The Comeuppance

 C

My reaction to the works of playwright Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins has been mixed. Three enthusiastically received plays that I enjoyed very much (Appropriate, An Octoroon, Gloria) were followed by two that I did not (War, Everybody). It has been six years since he has had a new play on a New York stage. Now he is winding up his Signature Theatre residency with this puzzling play now in previews at the Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre. In it we meet five friends who, except for one, are celebrating their 20^th high school reunion. These four, the membership of the self-styled Multi Ethnic Reject Group, have gathered for a pre-reunion get-together on the porch of Ursula (Brittany Bradford, Bernhardt/Hamlet), an underdeveloped character distinguished mainly by the fact that she has become a recluse since losing her sight in one eye. Her female friends are the childless Caitlin (Susannah Flood, Birthday Candles), who married a bigoted cop with two children and Kristina (Shannon Tyo, Regretfully So the Birds Are), a doctor who got her medical education in the military. A good Catholic with five children, Kristina has seen a lot, both in the military and in the pandemic, and eases her pain with booze. She has unexpectedly brought along her cousin Paco (Bobby Moreno, 72 Miles To Go) whose military service left him with a bad case of untreated PTSD. Emilio (Caleb Eberhardt, Choir Boy), a trendy artist living in Berlin who is back in the States briefly to supervise an installation of his work at the Biennale, has not seen the others in 15 years. There is another character as well. Through electronically modified voices, each character, at some point in the play, takes on the role of Death. By the third go-round, I had to stifle a giggle, which I don't think was the desired effect. The play touches on a checklist of traumas that the group has experienced, including Columbine, 9/11, and January 6. Furthermore, many underlying tensions within the group surface as the play progresses. The problem for me was that none of the characters or situations was sufficiently interesting to justify rambling on for two hours and twenty minutes without an intermission. The actors were all fine and the direction by Eric Ting (The Far Country) was fluid. Arnulfo Maldonado’s (A Strange Loop) set creates the cozy front porch of a small house, complete with swing, Adirondack chair, lots of plants and a bug zapper. Jennifer Moeller’s (Camelot) costumes are all suitable to their characters. I was disheartened when Jacobs-Jenkins decamped for the greener pastures of Hollywood to become showrunner, executive producer and writer for a Hulu series. Alas, his new play does not make his return to the stage cause for celebration.

Everybody

C-

No one can accuse playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Appropriate, An Octoroon, Gloria, War) of repeating himself. Each play has been unlike its predecessor; the only common denominator (except for War) was their intelligence and theatricality. His latest effort, part of his residency at Signature Theatre, is a deconstruction of the 15th century Middle English morality play Everyman. In that tale, God enlists his assistant Death to lead Everyman to his final reckoning. Death consents to his plea to be allowed to bring someone else along, but no one is willing to make the journey with him. In this version, the lead character has been changed to the gender-neutral Everybody. The play has a gimmick: five actors (Brooke Bloom, Michael Braun, Louis Cancelmi, David Patrick Kelly and Lakisha Michelle May) draw lots to determine who will play Everybody and four other roles at each performance. There are 120 possible combinations. The other four actors (Jocelyn Bioh, Marylouise Burke, Liyana Tiare Cornell and Chris Perfetti) have the same role each time. Burke’s version of Death is so delightful that it hard to remember that one should be frightened. Bioh is also a treat as God and another role that I won’t give away. Friendship, Kinship, Cousinship and Stuff decide not to accompany Everybody, as do late arrivals Strength, Mind, Beauty and Senses. Although Catholicism is briefly mentioned once, religion is surprisingly absent from the play. A character not in the original, Love (Perfetti), turns up late in the play and, puzzlingly, proceeds to put Everybody through a series of humiliations as a price for accompanying him (or her). Only Love and Shitty Evil Things stick around for Everybody’s final journey. The emerging moral seemed muddled. I also think that a lot depends on who is playing Everybody; one reacts differently to the fate of a pregnant woman vs. a white-haired man. In another departure by the playwright, perhaps to break the monotony, there are several blackout scenes during which we hear friends arguing with a dying friend who is telling the play's story as if it were her recurrent dream. I, for one, do not enjoy sitting in the dark listening to disembodied voices. Brief reference someone makes to racial insensitivity seems to have no connection to the play. In another blackout scene we get a marvelous pair of dancing skeletons. The central feature of Laura Jellinek’s set is a row of seats facing the audience identical to ours. Gabriel Berry’s costumes are excellent. The lighting design by Matt Frey enhances the production greatly. Lila Neugebauer (The Wayside Motor Inn, The Wolves) directs with assurance. There is cleverness in abundance, but I was not moved. I suspect that those in the production were having a better time than those in the audience. Running time: one hour 45 minutes; no intermission.

War **

After enjoying all three plays I have seen by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Appropriate, An Octoroon and Gloria), I arrived at LCT3’s Claire Tow Theater with high expectations. Unfortunately I was disappointed. Although I credit the playwright for his ambition and imagination, I did not feel that he had produced a coherent work. From reviews, I gather that the play has changed considerably since its 2014 Yale Rep premiere, Nevertheless it still did not seem like a finished product. The focus is divided among too many themes including sibling rivalry, family secrets, the scourge of dementia, dealing with parental illness, meeting parental expectations, racism in America and Germany from WWII to the present and man’s underlying simian nature. Particularly in the second act, there are too many long monologues that interrupt the flow. Roberta (the able Charlayne Woodard) is a well-to-do middle-aged African-American divorcee who has been rushed to a Washington hospital after suffering a stroke while visiting the ape house at the zoo. Her daughter Joanne (Rachel Nicks), a would-be children’s writer, is married to Malcolm (Reggie Gowland), a low key school teacher of no particular distinction, who is white. They have a young daughter. Joanne has only recently resumed a relationship with her mother after long years of estrangement. Her hostile brother Tate (Chris Myers), a political functionary working in Boston, flies in to be at his mother’s bedside and immediately lashes out at everyone including the kindly nurse (Lance Coadie Williams). We later learn that Tate and his male partner have recently split. Roberta was brought to the hospital by a mysterious woman who speaks almost no English; this is Elfriede (Michelle Shay), a German half-sister that Roberta has only recently discovered and, somewhat implausibly, never mentioned to anyone. Malcolm discovers a man staying at Roberta’s apartment, Elfriede’s angry son Tobias (Austin Durant), who is out to get a share of his late grandfather’s legacy. The nonstop shouting and bickering between Tate and everyone else grows quickly tiresome; Tate is so relentlessly nasty that I eventually cringed whenever he opened his mouth. The play’s most interesting feature is that for much of the first act we witness the comatose Roberta trying to regain her bearings with the assistance of a pack of gorillas led by Alpha (Williams again) whose language is projected as subtitles. It did not work for me. Simian imagery pervades the play from the monkey-sound taunts at Roberta’s father in Germany to the ape house at the zoo and the apes in her struggle for consciousness. Mimi Lien’s elegant scenic design is evocatively lit by Matt Frey. Montana Blanco’s costumes are apt. I can’t fault director Lileana Blain-Cruz for failing to bring all the disparate elements together better. While this evening was a disappointment, three hits out of four is still an enviable record for a playwright. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes including intermission.

Gloria ****

No one can accuse Obie winner Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Appropriate, An Octoroon) of repeating himself. Each of his three plays that I have seen creates its own world completely unlike that of the other two. His latest play, now at Vineyard Theatre, draws upon his experience working at the New Yorker for a few years. For the first 45 minutes, the play seems to be a witty workplace satire about assistants at a prestigious magazine. Then the mood abruptly shifts, to put it mildly. To say more would spoil your experience. The remainder of the play depicts the effects of a life-changing event on some of the people who experienced it and raises this question: when something newsworthy happens, who “owns” the story? The playwright also paints an unflattering picture of today's media scene in which stories become mere fodder for the ravenous film/television/social media/publishing beast. In Act One we meet three editorial assistants — Dean (Ryan Spahn), Ani (Catherine Combs) and Kendra (Jennifer Kim); Miles (Kyle Beltran, who made such a strong impression in Fortress of Solitude), a college intern; Lorin (Michael Crane), a somewhat older fact checker; and the title character (Jeanine Serralles, recently in Verite), a socially awkward longtime employee from another department. Each character is vividly sketched and the dialogue rings true. The first act is literally a tough act to follow. In the second act, all the actors except Crane play one or more new characters. The excellent cast is adept at changing roles. One of the play’s strengths is that, at any given moment, I had no idea where it was heading. The scenic design by Takeshi Kata captures the sterility of the modern cubicled office. The costumes by Ilona Somogyi are unobtrusively apt. Evan Cabnet’s direction is rock solid. In case there was any doubt, Jacobs-Jenkins demonstrates that he belongs in the first rank of contemporary American iplaywrights. Running time: 2 hours including intermission.

An Octoroon ****

After showing great promise with his recent play "Appropriate" at the Signature Theatre, Brendan Jacobs-Jenkins has fulfilled that promise -- and then some -- with this new work at Soho Rep. Jacobs-Jenkins is a master at appropriating theatrical tropes and reworking them into something new and more interesting. In the earlier play, he took the Southern dysfunctional family play and turned it inside out. In the current play the object of his deconstruction is "The Octoroon," an antebellum melodrama by Irish playwright Dion Boucicault, that opened at the Winter Garden in 1859 and ran for several years in road companies. The result is a meta-melodrama unlike anything I have seen before. The play opens with a depressed black actor, BJJ (Chris Myers) claiming to be the playwright, in his underwear, discussing a recent session with his therapist, during which he reveals his admiration for Boucicault. Suddenly Boucicault (Danny Wolohan) appears onstage and a shouting match ensues. They are joined by an assistant (Ben Horner) who helps them prepare for the play. BJJ applies whiteface makeup, the white assistant puts on blackface, and Boucicault adds redface, dresses in an Indian (no political correctness here!) costume with an elaborate feather headdress and performs a vigorous dance. Suddenly the rear wall of the stage collapses forward to reveal a bright all-white set with the floor covered with cotton balls, representing the Louisiana plantation Terrebonne where the action takes place. A trio of slaves -- Minnie (Jocelyn Bloh), Dido (Marsha Stephanie Blake) and Grace (Shyko Amos) -- take the place of a Greek chorus, but one that talks trash and contemporary psychobabble. The characters include George (Myers again), the young master who loves his 1/8th black cousin Zoe (Amber Gray), the evil overseer McClosky (Myers yet again) who also desires Zoe, the wealthy heiress Dora (Zoe Winters) who wants to wed George, the old house slave Peter (Horner again), the innocent young slave Paul (Horner once more) and his devoted Indian friend Wahnotee (Wolohan again), the auctioneer LaFouche (Wolohan) and a ship captain (uncredited). They are joined onstage by cellist Lester St. Louis whose music subtly underlines the action. The dialogue blends excerpts from Boucicault's play with Jacobs-Jenkins's inventions. The cast doubling opens clever opportunities such as a one-actor fight scene between George and McClosky. Meandering through the play at several points is an enigmatic Br'er Rabbit figure, a sharply dressed rabbit/man with a cottontail and a very expressive face. (It turns out that he is none other than the playwright himself.) Director Sarah Benson works wonders with the complex material, Mimi Lien's set is amazing, Wade Laboissonniere's costumes are wonderful, as are all other aspects of the production design. My compliments to Soho Rep for mounting such an ambtious play and congratulations to the playwright for his well-deserved Obie. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes including intermission.

Appropriate

B

Playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has created a southern family, the Lafayettes, who are right up there in theatrically dysfunctional behavior with any characters penned by Tennessee Williams, Horton Foote or Tracy Letts. The three Lafayette siblings have gathered at the family home in Arkansas, a former plantation, not long after their father's demise to hold an estate sale and auction the dilapidated house. The eldest, Toni (Johanna Day), an embittered recent divorcee, is in from Atlanta with her teen-aged son Rhys (Mike Faist), whose recent brush will the law has cost her her job. Bo (Michael Laurence) is a type-A New York executive who has brought along his Jewish wife Rachael (Maddie Corman) and two children, Cassidy (Izzy Hanson-Johnston) and Ainsley (Alex Dreier). To the consternation of his siblings, younger brother Franz f/k/a Frank (Patch Darragh), who had vanished 10 years prior after an incident with an underage girl, has reappeared with his New Age fiancee River f/k/a Trisha (Sonya Harum). It's not long before the three siblings are having at each other, pouring out resentment and blame. In sorting through the vast piles of their father's stuff, they come across an old album with photos of lynched blacks. Discovery of this album raises troubling questions about their father. The shouting and screaming are punctuated by a series of surprises. The playwright lays it on a bit thick, but the result is never boring. Clint Ramos's set is remarkable: it quickly creates a mood and has some surprises of its own. Director Liesl Tommy really keeps things moving. While the play has lots of negatives, for me at least, they were outweighed by its energy and ambition. I am not sure whether the title is the adjective or the verb or perhaps both. In selecting Jacobs-Jenkins for its Residency Five program, Signature Theatre has made a promising choice. I look forward to seeing what he does next. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes including intermission (at 3/9 preview). Nudity alert: There's a short scene of partial male nudity.