THE MORNING LINE DATE: Thursday, November 10, 2016 FROM: Melissa Cohen, Michelle Farabaugh Lana Picciano PAGES: 13, including this page

November 10, 2016

Review: Election Night With the Gabriels, a Play in Real Time

By Ben Brantley

It was not, as was mentioned several times by the friendly, anxious people preparing dinner, an evening that

anyone should spend alone. And though they often broke my heart as I listened to them trying so hard to sound

hopeful, I am grateful to have spent Tuesday night with the members of the Gabriel family of Rhinebeck, N.Y.

They didn’t exactly improve my state of mind about the state of the nation. But they put me in touch with

feelings that I had been trying to avoid all day. There are times when sitting down with like-minded friends for

a good cry — even if the crying is on the inside — temporarily drains the poison from what has felt like an

abscess of a day.

While millions of my fellow citizens gazed like frustrated fortunetellers into onscreen maps of the United States

turning shades of red and blue, certain New York theatergoers chose to hunker down with the Gabriels for

election night. This opportunity was graciously provided by the Public Theater, where “Women of a Certain

Age — Play 3 of the Gabriels: Election Year in the Life of One Family” opened on (and is set on) the very night

that Americans went to the polls to select their next president.

The Gabriels are the tenderly wrought creations of the playwright Richard Nelson. Their time onstage here and

in two previous dramas — along with Mr. Nelson’s earlier tetralogy, “The Apple Family Plays” (seen between

2010 and 2013), also set in Rhinebeck — may collectively represent the most profound achievement in topical

theater in this country since the Depression-era triumphs of Clifford Odets’s “Waiting for Lefty” and Marc

Blitzstein’s “The Cradle Will Rock.”

Not that Mr. Nelson’s cycle of works is anything like those ardently partisan predecessors. Neither the Apple

nor the Gabriel plays are exhortative in any polemical way. Nor do they belong to that class of domestic

melodramas (see: “August: Osage County”) in which a warring, divided family festers with the sins of their

nation.

What Mr. Nelson, who keeps adding to these plays up until hours before their first performances, does is quieter

and, ultimately, far sadder and more resonant. He asks us to sit down in real time, in the kitchen of a close

family for a casual meal. And as we listen to its members talk, even on trivial subjects like the decoration of

cookies, we feel the far-reaching tremors of a scared country that has come down with a rattling case of identity

crisis.

When “Women of a Certain Age” begins, most of its characters have already cast their votes for president. They

have all been for Hillary Clinton, though this play could never serve as part of any campaign endorsement. A

troubled ambivalence shades the political allegiances of the Gabriels, though there is something about the

prospect of a woman as president that makes them glow a bit brighter in the twilight.

As its title suggests, “Women of a Certain Age” is indeed dominated by women — all in late middle age, except

for one, who’s in her 80s, and all as at ease in their roles as if they were their favorite bathrobes. The house

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where they have come together to eat belonged to Thomas Gabriel, a playwright who died a year earlier, and is

now presided over by his widow, Mary (Maryann Plunkett), a retired doctor.

Also assembled for the purposes of making a cheering meal from an old Betty Crocker cookbook are Thomas’s

mother, Patricia (Roberta Maxwell), a resident at an assisted-living center nearby; Thomas’s sister, Joyce (Amy

Warren), a costume designer who lives in Brooklyn; and his first wife, Karin (Meg Gibson), an actress, who is

temporarily staying in the house. Then there’s Hannah (Lynn Hawley), who is married to Thomas’s brother,

George (Jay O. Sanders), a carpenter.

Notice that I have saved mentioning the one male cast member for last. Though all of Mr. Nelson’s Rhinebeck

plays have featured strong female characters, in this one, he more or less turns the stage over to them entirely

(though Mr. Sanders, wonderful as always, is a gallant kibitzer).

And, yes, these women do talk occasionally of Mrs. Clinton, whom they wish were a little closer to perfection

than she, being mortal, has turned out to be. Karin has even put together a one-woman show that traces the

chapters of Mrs. Clinton’s life, to be performed (and not without irony) later that evening.

But in cleaning out a lot of dusty boxes and trunks, the Gabriel women have come across vintage magazines,

cookbooks, photographs and sheet music that summon earlier eras. Women have changed so much since then,

haven’t they? Well, haven’t they?

The reason for all this rummaging, by the way, is that their house is on the market, to help pay for college for

George and Hannah’s son (who cast his first vote for president that afternoon) and for the care of the aging

Patricia. “The buzzards are circling,” George says, but it’s not really a joke. No one is entirely sure of where she

or he will be in a year’s time.

The talk in “Women” never strays far from the safe foot path of casual conversation. But Mr. Nelson knows that

in certain contexts, no conversation is casual. And somehow, before you know it, this modest play has indirectly

addressed matters both of the utmost immediate relevance — the election, the economy, the medical industry —

and of cosmic implications.

Far more than in any of his other plays, Mr. Nelson comes close here to capturing the elusive, expansive comic

sadness we associate with his beloved Chekhov. That Chekhovian sense of time fading even as we inhabit it

thrums through both the talk and the silences.

This is all the truer because the team of designers here — Susan Hilferty and Jason Ardizzone-West (set),

Jennifer Tipton (lighting) and Scott Lehrer and Will Pickens (sound) — have made the Gabriels’ kitchen into

what feels like a warm corner of never-ending security. And yet we’re abidingly aware that this house may well

be demolished within the year.

When we say that “this too shall pass,” it is sometimes as a source of comfort. But when you think about the

phrase in a larger way, it’s frightening, too, in that it says that our very lives shall pass soon enough. Mr. Nelson

understands both the solace and the sorrow of that multipurpose adage.

By the way, if you plan to see “Women” — and you should, no matter your political persuasion — brace

yourself for the moment when Ms. Plunkett’s Mary, toward the end, is asked, “What are you going to do?”

It’s a question that’s pregnant with possibilities, but Mary chooses to answer it in the most direct and literal-

minded way on offer. This is not the kind of statement that usually elicits tears, but the house was in floods on

the night I saw “Women.” Perhaps everyone was thinking, as I was, that the only thing to do when the world

goes dark is to try to avoid thinking about anything beyond that next, small step you have to take.

November 10, 2016

Review: Stranded. And Don’t Expect Help From Those

Animals.

By Laura Collins-Hughes

Hush, the movie’s starting.

“Exterior, night,” John Fleck says in a film-noir voice, narrating the screenplay he’s enacting before us. A

cigarette clenched between his lips, he walks onto the darkened stage at Dixon Place with only a miniature

flashlight to illuminate his face. “A full moon rising on a cloudy night casts an eerie glow on a Godforsaken

blacktop highway winding its way along the upper coast of Maine.”

Fog rolls in: a puff of cigarette smoke. A toy car in Mr. Fleck’s hand careens off the make-believe road. The

stranded driver seeks shelter at a nearby house — always a bad idea when you’re a character in a gothic horror

spoof, and even more so when it’s as gory and gleefully dark as Mr. Fleck’s delightfully deranged solo show,

“Blacktop Highway,” which soon layers video into the mix.

With his fellow performance artists Karen Finley, Tim Miller and Holly Hughes, Mr. Fleck is best known as

one of the N.E.A. Four, who in the 1990s found themselves at the center of a cultural debate about art and

obscenity after they were denied grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. Ms. Finley became

infamous for smearing herself with chocolate onstage in a work dealing with psychic damage.

“Blacktop Highway” prefers butterscotch, spooned and drizzled in the midst of a sexual frenzy.

Directed by Randee Trabitz, it’s a show that embraces absurdity from the get-go but eases us into a creepy story

line full of cruelty, lust and shame, about a pair of incestuous siblings, their Bible-quoting father and a

menagerie of animals in constant danger of being killed for food or taxidermy. There are also a disfigured,

rather yearning character, called Pitiful Creature, and a fusty academic who breaks in occasionally to comment

on the work. All of them would do well to watch their backs.

Aided by a bit of puppetry (designed by Christine Papalexis) and extensive video (designed by Heather Fipps),

both prerecorded and live, the charismatic Mr. Fleck plays each character as well as the narrator, and does

sound effects. As technical elements pile on, the show becomes messier than it needs to. A technical glitch on

Saturday night foiled the ending.

Some of the evening’s funniest moments occur onscreen. Yet “Blacktop Highway” is at its intoxicating best

when it’s simplest, depending on little more than Mr. Fleck’s rapid-fire ingenuity as a live performer. In the

room with him, our imaginations can fill in the blanks.

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Cast Albums For The Week of November 19