What: MCC, Clubbed Thumb, and Page 73 present Ro Reddick's play about Meek, a young Black girl in her local Cold War Choir (apparently this is a real thing), who gets caught up, along with her aunt, in intrigues involving the Soviet Union and a cult.
And? So there's a lot going on. It's a strange but interesting show with engaging performances, especially Alana Raquel Bowers's straightforward and sweet Meek, and Grace McLean's sly and purring Choir slash cult member. I don't quite know what to take away from the show, but it was a fun ride along the way.
 |
| Alana Raquel Bowers, center, as Meek, with Suzzy Roche, Grace McLean, and Nina Ross as the Choir. Photo from the Summerworks production by Maria Baranova. |
2/26/26: Marcel on the Train
What: Ethan Slater co-writes (with director Marshall Pailet) and stars in bioplay about a young Marcel Marceau's role in the French Resistance during the German occupation of France during WW2, as he helped Jewish children escape Nazi capture.
And? It's really quite an extraordinary piece of history on its own, and one I hadn't heard. Scenic Designer Scott Davis evokes the train car in which Marcel escorts the four orphan children with a wooden platform and benches, and a curved metal scaffolding overhead to represent the train's roof. This is where we are for the whole show (with a few flashbacks and flashforwards): a place with no apparent escape but also no evident protection. The ceiling is an illusion, the walls invisible. Studio Luna's lighting design plays dramatically with light and shadow, creating a world where darkness is safer than the threat of light. Against this, director Marshall Pailet crafts a taut 100-minute production, with each raised voice a potential siren to bring on capture and execution, while also teetering over a future uncertain enough that--even knowing Marcel Marceau goes to become a world-renowned mime--survival does not feel guaranteed. And indeed, with the flashforwards we see that no one escapes this time unscathed or free from trauma. Are these flashforwards the truth, or only what the children hope for--what Marcel hopes for?
The four children we see Marcel ushering are fictionalized but each serves as an interesting foil to the twenty-year-old man (in addition to being fully realized characters on their own): Henri (the sweet and funny Alex Wyse), whose gift for blather and determination to survive inspires a self-doubting Marcel to keep moving forward with his mission; Adolphe (my favorite, Max Gordon Moore), a preteen with a strong sense of right and wrong, and a distaste for lying, who holds Marcel accountable for his responsibility to four vulnerable children; Etiennette (a mute but expressive Maddie Corman), terror-struck but drawn out of her shell by mirroring Marcel's playful impulses and clown work; and Berthe (the always wonderful Tedra Millan, here bringing a brittle brine to her performance), whose blend of pessimistic and realistic perspective force Marcel to extend himself beyond gentle play into action and decision. Aaron Serotsky, who plays Everyone Else, brings an especially terrifying energy to the Nazi search of the train car, delicately tip-toing along the line between a benevolent authority figure performing an unfortunate necessity, and a snake waiting patiently for his prey to stumble in biting range. As the titular Marcel, Slater beautifully embodies the charisma and showmanship, while also delving into the vulnerability of a young man only just out of his teens, risking not only his life but the lives of children unable to protect themselves.
 |
| Tedra Millan as Berthe and Max Gordon Moore as Adolphe. Photo by Emilio Madrid. |
What: The Public Theater presents Anna Ziegler's newest, about a 40-year-old expectant mother reflecting back on the play Antigone but with a reimagined transgression: one that involves not the body of a dead brother she's forbidden to bury, but autonomy of her own body against Creon's new puritanical controls over sexual mores and--yes--abortions, though the word itself is never used in the play (it's called a procedure).
And? Timely is the word for it. As access to abortion care becomes increasingly difficult in this country, so too must Antigone resort to less than reputable means to prevent what she can't but think of as a sullied birth, after the truth about her parents comes out. But really, even without that, it's clear she doesn't want to have a child, and that should be enough. I like the lens added, of this contemporary woman trying to parse out a play she never understood as a child or even a young woman, but that now, in the context of grappling with the death of a mother whose love she never felt as well as her own imminent motherhood, sees suddenly a way into Antigone. The reframe--changing it from control over a man's body to control over her own--is a large enough leap that some purists might take exception. But if the point is that Antigone defies Creon's unjust edicts and then refuses to apologize, the reframe stands. Alone, or nearly alone, Antigone holds to her truth, as Joan did in Shaw's play, as John Proctor did in Miller's. Even at the cost of her life, even as she wants desperately to live, Antigone will not tell the lie that would undo who she is. And then ultimately it becomes a story of healing: we cannot save Antigone, nor indeed anyone else in her story, but our narrator, she can have the catharsis she needs to move forward and break her own trauma cycle. I saw the second preview, and we were told at the top that they're still actively working on revising in response to audience interaction, so I don't know how close the performance I saw will be to the frozen iteration that will open in March. But what I saw was good work, with an especially strong performance from Susannah Perkins as Antigone: a straightforward, unapologetic young woman with eyes that have seen too much and refuse to close as things get worse.
2/28/26: Hate Radio
What: St. Ann's Warehouse hosts the US premiere of Milo Rau's exploration of how the radio station RTLM paved the way for the genocide of Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda in 1994.
And? Another disturbingly timely piece, about the dangers of the almost pedestrian and offhand propaganda, which states lies as self-evident facts. I was brought up thinking of propaganda as inflammatory yellow journalism and mouth-foaming screams of hatred to an equally rabid crowd. But these days, it's more like this. Someone talking into a microphone or publishing an article with no evidence and no gainsay. The play begins with projections of (composite, not verbatim) survivor testimonies from the genocide, as well as a brief interrogation of one of RTLM's hosts. These are powerful and disturbing. When the show then transitions into the broadcast (played in one continuous real-time moment, no scene breaks), there's a settling into the banality of it all, alternating casual diatribes with audience requested songs, call-ins, and a history quiz. The three hosts, their DJ, and their security guard are contained within a glass box, audience on both sides, their microphoned audio playing directly into the audience's headphones. We are trapped in the poison of their words as surely as they seem trapped in their terrarium. Dramatically, it becomes a little stagnant (and those headphones are honestly very painful), but the subject itself is still interesting, and its implications sobering. We've been here before. We're here again now.
2/28/26: Bug
What: MTC presents a revival of Tracy Lett's study of trauma, paranoia, and conspiracy in a run-down motel room in Oklahoma.
And? I've reached the depressing age of dropping my powered-off phone into a yondr pouch for a revival of a show whose original run I saw before cell phones even had cameras. Still, my creaking knees aside, it was good to see this show again, its slow build from casual hedonism to intimacy to an ever-tightening noose where neither characters nor audience are sure if we're watching a true government conspiracy or the escalation of a self-destruction episode of delusion and hallucination. I mean, it becomes clear eventually, but the journey draws our hand through the crook of its elbow to see how easy it can be to get sucked in. Peter's conviction that he's been experimented on by the government is lent added weight by the casting of the excellent Namir Smallwood, as we know the history of the government doing just that to Black men. Carrie Coon's performance of Agnes is fantastically vulnerable and sharp, culminating in her final monologue of mounting horror and grief. And special shoutout to not only scenic designer Takeshi Kata, but also the efficient stage crew for several fantastic transformations of the space to reflect the crowded self-imposed isolation of two people who feel no safety left in the outside world.
 |
| Carrie Coon as Agnes and Namir Smallwood as Peter. Photo by Matthew Murphy. |
3/01/26: The Other Place
What: Two Antigone-inspired shows in one week! This one is at The Shed, by auteur Alexander Zeldin. Though it keeps some of the family structure of Antigone (two daughters grieving a dead father, and under the care of their uncle--now living in his dead brother's house, against whose precepts for living in said house Annie cannot stop herself from fighting.
And? Really powerful stagecraft. The house as designed by Rosanna Vize is mid-renovation, with a newly-removed wall opening two rooms into a space with nowhere to hide, and the windowed doors to the back yard taking up the entire back wall: windows which more often than not serve as undesired mirrors to the dysfunctional family. Josh Anio Grigg's sound design brings forth all the little noises that normally don't make it past the proscenium but which are pivotal to breaking into the psyche of the characters: the bite of an apple, the rustle of a bag, the perpetual chime of a text message. The story itself, though in family structure inspired by Antigone, owes more of a debt to its prequel Oedipus: a world where the truth coming to light leads to destruction, not rescue. A world where the search for closure causes more gashed-open wounds. And yes, some incest. It's a grim story, but then all Greek tragedies are.
All in all, a pretty heavy weekend of theater.
 |
| Ruby Stokes as Issy and Emma D'Arcy as Annie. Photo by Maria Baranova. |
Streaming Theater
- The blizzard livestream of Operation Mincemeat.
No comments:
Post a Comment