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Among the canniest aspects of “New Born,” a program of three monologues by the British playwright Ella Hickson, is that it begins with a kind of meditation on parasocial relationships: our insatiable hunger for gossip about celebrities; our fantasies of becoming close, in real life, to the famous people we watch on our myriad screens.
In theater, of course, stars’ tantalizing presence gets people through the door — certainly this spring on Broadway, but downtown, too, at the Minetta Lane Theater, where Hugh Jackman is giving one of the deftest, most extraordinary performances in New York. And, in the 399-seat space, one of the most intimate.
Jackman’s piece, “Deadwood,” comes last in the show’s lineup, so it is shrewd of the director, Ian Rickson, to ensure we glimpse him right at the top, when all three actors briefly enter together. Then Sepideh Moafi — one of several stars from the buzzy HBO Max drama “The Pitt” now appearing on Manhattan stages — performs the opening monologue, “Light.”
Her unnamed character is a married artist, reasonably happy at home and at work, though having a toddler means she hasn’t “slept a whole night in nearly two years.” For relaxation, she scrolls her phone for celebrity news. Out one night, by chance she meets a famous singer who takes a liking to her, and the glow of that attention — the mutual near-obsession they develop — shifts everything.
Moafi, alas, never goes deeper than the surface of Hickson’s text, and her artist seems awfully fresh and vital for a character so sleep deprived. It’s a perfectly neat performance, but barely realized; watching it is like being read to by someone who has the words memorized.
So it is thrilling when Marianna Gailus — who was Andrew Scott’s understudy in the solo “Vanya” Off Broadway last year — dives so fully into the second monologue that we are instantly in olden-times Wyoming. In “Rattle,” Gailus plays Martha, a young woman with a prickly rebel spirit who works at an inn. When her bloodied menstrual rag falls out, onto the floor of the inn’s saloon, she will not be shamed by some rough-mannered cowboy into picking it up.
“I would have, if I could have found a reason to do it that wasn’t propriety,” she says, to us.
Funny, vulnerable, tonally protean, Gailus’s interpretation is the kind that makes you urge people to see this actor now, while she is still unknown. The monologue loses its tautness halfway through, when Hickson overloads it with a plotline about a lost Black child amid rumblings of a Klan presence. The tale acquires a whiff of the white savior trope then, and its ending is too tidy. Gailus, though, is a stunner of a storyteller.
Produced by Audible Theater and Together — Jackman’s partnership with the producer Sonia Friedman — the program finishes with “Deadwood,” the longest, most psychologically intricate and best written of the monologues. The title has multiple meanings, one of them sexual.
In a T-shirt that shows off his superhero biceps, Jackman plays a tree surgeon who lucks into blissful, sunlit love with a woman named Katie. The tall, complex wooden ladder at the center of the set plays Katie’s cherished old tree. (Costumes are by Kaye Voyce. The lighting, exquisite, is by Japhy Weideman. The set is by Brett J. Banakis and Christine Jones.)
Jackman climbs high up that ladder and leans way back, hanging on with his left hand, gesturing with his right. All the while he chats to us, because the story he has to tell — about devotion and desire, family and fracture — needs, somehow, our understanding. Or, rather, the tree surgeon does. That’s how Jackman plays him, sifting through his thoughts with a disarming uptalk that suggests this guy wants to make sure we’re following him.
Adroitly attuned to the audience upstairs and down, Jackman is utterly in the room with us. Charmingly relatable and lightly comical, his performance is at times emotionally naked — especially after the tree surgeon leaves Katie because his attraction to her has left him.
“You can’t live the rest of your life against your body, against your nature,” he tells us. “I didn’t stop loving her, incidentally, ever.”
Tears fall helplessly from the tree surgeon’s eyes. The sight of it stabs at our hearts.
And Jackman, in his element, has us rapt.