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    ‘Grangeville’ Review: Am I My Half Brother’s Keeper?

    A story as old as Cain and Abel gets filtered through cellphone and video confrontations in Samuel D. Hunter’s bleak two-hander.“I don’t know why we have to do this over the phone,” says Arnold, speaking from Rotterdam to his estranged half brother, Jerry, in Idaho.That’s how I felt too, at least during the first half of Samuel D. Hunter’s “Grangeville,” a bleak two-hander named for the men’s hometown. Most of what happens happens at a distance of thousands of miles — and feels like it.The distance might have been mitigated if Arnold (Brian J. Smith) and Jerry (Paul Sparks) weren’t for the most part kept at opposite sides of a dim, featureless stage in Jack Serio’s halting production for Signature Theater. Until late in the play, the set, by the design collective dots, consists only of black walls and a janky trailer door, signifying the characters’ fractured, unsheltered childhoods. The interiorized sound (by Christopher Darbassie) and crepuscular lighting (by Stacey Derosier) lend many scenes the flat affect of a radio play.But it’s also a problem that Hunter, often brilliant with banality, has buried the characters’ Cain-and-Abel subtext so shallowly beneath repetitive and not entirely credible discussions of their dying mother’s finances. Jerry, an RV salesman and only about 50, cannot figure out how to access her bank accounts online, let alone keep ahead of her bills and reimbursements. Arnold, a decade younger and having fled the family long since, resents being pulled back by end-of-life math. He might as well ask — though it would not be Hunter’s style — “Am I my brother’s bookkeeper?”Yet an ancient fraternal struggle, like those in plays by Arthur Miller, Sam Shepard and Suzan-Lori Parks — and in the Bible — is what “Grangeville,” which opened on Monday, means to dramatize. Between discussions of prognoses and powers of attorney, we learn in the opening scenes how both men were brutalized by their mother’s violent husbands and her failure to offer protection. (She was often absent on benders.) Predictably enough, Jerry turned into a brutalizer too, in an effort, he now explains feebly, to help the sensitive and proto-gay Arnold survive.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Review: In ‘Three Houses,’ a Dark Karaoke Night of the Soul

    It’s open mic at the post-pandemic cocktail bar where Dave Malloy’s hypnotic triptych of monodramas takes place.It’s only fitting that a bar, replete with liquor and raised like an altar, presides over Dave Malloy’s “Three Houses,” which opened on Monday at the Signature Theater. Malloy’s music is, after all, intoxicating. Alcohol is the accelerant for the show’s linked monodramas. And hung over is how it leaves its pandemic-sozzled characters at the end of a dark karaoke night of the soul.You may feel that way too: lost in a morning-after fog like Malloy’s three protagonists, each having radically relocated during lockdown. Susan (Margo Seibert) found herself in her dead grandmother’s ranch home in Latvia, pointlessly alphabetizing the library. Sadie (Mia Pak) moved into her auntie’s New Mexico adobe, where a life-simulation game akin to Animal Crossing was her only companion. Having holed up in a “red brick basement in Brooklyn,” Beckett (J.D. Mollison) soon turned into an Amazon shopaholic.As each now takes the open mic at the metaphysical bar to sing about going “a little bit crazy living alone in the pandemic,” it becomes clear, though, that more was at play. Encouraged by a bartender not incidentally called Wolf (Scott Stangland) — “don’t be afraid to go deep,” he says — they reveal to us, and perhaps to themselves, that Covid wasn’t the only threat to their well-being. Love, too, was a lockdown.A recent seismic breakup is part of all their stories. Susan’s ex, Julian, moved to another state for work. Sadie’s Jasmine kept “messing up” household routines with her spontaneity. Beckett did not feel safe letting his wife, Jackie, see fully “the darkness within” him. That these accusations are so transparently thin does not weaken their effectiveness as defenses — or, because we recognize the behavior, as storytelling.But Malloy’s attempt to cross-reference the stand-alone 30-minute stories with psychological and literal echoes palls. It’s easy enough to write off the twee alliteration of the three J-named exes as a kind of light rhyme or fairy-tale resonance. Same with the eight jugs of red currant wine in Susan’s tale that become eight cases of mezcal in Sadie’s and eight bottles of plum brandy in Beckett’s. Why eight? Why not? The point is that people drink heavily in isolation.The meaning of the more ornate linkages is less clear. Each segment includes an obligatory puppet — a Latvian house dragon, a video game badger, a creepy spider, all designed by James Ortiz — that feels more like a stab at theatrical variety than an expression of a relevant human need. (Even so, Annie Tippe’s staging grows monotonous.) The bar’s orange-vested waiters (Ching Valdes-Aran and Henry Stram) reappear as various loving grandparents, indistinguishable despite their accents. But all the characters seem to have been reverse engineered from templates, suggesting structural desperation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More