Here There Are Blueberries, a 2024 Pulitzer Prize finalist by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich, explores the idea that a picture can speak a thousand words. The play has been created using “historical artifact, interviews conducted with real people, historical transcripts, and other primary sources.” Centered on an album of photos that was meant to be destroyed, the play asks whether the side of those who commit atrocities in history should also be shown.
October 7: A Verbatim Play by Phelim McAleers depicts events in the Gaza Envelope of southwest Israel on the day of last year’s attack by the Islamist organization Hamas. It’s based on interviews conducted by McAleers and his wife, journalist-filmmaker Ann McElhinnie, immediately after the siege that reportedly killed 1,200 people, wounded an estimated 5,400, and resulted in seizure by Hamas of more than 250 hostages. In a May 7 speech at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s annual Days of Remembrance ceremony, President Joe Biden lamented that, eight months after the assault (and despite ongoing warfare in Israel and Gaza), “people are already forgetting” the brutality of that day. McAleer’s play is agitprop against forgetfulness, burning a sense of the day’s agony into playgoers’ imaginations.
It’s I’m Not Rappaport meets Waiting for Godot meets The Gin Game! Take two old codgers on a park bench, combine with existential meanderings in a fixed setting, season with the ravages of aging, and you have Just Another Day, Dan Lauria’s uncertain reflection on all three components (but especially the third). Just Another Day suffers from being too much—well, just another day. Nothing terribly dramatic happens, and a great deal of curiously multisyllabic palaver fills out the hour and 45 minutes, including intermission. But it does have two actors very much worth seeing, for Lauria has cast himself, and opposite him, a flawless Patty McCormack.
Summer means free theater in New York, and Molière in the Park, an organization co-founded by Lucie Tiberghien and Garth Belcon. The Miser becomes the third free production at LeFrak Center, following The Misanthrope (2022) and Tartuffe (2023). Directed by Tiberghien, it’s an invigorating new version of the French playwright’s 1668 satire.
Boundaries of all types are tested in Ronnie Larsen’s comedic and big-hearted family chronicle, The Actors. The line between Democrat and Republican is pulled taut, as is the division between atheist and religious believer. But those are relatively minor concerns for the playwright. More to the point are the boundaries of grief and how to break through them, the borders of what constitutes a family, and what limits stage actors might burst through when their roles take over their lives. As farcical as it is melancholy, there are as many surprise door knocks in the play’s two acts and two hours as there are woeful revelations.
In William Shakespeare’s Richard III, the title character is a hunchback whose anger is fueled because he feels like an outcast. His quest for power becomes a form of revenge. Under Robert O’Hara’s direction, Richard III for the Public Theater is loose and playful. Actress Danai Gurira, in the gender-swapped title role, is sinewy and tiger-like. As Richard, she pounces, manipulates, smiles, grins, and grimaces: a shape-shifter who manipulates others.
When most people think of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, it's Shylock who springs to mind, not the titular merchant. As a Jew in a Christian city-state, Shylock is an outsider; as a moneylender in an economy that reviles usury, he’s a pariah. Director Arin Arbus has chosen John Douglas Thompson, one of the most accomplished classical actors of his generation, as Shylock in her modern-dress production at Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA). Thompson, reportedly the first Black actor to play Shylock professionally in New York, finds music even in the most acidic passages of the Bard’s rhetoric; his nuanced performance explodes at crucial points, with moral indignation outstripping self-pity.
The lives of the Berger family in Awake and Sing!, The Public Theater's production of Clifford Odets’ rousing Depression-era drama, sway to the swinging beat of old Hollywood’s silver screen. There is the drama of a young, forbidden love affair, the scandal of a child out of wedlock, the emotional carnage of lost hope and disillusionment. Rudolph Valentino receives a passing mention, and Fred Astaire croons about dancing cheek-to-cheek during intermission. Odets’ seminal play packs quite a sentimental wallop, but the National Asian American Theater Company's (NAATCO) touching revival featuring Asian-American actors in the largely Jewish-American roles, counters any mawkishness with strong, complex performances and director Stephen Brown-Fried’s confident steering.
Odets’ play centers around a Jewish family living in 1930s Bronx, and the ensuing turbulence that follows the growing restiveness of Ralph Berger (an appropriately energetic Jon Norman Schneider) and the breaking and building of Hennie Berger’s spirit (an evolution played to utter ferocity by Teresa Avia Lim). The siblings’ mother is Bessie Berger (Mia Katigbak, reprising a 2013 award-winning performance), stalwart matriarch of the family and brusque caretaker of her children’s lives. Mr. Berger (an endearingly soft-spoken Henry Yuk), on the other hand, trots about the apartment harmlessly. Rounding out the family is disillusioned academe and occasional grandfather-figure (a sage Alok Tewari) and the ever-present vitriol and violent passions of one-legged war veteran Moe Axelrod (a fantastically complex, utterly resplendent Sanjit De Silva), who has a "yen" for Hennie.
Much of the production’s conflict is courtesy of De Silva and Lim’s fiery chemistry, and Brown-Fried makes us anticipate their acerbic confrontations with glee. But aside from Ralph Berger’s erratic bursts of youthful, reckless energy (egged on by a philosophizing Jacob), the Berger kids don’t provide half as much vigor to Awake and Sing! as Katigbak’s Bessie does. Shamelessly guilt-tripping her way to what she thinks is a secure future for her children, Bessie is an unsympathetic antihero, and she dominates the power plays that rattle the household. Only Lim seriously challenges Katigbak’s governance, with Hennie’s caustic sarcasm and world-weary cynicism rivaling that of her mother’s.
Dusty browns, maroons and beiges color the set, as well as the costuming. Alexae Visel gives Bessie Berger matronly, no-nonsense dresses, while fitting Hennie with form-flattering skirts and black-buckled heels. The men get high-waist pants, oxfords and suspenders. Their fashion is reminiscent of silver screen lotharios and starlets, but Visel has imbued the clothes with hints of wear and tear. It’s occasionally difficult to catch a front view of the actors; the Public has staged the production in such a way that the performance space is sandwiched between two opposing rows of audiences. Sometimes, the effect can be quite stirring; Brown-Fried and scenic designer Anshuman Bhatia have cleverly made the space between the sofa and the dinner table into a battleground. Hennie and Moe’s emotional altercations take place in that no-man’s land, as does Ralph’s rebellious profession of love and Bessie Berger’s strict admonishments of her children.
NAATCO’s hope to carry out theater’s function in “taking people who were viewed as marginalized, and place them at the center of culture” is perhaps done so well, that we altogether forget that there is a Berger family. The characters seem to take on roles that are familiar and universal to everyone in the audience: an overbearing mother, a reckless teenage brother or a vicious old flame. Love songs from Hollywood’s Golden Age have audiences tapping their feet and humming, and the familiar twang of Bronx accents have us settling in comfortably, although hearing "goil" instead of "girl" soon trespasses on the ear. Subsequently, the supposed novelty of casting Odets’ typically Jewish-American drama with an Asian-American cast quickly dissolves; we are quite contentedly left with a fresh new realization of the Berger family. And it’s quite a sight to see.
NAATCO’s production of Awake and Sing! ran till August 8. For more information, visit www.publictheater.org.
