American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024

The Half-God of Rainfall  Inua Ellams (8 - 24 Sept.)    

Real Women Have Curves  Joy Huerta and Benjamin Velez (music and lyrics), Lisa 

Loomer (book) (8 Dec.–21 Jan.)  

Becoming a Man  P. Carl  (16 Feb. - 10 Mar.)  

Gatsby  Florence Welch (music and lyrics), Thomas Bartlett (music), Martyna Majok 

(book) (23 May - 3 Aug.)  

In its third post-pandemic season, the American Repertory Theater signaled that it was looking confidently toward the future. On November 17, the company announced that its proposed “Center for Creativity and Performance” in the Allston section of Boston (across the Charles River from Harvard’s main campus) had received formal approval from the city. The new theatre complex, which would replace the Loeb Drama Center in Cambridge as the A.R.T.’s home upon its projected opening in 2026, was described as a model of sustainable design for cultural buildings. 

Meanwhile, at the Loeb, the A.R.T. presented a season of four shows (down from its pre-COVID norm of five or six) with its now-familiar mix of cultural diversity, gender non-conformity, and Broadway ambition. In The Half-God of Rainfall, Nigerian playwright Inua Ellams wedded three pantheons: the West African spirits called orishas, the Greek gods of Mt. Olympus, and the superstars of the National Basketball Association. The deities clash when Zeus rapes a Nigerian girl, Modúpé, who is under the protection of the river orisha Oshun. Modúpé gives birth to Zeus’s son, a half-god named Demi, whose divinity reveals itself in his extraordinary skill on the basketball court. Although she is mortal, Modúpé defeats Zeus in an epic battle; her victory inaugurates a feminist utopia, with the Black orishas ascendant and the white European gods crushed. As dramatic as all this sounds, the play is more a declaimed recitation than an acted-out story; the characters simply narrate most of their actions in the third person. Stacey Derosier’s lighting and Tal Yarden’s projections supplied the theatricality that this mythic spectacle needed. 

The next production, Real Women Have Curves, used the format of a traditional book musical to examine contemporary concerns about immigration, xenophobia, generational conflict, and body positivity. Based on a play and film, the show centers on Ana, an 18-year-old Mexican American woman whose family runs a small sewing factory in East Los Angeles. Ana has been accepted into Columbia University, but she is conflicted about pursuing her educational dreams when the family business needs her help. She’s also vexed by her mother’s criticisms of her weight, although the young man she is dating assures her that she is beautiful. Offsetting Ana’s personal struggles are larger social and political problems, such as anti-Hispanic bias and the predicament of undocumented immigrants. One such migrant, a worker in the clothing factory, is caught in a raid and deported; her plight renews Ana’s determination to study law and fight for immigrants' rights. Lisa Loomer’s book sets up these multiple conflicts and issues broadly, simply, and efficiently, allowing plenty of room for tuneful ballads and comic numbers in a Latin pop style flavored with salsa and mariachi rhythms.  However, the multiplicity of issues prevents the musical from having a clear thematic center; even body affirmation, which gives the show its title and title song, turns out to be a minor concern for the show as a whole. Nevertheless, the production benefited from strong, appealing performances by the whole ensemble, especially Lucy Godínez as Ana, Florencia Cuenca as her sister Estela, and Justina Machado as their mother Carmen. 

The show that followed Real Women, P. Carl’s autobiographical play Becoming a Man, also focused on the struggle to affirm what’s real in matters of body and gender. After decades of living as female, including a lesbian marriage, Carl makes the transition to masculinity—a rocky process that he presents as both harrowing and exhilarating. Most difficult of all is negotiating the effects of the change on his relationship with Lynette, his wife, as she grapples with the new realities of her spouse’s body and self-presentation. Carl’s jubilant, self-absorbed embrace of his male identity makes him somewhat oblivious to Lynette’s pain, leading to raw confrontations between them that are the most compelling and affecting moments in the play. The work’s non-chronological structure reflected the erratic process of transitions both in gender and in relationships; even the physical staging, with sets by Emmie Finckel and video by Brittany Bland, was characterized by fluidity and motion. 

Ambitious, pretentious, rich, good-looking, and doomed—these adjectives for the title character of The Great Gatsby might also describe Gatsby, the musical version that capped the A.R.T.’s 2023-24 season. Mimi Lien’s imposing set—a junkyard piled with the mangled corpses of luxury cars, from which gleaming Art Deco stairways and platforms emerged—captured the sense of an opulent era that was headed for disaster. The same pessimism, but not the same panache, characterized the pop-opera score by Florence Welch and Thomas Bartlett. Except for a couple of numbers that had compelling shape and character, the music was a tedious stream of semi-songs, one much like the others. Although the leading performers—especially Isaac Powell as Gatsby, Charlotte MacInnes as Daisy, Solea Pfeiffer as Myrtle, and Adam Grupper as Wolfsheim—sang attractively and with conviction, their occasional incandescence couldn’t lighten the prevailing gloom, or make it feel truly tragic. In its glumness, one could argue that the show was echoing the novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway, who doesn’t glorify the Jazz Age but rather regrets being seduced by its hollow glamor. But Nick responds to his disenchantment with the world of Gatsby by writing an elegy for it in lyrical prose. The bitter taste of disillusionment was all that Welch and Bartlett’s Gatsby had to offer, and there was nothing elegiac about it.  

Nevertheless, as Nick observes: “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us.” The A.R.T. seems to believe in that future too: as Gatsby continued a healthy summer run, with many shows sold out, Playbill.com reported that the company was considering a Broadway opening. At the same time, the organization announced that its next season would once again offer five shows, including world-premiere commissions by tap choreographer Ayodele Casel and playwright Kate Hamill (adapting Homer’s Odyssey, no less). The A.R.T. appears to be gathering energy for solid achievement in its final years at its Cambridge house, as it prepares to follow the green light of a gleaming new home across the river.