. In it, Eddy, like everyone else in Hallencourt, is played by two actors, performing live and on prerecorded video. Often the violence is abstracted in Stewart Laing’s clever staging: The aggressor may be shown on screen while the victim is enacted onstage, or vice versa. Eddy’s unbearable isolation is likewise mitigated by the fact that there are two of him.

This is only partly a matter of practicality for a touring production that must tell a sprawling story in 90 minutes with a minimal cast and affordable effects. It’s also an aesthetic choice in keeping with the show’s aims. “The End of Eddy” comes to New York from Scotland’s Untitled Projects and the London-based Unicorn Theater, which bills itself as Britain’s leading producer of plays for young audiences. It recommends the show for anyone 16 and older.

I wish I’d been one of them back in high school; it’s heartening to think of the good work being done for today’s youth, even if I can’t quite cheer the result for adults. Too much effort has gone into making the play’s theatricality welcoming. The set, with those screens, is flat and cartoonlike; the lighting is never dark enough for deep feeling. Even the expert actors, Oseloka Obi and James Russell-Morley, are made maximally ordinary in their striped T-shirts and trainers, as if to demonstrate that they are just like most of the teenagers they are meant to perform for.

But Eddy is not just like them; if he were, he wouldn’t have a problem. And the more the play tries to sell a rational, political interpretation of his plight — arguing that poor people, shamed by elites, strike back at what they perceive as superiority — the less plight there seems to be. Even Eddy comes around to this stance, once he transfers to a school in the bigger, better-off city of Amiens and meets richer students with nicer manners.

“Perhaps I’m not gay after all,” he says wryly. “Perhaps I’ve only ever been a middle-class boy trapped in a working-class life.”

Unicorn’s version of “The End of Eddy,” which sometimes seems like an exceptionally well made anti-bullying video, does its best to promote this idea, perhaps as a way of encouraging any homophobes in the audience to shift their animus against gays to a different enemy. At the same time, its tagline in Unicorn’s brochure — “Can We Create Our Own Freedom?” — suggests a happy ending in which personal empowerment solves social problems. Offered as proof is an entirely invented moment late in the play in which Eddy’s father says, “I’m proud of you, son.”

I doubt that the novel’s Eddy, who finds safety only by burning bridges to his family, would recognize the sentiment. It’s not called the “end” of Eddy for nothing.

Indeed, by the time he wrote “History of Violence,” at 24, Eddy Bellegueule had changed his name to Édouard Louis. (“Bellegueule,” meaning approximately “prettyface,” must have been like wearing a pink triangle.) If he was under-schooled in Hallencourt, he was perhaps over-schooled in Paris: The story of his rape is rendered, in the book, in a peculiarly distancing way that’s almost a parody of postmodernism. It emerges as a yarn his sister Clara tells her husband while Édouard eavesdrops from behind a door when he visits her in hopes of a solace that is not forthcoming.

Thin-skinned and yet haughty, Clara doesn’t make a very reliable narrator, but she gets the gist right. Walking home late from a holiday party, Édouard is cruised by a handsome man who introduces himself as Reda. At first reluctant, Édouard eventually succumbs to Reda’s seductive wheedling, and they spend a hot night of intercourse and discourse. The discourse is mostly, again, about class: Reda is Kabyle, and his father immigrated to France from Algeria only to find a life of crushing work and poverty.

This would seem to make the two men sociological soul mates, yet in the morning all goes haywire when Reda pockets Édouard’s iPad and iPhone. Furious at the implicit accusation that he is a thief, which he is, Reda throttles Édouard with a scarf and threatens him with a gun, then rapes him before apologizing and leaving.

In his stunning production for Berlin’s Schaubühne, which runs at St. Ann’s Warehouse through Dec. 1, the director Thomas Ostermeier makes us wait a long time before showing us this scene directly. As is now almost an avant-garde cliché, Ostermeier works to divide our loyalty to narrative by shuffling events, doubling and casting doubt on them with live video and interrupting the action with moments of abstract physical expression that border on dance. A drum set is also involved.

All this feels at first like throat-clearing: self-important and peremptory. The video imagery seems especially inessential, distracting us from Édouard (Laurenz Laufenberg) by focusing on other cast members changing costumes or detectives dusting the crime scene for DNA.

And yet, as in Ostermeier’s production of “Returning to Reims,” which played at St. Ann’s last year, the conceptual curlicues eventually pay off when the actors are allowed to play real scenes together. (All four are excellent, but Alina Stiegler as Clara and Renato Schuch as Reda stand out.) The long confrontation between the men in the morning is made not just horrifying but also heartbreaking by the distancing setup that has kept us from feeling much until the moment when it is almost too late.

By then we have heard — or read; the production is in German, with English supertitles — the political interpretation that Louis and Ostermeier construct for the events. It is only logical, Édouard tells Clara, that Reda would steal from him and erupt in violence, given the racism and homophobia of the system he lives under. Elites have earned this comeuppance.

The play provides skimpy evidence for this idea, and you may find yourself uncomfortably nodding when Clara discounts it as crazy. But Louis has written elsewhere, potently and with great alarm, about the rise of the right in Europe, and the left’s complicity through its failure to address fundamental problems of class. It is in this context that he sees Reda’s actions as almost justifiable.

Point taken, and yet, speaking as someone who was terrorized for being gay throughout his teenage years — not excluding some of the same acts described in “The End of Eddy” — I’m not so sure that a class analysis is sufficient to explain or excuse homophobia, let alone rape. Some of my bullies were indistinguishable from me, socioeconomically. Whoever they were, whatever their beef, they did the same damage.

The missing piece of the puzzle is misogyny: Gay men are victimized at least in part because their alliance with women is seen as a threat to men. This is barely mentioned, let alone dramatized, in either play, perhaps because a problem burned into the human psyche is less amenable to political correction. You may switch governments and even redistribute wealth, but I’m not very hopeful about men as a gender even when they have good jobs.

Such thoughts made me resist the two plays, when I wasn’t reflexively spooked by them. Still, I was heartened by how both try to use the theater as a tool for stamping new ideas into currency.

Regarding gayness, I have long wondered whether plays have anything left to say. “The End of Eddy” and “History of Violence” do — and part of what they say is: Look beyond the white, Western, male, middle-class concerns that have monopolized the conversation, and into difficult confrontations with the rest of the world. The door that led us out of the closet is only the first of many.

Additional Information:

“History of Violence”Through Dec. 1 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn; 718-254-8779, stannswarehouse.org. Running time: 2 hours.

“The End of Eddy”Through Nov. 21 at BAM Fisher, Brooklyn; 718-636-4100, bam.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.

This article originally appeared in

(Critic’s Notebook)

Fleeing Home, but Not Homophobia

The answer isn’t that @GaryXXXFisher — as the author and pseudo-autobiographical main character of “Black Exhibition” are called — is hiding a messy, heartfelt, intensely personal spectacle from too much scrutiny. Or it’s not just that. The main reason is that @GaryXXXFisher is really Jeremy O. Harris, the author of “Slave Play,” and he is savvy enough to understand that his new play isn’t for everyone.

In the same way, he knew that “Slave Play” was. (Its transfer from New York Theater Workshop to Broadway this season was a great and moving surprise.) Though tightly focused on three interracial couples spending a week at a sex therapy retreat, “Slave Play” encompasses the entire scope of interracial America. From a handful of characters, it implies millions.

“Black Exhibition,” which opened on Saturday at the invaluable Bushwick Starr, turns the telescope the other way around. It features five characters who represent different aspects of outlaw sexuality, but narrows down to just one subject: its author. Part notebook, part incantation, part primal therapy, it is so esoteric it sometimes seems as if it were written in a language with just one speaker left.

And language is key here. Harris invokes Ntozake Shange’s term “choreopoem” to describe a collagelike construction that incorporates free verse, choral speaking, dance, tableaux vivants and (in his case, not hers) text message chains about getting gonorrhea in Berlin. The result is by turns caustic, coy, baffling, impish, embarrassing, insightful and, as the pseudonym suggests, frank.

But if Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf” celebrates the healing power of community, “Black Exhibition” feels neither healing nor communitarian. Harris plays a figure based on the real Gary Fisher: a gay black writer who died of AIDS in 1994, leaving behind a small but potent body of work. In Gary’s skin, Harris undergoes a kind of sacrificial flaying as the world he wants to be part of also torments him with its gaze.

In truth, that gaze can seem self-inflicted; Harris elects to spend most of the 60-minute work, directed by Machel Ross and beautifully designed by Frank J. Oliva for the tiny Bushwick Starr space, in little more than a jockstrap. (The droll costumes are by Sabrina Bianca Guillaume.) He is just as exposed in his quest for ecstatic spiritual communion.

The four other characters, or perhaps they are merely Harris’ avatars, advise him on issues of art, submission and self-display. Experimental feminist writer Kathy Acker (Ross Days) offers a paean to anal sex as a way to see God (or at least Elaine Stritch). Japanese poet Yukio Mishima (Miles Greenberg) schools Gary in “necessary fascisms.” And gay Afro-Futurist Samuel Delany (Dhari Noel) sings the ambivalent praises of Fire Island, where raunch is integrated into the landscape, yet the rich have “gentrified the trees.”

The three writers make some sense as Gary’s spirit guides; he has been reading them while visiting that gay playland. What the fourth is doing in the story is harder to say. Called MandinGO, he is based on Michael L. Johnson, the black athlete sentenced, after a trial later ruled to be “fundamentally unfair,” to 30 years in prison for not disclosing his HIV status to sexual partners. Perhaps MandinGO (AJ Harris) represents the twinned problems Gary is flirting with: the vulnerability of gay black bodies in white spaces, and the vulnerability of all bodies in the path of disease.

If I am uncertain about this, as about so much here, that’s fine with me. I don’t mind having to ponder the recondite (and wittily worded) questions Harris keeps sparking as Gary travels his “dark gay path.” I look to the theater, in part, to show me the lives of my co-humans as they live them beyond my ken. What it means to be a gay black man in the world is not, for instance, an experience I can ever have directly.

But writer’s block is, and that’s another of the play’s subjects, if not in fact its raison d’être. Harris draws a sly connection between — I’ll put this delicately — the openness to sex and the openness to inspiration. On the evidence of “Black Exhibition,” I’d say he’s at least got some good foreplay going.

Event Information:

‘Black Exhibition’Through Dec. 15 at the Bushwick Starr, Brooklyn; thebushwickstarr.org. Running time: 1 hour.

Playwright Exposes Himself in 'Black Exhibition'

NEW YORK — Why would a charismatic young playwright, with a critical hit playing to 800 people a night in Midtown, debut a new work, in which he also stars, at a 72-seat theatrical incubator so far off Broadway it’s in Brooklyn? And why would he do so under a pseudonym that sounds like the name of a bot?

I heard the perpetual question raised again a few days ago, and not innocently or idly. A showbiz veteran was concerned about the prospects for “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical,” which opened Thursday at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater.

How would it be different from a rock concert? she wondered. Would a life story like Turner’s fit into the form? And why, she asked finally, “would anyone want to see that?”

These are great questions, which is not surprising because the person asking them was Tina Turner herself. Now happily retired, and turning 80 this month, she discussed her initial misgivings in an article she recently wrote for Rolling Stone about the making of the $16.5 million bio-jukebox musical that now bears her name. Apparently, she got over her doubts; is it unfriendly to say that, having seen the show, I’m still working on mine?

And make no mistake, I see Turner — the greatest rock queen ever to drag herself onto her own damn throne — as a friend, at least in the sense that millions of others do, as someone to admire and even protect. If hers has been the story of triumph rescued from the disaster of childhood neglect and horrendous spousal abuse, ours has been the good fortune to see that redemption rendered in real time as music and spectacle.

So Turner’s last question is the easiest to answer: I’d hazard that almost anyone who’d ever heard or seen her might want to experience her tale told onstage.

It’s a good tale, in theory, cut to the pattern of classic drama. Two elemental forces — hurricane-voiced Anna Mae Bullock and typhoon-tempered Ike Turner — are pitted in a struggle that nearly destroys both. But while Ike, for his sins, winds up a pariah and eventually dies of an overdose, Anna, rechristened Tina by her Svengali-like husband, rises from the depths, to greater glory solo than she ever achieved under his boot.

More important, as far as pure entertainment is concerned, this story comes with songs that can thrill an audience when rendered as Turner sang them; at this, the musical “Tina,” directed by Phyllida Lloyd, happily succeeds. In a performance that is part possession, part workout and part wig, Adrienne Warren rocks the rafters and dissolves your doubts about anyone daring to step into the diva’s high heels.

But as to Turner’s other questions, I’m afraid I share her initial skepticism.

To rip the Band-Aid off quickly, the book (by Katori Hall, with Frank Ketelaar and Kees Prins) is so thin it’s see-through. You can’t really blame Hall, whose earlier work (including “The Mountaintop” and “Our Lady of Kibeho”) is complex and layered. No, this is a problem built into the biographical jukebox genre, whose songs leave the narrative only enough time for turning points and climaxes. Cherry-picked lives look ludicrous.

Shuffling and reassembling events to smooth the arc may improve the shape, but at the cost of accuracy; the 1993 Turner biopic “What’s Love Got to Do With It” was almost as much fiction as fact. This stage musical, for which Turner and her second husband, Erwin Bach, are credited as executive producers, is truer but blurrier. It rushes so hard that Warren, who appears in almost every scene, has to swap emotions even faster than costumes. She sometimes seems more rattled than ravaged.

The problem is exacerbated by another jukebox tic: songs bent into improbable shapes to serve a story they weren’t designed for. When Ike (Daniel J. Watts) proposes to Tina seemingly out of the blue, she responds by singing “You Better Be Good to Me,” from her 1984 comeback album. By 1984, she was divorced and had the guts to back up the lyric’s threat — but the scene is set in 1962, when she didn’t.

Such gaps in logic can be bridged if you spend enough time thinking about them; perhaps it’s meant as irony that Tina sings the joyous “River Deep, Mountain High” — about a love that “gets stronger every day” — just after getting a black eye from Ike.

But having to do that kind of mental work yanks you out of the story. So when the song “Private Dancer” turns up to illustrate the moment when Tina, at her nadir, is working as a maid to make ends meet, I had to ignore the lyrics, about a prostitute who will “do what you want me to do,” and just enjoy Warren’s husky, pungent way with the tune. The same was true when “We Don’t Need Another Hero,” the apocalyptic anthem from the “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome” soundtrack, was conscripted for a cremation.

Is it a surprise that a show with 41 credited songwriters cannot sustain a coherent point of view on a main character who sings in 25 of the 27 numbers? Ike, with just a few musical and narrative gestures, is better articulated, and Watts is terrific delivering his gleaming menace.

But Lloyd, in much of her staging, does not serve the book scenes well. The pace is too hectic except when it unaccountably grinds to a halt, which is an odd problem in a show that was already running in London for more than a year before being remounted for Broadway. And perhaps it’s only to be expected from the director of “Mamma Mia!” — the show that jump-started the jukebox genre — that the tone is generally coarse and obvious.

Still, whenever you begin to despair of its story, “Tina” (and, with it, Lloyd’s sense of buoyancy) roars back in purely non-narrative ways. Suddenly, Bruno Poet’s lights bump way up. Mark Thompson’s costume designs provide the icons we want: the gold shimmy dress with tiers of fringe, the Alaia red leather mini zipped up the front. And Anthony van Laast’s choreography, perhaps too slick in the early scenes, when Tina and the (terrific) Ikettes would not have been so smooth, turns deliciously satisfying in the later ones, when the star owns her body at last.

But what I’ve just described is a rock concert — which is what “Tina” essentially turns into. It’s a blast if that’s what you came for. If you meant to see a true union of song and story, though, you won’t get it here. Because that, to answer Turner’s first question, would be a real musical.

‘Tina: The Tina Turner Musical’: At the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, Manhattan; 877-250-2929, tinaonbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours, 35 minutes.

Review: The 'Tina' Musical Is One Inch Deep, Mountain High

NEW YORK — “What is a musical?”

NEW YORK — It took me a while to understand that the reaction I was having to “Dr. Ride’s American Beach House,” which opened Tuesday at Greenwich House, wasn’t bewilderment but its shy cousin, pleasure.

Once I did, I couldn’t stop grinning, partly because Liza Birkenmeier’s play is so witty and partly because it’s so weird. Both are welcome these days.

Mind you, wit is not the same as humor, though the play, an Ars Nova production, gets its share of big laughs. Wit comes in the form of ideas so angular, they take several extra beats to land. There’s also the way Birkenmeier and the terrific cast, under Katie Brook’s direction, stay so far ahead of the plot, they seem to be taunting you to keep up.

For the first 15 of the play’s 90 minutes, I worried there might not be enough to keep up with. Bypassing backstory or even a stab at introductions, Birkenmeier drops us onto a St. Louis roof on a hot day in June 1983 when nothing seems to be happening. Almost incidentally, we learn that Harriet (Kristen Sieh) and Matilda (Erin Markey) are there for the weekly meeting of the Two Serious Ladies Book Club, which they apparently named for the Jane Bowles novel and is pretty much defunct.

Mostly they drink beers and carp idly, in the coded manner of lifelong friends now in their 30s. “If one of us is brilliant, maybe it’s not you,” Matilda tells Harriet amiably. Though each has an MFA in poetry, they work as waitresses and no longer do much with words except flick them like flies.

They are not otherwise alike. Harriet is peevish and high-minded; she doesn’t care for the “riverboat aesthetic” of a nearby McDonald’s. Matilda is a sly, deliberate enigma, the one “every single person who walks into the restaurant is fascinated by.”

At least in part, the enigma is sexual. Though she has a husband as well as a child — and Harriet has a boyfriend somewhere — the play soon starts to drop clues that the two women are closer to each other than they are to their men. For one thing, Harriet doesn’t seem to have much use for hers. When she tells a long story about having sex with a bearded motorcycle guy while visiting her mother in a Florida hospice, the question of betrayal never comes up. And Matilda says, “I’m going to fantasize about it for weeks.”

Is that snark or a sideways allusion to the women’s own chemistry? If so, it’s a chemistry that otherwise goes unacknowledged, even as Matilda straddles Harriet on a chair, their faces nearly touching while Harriet spins her story.

Only when a wholeheartedly out lesbian named Meg arrives, for what she thinks is a meeting of the book club, does the subtext fully emerge; her big butch charm so jangles the other women’s suppressed energy that jealousies spark in every direction. (Performance artist Marga Gomez is charming in the role.) And when Meg announces that Sally Ride, the physicist and astronaut, is a lesbian even though she’s married to a man, it’s a revelation that stirs a revolution.

Ride is the organizing principle here. All three women are in awe of her talent: Harriet says she has “every skill,” and Matilda says she has “too many.” Because the play is set on the evening before the June 18 launch of the space shuttle Challenger, they try to imagine what she’s doing at the NASA beach house where astronauts are quarantined in preparation for flight. “I love her because she’s going away,” Harriet says.

If all this sounds a bit twee and blurry, that’s deliberate. “Dr. Ride’s American Beach House” is interested in the moment when women who are only vaguely aware of their misfit emotions begin to imagine “going away” from their programmed lives. Meg, with her crew cut and work boots, never had the option of not knowing herself and thus achieved full personality liftoff long before 1983.

But if Meg is airborne, Harriet and Matilda are barely on the launchpad, a difficult state of being to enact onstage. Nevertheless, in contrasting ways, the two leads do it beautifully. Sieh, so fearsomely disappointed as the wife of a feckless schmo in “The Band’s Visit,” all but drops her skin here; you can see her Harriet fitfully trying to create a new identity in real time. As the winningly awful Matilda, Markey, a rising star of the avant-garde, has the tossed-off braininess and comic polish of a Julia Louis-Dreyfus, bending phrases into philosophical riddles and not just for the fun of it.

I admit I was surprised to realize that a play whose story develops in what seem at first like listless whorls is actually tightly plotted; when new ideas are born, sometimes their form, of necessity, looks strange. Here, Birkenmeier is exploring the power women achieve when they make themselves the subject of their stories instead of the object. Not that anything is theoretical: If most plays of liberation involve trite slogans and metaphorical pickets, it’s bracing to see one that’s a drama instead of a diorama.

Great daring is needed to keep that going; Brook’s direction never loses its nerve in a story that dispenses with so much of theater’s traditional wayfinding apparatus. (The lighting design by Oona Curley and sound design by Ben Williams are especially helpful in grounding the action.) Which is not to say that everything about “Dr. Ride’s American Beach House” feels finished: A subplot involving Harriet’s sour landlady treads dangerously close to the whimsy line, though the character is amusingly handled by Susan Blommaert. And I’m not sure the play would holler if some of its loose ends were tied up tighter.

But like many young playwrights, Birkenmeier wants to display all the things she can do. (In a review in The New York Times last year, Elisabeth Vincentelli described Birkenmeier’s off-off-Broadway play “The Hollower” as “aggressively quirky.”) I don’t know whether that means she, like Ride, has “too many skills”; time will tell. But for this, her terrific off-Broadway debut, she has every skill she needs.

Production Notes:

“Dr. Ride’s American Beach House”

Tickets: Through Nov. 23 at Greenwich House, Manhattan; 212-352-3101, arsnovanyc.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.

Credits: By Liza Birkenmeier; directed by Katie Brook; sets by Kimie Nishikawa; costumes by Melissa Ng; lighting by Oona Curley; sound by Ben Williams; production stage manager, Alex H. Hajjar. Presented by Ars Nova.

Cast: Susan Blommaert (Norma), Marga Gomez (Meg), Erin Markey (Matilda) and Kristen Sieh (Harriet).

Review: Getting Intimate at 'Dr. Ride's American Beach House'

critic’s pick

That at any rate is how we meet her in “Bella Bella,” Harvey Fierstein’s cobbled-together PowerPoint of a play about the firebrand New York congresswoman of the 1970s.

If it’s a peculiar pose for Abzug, it makes perfect sense for Fierstein playing her; a star needs a big entrance, and there’s nowhere else for director Kimberly Senior to give him one on John Lee Beatty’s blue bathroom set.

Those who have seen Fierstein onstage won’t be surprised; they know he’s not going to lose a battle for dominance with any author, including himself. He’s a big, tasty ham and will do whatever is necessary to make sure you get an ample helping of his warmth and flavor regardless of the role.

That’s usually a net plus. But in a biographical vehicle like “Bella Bella,” which opened Tuesday at New York City Center Stage I, it unfortunately means someone else is not getting served. In this case, big surprise, it’s the woman. Her name may appear twice on the Manhattan Theater Club marquee but neither the anecdotal play nor the droll performance provides the depth of a reasonably thorough obituary.

Not that Fierstein stints on admirable facts about Abzug, whose career as a lawyer, feminist, anti-war protester, gay rights champion, congressional representative and environmental activist was full of marvelous firsts. On the night in September 1976 when the play is set, she is hoping to achieve, at 56, her biggest first yet: becoming “the first ever female senatorial candidate from the great state of New York.”

What meager tension exists during the play’s 90 minutes comes from the contrast between Abzug’s blustery confidence (she has been running for office, she says, since third grade) and her professional instinct about a five-way primary in which she is the most liberal candidate. Pacing from toilet to tub in her campaign suite at the Summit Hotel on the Upper East Side, while her supporters await the results on the other side of the bathroom door, she says repeatedly, but with diminishing confidence, “I have never entered a race I didn’t win — eventually.”

Though Fierstein has taken much of the text from his subject’s speeches and writings — inserting hokey segues like “Speaking of buttons” and “Oh what fun we had with that wacky Joe McCarthy!” — the selection is clearly skewed to emphasize humor and grit. (Abzug’s daughter Liz, the founder and executive director of the Bella Abzug Leadership Institute, serves as a consultant to the production.) Perhaps more to the point, the selection is skewed toward Fierstein’s familiar skills as a performer, allowing him to create the kind of character an audience has no choice but to love.

That’s a mistake: With no personality defects to exploit and only imaginary antagonists (all puny) to shake a fist at, this Abzug unbound gives Fierstein no resistance. His performance at times gets cloying and pushy, like an overeager canvasser buttonholing you for votes. Several times I wanted to tell him (and Senior, who doesn’t seem to be in control): Take it down a notch! I’m not the electorate!

At the same time, in his choice of material, Fierstein so over-represents Abzug’s famous zingers and one-liners (“This woman’s place is in the House: the House of Representatives”) that you’d think she was a Catskill tummler. Though her bit about Elizabeth Taylor as a rabbi is great, too often what the script calls a “cute story” — plumped with Yiddish and capped with an epigram — turns out sadly to be just that.

Or less than that. It’s hard to imagine that Abzug ever said, while making a 2 a.m. meal of Twizzlers and Cel-Ray soda, “I’ve had worse things in my mouth.”

You can easily imagine Arnold Beckoff (from “Torch Song Trilogy”) or Edna Turnblad (from “Hairspray”) saying it, though. And ghosts of Fierstein’s memorable performances do sometimes put Abzug in a similar light. Not that he plays her in drag; other than the hat, which he quickly removes, he wears neutral clothing — black slacks and shirt — with only black toenail polish to acknowledge the gender twist.

But if his Abzug is not an imitation, it can’t help being an embodiment, leaving you to wonder what that fierce advocate for expanding women’s roles would make of a man taking hers. (Patti LuPone, Bette Midler, Kathy Bates and Kathy Najimy were apparently approached before Fierstein decided to do it himself.) To say it’s no different from casting a woman in a part traditionally assigned to a man — a practice now, thankfully, becoming unremarkable — is to assume a symmetry of opportunity that doesn’t really exist.

Still, you can tell that Fierstein adores his subject; if only that were enough to fuel a play! But the affectionate spoken-résumé monologue genre hasn’t proved very successful for women, turning formidable characters like Ann Richards (“Ann”), Molly Ivins (“Red Hot Patriot”) and Ruth Westheimer (“Becoming Dr. Ruth”) into little more than salty self-promoters. (Men often fare even worse.) The setups are laughable, the conflicts interior, the relief uncomic, the conclusion foregone. It’s part of the contract of these plays that our hero winds up just where she started — except now with a shinier halo.

That needn’t have been the case with Abzug. One of the fascinating things about her is that after saying “I have never entered a race I didn’t win — eventually,” she lost. (In the play, she blames The New York Times, but there were other factors at work in her second-place finish to Daniel Patrick Moynihan.) And though she kept running for office, she never won an election again.

What did this disappointment do to her? Who was she anyway, under the hats? “Bella Bella” doesn’t get close to answering those questions.

But it does make you rethink the idea of loss. Many of the positions that made Abzug a radical in the 1970s seem moderate now; she introduced, with Ed Koch, the first national gay rights bill. Fierstein’s treasurable career, and this performance, are evidence that in some ways “Battling Bella” did win, eventually.

Through Nov. 24 at New York City Center Stage I, Manhattan; 212-239-6200, bellabellaplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.

Credits: By Harvey Fierstein; directed by Kimberly Senior; sets by John Lee Beatty; costumes by Rita Ryack; lighting by Tyler Micoleau; sound by Jill BC Du Boff; projections by Caite Hevner; production stage manager, Laura Smith; general manager, Florie Seery. Presented by Manhattan Theater Club, Lynne Meadow, artistic director, Barry Grove, executive producer.

Review: Abzug and Fierstein, on the Same Ticket in 'Bella Bella'

NEW YORK — Why is Bella Abzug — with her trademark big-brimmed hat — stepping fully dressed from the shower?

NEW YORK — When classics get adapted or updated, I often find myself asking: What’s the added value? What do you get from Shakespeare with penguins that you don’t get better from Shakespeare straight up?

That’s the chip I had on my shoulder when I went to see “Scotland, PA,” a musical riff on “Macbeth” that opened Wednesday at the Laura Pels Theater. It’s not as if the great tragedy hadn’t been plundered enough already; earlier “Macbeth” mashups include a “Macbett,” a “MacBird!” and even a “MacHomer,” in which Banquo is reconfigured as Ned Flanders.

And I already knew that this one, a world premiere commission from Roundabout Theater Company, was based on a 2001 film by William Morrissette that moves the action to the 1970s — not the most appealing era for updates. I worried the witches would be Charlie’s Angels.

But “Scotland, PA” — in which the witches, happily, are stoners instead — turns out to add some delicious value to both the original play and the film. Its smart book (by Michael Mitnick) and agreeable songs (by Adam Gwon) are often laugh-out-loud funny, something no one ever said about the version that opened in 1606. The show, directed by Lonny Price, is also quietly insightful, making piquant connections between Shakespeare’s drama of political powerlust and the consumerist mania of our own fast-food culture.

So I guess you could say the chip on my shoulder turned out to be a potato chip. After all, “Scotland, PA” takes place at a poky burger shack: a joint called Duncan’s in the title Pennsylvania town (a real place). There Joe McBeth, an affable slacker known to everyone as Mac (Ryan McCartan), is wading into his 30s content to work the Fry-O-Lator. He’s so laid back he doesn’t even mind that all his ideas for improving the business — revolutions like a drive-through window — are squashed by his brutal boss, Duncan (Jeb Brown).

But Mac’s wife, who also works at Duncan’s, does mind. In a fine “I Want” song called “What We’ve Got” — “not enough” — Pat McBeth (Taylor Iman Jones) lets her frustrated ambitions for a better life spill out. “You want one more night eatin’ from cans?” she sings. “You could be someone makin’ great big plans.” Soon, in “Everybody’s Hungry,” Mac catches her spark: “Time to get in on the chase/Shoutin’ to the cosmos/Like I own the whole damn place.”

Still, Mac’s ascent starts almost accidentally, when he and Pat deliver Duncan to a fittingly fast-food fate during an attempted robbery. The carefully calibrated tone of the musical — modeled no doubt on the comic-creepy balancing act of “Little Shop of Horrors” and “Sweeney Todd” — allows this material to work as comedy, even if it involves a murder. It helps that Mac, unlike Macbeth, is a dopey underdog and that his nemesis is such a sadist. But it also helps that Gwon’s songs give everybody a classic-rock heart.

Set up this way, the story pulls us along even when the steps to burger supremacy involve treading on innocents. One, a homeless man (David Rossmer), gets framed for Duncan’s murder. So does Duncan’s son Malcolm (Will Meyers), a high school student who’d rather play football (for secret reasons) than inherit the kingdom. Next, a dim but sweet co-worker of the McBeths called Banko — real name Anthony Banconi — is bamboozled into providing them an alibi. This occasions a terrific number called “Kick-Ass Party,” which Jay Armstrong Johnson sells in full surfer-dude mode.

If you are trying to trace the parallels to “Macbeth,” you are probably in a tangle by now. That’s just as well; Mitnick’s unusually tight book has the confidence not to be overly faithful to the play or even the movie. Although his Malcolm tracks nicely with the one in “Macbeth,” Banko doesn’t really line up with Banquo. Peg McDuff, the detective who arrives at the end of the first act, is only tangentially related to Shakespeare’s Macduff — and unlike the movie’s detective, played by Christopher Walken, is a woman: that reliable old pro Megan Lawrence.

That McDuff is also a vegetarian helps keep the story focused on the burger business as a case study in metastatic ambition. (There’s a reason so many of the characters’ last names begin with Mc instead of Mac.) What begins for Pat as a simple case of monetary reparations (“Not payback but back pay,” she says) winds up a quest for commercial domination. At the end, in a nifty plot twist I won’t spoil, the spooky stoners’ augury that McBeth will prevail unless “the peaks of mountains drip with blood” — no Birnam Wood here — comes hilariously, gruesomely and relevantly true.

Small, clever musicals are fragile things, though, and I don’t want to oversell this one in praising it. “Scotland, PA” still needs to cure a few structural hiccups (the first act seems to end twice) and to address its longueurs and lapses of logic. One of those arises from what are otherwise improvements: Now that the McBeths’ hatred of Duncan is so rationally motivated — we even learn that he beats his wife — the leap from hatred to murder is not.

That’s probably fixable with a few deft lines. But the show’s slight case of ambient mildness may be a harder problem to solve, especially in the songs. The deliberately warmed-over ’70s pastiche of Gwon’s music, and notably of its matching lyrics, too often favors authenticity at the expense of theatricality. Ambition is a dish best served hot.

Yet this is also a show that under Price’s clean direction gets so much right. For one thing, unlike its characters, it understands its own ambition, avoiding overplaying and overamplification. It is admirably well sung and acted by the spirited cast, especially the smoky-voiced Jones as Pat and Alysha Umphress as the stoner who spouts both prophecy and melisma. It moves without undue fuss on Anna Louizos’ simple revolving set.

And it makes its points with a similar modesty. That’s more than you can say for Shakespeare, with his annoying psychological profundity and showoff verbal panache. He may have presciently endorsed the musical’s theme 400 years ago when he had Malcolm worry that “my more-having would be as a sauce to make me hunger more,” but “Scotland, PA” is something even he never predicted: a kick-ass party.

Through Dec. 8 at the Laura Pels Theater, Manhattan; 212-719-1300, roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes.

Book by Michael Mitnick; music and lyrics by Adam Gwon; directed by Lonny Price; choreography by Josh Rhodes; music direction by Vadim Feichtner; sets by Anna Louizos; costumes by Tracy Christensen; lighting by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew; sound by Jon Weston; hair, wigs and makeup by J. Jared Janas; orchestrations by Frank Galgano and Matt Castle; vocal arrangements by Adam Gwon; fight director, Thomas Schall; production stage manager, Timothy R. Semon; production management, Aurora Productions; production general manager, Nicholas J. Caccavo. Presented by Roundabout Theater Company, Todd Haimes, artistic director/chief executive, Julia C. Levy, executive director, Sydney Beers, general manager, Steve Dow, chief administrative officer.

Cast: Jeb Brown, Jay Armstrong Johnson, Taylor Iman Jones, Lacretta, Megan Lawrence, Ryan McCartan, Will Meyers, Wonu Ogunfowora, David Rossmer, Alysha Umphress and Kaleb Wells.

Review: Double, Double, Burger and Trouble in 'Scotland, PA'

(Critic's Pick)

NEW YORK — The urge to move small shows to Broadway should generally be resisted. Whether musicals or plays, most transfers from 199-seat houses feel dinky in palaces accommodating 900, and the frantic efforts made by creative teams to fill the void too often wind up highlighting it instead.

There are, of course, exceptions, including “The Band’s Visit,” which won the Tony Award for best musical last year. That show’s director, David Cromer, a minimalist to begin with, didn’t inflate the material for Broadway; he battened it down, as if for a storm. Urging the audience to come closer instead of forcing the show to grow bigger, he made you enter its world through the smallest possible door.

The surprise — and joy — is that the world can seem so vast when approached that way. Or at least it does in Cromer’s flawless production of “The Sound Inside,” a play by Adam Rapp that opened at Studio 54 on Thursday. When I saw its world premiere at the Williamstown Theater Festival in 2018, it was already a gripping small-scale mystery, and a spectacular showcase for its star, Mary-Louise Parker. Now, having been put through Cromer’s less-is-everything makeover, it’s even more resonant on Broadway: a tragedy about fiction, both the kind we read and the kind we live.

The makeover — a subtle one, naturally — begins with the script. I had to read both versions to see what Rapp had done to tighten the screws without visibly altering the story or the running time: 90 uninterrupted minutes of tension. “The Sound Inside” is still, self-consciously, a yarn, which makes sense because it’s about writers: the kind of people who in weaving stories are often in danger of unraveling themselves.

That’s literal here. Bella Lee Baird (Parker) is a 50-ish creative writing professor at Yale who has just received a diagnosis of stage 2 cancer. Addressing the audience directly as if reading a novel-in-progress aloud, she describes — and in the process aestheticizes — her unorthodox treatment decisions. These eventually come to involve Christopher Dunn, a freshman in a course of hers called Reading Fiction for Craft.

Christopher (Will Hochman) is a misfit at Yale: He won’t use email or drink fancy coffee. He may be a misfit everywhere else, too, with his bursts of rudeness, floods of invective and obsessive interest in “Crime and Punishment.” But he is nevertheless, in Bella’s judgment, a prodigy. As he shares with her the pages of his own novel-in-progress, about a Yale freshman named Christopher who does something very bad, the two grow closer.

By the time their stories (and fictions) start to merge, the pleasure of fine in-the-moment writing is hopelessly jumbled with dread about what happens next. Even having seen the play before, I was in constant doubt as to its outcome. A piece of advice Bella gives Christopher helps to explain Rapp’s technique here: “If your protagonist is leading you then you’ll likely stay ahead of your reader.” Certainly Rapp, a longtime master of foreboding, stays well ahead of us, as Bella and Christopher seem to have stayed ahead of him.

Rapp’s revisions emphasize those gaps. Lines that tended to explain behavior or to suggest the possibility of such explanations have been cut. (Christopher’s father, described as a schizophrenic in the earlier version is now just “a complete mystery.”) Lines that were giveaways as to the characters’ emotional states are now refocused. (Bella no longer calls Christopher’s prose “gorgeous” but “beautifully restrained.”) Lovely, extraneous selections from other writers’ works have been trimmed in favor of tantalizing selections from Bella’s.

Offering a character’s artistry to an audience is always a gamble, but Rapp doubles down on it; Bella, being the author of two “slim volumes” of stories and one “underappreciated” novel, also speaks in stylish and witty prose. Describing a sexual encounter, she says that the man “moves over and into me like some soft rectangular machine that pushes smaller objects toward their inevitable path on an assembly line.”

That this never becomes twee is miraculous, but Rapp keeps switching up his approach, sometimes having Bella and Christopher alternate in telling the story and other times having them enact it together in scenes. The specificity of the performances also helps prevent the cultivated tone from cloying. Parker, never better in her 30-year stage career, has dug even deeper into Bella, treating each line as if it were an archaeological site; she builds her performance on artifacts, not theories.

And Hochman, who was still pecking his way toward the tricky role at Williamstown, has found it. What can read on the page as a character back-formed from plot necessity, and what therefore seemed like a collection of tics onstage, is now fully connected. Believable both as an 18-year-old and an artist, Hochman — and this is saying a lot — is a worthy partner to Parker onstage.

But it takes a third character — Cromer’s staging, a living presence in itself — to make “The Sound Inside” so riveting. I don’t know what other director would have dared to provide so little visual information in a two-person show; it is even sparer, more subliminal, on Broadway than it was at Williamstown.

On the other hand, a lack of visual information is a form of visual information; once you adjust to it, the dark created by the designers — Alexander Woodward (sets), Heather Gilbert (lights), Aaron Rhyne (projections) — becomes exceptionally expressive. Between black and jet black there’s room for a lot of drama.

Cromer has likewise forsworn, as a writer steers around clichés, any emotional underlining of the kind you typically get from costumes (David Hyman), sound (Daniel Kluger) and overacting. His principle seems to be that of fiction itself: to force an engagement between the author’s imagination and the reader’s. When you enter a story, especially one that is basically a mystery, you should do so almost naked, with as little information as possible.

Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that the result is almost erotic in its withholding. Rapp tips us off to this by having the manuscript of Christopher’s novella bear an epigraph from “Crime and Punishment”: “We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word is spoken.”

“The Sound Inside” interests us at first, bleak sight. It keeps our interest not only on its narrowest terms, as a play about writing, but in its larger implications. What we know about other people, what we know about ourselves, are stories that won’t stay still. As we write our lives, like a good novel, our lives keep out-writing us.

Through Jan. 12 at Studio 54, Manhattan; 212-239-6200, lct.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.

Credits: By Adam Rapp; directed by David Cromer; sets by Alexander Woodward; costumes by David Hyman; lighting by Heather Gilbert; music and sound by Daniel Kluger; projections by Aaron Rhyne; technical supervision, Hudson Theatrical; production stage manager, Richard A. Hodge; company manager, Bobby Driggers; general mangers, RCI Theatricals. Presented by Jeffrey Richards, Lincoln Center Theater, Rebecca Gold, John Hart, Eric Falkenstein, Salman Vienn Al-Rashid, Spencer Ross, Filmnation Entertainment/Faliro House, Jane Bergère, Caiola Productions, Mark S. Golub and David S. Golub, Ken Greiner, Gemini Theatrical Investors, Scott H. Mauro, Jayne Baron Sherman, Jacob Soroken Porter, and Williamstown Theatre Festival, Mandy Greenfield, artistic director.

Cast: Mary-Louise Parker (Bella) and Will Hochman (Christopher).

Review: Mary-Louise Parker in the Subliminal, Sublime 'Sound Inside'

Alas, “The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical” is a pale patch on the earlier show and a failed attempt to board the teenage fantasy-angst train. (See also: “Be More Chill” and, more successfully, “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.”) Based on the popular 2005 novel by Rick Riordan, it is both overblown and underproduced, filled with sentiments it can’t support and effects it can’t pull off.

It needn’t have been that way. When first mounted by TheaterWorks in 2014, “The Lightning Thief” was by most accounts charming: a low-tech, 60-minute romp for preteenagers. Its minimal production values, and matching ticket prices, suited a tale that was, at heart, a lighthearted fable about the “half-blood” son of the sea god Poseidon and a mortal woman. Translated from ancient Greece to contemporary New York, the tale drew its dry humor from the contrast.

The current version, which opened at the Longacre Theater on Wednesday after a seven-month national tour this year, has all the charm of a tension headache. To disguise its inaptness for Broadway, the original creative team — Joe Tracz (book), Rob Rokicki (music and lyrics) and Stephen Brackett (direction) — has doubled its length, added a clutch of unnecessary songs and generally inflated the material so hard that it explodes whatever mild pleasures made the book worth adapting in the first place.

The authors have also, significantly if silently, upped the characters’ ages. In the book, Percy is 12 when he is brought to Camp Half-Blood, a training ground and refuge for young demigods. (They need to acquire skills that will protect them from the jealous monsters of Greek mythology.) In the musical, as in the reviled 2010 movie adaptation, Percy appears to be 16 or so; at any rate, Chris McCarrell, the actor who plays him onstage, is 28.

Up-aging allows the authors to attempt social significance by hammering themes of parental neglect and teenage rebellion. At first, this is amusing, as when the opening number explains that, for half-bloods, the gods “you learned about / but weren’t paying attention to / well, they don’t pay attention to you, either.” Or when Annabeth (Kristin Stokes) describes her inattentive mother, Athena, in a neat triple rhyme: “She’s smart and she’s wise / She’s sworn off gluten and she’s sworn off guys / But if she came to camp it’d be a surprise.”

That song — “The Campfire Song” — is one of the few whose music and lyrics hang together long enough to make sharp points. Once the plot requires Percy to go on a picaresque quest to retrieve the titular lightning bolt, with Annabeth and a satyr named Grover (Jorrel Javier) in tow, the storytelling and songwriting become hectic and monotonous. Reduced to highlights and stripped of distinction, Percy’s adventures with Furies, oracles, Medusa, Ares and Hades quickly pall.

Brilliant staging — as in “Harry Potter” or “Hadestown,” another mythological mashup — might have made up for that. But “The Lightning Thief” is stranded in the contradictions of its ambition. Effects that might have looked crafty and imaginative in the original production look cheesy and anticlimactic in this one. Lee Savage’s set consists mostly of marbleized plywood scaffolding; the band, sitting atop that scaffolding, numbers just five. And why is Zeus’ lightning bolt, when it finally appears, about as awesome as a fluorescent Shake Weight?

It’s symptomatic of the illogical workarounds that the scene in which Percy’s supernatural powers are first manifested at Camp Half-Blood — a scene that, in the book, involves an exploding toilet — must make do with toilet paper, as if he weren’t the son of Poseidon but Charmin. Perhaps at this point I should take off my Scrooge glasses and see the show as a family might — albeit a family paying as much as $199 per ticket. A child might in fact enjoy the fusillade of toilet paper. Parents might enjoy McCarrell’s mostly laid back, tossed-off performance; underplaying is definitely the way to stand out in this production. And everyone might root for the cast of unknowns, all but McCarrell making Broadway debuts. It’s true that they give it their overamplified all.

But — glasses back on — I have to ask: What do we want musicals for young people and their families to be? Serious and urgent like “Dear Evan Hansen”? Sure, although that show is too exceptional to serve as a viable model. Moral tales sugared with spectacle like anything Disney? I can live with that. (Well, maybe not “Tarzan.”)

It’s the musicals lost somewhere in between I find myself unable to countenance. Not only are they often about whiny teenagers; they seem to be written by them as well.

Shows of this ilk — not just “The Lightning Thief” but also “Be More Chill,” “School of Rock” and, despite its terrific score, “13” — normalize the idea that actually quite privileged youngsters are victims of social or parental neglect. They bellow their rebellion in catchy songs; they go on childish quests to claim their maturity.

“The Lightning Thief” doubles down on that agenda. Its finale, an anthem called “Bring On the Monsters,” would be laughably banal if it weren’t so aggressively false. “The battle’s just begun!” the characters instruct the audience.

What battle? The one with the parents who ponied up the big bucks to bring you to a show featuring flashlights and sock puppets? Better to count your blessings and find another fantasy.

“The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical”

Tickets: Through Jan. 5 at the Longacre Theater, Manhattan; 212-239-6200, lightningthiefmusical.com.

Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes.

Credits: Book by Joe Tracz; music and lyrics by Rob Rokicki; directed by Stephen Brackett; choreography by Patrick McCollum; sets by Lee Savage; costumes by Sydney Maresca; lighting by David Lander; sound by Ryan Rumery; puppets by AchesonWalsh; hair, wigs, and makeup by Dave Bova; orchestrations by Wiley DeWeese and Rob Rokicki; fight direction by Rod Kinter; music direction by Wiley DeWeese; production stage manager, Veronica Aglow; company manager, Jim Brady; production manager, Brian Lynch. Presented by Martian Entertainment, Victoria Lang, Lisa Chanel, Jennifer Doyle and Roy Lennox, Van Dean/Meredith Lucio, O’Hara/Rae/Zurcher, Wei-Hwa Huang, Tosha Martin, Cara Talty, Fisher/Jacobs Baker/Masotti/Prince, SJGH Productions and TheaterWorksUSA.

Cast: Chris McCarrell, Jorrel Javier, Ryan Knowles, Sarah Beth Pfeifer, James Hayden Rodriguez, Jalynn Steele and Kristin Stokes.

Review: 'The Lightning Thief,' a Far Cry From Olympus

NEW YORK — Here’s an idea for a Broadway musical: An awkward boy with an absent father and an overwhelmed mother gets involved with friends in a dubious scheme that spins out of control and almost undoes him.

There’s a wonderful moment like that in “Soft Power,” which opened at the Public Theater on Tuesday in a coproduction with the Center Theater Group of Los Angeles. A golden curtain sweeps away to reveal, silhouetted on a scaffold in a cloud of vermilion light, a 22-piece orchestra, digging into the opening notes of Jeanine Tesori’s triple-crème score. If an audience ever sighed as one, it does here.

What’s strange is that this musical moment does not arrive until 20 minutes into the show, by which point we have already seen — twice — a main character being stabbed in the neck and left to die on a Brooklyn street. The character will survive; we know that because he is based on playwright, David Henry Hwang, who survived just such an attack in 2015. Even so, the promise of those violins turns out to come with lots of provisos.

Such is the cleverness, and confusion, of “Soft Power,” which the authors call a “play with a musical.” Bristling with ideas that rarely are dramatized, let alone in such imaginative form, it is something of a miracle but also something of a muddle, the ideas scrambling over one another for prominence and the ingenious form unable to corral them. Still, those ideas — about the betrayals inherent in love, democracy and musicals themselves — are too exciting and important to dismiss by quibbling them to death.

That doesn’t make “Soft Power” any easier to parse than it is to praise; I’m not sure even its authors and hardworking director, Leigh Silverman, have mastered all the whirligig tricks of perspective they’ve set in motion. It’s the kind of show that deserves, and unfortunately needs, to be seen at least twice.

What’s clear enough, in those opening 20 minutes, is that a lightly fictionalized Chinese-American playwright also named David Henry Hwang (Francis Jue) agrees to write a musical for a prominent Shanghai producer, Xue Xing (Conrad Ricamora). Based on a hit Chinese movie that champions marital fidelity even at the cost of unhappiness, the musical is to bear the same unpromising title: “Stick With Your Mistake.”

But as Hwang collapses after the possibly racist attack — the timeline is jimmied a bit so that the stabbing takes place just after the election of Donald J. Trump — he imagines a different musical, the one we proceed to see. This one, called “Soft Power,” written by Chinese artists instead of Americans, is both a rueful romance like “Stick With Your Mistake” and a gleeful riposte to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “The King and I,” inverting that Golden Age classic’s fallacies and stereotypes to hilarious and pungent effect.

The “I” in the dream musical, which jumps back to the weeks before the election, is Xue Xing himself; his arrival in the United States, like Anna’s arrival in Siam in “The King and I,” is depicted with dozens of erroneous details. Xue lands at “New York Airport,” with its glorious view of the Golden Gate Bridge. (It’s rare for a set design, in this case by Clint Ramos, to get such big laughs.) The Americans Xue immediately encounters are violent, gun-toting lowlifes, played by Asian actors in whiteface and sporting absurd regional accents.

The “King” to Xue’s “I” is none other than Hillary Rodham Clinton, portrayed, like the 1951 musical’s King Mongkut, as a natural leader trapped in a primitive culture. Forced to pimp herself out for votes, Clinton (Alyse Alan Louis) first appears at a fundraiser at “the most famous American restaurant of all”: a McDonald’s misunderstood as a glamorous Busby Berkeley nightclub. In a production number reminiscent of “Trouble” from “The Music Man,” she strips off her red spangled pantsuit, revealing a Wonder Woman outfit beneath.

It isn’t enough; as Xue instructs her — and as circumstances subsequently bear out — democracy is a degrading and unreliable system. Voting itself is a backward Western ritual; it takes a patter song modeled on Gilbert and Sullivan to explain the idiocy of the Electoral College. When Xue suggests that the certainty of communism produces much better results, Clinton naturally takes offense but cannot, of all people, argue the point.

Even so, when Clinton, in a song reminiscent of “The Rain in Spain” from “My Fair Lady,” finally learns to pronounce Xue’s name, a romance sparks between them. This is first expressed in a delicious polka (choreographed by Sam Pinkleton) that winkingly salutes “Shall We Dance?”

Though not imitations of Golden Age hits, Tesori’s songs are loving tributes that swim in and out of currents of familiarity. Orchestrated by Danny Troob for that unusually large orchestra, they sound marvelous, and yet they don’t quite do the trick. It would take the brilliancy of Sondheim, especially in the lyrics — Hwang’s are bare-bones, devoid of panache — to pull off the necessary double act here: to succeed as worthy successors to the originals and satires of them at the same time.

Without that, the inner musical of “Soft Power” just isn’t in the same class as the classics it needles. In any case, in the second act (after a truly hilarious interlude I won’t spoil) the book goes haywire, spinning out its political thread but cutting short the romantic one. (President Donald Trump, called “Dear Leader” and set to drop bombs on “Cheatin’ China,” sucks up all the narrative air, even if he’s not physically represented.) The armature of “The King and I,” which helped maintain structure, is largely abandoned.

The cast works hard to keep the story standing. Jue makes a delightfully wry impression as Hwang; Ricamora is dreamy as Xue in the inside musical and subtly duller in the outside one. As Clinton, Louis is apt but underpowered, a problem most likely built into the role. It would take a Jennifer Holliday to pull off her 11 o’clock number, a full-out screamer of a tribute to democracy.

If a song can make you love a lie, or at least a complicated half-truth, this one does it. (It even gets a moving, anthemic reprise at the end of the show.) But it’s a strange complication that “Soft Power” critiques the seductive persuasiveness of musicals — the “soft power” of American culture — while also trading in it.

Though I admire the idea that a musical can embrace that kind of complication, ultimately it feels like a pulled punch when this one fails to answer its own question. Is democracy a classic virtue or just a mistake we stick to, a happy Rodgers tune to ward off fear? What if, despite Hammerstein, we have real reason to be afraid, and scarcely any to whistle?

‘Soft Power’

Tickets Through Nov. 10 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; 212-967-7555, publictheater.org. Running time: 2 hour 15 minutes.

Credits Play and lyrics by David Henry Hwang; music and additional lyrics by Jeanine Tesori; directed by Leigh Silverman; choreography by Sam Pinkleton; sets by Clint Ramos; costumes by Anita Yavich; lighting by Mark Barton; sound by Kai Harada; hair, wigs and makeup by Tom Watson; sound effects by Bart Fassbender; projections by Bryce Cutler; special effects by Lillis Meeh; orchestrations by Danny Troob; dance arrangements by John Clancy; music contractor, Antoine Silverman; music director and music supervisor, Chris Fenwick; production stage manager, David Lurie-Perret. Presented by the Public Theater, Oskar Eustis, artistic director, Patrick Willingham, executive director, and Center Theater Group, Michael Ritchie, artistic director, Meghan Pressman, managing director, Douglas C. Baker, producing director.

Cast: Jon Hoche, Kendyl Ito, Francis Jue, Austin Ku, Raymond J. Lee, Alyse Alan Louis, Jaygee Macapugay, Geena Quintos and Conrad Ricamora.

Review: In the Musical 'Soft Power,' China Whistles the Tune

NEW YORK — Surely you know that telltale moment, at the start of many great Golden Age musicals, when the curtain rustles, the lights glow warmer and the violins start churning out the schmaltz. Whatever sadness the story has in store, the sound from the pit tells you all will be well.

Actually, the nation she rules with her husband, Roy, has just one of each of those things: one prisoner (a recent hostage, good at chess), one citizen (a doofus interested in pyrotechnics) and one young person (the 17-year-old prince, currently away on a mission).

That’s because Terra Firma, as the queen has named it, is a micronation: a self-declared kingdom located on an abandoned 6,000-square-foot anti-aircraft platform six miles out to sea. It may not boast much land or populace, but it has a national anthem, a tatty flag, a centralized health service and a constitution — if the queen could ever complete it.

“Terra Firma,” the play by Barbara Hammond about this country, likewise seems in need of more work. Ambitious and smart, it is not yet coherent, at least not in its world premiere, which opened on Thursday at the Baruch Performing Arts Center. Shifting from whimsical comedy to light satire to lumpy allegory, it quickly strips its gears and stops cold.

The whimsy, coming right at the start, proves especially deadly in Shana Cooper’s staging for a newly founded theater company called the Coop. Mild humor about the micronation’s pretensions to real statehood seems especially vaporous on the imposing set (by Andrew Boyce) and amid the foreboding ocean roar of Jane Shaw’s sound design. But at least the absurdity of the premise has a historical precedent: Terra Firma is based on a real place called Sealand, established in the late 1960s off the east coast of England.

The humans seem less precedented. As the citizen (John Keating) and Roy (Gerardo Rodriguez) hoist their hostage (Tom O’Keefe) onto the platform and proceed to interrogate him, we might almost be watching a Three Stooges routine, except with less finesse. Clumsily handled as well is the back story: The citizen and Roy, believing that recent nearby explosions are the work of enemies bent on their destruction, are desperate to understand the danger they’re in.

That danger, we quickly understand from the script’s broad hints, is ecological. When the young prince (Daniel Molina) returns from his reconnaissance mission, he brings with him a sliver of a hedge to decorate the homeland; it is apparently the last piece of greenery left in the world. And when a weather-beaten diplomat (T. Ryder Smith) arrives to negotiate the hostage “crisis,” we learn that the reason he is the first to heed Terra Firma’s calls for help — delivered in bottles cast out to sea — is that there may be no one else left to answer.

The queen, unwilling to credit such dire suspicions, doubles down on her queenliness. Because she is played by Andrus Nichols — the marvelously grave Elinor in Kate Hamill’s “Sense &amp; Sensibility” — a character that could easily turn camp instead comes across as somehow both deluded and brave. Despite her stained blouse and paste tiara, she practices holding her right arm aloft whenever she appears, as if searching for the perfect salute to comfort a grateful people.

This pathos gets at what the play does best: It understands and in some way forgives human limitation. It fares less well when it attempts a critique of rulers who reject reality even if it’s a reality they helped create. A parallel is suggested between the characters’ pride and the disaster now engulfing them, as if Terra Firma were the industrialized West in miniature, unable to steer away from the brink of climate change. In an author’s note, Hammond writes that she saw in the story of the real Sealand “a metaphor for the human predicament.”

But that comparison is under-drawn and illogical; a few people stuck on a massive steel life raft for several decades cannot have much to do with rising sea levels and whatever else is eating the rest of the world. The Terra Firmans aren’t nuclear physicists who built faulty reactors like the characters in Lucy Kirkwood’s “The Children,” a much more sophisticated treatment of the same theme. They’re refugees.

So, in a way, are the members of the Coop, recently formed as a kind of breakaway republic from another theater company, Bedlam. “Terra Firma,” the Coop’s inaugural production, matches its mission to stage plays “that resonate with timeless themes and universal truths,” but in this case resonance isn’t enough.

That’s a problem built into the bloated mash-up of genres: Comedy is based on particularizing human behavior, but allegory is based on generalizing it. In trying to be both, and an ecological tragedy as well, “Terra Firma” pulls in too many directions. Though the cast — especially Nichols, O’Keefe and Smith — is strong, and Cooper makes lovely stage pictures on the rusty platform, there’s something thin and self-defeating about the resulting circular logic. Like most life raft stories, “Terra Firma” doesn’t hold water.

‘Terra Firma’: Through Nov. 10 at Baruch Performing Arts Center, Manhattan; 212-352-3101, thecoopnyc.org. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.

Review: In 'Terra Firma,' a Wee Wet Country on the Brink

NEW YORK — “We are becoming like all the other nations,” the queen says in a moment of despair. “We have unhappy prisoners, indifferent citizens and the young people refuse to reproduce.”

Jesse Green

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