The Return of Benjamin Lay (c) Rebecca J. Michelson
Theater Review: The Return of Benjamin Lay
At the Sheen Center
If there was ever a play that epitomizes the mission statement of Sheen Center for Thought & Culture, which is proudly “a haven for the arts and provides a platform for provocative conversations about diverse and inclusive aspects of humanity as seen through the creative lens of faith and respect,” it’s Naomi Wallace and Marcus Rediker’s The Return of Benjamin Lay. My first two questions with a historical play like this, which I had no context for, are “Who was Benjamin Lay and where has he been?” The first question is explored in the first two thirds of the play. Benjamin Lay was essentially a British Quaker and a fierce abolitionist who lived during the 1700s. He was also a little person and is embodied by the British actor Mark Povinelli in an astounding New York theater acting debut. The conceit of the play is that Lay has returned to life in our modern times to a Quaker meeting, asking to be reinstated after being kicked out for his disruptive manner. While interacting with the audience (probably the least successful aspect of the play) Lay narrates his story from living in England working his dream job as a sailor to moving to Barbados with his wife, where he saw first-hand the evils of slavery. He was so resolute in his beliefs that he refused to partake in anything produced in any way by slaves, including sugar. After moving to the colonies, he got his abolitionist book published (by Benjamin Franklin, of all people) and lived most of his later years in a cave. (The Sheen is also hosting a helpful companion exhibition with more in depth exploration of the man and the Quakers.). This could have all been done in a dry edutainment way, but in Ron Daniels’s spirited production, The Return of Benjamin Lay is always engaging, with Povinelli hopping around and incorporating the full real estate of the stage, especially when talking about his life at sea. But it’s the message of anti-slavery, transposed to our modern world as racism and erasure of black lives that is the powerful heart of this intelligent play. When we have a current president who says he’s proud to abolish diversity, equality and inclusion, it’s imperative that we welcome the return of such a revolutionary voice as Benjamin Lay.
We Had a World (c) Jeremy Daniel
Theater Review: We Had a World
Manhattan Theatre Club at City Center Stage II
Joshua Harmon is one of the few reliable playwrights working today that even if I am less enthusiastic about a play, there is always something in it that impresses me. His last play, Prayer for the French Republic, was an multigenerational epic and his most successful to date. He has followed up with We Had a World, which, like French, is being produced by Manhattan Theatre Club, and while it’s a more intimate play, doesn’t feel in anyway less important, especially as Harmon makes it clear it’s all autobiographical if not verbatim. It’s Harmon’s Long Day’s Journey Into Passover. Harmon’s main character is named, of course, Josh (Andrew Barth Feldman) and he's a playwright who gets a call one day from his elderly grandmother Renee (Joanna Gleason), giving him permission to write a play about her life, most specifically her relationship with her daughter and Josh’s mother, Ellen (Jeanine Serralles). And write he does. Josh has always had a loving relationship with Renee, not only because she lived in Manhattan, but she takes him to movies like Dances with Wolves, art exhibits of Robert Mapplethorpe and, most importantly, plays like Medea and The Heiress that shaped him as a writer. Not so with Ellen, who felt her mother made her childhood unbearable for reasons Josh finds out about in his late teens. From there, Josh is constantly in a push and pull for allegiance and sympathy between the two, with each almost commandeering the play to bend the narrative to her side of the story. This is all played with Harmon’s usual wit and intelligence. Feldman, who still looks like he's in his teens, finds the right balance of confusion, humor and pathos, who, even when he’s in thirties, will always be seen by his mother and grandmother as their young bubelah. Gleason can never not give us a character who is smart and full of warmth, but here she also gives Renee, a fully lived-in character with some darker, complex notes. But it’s Serralles who really surprised me, as a woman who has familial obligations that she cannot ignore, even to family members she can never forgive. Director Trip Cullman inventively utilizes every inch of the Stage II theater, with the actors spilling into the audience, like the stray, wayward Tupperware the night I was there, happily breaking the fourth wall. The title refers to Josh’s concerns about global warming in the macro, but it’s also about Josh’s sadness about his ephemeral familial world of his childhood, lost to time, with only photos and recordings as faded reminders.
Last Call (c) Maria Baranova
Theater Review: Last Call
At New World Stages
In 1988, two legendary orchestra conductors supposedly ended up in the same bar in Vienna one night at closing time. According to playwright Peter Danish, he wrote the play after hearing about this serendipitous meeting between American Leonard Bernstein and Austrian Herbert von Karajan by a waiter who was working that evening. What Danish imagines in his play, Last Call, is that von Karajan is there, drinking tea, to find a new perspective on Brahams’ Symphony #1, which he has conducted many times before and will be performing the next day, while Bernstein is in town to accept an award. After a few minutes of pleasantries and inquiries about each other’s reported health ailments, it is obvious that while both men respect each other, they have had a tumultuous professional relationship, especially early in their careers. Von Karajan is a stickler to conducting the way a composer writes a piece of music, while Bernstein has a more emotional and expressive way of conducting, interpreting the music with his flair. The lynchpin moment of contention seems to be an infamous, politically charged Carnegie Hall concert in 1955 in which Bernstein invited Von Karajan to conduct. Danish’s play doesn’t have much plot, nor does it give much in depth biographical information for those unfamiliar with these two legends, both of whom will be dead within two years of this meeting. But Danish has some funny dialogue that keeps the play afloat. When asked if he has heard Bernstein’s last Mahler recording, the Austrian responds, “I certainly hope so.” But what really gives the play an extra dimension is director Gil Mehmert’s decision to cast two talented German actresses as the conductors. The versatile Helen Schneider gives Bernstein an infectious swagger, while Lucca Züchner, in an impressive New York debut, makes the more conservative Von Karajan relatable even in his stubbornness. Rounding out the cast is Victor Petersen as the waiter, who has an astonishingly theatrical moment that threatens to almost upstage the two stars. This is an amusing, “room where it happened” evening, especially for classical music fans, in which the tea is both literally and metaphorically spilled.
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