When visiting New York City, there’s nothing more exciting than a stroll through the neon wonderland of Times Square and the Theater District, albeit with the immense crowds that go with it, along with three-card monte cons, pickpockets and sellers of knock-off merchandise. Indeed, that tension between glamor and tackiness may be precisely what makes the area so alluring. For theater-goers of course, Broadway is Mecca, and has been for 125 years.
Theater in New York City has recovered from the long COVID shut-down, but it’s not yet quite what it was, the same as in Chicago. The quantity is back—there are scores of shows to see on-and-off Broadway—but runs are shorter. Not-for-profit and subscription theater productions are playing four weeks instead of six, or six weeks instead of 10, as the number of season subscribers is not back to pre-pandemic levels. Even commercial Broadway theatres are extending shows two months at a time, rather than announcing open-ended runs.
On an early-November trip to New York, I saw four shows which confirm the wide variety of fare available, and also the short time-windows in which to buy tickets for some of them.
The Hills of California is a new play by British writer Jez Butterworth, winner of numerous London and New York theater honors, among them a Tony Award. The play is in its American premiere in a Broadway production at the Broadhurst Theatre, through Dec. 22 (as of this writing). Several Butterworth plays have been produced in Chicago over the last 20 years, and they’ve been highly theatrical with pungent, coarse language. Frequently they have been violent and misogynistic (at least some of the male characters are such).
It was a pleasant surprise, therefore, to find that “The Hills of California” is neither violent nor misogynistic. Rather, it’s a big-hearted play about four sisters and their mother, taking place in Blackpool, England in 1955—when the sisters are adolescents—and 1976 when the sisters re-unite around their mother’s death. As girls, they are a close-harmony singing quartet, pushed into a minor showbiz career by their ambitious, well-sorted stage Mum. Eventally, one sister becomes a star, and the play revolves around how and why this happened, and the sibling conflict which was one result. The play has little connection to California, hilly or otherwise.
It’s extremely well-done and sympathetically-acted under prominent film and stage director Sam Mendes, a long-time Butterworth collaborator. It’s also a self-indulgent work. Written in three acts, it’s longer than necessary and filled with extraneous minor characters. It features 16 actors playing 23 roles on a massive three-story set, making it too big to travel or be produced by local theatre companies without being significantly scaled back. The four sisters require two sets of actors—younger and older—and the younger ones need to be accomplished close-harmony singers. Almost certainly, that makes this Broadway production a unique experience. The Hills of California enlarges my view of Jez Butterworth’s work and is a lovely—but long—evening of theater.
The Off-Broadway premiere of In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot, at Playwrights Horizons, is an example of the current shorter runs, playing only Oct. 10 through Nov. 17, including previews. Written by young American author Sarah Mantell, it’s even more a women’s piece than the Butterworth play. With seven female characters, it’s quite possible a Chicago company might stage this play some time. Several of the women are lovers or would-be lovers, and there are roles for several older women, all too rare in contemporary theater.
The play runs 90 minutes and is crammed with interesting premises and twists; too many of them, in fact. It’s set in a dystopian America—no, not Trump’s America specifically—in which climate change has flooded both coasts for several hundred miles inland, and in which “The Corporation” controls access to information. Having banded together, the women travel from Amazon warehouse-to-warehouse in different states for work, and now are in Idaho, living in vans in the parking lot, and sabotaging warehouse expansion in an under-motivated revolutionary movement.
Two unseen people, Matt and Barbara, also are linked to several of the women, but it’s never quite clear how: brother, ex-husband and mother all are referenced. In the end, The Corporation gets wind of their sabotage, seizes their vans and closes the warehouse, leaving them twisting in the wind.
In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot simply has too many plates on the table, although it offers sympathetic opportunities for the actors as staged by Sivan Battat. The production also had a dynamic, striking physical production featuring a stunning mountain landscape plus a working Amazon warehouse conveyor belt, designed by Emmie Finckel, with lighting by Cha See.
Being the Big Apple, New York always offers things you can only see in New York, such as: a wacky, delightful comedy featuring cult performance artist Alina Troyano, a Cuban-American who performs as Carmelita Tropicana. She co-authored Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! with notable playwright Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins, whose play Purpose had its world premiere at Steppenwolf Theatre Company last March. It’s a family drama inspired by Chicago’s Jesse Jackson, and featuring Harry J. Lennix as the patriarch. That production will open in New York this winter.
Meantime, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has gone on a pleasure cruise with Carmelita Tropicana in a zany phantasmagoria of puppets, meta-theatrical devices, a giant goldfish and a plot which involves Jacobs-Jenkins and Tropicana somehow switching bodies. The result is two hours of delight, cheap theatrical effects & knowing laughter. The Soho Rep, where the show plays, is tiny and tickets are hard to come by (and also inexpensive), but if you want a funny night out and a true Big Apple cultural experience “Give Me Carmelita Tropicana!” is it! It plays through Dec. 15.
That giant goldfish would feel right at home in the sea-faring setting of Swept Away, a new Broadway musical viewed in previews at the Longacre Theatre, and set to open Nov. 19. However, this new show is as sombre and tragic as Give Me Carmelita Tropicana is light-hearted and comic. With a book by one-time Chicago playwright John Logan, now an eminent writer, Swept Away is a juke box musical based on Mignonette, a 2004 concept album by the southern folk-rock group, the Avett Brothers.
The album was inspired by the quick-and-dead involved in an 1870s sea-faring disaster off the coast of England, and what happened to four survivors adrift in a rowboat. Logan has altered the setting to 1880s America, better suiting the folk-rock nature of the Avett Brothers songs (which are quite wonderful and melodic). The show runs 90 minutes straight through and features an attractive all-male cast with splendid voices. It’s quite powerful, even seen in previews, but increasingly solemn and brutal as the story plays out in the rowboat. The question with Swept Away isn’t whether or not the show is good—it is good—but whether or not audiences (and critics) will easily embrace such a dark tale.
JONATHAN ABARBANEL was Theater Editor of the Windy City Times for many years. He is a member of the American Theatre Critics Association, and can be heard Sunday mornings on The Arts Section on WDCB Public Radio (90.9 FM) or at wdcb.org.