Three Plays in NYC

On a recent trip to New York City, I sampled some current theater, both on- and off-Broadway. Off-Broadway theater has been very slow to recover post-COVID, as attendance has dropped, key personnel left the city, and some companies lost their lease at small theaters. Historically, the New Group has been among the healthiest of these smaller companies, often featuring established stars performing in unusual, or self-written plays. On this visit I saw Sabbath’s Theater, a theatrical reworking of Philip Roth’s novel of the same name, starring (and co-written by) John Turturro, film and stage star of Quiz Show, Severance, and Barton Fink. It’s centered on a horny 64-year-old ex-puppeteer who beds numerous women and has an existential crisis. I like Roth better when he does not obsess on the theme of oversexed middle aged men. While this is not one of my favorite Roth novels, I looked forward to seeing what a theatrical rewrite could do with it. Not much, it turns out. This play was unfailingly loyal to the book, and added little new insight to it. Worse, it maintained lots of third-person narrative spoken by the characters themselves, apparently because the worshipful co-writers wanted to maintain as many of Roth’s actual words as possible. So while the play was raunchy, the book was raunchier (our imagination works better sometimes). This seemed more like an altar to Roth than a compelling play, despite Turturro’s committed performance. 

A current hot ticket on-Broadway is Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along, famous as a rare Sondheim flop closing after only 16 performances in 1981. This production is the first in NY to make the musical a success, and I found the show fascinating, if not always entertaining. The musical follows three friends, starting in 1976 and moving sequentially backwards in time to when the three met in in 1957. While flashbacks to younger versions of characters are common in film and theater (eg Back to the Future, 17 Again), this play is unusual in running in strict reverse chronology. We learn at the very start that the three friends have grown apart…one is Frank Shepard, a famed theatrical director now sold-out to Hollywood and hosting a swanky Malibu party. Another is Mary, an alcoholic film critic who has had an unfulfilled crush on Frank for years. The last is Charley, formerly Frank’s creative partner, but now a Pulitzer-winning playwright who has stuck to his creative vision and has not sold out as Frank did. Charley is not at the party, so we do not even meet him until the second scene.

The structure of the play is intriguing, as it poses questions about its characters, then later answers some of them with the back-history as we move earlier in time. This is sometimes frustrating, but ultimately satisfying. What’s great about the musical is that, reflecting the plot, the music sounds from the 1970’s at the opening, and more from the late 50’s at the end, as the optimistic young friends look forward to their life. So Sondheim uses his music to echo both 1970s cynicism and 1950’s naivety. The set décor also moved backwards as the play progressed. While none of the songs was particularly memorable, the score featured lots of classic Sondheim counterpoint and complexity, played by a 12-piece orchestra suspended above the stage in view of the audience. The cast was strong, particularly Jonathon Groff’s versatile Frank (center, above) who conveyed the reverse transition from creep to idealist well. Harry Potter’s Daniel Radcliffe played the geeky Charley well, even without a true Broadway voice. I’m really glad I saw this, as it reminded me of Sondheim’s brilliance and how he reworked the musical into something for thinking people.

My most enjoyable evening was seeing the play Purlie Victorious (A non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch), a play by Ossie Davis (1917-2005) that premiered in Broadway in 1961, and has astonishingly not been revived on Broadway until now. This is a crackling black (and Black) comedy set in the Jim Crow South, as poor sharecroppers scheme to deceive and hoodwink their white racist “boss” in the mid-20th century. It’s a remarkable play from the early civil rights era, when many US Black people had not yet achieved any measure of equality. ML King is referred to, but his name now evokes far more meaning and emotion from the larger public than it would have at the play’s debut. What is brilliant about the play is how it can enchant us, amuse us, and horrify us, all within a short 90-minute single act. Leslie Odom, Jr. (Aaron Burr in Hamilton) was virtuosic as the complex lead who wants to be a role model for other Blacks but has difficulty constraining his smoldering anger over racism.

Better educated than the other sharecroppers, he tries to lead the others with “maturity” but fails in the face of the evil he sees around him. Tight direction and a consistently outstanding cast make this a must-see play if you are in NYC, or if it is performed in your area in the next few years. More than most of the newer plays by Black playwrights that are now all the rage, this one somehow made me reflect, get angry, and laugh at the same time.