THE NEW YORK THEATER SEASON is in full swing now, with five Broadway shows having opened since Labor Day and 10 more to come before we ring in the new year. Here are the five best things I saw on the New York stage last month, on Broadway and off.
Glenn Close raising a teenage girl who wants to save France in “Mother of the Maid” at the Public. Stockard Channing regretting some of her own parental choices in “Apologia” at the Laura Pels. Mare Winningham and a whole slew of talents turning Bob Dylan’s solos into grand group numbers at a Depression-era boardinghouse. And a stellar British cast in “The Ferryman,” the latest hit from London. And then there was a workshop production called “Women on Fire.”
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MOTHER OF THE MAID
Off Broadway, Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, publictheater.org. 2 hours 10 minutes. Limited run: Closes on Dec. 23.
THE GOODBYE GIRL Going off to battle in her new menswear, Joan of Arc (Grace Van Patten) reassures her mother (Glenn Close) that everything will be all right.
WHAT I LOVE MOST about Jane Anderson’s script for “Mother of the Maid,” which is the big Glenn Close star vehicle at the Public Theater now, is how contemporary and how historically authentic it seems at the same time.
“Well, get your head screwed on straight!” Dad yells at his daughter. Mom asks, “Do they know about the vision thing?” Joan’s brother calls the Dauphin (soon to be Charles VII) “a little wonky.” And everybody uses “fuckin’” as a casual adjective.
A FOOT BATH AND A PITCHER OF MEAD The court knows how to make a proper fuss over the mom of the army’s new superstar. From left, Kate Jennings Grant (now replaced by Kelley Curran), Olivia Gilliatt and Close.
Behavior rings true too. After Isabelle Arc (Close) has walked 300 miles to visit her daughter, now living at court, the Lady of the Court (now played by the excellent and sweetly sincere Kelley Curran, whom I saw), wearing a brocade gown, makes a huge fuss over her. Maybe the floor-length hem of Isabelle’s dress is crusted with mud, but she is immediately brought a soothing foot bath and a pitcher of mead (served in glass cups, which astounds and delights her).
The second-best scene of that kind: Now that Joan is a big-deal military hero and celebrity, her parents — Close and Dermot Crowley — are invited to a castle celebration. They’re put up in a particularly glamorous room (with super-high ceilings and tapestries on the walls) and invited to the most glamorous buffet of all time. They might as well be the new country-music sensation’s small-town Georgia parents staying at the Bellagio in Vegas. Joan comes to the party in full armor, because that’s what the royals asked her to do.
DANIEL PEARCE PLAYS both the royal scribe (in photo, with his high-tech writing box) and Father Gilbert, the village priest who persuades the Arcs to let Joan leave home. (At one point, Dad has suggested chaining her to the bed to stop her.) “Her role will be symbolic” in the war, Father Gilbert assures them. Mom, who had hoped Joan’s visions of St. Catherine meant she’d become a nun (as if, says the daughter), is now convinced. Dad isn’t, and Mom refers pleadingly to “this one bit of wonder that’s come our way.”
As Joan leaves, in the men’s clothing she insists on wearing now, Mom rationalizes herself into conviction. Joan is “so confident, so capable,” she marvels. “I raised an extraordinary young woman.” Dad’s opinion: “Court is for the boot lickers.”
Things go tragically wrong, of course, and in the later scenes Joan is imprisoned in England, accused of heresy. Charles VII has turned on her, refusing to pay her ransom. The hometown priest makes excuses about God’s will or somesuch.
SWORDSWOMAN Joan shows off for her brother (Andrew Hovelson).
SPOILER ALERT: JOAN DOES DIE at the stake. Her mother is determined to save her (“We’ll get our Joanie back”) and urges her to recant (“You made her up,” she insists, referring to St. Catherine). But in the end, Isabelle lies to her — well, everybody else has — in what seems a kindness but surely turned out to be a horror. She tells Joan, condemned to be burned alive, that St. Catherine has appeared to her and assured her that “You’re not going to feel any pain.”
Is it wrong of me to say that Isabelle reminded me of my mother? Well, I suppose plenty of women have told misguided lies, pretended their religious faith and warned their daughters not to work in low light for the sake of their eyes.
IT’S YOUR FAULT That our daughter had religious visions, went off to war and may die. Dermot Crowley and Close are a long-married couple who turn on each other.
THE REAL ISABELLE was 28 when Joan was born and would have been in her 40s when her daughter left home. It seems a good guess that she looked about the same age as Close does at 71, even deglamorized for the role.
Anderson, the playwright, also wrote the Emmy-winning drama “Olive Kitteridge” and Close’s most recent film, “The Wife.” The very able director is Matthew Penn, who worked on Close’s series “Damages.”
John Lee Beatty’s set is understated and perfect, from the rich wooden picnic tables and benches at the family home to the castle’s fleur de lis wall covering and the modest royal staircase flanked by mountains of candles. Joan descends it in a white gown, and her mother gasps.
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APOLOGIA
Off Broadway. Laura Pels Theater, 111 West 46th Street, Theater District, roundabouttheatre.org. 2 hours 15 minutes. Limited run: Closes on Dec. 16.
DINNER AND DRINKS From left, Megalyn Echikunwoke, John Tillinger, Talene Monahon, Hugh Dancy and Stockard Channing in “Apologia.” Ms. Echikunwoke’s glamorous dress cost her character £2,000.
OH, STOCKARD CHANNING, rock on! In “Apologia,” Channing plays Kristin Miller, an American (“By birth, not by choice,” she announces in the first scene — and you know she’s said that a thousand times) who decades ago made a new life in London. As the play begins, it’s her birthday and the oven won’t work.
EXPATRIATE Stockard Channing as an art historian living in London and having a bad birthday.
If only that were her biggest problem!. In maturity (she has two grown sons), she is alone — but, as her birthday dinner approaches, maybe not alone enough.
Here’s her son Peter (Hugh Dancy), who has brought his new girlfriend, Trudi (Talene Monahon, in photo with Dancy). It’s odd enough that Trudi has brought Kristin an ugly African tribal mask as a birthday gift, but the real shocker is the revelation that the young couple met at a prayer meeting. Peter is a newly minted born-again Christian.
It seems safe to infer that Kristin does not hold traditional religious beliefs. “The word prayer on its own is bad enough,” she says at one point.
They are joined by Hugh (the effortlessly majestic John Tillinger), a character who is drawn so sketchily that two friends and I debated his identity during intermission, and Claire (Megalyn Echikunwoke), the actress girlfriend of Kristin’s other son. (Hugh, by the way, turns out to be the gay best friend.)
Problems arise and are either solved or mourned. Because of the broken oven, a restaurant seafood dinner is delivered promptly, with Hugh convinced that there’s a fingernail in “the mushy peas.” Everyone considers the television series Claire appears in to be a soap; she doesn’t and is quite offended by the idea. Just after she’s bragged — or confessed (she seems torn) — that the gorgeous dress she’s wearing cost L2,000 (close to $2,600), someone spills red wine on it. A lot of red wine.
DEAD RINGER Dancy plays both of the lead character’s sons, Peter and Simon.
Ben Brantley’s review in The New York Times said it well: “Mr. Campbell is posing exciting and enduringly relevant questions here, about the price for women of achieving and sustaining professional success in a male-dominated world that sees motherhood as sacred. If Kristin has become a monster, she has perhaps had little choice.”
We learn that Kristin’s sons, Peter and Simon, felt abandoned by her when their parents divorced. There’s a long, sad story about her visiting them in Florence and one son’s being left alone for many hours at a train station. At the moment, though, the boys are more upset that Mom has just written a memoir and didn’t mention them.
The throbbing dark heart of “Apologia,” though, is the haunting beginning of Act II. Kristin and her other son, Simon (also played by Dancy), are seated at the dining table in near darkness. The lighting design — low, moody and seductively detail-obfuscating in this scene — is by Bradley King.
So Simon has indeed shown up at some point for the birthday party. But he has bits of broken glass in his arm, and his mother is carefully removing them as they talk — about everything and nothing. Masterly symbolism!
There is not a weak link in the five-member cast, although of course Channing is almost supernaturally magnetic. The playwright, Alexi Kaye Campbell (yes, that’s Mr. Campbell, as Ben Brantley said), also wrote “The Pride.” The director is Daniel Aukin, whose work has included “Admissions” and “Bad Jews.” The set design is by Dane Lafrey, whose work for “Once on This Island” was very different.
I wonder if the play’s condemnation (disguised as the protagonist’s self-condemnation) of its lead character is fair, but I’ll need to see it in revival to decide for sure.
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GIRL FROM THE NORTH COUNTRY
Off Broadway. Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, East Village, publictheatre.org. 2 hours and 30 minutes. Limited run: Closes on Dec. 23. .
BOARDINGHOUSE BREACH Mare Winningham and Stephen Bogardus as a couple separated by her mental illness in “Girl From the North Country.”
THE FIRST THING I should have done before seeing “Girl From the North Country” was to look up Bob Dylan’s birthdate. The minute the production announced that this was Duluth, Minn., in 1934, I kept waiting for little Bobby Zimmerman (Dylan) to be born. It never happened. Probably because Dylan was born in 1941.
So I don’t know why Conor McPherson, the brilliant Irish dramatist who wrote and directed this gloriously gloomy musical (music and lyrics by Dylan over the years). Maybe he just needed the Depression era in America to set the proper mood.
Nick and Elizabeth Laine (Stephen Bogardus and Mare Winningham) run a boardinghouse. Or rather he does now, because Elizabeth has retreated into what looks and sounds like schizophrenia. It’s not clear how much she hears of what goes on around her, but people often talk as if she isn’t there. Including Mrs. Nielsen (Jeanette Bayardelle), with whom Nick is having an affair. Mrs. Nielsen is waiting for some money from a legal settlement. Want to lay bets on whether it ever arrives?
MINNESOTA SATURDAY NIGHT, 1934 Todd Almond takes over the microphone for one of the show’s 20 musical numbers, all written over the decades by Bob Dylan.
THE BURKES (MARC KUDISCH and Luba Mason) have a grown son, Elias (Todd Almond), who is brain-damaged and childlike. Their lives have come to focus on keeping him out of trouble. The Lanes’ daughter, Marianne (Kimber Sprawl, in photo, with Sydney James Harcourt), is unmarried and pregnant — by a man who has long ago moved on. And the minister who turns up (David Pittu) is a blackmailer. There are just too many complications to go into.
But here’s the thing. How many times have you heard “Like a Rolling Stone”? Did you ever think how it might sound as a bold, powerful group number? Apparently, McPherson did, because that’s what he gives us “Girl From the North Country” has a cast of 17, and sometimes they’re all onstage together, swelling the sound. You’ve never been asked “How does it feel?” with more power before.
EVERY HOUSE HAD A PIANO Luba Mason, in red, plays the mother of a brain-damaged son.
There are 20 Dylan songs in the show, ranging from “I Want You” (from “Blonde on Blonde”) to “Went to See the Gypsy” (“New Morning”) and the heart-wrenching finale, from “Planet Waves”: “Forever Young.” But no one dast call this a jukebox musical, not with these deeply feeling characters and such moody stagecraft. Solos grow into group numbers. Actors play musical instruments. And the audience (at least the one I saw this production with) knows not to applaud after every musical number. It’s not that kind of show.
The scenic design — a dark, bare, rustic house that feels like the Depression deified — is by Rae Smith. And who would have guessed — when we saw “St. Elmo’s Fire” in the movie theater 33 years ago — that the breakout stage star of the Brat Pack would be Winningham?
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THE FERRYMAN
Broadway, Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, 242 West 45th Street, Theater District, theferrymanbroadway.com. 3 hours and 15 minutes. Two intermissions. Limited run: Closes on Feb. 17, 2019.
WHAT’S GOOD FOR THE GOOSE Paddy Considine, center, and feathered friend in Jez Butterworth’s “The Ferryman.”
“The Ferryman” doesn’t need a Press Nights review to be a sweeping Broadway success. The Daily Beast called it "a rollicking, moving, enveloping masterpiece.” In her Variety review, Marilyn Stasio went even further: “Glorious is not too strong a word.” Ben Brantley of The New York Times made the comparison few critics dare, referring to “exuberantly full individual scenes of a number and richness rarely seen outside of Shakespeare..”
You’ve got a stage full of a large, opinionated, country-eloquent Irish family — one member in diapers, one in a wheelchair and all the decades in between — directed by Sam Mendes and delivering a script by Jez Butterworth (“Jerusalem”) that had already won almost every theater award in London, including the Olivier.
TALES TO TELL Fionnula Flanagan and Mark Lambert at home.
SO I’LL SAY ONLY that “The Ferryman” is set in a huge Irish farmhouse at harvest time in 1981, the year the hunger strikers started dying. That the plot-driving news is about Seamus, the brother of the head of the household, Quinn Carney (Paddy Considine), Seamus, who disappeared 10 years ago, has been found — his body, that is — in a peat bog. Now Caitlin (Laura Donnelly) finally knows she’s really a widow. And while Act I and Act II are solid, rich, entertaining and dramatically expert, the brilliance and the great surprise are in Act III. That’s when the local I.R.A. guy (Stuart Graham) pays a visit.
In the middle of it all, there’s a live goose onstage — and a real baby (in photo with Genevieve O’Reilly). Four babies take turns in the role (I saw the flawless Theo Ward Dunsmore). One presumes they have to recast every few months.
There are tales of banshees and of non-mythological terrors. It must mean something that the stairs are so intimidatingly steep. (Scenic design by Rob Howell.) There’s a marriage proposal. So much is so heartfelt. The old people — like Aunt Maggie (the grand Fionnula Flanagan), who remembers being “struck cross-eyed with lust” at age 10 — are just as interesting as the young folk.
A FAVOR HE CAN’T REFUSE Stuart Graham and Considine in Act III.
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WOMEN ON FIRE
Royal Family Productions. Off Off Broadway workshop. 145 West 46th Street.
One last thing: “Women on Fire,” from Royal Family Productions, was a two-performance workshop that I saw up some steep stairs in the West 40s. I went because Kathleen Chalfant, whom I have never seen give a bad performance, was in it. The show had a definite theme: women’s lives in the age of Trump.
The Trump administration has inspired a good bit of theater so far, most of it quite unflattering and some of it just cathartic. That’s better than nothing. But “Women on Fire” offers us catharsis, identification, sympathy and determination too, and I hope that we’ll see it again. But I hope even more that when we do, it will be in a “Wow, that was close!” state of mind in a post-Trump world.
O.K., it’s a bit of a political screed. But that’s what they said about Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart” 30-something years ago, and look at it now.