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    in Theater

    ‘The Cherry Orchard’ Review: A Captivating Take on Chekhov

    Nina Hoss stars as a melancholic matriarch in Benedict Andrews’s immersive rendition of the classic at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.Every time it feels as if we’re nearing a state of Chekhoverdose, a great production rolls around to remind us of the Russian writer’s uncanny power to pull us into his fold.Andrew Scott’s solo performance of “Vanya” at the Lucille Lortel Theater, which the New York Times’s critic Jesse Green called “a reset,” seems to have that effect on many.For me, it’s Benedict Andrews’s electric take on “The Cherry Orchard” at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, which left me so emotional, happy — from being reminded of the power of theater to surprise and thrill — and plain revved up that I struggled to fall asleep that night.A brief recap for those who can’t tell their sisters from their seagulls: “The Cherry Orchard” is the one in which the head of a once-wealthy family visits her estate for the first time in five years, and everybody confronts the reality that the beloved piece of land in the title must be sold to settle debts.Usually that matriarch, Ranevskaya is the play’s magnetic center, a grande dame whose efforts to come to terms with her world’s downfall embody the changes brewing in an entire society. In Andrews’s adaptation and staging, Ranevskaya (Nina Hoss, all melancholy grace and understated charisma) feels more like a part of a true ensemble. When not doing a scene, she and the other characters sit in the audience, calmly watching the proceedings. The in-the-round staging reinforces the feeling that we are them and they are us.Chekhov plays lend themselves to almost infinite variations and approaches, and Andrews’s is relatively mild compared to some radical deconstructions that mauled Chekhov beyond instant recognition.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    in Television

    Stephen Graham and Owen Cooper Talk About the Netflix Hit ‘Adolescence’

    In an interview, the actors Owen Cooper and Stephen Graham explore the social and personal impact of the Netflix hit about a teenager accused of murder.In the three weeks since “Adolescence” arrived on Netflix, the drama about a 13-year-old boy accused of killing a schoolgirl after seeing misogynistic content online has soared in popularity. It has also made a star out of Owen Cooper for his portrayal of the teenager, Jamie Miller.Even so, Cooper, 15, had to return to high school in northern England on Monday.In a video interview this week, Cooper said that his first day back was “a bit mad,” with lots of attention from younger children. Tuesday was better, he said, with only “a bit of bother.”As Cooper discussed the complexity of his newfound fame, Stephen Graham, the actor who plays Owen’s father and was also taking part in the interview, sat up, alert. “What kind of ‘bother’?” Graham said, sounding like a concerned parent.Cooper explained that it wasn’t anything serious, just children coming up to him, shouting his name, then rushing off. To which Graham replied with relief and a smile, “Ah, just some silly bollocks.”“The reason I wanted to be an actor,” said Graham, who co-created the show, was “to make dramas that made me think.”Suzie Howell for The New York TimesCritics have highlighted that sort of bond between the two actors’ characters as one of the reasons for the show’s success, although it has also drawn praise for stirring debate about whether children’s access to social media should be restricted or smartphones banned from schools.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Truelove’ Explores Truth, Love and Endings

    This thoughtful British mini-series explores the complex bonds among a group of aging friends who are determined not to let one another suffer.“Truelove,” available now, on Acorn, is an ensemble drama about assisted suicide, about the bonds of friendship and the well-worn paths of regret. Later in its six-episode season, it is also a murder show, which feels a lot less special. But I guess by the time you’ve got morose British people walking by the seashore, you might as well throw in an investigation.The show centers on a group of old friends who gather at a funeral. In their grief and inebriation, they make a pact: We won’t let one another suffer. We’ll help one another die with dignity if that day comes. That’s what friends are for, right?When the first terminal diagnosis lands, the pals initially can’t bring themselves to help their compatriot die. But then he tries to hang himself, which he survives, and from his hospital bed he laments to the group, “I’m on suicide watch and ‘do not resuscitate.’” Maybe they will stick to the plan; maybe friendship means doing things together, the important things, even when they’re hard and sad and terrible.But if life is messy, death is doubly so, and confronting mortality sure has a way of changing one’s priorities. Phil (Lindsay Duncan, fantastic), still a little adrift after retiring from the police force, is incredibly loyal to her friends — and not only because she treasures them, etc. Her husband (Phil Davis) is not part of their clique. Her long-ago love (Clarke Peters) is. Maybe there’s a silver, silver-haired lining to all this heartache.Some of the needle drops here are perfect and lovely, while others are so on-the-nose they make your teeth ring. Understated, textured arguments exist alongside flat, dumb ones. The show becomes shallower but more propulsive as it goes, especially after a young police officer (Kiran Sonia Sawar) starts looking into this suspicious death cluster.At its highs, though, “Truelove” is a superb and knotty domestic drama. “Apart from blasting into space, divorce is the most expensive thing you can do,” Phil scolds her newly separated daughter, but she can’t ride that high horse for long. Where one partner accrues commitment, the other amasses boredom and resentment. It’s so easy to love what you don’t have. More

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    From Hasidic Brooklyn to Off Broadway: The Life of a Trans Rabbi

    After disavowing her strict religious upbringing, Abby Stein came out as transgender. She is now the subject of a new play by New York Theater Workshop.One morning in 2015, a few years after she had begun to separate herself from the ultra-Orthodox Jewish world in which she was raised, Abby Stein met with her father to come out as a woman.Raised in a Hasidic enclave in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Stein was all but certain that her family was unfamiliar with the notion of being transgender. In their isolated community, gender roles were rigid, and the internet was blocked entirely or made “kosher” with software that restricted sites like Wikipedia.“Any modern gender theory wouldn’t speak to him,” Stein, 33, said of approaching her father. “I needed to find something that would work.”That high-stakes conversation is at the center of a new Off Broadway play, “Becoming Eve,” opening next week. In the lightly fictionalized play, the protagonist is called Chava, which is Stein’s middle name. She is portrayed by Tommy Dorfman, opposite Richard Schiff, the “West Wing” star who, playing her father, is transformed by the traditional garb of a Hasidic man, complete with a long beard and a black silken coat.The play ends shortly before the real events that turned Stein into a public figure.Dorfman, in the background, with a puppet version of the young Chava and Richard Schiff as her father in the New York Theater Workshop production.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe same day that she had the conversation with her father, Stein, who was ordained as a Hasidic rabbi in 2011, came out to the larger world in a blog post. She woke up the next morning to find that the post on her typically lightly read blog had around 20,000 views.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    in Television

    Late Night Is Expecting Tariffs With a Side of Drama

    New tariffs will be unveiled at the White House Rose Garden — because “when you elect a reality TV star, you get all your economic policy via rose ceremony,” said Stephen Colbert. 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.‘Pack Your Lederhosen’President Trump plans to announce yet more tariffs in the White House Rose Garden on Wednesday (he’s calling it “Liberation Day”).“Like everything, he’s got to make it a spectacle,” Stephen Colbert said on Tuesday.“Because when you elect a reality TV star, you get all your economic policy via rose ceremony.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“[imitating Trump] Germany, I enjoyed our time in the fantasy suite, but your home visit left me cold. Thirty percent tariffs across the board. Pack your lederhosen, Fräulein.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Yes, ‘Liberation Day.’ I’m reminded of the immortal words of Patrick Henry: ‘Give me liberty or charge me an extra $10,000 for a Hyundai Elantra.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“President Trump is set to announce a new set of tariffs tomorrow in what he said will be ‘Liberation Day.’ Ah, yes, the day we’ll all finally be liberated from our 401(k)s.” — SETH MEYERS“Yep, Trump’s calling tomorrow ‘Liberation Day,’ while every stockbroker is calling it ‘Inebriation Day.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Right now, everyone who has invested their savings in Beanie Babies is like, ‘Well, well, well, who’s the idiot now?’” — JIMMY FALLONThe Punchiest Punchlines (Administrative Error Edition)“On Sunday night, President Trump deported more gang members to El Salvador, including child rapists and convicted killers. It’s all part of a bigger plan to make El Salvador more like Times Square.” — GREG GUTFELDWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    in Theater

    Fisher Center at Bard Announces Civis Hope Commissions

    The Fisher Center at Bard has announced a wave of works by artists including Suzan-Lori Parks, Courtney Bryan, Barrie Kosky and Lisa Kron.Hope may seem daring in this age of angst and uncertainty, but it is at the heart of three major new works coming to the Fisher Center at Bard, including a musical adaptation of “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy,” the performing arts center announced on Tuesday.With a $2.5 million gift from the Civis Foundation, matched by Bard College for an initial endowment of $5 million, the Fisher Center said it would create the Civis Hope Commissions, a program to support “contemporary artists who will examine, interrogate and transform American artifacts, archival materials or artworks from the past to imagine a more perfect, just and hopeful future.”Gideon Lester, the Fisher Center’s artistic director and chief executive, described the program in an interview as “a rallying cry for the possibility of art.”“Art can describe things as they might be,” he said, “and see things not only as they are framed by the current news cycle. Great art has the ability to shift our consciousness and show us what we might become if we were really inhabiting our best selves. That’s what these commissions are really about.”The Civis Hope Commissions are intended to continue in perpetuity, but the Fisher Center announced three projects to start: “Jubilee,” a new musical with a libretto by the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, based on Scott Joplin’s opera “Treemonisha”; Courtney Bryan’s first opera, an adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s “Suddenly Last Summer”; and the “Yentl” musical, which will be the celebrated director Barrie Kosky’s first project developed in the United States.These commissions had already been in the works at the Fisher Center, but were chosen for the Civis program because they fit its mandate, Lester said, adding that working under the Civis umbrella allowed him and the artists “an opportunity to think about them in a new way.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Review: ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ With Kieran Culkin, Bob Odenkirk and Bill Burr

    Kieran Culkin, Bill Burr and Bob Odenkirk star in a bumpy revival of David Mamet’s play about salesmen with nothing worth selling.Watch out for Richard Roma. Top man among the bottom feeders at a scammy Chicago real estate agency, he has a hypnotic come-on and a dizzying spiel. Identifying your vulnerabilities with forensic accuracy, he’ll lance them with a blunt needle. (“You think you’re queer?” he asks one mark. “I’m going to tell you something: We’re all queer.”) If it’s what you need, he’ll be the brother who thinks big on your behalf, who sees beyond your sad habit of safety to the rewards only risk can offer.Not that there are actually rewards. The lots he’s selling in Florida, in developments ludicrously called Glengarry Highlands and Glen Ross Farms, are worthless.Back at the office, too, he’s the alpha among losers. On the leaderboard of recent earnings, he stands closest by far to the $100,000 mark that will win him a Cadillac in the agency’s sales contest. (The two lowest earners will be fired.) His colleagues are merely additional marks to be bamboozled. They have schemes; he has juice.No wonder he remains, 41 years after he first hit Broadway in David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross,” one of theater’s greatest characters: the unregulated id of sociopathic capitalism. He makes Willy Loman look like a softy. This salesman will never die.Or so I thought. But in the weirdly limp revival that opened on Monday at the Palace Theater, something has flipped. As played by Kieran Culkin, leading a sales team that also features Bob Odenkirk, Bill Burr and Michael McKean, Roma is no longer the master of everyone else’s neuroses; he’s neurotic himself. Especially in the scene that ends the first act, as he winds up for a pitch into the soul of a schlub, he is so deeply weird and interior that any semblance of a confident exterior evaporates. The man couldn’t sell a dollar for a dime.Bill Burr, left, as the hotheaded Moss and Michael McKean as the strait-laced Aaronow in an Act I scene in a Chinese restaurant.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Andrew Scott on ‘Vanya’: ‘Who Isn’t Sad?’

    “I really believe that we all do contain multitudes,” Andrew Scott said on a Friday morning in March. Scott may contain more than most. An actor of unusual sensitivity and verve, he is starring, solo, in an Off Broadway production of Chekhov’s melancholy comedy “Uncle Vanya.” The title, like the cast list, has also been condensed, to just “Vanya.”The New York transfer of this London production had opened a few nights before. In this version, the playwright Simon Stephens has relocated the action from 19th-century Russia to rural Ireland in more or less the present day. Scott plays the central character, a man who has sacrificed his own ambition to support his feckless brother-in-law. He also plays the brother-in-law, the put-upon niece, the neglected young wife, and several others. Scott is alone onstage throughout. That stage can feel very crowded.The New York Times critic Jesse Green described Scott, in performance, as a “human Swiss Army knife.” Mindful of Scott’s work in “Fleabag,” “Ripley” and the recent film “All of Us Strangers,” Green also referred to Scott as a “sadness machine.” This is a popular opinion. Variety has called him “Hollywood’s new prince of heartache.”On this morning, Scott, 48, did not appear unusually sad, though he was somewhat rumpled. The plan had been to walk over to Little Island and then along the Hudson River, toward the theater, but severe weather had changed that.“Oh my God, it’s windy,” he said, out on the street. (“You can’t get sick,” his publicist fretted.) So Scott had retreated, with a breakfast burrito and a Day-Glo orange juice, to the shelter of a nearby pier. Its windows looked out onto the river. The water — choppy, gray-green — reflected in his eyes.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More