6 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER30, 2019
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THETHEATRE
American Moor
Cherry Lane
Who is Othello to a black actor? The famous
Moor, a character who is now almost exclusively
played by a black man (the Laurence Olivier
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 production
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), Em-
ma’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 par-
ticularly 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 (Re
viewed in our issue of 9/16/19.) (Through Dec. 8.)Derren Brown: Secret
Cort
The extremely personable British mentalist
entertainer has mounted a show that is atten-
tion-grabbing, funny, somewhat improvisatory,
often astounding, and thoroughly confounding.
Embarking on an increasingly complex series of
audience-participation exercises, Brown assures
us that he is not a psychic and that nobody is
“playing along.” It’s not exactly a magic show,
though surely there are tricks—there must be.
Some of the bits’ resolutions cross the line from
head-shakingly inexplicable to disturbingly bi-
zarre. In a prologue to the festivities, Brown
expresses a philosophy that our trip through
life is just a series of stories we tell ourselves.
Then, with an expert command of psychology,
misdirection, hypnotism, and legerdemain,
he proceeds to seriously mess with viewers’
perceptions and expectations. From a script
written by Brown with Andrew O’Connor and
Andy Nyman, and directed by O’Connor and
Nyman.—Ken Marks (Through Jan. 4.)Dust
Fourth Street Theatre
This punishingly sad and sometimes surpris-
ingly funny one-woman performance, written
and performed by Milly Thomas and directedby Sara Joyce for Next Door at NYTW, is an
uneven work of theatre saved by a lovely, tech-
nically impressive display of acting. Alice, a
deeply depressed young woman, more com-
fortable with her smartphone 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 Al-
ice’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 tal-
ent for physical gesture and facial specificity.
Think of an Eddie Murphy movie—now make
it dismayingly 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.—V.C. (Through Sept. 29.)Fern Hill
59E
Three close-knit, artsy, affectionately bickering
couples in their sixties and seventies are on the
verge of moving into a farmhouse together,
so that the six of them can grow older in what
they’ve decided to call a “commune”; an ornery
philosopher named Jer, who happens to co-own
the house, is the sole holdout. In Michael Tuck-
er’s leisurely comedy, directed by Nadia Tass and
staged on an excellent living-room set by Jessica
Parks, the male characters (played by Mark
Blum, Mark Linn-Baker, and John Glover) are
conspicuously more fully developed than any
of the women (Jill Eikenberry, Jodi Long, and
Ellen Parker), although the wives do get the best
zingers. “Men are easy,” one says. “They come
with a handle.”—Rollo Romig (Through Oct. 20.)Get on Your Knees
Lucille Lortel
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 com-
mon 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 delight, and a reminder
that a woman’s humor can cut as deeply as her
rage.—Alexandra Schwartz (Through Oct. 6.)Novenas for a Lost Hospital
Rattlestick
St. Vincent’s Hospital, which succumbed to
bankruptcy, in 2010, was a Manhattan institution
for sixteen decades. During that time, it battled
a cholera epidemic; treated survivors from the
Titanic, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and
9/11; and, most famously, cared for thousands of
patients in the city’s first AIDS ward. Presided
over by two Catholic do-gooders whose workLess genteel than her literary cousin
Blanche DuBois, but just as susceptible
to emotional highs and lows, Serafina
Delle Rose, the heroine of Tennessee
Williams’s 1951 play, “The Rose Tattoo,”
has proved a tour-de-force character for
performers including Maureen Staple-
ton, Anna Magnani, and Mercedes
Ruehl. She’s a feisty Italian matron,
living in a Sicilian neighborhood in a
small town on the Gulf Coast, with an
almost religious devotion to her hus-
band, who is smuggling drugs in the
back of his banana truck. When he’s
killed, she plummets into extravagant
mourning, and it falls to a stranger to
coax her out. Marisa Tomei is the latest
actress to explore Serafina’s beguiling
excesses, in Trip Cullman’s Roundabout
revival, in previews at the American Air-
lines Theatre.—Michael Schulman