Meditations on Identity

...Unlike him, Charles S. Dutton had earned his obscurity...

...A talented, conflicted soul, he struts before his colleagues and kowtows to Irvin and Sturdyvant...

...Now, you take the white man...

...If only that were so...

...Up to a point they defer to Ma's wishes...

...Wolf is captured by freelance Taliban, tortured and let gostrangely undamaged...

...The two old men, survivors of the Taliban, couldn't stand each other...

...WoLF:How'd he die...

...It would be more accurate to call it a two-Everyman show...

...Wolf not only intrudes on Abram's space and time, he also destroys his privacy...

...If Abram is a Jew, demands Wolf, why does he wear that Arabian headdress...

...His works, most of them centered in his hometown of Pittsburgh, include The Piano Lesson, Jitney, Joe Turner's Come and Gone and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fences...

...This month it happens to be ladies' ensembles...

...The one hit hardest by this is Levee...

...Sic transit...

...You all just back up and leave Levee alone about the white man...

...Under Aunt Deb's tutelage the robbery comes offwithout a hitch and tire teenagers head south to blow the money...

...The first is a rare disease that escalates the aging process: Its victims grow old at four times the normal rate...

...Buddy is a lorn boozer who spends his nights at bars and his days pumping gas...

...The item inspired Greenfeld's idiosyncratic work...

...But there is a redeeming performance that gleams in all this clutter...

...This she does despite a script that wants us to love her, yet makes her as unsympathetic as possible in Act Two, when she gets involved in Aunt Deb's check kiting scam...

...in the early 1920s Ma Rainey was a supernova, recording on Paramount's "'race" label...

...No dice...

...Like the playwright, the lead in Ma Rainey was completely unknown at the time...

...No more of that...

...He'd be about your age now...

...The production had difficulties midway through rehearsals...

...The Levacos have just moved from one New Jersey town to another, in an attempt to avoid Pattie's sister Debra (Ana Gasteyer...

...As the old Yiddish proverb has it, a guest who stays more than three days sticks a nail in the door...

...Then styles changed...

...Is he really a Jew after all—or a Muslim pretending to be a Jew in order to take over this building, perhaps to sell it to the Americans...

...Lugging a suitcase he refuses to open, Wolf (George Drance) claims to be an Israeli looking for a place to pray—and a place to stay, because the hotels are either fully booked or totally destroyed...

...Just before the curtain of Act One, for example, Kimberly suffers a severe heart attack...

...Kimberly Akimbo shows the marks of two afflictions, Progeria and Terminal Eccentricity...

...That's why he's troubled all the time...

...But once the drama opened on Broadway in 1984, the playwright announced that he had much larger intentions...

...He has to answer to two higher authorities...

...The dominatrix may have power over her own circle, but she can barely make a dent in the white world...

...And that ain't none of your business...

...That sad possibility, along with the ensemble work, Toni-Leslie James' smart costumes and David Gallo's imposing set, is reason enough to see Ma Rainey, even in this hobbled version...

...Jug band music was out...

...To get his own songs published and performed, he will do anything, no matter how demeaning...

...How old was he when he died...

...But in the end they make the rules, pay the cash and assure that the music conforms to their commercial demands...

...An exchange between the two men hints not only at local but geopolitical sorrow: Abram: I had a son...

...That's the way it goes around here...

...The pianist, Toledo (Thomas Jefferson Byrd), is abespectacled prophet manqué: 'As long as the colored man look to white folks to put a crown on what he say, as long as he looks to white folks for approval, then he ain't never gonna find out who he is or what he's about...

...Others in the cast cannot overcome their parts so easily...

...After spending an hour convincing us that she really is sweet 16, Burke changes into old-lady's clothes, complete with turban...

...Wolf knows a great deal more about sales than he knows about Judaism...

...Dutton has to play his scenes with her in capital letters, reducing Rainey to a walk-on of no real significance—except that she is being played by a Hollywood comedienne whose best work was done more than a decade ago...

...The trouble with this production has nothing to do with the text...

...The white man don't know how to have a good time...

...Although Kimberly is a member of the most dysfunctional family since Archie and Edith Bunker ruled prime time, her father, Buddy (Jake Weber), looks out for his young/old daughter...

...After considerable palavering, Ma and Sylvester do their thing...

...The absence of force in what should have been a funny, ferocious "Big Mama" character unbalances the evening...

...Reluctantly, Abram allows his co-religionist to remain for the night...

...In his lively meditation on identity, politics, friendship, and history, Greenfield maintains a "through line," keeping the audience off-balance from the opening scene...

...I ain't worried about that...

...He don't know how to laugh at life...

...Written by Josh Greenfeld, a novelist and screenwriter (Harry and Tonto) and sometime New Leader contributor, it concerns an actual news item of the recent past...

...The drop-off has been significant: McClinton is nowhere near as effective in shaping a drama...

...Crisis hovers in the air...

...The wisest is Abram (Jerry Matz), a lifelong resident of Afghanistan...

...Bombs can be heard outside a ruined synagogue in the capital city, and from time to time machine guns chatter on the nearby square...

...Trombonist and bandleader Cutler (Carl Gordon) would prefer to play music and avoid trouble...

...The same question could be asked of him...

...Burke's most poignant moment comes in the middle of this absurd scheme, when she is called upon to play Jeff's grandmother...

...It is also my nominee for the best production of the OffOff Broadway season...

...As the girlfriend and the nephew, Simms and Mackie provide some welcome comic relief...

...La MaMa describes this as a two-man show...

...We have no choice...

...He got through slavery and he'll get through whatever else the white man put on him...

...In addition, she is a pregnant, pill-popping depressive, and lame to boot, the result of a leg-shattering accident...

...Wolf: What war...

...His overriding belief is in retail—peddling anything he can get his hands on...

...hot jazz was in...

...He, too, made goodonhis intentions...

...One Friday night, Abram's routine is interrupted by an ebullient forty something stranger in Western garb...

...In the play's most explosively comic moment, he finally opens the suitcase, promises Abram a partnership for turning the synagogue into an emporium, extracts a vast line of miniskirts and sequined dresses, and hangs the garments from improvised hooks—Daffy's come to Afghanistan...

...That arena is represented by two men— Irvin (Jack Davidson), her manager, and Sturdyvant (Louis Zorich), who runs the recording studio...

...Burke and Gallagher are always ingratiating, even when their speeches are anything but...

...So we find the 16-year-old Kimberly Levaco (Marylouise Burke) hovering between adolescence and the AARP...

...But Lindsay-Abaire soon squanders the good will...

...This is a paraphrase of Othello's famous speech, "I have done the state some service, and they know't...

...Until Richards' retirement two years ago, the entire Wilson oeuvre bore his stamp...

...Abram: What's the difference...

...Billed as "The Mother of the Blues," this showboating headliner caromed up and down the black vaudeville circuit, singing double entendre numbers, flashing diamond stickpins and jangling her signature necklace of gold coins...

...The answer is up on the marquee: She is one of the producers, and producers never fire themselves...

...Hyperthyroid style may be appropriate for burlesque or slam-bang farce, but it is wildly inappropriate for a work that required delicacy and got flagrancy...

...If there is a villain in this piece it is director David Petrarca, who obviously believes that more is more, and has encouraged his cast to go over the top at all times...

...What is an astonishment is her total lack of stage presence...

...She wants Sylvester on her record despite the youth's impediment, no matter how weird the results...

...The statement continues, "I have done the theater some service, and they know it...

...Yet she is in irreversible physical decline, growing more decrepit by the day...

...He's just gonna be about what the white folks want him to be about...

...When Wolf demands to see the Torah, however, Abram can't dig it up...

...The result is horrific black-on-black violence that leaves one victim dead—and the two white bosses unscathed...

...This was to be the first in a cycle of 10 play s about nothing less than the AfricanAmerican experience in the 20th century, decade by decade...

...During the tryouts of Ma Rainey s Black Bottom, August Wilson's first play was rumored to be an attempt at resurrection...

...Convicted of man-slaughter, he had spent seven years injail, part of them in solitary for aggressive behavior...

...She turns out to be a homeless, hostile lesbian jailbird...

...Nor does it have anything to do with the quartet of musicians...

...No more ofthat...

...The sojoum stretches on...

...I can smile and say 'Yessir' to whoever I please...

...Weber makes an effort before settling into a TV sitcom clich...

...At the actual age of 62, Burke swings nimbly between the postures and confusions of puberty, and the pains and forbearances of age...

...others remain unsolved...

...Reminded that she has come in late, Ma refers to herself in the third person: "We'll be ready to go when Madame says we're ready...

...But as the leader of the ensemble he has to keep everyone in line...

...Abram: He was killed in the war...

...Most of the old man's energy is spent honing his survival skills, wrapping himself in Middle Eastern dress, hoarding a carrot or two for soup, hiding a teapot from collateral damage...

...Worse still, he questions his host's Jewish identity...

...Wolf: Where is he now...

...As soon as a high school nerd, Jeff (John Gallagher Jr...

...Your business is to play what I say" That may be, but Cutler is not the final arbiter...

...The fact that Wilson's moral is unsubtle does not make it any the less valid...

...That's one sure thing.' Bassist Slow Drag (Stephen McKinley Henderson) is a Panglossian figure who believes survival depends on going with the flow: "The colored man's gonna be all right...

...As it develops...

...The chaotic mise-en-scène at the Manhattan Theatre Club City Center Stage is occasionally alleviated with light interludes...

...He eats more than his share...

...they blend well and their give-and-take is as infectious as a jazz riff...

...Then again, Waiting for Godot never provided a glimpse of Godot, and, as Singer observed, "We have to believe in free will...

...Aiding the hallucinatory quality of the situation are Tom Lee's imaginative set, Sally Lesser's costumes and, of course, the performances of Matz and Drance under George Ferencz' impressive direction...

...Still, because Ma Rainey was configured so well, and because Dutton has returned to play the central role, the revival at the Royale Theater has its soaring moments...

...Although laughs are scattered throughout the evening, they cannot alleviate a pervasive air of melancholy...

...The Taliban have been uprooted, but gangs still roam the streets and wise men stay indoors...

...The wrinkled apparition is heartstopping, an indication of man's (and woman's) fate...

...Later, Abram manages to procure food and basic medical supplies...

...And if he's the caretaker of this synagogue, where is the Torah...

...Does it matter which war...

...Not quite...

...She has always been more of a personality than a thespian, and it is no surprise to hear that she sings poorly and see that she acts unconvincingly...

...It is as if she were a creature in an animated cartoon, continually falling off cliffs or getting bombarded with objects, but always bouncing back with no harm done...

...bombing of Afghanistan in the autumn of 2001, a New York Times reporter discovered that two synagogues still stood in the capital city, and that each had a single worshiper...

...The first is the bisexual Ma Rainey (Whoopi Goldberg), who makes a loud, tardy arrival accompanied by her girlfriend Dussie Mae (Heather Alicia Simms) and her stuttering nephew Sylvester (Anthony Mackie...

...With the Taliban on the run, he argues, the Muslim women will throw off their burkhas and jump into fashionable gear...

...Living under the shadow of senescence, this unusual heroine seems the only rational (not to say credible) person in the house...

...Thus the musician who has the most to contribute winds up with nothing except an offer from Sturdyvant to buy his original compositions for $5 per...

...Put down by Cutler for saying too many "Yessuhs" to Whitey, the horn man responds with a powerhouse soliloquy, recalling the brutal rape of his mother, and the way his father took fatal revenge on the white men who did the crime...

...Then why was Goldberg given the role...

...Jeff, a budding wordsmith, composes anagrams based on people's names and Kimberly Levaco turns into Cleverly Akimbo...

...after all, she's their meal ticket...

...In the process Levee's efforts are all thrown out: They're too progressive for the retrograde taste of those who count...

...where else can he go...

...After completing a college course the parolee was admitted to the Yale Drama School, studying theater arts under Lloyd Richards...

...Loud music issues from his CD player...

...The part of Levee, a volatile, painfully insecure trumpeter, presented Dutton with a career-making opportunity...

...McClinton was incapacitated for a couple of weeks and Dutton took over the direction, no doubt with much travail...

...I went through menopause four years ago...

...Davidson and Zorich are shrewd actors who never overplay their hands...

...The premise is interesting, and on occasion playwright David Lindsay-Abaire (Fuddy Meers) uses it for some telling off-the-wall ironies...

...If Dutton means what he says, the theater will be the poorer for it...

...Small wonder that in the Playbill he declares that this is his farewell performance on the legitimate stage...

...The scene is a recording studio in Chicago, around 1927...

...Aunt Deb finds out where they live and makes a big entrance...

...Wolf: I'm sorry...

...Abram mutters some unsatisfactory answers—the rags are all he has, and the scroll is buried in the Jewish cemetery to protect it from the Taliban...

...But somewhere in midsentence he determined to alter his attitude and his life...

...In the end, some puzzles are cracked...

...Abram: We always have war...

...Extravagant as that statement seemed, Wilson was to make good on his promise...

...The same could be said for Wilson, who then went on to garner just about every award the theater has to offer...

...They were so preoccupied with their personal feud that they barely noticed the fundamentalist Muslims, haters of all things Jewish, just outside their doors...

...The Last Two Jews of Kabul, at the La MaMa Theater, is my nominee for the best title of the Off-Broadway season...

...It was an epochal decision...

...Markell is too unpleasant and self-involved to elicit any sympathy, and Gasteyer is nothing but an elongated, grating yell from start to finish...

...As he sees it, the income will finally allow him to break free from the slavery of freelance life...

...She has just been operated on for carpal tunnel syndrome, and both hands are totally wrapped in bandages, giving her a mummified look...

...She dropped into obscurity, replaced by such singers as Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday, who would never have made it without Rainey's pioneer performances...

...Kimberly is still a child, caparisoned in high school outfits as she pores over her homework...

...Conversely, the Taliban were too busy with their own mishegas to bother with the remnant of what was once a vibrant Jewish community of some 40,000 souls...

...displays an interest in his classmate, Buddy remonstrates that he was young once himself and knows what adolescent boys are up to...

...Abram: Dead...

...He seized it and became that rarest of Broadway beings, an overnight star...

...His wife Pattie (Jodie Markell) is a born loser who collects distress the way a pocket gathers lint...

...No, the trouble is Whoopi Goldberg, a central piece of miscasting...

...Has he bribed them or is he one of them...

...I got my time coming to me...

...Fine...

...After the U.S...

...For the most part, though, this overwrought tragicomedy is a collection of shallow attitudes and tribulations...

...Then director Marion McClinton took over...

...Richards developed Ma Rainey at the Yale Rep, and when he was hired to direct the play in New York he brought along his acolyte...

...Snaps Kimberly: "What are you worried about...

...As the curtain rises on Act Two she has bounced back with scarcely a comment on the emergency...

...Early on...

...All the airports are closed, Wolf points out, and all the roads blocked...

...Four musicians awaiting the appearance of Ma discuss ways of getting on and keeping on while tuning up...

...It is as if Samuel Beckett and Isaac Bashevis Singer had decided to collaborate on an absurdist mystery...

...This he does by skillfully cajoling Toledo and Slow Drag, and by confronting Levee head-on...

...When the trumpeter tries to get the others to play his version of a song instead of Ma's, Cutler responds: "You trying to tell me what we is and ain't gonna play...