The Last Match

Written by Anna Ziegler; directed by Gaye Taylor Upchurch

Performances through December 24, 2017

Laura Pels Theatre, 111 West 46th Street, New York, NY

roundabouttheatre.org

A tennis match as a grand metaphor for life isn’t the most original idea, but playwright Anna Ziegler puts some topspin on it in The Last Match, which takes place during a U.S. Open semi-final between Tim Porter, the world’s greatest player who’s contemplating retirement but making one last run, and Sergei Sergeyev, a young hotheaded Russian talked about as a future champion.

As they play a hard-fought, five-set thriller, the men get on each other’s nerves, admit to their own nerves, and flashback to their off-court lives, which mainly consist of Palmer’s all-American wife Mallory, a tennis pro who gave up her career to marry and give him children (the latter of which was harder than they expected), and Sergei’s feisty fiancée Galina, whose brimming self-confidence helps balance Sergei’s rattling man-child antics.

As a tennis fan, I found it interesting that Ziegler’s players are at least partly based on real pros: Tim seems modeled after Roger Federer, the effortless, beloved G.O.A.T., while Sergei seems a cousin of a younger and more distracted Novak Djokovic. The men’s better halves are stock characters, but Ziegler’s zippy way with dialogue allows all four to play an entertaining doubles match at the same time that the men’s singles battle is going on.

With Tim Mackabee’s clever set showing off the U.S. Open court and the couples’ off-court battlefields, Gaye Taylor Upchurch directs with persuasive finesse, easily juggling the men’s shotmaking with their verbal shots and flashbacks. Of course, her exemplary cast is The Last Match’s ace in the hole. Wilson Bethel’s Tim and Alex Mickiewicz’s Sergei trade witty barbs while they impressively duke it out on the court, while Zoe Winters’ Mallory and Natalia Payne’s Galina are perfect foils who also provide a needed perspective to the players’ battle royale.

The Last Match has its faults: Ziegler, who otherwise has the court lingo down, lets her players serve at wrong times during the match, a huge unforced error on her part. But there’s humor and drama in abundance, which makes her play a down-the-line winner.

The Last Match

Laura Pels Theatre, 111 West 46th Street, New York, NY

M. Butterfly

Written by David Henry Hwang; directed by Julie Taymor

Opened on October 26, 20017

In the nearly three decades since David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly premiered on Broadway—winning Tonys for Best Play, Best Director (John Dexter) and Best Featured Actor (B.D. Wong)—unearthed facts have buttressed Hwang’s hard-to-believe true story about a Frenchman who had an affair with a Chinese spy for several years, apparently without knowing his beloved was a man.

Having incorporated some of this material makes play a different animal: while as fascinating as ever, the added elements let us see this story through our present lens; what in 1988 would have seemed implausible to audiences—gender fluidity—is now firmly in our wheelhouse, making M. Butterfly more in the present by dramatizing how sexual and social taboos are broken down.

Sitting in prison, French diplomat Rene Gallimard tells his tale about his love affair with Song Liling—a Peking Opera performer—a relationship that tentatively grows more intimate and physical, which we discover during an unnecessarily descriptive courtroom scene in which Song describes how he transformed himself to make Rene believe he had the requisite female parts to engage in sexual intercourse.

In Hwang’s new version, Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly is less central; instead, a Chinese opera The Butterfly Lovers is given two lengthy excerpts, which director Julie Taymor—with help from her arranger-composer-partner Elliot Goldenthal—stages with a flourish, the lone moments of visual ravishment in an otherwise restrained production. Large, colorful screens slide on and off the stage almost continuously in a play with dozens of short scenes in varied locales; Taymor’s consummate design team—scenic (Paul Steinberg), lighting (Donald Holder), costume (Constance Hoffman) and sound (Will Pickens)—creates a vivid world of deception and, even more damagingly for Rene, self-deception.

Clive Owen gives an intense and ironical performance as Rene, balancing the ludicrousness of his fate with an almost reaction to each new, puzzling situation. Although he’s less exasperated than the role’s originator John Lithgow was, Owen effortlessly finds the humanity needed to ground this character in a reality that points the way to his abyss.

As Song, Jin Ha is persuasively gender fluid, although our first glimpse of him as a man plays havoc with subsequent scenes in which he’s Song as a woman. Despite some contrivances and overexplicit explanations, M. Butterfly flourishes in its new metamorphosis.

M. Butterfly

Cort Theatre, 138 West 48th Street, New York, NY