One good thing about seeing theater at the highest levels is that even less successful productions, ones that don’t make top 10 lists, have transcendent moments. It belatedly gets a triumphant production, with a captivating performance by LaChanze, who previously won a Tony for her work in The Color Purple. The 1955 play, by Alice Childress, a Black playwright and author who died in 1994, was headed toward Broadway but Childress refused to tone down its message about racism in the theater community and beyond. Perhaps no production embodied this more than the Roundabout’s powerful Broadway premiere Trouble in Mind.
In 2021, the theater community took action to redress years of systemic racism, mounting more productions by creators of color. The performance I attended left O’Connell in tears during the curtain call. For the entire performance, O’Connell expertly lip synched recordings of interviews conducted with the actual Dana H., recounting her terrifying journey. The remarkable performance by Deirdre O’Connell had an extraordinarily high degree of difficulty and emotional toll. It ran in repertory with Dana H., the harrowing account of playwright Lucas Hnath’s mother, Dana H., getting kidnapped and held captive by a brutal member of the Aryan Brotherhood. The production was expertly paced, well-acted, entertaining and thought-provoking about important matters of individual responsibility and national policy. Reality Winner paid a steep price and was convicted and sentenced to more than five years in prison. Is This a Room was a gripping drama taken from FBI transcripts of the raid and arrest of Reality Winner, a high-tech security worker who, spurred by conscience, leaked top-secret data on Russian interference in the 2016 elections. and Is This a Room, both based on verbatim transcripts. In a brilliant pairing, the Vineyard Theater staged Dana H. In addition to venue-supplied headsets, it was also a good year for transcripts. After the performance, the people I attended with stared speechlessly at each other, before wandering off into the night, dazed. The story was also almost too close to home for the pandemic-stunned audience. At times, Stevenson was whispering directly in one ear, then scrambling behind your back to resume in the other ear. The immersive sound design by Ben and Max Ringham was almost too effective.
Each audience member wore headsets and the account of a breakdown of society after a global pandemic is chillingly voiced by Olivier Award winner Juliet Stevenson (the play was first presented in London). The show had socially distanced seats spaced widely apart and there were no live actors. Blindness, based on José Saramago’s novel, adapted by British playwright Simon Stephens (his adaptation of The Curious Incident of the Dog in Night-Time won a Tony in 2015), opened in April, when many people were newly vaccinated. Two entries on the list straddled pandemic restrictions. Based on the audience reaction, unchecked glee, it’s likely that this irrepressible pair will eventually reunite.
The banter was spontaneous, intimate, and hilarious. On paper, pairing a (tall) gravel-voiced bedazzled downtown performance artist with a (short) opera star is a ludicrous notion, but it improbably works. A good measure of the thrill was watching how much two extremely talented and narcissistic performers, Bond a transgender cabaret fixture, and Costanzo, a full-fledged international opera star who usually performs at the Met, reveling in their connection and being in front of an audience again.