The Morning Line

THE MORNING LINE DATE: Wednesday, February 24, 2016 FROM: Melissa Cohen, Michelle Farabaugh Claire Manning, Amanda Price PAGES: 13, including this page C6 February 24, 2016 C1 February 24, 2016 Review: In ‘Dot,’ a Fading Matriarch Brings a Family Together By Charles Isherwood One minute, Dotty’s eyes are clear, and her mind is as steely sharp as her tongue. A minute later, clouds seem to shroud those big, bright peepers, and she has the bewildered look of a toddler who’s lost track of her mother at the mall. Dotty (Marjorie Johnson), the widowed matriarch of a black middle-class family from Philadelphia, is 65, and although she mostly avoids directly admitting it to anyone — sometimes even to herself — she has Alzheimer’s. In Colman Domingo’s thoroughly entertaining comedy-drama “Dot,” Dotty’s failing mind becomes the focus of a fraught family gathering. The play, which opened on Tuesday at the Vineyard Theater, is an impressive advance for Mr. Domingo, also a gifted musical-theater performer, whose previous plays include the autobiographical “A Boy and His Soul” and“Wild With Happy.” One indicator of its quality is the somewhat surprising director: Susan Stroman, winner of five Tony Awards and an eminent director and choreographer of musicals, who rarely stages shows in which people do not regularly break into song and dance. Mr. Domingo appeared in Ms. Stroman’s production of “The Scottsboro Boys,” first seen at the Vineyard before moving to Broadway, and perhaps their relationship helped bring her aboard. But “Dot” would earn a director of some stature on its own merits. While conventional in form, it’s uproariously funny, if naturally streaked with sadness (and at times, a pinch or two of sentimentality). Mr. Domingo draws a complex portrait of a family in crisis, as Dotty’s three children grapple with the rapid decline of their mother. Managing Dotty’s illness has fallen like a ton of bricks on the shoulders of her 45-year-old daughter, Shelly, played with ferocious gusto by Sharon Washington. Attempting simultaneously to serve her mother breakfast, nudge her to take her pills and get her to sign legal documents, Shelly careens like a pinball around the sunny kitchen of Dotty’s West Philadelphia home, where Shelly is temporarily living. Tougher than any of those tasks is keeping her mother’s wandering mind on track. It’s 10 in the morning, but Shelly makes a pit stop at the freezer to yank out a bottle of vodka. You can’t blame her, especially when Dotty, who has plenty of moments of lucidity, cracks that Shelly’s new hairdo makes her look like a “mean pineapple” — twice. Exasperation radiates like an electric force field around Shelly, who is also trying to entertain Jackie (Finnerty Steeves), an old friend from the neighborhood who has dropped by unexpectedly, having fled a personal crisis in New York. Shelly is determined to use the impending Christmas holiday to corral her younger brother, Donnie (Stephen Conrad Moore), who lives in New York, and younger sister, Averie (Libya V. Pugh), who lives in Shelly’s basement, into sharing the burden. Although Shelly has hired Fidel (the sweet Michael Rosen), a shy young man from Kazakhstan, to help take care of Dotty three days a week, she cannot afford more help, and she needs to get back to her work as a lawyer. Mr. Domingo certainly doesn’t stint on stirring this simmering pot of family angst. When Donnie and his husband, Adam (Colin Hanlon), arrive, we learn that they are weathering relationship problems — Donnie’s a homebody and wants kids; Adam likes to party — which are not helped by the nerve-fraying juice cleanse they are on. Donnie’s finances are precarious because his career as a music journalist is unsteady. Averie cannot be relied on for financial help, either, since her acting career — kicked off when she became an Internet sensation for about 10 minutes — is stalled. Oh, and there’s some tension between Jackie and Donnie, who were high school sweethearts; on some level she’s never quite found a man to match him — and has now unhappily become pregnant by a married man. But Ms. Stroman’s streamlined direction, which sometimes has the snappy rhythms of musical comedy (there is even a brief dance break), keeps the play from tilting too far toward the soap operatic, or for that matter the sitcomic. The rapprochement between Donnie and Adam in the second act runs a tad long and approaches the treacly, but when the focus is on Dotty and her family’s reckoning with her disease, the play is on firm footing, and consistently generates laughter. The cast is terrific. Mr. Moore’s Donnie exudes a sense of aggrieved dissatisfaction, while Mr. Hanlon brings a sunny sweetness to Adam, whose close relationship with Dotty is gently touching; at one sad point Dotty’s mind slips into the past, and she imagines that he is her long-dead husband. As the unfiltered Averie — being filter-free is a trait that all the women share — Ms. Pugh puts an accent on the sass without overdoing it. And Ms. Steeves brings a sense of bewildered near-defeat to Jackie, who has come home to lick her wounds, only to find herself embroiled in more trauma. At the center of the play, of course, is Dotty, played with glowing warmth and sensitivity — but also fierce humor — by Ms. Johnson. Dotty’s almost constant shifts between lucidity and fogginess cannot be easy to negotiate, but Ms. Johnson makes us aware, at every moment, of just when Dotty’s grasp suddenly slips away. Most important, she accentuates her character’s bracing lack of self-pity. As the play progresses, Dotty’s gradual acceptance of her illness becomes deeply moving. Always a woman of strong spirit, she must now channel that fortitude to face the difficult present and the darker future. C4 February 24, 2016 Review: ‘The Body of an American’: Ties Created by War By Alexis Soloski Dan O’Brien’s “The Body of an American,” a lyrical, untidy and ultimately poignant work of theater is a ghost story. It is also a true story. In Somalia, in 1993, the journalist and war photographer Paul Watson heard that an American soldier was being dragged through the street, possibly alive, possibly dead. Hustled into a car by a driver and a bodyguard, he went in search of the soldier, Staff Sgt. William David Cleveland, and found him: dead, his nearly naked body fouled and bruised, ropes coiled around his hands and feet. In the few frames Mr. Watson shot before the mood of the crowd forced his retreat, Somalian men cheer as they desecrate the body. A woman reaches out a sandaled foot to trample the soldier’s stomach. These photographs won Mr. Watson a 1994 Pulitzer Prize and may have helped speed the withdrawal of American troops from the region. They also may have influenced the United States’ refusal to intervene in the Rwandan genocide shortly after. The images he captured would haunt Mr. Watson and the words that Mr. Watson used to describe them in a radio interview would haunt Mr. O’Brien, then a Princeton fellow working on a play about historical ghosts. For reasons Mr. O’Brien can’t articulate or understand, he sent an email to Mr. Watson. And Mr. Watson, for reasons equally mysterious, replied. The two men formed a tentative friendship — on email, on the telephone and eventually in person. From their conversations and from research into Mr. Watson’s life and his own, Mr. O’Brien has composed this poetic and fragmentary play for two actors, which won the inaugural Edward M. Kennedy prize for a drama inspired by American history. Under Jo Bonney’s direction for Primary Stages at the Cherry Lane Theater, Michael Cumpsty mostly plays Paul and Michael Crane mostly plays Dan, though they switch these roles occasionally and play a host of other characters, too — a girlfriend, a psychiatrist, a translator, the radio interviewer Terry Gross. Mr. Cumpsty has an effortless authority and an unforced charisma. Mr. Crane, a flexible actor, nicely conveys Dan’s unsettled art and life. There are a few discrete scene breaks, but mostly stories and speeches flow into one another, with light changes (by Lap Chi Chu) to signal a shift in mood or place. Mr. Watson’s photographs, projected on the back wall, also help to set the tone. On the surface these are very different men. Paul vaults from one dangerous locale to the next, often risking his life, while Dan mostly stays put, teaching undergraduates and trying to write his plays, risking little. But they sense similarities in each other — melancholy, difficulty relating to others, a sense of remove from one’s own life. At one point, Paul writes to Dan, “I’ve been meaning to say: You sound kind of depressed,” which is rather like the pot calling the kettle despondent. As a photographer and as a playwright, Paul and Dan are professional witnesses. Over the course of their slow- burn friendship, they become witnesses and confessors to each other. At times the play can seem glum, solipsistic and self-serious, but what invigorates it — beyond the energy and precision of the performances — is the sense of both men struggling, and often failing, to understand what draws them to each other or why they continue their conversation. At many points in the script, Dan admits to not knowing what he’s doing. “I’m hoping you’re still willing to write this play, or whatever it is, with me,” he writes to Paul.

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