Rent-Stabilized, but Otherwise in Flux Stephen Adly Guirgis’s ‘Between Riverside and Crazy’
Ben BrantleyAugust 1, 2014: Between Riverside and Crazy, the rich new play from Stephen Adly Guirgis at the Linda Gross Theater, resides in an in-between land of its own. I’d locate it somewhere south of cozy and north of dangerous, west of sitcom and due east of tragedy. Not surprisingly, those who occupy this prime real estate are not to be wholly trusted, since what they say always shimmies between truth and fiction. For theatergoers who are tired of the clear-cut eithers and ors of most mainstream play writing, Between Riverside and Crazy, which opened Thursday night in a deliciously mounted Atlantic Theater Company production, is a dizzying and exciting place to be. To help orient — or disorient — you, allow me to describe the elements of what may be the sexiest scene on a New York stage this summer, which takes place in the play’s second act. They are a battered old man in a wheelchair, an ample-bodied do-gooder identified in the program only as “Church Lady” and a communion wafer. To reveal much more would spoil what is a, uh, lovely surprise. But I can disclose that baptism and orgasm are not mutually exclusive. Blurring lines between the sacred and profane has always been a specialty of Mr. Guirgis, whose earlier tales of lives on the margins had telling titles like Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train, Our Lady of 121st Street and The Last Days of Judas Iscariot. Staged between 2000 and 2005 by the Labyrinth Theater Company, these works brimmed with original verve. But they also stripped gears as they shifted between confrontational harshness and soft sentimentality.
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