Eliana Willis

When I walked into Alice Birch’s “Anatomy of a Suicide” at the Atlantic Theater Company, a spell of springlike weather had snapped toward freezing. When I walked out again, the temperature hadn’t really budged. But the world felt even colder.Cleareyed, comfortless, often dazzling, like sun on ice, “Anatomy of a Suicide” follows three generations of women tethered to life by the thinnest possible filament. Staged simultaneously across three time periods — seemingly the 1970s, the 1990s, the 2030s — it explores, unflappably, the interior devastation that leads at least two of these women to take their own lives.The play, which won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize in 2018, is also, somehow, a bleak love letter to mothers trying the best they can, even if that best is appallingly inadequate. Did I mention I saw it on Valentine’s Day?It opens with Carol (Carla Gugino). Primly dressed and swathed in mystery like a pre-Code film star, she has bandaged forearms, the relics of a suicide attempt she keeps insisting was an accident. Finally, her husband, John (Richard Topol in a terrible wig), explodes as much as his mild manners will allow. “You ran a bath and you drank gin and you took pills and you left food and you tried really hard to die, Carol,” he says with one lonely expletive added.Later, as Carol smokes and makes a desultory attempt at cooking, Anna (Celeste Arias) appears to her left, in a separate hospital scene. Anna, we come to understand, is Carol’s daughter, and we meet her in early adulthood, wearing a cast on a wrist she doesn’t remember breaking. Jangled, still half-high, a too-free spirit, she is trying to cadge an IV from a doctor she knows. Then, to Anna’s left, Bonnie (Gabby Beans), Anna’s grown daughter, emerges, also in a hospital. A doctor herself, her hair tightly braided, she is stitching the hand of a flirty patient (Jo Mei, delightful).Each woman, in each time, occupies her own third of the stage. A lot of the dialogue is coincident and the speech carefully synchronized so that the women will say certain lines (“Yes,” “I’m fine,” “O.K.”) in unison or close sequence. Words and images recur. Time and the script move both horizontally and vertically, with the past concurrent with the future it initiates. Birch, incidentally, is a mother of two, so it’s as tempting as it is irrelevant to wonder whether these themes slant personal. (Most mothers I know — good mothers — feel they are failing their children in some way.)The director, Lileana Blain-Cruz, allows female characters to exist in all their complex humanity, without sanding down or slicing off any of the unlikable or unreconcilable bits. She managed it recently, in a lush revival of María Irene Fornés’s “Fefu and Her Friends” and in Birch’s “Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again.,” a violent deconstruction of gender and language. Her plays often resemble a ritual or invocation. “Anatomy of a Suicide,” which calls the past forward, has the feel of a summoning. The women don’t see one another, though they seem at times to sense one another.Blain-Cruz takes their characters’ genetic bond as implicit; she hasn’t pushed the actors to find similarities of tone or gesture. Gugino’s Carol, scarfed in a fog of herbal cigarettes, has a dreamy presence, as if she and gravity have worked out some side deal, though the birth of her daughter binds her to life. “She’s a fish hook around my middle pulling me up when I want to be under,” she tells her husband. Arias, an exciting and emotionally labile actor, makes Anna a jittery creature, like a woman in the constant throes of a low-grade fever. And Beans, in her doctor’s coat and burgundy jumpsuit (what a relief to know that jumpsuits stay chic!), plays Bonnie like a dour closed system.If death is always trying to spirit Carol away, like a demon lover, and psychosis comes suddenly for Anna, like an unpremeditated assault, it’s life that grinds Bonnie down. Beans suggests the tremendous effort she makes to move through the world with anything like sympathy or grace.The tone throughout is cool, a consequence of Birch’s style, which privileges language and rhythm over emotion, a negotiation of form and content reminiscent of Caryl Churchill. This coolness also puts distance — perhaps necessary — between the pain of the women’s inner lives and the fact of their expression. After all, a playwright can’t do an hour and 45 minutes of unadulterated agony. Or, rather, a playwright absolutely can; but I rarely want to see it. Mariana Sanchez’s blue-green set studded with houseplants — some fecund, some withering and Jiyoun Chang’s lights tend cool, too.Ideally, Blain-Cruz and the cast would have had a few more weeks to work through the play’s complex rhythms, to make each pause seem like the response an interaction demands rather than what the script requires, to find the music — grave, adagio — in the not-quite naturalism.The production, beautifully designed, does aestheticize women’s suffering, though it rarely romanticizes it. And were you looking for catharsis? Ha! What’s more fraught is Birch’s declining to see mental illness as something capable of treatment or productive intervention. Carol and Anna both undergo electroconvulsive therapy, and Carol has sporadic access to talk therapy. Nothing helps. This suggests suicide as an inherited trait, as direct and inevitable in its expression as red hair or detached earlobes. But do Carol’s fuguelike depression, Anna’s psychosis and Bonnie’s clenched anhedonia really share DNA?Still, none of the women experience suicide as a choice. Carol keeps trying to choose the life she doesn’t even want, with death drive as her pre-existing condition. “I have stayed,” she says. “I have Stayed. For as long as I possibly can.”The play’s coolness means that you may not feel everything that a narrative like this might allow you to feel, at least not right away. Me? I was never even close to tears, though I heard sniffling from several sides. But “Anatomy of a Suicide” isn’t the kind of show you can see then cavalierly head out for drinks, recycling your playbill along the way. It is a drama like the blue heart of a flame; it looks like winter even as it scorches you.Anatomy of a SuicideThrough March 15 at the Atlantic Theater Company, Linda Gross Theater, Manhattan; 866-811-4111, atlantictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

Zoe Caldwell, who won Tony Awards — four in all — in the 1960s, ’80s and ’90s, the last for portraying the opera star Maria Callas in “Master Class,” Terrence McNally’s study of the twilight of the singer’s career, died on Sunday at her home in Pound Ridge, N.Y., in Westchester County. She was 86.Her son Charlie Whitehead said through a spokeswoman that the cause was Parkinson’s disease.Ms. Caldwell, born in Australia, began her acting career in that country; joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in England in 1959; and then, after a stop at the Stratford Festival in Ontario, was part of the inaugural season of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis in 1963.In 1966 she was in a bill of two short Tennessee Williams plays on Broadway, combined under the title “Slapstick Tragedy.” The run lasted only seven performances, but she made an impression: She won a Tony Award for best featured actress in a play.A more enduring performance came two years later when she starred on Broadway in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” Jay Allen’s play based on a Muriel Sparks novel about an imperious teacher in the 1930s.“Miss Caldwell flounces onto the stage like a sparrow with illusions of grandeur,” Clive Barnes wrote in his review in The New York Times. “She is surrounded with an air of ineffable confidence, and her lilting Scots accent picks over her consonants with the languid deliberation of a dowager picking over a box of candy.”The performance won her the Tony for best actress in a play. She won the same award in 1982 for her portrayal of the title character in “Medea,” directed by her husband, Robert Whitehead, whom she had married in 1968, when he was the producer of “Miss Jean Brodie.”Ms. Caldwell’s screen credits included “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” in 2011, but she worked only occasionally in television and films. That was by choice.“The business of acting is sharing an experience,” she told The Boston Globe in 1986.“Television and movies tend to cut off the element of sharing,” she continued. “Images flicker across the screen. Everything is mechanical. Everything is dead. Actors on the stage are alive. The audience is alive.”Limiting her exposure on the large and small screens, she said, helped her be a better actress, because it let her immerse herself in the world.“Acting is reflecting on the observations of life,” she told The Globe. “I’m not a television face. I’m not known. I can walk around the streets of New York, ride the buses, observe life in action. I like to absorb everything I see.”Zoe (pronounced “zo”) Ada Caldwell was born on Sept. 14, 1933, in Melbourne. Her father, Edgar, was a plumber, and her mother, Zoe (Hivon) Caldwell, was a taxi dancer, someone from whom dance-hall customers could buy a dance. But at the time, in the midst of the Great Depression, her father was out of work, and with an older child already in the house, the pregnancy had come at a difficult moment.“Mum’s friends told her that she had no choice but to use the coat hanger,” Ms. Caldwell wrote in “I Will Be Cleopatra: An Actress’s Journey” (2001), “but Mum thought it might be fun to have me around, whoever I was, so she put her coat on the hanger and I was born.”By age 9 she was acting in a production of “Peter Pan.” By the mid-1950s she was performing with Melbourne’s Union Theater Repertory Company. A particularly famous character to emerge from that time is one she didn’t play.She was in a touring production of “Twelfth Night” with, among others, a student actor named Barry Humphries. At each town the troupe would be greeted by the chairwoman of the local arts council or some similar matron, and on the bus rides from one place to another Mr. Humphries began improvising what he thought the woman in the next town would say, using a character he called Edna. A director suggested he create a sketch for that character, whose name became Dame Edna Everage. Mr. Humphries’s idea was for Ms. Caldwell to play the role.“I read it and I said, ‘No, I wouldn’t be interested in doing that; I wouldn’t know how to make that funny,’” Ms. Caldwell said in an interview with the CUNY-TV series “Women in Theater” in 2006. “‘You should do it.’ And he did.”Other tellings of the origin of the character differ in some details, but one thing is undeniable: Mr. Humphries went on to make a career of playing Dame Edna.Ms. Caldwell often said that she didn’t like to remain with one acting company long; changing companies, she said, kept her from growing too comfortable and forced her to “see again.”After arriving at the Guthrie, she drew critical praise for her roles opposite Hume Cronyn in “The Miser” in 1963 and opposite Jessica Tandy, Mr. Cronyn’s wife, in “The Way of the World” in 1965. The couple, she said, introduced her to Mr. Whitehead, a recent widower.In addition to working with her on “Miss Jean Brodie,” Mr. Whitehead produced or directed other shows in which she appeared, including the 1986 Broadway production of “Lillian,” about Lillian Hellman, which he directed.In 1995 he was a producer of “Master Class,” in which Ms. Caldwell gave, Vincent Canby wrote in The Times, “what could be one of the funniest, most moving and gaudiest performances of this season and, perhaps, of her career.”Mr. Whitehead died in 2002. In addition to her son Charlie, Ms. Caldwell’s survivors include another son, Sam Whitehead, and two grandchildren.“Master Class” opens with the Callas character hectoring the audience, saying it’s not her fault if she can’t be heard, complaining that the theater is too hot and the lights are too bright. For one Wednesday night audience in February 1996, it took a moment to realize that the rant had gone off the rails and that Ms. Caldwell was in fact disoriented. She collapsed and was brought to a hospital. She later attributed the scare to oysters she had eaten after that day’s matinee.“Anything can happen in the theater,” she told The Times. “That’s why it’s so dangerous. I always have had oysters between matinees and the evening performance — high protein and quick energy. But I’ve gotten sick two times before, so now it’s over.” More

A Pied Piper story that doubles as a boldfaced allegory about class and community, “Where We Stand” is rich in its language but vague about what it truly wants to say.The playwright, Donnetta Lavinia Grays, is also the sole performer (alternating with David Ryan Smith on some dates). She rises from the audience at the start of the show, beginning in song then transitioning into poetry, making her way to an unadorned stage.She’s our nameless narrator, a down-on-his-luck fellow who describes an encounter with a magical figure and the complications that result.Genie or imp? Devil or fairy? The stranger arrives dressed in gold and bearing golden gifts — a seed, scythe and spade that our narrator will use to transform the town to an Oz-like paradise.They’re not in Kansas anymore, however, and, predictably, they all soon forget the debt they owe their smooth-talking benefactor, with unfortunate results.Produced by WP Theater in association with Baltimore Center Stage, and directed by Tamilla Woodard, the show is unusually understated, despite the fanciful tale at its heart. There’s an intentionally rudimentary story-time feel to it, and Woodard’s direction emphasizes the intimate interactions between Grays and her audience.She is an affable, uninhibited performer, whether as narrator or as the mysterious stranger, peddling the fable to us via enchanting lyrics and flourishes of humor. Transitions between characters in direct conversation, however, are less tidy.Yet the language in “Where We Stand” bounces with rhyme, alliteration and wordplay. “There’s a chance, perchance to change my drifter’s circumstance,” Grays jests at one point, before describing the “salted ground” and “sour air” of a crumbling utopia.Her titillating descriptions and canorous phrasing are a pleasure — so much so that I wished her to go bolder, to set the scene and capture the characters in rich Technicolor.The peril in “Where We Stand” seems to befall a black community (the script dictates that the narrator be played by an African-American actor), but connections to the workings of contemporary society are unclear. Which makes the play’s final immersive turn — a trial, with the audience as jury — a welcome, if abrupt surprise.Confronting the real world, which is so absent elsewhere, lends a dose of real-life gravity to the fiction. After all the theatrical fun and games, you’ll eventually have to pay the piper.Where We StandThrough March 1 at WP Theater, Manhattan; 866-811-4111, wptheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

Great playwrights are often eclipsed by their work and the actors who give voice to it, but a coming exhibition dedicated to August Wilson will focus on the man behind the words. The August Wilson African American Cultural Center in Pittsburgh announced on Tuesday that this fall it would open “August Wilson: A Writer’s Landscape,” a permanent show about the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright’s life, creative process and legacy.“This is a way for us to highlight the importance of August Wilson’s work, but also to share with people who he was as a man,” Janis Burley Wilson, the center’s president and chief executive, said in an interview on Friday. “Working closely with the estate, we’re able to do that.”Plans for a permanent exhibition about Wilson, who died in 2005, have been in the works for years. The show will be broken into three parts, each modeled on the acts of a play. The first is inspired by Eddie’s, a restaurant in the Hill District of Pittsburgh that Wilson frequented as a young man. A replica of the playwright’s home office that showcases his manuscripts and book and record collections forms the second. The final component includes sections dedicated to each of the 10 plays that constitute Wilson’s American Century Cycle.The exhibition is the first major endeavor for the organization’s new leadership. Threatened with foreclosure on its home in 2014, the center almost folded. Thanks to major foundation support and public money from the Allegheny Regional Asset District, the closing was averted.Ms. Burley Wilson said that since 2017, when she joined the center as its leader, its board of directors has grown from six to 11 members and 10 more foundations have been added to its list of supporters.Constanza Romero Wilson, the playwright’s widow and literary executor, said the impetus for the exhibition came to her when she donated his writing desk to the cultural center.“I posed the idea of having a little corner where I could recreate August’s desk with piles of books, printouts and his pencils,” Ms. Romero Wilson said. She wanted to show that “he really did sit down and write these things and that it was not an easy process, that these plays didn’t come out of nowhere.” The concept was subsequently expanded with the help of Ms. Burley Wilson.Video, props and costumes from notable productions and information about real world events that occurred during the cycle’s time frame will show how Wilson drew on history and the environment around him. Current and scheduled productions of Wilson’s plays around the world will also be highlighted to emphasize his continued relevance.“I think of this exhibition as something that is forever going to be growing,” Ms. Romero Wilson said. “As August’s legacy expands I hope that the different facets of his influence in the future will be reflected in it.” More

On Friday night at JACK, in Brooklyn, the audience was at a loss. At the end of James Ijames’s whip-smart satire “TJ Loves Sally 4 Ever” (which you would be wise to race to see), we in the audience waited for what felt like minutes. But there was no bow from the actors, who had already left the stage.That’s when it sank in. The beautiful dare the show had offered us in its final lines? We were expected to take it. Or not. Either way, we had a decision to make as we left the theater — voting, with our very bodies, for the kind of future we want to see.That’s mysterious, I know, but I won’t ruin the surprise of Jordana De La Cruz’s electrifying production, which offers an extraordinary, deeply moving payoff. The pinch of courage it demands of us — audience participation, like change, is frequently unnerving — proves more than worth it.Set on a college campus in the contemporary American South, where a whitewashed sense of tradition drips with nostalgia for the antebellum past, “TJ Loves Sally 4 Ever” is not a romance by any stretch. Despite the title, it isn’t TJ’s story either, though he does tend to think everything is about him.This play belongs to Sally (Sierra D. Leverett), our sensible, straight-talking narrator, and her fellow black students. As she informs us, “TJ” stands for Thomas Jefferson.“Not exactly the one that wrote the Declaration of Independence,” she notes.Still, you can see the resemblance, which only grows as TJ (John Bambery), the school’s white, middle-aged dean, develops a predatory obsession with Sally, his young research assistant, self-assured and certain of her own boundaries. (“Ever heard of Sally Hemings?” she asks us. “Yeah? No? Google her.”)Part of what Ijames (“Kill Move Paradise”) is interrogating is the inheritance that comes with a black body or a white body. And part of the power of his play, and of De La Cruz’s tone-perfect staging, is its very physicality.There are moments that make your skin crawl as TJ encroaches on Sally, but also scenes where she and her ferociously loyal sorority sisters (Aja Downing and Starr Kirkland) exult in their bodies, dancing together or parading in a marching band. Their bodies are emphatically their own, no rightful concern of his, and their joy is vivifying.Terrific moments of physical comedy include an absurdly long running-in-place chase between Sally’s activist friend, Harold (Drew Drake), who wants to rid the school of monuments to its racist history, and TJ, who doesn’t want to hear it. Later, their face-off in a tap-dance battle (the choreography is by Candace Taylor) is funny, furious and almost feral.This finely cast production’s heightened, sometimes hallucinatory feel (aided by Megan Lang’s lighting and Kathy Ruvuna’s sound design) is of a piece with the logical insanity of the world these students inhabit, where blackness and femaleness are enduringly alien to white men like TJ, with his sorghum-sweet accent and entrenched entitlement.But as much as this is a play about dismantling an ugly legacy, it is even more about constructing something better in its place.“You would think all of this would have been fixed by now,” Harold says, quietly.This confrontational, compassionate takedown of a host of social toxins is a step in that direction. Happy Presidents Day.TJ Loves Sally 4 EverThrough Feb. 29 at JACK, Brooklyn; jackny.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More