Photo by Ron Marotta
You’ll laugh, you’ll cry: Elaine Bromka, as Betty Ford.

TEA FOR THREE: LADY BIRD, PAT & BETTY  Three gold frames hang on the back wall of a room in the White House — where we’re about to meet a trio of first ladies in the waning hours of their reign. There’s no portrait or picture within them…and as the tight, 80-minute “TEA FOR THREE” plays out, the conspicuously empty space inside those gilded adornments will speak volumes about how we project our own values, opinions and desires onto the blank canvas of people we think we know (even if we’ve never actually met them).

Credit director Byam Stevens for that telling visual metaphor. The writing, by Eric H. Weinberger and Elaine Bromka, has its own stealthy dramatic conceit: Each presidential wife we’re about to meet (Lady Bird Johnson, Pat Nixon and Betty Ford) is reflecting on life in the White House, just as the new first lady is about to show up for the grand tour. About to be stripped of their duties (or freed from them as the case may be), this unique place in time affords them the rare chance to offer unusually candid opinions. Depending upon their disposition and the reason their hubby left office, the tea room becomes a confessional, a wartime bunker or the backroom of a speakeasy during last call. It’s a great premise to throw at lone cast member Bromka — a disciplined theater vet whose mastery of each woman’s voice, posture and temperament is as far from mimicry as one could possibly hope to expect. She’s especially good when required to make the swift shift from self-aware humor to clueless pathos. Played as a fun-loving gal who just wants the party to go on, her Betty Ford is especially poignant — a survivor of breast cancer who hasn’t yet been stopped in her tracks from the booze and pills she downs with skill and aplomb. Moments like that (and there are plenty of them) will stay with you — even if you don’t know much about the era in which these three women occupied the White House.

Through June 29. Wed.-Sat. at 8pm. Matinees Wed. & Sat. at 2pm & Sun. at 3pm. At The Theatre at 30th Street (259 W. 30th St., btw.7th & 8th Aves.). For tickets ($45), call 212-868-4444 or visit teaforthree.com. Visit teaforthree.com.

—Scott Stiffler

Photo by Stephanie Berger
Every year, a glorious noise: River to River favorite Bang on a Can opens the festival with a nine-hour super mix of boundary-busting music.

Down by the water and in the streets, 150+ events at 28 sites 

BY MAEVE GATELY  |  Every time spring turns to summer, it seems as if the promotional material for every musical performance, theatrical presentation, art exhibit, reading or family activity in Lower Manhattan boasts the same familiar phrase: “Part of the River to River Festival.”

The mostly outdoor and completely free series, which long ago had art down to a science, has designed its first post-Sandy installment to function as a homecoming for displaced artists — as well as a reminder to audiences that the area’s energy and vitality wasn’t washed away, or even slightly waterlogged, by the physical destruction of last October’s superstorm.

When asked whether the ongoing struggle to rebuild this area has impacted the event, Sam Miller (president of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, which sponsors the festival) said, “What has compounded the personal and professional losses for both artists and organizations, particularly in the areas most severely damaged, has been the loss of community, of home in that wider neighborhood sense.” As restaurants and stores closed, he went on to explain, the area struggled to recover psychologically. That’s why this time around, River to River hopes to bring back more than foot traffic.

“We will be providing activities and events that engage residents, workers and visitors in the hardest hit districts, particularly along the Water Street and South Street corridors, that we hope will generate a sense of excitement and interest in the area,” said Miller, adding that, “The festival will remind people of what a magical place Lower Manhattan is to work, play, learn, eat, shop and experience art.” That there was any festival at all, let alone one whose physical reach and formidable roster equals that of years past, only happened “with the support of stakeholders in the neighborhood.”

This year’s event will focus more closely on the processes by which the artists create their work, and not simply the works themselves. Open rehearsals and studio visits will allow visitors a glimpse into the ways in which a painting, sculpture or song is created. But before you go pulling the curtain back to see what makes a River to River artist tick, give the analytic part of your brain a break and just enjoy the beat.

THE BANG ON A CAN MARATHON

An all-ages event on Sunday, June 16, 1-10pm. At the Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts (3 Spruce Street).

A feat to witness and a joy to endure, this culture-blending, genre-busting musical marvel returns, with its traditional non-stop, nine-hour compilation of musical styles from across the world. The group, which is celebrating its 26th year, began as a one-day marathon concert in 1987. It’s since grown to include a variety of active and innovative programs and approaches — including residencies for musicians in developing countries (partnering with the State Department), a summer music festival for young composers, Asphalt Orchestra and an aggressively creative street band.

This year’s marathon will include performances by Alarm Will Sound, Talk Normal, Asphalt Orchestra and Hans Abrahamson.

FLUID: CONSTRUCT

June 15 through July 14. From 8am-6pm. Weekdays, at One Liberty Plaza.

Many of the shops at South Street Seaport are still closed, and the memory of the overwhelming power of Superstorm Sandy lingers. With this in mind, four New York artists will examine the city’s relationship with water in an exhibition commissioned by Arts Brookfield. David Baskin, Jason Head, Wyatt Nash and Emily Sartor will present their own interpretation of this shared theme, drawing from their backgrounds as painters and sculptors to bring color and life to an otherwise dark part of the city’s recent past.

THE JAZZ SAXOPHONE

An all-ages event on Friday, June 21 at 12pm, 12:30pm & 1pm. At Brookfield Place Plaza, 220 Vesey Street, One New York Plaza and Zuccotti Park.

New York City is, in so many ways, where the saxophone found its first and truest home. From the jazz clubs of 1920s to the work of Sonny Rollins, Charlie Parker and Jimmy Heath, to the backing tracks of many Frank Sinatra songs — the saxophone has had a love affair with this city.

A co-presentation with Arts Brookfield, as part of Make Music New York, “The Jazz Saxophone” is a musical tribute to this soulful instrument. Three 15-minute sets in three different locations will feature hip voices from the contemporary jazz scene. Come celebrate the perfect fusion of lively jazz and a lazy summer afternoon, and let the wail of the sax take you back — or forward.

LAURIE ANDERSON

June 18-22. A film/mixed media, interactive, literature/spoken word and music event, at various locations.

NASA’s first artist-in-residence isn’t resting on that 2003 laurel. The uncategorizable, unpredictable and prolific Laurie Anderson brings her decades of experience as a multimedia artist, musician and cultural analyst to the job of River to River Guest Curator.

On June 18 and 19, two 7pm Rockefeller Park concerts, “The Language of the Future,” have Anderson’s group of handpicked writers and performers exploring how time functions in their work. The first performance will focus on stories, the second on songs — as Anderson attempts, to “create a floating atmosphere that extends the summer evening and makes it all the more dream-like and timeless.”

Over the next three nights, Anderson will present a series of projects that demonstrate her interest and investment in fellow writers, directors, theatre and visual artists working in and around New York City — including a June 22 multimedia performance by Brooklyn-based performer and interactive-electronics artist Andrew Schneider. It takes place at 9pm, on Pier 15 (East River Esplanade). Expect the unexpected — but plan for plenty of “strobe lights and loud music.”

THE RIVER TO RIVER FESTIVAL

All across Lower Manhattan
June 15 through July 14
Free
For a schedule of events & more info, visit rivertorivernyc.com

Photo by Gyda Arber
Sound designer Ryan Holsopple’s revival of Alvin Lucier’s 1969 recording, “I Am Sitting in a Room,” presents the avant-garde composition as a concert-style performance using 2013 technology.

Brooklyn theater hosts festival of sound design

BY TOM TENNEY | The Brick Theater produces a lot of festivals — it’s kind of their thing. But festivals at the Williamsburg experimental venue aren’t your garden-variety observances of artist or genre: they’ve become the theater’s way of exploring aesthetic and cultural intersections. Sure, some of the dozens of festivals produced during the theatre’s first decade have had a chimerical bent (The Antidepressant Festival comes to mind), but just as often they examine critical connections between live theatre and other arts or performative elements. Their annual Game Play festivals, for example, present works that probe the relationship between performance and video gaming. Others, like the Comic Book Theater Festival, bring divergent artistic forms to the theatrical table.

It’s what Co-Artistic Director Michael Gardner calls “hybrid theatre,” and it makes one wonder what took them so long to come around to sound design. But come around they did — and for two weeks starting June 7th, the Brick Theater will present sound scape: a festival of 11 productions that celebrates the sound designer as a driving creative force.

“I’m a huge fan of sound design,” Gardner said. “It’s an unsung art form, and needed a spotlight. In this festival, the sound designer is the primary artist, and sound design, typically in the background in most theatrical shows, is foregrounded.”

While sound and theatre aren’t exactly incongruous forms — sound, of course, is an integral element in theater — the aural is normally relegated to the role of servile valet to the mighty image, and this is precisely what makes it cry out for a festival of its own.

Scanning the roster of performances, it’s hard to miss the fact that over half the productions in sound scape are based on past works — a fact that is thrilling to Gardner, who also curated the festival. “There’s a lot of classic text in there, and it spans a wide swathe of time,” he said. “You’ve got Homer, Dante, Beckett and Virginia Woolf. It wasn’t intentional, it’s just how it fell out.”

One of the most intriguing of these is a performance of Alvin Lucier’s 1969 recording, “I Am Sitting in a Room.” A classic among aficionados of avant-garde composition, Lucier’s piece is as much a scientific experiment as it is a work of art. In the original, Lucier recorded himself speaking into a tape recorder in an isolated room. The tape was then rewound, played back and re-recorded onto a second machine. This process repeated through several generations, each producing resonant frequencies which harmonized with each other — until the artist’s voice was obliterated, and all that remained were reverberating tones. This was groundbreaking stuff in 1969, and sound designer Ryan Holsopple’s revival as a concert-style performance designed using 2013 technology (the multimedia program Max/MSP) may be considered a scientific experiment in its own right.

Holsopple will employ the Brick’s new 5.2 surround sound system, but his use of modern tech is aimed towards maintaining the original piece’s simplicity. “It’s very stripped down and simple at its core,” he explained, adding that a public performance allows the possibility of the audience becoming part of the composition itself, in the tradition of John Cage. “If people get up to go to the bathroom, cough, move around, or if a siren goes by, every sound becomes a part of it because the room is constantly being recorded.”

Chris Chappell also plans on exploiting the Brick’s new sound system to its fullest. His piece, “ELE↓↑TOR”, was developed specifically for the kind of theatrical spacialization that a surround system can provide. The play takes place in an elevator in the Empire State Building, slowly ascending through a sonic spectrum on its way to the 80th floor.

Elevators are awkward and uncomfortable, and Chappell sculpts his sound to evoke this feeling in the audience. “We’re trying to create a feeling of being pushed into the confinement of a closed space,” he explained. Chappell cites two disparate sonic inspirations for the piece — elevator music, and the “noise instruments” developed by Futurist Luigi Russolo a century ago. He views the former as “a really empty kind of music, with a flattening quality that dampens the sharper emotions” — a perfect soundtrack to the social awkwardness of elevators.

Russolo’s influence is a bit more opaque, with pounding, electrical zapping and the sounds of “unfathomable technology” providing a counterpoint to the corporate, anxiety-mitigating quality of elevator music. Chappell says this theatrical noise “is not about soothing the modern man, it’s very loud and threatening and unpredictable.”

Another interesting sonic play on the past is “Commotion Collage,” which appropriates elements from the Dadaist simultaneous poem — a form pioneered in 1916 by Tristan Tzara at the Cabaret Voltaire, in which multiple voices and other sounds combine in a singular sonic composition.

Director Roger Nasser’s appropriation liberates the original form from its historic cultural context, and yokes it into service as a building block for a more contemporary version of the acoustic collage. “I’m going to take fragments of the original poems and weave them throughout, as part of the background,” he explained. He’ll also include contemporary sounds, such as answering machine messages, white noise and a riff from the “Family Ties” theme song — artifacts from an electronic culture that didn’t yet exist in 1916.

Given the number of ways the festival’s producers are demonstrating that a focus on sound can spur such theatrical innovation, it’s unlikely that sound scape will be merely a one-off festival, and may even become a staple of the Brick’s annual offerings. “I like the idea that theatre began as an auditory experience,” Gardner said, adding that, “Today, one thinks of going to see a play. But we want to remind the audience that they’re there to listen. I hope this is an opportunity for audiences to reinterpret what the stage is to them, and to re-imagine what a theatre-going experience can be.”

THEATER
Sound Scape
A Festival of Theatrical Sound Design
June 7-29
At The Brick
579 Metropolitan Ave.
At Lorimer St., Williamsburg Brooklyn (btw. Lorimer St. & Union Ave.)
Tickets: $15, online at bricktheater.com or call 866-811-4111

Photo courtesy of Discovering Oz L to R: Joel Leffert, Harlan J. Alford, Linda Tardif and Tina Shepard, in “Marcellus Shale.”

Talking Band’s latest digs deep below the surface

 BY MARTIN DENTON (of nytheatre.com and indietheaternow.com) | When I first saw the title “Marcellus Shale,” I thought it was somebody’s name: it sounds like the moniker of a character in a Thornton Wilder play, doesn’t it? It’s not, though. Paul Zimet got the title for his latest work from a geological formation located in the Appalachian Basin, including the Catskills in Southern New York.

This region is at the center of some significant controversy at the moment, for it contains massive amounts of untapped natural gas resources that many entities want to tap using the process known as fracking.

But my leap toward Thornton Wilder proved apt, as it turned out. This new work by Zimet — a remarkable, wise, deeply moving, highly necessary play — is in its way a descendent of “Our Town,” examining the details and rhythms of usually unexamined American lives to reveal something at once ineffable and fundamental.

Zimet’s not interested here in what’s eternal, but rather in what’s inexorable. “Marcellus Shale” is not so much about policy or economy as it is about complacency and inertia. Its central question is: How did we get to this place, where a society of supposed rugged individualist can-do Yankees got cowed into submission by a passel of entities that are too big — not just to fail, but also to topple or even to challenge?

“Marcellus Shale” unfolds in a small New York town only a few years into the future (the play is set in 2016), where gas companies have disrupted virtually every aspect of a life that residents sold out for leases that felt lucrative but now perhaps seem paltry.

The story revolves around four families: Tom and Bonnie, who leased their farm and are now retired; Betty, who works as a First Responder and whose son, Duncan, has just returned from the military abroad; Alex, a middle-aged stoner whose son Pablo has also just returned home; and Adelyn, a corporate trainer whose daughter Rona has also just returned home (from NYC).

The play has a strong narrative throughline, but I leave its compelling details for you to discover. It also probes into the rituals and dreams of these varied people, and finds in them evidence (as opposed to reason) that help us see, from our vantage point as onlookers, the paths these folks have taken.

Zimet gets under these characters’ skin with insight and eloquence. Here’s one of my favorite moments, in which Tom contemplates hitting the road:

I
sometimes had
had thought
had thought when I was younger that I’d like to
be a truck driver and see a lot of the country
and
well
Well yes I’d like to I’d like to see an awful lot of our country
I’ve I’ve always been
uh
had the wish to
see the Great Smoky Mountains and
see the uh the Grand Canyon of the Colorado
and uh
Rocky Mountains and
Mojave Desert and you know all the all the places that you see beautiful pictures of…

The play is gorgeously lyrical and suspenseful and involving. Zimet’s staging is signature Talking Band style — meaning that there’s not a wasted or unnecessary movement or transition; that there’s always music (by Ellen Maddow) and singing, and even dancing (sometimes, especially when you don’t expect it); that the ensemble work is tight and flawless and that simultaneously each of the production’s ten remarkably accomplished actors creates a full-bodied, empathetic, deeply human character.

The actors are Harlan J. Alford, Suli Holum, John Kurzynowski, Joel Leffert, Ellen Maddow, Mike Mikos, Steven Rattazzi, Tina Shepard, David Smilow and Linda Tardif. The design is stunning, with thrillingly evocative sets and video by Anna Kiraly, sound by Maddow, lights by Lenore Doxsee and Natalie Robin, and costumes by Kiki Smith, all working together to create a magical and theatrical world for a play that is mostly about the ground and our relationship to it.

I think what I most admire about “Marcellus Shale” is the fact that Paul Zimet has written it at all. In a time when so many artists seem content to gripe and grumble on blogs or Facebook, Zimet has done what he does best: creating a work of theater art to try to figure out how we got into this mess and what we are supposed to do about it. And I love, too, that of course no simple answer is promulgated here — we live in complicated, difficult times, after all; except, perhaps, the simplest answer of all, which comes in the play’s final, resonant moment.

“Marcellus Shale” does what great art is supposed to do. It engages us, jolts us, surprises and challenges us (even drawing the unexpected smile now and then, given its somber setting).

If we can get art as beautiful as this, then there’s hope that we can fix anything, right?

Note: This review first appeared on nytheatre.com.

THEATER
MARCELLUS SHALE
Written & Directed by Paul Zimet
Music by Ellen Maddow
A Talking Band production
Through June 9
At La MaMa
74A E. Fourth St. (btw. Bowery
& 2nd Ave.)
Tickets: $25 ($20 for
students/seniors)
For reservations, call 212-475-7710 or visit lamama.org

Photo by Joan Marcus A black and white drama, in more than one sense: “Lucky Guy.”A

Theatergoer Tallmer casts his votes 

BY JERRY TALLMER  |  Here they come again — the Tonys.

Allow me to cast my votes herewith for two extraordinary candidates — two endlessly fecund artists of two disparate generations — whom I not only knew and from time to time wrote about but could, I think, each be called friends of mine over the long haul.

They are playwrights Nora Ephron and Horton Foote.

There were some years when, as a newspaper’s theater critic, I was what’s called “a Tony voter.” This came to a screeching halt after the season in which on my ballot I wrote in: “Dr. Rose Franzblau, Best Actress in a Supporting Role in a Comedy.”

You don’t remember Dr. Rose Franzblau? No? Well, Dr. Rose Franzblau was for many years the Freudian-slanted agony columnist — the Miss Lonelyhearts — of the New York Post. Her answer to everything was: Go see a shrink. Getting fat? See a shrink. Lost your job? See a shrink. Scared of heart attack? See a shrink. Hate your mother, your husband, your wife, your kids? See a shrink.

One day at my desk at the paper, the phone rang.

“Hello, dollink. This is Dr. Rose Franzblau. You write like an angel. I told Mrs. Schiff you write like an angel. Dollink, this Joe Papp, he’s got a Shakespeare play about to open in Central Park. I have four important people coming in from out of town. They want to see it. I don’t want them to have to stand in line. Can you call this Joe Papp and fix me up with six tickets?”

I said: Gee, Dr. Franzblau, it’s for free, but Joe Papp makes everybody stand in line. I don’t think he’ll —

“Try!”

So I tried. The answer was: Tell Dr. Rose Franzblau to go eff herself. I conveyed that, more politely, to Dr. Franzblau. Who came back with a cajoling: “Listen, my dear. Are you a nice Jewish boy…?”

This was the same Dr. Rose Franzblau, showbiz angel and, at a guess, herself a Tony voter, who at every Broadway opening night could be observed standing erect in the second row on the aisle, her back to the stage, counting the house and waving to friends while all around her had taken their seats as the curtain was rising….

Nora Ephron and I reached the New York Post at roughly the same time in the 1960s, myself a few years ahead of her. She was the oldest daughter of highly successful Hollywood screenwriters and Broadway playwrights Henry and Phoebe Ephron, who had put Wellesley teenager Nora into their “Take Her, She’s Mine” both in film and on stage — but their daughter had carved her own way into the Post by way of writing for Victor Navasky’s parody issue, The New York Pest. Far from being shocked or angry, celebrity-conscious publisher Dorothy Schiff told her editors to get that Ephron girl, and fast.

Of course it didn’t hurt that Nora’s parents were Hollywood stars in their own right, but a movie career for daughter Nora seemed nowhere on the horizon. Indeed, when I did a magazine piece on Nora just a few years ago, and asked her if she’d ever as a kid thought she’d end up writing and directing movies of her own, the screenwriter and/or director of “Sleepless in Seattle,”  “When Harry Met Sally” and a dozen other motion pictures replied:

“No, that was the last thing I wanted. One of the reasons I left L.A. was because I hated L.A. and hated the movie business or anything to do with it. I wanted to be a, quote, real writer — a journalist — forever.”

Hated having anything to do with it? Well, Henry and Phoebe Ephron, who ended up as hard-core alcoholics, had something to do with it, and though I never in a million years would have thought Nora (1941-2012) would be dead as I write this — nor did she, I can tell you — a poignant confession of hers atop the script of “Lucky Guy,” the unmade movie that has now turned into the Broadway play that I’m nominating for Best Play in this year’s Tony Awards, reads as follows:

But for many years I was in love with journalism. I loved the City Room, I loved the pack. I loved smoking and drinking Scotch and playing dollar poker. I didn’t know much about anything, and I was in a profession where you didn’t have to. I loved the speed. I loved the deadlines. I loved that you wrapped the fish [in yesterday’s newspaper].

And there’s also this:

I’d known since I was a child that I was going to live in New York eventually, and that everything in between would be just an intermission. I’d spent all those years imagining what New York was going to be like. I thought it was going to be the most magical, exciting, fraught-with-possibility place that you could ever live…a place where I might be able to become the only thing worth being — a journalist.

And I’d turned out to be right.

Then there’s this. Phoebe Ephron, a tough cookie, left her daughter just two precepts:

1) Never buy a red coat.

2) Everything is copy.

Nora promptly went out and bought herself a red coat, but she lived (and died) by Precept No. 2: Everything is copy.

“Lucky Guy” is a City Room play that ranks right up there in toughness and know-how with “The Front Page” and all those other old black and-white “Hello, sweetheart, give me rewrite” movies that Bruce Goldstein runs at Film Forum from time to time.

Only this one is about real people with (mostly) real names, starting with Mike McAlary (1957-1998), the New York Daily News and New York Newsday reporter and columnist who, shortly before his death from cancer, won a Pulitzer Prize in journalism for his exposure of the brutality of a handful of Brooklyn cops for the torture and anal rape (by mop handle) of a 30-year-old Haitian immigrant named Abner Louima.

The volatile, ambitious, neurotic McAlary is played by first-time-on-Broadway Tom Hanks, a Nora Ephron regular (“Sleepless in Seattle,” “You’ve Got Mail”) who is up for a Tony Award of his own.

“Lucky Guy” is a black-and-white drama in more than one sense, because it co-stars Courtney B. Vance as James (Hap) Hairston (1949-2002), the Daily News city editor who as much as anybody else shaped not only McAlary’s copy but that restless soul’s whole professional life.

Here is what, for me, is the high point of “Lucky Guy.”

Mike McAlary and Hap Hairston, separately hospitalized, are having a phone talk, miles apart, hospital bed to hospital bed.

“I always knew I was going to live in the city,” says McAlary — echoing playwright Nora. “Knew I was going to write for a newspaper. Didn’t know which one, but I knew. I even knew I was going to be edited by a balding black man who drank almost as much as me.”

I don’t know who was Nora Ephron’s own Hap Hairston. Maybe nobody — just herself. But if this is the last play we’ll ever get from her, and I think it must be, I wish it well, Tony or no Tony.

*     *     *

I did not need FCC chairman Newton Minow to tell me, and the nation, back in 1961, that television was, even then, “a vast wasteland.” I knew it just from watching — as much as I could stand, which wasn’t much. But even then, there was one name that popped up from time to time on “the crawl” — the endless list of production credits — whenever a program of some quality had reached the small screen.

Photo courtesy of the producers “The Trip to Bountiful” gets Tallmer’s Tony nod for Best Revival.

And this had been true as far back as 1953, when NBC aired a short, quiet, powerful drama called “The Trip to Bountiful,” starring Lillian Gish as Carrie Watts, the lonely old lady who just wants to go back to take a look at the small town where she grew up.

The name on the crawl was Horton Foote. “Written by Horton Foote.” But who was he? It was a good many years before I found out that Horton Foote (1916-2009) was a real person, indeed a very real, authentic, forthcoming person who lived right here in Greenwich Village where the Meatpacking District hits the Hudson River.

It was when I got to know Horton better, review his openings, interview him from time to time, that I one day wrote this:

Some people get up in the morning and go to Wall Street. Or to their job in a department store. Or a supermarket. Or a newspaper office.  Or to fly an airplane.

Horton Foote gets up in the morning and writes plays.

Lillian Gish was followed over the years by Geraldine Page, Eva Marie Saint and many another prizewinning brilliant actress, and now an all-black “Trip to Bountiful,” with gorgeous Cicely Tyson as Carrie Watts, is up for a Tony as Best Revival of a Play. The competition includes Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” — which makes it tough for me, but I will stick with Horton on grounds of seniority. When he left us at age 93, up in Hartford, Connecticut, he was still hard at work on future projects with daughter Hallie.

You can sit down now, Dr. Franzblau.

THEATER
LUCKY GUY
Written by Nora Ephron
Directed by George C. Wolfe
Through July 3
At the Broadhurst Theatre
235 W. 44th St., btw. 7th & 8th Aves.
For tickets ($87-$152), call 212-239-6200, or visit telecharge.com

A TRIP TO BOUNTIFUL
Written by Horton Foote
Directed by Michael Wilson
Through Sept. 1
At the Stephen Sondheim Theatre
124 W. 43 St.,
btw. Sixth Ave. & Broadway
For tickets ($42-$142), call 212-239-6200 or visit telecharge.com

THE TONY AWARDS
Sun., June 9
8pm, on CBS

Photo by Samir Abady Photography
Moira Stone and Mateo Moreno, in Jerry Polner’s “Fix Number Six.”

‘Connections’ kicks off summer theater fest season

Photo by Ashley Marinaccio Breani Michele, in Girl Be Heard’s production of “9mm.”

BY MARTIN DENTON (of nytheatre.com and indietheaternow.com) | New York City’s busy summer theater festival season kicks off on May 29 with Planet Connections, a four-week celebration of independent theater and social consciousness that is now in its fifth year.

Its official moniker is “Planet Connections Theatre Festivity” — and that last word is just one thing that sets this event apart from the many other theatrical marathons that dot (dominate!) our landscape here in the Big Apple from June through August.

So what’s different about Planet Connections? This: the fact that all of the shows presented, in addition to being interesting new works spanning many genres and styles of the indie theater landscape, also champion specific causes. Each show is a benefactor for a nonprofit organization — and these entities will be represented in talkbacks, promotions, information sessions and fundraising throughout the Festivity.

Among the recipients of Planet Connections shows’ largesse this year are my own (The New York Theatre Experience, Inc.) along with many others — ranging from The LIT Fund to The Ali Forney Center to The Blue Green Alliance to the ASCPA. You should definitely check out the information about these charitable groups on Planet Connections’ website (planetconections.org).

But of course, artistically, the Festivity is well worth your time! I’ve been a regular attendee at all the previous editions, and I’ve met some truly exceptional playwrights, directors, actors and other theater artists along the way. Works by a diverse and talented roster of playwrights, ranging from Yvette Heyliger and Duncan Pflaster to Jason S. Grossman and Kimberly Pau have been seen at Planet Connections, and many of the best scripts from past years are assembled at Indie Theater Now (indietheaternow.com/Collection/Index/planet-connections).

This year’s Festivity runs from May 29 through June 23 at two East Village venues — the Robert Moss Theater and the Gene Frankel Theater. This is a fun, vibrant neighborhood with many shops, bars and restaurants where you can fill the time before, after and in-between the shows you catch at the festival.

There are 30 mainstage productions in Planet Connections 2013, along with a variety of special events and readings (including a special gala event on June 16th featuring readings of short plays by Neil LaBute, John Patrick Shanley and Winter Miller, at the Signature Center at Pershing Square). Because this is a relatively compact event, in terms of geography and size (but not in terms of timeframe), it is very possible for an audience member to see virtually everything the Festivity has to offer.

Here are a few of the works in this year’s Festivity that I know enough about to comment on, based on experience with the artists and companies involved. Don’t limit yourself to what I talk about here, though. Check out the variety and range of work and find subjects, styles and worthy causes that appeal to your sensibility.

“9mm America” — This devised theater piece from Girl Be Heard, about violence in America, was created by 10 young women of high-school age. Director Ashley Marinaccio, a passionate and dedicated activist/artist, is a Planet Connections veteran. Expect thought-provoking, raw, documentary-style theater.

“Artaud…mon momo” — Roi “Bubi” Escudero is a one-of-a-kind artist, with a deep knowledge of the avant-garde, a limitless imagination and a penchant for never repeating herself. This is her second look at the ethos of “Theater of Cruelty” inventor Antonin Artaud. There won’t be anything in the festival remotely like it.

“Dragon” — Articulate Theatre Company is launching with this new play by Jenny Connell Davis that looks to blend realism and mythology within the framework of a timeless love story. Director and company founder Cat Parker has been responsible for some excellent productions over the years, including the NYC premiere of “Sister Cities” back in 2007.

“Fix Number Six” — If nytheatre.com’s annual Person of the Year recognition means anything to you, then this is a show to see. This new play by Jerry Polner is about a travel agent who longs to be a spy. It’s directed by Michael Criscuolo, and its cast includes Arthur Aulisi and Alyssa Simon. All three of these luminaries have been People of the Year, which means that we think they’re top-notch artists.

“Straight Faced Lies” — This is the fourth year in a row that Mark Jason Williams will have a new script in Planet Connections (each of the other three was nominated for a playwriting award, with 2011’s “The Other Day” winning that honor). Mark is a smart, sensitive, courageous writer — and I expect this new piece, set at a family Thanksgiving dinner, to be one of this year’s highlights.

“Subject 62” — Rhode Island-based Lenny Schwartz is another four-time Festivity contributor. His latest play, which he calls his most personal, follows last year’s somewhat sensational “Accidental Incest,” 2011’s “Fidelity” and 2010’s “The Six Month Cure.” Expect an earnest treatment of a serious topic — how the onset of illness affects one family’s life.

“The Greatest Pirate Story (N)ever Told!” — On a lighter note we find this new musical by Christopher Leidenfrost, whose contributions to Planet Connections over the years include his award-winning starring roles as Whizzer in last year’s revival of “Falsettos” and appearing in drag in the gay marriage drama “The Declaration.” This new show ought to be just as it sounds — a fun, musical romp with plenty of audience interaction.

“What Do You Mean” — This entry from Ego Actus marks my first time seeing a play written by Bruce A. Kraemer. He is usually a designer and producer, so I’m excited to see him stretch in this meta tale of a person who is writing a play for a festival but doesn’t know what to write about. His longtime partner, Joan Kane, directs.

As I said, these represent just a sampling of what’s on offer at the Festivity. Browse their websites, check out previews and reviews on nytheatre.com and elsewhere and keep your eyes and ears open as you shuttle between the festival venues for audience buzz. Planet Connections is a fun event that’s much less intense than FringeNYC, yet still packed with entertainment value. I’m hoping to do one or more talkbacks and am looking forward to taking in as much as I can during the festival’s four weeks.

Enjoy!

THEATER

PLANET CONNECTiONS
THEATRE FESTIVITY

May 29-June 23
At the Robert Moss Theatre (440 Lafayette St., near Astor Place)
And the Gene Frankel Theatre (24 Bond St., corner of Lafayette St.)
For tickets ($18), call 866-811-4111 or visit planetconnections.org

This Scottish play is a bunny on the run

BY JERRY TALLMER | Is this a dagger I see before me?

Oh no, it is an apple.

The apple that Alan Cumming tosses from hand to hand, nervously, ritualistically, throughout much of his one-man “Macbeth,” is like Cagney or Bogart or George Raft flip-flopping a silver dollar against tedium and the fates in something less auspicious than Shakespeare. One also thinks of Nina in Chekhov’s “The Seagull” — the young runaway would-be actress who never knew what to do on stage with her hands. Here, Nina, here’s an apple to occupy your hands.

“One-man” means that at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre — in a “Macbeth” that has been chopped down to a longish two hours running time — the Scottish born-and-bred 48-year-old all-purpose actor plays all the roles, male and female (i.e., Lady Macbeth) with the nominal support of one actual living male (Brendan Titley) and one actual female (Jenny Sterlin) who speak only a few lines each, but are otherwise omnipresent as a doctor and his lab assistant in some unidentified Dunsinane of a nuthouse — where the only patient seems to be our hallucinating friend, Mr. Macbeth.

The whole drama is set in one large clinical room of that mental institution — a metallic hospital bed to our left, a locked door at the head of a metal flight of stairs to our right, a large observation window for the doc and his assistant to peer through at dead center and three pretty useless television screens above all that. Also, upstage, beneath the observation window, an old-fashioned free-standing bathtub. Keep your eyes on that bathtub.

The sound and lighting effects are to suit — loud, intermittent, illogical, scary alarums of varying shock effect. As the patient strips down, the lab assistant draws blood from his arm, the doctor takes a few notes and the drama (as reconceived by directors John Tiffany and Andrew Goldberg) begins with Macbeth/Cumming speaking the lines of the three witches — “When shall we three meet again?” — as he runs around in little puppy-dog circles to indicate changes of time and place.

Watching this, I had a flashback to a happier “Macbeth” experience, way back in the 1950s in Central Park, when Joe Papp’s youthful New York Shakespeare Festival company, long before there was any such thing as a Delacorte Amphitheater, dared defy the elements by opening its everything-on-a-truck production of the Scottish play in the teeth of a gathering thunderstorm.

Precisely on the line “So foul and fair a day I have not seen,” the heavens opened wide, the lightning struck, the thunder cannonaded upon us and the rain flooded down as a laughing Lady Macbeth — lovely Colleen Dewhurst — led everybody else in a frantic footrace back to the shelter of the truck.

Would that anything as exciting as that was happening these nights and matinees on West 47th Street.

There is a lot of dressing and undressing in this production, sometimes to indicate changes in gender, sometimes not, but it also comes permeated with what I should think is a very un-Scottish petulance. And by the way, I cannot believe that Stratford Will hurled forth this most virile thunderbolt of the English language with a knotty Scots intonation in mind. I mean, we know he could do that when he wanted to (“Henry V”).

Speaking in an exaggerated manner that reminds me of my mother playing “Funny English Lady,” it was difficult, at least for me, to tell whom this versatile actor was playing at any given moment. Who is he now? And now? And now? Ah yes, now he’s in the bathtub saying: “Take my milk for gall” and “I have given suck and know how tender it is to love the babe that milks me” — that has to be Lady Macbeth, yes — who now is commanding her husband to screw his courage to the sticking place and murder their effeminate guest, the king? Why effeminate? Your speculation is as good as mine.

The last time I ever saw a bathtub on stage was at director Ivo van Hove’s assault on “A Streetcar Named Desire,” for East Fourth Street’s New York Theatre Workshop. Blanche Dubois took a lot of baths, so why shouldn’t Elizabeth Marvel take one right there on stage?

And why does our Macbeth now have mimed sexual intercourse with his hospital bed? The last person I saw doing that was Lenny Bruce, a somewhat different cup of tea.

Adding it all up, when Macbeth informs his lady: “I have done the deed,” you could fool me. Let him go play with his voices, and his dog-trots and the doll that is his son in its old-fashioned, full-length nightgown. Not murder a monarch.

What is lost, or buried, or subsumed is the greatness and the fierceness and the immortality of the language, from “Who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him” to “She should have died hereafter” to:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and
tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

If that was good enough for William Faulkner (“The Sound and the Fury”), it’s good enough for me.

But you have to hunt for it at the Barrymore.

Alan Cumming has been everywhere in British films and television for some 20 years. He did good work on stage, mostly through silences, as the master of ceremonies — the Joel Grey role — in the 1998 “Cabaret” revival that starred Natasha Richardson. One cannot say the same for Joe Mantello’s over-obvious “Design for Living” of 2001, in which Cumming had to soul-kiss his male counterpart for emphasis. And now we have this “Macbeth.”

The audience the night I attended the show gave it a double standing ovation at final curtain, so mine is a minority vote. Mr. Cumming’s tragic hero of many voices puts me in mind of nothing so much as the Energizer Bunny darting frenziedly here, there, everywhere. I am reminded of the injunction of Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784):

“Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.”

Just so.

MACBETH
Written by William Shakespeare
Directed by John Tiffany
& Andrew Goldberg
Through June 30
At the Ethel Barrymore Theatre
243 West 47th St.
(btw. Broadway & Eighth Ave.)
Mon., Tues., Thurs. at 7pm
Fri. & Sat. at 8 pm
Sun. at 3pm
For tickets ($69.50-135, $199 for VIP), call 212-239-6200 or visit telecharge.com

“Matilda” is pure Broadway magic on every level

BY CHRISTOPHER BYRNE  |  A significant measure of Roald Dahl’s genius was his ability to understand the darkness inherent in childhood from a child’s perspective. His 15 novels are beloved by young readers for what they perceive as his honesty — expressed in abstract comedy and absurd situations — about what they experience in the world. His characters — Charlie Bucket from “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” James Henry Trotter from “James and the Giant Peach,” and Matilda Wormwood from “Matilda” — are his best-known characters from these quintessentially Jungian fables. Each must overcome disconnected, selfish, and chaotic adults to survive and grow.

Of all of these, “Matilda” is perhaps Dahl’s most searing critique of self-involved adults whose values are askew and inimical to the growth and education of children. Written at the end of Dahl’s career, it offers all his trademark humor and whimsy but his indictment of mainstream culture is more pointed and angry than in his earlier works.

Matilda is a freak in the Wormwood home. Her parents barely acknowledge her, and when they do it’s to belittle her native intelligence and curiosity and her devotion to — gasp! — reading. Matilda’s mother is a vacuous ballroom dance competitor and her father is a corrupt car salesman trying to foist off clunkers on some Russian businessmen. Her brother is nondescript and dull, besotted with television.

Matilda, though, is no wimp; she gets back at her family by playing nasty practical jokes. Like any real child, she’s not perfect. When Matilda is sent to Crunchem Hall (clearly a nod to Dickens’ Dotheboys Hall from “Nicholas Nickleby”), she ultimately becomes a hero, using her gifts and intelligence to prevail over the villainous headmistress Agatha Trunchbull, as well as everyone and everything else that holds her back.

In adapting this story for the stage, book writer Dennis Kelly and composer and lyricist Tim Minchin have created nothing less than a masterpiece of musical theater. Combining the sensibilities of a British pantomime with delightfully garish music hall moments and oddly affecting characters, the piece is rich and sophisticated — a children’s tale for thinking adults. At the same time, there’s plenty to delight any child over age 8, making this a bona fide family show.

Minchin’s score is varied and highly musical, marrying different styles to fit the dark situations of Matilda’s rebellion, particularly in “Naughty,” and in the ironically lyrical “When I Grow Up,” which opens the second act. Minchin has written lyrics sensitive to how kids express themselves — which is a rare talent.

The company is uniformly excellent. Gabriel Ebert as the nefarious Mr. Wormwood is hilarious throughout, and he has one of the best songs in the show, “Telly,” an indictment of the brain-dead consumption of entertainment. As his wife, Leslie Margherita is somewhere between Carmen Miranda and Lucy the Slut from “Avenue Q.” Bertie Carvel is brilliant as Agatha Trunchbull, Crunchem Hall’s evil and vindictive headmistress who is a former hammer throw champion. Each performance is informed by the fact that we’re looking at them through Matilda’s eyes, and their grotesque Grand Guignol style is exactly at the pitch that an overly imaginative child would take them in. All three are brilliant.

Four young actresses rotate as Matilda. I saw Oona Laurence, and it would be hard to imagine anyone more perfect in the role. Whether nasty or heroic, it’s impressive to see a child hold a Broadway audience in the palm of her diminutive hand. Lauren Ward is a sublime Miss Honey, and if she sometimes seems just too, too sweet, well, she serves as the counterpoint — or antidote — to the venal adults in Matilda’s mind.

Peter Darling’s choreography is inspired, at times hip hop-infused and consistently bold and original. Rob Howell’s Scrabble-tile sets and insanely imaginative costumes are great in every way. Matthew Warchus has directed this with a keen sense of the piece’s pantomime and music hall elements, balancing the abstract and magical elements of the tale with the story of a little girl’s wounded heart seeking a safe haven.

The original production of “Annie” inspired a generation of girls to pursue their theatrical dreams. “Matilda” is very likely to have the same affect on the current crop of little girls. At the very least it will be wowing audiences on Broadway for a long time to come.

Annual fest chronicles neighborhood life, lore

BY SCOTT STIFFLER  |  Documenting the evolution of its surrounding neighborhood through fiction based on historical facts as well as word-for-word fidelity to those living in the here and now, Metropolitan Playhouse’s East Village Theater Festival mines  those perspectives as a way to shed light on art, activism, immigration and gentrification.

This year’s festival, the fourth in an annual celebration of area life and lore, covers everything from 1898 suffragettes rattling the gates of the Stuyvesant Chess Club to Lower East Side tenement life to a morning-after tango of socio-sexual politics (negotiated by a Wall Street broker and his casual fling, as Occupy protesters fill the streets below).

That’s just for starters, in terms of what’s on the plate of “East Village Chronicles” — eight new plays equally divided between the themes of “Pioneers” and “Game Changers.” Six new solo performances are also on this year’s bill, the latest installment of Metropolitan’s “Alphabet City” project.

A time capsule in the form of oral histories, “Alphabet City” is a collection of solo performances written by their performers and culled, verbatim, from first-person interviews with local residents. The series (which, like “Chronicles,” will reach the decade mark next year) has already featured the life stories of over 50 artists, advocates, entrepreneurs, street figures, drug dealers and care-givers. Hilly Christal of CBGBs and “Mosaic Man” Jim Power are among its better-known participants — but like the work of the late Chicago-based Studs Terkel,  a greater portion of the “Alphabet City” recipe comes from those who’ve spent decades living and working in the East Village without having their contributions publicly acknowledged.

Terkel (whose “Working” is of particular relevance to the “Alphabet City” aesthetic) is always worth a read for his sweeping, in-their-own-words canvas of race, class and political concerns — but Metropolitan Playhouse does him one better, by bringing the transcribed recollections of its participants to life. This being theater, though, the real lives portrayed on the stage may not necessarily bear a precise resemblance to their originators.

“Every time there is a distance between the portrayer and the portrayed,” says Metropolitan Playhouse Artistic Director Alex Roe, “it really opens space for we in the audience to see the essence of the person, and not be so distracted by what we assume from their appearance. The farther apart they are in age, race and gender,” he says of the purposefully great divide between real life subject and theatrical counterpart, “the more you get a sense of the spirit of the individual. Emily Grosland is the actress playing Michael Schupbach, who’s a puppeteer. They both effervescent people, and that’s what you see. But since you’re watching a young woman play a man, what you get is that spiritual, bright enthusiasm for life, because that’s what’s common to them. At the same time, you’re reminded you’re not just looking at a Doppelgänger, because this is a common thing we all share.”

Roe says the festival puts equal emphasis on first-person accounts of East Village life because its snapshot nature “is not a playwright’s clever take on history. It’s revelatory and surprising, in the same way that you run across a beautiful moment in the street — the way the sunlight hits a building, or an interchange you overhear between two people.”

That said, Roe notes that the plays comprising their “East Village Chronicles” represent the “joy in seeing a structured story told,” particularly when it’s the work of a playwright far removed from where the action takes place. San Francisco-based Mercedes Segesvary, for example, contributed “Alive and Well,” about a Downtown biracial couple whose apartment is robbed.

“Fiction,” says Roe, “allows us to interact with our world in important way, by stepping back from the surfaces of the truth. Storytelling is a great way of not just reporting the world, but helping to interpret it. To me, I’m always interested in the benefit we get from distance, the perspective. What we try to do with this festival is not just celebrate and enjoy the neighborhood, but also introduce people to its past and current concerns. Among those are cultural or class conflicts. One of the plays [Segesvary’s “Alive and Well”] takes place after a power outage.”

Although Sandy isn’t mentioned by name, Roe speculates at little risk that last October’s hurricane and its aftermath will be front and center on the audience’s mind — as the plays asks very pointed questions about “how strong our social ties are when we’re confronted with the challenges of a natural disaster.”

Josh Gulotta’s “Occupy Avenue A,” says Roe, “asks questions about power dynamics, not just that of new lovers, but also as it relates to the Occupy movement and protests generally — which has always been a particular concern of this neighborhood.”

Before these and other meaty issues show up on the boards, the East Village Theater Festival kicks off with an April 15 reception and panel discussion about the area’s contemporary challenges. On the day we spoke with Roe, he had just returned from a meeting where members of a now-forming Lower East Side long-term recovery Group were in dialogue with FEMA, New York Cares, The Red Cross and “many local organizations, all of whom were there to talk about meeting social needs and disaster preparedness. I was there to mention we’re kicking off this festival. So everybody in that room, in their own way, was concerned about the future needs of the East Village. I hope some of them will be willing to join the panel. To think that our theatricalizing of the neighborhood could invite dialogue between performers, community groups and audiences excites me. I want to bring real people together to engage in real dialogue, to use our theater as a forum for conversation about, and preparation for, what the future holds.”
THE EAST VILLAGE THEATER FESTIVAL
14 NEW WORKS INSPIRED BY LIFE IN THE EAST VILLAGE
April 15-May 5
Mon.-Sun. at 7pm
Sat./Sun. at 1pm & 4pm
At Metropolitan Playhouse
220 E. Fourth St. (btw. Aves. A & B)
Tickets: $20 ($15 for students/seniors, $10 for under 18)
$50 for all four programs
Call 800-838-3006 or visit metropolitanplayhouse.org

From the 2011 Ego Actus production of “Aliens With Extraordinary Skills”

Ego Actus explores technology, teen bullying and fighting back

BY MARTIN DENTON (of nytheatre.com & indietheater.com)  |  Bullying is a hot topic these days, and with good reason. Most of the theater work I’ve come across that deals with this subject has been focused on victims. But what if a bullied teen found an effective way to fight back? And better still — what if that bullied teen was a girl?

That’s the idea of Penny Jackson’s new play, “I Know What Boys Want.” It’s being presented by Ego Actus, a relatively new but extremely prolific and energetic theater company run by director Joan Kane and theatrical jack-of-all-trades Bruce A! Kraemer (the exclamation point is not a misprint, and tells you a lot about this guy, believe me).

Here’s what Kane says their latest project is about: “‘I Know What Boys Want’ is about a girl named Vicky who refuses to be a victim of a bully, when he makes her the sensation of the Internet by posting a video of her having sex with her boyfriend. It is also about a group of teens who are rudderless, in that their parents are not involved in their lives and they have no one to help them navigate the rocky waters of adolescence.” Kraemer adds: “I think it is about the pervasiveness of technology in society today. We used to be afraid of Big Brother government watching everything we did. It turns out that ‘little brother’ is much more dangerous to privacy.”

Intrigued? I know I am. The first collaboration of Jackson, Kane and Kraemer — also produced by Ego Actus, at the 2012 Planet Connections Theatre Festivity — was a play called “Safe,” about a teenage girl who decides to start a relationship with a much older man she meets in a Starbucks.

“Safe” went on to win the Best Playwriting Award at the Festivity, and was published on Indie Theater Now shortly thereafter. It will be heading to the Edinburgh Fringe this August, following a short engagement at 59E59 as part of their East to Edinburgh Festival. Not a bad showing for a writer’s first produced play!

Jackson told me, “I’m very interested in how today’s generation of girls are turning their back on feminists like Gloria Steinem and are creating what is known as ‘the third wave of feminism,’ referred to as ‘grrl,’ where they feel proud of displaying their sexuality.” She’s been a theater fan since she was 16, when she saw a Tom Stoppard play in the back of a pub. “I knew then that theater can be truly magical and transformative.” Her work, immediate, uncompromising and socially conscious, certainly strives to awaken people to issues they may not have thought much about, and maybe even change some minds.

Jackson is on record as saying that Kane is her mentor. “She taught me how to write a play,” Jackson says, “how to focus on characters and motivation, and to emotionally connect to an audience.” Jackson has chosen wisely: Kane has been involved in theater for more than four decades, first as an actor and dancer and then as a founding member of the all-female company Lupa Productions — where she directed plays, readings, site-specific and devised works. In 1978, Joan met Bruce at a dress rehearsal of a production of “Platonov,” which she was acting in and he was lighting. Kane says, “Bruce got into an argument with the director and quit a show for the only time in his life. A few days later we saw each other in a bar and I told him that the show was lousy. He was delighted.”

They became partners in life, and after their children grew up, they decided to become partners in a new theater company, Ego Actus (“my way” in Latin), which they founded in 2009. “We wanted to create a company where artists could create and produce their art using whatever technique they were comfortable creating in,” Kane explained. “There are a variety of different techniques of producing a work of art and one way is not better than another way. We wanted all artists to be respected and cherished.”

I met Kane and Kraemer in 2011, when they were presenting the first NYC revival of Saviana Stanescu’s terrific play “Aliens With Extraordinary Skills.” Kane and Kraemer’s work on this piece was exemplary, and as I am very familiar with Saviana’s work, they invited me to do a talkback after one of the performances. [For those interested, I will be conducting another talkback with Joan and Bruce, following the March 30 matinee performance of “I Know What Boys Want.”] I was immediately impressed by their seriousness, their craft, and their fearlessness.

In a city where too many indie theater companies cover the same ground over and over again (mining the classics and a small passel of popular new plays), Kane and Kraemer seek out challenging work that is relevant to audiences and very likely unfamiliar to them as well. It’s through them that I got to know Jackson, and I will be excited to meet whatever other new writers they may happen to discover in the future.

Once “Boys” is finished, Kane and Kraemer will be presenting Kraemer’s play “what do you mean” at this year’s Planet Connections Festivity, and a revival of Kate Fodor’s provocative “100 Saints You Should Know” at Urban Stages. Then they’re off to Edinburgh with Jackson and “Safe.” They’re planning another new show in November at Theater for the New City, a co-production with Scandinavian American Theatre Company of the play “More” by award-winning Norwegian playwright Maria Tryti Vennerod. Jackson has a new play in the works called “Lay Me Down,” which is “about a family that is shattered when the father of an autistic son decides to abandon his wife and child.”

Yep, it’s a lot to take in. One can only admire the energy and dedication that these three artists bring to the NYC theater scene. In the meantime, check out “I Know What Boys Want,” which is sure to provide an unusual and thought-provoking perspective on a pervasive problem.

I KNOW WHAT BOYS WANT
Written by Penny Jackson
Directed by Joan Kane
Presented by Ego Actus
Through April 13
Thurs. through Sat. at 8pm
Matinees Sat. at 3pm
Talkback with neuroscientist
Heather Berlin on April 4
At WorkShop Theater
312 W. 36th St., 4th Fl.,
btw 8th & 9th Aves.
For tickets ($18), 800-838-3006
or brownpapertickets.com
Visit egoactus.com