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 seems 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 an 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  

If You Can't Stand the Heat. . .

Review of The Hot Wing King, Hartford Stage

Cooking is a lot like theater: you need the right mix of the right ingredients. Katori Hall’s Pulitzer-winning play The Hot Wing King offers light, sassy dialogue among a joshing group of gay men, a splash of impromptu musical numbers, a deep soak of caring and confrontational talk, and an infusion of spicey issues of gender, race, and sexuality. Directed by Christopher D. Betts, the play is a study in how friendship and erotic relations and family obligations can all simmer together, involving us all in the way they play out. It’s a heady mix that drew enthusiastic responses from the matinee crowd Sunday at Hartford Stage where it plays through March 24.

Cordell (Bjorn DuPaty) has left behind a wife and sons in St. Louis to move in with his lover Dwayne (Calvin M. Thompson) in Memphis. Dwayne is a hotel manager with a nice house where Cordell, as yet unemployed, feels his second-class status. Cordell’s chief way of asserting himself as the action opens is in concocting recipes for hot chicken wings and entering his creations in a local contest. To that end, Dwayne and two of their friends, Isom (Israel Erron Ford) and Big Charles (Postell Pringle) are pressed into service to help—whether it’s dismembering chickens or stirring a huge vat of sauce counter-clockwise for five hours or soaking wood chips. Cordell is a man with a mission and much of the first half hour or so is mostly the gossiping, joking, preening and one-upping of this colorful group of friends and lovers.

Big Charles (Postell Pringle), Dwayne (Calvin M. Thompson), EJ (Marcus Gladney, Jr.), Isom (Israel Erron Ford, seated), Cordell (Bjorn DuPaty) in The Hot Wing King at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Plot points begin to surface when we learn that Dwayne has guilty feelings for having called the police to help his distraught sister, who had mental troubles and addiction problems, and was killed in the confrontation. His sister’s son, “EJ” (Marcus Gladney, Jr.), eventually shows up seeking asylum from a makeshift household with his father TJ (Alphonso Walker Jr.), a hustler viewed as “a thug” by the genteel types in Dwayne’s home.

TJ (Alphonso Walker Jr) in The Hot Wing King at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Tensions percolate aplenty: besides Cordell’s feeling that Dwayne makes all his own decisions as though they are not in a relationship, there’s also Cordell’s feeling that he can’t take on helping out Dwayne’s nephew when his own sons won’t even speak to him for abandoning their mother. Meanwhile whatever Big Charles and Isom have going has its own prickly edges, and EJ, who has been known to pilfer in the past, has possible behavioral issues. TJ has his own issues with his son spending so much time around gay men.

Isom (Israel Erron Ford), Big Charles (Postell Pringle), Cordell (Bjorn DuPaty), Dwayne (Calvin M. Thompson) in The Hot Wing King at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

The verbal hectoring and ribbing can sometimes run a bit thick, and I suspect that Dialect and Voice Coach Cynthis Santos DeCure had quite a job keeping everyone on point for the local accent which, coupled with the slang and street phrases, can make one wish for subtitles at times. Then too this is a physically busy play, with well-orchestrated use of space and body language, and lots of movement throughout Emmie Finckel’s well-appointed two-level set, including a side basketball patio where some of the more intense dialogues take place. Jahise LeBouef’s costumes sport vibrant colors, and there are interludes at a piano and jokey song performances with cooking implements as microphones. Shortly before the break there’s an “oh no” moment that earns gasps, setting up comic repercussions in the second half.

As we settle in after intermission it’s easy to feel at home with these folks, and we want to see how their ad hoc household is going to work out its snags. To that end, there are great moments from both Marcus Gladney, Jr., as EJ, who finally has to dump on his uncle for not respecting him; and from Alphonso Walker Jr. who gives TJ a deeply thoughtful portrayal, quite welcome for its gravitas. Anything but grave, Israel Erron Ford’s Isom is the live-wire, life-of-the-party type with the accessories and attitudes to match; he’s also got moves and a voice that convince us he might be more than all show. Postell Pringle’s Big Charles is the kind of guy who is generally taxed with “keeping it real,” a sports-watching couch potato who gives a regular Joe feel to the group.

Everett “EJ” (Marcus Gladney, Jr.), Cordell (Bjorn DuPaty, foreground) in The Hot Wing King at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

As the sparring couple trying to make things work, Cordell and Dwayne can both feel a bit immature, but also familiar enough in their uncertainty about to how to cope with what they feel. There’s an intimate moment between them at one point that goes a long way to help us see that their bond is real, even if their day-to-day situation has them doubting it. And both Bjorn DuPaty and Calvin M. Thompson walk well the throughlines of high comedy and the deep dives of feeling that their roles require.

Dwayne (Calvin M. Thompson), Cordell (Bjorn DuPaty) in The Hot Wing King at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Lively and colorful like a party you were glad you got invited to, The Hot Wing Kings also feels at times like an insular gathering where you’ve got to bring a certain spirit—and not just an enthusiasm for wings—in order to gain admittance. Even at its most carefree, the tone seems aimed to prove something, such as the way these lives matter and the way they have to find—even within a certain amount of sit-com trappings—a valid way to represent truth.

The Hot Wing King
By Katori Hall
Directed by Christopher D. Betts

Scenic Design: Emmie Finckel; Costume Design: Jahise LeBouef; Lighting Design: Adam Honoré; Sound Design: Kathy Ruvuna; Dialect and Voice Coach: Cynthis Santos DeCure; Casting: Aliane Alldaffer; Production Stage Manager: Bernita Robinson; Assistant Stage Manager: Makayla Beckles; Associate Artistic Director: Zoë Golub-Sass; Director of Production: Bryan T. Holcombe; General Manager: Emily Van Scoy

Cast: Bjorn DuPaty, Israel Erron Ford, Marcus Gladney Jr., Postell Pringle, Calvin M. Thompson, Alphonso Walker Jr.

Hartford Stage
February 29-March 24, 2024

And Baby Makes Three

Review of Cry It Out, New Haven Theater Company

A play that looks at the expectations that drive and surround motherhood, Molly Smith Metzler’s Cry It Out is funny and touching, and thought-provoking. The story focuses on two new mothers inhabiting different social levels but sharing a joyful preoccupation with their newfound roles. Both are on maternity leave from work, but Lina (Deena Nicol-Blifford), a cheery and earthy medical worker, already knows when her time will be up. Jessie (Jenny Schuck), a lawyer who may be up for partnership, is wrestling with her desire to remain a fulltime mom and not return to the workforce, despite the plans of her husband, Nate (never seen).

The play’s action takes place in the adjacent backyards of the women’s homes where the duo relax during nap times with coffee and confidences. We learn a lot about how these women see themselves and the issues and joys of parenthood, and their rapport is heartening and entertaining. Lina, while she can take potshots aplenty at the tastes and assumptions of her friend (“Whole Foods? The nightmare is complete.”), seeks mainly to put Jessie at ease and to find and be a genuine friend. Her life is fraught with a mother and a stepmother who each in her way is a trial, and she knows that without her continued income the family will sink. Jessie, who has more options in life, has to wrestle with Nate’s longing for a home in Montauk next to his well-heeled parents, and her own traumatic memories of a birth that nearly didn’t happen.

Into this inviting give-and-take intrudes Mitchell (Ruben Ortiz), an awkward visitor from the much fancier neighborhood on the hill that overlooks the backyard (literally overlooks, as Mitchell has a telescope for watching the cozy coffee klatch). His reason? He is worried about his wife Adrienne and, in his view, her problems with new motherhood. His solution? To get her to mix with these fiercely fun moms and learn the ropes.

Lina (Deena Nicol-Blifford), Jessie (Jenny Schuck), Adrienne (Melissa Anderson) in New Haven Theater Company’s production of Cry It Out

Jessie’s OK to that plan is the first rift between the friends, though Lina tries to put a good face on it (while not for a minute swallowing her ill will or disbelief). Nicol-Blifford’s Lina can be depended on to indicate all her feelings and to laugh off, mostly, what can’t be helped. She’s a hearty, engaging character that could have been written for this actress, so naturally does Nicol-Blifford seem to grasp her mannerisms and speech rhythms. Shuck’s Jessie is more tightly wound and careworn. She seems to get through life by not expressing her real feelings and so her ability to voice profanity with Lina is the kind of license to be herself that she’s long been seeking. But it’s a given that Adrienne will be more like her than like Lina.

Adrienne (Melissa Anderson), it turns out, isn’t much like either. She has no problem expressing her utter disdain, asserting her professional status—as a jewelry designer soon to be carried by Barney’s—and denying any maternal anxiety such as her husband fears; in any case, unlike the other two, she has a support staff to help her. In fact, the other two women have already met Adrienne’s daughter’s nanny and the little girl herself, a telling indication of the social norms of child-raising in this zip code.

As played with a coiled bitterness by Anderson, Adrienne is a welcome riposte to the easy assumptions about home and husbands shared by the other two. Because we meet Mitchell without seeing the spouses of the other two women, we are privy (as are they) to the “he said/she said” nature of relations between Mitchell and Adrienne. And when Adrienne turns up again, she has a read on the situation that completely offsets Mitchell’s as well as Jessie’s diagnosis. That’s when the glass houses nature of these relations becomes fraught for all, and for us as we look on at the privacy of parenting made public.

As usual, NHTC, in this lively production directed by Marty Tucker (in his directing debut with the troupe), plays to its strengths. A single set, two main characters and two ancillary characters—all fully inhabited and easy to confuse with the actors themselves, the performances feel so natural—and a swift run-time of 90 minutes with no intermission.

There are many blackouts for quick changes, during which some kind of kid-friendly sing-song plays, the sort of thing I would mock incessantly to my own daughter, but that’s just me. My only cavil about the production is that Mitchell seems to collapse in tears before a stranger a bit too readily for the type he seems to be. But his renovation in the last scene is handled very capably by Ortiz, so much so that we might expect to see Cry It Out 2: Daddy’s Home, where working moms leave the little ones in the newly aware care of stay-at-home dads.

Comic and thoughtful and closely observed, NHTC’s Cry It Out cries out to be seen. Two additional shows have been added to the initial run.

Cry It Out
By Molly Smith Metzler
Directed by Marty Tucker

Cast: Melissa Anderson, Deena Nicol-Blifford, Ruben Ortiz, Jenny Schuck

New Haven Theater Company
February 22, 23, 24, 29; March 1, 2, 8, 9, 2024

Cry It Out Comes to New Haven Theater Company

Preview of Cry It Out, New Haven Theater Company

This coming week the New Haven Theater Company returns with a spirited production of Molly Smith Metzler’s popular play, Cry It Out. You might think the title refers directly to the parenting philosophy which advocates leaving a child to “self-soothe” by crying until the child learns to settle into sleep. In fact, the “cry” in “cry it out” has more to do with what Jessie and Lina, two mothers of small children, are feeling as they try to navigate motherhood and working careers.

Marty Tucker has acted with New Haven Theater Company before—most notably in their production of Marjorie Prime in 2019 and in White Rabbit, Red Rabbit last year—but this show will be his debut as a director with NHTC, though he has directed many other shows (mostly Shakespeare). He said that he had been planning to direct a different play for NHTC, but the play required a larger cast than was readily available. In the NHTC method, any member can suggest a play for the company, who then all read it and discuss what might work best. Cry It Out came up for consideration and Tucker immediately loved it.

“I was laughing as I read it,” he said, and felt certain he could find the right actors for the roles.  Besides the two friends—from different backgrounds, with different paygrades in their working lives—there is an additional woman, Adrienne, a neighbor who visits, goaded by her husband, Mitchell, who feels his wife needs a sort of motherhood support group. A four-character play is familiar territory for NHTC, which has also mounted several classic two-handers, such as Zoo Story and The Dumb Waiter.

Marty Tucker directs Jenny Schuck as Jessie and Deena Nicol-Blifford as Lina in Cry It Out at New Haven Theater Company

Tucker knew he wanted NHTC member Deena Nicol-Blifford for Lina, so much so that her participation was key to his taking on the play. Jenny Schuck, who has played in some of NHTC’s larger cast productions, such as Almost, Maine in 2013 and Rumors in 2018, as well as taking on one night of White Rabbit, Red Rabbit, plays Jessie, the principal role. “Jenny as Jessie, Deena as Lina . . . it had to be,” Tucker joked. Melissa Anderson, who played Walt Disney’s daughter in Lucas Hnath’s A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay on the Death of Walt Disney at NHTC in 2017, takes on what Tucker called “the difficult role” of Adrienne, and, in another NHTC debut, Ruben Ortiz, the Artistic Director of New Haven’s A Broken Umbrella Theater, plays Mitchell.

“The cast is so good together,” Tucker enthused, “there is camaraderie, bantering, and they are so very generous.” He also complimented his cast’s work ethic: even though rehearsals have had to be restricted to weekends for the most part, the cast clearly works over material when not together. “Any suggestions I make are already incorporated the next time we meet,” he said with a kind of awe, “there is a lot of rapport and that helps to make the characters likeable. Because if they’re not likeable, you’re in trouble.”

“This one is going to be special,” Tucker said, “I’m thrilled” that the very entertaining play is being fully realized by this talented team. He noted how, when he first read the text, he was still thinking about it three days later. “At some point you go ‘wow,’ and think how awful and poignant” the characters’ situations are. It’s a play that offers much to think about, but with much heart, compassion, and laughter.

In terms of set, the play also works to NHTC strengths: a good all-purpose space that has considerable intimacy. The action takes place in Jessie’s backyard, but, Tucker said, the floorboards of the NHTC stage wouldn’t be convincing. They put down Astroturf only to have a very fake-looking lawn. NHTC member Trevor Williams then painted the turf, giving the set “the look of the kinds of winter lawns you see around here” (or until the recent snow covered them).

A play about parenting that, in NHTC’s words, “takes an honest look at the absurdities of being home with a baby, the power of female friendship, the dilemma of going back to work, and the effect class has on parenthood in America.” Cry It Out is a play about coping, and might help us cope with winter in Connecticut, providing a welcome warmth.

Cry It Out
By Molly Smith Metzler
Directed by Marty Tucker

New Haven Theater Company
February 22, 23, 24, 29 (sold out); March 1 (sold out), March 2
Note: February 22 and 29 at 7:30 p.m.; all other shows at 8 p.m.

For tickets: Cry It Out

The New Haven Theater Company is: Melissa Andersen, Ralph Buonocore, Sara Courtemanche, Drew Gray, Erich Greene, George Kulp, Susan Kulp, Margaret Mann, Deena Nicol-Blifford, Sandra Rodriguez, Steve Scarpa, Jenny Schuck, J. Kevin Smith, Aleta Staton, John Strano, Marty Tucker, John Watson, Jodi Williams, and Trevor Williams

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