Author: David Gorsline

The World to Come

There’s a song from 1980 by The Police, “When the World Is Running Down, You Make the Best of What’s Still Around.” It would make an interesting underscoring for Ali Viterbi’s excellent apocalyptic The World to Come, starring Woolly long-timers Brigid Cleary, Michael Russotto, and Naomi Jacobson.

Set in what we once called an “old folk’s home” that suggests both an assisted living facility (an “I could retire here” set (at least in the opening moments) by Misha Kachman) and later a concentration camp, the residents piece together news of the world outside that is literally crumbling away. They are aided, then thwarted, by a succession of nurses played by Ro Boddie, who sports a progressively alarming array of PPE.

These self-described alter kockers challenge each other with the question, “What could/would/should you have done to deal with the crumbling?”, be it climate change, tyranny, plague, or nuclear war. Rather than hear answer in words, we see them carry out acts of compassion one-on-one: bring medicine, make love, fight, tell a funny story, say Kaddish,1 join in the other’s hallucination. Most movingly, to close Act 1, Fanny (Jacobson) sings to Barbara (Cleary), as Barbara slides into the undiscovered country; Barbara’s dementia has been punctuated by prophetic visions and moments of her career as physicist.2

Technical praise: Sarah O’Halloran’s sound design, realizing earthquake rumbles without Sensurround, and Ksenya Litvak’s terrifying raven puppets.

  • The World to Come, by Ali Viterbi, directed by Howard Shalwitz, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

1Alas, there are too few characters to make a minyan.

2I’m not crying, you’re crying.

Peter and the Starcatcher: an update: 4

I was reviewing my script and I realized how much importance is placed on characters’ names. Boy, of course, acquires two names in the course of his adventure, escaping the traps of being “No Name” and “Mule,” only after Black Stache asks him, “Appellation, please.” And Stache (who will soon lose that name) hears his own name shouted multiple times, at least once at his own prompting.

Lord Aster bears a rather transparent tag name (“star” in Latin). Sánchez can never get Stache to call him by his name. Prentiss uses an unflattering nickname for Ted. Much fun is made of the meaning of Molly’s name in whatever language is native to the polyglot Mollusks. For some odd reason, Stache calls Alf “Alfred.”

And so it is that I realized that, of the limited text that Captain Scott has, twice he tells us his full three-barreled name, just so we won’t forget who is doomed to an Antarctic grave. And thus I made the choice to make those self-namings really big, declaiming each piece to the three sections of the house, with a slight increase in pitch and dynamics: “Robert Falcon SCOTT.”

New York sights and non-sights February 2026

come inA bit of historical subway architecture: an entrance to the Bowling Green IRT (4 & 5) station.

My favorite breakfast spot (“Cafe Olympia Cafe”) down the block from my favorite hotel in Midtown East is gone. There was a diner a couple blocks up that I think is gone, too. There is still an awning with the name “Palace.” I think that was the place.

The shoe repair/tailor shop is no longer on the block, but a sign in the window says that it’s just moved.

What We Did Before Our Moth Days

Whenever my friend M. sees a play that he doesn’t care for, he’ll say that the play is very long. This play is very long.

Wallace Shawn’s disposition to acidulous, lengthy monologue, salted with dialogue scenes, is stretched to three hours in the current material.1 A routine love affair, some sordid practices, struggles with achieving and accepting success: at moments it seems that we’re watching The Four Faces of Wallace.

The play’s formal twist, that some of these four characters are speaking to us from a, shall we say, unique vantage point, doesn’t redeem the work; indeed, that vantage point yields no special insights. Maybe the single dialogue scene, after the second intermission, between Tim and Elaine, established an emotional connection or intellectual bond between the two, but it’s not a strong one—I’d drifted off by then.

  • What We Did Before Our Moth Days, by Wallace Shawn, directed by André Gregory, Greenwich House Theater, New York

1For a briefer example in my experience, see the film version of The Designated Mourner.

Ulysses

If you’re one of us Joyceans, then likely you have a favorite chapter of this strapping big book. No matter which of the eighteen you fancy, you will taste a delicious sample of it in this 3-hour reduction of Ulysses—introduced through the fourth wall by Scott Shepherd. (If you’re not familiar with/entranced by the book, hopefully you will find something of interest, be it the orchestrated chaos of “Circe” or the quiet opening of “Telemachus.” A handy synopsis of the material is available.) Only “Penelope” is presented in full, a gentle, intimate reading by Maggie Hoffman.

Myself, I’m partial to “Eumaeus” and “Ithaca,” with Shepherd answering the questions with ghostly reverb. But it’s the explosion of sound (Ben Williams) and projections (Matthew Deinhart) in “Aeolus” that knocked my socks off, every clank of the printing press turned up to 11. KMRIA!

Shepherd again breaks the fourth wall at two other points, to unpack the subtle satire of “Cyclops,” and before that to poke at a question that had not occurred to me: Bloom appears certain that Boylan will visit Molly at 4 PM, but nowhere in the text are we given an explanation of how he knows that.

Of necessity, this “greatest hits” interpretation of the book omits some characters in the interest of clarity, but there still are scads of characters for this vituoso ensemble to embody—among them, Stephanie Weeks as an oversexed Martha Clifford; Kate Benson as Zoe, Myles Crawford, and The Citizen; and Vin Knight as Leopold Bloom. A wonderful choice is to have two actors speak some of the internal monologue lines simultaneously, both the actor-character and a narrator. In Shepherd’s introduction, he suggests that every reading of a text is a misreading, and indeed this production amps up the juicy, saucy bits (see above, something for everyone). Most characters speak with an American dialect; perhaps some of the music is lost. To that end, I was somewhat taken aback by the pronunciation of Mr Deasy’s name as “DEE-zee.”

One more nugget that I’ve never noticed before: Molly speaks of men and their “20 pockets.” Yes, we are usually blessed with an abundance of places to store cakes of soap and potatoes and mash notes, but why 20? Did Molly come up with that number herself?

  • Ulysses, created by Elevator Repair Service, text by James Joyce, co-direction and dramaturgy by Scott Shepherd, directed by John Collins, The Public Theater, Martinson Hall, New York

Srsly?

If I spent all my digital ink on linking to stories debunking ridiculous, egregious, preposterous1 claims by officials representing 47, my electron deficit would be yuge. But this one really got up my nose: Dr. Oz is wrong: Medicaid does not automatically register people to vote.

1From Latin praeposterus (“with the hinder part before, reversed, inverted, perverted”), from prae (“before”) + posterus (“coming after”).