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Encores! Visits a Muted Wonderful Town
At City Center, Anika Noni Rose and Aisha Jackson don’t quite light up Greenwich Village.
A pair of sisters, the uptight writer Ruth (Anika Noni Rose) and carefree actress Eileen (Aisha Jackson), move to the big city from Ohio, encounter a cavalcade of Greenwich Village weirdos, and eventually learn to embrace their unorthodox urbanite sides. As an editor (Javier Muñoz) reads that story out loud, Rose and Jackson playact the plot with aplomb in safari hats, but I was left wanting more of a sense in Levingston’s direction about what it might mean for Ruth to feel like she can’t write about her own life. Levingston has provided a few cheeky updates — I appreciated a small gag in which a protester flipped a sign advocating for communist uprising to read “World Peace” when a police officer walked by — but the absence of firm overarching principles in the revival leaves a lot undetermined, and you need clean stakes to build a good comedic game.
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