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    ‘The Inheritance’ Arrives at a Festival of German Drama

    A new production of Matthew López’s seven-hour play was among 10 shows chosen for Theatertreffen, a celebration of the best theater from Germany, Austria and Switzerland.Midway through Matthew López’s “The Inheritance,” a character lashes out at E.M. Forster, the British author of “Howards End,” who appears as a spiritual guru to the play’s protagonists.“Why should we listen to you lecture us about fearlessness and honesty? You were never honest about yourself,” the character screams, excoriating Forster for spending his long life in the closet.When “The Inheritance,” a seven-hour intergenerational saga about gay men in New York, opened in London in 2018, it was praised to the heavens. When the production transferred to Broadway a year later, there was far less critical love.This month, a reprise of the first German production of “The Inheritance” kicked off the annual Theatertreffen, a showcase of the best German-language theater, for which organizers selected “10 remarkable productions” from 461 theatrical premieres in Germany, Austria and Switzerland that debuted last year. The ethics of storytelling and of responsible representation emerged as unofficial themes of the lineup.López’s skill as a dramatist comes through in Hannes Becker’s translation, but the lyricism of his prose less so. Despite the impressive plotting and memorable characters, “The Inheritance” often fizzles during its generous running time. And the play’s cliché-riddled depiction of New York — an entire scene consists of little other than a lesson in how to order correctly at Peter Luger, the celebrated steakhouse — often had this New Yorker rolling his eyes.In the end, the production, which hails from the Residenztheater in Munich, is redeemed by heroic performances from the company’s ensemble. It’s a tough call, but for my money Vincent zur Linden gives the evening’s most indelible turn: Playing both the aspiring actor Adam and the hustler Leo, zur Linden shifts between coyness, arrogance and twitching brokenness. As Eric Glass, the play’s central character, Thiemo Strutzenberger fills a bland role with emotional complexity. And Michael Goldberg, one of the troupe’s older members, inhabits the play’s two mentor-like figures, Forster and Walter Poole, with avuncular gentleness and secret sorrow.Theatertreffen loves a good theatrical marathon, like Frank Castorf’s seven-hour “Faust,” seen here in 2018, or Christopher Rüping’s even longer “Dionysos Stadt” a year later. Yet sheer length does not an epic make. Compared to those gutsy avant-garde extravaganzas, Philip Stölzl’s sleek, handsome production of “The Inheritance” felt tame.“The Bus to Dachau” considers how the Holocaust is depicted in art and how it will be taught and commemorated when no survivors are left.Isabel Machado RiosWhen I returned to the festival several nights later, it was for a production much more in line with the formally daring, conceptually knotty theater more commonly found at Theatertreffen: “The Bus to Dachau,” a coproduction between the Dutch theater collective De Warme Winkel and the Schauspielhaus Bochum theater in western Germany.Subtitled “a 21st century memory play,” this absorbing production takes a singular and idiosyncratic approach to confronting the Holocaust through art, and asks what form commemoration and education will take once all of the survivors are gone.Featuring audience participation and live video — including blue-screen effects and Snapchat filters — the production tackles its weighty themes with an off-kilter mix of irreverence and severity. As the actors feel their way through the material, they explore the moral implications of depicting the Holocaust onscreen and how Germany’s culture of memory can carry a whiff of arrogance and even, perversely, of possessiveness.“The Ego and Its Own” was inspired by an 19th-century paean to radical selfishness by Max Stirner, the German philosopher.Arno DeclairYet while “The Bus to Dachau” found compelling ways to dramatize its risky and sensitive themes, another aesthetically bold production at Theatertreffen was ultimately less successful at bringing unlikely material to the stage.That work, “The Ego and Its Own,” from the Deutsches Theater, was one of two shows on the lineup that originated at Berlin playhouses. (The other was the choreographer Florentina Holzinger’s latest freak-out vaudeville-style revue, “Ophelia’s Got Talent.”)Inspired by an 1844 paean to radical selfishness by the German philosopher Max Stirner, the abstract production finds six actors cavorting on a white spiral ramp that resembles the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. The play’s director, Sebastian Hartmann, a festival favorite, and the composer PC Nackt fashion a musical revue from Stirner’s opus that is equally arresting and bewildering.The actors intone and belt out slogans from the 19th-century text while Nackt and a drummer accompany them with a wild, mostly electronic score. Stark lighting, live video, fog and even 3-D projections contribute to the trippy expressionistic atmosphere. But despite the constant multisensory stimulation and energetic performances, it quickly grows tiresome. It’s a trip, to be sure — but I’m not sure how it illuminates Stirner’s influential and contentious ideas.One of the festival’s closing plays, “Zwiegespräch” by the Nobel Prize-winning author Peter Handke is an emotionally resonant production about intergenerational conflicts.Susanne Hassler-SmithControversy often attends the works Peter Handke, the Austrian who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2019. For many, Handke has been tainted by his sympathy for Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian war criminal. The news of the writer’s Nobel win was met, by some, with disbelief, and his 2020 play “Zdenek Adamec” premiered at the Salzburg Festival under the threat of protest. Still, Handke, now 80, continues to publish and be performed at an impressive clip.His latest text for the stage, “Zwiegespräch,” was published as a book shortly before its world premiere at the Burgtheater in Vienna. The author dedicated the dramatic dialogue to the actors Otto Sander and Bruno Ganz, the stars of the Wim Wenders film “Wings of Desire,” which Handke wrote the screenplay for; much of this brief, poetic text is concerned with the essence of acting and storytelling. There is also a sense of fraught struggles between grandfathers, fathers and sons.At Theaterteffen, “Zwiegespräch” will be performed on Saturday and Sunday as one of the festival’s closing productions. Not long ago, it headlined another one of Germany’s main theater festivals, “Radikal Jung,” at the Volkstheater, in Munich, which is where I caught it last month.The dazzling production, overseen by Rieke Süsskow, a young Berlin-born director, heightens the dialogue’s intergenerational conflicts. She sets her production in a nursing home and distributes Handke’s text to a cast of actors playing frail residents and their sinister caregivers, somehow creating a convincing dramaturgy without clearly differentiated characters or a conventional plot.Much credit is due to her stage designer, Mirjam Stängl, and her ingenious set, a succession of folding panels that expand and contract over the width of the stage like a fan, and Marcus Loran for his hallucinatory lighting design. Thanks to the attentive artistry of Süsskow and her team, Handke’s 60-odd page pamphlet comes to life in an emotionally resonant performance about memory, loss, regret and the nature of art.Separating the art from the artist shouldn’t mean giving artists a free pass. In the context of this sensitively paced and finely wrought production, however, there seemed little doubt that Handke is attuned to the moral responsibilities of storytelling.TheatertreffenThrough May 29 at various venues in Berlin; berlinerfestspiele.de. More

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    He Made a Show About Grief. She Saw Herself in It.

    Audible Theater’s leader and the creator of “Sorry for Your Loss” hope the autobiographical comedy helps others learn to talk about grief.Things are not necessarily as they appear. In Michael Cruz Kayne’s “Sorry for Your Loss,” a comedy show about grief, that is a prominent theme.When the producer Kate Navin caught the show last year at Caveat, a comedy theater on the Lower East Side in New York, she knew the instant he displayed a photo of himself with his wife and two children what he wasn’t telling the audience: that this wasn’t the full picture of his family, that it couldn’t be, because one of his three children had died.“In that moment I felt — I don’t want to use the word ‘seen’ because it can be cliché, but that’s the best word,” Navin said recently at a cafe in Greenwich Village.Her own family photos work the same way. Her first son, Jack, was 2 years and nine months old when he died in a fire with his grandmother, Navin’s mother-in-law, 10 years ago this August. Ask Navin what Jack was like and she’ll tell you he loved the movie “Cars,” prized raspberries above all foods and was remarkably kind — unusual for a toddler, she knows, having had two more.“You’d give him a bowl of raspberries and he’d hand them out to everybody in the room first before he’d start eating,” she said. “That was Jack. He was unbelievable.”Navin was deliberately not going to produce shows about grief when she joined the audio entertainment company Audible in 2017 to head its theater division.But when Daniel Goldstein, a writer-director who is a mutual friend of Navin and Kayne, took her to see “Sorry for Your Loss,” thinking that she might have a professional interest in it, he was correct. She thought the embrace of its humor could help other “lost parents,” as she calls them.Michael Cruz Kayne, pictured with his family in “Sorry for Your Loss,” a comedy show about reckoning with the death of his son.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe show running through June 10 at the Minetta Lane Theater, Audible Theater’s Greenwich Village base, is the latest iteration of “Sorry for Your Loss,” with shinier production values than Kayne, a staff writer on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” is accustomed to having at comedy clubs. Here he ponders the mysteries of permanent absence and lingering presence, and pokes at the culture’s deep discomfort with the inevitability of death and loss.Kayne, who hosts a podcast called “A Good Cry,” performed the first version of “Sorry for Your Loss” not long after a tweet he sent in November 2019, marking the 10th anniversary of the death of his son Fisher, from sepsis at 34 days old.Kayne had grown tired of not talking about that central fact of his life, which he said in a separate interview had become “the elephant in the room of my whole brain.” After the tweet went viral, he took that conversation to the stage, making a funny autobiographical show that allows sadness in.“I’m still at a point with it where I am happy to be identified with the story of my son,” Kayne said. “If that means that for a while, or forever, I am Grief Boy, things could be worse. This subject isn’t the only thing I want to contribute to the universe. But if it stopped here, I would feel like I got to say the thing I really wanted to say most of all.”These were not, by the way, maudlin interviews. But Navin did tear up when she recounted how terrified she had been of grocery shopping after Jack died, because she wouldn’t know what to say if she ran into one of his friends and they asked where he was.In the experience that Kayne articulates in the show, she recognized her own surreal isolation.She wants no one’s pity. But mention a child who died to someone who didn’t know, she said, and the conversation may not recover, because no matter how long ago it happened, people react as if your grief is fresh, and as if you are broken.“The mood shifts,” she said. “And it’s hard to be the person who caused the mood shift.”Kayne and Navin would like people to be less awkward about grief, which would let those who need to talk about it stop keeping it to themselves. “Sorry for Your Loss” provides one space for that.When I asked Kayne if he believes that art can heal, he quoted the W.H. Auden line “poetry makes nothing happen,” which he said he thinks about a lot.“I do think it’s possible for art to at least make you feel like you are not alone,” he allowed. “It’s so much to know that I’m not the only person who feels this way. If that is healing, which I think it is a little, then yes, I think art can heal people.”Navin, for her part, is certain that Kayne has changed her in a way that feels good, making her “less sheepish” about telling people that she has three children, and less worried about people’s reaction.“That’s a huge gift,” she said. “And he just makes me feel less damaged. Truly I feel less damaged than I did a year ago.” More

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    Summerworks Festival Opens With “Work Hard Have Fun Make History”

    Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks festival opener, written by ruth tang, rages against the machines and examines human alienation.Like a dog nosing around in the background, a robot vacuum cleaner is a guaranteed scene stealer. Late in the new play “Work Hard Have Fun Make History,” the unfailingly compelling actor Susannah Perkins shares the stage with one: a whirring black disk busily roaming the industrial carpet, bumbling into walls yet never toppling over edges, at least not the night I saw the show.Perkins plays a phone service representative named Annie, on a call with a frantic customer whose new android assistant, an iWhip 2.0, has turned menacing.“What’s the command to make it go away?” the caller pleads.“‘Blades down, iWhip,’” Annie instructs.Perkins gives the line a perfect comic spin, but our eyes are on Annie’s own insensate labor saver. Unleash a robot and havoc may follow. Wouldn’t that be entertaining?“Work Hard Have Fun Make History,” whose title echoes an Amazon motto, is not at all on the side of the machines, but it is acutely unsettled by their rampancy in our increasingly fractionalized, disembodied culture. Written by ruth tang (who lowercases their name) and directed by Caitlin Sullivan, this is the first production in Clubbed Thumb’s 2023 Summerworks festival, an annual showcase for off-kilter experimentation at the Wild Project in the East Village.There is, unfortunately, a nagging sense that a tumult of tenuously related ideas and a diffuse crowd of characters have overwhelmed this thought-provoking, plot-free comedy, which above all is about human alienation: from the body, from physical presence, from other people.It is about labor, both the kind that brings home paychecks and the kind that brings babies into the world, and about out-of-control greed disguised as genius; thus a couple of amusingly dim tech-bro characters called Jeff (Sagan Chen) and Elon (the performer who goes by b). It is about gender identity, and sex, and coupledom, and the pain of parental rejection. It is about climate change, and artificial intelligence that gets ever smarter while remaining, in elemental ways, extremely dumb. It is about containers — shipping boxes figure heavily — and the spilling over of that which cannot be contained.Which is a lot to fit into a 75-minute show. On a utilitarian set by the design collective dots, under warehouse-stark lighting by Isabella Byrd, “Work Hard” is told in a series of fragmentary scenes that aren’t always as taut as they might have been. Elon and Jeff, for example, ramble.With much doubling by the cast of three, and some dialogue in voice-over (sound design is by Lee Kinney), the show has a progression that can be cumulative, as with a grumpily funny baby (Chen) whom we first meet in utero and follow into life. But this sharply observant, sometimes poignant, grimly comic play is too scattershot to gather force as it goes on.Work Hard Have Fun Make HistoryThrough May 30 at the Wild Project, Manhattan; clubbedthumb.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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    ‘Demons’ Review: Grief Is the Thing with Red Fur

    A family processes its bereavement in the midst of a demonic haunting in Keelay Gipson’s new play for Bushwick Starr.When Danily, a red-furred, purple-lipped beast, appears onstage, his giant eyelids fluttering and huge maw flapping, he is irresistibly adorable, like something from Jim Henson’s dreams.And did I mention he’s a demon?In “Demons,” presented by Bushwick Starr at the Connelly Theater, a family grieving the recent death of its complicated patriarch becomes the target of a haunting by a puppet ghoul, the unexpected star of an otherwise disorderly production.The story begins when a family gathers for a funeral. The loud, combative Sissy (Paige Gilbert) and her brother, the reserved Bubba (Donell James Foreman), are home, their respective partners in tow, to tend to their God-fearing mother (Gayle Samuels) and to mourn their late father. Mama and Sissy are always fighting, and Bubba is forced to swallow his mother’s homophobia, even in front of his partner (Ashton Muñiz). To top it off, Bubba must also contend with the death of a father who never recognized his son’s queer identity.The play, written by Keelay Gipson, who also directs, is divided into five parts, based on the stages of grief. Each section consists of three scenes, showing the relatives chatting, watching TV, playing spades, all while struggling to communicate their real feelings to one another. When the family’s unspoken secrets come out into the open, our demon appears to exacerbate the conflicts, watching with a pair of glowing eyes in the dark, or pulling poltergeist-like shenanigans during a late-night TV session.You could say Danily is more human than the human characters around him (the fantastic puppet design is by Cedwan Hooks, and Jon Riddleberger directs the puppetry). Because otherwise, Gipson’s two-dimensional direction leaves the cast’s performances transparent. Mama, as the stern but loving matriarch, is a stock character, and Sissy is written unsympathetically and almost exclusively speaks in the tenor of a whine. Sissy and Bubba’s partners aren’t even named.Minjoo Kim’s lighting design, however, is impressive, from the angular splash of light strewn over white roses in a vase to the hazy spotlight over a character’s face replicating the glow of a TV set.But other production elements muddle rather than clarify the storytelling. The set design, by Yu Shibagaki, with its black-and-white floral couches and slate-gray textured walls, works for a funeral parlor, but it can’t pull off doubling as Mama’s home. And the television switches between channels depicting “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” “Labyrinth,” a trailer for the 2001 movie “Kingdom Come” and then later a “Real Housewives” special, seeming to intentionally nod to several different decades and making the setting unclear.By the end, at least one character has faced his demons, literal and figurative. As for the play, much still bedevils it.DemonsThrough June 3 at the Connelly Theater, Manhattan; thebushwickstarr.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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    ‘Ted Lasso,’ Season 3, Episode 11 Recap: Home

    Jamie, Nate and Ted find their paths forward.Season 3, Episode 11: ‘Mom City’Just as last season’s eighth episode, “Man City,” was an exploration of the wounds inflicted by poor fathering, this week’s focuses on the healing power of maternal love. It was in that earlier episode that we first learned that Ted’s dad had killed himself; this time, he and his mom find at least a modicum of long-belated closure. And Ted has what appears to be the long-simmering revelation that … But I get ahead of myself.I noted last week that with so many story lines and just a couple of episodes to go, “Ted Lasso” would need — in a strategy adopted by fourth graders since time immemorial — to write the remaining words smaller and smaller to get them all to fit on the page. What I overlooked, of course, is that streaming television now offers the alternative of simply making the pages bigger.When “Man City” came out last season, it was the longest “Lasso” episode to date, at 45 minutes. “Mom City” puts that number to shame, clocking in at one hour and nine minutes (the show’s latest longest run time). Yet in contrast to several episodes this season, the extended length is spent not hopping among unrelated subplots but developing a relatively uniform theme. In keeping with that mood, this week I will abandon my own typical subplot-by-subplot format as well.We open with a typical Ted morning, in which he ambles down his street exchanging pleasantries with everyone he passes, even the longstanding semi-antagonist who insists on referring to him as “wanker.” And then the morning suddenly turns atypical: On a bench at the end of the street is none other than his mom, Dottie Lasso (Becky Ann Baker).When we return to the two of them after the title sequence, Dottie explains that she’d decided on a trip to England as a “Mother’s Day gift to myself.” She is staying in a hostel filled with backpacking Australians who engage in “so much sex,” and she has already been in town a week. This is obviously no typical maternal visit, and Dottie and Ted will spend the episode circling one another, with mother, like son, deflecting every question about what’s wrong with some variant of “Don’t you worry about me.” (Mae sees right through it in the pub, reciting Philip Larkin’s poem “This Be the Verse” to Ted over the pinball machine.)In the meantime, Dottie will regale the team, the pub and pretty much anyone else within earshot with substantially exaggerated tales of Ted’s youth. (No, that was not him dancing onstage with Bruce Springsteen in the “Dancing in the Dark” video.) She will also demonstrate where Ted got his resolutely chipper demeanor, as the two of them trade lyrics from “The Sunny Side of the Street” on the way out the door to his apartment. Perhaps most importantly, she will at last speak for all of us when she informs Trent Crimm that his hair is “fabulous.”Nate and Jamie, meanwhile, have both fallen into ruts of self-doubt. For Nate, this consists of leaving his wunderkind coaching persona behind in favor of a job waiting tables at A Taste of Athens and refusing an invitation from Colin, Will and Isaac to rejoin Richmond as an assistant coach. “It didn’t really end for me too well there,” he explains to Jade guiltily.Jamie is a still greater mess, declining kudos for winning Premier League player of the month and apologizing for a goal he scored accidentally while trying to pass to a teammate. With the team on a 15-game winning streak and an upcoming match against their nemesis Manchester City standing between them and a shot at the league championship, this wilting flower is not what the team needs, as Roy explains in typically salty fashion.But Jamie merely blubbers in response. He can’t eat, he can’t sleep, he’s even given up on using conditioner when he showers. He’s like the fellow from the Red Bull ad, but with his wings plucked off. Roy, sensing that Jamie needs greater emotional I.Q. than he can provide, quickly enlists Keeley to help. Her first effort is a flop, reminding Jamie how brutally he’ll be booed back in his hometown, Manchester, where he also played. (His description of a suitcase as “a drawer without a home” underscores the point.) Things go from bad to worse when she tells him his hair is being mocked on social media.So after a team viewing of “You’ve Got Mail” at which Dani says how nice it is to see them together again — I’ll have more to say about the movie and the couple below — Keeley and Roy surreptitiously follow Jamie across Manchester to the home his mother (Leanne Best) shares with her partner. In her maternal embrace, he explains that his drive has all been a product of his rage toward his father, whom we got to know all too well in the aforementioned “Man City” episode.The visit with mom gets Jamie partway back, but it falls to Ted to complete the recovery. After Jamie injures himself in the midst of a brilliant game against Man City, Ted refuses to sub him out. If hating his dad — who, surprisingly, is nowhere to be seen in the stands — no longer inspires Jamie, Ted suggests he instead try forgiveness: “When you choose to do that, you’re giving that to yourself.” Needless to say, it works, with Jamie sprinting his way to a solo goal to ensure the win. (And, yes, that’s James Tartt Sr. whom we see watching the game appreciatively from a rehab facility.)Wingless in Richmond: Brett Goldstein, left, and Phil Dunster in “Ted Lasso.”Apple TV+For Nate, a bid at redemption comes not from his mother but from Jade, who blackmails the A Taste of Athens manager, Derek into firing him. But like Jamie, Nate too needs a second intervention. Beard had been violently opposed to Nate rejoining Richmond, until Ted showed him video proving that even at his black-clad, Rupert-influenced worst, Nate was still a wounded innocent. So Beard relents, telling Nate the story of the “Les Mis”-like second chance Ted once gave him. (Careful viewers will note that this is the second vehicular theft we learn of from Ted and Beard’s past, following the former’s joyride in the family car as a 12-year-old.) And so, with the gentlest of head butts — a clear callback to Roy and Jamie’s hug in “Man City” — Nate is welcomed back into the Richmond fold.Which finally brings us back to Ted himself. Tired of waiting for Dottie to spill why she has come to England, he erupts in a litany of “Thank you”s and “[Expletive] you”s that echo Jamie’s words on the pitch. Like Ted, she masked her grief at his father’s death beneath a facade of perpetual cheeriness; like him, she “pretended I was OK.” (As the Larkin poem Mae quoted earlier goes, parents “fill you with the faults they had.”) The ice finally broken, Dottie tells Ted what she has crossed an ocean to say: “Your son needs you.”We knew this, and Ted knew this. But like Nate and Jamie, Ted needed to hear it. He needed to let go of his pain — the divorce, the jealousy — to see his path clearly.The episode closes with Rebecca and Ted alone in his office. In a charming inside joke, she tells him that this is the time for her big revelation. (In Season 1, it was that she had been deliberately undermining him; in Season 2, it was that she was sleeping with Sam.) Alas, she has nothing, “no truth bomb this year.” “Well, that’s OK,” Ted responds. “I have one.”The end credits roll before he can declare it. But for anyone uncertain of Ted’s revelation, the credits are accompanied by a Brandi Carlile cover of “Home,” from the 1978 movie “The Wiz.” And we all know where it was that Dorothy needed to get back to.Odds and endsSo perhaps I jumped to the conclusion that Roy and Keeley were back together after the former showed up conspicuously underdressed in the latter’s apartment following his “stuck” revelation and subsequent letter. At the “You’ve Got Mail” viewing, they tell Dani that they are merely there as friends. At first, this seems like it could just be a taking-it-slow maneuver. But later, alone in Jamie’s childhood bedroom — where a prescient Jamie had long ago placed posters of the two of them on the wall nearly side by side — Roy tells Keeley he doesn’t want to be “just friends.” She’s interrupted before she can reply. And, unlike Ted, it’s far from clear what she intends to say.Speaking of “You’ve Got Mail,” someone in the “Ted Lasso” brain trust is awfully fond of the movie. This is at least the third reference I’ve noticed, following Sam and Rebecca’s Bantr handles back in Season 2, Episode 5 (LDN152 and Bossgirl, respectively) and the choice of the Cranberries’ “Dreams” to score the opening scene of Episode 7 this season. And given the closing-credits song this week is it a coincidence that we see the team watch the “Over the Rainbow” scene? No, it definitely is not.Also at the “You’ve Got Mail” screening, there’s a significant glance between Sam and Rebecca to follow up their hallway encounter last week. Should our Dutch houseboater be worried? I think I’m probably worried enough for both of us.But enough “You’ve Got Mail.” I’m with Ted: “Sleepless in Seattle” is a far superior film.The idea that Freddie Mercury once owned Richmond AFC and tried to make the team theme song “Fat Bottomed Girls” (played later in the episode) was amusing. But better was the gag that back in art school Mercury considered his greatest talent to be “flipping straights.” And no, that’s not a poker strategy.How great is it that Jamie’s hair color is Walnut Mist? I say pretty great.And speaking of great, I don’t know what Rebecca, Bex and Ms. Kakes will be up to in next week’s season finale. But I can’t wait to find out. More

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    How America’s Playwrights Saved the Tony Awards

    The screenwriters’ strike threatened next month’s broadcast, a key marketing moment for the fragile theater industry. That’s when leading dramatists sprang into action.Martyna Majok, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, was revising her musical adaptation of “The Great Gatsby” after a long day in a developmental workshop when she heard the news: The union representing striking screenwriters was not going to grant a waiver for the Tony Awards, imperiling this year’s telecast.So at three in the morning, she set aside her script to join a group of playwrights frantically writing emails and making phone calls to leaders of the Writers Guild of America, urging the union not to make the pandemic-hobbled theater industry collateral damage in a Hollywood dispute. “I had to try,” she said.Surprising even themselves, the army of artists succeeded. The screenwriters’ union agreed to a compromise: it said it would not picket the ceremony as long as the show does not rely on a written script.“Theater is having a very hard time coming back from the devastating effects of the pandemic — shows are struggling and nonprofit theaters are struggling terribly,” said Tony Kushner, who is widely regarded as one of America’s greatest living playwrights, and is, like many of his peers, also a screenwriter. “Ethically and morally, this felt like a recognition of the particular vulnerability of the theater industry. It’s the right thing to do, and costs us nothing.”Kushner, who is best known for the Pulitzer-winning play “Angels in America,” is a fiery supporter of the strike who freely denounces the “unconscionable greed” of studio bosses and who showed up on a picket line as soon as it began. But he spent a weekend calling and writing union leaders in both New York and Los Angeles, urging them to find a way to let the Tony Awards happen, arguing that canceling them would have been far more damaging to theater artists than to CBS, which broadcasts the event.He was among a number of acclaimed dramatists — including David Henry Hwang and Jeremy O. Harris — who spent a weekend phoning and emailing union leaders. At least a half-dozen Pulitzer winners joined the cause, including Lynn Nottage (“Sweat” and “Ruined”), Quiara Alegría Hudes (“Water by the Spoonful”), David Lindsay-Abaire (“Rabbit Hole”), Donald Margulies (“Dinner with Friends”) and Majok (“Cost of Living”).“Cost of Living,” by Martyna Majok, is nominated for best new play. Majok joined other playwrights lobbying the writers’ union to allow the Tonys telecast to proceed. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMajok, who is a first-time Tony nominee herself this year for “Cost of Living,” said, “I approached them with respect and gratitude for all they have done for me,” she said, “but this decision was impacting so many of my colleagues and friends deeply, in an industry that is still financially struggling.”Writers are never the main attraction at the Tony Awards. The annual ceremony centers musical theater, hoping that razzle-dazzle song and dance numbers will inspire viewers to get up off their couches and come visit Broadway. The telecast often struggles with how to represent serious drama.But playwrights say they treasure the Tonys, because the ceremony introduces new audiences to theater. “In one way or another, it’s all connected,” Kushner said.And for once playwrights actually had power, because in recent years, as the number of scripted series on television and streaming services has exploded, many of them have also taken jobs working in film and television, which pays much better than the theater industry. Many of the playwrights concerned about the Tony Awards were also members of the Writers Guild — some quite successful, like Kushner, who wrote the scripts for Steven Spielberg’s “Munich,” “Lincoln,” “West Side Story” and “The Fabelmans,” and Kenneth Lonergan, who wrote “The Waverly Gallery” for the stage and “Manchester by the Sea” for the screen.“Most playwrights are W.G.A. members, because they have to make a living and get health insurance,” said Ralph Sevush, the executive director of business affairs for the Dramatists Guild of America, which is a trade association of theater writers. “And yes, there was a great deal of lobbying of the W.G.A. by many of them to find a way to get the broadcast on.”The screenwriters’ union was torn over whether to assist the Tony Awards, with its eastern branch, filled with playwright members more sympathetic than the affiliated western branch, which is more Hollywood-oriented. It did not go unnoticed that many theatrical workers have been vocally supporting the writers’ strike, including Kate Shindle, the president of the Actors’ Equity Association, who has brought members of her union to the picket lines and who spoke with the heads of both branches of the screenwriters’ guild.“There was no master strategy involved — we were just standing up for the writers,” Shindle said. “But I’m happy with the way that it seems like a decision came about: writers talking to and debating with each other, which feels like the right thing.”The Tonys seem likely to be a rare exception. In the days following the greenlighting of the theatrical awards, this year’s Peabody Awards, which honor storytelling in electronic media, were canceled, and the Daytime Emmy Awards, which honor work on television, were postponed.Asked about the decision, Lisa Takeuchi Cullen, a vice president of the screenwriters’ guild’s eastern branch, offered an emailed statement that said, in part, “we recognize the devastating impact the absence of a Tonys would have on our New York theater community. Here in W.G.A. East, we have many, many members who are playwrights, and we are deeply intertwined with our sister unions whose members work in the theater.”Playwrights were not actually the first choice of Broadway boosters strategizing about how to save the Tonys — at first, industry leaders thought they might look to prominent politicians and famous actors to make their case. But they quickly realized that playwrights, because of their ties to the W.G.A., were better positioned to influence the discussion. Harris, who wrote “Slave Play,” and Gina Gionfriddo (“Rapture, Blister, Burn”) rallied writers to the cause, along with the agent Joe Machota, who is the head of theater for Creative Artists Agency.This year, they argued, would be an especially unfortunate time to downgrade the Tony Awards.Ariana DeBose, who hosted last year’s Tony Awards, is expected back this year, but it’s unclear what a ceremony without a script will look like.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBroadway attendance and overall grosses remain well below prepandemic levels, and new musicals are struggling — four of the five nominated shows are losing money most weeks.Unlike the Oscars, which generally take place after the theatrical runs of nominated films, the Tonys take place early in the run of most nominated musicals, so they can translate into ticket sales. The Tonys matter for plays in a different way: nominations and wins have an enormous impact on how often those works are staged, read and taught.“People that don’t work in playwriting don’t always have a meaningful understanding of how important Broadway is to Off Broadway and to regional theaters — they’re really a beacon for the community at large, and even if you don’t care about the glitz and the glamour, if they start to lose money, it has impacts all over the country,” said Tanya Barfield, a playwright and television writer who is the co-director of the playwriting program at Juilliard.After she heard her union had denied a waiver for the Tony Awards, a “heartbroken” Barfield joined a picket line with a homemade “I ❤️ the Tony Awards” sticker on her WGA sign. And she wrote union leaders. “We wanted to make sure theaters did not become a casualty,” she said.Another concern: this year’s Tony Awards feature an unusually diverse group of nominees, reflecting the increasingly diverse array of shows staged on Broadway since 2020. Five of this year’s nominated new plays and play revivals are by Black writers; four of the five nominees for best actor in a play are Black; the best score category for the first time includes an Asian American woman; and the acting nominees include two gender nonconforming performers as well as a woman who is a double amputee.“We need to showcase what we’ve been seeing with the diverse talent and rich storytelling of the past few years,” Majok said.The Tonys will be different this year. The event will take place, as planned, at the United Palace in Upper Manhattan, with a live audience, live performances of musical numbers from nominated shows, and the presentation and acceptance of awards. But there will be no scripted material (a draft script had been submitted, but will not be used) and no scripted opening number (Lin-Manuel Miranda had been planning to write one). Ariana DeBose, the Oscar-winning actress who had been named its host for the second year in a row, is still expected to take part, but it is not clear what role she will play.One new element that is expected at this year’s ceremony? Shout-outs to the striking screenwriters. Hwang, a W.G.A. member who called and emailed union leaders asking them to rethink their position on the Tonys, said, “I anticipate that there will be a lot of speeches that express our appreciation and support for the guild on Tony night.” More

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    Arian Moayed Plays Creepy Men for Thoughtful Reasons

    In roles in HBO’s “Succession” and “A Doll’s House” on Broadway, politics are never far from mind for the Iranian American actor.The actor Arian Moayed has an old passport photo that he usually keeps in his wallet: a black-and-white image of a small, darling boy with big dark eyes, wearing a whimsical sweater.We had been talking for nearly 90 minutes when he mentioned it. I’d asked if he remembered anything from his earliest childhood, in Iran in the 1980s.“The thing that I remember the most is fear,” he said. “The feeling of fear. Everywhere.”Then he told me about the picture. It’s him at 5 or so, shortly before his family immigrated to the United States in 1986. He described the look on his face — “real angry” — and his memory of sitting for the photo: how his mother, her hijab slipping, kept urging him in vain to smile.“And on the car ride back,” he said, “I told my mom that I thought that the camera was a gun and I was at a firing range. Because in Iran, on television, they would be showing public executions in the news.”So. The little guy in the sweater, trying to be brave, thought he was about to be shot.At 43, Moayed is a million miles from the fraught reality of that frightened child. He is widely known to fans of the HBO drama “Succession” for his recurring role as Stewy Hosseini, Kendall Roy’s old friend. And he is currently starring on Broadway as the ultra-controlling husband Torvald Helmer in “A Doll’s House,” opposite Jessica Chastain as Nora, the wife who walks out the door.Jessica Chastain, left, as Nora and Moayed as her ultra-controlling husband, Torvald, in “A Doll’s House” at the Hudson Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesStill, Moayed likes to keep the photo close.“I always want to remind myself that this is where it all came from,” he said.It was late April when we spoke at the Hudson Theater, on West 44th Street in Manhattan, and the show’s six Tony Award nominations were yet to come — the one for him, for best featured actor in a play, his second. His first was for his Broadway debut, as a sweet Iraqi topiary artist turned wartime translator, opposite Robin Williams in “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo” in 2011.Moayed’s Torvald could not be more different. A lawyer tapped to run a bank, he micromanages his wife, monitoring what she eats and spends. At once chilling and comical, he speaks to Nora in a voice soft as a cat’s paw, muscles and claws hidden just beneath the fur. He does not take her seriously as an adult human being, ever, yet he seems totally unaware of his own fragile vanity. He is the kind of man it is dangerous to laugh at, because ridicule infuriates him.It is an insidiously knowing portrayal of one of the great terrible husbands of the stage. But Moayed, who grew up in a suburb of Chicago and spent most of his career pigeonholed into Middle Eastern roles, hadn’t been sure he wanted to play Torvald at all.“I had no relationship with ‘A Doll’s House,’” he said. “When I moved to the city in 2002, the only roles available for me were being an ensemble member in some sort of Shakespeare regional theater thing, or playing a terrorist. ‘A Doll’s House’ and Ibsen was like: Oh, that is a category of things that’s never going to happen for me.”The British director Jamie Lloyd had other ideas. After seeing Moayed in “Bengal Tiger,” he noticed him over the years consistently giving standout performances — as the scheming Stewy in “Succession,” of course, but also in YouTube clips of the Off Broadway two-hander “Guards at the Taj” (Moayed won an Obie for that, in 2016), and in the film “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” as Peter Parker’s enemy Agent Cleary.“I had no relationship with ‘A Doll’s House,’” Moayed said. “When I moved to the city in 2002, the only roles available for me were being an ensemble member in some sort of Shakespeare regional theater thing, or playing a terrorist.”Erik Tanner for The New York TimesGearing up to stage Amy Herzog’s “A Doll’s House” adaptation on Broadway, Lloyd spotted Moayed on a list of possible actors for a different role, but sensed that he was “more of a Torvald than anything.”“My feeling was that he’s clearly someone who doesn’t mind being unlikable,” Lloyd said by phone. “Because he knows that there’s a reason for it. And he’s so compelling as these unlikable characters.”What initially intrigued Moayed about this version of “A Doll’s House” was Herzog, whose short play — “Gina From Yoga Two, Is That Your Boyfriend?” — he’d acted in at the Off Broadway incubator Ars Nova in 2010. Like Torvald, his character in that play was a species of creep, though in an interview Herzog described Moayed as “the menschiest person” and “definitely the furthest cry from the actual Torvald that you could find.”“His feminism is not a posture,” she said.When Lloyd asked her opinion of casting Moayed, she added, “I just knew, I knew he could do it.”What swayed Moayed about the role was the metaphor that leaped out at him from Herzog’s script. When he first read it last autumn, he was flying from Budapest, where he had been shooting a movie, to Berlin, where he was attending a protest against the Iranian government’s repression of women and girls — part of a movement led by Iranian women and girls.The story of Nora, freeing herself from the gilded cage of her marriage to a profoundly self-centered man, reverberated with him on a societal level.“I’m reading it, and all I see in this play is Iran,” he said.Aside from his stage work, Moayed is widely known to fans of the HBO drama “Succession” for his recurring role as Stewy Hosseini, an old friend of Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong, right).Peter Kramer/HBOMoayed stopped in London for a chemistry meeting with Lloyd, and they took a long walk through the city, where an Iranian protest was happening in Trafalgar Square. Moayed recalled saying that he didn’t want to play Torvald as a “chest-out” chauvinist, someone who would physically threaten his wife.“If you see that onstage, it’s very easy for a male to be like, ‘Well, that’s not me,’” he said.What interested him was subtler: investigating what he called “the micro cuts” that men inflict on women — in Torvald’s case, while cooing adoringly.“If you show humanistic qualities,” Moayed said, “you get a lot of people to look at it and be like, ‘Oh, I wonder if I do that.’”For the audience, the production can work on multiple levels: as a wake-up call for unwitting misogynists, as a catalyst for breakups, as an echo of awful exes. And, based on what Moayed has heard from Iranian friends and family, also as the metaphor he perceived.The parallel is so clear to his mother, he said, that she is convinced — albeit mistakenly, Lloyd confirmed — that his being Iranian is why he got the job.Moayed was born in 1980, the year after the Iranian Revolution ousted a secular, autocratic government and ushered in a theocracy. His oldest brother Amir was already in Illinois, and when Moayed’s family joined him there in 1986, his other brother Omid came along. But their beloved sister, Homeira, who had taken care of young Arian in Iran, had married there. It took 17 years to bring her over.Moayed’s initial interest in acting may have come from noticing how much his parents, middle-aged newcomers to a strange country, laughed at the classic Hollywood films they introduced him to, like Charlie Chaplin comedies and “Singin’ in the Rain.”“Subconsciously, I think I was trying to mimic that and just release a little bit of the tension that was inside of that traum—” He stopped himself before he finished the word. Then: “Well, it was traumatic. But that turmoil that was those first 10 years or so.”Moayed didn’t want to play Torvald as a “chest-out” chauvinist. “If you see that onstage, it’s very easy for a male to be like, ‘Well, that’s not me,’” he said.Erik Tanner for The New York TimesStewy, Moayed’s loose-cannon capitalist in “Succession” — a performance that got him an Emmy Award nomination last year — is also of Iranian descent. Early on, Moayed and Jesse Armstrong, the series’ creator, talked about which wave of immigrants Stewy’s family might belong to. Moayed, whose father was a banker in Iran, preferred his own.“I said, I think they came in the ’80s, which means that he came under duress, lost a lot of money,” he said. “I just like that trajectory, that Stewy climbed the ranks real fast. And was good at it, and went to a bunch of fancy private schools, got in somehow and became friends with Kendall, and then the rest is history.”Both Stewy and Torvald are centrally concerned with money and the acquisition of it. Moayed, in contrast, is intrinsically political. Around 2006, he decided that he wouldn’t play terrorists — insalubriously for his bank account in the heyday of “Homeland” and “24.”He believes passionately in the notion of artist as citizen, and in using art to “move the needle forward,” as he likes to say. For him, that applies to teaching and making theater with Waterwell, the New York City arts nonprofit he co-founded in 2002, but also to acting in shows like “A Doll’s House” and “Succession” — a series that, he said, demonstrates “how capitalism really is skewed and there shouldn’t be a few people that own all that money.”His perspective would come as a surprise to the finance-bro Stewy fans who, encountering Moayed in the real world, frequently, fruitlessly invite him to do cocaine with them.He is not that person — even if Stewy is the character who shook up casting directors’ perception that Moayed should play only Middle Easterners and humorless, heavy drama. A whole spectrum of creepy-guy roles has opened up to him, Torvald among them.He does get to channel his inner mensch, though, in the new Nicole Holofcener movie, “You Hurt My Feelings,” as he also did in “The Humans,” a hit on Broadway in 2016.But if Moayed could do something as an actor that he’s never had a chance to? He would dip into a genre he loves, ideally with his “A Doll’s House” co-star.“Jessica and I, we’re both like, ‘We should do a romantic comedy together,’” he said.His favorite is “When Harry Met Sally,” but he’s thinking more along the lines of “Romancing the Stone.”“A romantic comedy adventure,” he said, “would be some real friggin’ fun.” More