Three Plays and a Musical
Kernels: Jan 9 - 28, 2024 — Part One
Kernels is a somewhat weekly column of what I’ve been up to lately — this edition has been split into two posts due to length. In the next part, I’ll have semi-hot takes on some restaurants as well as pictures of seafood I’ve cooked!
I’ll figure out how to write these more quickly because I took too long and now this basically encapsulates my entire month, when the idea was to limit the scope of each of these columns to two weeks at most. A big part of it is that I can’t seem to just jot down some off the cuff remarks and leave it there; there has to be a narrative, some story, behind what I’m writing. While that does result in some good material, I need to find some balance between expression and expedience.
And coming soon: recaps of two Dinner & A Movie parties that I threw, for May December and Past Lives. And I swear to God I’m gonna send out part of my year-end reviews this week. It’s been 29 days since last year ended.
KitKat Cards!
Speaking of blowing through deadlines: every year, I send out an end of year card with a collage of cat photos. Usually I send them out at the end of December, but… I haven’t gotten around to it. I’m gonna design them this week, I promise, so there’s some time to request your own KitKat card by filling in this form!
Comings and Goings at the Theater
This month I saw four new stage shows, which had all premiered in prior years, ranging from 1959 to 2023. But first…
Where is my coat supposed to go?
As someone with a normal bodily response to cold weather, I’m pretty much always wearing a big puffy coat during these winter months. That added bulk has become a problem anytime I go to a theater (be it of the movie or stage kind). I never really know what to do with my big jacket. If there’s an empty seat next to me, I’ll easily park my parka there. But if it’s a packed house, I’m left with two undesirable options. One, I can stuff my expensive jacket under my seat and hope there’s nothing sticky on the floor. Two, I do that thing where you drape the jacket over the seat back and then you sit inside of it, which makes the seat uncomfortable — the ergonomics get fucked up — and you get way too warm, swaddled in all those down feathers in a well-heated environment.
Now, I don’t even like coat checks all that much. Having to queue up at the end of your event to retrieve your personal belongings is intolerable; Edith Wharton was dead on when she wrote that “Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it.” And to paraphrase Sidney Falco in Sweet Smell of Success: when I go out, I don’t want to leave a tip in every hat-check room in town. But there should at least be an option! The best solution, in my esteemed opinion, is to place a coat rack in every conceivable open area: by the bathrooms, in the landings outside the mezzanine and balcony sections, in the lobby. Sure, there’s liability issues for the theater if they let strangers put all of their stuff into a pile and expect them to not steal coats that are potentially worth hundreds of dollars. But that's what anti-indemnity notices are for. I wish every theater followed the example of the Polonsky Shakespeare Center, which has a humble coat rack set up outside of the bathrooms. Not every audience member took advantage of this amenity, but I certainly did.
Once Upon a Mattress
The rest of this newsletter will make it seem like I exclusively go to the theater for serious dramas, but I promise that I like to have fun! Yesterday, I saw Once Upon a Mattress, which is currently running through New York City Center Encores. The Encores series revives older musicals with all-star casts for a short run, without the massive expense of mounting a full Broadway run. Once Upon a Mattress is a silly little musical that premiered in 1959, a comedic version of that Princess and the Pea fairytale. You know the story: there’s a prince who is the most eligible bachelor in the land, but his mother doesn’t think anyone is good enough for her son, so she puts all of the prospective princesses through tests designed not to be passed. And because of the Queen’s decree, until the crown prince is married, no one else can. The resulting sexual frustration is not unremarked upon in Amy Sherman-Palladino’s updated book, which freshens up the jokes with references to Glastonbury and Greenpoint.
The musical’s light tone and lean towards physical comedy give it a broad appeal, and it’s become a favorite of high school drama classes and community theater groups. But the show certainly would be better with a cast of Broadway’s best, backed by a twenty-five-piece orchestra. It’s headlined by Sutton Foster (last seen on the stage in The Music Man), Michael Urie (best known for Ugly Betty, at least in my mom’s house), and J. Harrison Ghee (who broke out with Some Like It Hot). Foster reigns over the production as the spunky Winnifred, the princess who, it’s not a spoiler to say, bests a “sensitivity test” that involves a pea slipped under a stack of twenty mattresses. She’s got a phenomenal singing voice, but it's her aptitude for slapstick and her stage charm that makes this show well worth the price of admission. The rest of the cast pull their weight and match her energy perfectly, particularly David Patrick Kelly, as the mute king who has a hilarious pantomime duet to explain the birds and the bees to his son.
After this production concludes, Sutton Foster heads nine blocks south to the Lunt-Fontaine, where she’s stepping into the role of Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd. When I saw that Sondheim classic a couple months ago, Ashford was marvelous, and I figured that Foster would have some big clown shoes to fill. But after witnessing her ebullience and brilliance in Mattress, it’s obvious that she’s gonna kill it.
(As of press time, you’ve got a week left to see Once Upon a Mattress; the show ends on February 4. I cannot recommend it enough if you want a good, fun time! If you’re under the age of 35, you can use the code ACC2324 to get balcony seats for $28, and I think it might discount the pricier sections.)
This House Is Not A Home
January is a hot time for experimental theater, with multiple festivals devoted to boundary pushing works. One of the most prominent is Under the Radar, which the organizers describe as “a festival celebrating new theater and performance works from both around the world and down the street.” Even if the plays are rough around the edges, there’s a certain thrill to seeing these experimental productions. This House Is Not a Home certainly thrills. It’s genuinely abrasive and provocative, similar to Slave Play or A Strange Loop but scrappier, less compromised. Conceived by writer and actor Nile Harris, the play is a LOT of things. But it is mainly a serious satire of the radical experimentation afforded to white artists, as Sara Holdren reflects in her writeup for Vulture:
The blasé, brazen, super-pomo tone is just one of the show’s masks, and Harris peels them all back in layers throughout the performance. Truly, there’s nothing “or whatever” about this house — it’s a howling, gutsy, angry, mournful, mess-making, shit-taking act of trolling. You can feel Harris both flipping off and diving right into the eras-long tradition of white experimental artists getting all sorts of fancy grants to do, you know, whatever as long as it can be billed as “radical” — and you can feel his hunger and admiration, underneath and inside the ruckus, for truly radical work. (Can it even be made inside a nonprofit institutional framework, he asks?)
One extended scene has Harris, wearing a gingerbread man costume, delivering what’s best described as an Afropessimist rant (sample line: “I love oxymorons: Black FUTUUUURES!”). He warps and distorts his voice, which is amplified through a portable guitar amp, bringing to mind chopped and screwed remixes. (To drive the point home, the soundtrack similarly slows and warps the background music.) He eventually strips away all of the artifice, shedding the costume and speaking without vocal effects. Is he now speaking from the heart? Or is he still trolling? This play is also a striking meditation on grief: one of Harris’ close friends and collaborators died suddenly, and the bounce house in the center of the stage is revealed to be a tribute to the departed.
This is the kind of show that is sort of unreviewable, but it was certainly the rawest work of theater I saw all month. This House Is Not a Home is the kind of fucked up house party that sends you crawling into your skin but you also never want to leave. Harris brought his friends to the party, including dancer Malcolm-x Betts and a performance artist named Crackhead Barney, who led the most memorable part of the night. Notorious for her prank-ish antics around New York City (you should check out her Instagram), she waded into the crowd and interrogated an audience of mostly uncomfortable white people with questions like “what kind of n— are you?” and “have you ever fucked a Black guy?” while commanding the ASL interpreters to sign some phrases I cannot write here. The phrase “equal opportunity offender” is used a lot by white comedians, usually as a poor excuse for racism and misogyny in their jokes. Here, that phrase is turned on its head.
From the sound of it, I was in the last audience to ever see this show, but I hope it comes back in some form.
Appropriate
Taking place entirely within a former plantation house in Arkansas, Appropriate is a story about the family secrets that are dug up after the death of its patriarch. The Broadway production of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s play has gotten a lot of attention thanks to Sarah Paulson leading the cast. She’s a commanding presence, playing the sole daughter of the deceased. Taking her cues equally from The Glass Menagerie and Real Housewives, there are moments in the first act where it feels like she’s swallowing up all of the energy from her co-stars (which include Elle Fanning and Corey Stoll). But this approach is, ahem, appropriate for her role, and it’s just so fun to watch her do her thing. She’s delivering these rapid fire monologues with technical precision, chewing up the scenery with gusto. (The other actors get their opportunities when she disappears for much of the second act.)
Lest I make it seem like this play is high camp, I should stress that there’s more going on underneath the fireworks and bluster. The big family secret is uncovered by a hidden album that belonged to the departed man of the house: photographs of lynching victims. While that furthers the tensions between the characters — “was daddy a racist?” is certainly a loaded question — it doesn’t inspire a proper discussion of how their family’s legacy is tied to slavery and segregation. Appropriate explores the cognitive dissonance of white Americans when it comes to race, particularly those hailing from the South. (It is significant that the title is a homonym.) With the weight of all that has come before, it’s impossible to move in this world without holding two clashing beliefs at the same time.
Appropriate plays at the Helen Hayes Theatre through early March. Don’t forget to take advantage of the $30 under 30 deal, if you are able to! Also, the New Yorker recently ran a really good profile of Jacobs-Jenkins that contextualizes Appropriate with his other work, which I was not familiar with beforehand.
Public Obscenities
Funny enough, Appropriate is not the only play currently running that hinges on a secret revealed by a dead patriarch’s photo collection. But while the dysfunctional family members of that melodrama are all too eager to yell at each other, the characters in Public Obscenities leave much of their tensions unspoken. The plot of Shayok Misha Chowdury’s drama centers on Choton, a Bengali-American who visits his aunt and uncle in Kolkata, where he hopes to interview members of the city’s queer community for his PhD thesis. Accompanying Choton is his boyfriend Raheem, who works as a cinematographer and is there to film the interviews.
And there’s much about Public Obscenities that borrows from cinema conventions. A compilation of Indian television commercials form a sort of overture for the bilingual play (most, but not all, of the Bangla dialogue has supertitles). The projector stays on as the lights dim, showing opening credits over establishing shots of Kolkata, as if we were about to watch a movie. Even when the screen rises and the actors come into view, it sometimes feels like we’re watching a live staging of a film. Chowdury, who also directs, is clearly inspired by the Parallel Cinema works of filmmakers like Satyajit Ray: the story is informed by its setting, there’s emphasis on moments of stillness. There’s also elements of an indie dramedy (I would say Sundance-y if that were not a slur these days). Our leading man, played by Abrar Haque, is a smartass who nonetheless inspires sympathy (a fellow audience member called him a “Bengali Jerry Seinfeld.”) The play is restrained to a fault and committed to realism: one scene takes place almost entirely in the dark, lit only by the glow of a phone screen.
There are so many great ideas in this play, exploring many topics through a personal lens. But all these subplots end with ellipses rather than a definitive conclusion. Sometimes, a lack of satisfying catharsis is a virtue. But in this case, it left me frustrated, especially due to its three-hour duration. One sequence in particular was wholly unnecessary. Early in the play, Choton’s uncle recounts to Raheem, in vivid detail, a dream he once had, surmising that it could be turned into a surrealist movie. It’s a lovely moment. But later on, a filmed version of that dream is projected during an interlude. It goes against one of the key storytelling lessons from Citizen Kane, with that famous scene about the girl in the white dress: sometimes, it’s better to tell, not to show.
There is one subplot that I did find more powerful expressly because it was left unresolved. In America, Choton and Raheem, who is Black, treat the mixed-race aspect of their relationship as fairly unremarkable. But in India, Choton’s status as a Brahmin becomes apparent in the way he casually dismisses the humanity of the family servant. Raheem is quiet for a bit and then leaves the house to take a walk and clear his head. That initial silence communicated more than any blistering monologue ever could. Writing for the New Yorker, Helen Shaw posits that the play’s “brilliance lies in demonstrating how familiarity, even the kind we get from spending nearly three hours with these finely drawn characters, doesn’t ensure intimacy.” While that sentiment is very true, I just couldn’t find my way to fully appreciating this play.
Public Obscenities premiered last year and is currently running at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center until February 18. Folks aged 30 and under can go for just $20, for any seat, with code NEWDEAL.
Something to look forward to: walking through the Theater District, I went past the August Wilson Theatre, which is being converted to the “Kit Kat Club” for the Broadway revival of the seminal Cabaret, starring Eddie Redmayne and Gayle Rankin. I’ve never seen it or watched the (apparently) excellent movie version, so I’m very excited to see this once it opens this spring.
Wet January Update
Here’s a running list of the first drink I had on each day this month, which will be updated in subsequent columns. Entries in bold are for days where I probably would not have had any alcohol were it not for this little stunt.
With the month nearly over, it’s a little revealing how I would have drank practically every day this month even without Wet January. A lot of it has to do with a fairly busy social life, going to bars or friend’s places or hosting a dinner party. I didn’t go out much during the fourth week of January, which is why there’s a lot more bolded days for that week.
I decided not to track how many drinks I’m consuming each day because I really, truly, do not want to know that number!
Leftover white wine at home
German beer at Black Forest
(taking a mulligan on this day; hadn’t decided to do Wet January at this point)
Hard cider at Eric’s
Lagunitas at Plug Uglies
Cocktail at Hide & Seek
Brooklyn Kura Saké (Blue Door) at home
A flight of beer at Sixpoint Brewery
Boxed Gruner Veltliner (really good!!) at Aaron’s
A glass of PungJeong Sagye sool at Kochi
A glass of 2018 The Scholium Project "The Prince in his Caves” at Rosella
Split bottle of 2022 Florèz Wines Viognier Kind of Orange at Gem House x Ha’s Dac Biet popup
Shots of soju at Olivia’s
Hard cider at Eric's
Plantation OFTD rum at David's
A liter of Kostritzer Schwarzbier at Black Forest
“Apricot” Manhattan at Rockwell Place
A glass of some really freaking good Greek wine at home
Eggnog right before bed at home
Sixpoint Stooper Hazy IPA at home
Mulled wine at Josh’s
A glass of Purato Cataratto Pinot Grigio at home
A glass of Brooklyn Kura Blue Door Shiboritate at home
The “Smoking Jacket” cocktail at FancyFree
Sixpoint The Piff Hazy Double IPA at home
A glass of Sauv Blanc at Sravya’s
A pint of beer at Treadwell Park
Tequila Sherry eggnog at home
