Wendy Wasserstein’s Prescient Play
Wendy Wasserstein’s “An American Daughter” (revived, by La Femme Theatre Productions, at the Pershing Square Signature Center, now in previews) harks back to a more hopeful era. The play opened on Broadway in 1997, and it begins in the well-appointed Georgetown home of Lyssa Dent Hughes, a professor of public health and a fifth-generation descendant of Ulysses S. Grant. Her bid to become Surgeon General of the United States is derailed after her husband casually admits during a televised interview that she has never answered a jury summons. Within hours, a neglected civic obligation metastasizes into a national referendum on her privileged upbringing, her marriage, her ambitions, and her fitness for public life. A Beltway spin doctor is brought in to soften her damagingly competent profile, and Lyssa grudgingly consents to a follow-up interview, for which she dons a Hillary Clinton-esque headband: the center will not hold.
The play was partly inspired by the failed nominations, in 1993, of Zoë Baird and Kimba Wood for Attorney General; the candidacies of both women imploded after revelations that they had employed undocumented household workers. With layer-cake wit, Wasserstein transforms the “Nannygate” contretemps into a broader meditation on political spectacle and competing visions of feminism. The foil to Lyssa’s second-wave, shoulder-pad feminism is the androgynously named Quincy Quince, a sound-bite-spewing churnalist and third-waver, played by a mini-skirted Elizabeth Marvel in the original Broadway production.
In a Profile of Wasserstein, for this magazine, Nancy Franklin noted that the playwright described “An American Daughter” as being about “the sadness of a generation,” referring to her cohort’s failure to live up to its political ideals. Yet “An American Daughter,” like several of Wasserstein’s other works, is atmospherically closer to a comedy than a tragedy. Yes, Lyssa withdraws her nomination for Surgeon General, her husband betrays her, and her oncologist best friend, Judith, throws herself into the Potomac during a Tashlich service. But that husband, a sometimes cited but perhaps seldom read sociology professor, is more set piece than character, and Judith swims to safety after spotting a floating box of doughnuts and remembering a piquant motto from an old doughnut shop: “As you ramble on through life, whatever be your goal, keep your eye upon the donut and not upon the hole.”
Just what Wasserstein would have made of Dr. Casey Means, a wellness entrepreneur who has disclosed that she received hundreds of thousands of dollars in sponsorship and affiliate fees, and who was President Trump’s failed nominee for Surgeon General, is anyone’s guess. But there’s value in looking back. Recent productions such as “Suffs,” “A Woman Among Women,” and, especially, “Liberation,” by the eagle-eyed observer Bess Wohl, have invited audiences to compare the promises and the compromises of successive feminist generations. A revival of “An American Daughter,” starring Jean Lichty, Robert Sean Leonard, Mary Beth Peil, and Carmen Zilles, offers another such occasion.—Rhoda Feng
About Town
Ebrahim Golestan’s drama “Brick and Mirror,” from 1965, widely considered the first feature of the Iranian New Wave, turns a local problem—a Tehran taxi-driver finds an abandoned infant in his back seat—into a teeming panorama of city life. The driver brings the baby to friends partying in a night club; his quandary yields existential debate in a police station, a portrait of a courthouse’s bureaucratic frenzy, and a heartrending documentary vision of an orphanage. These tumultuous incidents are bound by a daring half-hour-long scene of the driver’s erotic overnight reunion with his hard-living girlfriend, who wants to adopt the child. Golestan’s blend of harsh realism and visual imagination is, even now, startling.—Richard Brody (Streaming on Criterion Channel starting Aug. 1.)
The ballet dancer Misty Copeland’s fight on behalf of Black dancers, who have traditionally been underrepresented in ballet, along with the determination and grace that have characterized her own rise, has arguably transcended the art itself. Now retired from the stage, Copeland moves into the role of mentor and producer. For the Joyce’s two-week Ballet Festival, Copeland brings together dancers including Dance Theatre of Harlem’s Alexandra Hutchinson and the Paris Opera Ballet’s Guillaume Diop (a veritable star). Two programs include a solo from John Taras’s “Firebird,” José Limón’s “Sonata for Two Cellos,” and a solo by Bob Fosse—a celebration of the diversity of dance itself.—Marina Harss (Joyce Theatre; Aug. 4-16.)
“Mexican Abstraction: Over a Century of Photography,” the title of an excellent show at Throckmorton, is a bit misleading. The images are mostly still-lifes, landscapes, and nature studies, but they’re never merely representational. If a few of the pictures—Tina Modotti’s telegraph poles, Manuel Álvarez Bravo’s optician’s sign—have come to define Mexican modernism, the show explores the full range and depth of that style, often with superb vintage prints. Modotti’s famous overhead shot of massed workers, in a soft, hazy sepia print, has an unusually subtle power. Some of the most memorable photographs take us into the uncanny. Graciela Iturbide finds a sky so dark with birds that we can practically hear their calls. Bravo zooms in on a skeletal hand—nightmarish, but oddly exquisite, with a thorny ring.—Vince Aletti (Through Sept. 26.)
In “The Saviors,” two altar boys—Paul (Julius Rinzel), grappling with his faith, and Michael (Ivan Howe), with his sexuality—find their friendship unsettled by the arrival of Julian (Stanley Simons), a long-haired drifter who has seemingly freed himself from the constraints of family, church, and ordinary human ties, only to be cornered by his own ruinous desires. The playwright Bubba Weiler, who has spoken of being raised in a “pretty conservative, Catholic atmosphere,” gets at the double consciousness of a Catholic atheist. Paul and Michael could be two sides of the same doubting person, and the setting, a Midwestern Catholic church, is both a crucible of assorted boyhood anxieties and, thanks to the gemütlich presence of its music director, Judy (Crystal Finn), in many senses a sanctuary.—Rhoda Feng (Atlantic Theatre Company; through Aug. 15.)
In 2016, an open-mike bard turned rapper, going simply by Noname, released the mixtape “Telefone,” making good on an early endorsement from a red-hot Chance the Rapper, and the project’s raw but cogent poetry heralded her as hip-hop’s next great theorist. She has since become one of the past decade’s most brilliant lyricists and evenhanded critics, emerging as a social activist and a proponent of pulp and revolutionary Black lit. Her self-released début, “Room 25,” from 2018, moved from mere rhetorical triumph into finesse and mastery, and its 2023 follow-up, “Sundial,” is her magnum opus, as sharp and focussed as it is compositionally rich. For the tenth anniversary of “Telefone,” the rapper returns to the moment when she established that making a name didn’t require having one.—Sheldon Pearce (Sony Hall; Aug. 5.)
The Georgian filmmaker Otar Iosseliani has long been a North Star for wistful post-Soviet cinephiles. Metrograph’s series “Otar Iosseliani: Fables of Modern Life” will afford New Yorkers a rare opportunity to discover his œuvre of Georgian and French films, meticulously restored in 4K. It is the auteur’s early efforts that truly shine. Iosseliani’s poetic portraits of life on the Soviet periphery range from neorealist documentation of collective farms to playful snapshots of Tbilisi, with a light touch reminiscent of the French New Wave. “There Once Was a Singing Blackbird” is particularly unmissable: a charismatic young timpanist, taking advantage of a ninety-minute gap between parts mid-performance, leaves his orchestra to run around seducing chic Tbilisi women, wreaking havoc by returning just in time for the finale.—Madeleine Wulfahrt (Aug. 8-16.)
On and Off the Avenue
Rachel Syme on new products promoting gut health.
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Like many other women in New York with a smartphone and a shopping problem, I have a thing for shoes, and my Instagram algorithm has adapted accordingly. All day long, my feed serves up a parade of pretty platforms and squishy sandals, beckoning me to part with my savings. I now know (mostly) how to avoid these lures, but a few weeks ago Instagram served me a pair of shoes that I could not manage to look away from—instead, I kept returning to my phone to stare at them, in all their tacky, lurid glory. This has to be some kind of joke, I thought—or maybe an art project? But, no, they were real, and available to buy, for just $69: rubbery beige platform sandals, about ten inches high, that are meant to be worn only during one extremely private activity. They were called, simply, “Sh*t Shoes,” from a company named Let Loose, a gut-health brand founded in 2024, by Alexandra Houx Grounds, a willowy blonde who suffered from constant gastric distress and wanted to bring products to market that could address women’s tummy issues with a sense of humor. Grounds’s first offerings were supplements—digestive enzymes, a constipation-relief lemonade mix—but it is the “Sh*t Shoes,” essentially a squatty potty split in two and made a bit more fashionable, that has sent the company viral. The first batch has already sold out, thanks, at least in part, to TikTok enthusiasts; now they are available only via pre-order. The shoes may be a gimmick, but they are part of a larger trend, in which people are openly talking about (and buying things to augment) their intestinal microbiomes. Synbiotics, fibre bars, colostrum powder, the new best-selling book “You’ve Been Pooping All Wrong,” by Trischa Pasricha—and, now, poop shoes. There’s never been a better time to trust your gut.
P.S. Good stuff on the internet: