Potpourri: Love Life, Don’t Eat the Mangos and Beckett Briefs

Kate Baldwin and Brian Stokes Mitchell in Love Life. (Photo: Joan Marcus.)

The review of Don’t Eat the Mangos contains spoilers.

The great Jewish Weimar composer Kurt Weill fled Berlin for New York in the early thirties. Nothing he wrote for Broadway earned him the fame he’d garnered as Bertolt Brecht’s collaborator in Germany, but he produced the music for eight shows between 1936 and 1949 (he died in 1950 at the age of fifty while he was working on a musical based on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) with a fascinating range of librettists including Moss Hart, Ira Gershwin, S.J. Perelman, Ogden Nash and Maxwell Anderson. And though the shows were a mixed bag, his music was usually glorious. The 1947 opera he and the poet Langston Hughes fashioned from Elmer Rice’s play Street Scene, set in a Manhattan tenement, may be the most exquisite score anyone has written for Broadway besides Porgy and Bess.

On one occasion he worked with the young Alan Jay Lerner: in 1948, the year after Lerner and Frederick Loewe had their first triumph with Brigadoon. The show was called Love Life. It ran for only seven months and it has never received a professional revival – that is, until Encores! presented it recently as the middle offering in its 2025 season. It had originally been planned for 2020 but Covid got in the way, and it’s taken half a decade for the series to get it back on the docket.

Among musical theatre historians Love Life is legendary because it’s so unusual. It’s a Brechtian vaudeville (its subtitle is A Vaudeville in Two Parts) and the first concept musical, predating Cabaret by nearly twenty years and Company by more than twenty. Like Company, it’s a commentary on the married state (and like Follies it contains a second-act fantasy revue section), but its take on the subject is, true to Brecht, didactic. Love Life is a fable whose message is that the greatest obstacle to a successful marital relationship is economics. Lerner’s other influence is Thornton Wilder. Like the family in The Skin of Our Teeth, which had been written six years earlier, Samuel and Susan Cooper and their children Johnny and Elizabeth stay the same age while around them America moves from age to age, though the arc of time in Love Life is considerably shorter: from the colonial era to the post-war present.

As an avowed Kurt Weill freak, I’ve wanted to see this show for most of my life, having read about it first in Stanley Green’s The World of Musical Comedy when I was twelve, and I’ve managed to find bits and pieces of it through the intervening years. The original Love Life failed to produce an original cast album because of a musicians’ strike, but songs from it have turned up in a number of Weill compilations and on Ben Bagley’s Alan Jay Lerner Revisited, where Jerry Orbach sings memorable renditions of “Love Song” and “This Is the Life.” Lotte Lenya, Weill’s widow, recorded “Green-Up Time.” The Encores! concert version, which was adapted by Joe Keenan and the director, Victoria Clark, turned up many songs I didn’t know and one true archeological curiosity, the first go-round for “I Remember It Well,” which Lerner retooled to a Loewe tune in the 1958 movie musical Gigi. The score is lovely, varied and, typical of Weill, full of surprises, like the love ballad “Here I’ll Stay,” which he weaves throughout the play as its vow of eternal loyalty becomes both more ironic and more desperate.

Does the musical work? It’s hard to say because the production was not very well staged, Joann M. Hunter’s choreography was uninspired, and the show needs the kind of glittering style and satirical edge that demand a longer rehearsal period than Encores! can afford. The music was, as always, performed robustly (Rob Berman was musical director), but the scenic design by Ryan Howell made little impression and Tracy Christensen’s costumes didn’t come close to finding an adequate solution for the immense period shifts. They were a patchwork: some members of the ensemble were in period and others were not. It would have been more effective to keep the Cooper family true to each setting while keeping the rest of the performers in simple generic dress. And though one of the high spots of the show was a tap dance by the two child actors, Chirstopher Jordan and Andrea Rosa Guzman, they had to carry more of the show than two kids should reasonably be asked to do, especially in the lengthy opening and with such a constricted preparation time.

But the Cooper parents were played by two generously gifted musical-theatre stars, Brian Stokes Mitchell and Kate Baldwin. Mitchell brought both his warm, luminous baritone and his acting chops to the role of Samuel, and his songs were terrific, especially “I’m Your Man” (a witty paean to the art of scamming clients by shifting masks to suit their predilections) and “This Is the Life,” which is about the character’s fervent effort to adjust to life without his family after he and Susan have separated. Baldwin sailed easily through the first act but without much to challenge her. At intermission I wondered why she’d bothered to take the part, but then in act two she got to shine in two standout numbers, the touching “Is It Him or Is It Me?” and “Mr. Right,” a satire with a tentative, tender core. Those performances answered my question. This Love Life didn’t work, but it was possible to see how it could – how someday some director will make it work. In the meantime, it provided more than enough reason to drop in.

Yesenia Iglesias, Jessica Pimentel and Evelyn Howe in Don't Eat the Mangos. (Photo: David Mendizàbal.)

It took me about twenty minutes at Don’t Eat the Mangos, the play by Ricardo Pérez González that opened last week in a Huntington Theatre Company production at the Calderwood Pavilion, to figure out that the ailing, wheelchair-bound father (José Ramón Rosario) surrounded by his long-suffering wife (Susanna Guzmán) and three grown daughters had sexually abused at least one of the girls when they were young. (It turns out to be the eldest, Ismelda, played by Jessica Pimentel.) The play, which was directed by David Mendizábal, takes place in San Juan, but it’s pitched at roughly the level of a common-denominator nineteenth-century melodrama, only with contemporary references and plentiful swear words. Papi is an unredeemable monster who not only had sex with Ismelda for years but got her pregnant three times, fed her liquids to induce stillbirth – not even miscarriage but stillbirth, the fiend! – and then buried the dead babies in coffee tins under the mango tree in the backyard. Ismelda is an angel who encouraged him to keep coming to her bed so he would leave her younger sisters alone, and once he’d ruined her chances of having a family of her own (it got around that she was a slut), she sacrificed her life to caring for him. González frames the play as a shocker, but grotesque isn’t the same as shocking. And even if you don’t recognize the steals from Sam Shepard’s Buried Child and Garcia Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba, the play is about as fresh as last week’s sandwich.

There is one shocking thing about it – that it's so amateurishly plotted. González can’t make up his mind whether Mami knew what was going on between her husband and her eldest daughter or had no idea. (She has had cancer on and off for years and spent a lot of time in the hospital, so she has an alibi.) Sometimes she intimates that she had her suspicions but repressed them, but her response to the news, when her youngest, Wicha (Evelyn Howe), spills it, sure isn’t written that way. Part of the news, that is, since the playwright forgets to include the revelation that Papi was responsible for the stillbirths and Mami apparently isn’t smart enough to make the connection. When she’s alone with him, having arranged for all three of the girls to vacate the premises, she murders him by shoving the little tinkling bell he uses to summon them to his bedside down his throat, proclaiming that she’s taking revenge for Ismelda. Then she walks into the ocean, leaving Ismelda and her sisters to find the body and figure out how to deal with the consequences. So much for the idea that she did it for her daughter.

In the second half of the play (there’s no intermission) González ramps up the dark comedy; for example, the daughters crack jokes about their father’s body and the way in which he was killed. I’m all for mixing tones, but only if you know what the hell you’re doing. The kindest charge I can level at a writer who throws gross humor into a melodrama is insensitivity.

Tanya Orellana’s set design is appealing, though the trick of having it spin on a revolve doesn’t serve much purpose and becomes tiresome. Mendizábal’s production is competent, and the actors march through it with conviction. (Yesenia Inglesias, as the middle sister, Yinoelle, is the most interesting to watch.) But their efforts are in vain: it’s not possible to find any kind of truth in a play as phony as Don’t Eat the Mangos.

F. Murray Abraham in Krapp's Last Tape. (Photo: Carol Rosegg.)

New York’s veteran Irish Repertory Theatre was gracious enough to stream their last production, Beckett Briefs: From the Cradle to the Grave, which I had wanted to see but wasn’t able to get to in person. It consisted of three pieces, for a total running time of just over an hour. First on the bill, the monodrama Not I, was performed impressively by Sarah Street as the speaker, whose mouth is the only part of her we get to see, though other editions I’ve seen of this piece have been more successful at climbing from the level of technical finesse to that of emotionally affecting theatre. Street’s best moments were the ones where the character seemed temporarily frozen, hesitating on the verge of articulation. I liked her better in the three-hander Play, in which the three members of a sexual triangle continue to justify themselves beyond the grave. (Beckett placed them in adjacent clay jars.) The actors – the other two were Kate Forbes and Roger Dominic Casey – kept their diction as sharp as a knife’s edge, and their banter was funny-nasty, in the manner of the last act of Noël Coward’s Private Lives. Casey was less interesting than the two actresses, though, and the play, short as it is, wound down before the end in this iteration.

The real reason to watch Beckett Briefs was F. Murray Abraham in Krapp’s Last Tape, wherein an aging man listens to a tape he made of himself thirty years earlier. It’s one of Beckett’s truly astonishing plays – magical. The vaudevillian hijinks at the beginning were dull and seemed to go on for a long time, but eventually Abraham as the older Krapp, listening rapt to his younger counterpart, became mesmerizing, as he reacted to a story about an old mistress as if he’d never heard it before, let alone lived it. Fiddling with the tape machine in an effort to find the sex parts, he suddenly seemed decades younger, a teenage boy searching for the most stimulating passages in a dime-store novel. Then he hovered over it, his cheek pressed to it, as if he thought he could transport himself back to this earlier time by wishing himself inside the tape player. Abraham illuminated the tension between Krapp’s cynicism and bitterness about the follies of his younger self and a tender nostalgia for them. At the end he insists, “I wouldn’t want them back . . . No, I wouldn’t want them back,” but the actor’s face belied his words. Abraham’s American acting training operated on Beckett in an unexpected way: this interlude about a man responding to evidence of his past suddenly became a study in sense memory. Beckett probably would have hated it; I loved it.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.