Suffs at the Music Box Theatre

When the cast of Suffs performed “Keep Marching” at the Tonys, I disliked it. It felt smug. Whether or not that was the song’s fault is hard to say. Self-importance has followed Suffs, which tells the story of Suffragist campaigner Alice Paul (Shaina Taub), from the beginning. Most of the marketing for the show didn’t have anything to do with the show itself, instead focusing on how “important” the subject matter is. I don’t have a lot of patience for that.

It wasn’t a false impression, either. The first act of Suffs suffers badly for the creative team’s desire to erect a monument. The story goes by in a flash, with little in the way of stakes or character. This is the leader, this is the friend, this is the wealthy one, this is the loose cannon, this is the quiet fresh recruit. Of course, there are stakes, but they’re abstracted, or buried. Importance and dramatic stakes are not the same thing. Suffs assumes you care rather than making you care.

It was hard not to think about Hamilton the whole time, and that’s not because both shows draw from American history. The score to Suffs is so thoroughly reminiscent of Hamilton that it made me more appreciative of all the things that show does well. At one point during the first act of Suffs, as I was being inundated with plot point after plot point spoken in rhythm over a sparse series of bass notes, I found myself thinking, “Wow, yeah, I guess Hamilton does have a lot of exposition.”

The bones of a great show are in there, I think, but they’re buried. Suffs would need to be less worried about relating facts, and more concerned with character. The central relationship to the structure of the first act is between Alice and the doomed Inez Milholland (Hannah Cruz), but the through line isn’t quite there. When Inez tells Alice that she’s leaving the movement to start a family, Alice convinces her to continue. That moment is crucial to everything that comes after, but it doesn’t hit. Inez doesn’t feel like she needs much convincing. Inez dies while campaigning in the midwest. She had a chronic illness that she’d known about for years. A version of Suffs in which the audience knows that while Alice tries to convince her to stay would probably be great.

As the show stands, it feels manipulative. I say that fully believing that the creative team is deeply sincere. Achingly sincere, even. When I saw David Byrne’s horrendous Joan of Arc at the Public back in 2017, the audience was greeted with a giant, hastily-assembled sheet that said, “Nevertheless, she persisted,” a phrase which had just entered the lexicon. I believed the people involved meant that sincerely. That was the story they were telling with their show. I also believed that they didn’t trust in the work to make its own point. Given how little meat is on the bones of Inez as a character, it’s hard not to roll my eyes at the decision to end Act I with a massive photograph of the real Inez Milholland filling up the stage.

The second act is much improved, with more attention paid to stakes and less of a breakneck pace. The show ends with an older Alice talking to a college intern. Much as Alice threatened the supremacy of the Suffs who came before her, this young woman can’t help but point out all the ways in which Alice’s beliefs about the Equal Rights Amendment are flawed. In that moment, realizing and accepting that she has inevitably fallen behind the times, Alice begins to sing “Keep Marching,” a song about the importance of doing the work for its own sake. Within the context of the show, it’s a great song. I’d even go so far as to say it’s important.

Conclave

Conclave is, first and foremost, fun. Too long, yes, but fun. Nothing I’m about to write will make it sound fun. I’m about to bleed all the joy out of what is, despite the moments when it gives in to its loftier intentions, a trashy arthouse thriller. This is a B-movie shot by a prestige director. That’s not a compliment. We don’t get enough of those nowadays.

But I cannot help where my mind goes. Whenever I encounter a story involving high-level religious bureaucrats, I wonder to what extent they believe in the whole [gestures vaguely] thing. Are the rituals truly important to the people who participate in them? Do they do the rituals out of habit? I understand the power and importance of pageantry and public perception, the idea that rituals convey legitimacy over time, etc., etc., but the Cardinals at the center of Conclave are doing all this behind closed doors. When the Pope dies, the Cardinals could call a conclave, choose the new Pope via a round of Heads Up 7 Up, then hang out playing X-Box for three or four days. We would never know.

Conclave seems to ask similar questions. For the duration of its two hours, the pomposity of these men, the self-absorption of those who would be Pope, runs up against the mere materiality of their world. Early shots of the elaborate ribbon-and-wax seal tied around the door to the Papal residence are intercut with paramedicos zipping His Holiness into a body bag and clumsily loading him onto a stretcher. The title card, “Conclave” in yellow letters that take up the whole of the screen, is shown atop an overhead shot of that bodybag in the back of an ambulance, rocking side to side every few seconds with the motion of the vehicle. Director Edward Berger holds that shot for a while. This is not a movie that is concerned with the sacrosanct. At least, not in the sense that it wishes to distinguish between what is and isn’t.

There’s a world in which a movie about Catholics that emphasizes the material could be on the side of the Catholics—the material world holds us back from transcendance—but here it mocks. For all of the presentational severity, the stark lighting and intense close-ups, Conclave finds every possible opportunity for quiet, needling comedy. We are at all times kept aware that these are merely men vying for an office position.

Conclave doesn’t embrace comedy to the extent of, say, Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin, nor does it have anywhere near as much to say about the nature of power, but it does have serious matters on its mind. Ideas about the nature of sin and doubt ooze out of the quieter corners of this movie. Its outlook is Humanist. Better to have sinned and learned than to have never been tempted, better to question the things you hold dear than to take them for granted.

I keep coming back to how firmly the movie is rooted in the material world. We see the immediate destruction of the Ring of the Fisherman, the ballots threaded together and burned, the cans that serve as the source of the legendary black/white smoke that concludes every vote, the liver spots that convey the age of most involved. Even the film’s final twist, an absurd attempt to give this delightfully glossy bit of eurotrash (non-derogatory) real heft, is rooted in the material.

Given my issues with Berger’s last film, All Quiet on the Western Front, I don’t find it surprising that the movie gets stuck on trying to make a statement. By the end, Conclave has become too consumed with making a point to remember that it used to be fun. Unless you are conveying something, well, transcendental, better to tell a good story that makes some good points on the way, I think, than to force it.

American Saturday Night

The most recent episode of Last Week Tonight included an extended segment about naturalization ceremonies, focusing specifically on their use of Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” Oliver made the argument that Greenwood’s tacky ballad has no place in a naturalization ceremony, especially given Greenwood’s political beliefs. I don’t disagree, and I happen to know the perfect replacement.

In 2009, Brad Paisley released the album American Saturday Night, possibly the single greatest album in all of contemporary pop country. The title track, a diamond-cut ode to multiculturalism, is exactly the sort of thing we should be blasting at naturalization ceremonies. Though wrapped up in all the aural trappings of a “girls, beer, and trucks” song, “American Saturday Night” has a lot more on its mind:

She's got Brazilian leather boots on the pedal of her German car,

Listenin' to The Beatles singin' "Back in the USSR.”

Yes, she's going 'round the world tonight, but she ain't leavin' here.

She's just going to meet her boyfriend down at the street fair.

And it's a French kiss, Italian ice,

Spanish moss in the moonlight.

Just another American Saturday night.

The album as a whole was unobtrusively progressive, and that was cool. This was an artist at the absolute peak of his creative and commercial powers—from 2005 to 2010, Paisley had ten straight number-one hits—pushing the boundaries of what mainstream country audiences were willing to hear. “American Saturday Night” wasn’t all that long after The (Dixie) Chicks were immolated for telling a crowd in England that they didn’t like George W. Bush. For a major recording artist who existed firmly within the same milieu as Toby Keith, Paisley’s stance was quietly brave.

I’ve written about Paisley before, albeit in a different life and on a different blog. His 2012 album Wheelhouse included two of his biggest swings, “Southern Comfort Zone” and “Accidental Racist,” but neither clicked with audiences. To be fair to audiences, the latter song is truly awful, though the intention remains exceptional. Since then, he has retreated into girls, beer, and trucks, losing the freshness that made him stand out. Meanwhile, the country audience has moved on. Paisley no longer charts the way he used to. An Imperial phase can only last for so long.

American Saturday Night will always be there, though. Looking back at it in this moment, with the election a week away, both album and song feel like artifacts from a lost world. For an instant, Paisley advocated for a turn a lot of the audience didn’t take. It’s not that simple, of course. Nothing is. But if I had to pick one message for newly inducted American citizens to hear, to say nothing of the rest of us, you could do much worse than:

Everywhere has something they're known for,

Although usually it washes up on our shores.

When my great-great-great-granddaddy stepped off of that ship,

I bet he never ever dreamed we'd have all this.

Berlin im Licht

Komm, mach mal Licht,

Damit man sehn kann, ob was da ist,

Komm, mach mal licht,

Und rede nun mal nicht.

Komm, mach mal Licht,

Dann wollen wir doch auch mal sehen,

ob da ‘ne Sache ist: Berlin im Licht.

- “Berlin im Licht,” by Bertolt Brecht

Turn on the light,

So we can fin’ly see what’s inside.

Turn on the light,

And keep those lips shut tight.

Turn on the light,

Because we all just want to take in,

Whatever’s really there: Berlin in Light.

It’s rough, but you can only ask so much of me on a rainy Tuesday morning at the end of a week spent walking around Berlin. My shoes, my feet, my right hip, and my brain are all tired.

The original German lyrics come from “Berlin im Licht,” Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s 1928 novelty song inspired by a festival of the same name, which aimed to show off what electric lighting was capable of. The goal, the marketing said, was to turn nighttime in Berlin into day. It’s a funny thing to consider, given that I can’t think of another Western city more associated with nighttime in the cultural imagination than Berlin. Paris is gorgeous at night, and New York is famous for refusing to go the fuck to bed, but when I think of Berlin, I think of nightclubs. I think of bars, and drugs, and fetish. That can’t be wildly off. I’m not drawing from anything approaching personal experience (I have been in bed no later than 11:00 pm most nights of this trip, thank you). That association has to be coming from somewhere. It has certainly been supported by the hundreds of posters for an upcoming leather party that I’ve been seeing throughout the city.

“Berlin im Licht” is a novelty, but it takes on new meaning when considered within the context of German history following its publication. What was a jaunty tune about a light fair carries with it the implication that there’s more out there in the darkness. It’s not much of a stretch to assume some of that “more” could be sinister. Hitler was already a national figure by 1928, after all. There was a lot hanging out in the darker corners of Berlin in those days. Turns out the light didn’t help much.

The city as it stands today is full of museums and memorials dedicated to remembering, to keeping those lights on. The Jewish Museum, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the series of parks commemorating the Wall, and the Soviet War Memorial exist to keep fresh in the mind all the ways in which things can go horrifically wrong. At times, I can hear Germany as a country frantically turning through her notes and asking if it would possible to do any more extra credit. Berlin is the most guilt-ridden city I’ve ever been to, which is not to say that guilt is undeserved, and not to say other cities shouldn’t be guilt-riddener than they currently are.

To what end all that guilt, though, I’m not sure. The synagogues are under 24 hour police protection and the AfD (Germany’s leading far-right party) keeps winning more seats in parliament. There was a teacher with a group of young students at the Soviet War Memorial. I wanted to ask him how he teaches World War II to his students. How do you thread that needle, making sure you relate the stakes of something without burdening students with a sense of guilt that could ultimately prove counter-productive? What’s the emotional experience like, going through that material? As an American, I should be in the best position in the world to relate, but we don’t teach slavery as something that Could Come Back, do we? That’s something that’s over now, we’re pretty sure, thank you.

The most effective exhibit I’ve attended in my week here was Otto Wendt’s Workshop for the Blind, a modest free museum tucked away in a courtyard just past the entrance to die Hackeschen Höfe. It commemorates the efforts of Otto Wendt and a large number of his collaborators (non-derogatory) to save the lives of as many Jews as possible, hiring them to work in his brush factory.  There are many such stories from that time, of ordinary people doing extraordinary and selfless things in the name of righteousness. It is always, that museum drove home, a choice.

That is what gives the best parts of historical Berlin their particular flavor: You see the best and the worst in people all at once. These memorials and parks and museums, when they’re on their game, make it clear that there is always another choice, and that it is right to make that choice. There were several biographies in the Workshop for the Blind that ended by noting those individuals never received acknowledgement for their actions during their lives. How entirely beside the point.

On Sunday, I went to Mauerpark. Deep in former East Berlin, Mauerpark is a wonder. Every 150 feet, you encounter a new musical act, all of them earnestly plying their trade. At the back, on a cobblestone platform surrounded by a half-circle of large stone stadium seats, a prickly Irishman runs karaoke every Sunday.

When I got there, I was thrilled to see the seats completely filled. Hundreds of Berliners had gathered to sit, to listen, to sing. What struck me most about it, coming from karaoke in the U.S., was the complete lack of irony. There was no self-consciousness permitted. Nobody seemed aware of or concerned about the quality of their singing. The audience couldn’t give two shits about anything other than the enthusiasm with which the performers took to their tasks. People cheered consistently and joined in singing when performers grew nervous. During my time on stage, I received reassuring eye contact from a number of people. Berlin, as a city, separate from its history, is fantastically alive.

I do wonder to what extent the implied menace of “Berlin im Licht” was intended. It was written by Bertolt Brecht, after all, so anything is possible. It could very well have been just what it says on the tin, a fun and breezy tune meant to entertain on its way in one ear and out the other, but it’s also entirely possible that Brecht was being, well, Brecht. To me, the German lyrics don’t carry much of a sense of foreboding. They were written in 1928, though, and I’m translating them in 2024. It’s hard not to let the intervening century creep in.

His Three Daughters

His Three Daughters is about death. There’s no getting around it. For most of the film, which takes place almost entirely within the living room of a single Manhattan apartment, the man in the next room is dying. Despite that, there isn’t a whole lot of talk about death. The characters don’t waste any breath speculating on the hereafter. Death isn’t a mystery to be pondered so much as it is a process to be borne out. It is scheduled nurse visits, DNR orders, and shifts keeping watch in case the inevitable should suddenly happen.

The protagonists are a trio of estranged—well, no, not estranged, but certainly distant—sisters who have come together in the final days of their dad’s hospice care. Not only do they not talk about death, you get the impression that they don’t talk about anything all that much. When they do, they seem to be talking past one another. Katie (Carrie Coon), the eldest, talks at, mostly.

The particulars of their lives are slowly and meticulously established. Katie lives in nearby Brooklyn and has a teenage daughter who won’t speak to her. Rachel (Natasha Lyonne) places daily sports bets and spends her days high. She’s been providing live-in assistance to their father, Vincent (Jay O. Sanders), for an unspecified amount of time. It would be easy to make Rachel a stock comedy stoner, a slacker, but Lyonne plays her as sensitive and clear-eyed, someone whose drug habit comes from a need to create a buffer between herself and the world so she can bear to function. The youngest sister, Christina (Elizabeth Olsen, who is magnificent), lives in another state, seemingly happily married and with a young daughter. The two moments when she talks to her daughter on the phone are the only expressions of joy we get for most of the movie.

That’s not to say this is a dour affair. It isn’t. It is often funny, and in unexpected moments, as befits the setting. The hardest I think I’ve ever made my mom laugh was during my grandfather’s funeral, on the way from the car to the door of the funeral home. The script is full of dialogue that reflects back on what we see in unexpected ways. One night at dinner, Katie tries to engage Rachel in conversation about the food, but Rachel is watching the final game in her parlay on her phone. “You think watching will change its outcome?” Katie didn’t intend it as a joke, but it is, and it’s a grim one. All three of them have upended their lives to sit around an apartment and watch their dad die. Do they think watching will change what’s going to happen?

After a particularly exhausting interaction with the hospice care provider, the sisters relax into their first and only real conversation, one in which nobody has any walls up and little seems to be at stake. Christina tells the story of a time when she and dad were watching something on TV and he became furious at the way it depicted death. What was on that screen had nothing in common with the real thing, he said. The mistake the movies and TV always make is using the depiction of death itself to represent the feeling of death, of what it is to have someone pass away. “The only way to sum up a person’s life, to communicate how death truly feels, is through absence.” The movie itself has been following his advice. Up until now, Vincent has been nothing but a suggestion, the beeping of a heart monitor. His absence has managed to take up the entirety of these women’s lives.

“I think what dad meant,” Katie follows up, “is that we don’t really know who people are until after they’re gone.” I agree with Victor’s belief that absence is the real impact of death, but I bristled at Katie’s interpretation. You may learn more about a person after they die as you go through their possessions, but surely we can learn more from the living? At least, in an ideal world. That’s particularly true when talking about our parents, full human beings who’ve often closed off entire portions of themselves in the interest of having and raising us.

At that point, having finally moved past their differences, the three of them go into Vincent’s room for the first time as a trio. He responds to their presence and, as best he can, asks them to bring him out to the living room so he can sit in his recliner.

In some stories, there comes a point where the limitations of reality run up against the need to express something, and reality, however briefly, loses. That moment in The Worst Person in the World when Julie, about to break up with her boyfriend, flicks the kitchen light switch and spends an entire imaginary day elsewhere. The ballet at the end of La La Land, when Seb and Mia play out the decade they could have had together if only they’d been different people. These are, unfailingly, my favorite pieces of storytelling. In His Three Daughters, that point comes when Vincent stands up from his recliner, goes into the kitchen, and opens himself a beer.

At that point, Jay O. Sanders delivers a wonderful monologue. You can always tell when a theatre actor knows they’ve been given a good piece of meat to bite into. He winds up by getting the beer, and then he uncorks. He speaks directly to each of his children, speaking to the hearts of their disagreements and insecurities. He tells them how much he loves them, how much he loved their mothers, and tells them the story of the first woman he ever loved. It’s all wonderful, beautifully acted and emotionally gripping.

As the monologue ends, Vincent leans against the apartment window and looks over to his chair, where he sits dying. His daughters are crying against him. He has, of course, said none of what we just heard. He makes and holds direct eye contact with himself. It seems to me that in his final moments he has imagined all of this, saying the things he never got to. Katie and Rachel are on their own to figure out why they get along like oil and water. Christina will never know why she didn’t get the sense of family that she needed. No person alive will ever again know the story of the first woman he loved. “We really don’t know who people are until after they’re gone” is nonsense. You have to tell people who you are and who they are now, while you’re here, before it’s too late.

The Samurai by Shusaku Endo

If there’s one thing you need to know about Japanese author Shusaku Endo before you start reading his novels, it’s that he was Catholic. Fortunately, when Endo’s name comes up, that bit of information is usually close at hand. It’s right there in the first sentence of his Wikipedia article: “Shusaku Endo was a Japanese author who wrote from the perspective of a Japanese Catholic.”

That phrasing is tortured, but there’s a point to it. It is worth noting that Endo was Japanese and a Catholic, since less than .35% of Japan’s population identifies as such, but his writing grapples both ex- and implicitly with questions of faith and religion, of systems and change, and his perspective on such matters is, to say the least, complex. Even operating within the boundaries of his own faith, his novels are very much the work of a man who was, by nature of being Japanese, somewhat outside of Catholicism, and, by nature of being Catholic, somewhat outside of what it means to be Japanese. He very much wrote from the perspective of a Japanese Catholic.

As is often the case with those who live just outside of a group with which they are deeply familiar, Endo was remarkably critical of both Japan and Catholicism. In fact, two of his most explicitly religious works, Silence and The Samurai, feature Japan and the Catholic Church as, at best, self-absorbed and malignant actors, if not outright villains.

Admittedly, the setting doesn’t help. Both novels concern the tumultuous early 1600s, when Japan closed its borders to Christian missionaries after a 40 years period during which the Jesuits had achieved no inconsiderable amount of success. The Japanese response was firm, to put it mildly. The Japan of Endo’s period novels is cold, calculating, unyielding, and cruel. It is a Government consumed only with maintaining order and the status quo, with flushing out bad actors. Throughout both novels, Japan as a nation is more than happy to use its own citizens as sacrificial pawns. Their humanity never enters the equation.

Missionaries and those affiliated with the Church do not fare any better under Endo’s gaze. Their faith is always beyond reproach, consumed as they are by the need to spread their beliefs, but they are uniformly portrayed as self-aggrandizing. As a random example, one of the protagonists in Silence writes, “It might well be that the poverty-stricken Christians were hungering for a priest to administer the Blessed Sacrament, hear their confessions and baptize their children. In this desert from which missionaries and priests had been expelled the only one who could give the water of life to this island tonight was myself. Yes, only myself.” The ardency of his belief is matched only by his ego. In The Samurai, the missionary Velasco constantly schemes to become the Bishop of Japan once it is formally included within Christendom.

Endo writes with anger towards those who forced Christianity onto a nation that did not need it, and simultaneously for the Government who took that as an excuse to consolidate power through violence. Despite the fact that Endo’s own faith is a result of the missionary work he depicts, he portrays them uniformly as contemptible. The pit at the center seems to be the unwillingness of missionaries to consider the ramifications of their actions. His feelings seem best summarized in “Araki Thomas,” the remarkable short story published in 1965 that likely germinated into Silence the following year:

Whilst fully aware of the ban on Christianity, foreign missionaries continued to steal into Japan. Fired by an intense vision to convert Japan to Christianity, their heroic spirit spurned even death. But what was to be done about the poor Christian peasants who were implicated along with them? The missionaries urged dreams of martyrdom upon the Japanese Christians. They expected them to die as martyrs. Martyrdom was now the only path which led to God, and they believed that, if they were to ignore it, they would be guilty of ignoring God. But did their faith offer nothing but this cruel path?

To Endo, the answer seems to be “No.” “Enough Christian blood had already been shed,” he writes a bit later in the same story, “and every time more missionaries slipped into Japan, more Japanese blood would necessarily be spilled. [Araki Thomas] begged the Church in Rome to forsake the people of Japan, to stop forcing its dreams and ideals upon the Japanese.” Over and over again, the Church is shown to be self-absorbed. The lesson of Silence, as I take it, is that the formalities of faith are nothing compared to its values. What good is Christianity if it prioritizes its promulgation over the safety of the souls it espouses saving? To Endo, true Christians are those who understand that the heart of Christianity is much greater than the rules and rituals.

In reading The Samurai, I was struck by the juxtaposition of the Church and Japan. The Church exists to spread itself as far as possible, to make as much Christian as it can, while blanching in the face of any changes that new influences bring into the church. Japan, during the time of these novels, is intensely interested in defining what Is and Is Not Japan. While the Church “invites” people in so long as they conform to its ways, Japan keeps people out. Endo seems to believe both approaches are wrong. You cannot spread yourself without risking change to the fabric of your being, and you should not reject the possibility of such changes out of hand.

Three Houses at the Signature Theater

Copyright Marc J. Franklin.

“During the pandemic, when the lockdown hit, I had just separated from my girlfriend, and was living on my own in Brooklyn, New York.”

While the specifics change from episode to episode, that’s how each of the three stories in Three Houses, Dave Malloy’s newest musical, begins. The show takes place during an open mic night at a mysterious bar. The bar is obviously not real. As the bartender, Scott Stangland (the only Broadway Pierre I didn’t get a chance to see) emits a sinister ambiance that permeates the theater. Each of the protagonists is compelled to present in turn, and “compelled” is just the word. There’s no indication that this is a choice. “Don’t be scared to dig deep,” Stangland says to each of them before they start, more mocking than encouraging. He knows they will.

The form is similar to Malloy’s previous production at the Signature, Octet, another show in which each character takes a turn to tell their story. Octet takes place at an internet addiction support group, an AA meeting for people hooked on notifications and Instagram feeds. The participants in that group would often share numbers, intertwining their stories when common threads were presented. The separation between sections in Three Houses is much stronger. But for the unifying elements and ensemble support between the three leads, Three Houses is divided into three fully individual extended sequences. When Susan (Margo Seibert) started singing, I had no idea she’d still be singing half an hour later.

I have to confess, when she began her monologue by mentioning the pandemic, I let out a (quiet) sigh. I didn’t know Three Houses was going to be a Pandemic Show. I have an instinctive distrust of anything that tackles COVID-19 explicitly. It feels too recent, and most of the things written about it too flat. “Oh, you were miserable? Cool.” “Oh, you found meaning in enduring those difficult times? Neat.” Fair or not, I couldn’t tell you. My distaste operates at a level below metacognition, in the realm of reflexive hostility. My general position is that most great art about COVID-19 will never call COVID by its name. It will be inferred, subtextual, a vibe.

Three Houses gets away with it because the show isn’t about the pandemic. The pandemic is very important to what’s happening on stage, and certainly important to my thoughts on the show, but it recedes to an ambience most of the time. COVID-19 is why these people are holed up. COVID-19 is why we watch them lose themselves in their obsessions.

If there’s one thing Malloy loves, it’s an obsession. He is compelled by and, it seems pretty clear, terrified of them. Octet is entirely about the compulsions of technology. Moby Dick is, well, we all know what Moby Dick is about. Even Great Comet can be looked at as an interlocking series of obsessions, a group of people consumed by their passions and their ideas. The obsessive moments of Three Houses fit comfortably within Malloy’s corpus, rendered, as ever, with humor and horrible understanding.

Susan is holed up in her late grandmama’s Latvian house. She smokes pot, drinks mulberry wine, and reorganizes her grandmother’s library. Her preoccupations are harmless enough, all things considered, though her recitation of her grandmother’s extensive collection has the edge of compulsion.

Sadie (Mia Pak) loses herself in a Sims-like video game, playing 14 hours a day. During what is probably the show’s highpoint, she recounts a childhood episode at the carnival, when she fed quarter after quarter into an arcade machine. “Quarter in. Roll. Click. Push, push, push, push, push, push,” Sadie repeats over and over, faster and faster, until the quarters have run out. “What happened? Where did I go?” That is a quintessential Malloy lyric. His work suggests that obsessions and compulsions are to be feared because of how they supersede our selves.

Beckett (J.D. Mollison) has the roughest go of it. His segment is when COVID-19 is most present, most suffocating. He completely cuts himself off from the outside world, choosing instead to box himself in. Literally. He orders compulsively from the internet. He names the spider that lives in the corner of the living room. He loses his grandparents to COVID, misses his sister’s “small outdoor” wedding, and loses his job due to poor performance.

If that setup works for all three protagonists, it can work for me, right? During the pandemic, when the lockdown hit, I had just separated from my girlfriend, and was living on my own in Brooklyn, New York. Like Susan, Sadie, and Beckett, I had just gotten out of a relationship when the pandemic hit. I too spent the early pandemic alone, my roommates cast to the far corners of Brooklyn while I stayed in the center. I bought and played and thought about board games. It got to the point where they were all I could think about, even though I myself was sick of them. It’s a strange thing, to have obsessive thoughts that you yourself are aware of as obsessive. It was a mania, and the only way through that I could find.

That behavior receded with time, thank god. Other things have hung around, though. After months of solitude, thinking about a Finnish man she met during her travels, Susan says, “I think he was the last person I touched.” I was alone for 76 days, and I have no idea who the last person I touched was. It feels like such an important thing. It might have been my roommate Sam, the last person to leave. It might have been the woman I went out on a date with the Monday before I decided I wasn’t leaving the apartment again. I don’t know. What I do know, as I contemplate that question, is that I cannot be alone anymore.

Three Houses is about isolation, obsession, and fear. Like all of Dave Malloy’s creations, it is funny, breathless, and discursive in extremis. The show is unified by the idea of the Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf, which feels neither wholly successful nor wholly necessary. I can’t tell what he is. Is he the things we avoid confronting in our lives? Is he death? Is he both? What does it mean to dance with him, as all three protagonists ultimately do? I don’t know, and I’m not sure the show knows either. That’s alright. There are worse things than having too many ideas.

The Notebook at the Schoenfeld Theatre

It is worth acknowledging from the jump what many of you, my dear and indulging friends, suspect: my expectations for a Broadway adaptation of The Notebook (a movie I do not particularly like) with music from Ingrid Michaelson (a singer-songwriter whose work I do not particularly enjoy) were not, well, they weren’t particularly high. I was mostly interested in seeing it to celebrate a former collaborator, Jordan Tyson, who’s making her Broadway debut as Younger Allie. 

When my parents announced they were coming to town, I knew just the show to recommend. Everything about the idea of a Broadway adaptation of The Notebook that caused me to approach it with eyebrow arched also makes it ideal My Parents Are Coming to the City material. And it is. The Notebook is indeed perfect fodder for the MPACttC crowd. That’s a backhanded compliment in many cases, but The Notebook also happens to be good.

I was more or less instantly charmed. Given the cast, I should have known. It’s hard to watch Dorian Harewood and not be charmed. Harewood, who plays Older Noah, and Maryann Plunkett (Older Allie) are both great actors, and it is a joy to watch them. The contemporary portions of The Notebook are set in the nursing home where Older Allie receives live-in care for advanced Alzheimer’s. Plunkett is remarkable, and exhausting to watch. I mean that as a compliment. I don’t know how she gives that performance eight times a week. It must be physically exhausting. Her Tony nomination is richly deserved.

I assume you know the story. So does the show, come to think of it. There are no attempts to couch anything in a twist, no reveals that a lesser adaptation might try to milk. We find things out as they happen. Perfect. Older Noah reads to Older Allie, his wife, from a mysterious notebook. We “learn” after a little while that the contents of the notebook are their story. I remember that being a bit more of a reveal in the movie version, but here the staging makes that more or less apparent from the start. Again, that’s fine. The Notebook isn’t interested in hiding that from you. The ultimate revelation about the notebook—if you know, you know—still hits, and it hits like a fucking truck.

The most interesting and inspired choice The Notebook makes is dividing both Allie and Noah into three flavors: Younger, Middle, and Older. Prior to seeing the show, I assumed that was a concession born out of practicality. I thought the show might jump back and forth too frequently to allow for aging or de-aging, whether through makeup or quick changes. Instead, the leads in triplicate are part of the conceptual fabric. Even if the idea started as a matter of practicality, the creative team has turned it into an inspired choice. The three eras don’t interact with one another, by which I mean they do not speak to one another, but they do create echoes. The various ages sing together, and spend much of the show on stage simultaneously.

Directors Michael Greif and Schele Williams make smart, tasteful use of the conceit. They never lean on it. This is a shockingly unsentimental show given what it could have been. One of my favorite moments, which comes during the absolutely tear-drenched finale—I have cried that hard in a theater only twice before—is when the Allies and Noahs kiss. The Olders are towards the back, the Middles in the middle, and the Youngers are right out front. It passed quickly, a moment content to be only an instant (treat the moment present as a present for the moment, indeed) and everyone goes their separate ways in the staging. That idea, that we are all of the versions of ourselves at any one moment, that to love someone is to love who you have been together and who you are and who you will be, it’s beautiful. I’m tearing up now thinking about it. The Notebook didn’t need to be this thoughtful.

I also have nothing but compliments for the book, which is sharp, funny, and expedient (Bekah Brunstetter earned that Tony nomination). The songs are where The Notebook struggles most. Individually, they are enjoyable, but as a score, they smear together. None of them make an impression, even if none of them offend. They are too similar. Joy Woods, who is phenomenal as Middle Allie, singlehandedly turns “My Days” into a great 11 o’clock number, but that was the only time I found myself getting lost in the music. The odd lyric jumps out here and there—Older Allie’s “I am in love with all of the things I forget” is wondrous—but there’s little to grab onto. With a better score, The Notebook might have a chance at entering the pantheon. I’m sure it will do just fine in any case.

One final thought before I go. In The Notebook, we get to see Harewood and Plunkett do something we don’t often get to see great older actors do: be people who are old. That phrasing is intentionally belabored. They aren’t playing Old People. Older Allie and Older Noah aren’t sagacious grandparents. Nor are they there to reflect on the younger characters around them. Though it would have assuredly wrecked me, The Notebook features nothing like Light in the Piazza’s “Let’s Walk,” a song about the passage of time framed around the behavior of The Kids These Days, and that’s as it should be. Allie and Noah are the narrative, in all three eras we see depicted. The Notebook gives equal time and weight and dignity to their experiences near the end of their lives as it does to those nearer the beginning. Older Noah’s flirtation with Older Allie is given the same energy as Younger with Younger. That is a kindness we do not normally see afforded in popular entertainment. I looked over at one point to notice my parents quietly holding hands. Who knows what memories they were sharing in that moment.