Naveen Kumar

Theater review by Naveen Kumar The allure of celebrity is universal in Jocelyn Bioh’s Nigerian comedy Nollywood Dreams. It’s the early 1990s in Lagos, and sisters Ayamma (Sandra Okuboyejo) and Dede (Nana Mensah) work at the family travel agency as their hearts and minds wander far away. Ayamma longs to break into movies, while Dede thumbs gossip rags and worships at the altar of Days of Our Lives, devoted to fame and fictions. Nigeria’s film industry is on the rise, favoring soapy plots, low budgets and pretty faces. There’s an open call for a new leading lady; once Dede learns the role is opposite craze-inducing heartthrob Wale Owusu (Ade Otukoya), the sisters team up to land Ayamma the part.  A broad and uncomplicated comedy ensues, populated with familiar entertainment types, including a fading diva (Emana Rachelle), a director of questionable integrity (Charlie Hudson III), and a daytime talk-show host (Abena) prone to mugging and masticating her words with a showy flourish. Named after its stateside counterpart, Nollywood reflects both an import of Western influence and a claim to Nigerian national pride. Bioh mines the tension of this cultural exchange for humor, while also pricking the common illusion that Hollywood (or America by extension) holds out to African immigrants: that leaving home is essential to fulfilling personal promise.  Director Saheem Ali’s production is handsome and fluid, flowing seamlessly on Arnulfo Maldonado’s multi-faced scenic design. But it’s

Theater review by Naveen Kumar A romance that begins with a proposal has a circuitous road ahead. From the moment Captain Wentworth (Rajesh Bose) drops to one knee in the opening scene of Persuasion, it’s clear he’s the only one for Anne (Arielle Yoder). Still, she’s dissuaded from him by her relations, especially the overbearing Lady Russell (Annabel Capper), a proxy for Anne’s deceased mother. Fast-forward seven years, and a still-single Anne is dangerously close to spinsterhood by Regency standards—but guess who just returned a hero from sticking it to Napoleon? Even in the age-old tradition of marriage plots, the outcome of this fated union is more obvious than most. So what’s a play to do? With its love plot sealed from the jump, Persuasion—adapted by Sarah Rose Kearns from the novel by Jane Austen—presents a gleeful if ultimately overstuffed exercise in diversion. This world-premiere production owes much of its theatrical appeal to the creative flourishes fans have come to expect from artistic director Eric Tucker and his acclaimed downtown company Bedlam, which has a knack for reinvigorating classic texts. Beneath the Connelly Theater’s compact but ornate proscenium, actors whistle birdsong into standing mics to conjure the English countryside. The light clack of fingernails across a plastic vase suggests rain, as do squirts from a spray bottle into the face of an arriving dinner guest. Tucker’s sly hand with striking tableaus is aided by Les Dickert’s lighting and Joh

Theater review by Naveen Kumar  The title of 72 Miles to Go… measures the distance between a mother who’s been deported to Mexico and the family forging ahead without her on this side of the border. Set in Tucson, Arizona, between 2008 and 2016, Hilary Bettis’s topical new play dramatizes a heartbreaking predicament more often reduced to headlines and politicized in Washington debates. A frequent writer for television, Bettis uses sitcom conventions to humanize the plight of undocumented immigrants and their loved ones, couching an urgent and eye-opening endeavor in a form optimized for familiarity. The action begins with a Unitarian pastor (Triney Sandoval) delivering a final sermon to the congregation he has served for 30 years. He cracks a couple of dad jokes before ripping up his prepared remarks to speak from the heart. He talks about seeing his wife for the first time and about sitting down to dinner with his kids; why don’t we realize, he asks, “how profound and beautiful and sacred these everyday moments are until they’re gone?” The play rewinds to the summer of 2008—time stamps are projected before each scene—to show us just such a moment between a father and his kids: a first day of school. The youngest (Tyler Alvarez) is an incoming freshman; his older sister (Jacqueline Guillén) is a senior. Their adult, undocumented half-brother (Bobby Moreno) lives with them too; their mom (Maria Elena Ramirez) scolds them, via speakerphone, to eat and dress properly.  Time fast

Theater review by Naveen Kumar  The ostensible subject of Endlings, Celine Song’s deconstructed new play, are elderly women native to a small island off the South Korean coast, where for centuries such women—known as haenyeo—have plunged into the ocean to gather seafood. But these divers turn out to be red herrings for the bigger fish that Song is out to fry: herself, her creative process, and the systems supporting this very play (including the theater in which it’s being presented). Although the result is less than cohesive, Endlings is a bold and revealing act of autofiction by a playwright actively wrestling with her identity as an artist.  We meet three haenyeo as they climb into snug orange wetsuits (the costumes are by Linda Cho) for a long day of foraging. Weathered but spry, each is introduced by the voice of a droll, unseen narrator. One (Hustlers’s Wai Ching Ho) is in her 90s and obsessed with peak TV; another (Emily Kuroda) is in her 80s and immune to common niceties, and the third (Jo Yang) is in her sprightly 70s and possessed of a playful vanity. A surrogate for Song, played Jiehae Park, soon interrupts the action and wrests the play into the here and now. If these divers are the "endlings" of the play’s title, or the last of their kind, the playwright is in some ways the first of hers.  Unmasked as our narrator, the playwright identifies herself as an immigrant artist trying to gain footing on another coastal island half a world away from the one depicted on s

Theater review by Naveen Kumar A craggy wooded area at the base of Japan’s Mount Fuji, the so-called Suicide Forest is a popular destination for people in pursuit of death. It is described, in the first scene of Haruna Lee’s play, as treacherous and enveloping: a quicksand nightmare haunted by lost souls. The same might be said of Lee’s perverse and electrifying psychodrama, in which the playwright performs a central role. It’s a raw, provocative and eviscerating exploration of the artist’s own identity, wrapped in the bubble-gum-pink and pastel hues of Tokyo export Hello Kitty. Hyperfemininity and the infantilization of young women are at the heart of Lee’s inquiry, which plays out as a series of brief sketches anchored in the psychosexual imagination. A salaryman (Eddy Toru Ohno), whom Lee’s script describes as “the face of Japanese masculinity” and “a man of uniformity,” is sitting in his office when his secretary (Yuki Kawahisa)—a cartoon coquette come to life—enters on routine matters. “What are you thinking in that disgusting, perverted little brain of yours?” she demands. (Naughty thoughts, it turns out.) His daughters (Dawn Akemi Saito and Ako), dolled up as Harajuku teens, come next, circling him and giggling for money. Their school-uniformed friend (Lee) seems more doll than human; when they leave her alone with their father, she slumps limply in a loveseat. Director Aya Ogawa’s surreal and hypnotic production, seen last year at the Bushwick Starr, handles acts of s

Theater review by Naveen Kumar Plumes of funerary incense give way to the aftermath of Hamlet’s original sin: Prince Hamlet’s father has been murdered, and the dead monarch’s specter drives his son to seek revenge. Director Yaël Farber’s breathtaking and uncanny reinvention of Shakespeare’s ghost story, anchored by Ruth Negga in a dynamic and luminous take on the monumental title role, raises goosebumps as it crawls under your skin. Prepare to ponder existential woe even as the hair on the back of your neck pricks up. The casting of Negga, a woman of Ethiopian and Irish descent, is not blind to race or gender. Hamlet begins the play mourning his black father (Steve Hartland); as the court gathers around him, their uniform whiteness adds to our sense of his isolation. And Hamlet’s androgynous breadth of emotion is a feast for an actor of Negga’s tremendous range. She brings a delicate cadence and revelatory transparency to the depths of the Hamlet’s vulnerability, the antics of his madness and the ferocity of his resolve. It’s an indelible performance supported by strong principal players, including a particularly haunting Aoife Duffin as Ophelia. Farber’s Hamlet, which originated at Gate Theatre Dublin, seems to unfurl in a translucent antechamber between this world and the next, surrounded on three sides by black doors and dark passageways (the set and modern costumes are by Susan Hilferty), awash in vapors and shadows (the lighting is by John Torres) and underscored in groa

Theater review by Naveen Kumar  Dan Hoyle paints a continent-sprawling picture in Border People, a solo docutheater play dedicated “to those who cross borders, geographical or cultural, by necessity or choice.” The writer-actor, who is white and based in the Bay Area, portrays multiple people he interviewed on this broad subject, from a black blue-collar worker who details his code-switching outside the South Bronx to an orphaned would-be migrant from Honduras who recalls his capture before reaching the U.S.–Mexico border. Hoyle’s skill as a performer make for an undeniably engaging and thought-provoking 75 minutes, even if the scope of his project is ultimately too vast to cohere.  Hoyle’s expansive purview suggests that his subjects are united by a common thread of their experience with borders, however disparate they may be in background and means. The experience of wrestling with and reconciling different cultures is in some way essential to each of Hoyle’s characters, such as a mixed-race teen in the projects and an Afghan refugee graduating high school in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. As the Bronx man puts it: “That’s a fancy way of saying…shit’s complicated.” That much is true, Hoyle seems to be saying, for anyone on the margins of white America.   At its best, Hoyle’s piece assembles voices that often go unheard, not only on stage but in public discourse around race, immigration and cultural difference—particularly since 2016, when he began compiling his interviews. In

Theater review by Naveen Kumar  A gunshot rings out in the first moments of Stew, Zora Howard’s subtly haunting new domestic drama. Mama Tucker (a fierce and tremendous Portia) insists it was just a blown tire as generations of other Tucker women, startled awake by the sound, scramble into her weathered but well-ordered kitchen. There’s too much riding on the day’s cooking to get bogged down with distractions. It’s a good thing everyone’s up early to chip in. Chores and everyday squabbles occupy the women, their hair wrapped in satin scarves, as they trim, chop, wash and assemble ingredients for a meal meant to serve Mama’s whole congregation. Her younger daughter (Toni Lachelle Pollitt) is 17 and enamored of a guy she insists on calling her “man” (because boyfriends are temporary, and this one is forever). The eldest (Nikkole Salter), born when Mama was a teenager, is visiting with a daughter of her own, whom they call Lil’ Mama (Kristin Dodson). The absence of men in the Tucker family kitchen—the fly-on-the-wall scenic design is by Lawrence E. Moten III—seems incidental at first, but grows to feel ominous. Lil’ Mama has a brother who’s out at a friend’s; no one’s quite sure whether her dad will join them at church later that day. But she wishes he were there to help prepare her audition for a comically age-inappropriate school production of Shakespeare’s Richard III. The scene, which Mama coaches her to deliver to a sweet potato, finds Queens Elizabeth and Margaret mourning

Theater review by Naveen Kumar  Set behind the employees-only doors at a big-box store, Paris is often funny in the style of a workplace sitcom. But Eboni Booth’s remarkable new play also casts the discomfiting shadows of a low-key social and psychological thriller. Both its humor and its quiet horrors are connected to the social realities of race and the disintegration of a viable working class. Booth’s deft and delicate hand cuts with slow deliberation until it reaches the bone. The year is 1995, and Paris is a small town in Vermont, where minimum-wage gigs start at $5 an hour. When the fluorescent lights come up on the break room at Berry’s—the ingeniously compact set is by David Zinn—Emmie (Jules Latimer, in a terrific Off Broadway debut) is filling out a job application while a corporate video plays on an overhead TV. She has a nasty gash on her cheek and gauze to catch the blood in her mouth; her claim to have slipped on ice seems suspect. She’s clearly at the end of her rope when Gar (Eddie K. Robinson), the store’s manager, hires her without much fuss. A hard-ass one minute and sweet as checkout-line candy the next, Gar is no favorite among his staff, which includes an aspiring Eminem type with a skater-boy bearing (Christopher Dylan White), a zero-bullshit mother of four (Danielle Skraastad) and a keeper-of-peace with a flask in her purse (Ann McDonough). As Christmas and New Year’s roll by, we come to see these folks as a kind of family. But it’s a closeness born of

Theater review by Naveen Kumar  A sage character in Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven describes the women’s shelter in which it is set as a refuge, not a destination. For the women in Stephen Adly Guirgis’s new play, the uncertain road home is littered with obstacles like addiction, mental illness, criminal records and social stigma. The structure is loose: a collection of friction among big personalities, backslides into self-destructive behavior, and liaisons between residents and staff members. Couched in the wit and rhythms of Guirgis’s free-flowing banter, their interactions are often diverting, despite their scattershot nature. It’s easy to imagine these women and their individual stories spun out into a TV series, like a sequel to Orange Is the New Black. The first act would make a good pilot episode. Guirgis introduces the ensemble of residents and employees with explicit dialogue that immediately signals a dark comedy with a mature rating. (Among the morning announcements: “Sunday workshop You, Me and Hepatitis C now includes pancake breakfast.”) Details of a memorial service for a former resident triggers a quick-fire exchange: “Keisha ain’t dead!!” “You thinking of Ta’nisha.” “I know the difference between Keisha and Ta’nisha!!!” The implication is that any one of them could be next. The youngest of the flock (Kara Young) spits her backstory—a Dickensian litany of awful misfortunes—in rhyme; another resident (Wilemina Olivia-Garcia) expresses herself in obscene

Theater review by Naveen Kumar  A play can be like a symphony, rapturous in a way that surpasses logic. María Irene Fornés’s ingenious Fefu and Her Friends is such a work, and this revival from director Lileana Blain-Cruz is nothing short of exquisite. Though the play hasn’t been performed Off Broadway since its 1977 premiere, it feels as ahead of its time as any work on today’s cutting edge.  One after another, women arrive in Fefu’s home, so handsomely appointed by set designer Adam Rigg you’ll have to resist an urge to move in. Fefu (a beguiling Amelia Workman) is a droll and mischievous host; she fires a shotgun at her unseen husband through the terrace doors before even pouring drinks. Almost as soon as all eight guests are assembled, in chic costumes by designer Montana Levi Blanco, the party disperses, and we’re invited to follow. Four scenes (in a bedroom, a sitting room, the kitchen and the yard) unfold simultaneously; the audience, split into four groups, circles around the set until everyone has witnessed each section. We find the women talking mostly in pairs: about a dream, the nature of love, psychic trauma, how absurd it is that everyone has genitals but they’re so rarely discussed.  All of them are reunited for a third act that reveals the gathering’s purpose: to rehearse a presentation for a charity devoted to arts education. Fornés’ play is itself a tutorial in how an ensemble of richly drawn characters—provoking, laughing and revealing themselves to each ot

Theater review by Naveen Kumar  [Note: This is a review of the 2019 Bedlam production of The Crucible. The production returns for an encore run at the Connelly Theater on March 27, 2020.] There has never been an inopportune moment to stage The Crucible, but with impeachment hearings underway, Arthur Miller’s indictment of miscarried justice seems especially instructive. Bedlam’s characteristically smart, stripped-down production pulses with an electric current and lays bare the play’s bitter truths. It is as gripping and revelatory a Miller production as New York has seen in years, and a bracing reminder of what a real witch hunt looks like. What begins as seemingly absurd paranoia—provincial and insular, funny in the style of Christopher Guest—gradually expands into terrifying life-or-death drama, as in a fun-house nightmare. In 17th-century Salem, rumors of witchcraft spread after a group of girls are caught dancing in the woods at night. John Proctor (Ryan Quinn) sees his life methodically turned inside out when their ringleader, his dismissed servent and onetime dalliance Abigail Williams (a blood-chilling Truett Felt) points her finger at his wife out of jealous vengeance. The quiet restraint of Susannah Millonzi’s breathtaking performance as Elizabeth Proctor cements a shift in tone that endures until the tragedy’s final heartbreak. Bedlam artistic director Eric Tucker, who also plays Reverend Hale, at first frames the story as a kind of wry pageant. The ensemble gather