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Becoming Eve (c) Matthew Murphy
Theater: Becoming Eve
Presented by New York Theatre Workshop at Abrons Art Center
Somewhere in the first half hour of Becoming Eve, it dawned on me that although the three people on stage are speaking in English to our ears, they are actually speaking Yiddish. Playwright Emil Weinstein had dropped hints along the way, but I was so absorbed by the action of the play, that of course, two of these characters who lived most of their lives in the Hasidic and insular world of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, would not have been able to communicate in English with the voracity and complexity they have been so far. The three people are all rabbis, and the setting is a progressive synagogue on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, led by Rabbi Jonah (the always warm and humorous Brandon Uranowitz). Jonah is brokering a reunion between Chava (the excellent Tommy Dorfman), a trans woman, and her Hasidic father, Tati, (an almost unrecognizable but always powerful Richard Schiff). Tati doesn’t know about Chava’s transness (she is wearing non-gendered clothing) as she wants to appeal to his intellect by referencing the Talmud and Torah as her gateway into the discussion of a female spirit in a male body with a fascinating debate revolving around, of all things, the interpretation of the Biblical story of Abraham being told by God to sacrifice his son, Issac.
Becoming Eve (c) Matthew Murphy
There’s a lot of father and son imagery in Becoming Eve, especially when we get flashbacks to Chava’s upbringing, with her now being played by a puppet (wonderfully designed by Amanda Villalobos), going through her childhood being protected by her mother (the underused but stoic Judy Kuhn), her flirtations with a male student (Rad Pereira) at the rabbinical school and her arranged marriage to a woman (Tedra Millan). This is all engrossing stuff, especially since the play is inspired by the 2019 memoir by Abby Chava Stein, a trans woman and rabbi. Weinstein’s adaptation is smart, giving each side of the debate equal weight, knowing that nothing really will be solved in one meeting. British director Tyne Rafaeli’s production is cleanly astute, with only the overuse of blackouts between the past and present scenes a bit tiring. I get the practicality of why, but Rafaeli should have trusted the audience’s ability to understand the theatrical leap of artifice. Still, this is one of the more engrossing and powerful plays dealing with the coming out process of a trans person (it’s sort of an inverted version of Yentl), especially now when trans Americans’ mere existence is shamefully being weaponized as a politicized woke scapegoat.
All the Beauty in the World (c) Joan Marcus
Theater: All the Beauty in the World
At DR2
When a play is titled, All the Beauty in the World, it would seem to be a hyperbole at best, but Patrick Bringley’s one-man play, based on his 2023 memoir of the same name, means it literally as Bringley had a stint as a security guard at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which housed, if not all, a good sampling (eight thousand, four hundred and fifty-eight by his count) of the beauty (and occasionally) the brutality of life on earth as seen through the artists and craftspeople who lived through them. On the job, our narrator is not there just for the security of the exhibits, but also a human Google search of random art facts, a guide for lost patrons, but mainly to tell people where the restrooms are. The two most satisfying and rewarding aspects of his 8-to-10-hour workday for Patrick are his co-workers, who hail from every corner of the globe, and the artworks themselves, that he can admire day-in and day-out. Bringley has an amiable, even keel, Carl Sagan-like demeanor, especially when discussing art, including Renaissance paintings like Titian’s “Portrait of a Young Man” (I never noticed the young man was taking off his glove) and Pieter Bruegel”s 1565 “The Harvesters,” which is considered the first modern landscape painting as it focused on common folks and not a religious theme. In between these art observations, Bringley also peppers in some autobiographical tidbits, including his stint working at The New Yorker Festival, his relationship with Tom, his beloved biomathematician older brother who was terminally ill, and his marriage to a schoolteacher named Tara, with whom he has a son, Oliver Thomas (in honor of his brother, I assume, who never got to meet his nephew). These stories give us an insight to Bringley’s small part of the world, but it would have been nice if it was integrated with the larger world of the Met, either through paintings that reflected his personal life or his personal life intersecting with his work. Family members must have visited him. Just a bit more of a connection to unify the two sides thematically. Still, this was an absorbing and entertaining glimpse into the observations of an ordinary man surrounded by all this beauty.
The Picture of Dorian Fray (c) Marc Brenner
Broadway: The Picture of Dorian Gray
At Music Box Theatre
When it was announced that Sarah Snook was bringing her hit West End show to Broadway, all I knew was a solo show adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s 1891 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. So when the play begins and Snook enters, not by herself, but with an entourage of helpers who never speak but are on stage with the Succession actress for most of the two-hour running time, I knew it wouldn’t be your parents’ one-person show. Snook starts telling the story in the third person, as a narrator, before she starts to inhabit the major characters. The story follows the beautiful but vain Dorian Gray in Victorian England, who, after his portrait is painted by admirer Basil Hallwell, makes a gothic novel deal with the devil that he will always be young and admired while the Dorian in the picture will age for him. Writer and director Kip Williams doesn’t update the play to modern times, but you would never know it from what he puts on stage, with Snook constantly being shot by the other actors via video cameras, TikTok filters on smartphones and computer-generated effects, adding elements on the video screens floating around the stage that’s not on stage. So, throughout the evening, Snook is playing off many of Wilde’s characters (pre-recorded by her). An ingenious scene involves Snook live on stage playing Dorian at a dinner party filled with five characters all being played by Snook in video form. If nothing else, this evening is a technical marvel, with only one moment at the performance I saw where the action on stage and what was on the screen were slightly out of sync, which the live actress was able to get back on track. And what a performance it is. Not only does Snook have to tell the story and play all the characters, but she also has to believably play off all the visual elements. Snook does this with such intensity and abandon, that you can feel the audience feeling exhausted along with her. It is indeed one of the best performances of the season. I just wished Dorian Gray wasn’t lost in all the technology.
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