April 30, 2018
The annual Brits off-Broadway festival at 59E59 is going strong, and per
usual, features an entry by England's arguably preeminent chronicler of human
foibles in neighborhood and community environments, Alan Ayckbourn. A Brief History of Women, his 81st play (2017), that debuted at
his own Stephen Joseph Theatre in Yorkshire, has arrived replete with its
original British cast, in a replication of the original production, directed by
Ayckbourn too, also per usual.
The play's title is a bit of a fooler. It leads you to believe that you're going to see a social comedy about the progress of women on the manner in which their roles have changed over the course of the play's four parts and fifty-year span. But a little way in, you realize that's not what it's about at all. It's about a shy man named Anthony Spates (Anthony Eden) and his personal history with the women who pass through his life, and it's set in a central locale key to his existence: Kirkbridge Manor, which is being continually repurposed over the course of the play, going from the manor house (which she is a young servant), to a preparatory school for girls (which he is a teacher), to an arts center (at which she is an administrator), and finally to a hotel (at which he is manager). While Spates and the manor provide the constant thread, all the characters around him keep changing (except one who makes a brief revisitation I shan't spoil), and that's where the rest of the cast are in differently constant motion, assaying four roles each (save for the one who revisits, who plays only two others, but the repeated role at different ages). It's a typical Ayckbourn structure.
Typical
too, is that Ayckboun delivers laugh out loud comedy that is often informed by
sadness, miscommunication, and sometimes in aching sweetness. This one is
highly recommended.
Yet another play with a very similar casting configuration is Mlima's Tale, by Lynn Nottage, at the Public Theatre. It starts out with a heavily muscled black man delivering a roaring monologue of impeding danger and warning to his family; it doesn't take long to realize that the character the man is playing is an African elephant, the Mlima of the title (Sahr Ngaujah); and we soon understand via brutal pantomime as another actor, playing a hunter, enters the scene, that we've heard Mlima's last living words, before he is slaughtered for his ivory tusks. At which point, the play settles into its structure, which is essentially that of Schnitzler's La Ronde, but what is passed along and up the societal ladder, via interlocking levels of corruption, are those tusks.
Mlima remains a silent but damning force as he follows the progress of what is left of him, while Jojo Gonzalez, Kevin Mambo and Ito Aghayere skillfully play the multiple links in the chain, Ms. Aghayere adding gender-shifting to her personal mix, in a series of short, bracing scenes.
As directed by Jo Bonney, the production employs open box (more accurate here than black box) techniques, often starkly, for an evening that is compelling, suspenseful and sad. Yet exhilarating in the way that a play saying something important can be. One hopes that in its deceptive physical simplicity, requiring only a cast of four, the play, in this production and others, may reach the eyes and ears of those most able to affect change.
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