Julia Izumi’s play, about transnational adoptees, employs soap-opera melodrama.
For many of us who love experimental theatre and the deep fringe, soap operas were a gateway entertainment. Any given arc on, say, “Days of Our Lives”— remember when Marlena was possessed twice, and she (re)married the priest who exorcised her?—can go toe-to-toe with the avant-garde’s dream-logic, postmodern approach to character and its calculated use of shock. Soaps also have old theatrical bones: they’re related to nineteenth-century melodrama, with its emotion-triggering musical underscoring and extravagant, even exuberant, treatment of female peril. It’s unsurprising, then, that two new formally adventurous shows are recognizably soapy: Julia Izumi’s “Regretfully, So the Birds Are,” at Play wrights Horizons, and the Second Stage and Vineyard co-production of “White Girl in Danger” (at the Tony Kiser Theatre), a new musical by Michael R. Jackson, following up on his Pulitzer- and Tonywinning masterpiece, “A Strange Loop.”
Life in both of these shows is extreme, and death hardly registers. For instance, in “Regretfully,” the white Asian-studies professor Cam (Gibson Frazier) is dead, but he stands in his family’s front yard as a snowman, still inaccurately lecturing his three adopted children as his wife (Kristine Nielsen) languishes in jail. (This sounds like a cut story line from “Passions.”) Izumi doesn’t make us wait for exposition. On page 4, Neel (Sky Smith) hurls this at his sister Mora (Shannon Tyo):
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der April 24 - May 01, 2023 (Double Issue)-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
Bereits Abonnent ? Anmelden
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der April 24 - May 01, 2023 (Double Issue)-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
Bereits Abonnent? Anmelden
ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH TECHNOLOGY ABRIDGED TOO FAR
The world according to Blinkist.
ANNALS OF INQUIRY WAIT FOR IT
Suspense in literature and life.
A REPORTER AT LARGE YOU MAKE ME SICK
How corporate scientists discovered—and then helped to conceal—the dangers of forever chemicals.
AGE OF ANXIETY
The love songs of Billie Eilish.
THE CURRENT CINEMA APOCALYPSE WHEN
“Megalopolis.”
Thataway Thomas McGuane
The two sisters were growing old now, but they went on gazing toward Palm Springs from this windblown prairie town as though to Mecca.
THE THEATRE - PHOTO REALISM
Moisés Kaufman's Here There Are Blueberries.”
FAMILY PORTRAIT
In his latest novel, Garth Risk Hallberg shrinks his frame.
EYES UP HERE
The perils and pleasures of a nice rack.
A CRITIC AT LARGE SAY THE WORD
Why liberals struggle to defend liberalism.