Between Riverside and Crazy Broadway Reviews

Everyone should see it anyway, to experience the pleasure of a great cast making a shrimps-and-veal meal of the incredibly rich material, even as it flips between comedy and tragedy on its way to the truth in between. Actually, that meal may even be too rich at points; the final scene can’t quite digest all that came before, and there are brief moments throughout when the actors’ love for the material itself begins to show through the facade of character, like those bricks behind the plaster. For the most part, though, Pendleton’s production is amazingly confident, featuring not just Walt Spangler’s set, but also top-notch lighting by Keith Parham, sound and music by Ryan Rumery and, especially, costumes by Alexis Forte, which tell their own story on top of Guirgis’s. And when the scene changes are as expressive as the actors’ attention to every nuance of each other’s actions, staging becomes a kind of emotional choreography: thrilling, precise, impossible to pin down.

That may sound like a downer of an evening, but Guirgis’s play is speckled with his customary wry humor and genuine strangeness that lifts it from straight issue drama into something lovelier and weirder. Often, there’s just the delight of the dialogue. Lulu is purportedly studying to be an accountant, but as Walter notes, “her lips move when she read the horoscope — that ain’t the mark of a future accountant!” The play sometimes seems like it’s heading toward one possible conclusion, but then Guirgis ducks away from the obvious. In the second act, Walter has an encounter with a lady from his church (played by Liza Colón-Zayas, another routinely excellent performer who deserves a bigger platform) that veers into possibly dreamlike absurdity. That scene and its heightened aftermath may be hard to swallow, but it’s performed with such conviction that I was fully along for the ride. There’s a sense that the strictures of New York life are so wild on their own — from the real-estate laws on down — that the only possible recourse is to embrace the crazy yourself. In a maddening time, go a little mad.

In veteran director Austin Pendleton’s well-balanced production, they are brought to life by an ensemble of actors whose comfort with one another is tangible: Aside from the rapper-turned-actor Common, who makes a solid Broadway debut, the cast has been with this play since its Off Broadway debut at the Atlantic Theater in 2014 and subsequent extension at Second Stage (which is also behind this delayed transfer). The earthy Rispoli and the divine Colón-Zayas, in particular, are unimprovable in their tricky roles. But it is Henderson who, at Between Riverside and Crazy’s gravitational center, holds it all together. He’s a perfect combination of rent and controlled, and his deceptively natural star turn is the twisted, generous soul of the play.

However, it’s Henderson who shakes the stage. The wonderful actor, who’s been a regular for years in plays by August Wilson and Lorraine Hansberry and in films as far-removed as “Lady Bird” and “Dune,” gives the performance of his career and the Broadway season. He makes the complicated Walter a millions things at once — adorable, frightening, calculating, indifferent, reserved, commanding, a stand-up comic, a boozer — that combine into one indomitable theatrical force. It’s not the sort of showy, speechifying role that we usually laud out of habit. Often, Walter simply watches on. But as played by Henderson, he’s a man you won’t soon forget.

Guirgis’ play is full of these piercing, inconclusive sub-plots and character portraits—an intricately composed feast of voices where everyone is more than an easy definition of good or bad, and the chorus of views and competing interests is really the melting pot of the city outside the theater, sieved and delivered with sharpened brio on stage. As New York gets quieter in these Christmas weeks, it may be the perfect time to hear those voices at full volume.

Crackling with humor and shot through with surprises, “Between Riverside and Crazy,” which premiered off Broadway at the Atlantic Theater Company in 2014 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, is both a captivating collection of character studies and an incisive indictment of the systems that act upon them. It’s a stunning intellectual achievement that’s also a total gas, a rare breed of theater deserving of protection at all costs.

With each successive scene, Guirgis peels away layers, and we learn more about Walter: He basically drinks from morning to night. There’s more to his shooting story than we thought. And he has a real mean streak toward the end—truly avaricious and petty. Yet we’re rooting for him despite each disturbing discovery. Henderson, an exceptional stage actor who’s perhaps best known for his roles in August Wilson plays, gives a bravura performance—all the more impressive considering he’s seated for most of his scenes. In his dalliance with the Church Lady (Liza Colón-Zayas, another Guirgis vet)—which features the wildest passing of the Communion wafer you’ll ever see—he’s confined to a wheelchair; and he’s hooked up to an IV and bedridden for an uncharacteristically restrained confessional with Junior. Judging by the entrance applause, Common is this production’s biggest draw, and the neophyte stage actor seems to still be finding his footing. But he’s sweet and subtly charming in a rooftop scene with Colón, and powerful in the aforementioned muted emotional exchange with Henderson. Guirgis gives his characters plenty of R-rated barbs and razor-sharp banter, but those smaller, low-key moments reveal Riverside’s bruised, battered heart.

Who else involved with Between Riverside and Crazy deserves those greatly earned kudos? How about Henderson, one of Broadway’s and off Broadway’s longtime reliable character actors? Guirgis has handed him a role that makes his abilities undeniable. As Walter, Henderson has a part that gives him wide opportunities to keep his gifts on non-stop display. There’s a persistent quality in the player, something at his core that always confirms the quiet but unquestionable truth in whomever he’s playing. And what of director Austin Pendleton, arguably the habitually busiest member of the New York City theater community? Last on Broadway stealing scenes in Tracy Letts’ The Minutes, he blithely and boldly returns as the Between Riverside and Crazy director. (Besides acting and directing, Pendleton is a playwright and acting teacher. Does he ever have any spare time? If he does, he probably spends it seeing a play.) Because Guirgis packs so much to be unpacked in his scripts—the drama, the humor, much of it intricately simultaneous—Pendleton must unleash and restrain the actors not just from minute to minute but from second to second. He doesn’t miss a beat. He doesn’t miss any of the potential nuances within a beat. Neither under his firm hand do any of the supporting actors. Perhaps Pendleton’s directorial request once he’s chosen his ensemble and has complete trust in them is to tell them to do what they do and feel confident doing it. Most likely, he says more, but knows how, as they interact, to shift focus nimbly. His is masterful directing.

Though the productions share those same elements, like a broom you find in the back of the closet, the words to describe the Prize-winner’s Broadway premiere are stiff and dusty. Save for Stephen McKinley Henderson’s masterful lead performance and Walt Spangler’s attractive, misused set, they apply to the book itself as much as to Austin Pendleton’s lifeless direction and 5.5 of the 6 other performances.

It’s a funny exchange, but also a sly clue. What Pops is saying about “they” is also true of all seven characters in “Between Riverside and Crazy,” especially Pops himself. They are not as they initially seem. As subtle in its craft as it is blunt in its language — and performed by a first-rate cast — the play is likely to make you delight in all the New Yorkers on stage in the first act…and then force you to question your initial judgement in the second.

“Between Riverside and Crazy” is a play where everyone, including Pops, is a con artist. Guirgis takes his time to expose the duplicity of each of his characters, and the scenes between Pops and the voodoo Church Lady (Liza Colon-Zayas) and his former NYPD partner, Detective O’Connor (Elizabeth Canavan), and her fiancée, Lieutenant Caro (Michael Rispoli), show a major talent writing at full and breathtaking speed. These four gifted actors know precisely how to jockey with each. They do the playwright’s poker-game of words full justice.

But if Between Riverside and Crazy does start to leak steam after its inspired first act, the same cannot be said of the strong cast, especially with Stephen McKinley Henderson giving such a supercharged performance in the lead role. The play could not be in better hands.