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Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater

    THEATER

    There’s Nothing Statuesque About Lady Liberty

    Fermín Rojas’s new play disrobes an icon

    By

    Even today, as Donald Trump recklessly exploits the xenophobia of American voters, the Statue of Liberty, rising majestically in New York Harbor, is a powerful symbol of New World freedom to millions of visitors and waves of immigrants as well as soldiers and native travelers returning home. Designed by sculptor Frédéric Bartholdi, the monument was meant as a gift from the people of France to the U.S. to commemorate the centennial of the Declaration of Independence. Because of delays in its financing, conception, and construction, the statue was finally commemorated in 1886, 10 years after the centennial, on the former Bedloe’s Island, atop a stone pedestal that was locally funded and built. Inside that pedestal, on a plaque, is a poem, “The New Colossus,” by Emma Lazarus, that sums up the meaning of Lady Liberty, as she has come to be known. “With silent lips,” Lazarus wrote, the statue speaks: “Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore./ Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,/ I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

    Sculptor Frédéric Bartholdi (left, Sam Perwin) holds the torch of his creation, Lady Liberty (Brandon Curry) in Fermín Rojas’s play Liberty Talks: A Colossal Satire. (Photos by Mike Kerouac)

    In Provincetown resident Fermín Rojas’s new play, Liberty Talks: A Colossal Satire, now having its world premiere at the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, the statue’s mythological reputation is defended, examined, and exploded. Rojas does this by turning the monument into a character, Libby, who confronts other statues (such as Blind Justice and Sojourner Truth) and characters who are part of her story, from Bartholdi in France to a descendant of Lazarus in the future. Rojas is an immigrant himself, having fled Castro’s Cuba with his family in the 1960s, and he is a fixture in the Provincetown art scene these days as an actor, writer, and documentary filmmaker at DKR Films, which he runs with his husband, Jay Kubesch. Though Liberty Talks is subtitled a “satire,” it’s more of a fantasia — a time-jumping mélange of real-life figures and surreal encounters that shed light on some of the lesser-known aspects of Lady Liberty and her creators.

    For example, Lazarus, who was an activist for Jewish refugees fleeing pogroms in Europe, was a lesbian. Or: the Statue of Liberty was also meant to commemorate the end of the Civil War, preserving the Union and ending slavery in the U.S. France’s special kinship with the United States has always been based on the connection between the American and French revolutions and the principles of the Enlightenment that were behind both of them.

    Brandon Curry (far left) embodies the inner life of Lady Liberty in Liberty Talks, here on stage with (left to right) Richarda Abrams, Sam Perwin (seated), and Miriam Kulick.

    It seems apt in this context that Libby is played by a Black actor, Brandon Curry, who is onstage for virtually all of the two-act play’s two hours. He gives a bravura, outsize performance that never strays into the excesses of camp. And he has top-notch support from the entire cast, often in multiple roles: Sam Perwin as a passionate, tormented Bartholdi; Miriam Kulick as Blind Justice; Richarda Abrams as Sojourner Truth; Eileen Sugameli as Emma Lazarus; and Pedro González as a teacher on a field trip.

    Director Janice L. Goldberg keeps the action flowing at an unrushed and believable pace, and Christopher Ostrom, WHAT’s producing artistic director, functioning here as the scenic and projection designer of Liberty Talks, provides the performers with a lush onstage world in which to perform — the multilevel set, a mix of cool metal and dark wood, is a stunner. Likewise, the costumes by Carol Sherry and lighting and sound design by Eric Nightengale are exquisite.

    Brandon Curry’s Libby (left) confronts the statue of Sojourner Truth (Richarda Abrams).

    I was reminded of Wicked while watching Liberty Talks: both take an iconic figure and peek behind a glossy façade to find the real story of how they came to be, full of contradictions and ironies. There is much that is disillusioning in Rojas’s play, just as there is in the American Dream. The land of the free is a promise that is often kept and often broken. It’s more of an ongoing struggle, and that’s exactly what Liberty Talks captures on a very personal level.

    Not Easy Being Green

    The event: Liberty Talks: A Colossal Satire by Fermín Rojas
    The time: Through Oct. 6, Thursday through Saturday at 7 p.m.; Sunday at 3 p.m.
    The place: Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, 2357 Route 6
    The cost: $48.75 (including fees); $45.25 seniors; $18.75 students and balcony, at what.org or 508-349-9428

    THEATER

    Friendship in a Season of Compromise

    Two women change each other in David Auburn’s moving Summer, 1976

    By

    So many friendships are born of circumstance — two people become roommates, neighbors, parents at the same time, or co-workers — and the experience can be intense for a time, perhaps life-altering, yet doesn’t always last. Do you go on together into whatever comes next, or does time, or distance, fray that bond?

    Jennifer Van Dyck, left, and Annie Meisels play two very different women who become close friends in Summer, 1976 at Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater. (Photos by Michael and Suz Karchmer)

    In his 2023 play Summer, 1976, now in a beautifully rendered and frequently funny production at Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, David Auburn gives us such a relationship between two very different women. The play explores whether they can, in spite of taking different paths, stay close.

    They strike up a friendship in Ohio during the titular summer when their young daughters are playing together. Diana (Jennifer Van Dyck) is an artist, teacher, and single mom with highbrow tastes and ideas. She sometimes disdains the views held by Alice (Annie Meisels), a free-spirited professor’s wife who hates housework and reads popular novels.

    Auburn, who won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Proof, began writing the 90-minute memory play as monologues, and that origin is clear in the way the women in this two-hander often speak directly to the audience. As they tell and reflect on their stories, they confide their initial bad impressions of each other, which kicks off the appealing, conversational, and sometimes comedic tone of Daisy Walker’s tender and insightful direction.

    The women are different, but both are lonely and restless until this friendship provides alliance. Van Dyck’s uptight Diana is opinionated, often judgmental, but when pushed is hardest on herself. Van Dyck gives Diana an unspoken vulnerability, making it clear the prickly exterior is armor for the lack of comfort she finds in herself. She says she’s an artist but hasn’t quite achieved that, no matter how she tries to present herself. This friendship becomes a hoped-for turning point that means more than she’s willing to admit.

    Diana sees traits she envies in Alice and vice versa. Meisels’s Alice is open and unconventional, and her wild curls and flowy, flowered dress courtesy of costume designer Jennifer Spagone make a clear contrast to Diana’s plain-jeans-and-blouse personality. Yet Meisels gives Alice vulnerability, too, and an edge. She’s smart and competent but uncertain around privilege, and among academics she eye-rollingly wonders why people take themselves so seriously.

    Auburn’s script includes few references to the title’s chosen time period, and designer Kevin Judge’s evocative main set of chrome kitchen table and chairs, frosted glass entryway, hanging plants, and abstract art only hint at where we are in time. Auburn likely wants us to consider the subtext of the era the play recalls: after Vietnam, after Nixon, nearly a decade after the Summer of Love — a time of post-counterculture letdown but from today’s perspective also quaintly devoid of smartphones, a time of sending cards rather than texts.

    Particularly worth pondering in this election-year summer nearly 50 years later is that both women had become pregnant — Diana on her second date with an unimpressive college boyfriend, Alice early in her marriage to tenure-striving husband Doug — shortly before Roe v. Wade made abortion a choice nationwide in 1973.

    Jennifer Van Dyck’s Diana, left, and Annie Meisels’s Alice look back on their life choices and second chances in David Auburn’s Summer, 1976.

    Separately and together, Diana and Alice contemplate their lives as women in the mid-1970s, where their choices have gotten them, and what could still change. While the women lead quiet, almost mundane existences — one where Doug’s creation of a college-parent babysitting swap through “shares” is a key plot point — feminist thoughts and discussions bubble up in the background.

    At one point, Alice laments, “I don’t know who I am.” And while Diana considers herself more of a “square,” she’s the one who sees the chance for reinvention when Alice wonders, “What am I supposed to do?” Both had education and career ambitions that haven’t worked out, in part because motherhood or marriage took precedence and perhaps, too, because of conformity to the expectations of the times.

    The Bicentennial summer was also one that included a focus on independence, which Auburn has said in interviews meant hope and possibility as the country turned a page. As the women look ahead to what’s next, both make pivotal changes, though they’re not the most freeing choices one could imagine. And when Diana and Alice look back on it all, it’s clear that what they have each achieved couldn’t have been kickstarted without the other.

    Auburn’s play — a Broadway vehicle last year for Laura Linney and Jessica Hecht — is a character study and era study more than anything. It focuses on small moments, occasionally meanderingly so. Its story is about white, privileged women — Diana has family money, Alice pinches pennies as a stay-at-home mom — so the play depicts a somewhat sheltered slice of mid-1970s white Americana. (Diana once sarcastically compares Alice to a 1950s housewife.)

    That slice, though, offers a poignant and humorous look at both the intensity of young friendships and the strangeness of the 1970s. In this relatable and warm WHAT production, the actresses and Walker make these characters two women you’re glad to know.

    Reflections on Independence

    The event: Summer, 1976, by David Auburn
    The time: Tuesdays through Saturdays through Aug. 31, 7 p.m.
    The place: Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, 2357 Route 6
    The cost: $45 (students $15) plus $3.75 fees, at what.org or 508-349-9428

    REST AND REASSESS

    Covid-19 Pauses Outer Cape Entertainment

    Two venues canceled a week of performances in July

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — Four years after Covid-19 brought live performances worldwide to a halt, the virus is still working its will on Outer Cape arts venues.

    Jody O’Neil and the cast of Reefer Madness, which wrapped a week earlier than planned at the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater because of Covid-19. (Photo by Michael and Suz Karchmer)

    The Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater on July 20 canceled its remaining showings of Reefer Madness, which had been scheduled to run until July 27, after five members of the cast and crew tested positive for Covid. Three were asymptomatic.

    “In the event of a Covid-19 case in the company, we start strict testing, masking, sanitation, and isolation protocols,” Artistic Director Christopher Ostrom said. “Following the current Centers for Disease Control guidance around isolation and masking, performances were simply not possible.”

    That same week, the Provincetown Theater canceled four performances of The Rocky Horror Show because of Covid. The production resumed on July 29 and is expected to run through Sept. 5.

    “We are a city of entertainment, which means we congregate in groups,” said Gary Garrison, the theater’s managing director. “We pack into events where people are dancing and joyously celebrating and singing. That makes it exciting, but now that Covid is back on the landscape, that also makes it problematic.”

    Garrison declined to say how many people in the company were sick last week. It was “enough for us to be concerned,” he said. “We thought it was prudent to withdraw so performers could rest and staff could reassess.”

    A Summer Spike

    According to data provided to the Independent by Outer Cape Health Services, which monitors weekly reports from the state Dept. of Public Health and maintains its own internal database of Covid cases, the positive test count among patients at the OCHS clinics in Provincetown, Wellfleet, and Harwich was about five times higher in July than it was in April.

    Boy Radio as Frank-N-Furter, the pansexual ringleader of The Rocky Horror Show, flanked by Zack Johnson (left), Evan Montgomery, and Devon Whitney (right). Rocky Horror resumed production on July 29 after four Covid-induced cancelations from July 22 to 25. (Photo by Bob Tucker/Focalpoint)

    “There has been a noticeable spike in Covid-19 infections this summer across the United States and locally,” said Dr. Marie Constant, medical director of the Provincetown clinic.

    Constant said that symptoms of the current Omicron variants are consistent with earlier strains and include coughing, sore throat, body aches, and fever.

    She said that most people experience mild symptoms, and high vaccination rates have lowered the overall risks from infection — but immunosuppressed people and those with chronic conditions remain at higher risk of complications.

    In Massachusetts and 19 other states, coronavirus levels are currently “very high,” according to the CDC’s National Wastewater Surveillance System, which monitors bacterial and viral particles in untreated wastewater.

    Provincetown’s wastewater testing program ended in March due to “the exhaustion of sampling kits and the end of program funding,” according to an item in Town Manager Alex Morse’s March 11 report to the select board. The last report is still on the town’s website, although it shows data that is unusually “spiky,” or inconsistent, over time.

    In Boston and its suburbs, wastewater numbers from the Mass. Water Resources Authority show a springtime decline in Covid-19 particles there, followed by a noticeable spike starting July 1.

    The Cape and Islands led the state in June for the percentage of hospitalizations from respiratory illness, including Covid-19, influenza, and RSV, according to the Dept. of Public Health’s Respiratory Illness Dashboard. As of July 3, about 9.5 percent of emergency department visits in Barnstable County were due to acute respiratory disease — down from about 21 percent in January.

    Current Guidance

    Tracking Covid-19 as one of several respiratory illnesses reflects national guidance from the CDC, which updated and simplified its respiratory virus recommendations in March.

    The agency now advises people to isolate until respiratory illness symptoms have improved and they have been fever-free for 24 hours.

    For the next five days after that, people should monitor symptoms, practice good hygiene, wear a mask indoors, maintain social distance, and test themselves, the agency advises.

    Free Covid-19 tests are no longer widely available on the Outer Cape, but while supplies last, free tests are available at OCHS clinics and at the community development dept. in the basement of Provincetown Town Hall.

    Free test kits are not currently available in Eastham or Wellfleet, and in Truro, the last batch of free kits expired, so the health dept. is no longer handing them out.

    “They’re very difficult to get,” said Gary Locke, assistant health agent in Wellfleet. “People have come in and asked us, but we just don’t have any more.”

    An updated Covid “booster shot” that targets the now-common KP.2 strain of Omicron is expected to become available this fall. In the meantime, Constant said patients should consult their primary care practitioners with questions about booster shots, which are available at OCHS clinics and at the CVS and Stop & Shop pharmacies in Provincetown.

    THEATER

    A Warning Against Fascism Returns to the Stage

    'It Can’t Happen Here — Again,' adapted from Sinclair Lewis, comes to WHAT on July 19

    By

    A theatrical warning about fascism and liberal complacency was performed on 21 stages across the country one week before the national election of 1936. The play was It Can’t Happen Here, adapted by Sinclair Lewis and John C. Moffitt from Lewis’s novel of the same name. It was seen by nearly 400,000 people.

    It Can’t Happen Here hit the stage of the Repertory Theatre of Boston in 1936.

    Renditions included a Yiddish performance in New York, a Spanish version in Tampa Bay, and a Seattle production where a nearly all-Black cast took the stage — the only white characters were the villains.

    The plot: Sen. Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip defeats President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1936 election on a populist anti-immigration platform, garnering the support of the nation’s “forgotten men.” Once in power, Windrip effectively dismantles Congress and establishes authoritarian rule.

    The plot sounded familiar to author James Carroll, a founding member of the national group Writers for Democratic Action (WDA).

    In an homage to the 1936 production, WDA — which originally formed to oppose Trump’s re-election in 2020 — is helping organize staged readings of a new adaptation of Lewis’s play in 19 states, including at the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater. The title is It Can’t Happen Here — Again.

    A poster from the Federal Theatre Project Collection for the original productions in 1936. (Images courtesy Library of Congress)

    The performances, with one exception, will be on July 19, the day after former President Donald Trump’s nomination at the Republican National Convention. (There will be a July 18 reading in Milwaukee, the site of the convention.)

    The Wellfleet reading, at 4 p.m., will have six actors, Laura Esterman, Dennis Cunningham, Brenda Withers, Sallie Tighe, Robin Bloodworth, and John Rothman, directed by Jeff Zinn. Nationally, performances will happen in libraries, parks, and churches in addition to local theaters. Carroll hopes informal readings will also occur in living rooms and back yards.

    “The beauty of it is it’s totally democratic,” Carroll says. “All it takes is five people reading from scripts. The point is: Trump got nominated last night. Now what?”

    The original play couldn’t be reproduced exactly for copyright reasons, according to Carroll. Instead, the adaptation’s authors — Carroll, Wesley Savick, and Rachel DeWoskin — used the original script as a starting point.

    The three writers collaborated over Zoom. The completed script is in conversation with the past. “It’s the fascists of 1936 against the foil of our own personal fascist in 2024,” Carroll says.

    The adaptation moves quickly through the thick plot of Lewis’s original play by weaving in historical and contemporary fascist threats. The dialogue bounces between the actors, who will rapidly take on a variety of fictional roles from the original play, like Windrip, as well as real ones like Roosevelt and, of course, Trump.

    The new adaptation will serve as an homage to the original play, urging audiences to take action and vote.

    The succinctness of the adaptation may help avoid the pitfalls of longwinded past rewrites, according to Zinn. The readings will run 30 to 40 minutes. “Getting the right tone and finding the irony in some of the lines is something to pay attention to and tease out,” Zinn says. “It’s rapid fire, as I envision it.”

    At WHAT, the reading will conclude with a 45-minute talk led by Carroll, who will ask for reactions to Trump’s nomination and offer an organizing “toolkit” with resources for the upcoming election.

    “We should take this man at his word,” Carroll says of Trump and his rhetoric. “We must go to the barricades, only in our case our barricades are the ballot box.”

    Carroll hopes that the July readings will “generate interest, especially after Labor Day, among high school students and college students.” WDA plans to do another round of readings on Oct. 27, exactly 88 years to the day from the original productions and a week before the 2024 election.

    Lewis’s work has had a resurgence since Trump’s political rise. In 2017, the original novel briefly became an Amazon bestseller. WHAT staged an adaptation in October 2016. “This is familiar territory for us,” says Christopher Ostrom, the producing artistic director at WHAT. He adds that, while in 2016 the play felt like “a cautionary tale,” today the plot seems “more like vivid history being painted in front of us.”

    Lewis and Moffit’s original adaptation was seen by nearly 400,000 people across the country in less than four months.

    Zinn added an extra part to Carroll’s script, expanding the play to have gender parity among the actors and reassigning the lines in the script accordingly.

    Actor John Rothman says he was looking for a way to make a difference. “I’m extremely concerned about the next election and what the stakes are,” he says. “There’s always the question: what can you do?”

    Rothman acknowledges that in Wellfleet, where nearly 80 percent voted for Joe Biden in 2020, the performance may be preaching to the choir. It will be more about mobilizing the audience than convincing them, he says.

    “This is not inevitable,” Rothman says, adding that he believes live theater is particularly important now. “People need to feel that we’re in this together.”

    It’s Happening Here

    The event: A staged reading of It Can’t Happen Here — Again
    The time: Friday, July 19, 4 p.m.
    The place: Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, 2357 Route 6
    The cost: Free, advance registration recommended at what.org

    THEATER REVIEW

    Thrilled by a Betrayal

    In a notable coproduction, WHAT and Harbor Stage do Pinter proud

    By

    There is something uniquely sublime about Harold Pinter’s dialogue: direct and unfancy yet veiled, charged, and evasive. It’s a challenge and a boon for actors, whose delivery is key. And in his 1978 play Betrayal, loosely based on a long-term affair Pinter had while married to actress Vivien Merchant, the words are as shrouded and trenchant as ever.

    Left to right: Brenda Withers, Jonathan Fielding, and William Zielinski in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, now playing at the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater. (Photos by Michael & Suz Karchmer)

    Betrayal is currently playing at the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater in a coproduction with the Harbor Stage Company. And though WHAT’s producing artistic director, Christopher Ostrom, served as scenic designer, the play feels very much like an intact and intimate Harbor Stage show imported to the vast Julie Harris Stage. Harbor Stage’s artistic director and co-founder Robert Kropf directed, and his fellow Harbor Stage co-founders Brenda Withers and Jonathan Fielding star as the extramarital lovers, Emma and Jerry. The third member of the play’s triangle, Emma’s husband, Robert, is played by Harbor Stage regular William Zielinski, and the role of the waiter is played by Ari Lew, who starred in Bread and Butter, a play by Withers that premiered at the Harbor Stage this summer. Lighting designer John Malinowski has worked regularly with both companies.

    The result of this merging of resources is thrilling, an unforgettable theater event for the Outer Cape. Pinter’s iced-over emotions seem even more alienating within the unadorned WHAT space. It’s hard to imagine that these private moments between three members of the British cultural elite, a publisher, his wife, and his oft-noted “best man,” a literary agent, would feel the same in the compact quarters of the Harbor Stage — even though that’s exactly where WHAT originated. The Harbor Stage Company grew out of that shared WHAT experience.

    Betrayal is notable for being a play told in reverse chronology, much like Kaufman and Hart’s Merrily We Roll Along and the Sondheim musical adapted from it. The effect — to travel from the sour present to the passionate past — is not as gimmicky as it sounds. Pinter’s transitions are seamless, and the backward trajectory is an especially revealing way of showing how the layering of betrayals over time causes bitterness and despair. Kropf flashes the chronology shifts on the stage’s backdrop, and they follow as logically and precisely as a surgeon’s scalpel into the characters’ stories.

    I saw Betrayal at a 2000 Broadway revival, with Juliette Binoche, Liev Schreiber, and John Slattery, and watched the 1983 movie adaptation, with Ben Kingsley, Jeremy Irons, and Patricia Hodge, and I can comfortably assert that the WHAT–Harbor Stage production is superior to both. The movie may have more punch, but in comparison it’s overwrought, and the Broadway revival had less edge. As usual with great plays, adapting them for the screen makes the settings too realistic and takes away from the beauty of the language, especially Pinter’s. (Kingsley’s hammy performance doesn’t help.)

    Jonathan Fielding and Brenda Withers in Betrayal.

    In contrast, Zielinski is pitch-perfect as Robert. His scenes with Fielding, when he knows his best friend is cuckolding him and then when he doesn’t, are chilling, mostly because of his nonplussed reactions and the subtlety of his zingers. He’s less competitive and resentful than the other Roberts I’ve seen, and it serves the play well.

    As Emma, the woman both men try to possess, Withers is silky and stoic, with a touch of ennui. There is, as always, a twinkle in her eye that conveys her allure, but she’s clearly the grown-up when confronting Jerry’s bravado. Fielding, as the most transparent of the three leads, is thoroughly convincing and, ultimately, pathetic, particularly when you see him set the affair in motion with heartfelt determination.

    Kropf directs with impressive restraint. On the mostly bare stage — a couple of plastic chairs are the only props — he keeps the characters moving in ways that are so emotionally exact as to be invisible. Despite the modernist design and fractured chronology, Betrayal is actually a fairly realistic and straightforward play. There are no absurd twists or fourth-wall-breaking interruptions.

    The lack of sentimentality is crucial to establishing the right tone for the play. This is a story of privileged, successful people. They’re not drowning in sorrow, and melodrama would be inappropriate. They simply coast, somewhat recklessly, into a destructive situation and make the best of it.

    If you want to see top-quality theater locally, go see Betrayal. It will be a night to remember.

    Three on a Match

    The event: Betrayal, by Harold Pinter
    The time: Through Oct. 14, Tuesday through Saturday at 7 p.m.
    The place: Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, 2357 Route 6
    The cost: $42.50; seniors, $38.50; students and partial view seats, $17.50

    THEATER REVIEW

    ‘The Pickleball Wars’ Are Unleashed at WHAT

    Big laughs are the collateral damage

    By

    They don’t come more homegrown than this. Kevin Rice’s The Pickleball Wars, which is having its world premiere at the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater through Sept. 9, is a comedy of, by, and for the denizens of the Outer Cape. Rice, the executive artistic director of Payomet Performing Arts Center in Truro and a cofounder of WHAT, is also a longtime Wellfleet resident, a seasoned playwright, and a scholar of Russian literature and culture.

    Robin Bloodworth and Kelly Christopher play a newly retired couple living on the Outer Cape in Kevin Rice’s The Pickleball Wars, now playing at WHAT. (Photos by Michael & Suz Karchmer)

    His new play is bound to satisfy all sorts of local audiences. Among them, the lovers of pickleball, especially those with a tribal passion for the sport and its rivalry with tennis on the courts, not unlike the competitive enmity that Red Sox fans have for the Yankees. Then there are the lovers of WOMR, the Outer Cape’s community radio station, and lovers of raucous comedy, particularly (if you’re old enough to remember) those Cold War–era movies that make mincemeat of American anxieties, starring Peter Sellers or Dick Van Dyke or even a young Woody Allen. And finally, the play will excite just about anyone who harbors a pet peeve about noisy neighbors.

    That’s because The Pickleball Wars is as much a satire of espionage and Boomer lifestyles in the age of Trump and Putin as it is about properly hitting (or “dinking”) a ball with a paddle.

    At the center of the story is Fred Fallon (Robin Bloodworth), an early retiree who has moved to the Cape to work on a book. Said tome begins and ends in Kazakhstan, the oil-rich former Soviet republic that Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat comedies have made famous — and a laughingstock. Fred is married to Sue (Kelly Christopher), who is growing increasingly impatient with the book’s mushrooming length and endless gestation, as well as Fred’s procrastination at WOMR, where he deejays a retro rock show, Fred Free Fallin’, recalling (and repeating ad absurdum) the chorus of Tom Petty’s hit song.

    Fred doesn’t open the play, however. Things start off on the pickleball court next door to Fred and Sue’s house. That’s where K.A. Bottoms (Kathy McCafferty) and Tina Mae Perks (Tatiana Chavez) lead an introductory course on how to join the pickleball crusade. K.A. is a bit like a drill sergeant, full of rules and lists, and Tina Mae is her “polyglot” sidekick. Their aim, besides breaking down the fourth wall and enlisting the audience, is to torture Fred with the sounds of pickleball being played. They even court Sue and question her about Fred’s book.

    Why would a pair of militant pickleball instructors be interested in Fred’s book? From Sue, they learn that she and Fred were in Kazakhstan as youthful Peace Corps volunteers and that he’s in touch with Kazakh rebels he met there. Fred, while spinning rock oldies at WOMR, is nudged by the station’s manager, Matty (Dennis Cunningham) to field pledges. He gets one call from someone with a Kazakh accent. What can it mean?

    Kathy McCafferty and Tatiana Chavez play secret agents masquerading as pickleball instructors in The Pickleball Wars.

    Decoding the plot in advance would spoil the fun, and I’m not even sure it all adds up. But that’s beside the point. The actors (and their co-conspirators in the audience) are aiming to have a few good belly laughs at everyone’s expense, including their own. And in that aim, they are peerless. Bottoms and Chavez are a precision duo of clowns, and Bloodworth is a hilarious victim of his own self-absorption, with Christopher and Cunningham giving him sure-footed support.

    As usual at WHAT, the production values are sublime. The set by Justin Lahue is a three-way collision — dialectic? — encompassing a pickleball court and Fred and Sue’s house next door, as well as a recording studio at WOMR jutting out on the level above. The lighting (Patricia M. Nichols), costumes (Jennifer Spagone), and sound (Grace Oberhofer) work seamlessly, allowing the mayhem to fester organically.

    Director Daisy Walker, who has many credits at WHAT and with Rice’s plays, keeps things moving gracefully. Rice’s Pickleball Wars offers her a funhouse of material to work with. The play is a consummate audience pleaser, and for those willing to plumb its intricacies, there’s a wealth of ominous detail to ponder. But perhaps the biggest joke of all is the mess of the world we live in.

    The Court Will Rise

    The event: The Pickleball Wars, a new play by Kevin Rice
    The time: Until Sept. 9, Tuesday through Saturday at 8 p.m.
    The place: Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, 2357 Route 6
    The cost: $42.50, including fees; seniors, $38.50; students and balcony, $17.50

    UNDER THE BIG TOP

    Circus Performers Juggle Locations to Keep Flying

    Payomet’s Cirque by the Sea takes its show to Wellfleet

    By

    WELLFLEET — A live scarecrow tumbles, sways, and hangs — precarious and loose-limbed — high above a field. Farmhands wildly flip ears of corn as crops “multiply.” A unicycle seems to till soil, red scarves become a barn fire’s flames, animal puppets dance.

    The circus has come to town. This summer, Cirque by the Sea’s latest production, Roots: A Farm to Circus Show, is entertaining all ages in Wellfleet rather than at the troupe’s usual home at North Truro’s Highland Center in the Cape Cod National Seashore.

    Teamwork is key in Payomet Cirque by the Sea’s Roots: A Farm to Circus Show, which has relocated to the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater for the summer. The performers are Eleanor Getz at top, Gabrielle “Teddy” Ment in the center, and, at the bottom, Copper Santiago on the left and Trevor Pearson. (Photos by Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll)

    With their tent due to be displaced by demolition work on decrepit buildings from the long-closed North Truro Air Force Base, performers from Payomet Performing Arts Center’s circus fruitlessly searched for over a year for a new location. Potential spots proved unavailable or under construction, and Outer Cape property too expensive.

    Then, earlier this year, a welcome invitation came from Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater Executive Director Christopher Ostrom to work together on family programming.

    In what circus program director Gabrielle “Teddy” Ment calls “a dream come true,” the troupe now has an 80-by-50-foot tent alongside the main theater, taking the place of the usual WHAT For Kids shows there. The tent is 20 feet larger than the one at Payomet, with a more central Route 6 location, a dressing room, and indoor access, Ment says.

    That’s the hub for weekday circus-skills youth camps; then, three evenings a week, four professional actors perform Roots. Bleachers and chairs face the setting of a tall red barn, with hay bales and “crops” pulled in as needed. Metal scaffolding soars close to the 18-feet-high roof to anchor ropes and pulleys for the trapeze, hoop, scarves, and straps that come into daring play as the farming story unfolds.

    Dressed as a scarecrow, Getz does a daring comic trapeze act with a farmhand played by Ment.

    “The WHAT location is just perfect, and they’ve been nothing but generous,” says Ment, noting the collaboration matches the circus’s focus on community and teamwork.

    “I can’t tell you how thankful we are that WHAT came to our rescue,” says Payomet Executive Director Kevin Rice.

    Ostrom believes collaboration is the key to Cape arts organizations recovering from the pandemic. The circus relocation is part of a summer schedule that also includes WHAT producing The Pickleball Wars, a new play by Rice (who was a cofounder of WHAT in 1985) that will run from Aug. 11 to Sept. 9 on the indoor stage, and a co-production of Betrayal this fall with Wellfleet’s Harbor Stage Company.

    Roots is theatrical, too, with performers offering broad comedy, slapstick, exaggerated expressions, and rousing dances among storytelling tricks that keep youngsters’ attention while teaching them about sustainable farming. Troupe members form a human pyramid and are engaging puppeteers, manipulating pecking hens, a cavorting, sneakered pig, and a friendly cow with a pink tongue long enough to lick children in the front rows.

    Santiago and Pearson perform a complicated two-person juggling act with pins painted to look like ears of corn.

    Cirque plots feature a moral theme, usually environment-related, say Ment and actor-director Eleanor Getz — reflecting their own activist passions. Past stories addressed gender equality, climate change, and recycling; Roots is about agriculture and the farm-to-table movement.

    Cape-based juggler Trevor Pearson helped create Payomet’s circus 11 years ago. Cape resident Ment and New York-based Getz joined two years later after discovering the North Truro opportunity for the duo talents they’d developed in 2014 at Vermont’s New England Center for Circus Arts. The two now manage Cirque’s business side, and this year they brought in circus-school friend Copper Santiago, who had been performing internationally.

    In the off-season, all four have performed on the Cape and elsewhere. Ment spent some winters working at a California farm. Getz joined her in 2020, and they were inspired to create Roots. Getz wrote the script with input from Cape farmers and other troupe members but saved the theme for the right post-pandemic combination of performer skills and larger audiences.

    The story is told through offstage narration and acted out by the cast through comedy and circus acts set to music. Old MacDonald (Getz) passes on his farm and traditional wisdom about soil, pollination, compost, and seasons to his son (Pearson). But the son decides to grow only corn for high-fructose corn syrup.

    Santiago hangs with her unicycle as Pearson, playing a farmer, looks on.

    “He’s making a lot of money for a while, and then things start to devolve and he has to take a step back and look at what he’s doing and why he’s doing it,” Getz says. The message in Roots is “reminding us to cultivate the land with care and reap what we sow,” she says.

    Young children might not process all the farming details, but the message isn’t heavy-handed. It’s mimed with flair and sometimes interactive humor by the four performers, who — in overalls, white shirts, and sneakers — each use their skills to defy gravity. Pearson makes multiple balls representing plants and pins painted like ears of corn whiz through the air in rapid arcs, and he juggles them through complicated maneuvers with Santiago.

    Santiago, Getz, and Ment are all mischievous, playful farmhands. Besides juggling, Santiago’s contributions to the troupe are artful prop-making plus unicycle and aerial stunts — even hanging upside-down and climbing over the unicycle in mid-air.

    Only a rope holds “farmhand” Getz aloft in one of numerous aerial stunts in Cirque by the Sea’s Roots: A Farm to Circus Show.

    Getz and Ment amaze with their acrobatics. Getz makes a rope dance, then climbs it to hang high above the floor. Ment swings up to, around, and through an elevated hoop and later gracefully dances mid-air with only scarves holding her aloft. The two clown through a double-trapeze act, with Getz acing the added challenge of wearing scarecrow mask, hat, and costume.

    “Every year, we remember our audience is often the same and we want to show them something new, a fresh perspective,” Getz says. “This is our time to shine.”

    This fall, Cirque will bring Roots and circus lessons to area schools in an expanding outreach program that Ment dreams could inspire local-food curricula. Mirroring the farm show’s theme of “creating an ecosystem” for success, Getz notes that Truro Central School provided Roots early rehearsal space.

    “We’re really thankful for the community in Wellfleet and Truro,” she says.”They’re open to what we’re doing and help us. Hopefully, we give back a little bit.”

    Farm Story by the Sea

    The event: Payomet Cirque by the Sea’s Roots: A Farm to Circus Show
    The time: Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays through Sept. 1 at 6 p.m.
    The location: WHAT for Kids Stage at Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, 2357 Route 6
    The cost: $25, $15 for children, at tickets.payomet.org

    THEATER REVIEW

    WHAT Presents a Feminist Fantasia on the Reign of Terror

    Lauren Gunderson’s The Revolutionists is a four-woman romp

    By

    The French Revolution that began in 1789, like the American one before it, is not known for its women fighters. The Enlightenment manifesto of the uprising is notably entitled the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Women are not a part of it.

    The four women of The Revolutionists, now playing at WHAT: Hannah Hakim as assassin Charlotte Corday, Christina Leidel as playwright and feminist Olympe de Gouges, Andréa Bellamore as Haitian freedom fighter Marianne Angelle — the only fictional character in the group — and Paige O’Connor as the infamous French queen, Marie Antoinette. (Photo by Michael & Suz Karchmer)

    Olympe de Gouges, a playwright who remains obscure to most Americans, was an outspoken feminist of that era. Her own manifesto, the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, challenged the inequality of the other Declaration’s democratic principles. She was also an avid abolitionist and supported freeing the enslaved Africans in the New World French colony of Saint-Domingue, which would become independent Haiti in the early 1800s. She supported Marie Antoinette as a constitutional monarch. She was a part of the relatively moderate Girondist movement during the Revolution, as was Charlotte Corday, the woman who in 1793 assassinated Jean-Paul Marat, a leader of the more radical Jacobins. The murder of Marat had the unfortunate effect of turning him into a martyr, and the Jacobins gained power and initiated the Reign of Terror, in which tens of thousands of Girondists and others were guillotined, including Corday and de Gouges, and, along with them, Marie Antoinette.

    Playwright Lauren Gunderson, in her self-described “feisty” 2018 comedy, The Revolutionists, places de Gouges at the center of the maelstrom of Parisian political life in 1793. In Gunderson’s play, de Gouges’s writings and musings come alive as a vaudeville spectacle in which she, Corday, and Marie Antoinette (neither of whom de Gouges ever actually met) — joined by a composite fictional character known as Marianne Angelle, the wife of a Haitian Creole revolutionary — conspire and argue about what to do as activists. That spectacle has now arrived at the Outer Cape: through Sept. 17, the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater is presenting The Revolutionists on its Julie Harris Stage.

    The meta-conceit of The Revolutionists is that the four women in it are enacting a creative mix of history and fantasy that is largely in de Gouges’s head, even though their onstage encounters are presented as real. The unfinished play that de Gouges is writing throughout The Revolutionists with the quill stuffed in her cap, entitled France Saved, or the Tyrant Dethroned is indeed, a historical document, one which was used to justify her execution. Yet all of what we witness onstage at WHAT is an act of 21st-century revisionism — a way of giving women’s roles in the Revolution the aura of consequence they have historically been denied. There’s a sub-theme about the power of words versus the necessity of action, but sororité over fraternité is the heart of the matter.

    To further her self-conscious update on history, Gunderson uses contemporary ways of speaking and thinking as a deliberate, winking anachronism. As a result, the play is often quite funny, despite its serious subject and the grave outcome. The costumes in the WHAT production, by Carol Sherry, emphasize the play’s cartoonish fantasy elements, exposing the panniers, or side hoops, that supported 18th-century dresses. And director Megan Nussle heightens the squeals and gestures and speed of the dialogue and action, making it unequivocally comic. Likewise, the aural and visual representations of the guillotine in J. Pizzuti’s set have a fanciful horror-flick vibe.

    The best things about The Revolutionists at WHAT are its four lead performances. Olympe de Gouges, as played by Christina Leidel, is a self-doubting, openly conflicted woman, despite her courage and idealistic ambitions. De Gouges’s feminism was way ahead of its time, but Leidel plays her as a dreamer, not a trailblazer. She relies on the support of her sisterhood, even though it’s largely imaginary.

    As Marianne Angelle, Andréa Bellamore is regal, compassionate, and wise: she’s something of a straight player in this clownish quartet. By providing a proud, sober complement to Leidel, she makes many of the playwright’s laughs possible.

    In contrast, Hannah Hakim’s Charlotte Corday is explosive and monomaniacal in her determination to kill Marat. And she’s kooky: there are touches of Linda Blair and Squeaky Fromme in her frantic murderousness.

    Paige O’Connor as Marie Antoinette nearly steals the show. Though her program bio describes her as a recent alum of N.Y.U. and Second City, she plays the doomed queen with the expert comic timing of a seasoned vet. Her sassy smile is infectious, and her Marie Antoinette makes glorious fun of herself, dropping red ribbons with innocent abandon. What better way to rehab the reputations of women in revolutionary France than to portray the hapless Marie, its symbol of misunderstood decadence, as a dainty smart-ass?

    Women in Revolt

    The event: The Revolutionists, a play by Lauren Gunderson
    The time: Though Sept. 17, Wednesday through Saturday (and Tuesday, Sept. 13) at 8 p.m.; Sunday at 4 p.m.
    The place: Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, 2357 Route 6
    The cost: $25-$40; seniors $22.50-$36; students $15; plus $2.50 fees, at what.org or 508-349-9428

    PLAYTIME

    WHAT for Kids Serves Up Wisdom for These Times

    A show that reminds grown-ups to look to young people for answers

    By

    Outside the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, eager children and resigned-looking adults find their seats. There are no lights to dim. Route 6 hums nearby. On a small patio stage flanked by low bleachers and a large banner that spells “Bugsy’s Restaurant” in colorful block letters, Little Chrys appears and begins — by saying hello to the audience.

    Paige O’Connor addresses the audience as Little Chrys in How to Cook Up a Good Idea. (Photos by Michael and Suz Karchmer)

    It’s opening night at the WHAT for Kids premiere of MJ Halberstadt’s How to Cook Up a Good Idea. And it’s clear this is no ordinary play. For one thing, everyone — audience members and cast — is in it. Halberstadt, who won an Elliot Norton award for The Launch Prize in 2016, wrote this play for WHAT.

    Little Chrys, played by 23-year-old Paige O’Connor, is five years old and full of innocent charm. He hopes that Bugsy’s Restaurant will earn a “Michigan star” by the end of the day.

    The cast, playing children ages five to eight, runs an imaginary restaurant in a park, complete with all the drama and disaster reality television might supply: 108 stuffed animals arrive at once, and they all want scrambled eggs; an entitled feline customer says she’s allergic to plates; and the direst situation of all creeps closer and closer as the play unfolds: the infamous Birthday Cake Critic will visit Bugsy’s Restaurant and expects a cake worthy of a powerful person’s time.

    Little Chrys, with the help of a magic pot of bubbles, can see and hear the audience. At intervals throughout the play, to help the characters onstage, the audience can shout out answers to questions Little Chrys asks, like “What should we put on the lunch menu?” (“Chicken salad” says one older gentleman) and “What kind of ice cream should go in the sundae?” (“Vanilla!” cries a small boy, and when an actor echoes his answer, he pumps his fist with delight.)

    On stage, the children’s play has complicated rules and is tinged with real urgency — just as in real life. Despite the silliness, one can’t help but take the children seriously. When an argument threatens the delicately maintained order at Bugsy’s, the audience murmurs. When the children mention the Birthday Cake Critic, who quickly becomes a looming threat, the audience gasps with the actors.

    Little Chrys offers flowers to the mysterious Birthday Cake Critic. From left: Marzipan Messina, Ruby Fisher, Lena Moore, Paris Bates, Nicole Duffy, Rocky Jacobs, Paige O’Connor.

    The play, with its bright colors, stuffed animals, paper plates, and markers, has gravity. One character, a high school-age park volunteer whom the other children call the “Garbage Can Kid,” offers some wisdom at a crisis point, when the kids are considering phoning a parent for an intervention. “Grown-ups don’t always know how to get along,” says the Garbage Can Kid, whose name is actually Tick. “Especially these days.”

    The children nod onstage, and the grown-ups in the audience nod, too. In the play, the children decide to handle the problem themselves. No time to waste. The Birthday Cake Critic is coming, ready or not.

    “I think the message, seemingly simple, is actually quite profound,” says director Amie Lytle. “With so much tension in our world right now, I think it has this power.” The play encourages us to look at and listen to kids for some of the answers, she says. “It’s certainly something we all need to hear.”

    Acting in the show are members of WHAT’s Professional Development Internship Program;  O’Connor, who is a professional; and four young people from the community who alternate performances.

    After the show, O’Connor has removed her cap and changed out of her overalls. Suddenly, she looks 23 again. “I know when I was a kid, vacationing on the Cape, your parents got to go out to a lot of fun things, and there weren’t a lot of things for the kids,” she says. “It’s nice to provide an opportunity for them to see a show.”

    It’s fun for her, too, she says. During one part of the show, Little Chrys plays with a small truck. “I’ve been fascinated by that truck,” she says and laughs. “In acting training, they talk a lot about connecting to your inner child.” This part has given her lots of opportunities for that.

    Marzipan Messina and Ruby Fisher, both 13 years old and sharing the roles of “Bee” and “BeeBee” with two other local students, reflect on the Australian accents they’ve added to their characters.

    “It’s the only accent I can do,” says Messina.

    They say the best part of being in the show is friendships made among cast members.

    What they bring to the stage are lessons in forgiveness, cooperation, and fun. They teach us that we can come together because of something as small as a birthday cake or as big as a restaurant — or our difficult and changing world.

    Brilliant

    The event: WHAT for Kids production of How to Cook Up a Good Idea by MJ Halberstadt
    The Time: Tuesdays through Thursdays at 7 p.m. through Aug. 11
    The Place: Outdoors at WHAT’s Larry Phillips Performance Pavilion, 2357 Route 6, Wellfleet
    The cost: $12

    THEATER REVIEW

    Straight White Men: A Spectacle of Privilege Deconstructed

    WHAT opens its season with a play by Young Jean Lee

    By

    The current culture wars — in which straight white men are born privileged and BIPOC and queer minorities and women demand rights and representation — are all about power. The battlefield is circumscribed by those in charge, and everyone else is in a constant struggle to define the terms and stakes to their own advantage.

    In Young Jean Lee’s stage play Straight White Men, now playing through June 24 at the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, there are two “Persons in Charge” onstage; one reveals they’re nonbinary (Eleanor Philips), and the other is a queer person of color of Native American ancestry (Freddy Biddle). Following an overture of not-ready-for-prime-time rap music, the pair introduce the play before a shimmering curtain of Mylar strips, and between scenes (there is no intermission), they supervise the stagehands as they dress the set. They fulfill the patriarchal role of presenting the drama that unfolds.

    It concerns four straight white men in one nuclear family: a widowed father, Ed (Mark Hofmaier), and his three grown sons — Matt (Mike Mihm), the oldest, a Harvard grad who’s living at home and working at a temp job; Jake (Andy McCain), an obnoxiously confident banker; and Drew (Carl Howell), the youngest, a writer and college instructor.

    Andy McCain, Carl Howell, and Mike Mihm in Straight White Men, now playing at WHAT. (Photo by Michael & Suz Karchmer)

    The setup, which is in a family room of a Midwestern home on Christmas Eve, feels a bit like a cage of lab rats. The brothers play a game of Privilege — a Monopoly set that the recently deceased mom had redesigned to teach her sons a lesson — and act out in stereotypically masculine ways, horsing around and relentlessly pranking one another. They also go through a few nostalgic Christmas rituals, probe each other psychologically, and, for reasons known only to the playwright and Persons in Charge, try to get to the root of how a straight white male can succeed in life, and thus be self-actualized and happy.

    The younger brothers, divorced yuppie Jake and academic Drew, feel that Matt should be a paragon of achievement instead of living the life of a loser — cooking and cleaning for Dad, paying off student loans, not dating. Jake, who claims he’s not feeling guilty about his own exploitive-capitalist job, sees Matt deliberately rejecting the system as a political statement. Drew thinks Matt is depressed and in need of therapy. Dad wants to give Matt money to pay off his loans, so he’ll be able to go off on his own. Matt himself is a cipher: though he spontaneously starts crying at one point, he insists he’s fine and happy, has no greater ambitions, and doesn’t understand what everyone else is talking about.

    The play was written during the Obama years and opened in 2014 at the Public Theater in Manhattan. A Steppenwolf production followed in Chicago in 2017, then a Broadway premiere in 2018, with Armie Hammer, Josh Charles, and Paul Schneider as the brothers. That made Lee — who was born in Korea, came to the U.S. as a child, earned her Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley as a Shakespeare scholar, and now teaches theater at Stanford — the first Asian-American playwright to get her work produced on the aptly nicknamed Great White Way.

    The WHAT production is brought to life with professional gloss by director Sasha Brätt. The set by Justin Lahue (with costumes by Seth Bodie, lighting by WHAT producing artistic director Christopher Ostrom, and sound by Sam Sewell) is a slick evocation of a bland bourgeois home. The performers, all of them strong, are continually animated and physical, almost slapstick: McCain, as Jake, is clownishly self-aware; Howell, as Drew, is sensitive and self-absorbed; and Mihm, as Matt, keeps his gruff mystery intact.

    The laughs they elicit are dark and nervous, arising out of awkward situations and tussles. In the end, however, Lee has not written a comedy. What starts schematically evolves into a real family drama in which it’s impossible not to take the characters seriously.

    It’s clear that Lee sees the unknowability of Matt as an abyss, and, since her play is told from the outlier’s point of view, it’s not an exercise of navel-gazing by straight white men about straight white men. But there’s a central irony to the whole enterprise: why write yet another play that explores the personal issues of the privileged class when there are so many stories about people like the Persons in Charge, nonbinary and BIPOC, that never get told?

    Ultimately, what matters is who you are and what you bring to the theater as a member of the audience. You may see yourself in the family onstage or you may see, instead, a group of toxic others. Straight White Men is an intense theatrical experience. As the first major indoor production at WHAT since Covid locked us down, it’s a high dive into the deep end of the pool. The audience may be checked for vaccinations and masked, but the drama is provocatively unsafe.

    Bros and Pros

    The event: Straight White Men, a play by Young Jean Lee
    The time: Through June 24, Tuesday through Saturday (and Monday, June 20) at 8 p.m.
    The place: Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, 2357 Route 6
    The cost: $15-$40 at what.org or 508-349-9428

    OPERA

    Seeing Fire in a Crowded Theater

    The Met returns with Terence Blanchard’s work about race, sex, and coming of age

    By

    Being back at the Metropolitan Opera in New York last Wednesday had a surreal quality. Masked faces peered across balconies through opera glasses. The sound of the orchestra warming up blended with audience chatter. And beneath the cacophony, the boom-ta-ta of a drum set.

    Yes, a drum set. The Met has made its historic return after 18 months of pandemic shutdown with Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones. It’s the Met’s first opera by a Black composer — a fact stated in both celebration and embarrassment. (It will be simulcast, live in HD, on Saturday, Oct. 23.)

    Blanchard, a jazz trumpeter, has composed more than 60 film scores, collaborating frequently with director Spike Lee. Fire calls for a jazz quartet in addition to the orchestra, which adds a rhythmic grounding and popular flair. I was pleased to see that the Met audience seemed younger and more diverse than usual.

    Baritone Will Liverman, center, sings the part of Charles.

    The libretto by Kasi Lemmons is based on journalist Charles M. Blow’s memoir by the same name. It begins in medias res. Charles, sung by Will Liverman, is barreling down a Louisiana back road with a gun in the passenger seat of his car. He is on his way to kill his cousin, Chester, whose part was artfully sung by Benjamin Taylor, standing in for Chris Kenney on the night that I attended. The allegorical character Destiny, sung hauntingly by Angel Blue, draws him into a flashback of his childhood.

    We learn that the seven-year-old Char’es-Baby’s family is dirt poor (literally — there’s a scene where Charles and his brothers describe eating dirt). His mother, Billie, works at a chicken processing factory; his father, Spinner, is a womanizer. Char’es-Baby, played by the adorable Walter Russell III, craves attention, which makes him especially vulnerable when Chester sexually molests him.

    In this flashback, Char’es-Baby sings mostly in octaves with his adult counterpart. The effect could have been dramatic, but because of the natural tendency for boy sopranos to be pitchy ends up being a bit distracting.

    Blanchard’s strength is his orchestration — blending jazz and classical idioms — rather than his vocal lines, which are sometimes, literally, almost one-note. But a scene in the chicken factory has genuinely catchy music, as well as the line “big ol’ ass and really tight pussy,” which, I assume, is a first on the Met’s stage. Despite months of being laid off, the orchestra was in good form, and Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducted with aplomb.

    The second act opens with a ballet sequence — men in skin-colored outfits billow and bend like trees. During Liverman’s aria “Peculiar Grace,” the haunting melody is picked up by the cello. It later returns when Charles is going off to college at Grambling State University. In one scene where Charles tries to purge his inner demons through baptism, Blanchard makes good use of an energetic gospel choir.

    A high point of Fire Shut Up in My Bones is the fraternity scene in Act Three. (Photos Ken Howard)

    The third act includes a hazing scene involving the fraternity Kappa Alpha Psi. The a capella step dance that the brothers perform is in some ways out of place in the opera, but extremely impressive. During the performance that I attended, the dance received the loudest applause of the night.

    Charles has a relationship with Greta, also sung by Angel Blue, that ends after he tells her about his history of abuse and she admits she is seeing someone else. When Charles calls home to hear his mother’s voice, Chester is there, prompting the murderous plan that opens the opera. But ultimately, after listening to Destiny and his younger self, Charles is able to “just leave it all behind.”

    Both the program notes and New York Times reviews gloss over the queer elements of the libretto, which are more explicit in the book. Blow is bisexual and writes about it candidly in Fire Shut Up in My Bones. In the first act of the opera, the community views Char’es-Baby as somehow different. He is called “a boy of peculiar grace.” Chester calls him a “punk,” which is a slur. The ballet sequences, which turn out to be Charles’s dreams, are homoerotic. He later sings of “strange desires, half formed” that appear to him during the night.

    There may be some bisexual erasure going on here. Charles’s relationships in the opera are with women — first with Evelyn, sung by Brittany Renee, with whom he loses his virginity in the second act, and then with Greta. And the linking of homosexuality with perversion is problematic. Blow writes in his book, “Abusers don’t necessarily make children different in that way, but rather, they are diabolically gifted at detecting that kind of difference, often before the child can see it in him or herself, articulate it, and accept it. It is possible that Chester glimpsed a light in me, and that moved the darkness in him.”

    One strength of Fire Shut Up in My Bones, the opera, is that the plot can take on different meanings. It’s about race, sexuality, trauma, and coming of age.

     Met Again

    The event: Fire Shut Up in My Bones live in HD

    The time: Saturday, Oct. 23, 12:55 p.m.

    The place: Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, 2357 Route 6

    The cost: $15 to $30 at what.org

    THEATER REVIEW

    Redemption for an American Holy Warrior

    Witnessing Nat Turner in Jerusalem at WHAT

    By

    It is said that history is written by the victors, and in the case of the slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in August 1831, a time of rising abolitionist sentiment, that is certainly true. Much of what is thought of as historical fact about Turner comes from a pamphlet published by a lawyer named Thomas R. Gray, entitled The Confessions of Nat Turner, the Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, Va. Gray was a slaveholder, and though he claims to be a reliable recorder of Turner’s account, his mercenary interests were on full display. He was appealing to white readers in antebellum Virginia, many of whom were panicked by the rebellion — recognizing their own vulnerability to a large slave population (as opposed to culpability for the horrors of slavery) — and the degree to which Gray exploited those fears and disregarded the facts can only be imagined.

    Ricardy Fabre as slave martyr Nat Turner and Robert St. Laurence as the lawyer Thomas Gray in Nathan Alan Davis’s Nat Turner in Jerusalem, now playing at WHAT. (Photo Michael & Suz Karchmer)

    Turner’s uprising was bloody, and so was the retribution. As many as 55 whites who were members of slaveholding families — including many women and young children — were brutally slaughtered. In the aftermath, it’s estimated that hundreds of Blacks — slaves and freemen, participants and sympathizers, and many innocents wrongly accused — were gruesomely executed, by courts and white vigilantes alike.

    Turner may have been seen as a terrorist by Southern whites — and, in fact, inflicting terror was one of his explicit aims — but he is nonetheless a hero to many. How do we reconcile the slaughter of innocents in an otherwise moral fight?

    Born into slavery in Virginia, Nat Turner was literate, an avid reader of the Bible, and he claimed to have been visited by God and directed by His manifest signs, such as a solar eclipse. He saw himself as a messianic vehicle of justice. William Styron’s 1967 fictional Pulitzer Prize-winning best-seller, The Confessions of Nat Turner, projects on Turner a psychosexual obsession with white women, which reflects a white author’s prejudices. There has been much rebuking of Styron’s motives and art, and endless debate about Turner himself. A pulpy 2016 film, Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation, romanticizes Turner and his rebellion from the Black audience’s point of view.

    Nathan Alan Davis’s Nat Turner in Jerusalem, a meditation on Turner’s spirituality and place in history, does a much better job of rebalancing our perspective. The play premiered at the New York Theatre Workshop in 2016 and is now showing at the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater’s outdoor Garden Stage through Sept. 5.

    Davis, a person of color, presents two multidimensional white characters in the play: Thomas Gray and Turner’s working-class prison guard, both performed with creative distinction by Robert St. Laurence in WHAT’s elegant and haunting production. Mostly, however, Davis gives renewed focus to who Turner was, as a historical persona and a deeply committed soldier of God. New York-based actor Ricardy Fabre plays Turner with patience and intensity, imbuing him with profound sensitivity — as if he were aware of his own frailty, and not merely a breathy, Jesus-like demagogue.

    The play takes place in Turner’s jail cell in Jerusalem, Va., during the day and night before his execution by hanging. He is visited by Gray, who is looking to enhance the “confession” he has already taken from Turner, and by the guard, who provides a refreshing contrast — an empathetic, if not sympathetic, interaction.

    With Gray, however, the encounters are filled with white panic (in terms of how well shackled Turner is) and mutual manipulation, Turner looking forward to eternity in heaven and Gray to prosperity on Earth.

    These dialogues are fascinating and moving. Rodney Witherspoon II, who played the lead in WHAT’s recent production of Shipwrecked!, directs with fluidity, grace, and power. The scenic and lighting design by WHAT’s producing artistic director, Christopher Ostrom, brilliantly conveys the grimness of a jail cell and the possibility of divine intervention on an outdoor stage at dusk — no small feat.

    Most of all, the production is grounded in the solemnity of cataclysmic history and the enormity of its horror: slavery, like the Holocaust, can never be disregarded or set aside. Nat Turner in Jerusalem is a rich exploration of the human and spiritual dimensions of slavery’s legacy, which, along with the genocide of Native Americans, is a primal sin of our history.

    True Confessions

    The event: Nat Turner in Jerusalem, by Nathan Alan Davis

    The time: Wednesday through Sunday, 7 p.m., through Sept. 5

    The place: Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, 2357 Route 6

    The cost: $35; students $15

    Tingle, Unmasked

    By

    Jimmy Tingle returns to Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater performing “No Mask” on Wednesday, July 28th through July 31st at 7 p.m. on the Garden Stage. Tingle reflects on the pandemic in all its horror with hope, humanity, keen observation, and humor. Tickets are $25 at what.org.

    THEATER REVIEW

    Truth in the Eye of the Beholder

    The joyfully incredible spectacle of Shipwrecked! at WHAT

    By

    As Louis de Rougemont, a real-life British adventurer of the Victorian era, Rodney Witherspoon II is an affable storyteller. He struts and frets for 90 minutes on the Garden Stage outside the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, telling the story of Louis’s life. And what an epic story it is — chockablock with seafaring disasters and feats of derring-do, terrifying creatures such as a giant man-eating octopus and flying wombats, encounters both hostile and romantic with exotic South Seas natives, and rituals of public adulation and disgrace.

    Assisting Witherspoon in the telling are two deft and versatile actors (Jackie Davis and Jackson Goldberg) who play a score of supporting roles of different genders, races, and species, each with a different sound and demeanor. Filling out the spectacle is the “musical accompaniment” of Justin Torrellas, who supplies old-fashioned radio-hour-style sound effects as well as melodies. I had no idea an accordion could make such a variety of noises.

    Rodney Witherspoon II plays storyteller Louis de Rougemont — here as a young boy, with Jackie Davis as Mother — in the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater production of Shipwrecked! (Photo Michael & Suz Karchmer)

    It’s all part of a play with the unwieldy title Shipwrecked! An Entertainment — The Amazing Adventures of Louis de Rougemont (as Told by Himself), by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Donald Margulies, which is as much an examination of the relationship between storytelling and truth (à la Life of Pi) as it is an episodic, serialized meta-Dickensian personal saga, ripped from the pages of pulpy Victorian magazines.

    WHAT veteran Daisy Walker directs this spectacle with a light vaudevillian touch, keeping the level of imagination high and the narrative at a pleasant clip, punctuating the farcical goings-on with understated winks and nudges. The lovely scenic and lighting design is by WHAT’s producing artistic director, Christopher Ostrom; the costumes (often cottony beige or white) are by Seth Bodie; and the crisp sound design was created by Sam Sewell. They provide the storied Wellfleet company with a well-suited return to live theater after a long and painful absence, out in the open air as the evening sky slowly darkens. It may be nice to share the arena with the wind and trees and insects, but I, for one, can hardly wait for a full return to indoor theatergoing, Covid fears and Actors’ Equity rules notwithstanding.

    Shipwrecked! opened off-Broadway in 2009 and has been produced widely on regional stages. It’s easy to see why. The play is family-friendly, though its ironies and twists will be lost on younger children. Mostly, though, it’s a celebration of theatrical performance and the way a story that’s persuasively told becomes believable — even if it’s not.

    According to the history books, Rougemont was born Henri Louis Grin in Paris in 1847, to Swiss parents. He started life as a sheltered child, a “fragile boy with a delicate constitution,” as his mother tells him in the play. Then, at 16, in Louis’s telling, he leaves home and sets out on an adventure: to search for pearls in the Coral Sea, off the coast of New Guinea. He is shipwrecked but survives — along with his dog — and comes ashore on an isolated island. He eventually makes it to the Australian Outback, starts a family with an Aboriginal princess, and, 30 years later, deserts them and sails to London, serializing his memoirs in The Wide World Magazine. His story is hugely popular with the Victorian public, and Rougemont is celebrated as a glorious adventurer. That’s when he faces a different kind of disaster. He is doubted by experts, confronted with impossible details, and his self-aggrandized world quickly collapses. Though aspects of his story may very well be true, the entire yarn is no longer believed, and Rougemont’s ability to entertain evaporates.

    As Rougemont, Witherspoon plays it straight. Unlike the gallery of outlandish characters that surrounds him, he engages us as a storyteller and gains our sympathy. It’s a necessary choice to keep such a frothy story grounded. But one shouldn’t overlook how impressive Witherspoon’s performance is, even if his two sidekicks get most of the showy, funny bits.

    WHAT’s Shipwrecked! is remarkably even-handed. From the outset, some in the audience may believe Rougemont, and others will not. But, in the end, the truth resides in the beholders of this spectacle, just as it always should.

    Fish Tale

    The event: Shipwrecked! An Entertainment — The Amazing Adventures of Louis de Rougemont (as Told by Himself), a play by Donald Margulies

    The time: Wednesday through Sunday, 7 p.m., through July 25

    The place: Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater’s outdoor Garden Stage, 2357 Route 6; theater parking is closed: use the highway lot by Dunkin’

    The cost: $35 in advance; $40 day of; $15 students; at what.org

    Whale Tale

    By

    The Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, 2357 Route 6, begins its WHAT for Kids summer season with The Tale of Ibis. Written and directed by Jody O’Neil, it tells the true story of a young humpback whale who became entangled in Provincetown Harbor in 1984. It opens Monday, July 5th, 7 p.m. and runs through August 12th. Tickets are $12 at what.org, with a portion benefitting the Center for Coastal Studies Entanglement Fund.

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