Theater

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      Stephen Gould, Tenor Best Known for Tackling Wagner, Dies at 61

      by

      He was especially acclaimed for his performances at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany. As his voice developed, he once said, so did his view of how and why to deploy it. Stephen Gould, a tenor who after a detour into musical theater established himself as a leading interpreter of the operas of Richard Wagner in performances at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany and elsewhere, died on Tuesday in Chesapeake, Va. He was 61.His death was confirmed by his longtime agent, Stephanie Ammann. Early this month Mr. Gould announced on his website that he had bile duct cancer, that the disease was terminal and that he was retiring from singing.The Bayreuth Festival paid tribute to him on its website after that announcement.“Stephen Gould was, with interruptions, one of the mainstays of the Bayreuth Festival from 2004 to 2022,” the festival’s post said. “Highly esteemed by audiences, the press and within the festival family, he was rightly dubbed the ‘Wagner Marathon Man’ and thrilled audiences with his distinctive voice and condition in countless performances.”Mr. Gould established himself as a reliable heldentenor, a singer who takes on heroic roles, mostly in the German repertory, requiring a particularly powerful voice. Such roles are among the most demanding in opera.Mr. Gould in the title role of “Tannhäuser” at the Bayreuth Festival in 2004, with Roman Trekel as Wolfram. “This was his Bayreuth debut,” one critic wrote, “and by the end of the evening he had become a festival favorite.”Jochen Quast/European Pressphoto AgencyHe first appeared at Bayreuth in 2004, performing the title role in Wagner’s “Tannhäuser,” a production that dazzled Olin Chism of The Dallas Morning News.“One of the heroes was American tenor Stephen Gould, who sang the title character,” Mr. Chism wrote. “This was his Bayreuth debut, and by the end of the evening he had become a festival favorite.”He remained so over the next 18 years, performing in 20 Bayreuth productions; he regularly sang the title role in “Siegfried” and Tristan in “Tristan und Isolde.” He also performed in leading opera houses around the world, including with the Metropolitan Opera, where he made his debut in 2010 as Erik, the hunter, in Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman.”Mr. Gould knew that the major roles he undertook required a certain maturity.“Everyone wants their heroes to be young and vibrant and look like Brad Pitt in his early days,” he said in a 2019 interview with the German news outlet Deutsche Welle. “But you have to give the voice time to develop.”As his voice developed, he noted in the same interview, so did his view of how and why he was deploying it.Mr. Gould as Tristan and Nina Stemme as Isolde in a production of “Tristan und Isolde” at the Royal Opera House in London in 2014.Robbie Jack/Corbis, via Getty Images“I don’t try to sing for the public anymore,” he said. “I did when I was younger, of course. You want to be popular, you want the critics to love you, you want your career to go high and all of that. Now when I’m onstage, what I enjoy most is discovering something for myself.”Stephen Grady Gould was born on Jan. 24, 1962, in Roanoke, Va. He studied at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston before joining Lyric Opera of Chicago’s developmental program for young artists, the Center for American Artists. He originally imagined himself as a baritone before switching to tenor.He was put to the test at age 27 when he had to substitute for Chris Merritt in the demanding role of Argirio in Gioachino Rossini’s “Tancredi” when Mr. Merritt became ill during a run in Los Angeles, where the opera was being staged jointly by Lyric Opera and the Los Angeles Music Center Opera.Mr. Gould in the Royal Opera’s production of Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s “Die Tote Stadt” in 2009.Robbie Jack/Corbis, via Getty Images“He gamely tackled the patriarchal ardors of Argirio with a light, often pinched voice and reasonable dramatic presence within the static staging context,” John Henken wrote in The Los Angeles Times. “The stratospheric climaxes were forced out as high-pressure bleats, and initially much of the passage work was smeared. But he seemed to gain strength and composure, and more than held his own in the big Act II duet with Marilyn Horne in the title role.”Soon after, on what he said was a whim, he auditioned for the national touring company of “The Phantom of the Opera” and was cast. He spent several years with that troupe, performing various roles, though not either of the male leads.“When I finished with musicals, I just was going to quit,” he said in 2019, “but I wanted to give it one more chance and met a teacher from the Metropolitan Opera who told me that I’d been singing incorrectly from the very beginning.”He rededicated himself to opera, working on his technique and growing into the Wagnerian roles for which he became best known.“By then,” he said, “I was at the right age to actually sing Wagner. Too many singers today are pushed into their big Wagnerian roles in their 20s.”Information about Mr. Gould’s survivors was not immediately available. More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Job’ Review: A Stress Test That Feels Like It’s Life or Death

      by

      In Max Wolf Friedlich’s nimble play, a crisis therapist tries to connect with a tech worker who is broken by her profession.“Job,” a tight, 80-minute play by Max Wolf Friedlich, is filled with so many ideas that it seems to expand beyond the walls of the tiny SoHo Playhouse where it opened this week. But claustrophobia sets in as, throughout one session, a young patient and an older hippie crisis therapist confront the turbulence of life in the belly of the cyber-beast.As the play opens, the therapist, Loyd (Peter Friedman), is trying to soothe the agitated Jane (Sydney Lemmon), who is pointing a gun at his head. Stress has gotten the better of her, culminating in a smartphone-era calamity: A video of her breakdown at work went viral. No longer feeling safe and still clearly unwell, Jane nevertheless has an industrial-grade resolve to return to her job at a Bay Area tech behemoth. This psychological evaluation will determine if that’s possible.Loyd, quietly pleased by his reputation for handling lost-cause cases, begins to tease out her anxieties, but soon finds Jane’s preoccupations with the many kinds of violence committed worldwide a tough web to untangle — and to distance himself from.As Jane, Lemmon captures the frenetic essence of a person overwhelmed, and ultimately paralyzed, by all the live-streamed killings playing repeatedly across a seemingly indifferent internet. Though a victim of her industry’s grind mentality, Jane doesn’t come off as a martyr: Her acid-tongued clapbacks and finger-pointing hardly feel excusable.Lemmon searingly personifies her character’s contradictions on her own, yet the production, nimbly directed by Michael Herwitz, also dips into her overstimulated psyche, as when computer clicks trigger rapid successions of TikTok-like sensory overload, with Jessie Char and Maxwell Neely-Cohen’s sound design blasting cacophonous drilling noises and porn sounds.Though Friedman’s character is the more passive one, he imbues Loyd’s counterarguments with a genuine passion — intensely talking with Jane about our uneasy relationships to social justice, family, personal fulfillment and trauma in the cyber age.As they unveil more about themselves, a late revelation nearly undoes the play by flattening the open-ended ethical questions it had so appealingly been posing. The play has to wrap up somehow, but this abrupt shift lands us in an entirely different genre.Friedlich’s clever updating of the generational-divide format is not undermined by the play’s thematic vastness. And it’s refreshing to see characters who are not afraid of their intellect, or feel the need to condescend by slowing down their high-speed streams of life-or-death consciousness.JobThrough Oct. 15 at SoHo Playhouse, Manhattan; sohoplayhouse.com. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Theater

      Review: Andrew Scott Plays Every Part in ‘Vanya.’ Why?

      by

      In London, transforming Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” into a one-man show is an impressive feat, but it costs the play its pathos.Most of us will live unfulfilled lives: This brutal and eternal truth has accounted for the enduring appeal of Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” since it was first staged by Konstantin Stanislavski in Moscow in 1899. An ambitious new adaptation of this bleakly funny play looks to tease out its essence by stripping it down to its barest elements.“Vanya,” adapted by Simon Stephens and directed by Sam Yates, runs at the Duke of York’s Theater, in London, through Oct. 21, and features Andrew Scott — best known for playing the forbidden love interest in the hit TV series, “Fleabag” — in all eight roles. Scott gives an accomplished and engaging performance, but the one-man-show format throws up challenges, and ultimately doesn’t quite do justice to the play’s moral complexity and emotional resonance.Small details have been changed here and there, but the contours of the story are familiar. Alexander, an aging and infirm filmmaker (a professor in the original play), returns to the country estate that has funded his cosmopolitan lifestyle, accompanied by his beautiful and much younger second wife, Helena. He hangs out with his middle-aged brother-in-law, Ivan (the titular Vanya), who has managed the estate for many years; his former mother-in-law, Elizabeth; his daughter, Sonia; and receives frequent visits from a doctor, Michael.Regrets and frustrations abound. Alexander is acutely conscious that his powers are waning; Ivan feels he has wasted his potential by eking out an existence as a rural dogsbody, rather than chasing his dreams; Sonia has an intense crush on Michael, who only has eyes for Helena. In short, everyone is miserable. The only solace comes in the form of vodka.Scott flits between the various parts by nimbly modulating his voice and bearing. If a certain amount of realism is sacrificed — to help orientate the audience, the characters’ names are mentioned more frequently than is natural, and the female characters occasionally come off a bit campy — it is nonetheless an impressive feat.“Vanya,” is a stripped down version of Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya,” adapted by Simon Stephens and directed by Sam Yates.Marc BrennerSometimes, when switching from one character to the next, Scott will shoot the audience a knowing look as he skips to another point a few feet away, channeling the tongue-in-cheek demeanor of a clown or pantomime artist. The conceit is played for laughs at several points, such as when one relatively minor character pipes up for the first time about 15 minutes into the show, prompting another character to ask how long he’d been sitting there.It’s a lot to take on, and, perhaps inevitably, Scott bumps up against some limitations. He does a fine line in affable awkwardness — the coy half-smirks, pregnant pauses and knowing glances that so endeared him to viewers of “Fleabag” — but he really needs a foil. Without one, we have the strange, and somewhat dissatisfying, spectacle of a man flirting with himself.There is, moreover, an emotionally shallow quality to Scott’s onstage presence, a certain glassy inscrutability that suggests he’s a little too steeped in wry self-awareness to comfortably inhabit any other mode. He is great when rendering the human comedy of unrequited love, frustrated lust and drunken self-pity, but in the earnestly melancholic moments — this is Chekhov after all — the best he can serve up is an ironic facsimile of wistfulness.The set, designed by Rosanna Vize, is carefully calibrated to evoke nothing in particular: A laminate desk; a fiberboard door frame; a generic, possibly midcentury, kitchenette. Scott’s attire is likewise neutral. Even the play’s title has been stripped down. Everything is geared toward an experience of pure, no-frills theater, enabling the audience to commune directly with the actor and text.It’s a noble aim, but a question niggles away: What artistic benefit is derived from having a single actor play all the parts? I was reminded of the French avant-garde writers’ circle, Oulipo, whose members enjoyed subjecting themselves to technical constraints. One of them, Georges Perec, famously composed an entire novel without the letter “e”: an interesting thing to do, but what was the point?The end product is what counts, and in this instance, the play is not well served; if anything, its pathos is diluted. Constraint for its own sake is self-indulgence, and there’s a fine line between a conceit and a mere gimmick.VanyaThrough Oct. 21 at the Duke of York’s Theater, London; dukeofyorks.com. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      André Bishop Will Depart as Head of Lincoln Center Theater

      by

      His pending departure, in 2025, means that there are job openings for the top artistic positions at three of the four nonprofits operating Broadway theaters.André Bishop, the producing artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater, will step down in the spring of 2025, ending a 33-year run leading one of the nation’s most prestigious nonprofit theaters.The organization has under Bishop’s stewardship been a leading producer of grand Broadway revivals of Golden Age musicals, and has simultaneously committed itself to nurturing emerging artists by constructing a black box theater for that purpose on its rooftop.“I’m exhilarated and sad at the same time,” Bishop said in an interview. “I will have been here many, many years — almost half my life — and it’s time for someone new and fresh to come in and pick up where I left off and go into other directions and do other things if they want to.”Bishop, 74, said he is choosing to leave at the end of the 2024-25 season because that is when his current contract ends, and because that will allow him to join in that season’s celebrations of Lincoln Center Theater’s 40th anniversary.His decision means that there are job openings for the top positions at three of the four nonprofits with Broadway houses, portending potentially significant change, and uncertainty, in a key sector of the theater industry that has had almost no leadership turnover for decades. Nonprofit theaters, which pay lower artist wages than commercial productions and are funded by philanthropy as well as box office sales, have become an important part of the Broadway ecosystem; Lincoln Center Theater has been able to stage musicals on a larger scale than many commercial producers can afford.On Wednesday, Carole Rothman, the president and artistic director of Second Stage Theater, said that after 45 years she would be leaving that institution, which she co-founded; Second Stage operates the Helen Hayes Theater on Broadway. And Roundabout Theater Company currently has an interim artistic director following the death in April of Todd Haimes, who led that organization for four decades; Roundabout operates three Broadway houses, including the American Airlines, the Stephen Sondheim and Studio 54.Lincoln Center Theater, which is a resident organization at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, has three stages of varying sizes, and has produced a wide variety of work. The company currently has an annual budget of $34.5 million and 55 full-time employees; Bishop received $783,191 in total compensation during fiscal 2022, according to an I.R.S. filing.The Vivian Beaumont Theater, where Lincoln Center Theater has staged Broadway revivals of “Camelot,” “South Pacific,” “The King and I” and “My Fair Lady,” is the third-largest stage in New York, after Radio City Music Hall and the Metropolitan Opera; it also features a thrust configuration that is quite rare on Broadway.When asked about the productions he was proudest of he named “The Coast of Utopia,” Tom Stoppard’s trilogy about 19th-century Russian intellectuals, which began running in 2006 and won the 2007 Tony Award for best play. Lincoln Center Theater’s other Tony-winning productions during Bishop’s tenure include “Carousel,” “The Heiress,” “A Delicate Balance,” “Contact,” “Henry IV,” “Awake and Sing,” “South Pacific,” “War Horse,” “The King and I” and “Oslo.”This season Lincoln Center Theater is planning to stage a Broadway revival of “Uncle Vanya,” with a new translation by Heidi Schreck; an Off Broadway production of “The Gardens of Anuncia,” a new musical by Michael John LaChiusa; and an Off Off Broadway production of “Daphne,” a new play by Renae Simone Jarrett. Bishop also plans, before he leaves, to produce new plays by J.T. Rogers and Ayad Akhtar, and a world premiere musical.“I’m proud of the variety of plays and musicals that we’ve done, from young experimental shows to well-known revivals,” Bishop said. He added that the theater is financially healthy and rebounding from the pandemic; although it has had fewer productions since the pandemic shutdown, he said he expected full-strength seasons ahead. “I think the future is glorious — we have an incredible staff and a very strong board and I see nothing but good things ahead.”Bishop arrived at Lincoln Center Theater in 1992 as artistic director, and he became producing artistic director in 2013. He had previously spent 16 years at a smaller Off Broadway nonprofit theater, Playwrights Horizons, where he served as artistic director for a decade.The Lincoln Center Theater board will conduct a search for Bishop’s successor. More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Lunar Eclipse’ Review: A Dark, Cloudy Night of the Soul

      by

      In Donald Margulies’s heavy-handed new play, Reed Birney is terrific as a farmer forced by his wife, played by Karen Allen, to face his grief.“We realize he’s crying” must be among the scariest stage directions an actor could find at the top of a script. How do you get from zero to tears with no context?That’s the challenge Donald Margulies puts before the actor playing George in “Lunar Eclipse,” his new two-character play at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Mass. And wait, it gets harder. As we will soon learn, George, a Midwestern farmer in late middle age, is stony and unsentimental, the opposite of a weeper. Yet as the lights slowly rise on his dark night of the soul, there he is anyway: a heaving, racking torrent of sobs.Is it thoughtless to say how lucky we are that the heaving and racking come from Reed Birney?It’s certainly lucky for Margulies and his somewhat overripe tear-jerker, which opened on Sunday. Often threatening to drown in a generalized wetness, the play benefits immensely from the detail and discipline of Birney’s superb performance. He doesn’t so much produce emotions as shed them.After nearly 50 years onstage, that’s no surprise; he’s won Obie, Drama Desk and Tony awards for his no-nonsense, full-sized approach, in which acting is the side effect of his insight and inhabitation of character. What’s surprising, and a bit scary, is that he has played such a variety of men so vividly: a vile journalist, a penitent philanderer, a conniving cross-dresser. How many feelings does he have inside him?And how many ways of turning them off? As soon as George’s wife, Em, arrives, the tears and all other signs of vulnerability get ruthlessly shut down. George is so ornery and curt that even after 50 years or so of marriage, Em (Karen Allen) must dance around him in search of some opening to his secret grief. Emotional intelligence has turned her into a spelunker.If you do not know such pairs from real life, you probably know them from the theater. “On Golden Pond” and “The Gin Game” both offer variations on the “crusty old man bickering with woman who knows better” template. Also like “Lunar Eclipse,” those plays try to corral their rambling contents within the bounds of a thematic fence: the months of a summer, the deals of a deck.Even more heavy-handedly, “Lunar Eclipse” uses the phases of planetary alignment as both plot and poetics. Its seven scenes (followed by a coda) are called “stages” and are described in pedantic voice-overs: “Stage 1. Moon enters penumbra. Penumbral shadow appears.”The framing adds nothing, in fact detracting from a story that could stand to be tighter and better grounded in reality. Margulies, so expert with urbane, artistic and moneyed characters — he won a Pulitzer Prize for “Dinner With Friends” and was a finalist for “Sight Unseen” and “Collected Stories” — is not as convincing with farm folk. (“Wild Turkey does a mighty fine job keeping you warm,” George says as if he were on “Hee Haw.”) I had to nod in agreement when I read a program note admitting that “astronomical liberties have been taken for dramatic purposes.”Astronomical in both senses. Yet despite the liberties, “Lunar Eclipse” remains affecting when its staging, by James Warwick, gets granular. In the middle of the night on which it takes place, George has come to a “sacred” spot on his farm (the needlessly rotating set is by John Musall) to watch the earth’s shadow eat up the moon. Em has followed him there with “provisions”: blankets he does not want and hot chocolate he reluctantly accepts only when she pours it into his tin cup of bourbon. She carefully applies bug spray to the neatly turned cuffs of her jeans (costumes by Christina Beam); he swats insects from his face throughout (crickets by the sound designer Nathan Leigh).These concrete details operate in helpful contrast to the back story revealed at regular intervals as the eclipse progresses over the next 90 minutes. We learn of beloved dogs buried nearby. Of a troubled sore-spot of a son. And of a new fear: that the early signs of dementia are beginning to cloud George’s mind.That the night is likewise too cloudy for a perfect viewing seems apt. (The very dim lighting is by James McNamara.) We see pretty well into George by observing his resistances, but Em, despite Allen’s astute performance, is underwritten and mostly reactive. Her one expressed grief, about a tragedy now years in the past, cannot stand up to George’s million pesky, present annoyances.Perhaps that’s Margulies’s point — and a way of making meaning of the eclipse, which otherwise seems like a McGuffin. “This may come as a shock to you,” George says with his usual asperity. “Even though we’ve been married forever, we’re two separate people.”In other words: We cannot know each other. Marriage, even if not loveless, is not equal. As with planets and moons, one spouse generally revolves around the other, doing more work and yet, come crunchtime, left in the obliterating shadow.Lunar EclipseThrough Oct. 22 at Shakespeare & Company, Lenox, Mass.; shakespeare.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      ‘9 Kinds of Silence’ Review: A Soldier’s Battle Is Within

      by

      In Abhishek Majumdar’s tense play at 122CC Theater in Manhattan, every sound underscores what’s left unsaid after a shellshocked veteran’s homecoming.Waves crash and dogs howl beyond concrete walls, while inside a holding cell a rotary phone trills and typewriter keys lash at a sparsely filled page. There are few moments of quiet in “9 Kinds of Silence,” directed by the playwright Abhishek Majumdar, with original music and densely layered sound design by M. Florian Staab. In this tense parable about a soldier’s homecoming that opened at 122CC Theater in Manhattan on Monday night, every sound underscores what’s left unsaid.A clerical worker known as Mother, played by Hend Ayoub, fills the already-thick air with words. She is “training returning soldiers to belong,” in accordance with a government manual on her cluttered desk that encourages veterans to speak before they’re sent back into the arms of their own mothers. (Officials fear, we later learn, that these bottled-up vets will explode, posing a threat to their homeland.)Clammed up and shellshocked, her current case, known as Son, played by Joe Joseph, is slumped in a chair on the other side of a beat-up tarp that divides the room in two (the set and costumes are by Jian Jung). His eyes are obscured by dark glasses, his shoulders are hitched up to his ears and his arms are slung across his ribs in a limp embrace. Mother salutes this Son as a hero, but if this is his reward, it hardly seems worth the cost.Ayoub rises admirably to the challenge of playing opposite a character arrested by trauma, in what is, for a significant portion of the production’s 80 minutes, essentially a one-woman show. Her clerk leads the crumpled soldier in vocal exercises meant to reanimate his national fealty, including sounds of recognition (“aha!”) and different shades of laughter, a highlight of Ayoub’s performance. As the play progresses, she begins to question, at her own peril — and in a tenor that grows increasingly personal — the meaning of patriotic sacrifice.Majumdar casts his antiwar critique in familial terms; the militarized regime to which both Mother and Son are bound is figured as patriarchal. Though the play includes prayers in Arabic, and references to a spiritual prophet and a supreme leader, its geopolitical context is left deliberately vague.Mothers sending their sons into battle, and the physical and spiritual wounds inflicted on everyone in the process, is near universal territory. But in foregoing both character development and broader specifics of time and place, Majumdar winds up treading a muddy middle ground.The play’s observations about nationalism, faith and the human tolls of war feel remote and theoretical, despite the intimate scale. When it comes time to land an emotional punch, the impact here is muffled.9 Kinds of SilenceThrough Oct. 7 at 122 Community Arts Center, Manhattan; playco.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      Review: In Theresa Rebeck’s ‘Dig’, a Plant Shop Nurtures Weary Souls

      by

      Theresa Rebeck’s play, a Primary Stages production at 59E59 Theaters, is a beautifully acted dramedy exploring the truth and warped perceptions of it.Amid the thriving greenery of an indie plant shop called Dig, two living organisms are only tenuously clinging to survival.One is a neglected wreck of withering vegetation brought in for emergency care. The other is a woman huddled in the corner, her hood up to block out the world. She’s here with her father, Lou, who nearly killed that plant. But as he bickers amusingly with his old friend Roger, the kindly grump who owns the store, she is too bone-weary to engage.Her name is Megan, and one of the worst misfortunes has blanketed her in grief: the death of her little boy in a notorious accident, which the whole country knows was all her fault. Total strangers despise her for it, yet no one is blaming Megan more mercilessly than she is herself. After a suicide attempt, she is living with her father in the Ohio town where she grew up. So far, it isn’t going great.“I embarrass him,” she tells Roger after Lou steps out. Pre-empting any argument to the contrary, she adds: “The truth is the truth and if you try to get around it, it will come after you and take you down.”The truth and poisonously warped perceptions of it are major themes in Theresa Rebeck’s new play “Dig,” at 59E59 Theaters, and we’ll get to that. First let’s pause to run down the list of off-putting subjects mentioned so far: death of a child, grief, suicide.But this intelligent, compassionate, beautifully acted dramedy — directed by the playwright for Primary Stages — is not a downer. Rebeck has spiked her script with comedy, and enlisted a cast as nimble with laugh lines as with prickliness and pain.As Megan, Andrea Syglowski has a coiled, almost feral rage that snaps its tight leash more than once. Just watch her go after Molly (Mary Bacon), a chatty customer who has been trying to figure out why Megan looks so familiar. When the penny drops, Megan turns on her with a scorching intensity.Alongside mourning and self-reproach, repentance is a motif in Megan’s life; she is forever apologizing. But humor can coexist with all that, and in this hope-filled, distinctly non-Pollyanna-ish play, she is very funny, too.Swiftly feeling more comfortable at Dig than in her father’s house — Roger (Jeffrey Bean), an absolute geek for plants, has a nurturing vibe — she finagles her way into an unpaid job there, and flourishes a bit. (The set is by Christopher and Justin Swader.) Everett (Greg Keller), the stoner who is the shop’s only other employee, sees her as a rival for Roger’s esteem. And Megan nearly worships Roger, which Everett truly does not get.“No offense, but you’re like a larva,” she says. “You know, you’re like something that’s not even a bug yet. So I don’t actually expect you to understand.”One of the judgiest gossips in town, Everett cloaks aggressive cruelty in the guise of honesty. But he has Keller’s charisma and comic chops, so the audience loves him. In an Act II scene between Megan and Everett, he is faced with a choice so morally appalling that a bad decision could change everything we’ve thought about him. I have never felt an audience silently will a character to do the right thing the way it did in that moment.Hypocrisy and sexist double standards are fundamental to what Rebeck is contemplating in “Dig,” as feminist a play as any of her others. She is examining not just parental guilt — Lou (Triney Sandoval) feels this, too, about Megan — but also deeply ingrained notions about the sanctity of motherhood in particular, and the censoriousness that failing at it brings.Everett and the many others eager to condemn Megan think they know the truth about her son’s death. Even Lou holds her responsible, but he ought to listen to himself.“She was always a screw-up,” he tells Roger, “but never in a million years would anyone have believed that she could do something so grotesque.”Did she, though? Megan has taken the blame, heaped it on herself. She believes to her core that she deserves it.She confessed to the police. And no one dug any further: It is the mother’s fault.DigThrough Oct. 22 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

    • 100 Shares119 Views

      in Theater

      A Tiananmen Square Musical Worries About China’s Glare

      by

      The original lead actor and director withdrew from the Phoenix production of a show about the 1989 pro-democracy protests, a topic that China aggressively censors.When it was announced that Zachary Noah Piser would be playing the lead role in “Tiananmen: A New Musical,” he happened to be on a concert tour of five Chinese cities with a group of Broadway actors.One day later, Piser, who played the title role in “Dear Evan Hansen” on Broadway last year, posted a short statement on Instagram, where most of his posts are bright and colorful.This one featured just seven words set against a blank white backdrop: “I have withdrawn from the musical Tiananmen.”“It was very odd to me because it was one statement, and it’s not usually how things like this happen in our business,” said Marc Oka, a cast member who found out about Piser’s departure through the Aug. 25 post, which had comments disabled.Those involved with the “Tiananmen” musical, which premieres at the Phoenix Theater Company next month, are well aware that China aggressively censors discussions of the Tiananmen protests, in which Chinese troops killed hundreds if not thousands of pro-democracy student activists.Jason Rose, the musical’s lead producer, said Piser’s manager told him — without providing details — that the actor felt pressure to leave the show and to post on Instagram. The manager, Dave Brenner, denied saying that.“It was a decision he had to make and it was not an easy one,” Brenner said of Piser, declining to comment on why the actor quit a day after the public casting announcement. Piser also declined to comment.Since the show, which follows the account of two Chinese students during the 50 days of protests at Tiananmen Square, was optioned by Rose’s Quixote Productions two years ago, some members of its cast have been worried about how the Chinese authorities might respond.It is unclear exactly why Piser, who is Chinese American, decided to leave the show he was set to star in. But the show’s original director and at least one other cast member dropped out, Rose said, because of fears about the safety of family members in China. The Chinese embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.Darren Lee became the musical’s director after the first one dropped out because of concerns about his family’s safety.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesThe departures illustrate how frightening it can be for people with connections to China to bring attention to the 1989 protests in Beijing. The Chinese government continues to evade responsibility for the massacre and tries to eradicate any remembrance of the event — the brutal conclusion to weeks of demonstrations that had pierced the Communist Party’s facade of invincibility.“Even doing a regional production in Phoenix, Ariz., there is so much concern over the control and reach of the Chinese government that American actors are afraid to be involved in the show,” said Kennedy Kanagawa, who replaced Piser in “Tiananmen.”The show’s new director and choreographer, Darren Lee, who is Chinese American, said he accepted the job only after determining that he did not have direct relatives who might face retaliation from the Chinese government.“It was the first time where I’ve ever been in the position where I asked my parents whether or not they thought it was OK to take the show,” he said.“Tiananmen: A New Musical,” with a book by Scott Elmegreen and music and lyrics by Drew Fornarola, follows two fictional students at Beijing Normal University who are named after real students killed by the military. Initially, the students, Peiwen and XiaoLi, have contrasting perspectives on the protests, but they fall in love and witness history as tanks roll into the square and soldiers draw their guns.Chinese troops killed hundreds if not thousands of pro-democracy student activists during protests in 1989.Jeff Widener/Associated PressThe musical wrestles with the tension between the revolutionary act of remembering and the authoritarian attempts to erase history. In one of the closing scenes, set in the present day, XiaoXia, the sister of XiaoLi, lights a candle as part of a vigil remembering the protests. A soldier arrests her and snuffs out the flame.Earlier in the show, in a fictional monologue as his soldiers gun down protesters, Deng Xiaoping, China’s top leader at the time, says, “People will forget what we did here.”He adds: “At the edge of memory, who defines the truth? Me.”To this day, the Chinese government is vigilant about eliminating discussion of Tiananmen. The word remains one of the most censored topics in the country, second only to President Xi Jinping, said Xiao Qiang, an expert on censorship and China at the University of California, Berkeley.It does not matter, Xiao said, that this show is being staged at a regional theater.“Even the word ‘Tiananmen’ would generate fear in the Chinese government and that fear would generate a very repressive action,” he said.Within China, people who publicly discuss what happened at Tiananmen can face jail time or see their children prohibited from attending universities. In May, the activist Chen Siming was arrested by the Chinese authorities over a social media post paying tribute to Tiananmen, according to Human Rights Watch.Often the mere specter of danger is enough to muzzle any dissent, Xiao said.The cast of “Tiananmen” is entirely Asian American and Pacific Islander, but those who are not ethnically Chinese have less concern about their involvement. Kanagawa and Oka, who are both Japanese American, said they felt comfortable speaking about the show because neither has family ties to China.Potential consequences have been front of mind for other contributors. After Piser dropped out of the show, Rose said, some cast members grew more fearful and asked not to be featured in news releases or photographed.The cast has had daily conversations, Kanagawa said, about repercussions for participating in the show. Some fret about being banned from visiting China or having business contracts canceled. Others fear for the safety of their relatives.“People in China disappear still, and the idea of that being a family member is legitimately terrifying,” Kanagawa said.“Every person in the room has decided, for whatever reason — could be artistic, could be political, could be whatever — to be there,” Lee said.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesThe Phoenix Theater Company and Quixote Productions have a history of staging politically relevant productions, presenting a musical in 2020 called “¡Americano!,” about a young man who discovers he is an undocumented immigrant. But “Tiananmen,” which was shaped by Wu’er Kaixi, one of the real student protesters in Beijing, has produced a special set of challenges.“Every person in the room has decided, for whatever reason — could be artistic, could be political, could be whatever — to be there,” said Lee, the musical’s new director. “Everyone also understands that their comfort and their safety is paramount.”Rose said Piser and the theater company had worked cooperatively until the actor arrived in China on his concert tour. At that point, “everything changed,” Rose said.“I was always aware of the sensitivities, but frankly that’s what drew me to the show,” Rose said. “If this were 1954 or 1951, would Russia be dictating our arts scene?”“This is a show that needs to be told,” he added, “particularly because of the efforts to erase the bravery and courage from history.” More