6 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER23, 2019
ILLUSTRATION BY LORENZO GRITTI
Consider the straight, white, middle-aged American male. He’s had some
bad press lately. After centuries of dominating the world stage—not to
mention the theatre’s—some would like to see him cede the spotlight.
And yet he persists, making dad jokes along the way. The writer and
actor Tracy Letts, best known for his acid family portrait “August:
Osage County,” observes a specimen from this embattled demographic
(of which the playwright is part) in “Linda Vista,” beginning previews
Sept. 19, at the Hayes. Ian Barford plays Wheeler, a mordant fifty-
year-old divorcé whose loathing extends to movies made after 1984
and restaurants that serve foam, as he moves from his ex-wife’s garage
to a San Diego housing community, where a new life and possibly new
love await. Dexter Bullard directs the Second Stage production, which
originated at Letts’s stomping ground, the Steppenwolf Theatre Com-
pany, in Chicago.—Michael SchulmanONBROADWAY
days behind us), may become a means to some
representation of blackness. In Red Bull The-
atre’s “American Moor,” the playwright, Keith
Hamilton Cobb, stars as an actor faced with the
role and challenged by the microaggressions of
a white director. Most of the play is a mono-
logue for the actor, with light cues indicating
shifts between his exterior presentation and
his interior thoughts. Cobb’s classical training
shines through when he slips into Shakespeare
(one Othello passage is mesmerizing), but it
occasionally renders his other modes stiff. The
show is a thought-provoking mix of racial and
social commentary and literary criticism; as
directed by Kim Weild, it swells with different
registers of diction, accents, and tones, but
Cobb’s streams of invective and rancor become
tiresome, and his occasional put-on of a “black
voice” feels, ironically, like a performance of
blackness.—Maya Phillips (Through Oct. 5.)
Betrayal
Jacobs
In this enjoyable, astringent revival of Harold
Pinter’s love-triangle-told-backward, from
1978, the director, Jamie Lloyd, strips the pro-
duction bare, leaving the play to speak in a
near-vacuum, a head without a body. Emma
(Zawe Ashton) and Jerry (Charlie Cox) have
carried on an affair for seven years; Robert
(Tom Hiddleston), Emma’s husband and
Jerry’s good friend, hasn’t been as much in
the dark as Jerry thinks. The implication of
the show’s placelessness is that its tangle of
iffy loves and fading affections is an ever-
unfolding human pattern, occurring not only
in England in the nineteen-seventies, where
Pinter placed it, but everywhere and all the
time. Unanchored from the world that helped
birth it, the play becomes a parable. Ashton
is particularly deft at using Pinter’s pauses as
ramps into and out of sonorous line deliveries,
and the playwright’s words and tones—his
native, brutal idiom—shine through.—Vinson
Cunningham (Reviewed in our issue of 9/16/19.)
(Through Dec. 8.)Eureka Day
Walkerspace
This new play, written by Jonathan Spector,
directed by Adrienne Campbell-Holt, and
produced by Colt Coeur, is brilliantly yokedto the flighty politics and the deadly folly of
the current American moment. Eureka Day is
a hyper-progressive private elementary school
in Berkeley, California, stewarded by an un-
bearably well-intentioned board of directors.
It’s headed by a hippieish guy named Don
(Thomas Jay Ryan), who reads quotes from
Rumi during meetings. Eli (Brian Wiles), a
rich ex-techster, is worried about “othering” or
“negating” potential applicants with the Web
site’s drop-down menu of possible ethnicities.
Somebody catches the mumps, and a large
number of the parents reveal their opposition
to vaccinations. When the board convenes a
live stream in order to discuss the crisis with
the school’s parents, the board bickers while,
online, the comments section turns into a free-
for-all. “Eureka Day” shows how, despite all
our cushioned language and practiced maxims,
“right-thinking” people have lately inched dan-
gerously close to the limits of liberalism.—V.C.
(9/16/19) (Through Sept. 21.)L. O .V. E. R.
Pershing Square Signature Center
When this one-woman show opens with Lois
Robbins, its playwright and star, sprawled
across a vibrating washing machine, in the
throes of orgasmic bliss, one expects an ex-
hibition of unabashed raunchiness. But the
machine—or, rather, the protagonist’s sexual
rapaciousness—serves as a kind of Chekhov’s
gun that doesn’t quite, well, go off. Granted,
there is talk of sex, though tame and minimal,
and a list of relationships, with several pro-
posals and affairs, but, in a world of Jacqueline
Novaks and Phoebe Waller-Bridges—and even
Carrie Bradshaws—“L.O.V.E.R.,” directed by
Karen Carpenter and presented by Kaleido-
scope Creative Partners, doesn’t distinguish
itself in its narrative or its telling. Brusque
transitions, with loud interjections of contem-
porary music and shifting neon lights, only
highlight Robbins’s failure to conjure such
energy, and the show takes an unfortunate turn
into the self-help aisle for its resolution.—M.P.
(Through Nov. 2.)Only Yesterday
59E
In September of 1964, the Beatles took a
weather-induced break from a gruelling tour
of America. The first-time playwright Bob
Stevens uses this moment of relative quiet
to imagine the long day and night that John
Lennon (Christopher Sears) and Paul Mc-
Cartney (Tommy Crawford) spent holed up
in a cheap motel room in Key West. The two
young men play out scenes of exhaustion,
boredom, cheekiness, anger, drunkenness,
and discovery, with, of course, music (and a
killer Elvis impersonation), as both actors
strum and sing appealingly. Apart from the
Liverpudlian accents, Sears and Crawford
don’t imitate Lennon and McCartney, but
they do capture their alternately clashing and
complementary personas. Some of the jokes
have a sitcom-y, prefab (sorry) construction,
but, in this production from Vermont’s North-
ern Stage, directed by Carol Dunne, there’s
plentiful insight into what drew these two
brilliant lads together, and what pulled them
apart.—Ken Marks (Through Sept. 29.)