Helen Shaw — Theater Critic

Even without the unifying fear of collapse, though, I expect that Evans and his super ensemble maintain their dazzling sense of common delight. This is a group moving perfectly in concert, as elegantly balanced as dancers. Perhaps the finest scene of the night is the four-way confessional of love between the goofy forest local Silvius (Edward Judge), his love-object Phoebe, her love-object Rosalind, and her love-object Orlando. “Tell this youth what ’tis to love,” demands Phoebe. “It is to be all made of sighs and tears,” Silvius replies.

It is piercingly relevant, and not just because Fauci, more than 30 years later, has been asked by Congress to defend his work in another plague. (“He is a man, an ordinary man who was being asked to play God, and he is being punished because he cannot be God,” says Kramer, at one point.) But the play also contains some emotional mystery that I can’t figure out. How is it so heartbreaking and so hopeful?

Else Went has a sure touch for dialogue and event, particularly across extremely long scenes; she has a precise ear for the sadness under the bluster. And she’s also courageous — if I found it difficult to bear “Degenerates,” it must have felt hellish to write. It’s a strange play to recommend because it forces an audience to listen to ugly and violent language and then to somehow find compassion for its speakers. But this is the world as it is! Logging off cannot be our answer.

*CRITIC'S PICK* White directed Bioh’s Broadway debut (the Tony-nominated “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding”), so she’s familiar with amplifying Bioh’s deft humor for a large house. Here, for the production that opened Monday at Manhattan Theater Club’s glittering Samuel J. Friedman Theater, White often moves her actors to the front of the stage, pointing them at the fourth wall instead of at one another. The punchlines therefore land like rimshots, though White’s frontal-attack strategy functions less well in later, sadder scenes.

Now, I am a big old scaredy-cat, and I did plenty of arm-clutching (sorry, neighbor to my left!) during “Paranormal Activity.” Yet the sense of release that follows horror of this kind might not only be the relief of having survived the jump scares. There’s also a strangely comforting suggestion that in a world where evil doers seem beyond the reach of justice, something is watching. If it’s hard to see for now, that’s only because it’s waiting to make the sinners pay.

I was occasionally impatient with the production, but that feeling has dissolved as time has gone by. The more I realized that Serio and Weiler had diverted me with teenage drama from an adult horror beneath, the more I admired the 90 minutes I spent at the Atlantic. This may be a play that needs to be considered twice. And, anyway, that’s what a certain savior would say, right? It is better to live through some sorrows a second time, knowing what’s to come.

Smith has written about young people in extremis before: Her “Grief Camp” at Atlantic Theater Company dealt with bereaved children having a good time, often in spite of their own fluctuating will. This play, though, feels like an advance. Her naturalistic dramatic voice — a still-sticky adolescent mixture of wild feeling and zoned-out alienation — comes into better focus here, thanks to the loose, swaggering realism generated by the director, Chloe Claudel.

*CRITIC'S PICK* Smith has written about young people in extremis before: Her “Grief Camp” at Atlantic Theater Company dealt with bereaved children having a good time, often in spite of their own fluctuating will. This play, though, feels like an advance. Her naturalistic dramatic voice — a still-sticky adolescent mixture of wild feeling and zoned-out alienation — comes into better focus here, thanks to the loose, swaggering realism generated by the director, Chloe Claudel.

But the Delacorte’s huge outdoor stage needs a director more comfortable with staging action and group scenes - for “Romeo and Juliet,” in which Verona’s warring houses play a crucial role, unsteadiness in handling the ensemble is fatal. And the emotional stuff just goes thud. When Juliet awakens in her family crypt to find her young husband dying as he leans over her, for instance, we lose several of that excruciating scene’s key beats. It’s a pretty famous moment, when she stabs herself, but Ali has explicitly cut the dagger (while laboriously emphasizing it in an earlier moment). The editing of the play grows particularly slapdash, and the lines mean less and less.

What is moving here, even in a murky production with too much stillness at its center, is the assembled talents — from Kaysen to Majok to Mann — all dedicated to describing a group of girls in a hospital nearly 60 years ago. Some didn’t survive, many of them weren’t cured, a few might not have even been sick. But at least, for a while, they do interrupt our lives. We pause, together, to remember them.

What is moving here, even in a murky production with too much stillness at its center, is the assembled talents — from Kaysen to Majok to Mann — all dedicated to describing a group of girls in a hospital nearly 60 years ago. Some didn’t survive, many of them weren’t cured, a few might not have even been sick. But at least, for a while, they do interrupt our lives. We pause, together, to remember them.

Lynn has a long catalog of excellent plays, and given another whack, he might find a more active approach to Wilder’s archive. In 2011, he and the Rude Mechs company brought “The Method Gun” to New York, and I still remember its audacity — at one point, the group performed incidental lines from Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire,” while dodging swinging pendulums. That spirit of danger is exactly what’s missing in this lugubrious Emporium. There might be a terror to adapting a giant like Williams or Wilder, but the answer ain’t reverence: You’ve got to get in there and dance.

If intensity is what you want, then Bedlam’s electrifying D.I.Y. “Othello” at the West End Theater will better fit your needs: Shakespeare’s thriller moves faster than a freight train with broken brakes; I spent so long on the edge of my seat, I actually wrecked my back.

If intensity is what you want, then Bedlam’s electrifying D.I.Y. “Othello” at the West End Theater will better fit your needs: Shakespeare’s thriller moves faster than a freight train with broken brakes; I spent so long on the edge of my seat, I actually wrecked my back.

The show makes its own journey of return in Debbie Allen’s revival, which opened on Saturday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, nearly four decades after its Broadway premiere at the same theater, in 1988. This production doesn’t always travel smoothly — some of Allen’s staging elements war with one another. A few younger members of the ensemble, crucial to the play’s novelistic ebb and flow, are also still finding their footing. But Wilson’s language rushes past and over every barrier.

*CRITIC'S PICK* So, damn it, Janet, I’m glad that the show hasn’t entirely worked out how to do deal with the audience. The show can’t just be a sacred relic — it needs a bit of destabilizing, a tussle between the stage and the seats. Roundabout’s professionalism and coy signage can’t entirely keep the fans in check, which gives the revival itself a sense that it might spin off its axis. What will it be like the night you go? Dratch will probably say something hysterically quelling; Evans will probably knock your stockings off. But who can say? The point of “Rocky Horror” is to lose control. C’mon, let’s do it again.

*CRITIC'S PICK* This psychological delicacy comes as no surprise: Lindsay-Abaire wrote one of our most persuasive dramas on social collision, “Good People,” which explores the two ends of the class struggle in New England. I may have quibbles with the way his plot here unfolds, particularly the way it incorporates Luz, whose circumstances must be manipulated in unrealistic ways. But all boulevard comedies lean on coincidence, and I guess that applies even when the boulevard is a residential esplanade. (I laughed while I watched “The Balusters”; I only grumbled while thinking about it hours later.)

Still, the father-daughter pair does, at least, perform charmingly together. Cheadle and Edebiri are both down-to-earth and unshowy in their clear affection for each other, and they’re warmly believable as parent and child. Cheadle is laid back to the point of liquidity; he’s the only star I’ve ever seen get entrance applause for lying on a love-seat. Edebiri, though, is in another league. At several points, she manages a crucial stage trick: She can seem to shrink, collapsing inward, while the audience registers an expanding sense of presence. It will serve her beautifully in other roles.

At first glance, Ferrentino’s play seems like a chance to see the pair in a shadowy, troubling romance, one unfolding between a man languishing on death row in Pennsylvania, Nick (Brody), and a sympathetic volunteer advocate, Jacki (Thompson). It’s an unlikely place for a love story, but this production makes their intimate isolation its whole atmosphere: Arnulfo Maldonado’s simple set of a wall of cell doors is sunk in ink-black gloom by the lighting designer Heather Gilbert; the deft director David Cromer encourages us to believe we are watching one 110-minute-long waking dream.

At first glance, Ferrentino’s play seems like a chance to see the pair in a shadowy, troubling romance, one unfolding between a man languishing on death row in Pennsylvania, Nick (Brody), and a sympathetic volunteer advocate, Jacki (Thompson). It’s an unlikely place for a love story, but this production makes their intimate isolation its whole atmosphere: Arnulfo Maldonado’s simple set of a wall of cell doors is sunk in ink-black gloom by the lighting designer Heather Gilbert; the deft director David Cromer encourages us to believe we are watching one 110-minute-long waking dream.

At first glance, Ferrentino’s play seems like a chance to see the pair in a shadowy, troubling romance, one unfolding between a man languishing on death row in Pennsylvania, Nick (Brody), and a sympathetic volunteer advocate, Jacki (Thompson). It’s an unlikely place for a love story, but this production makes their intimate isolation its whole atmosphere: Arnulfo Maldonado’s simple set of a wall of cell doors is sunk in ink-black gloom by the lighting designer Heather Gilbert; the deft director David Cromer encourages us to believe we are watching one 110-minute-long waking dream.

*CRITIC'S PICK* Now at the Winter Garden Theater, “Death of a Salesman” has returned to Broadway, yet again in triumph. We haven’t exactly had a chance to miss it; four years ago, Wendell Pierce and Sharon D Clarke were playing Willy and Linda Loman only a few blocks away. Still, we don’t begrudge a few Hamlets every season. You’re telling me Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf were available? And the director Joe Mantello? To quote Willy’s older brother, Ben, played here by a sharklike Jonathan Cake: “One must go in to fetch a diamond out.”

*CRITIC'S PICK* Now at the Winter Garden Theater, “Death of a Salesman” has returned to Broadway, yet again in triumph. We haven’t exactly had a chance to miss it; four years ago, Wendell Pierce and Sharon D Clarke were playing Willy and Linda Loman only a few blocks away. Still, we don’t begrudge a few Hamlets every season. You’re telling me Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf were available? And the director Joe Mantello? To quote Willy’s older brother, Ben, played here by a sharklike Jonathan Cake: “One must go in to fetch a diamond out.”

*CRITIC'S PICK* For the 40 or so minutes before it comes fully into itself, “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” is merely wonderful. The theme is: Youth. The category is: Fabulous. The directors Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch, along with the dramaturg Josephine Kearns and the choreographer Omari Wiles, have revived and reappraised (not to say rescued) Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1981 musical, “Cats,” by shifting it out of the wasteland of London’s alleyways and into New York’s queer ballroom scene.

*CRITIC'S PICK* For the 40 or so minutes before it comes fully into itself, “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” is merely wonderful. The theme is: Youth. The category is: Fabulous. The directors Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch, along with the dramaturg Josephine Kearns and the choreographer Omari Wiles, have revived and reappraised (not to say rescued) Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1981 musical, “Cats,” by shifting it out of the wasteland of London’s alleyways and into New York’s queer ballroom scene.