Paul E. Fallon's Blog, page 3

All Hail the Women Who Wear Their Crowns!

Moonbox Productions

Crowns

By Regina Taylor

Directed by Regine Vital

April 11, 2025 – May 4, 2025

The Cast of CROWNS. Photo by Chelcy Garrett

CROWNS is great theater, great energy, great community. CROWNS is simply great.

We entered into the black box hush of Arrow St. Arts in Cambridge on a drizzly Sunday afternoon. The theater had become a church, with an arc of seats facing a raised alter. We found our places, picked up our handheld fans with the photo of Matin Luther King Jr. (other congregants got Michelle Obama). We thumbed through the ‘Hymnal’ of lyrics to well-known Gospel songs. The audience trickled in. Mostly women, mostly Black, all better dressed than me and my companion. No matter. The space had a convivial vibe. We chatted. I told my neighbor we were in for a treat, as I’d seen this show twenty years ago at Lyric Stage Boston. She told me she owned 185 hats. Explained how each had special meaning. And tricky storge requirements.

The theater grew dark. From all directions came women, big women, powerful women, in brilliant African attire and elaborate head wraps, chanting loud and clear and strong. The forebearers in their crowns.

The plot of CROWNS is simple. Teenage Yolanda is Brooklyn born and raised. Her mother sends her to stay with her grandmother, “down South” after Yolanda’s brother is needlessly, violently killed. Grandmother is an old school, Bible-church-lady who wears a hat—a glorious hat—every Sunday. You can see where this is going: Yolanda bucks her newfound place until she embraces it. Thus, playwright Regina Taylor spends little time on plot, and devotes most of her energy to the glory of the Crowns.

Besides Grandma Em, there are four other church ladies, each with a slightly different take on the whys and wherefores of Black woman and their church-on-Sunday hats. There’s also a man—only one—who handles the task of being every man. Most often a good man; sometimes not.

Kaedon Grey and Janelle Grace. Photo by Chelcy Garrett

CROWNS is a pageant of pride. Of these women’s connection to their hats and their god. And their work in the fields, and their work in the home, and their work for their families and their struggle for rights and their place in this world. It’s beautiful and inspiring and funny, and a visual delight. E. Rosser’s costumes and the fabulous hats are a Spring-spectacular of purples and yellows and reds and blues. Regine Vital’s flawless direction keeps our eyes ever focused on what really matters on stage.

CROWNS takes its religious roots seriously, with ample room for humor. I loved when the altar was transformed into Grandma’s dressing table, and we watched her put on her best face for the Lord, before going to see the Lord. Later, the altar bears solemn weight as eulogy after eulogy, the hat of someone dear…important…loved marks their passage to their maker.

On a dismal Sunday afternoon we came together. We sang, we clapped, we stomped, we fanned. We praised these wonderful women and their spectacular crowns. We left refreshed, inspired, brimming in fellowship and good feeling. Isn’t that what church—and theater—is supposed to do?

The cast of CROWNS. Photo by Chelcy Garrett.

Are You Dead, or Are You About to Wake Up?

The Huntington

Don’t Eat the Mangos

By Ricardo Pérez González

Directed by David Mendizàbal

March 26, 2025 – April 27, 2025

Evelyn Howe, Jessica Pimentel, and Yesenia Iglesias. All photos by Marc J. Franklin

It’s a challenge to convey the full power of Don’t Eat the Mangos without spoilers, but just like the juicy fruit that, hanging too ripe for too long, falls rotting on the ground outside this Puerto Rican house, I will keep the play’s sweetness and secrets buried under tough skin. Mangos is billed as a tragicomedy: a domestic tale of three grown sisters and their aging, ailing parents. That’s misleading. Don’t Eat the Mangos is a comitragicomedy because it comes full circle. From a starting point of hilarity it descends into a place dark beyond comprehension, and then the comedy reemerges to offer at least a nubbin of hope.

The play is delivered in about 20/80 Spanish to English which, for unilingual brains like mine, presents a challenge in understanding that required me to sit up and take notice. I sorta kinda figured that whatever was uttered in Spanish could be understood by onstage action and whatever English followed, but I was never quite confident of full comprehension. Which I decided is the point in a play whose seeds of horror are ever present, rumbling beneath the tropical levity. We descend into hell while we’re still chuckling.

The duality of comedy and tragedy bullseyes when the mother asks her oldest daughter, stalled in life in so many ways, “Are you dead, or are you about to wake up?” We, the audience, hopes for the latter, even as we brace for the former.

Jessica Pimentel and Susanna Guzmán

Don’t Eat The Mangos is a very specific play. The Huntington’s astonishing set is a very specific house in a very specific place. The house is a major character in the play. Rotating slowly, its warm light pulls us into its stifling secrets.

Evelyn Howe is a standout as Wicha, the youngest sister, though the entire ensemble is effective. Each character knows, or suspects, what’s buried beneath the mango tree, and each gives particular voice to their perspective. By plays end, the array of shame and blame and complicity with the family’s secret is so superbly woven, we can find in each member a reflection of people we know, perhaps even love. And we discover empathy for (almost) every one of them.

Which is how Mangos, in its insistent specificity, unspools a universal story. One that, unfortunately, could be told of any culture, any faith, most any family in our world.

Go see Don’t Eat the Mangos. You will laugh. You will be unnerved. You will leave with deep, unsettling questions. But the food for thought will be so sweet.

Twenty Years of Yoga

David Magone at Down Under On Demand

Twenty years ago this month I took my first yoga class. A friend took me to a men’s naked yoga class in a third-floor walk-up above Teddy Shoes in Central Square. I attended weekly for a year or so, until one evening a new guy with incredible form invited me to Bikram hot yoga.

One class and I was hooked on my first and only addiction. I practiced yoga six, seven days a week for four years. Over a thousand 90-minute classes at 110 degrees. I woke at 5:30 every morning to practice before work. When people asked, “Where do you find the time to do so much yoga?” I replied, “I don’t have enough time not to do it.” Looking back, all of those hours in the hot room merge into a unified fusion of struggle and satisfaction; body and mind. I never felt better in my life, loose and light and full of energy. Like all zealots, I had to share my good news. Thus, the birth of this blog.

Eventually, like all addictions, Bikram proved to be both too much and not enough. I started exploring other forms: Iyengar, Ashtanga, restorative. I cut back to four, maybe five classes a week. I took up sculpt, which purists pooh-pooh as Americanized exercise.

After I retired, in 2014, I took yoga teacher training, and for a brief period, I taught. At the men’s class where I first learned. At the Cambridge Y. I invited small groups of middle-aged men to my place; guys too self-conscious of our girth and sag to frequent upscale studios so often tilted towards lithe young women. My favorite teaching gigs were one-on-one sessions with older men suffering Parkinson’s. The deep coordination and repetition inherent in yoga cannot cure Parkinson’s, but it slows its progression.

Susan LoPiccolo at Down Under On Demand

All of that came to a halt when I took on months of bike riding. Many would not consider pedaling fifty miles a day as yoga. But it was for me. Hours of meditation on the shoulder of the road aligned my momentum and balance surely as any asanas.

When I returned to Cambridge in late 2016 I dabbled with every aspect of my life. A variety of yogas, but I also joined a gym, and found new focus in walking. Yoga became but one ingredient in my recipe for fitness and well-being.

Then COVID arrived and everything stopped. There were no places to go; no classes to attend. I walked and walked and walked. Until we all became Zoom literate and everyone started streaming everything and yoga studios, like everything else, started creating content. I joined Down Under On Demand, which is where I practice still, alternating virtual yoga with in-person gym days. I’m not sure how easy it is for beginners to learn yoga online, but online yoga provides me enough structure of an in-person class that my mind releases while my body mindlessly, mindfully, goes through the motions.

Braxton Rose at Down Under On Demand

For most of my life I’ve looked my age; felt it too. These days, people often underestimate my age. I feel mighty good, prescription-free, healthier than most anyone I know pushing seventy. I credit my graceful aging (so far) to yoga.

Who knows how my practice will evolve. The time may come when the body demands that sculpt yield to restorative. If I’m lucky, there’ll be chair yoga in my future. No worry. It’s all yoga. It’s all good.

The MBTA is Getting Better

MBTA bus. All images courtesy of Wikipedia

I know it’s not fashionable to compliment or praise, but fashion’s never been my forte, so I’m going to go out on limb. The MBTA is getting better. The trains and buses are running more regularly, the slowdowns have slowed down, the operators are nicer, more people are riding the T.

The T hit is nadir after the pandemic, when people ought to have started to come back, but pretty much refused. There were so many slow zones on the subways you’d sit and sit in the tunnels without any notion when movement would occur. There was a shortage of bus drivers, so sometimes they’d simply skip a scheduled trip. No warning. Tough luck. The Boston Globe featured stories of MBTA execs who didn’t even live in Massachusetts, yet alone ever set foot on a subway platform. Worse became worst when the Green Line extension to Somerville opened, only to reveal that the tracks were installed at the wrong width, and the trolley cars would derail above, say, three miles per hour. Social media was full of clips of pedestrians outdistancing the trains.

I still rode the T—in bad weather—but took precautions that would be unwieldy for a regular commuter. When I used to figure 45 minutes to bus/subway downtown, I left an hour and a half. Sometimes I would arrive at my destination way, way, early, but all too often it took that full amount of time to traverse the six miles from my house to Park Street.

In an era when we all understand (even if we don’t all like to admit) that we need to be driving cars less and taking public transit more, the gruesome reality of riding the T sent more and more people into their cars. More than a year after pandemic closures, T ridership was limp. I would take a mid-day commuter train out to Worcester and pass empty parking lots at every station. The system was broken.

Then, a few heads rolled. Phillip Eng became General Manager. He made sincere apologies and established attainable targets for improvement. We endured shuttle buses for months on end as they fixed deteriorated tracks in subway tunnels. He provided incentives to get more bus drivers. And slowly but steadily, things improved. We’re not done. On any given weekend, there are still portions of the system that are closed. But we are so far along.

The media, of course, is still quick to highlight every deficiency. Recently, a train accident at Union Square required five people go to the hospital to be evaluated. All were fine, but it was first page news. When would they ever going to report such minimal injuries from automobile crashes, which happen with much more frequency?

Nevertheless, I have returned to my old habits. It only takes me 45 minutes to get downtown these days. Reliably. Predictably. There are more people on the trains and buses, and they make for just as good people-watching as ever.

Life on a Swing!

Vincent Randazzo and Avanthika Srinivasan in The Triumph of Love. Photo by Liza Voll.

The Triumph of Love at The Huntington

By Pierre Carlet de Chamberlain de Marivaux

Adapted by Stephen Wadsworth

Directed by Loretta Greco

March 7, 2025 – April 6, 2025

Marianna Bassham and Nael Nacer. Photo by Liza Voll.

If you’ve got whiplash from life in these United States these days, maybe it’s time to dial back a few hundred years and let your head clear on an elegant swing in a beautiful country garden. Forget the trivial differences loitering among us these days, and tackle the existential issues of rationality versus romance. Give in to pure indulgence and give yourself over to The Triumph of Love.

The Triumph of Love is an Eighteenth-Century play by Pierre Carlet de Chamberlain de Marivaux that premiered at the Comédie Italienne in 1732. If you’re like me, your working knowledge of French theater begins and ends with Molière and the Comédie Francaise. Marivaux came later, and he favored the rival Italienne troupe, which premiered most of his thirty+ plays. Marivaux’s satire is less biting than Moliere’s, but his social insights are keen and his humor is, well, meveilleux! Especially in Stephen Wadsworth’s wonderful adaptation.

The plot is pure, juicy fantasy. Léonide, princess of some Duchy or other, gained the throne after her grandparents killed off the rightful king and claimed the crown. In short, she is illegitimate, though through no fault of her own. Agis, the rightful heir, was snatched away as a baby and has been raised by Hermocrate, a Philosopher of the Rational, who is secluded away in his gorgeous garden with his step-sister Léontine, where they’ve raised the rightful heir, now grown to a strapping Adonis, to distain any stirrings of the heart.

Léonide once viewed Agis in a wood and fell instantly in love with him. But she knows that he hates her from afar—after all she sits on the throne that should be his own. So what does she do? This being an Eighteenth-Century comedy of errors, she dresses as a man and weasels her way into the garden to try to win his heart before fully revealing herself. Every duplicity requires more duplicity, and in short order all rationality evaporates as Léontine falls in love with Léonide, the man; Hermocrate falls in love with Léonide, the woman. Agis, ever sheltered, seems ready to burst his heart open to pretty much anyone. To marinate the plot twists and general hijinks, toss in a hysterical Harlequin, a sage though word-muddling gardener, and Léonide’s faithful servant Corine (also in pants).

The set is gorgeous, the lighting sublime, and the cast is uniformly enchanting. Marianna Bassham, a perennial Boston theater favorite, is a stand-out as Léontine, in a dress so stiff she moves like a cut-out doll rigid as her Rationality, until she completely falls for love and scampers about in her opulent layers.

Go see The Triumph of Love. First, for the belly laughs. Then, to savor the joys of love that linger long afterward.

Cast of The Triumph of Love. Photo by Liza Voll.

It Takes a Village…Oops, We Just Destroyed the Village

If you’re in the mood for a journalistic dive into why we Americans—so long-lived on the top of the socioeconomic heap—are in such a tangle of anger and division, I recommend Derek Thompson’s cover story in the February 2025 edition of The Atlantic, “The Anti-Social Century.” As if it’s not bad enough that we’re likely screwed by nuclear war or environmental devastation, viral resistance or End Times revelations, it seems we may simply do ourselves in by being the most self-serving, narcissistic, inward-focused creatures this planet has every tolerated. And we’re getting worse.

I have long subscribed to the theorem that what we buy with our affluence is privacy. Mr. Thompson’s article reinforces our preference for privacy over interaction at every possible opportunity. Since the 1980’s, by every measure, we spend more time alone, at home, on our devices. The trend spiked during the pandemic, but has not abated since we’ve had the ‘all clear’ to breath collectively again. Accordingly, we enjoy/endure less face-to-face time than ever. We are less and less content, let alone happy. And yet we do basically nothing to break out of our isolation.

The article is rich in amusing factoids, like the way many restaurants have repurposed bars (formerly places of communal gathering) into take-out delivery counters as their take-out business explodes in direct proportion to the shrinking numbers in their dining rooms. To be fair, Mr. Thompson points out some positive aspects of our solitary existences. How our devices actually make connections among core family and friends deeper, more continuous. And how those devises also enable us to find affinity groups, no matter how esoteric. But on the whole, “The Anti-Social Century” is pretty much 2000’s Bowling Alone updated in accordance with the worst possible scenario.

The stats are gruesome, the outlook bleak, but I did find one potentially useful nugget. Not so much a germ of hope as a framework for understanding our increasingly isolated society. After all, the better we understand a phenomenon, the better positioned we are to address it.

Marc Dunkleman, author and professor, describes our social world as three rings. The inner ring is our family and close friends. Our ring of intimacy. It is where we learn love. The outer ring is our tribe. It’s where we find broad commonalties. Where we learn loyalty. Each of these rings is affected by our physical isolation and device-dependence, but they can still flourish.

The middle ring is the village: our neighbor; our PTA; our children’s little league team; our local church; our veteran’s group. It is the people who are physically proximate, yet not intimates. Folks we knew in abundance a hundred years ago, during the heyday of American civic organizations. But in our era of spiraling downward engagement in any kind of localized group activity, the village is the most frayed remnant of social fabric.

Since we live in a world where physical connection is less and less important, why do we care if the village gets lost? Because of the most fleeting quality that Dunkleman attributes to the social ring of the village. Tolerance. In the old days, we had to get along with the people near us. We needed to be able to depend on them (at the very least in emergencies), and so we learned how to hold our tongue, muffle our opinions, cool our jets. Because it was more important to get along with our neighbor, than to agree with them.

Way back, when Hillary Clinton was First Lady, and her biggest faults were whether to claim “Rodman” in her name or channel Tammy Wynette in, “Stand By Your Man,” Ms. Clinton wrote a book, “It Takes a Village.” A bit of pop philosophy every bit as cheesy and as it is true.

It takes a village to support human life, to learn the kind of ‘give along to get along’ cooperation that brought us to the apex of the food chain in the first place. And if we keep disregarding the qualities that make up a village: mutual tolerance, respect, forbearance; our humanity is doomed.

ART and Hedda Gabler: More Great Boston Theater

ART

Playwright: Yasmina Reza

Translation: Christopher Hampton

Director: Courtney O’Connor

Lyric Stage Boston

February 21- March 16, 2025

Photo courtesy of Lyric Stage

Three long-time friends come to blows—perhaps—when one of them purchases a quite expensive piece of abstract art. ART is not for everyone. It’s got a peculiar plot. It’s a play of talk, more talk, and redundant talk. It’s white-on-white canvas triggers insecurities and prompts altogether too much relationship discourse. It’s a bit of Becket’s aimlessness, a bit of Ionesco’s absurdity, a bit of preciousness only the privileged can indulge. But the language is so delicious, so entrancing, that all can be excused. After all, these are not American men, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder at a bar, watching some sport on a screen. These are Frenchmen. Thus we savor how they dissect themselves and their purpose and their entanglements with the same precision of teenage girls everywhere.

ART premiered in Paris in 1994, and subsequently played in London, New York, and all over the world. It’s won Moliere’s and Olivier’s and Tony’s. It’s been translated into twenty languages. It’s a contemporary masterpiece. And this production delivers all of ART’s strengths with gusto.

The set, of course, is white and spare. The men’s clothes, of course, are muted. The lighting is alternately too vague and too bright. But the acting is consistently brilliant. Remo Airaldi, Michael Kaye, and John Kuntz are three of Boston’s finest actors; each of them in full flame. The audience sits transfixed for ninety minutes as three humans try to understand themselves and their interconnections to a remarkable depth. When it’s over we are enriched in the potential and complexity of human coexistence. Then we step into our world, where everything is siloed into digestible, mostly inaccurate sound bites. And we crave ART.

Parker Jennings as Hedda Gabler. Photo courtesy of Apollinaire Theatre

Hedda Gabler

Playwright: Henrik Ibsen

Director: Danielle Fauteux Jacques

Apollinaire Theatre

February 21- March 16, 2025

Paola Ferrer and Conall Sahler. Photo courtesy of Apollinaire Theatre

If you’re hankering for a truly timeless classic, find your way into the labyrinth of angled streets known as Chelsea, climb two hefty flights up into the former Odd Fellows Hall, and enter into the candlelit shadows of Apollinaire Theatre’s production of Hedda Gabler. I’ve seen enough Ibsen to know this would be no lark in the park, but I was amazed anew at Ibsen’s insights into contemporary life. When he wrote A Doll’s House in 1879, Ibsen allowed heroine Nora to escape her stifling life, albeit at great cost. By the time Hedda comes along in 1890, she enjoys no such luck. Bored. Bursting with undirected energy. Bored. Dismissed by all except for her looks and charm. Bored. Hedda has nothing to look forward to and so—well-known spoiler alert—she takes an early exit.

Apollinaire’s production is exquisite. The set, the costumes, the pacing are all dignified, elegant, and constricting. Parker Jennings, as Hedda, lets loose only a few times, and only when no one is present to see her frustration. Conell Sahler as her devoted, dithering husband is terrific. Paola Ferrer as Aunt Julianna is crisply clueless of her baffling new niece.

In 2025, Hedda Gabler is more than theater. It’s a cautionary tale. As our society slides backwards, and intimations of A Handmaids Tale feel uncomfortably close, god forbid we return to the skewered perspectives of Victorian Europe that Ibsen so keenly dissects.

A Very Important: Man of No Importance

A Man of No Importance

By Terrence McNally

Music and Lyrics by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Aherns

Directed by Paul Daigneault

Speakeasy Stage Company

February 21-March 22, 2025

Kathy St. George and the Cast of A Man of No Importance. Photo by Nile Scott Studios.

Thirty-three years after founding Speakeasy Stage, and growing the company from navigating around the columns of the black box theaters in the basement of the Boston Center for the Arts to moving upstairs as the resident company of the Roberts Studio Theatre, Paul Daigneault is stepping down as Artistic Director. Directing A Man of No Importance as his final Speakeasy show is both an act of nostalgia and a demonstration of a director at the top of his game. The show is terrific!!!

During his tenure, Paul has produced many LGBT-themed plays, numerous musicals, and several plays by Terrence McNally. A Man of No Importance embraces all of these attributes, with an ensemble cast that collectively include over one hundred years of Speakeasy Stage experience. Will McGarrahan has been in twenty-two productions, Kerry Dowling’s been a favorite since the days of Batboy, and Kathy St. Georges has been hysterically Ruthless! season after season.

A Man of No Importance, originally a 1994 film starring Albert Finney, takes place in Dublin circa 1963. Alfie is a single man living with his sister. A bus collector by day, a thespian by evening, Alfie is blessed with a wicked love of art and Oscar Wilde; a closeted gay man before that was a meaningful term. The musical premiered in New York in 2002, and most recently revived in 2022. Speakeasy Stage produced the show in 2003, though this production is quite different in how it fuses the actors and orchestra.

Speakeasy’s set is a pub, with a traditionally Irish back wall of books and booze. Or maybe it’s a church, with its prominent stained glass of Christ. Or perhaps it’s an homage to Oscar Wilde, who’s own stained glass sits just lower left of the Lord. The band sits in front of the bar. A few full-time players, with the actors filling in on all sorts of instruments. The stage proper is busy place, what with a cast of fifteen playing various Dubliners and infiltrating the band. The movement flows smooth and continuous as a good pint among mates.

Eddie Shields and Will McGarrahan. Photo by Niles Scott Studios

A Man of No Importance is not a great musical, but the play’s warmth and humor highlight the Irish reality that singing is to be shared, not showy. There are no great song and dance numbers, but the novelties (“Books” and “The Cuddles Mary Gave”) are hysterical; and they make the heartache of “Love Who You Love” all the more wrenching.

Every member of the ensemble cast shines. The Dubliners’ humanity triumphs over the Catholic Church’s repression. Every moment of this fine production proclaims everyone is welcome.

Please, come. Join the community. Celebrate. Hurrah for Speakeasy’s triumph!

The Grove

The Grove

By Mfonsio Udofia

Directed by Awoye Timpo

The Huntington

February 7 – March 9, 2025

Abigail C. Onwunali in The Grove. Photo by Marc J. Franklin

Upon entering the Wimberly Theater in Boston’s South End, you encounter a basic living room. Could be the set for a sitcom. But instead of walls displaying family photos or an art reproduction, the edges of the space are defined by thin metal poles (think electrical conduit) receding into hazy depth. In juxtaposing the familiar and the mysterious, the set of The Grove perfectly represents the play itself, which is both universal in portraying familial tensions at the dawn of the era of individual technology, and specific in unveiling the dissonance between the material and mystical within one Nigerian immigrant couple and their first-generation American children.

The Grove is the second of the nine play Ufot Family cycle. The first play, Sojourners is a chamber piece. The Grove is a bigger production in every way. A large cast, vibrant costumes, evocative lighting, and complex themes of identity and connection. The recent immigrants in Sojourners were simply trying to survive. More than thirty years later, the central characters of The Grove are reaching beyond food and safety, towards love, belonging: esteem.

It’s 2009 in Worcester, MA. If you know the backstory, that’s all good. (Back in 1978, Nigerian immigrant Abasiama left her newborn baby with its no-good dad in Houston while the messianic student Disciple was convinced his union with Abasiama was heaven sent.) But if you missed Sojourners, no matter. Disciple married Abasiama and completed his PhD. Abasiama became a research scientist. They have three children. Disciple’s rigidity has led him to be less-than-successful in work and his constant rants drive his children deeper into their music and their phones rather than debate ad nauseum how to make Nigeria rise. Abasiama, moderate in every respect, is the primary breadwinner and homemaker. Whatever intimacy may have existed between Disciple and Abasiama is long gone. All that seems left is projecting their dreams onto their children, who shrug the burden.

Adiaha, first born, is home from New York where she recently received a Master’s in Creative Writing. Time for a party! Which means men pontificating politics while women cook and serve and the children try to escape. The play gains traction when the set rotates and, beyond the thicket of poles, we enter Adiaha’s childhood bedroom and the reasons for her discontent become clear. Adiaha has a female lover in New York; she cannot reconcile her family with her desires. She starts writing wild, illegible stuff, prompted by shadows that emerge within and among the poles: Nigerian women from a world Adiaha has never experienced. It’s confusing, but also engaging. The audience hangs on to every utterance it cannot understand.

Janelle Grace and Ekemini Ekpo as Shadows in The Grove. Photo by Marc J. Franklin

The Grove suffers a few hiccups. When speaking of America, Director Awoye Timpo lines the actors across the stage and has them deliver lines in a stiff, pageant style, only allowing them to be fully expressive about Nigeria. It’s a subtle and unnecessary affront to the country these characters chose, and like all too many immigrant stories, glorifies the place that was in fact so difficult that it prompted exodus. The device makes even less sense for the children, for whom Nigeria is only an idea. Similarly, the men are unidimensional while the women are full-fleshed. There is so much Disciple, and he is all the same note. Mfonsio Udofia is a gifted playwright who infuses humanity in characters that most resemble herself. She will be a great playwright when she can infuse all of her characters with the breadth that resides within each of us.

The set spins several times as Adiaha betrays her lover, and then her family. Until, ultimately, she comes to terms with herself, and consequently her family and her lover. I will not disclose the resolution except to say it’s beautifully honest, appropriately hopeful, and leaves enough loose ends to make me eager to see the next Ufot play.

Catalyst Collaborative at MIT: 20 Years of Great (and not so great) Theater

SPACE

Central Square Theater

January 30-February 23, 2025

SPACE at Central Square Theater

This theater season marks the 20th anniversary of the Catalyst Collaborative @MIT, an endeavor to create and present theater that deepens public engagement with science, in conjunction with Central Square Theater (CST), located only a few blocks from MIT’s campus. Over the past two decades Catalyst Collaborative @MIT has commissioned five new plays and staged 35 productions, including ten world premieres.

The idea behind the collaboration is terrific; the execution is sometimes brilliant, sometimes clunky. The challenge with any art form that seeks both to engage and educate is how to balance the pedagogy with the entertainment. We are attending theater, not a lecture. We want to be immersed in a compelling story. Hopefully, we’ll be inspired. God forbid, we’re preached upon.

I’ve seen many Catalyst productions. The Women Who Mapped the Stars (2018), and Ada and Machine (2022) were extraordinary pieces of theater in which the science was beautifully woven into drama gripping as any Ibsen. Last season’s Beyond Words was a gem. Despite scant dramatic arc, the spirit was so uplifting, the staging so clever, and Jon Vellante’s parrot so engaging, the audience was swept away.

The current CST production, SPACE, is not as successful as those predecessors, though it has several redeeming qualities. The show is, broadly speaking, about mostly forgotten female aviators. More specifically, it focuses on the Mercury 13, female pilots circa 1960 who participated in a parallel series of (secret) tests to evaluate the potential of enlisting female astronauts.

Act One is mostly successful. Six women play various Mercury 13 participants. Catharine K. Slusar is terrific as Jackie Cochrane, the founder of World War II WASP’s, who underwrote the testing even as she was deemed too old for consideration. Oddly, the most dynamic actor in the play is the single male. Barlow Adamson plays JFK with great aplomb, as well as the NASA doctor, a Senator chairing secret hearings, and any other dick basically getting in the way of female empowerment. Like many an exposition play, there’s a whole lot of direct audience address, but it works fairly well because the direction is sharp, the lighting effective, and the sound design terrific. At several points, a trio of actors arrange themselves to actually become the various machines NASA puts the women through. This creates successful choreography while visually representing the women working together towards a common goal. Unfortunately, Act One ends when some bad man cancels the whole project, and the audience breaks for intermission with no idea where the play’s headed.

Catherine K. Slusar and Barlow Adamson in SPACE. Photo courtesy of Central Square Theater

Unfortunately, I don’t think the playwright knows either. Because, frankly, Act Two is a muddle. It’s 2021, but there are flashbacks to 1962 and flash forwards to 2121. We are immersed in a One Hundred Year Space Exploration Project. We are going beyond the moon, beyond Mars, all the way to the stars! And, along the way we are going to completely overhaul society (i.e. capitalistic patriarchy). Everything that was sharp and interesting in Act One is now chaos. The choreography becomes frantic running. The dialogue degenerates into staccato shouts of “Fusion!’ “Fission!” “Forward!” that strip any rigor or nuance from science or sexual politics. The actors change identities and timeframes so often the audience has no idea who’s who or where’s where, but perhaps it doesn’t matter because we’ve long since ceased to care. Even Adamson’s spot-on impersonation of Trump can’t salvage the mess.

Not to worry. SPACE is not lost. There’s plenty of good stuff to salvage from this premiere. Hopefully, the LM Feldman and Larissa Lury, the writer/director/creators, will be brave enough to step aside from material they love perhaps too much, invite some seasoned theatrical talent to cut, edit, and refine the overlong, confusing piece into a unity that contains the energy and discipline that every strong and brave female aviator of the 1960’s had to possess.