6 THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2019
ILLUSTRATION BY OHNI LISLE
Like a lot of kids who came of age in the eighties, I watched the North
Carolina native Joey Arias and his close friend Klaus Nomi, the late Ger-
man-born performance artist, back David Bowie on “Saturday Night Live”
while singing “TVC 15,” in December, 1979. It was a seminal moment.
There, on the small screen, was sexuality shown as a fluid, not fixed, thing,
and in such beautifully tailored costuming, too. Arias, who will be at Joe’s
Pub, on Oct. 30, with his show “Halloween Lullabies,” continues to push
sexual boundaries, and musical ones. His evocation of Billie Holiday is not
an act of imitation but a channelling of all that was brilliant and soulful
about the singer, and of what is brilliant and soulful about Arias. As a per-
son and an artist, Arias possesses kindness that further distinguishes him
from so many who treat performance as an opportunity to expel bitterness
and grievances. Here’s what audiences remember from an Arias show:
his gentility, no matter how raucous his humor, and his love.—Hilton AlsCABARET
1
DANCE
Black Grace
Joyce Theatre
Most Americans know little about Maori dance
beyond the odd haka performed before a rugby
match. Black Grace, a contemporary-dance
troupe from New Zealand, seeks to change this
with an approach that combines both Maoriby Kimberly Senior for Manhattan Theatre
Club, Fierstein doesn’t wear a dress or a wig
and avoids even attempting an impression of
Abzug, but she comes to life onstage through
sheer conviction in a show that’s often hilarious
and bracingly relevant, when it’s not utterly
heartbreaking.—Rollo Romig (Through Dec. 1.)
Is This a Room
Vineyard
When F.B.I. agents (Becca Blackwell, Pete
Simpson, and TL Thompson) approach the in-
telligence contractor Reality Winner (Emily
Davis) and start asking questions, she is nervous
but eager to appear coöperative. The agents
are relatively nice, but they don’t give an inch;
they are waiting for a warrant and keep inquir-
ing about her pets. Reality pretends ignorance,
but she knows what’s going on, and so do we:
the play’s text is the verbatim transcript of her
real-life arrest for leaking a classified docu-
ment about Russian interference in the 2016
election. Tina Satter, directing at the Vineyard,
inserts ominous pauses and brief blackouts to
indicate redactions in the transcript, and she
ably manages flashes of humor, both surreal
and poignant, that jarringly contrast with the
gravity of the event. Davis is heartbreaking
as the show’s increasingly panicked emotional
center, a well-meaning woman who paid a
stiff price for her decision to blow the whis-
tle.—Elisabeth Vincentelli (Through Nov. 10.)The Rose Tattoo
American Airlines Theatre
There is a wanton, operatic hysteria to Tennessee
Williams’s 1951 play (in a Roundabout Theatre
Company revival, directed by Trip Cullman),
set in a Gulf town, and to its heroine, Serafina
delle Rose (Marisa Tomei), a Sicilian-immigrant
seamstress with the soul of a diva. Before she
can tell her beloved husband, Rosario, that she
is pregnant with their second child, he crashes
his banana truck and dies. Three years later,
Serafina, who has miscarried, is still deranged by
grief, much to the frustration of her blooming,
Americanized fifteen-year-old daughter, Rosa
(Ella Rubin). Tomei’s exceptionally physical
performance, flitting in and out of Italian, is so
fine-tuned in its expressiveness that it verges on
dance, but it doesn’t become a pas de deux until
the play’s third act, when another banana-truckdriver, Alvaro Mangiacavallo (Emun Elliott,
buffo and pheromonal), appears, to lure her
back to life through love. This centaur of a play
is like a tragic torso from which comedy sprouts,
ungainly and irrepressible, singing a song of
hope.—Alexandra Schwartz (Reviewed in our issue
of 10/28/19.) (Through Dec. 8.)Scotland, PA
Laura Pels
In this musical comedy, based on the 2001 film
of the same name (and on Shakespeare’s “Mac-
beth”), one of the three witches—portrayed
here as mystical stoners—explains, “There’s
blood, and some people die, but we’ve changed
some shit, just, like, on a whim.” It’s 1975, and
Mac (an earnest Ryan McCartan), who works a
dead-end job in a burger joint in Pennsylvania,
is convinced by his wife, Pat (Taylor Iman Jones,
absent Lady Macbeth’s delicious bite), and the
double-toiling-and-troubling pot smokers to try
to reach the top of the fast-food chain. Of course,
dirty deeds attend him on his path. Under Lonny
Price’s direction, with a book by Michael Mitnick
and music and lyrics by Adam Gwon, the Round-
about production’s sporty show of camp, with its
rote shenanigans and its mirthless, unexacting
schmaltz, is not as fun as it pretends to be. The
songs are unmemorable, but the appropriately
tacky costumes and the set designs exhibit a
vivacity missing elsewhere among the fair and
foul play.—Maya Phillips (Through Dec. 8.)Soft Power
Public
In this metafictional fever dream by David
Henry Hwang, set in New York just before the
2016 election, an American playwright called
David Henry Hwang (Francis Jue) meets with
Xue Xing (Conrad Ricamora), a slick film pro-
ducer from Shanghai, who wants him to write a
musical for Chinese audiences. Hwang isn’t sure
he can oblige—he likes happy American stuff,
not cold-eyed Chinese pragmatism—but then
comes the shock of Trump’s 2016 win, followed
by personal disaster, when Hwang is stabbed in
the street. Lying in the hospital, he imagines
a big, brash American musical. The catch: the
actors are ethnically Asian, and the plot is a
cheeky inversion of “The King and I,” in which
the feeble ruler is a high-kicking Hillary Clinton
(Alyse Alan Louis, the one white cast member,
who could be Chelsea’s sister), whose salvation
depends on learning lessons from China. Aside
from some worn, if fair, observations about the
spectacle of American politics, the show, directed
with flair by Leigh Silverman, is bighearted,
goofy, and affirming about the compassion and
mutual respect that could make America good
again.—A.S. (10/28/19) (Through Nov. 17.)