THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY10, 2020 9
ILLUSTRATION BY SONIA PULIDO
One of the brightest lights of the experimental-theatre scene, Young Jean
Lee has a way of staring directly at whatever makes her—and us—uncom-
fortable. The results are funny, strange, genre-resistant, and often beautiful.
“Untitled Feminist Show,” from 2012, was a wordless pageant of gender
politics, featuring six performers in the nude. “Straight White Men,” which
made it to Broadway in 2018, was a kind of simulation of a naturalistic
family drama, without actually being one. Starting on Feb. 4, Second Stage
presents her work “We’re Gonna Die”—part rock concert, part comedy,
and self-consciously neither of those things—directed and choreographed
by Raja Feather Kelly. Its subject, the cold fact of mortality, is excellent
fodder for Lee. After all, what makes us queasier?—Michael Schulman
OFFBROADWAY
by Richard Eyre, for the Manhattan The-
atre Club), about a woman from Amgash,
Illinois, who escapes her poor upbringing
to become a writer in New York. Lucy tells
the audience that years ago, while in the
hospital with a mysterious illness, she woke
to find her estranged mother in her room,
part comfort, part threat. Together, they
tell tales of Amgash, circling the traumas of
Lucy’s childhood—caused by the cruelties
of Lucy’s mother and her father, who had
post-traumatic stress disorder from serving
in the Second World War. Strout’s language,
deftly adapted for the stage by Rona Munro,
is elegantly simple, and Linney, radiating
warmth and lucidity, is just the right actor
to bring it to life—her ninety-minute per-
formance is a feat of subtle bravura. But this
production could use more life—an escape
from the antiseptic cloister of the hospital
room to the rousing world outside.—Alexan-
dra Schwartz (Reviewed in our issue of 1/27/20.)
(Through Feb. 29.)
Paris
Atlantic Stage 2
Emmie (Jules Latimer), short for Emaani,
grew up in Paris, Vermont, but none of her
co-workers at a big, exploitative retailer are
inclined to believe her: why haven’t they
ever seen her around? Perhaps it’s because
she’s black, or because she spent time away
at college before family trouble dragged her
back. Whatever the reason, now she’s returned
home, her face mysteriously bruised, and so
grateful for the store’s poverty-level wages
that she almost cries when she gets the gig.
“Paris,” the first play by Eboni Booth, directed
by Knud Adams for the Atlantic Theatre Com-
pany, is the darkest possible workplace com-
edy, haunted by Emmie’s hard-ass boss, Gar
(Eddie K. Robinson), and a cast of co-workers
who, appropriately jaded by their anti-union
employer, form quiet bonds of solidarity.
Booth hides a clear moral sense and an ear for
empathy behind her skewed, subtly menacing
slapstick.—V.C. (Through Feb. 16.)
A Soldier’s Play
American Airlines Theatre
Charles Fuller’s 1981 play—which won the
Pulitzer Prize in 1982 and has been revived
by the Roundabout Theatre Company, di-
rected by Kenny Leon—takes place in the
mid-nineteen-forties, on a segregated Army
base in Louisiana, where a black sergeant,
Vernon Waters (David Alan Grier), has been
mysteriously killed. We glimpse Waters, a
proud, haughty, casually abusive man who
wields his rank as a bludgeon, in flashbacks
that bleed into the present investigation of
his death, led by Captain Richard Daven-
port (Blair Underwood). There are two plays
here: the interstitial telling of how Waters’s
wickedness, born of racism and spurred on
by sheer spite, sends him spiralling down-
ward, toward the grave; and a much more
rote detective story. Grier plays the sergeant
with a pleasing near-incoherence, his splashes
of anger and despair always threatening the
arrival of fiercer waters. The multivalence
of Grier’s performance—now comic, now
inviting doom, and, finally, much too late,
sodden with remorse—gives his moments
onstage their bitter, dismal truth: upward
motion means nothing when your ceiling is
somebody else’s floor.—V.C. (2/3/20) (Through
March 15.)
Timon of Athens
Polonsky Shakespeare Center
In William Shakespeare and Thomas Mid-
dleton’s brusque tale of hard luck, directed
by Simon Godwin for Theatre for a New
Audience, Timon (Kathryn Hunter) is a rich
woman—Hunter effortlessly pulls off the
flipped gender of the protagonist, originally
written as male—who is profligately generous
to her friends. At a grand dinner she hosts, the
sanest guest is the astringently philosophical
Apemantus (Arnie Burton), who scorns the
display; despite his warnings, Timon has spent
her very last cent, and when the bill collec-
tors come the rich partyers are no help. Soon
Timon is living on the city’s outskirts, the fun
in her face gone. The language in the latter
half of the play is full of the rhetorical de-
vice chiasmus, and those clever phrasings are
echoed in Hunter’s astounding performance.
She brings to each dense moment a platter
bejewelled with ironies. There is neither up
nor down, utter failure nor lasting success, for
Hunter’s wind-tossed Timon—only the person
nearly naked, cast away and caught in life’s
centrifuge.—V.C. (2/3/20) (Through Feb. 9.)
1
MOVIES
Cane River
This 1982 drama, long believed lost, is a major
rediscovery: the only feature by Horace Jen-
kins, an African-American filmmaker who died
soon after the movie’s completion. It’s centered
on the romance of a young black man, Peter
Metoyer (Richard Romain), a recent college
graduate and a poet who returns to his family’s
farm in rural Louisiana, and a local tour guide
named Maria Mathis (Tômmye Myrick), a
twenty-two-year-old black woman who, des-
perate to escape small-town life, is about to
leave home for college. Maria comes from a
poor family descended from enslaved Africans;
Peter comes from a landowning mixed-race
family (his ancestors include enslaved people
who also owned slaves), and their relationship
is strained by the groups’ long-standing social
differences. Jenkins’s spare, frank lyricism
foregrounds the couple’s tense discussions
about the traumas of history, the weight of
cultural memory, and the pressure of racial
injustice; he lends the intimate tale a vast
and vital resonance.—Richard Brody (BAM.)
Color Out of Space
There are five members of the Gardner fam-
ily: Nathan (Nicolas Cage); his wife, Theresa
