The Play That Keeps Playing

Review of Theatre People, Westport Country Playhouse

What is the chief characteristic of “theatre people”? Paul Slade Smith’s play of that name, playing at Westport Country Playhouse through April 12, suggests that “theatre people” may often feel they’re in a play, so that life tends to be a matter of plots and subplots and complications that may lead to a happy ending (comedy) or an unhappy ending (tragedy). Cleverly playing on an awareness of life’s theatricality and of comic theater’s familiar tropes, Smith’s play, ably directed by Mark Shanahan, enacts the kind of fast-paced comedy that Westport Country Playhouse has a tradition of bringing off extremely well.

Margot (Mia PInero), Victor (Michael McCorry Rose), Olga (Erin Noel Grennan), Oliver (Rodolfo Soto), Arthur (Michael McCormick), Charlotte (Isabel Keating) in Theatre People, Westport Country Playhouse; photo by T. Charles Erickson

Visiting at a Rhode Island mansion to hear Broadway star Margot Bell (Mia Pinero) perform, Charlotte Sanders (Isabel Keating) and Arthur Sanders (Michael McCormick) are playwrights who hope to facilitate Margot’s participation in the play they plan to make of a new novel, The Angel in the Next Room (which, unbeknownst to Margot, has been written in dedication to her by Oliver Adams (Rodolfo Soto), a young writer in love with her). To help what the Sanderses assume to be a definite couple work together, Charlotte has arranged for Oliver to stay in a bedroom adjacent to Margot’s. Complications arise when Margot is overheard being not so angelic in the next room, much to Oliver’s dismay.

Oliver (Rodolfo Soto), Arthur (Michael McCormick), Charlotte (Isabel Keating) in Theatre People, Westport Country Playhouse; photo by T. Charles Erickson

The Sanders must rectify the situation, which means: dealing with Oliver’s despair (given several comical layers by Rodolfo Soto); enlightening Margot of the enormity of the situation (the Sanders desperately need a hit play), which causes Mia Pinero to move swiftly from grande dame to flustered ingenue; roping Oliver’s rival, the handsome, dashing and dim actor Victor Pratt (Michael McCorry Rose), into their plans—which means he may have to flap his arms like a showboating angel at some length; and enlisting all manner of help from Olga (Erin Noel Grennan), a scene-stealing and theater-deprecating housemaid who stands in at times for a playwright, a director, and an audience. The cast are all equal to their characters’ supposed real selves as well as the play-within-the-play characters they have to convince one another they understand (which is not easy!).

Charlotte Sanders (Isabel Keating), Margot Bell (Mia Pinero), Victor Pratt (Michael McCorry Rose) in Theatre People, Westport Country Playhouse; photo by T. Charles Erickson

Adapted from Ferenc Molnár’s Play at the Castle (1924), which was popularized in English by P. G. Wodehouse as The Play’s the Thing (1926), Theatre People is set in the 1940s, the chief era for Hollywood screwball comedies, with the Sanderses sometimes flinging off sallies worthy of Nick and Nora—Isabel Keating, who plays Charlotte with a fizzy, can-do assertiveness, even resembles Myrna Loy a little, especially when some of the fizz falls flat and she has to consider that intricate plots may be easier to pull off on stage than in life. As her often bemused, confused partner who lives his life rising to her bait, Michael McCormick shows off great timing, a skeptical foil who knows how to make the most of any opening given.

Charlotte Sanders (Isabel Keating), Arthur Sanders (Michael McCormick) in Theatre People, Westport Country Playhouse; photo by T. Charles Erickson

The romantic triangle that has to center the shenanigans is never as diverting as the fiction Charlotte devises so as to tie-up everyone’s loose ends, and Margot and Victor spend the whole first act on the other side of that well-appointed wall, while Oliver is the kind of unrealistically romantic naif whom one can’t imagine writing a novel much less a good one. Such devices make “theater people” seem rather silly, but the protracted “rehearsal” that, in Act 2, makes ridiculous theater of Victor’s wooing of Margot—and creates a preposterous plot that lets Arthur literally play God—is the pay-off, and even manages to make Olga a believer in the value of theater. The value certainly includes the ability to make everything—set (James J. Fenton), costumes (Annie J. Le), lighting (Alyssandra Docherty), sound (Jill BC Du Boff), props (Anya Kutner) and hair/makeup (J. Jared Janas) as top-notch and flawless as possible as they are here.

Olga (Erin Noel Grennan), Charlotte Sanders (Isabel Keating) in Theatre People, Westport Country Playhouse; photo by T. Charles Erickson

There’s a point fairly early in the play when Charlotte tries to explain theater’s attractions to a doubting Olga, whose common sense grasp of human foibles doesn’t see why anyone would want to waste time re-enacting such things. Charlotte describes how the audience at a play are able to forget the world and all its troubles while getting caught up in the lives being staged before them by living people. The words, we can imagine, are meant to have a resonance for our particular times, but can—we realize—be assigned to any time in human history. The power of theater to create a facsimile of life that can fascinate us, whether believable or unbelievable, laughable or lachrymose, keeps us returning to our seats. As the final entry in the venerable Westport Country Playhouse’s “Season of Laughter,” Theatre People capably reminds us that people who live only on stage need an audience to come alive. They need us, in other words, theater’s people.

Theatre People
By Paul Slade Smith
Adapted from Ferenc Molnár’s Play at the Castle
Directed by Mark Shanahan

Set Designer: James J. Fenton; Costume Designer: Annie J. Le; Lighting Designer: Alyssandra Docherty; Sound Designer: Jill BC Du Boff; Prop Supervisor: Anya Kutner; Wig, Hair, & Makeup Designer: J. Jared Janas; Production Stage Manager: Rebecca C. Monroe; Assistant Stage Manager: Christine Lemme; Production Assistant: Zach De Brino; Assistant Director: Anissa Felix

Cast: Erin Noel Grennan, Isabel Keating, Michael McCormick, Mia Pinero, Michael McCorry Rose, Rodolfo Soto

Westport Country Playhouse
March 25-April 12, 2025

The Art of Belonging

Review of Laughs in Spanish, Hartford Stage

Alexis Scheer’s Laughs in Spanish, playing at Hartford Stage through March 30, grabs us from the start: a blank wall where expensive artworks should be hanging and a loud, sustained scream of “fuuuuuck!” from art dealer Mariana (Stephanie Machado). ‘Tis the season of the famed Art Basel Miami Beach, and Mariana must needs sell art. The missing paintings, though, come to seem mostly a minor plot point, a way to start the action with a bit of bait-and-switch. Directed by Lisa Portes, the play begins with comic, on-the-job high anxiety, but gradually becomes a play about relationships, and family, and community values.

I might have preferred to watch Mariana deal with the art world.

Mariana (Stephanie Machado), Estella (Maggie Bofill) in Laughs in Spanish at Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

But that’s just me: the accent here is on the accents, we might say. The play treats—with ready humor and a bubbly cast of characters—the shifting roles people play in their lives—work, family, romance—and, more particularly, the tonal shifts that come from being manifestly Latine, in some situations, and more knowingly Angloese in others. The fun of watching the play comes in seeing how the role and tone shifts are instinctive, instructive, and played for effect in a variety of social situations by this able cast.

Start with our screaming art dealer (Machado a little later does a rattled scream that easily eclipses her opening bellow): Mariana, we see, is a savvy, self-sustaining success, but success can easily totter into failure; besides the upcoming reception for art now gone, she has to deal with her assistant Carolina (María Victoria Martínez) who is a Latine artist looking for a break—and who cooly suggests her works should be hung in lieu of the purloined pieces; then there’s Mariana’s mom, Estella (Maggie Bofill), who is a celebrity because of a role she plays in a telenovela, and who is back in her old Wynwood stomping grounds for reasons of her own (but which are relevant to Mariana). Coincidentally, Jenny, Estella’s assistant, an Anglo, is a former school-chum of Mariana’s at the boarding school that absentee mom Estella sent her young daughter to. Does that backstory spell friction or romance? Meanwhile, there’s also very agreeable Juan (Luis Vega), the kind of security guard who thinks it’s no sweat when highly valuable art disappears on his watch, and who is more than cozy with Carolina.

In other words, there are past, present, and future situations aplenty. In all the busyness of the various cross-purposes, the play loses some of the charm that got us interested in the first place. The two strong characters here are Mariana and Estella, both given fascinatingly varied readings by Stephanie Machado and Maggie Bofill, respectively. The mother-daughter dynamic is the most fully fleshed-out, and watching these two work through their pasts and presents is rewarding viewing. Bofill’s Estella is the more demanding and commanding, even when she tries to be humble, and her range of ways to work a room never runs dry. Late in the play she delivers a speech/monologue that left me a little uncertain of its relevance but never in doubt that it was fun to listen to and watch.

Estella (Maggie Bofill); Mariana (Stephanie Machado), foreground, in Laughs in Spanish at Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

Machado’s Mariana can be breezy, ballsy, bitter, blithe—and believably girlish. She’s comes across as the kind of character that—if maybe not telenovela material—can be easily imagined as a sit-com heroine, cut from the Mary Tyler Moore Show mold (if that’s not too ancient a reference). This week, we see her deal with missing art, a school crush, and the fall-out from mom’s misdemeanors. Next week?

Jenny (Olivia Hebert), Mariana (Stephanie Machado) in Laughs in Spanish at Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

The supporting cast all get to have spotlight moments too: the scene of Carolina and Juan in his car with siren and lights going works as contemporary comedy-romance; Jenny’s scene with Mariana lingers maybe a bit too long in the indirection of romantic buildup but is still sweet; and anyone’s scene with Estella upgrades the play’s humor. She’s a walking, talking comic melodrama.

Estella (Maggie Bofill) in Laughs in Spanish at Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

Brian Sidney Bembridge’s scenic design is a bright open space that also shows off Hartford Stage’s spinning stage, so that we get a welcome scene change—twice—in the midst of the action. The street-art on a wall has the requisite Miami feel, I assume, and the forest of trees is foreboding and funky at once. Harry Nadal’s costumes are colorfully varied, and there are lively dance/movement routines to the original music by Daniela Hart/UptownWorks. Throughout, Lisa Portes shows a sharp sense of how to have her cast play to an appreciative audience. Most laughs land and some even simmer.

Carolina (Maria Victoria Martínez), Juan (Luis Vega) in Laughs in Spanish at Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

Laughs in Spanish shows us a vividly turning wheel that presents each character functioning in more than one environment and in more than one capacity. The point of it all, ultimately, turns on which self each character is most comfortable as; or we might say, which identity is the most authentic. The strength of Scheer’s play is that it shows we are each authentically, truthfully, actually more than one thing. The best we can do is make our various selves align with those we care about most.

Mariana (Stephanie Machado), Estella (Maggie Bofill) in Laughs in Spanish at Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

Laughs in Spanish
By Alexis Scheer
Directed by Lisa Portes

Scenic Design: Brian Sidney Bembridge; Costume Design: Harry Nadal; Lighting Design: Sherrice Mojgani; Original Music & Sound Design: Daniela Hart/UptownWorks; Dialect & Voice Coach: Cynthia Santos DeCure; Production Stage Manager: Theresa Stark; Assistant Stage Manager: Christina M. Woolard; Associate Artistic Director: Zoë Golub-Sass; Director of Production: Bryan T. Holcombe; General Manager: Emily Van Scoy

Cast: Maggie Bofill, Olivia Hebert, Stephanie Machado, Maria Victoria Martínez, Luis Vega

Hartford Stage
March 6-30, 2025

Don't Blame the Mirror

Review of The Inspector, Yale Repertory Theatre

“Dying,” the apocryphal theater saying goes, “is easy; comedy is difficult.” Farce, we might say, is even trickier. Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector dates from 1836 and is one of the classic farces of the era, a play that skewers the pretentions of provincials and metropolitans, of liberals and conservatives alike. If it’s a given that the officials in an out-of-the-way Russian village will be hopelessly corrupt, naïve and inefficient, it’s also a given that any remedy from higher up will be just as ineffectual. In Gogol’s world, humanity is ultimately at its own mercy; witless, indulgent, perverse, false, sentimental, occasionally inspired, the best and worst of our collective species wars in each individual brain and breast.

Yura Kordonsky’s adaption, which he also directs, is now playing at Yale Repertory Theatre through March 29 and aims to be as broadly comic as possible. It’s a production not without its dark side, but the manifest effect is gleeful celebration of theater as contrived spectacle.

Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector, Yale Repertory Theatre, left to right: Whitney Andrews, Darius Sakui, Brandon E. Burton (kneeling), Annelise Lawson, Edoardo Benzoni, John Evans Reese, Malik James, Grayson Richmond; photo by Joan Marcus

The distraught Mayor (Brandon E. Burton) of a nameless village has received word that an inspector, traveling incognito, will be coming to town to spy upon the local officials, who, we see, are a dissolute pack of incorrigibles: The Director of Public Health (Whitney Andrews) runs a hospital where patients die or get well because “they would have anyway”; The Judge (Darius Sakui) proudly takes bribes as suitable to the dignity of his office; The School Superintendent (John Evans Reese) is far too timid to impose any order on his teachers and resents them for acting better educated; The Postmaster (Annelise Lawson) opens and reads all mail in hopes of finding romantic billets-doux; and The Doctor (Grayson Richmond) is German, speaks no Russian, and is therefore made an authority. Then there are the townsfolk in the form of two nearly Beckettian clowns called Bobchinsky (Edoardo Benzoni) and Dobchinsky (Malik James) who vie for the thrill of spreading gossip. Finally, the Mayor’s family: Anna (Elizabeth Stahlmann), a wife and mother who resents being left out of events and sees the maturation of her daughter, Marya (Chinna Palmer), as an affront and a revolt, whereas Marya while naïve is no longer a child.

Marya, the Mayor’s daughter (Chinna Palmer), Anna, the Mayor’s wife (Elizabeth Stahlmann) in Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector, Yale Repertory Theatre; photo by Joan Marcus

Word comes that a stranger with a servant is staying at a local inn and has let drop that he’s from St. Pete’s (aka, St. Petersburg). This unsuspecting visitor, Ivan Khlestakov (Samuel Douglas), with his man Osip (Nomè SiDone), is trapped in town because his gambling losses have left him without funds. The officials’ efforts to bribe him relentlessly and favor him with all manner of obsequious attentions suits him wonderfully, leading to romantic entanglements and other potentially consequential exposures.

Ivan Khlestakov (Samuel Douglas), Osip (Nomè SiDone) in Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector, Yale Repertory Theatre; photo by Joan Marcus

The cast—all graduates from or current students in the MFA acting program at the David Geffen School of Drama—attack the material with what might be called collective mania. At the heart of the show is Samuel Douglas’ Ivan, played as a whining, preening man-child wildly fluctuating between astonishing self-importance and trembling insecurity. His initial surprise at his fawning reception, signaled by a high-pitched laugh reminiscent of Tom Hulce’s Mozart in the film Amadeus (1984), eventually gives way to a smug superiority as he deigns to humor each official’s shameless courtship.

Marya, the Mayor’s daughter (Chinna Palmer), Ivan Khlestakov (Samuel Douglas) in Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector, Yale Repertory Theatre; photo by Joan Marcus

The scene where Ivan attempts to secure a mischievously animate boot demonstrates the incredible vigor of Douglas’ physical comedy. His Ivan is a whirlwind of energetic bursts and outrageous attempts to curry favor. He boasts of being friends with Pushkin (as was Gogol) and aims to let his playwright friend Nikolai know of his adventures so they can be put into a play. While one might wish for a somewhat more temperate manner in Ivan’s bewilderment during the long leadup to Intermission, the play’s second Act finds our hero a bit more knowing if not outright Machiavellian. His turn-on-a-dime seductions of both Anna and Marya make hay of the usual love-interests of romantic plays, and are enacted with great relish.

Anna, the Mayor’s wife (Elizabeth Stahlmann), Marya, the Mayor’s daughter (Chinna Palmer), Ivan Khlestakov (Samuel Douglas), The Mayor (Brandon E. Burton) in Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector, Yale Repertory Theatre; photo by Joan Marcus

Other standouts are: the comic timing of the entire cast, particularly during the reading of a revelatory letter late in the play; Elizabeth Stahlmann’s grandly unhappy Anna who imperiously questions random audience members from a window, fidgets erotically before Ivan, and treats her daughter as an evil double; Annelise Lawson’s neurotic Postmaster whose literal scream for attention is one to remember and whose dimness is her greatest charm; the bluster and fawning of Brandon E. Burton’s Mayor, a figure who, through all the mannerisms of caricature, manages to be a character and the author’s deliberate spokesman at one key point; Malik James’ Dobchinsky who is so flustered by his moment in the limelight when interrogated by Anna that he spends it crawling over surprised audience members; and Edoardo Benzoni’s Bobchinsky, a peasant soul grappling for a modern sense of self, whose great claim is that he “lives here!”

Piotr Ivanovich Dobchinsky (Malik James), Piotr Ivanovich Bobchinsky (Edoardo Benzoni) in Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector, Yale Repertory Theatre; photo by Joan Marcus

Also for special mention: Silin Chen’s majestically dilapidated set, with exposed brickwork, a windowed room that makes for intrigue, with a sash that serves for a balcony à la Romeo and Juliet, and a stage full of eternal snow that sticks to every costume and at different points becomes medicinal or celebratory; KT Farmer’s range of costumes from the believable to the fantastic (check out those vermin), with any article apt to become a prop when suitable; Masha Tsimring’s lighting plays with situations as though a visual “score”; Minjae Kim’s sound design gives the musical score its due and includes atmospheric sound effects; Arseniy Gusev’s musical compositions shine in the gripping dream sequence before intermission, and there’s even a Pushkin poem set to music and sung with artful artlessness by Chinna Palmer as Marya.

The cast of Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector, Yale Repertory Theatre; Marya (Chinna Palmer), center; photo by Joan Marcus

The sting of Gogol’s satire might seem a bit dulled by the relentless zaniness of Kordonsky’s approach, but the exuberance of the comic hijinks becomes its own rationale. If we’re never remotely in anything like a real place with real people, then we might realize that what we’re seeing is not so much Theater of the Absurd as absurd theater. While the first asks us to question everything that could give coherence to theater as a telling representation of real life, the second lets us know that such theatrical questioning is no answer.

The dark side surfaces in those eerie vermin who seem both humanoid and alien and eager to take over; in the faceless collective that threatens Ivan as his shadowy double (as the actual inspector might be), but can also stand for bureaucratic anonymity (or DOGE dodginess?); and in that final image of the swinging chandelier—ask not for whom the candles dim.

We might shape the play’s relation to the us of the US 2025 thus: if those in power are thorough idiots not to be trusted, what of the idiots who let such idiots run things?

The cast of Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector, Yale Repertory Theatre; photo by Joan Marcus

Nikolai Gogol’s
The Inspector
Newly adapted and directed by Yura Kordonsky

Scenic Designer: Silin Chen; Costume Designer: KT Farmer; Lighting Designer: Masha Tsimring; Sound Designer: Minjae Kim; Composer: Arseniy Gusev; Hair Designer: Matthew Armentrout; Production Dramaturgs: Sophia Carey, Georgia Petersen; Technical Director: Cian Jaspar Freeman; Fight and Intimacy Directors: Kelsey Rainwater, Michael Rossmy; Vocal Coach: Walton Wilson; Casting Director: Calleri Jensen Davis; Stage Manager: Adam Taylor Foster

Cast: Whitney Andrews, Edoardo Benzoni, Brandon E. Burton, Samuel Douglas, Malik James, Annelise Lawson, Chinna Palmer, John Evans Reese, Grayson Richmond, Darius Sakui, Nomè SiDone, Elizabeth Stahlmann

Yale Repertory Theatre
March 7-29, 2025

Living Hell

Review of The Christians, New Haven Theater Company

“I have a powerful urge to communicate, but I find the distance between us insurmountable.” That may be the most resonant line in Lucas Hnath’s The Christians, playing for one more weekend at New Haven Theater Company, March 6-8. The words suggest the huge gaps that have arisen between “different sides” in our republic—right, left; Republican, Democrat; conservative, liberal—and, as in the play, between different beliefs within, nominally, the same religion.

The play is a serious, non-satiric, non-sentimental treatment of crisis in a religious community, and, directed by Deena Nicol-Blifford, is given another satisfyingly professional production in New Haven Theater Company’s long career. Well-cast, well-paced, with a telling grasp of how well this play works in front of a small audience, NHTC’s The Christians might convert you to the joys of small, local theater. As in the storefront where Pastor Paul’s church began, everyone present is fully visible.

The audience is the congregation, to a certain extent. We aren’t given cues, but we do watch as these somewhat theatrical church people go through their contortions. They generally speak into microphones as if their every thought must be broadcast (or in fact is, as the man upstairs is always listening). There’s a stultifying lack of humor in these characters, and a tendency to speak as if their beliefs determine the fate of humanity.

Such attitudes might be played with a sharp irony, but Hnath’s play takes these folks at their word, giving us glimpses of what it’s like to walk with Jesus every step of one’s life. Nicol-Blifford’s very capable cast convince us of the stakes here, even if we might think that whether Pastor Paul (Marty Tucker) or Associate Pastor Joshua (Gavin Whelan) believe in Hell or not doesn’t actually affect its existence or non-existence. To be fair, for the pastors the question isn’t simply whether they believe in Hell or not, but whether or not they should be trying to convince others to believe in it or not.

The play begins, riskily, with a sermon. As Pastor Paul, Marty Tucker is so spot-on believable it’s a bit uncanny. He exudes the measured cadence of a man who makes his living by public speaking, with the lofty tone of a man thoroughly wrapped-up in his own ethos. His story about wooing his wife Elizabeth (Susan Kulp) when she was a stranger on a plane, sending her a note with the quotation above, is made to stand for his ability to surmount the “insurmountable.”

Pastor Paul may be forgiven for being fascinated by the fact that others find him fascinating: his congregation has grown from less than fifty to the tens of thousands. (We’re meant to be seeing the leader of a megachurch, and I’m sure big theater productions with bigger budgets might try to recreate all the razzamatazz of church-going as arena spectacle, but the much smaller scale here means we can appreciate all the more the subtlety of the script.) Pastor Paul opens his sermon telling us that the church has overcome the cost incurred by building its grand meeting hall, and now is free of debt.

The relief of being financially solvent perhaps inspires Pastor Paul to attempt a radical change in the church’s dogma, which in effect says that a person’s soul could be in heaven, even if that person, in life, had never professed belief in Jesus Christ. The blowback on this alternative, and ostensibly progressive, creed is immediate. Associate Pastor Joshua, played with suitably dogged intensity by Gavin Whelan, takes exception, trying to quote the Bible to his purpose, but is nimbly rebuffed by Pastor Paul; Jenny (Margaret Mann), a seemingly meek and appreciative congregant, steps up to the mic with a testimonial that questions Pastor Paul’s good faith in changing course only after his congregation had sacrificed and scrimped to pay for his grand hall; Elder Jay (J. Kevin Smith), mostly supportive in private conversations with Paul, seemingly withdraws his backing when the church loses significantly more congregants than the initial fifty that had backed Joshua, now leading them as his followers.

Elizabeth (Susan Kulp), Paster Paul (Marty Tucker) in The Christians, New Haven Theater Company

In all this, The Christians stays within the bounds of religious practice and religious freedom. Few if any religions haven’t had schisms, heretics, and clashing doctrines even if not always spinning off into new faiths. We’re treated to a glimpse at how communities form and splinter, especially when it’s a matter of this charismatic leader or that. But Hnath’s play moves as well into more intimate realms. Late in the play we see Pastor Paul in conversation with his wife Elizabeth. The tension here comes from the pastor following only his own lead, keeping his wife uninformed of his intentions. What’s more, as Elizabeth presents her view, in Susan Kulp’s carefully modulated tones, we learn that she sides with Joshua on the question of Hell, and feels that her women’s Bible-study group might be a forum for her to express her dissatisfactions with her husband’s teachings.

In the end we see that, though the play concentrates on the problems that arise when a pastor veers from agreed-upon church doctrine into his own soul-searching agenda, The Christians isn’t only about religious belief or faith. Hnath’s text gestures toward the beliefs we profess but don’t really hold, the beliefs we change but conceal from others, the beliefs we use to denigrate those with other beliefs, and how hard it is to talk meaningfully about something that always, it seems, amounts to “a feeling.”

What’s bracing about the play is its sense that an inability to communicate is not insurmountable. Everyone in the play gets to state their views. The downside is that the firmer they are in their beliefs, the more the distance between their beliefs grows.

Insurmountable? As any good pastor might say, “let us pray.”

The Christians
By Lucas Hnath
Directed by Deena Nicol-Blifford

Co-Producers: Deena Nicol-Blifford and J. Kevin Smith; Stage Manager: Abby Klein; Set and Sound Design: Deena Nicol-Blifford; Lighting Design: Michael Abbatiello

Cast: Susan Kulp, Margaret Mann, J. Kevin Smith, Marty Tucker, Gavin Whelan

New Haven Theater Company
February 27 & 28; March 1, 6, 7, 8, 2025

Indelible Dialogue in a Diner

Review of Two Trains Running, Hartford Stage

A diner in a failing section of Pittsburgh in 1969. The Hill District was a Black neighborhood where a local community once self-sufficient and set apart has undergone a series of hard changes due to unemployment and the “redevelopment” which destroyed the neighborhood and the storied roots of many people, not least the playwright August Wilson. Wilson’s Two Trains Running, of all his plays set in his birthplace, is particularly aware of its moment. 1969 is a point at which, for some of his characters, what once was is still real while the notable changes for the worse have become irrevocable.

Wilson not only trusts his characters to have sufficient depth to touch on the themes that matter to him, he’s also able to let action become a background to how these characters talk out their reactions, their hopes, their fears, and their grudges. While there is a strong literary command here, one would be hard-pressed to turn any character into a symbol or a stand-in for a particular ideology. Wilson’s characters always speak their individual truths, eventually, and being present while that happens is a major incentive to attend his plays.

Two Trains Running is one of the most rewarding and deeply observed plays in the canon of works by this towering American playwright. Hartford Stage’s production, playing through February 16, is not to be missed.

Memphis (Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr.) in August Wilson’s Two Trains Running, Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

At the center of the story is Memphis (Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr.), a diner owner who originated in Alabama and plans to return to property there, someday. He’s still got the deed, he insists. Key to his current situation is whether to sell out, now that the neighborhood barely sustains his business and, if so, for how much. His pride in his past accomplishments and in his once central place in the local community sustains him as hard times come on. His diner is still a gathering place, but the regulars are not exactly boon costumers.

Foreground: Holloway (Jerome Preston Bates); background: Memphis (Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr.), Sterling (Rafael Jordan) in August Wilson’s Two Trains Running, Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

Chief among them is Holloway (Jerome Preston Bates), the main source of local history and the one best able to articulate the grievances of the area; Wolf (Postell Pringle) is younger, a hip numbers runner who flits in and out to drum up business and to take messages on Memphis’s pay phone, much to the proprietor’s annoyance; a newcomer is Sterling (Rafael Jordan), recently released from the penitentiary and desperate for work and for any kind of welcome to give him a sense of belonging. They are joined at random moments by: Hambone (David Jennings), a character afflicted by mental troubles who carries a long-standing grievance against a white employer for the unsettled payment of a ham for work done; and West (Jeorge Bennett Watson), the only well-to-do local Black businessman because, as an undertaker, he is never without work. Finally, there’s Holloway’s only worker, the harried and patient Risa (Taji Senior) whose presence strategically offsets the men’s club ambience at the diner. She bears self-inflicted scars on her legs that suggest a backstory the others aren’t quite willing to face.

The excellent cast renders these characters in all their verbal glory. The Hartford Stage playing space in Lawrence E. Moten III’s realistic design gives ample area for director Gilbert MacCauley’s subtle choreography of action that lets us follow interplay that happens both before our eyes and in our ability to follow a speaker’s manner and particular logic. The way these characters talk to each other is the marrow of this play, and it’s a memorable experience to hear Wilson’s dialogue given its full dimensions. Lighting (Xavier Pierce) and Costumes (Devario D. Simmons) provide visual cues that give extra weight to the personalities on display.

Memphis (Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr.), Wolf (Postell Pringle) in August Wilson’s Two Trains Running, Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

As Memphis, Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr., has the necessary presence, showing us a man both genial and anxious, able to muse aloud and to denounce the failings he sees in others, while demanding his due. Whether or not his grasp of reality is as unflinching as he thinks it is becomes a plot point when it comes to his evaluation of the diner. His crony, Halloway, a fixture at the diner, is a captivatingly mercurial figure in Jerome Preston Bates’ rendering; his intonations are like a jazz player, riffing on repetitions like Halloway’s recurring praise of Aunt Ester, a legendary figure of the neighborhood known for her wisdom and clairvoyant insight. Postell Pringle’s Wolf is pitch perfect in his facial reactions—like his ability to stare daggers—his vocal sallies, and his general demeanor: the way he looks through the glass door, up and down, before he puts a foot out tells us a lot about the kind of hustle he’s on.

Sterling (Rafael Jordan) in August Wilson’s Two Trains Running, Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

As the two younger characters who might form a couple, Sterling and Risa seem perhaps the more formulaic aspects of the play, and yet Wilson has a way of making them both very individual and surprising. As Sterling, Rafael Jordan is earnest and dogged, getting on others’ nerves at times, and yet trying to find some way to please; he’s also a loose cannon because the others don’t know exactly what all he might get up to doing. His preening insistence that Risa will marry him once his number comes in provides the play with some romantic comedy elements, and the interplay between Risa and Sterling finds touching use of Gregory Robinson’s original music. Taji Senior gives Risa a mixture of skepticism and sympathy toward the others that makes her at times a stand-in for the audience, trying to assess which of these very voluble men, all assertive and bossy with at least a pretense of charm, is most worth our trouble.

Risa (Taji Senior) in August Wilson’s Two Trains Running, Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

The main figure of sympathy is Hambone, who seems to live on handouts and disability payments while reciting his credo: “He gonna give me my ham.” David Jennings quite simply owns this role, his performance is forceful, funny, dramatic and fully engaged. As West, the least sympathetic if only because the most well-off, Jeorge Bennett Watson has the dignity of a professional and a long-tested patience that could make him our stand-in as well. His gentle hat-roll late in the play shows that even an undertaker can be playful.

Memphis (Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr.), Hambone (David Jennings) in August Wilson’s Two Trains Running, Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

August Wilson, who was born in 1945 and died in 2005, wrote a play for each decade of the twentieth century, each of them packed with characters who have compelling realism and archetypal power. This play has long seemed to me one of the more enduring, if only because the 1960s have played such an major part in influencing American culture through the end of the twentieth century. Two Trains Running manages to dramatize cultural forces of the time while avoiding some of the more obvious clichés of the period. It is a treasure of a play, full of history, grievance and hope, and brought to indelible life at Hartford Stage.

Foreground: Risa (Taji Senior), West (Jeorge Bennett Watson); background: Sterling (Rafael Jordan) in August Wilson’s Two Trains Running, Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

August Wilson’s
Two Trains Running
Directed by Gilbert McCauley

Scenic Design: Lawrence E. Moten III; Costume Design: Devario D. Simmons; Lighting Design: Xavier Pierce; Original Music & Sound Design: Gregory Robinson; Wig, Hair & Makeup Design: J. Jared Jonas; Intimacy Coordinator: Kelsey Rainwater; Vocal Coach: Cynthia Santos DeCure; Casting: Alaine Alldaffer & Lisa Donadio; Production Stage Manager: lark hackshaw; Assistant Stage Manager : Adalhia Ivette Hart; Associate Artistic Director: Zoë Golub-Sass; Director of Production: Bryan T. Holcombe; General Manager: Emily Van Scoy

Cast: Jerome Preston Bates, David Jennings, Rafael Jordan, Postell Pringle, Taji Senior, Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr., Jeorge Bennett Watson

Hartford Stage
January 23-February 16, 2025

Trouble in Paradise

Review of Eden, Yale Repertory Theatre

Set in the area of New York City called San Juan Hill in 1927, Steve Carter’s Eden draws us into the tensions between two neighboring families, tensions that stem from class and racial distinctions in the Black community. The main thematic concern of Carter’s play is how divisive cultural conceptions can undermine racial solidarity. It's a worthwhile historical lesson since, for those who didn’t spend much or any time in the twentieth century, the lack of specific ethnic or national identifications in blanket terms like “white” and “black” and “POC” lends itself to an unnuanced view of such identities. Carter’s lively, incisive, well written and engaging play, directed with superlative pacing by Brandon J. Dirden at the Yale Repertory Theatre through February 8, takes us back into U.S. history with the kind of command of period and personality that we find in peers like Arthur Miller and August Wilson.

Nimrod (Juice Mackins), Solomon (Prentiss Patrick-Carter), Agnes (Alicia Pilgrim), Annetta (Lauren F. Walker) in Eden, Yale Repertory Theatre; photo by Joan Marcus

As Miller and Wilson often do, Carter sets his play in a very specific time and place and focuses on a particular family. The Bartons consist of a father, Joseph (Russell G. Jones), and a mother Florie (Christina Acosta Robinson), who are West Indian, with two daughters, Agnes (Alicia Pilgrim) and Annetta (Lauren F. Walker), born there as well, and two sons, Nimrod (Juice Mackins) and Solomon (Prentiss Patrick-Carter), who were born in New York. The immediate contrast, played for laughs by the young boys, is the difference between the way the former islanders speak and the way the local Black youths (at the time designated “Negroes”) speak. It’s a cultural difference the young people can view as significant or not, but in their home their father is adamant that his children will not mix with “these people.” American Blacks, in his view, are inferior to Blacks from the Indies.

Annetta Barton (Lauren F. Walker), Eustace Baylor (Chaundra Hall-Broomfield in Eden, Yale Repertory Theatre; photo by Joan Marcus

Of course this culturally exclusive prejudice will be tested by the familiar “melting-pot” conditions of life in New York City, for the boys, and by the thorny issue of who gets to decide whom marriageable daughter Annetta, eighteen, will marry. Joseph Barton favors Mr. Wallace, a bachelor friend and successful store-keeper, old enough to be Annetta’s father but “pure” in his bloodline; Annetta, in the course of the play, falls for Eustace Baylor (Chaundra Hall-Broomfield), a young man who comes from the U.S. south and is living across the hall with his aunt Lizzie Harris (Heather Alicia Simms).

Carter deftly constructs scenes that illuminate this world and, while the plot developments are hardly surprising, real drama comes from getting to know these characters, and seeing how they come better to know themselves and each other.

Florie Barton (Christina Acosta Robinson), Joseph Barton (Russell G. Jones) in Eden, Yale Repertory Theatre; photo by Joan Marcus

There are wonderful, fully involving performances throughout. Christina Acosta Robinson is superb as Florie Barton; seemingly a self-effacing wife and mother, she comes on strong near the end of Act I and completely alters the family dynamic in Act II. Robinson plays her as a woman awakened to her own missed potential by witnessing her husband’s brutal mistreatment of Annetta. Russell G. Jones conveys what Joseph imagines to be tough love and high standards with a patriarchal superiority he deems unquestionable. More than a little tyrannical, he fears the scrappy street ethos of the U.S. will undermine his values, and of course he’s right, but how that plays out is key to the drama Carter finds in questions of social mobility and constructions of racial identity.

Joseph Barton (Russell G. Jones), Annetta Barton (Lauren F. Walker), Florie Barton (Christina Acosta Robinson), Eustace Baylor (Chaundra Hall-Broomfield) in Eden, Yale Repertory Theatre; photo by Joan Marcus

As the young couple yearning to breathe free, as it were, Lauren F. Walker’s Annetta presents the mix of innocence and knowing charm that easily stirs Eustace, played by Chaundra Hall-Broomfield with the kind of heartening self-confidence and easy manner we expect will carry the day. The scenes of confrontation with Mr. Barton have a grim inevitability since neither man can admit the other’s view.

As Aunt Lizzie, Heather Alicia Simms brings a further dimension to the story as a woman much more experienced in how immediate and provisional love can be, but also how life-altering. A conversation in Act II between Lizzie and Florie goes a long way in undermining Mr. Barton’s sense that there should be significant difference between the women due to birth and circumstances. They align in a wish to see the couple succeed.

Florie Barton (Christina Acosta Robinson), Lizzie Harris (Heather Alicia Simms) in Eden, Yale Repertory Theatre; photo by Joan Marcus

Ultimately, this cannot be a “happily ever after” story because the faultlines are too clearly marked. The difficulties of living with the hand one was dealt go beyond the bounds of this story for each character. Carter has the skill to conjure the relations that are meaningful for each character, letting us see how all are affected by such conflicts.

The scenic design by George Zhou, costumes by Caroline Tyson, lighting by Ankit Pandey all contribute significantly to the play’s strong naturalistic affect, creating spaces—including an impressive rooftop set—that feel fully inhabited. Aided by Ein Kim’s poetic projections and Tojo Rasedoara’s sound design and original music, the production is a triumph of subtle tech touches.

Eden’s title refers to Joseph Barton’s sense that the promised land, ultimately, is Africa, the land of his origins, following the views of his hero Marcus Garvey whose photo is prominently displayed in the home. Carter’s play shows how the realities of place have a way of taking precedence over ideological considerations, providing a view of how history is often shaped by unexpected affinities and differences.

Joseph Barton (Russell G. Jones), Solomon Barton (Prentiss Patrick-Carter), Nimrod Barton (Juice Mackins) in Eden, Yale Repertory Theatre; photo by Joan Marcus

Eden
By Steve Carter
Directed by Brandon J. Dirden

Scenic Designer: George Zhou; Costume Designer: Caroline Tyson; Lighting Designer: Ankit Pandey; Sound Design and Original Music: Tojo Rasedoara; Projection Designer: Ein Kim; Hair and Wig Designers: Krystal Balleza and Will Vicari; Production Dramaturgs: Austin Riffelmacher, Tia Smith; Technical Director: Nickie Dubick; Fight and Intimacy Director: Michael Rossmy; Vocal and Dialect Coach: Paul Pryce; Casting Director: Calleri Jensen Davis; Stage Manager: Hope Binfeng Ding

Cast: Chaundre Hall-Broomfield, Russell G. Jones, Juice Mackins, Prentiss Patrick-Carter, Alicia Pilgrim, Christina Acosta Robinson, Heather Alicia Simms, Lauren F. Walker

Yale Repertory Theatre
January 16-February 8, 2025

A Wild Goose Chase

Review of A Sherlock Carol, Westport Country Playhouse

Watching A Sherlock Carol at Westport Country Playhouse, written and directed by Mark Shanahan, you might find yourself thinking: how is it no one ever thought of doing this before? To combine two of the most venerable figures of Victorian literature—Sherlock Holmes and Ebenezer Scrooge—into a single story? Deerstalkers off and boughs of holly raised to Shanahan for coming up with this corker of an idea and bringing it to amusing life on the Westport Country Playhouse stage for eight pre-Christmas performances, December 17-22.

Dan Domingues, Isabel Keating, Joe Delafield, Sharone Sayegh in A Sherlock Carol, Westport Country Playhouse; photo by T. Charles Erickson

The story draws heavily on the familiar plot of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, in which Scrooge, a fractious miser, meets with three Spirits of Christmas and undergoes a spiritual transformation—from malevolent to benevolent. Shanahan’s A Sherlock Carol makes Holmes, the famous sleuth, undergo a similar series of events. While that might make for enough of a parallel, as we watch the generally detached and unmoved Holmes become more accessible to his emotions and the spirit of the season, there’s another plot point that’s a bit more surprising.

Holmes, in depression, has withdrawn from his old friend and chronicler Dr. Watson, and sees no point continuing his investigative adventures now that his arch-nemesis Moriarity is dead (“which must be clearly understood”). Who should try to lure him back into the field but Dr. Timothy Cratchit, a now fully grown “Tiny Tim.” And the mystery to be solved: What caused the death of good old Scrooge?

So, a mystery for Christmas, and a story arc moving toward good cheer through the chillier aspects of the season. While we might think Scrooge deserves to be mourned, we can also expect that—in the fashion of Marley’s Ghost—he’s bound to pop in sooner or later.

Sherlock Holmes (Drew McVety), Ebenezer Scrooge (Byron St. Cyr) in A Sherlock Carol, Westport Country Playhouse; photo by T. Charles Erickson

What best abets this swiftly moving and theatrically resourceful tale is the cast Shanahan has assembled to flesh out this ensemble of characters: Holmes (Drew McVety); Scrooge (Byron St. Cyr); Tim Cratchit (Dan Domingues); Scrooge’s housekeeper Mrs. Dilber (Joe Delafield); Dr. Watson (Delafield again); Holmes’ one-time flame Irene Adler (Isabel Keating), now a widowed countess; Emma Wiggins (Sharone Sayegh); various Fezziwigs (Keating, Domingues); Old Joe the notions dealer (Delafield again), and the erstwhile Inspector Lestrade (Sayegh again). Viewers who attended Westport’s irrepressible staging of The 39 Steps in the fall will recall Joe Delafield as our harried hero Mr. Hannay and Sharone Sayegh as a series of damsels he encountered. Here, their skill at quick-change characters is invigorating, with either apt to steal any scene they’re in.

Dan Domingues creates what is probably the most sympathetic character in Tim Cratchit, and Isabel Keating’s Countess belts out “The Twelve Days of Christmas” (which, we learn, was old Scrooge’s favorite carol). Byron St. Cyr’s Scrooge is a jolly old soul, often speaking in lines from the lessons the Spirits taught him once upon a Christmas eve. As Holmes, Drew McVety can reel off deductions and observations with the impatience of a genius irked that what is obvious to him is a mystery to others. His final recounting of what happened to Scrooge is a bit reminiscent of the two solutions in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express: one improbable, the other likely.

Shanahan has created the kind of script where anything anyone says may be an important detail in the mystery or a riff on some aspect of a Holmes story—particularly “The Mystery of the Blue Carbuncle”—or Dickens’ Scrooge story, so the ball just keeps bouncing along. And does indeed become something of “a wild goose chase.”

Irene Adler (Isabel Keating), Sherlock Holmes (Drew McVety) in A Sherlock Carol, Westport Country Playhouse; photo by T. Charles Erickson

The play is a good opportunity to create curiosity in youngsters about these unforgettable characters as originally presented. The staging stimulates with an awareness of how theater can transform space, time and persons in an eyeblink, bringing alive a wealth of detail with nimble wit and a knowing collusion with the audience. Costumes by Linda Cho have the requisite Dickensian look and James J. Fenton’s scenic design is mostly open stage graced by a range of interesting and imaginative props. And for the dialogue, accents abound.

With the first two shows of Westport Country Playhouse’s “season of laughter,” Shanahan has directed plays that depend on the actors’ awareness of the audience, which—for A Sherlock Carol—requires and repays a certain kindly Christmas presence. Hardly “elementary,” it’s a good deal of intricate fun.

Ebenezer Scrooge (Byron St. Cyr) in A Sherlock Carol, Westport Country Playhouse; photo by T. Charles Erickson

A Sherlock Carol
Written and Directed by Mark Shanahan

Scenic Designer: James J. Fenton; Costume Designer: Linda Cho; Lighting Designer: Alyssandra Docherty; Music & Sound Designer: John Gromada; Fight Choreography: Seth Andrew Bridges; Assistant Director: Anissa Felix; Production Stage Manager: Becky Fleming; Assistant Stage Manager: Amadi Cary

Cast: Joe Delafield, Dan Domingues, Isabel Keating, Drew McVety, Sharone Sayegh, Bryon St. Cyr

Westport Country Playhouse
December 17-22, 2024

Performance schedule is Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday at 7 p.m.; Friday and Saturday at 2 and 7 p.m.; and Sunday at 2 p.m. The play is recommended for age 7and up. Running time is 108 minutes, including one 15-minute intermission.

Pre- and post-show offerings include Together at the Table, on Wednesday, December 18, at 5:30 p.m., offering a pizza dinner to families or groups with student-age children; and Pride Night, on Thursday, December 19, at 6 p.m., featuring a cocktail party for the LGBTQ+ community and friends, with a limited open bar from Trevi Lounge and appetizers from Walrus Alley.

During the run of “A Sherlock Carol,” the Playhouse will be giving back to the community, benefiting individuals and families served by the Domestic Violence Crisis Center, Norwalk Toys for Tots, and Homes with Hope. Donations may be dropped off in the collection boxes located in the Playhouse lobby during box office hours, Tues. through Fri., 12 to 5 p.m.

Entre Nous

Review of Dear Elizabeth, New Haven Theater Company

Sarah Ruhl’s Dear Elizabeth, now playing at New Haven Theater Company for four more performances—tonight and next Thursday through Saturday—has an unusual remit: to present the story of the friendship between Robert Lowell (Ralph Buonocore) and Elizabeth Bishop (Sandra E. Rodriguez) using only excerpts from the published correspondence between the two famous poets as text to be spoken by the actors playing them. The sense of this restriction is that it lets us hear the voices of these two inestimable writers as pitched to one another, an ongoing verbal pas de deux that lasted thirty years. Indeed, the last letter Bishop wrote Lowell was en route to him in New York when he died of a heart-attack in a cab in 1977. Bishop died two years later.

The premiere production of Dear Elizabeth, at Yale Repertory Theatre in 2012 directed by Les Waters, had a wealth of interesting visual aids to hold our attention. At New Haven Theater Company, director J. Kevin Smith provides a much more intimate approach that has its own very choice theatricality. Set up with seating on all four sides, the play happens before us as an imagined space, one that Lowell and Bishop seemingly enter into readily. Their letters—usually written when considerable distance separates them in life—provide a particular intimacy that each strove to maintain, in different ways at different times. There are dramatized moments—such as their mimed meetings when we don’t get to hear them speak because what they said was not recorded—and moments of whimsy as when one or the other climbs a step latter as though to move above and beyond the quotidian bounds of life.

Elizabeth Bishop (Sandra E. Rodriguez), Robert Lowell (Ralph Buonocore) in Dear Elizabeth; photo by New Haven Theater Company

Moving chronologically through this literary acquaintance that becomes a lifelong friendship, we see how the two began, early on, with belief in one another as readers of and commentators on each other’s work. An aspect that never flags, with each dedicating poems to one another, and, late in Lowell’s career, arguing good naturedly but pointedly over Lowell’s use of doctored versions of his former (second) wife’s correspondence in his long poem “The Dolphin.” The “mixing of fact and fiction” is what Bishop objects to, so we can imagine that she would not censure Ruhl’s use of the poets’ correspondence since—though the play does not show us all that was said—the playwright uses only what was actually written. (Though on the question of tampering with written materials—which Bishop also faulted Lowell for—I will offer one cavil: to quote at length from Lowell’s famous poem “Skunk Hour,” dedicated to Bishop, without including the lines about the skunk not only truncates a powerful poem, but leaves those unfamiliar with the poem uncertain about what Lowell means when he said, in a letter, that he had become a skunk.)

Robert Lowell (Ralph Buonocore) in Dear Elizabeth; photo by New Haven Theater Company

The notion of the correspondence as a drama is supported by the way the two seem to require one another as audience to lives that move along with much travel and, for Lowell, three wives and two children, and, for Bishop, much time alone and then a long-term relationship with Lota de Macedo Soares, living together in Brazil, that ended tragically. The friendship between Lowell and Bishop had its more intense phase before Lowell met wife number two, Elizabeth Hardwick, author, critic and one of the founders of the New York Review of Books. Indeed, a powerful letter later in the play shows Lowell giving vent to reminiscence over the early possibility of a marriage to Bishop, whom he met before he met Hardwick. The possibility may have been only in his mind, but as depicted by the play, the earlier moment, when Lowell writes of meeting Hardwick and soon enough is enacting a marriage, finds Bishop sitting at her desk blowing bubbles and seeming to ignore his epistles. Was there ever a chance for these two to live as a settled couple? Doubtful, but, the play suggests, not unimaginable.

How we see this relationship owes much to how it’s staged. The strictures of the play make the audience seem to be reading the words of the poets over the shoulder of the playwright. Ruhl chooses what to include and what to exclude and provides terse statements of fact in a voice-over so that we will know things the letters don’t spell out. In addition, a silent factotum, called Brigit (Abby Klein, wonderfully focused) moves on and offstage, bringing in and removing props, aiding and abetting the dramatic business in a manner that seems to comment ironically on the fact that Lowell and Bishop have gone from living confidantes and career poets—each winning many important prizes—to figures in a play.

Elizabeth Bishop (Sandra E. Rodriguez) in Dear Elizabeth, photo by New Haven Theater Company

As characters, Rodriguez’s Bishop is the more winning of the two. Rodriguez infuses Bishop with a vital circumspection, a way of approaching life as though it’s happening to someone else. So those moments when she breaks down are all the more powerful as we see at once with what strength of purpose she pursued her very individual life. As Lowell, Buonocore never quite gets across the manic quality in Lowell, which he references in his letters—having not only to take medications but sometimes being relegated to sanitariums. In Lowell’s words one detects a performative quality that does lend itself well to those passages where Buonocore’s Lowell comments drily on others.

The main strength of the play is that it makes us aware of how any attempt to present oneself in a verbal medium begs a certain indulgence from the audience. An audience of one—the person addressed—has now become “the ages,” leaving us to make of these lives what we will. There’s a very successful moment late in the play when Lowell and Bishop circle one another reciting the various salutations and closings they had used with one another in the course of thirty years of letters. The lines compose a poem with very specific referents and contexts, full of affection, self-aware humor and a very, very personal touch, such as only real friends can appreciate between each other.

Dear Elizabeth
A play in letters from Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell and back again
By Sarah Ruhl
Directed by J. Kevin Smith

Producer: Margaret Mann; Production Stage Manager: Stacy Lupo; Lighting Designer: Adam Lobelson; Sound Effects: Tom Curley

Cast: Ralph Buonocore, Abby Klein, Sandra E. Rodriguez

New Haven Theater Company
November 7, 8, 9, 14, 15, 16, 2024

A Funny Thing Happened at the Theater

Review of The 39 Steps, Westport Country Playhouse

Westport Country Playhouse is back, under new Artistic Director Mark Shanahan, with a scheduled three-play season of comedies. The first, now playing through November 9, is the four-actor, multipart entertainment The 39 Steps, a slapstick rendering of a spy novel by John Buchan that reached the big screen in 1939, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. From that date, you can tell that a plot based on British secrets being leaked to crafty Germans was certainly timely. Nowadays, the espionage hijinks play out as a comically nostalgic recall of music hall comedy, chases on a train, and the clash of London panache with rural Scots oddity, among other things.

Richard Hannay (Joe Delafield) in The 39 Steps at Westport Country Playhouse; photo by Carol Rosegg

As our often flappable and put-upon hero, Richard Hannay, Joe Delafield looks like he belongs in a film from the Thirties or Forties: lean, “with piercing blue-eyes,” and a rakish moustache, Hannay, bored in his London flat, seeks excitement by going to the theater. There an act called Mr. Memory (Evan Zes) is interrupted by a gunshot and soon Hannay is swept up into a spy plot by Annabella Schmidt (Sharone Sayegh), whose hilarious accent and truly comic mannerisms seem to captivate our hero; that is, until she suddenly turns up dead.

Now if you’re thinking that doesn’t sound exactly hilarious, how wrong you are. You have to see the trench-coated hitmen (Zes and Seth Andrew Bridges) waiting by a streetlamp that they carry dutifully onstage each time Hannay or Schmidt looks out the window, and Annabella’s death throes have to be seen to be believed.

Richard Hannay (Joe Delafield), Annabella Schmidt (Sharone Sayegh) in The 39 Steps at Westport Country Playhouse; photo by Carol Rosegg

A major asset of this production is the casting: Delafield looks his part, certainly, and Sayegh conveys well the three different women that Hanny encounters and takes a more than casual interest in, especially plucky Pamela, a blonde who doesn’t buy his preposterous story, with good reason. Their “romantic interludes”—with lighting and sound that arrive on cue like a DeMille close-up—are almost as fun as what happens when two people handcuffed to each other have to navigate varied terrain, or remove stockings.

Richard Hannay (Joe Delafield) with Clown 2 (Evan Zes) and Clown 1 (Seth Andrew Bridges) in The 39 Steps at Westport Country Playhouse; photo by Carol Rosegg

Then there are the Clowns, Zes and Bridges. Zes, as Professor Jordan’s wife, looks like Groucho Marx in drag, and his extended effort to introduce Hannay, mistaken as a visiting candidate, at a political rally, is the kind of comedy that really must be done live to come off. We become the baffled rally crowd trying to discern if the speaker is saying anything intelligible at all. It’s a tour de force of silliness. And Bridges, as Professor Jordan, whom Hanny seeks out for help, creates a bizarre character who gets more and more unhinged. The return to the Mr. Memory act brings us full circle with the knowledge of the mysterious MacGuffin called “the 39 Steps” hanging in the balance.

Director Mark Shanahan handles all this with obvious love of the source material—not only Barlow’s adaptation but also the Hitchcock film universe that hovers as background, giving us jokes that play off a creepy but familiar world, as when a silhouette of the Bates Motel indicates Hannay’s and Pamela’s destination. Or when a tableaux of WWI fighter planes suddenly appears when Hannay goes on the run.

Richard Hannay (Joe Delafield) in The 39 Steps at Westport Country Playhouse; photo by Carol Rosegg

Westport’s The 39 Steps is inspired silliness handled with a great feel for the very visual humor of this enthusiastically charged romp.  Is there anything of substance in the story? As a hero, Hannay is typical of Hitchcock who likes his protagonists to be Everymen without any particular agenda. When Hannay is forced to improvise a stump speech in Scotland, he comes up with the kind of “a better world for everyone” rhetoric that sounds good without having any bite. Knowing nothing about the community he is addressing, he’s rather limited in what he can say, but it does somewhat fall on our ears as the sort of speech that, in 1939, would be rather weak and anodyne. But in the play there are real enemies and lives are really at stake. Just like in real life.

The cast of The 39 Steps at Westport Country Playhouse; photo by Carol Rosegg

The 39 Steps
Adapted by Patrick Barlow
From the Novel by John Buchan
From the Movie by Alfred Hitchcock
And an Original Concept by Simon Corble and Nobby Dimon
Directed by Mark Shanahan

Scenic Designer: James J. Fenton; Costume Designer: Jeni Schaefer; Lighting Designer: J. Dominic Chacon; Sound Designer: Ryan Rumery; Movement Coordinator: Steve Pacek; Production Stage Manager: Megan Smith; Assistant Stage Manager: Amadi Cary; Production Assistant: Chris Conte

Cast: Seth Andrews Bridges, Joe Delafield, Sharone Sayegh, Evan Zes

Westport Country Playhouse
October 22-November 9, 2024

Bipolar Soul

Review of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, Hartford Stage

Hartford Stage kicks off its 61st season with a classic, directed by Artistic Director Melia Bensussen. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) has been adapted numerous times as plays, films, spoofs and even a musical. One notable film adaptation featured Fredric March in the title double-role, for which he won the Best Actor Oscar for 1931, and was then remade with two-time Oscar winner Spencer Tracy as Jekyll/Hyde in 1941. Of course, the notion of a “Jekyll-Hyde” is common parlance for a dual personality, and we might suppose a contemporary version of the play will be somewhat sportive with the theme.

Fortunately, the Hartford Stage production uses Jeffrey Hatcher’s 2009 adaptation, which is respectfully faithful to the plot and the delivery of Stevenson’s multi-perspective tale. Like the theater’s handsomely stylish staging of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (a local tradition), Bensussen’s Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde brings literature to life.

Omar Robinson, Nayib Felix, Nathan Darrow, Jennifer Rae Bareilles, Peter Stray in Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde at Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

The main curiosity, going in, may be: how are they going to handle the transformation scene? Hollywood likes to employ special effects to make the contemporary sense of filmed realism include the fantastic, but the stage is apt to find means a bit more theatrical. Indeed, the inspiration of having Hyde conveyed by multiple actors (Peter Stray, Omar Robinson, Nayib Felix, Jennifer Rae Bareilles), and several times in tandem or unison, delivers an eerie and intriguing effect. Instead of watching someone in makeup enact a monster, we see how the Hyde personality manifests itself across race and gender and in various spaces simultaneously. And the Hartford Stage, with its wide-open circular playing space surrounded by an amphitheater of seats, is perfect for the swift physicality of this production, which never remains static for long, thanks in part to Shura Baryshnikov’s choreography. The scenic design (Sara Brown) also plays well as the operating theater where Dr. Jekyll (Nathan Darrow) and Sir Danvers Carew (Nayib Felix) do an engaging little number we might call “dueling doctors.”

Nayib Felix, Peter Stray, Sarah Chalfie, Jennifer Rae Bareilles in Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde at Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

The story, in Hatcher’s version, includes a woman—Elizabeth Jelkes (Sarah Chalfie)—who actually falls for Mr. Hyde, which gives a different wrinkle to the battle for ascendancy between Jekyll, a staid if somewhat peremptory gentleman who experiments upon himself, and Hyde, a bestial and immoral scoundrel who, the play suggests, might be an exciting person to know. You know how a certain kind of person is readily attracted to “bad boys”?

Nayib Felix, Sarah Chalfie in Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde at Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

While there are many ways the story might be made more arch or ironic or campy in its presentation and implications, Bensussen’s production is notable for taking Stevenson’s creation and Hatcher’s text seriously. This production works so well not only because it is so well-played and well-staged, but also because the familiar theme seems to have finally escaped the “monster movie” circuit and gotten back to serious drama.

Nathan Darrow in Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde at Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

Darrow’s Jekyll is a man who feels he can manipulate anyone and anything: his friends, the law, science, and even Hyde, his darker or less amenable side. His argument with Dr. Carew is over the question of “the soul” as a material element of the brain or a spiritual essence. The notion that exciting certain areas of the brain and suppressing others would cause complete personality change is credible, and Hatcher brings in elements from another Stevenson story (“The Body Snatcher”) in which the unethical use of cadavers is addressed. Jekyll, we see, is a man who, like Victor Frankenstein (with whom he is often compared), believes that scientific knowledge takes precedence over legal strictures, religious belief and sentimental attachment. His tragedy stems from not really knowing himself. The “evil” in him isn’t a scientific side-effect but an essential element of his psyche. As, indeed, it may be for us all.

Jennifer Rae Bareilles in Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde at Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

Watching the story play out is to be implicated to some degree in the sentiments expressed by  a bystander and witness to a brutal murder: she knew she should call for help, but she wanted to watch. The lure of sensationalism and violence is so deeply woven into so much of our entertainment, it is no surprise to learn we have, collectively, a “bad side.” What we might be surprised to learn is how easily that bad side could get along in the world without a care for the missing censure of the “good side.”

Omar Robinson in Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde at Hartford Stage; photo by T. Charles Erickson

Hartford Stage’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is fascinating and exciting theater.

 Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde
Adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher from Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Directed by Melia Bensussen

Choreographer: Shura Baryshnikov; Scenic Design: Sara Brown; Costume Design: An-lin Dauber; Lighting Design: Evan C. Anderson; Original Music & Sound Design: Jane Shaw; Wig, Hair, & Makeup Design: Jodi Stone; Fight Choreographer: Omar Robinson; Voice & Dialect Coach: Jennifer Scapetis-Tycer; Casting: Alaine Alldaffer; Production Stage Manager: Nicole Wiegert; Assistant Stage Manager: Julius Cruz; Associate Artistic Director: Zoë Golub-Sass; Director of Production: Bryan T. Holcombe; General Manager: Emily Van Scoy

Cast: Jennifer Rae Bareilles; Sarah Chalfie; Nathan Darrow; Nayib Felix; Omar Robinson; Peter Stray

Hartford Stage
October 10-November 3, 2024

Horsing Around

Review of falcon girls, Yale Repertory Theatre

Adolescence in all its earth-shaking, hormonal change is the setting of Hilary Bettis’s falcon girls, now playing in its world premiere at Yale Repertory Theatre, directed by May Adrales. While such material may be all-too-familiar in popular films and TV shows, Bettis’ compassionate play benefits from the specificity of its context.

The cast of falcon girls by Hilary Bettis at Yale Repertory Theatre; photo by Joan Marcus

The action, set in the early ‘90s, comes to us through the main viewpoint of the new girl in eighth grade in a school in rural Colorado where ranches and horses abound. H (Gabrielle Policano)—always addressed as Hilary and sometimes “Hillary Clinton” in the play—strikes us at first as an early-teen enthusiast utterly entranced by animal life, particularly horses, and eager to share her love with the world (her mother breaks for animals, especially turtles). In the early going, it seems we’re going to be treated to an extended revamp of Mean Girls, as none of the girls on the FFA (Future Farmers of America) competitive team welcomes a new recruit. H gets to be an alternate to an alternate, and spends her time pining for more status and generally dumping on her single-parent mother, Beverlee (Liza Fernandez), a nurse, for always working.

The classroom stuff is all zippy and overwrought as only young teens can be, and the cast is uniformly excellent at bringing the earnest tones of these girls’ voices to life (though we might begin to wonder why anyone, having lived through middle-school, would want to revisit it). Diversity here takes the form of different levels of disfunction: there’s April (Alexa Lopez), a wide-eyed would-be starlet (she wants to go to Hollywood and marry Neal Patrick Harris, har har); Carly (Alyssa Marek), a troubled girl with abusive father; Mary (Anna Roman), a fully indoctrinated proselytizer for Jesus; Rebecca (Annie Abramczyk), whose demanding mom is all about winning no matter what, and Jasmine (Sophia Marcelle, but on opening night played by understudy Gabriela Veciana), a girl who has begun surfing the perilous waters of online chats and phone sex. The girls are fond of stressing that they love each other like sisters and not “like a lesbian.” For a time we might imagine that H is the least burdened, but the second act does away with that view, and suddenly it’s all about the backstory.

H (Gabrielle Policano), Jasmine (Sophia Marcelle), April (Alexa Lopez), Carly (Alyssa Marek), Rebecca (Annie Abramczyk), Mary (Anna Roman) in falcon girls by Hilary Bettis at Yale Repertory Theatre; photo by Joan Marcus

The best part in the early going is when H sassily takes on the role of “horse evaluator” with her teammates as examples. Terms like “pig-eyed” and “breeding hips” get thrown about as the girls strike postures somewhere between artist models, cover girls and science specimen. We get not only the way the features of humans and horses share certain tell-tale aspects, but also that, in her chosen field, H has what it takes. Which doesn’t mean she’s going to be popular. Also made clear is how important the FFA culture is for these teens, leading not only to status, but to enabling careers from veterinarians to ranchers and entrepreneurs.

The cast of falcon girls by Hilary Bettis at Yale Repertory Theatre; photo by Joan Marcus

The consoling rides back home from lost competitions with Mr. K (Teddy Cañez), the patient, dedicated, and virtuous coach, are charming set-pieces that let all the different agendas of this often catty young team play out. Indeed, Cañez’s warm and knowing performance is a welcome break from the various kinds of hyperventilating on view, which includes the crush of the only male teammate, Dan (Juan Sebastián Cruz), on H, which leads him to be a joke mainly for his sartorial choices and his assumption that posing with a gun is the way to a girl’s heart. Cruz is very agile in the dance numbers (Kimiye Corwin, choreographer) that show us what the kids like to step to and how they work off nervous energy.

Bettis’ main theme is the vulnerability of these girls who are restlessly and self-consciously located somewhere on the continuum between children and adults, while trying to navigate their growing awareness that praying to Jesus and trusting in his love may be more panacea than problem-solver. A plot point about a real local girl—Heather Dawn Church—who was kidnapped and killed by a local man (not identified and arrested until four years later) adds a certain element of foreboding, as the darker side of life might find anyone, and Carly is living in the house formerly occupied by the Church family.

H (Gabrielle Policano), Beverlee (Liza Fernandez) in falcon girls by Hilary Bettis at Yale Repertory Theatre; photo by Joan Marcus

The story concerns us with the difficulties faced by teens at all times, and perhaps more so with each passing generation, though I do wonder about the audience for this particular version of teendom. Those who, like Bettis, were teens in the ‘90s (my daughter fits the bill) might run screaming at having to revisit those years, and current teens may be only dimly interested in a time when you had to use call-waiting on landlines to communicate with your friends. As for genial old folks like me, “our withers are unwrung,” so to speak, but, even so, I hear the voice of Alicia Silverstone in Clueless (1995) saying “Tell me that part about Kenny G. again…”

But, unlike Clueless with its lively satire of the Valley and the kids who once upon a time inhabited it, falcon girls doesn’t mock outright the lives of these enterprising kids, trying instead to illuminate aspects of their world for those of us not to the ranches born. Though the biggest lesson we might receive is that the democratic reach of capitalism and its reigning patriarchal discourse means that, in the U.S., life is often a version of “same shit, different State.” Playing at Yale, the play does agreeably promote the value of education, though with the cautionary notion that you might know all there is to know about animal life and nothing at all about yourself.

falcon girls
by Hilary Bettis
Directed by May Adrales 

Scenic Designer: Beowulf Boritt; Costume Designer: Micah Ohno; Lighting Designer: Kyle Stamm; Sound Design and Original Music: Joyce Ciesil; Projection Designer: Christian Killada; Hair, Wig, and Makeup Designers: Krystal Balleza and Will Vicari; Production Dramaturgs: Amy Boratko and Lara Priya Sachdeva; Technical Director: Tom Minucci; Fight and Intimacy Director: Kelsey Rainwater; Vocal Coach: Julie Foh; Choreographer: Kimiye Corwin; Casting Director: Calleri Jensen Davis; Stage Manager: Josie Cooper

 Cast: Annie Abramczyk, Teddy Cañez, Juan Sebastián Cruz, Liza Fernandez, Alexa Lopez, Sophia Marcelle, Alyssa Marek, Gabrielle Policano, Anna Roman; understudies: Ruth Aguilar, Caroline Campos, Dylan Scarlett Foster, Francisco Morandi Zerpa, Brendan Titley, Gabriela Veciana, Rosie Victoria

Yale Repertory Theatre
October 10-November 2, 2024

Family Snapshots

Review of 2.5 Minute Ride, Hartford Stage

A 75-minute play delivered in the form, for the most part, of a slideshow lecture about her family, Lisa Kron’s 2.5 Minute Ride closes out Hartford Stage’s 60th anniversary season as a unique show wherein amusement parks meet Nazi deathcamps. In the play’s original formulation, back in 1999, Kron played herself, giving glimpses of her family as they visit annually Cedar Point Park in Ohio, noted for its amazingly fast, tall, and breathtaking roller-coasters, or prepare for her brother’s wedding in Brooklyn, or—checking off a list of things to do with Dad before he’s gone—visit Auschwitz in Poland where his parents and other relatives died after he was placed in a Kindertransport that brought him to the U.S.

Lisa (Lena Kaminsky) in Lisa Kron’s 2.5 Minute Ride at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

As Lisa, Lena Kaminsky takes charge of the material with great aplomb. We can easily believe these are her experiences she’s recounting, and her way of working the material—Lisa is a somewhat captious host quite often—redounds to the success of this production, directed by Zoë Golub-Sass. The pacing snaps as Lisa confides and mocks and reveals. The main dramatic crux is that, in the midst of her straight-forward recounting of events, Lisa may come to weigh her experiences differently, as she does when she has to admit to a surprising flood of emotion at her brother’s wedding, or may even come to question why she’s trying to tell us what she’s telling us, as when she finds her descriptive powers tested by having to recreate the visit to Auschwitz. At that point, we could say she isn’t simply recreating, she’s reliving, and her distress becomes palpable.

But that’s also when we may become acutely aware that Kaminsky isn’t Kron, so that a scripted breakdown doesn’t quite play the same as one that could be coming directly from the author. That’s not likely to bother most viewers, but it did give the play, for me, an odd double-focus. First, on the question of how well Kron’s script conveys what she wants to say; second, how well Kaminsky plays Lisa. A theatrical monologue can be by an entirely fictional character, of course (see David Cale’s Sandra, now playing a few blocks away at TheaterWorks, Hartford, for instance), and so we know the actor onstage has adopted the role of the narrator/character. But when the monologue must render some aspects of the speaker’s relations with actual family members we might find ourselves thinking how fixed and undeviating this little slice of life has become. And we might become more aware of how structured the monologue is, especially as Kron likes to jump back and forth between Cedar Point and Auschwitz as though they should have some relation other than that furnished by visiting both with her aging father. Or so as to make one visit’s comic elements offset the creeping horror of the other visit, which becomes a bit of a crutch.

Lisa’s relation to her father is really what’s at issue here, but she keeps distracting us with other aperçus, as for instance the vapidity of a superstore in Michigan, or the lack of real pizza in Poland, or—more interesting—her mother’s refusal to be photographed from the time her children ceased to be infants, or the different roller-coasters and how it feels to ride them with an elderly man who might suffer a physical problem during their oh-so-fast flight. We might wish she’d concentrate more on this old man, though she makes it clear she finds it hard to do so. She began by trying to make a video documentary in which he could speak his memories, but the format didn’t work and that caused her a bit of soul-searching.

And that attempt is a telling failure because it lets us know that 2.5 Minute Ride is another attempt, in a very different medium, to tackle the problem. It’s up to viewers if it works, but I’d say the real takeaway, with regard to her father, is his comment about his time as a youth in Germany where he wonders if, had he not been a Jew, he could’ve resisted becoming a Hitler Youth, the way one German boy he knew did. Later, as an interrogator with the U.S. Army, stationed in Germany, Kron’s dad gets a man to admit he was actually with the Gestapo, though he had lived in denial of that fact. The admission comes freighted, we might say, with the man’s grievance against history. Had the Nazis won, his actions as a Gestapo officer would’ve been praised. Instead, he’s a criminal. Kron’s dad sympathizes.

The poignancy and pointedness of Mr. Kron’s statements simply bubble up and subside within the busy texture of Lisa Kron’s need to dramatize her relation to this man. I found myself trying to imagine what a monologue in her father’s voice might have sounded like. But that would’ve meant Kron stepping outside her own experience to attempt to recreate someone else’s. At one point, she admits the limits of her method: ''When I try to tell his stories, I begin to hyperventilate, and I don't know why. I can feel the myth, the awe creep into my voice, and it makes me feel sick because what does that have to do with him?'' The fact that the question is rhetorical doesn’t mean Kron needn’t try to answer it.

Lisa (Lena Kaminsky) in Lisa Kron’s 2.5 Minute Ride at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Late in the play, Lisa, placing her hand on a chair, says that she learned in drama school that if there is a piece of furniture onstage you should put your hand on it so as to appear bigger. In the play’s concluding line, she says, “I’m putting my hand on my father’s life.” We may infer she did so to feel bigger, but we might also wonder if she succeeded.

2.5 Minute Ride
By Lisa Kron
Directed by Zoë Golub-Sass

Scenic Design: Judy Gailen; Costume Design: April Hickman; Lighting Design: Daisy Long; Original Music & Sound Design: Jane Shaw; Production Stage Manager: Avery Trunko; Director of Production: Bryan T. Holcombe; General Manager: Emily Van Scoy

Cast: Lena Kaminsky

Hartford Stage
May 30-June 23, 2024

Gone Missing

Review of Sandra, TheaterWorks, Hartford

Playwright David Cale specializes in monologues, and in Sandra, now playing at TheaterWorks directed by Jared Mezzocchi, with music by Matthew David Marsh and creative content and video design by Camilla Tassi, he takes this theatrical genre into the realm of what might be the ultimate film genre: the thriller. If you think that a thriller—in which there is generally mystery and murder and various physical threats as well as psychological tension—might be hard to convey with a solo, narrating speaker, you’d be right. And you’re welcome to see how well the TheaterWorks production, which features state-of-the-art projections on walls and ceiling, pulls that off. The play’s run has been extended through June 27, so you now have more chances.

Sandra (Felicia Curry) in Sandra at TheaterWorks, Hartford (photo by Mike Marques)

Sandra, played with unwavering, forthright earnestness by Felicia Curry, is in her forties, separated from a husband who seems through with a marriage she might try to salvage, and runs a Brooklyn café called Sandra’s. She also seems to be the most isolated café owner one could ever imagine. Apart from that estranged husband whom we meet briefly in the later going (Curry enacts all Sandra’s interlocutors), Sandra has a co-worker/employee who hazards opinions, and knows a couple glimpsed briefly as a fleeting plot-point. Her entire life, it seems, is focused on Ethan, a younger, gay pianist/composer who gifts her a CD of his music before departing for Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, whilst remarking, “I feel like disappearing from my life.”

Disappear he does, and Sandra, an emergency contact person for Ethan, gets a call asking if she knows his whereabouts three weeks later. And there are authorities questioning her too. Her solution: head to Puerto Vallarta and try to find his trail.

I have to confess I did not attend Sandra thinking I was going to watch “a thriller.” The fact that Curry delivers the voices of all the other characters in a jokey way and plays Sandra as the type we’re most familiar with from clueless romantic comedies, made me imagine I was watching a play in which Sandra, sleuthing after the perhaps deliberately vanished Ethan, would learn way more about him (and perhaps herself) than she bargained for, and that her search in Mexico would include a wealth of odd-ball characters—like Beauford (a seventy-ish Tennessee Williams wanna-be who seems to base his life on Suddenly Last Summer) whom she meets briefly, or Luca, the quintessential sleazy/sexy Latin lover, by way of Sicily (his seduction of Sandra while Curry plays both parts definitely indicated rom-com). That play would all be in the interests of romance the way most trips to faraway places are.

Sandra (Felicia Curry) in Sandra at TheaterWorks, Hartford (photo by Mike Marques)

But no, tensions mount when Sandra finds evidence, such as Ethan’s handwriting on a note launched in a bottle by a long-haired blonde dude who had accompanied Beauford to the bar where she met him, but who departed when the elderly gent had to take his insulin shot. And so now Sandra isn’t looking for Ethan as much as for this long-haired, nameless dude. And if she finds him?

Thrillers, of course, tend to be the movies you love to shout at because their protagonists so often do the wrong thing or have motives and/or knowledge that are only gradually revealed or which have to surface just to make something implausible slightly less so. And it may be that Cale and company had in mind a send-up of the genre that would have audiences laughing over wild coincidence met by the steady can-do positivity that fuels many an amateur sleuth’s success. But long before Sandra recounts arrests, testimony, witness protection programs and the like you may find yourself wishing she’d take a moment and reflect or philosophize or give us tips on airflight (she goes back and forth between Mexico and Brooklyn a lot), or anything we might want an engaging narrator to do. Instead, it’s all plot all the time, underscored by the fact that—as she’s left alone to tell the tale to us on a stage—we know Sandra won’t meet with an untimely end. And so we might well ask: why are you telling us this?

And what does seeing the play do that simply reading it wouldn’t? Well, there is the immediacy of having Felicia Curry, an Emmy-nominated actor, speak things for us as though just realizing them, which is somewhat harder for a narrator to do in writing, and there is Camilla Tassi’s atmospheric projections, many of Puerto Vallarta itself, which include the ebb and flow of surf seen from above, the text of computer searches, and, in the play’s most dramatic moment, a looming shadow. All visuals are aided by the intricacy of the lighting design by co-lighting designers Amith Chandrashaker and Alex Fetchko. And there are Ethan’s lovely, stately piano compositions (by Matthew David Marsh) which might make you wish a friend more concerned with who Ethan is than where he is had been given a voice to recall him.

Sandra (Felicia Curry) in Sandra at TheaterWorks, Hartford (photo by Mike Marques)

Theatrical monologue is, certainly, a respected and capable genre, and creating suspense via the monologue’s blend of the speaker’s stasis with the kinesis of recalled action that moves through space and time is a hit-and-miss affair. Here, a hallucinating walk at one point is particularly well-rendered by Curry with Tassi’s projections. But when the main action taking place on stage is an actor consulting a laptop, something—other than Ethan—has gone missing.

Sandra
By David Cale
Directed by Jared Mezzocchi

Music by Matthew David Marsh
Creative content and video design by Camilla Tassi

Set Design: Marcelo Martínez García; Costume Design: Sarita Fellows; Co-Lighting Design: Amith Chandrashaker; Co-Lighting Design: Alex Fetchko; Sound Design: Evdoxia Ragkou; Stage Manager: Tom Kosis; Hair Design: Tinkia Sadiku; Dialect Coach: Josh FS Moser

Cast: Felicia Curry

TheaterWorks, Hartford
May 30-June 27, 2024

All in the Family

Review of All My Sons, Hartford Stage

“Patriotism,” Samuel Johnson once quipped, “is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” Thinking of Arthur Miller’s second play All My Sons, now in a powerful revival at Hartford Stage, directed by Melia Bensussen and starring Marsha Mason and Michael Gaston, we may wish to alter the adage, replacing “patriotism” with “family.”

Joe Keller (Michael Gaston), Kate Keller (Marsha Mason) in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Meet the Kellers: Joe (Michael Gaston) is a friendly, neighborhood patriarch relaxing in his backyard; he welcomes the neighborhood doctor, Jim Bayliss (Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr.), sharing his pipe tobacco; he entertains a local boy, Bert (Malachy Glanovsky), with plots to police the neighborhood and slap any malefactors, who might, for instance, say a dirty word, into the jail he claims to harbor in his basement. And Joe has a son, Chris (Ben Katz), who has served responsibly in the recent war (the setting is 1946 Ohio), and seems a chip off the old block. While we’ve no grounds to think we may be trespassing into O’Neill territory, we might reasonably suspect that the trouble in this affable collective will have something to do with Mom—Kate Keller (Marsha Mason).

Even before we meet her, we hear Joe worrying over how she will respond to the loss of a tree that split and fell over during the previous night’s storm. The tree was planted in honor of Larry, the younger son who went to war and has been MIA for over three years. Kate believes he will still turn up.

Kate Keller (Marsha Mason), Ann Deever (Fiona Robberson) in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Marsha Mason’s Kate Keller is the worried heart of this play, a woman who, it seems, has endless faith, and who navigates through the affronts the family has suffered with her dignity intact. A major factor is how she stood by Joe when he went to prison briefly. As a military supplier, Joe’s company sent substandard parts to the U.S. Airforce during the war. Twenty-one U.S. planes and pilots were lost as a result. Joe was cleared; Steve Deever, his partner, is still serving time. But if we think Kate is the staunch supportive type, watch how rigid she becomes when she realizes Chris wants to marry Ann Deever (Fiona Robberson), the gal Larry left behind and Steve’s daughter.

Later revelations will expose Kate as not only deluded in her hopes but also complicit in the shirking of responsibility that marks the elder generation in this play. It’s a complex role that has been played by Joan Plowright, Dianne Wiest, Sally Fields, Annette Bening, and others. Mason, a four-time Oscar nominee for Best Actress, has down the matronly tone that makes Kate seem a hostess to the world, but also the tough streak that makes us think no one could ever put one over on her. Her ultimate vulnerability comes with her own realization of how firmly she believed one lie so as to not have to face a harsher truth. It’s a riveting dramatic moment.

Kate Keller (Marsha Mason) in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Melia Besnussen’s firm hand on Miller’s play lets the script yield up its plot points with a steady pace, so that we get to take the measure of each character as, first, at their best and most outgoing and then, gradually, as the deniers and shirkers who have been covering up their guilty knowledge. The key exception is Ann’s brother George (Reece Dos Santos) who visits in Act II straight from his father’s jail cell with an ax to grind. The Deever kids had abandoned their father, it seems, in his disgrace, but now George has a new take on things. He comes on as the one who will finally make Joe confess he played Steve false, and, like Kate, he feels that a marriage between Ann and Chris would be a further outrage.

George Deever (Reece Dos Santos), Ann Deever (Fiona Robberson) in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

But watch how easily Kate is able to smooth over George’s ire, getting him to suddenly admit that he’s only really felt at home at the Kellers’. It’s a telling moment because the course of the play will turn on a dime and go the other way—into all the reasons we can’t trust our fondness for the Kellers. And once the full weight of the past asserts itself, we may find ourselves questioning the fantasy of home and of belonging that the play wants us to get beyond. For Miller’s play has its eye on war profiteers and all those who use “serving their country” as an excuse for all kinds of malfeasance. But the play also candidly confronts the comfortable lies that people use to defend themselves against inconvenient or even catastrophic truths. Joe’s excuse for his behavior comes down to the sorts of things we’ve heard from serial killers like Tony Soprano or from wheeling-and-dealing vipers like Logan Roy: I did it for my kids, I did it for my family. How can we deny the strength of the plea?

Joe Keller (Michael Gaston), Ann Deever (Fiona Robberson) in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Wartime demands that one stick it to one’s enemies in the name of survival and victory, but when one is sticking it to one’s partners and to one’s customers and, mortally, to one’s own country can one still tout survival above all? Any such victory feels horribly hollow. And that’s where Miller’s play takes us, as any sense of just deserts is apt to make us wonder what really could be fair or just for the people in this play.

There is much to note here that is first rate. Riw Rakkulchon’s set is a stunning use of the space, with clearly delineated segments while also fully naturalistic, as a comfortable yard behind a house that can be entered (some interesting effects are achieved by letting us see actors inside the house), with a wide expanse of water fading into sky behind. In addition to the house, actors can enter or leave the scene in three directions, making for very lively coming and going as neighbors drop in or depart, or when tensions provoke a character to storm off. Mary Louise Geiger’s lighting gives both the broad strokes of time of day and also the more subtle lightings that enhance particular scenes, and the lighting within the house has the feel of coziness that seems just right. An-lin Dauber’s costumes are period without seeming unduly dated, and have an earnest Sears Roebuck style, but for dressier moments—as when Kate gets set for a night out.

Dr. Jim Bayliss (Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr.), Kate Keller (Marsha Mason) in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

As the other star of the show, Michael Gaston’s Joe is impeccably presented, his gruff bonhomie quite likeable, his efforts to defend himself from any soul-searching full of a maudlin conviction that sentiment should be on his side. His final realization of the effects of his duplicity make for a staggering tearful moment. In the film made of the play, Edward G. Robinson, as Joe, can’t help but seem sinister and the soundtrack adds to the effect. Gaston’s Joe is much more credible as a living instance, perhaps, of Hannah Arendt’s notion of “the banality of evil.” 

Chris Keller (Ben Katz), Joe Keller (Michael Gaston) in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

More than able support comes from Ben Katz as Chris, whose outburst at his father is an emotional highpoint, full of rage, frustration and the kind of hurt love that hopes a failure can be made better; Fiona Robberson is quite memorable as Ann; though her role is often subdued, the times when she seems ready to fly off the handle have great snap and drive. As George Deever, Reece Dos Santos gets to sway our sympathies toward the Deevers while also letting us feel George’s ambivalence, now that he finds himself welcomed in the place he left behind. Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr., is also notable as Dr. Jim Bayliss, who gives us the tone Miller likes to sound, of a depressed Chorus whose sense of how dark fate will ultimately will out fills out the play. And Malachy Glanovsky hits perfectly the childish enthusiasm of Bert, giving us, early on, a reason to like Joe Keller.

Bert (Malachy Glanovsky), Joe Keller (Michael Gaston) in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Vibrant, gripping, relevant to the anxieties that should make any community or family question its unexamined truths, All My Sons is for everyone.

All My Sons
By Arthur Miller
Directed by Melia Bensussen

Scenic Design: Riw Rakkulchon; Costume Design: An-lin Dauber; Lighting Design: Mary Louise Geiger; Original Music & Sound Design: Lucas Clopton; Wig, Hair, & Makeup Design: J. Jared Jonas; Fight Director: Ted Hewlett; Voice & Dialect Coach: Julie Foh; Casting: Alaine Alldaffer; Youth Coordinator: Shelby Demke; Production Stage Manager: Nicole Wiegert; Assistant Sage Manager: Theresa Stark; Associate Artistic Director: Zoë Golub-Sass; Director of Production: Bryan T. Holcombe; General Manager: Emily Van Scoy

Cast: Marsha Mason, Michael Gaston, Yadira Correa, Reece Dos Santos, Ben Katz, Fiona Robberson, Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr., Dan Whelton, Caitlin Zoz, Malachy Glanovsky

Hartford Stage
April 11-May 5, 2024

Lives at Risk

Review of Sanctuary City, TheaterWorks, Hartford

The fragility and vulnerability of teenagers, as well as their resilient toughness and hopefulness and humor, enlivens the first half of Martyna Majok’s Sanctuary City, now playing at TheaterWorks, Hartford, directed by Jacob Padrón and Pedro Bermúdez. Set from 2001 to days before 2007, the play begins as an engaging treatment of two young lives—B (for Boy) and G (for Girl)—under much stress. Living in Newark, New Jersey, while attending a local high school, both B (Grant Kennedy Lewis) and G (Sara Gutierrez) are at risk because neither is a citizen of the United States. What’s more, G and her mother are often battered by the man they live with. It’s the violence at home that sends G scurrying up the fire escape and through B’s bedroom window, and we may think we’re watching a story of young love burgeoning under fraught circumstances.

B (Grant Kennedy Lewis) and G (Sara Gutierrez) in Sanctuary City at TheaterWorks, Hartford (photo by TheaterWorks)

Much of the first half lends itself to that reading because the story is scripted as a palimpsest of distinct moments that become almost like “routines”—such as what excuse bruised G will use to not attend school (she’s pretty much agreeable to anything but “lice”). The two kids, at greater risk of deportation in the upsurge in surveillance and prosecution (and persecution) of aliens after 9/11, are navigating not just their place in the social fabric, but their relation to each other. Always platonic, at times sibling-like, their interactions also have touches of flirtation and a wide range of intimacy. The set and reset and re-reset rhythm of their interchanges is swift and pointed, though the device of lights and sounds to separate scenes comes across almost as a sci-fi effect (unintentionally, I assume). It all culminates in a wonderfully enacted visit to a prom, that goes from skepticism to enthusiasm in almost strobe-like glimpses.

B (Grant Kennedy Lewis), G (Sara Gutierrez) in Sanctuary City at TheaterWorks, Hartford (photo by TheaterWorks)

B and G are mostly in the same boat until G’s fortunes change. Her resourceful mother not only walks out on the abusive guy but also attains naturalized citizen status and, by doing so before G turns eighteen, automatically makes G a U.S. citizen. We see that B is not entirely elated by G’s good fortune, nor by his mother’s return to the unnamed country she hails from, nor by further good fortune that comes G’s way (acceptance and scholarship at an unnamed school in Boston—we do learn that it has “books and trees”).  B, who has offered asylum to G when she needs it, and has helped her anyway he could, has plenty of concerns of his own not easily solved.

Henry (Mishka Yarovoy), G (Sara Gutierrez) in Sanctuary City at TheaterWorks, Hartford (photo by TheaterWorks)

And what of G? Her plan to help B results in the play’s most repeated routine: answering prodding and sometimes loaded questions about their alleged relations as a married couple. G, it seems, is willing to marry B to make him a citizen, but when she leaves for college, everything still hangs in the balance.

The second half takes up when G returns, three and a half years later, in response to a distressed phone call from B a month previous. The facts behind the call upset G and made her send B a letter that broke off their marriage plan; meanwhile, B spiraled into depression. G is seemingly back to make good the original plan, but B may have moved on.

In the extended scene that is the second half, the tensions that have intruded into that early rapport get the main emphasis. And that involves B’s boyfriend Henry (Mishka Yarovoy) who is hostile to G, while G can be rather callous herself. Mainly what the second half exposes is B’s weakness and self-serving willingness to make others defer to his needs. It’s a character study, ultimately, and Grant Kennedy Lewis’ B is played so neutrally and behaves so passively most of the time, we may find it hard to make a clear assessment of his nature.

B (Grant Kennedy Lewis), Henry (Mishka Yarovoy) in Sanctuary City at TheaterWorks, Hartford (photo by TheaterWorks)

Plot has been called the revelation of character and the plot of Sanctuary City seems aimed to bring the true desires of these characters to light. At the same time, while the play makes its setting in time and its characters’ status as not enjoying the full rights of straight, white citizens key to what occurs, there’s more to the story. Think of how the lovers in Romeo and Juliet can fall in love and even marry but, within the political and familial context of their lives, can’t make that marriage public. Here, B and G can marry, publicly and for reasons that are politically beneficial, but aren’t in love and won’t ever be. But that doesn’t mean they don’t love each other. And what Majok’s play very subtly lets us witness is how hard it can be to let go of whom you love and to live up to what love demands.

B (Grant Kennedy Lewis), G (Sara Gutierrez in Sanctuary City at TheaterWorks, Hartford (photo by TheaterWorks)

These lives at risk are faced with how much they are willing to risk emotionally. Sanctuary City is full of glimpses of not only what these lives are like, but also of what they might be like. The frustrations, the dreams, the hopes, the hard realities all circle in and out of these resonant interactions. Gutierrez, in particular, adds great fascination as she lets us see all kinds of shades and sides of G’s character, a character who, we are well aware by play’s end, is still a long way from fully mature. The male characters are less varied, but Yarovoy’s Henry seems perfectly cast as the somewhat fussy law-student he is; his little gasp when he sees the label of the wine G brought is so spot on it’s quite a laugh in a tense scene.

Padrón and Bermúdez have created a much busier production than the script calls for: there are hanging curtains to screen the at-times relevant, at-times distracting videos meant to give us a sense of the urban surround. The decision to have B and G sit on the floor during one scene adds a further distraction as sightlines become a problem. You may suddenly find yourself with an obstructed view. Perhaps this staging’s finest touch is the video of an open window, which has meant so much in both these young lives, that suddenly gets closer to us and seems to beckon as a way out.

Sanctuary City
By Martyna Majok
Directed by Jacob G. Padrón and Pedro Bermúdez

Set Design: Emmie Finckel; Costume Design: Sarita Fellows; Lighting Design: Paul Whitaker; Sound Design: Fabian Obispo; Projection & Video Design: Pedro Bermúdez; Casting Director: Stephanie Yankwitt/TBD Casting; Stage Manager: Tom Kosis; Intimacy Coach: Marie Percy; Assistant Set Design: Juhee Kim

Cast: Sara Gutierrez, Grant Kennedy Lewis, Mishka Yarovoy

TheaterWorks, Hartford
March 29-April 25, 2024

Come Into the Garden

Review of Escaped Alone, Yale Repertory Theatre

Much like Samuel Beckett before her, Caryl Churchill’s plays are anything but naturalistic dramas. Their theatricality is generally provocative, compelling, and oftentimes comical or at least quizzical. Such is the case with Escaped Alone, directed by Liz Diamond at Yale Repertory Theatre through March 30.

Vi (Mary Lou Rosato), Sally (Sandra Shipley), Lena (Rita Wolf), Mrs, Jarrett (LaTonya Borsay) in Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone at Yale Repertory Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

The cast consists of four women who have attained senior citizen status; Sally (Sandra Shipley), Vi (Mary Lou Rosato), and Lena (Rita Wolf) are visiting together in Sally’s garden when Mrs. Jarrett (LaTonya Borsay), a local women whom the others recognize but don’t really know, happens by. Mrs. Jarrett opens the play by addressing the audience and will close it the same way; her abrupt departure seeming to illustrate the play’s title phrase (a quotation from the Bible’s Book of Job that Herman Melville famously pressed into service in Moby-Dick): “I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”

In Job, the statement is made four times by four different messengers who tell Job of great calamities that have befallen his family and his livestock and his servants. In Churchill’s play, Mrs. Jarrett, suddenly separate from the rest, at regular intervals proclaims a litany of crisis and devastation that the playbill calls “graphic descriptions of human and environmental apocalypse." They are that, but they are also grotesque and carnivalesque and absurdist descriptions: “The hunger began when eighty percent of food was diverted to TV programmes” [. . .] “Only when cooking shows were overtaken by sex with football teams did ingredients trickle back to the shops and rice was airlifted again.” What we hear is a welter of emergency scenarios that, it may well be, we are poised more readily to take seriously than when Churchill’s play first debuted in 2016.

Mrs. Jarrett (LaTonya Borsay) in Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone at Yale Repertory Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

Each time we step out of that quiet, very English garden into Mrs. Jarrett’s flights (whether of fantasy or witness or prophecy we are never altogether sure) we are met first with a booming sound and blinding lights illuminating the audience. The device certainly creates tension, but undermines what I feel certain are meant to be comical elements in Mrs. Jarrett’s speeches. In Diamond’s production, LaTonya Borsay’s delivery has an almost unvarying pitch of barely suppressed panic. But even panic can become monotonous, and that may well be why the paucity of our imaginations is nowhere more pertinent than in the previsioning of apocalyptic scenarios. Churchill’s are richer than the norm but you’ll really have to concentrate to perceive her throughlines.

Within the garden, conversation moves agreeably amidst a range of topics, mostly small talk that serves to orient Mrs. Jarrett within the longstanding rapport of the other three, which allows them to speak in half-phrases and asides and addendums. The orchestration of the dialogue is brilliantly handled throughout. The play runs for under an hour, but you may find you would like to visit with these amiable women for much longer.

There are comments about grandchildren, former occupations, getting out of the house (or not), and acute observations (such as how neighboring countries are more likely to be antagonistic). The interplay of topics can sometimes put one or another on the spot, as when Sally talks about her testimony on behalf of Vi, when the latter was accused of murdering her husband. Such matters crop up with a comical matter-of-factness that is also speculative, as if the settled nature of these routine lives can be quite easily disrupted by a word or two too wide or too pointed.

And that of course is how these cursory topics relate to Mrs. Jarrett’s speeches, Churchill providing a verbal barrage that shows how we chatter upon a precipice and how hard it is to make speech work for us as more than directed sounds, as Lena puts it: “why move your mouth and do talking?”

Sally (Sandra Shipley) in Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone at Yale Repertory Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

Each character gets a telling spotlit moment, seated in her chair and letting us into her inner thought. For Lena, it’s how she easily withdraws from social expectations; for Vi, how she can’t bear a kitchen since that’s where her husband died; for Sally, a phobia about cats that mounts into a panicked need for someone who can make the fear go away; for Mrs. Jarrett, the single phrase “terrible rage” that—with Mrs. Jarrett played by a Black actress in this production—lands with more force than perhaps Churchill envisioned.

The resiliency of the quartet is nowhere better expressed than when they sing and dance together through a rendition of Ray Charles’ “Hit the Road, Jack,” a familiar, catchy tune that expresses an exuberance, not of escape but of assertion, as an “old woman” is addressed who is throwing a man out. It’s the most together these neighbors get and the musical number brings with it a sense of joyous renewal, as if their lives are still their own despite everything.

Vi (Mary Lou Rosato), Sally (Sandra Shipley), Lena (Rita Wolf), Mrs, Jarrett (LaTonya Borsay) in Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone at Yale Repertory Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

Lia Tubiana’s set suggests a placid world of green things bathed in Stephen Strawbridge’s day-bright lighting. Behind this garden scene stretch two huge screens that swirl and pulse with Shawn Lovell-Boyle’s projections—fire, lava, crepuscular life—during Mrs. Jarrett’s solo speeches, and depict clouds as if a time-lapse film later in the play. Costumes by Yu-Jung Shen are relaxed and colorful, with sneakers or sandals and cardigans. If at first we feel we’re calling with Mrs. Jarrett on a group of homebodies passing time, by the end we might feel we’ve stumbled on the Three Fates, speaking of “what’s past or passing or to come.”

Escaped Alone
By Caryl Churchill
Directed by Liz Diamond

Scenic Designer: Lia Tubiana; Costume Designer: Yu-Jung Shen; Lighting Designer: Stephen Strawbridge; Sound Designer: Sinan Refik Zafar; Projection Designer: Shawn Lovell-Boyle; Music Director: Liam Bellman-Sharpe; Hair Designer: Matthew Armentrout; Production Dramaturgs: Catherine Sheehy, Karoline Vielemeyer; Technical Director: Keira Jacobs; Vocal and Dialect Coach: Julie Foh; Casting Director: Calleri Jensen Davis; Stage Manager: Charlie Lovejoy

Cast: LaTonya Borsay, Mary Lou Rosato, Sandra Shipley, Rita Wolf

Yale Repertory Theatre
March 8-30, 2024  

The Treasures in Trash

Review of The Garbologists, TheaterWorks, Hartford

Collecting garbage, or, to use the more dignified name, sanitation, may be the quintessential thankless task. Not only do many people not respect it as a livelihood, but many more don’t really want to think about it. They just want trash, garbage, waste, to disappear, no questions asked.

Lindsay Joelle’s The Garbologists, playing this month at TheaterWorks directed by Artistic Director Rob Ruggiero, gives us a bit of a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the world of trash hauling. Even more, it asks us to consider the complexities of workers’ collaboration and of the empathy and enmity that can happen on the job. And when it’s a manifestly dirty job, the stakes are more fraught. The play centers on the relation between two sanitation workers or, as they jokingly refer to themselves at one point, “garbologists”: Danny (Jeff Brooks), a talky, mansplaining white guy who is an outgoing, knowledgeable veteran of the route, and Marlowe (Bebe Nicole Simpson), a somewhat withdrawn woman of color who is a newbie to the job. The two actors are perfectly cast and bring rewarding personality to the roles.

Marlowe (Bebe Nichole Simpson), Danny (Jeff Brooks) in The Garbologists at TheaterWorks, Hartford

Staged with great ingenuity by Ruggiero and his team—Marcelo Martínez García, Set Design; Joseph Shrope, Costume Design; John Lasiter, Lighting Design; Germán Martínez, Sound Design—The Garbologists gives us realism and a certain rugged romanticism. The truck’s cab, where much of the interaction takes place, provides an arena for fluctuating communications; the hopper of the trash truck figures prominently in a few scenes, as do the bags of trash to be collected, along with, at times, more surprising finds; a cozy bar is conjured up quickly for that afterwork drink that will either bring Danny and Marlowe closer or give them ample reason to resent one another more. And in the midst of what Marlowe (and we) learn about trash collecting, there is plenty they learn about each other.

As a series of vignettes driven by dialogue, The Garbologists is a welcome and entertaining reminder that, as fiction-writer Elizabeth Bowen once said, “dialogue is what characters do to each other.” There is action in the play, but most of what happens acts as an occasion for response, for discussion, for argument, and for reminiscence. Both can be snarky and temperamental, both have back stories that contribute to their day-to-day whys and wherefores, and there are certain mysteries to be understood, such as why Marlowe, with double degrees from Columbia and parents who are professors, is working on a trash truck. And why has she been assigned to Danny? And what happened to Danny’s former partner?

Marlowe (Bebe Nicole Simpson), Danny (Jeff Brooks) in The Garbologists at TheaterWorks, Hartford

The main flaw with the play comes from one of those big reveals that is meant to make it all make sense but that actually impairs the play’s sense of reality, much as all those abounding coincidences in novels of earlier eras can make readers of today feel themselves dupes of the author’s need to tie-up all loose ends. Here, it’s more like desire for a heart-tug moment defeats the steady verisimilitude the play had been building up. It’s one thing for characters to veer about emotionally, making us catch up with what is really going on with them. It’s another to feel that a key point is not acknowledged by the characters until the plot requires it.

But that’s simply to say that the play wants to make a dramatic connection between these two unlikely companions that it hasn’t really earned. What these fine character-turns by Jeff Brooks and Bebe Nichole Simpson do earn is our attention and affection and thanks for making visible workers who, as playwright Lindsay Joelle comments in the playbill, are often treated as invisible.

As is said at one point, “there’s treasure in trash”—which does seem to come true—but there’s also treasure in observing the quirks and compassion and compromises of people dedicated to doing their jobs as best they can, in anything but optimum conditions. For its 90 minutes with no intermission, The Garbologists makes the business of garbage a pleasure to behold.

The Garbologists
By Lindsay Joelle
Directed by Rob Ruggiero

Set Design: Marcelo Martínez García; Costume Design: Joseph Shrope; Lighting Design: John Lasiter; Sound Design: Germán Martínez; Casting Director: JZ Casting: Geoff Josselson, CSA, Katja Zarolinski, CSA; Stage Manager: Tom Kosis

Cast: Jeff Brooks, Bebe Nicole Simpson

TheaterWorks, Hartford
February 1-25, 2024

The Woes of the Father

Review of Simona’s Search, Hartford Stage

There’s a Biblical saying (from Deuteronomy) about the sins or iniquities of the fathers being visited upon the sons unto the third or fourth generation. In Simona’s Search, a world premiere play at Hartford Stage directed by Melia Bensussen, playwright Martin Zimmerman considers the possibility of a genetic link whereby the trauma of the parent is visited upon (or inherited by) a subsequent generation. It’s an intriguing idea, and might satisfy, one suspects, the longing for a genetic explanation for melancholy, depression, and states of anxiety and discontent that must have come from somewhere.

The play presents us with a trauma event of sorts—but it’s Simona’s, not her father’s. Having been warned not to come into her father’s room while he’s asleep, Simona (Alejandra Escalante), nine, not only does that, but brings in her friends who are visiting for a birthday celebration, and if that’s not violation enough, she hops on unsuspecting pop and puts her hand over his nose and mouth. Papi’s reflex reaction is to whack her across the room. Only someone who had experienced unspeakable horrors would behave that way, apparently. At least that’s Simona’s conclusion.

Simona (Alejandro Escalante) in Simona’s Search at Hartford Stage, photo by T. Charles Erickson

The father, played well with sympathetic indulgence and weary wariness by Al Rodrigo, is reticent about his past, so much so that it could be he’s covering up something terrible. Or it could be he just doesn’t like talking about life in his unnamed birth country. Because of what she reads as a teen, Simona diagnoses his problem as post-traumatic stress disorder and sees herself as a victim of transgenerational trauma. Though Papi would like her to study physics and seems to consider the questions it poses as the most significant in the world, she’s having none of it. Only what goes on in the psyche is worth her time. Their clash, though, isn’t portrayed as simply a difference in temperament or desire; instead, Simona takes the attitude that what her father seems to care about is only a smokescreen for what he won’t admit.

Corroboration comes from an experiment she reads about because Papi seemingly plants an article on genetic experiments among other clippings he saves for her about research in physics. Simona learns that second-generation lab rats were born with a fear of the smell of a certain flower blossom inculcated in their parental generation through the administering of electric shock. If that’s possible, then why not a daughter who inherits the dread of traumatic events her father experienced but never told her about?

Simona (Alejandro Escalante), Papi (Al Rodrigo) in Simona’s Search, Hartford Stage, photo by T. Charles Erickson

Regardless of the merits of this explanation in real world terms—and the playbill provides supporting evidence—it’s a bit of dead letter, dramatically. Simona speaks and acts from a foregone conclusion, and since she narrates most of the play, we have only her version of events. Escalante gives Simona a very earnest, measured tone that makes her vulnerable moments seem like approximations for the sake of effect. Little action is directly depicted, except Simona’s reticence with a sympathetic boyfriend, Jake (Christopher Bannow). Father and daughter are mostly at loggerheads and just when you think maybe they will have a scene together that amounts to something, it dissipates into more narration.

Jake (Christopher Bannow), Simona (Alejandro Escalante) in Simona’s Search at Hartford Stage, photo by T. Charles Erickson

Simona remains isolated by her trauma; her attempt to seek help is handled by a very facile and uninterested doctor (Rodrigo) who views her on-again, off-again haunting by a shadowy figure in her imagination as an hallucination. For Simona, it can only be a residual image of an interrogator who brutalized her father during an inferred incarceration. In a sense, Simona’s unwavering interpretation of what is causing her suffering becomes a form of obsession. The play starts to feel like listening to a recounting of personal and familial grief at an AA meeting, without being able to intervene or ask questions or even offer solace.

Bensussen does all she can to interject visual and theatrical interest into such a heavily verbal play: Hartford Stage’s space is put to good use with lively choreography by Shura Baryshnikov and projections by Yana Biryukov that can be both lovely—the blossoms—and eerie—that shadowy figure; Yu Shibagaki’s scenic design makes the shows few props seem to have metamorphic properties, while the lighting design by Aja M. Jackson and the sound design by Aubrey Dube are superb.

The show’s best theatrical moment is an interlude with a romantically inclined, French-accented, human-sized lab rat (Olivera Gajic, costume design) who steals the show. As the rat, Christopher Bannow shows yet again what a versatile actor he is, always a major asset to any production he’s in (as for instance last year’s Wolf Play at MCC in New York). The scene works because of the careful choreography and because of a sense of absurdity, fun, and weirdness—the flipside, I suppose, of a traumatic visitation.

Whatever we make of such an interlude is up to us as viewers, which is a lot better than having someone onstage telling us what everything must mean. I left the play not so much impressed by Simona’s search for the truth as cautioned by her certainty.

Papi (Al Rodrigo), Simona (Alejandro Escalante) in Simona’s Search at Hartford Stage, photo by T. Charles Erickson

Simona’s Search
By Martin Zimmerman
Directed by Melia Bensussen

Choreographer: Shura Baryshnikov; Scenic Design: Yu Shibagaki; Costume Design: Olivera Gajic; Lighting Design: Aja M. Jackson; Sound Design: Aubrey Dube; Projection Design: Yana Biryukova; Casting: Alaine Alidaffer; Dramaturgy: Kristin Leahey; Production Stage Manager: Nicole Wiegert; Assistant Stage Manager: Julius Cruz; Associate Artistic Director: Zoë Golub-Sass; Director of Production: Bryan T. Holcombe; General Manager: Emily Van Scoy

Cast: Christopher Bannow, Alejandra Escalante, Al Rodrigo

Hartford Stage
January 18-February 11, 2024 

Slings and Arrows in Chicago

Review of The Salvagers, Yale Repertory Theatre

Boseman Salvage Junior (Taylor A. Blackman) in The Salvagers at Yale Repertory Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

It’s winter in Chicago and Boseman Salvage Junior (Taylor A. Blackman) is back home after taking a degree in theater in North Carolina and then trying his luck in New York. We’re introduced to him as he shovels snow while snow still falls on a striking set (B Entsminger, Set Design) that conjures up the beauty of winter as well as the sheer weight of tons of snow. And Boseman dances, full of energy that needs an outlet. He’s not finding it in theater—as a dreadful audition we get to witness shows us—and he mainly works in a restaurant, smokes on break with Paulina Kenston (Mikayla LaShae Bartholomew), a chatty co-worker, and gets into grudge matches with his dad, Boseman Senior (Julian Elijah Martinez), a well-meaning but overbearing locksmith, and visits with his ooey-gooey mom Nedra (Toni Martin), a postal worker who feeds him pie and plays a little ritual of “so good” hugs. The Salvages are separated because—among other things—Nedra realized she’s a lesbian.

Nedra Salvage (Toni Martin), Boseman Junior (Taylor A. Blackman), Boseman Senior (Julian Elijah Martinez), Paulina Kenston (Mikayla LaShae Bartholomew) in The Salvagers at Yale Repertory Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

In short, the main attraction of Harrison David Rivers’ The Salvagers, directed in its world premiere at Yale Repertory Theatre by Mikael Burke, is that we feel for Junior but realize—at 23—he’s got to grow up out of this, now, and the question is: will he, and, if so, how will he? And, if not, how bad will it be?

Boseman Salvage Junior (Taylor A. Blackman), Paulina Kenston (Mikayla LaShae Bartholomew in The Salvagers at Yale Repertory Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

There are lots of plot points circling around that might land as a way of giving Boseman Junior direction. Maybe he will get a part in a play. Maybe he’ll get serious about Paulina—when the co-workers start to click, Junior’s mom catches on right away because her son’s mood is so improved. Maybe he’ll finally have it out with dad in some way more mature than the sullen sniping he generally indulges—and maybe Elinor Witt (McKenzie Chinn), that woman dad’s now seeing (after a cute meet when Boseman Senior opens her lock for her), will be some kind of catalyst, for bad or good. Rivers, whose intense, focused play This Bitter Earth played at TheaterWorks, Hartford, in 2022, is good at letting characters reveal themselves to us by how they pitch themselves to other characters, which works great for the two women trying to get to know Boseman Senior and Junior, respectively, but is harder for the Salvage family itself. Key to their problems is that Junior thinks he already knows all about his parents, but does he?

Nedra Salvage (Toni Martin), Boseman Salvage Senior (Julian Elijah Martinez) in The Salvagers at Yale Repertory Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

I do wish that the answer to that question took a slightly different direction than it does, as the “big reveal” is just a bit too dramatically fraught. It does the work it has to do, plotwise, as a big “hello!” to Junior, but opens up questions the story we’re given never addresses. There’s a sense at times that the plot may veer toward soap opera catastrophe, a world in which trauma is a badge of authenticity even if it feels a bit piled on.

Boseman Junior (Taylor A. Blackman), Boseman Senior (Julian Elijah Martinez) in The Salvagers at Yale Repertory Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

What keeps us in the story is the fine work by this ensemble of actors. As Boseman Senior, Julian Elijah Martinez fully inhabits a part that can be a bit underwritten. He doesn’t get major speeches, but works the small, intense moments of interaction, like mocking and helping his son while the latter has trouble with his bootlaces. A great scene later in the play has Senior and Junior one-upping each other on chin-ups: it’s wonderfully indicative of how they do and don’t get along, and how much they are cut from the same cloth. As Nedra, Toni Martin has to walk a fine line: she’s encouragement itself to her son but at the same time has to be believable as a woman who is living a lie. It’s a tough sell, and we could use a few scenes that let us see her as she really is. In supporting roles as the women trying to get to know the somewhat taciturn Boseman Salvages, Mikayla LaShae Bartholomew keeps us guessing about Paulina: she likes dumping on brunchers, regales Junior with lines from King Lear at will, and is able to get through Senior’s wall when necessary (and so seems like she was simply written to inhabit this play with no other purpose in life); McKenzie Chinn, as Elinor, is more upfront: she meets Senior, likes what she sees, goes for it, and then must confront the suppressed story that hangs over the family. She’s the one who, ultimately, must be won over if any good is going to be salvaged from the situation the Salvages are in.

Elinor (McKenzie Chinn), Boseman Senior (Julian Elijah Martinez) in The Salvagers at Yale Repertory Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

Special mention goes to Taylor A. Blackman who makes Junior a memorable example of untapped talent, depressed ambition, callous immaturity, and—to cite his man Hamlet—“that within which passeth show.” Hamlet mourns for a dead father and a mother unfaithful to her deceased husband’s memory; Junior mourns for—maybe—some time long past when he believed in his parents as a couple, or when he thought he might actually get along nicely without them. Now, back in Chicago and at dad’s, like a certain depressed prince returned to Denmark, the best he can hope for, seemingly, is discovering how rotten things really are. Blackman makes Junior a problem to himself that we ache to see solved.

Paulina Kenton (Mikayla LaShae Batholomew), Boseman Salvage Junior (Taylor A. Blackman) in The Salvagers at Yale Repertory Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

Director Mikael Burke, who did a great job this year with the fast-food kitchen dynamics of Lynn Nottage’s Clyde’s at TheaterWorks, Hartford, works the action and movement of this play to telling effect, including overlapping scenes in different locations that serve well the play’s steady forward pace. The kinetic qualities that Blackman displays so well are echoed by stage techniques—including mini-films by John Horzen and a sliding chair to simulate a subway ride—that show the kind of largess Yale Rep can bring to family drama. Kudos as well to Lighting Designer Nic Vincent for snowfalls that are poetic though not unduly sentimental. It’s not a winter wonderland feel here, but the play does make us appreciate how much we need humane warmth in a cold world.

Boseman Salvage Junior (Taylor A. Blackman) in The Salvagers at Yale Repertory Theatre (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Salvagers
By Harrison David Rivers
Directed by Mikael Burke

Choreographer: Tislarm Bouie; Scenic Designer: B Entsminger; Costume Designer: Risa Ando; Lighting Designer: Nic Vincent; Sound Designer: Stan Mathabane; Projection Designer: John Horzen; Production Dramaturg: Eric M. Glover; Technical Director: Luke Tarnow-Bulatowicz

Cast: Mikayla LaShae Bartholomew, Taylor A. Blackman, McKenzie Chinn, Toni Martin, Julian Elijah Martinez

Yale Repertory Theatre
November 24-December 16, 2023

A Pride and Prejudice to be Proud of

Review of Pride and Prejudice, Hartford Stage

The 60th anniversary season of Hartford Stage is off to a crowd-pleasing start. Playwright and actress Kate Hamill specializes in lively, contemporary adaptations of classic novels. Her bright and fun take on Jane Austen’s beloved Pride and Prejudice is given a fully frenetic realization by director Tatyana-Marie Carlo. The cast is having so much fun it all feels quite infectious.

Lydia (Zoë Kim), Mary (Madeleine Barker, back), Mrs. Bennet (Lana Young), Lizzy (Renata Eastlick) in Kate Hamill’s Pride and Prejudice at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

The plot, as you may already know, is about those Bennet sisters (here four instead of Austen’s five) residing in Regency era England. Not badly off, the young ladies are doomed to penury whenever their aloof, paper-reading pater (Anne Scurria) kicks off. A cousin—the daffy curate Mr. Collins (Sergio Mauritz Ang)—will inherit. And so Mrs. Bennet, played to the hilt and then some by Lana Young, urges upon her daughters any suitor likely to remain smitten long enough to reach the altar. Besides Collins, there’s also the very well-to-do Bingley (also Ang), and the perhaps not all he should be Wickham (also Ang), a mere lieutenant with whom Mr. Darcy (Carman Lacivita) has had disagreeable dealings. Darcy himself, the only potential suitor not played by the versatile and quite comic Ang, is given all the priggish airs you might expect in Lacivita’s icy performance. Watching him thaw despite himself is much of the fun.

Lizzy (Renata Eastlick), Jane (María Gabriela González) in Kate Hamill’s Pride and Prejudice at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

As the sisters, María Gabriela González is a lovely Jane, the one deemed a catch due to her looks, and she’s also able to twerk on beat; as Lizzy, the main heroine, Renata Eastlick is sensible and likeable, her intelligence and ease of manner making her the best Lizzy I’ve seen (this is the third version of Hamill’s play I’ve reviewed); as Lydia, the youngest, Zoë Kim somehow manages to be a credible fourteen year old, crazily spirited with a feisty naivete that Lydia would like to think precocious; then there’s Mary, whom Madeleine Barker plays as a cross between the Addams family’s Morticia and that girl that crawls out of the TV set in The Ring—a kind of funny, frightening and striking character that has to be seen to be believed (and enjoyed).

Miss Bingley (Madeleine Barker), Mr. Darcy (Carman Lacivita) in Kate Hamill’s Pride and Prejudice at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Other characters played by this energetic cast include: Madeleine Barker’s supercilious turn as turbaned Miss Bingley, sister of Bingley—who tends to approach romance as would an affectionate pet; Anne Scurria scurrying between wearing Mr. Bennet’s pants and neighboring would-be bride Charlotte Lucas’s skirts; Zoë Kim, moving effortlessly between Lydia pouting and preening to the imperious mien of Lady Catherine de Bourgh (deep fanfare!); and last but not least, María Gabriela González’s hilariously unearthly sounds as Miss de Bourgh, a neurasthenic shambles swaddled like a mummy and, in Lady Catherine’s view, the perfect match for perfectly detached and unattached Mr. Darcy.

Miss de Bourgh (María Gabriela González, back), Lady Catherine de Bourgh (Zoë Kim) in Kate Hamill’s Pride and Prejudice at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

The show opens with one of those mannered dances dear to the period, a signal that Carlo’s take is not going to foreground the gamesmanship that Hamill herself underscores via Lizzy’s comments on marriage as a contest with winners and losers; rather, the Hartford Stage production seems rather to concern itself with ritual and theatrics, seeing in the mating game the setting for so much of our ideas of how to act, look, dress, speak, move and so forth. Watching the varied displays of this busy staging is to glimpse what it’s like to live in a culture where someone is always watching, where public events—like balls (and how Mrs. Bennet loves balls!)—are occasions as deliberate as putting on a play. It’s all show-biz? Yes, and then some.

Lizzy (Renata Eastlick) in Kate Hamill’s Pride and Prejudice at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Lizzy, famously, is having none of it, until . . .  As her doting dad says on two occasions, “ask not for whom the bell tolls.” When Lizzy has to confront her own feelings she has to do so without the kinds of pretense that serve so well the game or ritual or manner of this comedy of manners. Did anyone ever get so great a reaction from setting a sheet of paper in front of a sodden suitor?

Mr. Darcy ( Carman Lacivita), Lizzy (Renata Eastlick) in Kate Hamill’s Pride and Prejudice at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Such are some of the many delights enacted here. Prepared to be tickled by things like Mr. Bennet brandishing a wig atop a stick draped with tatters of fabric to stand in for Mary (Barker then onstage as Miss Bingley), or the many times a little bell is rung to precede a visitor/suitor or other perhaps game-changing announcement, or the many times a cast member must react with surprise, shock or horror at the sudden appearance of Mary—as well as matters a bit more subtle, such as the way Lydia precipitates herself into wedlock not thinking that in “winning” (by being the first daughter married) she has lost something she might only begin to understand now; or the way Charlotte finds a way to live with Mr. Collins, as he crows offstage about his garden growths; or the way Mr. Bennet imagines it is just possible he may outlive his dutiful wife, who is always so concerned with how the family will manage without him.

The cast of Kate Hamill’s Pride and Prejudice at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Such matters used to be called “the war between the sexes,” but Austen and Hamill know it’s not an outright war so much as an ongoing negotiation that both sides engage in for the thrill of it all. Otherwise, what is there to do?  That question can’t honestly be asked in a culture where women cannot inherit and must marry so as to survive, where work, as such, is beneath everyone at this level of society, and so ladies must hitch their star to a man who has property or who is likely to rise socially. Sinecures are nice as well. While Austen’s novels tread this terrain with a knowing wink or grimace at all the subterfuges needed to achieve secure ends, Hamill can let it all hang out, placing the skirmish front and center with a kind of “on your mark, get set, go” urgency.

The cast of Kate Hamill’s Pride and Prejudice at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

The matches made are the same but the spectacle they make is the fun. Ably supported by Hartford Stage’s large open playing space—making a drawing room or garden or ballroom very much a playground—decorated with Scenic Designer Sara Brown’s sense of how to create visual interest (early on, there aren’t enough chairs to go around so Lizzy must push a cushion to center stage), the show also benefits from Shura Baryshnikov’s varied Choreography, Aja M. Jackson’s subtle Lighting Design, original music and sound design by Daniel Baker & Co (there are also a few popular songs that anachronistically surface for comic effect), and, particularly, Haydee Zelideth’s fantasies of era Costumes, the colors tend to be rich—like Lizzy’s true blue Plain Jane gown—and patterns abundant, and where, as was true to the time, the flouncier your skirt the higher you stood in status so that Lady Catherine wears clothes that might well swallow a lesser being. Meanwhile, Sergio Mauritz Ang gets to appear as curate, soldier, and affable love-smitten coxcomb by turns, switching costumes and mannerisms as needed. It’s dizzying.

Mr. Bennet (Anne Scurria, back), Mary Bennet (Madeleine Barker) in Kate Hamill’s Pride and Prejudice at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Mary—ever ready to announce an apothegm scored from the manners on display around her—at one point points out the difference between pride and vanity. No one listens, but we hear her, and her comment serves well the entire production. To be vain is to be concerned with what others think of you; to be proud is to esteem yourself for your own virtues. Tatyana-Marie Carlo’s version of Kate Hamill’s Pride and Prejudice, from Jane Austen’s novel, at Hartford Stage through November 5, has much to be proud of.

Pride and Prejudice
By Kate Hamill
Adapted from the novel by Jane Austen
Directed by Tatyana-Marie Carlo

Choreographer: Shura Baryshnikov; Scenic Design: Sara Brown; Costume Design: Haydee Zelideth; Lighting Design: Aja M. Jackson; Original Music & Sound Design: Daniel Baker & Co.; Wig Design: Earon Nealey; Vocal & Dialect Coach: Jennifer Scapetis-Tycer; Fight Director: Teniece Divya Johnson; Casting: Alaine Alldaffer; Production Stage Manager: Anaïs Bustos; Assistant Stage Manager: Theresa Stark; Associate Artistic Director: Zoë Golub-Sass; Director of Production: Bryan T. Holcombe; General Manager: Emily Van Scoy

Cast: Sergio Mauritz Ang, Madeline Barker, Renata Eastlick, Maria Gabriela González, Zoë Kim, Carman Lacivita, Anne Scurria, Lana Young

Hartford Stage
October 12-November 5, 2023