THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER2, 2019 11
ILLUSTRATION BY ELEANOR TAYLOR
Some dramatists write—repeatedly,
almost compulsively—about where
they’re from. It’s hard to separate Au-
gust Wilson from Pittsburgh or A. R.
Gurney from Buffalo. The thirty-
eight-year-old playwright Samuel D.
Hunter, who grew up in Moscow,
Idaho, has used his native state as a
recurring canvas in plays such as “A
Bright New Boise,” “Pocatello,” and
the gorgeous drama “The Whale,”
about an obese man confined to his
apartment in northern Idaho. Hunter’s
newest work, “Greater Clements,” is
set in a fictional Idaho mining town
long past its heyday. Judith Ivey plays
the proprietor of a mining museum
that is about to close. Davis McCallum
directs the Lincoln Center Theatre
production, in previews at the Mitzi E.
Newhouse.—Michael Schulman
OFFBROADWAY
petrol, sweat, onions, and alcohol converge
and linger.—Ken Marks (Through Dec. 29.)
Slava’s Snowshow
Stephen Sondheim
Back in New York City after a gap of eleven
years, this beloved show, created (and some-
times performed) by the virtuoso Russian
clown Slava Polunin, brings to Broadway
an element of anarchy rarely seen since the
Marx Brothers moved to the movies. Don’t
expect dialogue, narrative, or even much in
the way of themes; the clowns themselves, in
their adorably silly yellow or green costumes,
are the only real through line. Instead, it’s
an anthology of comic bits, many of them,
despite the title, entirely unrelated to snow.
Maybe it’s best thought of as a study in par-
adox: simultaneously tender and obnoxious,
melancholic and riotous, pivoting from min-
imalism as forlorn as anything in “Waiting
for Godot” (the first gag alludes to suicide)
to full-blown, crowd-pleasing spectacle, espe-
cially in the famous, genuinely overwhelming
blizzard finale.—Rollo Romig (Through Jan. 5.)
The Underlying Chris
Second Stage
With such works as “Thom Pain (based on
nothing)” and “The Realistic Joneses,” Will
Eno has built a reputation as a cerebral, ab-
surdist playwright for whom the meaning
of life may well amount to an impenetrable
joke. His new piece is among his most acces-
sible; it follows the title character from cra-
dle to grave through a series of brief scenes.
The hook: as the decades pass, actors of vary-
ing sexes and races play Chris (the name is
short for Christopher or Christine). Kenny
Leon’s fluid direction, Arnulfo Maldonado’s
smart set, and a wonderful ensemble help
Marie Curie (Francesca Faridany) and Hertha
Ayrton (Kate Mulgrew), might very well be
invincible. Written by Lauren Gunderson
and directed by Gaye Taylor Upchurch, the
play tells the story of Marie and Hertha’s
friendship—and Hertha’s attempts to help
Marie recover from a career-wrecking scan-
dal and save her from her self-destructive
impulses. “Radium is a cold heat, a dark light,
a force of nature,” says Marie at the opening
of the play, which serves plenty more poetry
alongside a delirious amount of wit. Occa-
sionally, the characters are subordinated to
the themes—feminism, scientific inquiry—
and the way the show accordions the women’s
final decades into its last few minutes is a bit
disorienting. But the delectable performances
by Faridany and Mulgrew—the latter with
enough warmhearted spunk to envelop the
entire theatre—give a radium-worthy glow
that even Marie would admire.—Maya Phillips
(Through Dec. 22.)
History of Violence
St. Ann’s Warehouse
The German director Thomas Ostermeier’s
production of Édouard Louis’s autobiograph-
ical book (adapted by Ostermeier, Louis, and
Florian Borchmeyer) starts with a crime scene,
then slowly walks us back to what prompted
its investigation—a sexual assault that takes
place toward the end of the show and whose
clinical brutality, audiences should be warned,
is upsetting. Édouard (Laurenz Laufenberg)
is a gay student in Paris, trying to escape his
working-class roots—he has even changed
his name. An encounter with Reda (Renato
Schuch), a handsome but self-loathing Ber-
ber man, prompts a reckoning for Édouard.
Ostermeier is among the most brilliant the-
atre-makers of his generation, and this pro-
duction, from Schaubühne Berlin, sports his
signature kinetic energy and imaginative use
of live video. What American audiences may
find even more discomfiting than the stage
violence, however, is the show’s moral and
political ambiguity—this is not a world of
black and white. In German, with English
supertitles.—Elisabeth Vincentelli (Through
Dec. 1.)
Pumpgirl
Irish Repertory
Abbie Spallen’s play, which débuted at the
2006 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, is the
latest in a number of works on New York
stages (“Little Gem” and “Molly Sweeney”
among them) with multiple characters but
no dialogue—just monologues, delivered
in rotation. This three-hander, directed by
Nicola Murphy, features Labhaoise Magee as
Pumpgirl, who works at a small-town filling
station in Northern Ireland; Hamish Al-
lan-Headley as Hammy, a stock-car driver
at the local track; and Clare O’Malley as
Sinead, a mother of two living in the town es-
tates. We quickly learn how these three lives
are intertwined, and Spallen paints a grim
picture of a society driven by hard times, with
people who are brutalized, angry, and des-
perately unhappy. The mood is unremittingly
dark as the actors passionately portray their
solitary pain. The playwright’s poetry leans
heavily toward the olfactory: the smells of
1
MOVIES
Atlantics
The French director Mati Diop’s first feature—
set in her father’s home town of Dakar, Sene-
gal—unites a wide array of ideas and genres with
her intensely sensory artistry. A young woman,
Ada (Mame Bineta Sane), and a young con-
struction worker, Souleiman (Ibrahima Traoré),
are in love, but her parents have arranged for
her to marry a rich businessman named Omar
(Babacar Sylla). Cheated out of his wages by a
government-connected company, Souleiman
heads for Spain in a rickety boat that capsizes
in the ocean. Then Omar’s house catches fire,
and, when a diligent police inspector (Amadou
Mbow) suspects Souleiman—who’s believed to
be dead—of arson, the romantic and political
melodrama takes a metaphysical turn. Diop
films the characters and the city with a tac-
tile intimacy and a teeming energy heightened
by the soundtrack’s polyphony of voices and
music; she dramatizes the personal experience
of public matters—religious tradition, women’s
autonomy, migration, corruption—with docu-
mentary-based fervor, rhapsodic yearning, and
bold affirmation. In Wolof and French.—Richard
Brody (In limited release and on Netflix.)
A Beautiful Day in the
Neighborhood
If last year’s documentary about Fred Rog-
ers, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?,” left you
unfurl the action smoothly. Yet the show, as
funny and touching as it sometimes is, strug-
gles to amount to more than a conversation
starter. Is Eno saying that we all have a core
personality, unaffected by gender or race?
Discuss.—E.V. (Through Dec. 15.)
