Off Broadway Shows Riff on Class Dynamics

It’s a strange sensation to sit in the lovely wood-and-concrete amphitheater of Little Island, a bauble gifted to the city by media magnate Barry Diller, and hear a cast of actors decry the wealth of billionaires. But so ends Kate Tarker and Dan Schlosberg’s new take on The Beggar’s Opera, which they’ve transposed from its roots in 18th-century London to 19th-century New York — with more than a little awareness of 21st-century dystopia. “We have a counterfeit democracy, where big money pulls the strings,” the chorus shouts in the production’s overheated conclusion. “Billionaires will soon be trillionaires, while blaming the poor for all the things.” I’m not one to argue with that sentiment, which is pretty much a statement of fact, but in the context of the performance space — where trendy drinks are on sale in the garden nearby, and Instagrammers prowl the vistas for good sunset pics — the anger rings hollow. Does the venue think a soupçon of class warfare will make it all the more chic?

The Counterfeit Opera arrives as part of Little Island’s commendably ambitious second season of summer programming. Last year, it launched with works like an almost-solo The Marriage of Figaro. The slate this summer includes, among other works, a bluegrass Onegin and a gospel Sophocles — plus Anthony Roth Costanzo, who did Figaro, will be back as Maria Callas — with tickets priced at $25 or less. That’s an appealing lineup, and it’s difficult to think of other venues that are pumping as much money into crossover collaborations between theater, dance, and opera. But the experience of being there and watching productions of that sort feels a bit like being led into a highbrow bear trap. It’s a trip to Pleasure Island, the destination in Pinocchio that turns boys into donkeys, now targeted at adult men who have strong opinions about A Little Life.

Which brings us to The Counterfeit Opera, itself a raring-to-go stab at updating a classic satire that, despite Tarker and Schlosberg’s insistence on its contemporary relevance, comes out the other end with its claws sanded down. The production’s the result of a warp-speed development process —Tarker has said she started the libretto this January — and it bears the weight of early 2025 heavy on its mind. The action’s now set in lower Manhattan’s Five Points in the 1850s, a hotbed of crime and anti-immigrant sentiment (the same locale as the muddily inspirational Paradise Square). Much is made of the Know Nothing party as a reflection of the current administration. There, our anti-hero Macheath — Damon Daunno, at his most roguish — runs a scam as a volunteer firefighter captain, though he’s actually starting the fires himself, then stealing the valuables inside. In the process, he’s ensnared the hearts of three women: the naïve-ish Polly (Dorcas Leung), the jailer’s daughter Lucy (Zenzi Williams), and the sex worker Jenny (Lauren Patten), who insists she’s over their affair in a blistering song that makes full use of Patten’s fortissimo abilities.

In Dustin Wills’s rough-and-tumble staging, The Counterfeit Opera does achieve a manic, “will they get away with it?” energy. The ensemble’s introduced as petty criminals in contemporary clothing, pulling costumes and props out of the back of a truck onto the stage and explaining that they’ve stolen them from the Met so that they can put on a poor person’s opera. (“Can you afford your rent?” they shout. “No! You can’t! Because you’re all poor!” That’s followed by the somewhat awkward acknowledgment that we are in Chelsea: “For tonight, at least.”) Wills’s instinct to lean into the class awareness feels right for the piece — John Gay’s original was making fun of snooty continental imports to England, and the show is working in the shadow of Brecht and Weill’s Weimar-era Threepenny Opera — but even if we’re told the props are stolen, they are a little too nice for their purposes. At one point, an ensemble member totes a giant planter through the audience on the way to the stage, with the implication he may have stolen it from somewhere else on the island, a cheeky gag that is itself baldly expensive.

That tension between context and content likely could have been refined with firmer material. Given its rushed production period, much of The Counterfeit Opera still seems as if it’s in process. In their songs, Tarker and Schlosberg are muscling together many different genres at once, from opera to musical hall to punk and more, with varying results. Alone in her room with puppy love, Leung impressively moves between alt-rock and classical soprano, though the shifts in genre do more work than the imprecise lyrics (“My parents are dumb, my parents are wrong”). Tarker is fond of throwing contemporary expletives into the dialogue — the great Ann Harada, as Polly’s mother, calls her “slut pie” — but that’s a comedic gambit with diminishing returns. The satire deflates when, as in the broadest of Broadway musicals, a character announces, “Fuck New Jersey.”

The Counterfeit Opera is strong, then, when it reaches to more austere extremes. Schlosberg’s music pushes Daunno, always a reliable option for a sleepy lothario (see: Oklahoma! and Hadestown), into the upper reaches of his countertenor when Macheath is imprisoned. “The American way of life is wanting more,” he wails. “My great American crime is being poor.” The plainness of the text there has a certain force — there are times where whacking a theme with a big hammer is the best course of action. But even then, the subtext roils and distorts what is being said directly. For one, in this adaptation, we’ve been told Macheath is forced into suffering by his socioeconomic condition, but we haven’t felt it — mostly, he has swaggered around town drinking and seducing women and then threatened to flee to California, which is average Brooklyn straight-dude behavior. For the second, this moment occurs in front of a gorgeous and inky indigo vista of the shores across the Hudson, a scene not exactly appropriate for a grim and pointless end. Or, to be charitable: Watching a poor man suffer while we’re sitting here on a billionaire’s island enjoying a soft breeze is just another part of the punch line.

➼ The Counterfeit Opera is at Little Island through June 15.

Prosperous Fools
Photo: Travis Emery Hackett

Over in downtown Brooklyn, in its own enviable facility, Theater for a New Audience is encouraging another artist to bite the hand that feeds them. In this case, it’s the ever-energetic maximalist Taylor Mac, who has modified Molière’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme for the purpose of taking direct aim at one of theater’s most hallowed traditions: the nonprofit fundraising gala. In Prosperous Fools, Mac plays a genius choreographer who has toiled in obscurity for far too long (Mac’s character longs for the taste of bourgeois finery, like farmers’-market lemon curd) and is finally presenting a ballet at an event honoring two big-name donors, a hateful billionaire named $#@%$ (it sounds a little like an incorrect-answer buzzer on a game show) and the much-adored actress named #### (imagine a heavenly tone).

The resentment that artists feel about the act of laundering their patron’s cultural cache has been around at least as long as the Greeks were dealing with Alcibiades, but Mac brings a pleasurably vicious mania to this particular play-as-tirade. There’s blood to be drawn everywhere. judy (Mac’s pronoun) plays an Artist so deeply self-involved he’s cast himself as Zeus in his own production about Prometheus, and while the Artist insists on no compromises, he’ll be cajoled by the theater’s artistic director, referred to as a “philanthropoid” and played by a brittle but furious-behind-the-eyes Jennifer Regan, into compromising on pretty much everything. The philanthropoid, of course, must answer to those terrible donors, each hateful in their own way. $#@%$ is a David Koch–slash–Elon Musk stand-in (Jason O’Connell, playing him, shows up in a baseball cap and graphic tee), eager to seize with force whatever he doesn’t understand or can’t control, while #### (a hilariously languid Sierra Boggess) delivers eddying pointless speeches about how she came to understand the world’s suffering while filming blockbusters on location in foreign countries. Her golden gown (the on-point costumes are by Anita Yavich) is trimmed with drawings of the faces of small starving children.

There’s pretty much no subtext here, which is in line with Mac’s M.O. and encouraged by the amped-up intensity of Darko Tresnjak’s direction. While the shots at $#@%$ occasionally slide into easy political-cartoon humor, Prosperous Fools tends to tackle the big, unsubtle issues with an earnestness that makes it compelling. Mac, according to an interview in the program, has been trying to get someone to produce this work for 12 years, but no one wanted to touch it — both, I imagine, because of how it might put off their donors, and because it involves ballet and a Wallace Shawn puppet.

Now, the drama arrives onstage as the sources of funding have shriveled up further, and the philanthropoids running these institutions have to dance even harder for their suppers. Trump’s hacking away at the NEA, which was never even enough to sustain theaters. (Prosperous Fools does have a made-for-the-present moment where Regan trumpets her institution’s diversity, then goes, “Don’t tell the president.”) And as my former colleague Helen Shaw reported in The New Yorker, large grant-giving organizations have shifted direction themselves, largely cutting off support for the general operating costs of theaters and making them more reliant on hunting down individual gifts from the likes of $#@%$ and #### and programming exactly what they want to see in the spaces or islands they themselves donated. One of Mac’s sharpest punch lines involves thanking an almost entirely bleeped list of donors that concludes with Bloomberg Philanthropies.

To that end, Prosperous Fools may navel-gaze, but Mac tends to burrow through the navel into the flesh below. The play’s second act is, as you might hope from an artist who did a sequel to Titus Andronicus with dancing dicks, full of blood and other viscera, raging and self-flagellating turn by turn. Sure, this is another satire whose acid is metabolized by the fact it’s being programmed by an institution carrying on with the same activities it satires. But I found myself won over by the desperate clawing anxiety of the thing, and by the way that Mac, once judy’s let it all flow out, shifts into a quiet Shakespearean epilogue. There, Mac takes on a role between Puck and Prospero, donning a joker’s cap to jokingly-and-not unsettle your expectations of how a play should end. Like a lot of Prosperous Fools, it’s both bracingly present and deeply classical: We’re gathered here in the agora, after all, to ask big questions.

➼ Prosperous Fools is at Theater for a New Audience through June 29.

Not Not Jane’s
Photo: Maria Baranova

To round out a trilogy of theatrical class warfare at different scales, you may be able to catch one of the last performances of Mara Nelson-Greenberg’s Not Not Jane’s, though you’d have to be quick — the run ends on June 13. Over at the little venue of the Wild Project in the East Village (it’s been raising funds to take permanent root in this space, which feels apropos to the themes at play here), the theater company Clubbed Thumb programs a series of new plays through the early part of the summer season. This year, its playwrights have had — you guessed it — the intrusions of private capital into the public space on the mind. (We’ll see if the trend continues with Cold War Choir Practice, up next; the title tells me it may.)

Milo Cramer’s Business Ideas, one of the funniest plays I’ve seen in months, kicked off the summer with a mother and daughter plotting get-rich schemes inside a corporate coffee shop. In Nelson-Greenberg’s Not Not Jane’s, a young woman named Jane (Susannah Perkins, essential in so many Clubbed Thumb productions) solicits a grant from a big-name donor (unseen, though he may as well be Prosperous Fools’s $#@%$) for a place where she can simply provide her community with free chairs to sit in, though she’s encouraged by a grant adviser (Sue Jean Kim) to turn the place into a profit-making venture. Eventually, it looks a lot like a coffee shop.

Nelson-Greenberg’s play had, like The Counterfeit Opera, a speedy development — at my performance, Clubbed Thumb’s artistic director Maria Striar introduced it by saying they’d commissioned the piece at a holiday party last year — and it teems with more ideas than the playwright can wrangle. There are plotlines involving Jane’s flirtation with a man who no longer has to work because he was hit by a truck (Jordan Bellow), a series of cameo appearances by a gig worker who’s making a living doing every job you can imagine (Yonatan Gebeyehu), and an overwrought dynamic with Jane’s mother (Dee Pelletier). Nelson-Greenberg also strains the humor with a reliance on repeated wordplay — as the title suggests, she’s fond of a too-cute double negative.

But there was a short sequence near the end of the play that has stuck with me for its awful honesty: Nelson-Greenberg has introduced a running joke about a man who claims to have met the devil, and in a brief sequence, she and director Joan Sergay shift into full-on horror. The lights flicker. Snakes fall from the ceiling. The terrible thing is not that Satan has arrived. It’s that he’s here, already. That he’s already infected our world with that relentless impulse to be productive. We’ve become, in short, what we should not be.

➼ Not Not Jane’s is at the Wild Project through June 13.