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    ‘Epiphany’ Review: A Holiday Party, but What Are We Celebrating?

    In this heady Lincoln Center Theater production, Brian Watkins finds laughs and shivers in a pensive gathering of old friends.I could describe Brian Watkins’s “Epiphany,” which opened Thursday night at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, as an existential dinner-party play. Or a satire of academics, armchair psychologists and the general intelligentsia, always trying to find a common language for our ways of living in the world. It could be called a critique of our modern society of self-interest. A statement on grief. Or a ghost story.I could even call it a kind of poem, making music out of abstractions while traversing the past and the present, the real and the surreal. That this heady work, in a Lincoln Center Theater production directed by Tyne Rafaeli, evades any one definition is a testament to its grand ambitions. In one hour and 50 minutes, “Epiphany” astutely captures a wide swath of ideas without losing its grasp on the hilarious and heartbreaking experience of being a person in the world.On a January evening in a secluded old house in the middle of nowhere, Morkan (Marylouise Burke, perfect as a jittery sexagenarian) hastily prepares for the holiday known as Epiphany, her itinerary packed with drinks, speeches, poems, songs, dancing and a goose feast. Which would be fine if anyone had read the full dossier Morkan sent along beforehand — or if anyone, Morkan included, actually understood what this archaic, forgotten ritual is.Thankfully Gabriel — Morkan’s beloved nephew, a revered writer and public intellectual, and the guest of honor — will be arriving to lead the festivities, and also to explain them. When Gabriel fails to show, instead sending Aran (an ethereal Carmen Zilles) in his place, a night of awkward exchanges, misunderstandings and spirited debates evolves into a dreamlike meditation on mortality.Also attending this vaguely defined soiree are Loren (Colby Minifie, currently in the Amazon series “The Boys”), a sober, vegan 20-something, helping with the preparations; Freddy (C.J. Wilson), a middle-aged alcoholic teacher; Kelly (Heather Burns), a pretentious pianist; Charlie (Francois Battiste), a smartly dressed, self-important lawyer; Sam (Omar Metwally), a pedantic psychiatrist with many opinions; Taylor (David Ryan Smith), his comically snide and heavy-drinking husband; and Ames (the reliably dry-witted Jonathan Hadary), an old friend of Morkan’s and her conspicuously absent sister Julia’s.In a rapid series of processions and introductions, we hear the characters before we see them; they ascend from an unseen lower level and appear in the parlor room of an old house.John Lee Beatty’s antique set design, with the main flight of stairs leading up into an ominous darkness, establishes an unsettling mood, strangely removed from the present day. And Isabella Byrd’s ghostly lighting summons an eerie “Fall of the House of Usher” vibe before illuminating a stunning surprise backdrop: We are watching an evening gathering during a January flurry, snow fitfully descending past the gnarled fingers of tree branches outside the towering windows.Members of the company on the “Epiphany” set, designed by John Lee Beatty with lighting by Isabella Byrd.Jeremy DanielThere’s not much action in “Epiphany,” so the play’s dynamism is all in the controlled chaos of the dialogue: interruptions, overlapping voices, heavy pauses. Watkins (whose plays include “Wyoming” and who created the recent time-loop western series “Outer Range”) effortlessly extracts the humor from the partygoers’ pretensions and posturing, which are just a cover for the insecurities they feel in the modern world — and in their own lives.Absurd developments offer punctuation: One character makes inappropriate bathroom jokes, another performs a “purposefully untitled” piano composition, and after one of the guests suffers a dinnertime injury, the others debate which alcohol to use to sterilize the wound.While Watkins leans into scorn for the insufferable urbanites one-upping one another, he seems to treasure the more introspective figures of Morkan and Ames. And there is plenty of beauty in the play’s abstractions; at its heart “Epiphany” is a love letter to the indefinable and unnameable.“As soon as you try and define love as an empirical thing you’ve suddenly lost the essence of love itself,” Aran says at one point in the night. “It’s bigger than our connotations.” And in a rare moment of drunken insight, Freddy recalls how he heard a poet once explain how the creative process is an act of “creating time … that the space between seconds and minutes actually like widens and deepens … as if eternity was inhabiting you.”Empiricism, existentialism, solipsism — “Epiphany” sends a lot of -isms into space, just to laugh at the volley. (“Well now we’re just saying words,” Ames points out.) Occasionally the play seems to fall down the rabbit hole of its own philosophical musings, but “Epiphany” never remains there too long; the humor, which works at several different registers, from barbed irony to tragicomic lampoonery to wacky physical comedy, reins in the play’s haughtier inclinations.Speaking of haughty — audiences may or may not catch the specter of another work within “Epiphany,” James Joyce’s “The Dead,” from his collection “Dubliners.” “Epiphany,” which first premiered in Ireland in 2019, in a production from the renowned Druid Theater Company, replicates some of the characters’ relationships and exchanges in “The Dead,” uses many of the same character names and echoes the general existential theme.References and snippets of the original text may fly right past anyone unfamiliar with “The Dead,” or anyone who hasn’t picked up “Dubliners” since college. No matter. There’s more than enough in “Epiphany” for it to stand on its own. See it and ruminate; this is a play “bigger than our connotations.”EpiphanyThrough July 24 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Manhattan; lct.org. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. More

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    ‘Transparent’ Musical Highlights Center Theater Group Season

    “A Transparent Musical,” with music and lyrics by Faith Soloway, will have its world premiere in May 2023 at Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles.The world premiere of a stage musical adaptation of the groundbreaking Amazon series “Transparent” will highlight the 2022-23 season of Center Theater Group in Los Angeles, the company announced Thursday.The production, “A Transparent Musical,” features characters from the original series about a sexagenarian parent in a Jewish Los Angeles family who comes out as a transgender woman. The new musical comedy is billed as “a story of self-discovery, acceptance and celebration.” It will have its world premiere in May at the Mark Taper Forum.The creator of the original series, Joey Soloway, and MJ Kaufman wrote the book, with music and lyrics by Faith Soloway (who wrote for all four seasons of the television series and composed the songs for its finale). The choreography is by James Aslop (“Girls5eva”), and it will be directed by Tina Landau (“SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical”).“My sibling and I have dreamed of creating a stage musical that brings the experiences of being trans and Jewish into a mainstream, pop culture fantasia,” Joey Soloway said in a release.The original series, which was inspired by the siblings Joey and Faith Soloway’s parent’s own transition later in life, was one of the first mainstream shows to focus on transgender issues when it premiered in 2014. It won eight Emmy Awards, and The New York Times’s Alessandra Stanley praised it as “an insightful, downbeat comedy told without piety or burlesque.” It was also the first scripted series to showcase a transitioning transgender character.“A Transparent Musical” will begin performances on May 20, 2023, and open on May 31, with a limited run through June 25, 2023.Center Theater Group, a 55-year-old nonprofit theater, will present the world premiere of Larissa FastHorse’s comedy “Fake It Until You Make It” (Aug. 2-Sept. 3, 2023), about “shifters” — people who exist in a world of self-determined identity. It will also present Jane Wagner’s one-woman play “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe,” which stars Cecily Strong of “Saturday Night Live” (Sept. 21-Oct. 23); Lynn Nottage’s Tony-nominated truck-stop-set comedy “Clyde’s” (Nov. 15- Dec. 18); and a revival of Anna Deavere Smith’s “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” (March 8- April 9, 2023) at the Taper.The productions are part of a Center Group season that includes work exclusively by writers who identify as female, transgender or nonbinary, a majority of whom are artists of color, which took shape after the company was called out last fall for its 10-play 2021-22 season, which included only one work by a woman. More

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    ‘Lessons in Survival: 1971’ Review: The Past Echoes in the Present

    The writer James Baldwin and the poet Nikki Giovanni are at the center of a crackling work of verbatim theater at the Vineyard Theater.If the year weren’t in the title, you might come close to guessing it from the architecture of the sunken space: a conversation pit lined with couches upholstered in burnt orange, with blood orange carpeting to match. There’s a comfort to the room, a midcentury modern hospitality that invites you to take your shoes off, have a drink, light one cigarette after another, and talk and talk as you try to set the world to rights.And so the writer James Baldwin and the poet Nikki Giovanni do in “Lessons in Survival: 1971,” a crackling work of verbatim theater starring Carl Clemons-Hopkins and Crystal Dickinson. A time-capsule excavation of a moment in 20th-century Black American activist-intellectualism, it recreates a sprawling interview that Giovanni did with Baldwin for the WNET television talk show “Soul!” when he was 47, famous and living in France, and she was 28 and just getting started.“Jimmy,” Giovanni says, in the play’s first line, “I’m — I’m really curious. Why did you move to Europe?”It’s so potent, that familiarity: calling him Jimmy, not Mr. Baldwin. Before he even opens his mouth, he becomes for us not a god visiting from the pantheon but a human being. And in the question that her question implies — Why did a continent an ocean away seem like a healthier place for you, a Black American, to live? — we hear her set up the framework for an ever-thoughtful, sometimes contentious, particularly American dialogue.Directed by Tyler Thomas at the Vineyard Theater, this engrossing 90-minute show arrives at the end of a season of civic and social reckonings on New York stages, which puts it at risk of seeming like an eat-your-vegetables experience. It is emphatically not.Conceived by Marin Ireland, Peter Mark Kendall, Reggie D. White and Thomas, and created with the theater collective the Commissary, it was presented in an earlier version online during the industry shutdown. In person, it is the kind of electric theater that charges audiences with energy: a meeting between public intellectuals wrestling rigorously with the culture, and clashing with each other along the way. The drama is built in. All we have to do is listen.The actors are listening, too, wearing earpieces that feed them the audio of the interview, whose words they speak with the original stammers and hesitations. We hear, briefly, the voices of the real Baldwin and Giovanni captured on that old recording, but the performance is about channeling their essence, not impersonating them.So it doesn’t matter, really, that Clemons-Hopkins — tall, broad-shouldered, bearded, familiar to fans of the HBO Max series “Hacks” as the endearing workaholic Marcus — has such a different physical presence than Baldwin. It’s the writer’s mind that this show is after.Dickinson is riveting as the lesser-known Giovanni, a poised young Black woman with a soft surface and a spine of steel. Respectful of Baldwin, she belongs to a different sex and generation than he does. And she challenges him on his stubborn sympathy for notions of Black manhood that she believes must change.“Be careful as a woman what you demand of a man,” he warns, but she is having none of it — a resistance that got her finger snaps of approval from the crowd at the performance I saw.Baldwin and Giovanni are united, though, in having no use for white critics, so take my admiration for this show with that grain of salt. But do go, and do pause in the lobby, where one corner has been turned into an installation by You-Shin Chen, the show’s set designer, and Matt Carlin, its props supervisor, with a loop of period video clips full of famous Black faces and retro advertising (by Josiah Davis and Attilio A. Rigotti) playing on a vintage console TV.It will transport you straight back to the era of the interview, when Giovanni and the expatriate Baldwin were determined that Black Americans should take rightful ownership of their white-run country.“I do know that we have paid too much for it to be able to abandon it,” he says, with an eye on the ancestors. “My father and my father’s fathers paid too much for it.”“I’ve paid too much for it,” she says. “I’m only 28.”Lessons in Survival: 1971Through June 30 at the Vineyard Theater, Manhattan; vineyardtheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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    Velcro or Snaps? The ABC’s of Stripping for a Cause

    Broadway Bares began as a response to the AIDS crisis. Thirty years later, the one-night-only burlesque spectacle remains a potent, frisky fund-raiser.Jerry Mitchell was a 32-year-old Broadway hoofer causing a sensation each night by dancing nearly naked in “The Will Rogers Follies” when he had an idea: To shake his bare bum for a good cause.It was 1992, near the height of the AIDS crisis. Mitchell recruited seven fit fellow dancers from other Broadway shows, and on a rainy Sunday night at Splash, a since-shuttered gay club in Chelsea, they took turns undressing on the bar to raise money for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. Two shows and a tray of tequila shots later, the novice strippers had collected $8,000 — and the burlesque spectacle Broadway Bares was born.“There were people who were confused as to why we were using a strip show to raise money for AIDS,” Mitchell, who is now a Tony Award-winning director and choreographer, said in a phone interview. “It was coming from a place of innocence,” he said, and of paucity: He didn’t have the money to attend big-ticket AIDS charity events, “but I had the drive and desire to help my community.”Broadway Bares became a hit, outgrowing one establishment after another and becoming steadily more polished, until “we weren’t just a benefit,” Mitchell said. “We were a Broadway show.” On Sunday, that show will celebrate its 30th anniversary at the Hammerstein Ballroom in Midtown Manhattan, with performances at 9:30 p.m. and midnight.Putting together the event — which involves more than 500 volunteer theater artists, among them performers, designers and stage managers, many busy in current Broadway shows — is a complex and hectic game of logistics, topped by a final rehearsal sprint in which the entire, one-night-only production comes together in a matter of days.From left, Nick Kenkel, an executive producer of the show; the director Laya Barak; and the associate director Jonathan Lee.Matthew Leifheit for The New York TimesAt one of those rehearsals this week, at a studio near Times Square, nearly 30 dancers were spinning, kicking and pretending to rip off their pants. Laya Barak, the director of this year’s show and a creator of the opening number, reminded everyone to “keep it sharp” and “reach from the shoulder.” More pressing, though, was the choreography of clothes. “Whatever your strippable is, that has to travel with you,” she told a group, meaning they needed to cart away their discarded layers. Other items were to be handed off to other dancers or chucked offstage.“Are you wearing a jock or a G-string?” she asked one dancer of his attire for the show, which bares a lot but stops short of full-frontal nudity. He wasn’t sure; costumes were still being constructed and wouldn’t be ready until Saturday.That meant Collin Heyward, the lead dancer in another piece, and his castmates wouldn’t get to practice removing his clothes until the day before opening. At the rehearsal, Heyward, who made his Broadway debut in “The Lion King” in February, attacked the hip-hop choreography with confidence but admitted to being anxious about the stripping. “It has to be seamless,” he said. “That’s an added pressure.”With about a dozen dance routines, each with its own choreographer, Broadway Bares is a high-profile platform for emerging dance makers. The routines use a variety of styles, including hip-hop, Latin dance, ballet and aerial arts, often mashed together into new combinations. But burlesque remains the core of the artistic ethos and attitude.“Burlesque isn’t only about being naked,” Mitchell said. “It’s about being funny. The humor is the heart.”Still, the endgame is getting naked. And that has its complications.Sarah Marie Dixey working on a costume. “I’m very fond of snaps and magnets,” she said. “They don’t really get tangled in anything.”Matthew Leifheit for The New York TimesThe “lead strips,” as the featured dancers are known, might have as many as five layers to remove. The first one is easy, like a hat or coat. “Then it gets a little tricky,” said Nick Kenkel, who has been involved with the show for nearly 20 years and is now an executive producer. A T-shirt might get ripped away (prepared with a small cut to ease tearing), followed by a dancer’s pants, but “you have to do it in a way that the tight boxer shorts underneath don’t pop off,” he said.Minding such fragile costumes and perfecting their precisely timed removal is a new skill for dancers more used to focusing on counts than on discarding clothes. “If you’re not pulling hard enough, it can ruin the strip,” said Jonathan Lee, the associate director and one of the choreographers for Broadway Bares.That’s where the costume designers come in, with their tricks and tools to construct clothes that are “comfortable to dance in but aren’t going to break at the wrong moment,” the designer Sarah Marie Dixey said. Quick-rig costumes use a variety of fasteners, each with pros and cons. Dixey called herself “an anti-Velcro person,” adding, “I’m very fond of snaps and magnets. They don’t really get tangled in anything.” From the performer’s perspective, a consensus emerged: “Snaps,” Lee said. “Always snaps.”Mishaps are inevitable, but “these are people who do this all the time,” Dixey said. “Not necessarily stripping, but being onstage and able to problem-solve in the moment.”Mechanics aside, stripping “was a challenge for me artistically,” said Aubrey Lynch II, a former dancer with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and “The Lion King” who performed in several early Broadway Bares shows and is now a dean and a director of education at American Ballet Theater. Despite any initial hesitation, Lynch said that what he experienced onstage was freedom — which “added another layer of performance to my toolbox and strangely strengthened my self-esteem.”Jason Tam and Bonnie Milligan rehearsing for this year’s show, which is called “XXX,” a nod to its age and its naughtiness.Matthew Leifheit for The New York TimesThat’s a lesson Mitchell is happy for performers to learn. He sees undressing onstage not as a vulnerable act, but an empowering one. “You’re in the driver’s seat,” he said he tells dancers, reminding them that “the audience is on your side. They’re rooting for you. If you’re comfortable, they’re comfortable.”The Broadway Bares routines, which are three to four minutes long, convey a mini narrative, and have been inspired by things like Greek myths and board games. Some choreographers have also used the dance to comment about societal issues.In this year’s production, titled “XXX” — a wink at both the show’s age and its naughtiness — Lee reimagined a superhero number from the 2002 event to include characters like Black Panther (danced by Heyward) and Shang-Chi with dancehall music, Afro beats and stepping. “I wanted to honor what we have gained in the past 20 years,” he said.While the inaugural Broadway Bares featured only well-toned, cisgender men, the next year’s event included women. Later iterations have gone on to feature transgender performers, disabled dancers and all expressions of sexuality. “We’ve even had straight performers,” Mitchell joked. (For all the representation onstage, though, the audience remains mostly gay men.)When Jessica Castro was invited to create a dance this year, she knew she wanted to embrace body positivity. She cast as her star Akira Armstrong, a plus-size dancer and the founder of Pretty Big Movement dance company. “It’s about celebrating all backgrounds, all body shapes, all types,” Castro said, adding that she found stripping to be an act of agency. “It’s a shedding of all these ideals, all these constructs that society has put on us.”Over the 30 years of Broadway Bares shows, AIDS has become a manageable condition, especially for those with access to health care and preventive drugs. But the devastation it caused New York’s tight-knit theater scene is a part of Broadway history that is woven into the show’s mission.The event is “both a fund-raising and an educational opportunity,” said Tom Viola, the executive director of Broadway Cares who attended the first Bares at Splash. (It has raised more than $22 million to date for Broadway Cares to support health and social services for entertainment professionals both locally and nationwide, crucially during the coronavirus pandemic.)As part of the rehearsal period, the organization helps dancers, most of whom did not experience the worst of the AIDS epidemic, “understand the anger, sorrow, loss and stigma that first propelled us into action,” Viola said. At this week’s rehearsal, dancers were given profiles of beneficiary organizations and encouraged to step up their own online fund-raising efforts.And while Barak is concerned with all the usual elements of directing a show of this scale, she is also asking: “How do we keep that flame going into the future to continue raising money for Broadway Cares and continue this tradition of community?”But in the meantime, back at rehearsal, she was ready for another run-through.“Going from the pants strip!” she yelled. More

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    ‘Corsicana’ Review: Four Lost Hearts in the Heart of Texas

    In a strange and beautiful new play by Will Arbery, finding happiness is a process of failing upward.The difference between comedy and tragedy is often just a matter of timing. Bring the curtain down early enough and even “Macbeth” can have a happy ending; in the back story of a play full of laughs, you’ll often find a bucket of tears.Will Arbery’s “Corsicana,” which opened on Wednesday at Playwrights Horizons, is that second kind of play; if its story began any earlier than it does, it would be an emotional blood bath. Instead, without ignoring the bone-deep sadness of characters confused and stymied by loss, it lets us watch them climb their way out of it — heading toward joy and sharing some in the process.The immediate cause of the sadness for Christopher (Will Dagger) and Ginny (Jamie Brewer) is the death of their mother several months before the action. Though they have different fathers, both of whom have long since skedaddled, the half-siblings have similar reactions, within the framework of their evident differences.Christopher, 33, is a wannabe filmmaker who used to teach at a college near Dallas. He has now retreated to the melancholy comfort of his mother’s home, in Corsicana, an hour south. He’s done so, supposedly, to care for Ginny, 34, who has Down syndrome but doesn’t want to be babied. She’s a “grown woman,” as she is constantly forced to remind everyone. Yet she, too, has retreated: No longer volunteering at a nursing home, she instead spends most of her time watching Disney videos and listening to girl-power pop.“I can’t find my heart,” she tells Christopher, who likewise seems to have misplaced his. But if he is clueless about his own suffering, despite the torrents of words pouring out of him, he loves his sister too much not to act. He tries to help her re-engage with the world.How he does so, and how she responds, form the core of a play that is, paradoxically, almost too specific to describe. Weird, perhaps: Some of the characters are ghosts; there are longish passages of improvised song. Dense, certainly: It has the fuzzy texture of lived experience rather than the silkiness of honed argument. Quiet, mostly: The characters — also including a family friend named Justice (Deirdre O’Connell) and a hermitlike artist named Lot (Harold Surratt) — are the opposite of aggressive. In the face of their own deepest hopes, they are passive to a fault.Justice (Deirdre O’Connell) with Ginny, who has uncanny emotional intelligence — something her brother completely lacks. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFor those who loved the slashing debate and emotional frenzy of Arbery’s “Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” which ran at Playwrights in 2019 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, “Corsicana” will thus seem like an about-face. Directed with delicacy and patience by Sam Gold, it steers away from political discourse. Though Justice is writing a treatise on capital, we never hear a word of it; when ideology is discussed it sounds like sharing recipes.The play is nevertheless political, inseparably from its plot. Justice believes that Ginny, who likes to sing, might find something in common with Lot, who aside from making sculpture from trash writes songs from his spontaneous thoughts. But when Christopher approaches him to broker a deal that falls somewhere between babysitting and musical mentorship, it does not go well. He finds a man whose exclusion from society, partly self-imposed and partly not, have made him as forbidding as his (unseen) artworks, which Ginny, when she visits, calls monsters.“Corsicana” sometimes veers too close to the idea that the woman with Down syndrome and the emotionally troubled artist are magic touchstones, with deeper wisdom than others and purer ideals. Ginny has uncanny emotional intelligence, something her brother completely lacks. And unlike Justice, who has ulterior motives, Lot neither shows his work nor seeks to sell it: “Anything I make,” he says, “is a one-way street to God.”But before such moments can cloy, Arbery usefully complicates his case. When crossed, Ginny flounces and says inappropriate things; when upset, Lot goes rigid and sputters and spits. That Ginny very much wants a boyfriend with whom to experience adult pleasure is seen as natural and even wholesome but not without complications. Her erratic path toward happiness, sometimes causing collateral damage, looks a lot like Justice’s. And Christopher’s difficulty integrating a traumatic past into a productive present looks a lot like Lot’s.With so much going on, you can’t say that “Corsicana” — named not for a person or an idea, but a town — has a point. Instead, insofar as it’s a fully imagined world, it has hundreds. (Arbery calls it “an accumulation.”) Watching it, I felt it was about who gets to make art, and for whom. Reading it, I felt it was about how becoming “grown” is, for anyone, a lifelong process of failing upward. Thinking back on it, I feel it was about the way the world tucks beauty inside envelopes of sorrow, and vice versa.And yet I discerned, at an almost cellular level, a particular intention: to show that we all have an equal claim on happiness, if only we know how to stake it. To the extent that the play is autobiographical — Arbery’s sister Julia has Down syndrome — this is no doubt an expression of love. But it is also an effect of Gold’s direction, which feels communal, often placing actors in corners of scenes they aren’t otherwise part of. Even the set, by Laura Jellinek and Cate McCrea, cooperates: two identical living rooms coexisting under one roof.Though I was very moved by all of this, I understand why some theatergoers left at intermission the evening I saw it. At 2 hours and 30 minutes, the play can sometimes seem indulgent; parts of the story feel undigested and perhaps indigestible.Still, Gold and the actors have evidently made sense of it all, which was good enough for me. Brewer, who, like her character, has Down syndrome, is touching and hilarious in a fully realized performance. Surratt, neither caricaturing nor condescending to Lot, is astonishing. And even when Arbery gives Christopher an immensely long aria of self-discovery, and Justice what amounts to a mad scene (if love is madness), Dagger and O’Connell, who is fresh off a Tony Award for “Dana H.,” make it seem like falling off a building headfirst.Or really, heartfirst. Arbery seems to have written “Corsicana” with his internal censors set to their lowest setting, as if he were hoping to make music the way his characters do: for themselves and, as Ginny puts it, “with the door closed.” The tune may be strange and leggy and long, and you have no idea whether it’s funny or sad, but it feels like happiness to overhear it.CorsicanaThrough July 10 at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan; playwrightshorizons.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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    Molière, Turning 400, Can Still Surprise

    In an anniversary year for the playwright, new productions in the Paris region show why his work still appeals to myriad audiences.PARIS — “I’m in shock,” a teenage boy sitting near me declared when the lights went up on a recent performance of Molière’s “The Forced Marriage” at the Comédie-Française, France’s oldest theater company. “It was really sexual,” one of his schoolmates told her friends on the way out. “It’s not the kind of stuff you should show.”Does Molière, the 17th-century comedy master and doyen of French playwrights, really still have the power to surprise? As France celebrates the 400th anniversary of his birth, a flurry of new productions suggests that he can — and, equally, that his work can easily feel old-fashioned.In both cases, the guilty party isn’t Molière. Wildly different takes on his work have been on show in the Paris region: While the Comédie-Française, whose 2022 program is entirely devoted to Molière, has invested in dark, offbeat productions, “Molière Month,” a yearly theater event run by the city of Versailles, has delivered traditional gowns and breeches, to slightly dull effect.No one could accuse Louis Arene’s version of “The Forced Marriage,” presented on the Comédie-Française’s small Studio stage, of being boring. Sganarelle, the stock central character — a deluded man seeking marriage with a much younger woman — is practically a Beckettian presence early on, looking puzzled on the plain gray stage and muttering lines from other Molière plays. (You could tell the Molière buffs in the audience from the scattered laughs these elicited.)Arene works hard to inject a contemporary sense of absurdity into what is an average play, first presented in 1664 as a three-act comédie-ballet, a hybrid genre combining spoken dialogue with danced and sung scenes, and streamlined into a one-act work four years later. In this production, all the characters are heavily powdered and wear bald caps as well as prosthetics; the size and form of their fake skulls and visible body padding were among the elements drawing cries of disgust from the adolescents in the audience.The five-person cast milks it all, turning standard marriage jokes into ominous physical comedy, verging at times on horror fare. (Vomit and severed body parts are involved.) Gender switches among the main roles, an increasingly frequent device on France’s stages, convincingly heighten the weirdness: In addition to Julie Sicard, who is barely recognizable as Sganarelle, Arene has cast Christian Hecq, a bald, 58-year-old character actor, as Dorimène, the young woman Sganarelle seeks to marry.Hecq doesn’t go for cheap laughs; on the contrary, he is serious and quite sensual as Dorimène. While Molière’s female characters typically resist fiercely when asked to wed suitors they don’t like, Dorimène actually isn’t against the marriage, seeing an opportunity to get rich and reunite with her lover once Sganarelle is dead. (Ultimately, Sganarelle backs out because he fears being a cuckold.)From left, Françoise Gillard, Christian Hecq and Clément Hervieu-Léger in “The Bourgeois Gentleman.”Raphael Gaillarde/Gamma-Rapho via Getty ImagesSimultaneously, Hecq has been present on the Comédie-Française’s main stage in a very different capacity, as the co-director of a stunning staging of Molière’s “The Bourgeois Gentleman” with his partner, Valérie Lesort, in which he stars as Monsieur Jourdain, the would-be gentleman. (It means that on some days, Hecq leaves Dorimène behind at 7:30 p.m., slips into Monsieur Jourdain’s costume and steps onto a different stage an hour later.)“The Bourgeois Gentleman” arguably cements Hecq’s place as one of the Comédie-Française’s most category-defying and valuable artists. With his gruff voice, small frame and clownlike gift for physical exaggeration, he could easily have been typecast as a commedia dell’arte servant. Yet his emotional range — willing to be thoroughly ridiculed one second, the picture of relatable heartbreak the next — is evident in his Monsieur Jourdain, the clueless bourgeois who wants nothing more than to be accepted as an aristocrat.And together with Lesort, he has emerged as part of a duo of stage magicians, deploying old-fashioned tricks and visual imagination. In “The Bourgeois Gentleman,” that means flying swords, a life-size embroidered elephant and animated goat heads that sway to one of the songs. Since this play also started life as a comédie-ballet, the original score, by Lully, has been revisited here by Mich Ochowiak and Ivica Bogdanic, in a vigorous style inspired by Balkan music. The costumes, by Vanessa Sannino, are luxuriously eccentric: Françoise Gillard, in the role of a marchioness, looks like a fabulous golden beehive.“The Bourgeois Gentleman” and “The Forced Marriage” each steer Molière toward crepuscular absurdity. Like Ivo van Hove’s “Tartuffe,” which opened the Comédie-Française’s Molière extravaganza in January, both productions are mostly designed in shades of gray or black, a departure from the colorful palette that is customary for the playwright’s comedies.This monochromatic approach helps the Comédie-Française orient itself toward the contemporary even as it celebrates its founding father — something that does not seem to concern Versailles’s “Molière Month,” a likable event founded in 1996. Many of its performances, staged around the town outside Paris where Molière presented a number of his plays to Louis XIV, are free, and feature a mix of professional actors and amateurs.As a result, the quality varies significantly. A staging of “The Impostures of Scapin,” directed by Carlo Boso and starring first-year theater students, drew many families with children to a local park on a sunny Sunday afternoon, though the laughs were few and far between. The fact that a number of roles were played in Italian didn’t help, although the result was easy enough to follow. The audience reacted more readily to anachronistic jokes — like a reference to the film “Titanic” — than to Molière’s lines.Laurent Paolini as Molière in Anthony Magnier’s “The Versailles Impromptu.”Marc-Olivier Carion/City of VersaillesThat wasn’t surprising, since Molière’s gallery of stock characters, heavily influenced by commedia dell’arte, was of its time, despite some innovations and the social commentary he wove into many plays. The opening production of the “Molière Month,” performed outdoors in a courtyard opposite the palace of Versailles, fared better. The director, Anthony Magnier, opted to stage “The Versailles Impromptu,” a rarely seen 1663 play that is cheekily autobiographical.The main character is Molière himself, struggling to put together a show with his reluctant actors. They play was written as a response to his critics, and is difficult to render today, with its parody of a rival company’s actors, which presumably had greater resonance in the 17th century.In a post-show speech, Magnier said the cast had rehearsed the show in just nine days, and it acquitted itself well, with Elisa Benizio a vivid highlight. “The Versailles Impromptu” allowed the text to take center stage, with assorted period costumes and next to no props and sets, yet the play itself didn’t feel especially enlightening or satisfying.On the other hand, when Molière is treated merely as the canvas for a director’s vision, as in some of the Comédie-Française’s productions this year, the inner logic and wit of his dialogue don’t always survive. Does it matter? Perhaps Molière’s true triumph is that four centuries on, his work remains malleable enough to appeal to radically different crowds.Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. Directed by Christian Hecq and Valérie Lesort. Comédie-Française, through July 21.Le Mariage Forcé. Directed by Louis Arene. Comédie-Française, through July 3.Mois Molière. Versailles, various venues through June 30. More

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    Stephen Colbert Taunts Ron Johnson for Faking It

    Colbert said that the Wisconsin senator tried to avoid talking to reporters after Tuesday’s Jan. 6 hearing, “but like most things, he’s not very good at that.”Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Bad FakeTuesday’s Jan. 6 hearings presented evidence suggesting that Senator Ron Johnson sought to hand-deliver fake elector votes from Michigan and his home state of Wisconsin to then-Vice President Mike Pence. Johnson acknowledged receiving the package but claimed he had no idea where it came from or what it contained.“It could have been anything in that envelope — he doesn’t care. Fake electors, angry bees, naked pictures of Mary Todd Lincoln. It don’t matter to Ron — he’s just a delivery boy,” Stephen Colbert joked on Wednesday.“You know those announcements in the airport when they say, ‘Do not carry onto the flight a package for someone you don’t know’? I’ve always wondered who those announcements are for. Turns out, it’s Ron Johnson.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“During yesterday’s hearing on the Capitol attack, committee members showed texts that indicated Republican Senator Ron Johnson wanted to hand-deliver a list of fake electors for then-Vice President Mike Pence to introduce on Jan. 6. You sent that over text? How do you send bribes — Venmo?” — SETH MEYERS“When this came out, Johnson tried to avoid talking to reporters, but like most things, he’s not very good at that.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Everyone knows you put the phone on the same side as the reporter — that’s scam artistry 101.” — SETH MEYERSThe Punchiest Punchlines (Farewell to Juul Edition)“Finally, if you are one of those people who regularly likes to vape, first of all, congratulations on being basic, and second of all, you might want to stock up because your supply is about to run out.” — TREVOR NOAH“The F.D.A. just announced that they are banning all Juul e-cigarettes in the U.S. Yeah, no more Juul. No more Juul. That will explain tomorrow when you see a bunch of your co-workers sucking on a Glade plug-in.” — JIMMY FALLON“But this is a big move by the F.D.A., because you realize Juul is the iconic vaping brand. So by them doing this, it is like going after soda by banning Coke, or going after coke by banning Don Jr.” — TREVOR NOAH“It’s a big deal because if they also ban fedoras, your old college roommate is going to have a nervous breakdown.” — JIMMY FALLON“It’s a tough day for everyone who loves ingesting chemicals, you know what I’m saying? Can’t even huff gas anymore — it’s too expensive.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingOn “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” the guest host, Sean Hayes, revealed he was an original cast member of the hit Netflix show “Ozark” and shared scenes from the cutting-room floor.What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightEvan Rachel Wood will appear on Thursday’s “Tonight Show.”Also, Check This OutFrom left: Naomi McPherson, Josette Maskin and Katie Gavin of Muna. The band’s third album, “Muna,” moves in more pop-influenced directions.Tonje Thilesen for The New York TimesThe Indie-pop group Muna is back with a self-titled third album and a new label boss: Phoebe Bridgers. More

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    At 52, Mabou Mines Is Still Testing Boundaries

    A three-day retrospective will shine a spotlight on the group’s most daring projects.The word “crazy” comes up fairly regularly when talking to people about the Mabou Mines theater company.Take one of Sharon Ann Fogarty’s early experiences with that fabled group — nine years before she became one of its co-artistic directors. It was on “Mabou Mines Lear,” a gender-reversed production of “King Lear” — not obvious back in 1990 — that was directed by Lee Breuer and starred Ruth Maleczech as the monarch.“The opening scene had dogs and all these kiddos so my job was to pick the kids up around five o’clock, drive them over, do the scene and drive them back,” Fogarty, now 65, said. “Then I would come back, and I was doing various other parts. One of them was holding down Isabell Monk while Honora Fergusson gouged her eyes out. It was kind of a crazy, crazy time,” she continued, “but it was really fun.”Starting Thursday, Mabou Mines is celebrating 50 years of theatrical experimentation with a three-day megamix, a retrospective of some of its most notorious, daring, beloved, memorable or, yes, craziest projects. (The company is actually 52 years old but the celebration was delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic.) The works will include live readings, concerts and films, in conjunction with a companion exhibition of archival material, at the Mabou Mines home in the 122 Community Center, in the East Village, where the group settled in 2017 after decades of a peripatetic existence.The 1990 staging of “Mabou Mines Lear,” a gender-reversed production of “King Lear,” featured, from left: Kandel, Ruth Maleczech and Greg Mehrten.Michael CooperThe performing arts, by definition, exist in the moment, so mounting a greatest-hits package — especially of an Off Off Broadway company — is a daunting task. Mabou Mines got the idea for its extended birthday party after a founding member, JoAnne Akalaitis, spearheaded a 12-hour tribute to the playwright María Irene Fornés at the Public Theater in 2018. “So when we came to talk about Mabou Mines’s 50th, JoAnne said, ‘Why don’t we just do a marathon of all the pieces?’” Fogarty recalled.This would have been more than 60 works, so they settled on 31. “Some are going to be excerpts, some are going to be full, some are just going to be the music,” Fogarty said. “Some of them are an hour, or you get 15 minutes, like a juicy scene or something.”The programs will bring former company members back to the fold, along with simpatico guests such as Bill Camp and Elizabeth Marvel, who will perform Franz Xaver Kroetz’s “Through the Leaves,” produced by Mabou Mines in 1984, on Thursday. The following day Akalaitis will direct David Greenspan, Ellen McLaughlin and Ellen McElduff, a former company member, in Samuel Beckett’s “Play,” which Mabou Mines staged in 1971.The time machine will travel all the way back to Mabou Mines’s first project, “The Red Horse Animation” (1970), which was conceived during a retreat in the isolated Nova Scotia town that gave the company its name. On Saturday, Akalaitis — who was in the original production — will reprise it alongside a pair of first-generation Mabou heirs: the writer, director and actress Clove Galilee, who is Breuer and Maleczech’s daughter, and the choreographer David Neumann, the son of the Mabou members Fergusson and Frederick Neumann, who died in 2012. (Akalaitis’s then-husband, Philip Glass, another founding member, wrote the music.)Tight family bonds have always been part of the Mabou Mines matrix — the group, born out of the experimentations of the 1960s, blurred the personal, the artistic and the political. Akalaitis, 84, recalls that the children of company members tagged along on tour in the 1970s and babysitters were in the line budgets for rehearsals — an afterthought for many current theaters.A still from “Moi-Même,” a movie that some of the Mabou Mines artists shot in Paris in 1968 and 1969 but never finished. It will be shown this weekend as a work-in-progress backed by a live band.John Rounds“Looking back, it was based on a very sound socialist principle that we are all equal and we all get paid the same amount of money, whether we’re working or not,” she said of the company’s precepts. “And when there was no money, there was no money — there wasn’t money for some.”Breuer, who died last year, had quickly emerged as a dominant personality, and he directed some of the troupe’s most famous shows, such as “Peter and Wendy” (the story of Peter Pan told by a solo actress and puppets, in 1997) and “Mabou Mines Dollhouse” (Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” with the men played by actors under 5 feet tall and the women by actresses who were nearly 6 feet, in 2003).At the same time the company embraced decision-making by consensus, which did not necessarily help speed things along. “Consensus building is very, very hard but I also think it’s the only way to do it,” Akalaitis said. “If you have a group of people who basically have big egos and don’t want someone else to be the boss, the only way to do it is that everyone’s the boss.”Even now, the company split leadership responsibilities among four co-artistic directors: Fogarty, Karen Kandel, Mallory Catlett and Carl Hancock Rux.The major reason Mabou Mines has endured for a half-century is that it has always drawn like-minded people who thrived on experimentation. Kandel remembered her first experience with the company, working on “Mabou Mines Lear” with Breuer and Maleczech. “There was a kind of trust that whoever was doing whatever role, you would find your way there,” Kandel, 69, said in a video conversation.Clockwise from top left, Fogarty, Rux, Kandel and Catlett. The shared leadership model, the co-founding member JoAnne Akalaitis, said, “was based on a very sound socialist principle that we are all equal.” Krista Schlueter for The New York Times“There was the shy me and then there was the thing inside of me, and that’s what Lee wanted to see come out,” she continued. “One time I said, ‘Why am I going to climb up this telephone pole?’ Lee’s response was something like, ‘Don’t ask me those questions, that Stanislavski [expletive]. Just climb up the pole!’” (Kandel would go on to star in the Mabou hit “Peter and Wendy.”)Past and present are inextricably entwined in “Moi-Même,” a movie directed by Breuer that the artists who would go on to form Mabou Mines (except for Akalaitis and Glass) shot in Paris in 1968 and 1969 but never finished.Breuer’s son Mojo Lorwin retrieved the footage and during the pandemic went over all 16 hours of it with his father on Zoom — there was no script and the dialogue was never dubbed in, so Lorwin, 38, was trying to figure out some sort of through line. “I did the vast majority of the work on it after he died but it really feels like a collaboration because he gave me this stuff to work with, but he left me all this space, too,” he said. “So I’ve written a script, I decided what these things mean.”On Saturday, “Moi-Même” will be presented as a work-in-progress backed by a live band and the Foley artist Jay Peck, with Kandel voicing all the adults and Declan Kenneally all the kids.In a way, it will be a bridge between Mabou Mines’s prehistory and what may lie ahead. “The future will be, hopefully, something that still feels like us,” Kandel said, “but won’t look like us.” More