Entertainment
Playwrights, back in the spotlight on Broadway, kick-start New York's fall theater season
Reports of the demise of the straight play on Broadway are greatly exaggerated, at least by the evidence of the fall theater season that has come front-loaded with high-profile drama.
Sam Mendes’ searing production of Jez Butterworth’s “The Hills of California” at the Broadhurst Theatre, hands down the best play I saw in a spree of late September playgoing, has become the essential ticket for discerning New York theatergoers this fall. Ayad Akhtar’s “McNeal,” starring Robert Downey Jr. in his Broadway debut at Lincoln Center Theater’s Vivian Beaumont, didn’t live up to expectations. But who could pass up the opportunity to hear from one of our sharpest playwrights on a subject that has already begun challenging our sense of reality, AI.
I was scheduled to see Jen Silverman’s “The Roommate,” starring that most enticing Broadway odd couple, Patti LuPone and Mia Farrow, but illness in the cast scuttled my plans. Still, I managed to pack in, on a four-day itinerary, David Henry Hwang’s “Yellow Face” (starring Daniel Dae Kim) at Roundabout Theatre Company’s Todd Haimes Theatre, Max Wolf Friedlich’s “Job” at the Hayes Theater, and in my one off-Broadway run, James Ijames’ “Good Bones” at the Public Theater. (I also caught the jaunty Broadway revival of “Once Upon a Mattress,” about which I’ll have more to say when the production, starring Sutton Foster, opens at the Ahmanson Theatre in December.)
Daniel Dae Kim in the play “Yellow Face.”
(Joan Marcus)
It was a pleasure to re-encounter “Yellow Face,” which had its world premiere at the Mark Taper Forum in 2007. Leigh Silverman, who directed that production, has returned to helm the play’s Broadway premiere, which runs through Nov. 24. This clever comedy, a self-referential work in which Hwang harks back to a theatrical controversy he found himself embroiled in after speaking out against the casting of Jonathan Pryce as a Eurasian character in the 1991 Broadway premiere of “Miss Saigon.” The uproar that followed was more than the Tony-winning playwright had bargained for. But he decided to tackle some of the questions about racial identity that emerged from the casting brouhaha in his play “Face Value,” a spectacular flop that closed in previews on Broadway in 1993.
In “Yellow Face,” Hwang reassembles these related events in a comedy that introduces a fictional device to what is otherwise a straightforward recounting. DHH, the playwright’s surrogate, is now played by Kim, a magnetic screen star (“Lost,” “Hawaii Five-0”) with Hollywood sex appeal to spare. Any male writer would be flattered to be played by Kim, but the casting is delectably ironic in a play that recalls a time when producers would throw up their hands when asked to find an Asian American leading man to anchor a film or Broadway show.
Silverman’s production, in other respects, doesn’t quite seem as comfortable blown up on a big Broadway stage. Some of the comic acting comes off as cartoonish, but the writing is so smart, fluid and free that it hardly matters. And the scenes between Kim’s DHH and Ryan Eggold’s Marcus, the purely invented figure in the play, revel in the hilarious hypocrisies that Hwang impishly sends up.
The conceit of the play is that DHH has accidentally cast a non-Asian performer as the lead in “Face Value,” and Marcus, grateful for this jump-start to his acting career, takes on a communal advocacy role that only makes the situation more farcically dangerous. DHH is afraid of losing face over his role in making Marcus an Asian American star. He came up with the bright idea of claiming that the actor was of Siberian Jewish heritage when learning the truth of his identity. As the accidental spokesperson for politically conscious casting, he’d rather not be hoisted on his own petard.
Hwang’s self-irony is part of the comic wonder of “Yellow Face.” But what is especially refreshing about the play is the way it approaches profoundly serious matters of identity politics with a light touch. Hwang is too agile a playwright to be doctrinaire. He recognizes what must be redressed, but he refuses to lose his sense of humor in the struggle or exempt himself from the human comedy that may be the only reliable equal opportunity employer.
Peter Friedman and Sydney Lemmon in “Job” at Broadway’s Helen Hayes Theater.
(Emilio Madrid)
“Job,” which had a much talked-about run last fall off-Broadway at the Soho Playhouse, moved to Broadway’s Helen Hayes Theater this summer and might be the sleeper of the season. A two-character work, the play (which is scheduled to close on Oct. 27) stars veteran Peter Friedman and Broadway newcomer Sydney Lemmon, a Yale School of Drama graduate who happens to be the granddaughter of Jack Lemmon.
Why has Friedlich’s play become so popular with New York theatergoers? The situation of a young woman showing up at a psychotherapist’s office with a gun sets up a self-contained dramatic situation that audiences seem to relish. Lemmon plays Jane, a content moderator at a tech company, who had a breakdown at the office after being exposed to the most horrific videos and now needs a psychologist to sign off on her return to work. Friedman takes on the role of Loyd, a San Francisco shrink who, in a period of time shorter than two sessions, must somehow dissuade Jane from pulling the trigger.
The contrivances of the situation are inescapable, despite the scrupulous honesty of the performers in director Michael Herwitz’s charged production. (As the Berkeley-educated, aging hippie therapist, Friedman is especially good at dispensing professional empathy to save his own life). The play contains a twist that wild horses couldn’t drag out of me, but how convinced you’ll be depends on your willingness to succumb to a plot that has been carefully programmed to ratchet up the dramatic tension. I remained at a skeptical remove, but I appreciated the absorption of my fellow audience members, who were more than happy to suspend disbelief and hop on an 80-minute-dramatic thrill ride.
Khris Davis, from left, Susan Kelechi Watson, and Tea Guarino in the New York premiere of “Good Bones,” written by James Ijames and directed by Saheem Ali.
(Joan Marcus)
The final play on my itinerary was “Good Bones,” by Ijames, a playwright I’ve been eager to get to know better after “Fat Ham,” his brilliantly hilarious Pulitzer Prize-winning riff on “Hamlet.” “Kill Move Paradise,” an earlier Ijames play still running at the Odyssey Theatre, constructs an emergency racial justice ritual to confront the epidemic of fatal police shootings of unarmed Black people. “Good Bones,” a play about a married couple, Travis (Mamoudou Athie) and Aisha (Susan Kelechi Watson), who are renovating a townhouse in the city where Aisha grew up, is much more conventional in form.
Aisha, who grew up poor, has a love-hate relationship with her hometown. She works for a company that’s erecting a sports complex that is going to tear down the same projects that she used to call home. Her husband, a chef from a more affluent background, is opening an upscale soul food restaurant in the midtown area. The two embody the spirit of gentrification, but they have as many differences between them as they have with Earl (Khris Davis), a meticulous contractor who still lives in the projects that Aisha wants to dismantle.
Ijames sets up debate drama in which the characters bring their unique life histories to the conflict. Earl’s sister Carmen (Téa Guarino), a finance major at the University of Pennsylvania, introduces a different generational viewpoint when she joins her brother to finish the renovation job.
The production, directed by Ijames’ frequent collaborator Saheem Ali, unfolds in the spacious modern kitchen that Earl is painstakingly refurbishing to restore this historic townhouse to its former luster. The scenic design (Maruti Evans) and costumes (Oana Botez) maximize the production’s televisual appeal. Perhaps this is the reason that “Good Bones” sometimes comes off as a TV pilot. The play has urgent social concerns that are right at home at a theater like the Public, where it runs through Oct. 27, but pat resolutions and a little too much window-dressing prevent the conflicts from becoming uncomfortably real.
“Fat Ham,” “Kill Move Paradise” and “Good Bones” are written in such different styles they could be the works of three separate authors. Except that each play is urgently concerned with the lifeblood of community. For Ijames, that includes not only who is on stage but who is in the audience. Expanding the circle of theatergoers isn’t an afterthought but an imperative for a playwright who recognizes that drama, at its most flourishing, serves as a societal meeting point.
My New York theatergoing brought this dynamism home to me, confirming that a theory of physics holds true for drama. When spectators enter a fictional world, their very presence changes what they observe. Proof of this concept is everywhere in a busy New York fall season that is fostering deeper connections between playwrights and their attentive public.
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Universal Music Group is investing $80 million for a stake in one of India’s biggest Bollywood production companies, Excel Entertainment Pvt.
Universal Music India, a division of Universal Music Group, will acquire a 30% equity interest in the Mumbai-based movie studio. In the deal, announced Monday, the companies will work together on forthcoming films, series, music and emerging formats.
While getting involved in India’s local film industry, Universal Music will also now receive global distribution rights for all future original soundtracks attached to projects produced or owned by Excel. There are also future plans for the companies to launch an Excel-linked music label that will allow UMG and Universal Music India artists to appear in various Excel titles.
The investment underscores the rapid growth in the Indian entertainment industry.
India is the 15th-largest recorded-music market globally.
Founded by producers Ritesh Sidhwani and Farhan Akhtar in 1999, Excel is responsible for making over 40 different films and scripted shows. Its most popular titles include “Dil Chahta Hai,” “Don” and “Talaash.” The company is currently valued at approximately $290 million.
“India’s entertainment landscape continues to grow from strength to strength, and this is the perfect moment to build meaningful global collaborations,” said Sidhwani and Akhtar in a joint statement. “Together, we aim to take culturally rooted stories to the world.”
Universal Music Group, with its corporate headquarters in the Netherlands and another office in Santa Monica, was founded in 1996. The music giant behind artists like Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish is valued at roughly $48 billion on the U.S. stock market, with shares selling around $25.80.
UNTIL DAWN is nicely shot and paced well, with believable performances. However, the movie has a strong humanist worldview featuring gruesome violence, lots of strong foul language, and excessive gore. The violence includes psychopathic killers, people spontaneously exploding, stabbings, kidnapping, demonic possession, and more. The frequent dying over and over in the plot of UNTIL DAWN puts the sanctity of life into question. It forces the characters to conduct abhorrent and unacceptable immoral actions for survival.
Dominant Worldview and Other Worldview Content/Elements:
Strong humanist worldview that twists the concept of modern psychology into a supernatural hellscape with unexplained time loops and reoccurring nightmarish horror filled with excessive violence and gore, but with unexplained pagan supernatural elements (such as a storm circling a house, the appearance of more buildings, the time loop itself, and many more), the time loop perverts the laws of mortality and implies that the consequences of violence, murder, suicide, etc., don’t apply, the psychologist controlling the time loop discusses the situation with modern psychology in vague circles meant to confuse and disorient the nature of the reality in which the victims are trapped, religion or God is not explicitly discussed, but there’s an unexplained cross in front of a house that isn’t explained and a character references the belief that a possessed person cannot become possessed through contact but rather weakness of faith, and some occult content where one woman is a self-described psychic and is into “woo-woo” stuff as another character describes it, she tries to amplify her psychic abilities with help from the others by holding hands and meditation, and she often has strong feelings and seems to have a sense the others do not have, but no worship or symbols are shown, plus a girl dating a guy is said to have previously dated a girl as well as other men;
Foul Language:
At least 101 obscenities (including 62 “f” words), two strong profanities mentioning the name of Jesus, and four light profanities;
Violence:
Very severe violence and gratuitous blood and gore throughout including but not limited to dead bodies, monsters, scarred masked psychopath, stabbing, beating, and people spontaneously exploding;
Sex:
No sex shown, but a person puts on a VHS tape and a pornographic movie is heard playing briefly but not shown, and a woman is said to date a lot of people and one time dated another woman;
Nudity:
No nudity;
Alcohol Use:
No alcohol use;
Smoking and/or Drug Use and Abuse:
No smoking or drugs; and,
Miscellaneous Immorality:
A psychologist is a callous antagonist whose motives are relatively unknown beyond having a morbid curiosity that led to awful experiments and playing games with other people, he purposely keeps people trapped for no known reason other than his sick and twisted observations that end in gruesome murder and unnecessary torture.
One year after her sister Melanie vanished without a trace, Clover and her friends look to find more information about her disappearance. Clues lead them to an abandoned mining town. This place of unimaginable horrors traps them all in a horrifying time loop where they will be murdered again and again.
UNTIL DAWN is nicely shot and paced well, with believable performances, but it has a strong humanist worldview overall with some occult elements is filled with gruesome violence, gore, lots of strong foul language, and a time loop that leads to an increasing amount of horrific murder and unacceptable immoral actions for survival.
The movie begins with a woman named Melanie clawing her way through the dirt with an unknown monster chasing after her. Digging her way out, she looks up to a masked psychopath standing over her with a scythe. She begs him, “No! Please not again. I can’t!” He fatally stabs her without a thought. It cuts to the main title, and an hourglass is shown with a ticking clock sound and unsettling music.
Cut to a group pf people in a red car driving up a winding mountain, an obvious nod to THE SHINING. It’s been one year after Clover’s sister Melanie vanished without a trace. The group consists of Max, Nina, Megan, Abe, and Clover. Shortly after their mother died, Melanie had decided to start a new life in New York. Clover decided to stay, which created tension between the sisters before Melanie left.
Clover and her friends are looking for more information about her disappearance. Their last stop is the last place she was seen in a video message taken in front of a middle-of-nowhere gas station. Megan, a proclaimed psychic, wants to join hands outside and see if they can feel any mystical energy regarding Melanie. Their attempt is cut short when an RV blares its horn and almost hits them, scaring them all.
Clover goes inside the gas station for a cup of coffee while the others talk outside. Clover asks the man behind the register if he worked here last year. After confirming he’s been working there for years, she shows him a picture of Melanie from the video. He asks if she was missing and clarifies saying that Clover is not the first to come asking. When she asks if many people around here go missing, he says people “get in trouble” in Glore Valley. As their only lead, the group decides to go there and stick together.
Nervously driving to the valley in an increasingly dangerous storm, the group begins to question what they are doing. Suddenly the storm stops but is still raging behind them. They park in front of a house with a “Welcome Center” sign, with the storm circling around the area but leaving the house dry. Confused, they get out of the car and look around. Nina decides to see if there’s anyone inside so they can come up with a plan. Everyone goes in except Clover, who walks up to the strange rain wall.
Inside the house, they find a dated and dusty interior. The power and water don’t work, and they conclude that they are the first people to come there in years. There is a strange hourglass with a skull on the wall. Checking the guest book, Nina finds Melanie’s name signed multiple times, with increasingly shaky handwriting. In another room, Abe finds many missing posters with faces on a bulletin board and finds poster with Melanie’s face.
Outside, Clover thinks she sees a person in the rain. She also hears Melanie’s voice and runs after it. Concerned, Max calls after her and he pulls her back in. As Nina signs the guestbook, the sun suddenly sets and the clock starts ticking.
Inside the house now with the hourglass turned over, they try to understand what’s happening. The car is out in the rain now with someone revving the engine threateningly. Some of them go to the dark basement, where the lights don’t work. There is an eerie sense of dread as Abe goes to check out a noise, and Nina finds a scarred and masked psychopath standing in a room as the top half of Abe’s body falls to the ground.
Hearing the commotion upstairs, the others go to see what happened and Max spots the killer. They run to hide, and the apparently invincible psychopath horrifically stabs each of them as they try to fight back. The sand in the hourglass runs back, as each character returns to where they were when Nina originally signed the book (she now signs it a second time). They remember what had just taken place, and how they were all murdered. Clearly stuck in this time loop escape room situation, they will now have to figure out how to escape this terrifying hellscape as the situations get worse with every loop.
UNTIL DAWN is nicely shot and paced well, with believable performances. However, the movie has a strong humanist worldview featuring gruesome violence, lots of strong foul language, and excessive gore. The violence includes psychopathic killers, people spontaneously exploding, stabbings, kidnapping, demonic possession, and more. The frequent dying over and over in the plot puts the sanctity of life into question. It forces the characters to conduct abhorrent and unacceptable immoral actions for survival.
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