New York Theater

The Revolving Cycles Truly and Steadily Roll’d Review: A Black Kid Missing, and Who Cares?

Karma, a “dirty little hood rat” of 17, is looking for her missing former foster brother Terrell, though she didn’t know him long and he didn’t like her much. He was, however, all she had. The first place she looks is the funeral parlor of Madam Rose Profit, 65, who insists her last name is pronounced Pro-fee, but she indeed profits from the tragedies in her community.
The two women, both portrayed by extraordinary actresses — Kara Young as Karma, Lynda Gravátt as Madam Profit — more or less compete to dominate the play by Jonathan Payne, who is making an arresting New York debut as a professional playwright.

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Collective Rage A Play in Five Betties Review

The full title of “Collective Rage,” Jen Silverman’s playful, bawdy, and episodic genderqueer/feminist/lesbian comedy about five women named Betty, is 47 words long. Only once does it include the word “pussy.”  That’s not true of the play as a whole. In 19 scenes over 90 minutes, the characters say “pussy” far more than they say, or express, “rage.”

Silverman has a lot of fun with this word. Each of the scenes also has its own title, which is projected line by line on a built-in screen that is as wide as the stage, and looms above it. These projections are reminiscent of the comically prolix and pompous chapter titles in an 18th century picaresque novel, except the scene titles in “Collective Rage” often include the word “pussy.”
For example: “6. Bettys 3 and 4 Discover That Highbrow Things Are Just Things That Seem To Be About Other Things When They’re Actually About Pussy”

But “Collective Rage: A Play in Five Betties” etc. is not (just) out for some schoolyard impudence. The five good actresses playing the  Betties deliver some memorable moments of oddness and hilarity.

Chaunte Wayans and Adina Verson in Collective Rage: A Play in Five Betties

Adina Verson

Lea DeLaria

Ana Villafane and Lea DeLaria

Adina Verson

Chaunte Wayans, Dana Delany, Lea DeLaria, Ana Villafane, Adina Verson

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Heartbreak House Review: Shaw’s Dark Comedy of British Boobs Set in A WWII Bomb Shelter

Singing morale-boosting songs during World War II: Karen Ziemba, Derek Smith, Raphael Nash Thompson, Tom Hewitt, Kimberly Immanuel, and Lenny Wolpe,

Sandbags and British flags abound in the air raid shelter where we have gathered, in the basement of London’s Ambassador Hotel in 1940, in the midst of the Blitz of London. This is a fine setting for a morale-boosting sing-along,  and indeed we are occasionally guided through such songs as “Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag, and Smile, smile, smile,” with a handout that prints all the lyrics.

Unfortunately, that’s not the main reason we are here in the audience at a ground-floor theater in Theatre Row for nearly three hours.  The bomb shelter is just the odd framing for the Gingold Theatrical Group’s production of “Heartbreak House” by George Bernard Shaw.

“Let’s do a Shaw play,” announces one of our fellow shelter inhabitants, and so a cast of veteran New York stage actors pretends to be spontaneously portraying a group of British eccentrics who gather in a villa in the English countryside on the eve of World War I.

Acting foolishly right before World War I: Derek Smith, Raphael Nash Thompson, Karen Ziemba, Tom Hewitt, Lenny Wolpe, Kimberly Immanuel, Jeff Hiller, and Alison Fraser

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Gospel at Colonus Review: Sophocles as Rousing Black Church Service

Gospel at Colonus: Jay Caldwell as Creon and the Rev. Dr. Earl Miller as The Messenger

Lee Breuer and Bob Telson’s glorious gospel musical, an inspired retelling of Sophocles’ “Oedipus at Colonus” as if it’s an African-American Pentecostal church service, debuted at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1983, and has been performed somewhere in the world ever since. It is now at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park for free, only through this Sunday. Beneath the open sky, a huge and hugely talented cast – including several who were in the original production —  give a soul-scorching delivery of the blissful score, composed of gospel and blues, with a little doo-wop thrown in and some heavenly jazz riffs.
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