(Hilton Als’s article appeared in the New Yorker, 3/16; via Pam Green.)
For fifteen years, the actor Jim Fletcher has worked with the important theatre director and writer Richard Maxwell, whose shows require an uncommon degree of silence from the performers. In a Maxwell work—his fourteenth full-length piece, “The Evening,” premières at the Kitchen on March 12, co-presented by Performance Space 122—part of the story is what the characters don’t say as they walk, measuredly, from one side of the stage to the other, often turning away from a fellow-performer and gazing off into the distance, as though dreaming of someplace else. When Fletcher looks out into space, he can communicate longing, certainly, while making sure that we also see his Rodin-like solidity, which refutes the adolescent jumpiness or feyness that most leading men convey on and off Broadway.