I saw these three hour-long shows from the 19th Under the Radar Festival one after the other on the same floor of the Rose building at Lincoln Center

Queens of Sheba

Muki Zubis stood on stage alone, rubbing her head as if troubled; then she began a slow, sad rendition of the song “Respect.” Suddenly her castmates Paisley Billings, Déja J Bowens, and Jadesola Odunjo burst out on stage dancing wildly and singing a lively version of the song – the upbeat way we remember it from Aretha Franklin —  as if to cheer her up.

It was a memorable start to what’s billed as a “choreopoem,” a phrase coined by Ntozake Shange half a century ago to describe a mix of dance and song and poetry. In “Queens of Sheba,” the constantly moving quartet of women mix a cappella versions of some dozen catchy soul hits and snippets of hits made popular by Aretha, Tina Turner, and Diana Ross with memories of mostly infuriating encounters as Black women, presented in a kind of poetic shorthand – Where are you from? (asked in school) Can I touch your hair? (asked in the office)…Why I must be uncomfortable so that you feel comfortable…I’m in love with my abuser…How did you become my biggest oppressor when your predecessor believed in solidarity.

“Queens of Sheba” is being promoted as the “spiritual successor” to Shange’s original choreopoem, “for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf,” which was a hit on Broadway in the 1970s. It is therefore hard to avoid comparing them. The recent Broadway revival of Shange’s show began with a voiceover recording of Shange herself  (who died in 2018), saying: “Imagine all the stories we could tell about the funny looking lil colored girls, and the sophisticated lil colored girls…. The ones just like you.” The new show lacks such stories, the sort of anecdotal monologues that were in the original. The promise of that opening moment didn’t pan out: There is little sense of individual characters in “Queens of Sheba.” Theirs is a collective experience; their recollections felt to me like the equivalent of anthems.

Part of the advantage of having scheduled  all the Lincoln Center shows in a row was that, while sitting around waiting for the next show to start, I got to talk to fellow theatergoers about the show we’d just seen.  For one of them, the experiences didn’t need to be fleshed out; the shorthand was enough to trigger powerful memories. She told me in a bitter tone: “That’s what I got asked all the time in school: ‘Where are you from?’”

For me, the most powerful moment was when the four women presented the stages of female childhood, in three-year segments from birth to age twelve, cataloguing the loss of innocence. They concluded:

 “Our mothers have made us mothers before our wombs have”

 “Our fathers have made us lovers before we have loved.”

“Queens of Sheba” is running through January 13 at the Clark Studio Theater, on the 7th floor of the Rose Building at 165 W 65th St,

The First Bad Man

“The First Bad Man” is the title of the first novel by Miranda July, published in 2015. This show with the same title, we were told, would be a meeting of a book club to discuss July’s novel.

I didn’t know exactly what to expect, but I assumed that audience members would be asked to participate in some way, especially since the show was being promoted as “immersive.”

The first bad sign was the contradictory information on the web page: First it said: “If you haven’t read it, don’t worry: the real story is the club itself…”

But then it says: “Just like any book club, you’ll know more about what’s going on if you finish the novel…” – and informs us that they will be sending us the book in advance, either shipping the book (if we buy a ticket in enough time) or emailing a digital copy.

They didn’t send me the book in either version (and I was unable to get it out of the library), but they did have a stack of the paperback edition in the hallway outside the Samuel Rehearsal Studio where the show was to take place, so I was able to finish the first chapter. It’s a funny, well-written chapter that made me want to read on, about a woman in her forties named Cheryl who has a crush on an older man named Philip, and an almost spiritual connection with a toddler whom she calls Kubelko Bondy.

I was reading in the rehearsal studio along with some fifty other people (most of them also reading the book,)  sitting in a vaguely circular pattern, while listening to a keyboardist playing the sort of spooky repetitive chords (music by Simon Kenny) that announce: We’re avant-garde.  Eventually, a woman in a yellow jumpsuit stood up walked to a microphone, and sang “I’m happy to help you, but I’m not your Mom.” One by one all four members of the cast — Mish Grigor, Faith Jones, Chris Manley and Grace Morgan – discussed the book and decided they would role play the characters.

The highlight of the dramatization for me was a scene between (Chris Manley portraying the book club member who was role-playing) Philip and (standout Mish Grigor – also one of the show’s creators – who was portraying the book club member who was role playing) Cheryl. “Philip” was begging “Cheryl” to get her approval to have an affair with a 16-year-old girl. Through such scenes, the plot of “The First Bad Man” became more or less clear even to those of us who hadn’t gotten the book in advance– and that seemed to be absolutely everybody, judging from the dozen or so audience members I talked to afterward.

And here’s the irony of this show: Only the cast members participated in the book club, but what made this experience passably worthwhile was the fact that I was able to talk to so many of my fellow would-be readers afterwards – as if we were indeed members of a book club.

If I doubt this was the aim of Peter Pan, the Dublin-based theater company that put “The First Bad Man” together, but I thought that this theatrical experiment has enough going for it to try it again, with a different novel, perhaps one about school, since the feeling the experience most strongly evoked was of being a student who hadn’t done his homework

“The First Bad Man” is running through January 13 at Samuel Rehearsal Studio, 7th floor of Rose Building,165 W 65th St

Search Party

Although Nigerian-born British writer and performer Inua Ellams has authored plays (“The Half-God of Rainfall” was produced last summer Off-Broadway), “Search Party” is really a poetry reading, albeit an unconventional one. It’s not really theater, Ellams told us at the start.  True, he was speaking from a stage set made to look like somebody’s living room — he sat on a couch, framed by houseplants and strewn with books – but the only important prop was his iPad.

On it, he explained, was an archive of his “poems, essays, proverbs” (not, apparently, his plays)

He asked us to shout out a word; he would look it up, and read the piece in which it was located.

“Fascism,”somebody shouted. He found the word in two of his essays, “Why I Write” and “My White Best Friend,” and chose the latter.  It was a long essay, which took him maybe ten minutes to read, and only near the very end did we hear the word “fascism.”

Other words that guided his selection: horses, wizard, existential, pizza. This last was the most memorable, a poem based on an interview with a Syrian refugee seeking asylum who was working as a food delivery man named Ghani during the pandemic, watching as people applauded health care workers from the UK’s National Health Service:

“I wish they were clapping for me sometimes. I know I’m no NHS hero, no frontline staff,
not risking my life fighting live virus, but the way I’ve been rolling through the streets of
this city, riding into the mouth of this place, dashing pizzas down empty throats, there’s
gotta be something heroic in that. I had to buy new tyres last week. Bossman paid for it,
dashed the money on the counter, told me to buy extras and comeback quick. Two
months ago I was fighting for my job, I’m now employee of the week…..

“…All the
judges, all the border guards, all of them locked in, hidden in their houses, huddled
round the tvs fighting with their spouses, I’ll even give them food, pay from my bonus
every other week. I don’t care their not clapping for me, cause as longs as they’re
focused on fighting the virus, giving doctors support they need, trying to find them PPE,
guess who’ll be popping wheelies on the high street? Me, flying out here, free.”

Ellams was informal and personable, which may be the main reason why the first few minutes, when he just chit-chatted with us (about his first experience with snow, about the Christmas episode of the TV series “The Bear”), and the last fifteen minutes, when he answered audience questions with startling candor, were easier for me to appreciate than many of the texts he read, because the poems and long essays required more active listening.  (Is it too unwieldy to suggest that at the end of each of these unique sessions, the audience members are emailed the poems that he read? )

 When someone asked him how he finds joy, he told a long story about how he was feeling tremendous anxiety after a breakup, so he was put on medication. This is how he finds joy?*

If I had been bold enough, I would have yelled out “dust,” so he could have read one of my favorite of his poems, which ends:

“Household dust is 80% human skin
So you lean in to inspect each speck
Which was part eyelid
What was parched lip
Which was once ear and listened in
You consider surveying your entire house
Brush and pan in hand
To sweep into a bowl
All you have been

To hold it like cereal at breakfast
And spoon yourself
Back into you
To gift to you
You
But first run a finger across that tabletop and bring what you find
Close enough to smell
Close enough to lick.”

That poem gives me joy.

“Search Party” is running through January 13 at the Clark Studio Theater, on the 7th floor of the Rose Building at 165 W 65th St.

*He later clarified: “I found joy by noting the incremental progress I was / am making in dealing with my anxiety; the joy is in noticing the tiny improvements in my mental health.”