Reviews

BY DAVID HURST

Stunning, David Adjmi’s provocative new play for Lincoln Center’s LCT3 productions at The Duke, starts with a ferocious bang and goes full throttle till it derails spectacularly midway through the second act. Smoothly directed by Anne Kauffman on a sleekly minimalist, pristinely white set by David Korins, Stunning is as frustrating as it is captivating. Set in Brooklyn’s Syrian-Jewish community, Stunning tells the Pygmalion-esque tale of Lily (a superb Cristin Milioti), a newly married teenager whose sheltered life with her controlling, misogynist, criminal husband, Ike (the sexy Danny Mastrogiorgio), slowly unravels thanks to her new African-American maid, Blanche (the always-wonderful Charlayne Woodard), who raises both Lily’s consciousness and her libido. But all is not as it seems by the end of the first act, and Adjmi, an out Jewish playwright with Syrian and Sephardic roots, doesn’t seem to know where to go with these fresh, vibrant characters. Stunning deals with issues of religion, education, sexuality and gender roles but then veers into contrived hysterics and unbelievable plot devices. And yet, for all its problems, it’s still well worth seeing.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Shafrika, the White Girl, a wildly self-indulgent vanity piece written by and starring Anika Larsen for JARADOA (Just A Roomful of Artists Doing Outreach And) Theater that closed last weekend at the Vineyard. Larsen is a lovely actress with a terrific voice. What she is not is a playwright, as evidenced by Shafrika, an autobiographical “musical” about her eccentric family (she is one of ten children, four natural and six adopted from various war-torn countries by her trust-fund, do-gooder parents) that’s performed in a grating meta-theater style and had me bolting for the door at intermission.

If tickets to the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park weren’t free, I’d tell you to start selling your furniture in the streets in order to secure a pair for this glorious new production of Twelfth Night, starring a revelatory Anne Hathaway as Viola, a rakish Raul Esparza as Duke Orsino, and a rapturously undone Audra McDonald as the Lady Olivia. Easily one of the finest productions I’ve seen at the Delacorte in more than 20 years of theater going, this Twelfth Night sings with clarity of speech, moves with light-hearted alacrity and amuses the funny bone mightily, thanks to the clear direction by Daniel Sullivan, a magnificent “green” set by John Lee Beatty and lavish period costumes by Jane Greenwood. It is, in a word, magically divine! N

Stunning plays through July 11 at LCT3 @ The Duke (229 W 42nd St, 646-223-3010). Twelfth Night plays through July 12 at Delacorte (Central Park, PublicTheater.org).