Eliana Willis

The work of translation that is theater — scripted dialogue and scored music transcribed via performance, design and direction — is tricky. That’s even more so when the original material is already a work in translation. Case in point: the Culture Project’s unsteady production of “About Love,” which awkwardly wrestles “First Love,” a novella by the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev, to the stage of the Sheen Center.Peter (Jeffrey Kringer), a 16-year-old vacationing with his parents in the Russian countryside, encounters the mesmerizing 21-year-old Zina (Silvia Bond). Trailed by a herd of male admirers, she is staying with her mother, a snuff-sniffing princess beleaguered by debts, in the shabby cottage next door. Peter spends the summer vying with other suitors for Zina’s attention, but soon discovers that her affections lie elsewhere. When he learns the truth, he reflects on the emotional hurly-burly of love and the injury of his first heartbreak.In his script, Will Pomerantz, who also directs, sticks to the plot but struggles to capture the most intriguing aspects of the novella.Taken alone, Turgenev’s story isn’t exactly awe-inspiring. But his similes and syntax — sentences that build tension through accumulation, creating a messy sense of overflow — conjure the tempestuousness of a teenage love.“My blood was in a ferment within me, my heart was full of longing, sweetly and foolishly; I was all expectancy and wonder; I was tremulous and waiting; my fancy fluttered and circled about the same images like martins round a bell-tower at dawn; I dreamed and was sad and sometimes cried,” reads one passage in the translation by Isaiah Berlin.In “About Love,” such sentiments are dimmed and ironed out: “I remember feeling the blood rushing through my veins, and I was often in a strange melancholy, which felt both delightful and absurd,” Peter announces.In a self-conscious touch that ultimately proves scattered, his and many other pieces of narration hot-potato from actor to actor as they crisscross the stage. Pomerantz may be attempting to shake up the written work, but the gesture is more gimmicky than complex. (At least Brian C. Staton’s stage design, a wooden-planked platform with a smattering of old furniture and trunks of dead birches littered around the space, doesn’t overstate itself.)Billed as “a play with songs and music” rather than a full-fledged musical, the production, with a cast of six plus four musicians, seems to want to have its Russian tea cake and eat it too. The six numbers, with music by Nancy Harrow, are short, more appetizers than entrees. A somber, trilling violin speaks to the Russian setting, but Harrow mashes up the Motherland with the Big Easy, abruptly inserting jazz-inspired numbers as well.[embedded content]Kringer’s Peter, adorable if a bit hokey in his youthfulness, has a fittingly romantic voice. Jazz may suit her character’s temperament, but Bond’s tidy rendition of “A Little Blue” lacks swing and swell.Otherwise, she is magnetic in the role: persuasive, mercurial and occasionally cruel. Dan Domingues, who appears both as a gruff Lurch-like butler and a wise doctor also courting Zina, is another standout.“What an exciting girl that Zinochka is!” Gustav Flaubert wrote in a letter to Turgenev, responding to the love object in the novella. “About Love,” by contrast, is mostly earnest. Something has been lost in translation.About LoveThrough March 22 at the Sheen Center for Thought & Culture, Manhattan; 212-925-2812, sheencenter.org. Running time: 1 hours 35 minutes. More

The scene is a staple of Broadway: After a show ends, its most ardent fans gather at the stage door, hoping for an autograph, an Instagrammable photo, or even a conversation with their favorite star.But this week, facing a widening coronavirus outbreak that threatens public health in New York and around the world, the theater industry’s leaders said they wanted to put a stop to the practice.“We are highly recommending that all stage door activities be eliminated for the time being,” the Broadway League, a trade organization representing producers and theater owners, said on Tuesday.The step is the latest in a series of actions the theater business has taken to keep its plays and musicals running while also protecting public health.Broadway, a hallmark New York industry that drew 14.8 million patrons and grossed $1.8 billion last season, is vulnerable to economic damage from the outbreak for multiple reasons: Its audience skews older, and older people seem especially vulnerable to this virus; its audience is heavily made up of tourists, and travel is drying up; and its events involve large numbers of people packed into tight spaces — a situation risky enough that it is being banned in some countries. On Wednesday, the owners of two theaters said that a part-time usher who worked for them had tested positive for the virus. No other worker had fallen ill, but the owners asked audience members and employees who were present at the same performances to monitor their health.Broadway’s leaders say they are determined to keep their theaters open if at all possible, and anticipate that they would collectively close only if ordered to do so by a government agency. That is not unthinkable: Some performance venues have been closed in Austria, Germany and Italy, among other places.On Thursday, Mayor Bill de Blasio said he was trying to avoid closing theaters, but also said they might need to cut down on audience size if they wanted to stay open.“What we’re trying to figure out is if there a way to reduce the capacity, reduce the number of people?” the mayor said on CNN. “If we cannot strike that balance, of course we can go to closure.”The scene at stage doors Tuesday night showed just how hard even small changes can be. At some shows — Disney’s “Frozen” and “The Lion King,” for example — theater employees made clear there would be no more stage dooring. But at other theaters, some actors obliged waiting fans.Outside the Shubert Theater, where “To Kill a Mockingbird” is playing, Ed Harris, the star who plays Atticus Finch, made a hasty exit with a wave to the crowd. But Nick Robinson, who plays Jem Finch, stayed to accept hugs, and stood in close, arms around shoulders, for pictures with a last handful of well-wishers. More

SHAKESPEARE IN A DIVIDED AMERICAWhat His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and FutureBy James ShapiroAmerica is massive. Shakespeare is massive. When two such cultural hyper-objects meet, they’re bound to create a black hole strong enough to suck in and warp just about anything around them. James Shapiro analyzes the effects of their collision in his terrific new book, “Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future.” If Jill Lepore and the late Tony Judt had collaborated, this taut, swift and insightful tract might have been the offspring. Yet Shapiro’s subtitle is misleading: His subject is us, the U.S., not Shakespeare plays. If you’re worried about the current state of the Republic, this is a book that will stoke your fears — while educating you on why you might justifiably be having them.Shapiro is already a master of creating Shakespeare treats for the literate common reader. His “1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare” and “Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?” are as entertaining as any nonfiction of recent years. Now he’s outdone himself — no surprise, given his qualifications for this new volume. He not only teaches English and comparative literature at Columbia, he serves on the board of directors of the Royal Shakespeare Company and is the Shakespeare scholar in residence at the Public Theater in New York. He also edited the comprehensive “Shakespeare in America” anthology. Here, his combined scholarship and theatrical experience help him examine — brilliantly — the notorious 2017 “Julius Caesar” in Central Park, in which a Donald Trump look-alike as Caesar was assassinated nightly to fierce outrage from the political right.Did you know there was an epidemic of men spanking women in movies in the decade after 1938? That young, pre-bearded Ulysses S. Grant was cast as Desdemona in an Army production of “Othello” and rehearsed but never went on because of what amounted to homosexual panic among the producing officers in a national manliness crisis? Did you know that Steve Bannon wrote a screenplay for a sci-fi “Titus Andronicus” as well as an alt-right “Coriolanus”? (Neither was produced.) That Abraham Lincoln’s favorite play was “Macbeth,” one that helped secure the reputation of John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s own Macbeth-to-be? It’s all here and much more.Each of the book’s eight chapters centers on a year with a different thematic focus. “1833: Miscegenation” examines contemporaneous reactions to “Othello,” almost all racist, some wildly screwy, like a female Shakespeare scholar’s attempt to prove that Othello was, as she effused, “a white man!” “1849: Class Warfare” provides a blistering account of New York’s deadly Astor Place riots, demonstrations against the English actor William Macready that were fueled by rising economic inequality and nationalistic fervor. When police forces fired into a massed crowd, more than 20 people died and dozens were wounded.“1916: Immigration” shows how Caliban got used as a token in arguments about assimilation at a moment when racism was intensified by support from fake “science” and the United States was closing its borders. The chapter details, among other things, wacky efforts to make Shakespeare into an American. Why not? Wasn’t he an “Anglo-Saxon,” like all true Americans? One Charles Mills Gayley of Berkeley published a popular book in 1917 arguing that Shakespeare should “be considered one of the founders of liberty in America” because of his connection to a “liberal faction” of Elizabethan capitalists. In an earlier poem, Gayley had saluted Shakespeare as “Born of the Mayflower, born of Virginia.” Such buffoons litter the book.In “1948: Marriage,” “Kiss Me, Kate” goes under Shapiro’s lens. The story of how Bella Spewack, the main book writer, wrestled the oft-reviled “Taming of the Shrew” into a musical, how the show shadowed gender-role preoccupations of the time, and how the change from the ’40s to the ’50s caused the politically bold Broadway show to be tamed for the Hollywood movie provides cultural history at its most diverting.The 1998 chapter is worth the price of the book alone. Examining American anxieties about adultery and same-sex love, it chronicles how “Shakespeare in Love,” originally a progressive script written by Marc Norman, got rewritten by Tom Stoppard so that elements of Shakespearean homosexuality, bisexuality and marital infidelity were fudged. Ironically, Stoppard had been hired to soften such areas by the producer Harvey Weinstein, the moral paragon with decades of alleged sexual assault and now a rape conviction behind him. We watch Weinstein trying to massage the film into a template of his own relationships with women by leaving its heroine as now-successful Will’s piece on the side. (Instead, she goes to America, of course.) As a bonus we’re privy to a “cringe-inducing” Stoppard skit at Miramax’s pre-Oscar party. Juicy? But to the point? Hell, yes.We meet a character of truly Shakespearean contradictions in John Quincy Adams, who plays the lead in the 1833 chapter on racial mixing. “Recognized as one of the leading abolitionists in the land” and a victim of death threats for his views, Adams nonetheless went into print twice to express at length his horror at the mere idea that a white woman, Desdemona, might fall for a black man. Indeed, he thought she got her just deserts by being murdered for it.It’s in the final chapter, “2017: Left | Right,” on the Public Theater’s Trump-as-Julius-Caesar production, where Shapiro really soars, analyzing the pitfalls of applying contemporary politics to a famously double-edged play. With “Julius Caesar,” Shakespeare strewed ambiguities like tacks on a highway, creating a play designed to multiply and complicate our responses. How are we to take Caesar? Or Brutus, or Cassius? If you don’t like Trump and Caesar is Trump, do you actually approve of seeing him butchered?When right-wing media screamed about the production (and why wouldn’t they? or shouldn’t they?), the Public realized it had set off a firestorm for which it was unprepared. A Shakespeare play is not a political statement, it’s a mosh pit of subjectivities, and here the audience was expected to sit back and rationally parse a theatrical Rorschach blot. This “Left | Right” chapter will feed annals of the Trump era a hundred years from now — if after the wildfires and the rising oceans anyone’s still here to write them.Shapiro’s book is history, but not past history. It’s ongoing and all too painfully still-relevant history. As he bounces back and forth between 1833 or 1916 and today, the similarities between Then and Now overwhelm the differences and Shapiro’s title resonates anew, reminding us how divided we’ve been since our very beginnings, with historical-tragical constantly muscling out pastoral-comical. Ultimately there rises the familiar suspicion that, for a country in love with the future, it’s always yesterday in America.Among all the fine words currently being spilled examining the American mess, James Shapiro has outshone many of our best political pundits with this superb contribution to the discourse. He upped the wattage simply by bouncing his spotlight off a playwright 400 years dead who yet again turns out to be, somehow, us. More

On his first date with Anita, Billy cooked tuna and noodles — not the suavest choice of entree, especially since he loaded it with mayonnaise.“It was terrible,” she reminisces on their anniversary, half a lifetime later. “The worst meal I ever had.”As she speaks, he recreates that dinner in their kitchen in Tucson, Ariz., where a vase of red roses adorns the table, lit by a single candle. But Billy is alone, Anita keeping him company by phone. Trapped on the other side of the U.S. border with Mexico, she is unable to get home to him and their children.It has been this way for many months, and if the government ever lets Anita back in, it won’t be for years. So they celebrate their marriage long distance, the easy intimacy of their conversation full of comfort and yearning. When she cajoles Billy into dancing with her, he dances with his phone.They are such ordinary people with such unremarkable dreams. And if Hilary Bettis’s “72 Miles to Go…” is a quiet, conventional drama with a penchant for endearingly cornball humor, that suits the story of a family that wants more than anything to blend in, to live regular American lives. The play’s poignancy lies in how mercilessly difficult that is, and how precarious for all of them.Billy and Anita first met in the desert — he an Arizonan out with his church group, bringing water to migrants, she a Mexican fleeing danger with her little boy, Christian, who will grow up not knowing Spanish and having no idea that he isn’t an American citizen like Eva and Aaron, the children Billy and Anita have together.Directed by Jo Bonney at Roundabout Theater Company’s Laura Pels Theater, “72 Miles” is not about the recent crisis at the border, or not directly anyway. Unfolding from 2008 to the spring of 2016, it encompasses a time of cautious optimism for young people like Christian, who called this country home and hoped the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy would allow them to stay.In the character breakdown in the script, Bettis (“Alligator”) describes each family member other than Anita as either Chicana or Chicano — an American of Mexican descent. This play is about various ways of being American, with or without the documentation to prove it.It is also about carrying a low-level fear inside you all the time, a worry that the authorities are coming for you, or your brother, or your mother. And about the pain of having to live without the physical presence of someone you need, someone who is 72 miles, one phone call and a world away.So there is teenage Eva (Jacqueline Guillén), bursting into tears on a prom night gone wrong, wanting so badly the solace of her mother (Maria Elena Ramirez), but having only her sweetly bumbling father (a terrifically winning Triney Sandoval) to drive her home.There is Eva’s little brother, Aaron (Tyler Alvarez), morphing from a tender, kindhearted boy into a man with a military-macho carapace. And there is her big brother, Christian (Bobby Moreno), stalked by terror that his life will disintegrate — that his American wife and the American family they made will have to do without him.Moreno is a fine actor, but Christian, when we first meet him, is just 23. Moreno, who is married to Bettis, looks at least a decade older — a distraction that makes you wonder how old Christian was when he got here and how he could have been pre-verbal then. It also throws off the intended dynamic between him and his siblings, particularly in a scene that dips into sentiment, calling back to the blanket forts and hot strawberry milk of their shared childhood.That moment, like a too-prophetic line that Billy speaks in early 2016 (“With a new president on the horizon, who knows what the laws will look like”), is an indulgence in a play that is otherwise thoughtful and restrained. Its power is in its simplicity, and in the vividly average Americanness of its characters.To its credit, “72 Miles” doesn’t go where you might think it will, but it does eventually bring us to Anita, with her family, in the flesh. And if that reunion is staged a little awkwardly, we are nonetheless awfully glad to see her. Over the phone, we’ve grown to know her voice so well.72 Miles To Go…Through May 3 at the Laura Pels Theater, Manhattan; 212-719-1300, roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More