Tartuffe: Tripping over Molière

Melissa Miller and Brett Gelman in Huntington Theatre's Tartuffe. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

I can’t think of a great playwright who stymies directors with the frequency of Molière. (That may not be true in France; my experience of Molière productions is limited to Canada, the U.S. and England.) His satirical high comedies are vibrant and hilarious on the page, but on stage they tend to fall into two categories: lethal academic readings in which the actors seem straitjacketed by their seventeenth-century costumes and – far more common over the last several decades – showy high-concept editions, heavy on farce, that push relentlessly for laughs. Peter DuBois’s Tartuffe at the Huntington Theatre is an example of the second, with one exception: I can’t figure out what the hell the concept is supposed to be, and there’s no director’s note in the program to provide assistance. The quote from DuBois in the press material, “Boston is going to see 2017 alive on stage within the framework of a 17th century farce, and the result will be satirical, smart, and a gut-buster,” doesn’t help. And what’s the significance of the lipstick-smeared pig on the poster? The setting is contemporary, though Tartuffe himself (played by Brett Gelman), the pious hypocrite whose hold over the aristocrat Orgon (Frank Wood) his beleaguered family is struggling to loosen, has been dressed by Anita Yavich as a cross between a Medieval monk and an imam. 2017 is represented not satirically but superficially, through a series of recognizable accoutrements, the most emphatic of which is a smart phone that Orgon’s son Damis (Matthew Bretschneider) uses to take selfies, and the substitution of a soldier in camouflage gear (Omar Robinso) for a messenger from the king to enact the happy ending. If DuBois has some idea in mind about how the play reflects our world, he hasn’t worked it out. The opening is a series of blackout sketches that mostly frame the two men in various comic-strip interactions that are clearly meant to be hilarious but are merely puzzling. The physical comedy is frantic and the actors have been coached to sprint through their lines, which at least has the effect of bringing the show in at two hours and ten minutes, including intermission – though, as habitual theatregoers know to our sorrow, time is relative, and it’s a long two hours. (I started checking my watch after forty-five minutes.)

Ayckbourn and Osborne: Brit Classics

Nael Nacer, Mahira Kakkar, and Karl Miller in Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company's Bedroom Farce. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

The comedies of the ridiculously prolific English playwright Alan Ayckbourn – eighty plays and counting – have typically proved to be tricky hurdles for American actors. The combination of his brand of banter (which spins, often hilariously, off the banality of middle-class English conversation), the physical demands of his scenarios (which ring inventive changes on typical sex-farce set-ups) and his peculiarly offhand satirical tone (he’s not a cruel playwright but he certainly isn’t warm) make for a challenging combination. Maria Aitken’s production of Ayckbourn’s 1975 Bedroom Farce for Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company is performed so delightfully, however, that you can barely see the hoops the eight actors have to jump through to make it work. The title itself is a characteristic Ayckbourn gag: it prepares us for a sex roundelay, when in fact the closest any of the characters comes to infidelity is a harmless, unpremeditated kiss at a party between Trevor (Karl Miller), who’s in the midst of a tiff with his wife Susannah (Katie Paxton), and his ex-girl friend Jan (Mahira Kakkar), who has left her husband Nick (Nael Nacer) at home in bed with an aching back. What the title actually refers to is the set – cleverly designed, in this instance, by Alexander Dodge – which divides the stage into three bedrooms. Stage left is Jan and Nick’s, occupied throughout the play by the unhappily laid-up Nick. Center stage is that of the party givers, Malcolm (Richard Hollis) and Kate (Emma Kaye). The bedroom stage right belongs to Trevor’s parents, Ernest (Malcolm Ingram) and Delia (Patricia Hodges), a homey, conventional couple celebrating their anniversary who, following a disappointing meal at a once-favorite restaurant, retire for a comfy night until their sanctum is unexpectedly invaded by their neurotic daughter-in-law. She doesn’t feel right about going home after she and Trevor have quarreled so extravagantly and vociferously at Malcolm and Kate’s that they managed to drive all the other guests out of the house.

Classics Without Inspiration: Quixote Nuevo and An Iliad

Emilio Delgado and Hugo E. Carbajal in Quixote Nuevo at the Huntington Theatre Company. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

Octavio Sollis sets Quixote Nuevo, his updated version of Don Quixote, in Texas, substituting a town called La Plancha for Cervantes’ La Mancha. In this version, a co-production of the Huntington Theatre Company, Hartford Stage and Houston’s Alley Theatre – currently playing at the Huntington – the hero, Jose Quijano (Emilio Delgado), is a retired literature professor sinking into dementia who, as Don Quixote, rides around on a bicycle with the skull of a horse hoisted on the handlebars – the horse, when it was alive, was the companion of his lonely childhood – performing heroic deeds in the name of his muse, Dulcinea. His sister Magdalena (Mariela López-Ponce) and his niece Antonia (Sarita Ocon), who have been caring for him, chase after him in the hopes of getting him into assisted living; his other pursuers are his parish priest (Orlando Arriaga) and his therapist (Gisela Chípe). His Sancho Panza is Manny Diaz (Juan Manuel Amador), who drives an ice cream wagon and whose anxious wife (Krystal Hernandez) is also trying to track down the pair of fantastic adventurers.

A Guide for the Homesick: Buddy Melodrama

Samuel H. Levine and McKinley Belcher III in the Huntington Theatre's A Guide for the Homesick. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

In Ken Urban’s new play A Guide for the Homesick, which the Huntington Theatre is producing in its South End space at the Calderwood Pavilion, two young Boston men meet at an Amsterdam bar and wind up in a hotel room. For Teddy (McKinley Belcher III), the encounter is a pick-up, but when he hints around, Jeremy (Samuel H. Levine) assures him that he’s misread the signals – though we’re not so sure. The set-up is familiar: this is a strangers-with-secrets play. Teddy has been vacationing with a work friend who’s about to get married, and for some reason his traveling companion has disappeared and his fiancée keeps calling Teddy’s cell phone. Jeremy went to Africa as a medical aid worker after graduating from Harvard and something went disastrously wrong, prompting him to return – reluctantly – to the States.

Top Girls: Thatcher-Era Feminism

Sophia Ramos, Carmen Herlihy, Paula Plum, Carmen Zilles, and Vanessa Kai in Top Girls. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

Thirty-six years after the original production of Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls at London’s Royal Court, the play – a revival of which concludes the Huntington Theatre’s mainstage season – feels inescapably like a remnant from the Thatcher years. That’s particularly true of the second act, which culminates in a long quarrel between two sisters, Marlene (Carmen Zilles), a high-powered single woman who works in a London employment agency, and Joyce (Sophia Ramos), a divorcée who stayed behind in the dilapidated working-class exurb Marlene couldn’t wait to escape from. Marlene’s conservative politics are meant to suggest her emotional and moral limitations; this is, after all, a Caryl Churchill play. The playwright tips her hand when it becomes clear that Joyce has raised Marlene’s illegitimate child, Angie (Carmen M. Herlihy), now a developmentally-delayed sixteen-year-old who adores the aunt she seldom gets to see. (You’d think that Churchill might have come up with a more persuavive device than a revelation that seems to have come out of a Victorian melodrama.)

Come Back, Little Sheba at the Huntington: An Elusive Balance

Adrianne Krstansky and Derek Hasenstab in Come Back, Little Sheba. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

Come Back, Little Sheba is the drama that put playwright William Inge on the map when it was produced on Broadway in 1950. Shirley Booth created the role of Lola, the slovenly, nostalgic wife of Doc Delaney, a chiropractor in a small Midwestern college town. (Her legendary performance is preserved in the 1952 movie version.) The play, which David Cromer has staged for Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company in its South End space at the Calderwood Pavilion, is about two people who have, in different ways, failed to accept the passing of their youth. Doc impregnated Lola when he was a medical student; he dropped out to marry her, they lost the baby, and he’s lived in regret for the sexual indiscretion that resulted in the loss of the life he’d planned for himself. Alcohol fueled that regret and disappointment; it also ate up his inheritance. When the play begins he’s been sober for a year, attending AA meetings regularly. Lola, lonely at home while Doc is seeing his patients, luxuriates in her memories of the youthful amorousness he’s trying to forget. (Her lost puppy, Little Sheba, is a rather obvious symbol of her vanished youth.) Their distinctive attitudes toward the past are illuminated by their reaction to their boarder, Marie, a coed with a serious boyfriend back home in Cincinnati who is carrying on a casual affair with a football player named Turk. Lola is touched by their lovemaking; it reminds her of her own romance with Doc, when she was young and pretty. Doc prefers to think of Marie as pure; he doesn’t like Turk, who he thinks isn’t good enough for her. The truth is that Turk’s sexuality recalls his own twenty years ago. The incontrovertible evidence that Turk and Marie are sleeping together forces a confrontation with his own past that knocks him for a loop – and right off the wagon.

Thy Brother’s Peeper: The Ascension of My Brother, My Brother, & Me

Justin, Griffin, and Travis McElroy. (Photo courtesy of Seeso)

Adapting a podcast into a television show might seem like a strange idea, but if anyone can make such a bizarre transition work, it’s the McElroy brothers. Justin, Travis, and Griffin McElroy – with frequent contributions from their father Clint – have emerged as media superstars in the past few years, reigning over an empire of websites and audio podcasts so expansive that they’ve earned a Midas-like reputation. Everything these guys touch turns to pure comedy gold, and they took the extra leap to prove it by returning to their humble, bucolic hometown of Huntington, West Virginia to tape a TV version of their biggest and most influential work: My Brother, My Brother, & Me, their “advice show for the modern era.”

I’m a bit obsessed with podcasts. They occupy the majority of my walking-around time (which, as a car-less Toronto urbanite, is substantial), and I tend to burn through a few hour-long episodes on the daily. As a medium, they’ve absolutely exploded in popularity, so I’m spoiled for choice: when I’m feeling intellectual there’s NPR’s Radiolab or Invisibila, or Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History; when I crave gripping narrative, I can sink into classics like Serial, This American Life, or Karina Longworth’s smoky Hollywood history lessons on You Must Remember This; and when I’m in a movie-loving mood I can celebrate the best with The Canon, or the worst with The Flophouse. But few things can balance out my mood – and make me look like a grinning madman on public transit – like a good comedy podcast, and the brightest star in that particular firmament must be MBMBAM (or, affectionately, “Ma-Bim-Bam”). It’s one of the funniest shows in any medium that I’ve ever enjoyed, full stop. And that’s entirely due to the trio of brothers who host it.

I Like to Recognize the Tune: A Doll’s House at the Huntington

Andrea Syglowski and Sekou Laidlow in the Huntington Theatre's A Doll’s House. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

You can set a play by Shakespeare or Molière in any era, but you can’t mess around with the setting of a realist play or it no longer makes sense. Yet contemporary directors keep doing it, subjecting the modern realist classics to time shifts that have the effect of bowdlerizing them. The Abbey Theatre’s touring production of Sean O’Casey’s great tragedy about the Easter 1916 uprising, The Plough and the Stars, which American Repertory Theatre imported to Cambridge last fall, threw it forward into the twenty-first century. In the last act of the Roundabout Theatre’s recent Cherry Orchard, Chekhov’s bankrupt Russian aristocrats – a class that was, of course, wiped out or driven into exile by the Russian Revolution – walk out into the world in modern-day outfits. And now we have the Huntington Theatre’s mounting of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (adapted by Bryony Lavery), with an ambiguous setting that is, however, definitely post-1930, judging from the dresses Michael Krass has designed for Nora Helmer (Andrea Syglowski) and her childhood friend Christine Linde (Marinda Anderson).

Diversions: The Drowsy Chaperone and Sherlock’s Last Case

The cast of Goodspeed Opera House's production of The Drowsy Chaperone. (Photo: Diane Sobolewski)

The Drowsy Chaperone is one of the high points in twenty-first-century American musical theatre. First produced on Broadway in 2006 in a rambunctious, irresistible production that is still the best thing director-choreographer Casey Nicholaw has ever done, it’s a parody of a 1920s musical comedy framed, ingeniously, by a commentary by a middle-aged musicals buff known as Man in Chair. The conceit is that this character, who finds most contemporary theatre unsatisfying – and the modern world exasperating – is sitting alone in his apartment, trying to coax himself out of the blues by listening to his favorite show recording, of a silly, lighthearted musical called The Drowsy Chaperone. Bob Martin, who wrote the book along with his fellow Canadian, Don McKellar, was the original Man in Chair; the ebullient, sometimes loony songs are by Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison, and the lyrics often make you laugh out loud – a genuine rarity.

The Art of Contemplation: The Seagull at The Huntington

The cast of the Huntington Theatre Company's production of The Seagull, in Boston, MA. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

Of his four dramatic masterpieces, Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull is the most autobiographical. It’s a transparent wrestling match in which he works through his personal issues: the tortured experience that is writing, the frustrations of practicing rural medicine, the tragic conflict between artistic purity and celebrity vanity. The Huntington Theatre Company’s current production, starring Kate Burton and her son, Morgan Ritchie, illustrates how the play is itself a contemplation of life. And its singular feature--its unique conceptual vision--is to highlight how this rumination takes place in a meditative milieu. The tragicomic melodrama – the interpersonal conflicts the characters experience – occurs within a sublime pastoral atmosphere, one that gives the audience its own taste of the good life. That the characters can’t access that beauty, though, only reaffirms our inability to live it fully.

The Art of Making Art: Sunday in the Park with George

The cast of Sunday in the Park with George at Boston's Huntington Theatre. (Photo: Paul Marotta)

Continuing its mission to produce the full canon of Stephen Sondheim musicals, Boston’s Huntington Theatre has opened its 2016-2017 season with a solid revival of Sunday in the Park with George – both musically and in terms of stagecraft one of his most demanding pieces. Sunday in the Park, which has a book by James Lapine – who directed the 1984 Broadway production starring Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters – is an imaginative account of how the post-Impressionist Georges Seurat (Americanized as George in the musical) created his masterwork, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte. It’s been widely identified as Sondheim’s most personal work – not just a treatise on making art but also a defense of the kind of art that can appear dispassionate and theoretical, by musical theatre’s most famously precise and cooled-out practitioner. In Seurat, whose pointillist approach to painting was condemned by critics and by his fellow artists as cold and pseudo-scientific, Sondheim found the ideal medium for arguing that art that seems to displace emotion can in fact subsume it, and that a man who puts his art ahead of romance and family is not necessarily cold and unfeeling. Dot, George’s model and mistress, leaves him because she feels unattended to, frozen out. She’s carrying his baby, and he’s content to let her new lover, Louis the baker, raise the child as his own. She comes to his studio to ask for a painting he did of her as a souvenir, and to try one more time to get him to convey some feeling for her before she and Louis emigrate to America, where he’s secured a job as a pastry chef for a rich couple. George disappoints her on both counts; he pushes her away, claiming he has to work. “Hide behind your painting,” she exclaims. “I have come to tell you I am leaving because I thought you might care to know – foolish of me, because you care about nothing.” “I care about many things,” he protests. “Things – not people,” she objects. “People, too,” he insists. “I cannot divide my feelings up as neatly as you, and I am not hiding behind my canvas – I am living in it.”

The Extraordinary Adam Guettel: The Light in the Piazza at The Huntington and Floyd Collins on Broadway

Emily Skinner in The Huntington Theatre's The Light in the Piazza. (Photo: Julieta Cervantes.)

The new Huntington Theatre mounting of The Light in the Piazza is the fourth production I’ve seen of this show, and except for Bartlett Sher’s spectacular original staging, at Lincoln Center in 2005, it’s the best. I think that Piazza, with its first-rate Craig Lucas book derived from Elizabeth Spencer’s 1960 novel and its soaring impressionistic score by Adam Guettel, is the greatest musical written in the twenty-first century. (Yes, I love Hamilton.) It’s an unconventional romantic musical in which the leap of faith made by the wife of a North Carolina tobacco executive named Margaret Johnson, who brings her daughter Clara to Florence on vacation in 1953, is a symbol for all of our attempts to find happiness in love, even though we know that the effort is reckless because as often as not it ends in shambles. One of the elements that make the play unusual is that though the lovers are Clara and a young Florentine named Fabrizio Naccarelli, the son of a shopkeeper, who fall in love at first sight. Margaret is the protagonist, and it’s finally she who has to overcome personal obstacles, not her daughter. She has been Clara’s protector since, at twelve, the girl was kicked in the head by a pony, apparently halting her emotional development. So when she and Fabrizio become entranced with each other, Margaret – encouraged via long distance by her husband Roy back home in Winston-Salem – attempts to stop it before the humiliating moment when the Naccarellis figure out something is wrong. But no one in the Naccarelli family is put off by Clara’s childlike nature, or even by her explosion when Fabrizio’s flirtatious sister-in-law, Franca, gets too close to him at a family get-together. The Naccarellis find her refreshingly old-fashioned; even Franca, whose attention-getting behavior is a response to her husband’s sexual duplicitousness, defends her; she thinks that Clara is right to fight for her man she loves and even wishes she had done so. Margaret has to confront the fact that the greater block to her approving Clara’s union with Fabrizio is the fact that her own marriage has been a disappointment, that she long ago ceased to believe in love.

Animal Crackers: Hijinks

The cast of Animal Crackers with Mark Bedard (centre). Photo: Jenny Graham.

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of Animal Crackers is scrappy but entertaining, and it’s fun to be reminded not only of the early days of the Marx Brothers but also of the freewheeling (and almost free-form) flapdoodle musical comedies of the 1920s. Animal Crackers opened on Broadway in 1928, before the Depression altered the style of the musical, seeding in elements of satire, urban sophistication and bittersweet elegance. It was written by two of the most skillful purveyors of loony-bin wisecrackery, George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, and no doubt it was rewritten many times in rehearsal to accommodate the Marxes’ improvisations. Marx aficionados know thick swatches of the dialogue by heart – most of it made it into the 1930 movie version, where it’s played at a dizzying speed that offsets the early-talkie staginess. (The Marxes’ film debut, The Cocoanuts, also began as a Broadway show.) What gets sacrificed in the Paramount version are the secondary romantic couple – no great loss – and most of the Bert Kalmar-Harry Ruby songs. The OSF production, which was directed by Allison Narver, not only restores them but tosses in a few others, like “Three Little Words” (one of the best known of their songs, and the title of the M-G-M musical bio with Fred Astaire and Red Skelton as the two tunesmiths) and “The Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gives to Me.”

Ellison’s Invisible Man on Stage

Teagle F. Bougere and members of the cast of Invisible Man (Photo by Astrid Reiken)

No one has tried to make a movie of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and until now – an adaptation by Oren Jacoby, directed by Christopher McElroen, is currently playing at Boston’s Huntington Theatre – no one, to my knowledge, has tried to put it on the stage either. It’s easy to see why. The staggering 1952 novel is as dense and highly conceptual as a Kafka story, its tone is satirical and its style is surrealistic. It imagines the radicalization of a bright, sensitive young black man (the nameless narrator), who wins a scholarship to a Negro college, as they were then called, by making a valedictory speech at his high school that enthusiastically promotes compliance as a means of bettering the position of the black race. The club that sponsors him is made up of prominent white men who first require him and other promising young African Americans to box blindfolded for the entertainment of the membership. At college, he idolizes the president, Bledsoe, who assigns him the job of chauffeuring an aging white benefactor. At the request of the curious guest, the narrator takes him off the grounds to a nearby black neighborhood, with disastrous results. Bledsoe suspends the narrator, sending him to New York with letters that he says will recommend him to various white members of the college’s board for jobs; having earned his fees for the fall, he’ll be allowed to return to school. The truth, as the narrator learns, is that he’s been expelled, and the letters are condemnatory. He finds work at a symbolic white paint factory, but an explosion sends him to the hospital. He rents a room in Harlem, where he observes an eviction that brings out the orator in him once again. His impromptu speech is so rousing that he finds himself picked up by socialists who give him a generous salary to make use of his talents. Their opposite number is a black extremist named Ras the Destroyer who preaches complete segregation of the races and targets the narrator for his special disdain. The book is a flashback: when it begins, the narrator has finally reached the conclusion that as a black man he’s invisible in white society and that the only way he can live in it (and not be wrecked by it) is to embrace his invisibility.

Author Ralph Ellison

The novel is one of the signal achievements in twentieth-century American literature – it may be the greatest American book of the mid-century – but its tortuous narrative is a catalogue of ideas about race. It lacks dramatic shape – not a problem for a book but certainly a challenge for a dramatist. Honestly, I’m not sure how the hell you’d turn it into a workable play, but Jacoby hasn’t really tried. Invisible Man at the Huntington is a Reader’s Theatre version of the classic text. The Invisible Man (played by a young actor of tremendous stamina, Teagle F. Bougere) is still the narrator, and he recites massive, unwieldy chunks of Ellison’s prose while around him nine other earnest performers in a variety of supporting roles reproduce episode after episode, almost exactly as each appears in the book. Jacoby has transferred almost every major development onto the stage. (Perhaps the only significant omission is the one in which the Invisible Man dons shades and is confused by a number of Harlem residents for a notorious local pimp who is juggling as many identities simultaneously as the narrator has tried on sequentially.) Clocking in at nearly three hours, including two intermissions, the production is recitation, not dramatization.

Rarely Revisited: Marivaux’s The Triumph of Love

Vincent Randazzo and Avanthika Srinivasan in The Triumph of Love. (Photo: Liza Voll.)

Pierre de Marivaux was the most important French playwright of the eighteenth century – that is, of the second half of the Neoclassical period; Molière and Racine ruled the French theatre of the first half. Yet whereas Molière has never been out of fashion and Racine’s Phaedra has been kept alive (though more in the form of revisions and adaptations than through productions of the actual text), theatre companies stopped performing Marivaux almost entirely for many years. Rare as productions of English Restoration comedies are, until perhaps thirty years ago they were more frequent than revivals of The Triumph of Love and The Game of Love and Chance, Marivaux’s most famous plays. (He was, in fact, extremely prolific.) The translators and directors who rediscovered him were struck by how modern these hybrids of high and romantic comedy are, as was the marvelous English filmmaker Clare Peploe, Bernardo Bertolucci’s wife, who made a magical movie version of The Triumph of Love with postmodern touches in 2001 starring Mira Sorvino, Ben Kingsley and Fiona Shaw. But that doesn’t mean that Marivaux has exactly returned to the repertory. It’s still unusual to find a theatre with the courage to attempt his explorations of the tension between love and reason, which play with ideas from both Shakespeare and the Restoration masters Congreve and Wycherley and are witty, cerebral and demanding in their use of language. The movie of The Triumph of Love is the only version of the play I’ve ever seen, so I was sure not to miss the one that just opened at Boston’s Huntington Theatre. (It closes April 6.)

Toni Stone, Mother Play, Uncle Vanya: Deserting the Audience

Stanley Andrew Jackson and Jennifer Mogbock in Toni Stone. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

The titular protagonist of Toni Stone, currently playing in the Huntington Theatre’s revered space in Boston’s Back Bay, is the first woman who played baseball regularly in a professional league. She played for three Negro leagues in the forties and fifties, culminating in a season with the Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro American League, where she replaced Hank Aaron, who had been picked up by the Milkwaukee Braves. It’s an appealing story for the stage and especially for contemporary audiences. But the playwright, Lydia R. Diamond, hasn’t worked out how to dramatize it.

Race Riff: Smart People

Eunice Wong, McKinley Belcher III (top), Miranda Craigwell, Roderick Hill in Smart People (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

When I was I was in graduate school I directed an African American freshman in a production of David Rabe’s Vietnam War play The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel. He had to play a working-class black soldier who spoke in jive, and though he was a stunningly gifted performer (who went on to a successful acting career) for a while he struggled with the requirements of the role. Here he was, a sophisticated young urban black man, a journalist’s son who’d gotten into Stanford, and I was asking him to sound like some hip street-corner dude. The fact that I was a white guy – and so was Rabe – couldn’t have helped.

My actor figured it out and gave a brilliant performance, and over the years I’d forgotten how resistant he was in the initial stages. What brought it back to mind was Lydia R. Diamond’s vivid and hilarious new Cambridge-set play Smart People, the season closer for Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company. Somehow I missed Diamond’s last collaboration with the Huntington, Stick Fly (2010), and missed it again during its New York run, and now I feel foolish because I had such a good time at Smart People. It’s a four-handed high comedy (as the title suggests) that mines the same awkward, slippery, rich territory as Bruce Norris’s great Clybourne Park. Diamond’s not up to Norris – she has a weakness for speechifying that keeps stopping the play cold, and she tends to fumble shifts in tone – but she’s very talented. The play is about how race sets up class expectations and the often ridiculous tangles that intelligent, educated, sensitive twenty-first-century liberals get themselves into as they try to negotiate the treacherous waters of race. The four characters are Jackson (McKinley Belcher III), a black surgeon who moonlights at a clinic he opened in a poor neighborhood; his friend Brian (Roderick Hill), a white Harvard neuroscientist whose study on racism in whites is getting him in trouble with his institution; Ginny (Eunice Wong), a half-Chinese, half-Japanese psychologist, also on the Harvard faculty, who’s conducting research on depression and low esteem in low-income Chinese women; and Valerie (Miranda Craigwell), an African American actor who dates Jackson (briefly) and gets part-time work in Brian’s lab when Harvard begins to pull his funding. All four are opinionated, tough-minded, outspoken and articulate, which makes them ideal figures for comedy of manners. They’re also touchy, quick to assume – through bitter experience – that other people tend to operate out of deep-dyed prejudices they mostly don’t know they possess. So they sally forth into conversational gambits with their dukes up.

Return to La Grande Jatte: The Latest Sunday in the Park with George

Jake Gyllenhaal in Sunday in the Park with George. (Photo: Matthew Murphy)

I didn’t expect to be reviewing another production of Sunday in the Park with George so soon after the Huntington Theatre’s season opener last September, but who could resist checking out a Broadway revival starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford? Sarna Lapine – niece of the book writer, James Lapine, who did the original Broadway staging in 1984 – worked it up out of the sold-out one-night-only 2016 concert version, and though it’s fully designed, it retains some of the intimacy it must have had in concert. Sitting in the front of the mezzanine at the newly refurbished Hudson Theatre, which dates from the turn of the twentieth century, I felt very close to the actors, especially in the two-character scenes between Gyllenhaal’s Seurat and Annaleigh Ashford’s Dot. Beowulf Boritt’s set is a raked rhomboid with an upstage curtain hung like a circus tent that holds Tal Yarden and Christopher Ash’s projections. In the 2008 revival, which came to New York by way of the Meunier Chocolate Factory in London, the projections felt like a cut-rate approach to a musical that was so visually vibrant in 1984, especially in the first-act finale, “Sunday,” where Seurat puts together his canvas A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte – which he had painted exactly a century before Lapine and Stephen Sondheim wrote their musical. But in this production of Sunday in the Park, the combination of Boritt’s and Yarden’s designs is elegantly understated and quite beautiful.

Bad Dates and Una: Bad Dates and Worse Ones

Haneefah Wood stars in Theresa Rebeck's Bad Dates at the Huntington Theatre Company. (Photo: T. Charles Ericson)

Theresa Rebeck’s Bad Dates was a hit for the Huntington Theatre in 2003, so the company has elected to resurrect it this season on its mainstage, which means that it programmed two one-woman shows back to back. (Mala closed last week in its South End space.) Bad Dates is by far the superior play – and the superior performance, by the bright-eyed, charismatic L.A. actress Haneefah Wood. It’s enjoyable if not memorable entertainment. I knew I’d seen Julie White in the show fifteen years ago but couldn’t recall a thing about it except the premise – a middle-aged single woman tells the audience about a succession of eagerly anticipated evenings with men that, one after the other, go wrong. The play hails from the Sex and the City era and the character shares with that series’ narrator-protagonist, Carrie Bradshaw, an obsession with expensive footwear and a frankness about life in Manhattan for an attractive thirtysomething with a career who’s trying to find the right man – though in this cases Haley Walker, who manages a relatively high-end restaurant for some shady people, is also raising a teenage daughter on her own.

Awake and Sing!: Loveless Intimacy

Awake and Sing!, directed by Melia Bensussen, at the Boston's Huntington Theatre Company (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

In a brilliant 1946 essay about Awake and Sing!, Robert Warshow called Clifford Odets the “poet of the Jewish middle class,” and when you hear his dialogue spoken from the stage of the Huntington Theatre in its deeply moving revival of the play you know exactly what Warshow meant. Odets – working from his own first-hand knowledge of Jews fighting to forge an identity in America, his consciousness of the hand-to-mouth struggle of families during the Depression, his Communist principles, his devotion to Chekhov, and his Stanislavskian training as a company actor in the Group Theatre – created a new kind of American drama. In 1935 he was twenty-eight and working at astonishing speed. In that year alone he churned out the agit-prop labor play Waiting for Lefty (which mixed Brechtian and naturalist elements and brought audiences literally to their feet, chanting, “Strike!” at the end along with the actors) and two magnificent realist dramas, Awake and Sing! and Paradise Lost. The best of the three – the best thing Odets ever wrote – is the Bronx-set Awake and Sing!, where the Berger family, in Warshow’s phrase, “live on top of one another, in that loveless intimacy which is the obverse of the Jewish virtue of family solidarity.” It’s a matriarchy that Bessie Berger rules over with increasingly desperate tyranny as the family threatens to come apart. Her husband Myron, who dropped out of law school for financial reasons, is a well-meaning, gentle-souled man who long ago ceded authority to his wife and who, in these hard times, has lost his breadwinner role, his work days cut back to three. When Hennie, their elder child, gets pregnant by an out-of-towner she can’t track down (either he gave her a false name or he lied about the company that employed him), Bessie marries her off post-haste to an adoring recent immigrant with a decent job who never questions the baby’s paternity. When Ralph, the younger child, falls in love with a poor girl, Bessie throws up obstacles; so does the girl’s family, and the romance dwindles. Ralph is close to the other inhabitant of this tenement apartment, his grandfather, Jacob, a Marxist who, though he himself is cowed by his daughter, fans the flame of the boy’s dreams and urges him to go out and change the world “so life won’t be printed on dollar bills.”