By Doug Strassler

Of all the scenes that will emblazon themselves upon the heart, as many in Sans Merci, the deeply affecting new Johnna Adams play that just opened at the Fourth Street Theater, will, the one that lingers the most is a silent one. It’s an emotional excavation of sorts, as two women linked by a third, absent one, comb through Tracy, the missing woman’s, things. One is Tracy’s mother, Elizabeth (Susan Ferrara), sorting through a knapsack of personal items; the other, Kelly (Rachel Hip-Flores), is sorting Tracy’s clothes on the couch. And without saying a single word, Ferrara and Hip-Flores conduct one of the most moving duets to be found onstage.

Merci traces how the woman got to this point, at both the micro and macro level. College students Kelly and Tracy (a winning Alisha Spielmann) were traveling in a Colombian village to help the U’wa Indians organize against an American oil company when they were attacked. Tracy was killed, and Kelly was left to detail with brutal physical and emotional scarring. Several years hence, Elizabeth, struggling in her own way, has shown up – uninvited – on Kelly’s doorstep to have some questions answered.

What I love about Adams’s script is how often it avoids cliché. Elizabeth and Kelly don’t hold on to dialogue that might be delivered at a more climactic point, because that isn’t how human beings talk; instead, they say what they need to say in the moment. Merci is further helped by top-nothc direction from Heather Cohn, who has demonstrated in previous Flux Theatre Ensemble works an uncanny ability to work within the limited space and resources of Off-Off-Broadway without sacrificing the emotional arc of her story nor the professionalism of her richly talented cast.

All of which is assuredly on display in Merci, which, true to its title (derived Keats’ poem, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”), does not hold back. In fact, even in the overwritten portions of the play, Cohn’s cast of three comes through. I wish Spielmann had a bit more flashback material with which Tracy could befriend and become intimate with Kelly, but she makes every moment count, allowing the audience to see this young, repressed girl’s eyes opening up to new worlds and possibilities. Hip-Flores is also strong and moving throughout, carefully navigating the play’s transitions between her younger, more carefree self and the older, grief- and guilt-stricken one locked in a tug-of-war with Elizabeth. Ferrara, meanwhile, is a revelation. Every moment of stillness is as rich as her every line of dialogue, which ache with hurt and a lack of understanding. (Janie Bullard’s sound design and Kia Rogers’ lighting design also help with establishing both mood and setting, of past and present.)

Merci – which ran for nearly two uninterrupted hours on the night I saw it – could stand a little trimming; Adams doesn’t always seem to trust her own audience to intuit the strength of Tracy and Kelly’s connection, even in death. But when this stark material works, it works wonders. Healing may be impossible, Merci says, but Adams’ script, and the masterful production Cohn has wrung from it, Cohn’s masterful production that comes from it, show what we need to hold on to in life to cope with loss.

Sans Merci
Fourth Street Theatre, 83 East Fourth Street (between Bowery and Second Avenue). www.fluxtheatre.org

By Doug Strassler

Photo by Ayumi Sakamoto

Real-life married couple Jake Margolin and Nick Vaughn conceived of A Marriage: 1 (Suburbia), an integrated work of performance art about the trials and tribulations of marriage. The show utilizes the entirety of HERE Arts Center – including hallways, dressing rooms, even restrooms – and such forms as video, sculpture, and drawings to document modern married life as they know it. New York Press discussed this irreverent show with the two.

How and how long ago did you two meet?

JM and NV: We met in 2006, working when Nick started working with the TEAM as a designer and Jake as a performer/writer. We still both work with the TEAM but we started making our own work together in the fall of 2007. Our first installation, at Pittsburgh’s Future Tenant Gallery, was created as a partner piece to the environment that we co-designed for (S)even, choreographed by Pavel Zustiak (Palissimo) for Pittsburgh’s LABCO Dance. That was where we started laying the groundwork for the collaboration that has continued until now.

What led you to determine to do a multimedia performance about marriage?

JM and NV: It’s sort of a two-part question, so . . . addressing the second part first, I don’t think we initially set out to make a piece about ‘marriage.’ When we actually started this project it was called Vietnam, Texas, and was about the oddity of the suburbs, of these strange isolated enclaves that are so deeply tied to the American Dream. And the deeper we got in the project, the more we realized that essentially we were trying to understand our place within that iconography, and that our ‘frame’ on the whole thing, as a same-sex married couple was really at the core of the work. Since then, the project has continued to develop and we’ve sketched out the beginnings of A Marriage: 2 (West-er) and A Marriage: 3 (50 States), each of which take on other particularly American iconographies.

As for the multi-media performance, I think all of our work develops in some way tangentially. We’ll start working within a given form, say, cut paper or print making, and as we work through ideas, suddenly we’ll find something that doesn’t fit anymore, and really demands to be handled as a video piece. Then working through that idea we’ll stumble across something else that really works better as a live performance, or a sculpture. Ultimately, we’re trying to make material/media decisions based on the content, which by its very nature ends up as a multimedia performance.

Could you explain a bit more about what HEREart does, and how you have found the many artists with whom you have worked?

JM and NV: We should differentiate between HERE, HEREart and HARP. HERE is this amazing arts center with a mission to commission, develop and produce hybrid performance work (theater/music/dance etc.). HEREart refers to the visual arts programming at HERE (including a stand-alone program of gallery exhibitions) and HARP is the HERE Artist Residency Program, which is a 1-3 year residency that supports the development of new hybrid work.

A Marriage: 1 (Suburbia) is a confluence of both the performance and the gallery programming. As HARP artists for the last three years we’ve been surrounded with a community of some of the most adventurous, exciting, and boundary pushing artists in New York, and that community and the feedback we’ve gotten from being a part of it has had a tremendous influence on our work.

How much of the “story” of the performance is autobiographical, and how much is fictional?

JM and NV: It’s handy that you put “story” in quotation marks, because there is no traditional narrative in the performance events that go along with the exhibition. There are several narrative strands in the rest of the installation (video works, some sound installations) which are mostly derived from the writing of Jessica Almasy and collectively paint a portrait of one fictional cul-de-sac, and in one video piece in particular you’ll see Jake and I trying on these identities, sort-of wearing them like clothing. There are also some documentary elements in the piece, including a series of interviews we conducted with some seminal queer performance artists and active participants in queer issues, as well as an accumulative sculpture created by reading the entire 13 days of testimony from Perry v. Schwarzenegger into plastic bags.

That said, the performance work while non-narrative is autobiographical in that (while abstract) it attempts to invite viewers to look through our eyes at the iconography of the traditional “American Dream” and it’s our hope that we present ourselves in a very direct and honest way. We like to talk about it as if we’re inviting the audience into our ‘workshop’ as we attempt to figure out how we fit into the American Dream.

Do you find there are specific challenges to same-sex marriage that differ from male-female marriage? What might they be?

JM and NV: I don’t know exactly if ‘challenges’ is the right word, but there seems to be a difference. One point of discussion that’s come up multiple times with multiple people is that same-sex marriage is (or could be positioned as) a direct attack on ‘traditional’ marriage, in that it suggests a partnership that is, by it’s very nature, free of the baggage of gender roles, resulting power structures, property implications and all the other questionable aspects of ‘traditional’ marriage. That queer marriage actually has the potential to reinvigorate and redefine straight marriage for the better.

Having just written that, there is a danger (challenge?) in the Marriage Equality debate though. There’s a danger in (and I/we say this as a married couple) buying into a system blindly. As Lisa Kron so eloquently says in the interviews section of the piece, (and we paraphrase here) it is a cause of concern when right wing politicians are suddenly jumping on the bandwagon of Marriage Equality as a sort-of token while simultaneously trying to dismantle the voting rights act. I think we have to remain vigilant to keep marriage equality from subsuming/coopting broader human rights issues.

Further information can be found at http://here.org/shows/detail/1165/.

Actors Don DiPaolo and Neil Holland and director Sam Helfrich, of theater company Knife Edge Productions, reunite after 2011’s successful run of the Stephen Belber show Tape with the new production of Owned. Penned by another major playwright, Drama Desk nominee Julian Sheppard, Owned takes a look at two down-on-their-luck bartenders (played by DiPaolo and Holland) who make a play for the brass ring. The play opens at TBG Theatre on April 26. New York Press spoke with all four members of the creative team about Owned, staying truthful to material, and the importance of working with friends.

NYP: Where did the idea for Owned originate?

NH: After the success Don, Sam and I had collaborating with each other on a revival of Stephen Belber’s Tape, we knew we made an amazing team and wanted to work together again. We decided that the next step would be to work on a brand new play. After interviewing several playwrights and reading their plays, we decided that Julian Sheppard was a great match for us, and commissioned him to write us a play.

JS: I wanted to find a venue for Neil and Don to be comfortable, to be buddies, but to have room for real conflict. I had landed on it wanting to be some kind of work-a-day job, but wanted to stay away from a “day job” conceit. The last thing I wanted to do was write a play for two actors who were working day jobs while being struggling actors. I had been batting around a bar scenario as one of the possibilities, when a friend of mine told me a story one night about an old friend of his who had been a bartender, and whom had gotten involved in buying a bar and some things that had gone haywire and mistakes that had been made… and it really gave me focus.

 How long did it take to work on it?

JS: I think I started writing early 2012. I had to go on and off a little bit because of other projects, so the first draft took a little longer than it might have otherwise. From there, we did a couple of very useful readings, in the fall, and then again late winter, which prompted rewrites. One of the pleasures of this process – and lures of the project to begin with – was that we didn’t do endless development and there weren’t workshop hurdles to jump through. We had to raise the money – but the play was going to be produced. That was a tremendous motivator and a very freeing feeling.

How much of the play echoes your actual beliefs in modern life and people’s status in it?

NH: A good amount. Julian spent a good amount of time getting to know each of us. We talked a good amount about what issues we are sensitive to, and different aspects of our lives. So, in many ways I can see myself in this play. Not necessarily in direct parallels, but there in very obvious ways to me nonetheless.

DD: These people are people I know and see. They are real people that are just trying to survive and get their piece of the pie. Like all of us.

SH: I think more than echoing my personal beliefs, the play is an accurate and poignant depiction of contemporary characters who feel authentic and whose struggles and shortcomings – and their attempts to overcome them – are easily identifiable.

JS: I think there are certain things that are hard to escape; I also think class creates sometimes invisible rungs on a ladder that can appear much higher than it seems when you start climbing it. However, the problems the characters face and the crises for them in the play are ultimately matters of personal flaws and not societal. All the characters Have opportunities to escape the failings they’re afraid they’ve inherited. Whether or not they’re able to is up to them, and not how their statuses are constructed.

Without giving too much away, do those of you involved with the show think you might react similarly to these characters given their circumstances?

NH: Yes and no. There are certainly many aspects of the play in which I probably would have similar reactions. Probably most specifically when it comes to my character’s reaction to some things he is feeling regarding the female character [played by Susannah Hoffman]. And for me, that is actually pretty cool, because it is something I am aware of in my own personal life and am trying to work on.

DD: I would say yes. For me they are familiar emotions and circumstances. Everyone is trying to find their place in this world.

SH: For me as the director, what I admire about the play is that the characters are complex and not easy to categorize (i.e. good/bad, dumb/smart, naive/worldy, etc). All of them, even the youngest, have already made many mistakes in life, which makes them very human and sympathetic, and it will be a mystery to discover who each individual audience member most relates to among the three.

How much fun was it to create and recite this dialogue?

JS: At the risk of being glib, so much fun. It was a treat writing for two specific actors, and incorporating their rhythms, habits, perspective and life stories into the play. From the beginning it made the dialogue pop and flow for me. I could always imagine Don and Neil saying the lines, so I had a kind of automatic litmus test for if it ‘felt’ right.

NH: Reciting the dialogue was a blast. I have some great lines, some great monologues. To just be able to play and discover new things, new meanings, in every rehearsal is exciting.

DD: Learning dialogue is always a process that isn’t always fun but once you learn it, it’s like having hand cuffs taken off of you. You’re free and the fun really starts and it makes the process all worth it.

Things escalate very quickly in Owned. How challenging is it to ratchet up the tension?

NH: It’s not easy. For me, it’s just about personalizing it and making it as specific and real for myself as possible. Sam is fantastic at setting things up and really finding the ways to dramatize the tension, which really helps me as an actor.

DD: Great question. It’s challenging to make it real and believable. I always go back to life. If it looks or feels similar to what I’ve experienced in real life than I know I’m on the right track.

SH: The challenge for me has been to communicate to the audience just how important the events of the play are to each individual character, so that the audience experience is one of believing in and feeling for characters who, in this moment, are living the most extreme moment of their lives – the moment in which your dream either comes true or
it doesn’t.

And is it easier to deliver some of these exchanges being real-life friends who have worked together in the past?

NH: Absolutely. Don and I are very good friends. We’ve known each other for nine years now, dating back to when we first met at The William Esper Studio. So there is a good amount of comfort and trust with each other. We know we have each other’s back, and that just really allows us to go for it with no fear.

DD: Definitely. Neil and I are such good friends and we have worked together before so it’s very comfortable but not in a lazy way. He is so good that I’m always surprised by him and this keeps it fresh. I think Owned can be a great American play that stands the test of time. A play that will be done for years and have its scenes be done
throughout acting classes. Which is always a good sign of a great play.

Tickets for Owned can be purchased at www.knifedgeproductions.com.

Photo by Ryan Miller/Capture Imaging

Daniel Talbott’s ‘Slipping’ is the first LA production for the NYC company

The Off-Broadway theatre community isn’t a geographical location as much as a mental one, a notion that Rattlestick Playwrights Theater has embraced wholeheartedly as it expands its base all the way from New York’s West Village to Hollywood.

Slipping, the well-received play written and directed by Daniel Talbott, runs at the Lillian Theatre through May 5, marking the first Los Angeles production for the Obie-winning New York company. The goal is for Rattlestick – a compendium of well-trained artists unafraid to explore truths in challenging, occasionally controversial works – to further the creative dialogue between its members and the entertainment community-at-large.

“Rattlestick is not only thrilled to bring some of its innovative New York productions to Los Angeles audiences,” says Rattlestick Artistic Director David Van Asselt, “but we are also seeking to collaborate and intercross with the remarkable entertainment communities in Los Angeles.”

This isn’t the first instance of Rattlestick spreading its wings. Just last summer, Talbott – one of Rattle stick’s literary managers – wrote Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, America, Kuwait, which was performed at the American Conservatory Theatre’s Costume Shop in San Francisco. “Los Angeles is a vital city,” Van Asselt explained, “open to experimentation and full of creative mavericks. We are very interested in exploring that, opening up a line of communication, and seeing what’s possible.”

In transporting Slipping, Rattlestick has carried over one of its more storied homegrown productions. It is an unconventional but emotionally trenchant work about Eli (Seth Numrich), a malcontent gay teen adjusting to a new life in Iowa with his mother, Jan (Wendy vanden Heuvel) after enduring a tragedy back home in San Francisco. Each thread of hope of starting anew – embodied by naïve, confused shortstop Jake (MacLeod Andrews) – is entwined by paralyzing memories of a past love, Chris (Maxwell Hamilton), which haunt him.

One of the distinguishing characteristics between Slipping and other shows is just how clear-headed it is, even as it suggests a world of dualities. While Eli’s pain is portrayed in an elliptical fashion (Leigh Allen’s lighting and Janie Bullard’s sound design aid these transitions immeasurably), slowly letting the audience understand both how Eli’s tough outer shell was formed as well as how Jake might be able to crack it, Talbott empowers his characters, who each speak in dialogue that flirts with poetry while remaining both realistic and individually character-appropriate. The playwright also never condescends or punishes his characters for behavior that might appear cruel or self-serving. All four of his characters make believable choices that the audience intuits on a mental level, even if some of the motivations remain enigmatic in the moment. And the result is a work that looks at human folly at its most heartbreaking, but also amusing.

Photo by Ryan Miller/Capture Imaging

And at the preview performance I caught at the Lillian, Slipping gets the production Angelinos deserve. Talbott’s staging was taut while allowing plenty of space to let his actors perform their characters’ internal hopscotch. While Numrich and Andrews reprise their roles from the 2009 New York run, Brett Donaldson essayed the role of Eli at my performance, and the young actor had a kung fu grip on the teenager’s complexities. He’s brave enough to push against audience sympathy at all costs, trusting that the play itself will fill in more of the character’s inner hurt. In fact, Rattlestick’s family will only continue to increase out west, as Wyatt Fenner will take over the role of Eli for Numrich, himself a Rattlestick regular (and star of such Broadway shows as Golden Boy and War Horse) who departs for a West End revival of Sweet Bird of Youth opposite Kim Cattrall.

Though Slipping is, of course, no one-man show. Hamilton walks the line between sleazy tease and stunted teen as Chris, putting Eli in situations that feel simultaneously dangerous and exciting for the young man. Their scenes together illuminate the way human damage is both learned and taught. Meanwhile, Jake balances out the other side, depicting how clumsy but enticing young crushes can be, and Andrews is pure genius at contrasting the more fun, freer side of young love to contrast with the cost that Eli bears. Vanden Heuvel offers a master class in subtle nuance as Jan both grieves and recovers in her own way. John McDermott’s clever set design also shows how one’s home can be both a place of refuge and of demons.

Quirky, challenging, and full of riches, Slipping isn’t your typical traveling show. Which makes it all the more appealing a choice to help Rattlestick as it establishes a bicoastal presence.

“We’re excited to bring Slipping to the West Coast and believe Los Angeles audiences will really respond to this material,” Van Asselt said. “Talbott’s writing is vital, wise beyond its years and unafraid to give us characters who are fierce, passionate, and yet with an underlying core of honesty and sincerity in an age when jaded cynicism is de rigueur.”

For more information about Slipping, please go to http://www.rattlestick.org/rattlestick-la/

Photo by Carol Rosegg

Helen, we soon learn, has reason to be cruel to Evan, although he needs to be reminded of why as much as the audience must be schooled in the explanation. This may not sound like a particularly sturdy basis for a piece of entertainment, but if I have described People as a modest show, please understand that there is nothing slight about this extraordinarily well-crafted play about small hopes and disconnected lives. Moreover, itt it is a production made all the more rewarding by director George Perrin’s perfectly attuned instinct for both story and his powerful acting duo’s sensibilities.

I’ll go ahead and explain. As a teenager, Evan was part of a more popular group of students that bullied Helen’s son, Jack (“Jack Hughes” was misinterpreted – or was it?! – as “J’accuse”). In one particular incident, the boys humiliated young Jack severely. But by revealing this initial connection, I have spoiled nothing in this show, presented by Scotland’s Traverse Theatre Company. Harrower, best known for the controversial Blackbird, provides the inverse of that show, in which a young woman (a girl) encounters the older man with whom she shares a poignant personal history. And in doing so, he again shines a light on the things that haunts us, questioning which sins are worthy of redemption and which are not.

Evan has returned to Helensburgh following a turn as a nurse in war-ridden Pakistan for the re-marriage of his two divorced parents, and has done so a bit worse for wear. He, too, has now suffered, victimized by terrorists in Pakistan. Helen has sunk into her own pit of despair and since a traumatized Jack has fled his childhood home, rejecting her house and (never-seen husband). And yet both characters in this two-hander soldier through hard times the way people generally do in life – by not talking about, and with humor, as can especially be seen in Harrower’s opening scene, when a rigid Helen refuses Evan early check-in to her clearly vacant lodging establishment.

Perrin’s staging of Harrower’s blueprint leaves is equal parts economical and elliptical. As both Evan and Helen retreat to places hidden in the corners of their own mind, we’re treated to further information from the past, explaining to us just how it nips at the present. And while People, conceivably, takes place in realistic fashion, it also works as a kind of dreamscape, thanks especially to Tim Deiling’s masterful lighting design and Scott Twynholm’s music and sound work. Ben Stones’ utile set design, like the show itself, also appears slim but reveals itself to be suggestive of a great deal more. And Perrin wrings great truth from the sublime Duff and Scott-Ramsay, two performers who give their all and still manage to give us something to mull over by play’s end. What’s a good trip if you don’t leave with a souvenir?

Good With People
59E59 Theaters, 59 East 59th Street; www.59e59.org. Through April 21.

By Helaina Hovitz

It’s a brisk Saturday morning in April, and a group of inner city students are rehearsing a musical of their own making at East Side Community High School on 12th Street and 1st Avenue.

This story doesn’t seem unique, at first, but the production isn’t your typical high school musical.

Among this group are teens who have endured abuse in all its forms, been kicked out of their homes because of their sexual orientation, and have become caretakers for their siblings because their own parents are addicts. The Possibility Project has brought them all together to sing about these and other experiences, hoping to help them transform the negative forces in their lives into means for positive change, raising awareness for these and other issues through the performing arts.

Throughout the ten-month school year, kids ages 13-19 learn to build relationships across differences, resolve their conflicts in peaceable ways, and engage in community improvement projects while writing and performing an original musical inspired by the stories of their lives. This year’s musical, “Home Free,” at El Museo del Barrio at 1250 Fifth Avenue, will be performed from April 25-28, and addresses the themes of poverty, bullying, homelessness, gun violence, and death, among other problems that most of the kids have previously never spoken about to anyone.

Photo by Christopher Smith

“These students go through traumatic life-altering events like abandonment and sexual abuse, and they blame themselves,” said Jeff Flowers, the program’s artistic director. “They think they’re alone until they get here and realize that other people have gone through something similar, and they see that there isn’t something inherently wrong with them.”

Not all of their young people are “troubled,” however, according to the program’s founder and president, Paul Griffin.

“The adolescent years are an emotional time, no matter what the circumstances, and the collision of vulnerability and responsibility can often play out in destructive forms,” said Griffin. “We try to bring together a diverse group, some who are struggling and some who are not, so they can learn from each other,” he explained.

Kids are selected for the program based on their availability, willingness to collaborate, and concern for various issues, rather than on talent or ability.

Isamar Ubiera, 18, a member of this year’s Production Team, said that the experience of hearing everyone’s story is always powerful and intense.

“You wouldn’t know these things happened to them, not even to your own friends, because it’s not something you’d normally talk about,” she said. “But we can’t change without knowing what the problem is.”

The next step is helping the teens figure out how to use what they’ve been through to create positive social change. The Production Team, a group of youth from the previous year’s cast, work with the staff to write the script for a show with six vignettes that relate to the youth’s personal stories.

“We believe our shows should be on the level of Broadway,” said Flowers. “People come in with low expectations because they’re kids. They think it’s a talent show, but it’s not. It’s risky. This show has edge.”

Because the themes are so intense, they must be dealt with carefully.

Photo by Christopher Smith

“You can’t just throw rape and violence at an audience,” said Kelly Claus, director of operations. “When you live in a hard world, it’s hard to see that hope is possible, but the show has to be about hope, too, not just hurt.”

Students also participate in Community Action Projects twice a year by choosing an issue of concern and designing a challenge to raise awareness for it. Last June, one group took a sex-ed game show to Union Square Park, and had no trouble finding participants wiling to answer questions about the effectiveness of a condom vs. the pull-out method.

Another group took their project up to 125th Street, fashioning a coffin out of individual cardboard tombstones, asking passerby if they’ve ever lost anyone to gun violence, and, if so, to write their name on the tombstone. Participation there was high, too.

Flunking out of school and often years behind, when young people see they can commit to the Project, they see that they also have the ability to follow through with school, which many participants ultimately go back and finish. Their grades improve, and practical skills like time management, goal setting and future planning also become part of their repertoire. For many, relationships with family and friends also improve.

“Even if I don’t feel like waking up on a Saturday, I don’t want to let my friends down,” said Ashley Rivera, 17, who attends East Side Community High School. “If I break my commitment, my classmates will look at me as someone who gives up too easily.”

Rivera, who lives on the Lower East Side, says that she is shy by nature and didn’t talk much before the program. Now, she is slowly coming out of her shell.

“I’m gaining the confidence to speak up,” she said.

Unless they join the Production Team, the program caps after two years of involvement.

Photo by Christopher Smith

“We don’t want them to become too dependent on us,” said Claus. “We want them to go out into the world and put what they’ve learned into action.”

The Possibility Project grew out Paul Griffin’s Washington, D.C. based City at Peace program, which he created in response to a lack of action ameliorating the rising tide of youth violence and racial division. Griffin moved to NYC in 2000 and began building the program here for the same reasons.

“These kids need a way to experience what they’ve been through as a way to understand the world around them,” said Flowers, speaking to the program’s ultimate goal. “Here, they find their purpose. We’re teaching them that they have choices…that there are possibilities out there for them.”

Among the Goliaths storming the New York City boards this year – Tony winners like Douglas Hodge, Shuler Hensley and Nathan Lane as well as marquee names like Alec Baldwin and Tom Hanks have or will graced the stage this season – one David has demonstrated remarkable staying power. In an understated, heartfelt performance that has drawn raves from critics and audiences alike, Ari Brand has become the toast of the town for his leading performance in Gordon Edelstein’s My Name is Asher Lev, currently playing the Westside Theater.

It’s a nice reversal for the humble Brand, whose career logline until earlier this season was, unfortunately, defined by a performance that never took place. Cast as an understudy in Neil Simon’s Broadway Bound, one of two plays (the other being Brighton Beach Memoirs) to run in rep as part of a Doc double bill, the production closed in its infancy, before anyone in his production ever even had a chance to bound to Broadway.

While other roles followed, including a memorable 59E59 gig as a jitter-filled groom in A.R. Gurney’s Black Tie, it’s his performance as the title character of Asher Lev that has proven to be the performer’s breakout. Brand demonstrates uncommon sensitivity in Aaron Posner’s adaptation of the Chaim Potok novel about the culture clash between a young artistic prodigy and his Hasidic family (his father is portrayed by Mark Nelson and his mother was originated by Jenny Powers; Ilana Levine has recently taken over the role) and community in 1950s Brooklyn. Unlike The Neil Simon Plays, the response to Asher Lev has been nearly rhapsodic. The show, which began last year in a limited engagement at the Long Wharf Theatre, has announced yet another extension, now running through September.

Which gives more audience members the chance to share Edelstein’s intimate experience. “The house lights are up in the beginning, and I can pretty much see everyone,” Brand says. “I feel connected to every single audience at every single show. It is a foreign world to almost all of our audiences. It’s essential that the audience understands my character and is engaged with the story.”

It’s a foreign world, but one with emotional connections to all walks of life. Poised and perceptive, Brand recognizes why the play seems to have such widespread appeal. “This story particularly was important for so many people of so many different backgrounds,” the actor explains. “It’s a story about growing up, coming of age and figuring out who you are, about teenagers trying to find their identities. It’s kind of amazing how many people have found the book. You expect Jewish people to, but we know there is a pastor from a black church recommending the show to the members of his choir. It speaks to gay black men in the South, to Mormon women. This is about a boy who is in deep conflict about his identity and what he knows himself to be – it’s a really universal story.”

However, Brand experienced none of his alter ego’s conflict growing up the child of two musicians in Greenwich Village. “I’ve never been in an Asher Lev situation,” the actor says. “I’ve always been privileged to have the support of a core group of people, including my family.”

In fact, if Asher Lev has any personal resonance for Brand, it’s because of how it parallels the life of his father, a concert pianist who passed away when Brand was six. “I’m much more telling my father’s story than my own. He was raised Orthodox in Jerusalem. He had a lot of conflict with his father about the restrictions that came along with being an Orthodox Jew and ended up leaving home to come to New York in the 1960s.

“Asher Lev is an only child, that’s a significant thing,” Brand adds with a laugh. “Maybe if he had had a brother who became an emissary, it might have been a little bit easier for him.”

Music was Brand’s first inspiration as well, and remains so. “I went to St. Ann’s, a progressive, arts-focused school,” he says, and acknowledges playing the guitar, drums, and bass and participating in chamber groups, classical and jazz bands. He also currently plays in a band called the New Facility. “But in college I realized that I loved being onstage and was encouraged to audition for department shows and friends’ shows, and it clicked. I realized that I loved what I was doing.” A friend’s mother helped him get an agent.

Brand is that most refreshing kind of talent, one that is both gracious and grateful. In fact, the more the actor speaks about his career to date, the more he uses the word “lucky.” He’s clearly appreciative for all of those around him (including his girlfriend, a doctoral candidate in Sociology at NYU) and for each of his opportunities, especially the current one. “It’s every actor’s dream to have your regional theater production move to New York for a commercial run.”

More information about My Name is Asher Lev can be found at http://www.asherlevtheplay.com/.

By Angela Barbuti

Maura Tierney has a lot to feel lucky about. Not only has she moved back to NYC, but she won a leading role in Nora Ephron’s Lucky Guy, where she gets to work alongside Tom Hanks every night. The 48-year-old, who has been on screen with roles in television and movies, now graces the stage in her Broadway debut. A Boston native who studied theater at NYU, Tierney said, “I love theater, so hopefully I’ll do some more theater at some point.”

How did you get started in the business?
I went to NYU and studied theater. And then I moved out to LA for a couple of months for fun after I graduated – and I ended up getting a job in a television movie.

This is your Broadway debut. What made you want to do a Broadway show?
I’d never done it before, so it’s something, as an actor, I’ve always wanted to do. And I really wanted to work with George C. Wolfe and Tom Hanks. George has directed some really amazing plays and Tom is – as everyone knows – a wonderful actor.

Can you give us a synopsis of Lucky Guy?
It’s a play about a journalist named Mike McAlary. He worked for the New York Post and Daily News in the late 1980s to the mid 1990s. He was a very accomplished, ambitious, raucous rousing tabloid reporter who then won a Pulitzer Prize.

You never met Nora Ephron.
No, I never did. I wish I had.

Tom and Nora were friends and he is paying tribute to her with this role, which she wrote for him to play.
I just think he’s a great actor and a really hard worker. I know they were very close, so it’s a nice thing.

What was moving to NYC for college like for you?
It was really fun. When I was looking at schools, I saw New York City and said, “This is where I want to be.”

Where are you living now?
I live in the West Village.

What are some of your favorite places in the city?
I love Hudson River Park all the way down to where you get the ferry. I go there all the time. I think it’s a really beautiful part of the city. I’m always downtown; I hardly ever come uptown. The Highline, I think, is really beautiful. I really like the East Village, and I don’t get to go there very often. I think it’s more of an alive place than the West Village, even though where I live is very pretty.

I saw on Twitter there was an ER reunion at the show the other night.
Oh – cause Angela Basset was there. We worked together on [the television show] ER.

You are very open with your own battle against breast cancer, which you were able to beat. Do people come to you for advice?
Sometimes. A lot of people, unfortunately, get diagnosed with cancer and a lot of them are okay. There are people in my personal life I’ve talked to, and sometimes I meet people in the street, but not so much.

You were recently on The View, and they called you “the thinking man’s sex symbol.” Is that going to keep coming up now?
I don’t know, but Joy Behar said it used to be Margaret Thatcher and now it’s me. I thought that was a pretty funny joke.

What are you future plans?
I don’t know. I have been working on this play since January and will be doing it until July. I don’t know beyond that. My head is very much into what we’re doing right now.

To learn more about Lucky Guy, visit www.luckyguyplay.com

By Kiara Downey

Photo by by Karl Giant

Taylor Mac makes transformation look easy.  This veteran performer is a singer, an actor, a producer, and a writer who spent the month of February redefining a classical Brecht character at La Mama Experimental Theatre Club while also preparing for and presenting a dazzling piece of performance art at Joe’s Pub.

He’s a chameleon with raw talent and seemingly infinite ambitions and he refuses to be categorized; “I don’t like labels,” he says.  “Labels are limiting.  I love being called a drag queen, because it’s part of my history.  But I hate it when people call me a ‘downtown artist’.  In New York, we get stuck in our neighborhoods; we compartmentalize and reduce.  The uptown/downtown divide is getting so strict – it’s getting harder and harder to cross.  Can’t we have relativism in our lives?  That’s the career I dream of: expansiveness.”

The Foundry Theatre’s sprawling staging of The Good Person of Szechwan at La Mama was sold out within days of its opening.  Waiting lists stretched into the double-digits, and most of the hopeful audience members were turned away at the door.  For those who were lucky enough to snatch a seat, the rewards came in the form of a smart and sassy spectacle.  There was much to celebrate in the ensemble work, but at the center of it all was the riveting Mr. Mac.

Shortly after a Sunday matinee, I chased down this seasoned, but ever-surprising shape-shifter, to ask him about his work, his desires, and what he does while the rest of us are sleeping.

“I am fired up for tonight,” he said after enjoying one day of rest following a five-show, two-day run of the demanding production.  “Every day gets better.  It’s an emotional play, but with every performance I understand it more.”

Photo by Drew Geraci

As a man who played a woman who also plays a man, Mac explored the drama’s central character with anger, grace, and vulnerability; “I don’t get to relax during the show,” he said, “when I go backstage it’s only to change clothes.”  In fact, Mac’s female persona underwent a transformation in front of the audience as well as behind the scenes.  When cast members publicly zipped Mac into a pinstriped suit, the fragile woman he embodied seamlessly morphed into a strident businessman who dominated the room. His intensity took over the entire theater.  Even those sitting in their seats were pulled into the play.

“The audience should matter,” said Mac. “At the end of The Good Person of Szechwan, Brecht asks the audience to go out into the world and make change happen.”  This sense of a shared commitment appeals to Mac who believes, “theatre builds community.  How can you build such community without an audience?  You have to invite people into the experience.  The show is for them.”

“I see plays sometimes where I think none of us needed to be here,” he said.  “Reenacting a Broadway production for people in Vermont doesn’t make sense. That’s cookie cutter art. Theatre shouldn’t be like watching T.V.  I prefer to ask: what does the audience need right now?”

Mac studied acting from an early age, and while many of his current pursuits are far from traditional, he considers the time he spent watching plays to be formative moments: “Seeing things on Broadway had a profound influence on my life.  While I was in school I saw a production of An Inspector Calls multiple times.  The set was designed like a dollhouse and the actors just chewed the scenery. It felt like it mattered every night.  I also think I saw Bill Irwin and David Shiner’s Full Moon about ten times.  It was a clown show, and every show was different – but the foundation was always there.”

With a voice influenced by luminaries such as Nina Simone, Michael Stipe, Patti Smith, and Mandy Patinkin, Mac eventually “stopped focusing on acting and started working in clubs,” where he learned that even “the drunk person has to become part of the story.”

“When you listen to someone like Patti Smith you understand that it’s not about perfection – but the underbelly of the story gets told.”  Mac believes in “humanity first and foremost.”  As a result of these experiences, he said, “I created my own aesthetic.”

A distinct element of that aesthetic is visual.  He regularly sports long, glittery eyelashes and his lavish costumes are big, bold and vibrant.  Mac often collaborates with the designer Machine Dazzle on the creations.  While the looks are impressive, they don’t overwhelm or define the performer.

One of the reasons Mac believes Lear deBessonet, the director of The Good Person of Szechwan asked him to embody the work’s central character was because “she likes that I’ve developed my own kind of theatre.”  And indeed, he is an innovator.  He is writing four plays in the style of Greek theatre that will have initial performances in San Francisco, and he will soon leave New York for a musical tour of Australia.  He will also regale audiences in Scotland and at the Dublin Fringe Festival, and his much-anticipated collaboration with Mandy Patinkin (“The Mandy/Mac Show”) is slated to premier in December.

Mac will return to Joe’s Pub on May 21st with another addition to his 24-Hour History of Popular Music.  This unfolding series of cabaret-styled spectacles will eventually culminate in a one-day musical review. The final concert (timetabled for 2014) will literally ask attendees to stay for the full day.  All will be encouraged to “bring bedding and toiletries.”

This man of many talents summarizes his oeuvre by saying, “ I want to be the winning float in a parade that wasn’t sponsored by a bank.”

It seems the parade is already in motion, and Taylor Mac’s float of many feathers reinvents itself at every corner.

In The Aliens, the last original play of Annie Baker’s to run in New York, the playwright employed what I refer to as the “gotcha moment.” At one point, a character breaks from the measured, elliptical style with which he, like all the others, have been speaking, slowly clueing the audience in to who they are and why they are the way they are, with a blunt confessional statement that turns everything on its head. It is not a stunt, because all that has preceded it and all that follows has been earned. Used once, it packs a visceral wallop. But used several additional times in The Flick, Baker’s latest play which just opened at Playwrights Horizons, this device has now become one of the writer’s hallmark effects, and its overuse, among other choices employed in this play – a well-intentioned misfire that is equal parts promising and frustrating – suggest that Flick has not yet arrived at the final cut stage.

With just three original plays under her belt – Body Awareness, Circle Mirror Transformation, and Aliens – Baker catapulted from promising voice to important talent in an instant. Her singular gifts lie in her observations, usually set somewhere in the small-town New England where she grew up, of socially stunted and broken people. In addition to that gotcha moment, she also employs devices like the awkward pause, hesitations, and repetitions to reflect the tentative and quirky links formed among strangers and the inherent but subtle power structures built within such relationships. Her plays, staged by the ubiquitous and similarly intuitive director Sam Gold (they also teamed up on last summer’s adaptation of Uncle Vanya at Soho Rep), have hit the sensitive bull’s-eye on the intersection between the humor and heartbreak of human folly.

Baker introduces characters similar to the ones we’ve met before in her world in Flick, whose title comes from a run-down movie theater in Worcester County, Massachusetts. There’s Sam (downtown stalwart Matthew Maher), the 35-year-old nebbish who resents that 24-year-old Rose (Louisa Krause) gets the privilege of running the projection booth at the same time he quietly pines for her, and Avery (Aaron Clifton Moten), the 20-year-old cineaste who has taken up work at the Flick while on a sabbatical from Clark University, where his father is a professor. He’s a purist who has been drawn to the local theater because it is one of the remaining few houses to use a 35-millimeter projector, as he hates the trend of digital moviemaking. (The marvelous set designer David Zinn has fashioned the theater in all its dilapidated glory.)

Baker has buried plenty of golden nuggets here among the threesome’s quotidian chores as theatrical custodians and concessionaires. As Sam and Avery bicker over which films from the last decade matter (the former declares Avatar a masterpiece; a horrified Avery avers that there has been no such thing such Pulp Fiction), their subtle verbal and non-verbal tics shade in volumes about what draws each of these outcasts to the Flick. And as the grungy Rose overshares details of her own life to Avery, we learn she isn’t even aware of him after a while; she just craves an outlet.

Flick is a departure from Baker’s earlier catalog in ways big and small. It’s certainly epic in length, if not in ambition, as we’re alerted from the get-go by a musical interlude that runs several minutes in length. And Baker’s rhythmic sensibilities are bar none. But Baker seems to think she has accomplished more than meets the audience’s eye. The fundamental flaw in Flick – and despite the play’s attendant nuance and riches, this is, sadly, both a flawed play and a flawed production in its current form – is that none of the relationships between the three main characters is strong enough to support the themes of loyalty, betrayal and connection for which Baker strives for by play’s end. (Alex Hanna also appears as a couple of minor characters). Several of the play’s most noteworthy, illuminative moments – a one-sided telephone conversation, an impromptu hip-hop dance, several revelatory monologues – stand out as solo sequences rather than reflect any real sense of bonding.

In other ways, Baker seems to distrust her own narrative abilities, and Flick, which runs three hours and fifteen minutes (including just one hurried intermission), suffers from this lack of economy. A first act sequence in which Sam reacts to Rose’s surprising invitation of Avery to a film screening that’s a de facto date is priceless, benefiting from a perfect tableau on Gold’s part, and providing all the shorthand an audience needs about how each character feels; a subsequent scene in which Sam tries to explain his feelings to an unreceptive Rose feels, labored, amateurish and melodramatic. It’s unnecessary and slows down this overlong show. So, too, do late scenes involving the Flick’s transition to a modern, digital cineplex. Simply seeing characters in an ugly new corporate uniform (the busy Zinn’s costume design is appropriately unflattering for all characters involved) implicitly informs the audience what Baker’s characters go on to belabor. This is unfair. You don’t have to cater to the lowest common theatergoing denominator, but if you plan to tax audience patience, the rewards should pay off in dividends.

Flick is also physically clumsy. Gold obscures too much interaction in the upstage projection booth. And while Baker has peppered the play with myriad film-title-dropping, it’s hard to be sure whether they are random references thrown in or if they are carefully chosen films meant to elucidate her characters. What, for example, does Pulp Fiction specifically mean to Avery? We never learn. Why, too, does he whistle “Le Tourbillon” from Jules and Jim? It takes more than scribing two girls and a guy to earn comparison to that masterwork. In Amy Herzog’s The Great God Pan and Samuel D. Hunter’s The Whale, two earlier Playwrights Horizons shows that stand out as highlights of the current theatrical season, entwined literary references to mythology and Moby Dick, respectively, in a far more essential manner.

The cast, however, refuses to be weighted down by Flick’s narrative ambiguities. With perfectly understated physicality, Maher, an alum of this summer’s Vanya, telegraphs his frustration as one of those nice guys who seem invisible to most, and his humor emanates naturally from Sam’s disappointments. Krause is a perfect fit for Baker’s material, nailing every cadence of Rose’s lost, mercenary soul. And with a perfectly calibrated clipped delivery, Moten makes an incendiary New York stage debut. His Avery, still at a loss as to how to properly arm himself against a world of hurt and disregard, is heartbreaking.

And yet for all the careful emotional spelunking done by this superlative cast, Flick leaves their characters lost at sea, intuiting a tighter bond among these three merely coexisting souls than truly exists. For all the film titles thrown about, Baker has omitted the one that unfortunately, feels the most apt: Being There.

The Flick

Playwrights Horizons, 416 W. 42nd St. www.playwrightshorizons.org Thru April 7.