8 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST 5 &12, 2019
ILLUSTRATION BY ISABEL SELIGER
Every summer, the Williamstown Theatre Festival appears in the
Berkshires like Brigadoon, turning a sleepy hamlet into a theatrical
epicenter. On the Main Stage, Uma Thurman stars in Henrik Ibsen’s
“Ghosts” ( July 31-Aug. 18), in a new translation by Paul Walsh, as a
widow trying to protect her family and her reputation from scandals
left behind by her late husband. On the smaller Nikos Stage, Mark
Blum and Jane Kaczmarek appear in the world première of Sharyn
Rothstein’s “Tell Me I’m Not Crazy” (through Aug. 3), in which a
man forced into retirement infuriates his family by taking up a new
hobby: guns. And in “Before the Meeting,” a new play by Adam Bock
(Aug. 7-18), the life of a member of an early-morning sobriety group
(Deirdre O’Connell) is upended when she is confronted by her estranged
granddaughter.—Michael SchulmanINTHEBERKSHIRES
1
THETHEATRE
Broadway Bounty Hunter
Greenwich House Theatre
In this new musical by Joe Iconis (“Be More
Chill”), Annie Golden plays Annie Golden,
a veteran musical-theatre actress, who was in
“Hair” and “Assassins”—pretty much herself,
if she had turned to bounty-hunting when stage
roles became sparse. The book, by Iconis, Lance
Rubin, and Jason SweetTooth Williams, pairs
Annie with the hunky Lazarus (Alan H. Green)
and sends them on a mission in Ecuador. As
in “Be More Chill,” the plot involves a per-
formance-enhancing drug, here used to boost
actors so they can do fifteen performances a
week instead of eight, thus making theatre
more profitable. The show, directed and cho-
reographed by Jennifer Werner, is an unabash-
edly silly sendup of martial-arts and blaxploi-
tation movies, and it’s a delight to see Golden
as the lead after decades of supporting roles.
The real star, however, is Iconis’s goofy, catchy
score.—Elisabeth Vincentelli (Through Sept. 15.)Dogg’s Hamlet / Cahoot’s Macbeth
Atlantic Stage 2
This evening, presented by the Potomac Theatre
Project, is one of two in repertory featuring
a Czech—or a Czech-born—playwright. (See
“Havel,” below.) Tom Stoppard’s two one-acts,
directed by Cheryl Faraone, begin with “Dogg’s
Hamlet,” in which Dogg refers not only to a
headmaster (the wily Peter B. Schmitz) but also
to the language spoken at his school, which uses
English words with alternate meanings. The play
ends with a student performance of “Hamlet”
that is comically abridged and then, as an encore,
improbably condensed even further. “Cahoot’s
Macbeth” is inspired by the “living-room plays”
that oppressed Czech artists were forced to per-
form in the seventies. This version of the Scot-
tish play is threatened by a menacing government
Inspector (the sharp, sarcastic Tara Giordano).
But the actors, led by Christopher Marshall and
Denise Cormier, as Lord and Lady Macbeth,
carry on bravely. Stoppard wraps the foolery
in antic action, but the spirit of Shakespeare
and the love of language and free expression
are unabridged.—Ken Marks (Through Aug. 3.)Get on Your Knees
Cherry Lane
Heterosexuality and its manifold indignities are
the subjects of this charmingly raunchy and very
funny standup set by the comedian Jacqueline
Novak. Nothing is less cool, in 2019, than to be
a woman who “lusts after the common shaft,”
but such is Novak’s predicament. She makes
the best of it by bringing her “poetic eye” (why
call it “doggy style” when you could speak of
“the Hound’s Way”?) and analytical swagger
to sex—particularly the oral variety. Novak was
twelve when she first learned that her “teeth
were a danger to men”; pacing the stage in a
pointedly schlumpy gray T-shirt and jeans, she
goes deep on the semantics of the male member
and the equally vulnerable male ego. Directed
by John Early, the show is an overthinker’s de-
light, and a reminder that a woman’s humor can
cut as deeply as her rage.—Alexandra Schwartz
(Through Aug. 18.)Havel: The Passion of Thought
Atlantic Stage 2
In this evening of short plays from the Potomac
Theatre Project (in repertory with two plays by
Tom Stoppard, reviewed above), three works by
Václav Havel, the Czech poet, playwright, dis-
sident, prisoner, and President, are bookended
by a very brief table-setter, “The New World
Order,” by Harold Pinter, and an equally fleet-
ing coda, Samuel Beckett’s “Catastrophe.” The
Havel works, “Interview,” “Private View,” and
“Protest,” suffer by comparison. They all feature
a character named Vanek (David Barlow), a
writer and an opponent of the Communist state,
who serves as a blank slate, eliciting guilty, pan-
icky responses from the characters he interacts
with—his boss at a brewery (Michael Laurence),
a desperately materialistic middle-class couple
(Emily Kron and Christopher Marshall), and a
TV producer (Danielle Skraastad). Directed by
Richard Romagnoli, all the plays are well acted,
but Havel’s absurdist, moralistic wordiness feels
flabby next to the sinister, scary concision of
Pinter’s interrogation and Beckett’s display of
theatrical degradation.—K.M. (Through Aug. 4.)Mojada
Public
In Luis Alfaro’s reworking of Euripides’ “Medea,”
directed by Chay Yew and set in Queens, Sabina
Zúñiga Varela plays Medea, who, along with
her son, Acan (Benjamin Luis McCracken),
her husband, Jason (Alex Hernandez), and her
longtime mother figure, Tita (Socorro Santiago),
has recently crossed from Mexico into the States
illegally. Trauma holds Medea, a talented seam-
stress, back from leaving the house where Jason’s
boss has allowed the family to stay; Jason, mean-
while, is everywhere but at home. What follows is
an unrelenting parade of dishonesties and cruel-
ties. There is humor to leaven the heaviness, but
the tone is often stilted. A series of monologues,
in which Medea narrates her passage across the
desert, contain the deep moral impulse behind
the play’s creation—how the inhumanity of the
process of migration leaves horrible entrails on
both sides of every border—but they have no
anchor in any action or character, and therefore
act as forced catharses that rub raw our patience
for the real thing.—Vinson Cunningham (Re-
viewed in our issue of 7/29/19.) (Through Aug. 18.)of Gilliam’s work from the sixties and sev-
enties opens at Dia:Beacon.)—J.F. (Through
Aug. 16.)