Until the 2008 election, race was the crucible of American life — the original sin of the US Constitution, the wedge issue of the Civil War, the seething resentment that continued to boil over into riots, marches, and assassinations. Then in November 2008, Barack Obama was elected president. We were now beyond our racial hangups and divisions.
So in 2009, the floodgates have opened up in New York City, and Broadway is having the conversation in earnest.
Not that talking about race was banned before. Sue and I saw The Color Purple during our 2006 pilgrimage to the Great White Way. A year earlier, we braved the frigid winter cold to marvel at August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean. Those two shows, by revered African American writers, were certainly powerful, but white folk played only peripheral roles in the drama.
The 2009-10 Broadway season boasts more racially-conscious — and confrontational — musicals and plays than ever before. Nor can any of these shows be accused of addressing the issue obliquely. In David Mamet’s Race, a team of lawyers, one black and one white, brainstorms how they will defend a high-profile white client accused of raping a black woman. Tracy Letts’s Superior Donuts explores the mutual suspicions of an aging white hippy shop owner who hires a young black writer as his assistant.
Musicals stretching back to Show Boat have been part of the ongoing symposium — but only intermittently. This season, we’ve already seen Memphis, loosely based on the life of 50s deejay Dewey Philips. Huey, as he’s now called, not only plays black music on a white radio station, he has the temerity to kiss his black girlfriend while she’s singing on his TV show. Ten days after Memphis rocked New York, a reshaped Finian’s Rainbow was revived, where a bigoted U.S. Senator from the Deep South suffers the humiliation of becoming black.
With In the Heights and the revival of West Side Story opening earlier in 2009 — and the 2008 revival of South Pacific still going strong — America as melting pot is very much on Broadway’s front burner as the new decade begins. Question is, are audiences eager to taste the gumbo? We have a split decision there: while Race and Memphis seem to be building audience despite lukewarm reviews, Superior Donuts closed on January 3, and Finian’s Rainbow — in spite of glowing reviews — closed on January 17.
Here’s how I saw those shows, plus four others on and off-Broadway, during our annual winter getaway:
Broadway
• Superior Donuts (***3/4 out of 4) — Lacking the epic length and sweep of August: Osage County, Tracy Letts’s compact new drama has been unfairly belittled. It’s a tightly woven Chicago tapestry with people as precisely drawn as those who converged on Osage and finely nuanced relationships between them. Besides the white and black protagonists, there are a white and black cop, two Russian immigrants, two Uptown hoodlums, and a daffy old woman named Lady Boyle.
Letts expertly stirs all these urbanites into his storyline, strewing suspense and violence along the way that counterpoise the sharp comedy and budding romance. Michael McKean brings a grizzled Willie Nelson charm to Arthur, the taciturn Polish hippie who owns Superior Donuts, while Jon Michael Hill is bursting with ideas, energy, and eagerness to learn as Franco, his new assistant.
There’s more to both of them than meets the eye. Franco has written what he hopes is the Great American Novel, and Arthur is eager to read it. But Franco won’t show Arthur his manuscript unless the boss can name ten black poets. The outcome of this friendly wager deftly foreshadows the horrors to come.
Kate Buddeke is delightful as Officer Randy, the female cop who yearns for Arthur. While applying pointers on how to properly make doughnuts, Franco schools Arthur on the fact that Randy is “ready to go” if he’ll only ask. That Arthur picks and chooses from the advice Franco offers on courtship is just one of the delights to be found in Letts’s sensitively calibrated realism.
With its colorful offbeat characters — and more modest production demands — Superior Donuts could wind up attracting far more interest than August: Osage from community and regional theaters. It may not be superior to the Pulitzer Prize winner, but it’s very, very good.
• In the Next Room or the vibrator play (***1/2) — Can you imagine a highly educated man and a mature married woman engaging in sexual relations with neither participant aware of it? Playwright Sarah Ruhl, whose The Clean House delighted Actor’s Theatre audiences in 2007, makes it happen in her new comedy. Bringing this improbability hilariously to life, Ruhl transports us back to the 1880s, when electrical appliances — such as the vibrator — were a novelty and American homes were not yet universally lit by electric bulbs.
Michael Cerveris gives us an exquisite portrait of Dr. Givings, who accepts the prevailing wisdom that the signature woman’s disease of the day, hysteria, had its root causes in the womb. With one hand, Givings applies the vibrator to a zone that medicine had yet to identify as erogenous, leaving the other hand free to clock his treatment with a stopwatch. Meanwhile, in a performance from Maria Dizzia that is pure starch with outbreaks of wild eroticism, the doctor’s patient, Mrs. Daldry, is experiencing intense relief from her affliction.
Compounding the comedy is the doctor’s wife, who is instinctively jealous of the orgasms manufactured by the miraculous appliance — and willing to be diagnosed with hysteria if that’s what it takes to get in on the action. Mrs. Givings’ journey to self-awareness is the core of the story, and Laura Benanti triumphs in the role.
Though he couldn’t possibly benefit from a hysterectomy, there is a male hysteric in the mix, an artistic Lothario when he has been buoyed by treatments with Dr. Givings’ special invention, the Chattanooga Vibrator. Chandler Williams plays him to the hilt.
You have to see this when you get the chance. (Closed January 10)
• Memphis (***1/4) — Telling its story of how a dauntless eccentric deejay brings black music to previously lily-white “middle-of-the-dial” radio stations, Memphis rocks and doo-wops with some gospelized testimony along the way. It also packages an astonishing performance by Chad Kimball as Huey, arguably the most charismatic new male role in American musical theatre since The Producers premiered in 2001.
Kimball bobs and weaves and boogies with every step, seemingly incapable of moving in a straight line or without some inner obsessive rhythm. Oozing a nasal drawl that’s more Kentucky than Tennessee, he’s unflappable and implacable, both in his courtship of soul goddess Felicia and in his championing of the black music she embodies — in a uniquely funky style that weds elements of Spike Jones and Thelonious Monk.
Montego Glover comes fairly close as Felicia to deserving all the adulation that Huey lavishes upon her. Or as close as the David Bryan-Joe DiPietro songs will allow. Though the DiPietro script could use a more emphatic ending, the show brilliantly depicts the tensions between the races and unsparingly defines the differences between North and South. Yes, Felicia can head up to New York, avoid the bigots who violently oppose her liaison with Huey, and rev up her career. But for Huey to bring his daily TV show to the Big Apple — and go national with his broadcast — he must do the bidding of network execs and ditch all the black kids dancing for the cameras in favor of whites.
The ending — back in Memphis, of course — could be more emphatic if DiPietro himself hadn’t neglected the kids, black and white, who made the rock-soul-doo-wop revolution happen anyhow. Only a wisp of the full Hairspray chemistry is duplicated, with outstanding performances from J. Bernard Calloway as Felicia’s club-owner brother and Cass Morgan as Huey’s white trash Mama. If the supporting cast were anything less than outstanding, we wouldn’t be able to tear our eyes away from Kimball.
• Race (***1/4) — These days, David Mamet doesn’t write the fragmented, scatological, precisely idiomatic dialogue that made him so fresh and unique when American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross established his greatness. But we can hardly say Mamet has mellowed, entering his seventh decade. While his rhetoric is retro, leaning toward the Shavian bite of his prose work, his thrust, first with November about a Bush-like incumbent and now with Race, has grown more high-profile and hot-button.
Richard Thomas, last seen here as the Everyman lead in 12 Angry Men, has a nastier edge to him as Charles Strickland, the celeb plutocrat accused of raping his black paramour — but that nastiness isn’t on the surface. So Thomas is a perfect fit. Likewise, James Spader as the cagey lawyer Jack Lawson is very much a continuation of Spader’s Emmy-winning exploits as Alan Shore on Boston Legal. Lawson is a wonderful creation who can be depended on to speak with disarming privileged-communication candor.
True, none of the advice Lawson gives his client — and none of the zingers he blithely tosses around during his firm’s strategizing brainstorming — pertains specifically to America during the Obama Presidency. But that doesn’t rob Mamet’s new piece, where Lawson is his mouthpiece on race, of its stinging relevance. Compounding the juiciness of the discussion, Lawson’s associates, law partner Henry Brown (David Alan Grier) and hotshot legal clerk Susan (Kerry Washington), are both black. Yes, Susan can empathize with the alleged rape victim, but this is Mamet, so the tensions and conflicts don’t develop or unravel predictably.
Mamet leans a little too much on Susan’s activist tendencies in driving his plot. He also overreaches when he repeatedly uses Lawson as his mouthpiece for the notion that preparing a great courtroom defense is like constructing a fine drama. The ending is slick and provocative enough, but we’re left with the suspicion that Mamet has lost interest in his defendant as a character once he’s through with him as an example.
• Finian’s Rainbow (**1/4) — After admiring “Old Devil Moon” for decades, I admit that I was nearly in tears when I finally heard this great standard sung as a love duet in its original dramatic context. Nearly the same goosebumps struck on “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?” sung by perky colleen Sharon McLonergan before she is smitten by Missitucky troubadour Woody Mahoney. The Burton Lane-Yip Harburg songlist also includes “Look to the Rainbow,” “Necessity,” and “That Great Come-and-Get-It Day.”
That handsome musical cargo explains why this full-scale revival, the first since the original production shuttered in 1948 after 725 performances, was so eagerly awaited. Trouble is, David Ives and Arthur Perlman’s adaptation of the Harburg-Fred Saidy book is incurably lame in dealing with the core problems of a show that was topical and politically correct in 1947. Few can recall the bluster of Senator Theodore Gilmore Bilbo, the Mississippi racist and proud Klansman originally satirized in the character of Senator Rawkins. Have the Senator wearing blackface as an errant wish on a pot of stolen leprechaun’s gold turns him into one of the race he despises? No way.
Two actors, David Schramm and Chuck Cooper, split the role. As for the oppressed sharecroppers of Rainbow Valley, they aren’t quite as black or downtrodden. They are half black and half white, a phenomenon that took no counting to confirm, since the entire citizenry pairs off in biracial couples whenever an ensemble dance breaks out.
Jim Norton, so wondrously irritating in The Seafarer in 2008, is utterly charming as Finian, Sharon’s impish father. Christopher Fitzgerald, as the leprechaun pursuing him — and finding himself growing alarmingly more human when he spends time with Sharon — bonds with the dopiness of his costume in two dubious novelty numbers, “Something Sort of Grandish” and “When I’m Not Near the Girl I Love.” Cheyenne Jackson and Kate Baldwin do their best as Woody and Sharon, but they can’t lift a show that, stripped of its original satiric bite, has no more suspense or drama than a Saturday morning cartoon. Except in their magical, old devil duet. (Closed January 17)
Off-Broadway
• Our Town (***3/4) — Be it Henry Fonda’s or Paul Newman’s, the cracker-barrel charm of our host has long been a production staple whenever this Thornton Wilder classic transports us to the Yankee simplicity of Grover’s Corner, New Hampshire. Yet he’s actually supposed to be a Stage Manager, not a Village Elder, so director David Cromer’s idea to have him shed his briar pipe and greet us instead with a clipboard — and a detached, efficient, plain-speaking demeanor — makes a lot of sense.
It also darkens the script considerably, for the Stage Manager’s mostly dispassionate attitude very much echoes that of the dead souls we find in Act 3. And Wilder’s empirical view of the universe itself. Yes, it’s a bit of a slap in the face when the Stage Manager roles over the Yankee turns of phrase without a trace of accent, as early as his first paragraph, when he tells us “The morning star gets wonderful bright” or points to “the holla’ by the river.” But he has already told us the names of the playwright and the leading actors in the show, so Cromer is just shedding one more pretense.
Cromer actually came back to the Barrow Street Theatre to do the Stage Manager over the holidays, giving me the opportunity to see the production exactly as he originally intended it. As the romantic leads, James McMenamin brings a pleasing patina of nonchalant conceit to George Gibbs, and Jennifer Grace endows Emily Webb with a perfect mix of braininess and upright ordinariness. What I missed was the blushing youthfulness of the protagonists that I saw up in Greensboro at the superb Triad Stage production of 2003 and the dewier adolescent chemistry they radiated. Usually on the periphery as Constable Warren, George Demas replaced Armand Schultz on the night we saw the show as Doc Gibbs, George’s dad, and was the best I’ve ever seen in that role. In other words: this is one very talented cast.
The production adheres religiously to Wilder’s no-props, black-box aesthetic until Cromer unveils a dazzling surprise in Act 3 that had me in tears. Profoundly satisfying.
• Circle Mirror Transformation (***1/2) — Seeing Annie Baker’s new drama a week before revisiting Our Town certainly underscored the similarities between the two scripts, which go beyond the New England setting in Shirley, Vermont. Scenery is similarly impoverished, with all the vignettes occurring in a nondescript rehearsal studio where we follow the progress of a spacey New Age acting course led by the moderately bohemian Marty, sparsely populated with her husband, an awkwardly repressed 16-year-old girl, a lonely divorced carpenter, and the newcomer to Shirley, a pretty actress who stirs up all the modest complications.
Although there is no narrator here, Baker views her characters with a clear-eyed objectivity reminiscent of Wilder that gradually unmasks all their weaknesses and frailties, enhancing their appeal in the process. There’s even an abrupt 10-year flash-forward after the seven-week course that adds sharp perspective, even if it isn’t quite cosmic.
Actors who have been subjected to the mumbo-jumbo that extols preparation, preparation, and more preparation to the neglect of actual acting will especially savor Baker’s witty little gem. But there’s a deep Chekhovian paradox woven into the action, things moving rather quickly while they seem to be static, that will appeal to all. Deidre O’Connell as Marty, Peter Friedman as her husband, Reed Birney as the carpenter, and Heidi Schreck as the actress form a cordial and uniquely candid love quadrangle, while Tracee Chimo as the teen retains her outsider edge as she passes through the threshold of adulthood.
Of course, all of the rituals in Marty’s class aren’t hokum. Over the course of the play, each of the students — and the teacher — stands in front of the group and introduces him or herself as if they were one of their classmates. Empathy truly is a part of personal growth, as valuable in life as it is onstage. Then there’s the climactic exercise where everyone writes down a secret they’ve never shared with anyone. Danger: high explosives. (Extended through January 31)
• Zero Hour (***1/4) — No matter how much you love Zero Mostel and no matter how much you think you know about him, this one-man show, written and performed by Jim Brochu, will expand your knowledge and affections. Unless you’re not tolerant toward Mostel’s left-leaning politics.
The great comedian’s ruling passion, it turns out, wasn’t the stage. Rather from the time he was a wee lad, it was painting, and we catch Zero in his studio as he answers unheard questions posed to him by an invisible interviewer from the New York Times. Nor is the real-life Mostel to be confused with the milky apolitical Tevye he portrayed. At satisfying length, we’re reminded that he refused to rat on his colleagues when subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1955 and was blacklisted as a result.
Brochu’s flamboyant coif and makeup are so close to Mostel’s that the audience breaks into applause when he first turns around to face them. The sound of his voice, his inflections, and his mannerisms are even more uncanny copies. You’ll also be happy to find, once Brochu gets rolling, that the title of the show does not refer to its length.
I’m only disappointed that the rage Zero expends on the Commie hunters of the 50s — and the havoc they wreaked among his friends — comes somewhat at the expense of getting more insights on the performer we’ve adored in Fiddler, The Producers, and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. More schmaltz, please! Brochu’s résumé includes the lead roles in both Mostel musicals on that list, so he should find some pretext for giving us a taste. Wouldn’t hurt. (Closing on January 31)
This article appears in Jan 12-18, 2010.
