THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER16, 2019 13
ILLUSTRATION BY RUNE FISKER
Born in 1901 in Austria-Hungary, the playwright and novelist Ödön
von Horváth lived to see—and flee—the rise of Fascism in Europe, and
his trenchant work has had a recent resurgence in German-speaking
countries. His life was a kind of dark joke: after outrunning the Nazis
twice (he lived in Germany until 1933 and in Vienna until the Anschluss,
in 1938), he moved to Paris, where he was killed during a thunderstorm,
at thirty-six, by a falling tree branch on the Champs-Élysées. His pen-
ultimate play, “Judgment Day,” is about a train-station manager who
inadvertently causes a fatal crash; it asks pointed questions about guilt
and responsibility. The British director Richard Jones, whose arresting
production of Eugene O’Neill’s “The Hairy Ape” played at the Park
Avenue Armory in 2017, returns to the Drill Hall with a new adaptation
by Christopher Shinn, running through Jan. 10.—Michael Schulman
OFFBROADWAY
Edgar Degas (André Herzegovitch), who, in
the eighteen-seventies, invited the American
expatriate Mary Cassatt (Natasa Babic) to
join the group, in a show of rebellious alter-
natives to the more rigid formality imposed
by the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Christopher
Ward’s two-hander imagines the relationship
between these brilliant, mostly mismatched
spirits. Degas is a chauvinist in every sense of
the word—of intellect, nationality, painterly
skill, and gender—but Cassatt gives as good
as she gets, and the performances do throw off
some sparks. Yet the exposition-laden dialogue,
though informative and laced with period gos-
sip, often comes off as a costumed art-history
lesson, and Ward’s direction lacks rhythm and
bite.—Ken Marks (Sundays through Jan. 5.)
The Inheritance
Ethel Barrymore
Matthew Lopez’s audacious and highly enter-
taining play in two parts (seven hours total,
directed by Stephen Daldry) is based on
E.M. Forster’s 1910 masterpiece, “Howards
End.” Forster himself, here called Morgan
(Paul Hilton), is a kind of spiritual godfather
who helps tell the story of the wild, impulsive
writer Toby Darling (Andrew Burnap) and
his stable, openhearted boyfriend, Eric Glass
(Kyle Soller), who live in a rent-controlled
apartment in New York. They befriend an
older couple, the real-estate magnate Henry
Wilcox (John Benjamin Hickey) and Walter
Poole (Hilton again), who, at the height of
the AIDS epidemic, bought a house upstate
where Walter cared for friends as they died.
The theme of cultural transmission between the
demolished older generation and the thriving
younger one is everywhere in the play; the first
part ends with a wonderfully moving piece of
stage magic, a communion of the living and
the dead. Regrettably, in the second, Lopez’s
fleet comic tone turns maudlin and preachy as
he doles out tragedy, followed by a redemption
that too neatly coddles his audience’s point of
view.—Alexandra Schwartz (Reviewed in our
issue of 12/2/19.) (Open run.)
seum, an 1832 Victorian building in the East
Village. The conceit of the latter adaptation,
by Rhonda Dodd (who directs) and John Kevin
Jones (who acts), is that we are in the nine-
teenth century and we are listening to Dickens
read his own text. Jones ably brings to life
and differentiates the tale’s various charac-
ters—Jacob Marley’s ghost takes huge, rag-
ged breaths, and Ebenezer Scrooge starts off
pinched and judgmental. At times, Jones seems
a bit like the uncle who inflicts his party trick
on family gatherings every year, but there’s
no denying the fit between his traditionalist
approach and the setting.—Elisabeth Vincentelli
(Through Jan. 5.)
The Half-Life of Marie Curie
Minetta Lane Theatre
It’s hard to beat a dynamic duo, and the two
brilliant ladies in this Audible production,
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 friend-
ship—and Hertha’s attempts to help Marie
recover from a career-wrecking scandal and
save her from her self-destructive impulses.
“Radium is a cold heat, a dark light, a force of
nature,” Marie says at the opening of the play,
which serves plenty more poetry alongside
a delirious amount of wit. Occasionally, 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.)
The Illusionists
Neil Simon
The theatre has become a lot more receptive to
magic shows, and the most successful ones tend
to be of the brainy variety, performed by gifted
storytellers such as Derren Brown and Derek
DelGaudio. There’s nothing highbrow about
“The Illusionists: Magic of the Holidays,”
which gleefully embraces a gaudier aesthetic
sourced from Las Vegas and “America’s Got Tal-
ent.” But, as delightful as some of this group’s
past Broadway shows have been—most notably
“Turn of the Century,” in 2016—the current
outing is on cruise control. The six-member
roster does not exude charisma, though the
British mentalist Chris Cox comes close, par-
adoxically thanks to his aggressively nerdy
approach. The real issue, however, is that the
production’s slick imagery works against it:
when it comes to fooling a live audience, a
certain old-fashioned hands-on approach tends
to trump the use of computer-generated visu-
als.—E.V. (Through Jan. 5.)
The Independents
The Theatre Center
The Independents was the name a group of
Parisian artists—including Renoir, Cézanne,
Monet, and Pissarro—preferred over the Im-
pressionists. They were led by the aloof, acerbic
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MOVIES
The Aeronauts
Tom Harper’s film takes a true story, inflates
it, and lofts it into the realm of the tall tale.
Eddie Redmayne plays James Glaisher, one of
the Victorian scientists who were responsible
