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    in Theater

    New Takes on Old Myths (With No Gods or Dragons)

    A theatrical reworking of Wagner’s “Ring” and a feminist revision of some Greek classics show how ancient legends can illuminate contemporary obsessions.ZURICH — At the start of “Der Ring des Nibelungen” a new play at the Schauspielhaus Zurich, the writer Necati Oziri makes the audience a promise: During the next four hours, we won’t hear a single phrase from Richard Wagner’s operatic tetralogy about gods, giants, dwarves and dragons.In an eloquent and deeply personal address, Oziri, a young German playwright, describes his conflicted feelings at being asked by Christopher Rüping, an in-house director at the Zurich theater, to tackle Wagner’s epic in a new stage work.After Elfriede Jelinek’s Marxist gloss in the book-length essay “Rein Gold,” and a “Ring” rewrite with an environmental message by Thomas Köck last season in Berlin, Oziri is the latest in a recent series of playwrights who have mined Wagner’s dramas for contemporary relevance. Although he rejects Wagner’s text, Oziri takes the composer’s characters and themes seriously, and treats them, for the most part, with respect.In his lengthy prologue, Oziri grapples with the perceived elitism of opera and the difficulty of approaching a work regarded as the apotheosis of German genius. He compares himself to a “cultural terrorist planning an attack at the opera.”Oziri then introduces “The Ring’s” dramatis personae through a series of involving monologues for the seven actors who share the stage with him and the American poet and rapper Black Cracker, who D.J.s for much of the evening. (The original soundtrack, contributed by eight artists and musical groups, quotes Wagner only a handful of times.) The house lights remain on for much of the lengthy production, with the entire cast onstage to listen to one another’s speeches.Rüping is particularly adept at creating a relaxed and even playful environment for the piece to develop organically and at an unhurried pace. The down-to-earth performances and the pulsating music help make this a loose-limbed production that quickly settles into a comfortable groove. In the best possible way, the production cuts the myth down to size.As Alberich, the dwarf who sets the saga in motion by forging an all-powerful ring from stolen gold, Nils Kahnwald delivers a rancor-filled monologue about loneliness. Maja Beckmann’s Fricka first appears on a video screen to record a message to her husband, Wotan, the chief god, recalling the bliss of their early love. Wiebke Mollenhauer, as Brünnhilde, the daughter whom Wotan punishes for disobedience, bids a tearful farewell to her Valkyrie sisters and rails against the patriarchy. “The only way to rise to the throne is by sitting on daddy’s lap,” she says, bitterly. When Wotan finally appears, toward the end of the evening, he unleashes an epic whine that parodies white male fragility.Matthias Neukirch’s comically raving, mansplaining performance in that role won him spontaneous applause at the performance I attended, but the segment feels less original or pointed than some of Oziri’s other writing, for instance a soliloquy he gives the exploited giants who construct Wotan’s castle, Valhalla. Oziri recasts them as Gastarbeiter, the migrant workers who were invited — as cheap labor — to help rebuild West Germany in the postwar period.This isn’t the first time that Rüping, one of Germany’s most celebrated young directors, has created startlingly contemporary (and lengthy) theater out of ancient myth. His 10-hour, classically inspired “Dionysos Stadt,” unveiled at the Münchner Kammerspiele in 2018, is a monument of recent German-language theater. (The epic production will return to Munich later this season). “The Outrageous Ones: Technoid Love Letters for Ancient Heroines” at Munich’s Residenztheater, directed by Elsa-Sophie Jach.Sandra ThenAnother young German director, Elsa-Sophie Jach, attempts something like a feminist version of “Dionysos Stadt” with “The Outrageous Ones: Technoid Love Letters for Ancient Heroines,” at Munich’s Residenztheater. With its long narrations, installation-like set and percussive live music, there’s much about the production that feels similar to Rüping’s work.In the intimate confines of the Marstall, a small Residenztheater stage in the former imperial stables, six actresses cavort around a hot-pink fountain as they recount the myths of Echo, Medusa, Cassandra, Medea, Philomela and Penelope — some of antiquity’s best-known and bloodiest. There’s no shortage of killing, sexual violence and wanton cruelty in these tales, often narrated in the first person, about women who suffer at the hands of gods and men. (The performing text is itself a patchwork of ancient and modern texts, from Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides and Sappho up to modern feminist authors, including Christa Wolf and Hélène Cixous.)Although these stories are well known, the actresses succeed in making us feel discomfort and rage at the sickening violence enacted against women over and over. By giving voice to wronged or misunderstood female figures, “The Outrageous Ones” sticks it to the patriarchy, as represented by Zeus, Poseidon and Apollo.It’s a stylish and assured production. An onstage band, Slatec, helps to channel the female fury with its dynamic improvisations. The eclectic quartet — two sets of percussion, synthesizers and a trombone — performs what might best be described as techno meets big band.The musicians drive the evening with momentum and energy, while the band’s colorful outfits contrast with the somber black worn by the actresses for most of the performance — as does the blood that shoots out of the fountain by the gallon toward the end of the evening. Aleksandra Pavlovic’s playful set and Barbara Westernach’s stark, dramatic lighting help turn the small brick interior of the Marstall into a kooky nightclub with a haunted-house vibe.As the performance draws to a close, however, it strains for relevance by including the real-life story of Nevin Yildirim, a woman who in 2015 was sentenced to life imprisonment in Turkey for killing a man who had raped her. Jach’s decision to add Yildirim to the pantheon of cruelly mistreated queens, princesses and nymphs feels out of place. Such editorializing seems tendentious, as if Jach and her performers lacked faith in their classical material. Before this modern-day interpolation, however, the production speaks up for the silenced women of antiquity in sensitive, eloquent and artistically unexpected ways.“Myths are public dreams; dreams are private myths,” wrote the American literary scholar Joseph Campbell. Can it be any wonder that theatermakers continue to turn to our most ancient legends to dream through our contemporary worries, obsessions and fears?Der Ring des Nibelungen. Directed by Christopher Rüping. Schauspielhaus Zurich. Through March 27; guest performances at the Wiener Festwochen June 1-3.Die Unerhörten. Directed by Elsa-Sophie Jach. Residenztheater Munich. Through April 26. More

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    Late Night Recaps Biden’s Annual ‘Status Update’

    Trevor Noah joked Biden’s speech was “like a birthday card from a 4-year-old: A lot of words didn’t make sense, but you got what it was trying to say.”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.America Has Updated Its StatusLate night hosts recapped President Biden’s State of the Union address on Wednesday night, which Trevor Noah called “the one night a year where the president gives the country a status update about how things are going.”“Let’s talk about the State of the Union address, the one night a year Joe Biden stays up past 6 p.m.” — TREVOR NOAH“Biden spoke for 62 minutes. Well, actually he spoke for 10 with 52 minutes of clapping.” — JIMMY FALLON“More than 33 million Americans watched Grampotus speak for more than an hour. He announced he will release 60 million barrels of oil from our national reserve, which is good news for Ted Cruz’s hair.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Last night, President Biden gave the shortest State of the Union address since 2016, clocking in at one hour and two minutes. The shortest — I like this trend. I like it. Let’s get it down — let’s get it down to one TikTok, just save us all a bunch of time.” — JAMES CORDEN“You know, at times this speech was like a birthday card from a 4-year-old: A lot of words didn’t make sense, but you got what it was trying to say.” — TREVOR NOAH“But aside from policing and Covid and Ukraine, Biden also brought up a lot of policies last night that he wanted Congress to pass this year, like letting Medicare negotiate the price of drugs and doubling clean energy production and raising taxes on corporations, and strengthening voting rights — which are all great ideas that I can’t wait for him to bring up again at next year’s State of the Union. Because, I mean, if we’re honest, none of that [expletive] is going to pass through this Congress.” — TREVOR NOAH“According to a new poll, 71 percent of Americans who watched President Biden’s State of the Union address had a positive reaction to the speech. But let’s be honest: Everyone who would have had a negative reaction was watching ‘Yellowstone.’” — SETH MEYERSThe Punchiest Punchlines (Him Who? Edition)“I’m sorry: ‘God protect our troops — Go get him.’ Get who? Go get God?” — TREVOR NOAH, on Joe Biden’s yelling “Go get him!” at the end of his State of the Union speech“Right after, Putin called Trump and was like, [imitating Putin] ‘Is he talking about me?’” — JIMMY FALLON“Go get him who? Does Biden just randomly shout, ‘Go get him’ sometimes? I mean, it would explain why his dog kept attacking people.” — TREVOR NOAH“Who are we supposed to go get? Putin? Pokemon?” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Mike Pence was watching from home and was like, ‘Not again. What did I do this time?’” — JAMES CORDENThe Bits Worth Watching“Tonight Show” guest Zoë Kravitz took Jimmy Fallon in a game of “Can You Feel It?” where they guess objects they can’t see by touch alone.What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightSerena Williams will sit down with Trevor Noah for the first time on Thursday’s “Daily Show.”Also, Check This Out“The Dropout” tracks the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes and the start-up Theranos. From left: Elizabeth Meriwether, the creator; Amanda Seyfried, the star; and Rebecca Jarvis, the journalist whose podcast inspired the series.Jingyu Lin for The New York TimesThe women behind “The Dropout” seek to humanize Elizabeth Holmes in their new Hulu series about the disgraced tech entrepreneur. More

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    in Theater

    I Love London Theater. But Not London Theatergoing.

    While full of fine shows, a long-awaited binge was also full of stress about how loosely audiences followed rules about staying healthy in a pandemic.LONDON — On the February morning when England’s National Health Service pinged me, saying I’d been identified as a contact of someone who had tested positive for Covid, I freaked out completely.Not out of fear of getting sick; I’m boosted, and I think if I got the virus I would probably be fine. But the last time I came to London, in September, my euphoric playgoing trip was thrown into disarray when I tested positive post-arrival, which banished me to a hotel room for 10 solitary, asymptomatic days. Was I about to get stuck here again?I’d only seen one friend this trip and he was OK, so it had to be a stranger, this person with Covid. My mind scrambled to figure out where our paths had crossed. Based on the time frame that the N.H.S. suggested, I would bet it was at a small, crowded theater two nights earlier — my prime suspect being the guy in front of me who’d sneezed mid-show. That’s when I noticed he wasn’t wearing a mask.Which made him pretty unremarkable here, in a city with genuinely world-beating theater but audience Covid safety protocols ranging from lax to cavalier, and getting looser. Over my 12-day visit, which included some gorgeous productions I am grateful to have seen, that lack of stringency dampened my anticipation of shows, my enjoyment of them — and ultimately my interest in going to them.Because even in this not-yet-over pandemic with its ever-shifting rules, I’m used to feeling safe at the theater; used to feeling like we are all looking out for one another, trying to keep everyone onstage and backstage and in the house healthy, in pursuit of this art that we love. It’s not a minor thing, this feeling; it’s rooted in empathy.And on a purely practical level? We Americans do have to test negative before we’re allowed to fly home — on planes that are still nowhere near as crowded as they used to be.TRAVELING TO SEE THEATER is one of those prepandemic habits that has yet to return for most of us, and it’s been driving me a little bit crazy.I am one of those people — maybe you are, too — who reads the news about which plays are being done in which far-flung places and aches to be in the room with them, burns with envy of those who can be, keeps checking and rechecking the mental calculus of “Can I risk it yet?” against “Can I bear one more second not to?” Evelyn Miller and James McAvoy in “Cyrano de Bergerac.” The production was wonderful, but the audience at a return performance — not so much.Marc BrennerSo when my editor, wanting a profile of the actor James McAvoy, emailed to ask if I would be willing to do the interview in London, where he is starring in Jamie Lloyd’s electrifying production of “Cyrano de Bergerac” in the West End, my answer was an all-caps, unfettered yes. It is one of my favorite cities, and I missed it. The time to risk going, it suddenly seemed, was now.I would need to see that “Cyrano” again — twist my arm — because it had been more than two years since I’d caught it in early previews during its original run. To take full advantage of the slog across the Atlantic, I would stay a while and see a slew of other shows — starting, just hours after passing through customs at Heathrow, with a matinee chosen to go easy on my jet-lagged brain.That was “& Juliet,” a pop-musical riff on “Romeo and Juliet” at the Shaftesbury Theater, where we did have to show proof of vaccination or a negative Covid test to get in, and the people near me were wearing masks. It was a jolt, though, in a more than century-old West End theater that couldn’t be described as airy, to see whole groups of people walk in and take their seats barefaced.Assembling onstage before the performance began, the actors did try, in a spirit befitting their frolic of a show, to encourage safer behavior. One briefly held up a chalkboard with a hand-lettered message: “Hello,” it said, which got cheerful hellos back from the crowd. Another brief chalkboard, another message: “Thank you,” which got some applause.But the wordless chalkboard in between those two — bearing a friendly pastel drawing of a mask — got only silence. Which, in the circumstances, counted as a response.“& Juliet” turned out not to be my cup of tea. Still, I’d have stayed if I’d been able to stop thinking about the ventilation, wondering what I was breathing and whether it was worth it.I decided it wasn’t and fled at intermission, back onto the street, back into the open air.Heather Forster and Samuel Creasey in “The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage.”Manuel Harlan“THE BOOK OF DUST: La Belle Sauvage,” that night at the Bridge Theater, was leagues more rewarding. Adapted by Bryony Lavery from Philip Pullman’s fantasy prequel to “His Dark Materials,” and staged by Nicholas Hytner with beguiling visuals, it’s the character Lyra Belacqua’s origin story.The stagecraft is more enchanting than the narrative, but what marvelous stagecraft it is: projections conjuring a watery world, life-size boats moving through it with a choreographed fluidity more persuasive than I’d ever witnessed onstage. And of course the spectral puppets, glowing from within.The lovely guy next to me, masked when he wasn’t snacking, told me he felt perfectly safe at the Bridge precisely because it was airy — not like some old West End house, he said. Until that evening, he hadn’t been to any theater since the pandemic began. (You can see “The Book of Dust,” whose Bridge run has ended, in a National Theater Live recording.)It makes me happy when I’m in London at the same time as an Emma Rice production. This trip it was her adaptation of Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights” at the National Theater: a 19th-century classic warmed with music and breathed to life as if it had taken as its cue something Charlotte Brontë once wrote about the novel: that it “was hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials.”The moor is a kind of Greek chorus in the play, while the storytelling is nimble and full of fun; Katy Owen is comic perfection as Little Linton, the pampered princeling of Wuthering Heights. But when Catherine (Lucy McCormick) dies and Heathcliff (Ash Hunter) cries, “Catherine Earnshaw, haunt me!,” his jagged grief rips through us, straight to the soul.Lennie James, left, and Paapa Essiedu in the Old Vic production of Caryl Churchill’s two-hander “A Number.”Manuel HarlanIn Caryl Churchill’s brisk two-hander “A Number,” given a stellar production by Lyndsey Turner at the Old Vic, every moment of Paapa Essiedu’s beautifully modulated performance has a similar visceral reach, right into the center of us. Opposite Lennie James as a father who secretly replaced his original son with a clone, Essiedu plays three disparate but genetically identical men with an unshowy humanity that pops against Es Devlin’s stylized tomato-red set.OF EVERYTHING I SAW, though, the production that brought me there is the one that left me absolutely stunned. The first time I saw “Cyrano de Bergerac,” on Thanksgiving Day 2019, the production was still a work in progress.This time, I left the Harold Pinter Theater with a sensation through my limbs like an electrical charge. We are all bodies in space at the theater, and I responded to this “Cyrano” on a cellular level.I saw other shows, too: at the Hampstead Theater, Florian Zeller’s weary new psychological drama, “The Forest,” about a man whose seemingly perfect life is blown up by his infidelity (but at least the cast includes Gina McKee and Finbar Lynch); at the Almeida Theater, Omar Elerian’s overlong take on Ionesco’s “The Chairs,” with the reliably first-rate Kathryn Hunter in slapstick clown mode; and, at the Donmar Warehouse, “Henry V,” starring Kit Harington and featuring — this will sound strange, but it is absolutely true — the most entrancing stage rain I have ever seen. I was able to snag a ticket (a terrible one; I spent a lot of time with actors’ butts blocking my view) the day a lethal storm blew into Britain and people canceled plans.Kit Harington, center, in the Donmar Warehouse production of “Henry V.” The theater was one of the few that explicitly requested that attendees wear masks.Helen MurrayI’d canceled my own theatergoing plans earlier that week, when the N.H.S. texted me about that contact and told me to take rapid tests for five days. In my initial flood of anxiety, I nixed a train trip to Bristol and returned my ticket to see Mark Rylance there in “Dr. Semmelweis” — a play about a pioneer in the prevention of needless infection.Then, at the pharmacy, a clerk handed me a free box of seven rapid tests, from the N.H.S. — a perk of pandemic life in England that Boris Johnson, the prime minister, would announce the end of for most people days later, along with other precautions including contact tracing.Apparently I was fine. Each time I took a test, the result was negative — and each time I reported that online to the N.H.S., the automated response reminded me to “wear a face covering in crowded settings.”It boggles my mind that so many theatergoers in London, sitting side by side for hours, don’t bother with that elementary precaution — if not for themselves, then for the actors, who are not masked, and for other people in the audience who might be medically vulnerable, not able to be vaccinated yet or in close contact with people in either of those groups. It is such a simple kindness. It is also an act of inclusion.The only theater that I saw actively request it was the Donmar, and people complied. Elsewhere any such request was timid, and certainly not face to face. When major West End theater operators said recently that they would no longer require mask wearing or proof of vaccination from audience members, I had to wonder how a mask policy could count as mandatory if it had gone unenforced.One night I went to the Duke of York’s Theater to see “The Ocean at the End of the Lane,” an adaptation of the Neil Gaiman novel. The show hadn’t started yet when I noticed that the guy on one side of me wasn’t wearing a mask. Then a barefaced guy sat down on my other side. I thought: If this were the subway, I would get up immediately. So I left.HOW DOES A CITY — or an industry — that wants to welcome the world and its wallet not worry about things like that? The contrast between playgoing in New York and in London isn’t about quirky cultural differences. These are fundamentally divergent ways of navigating the pandemic.One is cautious, cognizant of the frailty of bodies; of the gaps that remain in our knowledge of Covid and long Covid; of the fact that we learn of new variants only after they start spreading. The other seems heedless — telling the audience, in effect, that they can take their chances or stay home. I wonder how many people, surveying the options, have decided to keep their money and keep safe.I spent a bit more of mine, returning to the Pinter for “Cyrano.” A good single seat had opened up, and I grabbed it. I didn’t want to wait until the show got to Brooklyn to see it again. But I wish I had.The audience was, hands down, the most overwhelmingly barefaced I had seen. I kept looking at the performers, doing their jobs so gloriously on that stage, and wondering how anyone could be so reckless as to gamble with their health. That’s not a right that a ticket ought to buy you.The next night, my last in London before I flew back to New York, I didn’t go to the theater. Unthinkably, it had lost its appeal. More

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    in Television

    Stephen Colbert Grades Biden’s First State of the Union Address

    “Many lawmakers wore the colors of the Ukrainian flag, blue and yellow,” Colbert said. “It’s a show of solidarity not seen since the last ‘Minions’ movie.”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.Not So Civil UnionStephen Colbert went live on Tuesday night after President Biden’s first State of the Union address.“And let me tell you, it was a roller-coaster ride of rip roaring reasonableness,” Colbert said of Biden’s speech.”A roller coaster ride of rip roaring reasonableness.”- @StephenAtHome on President Biden’s #StateOfTheUnion speech. #LateShowLIVE pic.twitter.com/axxKy2F1xq— The Late Show (@colbertlateshow) March 2, 2022
    “Keep in mind, a week ago, this was going to be a totally different speech. But when Ukraine was invaded, the world changed. Because right now, there is a dictator who thinks he can violently conquer a sovereign democracy, but Joe Biden beat him in the last election.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Many lawmakers wore the colors of the Ukrainian flag, blue and yellow. It’s a show of solidarity not seen since the last ‘Minions’ movie.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Not everyone was focused on the speech. Kevin McCarthy was there but busy looking at his phone. To be fair, today’s Wordle was pretty tricky.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Of course the minority leader in the House not paying attention looked disrespectful. But keep in mind, he might’ve been on Amazon shopping for a spine.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Four Horsemen Edition)“It was a tough speech. Biden said that even though the country is divided right now — right now, we all need to come together and agree that the ‘Sex and the City’ reboot wasn’t anywhere near what we hoped it would be.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Yep, it was historic — 400 representatives, 100 senators and Size 96 font on the teleprompter.” — JIMMY FALLON“But the State of our Union is as strong as Kim and Kanye right now.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“That’s right, Biden was at the podium with Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi right behind him. Fox News was like, ‘Throw in Hillary and you’ve got all Four Horsemen.’” — JIMMY FALLON“During his speech, Biden introduced his new unity agenda. Unity agenda, yeah. And you can tell it worked because every single Republican ignored him.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingThe “Late Night” writers Amber Ruffin and Jenny Hagel struggled to get through their song praising the Supreme Court hopeful Ketanji Brown Jackson.What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightZoë Kravitz will talk about playing Catwoman (Selina Kyle) in the new “Batman” film on Wednesday’s “Tonight Show.”Also, Check This OutIn her new memoir, Amy Bloom writes about helping her husband to end his life after a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. More

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    in Theater

    ‘Out of Time’ Review: Once Sidelined, Now Taking Center Stage

    Five Asian American actors, all over 60, deliver monologues that touch on grief and heritage, on adult children and cultural cancellation.She is absolutely elegant, and completely isolated — a documentarian, microphone clipped to her chest, talking to an unseen camera about the last time she hugged someone.This will be the final film in the long career of this quietly charismatic woman, and the first in which she steps into the frame to center the narrative on herself. Although her real subject, she says, is someone near to her, now lost.“My Documentary,” written by Anna Ouyang Moench and performed by Page Leong, is the captivating opener to “Out of Time,” a collaboration between the National Asian American Theater Company and the Public Theater that gathers five new solo shorts by Asian American playwrights into a single program.The five performers are Asian American actors, all over 60, deep into careers in which their odds of working have been far tougher than for their white contemporaries. In “Out of Time,” they step into the frame — figuratively speaking, mostly — to tell wide-ranging stories that touch on grief and heritage and the pandemic, on adult children and cultural cancellation, on making art and pulling off an optical illusion.Not all of the art-making succeeds in Les Waters’s uneven production at the Public, but every actor is one you’ll want to see again, and that is a large part of the point. So is the potent sense of worldviews and experiences that the American stage has generally ignored.“My Documentary” is a beautiful piece of writing. A life story that’s a love story, too, it has a bruised awareness that “misunderstanding something very important as you’re living it” is a human tendency. In Leong’s hands, the nameless documentarian is compelling in a lean-forward way: Funny, sharp and warm, she has a whole cogent argument against hugging at work, and remembers her own sons in their earliest years as “agents of chaos” in her life. Connection and solace are what she’s seeking with her film. They’re also what the monologue brings.A series of long, sheer fabric curtains (by the design collective Dots) form most of the set for “Out of Time,” and when we first glimpse Mia Katigbak in Mia Chung’s play “Ball in the Air,” it is through them as she crosses upstage, intently playing with a paddle ball. You know the kind: wooden paddle, rubber ball attached by a string.It’s an intriguing start, and Katigbak — a founder of the National Asian American Theater Company and a dependably excellent mainstay of downtown theater — is a fine paddle ball player, it turns out. But the monologue is all confusion, written in short chunks that seem to come from three different strands of narrative that aren’t so much braided together as stacked on top of one another: one about an election, one about a friendship gone wrong, another about a car ride, if I’ve parsed them right. They might make perfect sense intercut in a film. Here they blend together muddily.Rita Wolf, behind a curtain and onscreen, in Jaclyn Backhaus’s monologue, “Black Market Caviar.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe sole moments of clarity concern the optical illusion: a ball that Katigbak seems to make disappear in midair. (Steve Cuiffo, New York theater’s go-to magic guy, is listed in the program as a consultant.) Later, speaking directly to the audience, she tells us how it works. You’ll come away with that knowledge, anyway.The program’s rough patch continues with the next play, Jaclyn Backhaus’s “Black Market Caviar,” a gorgeously layered monologue foiled by Waters’s staging. Performed by Rita Wolf, it is a message of love and comfort spoken by a woman named Carla, 30 years in the future, to her younger self. In the script, Backhaus says that Carla appears in “a portal from somewhere that opens before you on December 31st, 2019.”Maybe it was the urge to mix things up that enticed Waters to place Wolf at such a chilly distance from the audience, veiled behind a curtain, seated in profile and talking to a video camera. We see her in close-up on a screen downstage, her image frustratingly out of sync with the sound of her voice, which travels faster. But is watching someone on video what we’ve come to the theater for?The screen prevents the vital communion between actor and audience, making it harder to hear Backhaus’s play — about a genetic predisposition toward cancer passed down from one generation of women to the next in Carla’s family, and about undoing the trauma that came from keeping that scary fact a secret.“Don’t succumb to the fear,” Carla counsels, surely knowing that the mere fact of her being alive so far in the future is heartening.“Be afraid,” she says, “and live your life.”The program bounces back with Naomi Iizuka’s “Japanese Folk Song,” starring Glenn Kubota as a silver-haired retired banker named Taki, speaking to his grown daughter about his life — and his loathing of jazz, including the Thelonious Monk song that gives Iizuka’s monologue its name.The script carries a poignant dedication, “to Takehisa Iizuka (1934-2020),” and the playwright has said that Taki is strongly influenced by her father. The character tells the audience, in a quick prologue to the play, that he is not the real Taki but rather a stand-in who looks like him. This, then, is theater as a tender, comic, aching act of remembrance.Leonie, the famous septuagenarian novelist in Sam Chanse’s “Disturbance Specialist,” the final monologue, is very much not retired, though a younger generation who deems her tweets problematic is trying to make her go away. In response, Leonie has shown up defiantly at her alma mater to give a speech.Performed by Natsuko Ohama, it’s a thoughtful play, discursive and entertaining, with sympathy for a lifelong artist-activist who worked hard to earn a place at a table where white men were so much more freely welcomed, and who abruptly finds that place threatened. Yet Leonie, for all her indignation, recognizes that her detractors may have a point.She was young and furious once, too. And she knows that, even at her age, she must adapt to thrive.Out of TimeThrough March 13 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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    in Theater

    The Past Pushes Back in 2 Shows With Contemporary Blackness in Mind

    New productions of “The Merchant of Venice” and “Black No More” aim to reflect our current racial politics. The results are uneven.On a recent weekend, I eagerly set out to see two new productions that prominently center Blackness: the director Arin Arbus’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” and “Black No More,” a new musical with a starry creative team that was inspired by a satirical 1931 novel about race in America.“The Merchant of Venice,” a Theater for a New Audience production at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, came first. Here, Arbus strong-arms contemporary politics into the work, which she places in a modern-day setting. The tension between Arbus’s direction and the text is most apparent in a scene in which Shylock, the Jewish moneylender, in arguing he should be repaid after a merchant defaults on a loan, cites laws about the enslaved:You have among you many a purchased slaveWhich, like your asses and your dogs and mules,You use in abject and in slavish partsBecause you bought them. Shall I say to you‘Let them be free, marry them to your heirs.Why sweat they under burdens?’In this race-conscious production, the speech takes on a different meaning. Since the actor playing Shylock is John Douglas Thompson, Shylock’s Jewish identity is subordinated to another one: a Black identity.While “Merchant” reflects our current racial politics and sensibilities through the director’s vision, “Black No More,” the New Group’s musical, relies on the major ways in which its script deviates from the original novel. Both shows function almost as reactionary works of criticism, “Merchant” critiquing Shakespeare’s text and “Black No More” critiquing the bleak satire of the novel. And though each production brings art from the past to the present, sometimes in brilliant ways, the antiquated plots, themes and characters aren’t always easy to recontextualize. The past pushes back.In this “Merchant,” Antonio, the title character, and Bassanio, the best friend to whom he offers his fortune and very nearly his life, are lovers. The women — the heiress Portia, her maid Nerissa and Shylock’s daughter, Jessica — are married in the end, as is typically the rule in Shakespeare’s comedies, but are unhappy and wise to their husbands’ misogyny and other faults. And then Shylock and his daughter (and Shylock’s Jewish friend Tubal) are all Black, which brings in the history of racial discrimination, slavery and prejudice.Arbus shifts the focus of the text so Shylock — performed by Thompson with devastating pathos — isn’t the antagonist who stands in the way of the central characters’ happiness, but the tragic heart of the play. Though there’s still the matter of the dual Black and Jewish identities; of course Black Jews exist, but the conflation addles the themes of the production and bends the original text in directions it can’t actually go.While the text specifically speaks of anti-Semitism, the pivot to include anti-Black racism overwhelms it. Arbus does try to balance the two identities, especially in the final scene, in which Shylock and his daughter (beautifully portrayed by Danaya Esperanza) recite a Hebrew prayer; the exceptional performances almost make up for the fact that the scene feels out of place, like a last-ditch effort to assert that this is still also a play about anti-Semitism.Blackness is already in the play, in the form of racist throwaway comments about “Moors” that Arbus’s direction highlights to the degree she can. So Portia’s matter-of-fact dismissal of any dark-skinned suitors as she speaks to Nerissa (played by the Black actress Shirine Babb) is challenged by Nerissa’s disapproving glare. And when Jessica’s suitor, Lorenzo, disdainfully jokes about Shylock’s servant impregnating a Moor, Jessica silently steps away in disgust.Racism against Black people was assumed in Shakespeare’s time, so in a contemporary race-aware production that stays loyal to the text, the characters’ reactions to it must be limited to pauses and glances.Perhaps a contemporized version of this problematic play must be edited beginning with the language, mixing in modern-day parlance, as James Ijames did in his “Fat Ham,” or revised by artful omission, as in Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth.” Because there’s a limit to Arbus’s approach even within these textual constraints; Nerissa and Jessica can silently respond to a comment about Moors, but no one speaks about or refers to Shylock’s Black identity, just his Jewish one. It’s odd to showcase Blackness without having a Shylock who can explicitly speak about his Blackness. It then feels as if his two identities are at war. To which should we direct our attention, because the text can’t hold both?These thoughts lingered as I headed to the Pershing Square Signature Center in Manhattan to see “Black No More,” whose short run ended this weekend.Unlike “Merchant,” “Black No More” isn’t loyal to the original text, George S. Schuyler’s novel of the same name. But it does take the book’s basic plot and characters. (“Schuyler’s ‘Black No More’ is an essay,” Tariq Trotter, who wrote the show’s lyrics, said in a recent interview. “Ours is an essay on that essay. A critique of a critique.”)In Schuyler’s novel, a Harlem man named Max Disher undergoes a scientific procedure that turns Black people white. The process, invented by a Black scientist named Dr. Crookman, becomes so popular that it affects Black businesses and institutions, labor politics and more. The newly Caucasian Max changes his name and moves down South to find and marry the racist white woman named Helen who had previously rejected him. He eventually becomes the leader of a white supremacist group and profits off racist rhetoric.Brandon Victor Dixon as Max Fisher in the musical “Black No More.” Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Black No More” the musical, directed by Scott Elliott and with a book by John Ridley (“12 Years a Slave”), softens — and in some cases eliminates — Schuyler’s biting critique. The novelist didn’t just target racist whites but also Black identity, and Black leaders and institutions that claim to support the Black community while actually damaging and profiting off it.In the novel, characters mostly act in their self-interest, especially when it comes to money; in many ways the villain is capitalism. (Schuyler was a vocal socialist at the time he published the book.) In the musical, things are simplified: Dr. Crookman (played by Trotter) is a devil figure offering a Faustian bargain.There aren’t many sympathetic characters in the text, which the musical changes. Helen, now a liberal at heart, falls in love with Max when he’s still Black and reveals she’s only pretending to be racist around her conservative family.In the book, Max’s best friend, Bunny, follows his lead, also turning white and serving white supremacists for profit. In the musical, Bunny (now Buni) is a Black woman who acts as Max’s moral compass; she defends Blackness and calls out Max for betraying his race. Schuyler’s book disregards women, and the intersection of race and gender, altogether. In the musical, Buni gets a song about the burdens Black women bear for their families and communities, but her character is thinly written, just bolstering Max’s story.The influential Black artists who worked on the show appeared eager to transform the original work into a piece that celebrates Blackness. Trotter’s lyrics, Bill T. Jones’s choreography and the music by Trotter, Anthony Tidd, James Poyser and Daryl Waters were lovingly appreciative of Black movement and sound, with R&B, soul, hip-hop, spoken word, step and lindy hop forming an extravagant collage. And some numbers — like the oddly triumphant final song of Black solidarity — and a new Black activist character named Agamemnon, seem incorporated to counter the cynicism of Schuyler’s work.It’s understandable, especially given the way Black Lives Matter has shaped the cultural conversation about inequality faced by Black people; it would be outré to produce a true adaptation of a work like Schuyler’s, which has no redeemable Black characters and berates pillars of the Black community as vehemently as it does white institutions.And so Max, our Black-turned-white protagonist, is given a guilty conscience; he’s made sympathetic just long enough so he can be the martyr, shot down in the middle of a fourth-wall-breaking monologue that’s meant to be a bridge between the 1931 story and 2022 audiences.In art, context is key. But depending on the work and what new context the director or playwright wants to bring to it, some changes can feel too forced, too transparent. “Expectation from you all is … what? For me to give a moving soliloquy on race in America?” Max says in his final monologue. He’s no longer speaking from the world of the musical but from today. “Still we can’t put all our nonsense behind us,” he says. And the bullet that takes him down? It doesn’t come from Schuyler’s time; it’s shot from 2022. It just goes to show that when past and present collide, it may not be pretty. More

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    Ned Eisenberg, New York Actor Known for ‘Law & Order,’ Dies at 65

    Eisenberg performed in several Broadway productions between appearances as the defense lawyer Roger Kressler on NBC’s long-running police drama “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”Ned Eisenberg, a character actor known for his work on popular shows including “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and “Mare of Easttown,” died at his home in the Jackson Heights section of Queens on Sunday. He was 65.The cause was cholangiocarcinoma, a cancer of the bile duct, and ocular melanoma, according to a statement from his agent, Jeanne Nicolosi, issued on his family’s behalf.Eisenberg was a New York character actor whose roles in film, theater and television spanned the past four decades on Broadway and in Hollywood.Fans of the NBC police procedural “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” may best remember him as the defense lawyer Roger Kressler, a recurring character on the long-running drama. From 1999 to 2019, he appeared in two dozen episodes of the show — mostly as Kressler, but twice early on in other roles, according to IMDb. He also appeared in other series in the “Law & Order” franchise, playing different roles.Ned Eisenberg was born on Jan. 13, 1957, in the Bronx. He grew up in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, where he attended Riverdale Junior High School.In 1975, he graduated from what is now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, in Manhattan, where he studied acting.He began his professional theater career in Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach Memoirs” and appeared on Broadway as Truffaldino in Julie Taymor’s “The Green Bird” (2000) and as Uncle Morty in Bartlett Sher’s “Awake and Sing!” (2006), according to Nicolosi.In a New York Times review of “The Green Bird,” Eisenberg and other cast members were credited with bringing “a balletic grace” and “antic shtick” to the performance, in which he and Didi Conn played “a Punch-and-Judy pair of sausage makers.”He performed in lead roles in theaters around the Northeast including the Theater for a New Audience, New York City Center and the Williamstown Theater Festival.He was an early member of the Naked Angels Theater Company along with Kenneth Lonergan, Frank Pugliese and Joe Mantello. The actors Rob Morrow, Mary Stuart Masterson, Nancy Travis and Gina Gershon were also among the founding members of the group, which was started in 1986 to serve as a “creative home for new voices.”In 2009, he played Iago in a Theater for a New Audience production of “Othello.” In a review for The Times, Charles Isherwood wrote that Eisenberg’s performance was “decked out in small, witty flourishes,” noting that “the bitter half-smile with which Iago looks on at the waste he has wrought in the final scene says everything about his shriveled soul.”In supporting roles throughout his career, Eisenberg worked with Academy Award-winning directors and filmmakers.In 2004, he played the boxing manager Sally Mendoza in Clint Eastwood’s “Million Dollar Baby,” which starred Hilary Swank and won the Oscar for best picture. Eisenberg played the photographer, Joe Rosenthal, in “Flags of Our Fathers,” another film by Eastwood, about the six men who raised the flag at the Battle of Iwo Jima during World War II.Eisenberg also acted in “World Trade Center,” a 2006 Oliver Stone drama about police officers who responded to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and the 2011 thriller “Limitless,” starring Bradley Cooper.Last year, he appeared in the Emmy Award-winning HBO drama “Mare of Easttown” as Detective Hauser.He is expected to return as the manager Lou Rabinowitz in a coming episode of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” on Amazon Prime.He is survived by his wife, the actress Patricia Dunnock, and a son, Lino Eisenberg. More

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    The Best Movies and TV Shows Coming to HBO, Hulu, Apple TV+ and More in March

    Every month, streaming services add movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for some of March’s most promising new titles.(Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)John C. Reilly, Quincy Isaiah and Jason Clarke in “Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty”HBONew to HBO Max‘Drive My Car’Starts streaming: March 2Nominated for four Academy Awards this year, including best picture, this critically acclaimed drama is a captivating meditation on loss and regret. Directed and co-written by Ryusuke Hamaguchi (adapting a Haruki Murakami short story), “Drive My Car” has Hidetoshi Nishijima playing Yusuke Kafuku, a renowned actor and theater director who is mourning the death of his wife and muse. When he agrees to direct a multilingual stage adaptation of “Uncle Vanya” in Hiroshima, Yusuke bonds with his designated driver, while also forging a wary relationship with the play’s star — who was his late wife’s secret lover. Though the movie has a three-hour running time, Hamaguchi moves the plot fairly briskly from one quietly intense scene to another, bringing a beautiful blue tinge to the story of a man haunted by all things he has left unsaid and undone.‘Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty’Starts streaming: March 6The sports reporter Jeff Pearlman’s book “Showtime” covered the rise of the 1980s Los Angeles Lakers, an exciting and star-laden team who helped the N.B.A. become an international phenomenon. The TV adaptation “Winning Time” turns that tale into a stylish period dramedy and features an all-star cast recreating an era when a handful of strong, often conflicting personalities changed the whole culture of professional basketball. The producer Adam McKay (who also directed the first episode) and creators Max Borenstein and Jim Hecht deploy a storytelling style reminiscent of McKay’s movie “The Big Short,” where characters like Jerry Buss (John C. Reilly), Jerry West (Jason Clarke), Magic Johnson (Quincy Isaiah) and Pat Riley (Adrien Brody) sometimes break the fourth wall to help explain the fine details of business management, on-court strategy and handling superstar egos.‘Minx’ Season 1Starts streaming: March 17Set amid the freewheeling publishing industry in early 1970s Los Angeles, “Minx” stars Ophelia Lovibond as Joyce, an activist who gets the chance to create and edit the feminist magazine of her dreams — so long as she is willing to include erotic photo spreads of naked men. Jake Johnson plays Doug, a successful pornographer who mentors Joyce, a proudly independent woman embarrassed to admit the troubles she has had adjusting to the age of sexual liberation. Created by Ellen Rapoport, “Minx” finds humor in the ways that certain gender-role expectations and stereotypes persist even in an “anything goes” era of free love and progressive politics.Also arriving:March 1“The Larry David Story”March 2“West Side Story”March 3“Gaming Wall Street”“Little Ellen” Season 2“Our Flag Means Death” Season 1“The Tourist” Season 1March 8“Ruxx” Season 1March 10“Dune”“Theodosia” Season 1March 13“Game Theory with Bomani Jones” Season 1March 13“Blade Runner: Black Lotus” Season 1March 15“Phoenix Rising”March 17“DMZ” Season 1“Jellystone!” Season 2March 18“Lust” Season 1“Pseudo”March 20“Amsterdam” Season 1March 24“King Richard”“One Perfect Shot” Season 1“Starstruck” Season 2March 31“Julia” Season 1“Moonshot”Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball as seen in “Lucy and Desi.”Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesNew to Prime Video‘Lucy and Desi’Starts streaming: March 4The comedian and producer Amy Poehler directed this homage to the groundbreaking Hollywood power couple Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, taking a comprehensive look at their impressive careers and rocky marriage. With the help of rare home movies and old audio interviews — combined with new comments from Carol Burnett, Bette Midler and others — Poehler and her team detail how Ball and Arnaz worked their way up in show business, before creating the groundbreaking sitcom “I Love Lucy” and founding the influential television studio Desilu Productions. This is a film about two widely beloved entertainers who helped change television with their business savvy and their stubborn refusals to compromise, even as they worked to exhaustion and made each other miserable behind the scenes.Also arriving:March 4“The Boys Presents: Diabolical”March 7“2022 Academy of Country Music Awards”March 10“Harina”March 11“Upload” Season 2March 18“Master”March 25“Lizzo’s Watch Out for the Big Grrrls”Steve Sang-Hyun Noh, center, with Minha Kim and Inji Jeong in “Pachinko.”Apple TV+New to Apple TV+‘Pachinko’ Season 1Starts streaming: March 25Min Jin Lee’s best-selling historical novel “Pachinko” inspired this ambitious drama, which follows one Korean family across three countries and seven decades against the backdrop of war and military occupation. Created by Soo Hugh — a writer and producer on “The Terror” — and featuring the work of the acclaimed indie film directors Kogonada and Justin Chon, “Pachinko” weaves together story lines from multiple time periods, including from a Korean fishing village in the early 20th century and Japan around the time of World War II and the late 1980s, when global business concerns were shrinking a lot of the old distinctions between regions and ideals. Like the book, the series is about the legacies and connections that sustain people through times of turmoil.Also arriving:March 4“Dear…” Season 2March 11“The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey”March 18“WeCrashed”Amanda Seyfried portraying Elizabeth Holmes in “The Dropout.”Beth Dubber/HuluNew to Hulu‘The Dropout’Starts streaming: March 3Amanda Seyfried plays the scandal-plagued biotech entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes in “The Dropout,” a miniseries based on the podcast of the same name. Anyone who has read the various investigative exposés about Holmes’s failed start-up, Theranos, already knows the yarn of how the company claimed to have developed a groundbreaking blood-testing device that never worked as promised. “The Dropout” goes deeper into Holmes’s past, framing her less as a hapless fraud than as a well-meaning misfit who was in too much of a rush to become rich and famous.‘Atlanta’ Season 3Starts streaming: March 25After a four-year layoff, Donald Glover’s one-of-a-kind, award-winning dramedy “Atlanta” returns for its third and penultimate season, which was shot mostly in London. (Season 4 is currently slated to run this fall, wrapping up the series.) The story picks up with the aspiring rap star Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry) and his bumbling manager and cousin, Earn (Glover), trying to make inroads in the European market while they and their friends Darius (LaKeith Stanfield) and Van (Zazie Beetz) are feeling more alienated than usual by their surroundings. As always with “Atlanta,” expect the unexpected, as Glover and his creative team explore aspects of the Black experience that range from the subtly poignant to the comically surreal.Also arriving:March 1“Better Things” Season 5“The Savior for Sale”March 4“Benedetta”“Dicktown” Season 2“Fresh”March 6“Mark, Mary & Some Other People”March 8“India Sweets and Spices”March 10“American Refugee”March 14“Hell Hath No Fury”March 15“You Can’t Kill Meme”March 17“Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn”March 18“Deep Water”“Life & Beth” Season 1March 19“Captains of Za’atari”March 26“Mass”March 29“The Girl from Plainville”Oscar Isaac as the hero in “Moon Knight.”Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios.New to Disney+‘Moon Knight’ Season 1Starts streaming: March 30The latest Marvel Cinematic Universe television series features a cult-favorite superhero: a cloaked vigilante who draws inspiration and strength from an ancient Egyptian god. Oscar Isaac plays the hero, who has dissociative identity disorder but does his best to use the unique qualities of his different selves in his fight over evil. In the Marvel comics, Moon Knight is a fairly dark, violent character, similar to Batman and Daredevil in his knowledge of the criminal underworld and his willingness to crack skulls. The TV version is being pitched as similarly shadowy, as evidenced by the first season’s main villain: a charismatic religious cult leader played by Ethan Hawke.Also arriving:March 11“Turning Red”March 18“Cheaper by the Dozen”“More Than Robots”March 23“Parallels” Season 1March 25“Olivia Rodrigo: driving home 2 u”“The Wonderful Spring of Mickey Mouse” More