Wanda Wheels bristles when Mateo calls her “kind” in this sprawling, funny, foul-mouthed, messy, moving ensemble piece, Stephen Adly Guirgis’s first new play in New York since his Pulitzer Prize winning Between Riverside and Crazy five years ago. “Don’t pin a ‘kindness’ target on me,” Wanda says. “There’s a place for kindness. It’s not here.”
Here is Hope House, a government-funded temporary residence in New York City for women who have been cruelly treated in life and now are junkies, drunks, ex-cons, former hookers, or mentally ill, or just New Yorkers who have nowhere else to go. Over the course of the three hour play, we come to learn more about their complicated lives, and wind up sharing the affection the playwright feels for them, even as they curse each other, confront one another, furtively drink or take drugs, get physically violent. But there is kindness too; it’s just in disguise.
“You don’t have to be nice to me,” Betty Woods says to Venus Ramirez.
Earlier, another resident savagely beat up Betty because she smells. She smells because she refuses to take a bath. She refuses to take a bath, as Venus figures out, because she hates looking at her own body, because she’s obese.
“Oh I’m not being nice,” Venus replies, as she bathes her. She’s just being practical, she says. “If they fuck you up bad, the police will come, and I got warrants.”
The scene is one of the many in Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven that exhibit the kind of writing we have come to expect from the author of such works as The Motherfucker with the Hat, Jesus Hopped the A Train and Our Lady of 121st Street – startlingly street tough, at times almost offensively comic, but also oddly tender and, for all the coarse language, gorgeously poetic.
Full production photographs at NewYorkTheater.me
The production at Atlantic Theater is performed by a spot-on 18-member cast, many of them veterans of Guirgis’ work as members of the 27-year-old Labyrinth Theater Company, whose artistic director, John Ortiz, is making his long-delayed Off-Broadway debut as a director.
Among the notable Lab Theater vets are Elizabeth Rodriguez (Tony nominated for MF with the Hat, and a familiar face on TV) as the director of the halfway house, who works 80 hours a week and never smiles, but whom the residents respectfully call Miss Rivera, because they know she’s battling the bureaucracy for them.
Liza Colón-Zayas (who originated roles in three other Guirgis plays, including Between Riverside and Crazy) portrays Sarge, a damaged veteran of the Iraq war who has a violent temper. She’s the one who beat up Betty, after demanding that she shower: “See — no matter who any of us is, no matter race, color, or– in your case — diameter — the golden rule is we all gots to get along!”
Sean Carvajal, such a revelation in the 2017 revival of Jesus Hopped The A Train, is here Mateo, a teenager whose mother is upstairs in her death bed, and who is a favorite of both staff and residents. He and Wanda Wheels (Patrice Johnson Chevannes), an anorexic and an alcoholic in a wheelchair, like to stand on the stoop outside and draw together. After he apologizes for calling her kind, she does him a kind of kindness — he had said he was hungry, so she gives him the bottle of Ensure that the counselor has been forcing her to drink, then takes it back and fills it full of vodka for herself. Yet, over the course of the play, we learn that she was a Broadway dancer, a film actor and an intellectual who dined with Noam Chomsky.
I might consider that a spoiler if there weren’t oodles of revelations about the characters in the play. “No Saint without a past, no sinner without a future,” Father Miguel (David Anzuelo) says to custodian Joey Fresco (Victor Almanzar, also a Guirgis/Labyrinth vet), both of whom turn out to have their own vivid pasts.
If the scenes in Halfway are reminiscent of Guirgis’ earlier plays, it’s worth noting that Hat and A train have casts of five each; there are seven actors in Riverside. A slice-of-life play with 18 characters on the margins of society in a single setting, each of whom gets to tell their story, was once a staple of the theater, in such plays as Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths and Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh . It now seems more common in online series, like Orange Is The New Black, where acoustics and seat comfort are not issues, and audiences can pause if their attention begins to flag. Perhaps it’s just a reflection of the decay in our (ok, my) cultural literacy, but it occurred to me that each of the relationships that play out in Halfway Bitches Go Straight To Heaven could be its own episode: crazy mother- smart daughter codependency, lesbian lovers, surrogate father-son, macho-trans attraction. There is even a subplot involving a live goat, which is shocking and absurd, and, like much of the rest of the play, both funny and sad.
Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven is on stage at the Atlantic Theater (336 W 20th Street, between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, New York, NY 10011) through January 5, 2020. Tickets and details
Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven by Stephen Adly Guirgis. Directed by John Ortiz. Sets by Narelle Sissons, costumes by Alexis Forte, lights by Mary Louise Geiger, sound and original compositions by Elisheba Ittoop.
Featuring Victor Almanzar, David Anzuelo, Elizabeth Canavan, Sean Carvajal, Patrice Johnson Chevannes, Molly Collier, Liza Colón-Zayas, Esteban Andres Cruz, Greg Keller, Wilemina Olivia-Garcia, Kristina Poe, Neil Tyrone Pritchard, Elizabeth Rodriguez, Andrea Syglowski, Benja Kay Thomas, Viviana Valeria, Pernell Walker and Kara Young. Reviewed by Jonathan Mandell
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