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    Ukrainian Children Bring a Play From a Bomb Shelter to Brooklyn

    The group recently arrived in New York to perform “Mom on Skype,” first staged in April in Lviv, at the Irondale Center this weekend.In a converted Sunday school space in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn on Monday, eight children, who recently arrived from Ukraine, gathered on a pair of risers and broke into song.Hanna Oneshchak, 12, on the accordion, accompanied the other seven as they sang a Ukrainian folk song, “Ta nema toho Mykyty,” about a man who decides to leave the country to seek better work, but then looks to the mountains and, struck by their beauty, changes his mind.“Whatever the grief we have,” they sang in Ukrainian, “I won’t go to the American land.”The children, students at the School of Open-Minded Kids Studio Theater in Lviv, were rehearsing the song ahead of two weekend performances of the play “Mama Po Skaipu” (“Mom on Skype”) at the Irondale Center in Brooklyn. This will be the American premiere of the 80-minute show, being presented on Saturday and Sunday night.“We share our emotions with Americans,” Anastasiia Mysiuha, 14, said of the group’s play.Calla Kessler for The New York Times“We share our emotions with Americans,” Anastasiia Mysiuha, 14, said in English. And, she said, she hopes that audience members will “better understand what’s happening in Ukraine.”The show, which will be performed in Ukrainian with English subtitles, is a series of seven monologues about family separation told from the perspective of children. Written by contemporary writers from Lviv, the true stories were inspired by the mass exodus from Ukraine in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union. At that time, many men and women went to other countries to work so they could provide for their families back home.“Mom on Skype” was first staged in a warehouse-turned-bomb shelter in Lviv, in western Ukraine, in April, just two months after the Russian invasion began. There it was directed by an arts teacher turned active-duty Ukrainian soldier, Oleg Oneshchak, who is the father of two of the children in the play: Hanna and Oleksii, 7. It was one of the few cultural events to take place in Ukraine at that time.“Lots of people were crying when we did it in Ukraine,” said Khrystyna Hniedko, 14, one of the performers.Now, the children, ages 7 to 14, are performing for audiences in Brooklyn this weekend.The idea for the visit came about when Jim Niesen, artistic director of the Irondale Center, the home of the nonprofit Irondale Ensemble Project theater company, saw a photo essay in The New York Times in late April about the performance in Ukraine.“I was so inspired by them,” Niesen said in an interview at the theater this week. “There was this horrific war going on, and here they were, doing a play.”He and the theater’s executive director, Terry Greiss, tracked down Oneshchak on Facebook Messenger and proposed an idea: Would he and the children consider bringing the show to Brooklyn?The students, from left: Sofiia Goy, Marharyta Kuzma, Khrystyna Hniedko, Anastasiia Mysiuha (foreground center), Nikol Bodiuk, Valeriia Khozhempa, and the siblings Hanna Oneshchak and Oleksii Oneshchak (seated).Calla Kessler for The New York TimesOneshchak, the children and their families were all enthusiastic about the idea, and Greiss and the team at Irondale began raising money to pay for travel and accommodation costs — the total bill for the monthlong stay for the eight children and their three chaperones, which will also take them to Connecticut and Massachusetts, is around $40,000, he said. (Oleg Oneshchak wasn’t able to make the trip, but his wife, Mariia Oneshchak, who is also an actor and educator at the theater program, was.)A majority of the group’s meals have been donated, and many of them are staying in the homes of Irondale board members and others. The offices of Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries also helped the group book visa appointments, which are difficult to secure because so many people are trying to leave Ukraine, ahead of their arrival on July 22.The generosity of other donors meant that the itinerary for the trip quickly ballooned to include a weeklong performing arts summer camp in Connecticut, where the children taught American campers three Ukrainian folk songs; an outing to see “The Lion King” on Broadway; visits to the Guggenheim Museum and Coney Island; a Russ & Daughters bagel factory tour; and a private tour of the Statue of Liberty.When we spoke at Monday’s rehearsal, Valeriia Khozhempa, 12, said she had been immediately struck by one thing: the absence of air-raid sirens.“It’s a really beautiful life,” she said. “In Ukraine, there are so many air alarms.”There was also a humorous attribute, Khrystyna said: American politeness. “People always say ‘Sorry’ and ‘Excuse me,’” she said. “It’s surprising because everyone is really polite.”Hanna Oneshchak, left, and Nikol Bodiuk in Brooklyn.Calla Kessler for The New York TimesThe children began working on the show in January before being forced to halt rehearsals when Russia invaded Ukraine. Even though the play was originally about stories from the 1990s, families are being separated again because men are fighting in the war. (Most Ukrainian men ages 18 to 60 — of conscription age — are not allowed to leave the country.)The theme of each of the show’s monologues is that parents do not realize how detrimental their decisions, even if financially prudent, can be to their children’s happiness. “Money can never compensate you for losing your connection to the people you love,” a character says in one of the stories, titled “Through the Eyes of Children.”All of the children are anxious about whether American audience members will understand their message, because of the language barrier and having to read subtitles.“I know it will be hard,” Anastasiia said. “But if they will come, I hope they will try to understand.”All of the proceeds from this weekend’s shows — as well as performances in Hartford, Conn., and Boston next week — will go toward a fighter jet that the group hopes to help purchase for the Ukrainian military. (A used jet costs approximately $1 million, Oleg Oneshchak said.)Hanna Oneshchak, who sings a patriotic Ukrainian song she wrote, said she hoped the audience would see not just the play, but the underlying message about the war that the performers embody.“The world sees this like a film,” she said. “I want them to remember us.” More

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    Anne Heche Is Brain-Dead After Crash, Representative Says

    The actress, 53, was being kept on life support while it was being determined if her organs could be donated, the representative said.The actress Anne Heche, who had been in a coma since a car crash last week, has been declared brain-dead and is being kept on life-support to see if her organs are viable for donation, one of her representatives said Friday.Ms. Heche, 53, was critically injured on Aug. 5 when she crashed the Mini Cooper she was driving into a home in the Mar Vista neighborhood of Los Angeles, the authorities said. She sustained a severe anoxic brain injury and was being treated at the Grossman Burn Center at West Hills Hospital, according to a statement released on behalf of her family and friends Thursday night.“It has long been her choice to donate her organs and she is being kept on life support to determine if any are viable,” the statement said.The declaration of brain death had come Thursday night but “her heart is still beating” on life support, the representative, Holly Baird, said Friday. The search for possible organ recipients could take a few days, even as Ms. Heche’s family and friends put out statements of grief.“Today we lost a bright light, a kind and most joyful soul, a loving mother, and a loyal friend,” her friends and family said in a statement released by Ms. Baird. “Anne will be deeply missed but she lives on through her beautiful sons, her iconic body of work, and her passionate advocacy.”The crash started a fire that took 59 firefighters more than an hour to extinguish, the Los Angeles Fire Department said. Ms. Heche was the only person in the car, the authorities said.Jeff Lee, a public information officer with the Los Angeles Police, said an initial blood sample drawn from Ms. Heche at the hospital had revealed “the presence of drugs” but did not say what kind. He said a second test was needed to rule out any substances administered by hospital staff but those results could take “weeks.”In 1991, Ms. Heche won a Daytime Emmy Award for outstanding younger actress in a drama series, for playing good and evil twins on the NBC soap opera “Another World.”She starred in several popular Hollywood films in the late 1990s, including “Donnie Brasco,” “Wag the Dog” and “Six Days Seven Nights.” She continued to have television roles, including on “Men in Trees” in 2006 and “Hung” in 2009, and performed on Broadway, starring in “Proof” in 2002 and “Twentieth Century” in 2004, for which she received a Tony nomination.In his review of “Twentieth Century,” Ben Brantley of The Times wrote of Ms. Heche’s portrayal of Lily Garland, “Her posture melting between serpentine seductiveness and a street fighter’s aggressiveness, her voice shifting between supper-club velvet and dime store vinyl, Ms. Heche summons an entire gallery of studio-made sirens from the Depression era: Jean Harlow, the pre-mummified Joan Crawford and, yes, Carole Lombard, who famously portrayed Lily in Howard Hawks’s screen version of ‘Twentieth Century.’”She has several projects that are in postproduction, according to IMDb, including “Supercell,” a movie with Alec Baldwin, and the HBO show “The Idol.” She had recently finished filming on “Girl in Room 13,” a Lifetime movie that is scheduled to premiere in September, Variety reported.Vimal Patel More

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    ‘A Little Night Music’ Review: A Rueful Take at Barrington Stage

    Barrington Stage Company offers a take on the Sondheim-Wheeler classic highlighted by performances in shades of regret.PITTSFIELD, Mass. — I thought I’d seen everything you could do with “A Little Night Music,” the nearly unimprovable 1973 musical by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler. But Barrington Stage Company’s bittersweet revival, which opened here on Wednesday, ends the first act with an especially deft touch. As the principals step forward for the final chorus of “A Weekend in the Country,” envisioning their upcoming visit to a grand estate, each carries a revealing and slightly absurd item of personal luggage.Count Carl-Magnus Malcom, a military peacock, has a gigantic hunting bow slung over his shoulder, the better to stalk game or romantic rivals. Anne Egerman, an 18-year-old virgin married to Fredrik, a stuffy middle-aged widower, totes a bird cage. (She’s the canary.) Fredrik’s son, Henrik, struggling to reconcile his seminary ethics with his hots for his stepmom, clutches a prayer book. And Fredrik himself, perhaps not realizing he’s bringing skoals to Newcastle, bears a neatly wrapped and ribboned bottle of champagne.“A Little Night Music” is like that champagne; when the original Broadway production opened, Clive Barnes, in The Times, called it Dom Pérignon. Bubbly it certainly is, especially Wheeler’s ingenious book, based on the 1955 Ingmar Bergman movie “Smiles of a Summer Night.” Henrik loves Anne; Anne won’t sleep with Fredrik; Fredrik longs for the actress Desiree Armfeldt; Desiree is kept by the jealous count; the count’s wife, Charlotte, is desperate for his attention — round it goes.And even though the stage is set for what could be a tragedy (guns do come out), when they all meet for that weekend at the manse of Desiree’s mother, it ends as happily as a Shakespeare comedy — on the surface. The mismatched and damaged souls get repaired, in both senses of the word.Despite that effervescence, though, “A Little Night Music,” in any half decent production, is also about rue. That’s even more salient in this first year following the death of Sondheim, who layered its brilliant songs so densely with varieties of regret. We feel that regret doubly now; for the characters no less than for us, pleasure is always coupled with loss.So perhaps it’s no surprise that this Barrington Stage production, directed by Julianne Boyd, gets the rue so right. Especially in the performances of three of its central women, mixed emotion is always palpable. As the embittered Charlotte, Sierra Boggess offers a sad and hilarious sketch of a wife so steeped in the brine of her own disappointment that she actually looks pickled. And Madame Armfeldt, Desiree’s imperious mother, is no senile narcissist in Mary Beth Peil’s vivid performance; she’s a woman clinging as hard as she can, in her final days, to the thrill of a fully lived past.But it’s Emily Skinner as Desiree, the focus of the complex romantic geometry, who most powerfully holds the show’s opposing forces in equilibrium and produces its warmest glow. She’s funny, of course; the scene in which she welcomes Fredrik (Jason Danieley) to her apartment after a performance and, despite his paeans to Anne, consents to revive their long-ago liaison — “What are old friends for?” — is a model of perfectly played situational humor.Later, though, the humor deepens. Near the end of the weekend, when Desiree realizes that her last-ditch dream of getting Fredrik back for good has failed, Skinner offers a reading of the show’s big hit, “Send in the Clowns,” that, aside from being wonderfully sung, is as layered as a lasagna. Beneath her good-sport bravado is anger — at Fredrik, to be sure, for still being “in midair” when she’s “at last on the ground.” But beneath that is something unexpected and even richer: anger at herself for having failed to care in time about the squalid carelessness of a tossed-off, footloose life.Vocally, the production is exceptional, with Danieley a standout among singers including Cooper Grodin as the count, Sabina Collazo as Anne and Sophie Mings as Anne’s randy maid Petra. (She scores big with “The Miller’s Son” — a showstopper but, given to a minor character, perhaps the work’s one misstep.) Every word sung is perfectly clear (the sound is by Leon Rothenberg), and the ensemble moments are gorgeous, almost overwhelming in the relatively intimate theater.Still, on opening night, there was much that needed fine-tuning. Lighting cues went awry, scene changes were erratically paced, wet clothes didn’t drip and a shattered glass produced no sound. More substantially, the men were not yet digging as deep as the women. Danieley’s Fredrik, not stiff enough at the start, has little to unravel as the evening’s profound events bear down. And Noah Wolfe’s Henrik is so floridly agonized that it’s hard to see how his profoundness may yet be appealing.A weekend in the country, with, from left, Sierra Boggess, Cooper Grodin, Jason Danieley, Sabina Collazo, Noah Wolfe and Sophie Mings. Daniel RaderSuch problems will most likely take care of themselves before the show closes on Aug. 28. There’s nothing to be done, though, about the weak-tea watercolor set by Yoon Bae and the odd costumes by Sara Jean Tosetti. (For “Send in the Clowns,” Skinner wears a gold brocade gown with lamé sleeves that looks more like a 1970s Vegas castoff than Sweden in 1900.) And though the reduction of Jonathan Tunick’s original sumptuous orchestrations to a string quartet, two keyboards and one overtaxed reed player is sufficient to support the show’s more intimate moments, the high-spirited ones lack their Straussian oomph.These are among the costs of putting on a very ambitious show at a regional theater without big Broadway money behind it. In that sense, they may be not just the costs but also the glory. It is, after all, no small thing to be able to see such worthy productions — and I’ve seen many here over the years — in a ragged, deindustrialized city like this one. It’s crucial to the culture that complex work be performed creditably at every level, and crucial to the local economy too. Barrington Stage appears to be one of Pittsfield’s most successful concerns.For that, you have to thank Boyd, who along with Susan Sperber established the company in 1995 and will retire as its artistic director at the end of this season. (Alan Paul takes over in October.) Having directed “A Little Night Music” once before, in 1998, when the company performed in the auditorium of a high school arts center in nearby Sheffield, she knows all about its mixed emotions: how the promise of growth and the acceptance of limitation are often the same thing. That’s the gift she brings to the stage at the end of Act I — just as she has brought it, for 28 seasons, to us in audience.A Little Night MusicThrough Aug. 28 at the Boyd-Quinson Stage, Pittsfield, Mass.; barringtonstageco.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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    Dolly Alderton’s ‘Everything I Know About Love’ Is Adapted for TV

    The writer has turned her memoir, “Everything I Know About Love,” into a TV show, which plots its central friendship like a grand love story.LONDON — Dolly Alderton peered through the window of her old house in Camden Town, squinting to see inside the kitchen. She had last visited the tree-lined street in London the year before, “with my mates when we were drunk,” she said. When she asked the current tenants if she could look inside, “they said, ‘Did you write a book about living here?’” she recalled. It was, apparently, the first thing the landlord mentioned when advertising the property.On that visit, the 33-year-old writer had been in the midst of turning that memoir, “Everything I Know About Love,” into a TV show, which premieres in the United States on Peacock on Aug. 25. Both iterations are set in this area of North London — known for its rich rock ’n’ roll history and graffitied canal — where Alderton lived for almost 10 years, and which she jokingly described as “the second-most visited tourist destination in London after Buckingham Palace.”During that decade, Alderton worked as a story producer on the British reality TV show “Made in Chelsea,” wrote a dating column and created a hit podcast, “The High Low,” with the journalist Pandora Sykes. But what defined the period for Alderton was being single, in her 20s and living with friends.When it came to adapting her memoir for the screen, Alderton realized that readers connected with how she had framed her relationship with Farly Kleiner, her childhood best friend, as “epic and grand and romantic” — a love story. In the series, the two are fictionalized as Maggie (Emma Appleton) and Birdy (Bel Powley). With the show’s “ups and downs, tensions and silliness, surprise and excitement,” Alderton said, the seven episodes plot the narrative arc of their relationship like a romantic comedy.Alderton said that she saw Maggie, played by Emma Appleton in the show, “as someone who is 10 tracing paper copies away from me.”Matt Squire/PeacockMaggie’s more sensible best friend, C is based on Farly Kleiner, Alderton’s own childhood best friend.Matt Squire/PeacockWorking Title Films, which made rom-coms like “Notting Hill,” “Bridget Jones’s Diary” and “Love Actually” — acquired the film and TV rights for the memoir in 2017, when the book was still at the proposal stage.Eric Fellner, the production company’s co-chairman, also optioned “Bridget Jones” from Helen Fielding’s book. When he read “Everything I Know About Love,” he “thought, this writer has got a similar connection to an audience that Helen Fielding had all those years ago,” he said in a recent phone interview, “and maybe this is the millennial version.” Both writers, he added, “can look at their generation in a brilliantly humorous way.”At a cafe in Primrose Hill, Alderton said that for her generation, “sincerity has become unfashionable” and that coming of age in the 2010s meant growing up in “a very cynical time.” It is against this backdrop that “Everything I Know About Love” is set, in 2012 — “literally the year Camden stopped being cool,” Alderton added. ‌Rebecca Lucy Taylor, better known as the pop star Self Esteem, was in an indie band at that time. She contributed three songs to the show’s soundtrack, and said the episodes were “so evocative of the ever-competitive alt scene, where everyone is trying to seem like they’re not trying.”Birdy, Maggie and their two housemates, Amara (Aliyah Odoffin) and Nell (Marli Siu), are all “provincial or suburban” and “on the fringes of everything — in not a good way,” Alderton said. When they arrive in Camden, all four are ravenous for some big city experience.This lack of urban initiation is what distinguishes Alderton’s characters from their more aspirational forebears in shows like “Sex and the City” and even “Girls.” Alderton once pined for the glamour of the big city, too, she said. She grew up in Stanmore, a “comfortable” and “beige-carpeted” suburb of North London, she said, where “the buses are slow and infrequent.” As children, she and Kleiner would circle a single cul-de-sac on their scooters, and wander around the shopping mall without ever buying anything. “All we did was talk and dream,” Alderton said, adding that the lack of stimuli gave her brain “an Olympic workout for imagination.”Alderton spent nearly a decade living in the Camden area of London, a period she turned into a best-selling memoir.Ellie Smith for The New York TimesNow, Alderton is one of Britain’s best-known millennial writers. Between her memoir, podcast, a recent novel and her gig as an agony aunt for a British newspaper, many young British women see her as the trusted voice of a close friend.“There’s always women running up to her wanting to talk to her,” said Cherish Shirley, a writer and story consultant on “Everything I Know About Love.” Most days, Alderton said, she meets “amazing, generous, lovely girls” in bars, bookstores or bathrooms who want to talk. “Because I opened up a channel of communication,” she said, “they speak very intimately back to me.”But after the paperback edition of “Everything I Know About Love” came out in 2019, the amount of attention began to feel “unmanageable,” she said. Alderton moved back to her parents’ house for six weeks to spend some time being “really small and really quiet and really hidden away,” she said.For the first time in her career, she also began putting more distance between herself and her work. In adapting her memoir for television, she said she chiseled the show’s protagonist into a character who was less self-aware, and less precocious, than herself.“I see Maggie as someone who is 10 tracing paper copies away from me,” Alderton said. Another divergence from the book is the addition of characters of color, including Amara, a Black British dancer. “Criticism of the book — that I fully accept — is that it was very white,” she said. This was another reason she made the show “semi-fictional,” she said, and Shirley added that Alderton was intentional in bringing together “a mixed group of women from all sorts of backgrounds” to form the show’s writers room, and fill out its world with authentic, diverse characters.Clockwise from left, Birdy (Powley), Amara (Aliyah Odoffin), Nell (Marli Siu) and Maggie (Appleton) in their shared kitchen during a scene from the show.Matt Squire/PeacockIn March, three months before the show premiered on the BBC in Britain, Alderton had “a big wobble” about being thrust into the spotlight again, she said. Surian Fletcher-Jones, an executive producer on the show, instructed her to get “match fit.” Alderton said she stopped drinking for a while, and also started a course of cognitive behavioral therapy, billing the sessions to the production.Simon Maloney, a producer who also worked on Michaela Coel’s “I May Destroy You,” emphasized the importance of providing support for female showrunners who draw heavily from their personal experiences, Alderton said. “You can’t drag the story out of a woman like that, and then leave her alone,” she remembered him saying.Alderton described herself as “an oversharer,” but these days, she thinks carefully about how that sharing should take place, and posts less on social media. ‌“What I now realize,” she said, “is people don’t need to go into forensic detail of their emotional lives to get people to like, and then relate, to them.”Fellner revealed Alderton had a studio deal for a film adaptation of her fiction debut, “Ghosts.” She is also researching a novel about heartbreak and loss. “The work I do in fiction is still very exposing,” Alderton said, because it continues to reference her life, even if she is no longer the main character.“That’s enough of my heart, and soul, and brain and life spilled out everywhere,” she said.“What I now realize,” Alderton said, “is people don’t need to go into forensic detail of their emotional lives to get people to like, and then relate, to them.”Ellie Smith for The New York Times More

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    What to Do With an Absent Father? Cast Him as a Character Onstage.

    The experimental theater maker Aya Ogawa ponders her distant father as well as failure and forgiveness in “The Nosebleed” at Lincoln Center Theater.The Brooklyn-based experimental theater maker Aya Ogawa hadn’t thought about her father in 10 years. When that fact occurred to her, in 2017 — a decade after his death, which she and her mother had chosen not to mark with a funeral, or even an obituary in the local newspaper in his California town — she didn’t feel guilty about it.It seemed indicative of the remoteness of their relationship, and how painful it had been for her. Yet Ogawa, then in the midst of creating a show called “Failure Sandwich,” did think she had failed somehow as a daughter to him.“He would have wanted to be memorialized,” Ogawa, 48, said one afternoon last week, sitting casually barefoot on the floor of a rehearsal studio upstairs at Lincoln Center Theater. “He would have wanted to be celebrated and acknowledged and all that stuff.”It was too late for her to do anything about the absence that her father had been in her life, even when they shared the same house. The bond they’d never forged would never be. But she could use the tools of her art to imagine an alternate ending to their relationship — a gesture of forgiveness to him, “for not being able to be any other way,” she said, and a gesture of forgiveness to herself as well.And so “Failure Sandwich,” a piece she had been building out of other people’s stories of failure, evolved into her acclaimed play “The Nosebleed,” a kind of mourning ritual in dramatic form, with comedy. After a brief run last fall at Japan Society, it’s back through Aug. 28 at the Claire Tow Theater at LCT3, Lincoln Center Theater’s stage for new works.In “The Nosebleed,” Ogawa portrays her father at various ages as well as her younger son.Julieta Cervantes“The Nosebleed” contemplates what Ogawa describes to the audience as “one of the greatest failures of my life.” That’s not something she had been eager to dissect publicly.“I never wanted to write autobiography,” said Ogawa, who grew up in Japan and the United States and graduated from Columbia University. “I never thought I would be writing about my father. It presents really vulnerable aspects of my life, and, you know, it’s very scary to do that.”With Ogawa portraying her father at various ages and her younger son at age 5, four other actors play prismatic versions of their playwright-director.“It’s a mind trip, you know?” said Drae Campbell, who has worked with Ogawa for 20 years, considers her “like family” and plays the character Aya 4.Ogawa’s unsentimental play eschews bitterness in favor of kindness, humor and emotional complexity. It invites but does not compel audience participation, primarily by asking for a show of hands at questions like “Who here has a father who has died?,” “Who here hates their father?” and — more lightheartedly — “Who here has watched the reality shows ‘The Bachelor’ or ‘The Bachelorette?’”There is also a Japanese Buddhist funeral ritual for Ogawa’s father, in which some spectators may choose to take part, using chopsticks to pick ersatz bone fragments out of his imaginary ashes. The playwright, who watches that scene in character as her father, said it has become for her, unexpectedly, “this incredible, profound, spiritual practice.”“I am seeing the remains of my body come out before me,” she said, “and I’m seeing strangers come up and help me put that body to rest.”To Evan Cabnet, LCT3’s artistic director, Ogawa’s compassion and vulnerability are part of what marks her as “a real outlier” among experimental theater makers.“There are a lot of artists who work in formally experimental modes, and the end result of that work is very often cerebral or intellectual or clever,” he said. “Aya’s work is all of those things, but primarily it leads from the heart. And, I think, from a sense of opening, and from a sense of softness and care.”That might sound like a backhanded compliment, but only if the ideal is tough-guy theater. Which for Ogawa — who uses she/they pronouns and is developing a play about motherhood called “Meat Suit” — it is decidedly not.A major catalyst for “The Nosebleed” was a pan of Ogawa’s 2015 play, “Ludic Proxy,” by the critic Helen Shaw in Time Out New York — a brisk 600-plus words, three of which were fails, failure and failing. To Ogawa, the review was a devastating dismissal that lodged the notion of failure inside her, demanding that she examine it.From left, Haruna Lee, Akiko Aizawa, Eddy Toru Ohno and Dawn Akemi Saito in “Suicide Forest.” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat same year, the experimental playwright Haruna Lee, who uses they/them pronouns, was just out of graduate school at Brooklyn College and seeking a director for their play “Suicide Forest,” which no one who read it seemed to understand. Then they sent it to Ogawa, whom Lee knew only from a distance as “this badass Japanese American director with an asymmetrical haircut and double nose piercings.”Ogawa, who has a considerable track record, too, as a supple translator of Japanese plays, responded with “like 50 questions,” Lee said, and an immediate comprehension of how Japanese and American cultures were “mixing in a very raw way in that play.” The script is also in part autobiographical, about a parent-child relationship.Lee was afraid to perform the central role of a teenage girl, but Ogawa pushed them to do it anyway. Lee acquiesced out of trust, embarking on an exploration that eventually led to Lee coming out as nonbinary. When Ogawa directed the play at the Bushwick Starr in 2019, it was a hit.By then, Lee was also playing one of the Ayas in “The Nosebleed” — something they aren’t doing at Lincoln Center only because it conflicted with joining the writers’ room for Season 2 of the Apple TV+ drama “Pachinko.”Ogawa thinks of “Suicide Forest” and “The Nosebleed” as works that “were kind of percolating in the same brain swamp,” with Lee’s play giving her the courage she needed for her own.Aya Ogawa thinks of “Suicide Forest” and “The Nosebleed” as works that “were kind of percolating in the same brain swamp,” she said.Shina Peng for The New York TimesThe title of “The Nosebleed” comes from Ogawa’s then 5-year-old son, Kenya, waking up in the middle of the night with a bloody nose on a family trip to Japan in 2017. His big brother, Kai, had accidentally punched Kenya in his sleep. But the reason for the title is the metaphor of the child’s blood — the lineage that links Ogawa’s son to her, and to her father. (As a parent, Ogawa’s husband is a stark contrast to her own father: engaged, invested and emotionally present with their children, she said.)She finds it easier to play her child, but not difficult to slip into her father. “I don’t know how to describe what is happening to me,” she said, “except that it kind of does feel like a channeling. And dropping into him somehow, or like my body becomes a vessel for the image that I have of him.”And like every actor who has had to find sympathy for a character in order to play that person, she has had to find a way to understand her father.Her sons are 10 and 12 now, both born after their grandfather died. But on opening night at Lincoln Center last week, she wanted them to take part in the play’s funeral ritual — to be first in line for it, as the closest kin would be in a real funeral.And so they were. Onstage in front of the symbolic cremated remains of their grandfather, they took chopsticks and together helped lay his body to rest.Their mother, in character as an enfeebled old man, watched and felt release — felt absolution. More

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    ‘The Nosebleed’ Review: Reconciling the Ghosts in the Attic

    Aya Ogawa’s memoir-like excavation tests the boundaries of love and family obligation through intimate confession.Do artists owe us the truth? Autobiography is inherently subjective, and colored by creative license. But if it holds up a mirror that reflects everyone in some way, doesn’t that make it true?The playwright and director Aya Ogawa digs so deep into her conscious memory in “The Nosebleed,” which opened Monday at the Claire Tow Theater and had an earlier run last fall at Japan Society, that it’s no wonder someone’s head eventually springs a leak. Conversational, unflinching and delicately layered, Ogawa’s memoir-like excavation tests the boundaries of love and family obligation through intimate confession. But the creator does more than unburden herself of haunting regrets, compelling audiences to detail and release their own. Not everyone will be ready to face what they find.The lights are still up when Ogawa introduces herself, explaining that “The Nosebleed” began as an exploration of failure. Four actors, standing in the aisles of the theater, step to the front one at a time to briefly recount failures of their own. Earlier that day, Ashil Lee was adjusting her mask when it snapped back into her eyes, momentarily blinding her on the street. Drae Campbell, a dog walker by day, once was so distracted by her phone that a rogue dog defecated inside. Memories of these incidents add another dimension of reality to the ensemble’s unaffected performances, establishing everybody onstage as infallible, imperfect and human.That gushing schnoz belongs to Ogawa’s 5-year-old son, screaming in his blood-soaked bed on a family trip to Japan, jet-lagged and delirious. Ogawa plays her own son and father onstage, but cedes the role of herself to a quartet of other actors, an apt embodiment of the multiple instincts and voices that animate a single mind. Aya, the character variously played by the others, has been awake streaming bootleg episodes of “The Bachelorette,” in which a contestant’s estrangement from his father compels her to consider her own. She dragged her kids across the world to connect them to their Japanese heritage, but the real quest seems to be finding her own sense of identity.From left, Lee, Saori Tsukada, Drae Campbell and Kaili Y. Turner.Julieta Cervantes“Why can’t we just be ‘normal’ Americans?” asks one iteration of Aya (Saori Tsukada).“Why can’t we find a place that feels like home and just live there?” pleads another (Kaili Y. Turner), exasperated.This unmoored sense of perpetual in-betweenness will ring familiar to immigrants, their descendants and anyone who has felt caught between cultures. Ogawa’s introspection leads, as so much self-reflection does, back to her parents, and especially to her strained and often wordless relationship with her late father. Finding a sense of home begins by reconciling with the ghosts in the attic.In concept, “The Nosebleed” might have been cloyingly navel gazing were it not conceived with a generosity of perspective and an unpretentious bid for audience engagement. (If there are perhaps too many requests from onstage for a show of hands over the play’s 70 minutes, the sustained exchange at least feels earned.) Some audience members may not want to be confronted with their own private thoughts. But breathing the same air means participating in “The Nosebleed,” even for those who sit quiet and still.There’s a blank canvas quality to Ogawa’s crisp, evocative production that similarly feels like a visual invitation for personal association. The white-walled set by Jian Jung gradually recedes, expanding the depth of field. As the action transitions from almost pageant-like into a communal ritual, even casual movement feels lyrical.If loss is the only true certainty, Ogawa recounts her own in a way that grapples with abiding questions of mortality, forgiveness and self-determination. But as she insists from aching experience, it’s the questions that go unasked that stick with you.The NosebleedThrough Aug. 28 at the Claire Tow Theater, Manhattan; lct.org. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More

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    At Edinburgh’s Festivals, Big Names and Live Issues

    While marquee productions have featured star turns from Ian McKellen and Alan Cumming, smaller shows deal with contemporary life.EDINBURGH — Some big names have been leaving their mark this month in Edinburgh, where both the International Festival and the bustling theatrical grab bag that is the Fringe are in full swing after a slimmed-down pandemic lineup last year. Ian McKellen and Alan Cumming have proved box-office catnip, both of them in dance-intensive enterprises that take already long-established careers in new directions.There is excellence, of course, among the less well-known talent here, too. But there’s no denying the marquee appeal of McKellen, now 83 and pretty much alone among his generation of British actors in still being onstage. (Too many of his onetime colleagues have either retired or died.) Last year, he gave us a limber, age-defiant Hamlet, for an extended run. And this month, he is revisiting that hallowed text, in a 65-minute fusion of dance and theater that is unremarkable but easy on the eye.The performance, devised by McKellen and the Danish choreographer Peter Schaufuss, finds the veteran Shakespearean delivering excerpts from the text in his familiar, deep-voiced rumble; all the other performers are dancers, many from the company of the Edinburgh Festival Ballet, which Schaufuss runs. The approach includes Ophelia (an expressive Katie Rose) swooping to the stage floor in grief, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern hopping briefly into view and the charismatic dancer Johan Christensen whirling in torment as the young Hamlet: He and McKellen offer dual aspects of a split psyche. Luke Schaufuss, the choreographer’s son, completes a central triangle of sorts as a model-handsome Horatio in a decorative outing that is watchable, to be sure, but doesn’t run very deep.Alan Cumming performing an extract from the poetry of Robert Burns in “Burn,” created by Cumming and Steven Hoggett. Jeff J Mitchell/Getty ImagesAlan Cumming, the Tony-winning Scottish actor, gets the stage all to himself in “Burn,” an official Festival entry in conjunction with the National Theater of Scotland that will travel next month to the Joyce Theater in New York. It’s a portrait in words and movement of the 18th-century poet Robert Burns, Scotland’s national bard, whom Cumming and his co-creator, Steven Hoggett, have conceived as a lank-haired, black-clad goth. (The show finished Aug. 10 in Edinburgh and will tour Scotland before its New York run.)And what if Burns was 37 when he died — 20 years younger than Cumming is now? The protean actor brings to this assignment a lithe, sinuous physicality that belies his years, while a digital clock counts down the passage of time in Burns’s too-brief life. The show couples enticing visuals (Tim Lutkin’s lighting is suitably stormy) with a canter through Burns’s verse. We’re left at the end with a sweet recitation from in front of the stage curtain of “Auld Lang Syne,” the traditional New Year’s Eve melody, for which this Scotsman wrote the words.Contemporary themes are being dealt with in Edinburgh, too, even as this year’s celebrity names chose to look toward the past. “Silkworm,” at the Assembly Roxy, tells of a lesbian couple from Nigeria who arrive in Glasgow seeking permanent asylum in Britain. Ewa Dina, left, and Antonia Layiwola in Vlad Butucea’s “Silkworm.” Tommy Ga-Ken WanWritten by Vlad Butucea, a Romanian-born, Glasgow-based dramatist, the play is set 17 floors up in a low-income housing project where, we are told, “You can hear the wallpaper peeling.”Abidemi (a radiant Ewa Dina) is the more expansive of the pair; her partner, Omolade (the intense Antonia Layiwola) is fearful that the authorities won’t recognize the gravity of the women’s plight. That the previous occupants of this same apartment leaped to their deaths amplifies the air of unease: Once their fates are decided, the lovers’ bond gets tested in a slow-burning drama that could be teased out further for greater impact.Calvin (the live-wire Michael Dylan), the gay man at the endearingly manic center of James Ley’s “Wilf,” is in the process of ending a relationship when we first encounter him center stage, chattering away and wearing a Celine Dion T-shirt. His story, he tells us at the start, involves love, loss and the comfort he takes in the car of the title, a used Volkswagen Polo that he has come to cherish as if it were a person. The play is at the Traverse Theater — always a reliable Fringe destination — and directed by Gareth Nicholls, the house’s artistic director.Irene Allan and Michael Dylan in James Ley’s “Wilf,” directed by Gareth Nicholls.Mihaela BodlovicIts good nature proves entirely infectious as Calvin learns to motor his way, literally and metaphorically, through the pain of separation, en route to a possible new start with any of the various men he encounters along the way. Neil John Gibson gives vivid life to a broad array of romantic prospects, and a third performer, Irene Allan, is a hoot as a polyamorous onetime therapist. The play’s sexual candor was something of a surprise at 11 a.m. — performance times vary throughout the run — but “Wilf” is highly engaging whatever the time of day, and very touching, too.The sexual peccadilloes in “Boris the Third,” at the Pleasance Courtyard, belong to Britain’s prime minister. The writer-director Adam Meggido’s overextended comedy puts center stage a teenage Boris Johnson in a production of “Richard III” at Eton, one of Britain’s most elite boarding schools. The troubled show took place — or maybe not, given that Johnson’s father remembers that the actual Shakespeare play was “Richard II” — with a leading man who, in this account anyway, was more intent on bedding two sisters at once than on learning his lines.Meggido’s play tries to connect the conniving if doomed charmer Johnson may once have acted onstage to the modern-day leader who has been repeatedly called out for deceit. While it is worth seeing principally for Harry Kershaw’s pitch-perfect performance in the title role, it still feels like a shaky first draft.From left, Naima Swaleh, Fionn Ó Loingsigh, Anna Healy and Fiona Bell in Sonya Kelly’s “The Last Return,” directed by Sara Joyce.Ste Murray I had a much better time at Sonya Kelly’s wonderful “The Last Return,” the best of the seven shows I attended last weekend. Also at the Traverse, this production by the Druid Theater of Galway, directed by Sara Joyce, gathers a disparate array of characters, all clamoring for entry at any price to the sold-out final performance of a fictitious play.The ebb and flow of the queue is of scant interest to the ticket seller (Anna Healy), who repeats ‌as if ‌by rote that there are no seats left, and the prospective playgoers become increasingly fractious. A disaffected 60-something academic (Bosco Hogan) has tried 36 times to make it through the show but hasn’t managed, because he is incontinent; this performance is his last chance. Among those also jockeying for admission are a battle-scarred American soldier (Fionn Ó Loingsigh) who just wants to rest his feet after the trauma of war and, most memorably, a querulous Scotswoman (Fiona Bell) who offers homemade snacks to the other characters as she angles for a spot at the front.The lineup of hopefuls also includes a mostly silent Somali woman (Naima Swaleh) who has crossed continents, we discover, to get to the theater and whose final gesture ends the play on an unexpectedly touching note. Chaos, “The Last Return” suggests, lies in wait everywhere, but so, too, do humanity and compassion, if we are lucky enough to experience them — and this play.Edinburgh International FestivalThrough Aug. 29 at various venues in Edinburgh; eif.co.uk.Edinburgh Festival FringeThrough Aug. 29 at various venues in Edinburgh; edfringe.com. More

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    Julia Lester on Her ‘More Knowing’ Little Red Riding Hood

    Her bold choices for “Into the Woods” have garnered the 22-year-old actress critical acclaim and a Broadway debut.Conventional wisdom has it that actors should not audition in costume. But Julia Lester did so anyway — fashioning a red cape out of a circle skirt — when she videotaped her audition for the part of Little Red Riding Hood in the Encores! production of “Into the Woods” this spring. Two weeks later — without even a callback — she heard from her agent: “Stephen Sondheim wants you to play Little Red.”Indeed, it was her many bold acting (as well as sartorial) choices for the fabled girl bound for grandmother’s house — her raised eyebrow, brassy willfulness and wry sophistication — that captured the attention of critics in May and catapulted Lester to a Broadway debut at just 22 years old after the show transferred there this summer. (The Broadway run has just been extended through Oct. 16.)“In Lester, we witness a major new comedic talent emerge,” said Johnny Oleksinski in The New York Post. “All her well-known jokes feel fresh, and she is unbelievably funny. My face was a lot red from laughing so hard.”The New York Times called her “pert and twinkling”; The Washington Post, “uber-confident, rough-and-ready”; The Wall Street Journal, “deliciously impish and knowing.”It was her aura of worldliness and tenacity that made the show’s director, Lear deBessonet, so certain in casting Lester. “I knew she was right 10 seconds into her audition video,” deBessonet said. “Having seen a number of Little Reds over the years, any sort of cutesy, girlie, victim thing was totally not of interest to me. As a woman, there are certain things I don’t ever want to see onstage again.“There is a lot of pressure on actors to live through other people’s eyes,” Lester said. “Learning to live unapologetically and as myself has been really important.”Raphael Gaultier for The New York Times“For me, the defining quality of the character is hunger, this delicious power lust which is so refreshing and unexpected,” deBessonet continued. “It was immediate upon seeing Julia. I was like, ‘Yup, well: There she is.’”Sipping water in a theater district hotel before a recent performance, in a braid and Doc Marten lace-up boots, Lester did come across as preternaturally comfortable in her own — admittedly callow — skin.Despite her cherubic face and wide-eyed words about getting to share the stage with so many veterans (including Sara Bareilles, Gavin Creel and Phillipa Soo), Lester talked about how she has grown increasingly self-assured over the last few years.“There is a lot of pressure on actors to live through other people’s eyes,” she said. “Learning to live unapologetically and as myself has been really important for me.“Our whole career is based on what other people think about us,” Lester continued. “It’s quite a struggle to know that other people are silently or non-silently judging you on a daily basis.”If onstage she seems experienced beyond her years, that’s because she is, having performed professionally since she was 5 and just completed her third season as Ashlyn Caswell in the Disney+ series “High School Musical: The Musical: The Series,” the musical drama about high school theater students. (The fourth season starts shooting in Salt Lake City in September.)Lester, at the piano, with Olivia Rodrigo in the TV series “High School Musical: The Musical: The Series.”Fred Hayes/Disney +Show business also runs in Lester’s blood. Her great-grandfather and his siblings were part of a Yiddish opera company in Poland at the turn of the century. Her maternal grandparents, Helen and Peter Mark Richman, met doing summer stock theater. Her mother, Kelly, and father, Loren, continue to perform, as do her two older sisters, Jenny and Lily.“We’re a big performing family,” Lester said. “I can’t stress enough how supportive we all are of each other.”Her version of Take Your Daughter to Work Day was going to the Universal Studios lot and hanging out with her dad on commercial shoots. “I always knew from the second I was born that this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life,” Lester said. “So being able to be surrounded by it on a daily basis, and really learn from my family, is such a blessing.”Born on Jan. 28, 2000, in Los Angeles, Lester had been in productions of “Into the Woods” twice before: first as the cow Milky White in a community theater production when she was in elementary school (her sisters played other parts) and the next time at age 18 as Little Red in a 99-seat theater in Los Angeles.While many actors dread having to try out for parts — given their nerves and the statistical likelihood of rejection — Lester said she loves auditioning.“You’re being given the opportunity to do what you were put on this earth to do,” she said, “which is to perform.”Lester is also personally drawn to the character of Little Red, who, after being rescued from the mouth of the wolf, goes on to carry a knife for protection, to look after Jack (of beanstalk fame) and to grow up before the audience’s eyes. “She is so feisty and so funny,” Lester said. “In a lot of the moments when it’s really high stakes and dark themes are happening, she is a beacon of comedy and light. That’s always really fun — to be able to bring down the house during a quiet, serious moment.”Lester as Little Red Riding Hood and Cole Thompson as Jack in the Broadway revival of “Into the Woods.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWith her performance in this Encores! revival, which originated at New York City Center before moving to the St. James Theater on Broadway, the actress said she “wanted to reinvent the way people see Little Red.”“When I was working on the script, I tried my very best to look at every line that she says, and really think about, ‘What’s the most unexpected way to portray what’s written?’” she said.James Lapine, who wrote the show with Sondheim (who died in November), said it was the first time that he had seen an adult play the part, which its usually played by actors under 18. “She’s bringing something a little punchier to it and more emotional shadings,” he said. “She’s a more knowing Little Red Riding Hood.”The show’s actors say they, too, have been struck by Lester’s sure hand in getting big laughs and by how she brings a modern sensibility to the role without bastardizing it. “She has that radar which the greats have — they know when to put their foot on the brake or the gas,” said Brian d’Arcy James, who plays the Baker, adding that Lester’s interpretation is “totally fresh but also honoring what’s preceded.”Bareilles, who plays the Baker’s Wife, said she had been pleasantly surprised by Lester’s “natural fire” as well as by her palpable respect for the opportunity she had been given, for her fellow performers and for live theater itself. “She feels like an old soul to me,” Bareilles said. “She doesn’t carry any neediness or urgency to get seen. There is a reverence in how she approaches the work.”From left: Sara Bareilles, Brian d’Arcy James, Phillipa Soo and Lester in the show. “She has that radar which the greats have — they know when to put their foot on the brake or the gas,” James said of Lester.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs “a real die-hard theater kid,” Lester said, there is a pinch-yourself quality to what she’s living through, since she long admired from afar the very people she now finds herself performing next to onstage.“I never expected that I would be making my Broadway debut in a Sondheim show, let alone be surrounded by so many people that I’ve grown up loving and watching,” she said, adding, “Every single person has taken me under their wing.”While she is only committed to the show until Sept. 4, Lester said she would love to return to this Broadway production and to see it live on. “I’m sort of hoping for this show to be the new ‘Chicago’ and just be long-running forever and I can come back to it like home base whenever I am available,” she said. “This is definitely a show that I am not ready to say goodbye to anytime soon.”The personal response she has received from members of the audience has been particularly rewarding. Well aware that, as a full-figured young woman, she may not meet the traditional physical definition of an ingénue, Lester said she was gratified that other young women have looked to her as an affirming role model.“It’s taken a second to grow into myself and be comfortable with who I am, but it’s got to start somewhere,” she said. “If someone can say, ‘I see myself in you when you’re playing Little Red’ — when I’m standing on a Broadway stage — that’s exactly why I’m an actor and a performer.”“I’m really grateful to the people who have seen beyond what I look like,” she added, “and seen what I can offer to the world.” More