Category: Opinion

Under David Winitsky’s direction, a stellar five-person cast radiates political and artistic passion and mostly transcends stereotypes.

Seth Rozin’s Settlements deliberately offers what the controversial play powering its plot does not: the balanced expression of multiple viewpoints.

Inspired by real-life events, Rozin’s world-premiere drama at his InterAct Theatre Company fuses smart intellectual debate with economical storytelling. Its weaknesses are its dearth of action and an occasionally distracting detour through the thickets of gender identification. Under David Winitsky’s direction, a stellar five-person cast radiates political and artistic passion and mostly transcends stereotypes.

Rozin, InterAct’s cofounder and producing artistic director, favors punning titles. His 2018 play, Human Rites, which drew on anthropological research into the practice of female circumcision, explored cultural differences and human rights. Settlements references the occupation of the Palestinian West Bank by Israel. But its larger subject is the desirability of overcoming polarization and forging compromise.

The characters in Settlements, especially a half-Jordanian, half-Jewish playwright and a wealthy donor with strong ties to Israel, aren’t exactly at home in that territory.

Rozin’s play owes its premise to a 2013 imbroglio involving the D.C. Jewish Community Center and its well-regarded Theater J. The center fired Ari Roth, the theater’s longtime artistic director, after years of contention over programming sympathetic to Palestinians and critical of Israel.

The center has commissioned a work by a young playwright, Yasmine (Becca Khalil), betting that the writer’s mixed heritage will produce a balanced examination of Middle Eastern issues. It turns out to be a bad bet.

Yasmine identifies as nonbinary and uses the pronoun “they,” which Noah readily adopts and other characters reject or stumble over. The stumbles take up too much stage time. But Yasmine’s identity also bears thematic weight, symbolizing the need to reject binary ideologies and find common ground. Yasmine, ironically, won’t be the one to do it. Impelled by a West Bank encounter to chronicle the impact of violence on a Palestinian family, she has lost interest in portraying Israeli characters or perspectives.

Noah tries, gently, to coax Yasmine into more complexity, while fending off interference from the center and its board. In Rishard’s prickly, charismatic portrayal, he is not anyone’s notion of an ideal employee, but his advocacy of artistic independence seems admirable. His most dedicated antagonist is Cesar, a retired ophthalmologist, philanthropist, and son of a Holocaust survivor whose largesse is jeopardized by Yasmine’s intransigence. Mitch Greenberg is excellent in the role, which Rozin renders with unexpected sympathy.

Trying to find the elusive middle ground are Judith and the center’s board president, Marion (Emily Zacharias), elegantly attired by costume designer Natalia de la Torre.

Along with a few pieces of furniture, Marie Laster’s scenic design includes off-white and blue sliding panels, suggesting both boundary walls and Israel’s national colors, and a silhouetted cityscape evoking the West Bank. The set strikes a nice balance — that word again — between realism and the symbolic world of the imagination.

Settlements

Presented by InterAct Theatre Company at the Proscenium Theatre at The Drake, 302 S. Hicks St., through April 24. Vaccination proof and masks required. Tickets: $35. Information: 215-568-8079 or www.interacttheatre.org.Published April 11, 2022

Review by Julia M. Klein for the Philadelphia Inquirer

On the surface a story detailing the journey of some Vietnamese immigrants as they escape the fall of Saigon in 1975 and land in a refugee camp in Arkansas, Vietgone is actually an irreverent, topsy-turvy, wild ride of a moving and engaging love story–in this case, a story based on how the playwright’s parents actually met. But as their story is told, Qui Nguyen keeps us guessing if Vietgone, which premiered in 2015, is also a romantic comedy, a sex-and-expletive-packed action adventure, a rap-and-rock-infused musical, a parody about recently arrived immigrants’ views of America, a tale of stark realism, or one closer to fantasy. The answer is yes to all.

City Lights Theater Company has assembled an absolutely sizzling, crackerjack cast of five under the incredibly imaginative and insightful direction of talented and wildly popular director (and playwright) Jeffrey Lo to stage a not-to-be-missed Vietgone. From the opening greetings to the audience of “What’s up, bitches? … Yo, there’s a whole lot of white people up there” to the final moments when holding back tears is almost impossible for cast or audience, Vietgone is a nonstop series of scenes that elicit a lot of laughter, many memories (especially for those of us in the baby boomer generation), and much re-thinking and re-evaluation about a war that most in the audience probably entered the theater with a low regard for and a desire to forget.

The plot of the story, if it were told in a normal timeline sequence, begins with two people who are among the last to escape Vietnam–each leaving behind someone who loves him or her. Quang, an eight-year South Vietnamese veteran of the war, reluctantly leaves a wife and two young kids he barely knows, while Tong escapes both the Viet Cong and a boyfriend who desperately wants to marry her but whom she only mildly likes. Quang and Tong meet in a refugee camp in Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, and have a hot time in bed together (many times), with seemingly no strings attached. Quang then convinces his best friend and fellow escapee Nhan to make what will be a life-changing trip across America on a motorcycle to head back to a family Quang isn’t sure are still alive in a country he has no clue if he can actually get back into safely.

It is that journey that begins the play, with bits of the story’s Vietnam and Arkansas bookends spliced in along the way in no particular order. Since we are warned before the play begins not to “repeat/retweet anything about my parents” in this “boy-meets-girl love story” by someone who identifies himself as The Playwright, we start to expect the story’s romantic, happy ending early on. However, it cannot be predicted how it will be told through Qui Nguyen’s eclectic, electrically charged script punctuated by the original rap songs of Shane Rettig. Our ride will be as wild as that of Quang and Nhan as they motor across the country and meet hippies, good ol’ boys, and even Ninja Turtles in exotic places like Amarillo, Oklahoma City, and Albuquerque.

Bay Area favorite Jomar Tagatac returns to a play he performed in at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre and Sacramento’s Capital Stage Company. As City Lights’ Quang, he is nothing short of stellar. His face is often a map of his own journey: the pain of loss of family, home, and country; the shock and anger of landing in a place where he does not want to be; the constant impatience and sheer determination to return at all costs to his family against the odds of doing so all remaining alive. His Quang longs for a home “where we were heroes, where we count for something” and is disgusted by this new country where “we aren’t worth shit.” His anguish is palpable when he moans, “Here I may be living, but I am not really alive.” When he turns to rap to expose his innermost anguish, repeatedly he defiantly chants, “However impossible this is, I’ll make it home.”

But there is one thing that causes Quang to look longingly over his shoulder back toward Arkansas as he heads west toward the California coast and hopefully on to Vietnam. That persistent tug on his heart is Tong, the thirty-year-old immigrant who was supposed to be only a quick, hot fling, but who became a good friend with benefits. And now, on Quang’s journey, his longing eyes say something more.

…

Vietgone runs through April 24, 2022, at City Lights Theater Company, 529 S. 2nd Street, San Jose CA. Patrons must show proof of full vaccination and must wear masks at all times inside the theater. For tickets and information, please visit cltc.org.

Read the full review by Eddie Reynolds for Talkin’ Broadway here.

The Milwaukee Rep welcomes theater back into the Stiemke Studio with Antonio’s Song/I Was Dreaming of a Son by Dael Orlandersmith and Antonio Edwards Suarez, directed by Mark Clements. The Rep describes the play as a “poetic journey of a dancer/artist/father questioning the balance of his passions — art, culture, family.”

This one-man work of art follows Antonio (played by Suarez) from the streets of Brooklyn to Russian ballet studios to fatherhood as he wrestles with stereotypes of ethnicity and gender, all while aching just to be his singular self. This is a memoir play, meaning it comes from Suarez’s lived experiences. The stories he tells are his own. But together with Orlandersmith, whose work is beloved and renowned for its poetry, these stories weave with music and movement for a truly artful, rhythmic experience.

In fact, the play is so dependent on movement that one almost wonders why it isn’t entitled Antonio’s Dance. Movement Director Alexandra Beller has been collaborating with Orlandersmith and Suarez for years on this project, for they always knew their play was meant to be as much a dance as anything. Per the Rep’s Audience Guide, Beller says: “Antonio did a lot of improvising while speaking the text and I cataloged what naturally came from his body. Then I would hone it and crystallize it and teach it back to him… But it had all been generated from his body through the text, and that seemed really magical to both of us.”

Suarez’s performance is indeed a magical one. His movements speak loudly, softly, and never stutter. He delivers poetry with strength and grace. Through the telling of his crisis of identity, Suarez takes on multiple roles, from his Bushwick bros to his own mother to himself as a child. This is, in the end, an exploration of the multitudes within us, and Suarez captures and beautifully exposes those that reside within him. He’s captivating.

The performance is backed by dynamic projection design by Jared Mezzocchi. The set is simple, with video and music lending the location and mood, with help from Lighting Designer John Ambrosone and Sound Designer Andre J. Pluess. This stripped-back scenery and the projections that support it keep the focus on Suarez and his storytelling.

If you’re wondering if this play is for you, consider this: There’s a moment in Antonio’s Song that speaks in praise of being a “citizen of the world.” That is who this play is for. This work transcends any one descriptor — it’s not just about race, gender, stereotypes, or parenthood. If you are devoted to your fellow humans, to their stories, their struggles, their triumphs, and to exploring just how much we have in common as citizens of the world, then Antonio’s Song is absolutely for you.

Antonio’s Song/I Was Dreaming of a Son is on stage now at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater through March 6, 2022.

Article by Kelsey Lawler for Broadway World.

InterAct’s latest production presents an interracial gay relationship through the scrim of memory.

In This Bitter Earth, a tender tragedy about the intersection of the personal and the political, the playwright Harrison David Rivers takes on two challenges: the depiction of interracial gay love and a restlessly nonlinear narrative.

The play, whose title is taken from a bluesy 1960 love song popularized by Dinah Washington, involves an attraction — really a collision — between two apparent opposites. Jesse (David Bazemore) is an earnest Black playwright, not unaware of race or history, but determined to focus on his art. His white boyfriend Neil (newcomer Gabriel W. Elmore, in an immensely likable performance) is both a child of wealth and privilege and a Black Lives Matter activist. Conflict, as we can imagine, ensues.

InterAct Theatre Company’s satisfying production — its second live staging under pandemic protocols — is directed with care and precision by Tyrone L. Robinson, with an emphasis on the easy, often scintillating chemistry between the two politically mismatched men.

In about 85 intermission-less minutes, the action hopscotches around the period between March 2012 and December 2015, and between St. Paul, Minn., (where Rivers himself lives) and various New York City locations.Advertisement

Both the burgeoning protest movement sparked by police (and other) killings of Black men and women — years before George Floyd’s murder made the world take note — and the growing mainstream acceptance of gay relationships provide the play’s charged backdrop. References to gay Black poet Essex Hemphill, a favorite of both characters, tie the two themes together.

InterAct producing artistic director Seth Rozin has described This Bitter Earth as unspooling “through the jumbled lens of memory.” That idea helps. So, too, do the projections of dates and locations, which orient (and occasionally disorient) us. Still, the play’s complex structure, with its repeated evocations of a single cataclysmic event, seems at least as much a demonstration of Rivers’ virtuosity as a narrative necessity.

On Colin McIlvaine’s set, an apartment bisected by a sidewalk and bathed in Shannon Zura’s purple lighting, Jesse frames the action with a monologue about his problems with balance. The language is poetic, and the malady, though real, is also symbolically suggestive — of the relationship and perhaps the society that complicates it.

The pairing between the lovers, who meet at a New York City rally in which Neil has taken a leading role, is a canvas on which Rivers dissects the pressures on high-achieving Black men. Bazemore’s emotionally reserved, slyly witty Jesse prefers to devote his talents and energy to the theater. But his chosen life with Neil connects him, however reluctantly, to the politics of the day, even if he leaves the marching to his boyfriend.

At times, the two traffic in the expected: Jesse derides Neil for his “white guilt,” and Neil criticizes Jesse for his apathy. When Neil points out that they’re living in a world that still can’t entirely accept that “Black Lives Matter,” it is Jesse who retorts: “All lives matter.”

But Jesse can’t remain permanently on the sidelines (or can he?). And surely mutual desire can’t forever fend off the varied forces threatening to tear the couple apart. This Bitter Earth is an elegy — a deeply moving one — to the relationship, and a dirge about what happens next.

“This Bitter Earth,” presented by InterAct Theatre Company at the Proscenium Theatre at the Drake, 302 S. Hicks St., through Feb. 20. Masks and vaccine proof required. Seating is distanced. Tickets: $35 Information: www.interacttheatre.org or 215-568-8079.

Article by Julia M. Klein for the Philadelphia Inquirer.