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      How ‘Sabbath’s Theater,’ Philip Roth’s Raunchiest Book, Made It to the Stage

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      For their adaptation of “Sabbath’s Theater,” John Turturro and Ariel Levy sought to preserve “the nasty side of existence” evoked in the book.For John Turturro, it was time to honor Philip Roth. Turturro, the veteran actor, had been friends with the novelist for nearly a quarter-century when Roth died in 2018 at 85. They first met, Turturro recalled, after Roth saw his performance in the 1994 film “Quiz Show” and picked him to star in a one-man stage adaptation of “Portnoy’s Complaint,” Roth’s 1969 best seller about a young man with a penchant for self-pleasure.That play never got beyond readings. Plans for other works had similar fates. Two years after Roth’s death, Turturro appeared in the HBO mini-series “The Plot Against America,” David Simon and Ed Burns’s adaptation of Roth’s 2004 alternate-history novel.Still, Turturro said, he felt he wanted to “complete the conversation.” Now he’s starring in the New Group’s production of “Sabbath’s Theater,” Roth’s 1995 novel about a lascivious 64-year-old ex-puppeteer named Mickey Sabbath, which is in previews at Pershing Square Signature Theater. The book, a National Book Award winner regarded both as maybe Roth’s greatest novel and his black sheep, is certainly his raunchiest and most transgressive. (What Alexander Portnoy does with a piece of liver, Sabbath does at his lover’s grave.)Those familiar with the story might reasonably wonder: Why, out of all of Roth’s nearly 30 works of fiction, has John Turturro elected to embody the most estranging, the most irredeemable, the quite simply filthiest character in Roth’s canon?Turturro is also starring as the title character. “I was not afraid of it,” he said of the divisive protagonist. “I don’t have to be the hero.”Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“He’s like a stand-up comedian. That lends itself to the theater,” Turturro, 66, said of the Roth who wrote “Sabbath’s Theater.” “When he’s on a rant you go from Lorena Bobbitt to Mussolini to Ibsen to Macbeth, all in the same breath.”There were other reasons, too. Turturro was attracted to the novel’s house style: Its manic, sarcastic, abasing observations, largely written in the third person but never far from Sabbath’s perspective, seemed made for the theater.As Sabbath, Turturro is onstage virtually the entire play, speaking for much of that time and cycling through emotions like excitement and pity, desire and tenderness, depression and optimism.“You let the whole creature out,” Ariel Levy, the New Yorker staff writer with whom Turturro adapted the script, told Turturro during a joint interview, quoting from “Sabbath’s Theater.” She added: “And that’s what [Roth] sensed about you.”Turturro replied: “I was not afraid of it. I don’t have to be the hero.”Not having to be the hero is an important qualification for the actor playing Mickey Sabbath. His exploits include an obscenity arrest, a phone-sex scandal and compulsive lecherousness — up to and including stealing his friend’s college-aged daughter’s underwear from her childhood bedroom. Judith Thurman, the New Yorker staff writer and close friend of Roth’s, said “Sabbath’s Theater” was Roth’s favorite of his own books, the one he chose to read from at his 80th birthday celebration.“It is his most impious book, in a lifetime of impiety,” said Thurman, adding: “I think he would have been delighted that Ari and John had the nerve to do this. Nerve was one of the qualities in an artist that he most admired.”Roth at home in New York City, a few months before he died in 2018.Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesThe 1995 novel is a National Book Award winner and regarded as one of Roth’s greatest.For both Turturro and Levy, Sabbath’s offensiveness, his audacity, his utter lack of embarrassment alchemized into Roth’s most life-affirming book, one that finds the protagonist recalling all the people and things he has loved and lost — his brother, his mother, his first wife, his vocation (his fingers are now arthritic), his longtime mistress. As Sabbath puts it in the play (in one of many lines of third-person narration transposed to Sabbath’s voice): “For a pure sense of being tumultuously alive, you can’t beat the nasty side of existence.”The production, directed by Jo Bonney, leans into the novel’s frank depictions of unbounded lust, gleeful disloyalty and bodily functions. It is, at times, almost a gross-out comedy. Yet the story’s undertones of grief also attracted Turturro and Levy. Turturro read Roth’s memoir of his father’s death, “Patrimony: A True Story,” after his own father died and identified profoundly with it. Levy’s 2017 memoir, “The Rules Do Not Apply,” recounted a miscarriage, and she said that while working on the play she thought of her husband’s having lost a brother while a young man, as Sabbath does.“We did this workshop in London at the National Theater, and somebody there asked, ‘Why now?’” Levy said. “And John said, ‘Because we’re all going to die.’ And that’s it. The depth and the death, grief and being haunted and sometimes feeling the dead are as real to you as the living.”The conventions of theater permit Sabbath’s many ghosts to haunt him not just in his mind’s eye but physically on the stage. In one scene, a nightgown represents the corpse of a mother mourned by her daughter, Sabbath’s first wife, Nikki; Sabbath, feet away, is simultaneously in the present tense with another character and conjuring the memory of Nikki, who herself disappeared decades earlier.“The ghosts of Mickey’s loved ones are more real to him than the living,” Bonney said. Enacting the novel’s fragmented nature by jumping back and forth in time was crucial to its dramatic success, she added. “We’re taking people on this ride of the mind as opposed to a regularly plotted story.”Such staging was revelatory to Levy, 49, who had never worked professionally in theater. “When you’re just writing, all you have is words, words, words, words, words,” Levy said. By contrast, she added, in theater, “you have other things going into the storytelling, like the way a person’s body is or their voice.”PERHAPS THE GHOST foremost summoned by the production is Roth’s. Turturro’s lanky frame is the opposite of Sabbath’s, but it echoes Roth’s, and the actor acknowledged that his Sabbath is partly a gloss on the novelist.“He definitely has a Philip-like quality — dark, antic, hectic, comic at the same time,” said Thurman, who saw a reading of the play in 2021 at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.Turturro with Jason Kravits, left, and Elizabeth Marvel in the show, scheduled to run through Dec. 17 at the Pershing Square Signature Center.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesWhen it came time to seek a writing partner for the script, Turturro said it was important to find someone who would be faithful to Roth’s language.“I was thinking about playwrights,” Turturro said, “but then I was thinking, ‘Would they want to come in and rewrite Philip’s work?’”Instead Turturro pitched Hilton Als, a longtime theater critic who is also a staff writer at The New Yorker. Als suggested Levy. By then it was the spring of 2020, so Levy and Turturro met over Skype and got to work.“We didn’t write anything,” Levy said. “It’s only Roth’s writing. Including most of the stage directions. Because you can’t top it.”During rehearsals last month, Levy, considering how a scene should be blocked, grabbed her pummeled copy of the novel, found the original rendering and consulted it like scripture.One challenge was turning the novel’s stream of consciousness into scenes with characters, along with soliloquy-like asides from Sabbath.“We didn’t say, ‘Oh, let’s do this as a pushback against the oppressions of the moment,’” Levy said. “But is there a little bit of a thrill in all that? Sure, absolutely.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesTheir script stipulates that the 16 characters besides Sabbath be played by just two actors. In this production, Jason Kravits portrays Sabbath’s put-together, respectable friend Norman Cowan as well as his 100-year-old cousin, Fish; Elizabeth Marvel plays his mistress, his wives and his mother.Turturro said the decision was inspired by Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell’s 1943 film “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp,” in which Deborah Kerr plays three characters. “You know that thing in life where people seem like iterations of each other?” Levy said. “One actress being all these women makes so much sense.”Alongside Turturro’s Sabbath, the signature performance might be Marvel’s turn as Drenka Balich, Sabbath’s 52-year-old Croatian mistress. A mother and a lover, a force of life and sex, Drenka has long been Exhibit A for those defending Roth from charges of misogyny in his depictions of women.“Drenka is such a heroine on so many levels,” Levy said, “so interesting and complicated and older, just a combination of traits you don’t see flipped together. You see it in life, but you don’t get to see it onstage, on the screen.”Is 2023 ready for Mickey Sabbath? If so-called cancel culture — which Roth forecast in “Sabbath’s Theater” and, more directly, in “The Human Stain” (2000) — were to come for any Roth novel, it would surely be this one.“We didn’t say, ‘Oh, let’s do this as a pushback against the oppressions of the moment,’” Levy said. “But is there a little bit of a thrill in all that? Sure, absolutely.”In a Yale Review essay published this year and partly titled “in praise of filth,” the novelist Garth Greenwell wrote that he “can’t imagine a book like ‘Sabbath’s Theater’ being published today, certainly not by anyone save a writer of Roth’s stature.” Yet to Greenwell it is precisely the novel’s depiction of various repellent activities that lends the novel its moral force. “By repeatedly tempting us to pass judgment on Sabbath,” Greenwell added, “Roth’s novel reminds us how much more a person is than their worst acts.”Turturro wants theatergoers to make their own judgments. “My job is to keep the audience awake,” he said. “Whatever you think, you think.”Levy added: “It’s not a good play to bring your grandma to. Although, it depends on your grandma. My grandma would have loved it. She was dirty. She was really dirty.” More

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      ‘Partnership’ Review: A Lost Tale of Ambition That Resonates

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      The Mint Theater revives Elizabeth Baker’s charming 1917 comedy, which offers a gentle reminder about work-life balance.Find a job that you love and you’ll work every day of your life. So warns “Partnership,” the third Elizabeth Baker play to be staged by the Mint Theater Company, which has long nurtured the works of forgotten playwrights. Baker’s play premiered in 1917 in London, but the way it tackles the issue of work-life balance seems to speak more to the Great Resignation than to the Great War.The owner of a successful boutique in the south of England, Kate (Sara Haider) is focused on the needs of her distinguished clients. When George Pillatt (Gene Gillette), a potential rival, instead proposes a merger, marriage is part of the deal. The union, Kate understands, would be purely professional.As another character remarks, in one of the play’s most impressively undated lines, “Men are a lot, aren’t they?”Kate takes more of a shine to Pillatt’s companion Lawrence Fawcett (Joshua Echebiri), a gadabout investor with mud on his boots and a glint in his eye. Fawcett inspires Kate to contemplate a new way of life, including the exquisite novelty of a day off. In the show’s breeziest scene, the pair behold the Downs, an expanse of land and sky expressed in a breathtaking backdrop: The characters effectively step into a landscape painting (adapted from an artwork by James Hart Dyke) within the gilded frame provided by the scenic designer Alexander Woodward. It’s a testament to the production that it conjures the sense of a shimmering vista in a tiny theater.If the director Jackson Grace Gay tries a little too hard to coax out new laughs, the cast handles Baker’s gentle comedy with evident affection. Echebiri’s Fawcett comes alive in his natural habitat, while Gillette’s Pillatt has the constrained movements of one who thinks a leisurely walk is a waste of time. As Kate’s friend and associate Maisie, Olivia Gilliatt is having nearly as much fun as the costume designer (Kindall Almond) is having dressing her. Her ready energy and comical, gale force yawp could command a larger theater.Written during the height of the women’s suffrage movement in the United States, this English playwright’s portrait of a driven businesswoman — two driven businesswomen, actually — feels boldly up-to-date. Refreshingly, by contrast, it treats some of the male characters as more or less incidental.The suggestion of farce never materializes, but there is class critique in the play’s portrayal of characters’ couture concerns and their endless talking shop.The plot itself — Kate’s transformation from workaholic to not-so-quiet quitter — barely rattles a teacup. But “Partnership” charms regardless, offering a gentle reminder about not letting work overtake your life. Some notions should never fall out of fashion.PartnershipThrough Nov. 12 at Theater Row, Manhattan; bfany.org. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. More

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      Review: In ‘Daphne,’ Remaking a Myth, With Mixed Results

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      The playwright Renae Simone Jarrett makes her professional stage debut with a surreal reworking of a Greek myth about a river nymph.A crying baby pulled from a kitchen cabinet, a woman abruptly exiting a house via a window and a banged-up finger that turns into bark: The new play “Daphne” is chock-full of magical surprises and mystical transformations, but its surreal elements leave the audience with too many unanswered questions.In the play, which opened on Monday at the Claire Tow Theater, Daphne (Jasmine Batchelor) has recently moved in with her girlfriend, Winona (Keilly McQuail) — an abrupt change that has Daphne’s friends concerned. And with good cause: Daphne is living in a big, mysterious house in the middle of big, mysterious woods with a controlling partner who disapproves of her leaving or receiving guests. After an accident leaves Daphne with an injured finger, she begins a botanical transformation like that of her mythological namesake.Daphne and Winona’s toxic relationship seems to be the trigger for Daphne’s transformation, as is the case in the Greek myth, when Daphne, a river nymph, prays for help escaping the predatory god Phoebus Apollo and is turned into a tree. If “Daphne” is trying to create a sort of mythological fairy tale, then the play’s other fantastical details only introduce more confusion: Winona’s peculiar, unseen bird named Phoebus; the neighbor (Denise Burse) whom Winona warns that Daphne is a home-invading witch; a human face found in a cabinet door.Scenes with Daphne’s visiting friends (played by Naomi Lorrain and Jeena Yi with a delightful, though out-of-place, sitcom-style humor) seem meant to provide some context about Daphne’s world and life outside her new home, but they do neither.Presented by LCT3, Lincoln Center Theater’s programming initiative for new artists, “Daphne” is the professional stage debut of Renae Simone Jarrett, a member of E.S.T.’s Youngblood collective for early-career playwrights. Jarrett’s script is spare, and the setup is initially intriguing, but ultimately too obtuse. The direction, by Sarah Hughes in her Lincoln Center Theater debut, accentuates the dark whimsy of the script but doesn’t provide insight into what those whimsical elements are meant to express. The same for the cast: Though they dutifully inhabit their characters, they cannot make them feel more than ephemeral.McQuail is especially captivating as Winona. Her languid way of moving, her dreamy delivery of quixotic musings and her aloofness — with a sharp edge of intention underneath — draw the spotlight from Batchelor’s steady, though flatter, Daphne. Is Winona the big bad of the story, or just the relationship? Is there some greater evil? Is Daphne losing her sense of reality, or is this a manipulation caused by Winona, or by the suspicious neighbor next door? Without clear stakes, it’s difficult to invest more deeply in the story.The production also withholds any specifics that would ground viewers in a particular setting. Scenes begin and end with snappy lighting transitions (by Stacey Derosier) between a cool daytime light and a warm nighttime glow, so Daphne’s world feels as if it exists in a timeless bubble. Maruti Evans’s rustic set design, a living room and kitchen of a home lined with wallpaper consisting of giant fall-colored leaves, also feels hemmed in, though the couple are meant to be living in a large, haunting abode.“Daphne” is so good at creating a sense of its main characters’ insularity that the production also feels confining, stuck within a set of indecipherable metaphors. But unlike Daphne, who is transformed by the end of this 90-minute contemporary myth, we’re left exactly as we arrived.DaphneThrough Nov. 19 at the Claire Tow Theater, Manhattan; lct.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Théâtre de la Ville Reopens After 7 Years of Renovations

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      The Théâtre de la Ville, now named for Sarah Bernhardt, reopened after a seven-year renovation. But its once-radical approach to dance is now less of a calling card.A lot can happen in seven years. When the Théâtre de la Ville — a flagship venue for Paris’s contemporary dance and theater scene — last welcomed audiences, in late 2016, TikTok had just launched. A pandemic seemed like a far-fetched idea. La(Horde), the influential dance collective featured prominently during the theater’s reopening festivities this month, was still wholly unknown.Roughly half of the Théâtre de la Ville’s current employees joined during the closure and didn’t set foot in the building during renovations, its director Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota said during a tour of the playhouse last month. (While it was closed, shows continued at a temporary location, the Espace Cardin, at partner venues and on the Théâtre de la Ville’s second stage, Les Abbesses.)Anticipation for the reopening was high, and the Théâtre de la Ville does look — and feel — different. First, it boasts a new, slightly unwieldy name: the Théâtre de la Ville-Sarah Bernhardt, a nod to its most famous owner, the French actress who ran the space between 1899 and 1923. (The venue’s website has yet to reflect the rebrand.)The biggest change, however, hits when you walk through the doors. The heavy-looking concrete staircase that led from the entrance into the auditorium has been eliminated. Discrete stairs are now hidden in the back of the hall, and two curved mezzanines in warm wood tones hug the facade — with panoramic views of the neighborhood, including the Théâtre du Châtelet, the rival playhouse that stands across the street.The old concrete staircase in the thater’s entrance is gone, creating an open atmosphere with panoramic views.Josephine BruederThe closure was never intended to last this long. The initial plan was a partial renovation to bring the Théâtre de la Ville, which hadn’t had a significant upgrade since 1967, up to current security and technical standards. Difficulties quickly piled up, initially because of extensive lead and asbestos, then owing to the Covid pandemic. The total cost, first estimated at 26 million euros, or $27.5 million, ultimately rose to €40 million ($42 million).The result is a distinctly 21st-century update, which adds yet another layer to what was already an architectural mille-feuille. Inaugurated in 1862, the building was destroyed during the Paris Commune of 1871 and rebuilt a few years later. It was then rebranded several times before the city of Paris chose to reimagine it in 1966. While the facade and roof remained, the Italian-style interior was gutted in favor of a more egalitarian, Brutalist-style auditorium, designed by Jean Perrottet and Valentin Fabre.The auditorium still feels familiar. While the seats are now a muted shade of sand instead of gray, its concrete underpinnings — dotted here and there with gold leaf — still hang over visitors in the hall. Behind the scenes, however, the stage machinery has been entirely updated. Even the mezzanines are now equipped with curtains and professional lighting, for smaller in situ performances.And Demarcy-Mota, Théâtre de la Ville’s director since 2008, is attempting to make up for lost time. In early October, the reopening was marked with a free 26-hour performance marathon, “The Great Vigil,” starring around 300 artists from the fields of dance, theater and music.“Marry Me in Bassiani,” a production created by the French dance troupe La(Horde) at Théâtre de la Ville.Aude AragoSome, like the choreographers Angelin Preljocaj and Lucinda Childs, were regulars long before the Théâtre de la Ville closed. Another frequent visitor, the flamenco star Israel Galvan, made a surprise appearance for a brilliant duet with the French harpsichordist Benjamin Alard.Others were making their Théâtre de la Ville debut, like the pianist Yi-Lin Wu, who set a meditative tone around 1 a.m. with a performance of Ravel’s shimmering “Gaspard de la Nuit.” There was something eerie about wandering the halls late into the night, encountering a highly theatrical statue of Bernhardt playing Phaedra, by a staircase, and climbing up to a newly opened studio, La Coupole, to watch “Ionesco Suite,” a five-play mash-up of the French dramatist’s works, directed by Demarcy-Mota — until well past 3 a.m.For many visitors at the opening, it was a joyful reunion with a playhouse that shaped much of the French dance scene in the last decades of the 20th century. At that time, the Théâtre de la Ville fiercely promoted avant-garde contemporary dance, and became known as the Parisian home of the Tanztheater luminary Pina Bausch, who visited each year.In her Théâtre de la Ville debut, the pianist Yi-Lin Wu set a meditative tone with a performance of Ravel’s “Gaspard de la Nuit.” Laurent PhilippeThis identity had begun to shift in the years before the Théâtre de la Ville closed, with a greater diversity of choreographic trends represented on its stage. Still, during its seven-year absence, other Parisian venues like the Grande Halle of La Villette have stepped up their dance offerings or reoriented their focus to favor more diverse voices and collectives, many of them steeped in street dance styles.So as the Théâtre de la Ville-Sarah Bernhardt kicked its first season into gear this month, it was sometimes hard to discern what sets it apart from other theaters. High-profile choreographers are no longer identified with individual venues, the way Théâtre de la Ville once was with Bausch: Every programmer in town seems to want the same names.The collective La(Horde), which took over the stage after “The Great Vigil,” is one example. Less than a week before its run of “Marry Me In Bassiani,” a production the group created for a Georgian company, Iveroni Ensemble, La(Horde) was across the street at the Théâtre du Châtelet with its newest creation, “Age of Content.”There will be plenty more opportunities to see what Théâtre de la Ville-Sarah Bernhardt does with its revitalized venue as its season progresses. Demarcy-Mota, a theater director who splits his programming between dance, theater and a smattering of music events, said in his inauguration speech last month that he sees the stage as “a space for contradiction.”And the thrill of discovering new work in a theater known for groundbreaking performances could already be felt last week when La Coupole, the upstairs studio, hosted “En Addicto,” a one-man show inspired by a monthslong residency in a hospital wing devoted to addicts.Its director and performer, Thomas Quillardet, let the voices of staff and patients alike flow through him with just the right mix of empathy and levity. It brought to mind Demarcy-Mota’s commitment to sending Théâtre de la Ville artists to local hospitals during the pandemic, to share poems or mini-performances. It’s been a long wait, but these artists can finally come home. More

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      Ali Stroker Has Tips for Fellow Sleep-Deprived Working Moms

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      The Tony winner and author talked about the Broadway shows she’ll see once she can stay up late again, and the podcast that comforted her during the pandemic.The actress Ali Stroker never thought she would write a book.“Growing up, I didn’t like reading,” said Stroker, who in 2019 became the first performer who uses a wheelchair to win a Tony Award. “Books didn’t have any characters I related to.”But when Stacy Davidowitz, the author of the middle-grade series Camp Rolling Hills, asked to interview her because a character she was working on had a disability and worked in theater, Stroker had an idea: What if they wrote a story together?“That’s what I always tell anybody who wants to do something they’re not sure they know how to do: Find somebody who does and collaborate with them,” Stroker, 36, who lives in Westchester County, said in a phone interview on the way to a rehearsal in Manhattan.Their partnership led to “The Chance to Fly,” a middle-grade novel published in 2021, and a sequel out this month, “Cut Loose!”“I needed characters like this in middle school,” said Stroker, who was paralyzed from the chest down after a car accident when she was 2.The Broadway star, who gave birth last year to a son, Jesse, talked about the shows she plans to see once she can stay awake past 9 p.m., and the activities and advice that are helping her out in the meantime. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Broadway (Eventually)I have not seen a lot of shows in the past year because mom life, and I’ve usually been asleep by 9 p.m. But I want to see “Sweeney Todd,” “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” and “Hadestown.”2‘Cook This Book’ by Molly BazThere’s a recipe in this book that I’ve made probably 100 times: the pastrami chicken. It’s so good. She’s coming out with a new book, and my sister and I are going to Brooklyn to get our books signed.3Cookbook ClubThis is something my sister, Tory, started last year. Women from the town we grew up in, Ridgewood, N.J., gather once a month to make a recipe from a cookbook. It’s been nice for me to have a community of moms to talk to and relate to.4Hudson Valley Farmers’ MarketsI live in Westchester, and it’s been so nice having farmers’ markets every weekend. We go to the Ossining and the Pleasantville ones. They make these cinnamon doughnuts, and they’re just to die for.5Accessibility at HomeI don’t want Jesse living in a world where Mommy can’t do things in our very own house. It’s important to model that you can get creative and make accessibility for yourself. For instance, I found a chopping block for our kitchen that’s my height so I can chop vegetables, and we have this induction hot plate that I use because the stove is high.6‘Rent (Original Broadway Cast Recording)’That show is so raw, and that recording is so emotional. Hearing the intro to these songs makes me feel like I’m in middle school again and listening to it in my room on my CD player. It captures for me first falling in love with theater.7‘The Goal Digger Podcast’What I love about Jenna Kutcher is that she’s so relatable. It feels like she’s like hanging out with you. I love hearing her talk about business and finance and all the ways you can elevate your life. She also brings on really cool people to interview. I started listening to her during the pandemic because my husband and I were out on Cape Cod, at the home of a family friend, and I would go for a push every day. It became a comforting ritual at a time when so much was unknown.8AudiobooksI like to listen to Audible in the car, especially on long drives, so I’ve been fortunate this year to have a lot of concerts booked. Two of my recent favorites are Stanley Tucci’s memoir, “Taste,” and “Driving Forwards,” by the TV presenter and disability advocate Sophie L. Morgan.9First Village CoffeeLuis, the [co-owner], and the people who work in this cafe in Ossining, N.Y., are just so wonderful. They feel like extended family. And the scones are so good. They’re fluffy inside, crispy on the outside, they have this amazing vanilla chai icing on top. They’re heavenly.10Taking Cara BabiesNo one can prepare you for what the sleeping situation is with a brand-new baby. But this woman, Cara, who’s a mom herself, has come up with these plans and tips for new parents — when to do naps or how often or schedules. New parents kept recommending her, and it has been so so helpful. More

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      Alan Eisenberg, Longtime Actors’ Union Head, Dies at 88

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      In his 25-year tenure at Actors’ Equity, he helped build Equity Fights AIDS and challenged the casting of the top roles in the hit musical “Miss Saigon.”Alan Eisenberg of Actors’ Equity Association was honored by the Actors Fund of America at a gala in New York in 2006. With him was the actress Lynn Redgrave.Peter Kramer/Getty ImagesAlan Eisenberg, a lawyer who during his 25 years as the top executive of Actors’ Equity Association helped to build its membership and stabilize the finances of its health plan, and also dealt with a highly publicized controversy involving the casting of the hit musical “Miss Saigon,” died on Oct. 7 in Rhinebeck, N.Y. He was 88.His wife, Claire Copley, said he died in a hospital of lung cancer.Mr. Eisenberg had worked at law firms for two decades before he was hired in 1981 as the executive secretary (his title was later changed to executive director) of Actors’ Equity, which represents theatrical actors and stage managers.In the 1980s, the union was confronted with the AIDS crisis, which had a particularly harsh impact on the theatrical community. Mr. Eisenberg was a champion of Equity Fights AIDS, the philanthropic fund formed within Actors’ Equity in 1987 to directly help members in financial need.Tom Viola, the executive director of the nonprofit Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS (the two organizations merged in 1992), said in a phone interview that Mr. Eisenberg offered “ballast and direction” to the “emotional understanding of what needed to be done” that was provided by the actress Colleen Dewhurst, who was president of Equity Fights AIDS from 1985 until her death in 1991.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please More

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      Movement and Memory: Dance Love and Dance Rejection in Ireland

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      Michael Keegan-Dolan has collaborated with his partner Rachel Poirier on “How to Be a Dancer in 72,000 Easy Lessons,” coming to St. Ann’s Warehouse.“For some reason I wanted to be a dancer,” Michael Keegan-Dolan said of his younger self. “And then I realized I was really bad at it.” Keegan-Dolan, a choreographer and director, was talking on a video call from his home in Dingle, a remote spot on the southwest coast of Ireland where he lives with the dancer Rachel Poirier, and where his dance company Teac Damsa is based. “I was this kind of tragic character.”Sitting next to him, Poirier chuckled. “I didn’t see him dance then,” she said, “so thank God I don’t need to comment.”Keegan-Dolan’s dance-theater work “How to Be a Dancer in 72,000 Easy Lessons,” which opens at St. Ann’s Warehouse on Saturday, springs from the tension between this thing he loved beyond all others — dance — and the realities of his body.In a mix of stories and dance, he and Poirier trace the dogged efforts of a young Irishman, based on Keegan-Dolan, now 54, coming of age in the 1980s and ’90s, struggling to find his place in the world of dance. It plays out against a backdrop of ingrained ideas about masculinity, I.R.A. violence and his feelings of being an unwelcome outsider in England, where he went to advance his training.“I was a kind of tragic character,” Keegan-Dolan said of wanting to dance but not being much good at it. Poirier didn’t see him perform back then, she said, “so thank God I don’t have to comment.” With the couple is their dog Chamalo.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesIn ballet school Keegan-Dolan was told that his pigeon-toed feet were hopelessly untrainable. In the show he recalls being asked by a teacher, with as much kindness as she can muster, “Is there anything else you might like to do with your life?” He can’t think of anything.His salvation, it turned out, would be choreography, and through it, theater. After his last appearance onstage as a dancer in 1994, he turned to making dances and eventually rose to acclaim as a choreographer, first in opera and later in ensemble works of his own.In 1997 he founded Fabulous Beast Dance Theater in the Irish Midlands, which, after its relocation to Dingle, became Teac Damsa. (The name means “house of dance” in Gaelic.) With those companies Keegan-Dolan has explored themes from Irish history and myth in well-received works that combine live music, theater and dance, like “The Bull,” “Rian,” a reimagined “Swan Lake,” and “Mám,” recently presented at Sadler’s Wells.In “How to Be a Dancer” he turns his lens inward. There are just two characters, the Dance Man and the Dancer, played by Keegan-Dolan and Poirier.The work’s intimate scale is partly a product of circumstance. “How to Be a Dancer” was created during the pandemic and rehearsed at a theater down the road from Keegan-Dolan and Poirier’s house. (It premiered in 2022 at the Gate Theater in Dublin.)For Susan Feldman, the artistic director at St. Ann’s, the small scale offered an opportunity. “I’ve been aware of Michael for many years,” she said in an interview, “and I’ve seen many of his works, but our space isn’t really conducive to presenting large dance pieces.”Feldman was struck by the honesty and humor of the show. “I was really interested that it would be him dancing,” Feldman said of Keegan-Dolan, who hasn’t performed in decades and appears in a series of wigs. “At first I didn’t even realize it was him.”Keegan-Dolan turns his lens inward in “How to Be a Dancer,” which he developed in Dingle during the pandemic.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesThe material that makes up “How to be a Dancer” began to emerge before the pandemic, Keegan-Dolan said, but the period of forced inactivity gave him time to look back on memories that had dogged him for years. The number in the title comes from yoga practices that hold that 72,000 channels, known as nadis, circulate energy through the body.The stories in the show draw upon the kinds of memories — small revelations, as well as shameful or painful experiences — that help shape our inner lives. Keegan-Dolan describes sitting in his home in Dublin, the youngest in a large family, watching Gene Kelly on television as his mother ironed. And how he felt when he took his first dance class, at 18, towering over the barre in rugby sweats in a room full of “9-year-old girls in pink leotards,” he says. He should feel ridiculous, he adds, “but instead I feel like I am in exactly the right place.”After moving to London in the ’80s, a period of deadly bombings by the Irish Republican Army, he remembers being called a terrorist and worse. Often he reframes such painful experiences as absurdist comedy. But the sting is still there.Onstage, the stories roll out of him like well-worn yarns. And like all such tales, they contain some fabrication. “I like the idea that you can change a memory, like you can change a story,” Keegan-Dolan said. He is a natural storyteller, lively and funny, “un peu cabot” (a bit of a show-off), as Poirier put it in her native French.The storytelling is layered with snippets of movement and dance, as when Poirier and Keegan-Dolan re-enact a happy-awkward dance at an Irish disco in the ’80s, while bullies hurl insults from the sidelines. “I wait for him to go,” Keegan-Dolan says of one of them, “and when he’s gone I start dancing again.” Nothing can deter his joy in movement — not even the fear of being punched in the face.Keegan-Dolan, a natural storyteller, said, “I like the idea that you can change a memory, like you can change a story.”Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesThe more technical dancing in the show is left to Poirier, who has danced with the Rambert dance company and the Merce Cunningham Repertory Understudy Group among other troupes. She is the dancer he would have liked to have been, Keegan-Dolan said — along with Rudolf Nureyev, Fred Astaire and Jacques d’Amboise.The climax of the piece is a 15-minute solo performed by Poirier that the pair choreographed together to Ravel’s “Boléro.” Here, the memories that rise to the surface are hers.“There are bits of steps hanging there, dance memories,” Poirier said, “and the feeling of what it’s like to be a dancer, all the struggles and the lack of money, and the greatness and the poetry that comes with doing the job we do.”And even as she pushes through exhaustion, the freedom and force of her movements, sustained by Ravel’s music, suggest something about the power of dance, the thing that has kept Keegan-Dolan in its thrall all these years.“It connects you to a part of yourself that is otherwise totally inaccessible,” he said. “And you don’t even have to be good at it.” More

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      in Theater

      ‘Free Your Mind’ Does Little to Challenge the Brain

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      A huge new performance space in Manchester, England, opened with a show that trumpets the building’s possibilities, but doesn’t push any boundaries.There was a sense of momentous occasion on Wednesday at the opening of the new Aviva Studios performance space in Manchester, England. Political and cultural figures made sweeping declarations: This was Britain’s most significant cultural project since the Tate Modern opened in London over 20 years ago; the largest government investment in the arts since forever; the most important new theater space in Europe; and a generator of work, well-being and regeneration in Britain’s underserved north.“It’s a big day not just for Manchester, but for the U.K.,” said Lucy Frazer, Britain’s culture secretary, at a news conference several hours before the opening performance of “Free Your Mind,” a large-scale spectacle directed by Danny Boyle that inaugurated the building.The 144,000-square-foot Aviva Studios (named for an insurance company that gave around 35 million pounds, or $43 million, to the project) is the new home of Factory International, the organization that produces the Manchester International Festival. The building was designed with multipurpose and multidisciplinary intent by Ellen van Loon from the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, the Dutch firm founded by Rem Koolhaas, costing “around £240 million,” or $290 million, according to a spokesman for the venue.There is a conventional 1,600-seat theater (“the Hall”) and a 700-foot long, 226-foot high performance space (“the Warehouse”) that can accommodate 5,000 people. The spaces can be used individually, combined or divided to create several distinct, acoustically isolated performance areas.The seats in the theater can be taken out for gigs; the floors can flood and drain; you could hang 100 cars from the ceiling of the Warehouse. “We want people to imagine seemingly impossible things,” said John McGrath, Factory International’s artistic director, during a tour of the building.The massive 144,000-square-foot space hopes to revitalize the arts scene in Manchester.Marco Cappelletti, via OMA and Factory InternationalLiving up to these ambitions in an opening show is a tall order, even for Boyle, the Academy Award-winning film director (“Trainspotting,” “Slumdog Millionaire”) who masterminded the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics. For “Free Your Mind,” he teamed up with the hip-hop choreographer Kenrick “H2O” Sandy, the composer Michael “Mikey J.” Asante, the designer Es Devlin and the writer Sabrina Mahfouz to create a show loosely based on the “Matrix” movies, with their prescient themes of artificial intelligence taking over human life.At the news conference, Boyle talked about using “The Matrix” (directed by the Wachowski siblings) and its sequels as a widely available cultural reference, and “Free Your Mind” is mostly interesting as a statement of intent. It’s accessible, fun, visually spectacular and entirely unchallenging. But on the evidence of opening night, the show draws an impressively young, hip and diverse audience.“Free Your Mind” opens in the Hall, with a lecture delivered via an old-fashioned television screen and new-fashioned technology by the mathematician Alan Turing, who developed an early vision of modern computing. There is a quick history of Manchester as the home of the machine, and a question asked early: “Should we be worried that machines could think?”Dancers in trench coats appear, moving with robotic jerkiness and Neo (Corey Owens), the hero of “The Matrix,” emerges from the front row and is confronted by a dark-glasses-wearing, sinister group, before the scene changes to a cluster of faceless figures encased in stretchy white fabric that is attached to the ceiling. As they move in a circle, the tubes of fabric entwine like a maypole; visually arresting and oddly old-fashioned, reminiscent of the choreographer Alwin Nikolais’s experiments with form and fabric in the 1950s and 1960s.The show begins with a monologue delivered by an avatar of the mathematician Alan Turing, which the visual effects company Union VFX created from a photograph.Tristram KentonThe show’s movements are directed by the hip-hop choreographer Kenrick “H2O” Sandy.Tristram KentonThese figures are presumably the humans whose energy is being harvested by an evil artificial intelligence: the truth revealed by the omniscient Morpheus to Neo in “The Matrix.” A series of episodes move us through a meeting between Neo and the female warrior Trinity (Nicey Belgrave), confrontations with the police and the machine Agents who guard the Matrix, and the trial of the first robot to kill a human.Sandy’s movement language, drawn from hip-hop and street dance vocabularies, is boldly graphic, and he adeptly moves the 50-dancer cast in crisp, cascading formations, but there is little subtlety or variety either here or in Asante’s serviceable atmosphere-creating score. (The sound system, however, is fab, as is Lucy Carter’s lighting.) The only standout dance moment comes in part two, when Sandy himself, as Morpheus, performs a compelling solo of sweeping, martial arts-inflected motion, legs kicking high as his body arches backward.In the intermission, Matrix-agent figures were suspended around the huge lobby and bar space (rather more effectively Matrix-y than anything onstage), and white rabbit-headed figures danced with audience members. (A reference to the message, “Follow the white rabbit,” that appears on Neo’s computer screen in the movie, but surely also to the Jefferson Airplane song, “White Rabbit,” with its lyrics about mind-bending pills.)Part two, in the Warehouse, is more abstract, with Devlin’s spectacular set as the star: a huge cocoon of white Manchester cotton rounding out the angles of the space and enclosing the audience, mostly standing on each side of an enormous catwalk. Long narrow screens above this stage offer a montage of Manchester cultural history — footage of millworkers, British soap operas, references to pop bands like Joy Division — then show an incessant stream of images that blur into a kind of visual wallpaper as one scene after another plays out beneath.The show’s sets are by the designer Es Devlin.Tristram KentonPart two of “Free Your Mind” plays out on an extended catwalk in a part of Aviva Studios called the Warehouse.Tristram KentonThis section is presumably our present in which data, rather than energy, is being harvested from us humans. Amazon packages are delivered, Twitter ticks, the Apple logo and Google are referenced in Gareth Pugh’s costumes; dancers move while unable to take their eyes off their phones. Finally we get the battle between Neo and Smith, with a re-enactment of the famous bullet-stopping sequence in the original film, before a group finale to Asante’s portentous chords. The final image is of the screens, showing human figures effaced by vertical lines of code. (Oh dear.)The audience, which clearly knew and loved “The Matrix,” didn’t seem depressed by that, and gave the show a rousing ovation. “Free Your Mind” is a good night out and a decent demonstration of the new building’s capacities, even if its muddled mix of pure-dance display and clumsy propositions don’t say much about what it means to be human. Something stranger and more genuinely boundary-pushing would have been a welcome opening salvo from the often-visionary minds at Factory International. Perhaps that’s next.Free Your MindThrough Nov. 5 at Aviva Studios, in Manchester, England; factoryinternational.org. More