There’s the law, and then there’s justice. The difference between the two is timeless material for art, never more so than in an era where the former is casually disregarded in the highest government offices, making the latter impossible to achieve. Can it get worse? Yes, argues actor and playwright Tim Blake Nelson in And Then We Were No More, Off Broadway at La MaMa. In his dystopian future AI has replaced the courts, and a woman who has slain her family, referred to as The Inmate (Elizabeth Yeoman) is being tortured by the state before her execution, simply because our tech overlords are fascinated by how she clings to her free will. A Lawyer (Elizabeth Marvel) is assigned to send her on her way to a painless vaporization in a machine, but she butts heads with An Official (Scott Shepherd).
Yes, this one of those plays where the five characters, including An Analyst (Jennifer Mogbock) and The Machinist (Henry Stram, in a brief, wily turn) have designations rather than names, and supple, innovative actors like the stage and screen veteran Marvel and Shepherd (Gatz) are asked to do little but intone their dialogue with maximum clipped efficiency. (Only Yeoman, who speaks in gibberish, is allowed wounded emotion in this less-than-human world.) Directed by Caryl Churchill veteran Mark Wing-Davey it’s intentionally stilted for 75 minutes, when it reaches a flashpoint–then resumes for an additional 20 minutes after a 10-minute intermission. This kind of start-and-stop rarely works at one-act length and it doesn’t here, either, as it reaches a gloomy, confused ending. I understand what Nelson is trying to get across, just as I did when I saw similar themes enacted in Severance, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Zone of Interest, etc. The bad news is omnipresent in our culture, And Then We Were No More just adds more. But I liked David Meyer’s scenic design (assisted by Josh Barilla), which is like a kids play center emptied of toys. Those places are creepy.
The Irish Troubles seem far off but they are front and center in Leo McGann’s The Honey Trap, a moral thriller now at Irish Repertory Theatre. The formidable Michael Hayden stars as Dave, a former British soldier reluctantly particpating in an oral history of the period for the politely inquisitive Emily (Molly Ranson). The brutish, taciturn Dave doesn’t seem like much of a subject but he warms to the task, recalling a fateful night in Belfast, 1979, when he and his mate Bobby (Harrison Tipping) befriended two girls at a unionist pub while off-duty and took them to a hotel. (A fog of war rolls across the stage as the events are reenacted.) Bobby paid the ultimate price for them letting their guard down but decades later Dave waxes philosophical about the matter…or seems to. Manipulating Emily, Dave extracts precious information from her recordings that in the second act leads him to Sonia (Samantha Mathis), a coffee shop owner drawn into a tryst, with potentially deadly consequences.
I feel I’ve said too much but there’s more to come as past and present collide in unexpected ways, tender and horrific in equal measure. These sorts of plays are rare birds these days but director Matt Torney turns the screws on McGann’s text, as the tightly coiled Hayden seeks vengeance in a memory play where the memories never stop tormenting. Mathis is equally good in her confusion, desperation, and resolve, as the pair, united in their prison, seek a way forward from the blood and muck of time.
The West End import Punch, a Manhattan Theatre Club presentation on Broadway at the Friedman, adapts an agonizingly true story for a searching look at law and justice. We’re often told that we aren’t our worst moments, but what does that mean, really? To grapple with that question we meet Jacob, a motor-mouthed lout barely scraping by with his mum and brother at a shabby council flat estate in Nottingham, England. Cue a bitter Robin Hood joke or two but in incisive scenes we see how the dismal environment has deformed a troubled child. By his teens Jacob is a wild child, one who for no reason at all except for maybe a laugh throws a punch at James, a paramedic cheering on his soccer team at a local pub. It turns out to be a killing blow, leaving James’ parents, Joan (Victoria Clark) and David (Sam Robards), to grieve his early loss.
Playwright James Graham wrote a recent favorite of mine, the excellent Ink, a boisterous show about how Rupert Murdoch came to be. That had a swift, semi-musical staging. Directed by Adam Penford this is more pensively paced, but each scenes is a fully immersive vignette, with most of the cast doubling up for different parts (and all ably supported by Anna Fleischle’s set, Robbie Butler’s lights, and Alexandra Faye Braithwaite’s music and sound design). But Will Harrison’s Jacob most often stands apart, uneasily, as he steers the 2.5-hour show with his sole characterization. We don’t see James’ murder but we feel it, just as we feel Jacob’s bravado fade as he enters prison. In a lucky break for him the charges are downgraded and he’s released in relatively short order. But Joan and David are livid–where is the justice in that? It’s suggested that both parties try “restorative justice,” a program that brings together those afflicted by violence with those who inflict it.
The stage is set for explosive confrontations. What we get is scaled to broken people negotiating their broken lives. Clark (shifting from the musical comedy of the Tony-winning Kimberly Akimbo) and Robards are skilled stage actors, who know how to get more from less, and their gestures speak as loudly as their words. In his Broadway debut Harrison plays Jacob in all his flailing, tumultuous humanity, as much a stranger to himself as he is to others. Are we our worst moments or are we not? Punch answers with a flesh and blood anatomy of one wary, feral man who learns to change, under the guidance of unlikely others. My teen son and I were deeply moved by the transformation. But you be the judge, as this superb show is live-streamed in its final week of performances.
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