By Ben Brantley
Fun house mirrors are scary. Sure, we usually laugh at their grotesque images, so different from those reliable reflections found above the bathroom sink. But inside us, there lurks the suspicion that those warped and melted visions might just be who we really are, self-portraits wrested from the core of our unconscious.
There was a fertile period in New York — starting in the late 1950s — when adventurous playwrights regularly deployed the theatrical equivalent of such mirrors. As is made clear by the tasty bill of three short vintage works assembled under the title “Signature Plays,” which opened on Sunday night at the Pershing Square Signature Center under the accomplished direction of Lila Neugebauer, such works still have the power to engage, amuse and, above all, disturb.
Only one of these minidramas — Adrienne Kennedy’s “Funnyhouse of a Negro” from 1969 — uses the literal image of the distorting mirror that tells the greater truth. But each in its own way slyly reflects the nightmare within the American dream. And like “Funnyhouse,” Edward Albee’s “The Sandbox” (1959) and María Irene Fornés’s “Drowning” (1986) remind us that just because a style has gone of fashion doesn’t mean it has lost its aesthetic worth.
By holding on to that essential tenet for a quarter-century, the Signature Theater has made itself an invaluable part of Manhattan’s cultural landscape. Under the tenacious stewardship of its founding artistic director, James Houghton, this troupe has reintroduced New Yorkers to playwrights who threatened to recede into the shadows.
They have included Ms. Kennedy, Ms. Fornés, Horton Foote and, improbably enough, Mr. Albee, whose revitalized career in New York could be said to have been jump-started by Signature’s season of his work in the early 1990s. His “Sandbox” opens the evening as a perfect amuse-bouche for the heavier fare that follows. This 20-minute work recounts a simple family outing — a sunny day at the beach, during which Mommy (Alison Fraser) and Daddy (Frank Wood) deposit the 86-year-old Grandma (Phyllis Somerville, who looks great in a bathing suit) in the sandbox of the title, while a cellist (Melody Giron) plays solemn music and a strapping young man in swim trunks (Ryan-James Hatanaka) does calisthenics.
And that’s all there is to this stark little diversion. Kind of. That hunky, smiley guy who’s hoping to be a movie star (embodied with disarming ineptitude by Mr. Hatanaka)? He’s also the Angel of Death, a figure who will turn out to be a frequent visitor in Mr. Albee’s subsequent plays. And that status-quo-conscious Mommy, incarnated with steely silliness by Ms. Fraser, prefigures a host of hypocritical, life-stifling society ladies whom Mr. Albee will also render again and again.
Even if you have no knowledge of Mr. Albee’s later, illustrious career, you’ll still find much to savor and shiver over in this allegory of pushing the elderly into the arms of death. Mr. Albee called this work the closest he ever wrote to a perfect play. And it indeed possesses the stylish self-sufficiency of a crisply turned epigram; like its resident muscle boy, “The Sandbox” doesn’t have an ounce of superfluous fat.
Nor does Ms. Fornés’s “Drowning,” a gentle paean to the laboriousness and loneliness of living small. Set in what looks like an anonymous institutional cafeteria, it presents three creatures with freakishly oversize heads who talk and move very, very, very slowly.
The callow Pea (Mikéah Ernest Jennings) dreams of meeting a woman whose picture he sees in a newspaper. The more worldly Roe (Sahr Ngaujah) patiently offers instruction to his friend, which includes explaining how snowmen are different from humans and just what a newspaper is. Mr. Wood appears as Stephen, the man they are waiting for.
Unlike the Godot of Beckett (whose spirit hovers here), Stephen shows up. His arrival does not, however, dispel the melancholy that pervades this deeply compassionate elegy on the confounding sorrows of day-to-day existence. The glacier-paced interactions of the actors here may initially madden you; by the end, the sense of the oppressive weight that controls their motions breaks your heart.
Ms. Kennedy’s “Funnyhouse” provides the last — and most visually arresting — panel in the evening’s triptych, and its flamboyant patterns have been etched in acid. The lavishly wrought room in which it occurs is the prison that one writer has made of her mind.
That’s Negro-Sarah (played with a razor-edged smile by Crystal Dickinson), who is forever haunted by the specters of her dark-skinned father and paler mother, an unloving couple of clashing sensibilities. There are other ghosts on the premises, as well, including two regal beauties in ball gowns and white face, Queen Victoria Regina (April Matthis) and the Duchess of Hapsburg (January LaVoy).
Sarah’s mom (Pia Glenn), an Ophelia-like beauty, stalks the stage silently. The avatars of Sarah’s missionary father — in the form of the Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba (Mr. Ngaujah) and Jesus (Mr. Jennings), who wears the requisite crown of thorns — are a wordier, noisier lot.
But they’re all — even her mocking Caucasian husband (Nicholas Bruder) and landlady (Ms. Fraser) — aspects and inhabitants of Sarah’s echo chamber of a mind. The same origin story of racial conflict and denial is repeated, with only slight variations, by Sarah and her ghosts in a fugue that seems destined to end with its creator’s death.
The “Funnyhouse” of the title has been given ravishing atmospheric life by a design crew that includes Mimi Lien (sets), Kaye Voyce (costumes), Mark Barton (lighting) and Brandon Wolcott (sound and music). They’re also responsible for the bright yellow beachscape of “The Sandbox” and the chilly decrepitude of “Drowning.”
In every case, this first-rate creative team has done its job. That is to say, they’ve created unfamiliar worlds that somehow feel deeply, ineffably familiar — the sort of places that you visit as you’re falling asleep. And all the places you’ve ever lived, and all the people you’ve ever been, start to mingle and merge into one eerie, endlessly reflected entity.
Pershing Square Signature Center, The
480 W. 42nd St.
Midtown West
Category Off Broadway, Play
Credits Written by Edward Albee, Maria Irene Fornes and Adrienne Kennedy; Directed by Lila Neugebauer
Cast Featuring Nicholas Bruder, Crystal Dickinson, Alison Fraser, Pia Glenn, Ryan-James Hatanaka, Mikeah Ernest Jennings, January LaVoy, April Matthis, Sahr Ngaujah, Phyllis Somerville and Frank Wood
Preview May 3, 2016
Opened May 22, 2016
Closing Date June 19, 2016
