THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 16, 2019 11
ILLUSTRATION BY EUGENIA MELLO
Mary-Louise Parker made her Broad-
way début in 1990, in Craig Lucas’s
weird and wistful “Prelude to a Kiss,”
and, though her star has risen since
then, she has never stayed away from
the stage for long. Next spring, she and
David Morse will re-create the roles
they originated, in 1997, in Paula Vo-
gel’s “How I Learned to Drive.” But,
before that, you can find her at Studio
54, in “The Sound Inside,” a new play
by Adam Rapp (“Red Light Winter”).
Parker plays a Yale professor who has
just received a life-changing diagnosis.
As she attempts to distill her experience
into prose, one of her creative-writ-
ing students (Will Hochman) shows
up during office hours to complicate
her sense of reality—and ours. David
Cromer’s production begins previews
on Sept. 14.—Michael Schulman
ON BROADWAY
the new form fits like a cancan dancer’s glove.
In 1899, Christian (Aaron Tveit), an Ameri-
can romantic in Paris, falls in with an amiable
group of Montmartre artists, who recruit Sa-
tine (the wonderful Karen Olivo), the premier
courtesan of the Moulin Rouge, to star in their
new play. It’s love at first sight for Christian,
but the club’s impresario, Harold Zidler
(Danny Burstein), has promised Satine to the
evil Duke of Monroth (Tam Mutu), whose
lucre Zidler needs in order to keep the lights
on and the absinthe flowing. Tveit’s Christian
is adorable, the Duke louche and slinky, but we
are here for the music—hits from Elton John
to Beyoncé and Lady Gaga that roll through
the audience in wave after wave of dopamine—
and for the glorious glitz: arrive early to see
the actors begin to appear in their corsets and
codpieces on Derek McLane’s appropriately
maximalist set.—Alexandra Schwartz (Reviewed
in our issue of 8/5 & 12/19.) (Open run.)
“Perfect Catastrophes”
Flea
As a faculty member in Brooklyn College’s
M.F.A. program in playwriting, Mac Wellman
has been an invisible hand shaping modern
American theatre—his former students in-
clude Annie Baker, Young Jean Lee, and Sarah
DeLappe. This fall, the Flea Theatre, which
he co-founded, is honoring Wellman’s own
demanding work with “Perfect Catastrophes,” a
festival that includes five of his plays. The first
two (both playing through Oct. 7) land squarely
in absurdist territory. The apocalyptic “Bad
Penny” (1989), which Kristan Seemel stages
in the Flea’s courtyard, has a wacky feel—until
existential dread seeps in. “Sincerity Forever”
(1990), directed by Dina Vovsi, begins with
Southern teen-agers flirting while decked out
in Ku Klux Klan outfits, and then the prosaic
turns bizarre. Both shows are either challenging
or irritating, depending on your tolerance for
experimental mind games. But neither, it must
be said, gets all the support it needs from its
cast, pulled from the Flea’s non-Equity troupe,
the Bats. The young actors are well intentioned
but lack the chops this material requires.— E. V.
(Through Nov. 1.)
Tech Support
59E
Debra Whitfield’s romantic comedy is, like
most entries in the genre, an exercise in wishful
thinking: true love is just around the corner if
you accept whatever fate throws at you. In this
case, love is just around a rip in the space-time
continuum. While trying to get phone help for
her malfunctioning printer, Pamela (Margot
White) finds herself transported back to 1919.
She goes from being baffled by modern giz-
mos to mindlessly spouting anachronisms to
uncomprehending people from another time.
As soon as she starts to settle in, Pamela is
whisked to 1946, then to 1978. Eventually, she
finds a soul mate who transcends time, and
realizes that the problem all along was not
technology but herself. The show, directed by
Whitfield for the Chatillion Stage Company,
awkwardly tries to mix fish-out-of-water humor
and earnest second-wave-style feminism. It’s a
tough combination, no matter the year.— E. V.
(Through Sept. 21.)
1
MOVIES
Chained for Life
The writer and director Aaron Schimberg’s
thrillingly imaginative twist on a familiar
theme—the lives of actors on and around a
movie set—considers, with empathetic depth
and tender humor, the urgent questions of
who tells whose stories, and how, and why. A
performed by Milly Thomas and directed by Sara
Joyce for Next Door at NYTW, is an uneven work
of theatre saved by a lovely, technically impres-
sive display of acting. Alice, a deeply depressed
young woman, more comfortable with her smart-
phone than with the people she knows, has taken
her own life, and, in an unsettling image of the
afterlife, now has to hang around and watch the
aftermath. The play’s structure—a series of visits
to Alice’s parents, her loser boyfriend, her sweet
best friend, and even her own funeral—gives
Thomas too much exposition to deliver, but, at
the same time, it offers her the opportunity to
showcase the breadth of her dancerly talent for
physical gesture and facial specificity. Think of
an Eddie Murphy movie—now make it dismay-
ingly tough to watch. If Thomas often seems too
focussed on making you cry, she’s also bound
to make you hunger to see her in something
else.—Vinson Cunningham (Through Sept. 29.)
Felix Starro
Theatre Row
In this musical, directed by Ralph B. Peña for
Ma-Yi Theatre Company, with a book and lyr-
ics by Jessica Hagedorn and music by Fabian
Obispo, a depressing hotel room, enlivened
only by a statuette of the Virgin Mary, becomes
the arena for a man’s last stand—and last scam.
Felix Starro (Alan Ariano) is a formerly famous
TV “healer,” whose specialty is the extraction
of “negativities” from ailing fellow-Filipinos in
his homeland and, sometimes, in San Francisco.
Now he’s Stateside again, with his namesake
grandson in tow, hoping to clear his name and
then return triumphantly home. If you’ve ever
known a false prophet or a phony supernatural-
ist, you know it’s tough to humanize that lowlife
type—and Ariano pulls it off. Ching Valdes-Aran
is hilarious as a florist who helps Junior (Nacho
Tambunting) get a fresh start. A few too many
songs grind turgidly on, but this spectacle of
deception and diaspora contains some enter-
taining sleight of hand.—V.C. (Through Sept. 21.)
Make Believe
Second Stage
The four Conlee kids have an attic playroom
that serves as both an escape and a refuge in
this quietly unsettling play by Bess Wohl. As
in her acclaimed “Small Mouth Sounds,” Wohl
creates fleshed-out characters from seemingly
little—an impressive feat, considering that
the characters are preteens (played by child
actors) in the show’s first half. “We are not even
going to remember most of this stuff when we
grow up,” the boisterous Chris (Ryan Foust)
soothingly tells his siblings in a time of crisis.
“Make Believe” explores trauma and its leg-
acy, brought into the open when the Conlees’
adult selves turn up. At eighty minutes, this
is the rare show that feels too short, and Mi-
chael Greif’s production, for Second Stage, has
moments that are a little too big, a little too
emphatic. Still, Wohl has a voice all her own,
especially when suggesting the unsaid.—Elis-
abeth Vincentelli (Through Sept. 22.)
Moulin Rouge! The Musical
Hirschfeld
Baz Luhrmann’s pop-fuelled film fantasia is
now a musical, directed by Alex Timbers, and
