Eliana Willis

More stories

  • 100 Shares139 Views

    in Theater

    Actors’ Equity Seeks to Unionize Broadway Production Assistants

    The position is one of the few nonunion segments of the theater industry’s work force.Actors’ Equity, the labor union representing American stage performers and stage managers, is seeking to unionize Broadway production assistants, one of the few nonunion segments of the industry work force.The campaign comes at a moment when labor unions in the United States have become increasingly restive; there are organizing efforts in many sectors of the economy, and Hollywood’s writers and actors have been on strike for months.Broadway production assistants work with stage managers in entry-level positions that are usually filled only during rehearsal and preview periods. Equity described them as “doing everything from preparing rehearsal materials to ensuring decisions made during rehearsals are recorded to being extra sets of hands and eyes during complicated technical rehearsals to efficiently running errands that keep the rehearsal productive.”Many of the workers are young and are paid minimum wage, according to the union.Late on Thursday, Equity asked the Broadway League, a trade association representing producers, to voluntarily recognize Actors’ Equity Association as the bargaining representative for production assistants working on commercial productions on Broadway and in sit-down productions, which are extended non-touring engagements produced by members of the Broadway League outside New York.If the League does not agree, Equity said it would ask the National Labor Relations Board to oversee an election.“Broadway is an extremely heavily unionized workplace, and these are some of the only folks without union contracts in these rooms,” said Erin Maureen Koster, an Equity vice president who represents stage managers. Koster said that without union membership, production assistants have less protection should they be injured or harassed or have other concerns.Equity said that there were only about a half-dozen people working in the job category on Broadway and in sit-down productions at any one time, but that about 100 people have worked in the position over the past two years. The union said the position was an important rung on the career ladder for people aspiring to work as stage managers on Broadway; even some people who have worked as stage managers Off Broadway or in regional theaters take temporary jobs as Broadway production assistants as a way to break into the industry.“As shows are getting more complicated, they are hiring more production assistants, and hiring qualified stage mangers into these roles,” Stefanie Frey, Equity’s director of organizing and mobilization, said. “It’s time.”The Broadway League said in a statement that it was considering the union’s request and looked forward to discussing it further. “The Broadway League and our members support the right of employees to lawfully choose a bargaining representative,” the statement said. More

  • 125 Shares179 Views

    in Television

    ‘Sex Education’ Is Back. Here’s What You Need to Know.

    The raunchy British teen dramedy has been away for two years. Here’s a refresher for the Netflix series’s fourth and final season.School is back in session for the sweet, sometimes absurd British comedy “Sex Education,” which leans heavily into its streaming-series freedom to portray adolescent sex for what it generally is: awkward, mediocre, part of life. Expect close-ups of patchy pubic hair, belly rolls and many (many) penises — among other physical realities of sex that don’t typically appear in teen stories.The show, which won the award for best comedy series at the International Emmy Awards in 2022, centers on Otis (Asa Butterfield), the erudite but romantically floundering son of a sex therapist (Gillian Anderson), who finds that he, too, has a gift for doling out intimate advice — in his case, to his desperately uninformed classmates. Unlike other raunchy teen dramas, like the provocative “Skins” and “Euphoria,” “Sex Education” takes a normalizing, endearingly un-edgy and even occasionally musical approach to the birds and the bees (though the writers would probably choose a more clinical term).In the fourth and final season, now streaming on Netflix, Otis must navigate a new school alongside his effervescent best friend, Eric (Ncuti Gatwa). After the closure of Moordale Secondary School at the end of Season 3, they now face a social hurdle more daunting than trying to become popular: survival as the new kids.But if popularity at Moordale was all about status and appearance, the new school represents something of an alternative educational universe, where learning is student-led, sustainability is cool and gossip is frowned upon.Will Otis and Eric fit in? Will Otis set up a new sex therapy clinic? And where is his broody, wryly sharp love interest Maeve Wiley (Emma Mackey)?Two years have passed since the release of Season 3. Here’s a refresher — a little gossip, if you will — as we head into Season 4.What happened to Moordale?After a schoolwide sexually transmitted infection outbreak in Season 2 and an obscene, intergalactic production of “Romeo and Juliet: The Musical,” Moordale Secondary School attracted news attention for its debauchery and earned the nickname “Sex School.” The administration hired a new head teacher, Hope Haddon (Jemima Kirke), to turn things around, but her shame-based approach to discipline and strict dress code couldn’t keep the students from being sexually curious teenagers.As revenge, the student body revolted at a public assembly for Moordale’s investors and the news media, disrupting the program with a screening of a sex-positive student film in which they dressed in genitalia-inspired costumes. Then the audience chanted, “We are Sex School,” and the band performed an explicit song.It was chaotic and symphonic, and it was enough of a ruckus to scare off investors and prospective paying parents. Moordale’s funding was withdrawn, and it closed its doors, forcing its students to find new schools.Where is Maeve?In Season 3, one of the English teachers at Moordale, Ms. Sands (Rakhee Thakrar), gave Maeve, Otis’s crush and sex clinic business partner, a brochure for a gifted and talented program in the United States. Throughout the season, Maeve wavered back and forth on the decision, concerned about the money and leaving her little sister behind.Otis and Maeve’s will-they-won’t-they relationship got some resolution when they finally kissed on a class trip to France. But in the final scene of the season, we learned that Maeve was leaving to study literature at a prestigious American university.The news came as a blow to Otis, who was happy for Maeve’s dream opportunity but devastated to see her go. Maeve promised that her departure didn’t mean that they were over, but she didn’t define the relationship further.Gillian Anderson in the Season 4 premiere of “Sex Education.”Thomas Wood/NetflixIs Jean … OK?Yes … and no. At the end of Season 3 Otis’s mother, Jean, went into labor with dire complications, including hemorrhaging. But she pulled through, and in the season finale, she delivered a healthy baby girl whom she named Joy. Although the pregnancy had a happy ending, the future of the family is a bit fuzzier. In one of the final scenes of the finale, Jean opened a paternity test and her shock revealed that her partner, Jakob (Mikael Persbrandt), might not be the father.Throughout the pregnancy, Jean and Jakob were committed to raising their baby together and forging a robust, if a bit untraditional, family unit with Otis and Ola (Patricia Allison), Jakob’s daughter (who, in a messy set of circumstances, used to date Otis).Will Jean, a careerist rising in her field, continue her sex therapy practice? Will Jakob remain in the picture? And if he isn’t the father, who is?Where do things stand with Eric and Adam?Eric, who is gay and proudly wears eyeliner, colorful nail polish and silky scarves, has had an emotional roller coaster of a relationship with Adam (Connor Swindells), a closeted bully who is new to intimate relationships. They grew closer as Adam learned to accept his sexuality, but Eric struggled to be with someone who couldn’t fully open up, and he eventually kissed another boy on a family trip to Nigeria.Adam eventually forgave the infidelity, but Eric realized he had outgrown the relationship and broke up with him anyway. Heartbroken, Adam began to come to terms with his identity; in the finale, he came out as bisexual to his mother, finally admitting to her that Eric had been his boyfriend. This could be a turning point for the animal-loving gentle giant who always feels like a misfit.Is there still a wide array of experience in Season 4?Somehow the show’s lens has gotten even wider. “Sex Education” is known for its nuanced depictions of gender, sexuality and disability, and for presenting forms of intimacy that are rarely displayed on mainstream television. A progressive new school promises an even more varied student body, with types of relationships not explored in previous seasons. Whether the school lives up to its “good vibes only” reputation remains to be seen.The show celebrates the body — its limitations, its potential, its drive — in its many forms. Whatever Season 4 may bring, it is sure to explore a wide range of teenage lust and physical complexities. More

  • 138 Shares199 Views

    in Theater

    Stephen Gould, Tenor Best Known for Tackling Wagner, Dies at 61

    He was especially acclaimed for his performances at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany. As his voice developed, he once said, so did his view of how and why to deploy it. Stephen Gould, a tenor who after a detour into musical theater established himself as a leading interpreter of the operas of Richard Wagner in performances at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany and elsewhere, died on Tuesday in Chesapeake, Va. He was 61.His death was confirmed by his longtime agent, Stephanie Ammann. Early this month Mr. Gould announced on his website that he had bile duct cancer, that the disease was terminal and that he was retiring from singing.The Bayreuth Festival paid tribute to him on its website after that announcement.“Stephen Gould was, with interruptions, one of the mainstays of the Bayreuth Festival from 2004 to 2022,” the festival’s post said. “Highly esteemed by audiences, the press and within the festival family, he was rightly dubbed the ‘Wagner Marathon Man’ and thrilled audiences with his distinctive voice and condition in countless performances.”Mr. Gould established himself as a reliable heldentenor, a singer who takes on heroic roles, mostly in the German repertory, requiring a particularly powerful voice. Such roles are among the most demanding in opera.Mr. Gould in the title role of “Tannhäuser” at the Bayreuth Festival in 2004, with Roman Trekel as Wolfram. “This was his Bayreuth debut,” one critic wrote, “and by the end of the evening he had become a festival favorite.”Jochen Quast/European Pressphoto AgencyHe first appeared at Bayreuth in 2004, performing the title role in Wagner’s “Tannhäuser,” a production that dazzled Olin Chism of The Dallas Morning News.“One of the heroes was American tenor Stephen Gould, who sang the title character,” Mr. Chism wrote. “This was his Bayreuth debut, and by the end of the evening he had become a festival favorite.”He remained so over the next 18 years, performing in 20 Bayreuth productions; he regularly sang the title role in “Siegfried” and Tristan in “Tristan und Isolde.” He also performed in leading opera houses around the world, including with the Metropolitan Opera, where he made his debut in 2010 as Erik, the hunter, in Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman.”Mr. Gould knew that the major roles he undertook required a certain maturity.“Everyone wants their heroes to be young and vibrant and look like Brad Pitt in his early days,” he said in a 2019 interview with the German news outlet Deutsche Welle. “But you have to give the voice time to develop.”As his voice developed, he noted in the same interview, so did his view of how and why he was deploying it.Mr. Gould as Tristan and Nina Stemme as Isolde in a production of “Tristan und Isolde” at the Royal Opera House in London in 2014.Robbie Jack/Corbis, via Getty Images“I don’t try to sing for the public anymore,” he said. “I did when I was younger, of course. You want to be popular, you want the critics to love you, you want your career to go high and all of that. Now when I’m onstage, what I enjoy most is discovering something for myself.”Stephen Grady Gould was born on Jan. 24, 1962, in Roanoke, Va. He studied at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston before joining Lyric Opera of Chicago’s developmental program for young artists, the Center for American Artists. He originally imagined himself as a baritone before switching to tenor.He was put to the test at age 27 when he had to substitute for Chris Merritt in the demanding role of Argirio in Gioachino Rossini’s “Tancredi” when Mr. Merritt became ill during a run in Los Angeles, where the opera was being staged jointly by Lyric Opera and the Los Angeles Music Center Opera.Mr. Gould in the Royal Opera’s production of Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s “Die Tote Stadt” in 2009.Robbie Jack/Corbis, via Getty Images“He gamely tackled the patriarchal ardors of Argirio with a light, often pinched voice and reasonable dramatic presence within the static staging context,” John Henken wrote in The Los Angeles Times. “The stratospheric climaxes were forced out as high-pressure bleats, and initially much of the passage work was smeared. But he seemed to gain strength and composure, and more than held his own in the big Act II duet with Marilyn Horne in the title role.”Soon after, on what he said was a whim, he auditioned for the national touring company of “The Phantom of the Opera” and was cast. He spent several years with that troupe, performing various roles, though not either of the male leads.“When I finished with musicals, I just was going to quit,” he said in 2019, “but I wanted to give it one more chance and met a teacher from the Metropolitan Opera who told me that I’d been singing incorrectly from the very beginning.”He rededicated himself to opera, working on his technique and growing into the Wagnerian roles for which he became best known.“By then,” he said, “I was at the right age to actually sing Wagner. Too many singers today are pushed into their big Wagnerian roles in their 20s.”Information about Mr. Gould’s survivors was not immediately available. More

  • 150 Shares199 Views

    in Theater

    ‘Job’ Review: A Stress Test That Feels Like It’s Life or Death

    In Max Wolf Friedlich’s nimble play, a crisis therapist tries to connect with a tech worker who is broken by her profession.“Job,” a tight, 80-minute play by Max Wolf Friedlich, is filled with so many ideas that it seems to expand beyond the walls of the tiny SoHo Playhouse where it opened this week. But claustrophobia sets in as, throughout one session, a young patient and an older hippie crisis therapist confront the turbulence of life in the belly of the cyber-beast.As the play opens, the therapist, Loyd (Peter Friedman), is trying to soothe the agitated Jane (Sydney Lemmon), who is pointing a gun at his head. Stress has gotten the better of her, culminating in a smartphone-era calamity: A video of her breakdown at work went viral. No longer feeling safe and still clearly unwell, Jane nevertheless has an industrial-grade resolve to return to her job at a Bay Area tech behemoth. This psychological evaluation will determine if that’s possible.Loyd, quietly pleased by his reputation for handling lost-cause cases, begins to tease out her anxieties, but soon finds Jane’s preoccupations with the many kinds of violence committed worldwide a tough web to untangle — and to distance himself from.As Jane, Lemmon captures the frenetic essence of a person overwhelmed, and ultimately paralyzed, by all the live-streamed killings playing repeatedly across a seemingly indifferent internet. Though a victim of her industry’s grind mentality, Jane doesn’t come off as a martyr: Her acid-tongued clapbacks and finger-pointing hardly feel excusable.Lemmon searingly personifies her character’s contradictions on her own, yet the production, nimbly directed by Michael Herwitz, also dips into her overstimulated psyche, as when computer clicks trigger rapid successions of TikTok-like sensory overload, with Jessie Char and Maxwell Neely-Cohen’s sound design blasting cacophonous drilling noises and porn sounds.Though Friedman’s character is the more passive one, he imbues Loyd’s counterarguments with a genuine passion — intensely talking with Jane about our uneasy relationships to social justice, family, personal fulfillment and trauma in the cyber age.As they unveil more about themselves, a late revelation nearly undoes the play by flattening the open-ended ethical questions it had so appealingly been posing. The play has to wrap up somehow, but this abrupt shift lands us in an entirely different genre.Friedlich’s clever updating of the generational-divide format is not undermined by the play’s thematic vastness. And it’s refreshing to see characters who are not afraid of their intellect, or feel the need to condescend by slowing down their high-speed streams of life-or-death consciousness.JobThrough Oct. 15 at SoHo Playhouse, Manhattan; sohoplayhouse.com. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

  • 113 Shares189 Views

    in Theater

    Review: Andrew Scott Plays Every Part in ‘Vanya.’ Why?

    In London, transforming Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” into a one-man show is an impressive feat, but it costs the play its pathos.Most of us will live unfulfilled lives: This brutal and eternal truth has accounted for the enduring appeal of Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” since it was first staged by Konstantin Stanislavski in Moscow in 1899. An ambitious new adaptation of this bleakly funny play looks to tease out its essence by stripping it down to its barest elements.“Vanya,” adapted by Simon Stephens and directed by Sam Yates, runs at the Duke of York’s Theater, in London, through Oct. 21, and features Andrew Scott — best known for playing the forbidden love interest in the hit TV series, “Fleabag” — in all eight roles. Scott gives an accomplished and engaging performance, but the one-man-show format throws up challenges, and ultimately doesn’t quite do justice to the play’s moral complexity and emotional resonance.Small details have been changed here and there, but the contours of the story are familiar. Alexander, an aging and infirm filmmaker (a professor in the original play), returns to the country estate that has funded his cosmopolitan lifestyle, accompanied by his beautiful and much younger second wife, Helena. He hangs out with his middle-aged brother-in-law, Ivan (the titular Vanya), who has managed the estate for many years; his former mother-in-law, Elizabeth; his daughter, Sonia; and receives frequent visits from a doctor, Michael.Regrets and frustrations abound. Alexander is acutely conscious that his powers are waning; Ivan feels he has wasted his potential by eking out an existence as a rural dogsbody, rather than chasing his dreams; Sonia has an intense crush on Michael, who only has eyes for Helena. In short, everyone is miserable. The only solace comes in the form of vodka.Scott flits between the various parts by nimbly modulating his voice and bearing. If a certain amount of realism is sacrificed — to help orientate the audience, the characters’ names are mentioned more frequently than is natural, and the female characters occasionally come off a bit campy — it is nonetheless an impressive feat.“Vanya,” is a stripped down version of Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya,” adapted by Simon Stephens and directed by Sam Yates.Marc BrennerSometimes, when switching from one character to the next, Scott will shoot the audience a knowing look as he skips to another point a few feet away, channeling the tongue-in-cheek demeanor of a clown or pantomime artist. The conceit is played for laughs at several points, such as when one relatively minor character pipes up for the first time about 15 minutes into the show, prompting another character to ask how long he’d been sitting there.It’s a lot to take on, and, perhaps inevitably, Scott bumps up against some limitations. He does a fine line in affable awkwardness — the coy half-smirks, pregnant pauses and knowing glances that so endeared him to viewers of “Fleabag” — but he really needs a foil. Without one, we have the strange, and somewhat dissatisfying, spectacle of a man flirting with himself.There is, moreover, an emotionally shallow quality to Scott’s onstage presence, a certain glassy inscrutability that suggests he’s a little too steeped in wry self-awareness to comfortably inhabit any other mode. He is great when rendering the human comedy of unrequited love, frustrated lust and drunken self-pity, but in the earnestly melancholic moments — this is Chekhov after all — the best he can serve up is an ironic facsimile of wistfulness.The set, designed by Rosanna Vize, is carefully calibrated to evoke nothing in particular: A laminate desk; a fiberboard door frame; a generic, possibly midcentury, kitchenette. Scott’s attire is likewise neutral. Even the play’s title has been stripped down. Everything is geared toward an experience of pure, no-frills theater, enabling the audience to commune directly with the actor and text.It’s a noble aim, but a question niggles away: What artistic benefit is derived from having a single actor play all the parts? I was reminded of the French avant-garde writers’ circle, Oulipo, whose members enjoyed subjecting themselves to technical constraints. One of them, Georges Perec, famously composed an entire novel without the letter “e”: an interesting thing to do, but what was the point?The end product is what counts, and in this instance, the play is not well served; if anything, its pathos is diluted. Constraint for its own sake is self-indulgence, and there’s a fine line between a conceit and a mere gimmick.VanyaThrough Oct. 21 at the Duke of York’s Theater, London; dukeofyorks.com. More

  • 125 Shares99 Views

    in Theater

    André Bishop Will Depart as Head of Lincoln Center Theater

    His pending departure, in 2025, means that there are job openings for the top artistic positions at three of the four nonprofits operating Broadway theaters.André Bishop, the producing artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater, will step down in the spring of 2025, ending a 33-year run leading one of the nation’s most prestigious nonprofit theaters.The organization has under Bishop’s stewardship been a leading producer of grand Broadway revivals of Golden Age musicals, and has simultaneously committed itself to nurturing emerging artists by constructing a black box theater for that purpose on its rooftop.“I’m exhilarated and sad at the same time,” Bishop said in an interview. “I will have been here many, many years — almost half my life — and it’s time for someone new and fresh to come in and pick up where I left off and go into other directions and do other things if they want to.”Bishop, 74, said he is choosing to leave at the end of the 2024-25 season because that is when his current contract ends, and because that will allow him to join in that season’s celebrations of Lincoln Center Theater’s 40th anniversary.His decision means that there are job openings for the top positions at three of the four nonprofits with Broadway houses, portending potentially significant change, and uncertainty, in a key sector of the theater industry that has had almost no leadership turnover for decades. Nonprofit theaters, which pay lower artist wages than commercial productions and are funded by philanthropy as well as box office sales, have become an important part of the Broadway ecosystem; Lincoln Center Theater has been able to stage musicals on a larger scale than many commercial producers can afford.On Wednesday, Carole Rothman, the president and artistic director of Second Stage Theater, said that after 45 years she would be leaving that institution, which she co-founded; Second Stage operates the Helen Hayes Theater on Broadway. And Roundabout Theater Company currently has an interim artistic director following the death in April of Todd Haimes, who led that organization for four decades; Roundabout operates three Broadway houses, including the American Airlines, the Stephen Sondheim and Studio 54.Lincoln Center Theater, which is a resident organization at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, has three stages of varying sizes, and has produced a wide variety of work. The company currently has an annual budget of $34.5 million and 55 full-time employees; Bishop received $783,191 in total compensation during fiscal 2022, according to an I.R.S. filing.The Vivian Beaumont Theater, where Lincoln Center Theater has staged Broadway revivals of “Camelot,” “South Pacific,” “The King and I” and “My Fair Lady,” is the third-largest stage in New York, after Radio City Music Hall and the Metropolitan Opera; it also features a thrust configuration that is quite rare on Broadway.When asked about the productions he was proudest of he named “The Coast of Utopia,” Tom Stoppard’s trilogy about 19th-century Russian intellectuals, which began running in 2006 and won the 2007 Tony Award for best play. Lincoln Center Theater’s other Tony-winning productions during Bishop’s tenure include “Carousel,” “The Heiress,” “A Delicate Balance,” “Contact,” “Henry IV,” “Awake and Sing,” “South Pacific,” “War Horse,” “The King and I” and “Oslo.”This season Lincoln Center Theater is planning to stage a Broadway revival of “Uncle Vanya,” with a new translation by Heidi Schreck; an Off Broadway production of “The Gardens of Anuncia,” a new musical by Michael John LaChiusa; and an Off Off Broadway production of “Daphne,” a new play by Renae Simone Jarrett. Bishop also plans, before he leaves, to produce new plays by J.T. Rogers and Ayad Akhtar, and a world premiere musical.“I’m proud of the variety of plays and musicals that we’ve done, from young experimental shows to well-known revivals,” Bishop said. He added that the theater is financially healthy and rebounding from the pandemic; although it has had fewer productions since the pandemic shutdown, he said he expected full-strength seasons ahead. “I think the future is glorious — we have an incredible staff and a very strong board and I see nothing but good things ahead.”Bishop arrived at Lincoln Center Theater in 1992 as artistic director, and he became producing artistic director in 2013. He had previously spent 16 years at a smaller Off Broadway nonprofit theater, Playwrights Horizons, where he served as artistic director for a decade.The Lincoln Center Theater board will conduct a search for Bishop’s successor. More

  • 125 Shares179 Views

    in Theater

    ‘Lunar Eclipse’ Review: A Dark, Cloudy Night of the Soul

    In Donald Margulies’s heavy-handed new play, Reed Birney is terrific as a farmer forced by his wife, played by Karen Allen, to face his grief.“We realize he’s crying” must be among the scariest stage directions an actor could find at the top of a script. How do you get from zero to tears with no context?That’s the challenge Donald Margulies puts before the actor playing George in “Lunar Eclipse,” his new two-character play at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Mass. And wait, it gets harder. As we will soon learn, George, a Midwestern farmer in late middle age, is stony and unsentimental, the opposite of a weeper. Yet as the lights slowly rise on his dark night of the soul, there he is anyway: a heaving, racking torrent of sobs.Is it thoughtless to say how lucky we are that the heaving and racking come from Reed Birney?It’s certainly lucky for Margulies and his somewhat overripe tear-jerker, which opened on Sunday. Often threatening to drown in a generalized wetness, the play benefits immensely from the detail and discipline of Birney’s superb performance. He doesn’t so much produce emotions as shed them.After nearly 50 years onstage, that’s no surprise; he’s won Obie, Drama Desk and Tony awards for his no-nonsense, full-sized approach, in which acting is the side effect of his insight and inhabitation of character. What’s surprising, and a bit scary, is that he has played such a variety of men so vividly: a vile journalist, a penitent philanderer, a conniving cross-dresser. How many feelings does he have inside him?And how many ways of turning them off? As soon as George’s wife, Em, arrives, the tears and all other signs of vulnerability get ruthlessly shut down. George is so ornery and curt that even after 50 years or so of marriage, Em (Karen Allen) must dance around him in search of some opening to his secret grief. Emotional intelligence has turned her into a spelunker.If you do not know such pairs from real life, you probably know them from the theater. “On Golden Pond” and “The Gin Game” both offer variations on the “crusty old man bickering with woman who knows better” template. Also like “Lunar Eclipse,” those plays try to corral their rambling contents within the bounds of a thematic fence: the months of a summer, the deals of a deck.Even more heavy-handedly, “Lunar Eclipse” uses the phases of planetary alignment as both plot and poetics. Its seven scenes (followed by a coda) are called “stages” and are described in pedantic voice-overs: “Stage 1. Moon enters penumbra. Penumbral shadow appears.”The framing adds nothing, in fact detracting from a story that could stand to be tighter and better grounded in reality. Margulies, so expert with urbane, artistic and moneyed characters — he won a Pulitzer Prize for “Dinner With Friends” and was a finalist for “Sight Unseen” and “Collected Stories” — is not as convincing with farm folk. (“Wild Turkey does a mighty fine job keeping you warm,” George says as if he were on “Hee Haw.”) I had to nod in agreement when I read a program note admitting that “astronomical liberties have been taken for dramatic purposes.”Astronomical in both senses. Yet despite the liberties, “Lunar Eclipse” remains affecting when its staging, by James Warwick, gets granular. In the middle of the night on which it takes place, George has come to a “sacred” spot on his farm (the needlessly rotating set is by John Musall) to watch the earth’s shadow eat up the moon. Em has followed him there with “provisions”: blankets he does not want and hot chocolate he reluctantly accepts only when she pours it into his tin cup of bourbon. She carefully applies bug spray to the neatly turned cuffs of her jeans (costumes by Christina Beam); he swats insects from his face throughout (crickets by the sound designer Nathan Leigh).These concrete details operate in helpful contrast to the back story revealed at regular intervals as the eclipse progresses over the next 90 minutes. We learn of beloved dogs buried nearby. Of a troubled sore-spot of a son. And of a new fear: that the early signs of dementia are beginning to cloud George’s mind.That the night is likewise too cloudy for a perfect viewing seems apt. (The very dim lighting is by James McNamara.) We see pretty well into George by observing his resistances, but Em, despite Allen’s astute performance, is underwritten and mostly reactive. Her one expressed grief, about a tragedy now years in the past, cannot stand up to George’s million pesky, present annoyances.Perhaps that’s Margulies’s point — and a way of making meaning of the eclipse, which otherwise seems like a McGuffin. “This may come as a shock to you,” George says with his usual asperity. “Even though we’ve been married forever, we’re two separate people.”In other words: We cannot know each other. Marriage, even if not loveless, is not equal. As with planets and moons, one spouse generally revolves around the other, doing more work and yet, come crunchtime, left in the obliterating shadow.Lunar EclipseThrough Oct. 22 at Shakespeare & Company, Lenox, Mass.; shakespeare.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

  • 125 Shares199 Views

    in Theater

    ‘9 Kinds of Silence’ Review: A Soldier’s Battle Is Within

    In Abhishek Majumdar’s tense play at 122CC Theater in Manhattan, every sound underscores what’s left unsaid after a shellshocked veteran’s homecoming.Waves crash and dogs howl beyond concrete walls, while inside a holding cell a rotary phone trills and typewriter keys lash at a sparsely filled page. There are few moments of quiet in “9 Kinds of Silence,” directed by the playwright Abhishek Majumdar, with original music and densely layered sound design by M. Florian Staab. In this tense parable about a soldier’s homecoming that opened at 122CC Theater in Manhattan on Monday night, every sound underscores what’s left unsaid.A clerical worker known as Mother, played by Hend Ayoub, fills the already-thick air with words. She is “training returning soldiers to belong,” in accordance with a government manual on her cluttered desk that encourages veterans to speak before they’re sent back into the arms of their own mothers. (Officials fear, we later learn, that these bottled-up vets will explode, posing a threat to their homeland.)Clammed up and shellshocked, her current case, known as Son, played by Joe Joseph, is slumped in a chair on the other side of a beat-up tarp that divides the room in two (the set and costumes are by Jian Jung). His eyes are obscured by dark glasses, his shoulders are hitched up to his ears and his arms are slung across his ribs in a limp embrace. Mother salutes this Son as a hero, but if this is his reward, it hardly seems worth the cost.Ayoub rises admirably to the challenge of playing opposite a character arrested by trauma, in what is, for a significant portion of the production’s 80 minutes, essentially a one-woman show. Her clerk leads the crumpled soldier in vocal exercises meant to reanimate his national fealty, including sounds of recognition (“aha!”) and different shades of laughter, a highlight of Ayoub’s performance. As the play progresses, she begins to question, at her own peril — and in a tenor that grows increasingly personal — the meaning of patriotic sacrifice.Majumdar casts his antiwar critique in familial terms; the militarized regime to which both Mother and Son are bound is figured as patriarchal. Though the play includes prayers in Arabic, and references to a spiritual prophet and a supreme leader, its geopolitical context is left deliberately vague.Mothers sending their sons into battle, and the physical and spiritual wounds inflicted on everyone in the process, is near universal territory. But in foregoing both character development and broader specifics of time and place, Majumdar winds up treading a muddy middle ground.The play’s observations about nationalism, faith and the human tolls of war feel remote and theoretical, despite the intimate scale. When it comes time to land an emotional punch, the impact here is muffled.9 Kinds of SilenceThrough Oct. 7 at 122 Community Arts Center, Manhattan; playco.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More