Is the rarely performed Summer and Smoke first rate Tennessee Williams? I don’t know, but I’ve never seen a more powerful production of any of Williams’s plays.
Hadestown is a folk musical, now Broadway-bound after a long production history. Anais Mitchell (daughter of Quaker sheep farmers Don and Cheryl Mitchell of Middlebury) started with a concept album, which then became an off-Broadway show directed by Rachel Chavkin of Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812. It’s now on the huge Olivier stage at the National Theatre. And it’s good.
André de Shields plays Hermes, the charismatic narrator who recalls Morgan Freeman in The Gospel at Colonus as he guides us through the elements of a universal story. With a few twists.
Matthew Lopez’s new play, The Inheritance, is a massive, nearly 7-hour work, performed in two parts, which we saw over two consecutive nights. It’s an intriguing re-working of Forster’s Howards End, imagined as a story of gay life in 21stcentury New York. Forster himself (“Morgan” in the play) appears as well, helping the young men of the play tell their story.
Last night I saw Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change. It’s a memory play, a sung-through musical created with the composer Jeanine Tesori. Reconstructing his own childhood, Kushner places us in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where Caroline is the black maid for a Jewish family in some distress. The mother has recently died, the father has remarried, the young son Noah hates his stepmother and reveres Caroline, who seems to him the all-powerful ruler of her domain: the laundry room in the basement.
