Finalist: Vinson Cunningham of The New Yorker

“The Appointment” skewers the hypocrisy of the abortion debate.

By Vinson Cunningham

It’s usually the anti-abortion activists—the sign-wavers outside clinics, the tellers of post-op horror stories—who want to show you, in great detail, what a fetus looks like. There’s something about the peach-and-hibiscus shock of flesh and blood, about the smallness of that embryonic presence: the picture is supposed to appall you into some new way of thinking and feeling about the politics of birth. It’s only right, then, that the first big laugh of the raucously pro-choice musical “The Appointment,” by the Philadelphia-based theatre collective Lightning Rod Special, directed by Eva Steinmetz at WP Theatre, is earned with a similar kind of representation.

When the curtain opens, there’s a fetus onstage, moving slowly and subtly, as if bobbing in fluid. It’s soon joined by several others. We know they’re fetuses precisely because of those images we’ve seen used as agitprop, even if we’ve strained to avoid them. The fetuses are played by members of Lightning Rod Special—Katie Gould, Jaime Maseda, Lee Minora, Brett Ashley Robinson, Scott R. Sheppard, Alice Yorke, and Danny Wilfred, all vibrating with talent and hip smarts—wearing skintight, skin-colored suits marbled with purplish-gray veins. From their tummies sprout ropelike umbilical cords.

These outfits, funny and gross, are emblematic of the show’s approach to abortion—instead of treating it as an “issue” to be regarded from a respectful and pious distance, “The Appointment” sniffs out taboos and hunts them down at the pace of a sprint. Here’s a taboo for you: the chorus of fetuses turn out to be the play’s main characters—or, at least, they get the most stage time. They sing and dance and tell jokes (the book is by Yorke, Steinmetz, Sheppard, and Alex Bechtel, who also wrote the music); they engage in crowd work with the audience. They’re obnoxious and needy, selfish and demanding. The fetuses are stage-hogging hams—which makes sense, given how much of the national political spotlight, in Supreme Court hearings and state legislative chambers and on referendum ballots, they’ve become accustomed to.

They even talk about their futures. When one cries out, “I was going to cure cancer!,” another retorts, “Oh Reginald you’re a gambler not a doctor!” Yet another forecasts a humbler fate: “I was going to be on ‘Tiger King’!” The only way to herd them offstage is to give them the “hook.” That show-biz cliché has a pointed meaning here. A glinting surgical instrument shows up time and again to stop the incessant fetal chatter.

“The Appointment” is, in truth, less a musical than a kind of cabaret or variety show. Think of a gleefully spiky, feminist version of “The Carol Burnett Show,” or a special episode of the early, punk-fuelled “Saturday Night Live.” (The big, padded heads of the fetus costumes reminded me more than once of Eddie Murphy’s Gumby getup.) The only real story comes when the fetuses are offstage. A woman, Louise Peterson, played with stoic calm by Yorke, goes to a clinic to get an abortion. She wears a paper gown and is attended to by a cheerful, professional medical assistant named Oliver, played by Wilfred. (“Ooh I like your socks!” he says.) Over and over, Louise is asked her date of birth: “07/24/89,” she keeps saying with a cool patience.

Assuming that the action of the play is happening in 2023, Louise is a thirty-three-year-old woman, grown, fully aware of what she’s doing. In what feels like the only totally sincere song of the show, she sings:

I don’t feel confused.
And I don’t feel lazy.
I don’t feel regret.
And I don’t feel fucking dumb.

That’s a sharp contrast with the cautionary video that Louise’s doctor is legally obligated to play for her and the other women with whom she awkwardly sits in the clinic’s waiting room. Dr. Parsons (Sheppard) seems kind, and is palpably mortified by the procedural obstacles he has to put these women through—including a twenty-four-hour waiting period that might be the true span of the play, the fetuses hanging on to one last planetary twirl under the lights. The video shows a long, melodramatic aria sung by regretful former abortion patients, performed, ironically, by the men in Lightning Rod Special’s company. “Get me a razor, so I can erase all the pain,” one of them howls.

Another legal necessity: Louise has to look at a picture—not one of those gruesome hyperreal photographs that show up at rallies but a sonogram. Dr. Parsons asks her to explain what she sees. “I just have to write something down,” he says. The people who make laws like this think, one supposes, that the sonogram image, a staticky moon landing in monochrome, might occasion a last-ditch upheaval in the pregnant woman’s heart. But to Louise the picture is an abstraction. She describes it in a befuddled ekphrasis, like an art student looking at an obscure slide, bringing none of its ideological weight to the task. “I mean it’s blurry. It’s kind of . . . moving a little bit,” she says. “It’s in black and white—I don’t know.”

All this business about images is tricky, and tetchy, and strange. It’s easy to imagine a pro-choice argument against “The Appointment”—that, despite the satiric intentions of its creators, there’s just too much risk involved in representing fetuses as persons, or in airing the arguments of anti-abortionists. The fetuses parrot and parodize pro-choice analogies—inherently visual—about their size. “Guess what, mommy? I’m as big as an olive,” one says. “I’m as big as a hot fudge sundae with a little cherry on top and I’m sweet like one, too. But don’t eat me please!” another pleads.

But the fetuses also paint pictures of life outside the womb. They fantasize about having a nice dad. (“My dream daddy subsidizes my life as an artist.”) They make promises to the women who may or may not bring them to term. “We’ll make you feel so whole—we’re what you dreamed of,” they sing. “Tiny, but filled with soul.” In promotional materials, the members of Lightning Rod Special assert, by way of explaining their rationale for restaging this show, which premièred in 2019, that “the need for people to confront their participation in the systems that got us here is more pressing than ever.” (By “here,” of course, they mean life after the recent repeal of the constitutional right to an abortion, following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision, last summer.)

But the show does something else entirely. Instead of excoriating the audience for its complicity, it mashes our faces into the scattered, swept-aside mess of images and tropes that are linked umbilically with abortion in our minds and cultural memories. It asks us whether it matters, or how much it matters, how we envision the fetus—as a bean, or a taco, or a ghost, or a smear on a screen, or even, most harrowingly, as a person with a daddy and a nascent sense of humor. The play makes you look at all of this, forcing you to court, with squirm-inducing clarity, the imaginings that come by way of looking.

In a poem titled “Orlando,” recently published in The Nation, the writer Megan Fernandes indulges in the same kind of unmournful speculation about what might have become, in an alternate reality, of an aborted child:

. . . I think he’d be
a drummer and wear green. I have no regrets,
but I wonder if he’s waiting in the sky somewhere
or doing blow in another dimension where he’s a rocker
and very much flesh.

Fernandes echoes Anne Sexton, who, considering “this baby that I bleed,” wrote stoically, “Somebody who should have been born / is gone.” The daring, unspoken claim of “The Appointment” is that here, post-Dobbs, with abortion up in the air and out in the open yet again, more perilously than ever, there’s really no harm in pictures or possible futures, counterfactuals or graven images. Let them multiply. You might even get a laugh.

“Hang Time,” by Zora Howard.

By Vinson Cunningham

In terms of its words, “Hang Time,” by Zora Howard, is a very subtle play. Its language is rich, and the themes that its characters usher forth chime suggestively, like harsh but precisely rung bells, never quite settling on a resolution. Its imagery, however, is awful and overt: even before the show starts, as the audience files in, three Black men are hanging in midair, their legs dangling, the motion of their bodies almost stilled. Walking into the small, dark theatre at the Flea and finding this scene is like happening upon the fresh aftermath of a crime. As the play gets going, it becomes like looking on helplessly—or, worse, passively, as a kind of entertainment—while a lynching ensues.

The stage direction in Howard’s script seems to make the matter of her setting even blunter: the play takes place “underneath an old, wide tree.” But in this production—directed by Howard, with scenic design by Neal Wilkinson—the actors are held up from behind by a metal contraption. No tree or other entity, living or dead, is visible above their heads. No ropes. Sometimes the men’s legs are free to sway, but a black platform periodically rises to meet their feet, enabling them to stand. The lighting design, by Reza Behjat, is stylishly minimal, and makes it so that the apparatus, black and glinting steel, is often nearly unseen. Maybe this is how we carry out a warning example of a showy death in the technological age: with machinelike efficiency and an iPhone’s sleek curvature and silence, leaving all those unfashionable knots and organic materials behind.

Meanwhile, the men speak. Blood (Cecil Blutcher) is a young man trying to make it, full of humor and earnest intensity. He’s already had his fair share of trouble—neglectful father, sick grandmother, overworked mother, hungry siblings. But his father’s wanderlust has been passed down to him, like a gene. He wants to get out of “here”—where that is, exactly, is never specified—and get on the move, go travelling. He’s heard of pink rivers and red oceans, surreal locales accessible only by a yearning for adventure and an impatience with local comforts. He wants to see it all for himself.

Slim (Akron Watson) is a middle-aged trickster, the kind of crossroads-dwelling creature we associate with the blues, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, Slim loves. When he’s not bragging about his sexual exploits, or giving the other guys great snowdrifts of shit, he’s belting out songs. His relationship with melody is inconsistent—it’s obvious that Watson can actually sing, and he sometimes strains to make himself sound bad—but his passion is unimpeachable. Little wonder: he’s seen and done some terrible things. At one point, he cries out:

Have you ever loved a woman
So much you tremble in pain?
Yee-es!
Have you ever loved a woman
So much you tremble in pain?
Yee-es!

Bird (Dion Graham), the eldest and world-weariest of the trio, isn’t charmed by Slim’s effusion of emotion. The men’s banter is typical of “Hang Time” ’s method, heavy on humor until the jokes run their riverine course toward pain.

Bird: Slim.
Slim: What? Brother can’t sing a little to pass the time?
Blood: Hopefully sing better than that.
Slim: Oh, you don’t like my voice?
Blood: I like when people sing good.
Slim: Yeah, well, ain’t supposed to be good. Supposed to be ugly.
Blood: Well, that part you got.
Bird: Ha!
Slim: You wouldn’t know nothing about it no how.
Blood: Don’t wanna know neither.

That’s true: no, you really don’t want to know the deep, burbling source of the blues. The kind of grief that urges you to song is inelegant, a hot devil nearly impossible to wrestle into form. The right note in that scenario—the kind of experience with which these men, in their different ways, all seem too familiar—might sound out of tune. Moving on and staying alive mean, for the most part, steering clear of that abyss. Bird, for instance, tries to counsel the younger men to settle down with a good woman and let the rhythms of a conventional life console them. “When you weary of the world, who gonna hold your head in her lap?” he pointedly asks. “Who gonna make sure you fed mind, body and spirit?”

At one point, Bird squabbles with Slim about the blues—the music is a grinding, perpetually active metaphor in “Hang Time.” Slim asserts that Freddie King is the “greatest bluesman of all time.” “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Bird says. “I need to know who it is got in your head that Freddie King was ever considered to be THE King of the Blues.” He argues, instead, for Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson. “Time, nigga,” Slim replies. “The general populace, that’s who.” The dispute isn’t about singers, not really. It’s a thin tarp thrown over the unsayable; so is this show. Each time one of the men is forced to the brink of his deepest wounds, he starts to twitch and shake and twist at the neck. The physicality of the lynching tree comes rushing back.

So, where are these men? What kind of speech are they engaged in? They often ask each other which day of the week it is, with a touching and seemingly avoidant confusion. The play runs for only an hour, but feels dense with their reminiscences and world views, their trepidations and buried fears. They seem stuck not only by way of their unmentioned hangings but in some gray gap between life and death, between wistful retrospection and wounded involvement in the dailiness of things.

This might be a kind of Purgatory, where talk and memory and proximity to trauma are cleansing agents that, by degrees, lift the soul toward Paradise. Or it could be a final act of protest, a gabby defiance against the towering contemporary oaks from which people like these three still sometimes swing: overzealous policing, for-profit prisons, low wages, negligent medical advice, unshakable ennui. If you keep talking, they can’t close the lid on your tomb. Cutting jokes and resigned complaint shield against the void.

The unchanging positioning of the three men’s bodies—a closely clustered triangle, with Blood in front and Slim and Bird slightly behind, flanking him like a pair of living wings—suggests classical paintings of the Crucifixion. As the story goes—Bird would know this, as he’s a God-fearing man—two thieves were hung alongside Jesus. One of them asks for a show of power: Christ should leave his cross, saving himself and the criminals. (The scornful request reminds me of some famous lines from W. H. Auden: “We who must die demand a miracle. / How could the Eternal do a temporal act, / The Infinite become a finite fact.”) The other, more simply, asks to be thought of: “Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom.” Perhaps we’re all stuck between those poles: a doomed will to power over an already certain fate; a hope that memory, our unstable shadow, is the route to everlasting life.

More than anything, I thought of a funeral service, with its unfair mismatches of speech. The mourners try and fail to put a life into words: an out-of-tune blues. And the beloved’s body, quiet and changed, unreal in its onstage presence, sits, unable to testify on its own behalf. But what if the dead could rise, if only for the hour or so it takes to put on a show? They might struggle to the podium and adjust the microphone and deliver their own eulogies. It’s a sweet and impossible fantasy, from both angles: to see and hear the lost one last time, to speak one more word for yourself, to clarify. Maybe, though, they’d just splash back into the waters of simple conversation. What day is it? they might ask. Nice weather.

“New York, New York” and “Good Night, Oscar.”

By Vinson Cunningham

Critics don’t come to the theatre with empty brains and untroubled hearts, ready to take in a play and shun the outside world. No, we bring our hopes and stresses to our seats. The challenge is to put the show into jangling harmony with one’s own unspoken flow of feeling. That’s doubly true in New York City—which serves not only as the setting but also as a lead character in two new plays on Broadway. The other day, as I was on my way to midtown, I saw one guy noodling a version of “Sir Duke” on his violin while another sparked up a joint. How, in a town like this, could anyone arrive at the theatre as a pure, empty vessel of objective observation?

So please forgive me: when I showed up in a hurry, uncomfortably exact in my timing, to see “New York, New York”—a new musical at the St. James, directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman, with a book by David Thompson with Sharon Washington, a score by John Kander and Fred Ebb, and additional lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda—I was preoccupied with worry about the Knicks. They’d started out Game Three of their first-round playoff series against the Cleveland Cavaliers in rare style and force, and at halftime they were up big. But then the Cavs came storming back, and, by the time I had to leave, the game was tied at fifty-nine points. There was an irony in this that I couldn’t quite name: being worked up over the Knicks—who, at the moment, are putting on possibly the best and most dramatic show in New York—while settling in for a play about strivers in New York.

“New York, New York,” set in 1946, is about a loose group of largely undistracted young people who use the city as the staging ground for their hungrily sought aspirations. Jimmy (Colton Ryan), an itinerant piano player who can’t keep a gig, is a well-worn type: the Irish trickster with a black streak of sadness in his past. Both he and his older brother, Mikey, served in the war—Jimmy as a lowly secretarial staffer, and Mikey, also a singer, as a private first class. Mikey, always the model boy, never made it home, and Jimmy’s prior stint as Kid Wonder, his brother’s sidekick, is long over. Now he’s heartsick and taking it out on every irritated venue owner in town. When we meet him, he’s arguing with one of them about the merits of a prospective new singer, Francine (Anna Uzele), a Black woman from Philadelphia with stardom on her mind. She doesn’t get the job, and Jimmy gets fired trying to get it for her. But soon he invites her to his instrument-bedecked apartment and begins the process of wooing her.

Around this central story float several others. There’s Jesse (John Clay III), a Black veteran who wants to play the trumpet, and Mateo (Angel Sigala), a young Cuban immigrant who—against the wishes of his abusive, homophobic father—wants to follow his dream of playing the bongos. You get it: everybody has a struggle, and the only fix is music.

There’s a smooth, impressively polished competency to every aspect of the show. Stroman’s direction is dancerly and strong—the company members move in flowing tandem, using their bodies to echo the lively churn of the city. Beowulf Boritt’s scenic design is evocative, sometimes fantastic. A dense set of fire escapes, from which an entire neighborhood looks down on the street, emphasizes the watchfulness (verging on nosiness) of closely situated neighbors and the casual beauty of even the most ploddingly functional aspects of urban design. A scene that takes place in the sky, on treacherous beams of naked metal at a construction site, turns into a tap-dance number, one of the best I’ve seen in recent Broadway shows. The songs are a mix of originals and classics from the big-band era—yes, the song “New York, New York” is sung, and, yes, it comes at a climactic moment—and the performers deliver them with charm and energy, even if none of the melodies or lyrics from the new numbers are especially memorable.

Theatregoers without much interest in story, or in how the seemingly indifferent city, hulking and unsentimental, is actually an intimate nudge, a goad to narrative, will find a lot to like about the show. But, its obvious excellence notwithstanding, “New York, New York” falters when it tries to match the common clichés about the city—that it’s a locus of focus and drive, a trampoline upward, toward a high, wild dream—with the less linear actualities of human behavior.

It’s strange: Jimmy and Francine are often talking, in one way or another, about Francine’s race, but the conversation almost never breaks the surface of a story whose only truly realized dimension is personal ambition. There are several oddly avoidant passages, such as a conversation between Jimmy and his harried booker:

Jimmy: Max, listen, I need a gig. I’ve cleaned up my act. I’m off the booze. I’m a married man now.

Booker: I heard. You two are the talk of the town. You marrying a—

Jimmy: Singer. Max. A singer. You gotta have something!

There’s a joke in there somewhere, but I’m not sure I get it. Maybe the booker wants to use a different word that ends in “-er,” but none of the menace that ought to proceed from that possibility makes it across. There are racists out there, somewhere—nobody’s denying it—but their power can’t really be felt onstage, under the lights, where the true prize is a recording contract or a steady slot on a popular radio program. Similarly, the spectre of war, and its traumatizing aftermath, hangs over the whole show. One character is a violin teacher named Madame Veltri—played with heart and moving depth by Emily Skinner—who’s waiting and waiting for her son to come marching home. Still, the war never serves as anything more than part of the backdrop.

There’s no question that the narrative of upward motion through work is part of the lore of New York. But life, here and elsewhere, is never so singularly aimed. There are accidents and coincidences—the odd passion, thrillingly unanticipated, picks you up and drops you down on a street you’ve never seen. You think two things at the same time. At intermission—this show runs to two hours and forty-five minutes, unbelievable for a story that’s not even close to an epic—I realized that, although I loved the dancing and liked the singing, I didn’t care much about the fates of the characters. A moment later, though, standing in line for a Diet Coke, I learned that the Knicks had won the game. That’s New York: one story can fizzle while another shines.

The city’s production value, as it were—its nighttime vistas and accidental dances, its constant, unconscious song—works on the soul and the emotions only because of how it sometimes underlines and sometimes cuts against the vivid, plural lives of the people on the streets. A quick, melancholy spring rain, like the one I got caught in the day before seeing “New York, New York,” is memorable only if, for instance, you’ve been rushing around, looking for a place to have dinner with a new friend, trying to leave just enough time to—yes—make it to another show.

You get a better sense of this parallel music in “Good Night, Oscar,” a day-in-the-life bio-play by Doug Wright, directed by Lisa Peterson, at the Belasco. Sean Hayes plays Oscar Levant, a wisecracking virtuoso pianist famous for his interpretations of George Gershwin.

In Hayes’s hands, Levant—whose mental-health struggles led to bleak periods of depression and intermittent institutionalization—is a halting, harried, angry man, whose frequent hallucinations center on his regret about devoting himself to Gershwin instead of following his own muse. His wife, June (Emily Bergl), has hatched a plan, together with the great talk-show host Jack Paar (Ben Rappaport), to spring him from a mental-health facility so that he can spend just one night chatting it up on late-night TV.

The production gets wooden when Oscar goes on long rants that are thinly veiled exposition, catching the audience up on every nook and cranny of his career. But Hayes, a classically trained pianist who puts this lesser-known gift to exciting use toward the end of the show, plays him with real soul, showing how rote ambition—being on TV, getting a bit of shine—isn’t all that’s at stake in the big city. There’s music to play, but there’s also, always, a life—one’s own—to save. You’ve gotta do two things at once.

“The Comeuppance,” by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins.

By Vinson Cunningham

“The Comeuppance,” Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s unsettlingly up-to-the-moment new play (at Signature Theatre’s Pershing Square Signature Center), begins with the shadow-swathed figure of a young man on an unremarkable porch. An American flag hangs in a perfunctory way from the side of the house, picking up no air. In the course of the play, the flag comes to seem less like a patriotic statement than like a gesture meant to ward off neighborly suspicion, aimed at fitting in without a fuss. When the man begins to speak, it’s not as a human being but as humanity’s great and usually unspeaking enemy: Death.

“Hello there,” he says with an almost sheepish charisma. “You and I, we have met before, though you may not recognize me. People have a tendency to meet me once and try hard to forget it ever happened, though that never works, not for very long.”

That mismatch, between meek suburban setting and high-flown transcendent stakes, is the substance of Jacobs-Jenkins’s two-stranded rope of a play. On the one hand, “The Comeuppance” is a mostly realistic portrayal of four high-school friends—some closer than others—who have gathered to “pre-game” their twenty-year high-school reunion. Like the rest of us, they’ve all recently been through a stubbornly nonfictional period of plague and isolation; grown too familiar with Zoom and other facilitators of falsely intimate distance; and come out on the other side covertly but undeniably deranged. A limo’s on its way to pick them up and take them to the party, a slightly kooky and more than a little corny sendup of the semi-marital rituals that surround the senior prom.

The guy whose body was briefly inhabited by Death at the beginning of the play is Emilio (Caleb Eberhardt). He’s an artist of growing renown, “based” in Berlin but visiting his home town in the D.C.-adjacent precincts of Maryland—not only for the reunion but also to participate in an unspecified biennial in New York. It’s tempting to deduce that we’re talking about the famous one, at the Whitney, and that Emilio’s “sound art” will appear in the follow-up to the so-called “Tear-Gas Biennial” of 2019. That year’s exhibition weathered protests by scores of artists against one of the Whitney’s vice-chairmen, Warren B. Kanders, whose company, Safariland, has manufactured armor and weapons—including tear gas—for police and military forces.

Emilio and his friends, rapidly approaching middle age, are uncomfortably subject to the swift, strong currents of history, despite the force of their individual exertions. Here are a handful of Emilio’s disappointments: the world has ground to a halt because of covid; he knows his friends much less well than he thought he did; and a previously more or less uncontroversial route to the sheen of artistic success now seems somewhat sullied by current events. Anyway, Emilio appears less than enthused about the biennial, whichever one it is, but he’s tickled in a cynical way by the limo thing. “Isn’t the point of this dumb event reliving high school for the night?” he argues, in favor of the limo. “I think people will think it’s funny. Maybe it is a little conceptual.”

The porch and the house, where the pre-reunion is taking place, belong to Ursula (Brittany Bradford), who has borne the brunt of passing time in more obvious ways than her classmates. Her grandmother—as close as a mother—has recently died, and, as a result of diabetes, she has gone blind in one eye. She moves gingerly around the porch and worries about her friends moving things around in her house. She needs to depend on things staying where they are; but, of course, stuff’s always moving—a bump here, a slide there—just like time. Bradford, always a tidally influential performer, plays Ursula with a quiet weight that rivals even the presence of the Reaper himself. Death keeps speaking in revealing monologues throughout the play, taking turns inhabiting each actor, and thereby creating a sort of prism. Each host exposes a new aspect of his quiet activity.

Caitlin (Susannah Flood) has married a much older man, a police officer who is getting sucked into the churn of right-wing conspiracy theories. Kristina (Shannon Tyo) is a doctor with “so many . . . fucking kids”; in the course of the lockdowns, she started to rely too much on booze to calm her anxieties. She brings along her cousin Paco (Bobby Moreno), who once dated Caitlin—and, we gather, treated her quite poorly.

All but Paco were part of a friend group called m.e.r.g.e.: Multi Ethnic Reject Group. Emilio—who seems a bit like an alter ego for the artist who thought him up—emerges as a kind of centrifuge. He hasn’t seen the others since Kristina’s wedding, fifteen years ago, and he’s bristling with defensive energy. He’s condescending and confrontational, always trying to call people on their shit or their shoddy memory, but it becomes clear pretty quickly that he’s the one who has succeeded least in moving on.

If you’re still friends with your high-school friends, you’ll recognize the rafts of cutting in-jokes and spiky insistence on perfect recall among this group. They pretend to snap the neck of someone who’s started to ramble or become too much of a downer. But their gentle razzing is undercut by their flagrant unreadiness—who among us is ever ready?—for their historical situation. They’ve lived through 9/11, endless wars, a financial crisis, and now a plague; they never reached or earned the bright future that people of this generation were trained to expect. (This play bothers me a bit, I’ll admit, because everybody in it seems to be exactly my age.)

At one point, Death gives his—and the play’s—game away. “Are you familiar with this notion of the danse macabre?” he asks suggestively. And, yes, there’s more than a hint of Thanatos at work here. Death’s insistent monologuing is a kind of invitation: each character gets a solo dance at the edge of the grave. Death’s presence creates a structure of suspense that runs parallel to the growing tension among the friends, spurred by Emilio: Death says he’s here “for work.” Sometimes my worry for the characters’ immediate safety drowned out my interest in their uncloaked ennui.

More often, though, the constant backdrop of mortality gives a lachrymose tinge to each of the characters’ intermittent outbursts. Ursula is happy to hang at her house but insists that she won’t go to the reunion. She doesn’t know whether she’ll be able to navigate so big a crowd, and it’s clear that she’s ashamed of the eye patch she has to wear. Kristina is in denial about her drinking but oddly clear—in a brilliantly delivered monologue—about the deep sources of her lostness.

You might consider some of these desperate disclosures unrealistic until you think of the effects of too much strong “jungle juice” and weed, and of the unburdening presence of close longtime friends. Eric Ting, the director, has choreographed their intimacies intricately, and with loving attention to the unspoken histories behind their interactions. That lovingness matches, in a weird way, the tone of Death’s monologues, which, despite a constant Catskills-esque patter of dark jokes about the daily vagaries and indignities of his work, often sound like a companionate essay by Jacobs-Jenkins. It’s a way of entering his own play, admitting his lordship over its characters and his interest in the pressures that they share, which are also his to bear, and all of ours.

Days after seeing “The Comeuppance,” I’m still wondering if Death really belongs in the same play as Emilio and Ursula and the rest of the insecure gang. Maybe he should have a real epic to walk around in—just as talky and smart and unsparing as Jacobs-Jenkins’s play, but stretched across the whole line between birth and life’s end. covid, just one grim notch on such a span, still has a concussive effect in a theatre—you can feel your neighbor squirm when it comes up—but it will be truly useful in fiction when, helped along by artists like Jacobs-Jenkins, it dissolves into a metaphor. It’ll stand at the crossroads of personal life and historical time, control and contingency, the green vitality of living and the sensation of that old black robe swishing against your skin.

Ato Blankson-Wood stars in “Hamlet” in the Park.

By Vinson Cunningham

Wear black and talk softly, withdraw from the crowd and train your mind on higher things—it’s strange how much of the etiquette of grief is also a shortcut to cultivating an aura of sexy mystery. Maybe that’s the logic behind casting Ato Blankson-Wood, an increasingly and justly busy actor around New York, in the title role of the new Shakespeare in the Park production of “Hamlet,” at the Delacorte. Blankson-Wood has a world-class sulk—onstage, he pouts and rolls his eyes and projects intense dissatisfaction before he ever delivers a line. A few years ago, in Jeremy O. Harris’s “Slave Play,” he played Gary, a gay Black man whose partner couldn’t—or, more precisely, wouldn’t—acknowledge the repercussions of their racial differences. Gary was a magnetic malcontent, for whom pain and sex appeal went hand in hand and seemed to spring from the same source.

There’s something similar happening with Blankson-Wood’s depiction of the theatre’s most famous mourner. His Hamlet is bereft but flirtatious, abusive in speech but stylish in dress, lividly angry but under his own perfect control, mixed in emotion and motive and utterly impossible to read. This is less a take on Hamlet—an assertion that he’s mad, or juvenile, or the only truly sane character in the kingdom—than a further blurring of the many colors that the play provides. There’s “mirth in funeral” and “dirge in marriage,” and, in Blankson-Wood’s interpretation, a hint of eros that plays against the chaos that comes after death. That eroticism is often aimed in odd, Oedipal directions: in this rendering of the text, Hamlet seems to have absolutely no past or present interest in Ophelia (Solea Pfeiffer), to whom he’s been sending declarations of love, but speaks with a strikingly emphasized suggestiveness to his mother, Gertrude (Lorraine Toussaint), and to his uncle, Claudius (John Douglas Thompson), the new king and Gertrude’s new husband.

New York audiences were recently treated to the German director Thomas Ostermeier’s “Hamlet,” starring Lars Eidinger, who eats cemetery dirt and gets wet in the rain and plays wall-breaking games with the audience. Blankson-Wood’s Hamlet would never. He’s undone but strangely put together—his mourning clothes look designer. We’re being tricked, but I’m not sure exactly how, or in which direction. With a few exceptions, Hamlet’s “hectic” blood is strangely cool.

Blankson-Wood’s multifaceted, ultimately unsettled approach may be an outflow of the tendencies of his director, Kenny Leon, who never misses an opportunity to let that hundredth flower bloom. The production is set, we’re told in the program notes, in Atlanta, in 2021. Hamlet’s father was—as we gather from a huge painted portrait that looms upstage—a member of the United States Marine Corps. In a kind of prologue to the action of the play, at the father’s funeral, people come up, one by one or in solemn pairs, to the casket where his body lies, apparently still intimidated by him in death. Off to the side of the stage, in what looks like a ruined lawn (Beowulf Boritt designed the set), is a capsized “Stacy Abrams 2020” banner—a holdover from Leon’s Shakespeare in the Park production of “Much Ado About Nothing,” in 2019. A praise team sings in tight harmony to send the great man off. The production seems to want to say something about a decadent America skipping past opportunities for hope on its way down a nihilistic drain, but that line of meaning is never fully pursued.

Instead of a unitary idea, Leon—whose specialty is spectacle—offers a wide-ranging, endlessly inclusive Gesamtkunstwerk, in which song and dance can appear to be just as important as Shakespeare’s text. The setting looks like a spoiled upper-middle-class utopia, a horrified Alpharetta, Georgia, of the mind, where, in better days, a family like Hamlet’s would sit in an air-conditioned living room, sipping lemonade and listening to Sade. Sometimes the production seems to want to tip over into a full musical, with songs playing contrapuntally against the story of the Dane.

At points, the show is more of a cabaret than a narrative aimed like a dagger at the heart. The advantage of that loose approach is that each of the actors in the ensemble surrounding Blankson-Wood gets to put their own best foot forward, rather than following any strong thread of interpretation put forward by Leon. I’ve never felt more sympathy for the murderous Claudius than I did in this production, in which he’s carved by Thompson down to hand-wringing human size. Toussaint’s Gertrude is thrillingly vulnerable—her fear and guilt and trepidation are, at every point, visible in her body and audible in her speech. Daniel Pearce’s Polonius becomes heartwarming comic relief, his prolix speeches running together into an anxious, often hilarious slurry. Poor Ophelia is portrayed soulfully by Pfeiffer; Laertes, Ophelia’s vengeful brother, is played with admirable intensity by Nick Rehberger.

I was especially tickled by Warner Miller’s take on Hamlet’s dependable pal Horatio—here, he’s an around-the-way guy, not easily excitable, the kind of dude who’s standing on the corner when you leave for work and somewhere near the same spot when you’re on your way home. You know he’s had an active day, full of talk and business, but you’d never think to ask after each of his moves. If he gives you advice, you shut up and gratefully take it.

When, early on, Hamlet and Horatio are up late, looking out for Hamlet’s dad’s ghost, you trust that the errand isn’t frivolous precisely because cool Horatio’s there, taking part. When the spectre does arrive, bearing the fratricidal news of his final hour, one of the best and most focussed moments of Blankson-Wood’s performance follows. Instead of using another actor to fill the father’s figure, Leon shows Hamlet being possessed by his dead father—Blankson-Wood mouths the ghost’s portentous speech. His slinky physicality suddenly becomes regal and strange. His eyes roll back into his head. Fire might as well be spouting from the tips of his fingers. That’s another unexpected thing about grief, how it coaxes you into an attempt at becoming the other, taking on their tics and savoring how they used to talk, fishing a ring out of their jewelry box and stuffing it onto your finger—all evidence of a great hope that, by embodying those details, you might permanently save them.

Leon’s interest in creating a kind of party onstage has its charms, but I ended up wishing that this production had followed the curious, perhaps narrower path laid out by Blankson-Wood’s performance. As it stands, Hamlet’s great monologues seem like grand but fatuous excuses for his chaotic vigilantism, not language born organically from the parallel pressures of sadness and filial loyalty.

Listening to the music of the conversations between Hamlet and Horatio, I kept thinking about the King and Queen’s constant admonishments that Hamlet go abroad—he needs a bit of travel, the idea goes, to help him cool off and shake the worst of his sorrow. For the first time, I thought that his mom and stepdad might be right. I can imagine a quieter play, off to the side of Shakespeare’s but doubling its themes, showing this contemporary American Hamlet on the road. He might go sleep in a friend’s extra room in L.A., or seek shelter in a New England summer home, or take his black carry-on bag across the Atlantic, sowing tears like seeds in lonely hotel rooms all over Europe.

Blankson-Wood has all the goods to play that lost young man, not adrift amid sudden songs but trying to sort out the cacophony of anger and pain, recrimination and confusion, paranoia and sexual suggestion that’s clanging around inside his head. He might come back even more unscrewed, but one would hope that the trip could mark a reëntry into society. The way back from the graveside to the wider world is strewn with petals fallen from the flower of love. You might need to be alone, far from your family, to bend down and gather them, one by one.

Leslie Odom, Jr., stars in “Purlie Victorious.”

By Vinson Cunningham

The Reverend Purlie Victorious Judson (Leslie Odom, Jr.), the hero of Ossie Davis’s 1961 comedy, “Purlie Victorious: A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch”—revived on Broadway at the Music Box Theatre, directed by Kenny Leon—is, above all else, a hustler. You might know somebody like this: He blusters onto the stage of your life, pouring out plans before he’s properly introduced himself, energized toward some vista that only he can see. He puts an arm over your shoulder and tries to convince you that you’re on your way there together, as partners, but in his mind’s eye, you can tell, he’s up in the pulpit and you’re down in the seats. Half of what he says sounds cockamamie, but something about him—his personal history, perhaps, or a kind of animal endurance in his bearing—persuades you that, somehow, he’ll get what he wants.

In the case of this show, most of what Purlie wants is a fair shake for Black people. He’s an itinerant minister who has come back to the postbellum Georgia plantation where he grew up. He wants to rally the people there—who now work as sharecroppers for Ol’ Cap’n Cotchipee (the intensely funny Jay O. Sanders)—to take back their local church, Big Bethel. He cooks up a scheme that will, with one stroke, get them the deed to the church and free his family from their impossible debts to Ol’ Cap’n.

Purlie’s a benign enough con man whose con is social justice. He talks sonorously, in a nearly constant preacher’s cadence; he always seems to be skiing downhill, with great skill and heedless abandon, toward some grand, irrefutable point. When he gets really wound up, he adopts a half-sung, high-flown, heavily syncopated tone whose aim is less to emphasize an argument than to stoke a frenzy in a row of invisible congregants. At a peak moment, he rattles off this rhyming confection: “Let us, therefore, stifle the rifle of conflict, shatter the scatter of discord, smuggle the struggle, tickle the pickle, and grapple the apple of peace!”

It’s clear that the clergy isn’t his first racket, and it might not be his last. “Last time you was a professor of Negro philosophy,” his sister-in-law, Missy (Heather Alicia Simms), says, with a hint of acid in her voice. “You got yourself a license?” As the play unfolds, we watch Purlie oscillate between courage and cowardice, brilliance and haplessness, forthrightness and a penchant for telling tall tales. His plan is to pass off a girl whom he captivated via one of his sermons, Lutiebelle Gussie Mae Jenkins (Kara Young), as his long-lost cousin, Bee, and trick Ol’ Cap’n into handing over a five-hundred-dollar inheritance that he owes the family.

Purlie’s brother, Gitlow (the always impressive Billy Eugene Jones), works for Ol’ Cap’n and plays his role as the Good Negro, singing and shuffling, to a T. He’s been given the farcical title Deputy-for-the-Colored. Another Black member of Ol’ Cap’n’s household is Idella (Vanessa Bell Calloway), who has raised Ol’ Cap’n’s son, Charlie (Noah Robbins), as if he were her own. Purlie’s got to corral all these co-racialists—and their divergent loyalties—and lead them all toward reclaiming Big Bethel.

In creating Purlie, Davis took two long-lasting tropes of communal Black life and twinned them in a single body. On the one hand, Purlie is reminiscent of Father Divine, or, later, the Reverend Ike—a flashy, overconfident preacher who makes lofty promises of prosperity and wins wild, irrational allegiance from Black masses grown tired of living like the lowly Jesus. On the other hand, he’s decided on a career as a self-appointed, semi-professional spokesman for the race. He’s T. D. Jakes and Al Sharpton all at once, a study in the uses and abuses of oratory in Black life.

A creature like Purlie, made up of cultural memory and social satire, is often hard to play. Cliché and niche obscurity, the Scylla and Charybdis of in-group commentary, lie to either side of the role. But Odom guides his performance cannily, playing each of Purlie’s notes with a musician’s tonal perfection. Sometimes he’s an overbearing tuba, sometimes he’s an earnest flute. Odom makes plain at every impasse that, sure, Purlie cares about his image, about collecting disciples—but that he also wakes up each morning with his mind on real freedom for his people.

“Purlie Victorious” is also an investigation of the allure of text in American life. There’s lots of to-do about documents. Purlie’s preaching draws richly from the American past instead of from the Bible. “I preached the New Baptism of Freedom for all mankind, according to the Declaration,” he tells Missy, describing the sermon that drew Lutiebelle to his flock, “taking as my text the Constitution of the United States of America, Amendments First through Fifteenth, which readeth as follows: ‘Congress shall make no law—’ ”

Charlie, Ol’ Cap’n Cotchipee’s egalitarian, integrationist son, constantly refers to statutes. Integration is “the law of the land,” he says to his father, “and I intend to obey it!” The rightful inheritance that Purlie means to purloin by madcap deception is another promissory note whose power drives the action of the play. This obsession with text alienates Purlie and Charlie, and anybody who’d follow them, from the more sensual, instinctual culture of the formerly slaveholding South. Guys like Ol’ Cap’n Cotchipee and, in a different way, Gitlow Judson can’t be bothered with the nuances of the law or the declamations of the Declaration: their rules, long held, are unwritten. You know where you fit in by following patterns deeply rooted in the past. Between Blacks and whites there’s something “no Supreme Court in the world can understand,” Ol’ Cap’n says.

It’s funny, then, that this production’s greatest asset, by far, is its emphasis on physical comedy. Odom finds a lyricism in Purlie’s body that’s not always evident in his rhetoric. Jones pairs Gitlow’s nostalgic singing of Negro work songs with a dancer’s precision, allowing his body to convey an ironic subversion: even the most archetypal Uncle Tom might have wordless designs on a brighter future. The whole company moves in choreographed tandem—one bit, at a particularly melodramatic moment, has them running up and downstage like relay racers, skidding with cartoonish exaggeration.

Then there’s Kara Young, whose turn as Lutiebelle is a pinnacle of her burgeoning career. Young’s performances in recent plays such as C. A. Johnson’s “All the Natalie Portmans,” Lynn Nottage’s “Clyde’s,” and last year’s revival of Martyna Majok’s “Cost of Living” showed off her otherworldly comic chops, which she grounds in what feels like a small, true place of personal pain. Here, though, in Lutiebelle, Young has found a perfect vehicle to transmit all the aspects of her talent.

Lutiebelle is a poor, sweet young woman who feels unequal to the task of impersonating Purlie’s cousin Bee—Bee was a beautiful college girl, and Lutiebelle doesn’t consider herself pretty, or smart—but she’s been waiting for a long time, it seems, for a chance at adventure. She was abandoned by her parents at an early age, and it takes almost nothing for her to fall in love with Purlie and his talk. She worries and pines and pouts and puts on airs and tries to learn—in this way, she’s almost a metaphor for an entire race trying to squirm itself, by hook or by crook, toward higher ground.

Young plays Lutiebelle with a physical and emotional energy reminiscent of Lucille Ball’s or Carol Burnett’s. She acts big and broad, then pulls the string of her imagination right back, showing how small, everyday hurt, the kind we all carry around, can fuel a great fire of productive delusion. Young’s approach to acting is like the sophisticated engine of a sleek sports car—she floors the pedal around perilous curves and somehow stops on a dime. There’s nobody quite like her in the theatre, or anywhere else, these days.

Kenny Leon, with his flair for showmanship and sizzle, is the ideal director to match Young’s indomitable energy. His frenetic pacing and elaborate physical setups create a framework in which her intricate riffs can add up to a meaning that stretches beyond the text. Young’s hilarious, heartening Lutiebelle fulfills a hope shared by lovers of performance and workers for social peace—that freedom might be found not only on a page but written in a body, and on the heart.