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    Richard Greenberg, Playwright Whose ‘Take Me Out’ Won a Tony, Dies at 67

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    More than 30 of his plays were produced on Broadway and off. Many of them dealt with the manners and mores of New York’s upper middle class.Richard Greenberg, who won frequent praise as the American Noël Coward for his sharp-witted plays about the manners and mores of urbane, sometimes smug New Yorkers, and who received a Tony Award in 2003 for “Take Me Out,” his play about a gay baseball player, died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 67.His sister-in-law, Janet Kain Greenberg, said the cause of his death, in a hospice, was cancer.A child of the middle-class Long Island suburbs, Mr. Greenberg rose to theater fame in the 1980s with a string of scripts that delved into the interior lives of the people he knew best: young, upwardly mobile urban professionals — yuppies, in the parlance of the time.Works like “Eastern Standard” (1987) and “The American Plan” (1990), two of his first major plays, were incisive and biting, but never cruel. His goal was to examine the bourgeoisie, but never to épater them.From left, Kieran Campion, Lily Rabe, Brenda Pressley, Mercedes Ruehl and Austin Lysy in the Broadway revival of Mr. Greenberg’s “The American Plan” in 2009.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHaving once aspired to be an architect himself, he used that profession as both an identity for many of his characters and an unspoken metaphor in his plays: How do the relationships we build on love and family and friendship bear up over time and under the stress of imperfect, if caustically funny, partners?“We’re always trying to make a cogent story out of our existence,” Mr. Greenberg told Princeton Alumni Weekly in 2016, “and people in my plays often feel they have the story, but almost invariably they’re wrong.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Memnon’ Review: To Fight or Not to Fight?

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      In Will Power’s play for the Classical Theater of Harlem, Eric Berryman stars as an Ethiopian king drawn into the Trojan War.The trappings of royalty don’t always send the intended signals. Take the gilded crown of laurels gleaming expensively atop the head of Priam, the king of Troy. He means the jewelry to underline his status, to augment his gravitas, but no such luck. Even gussied up, he is unmistakably a twit.His nephew Memnon, though? That man has majesty. As embodied by a gripping Eric Berryman in “Memnon,” Will Power’s Trojan War verse play at the Classical Theater of Harlem, he radiates the charisma, integrity and serious-mindedness of a leader. He has a sense of family duty, too.Not to be confused with Agamemnon (same war, different king, opposite side), Memnon has traveled all the way from Ethiopia, where he is king, to answer his uncle’s call for help. A great warrior, he is uncertain that he wants to join the battle, though Troy is a decade deep in combat and in danger of imminent defeat.Memnon has not forgotten the painful slights he has endured for being Trojan only on his father’s side: treated as “not fully Trojan, kin and not kin,” he says. Is a society that has always regarded him that way, led by a king who also sees him that way, worth risking his own life for?His moral wrestling is at the heart of the play, his blend of affection and alienation speaking to the present with bracing clarity.“It makes no sense, to fight for that which has proven time and time again that you will forever be other,” he says. “And yet, golden moments do I have. Good memories in Troy.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Book Review: ‘Bring the House Down,’ by Charlotte Runcie

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      Drawing on her own experience as an arts journalist, Charlotte Runcie comically skewers bad men, bad faith and (unforgivably) bad theater.BRING THE HOUSE DOWN, by Charlotte RuncieHow cruel may a critic be? I ask for a friend.David Niven was once dismissed as “tall, dark and not the slightest bit handsome.” (He hung the review in his bathroom.) John Simon described Barbra Streisand’s nose in “A Star Is Born” as “a ziggurat made of meat” bisecting the screen like “a bolt of fleshy lightning.”Having never gone further than calling an actor confused or miscast, I find such put-downs shocking. But they pale in comparison to Alex Lyons’s review of Hayley Sinclair in a one-woman Edinburgh Festival Fringe production called “Climate Emergence-She.” After disemboweling the script, Lyons turns his attention to its author and star. “Hayley herself is so tedious, and so derivative,” he writes, “that after you’ve endured the first 10 minutes of what the venue is loosely calling ‘a show,’ you’ll be begging for the world to end much sooner than scheduled.”Should Lyons, the lead critic at a major British newspaper, be canceled for that? How about if, in the hours between writing the pan and its publication, he picks up Sinclair at a bar and sleeps with her? She reads her one-star review in the morning, not knowing until then that the man she spent the night with was its author.And does it change the moral calculus if Lyons was right? The show sounds truly dreadful.Those are the questions heating up Charlotte Runcie’s debut novel, “Bring the House Down,” which enjoyably pours fuel on both his and her sides of the dispute. Lyons is basically a #MeToo straw man, so grossly cavalier and indifferent to the sensitivity of other people, especially women, that you’d want to cancel him just for existing.Nor does Runcie make Sinclair a shining heroine. In a canny and commercial act of revenge, the character instantly revamps “Climate Emergence-She” as “The Alex Lyons Experience,” dredging up the history of the critic’s indiscretions and releasing the monster of internet rage. With its parade of guest star exes and its bonus semi-nudity, the new show is the hit the old one could never be.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Heathers: The Musical’ Returns to New York, Fueled by a Devoted Fandom

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      When the pitch-black comedy “Heathers” came out in 1989, a review in The New York Times said it was “as snappy and assured as it is mean-spirited.” An early scene was said to have “the air of a demonic sitcom.” This may explain why the composer Laurence O’Keefe initially had reservations about working on a musical adaptation.“I thought it was too nihilistic,” O’Keefe said of the movie, in which a frustrated senior (Winona Ryder) and her murderous boyfriend (Christian Slater) dispatch members of their high school’s bullying elite with theatrical violence. “This material is in some ways more despairing than ‘Sweeney Todd.’”Yet O’Keefe still thought there was a way to make the story palatable for the stage. He was right: These days, “Heathers: The Musical,” the adaptation he created with the writer Kevin Murphy and the director Andy Fickman, is gaining cult-classic status in its own right.It took a decade, but in December the Off Broadway production’s cast album, from 2014, went gold. Packed with a mercilessly catchy mix of bangers (“Candy Store”) and ballads (“Seventeen”), the recording was instrumental in fueling a “Heathers” craze in Britain, where the show has had several West End runs and tours, which were further immortalized in a second cast album and a live capture.From left, Winona Ryder, Kim Walker, Lisanne Falk and Shannen Doherty starred in the pitch-black high school comedy “Heathers.”Moviestore Collection Ltd/Alamy Stock PhotoNow “Heathers: The Musical” has returned to New World Stages, where it had its original New York engagement back in 2014. This version incorporates changes, including new songs, made to the show in the intervening decade. It will open on July 10 with a sterling cast list led by Lorna Courtney (“& Juliet”) as the arty senior Veronica; Casey Likes (last seen on Broadway in “Back to the Future: The Musical”) as the vengeful J.D.; and McKenzie Kurtz, Elizabeth Teeter and Olivia Hardy as the school’s queen bees, all named Heather.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      As Avignon Festival Turns to Dance, It Trips Up Some Onlookers

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      The festival opener “Nôt,” from Marlene Monteiro Freitas, drew both boos and applause. Elsewhere, for Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, the spectacle was kept to the stage.The Avignon Festival, in the south of France, has long had an ambivalent relationship with dance.The monthlong event, founded in 1947, is a European theater mecca where the reputation of directors and actors are made every July, while choreographers have tended to remain on the margins. In recent years, they have frequently been relegated to the festival’s later dates, when many audience members and professionals have already left.Not this year. For the first time since 2011, dance took center stage on the festival’s biggest night: the opening performance in the monumental Cour d’Honneur, the open-air courtyard of the city’s Papal Palace. And the reaction from the theater-inclined audience was mixed on Saturday: Many looked bewildered, some left midway through, and others stayed long enough to boo as soon as the lights went down — though they were quickly drowned out by applause.The choreographer for the show was Marlene Monteiro Freitas, from Cape Verde, whose absurdist, carnivalesque work has become a phenomenon of European contemporary dance in recent years. Still, with her Avignon opener, “Nôt,” which means “night” in Cape Verdean Creole, she arguably overpromised.The production was billed as inspired by “One Thousand and One Nights,” the collection of Middle Eastern tales — a nod, Freitas said in the playbill, to the focus placed on Arabic at this year’s festival. (For the first time, preshow announcements were delivered in Arabic, the second-most-spoken language in France, as well as in French and English.) Yet Freitas is no conventional storyteller, and “Nôt” is more like a loose collage of scenes, with overt references to “One Thousand and One Nights” few and far between.Mariana Tembe, a standout performer in “Nôt.”Christophe Raynaud de LageThe style she has honed with her excellent performers relies heavily on stilted, puppetlike movements and clownish mime; for “Nôt,” Freitas has added whimsical full-face masks. Hidden behind, one performer shuffles across the stage, awkwardly cleaning the props. Another goes into the vast auditorium with a chamber pot, which he hand around the audience members while pretending to relieve himself in their laps.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Laurie Metcalf to Star in Broadway Play Produced by Scott Rudin

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      The production, of the Samuel D. Hunter play “Little Bear Ridge Road” that got strong reviews in Chicago will be the first produced by Rudin since news reports of his bullying behavior in 2021.“Little Bear Ridge Road,” Samuel D. Hunter’s acclaimed small-cast play about loneliness, compassion and a search for connection between an aunt and her nephew in rural Idaho, will come to Broadway this fall in a production starring Laurie Metcalf and Micah Stock.The production, directed by Joe Mantello (“Wicked”), will mark the return to Broadway of the producer Scott Rudin, who in 2021 paused his producing activities and resigned from the Broadway League amid reports of bullying behavior toward assistants and others.Rudin is producing the show with Barry Diller, the billionaire media mogul who has frequently backed his shows.The play is scheduled to begin previews Oct. 7 and to open Oct. 30 at the Booth Theater for an 18-week limited run.Hunter, the playwright, is best known for “The Whale,” which was adapted into a 2022 film. He was raised in Idaho and many of his plays are set there and feature socially isolated working-class characters. This will be Hunter’s first play staged on Broadway.“My initial impulse for writing the play — which I told to Joe and Laurie, and I credit them that they still had faith in me after I said this — is that I wanted to write a play about people watching television,” Hunter said in a telephone interview. “That was the platform for the play, but the play became this story of this aunt and this nephew who have almost no relationship, and a lot of painful history between them, hunkering down together during the pandemic, and both of them trying to figure out a path forward in a deeply complicated reality.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      11 Off Broadway Plays to See in July

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      Here’s what’s onstage in New York: a new musical about Joy Mangano of Miracle Mop fame, and two plays from the “Oh, Mary!” director Sam Pinkleton.‘Out of Order’In his new show, staged in an intimate basement space, the playwright and actor Carl Holder shuffles the autobiographical-solo genre by picking out prompts and questions written on a bunch of index cards and enacting them. The result is, by turns, emotional, funny, wrenching, not adverse to interpretive dancing and occasionally interactive. Decked out in an Adidas tracksuit, Holder holds the 90-minute production together thanks to a performance that feels openhearted. “Out of Order” is underground in every sense of the word, and unexpectedly heartbreaking. (Through July 22, East Village Basement)Hot FestivalCreated in 1992 by Dixon Place’s founding director, El Covan, the Hot Festival would be a miracle of longevity by any standards, but it’s particularly impressive by Off Off Broadway ones — all the more since the annual event focuses on queer theater, which lands the double whammy of being perennially underfunded and under attack. The festival presents queer-focused shows at various stages of their artistic lives. Among the ones likely to be further along the creative journey are the New York Neo-Futurists’ “The Infinite Pride” (July 9), a special edition of their long-running show “The Infinite Wrench” — an ever-evolving patchwork of 30 very short plays performed in about an hour. Another promising entry is David Dean Bottrell’s “Teenage Wasteland: Thirteen Fourteen Fifteen” (July 16), in which the actor recounts his coming of age in the Bible Belt of the 1970s (Through July 25, Dixon Place)‘Berlindia!’A production whose credits includes an entry for “choreography and techno” may well pique the interest of adventurous theatergoers. Here said choreography and techno (by Mia Pak and Nicholas Webster) are deployed in a new play with an absurdist tinge by Daniel Holzman, directed by Noah Latty and produced by Emma Richmond (who also worked on Kallan Dana’s buzzy recent show, “Lobster”). The cast of “Berlindia!” includes Mike Iveson (“What the Constitution Means to Me”) and Pete Simpson (“Is This a Room”). Add that this is playing at the Tank, a haven for hard-to-describe theater that’s steps from Penn Station, and most tickets cost under $40, and you have something worth gambling on. (Through July 27, the Tank)Megan Hill in Crystal Skillman’s “Open.”Maria Baranova‘Open’In one of the summer’s most welcome surprises, Crystal Skillman’s wondrous monologue returns six years after its premiere at the Tank. It’s not so much a revival as a reprise, since the production brings back the original team of star Megan Hill (“Eddie and Dave”) and director Jessi D. Hill. The first easily holds our attention as Kristen, a woman who attempts to channel her anguish and grief through magic tricks. “Open” is a love story with an aching heart — let’s welcome back this delicate slice of summertime sadness. (July 8-27, WP Theater)‘Joy: A New True Musical’There is something inspiring about Joy Mangano’s life and entrepreneurial spirit: A decade after the movie “Joy,” in which she was played by Jennifer Lawrence, comes this new musical starring Betsy Wolfe (most recently of “& Juliet”). Wait, you haven’t heard of Mangano? She is most famous for unleashing the self-wringing Miracle Mop onto America’s dirty floors. The musical’s book is by Ken Davenport and its score by AnnMarie Milazzo (best known for her orchestrations and vocal arrangements on Broadway). Intriguingly, the choreographer Lorin Latarro directs, while Joshua Bergasse (a recent Tony nominee for “Smash”) handles the choreography (Through Aug. 17, Laura Pels Theater)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Paul Libin, a Forceful Presence On and Off Broadway, Dies at 94

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      He staged a revival of “The Crucible” in a Manhattan hotel ballroom in 1958, helped run Circle in the Square and oversaw the operations of Jujamcyn Theaters.Paul Libin, a prolific producer and respected Broadway theater executive whose first major endeavor was an Off Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s play “The Crucible” that he staged in the ballroom of a Manhattan hotel in 1958, died on June 27 in Manhattan. He was 94.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his son, Charles.In his nearly 70-year career, Mr. Libin ran Circle in the Square Theater with Theodore Mann, one of its founders, and together they produced more than 100 shows. Later, Mr. Libin was in charge of operations at Jujamcyn Theaters, the owner of several Broadway houses.Rocco Landesman, the former president and owner of Jujamcyn, said Mr. Libin had a wall-penetrating voice, a forceful presence and enormous energy.“I depended on Paul entirely,” Mr. Landesman said in an interview. “Someone had to run the company. But I wouldn’t describe his role as corporate. He was as likely to be climbing into the air-conditioning ducts at the St. James Theater as he was to be sitting at his desk. He came in every day with enthusiasm.”That enthusiasm dated to Mr. Libin’s early days as an assistant to Jo Mielziner, a Tony-winning scenic designer and producer. When Mr. Mielziner produced the Broadway musical “Happy Hunting,” which opened in late 1956, he promoted Mr. Libin to stage manager.In 1958, on his way to a dentist appointment, Mr. Libin passed the Hotel Martinique, on West 32nd Street near Broadway, and saw a sign advertising the ballroom’s availability. He thought of it as a space that he and the director Word Baker could turn into a theater-in-the-round for a production of “The Crucible,” the 1953 Tony-winning Broadway play about the Salem witch trials and an allegory of the McCarthy-era Red Scare.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ronald Ribman, 92, Dies; His Plays Mined the Absurdity of Existence

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      He set his frequently neurotic characters in bleak, morally ambiguous situations where laughter, as he put it, “is a measure of the sickness of society.”Two men are on the rooftop garden of a hospital in Manhattan. One is an Armenian grocer. He has cancer and a big mouth. The other is an art dealer, a self-loathing Holocaust survivor who also has cancer and is tired of his own voice. In between medical procedures, they bicker about the quagmire of the past.“You came out a big winner,” the grocer says.“Because I survived?” the art dealer says. “It doesn’t feel like a triumph.”“That’s because nothing we ever do feels like a triumph, because the mind’s a piece of garbage,” the grocer replies. “It’s never happy with what we do for it. I once took my mind down to Barbados for two weeks, and you know what it said to me? ‘You should have taken us to Jamaica!’”The verbal jousting took place in “Cold Storage,” a 1977 play staged at the Lyceum Theater on Broadway and written by Ronald Ribman, a mordantly funny playwright whose frequently surreal works grappled with God’s impatience, the past’s invasion of the present and, as he once put it, “a person’s right to fail as a human being.”Mr. Ribman’s “Cold Storage,” staged on Broadway in 1977, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. PlaybillIn “Harry, Noon and Night,” a 1965 Off Broadway production set in postwar Munich, Dustin Hoffman played a gay Nazi with a hunchback who quarrels with his roommate, a disturbed American painter who believes a caterpillar gave him syphilis. “The Journey of the Fifth Horse” (1966), also Off Broadway, was based in part on Ivan Turgenev’s short story “The Diary of a Superfluous Man,” and starred Mr. Hoffman as an editor at a publishing house who rejects a posthumous memoir by a 19th-century landowner who died friendless and broke. In “The Poison Tree” (1973), inmates and guards battle over the moral high ground in prison.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More