Michael Dale's Theatre Crawl - The Power and Influence of Activist Theatre
By Michael Dale
Stephan Morrow in Darkness After Night: Ukraine (Photo: Jonathan Slaff)
This week…
Darkness After Night: Ukraine at Theater For The New City through January 8. Tickets $15, Seniors/Students $12.
Your Own Personal Exegesis at Lincoln Center’s Claire Tow Theatre through December 31. Tickets $30.
I’m looking forward to…
Paper Kraine at The Kraine Theatre, December 28 and the last Wednesday of most months. An unpredictable, curated open stage for artists to present new works based on a given theme. Tickets $15 or whatever you can afford, with proceeds donated to a selected non-profit organization.
From Aristophanes’ Lysistrata helping to bring an end to the Peloponnesian War to Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart calling attention to the fear and indifference behind the downplaying of the AIDS crisis…
…and other examples beyond, activist theatre has historically played an important role in both documenting and influencing public opinion.
I caught playwright/director/actor Stephen Morrow’s Darkness After Night: Ukraine two days after President Volodymyr Zelenskyy took a brief break from the front lines of his country’s defense against Russian aggression to address a joint session of the United States Congress to plea his case for weaponry support.
While I won’t venture a guess as to any influence Morrow’s play may someday have on the future of that conflict, I can say with certainty that it’s written with passion and a concern for humanity.
In his fictitious story, Morrow plays a Russian logistics commander who, after witnessing his country’s attack on a children’s hospital, decides to defect to the other side. He’s captured and treated as a traitor by military men who are convinced their cause is just. One prison guard in particular (George Lugo) has no sympathy for anyone endangering the life of his son, who is stationed at the front.
The action is primarily the doomed prisoner’s memories of events that brough him to this point, including his friendship with a man who has risen to Putin-like power (Joe Marshall), a romance with a woman (Emile Bienne) that turns political and the possibility of a prisoner swap.
I saw the play last Friday night, when icy winds and single-digit temperatures kept most New Yorkers inside and I felt great admiration for the ensemble of actors skillfully playing their roles to only a handful of audience members.
Darkness After Night: Ukraine is very much a work in progress at this point. The playwright’s notes include the possibility of using the script as the screenplay for an independent film, which explains its structure as a series of short, surface-scratching scenes presented with static staging that seems more appropriate for cinema than the stage. I’d be interested to see how this piece may develop (hopefully it will be dated soon enough), but at this part of the process a play needs the reactions of a full audience to find its proper direction. At $15 a ticket, I’d say it’s worth the effort to be a part of the process.
As much as I enjoy Lincoln Center’s opera, ballet, symphonies and Bartlett Sher revivals…
…in recent years, my favorite visits to the complex have been to see what’s happening at the Claire Tow Theater, the 112-seat venue built above the Beaumont that’s certainly the fanciest theater in New York where all tickets are $30. I always advise friends to arrive a bit early for drinks in the nice lobby lounge (closed at the moment due to COVID) and to spend a little time on the lovely rooftop terrace, which has a set of upright binoculars with a curiously direct view of the Hotel Empire’s windows.
Since opening in 2012, the Tow has been the home of LCT3, dedicated to building new audiences with inexpensive tickets and plays by emerging writers. Their first decade track records has been pretty impressive, including Ayad Akhtar’s Pulitzer-winning Disgraced and Antoinette Nwandu’s Pass Over, the play that reopened Broadway after the COVID closure.
If I were a churchgoer, I’m sure I would have gotten more of the references and parallels drawn in their current offering, Julia May Jonas’ Your Own Personal Exegesis, but that didn’t keep me from enjoying the play and director Anne Tippe’s humorous and thoughtful production.
Cole Doman and Hannah Cabell in Your Own Personal Exegesis (Photo: Jeremy Daniel)
The story commences on Christmas Eve 1995 at “the (redacted) Church” of “(redacted), New Jersey” where the self-styled cool youth minister opens sermons with jokes and fakes baring her claws when telling the kids to call her by her nickname, Rev Kat.
Based on info dropped in the script, Rev Kat seems to be in her mid-30s and in portraying her, Hannah Cabell gives off a big sister vibe to the rest of the cast, who play older teens.
Though she vents frustration over sexist attitudes she feels are regulating her to running youth groups instead of leading services for the general congregation, it isn’t long before the stereotype of kids being safer with women is severely challenged by her actions. Palpable sexual tension is witness at the charity dance marathon between Rev Kat and 18-year-old Chris (Cole Doman), an athletic and sensitive new church member she’s helping through family troubles.
Her rehearsal of a church play setting the story of David and Bathsheba during the Vietnam War era includes a rather inappropriate session of intimacy direction and when she assigns Chris to play Jesus in the Good Friday cross carry, it’s an obvious excuse for her to get close to his disrobed physique. Meanwhile, Rev Kat is oblivious to the fact that two girls (Mia Pak and Annie Fang) have been wearing baggy clothes that cover up how their bodies are shrinking from eating disorders.
Played as a subtly quirky comedy, Jonas and Tippe’s intention may be to play off the stereotypical trust audience members could have for the woman minister - the attitude Rev Kat says is what’s holding her career back - until Your Own Personal Exegesis reveals itself as a coming of age story where it’s the adult who needs to grow up.
“If musician ruled the world, there’d be no war,”…
…proclaims Michael Garin, one-quarter of The Habibi Kings, specialists in music from North Africa and the Middle East. But he’s quick to add, “Nothing else would get done.”
I’ve become a big fan of this combo in the past several years, though they’ve been playing together for over three decades. Founded by New York piano lounge mainstay Garin and two of Broadway’s The Band’s Visit alums, Egyptian-born percussionist Ossama Farouk and Israeli-born violinist Samir Shukry, their inspiration comes from a golden age when music nightly spilled onto the streets of Manhattan’s 8th Avenue south of 33rd Street from restaurants and nightclubs catering to a mixture of Arab, Israeli, Greek, Turkish, Armenian and Iranian guests, sharing their love for the melodies of their homelands.
Eventually Garin’s cabaret vocalist wife, Mardie Millit, entered the mix, adding flavors of musical theatre and American songbook.
I was thrilled to grab a great table for their holiday show last week in the basement of Hunt & Fish Club, the snazzy Theatre District steak and seafood joint located smack between the Belasco and the Hudson. (Their Caramelized Blood Orange Cheesecake is high on my list for post-theatre desserting.)
Habibi Hannukah provided their usual lively mix of cultural samples that quickly had patrons claiming spots on the dining room floor for rug-cutting, especially when belly dancer Sira started working the crowd.
Keep your ears open for swaths of Gershwin or The Rolling Stones to blend with Middle Eastern standards like "Habibi Ya Nour Al Ein" and Shukry’s international hit "Rona”. You might be surprised to realize how easily a certain Sondheim classic can lead into "The Dreidel Song", or to learn that a line of Mohamed Fawzi’s multi-language “Ya Mustafa” translates to “Darling, I adore you, like tomato sauce.”
Now, that’s true love in any tongue.
Curtain Line…
What if Elsa Schraeder sang "What Would You Do?" in the second act of The Sound of Music and Fraulein Schneider sang "No Way To Stop It" in the second act of Cabaret?