Eliana Willis

The verdict is in: Zoom can, in fact, be an effective new stage for theater.The Boston-based Arlekin Players Theater’s digital production of “State vs. Natasha Banina” reimagines the utility of the medium beyond everyday office meetings and virtual happy hours, using graphics, animation and other interactive elements to create a captivating theatrical experience.The immersive production, directed by Igor Golyak and starring Darya Denisova, is based on “Natasha’s Dream,” by the Russian playwright Yaroslava Pulinovich. Before it starts, an announcement sounds: “By joining us today, you have self-selected to be part of our trial.”Eschewing the virtual equivalent of a theater’s typically silent, anonymous audience, this “live theater and art experiment” encourages viewers to introduce themselves to one another via the Zoom chat, and to take an interactive poll so they can be selected as jurors.But, clearly, this is no typical trial: At the performance I watched, more than a hundred participants peered into their computers from their homes across the U.S. to hear the testimony of Natasha Banina (Denisova), a Russian teenage orphan being tried for manslaughter. Natasha nonchalantly describes her time in the orphanage, among girls who bully one another and supervisors who seem not to care. But Natasha wants more; she had a dream, she tells us, repeatedly, with desperation.And here’s when things got bad, she tells us: When she met a journalist who took an interest in covering her hardships at the orphanage, she became infatuated with him, then obsessed, until she was driven to commit a crime of passion. At the end, the audience votes on her fate: guilty or not guilty?While many productions have been trying to figure out how to use Zoom to mask the fact that we’re seeing theater at a remove, “State vs. Natasha Banina” (presented by the Cherry Orchard Festival) leans into that sense of disconnection. Natasha herself is detached from the world, and as she moves around the white walls of her empty cell, fidgeting and throwing middle fingers up to the camera, we become drawn into her head space.ImageAnton Iakhontov’s animations include the depiction of Natasha’s lover as an astronaut.She draws on the walls, and the sketches come to life thanks to Anton Iakhontov’s brilliantly executed animations: a cigarette smokes; a two-dimensional drawing of a TV conjures a functional one that plays a news segment; a faucet drips hearts that drop to the bottom of the screen.We encounter her imagined lover, too, though never rendered as a three-dimensional human but rather piecemeal, as just a hovering pair of glasses or a drawing of legs and feet, or, most commonly, as an astronaut who strolls alongside her, as though her imagination has fully launched her into space.This mutable virtual tableau is satisfyingly disconcerting. We’re intimately acquainted with Natasha; her mind is open for us to see, with all of its dreams and diversions, and her imagination is suffocating, as she swings wildly between declarations of affection and vicious aspersions.Yet we are asked to judge her. The play’s conceit feeds from this tension, between empathy and dispassionate scrutiny. Zoom ironically makes the interaction even more personal; Natasha looks at the screen and calls out the names of audience members, pleading with them to see her side of the story.This is the second interactive trial play I’ve seen recently (“Where We Stand” had its audience rule on its protagonist’s rise and fall from grace thanks to a magical interloper). Both are quiet calls for accountability that reach beyond the stage. We are asked for awareness, a vigilant wokeness in regards to a society’s disadvantaged, who are so often born into circumstances that make them figuratively dead on arrival.This conceit could come across as gimmicky or melodramatic if it weren’t for Golyak’s crafty direction and video design, and especially Denisova’s charismatically off-kilter performance. Her ever-grinning Natasha is abjectly alluring: unhinged and almost bestial, as she fidgets, paces and compulsively picks her nose. Natasha’s vehement insistence on her strength and indifference (“I don’t care” is a common refrain) reveals just the opposite, which makes moments of vulnerability, as when she curls up in a ball in the corner of the room and speaks of her mother, that much more riveting.ImageDenisova’s Natasha insists on her indifference, though her actions show otherwise.One can pick up on the play’s political notes: a timely criticism of a system that punishes people who have been marginalized by broken institutions, including orphanages. But the unequal social scaffolding built around Natasha is overshadowed by the grotesque peculiarities of the character herself, and Denisova’s mesmeric rendering. Though the story holds, it’s a missed opportunity, in this current moment of protest.As we each sit in our separate rooms, considering our own inconvenient detentions, “State vs. Natasha Banina” delivers an alternative: not freedom, but a view into another’s imprisonment. The sight is unsettling — the Cheshire grin of a girl trapped in a room with only her fantasies.“State vs. Natasha Banina” is streamable on June 21 and June 28 at the website of the Cherry Orchard Festival. More

An all-star team of black theater artists has formed a new coalition vowing to combat racism in the theater community.Black Theater United counts among its founding members the Tony Award winners Audra McDonald, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Billy Porter, Phylicia Rashad, LaChanze, Kenny Leon, Adriane Lenox and Lillias White.The group, whose founders also include the actors Wendell Pierce, Vanessa Williams, Norm Lewis and Brandon Victor Dixon, said it had formed a nonprofit that would seek “to influence widespread reform and combat systemic racism within the theater industry and throughout the nation.”Among its plans: working for social change by pressing for greater participation by hard-to-count communities in the census, and reviewing theater industry practices and assisting black theater artists.The effort is one of several prompted by a wave of national unrest over racial injustice that has followed the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis last month.Another group of prominent black theater artists last week issued a “Dear White American Theater” letter decrying racism in the industry.The groups differ in their approach.The “Dear White American Theater” collective introduced itself with a blistering critique of the theater industry, which it called “this house of cards built on white fragility and supremacy,” and then said it plans to turn to next steps.“We are currently collecting data, testimonials and statistics, which will be incorporated into a comprehensive list of demands calling upon white institutions to examine, change and dismantle their harmful and racist practices,” the collective said in a press statement.Black Theater United began by specifying actions it intends to take, including supporting existing efforts to bolster census participation and developing new mentorship programs for aspiring young black theater artists. The group said it will next “constitute an inquiry committee to accurately assess past practices and policies within the theater.”There are several other efforts underway to call out and challenge racism in theater, and to champion black artists. Because the nation is still in the throes of the coronavirus pandemic, many of the efforts are online.The Broadway Advocacy Coalition, formed in 2016, last week held three online sessions to discuss racism, and then invited nonblack members of the theater community to sign a “public accountability pledge.”The organization Broadway Black has created a new awards ceremony, the Antonyo Awards, to honor black artists working on Broadway and Off Broadway; the ceremony is to be held on Friday, which is Juneteenth, a holiday that celebrates the day the Emancipation Proclamation was read in Texas.The intensifying national focus on race and racism have also prompted online panels discussing race in theater, and streaming productions of plays that deal with race.Much of the conversation is taking place on social media. Black artists are sharing personal experiences of racism in theater (some under the hashtag #TheaterInColor); some white women theater artists with large followings invited black women theater artists to take over their social media accounts for a day (mirroring a similar campaign in other sectors of society). More

The audiences at theaters for young people around the country are often quite diverse, reflecting the schools whose field trips fill the seats.But the programming and creative teams: not so much.A new study finds that about 80 percent of the shows presented around the country are by white writers, and 85 percent of the productions are led by white directors. Also of concern: Much of the industry’s diversity is concentrated in a small number of productions about people of color, while the shows that dominate the industry’s stages, generally adapted from children’s books and fairy tales, have overwhelmingly white creative teams.The study, by the Center for Scholars & Storytellers at the University of California, Los Angeles, was commissioned last year, well before the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis set off a wave of national unrest over racial injustice. That unrest, in turn, has prompted renewed scrutiny of inequities in many aspects of American society, including theater.“The numbers don’t lie,” said Idris Goodwin, the director of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College. Goodwin is a playwright who has written for young audiences and who previously ran StageOne Family Theater in Louisville, Ky.“In the world of theater, the efforts at inclusion have not been effective enough,” he said. “What this report shows is that we’ve got to interrogate the ways white supremacy has built structures that keep whiteness pervasive.”The study was commissioned by Theater for Young Audiences/USA, an organization representing about 250 theaters around the country that produce professional work for audiences ranging from infants to adolescents. (The casts are generally adults, and are paid; these are not youth theaters featuring unpaid children as performers.) The industry’s willingness to study itself differentiates it from other segments of the cultural world, including nonprofit and commercial theaters for adults, that are generally studied by academics or advocacy organizations.“It’s important to recognize the gains — playwrights of color doubled over the last 10 years, which is a sign of progress,” said Jonathan Shmidt Chapman, the Theater for Young Audiences executive director. “But we have a long way to go in terms of reaching equity across the field.”The industry is fueled by titles familiar to children: During the 2018-19 season, the most-produced show was “Elephant & Piggie’s ‘We Are in a Play!’,” based on a series of children’s books by Mo Willems.“Our industry for a long time has relied heavily on book adaptations as a driver of ticket sales, so the problems are the same that exist in the book industry,” Chapman said. “When we do invest in new work, we are far closer to reaching our goals.”Among those investing in new work is the Chicago Children’s Theater, which in recent years co-commissioned Cheryl L. West to adapt two well-regarded children’s books, Matt de la Peña’s “Last Stop on Market Street” and Christopher Paul Curtis’s “The Watsons Go to Birmingham — 1963.” The theater’s artistic director, Jacqueline Russell, said the new study sends a message to the industry, “making us question again where we’re looking for our source material, and how we’re putting together our seasons.”The report also raises questions about why the most commonly produced work — adaptations of fairy tales and well-known titles — has less diverse creative teams. “Possibly it is because the underlying intellectual property is written by white people, but that doesn’t mean you can’t hire someone of color to adapt it or direct it,” said Yalda T. Uhls, the founder and executive director of the Center for Scholars & Storytellers.The study compared the 2018-19 theater season to that a decade earlier, reviewing 441 productions at 50 theaters. Some of the key findings:“Culturally-specific productions,” in which people of color were essential to the narrative, made up 19 percent of all productions. Playwrights of color wrote 69 percent of those shows, but only 8 percent of other shows.Among playwrights whose work was produced at theaters for young audiences, 36 percent were women, up from 33 percent, while 20 percent were people of color, up from 9 percent.There was gender parity among directors: 52 percent were women, up from 38 percent. But only 15 percent of directors were people of color, up from 10 percent.There was also gender parity among actors: 52 percent were women, up from 45 percent. Among actors, 37 percent were people of color, up from 24 percent.The coronavirus pandemic poses a new challenge to the sector, as it has hobbled theaters financially. Chapman said there is a risk that theaters for young audiences will recover even more slowly than other theaters because schools might cut arts spending and be reluctant to resume field trips. There is also a risk that, once theaters for young audiences do reopen, they will rely even more heavily on familiar titles in an effort to sell tickets.But the events of this year, including not only the pandemic but also the unrest, could also inspire new plays. “We’re talking with colleagues around the country about ways to commission new work that is reflecting the resilience of young people that we’ve seen over and over in this unusual year of 2020,” said Julia Flood, the artistic director of Metro Theater Company in St. Louis. She said the study’s findings were not a surprise, but should be a spur.“I think it’s going to help galvanize the field,” she added. More

The Upright Citizens Brigade comedy organization, which has been financially troubled in recent years, has announced an effort to diversify its ranks and remake itself, at least in part, as a nonprofit.The group’s founders, Amy Poehler, Matt Besser, Ian Roberts and Matt Walsh, who control operations of the organization’s training program and theaters, said that they have been seeking nonprofit status since February, and that they intend to pass control of their theaters to a new board “of diverse individuals.” They revealed the outline of their plans in an email on Saturday addressed to the “U.C.B. community.”The statement said that they want the board to address “the questions of systemic racism and inequality within the theaters,” among other issues. The news comes less than two months after U.C.B. announced the closing of its two Manhattan locations — a theater in Hell’s Kitchen and a training center on Eighth Avenue — after they had gone dark in response to the pandemic.U.C.B. still has two locations in Los Angeles, and has been operating online improv and sketch classes as part of its efforts to weather the pandemic’s financial impact.Even before it closed its New York locations in April, the organization had been under strain: In what was not the first round of cuts in the last few years, it laid off many employees on both coasts in March, and early last year it closed a third New York location, in the East Village. More