Between Riverside and Crazy
Opening Night: December 19, 2022
Theater: Helen Hayes Theatre
Website: 2st.com
City Hall is demanding more than his signature, the landlord wants him out, the liquor store is closed — and the Church won’t leave him alone. For ex-cop and recent widower Walter “Pops” Washington and his recently paroled son Junior, the struggle to hold on to one of the last great rent stabilized apartments on Riverside Drive collides with old wounds, sketchy new houseguests, and a final ultimatum in this Pulitzer Prize-winning dark comedy from Stephen Adly Guirgis. For Pops and Junior, it seems the old days are dead and gone — after a lifetime living Between Riverside and Crazy.
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December 19, 2022
Ultimately, to draw an analogy from the play, we’re all playing a game of poker and everyone is dealing with the hand they’ve been dealt; only Walter never folds. You don’t feel bad for him, nor do you love him in the end; you are just left ashamed having seen the side of yourself he uses his life to show you. That is the genius of Stephen McKinley Henderson and Stephen Adly Guirgis.
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December 19, 2022
That all of this is the same as in 2014 doesn’t mean the play hasn’t changed. Great works always revise themselves, as time finds endless new lenses to put in front of them. The past eight years have underlined in “Riverside” the story of white police officers shooting Black men — even fellow officers — and blaming the victims, as Walter is blamed, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Those crimes, and their concomitant defenses, retint the story with outrage.
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December 19, 2022
Though the play won its scribe a Pulitzer, here it’s Henderson’s gorgeous, affecting performance that deserves a reward. He makes stubbornness a trait to root for and reminds us that freedom is a right to protect. After decades of inhabiting supporting parts in notable plays and movies, the titan steps directly into the spotlight mastering a role that is wholly his own.
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December 19, 2022
But it is Henderson who, at Between Riverside and Crazy’s gravitational center, holds it all together. He’s a perfect combination of rent and controlled, and his deceptively natural star turn is the twisted, generous soul of the play.
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December 19, 2022
Crackling with humor and shot through with surprises, “Between Riverside and Crazy,” which premiered off Broadway at the Atlantic Theater Company in 2014 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, is both a captivating collection of character studies and an incisive indictment of the systems that act upon them. It’s a stunning intellectual achievement that’s also a total gas, a rare breed of theater deserving of protection at all costs.
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December 19, 2022
“Between Riverside and Crazy” won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2015, and there’s no arguing with the brilliant creation of Walter “Pops” Washington, whose every utterance of contempt for humanity is as clear-eyed as it is unerringly correct.
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December 19, 2022
Though the productions share those same elements, like a broom you find in the back of the closet, the words to describe the Prize-winner’s Broadway premiere are stiff and dusty. Save for Stephen McKinley Henderson’s masterful lead performance and Walt Spangler’s attractive, misused set, they apply to the book itself as much as to Austin Pendleton’s lifeless direction and 5.5 of the 6 other performances.
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December 19, 2022
Featuring much of the original cast from off-Broadway runs at Atlantic Theater Company in 2014 and Second Stage in 2015, the production has moved to Second Stage’s Broadway house, the Hayes Theater, where the performances in this astonishing comedy-drama have aged like a fine wine.
READ THE REVIEWDecember 19, 2022
Between Riverside and Crazy is about the lengths people will go to make out alright in an unforgiving world. Even if we can’t relate to the characters’ constant threat of eviction or arrest, we can understand and be moved by their search — rent-wise or otherwise — for a little stability.
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December 19, 2022
Are you in New York City for Christmas? Wondering how to spend one of those afternoons or evenings that seem to magically exist outside of time? Here is the perfect play, and one of the last Broadway openings of the year.
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December 19, 2022
Henderson’s Walter belongs on Broadway, and it’s a pity it took this long for the production to transfer. He’s this sputtering, bellyaching tragic monarch of contemporary New York — a place where even royalty can still be evicted.
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December 19, 2022
Guirgis’ compassionate play, directed with great care by Austin Pendleton, is also wildly funny — actually more hilarious than many recent flat-out comedies — and devilishly inappropriate. His dialogue rightly doesn’t try to clean up how cops and convicts might talk and it also establishes that nobody here is a saint.
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