With good reason, Malpaso Dance Company is one of Cuba’s most sought-after dance companies. Since its inception in 2012, the company of 11 dancers has served as global ambassadors of Cuban culture, heritage and artistry.
Celebrity Series brought the vibrant troupe back to Paramount Center’s Robert J. Orchard Stage for three performances. On opening night, there was as much excitement in the packed house as there would be on stage during the 90-minute performance.
The program of three dances opened with “Floor…y Ando,” a 2023 piece choreographed by Ephrat Asherie (who also designed the costumes) and set to music by Aldo López-Gavilán. Three male dancers stand on stage as the piano jazz solo begins and the house lights dim. Two stand upstage; the third is somewhat downstage on the opposite side. Manuel Da Silva’s spot-on lighting catches their white shirts and pants, arms and legs moving slowly.
As the solo dancer starts to move, the other two follow his lead as mirrored tandem images. The music shifts to a more upbeat tempo, and the dancers follow with short, rapid, fluid floor work. They bounce and roll with joyous abandon, and just as quickly, they’re on their feet, leaping and then shuffling, their sneakers squeaking across the stage.
All too quickly, it’s over and the dancers walk off-stage as they walked on, two audience-left, one audience-right.
The piece (loosely translated as “Floor..and Walking”) is Asherie’s tribute to the late Gus Solomons, Jr., an American dancer, choreographer, dance critic, and actor who was a leading figure in postmodern and experimental works. He also studied architecture at M.I.T. One of his most quoted statements is, “Architecture and dancing are exactly the same. You design using all the same elements — time, space and structure — except that in dance, time is not fixed.”
After a brief pause, the curtain opens on choreographer Ronald K. Brown’s “Why You Follow,” a 2014 piece set to hip-hop music that exemplifies the multicultural influences that make Cuba the unique artistic petri dish it is. The full company is dressed in simple costumes (Keiko Voltaire), each sporting a spot of red, either as a belt, shirt patch, or pant stripe. The effect is subtle and coherent.
The dancers celebrate the rhythms of the music by incorporating elements of salsa, samba and Bhangra. There is also a smattering of classical ballet and traditional jazz thrown into the mix. The pure, simple but never monotonous beat of the soundtrack (“Look at Africa” by Zap Mama; “En Route to Motherland” and others by Gordheaven & Juliano) has the dancers shaking their hips and the audience dancing in their seats.
The stage is set like a crowded club, and dancers appear as solos, pairs, and groups. Sometimes, the rush of figures feels like a conga line; other times, a single dancer’s graceful and impossibly supple body is the focus.
There is also a playful element in this piece, a funky, spunky confidence as the dancers circle the stage riding what could be stick horses that they slap with their long, graceful arms. This upbeat element is repeated throughout the piece, each time eliciting the same audience reaction of delight.
Clifton Taylor’s fire engine red lighting design mirrors the up-tempo and pulsation of the dancers and music, creating an electrifying performance that leaves the jubilant audience applauding wildly.
After a brief intermission, “A Dancing Island,” the evening’s longest and final piece, brings the full company back to dance to the music of Alejandro Falcón and Ted Nash & the Cubadentro Trio. Choreographed by Osnel Delgado in 2023, the piece is non-stop sparkle and fizz, a full-throated jamboree of thick, sultry, sassy and uniquely Afro-Cuban Music and dance.
The piece opens with the sound of wind and/or waves, the dancers bathed in hazy spotlights (Manuel Da Silva), clad in flirty costumes (Guido Gali) that are as revealing as they are cheerleader cute. The women even wear white knee socks and T-strap shoes, their sheer-ish tops looking like suspenders over tattoos.
“A Dancing Island” is more of a journey than a single theme, with dancers hanging upside down, then lying prone on the floor for one minute and reflecting the more somber tone of a single female acapella voice the next. There is also an intense intimacy as dancers pair and intertwine, barely touching yet presenting in perfect synchronicity. At one point, the house lights come up and a dancer slowly walks down the aisle to join his partner on stage, a poignant and creative touch.
Like Malpaso Dance Company itself, “A Dancing Island” casts a wide net, one the audience is delighted to be caught in. The only shame is that they were in Boston for such a short time. Be sure not to miss them the next time Celebrity Series brings them to town!
Celebrity Series of Boston presents Malpaso Dance Company. Executive Director and Co-Founder Fernando Sáez. Artistic Director and Co-Founder Osnal Delgado. At the Robert J. Orchard Stage, Paramount Center, January 17-18.
Cast of Lyric Stage’s ‘Crumbs From The Table Of Joy’. Photos: Mark S. Howard Thomika Marie Bridwell, Madison Margaret Clark, and Dominic Carter
By Shelley A. Sackett
Luck
Sometimes a crumb falls From the tables of joy, Sometimes a bone Is flung.
To some people Love is given, To others Only heaven.
— Langston Hughes
James Mercer Langston Hughes, best known for his Harlem Renaissance Jazz Poetry, wrote “Luck” in 1947. The poem can be interpreted as a commentary on unfairness, deprivation, and the pursuit of love. It could also be read as a reminder of the injustices faced by Black Americans and other “have-nots’ who must bear witness to the overflowing bounty of the “haves” and hope they are in the right place at the right time to scoop up the discarded scraps.
Lynn Nottage’s 1995 play, ‘Crumbs from the Table of Joy,’ picks up Hughes’ theme and runs with it in a two-act work now in production at Lyric Stage. Fair warning to fans of Nottage’s later, brilliantly biting “Clyde’s,” and Pulitzer Prize-winning “Ruined” and “Sweat” — ‘Crumbs’ is far less absorbing and captivating. A nostalgic look in the rearview mirror, it is a good story but about as edgy as a Hallmark movie.
Set in 1950, “Crumbs” is a memory play about the Crumps, a “colored” family that migrates from Jim Crow Florida to Brooklyn. Although the country is recovering from World War II and the Civil Rights movement is gaining momentum, the discrimination and lack of opportunity that greets them in New York doesn’t differ significantly from what they left behind.
Ernestine Crump (Madison Margaret Clark), a 17-year-old who wears bobby socks and glasses, is the amiable, if hardly charismatic, narrator. She shows us around the cramped Brooklyn flat she shares with her father, Godfrey (a nuanced Dominic Carter) and her bouncy, lively 15-year-old sister Ermina (an engaging Catia).
Grief-stricken and psychologically undone by his wife Sandra’s death and faced with raising two motherless teenage girls on his own, Godfrey uprooted the family to follow the African American evangelist, Father Divine, his personal guru and religious savior. It turns out Brooklyn is the return address on Father Divine’s mail order catalog; his Peace Mission Movement is actually headquartered in Philadelphia.
Undaunted, Godfrey immerses himself in his faith in the belief that this will provide a fresh start and a better life for him and his daughters. He dons blinders and digs deeper into Father Divine’s strict religious teachings of celibacy, sobriety and solemnity on Sundays. Structure and strictures are his lifeline. Father Divine lets him know all will be O.K.
Catia, Bridwell, and Clark
He writes letter after letter to Father Divine, desperate for his advice and a glimmer of direct connection. Finally, the mission writes back, telling him to keep following the path and donate money. Godfrey bestows a church name on himself and his daughters and keeps a notebook into which he obsessively jots down questions he will ask Divine Father during his anticipated face-to-face.
Ernestine and Ermina don’t share this version of deliverance and choose a different escape route from reality. For them, joy is to be found in dreams and fantasy; in other words, at the movies.
Ernestine is also about to graduate from high school, the first Crump to reach that level of education and achievement. One day, a sewing pattern arrives in the mail for her. It turns out her mother had ordered it before she died. She sets up a sewing form in the living room, sewing the dress throughout the play as a reminder of her mother and a bridge between the world they left behind and the one in which they now live.
Just when it feels like the weight of Nottage’s sluggish, speech-heavy script (not helped by voice projection problems) might sink the ship before it gets out of the harbor, Sandra’s sister, Lily Ann Green (an outstanding Thomika Marie Bridwell), saves the day. She bursts into the apartment, riding a gale wind that fills the play’s sagging sails and keeps it afloat for the remainder of its almost two-and-one-half-hour running time.
Clark, Catia
Vivacious and uninvited, Lily is dressed in sunglasses, a fur coat and a well-tailored white suit. Red shoes and a cigarette are the perfect accessories. Lily is a non-conformist, an educated woman who lives in Harlem and hobnobs with revolutionaries and communists. Although she didn’t make it to her sister’s funeral, she is committed to moving in with Godfrey and helping raise her sister’s two girls.
She is also committed to raising hell, and although she and Godfrey share a past that she tries desperately to reignite, her antics send him scurrying away, leaving her more isolated than ever.
Lily drinks, cavorts, swears and doesn’t work. She is the unrequited yin to Godfrey’s yang of a consuming need for order and answers. Both are chasing salvation as they try to manage their grief and rage. After Lily goes too far one night, giving Godfrey a kiss which he miserably admits does tempt him, Godfrey disappears for three days, leaving Lily and the girls to fend for themselves.
He returns with Gerte (a terrific Bridgette Hayes), a white German refugee whom he met on the subway and introduces as his wife. He believes he is following Father Divine’s advice to move forward with his life. It’s unclear whether the girls are more unhappy that she’s white or that their father married so soon after their mother’s death. Lily sinks deeper into drinking, humiliated and devastated that Godfrey couldn’t/wouldn’t marry her instead.
Clueless about racial tensions in America but delighted to have found an American husband, Gerte’s one saving grace is the love for movies she shares with the girls. In her dreams, she hungers to be Marlene Dietrich, and the scenes that allow Hayes to channel that persona are a welcome respite and among the play’s most engaging.
Nottage plods on, addressing a myriad of social, political and emotional issues while keeping us in the loop as time marches on for the Crumps. Every member of the family eventually runs smack into the reality of how the color of their skin interferes with their pursuit of the American Dream. Change and revolution may be in the wings, but they are not here yet and they will be traveling hand-in-hand with pain and fear. In the meantime, each Crump must cope in their own way, through action, fantasies, faith and anesthetics.
Director Tasia A. Jones gives us a straightforward version of ‘Crumbs’ and, while Cristina Todesco’s set design and Eduardo Ramirez’s lighting design work well as the action hops from living room to subway car to Ernestine’s movie fantasies, the production lacks coherency, urgency, and intimacy. We want to understand Ernestine and what makes her tick, but her monologues, monotone, and static blocking keep us at arm’s length.
‘Crumbs’ is worth seeing for its solid ensemble and stand-out performances, its homage to the 1950s, and, most of all, for providing a reason to appreciate how far Lynn Nottage has traveled in her 30-year career.
‘Crumbs from The Table Of Joy.’ Written by Lynn Nottage. Directed by Tasia A. Jones. Sound Design by Aubrey Dube. Costume Design by Mikayla Reid. Scenic Design by Cristina Todesco. Lighting Design by Eduardo Ramirez. Produced by Lyric Stage at 140 Clarendon Street, 2nd Floor, Boston, through February 2nd.
Cast of SpeakEasy/Front Porch’s ‘Ain’t No Mo’ Photos: Nile Scott Studios MaConnia Chesser, Kiera Prusmack, De’Lon Grant, Schanaya Barrows, and Dru Sky Berrian.
By Shelley A. Sackett
Jordan E. Cooper’s Ain’t No Mo is a complicated, uneven, scathing, audacious, and hilarious rollercoaster ride of a play. It covers a lot of ground, and Cooper dips his pen into the inkwell of every genre known to playwrights: from satire, allegory, fiction, and parody to tragedy and Shakespeare-worthy soliloquy.
Performed as a series of loosely connected vignettes that sometimes change at whiplash speed during 100 intermission-less minutes, this SpeakEasy Stage Company/Front Porch Arts Collective production is guaranteed to spark lively post-theater discussion.
Here’s the premise.
In 2016, with the election of Donald Trump and the end of Barack Obama’s presidency and its promise of Hope and Equality, African Americans descended from slaves are offered a one-way ticket “home” to Dakar, Senegal. A “dedicated observer of equal oppression,” African American Airlines’ Flight 1619 is in the house, or the White House to be more precise. Whether to stay and live life as it is in this country or leave on the “Reparations Flight” and start anew is each individual’s choice.
The government expects this will solve the problem of racism in America once and for all. Almost all eligible Blacks (millions) register to take advantage of the free flight.
What Cooper does with this simple premise, however, is staggering in terms of its brazenness and sheer creative genius. Director Dawn M. Simmons executes with full-throated flamboyance and exaggeration.
The six-actor ensemble switches into many roles easily, aided by Rachel Padula-Shufelt’s fabulous costume design and wig choices. Mac Young’s set design is both flexible and exacting, flowing smoothly between very different settings. Aja M. Jackson’s lighting design and Aubrey Dube’s sound design help create a unifying aesthetic for the show’s differing segments.
Cooper’s no-holds-barred approach is evidenced full blast even before the house lights are fully dimmed. The mild-mannered recording that announces where exits are and what to do in case of an emergency is suddenly interrupted by Peaches, the Flight 1619 airport gate attendant.
Grant Evan
“Ladies, gentleman, and those who don’t give a damn. Welcome yo ass to The Roberts Theater. Yessss, we in Boston, bitch! It’s ‘bout time to get this thing started, so I hope you had enough sense and shat before you sat,” she shouts into the sound system.
The rest of the play, which starts with the election of President Obama and ends with Flight 1619 taking off, traces the Black American experience with scenes Cooper chooses to exemplify that jumbled, complicated, painful journey. Like a book of loosely connected short stories, each scene functions independently, yet, taken together, they weave a single cloth.
What unites them is their characters’ reactions to news of the subsidized flight to Africa. Will they stay or leave? And, more importantly, why?
The action opens with “Book of Revelation,” a bang-up of a funeral led by Pastor Freeman (played with over-the-top verve by a terrific De’Lon Grant). It is November 4, 2008, and the Black community has gathered to celebrate Obama’s election and lay Brother Righttocomplain, the embodiment of protest and injustice, to rest.
“Ain’t no mo’ shot down dreams with its blood soaking the concrete,” Freeman bellows. “Ain’t no mo’ riots.”
Now that a Black president has been elected, the unrealistic assumption is that centuries of racism and discrimination will suddenly be reversed and a new era of promise will be escorted in.
The joy and celebration is short-lived. After this gospel-infused scene, the mood and time shifts to 2016 and the election of Trump. White backlash against black Americans and ginned-up fear and resentment will set the next agenda.
Between each plotted scene, we witness morsels of what Peaches (a scene-stealing non-binary Grant Evan) is dealing with as the sole check-in agent for Flight 1619. A larger-than-life drag queen who wears a hot pink wig, Kente scarf, and model airplane-adorned tiara; her role is the play’s only constant through a series of sketches and settings.
She checks in various passengers and offers counsel to those who are hesitant. She also prepares Miss Bag, a suitcase she claims holds “our entire story as a people in this country,” and encourages passengers to drop their stories in the bag so they may bring it to Africa. She warns those who stay behind will be subjected to “extreme racial transmogrification” by “The Powers That Be”: they will be turned into white people.
The audience comes to trust her voice and feel her frustration and angst as she single-handedly supervises boarding millions. She is the reliable narrator, part mother hen and part Greek chorus.
Dru Sky Berrian, MaConnia Chesser, Kiera Prusmack, and Schanaya Barrows
With “Circle of Life,” Cooper tackles the heartbreak of young lives ended by violence and police brutality and the unwillingness of Trisha (Dru Sky Berrian), pregnant by Damien (Grant), to bring a future victim into the world. “A better time is coming. We just have to wait for it,” Damien assures her. Despite his pleas, she is adamant. So are the million other women in line at the Sister Girl We Slay All Day Cause Beyonce Say Community Center, a clinic oasis in a country where abortions are no longer available. Trisha is Number 73,545.
“Real Baby Mamas of the South Side” is a parody of the Real Housewives franchise. This one focused on four black women pretending to have multiple baby daddies and an obsequious host who keeps the provocation flowing. One panelist isn’t even black but is “transracial,’ white Rachel dressed as black Rachonda, “choosing to be herself” and “living her truth” as a black woman.
Tracy, another panelist, breaks character and confronts her. “Race is not a choice. It’s a fact,” she states. Unlike the Rachondas of the world, her skin and the experiences that come with it are NOT optional.
Here, and at many other times, Cooper squanders an opportunity to dig deep into some meaty issues like exploitation, appropriation, stereotyping, ownership, protection of black culture and the tipping point between the humorous and the hateful. Instead, he takes the easy way out, letting the scene devolve into a catfight, leaving the audience unsatisfied and his craftsmanship in question.
In “Green” and “Untitled Prison Play,” Cooper makes his point with more clarity and self-discipline. Each scene features Maconnia Chesser, who anchors and elevates them. In “Green,” Cooper lampoons rich black families who – in this case literally — buried their blackness and partook in the material rewards of assimilation. They have no intention of going anywhere, certainly not to Africa. They have bought into the American Dream, despite its hefty price tag. This is now their America, too.
Chesser plays Black, the human personification of their family’s “blackness,” locked away in the basement by the family’s deceased patriarch for forty years while he became rich. Suddenly, she is set free. She has a lot to say. And she is pissed off.
“Now is the chance to learn who you really are,” she tells them. “I am your family’s black. Come on, we have a plane to catch.” Instead, they plead, threaten and eventually try to shove her back into the basement. No way is this Pandora going back into her box.
Again, the scene devolves into chaos and violence, and again, we are left unsure what point Cooper was trying to make and why.
In “Untitled Prison Play,” the play’s most moving scene, Chesser plays an inmate who can’t leave prison without signing for her possessions and who won’t sign until everything she had when first incarcerated is accounted for and returned. What she’s missing are her joy and a little piece of chaotic peace. Her name. Her place on earth. And, most of all, her smile. Her real smile.
But her choice is stark. Refuse to sign and return to her cell or leave and find herself some new stuff. Like Freedom.
Flight 1619 does finally takes off, but not before Peaches brings down the house with a lightning bolt monologue. There are even last-minute spoilers and pyrotechnics.
When Cooper started Ain’t No Mo, he was just a high school student. Its genesis was in reaction to an incident of police intimidation that rocked and changed him. Its Off-Broadway premiere happened when he was just 24 years old and three years later, Cooper became the youngest Black American to make his Broadway playwriting debut and the youngest Black American playwright ever nominated for a Tony Award. Ain’t No Mo garnered six nominations, including Best Drama, despite its closing after a mere three-week run.
To be sure, Cooper’s play is hardly flawless. It is dated and full of platitudes, pacing issues, and tiresome, gratuitous expletives. It is also in dire need of judicious breadth and length editing.
But Cooper’s pen is a magic wand as well, spinning a smart, confident and grand play out of an undisciplined galaxy of issues and ideas. And when the smoke clears and the stage finally quiets, we’re surprised by the number of important questions left rolling around in our minds, like party favors.
Kiera Prusmack and MaConnia Chesser
If Miss Bag is the “carrier of our entire story as a people in this country” — the music, art, culture, political ideas, and everything else Blacks have contributed to the American landscape — should it travel to a new destination? Will it reassimilate or hold its owners back, married to an old reality while trying to forge a new one?
When émigrés board a plane, for example, perhaps with just one bag, what do they leave behind? What does the country they leave lose? And after they leave, whose story is theirs to tell? What do we do when the story is over? Perhaps, most importantly, where does freedom fit in if its price is a future without a past?
And these questions are just for starters.
‘Ain’t No Mo’.’ Written by Jordan E. Cooper. Directed by Dawn M. Simmons. Co-produced by SpeakEasy Stage and Front Porch Arts Collective at the Calderwood Pavilion, 527 Tremont Street, through February 8.
Cristhian Mancinas-Garcia and Parker Jennings in ‘Every Brilliant Thing’ at Apollinaire. Photos by Danielle Fauteux Jacques
By Shelley A. Sackett
A one-person show about suicide and depression that threatens random audience participation, runs for approximately 75 intermission-less minutes, and pledges to be funny and uplifting has a pretty high bar to clear. Yet, Apollinaire Theatre Company does just that with room to spare in its brilliant production of Every Brilliant Thing.
The play’s narrator, the irrepressible Parker Jennings (alternating the role with Cristhian Mancinas-Garcia, who also performs it in Spanish), is already standing in the middle of the stage when even the earliest audience member arrives. As if welcoming them into her own living room, she greets them warmly with an unaffected smile and a blue basket full of cards.
“I have a job for you all this evening,” she exclaims as she hands out the numbered cards with instructions to shout out what is written whenever she says that number.
Set in the round in an intimate black-box space that is furnished with comfortable salon-like seating, Jennings’ rapport with the audience is immediate and palpable. Upbeat jazz and full house lights heighten the sense of communal conversation. Before she has uttered her first line, she has us in the palm of her hand, making us feel like we’re here by design rather than happenstance.
“The list began after her first attempt,” she begins. “A list of everything brilliant about the world. Everything worth living for.”
The first call and response quickly follows. “Number One,” she says, and the person holding that card shouts out, “Ice cream.” Number two is water fights. Three is staying up past your bedtime and being allowed to watch TV. Any flicker of stage fright or self-consciousness has completely evaporated. We are in this together.
In an instant, Jennings the Narrator has morphed into the seven-year-old girl who, after learning that her mother attempted suicide, vows to make her mother feel better by making a list of everything that makes life worth living and sharing it with her. This coping exercise will see her through the next several decades and, by the end of the play, will number one million.
Her first encounter with death (“a loved one becoming an object”) and the first audience-supporting role (as the vet) occurs when she has to put down her beloved dog. Jennings’ improvisational chops and talent for putting the audience at ease are on full display. Other interactive roles will include her father, teacher, school counselor, and first love/wife.
Her second encounter with the idea of death occurs when her father picks her up from school after her mother’s first suicide attempt. He explains to the little girl that her mother is in the hospital because she is sad, because she couldn’t think of anything worth living for.
The precocious child intuits the concept of glimmers, the opposites of triggers. These are small experiences of pleasure that happen during simple, everyday activities. Noticing and appreciating them can cue your nervous system that you’re safe and can relax.
She devotes her life to crafting a list of every brilliant thing she can think of, first in an attempt to save her mother and later for herself, as she navigates her own journey of hills and valleys and, poignantly, fear that her mother’s mental illness tributary runs through her veins as well. As time moves on, the list becomes a sort of diary that reflects the texture of her everyday experiences.
“Things may not always get brilliant, but they get better,” she says. “We need to imagine a future better than the past because that’s what hope is and without hope, life isn’t worth living.”
Thanks to Joseph Lark-Riley’s carefully curated sound design, the significance of blues and jazz also runs deeply. These songs and artists link the Narrator to her vinyl-loving dad and tether her. Lyrics from “Drown In My Own Tears,” “I Love You Just the Way You Are” and “At Last” are more than toe-tapping background; they are placeholders and place setters that connect us to our narrator and her story. It’s no surprise that one of the items on her list is: “A song transporting you back to a moment in time.”
The tone and substance of Duncan Macmillan’s script (written with Johnny Donahoe, a British stand-up comedian who first played the role at the Ludlow Fringe Festival in 2013) covers a lot of ground. The Narrator’s ability to confront issues as heartwrenching as the guilt felt by children of suicides, social contagions, and the virulence of hard-wired, chronic depression with playfulness, insight, and unflinching honesty prevents the play from becoming mawkish, which easily could have happened if penned by a less skillful and empathetic playwright.
Danielle Fauteux Jacques wisely directs with a light touch, and Jennings shoulders the production with chipper verve and a storyteller’s charm. Yet, she also brings an emotional intelligence to her performance, the shadow of a veil that, when lifted, reveals the scars of underlying trauma. Most recently seen as Sarah in Apollinaire’s equally extraordinary “Touching the Void” last May, Jennings is an actress I would (and did) go out of my way to catch in any role she should take on. Her energy, authenticity and confidence are matched only by her raw talent.
As the play winds down, the Narrator’s list takes on a life of its own as an ersatz crowdsourced lifeline, publicly shared and collaboratively complied. Although the list couldn’t save her mother, it may just have prevented her from following in her footsteps. She leaves us collectively more open-hearted and open-minded with the balm of these parting words of benediction: “If you live a long life and get to the end of it without ever once having felt crushingly depressed, then you probably haven’t been paying attention.”
‘Every Brilliant Thing’. Written by Duncan Macmillan with Johnny Donahoe. Directed by Danielle Fauteux Jacques. Scenic and Sound Design by Joseph Lark-Riley. Lighting Design by Danielle Fauteux Jacques. Produced by Apollinaire Theatre Company at Chelsea Theatre Works, 189 Winnisimmet St, Chelsea, MA through January 19th.
For more information and to buy tickets, visit apollinairetheatre.com
SALEM – Between the early 1400s and late 1600s, the area in Northern Belgium now known as Flanders was embroiled in war, plagues, and religious upheaval. Ruled by Spain, borders shifted regularly and the reigning Catholic archdukes tried to stem Protestant encroachment. Most Flemish art served religious or political purposes, created for royalty and clergy to hang in palaces and churches.
The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem is showcasing the artistic renaissance of the period in “Saints, Sinners, Lovers and Fools: 300 Years of Flemish Masterworks,” a major exhibition of paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts on view through May 4.
Jewish life during this time was marked by its own history of persecution, expulsion, and ultimately, a muted religious freedom. Jews who had refused conversion to Christianity in Spain were expelled or killed by the Catholic monarchs during the Inquisition of 1492. Some fled to Portugal, where they were able to live as Marranos (also known as crypto-Jews, or Jews who converted to Christianity but secretly practiced Judaism). Many became merchants, trading in Iberian commodities.
Jews were drawn to the port city of Antwerp – then part of Portugal – a hub of international commerce. There, they played a key role in the city’s economy as non-citizens who could practice their trade, if not their religion.
By the 1600s, Flanders was flourishing, awash in the unprecedented wealth that global trade brought through ports such as Antwerp. Other major cosmopolitan cities, including Ghent and Bruges, became influential centers for a new bracket of business and intellectual elites. A modern civil society emerged, where a free market allowed all entrepreneurs to elevate themselves above their station and control their own fate.
Life was good for this rising middle class, and for the first time, Flemish artists and craftsmen had a new market for their works, one fueled by the tastes and appetites of these nouveau consumers rather than by the political needs of reigning royal and religious power.
These Flemish Renaissance painters radically changed European art and generated a booming commercial market, the first in European history. It is in homage to these artists that Peabody Essex Museum hosts this exhibition. Co-organized by the Denver Art Museum and the Phoebus Foundation in Antwerp – now in Belgium – it features rarely exhibited masterpieces by Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, Hans Memling, Jan Gossaert, Jan Brueghel, Clara Peeters, Jacob Jordaens, Frans Francken, and Michaelina Wautier, among many others.
The extensive exhibit is carved into seven sections that break 300 years of tumultuous Flemish tumultuous history into discrete areas of intense focus. Wisely, the exhibit starts with “This Is Flanders,” geographically grounding the viewer. Maps and an introductory video are both helpful.
“God Is in the Details,” the largest section, displays devotional art earmarked for both private and public prayerful use. The Catholic Church was the biggest commissioner – and displayer – of these religious paintings. Pensive religious hymns echo through the gallery, complementing the display.
With “New Perspectives,” the subject matter and style shifts from the rigidly iconic and religious to richer, freer artistic compositions of landscapes, still lifes, and portraits that capture the personality of both subject and artist.
“Everyone to His Taste,” by Michaelina Wautier (circa 1650), is a luminescent painting of a boy trying to take an egg from another. It illustrates the proverb, “To each his fancy, but sharing is best.” Wautier is one of four female artists represented in the exhibit.
Innovations of all sorts are highlighted and heralded. Artistic and scientific inventions, such as oil painting and bird dissection, were invented in Flanders and influenced how artists depicted the body. As new genres emerged in the 1600s, Flanders became a center for experimentation by curious scientists, engineers, physicians, botanists, cartographers, and humanists.
“Fool in the Mirror” is a section full of whimsical, clever scenes that, while humorous and irreverent, caution Flanders’ wealthy citizens that although living a Dionysian life of excess may feel good, they should beware of crossing the ever-present line that would prevent them from getting into heaven. These cautionary messages hint at the importance – and challenge – of maintaining pious and humble lives in the face of such sudden immense wealth.
“Rebus: The World Feeds Many Fools” by Jan Massijs (circa 1530) is a showstopper in this section. It is also a rebus word puzzle the artist has challenged the viewer to solve. All the rage in the 1500s, a rebus is a device that combines the use of illustrated pictures with individual letters to depict words or phrases. Massijs’s rebus has hints and even the answer displayed beside it.
The last section, “Cabinets of Wonder,” pays tribute to the collections of “curiosities” Flanders’s individuals amassed to both reflect their wealth and connections and also possess a microcosm of the world in miniature. PEM’s “Wünderkammer Gallery” evokes these 17th century cabinets, which are full of such seemingly random items as cauliflower coral, a skull-shaped pendant, and a stuffed ostrich. More than 100 objects hail from Africa, Australia, Brazil, China, Indonesia, and Japan.
A selection of natural and man-made wonders in the Saints, Sinners, Lovers, Fools cabinet of wonders at PEM
There are two omissions from the exhibit. One is deliberate and due in part to lack of space. Although Brussels was the principal center for tapestry weaving at the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries, a bias toward painting existed both then and in the collection on display at PEM.
The other omission is any mention of the crypto-Jews who fled the persecutions and expulsions in the Iberian Peninsula and the key roles they played in cultivating Antwerp’s economic preeminence by helping develop the important diamond, pearl, and commodities industries.
Ayodele Casel (center) and the cast of A.R.T.s ‘Diary of a Tap Dancer.’ Photos: Nile Scott Studios and Maggie Hall
By Shelley A. Sackett
Ayodele Casel’s ‘Diary of a Tap Dancer’ defies pigeonholing. First, it is a crackerjack tap dance concert, choreographed and performed by a jubilant devotée of the genre whose sensitivity to its rhythmic musicality keeps the action moving and the audience’s toes tapping along.
Second, it is a narrative documentary that “shines a light on women hoofers,” especially the unknown and forgotten black tap dancers of the 1920s through the ‘50s who blazed a trail for others, like Casel, to follow. Projection Designer Katherine Freer has curated a six-screen still and moving visual accompaniment that introduces us to all the dancers who might have been written out of history — women like Juanita Pitts, Jeni Le Gon, Cora LaRedd, Louise Madison and Marion Coles — but for her efforts to draw attention to them.
“I have an intense need, desire and responsibility to speak their names,” Casel, the self-proclaimed sepia Cinderella of tap, shares. “They were entrepreneurs, choreographers and dancers. Our time on earth matters. Don’t wait for an invitation to tell your story.”
Additionally, Casel’s ‘Diary of a Tap Dancer’ is just that- an oral diary that tells, in upbeat, humorous and, at times, painfully repetitive detail, the story of her life.
Born in the Bronx to a Puerto Rican mother and African American father (whom she didn’t meet until she was 17 years old), she was sent as a child to live with her Puerto Rican grandparents, where she honed her scrappy spirit by getting into fist fights with boys. When she returned to the Bronx, she and her mother watched old movies and read movie magazines, falling for the glamor and magic of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. She discovered the world of tap during a high school class in movie history. Later, as an NYU theater major, she took her first tap class, showing up with shoes from “Payless” that were as close to Rogers’ as she could find.
“Tap is magic,” Casel says. “It changed my life.”
Her single-minded persistence landed her a spot as the first woman in Savion Glover’s (of mid-90s off-Broadway hit, “Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk,” fame) dance company, a real turning point in her career. Tap legend Gregory Hines has referred to her as “one of the top young tap dancers in the world.”
When it comes to paving the way for other marginalized dancers, Casel doesn’t just talk the talk; she also walks the walk (taps the tap?) by sharing the stage and spotlight with seven female and nonbinary young dancers who both complement each other as an ensemble and shine as soloists. But the spritely, charismatic, and extraordinarily talented Casel can’t help but steal every scene with the simplest flap-ball-change. Who knew tap could be so orchestral and communicative?
Under Torya Beard’s (Casel’s longtime collaborator and wife) direction, the atmosphere is set even before the show starts with an almost holy ambient organ major harmonic dyad punctuated by muted city traffic, sirens, and birds. A simple blue set sports what looks like graffiti but is actually a photograph of 18th-century legislation forbidding slaves from owning drums.
A slow spotlight reveals white-clad dancers using every inch of Tatiana Kahvegian’s sparse but effective stage. Dancers are scattered in little solo spaces reminiscent of the staging of “The Lion King.” When the soundtrack kicks in and they all start tapping, it’s like a magical sound bath of rhythm and movement.
Backed by a terrific trio of on-stage musicians (Carlos Cippelletti on piano, Raul Reyes Bueno on bass and Keisel Jiménez Leyva on drums), the musical dance numbers are a pure delight. Casel tells her intimate and powerful story through straight narration, rap, beat and counter-beat. Her acting chops show in the comfort with which she addresses the audience. It’s no surprise to learn that “Ayodele” is Yoruban for “joy.” Casel is not just a top-notch dancer and choreographer; she is genuinely warm, funny, smart, guileless, and humble. She is also an articulate, eloquent, and bold guide who unlocks the enchantment and triumph of the human spirit that is the essence of tap.
The problem (at least at last Sunday’s world premiere production, which ran 30 minutes beyond the show’s already overly generous 2 hours with one intermission) is that Casel has a lot to say about a lot of topics about which she is understandably passionate. “This show is narrative justice,” she explains.
But by trying to tackle such big-ticket items as racism, sexism, African American history, misogyny, and historical exclusion, instead of leaving her audience feeling enlightened and informed, she leaves them wishing for more dance and less talk. A LOT less talk.
While Casel is an excellent and engaging narrator, it is the magic language of her syncopated footwork and vocal scat work that offer a more compelling and emotionally accessible (and less preachy) tribute to the art form of tap and the black foremothers she seeks to honor. A little editing could go a long way.
‘Diary of a Tap Dancer’ – Written and Choreographed by Ayodele Casel. Directed by Torya Beard. Musical Direction by Nick Wilders; Scenic Design by Tatiana Kahvegian; Costume Design by Camilla Dely; Lighting Design by Brandon Stirling Baker; Sound Design by Sharath Patel; Projection Design by Katherine Freer; Compositions, Orchestrations, and Arrangements by Carlos Cippelletti, Ethan D. Packchar. Presented by American Repertory Theater at the Loeb Drama Center, 64 Brattle St., Cambridge, through January 4, 2025.
Martha Graham Dance Company’ — Presented by Celebrity Series of Boston at Emerson Cutler Majestic. Run has ended.
By Shelley A. Sackett
The last time I saw a Martha Graham piece performed was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in October 2023, when I had the random good fortune to attend its exhibition, Art for the Millions: American Culture and Politics in the 1930s. As part of that exhibit, dancers from the Martha Graham Dance Company staged some of Graham’s most powerful ’30s solos in galleries throughout the museum.
I was lucky enough to catch “Lamentations” in the New Greek and Roman Galleries, the spectacular “museum-within-the-museum” built to display the Met’s extraordinary collection of Hellenistic, Etruscan, South Italian, and Roman sculpture.
Graham’s 1930 work, set to Hungarian Zoltàn Kodàly’s plaintive music, features a single dancer whose angular moves inside a stretchy fabric cocoon have long marked Graham’s trailblazing style. Over a mere four minutes, the dancer fights what feels like an eternal battle to get out of her encasement. Only her face, hands and feet are visible, yet the geometric shapes she creates epitomize her fruitless struggle. She pleads and prays, but there is no escape. Graham called the piece “the personification of grief.”
Seeing the timeless, sculptural piece in a sun-filled atrium with an audience of ancient statues was nothing short of sublime.
Its recent performance at the 1,200-seat beaux-art Emerson Cutler Majestic, though a less intimate setting, was no less astonishing.
Few dance companies have transfigured the art of contemporary dance quite like Martha Graham’s. Since the company’s founding in 1926, Graham’s signature style has remained a bedrock of American modern dance and continues to be taught worldwide.
In anticipation of the company’s 100th birthday celebration in 2026 (GRAHAM100), the Boston Celebrity Series brought the legendary troupe to Boston for three special appearances to kick off its own 2024/2025 Season Dance Series.
The Friday night capacity show illustrated why Graham remains the gold standard of contemporary dance choreography.
The program opened with “Dark Meadow Suite (1946), highlights from her longer “Dark Meadow.” The full ensemble (featuring Lloyd Knight and Anne Souder) performs an ancient mating ritual as part of Graham’s American homage to a mythological rite of spring.
The piece opens with a Greek chorus of five women who circle trancelike, stamping a primordial rhythm with their bare feet. Thick, rich music by Carlos Chávez sets the auditory stage for stunning, sensual, animal-like movements as dancers join, separate, and pulsate in perfect synchronicity. Playful lighting (Nick Hung) adds color and texture and black and orange flowing costumes (Martha Graham) are equal parts elegance and flirty frolic. Knight and Souder are the embodiment of grace as they perform their coupling ceremony, which Graham described as “a re-enactment of the mysteries which attend the eternal adventure of seeking.”
Close Graham friend and collaborator Agnes de Mille, the storyteller niece of filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille, choreographed the iconic “Rodeo or The Courting at Burnt Ranch.” For its GRAHAM100 3-year celebration, Gabriel Witcher rearranged Aaron Copeland’s trademark music for a six-piece bluegrass ensemble. Celebrating the diverse genesis of America, the piece is a series of humorous vignettes featuring dancers clad in full-blown cowpoke, cowgirl, and genteel pioneer women’s regalia.
Like a silent movie, the action takes place on a Saturday afternoon and evening on a ranch in the southwest. DeMille referred to her work as “a pastorale, a lyric joke,” and as The Cowgirl, Laurel Dalley Smith manages to be sassy and funny while displaying serious dancing talent. The piece flits from a Wyatt Earp TV set to a mariachi band to a barn dance, loving spoofs that straddle Broadway blockbuster musicals, classical ballet, and cowboy rodeo activities. In between are tastes of square dances, polkas, and couples pairing and unpairing. Screen projections that change from ranch to sunset to starry night to barn dance are effective without being hokey.
Post intermission, the afore-described “Lamentations” is even more stunning on the heels of the slapstick-like “Rodeo.” So Young An, the recipient of the International Arts Award and the Grand Prize at the Korea National Ballet Grand Prix, is a talent to be reckoned with.
The evening ends with the 2024 piece, “The People.” Choreographed by Jamar Roberts, who describes his work as “part protest, part lament,” the piece resonates with references to American history. Dancers are both uplifting paeans to the hope and promise of American folk music and downtrodden, burdened examples of what can happen when America doesn’t live up to its promises. A new score by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and American roots musician Rhiannon Giddens (arranged by Witcher) spotlights rich, throaty harmonies peppered with pockets of poignant silence.
The last time the Martha Graham Dance Company adorned Boston’s stage was in 2005. Judging from the exuberant standing ovation its 2024 audience bestowed last Friday evening, one can only hope they got the message that they have been away far too long.
Lorraine Victoria Kanyike, Fady Demian, Josephine Elwood, and Liza Giangrande in Actors’ Shakespeare Project’s production of ‘Emma’. Photo by Nile Scott Studios.
‘Emma’ — Written by Kate Hamill. Based on the novel by Jane Austen. Directed by Regine Vital. Scenic Design by Saskia Martinez; Costume Design by Nia Safarr Banks; Lighting Design by Deb Sullivan; Sound Design by Anna Drummond. Presented by Actors’ Shakespeare Project at Multicultural Arts Center, 41 Second St., East Cambridge through December 15th.
By Shelley A. Sackett
Jane Austen’s 1815 novel “Emma,” like all her other novels, explores the concerns and difficulties of genteel women living in Georgian–Regency England. Her Emma Woodhouse is a bright, wealthy, and confident young woman who basically has it all — education, intelligence, beauty, and money. She also has a surplus of self-confidence, pride and time. She is as spoiled, meddlesome, and self-deluded as she is witty, charming, and pithy.
She lives in an age that prepares wealthy women like Emma for a life of the mind but permits them no occupational outlet. It is matrimony or nothing. It’s no wonder the poor girl nearly explodes with pent-up energy and resentment.
Bored with her own life, Emma turns to the challenge of meddling in the lives of others, manipulating them for sport. She doesn’t court friends; she undertakes assignments. Although she is as unskilled at reading others as she is at self-examination, she fashions herself a gifted matchmaker. Her delusional overconfidence as a marriage broker blinds her to her own romantic potential and leads to misunderstandings, mayhem and heartache.
To her credit, Kate Hammill has taken Austen’s borderline unsympathetic heroine and turned her into a likable rebel who rails against the cruel patriarchal system that imprisons her potential. “What is the purpose of educating women only to have them marry?” she asks. “I must have something to do, or I shall go mad.”
Hamill is no stranger to the genre (she adapted three other Austen works as well as “Little Women” and “Vanity Fair”), and her “Emma“ brims with a delicious melding of past and present, creating a heroine as at home at a lady’s afternoon tea as cutting up the disco dance floor in a white go-go jumper.
Elwood and Mara Sidmore
Over nearly 2 1/2 hours (one intermission), the plot unfolds. Emma (played with boundless joy and energy by Josephine Moshiri Elwood) and the cast are introduced to us at a party celebrating the wedding of her former governess, Anne (Mara Sidmore), and the widower Mr. Weston (Dev Luthra). Emma tells her father and her best friend since childhood, George Knightley (an outstanding Alex Bowden), that she practically arranged the marriage by introducing them. After such a clear “success,” Emma is determined to make another match. This time, she has set her sights on Mr. Elton, the village vicar. Both Emma’s father and Knightly caution her against interfering, but they ultimately fail to dissuade her.
“You can’t control everything, Emma,” Knightly warns her repeatedly, only to meet the same response: “But isn’t it fun to watch me try?”
In an act as dispassionate and calculating as Henry Higgins’ taking on Eliza Doolittle, Emma decides that for her next “project,” she will undertake the transformation of Harriet, a 17-year-old student of unknown parentage and inferior social status. Harriet is an eager beaver, as compliant and adoring as a lapdog.
Emma sets about improving (i.e., making her more like herself) her “friend,” starting with convincing her that the groundskeeper, Robert Martin (Fady Demian), the man she loves, is beneath her. When he proposes, Emma gets Harriet to refuse him. She is determined to get Mr. Elton to fall in love with Harriet, thereby elevating both Harriet’s social standing and her own reputation as an unmatched matchmaker.
Needless to say, all does not go according to Emma’s plan. The rest of the play is peppered with colorful characters and rotating liaisons that, owing to double and triple casting, are often hard to keep straight. Aloof, mysterious Jane Fairfax (Lorraine Victoria Kanyike) is Emma’s equal and rival, the only one able to ruffle Emma’s feathers. She is as cool as Emma is hot-blooded, as calm as Emma is kinetic.
Adding insult to Emma’s injured pride, she is also accomplished (as a governess) and intriguing (she left her most recent job under mysterious conditions). She is a thorn in Emma’s side, catapulting her best-laid plans into the abyss.
Although marriage doesn’t figure into Emma’s plans for herself, Knightly and Emma are a match made in heaven that is tediously obvious. They squabble and dance around each other until Emma’s former governess, a very pregnant Anne, practically knocks their heads together and tells them to “work it out!”
Emma must first be pushed off her narcissistic pedestal before this can happen. Ironically, it is meek, malleable Harriet who does the honors when she rejects Emma’s “help” and realizes she has been duped. “You think you control everything, but you don’t control me anymore,” she practically spits.
Like a deer caught in headlights, Emma has a major breakthrough of sudden self-examination. Breaking the fourth wall (which Hamill and Vital execute frequently and effectively), she addresses the audience with cartoonish naïveté. “I may not know everything,” she deadpans in the same stunned voice with which Dorothy announces, “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”
Liza Giangrande and Elwood
Subtlety is hardly this production’s strong suit.
What IS its strong suit is a stellar cast with unrivaled energy. Elwood IS Emma, with all her strengths and weaknesses. It is a pleasure witnessing an actor so comfortable in her own skin and in that of her character’s, and a joy to behold her joy in the role.
As Harriet, Liza Giangrande has to walk a fine line between hysterically funny and pathetically histrionic. Giangrande rises above the sometimes two-dimensionality of her character, embracing Harriet’s more accessible, loveable, trusting side.
Bowden’s Knightly centers the plot and grounds Emma. He also projects and articulates so effectively that even when his back is to the audience (a frequent and unfortunate feature of the staging, as is poor sight lines from most seats), his lines are easily understandable. Likewise for Mara Sidmore’s Anne Weston.
Although the play is fun, full of funny one-liners and Monty Python-esque routines, at the end of the day, it is Emma and the complicated times she lives through that resonate. As we wade through the sight gags, slapstick, and farce, her plaintive refrain rises above to ring clear as a bell: “What is the purpose of educating women if a lady is not allowed real employment?”
Yet Hamill ends on a hopeful note, planting the seeds of 20th-century feminism in 19th-century soil.
“If I teach my girls the best I can and they teach their girls the best THEY can and their girls and their girls, and so on – who knows what we could make? What power we could harness? What we could do? Can you imagine—someday—a whole world full of Emmas, working together?” Emma asks the half-stunned, half thrilled Knightly.
Dev Luthra and Mara Sidmore
“Now THAT, dear Emma,” Knightly should have said in response, ”is a cause indeed worthy of a rebel like you.”
Karen MacDonald and Gordon Clapp in SpeakEasy Stage Company’s production of Pru Payne. Photo: Nile Scott Studios
By Shelley A. Sackett
Karen MacDonald, recently introduced as “the empress of Boston,” adds another gem to her tiara with her portrayal of Prudence Payne, a Dorothy Parker-esque reviewer whose sharp wit, acid tongue and encyclopedic familiarity with minutiae of all things cultural have earned her many awards. We are introduced to her as she and her son, Thomas (De’Lon Grant) sit in the Brook Hollow clinic anteroom, awaiting a consultation with a doctor. The television is blaring pablum. Pru regally grabs the remote, waves it like a magic wand. She tries to turn the television set off, but can’t. She retakes her seat, slumping in confused defeat. Tommy reminds her that there are other people in the room who may want to continue watching. “Re. Member,” Pru says, enunciating each letter as if it were a syllable unto itself.
In a flash of a flashback, the music cues and we are transported to 1988 (kudos to Set Designers Christopher and Justin Swader, whose elegantly simple set easily morphs in our mind’s eye from medical waiting room to time travel “Beam Me Up Scotty” mode to grand ceremonial dais.) Pru is at the pinnacle of her career, about to become the first woman and first critic to receive the alliteratively laden AAAA’s (American Academy of Arts and Aesthetics) Abernathy Award.
We catch her as she mounts the podium amidst resounding applause. Her acceptance speech is impudent, provocative and riotously funny. She is brilliant and revels in peppering her monologue with fast-paced literary citations that showcase her sophisticated and seasoned palette while challenging her audience to guess their source. If there were a Mensa Jeopardy, Pru would be its host.
MacDonald, Marianna Bassham
But a sudden shift, almost imperceptible at first, indicates all is not quite right with Pru. She devolves into F-bombs, rectal references and borderline slander. Thomas approaches her, but she waves him away. When she loses her place and starts to panic on stage, MacDonald’s prodigious skills are on full display. In the blink of an eye, her Pru actually pales, her face sags, her shoulders droop and her speech falters. Thomas rescues her and escorts her to her seat. We are back in the waiting room, where the TV continues to blame.
Brook Hollow, it turns out, is a Massachusetts memory clinic where Thomas has brought Pru for evaluation following her speech and the uproar it causes. To smooth the turbulent wake Pru left with the AAAA, he has offered up her memoir as a peace offering, due the following fall. It is only two weeks later, yet we sense that Pru has deteriorated. She is still irreverent and acerbic, yet her confusion and slips are more frequent.
Thomas is desperate to thwart his mother’s memory loss. It is an irony lost to no one that a woman whose memory is galloping away is chasing her past before it is out of reach in order to write her memoir.
For the next 90 intermission-less minutes, we ride shotgun over two decades as Pru travels down the path of full-blown, irreversible dementia. If this sounds gut-wrenching and jarring, it is. Yet, in the skilled hands of master wordsmith and award-winning playwright Steven Drukman (and under Paul Daigneault’s flawless and sensitive direction), it is also rip-roaringly funny and brimming with empathy. The Newton native has married head and heart in a tightly crafted script that abounds in clever one-liners and zinger plays on words. (It also has tons of fun local references). Painful as the topic and Pru’s story are, Drukman’s humor and hopefulness dull the knife’s sharp blade just enough to prevent the play from circling the drain of utter despair.
Greg Maraio, De’Lon Grant
He has also penned a group of supporting characters who each have independent agendas and stories, yet who interlace as an ensemble that embraces and supports the play’s eponymous Pru.
Pru and Thomas, an aspiring novelist, meet with Dr. Dolan (the magnificent Marianna Bassham in an unfortunately understated, somewhat unimaginative role), who, unsurprisingly, wants to admit Pru for observation. They start to protest when Pru spots Gus Cadahy (the quietly show-stopping Emmy, SAG and IRNE Awards winner Gordon Clapp), a custodial engineer who is accompanied by his son, Art (Greg Maraio). They, too, are at Brook Hollow so Gus can be evaluated for memory decline and associated behaviors.
Pru and Gus are yin and yang, opposite forces that form a whole in a balance that is always changing. He is lower middle class, uneducated, and speaks with a thick Boston accent. She is stratospherically wealthy, wears her pedigree on her sleeve, and effects a Brahmin patois. He is unapologetic, hilarious and down to earth, determined to squeeze every last drop of fun and pleasure out of life. He makes no excuses and accepts what comes his way.
She is calculated, driven and controlling. “Good enough” are two words meant to be spat, like a curse. Despite her sophistication and breeding, she is far crasser than the social mores minded Gus.
Their love affair at Brook Hollow opens the door to more than a delineation of their differences. Pru is Gus’ missing piece and vice versa. He softens and grounds her, whether playing gin, dancing, making love or reeling her back from memory’s steep precipice. Pru, for the first time in her life, is able to let go, let loose and let herself love and be loved.
MacDonald, Clapp
Meanwhile, their sons have their own backstory, which would be a spoiler to divulge other than to let slip that, while their parents are creating new memories, their sons are revisiting old ones.
Boston native Maraio is terrific as Art, both in his interactions with his father and with Thomas, especially as concerns their parents’ relationship. He brings a nuanced vulnerability to his external impermeability. Grant, so wonderful as Keith in “A Case for the Existence of God,” brings that same sweet openness to Thomas, a quiet defenselessness and optimism.
Although Drukman meanders peripherally into timely topics of the 1990s and 2000s (AIDS, politics, and the demise of cultural standards, for example), he has the good sense to use this detour for context rather than theme. He has written an important and riveting play about a timely and difficult subject that is, in its own right, much more than just “good enough.”
We ache for Pru and her family, but covet our view through the keyhole at that in-between stage where one starts to become unglued. yet is still together enough to be aware of what is happening (and what is to come). We also come face to face with some heady and introspective queries.
Clapp, MacDonald
How, for example, do you sum up a person, especially one whose life ends in the black hole of dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease? Who is the real Pru? How should she be remembered? Is it fair to her to remember her in her absolute decline or is it dishonest to remember her otherwise? Do we curate our own memories? Do others curate theirs of us? At the end of the day, does it really matter?
As her own memories dissolve and past human connections along with them, Pru has moments lucid enough to still contemplate Pru-worthy big picture questions. What if, she wonders, her entire life was just a memory trick?
What if, indeed.
“Pru Payne”— Written by Steven Drukman. Directed by Paul Daugneault. Presented by SpeakEasy Stage at Boston Center for the Arts, Calderwood Pavillion, 539 Tremont St., Boston, through Nov. 16.For tickets and more information, go to https://speakeasystage.com/
InSights 