The Morning Line

THE MORNING LINE

DATE: Wednesday, June 8, 2016

FROM: Melissa Cohen, Michelle Farabaugh Clare Lockhart

PAGES: 18, including this page

June 7, 2016

Laura Linney and Cynthia Nixon Are to Trade Roles in ‘The Little Foxes’ By Jennifer Schuessler

Laura Linney, left, and Cynthia Nixon. Credit From left, Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images; Andrew Toth/Getty Images

Laura Linney and Cynthia Nixon will not just be trading barbs in a new production of “The Little Foxes,” by Lillian Hellman, set for the Manhattan Theater Club next spring — they’ll also be swapping roles.

Echoing a move seen on Broadway in 2000 with the acclaimed production of “True West,” starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly, Ms. Linney and Ms. Nixon will alternate the roles of Regina Hubbard Giddens and Birdie Giddens, two sisters-in-law doing ferocious battle over the family business in Alabama in 1900. Daniel Sullivan, a Tony Award winner in 2001 for “Proof,” will direct the production, which is to begin previews on March 29.

Ms. Nixon, for those keeping score, has one Tony, for “Rabbit Hole” (also directed by Mr. Sullivan), and two nominations, against Ms. Linney’s three nominations. Which actress will play which role at each performance won’t be announced until the spring. But with any luck, the audience will face the same happy problem posed by “True West,” of which Ben Brantley wrote in The New York Times: “If you’ve followed Mr. Hoffman’s and Mr. Reilly’s work on film, you probably have your own ideas who was meant for which part. Forget it. Whichever way you’ve sliced it, you’re right.” C3

June 8, 2016

‘The Glass Menagerie’ Heads Back to Broadway, With Sally Field By Scott Heller

Only four years after its last revival, “The Glass Menagerie” will return to Broadway, starring two-time Academy Award winner Sally Field as Amanda Wingfield.

Also starring with Ms. Field in Tennessee Williams’s 1944 family drama will be the actor-director Joe Mantello, as Tom Wingfield, and Finn Wittrock, as the Gentleman Caller. Sam Gold will direct the production, which he developed (with a different cast) in 2015 at Toneelgroep Amsterdam.

Madison Ferris, a newcomer, will be Laura, the disabled Wingfield daughter, protected by her mother, whose romantic illusions are buoyed and then crushed. Ms. Ferris will be the rare Broadway actor who performs in a wheelchair.

In a statement on the Toneelgroep website, Mr. Gold said that as a father, the character of Amanda resonates with him in new ways. “It surprises me that I recognize myself in her now, in her tormented love for her children,’’ he said.

The last Broadway revival of “Glass Menagerie” began at the American Repertory Theater in 2013, and earned Tony nominations for the cast members Cherry Jones, Brian J. Smith and Celia Keenan-Bolger.

Mr. Gold’s production will begin performances at the Golden Theater on Feb. 14 with an official opening night set for March 23. Scott Rudin is the lead producer. C1

June 8, 2016

Review: ‘A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Gynecologic Oncology Unit’ Blends Rage With Gallows Humor

By Ben Brantley

There’s a raw spot — one of the tenderest places on the continent of human emotions — that exists between laughter and pain. Make that between laughter and everything that feeds pain: rage, hatred, desperation, hopelessness, fear, even physical disease. Such is the location of Halley Feiffer’s “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Gynecologic Oncology Unit at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center of New York City,” a play that is as deeply felt as its name is long. To be literal, its setting is a sickeningly pink double room in the hospital of its title. But as anyone who’s spent much time in similar rooms knows, antechambers to death are incubators for those guffaws that it’s hard to distinguish from sobs, places where you find yourself fighting a close battle with the urge to giggle madly. To give in to such an impulse, in such a context, would be very, very inappropriate. Or would it? “Funny Thing,” which opened on Tuesday night at the Lucille Lortel Theater, makes a convincing case that hard laughter is an absolutely appropriate response, if not a socially sanctioned one, to those moments when life seems like too bad a joke not to respond otherwise. And if you feel that way all the time, as does the young stand-up comedian played with uncompromising obnoxiousness by Beth Behrs, well, I pity you. But I sure know where you’re coming from, especially after seeing this gorgeously acted MCC Theater production, directed by Trip Cullman. Ms. Feiffer, the talented young playwright (and actress) whose earlier work includes the recent downtown hit “I’m Gonna Pray for You So Hard,” is mining familiar territory. We know what Freud said about humor and hostility, and what cultural pundits have been saying about anger and comedy forever. Wisecracking in the shadow of death has been the basis for entire club acts (Tig Notaro) and amiably morbid movies (Judd Apatow’s “Funny People”). But Ms. Feiffer — whose father is the cartoonist laureate of urban neuroses, Jules Feiffer — has her own winsomely vicious approach to the subject, one that makes us feel close kin to the awkward, feel-bad clowns who dominate open-mike nights. And you start to think that the reasons comedians talk so often before an audience about the fear of dying have far wider implications than you imagined. On the basis of the jokes she’s trying out on a captive (and possibly comatose) audience in the opening scene of “Funny Thing,” Karla (Ms. Behrs) has been dying all her life. “I’ve been single for so long, I’ve started having sexual fantasies about my vibrator,” she says in the play’s opening line, one she will keep amending endlessly.

Hold for your laugh, Karla. Except it never arrives. Karla’s audience is her mom, Marcie (Lisa Emery), who’s in the hospital bed recovering from surgery for ovarian cancer. (The set designer Lauren Helpern has provided an unsparingly exact facsimile of hospital décor, starting with its watery Pepto-Bismol walls.) Marcie’s in no condition to do anything but snore right now. Anyway, it turns out that this nonresponse to her daughter’s wit is pretty much the same when Marcie’s awake. Then someone else soon enters the room who, from the other side of a flimsy dividing curtain, can hear Karla’s raunchy musings on masturbation, and they do not sit well with him: Don (Erik Lochtefeld), a lanky, middle- aged millionaire who dresses like a homeless person and who’s there to visit his mother, the vegetative-seeming Geena (Jacqueline Sydney). And there you have the entire cast of characters, and the setup for an extended joke in which death is the inevitable punch line. In fact, it’s the sentence “She’s dead,” uttered in a strangulated voice by the still-sleeping Marcie, that allows Don and Karla to start bonding, after meeting in a barrage of noisy insults that is as classically and irritatingly New York as a stalled subway car. By now, you may think you know where the plot is heading, and your surmises are probably not wrong. For its intermissionless 85 minutes, “Funny Thing” abides by the rom-com rules that a couple who meet antagonistically have to be attracted to each other, and that any heroine who is so aggressively defensive has a tortured back story, preferably involving a mirror-image parent. But to render “Funny Thing” in synopsis doesn’t do justice to Ms. Feiffer’s exposed nerve of a script, or to the open-wound performances, which Mr. Cullman has steered as close to festering as audiences’ stomachs allow. Ms. Behrs, best known as the exiled society princess on television’s “2 Broke Girls,” makes a brave and very effective Manhattan stage debut. Her Karla is one of the New York archetypes you would least like to be trapped in an elevator with: a showboating narcissist who draws you in to push you away, while operating on the conversational principle that there’s no such thing as too much information. But Ms. Behrs finds the frightened passivity within Karla’s aggression, and she keeps us on her character’s side without even asking us to like her. Ms. Sydney is saddled with what might be called a prop part, but in Geena’s fleeting moments of consciousness, she delivers. Ms. Emery is, as always, a knockout, creating a portrait of a monster mom that also reminds you that no human being is truly a monster. And Mr. Lochtefeld is so appealingly heartbroken as the gangly, life-mangled Don that you’ll wonder where he’s been all your life. Ms. Feiffer’s script needs these performances. It’s heavy on monologues of self-revelation that, in the wrong hands, could freeze the show’s momentum. But this spare but choice ensemble listens as well as it talks, and every splenetic speech, no matter how self-contained, still feels like part of a vital dialogue. Besides, these people are all New Yorkers. Monologue is their native tongue. And that sentence sets me up quite nicely to describe what has to be the most sensational — and funniest — sex scene on a New York stage these days. But, hey, I know when to stop. That Ms. Feiffer’s characters do not is what makes them so painfully irresistible.

June 8, 2016

Review: ‘The Death of a Black Man (a Walk By)’ Takes On the Issue of Gun Violence By Ken Jaworowski

A live wire of outrage runs through almost every moment of “The Death of a Black Man (a Walk By).” That’s just as it should be, and it’s a good reason to see this energetic piece of agitprop.

The play, by Ian Ellis James (a former writer for “Sesame Street,” who is presenting this show under the name William Electric Black), starts as the audience members, who stand throughout, enter an area cordoned off with crime-scene tape.

Over the course of 75 minutes we watch sketches that take place before and after the shooting deaths of several high school students. We move around as part of the crowd at a protest, a candlelight vigil, a funeral service and other events.

It’s an incensed, involving shout against gun violence that’s staged with a committed cast of 14. The actors use rap, song, poetry, a shadow screen and more; Mr. James takes a cue from Clifford Odets’s “Waiting for Lefty” and has them mixing among the audience members while performing the vignettes. A scene in which TV reporters cover a story, talking over one another with the same platitudes, is inspired, as is a segment that looks at tensions between groups of black girls and white girls.

As directed by Mr. James, the young actors play various characters boldly. Brittney Benson, Carleton King and Sebastian Gutierrez have the choicest roles and inhabit them with gusto. Alexander Bartenieff’s lighting and Chriz Zaborowski’s percussion boost the fear and stress in the immersive staging.

Mr. James might have better used some of his energy to build situations with more complexity. There’s passion, yet the plot and characters risk being fairly standard: good kids in bad situations on tough city streets. Still, the questions he poses are vital.

“Can you do anything?” the actors ask in one scene, looking into the faces of the audience members. Indeed, is such a show merely preaching to the converted? Does theater really have any power to stop gun violence? I’m not confident that it does, and I’m not sure that Mr. James is, either; to his credit, he offers no false or easy answers. But getting angry is a good starting point. This play can help people do that.

June 8, 2016

Review: ‘Suddenly, a Knock at the Door,’ Based on Etgar Keret’s Stories By Alexis Soloski

A writer struggling with a story finds himself unexpectedly assaulted by two men with pistols and a pizza delivery woman wielding a cleaver. They all have the same demand: a new tale. “I’ll bet this doesn’t happen to Philip Roth. Or Amos Oz,” the writer (Kenneth Talberth) complains. He is probably right.

“Suddenly, a Knock at the Door,” at Theater for the New City, is based on a collection of stories by the Polish- Israeli writer Etgar Keret, a proponent of darkly whimsical magical realism. The opening, which is borrowed from the book and positions the piece as a cracked, contemporary “One Thousand and One Nights,” has a certain wild confidence. But the ensuing play, adapted by Robin Goldfin and directed by David L. Carson, emphasizes the difficulty of translating prose works for the stage.

In many of the scenes, the words simply don’t leap far enough off the page. One of the men who threatens the writer tells him, “Work that imagination of yours, brother, invent something — let it flow,” but too many of the scenes betray their short-story form. Rather than transmuting the stories into dialogue and action, the script has an over-reliance on direct address and observation. Mr. Goldfin’s ways of tying the stories together too often show the seams.

As if to compensate, Mr. Carson has encouraged his actors to emote as though their lives depended on it, and not all are up to the task. The tone and pacing are too consistently hectic, the characterizations quite broad. But the two onstage musicians are a fine touch, providing underscoring sound effects and occasional commentary with their acoustic guitars. And the show does manage to convey Mr. Keret’s casually mordant worldview, his sense that fiction so often palls before the quiet and terrible absurdities of everyday life.

June 8, 2016

Review: In ‘The Block,’ a Fretful Neighborhood Watch By Alexis Soloski

In Dan Hoyle’s “The Block,” a garrulous and affectionate portrait of the contemporary South Bronx, no one is boogieing down. Financial stability is a rarity, friendships falter, and gentrification threatens. “I’m telling you, the avocado apocalypse is upon us,” says Rick (Flaco Navaja), a livery driver. He’s seen two bougie restaurants open in Mott Haven. Even worse, last week he spotted “two white dudes with fluffy beards on bikes.” SoBro? Oh no, bro.

“The Block” is part of Five Boroughs/One City, an ambitious project by theWorking Theater to create a play for each borough, inspired by conversations and story circles with members of particular communities. (After a run at Urban Stages in Manhattan, the show will tour the other boroughs.) In between scenes of “The Block,” the sound system plays snippets of field recordings, in which actual Bronx residents reminisce about a favorite doughnut shop or discuss an area’s transformation. These extracts lend character and atmosphere, which are the stronger elements ofMr. Hoyle’s play, directed by Tamilla Woodard. In matters of story and structure, it’s somewhat weaker.

The plot seems to center on Dontrell (Clinton Lowe), a former hustler now back after several quiet years upstate. He’s trying to reconnect with his old friend Rick and his old roommate Soria (Yvette Ganier), but neither offers much help as Dontrell tries to stay out of prison and trouble. Soria is too focused on hanging on to her rent-stabilized apartment; Rick is trying to save enough to open his own livery service and take over a storefront from Moe (Nathan Hinton), an African immigrant tempted to decamp for the Midwest.

But Dontrell’s struggles aren’t really the main concern. Any action, when it comes, seems halfhearted, if not superfluous. Mr. Hoyle’s larger scheme is to depict a neighborhood by showing why people go and how they stay. Mostly, he does this by letting his characters talk — teasing, joking, bragging and scrapping. If Mr. Hoyle lets his story get away from him, he presents warm, robust sketches of the neighborhood’s gutsy dwellers.

Even its mice. Soria describes an attempt to rid her apartment of vermin, saturating her kitchen with poison. It doesn’t work. “These is Bronx mouses,” she says. “They ate it like it was dessert!”

June 7, 2016

Laura Linney, Cynthia Nixon to Trade Roles in Broadway’s ‘The Little Foxes’

By Gordon Cox

REX SHUTTETSTOCK

Laura Linney and Cynthia Nixon will star on Broadway in a spring 2017 revival of “The Little Foxes” — and alternate in the play’s two major female roles.

In the Manhattan Theater Club production, directed by Daniel Sullivan, Linney and Nixon will switch off in the roles of Regina Giddens and her sister-in-law, Birdie Hubbard, in Lilian Hellman’s 1939 play about an Alabama family’s ferocious fight over money and a promising investment. Doubling roles in repertory is a rare but not unheard of gambit on Broadway; Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly alternated in the two lead roles of Sam Shepard’s “True West” in 2000.

Both Nixon and Linney are fairly regular presences on Broadway, and both have worked in the past with MTC. Nixon starred in MTC’s 2012 staging of “Wit” and the 2006 play “Rabbit Hole,” while Linney was most recently on Broadway in MTC’s 2010 outing “Time Stands Still.” Both “Rabbit Hole” and “Time Stands Still” were directed by Sullivan (“Proof”).

“The Little Foxes” begins previews March 29 ahead of an April 19, 2017 opening at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater. The production joins an MTC Broadway season that is already due to include “Heisenberg,” with Mary-Louise Parker, and “Jitney.”

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June 8, 2016

June 13, 2016

June 7, 2016

June 8 – 14, 2016