Melissa Rose Bernardo

  Theater review by Melissa Rose Bernardo  Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s eye-opening 2021 drama Cullud Wattah explored the devastating physical, emotional, and economic effects of the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. Now she has returned to the Public Theater with another water-powered play: the lyrical and lugubrious shadow/land, the first entry in a planned 10-play cycle about the damage wrought by 2005’s Hurricane Katrina on the playwright’s hometown, New Orleans. First produced as an audio play at the Public in 2021, shadow/land brings the mass destruction into focus by centering on two women. Eighty-year-old Magalee (Cullud Wattah’s Lizan Mitchell) is the primary owner of a bar called Shadowland that has been in the family for generations; her caretaker daughter, Ruth (Joniece Abbott-Pratt), wants to sell the building while it’s still standing. “It’s about the land,” Magalee says. “Come hell or high wawdah, I cant sell it Ruth.” (The latter will come sooner than anyone suspects.) Magalee also has middle-stage dementia, so arguing with her about anything—selling Shadowland, getting out of the path of the storm—is futile. “I was 40 when Betsy came through blowin her trumpet & Im still here & Ima be here afta Katrina hardens into a gnarled cackle,” she insists. “Ev’ry storm just a jealous band memba vyin for the spotlight tryna top the last solo.” A third character, the sharp-suited Grand Marshal (a liquidy, loose-limbed Christine Shepard), dances around the edges of the stage

Theater review by Melissa Rose Bernardo  Ryan J. Haddad does not want your sympathy. “If you came here to pity me, you can leave,” says the playwright-performer toward the start of his autobiographical Dark Disabled Stories, a co-production of the Public Theater and the Bushwick Starr. “And don’t ask for a refund.” Reader, no one left.  Haddad has cerebral palsy, which he admits to often mining for laughs. “I try to make disability funny so that non-disabled people can understand it,” he says. Dark Disabled Stories digs into accessibility, ableism and inclusion, yet it’s still shamelessly funny. (“I’m a naturally comedic person,” Haddad says, accurately.) A few years ago, you might have seen his solo show Hi, Are You Single? Here, he has two costars to make the production as accessible as possible for disabled audience members. Deaf actor Dickie Hearts communicates in ASL alongside Haddad, and the duo’s comic timing is flawless; Alejandra Ospina sits just offstage and describes all the visuals—from the set design to the actors’ movements—for blind and low-vision theatergoers. (“Dickie visually represents whipping a cock out of his pants and shaking a cocktail.”) Her captions appear as supertitles atop the flamingo-pink proscenium, and dialogue is projected onto the back wall of the stage. Haddad’s tales run the gamut from daily commutes to nightly sexcapades: his reluctance to ask for help reaching the bathroom in a business meeting, leading to a humiliating “urine situation”

Theater review by Melissa Rose Bernardo  In his 2018 play The Chinese Lady, Lloyd Suh introduced us to Afong Moy, reportedly the first Chinese woman to set foot in the U.S., who was displayed like a curio for paying audiences. In The Far Country, whose premiere at the Atlantic is directed by Eric Ting, he digs into a later period of Asian-American history: the aftermath of 1882’s Chinese Exclusion Act. But this is no staid history class. In just over two hours, Suh succinctly and humorously covers 21 years, two continents, two interrogations and two obscenely expensive trans-Pacific crossings from Taishan to San Francisco.  Gee (Jinn S. Kim), having secured American citizenship, has returned to his farming village, where he offers to take the teenage Moon Gyet (Eric Yang) back to the States with him—for a hefty price. “The cost, based on fair market value, is $100 for every year of age,”he explains to the boy’s mother, Low (Amy Kim Waschke). “The price shall be $1,600. To be paid ten percent now and the rest I will recoup from his wages until the debt is fully paid.” Moon Gyet is to work in Gee’s laundry to pay off the fee, pretending to be his son. The whole scenario is “grossly illegal”—as Yuen (the completely delightful Shannon Tyo) points out when Moon Gyet returns years later to make her a similar offer. “This is not how I imagined my marriage proposal would transpire,” she quips. The trip is a major risk emotionally as well as financially. We soon learn that the Bay Are

Theater review by Melissa Rose Bernardo Under the heading of “you can’t make this stuff up”: Camp Siegfried, which gives Bess Wohl’s compelling but slight new Off Broadway play its title, was a real World War II–era summer camp in Suffolk County, Long Island, run by openly fascist German-Americans. Youths there could engage in such character-building activities as studying German, chopping wood and learning Nazi dogma. Wohl sets Siegfried in 1938—the actual camp didn’t close until 1941—and focuses on only two attendees. She (Lily McInerny) is 16, going on 17, and He (Johnny Berchtold) is 17, going on 18, but this is no Liesl-and-Rolf love story. These characters don’t even get names; they’re just She and He, as though the playwright had randomly plucked two teens from their temporary digs on Hitler Street.   At first glance, the two are simply awkward teenagers fumbling around the bases. After their first kiss, She sputters: “I’m sorry oh gosh I’m so sorry. I’m confused oh gosh I’m so confused. It’s nothing it’s nothing. It’s just that I hate myself.” But they’re clearly damaged goods—she’s coming off a yearlong “relationship” with a teacher; he refers to himself as “defective” and “a runt,” labels he undoubtedly received from his father—which makes them prime candidates for indoctrination. Listening to target practice in the distance, She parrots what she’s learned: “Fraulein Linda said the Day of Freedom is coming when we storm the government and fight back.” If you think t

Theater review by Melissa Rose Bernardo A generation gap becomes a generation gulf in Yilong Liu’s ambitious, time-hopping Good Enemy. Howard (the inimitable Francis Jue), a Chinese immigrant to America, lacks a strong bond with his only child, college student Momo (Geena Quintos). They live on opposite coasts—he in Southern California, she in New York—and the pandemic has only exacerbated their emotional disconnect. He doesn’t understand her world: the protests she attends, the TikToks she makes. Conversely, Howard’s formative years in China are a total mystery to Momo. “Who were you before you were my dad?” she asks, but Howard has closed the book on that period—literally. (There is an actual book, and it later comes into play.)  Commissioned and produced by Audible, which will also release an audio recording of it, Good Enemy toggles back and forth between 2021 America and 1984 China with relative ease. Yilong relies on another character—Dave (Alec Silver), a pot dealer and aspiring screenwriter who is chauffeuring Howard cross-country to see Momo—to kickstart the flashbacks. Dave hopes to sell Howard’s story to Hollywood and, perhaps intentionally, the China scenes do seem big-screen ready. Hao (Tim Liu), a rookie police officer tasked with rooting out corruption—loud music, suggestive dancing, Western-influenced discourse—slips into an underground club, where he meets a self-possessed young woman named Jiahua (Jeena Yi). She slips him bootleg Joy Division cassettes, trie

Broadway review by Melissa Rose Bernardo After for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf received a beautiful (if bursting-at-the-seams) 2019 revival at the Public Theater, where it played in 1976, how fitting that Ntozake Shange’s theatrical tone poem should now circle back to Broadway’s Booth Theatre, to which it originally moved and ran for nearly 750 performances. The first voice we hear is Shange’s own. “Imagine all the stories we could tell,” she says in a recording, “about the funny looking lil colored girls, and the sophisticated lil colored girls, and the pretty lil colored girls…the ones just like you!” Poet-playwright-dancer Shange—who originated the role of Lady in Orange, one of the show’s seven color-coded characters—died in 2018, but this rousing revival testifies to the magnitude of her imagination and the unyielding power of the female voice. Almost from the start, the show is in constant motion. “We gotta dance to keep from cryin,” says Lady in Yellow (D. Woods); “we gotta dance to keep from dyin,” echoes Lady in Brown (Tendayi Kuumba). The staging by Camille A. Brown (Once On This Island) takes those words to heart, stopping the flow only to underscore the text’s most serious moments, such as a still on-point sequence about “latent rapists.” Brown choreographed the Public version, which was helmed by Leah C. Gardiner; with this production, she becomes the first Black woman to direct and choreograph a Broadway show since Katherin

Theater review by Melissa Rose Bernardo  Give the Mint Theater Company an uncut gem—an obscure work by the likes of Ernest Hemingway, A.A. Milne, or, in this case, D.H. Lawrence—and they’ll buff it into something precious: a multifaceted theatrical heirloom to be treasured for years to come. Now, for the second time in its three-decade history, the Mint is mounting Lawrence’s The Daughter-in-Law, a dense, class-conscious drama that is by all accounts the best of the novelist’s eight rarely produced plays.  The East Midlands dialect is thick, and even those with an ear for accents might have difficulty understanding all the dialogue—though the actors, especially the women, handle it well. As soon as you’re seated at New York City Center’s intimate Stage II, scan the program notes to pick up a few handy terms: a “blackleg” is a strikebreaker; “day men” are the miners who work in teams; “orts and slarts” are leftovers; “clat-fart” is gossip. (Drop that one at your next cocktail party!)  The plot is set against the backdrop of England’s Coal Strike of 1912. Mrs. Gascoyne (Sandra Shipley, impressive in a rather unsympathetic role) has two miner sons whom she “mards” (i.e., spoils): the pouty Joe (Ciaran Bowling) and the glowering Luther (an over-the-top Tom Coiner). Much to her dismay, Luther has recently married Minnie (a wonderful Amy Blackman), a former governess with supposedly questionable taste in furnishings—and a nest egg that exceeds her husband’s annual salary. Before we

Theater review by Melissa Rose Bernardo  All the Natalie Portmans has a good gimmick at its core. Whenever the play’s heroine, 16-year-old Keyonna (Kara Young), is lonely or distressed, her imaginary best friend, Natalie Portman (Elise Kibler)—actress, activist, Harvard alum—magically appears in costumes from her most famous films: the feathered tutu from Black Swan, the intergalactic warrior gear from the Star Wars prequels. “She the best in the game right now,” Keyonna tells her older brother (Joshua Boone) as she tapes Cosmopolitan pics of Portman to her dream board alongside photos of Julia Roberts and some token shots of Gwyneth Paltrow. “Hollywood is full of beautiful, talented women, Sam. And I see that. I honor it. And someday I’mma make mad money exploiting the hell out of it. Natalie is my ticket.” The rest of C.A. Johnson’s play, unfortunately, is awash in Hollywood-style clichés. Keyonna is smart as hell but skips AP calculus “ ’cause it’s easy.” (Between this play, Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven and The New Englanders, Young is quickly cornering the market on brash, brainy teenagers.) Sam is trying to be both brother and father to her since their dad died; their alcoholic mom (an excellent Montego Glover) disappears for days at a time, leaving her kids to scrounge for food and rent money. And when she is there, she’s by turns disinterested and demeaning, referring to the lesbian Keyonna as her “ass-backwards daughter.” Johnson puts a twist on the love-tria

Theater review by Melissa Rose Bernardo Even the most fervent Horton Foote fan might be hard-pressed to explain the appeal, much less the Pulitzer Prize, of The Young Man From Atlanta. The playwright was renowned for his delicate, layered storytelling, but this 1995 drama lays it on thick. Within the first few minutes, proud Houstonian Will Kidder (Aidan Quinn) mentions his “slight heart condition.” Soon he blurts out the entire tragic tale of his 37-year-old son Bill’s recent death, the newfound religious fanaticism consuming his wife, Lily Dale (Kristine Nielsen, kooky but relatively reserved), and the suspicious appearance of Bill’s, ahem, roommate, the much-discussed but never-seen title character. And then Will, who has just plunked down $200,000 (in 1950!) for a new house, gets canned from his grocery-wholesaling gig: “We need younger men in charge here,” says the tactless Ted Cleveland Jr. (Foote veteran Devon Abner). That’s a lot for even someone with a good heart to take in a single scene. The steely-eyed Aidan Quinn, back on stage after seven seasons on CBS’s Elementary, proves an ideal red-blooded Texas businessman, and the perfect anchor in an often shaky piece. (As Lily Dale’s stepfather, the family peacemaker, Stephen Payne looks uncomfortable in even his best moments.) And go-to Foote director Michael Wilson, who helmed 2007’s superb Dividing the Estate and 2009’s nine-play masterwork the Orphans’ Home Cycle, at least gives this head-scratcher of a play a hands