What: The Public Theater presents Itamar Moses's new play, about Asaf, a progressive Jewish playwright in a college town who finds himself embroiled in a delicate and contentious campus conflict when he's asked to add his name to a manifesto that--in criticizing the institutional violence against Black people in America--sees fit to criticize Israel as well. Important to note: the play takes place in September and early October of 2023, just before the pogrom on October 7th. It was also written years ago and intended to be presented at The Public, before Covid shutdowns delayed it until now; it has seen some revisions in light of current events.
And? Oskar Eustis's program note articulates that the intention of the play is to dive into these difficult questions without providing an answer, and without designating one voice as the author's proxy. It asks the audience to take the space to listen, to bring empathy to hearing different voices than their own.
It's good to make the space for this discussion, in a landscape where people stop to listen before speaking. For me, however, the play doesn't truly get past the various different talking points I've already read and heard, and the characters themselves aren't fully sketched beyond being the different mouthpieces for those talking points (Reuven, the most ardent defender of the existence of Israel, exists for one scene only and then is neatly packed away in his mouthpiece box. I got the quiet feeling that if he'd gotten any more time, they would have accused the play of being too imbalanced, even though most of the characters are anti-Israel). But maybe this play isn't for me. Maybe it's for that person in the back row the night I went, the person who clapped every time a character spoke one of the dog whistle talking points: those phrases that sound like criticism of Israel but are actually invoking centuries-old tropes and propaganda. (I hate that I have to do this because it should be obvious, but much like the protagonist Asaf, I know I need to reiterate that criticism of Israel's government is valid and necessary; there's a difference between that and a lot of what's being said right now) So maybe this play is for that person clapping, who's heard only their own talking points; maybe it's to break them out of that bubble and work towards empathy. But I can't say I have high hopes that she heard anything she didn't feel like hearing.
Hanging over all of the proceedings, like a Greek tragedy, is the audience's certain knowledge of the tragedy that is only days away. What we see are the tensions ready to explode, just waiting for their object to do so. I wonder what the sequel to this play might look like.
Zooming in a bit, underscoring Asaf's on-campus challenges are his struggles to satisfy his wife, struggles which mirror his struggles as a progressive Jew in America: at once he's both given up too much to move across the country for her job, while also not compromising his ethics enough to support her; she didn't know he felt so strongly about Israel, but also how could he then back down from his stance? Part of their conflict necessitates the unpacking of why a past relationship of his fell apart, one where he could never seem to find safe ground. Where is the path to being the perfect partner? Where is the path to being the perfect Jew, one who satisfies all their liberal friends by being the right kind of ally and not calling out imbedded antisemitism if it detracts from the larger cause (there's always a larger cause)? How are any of us ever enough to deserve to be treated like our pain matters too?
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| Josh Radnor, Madeline Weinstein, Cherise Boothe, and Michael Khalid Karadsheh as Asaf, Rachel, Nakia, and Farid. Photo by Joan Marcus. |
3/20/24: The Who's Tommy
What: The Broadway revival of the musical about that pinball wizard. (okay, it's about a young boy who witnesses a scene of intense violence and retreats so far into himself that he spends the next twenty years unseeing, unhearing, and not speaking)
And? Des McAnuff, who cowrote the book and won a Tony award for directing the original production, returns to direct this revival. By and large, I think it's a great time. The absolute perfection of David Korins's skeletal scenic design with Amanda Zieve's lighting and Peter Nigrini's projection design work in perfect concert to sculpt this real and unreal space, where walls are imagined and perspectives are constantly shifting, telescoping in and out, then sliding away. The movement as crafted by McAnuff and choreographed by Lorin Latarro is kinetic and relentless.
My big complaint though is the costume design: I have no idea what story Sarafina Bush is telling. Though the color palate--pulling the neon yellow from the scenic and projection designs to show a sort of poisoning of the space--is effective against the grey scale, a lot of the other costume work feels a bit cartoonish. And I don't know why there are armbands everywhere (gonna hold McAnuff responsible for this too) -- why is fascism a theme in the show now? I thought the show was about the difficulties of processing intense trauma (especially in a family that wants to suppress the bad feelings), and then the dangers of celebrity worship (and a bit of a failed Christ story, a la Pippin). But now there's fascism too, and a longer jump to the future than I remember being in the show prior. I don't get it. It doesn't help that, with the cuts to the second act, that whole second arc feels rushed and a bit unearned.
An interesting new aspect of the staging now is that Tommy is very clearly coded as autistic. At first I was concerned the production was implying that the trauma somehow caused it, but then I realized: in this version Tommy was always autistic: after witnessing the horrible violence and then being instructed by his parents that he didn't hear it, didn't see it, and would never speak of it, the traumatized child took them at their word, and self-induced these psychosomatic disabilities. So um. It's not perfect, and it's not exactly good science, but I don't think Tommy has ever bothered itself about good science. It's a fairy tale.
The preview night we went, two of the principal actors--Adam Jacobs and Christina Sajous--were struck down with a sudden illness; the producers had canceled that day's matinee to let the covers rehearse the show. So we got to see David Paul Kidder's and Afra Hines's debut performances in the roles of Captain Walker and Acid Queen, and if we hadn't been told that, we wouldn't have known. Just, god I love live theater. I love how everyone in the audience cheered loudly, both at those actors' first appearances but also at the curtain call. We were all there celebrating that things go wrong, but theater people figure out how to cope.
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| Ali Louis Bourzgui as Tommy and the company of The Who's Tommy. Photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman. |
3/21/24: Lempicka
What: A new (semi-fictionalized) biomusical about the artist Tamara de Lempicka, a bisexual Jewish artist from Poland who hit the height of her career as an Art Deco artist in Paris between the world wars, before fleeing the rise of fascism.
And? I saw a very early preview so I probably shouldn't get too in the weeds. It's okay. It doesn't feel as cookie cutter as some biomusicals, but it's not life-changing for me. I think it will mean a lot to people to see this many queer female characters onstage at once. I wanted the design to reflect the aesthetic of her art more than it did. Beth Leavel, though not a major character, manages to have the most affecting scene in the show as, sitting for a portrait with only weeks left to live, she gently chides a grieving Lempicka, "Despair is a luxury we don't have time for."
Streaming Theater Related Content I Watched
- National Theatre Live's screening of The Motive and the Cue.
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