THE MORNING LINE

DATE: Thursday, September 15, 2016

FROM: Melissa Cohen

Lana Picciano

PAGES: 9, including this page

September 15

th, 2016

Horton Foote Prize Goes to 2 Playwrights

By: Andrew R. Chow

The playwrights Jordan Harrison and Zayd Dohrn have won the 2016 Horton Foote Prize, which honors

excellence in American theater every two years.

Mr. Harrison won the outstanding new play award for “Marjorie Prime,” which was a 2015 Pulitzer Prize

finalist and a New York Times Critics’ Pick when it arrived at Playwrights Horizons last fall. The play centers

on an 85-year-old woman, portrayed by Lois Smith in last year’s production, who confronts memory loss

through storytelling and artificial intelligence. In his review for The Times, Ben Brantley called it “elegant,

thoughtful and quietly unsettling,” adding, “this production keeps developing in your head, like a photographic

negative, long after you’ve seen it.”

Mr. Dohrn received the promising new play prize for “The Profane,” which will have its premiere at

Playwrights Horizons in March. The play follows a romance that develops amid differing cultural and familial

values.

The prize comes with $20,000 for each playwright and is named after the Pulitzer-winning playwright who died

in 2009. (A production of Foote’s play “The Roads to Home” starts previews at Primary Stages on Wednesday.)

The judges were the actress Stockard Channing; a Vineyard Theater artistic director, Sarah Stern; the

playwright Deborah Zoe Laufer; and the director Victor Maog.

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September 15, 2016

Review: ‘Blossom,’ a Puppet’s Tale of Alzheimer’s

By: Laura Collins-Hughes

With his tufted white eyebrows and kindly old face, James Blossom is instantly endearing — even more so in

his patterned sweater vest and jaunty bow tie. But when he first appears at the start of Spencer Lott’s puppet

play, “Blossom,” at Dixon Place, James is outfitted for underwater adventure.

His mission is straightforward, in a Hollywood sort of way: to defuse a nuclear bomb near New York Harbor

and save the world. He does it, of course. In the cinematic fantasies of his increasingly untethered mind, there’s

always a heroic way out.

It’s reality that’s getting tricky. A widower at 76, he has Alzheimer’s disease, and after he leaves his cherished

motorcycle in the middle of the street, being at home alone is no longer an option. So his daughter, Kathryn,

devoted but overwhelmed, trundles him and his favorite armchair off to assisted living at a place called Garden

Ridge.

“Blossom” intercuts James’s deterioration there with the exploits he imagines, all tied to his past in a way that’s

sweet to discover. Mr. Lott’s script is sensitive, mostly avoiding clichés as it traces stages of decline and the

familial trauma that goes with them.

This ambitious production — directed by Mr. Lott, who also designed the puppets — does many things well,

foremost the puppetry: When the residents at Garden Ridge doze off, you can see them gently breathing. The

show’s sound (by Chris Gabriel) is strikingly evocative, and the lighting (by Alex Jainchill) is playful and

imaginative, particularly in a night scene when James goes for a ride on his Harley.

It’s speech that foils “Blossom,” which can be wonderful in its wordless moments. Rowan Magee does a

delicate job as James’s principal puppeteer, making his movements spry early on, tentative and confused as his

health weakens. Yet almost everything James says, voiced by Mr. Magee, sounds as if it’s coming out of the

mouth of a hale 30-something.

That fatal disconnect between the visual and the vocal saps the tenderness from the relationship between James

and Kathryn (who is a human, not a puppet, and is nicely played by Jamie Agnello).

Another Garden Ridge resident, a potato-faced golf nut named Ronald, doesn’t have many lines, but his main

puppeteer, Sam Jay Gold, makes the most of them. Ronald is ridiculous, yet we believe in him.

James is the star, though. On paper, he’s poignant. But in this production, there’s no ache where the ache needs

to be.

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September 15, 2016

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September 14, 2016

Theater review: Gospel singers make heavenly music in Marie and

Rosetta

By Adam Feldman

Photograph: Ahron R. Foster

“God don’t want the Devil to have all the good music, right?” asks gospel singer and guitarist Sister Rosetta

Tharpe (Kecia Lewis) to Marie Knight (Rebecca Naomi Jones), a young woman she is grooming to join her act.

It’s a rhetorical question: Rosetta holds herself with the confidence of someone who knows exactly what God

wants, even if He may not know it himself. In 1946, she’s a musical pioneer woman, infusing church music

with R&B and the early loin stirrings of rock & roll. “Your joy…has hips in it,” notes Marie, who is used to a

goodier-two-shoes approach. But Rosetta wants her to put more boogie into her piano playing. As she puts it:

“It’s hip or the highway.”

Marie and Rosetta is set at a funeral home in the Deep South, where the two women will be sleeping in caskets

that night, hotels being off limits to African-Americans. George Brant’s drama, unsentimentally directed by the

Atlantic’s Neil Pepe, is peppered with that kind of evocative detail, and it incorporates its biographical material

gracefully. (There’s a wonderful story about catching white people’s pennies in a hat.) But although Rosetta’s

incipient mentorship of Marie is capably rendered—including its overtones of seduction—the story takes a back

seat to stirring renditions of songs including “This Train” and “Didn’t It Rain.” Lewis and Jones and Jones sing

superbly, supported by two excellent unseen musicians: Deah Harriott on piano and Felicia Collins on guitar.

As the play goes on, the dialogue starts to seem more and more like segues between musical numbers, but it’s

hard to complain. You don’t have to be religious to know when you’re in the presence of glory.

Atlantic Theater Company (Off Broadway). By George Brant. Directed by Neil Pepe. With Kecia Lewis,

Rebecca Naomi Jones. Running time: 1hr 35mins. No intermission. Through Oct 2. Click here for full

venue and ticket information.

September 14, 2016

High Church and the Cotton Club, on the Same Day

By Robert Kahn

Rebecca Naomi Jones as Marie Knight and Kecie Lewis as Sister Rosetta Tharpe in the Atlantic's world premiere of "Marie and Rosetta," a play with

music by George Brant.

Is that a corpse being made up for burial? Or a fiery diva getting set to perform? That’s our question at the onset

of “Marie and Rosetta,” a brash and swaggering new play with music from the Atlantic.

The confusion can be forgiven: the setting is a casket-lined funeral parlor, where a young woman is applying

blush to a more senior, and perfectly still, counterpart, bathed in a pale light. Soon, though, the older woman

stirs to life.

Gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe and her new discovery, Marie Knight, have merely borrowed a friend’s

funeral business to use as a rehearsal studio and makeshift “hotel.” The surroundings give Marie the creeps, but

as Sister Tharpe pipes up … sleeping in a coffin is safer than sleeping on a tour bus for two black women in

1946 Mississippi.

A world premiere by George Brant, "Marie and Rosetta" imagines Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s first rehearsal with a

protégée, as they prepare for a tour that will establish them as a successful team. Tharpe was the so-called queen

of “race records” in the 1930s and ’40s, a woman at ease performing in churches or the Cotton Club, often the

same day.

She both helped push gospel music into the mainstream and won admirers as eclectic as Elvis Presley, Johnny

Cash and Jimi Hendrix.

Playwright Brant, whose recent works include “Grounded,” with Anne Hathaway at the Public, has crafted a

90-minute historical drama chronicling the grand tragedies and triumphs of the lives of both women. The story

is punctuated by a dozen or so of Tharpe’s better-known recordings, including “Strange Things Happening

Every Day.”

Stage vet Kecia Lewis, who earlier this year was excellent as a last-minute addition to the Classic Stage

Co.’s “Mother Courage …,” is wised-up, earthy and soulful as the flamboyant performer who has both a

matronly concern for her new charge and something of a sensual draw to her, as well.

Rebecca Naomi Jones (“Hedwig,” “American Idiot”), as Marie, is initially timid, but Sister Rosetta draws her

out, helping her walk a line between faith and seductiveness. Sister Rosetta doesn’t just persuade Marie to adopt

her way of thinking; she helps the woman, 23, find her own voice.

Clever stagecraft makes it appear the two women are in full command of the piano and guitars at the tips of

their fingers, though it becomes apparent they've got support behind the scenes.

Riccardo Hernández’s setting serves as an imposing backdrop for the head-spinning details of the duo’s lives:

Sister Rosetta was once such a popular figure she drew 25,000 paying customers to her third wedding, held in

Washington, D.C. Yet for years after her 1973 death, she was buried in an unmarked Philadelphia grave.

This funeral parlor, it turns out, suggests the paradoxes of the duo’s lives: The fine wood, and satin and brass

fittings of the coffins speak to the wealth their star power earns -- but the back-room location could just as well

be a metaphor for the way they were still expected to be invisible, like servants.

“Marie and Rosetta,” through Oct. 2 at Atlantic Theater Company’s Linda Gross Theater, 336 W. 20th St.

Tickets: $65-$75. Call 866-811-4111.

September 15, 2016

Cast Albums For The Week of September 24