Weekly Margin 2025, W12: Operation Mincemeat, BOOP!, Fog and Filthy Air

 3/18/25: Operation Mincemeat

What: The Broadway transfer of the West End hit, a tongue-in-cheek musical adaption of the real-life British mission of deception in World War II.

And? Y'all, this show is a goddamn delight. The five actors--three of whom also cowrote the piece--have perfected the timing of their physical comedy to help make this sharp, hilarious, and without falter. Jak Malone, who won an Olivier for this production, is a particular standout in his various roles, and manages to break everyone's heart with a six-minute song sung in total stillness--that's when you know the audience is hooked. Ben Stones, responsible for the set and costume design that help facilitate the countless quick character changes and space shifts, is a magician with his designs full of trap door surprises and delights that keep us gasping and laughing. This one's a real treat.

Claire Marie Hall, Zoe Roberts, David Cummings, and Natasha Hodgson.
Photo by Julieta Cervantes.

3/19/25: BOOP! The Musical

What: A new splashy musical about Betty Boop who, tired of her life in the spotlight, escapes to the real world to discover they love her just as much. Sort of Enchanted/Barbie vibes, but with Betty Boop.

And? This show knows who its audience is, and is catering to it like mad: tourists in town looking for a brightly colored, dance-filled, feel-good musical. I found myself questioning if I've missed the immense popularity of a cartoon I vaguely remember from childhood. More than that, though, I was often disappointed by what I felt were missed opportunities by the designers. When we're first introduced to Betty Boop's world, of cartoonish grey-scale, it's delightful and imaginative, and a balanced use of projections and practicals. But I desperately want more contrast once we journey to the real world. In those scenes, the use of projections feels lazy, like they just didn't feel like building real things. But the whole point that keeps getting hammered in is that this is real, everything here is real, so why can't the design reflect that? Form and content, baby! That being said, the costume design is pretty great (and has a beautiful reveal at the top of the second act), and the lighting design does wonders to balance the look and feel of the characters when we're seeing both worlds at once onstage: bathing the real world in warmth while washing out the cartoon world. Even the vocals were tailored to this contrast, as we heard the more legit singing of Betty's film colleagues contrasted with the hard-belt (and no vibrato) of her real-world love interest. I also think they could shave off a half hour on this show if they cut Faith Prince's character (I love her, but she's wasted here and not plot-essential). But the performers in general are great: good voices and good stylized delivery in particular from Jasmine Amy Rogers as Betty, and Stephen DeRosa as Grampy.

Stephen DeRosa, Jasmine Amy Rogers, and Phillip Huber as Grampy, Betty
Boop, and Pudgy. Photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman.

Margin Notes: Fog and Filthy Air

Fog and Filthy Air

Seen on: Thursday, 3/20/25.

Robert Homeyer as Father. Photo by Peter Welch.

Plot and Background

Theater For the New City presents Tom Diriwachter's new play, inspired by true events, about Tim, a playwright working as a waiter in a restaurant, who travels by bus to Memphis in the middle of the night to rescue his parents, staying in a purgatorial motel and unable to drive themselves home.

What I Knew Beforehand

That it was about a family in crisis.

Thoughts:

Play: It's hard, with plays based on real events, to decide how faithful you must stay to reality, and when you are allowed to take liberties. This play ultimately feels like its intent is an apology and a tribute to Tim's (playwright Tom Diriwachter's stand-in) parents, flawed as they are. In the play itself he is frustrated with them, frustrated with their inability to take his writing seriously or to communicate with him frankly. But when Tim himself is offstage the audience sees the deep love his parents have for each other, the way his mother protects her husband from the creeping frailty of his own faculties. The play then is Tom/Tim apologizing for not seeing that at the time, but recognizing it now, decades later. However, beyond that, I don't know what the play itself is actually about. Its focus drifts, as well as its conviction as to whether what we're even seeing is real or not. The poster image includes a line from the show invoking "the Devil's eyes" haunting the father as he drove; the characters repeatedly refer to the motel room as Hell (though to me it reads more as a purgatory, with a very Godot/Dumb Waiter energy of wondering if the characters can actually leave), and I wonder if the playwright hoped for the play to leave the literal into some bizarre otherspace where perhaps all three characters are dead and the story is about them accepting that truth. But maybe it really is just about a father having a nervous breakdown, and his wife and adult son gently helping him collect himself enough to go home.

Long I Stand

This weekend I took a walk in a forest blanketed with pale crepe-paper leaves. And I thought of the Robert Frost poem. People tend to focus on the moral of it: "I took the one less traveled by,/And that has made all the difference." But that's an ending, a look back. That's the writer's purview, of course. But what's always stuck with me was the opening pause: 

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

Long I stood. It's the pause, the wonder. That phrase has haunted me for years; I kept trying to write a meditative story on the paralysis of choice, with that phrase as its title. Choice doesn't have to paralyze, but we don't need to rush the choice either. We can take a pause, take a breath, knowing we are only one traveler. Long we can stand, before we choose our next path. I grew up in a small town but I'm a city girl. As an introvert, the only way I can keep loving the city is to leave it every now and again. To visit the other path. It's not an either-or, though. It's both. We need both. It's the contrast that makes it matter, like how music has to be about change--otherwise it's just noise.

This weekend I practiced Shinrin Yoku, the Japanese practice of forest bathing, to let the sound and the feel, the smell and the taste of the forest wash over you. To take your path slowly and with intention.

I've been thinking about what March means. It's a month of transition, of shucking winter off, of stomping through the mud until we reach a warm rebirth. It's also a time of griefs, many griefs. It was March 2000 when we found out the cancer had returned, even after a bone marrow transplant. It was March 2020 when my city shut down, when writers who had shaped my world began dying around us. It was March 2021 when we grieved a year of isolation and loss. March 2023 had myriad griefs for me. March 2024 had the grief of watching people I thought were friends lionize men who celebrated the destruction of my people, my family. March 2024 was when I finally began the conversation of starting on antidepressants, when the griefs were too numerous to hold. March is also my birthday month.

The day before I left for my weekend away, I saw Redwood, a new musical about a woman who, unable to process her grief for her son, flees New York City for the California Redwoods. That too put grief in my head this weekend, as I stared at my own little forest in Massachusetts.

This weekend I had a hot stone massage on my birthday. The music playing under was a piano piece that was sometimes lively and tripping, sometimes desperate, sometimes quiet and ponderous, like water slipping easily over stones (I've always associated piano pieces with the movement of water). This music felt like grief to me, but not the dirgeful trudge of it, the weighted drowning over it. More the ways our minds and bodies try to cope with its heaviness. Movement, distraction, and the chosen moments when we look it in the face before turning away again.

And I thought that it's been five years of grief, March after March after March after March after March of it, slipping through and slipping by and trying to choose our moments of looking it in the face before we turn away again.

March is a good month for it.

This weekend I talked to a tarot reader about my burnout. I talked to an acupuncturist about my anxiety. I talked to a yellow wood about the best way to use my voice.

Most of my online "activism" takes place on one of the few platforms I'm still on (Facebook), and--I don't think it's helping. Maybe it is, maybe there are people quietly reading but not replying, quieting reading and taking strength in knowing they're not alone. Maybe there are people who know I'm not a monster and therefore if I've been advocating so staunchly on what is clearly an unpopular side for Left-leaners, there might be something worth interrogating. I don't know.

But it doesn't feel like I'm helping most of the time. I haven't seen additional people take up the call as a result of anything I post. The primary engagement I get lately is from gentile men who think they understand antisemitism better than I, a Jewish woman, or who think they understand the Middle East better than I, a woman who's had family in Israel since before I was born and who has been paying attention since I was five and saw a picture of my cousin napping in the bomb shelter, his face obscured by a gas mask. It's exhausting every time one of these men sea lions in, not even to engage with me, but to engage with a straw version of me, imputing thoughts I don't have to me, words I haven't said to me. These people who haven't engaged with me in a meaningful way in a decade, either in person or online, but I'm one of the few people posting about this, so they're going to spend their anger on me.

This weekend I turned forty. Life is short, and getting shorter with every passing year. I have one life to live, and I'm standing here in this yellow wood deciding how I want to live it. I'm probably going to be posting less, we'll see. But I'm no longer going to engage with these angry men who don't actually want to have a conversation with me. They don't get to poison my days anymore. Life is short, and they're not entitled to another second of mine.

If you do want to have a conversation with me, if you have questions, I am here for that. I am here for you. It's never too late to say that there are things we've misunderstood, that we've been taken in by one of the world's most powerful propaganda machines, activating a centuries-old latent bias. It's not too late. I have always believed in our ability to change. I've seen it firsthand. But if you want that conversation with me, you have to start it, and you have to start it in good faith, with an interest in listening, with questions. Not with attacks, not with assumptions.

But please know that this is a big energy drain to me each time it happens. This isn't an academic exercise or a hunt for a dopamine hit. This is my family, my life, my blood. This is real and deeply personal to me.

This weekend I sat quietly with myself. This weekend I stood long in a yellow wood.

I hope it's made a difference.

Moon rise in Lenox, Massachusetts. Photo by Zelda Knapp.

Weekly Margin 2025, W11: We Had a World, Redwood

3/11/25: We Had a World

What: MTC presents the world premiere of Joshua Harmon's memory play about the complicated dynamics among himself, his mother, and his alcoholic grandmother.

And? Memory plays really can be a crap shoot, but this one is exquisite. It dives into the complexities not only of unreliable narrators, but the unreliability of memory itself, including the stories we tell ourselves to explain what's happened to us. It's bolstered by a profoundly powerful cast of only three (and in fact the night I went, we were treated to understudy Courtney Balan playing Jeanine Serralles's role of Ellen, and you'd never know she doesn't play it every night. The heartbreak and strength she brings to every moment, the lived-in relationships she has with characters both on- and off-stage, it's all there and rich and wonderful and awful. Similarly, Andrew Barth Feldman and Joanna Gleason as Joshua and Renee both just seem like people living and interacting on stage, not performing characters.

This is all the more remarkable for how presentational the frame of this production is. Pre-show, the furniture is draped in tarps with City Center stamped on them, as a crew member slowly prepares the space for performance. The furniture used does not match the descriptions given by the characters but seem instead to be leftovers from other productions, rehearsal hall stand-ins. And then Barth, clad in only his underwear, nods to the crew member to cue the light change that starts the play. As the piece progresses the three characters argue about which parts of the story need to be told, and when, and why. Three people, three truths. They talk to us, and to each other, about the story they're telling, even as we see the exposed bones of their storytelling tools, reminding us all this is still a play, by a playwright and about a playwright, with a family who is watching him write this new play in front of and about them. Perfectly directed by Trip Cullman, with a brilliant scenic design by John Lee Beatty (the transformation! I adored it): a gem of a production.

Jeanine Serralles, Andrew Barth Feldman, and Joanna Gleason as Ellen,
Joshua, and Renee. Photo by Jeremy Daniel.

3/13/25: Redwood

What: A new musical by Tina Landau and Kate Diaz about a woman who, unable to process the death of her son a year ago, abandons her wife in New York to drive to the redwoods of California.

And? This one is getting mixed responses, from what I can tell. It's fine, but the songs have too much same-ness to them, especially when sung by Idina Menzel: her belt is tremendous but it seems to be the only flavor she has. I wanted more variety of vocal texture to help track her emotional journey through the show. I will say, this was the finest work I've seen from Michael Park in the supporting role of Finn. And the Jewish representation was nice, too. The scenic/projection design by Jason Ardizzone-West and Hana S. Kim, respectively, while stunningly detailed from my mezzanine seat, has even more towering majesty from the angle in the orchestra.

Khaila Wilcoxon and Idina Menzel as Becca and Jesse. Photo by Matthew
Murphy and Evan Zimmerman.

Weekly Margin 2025, W10: Deep Blue Sound, Purpose, Buena Vista Social Club, SUMO

3/03/25: Deep Blue Sound

What: Clubbed Thumb's Obie-winning production of Abe Koogler's play transfers to The Public.

And? Between this and Staff Meal, Abe Koogler is now a must-watch playwright for me. I adored this strange little play: part presentational, as if we're watching a very disorganized town council meeting; part deeply intimate, as if we're seeing scenes of vulnerability not meant to be witnessed. Ostensibly about a group of islanders in the Pacific Northwest trying to solve what happened to their missing pod of orcas, it's also about what each character is willing to make part of their public witnessed self, as opposed to what they insist on holding so close to the vest almost no one sees it. So we have Ella, sick and planning for her death but refusing to warn her closest friends; we have Mayor Annie, brittle in her attempts to lead the committee and unsure how to guide her son's passion for dance; Les, who struggles and struggles to make connections both local and long-distance but who knows enough to sally forth solo when she has to; John, who wants to help but doesn't know how to break past the binds of polite behavior. And we have whimsy and heartbreak, and so many [redacted because this is a spoiler but it made me cry when it happened]. Arin Arbus ably directs a powerhouse ensemble featuring the always piercing Maryann Plunkett, the consistently surprising and wonderful Miriam Silverman, and the monologue master Mia Katigbak. Also shoutout to dots for their rabbit-in-a-hat scenic design.

Thank you, Clubbed Thumb. I needed this show.

Crystal Finn, Maryann Plunkett, Arnie Burton, and Miriam Silverman as 
Mayor Annie, Ella, John, and Mary. Photo by Maria Baranova.

3/04/25: Purpose

What: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's new play, transferred from Steppenwolf: one of those plays where a family fractures as skeletons are confronted.

And? Really truly wonderful performances, especially from Jon Michael Hill and Kara Young, and the direction is well-paced. But I don't think this play needed to be the three hours it was, and I didn't leave with as clear a sense of something to think about as I sometimes do with BJJ's plays. There are some strong moments, but it doesn't add up to as much as I wanted it to.

The cast of the Steppenwolf (pre-Broadway) run of Purpose. Photo by
Michael Brosilow.

Weekly Margin 2025, W9: The Jonathan Larson Project, Safe House

2/24/25: The Jonathan Larson Project

What: The world premiere of Jennifer Ashley Tepper's passion project: a new piece based on the unfinished/unproduced works of the late Jonathan Larson.

And? A mixed experience. It's for sure a treat to hear never-before heard songs from Larson, but they're of inconsistent quality. Similarly inconsistent is the use of screens. The pre-show is full of actual New York footage shot by a human (he was sitting behind me and I heard him discussing it), but the show itself has some clearly digitally-rendered images and the contrast with the real footage we saw earlier makes it look even worse. However, the gifts of real footage from Larson's life, and of people talking about his impact, make the presence of the screens worth it. I will admit that I'm also not sure if the show itself knows what it wants to be. Sometimes it's a straight-up revue, with a performer delivering a song sans connective thread to the other songs. Sometimes it seems like this is a group of five friends gathered to share their work and musings on art and writing. I'm not really sure which one we're dealing with.

But at the end of the day, it's a set of five very talented performers giving their all for each song, and some of the songs are worth the ticket.

Andy Mientus, Lauren Marcus, Jason Tam, Taylor Iman Jones, and Adam
Chanler-Berat. Photo by Joan Marcus.

3/01/25: Safe House

What: St. Ann's Warehouse and Abbey Theatre present Enda Walsh's new play, with song cycle by Anna Mullarkey, about ... well, that's always hard to say with an Enda Walsh play.

And? Proof that it's hard to say what the story of a piece by Enda Walsh is: after the show the group I attended with gathered to share thoughts. My read was that while I don't know literally what story was being told, I knew thematically that it was about someone searching, through both her past and present, to find a place she could be safe. The person in the group who was raised Catholic was sure that that person was dead the entire span of the play. Others thought she died at some point during it. So ... I don't know that I can tell you what this play is about. But it's engaging, if confusing, and features a great performance by Kate Gilmore.

Kate Gilmore as Grace. Photo by Teddy Wolff.

Weekly Margin 2025, W8: Dakar 2000, Truth Be Told

2/18/25: Dakar 2000

What: MTC presents a new play by Rajiv Joseph about a young man in the Peace Corps in Dakar in 2000 and his run-in with the US embassy after he reappropriates supplies to help a local community build a garden.

And? I had a hard time staying focused in the first half, but the second half is very compelling, with truly wonderful work being done by Abubakr Ali as the charismatic Boubs.

Mia Barron and Abubakr Ali as Dina and Boubs. Photo by Matthew Murphy.

2/21/25: Truth Be Told

What: The Gene Frankel Theatre and ARA Theater present William Cameron's two-hander play: a showdown between a journalist and an implicated mother in the aftermath of another mass shooting.

And? full review here

Michelle Park and Francesca Ravera as Kathleen Abedon and Jo Hunter.
Photo by Bronwen Sharp.

Margin Notes: Truth Be Told

Truth Be Told

Seen on: Friday, 2/21/25.

Michelle Park and Francesca Ravera as Kathleen Abedon
and Jo Hunter. Photo by Bronwen Sharp.

Plot and Background

The Gene Frankel Theatre and ARA Theater present William Cameron's two-hander play: a showdown between a journalist and an implicated mother in the aftermath of another mass shooting. Jo, a crime journalist with a bestselling book about a mass shooter, meets with the mother of another mass shooter to record her experience, but is surprised by the revelation that Kathleen believes her son is innocent of the crime.

What I Knew Beforehand

Just the premise.

Thoughts:

Play: I think the premise is an interesting one, but I wonder if maybe the scenes are in the wrong order. From the moment Kathleen voices her opinion that her son didn't commit the murders, the audience and Jo know that she's delusional. And the audience's conviction never really changes. I think there could be a complicated journey explored if there were a sense that Kathleen's theories have some actual grounding. If the audience's notion of truth could be questioned over the course of the play, if we begin to wonder as well if Julian was framed, it would make Kathleen's final collapse all that more shattering. Instead, the audience sits through ninety-plus minutes of someone going through the denial stage of grief with little to no ripples in her waters. There's a richness to be mined here, of these two opposing characters with their complicated relationships to their sons, to violence, and to truth, but the play isn't there yet.

Weekly Margin 2025, W7: Grangeville, Maiden Mother Crone

2/11/25: Grangeville

What: Signature presents Samuel D. Hunter's new two-hander about half-brothers, estranged both emotionally and physically, seeing if they can reconnect across all the hurt as they discuss their mother's end of life care.

And? It doesn't touch A Case for the Existence of God for me, which I adored, but it's still well-done and very well performed, especially by Paul Sparks in the showier role.

2/13/25: Maiden Mother Crone

What: The Pete at The Flea hosts two solo plays, Sugarcoated by Jen Ponton and The Longer My Mother Is Dead The More I Like Her by Deborah Unger.

And? full review here.

Margin Notes: Maiden Mother Crone

Maiden Mother Crone: a duet of solo plays

Seen on: Thursday, 2/13/25.

Plot and Background

The Pete at The Flea hosts two solo plays, Sugarcoated by Jen Ponton and The Longer My Mother Is Dead The More I Like Her by Deborah Unger. Both pieces are memoir pieces: Sugarcoated, tracking Ponton's journey toward sexual actualization while navigating a fatphobic and heteronormative world; The Longer My Mother navigating Unger's complicated relationship with her recalcitrant mother.

What I Knew Beforehand

A pair of solo plays confronting feminine archetypes.

Thoughts:

There's an unspoken contract between audience and performer/author when it comes to autobiographical solo shows: there will be trauma, and it will be processed. In Ponton's case, it's a series of men--starting with her own father--who refuse to see her worth and whose cruelty trigger a series of dissociations from her own body. With Unger, it comes in the form of a mother's refusal to communicate with or understand her child.

What's surprising in both cases, then, is the joy both performers are able to find within these harsh narratives. Ponton, who starts the show with the unfiltered joy of her seven-year-old self awash on her face, sitting in front of a beautifully frosted pink birthday cake, keeps seeking joy in every age and stage of her journey. Yes, that means her gleaming eyes and cheeks often crumple under new heartbreaks, but somehow we know that her spirit won't be permanently squashed, even if the journey to liberation takes longer than she would like.

Weekly Margin 2025, W6: Liberation, Still, Urinetown

2/04/25: Liberation

What: Roundabout presents Bess Wohl's new play, a twist on a memory play, revisiting the time in the 1970s when her mother was part of the women's liberation movement.

And? It's quite a thing, to write a memory play about a time you don't remember. But that becomes part of the play, as Bess, played with marvelous depth by Susannah Flood, becomes her mother through the memories she's had to reconstruct through interviewing the surviving members of the group. Her purpose: unpack what they did back then, to help her answer the question of why here in 2025 we are still fighting the exact same fight (a throwaway line about "we got Roe v. Wade" lands especially bitterly in today's environment). But even as she pursues this question, it becomes clear it's still the wrong question--it's not why they "failed," but why this world is still so resistant to universal freedoms across not just gender but race and ethnicity, sexuality, and other barriers from being the "default" position of a wealthy straight white able-bodied man in the United States. The play itself is unable to answer that question, but perhaps the intended message is not that these women were all archetypes, but that they were all people, complicated and flawed, and that they did fight, and advocate. And it's what we can do, too.

2/05/25: Still

What: Lila Romeo's two-hander about a successful writer and a successful lawyer reuniting after many years and a terrible breakup, only to realize the barriers between them have only grown.

And? Meh. Nothing in here was interesting to me.

Mark Moses and Melissa Gilbert as Mark and Helen. Photo by Maria Baranova.

2/06/25: Urinetown

What: NY City Center Encores! series presents Hollmann and Kotis's satirical musical about a town where it's "a privilege to pee."

And? Urinetown's always a fun night out at the theater for me. The cast here is pretty strong. Especially of note: Christopher Fitzgerald, stealing moments as Officer Barrel with his off-the-wall delivery, Rainn Wilson's surprisingly good turn as Caldwell B. Cladwell (his bio says he's never sung in front of people before), and the fantastic Tiffany Mann, stepping in to cover Penelope Pennywise the night we saw.

Kevin Cahoon, Stephanie Styles, Keala Settle, Myra Lucretia Taylor,
Pearl Scarlett Gold, and Graham Rowat as Hot Blades Harry, Hope Cladwell,
Penelope Pennywise, Josephine Strong, Little Sally, and Five-Times Johnny.
Photo by Joan Marcus.

Weekly Margin 2025, W4: The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy [redux], Blind Runner

1/21/25: The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy [redux]

What: NYTW in association with Lucille Lortel Theatre, hosts a revival production of A Sinking Ship and Theater in Quarantine's The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy, originally presented live online in 2020. Based on a short story by Stanislaw Lem, it follows Egon Tichy, alone on a spacecraft, perpetually throwing himself into a vortex to time travel to an earlier version of himself, in order to perform a mechanical fix that requires two people. Chaos ensues as it seems arrogant curmudgeon Egon Tichy can't even get along with himself.

And? This was a goddamn delight. Although I saw a lot of TiQ's work in 2020, I somehow missed this one, and it's a real treat to see him do it in real time, and see how he achieves the various special effects, all within the small white box that is TiQ's performance space. As I texted a friend on my way home after the show, "Josh Gelb is an evil genius." Her reply? "He always has been." First show of the year to earn a guaranteed spot on my end of year Best Of theater list.

Joshua William Gelb as Egon Tichy. Photo source.

1/23/25: Blind Runner

What: St. Ann's Warehouse presents Mehr Theatre Group's production of Amir Reza Koohestani's play about an Iranian distance runner whose wife, a political prisoner, convinces him to help a bilnd woman run a marathon, and from there, make their own political protest.

And? The design and vision of the piece is really marvelous: the two performers intimately mic'd, their running tracks filmed and livestreamed behind them in overlapping, trancelike rhythms. I don't know that I ultimately took away much more than that from the piece, but it's a well-executed and hypnotic hour of theater.

Ainaz Azarhoush and Mohammad Reza Hosseinzadeh. Photo by Benjamin Krieg.

Weekly Margin 2025, W3: The Antiquities, Show/Boat: A River

1/14/25: The Antiquities

What: Playwrights Horizons, in conjunction with the Vineyard Theatre and the Goodman Theatre, presents Jordan Harrison's play, a speculative view of the future of the world, where artificial intelligence has taken over and now keeps a museum to remember their dinosaur ancestors: humans.

And? There's a care and a precision here that I really appreciate. It comes through in the unity of the ensemble of performers, as directed by David Cromer and Caitlin Sullivan. It's in the tenderly curated language of playwright Jordan Harrison. It's in the small details of design by Paul Steinberg and Brenda Abbandandolo. We are placed in the moment of an unknown (to us) future, looking back at ancient times ranging from the 19th century to two years ago to two hundred years from now, when the very last humans are deciding whether or not to continue reproducing. The look-back moments are all linked through themes of life and death, the notion of monsters, the advancement of technology, and most importantly the question of creation: creating life, the responsibility that entails, and the danger of our creations to our own survival. 

It makes sense, then, that we start with Mary Shelley, who, in the grief of losing her infant, concocts the tale of Doctor Frankenstein and his monster. We journey from there to the Industrial Age factory workers, to the world wide web, to robot technology, to social media, to a sentient AI, to increased human-tech modifications, to a rebel sect of humans fighting the dominant tech, to the last remaining colony of non-synthetics. And then like a boomerang, we return again to see the other side of what we lost, of what we have continued to reach for, what Mary Shelley and Doctor Frankenstein were reaching for: not just creating life, but creating immortality or at least a sentient afterlife, so that we would never have to grieve another loss, so that we ourselves will never disappear.

Of course, this isn't achievable. Not really. Every legacy gets a little lost in translation. In the world of this play, it's all a foolish ambition, and humanity built its own destruction and then marched on willingly.

I like the exploration, and I really like the themes connecting each time and place we visit, but I did also feel that the play itself is perhaps a little too neatly tied up and pat. I miss the messiness we got with Dave Malloy's Octet, which seemed a warning and a condemnation of living our lives online, but did find the grace of what we do get from the interconnectedness of our smartphones. This play feels more like a Greek tragedy, but then that's probably the point.

Kristen Sieh and Julius Rinzel. Photo by Emilio Madrid.

1/15/25: Show/Boat: A River

What: NYU Skirball and Target Margin Theater present a reconfiguration of the Hammerstein/Kern musical Show Boat.

And? Target Margin Theater's production is not so much a deconstruction as a defamiliarization. The most racially charged moments in the show are often dilated into a dialog cycle, sometimes monotone, before breaking back into more melodic speech patterns. Further defamiliarizations come in a small ensemble cast primarily with performers of color who, regardless of their ethnicity, wear a sash that says WHITE whenever playing a role that is either white or white-passing. When the sash isn't worn, the presumption of whiteness leaves.

Some of this works in interesting ways, some of it doesn't. It reminded me, actually, that every time I've seen the show it's felt like half the story got cut and I'm just seeing highlights. Weird structure of the book of the show, I guess. I wouldn't necessarily recommend this production to someone unfamiliar with the show, but for returners like me it at least has something interesting to offer, plus a stellar cast with strong voices -- especially Alvin Crawford as Joe, Stephanie Weeks as Julie, Rebbekah Vega-Romero as Magnolia, and Philiipi Themio Stoddard as Ravenal. Though I'll admit I don't understand how the new title connects to the new vision of the show, aside from cluing us that it is a new vision.

A lyric that has always stood out to me took special resonance in this production, especially as the entire cast sang it, and not just Joe: "I'm tired of living and scared of dying." That's ... that's a lot of what's going on right now.

Alvin Crawford, Stephanie Weeks, Suzanne Darrell, Caitlin Nasema Cassidy,
and Rebbekah Vega-Romero. Photo by Greg Kessler.

Weekly Margin 2025, W1: Our Town

1/02/24: Our Town

What: Kenny Leon directs a Broadway revival of the Thornton Wilder classic.

And? Well, that was pretty bad. I don't believe the director--or anyone--did any work to coach the actors through their monologues, and unfortunately it shows. But even more troubling is this production's display of a fundamental lack of understanding of some pretty core themes of the play. A sense of place is vitally important--there's a reason the play opens with the Stage Manager describing in minute detail the layout of a town whose real structure we never see. The other way that sense of place needs to be constructed is in the company's use of mime: it needs to be precise, specific, and so real we can almost feel it ourselves. Again I wonder if anyone coached the cast on this. Instead these mimed items float in a nowhere-space, being laid down in one place and collected from another. 

Another major theme of this play is that we need to breathe and take in the moments we have, appreciate them, because they'll be gone in another moment. That's rather hard for the audience to take away from this production, whose Stage Manager throws away moments like packing peanuts, and rushes the cast from scene to scene like he's got a train to catch. While I was grateful for an early reprieve from a production I was not enjoying, this isn't the way to do Our Town. God, it made me miss the David Cromer production so much.

Oh and hey to return to specifics, or rather specific vs. universal. I think unfortunately this production didn't learn the lesson from David Leveaux's misguided Fiddler on the Roof, which aimed for universal by somehow making a story about a shtetl less Jewish. This production opens with overlapping prayers in various languages, starting with the Sh'ma, a Jewish prayer. I noticed also during the third act that one of the gravestones has a Jewish star on it; another I believe had the crescent moon, an Islamic symbol (I'm not as positive on this second one). And just, no. Grover's Corner isn't a magical utopia of religious diversity. It's a Christian town. It's such a Christian town that part of the Stage Manager's opening monologue lists all the churches. No temples, no mosques. Let Grover's Corner be Christian. Let this play be Christian. It's fine. I'm not asking for Jews to be in this story. We have a profoundly different relationship to death than Christians have.

I liked the lanterns.

The cast of Our Town. Photo by Daniel Rader.