11/13/2023 0 Comments Quincy tyler bernstine wikipediaIn “Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train,” revived last year by the Signature, the conflicts were about the nature of justice. They are groping toward the core of conflicts that are hard to put into words otherwise. Guirgis’s characters are never merely indulging in insult comedy. Inez pretty much nails Norca as “some kinda no-ear pit bull.” Flip informs his lover that he’s “the worst actor in the state of Wisconsin - and that’s no easy feat.” And Rooftop, who has not been to confession since maybe ever, tells the priest, Father Lux, that the church has to take some of the blame for that: “It’s not like y’all got the most alluring marketing campaign going on these days.”Ĭutting they may be, but Mr. But even without curses the back-and-forth is biting. Guirgis’s other plays - he won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for “ Between Riverside and Crazy” - has dialogue so laced with profanity been so gorgeously employed to define and distinguish character. Not since the remote heyday of David Mamet or, more recently, Mr. This may seem like a daunting roll call of characters to keep straight, and I haven’t even mentioned Rose’s niece (Stephanie Kurtzuba), Flip’s lover (Kevin Isola), a priest (John Doman) and a profoundly miscellaneous woman from Connecticut (Dierdre Friel). Whoever they are, they’ve also stolen the pants off one of the mourners. We never meet the ghouls who have set the plot in motion by stealing the body of the late Sister Rose from her coffin in the viewing room at the Harlem funeral parlor. Thin-skinned and foul-mouthed, with grudges against everyone, the bereaved are a dirty dozen of unpublishable grievance.Īnd they aren’t even the worst of the miscreants that the playwright, Stephen Adly Guirgis, has yanked from his darkly comic imagination. No surprise, then, that there are so many whiners and wastrels to be found on New York stages, from the meat-pie maniacs of “Sweeney Todd” to O’Neill’s Tyrones, abusing drugs and one another.īut 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,” which opened in a raucous, rough-edged revival directed by Phylicia Rashad at the Signature Theater on Sunday. Almost by definition, drama is about people behaving badly.
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