Off-B'way Review: Pre-Existing Condition; In Honor of Jean-Michel Basquiat

Lupita Nyong'o in Pre-Existing Condition.
Credit: Jessica Kourkounis

Marin Ireland is one of our most versatile and talented actresses, usually turning up as conflicted and struggling mothers, daughters, wives, or girlfriends in perceptive, searing Off-Broadway plays. With her play Pre-Existing Condition, now at the Greenwich House Theater after an engagement at the tiny Connelly Center last season, she joins the ranks of promising playwrights. In 80 shattering minutes, she documents the wrenching experience of an unnamed woman A, vainly attempting to come to terms with exiting a toxic relationship after her ex assaulted her. The protagonist turns to the law, counseling, therapy, friends, and new relationships, but none offers her resolution or closure. “I don’t know what I want,” she cries more than once. Often she tells whoever will listen (except her distant mother whom she can’t bring herself to tell about the violence she has endured) she just wants the feeling of powerlessness and victimization to go away. But there is no resolution other than the slow process of unpacking her emotions and facing them. 

Ireland painstakingly documents A’s journey through rage, self-blame, and guilt through a

Lupita Nyong'o and Jeff Keller in
Pre-Existing Condition.
Credit: Jessica Kourkounis

series of short, fragmented scenes that flow smoothly thanks to Maria Dizzia’s subtle, graceful staging and Isabella Byrd’s sensitive lighting. The entire play takes place on Cate McCrea’s bare set which resembles a nondescript, support-group meeting room. The play opens with A leaving numerous voicemail messages for a lawyer. He finally returns her calls and informs her there is little legal recourse for her situation since there were no outside witnesses, the police weren’t called, and the laws are antiquated. From there A tentatively embarks on dating, attends individual and group therapy sessions and meets with a friend offering an apology from the former boyfriend. 

In an interesting casting choice, the lead role will be played by a series of different performers during the show’s limited engagement. Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o opens the run and delivers a complex, deeply-felt performance as A. She charts the main character’s circuitous path from numbness to rage to hard-won reflection. She  bubbles with anger, flirts with humor, and hards back tears. She jiggles her leg nervously in one scene, giggles with suppressed anxiety during a first, tentative date in the next. A bravura range of reactions to a ruptured romance. (Philipa Soo, Edie Falco, Hari Nef, and Susanna Flood will follow.)     

Book Review: The Weight of Ink

(Bought at the Strand Bookstore for $8): The was the first volume assigned for my new book club. I found it at the Strand and said to myself, "This thing is over 500 pages! How am I gonna finish it in time for the first class?" Luckily I had a couple of weeks and was able to get through it. A fascinating, complex story on two time tracks. In 2000, scholar and historian Helen Watt discovers a trove of documents from a 17th century rabbi in a London suburban house. She clashes with

brash Jewish-American grad student Aaron who has issues of his own. Helen is not Jewish, but flashes back to her time working in the new state of Israel. But that's not the second timeline. We also trip back to the 1660s and the story of Esther, the blind rabbi's scribe. Rachel Kadish explores women's roles, religion, love, philosophy, Jewish history in an absorbing novel. The ending wherein everything is resolved and explained is a bit too tidy for me.

It reminded me of Possession which employed a similar format with two modern scholars unearthing the correspondence of two Victorian poets. 

Book Review: The Crying of Lot 49

(Borrowed from the NY Public Library on 40th St.) Back in the mid-70s when I was in my teens, I tried to read Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, a massive best-seller in paperback. It was a big, important book that got a bunch of glowing reviews and I thought I should read it. I couldn't finish it or make head or tail out of it. There was something about missiles and Nazis, but I can't recall any characters or why I should care about them. But Pynchon is a highly regarded author and now 50 years later, I needed something short to read until the next session of my online book club when they assign us another novel. So while scanning the Fiction section of the NY Public Library at 40th Street, I found this work which is only about 150 pages. Just as confusing as Gravity's Rainbow, but at least I finished it. The heroine Oedipa Maas goes on a wild goose chase once she becomes executrix of her millionaire ex-lover's estate. She finds a weird symbol on a ladies' room wall and somehow it's connected to an ancient independent mail system. Somehow this secret society of mail carriers is important, but it's not clear why. They're killing or threatening all the men in Oedipa's life. Why or what it has to do with an auction of a set of rare stamps is not sufficently explained. And how is Oedipa like the Greek tragic figure Oedipus? Well, the ex-lover was older, so is it because she had sex with a father figure? Did she metaphorically blind herself?

There are several well-written and intriguing passages such as Oedipa's drunken seduction with Metzger, the estate's handsome lawyer where she dons several layers of clothing so she won't lose in strip poker. I also like the Paranoids, a teen garage band Oedipa encounters. But the conspiracy Oedipa investigates didn't seem particularly dangerous or vital to expose. What was she after, what made her journey one I wanted to follow? It didn't make me want to return to Gravity's Rainbow or pick up Pynchon's later novel Vineland, which Paul Thomas Anderson filmed as the Oscar-winning One Battle After Another.

This cover from a paperback edition was groovier than the book itself.

Off-B'way Update: Patti LuPone in Full Gallop

Patti LuPone will star in Full Gallop.

Three-time Tony winner Patti LuPone (Evita, Gypsy, Company) returns to the New York stage as legendary fashion editor Diana Vreeland in the solo play Full Gallop written by Mark Hampton and Mary Louise Wilson, who played the role in the original 1995 production. The production directed by Gordon Greenberg (The Baker's Wife) begins previews on Jan. 8, 2027 at NY City Center Stage II, with an opening set for Jan. 17. 

Wilson played Vreeland when the play premiered at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego and again for NYC engagements at Manhattan Theater Club and the West Side Theater. She won an Obie, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Solo Performance. Vreeland served as fashion editor for Harper's Bazaar, editor-in-chief for Vogue and consultant for the Metropolitan Museum's costume collection. 

B'way Update: Annie; Princess Bride

Reid Shelton and Andrea McArdle 
in the original Broadway production on
Annie.
Credit: Martha Swope

The sun will come out tomorrow...or next fall. Tony-winning director Sam Pinkleton (Oh Mary!) will direct a 50th anniversary production of Annie, the beloved musical based on the long-running comic strip about the spunky, red-headed orphan who gets adopted by multi-millionaire Daddy Warbucks. 

“If you ask any of my closest friends what I love more than anything on the planet, everyone will have the same answer: Annie,” says Pinkleton in a statement. “Annie is everything I love about New York City: gutsy, fearless, and funny as hell. It’s a perfectly constructed musical comedy that my collaborators and I will run toward with joy and abandon—with open hearts and total adoration for this legendary show that has made generations fall in love with musicals.”

Annie opened on Broadway in 1977, won seven Tony Awards, and ran for 2, 377 performances. There have been Broadway revivals in 1997 and 2012 and a touring production played Madison Square Garden in 2024. Film versions were produced in 1982, 1999, and 2014, and a live TV version aired on NBC in 2021. No word on casting, but there is already speculation on who will play Miss Hannigan, the deliciously evil mistress of the orphanage. Some on social media predict Jinx Monsoon of RuPaul's Drag Race and the recent Pirates of Penzance revival. Others vote for Cole Escola, star and author of Oh Mary!

Off-B'way Review: The Ford/Hill Project

Elizabeth Marvel and Gabby Beans in
The Ford/Hill Project,
Credit: Rebecca Smeyne

A docu-play made up of verbatim Senate testimony? Doesn’t exactly sound riveting. Yet The Ford/Hill Project, now at BAM’s Fishman Space after regional productions and a run at the Under the Radar Festival, provides a searing portrait of the workings of government power and its failure to deal with violence and harassment against women. Elizabeth Marvel (one of four cast members) and Lee Sunday Evans (who directs) have stitched together the most dramatic excerpts of testimony and questions from the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominees Clarence Thomas in 1991 and Brett Kavanaugh in 2018. Both high-profile events were rocked by the respective eyewitness accounts of Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford, both of whom claimed the nominees mistreated them. 

Hill testified Thomas pressured her to date him and then, when she refused, used lewd, pornographic language and innuendo in front of her when they worked together at the US Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Ford claimed Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a party when they were in high school. At the time of both hearings, the accusations made headlines and threatened the Republican nominees’ appointment to the highest court in the land. Both vehemently denied the allegations and were eventually successfully confirmed. With the passage of time, the impact of these events has faded, but this intense distillation of Hill and Ford’s stories and Thomas and Kavanuagh’s insistent denials bring them vividly into focus.

Book Reviews: Still More Christopher Durang Plays

(Taken out of the Lincoln Center Library): Christopher Durang had the same sense of humor as me. Wild, wacky, and full of pop cultural references. I've read or seen most of his plays, but I wanted to go back and re-experience them. Some of them have dated allusions and I don't know if they'd play today. (Leona and Harry Hemsley, Bush's war on terror, Jesse Helms, Bill Clinton, etc.) But we are still dealing with the forces of racism and homophobia that Durang railed against. His forwards and afterwards are also fascinating to read. In the commentary on Laughing Wild and Baby with the Bathwater, he recounts the then-seemingly insurmountable problem of the NY Times theater critic (Frank Rich at the time) having too much power. 

Volumes read: Laughing Wild and Baby with the Bathwater.

Miss Witherspoon and Mrs. Bob Crachit's Wild Christmas Binge are collected in one volume. I saw the former at Playwrights Horizons. The latter debuted regionally but has yet to appear in NYC. It imagines Mrs. Crachit getting sick and tired of the poverty and misery that surrounds her and she goes off a tear. I wish I had seen Kristin Nielsen do this role. 

The Idiots Karamatzov (co-written with Albert Innaurto): A zany romp through Russian and all Western literature. Durang co-wrote this with Albert Innaurto when they were both students at Yale Drama School. I would love to see this on stage. On the page, it's pretty bizarre and unless you are familiar with references to Dostoevsky, Hemingway, Joyce, O'Neill, Anais Nin and Djuna Barnes, it can be heavy going. I've been rereading a lot of Durang's plays and he's always funny. This is one is not a laugh riot, but a curious addition to his oeuvre.

Durang Durang, six one-acts performed together Off-Broadway including parodies of Tennessee Williams and Sam Shepard. 

3 Short Plays: The Nature and Purpose of the Universe, Death Comes to Us All, Mary Agnes (a satire of "well-made" plays where a family gathers as the old cruel patriarch is dying and regrets are expressed), and 'dentity Crisis.