Weekly Margin 2026, W3: Try/Step/Trip, The Great Escape, Fiddler on the Roof

1/12/26: Try/Step/Trip

What: The Living Word Project presents Dahlak Braithwaite's non-linear interrogation of a young Black man's experience within a court-mandated rehab program, utilizing the the language of hip hop, step, and spoken word.

And? full review here.

Dahlak Brathwaite, center-ish, and the Los Angeles cast of
Try/Step/Trip. Photo by MarKing IV Photography.

1/16/26: The Great Escape

What: Ruthie Scarpino brings her clown, four-year-old Apfel Tucas, to New York with the story of her daring escape from Rosh Hashanah services to find the snack stash at her synagogue.

And? Pretty freaking adorable. Scarpino's well-gifted in the body- and gesture-isolation needed to do effective mime work, and her guileless persona as young Apfel endears her to the audience even as she continually drafts them into helping her physicalize her imaginings and enact the story of her great escape.

Ruthie Scarpino as Apfel Tucas. Photo source.

Margin Notes: Try/Step/Trip

Try/Step/Trip

Seen on: Monday, 1/12/26.

The Los Angeles cast of Try/Step/Trip.
Photo by MarKing IV Photography.

Plot and Background

The Living Word Project presents Dahlak Brathwaite's non-linear interrogation of a young Black man's experience within a court-mandated rehab program, utilizing the language of hip hop, step, and spoken word, as part of the 2026 Under the Radar Festival. As "Anonymous" navigates rehab and the systemic external expectations placed on him by society for the intersectional parts of his identity, he must also navigate his own sense of self, independent of these markers.

Thoughts:

Brathwaite's work is instantly kinetic, rhythmic, and engaging as he summons the ensemble from his place at the Conductor's station (a setup including keyboard, soundboard, and microphone). They jog out in perfect percussive synchronicity to the beat he's built, chased by the Conductor's spoken word introduction of the cyclical nature of his story and this performance, and it becomes clear to the audience that we're in the hands of a confident, polished, and virtuosic writer/composer/star. Anonymous, the younger version of the Conductor, lands himself in group rehab with the charismatic Samples, always on the verge of relapse; the self-possessed Mary, acknowledging her indulgences but committed to staying clean; Steve, a recovering cocaine addict and lone white character, whose frantic energy is maintained with a new fixation of espressos; and Pastor, the group's leader and a firm advocate of religion as salvation from addiction.

Anonymous, after delineating a series of police aggression--stop and frisks over the years that yielded nothing--finds himself in rehab after finally being stopped while in possession of mushrooms. Though apparently not an actual addict, he enters the program to avoid prison because "we been locked up since the day we arrived" anyway. But what he learns is that his inescapable identity as a Black man in America subjects him to systemic proscriptions of that very identity, regardless of his actions. As he says, he "seems to be stuck in the same role/No one wondered why [he] was there./[He] was just playing the role." And in this framework, he is volleyed from law enforcement prejudices to the criminal court with a seedy public defender, to a group rehab where he encounters two men vying for the position of his mentor: Pastor, who wields his religion like a cudgel against a young man who never felt at home in the church; and Samples, who encourages him to embrace hip hop as a liberation, to embrace the tradition of being an American Black man descended from enslaved people. The sticky part of either of these conflicting credos is that Anonymous himself is the child of immigrants and a first-generation American. So any identity offered to him--be it a Baptist church, a hip hop artist articulating his generational pain, or a criminal waiting to be caught--does not truly speak to who he is, even as he tries on different identities in search of a truer understanding of himself.

Weekly Margin 2026, W2: Picnic at Hanging Rock

1/05/25: Picnic at Hanging Rock: The Musical

What: A musical adaptation of Joan Lindsay's novel about a schoolgirl picnic in Victoria, Australia where several girls and a schoolteacher mysteriously go missing. As the search for the missing girls continues, the remaining students and teachers slowly start to fracture themselves, the damage from the tragedy stretching out to encompass them.

And? What a weird weird story. I'm half-tempted to read the novel, but from what I've learned it has as dissatisfying and inconclusive an ending as the musical does. The show is full of strong performers (and it's refreshing to see another female-dominated musical), but the staging feels very cramped on the Greenwich House stage. The scenic design, though visually striking, cinches the cast in, and then there is choreo of the seven students trying valiantly to not knock themselves against anything as they spin. I don't think it needed to be this claustrophobic; I think the Greenwich House Theater is actually maneuverable enough to allow for a more expansive performance space to really let the story and performers breathe (this is, after all, where the pie shop Sweeney Todd played, when it was still the Barrow Street Theater).

The company of Picnic at Hanging Rock. Photo by Matthew Murphy.

Weekly Margin 2026, W1: Marjorie Prime, Twelfth Night

1/03/25: Marjorie Prime

What: 2nd Stage revival of Jordan Harrison's play about Marjorie, a woman in her 80s with Alzheimer's interacting with a new technology of holographic people called Primes who are taught to be the embodiment of lost love ones, through the stories told to them by those who still remember. Marjorie's adult daughter Tess struggles with the idea of this technology, both as an evocation of her dead father and as an imperfect and filtered version of reality: a Walter who is taught a gussied up version of his marriage to Marjorie and who isn't told about his son Damien who died many years ago.

And?  The wildest thing about this play to me is that it was written years before ChatGPT existed, because it seems like such a good conversation piece to have in regards to that particular AI application, full of half-truths culled from many sources, but also full of hallucinations (and frankly terrible counting skills--ask my sister). Walter Prime tells Marjorie the story of the night he proposed, but Marjorie asks him to overwrite it so they saw Casablanca rather than My Best Friend's Wedding. The death of their son Damien irrevocably changed the entire family, and yet Marjorie hasn't spoken Damien's name since he died. Walter Prime learns from her the story of their marriage, their daughter, their two dogs, but not a word about their son. And as each memory is overwritten with a newer glossed-over draft, it steps further and further away from reality and into the realm of fairy tales. Spoilers ahead, so stop reading now if you don't want them! As each subsequent character passes away, to be reincarnated into their blank page version to be written and rewritten, we step further and further away from reality: each new self has softened edges, removing conflict and unkindness, erasing trauma and baggage for theoretically easier communication, but instead creating smudged carbon copies. In the final sequence, the three remaining Primes sit around a table telling each other their stories, each one not quite true, but yet in full consensus. It's an excellent demostration of the inferiority of AI art to human-created art: AI art can regurgitate and collage, but it cannot invent, whereas human-created art can do both. The final sequence of these three Primes in their loop of half-truths and elided facts also got me thinking about the line I heard once, that you only truly die when there's no one left alive who remembers you (Tom Stoppard's Leopoldstadt explores this theme beautifully). Here at the end when only Primes remain, with no one left alive to remember Damien, the poor unhappy son is dead at last.

June Squibb and Cynthia Nixon as Marjorie and Tess.
Photo by Joan Marcus.

Streaming Theater

• Shakespeare in the Park's summer production of Twelfth Night, hosted on PBS.

Writing Roundup: 2025

This year I've ...

My story "House Rules," which appears
in Behind the Revolving Door, was
nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

... written and presented "No Trouble in River City: When Broadway Revisals 'Fix' the Wrong Things" at the MLA 2025 Convention

... attended and written about 119 theatrical experiences for 2025

... written full reviews of 15 shows

... written five new poems (okay it's not a lot but it's better than zero)

... ranted about Eugene O'Neill and got paid for it

... submitted 191 pieces for publication

... had nine of those pieces accepted for publication (eight are out now; one is slated for next year)

... had one of those nine pieces nominated for the Pushcart Prize (I'm aware thousands of pieces get nominated; it's still nice)

... queried the manuscript of my second collection 38 times

Next year, I'd like to ...

... get back on the story-writing horse

... write that Beauty and the Beast /  Lilo and Stitch paper

... succeed in finding a publisher for my collection

... I dunno, write another parody of "The Raven"? That seems to be a thing I do