“Grupo Corpo” Artistic Director – Paulo Pederneiras; Choreographer – Rodrigo Pederneiras; Presented by Celebrity Series at Boch Center Shubert Theatre. Run has ended.
By Shelley A. Sackett
Founded in 1975 by Paulo and Rodrigo Pederneiras, the Brazilian dance company Grupo Corpo (meaning “Body Group” in Portuguese) is renowned for its unparalleled blend of popular Brazilian culture, African rhythms, and classical technique.
At last Saturday night’s performance, the troupe treated its audience to a mesmerizing evening of ingenious choreography, tireless, virtuoso dancers, inventive lighting and stage design, and pulsating, tribal-tinged music by Bahian songwriter Gilberto Gil and the Brazilian jazz band, Metà Metà.
The concert was as thrilling, riveting and entertaining as it gets.
In the first piece, “Gil Refazendi (Gil Remaking),” a subtly shifting abstract image of unfolding sunflowers is background to a stage lit by simple, single white light spots. (Scenography and lighting by the talented Paulo Pederneiras). The jazzy, infectious beat of ancestral drums, electronic distortions, African percussion gourds, and woodwinds sets the mood.
Known as the godfather of Brazilian music, Gilberto Gil’s compositions are high energy and uplifting, impossible not to sway and toe tap to. Conceived and then, post-pandemic, fully reconceived by choreographer Rodrigo Pederneiras, “Gil Refazendi” contains themes of renewal, rebuilding, and revitalization.
Female dancers explode onto the stage, alighting like beams of Tinkerbell magic clad in oversized white raw linen shirts and scanty shorts. The male dancers follow, dressed in the same breezy material cast as casual shirts over billowing pants (Costumes by Freusa Zechmeister). The effect is smooth, graceful, and playfully sexy.
Under Pederneiras’s mind-boggling choreography, the dancers stretch, pirouette, leap and undulate to the varying strains of samba, bossa nova and rock. They dance solo, as couples and in various groupings.
Although each dancer has their moment in the spotlight, what resonates most is the awe-inspiring synchronicity of the twenty-member troupe. When on stage as an ensemble, they move as a single organic whole. Not one wrist flicks out of tempo; not one back arches higher than another. That degree of skill and discipline is nothing short of astonishing and a rare pleasure to behold.
The second piece, “Gira,” is less abstract and more somber in tone. It is based on the rites of “Umbanda,” one of the most widely practiced Brazil-born religions that pulls on traditions from West African practices, Candomblé, Catholicism and others. In some Umbanda rituals, participants release control of their bodies to the spirits of ancestors or deities in what’s described as an altered state of consciousness.
Pederneiras’s choreography reflects gestures and movements he witnessed during actual ceremonies. There is a hint of menace in the air, particularly during the male/female couplings, which frequently teeter on the edge of violence before withdrawing back to more tender territory.
Male and female dancers are dressed identically, with naked torsos and white skirts of raw linen. Red paint on their necks adds a formal, sacramental touch. Again, the dancers are impossibly lithesome, transitioning from jolts of electric voltage to supple melting seamlessly. That they are dressed identically further blurs the edges between solo and troupe, between the individual and the collective.
Pederneiras started to choreograph in 1978 and has become known for the way in which he constructs sophisticated dialogues between music and dance using the bodies of his dancers as his interpreters. His work is a thrill to behold and one-of-a kind, a genuine reimagining of the ways in which humans can harness, express and appreciate the magic of creative energy.
Cast of ‘Fat Ham’ The Huntington Theatre. Photos by T Charles Erickson
By Shelley A. Sackett
“Fat Ham,” winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize Award for best drama, is much more than a modern-day riff on “Hamlet,” one of Shakepeare’s most quoted, performed and adapted plays. Using the bones of the Bard’s tragedy as a structural anchor, the exceptionally talented playwright, James Ijames, has fleshed it out with analogous characters whose feet are firmly planted in the here and now and whose modern-day nightmares and dreams reflect both the mundane and the existential.
Like Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” “Fat Ham” asks the question, “How do we cope in a belligerent world untethered?” and answers it simply: “To thine own self be true.” But instead of engaging in a bloody palace battle over his wearing his father’s coveted crown, this Hamlet wants only to prove his father’s murderer’s guilt and then high tail it to greener, less legacy-laden pastures where he can let down his guard and live an authentic and happy life.
Although full of allusions to the original tragedy about the Danish king (a splendid one-page graphic summary of “Hamlet” by Mya Lixian Gosling is a welcome inclusion in the program), “Fat Ham” stands on its own. Its story is told through the eyes of Juicy/Hamlet (a spot-on Marshall W. Mabry IV), a young, queer Black man marooned in no man’s land with no lifeboat in sight.
The play opens in Juicy’s backyard as Tio/Horatio (the stand-out, gifted Lau’rie Roach), his best friend and greatest advocate, tries to get his buddy to address and snap out of his melancholy. Juicy’s father, Pap, was recently killed in jail, where he was serving time for slitting a man’s throat because he couldn’t stand the smell of his breath.
Tio, more laid back than Juicy, diagnoses Juicy’s problem as more than a reaction to his recent domestic woes. According to Tito (who sees a therapist, so he has cred in this department), Juicy isn’t suffering from individual filial grief. Rather, his is the inescapable condition of Black “inherited trauma.” “Your Pop went to jail; his Pop went to jail. His Pop went to jail. His Pop went to jail, and what’s before that?” he asks. “Slavery.”
As if that weren’t heavy enough, Juicy (like Hamlet) has much more on his plate. His mother, Tedra (a slinky Ebony Marshall-Oliver), married Pap’s brother Rev (James T. Alfred, who also plays Pap) while Pap’s body was still warm. Then, just as the backyard bar-b-q wedding celebration is about to begin, Pap appears to Juicy as a ghost.
Pap is one mean son-of-a-bitch, cursing Juicy for being soft and trying unsuccessfully (he is, after all, a noncorporeal ghost) to beat him to a pulp. Yet, he has a message and directive that Juicy can’t ignore.
Rev was behind Pap’s murder, he tells his son. He insists Juicy man up and avenge his death.
“It’s amazing what fathers think they own just because they share the same name as their son,” Juicy tells Tito, who couldn’t see Pap’s ghost but knows exactly what Juicy means.
Mirroring the relationship he had/has with his father, there is also no love lost between Juicy and Rev, who treats his nephew/son with contempt and one-upmanship, calling him a pansy and stealing his college tuition money to remodel a bathroom worthy of a new man of the house.
What should Juicy do? Be a man, embrace violence and follow in his father’s footsteps? Or take the road advocated by the laidback, don’t-worry-be-happy Tito and reimagine what it means to be a man?
If this sounds solemn and heavy, it is. (Just read the original “Hamlet.”) Yet, in Ijames’ magical hands (and under Stevie Walker-Webb’s razor-sharp direction), such profound topics as: the unending cycle and generational trauma of male violence; sexual and racial inequity, and freedom of identity become manageable because they arrive wrapped in the gift of comedy.
Ijames’s true genius (and no doubt a reason for his well-deserved Pulitzer Prize) is his ability to infuse this story of tragedy and violence with laugh-out-loud jokes, songs, sight gags and such modern props as a karaoke machine. His troupe of lively, original and (other than Rev) compassionate people each literally vibrate to their own rhythm.
Opal/Ophelia (a perfectly cast Victoria Omoregie) is a pouty teenager, chafing at her mother’s heavy-handed directive to be ladylike and wear a dress when all she wants is to join the military and scream at the top of her lungs that she likes girls. Rabby, her rabid liquor-loving, church-lady mother and a stand-in for the equally judgmental Polonious, is played by scene-stealer Thomika Marie Bridwell. Larry/Laertes (the splendid Amar Atkins), Opal’s Marine brother who is also a closet gay, rounds out the cast.
Ijames has many tricks up his sleeve to keep the fast-paced, 90-minute (no intermission) play moving effortlessly. He manages to combine an unlikely list of ingredients (serious soliloquies, characters who break the fourth wall, slapstick, stoner raps, MTV-worthy musical song-and-dance numbers and internal monologues) to create a satisfying, hearty four-course meal.
Luciana Stecconi’s set brings the audience squarely into a lower-middle-class, well-loved, and much-used backyard. Her keen eye and attention to countless details, such as a screen door off its hinge, shows.
The one criticism (and this production is not alone in this department, unfortunately) is that the actors need to have better mics, and their lines frequently need better pacing. Nothing is more frustrating to an audience than when the end of a line is swallowed or a new one begun before laughter from the previous one has died down. Ijames’s writing is too delicious not to savor.
Some have complained that the end is a facile cop-out meant to offer an easy out for the current feel-good streaming culture. Ijames deserves more credit than that. His ending may be upbeat (and a delectable dessert), but it is deliberate and message-laden.
The playwright challenges us to answer Tito’s rhetorical question: What would life be like if we chose pleasure over harm? Judging from the audience’s reaction to the finale, it would be pretty darn good indeed.
Fat Ham’ — Written by James Ijames. Directed by Stevie Walker-Webb, Scenic Design by Luciana Stecconni, Costume Design by Celeste Jennings, Sound Design by Aubrey Dube, Lighting Design by Xiangfu Xiao. Presented by The Huntington Theatre in association with Alliance Theatre and Front Porch Arts Collective at the Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA, 527 Tremont St., through Sunday, October 29, 2023.
Carly Zien, Amy Resnick, Will Lyman and Joshua Chessin-Yudin. | PHOTO T Charles Erickson
By Shelley A. Sackett
Nothing crystallizes millennia of antisemitism like the Martyrology Service during Yom Kippur afternoon service. “Why are we so hated?” “Can anyplace ever be truly safe?” and “Where will be next on this list?” we can’t help wondering.
As if on cue, the Huntington Theatre’s season opener speaks to these questions and more with Joshua Harmon’s exceptional “Prayer for the French Republic,” winner of the 2022 Drama Desk Outstanding Play Award. Under Loretta Greco’s razor-sharp direction, Harmon’s themes of antisemitism, assimilation, family, freedom, identity, and fear come to life.
Set in Paris in 2016-17 and 1944-46, “Prayer” follows five generations of Jewish piano sellers. Marcelle Salomon Benhamou, the current matriarch, her husband Charles, and their children, Daniel, 26, and Elodie, 28, are the limbs of the original Salomon family tree. The play opens with house lights up as Patrick, the play’s narrator and Marcelle’s brother, addresses the audience. His eye-contact and hands-in-trousers-pockets ease establish rapport and immediacy. “What is the beginning of a family?” he asks as he strolls across a set that will represent both 1944 and 2016. “And what,” he doesn’t ask but seems about to, “is its end?”
Abruptly, the calm evaporates. We are in the Benhamou apartment, where Marcelle (the sublimely talented Amy Resnick) is mid-sentence, explaining her convoluted genealogy to Molly, an American cousin who has just arrived to spend her junior year abroad. Only one thing seems clear: Marcelle’s Ashkenazi family has been rooted in French soil for centuries.
Just as Molly sort of gets it, Charles (the always amazing Nael Nacer) bursts through the front door with Daniel, who has been attacked by a gang of antisemitic thugs. Daniel’s face is bloodied, but he is nonplussed. His parents are apoplectic.
“How many times have I begged you to wear a baseball cap?” Marcelle pleads. Daniel teaches at a Jewish school and wears a kippah. She urges her son to acknowledge and adapt to the danger he invites by advertising his religion in a world where antisemitism and fascism are on the rise. What she doesn’t do is entertain any thought of leaving France.
Charles’ reaction is more flight and fright than fight. He has walked this walk and knows where it can lead. He and his North African Sephardic Jewish family have lived in diaspora since antisemitism forced them to flee Algeria in the 1960s.
“It’s the suitcase or the coffin,” he says. “I’m scared. Something is happening.” This wandering Jew is tired of living at the whim of host countries. He wants to go “home.” He wants to move to Israel.
Harmon quietly relocates us to 1944 (Andrew Boyce’s set makes this seamless), where we meet Marcelle and Patrick’s great-grandparents. They sit in their comfortable apartment, wondering what has happened to the rest of their family. Miraculously, they were able to remain in Paris during the war after the Nazi sent to deport them took pity on their age and left them alone. They even kept their piano store.
The rest of the play vaults between these two time periods, connecting them with the overarching question: When is the tipping point between suitcase and coffin? When is it best to leave, even if one’s family has been there for centuries and no other place will ever feel like home?
“You have to trust your instincts,” Charles implores. “It’s all you have.”
Writing cutting, funny, fast-paced, and well-researched dialogue that tackles difficult, uncomfortable topics is one of Harmon’s many attributes. His humor is often dark and our laughter is tainted with discomfort, but he wields his pen judiciously and always hits his introspective mark. He expertly uses Elodie (an electrifying Carly Zien) as his trademark firebrand mouthpiece, and her show-stopping monologue deserves a standing ovation.
Harmon doesn’t ignore the question of whether Israel’s politics have changed our feelings about it being a home for all Jews. Conflating Israel and Judaism has become painfully unavoidable. When Charles expresses his discomfort at reciting “A Prayer for the French Republic” during services, it’s hard not to relate.
Harmon is not pessimistic. We don’t pray to what is, he implies, but for what is not. “What is a prayer but speaking out loud to hope?” a character asks. Yet, can we really call a country whose politics marginalize who we are “home?” By ending “Prayer” with the cast belting out the French anthem, “La Marseillaise,” instead of Israel’s “Hatikvah,” Harmon’s answer, at least for now, seems to be yes.
The play runs through Oct. 8 at the Huntington Theatre, 264 Huntington Ave. Visit huntingtontheatre.org.
Cast of SpeakEasy Stage’s production of “POTUS” (Courtesy Nile Scott Studios)
“POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive” by Selina Fillinger. Directed by Paula Plum. Scenic Design by Jenna McFarland Lord. Sound Design by Aubrey Dube. Lighting Design by Karen Perlow. Costume Design by Rebecca Glick. Fight Choreography by Angie Jepson. Presented by Speakeasy Stage at the Calderwood Pavilion, Boston, through October 15.
By Shelley A. Sackett
Hands down, “POTUS” takes the prize for the most winning opening scene currently on stage in Boston. It is shriek-out-loud funny, clever, pithy, lightning-paced, and uncompromisingly no-nonsense.
The setting is The White House, not exactly the Trump administration, but also not exactly not the Trump administration. Two pantsuit-clad women are in mid-conversation when the audience joins them.
Chief of Staff Harriet (Lisa Yuen) is filling in Press Secretary Jean (Laura Latreille) on the morning’s diplomatic meeting and on what POTUS did that she, as press liaison, will have to spin at the press briefing that is about to start.
The play’s first line sets the tone for the rest of the evening. “Cunt,” says Harriet, lassoing Jean’s and the audience’s attention. Apparently, POTUS excused his wife Margaret’s absence by saying she was having a “cunty” day. Beyond the use of the “C” word, the even bigger trouble is that Margaret was in the room. The whole time. Sitting (obscured) right in front of POTUS.
Not to worry. Jean’s job, after all, is to support and protect POTUS and, despite his worst instincts and basest actions, keep him (and herself) in power. She is used to donning rubber gloves and cleaning up the mess. “That’s not so bad. We can contain that,” she says, brightening. “We all have cunty mornings sometimes. My son has them every week.”
Playwright Selina Fillinger’s “POTUS” is aptly subtitled, “Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive.” She has populated her farce/satire with seven strong behind-the-scenes women whose sole purpose is to keep a dangerous and inept man in office, not because they believe in him, but because the only way they are allowed near the epicenter of power is by clinging to his coattails.
Catia, Marianna Bassham, and Johanna Carlisle-Zepeda
In addition to Harriet and Jean, the other women in the president’s inner circle are his savvy, earthy, and jaded wife Margaret (Crystin Gilmore) and his neurotic, perfectionist personal secretary Stephanie (Marianna Bassham). Clearly, these women are the only reason he has a job. They are brilliant, dedicated, and gifted at damage control. What they aren’t is respected, acknowledged, or valued by anyone except each other.
“Why isn’t SHE president?” is the common refrain as each rises to the next challenge and douses the next blaze. The answer boils down to one word — patriarchy. “People don’t love him,” one character explains. They’re just afraid of the alternative — US!”
Add to the mix his cocky, queer, convicted-felon sister Bernadette (Johanna Carlisle-Zepeda), Chris, the recently post-partum reporter whose attire includes breast pump attachments (Catia), and the president’s pregnant girlfriend Dusty (the impossibly flexible Monique Ward Lonergan), and you have all the ingredients for a no-holds-barred satirical farce. There is a little of everything, from door slamming, slapstick, sight gags to dramatic anarchy, comic invective, and mistaken identity.
There’s even a bottle of psychedelic tabs masquerading as Tums.
Yet beneath all this droll merriment are serious messages for these serious times. According to Fillinger, those messages may be political, but they are hardly partisan. The pain and rage that underpin the biting humor in her words are aimed squarely at the White Patriarchy that keeps women in their places and men like POTUS in his.
Director Paula Plum has plumbed the sizeable talents of her extraordinary cast to create an ensemble where each individual performer shines, and the whole is even greater than the sum of its parts, no small feat with these remarkably gifted women.
Laura Latreille, Monique Ward Lonergan
Jenna McFarland Lord has created the perfect set, part “Laugh-In,” with lots of doors to open and slam, and part Pee Wee’s Playhouse, where even the pictures are askew. The result is a dizzying, unhinged quasi-reality, mirroring the conditions our heroines face daily.
Despite her use of potty language, piercing wit, and crude jokes (most of which hit their mark), Fillinger has a serious point to make. What would it be like if these skillful, thoughtful women were able to spend their time actually running the world instead of covering and cleaning up after the inept dumbass who was elected to perform that duty but can’t? Is that idea really that scary?
Asked what she hopes audiences take away from seeing “POTUS,” Fillinger said, “I hope they wake up the next day and put their money, time and votes towards equity and freedom for all,” to which we add, “Amen.” For tix and information, go to: https://speakeasystage.com/
Cast of The Huntington’s ‘Prayer for the French Republic’. Photo by Nile Hawver.
‘Prayer for the French Republic’ – Written by Joshua Harmon. Directed by Loretta Greco. Scenic Design by Andrew Boyce. Costume Design by Alex Jaeger. Lighting Design by Christopher Akerlind. Sound Design and Composition by Fan Zhang. Presented by Huntington Theatre, 264 Huntington Ave., through October 8.
By Shelley A. Sackett
Playwright Joshua Harmon has a gift for tackling important, profoundly challenging and topical subjects and, through sheer brilliance of characters and dialogue, creating intimate and accessible theater that both rivets his audience and leaves them in a standing ovation of thunderous applause.
He did it with “Bad Jews,” “Admissions,” and “Significant Other,” which Boston theatergoers had the good fortune to see at SpeakEasy Stage Company. Thanks to the Huntington Theatre’s season opener, the 2022 Drama Desk Outstanding Play Award-winning “A Prayer for the French Republic,” they have the opportunity to experience this supremely talented writer’s latest and most ambitious project.
And experience it they should.
Under Loretta Greco’s razor-sharp direction, the 11-member cast masterfully brings Harmon’s themes of antisemitism, assimilation, family, freedom, identity and fear — to name a few — to life. Despite its three-hour running time (one intermission), the fast-paced and sharp-witted dialogue makes the time fly by.
Set in Paris in 2016 and 1945, the play follows five generations of Jewish piano sellers. Marcelle Salomon Benhamou, the current matriarch, her husband Charles and their children, Daniel (26) and Elodie (28), are the contemporary members of the original Salomon family. Hers is a complicated and intricate family tree, full of twists and turns and bent and broken branches.
Jesse Kodama, Jared Troilo, Phyllis Kay, Peter Van Wagner, Tony Estrella
The play opens with house lights up as Patrick (Tony Estrella), the play’s narrator and Marcelle’s brother, addresses the audience. His eye contact and hands-in-trousers-pockets ease establish rapport and immediacy. “What is the beginning of a family?” he asks as he strolls across a set that will represent both 1945 and 2016. “And what,” he doesn’t ask but seems about to, “is its end?”
The calm is broken by a thrust into the Benhamou apartment, where Marcelle (the sublimely talented Amy Resnick) continues Patrick’s train of thought by explaining the family genealogy to a dumbfounded guest, Molly (Talia Sulla), a naïve and distant sort of cousin from America who is spending her junior year abroad in Paris. Molly (like the audience) tries to absorb the details but is thankful when Marcelle repeats the accounting.
Jumping to the present, Marcelle explains that Daniel is their religiously observant son. Daughter Elodie has been struggling with mental health issues and is, well, Elodie. Molly nods in mute agreement.
Just as Molly (and we) sort of get it, Charles (the always amazing Nael Nacer) and Daniel (Joshua Chessin-Yudin) burst through the door. Daniel, who teaches at a Jewish school and wears a kippah (Jewish head covering), has been attacked by a gang of antisemitic thugs. His face is bloody, but he is nonplussed. His parents are apoplectic.
“How many times have I begged you to wear a baseball cap?” Marcelle pleads, comparing his refusal to hide the kippah to painting a target on his back that screams, “Here I Am.” She urges her son to wake up to the danger he invites by advertising his religion in what is France’s current climate, where Holocaust deniers and Nazi sympathizers hold more sway. What she doesn’t do is entertain any thought of fleeing the country where her family of Ashkenazi ancestors has lived for centuries.
Carly Zien, Amy Resnick, Will Lyman, Joshua Chessin-Yudin
Charles’ reaction is different. He has seen this before and knows where it can lead. His North African Sephardic Jewish ancestors have been living in diaspora since they were forced to flee their home in Algeria in the 1960s.
“It’s the suitcase or the coffin,” he says. He has reached his limit. He wants to go “home.” He wants to move to Israel. It may be unsafe there, too, but at least everyone is unsafe, not just Jews.
The family’s real firebrand and deliverer of Harmon’s celebrated monologues and dialectic analyses is Elodie (an electrifying Carly Zien, who steals every scene she’s in). While she may present as disheveled, her lines of logic and fact-based arguments are sources of encyclopedic knowledge and awe. She is not mentally ill so much as she is reacting in an unhinged way to a world that has come unhinged. (Her interaction with Molly at a bar is worth the price of admission and deserving of a standing ovation).
Harmon then quietly relocates us to 1944 (Andrew Boyce’s set accomplishes this seamlessly and with elegant artistry), where we meet Marcelle and Patrick’s great-grandparents, Irma and Adolphe Salomon (Peter Van Wagner and Phyllis Kay, both charming). They sit in their apartment towards the end of World War II, wondering what has happened to the rest of their family. Miraculously, they were able to remain in Paris during the war after the Nazis sent to deport them took pity on their age and left them alone. They have even managed to hold onto their piano store.
“What do people remember when you’re gone?” narrator Patrick asks the audience, pointing to his forebears. He then tells the story (Estrella really shines here) of how Irma would butter Adolphe’s toast first, and then use what was left to butter her own, in order to make it last longer and hide their dire circumstances from Adolphe. Those tiny, very human details are only one example of Harmon’s many playwriting virtuosities.
Writing cutting, funny, fast-paced and well-researched dialogue is another. The words fly at whiplash speed when the action shifts from 1944 back to 2016, where we pick up where we left off. Daniel and Molly are getting to know each other. (“How did you become religious?” she asks. “I prayed and I liked it, so I kept going,” he replies.)
Amy Resnick, Tony Estrella; photo by T Charles Erickson
Charles makes his case for leaving France before it’s too late (“I’m scared. Something is happening,” he confesses). Marcelle, quintessentially French and clinging to control, argues that Jews are never safe. Anywhere. At any time. Jew hatred, which in 2016, with the 2015 Charlie Hebdo and kosher deli shootings in Paris, the rise of the ultra-right in Europe and the election of Trump in America, has been regaining a foothold globally, is just the way it is.
“What is history but a bunch of stuff other people tell you to get over,” Patrick asks when later, with calm, cynicism and a touch of sadness, he gives a matter-of-fact account of the centuries of persecution suffered by Jews at the hands of the French, starting in 1096 with the Crusades.
And yet, France was the first country in Europe to offer Jews the full rights of citizenship in the hope that they would stop acting like a separate nation and assimilate, identifying more as French than as Jews. Making the case for staying put, he alludes to the fact that even the Holocaust couldn’t uproot the Salomon French family tree. Nor did it force them to convert (although he chose to marry a Catholic). They can withstand this comparative blip.
“Prayer for the French Republic” addresses many deeply troubling topics. Why are people obsessed with Israel? Is it appropriate for Jews to be scared? Is it irresponsible not to be? Now that Israel’s internal politics have so radically shifted, is even Israel still safe? Is it really “home?” Are we at the same tipping point where we were right before the Holocaust? At what point do we acknowledge that our world has hit an iceberg and, like it or not, our choices are to jump overboard or go down with the mother ship?
For this reviewer, the most telling moment was the play’s end. Would Harmon come down on the side of staying put in France or moving to Israel? As the cast belted out the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise” instead of Israel’s “Hatikva,” we had our answer.
Cast of “The Half-God of Rainfall,” at A.R.T. Credit: Lauren Miller
By Shelley A. Sackett
Will we ever become inured to the other-worldly team at American Repertory Theater and its ability to sprinkle fairy dust on Boston’s theater scene? With “The Half-God of Rainfall,” now in production through September 24, the answer is a resounding “No!”
It helps that Nigerian native Inua Ellams’s sinuous play is a masterful blending of unlikely ingredients: Greek mythology and Nigerian Yoruba spirituality, a war between mortals and gods, basketball, toxic patriarchy, white supremacy, female empowerment, and maternal love. Couple that with a script crafted as an epic poem, a stellar cast that works as a seamless ensemble, and breathtaking choreography, lighting, and sound designs, and well, you have all the makings for a night of unparalleled theatrical pageantry.
The scope and ambition of Ellams’s work is staggering.
It’s hard to describe the multilayered and, at times, opaque plot. Using basketball as both ground zero and allegory, Ellams creates a new myth about the half-god, half-mortal Demi (Mister Fitzgerald), born to human Nigerian high priestess Modúpé (Jennifer Mogbock) after she is brutally raped by the Greek titan god, Zeus (Michael Laurence).
Jennifer Mogbock and Michael Laurence
The genesis of the rape is even more chilling. As stand-ins for superpowers, Zeus and Sango (Jason Bowen), Greek and Yoruba gods of thunder, bet on a race. They agree to “boys-will-be-boys” terms as a settlement. The winner gets to take a member of the loser’s world as a prize.
When Zeus wins, he takes Modúpé as his deserved own, to do with as he pleases.
Demi grows up in a poor Nigerian village, gradually becoming aware of his extraordinary abilities to flood the land with the water from his tears and defy gravity with his basketball wizardry. He learns that basketball is more than a sport when he leaves Nigeria for the Golden State Warriors and superstardom. There, he earns the nickname “rainmaker” and rules the courts with his uncanny proficiency.
Yet all is not quiet on Mt. Olympus, where the gods (and especially Zeus) see all. One of the play’s lighter moments is when Nigerian American player Hakeem Olajuwon (Bowen) visits Demi and explains that all the great sports players are demi-gods but that Zeus forbade them from participating in mortal sports after Michael Jordan almost blew their cover by flying on the court. In defiance, Demi sets his sights on the Olympics, daring Zeus to descend from Olympus and stop him.
Examining sports culture and the way it informs and mirrors the best and worst of human behaviors is not all Ellams has up his sleeve, however. At 90 intermission-less minutes, he has ample time to address other meaty themes such as rape and its resultant PTSD, the burden of being a single mother, free will, female solidarity, Black feminism, and the #MeToo movement. And address them he does, with sensitivity, candor, and gusto.
Rather than hammering polemics, however, Ellams weaves important points into the fabric of the plotline by having his characters humanize and personalize them. “What teaches males to take what isn’t given?” Modúpé asks the river goddess Osún (Patrice Johnson Chevannes). Later, she describes how she was able to love her son Demi, despite the fact that his existence was borne of and is a reminder of such pain and trauma. “My body is my body. But my mind – I can’t control it. He (Zeus) took from me control of myself, but he gave me you,” she tells her son, implying that a mother’s love for and connection to her child supersedes all else.
Ellams pens another intriguing exchange between Zeus and Demi as they discuss who is better off, all-powerful gods or mere mortals. Surprisingly, an introspective Zeus shares that even though he fears he (and all gods) could become insignificant to mankind, he is even more threatened by the fact that humans have free will and can choose how to live. As the last free half-god, Demi has one foot in each world; he is half free but also half stuck in Zeus’ world of rules and obligation.
While the play presents challenges in terms of understanding the actors’ accents, hearing their voices and following the entwined and often confusing stories, the actors’ physicality and sheer force of production pyrotechnics provide ample balm. “Half-God” defies pigeon-holing. Part Magical Mystery Tour, part modern dance concert, part art installation, and all ingenious invention, “Half-God of Rainfall” is a must-see for anyone curious about how far the envelope of theater can be pushed. Once again, A.R.T. positions itself as the undisputed leader of the pack with another groundbreaking and thought-provoking production.
‘The Half-God of Rainfall’ – Written by Inua Ellams. Directed by Taibi Magar. Movement Direction by Orlando Pabotoy. Scenic Design by Riccardo Hernández. Lighting Design by Stacey Derosier. Sound Design and Music Composition by Mikaal Sulaiman. Projection Design by Tal Yarden. Orisha Movement Consulting/Choreography by Beatrice Capote. Costume Design by Linda Cho. Presented by American Repertory Theater in co-production with New York Theatre Workshop. At Loeb Drama Center, 64 Brattle St., Cambridge, through Sept. 24.
Jenna Blum/JANNA GIACOPPO and Hank Phillippi Ryan/IDEN FORD
By Shelley A. Sackett
SALEM – Fans of the Jewish Community Center of the North Shore’s Jewish Book Month speaker series will be thrilled to learn that two favorite authors, Jenna Blum and Hank Phillippi Ryan, will appear at the upcoming Salem Literary Festival.
Presented by The Salem Athenaeum, the Salem Lit Fest will run in virtual and in-person format from Sept. 5 through Sept. 10 with a host of events that range from writing workshops and moderated author panels to a puppet show and a Spanish/English bilingual community read.
On Friday, Sept. 8, Blum will share the stage with Laurie Lico Albanese to speak about, “A Telling Story: Familiar Tales Retold” at Salem Academy Charter School. The free, in-person event will start at 7 p.m. (registration required).
GennaRose Nethercott will bring added value (and her handheld and shadow puppets) to the evening with a presentation of her novel, “Thistlefoot,” a reimagination of the centuries-old character Baba Yaga as a Jewish woman living in a shtetl in 1919 Russia, a time of civil war and pogroms. This charmed exploration of Jewish myth and lyrical prose is a sweeping epic rich in Eastern European folklore, sibling rivalry, and Kyiv magic.
Keynote speaker Blum is the author of three novels: “Those Who Save Us,’’ which won the Ribalow Prize awarded by Hadassah magazine and adjudged by Elie Wiesel; “The Lost Family,” and “The Stormchasers,” and a memoir about her dog, “Woodrow on the Bench.” She is cofounder/CEO of the online author platform A Mighty Blaze. She has taught writing workshops at Grub Street Writers in Boston for over 20 years.
Blum grew up in Montclair, N.J., a town with a robust Jewish population. Her dad was “Jewish in culture – a self-described bagel Jew,’” and her mom, a “recovering Lutheran.”
Her Westchester paternal grandparents introduced her to lox and schmear, kugel, kasha, and Yiddish terms with which she still peppers certain conversations. She always had Jewish friends and identified strongly as a “half-Jewish girl.” Reading “The Diary of Anne Frank” affected her so deeply that she prepared for the Nazis’ inevitable arrival in Montclair by outfitting an attic hiding place with her favorite stuffed animals, books, and Lorna Doones.
In the mid-1990s, after a life-changing post-college trip to Germany with her mother, Blum immersed herself in research about the Third Reich, its causes, victims, and citizens. Of most importance to her were the four years she spent interviewing Jewish survivors in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area for Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation (now the USC Shoah Foundation). “It was, and is, the greatest honor of my life,” she said by email.
Almost every survivor told her, “The world should know what we went through so it will never happen again.” As a writer and an activist, she takes the moral responsibility of transmitting the stories of those who no longer can speak for themselves. “If I spent the rest of my life communicating what they went through, it would never be enough,” Blum said.
The main characters Anna (“Those Who Save Us”) and Peter Rashkin (“The Lost Family”) owe much of their full-fleshed emotional spectrum to Blum’s careful listening and deep-dive exploration. Although she used no actual survivor testimony in writing “Those Who Save Us,” out of respect for the “hallowed ground” those memories occupy, she refracted their anguish and horror through a fictional lens.
“That is another reason I wrote the novel: to pay survivors homage,” she said.
On Saturday, Sept. 9, Hank Phillippi Ryan fans will have the opportunity to hear her moderate an author discussion titled, “Crime Time: Secrets of Suspense.” The in-person event starts at 4 p.m. at the Community Life Center.
An on-air investigative reporter for Boston’s WHDH-TV who has won 37 Emmy Awards, Ryan is also the USA Today bestselling author of 15 psychological thrillers, winning the most prestigious awards in the genre: five Agathas, five Anthonys, and the coveted Mary Clark Higgins Award.
Of growing up as one of the only Jewish kids in rural Indiana more than 55 years ago, Ryan said, “I didn’t know it was strange until it was strange.” At that time, she ascribed her lack of friends, dates, and invitations to garden variety unpopularity. She remembers wondering what she had done wrong until her mother explained that behaviors she took for granted – celebrating Jewish holidays, attending temple, observing Passover – marked her as “different.” Her high school class voted her “Most Individual.”
Ryan always loved reading, and was especially drawn to Nancy Drew books, Sherlock Holmes short stories, Dorothy Sayers, and Agatha Christie. “I fell in love with storytelling, and the architecture of a mystery,” she said. That love blossomed into her first mystery novel, the Agatha Award-winning “Prime Time,” which she wrote in 2007 after she “simply had a good idea” while working at Channel 7 on what was otherwise an ordinary day. Finishing writing that book was encouraging evidence she could succeed as a writer.
Ryan crafts her books with her readers in mind, wanting them to be unable to resist finding out what happens next. She creates compelling characters, an important problem that needs to be solved, life-changing secrets and stakes, and an ending that gets justice and changes the world a little.
“The big key of suspense is to have readers care about what happens,” she said. Her fast-paced thrillers weave intricate plots, but also tackle thought-provoking themes like female empowerment and the power that persuasive words in the wrong hands can have to devastatingly change a person’s life.
Ryan, 72, considers herself the poster child for undertaking new pursuits at midlife and urges others to consider following suit. “I’m proof, as I sit here writing my 16th book, that it’s never too late to follow your dreams,” she said. Θ
For more information and to register for the Salem Literary Festival, visit salemlitfest.org.
Erica Steinhagen, Karl Gregory, and Nael Nacer in Gloucester Stage Company’s ‘The Ding Dongs’
By Shelley A. Sackett
We’ve all been there. That split second when we realize that all may not be as it seems, that we have misread a vital clue and that all is about to go south. The Ding Dongs, in production at Gloucester Stage through August 27, takes that moment and straps it to a steroid drip.
Don’t be put off by the title, as I almost was. (Is it a tribute to Hostess? To a bebop group? To the comedic wrestling duo?) The Ding Dongs will keep you on the edge of your seat for its entire 75 minutes from lights up to fade out and leave you dying to talk about it to anyone within earshot.
When is the last time theater had that kind of visceral effect?
The action starts with — what else — a couple ringing the doorbell of a suburban single-family home. Inside, the owner Redelmo (the always magnetic Neal Nacer), pauses and runs his hand over his shaved head as if some sixth sense warns him against answering the door.
From the get-go, there is something awry with Natalie (the mesmerizing Erica Steinhagen) and Joe (the superbly flexible Karl Gregory). Natalie is dressed like soccer mom Barbie and her husband Joe looks at home in his orange hooded windbreaker and fitted mod shirt. They present as any ordinary, if unfashionable, couple might, a little ditzy perhaps (another meaning of “ding-dong” is dingbat), but otherwise innocuous.
Natalie is the more forceful, immediately establishing that Joe grew up in Redelmo’s house and that they would love to come inside and take a peek at the old homestead. Joe is the more affable, taking his cues from Natalie and speaking only when she opens that door and invites him into the conversation.
Uncomfortable and increasingly suspicious, Redelmo tries to field their barrage of questions and reveal as little about himself as possible. Yet his politeness and graciousness are no defense to the couple’s verbal bombardment, and they steamroll right over the doomed deed holder’s threshold.
Once inside, all semblance of ordinariness vanishes. The couple launches their assault in earnest, cajoling, beseeching and threatening Redelmo. Natalie is equal parts pit bull prosecutor, evil enchantress and comical talk show host. Joe plays her foil, good cop to her sinister, slightly unhinged one.
The exchanges can be funny, but the overlay of menace and chaos erases any possibility of the audience feeling comic relief. These two are world-class black widow creeps, and Redelmo, with his social graces and timidity, is no match for them.
Soon, their unsettling stories turn more sinister, violent and threatening. Their past is revealed, including a dark chapter involving home invasions, violence, disruption and dislocation. The two are verbal quick-change artists, feigning innocence one minute, wielding machetes the next.
In this boxing match of words and wit, Redelmo is outperformed and outnumbered and no amount of fancy footwork is going to save him from the blows that will eventually corner and pummel him into submission.
Unexpectedly, the doorbell rings again and large boxes addressed to the couple begin arriving. At this point (and not until), Redelmo wakes up to the fact that these two are not visitors who can be reasoned with and will eventually get the message that he wants them to leave. These are ruthless, deranged home invaders who play by alien rules and carry baggage far more unsettling than whatever might be in the avalanche of boxes squatting in his living room.
Abruptly, his house has gone from a calm, suburban home to a cross between Pee Wee’s Playhouse and Regan’s bedroom in “The Exorcist,” and Redelmo reels at the heightened stakes.
Natalie continues, now claiming that the house really belongs to Joe because, after all, he has priority in the chain of deeds, having lived there well before Redelmo “owned” it. In fact, they argue, to an outside observer, it is Redelmo who would be considered the squatter, not them.
“The simplest explanation is always the best, even if it isn’t the truth,” she says. Like wolves closing in on common prey, Natalie and Joe encircle Redelmo, smelling his fear and tightening their grip.
And then, things get even twistier and more disorienting until by the play’s sudden end, neither the actors nor the audience is really sure who’s who and what’s what. Like a huge pot put on a flaming stove, this play simmers for a long time until you wonder if it will ever reach boiling point. When it finally does start to roil, however, there is no lid heavy or strong enough to keep it from boiling over, like poor Mickey’s cauldron in “Fantasia’s” famous “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”
Playwright Brenda Withers has written a riveting, thought-provoking, timely play that receives a must-see, first-rate production under Rebecca Bradshaw’s crisp direction. Sound designer Julian Crocamo masterfully reflects the jerkiness of mood by subtly swinging from the sweetness of harmony to the menace of dissonance.
Setting the stage as a theater-in-the-square with four bays of seats gives the illusion of a boxing arena. It also allows Bradshaw and lighting designer M. Berry to take full advantage of a set that affords the audience a different perspective by slight shifts in position and luminosity. A few steps to the left or right and the focus can swing from an actor’s action to their reaction, giving the audience an entirely different perspective on the same situation.
With “The Ding Dongs,” Withers has created a sophisticated, multi-layered, complicated microcosm whose effects linger long after the play’s dramatic end. She subtitled her play, “What Is the Penalty in Portugal? a meditation on homeland security,” and she gives a clue as to her intention in writing it in a recent interview.
She had started thinking about land and property after reading an article about a skirmish in the Middle East. She thought about gentrification, the displacement of humans around the globe, and what makes a home a home.
She also thought about civility and how far we’ll let people get in order to maintain good manners. “What happens when you finally push back on someone and say, ‘These are actually my boundaries’ or ‘This is what’s making me uncomfortable.”’
This is not a “feel good” kind of play. Its laughs are funny but not funny. The manipulation, aggression and sense of helplessness are palpable and contagious. Those of us who think we may be inured and resigned to the realities of living in a macroworld where rules and truth are arbitrary will be further disheartened by this up close and personal micro-encounter with its nefarious day-to-day consequences.
It is, however, an important play with a timely and important message that should be seen and discussed. That Gloucester Stage’s production is an artistic bases loaded home run is icing on the cake.
‘The Ding Dongs’ — Written by Brenda Withers. Directed by Rebecca Bradshaw. Costume Design by Camilla Dely; Lighting Design by M. Berry; Sound Design by Julian Crocamo. Presented by Gloucester Stage, 267 East Main St., Gloucester, through August 27.
Stew is any dish that is prepared by “stewing” — that is, submerging the ingredients with just enough liquid to cook them through on a low flame in a covered pot for a longtime. It is also a synonym for brooding. One who is in an extreme state of worry and agitation is said to be “stewing.”
Playwright Zora Howard has captured the richness of the dish and the simmering state of its emotional namesake in her 90-minute intermission-less play, “Stew,” now in production at Gloucester Stage. A 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Drama finalist, it is the story of three generations of Black women who gather at the family home in Mount Vernon, N.Y.
The show opens in the Turner’s comfortable kitchen with Mama (the magnificent Cheryl D. Singleton in a role that fits her like a glove) alone in her slippers and robe, singing, dancing, and grooving to the gospel song,”“Rejoice.” She sashays over to the pot bubbling on the stove, stirring it with the finesse and timing of a backup singer. This is a woman in her element. Unobserved, undisturbed, she is in her happy place.
That spell is quickly shattered by a dog barking and the boisterous arrival of the rest of theclan. Mama’s two daughters, Lillian (Breezy Leigh) and Nelly (Janelle Grace), burst into the room, and the atmosphere shifts from private sanctuary to multi-generational chaos. Lillian, in her 30s, is visiting with her 12-year-old daughter, Lil Mama (Sadiyah Dyce Janai Stephens), and younger son Junior, who is already up and outside playing. Lillian’s sister, 17-year-old high schooler Nelly, lives with Mama, although not for long if she has her way and her temporary boyfriend turns out to be her forever man.
The titular plot revolves around Mama cooking for 50 for an event after church. The stew that has been brewing on the stove has burned, and Mama dumps it into the trash. Similarly, the relationships among these four Turner women get an overhaul during the course of the day as their banter and bickering reveal their secrets, fears, resentments, and hopes, the ingredients they bring to the familial stew that has been quietly simmering on the Turner family back burner for many years.
Mama has just been to the doctor, and although she won’t admit it, is starting to slow down. “Are you dyin’?” Lillian asks with both accusation and terror in her voice. “It’s certainly the direction I’m heading,” Mama quips. For her part, Lillian has returned home to do more than just check in on Mama’s well-being. Her marriage is stuck in an awkward gear, and, although it will take her another hour to voice it, she is home because she needs her mother’s support and advice.
Nelly has her first real boyfriend and confides to Lil Mama that she’s sure she has found the real thing. She can’t wait to get on with her life with him. Lil Mama is a free-spirited pre-teen, equal parts silly and earnest, anxious to be taken seriously but still needing to be coddled. She is preparing to audition for the role of Queen Elizabeth in Shakespeare’s Richard III.
Just as Mama takes charge of her brood in directing them to create her stew, so she commands the troops in helping Lil Mama practice her lines. Mama was, after all, the founder and director emeritus of the Mt. Vernon High Dramatic League as well as the first soloist at the Greater Centennial A.M.E. Zion Church, a fact her children know so well they lip sync the oft-repeated line.
Howard has a keen ear for writing compelling and laugh-out-loud dialogue that blends the authentic, intimate, and emotional. She manages to keep the rapid-fire pace of the women’s feisty verbal thrusts and parries while subtly defining each character’s individual traits and issues. More than once, she injects thought-provoking subtext into a moment that was teetering dangerously close to TV sit-com banality.
In her Director’s Notes, Rosalind Bevan hits the nail on the head in describing “Stew’s” message. “All families are woven from a multi-generational fabric spun with joy, pain, celebration, misunderstanding, regrets, and triumphs. If we’re lucky, we can feel and see that the thread holding all of these things together is love. If we’re honest with ourselves, in those moments when that love is less felt or harder to see, we know it’s still there.”
Bevan’s direction shines a spotlight on the splendid set (Jenna McFarland Lord) while allowing her ensemble cast enough breathing room to create strong individual presences. Leigh’s Lillian is believable and complicated, her pain and uncertainty barely perceptible beneath her bubbly veneer. As the teenage rebel looking for a cause, Grace manages to bring a childish innocence to Nelly’s most churlish tantrum. And who could resist Stephens’s gap-toothed Lil Mama, even when she is screeching at the top of her lungs?
But it is Singleton as Mama who grounds the show and the family, seasoning her loved ones with the same care and compassion she brings to her cooking. “You’ve got to season your food, talk to your food. Keep it going. You gotta laugh and eat together. It’s the nourishment of life,” she tells her daughters and granddaughter.
Although uneven and sporting a questionable ending, “Stew” paints a timeless and universal picture of family life, with all its messiness and serendipity. Like the flavors of the secret ingredients in Mama’s special stew, Howard has written a play that will continue to roll around in your thoughts long after the curtain has fallen.
‘STEW’ – Written by Zora Howard. Directed by Rosalind Bevan. Scenic Design by JennaMcFarland Lord. Costume Design by KJ Gilmer. Lighting Design by Kat C. Zhou. SoundDesign by Aubrey Dube. Presented by Gloucester Stage, 267 E Main St, Gloucester, MAthrough July 23.
Joshua David Robinson, Firdous Bamji, and Steven Skybell in ‘The Lehman Trilogy’ at the Huntington. Photos by T. Charles Erickson
By Shelley A. Sackett
A lone and mournful clarinetist (Joe LaRocca) wanders across the stage of the Huntington’s theatrically astonishing “The Lehman Trilogy,” inviting comparisons in tone and content to the spirited drama “Fiddler on the Roof.” Steeped in ritual and Judaism, both stories trace what happens to a family when political oppression forces it to leave home, leading most of its members to emigrate to America.
For the dairyman Tevye ben Shneur Zalman, tradition and God are immutable and one; he will walk the straight and narrow walk wherever he wanders. For the Lehman brothers — and especially for their American progeny — tradition and God are moving targets, luxuries that morph with the exigencies of assimilation.
Yet the unobtrusive but ever-present LaRocca and his plaintive clarinet, saxophone, and flute melodies (original music by Mark Bennett) are constant reminders of the Lehmans’ past and the threads that, though frayed and denied, they share with Tevye and his ancestors.
“The Lehman Trilogy,” winner of the 2022 Tony Award for Best Play, assumes the 2008 demise of Lehman Brothers, the colossal bank whose collapse helped trigger the global Great Recession, is well known. Instead of rehashing that final piece of the story in detail, it wisely spends the bulk of its three and a half hours (two intermissions) chronicling the lesser-known details of the enterprise’s birth and extraordinary upward trajectory.
The action opens on 9/11/1844 with the New York arrival of 21-year-old Henry (Steven Skybell, the standout in a cast of standouts) from Rimpar, Bavaria. He immediately sets sail for Mobile, Alabama, with little but his experience in trade and finance and his skill with cloth. Buoyed to be in the American South, where Jews are allowed to own land and where the caste system is built on race rather than religion, Henry quickly makes enough money as a peddler to fund his move inland to Montgomery, where he settles down and opens a dry goods store. Younger brothers Emanuel (Joshua David Robinson) and Mayer (Firdous Bamji) soon follow to this promised land of milk and honey and cotton where “a man can live to work, not work to live.”
Absent the violence, restrictions, and family restraints of Rimpar, the brothers create their own American version of the Lehman myth, tradition, and legacy. Their unbridled ambition, ingenuity, and taste for fortune lead them to adapt to the times and fill any gap they spot.
The first Lehman Brothers sign is hung on a dry goods storefront that starts out selling fabrics and cotton and ends up as a powerful monopoly that buys raw cotton from antebellum plantations and resells it to factories in the North. The brothers ingeniously invent the profession of being a middleman, making their first fortune off the back of an economy dependent on slavery.
They also dip their toes into the business that will fuel their rise and fall. By offering credit to planters short of funds, they become cotton brokers, the first stage in their eventually becoming an investment bank.
Only after the cotton economy’s collapse in the wake of the Civil War do we hear a word of admonition or conscience about their connection to slavery (word is the lines were only added in response to criticism), and those are spoken by only one character, a local doctor.
“Everything that was built here was built on a crime,” he tells the brooding Mayer. “The roots run so deep you cannot see them, but the ground beneath our feet is poisoned. It had to end this way.”
Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, Lehman Brothers transforms and reinvents itself, helping the South as it reconstructs. Over the decades, it will survive two world wars, the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression, mutating from a brokerage house to an investment bank and finally to architects of subprime mortgages. The brothers relocate to New York and create the Cotton Exchange, Coffee Exchange, and Stock Exchange, all admirable strokes of business genius which pad their own pockets handsomely.
Structured in three parts, the play follows the Lehman family through 164 years of successive generations. We ride shotgun on the journey that proves even more tragic for the fabric and integrity of the heritage the three brothers so revered. Along the way, ethics, decency, and loyalty are qualities that vanish from the Lehman family tree, especially in the wake of the 1960s creation of a trading division run by non-family members. From boardroom savagery to talk of how to get people to buy things they don’t want with money they don’t have, the apples fall far, far from the ancestral tree.
And therein lie the bones of the play and the attraction of its world. At heart, this is a very human story about real, complicated people living real, messy lives. The story’s true tragedy and greater lesson is to be found in the degradation and demise of their familial — rather than financial — legacy.
When we first meet Henry, Emanuel, and Mayer in the 1840s, they are untarnished, wide-eyed boychiks, still tethered to their religious and family values. We bond with them. We root for them. Most all of, we care about them.
Henry is funny and sympathetic, his guilelessness rendering him accessible and charming. Mayer and Emanuel elicit similar reactions. When their children and grandchildren become characters from “Succession,” we cut them a little slack because we knew their parents and grandparents. Although we’re glad they’re not around to witness the havoc they wrought, we miss them.
Fleshing out this compelling story is the real reason “The Lehman Trilogy” is in that rare not-to-be-missed category: the breathtaking three actors (the entire cast!) who switch genders and ages to portray a score of characters. Starting out as the engaging Henry, Skybell is a delight as a tightrope walker, a crusty, old rabbi, a flirty divorcée, and others. Bamji is no less extraordinary as the youngest (and patronized) brother Mayer. His acting chops are on full display as the ruthless Bobbie, a blushing bride, a pouty toddler, and more. As the steady, stalwart middle brother Emanuel, Robinson clearly enjoys the looser reins when playing the later Lehman clan members and their gang of motley plunderers.
Equally praiseworthy are Perloff’s razor-sharp direction (the wrecking ball pendulum as 2008 draws nigh is brilliant), Brown’s efficient yet thrilling set, and Oi-Suk Yew’s use of projected images.
Much has been penned complaining about the play’s underemphasis on the role slavery played in the Lehmans’ initial success and the short shrift given to the firm’s 2008 nosedive crash and burn finale. My take is that these were not intended as deliberate snubs. Rather, they were omitted because they were peripheral to playwright Massini’s core purpose: to allow us a peek through the keyhole at the tale of three German Jewish brothers from Bavaria and the way they took America by storm.
The resulting epic — intimate and engaging — is a nonjudgmental study of the personalities, relationships, and events that shaped this one family’s shifting definition of the American dream.
Don’t be put off by the play’s length. The story is so engrossing, the production (and acting!) so remarkable that more than one patron was overheard commenting that they wished it had been even longer!
‘The Lehman Trilogy’ – Written by Stephano Massini and Adapted by Ben Power. Directed by Carey Perloff. Scenic Design by Sara Brown; Projection Design by Jeanette Oi Suk-Yew; Costume Design by Dede Ayite; Lighting Design by Robert Wierzel; Original Music by Mark Bennett; Co-Sound Design by Mark Bennett and Charles Does. Presented by the Huntington Theatre, 264 Huntington Ave., through July 23.
InSights 