The last time Frances McDormand appeared on a New York stage, she won a Tony for portraying a working-class mom in the gritty 2011 drama “Good People.”
Her new project couldn’t be any more different: an arty show at a 200-seat venue in Brooklyn.
Written by Suzanne Bocanegra, “Bodycast” is framed as lecture in which the author talks about art and the body, as well as the two years she spent in a full cast as a teenager.
McDormand plays Bocanegra — who actually stands off at the edge of the stage, feeding the actress her lines through an earpiece.
There’s a slight chance McDormand hasn’t memorized her text, but more likely this is Bocanegra’s whimsical mind at work. After all, this is someone who once created a tartan pattern based on the Manhattan grid.
Using PowerPoint slides, McDormand strolls down Bocanegra’s memory lane, touching on her stay in Rome, her youth in Texas, and of course the clunky cast meant to fix her scoliosis.
Stalking the stage like an engaging professor, McDormand handles all the talking. The show, directed by Paul Lazar, also features two guest appearances by dancer Emily Coates and vocalist Theo Bleckmann. The first counts out dots in a painting by tapping them on pointe while Bleckmann sings out various yarn colors.
This sounds abstract but the show’s very accessible and funny — we learn that brown is “a color that, in clothing, always says, ‘Calm down!’ ”
“Bodycast” is also insightful about how our views of the ideal body have evolved. There’s quite a gap between a ballerina’s airbrushed-looking perfection and the hairy armpits in the 1970s feminist book “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” which marked Bocanegra at the time.
If all artist lectures were this lively, museums couldn’t keep people away.