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New York Times
25-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Grangeville' Review: Am I My Half Brother's Keeper?
'I don't know why we have to do this over the phone,' says Arnold, speaking from Rotterdam to his estranged half brother, Jerry, in Idaho. That's how I felt too, at least during the first half of Samuel D. Hunter's 'Grangeville,' a bleak two-hander named for the men's hometown. Most of what happens happens at a distance of thousands of miles — and feels like it. The distance might have been mitigated if Arnold (Brian J. Smith) and Jerry (Paul Sparks) weren't for the most part kept at opposite sides of a dim, featureless stage in Jack Serio's halting production for Signature Theater. Until late in the play, the set, by the design collective dots, consists only of black walls and a janky trailer door, signifying the characters' fractured, unsheltered childhoods. The interiorized sound (by Christopher Darbassie) and crepuscular lighting (by Stacey Derosier) lend many scenes the flat affect of a radio play. But it's also a problem that Hunter, often brilliant with banality, has buried the characters' Cain-and-Abel subtext so shallowly beneath repetitive and not entirely credible discussions of their dying mother's finances. Jerry, an RV salesman and only about 50, cannot figure out how to access her bank accounts online, let alone keep ahead of her bills and reimbursements. Arnold, a decade younger and having fled the family long since, resents being pulled back by end-of-life math. He might as well ask — though it would not be Hunter's style — 'Am I my brother's bookkeeper?' Yet an ancient fraternal struggle, like those in plays by Arthur Miller, Sam Shepard and Suzan-Lori Parks — and in the Bible — is what 'Grangeville,' which opened on Monday, means to dramatize. Between discussions of prognoses and powers of attorney, we learn in the opening scenes how both men were brutalized by their mother's violent husbands and her failure to offer protection. (She was often absent on benders.) Predictably enough, Jerry turned into a brutalizer too, in an effort, he now explains feebly, to help the sensitive and proto-gay Arnold survive. 'I was just trying to toughen him up,' he says. Job well done. Arnold moved about as far as he could from Idaho, developing an impenetrably thick skin regarding his past and trying to put even English behind him. (His husband, Bram, is Dutch.) For years, his buried feelings were most vividly channeled into his artwork: dioramas depicting local Grangeville attractions like the tattoo parlor and the Dairy Queen. Kick-starting his career, these dioramas seemed, to his admirers, to be making fun of America: 'the one theme in modern European art,' Arnold says bitterly, 'that is consistently evergreen.' But for him they were the one form of home he could tolerate. In any case, that well has now run dry. Unable to produce new work he likes, Arnold allows his anger to explode as unfocused rancor. 'Oh my god,' Bram exclaims, 'it's like shooting clay pigeons with you, I can't keep track of your grievances!' — as at times I couldn't keep track of the play's. If Arnold and Bram are in some stage of estrangement, so, in an overly neat parallel back home, are Jerry and his wife, Stacey. Nevertheless, it's in this marital material that 'Grangeville' comes alive — largely, I think, because Hunter has contrived to create third and fourth characters from a two-man cast. Almost midway through the play's 90 minutes, Smith switches without notice from playing angry Arnold to playing reasonable Stacey in a sweet-sad scene with Jerry; their wrangling over child care schedules makes a convincing proxy for the mismatch of their marriage. And soon thereafter, the mirror image: Sparks switches from playing wheedling Jerry to playing upright Bram in a harrowing scene with Arnold. Bram's argument that people remain connected to their families whether they like it or not, and that Arnold must therefore go home and make peace, has a similar double meaning for them. Now that the play's characters are in the same space, locking eyes as we lock eyes on them, the drama becomes dimensional, and the actors, formerly overplaying, shine. There is something pregnant and poignant about Smith's portraying a woman, even leaving aside that she is married to his brother. Likewise with the excellent Sparks, a late substitution for Brendan Fraser. His Bram, though intensely logical in his love, brings enough of Jerry with him to suggest the way people keep recreating their family of origin. The play's engine having finally turned over, it purrs confidently to the end, which includes a coup de théâtre reminiscent of the one in Hunter's previous Signature outing, 'A Case for the Existence of God.' Like that gorgeous play, too, it offers the idea of incremental hope to those whose lives would not seem to allow it. The trick, as Stacey learns from reading medieval history, is to find the freedom in that. There is no fate, Hunter argues, and his play demonstrates: just an infinity of second chances.
New York Times
06-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
New York Theater to See Now: Isabelle Huppert, ‘Urinetown' and More
Let some brilliant theater artists — like Jeff Hiller in 'Urinetown,' Susannah Flood in 'Liberation' and Tonya Pinkins in 'My First Ex-Husband' — tell you a story this month. Here are 10 shows to tempt you, Off Broadway and beyond. If you are allergic to bathroom humor, Greg Kotis and Mark Hollmann's Tony Award-winning musical satire probably is not for you. Winkingly Brechtian, with echoes of Ibsen's 'An Enemy of the People,' it's set in a dystopia where private toilets are illegal and public facilities charge for use — a situation ripe for rebellion. Directed by Teddy Bergman ('KPOP') for New York City Center Encores!, this brief revival stars Jordan Fisher, Rainn Wilson, Keala Settle and Jeff Hiller. (Through Feb. 16, New York City Center) A marionette made of ice plays a wandering, melting, disappearing Oedipus accompanied by his daughter Antigone in this puppet piece by the French company Théâtre de l'Entrouvert, which uses bits of text from Henry Bauchau's novel 'Oedipus on the Road.' Conceived and directed by Élise Vigneron, whose interest in ephemerality has led her to work repeatedly with ice puppets, it is presented with the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival as part of Basil Twist's Dream Music Puppetry program. Recommended for ages 11 and up. (Through March 2, Here) The New York Times once described Charlie Chaplin's longtime assistant, Toraichi Kono, as 'the keeper of his privacy.' An immigrant from Japan who made fleeting appearances in Chaplin films, this 'combination valet, bodyguard and chauffeur' is the title character of Philip W. Chung's historically based play, which follows Kono's fortunes as he is suspected of espionage and imprisoned in an internment camp during World War II. Jeff Liu directs the world premiere for Pan Asian Repertory Theater. (Through March 9, A.R.T./New York Theaters) This new two-hander by the Obie Award winner Samuel D. Hunter ('A Case for the Existence of God') stars Brian J. Smith and Paul Sparks as estranged brothers with different fathers, discrete wounds and far-flung lives — one in their Idaho hometown, the other in a city thousands of miles away. But they have a shared filial task: caring for their sick mother. Jack Serio ('Uncle Vanya') directs for Signature Theater. (Through March 16, Signature Theater) The Obie-winning playwright Rajiv Joseph ('Guards at the Taj') spent three years serving in the Peace Corps in Senegal. That country is the setting for his new thriller, about a Peace Corps volunteer who finds himself under the protection of a State Department operative as the year 2000 approaches. May Adrales directs this world premiere for Manhattan Theater Club. (Through March 23, New York City Center) The New Group can be relied on to sprinkle its shows with stars, and so it goes with this revival of Sam Shepard's 1977 Obie winner, a poetic tragicomedy about a family living the flip side of the American dream. Directed by Scott Elliott, it's led by Calista Flockhart as Ella Tate and Christian Slater as her drunken, combustible husband, Weston. Cooper Hoffman, whose father starred in Shepard's 'True West' on Broadway, plays their teenage son. (Through March 30, Pershing Square Signature Center) Bess Wohl, who so deftly traced an older woman's feminist awakening in her Broadway comedy, 'Grand Horizons,' here tells a mother-daughter story, stretching from Ohio in 1970, during the era of women's consciousness-raising groups, to a half-century later. In a world-premiere production for Roundabout Theater Company, Whitney White directs a cast that includes Betsy Aidem, Susannah Flood and Kristolyn Lloyd. The show contains nudity, and audience members are required to place their phones in locked pouches during the performance. (Through March 30, Laura Pels Theater) Rotating casts filled with boldface names are the lure for this collection of comic relationship stories written by Joy Behar, who performs them alongside Susie Essman, Tovah Feldshuh and Adrienne C. Moore through Feb. 23. Judy Gold, Susan Lucci, Tonya Pinkins and Cathy Moriarty take over from Feb. 26 to March 23, followed by Veanne Cox, Jackie Hoffman and Andrea Navedo, March 26 through April 20. Gina Gershon joins them from April 2 to April 20. (Manhattan Movement & Arts Center) The Irish dramatist Enda Walsh, a St. Ann's Warehouse favorite last seen there with his shattering 'Medicine' in 2021, returns with this fractured memory play, woven through with original music by Anna Mullarkey. Directed by Walsh for the Abbey Theater in Dublin, it stars Kate Gilmore in an acclaimed performance. Walsh, a Tony winner for the musical 'Once,' is drawn to explorations of abuse and its damages. This is one of those. (Feb. 15 through March 2, St. Ann's Warehouse) The letters of Mary Stuart — the 16th-century Scottish queen whose own cousin Elizabeth I of England ordered her beheaded — form the basis of this 90-minute monologue about a life full of royal plots and scheming, spoken on the eve of her execution. Starring Isabelle Huppert and directed by the avant-gardist Robert Wilson, this highly stylized production is the third time Huppert has starred in a show of Wilson's. Written by Darryl Pinckney, with a classical score by Ludovico Einaudi, it is performed in French with English supertitles. (Feb. 27 through March 2, NYU Skirball)
