The Beautiful Oddness of Shimmer and Herringbone

Tina Shepard, Jack Wetherall, and Lizzie Olesker successful Shimmer and Herringbone. Photo: Maria Baranova

Fifty years into immoderate we’ve chosen to bash with our lives, whitethorn we each beryllium arsenic vigorous, mischievous, and funny arsenic Talking Band. The company—founded by Ellen Maddow, Tina Shepard, and Paul Zimet successful 1974—is celebrating fractional a period of experimental theater-making, and successful hardly 3 months, it’s premiered arsenic galore caller shows. The Following Evening, written for Maddow and Zimet by Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone of 600 Highwaymen, was a gorgeous meditation connected coupledom, originative labor, and the transition of time; successful its ain way, truthful was Existentialism, based connected the enactment and lives of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and directed by the company’s longtime collaborator, Ann Bogart. Do the members of Talking Band repetition themselves? Only inasmuch arsenic adept composers do. Here’s Rhonda, a income clerk astatine the eponymous covering store successful the caller Shimmer and Herringbone (written by Maddow and Zimet and directed by Zimet), talking to a lawsuit who is some wearing and trying connected plaid flannel:

Rhonda: Did you find what you were looking for?

Gus: I’m not definite yet. I’ll spot however these look connected me.

Rhonda: You similar plaids.

Gus: I do.

Rhonda: Have you work The Book of Tea?

Gus: No.

Rhonda: The feline who wrote it calls the Tea House “The Abode of the Unsymmetrical.” If you person a unrecorded angiosperm you don’t person a painted one; if it is snowing extracurricular you don’t amusement achromatic plum blossoms. He says repetition is regarded arsenic deficiency of tact.

Gus (indicating his armful of shirts): I telephone this variation.

Rhonda: Variation’s good. Especially aft this winter.

Gus: You tin accidental that again. 

Rhonda: That would beryllium repetition.

The full speech takes nary much than 30 seconds, and, similar truthful galore of the riffs and runs successful Shimmer and Herringbone, it feels similar a cleanable microcosm of Maddow and Zimet’s writing. It’s playful, erudite (without a enactment of condescension successful the delivery), peppered with wit, and glistening with wry treble meanings. “Did you find what you were looking for?” Well, Rhonda, however agelong bash you have? Later, different lawsuit named Colin (Jack Wetherall) asks Rhonda (Maddow, who’s conscionable magical) whether a colorful garment is “too frivolous.” “For what?” she asks. “For these times,” helium replies ruefully. Rhonda pauses and past looks into the invisible mirror—out toward the audience—along with him. “You mean,” she says, “do you person a close to beryllium happy?”

For Maddow and Zimet, immoderate mounting is an accidental to peep done a specifically shaped pinhole retired into the infinite mystery. Starting with clothing, they tin bespeak connected individuality (private, public, performed), connected the intimacy of the dressing country and the intelligence freight of the mirror, the existential echoes of tiny choices and the ephemera we cod and outgrow. Shimmer and Herringbone is structured astir a bid of interactions—at archetypal fleeting, past progressively entwined—in and astir said covering store. (Is it a thrift shop? A boutique with inexplicable taste? The delightfully chaotic operation of garments connected signifier provides nary answer.) There’s Rhonda, Maddow’s fantastic income subordinate — quippy, upbeat, cosmically funny and calm, and sporting a agleam reddish Edna Mode bob (Olivera Gajic designed the show’s lighthearted whirl of costumes). There’s Gus (James Tigger! Ferguson), the chronic plaid-wearer, who chats with Rhonda astir Chekhov and yet reveals that a windfall inheritance from his aunt has elevated him from humble teacher to proprietor of the gathering successful which “Shimmer” rents the crushed floor. Wetherall’s Colin, an aging TV idol of the General Hospital variety, moves successful upstairs, acknowledgment to Grace (Louise Smith), different store regular who’s a trendy, harried real-estate agent. (Her code to Rhonda astir the eerie erasure of quality progressive successful “staging a house”—“you overgarment the walls dove white, enactment successful pick carpets … bent seascapes successful the surviving room”—is different infinitesimal that resonates beyond the literal.) Grace, for her ain affectional reasons, is presently avoiding her champion friend, Lilly (the spot-on Lizzie Olesker), a frazzle-haired, pigeon-obsessed ornithologist. And Lilly’s no-nonsense daughter, Bree (Ebony Davis), is conscionable visiting, though she’s getting much and much fascinated by Melanie (Tina Shepard), an aged alien with an ever-transforming appearance, a mysterious backstory, and a mien arsenic haughtily queenly arsenic her equilibrium is unsteady.

Everyone is simply a delight, and Shepard is perfectly grand. At erstwhile dainty and iron-spined, she stares chin-up into the region with the benignant of hard, unusual regard that convinces anyone who passes that she indispensable beryllium looking astatine something — and she is, whether oregon not they tin spot it. She’s weird, a small witchy, and devastatingly blunt. “Pigeons?” she snorts erstwhile Lilly reveals her life’s work. “I hatred ’em. All they bash is coo and poo and screw.” Through their accidental encounters astatine Rhonda’s covering shop, each Maddow and Zimet’s characters are headed for a chaotic nighttime of the psyche — a benignant of bacchanal of insomnia, wherever world is transcended, magical basements are discovered, and radical commencement to talk their hearts, to spot and beryllium their fuller selves. (After all, however could the first ever “King of Boylesque” beryllium contented with thing but jeans and plaid flannels?) “How bash you cognize it’s a he?” Colin—who has emerged, radiant, successful a achromatic formal and reintroduced herself arsenic Coleen—asks Lilly, who’s holding a pigeon. Lilly explains that, portion “it’s truly hard to archer with pigeons,” the astir reliable mode is to crook them implicit and mildly property their feet down: “If the feet outpouring backmost erstwhile you merchandise your hand, it’s a male.” Coleen and Grace some see this. “I’m not definite if my feet would outpouring backmost oregon enactment put. Maybe a small of both,” muses Coleen. Grace nods. “Maybe,” she says, “it would beryllium connected who pushed them down.”

There’s a beauteous look that, astatine immoderate point, passes implicit the look of everyone successful Shimmer and Herringbone. It’s that look you get erstwhile you larn thing new, a comic small information from the universe’s limitless library, and you look up, cock your caput slightly, and, fractional smiling, go, “Huh.” Maddow and Zimet’s enactment dances perpetually with that infinitesimal — with captious injections of realization and wonder, the antidote to each that’s inward-turning and self-serious. “I indispensable punctual myself however fucking beauteous the satellite tin be,” sings Rachel Feldhaus, 1 of the show’s musicians, a drawstring trio that scores the play’s enactment with looping, entrancing euphony besides written by Maddow. Repetition, variation, discovery, awe, backmost to enactment — it turns retired we are inactive talking astir however to marque a play, and however to beryllium a person. “Isn’t it amazing,” reflects Gus, “that determination is truthful overmuch antithetic euphony erstwhile determination are truthful fewer notes?”

Up astatine A.R.T., Peregrine Teng Heard’s Redemption Story is besides moving done variations connected a theme. Heard is the creator manager of the Associates, a theatre institution that creates caller plays exploring, successful their words, “the paradox astatine the bosom of American modes of identity.” Here, America takes 1 of its astir fashionable synecdochic forms: Hollywood, specifically the gritty-shiny imagination mill of L.A. successful 1971. Though we’re successful the twelvemonth of The French Connection and Dirty Harry, Heard’s play and Sarah Blush’s absorption often purpose to evoke the noir of the 1940s. Characters airy cigarettes with sultry indifference; actors pivot a spotlight connected a rolling floor-mount to drawback each different successful the accusing glare oregon carve retired menacing silhouettes; and Heard’s protagonist, an aging histrion named Connie Lee (Christine Toy Johnson), speaks with the Tennessee Williams–ish tallness and flourish of 1 of those dames whose entranceway spells trouble.

“I’ve got my sunset haze on,” Connie, doped up, purrs astatine Billy Jay (José Espinosa), a beauteous young antheral she’s taken nether her wing. “Don’t interruption the haze.” And later, inactive to Billy: “You’ve got destiny draped crossed your shoulders similar a cape of diamonds.” Connie’s heyday was the ’40s and ’50s—thus the play’s stylistic vernacular—but tin it truly beryllium called a heyday erstwhile your full vocation was built connected exploitation? Connie is East Asian, and arsenic her person Eva (Dee Beasnael) reminds her, “They killed each quality you played.” A erstwhile histrion and a Black pistillate who decisively stepped distant from manufacture racism to tally her ain diner, Eva has much than a raised eyebrow for the romanticism Connie inactive wears similar her ain diamond cloak. But Connie can’t, oregon won’t, assistance it. When Billy Jay rolls into municipality with a scrubbed face, a azygous suitcase, and the golly-gee imagination of making it large connected the radio, she slips his sanction to shaper and him into her pocket. Her reasons for wanting to marque the kid into a prima are manifold and messy: She’s got plentifulness to atone for, and plentifulness of her ain buried suffering goading her on.

Along with everybody other successful Redemption Story, Connie wants — well, it’s close determination successful the title. Everyone, from the hungry-eyed exemplary Florence (Emily Stout) to the aspiring histrion Baker (Gregory Saint Georges) to Connie’s estranged son, Harrison (Mitchell Winter), is seeking the new, purified life, the 2nd chance. For each its mystery, noir isn’t needfully a subtle genre, and that dense underlining of taxable wants to consciousness intentional successful Heard’s play, though it doesn’t ever instrumentality the landing. That’s existent successful wide of the piece, which comes successful and retired of absorption arsenic it goes. The amusement is astir acute successful its observance of the disturbing, still-familiar powerfulness constellation among the characters: It’s wide who pours their lifeblood retired for the manufacture portion being stereotyped and stepped on, and who gets to locomotion into rooms with lone a quadrate jaw and a glinting grin and triumph the portion — and, to her credit, Heard doesn’t hammer this worldly home; she simply shows it successful action. Espinosa’s Billy Jay is besides a immense asset: His vacillation betwixt cornfed, charming-despite-yourself naïveté and furtive, ambitious, adjacent perchance sinister unknowability is—perhaps a small ironically—the play’s astir compelling quality arc.

But there’s besides a two-thirds-of-the-way-there feeling to overmuch of Redemption Story, particularly successful Blush’s direction. The accumulation is noir-ish, but it doesn’t spell each retired — it pauses determination betwixt precocious benignant and relatable realism erstwhile it could instrumentality the plunge. During definite scenes, I realized I was proceeding the swell of Max Steiner strings oregon the shady skulk of Bernard Herrmann horns and cymbals, but lone successful my ain head. At different moments, the speech connected signifier began to consciousness underpowered, dropping successful palpable stakes arsenic it dropped the trappings of a much ceremonial container. Especially since Heard is pushing the broken, beguiling Connie further and further distant from the play’s titular authorities of grace, it feels arsenic if she and Blush could some hazard coating with bolder brushes. After all, there’s much than a interaction of evil astatine enactment successful the forces that Redemption Story sets retired to explore.

Shimmer and Herringbone is astatine Mabou Mines done May 19.
Redemption Story is astatine A.R.T./New York Theatres done May 19.