AMERICAN THEATRE | Race, Mystery, RBG, Opera: I’ve Got a Little List

The fall theatre plate is full and I’m nonetheless on the buffet, seeing much more I’d like a chew of. This week I’ll inaugurate a extra quick-hit model of this column, based mostly partially on a operating record I’ve saved as I’ve up to date these season listings and observed reveals that piqued my curiosity, and based mostly partially on different tasks I’ve been attempting to keep watch over, all of which I’d make some extent to personally see if distance weren’t an impediment. Each of those productions may advantage their very own piece, however this must do for now. Tucking in…

Now at Road Less Traveled Productions in Buffalo is a manufacturing of Michael Mitnick’s Mysterious Circumstances (by way of Oct. 16). While Ken Ludwig and some others have written performs spinning off of Sherlock Holmes (The Game’s Afoot, concerning the stage actor who made his identify taking part in Holmes, William Gillette, and Baskerville, a form of 39 Steps-style romp), this one is one thing a bit weirder and extra bespoke. Mitnick’s play is impressed by a riveting, labyrinthine 2004 New Yorker article by David Grann about Richard Lancelyn Green, an Sir Arthur Conan Doyle researcher who was on the verge of a serious discovery—a long-missing trove of the writer’s papers that may have cracked a number of mysteries about Conan Doyle’s life and work—when he turned up lifeless below, properly, mysterious circumstances. Mitnick—a deft comedian author I met years in the past once we have been each within the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop, and whose different performs embrace The Siegel, Ed, Downloaded, and the Macbeth-riffing musical Scotland, PA—takes the Grann story as a jumping-off level for a play about an intensely aggressive, presumably even murderous, nerd tradition. He additionally, based mostly on what I’ve learn in opinions of its 2019 premiere at L.A.’s Geffen Playhouse, takes the story to one in all its logical conclusions: If, as many have commented, the dying of Green is the form of thriller solely Holmes and Watson might presumably unravel, Mitnick interpolates the crime-solving duo into his personal play. Here’s hoping Mysterious Circumstances will get to a stage the place I can catch it.

Ifa Bayeza didn’t simply write one play concerning the shameful 1955 homicide of 14-year-old Emmett Till, she wrote three, and Washington, D.C.’s Mosaic Theatre is staging all of them with their bold The Till Trilogy (Oct. 4-Nov. 20), directed by Talvin Wilks and carried out in rotating repertory by 10 actors. The three performs embrace Bayeza’s well-known The Ballad of Emmett Till, which premiered in 2008 on the Goodman Theatre; Benevolence, which bowed in 2019 on the Penumbra; and That Summer in Sumner, in its world premiere on the Mosaic. The first of those is a music-infused telling of Till’s homicide by two white males who believed he had flirted with a white girl, Carolyn Bryant; the third is a courtroom drama concerning the trial of his murderers, who have been acquitted; whereas Benevolence, the third within the chronological timeline however not Bayeza’s latest play, follows two {couples}, one Black and one white, as they navigate the ripple results of the Till homicide of their lives. As this Washington City Paper article makes clear, these performs are simply a part of a “sprawling series of free events dedicated to honoring Till’s legacy, with discussions and readings taking place in museums, community centers, and libraries across the D.C. metro area,” they usually spring from the management of Mosaic’s new inventive director, Reginald Douglas, who intends to “strengthen local ties and draw audiences into a pivotal moment in American Civil Rights history—one that Bayeza has described, unabashedly, as the stuff of myth and epic.” It’s additionally the stuff of latest real-life headlines: As not too long ago as August, a Mississippi grand jury declined to indict Bryant on costs of kidnapping and homicide, of which her husband and his brother have been acquitted on the authentic trial. Bryant is 88; Emmett Till can be 81 had he not been lynched.

Rupert Holmes—sure, the “Piña Colada Song” man, but in addition the Mystery of Edwin Drood man—has a brand new play kicking off a 16-city tour this week, and it’s not a thriller or a romance however All Things Equal–The Life and Trials of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, billed as “an intimate portrayal” of the late Supreme Court Justice. The 90-minute one-woman present, starring Michelle Azar and directed by Laley Lippard, sounds a bit like Holland Taylor’s Ann: The premise is that RBG has invited a good friend to her chambers to convey “a sense of her life and its many trials,” as you do. It kicks off Oct. 5 at freeFall Theatre Company in St. Petersburg, Fla. (spared the ravages of Hurricane Ian, in case you’re questioning), and will likely be at Sag Harbor, N.Y.’s Bay Street Theater in November, earlier than ranging between now and subsequent May from D.C. to Phoenix, Atlanta to Elvira, Ohio, and lots of factors in between (although not Ginbsurg’s native Brooklyn, alas). And although it’s not a musical, a quote from Holmes guarantees that the play “also reveals the love song that ran through her remarkable life and shares the music that was her giddy delight.” (We additionally know that she, like her unlikely Supreme Court pal Antonin Scalia, additionally beloved the theatre, and has been the topic of a stage play not less than as soon as earlier than.)

The title alone drew me to this subsequent one. Opening this week at Chicago’s A Red Orchid Theatre is The Malignant Ampersands (Oct. 6-Nov. 27). It appears to be precisely what it seems like: A not-at-all reverent tackle Orson Welles’s broken 1942 masterpiece The Magnificent Ambersons, itself based mostly on Booth Tarkington’s novel a few wealthy, difficult Midwestern household. But that is no late-night cinema roast: As this New City Stage article particulars, author Brett Neveu has as a substitute used the Tarkington/Welles chassis to construct a completely new automobile, imagining a dissolute modern household comprising six members, all bothered in a roundabout way or different with most cancers, as they shuffle between medical doctors’ workplaces and fear over their well being. Oh, and it’s in verse. Stay bizarre, Chicago.

I’ve by no means been to Alaska however I can’t think about a greater introduction to the state and its tradition than Where the Summit Meets the Stars, written and directed by Frank Henry Kaash Katasse and beginning performances at Perseverance Theatre in Juneau on Oct. 5. It’s billed as “an ethereal Alaska Native story driven by music, dance, and the culture of the Tlingit people,” following the story of a lady, Rose, rescued from a near-death expertise by a mysterious stranger. Developed at Native Voices on the Autry and at La Jolla Playhouse, it’s a play that Perseverance has been hoping to carry to its stage since earlier than the pandemic, and now it’s lastly right here. The extremely quotable playwright speaks for us all when he says on this article: “There’s nothing like the excitement of being in the theatre on opening night. Every once in a while you’ll get a zap of zen when you’re working on these plays. It feels like the first time you’re hearing other people say your words or hearing people discussing your play, and you’re like, ‘Wow they really care about this!’ I think just being there and experiencing something with them and sharing the same heartbeat and perspective as an audience member, it’s something magical. It’s a very human thing.”

I’ve been fascinated by Pittsburgh’s Quantum Theatre ever since we did one in all our first Know a Theatre options on them in 2014, and it shouldn’t be arduous to determine why: Since 1990, they’ve been staging avant-garde performs and operas at numerous unlikely websites across the City of Bridges. I lastly had the possibility, to not see a manufacturing, alas, however to fulfill founding inventive director Karla Boos on the TCG convention in June in Pittsburgh, the place she and her government director, Erick Hoffman, tipped me to the troupe’s subsequent large enterprise: The world premiere of a brand new model of Idaspe, Riccardo Broschi’s 18th-century opera, with fashionable notation and a totally up to date staging by composer Claire van Kampen and Chatham Baroque. Van Kampen is greatest identified stateside for the operatic drama Farinelli and the King, which hit Broadway starring her husband, Mark Rylance in 2017, and there’s a Farinelli connection to this new work as properly: Mezzo-soprano Vivica Genaux will likely be singing the position of Dario, initially written by Broschi for his brother, Farinelli, the famed castrato who, based on van Kampen’s play in addition to well-liked lore, had the fateful operation ordered by his composer brother. None of that backstory is a part of Idaspe, although van Kampen’s modern replace—she’s set it in Sixties Naples, amongst Middle Eastern refugees who grow to be entangled in an area organized crime community—is more likely to evoke not solely modern parallels to the Europe’s present refugee disaster however resonances with the intrigues and inequities of 18th-century Naples. Above all, the piece marries Van Kampen’s and Quantum’s shared need to carry opera again to the theatre, because the composer explains in this transient video. (Indeed, in a slight departure from earlier observe, Quantum will stage Idaspe not in a warehouse or a museum however on the landmark Byham Theatre.)

Finally, as a part of an unsurprisingly thrilling 2022-23 season, Chicago’s Steppenwolf will lastly premiere 1919, a stage adaptation by J. Nicole Brooks of Eve L. Ewing’s searing e book of poems concerning the Chicago race riots of the title yr, which left 17-year-old Eugene Williams lifeless. (The present, meant to inaugurate Steppenwolf’s new theatre in February, was postponed on account of a COVID surge; now in previews, the brand new run has its opening evening Oct. 10 and runs by way of Oct. 29.) Though it’s a manufacturing of Steppenwolf for Young Adults, I wouldn’t miss this one have been I in Chicago, and there can be loads of possibilities, both in its run at Steppenwolf or at one of many 5 Chicago places it is going to tour to in November. Said Ewing (previously Twitter’s beloved wikipedia brown) in an announcement, “It feels surreal to know that this little book and the stories I tried to capture will find a new home on the stage, thanks to the incredible work of such an impressive and interdisciplinary group of artists. I can’t wait for Chicagoans to have the opportunity to reflect on the events of the Red Summer in this new way, and as an educator I’m especially inspired and humbled to know that so many young people will have the chance to experience the production.”

Count me impressed too, by the variability and abundance on show throughout U.S. theatres, even those I can’t expertise firsthand.

Rob Weinert-Kendt (he/him) is the editor-in-chief of American Theatre.

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