Eliana Willis

A revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire” by Tennessee Williams, directed by Robert O’Hara (who recently staged “Slave Play” on Broadway) and starring Audra McDonald, Carla Gugino and Bobby Cannavale, will open the Williamstown Theater Festival’s season this summer. The season, announced Monday, will also include four new plays and a new musical, along with a new production of the Anna Ziegler play “Photograph 51.” It will run from June 30 through Aug. 23 in Williamstown, Mass.“I think when you look at contemporary work by living playwrights, especially alongside some of the great canonical writers and their work, you’re really looking at the American experience in both directions,” Mandy Greenfield, the festival’s artistic director, said in a phone interview. “You’re looking at who we were at a moment in time, and you’re looking at who we will be, who we can be, who we are currently.”That should be especially pronounced during the summer of an election year.In addition to “Streetcar,” which will run through July 19 and cast McDonald as Blanche DuBois, the Main Stage will host “Cult of Love,” a dark comedy from Leslye Headland, a creator of the Netflix series “Russian Doll.” The play had a brief run staged by IAMA Theater Company in Los Angeles in 2018, but hasn’t been seen elsewhere. This production will be directed by Trip Cullman; its cast will include Kate Burton (“Grey’s Anatomy”) and Taylor Schilling (“Orange Is the New Black”). The story centers on a family grappling with differences in religious, political and sexual identity while at home for the holidays. (Ms. Greenfield called it a “family drama for our moment.”) It runs July 22 through Aug. 2.“Photograph 51,” the Ziegler play, will close out the Main Stage season. The Tony-winning director Susan Stroman will direct the new production, which comes five years after Nicole Kidman starred in the play in London’s West End. The story is based on the life of Rosalind Franklin, a British scientist who produced pivotal research on DNA in the early 1950s. It will run Aug. 6-23.The rest of the season’s performances, all world premieres, will take place in the festival’s smaller theater. They are: “Wish You Were Here,” a play by Sanaz Toossi about the effects that the Iranian Revolution has on a group of friends; “Chonburi International Hotel & Butterfly Club,” a play by Shakina Nayfack about gender confirmation surgery that centers on a group of transgender women at a hotel in Thailand; “Row,” a musical with a book by Daniel Goldstein and music and lyrics by Dawn Landes that follows the first woman to row a boat across the Atlantic Ocean solo (it’s based on the autobiography of Tori Murden); and “Animals,” a play by Stacy Osei-Kuffour about a spontaneous marriage proposal.Works at the festival often go on to have a life in New York. Expect some of the above to carry on that tradition.More information can be found at wtfestival.org. More

Terry Hands, a British director who led the Royal Shakespeare Company in England and in the 1980s took several productions to Broadway, including a well-regarded “Much Ado About Nothing” and the notorious musical flop “Carrie,” died on Tuesday. He was 79.Theatr Clwyd in Wales, where he was artistic director for 18 years, retiring after directing a final “Hamlet” in 2015, posted news of his death. The location and cause were not given.Mr. Hands was with the Royal Shakespeare Company for almost a quarter-century, joining it in 1966 to run Theatregoround, an outreach program. In 1978 he became joint artistic director with Trevor Nunn, and from 1986 until his departure in 1990 he was the company’s chief executive.One highlight of his tenure there was his work with the actor Alan Howard, whom he directed in an ambitious staging of Shakespeare’s “Henry IV, Part 1,” “Henry IV, Part 2” and “Henry V” at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1975, with Mr. Howard starting out as Prince Hal in the first play in the cycle and growing into the title character in “Henry V.”Another noteworthy pairing came in the 1980s, when Mr. Hands directed Edmond Rostand’s “Cyrano de Bergerac” and Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing.” Derek Jacobi and Sinead Cusack starred in both, as Cyrano and Roxane in the first and as Benedick and Beatrice in the second. Mr. Hands moved both productions to Broadway in 1984, running them in repertory.“A few wrong notes and ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’ could become this year’s Mel Brooks parody,” Frank Rich wrote in his review in The New York Times. “But Mr. Hands has perfect pitch. This director’s virtuosity is as impressive as his star’s.”As for “Much Ado,” Mr. Rich called it “an iridescent reverie, as delicate as the wind chimes that shimmer in Nigel Hess’s exceptionally beautiful score.”“Cyrano” earned three Tony Award nominations and “Much Ado” seven, with Mr. Jacobi’s Benedick winning him the best-actor prize. Mr. Hands was nominated for best director for that production, and his lighting design for each production — he often did his own — was also nominated.“Doing this in America is obviously a gamble,” he told The Times in 1984 when the two plays were about to open. “Pleasing people in New York is not easy, and Broadway is a sudden-death street.”He received confirmation of that in the most brutal of ways in 1988, when his production of “Carrie,” a musical based on Stephen King’s horror novel about a high school girl with telekinetic power, traveled to Broadway.With music by Michael Gore, lyrics by Dean Pitchford and a book by Lawrence D. Cohen, the show had had a rocky start at Stratford-upon-Avon, but Mr. Hands, who directed, took it to New York anyway. Critics were unkind, to say the least. Mr. Rich, singling out a scene involving the slaughter of a pig, invoked another famous Broadway flop.“Only the absence of antlers separates the pig murders of ‘Carrie’ from the ‘Moose Murders’ of Broadway lore,” he wrote in his review.“Carrie” closed three days after it opened and has been something of a theatrical reference point — and not in a good way — ever since. Mr. Hands, though, who during his Royal Shakespeare tenure had pushed to expand that company beyond its comfort zone, had known that failure was a possibility and had embraced the challenge.“You can’t deny that any show that begins with menstruation in the high school shower and ends with a double murder is obviously taking a risk,” he told The Times a few months earlier. “But that’s the attraction, too.”Terence David Hands was born on Jan. 9, 1941, in Aldershot, England, southwest of London, to Joseph and Luise (Kohler) Hands. He attended the University of Birmingham and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, graduating in 1964 and becoming a founder of the Everyman Theater in Liverpool.His time at the Royal Shakespeare Company was punctuated by battles over public financing that ultimately wore him down.“I’m haunted by the specter of endless revivals of ‘Peter Pan’ to pay for endless revivals of ‘Peter Pan,’” he told The Associated Press in 1990 shortly before he left, referring to the J.M. Barrie play that has been a Christmas perennial.He expressed the hope that his successor would escape the burden of “having to spend three-quarters of the day raising, saving or making money.”After leaving the Royal Shakespeare he worked as a freelance director until 1997, when he responded to a call from Theatr Clwyd, in northeastern Wales, which was on the verge of closing. He became its artistic director, bringing some stability to the finances and building a supportive audience.“He saved the theater from closure — this is actual truth, not hyperbole — and protected it from ongoing public funding cuts,” Tamara Harvey, the theater’s current artistic director, said in a statement.Mr. Hands’s marriages to Josephine Barstow in the 1960s and Ludmila Mikaël in the 1970s ended in divorce. In 2002 he married Emma Lucia, a director, who survives him, along with a daughter from his second marriage, the actress Marina Hands; and two sons, Sebastian and Rupert, from a relationship with Julia Lintott.In 2015, as he was directing his final production for Theatr Clwyd, The Daily Post of North Wales asked him to name the highlights of his tenure there.“Maybe one highlight is last year we played to over 200,000 people,” he said, “which, for a small theater up a hill surrounded by sheep, is an achievement.” More

As an all-terrain vehicle rumbles through a serene desert valley, its driver unwittingly starts a devastating fire by flicking cigar embers out the window. In another landscape, volcanoes are erupting, acidifying the ocean and threatening the life within it.These scenes unfold on different theatrical stages and in periods 500 million years apart. But both come from productions intended for children, an audience usually left out of the conversation on climate change.“PackRat,” presented by Dixon Place, and “Riddle of the Trilobites,” at the New Victory Theater, convey their messages through protagonists who aren’t human but who gain vivid life as puppets. Carlo Adinolfi, who designed the set, projections and larger-than-life puppetry for “PackRat,” has created amazingly expressive rodents, reptiles, birds of prey, a jack rabbit — and even Cowgirl, the cigar-smoking driver — from wood, papier-mâché, cardboard, wire and, fittingly, recycled trash.Some of the same materials help form the goofier-looking but no less compelling creatures of “Riddle of the Trilobites.” Designed by Amanda Villalobos, the prehistoric arthropods in this show gambol about with googly eyes and flicking antennas and tails. Each production has talented puppeteers who seem not to manipulate these marvelous inventions so much as merge with them.“PackRat,” written and directed by Renee Philippi, who collaborated with Adinolfi in creating it, draws inspiration from “Watership Down,” Richard Adams’s 1972 best seller about rabbits in exile. But this Concrete Temple Theater production offers an allegory more ecological than political. It stars the lowly animal of the title, a hoarder named Bud. After the blaze ignited by the cigar, his fellow creatures banish him, convinced that the human set the fire deliberately to punish Bud for collecting people’s “treasures,” including a spoon and a bag of marshmallows.Accompanied by the jackrabbit Firestone and eventually Happy, another rat, Bud goes on a journey of rescue and redemption, trying to find Artemisia, a land said to be free of human intervention. But despite the stage craft, which is thoroughly mesmerizing, the animals’ odyssey can be hard to follow.Not even adults will immediately grasp that a second, more skeletal set of bamboo puppets is supposed to be enacting dream sequences. And the prerecorded narration and dialogue, both delivered by Vera Beren, have the solemn austerity of an ancient fable. “PackRat,” which includes a wrenching onstage death, will appeal most to theatergoers over 10, who are less likely to be troubled that the wildlife’s arduous story has no clear resolution.But what resolution can climate activists hope for? Prehistoric species saw their environments deteriorate, and we all know what happened to them. Still, “Riddle of the Trilobites,” geared toward a younger audience than “PackRat,” manages to be something unusual: a cheerful, peppy musical about extinction.With a book and lyrics by Geo Decas O’Donnell and Jordan Seavey, and score and lyrics by Nicholas Williams, “Riddle” focuses on the trials of Aphra (Sifiso Mabena), a rebellious adolescent trilobite who learns on her first Molting Day that she’s destined to fulfill an ancient prophecy. She alone can unravel the riddle of her kind: “When the ocean changes, the trilobites cannot live but will not die.”With Judomiah (Richard Saudek), her initially fearful best friend, Aphra embarks on an adventure that is just as dangerous as Bud’s, but leavened with hefty doses of humor — sometimes corny, but still welcome — and rollicking song. (I kept writing “good score” in my notes.) These trilobites’ travels bring them into contact with other creatures, including Hai (Phillip Taratula), an early species of fish. The actors, who talk, sing and frolic while operating the puppets, multitask brilliantly.Directed by Lee Sunday Evans and produced by CollaborationTown and Flint Repertory Theater, “Riddle” dances around — sometimes literally — the ultimate fate of Aphra and her fellow trilobites. But even though the destructive powers of Homo sapiens are millions of years away, the show demonstrates that the ocean is a source of life and its pollution a harbinger of doom. It also cautions against any species’ assumed superiority: When the trilobite elders first see Hai, they lock him in a cage.These productions emphasize that the young must take charge, and that environmental action is desperately needed. As Bud, the beleaguered pack rat, says: “I don’t want to just sit around! That’s what humans do.”PackRatThrough Feb. 15 at Dixon Place, Manhattan; 212-219-0736, dixonplace.org. Running time: 55 minutes.Riddle of the TrilobitesThrough Feb. 23 at the New Victory Theater, Manhattan; 646-223-3010, newvictory.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More