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    After Being Stuck in Russia, Kirill Serebrennikov Directs a Play in Germany

    Kirill Serebrennikov is living under a three-year travel ban, but to his surprise, Russian authorities approved his request to direct a play in Hamburg.HAMBURG, Germany — At first glance, a recent rehearsal at the Thalia Theater here looked much like any other. Onstage, the actors ran through the final scene of a play called “The Black Monk,” trying to get the flow just right.“Stop, stop, stop,” the director, Kirill Serebrennikov, cried from the middle of the auditorium. He wasn’t happy with the projections beamed onto moons suspended above the performers, and started to troubleshoot.It was business as usual in theater, but for Serebrennikov — one of Russia’s most prominent directors, whose stage work is produced across Europe — the chance to oversee the production in person was an unexpected surprise. It was the first time in more than four years that he had been able to set foot outside of his home country.Serebrennikov’s provocative stage work, which often deals with topics considered taboo in Russia, like homosexuality, has been seen as critical of life under President Vladimir V. Putin. Perhaps too critical, since for the last four and a half years Serebrennikov has been embroiled in a financial fraud case that is widely seen by Russia’s intelligentsia as part of a crackdown on artistic freedom.“The Black Monk” features a large cast of Russian, German, American, Armenian and Latvian actors, dancers and singers.Hayley Austin for The New York TimesBeginning in August 2017, Serebrennikov spent nearly 20 months under house arrest in Moscow, and was later convicted of embezzling around 133 million rubles, or around $2 million, in government funds allocated to a festival that was put on at the Gogol Center, the avant-garde theater Serebrennikov used to run. The high-profile court case resulted in a suspended sentence for the director in June 2020, but also a three-year ban on his traveling outside of Russia.So when the director arrived at Hamburg Airport on Jan. 8, Joachim Lux, the Thalia’s artistic director, greeted him with astonishment.In a statement issued by his theater, Lux sounded relieved, noting that his playhouse had overcome “all pandemic and political obstacles” to bring the director to Hamburg. He called the director’s safe arrival “a great miracle that gives strength in difficult times!”Among those most surprised was Serebrennikov himself.The director explained that his request to leave Russia so he could direct a production based on a little-known story by Anton Chekhov was unexpectedly approved, and on very short notice.Since his arrest, Serebrennikov has come up with inventive ways to direct from a distance. For “The Black Monk,” he was able to be there in person again.Hayley Austin for The New York Times“Please allow me to go to Hamburg for work,” the director had asked Russian officials, he said during a recent news conference in the foyer of the Thalia. It was the same standard request that the authorities had rejected numerous times before. However, earlier this month, “they just gave the permission for this project,” Serebrennikov said, adding that the authorization to travel came through at the very last minute.“They just signed the paper right after the New Year holidays,” said the 52-year-old director, dressed in black and wearing lightly tinted sunglasses and a baseball cap. “Probably I was a good guy, my behavior was good and that’s why they said OK,” he added.In an interview after the news conference, Serebrennikov said he had given up trying to understand exactly why he was let out of Russia to direct “The Black Monk.”“Here I am. I’m in Hamburg,” he said with a shrug. “We are creating theater together with a lot of very talented people in one of the best theaters in the world.”When he was unable to leave Russia, Serebrennikov found resourceful ways to keep his work going abroad. In November 2018, when he was still under house arrest and prohibited from using the internet, he directed a production of Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” at the Zurich Opera using a relay system for video files that involved a USB stick hand-delivered to him by his lawyer in Moscow.Similar technological workarounds have allowed him to remain highly prolific in captivity of one kind or another. Since the Zurich “Così,” he has also had artistic control of stage productions in Germany and Austria and completed two well-received films, “Leto,” in 2018, and “Petrov’s Flu” in 2021, both of which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, in the director’s absence.Filipp Avdeev, left, and Gurgen Tsaturyan in “The Black Monk.”Hayley Austin for The New York TimesIn much of Serebrennikov’s recent stage work, confinement has appeared as a central theme, including in his production of “Outside,” which played in Avignon and Berlin, and his 2021 staging of Richard Wagner’s “Parsifal” at the Vienna State Opera, which was partially set in a prison. His production of Dmitri Shostakovich’s “The Nose,” which opened the current season at the Bavarian State Opera, featured scenes of state violence and repression in a dystopian yet oddly contemporary Russia.Serebrennikov speculated that being forced to practice his craft remotely over the months he spent under house arrest gave him an edge once the pandemic began. “It was my personal rehearsal for Corona,” he said with a wry laugh.Since his legal woes began in 2017, Serebrennikov has become an emblem of artistic freedom in the face of government repression. But the director said he was uncomfortable with this role. “I’m a working animal,” he said. “I don’t want to be a symbol.”Even by the director’s standards, “The Black Monk” is a challenging production. It features a large cast of Russian, German, American, Armenian and Latvian actors, dancers and singers, has dialogue in three languages and incorporates music by the Latvian composer Jekabs Nimanis.“We have not too much time,” Serebrennikov said of the two weeks he has in Hamburg to finish the production. And while he seemed glad to be back to “in person” directing, he said that working remotely is an artistically viable alternative.“We get used to having a lot of digital life around us,” he said. “Of course, personal presence is much more preferable for me, but Zoom is OK,” he added.“We are creating theater together with a lot of very talented people in one of the best theaters in the world,” Serebrennikov said of “The Black Monk.”Hayley Austin for The New York TimesAfter “The Black Monk,” Serebrennikov has a number of other international productions on the horizon, including an opera at this summer’s Holland Festival in Amsterdam, and a possible tour of “The Black Monk.” Whether he’ll be allowed to travel for either is unclear.“It could happen, but nobody knows,” he said. “I prefer to be in the moment and not to hope too much,” he added, alluding to his own legal predicament and the wider world’s battering by the pandemic.Under the conditions of his travel permit, Serebrennikov must return to Russia on Jan. 22, the day after “The Black Monk” opens. The director said he had every intention of going back to Moscow, where he will start work on a film that will be his first in English.“I’m a reliable person,” he said, adding that “the people who allowed me to leave are probably at risk as well.” More

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    Augmented Reality Theater Takes a Bow. In Your Kitchen.

    The Immersive Storytelling Studio at the National Theater in London is using technology to bring a miniature musical to viewers’ homes. It’s one of several high-tech British projects pushing dramatic boundaries.LONDON — Standing in front of a golden bandstand, dressed in a white satin gown and pearls, the vocalist Nubiya Brandon sashayed to a gentle beat. Stepping toward the spotlight, she took a lazy turn around the stage, singing a playful calypso number and smiling occasionally at the band behind.The weird thing about this show, called “All Kinds of Limbo,” was that Brandon appeared to be in this reporter’s kitchen. The singer was in fact an eerily realistic holographic avatar on a mobile phone screen; her performance had been recorded and was now being broadcast in augmented reality from the National Theater in London.Via the technology’s strange alchemy, which overlays digital imagery onto whatever a camera phone is pointing at, Brandon seemed to be singing and sashaying on the countertop. After she took a bow, her image evaporated and the bandstand faded into nothingness, leaving only a sink full of washing up behind.The success of digital-only theater productions has been one of the pandemic’s surprise silver linings: Audiences have been willing to try them and theater companies have found fans thousands of miles away. But could immersive technologies provide a more intriguing path forward for drama, one that will endure once Covid-19 (hopefully) subsides? Augmented reality (A.R.) and virtual reality (V.R.) are already changing gaming, music and art; might theater be next?“All Kinds of Limbo’s” director, Toby Coffey, said he hopes so. In 2016, he set up the National Theater’s Immersive Storytelling Studio, which operates as a kind of “start-up” within the company, he said in a recent interview at the studio’s modest space, which was crowded with a jumble of technical equipment. The team’s brief is to see how live theater and new technologies can interact and intersect.Toby Coffey, who founded the National Theater’s Immersive Storytelling Studio in 2016.Suzie Howell for The New York Times“Theater makers are naturally fascinated: They’re used to working in 3-D,” Coffey said. “As soon as you bring a director or stage designer or choreographer into V.R., you see their brains whirring.”The studio’s first production, “Fabulous Wonder.land,” was a V.R. music video featuring a track by the musician Damon Albarn with words by the playwright Moira Buffini. The team has since made 360-degree films of live shows, developed a one-on-one piece in which an audience member interacts with a live actor while wearing a V.R. headset and created a mixed-reality “exhibition” about government welfare cuts.“All Kinds of Limbo” came into being in 2019 after the National Theater had a hit with “Small Island,” a play about postwar Jamaican immigration to Britain. Coffey and his team commissioned Brandon, the vocalist, and the composer Raffy Bushman to create a 10-minute song sequence responding freely to the play’s themes. It was written, performed and motion-captured that year, and was initially presented as a V.R. experience in one of the theater’s event spaces.Brandon performing in a motion capture studio to record “All Kinds of Limbo.”The National TheaterWhen the pandemic shut down British performing venues in March 2020, Coffey accelerated plans to turn “All Kinds of Limbo” into an at-home experience. The retooled version can be watched via A.R. on a mobile device, via a V.R. headset, or on a regular computer. Brandon’s performance stays the same, but, depending on the device used, the experience feels subtly different.To summon some of theater’s shared intimacy, it’s being ticketed and broadcast as live, although the show is recorded. Other people attending virtually are represented by blades of moving white light and, by playing with the settings, you can move around the space and see the action from different angles.It’s a short piece, but “All Kinds of Limbo” does feel like the glimmering of a new art form: somewhere between music video, video game and live cabaret show.Over the last few years, Britain’s theater scene has become a test bed for similar experiments. Last spring, the Royal Shakespeare Company co-produced an immersive digital piece called “Dream” that featured actors performing using motion-capture technology and was watchable via smartphone or computer. Other projects, such as shows by the Almeida theater in London and the company Dreamthinkspeak in Brighton, England, require participants to turn up in person and get equipped with VR headsets.Francesca Panetta, a V.R. producer and artist who was recently appointed as the alternate realities curator at the Sheffield DocFest film festival, said in a video interview that practitioners from audio, gaming, theater, TV and other art forms were collaborating as never before. “Many different people are trying to explore this space and work out what it really is,” she said. “No one is quite sure.”One of the most keenly awaited partnerships is between the immersive theater troupe Punchdrunk, which pioneered live site-specific shows such as “Sleep No More” and “The Masque of the Red Death” in the mid-2000s, and the tech firm Niantic, best-known for the wildly successful A.R. game Pokémon Go.Speaking by phone, Punchdrunk’s co-founder Felix Barrett seemed invigorated by the creative possibilities. “We’re on the cusp of a new form of entertainment,” he said. “It’s a new genre; it just hasn’t been named yet.”Later this year, Niantic and Punchdrunk plan to unveil the first results of their collaboration. Barrett was reluctant to reveal too much, but said that it would offer participants “a citywide adventure” that will feel like an immersive video game happening in the real world. “Our goal is to try and make you the hero of your own living movie,” he said.Ambitious as such projects are, they are also — at least by theater standards — time-consuming and forbiddingly expensive. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s “Dream” wouldn’t have been possible without corporate sponsorship and a hefty grant from a roughly $55-million British government fund promoting digital arts innovation. The latest iteration of “All Kinds of Limbo” relies on a partnership with Microsoft and the livestreaming platform Dice.Production work on “All Kinds of Limbo.” The show can be watched via A.R. on a mobile device, via a V.R. headset, or on a regular computer, through Jan. 30.The National TheaterThere’s also the question of audience. Though theater-led projects such as “Dream” and “All Kinds of Limbo” have gained positive reviews, they have attracted only a tiny fraction of the 12 million viewers who watched a 2020 virtual performance by the rapper Travis Scott in the online game Fortnite. The chances of monetization at scale look slim, at least for now.And the irony is that, while the pandemic may have whetted audience appetites for digital drama, it has had devastating consequences for theater companies themselves. The National Theater’s Immersive Storytelling Studio originally had four staff members; after belt-tightening layoffs in the company, it’s now just Coffey and one full-time co-worker. “Even before the pandemic, we could have been doing 10 times more than we had resource to be able to do,” Coffey said. “We need to work within those restrictions.”What happens next is up for debate. The National Theater is working on redeploying the app and distribution platform used for “All Kinds of Limbo” into something that works for other projects. Panetta said that the metaverse, if it genuinely takes off, offers its own possibilities for live performance. “It’s difficult to see what the pathway is; I suspect it’ll be a mix of many different things,” she added.So how long until we’re watching Ibsen or Shakespeare in augmented reality at our kitchen tables? Coffey laughed, then cautioned that designing successful A.R. performances was still an emerging skill. “But some day it’ll happen, I have no doubt,” he said.All Kinds of LimboStreaming through Jan. 30; allkindsoflimbo.com. More

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    Review: ‘Addressless’ Is on the Streets and in Your Home

    This hybrid of theater and game asks us to consider homelessness empathetically but can’t overcome the friction between education and entertainment.In June, after a series of court battles, 60-some men were moved out of the Lucerne, an Upper West Side hotel that had served as a shelter during the first year of the pandemic. Their presence had divided the neighborhood, with some residents starting a Facebook group to complain about how the men had decreased their quality of life, even as there was no discernible uptick in the local crime rate.One of the Lucerne’s residents, Shams DaBaron, who first became experienced homelessness as a child, found himself representing his fellows. At a rally in September 2020, he spoke up, saying: “Despite our being homeless we can do the right thing. Don’t criminalize us, don’t dehumanize us, let us all come together with both sides and make this thing work.”These days DaBaron has found a different way to get people to come together. A virtual one. He is a star of “Addressless,” a theater and video game hybrid presented by Rattlestick Playwrights Theater. DaBaron plays Wallace, a single father in the shelter system. (DaBaron is housed now, but the character’s experiences mirror his own.) The other homeless characters are Joey Auzenne’s Louis, a veteran with untreated back problems; and Bianca Norwood’s Josie, a queer teen runaway. The “games master” is Hope Beaver, a licensed social worker at a family shelter on the Lower East Side.A creation of Martin Boross, a Budapest-based director, and the playwright Jonathan Payne, “Addressless” has empathy in mind. Its subtitle is “A Walk in Our Shoes.” By splitting its audience into three groups, each assigned to a particular character, it asks us to participate in that character’s life choices. As often as not, all of the choices on offer are bad ones. The goal is to leave your character with enough money and enough health points to enter a housing lottery. Staged via Zoom, the show alternates live performances and breakout-room chats with amateurish filmed sequences.((“Joey Auzenne as Louis and Hope Beaver as Social Worker of “Addressless”))via The Chamber GroupThere’s an obvious tension between wanting to excite empathy for the homeless and making a game of the situation, reducing a person’s life to “health points” and a cash amount. (A subtler tension: participating in a show about the housing crisis from the comfort of your own home.) “Addressless” takes pains to show that people experiencing homelessness are more than just numbers on a caseworker’s docket. Then the show shrinks them down to numbers anyway.Winning becomes paramount, the unhoused person’s experience less so. Auzenne and Norwood are trained actors and able to disappear into character. That DaBaron and Beaver are not only intensifies this friction between entertainment and education.The game often doesn’t play fair. (Then again, a state that has enshrined the right to shelter into law and yet doesn’t provide it isn’t playing fair either.) More irksome, “Addressless” doesn’t follow through on its choose-you-own-adventure premise. In the show’s first section, participants can choose where characters sleep — on the streets, in a shelter, on a friend’s couch. After that, the characters choose for themselves. Not always wisely. But there’s poignancy in some of the dilemmas, like whether Louis, who is injured on the job during a trainee period, should go back to work, risking his health, or take time off to heal, risking his continued employment.For many housed New Yorkers, day-to-day interactions with homeless people will be defined by arm’s-length benevolence (donating to a food or coat drive) or inconvenience (panhandlers on the subway). Even if “Addressless” sometimes sacrifices deep identification to its game structure, it wants us to do better, and the show’s chat function provides a list of resources to enable that. Some participants seemed primed to use them.As a Sunday evening show concluded, one woman unmuted herself. “My heart just breaks for everyone who experiences this,” she said.AddresslessStreaming through Feb. 13; rattlestick.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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    How a Broadway Producer Spends His Sundays

    Theater may be struggling, but Ron Simons is committed to opening his next show, “For Colored Girls,” this spring.Ron Simons, one of a handful of Black Broadway producers in New York, has won Tony Awards for “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder,” “Porgy & Bess,” “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike” and “Jitney.” Not to be outdone by the pandemic, he recently produced “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” which closed last month, and his next show, “For Colored Girls,” is scheduled to open this spring.“Recent events have allowed us to be fully expressed,” said Mr. Simons, alluding to the killing of George Floyd in May 2020 and the unrest and conversations about race that followed. “If done correctly, through storytelling, shows like ‘Thoughts of a Colored Man’ and others will help dispel ignorance and hatred.”Even though Broadway attendance is down and casts and crews are struggling to evade the Omicron variant, Mr. Simons remains optimistic. “People forget how long Broadway has been around,” he said. “Broadway is an institution that is not going away. It’s still strong and becoming more inclusive.”Mr. Simons, 61, lives with his partner, Jbya Clarke, 53, a personal trainer and wellness professional, on West 54th Street.THEATER HOURS Depending upon what time I got to bed the night before, Alexa wakes me with an obnoxious beeping sound around 10 or 11 a.m. When I’m raising money for a show, like I am with “For Colored Girls,” I tend to work into the wee hours of the night on Saturdays. I pick up the phone to see if there are any fires with the shows and if they need to be put out.“I tend to work into the wee hours of the night on Saturdays,” said Mr. Simons, who likes to sleep in on Sundays. Laila Stevens for The New York TimesPURGE Jbya is already up and has made coffee. Right now we’re drinking two coffees from Café Britt, one that’s Hawaiian and another that’s Costa Rican. I’ll drink it in whatever mug is available with cream and Stevia. That’s followed by a green juice made with spinach, pineapple, mango, collagen and MCT oil. It’s very cleansing. I have an addiction to fast food, it’s cheap, fast and easy. This helps the detox process. Every year I do an 11-day purge in mid-January. All I have is green drinks with protein powder. I like to start the year off with a healthy disposition. The purge makes me feel lighter and makes my brain clearer.SPIRITUAL STREAM I’m a member of The R.O.C.K. church in Houston. My cousin is married to the pastor. She preaches and oversees operations, so I watch the morning service on my computer. I find her inspiring. I’m always looking for inspiration and beauty. That’s how I counteract the news that’s been spreading over the country. I might meditate as well.He likes to tune in to services from a Houston church whose pastor is married to his cousin. “I’m always looking for inspiration and beauty.”Laila Stevens for The New York TimesBRUNCH By noon we are thinking about places to have brunch. Our favorite is Cookshop. I always say I won’t get a cinnamon roll, which come out warm and delicious, so I order wheat toast. I end up getting the cinnamon roll, too. And French fries. They’re my nemesis. We have one or two friends join. Sometimes we make brunch at our house, or we do it potluck, which is a good way to reconnect with some important people in our lives.MATINEE I’m a Tony voter, so I have to see all the new shows. If we don’t eat brunch we see theater instead. Because I’m so exhausted from the week, I tend to fall asleep at night, so Sunday makes me more of an alert audience member.Socializing in Chelsea, the Manhattan neighborhood where Mr. Simons and Mr. Clarke will often go for brunch. Laila Stevens for The New York TimesLUNCH WITH LIGHTING After theater Jbya and I walk around Hell’s Kitchen. I’m on a mission to have dinner at all the Hell’s Kitchen restaurants. Eating out is a different energy than eating in front of the TV. I look at the menus, what they’re serving and how are they rated. If there are a number of dishes that appeal to me I’ll consider going in. And it has to be clean with nice lighting. I’m a man of the theater. I always talk to people about the mood that lighting brings. Then we walk home because I’ve gained 20 pounds since Covid.PILES OF THINGS From 5 to 7 p.m., Jbya and I split up. He goes into his man cave, which is our media room, closes the door, turns off the lights and draws the shades. Then he watches something about the royal family, RuPaul or the Kardashians. I talk myself into opening mail, which I have let pile up for a month so that my box is so full it has to be given to our doorman to hold. Mail creates action items — like responding to an invite, paying a bill or cashing checks, all of which I hate doing. Or I try to organize my office, which usually looks like a hurricane hit it. Everything ends up sitting on my desk. Even though I create piles of things I need to do, it still looks like a mess. I’m a borderline hoarder. I love tchotchkes.The terrace of their home in Midtown Manhattan is one of their favorite places. Laila Stevens for The New York TimesTRAYS, TALK By 7 we’re deciding where to order in from, Seamless or Uber Eats. We might do Chinese food or Burger King. Jbya is a vegetarian and loves their Impossible Whopper; I usually order a Whopper, French fries and Diet Coke if I don’t have any at home. I finally bought TV trays, which makes me feel retro, which we bring into the media room. This is the best time for us to spend together. Evenings during the week are hard. We’ve both had very different days. He’s ready to talk and I’m all talked out from doing it all day. I’m still trying to navigate that so Sunday is a real coming together time for us.ACTION-PACKED ESCAPE We just finished “Tales of the City.” We like thrillers and science fiction, which is what we look for. I’m finishing the casting for “For Colored Girls” and am still in the capital-raising phase, so all week I’m dialing for dollars. Nights like this, I want something thrilling to wash over me like “The Bourne Identity” series, which we can watch over and over again, or “The Matrix” or “The Lord of the Rings.”Sunday evenings are for dinner and light viewing. “This is the best time for us to spend together.”Laila Stevens for The New York TimesGAMES PEOPLE PLAY By 1 or 2 a.m. we’re back in the bedroom. I call Alexa and she glows. I ask for a reminder about something or I’ll set the alarm. Then I tell her to play thunderstorm noise. It’s our version of white noise. Jbya falls asleep first. If I can’t, I play games for 45 minutes on my phone. I take West Game very seriously. It’s a fighting game where you build your town and battle against other players, and Toy Blast, which is a pattern-matching puzzle game. My lids get heavy and I fall asleep.Sunday Routine readers can follow Ron Simons on Instagram @ronaldksimons More

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    Late Night Celebrates One Year of President Biden

    “A year ago, Biden pledged to address Covid, the economy, climate change and racial injustice. And good news — after 12 months of tireless effort, we’re all getting three free masks,” Jimmy Fallon said.Welcome to the 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.One Long YearThursday marked the end of President Biden’s first year in the White House.“When asked what he’s learned, Biden said, ‘Being vice president was a hell of a lot more fun,’” Jimmy Fallon joked.“President Biden said yesterday that his first year in office has been ‘a year of challenges,’ but he’d rather focus on the positives, like your Covid test.” — SETH MEYERS“It seems like just yesterday our democracy was being held hostage by a cabal of obstructionists who didn’t want every vote counted. Oh, wait, that was yesterday.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“A year ago, Biden pledged to address Covid, the economy, climate change and racial injustice. And good news — after 12 months of tireless effort, we’re all getting three free masks.” — JIMMY FALLON“President Biden yesterday held a 1 hour 51 minute press conference. It was the first thing Americans actually wished Joe Manchin had stopped.” — SETH MEYERS“A lot of people are disappointed with President Biden. His approval rating just reached a new low after his press conference yesterday. The press conference was a success in that he went nearly two hours without having to pee.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“He promised no malarkey, but lawyers made him change it to ‘produced in a facility that also processes malarkey.’” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Unvoting Voting Edition)“Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema believe so strongly in the power of voting that they use their vote to block voting rights for the entire country. They were unvoting voting by voting.” — TREVOR NOAH“I mean, say what you will about the Democrats, but never has a party been on a hotter streak of getting absolutely nothing done.” — JAMES CORDEN“The big takeaway is the people you voted for, voted to make it harder for you to vote.” — JAMES CORDEN“Republicans want to add restrictions to voting because they are worried about voter fraud, even though it’s almost completely nonexistent, voter fraud. Hey, you know what? You guys believe climate change is nonexistent, right? How about coming up with some restrictions for that? Let’s compromise on this.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“You can’t compromise with the side that’s doing the damage. When you’re putting out a fire, you don’t call the Fire Department and the arsonist, and see what they can work out together.” — SETH MEYERSThe Bits Worth WatchingJames Corden talked with Rachel Brosnahan and Ed Helms about the celebrities they are frequently mistaken for on Thursday’s “Late Late Show.”Also, Check This OutImages from the Barbed-Wire Kisses panel at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival.Sandria Miller for Sundance InstituteThis year’s Sundance marks 30 years since the festival held its first panel on New Queer Cinema, a sea change for L.G.B.T.Q. film. More

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    Review: In ‘Whisper House,’ the Living Are the Pawns of the Dead

    A lighthouse keeper, the nephew living with her and a Japanese employee are on alert for U-boats and graver threats in this chamber musical set in 1942.The ghosts, at least, are having fun.Sunken eyed, in moldering Jazz Age whites, they slink and shimmy around 59E59 Theater’s petite stage — about the size of a backyard swimming pool — luring characters to their various dooms. There are only four living characters and a limited supply of calamity, but still these spirits put in overtime. In Duncan Sheik and Kyle Jarrow’s pocket Gothic, “Whisper House,” the ghosts (Alex Boniello and Molly Hager) deliver 12 of the 14 songs, each a hymn to a wicked hereafter.“It’s good to be a ghost,” they sing. “It’s better to be dead.”A chamber musical planted in Maine’s stony soil in the early 1940s, “Whisper House” had its world premiere in 2010 at the Old Globe in San Diego and played London in 2017. It has spent the past couple of years in a kind of limbo, having clocked a single 59E59 performance before the 2020 theater shutdown. It returns, tentatively, in a moment of renewed anxiety and upgraded face masks.The show, about the fear of the unknown and the trust that love requires, can feel indefinite, too. Directed by Steve Cosson, the artistic director of the cherished theater company the Civilians, it has mood for days. (All credit to Jorge Arroyo and Jeff Croiter’s sepulchral lights and a surfeit of stage fog.) And the music haunts prettily. When the ghosts are singing, anyway. But none of the living characters feel precisely real and the book scenes totter under the weight of metaphor.“Whisper House” opens with a boy named Christopher (Wyatt Cirbus, who looks as if he has never seen the sun), a near-orphan sent away to live with his aunt, Lily, a lighthouse keeper in coastal Maine.Lily (Samantha Mathis) has a Japanese employee, Yasuhiro (James Yaegashi), and a nodding friendship with the local sheriff, Charles (Jeb Brown). This is 1942. Roosevelt’s executive order and the threat of nearby U-boats mean that Yasuhiro has to go. But he wants to stay and Lily wants that, too. The ghosts, with Christopher as their pawn, have other ideas.That sets the lighthouse table for tragedy. But the trouble with the story, conceived with Keith Powell, is that you have to abandon psychology to make it happen. Would a woman with Lily’s stoic good sense trust a traumatized child with a secret? Would Yasuhiro try to bribe him? The more you think about the living characters, the flimsier they seem. If your ghosts are your most substantial creation, what has gone wrong?“We don’t believe in you,” the ghosts sing to the living. They have a point. The plot also absolutely depends on ignoring the wet and the weather.Wyatt Cirbus, left, and Samantha Mathis as the nephew and aunt in the musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut the music is mostly lovely, if unvaried. As in Sheik’s score for “Spring Awakening,” it melds pop balladry with folk and it carries his very particular mix of romanticism and cynicism. (Sheik has a reputation for one-hit wonders, but this ignores some fine if piecemeal work over the years, as well as his lush Gullah-inflected score for “The Secret Life of Bees.”) The lyrics, co-written with Jarrow (“SpongeBob SquarePants the Musical”), are clever for the ghosts and pallid for everyone else, freighting Yasuhiro with the awkward solo “The Art of Being Unseen.” That neither Yaegashi, always a welcome presence, or Mathis, stuck with a costume-party Katharine Hepburn accent, are vocal powerhouses probably doesn’t help. The orchestrations, credited to Sheik, Jason Hart, Simon Hale and Wiley DeWeese, contain some fine surprises, like the bright blare of a horn. The choreography, from Billy Bustamante, mostly seems an afterthought.If the show spends about 85 of its 90 minutes inclining toward tragedy, its creators have something gentler in mind. The ultimate theme of “Whisper House” is that we must love another or die, a comforting thesis in a moment that demands — in every auditorium — so much mutual faith and care. Then again, there are the paired, smirking ghosts to imply the contrary. Turns out you can love another and die.Whisper HouseThrough Feb. 6 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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    in Television

    At Sundance, Two Films Look at Abortion and the Jane Collective

    In the years leading up to Roe v. Wade, a Chicago group helped thousands of women obtain the procedure safely. A documentary and a feature tell their story.Judith Arcana was 27 and recently separated from her husband when she began driving women surreptitiously for safe — but illegal — abortions. The year was 1970, she was an out-of-work teacher on the South Side of Chicago, and she was spending her days counseling women in need.“I don’t think we were crazy,” said Arcana, now 78. “I don’t think we were stupid. I think that we had found something that was so important, so useful in the lives of women and girls.”“We were radicalized in the arena of women’s bodies,” she said. “We knew that what we were doing was good work in the world. And we knew that it was illegal.”Arcana was part of the Jane Collective, a disparate, rotating group of women who ensured safe abortions for thousands of women in Chicago between 1968 and 1973. Despite the law, women were still getting abortions. But they were often performing them on themselves and winding up in the hospital, or paying the mob with no guarantee of survival.During these years, because of Arcana and other women, if you lived in Chicago and needed help, you could call a number and talk with a woman who would offer a safer alternative. Members of the collective provided counseling and arranged the procedures, which they eventually administered — 11,000 all told during that period. But then in 1972, Arcana and six other members of the group were arrested, each charged with 11 counts of abortion or conspiracy to commit an abortion with a possible 10-year sentence for each charge. Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision issued in 1973, saved them all.Mugshots of members of the Jane Collective who were arrested in 1972. HBONow, close to 50 years later, members of the collective are sharing their stories in a pair of movies at the Sundance Film Festival, which begins Thursday: the HBO documentary “The Janes”; and a fictionalized account titled “Call Jane,” starring Elizabeth Banks and Sigourney Weaver, and looking for distribution.The movies are debuting at a particularly crucial time for abortion rights. The Supreme Court heard arguments in December over the legality of a Mississippi law that bans abortion after 15 weeks; it is expected to issue a decision this summer. Should the court uphold the law, the ruling would be at odds with Roe v. Wade, which declared abortion a constitutional right and forbade states from banning the procedure before fetal viability (23 weeks). The Sundance filmmakers make no secret that they support abortion rights but say they want their work to show the complexity of the subject.In “Call Jane,” Banks plays Joy, a mother and housewife who seeks out an illegal abortion after learning that her pregnancy is life-threatening — her attempt to secure one legally having been denied by an all-male hospital board. The movie’s director, Phyllis Nagy (whose credits include the screenplay for “Carol”), said she wished she could show it to the Supreme Court’s conservative justices. “I would sit there and say, ‘Now, talk to me,’ and it wouldn’t make any difference, probably,” she said. “But artists need to start having the kinds of political conversations with society that aren’t didactic,” she added. “Nothing else has worked.”Elizabeth Banks in “Call Jane,” about a woman trying to terminate a life-threatening pregnancy. Wilson Webb, via Sundance InstituteThe makers of “The Janes” hope those with differing views will allow themselves a look at life before Roe v. Wade. “This is a glimpse at history; I don’t think it’s an advocacy film,” said Tia Lessin, who directed with Emma Pildes, whose father used to be married to Arcana. Arcana’s son, Daniel, and Pildes are producers on the film. Lessin added, “It’s a real life story about what happened and the lengths that women went to to have abortions and to enable other women to have abortions.”“Do I hope that people’s takeaway will be ‘let’s not go back there’? Sure. But I really hope it moves people to engage in conversation. Love the film, hate the film,” she said before Pildes jumped in: “Talk about the issue.”And there is plenty to discuss.The Jane Collective was formed when a college student, Heather Booth, now 76, received a desperate call from a friend looking for an abortion. Booth, active in the civil rights movement, found a doctor willing to help and passed along the information. “I made what I thought was a one-time arrangement,” she said in an interview. Soon another woman called. Then another. Booth found herself negotiating fees and learning the intricacies of the procedure so she could counsel women. After a few years, Booth, by then a mother working on her graduate degree at the University of Chicago, recruited others to fulfill the growing need.“I was working full time. The number of calls were increasing. It was certainly too much for one person,” she added.Marie Leaner, now 80, was raised Roman Catholic and taught to believe that abortion was a sin. At a community center on the West Side of Chicago, she ran a program for teenage mothers. “I just thought it was atrocious that these women didn’t want to carry the babies but they felt this was their punishment for being in love or being sexually involved with someone,” she recalled. “I decided I wanted to do something about it.”She offered up her apartment for the procedures and occasionally held the hands of the women who came through. As one of the few Black women in the group, she said, “I knew that Black and brown people wouldn’t partake of the service if they couldn’t see themselves involved in it.”The State of Abortion in the U.S.Card 1 of 5Abortion at the Supreme Court. More

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    in Television

    A New Coalition Amplifies Disability Culture in the Music Industry

    RAMPD, an organization of professional disabled musicians, will push for accessibility in the music industry, including adding visible ramps to awards show stages.For the singer, songwriter and producer Lachi, the acronym was everything.She helped start the organization that would become RAMPD — Recording Artists and Music Professionals with Disabilities — in July 2021, but it was a few months earlier, after moderating a panel for the Recording Academy about disability inclusion, that she came up with the name.“After that aired, musicians with disabilities were coming out of the woodwork and following me on Instagram, DMing me going, ‘What are we going to do? Are you going to lead this charge? What’s next?’” Lachi said in an interview. “Everyone was energized. And that’s when the spark came, of the acronym.”RAMPD, which Lachi co-founded with the singer-songwriter and violinist Gaelynn Lea, alongside a dozen or so founding members, works to amplify disability culture and advocate for accessibility in the music business. One of its main goals, fittingly, is to make accessibility ramps visible on TV during awards shows to help normalize disability in the entertainment industry.The coalition’s kickoff will be a virtual event at 5 p.m. on Friday, with opening and closing remarks live from the Grammy Museum Experience at the Prudential Center in Newark, N.J. (The Grammy Awards, originally scheduled for Jan. 31, have been pushed back to April 3.) Adrian Anantawan, a classical violinist; Eliza Hull, an indie rock singer-songwriter; and Molly Joyce, an organist and songwriter, will perform, alongside other disabled musicians, and professional membership applications for the group will open.“Our professional membership have awards, have toured, have worked with big names, are big names themselves,” said Lachi, who is based in New York. “And we’re not here to make folks feel warm and gushy. We’re not here to get handouts. We’re here to get gigs. We’re here to get on stages, we’re here to get paid.”“Disability isn’t ‘despite this, they did this,’” said the singer-songwriter and violinist Gaelynn Lea, a RAMPD co-founder. “It’s more like, ‘because of their identity as a disabled artist, you are enjoying this art in this form.’” Paul VienneauIn October, RAMPD partnered with the inaugural Wavy Awards for an event celebrating women, L.G.B.T.Q. artists, nonbinary musicians, artists of color, performers who identify as having a disability and allies. The organization advised the show on American Sign Language interpretation, captioning, audio description and ensuring the inclusion of people with disabilities on-camera and behind the scenes.Perhaps Lachi’s favorite part, though, was promoting the use of what she calls “self description,” known widely as visual description, which is added as audio to television programs and movies to help people with low vision and people who are blind, like herself.“My name is Lachi, she/her, Black girl, cornrows,” she said as an example. “So that’s what I go by. And that’s all it is.”She underscored how racism, sexism and homophobia compound the discrimination disabled people face. “It’s paramount for folks to recognize that disability has color, that disability has gender, that disability has sexual preference and that disability is not straight, white, middle-America male,” she said.Lea, who was born with osteogenesis imperfecta and is based in Minnesota, pointed out that she wouldn’t make the same music — which won NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Contest in 2016 — if not for her life experience.“Disability isn’t ‘despite this, they did this,’” she said in an interview. “It’s more like, ‘because of their identity as a disabled artist, you are enjoying this art in this form.’”She added, “Disability culture and the movement that we’re starting I think really is actually up there in terms of cultural shifts with all the other diversity movements we’re talking about.”Through the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council in Duluth, Minn., Lea received the Arts Ecosystem Grant, which will allow RAMPD to build a membership database of professional disabled artists — something that never existed until now. RAMPD also recently secured a fiscal sponsor, Accessible Festivals, a nonprofit organization that will help manage RAMPD’s grants and donations, and allow for the group to grow beyond Lachi and Lea.“We want to see more leaders emerge out of this and people recognize them in the community, because sometimes it feels like I get asked to do so many events, and it’s partly because I feel like people don’t know anyone else to ask,” Lea said. “That’s something that we have to fix.” More