When is a play not really a play? When it’s chatty dialogue written for four actresses while they sit around enacting a birthday brunch. That’s not to say that Sandra Tsing Loh’s Madwomen of the West isn’t enjoyable to sit through: it is, but it’s almost entirely due to the performers onstage, pros all, who know how to interact and toss off Loh’s one-liners—some good, some not so good—with aplomb.

 

Marilyn throws a brunch at Jules’ L.A. (actually, Brentwood) home for Claudia’s birthday, who’s down in the dumps recently. Another of the women’s college friends, Zoey, who has earned fame and fortune onscreen and as an international wellness guru, was invited by Jules, and they are shocked when she shows up. The bulk of the show features verbal sparring as well as attempts to cheer up and empower each other through the difficult paths their lives have taken, both personally and professionally.

 

Loh’s script provides some good-natured and acidic jibes, though a few moments (like a tired Hillary Clinton argument between Marilyn and Jules, for example) could have been dropped. But it’s an entertaining 90 minutes thanks to the formidable cast, which director Thomas Caruso is canny enough to leave to their own devices. Caroline Aaron is her usual feisty self as the feisty Marilyn, while Brooke Adams is an elegant and refined Jules and Melanie Mayron’s matter-of-fact delivery works well for Claudia. Then there’s ageless wonder Marilu Henner enlivening the show with her flair and ceaseless energy as the zesty Zoey, who has a prodigious memory, just like the real Marilu.

 

Are these actresses simply playing thinly disguised versions of themselves? Henner and her memory are one thing, but I hope for their sake that Aaron never shot her husband, Adams never fell for the streaming Peleton trainer and Mayron never had a dysfunctional relationship with her transitioning teenage child. Either way, it’s a real hoot watching this quartet having fun onstage.

 

I didn’t expect the first immersive artist show following Beyond Van Gogh on Long Island to spotlight the greatest of the French Impressionists—and forerunner to the abstract expressionism that exploded in the mid-20th century—Claude Monet. But here we are—although, since Beyond Monet alternates in the same space with the ongoing Van Gogh show, it’s likely not nearly as popular.

 

Similarly to Beyond Van Gogh (and, I would guess, other immersive artist shows), the multimedia Beyond Monet gives viewers a new way of looking at an artist and his—it’s always his—preoccupations, usually by lining up, on the walls of the space, reproductions of paintings that are visually similar, then morphing into other works. Then there’s replicating the “look” of the settings of Monet’s best-known works, like the gardens and water lilies near his home in Giverny, the cathedral in Rouen or London’s Parliament buildings. 

 

The visual motifs, as in the Van Gogh show, provide a sumptuous array of colors, transforming into other subjects that might or might not look familiar, based on one’s knowledge of Monet’s oeuvre. Ambient music—at times sounding like early ‘70s Pink Floyd—accompanies the show; unlike Van Gogh, there are no voices intoning Monet’s commentaries on art but rather simply the words thrown onto the walls, in the original French and in English translations. As I said in my review of Beyond Van Gogh, there’s a kind of Cliff Notes effect to this visualization of an immortal artist’s life and art, with little immersive sense, so to speak, of Monet’s artistic and historic importance. 

 

Of course, standing in front of the artist’s actual artworks is always more satisfying, and that also goes for Monet, whose masterly and massive Water Lilies canvases, which take up two galleries of the breathtaking Musée de l’Orangerie  in Paris, along with a large gallery in the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, might be considered some of the first truly immersive paintings.

 

Unlike the Van Gogh show, Beyond Monet does not include a virtual-reality experience, which makes it somewhat less immersive than it should be. Still, if this sort of thing is up your alley, it's is a pleasant way to spend an hour.

In her play Spain, Jen Silverman tells a story about disinformation and the value of art through an historic lens. In 1930s Manhattan, two Communist sympathizers are charged by their Russian handlers with making a film, a piece of propaganda, about the Spanish civil war. Neither having been there—and after brainstorming the most obvious clichés—they enlist a couple of famous writers to help flesh out the script. The film eventually gets made, and the Russians move on to other forms of brainwashing.

 

Of the characters in Spain, at least three are flesh and blood; the filmmakers are the fictional Helen and Joris Ivens, a Dutch filmmaker who did make a propaganda film for the Russians, The Spanish Earth. Karl, their Russian handler, is fictional; but novelists John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway, who are recruited by Helen and Joris, are not only but also contributed in some way to Ivens’ film. Silverman has fun with her bit of alternative history but, since Ivens comes off as naïve, Dos Passos as staid and Hemingway loud, the caricatures too neatly fit the play’s cantankerous tone, not quite serious but not quite frivolous.   

 

That said, Spain is somewhat underwhelming; with such imposing real-life characters and an exciting true story, it should have far more crackling dramatic sweep than it does. Yet, it’s a diverting 90 minutes, largely thanks to Tyne Rafaeli’s appropriately cinematic direction; she is greatly assisted by Jen Schriever’s inventive lighting, Dane Leffrey’s maneuverable sets, Daniel Kluger’s witty sound design and Alejo Vietti’s on-target costumes, all of which contribute to the fast but not exhausting pace. The cast, comprising Andrew Burnap (Ivens), Marin Ireland (Helen), Danny Wolohan (Hemingway), Eric Lochtefeld (Dos Passos), and Zachary James (Karl), does its best to put some flesh on these caricatures, with James providing extra zest with his booming singing voice giving the occasional operatic flourish.

 

Despite Spain’s glittery surface, Silverman is after something more. Late in the play, it’s said that “…films are powerful and so are the people who make them.” That leads to an ending that’s set in a somewhat hazy present with the same characters, who are now tasked with using their wares on the internet since, as Karl (still their handler) notes, “Movies aren’t a thing anymore.” But this scene feels tacked on as a way to crudely link past and present. Its themes of disinformation and purity in art remain relevant, but Spain sometimes becomes what it warns against.