Eliana Willis

“300 el x 50 el x 30 el,” the Belgian troupe FC Bergman’s ambitious theatrical installation, will open BAM’s Next Wave festival with an elaborate set that recreates a rural settlement onstage.The Belgian theater collective FC Bergman was still young when it landed an invitation to a prestigious festival in its town, Antwerp, in 2011. “They said, ‘You have one evening — do something,’” Marie Vinck, a company member, recalled in a recent video conversation.The troupe members, who were finishing drama school, were thrilled — except that they had no money and no time. Still, in just a month, they hatched the sprawling “300 el x 50 el x 30 el,” an ambitious hybrid of theater, installation and live video, with an elaborate set that recreated a rural settlement onstage.“It was around Christmas time and we thought we could take the Christmas trees out of the streets to create this forest in the back of the theater,” Thomas Verstraeten, another member, said during the same Zoom conversation. “It was a very crazy experience, actually. We invited our friends to be onstage but also our parents, the father of a technician of ours,” he continued. “Marie’s old babysitter was in it. Because it was only once, they said, ‘OK, we’ll do it for free.’”From left: Thomas Verstraeten, Stef Aerts, Marie Vinck and Joé Agemans make up the theater collective FC Bergman.Paule JosepheDespite its abbreviated gestation, the show turned out to have legs: It has toured Europe, and this month will open the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave festival on Sept. 28 and run through Oct. 1. It will be FC Bergman’s U.S. debut.“It’s funny, it’s thought-provoking, it sprang from biblical sources, but it’s 100 percent contemporary,” David Binder, the artistic director of BAM, said of the show in a phone interview. “On one hand it’s pushing boundaries, and on the other hand it has a level of accessibility for everyone.” Well, not quite everyone. Binder quickly added that the evening is unsuitable for children.The cryptic title refers to the dimensions of Noah’s ark as described in the Bible, and the scale is appropriately awe-inspiring: The village that New York audiences will discover in “300 el x 50 el x 30 el” will accommodate a cast of 15, supplemented by scores of locally hired extras, live pigeons and, of course, that forest. “It’s one of our smaller shows, actually,” Stef Aerts, another company member, said, laughing.The collective’s productions have drawn comparisons to the physicality and transcendence found in the work of European superstars like Romeo Castellucci and Pina Bausch.Kurt Van der ElstAerts, 34, Verstraeten, 36, and Vinck, 39, were talking from Stockholm, shortly before a performance of their 2021 production “The Sheep Song,” a poetic fable about a sheep dissatisfied with its fate, at the Royal Dramatic Theater, once the home base of the Belgian troupe’s namesake, Ingmar Bergman. (Missing from the call was Joé Agemans, 40, also part of the collective. The other two founding members left in 2018.) FC Bergman regularly travels to the finest European houses and festivals, and since 2013 it has been a resident company at Antwerp’s municipal theater, Toneelhuis. The group doesn’t need to scavenge discarded goods for its sets anymore, leaving extra time for hatching new concepts.Indeed, while FC Bergman has tackled existing works, including an adaptation of William Gaddis’s novel “J R” and the Bizet opera “Les Pêcheurs de Perles,” it usually conceives its own, typically wordless, material. For “The Land of Nod” (2015), the collective set a show inspired by Jean-Luc Godard movies and Flemish masters in a custom-built, full-scale replica of the Rubens room at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium, garnering comparisons to the physicality and transcendence found in the work of European superstars like Romeo Castellucci and Pina Bausch.As for “300 el x 50 el x 30 el,” the troupe drew from the aesthetics of the Scandinavian crime series that were becoming popular at the turn of the 2010s. “That was also the period when we discovered the work of the great Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson, who became a really big influence,” Aerts said, before mentioning “the other Scandinavian guy, Lars von Trier, and also, of course, the Catholic religion and lots of Flemish visual arts.”“It’s about people who are very much isolated in their mini-community,” Aerts said of the show, which uses live video to take audiences inside the homes of the villagers. Kurt Van der ElstRelatively little in this production happens in full view of audience members, who watch the proceedings via a live video feed. “It’s about people who are very much isolated in their mini-community — they live in the village but they don’t interact with each other, only in their little houses and with their little families,” Aerts said. “I think the use of the camera translates this feeling to the audience. You’re just presented the walls of locked houses, but you can peek through the keyhole.”This leaves viewers a lot of room to superimpose their own narratives and interpretations on the visuals. “We played in Greece in the middle of the Euro crisis and you felt that people saw the show as some kind of a metaphor for their situation,” Verstraeten said. “Now it will become something else. I love the idea that meaning is something that can change all the time.”The three company members also emphasized that there is no right or wrong way to read the show.“I hope that the audience permits itself to be very open and to not have the urge to analyze it or to find a key, to crack the code,” Aerts said. “You have to get underwater and let the performance flow over you.” More

Parading down the middle of West 63rd Street last Saturday afternoon, we were following a giant puppet — a whole crowd of us, trekking along behind Little Amal.The 12-foot-tall Syrian refugee child, a creation of the renowned Handspring Puppet Company, was en route to Lincoln Center to greet more of her public, who would throng the wide plaza there to catch a glimpse of her with their own eyes, and capture proof of the encounter on their phones.Fueled by a savvy social media campaign — and surely also by recent headlines about migrants and asylum seekers being bused and flown north by Republican governors — Little Amal is the hottest celebrity in New York right now, drawing masses of admirers to her dozens of scheduled appearances.Since last year she has traveled across Europe, a sympathetic, high-profile emblem of the global migrant crisis. Her current 19-day tour of these five boroughs lasts only until Oct. 2, and as always with in-demand visitors, the time limit adds to her cachet.Making connections: Amal is in town through Oct. 2 and will be visiting all five boroughs over her 19-day stay in the city.For me, a puppetry fan with an interest in political theater, Little Amal — who is operated by one puppeteer strapped into stilts inside her torso and two others controlling her arms — should have been an almost automatic fascination. And yet she left me cold when I first went to scope her out, on Fifth Avenue in front of the New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, on Sept. 15, the day after she arrived. Even when she bent down to cuddle Patience, one of the famous marble lions, I was unmoved.Amal is a 10-year-old, but with her gargantuan hands and forceful jaw, she reminded me of one of those paintings of a child before painters figured out that children weren’t merely miniature adults. Worse, the event felt like barely more than a photo op. I wondered if she is truly meant to be experienced in person — if, in fact, she counts as theater — or if the main purpose of this wordless puppet is to be an object, recorded in photos and videos in glamorous locations that people all over the world will recognize.Then, last weekend, my heart abruptly cracked wide open. On that tree-lined stretch of West 63rd Street, the brass band accompanying Amal broke into a festive rendition of “When the Saints Go Marching In,” and she began to dance as she walked along. It was a gentle, reveling bounce, and it made her utterly enchanting.In Central Park last weekend, spectators of all ages followed Amal.Later that day, her path cleared by a police escort, Amal led another procession up Central Park West. As her band played, we trooped along in the street — grown-ups, little kids riding on shoulders, the occasional dog. The mood was buoyant, happy, kind.There is something to be said for what is, in effect, a citywide party in honor of a refugee — even if she is merely a puppet, even if she is so well-connected that St. Ann’s Warehouse helped to bring her here. Symbolic behavior matters.Up ahead, Amal’s long brown hair swayed in the breeze, adorned with a bright red ribbon that was a beacon for those farther back. A thought crossed my mind that took me entirely by surprise. Although I was raised Roman Catholic, I’m not religious, and definitely not accustomed to bits of Bible verses floating through my consciousness.Still, there it was, inescapably, a line from Isaiah: “and a little child shall lead them.”Gulp.This, of course, is the point of Little Amal — to use the visceral power of puppetry, and of theater at its most disarming, to make us feel, and cajole us into considering what we owe to the most vulnerable among us. And ultimately, presumably, to act on that moral imperative.She was greeted at Lincoln Center on Sept. 17.Amir Hamja for The New York TimesBut it is so easy for any message to get lost on the grand stage set that is New York, and maybe even more so when collaborations with the city’s cultural institutions can come across as mutually promotional opportunities, bereft of substance. When Amal visited Lincoln Center, she seemed more like a dignitary granting an audience than a child ambassador for a cause. Her context had disappeared; without it she registered as a buzzy spectacle, one you want to be able to say you saw.Still, the visuals were terrific — musicians serenading her from the balcony of the Metropolitan Opera House — and people strained to get near her, to touch those enormous hands. It is astonishing when she gets really close, looming right above you. Looking up, all you see is her huge face, with those big, brown, blinking eyes. (Makes a great photo, actually.)I followed Amal late on Sunday morning to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where the vast front doorway posed no obstacle to her height, and where the lyrics of one hymn were particularly apt — not so much for her but for the rest of us: “Whatsoever you do to the least of my people, that you do unto me.”Some people are seeking out Amal around town, while others, instantly smitten, seem to be ditching their plans to tag along.And I followed her early on Monday morning to Coney Island, Brooklyn, where she wandered the wooden boardwalk forlornly, peering through the gates of rides not open just then for customers. The carnival colors popped, the moody clouds cast a flattering light and when she looked over the side of a pier into the water, the sound was of crashing waves and clicking shutters.If it seemed contrived — which, to be fair, it was; this was theater — there was no feigning the interest in her as she strode along with a gathering entourage, while a persistent drone hovered unnervingly overhead. Some people had made the pilgrimage to see Amal; others, like a smitten woman in a one-piece swimsuit and pink bathing cap, seemed to have ditched their beach plans to tag along.Amal’s performance that night, with its narrative of a weary child’s peregrination through Dumbo to the glass-walled carousel in Brooklyn Bridge Park, should have been delicate and gorgeous. But from the moment she set off from the walk’s starting point, a triangle in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge, something was wrong.In Coney Island, on Sept. 19, Amal found the space she needed to stand out as she strode along with a gathering entourage. But later that night, in Dumbo, the crowd overwhelmed her event.It wasn’t only that the hundreds of us were too many for the narrow cobblestone streets; the spirit of the evening was off, too. In that most Instagrammable of the city’s neighborhoods, the focus of the crowd was palpably on getting the shot — and Amal, in that lighting, did look glorious. (She stopped, lingeringly, in precisely the ultra-photogenic spot that’s illustrated on the cover of the current issue of The New Yorker.)But this wasn’t the joyous welcome of an attentive audience; it felt like a flash mob that had gotten out of hand. And when we reached the carousel — an elevated and brilliantly illuminated space that should have made an ideal stage — it was so surrounded by people that the performance was impossible to see unless you were up front. Even being 12 feet tall couldn’t help Amal there.The creepiest thing about that evening’s walk, though, was the sense that allegiance had been replaced by pursuit. It had the feeling of a hunt, with the puppet refugee as quarry. People jostled for position, cut in front of one another, tried to anticipate where Amal was going and get there first.And so I wonder, a little worriedly, with Saturday’s walk across the Brooklyn Bridge coming right up: Are we ruining Little Amal for ourselves?There may be no solution to the problem of the sheer numbers she draws, especially when the vistas promise to be breathtaking. But one tenet of theater suggests a way to better experience her live.Be present.Shoot a few photos if you like, a snippet of video. But mostly, just put down your camera, put away your phone. Be there, in the moment, walking with her. And feel. More

A handful of works deal with the many questions of nourishment and nurture. How we feed. How we are fed.Last Friday night, a group of about a dozen of us walked into a woman’s vagina. It was red, French-accented and soft. This was near the climax of “The Path of Pins or the Path of Needles,” a cynosure of this year’s FringeArts Festival in Philadelphia, which began on Sept. 8 and runs until Oct. 2.Philadelphia’s Fringe began in 1997, the same year that the New York International Fringe Festival got started, both of them modeled, loosely, after Edinburgh’s Fringe. (The New York festival hasn’t been presented since 2019.) Most years, the Philadelphia Fringe has included several big names on the performance circuit — big enough to attract out-of-town ticket buyers — while also demonstrating a strong commitment to local artists like Pig Iron Theater Company, Lightning Rod Special, Thaddeus Phillips and others.Since the pandemic, the presence of artists from beyond Philadelphia appears to have diminished, but the festival still includes more than 180 theater, performance art, dance, circus and comedy shows. Last weekend I could have seen a musical about sleep apnea or an improvised Dungeons & Dragons adventure — aren’t all D&D adventures essentially improvised? — or, if I were less uptight, “Bath House,” which was advertised as “a deeply sensory immersive theatrical experience dripping with erotic energy.”Instead, I went with “The Path of Pins or the Path of Needles,” a collaboration between Pig Iron and the filmmaker Josephine Decker, and “Food,” a solo show from the Pig Iron member Geoff Sobelle (who also makes work with the theatrical group rainpan 43). And as a kind of palate cleanser in between, “Yes, We’re Ready, We’ll Split an Order of Fries for the Table — Does That Work for You? — Sure, One Check Is Fine,” an elegy for the American diner. At a late-night cabaret, I also caught a drag peep show with a butcher shop theme. Nothing I saw felt finished (in fact, I received a post-show email from “Path” clarifying it as a work in progress), but all seemed to take on questions of nourishment and nurturing. How we feed. How we are fed.Diners sharing French fries in “Yes, We’re Ready,” a tribute to the diner. Mike Durkin“Path,” a site-responsive piece staged in a shabby mansion to the north of the city, imagines its audience members as people in the late, sway-bellied stage of pregnancy. The cast, mostly women garbed in flamboyant thrift-store finery, is spread out across the lawn — jumbled with beds, lamps and clotheslines — and the first floor of the house. It is nearly sunset when the show begins and just after dark when it ends. This golden-hour gloaming lends the show a dreamy, fairy-tale quality. If some of its subject matter inclines toward the grisly, that’s true of fairy tales, too.As a filmmaker, Decker (“Madeline’s Madeline,” “Shirley”) favors intense psychology and surrealistic flights. For “Madeline’s Madeline,” a movie set in and around the world of experimental theater, she studied with Pig Iron. This new collaboration marries that company’s physical and metaphysical theatrics with Decker’s feminine, fevered aesthetic. There’s a sense of play here. And also a sense of danger.Some scenes are quiet and abstract, as when a pile of clothes is flung into the air, then carefully folded. Others are noisy and more pointed, as when audience members are given scraps of paper, each of which details a mother’s failures, and asked to recite them, loudly. Much of the show suggests an ambivalence — angry, funny, raucous, witchy — toward pregnancy and motherhood and the lived reality of the female body. A pumping bra is used to droll effect (though, honestly, I had hoped to never see a pumping bra again), and many of the lines have a comic anguish.“I used to be a woman who washed my hair!” one performer wails.It wasn’t always clear if we spectators had the freedom to explore the various locations or if we were constrained to follow where led. (The freedom that a pregnant body does or doesn’t have is a resonant theme, especially now, but this tension felt accidental rather than intended.) I’m relatively obedient, so I went where I was bid and read from Daphne Spain’s “Gendered Spaces” when asked. But late in the play, when a performer asked, “Does anyone feel like decomposing?” I veered elsewhere. Because feeding a baby is one thing. Being food for worms? That’s another.Geoff Sobelle in “Food,” a meditation on what and how and why we eat.Maria BaranovaThe next day I found myself seated at a long table at one end of the Broad Street Diner, sharing a bowl of crispy, salty, twice-fried French fries. This was a highlight of “Yes, We’re Ready,” Mike Durkin and Nick Schwasman’s daylight tribute to the diner. Gentle if haphazard, this show celebrates the phenomenon of the all-night eatery with jokes, stories, snacks and friendly audience participation. Its relationship to theater feels remote and its structure limp in the way of an abandoned onion ring, but it is unfailingly cheerful and kind. And maybe theater would be a happier place if more shows allowed ticket holders, like the ones seated near me, to happily demolish shared plates of chicken fingers and Belgian waffles while the action unrolls.This was an appropriate appetizer for Sobelle’s “Food.” As he proved in “The Object Lesson” and his work with rainpan 43 (“all wear bowlers,” “Elephant Room”), Sobelle is both a philosopher and a clown, and “Food” is his meditation on what and how and why we eat. It begins with the first multicelled creature to evolve a mouth and ends with the promise and devastation of the global food system, with a multicourse dinner served in between. Not served to you, of course. Though if you are seated at the table at which the action takes place (I was shunted to a balcony), Sobelle may pour you a glass of wine.For much of the show, Sobelle plays a harried waiter — attentive, dandified, arrogant. Using prompts and magic tricks and graceful physical comedy, he makes an enormous amount of food appear and then disappear, seemingly down his own gullet, as in the Monty Python skit. A point of concern: Should one man really drink that much ranch dressing? Each course has been prepared with care, though how those courses interrelate and whether they constitute a full meal is less certain. The show seemed to end about five different times before actually concluding, which suggests a disjointedness, a difficulty in translating so many ideas — good ideas! — into theater.And yet, I would watch Sobelle do just about anything — like, say eat half a dozen apples in just a minute, even from far away. (And for those at the table, there are opportunities to do more than merely watch and listen.) The ending, when it does come, doles out one final conundrum. Do you applaud? Or tip your waiter? More

“Handbagged,” a play that opened in London a day after Queen Elizabeth II died, depicts a clever, compassionate monarch. But theatrical depictions haven’t always been so reverential.LONDON — When the Kiln Theater planned its current revival of “Handbagged,” nobody knew how extraordinary the timing would turn out to be.The 2013 play, by Moira Buffini, is one of a long line of dramas to put Queen Elizabeth II center stage. But its reopening during this period of mourning for the monarch turns out to serve the piece well, communicating a respect and affection for her memory that chime with the public mood. (The play’s first preview was Sept. 9, the day after the queen’s death.)Plays can catch a moment, which is what “Handbagged” has done. Seeing Indhu Rubasingham’s production several days before the queen’s state funeral, I felt an audience connecting with the play with an intensity I didn’t sense during its West End transfer in 2014. Theater, a live art, can seem especially vital at times like this. Would it have felt as moving to be watching “The Crown” on TV that recent afternoon? I doubt it.Several other playwrights have given voice to this essentially mysterious figure. Plays like Peter Morgan’s “The Audience” and Alan Bennett’s “A Question of Attribution” revealed the queen to be a great theatrical subject: wry and witty, her onstage intelligence feeding a sense among the public that so private a person always knew more than she let on.Some Key Moments in Queen Elizabeth’s ReignCard 1 of 9Becoming queen. More

The show had a bumpy, boisterous run, and will now begin a tour.“Beetlejuice,” an exuberantly ghoulish musical that was so on brand it came back from the dead, will end its Broadway run on Jan. 8, the show’s producers announced Tuesday.This is the latest in a string of closings as Broadway grapples with diminished tourism, fewer Manhattan office workers and an inflation-driven rise in production costs following the lengthy pandemic shutdown of theaters. Last week, “The Phantom of the Opera,” which is Broadway’s longest-running show, announced that it would close in February; over the weekend “Dear Evan Hansen” closed and “Come From Away” is closing early next month.“Beetlejuice,” adapted from the 1988 film, has had a bumpy ride on Broadway. It opened in 2019, but sales were weak enough that the Shubert Organization asked it to vacate the Winter Garden Theater; before it did so, sales rebounded thanks to a viral embrace of the show on social media, and then, while it was still trying to figure out its next steps, the pandemic shuttered all theaters.The show, produced by Warner Bros. Theater Ventures and Langley Park Productions, returned to Broadway last April, now at the Marquis Theater, and its grosses have been decent — $930,798 during the week that ended Sept. 18 — but apparently not good enough to sustain a long run for a large-scale musical. At the time of its closing it will have played 679 performances, including the runs at both theaters.The musical features songs by Eddie Perfect and a book by Scott Brown and Anthony King; it is directed by Alex Timbers. The show is planning a tour starting in December in San Francisco.“Beetlejuice” was originally capitalized for $21 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It has not recouped those costs. More

The Majestic Theater has housed “The Phantom of the Opera,” which Prince directed, for the entire 35 years of its run.Carol Burnett doesn’t own a Broadway theater. But she does have a long résumé, a lot of friends and fans, and an Instagram account. And now she is hoping to use what influence she has to persuade Broadway’s bigwigs to rename a theater after the legendary director and producer Hal Prince.Burnett, speaking in a telephone interview, said that last week’s announcement of the impending closing of “The Phantom of the Opera,” which Prince directed and is the longest-running show in Broadway history, prompted her unexpected activism. She said she has come to believe that the Majestic Theater, which has housed “Phantom” for the entire 35 years of its run, should bear Prince’s name.“Hal not only had the longest-running show, but he had 21 Tony Awards, and now that ‘Phantom’ is closing, what a great way to honor him,” she said. “It should have been done a long time ago.”On Wednesday, she posted a short Instagram video urging the renaming, and called on others to do the same. Among those supporting her efforts: Chita Rivera and Kristin Chenoweth. “He changed the face of musical theater,” Chenoweth said in an email. “Changes are happening, and this is one he’d be so proud of.” Rivera agreed, saying in an email: “Hal was such a visionary director and producer as well as an extraordinary human being. It is so vitally important to keep his flame burning.”Prince, who died in 2019 at the age of 91, was among the most significant figures in Broadway history, directing not only “Phantom” but also “Cabaret” and a string of Sondheim musicals, from “Company” to “Sweeney Todd.” He also directed a 2002 play called “Hollywood Arms,” which was based on Burnett’s memoir.Burnett, 89, said she considered Prince “a dear friend” and felt the time was right for Broadway (where she won a special Tony Award for contributions to the theater in 1969) to name a theater for him. “The Majestic is fit for a Prince,” she said, test-driving a slogan she hopes will catch on. The project is being coordinated by Eila Mell, a writer who just co-wrote a book about Broadway set design.Hal Prince, left, with Andrew Lloyd Webber at a 2006 performance of “The Phantom of the Opera” at the Majestic Theater. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesPlenty of people have had ideas and suggestions about whose names should be added, or subtracted, from Broadway’s 41 theaters, and the decisions are up to the theater owners and operators. This year, two renamings are already underway — last week the Cort was renamed the James Earl Jones, and this fall the Brooks Atkinson is to be renamed after Lena Horne — both moves prompted by an agreement between theater owners and Black Theater United to name some buildings for Black artists.The Shubert Organization, which operates the Majestic Theater, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. More