{"id":162972,"date":"2023-01-13T11:00:16","date_gmt":"2023-01-13T16:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=162972"},"modified":"2023-01-13T12:21:08","modified_gmt":"2023-01-13T17:21:08","slug":"on-three-new-plays","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2023\/01\/13\/on-three-new-plays\/","title":{"rendered":"On Three Plays"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_162974\" style=\"width: 810px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-162974\" class=\"size-full wp-image-162974\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/massdot-salt-shed-sandwich-november-7-2013-10726244236.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/massdot-salt-shed-sandwich-november-7-2013-10726244236.jpg 800w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/massdot-salt-shed-sandwich-november-7-2013-10726244236-300x225.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/massdot-salt-shed-sandwich-november-7-2013-10726244236-768x576.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-162974\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">MassDOT salt shed, Sandwich, Massachusetts, November 7, 2013. Public domain, via <a href=\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:MassDOT_Salt_Shed,_Sandwich,_November_7,_2013_(10726244236).jpg\">Wikimedia Commons<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In Wallace Shawn\u2019s <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Evening at the Talk House<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">,<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> a group of former theater collaborators reunite at the bar they once frequented together. They\u2019ve since all gone their separate ways, some making good money in TV; others have cobbled together livings from various odd jobs. But when their sad-sack friend Dick (played by Shawn himself in the New York premiere of the play) arrives late to the party, face bruised and crusted with dried blood, the play reveals its insidious side. At first, Dick acts as if nothing has happened, but then, when pressed, he earnestly explains, \u201cI <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">was<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> beaten, rather recently, by some friends, but you see, I actually enjoyed it very much, in the end. Really, it was great. No\u2014I loved it!\u201d Dick does what just about all the play\u2019s characters will go on to do: compulsively excuse horrible ideas and horrible actions. Act like nothing happened. Act like everyone else is making too big a deal out of something. The play glides along so blithely that its evolution into a genuinely frightening horror story might catch you by surprise. A year after it premiered in New York, the ensemble cast, led by Shawn and Matthew Broderick and directed by Scott Elliott, <a href=\"https:\/\/podcasts.apple.com\/lv\/podcast\/evening-at-the-talk-house-part-1\/id1195206601?i=1000409139629\">recorded<\/a> their performances for the podcast <em>Intercepted<\/em>. It works beautifully as a radio drama, especially since one of the most perverse and hilarious pleasures of this play is to hear those voices argue so pleasantly and so reasonably in favor of cruelty, as if they\u2019re kindly injecting you with a needle full of poison.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: right;\"><b>\u2014Lucas Hnath, author of \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/fiction\/7962\/from-old-actress-lucas-hnath\">Old Actress<\/a>\u201d<\/b><!--more--><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I\u2019ve been following the rise of Julia May Jonas since her debut novel, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Vladimir<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, came out last year. When I learned that Jonas had written a new play, <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.lct.org\/shows\/your-own-personal-exegesis\/\"><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Your Own Personal Exegesis<\/span><\/i><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, I leaped at the chance to see it at LCT3. <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Exegesis<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> is a memory play\u2014a reconstruction of the memories of one of the characters, Beatrice (Annie Fang). Set at \u201cRedacted Church in Redacted, New Jersey\u201d in 1996, it follows the church\u2019s youth group, which meets on Friday nights for Bible study, danceathons, and performances of liturgical plays. Beatrice is the group&#8217;s youngest member. There\u2019s also Chris (Cole Doman), the \u201cJock Rebel Sensitive Everything guy&#8221;; and Brian (Savidu Geevaratne), who was raised in the church and lusts after Addie (Mia Pak), whose disordered eating causes her to grow lanugo and eventually sprout black wings. Overseeing the group is Reverend Kathy Redacted, or Rev. Kat, as she\u2019s known to her students. Her name and the name of the church, which are literally blacked out on the church bulletins the audience is given as we&#8217;re ushered to our seats, are our first clues that something sordid is in the offing. Having read <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Vladimir<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, in which the narrator develops a passion for a younger colleague in her department, I expected a similar story of illicit desire. <em>Exegesis <\/em>is cleverly and precisely structured, beginning with a call to worship followed by an invocation, a reading of the New Testament, a presentation of tithes and offerings, a confession of sins, and so on. At select call-and-response moments, the audience is directed to read aloud from the bulletins in our laps. We complete a circuit of knowledge, and maybe something more. Ultimately, the play\u2019s concern with how an authority figure might wield charismatic power over her charges put me in the mind of Muriel Spark\u2019s <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. Considering Rev. Kat, Beatrice says, \u201cShe frightens me \u2026 She say[s] what other people don\u2019t want to hear <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">because<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> they don\u2019t want to hear it.\u201d Others, though, fall for her faster than you can say \u201cbenediction.\u201d<\/span><!--more--><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: right;\"><b>\u2014Rhoda Feng<\/b><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The tone is set for <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/thenewgroup.org\/production\/evanston-salt-costs-climbing\/\"><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Evanston Salt Costs Climbing<\/span><\/i><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, the New Group production of Will Arbery\u2019s new play, directed by Danya Taymor, with a song by David Berman, \u201cSnow Is Falling in Manhattan.\u201d The lyrics describe a \u201cgood caretaker\u201d who \u201csalts the stoop and scoops the cat in \/ tests an icy path for traction.\u201d Set over the course of three perilous winters, Arbery&#8217;s play centers around the lives of municipal servants charged with defrosting the frozen roads of Evanston, Illinois\u2014a task they attempt through the insomniac hours in a freight truck bearing a mound of rock salt and a lone heater sparing them from the deadly cold. In the first minute of the play, Peter, one of its four characters, announces his desire to commit suicide. From there, his seemingly pragmatic task\u2014to combat ice with salt\u2014is quickly exposed as a self-protective ritual; the increasingly expensive and ineffective practice becomes the focus for an intimate examination of climate change, the material damage it has caused, and the often futile, ultimately sacrificial measures we all have to take against it. Peter speaks repeatedly of another hopeless tradition that has become central to his life: using the Domino\u2019s pizza tracker for real-time updates on his orders. Arbery brilliantly compresses an existential problem into a funny and frighteningly true fact of everyday American life: the pizza tracker, that instrument by which Peter marks his meals, his days, his time alive, changes nothing\u2014not the pace of arrival nor the pizza itself\u2014but he can\u2019t stop looking at it. It\u2019s coming, says Peter, says Arbery, says Berman, and what can a person do but watch it come?<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: right;\"><b>\u2014Owen Park, reader<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Lucas Hnath, Rhoda Feng, and Owen Park review plays by Wallace Shawn, Julia May Jonas, and Will Arbery.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68386],"tags":[67827,68591,883,44,5242,68382],"class_list":["post-162972","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-reviews-review","tag-featured","tag-julia-may-jonas","tag-staff-picks","tag-theater","tag-wallace-shawn","tag-will-arbery"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>On 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