Eliana Willis

The first time I ever saw Michael Sheen, he was blazing like the sun. He was 30 then, making his Broadway debut as a divinely inspired, impishly behaved Mozart in the 1999 revival of Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus.” He gave such undiluted radiance to a young composer’s brilliance that he eclipsed everyone else onstage, and it felt almost dangerous to stare at him for too long.Two decades later — on Saturday, in fact — I watched a 51-year-old Sheen portraying another artist, an older man raking through the ashes of a career that had burned only fitfully. As Frank Hardy, the title character of Brian Friel’s “Faith Healer,” which was streamed live from the Old Vic Theater in London, Sheen became a walking shadow, a figure whose doubts had long ago overwhelmed his gift, the dubious but occasionally transcendent art of healing the sick and the maimed by faith alone. (And make no mistake: Friel is discussing the role of the artist here.)But as the camera stared at Sheen, strutting and slinking across an empty stage before an audience of no one, you could sense the sparks in the embers. Frank is an Irish-born traveling seller of hope and a man whose talents are, to put it kindly, capricious.Sheen drew Frank in lines of darkness that never entirely hid the light that still flickered disturbingly within. And an actor I had first valued for his incandescence was now working in subtle, murky shades that paradoxically illuminated one of the greatest plays ever written about the benediction and curse of the artist’s gift.One of the great rewards of having been a theater critic for as long as I have is the privilege of seeing actors and plays change colors, shape and substance over the years. Sometimes, there is shrinkage. If “Faith Healer” — four monologues for three actors first staged in 1979 (with James Mason!) — tells us anything, it’s that greatness is never fixed.Then there are those wondrous occasions when a performance startlingly shifts your perspective on a work you thought you knew well. A new, beckoning landscape opens up, there to tell you what you hadn’t figured out before and suggesting, with audacious hope, that this old and familiar play still teems with unexplored and mysterious life.That’s what happened to me watching Sheen in Matthew Warchus’s enthralling production of “Faith Healer,” which ended its brief run on Saturday as part of the Old Vic: In Camera series of live performances, staged (to an empty house). I first saw “Faith Healer” in 1994, during my first year as a New York Times daily reviewer, a job I am leaving next month.In that version, directed by Joe Dowling at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, Conn., Frank was played by the great Irish actor Donal McCann. McCann embodied Frank as a living dead man, trapped in an eternal fugue of reflection and regret. It’s a performance that still haunts my dreams, and it gave an otherworldly, fablelike shimmer to this account of a man who, on rare occasion, genuinely seemed to work miracles as he traveled rural Scotland and Wales in the company of his wife, Grace, and manager, Teddy.The next time Frank showed up in my life, in 2006, he looked much more glamorous. That’s because he was being incarnated by Ralph Fiennes on Broadway, in a performance that homed in on the character’s contemptuous narcissism. It was a stinging, brooding performance that captured the destructiveness of an artist’s self-absorption, and it too has lingered in my recollection.Now my memory must also make room for Sheen’s Frank, an interpretation that grounds the character in a grimy reality in ways I hadn’t thought possible. First seen weaving through a row of empty chairs, booming out the names of Welsh towns he visited on his healing tours, he exudes the stale aroma of an old-time vaudevillian’s greasepaint.A barrel-shaped figure in a much-worn black suit, overcoat and fedora, his face half-covered by a grizzled beard, he would appear to be a posturing mediocrity, a mountebank with a smooth line in Irish gab. Then the camera moves in on his face, and you see something unspeakable in the eyes — fathomless pain and self-loathing and, yes, a glint of the ineffable, of genius, perhaps, that this shabby, middle-aged man can’t begin to make sense of.Frank has the first and last monologues of “Faith Healer.” And the presence established by Sheen in the opening scene justifies the accounts of the two other characters in the play. That’s Grace (a superb Indira Varma, as a woman turned into an unstanched wound by a lacerating love) and Teddy (a cozily louche David Threlfall).Not that the details match up in these characters’ anguished, faltering recollections of the bleak life they shared on the road, and its horrible and somehow inevitable conclusion. On the contrary, facts both trivial (who chose the music for Frank’s performances) and monumental (births, deaths) tend to change according to who’s telling the story.But still, the sometimes sadistic but irresistible man Grace could never leave was palpably there in Sheen’s initial portrait. So was the none-too-bright, rather ordinary fellow described by Teddy, the Frank who turned into a figure of magnificence on those rare, outrageous occasions when he became what his advertisements said he was. And you understood why these three people, who were destined to wreck one another’s lives (and knew it), nonetheless had to stay together.As is the custom of Old Vic: In Camera (whose earlier, starry offering have included Duncan Macmillan’s “Lungs,” with Claire Foy and Matt Smith and Stephen Beresford’s “Three Kings,” with Andrew Scott), there is very little scenery, but then there has never been with “Faith Healer.”It takes place in the endless and open darkness of recollection, where the events and faces and words of another time keep changing shape. (The lighting, by Tim Lutkin and Sarah Brown, summons that dark realm beautifully.) In a way, it’s about how every one of us is an artist by default, reinventing the world each time we remember something.If I saw a recording of this production at some point in the future, I think I’d discover it wasn’t quite the way I’ve described it here, after all. The singular blessing of live theater, which I have so cherished during my 27 years at The Times, is that it insists you learn to live with the memories of it, which are as mutable, perplexing and endlessly revealing as life itself.Faith HealerPerformed Sept. 16-19; oldvictheatre.com More

For an enduring figure in the American canon, Henry David Thoreau is needier than you might think. When this relic of the 1800s shows up in Toshiki Okada’s probing, funny, hugely resonant play “Zero Cost House,” he is insecure about his 21st-century status. It’s pretty clear he’s been keeping close tabs.“Do you Google yourself, Mr. Thoreau?” the playwright asks — because this is the kind of show where the author is a character (well, two characters; more on that in a moment), communing with the past.“Sure, every day,” Thoreau answers. So he knows that his readership is down.Okada himself, as a young writer in Tokyo, was a fervent “Walden” devotee, and convinced that he always would be. By his late 30s, though, he has become an internationally lauded experimental playwright, but also a guy who considers Thoreau’s treatise on simple living naïve.In “Zero Cost House” — written for the Philadelphia-based Pig Iron Theater Company, which first staged it in 2012 and has reconfigured it superbly for Zoom — those two versions of Okada (played by an assortment of actors) butt up against each other, albeit gently. Plush rabbit puppets and a charismatic architect-philosopher are along for the ride, with Björk on the soundtrack and cast members trading off characters almost relay-style.To step into an Okada play is to enter a dreamscape, and that’s true of this fractured stage memoir, too. Then dream morphs into nightmare. The earthquake that struck Japan in March 2011, setting off a tsunami and a nuclear disaster at a power station in Fukushima, becomes the catalyst for Okada’s reconnection with “Walden” and a more radical way of life.What gives this live-streamed “Zero Cost House” particular potency right now is the wide variety of lenses we have through which to view it — the assorted calamities jolting people into working for social change or into altering their comfortable lives in drastic, once unthinkable ways.Yet this play is not a dour exercise. Translated into comfortably colloquial American English by the Okada veteran Aya Ogawa, it has a friendliness that makes it approachable.Directed and adapted by Pig Iron’s co-artistic director Dan Rothenberg — whose previous Okada productions include the achingly atmospheric post-earthquake meditation “Time’s Journey Through a Room” and the more comically contemplative “The Sonic Life of a Giant Tortoise” — “Zero Cost House” encourages us to seize the opportunity of disaster: to be brave enough to live more meaningfully, to construct a better world.By re-engaging this deeply with the text, making it work so beautifully online, the artists behind this production — including a uniformly excellent cast and a pair of designers, Maiko Matsushima (visual) and Rucyl Frison (sound) — are themselves responding to a crisis.In the play, Thoreau mentions a moment in “Walden” when he meets a couple who “seemed to be in dire straits, and what was worse, they had no awareness of how their circumstances had gotten that way in the first place.”Amid our own dire straits, Okada prods us to consider how we got here — and what we urgently need to change to save ourselves.Zero Cost HouseFinal performance Sept. 25 via Zoom; pigiron.org More

In the early days of the pandemic, when someone passed too close to me on the street or in the grocery store, I held my breath.I thought of that first.Just a few weeks earlier, on a night of wine-drinking and chatting, one of my semiregular panic attacks seized me; I doubled over in the bathroom, heaving and clutching my chest while a friend coached me through inhales and exhales.I thought of that second: the fear that confronts me in those moments I seem to forget the most basic function of my body.These are the scenes that played in my mind at “Static Apnea” a short but frightening performance installation that immerses you in the sensation of suffocating underwater — but could just as easily go a few toes further into the deep.Conceived and directed by Christopher McElroen, who wrote the script with Julia Watt, “Static Apnea” is fascinating to behold even before you set foot in the space: A 40-foot-long storage container in Carroll Gardens, in a narrow lot next to an Eileen Fisher, is home to the piece, which is presented by the American Vicarious and the Invisible Dog Art Center.The pitch-black interior feels like a perverse fun house: You navigate through a narrow, winding path with mirrors on each side until a walkway appears. (Troy Hourie did the daunting design.) The walls to your left and right glow a rich cobalt (the vivid lighting is by Zach Weeks), and, later, other piercing shades, that give the unnerving sense of being surrounded — trapped, even — by water.And of course that’s the point. At the end of the walkway, behind a pane of glass, an actress appears (in my performance, Isabella Pinheiro; in others, Jenny Tibbels) to speak, in a series of lyrical fragments, about static apnea, the practice of holding one’s breath underwater for as long as possible.The record for a woman: 9 minutes and 2 seconds.Fittingly, the performance is short enough to fit in that very same pocket of breath. Pinheiro urges you to breathe with her and hold your breath with her. She cascades through a number of questions: “What does blue feel like? Can you breathe it in?” Then later, “Do you know what failure depth means?” Her voice seems to echo in the space (Andy Evan Cohen did the stellar sound design), and though her questions prod, her voice is affectless and gently mesmerizing.First presented in 2017, “Static Apnea” stands on its own, but is now saddled with implications that it doesn’t directly engage: an illness that ravages the respiratory system; a Black man who, while pinned under a police officer, declared that he couldn’t breathe.In a production that emphasizes the intimacy of one-on-one interaction between viewer and actor, it adheres too stringently to its stylistic austerity. Though this was the closest I’ve been to a performer in months, with just a pane of glass between us, Pinheiro felt more distant than ever.The script, full of elegant queries, is over so soon, offering just a taste of what a more penetrating version would look like: What actually happens during the process of drowning? What does that feel like?In her stunning poem “The Five Stages of Drowning,” Patricia Smith slowly details each of those steps, taken from the true story of a child tossed into the water. “The startled river opens, then closes over her, the way a new mother would,” she writes.“Static Apnea” had me holding my breath, but was just shy of breathtaking.Static ApneaThrough Oct. 17 at the Invisible Dog Art Center, Brooklyn; theinvisibledog.org More

Broadway shows may be off the table until at least January, but when shows do resume, New York City Center is giving two musicals that focus on people of color, but were never revived on the city’s biggest stages, another shot.The new Encores! season, announced Friday, includes “The Life,” a gritty musical about the hustlers and prostitutes who inhabited Times Square in the early 1980s, and “The Tap Dance Kid,” about an aspiring 10-year-old dancer whose dreams are scorned by his hard-driving lawyer father.No dates have yet been set, but the theater says it plans to stage the shows in person once it determines it is safe to do so. While Encores! began in 1994 with concert-style presentations, its shows have gotten more elaborate over time, and it has moved from Golden Age musicals to more recent shows that have never gotten full-fledged New York revivals.“The Life” (1997) — with a book by David Newman, Ira Gasman and Cy Coleman — will be directed by the Tony Award-winning actor Billy Porter and offers an updated take on the story of a young Black prostitute, Queen, and those who walk the streets with her as they work toward a better life in crime-ridden New York City. Both Chuck Cooper and Lillias White won Tonys for their roles in the original production.“The Tap Dance Kid” (1983) — with a book by Charles Blackwell and lyrics by Robert Lorick — will be directed by another Tony winner, Kenny Leon. It follows a Black boy from an upper-middle-class family as he nurses a dream of becoming a tap dancer, against his father’s wishes. The musical is based on the 1974 novel “Nobody’s Family is Going to Change” by Louise Fitzhugh.The third musical, to be announced at a later date, will begin a tradition of including a classic title in a series that typically revives hidden gems.This season will be the first under Lear deBessonet, the new Encores! artistic director. Clint Ramos, the first person of color to win a Tony Award for costume design of a play for his work on “Eclipsed,” in 2016, will also take on the newly created role of Encores! producing creative director.The center also announced a five-part documentary series, “Encores! Inside the Revival,” which will debut Oct. 14. The 10-minute episodes, which will be available for free on City Center’s YouTube channel and website, will offer a behind-the-scenes look at the three productions in development.Two episodes will also focus on shows that were canceled this spring because of the coronavirus pandemic: “Love Life” (1948), which had been set to star Kate Baldwin and Brian Stokes Mitchell in March, and “Thoroughly Modern Millie” (2002), which would have put Ashley Park in the flapper dress in May. An Encores! spokesman said those productions were still possible for future seasons. More