I Love You So Much I Could Die

The title I Love You So Much I Could Die hints at a deeply emotional, even fervid, show. 

Nope.

For reasons that remain obscure to me, I Love You So Much I Could Die extends a great deal of effort to eliminate emotion, connection, and communication from its characteristics. The show consists of monologues interspersed with songs. The words are intoned by a generic male computer voice. The singing is performed by the author, Mona Pirnot, sitting at a desk with her back to the audience. There is little in the way of visual expression. I ended up watching the cursor on Pirnot's computer move in tandem with the sentences of the monologues, just to have something to do. 

In my eyes, theatre is about communication. I even have reservations about one-person shows, because I want dialogue and human interactions. I Love You So Much I Could Die pretty much removes any reason to be in a theatre. 

Wendy Caster

Hadestown

It's a sad song

It's a sad tale, it's a tragedy

It's a sad song

But we sing it anyway

'Cause here's the thing: 

To know how it ends 

And still begin to sing it again

As if it might turn out this time

I learned that from a friend of mine

See, Orpheus was a poor boy

But he had a gift to give: 

He could make you see how the world could be

In spite of the way that it is

Helen Maybanks

One of the many miracles of Hadestown, Anaïs Mitchell and Rachel Chavkin's strange, stunning folk opera at the Kerr, is the richly bittersweet way it manages to simultaneously lament and celebrate the endless repetitions that make up human lives. In so many ways, most all of them beautiful in execution, this haunting show teases out the endless redundancies and rituals that lead us from birth to death, pointing out along that way that cycles can be a drag, but also the source of joy and celebration. Life might seem futile in its repetitions, Hadestown implies, but so long as there's the potential for beauty, love and ritual, it isn't a waste.

Mary Jane

The beautiful, incredibly nuanced Mary Jane, currently at New York Theatre Workshop, does what seems impossible: it burrows deep into a character who practically forces herself to be two-dimensional. Credit for one of the most finely-wrought productions I've seen in a long time seems evenly distributed across the entire company, from playwright Amy Herzog to director Anne Kauffman to a universally solid five-woman cast. This is one of those shows that grabs you quickly, and then only gets better the more you think about it. I'm still marveling over its depictions and its many smart choices, and expect I will continue to for quite some time.

Joan Marcus

Mary Jane is all the more remarkable considering the fact that as a play, it is quietly descriptive, but not at all big on Maximum Staginess or Dramatically Well-Paced Moments. More a succession of scenes depicting days in a small if very complicated life, Mary Jane doesn't go in for more exposition or subtext than it has to. Its refusal to slop into cheap sentiment is especially noteworthy considering the fact that the titular character is a divorced woman with a (never seen or heard) catastrophically ill special-needs child. If there's anything that invites melodrama, or what I have sometimes heard called "inspiration porn," a show about a single parent with a very special kid is probably gonna top the list.

But Mary Jane (an excellent Carrie Coon) has absolutely no time for pity. She's too busy putting one almost impossibly competent foot in front of the other, even as the treadmill she walks gets ever faster. She's almost exhausting in her unwillingness to budge from behind her chipper, ultra-positive facade: not when she's offered unsolicited, ludicrously alarmist (if well-meaning) advice, not when one of her son's nurses borders on dangerous incompetency, not when she's nearing termination from a job she frequently can't make it in for, and certainly not during the most terrifying of medical emergencies.

I know special-needs parents like Mary Jane. I probably even turn into her sometimes, even though I have a devoted partner and my kid has nowhere near the special needs hers does. She's built up the kind of coping mechanisms we happen to excel at developing in the face of umpteen forms, countless meetings, annual assessments, regularly scheduled tests, friendly advice from the totally uninformed, totally informed advice from the not always friendly, wellsprings of undesired and unsolicited pity, and endless judgments, less from above than from across: across the playground, the restaurant, the grocery store, the subway, the dinner party. We all cope differently; Mary Jane's unique cocktail of defense blends quick jokes, self-deprecation, displaced anxiety, a too-cool demeanor, and a stubborn refusal to think too deeply, ever, about how she feels, what she wants, how weary she is. To contemplate any of it would result in a headfirst fall into a bottomless abyss.

It is only in the second half of the play, set in the pediatric wing of a hospital during a particularly lengthy stay, when Mary Jane starts to show cracks in her veneer. Yet even these are barely perceptible: an extra beat between questions to her son's neurologist following an especially ominous response; conversations with hospital staff and fellow parents that veer into newly complicated spiritual territory; a particularly terse exchange with a hard-to-schedule music therapist. Still--no spoilers, here--the play doesn't tie up all its loose ends nicely and neatly. Lives--especially those devoted, even in part, to the very special and very sick--have a pesky way of not resolving perfectly at the well-timed end of a two-hour stretch.

Mary Jane  doesn't make a big dramatic splash, but it ripples out beautifully into ever wider circles nonetheless. It's an astonishingly good production of an astonishingly good play. If you get the chance, make this the one show you rush out to see before it closes.  

Mary Jane

The New York Theater Workshop's Mary Jane doesn't open officially until September 25, but I suggest you get your tickets now, before they become unavailable or you have to pay way more when it moves to Broadway. (No, a Broadway transfer has not been announced, but I can't imagine the show won't move.)

Yes, I was quite impressed with Mary Jane. Subtly and smartly written by Amy Herzog, subtly and smartly directed by Anne Kauffman, and subtly and smartly acted by Carrie Coon, Liza Colon-Zayas, Danaya Esperanza (who has an astonishingly beautiful singing voice), Susan Pourfar, and Brenda Wehle, Mary Jane is one of those great evenings in the theater when the whole is larger than the sum of its parts, and its parts are damn good.

Hadestown

Have you ever not completely connected with a show when you first sat through it, only to fall head over heels in love with it in retrospect? It's happened to me on only a few occasions that I can recall. I was amused and entertained by Passing Strange, for example, but not so passionately that I was even remotely prepared to wake up the following morning with the almost physical urge to listen to the cast recording over and over again, thereby cementing my embrace of a show I'd been unsure about in the first place.

I'm back there with Hadestown, a gorgeous, strange theatrical rendering of the 2010 concept album of the same name by Anais Mitchell. The production, running through the end of the month at New York Theatre Workshop, boasts a terrific cast, whose voices are haunting and appropriately weird. The visual aspects of the production are gorgeously rendered, thanks in part to Rachel Chavkin, an innovative director whose current hot status is well-deserved. The backing band is jumping, the music is catchy, and the set and lighting deceptively simple. The numbers alternate between deeply affecting ("Flowers"), amusingly jaunty ("Our Lady of the Underground"), and bone-chillingly prescient ("Why We Built the Wall", which is one of the catchiest songs on the album, and also the ickiest given the current political climate). Still, while I found myself loving the show's many parts, the finished product initially left me cold, since it doesn't try too hard to fill in all the narrative gaps left by the original album.

Joan Marcus

Lazarus

About halfway through Lazarus, the self-important mess that is currently a hot ticket at New York Theatre Workshop, the dude next to me started noodling with his Apple watch. Now, normally, that sort thing fills me with sanctimonious rage: how DARE this troglodytic asshole distract me with his shiny electronic bauble? FUCK this guy with his bad theatergoing manners! But in this case, not only didn't I mind, I was momentarily mesmerized. It's a pretty cool gadget, really, and it was a lot more interesting than much of what was going on up on the stage pretty much each time he checked it (which was about every three minutes). What all is on there, aside from the time, I found myself wondering? And what is time, anyway? Does time exist anymore? Because, man, it sure would be reassuring to know that eventually, I'll be allowed out of this theater and will get to go home, which is not as beautifully designed, but also not nearly as boring.

Lazarus was probably too good to be true, really. Any project developed by the brilliant, highly accomplished musician David Bowie and the brilliant, highly accomplished director Ivo Van Hove would have held almost too much promise of exponential brilliance. Both specialize in detached, cooly efficient surfaces, beneath which roil blood, guts, and the contradictory tangle of the human psyche, poked through with lacerating barbs of moody alienation. Bowie's songs may be gorgeously produced, chock full of tight, chugging rhythms and the slickly smooth harmonies of female backup singers, but take a listen to his lyrics. Whether he's intoning them in his husky baritone or rising past his thinning tenor into primal scream territory, his songs inevitably imply that he's been up for weeks doing blow, losing touch with reality, making terrible, life-mangling mistakes, or just staring into the void, probably while doubting your love or worrying about fascism. Likewise, Van Hove's overlying vision might be sparsely efficient and outfitted with clean lines, beige tones, and cold lights, but his characters are about to beat or fuck the shit out of one another, maybe both, probably while being judged by the magnified faces on subtly shifting video projections.