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    ‘Uncle Vanya’ Review: Candlelit With a High-Wattage Cast

    Unrequited love swirls through this prestige-cast production of Anton Chekhov’s play, in a Manhattan loft.Leaning close in the flickering candlelight, Sonya and the man who makes her stomach flutter share a sneaky midnight snack. He is Astrov, her houseguest, and he is frankly a bit of a mess — drinks too much, is in fact drunk at the moment. He is also endearingly odd and smart and sweet, an eco-nerd physician who’s sending her some incredibly mixed signals.“We’re all alone here,” he says, sotto voce. “We can be honest with each other.”It is a scene so beguiling, so full of crushy hope on one side and obliviousness (or is it?) on the other, that it’s like watching Laura and the Gentleman Caller in “The Glass Menagerie.” But this is “Uncle Vanya,” and if Chekhov has never before made you want to match-make a couple of his characters on Tinder, this version — directed by Jack Serio in a loft in the Flatiron District of Manhattan — just might.“You’re a beautiful human being, more than anybody I know,” Sonya tells Astrov, and because she is portrayed by the magnificent Marin Ireland and he would obviously be ridiculously lucky to have her, your whole soul rises up in outrage: What is wrong with this likable doctor (beautifully played by Will Brill of sexy “Oklahoma!” and “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”) that he’s obsessed with Yelena, her stepmother, instead?So is Sonya’s Uncle Vanya, whose play this is meant to be. A nose-to-the-grindstone worker, he looks up in middle age and realizes to his horror and humiliation that he has wasted his life fattening the bank account and elevating the status of an unworthy man: Sonya’s father, the over-entitled professor, Serebryakov (a dapper Bill Irwin). Doomed to receive nothing better from Yelena, the professor’s wife, than a pathetic kiss on the forehead, Vanya doesn’t even have a woman to love him.David Cromer’s performance in the title role, though, suggests none of that swallowed fire and swirling torment. His Vanya is a blank, and it’s not a matter of simplicity or restraint; there is nothing to the interpretation underneath the words, even when Vanya gets loud. Certainly there wasn’t on Saturday night, when I saw the play. But a live show is an evolving organism. Cromer may yet fill up that hollowness.Using a warm, seamless, contemporary translation by Paul Schmidt, and performed for an audience of no more than 40 seated along two sides of the loft, this is an intimate production that’s strange as well — because of the unbalancing emptiness of Cromer’s Vanya, and because of the maturity and intelligence of its Yelena, played by Julia Chan.Reading as older than the 27 years that Chekhov specifies, but still clearly decades younger than her husband, she is no incurious ingenue. There is a wisdom to this Yelena, and a savvy; Astrov and Vanya’s rivalrous infatuation with her, then, is no mere response to dewdrop youth. Chicly dressed for the city life she has left behind (costumes are by Ricky Reynoso), she is the picture of pristine elegance, sure of herself and too lively minded to find happiness in the cosseted quiet of this country house.Jack Serio’s production of “Uncle Vanya,” with, clockwise from lower left, Virginia Wing as Marina, Will Brill as Astrov and David Cromer as Vanya. It’s performed for an audience of no more than 40 seated along two sides of the room.Emilio MadridNo one else is finding happiness, either, of course; at best, perhaps placid resignation. Vanya, in his resentment, comes nowhere near that, but a bouquet-smashing eruption of his temper is the catalyst for a mesmerizingly pretty stage tableau: soft orange rose petals fallen just so on the weathered teal table and the blond wood floor. (The set is by Walt Spangler, the props by Carrie Mossman.)“It was a scene worthy of an old master,” Vanya and Sonya’s adorable, guitar-strumming neighbor, Telegin (the wonderfully funny Will Dagger), says a short time later, and while he may be thinking less of the flowers than of the gunplay that ensued, the sentiment is absolutely right.Stunning visuals — like those petals and that candlelit tête-à-tête — are a hallmark of Serio’s work. The lighting designer Stacey Derosier, who was instrumental to the look of his “On Set With Theda Bara” early this year and “This Beautiful Future” last year, also designed “Uncle Vanya.”But what glows most tantalizingly in this production is the pulsing electricity between the tender, resilient Sonya and the tree-planting Astrov, who is far too casual with her heart. If only he could love her the way he loves the forest.Uncle VanyaThrough July 16 at a loft in the Flatiron District, Manhattan; vanyanyc.com. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes. More

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    ‘Here Lies Love’ Pairs Disco With a Dictator. It’s a Controversial Choice.

    The musical, the brainchild of David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, dramatizes — and, some say, sanitizes — the life of the former Philippine first lady Imelda Marcos.The Broadway musical “Here Lies Love” is a rollicking karaoke dance party with an immersive staging and, for the first time in Broadway history, organizers say, an all-Filipino cast.It’s a good time — until it’s not.At its center is the brutal regime of Ferdinand (played by Jose Llana) and Imelda Marcos (Arielle Jacobs), the former president and first lady of the Philippines who committed countless human rights abuses and violent crimes during his 21-year reign from 1965 to 1986.David Byrne, who wrote the music and lyrics for the show with the electronic dance musician Fatboy Slim, has said the musical, which focuses on the life of Imelda Marcos, interpolates karaoke as a means of replicating for audiences how it felt for Filipinos who lived through the Marcos regime.But, some argue, telling the story of the corrupt Marcos regime through disco does not work when the audience lacks the necessary context. The production, opening July 20, has faced accusations that it trivializes the suffering of thousands of Filipinos.Here’s what to know about Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos, the People Power Revolution of 1986 and the controversies the show has faced.Who was Ferdinand Marcos?Ferdinand Marcos, the longest-serving president of the Philippines, was a dictator who placed the country under martial law from 1972 until 1981. In 1983 the opposition leader Benigno Aquino Jr. (played by Conrad Ricamora) was assassinated at the airport as he was returning from exile; an investigatory panel concluded that a military plot was responsible. The assassination led to a series of events that culminated with Aquino’s widow, Corazon, becoming president in 1986.With the election of Aquino, Marcos fled the Philippines for Hawaii, where he died in 1989 without ever facing trial in the United States on criminal charges that he plundered the Philippine Treasury of more than $100 million. (However, the following decade a jury in Hawaii awarded damages of almost $2 billion against his estate for the killings and tortures of almost 10,000 Filipinos. Collecting on that judgment has been difficult though, and despite ongoing efforts, victims have seen only a fraction of that amount.)Who is Imelda Marcos?Imelda Marcos, who married Ferdinand in 1954, became the face of the regime’s enormous wealth. A former teenage beauty queen known for her love of nightlife and disco music, she and her family raided government coffers to finance a lavish lifestyle while millions of Filipinos lived in poverty.A Philippine court convicted her on corruption charges in 2018 for creating private foundations to hide her wealth, but she appealed the case and is unlikely to see jail time because of her age. She is now 94.What was the People Power Revolution?The Marcos era ended in February 1986 after a series of nonviolent street marches. The People Power Revolution, with more than two million Filipinos participating, condemned the regime’s human rights violations and electoral fraud. The demonstrations ended with Ferdinand Marcos’s departure.Why has the show been controversial?A number of Filipinos have objected to what they argue is the show’s trivialization of the Marcos’s crimes and sympathy toward Imelda Marcos. The actress Sara Porkalob, who recently appeared on Broadway in “1776,” wrote in 2017 that the musical, then playing at the Seattle Repertory Theater, one of the show’s several regional and Off Broadway engagements since its premiere at New York’s Public Theater in 2013, “paints a glossy veneer over the Philippines’ national trauma and America’s role in it.”Those objections have become particularly salient for many now; Ferdinand Marcos Jr. was elected president of the Philippines last year.“David Byrne’s attempt to humanize Imelda Marcos insults the impoverished people she and her family stole from,” Ruben Carranza, a former government lawyer who prosecuted Imelda Marcos’s hidden wealth cases, wrote in a recent email. “And because it is playing at a time when the Marcoses have lied their way back to power, ‘Here Lies Love’ will only reinforce those lies and serve, intentionally or not, the larger Marcos agenda of denying truth and revising the history of their dictatorship.”Others, however, have praised the show’s approach, contending that it “mirrors Filipino complicity and American blindness through its disco-controlled experiment on its audience,” as the Filipino novelist Gina Apostol wrote in 2014 after seeing the show Off Broadway at the Public Theater.How has the production responded?In a statement released earlier this year after criticism resurfaced following the announcement of the Broadway transfer, producers wrote that “Here Lies Love” is “an anti-Marcos show” intended to combat disinformation with “a creative way of re-information.” The show has also hired a Filipino American actress, Giselle Töngi, known as G, as a cultural and community liaison.Why did Broadway musicians object to the show?Though producers have argued that using recorded instrumental tracks instead of a live band is central to the storytelling, a labor union representing musicians objected in May, arguing that its contract for the theater requires musicians to be used for musicals. In June they reached a compromise: The musical would employ 12 live musicians.What has Imelda Marcos said about the show?In 2010, after listening to part of Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s original concept album for the show at a mall food court in the Philippines during her campaign for the country’s House of Representatives, she told The New York Times reporter Norimitsu Onishi, “I’m flattered; I can’t believe it!”The show takes its title from the three-word phrase she has said she would like inscribed on her tombstone. More

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    At 20, an Upstate Arts Haven Keeps Breaking New Ground

    On a recent Saturday night, a group of young people were gathered in this bucolic hamlet in the Hudson Valley, building a campfire of sorts. There were no matches or flames, but there were lanterns, chirping crickets, fir trees swirled with haze and, at one point, a zombie attack.The ersatz campfire was onstage, at the final evening performance of “Illinois,” a dance-theater piece based on Sufjan Stevens’s beloved 2005 indie-pop concept album. Directed by the star choreographer Justin Peck, the show drew a sold-out crowd of arts-minded weekenders and curious Stevens fans to commune inside the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College.Since opening 20 years ago, the center’s Frank Gehry building has emerged as a hothouse for the creation of uncompromising, cross-disciplinary and sometimes hard to describe hits.It’s here that Daniel Fish’s radically reimagined “Oklahoma!” took shape before its unlikely run to Broadway (and a Tony Award for best musical revival), and here that the choreographer Pam Tanowitz’s “Four Quartets” (praised in The New York Times as “the greatest creation of dance theater so far this century”) was sparked by a random breakfast conversation.Gideon Lester, the Fisher Center’s artistic director and chief executive. “Just approaching an artist and saying, ‘Let’s do something together,’ is the thing that excites me most in the world,” he said.Erik Tanner for The New York TimesGiven the personnel involved, “Illinois,” which will move to the Chicago Shakespeare Theater in January, would seem to have the makings of a popular hit. But for Gideon Lester, the Fisher Center’s artistic director and chief executive, it furthers the same exploratory mission as everything else the center does.“All of these projects are research, which is why they belong in a college,” he said. “What these artists are doing is investigating something, experimenting, creating something in a new way.”These are tenuous times for the performing arts, including in the Hudson Valley, where several independent institutions have curtailed programming or shuttered entirely. But the Fisher Center, nestled in a college long known as a bastion of the humanities, is making big plans.In October, it will break ground on a $42 million studio building designed by Maya Lin. And it just received a $2 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to support the work of Tania El Khoury, an artist in residence and director of the school’s recently founded Center for Human Rights and the Arts.Gehry’s building, with its explosion of stainless steel whorls, is something of a symbol of the center’s discipline-scrambling programming. Each year, the center is home to full-scale productions of rarely performed operas (like Saint-Saëns’s “Henry VIII,” which opens on July 21) and theatrical world premieres (like Elevator Repair Service’s “Ulysses,” coming in September).The center has also hosted a live-art biennial, development workshops for Justin Vivian Bond and Anthony Roth Costanzo’s “Only an Octave Apart” and, during the pandemic shutdown, a streaming serial production of “Chapter & Verse,” Meshell Ndegeocello’s musical performance inspired by James Baldwin.Justin Peck, left, in rehearsal with Ahmad Simmons, a dancer in “Illinois.” Peck’s dance-theater piece is based on the 2005 indie-pop album by Sufjan Stevens.Erik Tanner for The New York TimesFrom left, Simmons, Tilly Evans-Krueger and Jonathan Fahoury. “I wanted to build a spaceship for all these dance artists to blast off in,” Peck said of “Illinois.”Erik Tanner for The New York TimesAs for “Illinois,” presented as part of the annual SummerScape festival, even those closest to it are hard-pressed to categorize it. Aaron Mattocks, the Fisher Center’s chief operating officer, called it a “genre blur.”For Peck, who came to the center with the idea about two years ago, it’s “a spaceship for all these dance astronauts to blast off in.”“I was looking for a place to go that felt somewhat quiet but also exciting, and a place that had felt willing to take risks on something like this,” Peck said.The Fisher Center opened in 2003 as a multifunctional performing arts center that would be home to the college’s teaching programs as well as the Bard Music Festival, allowing it to mount full-scale operas.The center has always presented theater and dance, too. But with Lester’s arrival in 2012, it has expanded its commissioning of original, contemporary-minded work.“What Gideon has done is brought to it a fantastic originality and an eye and ear for things that need doing, and then inspiring artists to do it,” Leon Botstein, Bard’s president, said.Jenny Gersten, a producer and the interim artistic director at the Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts, credited the Fisher Center with fare that is “distinctively downtown-on-the-Hudson.”“Lots of theaters outside of New York City can develop work,” she said, “but Bard is one of the few who chooses to dig into experimentation of form and bold artistic dares.”Erik Tanner for The New York TimesErik Tanner for The New York TimesLester, 50, grew up in London, in the period when the director Sam Mendes and the theater company Complicité were emerging. (He also admits to memorizing all the lyrics of “The Phantom of the Opera.”)But his own brief directorial career had a shaky start. At Oxford, he and another student persuaded the playwright Peter Shaffer to let them mount a production of Shaffer’s “Yonadab,” which hadn’t been performed since its disastrously reviewed 1985 premiere at the National Theater.About 15 minutes into the Oxford opening, there was a general power cut, and the play stopped. But the assembled London critics reviewed it anyway, noting, Lester recalled, that the play “hadn’t improved much.”“I was completely freaked out and thought, ‘This is too much pressure, I don’t think I can direct,’” he said.Instead, he enrolled in the dramaturgy program at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., even if — like many in theater — he was a bit hazy on what exactly dramaturgy was.A rendering of a planned new studio building designed by Maya Lin.Maya Lin Studio with Bialosky + Partners“Basically, I just learned what dramaturgy was by sitting in the room with directors,” he said, by “making mistakes and giving notes and being told to shut up.”Lester became the theater’s resident dramaturg under Robert Brustein and later, under Robert Woodruff, its associate artistic director. Asked about highlights, he mentioned working with artists like the Dutch-Syrian director Ola Mafaalani (“Wings of Desire”) and the Polish director Krystian Lupa, whom he approached after seeing his 11-hour production of “Sleepwalkers” at the Edinburgh Festival.Lupa’s “Three Sisters” at the A.R.T. was “amazing,” if not “particularly liked,” Lester recalled with a wry laugh. “But I got to be in rehearsal with him and see how he worked.”At Bard, Lester has shepherded an impressive series of audience pleasers. But when talking about him — and Caleb Hammons, the director of artistic planning and producing — collaborators use words like “artist centered” and “artist forward.”“They’re unusually good at being adaptive to what different artists need,” said Daniel Fish, whose “Most Happy in Concert” also originated at Bard.Tanowitz, the choreographer, first met Lester in 2015, when he invited her to do a repertory show. Afterward, over breakfast, he asked about the title of one dance, which included a phrase from T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets.”Damon Daunno and Amber Gray in Daniel Fish’s “Oklahoma!” in 2015. The production went to Broadway, where it won a Tony Award for best revival.Cory WeaverDancers in the 2018 premiere of Pam Tanowitz’s “Four Quartets,” which grew out of a conversation Tanowitz and Lester had over breakfast.Maria BaranovaThey talked about the poem for a while, and then she went to the bathroom. When she got back, he asked, “Why don’t you make a dance of ‘Four Quartets’?”“That’s classic Gideon,” Tanowitz said. “He thinks big. He has chutzpah. Part of it was a dare, so I said yes, thinking in my mind, ‘This will never happen.’”He introduced her to collaborators including the actor Kathleen Chalfant, who narrated the piece; the painter Brice Marden, whose paintings inspired the scenic design; and the composer Kaija Saariaho. (The Fisher Center has also taken over the administration of Tanowitz’s company.)But for all Lester’s skills as a connector, Tanowitz said, mostly he “dares you to be yourself.”El Khoury, who is Lebanese, first met Lester in 2017, at the Public Theater’s Under the Radar festival, where he invited her to breakfast. “In classic Gideon fashion, he proposed all these things,” she recalled.She wasn’t sure how seriously to take any of them. But then he popped up again a few months later, at the CounterCurrent Festival in Houston.She came to Bard in 2019, as guest curator of the third Fisher Center biennial. During a long drive to New Hampshire, she and Lester had a rambling conversation that led to the creation a year later of the Center for Human Rights and the Arts, which is part of the Open Society University Network.“It’s a huge responsibility to bring in an artist from a totally different environment and give her a lot of space and funding and trust,” El Khoury said.The most recent biennial addressed the politics of land and food. It culminated in May with a four-day festival that included El Khoury’s “Memory of Birds,” an interactive sound installation that invited visitors to lie in cocoon-like structures at the base of a row of maple trees.“I love it that the last piece we commissioned was Tania’s, which could be experienced by seven people at a time,” Lester said. “And now we’re doing ‘Illinois’ for almost 900.”The Fisher Center, nestled in a college known for the humanities, is expanding at a time when many performing arts institutions are struggling.Erik Tanner for The New York TimesPeck, the resident choreographer at New York City Ballet, said he had been thinking for almost a decade about creating something based on Stevens’s album, which he fell in love with as a teenager.“It’s a real full-circle moment, getting to engage with this album of a generation,” he said.“Illinois,” which came to the Fisher Center with commercial producers attached, is the most expensive non-opera production it has done, with a budget of about $1.2 million. (“Oklahoma!,” Lester said, cost about $450,000.)The show, whose narrative was developed by Peck and the playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury (“Fairview”), has no dialogue, just the lyrics of the songs, which are orchestrated by Timo Andres and performed and sung by a 13-piece band.The 12 dancers include some who Peck worked with on the 2018 Broadway revival of “Carousel” and Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story.”“I wanted to create a vehicle for today’s generation of dance artists who are working in theater and storytelling,” he said, “to tell a story using their language, which is their movement.”Critics were not invited — they will be at the show’s Chicago run — but at the final evening performance, the audience whooped and applauded after most songs. After the tap-inflected “Jacksonville,” featuring a rapturously received turn by Jennifer Florentino, Lester and Drury fist-bumped.The show, Lester said, is “full of joy.” And part of that feeling, for him, is the white-knuckle uncertainty that comes with every project.“The joy of it,” he said, “is not knowing whether something’s going to work.” More

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    Sarah Benson, Soho Rep’s Former Director, Wants Theater to Push You

    At the helm of Soho Rep, Benson presided over a long streak of ambitious, thought-provoking works. As she heads out the door, she reflects on her vision for theater’s future and plans for her own.Contemporary American theater would not be the same without a 65-seat theater tucked away on a quiet TriBeCa side street. Founded in 1975, Soho Rep has produced new, often boundary-pushing plays, including, in recent years, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s “An Octoroon,” in 2014, and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Fairview,” in 2018.Indeed, for the last decade and a half, the theater has been on quite a roll, presenting shows by a formidable cohort of playwrights that also includes Lucas Hnath, Anne Washburn, David Adjmi and Aleshea Harris. This golden age coincided with the tenure of Sarah Benson, who became Soho Rep’s artistic director in 2007 and departed the institution on June 30.Benson, who grew up in Britain, moved to the United States as part of a Fulbright program and earned an M.F.A. in directing at Brooklyn College. She had run Soho Rep’s Writer Director Lab for two years before replacing Daniel Aukin at the company’s helm.The first show Benson directed for the Rep, Sarah Kane’s bleak, gruesome “Blasted,” which starred Marin Ireland and Reed Birney, became a sensation in the fall of 2008. That show was both an outlier (“Blasted” was 13 years old then and Soho Rep would go on to focus on new work) and a harbinger of the many thought-provoking, destabilizing productions to come. Benson herself went on to direct “An Octoroon” and “Fairview,” which demolished the fourth wall and kept upending audiences’ expectations of where the plays were going.From left, Chris Myers, Danny Wolohan and Amber Gray in Benson’s 2014 production of “An Octoroon.”Pavel Antonov“The first time we worked together, it became the gold standard by which I judge all collaborations,” Jacobs-Jenkins said over the phone. “She’s incredibly open and shockingly egoless. Her shows are the kind that you can go back to again and again because she’s got so much in every corner that it’s hard to take them all in one go,” he added. “I’d say she’s radical, but entertaining and visionary.”(Benson’s résumé also includes “Skittles Commercial: The Broadway Musical,” which ranks among the most surreal Super Bowl ads ever made.)In 2019, Soho Rep switched to a shared leadership, with Benson, Cynthia Flowers and Meropi Peponides on equal footing as directors. “Sarah has an incredible design brain and I am a much more abstract thinker,” Peponides, who also just left, said on the phone. “We were able to round out each other’s skill sets in terms of how to make a big, wild, ambitious idea happen.” One of those ideas was Project Number One, which was announced in September 2020 and provides theater artists a living wage as they develop new works for Soho Rep.Now a free agent, Benson has several projects in the works, including César Alvarez’s “NOISE (A Musical)” at Northern Stage in Vermont later this month and Michael R. Jackson and Anna K. Jacobs’s “Teeth” at Playwrights Horizons early next year. At a coffee spot near her home in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, the director, 45, chatted about her vision of theater and her plans for the future. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Did you leave because you wanted to spend more time on directing and less on paperwork?That’s part of what has led to this moment. I’m ready to be able to say yes to more projects. It’s been an incredible gift to be working at that level of artistic risk and to be surrounded by other artists working at that level of risk. It’s been life-changing, truly. And it’s a lot [laughs].Did you have any management experience before Soho Rep?I had experience as an artist, that was it. But as a director, you are in a position of leading and figuring stuff out. I think that the skill sets of an artist are actually very well-suited to being in leadership.Why choose “Blasted” for your first outing as director at Soho Rep?Marin Ireland instigated that project. I’d always absolutely loved that play, but for me it was about the Northern Irish conflict. So I read it again, and I got this jolt, like, “Oh no, this is about civil war and what is happening right now.”Do you need a jolt to decide to do a play?Immediately I start imagining pictures and feelings. I’m always attentive to what feelings I get because that is the best information that’s going to take me to “What’s the real material? What can I bring to this material?” I’m always trying to seek out that charge.You have directed very different plays, but the one through line is that your stagings, besides being surprisingly entertaining, avoid the naturalism common in American theater.To get to an honest place of having an embodied conversation about joy and pain, and how close we can look at those things together — naturalism just doesn’t get there for me. For me realism is a closed system. It’s like, “Here’s the thing, look at it.” I’m much more interested in something where there’s space for the audience to get in there and complete the event through that feedback loop of live theater. People want to see ambitious work and things they haven’t seen before. They want to be challenged.From left, Charles Browning, Heather Alicia Simms and Roslyn Ruff in Jackie Sibblies Drury’s “Fairview,” directed by Benson for Soho Rep in 2018.Emon Hassan for The New York TimesWhat are your first steps when you start working on a new show?“What’s the problem?” is always interesting to me, so I’ll often start from there. I do a lot of work on my own initially, reading and research and images, and kind of start from that place of, “Where am I feeling the heat and the energy? What am I feeling confounded by?” I’ve been lucky to have these phenomenal, deep collaborations with designers where we’ll meet early and often and really approach it like conceptual art, or whether design can really inform, in many cases, the text.How has Soho Rep changed as an institution over the past 16 years?With Meropi and Cynthia, we completely changed the planning horizon of what was possible. We’re commissioning to produce, so when we commission an artist, we’re going to do whatever they write. So it’s moved away from agents submitting plays. People still, of course, do that somewhat, but we don’t have a literary department — it’s much more about building relationships with artists and committing to them for the long haul.As a director, do you think you’ll be able to pursue completely different opportunities now?I’m getting invited to do opera. There’s a lot of big ideas and spaces that I’m now dialoguing with. I’m like, Yeah, I am interested in scale. This is what I’m very ready for. The gift of Soho Rep has been this room where you could literally cut a hole on the floor for “Blasted.” You can be very impolite with that room, get in there and have a conversation with that space, and that’s been amazing. But I know that room very well, and I’m excited to situate my practice in other kinds of spaces.How do you think the New York theater ecosystem has changed in the past two decades?Around 2004, 2005, I would be out seeing eight or nine shows a week sometimes. It was truly experimental in a very amazing way. I don’t have nostalgia for that time because there were a lot of issues and no one was getting paid. It was hard. But the work was oriented around a community, and that was very real. I feel like that communal north star has evaporated, and it became much more oriented toward mainstream success of some kind. But I feel like Covid broke that apart and now I feel weirdly close to that time from the aughts, where it’s up to artists to decide what we want to make and see.That makes you one of the few optimistic people in the field right now!Everything’s going to [expletive], it’s all falling apart. Even in the mainstream commercial spaces, the old model of tourists and all of that, it’s gone, the subscription model is gone. There’s a lot of second-guessing that doesn’t put any trust in the audience — it’s really patronizing. But audiences want to see something new. They don’t want to see what they’ve seen over and over and over again. More

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    In ‘The Horror of Dolores Roach,’ the Empanadas Are to Die For

    Justina Machado and Aaron Mark went uptown to sample the savory pastries that play a central role in their new horror-comedy — minus the mystery meat.You know those days when you would kill for an empanada? Well.It was a cool and sunny morning last month in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, and the actress Justina Machado and the writer Aaron Mark had agreed to meet there to talk about their new Amazon series, “The Horror of Dolores Roach.” An eight-part horror-comedy, starting Friday on Prime Video, the show makes the neighborhood a central focus, which was why I took the train uptown. It does the same for cannibalism, though there was nothing like that on the schedule as far as I knew.But we had all day to talk about eating people. First, empanadas. Grabbing a park bench, Mark and Machado fueled up on the hot, crisp hand-held pastries — guava and cheese, carne de res — from Empanadas Monumental, near 157th Street and Broadway, around the corner from where Mark lived for a decade as what he called a “broke, broke, broke” playwright.I drooled a little watching Machado and Mark take bites of the face-sized empanadas, which were perfectly golden brown, bubbly in the right spots and oozy, not greasy. They were tasty, Machado said, but she was partial to the chicken-and-cheese pastelillos, fried turnovers similar to empanadas, that her Puerto Rican mother used to make.“She would make them with a cafe con leche,” said Machado, known best for her roles in the “One Day at a Time” reboot and “Jane the Virgin.” “I could kill, like, four of them.”Empanadas devoured, we moved to a nearby cafe — this time, to talk over cinnamon buns — and got right to the macabre meat of “Dolores Roach.” Mark, who created the show, serves as showrunner with Dara Resnik. Based on his fictional Gimlet Media podcast of the same name (2018-19), the series itself is an adaptation of the one-woman play he wrote, “Empanada Loca.” A New York Times review of its 2015 Off Broadway production by the Labyrinth Theater Company called it an “exuberantly macabre” show.Mark was inspired to pursue a “contemporary gender-flipped ‘Sweeney Todd’” while living in Washington Heights. Machado made her Broadway debut in “In the Heights,” which is set there.Victor Llorente for The New York TimesMachado stars as Dolores, who returns to a gentrified Washington Heights after 16 years in prison for taking the rap for her drug-dealer boyfriend. Rattled by her new surroundings, she tries to start life over as a masseuse in the basement of an empanada shop run by her old friend Luis (Alejandro Hernández). But after her jerk of a first client gropes her, and she snaps, killing him in a sudden rage, she can’t seem to stop murdering.To the delight of his unsuspecting customers, the deranged Luis decides to make empanadas stuffed with the kibbled dead body parts of her victims, leaving Dolores to wonder how her life has taken such a monstrous path.Mark, a self-described “Jew from Texas” and a longtime horror fan, said the idea for a “contemporary gender-flipped ‘Sweeney Todd’” started percolating in 2013, when he and the actress Daphne Rubin-Vega developed the idea in New York. (She played Dolores in the play and podcast and is an executive producer of the series.) Mark moved four years ago to Los Angeles, where he had no luck pitching it as a TV series.But the theater world is small: Mimi O’Donnell, a former artistic director of Labyrinth, was tapped to head scripted podcasts at Gimlet, and she brought the project over as her first fiction podcast. (She is now the head of scripted fiction at Spotify Studios.) In 2019, the horror producer Blumhouse Television came aboard to help develop it for TV.Alejandro Hernández plays Dolores’s old friend Luis, who turns her murder victims into the filling for empanadas at his shop.Amazon Prime VideoThe show features some high-profile names in supporting roles, including Cyndi Lauper as a Broadway usher who moonlights as a private investigator and Marc Maron as the empanada shop’s landlord.But the series also has two uncredited stars: empanadas and Washington Heights. Mark said the show’s food stylist, Rossy Earle, tapped into her Panamanian roots to choreograph how Hernández rolled out, stuffed and fried the empanadas. She crafted distinct recipes for Dolores’s victims so that each corpse-meat filling had its own flavor.For Dolores’s first victim, Earle braised pork shoulder and butt in Achiote oil to give the filling an unctuous mouth feel — “Greasy and obnoxious,” like the character, Earle wrote in an email.Much of the series was shot in Ontario, but parts were filmed in Washington Heights, including on Mark’s old stoop on West 156th Street, where he recalled days spent “listening to what gentrification was doing to the humans who had been here for decades.”“That’s really what got me to ‘Sweeney Todd,’” he said. “I thought, this neighborhood is cannibalizing itself.”(Mark acknowledged in an email that he himself had been “very much an interloper uptown”; that awareness, and a growing “sense of culpability,” he said, had fueled his urgency to write about what he had seen and been a part of.)Machado, who grew up in Chicago, had a personal connection to Washington Heights, as well. In 2009, she made her Broadway debut in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s breakout musical, “In the Heights,” which is set there.Mark and Machado outside the building where Mark lived for a decade in Washington Heights.Victor Llorente for The New York Times“I guess there’s something about the Heights that’s calling me,” she said.As our conversation wrapped up and Machado and Mark eyed their doggy bags of empanadas, they were mum on whether a second season was in the works. But Roach isn’t Dolores’s last name for nothing. “She’s unkillable,” Mark said.Is she a coldblooded monster? Or a victim of circumstances? Machado and Mark didn’t entirely agree.“She’s not a maniac,” Mark said. “She wants to be a good person.”“She’s a survivor,” Machado offered. “But she’s a sociopath.”Either way, Machado called it “liberating” to be in a show about Latinos that wasn’t afraid to be comically sinister and eye-poppingly gory.“When we try to tell our stories, we feel a responsibility to make it a happy ending because we want to change the narrative, we want people to know that we have human experiences, that we are human beings,” she said. “But we love horror, too.”On playing Dolores, she added, with a laugh: “I’m a Latina serial killer, and I’m proud of it. I really am.” More

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    How to Squeeze a Feminist Farce Into an English Country House

    The new Broadway comedy “The Cottage” begins with a pair of lovers in an English country house in 1923, the morning after their annual illicit tryst. Sylvia, played by the “Legally Blonde” star Laura Bell Bundy, is aflame with passion for her paramour, Beau, played by Eric McCormack of “Will & Grace.”On an afternoon in mid-June, the cast wore street clothes as they did a stumble-through of the show at a rehearsal studio in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan. When Beau, in a fit of desire, sank his teeth into Sylvia’s foot, McCormack was in fact gamely biting into Bundy’s sneaker top.Ah, the glamour of acting!There is a certain borrowed elegance, though, to the play itself. Arguably a farce — though the playwright, Sandy Rustin, rejects that term, which to her suggests stock characters and clowning — “The Cottage” is a feminist twist on witty British comedies in the Noël Coward mold.“The Cottage” cast rehearsing, from left: Eric McCormack, Laura Bell Bundy, Dana Steingold, Lilli Cooper and Alex Moffat.OK McCausland for The New York Times“I’m really a huge fan of that whole genre of upper-crust British style,” said Rustin, whose best known play is the murder-mystery comedy “Clue,” adapted from the 1985 movie. “But the female characters often leave much to be desired. They’re often just there to serve the men. I was interested in finding a way into that genre where the women ruled the roost.”It’s no accident that Rustin, an actor who learned sketch writing and improv at Upright Citizens Brigade, set “The Cottage” in the 1920s, as British women’s rights were gaining traction. But the feminism, for much of the play, is more insinuated than overt.Only gradually does it become apparent that Sylvia, Bundy’s character, is the heroine of this ensemble piece, which starts previews on July 7 at the Helen Hayes Theater. Cheating with Beau, Sylvia is married to Clarke, who, in turn, is deep into an affair with Marjorie, Beau’s wife. All of them, and a couple of other lovers besides, turn up at what is, by Act II, a very crowded cottage.The cast of six includes Lilli Cooper — a Tony Award nominee for “Tootsie,” seen most recently on Broadway in last year’s feminist farce, “POTUS” — as the heavily pregnant Marjorie. Alex Moffat, late of “Saturday Night Live,” plays Clarke, a role that taps Moffat’s talent for falling down stairs. Jason Alexander, of “Seinfeld” fame, directs.“Comedy’s hard,” Alexander said, though at rehearsal he was an exuberant presence, watching from behind his music stand. “To make something light is heavy lifting.”In the days after the stumble-through, he, Rustin and some of the actors spoke individually by phone about what it takes to pull off this nouveau-throwback play, in period style. These are edited excerpts from those conversations.Alexander with the playwright Sandy Rustin on the play’s set at the Helen Hayes Theater in Manhattan. Victor Llorente for The New York TimesIt’s all about precision, darling.SANDY RUSTIN Every single actor is walking onto the stage as if they are in a legit Noël Coward play, they’re in an Oscar Wilde play. And then it kind of comes off the rails. That reality sort of unravels.LAURA BELL BUNDY I’m in, like, 140 out of 147 pages [of the script]. And let me tell you, these words, they are not normal to my vernacular. Remembering where all the “rathers” and the “darlings” go, I swear that has been the most difficult thing. If you don’t get the exact wording, it’s like, that’s not the style. And also you have to speak it so quickly, because that’s the rhythm.‘Pace becomes a character.’ERIC McCORMACK As Jason has said many times, these are all great words, but without the pace, without the absolute synergy of the six of us, they’ll just sit there. This becomes its own thing when the six of us are firing on all cylinders, and the pace becomes a character, virtually. The urgency of the play isn’t just the jeopardy of “Oh my God, somebody’s coming to the door,” as much as it is, we’re all kind of running for our lives. We’re dancing for our lives.BUNDY There is a rhythm to comedy, especially stage comedy. The comedy is inside the way that some of those lines are being delivered, the pace in which they are, the volume in which they are. That is essentially the same as musical theater, or the same as multicamera comedy. Which is why I think Eric is nailing this. That’s also why Jason is nailing this.At a rehearsal last month, from left: Steingold, Alexander and Nehal Joshi. OK McCausland for The New York TimesThe play is like a musical. Or Whac-a-Mole.JASON ALEXANDER I call it the sort of nonmusical musical. With a musical number, everybody in it, even if they’re wildly separated from each other, they all understand the tempo, the intonation, the mood of the piece, the movement of the piece. This play and this cast require that in a very similar way, but there’s nobody keeping a drumbeat, and there’s nobody playing a melody. So they have to feel it internally with each other.LILLI COOPER We’re all kind of cogs in this wheel. And there are six of us onstage sometimes. But, you know, the focus has to be on something very specific. So we need to learn how to blend in with the scenery in moments and pop forward in moments. In rehearsal the other day, I compared this play to a Whac-a-Mole. We need to figure out which mole, and when, do we pop out of the hole.The script is a kind of score.BUNDY When I lost my voice the other day, it was hard for me to convey all the tonality that, when you shift the tone of voice, can hit a punchline. No matter what the format is, whether it’s musical theater comedy or whether it is absent of music, there’s still music to it.McCORMACK This role is literally a three-octave role. You need all of those notes to just sort of surf the wave of that very highfalutin English conversation.From left: Joshi, Bundy and Steingold. “Every single actor is walking onto the stage as if they are in a legit Noël Coward play,” Rustin said.OK McCausland for The New York TimesPoses are drawn from the past.ALEXANDER Can we find a common language of behavior and action and movement and playing style that is clearly rooted in what we now think of as the over-the-top styles of acting from the ’30s and ’40s? There’s a sort of a posing there that is just behaviorally different. I’ve said to Eric once or twice, “Eric, that arm gesture that you just made is very 2023.”BUNDY The body language of [Sylvia] being this fairly well-to-do woman from the 1920s in Great Britain: How does that body hold itself? I’m figuring that out. Then as she begins to transform and become a more authentic version of herself that isn’t wrapped up in the niceties of the time and what a woman should be, how a woman should be behaving, how does the body language change? All of that is stuff that I’m having to be really calculated about.Bodies are comedy fodder.RUSTIN I tend to write really physical comedies, where it’s equal parts text and what’s happening to the bodies onstage. The two things for me are married. The humor comes from how these people are inhabiting their space.COOPER I was fairly recently pregnant, a year and a half ago. It is so crazy how putting that [costume pregnancy] belly on truly brings me back. It’s like this sense memory. When I was pregnant, I kind of couldn’t believe it; it’s pretty wild that we grow humans inside ourselves. So there’s this absurdist element to it. There’s comedy in spatial awareness. Like, I physically take up more space when I have this belly on.“I call it the sort of nonmusical musical,” Alexander said. It’s all about timing. Victor Llorente for The New York TimesPies, no. Stairs, yes.McCORMACK Besides just being a hundred years old and not really wanting to fall down stairs anymore — I’ll leave that to Alex — what’s hard about physical comedy, mostly, is doing something that feels in the moment. We’ve all seen pies in the face and all that stuff. But finding an original moment, particularly in a moment of high angst or high anxiety, is just a great reward.ALEX MOFFAT I’m interested to get into the theater and see what the stairs look like. Currently in our [rehearsal] space, it’s just a few stairs. I can [fall down them] six or seven times a day, as we have been doing. But if it’s like 12 stairs coming down from the upstairs of the cottage, we’ve got a lot of figuring out to do.The political message? Sneak it in.BUNDY I was very attracted to this play because of this epiphany this woman [Sylvia] begins to have — that her joy does not need to revolve around the love of a man. Women’s sexuality is so stigmatized. And the thing is, these truths about what it means to be a woman with sexual drive, that’s also making us laugh.MOFFAT Hopefully it’s just a barreling freight train of guffaws. But absolutely it might surprise people with how the play has such a great, strong, feminist point of view. Just doing a really funny thing and taking people along for that ride, it can work as long as people get swept along in the comedy of it, in the story of it. And then maybe at the end they go, “Oh! That made an interesting point.”COOPER One of my favorite lines in the show is [paraphrasing], “Well, maybe she doesn’t need a man.” It’s such a revelation to these people that they truly ponder it. That concept being so unfathomable to this generation is funny in itself. And feminist. More

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    ‘Silo’ Creator on the Show’s ‘Cautionary Tale’ About Tech

    In an interview, Graham Yost discusses the Apple TV+ sci-fi series and the mysteries and revelations of its twisty season finale.This interview includes spoilers for the first season of “Silo.”In the cliffhanger season finale of the dystopian saga “Silo,” streaming on Apple TV+, Bernard (Tim Robbins), the true power of the closed Silo community, gives the condemned protagonist, Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson), a secret peek at some hidden truths.First he reveals the surveillance machinery used to keep tabs on an unassuming populace. Then, sitting in her cell, before her banishment into the mysterious outside world — a supposed death sentence — Bernard tries to convince Juliette (and himself) that his authoritarian actions were for the good of all.“To me, that was a really important scene,” said the series creator and showrunner, Graham Yost (“Justified”). “It’s not easy being Bernard. You get the sense that this guy who we’ve come to believe is stone evil is someone who has his own burden. You realize he has the worst job in the Silo.”That word, “Silo,” refers both to the enormous subterranean city that shelters 10,000 people and to the practice of information siloing: filtering data through narrow, manipulative networks. Those living in the Silo — this one, at least — believe themselves to be the last people on Earth, having been convinced that life is impossible in the wasteland outside.The echo chamber is carefully monitored by Bernard’s I.T. team, themselves unaware of the extent of the lies told on the screens inside the Silo. While the image everyone sees is of a gray and toxic world inhospitable to life, a contraband version shows blue skies and green trees — supposedly evidence of the Silo leadership’s manipulation. Which is the true depiction of the world?When Juliette is cast out by Bernard in the finale, she sees the ugly truth: The outside is, in fact, desolate and poisonous. She also discovers that there are many more Silos beyond her own. But unlike her doomed predecessors — Sheriff Holston Becker (David Oyelowo) and his wife, Allison (Rashida Jones) — Juliette survives because of the spacesuit-sealing power of the superior heat tape supplied by her pals in the lower reaches of the Silo, the subject of a running subplot.“At its heart, this is a mystery show,” Yost said. “You’re trying to find out what the hell happened to force people to live underground, when it will be safe to go out, what’s going on and why.”In an interview last month, Yost was careful not to spoil the many mysteries, though curious viewers can find answers in the Hugh Howey novels that form the basis of the series. (Howey himself makes a brief crowd-scene cameo in the finale.)“At its heart, this is a mystery show,” said Graham Yost, left, with the author Hugh Howey.Apple TV+As for what the future holds for “Silo,” Yost said he has a four-season plan to cover the three books in the series so far: “Wool,” “Shift” and “Dust.” (Howey has said he is writing more “Silo” novels.) The second season is currently in production in England, but Apple TV+ has yet to announce further seasons.Speaking by phone while on vacation in Newfoundland, Yost discussed his “Silo” game plan, a useful note from Apple and the continuing Writers Guild of America strike. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Many television writers aren’t talking about their series right now, why are you doing so? And how does the strike affect your plans for Season 2?I’m on strike. But I ran this interview by the W.G.A., and I think it’s OK. We’ll see if I get yelled at. It’s a weird time. I did stop all producing activities as requested by the Guild, and I declined promotional stuff leading up to the launch of the show. Now it’s a month-and-a-half later, and if I get a chance to talk about the strike, I’m happy to do it.The reality is, we had to get started on Season 2 a long time before we would announce it. I imagine that if the show had done terribly, they might have pulled the plug. But scenes are being filmed in England as we speak because all the scripts were written for Season 2 long ago, and we did a mad dash before the strike to make sure we’d answered the actors’ and directors’ notes as best we could.In Howey’s first book, we learn early on that the greenery screen is a virtual reality simulation, but we don’t find that out in the show until the finale.At the end of the written story, when Holston takes off his helmet, he sees that the world is dead and that the display in the helmet is a lie, while the display on the screen in the Silo is actually telling the truth. That’s a really nice flip; that’s one of the things that hooked me on this. But we decided let’s hold off.Why?Frankly, that was a note from Apple. They said: “What if we don’t find that out until the end of the season? Let’s see how that feels.” The great thing is, when you write the scripts, you can read them all and go: “Yeah. Let’s hold off on that.” We could have gotten to the finale and said, “No, let’s not reveal it this season.” But we wanted to.Even before we brought the writers’ room together, we knew that Juliette going outside was a great end of the season. Then we went back and forth on how much to reveal. Do we reveal the other Silo berms, or do we hold off? In this instance, we wanted to reveal that the world really is dead out there. The stuff that Holston saw, the stuff that Juliette sees — it’s not true. It’s an augmented reality.We also wanted to add another big question with the additional Silos, which was something like the hatch in “Lost”: What does all this mean? That feels like a great thing to kick off another season.Juliette (Ferguson) spends much of the first season antagonizing powerful figures in the Silo and is eventually forced to leave.Apple TV+Now that you’ve established the world of the show, will there be more room for the story to breathe in Season 2? Perhaps more flashbacks, as in the second book?When I pitched Season 2, we thought we were going to be telling more of the deep back story than we are actually going to. It does appear, but I don’t want to say anything more about it. You have to put on the brakes and go, No, the audience isn’t going to enjoy that. They want to be able to focus on solving one big chunk of mystery at a time.The show is loosely blocked out for four seasons. I suppose there’s a world where we get into the fourth season and go, “Man, we’re going to need two more seasons,” but I honestly can’t see that happening now. We’re so far into it. We looked for things in the books like, “Wow, this would be a great end of Season 2”; “This would be a great end of Season 3”; “This is how the series should end”; and then worked backward from that.The story seems to be nervous about technology in general: I.T. is used for surveillance and manipulation, and even some of the “relics,” which seem initially like important clues, end up being misleading.Ultimately, be very afraid of technology. This is a cautionary tale: What happened to the world? Was it nuclear? Was it a disease? Was it A.I.?And that brings us back to the writers’ strike. A.I. was not a high priority on our agenda last year but then ChatGPT came out, and it was like, Oh my lord. It’s not great, but it can learn. We’ve got to figure this out, because A.I. is not the demon. It’s how you use it.If a studio or network wants to have A.I. write scripts and then just have one writer clean them up, I don’t think that would be good. And it’s not just because we’re afraid of being out of work: It’s also that we love the medium we work in. We want it to stay vital, humane, human, clever and groundbreaking. It would be a terrible shame if stuff was just churned out because A.I. is a cheaper way to do it: “We don’t need the writers. We don’t need the directors. And we can use digi-models of the actors, too.” That might cost $1.98, but what would it do for the human spirit? More

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    School Plays Are the Latest Cultural Battleground

    At a time when lawmakers and parents are seeking to restrict what can and cannot be taught in classrooms, many teachers are seeing efforts to limit what can be staged in their auditoriums.Stevie Ray Dallimore, an actor and teacher, had been running the theater program for a private boys’ school in Chattanooga for a decade, but he never faced a school year like this one.A proposed production of “She Kills Monsters” at a neighboring girls’ school that would have included his students was rejected for gay content, he said. A “Shakespeare in Love” at the girls’ school that would have featured his boys was rejected because of cross-dressing. His school’s production of “Three Sisters,” the Chekhov classic, was rejected because it deals with adultery and there were concerns that some boys might play women, as they had in the past, he said.School plays — long an important element of arts education and a formative experience for creative adolescents — have become the latest battleground at a moment when America’s political and cultural divisions have led to a spike in book bans, conflicts over how race and sexuality are taught in schools, and efforts by some politicians to restrict drag performances and transgender health care for children and teenagers.For decades student productions have faced scrutiny over whether they are age-appropriate, and more recently left-leaning students and parents have pushed back against many shows over how they portray women and people of color. The latest wave of objections is coming largely from right-leaning parents and school officials.Stevie Ray Dallimore taught theater for a decade at a private boys’ school in Chattanooga, Tenn. After a year of tensions over the content of plays, the school eliminated his position.Greg Kahn for The New York TimesThe final act in Dallimore’s yearlong drama in Chattanooga? He learned that his position at McCallie School, along with that of his counterpart at the nearby Girls Preparatory School, was being eliminated. They were invited to apply for a single new position overseeing theater at both schools; both educators are now out of the jobs.“This is obviously a countrywide issue that we are a small part of,” Dallimore said. “It’s definitely part of a bigger movement — a strongly concerted effort of politics and religion going hand in hand, banning books and trying to erase history and villainizing otherness.”A McCallie spokeswoman, Jamie Baker, acknowledged that the two school theater positions had been eliminated so the programs could be combined but said that “implying or asserting in any way that the contract of McCallie’s theater director was not renewed because of content concerns would be inaccurate.” She noted that the school has a “Judeo-Christian heritage and commitment to Christian principles,” and added, “That we would and will continue to make decisions aligned with these commitments should be no surprise to anyone.”Drama teachers around the country say they are facing growing scrutiny of their show selections, and that titles that were acceptable just a few years ago can no longer be staged in some districts. The Educational Theater Association released a survey of teachers last month that found that 67 percent say censorship concerns are influencing their selections for the upcoming school year.“The Prom,” which opened on Broadway in 2018, has a school edition for use by students, but some schools are unwilling to produce it because the protagonist is a lesbian.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn emails and phone calls over the last several weeks, teachers and parents cited a litany of examples. From the right there have been objections to homosexuality in the musical “The Prom” and the play “Almost, Maine” and other oft-staged shows; from the left there have been concerns about depictions of race in “South Pacific” and “Thoroughly Modern Millie” and gender in “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” and “Bye Bye Birdie” and “Grease.” And at individual schools there have been any number of unexpected complaints, about the presence of bullying in “Mean Girls” and the absence of white characters in “Fences,” about the words “damn” (in “Oklahoma”) and “bastards” (in “Newsies”) and “God” (in “The Little Mermaid”).Challenges to school productions, teachers say, carry far more weight than they once did because of the polarized political climate and the amplifying power of social media.“We’re seeing a lot of teachers self-censoring,” said Jennifer Katona, the executive director of the Educational Theater Association, an organization of theater teachers. “Even if it’s just a bunch of girls dressed as ‘Newsies’ boys, which would not have been a big deal a few years ago, that’s now a big deal.”Teachers now find themselves desperately looking for titles that are somehow both relevant to today’s teenagers and unlikely to land them in trouble.“There’s a lot of not wanting any controversy of any kind,” said Chris Hamilton, the drama director at a high school in Kennewick, Wash. Hamilton said this past year was the first time, in 10 years of teaching, that a play he proposed was banned by school administrators: “She Kills Monsters,” a comedy about a teenager who finds solace in Dungeons & Dragons that is the seventh most popular school play in the country, and which features gay characters. “The level of scrutiny has grown,” Hamilton said.Around the country, in blue states as well as red, theater teachers say it has become increasingly difficult to find plays and musicals that will escape the kind of criticism that, they fear, could cost them their jobs or result in a cutback in funding. “People are losing their jobs for booking the wrong musical,” said Ralph Sevush, the executive director of business affairs at the Dramatists Guild of America.“A polarized society is fighting out the culture wars in high schools,” he added.Stephen Gregg, a longtime playwright in the school market, said removing gay characters from plays, as he has been asked to do, “sends a terrible message.”Alex Welsh for The New York TimesStephen Gregg, a playwright who has successfully been writing for high school students for three decades, said he was startled this year when his publishing house forwarded him an email seeking “major edits” to his science fiction comedy “Crush,” seeking to replace an anecdote about a gay couple with a straight one and explaining, “As we are a public school in Florida, we can’t have gay characters.”Gregg turned down the request, thinking, he said, that “you probably have gay kids in your theater program, and it sends a terrible message to them.”Several school productions made news this year when they were canceled over content concerns. In Florida’s Duval County, a production of “Indecent” was killed because of its lesbian love story. In Pennsylvania, the North Lebanon School District barred “The Addams Family,” the most popular school musical in the country, citing its dark themes.“There was a very clear streak of teacher cancellations this whole school year, and it is happening in parallel to, and related to, the efforts to ban books,” said Jonathan Friedman, the director of free expression and education programs at PEN America. “Sometimes it affects plays in production, and sometimes it affects the approval of plays in the future. The whole climate is impacted.”Some productions have overcome objections. In New Jersey, Cedar Grove High School canceled a production of “The Prom,” a musical whose protagonist is a lesbian, but then relented and staged it after public pressure. In Indiana, after Carroll High School in Fort Wayne canceled a production of “Marian, or The True Tale of Robin Hood,” which is marketed as “a gender-bending, patriarchy-smashing, hilarious new take on the classic tale,” students staged it anyway at a local outdoor theater.A Florida school district canceled a production of “Indecent,” shown here on Broadway in 2018, because it concerns a lesbian love affair.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAutumn Gonzales, a teacher at Scappoose High School in Oregon, faced objections over a production of “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” a musical that has a character with two gay dads. She stuck with it — the show had been chosen by her students — and the production was allowed to proceed. But she is being extra cautious about next year. When her students expressed an interest in “Heathers,” which has suicide themes, she told them, “That is not going to happen.”“I’ve always tried to go for a middle ground,” she said.“We’re not going to do ‘Spring Awakening,’” she said, referring to the 2006 musical about young people and sexuality. “This just isn’t the community for that. But I’m also not going to deny the existence of gay people — that’s not any good for my student actors. I’m not going to be inflammatory for art’s sake, but I’m also not going to shy away from deeper messages.”The constraints, advocates say, are having an effect on the education of future artists and audience members.“Students deserve to have the opportunity to be exposed to a wide variety of work, not only the safest, most benign, most family-friendly material,” said Howard Sherman, the managing director of New York’s Baruch Performing Arts Center, who has been tracking the issue for years.In some areas, the contested plays cannot even be read: In Kansas, the Lansing school board, responding to objections from a parent, barred high school students from reading “The Laramie Project,” a widely staged and taught play about the murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay student in Wyoming.“Every year there have been a few schools that have banned a production, but this is the first time the play has been banned from being read,” said the play’s lead author, Moisés Kaufman, whose theater company offered to send its script to any Lansing student who asked. “I don’t want to be an alarmist, but it is alarming.” More