By Ken Fallin

There are performances that impress you, and then there are performances in which you can actually see an actor transform thought into flesh. Linda Purl’s extraordinary work in Sharon Scott Williams’ Crazy Mama: A True Story of Love and Madness, now receiving its Off-Broadway premiere at 59E59 Theaters, thanks to the Rubicon Theatre Company, belongs firmly in the latter category.

Linda Purl photo by Carol Rosegg

Linda Purl photo by Carol Rosegg

Purl plays 16 characters over the course of Williams’ deeply personal story, but calling what she does a display of versatility almost diminishes it. There are no cheap tricks here, no parade of funny voices announcing that another character has arrived. Purl creates through-lines. A transformation begins in her eyes, travels into her face and then seems to spiral through her entire body, stretching almost like taffy until another human being stands before us. The movement is continuous, organic and astonishingly precise. She is beyond brilliant.

Linda Purl photo by Carol Rosegg

Linda Purl photo by Carol Rosegg

Crazy Mama began as Williams’ own story, inspired by her award-winning memoirs about growing up with a mother suffering from severe mental illness. The play begins with eight-year-old Sharon racing home from school, determined to beat her teenage brother Spikey to the final slice of her birthday cake. Instead, she enters the kitchen and finds her mother holding a knife. Soon the sheriff arrives, Mama is taken away, and a child begins a decades-long attempt to understand—and somehow save—the woman she loves.

Linda Purl photo by Carol Rosegg

What follows could easily have become unbearable. Instead, Williams writes with a Southern lyricism that occasionally reminded me of Tennessee Williams—not because she imitates him, but because she understands how language can expand beyond ordinary speech when ordinary words are no longer large enough. Humor and horror live surprisingly close together. A phrase can be funny until suddenly it isn’t. Beauty can emerge from circumstances in which beauty has no apparent business existing.

Will Huse, Linda Purl photo by Carol Rosegg

The historical treatment of Mama’s illness makes the story particularly painful. Psychiatric care during much of the period depicted could be brutal: institutionalization, isolation and electroconvulsive therapy existed within a mental-health system very different from the one we know today. The production itself describes Mama as repeatedly committed to institutions while Sharon remains convinced that somehow, someday, she can bring her mother home.

Linda Purl photo by Carol Rosegg

Linda Purl, Anson Williams

Crazy Mama is ultimately less interested in diagnosing Mama than in asking what happens to the child who loves her. That is where the play becomes devastating. Children don’t stop loving a parent because that parent is ill. They don’t understand diagnostic terminology or treatment protocols. They understand that Mommy was here and now Mommy is gone. They understand promises, disappearances, fear and the desperate conviction that if they can only do the right thing, somehow everything can become normal again. Sharon carries that hope into adulthood.

Will Huse photo by Carol Rosegg

Will Huse, Sharon Scott Williams, Anson Williams, Patrick Duffy, Linda Purl, Ron Howard and Cheryl Howard

The remarkable thing about Williams’ story is where she eventually takes it. She could have written an indictment. She could have remained inside the anger of a childhood shaped by circumstances no child should have been expected to understand. Instead, Crazy Mama moves toward something considerably harder: redemption. Not denial. Not pretending the damage didn’t happen. Forgiveness.

Sharon Scott Williams, Anson Williams, Linda Purl,, Will Huse Photo by Carol Rosegg

Will Huse, Sharon Scott Williams, Anson Williams, Patrick Duffy, Linda Purl, Ron Howard and Cheryl Howard

By the time Mama finally dies, death becomes less an ending than a release from a mind that had imprisoned her for much of her life. Sharon, too, is released—not because the past disappears, but because she refuses to allow it to consume everything that comes afterward.

Will Huse, Sharon Scott Williams, Anson Williams, Linda Purl, Ron Howard and Cheryl Howard

That distinction gives the play enormous relevance at a moment when mental health dominates so much of our cultural conversation. The recent death of 27-year-old Presley Gerber has once again reminded us that money, beauty, access and an apparently privileged life tell us very little about what may be happening inside another human being. We still have enormous difficulty knowing what to do with suffering we cannot see.

Sharon Scott Williams, Anson Williams

Williams doesn’t offer an easy answer. She offers something better: the experience of what mental illness can do not only to the person experiencing it, but to everybody who loves that person.

Anson Williams, Ron Howard

Anson Williams directs with tremendous sensitivity. Best known to many as Potsie from Happy Days, Williams has spent decades directing television, and here he understands when to shape the evening and, more importantly, when to get out of Purl’s way. The production never turns Mama into a spectacle. Nor does it sentimentalize Sharon’s suffering.

Tim Abou-Nasr , Paige Carlyle Howard

Will Huse, as The Blues Man, provides another essential presence. His guitar and vocals become part of the emotional landscape rather than musical decoration, allowing the story to breathe between some of its most difficult passages. Williams also wrote the lyrics heard in the production, giving the music the same deeply personal DNA as the play itself.

Richard Thomas and Georgiana Bischoff

The technical elements remain deliberately spare. Brian Gale’s lighting and projections and Lindsay Jones’ sound design create the world around Purl without competing with her. That restraint is exactly right. When an actress can populate a stage with 16 people using little more than her body, voice and imagination, she doesn’t need scenery doing the work for her.

Sharon, Ken Fallin, Patrick Duffy and Stanley

Opening night also became something of a reunion of television and theatre royalty, with Patrick Duffy, Richard Thomas, Michele Lee and Ron Howard among those celebrating the company. Afterward, the evening continued at producer Jeffrey Grove’s apartment, where cast, creatives and guests gathered to toast a production that had clearly landed with considerable emotional force.

The reason to see Crazy Mama isn’t the opening-night glamour. It’s Linda Purl.

At two hours and five minutes including intermission, this is a substantial evening, yet Purl holds it with extraordinary command. Sixteen characters emerge from one actress, and never once does the performance feel like an acting exercise. Every transformation exists because Sharon remembers these people, because they mattered, and because each left something behind.

In lesser hands, Crazy Mama could have become either relentlessly bleak or insistently inspirational. Williams and Purl refuse both traps. Mental illness caused enormous damage to this family. Love did not magically cure it. A little girl could not rescue her mother simply by wanting badly enough to do so. But that little girl survived. She grew up. She wrote the story. And instead of handing the pain to the next generation, she transformed it into something filled with compassion, humor, forgiveness and hope.

That may be the greatest act of resilience in Crazy Mama.

And Linda Purl’s performance makes it unforgettable.

Crazy Mama: A True Story of Love and Madness: Produced by Rubicon Theatre Company at 59E59 Theaters through October 18th

There is an extraordinary play buried inside Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love. There may even be several of them. Unfortunately, at nearly three hours, Stoppard seems determined to give us all of them at once.

David Greenspan Photo by Paul Lutvak

The MAP Theater’s rare revival, now playing a brief engagement at Theaterlab, is beautifully acted, intelligently conceived and directed with considerable imagination by Zachary Elkind. At its center is the incomparable David Greenspan as A.E. Housman, the Victorian poet and classical scholar whose life was shaped as much by the love he could never openly express as by the scholarship he could. The production runs approximately two hours and 45 minutes, including intermission, through October 3.

David Greenspan, Annabel Capper Photo by Paul Lutvak

Stoppard begins at the end. Housman is dead, boarding Charon’s boat for his journey across the River Styx. Annabel Capper is excellent as Charon, and the boat becomes the central image of Elkind’s stylized production, carrying us backward and forward through Housman’s memories, intellectual obsessions and emotional failures. Theaterlab’s stark white space proves remarkably adaptable as past and present coexist without requiring elaborate theatrical machinery.

Annabel Capper Photo by Paul Lutvak

Greenspan is simply astonishing. Housman was a man possessed by language, and Greenspan has been handed a mountain of it. Dense, intricate, classical, academic, witty and frequently exhausting language pours out of him with such precision that he makes what must be an actor’s private circle of hell look effortless. Greenspan never appears to be reciting Stoppard. He appears to be thinking him.

Yaron Lotan Photo by Paul Lutvak

Yaron Lotan is terrific as the younger Housman, allowing us to see the man before reserve calcified into identity. Housman’s great emotional wound is his unrequited love for his Oxford schoolmate Moses Jackson, played with tremendous charisma by José Espinosa. Jackson possesses precisely the ease that Housman lacks. He is physical where Housman is cerebral, open where Housman is guarded, and alive in ways the older man will spend a lifetime remembering. Daniel Liu rounds out the youthful Oxford trio as Pollard.

Yaron Lotan, José Espinosa Photo by Paul Lutvak

The large ensemble is uniformly excellent, with many of the actors moving among several characters. Abrar Haque and Leland Fowler are particularly adept at making those shifts clear within a production that is constantly moving between people, periods and ideas.

Sam Bolen, David Greenspan Photo by Paul Lutvak

But the scenes that truly ignite belong to Oscar Wilde. Sam Bolen is thoroughly convincing as Wilde, Housman’s flamboyant contemporary, although the two men apparently never met. Wilde represents almost everything Housman could not permit himself to become: visible, audacious, sexual and defiantly public. Housman hid his love for Jackson inside himself; Wilde dared Victorian England to look directly at his. Wilde was prosecuted for gross indecency in 1895 and sentenced to two years of hard labor, the persecution Housman would later address obliquely in his poem “Oh Who Is That Young Sinner?”

David Greenspan, Sam Bolen Photo by Paul Lutvak

These scenes bring the play’s central conflict beautifully into focus. This is not merely a story about a man who loved another man who did not love him back. It is about what happens when intellect becomes both sanctuary and prison, when scholarship can explain nearly everything except the life one is afraid to live.

David Greenspan Photo by Paul Lutvak

Then Stoppard keeps talking. And talking. And talking. The classical scholarship begins to overwhelm the human being at the center of it. We plunge into Latin, textual criticism, Oxford intellectual rivalries, manuscript scholarship and academic disputes with an enthusiasm that may thrill classicists but increasingly distances us from the aching simplicity of Housman’s story. I understood what Stoppard was doing. That wasn’t my problem. My problem was that eventually I stopped caring.

Yaron Lotan, David Greenspan Photo by Paul Lutvak

There is a peculiar kind of theatrical excess in which intelligence begins working against itself. Stoppard is unquestionably brilliant, but brilliance still requires an editor. The Invention of Love repeatedly arrives at its emotional destination and then continues another intellectual lap around the track. At some point I found myself thinking: I would rather be stupid if this is what I have to listen to.

Sam Bolen, Leland Fowler, Spencer Lutvak Photo by Paul Lutvak

That is particularly frustrating because the essential story is so moving. A man loves someone who cannot return that love. He lives during an era in which expressing that love carries profound social and legal consequences. He retreats into scholarship. He grows old. He dies. And only then, aboard an imaginary boat traveling toward Hades, can he finally confront the life he didn’t allow himself to have. There is more than enough there.

Sam Bolen, Abrar Haque, Leland Fowler, Spencer Photo by Paul Lutvak

Elkind nevertheless directs the formidable material with confidence and theatrical imagination. He understands that a play this intellectually dense cannot afford to become visually static. Bridget Lindsay’s scenic design makes elegant use of Theaterlab’s intimacy, while Alyssa Korol’s period costumes help distinguish Stoppard’s crowded population of scholars, poets and public figures.

José Espinosa, Yaron Lotan Photo by Paul Lutvak

Most importantly, Elkind has assembled actors capable of making Stoppard’s language breathe. There isn’t a weak performance among them. This is one of those maddening theatrical evenings in which I admired virtually everyone responsible for putting the play onstage while desperately wishing someone had been permitted to take a red pencil to the playwright.

Yaron Lotan, Daniel Liu Photo by Paul Lutvak

Then there is Greenspan. Watching him navigate this enormous, dense text is worth the evening. He finds humor without begging for it, sorrow without sentimentalizing it and intelligence without showing us how intelligent he is. The words simply seem to belong to him. When Housman finally reaches the emotional core beneath all that scholarship, Greenspan lets us glimpse the terrible cost of a life spent knowing so much and saying so little. That is The Invention of Love at its best.

David Greenspan Photo by Paul Lutvak

I didn’t fail to understand Stoppard’s play. Stoppard’s play failed to make me continue caring about something I understood perfectly well. David Greenspan, however, never lost me.

Yaron Lotan, Annabel Capper Photo by Paul Lutvak

Considering the number of words standing between him and the finish line, that may be the evening’s greatest invention.

The Invention of Love: The MAP Theater at Theaterlab, 357 W 36th St. 3rd floor, until October 3rd

There was no way of knowing, when the company of Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen recently gathered to meet the press, how suddenly the meaning of the afternoon would change.

Sophia Anne Caruso stepped forward and performed “Immured,” one of the songs written by Duncan Sheik for the new musical. Days later came the devastating news that Sheik, the Tony and Grammy Award-winning composer who helped change the sound of contemporary musical theatre with Spring Awakening, had died at 56.

Sophia Anne Caruso

Sophia Anne Caruso

Sophia Anne Caruso

Now, as Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen prepares to begin performances Off-Broadway on September 25, the musical arrives not simply as Sheik’s newest work, but as part of the final chapter of an extraordinary theatrical career that was very much still in motion. Sheik died September 17 in Manhattan; his mother told The New York Times that heart failure led to cardiac arrest.

The Cast of Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen

Cory Jeacoma, Nkeki Obi-Melekwe, Sophia Anne Caruso, Jenny Powers and Marc delaCruz

And what an intriguing final project this appears to be.

Tony Marion (Producer) and Kenny Kurokawa (Producer)

Yu Anne Ando (Producer), Or Matias (Music Supervisor), Leah Nanako Winkler (Book), Tony Marion (Producer) and Kenny Kurokawa (Producer)

Based on the award-winning manga by Japanese artist Moyoco Anno, Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen features music and lyrics by Sheik and a book by Peabody Award-winning playwright Leah Nanako Winkler. Tony, Olivier and Emmy Award winner Rob Ashford directs and choreographs the production, which begins previews Friday, September 25, before an October 15 opening. The limited engagement continues through January 3, 2027.

Sophia Anne Caruso

Caruso, whose singular presence helped make Lydia Deetz in Beetlejuice unforgettable, stars as Colette, a witty young woman living in fin-de-siècle Paris and working at the Night Egg, an elusive maison close populated by men carrying desires, fantasies, confessions and private sorrows.

But Colette refuses to remain merely the object of those desires. She begins writing.

Sophia Anne Caruso

As she records the intimate lives of the men around her, the observed becomes the observer. Their secrets become her material, their perversions become art, and writing begins giving Colette something far more dangerous than desirability: a voice of her own.

Cory Jeacoma

There is, however, one story she cannot write herself free from. Colette remains destructively attached to Léon, her childhood love, played by Cory Jeacoma. As her independence grows, so does the tension between the woman she is becoming and the relationship that continues pulling her backward.

Sophia Anne Caruso

It is fertile territory for Sheik, whose best theatrical work has always lived somewhere between desire and repression, the things people reveal and the things they cannot quite bring themselves to say. From Spring Awakening forward, he possessed an unusual ability to make interior life musical without making it sentimental.

Nkeki Obi-Melekwe

Jenny Powers

The cast also features Nkeki Obi-Melekwe as Nana, Jenny Powers as Madame and Marc delaCruz as Sakae, alongside Leanne Antonio, Kailin Brown, Michael Everett, Elsa Keefe, Jaedynn Latter, Austin Lesch, Nika Lindsay, Caleb Marshall, Jessie Peltier, Michael Starr and Thomas Winter. Marc delaCruz’s casting was announced September 21, just days before the first preview.

Marc delaCruz

The production itself is attempting something equally ambitious. Audiences won’t simply visit the Night Egg metaphorically. Tony Award-winning scenic designer Scott Pask has transformed a new theatrical venue inside the Culture Club at 530 West 27th Street into the world of Colette’s story. The space carries its own delicious New York history: it was previously home to the legendary Twilo nightclub and later Sleep No More. The new venue takes its name directly from the club in Anno’s manga.

Or Matias (Music Supervisor)

Leah Nanako Winkler (Book)

Joining Pask on the formidable creative team are six-time Tony-winning costume designer Catherine Zuber, lighting designer Brian Tovar, sound designer Cody Spencer, hair and wig designer Tom Watson and makeup designer Veli Sadiku. Or Matias provides music supervision and vocal and incidental music arrangements. Casting is by The Telsey Office, Patrick Goodwin and Alex Cortinas.

Sophia Anne Caruso

Anno’s Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen, originally serialized in Japan between 2013 and 2018, brings another fascinating distinction to the project: the production is being billed as the first Japanese manga graphic novel adapted into an original English-language American musical.

Sophia Anne Caruso

That collision of Japanese manga, decadent Paris, immersive New York theatre and Duncan Sheik’s unmistakably contemporary musical vocabulary already made Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen one of the more curious productions arriving this fall.

Sophia Anne Caruso

Now it carries something else.

Sophia Anne Caruso

Sheik’s death comes at an almost impossible moment professionally. His music is about to be heard in this entirely new work while Spring Awakening, the musical that forever changed his theatrical life, is itself preparing to return to New York. His career did not end during a quiet retrospective period in which everyone had already decided what his legacy would be. He was still creating it.

Sophia Anne Caruso

That makes the image of Caruso standing before the press and singing “Immured” particularly poignant. At the time, it was a first look at a new musical. Days later, it became something more: one of the first glimpses New York received of a Duncan Sheik score that its composer would never get to see officially open.

Sophia Anne Caruso and cast

Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen begins performances September 25 at The Night Egg at the Culture Club, 530 West 27th Street, with opening night set for October 15. The engagement is currently scheduled through January 3, 2027.

Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen official site