Ian McKellen sure knows how to baptize a stage. In 2007, at the recently opened Times Center in Midtown Manhattan, adhering to what he described as his tradition, he capped an evening of public conversation by kneeling to kiss the spotless new boards. Then he rose and recited a speech attributed to Shakespeare.
The birth of a theater is always a miracle and a joy, never more so than when the herd is thinning. But the harder work comes after the kiss. Whose words will be spoken there? How smartly, usefully will the space be filled?
The Bushwick Starr, a home since 2001 to original and often out-there work, can celebrate on both counts: It has given birth to an adorable new theater and opened it with a healthy new play.
The theater, after 23 years in a dim, janky, jury-rigged space on the second floor of a former doll factory, where God forbid you had a bum knee or claustrophobia, has moved three stops farther into Brooklyn on the L train to a former dairy on Eldert Street. The place is still not fancy, but it is bright and welcoming without having sacrificed the invitation of wildness. It honors and improves on the company’s institutional past and the building’s industrial one.
And though “A Woman Among Women,” by Julia May Jonas, which opened there Friday in a co-production with New Georges, is likewise a response to an older work, it is nevertheless that rare thing onstage: a fresh story freshly told.
The work it responds to, but only generally, without overdrawn parallels, is Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons.” In that 1947 drama, a pillar-of-the-community type — “a man among men,” as Miller describes him — knowingly sells defective airplane parts to the Air Force, resulting in the deaths of 21 pilots. The collateral damage as the blame is shifted to a business partner drives the plot; the conflict between personal and communal responsibility is the theme.
“A Woman Among Women” borrows the backyard setting of “All My Sons” but moves it from small-town Ohio in 1946 to Northampton, Mass., today. The men at the center of Miller’s action have been replaced by women in a very different social environment: progressive, semi-communal, racially and romantically diverse. Cleo, the much-admired founder of a women’s wellness center in town, lives with Tina, her platonic life partner; their neighbors on one side are a lesbian couple with two children and on the other, a straight couple with one.
In the manner of such plays, the characters are all up in one another’s business, at first joking and carping lightly about domestic chores and parenting problems. But over the course of 100 minutes, the story darkens as it narrows on brisk, decisive, compartmentalized Cleo (Dee Pelletier) and her two daughters, who were essentially raised by the free-spirited Tina (Maria-Christina Oliveras). The daughter we meet is Grace (Zoë Geltman): 36, neurotic and an inveterate people pleaser. The reason she is so invested in pleasing may be inferred from the fact that the other daughter, Jo, having beaten a man nearly to death, is in prison.
Jonas, who also writes fiction — “Vladimir,” her debut novel, is in a way a response to “Lolita” — builds this world exquisitely, calibrating the revelations like doses of arsenic, then chasing them with amusing distractions. (Among them: historical flashbacks, sung dialogue passages, full-out songs, a clapping circle you are requested to join.) Only as the stakes keep rising do we realize how the granular details and apparent sidetracks are fully integrated into the big story, which (for reasons I won’t spoil) cracks open, in a nod to Miller’s instigating crisis, when Grace falls in love with a hunky former neighbor played by Gabriel Brown.
The staging, by Sarah Hughes, honors both the structural rigor of the Miller and Jonas’s delightfully scruffier dramaturgy. The audience of about 70 sits concentrically around the action, interspersed with members of the cast on funky lawn chairs. (The set is by Brittany Vasta.) The lights (by Masha Tsimring) do not much differentiate between the performers and the observers; everyone is part of the play’s community. And yet, when the story approaches its classical climax, the seating arrangement is scrambled and a proscenium appears, as if to acknowledge that the untying of a tragic plot requires distance and a frame.
But if that willingness to toy with stage conventions is apt, reflecting the women’s discomfort with Miller’s brand of moral certainty and, perhaps, the consequences of that discomfort, it has consequences of its own for this story. What the Greeks called the anagnorisis — the recognition — is hasty and confusing. When Cleo comes to an understanding of her essential role in what happened to Jo, and thus to Jo’s victim and everyone else, the desired exclamation point (Miller was very good at those) sags into a question mark.
Still, the point is made. Hubris is an equal opportunity offender. Women who think more about communal responsibility may yet have personal values as muddy as any man’s. What I like most about Jonas’s play — I felt the same way about “Your Own Personal Exegesis,” which ran at Lincoln Center Theater in 2022, and her earlier works at the Starr’s old home — is that it sees opposing things at once, uplifting and criticizing its characters, respecting and rethinking its source.
That past-is-present ethos is also what I like about the new Starr. Though a garage door that opens to the sidewalk makes the theater much more accessible, and, inside, the bathrooms are hugely improved, still, like all of us, and like Jonas’s play, the place remains charmingly janky and jury-rigged. I embrace that spirit wholeheartedly — without, however, kissing the floor.
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