I would love to be a fly on that bar

photo credits are Ken Yotsukura

Townsend writes in rare registers: heightened melodrama, yes, but also densely written jeremiad about personal, political anguish. How much is "real" here wavers, except for the rock-solid sense we're in the presence of real talent—both onstage (Weinstein is amazing) & behind it. www.jewishplot.com

But Townsend dug this thing up (the word "plot" has certain graveyard implications, no?) to explore even darker matters than antisemitism in Dickens's London. The games-within-games that Townsend and director Sarah Hughes play instill a sick dread in us. I found it thrilling but nauseating (3/4)

When Madeline Weinstein welcomes us, she introduces Eddie Kaye Thomas, playing the lead in Townsend's reconstruction of a "lost" nineteenth-century play subtitled "The Semite of Mayfair." The melodrama wends along; it's almost too bad to be true. "Oh," you'll think, "how far theatre has come" (2/4)

The show is just right for Election week: it demonstrates the vulnerabilities of coalition building while inspiring us to do it anyway. It also helps us recognize bad-faith actors by naming their strategies—now, when we see someone working the refs as Pearlman did, we won't fall for it. Right? (5/5)

"Kyoto"'s point is that Pearlman invented the anti-progress rulebook: delay negotiations on procedural grounds, exaggerate scientific uncertainty, attack the scientist rather than the science, exploit your enemies' inner divisions, etc. In this important way, "Kyoto" is good, because it's useful 4/5

Like other such shows, Kyoto builds tension with cinematic music, bustling movement to create a sense of drama (some of us still remember the way Jennifer Ehle vigorously slid a coffee table onstage for J.T. Rogers's Process Drama "Oslo"), and a climactic Storm of Papers. This stuff kinda works 3/5

It's another Process Drama from overseas: we've recently had "Grenfell: In the Words of Survivors," brought over from the National, which re-enacted the inquiry after a hellish fire, and "Agreement," from Belfast's Lyric, which dramatized the down-to-the-wire peace process in Northern Ireland 2/5

Graham, wary of the "dark ladies" she plays, talks about being a "vessel" for her characters; Move's embodiment is in that same spirit. He too makes himself a cup for another person's wine. Graham's intensity hasn't dimmed...and the show at its best feels like touching a still-live electric wire.

The first section, when Move and the two former Graham dancers Catherine Cabeen and PeiJu Chien-Pott enter silently, moving in elegant and sorrowful hieroglyphics, was stirring; the section when Graham/Move is explaining the company exercises, demonstrated by the two dancers, was illuminating

Move and Lisa Kron (as Walter Terry) reenact the pair's 92nd Street Y interview from 1963. Martha Graham never knowingly under-dramatized. Asked about how to deal with repetition, she says, graciously, head bowing like a lily, "Don't get bored—think of yourself as dancing towards your death." Right.

I bet there’s a waitlist! No show is ever truly full!

The ending wobbles, but all else is superb... lovely performances—Arielle Goldman & Molly Carden as bickering sisters are particularly good—in a drama that is studiously about this world: its mystery, its types of harm, and the excitement of those who read and discuss it deeply, making it new (4/4)

Cespedes plays the most questioning and querulous of them, badgering her invisible mom (Botchan, offstage) for answers, even as she grows elusive about what help she'll provide. Is help coming? The girls call the voice "Mrs. H" and, after a bit, I remembered what letter "Hashem" starts with. (3/4)

Vaynberg writes about a group of orthodox Jewish girls who grow into women. As 13-year-olds, they study Torah (& laugh & eat snacks), instructed by an (offstage) mother in Talmudic categories of damage. In the 2nd act, they reunite as adults, and we see patterns of ego & learning & hurt repeat (2/4)