Etta and Ella on the Upper West Side
the monologist’s grasp of reality. Her story spills forth in disordered impressions, “the way one might break open a piggy bank and watch the coins scatter across a table.”
You can understand why Kennedy’s work is widely revered but not often produced, said Maya Phillips in The New York Times. Her way of addressing the experience of being black in America is to create black characters who “never simply exist in one place or in one moment.” Her plays are “full of leaps in time, rapid shifts in setting, constantly changing perspectives, and characters who embody disparate identities at once.” Etta and Ella is one of four works featured in a current online festival of Kennedy plays, and even at 32 minutes, it ranks as “the most enigmatic of the bunch.” Such are the risks in the playwright’s ongoing bid to present blackness as a splintered, untenable identity built on a foundation of violence. Often the result is “a bold rendezvous with truth.” At other times, “it’s a bramble.” Either way, said Vinson Cunningham in The New Yorker, she remains “one of our greatest and least definable living playwrights.” $17.50, roundhousetheatre.org or mccarter .org, through Feb. 28
barrels toward a shock ending, it “starts to feel at odds with itself, as if it were trying to make you cackle and weep at the same time.” Director Emerald Fennell’s “glibly cynical” script is largely held together, though, by Mulligan’s wrenching performance, said Ty Burr in The Boston Globe. “The arguments you may have after the lights come up will be well worth having. But it’s the sadness behind Cassie’s practiced smile, the wildfire fury behind the sadness, and the reasons for that fury, that may haunt you when the arguments are over.” (In theaters
The New Yorker, “is its fusing of the impassioned and the grimly palpable.” A gamble on romance throws the protagonist into a bleak and bewildering new life. Given the setup’s allure, “it comes as a genuine disappointment when the puzzle of the plot is solved.” In select theaters or via virtual cinemas. (Not rated)
Our Friend
Casey Affleck, Dakota Johnson, and Jason Segel’s new cancer drama should be about the ugliness of dying, said Peter Debruge in Variety. That’s what magazine writer Matthew Teague wanted to put across after his wife died at 34 and he wrote the essay this movie is based on. But while the performances are “top notch,” the screenplay “doesn’t have the nerve to do what Teague did,” instead presenting a sentimental story of friendship and a “dishonest, sanitized, nohelp-to-anyone TV movie version of death.” In theaters or on demand. (R)
Notturno
Gianfranco Rosi’s portrait of civilian life amid the ravages of ISIS “finds an awful poetry in that rubble and darkness,” said Steve Pond in TheWrap.com. The Italian filmmaker shows “an exquisite eye for composition” in this documentary made up of vignettes of people trying to go about their lives in war-racked Iraq, Syria, Kurdistan, and Lebanon. “It’s hard to watch Notturno at times, but to the director’s credit, it’s also impossible to look away.” In select theaters or via virtual cinemas. (Not rated)