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      Review: In Central Park, ‘The Tempest’ Sings Farewell to Magic

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      A joyful, bumpy musical version of Shakespeare’s late romance closes the Delacorte Theater before an 18-month renovation.“The isle is full of noises,” sings Caliban, and on Tuesday night it certainly was. Helicopters, radios, sirens and birdsong were competing to be heard in the Manhattan air.Yet all of them melted away, as they usually do, at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, where the Public Theater’s new musical version of “The Tempest” was giving its opening-night performance. (It runs only through Sunday.) The seventh in the Public’s series of Public Works productions, it will also be the last for the time being; this fall, the Delacorte begins much-needed renovations that will put it out of commission until 2025.“The Tempest” makes for a fitting farewell, having opened the series, in a different adaptation, in 2013. That “Tempest” introduced the innovative Public Works idea: civic theater made for everyone, with members of local community organizations performing alongside professional actors. This new “Tempest,” adapted by Benjamin Velez (whose songs are tuneful and sweet) and Laurie Woolery (whose staging is bumpy but joyous), continues the tradition but emphasizes a new note: the pang of goodbyes.The goodbyes are generally the same ones Shakespeare plotted around 1610. Prospero, a sorcerer living for 12 years in exile on an enchanted island, must forswear the magic that has helped him survive and, with it, his fury over the betrayal that landed him there. He must also release from servitude his chief sprite, Ariel, and his monstrous slave, Caliban. And when his daughter, Miranda, having little experience of men, falls for one who washes up on shore, Prospero, deferring to love, must give her up too.“Am I not the liar/If I deny her?” he sings in the oddly named “Log Man,” a highlight of the nine-song score.Actually, make that “she sings,” because in this production, Prospero, played by Renée Elise Goldsberry in gorgeous voice, is a woman, and not gratuitously so. Her interactions with Miranda are specific to her gender. “Innocence flies like the last gasp of summer/Childhood dies in the arms of a lover/And no one tries to hold on like a mother,” she notes in a later verse of “Log Man,” getting a big laugh on the inevitability of that last word.Renée Elise Goldsberry, as Prospero, knows how to shape a moment for maximum impact, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt least for the first half of the 100-minute show, the Shakespeare is effectively translated to musical theater — perhaps not so surprising given that musical theater is in many ways a translation of Shakespearean templates to begin with. (Songs and monologues often do similar structural work.) Here, Velez’s poppy melodies and gentle slant rhymes usually serve a second function, crystallizing the themes in quickly recognizable and memorable gestures, as the harsh economy of musicals requires.So Prospero’s opening number, “Cast a Spell,” sets up her conflict instantly: She must “finally be free of the tempest in me.” When Miranda (Naomi Pierre) meets Ferdinand (Jordan Best), the Disneyesque “Vibin’ on to You” characterizes their instinctual infatuation in its first funky measure. A merry operetta drinking song (“A Fool Can Be King”) gives Joel Perez, as the soused clown Stephano, a rousing production number, and the song that introduces Sebastian (Tristan André) and Antonio (Anthony Chatmon II) might as well have “comic villain specialty” stamped on it.Of course, those villains aren’t so comic in the Shakespeare, where their threats recall the culture of deceit and violence bred by greed and politics. But that’s one of the trade-offs of Public Works. You do get to see charming nonprofessionals like Pierre (from the Center for Family Life in Sunset Park, Brooklyn) work side-by-side with Broadway talent like Jo Lampert (who makes an acid-queen Ariel) and Theo Stockman (a piteous Caliban). But you’re not likely to see any of them get the chance to dig terribly deep.The production’s rushed second half shows why, as the late-night subway schedule bears down and the plot gets ruthlessly trimmed to beat it. We don’t miss the cut scenes so much as the connective tissue that might hold up what’s left. Also missed: the rich language that creates emotional context for a story that, with its spirits and spells, can otherwise seem almost inhuman.And though there’s a lovely finale called “A Thousand Blessings” — with members of Oyu Oro, an Afro-Cuban experimental dance ensemble, flooding the stage — the songs now come too close together to represent peaks of feeling. A landscape with only peaks is flat.Woolery, who leads Public Works and directed its terrific “As You Like It” in 2017, too often exacerbates that problem. With as many as 88 people moving about, plus five musicians in a tipped-over house remaindered from this summer’s “Hamlet” (the sets are by Alexis Distler), the stage can sometimes look like a busy airport instead of a nearly deserted island. And the clown scenes, so dependent on imaginative physical comedy, exceptional timing and an understanding of pathos, are not reliably funny.But one of the nice things about watching nonprofessionals in the limelight, especially the children, is that they don’t cover their excitement, which is funny (and moving) in itself. And one of the nice things about watching professionals in the limelight is that they know how to shape a moment for maximum impact.This is something Goldsberry does over and over, no more so than near the end, when Prospero must act on her insight that “the rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance.” As she breaks her magic staff in two, several feelings — fear, wonder, resolve — seem to scud across her face. Has she done right in making that choice?Has Public Works done right in making a similar one? Producing work that by traditional measures lacks polish, it has prioritized the virtue of engagement with actual people, and lots of them, over the secret magic known only to a few.As a critic, I feel obliged to ponder the trade-off. But as a citizen I have no doubts. Even in its lesser outings, Public Works makes its own kind of magic: a communitarian charm sorely missed these furious days. We need the series back in the park as soon as possible — albeit with better seats, more accessible bathrooms and raccoonless backstage facilities — to keep making beautiful music for our beleaguered isle of noises.The TempestThrough Sept. 3 at the Delacorte Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      ‘Pay the Writer’ Is Just One Point in This Relationship Play

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      Despite its thunderbolt of a title, the focus of this memory play is on the relationship between a self-involved author and his long-suffering agent.Amid an ongoing strike by Hollywood screenwriters and actors, a play with the nifty title “Pay the Writer” courts applause before anyone has uttered a word. Never mind that its turf is mainly the literary world, not the cinematic one; the author at the center of Tawni O’Dell’s play, Cyrus Holt (Ron Canada), seems to speak for all underpaid writers when he inscribes that feisty injunction in a copy of his book that is being adapted as a movie.Holt’s agent, Bruston Fischer (Bryan Batt), has the thankless job of acting as the go-between for his client and the film producer, who has not paid anything more than a small advance. Despite its thunderbolt of a title, the real focus of this elegiac memory play is on the relationship between Holt and Fischer: one an ailing, thrice-divorced author, the other his confidant, therapist and enabler.Under Karen Carpenter’s brisk direction, the play darts back and forth between present-day New York City and Holt’s Lothario days in the East Village, Paris and Los Angeles some 40 years earlier. When we first meet him, Holt is ensconced in penthouse luxury, anxiously waiting word from his French translator Jean Luc (Steven Hauck) about his new manuscript. He is now “the Black author on every American Lit syllabus kids try to avoid reading,” as he wryly puts it.But before he became a star in the literary firmament, Holt was a struggling author. As a portrait of the artist as a young man, the play is contractually required to mention a Big Bang moment. That moment arrives in a funny, if slightly overwritten scene when the younger versions of Holt (Garrett Turner) and Fischer (Miles G. Jackson), then working as a junior editor, meet outside a publishing house. They trade opinions on the relative merits of Tolstoy and Richard Wright before Holt gives Fischer a copy of his manuscript. A beatific expression washes over Jackson’s line-free face as he reads aloud excerpts, but the tin-eared prose made me yearn for Keats’s “unheard melodies.” Holt’s novel, about a mother who kills her child, owes too much to Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” — and suffers by comparison.Although its snide, knowing remarks about the cutthroat publishing world occasionally impart the fizzy pleasure of the television show “Call My Agent!,” the dialogue is blunted by cliché and frequently bogged down with exposition. Multiple characters remind Holt, with implausible regularity, about his National Book Awards, his Pulitzer and best sellers; scenes with his estranged son, Leo (Garrett Turner, giving a sensitively etched performance), are built on the creaky foundations of “Do you remember? Of course you don’t” repeated over and over.Other characters, including Holt’s standoffish, runway-ready daughter, Gigi, (Danielle Summons), his equally glamorous wife, Lana (Marcia Cross), and the subtle-as-a-heart-attack Jean Luc, are given one-dimensional roles as mild antagonists or the collateral damage of a colossal career. These people all paid a price for putting up with a supremely self-involved author, and it’s not clear if it was ultimately worth it for them — or for us.Pay The WriterThrough Sept. 30 at the Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; paythewriterplay.com. Running time: 2 hours.This review is supported by Critical Minded, an initiative to invest in the work of cultural critics from historically underrepresented backgrounds. More

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      In Annie Baker’s Plays, Pay Attention to the Pauses

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      Her work, including the new “Infinite Life,” involves silences full of meaning. But what exactly they convey can change depending on the director.“The Flick,” a play by Annie Baker, had its premiere at Playwrights Horizons in 2013. Its three hour and 15 minute runtime included long stretches in which the characters — three underpaid workers in a tired, single-screen movie theater — moved from row to row, sweeping the floor. The drama found a kind of poetry in everyday speech: the hesitations, filler words, abandoned sentences and otherwise awkward attempts to connect. A lot of the time, Baker’s characters didn’t speak at all.The show apparently tested the patience of some. “We’d see a lot of empty seats after intermission,” the actor Matt Maher said. A widely shared email from the Playwrights Horizons artistic director at the time, Tim Sanford, made reference to emphatic expressions of displeasure from subscribers and much hand-wringing behind the scenes. He wrote that “we had lengthy discussions about what to do.”In a recent conversation in a cafe in Chelsea, Baker, who won a Pulitzer Prize for “The Flick,” said she was untroubled by the walkouts. “I don’t think of myself as a provocateur, but I also don’t think of myself as an entertainer,” she said. “People walk out of my plays all the time. I don’t get freaked out by it.”Louisa Krause and Aaron Clifton Moten in “The Flick” at the Barrow Street Theater in 2015. When Playwrights Horizons staged it, the show tested the patience of some audience members.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBaker’s best known works are partly symphonies of silence in which what might be mistaken for dead air is anything but. Her scripts call for comfortable pauses, uncomfortable pauses, weird pauses, confused pauses, horrible pauses and, in “The Flick,” a happy pause that morphs into an awkward pause. When we’re not watching unspeaking characters sweep up popcorn, we might be watching them mutely smoke, drink tea or hula-hoop. Her script for “The Aliens” begins with a taxonomy: “At least a third — if not half — of this play is silence. Pauses should be at least three seconds long. Silences should last from five to 10 seconds. Long pauses and long silences should, of course, be even longer.”“She’s a high priestess of silence and stillness,” the director James Macdonald said.An Atlantic Theater Company and National Theater co-production of Baker’s latest play, “Infinite Life,” directed by Macdonald, is in previews now and will open on Sept. 12. It is a play about the experience of pain — our own and each other’s. “Infinite Life” also goes further than Baker’s other plays in its exploration of stillness, Macdonald said. “Nothing appears to be going on for great stretches.”Then, in October, “Janet Planet,” Baker’s debut feature film as writer-director, will screen at the New York Film Festival, before a wider release next year. Baker said the film used a natural soundscape but no musical score, and replicated the way time felt to her 11-year-old self.While she has said that some of her “favorite moments in all of my plays are usually moments when people aren’t talking,” Baker also insisted that she was not obsessed with quietude.“I’m interested in silence, I’m interested in noise, I’m interested in speed, I’m interested in stillness. To me it does feel like writing a play feels a bit like composing a piece of music. There are the quarter notes and there are the rests.”From left, Nielsen, Pressley, Burke and Katigbak in “Infinite Life.” Katigbak explained that the silence isn’t empty: “There has to be something happening. Even when it’s at rest, it’s active.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesOn the air and space that pervades her work, she added, “It was never a conscious decision or aesthetic cultivation on my part. It’s just me trying to follow my own pleasure and my own taste and my own ear.”Ten years after the “Flick” fracas and ahead of the opening of “Infinite Life” — with productions of Baker’s earlier plays still finding audiences around the world — it’s worth contemplating what’s going on between the lines in her low and slow theater. For starters, why do some audience members find silence so off-putting?Amy Muse, a professor of English at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn., and the author of “The Drama and Theatre of Annie Baker,” offered a theory rooted in the metaphysical. “We fear silence because it seems to indicate an absence of meaning,” she wrote in an email, adding, “Indefinite stretches of time, like space, fill people with dread.”More likely, she continued, “they’re fearing they’ve wasted time and money to be bored watching ordinary people doing ordinary things, instead of listening to the smart dialogue they expect from a play.”For admirers, though, Baker extends “a kind of sacred invitation to be present,” Muse said. It urges a leaning in, sensitizing us to the minutest moments, gestures and expressions, and the ever-present ache of her characters. What’s said attains extra significance surrounded by what’s unsaid, and details accumulate like snowfall, as the critic Hilton Als wrote in The New Yorker.It was in the quietest moments in “The Flick,” Maher said, when he could feel the audience most tuned in. “Like I could just shrug or raise an eyebrow and could feel the audience clocking it.”Baker’s preference for understatement stands out, not just when compared to most mainstream entertainment, but also much of daily life. “To me it’s very countercultural,” said the “Infinite Life” actor Christina Kirk. “In the sense that our dominant values are bigger, faster, louder, more. I think that generally Annie is interested in exploring smaller, slower, quieter, less.”Kirk said she found Baker’s silences countercultural because “our dominant values are bigger, faster, louder, more.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesIn a way, the audience members who gave up on “The Flick” were fooled by a fundamental deception on Baker’s part. Not much seems to be happening, and yet everything is happening. Darker truths emerge, awful revelations occur, human cruelty, despair, shame and weakness come into shocking focus. As Chekhov — a key influence for Baker — wrote: “People are sitting at a table having dinner, that’s all, but at the same time their happiness is being created, or their lives are being torn apart.”There’s a specificity and precision required of actors and directors. “The biggest lesson as a director was that those pauses and silences need to be active — as taut and as fully inhabited as the most exhilarating monologue,” said Mitchell Cushman, who has directed productions of “The Flick” and “The Aliens” in Toronto. “I distinctly remember the work we did on ‘The Flick’, after first preview, to pick up the pacing in the long silences.” The silences didn’t get any shorter. Rather, “they got much more charged. It made all the difference.”Macdonald provided the cast of “Infinite Life” with a mantra: “Still bodies, alert minds.”“Those moments of stillness can’t be empty,” the actor Mia Katigbak explained. “There has to be something happening. Even when it’s at rest, it’s active.”Not every production has adhered religiously to Baker’s stipulations. One London staging of “The Aliens” shaved its runtime from at least 100 minutes, with an intermission, to 75 minutes without. Perhaps even more egregious, Baker witnessed regional theater performances in which the pauses were halfhearted. “I could tell they were counting to five during them,” she said. “Now I just don’t see productions in my plays that I wasn’t involved with.”On the other hand, for productions of “The Aliens” and “Circle Mirror Transformation” in Moscow, the director Adrian Giurgea felt it more in keeping with Stanislavskian psychological realism to extend the stretches of non-dialogue to “unbearable” lengths — up to 11 minutes long, he said.“Circle Mirror Transformation” at Playwrights Horizons. A production in Moscow extended the silences to as long as 11 minutes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSome silences can feel more vibrantly alive than others, or suggest a porosity between the real world and the world of the play. Maizy Scarpa directed an outdoor production of “The Aliens” in the Berkshires, in a tunnel under active railroad tracks. “I had to remind the actors to acknowledge ambient sounds, not fight with them,” she said. “If someone shouts in the distance, look up! If there is a car that honks during your monologue, react!” Ultimately the audience “could absorb the whole experience.”In a production of “The Aliens” at the Old Fitz, an 80-seat theater in a Sydney pub that allows patrons to bring in their drinks, the silences were relatively raucous, particularly on trivia night. “The audience really felt like they were in the yard, hanging out with the characters, having a beer,” the director Craig Baldwin said. “If you think about an audience as always being a silent participant in a piece of theater, it was particularly magic when the characters joined them in that silence. Everyone in the backyard was silent together.”Which suggests another way to think about these moments: as audience participation. It’s an opportunity — whether we accept it or reject it — to fill those silences with ourselves.“Ideas are often the most powerful when they’re hidden,” Baker said. “It’s so delicious to feel a character having a thought and not know, not have access to what that thought is. I like to allow an audience member to make the discovery themselves.” More

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      Tina Howe, Playwright Best Known for ‘Coastal Disturbances,’ Dies at 85

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      She mixed insight and absurdity in a vast body of work that also included “Painting Churches” and “Pride’s Crossing,” both of which were Pulitzer finalists.Tina Howe, who in plays that could be extravagant productions or small-cast gems zeroed in on the humor, heartache and solidity of her characters’ lives, particularly the female ones, died on Monday in Manhattan. She was 85.Her family said the cause was complications of a broken hip sustained in a recent fall.Ms. Howe was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in drama, for “Painting Churches” in 1984 and “Pride’s Crossing” in 1997. Her “Coastal Disturbances” had a 350-performance run on Broadway in 1987 and was nominated for the Tony Award for best play.In the foreword to a 1984 collection of her plays “Museum,” “The Art of Dining” and “Painting Churches,” she described those three works this way, a summary that applies to much of her output:“They share an absorption with the making and consuming of art, a fascination with food, a tendency to veer off into the primitive and neurotic, and of course a hopeless infatuation with the sight gag.”Her plays also generally share another attribute: They have multidimensional female characters of a type that were not often seen when she started out in the 1970s. As she told an interviewer in 2004 on the CUNY TV program “Women in Theater,” in those years many artistic directors were men who were interested only in plays in which female characters were victims. It was harder, she said, to get support for a play that featured “a strong woman, a sexy woman, a smart woman.”A scene from a 2012 production of Ms. Howe’s play “Painting Churches,” with Kate Turnbull, left, and Kathleen Chalfant.Carol RoseggSome of her plays were sprawling creations, like “Museum,” which, set in the gallery of a major art museum, had a cast of almost 50 when it premiered in 1976 at the Los Angeles Actors’ Theater. “Coastal Disturbances,” as Ms. Howe described it in the preface to a 1989 collection, takes place on “a beach complete with heaving ocean and 20 tons of sand.”“I seem to go out of my way to make putting them on as hard as possible,” she wrote of those types of play.But she also wrote more intimate works, one of which, “Painting Churches,” took her career to a new level when it had its premiere at Second Stage in Manhattan in 1983. The play has just three characters: a married couple and their artist daughter, who as the play progresses paints her parents’ portrait, with truths about the family revealed as she goes about the task. Ms. Howe described it as a sort of reverse image of “Museum,” in which characters talk about art; in “Painting Churches,” the characters become art.Frank Rich, reviewing the production in The New York Times, invoked a line spoken by the father late in the play.“‘The whole thing shimmers,’ he says, in a line of art criticism that can also serve as an apt description of Miss Howe’s lovely play,” Mr. Rich wrote.After its run at Second Stage, the production moved to another Midtown theater and ran for months more.Annette Bening in the central role of Ms. Howe’s “Coastal Disturbances,” which opened Off Broadway in 1986.Martha Swope/The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts“Coastal Disturbances” also opened at Second Stage, in 1986, and it, too, drew raves. That play is about four generations of vacationers gathered on a beach, though this is merely the premise.“It was really about the anguish of love and the ache of love and the exhilaration and the heartbreak and the joy,” Annette Bening, who played the central role, a photographer named Holly who has a relationship with a lifeguard, said in a phone interview.Ms. Bening, who earned a Tony nomination after the play moved to Broadway, was new to New York and largely unknown at the time. Holly, she said, was a thinly veiled version of Ms. Howe herself, which meant that she and Ms. Howe developed a bond.“She was incredibly incisive and hard-core intelligent,” Ms. Bening said, “and her plays reflected all of that.”Mr. Rich, reviewing “Coastal Disturbances,” called it “distinctly the creation of a female sensibility, but its beautiful, isolated private beach generously illuminates the intimate landscape that is shared by women and men.”“Coastal Disturbances” showed Ms. Howe’s flair for absurdity. In one scene, Ms. Bening was buried up to her neck in sand by the lifeguard (played by Tim Daly) while relating a somewhat erotic fantasy involving anthropomorphized dolphins.Cherry Jones, left, and Julia McIlvaine in a scene from Ms. Howe’s “Pride’s Crossing,” at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center in 1997.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn the introduction to a 2010 collection of her plays, Ms. Howe explained her penchant for wacky scenes.“I came of age during the heyday of Absurdism when it was the fellas who were shaking up perceptions of what was stage worthy — Pirandello, Genet, Ionesco, Beckett and Albee,” she wrote. “Their artistry and daring were thrilling as they scrambled logic and language, but where were their female counterparts, shaking up what was stage worthy for us? Since I was a hopelessly unevolved feminist with no ax to grind, who better to take on the challenge than me?”Mabel Davis Howe was born on Nov. 21, 1937, in Manhattan to Quincy and Mary (Post) Howe. (She was called Tina from childhood and made it her legal name when she turned 18, her son, Eben Levy, said.) Her father, an author, journalist and broadcast commentator, worked for CBS radio and ABC television. Her mother was an amateur artist who exhibited on Long Island.Marx Brothers movies were among Ms. Howe’s childhood passions and influenced her playwriting.“The whole point was to keep piling excess upon excess,” she wrote in the 1989 collection. “Why shouldn’t it be the same in the theater?”While she was attending Sarah Lawrence College, the actress Jane Alexander, a friend and fellow student, directed one of Ms. Howe’s first plays, “Closing Time.” Ms. Howe graduated in 1959 and then spent a year in Paris.“The most profound thing that happened to me that year was seeing ‘The Bald Soprano’ by Ionesco,” she told The Times in 1983. “That exploded me all over the place.”Ms. Howe in 2017 with her husband, Norman Levy, in their home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesShe married Norman Levy, a teacher and writer, in 1961 and accompanied him to Maine and Wisconsin while he finished his degrees. In 1967, when Mr. Levy got a job teaching at the State University of New York at Albany (now the University at Albany), the couple moved to Kinderhook, N.Y., where Ms. Howe made a start working on plays in earnest.In 1970, her play “The Nest,” which she described as a “funny, erotic play about women and how fierce and pathetic they are when dealing with men,” received a production at the Mercury Theater on East 13th Street in Manhattan. That the first sentence of Clive Barnes’s review in The Times didn’t kill her fledgling career was something of a miracle.“It is always rash to use superlatives,” Mr. Barnes wrote, “but it does most forcibly occur to me that ‘The Nest,’ which boldly calls itself a play and even more boldly opened last night at the Mercury Theater, must be on any reasonable short list of the worst plays I have ever seen.”Ms. Howe, though, kept at it, drawing attention not only for “Museum” but also for “The Art of Dining” (staged at the Public Theater in 1979) and other plays. In 1983 she won an Obie Award for her recent works. Numerous other awards followed.Among her most successful plays after “Coastal Disturbances” was “Pride’s Crossing,” in which a 90-year-old swimmer looks back on her life. That piece was staged at Lincoln Center in 1997.“Old women have great power,’‘ Ms. Howe said at the time. “Magic is afoot with them. A lot of times they are not on this earth; their thoughts are in never-never land. But in with the magic and the dreaming is that anger that old women have. I wanted to put that voice, that fever, that sort of animal yelp of self-preservation on the stage.”André Bishop, producing artistic director at Lincoln Center Theater, recalled a playwright with a unique style.“Tina was a deliciously idiosyncratic writer whose playful wit and sense of the absurd infused all her work,” he said in a statement. “She was delightful, as were the plays written in her highly distinctive voice.”Ms. Howe and Mr. Levy settled in Manhattan in 1973 and had most recently lived in the Bronx. Mr. Levy died last year. In addition to her son, Ms. Howe is survived by a daughter, Dara Rebell, and three grandchildren.In an Instagram post yesterday, the playwright Sarah Ruhl called Ms. Howe both a friend and a mentor.“One of the last times I visited her,” Ms. Ruhl wrote, “she said: ‘I still want to write. Women are still an undiscovered country.’”Kirsten Noyes contributed research. More

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      At a Rejuvenated Stratford, Second Chances for Plays and Theaters

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      A smash, a romp, a mess and a mystery are part of this Ontario festival’s 12-play repertoire after two seasons of retrenchment.It’s a joyful thing when a great play that seemed to be lost is found. How much more so when its greatness is confirmed and the play takes root in the soil of a new time.That was my experience seeing Alice Childress’s “Wedding Band” this summer at the Stratford Festival, in Ontario. Written in 1962, and first produced in New York by the Public Theater, in 1972, it had all but disappeared for 50 years when Theater for a New Audience, in Brooklyn, revived it in the spring of 2022. A revelation then, it is even more so now, not because Stratford’s production is better but because, by being excellent in a different way, it confirms the play’s vitality.Second comings are crucial to the restocking and refreshing of the dramatic repertoire; a work may be praised at its premiere or when unearthed as a novelty but must be produced a second time before it can be produced 100 times. Helping new and rediscovered work through that bottleneck is one of the things the noncommercial theater does best.During the week I spent at Stratford last month I saw four plays (and two musicals, which I’ve written about already) that encompass the idea in various ways and to various ends. Two of the plays — “Wedding Band” and a rollicking “Much Ado About Nothing” — were revelations. Another, a “Richard II” set in the disco era, was a mixed-metaphor mess. And one, “Grand Magic,” a 1948 morsel of the Italian absurd, was a stylish mystification.At the same time, returning to the festival for my fifth visit in seven years — it and I were mostly shut down for the two worst Covid seasons — I was heartened by the second coming of the festival itself, and of its recently rebuilt theater, the Tom Patterson.“Wedding Band,” “Richard II” and “Grand Magic” all played at the Patterson, the only one of Stratford’s four theaters with an elongated thrust stage. That made it ideal for the claustrophobic intimacy of Childress’s play, in which a Black woman in South Carolina in 1918 (Antonette Rudder) and the white man who is her husband in all but the law (Cyrus Lane) find the world in which they can share their lives shrinking, eventually to nothing.It was always a tragedy for the couple and, by implication, the country, whose attempts to encompass all races in a loving union have been notably fitful and remain unfinished. But the director Sam White’s production unexpectedly adds another layer of tragedy. Her staging emphasizes the hard-won pleasures of the central relationship, so that something valuable is felt to be lost when the world intervenes. But distinctively it also suggests the tragedy of the white characters — especially the man’s mother and sister — who are nominally the villains.When I saw the play in Brooklyn, those women were brilliantly rendered grotesques. As played here by Lucy Peacock and Maev Beaty, they are no longer monsters though their behavior remains monstrous; we see how the tragedy of racism makes victims of everyone.The production of “Much Ado About Nothing,” with Maev Beaty as Beatrice and Graham Abbey as Benedick, preserves its original 16-century setting but puts the play in an overtly feminist frame.David HouIt is a pleasure of the repertory system, nearly extinct elsewhere in North America, that Beaty, so twisted and tortured in “Wedding Band,” was a witty and emotional Beatrice in “Much Ado” the night before. To my mind the best of Shakespeare’s comedies in balancing insight with laughs, “Much Ado” is frequently updated in various ways. Most recently in New York City, Kenny Leon set it in an upper-class Black suburb of Atlanta during a hypothetical Stacey Abrams campaign for president.At Stratford, the director Chris Abraham has left the original setting pretty much alone, though his version of 16th-century Sicily has a stronger than usual commedia dell’arte accent. (The pratfalls never stop.) Beaty’s Beatrice is notably more heartful than most, not so guarded about the love she feels for Benedick (Graham Abbey) despite their professed mutual disaffection. And Abbey’s Benedick, though sharp-tongued, is a superbly rendered goofball, an overgrown bro who doesn’t know how to get serious about what he wants.Purists shouldn’t mind any of that, but they will surely yelp about the addition of material, by the Canadian playwright Erin Shields, that puts the play in an overtly feminist frame. A new prologue, spoken by Beatrice in a reasonably supple pentameter, tells us, among other things, that in Elizabethan London, “nothing” was slang for “vagina,” thus altering the thrust of the play’s title. And in a revamped final scene, Shields bears down on the harm done to women by male paranoia, the cure for which must be liberation.Since that theme already underlies the play, it hardly needs the underlining; Abraham’s production gets to the same point quite handily on its own. Still, I found Shields’s additions droll, and possibly useful as a kind of welcome, for those not expecting such rutting from Shakespeare, to the three hours of frank sex talk, or at least sex puns, that have always been hiding there in plain sight.Stephen Jackman-Torkoff as Richard II in a production that transports the king to Studio 54-era New York for a celebration of what a program note calls queer Black “divinity.”David HouWhat’s hiding in Stratford’s “Richard II” is, alas, the play itself, so baroquely reframed you can no longer see it. As conceived and directed by Jillian Keiley — with interpolations from “Troilus and Cressida,” “Coriolanus,” “Much Ado” and the sonnets — the tragedy of the 14th-century English king has been phantasmagorically transported to Studio 54-era New York as a celebration of what a program note calls queer Black “divinity.” So Hotspur is a coked-up club kid and, yes, there’s oral sex in a hot tub. AIDS gets what seems to me to be a gratuitous cameo.The problem certainly isn’t the queer part of the mission statement. Many productions have explored the suggestion in the text that Richard (Stephen Jackman-Torkoff) and his cousin Aumerle (Emilio Vieira) were lovers, and that their connection helped lead to the king’s downfall in a court that would have seen that relationship as a sign of his unfitness. And surely in the age of “Bridgerton” we’re excited rather than scandalized by the casting of Black actors in roles previously played only by white ones.The problem is the cultural metaphor that Keiley and Brad Fraser, who did the adaptation, have chosen to superimpose on a history play. The first of a tetralogy telling the “sad stories of the death of kings,” “Richard II” is fundamentally about personal flaws that become political disasters. Celebrating those flaws as fabulousness confuses the issue whichever way you look at it. Was Richard a martyr to a movement in the future? Does the ecstasy of gayness make for bad governance?It did not help, on the Patterson’s extraordinarily long and narrow thrust, with audiences banked closely on three sides, that the actors were staged so densely and busily you often could not grasp what was going on.Geraint Wyn Davies as a washed-up magician, with Sarah Orenstein, in the premiere of a new translation of “Grand Magic.”David HouThat wasn’t a problem for Antoni Cimolino, the festival’s artistic director and a primary force behind the building of the new theater. His production of Eduardo de Filippo’s “Grand Magic,” on the same stage as “Richard II,” is flat-out gorgeous — sets, costumes, music, everything — and always legible.If only the play itself were. The world premiere translation (by John Murrell and Donato Santeramo) is clean and colloquial, but the story of a washed-up magician (Geraint Wyn Davies) working scams on customers at a Neapolitan resort is nevertheless as hard to follow as one of his tricks. Like “Much Ado,” it turns on a husband’s overweening jealousy, and his wife’s need to liberate herself, in this case with the help of a disappearing act.Yet the play finally isn’t very interested in its story or even its characters except as vehicles for big ideas about identity and illusion. Playgoers drawn in by the captivating mise-en-scène may soon feel hoodwinked by the flood of abstractions. As a play, it’s its own disappearing act.I don’t know what will happen to “Grand Magic” next; I barely know what happened during it. But sorting work for the future can sometimes mean letting it go. Re-creation is a constant winnowing, but also, more happily, a constant expansion. “Wedding Band” — and Stratford itself, nearly back to its prepandemic capacity — will both be part of that.Stratford FestivalIn repertory, with staggered closing dates through Oct. 27, at the Stratford Festival, Stratford, Ontario; stratfordfestival.ca. More

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      Hitting Theater Hard: The Loss of Subscribers Who Went to Everything

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      The subscription model, in which theatergoers buy a season’s worth of shows at a time, had long been waning, but it fell off a cliff during the pandemic.As a group of stagehands assembled train cars for the set of “Murder on the Orient Express,” Ken Martin looked grimly at his email. His first year as artistic director at the Clarence Brown Theater in Knoxville, Tenn., was coming to an end, and the theater had missed its income goals by several hundred thousand dollars, largely because it had lost about half its subscribers since the start of the pandemic.“I’ve already had to tear up one show, because of a combination of cost and I don’t think it’s going to sell,” he said. “I’m in the same boat as a lot of theater companies: How do I get the audience back, and once I get them in the door, how do I keep them for the next show?”The nonprofit theater world’s industrywide crisis, which has led to closings, layoffs and a reduction in the number of shows being staged, is being exacerbated by a steep drop in the number of people who buy theater subscriptions, in which they pay upfront to see most or all of a season’s shows. The once-lucrative subscription model had been waning for years, but it has fallen off a cliff since the pandemic struck.It is happening across the nation. Seattle’s 5th Avenue Theater had 13,566 subscribers last season, down from 19,770 before the pandemic. In Atlanta, the Alliance Theater ended last season with 3,208, down from a prepandemic 5,086, while Northlight Theater, in Skokie, Ill., is at about 3,200, down from 5,700.Theaters are losing people like Joanne Guerriero, 61, who dropped her subscription to Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, N.J., after realizing she only liked some of the productions there, and would rather be more selective about when and where she saw shows.“We haven’t missed it,” she said, “which is unfortunate, I suppose, for them.”Subscribers were long the lifeblood of many performing arts organizations — a reliable income stream, and a guarantee that many seats would be filled. The pandemic hastened their disappearance for a number of reasons, according to interviews with theater executives around the country and theatergoers who let their subscriptions lapse. Many longtime subscribers simply got out of the habit while theaters were closed. Others grew to appreciate the ease and flexibility of streamed entertainment at home. Some found the recent programming too didactic. And the slow return to offices meant fewer people were commuting into the downtown areas where regional theaters are often located.Facing a precipitous post-pandemic drop in subscriptions, the Clarence Brown Theater is trying to appeal to new subscribers with a populist lineup of shows this season.Jessica Tezak for The New York TimesMany artistic leaders believe the change is permanent.“The strategic conversation is no longer ‘What version of a membership brochure is going to bring in more members,’ but how do we replace that revenue, and replenish the relationship with audiences,” said Jeremy Blocker, the executive director of New York Theater Workshop, an Off Broadway nonprofit that has seen its average number of members (its term for subscribers) drop by 50 percent since before the pandemic.Why do subscribers matter?“No. 1, it reduces your cost of marketing hugely — you’re selling three or five tickets for the cost of one,” said Michael M. Kaiser, the chairman of the DeVos Institute of Arts Management at the University of Maryland. “No. 2, you get the cash up front, which helps fund the rehearsal period and the producing period. And No. 3, subscriptions give you artistic flexibility — if people are willing to buy all the shows, some subset of the total can be less familiar and more challenging, but if you don’t have subscribers, every production is sold on its own merits, and that makes taking artistic risk much more difficult.”There’s also a strong connection between subscriptions and contributions. “Most donors are subscribers,” said Maggie Mancinelli-Cahill, the producing artistic director of Capital Repertory Theater in Albany, N.Y., “so there’s a cycle here.”Theaters are simultaneously trying to retain — or reclaim — subscribers, and also reduce their dependence on them. Many are experimenting with ways to make subscriptions more flexible, or more attractive, but also seeing an upside in the need to find new patrons.“For some theaters, a reliance on an existing homogeneous group of patrons has really shaped the work they’re doing,” said Erica Ezold, managing director of People’s Light, a nonprofit theater in Malvern, Pa. “Ultimately it’s going to be really positive to be not as reliant on subscriber income and have greater diversity in our audiences.”“I’m in the same boat as a lot of theater companies: How do I get the audience back, and once I get them in the door, how do I keep them for the next show?” said Ken Martin, artistic director of the Clarence Brown Theater.Jessica Tezak for The New York TimesProgramming is clearly on the mind of lapsed subscribers around the country. Even as subscriptions have fallen sharply at regional nonprofits whose mission is to develop new voices and present noncommercial work, they have remained steadier at venues that present touring Broadway shows with highly recognizable titles.“There’s so much going on with the ‘ought-to-see-this-because-you’re-going-to-be-taught-a-lesson’ stuff, and I’m OK with that, but part of me thinks we’re going a little overboard, and I need to have some fun,” said Melissa Ortuno, 61, of Queens. She describes herself as a frequent theatergoer — she has already seen 17 shows this year — but finds herself now preferring to purchase tickets for individual shows, rather than subscriptions. “I want to take a shot, but I don’t want to be dictated to. And this way I can buy what I want.”But there are other reasons subscribers have stepped away, including age. “We’re all old, that’s the problem,” said Happy Shipley, 77, of Erwinna, Pa., who decided to renew her subscription at the Bucks County Playhouse, but sees others making a different choice. “Many of them don’t stay up late anymore; they’re anxious about parking, walking, crime, public transportation, increased need of restrooms, you name it.”Arts administrators say that many people who were previously frequent theatergoers remain fans of the art form, but now attend less frequently, a phenomenon confirmed in interviews with supersubscribers — culture vultures who had multiple subscriptions — who say they are scaling back.Lisa-Karyn Davidoff, 63, of Manhattan, subscribed to 10 theaters before the pandemic; now she is far more choosy, citing a combination of health concerns and reassessed priorities. “If there’s a great cast or something I can’t miss,” she said, “I will go.” Rena Tobey, a 64-year-old New Yorker, had at least 12 theater subscriptions before the pandemic, and now has none, citing an ongoing concern about catching Covid in crowds, a new appreciation for television and streaming, and a sense that theaters are programming shows for people other than her. “For many years, I’ve pushed my boundaries, and I’m just at a point where I don’t want to do it anymore.”And Jeanne Ryan Wolfson, a 67-year-old from Rockville, Md., who had four performing arts subscriptions prepandemic, is just finding she likes an à la carte approach to ticket purchasing; she kept two of her previous subscriptions, dropped two, and added a new one. “I was paying a lot of money for the subscriptions, and some of the productions within those packages were a bit disappointing or might not have the wow factor I was looking for,” she said. “I think what I want to do is pick and choose.”Martin said the Knoxville theater’s staff has spent much of the summer discussing the drop in subscriber numbers — the theater had about 3,000 before the pandemic, but 1,500 last season — and hired a marketing firm to study the situation.Now he is picking productions carefully. He has set aside his dream of staging William Congreve’s “The Way of the World,” worried that the Restoration comedy wouldn’t find an audience. This season he’s starting with “Murder on the Orient Express,” which should do well, followed by a war horse — the annual production of “A Christmas Carol” — and “The Giver,” which Martin hopes will appeal to younger audiences because it was adapted from a popular young adult novel.The Clarence Brown Theater, like about a dozen other professional theaters around the country, is affiliated with a university (the University of Tennessee) which provides it with some financial support.Jessica Tezak for The New York TimesThen comes “Kinky Boots,” the kind of uplifting musical comedy many of today’s audiences seem to want. (“Kinky Boots,” with a plot that involves drag queens, also makes a statement for a theater in Tennessee, where lawmakers have attempted to restrict drag shows.) There will be more adventurous productions, but in a smaller theater: “The Moors” by Jen Silverman, and “Anon(ymous)” by Naomi Iizuka.But selling tickets show by show, instead of as a package, is challenging and expensive.“It takes three times as much money, time and effort to bring in someone new,” said Tom Cervone, the theater’s managing director. He said the theater is trying everything it can — print advertising, public radio sponsorships, social media posts, plus appearances at local street fairs and festivals where the theater’s staff will hand out brochures and swag (branded train whistles to promote “Murder on the Orient Express,” for example) while trying to persuade passers-by to come see a show.The theater, which is on the flagship campus of the University of Tennessee, is less dependent than some on ticket revenue, because, like a number of other regional nonprofits, it is affiliated with a university that subsidizes its operations. Still, the money it earns from ticket sales is essential to balancing the budget.“It’s been scary some days,” Cervone said, “like, where is everybody?” More

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      Patti LuPone Performs on Fire Island for Her Most Ardent Fans

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      Last weekend on Fire Island in New York, far from the bright lights of Broadway, Patti LuPone performed at the Ice Palace nightclub for some of her most adoring fans. These die-hards, sometimes called LuPonettes, included a man who had seen Ms. LuPone in the 1979 production of “Evita” and another who had a caricature of her tattooed on his back.Ben Rimalower, who arrived hours before doors opened, stood at the front of the line. “I first fell in love with Patti when I saw the ‘Evita’ commercial,” he said. “I’ve now seen her live hundreds of times, but never on Fire Island. Nowhere else will Patti get an audience that understands her like here.”Opened in the 1970s, the Ice Palace is an institution in Cherry Grove, a Fire Island hamlet known as a summer haven for New York’s gay community. In addition to its Friday night Underwear Party, its stage has hosted Chita Rivera, Liza Minnelli and Alan Cumming.“Patti has played the greatest venues in the world, but for her to play here it’s about connecting with her most fervent fan base,” the club’s co-owner, Daniel Nardicio, said. “Her fans will scream and cry for her here.”Ms. LuPone, 74, put on two sold-out performances of “Songs from a Hat,” in which she sings tunes plucked at random. Accompanied on a white piano by her musical director, Joseph Thalken, she gave her all to staples like “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” and “Meadowlark.” When she did the Sondheim number “I Never Do Anything Twice,” she brandished a riding crop.In the edited interviews below, her fans reflected on why they can never get enough LuPone.Jack SwerdlinAccountantJames Emmerman for The New York TimesWhy do you love her? I’m a fellow Long Island girl, just like Patti. Her power as a performer is so unattainable that you can’t help but be in awe.When did you first see her live? It should have been when I was 12. I still hold a grudge against my family. My parents took my sister to see “Gypsy” for her Sweet 16, but they didn’t bring me because I was too small. My mom told me I have to get over it. I told her, “I will never get over it.”Quinto OttActorJames Emmerman for The New York TimesWhy do you love Patti? Because she’s an ally to us in a way others are not. Lots of celebrities are part of the battle, but she’s been with us a long time. For an artist like Patti to come out here and do a show for us at the Ice Palace, that says something about her allegiances.If you could spend a day with Patti, what would you do? I’d love to sit and have cocktails with her and Mandy Patinkin. Just to listen to the two of them talk. About anything.Austin TracyBartender and playwrightJames Emmerman for The New York TimesWhat’s the story behind your tattoo? Years ago, I decided I wanted to cover myself with the divas I love, and I’ve been adding Broadway legends to my back ever since. This Patti is from “The Baker’s Wife.” I’ve also got Liza Minnelli and Elaine Stritch.Daniel NardicioNightlife promoterJames Emmerman for The New York TimesHow did this show come about? We basically wooed her to come out here and eventually she said yes. Sure, we have the famous Underwear Party, but we also have greats like Liza Minnelli and Chita Rivera here. Gay men have a deep relationship with these women, so they’re always appreciative to see them, and that’s why these women are willing to come out here and do these shows at the Ice Palace.Lynda MarcheseRetired astrophysicistJames Emmerman for The New York TimesWhen did you first see her live? I saw her do “Evita” years ago and I was mesmerized. I don’t even like musicals. I’m not like the guys here.What do you make of her performing here? This place started out as a sea shack for good times by the ocean. Everyone was doing poppers and having fun. But Cherry Grove has been changing. Lots of straight people from the city have been buying places here, changing our community’s culture.Josh PreteWhiskey salesmanJames Emmerman for The New York TimesAny song you’d like to hear? Anything from “Sunset Boulevard.” It holds a special place for LuPone fans because Patti was infamously fired from her role and replaced with Glenn Close. So hearing Patti sing anything from it would be special and rare.Ben RimalowerCabaret directorJames Emmerman for The New York TimesWhy do you love Patti? Her ferocity. Everyone throws that term around now but she’s the real thing. She’s a tiger. Patti would cut you. Whereas Minnelli is there to delight, Patti commands you and makes you afraid of what you might miss if you take your eyes off her for even one second.If you could spend a day with Patti, what would you do? I wish a reality television show camera followed her. I would watch it all day.Adam FeldmanTheater criticJames Emmerman for The New York TimesWhy do you love Patti? Because her voice is a unique musical instrument and she’s maintained it to an astonishing degree. When other stars do cabaret shows they can sound diminished, but not Patti. She’s also old-school in a way that Broadway doesn’t reward so much anymore. She plays by her own rules.Yvonne LaVialeRetired property managerJames Emmerman for The New York TimesAny tune you’d like to hear? “The Ladies Who Lunch.” There’s no one like Elaine Stritch, but Patti is the only one who can sing it with the same feel as Stritch.Michael Fisher and Gary SacksCherry Grove residentsJames Emmerman for The New York TimesYou’re longtime Cherry Grove residents. What do you make of Patti’s playing here?M.F.: The Ice Palace is where gay men used to come to discover their sexuality. It only makes sense for Patti to play here, to perform for her most devoted following.G.S.: We love Patti and it’s beautiful to see her come to our community. I hope she sings “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina.” Because when she sings that, I want to cry. More

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      Jeff Daniels Unwinds With Hidden-Camera TV

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      The actor, musician and playwright has made a career out of finding ways to stay creative between “Dumb and Dumber” and “To Kill a Mockingbird.”Jeff Daniels has accomplished a lot battling boredom.Before he moved to New York in 1976, he bought a guitar to play when he wasn’t getting work. After he moved back to Michigan in the 1980s, he started getting bored between movie jobs, so he formed the Purple Rose Theater Company. That’s why today, in addition to being an actor known for portraying Atticus Finch on Broadway and Harry Dunne in “Dumb and Dumber,” Daniels, 68, is an accomplished musician and playwright who sometimes performs a one-man musical at a theater he helped bring to life.“Alive and Well Enough,” his 12-episode audio memoir that Audible plans to release Sept. 7, incorporates skits, bits, songs and stories from his career. It leans heavily on his passion for the work, regardless of whether it resonates on the level of his role in the 1983 film “Terms of Endearment.”“The rush is between action and cut, when you’re doing it,” Daniels said in a phone interview this month. “The curtain call has always been kind of a silent movie for me. I walk out and I see them, I hear them, but that’s not the climax. That’s not what happened. For me, by that point, it’s over.”Daniels talked about pursuing his other endeavors — creative and athletic — while avoiding ticks. These are edited excerpts from the conversation and an email.1‘The Beatles: Get Back’I loved every minute of Peter Jackson’s documentary. Seeing the band’s creative process, to watch people of that caliber face the same mountain that everybody else does — whether they’re writing a song or a play or a musical or a poem — was affirming.2Golf in the BackyardDuring Covid, when we all had to kind of bunker, our family put together a golf course on our property. We play with plastic balls, and we each use one club. We’ve got a creek and a pond and some things you have to work around. But you never have a problem getting a tee time, and there’s never a slow foursome in front of you.3My KindleI love the portable library aspect of it, and I read more because of it. I recently read “Grinning at the Edge,” Paul Allen’s biography of the playwright Alan Ayckbourn. And I’ve got Rick Rubin’s “The Creative Act” queued up now.4Detroit TigersThey’re young and they’re talented and they’re getting better every season. For me, it’s fascinating to watch the management manage the talent and the contracts and who you need. It’s the same uniforms, the same game, the same field, and yet the players change. The cast changes. It’s this living, breathing thing that’s evolving.5Clearing Your Head in the WoodsThings get unlocked when you’re walking or biking through the woods. If you’re stuck on something, then just go for a bike ride and wait. Across the street from my house, there’s a state recreation area. It’s kind of like having 10,000 acres of your own, which you didn’t have to pay for. It’s terrific, especially in the winter when there aren’t any ticks.6Circle RepWhen I went to Circle Rep Off Broadway in the 1970s, they had a whole bunch of playwrights there, including Lanford Wilson and John Bishop. That’s where I fell in love with that kind of theater — live, creating, new play stuff. I wanted to create that creative place at Purple Rose Theater Company, where I’m surrounded by like-minded people who have to do this thing because it’s what we do.7‘Impractical Jokers’When I was doing “To Kill a Mockingbird” on Broadway, I would come back to my apartment and turn on the hidden-camera show “Impractical Jokers” to wind down after a show. Whatever Atticus Finch might’ve watched if he were around, it probably wouldn’t have been “Impractical Jokers.” It was a way to disconnect from the show and just unplug. And the guys just crack me up.8New York CityI go to New York for the theater — to see it and be in it — but also to remind myself of who I am. It’s all about the imagination and the art and the creativity, and imagining all those writers who were in New York and kicking around. It’s a good place for me to write.9My GuitarFor my entire career, an acoustic guitar has kept me creatively alive. Over the past 20 years, I’ve played in clubs all over the country, but my regular gig is on my porch looking out at the lake.10Writing, Even When It’s HardThere’s a battle to it. But when it happens, when you unlock it and that thing launches you toward your ending in a way that you never saw coming, that’s the fireworks. Writing that line that’s going to end the scene, and you close your laptop because you’re going to take the rest of the day off, that’s what keeps you going. You hang onto those euphoric moments. More