Finalist: Sara Holdren of New York Magazine

Kenneth Branagh’s production is fleet and facile.

There’s a difference in the way Americans do mediocre Shakespeare and the way Brits do it. Ours tends to be easier to recognize for what it is. American acting training is heterogenous and feelings-forward; we still put a lot of stock in dubious Strasbergian notions of authenticity, and we’re scared of things above, beyond, and fundamentally opposed to realism. We tend to deflate the cosmic into the casual, making word salad while we’re at it. For the Brits, there’s at least a base-level expectation of textual rigor. At the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art one summer, I spent three days sitting on the edge of my chair (we weren’t allowed to lean back) painstakingly reading Pericles aloud as a towering Liverpudlian director snapped at our cast after every phrase, “What does that mean?!” If anyone started their answer with, “Well, uh, basically —” she’d scream, “No!” and we’d start again. You don’t leave RADA not knowing what you’re saying or without an appreciation for the richness and versatility of Shakespearean language and a drive to make it sing.

But being able to speak Shakespeare, to utilize poetry and communicate meaning, will still only get you so far in bringing one of his vast, infinitely faceted plays to life. It will probably mean — as is the case with the King Lear now visiting the Shed, starring Kenneth Branagh and co-directed by Branagh, Rob Ashford, and Lucy Skilbeck — that you can tell a clear story with at least a superficial sense of urgency. It won’t mean that you’ve decided what that story, deep in its bloody viscera, is really about. Tellingly, in an interview with the Shed’s artistic director Alex Poots in which Poots asks Branagh to share his “overarching vision” for the play, Branagh responds by talking not about an idea but about an experience: “I first saw King Lear when I was 17 years old,” he says. “I was a bit intimidated going in, but I came away thinking … Well, first of all, there’s lots of incident, there’s lots of plot, there’s lots of story … Its size and its so-called importance fell away, but its urgent, familiar, recognizable story about human beings was what I carried away with me.”

I’m happy for 17-year-old Kenneth, and also that doesn’t answer the question. Branagh’s overarching vision seems to be textural rather than essential — “to be as urgent as possible.” He and his co-directors have sheared the behemoth down to two hours sans intermission, and the thing does move, but to what end? I once listened to a director describe the necessity for plays to proceed simultaneously along two axes: There’s the x-axis of forward motion, but there’s also the y-axis of depth. Get stuck doing only y and you’re wallowing. Ride only the x-axis and, eventually, all the sprinting entrances and exits and panting, gasping line deliveries in the world won’t save you. You’ll be running without carrying anything.

That’s the feeling for most of this Lear, where it’s not just the extreme text trims that create a sense of flattened character and circumstance but also, and more significantly, the one-dimensional hastiness of the direction. It’s not impossible for Lear’s two older daughters, Goneril (Deborah Alli) and Regan (Saffron Coomber), or for Edmund (Dylan Corbett-Bader) — the self-described bastard of Lear’s ally, Gloucester (Joseph Kloska), and most explicit villain of the play — to define themselves fully in fewer words. But all three of these crucial figures wind up feeling like outlines. They all speak their text well — everyone does — but beneath their performances and plenty of others, there’s an absence, an echoing space of unhad or at least unmanifested conversations. Do Lear’s daughters love him? What do they bring with them into the space when they gather along with the rest of their father’s court to witness the old king divesting his power and dividing up his kingdom? What have their lives been like? Their marriages? When their father, exceptionally hale and hearty in Branagh’s rendering, asks the dire question, the joke that’s not a joke — “Which of you shall we say doth love us most?” — are they shocked, prepared, cynical, hurt, furious? Here, they convey plot rather than complexity of soul. They say their lines crisply and get on with it.

Branagh, Ashford, and Skilbeck may think that they’ve sufficiently summoned King Lear’s prodigious existential scale by literally bringing the cosmos into the room. Aesthetically, the production is pitched somewhere between Vikings and The Dark Crystal, in a Neolithic Albion where everyone carries stone-tipped spears and wears a lot of fur, baggy linen, and cute leather boots and belts (pay no attention to the trendy buckles and rubber soles). Jon Bausor, who designed costumes and set, surrounds the stage with Stonehenge-like slabs and suspends an enormous, doughnut-shaped projection surface above it — a kind of looming God’s eye where, as the audience enters, galaxies and nebulae swirl murkily. As the play begins, Earth revolves into view, Death Star style, then we start to zoom toward landmasses, eventually zeroing in on ancient Britain. Considering that Branagh treasures his teenage memory of seeing Lear’s “so-called importance” stripped away, the portentousness feels counterintuitive, not to mention a bit silly. This is how a high-school student starts an essay on King Lear (or on anything, really): “Since the dawn of time, mankind has always …” It’s also much more cinematic than it is theatrical. The Branagh who directed Thor is present, but what of the Branagh who’s got something to say to us, as both director and actor, in this room right now, about King Lear?

As an actor, Branagh has always been one of the most fluent speakers of Shakespeare out there. You’re never lost when he’s talking, and he’s got a distinctive knack for making individual words sing — watch his face crinkle on the drawn-out long e’s in “pleased me”; feel his consonants buzz and twang in words as simple as “live” or “things.” Listen to his r’s just keep on rolling, all the way up to the end. Those r’s, though, are where technique — even Branagh’s — reaches its limits. Whose diction stays this grand, this ornamented, when they’ve been stripped of everything, perhaps even their sanity? When they’re wandering a desolate beach, barefoot and crowned with twigs, only to find their old friend with his eyes gouged out? Poetry has got to marry with circumstance, and the circumstances of Lear are monstrous. “The worst is not so long as we can say, ‘This is the worst,’” says Gloucester’s loyal son, Edgar (Doug Colling), in one of the play’s many lines that absolutely should hit like a cannonball to the chest but that here feel swept up in the action, lost in an overarching need to get on. Another is Lear’s devastating revelation on the heath, his mind breaking open to his own blindness, his lifelong misuse of power and neglect of others’ suffering: “O, I have ta’en / Too little care of this.” Branagh’s Lear, robust and active and frustratingly opaque all throughout his breakdown (it’s hard to believe he’s “old” or “mad”), hardly stops moving around the stage for this line, and its ending is garbled by Colling’s yawp as he leaps into sight disguised as the raving beggar Poor Tom. Branagh doesn’t sit with anything, nor let us receive the full force of its impact.

If there’s an actor in King Lear who’s attempting to go deep as he drives forward, it’s Kloska. His Gloucester, though conspicuously young — everyone’s young, even Branagh, whose not-skipping-leg-day 63 feels more like 49 — has both gravitas and conscience. He’s feeling what he’s saying and what’s said to him. His suffering is tangible. When, after hearing the lie that his beloved son Edgar wants him dead, he turns his brokenhearted gaze skyward and says, “These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us,” he brings Bausor’s hovering heavens-screen into really meaningful relief for the first time. “Loves cool,” he continues, managing to crack open a door to the play’s great, bleak, howling heart, “friendships fall off, brothers divide: in cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond cracked ’twixt son and father. We have seen the best of our time.”

That is King Lear. But Branagh, Ashford, and Skilbeck offer no consistent access to the play’s magnificent existential darkness. Even in his Lear’s final moments, Branagh, despite the God’s eye above him, chooses the literal over the cosmic. When he carries in his dead youngest daughter, Cordelia (Jessica Revell, who doubles as a much-cut, playful but insufficiently prophetic Fool), his howls of mourning feel strangely unwrenching, and his eventual death a downright misreading of the play. “Look there, look there!” Lear whispers over Cordelia’s body in an incredible echo of the warning given him by the loyal Kent (Eleanor de Rohan) back before it was all too late. “See better, Lear,” says Kent, and as the old king dies, cradling his dead child, he finally does see. It’s a mystical death, a moment of preternatural vision followed by a departure. “Look there!” he says, then joins Cordelia in the place we cannot see. But Branagh, who has seeded a couple of aneurysm-like attacks throughout his performance, plays the moment with crushing realism. He seizes up, gasps and grabs his head, thrashes, contorts, dies. Not only does such an interpretation fatally diminish the play’s scope, it also makes the moment about him, not about Cordelia, and not, even more crucially, about the invisible thing he’s exhorting us all to see. A King Lear without that invisible thing might have battles and betrayals, drums and trumpets, and get us back out on the street in a cool two hours, but it won’t be “the thing itself.” It will, in the end, come to nothing.

King Lear is at the Shed through December 15.

The Act One climax of David Adjmi’s Stereophonic is one of the most exhilarating moments I’ve experienced in a theater in recent memory. We’re in a recording studio in Sausalito, California, evoked in gorgeous detail, down to the smallest dial, the scuzziest beanbag chair and crocheted throw. The year is 1976, and an unnamed band, hovering on the verge of serious fame, is recording an album. They’ve been at it for months. The air is clogged with cigarette smoke and marijuana smoke and tension as viscous as Marmite. The drummer, Simon (Chris Stack), does not want to use a click track, but it’s been 36 takes and he’s still dragging. Diana (Sarah Pidgeon) sings beautifully and has songwriting chops that get stronger by the day, but she’s fragile and defensive and feels constantly under attack from her lead-guitarist boyfriend, Peter (Tom Pecinka), who’s brilliant, creatively domineering … and also fragile and defensive and convinced that he’s constantly under attack from, well, everyone. The wry, aloof vocalist-keyboardist, Holly (Juliana Canfield), has, for the moment, reached a détente with her philosophizing, self-pitying, cocaine-and–Jack Daniels–fueled husband, the bassist, Reg (Will Brill), but hostilities could resume at any moment. The engineers, Grover (Eli Gelb) and Charlie (Andrew R. Butler), just want Simon to use the fucking click track so that they can get the fucking take and everyone can go the fuck to sleep. Then — suddenly, gradually, somehow both — a miracle happens. Take 37 is perfect. The song bursts into driving, dazzling life. People throw down headphones and instruments and grab each other, hugging and hooting and doing stupid dances. Simon howls at the universe, “WE’RE SUCH A GOOD BAND!!!”

Stereophonic is an echo-portrait of Fleetwood Mac and the hard birth of Rumours (Simon, Holly, and Reg are British and played together for years before joining up with Peter and Diana, the Americans). It’s also a stunning feat of scoring by Adjmi — whose hypernaturalistic script captures the ebb and flow of overlapping speech both inside and outside the studio’s sound room — and by director Daniel Aukin and composer Will Butler. Aukin and the show’s stellar cast play Adjmi’s rigorously constructed, deceptively casual prose with as much exactness and audacity as the actors, all playing their instruments live, pour into Butler’s songs: Smart, well-crafted tunes that blend the folk and blues and prog vibes of the ’70s with the soaring indie yearning of Butler’s former band, Arcade Fire. (There’s a cast album on the way.) The show is part concert and part breakup drama, part sound-design marvel (Ryan Rumery is the hero responsible) and part beautifully observed period piece (everyone’s legs look dynamite in Enver Chakartash’s bells and flares, and that lovingly intricate set is by David Zinn). But it’s the thing Adjmi conjures up at the end of Act One that makes Stereophonic such a meaningful and exceptional piece of work: In its bones, it’s a love song, bittersweet and wounded and ferociously loyal, to the act of making art — specifically, art that requires that most exhausting, infuriating, transcendent element: collaboration.

“It’s a torture to need people,” sighs Holly. She and Simon — the Brits who aren’t continuously neck deep in substances — pride themselves on keeping their composure. Simon is the manager and the designated group “dad,” and Holly has the kind of great posture, posh vowels, and naturally regal mien that all the slumming in the world can’t tarnish. But no one in the band is actually okay. They’re all broken, all frightened, all experts in hurting themselves or others or both. But there is something they’re capable of, even called to, amidst the constant raging of egos and reopening of wounds. “I WANNA PLAY MUSIC!” Peter bellows as he stomps from the studio’s control room, where people are still passing around the enormous coke bag and bitching about the broken coffee machine, into the sound room: the temple, the sacred space where things get serious, where everyone suddenly turns from a fucked-up human into a necessary part of a whole.

Plenty of art has been made about the artist as egomaniacal monolith, as genius or tyrant or lonely freak. But Adjmi is looking at something more complex and contradictory — that ineffable thing that pulls a bunch of egos together. The torture and the elation of needing people: Music has it, and theater has it. And anyone who’s thrown themselves into either knows that the same project, the same people, can somehow leave you more battered and drained than you thought possible while also being, as Diana whispers, “the best thing that ever happened” to you.

Right from the title, Adjmi has built into his play this fixation on the harmonies and discords of collaborative creation. Stereophonic sound comes at you from more than one source, blended by the ear and the brain to form a greater whole. That’s the task for the show’s seven actors: Both on instruments and as instruments, they’ve got to weave together individual lines of a precisely built score, and tempo and blend are everything. This is the great trick of high naturalism: To sound the most “real” takes the most careful listening, the most painstaking dedication to style. Adjmi’s script is orchestrated down to the beat — pauses, overlaps, shifts in intonation all noted (one of my favorite stage directions: “proleptic apology”). Language like this takes an ensemble of athletes, along with a great deal of trust — and the show’s transfer from Playwrights Horizons has only given Aukin’s extraordinary company more time to grow together. No one misses a beat, from Brill’s itchy, writhing, slurring, somehow still strangely sweet mess of a bassist (just wait for his mind-blown effusion on houseboats) to Butler’s cheerfully bizarre assistant engineer — his lack of room-reading skills is one of the show’s great entertainments, and the band members’ repeated inability to remember his name is one of its small, hilarious heartbreaks. Canfield gives the outwardly cool Holly gorgeous depths — it’s devastating to hear her, enraptured, tears in her eyes, describe the sex scene from Don’t Look Now as beautiful “because you know it’s coming from grief” — and Stack expertly turns Simon into that guy who’s at once the most lovable and least readable in the room. He seems like the peacemaker, the caretaker, the one who’s there to cheer you up with a bump from the bag and a tickle — but there’s also a distance in him, a cost that’s been paid, a mountain of words unsaid.

As the quasi Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks figures, Pecinka and Pidgeon have to generate the churning, molten emotional core of the play, and both their chemistry and the sharp edges of their portrayals have only grown since the show’s first run. In contrast to her phenomenal voice, Pidgeon has found something a little uglier in Diana as a character, and it works: It’s all too possible, especially given the teams that we tend to run toward automatically these days, for the exacting, damaged Peter to become the show’s villain. Just listen to the audience gasp when, after the band lays down an absolutely smoking recording of one of Diana’s songs, Peter, stone-faced and toneless, hits her with: “It’s good but … your ego is getting in the way and you need to decide if you’re gonna be a mediocre songwriter or push it to the next level.” Yet it’s crucial that we don’t assign bad guys and good guys in a show like this. Peter — to whom Pecinka completely commits, giving him terrible hardness, immense hurt, and bravely daring to be anything but likable — has got to be as human as Diana, as right and as wrong, as sinned against as sinning. Pidgeon and Pecinka have been nimbly messing around with the dials of their characters’ relationship like Grover at his soundboard, and have found a dynamic that feels marvelously complicated, a rich, sad place where it’s no easy task to point to a singular victim.

And as for Grover — the character is the secret heart of the show, hidden in plain sight at center stage, as we concentrate on the colorful artists behind the glass wall. Gelb quietly crafts a long, aching arc with the suffering, aspiring, not-as-cool-as-he’d-like-to-be engineer. He’s funny, he’s lost, and he’s also every inch an artist: dedicated, ambitious — ultimately, whether he likes it or not, both a perfectionist and a believer. Grover, along with everyone else in this smelly, volatile studio, could shout along with Reg when, at the climax of a ganja-assisted revelation, he declares, “I want to live in art.” It’s not really a joke — it might even be a tragedy. Or maybe it will be the best thing that ever happened.

Stereophonic is at the John Golden Theatre.

Soho Rep has been playing its imminent departure from the downtown black box fondly known as Walkerspace very cool. Yes, the venue is tiny; it lacks disabled access; it’s got water damage and old plumbing and too little electricity to run the AC during tech rehearsals. And yes, Soho Rep’s leadership team, as well as the folks at Playwrights Horizons—where the Rep is about to bunk up for at least two years—are genuinely excited about their upcoming partnership. “Are there ways both our organizations can learn from each other?” Caleb Hammons, one of the Rep’s artistic leadership trio, has asked, while Playwrights’ artistic director Adam Greenfield believes the collaboration will reveal “that two theaters working together are much greater than the sum of their parts.” It is exciting, though it never would have happened if Walkerspace’s old landlord hadn’t died and the building hadn’t been acquired by yet another city-devouring developer. Kind of like how the Connelly—one of the most beautiful old theaters in the East Village, with some of the most consistently compelling programming—wouldn’t be shut down and futureless if its landlord, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, hadn’t started screening the scripts a little more closely and decided that these dangerous deviant plays won’t do.

What—in theater and everywhere else—are we to do as the bulldozers of avarice and bigotry roll on? The truth is that we really don’t have a choice about whether or not to move toward a new era of mutual aid — of, theatrically speaking, co-production, space- and resource-sharing, and institutional collaboration and cross-pollination. The line between ethical imperative and basic survival strategy has long since been chipped away. It’s time to invite the village in and start making stone soup. Perhaps it’s because of its tricksterish awareness of the perilous, possibility-rich state of things—coupled with its unabashed playfulness—that Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! feels like the perfect farewell-and-godspeed to Soho Rep as we know it. The show is a trippy love letter, the kind of wily, ingenious, slightly unhinged delight that pulls back the curtain on what theater really is: simultaneously a silly game and an inherently political act in which a bunch of kids, some young, some old, try on personas like feather boas, making shit up, making a mess, making worlds.

Pulling back several curtains, actually. Mimi Lien and Tatiana Kahvegian’s cardboard-and-tinsel-happy set is a gleeful box of surprises, revealing layer after hidden layer of madcap mental landscape. “Phantasmagoria” is the show’s chosen word for it, a term that’s expounded upon at length in one of the play’s funniest sequences by a maniacal goldfish puppet. But I’m getting ahead of myself. To quote Branden, the onstage avatar for Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, who co-wrote the play with the performance artist Alina Troyano, often known as her stage persona Carmelita Tropicana: “You’re probably asking yourself, ‘What’s this play about?’” Well, put as simply as possible, it’s about two artists, one the “former star student” of the other, and the Wonderland–style adventure they’re sucked into when the student offers to buy the teacher’s alter ego. “Oh God, B. I’m in such a mess,” says Troyano, the teacher, playing her offstage self and muttering over the phone to Branden (embodied with flawless comic precision by Ugo Chukwu) on a dark and stormy night. “I’m scared I have to do something drastic soon … I think … I think I’m going to have to kill her.”

Cue thunder! Cue lightning! Jacobs-Jenkins—who loves the Gothic, not to mention the slippery business of representing oneself onstage—is clearly having a blast. In collaborating with Troyano, he’s getting an extra infusion of “screw it, let’s do it” exuberance, a push to embrace the big, delicious, unsophisticated impulse, and it feels great and freeing. When that’s chucked in a blender with his own penchant for spiky-savvy verbosity, the results fizz and pop. “Hadn’t I been her mostly loyal star pupil all these years?” demands Chukwu’s Branden, whose self-satirizing preening is tuned at just the right frequency. “Devoted to the care of the very soil from which she herself had not only sprouted but through her life and work also tilled with such wit and sacrifice, and by that I mean the ontology of intersectional ‘minority’ urban American life in the latter half of the 20th century as expressed through the professional identity of the ‘gigging creative’ jargon jargon jargon theory theory theory?” Chukwu pirouettes through this kind of winkingly pompous spiel with agility and verve. Part of what makes his Branden so funny is his anxious desire—that of the comparatively successful, socially conscious millennial—that we be impressed with him but not alienated. “Guys, I’m not rich,” he insists to the audience, feebly and hilariously, after Alina has implied otherwise.

Alina could be forgiven for the mistake. After all, Branden’s response, when he hears that his mentor is thinking of killing (or perhaps “retiring”) Carmelita Tropicana, sounds like that of an eccentric millionaire. “Don’t kill her,” he says. “Give her to me. I want her  … Or, wait, I could buy her from you? You could sell her to me  … How much do you want?” Carmelita Tropicana—the brassy, banana-wearing lesbian chanteuse from Havana who lives inside Alina Troyano—is suddenly a tradable commodity. But a whole rabbit hole’s worth of shenanigans are about to unfold as Branden starts to discover just how much more she is.

A few surreal turns later, Carmelita has entered Branden’s body, and Chukwu—conjuring up Steve Martin as possessed by Lily Tomlin in All of Me—is caught debating himself. “I guess I just didn’t … I didn’t understand that there was this whole other metaphysical element to it,” his Branden side falters. “I just thought we were talking about … you know … IP?” It’s a great line — the kind that’s funny because it’s a cleaver, with both edge and weight to it. Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! is often zany but never mindless. If it’s got something to say—inside the farcical, fantastical twists and tumbles, which are all fully digestible in their own right as pure, liberating fun—it’s that our insistence on a world in which everything is for purchase is wreaking havoc not only on our environment, our politics, our social conscience, but also and most crucially on our imagination, which is the place where any change, any alternative vision, truly begins.

How such a vision comes to life—at least according to Jacobs-Jenkins and Troyano, along with director Eric Ting, who gamely leans into the bizarre—is through a theater of wit and wackiness, collage and surprise and accumulation — something less like settling in to listen to a straightforward narrative than like rifling through the attic of a wild great-aunt. Ooh, look! A photo of her at the WOW Café in the ’80s. Another where she’s playing a … sexy cockroach? And over here — a feathered turban, a “bejeweled brassiere”! Together, Branden and Alina stumble through Phantasmagoria, the mind-maze that houses all Alina’s personas and creations — including the cigar-smoking bus driver and self-appointed poet of Cuban manhood, Pingalito (Troyano at first, then the excellent Octavia Chavez-Richmond), and, yes, that sexy cockroach. Her name is Martina (Keren Lugo, who also plays a very funny lawyer called Dede), and she’s married to a mouse, though there’s a mournful, histrionic horse called Arriero (the absolute gem Will Dagger) pining for her. Long-maned and leather-clad, with fluttering eyelashes and a constant pout beneath his mustache, Arriero looks like he’s ready for a night out in the Meatpacking District. Greg Corbino—who brought to life the fabulous vulva-scape of Soho Rep’s Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken last year—designed the show’s costumes and, more strikingly still, its puppets. Dagger also plays ever-expanding iterations of the goldfish (its origin can be traced back to a performance-art piece young Branden did in Alina’s class at NYU), and both his wonderfully demented performance and Corbino’s incredible creations touch something beyond the simply daffy. There’s a weird beauty here too, even something fearsome.

If I tell you that our heroes eventually end up singing Spice Girls karaoke with Maria Irene Fornés (Chavez-Richmond) and a jorts wearing Walt Whitman (Dagger) while a surly, vaguely horny Juana Inés de la Cruz (Lugo) looks on, is that a spoiler? I hope it’s an enticement. Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! joyously follows Walt’s advice—“Have you tried containing multitudes?” he titters at Alina and Branden—revealing the kind of intellectual and spiritual center that’s inherent in humor and curiosity, in the genuine pursuit of delight. Though the writers encourage us not to cling too desperately to questions of meaning—“There was a time in my theatergoing life where I didn’t go to plays because I needed them to be ‘about’ anything,” Chukwu’s Branden ruminates—that stance is also a bit of sleight of hand: Look over here! At the cockroach, at the gargantuan goldfish, at the one and only Carmelita Tropicana! We do look, and laugh, and ride the ride — and through those portals, a bold proposal slips in. What if more plays were this playful? What if, like Fornes, we turned to possibility rather than to formula? “I don’t know,” squeaks Martina the cockroach, trapped at one point in the body of Dede the lawyer, outside of her native Phantasmagoria and inside the only part of Lien and Kahvegian’s set that resembles that of a realistic, office-set drama. “I kind of hate it here. It’s so beige and unfree.” So, says Carmelita Tropicana, imagine something else.

Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! is at Soho Rep through December 15.

The playwright Sarah Gancher has a gift for invoking theater’s extraordinary power of simultaneity. On the stage, many times can coexist, and many places — they can sit side by side and we can hop between them, or, richer still, they can lie atop one other, like archaeological strata or translucencies that bring together a composite image. “Here’s what Einstein thought,” says an audience member at Gancher’s exquisite new play, The Wind and the Rain, reading from a text that’s been handed to them by an actor. “Space and time are the same thing. Just like I’m here now, but I could be in Hawaii. And Hawaii exists. I’m here now, but I could be 300 years in the future. And somehow that exists too, even though I am currently surrounded by now … Einstein thought that in the Big Bang, not just all space but all time was created.”

I’m here now, at my desk, but there’s also an I that’s still on the barge that houses Red Hook’s Waterfront Museum, where The Wind and the Rain is performed; another I is sitting in the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh in 2011, watching a play called Mission Drift that Sarah Gancher created with the TEAM. That I was also there on the boat as this new play unfolded — and for all of us, all three, the heart swells in the chest. For in both plays, Gancher sends a plumb line down through history and a flare up into the future. Both pieces fill the here and now, as the spark illuminates the filament with a glowing, pulsing sense of the infinite present. For Gancher, the theatrical moment stretches to encompass all moments past and to come, vibrating with beauty, urgency, and potential.

A brief interlude: God bless companies like En Garde Arts, which is producing The Wind and the Rain in association with Vineyard Theatre, and whose founder, Anne Hamburger, asked Gancher for “the biggest, most ambitious site-specific piece that you’ve ever imagined, but never written, because you thought nobody would ever produce it” (so writes Gancher in the show’s program). That, friends, is how art this good gets made: real trust and investment in big, weird, specific, local ideas. Curiosity. Running screaming from the safe middle, which never turns out to be all that safe after all.

Gancher’s ambitious site-specific piece has a subtitle — “A Story About Sunny’s Bar” — and therein lies its touchstone, the pitch pipe she uses to start composing its harmonies. As you walk down Conover Street, toward the water and the Waterfront Museum, you pass the real Sunny’s — a brick building, an unassuming green awning, a rusty neon BAR sign, and an even rustier pickup permanently parked out front. The place has been around for over a century and has been run the whole time by the Balzano family, notably the garrulous, charismatic philosopher king, Sunny Balzano, who died in 2016. (Here, Sunny is embodied by Pete Simpson, who just couldn’t be better.) As The Wind and the Rain reveals, though, it would be more accurate to say that Sunny’s wife, Tone Johansen (played with heartbreaking restraint by Jen Tullock), ran things, as she still runs them today. Tone, a sculptor and musician who came from Norway on an artistic grant in the ’90s (her name is pronounced “tuna”), met Sunny when Red Hook was still “desolate, burnt out,” says Jennifer Regan, one of the show’s five storytellers who assume various roles in the moment. “The streetlights didn’t work. A pack of wild dogs lived on Beard Street.” Flashing his irresistible smile, Simpson’s Sunny warns Tullock’s Tone that she better not be out on foot after dark: “If you’re on a bike and you run into the dogs, you can outrun them. Worst comes to worst, throw the bike at them.”

Later in the show, as the neighborhood around Sunny’s shifts and shifts again, another audience member is given a line to say (the show’s audience participation is unpretentious, unforced, and integral): “I saw a dog wearing a cashmere sweater.” So much for wildness — but not for danger. Myriad forces swirl through Gancher’s play, and the literal tempest of its title — thrown into such terrible focus in the aftermath of Helene and Milton — blows alongside other gales, equally implacable and equally traceable straight back to human avarice. “We are ending and ending and ending our world,” Gancher writes. “All because of money: A fiction that is eating the planet.” The ache that rises like its own waterline as The Wind and the Rain delves deeper and deeper into the patch of earth we’re sitting on isn’t about nostalgia: The show compellingly evokes the days when longshoremen rubbed shoulders with mobsters at Sunny’s counter — and the Feds prowled Red Hook on the lookout for homemade wine and moonshine (the Balzanos produced both) — without valorizing them as somehow better times. And it’s not that there’s something inherently evil about the Red Hook of vegan pizza, craft breweries, and Ikea. But all you have to do is open Zillow to know that something is broken, and not accidentally so. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse aren’t just warlords; they’re landlords.

The particular doomsday with which The Wind and the Rain is concerned is, of course, Hurricane Sandy — yet a great part of the play’s potency lies in the richness and density of its echoes. The world has ended in this place before, when the glaciers melted, when the Dutch slaughtered the indigenous Wickquasgeck people, when the English displaced the Dutch. It will happen again. “When the flood comes,” says Regan, “memories lift up and float.” It’s a breathtaking image: In the stretches of the show that occur during Sandy, Tullock enacts lurching through waist-high water on the first floor of the bar as Tone tries to rescue photographs from the deluge. Gancher uses the photos as portals, vaulting in and out of ancestral stories, conjuring the souls that cling to Sunny’s walls, even as everything seems to be slipping away. We see Sunny’s grandparents, Antonio Balzano, who arrived from Calabria in 1888, and his wife Angelina, who came through Ellis Island in 1896 when she was 20 years old. There’s the charming, philandering bartender Romeo and his sharp, suffering wife Teresa, not Balzanos but family enough to manage the bar during Sunny’s boyhood. Here are Sunny’s siblings, Frankie and Rose — the former immortalized along with Sunny in a fuzzy photo from 1944, leaping off a Red Hook dock in their underwear. Rose was not allowed to join.

Just as she loops and layers moments in time, so Gancher also interweaves fact and the freedoms of fiction. Much of The Wind and the Rain is based on interviews — Gancher, a fiddler, is a regular at the folk-music jam sessions that have become legendary at Sunny’s over the years, and she knows the real Tone well. But the show isn’t a documentary. It wants to pluck the strings of larger ideas and resonant parallels. So many adventurous boys, so many impulsive, magnetic, beautiful men — friends to all, lovers to as many as possible. And so many women who have been there keeping the walls from falling. Along with Simpson, who also plays Romeo, and Tullock, who doubles as Angelina, Regan and Paco Tolson form a quartet of domestic complexity across time: Like Sunny, Tolson’s Antonio is a dreamer, happy to let his wife do the taxes. Like Regan’s stricken Teresa, Tone watches her husband make love to everyone (“It’s a bartender’s job to flirt!” Sunny insists), while only she knows the flip side of his glamour, the pits of narcissistic despair in which he’s apt to sink. During the hurricane, Sunny — older than Tone and in remission from cancer, though he’s mixing his meds with nicotine and booze — practically turns to stone. It’s chilling to watch Simpson curl up a table, all his easygoing radiance drained away, while Tullock’s Tone staggers around in the dark, trying to muck out the bar, call someone, anyone, for a generator, deal with horrible relatives from Jersey who want them to sell, and take care of a baby. “I don’t know what you want me to do,” Sunny tells her, poison in his voice. “I’m not Mr. Mundane Details … I’m a poet and to me, this is grief! This is grief! I can’t help.” How can Tone still love this man? How can we? It’s proof of both the nuance in Gancher’s script and the heart in Simpson and Tullock’s performances that we know the answer, even if it’s inarticulable.

Most of The Wind and the Rain unfolds in the snug, lantern-lit interior of the Waterfront Museum barge, with the playful, free-flowing energy of one of the bar’s own jam sessions. (Different local bands, all frequenters of the jams, play preshow music every night, and Pete Lanctot rounds out the cast as resident musician.) But in the show’s final moments, director Jared Mezzocchi shifts ground. Mezzocchi is also known as a projection designer and multimedia artist, and though Paul Deziel designed the projections here, you can tell that Wind’s director has been itching to add a digital layer or two to the show’s erstwhile scrappy palimpsest. It’s a stylistic gamble that pays off: Gancher has already crammed so much within this wooden barge, and now Mezzocchi takes us out into the chilly Red Hook night, at once expanding the circumference of the production’s conjuring circle and allowing its magic to diffuse, as all things must. I won’t give away the show’s lush final gestures in their entirety, but there is a moment in which the audience is walking together past a row of cargo containers. Deziel has a projector stashed across the parking lot from these containers, and as we pass by, ghostly silhouettes walk in tandem with us along their corrugated surfaces. We are, for a moment, in stride with our ancestors and fully aware of their presence.

There is a now that is a set of fleeting, gorgeous moments in October, in which a play about a bar is unfolding at the end of a Red Hook dock. There is a now when that bar was underwater, when a woman from Norway was fighting with everything she had to save it. There is a now when two boys were leaping from a dock — this very one? — in their underwear. The rain, it raineth every day — not because the sun never shines, but because somewhere, in someone’s now, the storm has already come. Without admonishment or accusation, The Wind and the Rain offers us the gift of responsibility. Whether we can sing in harmony with the future depends on what we do today, what we love, and what we save.

The Wind and the Rain is at the Waterfront Museum in Red Hook through October 27.

For a middle-aged estate manager with a drinking problem, a crush on his former brother-in-law’s too-young new wife, and a creeping horror that he has wasted his life, Ivan Petrovich Voynitsky — known to friends and audiences as Vanya — is so hot right now. Chekhov’s plays have an uncanny tendency to resurface in waves in the English-speaking theater, and we’re in an Uncle Vanya moment. Perhaps it has to do with a pandemic-adjacent sense of claustrophobia or the relatability of existential crisis. Whatever the case, arriving in the wake of Jack Serio’s hot-ticket “loft Vanya” and Andrew Scott’s London-based experiment with playing all the characters at once, Heidi Schreck’s new translation of the second of Chekhov’s Big Four is entering a busy playing field. It’s got major names (Steve Carell is carrying the autumn roses and the gun), a major stage at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont, and a palpably earnest desire to excavate the story’s humanity. And it is, unhappily, an example of how all these things can fail to cohere into something powerful. Like its luckless hero, it shoots and misses.

“I’m bored!”; “She’s so bored she’s just staggering around”; “God, I really am dying of boredom”; “You know why you and I are such good friends, Vanya? Because we’re both such boring, tedious people.” So say Schreck’s versions of the characters thrust together on the country estate where Vanya (Carell) and his niece, Sonia (Alison Pill), live with Vanya’s withholding mother (Jayne Houdyshell) and the tolerant old nanny, Marina (Mia Katigbak, being wonderful) — the estate where the smart, troubled, hard-drinking local doctor, Astrov (William Jackson Harper), and the endearing oddball of a neighbor, Waffles (Jonathan Hadary), come to spend their days and where the old routines have recently been thrown into chaos by the arrival of “the professor” (Alfred Molina) and his beautiful young wife, Elena (Anika Noni Rose). If there’s a principal trap that American productions of Chekhov, this one included, tend to hurl themselves into, it’s taking all this talk of boredom at face value. There’s a reason that whole schools of acting — and the entire art of modern direction — developed in tandem with Chekhov’s plays, and it’s because they require the construction of vast underground cities: The text itself is a constellation of spires, minarets, and domes, their tips peeking up through the surface of a desert after a civilization-burying sandstorm. Envisioning and, crucially, enacting the limitless subtextual architecture of the plays is the great task, but here, Lila Neugebauer’s actors feel unrooted, their energy too often scattershot or droopy. They’re playing the uppermost level of the text, which makes for a drifting, sleepy feeling — whence the ancient and misguided, but all too often theatrically justifiable, complaint that in Chekhov “nothing happens.”

The objective is to figure out what’s happening and then do it. But though there are plenty of appealing performers in this Vanya, there’s also an enervating absence of emotional events taking place. The acting teacher Mira Rostova, who studied with Stanislavsky, talked about theatrical action in terms of the “Doings.” A line of text, she posited, must be doing something essential: the “admit,” for example, or the “lament with humor,” the “defy,” or “the demonstration of amazement.” (The playwright Sarah Ruhl, who translated Three Sisters in 2013, makes a point of noting just how much this kind of lament differs from the very American notion of complaint: The first is rich with existential irony; the second is whiny, hard-done-by, entitled.) The Doings have uplift and drive to them — inside of language that can seem to sigh and meander, or simply to be describing states of being (“I’m all mixed up,” “I’m exhausted,” “I’m so happy”), they can provide actors with muscle and teeth, concrete things to be fighting for or guarding against. Here, one gets the sense that Neugebauer and her ensemble have done plenty of talking about the play but that somewhere between the table and the stage, good ideas have diffused or have floated back up into the realm of theory. They haven’t coalesced into engines — they’re not living in the actors’ blood and bones.

Intertwined issues of script, casting, and direction are at work here. Schreck has given the text a hard shove toward the contemporary and the casual (a choice that’s echoed in Kaye Voyce’s costumes, which have Astrov in hospital scrubs, Sonia in shorts and boots, and Elena in a different luxe jewel-tone dress for each act). She has also done away with any mention of Russia and with patronymics and diminutives. While all this updating and tone tweaking is theoretically fine, it lands Neugebauer’s production in a kind of no-place, a generalized now-ishness that hits bumps when a bit of formality escapes Schreck’s sandpaper (“Two or three more words and then it’s over,” “I can feel the touch of his hands … The second he shows up, I run to him and start babbling”), or when a character’s attitude jangles up against our present. “What I don’t understand is why we’re still destroying entire forests,” insists the environmentally conscious Astrov. “Why not?” says Vanya, still speaking like a man in 1899. These blips of cognitive dissonance can, cumulatively, weaken a play’s feeling of solidity; they make it harder, subconsciously, for both actors and audience to hold on. Of the company, only Katigbak, Hadary, and Molina sound really at home — Katigbak and Hadary because they know exactly how to access the cosmic acceptance, wry in Marina’s case and bemused but sincere in Waffles’s, that the rest of the characters lack; Molina because, along with the affectations of his character, his own British accent does him a service. It gives him a natural boost toward style, makes him sound comfortable in language that hasn’t entirely found its own sense of ease.

Of course, it’s true that Chekhov’s people are discontented — horribly and hilariously so — but a feeling of gnawing frustration in a character is different from a lack of release in a performance. And at the center of this Uncle Vanya is a quartet of actors who, while they all have the individual capacity to be lovely or poignant or very funny, aren’t sparking the necessary alchemy, or even chemistry. No one gets what they want, but the currents of need — both platonic and very much not — that crackle between Elena and Astrov and Vanya and Sonia should make our arm hairs prickle. Neugebauer, however, is presiding over one of the least sexy Vanyas I’ve ever seen. The real rain that douses the Beaumont’s stage in Act Two (it’s truly the rainy season on Broadway) is the most sensual thing in the production.

Both Carell and Harper have flexed their comic chops on TV, but neither cracks open easily into naked pathos or desire, and Neugebauer hasn’t helped them find it. Harper, especially, needs to fascinate two women and, eventually, be rocked by lust for one of them — but his Astrov’s particular brand of suffering doesn’t make much room for stuff below the neck. That itchy, avoidant, raised-eyebrow quality hits home when he goes on an anxious tear — he’s delightful in a rant about how weird people find him — and it’s part of what made him so wonderful on The Good Place. In that show, Chidi’s sacral chakra (the sexy one) is closed, while his crown (intellect and spirit) is dizzyingly exploded. But it’s not enough here, nor is it helped by Pill’s Sonia, who has a worked-up, easily tearful childishness about her that belies both the rock-solidness of the character’s feelings for Astrov and, still more important, her anchoring role as the play’s moral center.

Carell does locate moments of morbid fun (often extratextual, as when he and Harper’s Astrov get drunk together and he grabs a lamp and fakes electrocution), but his Vanya never really breaks in two. The audience is happy to laugh when, after plummeting into despair, he unsuccessfully fires off two shots at the professor — and the moment should be funny; it is funny. It’s also something else, something so painful it should take the breath out of us. Here, like so much else, it doesn’t reach our guts.

The performers’ struggle to connect is also tied to the mise en scène. Somehow, in trying to go vast and “expressionistic,” Neugebauer and scenic designer Mimi Lien have stumbled back around into vagueness and cliché. There’s a photo of sad birch trees as a backdrop (though it moves up- and downstage, the extra depth it reveals is never taken advantage of as playing space), and in front of it are standard collections of furniture, one meant to be outdoors, the next indoors — though, strangely, each setup has almost the exact same footprint, as if the company got used to one arrangement in the rehearsal room and never bothered to rethink it. Most oppressive of all, when the action moves indoors, Lien flies in a heavy brown wall. Everything already felt brown, and now the soporific monochrome is complete. The actors’ relationship to all this furniture is lackluster, normative; they give a lot of their energy away to chairs. In one moment, Carell leaps up on a table and it makes you blink. In context, it feels forced and awkward, but that’s only because no one’s body has as yet been similarly activated. Oh, what a world it could be if such a leap emerged from a consistent through-line of full physical expression.

We still don’t know how to do Chekhov in this country. Our laments lack humor and our humor lacks lament, we complain where we could defy, and we rarely demonstrate — or provoke — amazement. “I want to live,” insist his characters. “We have to live.” That’s not a sigh. It’s a howl, a gauntlet, an invitation to existential scale that bursts the limits of our theatrical thinking, no matter what degree of “realism” a production’s aesthetic might express. The tunnels and caverns of his texts encourage infinite exploration, but even when we love him, study him, and get excited about him around a read-through table or in an acting class, we’re still too apt to wind up with productions about birch trees and ennui. We’re still liable to hear “boredom” and end up with boring.

Uncle Vanya is at the Vivian Beaumont at Lincoln Center Theater.

Peter Morgan is interested in rehumanizing that most dehumanizing of forces: power. Total authority, extreme wealth and privilege — these things turn human beings into symbols, abstract entities even to themselves. There’s a reason that Morgan’s big hit Netflix drama is called The Crown and not The Queen, and it’s not just because Morgan already wrote that movie in 2006. It’s because, as British writers have understood at least all the way back to Shakespeare, the golden round subsumes the person. Somewhere underneath the scepter or the presidential seal or the billions is someone who feels want, tastes grief, needs friends — but also, anything buried for long starts to decay. Morgan has made a career out of imagining the hidden wants and griefs of his country’s rulers, while simultaneously depicting the lavish ceremonial padding that surrounds them and keeps the plebes tuning in. It’s an addictive formula, and its own politics, rather like the souls of its characters, is markedly recessive and ambivalent. On the one hand, isn’t it good exercise for the psyche to try to see other people, however famous or flawed, in their fullness? On the other, every time we let out a sympathetic “Awww” when Margaret Thatcher shows up at Balmoral in the wrong shoes, or plays fawning nursemaid to her arrogant git of a son, are we also dulling our own impulses toward structural change? Morgan was an anti-monarchist when he began making The Crown and within a year of working on the show was talking about having become a royalist. That, as Shakespeare might say, must give us pause.

A similar combination of moral reticence and fascination with super-high status pervades Morgan’s new play Patriots, which shifts its writer’s lens from his native England to the hulking enigma of Russia. “In the West you have no idea,” says the first person to speak to us from the stage (an imposing, rather busy mash-up of red cat walk, long power-broking table, seedy nightclub, and curving, prison-like brick wall designed by Miriam Buether; “It’s giving… Meatpacking bondage with LED tape,” said the friend who saw the show with me). The speaker is Boris Berezovsky (Michael Stuhlbarg, deprived of hair but vibrating with energy), the real-life Russian oligarch who was found dead in London in 2013. The circumstances around Berezovsky’s death remain a mystery, and Morgan isn’t here to clear anything up for us. His project is to complicate—and perhaps for many, simply inform—our picture of the country that has grown more and more dangerous, isolated, authoritarian, and brutal under the termless presidency of Vladimir Putin. “You think of Russia as a cold, bleak place, full of hardship and cruelty,” Stuhlbarg’s Boris tells us before going on to elegize the quirks and beauties of his homeland. While I don’t think of Russia that way at all, I get the point: This is a Morgan joint, and we’re going to be peeling back cultural façades in search of human drama, speculating about what exactly makes up the makers of nations.

In other words, Patriots is a present-day history play, and Morgan has learned plenty from the upstart crow: His Berezovsky and Putin (played by an adenoidal, hard-staring Will Keen, whose likeness in aura to the Russian president is at times uncanny) contain echoes of Falstaff and Hal, Mark Antony and Octavius. One runs hot, brilliant, amoral, and insatiable; the other, deliberate and circumspect, cold and damp as some eyeless cave creature. Even if all this were fiction and we weren’t living in our current Putin-afflicted present, it wouldn’t take much to figure out who’s going to underestimate whom, and whose castle wall will eventually be bored through by downfall and death. The New School professor Nina L. Khrushcheva (who’s also Nikita Khrushchev’s great-granddaughter) worked with Morgan as an advisor on Patriots and described Berezovsky as “the King Lear” of the show — “the most tragic figure you can imagine.” His tragedy is personal and, more compellingly, national-turned-global: As the most powerful of Russia’s oligarchs in the 1990s, Berezovsky was closely enmeshed with Boris Yeltsin and responsible for elevating the unglamorous Putin—a mid-level bureaucrat, a “desk-jockey” and “KGB jobsworth”—first to the prime ministership and then the presidency. But, as Keen’s reptilian Putin observes, “Once a Kingmaker has made a King he has created a problem for himself.” In Morgan’s telling of the story, in trying to install a puppet, Berezovsky frees a world-destroying beast.

The crushing irony is that Berezovsky envisioned himself as an architect of the future: “Ambition is the belief that the infinite is possible,” he tells his old teacher, Professor Perelman (Ronald Guttman), before leaving the academy to parlay his work in economic decision-making theory into money-making reality. Morgan’s play jumps around in time, showing us Boris on top—all charisma and complacency, underage girlfriends and Roy Cohn–esque phone juggling—along with Boris on the rise and Boris as a shuffling math prodigy teenager, all in the lead-up to his inevitable fall. Even at the height of his wealth, sitting atop a mountain of stocks and yachts, Berezovsky crucially retains an image of himself as “a patriot trying to wake up Russia after seventy years of slumber.” At one point he tells an ambitious young trader named Roman Abramovich (Luke Thallon), “Politicians cannot save Russia … We businessmen must.” Later, to a newly anointed President Putin, he says, eyes gleaming with reconstructionist zeal, “The history of Russia and the West is a series of missed opportunities.”

Patriots’ chief pleasures are intellectual. Morgan’s work is thinky, at times witty and always distanced from judgment. It has the quality of being interesting because it’s interested, and at the heart of his play lies the paradox inherent in Berezovsky’s grand dreams for his country: Capitalism, liberalization, and cementing friendships with the West would all be personally great for an already wealthy man. When Keen’s Putin—as humorless and iron-jawed as Stuhlbarg’s Boris is roguish, hedonistic, and theatrical—snaps that “honest hard-working Russians are starving while a handful of ‘kleptocrats’ are not just rich, but obscenely rich,” how can we not agree with him? Of course, the trick is that Putin, as convinced of his own patriotism as Berezovsky, doesn’t actually care about honest hard-working Russians at all; he cares about power. And as his star rises and Berezovsky’s dims, the billionaire becomes an unlikely revolutionary. Keen won an Olivier for the role in London, and his Putin is a beady-eyed rodent visibly trying to cultivate an almost comical physical machismo. He checks and rechecks his posture in the mirror; he practices a cowboy’s stiff, bow-legged gait, one arm pinned to his side as if he’s taken an arrow in battle. At one point, he spread his legs so wide while taking center stage that I laughed out loud — for some reason, I found myself thinking of seeing Michael Flatley in Riverdance years and years ago. Every time he entered, his billowing shirt had one more button undone. Keen’s Putin is equally, embarrassingly blatant in his self-construction. It would be funny if it weren’t deeply not a joke. It’s Boris Yeltsin’s daughter, Tatiana (played by Camila Canó-Flaviá with wry self-possession), who most accurately—and most Shakspeareanly—assesses him: “He feels little. Little is dangerous. Little, in my experience, only ever wants to be perceived as big.”

Though Morgan is plenty perceptive about character, there’s something cool at the center of Patriots that begins to chafe as the play nears its end. This is not a Russian play; it’s a very British play about Russia, and Morgan’s Berezovsky is perhaps righter than even he knows. In the West, we have no idea. Nina Khrushcheva raises an eyebrow at the idea that Berezovsky committed suicide (“I am one of those people who think that you can expect everything and anything from the K.G.B.”). Alexander Litvinenko (here played by Alex Hurt), who worked for Berezovsky after denouncing and leaving the secret police, was poisoned with polonium. Russian protestors, opposition leaders, and artists are dead, in prison, and in exile. At a certain point, these stop being mere interesting facts. Perhaps in a simpler, starker container, Patriots could have overcome some of its stylish detachment, but Rupert Goold is a director who likes flash, and the dressing he adds to the script doesn’t actually help its sense of real and present stakes. There’s a lot of video on the back wall, a lot of red LED light, a lot of literal smoke and mirrors — it’s got zazz without having psychological or ethical impact.

Yet the first stage direction of Patriots is: “A bare stage.” As I left the shadows of Boris and Vladimir behind, I wondered what that version of their story might have looked like, and whether it could have become more than an exercise in (Morgan’s words) “riveting personal interactions”; whether, in its attempt to touch the Russian soul, it could have asked for more of our souls and hazarded more of its own.

Patriots is at the Barrymore Theatre.