10 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER29, 2021
ILLUSTRATION BY MATTHEW KAM
agents Garrick (Pete Simpson) and Taylor
(Will Cobbs) came to interrogate her at her
house, in Augusta, Georgia. The naturalism
demanded by the script—all that fumbling
and crosstalk—requires razor-sharp timing,
and Simpson and Davis have honed theirs to
metronomic precision. It is startling, while
watching these two formidable actors match
each other beat for beat, to realize the extent
to which the actual Reality Winner accepted
the conventions of the genre she found herself
trapped in. Deflection, denial, confession,
motive: they are all there.—A.S. (10/25/21)
(Through Nov. 27.)Medicine
In the common room of a psychiatric hospital,
an inmate (Domhnall Gleeson) attempts to
tell his life story with the supposed aid of
two drama therapists named Mary (Clare
Barrett and Aoife Duffin) and a drummer
(Sean Carpio). Written and directed by
Enda Walsh, this absurdist drama never says
what’s real and what isn’t, but its theme—the
lovelessness with which mental patients are
too often treated—is chillingly clear. This
particular blend of slapstick and despair in-
evitably brings to mind Walsh’s fellow-Irish-
man Samuel Beckett, although only Walsh
would include an extended dance break to
Earth, Wind & Fire. Gleeson, with his gan-
gly, wounded presence, somehow makes his
character’s very unobtrusiveness loom over the
stage, and Barrett and Duffin make a superb
comic duo.—Rollo Romig (St. Ann’s Warehouse;
through Dec. 5.)Morning Sun
Simon Stephens’s new play (directed by the
talented Lila Neugebauer, for Manhattan The-
atre Club) is a dreamily extended riff on the
life of Charley McBride (Edie Falco), who haslived in the same apartment, in Greenwich
Village, for most of her life. She’s sandwiched
between generations—her mother, Claudette
(Blair Brown), and her daughter, Tessa (Marin
Ireland). Her life is unsung, and the telling of
it is a chance to make it all glimmer, however
softly, with meaning. A fleeting encounter
gives her the sharp surprise of a baby—Tessa—
and a subsequent life as a single mom. Later,
she meets a man at a museum who guards a
room with a painting by Edward Hopper,
her favorite painter. The procession of place
names that runs through the play can feel like
corny pandering, but it’s to Stephens’s credit
that he keeps the particulars of Charley’s life
pinned to the political and cultural events that
spin around her. Edie Falco is a wonderful
vehicle for all this thought. Her face is open
and tender; her eyes stretch out easily, em-
bodying all the wonders and the unspeakable
fears of childhood—including the ones that
last a lifetime.—V.C. (11/15/21) (City Center
Stage I; through Dec. 19.)Nollywood Dreams
The diasporic mélange of a culture forged in
both Africa and the Caribbean—a product
of troubled national and colonial histories
and irrepressible creativity—is the theme
that hums excitingly under this new play by
Jocelyn Bioh (directed by Saheem Ali, for
MCC). Set in Lagos, Nigeria, in the Techni-
color nineteen-nineties, it tells a story whose
backdrop is the early upsurge of Nollywood,
that burst of off-kilter, melodramatic cin-
ematic invention which has, in the decades
since, helped make Nigeria a formidable en-
gine of global entertainment. Ayamma Okafor
(Sandra Okuboyejo) and Dede Okafor (Nana
Mensah), sisters who work at their parents’
travel agency, have a finely honed comic pat-
ter. When Ayamma auditions for the leading
female role in a new film by a famous Nige-
rian director, Gbenga Ezie (Charlie Hudson
III), she is pitted hilariously against Fayola
Ogunleye (Emana Rachelle), an established
starlet whom the tabloids call “the Nigerian
Halle Berry with Tina Turner legs.” The show
is quick and bodacious, funny and well built.
It avoids smoothing itself down into an on-
stage sitcom—a possible risk in hands less
sure than Bioh’s—by keeping its focus on the
many kinds of performance that it takes to
create a new industry.—V.C. (MCC Theatre;
through Nov. 28.)while you were partying
This show, created by Peter Mills Weiss and
Julia Mounsey with Brian Fiddyment, be-
gins with Mounsey playing a recording of
herself telling a (possibly true) story: after
an extremely awkward pandemic-era evening
she spent with a childhood friend named
Brian, she promises him that she’ll write a
“comedy sketch” about his recent suicide
attempt. The rest of the play is that sketch,
and it is deranged. Mills Weiss, as Brian’s
mom, has a deadpan so impenetrable that
it reads as pure menace. Fiddyment, at the
other end of the spectrum, plays Brian as so
giddy with unfocussed energy and so red
with rage that you fear he’ll pop. The piece’s
unnerving tastelessness feels highly attuned
to the current moment, in which everyone
is angry and everything is mediated.—R.R.
(Soho Rep; through Dec. 12.)What do the movie star Cary Grant,
the Republican diplomat Clare Boothe
Luce, and the author Aldous Huxley
have in common? One answer: they
all experimented with LSD before
its hippie heyday. Another: they are
the protagonists of the new musical
“Flying Over Sunset,” which imag-
ines the three mid-century luminaries
taking an acid trip together in nine-
teen-fifties Hollywood. James Lapine
wrote the book and directs the Lin-
coln Center Theatre production (in
previews, opening on Dec. 13, at the
Vivian Beaumont), with music by Tom
Kitt and lyrics by Michael Korie. Tony
Yazbeck plays Grant, Carmen Cusack
plays Luce, and Harry Hadden-Paton,
last seen at the Beaumont as Professor
Henry Higgins, in “My Fair Lady,”
plays Huxley.—Michael Schulman
ONBROADWAY
set by Adam Rigg, the women grope toward
a future but keep sifting through their shared
past.—Vinson Cunningham (Public Theatre;
through Dec. 12.)
Dana H.
In the late nineties, when the playwright Lucas
Hnath was a college student at N.Y.U., his
mother, Dana Higginbotham, was kidnapped
by a man she had met while working as a
psych-ward chaplain at a hospital in Florida.
She spent five terrifying months as his cap-
tive, hustled back and forth across state lines.
Nearly twenty years later, as a playwright,
Hnath asked a friend, the director and writer
Steve Cosson, to tape a series of interviews
with his mother about her ordeal. In Hnath’s
play, directed by Les Waters (in repertory
with “Is This a Room,” at the Lyceum), the
role of Dana is performed by Deirdre O’Con-
nell, who pulls off a titanic feat of emotional
and technical prowess. Although she is the
only actor onstage, O’Connell takes part in
a collaboration: sitting in an armchair, she
lip-synchs to the real Dana’s recorded voice.
What audiences witness is an act of posses-
sion, and ultimately of catharsis, deliverance,
and release.—Alexandra Schwartz (Reviewed in
our issue of 11/1/21.) (Through Nov. 28.)
Is This a Room
Conceived and directed by Tina Satter, this
play—in the Vineyard Theatre’s stellar Broad-
way staging, at the Lyceum—takes as its text
the transcript of the F.B.I.’s visit to the home
of the whistle-blower Reality Winner, on June
3, 2017. The production pounces on its found
script with perverse, bravura precision. Real-
ity Winner (Emily Davis) was a twenty-five-
year-old former Air Force language analyst
who had been working as a Farsi translator
for a military contractor when the F.B.I.