12 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER25, 2019
ILLUSTRATION BY KATHERINE LAM
The playwright Lucas Hnath takes big swings: his back-to-back Broad-
way outings, “A Doll’s House, Part 2” and “Hillary and Clinton,” used
iconic female characters to play out dialectical ideas about morality and
self-creation. Hnath grew up in the church—his mother was a minister—
and themes of faith and doubt infused his play “The Christians,” which
ran at Playwrights Horizons, in 2015, and told the story of a pastor who
declares that Hell doesn’t exist. Hnath returns to Playwrights Horizons
with “The Thin Place” (starting previews on Nov. 22), a drama that comes
at faith from a different angle: the main character is a young medium
who claims to communicate with the dead. Her act may be an illusion,
but then so is the theatre—a parallel that Hnath will inevitably put to use
in his metaphysical mind games. Les Waters directs.—Michael SchulmanOFFBROADWAY
Brando was acting in the film “Sayonara”
and Truman Capote interviewed him for a
Profile in this magazine. (Jennifer McClin-
ton stands out as a slinky Capote, as does
Lynn R. Guerra as Brando’s mother.) It then
imagines that interview extending to the end
of Brando’s life, conflates his movie dialogue
with his actual biography, tosses in bits of
Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” and loops them,
in a manner suggestive of Noh theatre. Why?
It’s anyone’s guess, but it looks great, with
sound (by Marcelo Añez), lights (by Laura
Mroczkowski), choreography (by Laura K.
Nicoll), movie clips, and props working to-
gether in sometimes dazzling concert.—Rollo
Romig (Through Nov. 24.)Broadbend, Arkansas
The Duke on 42nd Street
The Transport Group’s Jack Cummings III
directs this pair of musical monologues,
largely about the effect of police violence
on African-American families, on a nearly
bare stage. In the first act, written by Ellen
Fitzhugh, it’s 1961, and Benny (Justin Cun-
ningham), a nursing-home orderly and a
single father to three-year-old twins, de-
cides to follow a busload of fearless Freedom
Riders. In Harrison David Rivers’s second
act, set a generation later, Benny’s daugh-
ter Ruby (Danyel Fulton) seeks solace in
a graveyard after police brutally beat her
fifteen-year-old son. A six-piece orchestra,
fully visible behind the singers, performs
Ted Shen’s subtle, questing compositions.
The stories and melodies have a tendency
to meander, but both singers have arrest-
ing voices and presences, and the whole
project is admirably unconventional.—R.R.
(Through Nov. 23.)Cyrano
Daryl Roth
The smart, sensitive, always vaguely rav-
aged-seeming Peter Dinklage stars in the New
Group’s musical version of a tale most of us
know well. A brave, proud, warlike man with a,
shall we say, undesirable visage (the problem,
classically, is with his schnoz, although the
nose is jettisoned in this production) sheds all
hope of a union with his true love, Roxanne
(Jasmine Cephas Jones), and instead serves
as ghostwriter and ventriloquist to Christian
(Blake Jenner), a more handsome but basically
empty-headed suitor. The music that accom-
panies Erica Schmidt’s adaptation of Edmond
Rostand’s 1897 play (Schmidt also directs, in
dancerly but often over-stylized fashion) is
written by several members and collaborators
of the rock band the National—there are some
good (if largely sentimental) tunes, but they
tend to drone on. The same can be said of
the entire production, which stalls in almost
every scene, never convinces us of the love that
ought to be its engine, and leaves Dinklage’s
charisma—undeniable even here—as a lonely
encouragement.—V.C. (Through Dec. 22.)Fires in the Mirror
Pershing Square Signature Center
For decades now, Anna Deavere Smith’s
great works of probing, intricately latticed,1
THETHEATRE
Black Exhibition
The Bushwick Starr
A man who calls himself @GARYXXX-
FISHER, but who, in every other partic-
ular, resembles the playwright Jeremy O.
Harris (“Slave Play”), has gone to Fire Island
Marilyn Nonken
Frederick Loewe Theatre
David Rakowski, a prolific composer of
brilliant piano music, crafts preludes and
études packed with technical challenges and
personality. It’s no surprise, then, to see one
of his newest creations on this free program,
assembled by the valiant new-music advocate
Marilyn Nonken. “Eighters Gonna Eight”
requires all hands from Nonken, plus three
additional keyboardists: Donald Berman,
Sarah Bob, and Geoffrey Burleson. Addi-
tional works for one or more pianists, includ-
ing New York premières by deVon Gray and
Stefanie Lubkowski, complete an intriguing
bill.—S.S. (Nov. 26 at 8.)
hoping to write, but all he can do is “fuck
and cry.” What ensues, in the avant-garde,
intensely personal “Black Exhibition,” written
by Harris and directed by Machel Ross, is
refractory: an antic memoir, a fraught di-
aristic travelogue, and sometimes a night
out at a dreamed-up club. Harris calls this
work a choreopoem, linking it ancestrally to
Ntozake Shange’s “for colored girls” (still
in ecstatic revival at the Public). Like that
forerunner, “Exhibition” proceeds a bit like
a cabaret. Alongside Harris’s Fisher are
performers acting as tripped-out avatars of
famous figures—such as Kathy Acker (a hi-
larious Ross Days) and the Japanese writer
Yukio Mishima (Miles Greenberg)—who
trouble the text like ghosts. The show is sad
and scatological, an intellectual collage and an
essayistic provocation. It shows how “experi-
mentalism” is often just an attempt to tell the
truth.—Vinson Cunningham (Through Dec. 15.)BrandoCapote
The Tank
Written by Sara Farrington and directed by
Reid Farrington, this jittery dance-theatre
piece, performed by five actors in kimo-
nos, begins in 1957, in Kyoto, where Marlon