St Ann’s Warehouse (Brooklyn, NY)

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    ‘The Cherry Orchard’ Review: A Captivating Take on Chekhov

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    Nina Hoss stars as a melancholic matriarch in Benedict Andrews’s immersive rendition of the classic at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.Every time it feels as if we’re nearing a state of Chekhoverdose, a great production rolls around to remind us of the Russian writer’s uncanny power to pull us into his fold.Andrew Scott’s solo performance of “Vanya” at the Lucille Lortel Theater, which the New York Times’s critic Jesse Green called “a reset,” seems to have that effect on many.For me, it’s Benedict Andrews’s electric take on “The Cherry Orchard” at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, which left me so emotional, happy — from being reminded of the power of theater to surprise and thrill — and plain revved up that I struggled to fall asleep that night.A brief recap for those who can’t tell their sisters from their seagulls: “The Cherry Orchard” is the one in which the head of a once-wealthy family visits her estate for the first time in five years, and everybody confronts the reality that the beloved piece of land in the title must be sold to settle debts.Usually that matriarch, Ranevskaya is the play’s magnetic center, a grande dame whose efforts to come to terms with her world’s downfall embody the changes brewing in an entire society. In Andrews’s adaptation and staging, Ranevskaya (Nina Hoss, all melancholy grace and understated charisma) feels more like a part of a true ensemble. When not doing a scene, she and the other characters sit in the audience, calmly watching the proceedings. The in-the-round staging reinforces the feeling that we are them and they are us.Chekhov plays lend themselves to almost infinite variations and approaches, and Andrews’s is relatively mild compared to some radical deconstructions that mauled Chekhov beyond instant recognition.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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      ‘Safe House’ Review: Singing a Song of Loneliness

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      Enda Walsh’s formal experiment, at St. Ann’s Warehouse, finds him in pared-back mode.Wearing a meadow-green T-shirt that proclaims her an Irish Princess, Grace dances with a white stuffed bunny that is her confidant. The music is Tchaikovsky’s “Sleeping Beauty” waltz, and it’s a clue to how Grace’s life plays out — not the ballet’s storybook ending, just the tragic parts.In this snippet of a scene near the top of Enda Walsh’s new play “Safe House,” which opened on Thursday at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, the music gets speedier, more intense, all sense of comfort vanishing. Control, too, but that’s hardly a constant for Grace, a homeless young woman with a mind blurred by alcohol. Like Sleeping Beauty after the curse kicks in, she is exiled from a life that looked secure enough from the outside but was treacherous from the start.Fair warning, though: Woven through with songs by Anna Mullarkey that are sung by Kate Gilmore as Grace, Walsh’s Abbey Theater production feels more like a live performance of a concept album than a play. In his plumbing of trauma and abuse — think “The Walworth Farce” or “Medicine,” his most recent play at St. Ann’s — he can have a way of reaching right into your viscera. Not here, unfortunately.In “Safe House,” it is 1996 in rural Galway, and Grace is scrabbling together an existence on the margins. Guzzling box wine, trading her body for money, she plays grim bits of her sepia past on repeat in her head; for us, these are projections upstage or scraps of audio. Long gone though she is from the home she grew up in, which for her was a place of harm, she has not severed every family tie.On the other end of a phone, we hear her father pick up.“I can hear you breathing,” he says, in Irish. “Where are you, Grace?”The set and costume design are by Katie Davenport, while video is by Jack Phelan.Teddy WolffWe 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: ‘Grenfell’ Sees Tower Fire Through Residents’ Eyes

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      At St. Ann’s Warehouse, this documentary play about a London fire is blood-boiling and aggrieved.The notion of creating a safe space for an audience to experience a work of theater tends to provoke the tough-guy purists, because it sounds like coddling. Shouldn’t the stage be a place of daring, unhampered by any content revelations that might spoil the surprise?Presumably, anyone who arrives at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn to see “Grenfell: in the words of survivors,” a tense and enthralling documentary play about a 2017 residential fire in West London that killed 72 people, is aware of the potentially upsetting subject matter. But before the storytelling even starts, the actors in this National Theater production set about making a safe space with a preamble whose clear language and kind tone are not the least bit soppy.“We do want to reassure you that we will not be showing any images of fire,” one cast member says from the stage, which is surrounded on all sides by the audience. “If you need to leave even for a short break, our front of house staff will show you out, and if there’s an actor in the way when you want to leave, don’t worry, we will move.”Another adds: “If you do leave, you’re welcome to come back.”Our humanity tended to, the characters begin their recollections — nothing traumatic, not yet, just simple, sun-dappled memories. Because before Grenfell Tower, a 24-story public housing block, became a cautionary tale about the dangers of government penny-pinching and corporate corner-cutting, it was people’s home.Thinking back on the apartments that had been their sanctuaries, they miss the freedom of life above the tree line, the view of the fireworks on New Year’s Eve, the quiet when they’d shut their door and leave the noise of the city outside. They miss the community of good neighbors.“When I got my flat in Grenfell Tower,” Edward Daffarn (Michael Shaeffer) recalls, “my heart told me it was going to be OK. I was really, really happy.”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