Sure, I wish the place had been packed to the rafters, but the Tuesday 3:45 screening of Late Fame at Film at Lincoln Center drew fewer than a dozen Upper West Side retirees and me. The sparseness of attendance rhymed with this wistful portrait of a vanished culture barely kept alive by nostalgia borrowed by the young.

Willem Dafoe plays—with infinite grace and wry dignity—Ed Saxberger, a postal worker and longtime New Yorker who published a book of poetry called Way Past Go in his twenties. Back then, the late 1970s, the downtown arts scene was quite different. It was alive, to start with. (This was about 15 years before I showed up to dance in the afterglow of the afterlife of NYC’s avant-garde scene.) Today, Ed sorts mail at the post office, a disposable blue ballpoint pen tucked behind one ear. The prop pointedly underscores the fact that Ed hasn’t spun verse for decades.

One day outside his building, Ed is approached by a stiffly well-spoken dandy named Meyers (Edmund Donovan). Trembling with excitement, Meyers confesses to finding Way Past Go in a used-book shop in London and becoming an instant fan. Soon Meyers has drawn the bemused yet flattered ex-bard into a circle of Gen Z neo-bohemian aesthetes who dub themselves the Enthusiasm Society. They’re a very serious gang of (mostly male, mostly white) essayists, poets, and playwrights. Writing with real pens on real paper, hoping to ignite a movement IRL to reclaim the rough magic of downtown performances and readings. The glittering Greta Lee plays an absurdly flouncy, affected stage diva—a more sympathetic version of the grifter she created on High Maintenance. Experimental-theater veteran Tony Torn has a brief but savory cameo as Ed’s elegantly camp neighbor, Paulie.

Late Fame is directed by Kent Jones, written by Samy Burch and based on the posthumous novella Später Ruhm by Arthur Schnitzler. I totally loved it: the carefully shaded yet spontaneous character work; the absence of any need for special effects; the jazzy, passionate poem Ed reads toward the end of the film (penned, it so happens, by Jones himself). It would be an understatement to say I may be the target audience here. The below-14th Street realm of Off-Off Broadway that I acted and directed in, that I published a theater ’zine in, where I lived and loved and partied and made art: It’s unrecognizable today. Sure, squirreled away in plastic containers under my bed are postcards from shows and yellowing copies of OFF, but that world turned out to be just as ephemeral as the plays we put on.

The movie treats all its characters tenderly, even when they’re being pretentious jerks (that includes Ed for a spell). Ed wants to rekindle his passion for writing, a yearning which is more than old age panting after its own youth; it’s the desire for beauty in one’s life, beauty that one summons out of empty air. Some of the motions in search of lost time are comical: nonsmoker Ed selects a pack of cigarettes by asking the bodega guy what the kids like. Other scenes are lovely, such as Ed playing CD recitations by poets—William Carlos Williams, H.D., T.S. Eliot—for creative juice as he squirms over a blank legal pad. Ed wanders the streets turning the phrase, “seasons collide” over and over in his head, a quite accurate way to show writers at work.

There is humor to cut through the melancholy, a running lampoon of the young characters and their Google-search conception of “underground” artistes. Not too surprisingly, the Zoomers turn out to be trust-fund poseurs who only pretend to be Extremely Offline. Even so, they’re earnest, genuinely hungry for real aesthetic knowledge, living language and experiences beyond the endless scroll. The sardonically titled Late Fame isn’t satire, but our culture at present kinda is. The film simply reflects it back to us, with compassion and humor.

Dafoe achieves new highs of subtlety and warmth: his wry and defensive late-middle-age shell molting to expose the young poet agog in a New York where anything is possible, eager to capture the world in a page. Donovan—who wowed me in 2020 as a mentally disturbed Idahoan obsessed with abandoned mines in Samuel D. Hunter’s Greater Clements—is brilliant as a child of privilege desperate for a father figure in a family of choice, trapped in his golden cage of wealth. Yes, Donovan makes the poor little rich boy trope touching.

Late Fame leaves you quietly joyful to be a New Yorker, especially a New York artist (current or retired). It also makes you angry and sad that obscenely overpriced real estate and technology have flattened our cultural lives so much. But for about a hundred minutes in the dark, you can sit beside your younger self and ruminate on the people you were and the people you may yet become.

First is benevolent from Good Apples Collective, a funny-sad-angry period piece set in 1917 New York among young ladies scrubbing dirty laundry in the basement of a reformatory for “fallen” women. Class, race, sexuality—all get put through the wringer in this defiantly grim but heartfelt drama from the ace duo of playwright Sophie McIntosh and director Nina Goodheart. (Last year’s Road Kills was equally irreverent and grisly.) McIntosh is a notably sharp storyteller; she addresses social ills and inequality, but also knows how to twist a narrative and subvert expectations—without selling out her characters. Goodheart gets solid ensemble work from the four-member cast, with especially vivid turns by the wickedly magnetic Chani Reese as a hardened-to-breaking sex worker and butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth Livvy Marcus playing a smug, cosseted rich girl discovering the limits of privilege and the cruelty that can lie beneath charity. Not all the Borax powder or skin-scraping washboards can cleanse society of its crimes against women. Through September 5!

Similar to Good Apples, a two-woman team is behind the frothy and cartoonish How to Be Normal and Regular at Brick Aux—through tomorrow only: three more shows! The spirit of two sainted Charleses—Ludlam and Busch—imbue this daffy homage to Madonna’s nightclub siren in Dick Tracy, packing in a dissertation’s worth of references to classic Hollywood tales of backstage backbiting bitchery. (See the voluminous list of books and movies cited and songs clipped—Liza, Fosse, Streisand, Sondheim, Bruce Willis?!?—here.) Again, the cast is all gifted, but I must give a shoutout to the lethal, lanky Thaleia Dasberg as Tanya, a cynical, copper-wigged showgirl who seduces the crowd with smoldering looks, curled lip, and demented jazz dahnce. Mimi Wu is equally delish as poisonous ingenue Cindy, an Eve Harrington in full goblin mode: How she scampers and gambols in malicious glee! As for the tireless John R. Howley, operatically suffering in Madonna drag as Breathless Mahoney, all I can say is: the late, great Dito van Reigersberg would have taken John out for a celebratory drink. Written and directed by Celia Krefter and Kate Purdum, How to Be Normal is a loose neocamp collage peppered with goofy dance numbers (Liza Minnelli’s disco cover of “Losing My Mind” as the ensemble dashes around manically brushing their teeth).

There you have it: two historically inflected shows made by women telling stories about women pulling together or tearing each other down, summer cocktails for a range of tastes: bitter, sugary, sour, floral, and fruity—each leaving you quite buzzed.

After the end of the end of the party, you see the sunrise.

How sweet it would be to behold the blessed atmospheric refraction in a mood of soulful gratitude, nestled in a porch swing on an east-facing terrace caressing a mug of tea, hearing your beloved’s legs stir bedsheets beyond the screen door—a sound which makes you smile, turn your head, and whisper: You gotta see this.

Instead, after the end of the end of the party you’re standing solo, blinded by sunrise as your sneakers stick to an East Village pavement slick and thickened with carcinogenic ground sweat, undergraduate urination and semisolid vomit, weekend trash overspilling dented wire buckets not yet lustily upended by men stronger than you, men impervious to disgust doing the 5am collection. You’re 32 and just spent seven hours shoving poison up nose and down throat and now’s the time to toddle home to Queens and your eyeballs are in a knife fight with the sunrise and, guess what, the sunrise is winning. You squint left and right for a cab. Vacant streets. Only you and the talons of dawnlight clawing your face to ribbons. No witness to the crime.

Some of the happiest and worst times of my life happened when I was alone. Alone before a great moment of union or abandonment. I think about that. About my instinctive dislike of crowds, the fact that I spent many years of my life sitting in crowds in theaters, waiting for the party to end so I could detach myself from the mass and conjure meaning from what I fled. I think about my morbid aversion to fatherhood or extended families or families members who closely resemble each other.

I think about bitter epiphanies I reached as a confused adopted child, shutting myself in a lightless closet to seethe, whispering gollumly to myself that no one was on my side; trust only yourself. About the time in third grade when our assignment was to write down the name of a person we admired and why. Returning my folded slip with the words, “I don’t admire anyone and nobody admires me.”

I think about parking my car by the side of the road, soon to graduate and head to college. I’d gotten a decent education, my head was full of poetry and history, stories I wanted to write and roles I wanted to act, but I could feel my heart was a small, cold stone. Came from never being loved or touched, being too scared to ask. How I sighed, gripped the sleeping wheel, tried to reframe the small, cold stone. Ahead of me, ahead of me, Romance and Ecstasy. Just past the next bend of the road. That time you sobbed for an hour at the part in Great Expectations when Pip’s fever broke and he felt remorse for the family he cast aside in pursuit of better fortunes. Proof of humanity, right? That prolonged spasm of tears? Start the ignition, you fool.

Then I think about the Shakespeare characters with whom I developed parasocial affinities: Hamlet, Richard of Gloucester, Edmund, Iago. Every bitter, cynical, judgmental bastard with luscious, sneering lines.

Let Us Pause for an Elizabethan Edgelord Medley

I considered naming this place Nothing If Not Critical.

Once the party ends, normal, sensible people leave. At the end of the end, degenerate drunks finally shove off. To be straggling after the end of the end is truly an embarrassing position. And so it felt in certain ways to be a theater critic at a weekly magazine at the start of the 21^st century. “The end of the end of the party” is how I used to glibly locate my era in the media. Catastrophizing to spare myself heartbreak. I knew popular criticism’s best years were far behind us.

When I joined the staff of Time Out New York in 2000, crafting my first professionally edited, non-self-published, painstakingly second-guessed reviews and articles, it felt like a temporary lease of optimism.

I didn’t know it would last nearly seventeen years. I didn’t know if it would last two.

Last August I marked a quarter century in the critical racket. In December I was told the Observer, for whom I’d freelanced for seven years, would no longer be covering culture. Can’t say it was a surprise. Still, it hurt. I was pleased to write for the Village Voice from 2017-18. It was a delight to think deeply at 4 Columns. That fine online arts site shut down in June (planned obsolescence for a decade-long venture). My venues for writing about theater are fewer and fewer. End of the end of the…you know.

All dogs go to heaven, and all cashiered journalists gravitate to Substack. Here, as you’ve noticed, I notice stuff. Theater stuff, opera stuff, museum stuff, book stuff, movie stuff, stuff that I’m working on as a librettist, playwright…and, it would now seem, personal essays.

Devoid of supernatural beliefs, I do suffer from a touch of numerology. As a thrifty, anxious Capricorn, I compulsively check my cupboards, fridge, inbox, and shelves for reassurance. I inventory my life in fixed four-year cycles. These calendrical quatrains shadow my years of schooling (and Presidential elections), coincidentally. There’s 1984-1988 (high school), 1988-1992 (Bard College) continuing up to 2016-2020, an era that included being laid off at Time Out New York, freelancing, my wife Katy’s last year of life, opera premieres and song cycles, artist residencies, the pandemic, and a great deal of grief and isolation with fitful attempts to work on myself. The first year (2016) and last (2020) I call “hinge years” in which life-events arise, morph, or persist, overlapping with the previous and next quadrennial blocks.

The quad cycle is how I make sense—reauthor myself—after time and accident’s messy first draft. Decades, as everyone knows, are handy groupings. Herewith are a handful of Retrospects—as Dickens titles his fast-forwarding chapters in David Copperfield (which I’m a hundred pages from finishing).

Thirty Years Ago

I’m 26 and co-founding a photocopied Off-Off ‘zine called OFF: a journal of alternative theater. Co-created by marvelous actor and graphic-design sorceress Jenny Woodward. It begins as 10 or 12 pages, transitions to newsprint, and survives for about two years. Reviews, interviews, thought pieces, manifestos, satirical cartoons, listings. Even ads! We lug and leave piles of them for free at Off-Off venues such as the Ontological at St Marks, HERE, La MaMa, P.S. 122, the Kitchen, Dance Theater Workshop, the Kraine, Nada... (Media and showbiz historian Trav SD has an engaging retrospective here.)

Twenty-Six Years Ago

I’m 30 and hired at a magazine, my first professional gig in journalism. Job title: Theater Writer at Time Out New York. Editor Jason Zinoman gives me a break and starts me on this path. In 2003 he jumps ship for the New York Times. I serve as editor for 14 years.

Twenty-Four Years Ago

A 32-year-old fully employed, poorly compensated, and emotionally chaotic professional critic, I squander my free time and peace of mind on drinking and drugs when I should be reading and writing or (joke ahead) finding love and emotional fulfillment (see Paragraph 3, above).

Twenty Years Ago

I’m 36 and start publishing a blog called Histriomastix as well as running the Time Out New York theater section, spending hours arguing with people in comments. (For the record, this is the historical inspiration for that pretentious title.) Life is more stable, but I still waste energy on non-creative activities. During intermission of a play called The Wooden Breeks at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, a friend introduces me to a colleague of his named Katherine Kellgren, a rather successful audiobook narrator. She seems gentle and intelligent. We chat briefly and politely, but I am distracted and in a relationship. Fate shakes their head and mutters, “What an asshole.”

Eighteen Years Ago

I’m 38 going on 39 and meet this Kellgren woman a second time, at a holiday party. Newly emancipated from a four-year somethingship, I’ve made peace with the universe about pushing on as a harmless, slightly melancholy bachelor. At this party for an audiobook company (invited by an audio engineer friend) I find myself deep in conversation with the elegant, luminous, classy Katy. She glows and smiles as we compare notes on our favorite playwrights. Conor McPherson! The Seafarer, recently on Broadway. Yes, I loved it, too! I hover two feet to the right, outside my body. What is this chemistry and rapport? “These things happen to other people; they don’t happen at all,” as They Might Be Giants sing. I return to my body like smoke sucked backward into a genie’s lamp remembering that, burning the proverbial hole in pocket, is a pair of tickets to the Metropolitan Opera. Massenet’s Thaïs. Do you like the opera? I ask.

Nine Years Ago

I’m 47 and laid off from the magazine. Katy is very sick and, having lost my job, I feel I’ve failed her. Failed both of us. I love her very much. I’ve read that people at age 47 are, statistically, experiencing the greatest unhappiness of their lives, which means I’m punctual as fuck in the Department of Woe. Katy is six months older than me and she is truly going through hell. Her strength is colossal. Yet she’s human; she’s scared. We’ve been together less than nine years, but I was searching for Katy all my life. She sympathizes as I break down at home telling her; she says it’ll be alright.

Eight Years Ago

I have moved to Inwood and it will be a long time before I unpack the boxes. I am alive but numb, doing the necessary things to move through the world and acquire money. One day in September I decide to explore Inwood Hill Park. I wander off the path, a rare show of outdoorsy initiative, and enter a clearing where there looms a sheer rock face stretching high into upper clusters of trees and thick bushes. A gothic upsurge of schist and gneiss sculpted 50,000 years ago by the vast Wisconsin ice sheet, a towering bulwark that denies passage with the mute command: Go No Further But Up. At the foot of this surface is a low, flat boulder, somewhat like an altar. Shaking on jellied legs, I look around and feel trapped in an arboreal closet of sorts, unsure if I have stumbled upon a place of sacrifice or other cultish atrocity. Honestly don’t know if I’m in the presence of evil or holiness. I think of Katy. But then, I’m always thinking of Katy and wish someone would tell me what to do, where to turn. Is she here? Is she not here? I burst into tears accompanied by whiny, mucoid moans. Sobbing wildly as I did thirty years ago over Great Expectations, as if I could empty this reservoir of sadness. After a time, I stop crying and gulping, and start to climb a steep path in a cleft in the rock barrier. It’s hot, I’m out of shape and sweat through my shirt, feeling dehydrated. I fear I will faint and tumble down. Then I lose the crude path under bushes. Panic resumes. That’s when a shirtless hobo appears. Long black hair and beard. This prophet in the Upstate Manhattan wilderness, Saint Jerome with a 40 of Olde English. Where’s the path? I pantingly ask. Silent as stone, he gestures. Up.

Today?

If after the end of the end of the party comes the sunrise, does that make Cote Notices the break of day? It sure as fuck beats the opposite: sunset, sundowning, senescence, sepulcher, quietude, death. How to distinguish sunrises from sunsets? Sunsets are bloodier. I began my career in theater journalism as a self-produced, underground ’zine maker. The platform has changed, but I’m almost comforted that the wheel of fortune has clacked back to the beginning.

The most recent quad cycles? Pandemic, grieving, therapy, opera premieres, playwriting, artist residencies, freelance, travel, moments of joy. Creative pursuits becoming more frequent and rewarding. As I whirl through 2024-2028, my career as a critic is nosediving, creative opportunities keep me sane, residencies let me in, my health is decent, and my friends are freakin’ fabulous. I want to get fit, adopt a dog, and dance my ass off at a sober dawn rave. I want to spark my joy, chase my bliss, hold space, extend grace, eat, pray, and all the other bullshit.

This has been an odd essay. A hodgepodge of reflections on media careers, my arrested childhood, finding and losing the love of my life, the boxy continuity I force on my past for the balm of storytelling. Should I retitle this post Notes on the Critical Pathology? Confessions of Failed Critic Transitioning to Failed Artist? Or simply: Tracing a Lifetime of Janky Coping Mechanisms for a Core of Sadness?

When Katy died and I attended group therapy with others who’d lost their spouses to cancer, I listened to bereaved fathers, mothers, grandparents, Jewish people and Christians, a range of folks firmly connected to bloodlines and community. I walked home after a session, weeping on the streets under cover of night (as I often did then), thinking self-pityingly and defensively about how I didn’t fit in at group. I was a creepy isolato in their midst. I had no progeny, none of that ghastly burden. I had no community, no stupid tribe. I kept my own family at arm’s length. I had no religion, never have—infantile pretense. Zero belief systems. Not even a secular philosophy of stoicism rooted in logic or reason. Humanism? I didn’t have faith in people; I barely believed in myself.

Thou, Negation, art my goddess; to thy law my misery is bound.

I believed in good books and good writing, bountiful words and their beautiful sounds. What did that mopey kid write on a slip of paper, years ago? I don’t admire anyone and nobody admires me. How went that whisper in the dark closet? Don’t trust them; you’re the only one on your side.

An astrologist I paid to read my chart six years ago told me over the phone, in her velvety and lilting voice: “You have to decide if you’re going be on your own side,” and I gasped and bit my lip to stop a salty deluge.

End of the end of the party, babe.

You’re on your own in the middle of the street.

Only direction is up.

Don’t know if you noticed, but America has trouble electing a woman President. In the past decade, two very qualified female pols applied for the job, and instead voters went with a leaky plastic bucket of radioactive wastewater, rat anuses, and botulism.

Nevertheless, American history has no shortage of women who ran for the Oval Office. To date, more than a hundred have sought the U.S. presidency—most as third-party or independent candidates, a few on big-party tickets. Want to hear some of their stories?

Creator-producer Jocelyn Kuritsky and a veritable village of theater and audio artists hope you do. Season two of A Simple Herstory is currently being written, developed, and workshopped. As you may guess from the tongue-in-cheek title, this hybrid podcast-performance dramatizes the twisty ways various women have tried to win the hearts and minds of the American electorate. Do not expect a tidy morality tale of an idealistic underdog going up against misogyny and big money. It’s complicated.

Each of the series’ subjects is complicated, too. The first season chronicled the rise and fall of Victoria Woodhull. Newspaper editor, stockbroker, “magnetic healer,” and onetime advocate of free love, Woodhull was a 19th-century original who rose from poverty to live nine lives and run for President in 1872, despite widespread mockery and libel. Was she a suffragist pioneer? A serial con artist? A deeply eccentric person demanding freedom in an impossible world? Through eight episodes, the program leapt beyond the bounds of history lesson (and podcast recording booth) to embrace all the messiness that ensues when politics meets a woman who persists. Scripted with Stoppardian brio by Jonathan Goldberg and featuring a wildly talented cast— Kara Young, Florencia Lozano, Carmelita Tropicana, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Tonya Pinkins, Rachel Crowl and more—the series is a marvel of audio dramaturgy and reaped a handful of awards.

The current season charts the political fortunes of Maine Senator Margaret Chase Smith (1897-1995) who stood up to Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare and sought the Republican nomination for President in 1964 (losing to Barry Goldwater). Smith bridged two world wars and the birth of civil rights and modern feminism. She was a New England conservative who reminded the nation that freedom of speech is inviolable and McCarthy was a creep. She was the first woman to campaign for a major political party’s nomination. But what really, the Simple Herstorians ask, did Smith stand for? What power did she crave behind the Resolute desk? You’ll have to listen to A Simple Herstory to find out.

And you’ll have a chance soon. Sections from the genre-blurring project will be shared as a live radio drama Sunday, June 7 at 3pm at The Tank (within the curated event roster of Tribeca Festival, turning 25 years old this year).

As usual, producer Kuritsky has assembled only the best to tell Smith’s story; each episode is conceived and performed in the style of a classic Hollywood film: screwball comedy, film noir, and so forth. Voice talent for June 7 includes Kate MacCluggage (brilliant in Irish Rep’s recent The Approach), Cecil Baldwin (the voice of Welcome to Night Vale), Jake Hart (Big George), and Colleen Werthmann (Emmy Award-winning writer and actor with Elevator Repair Service). The event is co-directed by Meghan Finn and Donya K. Washington, with additional conception and consultation by Jenny Turner Hall. Tickets are available here.

||: Girls :||: Chance :||: Music :||

There’s like a dozen plays at present about women between the age of 8 and 18. Here’s another, very much worth your time, written and composed by the magical Eisa Davis and directed with great lightness and sensitivity by Pam MacKinnon. Four remarkable actor-musicians craft delicately shaded portraits of high schoolers attending an all-girls East Bay music conservatory one summer, bonding over music, making out, fighting, drifting apart. Not only is the scene work fresh and understated, the charming, talented four—Gianna DiGregorio Rivera, Hillary Fisher, Naomi Latta, and Yeena Sung—jam in improvised sessions that are different at each performance. Aleatory, or chance music, as it’s called. There’s lots of musical interludes that bubble up and merge into and out of scenes: a Rossini aria, an improvised bit of vocalese that morphs into drums, piano, and flute. Each of the girls is trying to find and hold on to the music in their lives. Not all of them successfully. (Keep your eyes on these magnetic performers.) Davis touches on absent fathers, alcoholic moms, suicidal ideation, bulimia, and sexual panic, but gently and empathetically. Despite a couple of late plot twists that seem overly convenient, ||: Girls :||: Chance :||: Music :|| is an engrossing coming-of-age tale whose unfeigned openness honors its characters’ wisdom and fragility. Nearly two hours flow by. There’s something very special about this show with the finicky title. See it and you’ll feel gifted, too. More here.

Derangements

Second offering in Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks, and the runs are short. The cast is fire: Hannah Cabell, Camila Canó-Flaviá, Crystal Finn, Marceline Hugot, Allan K. Washington and Danny Wolohan. The ace director Annie Tippe has brought work by Dave Malloy and Julia May Jonas to blazing life. And the script by Nadja Leonhard-Hooper (at least on paper) is crazy funny gold. A surreal comic nightmare about sexuality, paranoia, loneliness, and social disintegration. Two old friends meet for dinner (that feels scripted by a younger Wallace Shawn). Anne Marie, uptight and anxious, reunites with Roxanne, who reads every social encounter as a sexual advance. What begins as awkward catching up escalates into High Weird when Roxanne shares the suspicion that her gynecologist’s routine exam was flirtation. Then a flasher with literally blinding genitals shows up. Is it any wonder that the male gaze, predatory sexuality, and the epic horror of heteropatriarchy can drive a lady mad? More here.

21st Century Princess

In a 2009 interview with Der Spiegel about his lavishly illustrated book of art history and philosophy, The Infinity of Lists, Umberto Eco hypothesized why we scribble stuff on scratch paper. “We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death,” Eco observed. “That’s why we like all the things that we assume have no limits…It’s a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don’t want to die.” I had Eco’s tome on a shelf, but I had to discover that quote after seeing writer-director Jordan Baum’s hyperfecund and cryptic mediation on the Disneyland Resort. Yes, Uncle Walt’s funtopia in Anaheim, California that employs approximately 36,000 “cast members.” All those people who sustain a world that promises an infinitude of magic, wonder, enchantment, and talking, singing animals. Minimalist in production design but maximalist in language and actor virtuosity, 21st Century Princess is a hallucinogenic workplace immersion. Limited run through Sunday. (Immediate Medium site says sold out, but show up and get on waiting list.) This prodigious, hilarious vibe of a play crazy-quilts scenes of backstage life involving resort employees, visitors, and… a cat… I believe. It’s like somebody made a Robert Altman community mosaic about the Magic Kingdom, but in the style of Richard Linklater’s Slacker—then blew pot smoke in its face for two hours (there’s an extended scene of workers “hotboxing” in a car). Alternate bottom line: It’s Our Town if the locals had jobs like “Teacup Machinist,” “Avian Management,” “Mountain Cleaner,” or “Wishing Well Attendant.” In one bravura sequence, “cast members” stand in a circle and introduce themselves by (exotically silly) name and utterly batshit job which goes on for seven pages. Lists! Lists! Plenitude! Infinite Cast Members! Surrender to Baum’s cartoonish, hyperspecific dreamscaping and pullulating personalities. Superb 13-strong ensemble includes Jess Barbagallo and Maggie Hoffman (who played Molly Bloom in Elevator Repair Service’s Ulysses earlier this year). You’ll have a Goofy grin on your face the whole time. (P.S.: This show has got to return. I’m looking at you, St. Ann’s Warehouse, Under the Radar, Park Avenue Armory, C’MAWN!!!!) More here.

Robert Wilson On Screen

If you couldn’t make the brief run of Moby Dick at BAM last month, this might soothe the pain of missing one of Robert Wilson’s last beguiling, dreamlike creations. The tenth Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance spotlights “Robert Wilson On Screen,” a major retrospective running May 29–June 5 at Anthology Film Archives. The series features films by and about the avant-garde legend, including VIDEO 50, Deafman Glance, Stations, and documentaries on landmark productions such as Einstein on the Beach, The CIVIL warS, and The Black Rider. Presented in collaboration with Anthology Film Archives, the Robert Wilson Estate & Trust, and the Watermill Center, the retrospective traces Wilson’s groundbreaking fusion of theater, visual art, opera, and film across five decades of experimental performance. Tickets ($14-$8) can be purchased here.

Giant

Bigoted Friendless Goy. John Lithgow is yeah, towering, in Mark Rosenblatt’s smartly structured and verbally dazzling portrait of the artist as emotionally stunted sadist. Was Roald Dahl a brilliant children’s author who believed in the power of smaller, weaker things to stand up to bigger, crueler beings? Of course. Did his rather childish moral worldview lead him to channel all his loss and misery into an anti-Israel stance that he contemptuously let slide into antisemitism? Yes. Racism is a fairy tale, and Dahl swallowed hook, line, and sinker the one that assuaged his lifelong sense of injustice. All the performances are tip-top in Nicholas Hytner’s masterful staging: impeccable naturalism in service to a political debate that lives in the bodies and minds of the characters equally. Of course I’ve idolized Lithgow since I was a teen geeking out at Buckaroo Banzai, Twilight Zone: The Movie, and the underrated 2010: The Year We Make Contact. But this is next-level material for the technique-rich beast of a character actor—he turns on a dime from long-grieving father to venomous Jew-hater. Rosenblatt’s drama is a model of snappy pacing and control of information. Giant has a perverse, chilling ending, yet I left the theater abuzz and energized. Strong contender for best play at the Tony Awards. Tickets here.

I’m working on a review of The Maids now at St. Ann’s Warehouse, directed by Kip Williams, whose staging of The Picture of Dorian Gray drew superlatives out of me elsewhere. That live-video-enhanced production starring Yerin Ha, Phia Saban, Lydia Wilson officially opened last night, but my review comes out on 4 Columns June 5. I dove into ye olde Cote Archives to see what I had to say about the last major revival in New York.

Here’s me in Time Out New York on August, 11 2014. Content warning: I was in a mood.

After sitting through the aestheticized lobotomy that was Robert Wilson’s Threepenny Opera at BAM in 2011, I cultivated a rather vivid fantasy of old Bertolt Brecht, risen from the dead and sucking on a cigar, marching straight up the aisle to Wilson and dropping him to his knees with one swift kick to the groin. Now, after the slick, strenuous vapidity of Sydney Theatre Company’s The Maids, I envision Jean Genet paying a visit to City Center. I can’t predict what the crime-fetishizing French author would do to director Benedict Andrews and co-translator Andrew Upton, but it may be a trick he learned in prison.

If you couldn’t afford a ticket, or didn’t have the social clout to snag a comp, I beg you not to worry: All you are missing is a flashy, messily acted and superficial misfire of a modern classic, with a grotesque bit of miscasting (Isabelle Huppert) that hobbles what was already a limp update. Yes, Cate Blanchett acts her heart out and lets her makeup run; yes, Huppert has moments of inspired weirdness; yes, full-length mirrors and furs and live video and acres of flowers suggest an aura of decadent, morbid voyeurism; but it never coheres—or worse, unnerves. Only the most degenerate starfucker would give a pass to this glib and brainless production because OMG! I’m sitting here watching Cate Blanchett—live! Actually, in this case, live is a matter of opinion.

That’s because the performance is mediated through cameras behind mirrors on the periphery of the action, with images projected on a wide screen above the stage. There’s also a camera behind a makeup table center stage. As the actors scowl at or adore their own reflections, their movie-size faces are beamed to the house. Sean Bacon’s video design and Alice Babidge’s ersatz showroom set are perfectly appropriate: Multimedia is the no-brainer approach to Genet in 2014. The playwright and novelist was fascinated by deceptive surfaces, masks behind masks and the slippage between social role and personal quirk. But here, there’s no dramaturgical sense to the way video is used, except in the most banal, illustrative, cinema-lite sense. We get details of shoes or appreciate an artfully framed shot of Blanchett and Huppert. But with the exception of direct address to the camera or mildly amusing film-noir–style editing, it’s window dressing.

This is all the more disappointing because professional revivals of The Maids (1947) are rare. It’s too angry, vicious and weird for our bigger nonprofits to touch. The chamber psychodrama opens with erotic role-playing: Claire (Blanchett) bellows obscenities and commands as the imperious Mistress; meek Solange (Huppert) scurries to fulfill to her every whim. (The adaptation, by Andrews and Upton, substitutes vulgarity for poetry or ideas.) We discover that the maids are sisters (incestuous, no less) who live in the attic and recently framed their Mistress’s lover for a crime. He has just been released from prison for lack of evidence. The desperate siblings hatch a plot to poison their boss by loading her tea with drugs. When their young, capricious Mistress (Debicki, a supermodel dynamo) returns in a fury, we wait tensely to see how things play out.

My summary may be unnecessary for two reasons: First, you don’t really go to Genet for plot, even though his narratives are complex and carefully layered. They contain a lot of repetition and rhapsodic digression, but like all good tragedies, there’s a violent act (past or looming) to focus attention. Second, even the most detailed synopsis won’t help you understand what the hell Isabelle Huppert is saying for nearly two hours. Her accent—thicker than melted Brie—is not mitigated by constant mugging and comic business. You grow weary and irritated trying to pick meaning out of her mumble. Most of the tension and basic sense of her interactions with Blanchett are thus cavalierly tossed away.

Maybe that’s why it seems Blanchett is overcompensating. In previous visits to the New York stage (Uncle Vanya and A Streetcar Named Desire), the Australian star has never shirked from a style of emoting that is, shall we say, vigorous and full-bodied. But the stops have been removed. Acting herself into a sweaty, smeary, emotionally devastated tizzy, Blanchett almost makes you think Genet wrote the piece on commission for Lee Strasberg. Debicki, young and stunning, matches Blanchett for intensity, but smartly pulls back from wallowing utterly in camp hysterics. If an intelligible actor had been cast as Solange, you could almost enjoy the slick glitz.

I applaud Blanchett’s zeal to make world-class theater in her hometown of Sydney and share it abroad, but I also wish her smarter collaborators, ones who don’t confuse surface with depth. The Maids ought to feel dangerous, dirty. It ought to elicit disgust and sympathy for its degraded antiheroes, and muddle what is real and what is a reflection. Genet worked to maintain his outsider status (orphan, thief, homosexual, revolutionary). You can only imagine his disgust at this neutered, big-ticket attraction. It is theoretically possible that two global celebrities could star in a multimillion-dollar production of The Maids for a well-heeled New York audience—and not make the author want to puke in his coffin. But it would take a director of substance: Katie Mitchell, Jay Scheib or Ivo van Hove. Absent that, it’s just movie stars playing dress-up with a master.

Dad Don’t Read This

Never having been a Sims player or a teenage girl, I might not be the target audience for Eliya Smith’s spellbinding ode to YA rage, resilience and escape Dad Don’t Read This. And yet: Who hasn’t wondered if this is real life or a game, and whether anyone can “win” it? Four high-schoolers navigate the constricting, weird, fake scripts of suburban ennui by hanging out and swapping juicy “goss,” chugging a beverage concocted from shots of everything in the liquor cabinet, and making their Sims do “WooHoo” (Simlish for sex). Like Smith’s equally elliptical and casually profound Grief Camp, the new piece showcases her effortless skill at kids’ slippery crosstalk and her granular familiarity with their inner (and online) lives. Mal (Amalia Yoo) is an Ohio teen with parents forever bickering, muffled, behind walls. Moody and furtive, Mal keeps secret selves both inside and outside SimNation—like where does she slip off to during school lunch? Crowding her bedroom are cool but kindly Noelle (Reneé-Nicole Powell), queerly nerdish Lida (Kayta Thomas), and Sophie (Sophie Rossman), the high-strung Christian girl navigating the predatory male gaze. Each is a not-unfamiliar type, but artfully shaded and armed with dialogue that alternates pithy wisdom with kiddish frivolity. Chloe Claudel (herself a striking performer) steers this appealing, pitch-perfect quartet through its snaking dialogue and builds rich, resonant imagery. The most startling and primal being Rossman’s furious tap routine in clogs (choreographed by Lena Engelstein) before a glittering star field as Bobby Womack’s cover of “California Dreaming” grooves. I kinda view The Sims as a waste of time, but Smith’s play will richly reward yours. Through May 30.

Indian Princesses

Apparently, May is all about girls and their avatars coming of age. Eliana Theologides Rodriguez’s New York debut takes place in 2008 during the housing crash. A motley handful of white fathers and their biracial or adopted daughters have gathered at “Camp Catori” somewhere in the Midwest. It’s a bonding experience, for the young ladies to learn and embody the values of “Indian Princesses” with the sturdy support of their dads. The indigenous kitsch is suitably cringe; a white lawyer stepdad (Greg Keller) exhorts the group to use “Native,” not “Indian.” Rodriguez’s play, which premiered last summer at La Jolla Playhouse, comes to the Atlantic Theater in a beautifully balanced staging by Miranda Cornell (also making her Off Broadway debut). The ensemble includes a murderer’s row of superb character actors—Keller, Pete Simpson, Ben Beckley and Frank Wood—matched by a quintet of excellent young newcomers. Anissa Marie Griego, Rebecca Jimenez, Serenity Mariana, Lark White, and Haley Wong hold their own as tweens aged 8 to 12, variously cut off from or yearning for connection to Black, Mexican, or Indigenous heritage. Wong plays a biracial Asian girl whose mind is colonized by Christian guilt, which she tries to assuage by thumping her chest. White’s Black adoptee, Maisey, fabulates a wizardly origin story cribbed out of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. A glum daddy’s girl barely able to acknowledge her recently deceased mother, Jimenez’s Andi is heartbreaking study in shut-down emotion. While the cultural politics are front-loaded and our sympathies squarely with the “princesses,” Rodriguez extends grace to each of the father figures. They may be selfish, pompous, or too angry-proud to ask for help, but they’re believable men trying to do the right thing. In hack-journalist shorthand, it’s “John Proctor Is the Villain minus the villain, except for American history.” (There is a sequence where the girls group-scream their frustration.) Beneath the search for identity and belonging, Rodriguez delivers an empowering message that children can be self-anointers of future royalty._. Through June 7.

Rheology

I’m late to heap praise Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s Rheology, a numinous and wrenching meditation on motherhood, change, and death. The writer-director of the breathtakingly intimate yet epic Public Obscenities returns to the family bosom for inspiration, burrowing deeper into myth and science, grief and transformation. Chowdhury has a delightfully teasing relationship with naturalism and Rheology begins as a bona fide lecture on the properties of sand delivered by physicist Bulbul Chakraborty (the author’s actual mother). Chakraborty demonstrates the solid yet liquid-like movement of sand particles by pouring a bunch of the beachy stuff into a beaker, then begins coughing, over and over—violently. I’m already spoiling things. Chakraborty’s son is in the audience, taking notes; what we’re witnessing is experimental theater about a physics experiment. From there it metamorphoses into a melancholy yet puckish pre-wake: how can a child imagine and survive a parent’s inevitable death? The wise and totally lovable Chakraborty will correct my science, but everyone’s simply a bunch of molecules passing through and around other bunches of molecules we call mom, dad, son, me. Through May 29.

What We Did Before Our Moth Days

How is it possible that I, a person who has idolized Wallace Shawn since college and counts The Designated Mourner among his favorite plays (and caught it twice downtown in 2000), has not written about his latest? Maybe I felt confused and disappointed. Maybe I saw it a second time and noticed and felt so many terrifying things I grew bewildered. Maybe I want to savor it, privately. I’ll get to it one day. In the meantime: GO. It closes Sunday. At the performances I attended, there were a couple empty seats. Get on the waiting list and wait. In this hypnotically eloquent and oblique portrait, four sensitive, artistic people probe and expose inner lives left to rot in an ethical and moral basement. That might make the piece sound more shocking or lurid than it is. Although many of Shawn’s early plays and some later ones have explicit sexual or violent content, this one is mostly left to the audience’s imagination. A successful novelist (Josh Hamilton) marries his college sweetheart (Maria Dizzia) who gives up her ambitions to teach in a hellish low-income school. Their son (John Early) grows up to be a cheerfully depraved ephebophile and designer of book covers. At some point in his thirties, the novelist begins an intense affair with a misanthropic writer of mystery fiction (Hope Davis). There’s a lot these characters aren’t telling us, almost entirely through monologues over the course of three completely engrossing hours. André Gregory, who knows a thing or two about the power of sitting with Wallace Shawn’s words, directs with sublime precision and restraint. What does it mean? They’re all book people, literary creatures, in one way or another. They fall in love or lust, they chase pleasure, they blame genetics or family for who they become, they fuck and write and drink and die. Tim, the smirking perv that Early incarnates with uncanny insouciance, feels like a harbinger of Epstein. He wants young girls and he’s willing to buy fancy friends. Shawn’s father, the legendary New Yorker editor William Shawn, kept a second family in an apartment twelve blocks from the one where Wallace grew up. Is What We Did Before Our Moth Days an elaborate Oedipal fable? Is the lack of overt political talk the point? Pairing Moth Days with The Fever—performed by the author on Sundays and Mondays—may be a deliberate move. Through May 24.

Vanessa

Triumphantly reimagined by Heartbeat Opera, this 1958 work by Samuel Barber (to a libretto by Gian Carlo Menotti) offers a curious theatrical mix: notes of Genet, Ibsen and Chekhov in a gothic fable about a middle-aged baroness rapturously expecting a visit from her former lover. The title diva (Inna Dukach), a vain and imperious recluse, is attended on by her dour niece, Erika (Kelsey Lauritano). When the rakish lover, Anatol (Frederick Ballentine) appears, he’s impossibly young—in fact, he’s the lover’s grown son. Erotic and psychological entanglements grow twisted and deadly as the opera explores love as willful delusion, and the desire to be loved as a cyclical prison that traps the young. Barber’s rich melodies evoke the swelling romanticism of Puccini sour ecstasies of Richard Strauss, plumbing the depths of longing and despair. Director R.B. Schlather’s sensual, monochromatic staging is a symphony of shadows, harsh squares of light, tongues of fog licking the floor—altogether a marvel of dramaturgy by design. The expressionist visuals pair perfectly with music director Dan Schlosberg’s lustrous arrangement for chamber ensemble. Get to know a neglected jewel of American opera. Among the cast, Lauritano is a standout for her burnished mezzo and smoldering journey from virginal servant to sexual being to traumatized survivor of desire. Through May 31.

Second Stage Theatre’s The Receptionist couldn’t be more timely.

It also couldn’t be more inadequate.

To clarify. In 2007, I had nothing but solid admiration for Adam Bock’s workplace horredy, a bleak satire for our post-September 11, War-on-Terror moment. The Receptionist is set in a nondescript office in an unnamed city in which bland bureaucrats torture (unseen) detainees for information and file reports to the Central Office. (Think Jack Lint’s cheery stenographer in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.)

We don’t see anyone being tortured or hear what they say under duress. The majority of Bock’s script involves characters not discussing their jobs. Then at a key moment, watercooler gossip and interoffice flirting gives way to a terse remark about breaking an interrogee’s little finger and bringing in his wife so he can watch them work on her. Slapping a sitcom laugh track over neofascist brutality, The Receptionist was Ricky Gervais’s The Office meets Harold Pinter’s One For the Road.

Apart from a softly menacing opening monologue and a grim final tableau, our attention is trained for 80 minutes on the front-desk area. This is the domain of Beverly (Katie Finneran), an ultra-capable, motherly, rather persnickety office manager and phone wrangler. Beverly keeps a tight ship, dust-busting donut crumbs from the rug, bending and scrubbing coffee stains from the same. Her true passion is collecting teacups with her sweet but bumbling offstage husband. When not redirecting calls to voicemail, Beverly chats up friends on the phone, advising Cheryl Lynn, for example, to not even think of dating that married man, and so forth. At other times, Beverly grouses about how young, pretty Lorraine (Mallori Johnson) keeps stealing pens (the good ones, Flexors). Meanwhile, their supervisor Mr. Raymond (Nael Nacer) seems to have had trouble with a recent client. Martin Dart (Will Pullen) drops by from Central Office to see Raymond. Lorraine flirts shamelessly with Dart, for which Beverly castigates Lorraine; Dart is married!

Once we learn the inhumane business going on behind closed doors, Beverly’s obsessive focus on tidiness and ethical codes seems like criticizing the mote in her sister’s eye when she can’t see the roofbeam in hers. Beverly is Hitler’s secretary. Mao Zedong’s tailor. Whoever buys Donald Trump’s makeup. Does she deserve her fate by the end of the play? I suppose that’s the most interesting moral question that Bock gives us to ponder.

Leaving the Signature, the question I pondered was: “Can’t we do better than this?”

Nearly 20 years on, I’m sorry to say programming The Receptionist feels too little, too late. A wink when we need wide-eyed, horrified staring. It comes across as a theatrical relic from a time when we could be shocked but ironic about the rightward tilt of fellow citizens cowed by an authoritarian-ish administration, three years after the reelection of George W. Bush—an implicit endorsement of his war crimes. Voters were freaked out by gay marriage; they didn’t care about “black sites,” “enhanced interrogation,” and the neocon dream of an “imperial Presidency.”

Well, the dream is reality. And the black sites may be coming to a warehouse near you.

A parable in which the gory business of totalitarian terror is conducted under cover of corporate monotony? We are so far beyond that. They’re not hiding the self-dealing, the street executions, the antidemocratic contempt in deepfake propaganda. They’re posting selfies at torture prisons. They’re sharing sick edits of Game of Duty and shit blowing up in Iran. Just give them clicks. Let them handle the votes. I know my outrage is performative and you’ve heard it already, but indulge me: Where’s the work that captures our daily juxtaposition of hilarity and barbarity? Shows how it is systematically built and maintained? I know that Bock meant to smash triviality into atrocity—and he did, with skill and grace—but seeing Sarah Benson’s smartly designed and ably performed production left me in a greater state of despair.

Not long after The Receptionist premiered at Manhattan Theatre Club in an excellent production by Joe Mantello, anchored by glorious Jane Houdyshell, I was invited to write an essay about it for the Best Plays Theater Yearbook 2007-2008. What an honor and delight! The play made me excited about theater and pissed off about our country.

I began my essay thusly:

At what point precisely did Americans become Nazis?

Was it after the towers fell on September 11? Was it after the reelection of George W. Bush? Has the instinct always been there, coiled in our national DNA, the willingness to dominate, to obey, to commit genocide if permitted?

It’s rather hard to pinpoint the moment.

After I submitted the draft, my editor emailed: “You are NOT going to start the essay that way.” We went back and forth about it, but I caved.

I was only following orders.

Look, I love Adam Bock. For decades he has written quirky, weird, edgy pieces that remain dear to my heart. This is me in the Best Plays Yearbook:

Adam Bock rules. I want all his plays revived: gimme The Drunken City and A Small Fire. In 2016, my wife Katy and I saw his meditation on solitude and death, A Life, at Playwrights Horizons. A funny, sad, transporting piece. Anne Kauffman directed a miracle of a production led by David Hyde Pierce doing his best work, which kept receding and deepening before our eyes, from a recluse’s apartment to the threshold of the Great Hereafter. Katy’s brother had taken his life the previous year. She was wracked with grief and guilt over it. She said the play helped her process those feelings, move her closer to acceptance.

The Receptionist left me feeling anything but acceptance. The friend I went with said it seemed aimed at “aging white liberals”—a demo of which we were more or less a part.

Caryl Churchill got name-checked above. Given the assignment, what would Caryl do?

She already did it. Her totalitarian fable, Far Away, premiered at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 2000, less than a year before September 11. The play made its American premiere in November 2002. It did many things that The Receptionist could not do five years later, and the sort of wild, terrifying things we need desperately now.

I reviewed Far Away when it ran at New York Theatre Workshop, and re-reading what I had to say, I wince. I groan. I fear to disinter the cursed document from its link-rotted digital graveyard. The review takes a strenuously unimpressed and cynical attitude toward something I dub the “Brit-Shock Tactic.” I shit-talk Pinter’s politics, god help me. I unflatteringly compare Far Away to Wallace Shawn’s The Designated Mourner, saying his oranges are better than her apples. (Yes, the two plays vibrate with each other, but you know what I mean.)

I oughtn’t post a review that makes me look like a shallow twerp, but here goes.

Want to quote this detail, about a sequence I will never forget:

Next comes a horrific parade of beaten, chained prisoners—soon to be cremated en masse—wearing those same gaudy hats in a parody of fashion runway shows. The long, wordless scene, played to ear-splitting military-band music, is both theatrically splendid and utterly vapid. You’ll get the same quasi-fascist S&M thrills from Pink Floyd’s The Wall.

Fine, dickweed: You were rolling your eyes at the “mixing of banality and brutality” which British (or, in Bock’s case, Canadian) playwrights find “irresistibly profound, regardless of the actual message.” I bet you’d sell your grannie for a revival of Far Away now, right? You want to cheer and shiver with dread at that grotesque hat parade. You’d even pay money for your ticket, you little bitch. No press comps for you!

Whoa, whoa. Calm down.

I kinda wish Second Stage Theatre hadn’t mounted this neat and respectful revival but commissioned a new play from Bock, something that even he was scared to share. Instead, we get top-notch retro design and drum-tight pacing from Sarah Benson and her wonderful cast (Finneran’s manic chortles and pulling of faces are undeniable highlights). You may be entertained and slightly disturbed. But that’s all.

The crisis cycles are stacking faster than we can count or care. The news is a fingerless doomscroll, it glides on its own invisible wheels. There’s no time for art, no space for art, no oxygen for art to capture, refute, exalt, or uglify the crimes happening around us, which assume terrifying new shapes faster than AI nightmare fuel.

Do we expect a play to compete with all this wildly entertaining entropy? The possibility of meaningful political theater is hard to envision right now, much less justify (i.e., market) to your average benumbed theatergoer. Protest art would make us feel righteous communal anger and maybe break into the headlines if it were offensive or ambitious enough.

Can we collectively manifest it? An epic, quadruple-layer, metaphysical fantasia on national themes delivered with firecracker rhetoric and stunning, iconic images, encompassing (ironically, earnestly) our tragic history while pointing to a hopeful future? Cuz that would be very nice right now.

It ain’t crashing through the ceiling anytime soon. Our latest and probably last theatrical masterpiece was thirty-plus years ago.

I want the previous sentence to be a lie.

Maybe Far Away was a masterpiece and I was too complacent to realize it. I was bored, jaded, distracted, lazy, overworked, scared. I looked at my phone.

Who’s to blame? Second Stage Theatre. New York audiences. Me.

When did I become a Nazi?

“Late”

Running late,
stepping off the F at Herald Square
a Wednesday afternoon I bumped
into myself.
Younger, thinner, smooth of forehead
not yet smooth of head
almost unrecognizable to me
but me.
I grabbed his arm and let the train go.
Don’t talk to her,
don’t get drawn in
I barked at him,
have your fun, Jesus, have more fun than I ever did,
get bored of the fun just don’t meet her
she’ll sicken and fall and take half of you down the hole
leaving you
as this
a sunk wreck
a slow rot.
He shook his sleeve free.
End in tears will it?
He laughed at me,
Why take advice from one so
old and bent and gray,
shying from his shadow
one who’d betray the beloved?
You were always meant to be alone
You should have known as I have known
You’ve only made me late.

Broadway musicals about vampires tend to be financial and critical fiascos, coffin flops, if you will. The first decade of this century brought three—count ’em, Count von Count—three bloody dreadful attempts to marry the gothic chills of vampire lore with razzmatazz. I’m referring to that unholy trinity of Transylvanian turkeys about cape-wearing partakers of plasma: Dance of the Vampires (2002), Dracula the Musical (2004) and Lestat (2006).

Tonight, the unkillable genre rises again—same theater, it so happens, as Lestat 20 years ago. The Lost Boys is the final opening of Broadway’s 2025-26 season, an adaptation of the 1987 movie directed by Joel Schumacher starring Jason Patric, Dianne Wiest, Kiefer Sutherland, and Coreys Haim and Feldman. Elevator pitch: A single mom with two sons moves to “Santa Carla,” California, a coastal town beset by mysterious deaths. Said murders are due to the nocturnal feeding habits of a gang of teenage punk vampires, into whose neck-bitey clique the older son gets drawn. The Lost Boys was peak ’80s summer viewing at the cineplex, a bit trashy, a bit cool, buoyed by Gerard McMann’s dark-wave banger “Cry Little Sister.”

Capitalized at about $25 million, The Lost Boys is Broadway’s splashiest opening in years, with nostalgia-feeding IP, gravity-defying F/X, and a hard-working cast of pros and fresh faces. Watching it, did I want to open a vein? No, actually. Does The Lost Boys pump new blood into the Vampire Musical? Hold on to your garlic.

Fear Factor

It’s not easy for a director to achieve legit jump scares outside of a movie, much less in a theater the size of the Palace, but Michael Arden brings the chills. The opening scene of The Lost Boys shows a police officer descending stairs into an abandoned factory. There’s a small TV on a chair playing Ronald Reagan giving a speech at Camp David. Weird. Cop switches it off. The vast space is pitch black; the officer rakes a flashlight over empty catwalks, trying to flush out a trespasser. Music growls menacingly. It’s giving Strangers Things. Suddenly, a figure flits into the beam of light and a second later, the cop has been hauled skyward by a flying ghoul who feasts on him midair (deft fight choreo by Rick Sordelet). Other kills later in the show are more in-your-face—a video store worker gets swarmed and chomped on the boardwalk and a beach party breaks up when vampires start slashing necks like it’s maple tapping season. All timed and executed for a decent level of shock value.

Batshit Crazy Lewks and F/X

This leads us to the next item on the “pro” side: spectacle. Production elements on The Lost Boys are wicked impressive. There’s a ton of scenery in Dane Laffrey’s dense, fast-changing design, forever in motion. Laffrey makes full use of the Palace Theatre’s massive trap lift to bring up the ground floor of a house, with flown-in scenery for the second story, while automated travelators whisk countless set pieces on and off from the wings to suggest video rental front desk, comic book store, or fancy restaurant. One moment we’re in Lucy, Michael and Sam’s hunting-lodge style house, the next the space has transformed into a disused playground with slide and rusty merry-go-round. Bodies are forever falling through the floor: a ghostly procession of ensemble members dressed like Michael (LJ Benet) march down stairs and, one by one, zombie-like, plummet backward through the trap. The daredevil scene in which Michael and his new undead buds hang from train tracks and let go becomes one of several graceful aerial set pieces choreographed by Gwyneth Larsen and Bill Mulholland. Yes, we’ve seen actors fly with wire and harness, but there’s an almost melancholy poetry to the way Arden and his designers depict weightlessness and freedom. So many visual and sonic elements conspire to create a unified sense of mystery and tension at night, and sun-drenched Cali kitsch by day: lighting by Jen Schriever (and Arden), sound by Adam Fisher, makeup by Christina Grant, costumes by Ryan Park. I could go on. There is so much damn eye candy up there—and I’m not even talking about the totally buff Cameron Loyal, who plays an oiled-up, shirtless Sax Man.

Sex, Blood, and Rock & Roll

Fine, lots to look at. How’s the music? As with several new Broadway shows—The Outsiders, Swept Away, Hell’s Kitchen, Illinoise—the score for The Lost Boys comes from artists who primarily work in the music industry. The Los Angeles-based Rescues crank out pouty, Coldplay-ish ballads about heartbreak, loneliness, and the like. So, yes, there are too many pop anthems that repeat generic feelings rather than delineate character or a unique thinking process. When Michael storms out of the house and hits the boardwalk singing, “Oh-oh-oh! Wanna run ‘til I run outta light / Find a way to feel alright / and lose myself tonight,” the art of the show-tune lyric is not making any great leaps forward. However, a few songs shine in their emotional directness: Michael’s plaintive “I Want” number “Belong to Someone,” as he hovers forlorn above the stage; his wistful duet with the vampire-adjacent love interest, Star (Maria Wirries), “Now, Forever”; and “Wild,” in which mom Lucy (Shoshana Bean as another long-suffering mother) recalls her idealistic salad days. There’s a lovely a cappella bit by the Lost Boys as Michael hesitates to drink the blood-filled chalice that will begin to vampirize him: “My Heart With You.” I enjoyed a couple fast-rocking diegetic tracks when the title dudes perform at bars, when it doesn’t matter if you can’t understand the lyrics. (I will avoid discussing the comic-relief or “charm” numbers given to Michael’s excitable kid brother, Sam.) On the whole, the Rescues strike an atmospheric balance between adolescent broodiness and hard-earned hope.

Puts a Stake Through Your Heart

The Lost Boys is a musical about many kinds of families: broken ones, healing ones, found ones, toxic ones. Per the Peter Pan-referencing title, all the younger characters lack proper parenting. But the nail-biting finale makes one thing clear: mom will always save the day. There’s a satisfying (shamelessly manipulative) Hero Moment I won’t spoil. Do I wish the book writers had sketched out lead vampire David’s back story more sensitively? Same with that of Star, Michael’s love interest? Sure, but the emotional impact of the family-in-danger premise is pretty effective.

Not Your Grandpa’s Dracula

The vampire is a highly adaptable symbol across media. For some it represents addiction; for others it’s erotic surrender; to many it’s eternal youth. The Lost Boys touches on all those associations, but perhaps the most relevant here is that vampires are fucking cool. They play in bands, they fly, they sleep hanging upside down. They teleport from one side of the stage to another (with the help of body doubles) and have omnisexual tastes that don’t discriminate. Vampires are—to use an overused descriptor—horny AF, often into toothplay. Moreover, they are natural theatre kids: they love to dress fancy, wear makeup and stand too close to people they just met; they will offer a backrub, unprompted. In his blonde Bowie coif and black leather ensemble, Ali Louis Bourzgui’s David gives Frank-N-Furter a run for Best Predatory Rizzler on Broadway. Even vegans crush hard on vampires.

I never expected to leave a musical about undead bloodsuckers thinking, “That was kind of fun.” Maybe when the world is run by actual ghouls and fiends, when our phones drain our will to live at night, it feels good to stick the platelet-sipping devils center stage and make them sing, then cheer as they burn to dust at dawn.

What a shock to discover myself a virgin at The Rocky Horror Show. Rehymenated.

Didn’t I already brave that sticky ritual: the sweat, the fumbling, the blood?

It was 1986, Cambridge, Mass. A midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Harvard Square Theatre complete with live reenactments by the legendary Full Body Cast. My sister drove a bunch of us down from New Hampshire, terrified and titillated by rumors of deviant shenanigans. The theater was thronged with giddy ghouls decked in leather and lace, faces smeared in black makeup, hurling fistfuls of rice, screaming “Slut!” and pumping their pelvises at their celluloid idol. Sixteen-year-old me cowered in my seat, a red lipstick “V” (for virgin) slashed on my forehead, agog at my first (possibly only) sex-ed class. I lusted for Magenta. I lusted (confusedly) for Tim Curry’s Frank-N-Furter. In ensuing decades, I would rewatch the film and cherish its Monster Mash-meets-Ziggy Stardust soundtrack.

And yet, it wasn’t until Sam Pinkleton’s freshly demented and chaotically erotic revival that I saw, live and in the flesh, the stage extravaganza that launched a thousand—nay, a million—callbacks.

I missed the 2000 revival which (I gather) missed the point of Rocky Horror. To wit: Richard O’Brien’s opus shagnus—horny and scruffy by design—could never and should never be a slick Broadway property. Pinkleton and his shrewd crew of designers understood the assignment, crafting an ingenious trash-vaudeville aesthetic at Studio 54, queerly evoking a burlesque and downtown vibe, part sex club, part Halloween haunted house. Nude silver and gold mannequins guard the stage and balcony; LED string lights snake around aluminum foil ducts and the set is splashed with garish green and purple washes (set by the collective dots, lights by Jane Cox).

From Tokyo to Las Vegas, camp magpie Pinkleton thieves everywhere. I sensed the spirit of Aussie performance artist Leigh Bowery, who envisioned high fashion as Boschian hellscape—especially in the grimacing, black-clad ensemble members who manipulate set pieces like kurogo in Kabuki. Swole, seminude chorus boys swan onstage wearing cyclopean monster heads (think avant-rockers The Residents) to join OG freak Juliette Lewis’s Magenta (in usher drag) serenading us with “Science Fiction Double Feature.” Can Lewis sing? Not really, but she sells the number with wide-eyed, Manson Fam fervor and we sprint to join her cult.

I spy a few of you with L’Oréal “V” foreheads signifying Rocky Horror innocence. Here’s the porno-thin premise: Romantic squares Brad (Andrew Durand) and Janet (Stephanie Hsu) get impulsively engaged at a friend’s wedding and drive through a thunderstorm to secure the blessing of their teacher, Dr. Scott (Harvey Guillén). On the road a tire gets blown (lucky tire!) and our couple creeps through rain to the “Frankenstein place” to phone for help, greeted by sinister butler-wraith Riff Raff (Amber Gray), witch-maid Magenta (Lewis), and party waif Columbia (Michaela Jaé Rodriquez). Faster than you can say, “time warp,” Brad and Janet are trapped in a house of weirdos lorded over by Dr. Frank-N-Furter (Luke Evans), a “sweet transvestite from transsexual Transylvania.” (Dracula spins in his grave.) This flaming creature has built a blonde muscleman named Rocky (Josh Rivera), who will be the beefy catalyst for Janet’s sexual awakening. Frank, revealed to be a space alien, will eventually be usurped by mutinous fellow ETs Riff Raff and Magenta.

A London stage hit in 1973, a Broadway flop in 1975, and a movie the same year that tanked at the box office but gained a cult afterlife in late-night interactive screenings, the Rocky Horror legend remains healthily undead. Smutty yet juvenile, its B-movie obsessions naturally complement adolescent anxieties over gender and desire; when you’re a teenager, what’s more terrifying than sex—especially if you worry that your body or fantasies are gross, monstrous?

Born in New Zealand and identifying today as transgender, O’Brien was an outsider theater artist in London’s post-Swinging Sixties, in a time of glam rock, pre-punk, and economic recession. In that anything-goes, ebullient but dread-filled epoch, O’Brien would Frankenstein a loose-limbed revue from sci-fi and horror tropes, British sex farce, and bona fide rock bangers. The show’s Narrator (Rachel Dratch) comments drily on the proceedings to give a semblance of order to all the promiscuous genre-hopping. Beyond the hokey dialogue and sketch-comedy gags, O’Brien’s tunes are what really hook you: “The Time Warp,” “I Can Make You a Man,” “Touch-A Touch-A Touch Me,” all swaggering pop earworms in a score that eases into Bowie-esque melancholy with Frank’s teary “I’m Going Home.”

How delicately Luke Evans cradles that song in a star turn that’s a Tony lock for best actor in a musical—cute, since the role defies gender. Sporting a trim moustache and blonde hippie locks, his face artfully rouged and eyeshadowed, a stevedore bod squeezed into designer David I. Reynosa’s BDSM corset and fishnet stockings, Evans is a walking exquisite corpse of genders: butch, femme, and all the colors in between. His nethers are tucked in a form fitting leather codpiece; clearly, that’s where Frank keeps his furter. It’s as if someone took a prima ballerina from Les Ballets Trockadero and stitched on the head of Gregg Allman.

The signals get even messier when it comes to the mad scientist’s ethics: Utterly without boundaries, he’s handsy and coercive, sneaking into Brad and Janet’s bedrooms by impersonating each of them in turn. For today’s consent-based sex etiquette, Frank is a registered offender waiting to happen. But hold on. This is Rocky Horror; it’s meant to be an anarchic fable, not a proscriptive sermon. Brad and Janet begin as judgmental cishet normies who probably vote Republican. A bisexual alien invader, Frank loves the planet so much he dies for it. When Riff Raff and Magenta laser-blast their erstwhile commander, he dies, heartbroken, in a billow of hand-thrown glitter. Frank may be a perv, but he’s our perv. (Another thing: Haven’t we moved past representation equaling endorsement? Can we leave that puerile reading of culture to the religious fanatics and right-wing bigots?)

If Evans does win the Tony, Pinkleton will have unique bragging rights: directing two successive leading “actors” whose characters lampoon the male-female binary. Last year Cole Escola won for Oh, Mary! in the play category. Pinkleton seems to be singlehandedly decolonizing gender on Broadway.

Lord knows we need more subversion. In a season of blah musicals squeezed out of mid movies or TV (Beaches, Schmigadoon!, The Lost Boys), Rocky Horror stands out as a trash masterpiece that knows what you want and intends to give it to you, hard.

The whole cast is impeccable, from Gray’s vampiric but strangely childlike Riff Raff to Hsu’s Janet, whose libidinal explosion is a joy to watch. Like Lewis and Rodriquez, Guillén (Guillermo from What We Do in the Shadows) may not have the strongest musical chops, but he does amusing double duty as doomed rocker Eddie and the barely closeted Dr. Scott. Across the ensemble, voices are—perhaps deliberately—uneven. Evans has a big, confident pop baritone and his macho-mincing rendition of Frank is a work of cheeky genius. Durand and Hsu are musical-theater veterans who deliver. Gray (Hadestown’s original Persephone) has splendid range and phrasing. If Pinkleton leaves some vocal work rough around the edges, maybe he’s going for a lunatics-have-taken-over-the-asylum effect, blurring the line between Broadway trouper and proficient cosplayer.

But please, join your palms to mine in a Transylvanian twist as we salute Rachel Dratch, owlish imp par excellence, the straight woman who’s so straight she’s a clown. I wonder if the great Margaret Dumont’s soul transmigrated to Dratch in embryo. Just try not to giggle as the dour Narrator’s eyeballs swivel suspiciously to the balcony for any hint of triviality. Dratch takes the brunt of the audience callouts and handles them with the unflappable aplomb of an improv pro.

Fittingly, Rocky Horror represents an alien culture crash landing on virgin Broadway: panto. The British yuletide tradition, with fairy-tale plots, cross-dressing, and raucous audience talkback, has made a curious journey from stage to film back to stage. The form is rare to nonexistent on the Great White Way. All because a 1975 film blasted through the vinyl screen like tumescent teens tearing off each other’s clothes, unleashing perverse waves of intergalactic lust channeled in three dimensions by generations of superfans. “Don’t dream it,” Frank croons seductively, “Be it.” From the movie of our collective past to the ecstatic scene at Studio 54, we obey and celebrate being. Our messy, scary, touch-a-touch-a-touchable being.

The Rocky Horror Show | 1hr 50mins. One intermission. | Studio 54 | 254 W 54th Street | 212-719-1300 | Click here for tickets

Twenty years ago I reviewed David Lindsay-Abaire’s Rabbit Hole, and my, did I go off.

In the opening line I said the show made me sick, and it didn’t get any nicer from there. Rabbit Hole was about well-to-do Westchester parents grieving the senseless, accidental death of their young boy. There’s talk about pocket universes where grief is eternal and the concept helps the sorrow-frozen protagonists achieve closure or peace. To me it all seemed like a manipulative, audience-flattering drama, an exercise in technique with no soul.

Basically, I did the in-case-of-emergency-break-glass review: designating one play as the quintessence of a whole deplorable tendency. In the case of Rabbit Hole, it was the overproduced naturalistic drama about upper-middle-class FEELINGS. A suburban weepie that shops at Williams Sonoma and keeps Aēsop hand wash in the guest bathroom. I dismissed the play as bougie grief porn, a TV movie, an unimaginative take for unimaginative subscribers that had no business occupying valuable real estate on a Broadway stage. I begged for cruelty, violence, weirdness…the sort of things Lindsay-Abaire flirted with in early comedies such as Fuddy Meers.

I shared a postscript about me and Lindsay-Abaire with Rob Weinert-Kendt at American Theatre a day after I was (ha, ha!) laid off at Time Out New York.

Helen Shaw called the review “famous.” A rave!

Twenty years later, how little has changed.

I mean, the venue has a new name. It used to be the Biltmore, now it’s the Samuel J. Friedman. Same producer: Manhattan Theatre Club. Same playwright. The Balusters is not bougie grief porn. It is a bougie meta-woke social comedy. It steps into the well-trodden furrow of the Hypocritical Liberal Play. Other examples (every other critic will list them) include The Thanksgiving Play, Eureka Day, and The Minutes. I wasn’t crazy about any of those previous titles, and The Balusters doesn’t elevate the formula.

Technically, it’s a big swing: Ten fleshed-out, sympathetic but flawed characters, 105 minutes, twists, surprises, showdowns, violent outbursts, laughs. Well-plotted, well-structured, well-set-up punch lines. What’s it about? The HOA for a historic section of Brooklyn is shaken up by intersectional tensions over a proposed traffic light that the white Boomer president of the group says will ruin the pristine beauty of the esplanade. It’s about real estate, nostalgia, and the shifting of power from old white people to younger people of color. Is it woke? Anti-woke? Anti-anti-woke? All of the above. It comments on race, class, and gender and concludes: Aren’t people funny? Nobody dies, and the new order is slightly better than the old one.

The title refers to vertical supports that go under railings for decks, porches, or stairs. There’s an argument in the play about a neighbor who has installed balusters on their porch that are not up to community standards or style. A physical baluster appears as a prop in the final scene. Will the smug white Boomer (Richard Thomas) grab the baluster and swing it like Wendy Torrance when he’s cornered, proven to be a mean, classist jerk? Take a guess. Instead of The Balusters could the author have swiped Ibsen’s The Pillars of Society? He’ll never tell!

While we’re talking on-the-noseness, here are the first couple of lines. Kyra (Anika Noni Rose), a Black Gen X homeowner who has just joined the HOA, is getting ready to host a meeting with wine and snacks on hand. Her Latina maid, Luz (Maria-Christina Oliveras), asks:

LUZ
I put the crackers in a basket. Unless you want them around the cheese.

(Shows her the basket)

KYRA
No, I like the crackers separate. It’s less messy.

Am I overthinking to see the author winking via a racial double entendre (“crackers”) and the question of separation versus integration? Messy? Yet bet it’s gonna get messy! It’s that ol’ “put the theme in the first line” Easter Egg trick. Clever!

Twenty years ago I was willing to portray myself as the Angry Young Critic. Not sure I have the energy now. American theater has enough problems. Do we need this gently satirical group portrait about property and propriety? Is it going to spark deep, lively conversations among MTC subscribers? Am I heading to the closet to retrieve my rusty flamethrower?

Nope. This is me letting go. Go see it for yourself. Read someone you trust. This is not a review. It’s me scowling at the cocktail party, munching a stale cracker.

Look: David Lindsay-Abaire is one of the smartest and most skillful playwrights in America today. Any dramatist would give their non-dominant hand to have a quarter of his skill at plotting, dialogue, punch lines, and sketching dynamic characters with such economy. Where many writers stick to producible, two-character scenes, Lindsay-Abaire sticks ten people in a room and keeps all the balls in the air. He’s a humanist. He’s whimsical. He reads the room in a zeitgeisty way, I suppose.

And his work feels calculated to please and do very little else. It doesn’t rock the boat, or kick out a baluster. He’s the Neil Simon of our times. A master craftsman who writes witty and neat boulevard comedies that amuse for a couple of hours. The cast is tops. The set looks expensive. Director Kenny Leon blasts Ye during scene changes. What the hell am I bitching about?

Check out the last paragraph of my two-decade-old flamethrower review. There might have been a time, thirty or forty years ago, when artistic directors of the city’s biggest nonprofits could have begun challenging and training their audiences, hosting the most unconventional downtown ensembles or writers. Commissioned more timely play about divisive social issues. Before the internet, social media, a billion streams and brain rot in our back pocket, maybe these hypothetical ADs could have started to attract the imagination of a generation hungry for original, weird storytelling that could only be live theater.

Sadly, the most talented downtown artists in my lifetime were never allowed on the block, much less offered a seat on the HOA. Reverse gentrification may occur in some neighborhoods, but we have yet to see it in the theater.

I assume you’re familiar with the Noël Coward Tiptoe. The playwright frequently ends his drawing-room farces with characters covertly fleeing a property, having been seduced or badgered by eccentric, hot-tempered persons of the comedy. You might call it the coward’s way out. (Yes, I am aware some of you are paid subscribers.) Stealthy absconding appears like clockwork in Hay Fever, Private Lives, and Blithe Spirit: If you see Charles Condomine making a furtive beeline for the door as ghost wives Elvira and Ruth hurl vases, you know the curtain will soon be rung down.

Fallen Angels offers a twist on the formula: In its closing scene a couple of London housewives openly abandon their dull husbands to join a sexy Frenchman in the apartment directly upstairs. No tiptoeing, no shame. As the men listen, nonplussed, their spouses and the Gallic gent appear to make “la whoopee,” if you’ll pardon my French. The chandelier above them shudders with erotic regularity.

Produced in 1925 after much tut-tutting by government officials for taking marital infidelity so lightly (and women’s pleasure so weightily), Fallen Angels is early Coward, a young writer determined to grab the spotlight using sex and spit-polished repartee. Slight and schticky even by Coward standards, the piece has gone un-revived on Broadway for 70 years, a condition now remedied by the Roundabout Theatre Company in a gung-ho, moderately amusing production.

Rose Byrne (If I Had Legs I’d Kick You) plays Jane as a sneering, yipping, sexually frustrated whippet. By contrast, Kelli O’Hara’s Julia hides her marital discontent beneath a façade of soigné equipoise. Their duffer hubbies (Aasif Mandvi, Christopher Fitzgerald) depart for a weekend golf trip. A flustered Jane arrives at Julia’s flat with bags packed and waving a postcard from their mutual lover in premarital times, Maurice Duclos. The repressed gal pals thrill with shared excitement: Maurice is visiting London and may rekindle their twin flames (not in the same bedroom, mind)!

By far the funniest scene is an extended dinner sequence that evening as the women get progressively rat-arsed on martinis, champagne and brandy, waiting for Maurice to call, descending into a boozy ecstasies then a bitter blowout. As overqualified servant Saunders, Tracee Chimo—eyeballs ablaze, smile coldly fixed like a demonic Mary Poppins—keeps the flutes brimful of bubbly.

O’Hara is beloved for her velvety bel canto pipes in classic Broadway musicals, but anyone who saw the Roundabout revival of Kiss Me, Kate is familiar with her skills as a physical comedian—as shrewish Kate she literally kicked costar Will Chase’s butt to great effect. Slender and twisty with angst, Byrne is her match in the slapstick department, such as when the sozzled duo try to light two cigarettes off the same flame, a proprioceptive dance of tipsy bobbing and weaving and sliding off ottomans. The next bleary morning, Byrne’s bloom of unkempt hair—Jane enters hungover and full of regret—exemplifies coiffure as pure punch line (bravo to David Brian Brown and Victoria Tinsman on hair and wigs).

Scott Ellis’s zippy and graceful staging on David Rockwell’s Art Deco-tastic set goes down easy as box wine, even if the comic fireworks are muted. An all-English cast would nail accents and tone better.

Fallen Angels runs but 90 minutes and while you wish for bigger laughs and more assured style, it’ll be over before you feel like sneaking out.

Fallen Angels | 1 hr 30 mins. No intermission. | American Airlines Theatre | 227 West 42nd Street | 212-719-1300 | Click here for tickets

This was from a private collection. The guard stationed next to it halted my attempt to take a picture. So I sneakily snapped one from across the room. Goblet in boy’s right hand shows Carracci’s skill in depicting cloth through glass and amber liquid.

When Katy and I visited Italy 11 years ago she put Rimini on the itinerary. This very artwork, in slightly rougher condition, was kept there in the Museo della Città. Recently restored, it has been on display at the Morgan. Katy was a voracious art lover and art tourist. I wasn’t a total ignoramus when we met, but museumgoing wasn’t a staple of my cultural life. Now it is. She and I had our honeymoon in Venice, Florence and Rome in 2012. Below is a photo from the 2015 trip. Urbino. Katy gazing at The Flagellation of Christ (1459–1460) by Piero della Francesca. I’m trying to find pictures of us in Rimini looking at the Bellini.

When we went to La Scala in Milan. What did we see? Cav/Pag, naturalmente!

Pietro Perugino (ca. 1450–1523). Man of Sorrows (1495)

Trying really hard not to make Clavicular joke. Look at how his right deltoid is as plump and meaty as the peach not too far below.

Sending this to my friend, Matthias, who recently visited and is a man who spent decades in close and tireless reading of countless books. He has lived the reading life I can only dream of.

I’m a small, petty man, and thus will start with a small, petty complaint.

It’s irritating when a play doesn’t explain the title at some point.

Let us imagine a dramedy called Smilin’ Heart. Lovelorn rodeo clown Clem watches the girl of his dreams walk out the door never to return, and his friend Vinnie asks if he’s sad. Clem says, “Nope.” Then why, Vinnie asks, is Clem crying. Clem gazes over the audience and replies, “It’s cuz I got me a smilin’ heart.” BLACKOUT.

Granted, that’s the head-slappingly dumb version.

Nowhere in The Fear of 13 do we learn what triskaidekaphobia has to do with the story of a man wrongfully convicted for rape and murder, the 23 years he survived on death row, and his agonizingly protracted exoneration through DNA evidence. It’s playwright Lindsey Ferrentino’s second Broadway show this season adapted from a documentary. First was her book for the musical The Queen of Versailles (music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz) a dreadful heap of kitsch that closed after 49 performances. Here, Ferrentino translates a 2015 British movie about Nick Yarris, an American whose shamefully mismanaged case landed him on death row.

Through the documentary we learn that Yarris got through hard time partly through reading, losing himself in books and learning new words by rote such as (yes) triskaidekaphobia. See it here at the 34 minute mark. Please bear in mind: not all of us screened the film before we rolled up to the James Earl Jones Theatre. (I should add this is not a formal review, just me chatting with you at the cocktail party.) Did nobody raise the question in rehearsal? Audiences may know the premise, that the guy was innocent going in—although the reveal comes halfway through. The most compelling section is also the most frustrating: nine years of bureaucratic hell before the court would process the DNA evidence that vacated Yarris’s sentence.

In the play, Nick Yarris (Adrien Brody) befriends, falls in love, and eventually marries Jacki Miles (Tessa Thompson), a writer investigating the lives of men on death row. Jacki narrates the tale of a broken criminal justice system, a chronicle of spiritual survival behind bars, and redemption preceded by the pits of despair.

The topic was of particular interest to me, since I wrote about it in a 2019 opera about real-life cases of wrongful conviction and exoneration, Blind Injustice. My libretto—compiled from research and interviews—focused on four cases that involved six innocent people eventually freed by the Ohio Innocence Project. The opera premiered at Cincinnati Opera, then had subsequent productions at Peak Performances, MasterVoices, and at Cleveland’s Playhouse Square. The New York Times did a story about it. As I always say, any one of these cases could have fueled a full-length opera.

But enough about me.

A soulful wolfhound of a thespian, Adrien Brody makes a confident, charismatic Broadway debut. In his hands, Nick is simultaneously a wounded child, juvenile delinquent, and middle-aged man bowed by tragedy. Yarris is no angel, having spent years doing petty crimes and drugs in his youth, but in prison he finds a path to patience and inner peace. Brody won two Oscars personifying grace under pressure, oppressed artists in The Pianist and The Brutalist. With The Fear of 13, the lead is less glamorous, but no less sympathetic and heroic.

Brody has a dancer’s body, lanky and nimble, ready for a feather-light waltz or bumbling slapstick. At the moment when Yarris hits his existential rock bottom, after Jacki leaves him (with his blessing) and begs the court to carry out the sentence of death, Brody crumples like a marionette, his strings snipped, as shower water/rain pours down from the flies. He suffers magnificently. Christlike comes to mind.

At the same time, he’s a witty, debonair, retro spirit. I’d love to see Brody take on Kaufman and Hart, Noël Coward, Durang, Albee, or Richard Greenberg (a revival of The Dazzle please).

Tessa Thompson radiates sensible warmth and intelligence, but Jacki is ultimately a thankless role. She is a woman who Cares Too Much, who falls in love with a man she pities more than loves. And so Thompson does a lot of concerned listening and carrying of exposition. She’s part of a gifted and hard-working ensemble, fast-changing into inmates, guards, crooks, judges and others. Eddie Cooper, Joel Marsh Garland, Michael Cavinder, Ephraim Sykes: just four of the guys doing solid work in director David Cromer’s usual fine-grain, atmospheric staging.

Is the play itself any good? It’s kind of tropey and schmaltzy and could have used harder data on how these miscarriages of justice unfold (again, I’m biased by my own experience). Ferrentino clearly wanted to have a woman’s perspective framing the story, but she doesn’t render Jacki complex or active enough to justify the focus (and fails to include any other women characters). I wanted deeper drilling on innocence work or even frank eroticism between our leads (a montage of phone calls was a missed opportunity). What we get are nearly two intermission-free hours of episodic jailhouse drama that climaxes in a flashback of the childhood sexual assault that traumatized Nick and probably drove him into crime. For fans of Law & Order or prison flicks, the narrative devices are ready-made. Sadistic guards with sudden flashes of humanity, visiting-hour intimacies, courtroom dysfunction, grossly indifferent judges, the moment our hero walks through the prison gate a free man.

It’s hard to avoid these types of scenes, and I deployed a few in my opera, too. But I had Scott Davenport Richards’s thrilling, polyglot music elevating the words. I missed a sense of poetry in Ferrentino’s script—language heightened by obscure words and an autodidact brain crammed with thousands of books (hi, triskaidekaphobia), or the bardic lyricism of Yarris’s storytelling in the original doc. The play ends with a tacky final tableau involving a pet dog named Jocko that ran away when Nick was a kid. Our hero leaves prison; Jocko returns in his mind; a trained dog scampers onstage; Yarris hugs it. Inner child healed. Restorative justice achieved?

And still no explanation of the title. Harrumph!

But YOU, YOU, YOU, YOU, YOU, YOU, probably don’t want to suffer a MIND attack!
You want YOUR mind, ladies and gentlemen,
To remain invulnerable.
The most intimate part of yourself—
Am I right? Perfect.
Okay.
You will now suffer a mind attack!
Theaters across America
Will feature, tonight, inner details of YOUR mind.
People will view, if not your thoughts,
At least your associative tendencies.
And you WILL, to say the least, be humiliated.

— The Maestro in Pearls For Pigs

After seeing several of Richard Foreman’s uncanny extravaganzas in my early years in New York, I finally got to be in one. I was cast as a Large Male Dwarf (one of four) in Pearls for Pigs. We were a quartet of young dudes in lace stockings and sleeves, combat boots, flesh-colored padded butts, Elizabethan ruffs, white half gloves, black lipstick and beauty spots, and a beehive shaped foam rubber hat that looked like a pile of, well, poo. We were the glam, goth, genderqueer, troll-like servant/tormentors of the Maestro, played with pugnacious intensity by David Patrick Kelly. The Maestro was an embittered theater genius lashing out at a cruel, vulgarian world. Other characters in his orbit included a seductive Columbine and a man-child Pierrot, plus a sinister Doctor with a thick German accent.

If you’ve seen one or more Foreman shows, you don’t need me to describe the dense, inexplicable blizzard of godlike voiceovers, music loops, crashes, pings, lights flashing at the audience, painstakingly choreographed movement, the deadpan-cryptic line readings, non sequiturs, the overall sleep paralysis demon vibe. If you’ve never seen a Foreman show, read Helen Shaw or more recently, Billy McEntee.

Rehearsing and touring Pearls for Pigs kept me busy in 1997. We rehearsed in the Bronx, previewed and opened at Hartford Stage, then took the show to Montreal, Paris, Rome, Portland, Los Angeles, and Dartmouth, finishing with a six-week run in New York. It was challenging, exhilarating, frustrating, and a unique mental workout. I joined Equity. It was the highest paying acting job I would ever get. (Three years later I quit acting to become a critic.)

Every night we scurried on bearing large gilt-framed mirrors, headless bodies, plastic meat cleavers, and dozens of other strange props. And every night, I was transfixed by the monologue excerpted above. It’s a digressive, menacing, goofy, heartbreaking aria by the Maestro, the disillusioned auteur, who threatens us with MIND ATTACK! Every spectacle Foreman put on could have been titled MIND ATTACK!

Foreman lived an artist’s dream, creating the theater he wanted to see, on his terms, from 1968 to about 2013, when Old-Fashioned Prostitutes (A True Romance) opened at the Public Theater. He passed away last year at age 87, and I wrote a brief reminiscence for the Washington Post.

And there’s more to say! On April 25 at Torn Page, I get to share the stage with Tony Torn, T. Ryder Smith, Susan Latham, Frank Boudreaux, and Shauna Kelly. Shauna, of course, compiled I’ve Got the Shakes: Performing Richard Foreman, a scrupulous and insightful oral history from those who collaborated with Foreman over the years. RSVP a spot here.

Come on by and share your memories of the Maestro of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, whether as an audience member, performer, or the innocent victim of a

MIND ATTACK!

Names are hard for me. Working on plays or libretti, I agonize over each character’s christening. Too bland? Too exotic? Too on the nose? Too random? Same with titles; pure torture. I actually believe some pieces were held back by crummy titles.

Settling on a handle for this little corner of the media wasn’t too painful. I wrote down every dumb idea and ran them by a trusted friend.

In the end, sound won. Isn’t that often the way? It just sounds right.

Or is it right? One of my biggest limitations as a writer—and it took years to gain any confidence—is how my ear leads me astray. I’m always seduced by rhyme, rhythm, euphony, assonance, alliteration, stress, tempo, all aspects of prosody.

What’s the problem, you may ask? Whether read or spoken aloud, writing should appeal to the ear—or the mind’s ear, as it were. True, but I often find myself in a flow state where things sound good (to me) before they mean anything or build an argument. Maybe this childish aural fixation is good for generating lyrics or bouncy dialogue or nonsense nonce verse. But it can stymie the reviewing brain.

In the end, it worked out: Cote Notices is what this place is, and it sounds nice. Assonance with asymmetrical beats. Spondee followed by a dactyl.1

Sometimes it’s more illuminating to see what was rejected than what was accepted. In no order, here are all the stupid names I brainstormed before the clouds parted.

Alone Together

Noticing

Notes

Noticed

Notifier

Deinfluencer

Pullquote Whore

Enter a Critic

Sans Taste, Sans Everything

Exit, Pursued by a Critic

Histriophage

Theatrophage

The Saucy Puritan Daily

Critical Stage

Critical Mass

Critical Mess

Crritic!

Statue to a Critic

The Daily Cloaca

Rat Under the Boards

Sez Me

The Critic’s Mausoleum

Deserted Aisle

Aisle Be Damned

Eunuch at the Orgy

The Choosy Philistine

Opinionized

Opinionly

Adopted Gen X Capricorn Says What?

Scene and Herd

Thumbless Judgment

The Subjective Absolutist

The Mouthy Mute

Addison DeWitless

All the Stage’s a World

Lobby Villain

Shadow Scribbler

Kicker

Stage Whisperer

Punchbowl Pisser

Teaser and Tormenter

Blackout Dreams

Dreamt on the Aisle

Nothing If Not Critical

Critical If Not Nothing

Noting Nothing

Note I

No Singing in the Navy

Salty and sweet like a lollipop lost at sea, Milo Cramer’s musical cheerily (and queerily) follows three seamen on 24-hour shore leave, forbidden to warble. This tuneful picaresque includes harmonizing crabs (in a bucket), a closeted, Claggart-like captain who croons, and a lonely lighthouse who gets the power ballad. Forget nonbinary bisexual polycules, kids, we’re neck-deep in the polymorphous waters of object sexuality. Drown in delight at Cramer’s waves of goofy wordplay and cute ditties. “Silly sailors,” Bailey Lee, Ellen Nikbakht, Elliot Sagay steer us expertly from giddy abandon to a gut punch of grief. Playwrights Horizons through April 26

Spider Rabbit

Tony Torn revives the spirit of ethereally weird downtown performance artist Taylor Mead, who premiered this Michael McClure monologue in 1971. Torn describes the piece as “an absurdist, anti-war, gargoyle cartoon that feels increasingly relevant over 50 years later.” Imagine Aunt Gladys and Longlegs had a hate child who grew up to be a children’s birthday party clown. Fearless Dan Safer directs and choreographs Torn for an hourlong descent into madness that will sear your brain. The Club at La MaMa through April 12

Mexodus

Two dudes, a sound looper, a bunch of instruments, and a reservoir of talent big as Texas. Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson take us on an epic journey of 19^th-century Mexican immigration—just not in the direction you might assume. A Black slave escapes and the only path to freedom and a new life lies south. Part buddy comedy, part Latinidad Pride house party, Mexodus is a blast. Not since Hamilton have I seen a show fuse folk and hip-hop to such powerful theatrical effect. Dynamic choreography by Tony Thomas and richly atmospheric staging by David Mendizábal. Daryl Roth Theatre through June 14

Becky Shaw

What I noticed: “A black social comedy about class, upward mobility, and ethics. It asks: Can one be rich and good?”… “Gina Gionfriddo’s script is packed with witty banter and darkly funny aphorisms—as well it should be. After all, these characters are descendants of Congreve’s carefree rakes, Sheridan’s scheming libertines, and Wilde’s quipping fops, not to mention Philip Barry’s sophisticated socialites yearning for freedom.” … “What a delight to hear well-tuned repartee and a clockwork comic plot from a writer with a sense of pedigree.” Helen Hayes Theatre through June 14

Death of a Salesman

What I noticed: “I suppose you can screw up Salesman, but you’d have to work very hard with terrible actors. And this cast is extraordinarily good.” …. “The production suggests that Joe Mantello was taking notes at Ivo van Hove’s abstract yet muscular staging of A View from the Bridge. Mantello sets the action inside the loading bay of a dusty, abandoned warehouse. Scenic designer Chloe Lamford’s massive columns fill the cavernous Winter Garden stage, nodding to the ghost of industrial America. Will this concrete pile be reclaimed as an AI data center? An Amazon shipping facility? An immigrant mass detention camp?” Winter Garden Theatre through August 9

The Lomans of Brooklyn are a tribe of liars, thieves, and lechers. The men talk big about the American Dream, the virtues of hard work and strong character, but in reality they’re creeps who despise their jobs and bosses, who view women as mouthy servants or whores to conquer. The mother of the clan is a fretful, cowed enabler. Contempt flows freely between father and sons.

Pardon the scornful tone. Like you, perhaps, I grew up in an all-American family under the shadow of booze, bullying, and boredom. No one in the Loman household is a drunk or abuser, but they’re all hollowed out by the pressure to succeed. If the men are tragic, it’s because they’re not ruthless enough to bluster and fantasize all the way to the White House—to pick a random example of success. Willy Loman’s last drop of decency saves him: a Hail Mary to monetize a wasted life.

Watching director Joe Mantello’s monumental yet intimate revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, it’s also hard to suppress thoughts of the not-yet-dead huckster running our country. In 1949, Miller could not have predicted an American economy perched so precariously on fraud, speculation, and antihuman tech. At least, not quite. There are signs of technology’s power to capture reality in a wire recorder that the young supervisor Howard (John Drea) demonstrates for a befuddled Willy Loman (Nathan Lane). In another scene, careworn spouse Linda (Laurie Metcalf), tells Willy the refrigerator needs a new belt. His bilious reply:

Once in my life I would like to own something outright before it’s broken! I’m always in a race with the junkyard! I just finished paying for the car and it’s on its last legs. The refrigerator consumes belts like a goddam maniac. They time those things. They time them so when you finally paid for them, they’re used up.

Nobody talks of refrigerator belts today, but you could sense the audience at the Winter Garden Theatre collectively wincing over endless upgrades, the inevitable shoddiness of online ordered crap, or shrinkflation—charging more for a smaller bag of chips. “In America,” the saying goes, “the moment you walk out the door the system is grabbing your money.” Willy and Linda pore over the household finances, trying to stay ahead of creditors as they outspend their budget.

How can one win, much less survive, in such a rigged system? In the damnably applicable Death of a Salesman, Miller opposes the pressure to sell against the pride to build. A romantic distinction, but one not without merit. Willy’s 34-year-old son, Biff (Christopher Abbott), longs for the wide open West; he dreams of buying a horse ranch and feeling the sun on his bare chest. So why has Biff slunk home to Brooklyn, back to the bedroom he shared with his younger brother, underachieving womanizer Happy (Ben Ahlers)? Biff couldn’t sell himself above a dollar an hour. His labor worth a buck, Biff feels utterly worthless. That’s the despairing conclusion he tries to force Willy to see in the play’s brutalizing showdown. Valuing yourself by a sick society’s standards will leave you poor indeed. The play’s final line is Linda’s “We’re free.” Free as liberated, or a commodity that can’t be sold?

The Salesman binary between selling and making can be reframed in more metaphysical terms: imaginary versus material, emotion and body, or ideology in contrast to action. Sides that don’t cancel each other out, but must exist in balance. You can’t lead a life of lies in order to acquire material wealth. I mean, you can; countless con artists and Silicon founders have. But there’s psychological payback—unless you’re lucky to be born a narcissistic sociopath. If I were to open Chat and dump in the text of Salesman, the press release, my review of the 2012 revival, a couple academic essays, and Miller’s own commentary, and told the robot to produce a 1,000-word review in David Cote’s voice, evaluating the acting, design, direction and relevance of the play today, what have I made? A fool of myself; worse, a fraud.

Then again, who cares? This is a theater review, after all. Am I so deluded to think I’m making anything? Am I not a parasite, absorbing information from generative artists, reorganizing data so I can extrude blocks of vaguely “original” text that blandly and superficially pre-digest the show you may never see? I’m bound to “hallucinate,” make stuff up that never happened onstage, misidentify actors and designers, or make weird claims about human behavior that only a soulless automated toaster would assert. This isn’t making, it’s selling: an image of myself, cribbed from the work of others.

Just some of the things you think about at Death of a Salesman in 2026.

Hey, this is a review, so let’s review.

I suppose you can screw up Salesman, but you’d have to work very hard with terrible actors. And this cast is extraordinarily good. Have you seen Laurie Metcalf in her many, many gigs on Broadway, most recently Little Bear Ridge Road? Have you marveled at that restless, live-wire quality she has, the spontaneity and intensity of physical business and vocal attack, the quicksilver shifting between anger, concern, and resolve that transmits to the balcony? It’s there in full force in Metcalf’s Linda, who is meek one moment and spitting poison the next. By the end, at her husband’s gravesite, Linda has no more to give, she’s a shell. She can only take the mortgage to the house, which has been paid off, and bury it next to Willy.

Speaking of whom, Nathan Lane continues his mountaineering expedition across American drama, following Roy Cohn in Angels in America (Broadway, 2018) and Hickey in The Iceman Cometh (BAM, 2015). Rationing his comic energies, Lane crafts a charming, keenly pathetic, occasionally droll Willy. The actor may not have resources as deep as his predecessors: the volcanic rage of Brian Dennehy, the bone-deep agony and weariness of Philip Seymour Hoffman, the wounded sense of injustice of Wendell Pierce. Still, I don’t know if I ever saw a Willy Loman I wanted to love as much as Lane. He’s the father who lost his way, and it breaks your heart. Showing signs of sundowning with erratic shifts of timidity to belligerence, his is an honest and lucid portrait of losing oneself. Willy as clownish carnival barker whose biggest sale was to his sons, who swallowed the pitch about being destined for greatness.

As those two unlucky young men, Abbott and Ahlers turn in kinetic, high-definition work. Perhaps Abbott could talk a little less with his hands, but he’s got sensational presence as brooding, disillusioned Biff. Ahlers counterbalances quite humorously as the skirt-chasing himbo Happy, which makes his humiliation all the more painful. The two have palpable chemistry; you believe their sibling bond.

Overall, the production suggests that Joe Mantello was taking notes at Ivo van Hove’s abstract yet muscular staging of A View from the Bridge. Mantello sets the action inside the loading bay of a dusty, abandoned warehouse. Scenic designer Chloe Lamford’s massive columns fill the cavernous Winter Garden stage, nodding to the ghost of industrial America. Will this concrete pile be reclaimed as an AI data center? An Amazon shipping facility? An immigrant mass detention camp? It’s a crumbling mausoleum that stands for an economy that has turned from manufacturing useful objects to monetizing attention and human misery.

It rather sounds like my mind was everywhere but at Death of a Salesman: my bitter upbringing; our shitty President; existential despair of the critic; Amazon; ICE; AI. Guilty. I once read that’s what great plays do: hold a mirror up to nature, perhaps even smushing the glass in our face.

Ah, but never mind me; I’m just here trying to sell you something.

Random Observations

• From the get-go in text and production, the emphasis is on sight. The retractable upstage metal door clanks upward, Caroline Shaw’s wistful chamber music plays, and Willy’s 1964 Chevy Chevelle Malibu rolls in (normally it’s a 1940s Studebaker; more on anachronisms below). Headlights briefly blind the audience (spare, aggressive lighting by Jack Knowles). Why did Willy abort his sales trip to New England and return to Brooklyn? He couldn’t focus on the road, although he says it’s not his eyeglasses: “I see everything.” (Irony Alert.) Recall that after he learned the truth of his parentage, Oedipus gouged out his eyeballs, and King Lear’s blinded Gloucester laments, “I stumbled when I saw.”

• Mantello exploits actor height to interesting effect. Lane and Metcalf are fairly average, but Abbott and Ahlers tower over them. Likewise, as the scarily suave Master of the Universe Ben—Willy’s absurdly successful brother—the strapping Jonathan Cake seems a giant. This verticality gap lends Willy and Linda a vulnerable, almost child-like quality. Mantello reinforces the visuals with a textual choice. In the published version of Salesman, Willy tells Linda he’s “fat,” that a coworker nicknamed him “walrus.” Using Miller’s near-final manuscript, Mantello opts for an earlier choice: “short.” Willy is mocked as “shrimp.”

  

• This is a ridiculously stacked ensemble. K Todd Freeman has buckets of charisma and wit as Willy’s empathetic neighbor Charley, a regular Joe who lovingly raised a son who became a successful lawyer, played with coiled, inscrutable charm by Michael Benjamin Washington. As noted, Jonathan Cake is sleek as a shark, a self-adoring millionaire with Africa diamond blood on his hands. In the smallish role of Letta, a girl that Happy chats up in a restaurant, the vivacious Mary Neely radiates main-character energy, all big bright eyes and cascading black curls.

• Hard to miss the modern touches. Willy pours a glass from an Organic Valley 2% carton of milk. As Howard fires him, the supervisor sips from a Starbucks-like paper cup with heat sleeve. Linda’s outfits (costumes by Rudy Mance) become notably contemporary in the second act, on the morning when Linda feels briefly optimistic for Willy and the boys. Sartorially transported to a happier future?

Death of a Salesman. By Arthur Miller. Directed by Joe Mantello. With Nathan Lane, Laurie Metcalf, Christopher Abbott, Ben Ahlers. Winter Garden Theatre, 1634 Broadway at 51st Street. Running time: 2hrs 50mins. One intermission. Through August 9. Tickets here.

Today I’m tinkering with a review of the new Death of a Salesman, starring Nathan Lane, Laurie Metcalf, Christopher Abbott, and Ben Ahlers (and a knockout supporting cast). Joe Mantello’s regietheater-ish revival opens at the Winter Garden Theatre Thursday night. I read and watch whatever’s at hand to get inspired and shake ideas loose, including my last take on Arthur Miller’s masterwork, 14 years ago.

This review went live at Time Out New York on Sunday March 18 2012. Here’s the lede.

“You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away,” rages the soon-to-be cashiered salesman, far past his prime, with a head fogged in memories and a heart in shards. “A man is not a piece of fruit!” To borrow Willy Loman’s orchard metaphor, Philip Seymour Hoffman still has plenty of pulp: He’s 20 years younger than the character he plays in Mike Nichols’s magnificent, bracing revival of Death of a Salesman. Whereas firing aged workers is common enough in business, most 44-year-olds would not be hired for Willy on the basis of youth (admittedly, Lee J. Cobb was 38 when he originated the role in 1949). But Hoffman makes Willy his own: stamping the iconic figure with hangdog gravitas, slow-burning humiliation, fast-flaring passion and a genius for making each moment acute and dangerously raw. In short, Hoffman is stupendous; I can’t wait to see him do it again when he’s retirement age.