HURRICANE DIANE, by Madeleine George At The Hartford Stage

 

Review by Andy Hoffman

HURRICANE DIANE, by Madeleine George At The Hartford Stage June 5-29, 2025 Directed by Zoe Golub-Sass

 The Hartford Stage closes out its 2024-25 season with a rousing production of HURRICANE DIANE, by Madeleine George. A comic take on Greek tragedy, the play has Dionysus returning to claim a rightful place among humans and stop the degradation of the Earth — starting with a cul-de-sac in a suburban New Jersey neighborhood. The demi-god appears as Diana, a landscaper promising to return the neat, manicured lawn of suburbia into permaculture forest, a state of natural equilibrium. Dionysus, god of wine, agriculture, theater, and insanity, prefers a world with as few controls as possible, a place that celebrates the rioting soul of both nature and human beings — especially women. The four identical houses on this cul-de-sac hold four very different women out of whom Diane plans to create her first acolytes and from there reestablish the Dionysian cult. Among the four, Diane first picks Carol, played coolly by Katya Campbell, in whom she senses a deep loneliness. 

Unfortunately, though, Carol treasures her suburban ideal of pristine lawn and curb appeal as the only defense against the wild disappointments of life. She dreams of an elaborate wrought-iron bench as the centerpiece of her blessedly restrained garden. Diana, repulsed both spiritually and physically, realizes she has chosen her first convert badly and turns her attention to Beth, whose husband sucked her dry and then left her in this emotional desert. The seduction is almost immediate, freeing Diane to shift her focus first to Renee, a former lesbian who already believes in permaculture, and then to Pam, an Italian housewife who has becomes the emotional center of this corner of the world. 

\The all-female cast – Christina DeCicco as Pam, Sharina Martin as Renee, and Alyse Alan Lewis as Beth – push the story forward with visible energy – holding the spotlight for Bernadette Sefic’s Diane. Between the sequential seductions, the women gather to tell stories and assess their lives. Like most of HURRICANE DIANE, these exchanges provide nonstop laughs, from the good-natured ribbing about Renee’s too-often told stories of her wild past to the more serious question of how much sex is normal. Madeleine George has a gift for humor; she’s a writer and executive story editor on the Steve Martin vehicle on Hulu, the award-winning ONLY MURDERS IN THIS BUILDING. The Hartford Stage brought in Zoe Golub-Sass to magnify the laughs. This production finds the extraordinary balance between humor and cataclysm. As Diane says in her opening monologue, “It’s 11:45. If I don’t step in now, the glaciers are gonna melt the permafrost is gonna thaw and fast-forward a hundred years and there won’t be a single human left on the planet to worship me!”

 HURRICANE DIANE blends the bawdy and existential threat into a shining example of ‘a spoonful of sugar’ to help the medicine go down, a call to action wrapped in myth and hi-jinks. Almost every aspect

Romeo and Juliet, a play by William Shakespeare At The Hartford Stage

 Romeo and Juliet

Review of Romeo and Juliet, a play by William Shakespeare

At The Hartford Stage through May 18, 2025

By Andy Hoffman

Definitely worth the trip to see the Hartford Stage production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Directed by the company’s Artistic Director Melia Bensussen, this instance of the classic possesses both the familiar tragedy of “star-crossed” lovers and much unfamiliar, new without devolving into the strange for strangeness’ sake. Bensussen places the play in colonial Mexico at a moment of historical uncertainty. This setting opens the play to a rich textual vein in Shakespeare’s script, the repeated references to light and dark paired with as much emphasis on love and death. The actors hit those contrasts with just the right weight: enough to strike the ear of the audience without twisting the language into incomprehension. We expect professional productions to render Shakespeare’s verse with clarity, and this production goes beyond merely making his lines intelligible. The actors sound contemporary, finding the humor and the tension that carries the play swiftly through the familiar rough waters of youthful love.

The deceptively simple set proves itself malleable enough to represent the city of Verona, a church, a garden, a public sphere, a private banquet hall, a bedroom. And a crypt, all with almost no disruption of either the stage or the flow of the play. Bensussen and her cast run through Romeo and Juliet with astonishing speed, giving up almost nothing in the process. The set, equipped with a few arches, several entrances, and the simplest suggestion of a balcony, appears a first as textured stone, but as the play goes on the changes in lighting reveal colors and patterns hidden on the paint. These striking, almost magic, transformations of the stage allow the design to seamlessly represent a variety of venues. A few simple devices – lanterns dropped from above, the bed (and later crypt) rising from below – give the actors all they require to establish their setting. The costumes, too, redolent of both 19th Century Mexico and Dia de los Muertos, with their flowers and skulls, carry through the themes of light and dark, love and death. The production demonstrates the mastery The Hartford Stage has achieved under Bensussen.

The performances, too, propel this Romeo and Juliet past standard productions of the Bard. I must single out Carmen Berkeley, who finds strength in Juliet, most frequently portrayed as the object of Romeo’s random passion. Juliet’s strength in this production doesn’t come from her beauty, though she surely has that, but rather from her self-knowledge. Shakespeare’s script can reduce Juliet to a pawn in the Capulet family’s political positioning, but Berkeley presents her as a young woman with the power of self-determination. The cast around Juliet, with one exception, leans into her strength, supporting her as she drives the action of the play. Juliet’s parents, played by Gerardo Rodriguez and Eva Kaminsky, Annmarie Kelly as her nurse, put Juliet’s power at the center of the performance and help make this production as effective as it is. The remainder of the cast shapes the movement of the play, keeping the pace breathless. Alejandra Escalante, as Mercutio, deserves special notice. Romeo here becomes the one weak link in the cast, perhaps because his power recedes as Juliet’s blossoms, but I couldn’t help but feel that an actor with better chops than Niall Cunningham could have found a way to make Romeo more compelling even as Carmen Berkeley shines.

Melia Bensussen has done more than simply direct a fresh production of a Shakespeare classic, itself a remarkable accomplishment. She has also opened the play to new insights and new emotions, at least for me. In addition to the tragic and well-worn love story, this production made me see a strong political message, one that could transcend the long-settled quarrels of Elizabethan England. In that time, after the religious violence of Henry VIII and Queen Mary – persecuting first Catholics and then Protestants – Elizabeth navigated a difficult line that maintained an uneasy peace. Shakespeare himself came from a family with long-standing Catholic ties and therefore lived in and benefitted from this truce. In addition to the passion shared by Romeo and Juliet, they can also be seen as two faces of Christianity – or two sides of any political conflict – and Romeo and Juliet as a plea to create peace before that passion destroys them both and Verona with them. Congratulations to the entire production, with special laurels for its director and its Juliet.

Nassim Review of Nassim, a play by Nassim Soleimanpour

 

Nassim

Review of Nassim, a play by Nassim Soleimanpour

At the Calderwood Pavilion of the Huntington Theatre through October 27, 2024

By Andy Hoffman

Nassim, currently playing at the Calderwood Pavilion and presented by the Huntington Theatre, defies all expectation of a theatrical experience. It features a new co-star every performance, and that co-star has not seen the script prior to the start of the show. As the play begins, we see the featured performer struggle to gain his or her footing as they attempt to act out a play about which they know almost nothing, cold-reading their lines projected on a screen behind them. The audience instantly sympathizes with the performer as the script they read pokes fun at stage conventions. On the night I saw the production, Armando Rivera, the Puerto Rico-born Co-Artistic Director of Teatro Chelsea gamely kept up with the process, even when the text on the screen appeared in Italics, as stage directions typically do. He boldly faced the challenge of talking to the audience while glancing back at the screen for his lines. A pair of hands sometimes appear with the lines, changing the words or forcing an emphasis the performer elides. About 20 minutes into the play, we learn that those hands belong to the playwright himself, Nassim Soleimanpour.

Soleimenpour has a fascinating story to tell in this autobiographical play. Born in Iran, Soleimenpour cannot produce his plays in his repressive home country. Living now in Berlin, the playwright feels always disoriented, writing in his native Farsi for audiences that will not understand him and then translating the script to perform elsewhere. As a result, NASSIM deals with language and the ways in which language both divides people and brings them together. Soleimanpour has gathered many languages on tour with his plays. He lives in Germany now, and seems largely fluent in English, though he speaks little. In the almost 500 performances of NASSIM, he has gathered words from around the world, which he shows the audience in the journal he keeps of words contributed by the audiences and defined by the performers. Through his “new best friend” – the performance’s special guest – Nassim and NASSIM reach a remarkable plateau of feeling and insight. And as you might expect, if you attend NASSIM, you might have the opportunity to learn some Farsi – onstage, in front of a supportive audience.

I would like to take this opportunity to praise Loretta Greco, the Huntington’s Artistic Director, who has shaken awake the somewhat staid old-guard company with a stunning and excellent line-up of inventive productions. And she has transformed the Boston theater scene not only through the Huntington Theatre’s annual schedule, but also through her policy of partnering with small theaters in the city, most particularly with African-American companies like the Front Porch Arts Collective. Under Greco, The Huntington will present Mfoniso Udofia’s multi-play cycle about a Nigerian American family. Efforts like this have opened up theater in the city, making it a truly a cultural institution for all of the region’s cultures. NASSIM carries this attitude forward with charm. Greco has the knack of staging shows that push the theatrical envelope while embracing the audience. Having sat through adventuresome but painful and destructive seasons at theaters elsewhere, I wish to give Greco unstinting praise for embracing the new without alienating traditional theater fans. It’s been a remarkable growth to watch. I hope the Huntington can keep Greco in Boston for a good long time.

NASSIM has an entertaining line-up of performers scheduled for its run, including Mfoniso Udofia, Tony Shalhoub, Jared Bowen, Keith Lockhart, and Imari Paris Jeffries. Every night will bring a different performance of the same play as these public figures and sometimes actors play with Nassim Soleimenpour’s script. Bringing in community leaders to perform makes NASSIM a bit of a gimmick, a gimmick that Soleimanpour used previously in his 2011 WHITE RABBIT RED RABBIT. But just because it’s a gimmick does not mean that it is easy to do or that it isn’t effective. My party left the theater feeling more connected to the world, and we can all use that feeling, however we acquire it.

Review of Leopoldstadt, a play by Tom Stoppard

 

Leopoldstadt

Review of Leopoldstadt, a play by Tom Stoppard

At the Huntington Theatre through October 13, 2024

By Andy Hoffman

Tom Stoppard has said that Leopoldstadt might be his final play. The production of it at the Huntington Theater, running through October 13, 2024, gives us reason to celebrate and reflect on the playwright’s accomplishments. From his first hit, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in 1966, through his most recent work – with important side journeys into film, such as Brazil and Shakespeare in Love (for which he won an Oscar) – Stoppard has challenged directors and audiences with his intellectual slapstick, jumps from reality to fantasy, splices of chronology, and productions seemingly too large for the stage. In Leopoldstadt, Stoppard explores his family history, but with all the elements that have made his plays essential viewing.

Stoppard has transferred his family from Zlin, Czechoslovakia to Vienna, Austria, which gives him the broad canvas he loves. Beginning in the 1860s, Vienna became an artistic and intellectual magnet, providing a launching pad for excellence in diverse fields. Home to Sigmund Freud, Gustav Klimt, and Gustav Mahler, Vienna drew people and perspectives from across the Habsburg empire. Approximately ten percent of Vienna was Jewish, and Jews wielded disproportionate influence in universities, in the arts, and in society. Although still excluded from full and equal participation in public life, Viennese Jews led and inspired Austrian culture. Stoppard, who only learned at age 57 of his own Jewish roots, reimagines his family in the political and artistic milieu of Vienna, where secular Jews often adopted Christianity, married out of their tribe, and endeavored to mix completely into Austrian society. Leopoldstadt is a multi-generational family drama, in which the largely Jewish family is buffeted about through history. Despite their accomplishments, their friends, and their individual efforts to pass beyond social barriers, in the end Nazis determine who is Jewish and who is not, who is worthy of full citizenship in Austria, and who will find themselves in the ashpit of Auschwitz. Stoppard’s parents had the good fortune to escape, though his father died on the circuitous route to England, and he was himself raised as an Englishman, full stop. Most of his family, like most of the family we meet in Leopoldstadt, fall victim to the Holocaust.

Directed by Carey Perloff, who helmed the superb Lehman Trilogy last season, this production of Leopoldstadt handles Stoppard’s dramatic pyrotechnics adroitly. In the first scene, for example, the entire family appears on stage for a Christmas gathering, almost twenty characters crowding the stage with music, dancing, and family quarrels as we focus in on small groups chatting about art, politics, and religion. The scene could devolve into a confusing mess, but the Huntington’s actors, following Perloff masterful direction, keep the action moving throughout. The drama focuses on Hermann’s attempt to navigate Vienna’s turbulence with money and connections. He converts, marries a Christian, and truly believes he will ride out the tide of history. He learns, after attempting to satisfy his honor through a duel, that members of the class he aspires to won’t even deign to kill the descendent of a Jew in pursuit of honor. Only then does he, and the audience, begin to fully realize how impossible fighting the tide will become. Stoppard uses the well-known story of the rise of Nazism to point out the dangerous times we live in now. Toward the end of the play, when we meet the few survivors in the fourth generation of the family we meet in the first scene, one of the characters representing the English Stoppard observes that the Holocaust could never happen again. The audience knows better and gasps audibly. We have seen almost the entire family obliterated, generation after generation, before we can clearly distinguish individual members, more expendable Jews than remarkable people.

Brave and ambitious as it is, Leopoldstadt does not quite reach the stratospheric heights of Travesties or Arcadia, but it reminds us that we have enjoyed the inestimable privilege of sharing the earth with Tom Stoppard. As Ludwig, the family mathematician, uses a cat’s cradle to explain the hidden relationships between events discernable only through study and intellect, we recognize and thank Stoppard for helping us in our struggle to understand the extent to which people choose cruelty. Extraordinary performances by Nael Nacer as Hermann and Firdous Bamji as his cousin Ludwig anchor the picture of the family, even as they disappear under the waves of the twentieth century. The costumes, set design, lighting and sound also help pull together this complex family portrait. I encourage you to see Leopoldstadt and embrace the sweep of language and history Tom Stoppard brings to life.

Toni Stone Review of Toni Stone, a play by Lydia R. Diamond

 

Toni Stone

Review of Toni Stone, a play by Lydia R. Diamond

At the Huntington Theatre through June 16, 2024

By Andy Hoffman

In Toni Stone, the Huntington Theater has an exhilarating show to close out the season. Filled with dance, music, drama and laughs, this story of the first female professional baseball player on a male team simultaneously lifts the spirits of the audience and explores the ways that identity defines our possible lives. As a black woman, Toni couldn’t play in the women’s professional league memorialized in A League of Their Own. Instead, she signed with a variety of semi-pro teams before landing on the roster of the Indianapolis Clowns, replacing Hank Aaron at second base for the 1953 season. This rousing production at the Huntington Theatre brought the audience to its feet, closing out Artistic Director Loretta Greco’s glorious first season at the helm. An evening at Toni Stone produces all the joy and satisfaction of an exquisite day at the ballpark.

The play focuses on the single season Stone spent in the league, hired at least in part as novelty to sell tickets. The Negro League played excellent baseball, with enormous talents like Satchel Paige, Jackie Robinson, and Hank Aaron in the line-ups before Major League Baseball welcomed African Americans, but the owners saw the games – both within the league and the unofficial exhibition games with white teams, often rigged so the white teams would win – as entertainment as much as sport. If you think of the Harlem Globetrotters as the framework, you’ll get the idea. In this context, Toni’s ground-breaking season seems more showmanship than athletic accomplishment. Though Toni Stone was an extraordinary athlete, distinguishing herself in track, figure-skating, and gymnastics before settling on baseball, the league owners secretly agreed to pitch hittable balls to her to satisfy the audience. Whether for that reason or another, Stone stepped back from professional baseball after playing a year with the Clowns.

In the context of the play, however, this performative emphasis in her presence on the field brings meaning to the production. Diamond, who both wrote and directed the play, leaves Jennifer Mogbock, who plays Toni marvelously, as the only woman on the stage. Men play the other women, just as the Black actors play the white team owners and the disgruntled fans when Toni and her teammates refuse to throw a game to the white exhibition opposition and the boys

learning the game. Toni Stone explores the degree to which gender, race, and sexuality can become purely matters of performance rather than matters of fact. Having a woman play professional baseball calls into question all the assumptions about how socially constructed identities become stand-ins for the reality we share. It’s a testimony to this production that the profundities of the script never bog down the show, just as the extraordinary fact of a woman in professional baseball doesn’t alter the basic facts of baseball’s nine innings and three outs. The show zips along even as it invites the audience to uncover the essence beneath the performance.

The play – and Mogbock’s performance – also reveals the painful conflicts Toni experiences as she breaks cultural norms. Toni never feels at ease or at home on the baseball field, even though the sport represents her true love. Whenever she comes up against the social tensions her boundary-busting position imposes on her, she pulls out a pack of baseball cards from her pocket and begins reciting statistics as a way to remind her of what she’s doing. Her character finds a balance in teammate Spec, played by Omar Robinson, who reads between at bats and quotes the Ancestors – especially Harriet Tubman and W.E.B. DuBois – throughout the play. The set and the cast shift endlessly as new characters enter and exit, played by Toni’s teammates. The stands form the backdrop onstage becomes the bus the players travel on, the whorehouse where they’re sometimes forced to sleep, the bar where Toni meets Alberga, with whom she forms a relationship, and a variety of other performance spaces. The elasticity of the set and the cast reflects the elasticity of the game, which remains baseball no matter who plays it. Toni Stone caps a promising initial season with Lorretta Greco at the artistic helm of the Huntington, balancing crowd-pleasing and challenging productions such as Prayer for the French Republic, John Proctor Is The Villain, and The Band’s Visit. The Huntington Theatre finds itself in sure hands, and next season promises to be every bit as good as Toni Stone.