What’s in a name? That is, in the name of a play? The iconoclastic Stephen Adly Guirgis appears to fashion his titles with the same spider-web of concentration he lavishes on his plays. Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train, Our Lady of 121st Street, and The Motherf**ker with the Hat have now been joined—not only on the list of intriguing titles but in terms of fascinatingly wrought dramaturgy—by Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven at the Atlantic.
Guirgis—whose last new play was the deservedly Pulitzer Prize-winning From Riverside to Crazy, which the Atlantic produced in 2014—writes dense, undisciplined, overstuffed plays, in this case packed with no less than 18 actors cramping the stage of the converted church on West 20th Street. Most are in view as the lights flash on Narelle Sisson’s set, which spills out into the auditorium in a novel and most effective manner.
The clutter of characters—enduring a group meeting in a halfway house in upper Manhattan, impatiently awaiting the promised after-meeting pizza—is purposely offsetting. Too many bodies, the playgoer might think, too many characters for a play to delineate and for an audience to differentiate and ultimately care about.
[Read Elysa Gardner’s ★★★★ review here.]
It is the magic of Guirgis that he can, and insists, on doing just that: Taking denizens of the street—whose usual function on traditional stages is as stereotyped and often minor characters—and humanizing them. Not only does the playwright give us numerous principal characters here, all of whom register in the storytelling, he writes them each distinctly.
A hallmark of his plays is that there are no generic characters, and none of his characters sound alike: Everyone has a particular, personal language. It seems like each time I review a Guirgis play—most recently the Signature Theater revivals of the 2000 Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train (2017) and the 2003 Our Lady of 121st Street (2018)—I wind up calling Guirgis a street poet of the underbelly or something of the sort. He is indeed, bringing forgotten and overlooked characters into the spotlight and revealing them to be as human, sympathetic, and troubled as the privileged classes. (When you’re a homeless, abused ex-con living in a halfway house, everyone else is privileged.)
The new play takes place at a shelter in upper Manhattan inspired by Hope House, a government-funded transitional residence for women. The human riffraff—or, rather, the residents—are dominated by Sarge (Liza Colón-Zayas, from Riverside), a bipolar Iraq vet with issues of anger, addiction. and violence. The group includes Bella (Andrea Syglowski), a recovering addict with a past and an infant; Venus (Esteban Andres Cruz), a transsexual taking refuge at the shelter; Rockaway Rosie (Elizabeth Canavan, also from Riverside), a decidedly out-of-place lost-soul-of-an-alcoholic who seems to be an unfortunate niece of Edith Bunker; and Wanda Wheels (Patrice Johnson Chevannes), an alcoholic wheelchair-bound ex-Broadway-and-film dancer who offers a long discourse on her dinner with Noam Chomsky at Café Carlyle. Which gives you an idea of the unbound breadth of scope of the author’s writing, bless him.
Special attention goes to the younger residents: Taina (Viviana Valeria), who despite a life of abuse won’t desert her unstable mother; Mateo (Sean Carvajal, an Obie, Lortel and Drama Desk winner for his stunning performance in the revival of ‘A’ Train), whose mother is a terminally ill resident; and Little Melba Diaz (Kara Young), an abused teenaged ex-prostitute who writes poetry, including an astonishingly wrought autobiographical piece which concludes with “Halfway Bitches got it hard—but we going straight to Heaven.”
Central to life at the halfway house are Miss Rivera (Elizabeth Rodriguez, a Tony nominee for Motherf**cker), who runs the home; and ex-con janitor Joey Fresco (Victor Almanzar, from Riverside). Overlooking, protecting, and trying to minister to the residents is Father Miguel (David Anzuelo), whose stage time includes two key scenes with Nicky (Greg Keller), a wife-beater trying to retrieve his spouse from the safety of the home. Guirgis being Guirgis, there is also a goat called Mr. Skittles.
Virtually all the participants are members of LAByrinth Theater Company, which was established in 1992 (as Latino Actors Base) and long guided by Guirgis’ artistic partner Philip Seymour Hoffman. Halfway Bitches is a coproduction by Atlantic and LAByrinth. The play is well directed by longtime LAByrinth artistic director John Ortiz, who finds canny solutions to the overstuffed demands of Guirgis’s play. Let us note in passing that some of these actors are so excellent—Rodriguez, Colón-Zayas, Canavan, and Carvajal, among them—that we rue their limited opportunities on high profile stages.
The playwright messily but carefully fits his many characters into the puzzle: The play runs over two-and-a-half swift hours, but there doesn’t seem to be anything or anyone extraneous. After all is said and done, Guirgis finds a way to startle and prod us at the final curtain with three little words which demonstrate that his Halfway Heaven is not quite so far away from “our” world.
If the world of Guirgis seems foreign to you, rest assured: At least part of the playwright’s aim seems to be to demonstrate that while circumstances might be radically different on the underside of society, people aren’t. Playgoers who are new to Guirgis are hereby advised to give him a chance; those that have seen Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train, Our Lady of 121st Street, From Riverside to Crazy, and/or The Motherf**ker with the Hat have already, most likely, eagerly obtained their tickets.
Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven opened December 9, 2019, at the Linda Gross Theater and runs through January 5, 2020. Tickets and information: atlantictheater.org
