'Our Lady of 121st Street'

In my last play report, I wrote that I liked subscribing to the Signature Theatre’s seasons because it afforded me the opportunity to see plays by authors whose work I either didn’t know or hadn’t seen enough of.  That report was on Dominique Morisseau’s Paradise Blue (posted on Rick On Theater on 2 June), a play by an author whose work I hadn’t seen yet.  This time, I’m catching up with a playwright a couple of whose plays I have seen before, but whose work I don’t yet have a handle on: Stephen Adly Guirgis.  Coincidentally, the play on which I’m reporting here is one of the two I’ve seen previously, Our Lady of 121st Street; I saw the début production after it moved to the commercial venue, the Union Square Theatre, in 2003.  Oddly, I didn’t remember much about the production or, arguably more importantly, my response to it.  (2003 was years before I started writing performance reports, both the e-mail versions I sent my out-of-town friends and my ROT reports, so, alas, I have nothing in writing on that production.)

Pulitzer Prize-winner Guirgis (for 2015’s Between Riverside and Crazy), as readers of my reports will know, was the 2017-18 Residency 1 playwright at the Signature Theatre Company (succeeded by Morisseau); Our Lady is his second play (following the revival of 2000’s Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train last fall) of the three he’ll have at the company during his year-long term.  (Guirgis’s third residency play, a new one, was supposed to be produced at STC during the 2018-19 season, but the script isn’t ready so the unannounced new play will be presented in a later season.  I hope it will  be because I’d like to see where he’s gotten to since 2000 and 2002.  For a brief bio of Guirgis, see my report on Jesus, posted on 6 November 2017.) 

Our Lady of 121st Street had its world première Off-Off-Broadway from 20 August to 12 October 2002 at Center Stage, NY (on W. 21st Street in Manhattan’s Flatiron neighborhood).  Produced by the LAByrinth Theater Company (of which Guirgis was a member), it was directed by the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, the company’s founder and artistic director.  It moved to Off-Broadway and reopened at the Union Square (with the same director and cast) on 6 March 2003 (after starting preview performances on 18 February); the production ran until 27 July, collecting a passel of 2003 award nominations, including the Lucille Lortel Awards for Outstanding Play and Outstanding Director, Drama Desk Awards for Outstanding Play and Outstanding Director of a Play, and the Outer Critics Circle’s John Gassner Playwriting Award (unfortunately, taking home none).

Revivals and regional premières of Our Lady have been staged all over the United States, including Chicago (Steppenwolf Theatre Company, 5 February-28 March 2004; Eclipse Theatre Company, 14 July-21 August 2016), Washington, D.C. (Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, 8 December 2004-5 January 2005), San Francisco (San Francisco Playhouse, 4 March-22 April 2006), Los Angeles (Matrix Theatre, c. 23 November-30 December 2006; Burbank – Victory Bare Bones Ensemble/Zubber Dust Players, 1 May-7 June 2015), Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh Playhouse, 4-13 December 2015), Miami (Ground Up & Rising, 2-11 September 2016).  (The play is also very popular in school theaters, including, despite the language, high schools.)  Signature’s two-hour, one-intermission revival, the first in New York City since the première, began previews in the Pershing Square Signature Center’s Irene Diamond Stage, the company’s 294-seat proscenium house, on 1 May 2018 and opened on 20 May.  My theater partner, Diana, and I caught the 7:30 performance on Friday evening, 25 May; the production is currently scheduled to close on 17 June (after an extension from the original 10 June closing).

Since there’s almost no discernable plot, synopsizing Our Lady is a hard task.  Essentially, a diverse gathering of characters (sort of Grand Hotel-ish), each struggling with his or her own problem(s), comes together at the Ortiz Funeral Home in their old (East) Harlem neighborhood to mourn the death of Sister Rose, a severe but dedicated nun who’d been the teacher of many of them.  (She wasn’t averse to taking a “shillelagh” to her charges who “loved her, even when we didn’t.”)  Sister Rose, known to “any kid who grew up ’round a hundred twenty-first” as “Our Lady,” drank herself to death.  On the day of her wake, her former students, ranging from 30-somethings up to 50-somethings (plus a few hangers-on), discover that her body’s been stolen from her casket.  One ex-pupil, Balthazar (Joey Auzenne), who has his own issues, is an NYPD detective and is investigating the bizarre theft.  This extends the funeral schedule and all the . . . ummm, mourners (I can’t think of a more precise word—though there’s little mourning in evidence, just some recollecting), who’ve returned from all over the country, stick around longer than they’d planned. 

Our Lady’s apparently—according to the theater’s promos and several reviewers—about what happened when these mismatched folks, with only two things in common—the nabe and Sister Rose—come together after several decades and their old feelings, beefs, and attitudes resurface.  I’m not convinced that that’s actually what Guirgis had in mind when he composed (or assembled) Our Lady, but in any case, nothing is resolved from all the sound and fury (not even the theft of Sister Rose’s body, despite a gruesome revelation at the end of the play).  The characters don’t actually develop over the course of the play, but remain the same throughout the play, just more intense (like TV characters in sitcoms over a season or more).  The play doesn’t actually end . . . it just stops.  (I fall back on my unsubstantiated impression that the playwright sampled chance exchanges and sundry characters and then stitched them together with the Sister Rose contrivance.)

In addition to Balthazar, Sister Rose’s former students who’ve gathered for her funeral are Rooftop (Hill Harper), a popular Los Angeles DJ who got his nickname for his habit of taking “every Jordache bubble-butt from Ninety-sixth on up” onto the tenement roofs for sex, looking to reconcile with his ex-wife, Inez (Quincy Tyler Bernstine); Flip (Jimonn Cole), a closeted gay lawyer who arrives from Wisconsin with his needy lover, Gail (Kevin Isola), an amateur actor in denial about his effeminacy and who finds Flip’s return to his hetero high school persona frightening; fiery, foul-mouthed, eternally furious “Nasty” Norca (Paola Làzaro), with a wicked wit, who slept with her best friend Inez’s husband, Rooftop, but still expects Inez to forgive her; and Edwin (Erick Betancourt, who played one of the prison guards in Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train at STC), a local building super and caretaker for his brain-damaged brother, Pinky (Maki Borden), who was injured as a child when Edwin threw a brick out a window, hitting his little brother on the head.  There’s also an older former student, Victor (John Procaccino), who makes his appearance in the very first scene without his pants . . . because they were stolen while he slept at the funeral parlor when Sister Rose’s body was taken.  (There’s a bit of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in this turn—a man in underpants standing before a coffin.)  In addition to Gail, who wasn’t one of Sister Rose’s students, are Father Lux (John Doman), a wheelchair-bound priest at the church to which the school was attached who lost his legs in the Korean War and who may be losing his faith; Marcia (Stephanie Kurtzuba), the nun’s allergy-plagued niece; and Marcia’s friend Sonia (Dierdre Friel) from Connecticut, who’s a little lost in this world and whom Norca insists is a hated former schoolmate—Norca even assaults her—though Sonia was never one of Sister Rose’s pupils.

The characters are mixed in age from the mid-70’s (Father Lux) to early 50’s (Victor) to mid-40’s (Rooftop) to mid- and late 30’s, as well as race and ethnicity (Hispanic, black, white).  The time is unstated in the program (one published script puts it as “The present”), but there are indications in the script as well as Rashad’s staging that suggest the early 2000’s, when Our Lady of 121st Street was written (mentions of “if Rudy [Giuiani] were still in office”—his term expired in January 2002; New York City newscaster Bill Buetel, who retired in 2003 and died in 2006; and actor Gail getting work on Law & Order, which was cancelled in 2010; the characters carry “flip” cell phones, which were outdated by the mid-2000’s); furthermore, if the play were set in 2018, Father Lux would be 10 years too young to have fought in Korea. 

Like Neil Patel’s set for Signature’s Paradise Blue, Walt Spangler designed an acting environment for the Diamond stage that incorporates multiple areas: sections of the Ortiz Funeral Home (up center) towering over which is a huge sign with the business’s name, the neighborhood church (predominantly the confessional, down right), and a local bar and grill (down left and center) while accommodating incidental locations as the script requires.  (This design choice leave a large empty chasm in the center of the bar and grill set that’s a large void when not in use for a street scene or some other action.)  As a result, Rashad’s staging flows among the many short scenes much like a movie or TV show.  Given the discontinuous structure of the script, this decision is necessary—though not sufficient.

Our Lady isn’t a rookie play, coming two years after Jesus, a much better script, but Guirgis displays a shaky grasp of dramatic structure here.  The play has characters and scenes that are clearly juicy for actors—remember that Guirgis trained and started as an actor (he regards himself as “primarily an actor who writes,” says Leslie (Hoban) Blake in an interview with the playwright) and LAByrinth is basically an actors’ theater (Hoffman was also first and actor).  While Guirgis’s writing in Our Lady still has some (street-) poetic notes (albeit with a lot of F-bombs!), that’s not enough to compensate for the fragmented structure.  It’s probably supposed to have been a string-of-beads structure, but the string—the characters’ relationship to Sister Rose, her death, and the theft of her corpse—hardly exists; it’s a phony construct that means nothing and leads nowhere—an excuse for this unintegrated group to come together. 

Our Lady of 121st Street turns out to be a collection of disjointed scenes about a disparate group of characters who are near-clichés—and the script never coheres.  You could label it a portrait of a community, or a slice of life, or a snapshot of a time and place in a corner of New York City, but though I call it a “play”—because actors stand on a stage and speak lines before a live audience (and I don’t have another adequate word)—in the end it’s not a drama.  I said to Diana that it felt to me as if Guirgis had eavesdropped on snippets of random conversations on the streets and bars in Harlem and transcribed them, then decided to assemble them into a “play” without ever finding a common theme.  The separate scenes, many of the them two- or three-handers, are terrifically actable serio-comic pieces, wonderful material for scene-study classes, but they don’t add up to a satisfying evening of theater.  

The acting is fine, with the caveat that no one breaks away from the stereotypes Guirgis contrived—and they probably couldn’t have, given the script.  Standouts include Doman’s Father Lux, combining world-weariness, sympathetic toughness, and impatience, especially for Rooftop’s narcissism (his long peroration in the confessional kept reminding me of the joke that ends with the priest scolding, “You’re not confessing.  You’re bragging!”); Làzaro’s Norca, with her mercurial volatility and sharp tongue; Borden’s Pinky, a simple man-child in constant need of reassurance and acceptance, and Betancourt’s Edwin, expressing his love and concern for Pinky through gruffness and apprehension.  The whole cast, though, acquits themselves well, even if they never come together as a true ensemble but remain a gathering of quirky individuals.  I’m not sure director Rashad, an award-winning actress who makes her New York directorial début here, could have melded them into a whole any more than she managed.

Based on 29 published notices, Show-Score, the review-survey website, gave Our Lady of 121st Street an average score of 79, with 83% of the reviews being positive, 14% mixed, and 3% negative.  The site included five top scores of 90 (Hollywood Reporter, Gotham Playgoer, Daily Beast, and two notices on New York Stage Review), backed up by an 89 for Front Row Center and nine 85’s (including Theatre’s Leiter Side, CurtainUp, and Talkin’ Broadway); Show-Score’s lowest score went to the website Reclining Standards with a score of 40.  My round-up will cover 17 published notices.

In the Wall Street Journal, Terry Teachout declared that Rashad’s directing, “if uneven, [is] mostly pleasing,” and said the same of the play itself, which  “comes through with all sails billowing.  It isn’t perfect, but it’s smart and touching—and fun.”  In fact, whether despite or because of Guirgis’s liberal use of expletives (that Teachout can’t quote in the Journal), the reviewer states, “‘Our Lady’ is one of the funniest plays I’ve ever seen—or, rather, one of the funniest acts, since things get serious after intermission.”  He added, however, “The problem with “Our Lady of 121st Street” . . . is that it’s essentially plotless.”  As Teachout knows, “No matter how funny you are, it’s tough to keep a plotless comedy in motion—especially a serious one.”  The Journalist felt, though, “It’s a tribute to [Guirgis’s] inborn talent that he manages to make ‘Our Lady’ work in spite of its aimlessness,” and continued that “it’s no less a tribute to this well-cast revival that everybody in it . . . makes a sharp and strongly flavored impression.” 

Max McGuinness of the U.S. edition of the Financial Times observed, “It’s the oldest trick in the theatrical book.  Kill someone off.  Then round up family and friends for the funeral, where they can settle scores and rekindle old flames.”  Then the FT reviewer continued, given the circumstances of Our Lady of 121st Street, “It’s as if Guirgis is sending up the emptiness of his own plot device.”  He reported, “The loosely connected scenes . . . mostly serve as vehicles for Guirgis’s bawdy, rapid-fire repartee and colourfully sketched characters.”  Despite Rashad’s staging, which “keeps the comic tempo humming along nicely, . . . Guirgis’s text has a narrow, overly boisterous emotional range.”  Barbara Schuler’s “Bottom Line” in Long Island’s Newsday was “An entertaining study of some crazy, mixed-up characters” in a play made up of “brief scenes that director Phylicia Rashad keeps moving right along.”  Schuler declared, “This is a character study, pure and simple” and “offers no resolution whatsoever.” 

The New York Times’ Jesse Green posited that “drama is about people behaving badly” and there are a lot of “whiners and wastrels to be found on New York stages . . . .  But undoubtedly the most enjoyable screw-ups you can catch right now are those hanging around the Ortiz Funeral Parlor in ‘Our Lady of 121st Street.’”  He called the STC production “a raucous, rough-edged revival” and asserted that it’s been a long time since “dialogue so laced with profanity [has] been so gorgeously employed to define and distinguish character” by “a dirty dozen of unpublishable grievance.”  The Timesman observed that “even without curses the back-and-forth is biting.”  He assured us, though, “Cutting they may be, but Mr. Guirgis’s characters are never merely indulging in insult comedy.  They are groping toward the core of conflicts that are hard to put into words otherwise.”  In Our Lady, Green explained, the “scenes . . . don’t drive forward so much as accumulate. . . .  This is not the stuff of pointed drama; Balthazar the detective doesn’t even solve the crime.”  The Times reviewer continued, “But these aren’t failings so much as expressions of Mr. Guirgis’s overall despair that humans, however well intentioned, are not equipped to repair the damage they cause.  Really, they are only equipped to keep causing it.” 

Under Rashad’s direction, reported the review-writer, “the cast offers a very rich, primary-color rendition of a complicated group of people.”  But Green found that “good as they are, they too often seem to cut corners rather than hug the curves of the play’s twisty contours” and he blames Rashad’s staging, “blurry and amorphous,” for that.  “It is often difficult to tell where the action is taking place, and even where to look. . . .  And when scenes end, they do so awkwardly or indifferently, with an abrupt change of lights (by Keith Parham) or music (by Robert Kaplowitz), as if under-rehearsed.”  Saying that “no contemporary playwright is better at the long game of setting up jokes, and making them pay unexpected philosophical dividends” than Guirgis, Green went on:

I hesitate to say that the play, too, might have benefited by some rethinking. . . . .  And especially in the second act you can feel Mr. Guirgis’s dramaturgical anxiety mount as he tries to juggle too many stories.  Some he just drops, or tosses offstage when he hopes no one is looking.  The ending is a sheepish shrug.

Sara Holdren, in New York magazine/Vulture, labeled Our Lady of 121st Street “a play full of combustible energy that would benefit from compression and claustrophobia.”  “The production,” Holdren found, “is a curious creature:  It’s powered by a number of individually gutsy performances, yet, taken as a whole, its punch doesn’t quite hit the gut.”  She explained:

It rails and rants and gets characteristically raw—Guirgis is a playwright of the every-other-word-is-fuckin’ school—but in the Diamond, under the actor-friendly direction of Phylicia Rashad, its energy can feel diffuse and its trappings noticeably un-gritty.  It doesn’t need an intermission, but it’s got one.  All in all, it often feels weirdly comfortable, like a downtown street cat that’s moved uptown and indoors, where its claws get regularly clipped and there are always Friskies in the bowl.

In her direction, “Rashad seems most at home working with Our Lady’s cast in these individual moments of outsized emotion, connection, and indignation,” Holdren found, “but the arrangement of scenes in space feels static and tableau-ish, and the transitions—conventional music-plays-while-the-lights-go-dark affairs—fail to add meaning or movement.”  The reviewer blamed Spangler’s set, “a bit like a series of dioramas.”  As a result, “the characters of this Our Lady of 121st Street—all scrappy, surly fighters—have too much breathing room.”  Holdren found, “Some of their anger, which should bounce off the walls and smack us in the face, floats off into the air, or gets absorbed in the carpet that covers the stage.”  She concluded that “the vigor and power of this Our Lady belong to its actors, while the play itself feels a little defanged.”

The reviewer for the New Yorker’s “Goings On About Town” section warned us that “tight storytelling is not the point here, and neither is Sister Rose.”  The unnamed review-writer pointed out, “Plot strands are brought up and abandoned; people come and go for no good reason.”  Still, “the play does have memorable characters spouting memorable dialogue,” acknowledged the New Yorker writer.  “Few contemporary playwrights have Guirgis’s sense of rhythm or his flair for telling, grounding details.”  The reviewer’s estimation of the STC revival was: “The Signature’s cast is firing on all cylinders under Phylicia Rashad’s direction, even as it battles a sprawling set, by Walt Spangler, that creates problems rather than solving them.”

Frank Scheck of the Hollywood Reporter wrote in his “Bottom Line”: “Superb performers do full justice to blisteringly funny material” and recommended, “Acting students would be well advised to head immediately to the off-Broadway revival of Stephen Adly Guirgis’ Our Lady of 121st Street.”  The play’s “procession of darkly hilarious scenes providing a ready-made series of indelible audition pieces for male and female performers of varying ethnicities.”  In his high-scoring review (one of Show-Score’s 90’s), Scheck effused, “This superb production, staged to perfection by Phylicia Rashad, provides a master class in how it’s done.”  The HR reviewer warned, “To say that not much really happens in the course of the play is an understatement,” adding that the ostensible missing-corpse plot “proves merely a springboard for the characters to unveil their hopes, fears and disappointments in a series of confrontations that are frequently as moving as they are riotously funny.”  Rashad, reported Scheck, “delivers an assured staging that fully allows the actors to flower in their roles while resisting the temptation of going over the top” and “all the performances feel fully lived in.”  “While it might benefit from being presented in one of the theaterplex’s smaller spaces,” observed Scheck, the STC revival of Our Lady “makes a strong case for the playwright as one of our most essential theatrical voices.”

“I’ve been struck by how often Stephen Adly Guirgis . . . is praised for the authenticity of his street vernacular,” remarked David Fox on Reclining Standards, which scored Show-Score’s sole 40 (as you’ll soon see why).  “Maybe, but since the comment most often comes from critics (which I mean here to be taken as code for mostly affluent and white), how exactly would they know?”  Fox continued his argument:

I freely admit I’m not in a position to judge its accuracy, but what I hear is dialogue that feels highly constructed, with flashes of cleverness and wit, heavily laced with Guirgis’s signature barrage of expletives. It doesn’t suggest “authenticity” to me so much as the sassy cousin of funny TV writing, deliberately made racy for shock value.

Fox’s objection to Guirgis’s playwriting is that “although he’s an exceptionally good craftsman—adroit at telling a story and keeping a lot of (forgive the expression) balls in the air—his plays only intermittently go deeper than their surface shock tactics.”  As for Rashad’s “flashy, shallow” revival of Our Lady of 121st Street at Signature, asserted Fox, “You certainly won’t find much depth” there, “though Guirgis doesn’t help.”  The RS reviewer felt that “from the get-go, Guirgis signals that seriousness will be consistently undercut with humor,” and the production becomes “a rollercoaster ride, veering from comedy to tragedy”—except, Fox lamented, “Rashad’s direction inserts an unwelcome sense of jazz-hands flash into the short scene-lets, which here look more like the kind of miniatures specifically designed for acting showcases than part of a long, thoughtful story arc.”  He also complained of “the awkwardly wide performance space of the Irene Diamond Stage, which further compounds the artificiality.”  His ultimate analysis was that “a production meant to celebrate Stephen Adly Guirgis’s importance and influence paradoxically reveals his faults.  As seen at Signature, Our Lady of 121st Street is perilously close to TV comedy, with the addition of a lot of dirty words.”

Jonathan Mandell of New York Theater found STC’s revival of Our Lady of 121st Street “a production smartly cast and competently directed by Phylicia Rashad.  The script,” he continued, “exhibits some of Guirgis’s familiar street energy, full of harsh, foul-mouthed humor; it even touches on some of his usual themes (living with sorrow and regret; betrayal; spiritual redemption.)”  Mandell reported, however, that “‘Our Lady of 121st Street’ is less substantive and less satisfying than many of his other plays.”  The play’s opening scene “promises . . . a farcical mystery,” then “quickly swerves in a different direction—or, more precisely, loses direction.”  Our Lady unfolds “mostly in two-character or three-character scenes that amount to little more than darkly comic vignettes.”  Each of the play’s characters (as I noted earlier) has a roster of serious personal problems, “but these are largely undeveloped,” explained Mandell, “told in throwaway lines.  The comedy dominates. (I’m not sure if any director could bring the poignancy more to the fore; this one doesn’t.)”  The NYTheater reviewer found, “Some of the scenes, though, are not so much funny as just odd, or incomplete,” while “[o]thers get by on the force of the acting.” 

Howard Miller labeled the Signature production of Our Lady a “snappy revival” of a “scary-comic” play on Talkin’ Broadway.  “Don’t go looking for much of a plot,” warned Miller.  “Our Lady of 121st Street is a character-driven play.”  The TB review-writer reported that “the entire first act is made up of short scenes that serve as introductions,” continuing, “Every encounter seems like the ultimate non sequitur, most of them hugely funny though seemingly unrelated to the others, until the jigsaw puzzle starts to assemble itself piece by piece in Act II.”  Guirgis, “the excellent cast,” and director Rashad “deliver the goods.”  Miller concluded, “The permeating dark humor of Our Lady of 121st Street masks a great deal of pain, and Stephen Adly Guirgis uses it smartly to turn over a lot of rocks.”

On Broadway World, Michael Dale dubbed the STC revival a “crackling production” which “hits the ground running” in “a series of touching and funny interactions between everyday souls getting through their own personal struggles.”  In his final assessment of the performance, Dale asserted, “Skillfully gliding from sharp, scatologically-expressed humor to realistic pathos, OUR LADY OF 121ST STREET is a terrific collection of genuine New York stories.”  Sandi Durell of Theater Pizzazz characterized Our Lady as an “all too funny, poignant and earthy story about the down-trodden.”  Durell found “the characters are rich and ripe” and Rashad “takes the reins and willingly lets go allowing her cast to fly untethered.”  In her final word on the production, the TP reviewer advised, “Be prepared for the unexpected and enjoy the ride! Guirgis is a genius when it comes to dark irreverent comedy.” 

On TheaterScene,net, Joel Benjamin recalled the 2003 première of Our Lady of 121st Street “as a dark tale of troubled characters, not without an edge of humor.  I didn’t come away laughing, but trembling partly in anger and partly in disgust.”  However, he found that the STC revival “magically now comes across as an addled, profane sitcom.”  Benjamin affirmed:

It’s entertaining and at times moving, but the real magic is that the very same words can be tended by a solid director—this one obviously experienced in sitcoms [readers will recall that Rashad played Clair Huxtable on The Cosby Show for eight years]—and refresh a theatrical experience so completely.  Rashad has shown that scathing can be scathingly funny.  This time I left laughing.

“Scenes switch quickly” with a “parade of characters.”  All the characters have “neuroses and social issues, few of which are dealt with when the play ends on an abrupt, breathless note.”  Benjamin felt. “It’s Guirgis’ . . . talent to make these different elements coalesce into a wonderfully rich crazy quilt of humanity on the lowdown.” 

Elyse Sommer emphasized on CurtainUp that the missing-corpse scenario is “a device for initiating a series of verbal pas-de-deux or trois character-defining scenes for a big cast of terrific actors.”  Guirgis, she affirmed, “did weave all those episodic interchanges into a memorably hilarious very dark human comedy.”  Rashad has “assembled an excellent top to bottom ensemble and competently guided them.” 

On Theatre’s Leiter Side, Samuel L. Leiter labeled Our Lady of 121st Street a “black comedy” that’s “essentially plotless” with a first act that is “hilariously potty-mouthed.”  Leiter described Our Lady as, “rather than a conventional play, an episodic, dramatic concert in which the songs have been converted to acting arias, including solos, duets, and choral numbers.”  The play’s structure is a “series of scenes . . . with rippling, sinewy dialogue that commands attention and ignites raucous laughter, introducing us to a succession of pulsing livewires whose connections with others create fiery sparks.”  The TLS blogger confirmed that “Our Lady has loose ends [and] several vaguely drawn characters,” but “[d]espite the play’s structural problems, its characters and language are so electric that, even when the laughs subside in the more serious Act II, you remain invested in these damaged souls.”  Leiter had problems with the set design, which “is too spread out on the wide stage, dissipating focus, and creating problems that Rashad’s directing doesn’t fully resolve.”  Still, the blogger concluded that “even with its flaws, Our Lady, of the nearly 20 plays I’ve reviewed since the 2018-2019 began, is (by a hair) the best.”

On New York Theater Guide, Donna Herman observed, Our Lady “is missing several elements that are usually vital to a play—like a plot and an ending. But the biggest thing it’s missing is . . . more.”  She explained, “When the lights came down on the revival of Our Lady of 121st Street currently playing at the Signature Theatre, I didn’t want it to end.”  In a unique comparison, Herman offered, “What Our Lady of 121st Street really resembles is an uptown version of Seinfeld.  Not a lot really happens in terms of plot.”  Furthermore,

Mostly everyone sits around talking to each other.  But the characters get under your skin, and their quiet and not-so-quiet struggles to stay afloat in a hostile world, and their ability to see the humor in the darkness, is like water in the desert. You thirst for more

In the end, the NYTG reviewer declared, “Hats off to a superb cast, insightful and powerful script by Stephen Adly Guirgis and deft direction by Phylicia Rashad.”

Hayley Levitt of TheaterMania proclaimed that director Rashad has built “a vibrant yet subtle energetic network within her brilliant ensemble of actors” for STC’s Our Lady of 121st Street.  In contrast to most reviewers, Levitt found that “Walt Spangler’s sectioned scenic design perfectly accommodates the play’s vignettes, which begin as their own mini-plays but bleed together into the single space of the funeral home waiting room by Act 2.”  The set “also gives a semblance of structure to an amorphous narrative where conflicts are left unsettled, crimes are left unsolved, and goals are left extremely undefined.”  The TM review-writer felt that “if after Our Lady of 121st Street we feel somewhat unsatisfied, that means we’re hungry for more.” 

'Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train'

Stephen Adly Guirgis has been around as a playwright since 1995 (with the one-act Race, Religion and Politics at HERE in lower Manhattan), so he’s been what’s usually called an “emerging playwright” for 22 years.  I’ve known his name for much of that time, but I’d still only seen one Guirgis play, the original production of  Our Lady of 121st Street in February 2003 at the Union Square Theatre.  Now Guirgis is the Residency One writer at the Signature Theatre Company, the successor to Suzan-Lori Parks, whose year-long term just ended, so I was glad to have a chance to see some more of his work.  The thing is, I don’t really remember much about Our Lady of 121st Street, so I’m sort of starting with a clean slate.

Guirgis, who turns 53 on 30 November, is now a Pulitzer Prize-winner (in 2015 for Between Riverside and Crazy, Atlantic Theater Company, 2014; Atlantic Theater Company/Second Stage Theatre, 2015; also 2015 Lucille Lortel Award, Outer Critics Circle Award, New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, Off Broadway Alliance Award) with a Broadway run to his name (The Motherfucker with the Hat, Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, 2011; nominee for 2011 Best Play Tony, Outstanding Play Drama Desk Award, Outer Critics Circle Award, Drama League Award).  His first STC production is the current Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train; it will be followed by a revival of Our Lady of 121st Street in the spring of 2018 and a new play during the 2018-19 season.  After seeing the new production of Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train on Friday evening, 27 October, I’m looking forward to seeing it again—and catching Guirgis’s première next year. 

Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train had its world première at the East 13th Street/CSC Theatre in New York City’s East Village from 29 November to 31 December 2000, directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman for the LAByrinth Theater Company.  The production starred Ron Cephas Jones as Lucius Jenkins and John Ortiz, LAByrinth’s co-artistic director (with Hoffman), as Angel Cruz.  The play was later presented at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2001 where it won the First Award, as well as at the Donmar Warehouse in London in 2002, garnering a nomination for the Olivier Award for Best New Play for 2003.  Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train was produced by the Eclipse Theatre Company of Chicago in 2016 and in Melbourne, Australia, in 2003 at the Red Stitch Theatre.  Other revivals have been staged around the U.S. and abroad.  The current STC mounting, the first revival in New York City since its début here, began previews under the direction of Mark Brokaw in the Pershing Square Signature Center’s Irene Diamond Stage, the company’s main proscenium house, on 14 October 2017 and opened on 23 October; it’s scheduled to close on 26 November (after a two-week extension from 12 November).

Despite being a fixture in New York and U.S. theater—Guirgis is also a working stage, film, and TV actor, a director, and a screenwriter—there’s remarkably little about his background in public record that I’ve found.  Stephen Adly Guirgis was born in 1964 in New York City, the son of an Egyptian father and an Irish-American mother, and raised on the Upper West Side.  He attended Catholic school in nearby Harlem and went to the State University of New York at Albany, graduating in 1990.  It took Guirgis 7½ years to complete his BA because, as he acknowledged, he was “just lost,” switching majors from undeclared to political science to English.  Then he found his focus when his sister gave him tickets to Lanford Wilson’s 1987 drama Burn This starring John Malkolvich.   That production “changed my fucking life,” Guirgis declares.  “The play just knocked me out.  I went back and changed my major to theater.”  As a theater student at SUNY-Albany, Guirgis also met a new friend: classmate John Ortiz who would be a founding member and co-artistic director of the LAByrinth Theater Company.

Guirgis began his theater career as an actor—he considers himself “an actor who writes,” according to theater journalist Leslie (Hoban) Blake—and in 1994, he was asked to join LAByrinth.  The next year, Ortiz asked him to write a play, which turned out to be his first produced work, Race, Religion and Politics.  At LABryrinth, the tyro playwright also met Philip Seymour Hoffman, who became Guirgis’s friend and frequent director in his early years.  The writer felt that LABryrinth became his family and Hoffman his brother, as he wrote in the dedication to the published text of three of his plays.  (Hoffman died from a drug overdose at 46 in 2014.)  LABryrinth, founded in 1992, has produced eight of Guirgis’s 10 scripts (to date), five of them directed by Hoffman.  His screenwriting credits have included TV shows such as NYPD Blue and The Sopranos.

Guirgis’s plays depict a life on society’s margins, characters the New Yorker’s Hilton Als observes are “black, Jewish, and Latino voices that meet and crash and land on the predatory streets” of New York City.  His plays, including Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train, are tragic, but include a great deal of tremendous humor.  He employs language as a kind of street poetry, salted with obscenities, but his characters use it to express often complex and profound ideas they wrestle with throughout the play.  The character’s themselves at first glance seem like stereotypes, even clichés, but they soon show themselves to be unique and fully-rounded individuals who often surprise the viewer.  If there’s a detriment to this dramaturgy, it’s that many of Guirgis’s characters, both the educated and the un-, begin to sound alike, as if they are all avatars of one another.

This isn’t to say that Guirgis’s plays offer a clear-cut resolution either to the plays’ situations or the characters’ issues; they are often open-ended and leave many questions raised but unanswered.  Some critics have found this a drawback in Guirgis’s playwriting, while others see his not supplying ready answers as an asset.  By one measure, too, his plays cover too many metaphysical and intractable problems to resolve easily.  This can be frustrating to a spectator, even unsatisfying—but it leaves the theatergoer thinking, which may well have been the dramatist’s intent all along. 

This 2¼-hour, two act play focuses on two temporary inmates of New York City’s Rikers Island jail complex, Angel Cruz (Sean Carvajal) and Lucius Jenkins (Edi Gathegi), and the two men and one woman who are in their orbit in the city’s criminal justice system.  (Curiously, Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train was originally set in the The Tombs, formally called the Manhattan Detention Complex, at the southern end of the island, known at the time as the Bernard B. Kerik Complex.)  It’s around 2000 (because Lucius mentions wanting to be interviewed by TV journalist Connie Chung, who’s been off network news since then and off the air for over 10 years now).  Angel, a 30-year-old Nuyorican, is waiting to be tried on a charge of attempted murder for shooting Reverend Kim, the leader of a Moonie-like cult, in the ass.  Angel charged that Reverend Kim had “stolen” his childhood friend Joey and, stymied by a system rigged by the reverend’s influential church, the assault “was something I could do, ah-right?!”—the only thing.  (Guirgis says that he wrote the play based on his own attempt to rescue a friend from Moon’s Unification Church.)

After an opening scene in which the irreligious Angel tries unsuccessfully to say the Lord’s Prayer (“Our Father, who art in heaven, Howard be thy name” is how it comes out), accompanied by obscene catcalls from inmates and guards, his public defender, Mary Jane Hanrahan (Stephanie DiMaggio), meets with her client and starts off confusing him with another defendant.  He demands a “real” lawyer and Mary Jane tries to mollify him by demonstrating how well she knows his case—but Angel won’t have any of it.  A volatile and passionate man, Angel blurts out in his anger that he did, indeed, shoot Reverend Kim—though he denies he intended to do any more than “bust a cap in his lyin’, bullshittin’ ass.”  Whatever his intent, Mary Jane explains that she can’t represent him now because he confessed to her.  Having admitted that he shot Reverend Kim, she can no longer put him on the witness stand because if she does she “would be suborning perjury” and “if you’re lying up there, we can’t know about it.”  Now, Mary Jane observes, Angel will get that new lawyer he wants.

(This little dramaturgical gambit of Guirgis’s disturbed me—not the suborning perjury, which is legit, but the lawyer’s dropping a client because he “confessed” to her.  I didn’t buy it: if it were accurate, it seems like something that would happen fairly often and an awful lot of lawyers would be walking away from an awful lot of defendants.  I have a hard time believing this would really happen outside fiction.  So I asked a criminal defense lawyer I know—who does a lot of court-appointed cases, as a matter of fact—and he replied that I’m “correct that the attorney normally would not just walk away after such an admission.”  It’s not terribly consequential to the play since Mary Jane ultimately doesn’t drop Angel as a client—and we’ll see the consequences of that.)

Mary Jane sympathizes with Angel’s earnestness too much and ends up defending him anyway.  She begins by examining his motivation for shooting Reverend Kim.  When the reverend dies of a heart attack as a result of the operation to  remove the bullet, the charges against Angel are upgraded to felony murder.  As a result, he’s transferred to the Protective Custody wing of the jail and during his one hour of exercise in an outdoor cage, he meets Lucius in the next cage.  Well, not “meets,” exactly: the two inmates are separated by a uncrossable chasm of a few feet as each man is caged up within a box of metal mesh.  Lucius, an African American around 42, is a serial killer nicknamed “Black Plague,” awaiting extradition to Florida to face a capital trial for five murders, but he has delusions that he’s found Jesus even though he remains unrepentant.  Also in the PC exercise yard are two prison guards, Charlie D’Amico (Erick Betancourt) and Valdez (Ricardo Chavira), who have diametrically different approaches to implementing the laws they’re charged with enforcing; Charlie, in his 30’s, is affable, good-hearted—the uber good cop who’s become Lucius’s sidekick, and Valdez, older, maybe 40’s, has a vicious wit, a nasty mouth, and no sympathy for the cons. 

(The upgrade of Angel’s charge raised another question I posed to my attorney friend.  Obviously, the death of the victim of an assault ups the crime from attempted murder; that’s not in doubt.  I’d have thought he’d simply be charged with some kind of straight murder, however, not felony murder.  The death didn’t occur during the commission of some other crime—such as robbery, rape, arson, or burglary—but as a direct result of having been intentionally shot by the defendant.  My legal informant concurred: “I see no basis for felony murder on the facts as presented,” he wrote me.  I also checked on line and found that, as I surmised, assault isn’t construed as an underlying crime for a felony murder charge since murder usually involves an assault.  Again, though, this misunderstanding is of little consequence except insofar as it pulled me out of the play—any public defender, DA, or judge would know better—because the only important circumstance is that Angel is now charged with murder.)

The rest of Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train is a confrontation, sometimes humorous, sometimes harrowing, mostly profane, between Lucius, charismatic and with a positivism that’s nearly maniacal, and Angel, hot-headed, emotional, stubborn, and conflicted (he’s dubbed “Droopy Dog,” much to his displeasure), as the three others circle around the periphery of their nonce universe.  It’s no coincidence that “Lucius” sounds a lot like “Lucifer,” so Guirgis is presenting us a conflict between Devil and Angel (who, to make this paring hold up, doesn’t use the Spanish pronunciation of his name).  Lucius speaks in the language of Christianity and redemption even though he’s committed eight gruesome murders (five in Florida and three more in New York State for which he’s already been convicted) and yet declares himself saved.  William Shakespeare observes that “the devil hath power / T’ assume a pleasing shape.”  And Angel, caught between his desire to escape his punishment and his impulse to take responsibility for what he’s done, vacillates between accepting Lucius’s proffer of deliverance and rejecting his pretense of false salvation.  (Guirgis, a lapsed Catholic, has thrown a “Mary” into the mix as an arrogant and prideful would-be savior who stoops to deceit to win Angel’s case—which he, himself, scuttles resulting in her disbarment.) 

I found Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train fascinating—not great, which I’ll try to get to in a moment—though Diana, my usual theater companion, dismissed it as “same old same old” (which I reject).  She contended that Guirgis’s language was ordinary, that she’d heard it everywhere many times, and when I said I found it startling and even poetic (it is vulgar, but the characters are mostly jailbirds and guards), she sort of harrumphed.  This exchange occurred at intermission, so I said I wasn’t prepared to dismiss the play yet, that I found it interesting so far.  The characters intrigued me; though they appeared at first to be stereotypes, they seemed to promise surprises and quirks that hooked me. 

Now, I have to admit that in the end, Guirgis didn’t live up to the promise he seemed to have made.  The characters and the action didn’t really go anywhere in the end; the play’s a series of mostly short scenes that are all airy, philosophical discussion—albeit in earthy language—that don’t resolve anything as far as the drama goes.  The scenes are also often separated by direct-address monologues by many of the characters, a tactic I find anti-theatrical—people standing in a spotlight, talking to me.  (This reminded me a little of Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Confessions” in In the Blood.  See my report posted on 12 October and Kirk Woodward’s article “The Red Letter Plays, Continued,” 1 November.)  Still, I’m not ready to write Guirgis off, and I see enough of interest in Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train to want to see where he goes with it.  Even with flaws in the overall dramaturgy, there are individual aspects of the play that are stunning.  (Guirgis’s third play as a Residency One writer will be a new work.)

Still, Guirgis not only has an ear for common speech, but like August Wilson, Tennessee Williams, and Anton Chekhov, he lets his characters speak more lyrically and poetically than real people ever can while still making it sound like street speech.  (This despite the vulgarities, which are just part of the milieu.)  The characters in Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train talk philosophy without making it sound out of their range.  (The dialect coach for STC’s revival is Deborah Hecht, whom I assume has much to do with the success of this on stage at the Pershing Square Signature Center.)  He’s also created characters, all five of whom are seriously flawed.  Devil and Angel may be Guirgis’s template here, but not necessarily Good and Evil, for none of the five clearly represents either position.  For all his righteous anger and sense of justice, Angel is rash, out-of-control, and oblivious to the consequences of his choices, intended or not.  Lucius’s epistemology is insidious and self-deluding.  With Mary Jane, Charlie, and Valdez, the picture of the justice system the playwright has drawn demonstrates that the people on both sides are damaged.

Mark Brokaw has directed the STC company with high energy.  Not just Carvajal’s Angel and Gathegi’s Lucius work at full tilt, but so does Chavira’s Valdez and, to a slightly lesser degree, DiMaggio’s Mary Jane; only Betancourt’s Charlie performs on a slightly calmer plane—but his emotional investment is still pretty intense.  Gathegi does much of his scene work in a state of vigorous physical activity which is almost exhausting merely to watch, but he maintains his sense of character throughout.  (Andrea Haring is credited as vocal coach for the production, and I imagine she has something to do with this work.  There’s no credit for Gathegi’s physical performance, but whoever is responsible should take a bow.)  Brokaw has also staged the monologues most of the characters deliver to the audience so that they seem less interruptive than they might have in other hands—though they still halt the play so Guirgis can supply some background or reveal a character’s thoughts.  There ought to be a better, less writerly way to manage this (if, indeed, it’s even necessary)—but that’s not the director’s problem. 

Riccardo Hernandez’s minimalistic set, which consists of two metal cages that resemble nothing more than oversized kennels, is as grim and characterless as you might imagine a city jail would be.  (I haven’t had a great deal of experience with jails; my one encounter was in West Berlin when I was in the army and had to speak with someone who was incarcerated.  He was in a cell, not an exercise cage, but the image is mighty similar.)  Scott Zielinski’s lighting enhanced the bleakness of the surroundings—blazingly bright when the inmates are in the outdoor cages, exposed to the sunlight; dim and shadowy when they’re inside as when Angel meets with his lawyer. 

Before I get to the acting, I should make note of some difficulties through which the company went late in the rehearsal period for Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train.  On 28 September, Playbill reported that the Signature Theatre Company delayed the start of previews, scheduled for 3 October, because of the withdrawal of actor Reg E. Cathey from the cast for “personal conflicts” (which Playbill indicated were unspecified “medical issues”).  The performances were to start on 5 October with Edi Gathegi taking the role of Lucius.  Then on 12 October, the theater magazine reported that Victor Rasuk, the actor playing Angel, had left the production for “personal reasons”; the role would be assumed by Sean Carvajal.  STC canceled performances from 7 through 14 October to rehearse Carvajal, but the opening date of 23 October was maintained.

Given the tribulations of the cast, and Gathegi and Carvajal in particular, they did a remarkable job just a fortnight after coming together.  I’ve already mentioned Gathegi’s physical exertions and the vocal work he does at the same time, but what makes this a performance and not just an exhibition of aerobics-cum-speech-making is that both Gathegi’s physicalizations and vocalizations are extensions of the emotional and psychological state of his Lucius.  As mercurial as Gathegi’s serial killer is, he makes it all visible and audible in his performance.  Another of Gathegi’s assets in the role is that I was never sure if his Lucius is on the level or shining us all on, especially Angel.  He’s so obviously pushing Valdez’s buttons and he shamelessly manipulates Charlie to do his bidding—clues that nothing he says or does is should be taken at face value—but is he putting one over on Angel, too?  Gathegi never provides an answer.  As Charlie says after viewing Lucius’s execution in Florida, “Ask me about Lucius Jenkins, . . . there ain’t a hell of a lot I know.”  Gathegi’s cool and his ability not to let us see a glimmer of truth makes his Lucius a truly terrifying man.  (I can’t entirely shake the character Gathegi played on The Blacklist on NBC in 2015 and ’16.  Being similarly inscrutable to Lucius, Gathegi’s character was one of the nastiest and most detestable killers ever to have a role on a TV series; he absolutely needed to die.) 

He’s matched beat for beat by Carvajal (who had even less time to prepare).  A small man, Carvajal seems lost in a prison jumpsuit that’s too big for him—but his stage presence and his energy are anything but hidden or small.  This dichotomy makes him something of a conundrum right from the start.  (This effect was either a brilliant coup by costume designer Dede Ayite, or a fortuitous accident of being forced to use the costume built for Carvajal’s predecessor.)  There are problems with Angel’s credibility—it’s hard to believe his quicksilver reversals, especially his final one that prompts him to confess in court to his act of revenge.  That’s no fault of Carvajal (or Brokaw); it’s Guirgis’s tyro playwriting.  (Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train was only the writer’s third produced work.)  However hard to get hold of Angel’s character is, Carvajal so fully commits to it, inexplicable changes and all, that I accepted it wholeheartedly.  There are people like that sometimes: you can’t figure out why they do what they do, but you completely believe they’re sincere about it.  That was Carvajal’s Angel.  As much as Gathegi keeps everyone, including the audience, out of Lucius’s inner life, Carvajal draws us in to Angel’s.

I’ve also already remarked that the figures on the outside of the Rikers cages are nearly as scarred as the prisoners, and all three actors, Stephanie DiMaggio, Erick Betancourt, and Ricardo Chavira, let us see this.  They show us the masks Mary Jane, Charlie, and Valdez present to the world in their scenes with Angel and Lucius, and DiMaggio and Betancourt show us the damaged and pained Mary Jane and Charlie in the monologues.  (Angel and Valdez are the only characters in Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train who don’t address the audience directly.)  I’d have preferred to see those self-revealing moments integrated into the dialogue scenes, but, again, that’s not the fault of the actors.  If their roles are a little two-dimensional, DiMaggio, Betancourt, and Chavira carry them off convincingly.

Based on 24 published and posted reviews, Show-Score gave Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train an average rating of 83.  The site’s top score was one 95 for Theatre Is Easy, followed by a 93 on Front Row Center; the lowest score was Time Out New York’s 60.  The breakdown on Show-Score was 95% positive, 4% mixed, and no negative notices at all.  My round-up will consist of 14 reviews.

The New York Times was the only daily newspaper to cover the revival of Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train at STC.  In his review, Jesse Green labeled the play “an obscenity oratorio in which vicious, muscular dialogue, appropriate to its setting, turns into gorgeous music.”  Green elucidated:

If it reached no further, the breakneck drama . . . would be a worthy enough stunt, a jukebox of Mamet-scaled vulgarity.  But when performed, as it is here, by a cast that can recreate its rapture as well as its moral gravity, it achieves the doubleness of great art, burrowing deeper the higher it flies.

(Believe it not, this notice scored only a middling 85 on Show-Score’s scale.)  The opening moment of Angel struggling with the distant memory of the Lord’s Prayer, the Times reviewer pointed out, “is Mr. Guirgis’s tip-off that what may look like a genre play—a legal procedural—is going to consider God’s justice as well as man’s.”  Positing that “we have trouble deciding how to invest our emotions” between “the psychopath [who] is an acute thinker” and the “tantrum-prone man-child,” Green asserted, “That is exactly where Mr. Guirgis . . . wants us: in a confused crouch that renders us vulnerable to deeper questioning.”  The Timesman went on to ask: “So where is God—where is good—in the criminal justice system?” adding, “The questions don’t so much hover over ‘Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train’ as yank at it with gale force.”  Green, like me, found that the monologues “pull . . . back from the action,” but otherwise deemed Brokaw’s “staging . . . is otherwise evenhanded and clean, as if not wanting to leave any fingerprints,” instead “rightly” focusing “on shaping the cast into a superlative ensemble.”  The review-writer concluded that the play’s “arguments are eternal . . . .  But they are also particular to our time and place, perhaps even more so now that the United States is the world’s largest jailer than they were in 2000.”  His final point was: “In 2017 ‘Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train’ seems to ask whether justice, and even God, is possible in an unjust society.  No wonder it’s so profane.”

Helen Shaw of Time Out New York reported in Show-Score’s lowest-rated review (60) that at the performance she saw, “the audience applauded midscene four times.  Four times!  That’s unusual at a nonmusical; contemporary realism doesn’t go for showstoppers.”  Calling Guirgis “an unapologetic maximalist,” Shaw said he “writes as though he were composing opera: Stretches of talk flower into huge, profane, splenetic prose arias”:

These near-monologues are often gorgeous, but they can also be weirdly self-negating; in ‘A’ Train, they don’t even always make sense.  Still, they’re full of rhetorical fireworks.  Dazzled, we ooh and aah.

The TONY reviewer called the play “a fugue on themes of justice, incarceration and faith,” which, in Brokaw’s staging, “moves a bit uneasily.”  She perceived “a certain stasis in the play,” asserting that the author

frequently seems content to have people speak for the sole purpose of hearing them hold forth; we could almost be at an actors’ showcase, with the performers taking turns.  There’s enough bluster and noise between Angel and Lucius—enough tough-guy posturing and King James cadences—that we assume a real conversation is taking place.  But even as the speeches build in volume and intensity, they seem less and less connected to each other, buried in an avalanche of passionate talk.   

In the Hollywood Reporter, Frank Scheck stated in his “Bottom Line”: “Superb performances enliven this scorching drama.”  Reporting that Guirgis’s play “is now receiving a superbly acted revival at” STC, in a “riveting production staged by Mark Brokaw,” Scheck wrote that “Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train showcases a writer beginning to flex his creative muscles” by “[i]nfusing its familiar criminal justice system tropes with incisive characterizations and riveting dialogue.”  The play, however, “reveals a young playwright’s awkwardness with its overwritten passages and reliance on expository monologues,” the HR reviewer felt.  “But it also displays incendiary passion and insight into its troubled characters.”  Carvajal and Gathegi both “deliver superb performances,” Scheck reported, though the rest of the company “are a bit hamstrung by their characters’ stereotypical aspects but are solid nonetheless.”  In his final analysis, the review-writer warned: “With its explosively profane dialogue and disturbing subject matter, the play is not for the faint-hearted.  But for everyone else it remains a vital, pulsating drama by an ascending playwright whose early promise has been richly fulfilled.”

Marilyn Stasio of Variety characterized Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train as an “intense prison drama” with “a painfully sensitive performance by Sean Carvajal” and “a drop-dead-cold performance from Edi Gathegi.”  Stasio described the revival by asserting that the director “has spring-wound this production so that taking too long a breath means missing something.  Voices are so well orchestrated they’re as complementary as the colors of a painting.” 

In cyberspace, Ran Xia wrote in his “Bottom Line” on Theatre Is Easy that Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train is a “furiously funny and gut-wrenching masterpiece.”  Labeling the production as “a breathtaking two-hour feat of humanity at its most relentless sincerity” in Show-Score’s top-rated notice (95), Xia described Guirgis as “one of those writers who possesses the rare and astonishing magic of not only transporting us into a tale far more complex than any one single theme, but in doing so by means of characters who engage us within seconds.”  The Theasy reviewer reported that despite the play’s “grim subject matter, Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train is ferociously funny” as director Brokaw “stays true to the story and lets each character speak candidly to the audience.”  With “no superfluous stylistic choices, nor any theatrical ‘accessories’ to distract us from Guirgis’ text,” Xia observed, “The result is an earnest and triumphant production without a single dull moment.” 

On TheaterMania, Zachary Stewart affirmed that Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train “raises difficult questions about the intersection of race and class when it comes to justice.”  Brokaw’s “tightly staged production” featuring “[a]cross-the-board stellar performances” offers “few answers or moments of relief,” Stewart found, and “hurls these quandaries at us with the velocity of an express train making the run between 125th Street and Columbus Circle.”  (For those who don’t know, that’s the ‘A’ train of the New York subway and is, I believe, the longest non-stop run in the system.)  The TM reviewer singled out Carvajal, who “takes an already noble character and lifts him higher with a stirring and unforgettable performance.”  Stewart concluded, “A thousand debates blossom from Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train, a disquieting miniature of America in just five characters.”

Michael Dale characterized Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train as a “superb drama of public morality and personal convictions” on Broadway World.  Presented in “a thoroughly compelling new production” by Brokaw, “with an excellent company,” the STC revival “graces the playwright's emotionally thick and thought-provoking piece.”  On the Huffington Post, Steven Suskin proclaimed that “Guirgis is a tantalizing street poet” who “writes street plays for street characters.”  Suskin continued, “Time and again, in play after play, Guirgis surprises us with street-savvy but elegant prose, smart, lacerating and viciously funny.”  In Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train, confirmed the HP review-writer, “We spend a significant part of the evening trying to keep up with the dazzling images that Guirgis sprouts from the mouths of babes.”

“I’d advise you to swipe your MetroCard and rumble over to [Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train’s] gripping revival at the Signature Theatre,” advised Samuel L. Leiter on his blog, Theatre’s Leiter Side.  Calling the play “a powerful drama, laced with biting humor,” Leiter asserted it “embraces deeply thoughtful themes of masculinity, faith, guilt, remorse, and responsibility.”  As I have, Leiter found fault with the play’s non-dramatic monologues, a literary but not theatrical device, but went on to declare that “Guirgis’s writing, matched by exceptional acting, is so commanding, I can only hope audiences will be hopping the A train with (or without) Jesus to embrace it.”

On Theatre Reviews Limited, David Roberts affirmed that the play “carefully strips away the façade of ‘right and wrong,’ ‘innocence and guilt,’ and ‘good and bad’ to expose the horror of ‘discarding’ human being—a discarding that is ‘irreparable’ and will ‘last forever.’”  He added, “The play also resounds with the horrific wonder of the cycle of redemption.”  Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train, said the TRL blogger, “raises rich and enduring questions regarding justice and morality; moral ambiguity; and guilt and innocence”; Guirgis’s “carefully developed tropes . . . are rich imagery and figurative language.”  Theater Pizzazz’s Sandi Durell warned potential theatergoers that Guirgis “writes with guts and blood and not for the faint of heart” and advised any who are “a little uncertain about hearing the on-going profanity of the imprisoned at Rikers Island, you might reconsider as well.”  Durell characterized Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train as “awash with minor and major monologues like pop ups that arise in empty spaces with [its] own humor and one-liners and a symphony of themes that encompass social justice, imprisonment, religious belief as the inmates and the guards battle their own demons.”  In the end, the TP review-writer reported, “The play is powerful, the actors riveting as Mark Brokaw drives the production with insightfulness aided by the dramatic lighting of Scott Zielinski.”

Bill Crouch asked on Stage Buddy, “What if everything you believe is wrong?  (I once asked this of very religious actress friend of mine.)  What if there is no God?  What if Jesus wasn’t the Son of God?”  Crouch continued: “Her answer haunts me to this day.  She looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘Then I have nothing.  Nothing at all.’”  This connected to his response to STC’s revival:

The brilliance of Stephen Adly Guirgis’ play Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train . . . stunned me for the exact same reason her rebuke did.  It told me the unflinching truth.  The genius at work here is that Guirgis’ characters have nothing (and everything) to lose, and so, they argue brilliantly.  They argue to the death.

Performed by a “solid cast,” our stage buddy observed, “Though it can be a bit of a shouting match at times, in what feels like a somewhat cavernous space, there’s modulation here, too.”  With praise for the design team and the “precise and smooth direction,” Crouch recommended, “Get a ticket, hop a train, see this remarkable production at Signature Theatre Center.”

CurtainUp’s Les Gutman, who reviewed the play in its original run, had great praise for Guirgis’s work in general and for Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train in particular.  After complimenting especially Carvajal and Gathegi, Gutman contended that “it’s the play that’s compelling, and the fine actors are wonderful stewards of Guirgis’s words.”  He advised that “anyone who wants to understand why Guirgis earned all of the honors he has received should pay it a visit.”  The CU reviewer found that the design elements “are unforgiving in a way that perfectly conveys why none of us want to go to prison” and that Brokaw “directed with a careful but light hand.”  Gutman concluded that “Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train is not a hard play to watch, because its intensity is lightened with lots of humor and its nuanced themes keep one too engaged to leave time for much outside the play.” 

On New York Theater Guide, Tulis McCall exclaimed that Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train, a “nearly operatic” play, “is running in full glorious throttle at Signature Theatre.”  The playwright’s “writing here is spare and direct” with “the urgency of life and death.”  He “guides us through the switchback trails he has laid out with a steady hand,” asserted McCall.  Though she “questioned a few moments,” the NYTG review-writer felt, “The performances are spot on in every way.  No loose ends.  Just clarity, precision and engagement.”  Brokaw’s “direction mirrors the writing in its simplicity and ease.”  As her last word, McCall affirmed, “This is one of those productions that makes you remember why you love the theatre - because it is transformative.”