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    Review: A Far-From-Revolutionary ‘Danton’s Death’ at the Comédie-Française

    A passé take on Georg Büchner’s 1835 play about the French Revolution leans into the worst instincts of the Comédie-Française, our critic writes.It was a surprising oversight in the centuries-old repertoire of the Comédie-Française, France’s foremost theater company. Until now, it had never performed Georg Büchner’s 1835 “Danton’s Death,” arguably the best-known play set during the French Revolution.A new production by the French director Simon Delétang tried to right that wrong this week, but it may have come too late. Given the Comédie-Française’s affinity for prestige period dramas, the feuding revolutionaries of “Danton’s Death” should be an easy fit. Yet Delétang, who was until recently the director of the indoor-outdoor Théâtre du Peuple in the Vosges Mountains, plays into the company’s worst instincts, with a staging that eschews historical insight for endless grandstanding in front of candelabras.The Comédie-Française’s actors undoubtedly look good in knee breeches, but you’d be hard-pressed to know what they, or Delétang, make of the revolution, based on this production. Part of the issue is that, from a French perspective, Büchner’s play feels dated. Büchner, a German playwright, wrote it at age 21, using the historical sources available to him in the 19th century.The result, which is laced with literary references, dramatizes the rivalry between two revolutionary leaders, Georges Danton and Maximilien Robespierre. Formerly friends, they are at odds when “Danton’s Death” starts, at the height of the Reign of Terror, in 1794. In the play, Danton is as hedonistic as Robespierre is inflexible; Robespierre is also ready to sacrifice anyone to the virtuous new republic — starting with Danton, whose relative moderation he has grown to despise. These are undoubtedly meaty roles, and other important historical figures make appearances, including Louis Antoine de Saint-Just and Camille Desmoulins.In true 19th-century fashion, “Danton’s Death” is a clash between “great men,” heroes and antiheroes, who frequently launch into lyrical monologues about blood and death. Yet much work has been done in France in recent decades to examine the blind spots of this narrative, including the oft-forgotten role of women during the revolution.There are only a handful of women in “Danton’s Death,” and when they appear, they talk about men, or listen to them. That’s hardly surprising, because Büchner was a writer of his time, but Delétang appears uninterested in finding an angle that might resonate with current audiences. Even the people — so central to the revolution — are excluded from his production: Aside from a few supporting actors appearing at a window, there is no sense of a popular uprising.A number of French directors have done great work to remedy some of these biases, starting with Ariane Mnouchkine, who focused on the people’s role in her play “1789,” which premiered in 1970. More recently, Joël Pommerat’s plainclothes “Ça ira (1) Fin de Louis” (“It Will Be Fine (1) End of Louis”) captured the events of the early years of the revolution in all of their messy complexity, down to town-hall-style debates, with actors positioned in the auditorium as if audience members were 18th-century citizens, too. It was such a success that it toured for seven years, from 2015 to 2022.Loïc Corbery, who plays the title role in “Danton’s Death.”Christophe Raynaud de LageIn the wake of these works, Büchner’s Danton, a drunk with a death wish who wallows in self-pity and ends up guillotined, is hardly captivating. It doesn’t help that Delétang cast one of the Comédie-Française’s heartthrobs, Loïc Corbery, in the role. Danton, a lawyer by training, was notoriously unattractive after catching smallpox as a child and having his face mauled by a bull. Corbery is much too smooth and seductive a presence; it’s as if Timothée Chalamet turned up to play Winston Churchill.Opposite Corbery, Clément Hervieu-Léger is prissy and repressed as a bewigged Robespierre, with a dancer’s ramrod posture throughout. Guillaume Gallienne makes a suitably scary Saint-Just, and Gaël Kamilindi is a highlight in the role of Desmoulins, here a youthful dreamer whose life is cut short alongside Danton’s.The action takes place almost entirely in a cold semicircular room designed by Delétang himself, which stands in turn for a bourgeois salon, France’s revolutionary assembly and a prison. “Danton’s Death” culminates with the appearance, center stage, of a gold-rimmed guillotine that is almost as high as the walls around it. No heads roll onstage, but by that point, over two hours in, you just hope it ends the proceedings swiftly.“Danton’s Death” isn’t the first misfire on the biggest of the Comédie-Française’s three stages, the Salle Richelieu, since the company’s return from its pandemic-enforced break. And while a company director, Éric Ruf, has done much to work toward greater diversity since his appointment in 2014, men continue to dominate main-stage programming. Out of 12 productions this season, only four are directed by women, and no works by female playwrights are scheduled.On paper, it makes sense to have “Danton’s Death” in the Comédie-Française repertoire. After all, the company’s own history is tied to France’s fluctuating political governments, and some actors from the (formerly royal) troupe barely escaped the guillotine. But in Delétang’s passé production, the past never speaks to the now. More

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    Jimmy Fallon Finds the Funny in the Debt Ceiling

    Fallon says the news that the government has hit its debt cap explains why “Mitch McConnell started an OnlyFans.”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.‘So Broke’The United States reached its debt limit on Thursday, hitting a $31.4 trillion debt cap.“The country’s so strapped for cash, George Santos is emailing people pretending to be a Nigerian prince,” Jimmy Fallon joked.“Today, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said extraordinary measures are being taken to keep the government’s bills paid, which explains why tonight Mitch McConnell started an OnlyFans.” — JIMMY FALLON“America is so broke, the government might have to resort to extraordinary measures, like taxing the rich or not going to war all the time.” — LESLIE JONES, hosting “The Daily Show”“You know it’s not a good situation when the Treasury Department is like, ‘Hey man, could you — could you, could you wait until next week to cash that check?” — JAMES CORDEN“If you ask me, this is where we could use Donald Trump. Now look, I don’t — I didn’t like the guy, I don’t like the guy, I don’t. You’ve got to admit he is pretty good at not paying money that he owes.” — JAMES CORDENThe Punchiest Punchlines (Don’t Call It a Comeback Edition)“Trump, meanwhile, is desperately trying to get back on Facebook. You know, his team sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg requesting that they unblock his account. I’m actually surprised Trump wants to get back on Facebook. Isn’t Facebook just an unpleasant annual reminder that Don Jr. and Eric were born?” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Facebook said they are going to ‘look to experts to assess whether the risk to public safety has receded.’ This is like Jurassic Park saying they’re going to ask around to see if it’s cool to let the raptors out again.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Who needs Facebook when you reach almost a dozen people a day on Truth Social?” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth WatchingHarvey Guillén, who stars in “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish,” satirized George Santos on Thursday’s “Late Show.”Also, Check This OutMadonna performing at the singer Maluma’s concert, “Medellín in the Map,” in Medellín, Colombia, in 2022.Fredy Builes/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAt 64, Madonna has announced her 12th world tour with all of the fanfare that followers have come to expect. More

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    When Monsters Make the Best Husbands

    “Frankenstein’s Monster Is Drunk and the Sheep Have All Jumped the Fences” and “Heaven,” two plays in Origin’s 1st Irish Festival, offer two very different views of marriage.The monster is nestled in a glacier when the villagers dig him out, frozen but not dead, because he was undead already. Tall, broad-shouldered, hulking in his platform boots, he is instantly recognizable, and once he thaws, proves unpretentious despite his Hollywood fame.It is 1946 in a tiny European village, and he is the most endearing of monsters: awkward, uncertain, just wanting to help out. And in “Frankenstein’s Monster Is Drunk and the Sheep Have All Jumped the Fences,” a winsome cartwheel of a show that’s part of the Origin Theater Company’s 1st Irish festival, he finds lasting romance — with a local outcast who falls in love with him at first sight. Never mind that by his own account he is “constructed from the dismembered body parts of a number of different corpses”; their sex life is fabulous.Written and directed by Zoë Seaton for her Big Telly Theater Company, from Northern Ireland, this quick-witted frolic is adapted from Owen Booth’s short story of the same name. On the smallest stage at 59E59 Theaters, with a nimble and inventive cast of four, it is a fast-moving comedy that dares to tip into poignancy.The soulful, well-meaning monster (Rhodri Lewis) and his brisk, nameless wife (Nicky Harley) spend years finding a way to fit into their tiny village, whose populace is represented by the much-doubling Vicky Allen and Chris Robinson. With a large wooden cupboard as the movable centerpiece of its no-frills set (by Ryan Dawson Laight, who also designed the costumes), the play is the story of their marriage: passion, heartbreaks and all. Also mishaps — inevitable where a slightly bungling monster is involved.“One day he gets drunk and manages to lose her entire flock of 63 rare Italian blue sheep,” Robinson tells us, in narrator mode. “They spend years arguing about that.”With a dreamy, heightened air abetted by the lighting (by Blue Hanley and Sinead Owens), the play has tender depths. The monster and his wife can’t have children, and this grieves them terribly. But they get on with life, and with loving each other. And in their imaginations, they create together a whole secret world.In “Heaven,” Andrew Bennett plays a married man who fantasizes about a young man who looks like Jesus.Ste MurrayA very different kind of marriage awaits audiences at Eugene O’Brien’s two-hander “Heaven,” also part of Origin’s 1st Irish at 59E59. So does a helpful glossary of terms, stapled to the one-sheet program. “On the todd” means single; “up the duff” means pregnant; a “ride” is having sex; and so on.Mairead (Janet Moran) and Mal (Andrew Bennett) have been married for 20 years. In their 50s, the parents of a 19-year-old daughter who has never gotten along with Mairead, they haven’t slept together in quite some time. Still, Mal says: “We are the best of pals.”Back in Mairead’s hometown for a wedding, she kisses an ex-boyfriend — one of many she had before settling down with Mal, who lately has taken to indulging sexual fantasies about Jesus that he first had as an altar boy. A young man who looks like Jesus is a guest at the wedding, and now Mal has fantasies about him, too.Directed by Jim Culleton for the Dublin-based company Fishamble, “Heaven” is constructed as a series of alternating monologues by Mairead and Mal, narrating their alcohol- and drug-fueled adventures over the wedding weekend.It’s a well acted, reasonably entertaining play. But while “Heaven” might appear at first to be interested in shaking up the status quo, it turns out to have a drearily conventional spirit, certainly where Mairead is concerned.As the play nears its end, she makes a U-turn away from her own desire, abruptly keen instead on inhabiting one of the most selfless and desexualized of female roles. It’s an out-of-nowhere switcheroo, and it feels utterly imposed.Even so, O’Brien’s final line is perfect — in a shaggy-dog-story way.Frankenstein’s Monster Is Drunk and the Sheep Have All Jumped the FencesThrough Jan. 28 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes.HeavenThrough Jan. 29 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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    Review: ‘Not About Me’ Remembers Decades Shrouded by AIDS

    Eduardo Machado’s autofictional play follows the playwright’s alter ego as he navigates gay life in the 1980s and ’90s.It’s one thing for a new show to take place, for the most part, in the downtown Manhattan of the 1980s and ’90s. It’s another to make audience members feel as if they are watching it contemporaneously: Eduardo Machado’s “Not About Me,” which just opened at Theater for the New City, could have been airlifted wholesale from that era.For New York theatergoers who lived through those times, the occasionally ramshackle acting and the endearingly primitive projections make for an experience akin to stepping into a hot-tub time machine. Younger people might think they have chanced upon a diorama of vintage East Village theater. Everybody is likely to agree that the eye-searing abundance of ill-fitting pants is pushing verisimilitude a pleat too far.The protagonist and narrator of “Not About Me” (take that title with a grain of salt) is a Cuban-born gay playwright named Eduardo (Mateo d’Amato) who bears a striking resemblance to Machado, a Cuban-born gay playwright. This autofictional bent is par for the course for an artist who has long drawn on his own story. Eduardo is even married to a Harriett, as Machado was in real life for nearly 20 years — “your wife who you have always made an offstage character in all your plays,” according to one of Eduardo’s friends, Frank (Ellis Charles Hoffmeister).Machado has acknowledged that “Not About Me” was prompted by the arrival of Covid, which reminded him of AIDS, “the first pandemic of my generation,” as Eduardo puts it. The show, which the playwright also directed, starts in the mid-1980s, when AIDS was still thought of as “the gay disease.” Dancing and cruising in clubs, Eduardo and his buddies are at first oblivious to the new viral threat, then mildly worried, then terrified. Complicating matters, he thinks of himself as bisexual. Eduardo spends most of the show flirting with men, especially Gerald (Michael Domitrovich, with whom, in another example of a real-life connection, Machado collaborated on the memoir “Tastes Like Cuba: An Exile’s Hunger for Home”), and going through an obsession with a troubled, temperamental actress named Donna (Heather Velazquez). He gets flak from both sides, as when his friend Tommy (Charles Manning) jokes that Eduardo should write a play titled “How to Go From Bisexual to Gay When It’s Convenient for Your Career.”Eduardo is almost always portrayed as the object of everybody’s desire, including, in a more platonic way, another actress, the Los Angeles-based Marjorie (Sharon Ullrick, stepping in for Crystal Field at the performance I attended). They are rehearsing a short Tennessee Williams play whose feverishness reflects Eduardo’s approach to life — swashbuckling, peacockish, omnivorous. More important, Marjorie has cancer, and Eduardo must learn to accept her looming death.The play can never settle on a tone, and many scenes land askew, teetering uneasily between earnestness and flamboyance — it often feels as if dramatic ones are played for laughs, and vice versa. It’s also never quite clear whether Machado, with cleareyed honesty, deliberately paints Eduardo as somewhat ruthless and a narcissist (after learning two of his friends have died, he wonders, “On my 40th birthday?”) or if he’s oblivious to how his alter ego comes across. This tension between intention and lack of polish — the show does not feel like it’s been workshopped to death — at least makes “Not About Me” stand out.The play slowly makes its way through the decades and ends in the present, with another pandemic that both crushes and spurs Eduardo. “To write, or not to write, that is the question,” he asks. Let’s rejoice that he chose to write.Not About MeThrough Feb. 5 at Theater for the New City, Manhattan; theaterforthenewcity.net. Running time: 2 hours. More

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    A Wednesday Addams Contest Brings the Fans

    At a Brooklyn club, fans of the Netflix series “Wednesday” showed off their takes on the pigtailed heroine’s signature moves in a midnight competition.On a Brooklyn street dotted with auto repair garages, a line of young women wearing black ruffled dresses, black chokers, little black backpacks and Doc Martens waited in the cold outside a club called Quantum on Friday night. They were united in their fandom for the Netflix series “Wednesday” and their adoration for the show’s macabre protagonist, Wednesday Addams.The club, which is beside the Gowanus Expressway, was hosting an Addams Family-themed party dedicated to the dance that Wednesday performs in the show’s fourth episode at a prom-like event at Nevermore Academy, a boarding school for outcasts, vampires and werewolves. The angular dance is characterized by unpredictable arm flails and head jerks, and executed to the 1981 psychobilly classic “Goo Goo Muck,” by the Cramps. It has inspired endless fans to post bedroom tributes on TikTok.Jenna Ortega, the 20-year-old former Disney star who plays Wednesday, choreographed the moves herself by studying footage of goths dancing at clubs in the 1980s and borrowing ideas from performers like Bob Fosse, Siouxsie Sioux, Lene Lovich and Denis Lavant.She has also cited the gyrations of Lisa Loring, who played Wednesday in the 1960s TV series “The Addams Family.” The New York Times dance critic Gia Kourlas has written of Ortega’s performance: “It’s the defiant dance of a nonconformist. It’s a celebration of weird.”The crowd at Quantum Brooklyn watches the Addams Family-themed dance competition.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesA cardboard cutout of the night’s role model has a moment in the spotlight.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesAs the club filled up with Wednesdays, there was a sense of anticipation in the crowd: At midnight, on an elevated runway, there would be a contest to determine which Wednesday had mastered the dance best.Wednesday Addams, High School SleuthJenna Ortega stars as the Addams Family’s death-obsessed young daughter in Netflix’s new series “Wednesday.”Review: “Perhaps for the first time, an Addams Family story pushes Wednesday toward being more like everyone else,” our critic writes.Inhabiting Wednesday: Ortega, a former Disney star, plays a teenage version of the character, who is sent to a boarding school for outcasts. This is what she said about taking on the role.Iconic Moves: Ortega’s Wednesday dance is a viral sensation, but why? Disarming and defiant, it’s the dance of a nonconformist.Along for the Ride: Joy Sunday, who plays a siren and popular girl who clashes with Wednesday, shares glimpses of her life in 2022 through seven photos in her camera roll.A big screen behind the D.J. booth showed clips of the old black-and-white TV series, the Addams Family movies from the 1990s and the Netflix show. The event’s organizer (an outfit called Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger Presents) had promoted the party with a program that promised a playlist of “sad girl bops,” which ended up meaning songs by Lana Del Rey and My Chemical Romance. On the stage, the hip-hop artist Sl!ck performed a Wednesday-inspired rap.The Quantum dance floor became a fashion runway for all manner of Wednesday Addams costume interpretations: outfits featured black-and-white socks, polka dot shirts, leather coats, metal skull earrings, thick-soled boots with silver spider buckles and brothel creepers. But there were a few spots of color in the crowd, in the form of fans dressed as Enid Sinclair, Wednesday’s jovial roommate, who wears floral skirts, pink sweaters and berets.Between dances, fans reflected on Ms. Ortega’s performance, as well as why a character conceived in the 1930s by the New Yorker cartoonist Charles Addams is now thriving as a mascot for the weird almost 90 years later.“What Wednesday’s dance represents is that it’s not about trying to prove you’re different,” said Melanie Allen-Harrison, 32, who wore a dark baggy coat and a silver pendant necklace. “It’s about knowing that you are and owning that.”Melanie Allen-Harrison, left, and Rosalinda Rodriguez were among the revelers.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesAriella Van Cooten, 31, a middle-school teacher who had dyed her hair pink and green, said: “Now it’s cool to be goth because of the show. People used to look at me funny because I shopped at Hot Topic.” She added, “I think Wednesday has endured as a character because she’s not afraid to be bold, even if that means drinking poison.”The D.J., Cip Cipriano, who wore a Wednesday Addams muscle shirt, said: “I was a gay guido from Yonkers who had to move to San Francisco. We’re drawn to Wednesday because so many of us know what it feels like to be an outcast. And not only is Wednesday a black sheep, she’s the black sheep of the Addams Family.”Finally, midnight arrived, and the Wednesday dance contest was at hand.In homage to a pivotal “Wednesday” scene, a clubgoer squirted fake blood at dance-off competitors.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesPetra Hyde does the Wednesday dance.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesSix contestants climbed onto the stage. The reverb guitar twang of “Goo Goo Muck” began to thunder through the club’s loudspeakers. As the crowd cheered, the contestants mimicked Ms. Ortega’s moves while imitating her character’s signature cold stare.In the final round, water guns were given to audience members so that they could douse the contestants in red paint — a homage to the scene following Ms. Ortega’s dance, in which some local teenagers stage a cruel prank on the Nevermore students by pumping a blood-like liquid into the school’s sprinkler system.The winner was picked democratically: whoever received the loudest applause. It was Jeffrey Pelayo, a 23-year-old fashion stylist who had dressed up as Wednesday’s father, Gomez Addams. He was wearing a blazer and tie, and his smudged pencil mustache was drawn in mascara. He was given a tiara and a drink ticket as his prize.And the winner is … Gomez? Jeffrey Pelayo drew the biggest cheers at Quantum.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesAs night waned into early morning at the club, the Wednesday crowd began to thin out and the staff diverted its attention to customers who wanted to slam shots and party to hits by Kesha and Katy Perry. The dance floor, in other words, turned into the kind of scene that Wednesday Addams would despise. Bombarding the stage, a gang of college girls screamed along to the lyrics of Rihanna’s “We Found Love” while a couple of guys loitered at the bar building up their liquid courage.And yet, as the club devolved into a fratty spectacle, a pair of last-call Wednesdays were dancing hard in a dark corner of the floor, stomping their boots and moshing around in circles, their little black backpacks bobbing up and down. They moved with defiance, dancing strangely without a care. More

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    Jimmy Kimmel: George Santos Is a ‘Scooby-Doo’ Villain

    “He’s been accused of stealing from a dog,” Kimmel said of the congressman on Wednesday.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.By Any Other NameGeorge Santos’s former roommate appeared on CNN this week after reports that the New York congressman had kept money raised on GoFundMe meant to help a veteran with a sick dog, and that he went by other names, such as Anthony Devolder.On Wednesday, Jimmy Kimmel said that it’s “always a bad sign when your former roommate is on CNN.”“Santos raised money for something called the Friends of Pets United. But, no surprise, the I.R.S. has no records of a charity with that name. OK, but have they checked for ‘Friends of Pets Devolder’?” — STEPHEN COLBERT“He’s gone by a number of names, including George Santos, Anthony Devolder, Anthony Zebrowski, LL Cool G, Supreme Court Justice George Bader Ginsberg, George Costantos, Melania, Malala, Madonna, and King George Batman Santos-Clooney.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“His roommate says he conned a homeless veteran out of money intended to save his service dog, which had to be put to sleep. Well, you checked every box with that one, that’s for sure.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“He’s been accused of stealing from a dog. He’s literally a ‘Scooby-Doo’ villain at this point, and he’s in Congress.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Because when the veteran finally got ahold of Santos to schedule his dog’s surgery, Santos refused to give him any of the donations, saying he would take the money and use it for ‘other dogs.’ Yes, ‘other dogs’ like Max and Skipper and Rover Devolder.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Double Life Edition)“When he heard this, even Kevin McCarthy said, ‘That’s it. George Santos has got to go … sit on two House committees!’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Speaker Kevin McCarthy put him on the Science Committee and the Space and Technology Committee, which makes sense because he’s the only congressman who found a cure for cancer and successfully manned a mission to Mars all this year alone.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Small business and science. Well those two make sense. I mean, Santos said he has a degree from the Bill Nye School at the Shark Tank Academy of Business Science. He even played for their volleyball team, the Fightin’ Barbara Corcorans!” — STEPHEN COLBERT“A lot of people are saying that he’s not qualified and, I mean, just look at how he defined some simple space terms. For instance, when asked to define cosmos, Santos said, ‘That cocktail they love on ‘Sex and the City.’” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth Watching“The Menu” star John Leguizamo talked about his experience trying cobra blood on Wednesday’s “Tonight Show.”What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightLily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, Rita Moreno and Sally Field will talk about their new film, “80 for Brady,” on Thursday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Also, Check This OutLuis A. Miranda Jr. invested in the documentary “Going Varsity in Mariachi.”Sundance InstituteMore people of color are financing movies focused on elevating underrepresented voices at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. More

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    At Under the Radar, Family Histories Bubble Up With No Easy Answers

    The Public Theater’s experimental theater festival is back in person for the first time since 2020. Here, our critics review a second selection of the works on display.‘Otto Frank’Through Sunday. Running time: 1 hour.It’s unnerving how seldom Otto Frank blinks in Roger Guenveur Smith’s hourlong “Otto Frank.” But then why would he? Having for 35 years tended the posthumous flame of his murdered daughter Anne — while doing the same for her sister and mother and six million others — Otto might well have had to force himself to keep seeing.You may need to blink, though. Not because the story Smith tells in his crushing, exhausting monologue, part of the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival, can come as a surprise. Anne’s diary, prepared for publication by Otto in 1947, has been outsold among nonfiction books, Smith tells us, only by the Bible. It was adapted for Broadway in 1955, and Hollywood in 1959.Yet we have rarely been asked, as we are here, to view the horror through a double tragic lens. Watching Smith inhabit Otto and endure his unrelenting memories feels like watching someone die in pain — and then keep dying over and over.That must be what Smith is going for. As has often been the case in his earlier monologues — about Huey Newton, Bob Marley and Rodney King, among others — he does not settle for dry narration. In lightly rhymed, intensely poetic cadences that sometimes spill into a kind of keening song (the live sound design is by Marc Anthony Thompson), he instead reaches out from history to make broader connections, beyond territory and time.Beyond race and religion, too. References to “the congregations in Charleston and Pittsburgh and Christchurch and Poway” mix synagogue shootings with murders in a mosque and a Black church. Otto also mourns enslaved Africans who were “marched to their death” during “the great middle passage” and name-checks massacres in Bosnia, Rwanda, Wounded Knee and Tulsa. (“Otto Frank” will be performed at the Oklahoma City Repertory Theater Jan. 27-28.) He even suggests that Anne “would be proud” of “the young American woman in a hard hat” — Bree Newsome Bass — who in 2020 climbed a flagpole in Columbia, S.C., to remove its confederate flag.Comparing atrocities (and braveries) is a tricky business, and the entire project of dramatizing the Holocaust is fraught with problems of scale. As was also the case with Tom Stoppard’s Broadway hit “Leopoldstadt,” I sometimes felt in “Otto Frank” that the names of the camps and the litanies of loss were being dragooned into dramatic service illegitimately. That doesn’t invalidate the sincerity and even the occasional beauty of the effort. But what Smith apparently felt forced to see sometimes made me want to look away. JESSE GREEN‘KLII’Through Sunday. Running time: 65 minutes.Drawing on works including Patrice Lumumba’s Congolese independence address, Kaneza Schaal evokes King Leopold II, the Belgian monarch who brutally reigned over the Congo Free State in the late 19th century.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs audience members take their seats for Kaneza Schaal’s “KLII,” they are offered bars of soap with which they can wash their hands in water buckets. Schaal is already onstage, sitting on a luxurious throne-like chair in the semi-darkness. A long beard spreads to the top of her red-and-gold uniform jacket. The figure she is evoking is King Leopold II, the Belgian monarch who, in the late 19th century, owned the Congo Free State (what is now, for the most part, the Democratic Republic of Congo).This dimly lit, moody prelude is quietly unsettling — quite a theatrical feat since nothing much is happening.Eventually, Schaal climbs a steep metal ladder to part-declaim, part-lip-sync a speech. This part of “KLII,” before the show makes a sharp turn in terms of artistic approach and content, is cobbled together from sources like Mark Twain’s satirical “King Leopold’s Soliloquy,” from 1905, and a 1960 address from the independence leader Patrice Lumumba, but Camila Ortiz and Ian Askew’s sound is so blurred by industrial-strength reverb and booming echo that little besides stray words and sentences emerge from the sonic murk. There is something Leni Riefenstahl-esque about the vision of a despot authoritatively spouting unintelligible — either by design or accident — verbiage, but a little goes a long way, and the scene overstays its welcome.After climbing down from her perch, Schaal, who conceived “KLII” and directed it with the designer Christopher Myers, takes off her makeup — literally wiping Leopold off her face — and tells us, in a conversational voice now free of distortion, about her young daughter’s passion for “Fiddler on the Roof.” Other topics in that monologue (which is credited to Myers) include a brief on what happened when soap manufacturers transitioned from animal fat to palm oil and a peek at her family history with the tale of her Grandpa Murara, who fled Rwanda and opened a guesthouse in Burundi.In a note, Schaal describes “KLII” as “an exorcism, in theater.” This implies a certain amount of release, but even in its intimate, more directly autobiographical second half, the show does not deliver, or even aim for, easy catharsis.Avoiding the obvious is to be commended, but Schaal does not connect the dots into a convincing whole. “KLII” is most effective on a purely aesthetic, visceral level, down to small details that linger, like the cups of hibiscus tea that are handed to theatergoers on their way out. Printed inside the cups is a hand, which feels like a symbol of extended hospitality, until you remember that Leopold would casually order Congolese folks’ limbs to be hacked off. ELISABETH VINCENTELLI‘Our Country’Through Sunday. Running time: 65 minutes.Annie Saunders carries Jesse Saler, who plays her brother in the semi-autobiographical “Our Country,” which probes Wild West myths about freedom and the erosion of a sense of national identity.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn the canon of dramatic siblinghood, Antigone may be the most heroic sister. A mythic rebel drawn by Sophocles, she risks her life to bury her disgraced dead brother, an enemy of the state.The experimental writer-performer Annie Saunders does not dispute the bravery of that act of devotion. But in “Our Country,” a somewhat ungainly examination of Saunders’s bond with and duty toward her own legally beleaguered younger brother, she suggests there might be another way of looking at Antigone’s self-sacrifice.“I just wonder, has it ever occurred to anybody that maybe that was not her job?” she says. “Like maybe she could have just lived her life?”Saunders, who created “Our Country” with its director, Becca Wolff, knows it isn’t that simple — that love, a shared past and the pull of familial obligation can conspire otherwise. When the age gap between siblings is wide enough, as it is between her and her brother, Rafe (Jesse Saler), the older one has memories stretching back to the younger’s arrival.“When you were a baby I took you for show and tell, when you were born,” Saunders says. “Did you know that?”“‘This is my brother. Everybody line up and pet him,’” Rafe says, teasing her gently, disarmingly.“Our Country,” at the Public Theater, takes much of its dialogue from recordings that Saunders made, with her brother’s consent, of conversations between them. She, a Los Angeles artist, tries to understand him, an anti-establishment, pro-gun, Northern California marijuana farmer with a checkered legal past cleaned up by clever attorneys. Now he’s “in hotter water than usual,” she says: facing charges that might put him in prison. She’s been asked, by their lawyer mother, to write a letter in support of him.“Do you concede that you are having a particularly Caucasian experience of our criminal justice system?” Saunders asks, and Rafe pushes her off her high horse immediately.“Would you like to talk about privilege now in your play?” he says.On Nina Caussa’s rustic set, the siblings assemble a giant play fort — a patchwork tent whose awning stretches over the first rows of the audience. Sister and brother talk and tussle, their physicality almost balletic as Saunders, who is smaller than Saler, repeatedly carries him, though sometimes it’s the other way around. (Movement direction is by Jess Williams.)As the title suggests, “Our Country” means to be about more than one pair of siblings. Saunders and Wolff are also poking at Wild West myths about freedom, and at the widening chasm where some semblance of national identity used to be.Inside the fort, recollections of family history vary. Maybe, it seems, that longed-for collective past was partly imagined even at the time. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES More

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    When Black Characters Double-Deal to Make Ends Meet, It’s Never Enough

    In three Broadway plays this season, a quest for financial stability can’t undo the trauma of the past or dismantle the architecture that places a ceiling on Black futures.In “Between Riverside and Crazy,” a Black man haggles over the concessions he’s being offered by his former employer, the New York Police Department, eight years after he was shot by a white cop. In “Topdog/Underdog,” two brothers hustle pedestrians on the street and, at home, each other. And in “The Piano Lesson,” family members bristle at a scheme that would involve hocking a precious heirloom.While these Broadway plays couldn’t be more different, they all similarly explore what happens when Black characters aren’t able to achieve financial stability through traditional, or official, channels. They are left little choice but to create and work in their own separate economies: A hustle is the only way the Black characters can even the playing field. And yet they never manage to do so — at least not for long. Even when one profits from a con, it’s a Faustian bargain that comes at the expense of another Black man’s opportunities.Ultimately, there’s no real winning, no outcome that can undo the trauma of the past or dismantle the architecture that places a ceiling on Black futures.In that regard, the shows mirror the reality facing many Black Americans who have dared to dream of financial success. Back in the 1930s, the setting of “The Piano Lesson,” federal housing programs under the New Deal segregated Black families by steering them to urban housing projects far from the almost exclusively white suburbs. The effects of these government programs, along with a variety of other exclusionary tactics used by agents and white residents — what we now call “redlining” — put many Black Americans at a disadvantage. (In Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 classic “A Raisin in the Sun,” revived this past fall at the Public Theater, the Younger family experiences this firsthand when a white representative from the neighborhood where they recently bought a house offers them a bribe to keep them from moving in.)And it’s not just housing: There are racial inequities in hiring practices, and in pay rates and retention in the job force; gaps in access to quality education and health care; and of course Black Americans are imprisoned at disproportionately higher rates than white Americans.Corey Hawkins, left, as Lincoln and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Booth in “Topdog/Underdog,” which is full of hustles, games of deception and power plays that go beyond what the brothers do with a deck of cards.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Topdog/Underdog,” a revival of which is at the Golden Theater through Sunday, the brothers Lincoln and Booth share Booth’s tiny efficiency apartment. Lincoln’s wife has kicked him out, and Booth refuses to hold down a job. Lincoln supports them with a gig as an Abraham Lincoln impersonator, and Booth spends his days shoplifting, aggressively trying to woo an ex and planning his debut as a master of three-card monte. In some ways, Booth’s on top: Though he has no job, he gets along fine and still has his $500 inheritance. Lincoln’s struggling: a job that he fears he’s going to lose, no wife, no home and his own $500 inheritance is long gone.“Topdog/Underdog” is full of hustles, games of deception and power plays that go beyond what Lincoln and Booth do with a deck of cards. Booth never subscribed to the losing game of American capitalism by getting a 9-to-5, and yet Lincoln, a former card hustler, now takes “nowhere jobs” and plays the 16th president in an arcade that underpays and then fires him.Though the economy Lincoln built on the street was illegal, it was at least more reliable than what he faces in the traditional job market. Yet again, there’s a blood cost. After Lincoln pulls off the ultimate con — hustling his brother out of his inheritance — Booth shoots him.Nobody wins. Nobody profits.Stephen Adly Guirgis’s “Between Riverside and Crazy,” now playing at the Helen Hayes Theater (and livestreaming its final two weeks of performances), had its Off Broadway debut in 2014, during the early years of the Black Lives Matter movement. In the play, Walter, a Black former police officer who was shot while off duty, has lost his wife and is now being pushed out of his rent-stabilized apartment in an area experiencing gentrification.He tells his son, Junior, that despite following the straight and narrow — “Married your mother. Joined the police. Paid taxes. Bought insurance. Got a Riverside Drive apartment. Had you. Put down firm roots” — he knew he would be cheated and disrespected. It doesn’t matter that he’s an “old patriotic, tax-paying, African American ex-cop, war veteran senior citizen,” as he says twice in the play. At the end of the day, he’s still just a Black man in America.So he has no qualms lying about a detail in the shooting and later about demanding that his former partner’s $30,000 engagement ring be included in his new settlement. Given the circumstances, Walter’s con feels like reparations, not thievery. He successfully gets his payout and keeps his apartment, and the play ends with Walter ready to move on from his old life. But in this final scene we also see that his son has taken his father’s seat at the kitchen table. Dressed in Walter’s robe, Junior, an ex-con with a roomful of suspiciously acquired electronics, has been left behind. Though the city, in its deal with Walter, has expunged Junior’s criminal record, the play suggests that this is far from enough for Junior to build a life of success.In “The Piano Lesson,” a family grapples with how best to preserve its painful legacy, which is represented by an elaborately carved piano.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThese plays depict dire times — contemporary times (“Between Riverside and Crazy” is set in 2014, and “Topdog/Underdog” premiered at the Public in 2001) when the American dream, which has been accessible to white Americans since before the ink dried on the Declaration of Independence, is still so far out of reach for Black people.August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson,” however, is set in 1936, during the overlapping period of the Great Depression and the Great Migration, when Black Americans were working to distance themselves from the economy that slavery built — trying to survive, even thrive, amid national fiscal insecurity.When Boy Willie, a sharecropper in Mississippi, arrives in Pittsburgh at the home that his uncle Doaker Charles shares with Boy Willie’s sister, Berniece, he feverishly reveals his plan to become a respectable landowner. He simply needs to sell the watermelons that he hauled up there in his broken-down truck, and find a buyer for a family heirloom in his sister’s possession.The land he wants to purchase isn’t just any plot — it belonged to Sutter, the white man whose ancestors owned the Charles family as slaves and who employed Boy Willie as a sharecropper. By cashing in on his family’s history, and pain, Boy Willie wants to buy a piece of the American dream that was stolen from his family generations ago.Berniece is adamant that the price is too high, and she suspects that the recently deceased Sutter was killed by Boy Willie so that he could buy the property. Boy Willie goes behind his sister’s back to sell the heirloom, a piano engraved with the Charles family’s story of enslavement, separation and death, which is in large part a result of the instrument — a slave-owner’s anniversary gift to his wife, paid for in slaves. Though Berniece keeps the piano, and thus a connection to their family’s legacy, the cost is Boy Willie’s dream of the financial security and independence that would have come from owning his own property. (Though that dream, the play indicates, was always a delusion, because a Black landowner in the South would almost certainly be targeted.)Wilson’s play is a window into the ways our country’s perverse economics make even one’s trauma psychologically too pricey to keep. At least that’s Boy Willie’s feeling. For Berniece, it’s too valuable to sell off and forget.Boy Willie misses out on landownership, Junior loses his father, Booth his inheritance, and Lincoln his life. When it’s Blackness versus the American dream, that paradise of white capitalism, the house always wins. More