The Coast Starlight

 B+

Keith Bunin’s (The Busy World Is Hushed, The Credeaux Canvas) clever, humane play at Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi Newhouse, takes place in the conditional. It deals with what might have happened if six passengers on the train between LA and Seattle had overcome their inhibitions and actually started to converse. The six are a diverse lot: Jane (Camila Cano-Flavia, Network), an animation artist who passes the time by sketching the other passengers; T.J. (Will Harrison, NY debut), a young Navy medic who doesn’t want to return to Afghanistan; Noah (Rhys Coiro, Dinner at Eight), a laid-back veteran who lives on a boat; Liz (Mia Barron, The Wolves), a hilariously unhinged woman fleeing a meltdown at a couples’ workshop; Ed (Jon Norman Schneider, The Oldest Boy), a beat-down salesman trying to find the hope to move on; and Anna (Michelle Wilson, Sweat), a black lesbian who has hidden the existence of her children’s uncle from them. All are vividly written and convincingly portrayed. The playwright explores how and whether they could have helped each other if only they had broken through to initiate a conversation. Arnulfo Moldonado’s (Power Strip) simple scenic design is well-complemented by 59 Productions’ projections (Flying Over Sunset). The costumes by Asta Bennie Hostetter (The Wolves) are suitable to each character. Tyne Rafaeli’s (Selling Kabul) direction is unfussy and assured. If you are looking for more action than talk, you may be disappointed, but if you want to get to know how these six people represent the human condition, you should find the play rewarding. Running time: 100 minutes, no intermission.

Greater Clements

B-

I suspect that the Idaho Chamber of Commerce wishes that native son Samuel D. Hunter would find a different setting for his next play. If one judged Idaho solely by his plays, which include The Whale, Pocatello, The Few and Lewiston/Clarkston, one could easily conclude that it is impossible to have a happy life anywhere in that state. Take Maggie (the magnificent Judith Ivey; Hurlyburly, Park the Car in Harvard Yard, The Heiress), the heroine of Hunter’s latest play, now in previews at Lincoln Center Theater. She has been disappointed by all the significant men in her life: her father, who broke up her romance with a young Japanese-American man; her husband, Caleb, who left her for a man; and her son Joe (a remarkable Edmund Donovan; Lewiston/Clarkston), who suffers from mental illness. Maggie runs the town’s mine museum and its popular tours of the abandoned mine where 81 men including her father perished in a fire several years ago. Joe, now 27 and recently back from six years in Alaska, helps her by serving as a tour guide. Hordes of wealthy Californians have built expensive weekend homes in the area and then tried to use their influence to bend local ways more to their liking. To prevent their gaining power, the townies have voted to unincorporate. One of the effects is that the museum must close and the tours must end. Maggie’s overbearing longtime friend Olivia (Nina Hellman; Pericles, 10 out of 12) is incensed over the seemingly spiteful vote and can’t stop talking about it. The town’s sole policeman, Wayne (Andrew Garman; Admissions, The Christians), soon to be the newly elected sheriff, drops by for pie. Eventually we learn why Joe had to leave town six years before, why he returned, and why Wayne keeps a close eye on him. Maggie’s former beau Billy (Ken Narasaki), now a widower, and his 14-year-old granddaughter Kel (Haley Sakamoto; Big Green Theater), who lives with him because her father is an abusive alcoholic, stop by for a visit, allegedly on the way to drop Kel off at a mock state legislature session. Billy really has come to see Maggie because he has hopes of rekindling their romance. Only someone who has never seen a Hunter play would think that there is any way in the world that this will end happily, so the only real suspense is in how their dreams will be thwarted. The first two acts lay out the groundwork skillfully. Unfortunately, the third act goes off the rails and turns into melodrama. A powerful flashback seems manipulative because of where it is inserted. In addition, the final scene brings in a new character, Mona (Kate MacCluggage; The Farnsworth Invention) whose role adds nothing to the mix and leads to a weak ending. Perhaps in the week remaining before opening night, they will whip the third act into shape. I hope so. My disappointment was all the more acute because I liked the first two acts so well. One other negative aspect is the set by Dane Laffrey (The Harvest, Once on This Island). In order to gain the suggestion of a mine elevator, there are three thick pillars that periodically block the view of a good portion of the audience. The platform supported by the pillars rises and lowers to reveal different levels of the house. It seemed a very cumbersome solution to a problem that could have been solved much more simply. Also a dozen or so audience members are seated onstage for no particular reason. Despite its shortcomings, the play is worth seeing just for the great performances by Judith Ivey and Edmund Donovan. Just accept the fact that it is a downer. Davis McCallum’s (The Whale, Pocatello, The Few and Lewiston/Clarkston) direction is assured most of the time, although the play could use some trimming. Running time: two hours 50 minutes including two short intermissions.

Nantucket Sleigh Ride

C

Can the creative team that brought us House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation — playwright John Guare, director Jerry Zaks and Lincoln Center Theater — strike gold a third time? Judging from the new absurdist memory play, now at the Mitzi E. Newhouse, the answer is “No.” Despite the best efforts of a first-rate cast, an ingenious set, great costumes and smooth direction, this quirky play never really takes off. There are several amusing moments, but they don’t lead anywhere. The convoluted plot involves Edmund Gowery (John Larroquette; The Best Man, How To Succeed in Business without Really Trying), a playwright turned venture capitalist who is having an affair with his agent Gilbert’s  (Jordan Gelber; Sunday in the Park with George) wife Antonia (Tina Benko; The Crucible, Describe the Night). One day, his secretary (Stacey Sargeant; Wild Goose Dreams) allows entry to Lilac (Grace Rex; Life and Limb) and Poe (Adam Chanler Berat; Next to Normal, The Fortress of Solitude), a confrontational sister and brother bearing a book he autographed 35 years before on Nantucket. Their memories of that summer are blank and they demand that he tell them what occurred. It being August, his therapist Dr. Harbinger (Douglas Sills; The Scarlet Pimpernel, War Paint) is unavailable for advice. And so begins a flashback of a few days on the island that summer, where he meets the two annoying siblings whose parents are Schuyler (Sills again), a child psychoanalyst, and Elsie (Clea Alsip;  M. Butterfly, The Way We Get By), the daughter of a famous author of children’s books. He also meets McPhee (Will Swenson; Waitress, Jerry Springer: The Opera), who is either Elsie’s lover or her stalker. The absent Elsie has allegedly been traumatized by Gowery’s brusk refusal to come to the island the previous year to see an amateur production of his sole play, “The Internal Structure of Stars.” A running joke is that everyone he meets on Nantucket, including the police officer (Sargeant again) who accuses him of running a child pornography ring from the house he owns but has never visited, was involved in the production of Gowery’s play. Gowery is excited at the possibility of writing the screenplay for Roman Polanski’s remake of Hitchcock’s “Suspicion” starring Jane Fonda and Robert Redford. Or is it a Disney adaptation of Elsie’s father’s children’s books also to be directed by Polanski? A cryogenic Walt Disney (Sills again) makes a strong pitch to Poe and Lilac. Gowery’s #2 girlfriend Alice (Benko again) refuses him a crucial favor. Jorge Luis Borges (German Jaramillo; Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter) pops up now and then with a quotation for every occasion. Chaos ensues as the various plot strands bump against each other without satisfactory resolution. David Gallo’s (Jitney, The Drowsy Chaperone) three-tiered set is a treat and Emily Rebholz’s (Indecent, Dear Evan Hansen) costumes are a hoot. While the play is intermittently amusing, there is little point to it.  While I was grateful for the chance to see John Larroquette, Douglas Sills and Will Swenson onstage together, I left disappointed. Running time: one hour 50 minutes including intermission.

Junk

B+

Lincoln Center Theater has pulled out all the stops for its production of Ayad Akhtar’s (Disgraced, The Invisible Hand) look back at the world of finance in 1985. The size of the cast — 23 — and the sleek set by John Lee Beatty with modules that pop out as needed to facilitate smooth scene changes suggest that no corners were cut here. This is appropriate to the play’s theme. Robert Merkin (Stephen Pasquale; The Bridges of Madison County, Far From Heaven), the central character, is loosely based on Michael Milken, who turned the financial world upside down with his unsentimental application of the logic of globalism to corporate America, which often made companies worth more if they were dismembered and their unprofitable manufacturing operations closed irrespective of the number of jobs lost. The play follows the attempted hostile takeover of Everson Steel by a company backed by Merkin, who has discovered that Thomas Everson, Jr. (Rick Holmes; Hapgood, Matilda) has been cooking the books to hide the fact that profits from their pharmaceutical division have been used to hide the losses of their steel mills. When Israel Peterman (Matthew Rauch), whose company Merkin has selected to acquire Everson, and Merkin meet with Everson and his lawyer Maximilian Cizik (Henry Stram; The Cruiclble), it does not go well. The not so subtle anti-Semitism of the white-shoe financial powers versus the Jews who are threatening their status quo is an underlying theme. Some of the other characters we meet are an ambitious journalist Judy Chen (Teresa Avia Lim); Merkin’s loyal attorney Raul Rivera (Matthew Saldivar; Act One, Honeymon in Vegas), Murray Lefkowitz (Ethan Phillips), an investor with a nervous wife; Jacqueline Blount (Ito Aghayere), a lawyer who plays both sides against each other; Leo Tesler (Michael Siberry; When the Rain Stops Falling), an older investor with a taste for Judy and a distaste for “junk”; Boris Pronsky (Joey Slotnick; The Front Page), a shady middleman that Merkin’s wife Amy (Miriam Silverman; A Delicate Ship) begs him not to do business with; and Giuseppe Addesso (Charlie Semine), the N.Y. district attorney who is running for mayor. Virtually every character is corrupted by money at some point along the way. The lack of anyone sympathetic to root for is a problem for me. It is basically an ensemble piece with too many characters for any of them to be developed in much depth. If you are too young to remember the rise and fall of Milken, you may learn something new. Otherwise, your level of engagement may depend on your interest in finance and the economy. There’s more here to engage the intellect than the emotions. I thought Lucy Prebble’s play Enron was far superior. Catherine Zuber’s (Oslo, The King and I) costumes befit their characters. Doug Hughes (The City of Conversation, The Father) skillfully keeps the many strands under control. Running time: two hours 20 minutes including intermission.

Pipeline

B

Dominique Morisseau (Skeleton Crew) makes an impressive Lincoln Center Theater debut with this wrenching look at our society seen primarily through the eyes of a black teacher and her teenage son. Nya (Karen Pittman; Disgraced) teaches English in a tough urban high school. Her only child, Omari (Namir Smallwood), is at a private boarding school upstate where he has just been involved in a third incident that could get him expelled. The natural concern of a black mother for the safety of her son in a dangerous world is exacerbated by the fact that he is her only child and that her ex-husband Xavier (Morocco Omari) is providing little for the boy except child support. While Xavier has moved on, Nya still has feelings for him. We see Nya in the classroom, teaching an ominous Gwendolyn Brooks poem, “We Real Cool,” that frightens her; in the lunchroom exchanging barbs with Dun (Jaime Lincoln Smith), the security guard whose flirtations she fends off, and commiserating with fellow teacher Laurie (Tasha Lawrence; Good People), who has been losing the battle against student violence; at Omari’s school where she interrogates his Latina girlfriend Jasmine (Heather Velazquez), another fish out of water at the lily-white school, to find out where Omari is; and at home alone, finding solace in cigarettes and liquor. Morisseau does not spell everything out for us. Only the projections between scenes, escalating from images of black students at school to violent students to handcuffed young blacks on a bus, indicate that the title refers to the school-to-prison pipeline too often traveled by black youth. The acting is uniformly strong; my one quibble is that Smallwood looks too old for a secondary student. The characters are vividly drawn. Jasmine and Laurie are such dynamic presences that they almost hijack the play. The elevated, rather poetic style of speech the playwright occasionally turns to has the effect of making the characters sound more alike than they should. There are individual scenes that are wonderful, but they don’t cohere into as satisfying a whole as I would have wished. The set by Matt Saunders with its cinderblock walls, linoleum floor and bright fluorescent lights creates an aptly harsh institutional setting. The costumes by Montana Levi Blanco befit the characters well. The direction by Lileana Blain-Cruz (War; Red Speedo) is unfussy and assured. Although I have some reservations, I found the play well worth seeing. Running time: one hour 25 minutes; no intermission.

Note: The Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater has been refurbished with very comfortable new seats. The space formerly occupied by the coat lockers, whose use was halted by security concerns, is now filled by a colorful attractive mural of Lincoln Center.

Shows for Days ***

Douglas Carter Beane’s comedic memoir, now in previews at Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitizi E. Newhouse Theater, recounts the events of the year the playwright turned 15 in a suburb of Reading, Pennsylvania and joined a local community theater where he discovered his place in the world and first experienced sex and unrequited love. His story is not particularly original or well-told and he panders shamelessly to an audience largely composed of gays and Jews.  The second act is a mess with plot developments that are downright implausible. However, if you forget about the plot and sit back to enjoy an almost nonstop series of hilarious one-liners, you will have a very good time. It helps tremendously that the young Beane, known here as Car, is played by the always-appealing Michael Urie (Buyer & Cellar) and that the theater’s artistic director Irene is the iconic Patti LuPone. We also meet Sid, the theater’s lesbian co-founder and manager (a wonderful Dale Soules); Clive, the company’s flamboyantly gay lead actor (a delightful Lance Coadie Williams); Damien, a handsome actor/waiter who is bisexual (Jordan Dean); and Maria, the young actress (Zoë Winters) whose role is notably underwritten. John Lee Beatty’s set combines an open stage with a back wall over-cluttered with props. The costumes by William Ivey Long are a good part of the fun. Jerry Zaks’s direction does not aim for subtlety.  The opportunity to see Urie, LuPone and a fine supporting cast keeping the zingers flying went a long way, at least for me, to overcome the play’s weaknesses. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes including intermission.

The Mystery of Love and Sex ***

About an hour into the first act of Bathsheba Doran’s new play at LCT’s Mitzi Newhouse Theater, I began to wonder whether the playwright suffered from AD/HD. Roughly every 10 minutes, a new plot line arrived, seemingly out of left field. By the end of this overstuffed dramedy, I felt like a guest at a dinner party where too many courses were served. Fortunately, we have four fine actors — Tony Shalhoub, Diane Lane, Gayle Rankin and Mamoudou Athie — onstage to guide us through the many twists and turns. Howard (Shalhoub) is a successful Jewish author of mysteries. Lucinda (Lane) is a southern belle who met him at Yale, converted to Judaism and married him. Charlotte (Rankin) is their neurotic daughter who turned down Yale to attend a Southern college with Jonny (Athie), her friend since childhood. Charlotte and Jonny may or may not be falling in love. Howard is opposed, but alleges that it is not because Jonny is black. Among the semi-digested themes that are hurled at us like pitches from a batting machine are conscious and unconscious racism, sexism and homophobia; the angst of confused sexual identity, the self-centeredness of writers, Jewish-Black relations, intermarriage, same-sex marriage, strained marriage, the tricky relationships between parent and child, the porous border between friendship and love, the chances for a fresh start. Lest our interest lag, the author throws in a little semi-gratuitous nudity — twice. Andrew Lieberman’s simple set has a wall of curtains at the back that are tugged this way and that from time to time. The actors have to shlep a lot of furniture between scenes. The overlong first act had a few false endings that were greeted by applause because the audience thought the act was over. Kaye Voyce’s costumes are fine. The ubiquitous Sam Gold directed. It is far from a good play, but nonetheless an entertaining one, thanks largely to the appealing cast and several comic moments. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes including intermission.

Golden Boy ***

(Please click on the title to see the complete review.)
Lincoln Center Theater's lavish 75th anniversary production of this Clifford Odets classic is now in previews at the Belasco Theatre. The cast of 19, directed by Bartlett Sher, features such stalwarts as Tony Shalhoub, Danny Burstein and Jonathan Hadary, whose topnotch performances were, for me,  the main reason to see the play. Lucas Caleb Rooney, Dagmara Dominczyk and Michael Aronov are fine as Joe Bonaparte's brother, sister and brother-in-law respectively. Anthony Crivello is appropriately menacing as Eddie Fuselli. Yvonne Strahovski (Hanna on Dexter) makes an impressive debut as Lorna Moon. Danny Mastrogiorgio seemed a bit shaky as Joe's manager. And then there's Seth Numrich as Joe. Let me just say that he is not an obvious choice for the part. He is too big to be plausible as a welterweight, he doesn't look remotely Italian and his acting is outclassed by his fellow cast members. It is a tribute to the overall excellence of the production that this weakness does not seriously harm it. Michael Yeargan's multiple sets are excellent and Catherine Zuber's costumes are superb. I was surprised that the play did not seem as dated as I had expected and that Odets had managed to keep his usual sermonizing mostly in check until the third act. The ending is rather flat. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the evening more than I expected to. Running time: 2 hours, 50 minutes, including two intermissions.

Theater Recommendation: 4000 Miles ****

(Click on the title to read the complete item.)
Amy Herzog's play received universal acclaim during its brief run at the Duke last summer. It will be moving into the Mitzi Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center in mid-March with the original cast for a limited run. If you missed it the first time, be ready to order tickets as soon as they go on sale -- February 6 for LCT members, February 12 for the general public.

Here is my review from last June:

The title of this new play by Amy Herzog, in an LCT3 production at the Duke, refers to the distance 21-year-old Leo (a strong Gabriel Ebert) has traveled on a cross-country bicycle ride that ends with his unexpected 3 a.m. arrival at the West Village apartment of his 91-year-old grandmother Vera Joseph (the incomparable Mary Louise Wilson). [The character of Vera, a devoted Marxist, also appeared in Herzog's recent well-received play After the Revolution]. Leo has been traumatized by the death of his best friend en route, a less-than-enthusiastic reception by his girlfriend Bec (Zoe Winters), a student at Columbia, and family problems back home in St. Paul. Grandmother and hippie grandson gradually overcome their differences and grow close. Greta Lee is hilarious as Amanda, a Parsons student Leo brings home one night. The characters are vivid, the dialogue is believable and the back story is interestingly complex. One can quibble over a few plot devices, but Herzog is clearly a talented playwright. The set by Lauren Helpern perfectly captures a slightly worn apartment that hasn't changed much in 50 years. Daniel Aukin's direction in unobtrusively fine.