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      Union for Broadway Crew Members Reaches Tentative Deal, Averting Strike

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      The agreement would cover a subset of workers, including about 1,500 stagehands, hairdressers and other crew members on Broadway and in touring productions.The union representing a segment of Broadway crew members reached a tentative agreement for a new contract with theater owners just as its members were voting on whether to authorize a potential strike, the organizations announced Thursday.The deal involved a subset of Broadway workers who are covered by what is known as the “pink contract,” including roughly 1,500 stagehands, wardrobe personnel, makeup artists and hairdressers. A strike of those workers — who are involved in 45 theatrical shows, including touring productions, and 28 shows on Broadway — would have had the potential to shut down much of the industry, especially if other unionized theater workers joined in solidarity.The tentative agreement was announced in a joint statement between the union, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, and the Broadway League, a trade association representing theater owners and producers. Disney Theatrical, which is behind shows such as “Aladdin” and “The Lion King,” is also part of the deal. It covers crew members who carry a pink traveling card that shows that they’re able to do union work in different jurisdictions.“The strike has been averted,” Jonas Loeb, a union spokesman, said in a statement, “though the contract must be approved by the membership.”Loeb said that the union has been negotiating about two months, including a marathon 19-hour session this week, and that one of the major sticking points was minimum payment rates for Broadway crew members.A walkout by theater workers would have added to the labor unrest roiling the American entertainment industry, as Hollywood writers and actors continue their strikes. More

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      BroadwayCon Panelists Tackle Diversity and Representation Onstage

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      The eighth annual fan event will host a variety of discussions about how to diversify stages, songs and scripts. Here are six to look out for.It’s the most musical time of the year, the weekend when thousands of fans from around the world descend on Midtown Manhattan for costume contests, Playbill swaps and theater idol meet-and-greets.This year’s BroadwayCon, which takes place July 21-23 at the Marriott Marquis hotel, gives fans the chance to preview new Broadway shows like the “Back to the Future” musical and the “Jaws” comedy “The Shark Is Broken,” catch up with original cast members from the not-exactly-family-friendly puppet musical “Avenue Q” and the storied rock opera “The Who’s Tommy.”The schedule also features thoughtful panels, many focused on issues of representation on Broadway, such as a planned discussion on roles for disabled actors, featuring the “Cost of Living” Tony Award nominee Katy Sullivan.Here are six you won’t want to miss.Celebrating Female and Nonbinary VoicesA group of female and nonbinary songwriters, among them Kristen Anderson-Lopez, the Oscar, Grammy and Emmy Award-winning co-writer of Disney’s “Frozen” (both the film and Broadway musical) and “Remember Me” from Pixar’s “Coco,” will spotlight recent achievements by female, nonbinary and gender-expansive composers and lyricists and discuss how the industry might open more doors to them.“Spotlight on Women and Nonbinary Musical Theater Writers,” Friday, 10 a.m.Diversifying StagesA panel of playwrights, composers and actors of color will discuss how to bring more work to Broadway that represents perspectives from beyond white American culture. Among them will be Jordan E. Cooper, who was recently nominated for two Tonys for writing and starring in the biting race comedy “Ain’t No Mo’” on Broadway; Helen Park, the first Asian female composer on Broadway, who earned a Tony nomination for “KPOP”; and Kristoffer Diaz, whose new musical, “Hell’s Kitchen,” written with the singer Alicia Keys, is slated to open at the Public Theater in November.“What Is the Future of Broadway? A Dream Session with Global Majority Playwrights and Musical Theater Writers,” Friday, 11:15 a.m.Restaging Problematic ClassicsA panel of directors, writers and producers will discuss how to revive musicals like “Miss Saigon,” “South Pacific” and “The King and I” with troublesome structural or political elements (or both). Participants will include Lear deBessonet, the artistic director of Encores!, a longstanding, popular New York City Center series that stages short-run productions of decades-old musicals, and Schele Williams, who is directing the upcoming Broadway revival of “The Wiz.” “That Wouldn’t Fly Today: The Art of Revising Revivals,” Friday, 3:45 p.m.Discussing Disability on BroadwayPerformers with disabilities have become a more common sight on Broadway stages lately, appearing in productions including “Cost of Living,” “A Doll’s House” and “Grey House.” For Katy Sullivan, who was recently nominated for a Tony for her performance in “Cost of Living” as the feisty wheelchair user Ani, it’s not just the presence of disabled actors in recent productions that is encouraging — it’s the types of roles they’re being cast in.“I would love to see a world where even more performers with disabilities are utilized within characters who aren’t necessarily written as disabled,” Sullivan said. The panel also includes Gregg Mozgala, her “Cost of Living” co-star; Madison Ferris, who became the first wheelchair user to play a lead role on Broadway when she starred in a 2017 revival of “The Glass Menagerie” opposite Sally Field; and David Connolly, who became the first amputee to perform on Broadway in a 1989 revival of the Civil War musical “Shenandoah.”“Ready, Willing and Very Abled,” Saturday, 3:45 p.m.Zachary Noah Piser was the first Asian American actor to play the lead role in “Dear Evan Hansen” on Broadway. He will speak on a panel about Asian American representation in theater.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesApplauding Asian American StoriesThe New York theater landscape has changed radically since Ali Ewoldt made her Broadway debut as Cosette in a revival of “Les Misérables” in 2006.“We for a long time had a very homogeneous way of telling stories,” said Ewoldt, who in 2016 became the first Asian American actress to play Christine in “The Phantom of the Opera” on Broadway. “So it’s exciting to me when Broadway and theater and TV reflect the world we live in, in all its complexity and diversity.”She and five actors of Asian American and Pacific Islander descent — among them Zachary Noah Piser, who in 2019 became the first Asian American actor to play Evan Hansen on Broadway — will celebrate recent representation in shows like “Here Lies Love,” “Camelot” and “Life of Pi” and discuss how to see even more of their communities’ stories portrayed onstage.“Telling Our Stories — Breaking the A.A.P.I. Box on Broadway,” Sunday, 11:15 a.m.Building a Latino FutureSix songwriters, playwrights, directors and actors, including Luis Salgado from “In the Heights” and the playwright Christin Eve Cato, will discuss the importance of creating, sharing and producing Latino-written works of musical theater, as well as the challenges they faced on their journeys to Broadway and the strategies that helped them break through.“El Futuro es Latiné: Dreaming of A More Diverse Theater Industry,” Sunday, 11:15 a.m. More

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      Review: A Lack of Passion Keeps Tennessee Williams’s ‘Orpheus Descending’ Earthbound

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      Erica Schmidt’s revival of this Tennessee Williams play for Theater for a New Audience downplays the melodrama.Clad in a snazzy snakeskin jacket and carrying a guitar, Val Xavier steps into a small town’s mercantile like a handsome troubadour dropping by to serenade the locals. But he is a stranger whose car has broken down, and in the South of the 1950s, the local women are going to talk and the local men might just stalk.And then there is Lady Torrance, who runs that dry-goods store and whose interest is piqued by the new arrival.A few minutes into Tennessee Williams’s “Orpheus Descending,” we know that emotions will run operatically high. Or at least they do on paper, because Erica Schmidt’s revival for Theater for a New Audience, which opened Tuesday at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn and stars Maggie Siff as Lady Torrance, is maddeningly earthbound. The word “melodramatic” is usually deployed in a pejorative way to suggest an affected, exaggerated fervor designed to draw attention, or to describe something that defies conventional rules of propriety. But it is that heightened exaltation that makes Williams’s work glorious, and it is woefully missing in this cautious, bloodless production.“Orpheus Descending,” which had a short Broadway run in 1957, is not among Williams’s most famous pieces; critics tend to place it on the B list. The play, a reworking of “Battle of Angels,” from 1940, is a bit of a rambling mess, but it is also passionate and fascinatingly peculiar — the plot is loosely inspired by the story of Orpheus, after all.That mythical figure is Val (Pico Alexander), and it’s easy to see why he fascinates Lady (Siff). She is dressed in black when we first see her, but she is not, technically speaking, a widow: Her older, tyrannical husband, Jabe (Michael Cullen), has cancer and is hanging on by a thread spun of bile and loathing. For most of the play, Jabe is heard rather than seen, making his presence felt by imperiously knocking on the floor of the couple’s quarters, which are above the store.Like Val, Lady is different, which also puts her at odds in the community. She is Italian, for starters — though Siff’s bizarre accent is Sicilian by way of Eastern Europe — and she is also burdened by a tragic past: Her father was killed in a fire set by the Ku Klux Klan for selling alcohol to Black people.Williams writes that Lady “verges on hysteria under a strain,” but Siff (best known for the Showtime series “Billions”) evokes neither. Siff’s ability to project composure and intelligence was central to her terrific performances in two previous Theater for a New Audience productions, “The Taming of the Shrew” (2012) and “Much Ado About Nothing” (2013). Here it is a hindrance, as she can’t quite give in to the forces pressing down on Lady. Siff imbues the character with a convincing inner strength — the life force is evident — but less clear is the fact that Lady is stuck in a hell that is within and around her.It might have helped if Siff had a sturdier partner, but Alexander’s wan emo sensibility lacks the haunted charisma of a sexy drifter attempting to move on from his past. When Val tells Lady, “I lived in corruption but I’m not corrupted,” Alexander is much better at suggesting the second part of that sentence than the first. But the role needs both. (The 1960 film adaptation, “The Fugitive Kind,” starred Marlon Brando and Anna Magnani, which gives an idea of the intensity the play should aim for.)Tonally the production is similarly unmoored. The play alludes to fantastical elements, as with Val’s entrance, which looks as if he had been manifested out of thin air by Uncle Pleasant, a character who is also referred to as “conjure man” (Dathan B. Williams), or when Jabe’s baleful pounding sounds like the emanation of an enraged poltergeist. But Schmidt (“Mac Beth,” the musical “Cyrano” starring Peter Dinklage) does not exploit those opportunities. Also failing to make an impact is the outsize, fascinating character of Carol Cutrere (Julia McDermott), a lost soul who staggers in and out of the play in runny eyeliner, and is a key third outcast in the story.Amy Rubin’s atmosphere-free set does not help: If the store is meant to be a representation of hell on Earth, its blond wood, neat interior and tidy lines make it feel more like a furniture shop in a hip Hudson Valley town.Occasionally, Lady and Val wander to liminal spaces off to the side of Torrance Mercantile but still within view of the audience. There is a beguiling mystery to those brief scenes, allusions to life and love outside the bounds of the infernal prison. Oh, what could have been.Orpheus DescendingThrough Aug. 6 at Polonsky Shakespeare Center, Brooklyn; tfana.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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      In Richard Hollman’s Play, the Back and Forth of a Friendship

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      Richard Hollman’s tender, site-specific play explores the awkward resumption of a Covid-interrupted friendship over a deceptively innocent game of catch.Catch is one of the few basic children’s games that can extend into every phase of life. Taking turns tossing and catching the ball furnishes the game with built-in respites, which give the participants a chance to reflect on past choices and prepare for future ones.Richard Hollman stretches that metaphor into “Back and Forth” — a modest play about two friends reuniting after a year and a half of Covid-induced isolation. Their routine game of catch morphs into a catch-up about their time apart. The resulting production — playing out in Central Park’s East Meadow, rimmed by rock outcrops — blossoms into a congenial meditation on the thieving nature of time and the various chapters of adulthood, and yet it’s missing the one thing every game of toss requires: gravity.Hollman also stars as Marty, newly single in his late 30s with a penchant for reliving his glory days, while Chris Roberti plays Drew, a young father of a similar age who’s trapped in an apartment so cluttered that maneuvering around barefoot feels “like walking on an everything bagel.” Marty’s eager for the reunion but Drew remains guarded, clutching a secret as tightly as his mitt. The director, Katie Young, lets the initial monotony of their languid throws settle into a steady rhythm, making the disjointedness of their conversation all the more obvious.Hollman’s script sketches out standard shifts in domestic life for Marty and Drew, as they deal with aging bodies, babies and breakups. And though Drew’s shiftiness hints at something more insidious, the play opts for the simplest of the infinite horrors a quarantine play could choose. Simple but still true: Even the smallest secret, when held by a dear friend, can feel like virulent betrayal.Running only 45 minutes, “Back and Forth” has little time to offer profundity beyond this. The show’s real intrigue lies in its unique staging. The audience sits several yards away, witnessing the action while tuning in to the men’s dialogue on radios the production provides. Both performers humorously improv with the passing joggers, children and dogs that unknowingly insert themselves into the action, and are able to reorient each other back to the script with ease.There is also the amiability of Young’s straightforward direction. The cadence of Marty and Drew pitching and catching mirrors the surges in their emotions. And there are entire stretches with no speech, with the sound of the ball thudding into a mitt like the dull tick of an aging clock.“Back and Forth” initially premiered in fall 2021 — a season when variants of the virus threatened to isolate New Yorkers once again — so much of the play’s affection still rests on its timing. While the two years since then may seem microscopic in the grander scheme of things, they contain an eternity of major events. And though the play raises evergreen themes, “Back and Forth” feels not just set in 2021, but stuck in it.Back and ForthThrough July 23 at Central Park East Meadow, Manhattan; backandforthplay.com. Running time: 45 minutes.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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      Can ‘Miss Saigon’ Be Saved? Two British Shows Disagree.

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      A revival reimagines the polarizing musical for the 21st century while a new show offers a bawdy riposte.“Miss Saigon” is back and so, inevitably, is the surrounding discourse.Claude-Michel Schönberg’s musical melodrama about an ill-fated romance between a Vietnamese sex worker and an American G.I. during the Vietnam War has polarized opinion ever since it was first staged in 1989. In that original West End run, Jonathan Pryce donned yellowface to play a mixed-race pimp, and the show’s critics have continued to raise concerns about its portrayal of East Asian people, particularly its tawdry sexualization of Vietnamese women.So not everyone was pleased when the Crucible Theater in Sheffield, England, announced it would stage a new production of “Miss Saigon” this summer. A British East and Southeast Asian theater troupe pulled their own show from the playhouse in protest, saying the musical peddled “damaging tropes, misogyny and racism.”The boycott may have been unwarranted, however, as this new production — directed by Robert Hastie and Anthony Lau under the auspices of the acclaimed producer Cameron Mackintosh, and running through Aug. 19 — sets out to address those longstanding criticisms, reimagining the musical in line with 21st-century liberal sensibilities.The outline of the story, heavily inspired by Puccini’s 1904 opera “Madama Butterfly,” is largely unchanged. Chris (a compellingly lugubrious Christian Maynard) meets Kim (Jessica Lee) in a brothel and they fall in love, but their affair ends abruptly when the Americans withdraw from Saigon. Three years later, Chris, now married to an American woman, learns that he has a young son by Kim. Kim tragically takes her own life in order to ensure her child will be raised by his father in the United States, and thus have a better life than she can provide for him.But the play’s look and feel have changed. For starters, there’s the casting: The hitherto male role of the Engineer, the scheming pimp whose machinations provide much of the story’s motive force, is here played with a suitably brash, pantomimic vitality by Joanna Ampil, who played Kim in two 1990s runs at London’s Theater Royal Drury Lane; Chris and his wife, Ellen (Shanay Holmes), are played by Black, rather than white, actors. While this neatly sidesteps some of the baggage associated with Chris being a “white savior,” it does feel a little gimmicky, since what really matters to the plot is his American passport.Shanay Holmes and Christian Maynard in “Miss Saigon.”Johan PerssonMore significantly, Ben Stones’s splendid set design eschews the hackneyed visual imagery associated with this show. The action plays out around an imposing industrial staircase set against a large, dark gray metal screen cut with a geometric pattern, a forbidding backdrop evoking a decidedly unsentimental urban landscape, which is a far cry from the idyllic visions of rural bamboo huts often seen in “Miss Saigon” productions.Lee excels as Kim, rendering her with a dignified stoicism that imbues her sorrowful ballads with pathos — despite the music being objectively corny. Neither she nor her supporting ensemble in the brothel are overtly sexualized: they are just people, doing what they must to survive.The directors Hastie and Lau have argued the case for “reshaping and transforming” problematic narratives rather than doing away with them entirely, and with some tweaks to the script, made with Schönberg’s blessing, they have succeeded in creating a relatively tasteful and humane version of this perennially contentious musical.Yet it’s hard to shake the suspicion that Orientalist kitsch was integral to the shows’s commercial appeal. Remove the defamiliarizing frisson of the exotic and you have, essentially, a love triangle with an immigration paperwork angle. It’s still a heart-rending tale, but is it as much of a spectacle?Forty miles down the road, audiences in Manchester have been enjoying “Untitled F*ck M*ss S**gon Play,” which runs at the the Royal Exchange Theater through July 22 as part of the Manchester International Festival before transferring to London’s Young Vic in September, and is every bit as irreverent as its title suggests.Written by the New York-based dramatist Kimber Lee and directed by Roy Alexander Weise, it features a succession of mordant sendups of the “Madama Butterfly” and “Miss Saigon” narrative arc, in which several iterations of the Kim character (Mei Mac) repeatedly endure the same ill-treatment at the hands of a would-be white savior (Tom Weston-Jones) while a narrator (Rochelle Rose) provides knowingly wry commentary.The series of sketches begin in 1906 (the year “Madama Butterfly” premiered in New York) and ends in mid-’70s Vietnam (the setting for “Miss Saigon”), with pop-cultural touchstones along the way including the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “South Pacific” and the TV series “M*A*S*H.”It’s a bawdy and playful pastiche, with the Orientalist elements hammed up for comic effect, in Kim’s ludicrously doll-like passivity and the generic “hut-like dwelling” in which the romance unfolds: “The whole place looks like Pier 1 and Cost Plus had a three-way with Ikea and this hut is their bastard mixed-race child,” the narrator quips.Kim’s American lover speaks to her in a nonsensical language made up of assorted Asian words — bulgogi, sashimi, onigiri — which the narrator translates into English, a pointed callback to the use of gobbledygook in lieu of Vietnamese in productions of “Miss Saigon” from the 1990s.Things take an autofictional turn when the setting shifts to a dinner party in present-day New York. Kim is now a struggling playwright burdened by a sense of responsibility to push back against decades of racially offensive caricatures on stage and screen. At this point the fun fizzles out somewhat, giving way to essayistic soul-searching.Kim’s mother, Rosie (Lourdes Faberes), delivers an impassioned monologue on behalf of first-generation immigrants, explaining that insensitive representations were something they had to take in their stride. She would like her daughter to be less zealous, and just live her life. A friend implores Kim to make peace with the past, reminding her that American society has come a long way: “We could stop here. We could stay here. It’s not so bad, is it?”It’s a vibrant, funny and intelligent show, but that loss of momentum in the latter stages exposes the limitations of activist theater in which the primary creative impulse is corrective: Once you’ve made your point, there is nowhere left to go.In this regard, “Untitled F*ck M*ss S**gon Play” shares similarities with the new “Miss Saigon,” a show whose moral and aesthetic merit derives primarily from what it omits — the offensive caricature, the crass fetishism — rather than what it contains.These productions function as valuable cultural palate cleansers. But the drive to sanitize problematic content is, ultimately, a matter of commercial self-preservation: Juggernaut brands like “Miss Saigon” are too lucrative to be allowed to die.Having outlived its relevance, the musical is doomed to an afterlife of well-meaning but slightly anodyne remakes as it slowly, inexorably fades into oblivion. More

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      Artistic Director of HERE to Depart After 30 Years

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      “I’m not retiring,” Kristin Marting said about her decision to leave the cross-genre avant-garde company next June.Kristin Marting, the founding artistic director of HERE, wanted to make something clear in announcing her departure from the avant-garde Off Off Broadway theater after 30 years.“I’m not retiring,” she said in an interview last week.“I’ve had my opportunity as a white woman leader to put my stamp and perspective on HERE and on the work that we do,” she said. “So it just feels like the right time for me to make space for what that new vision is.”Exactly what that new vision will be is unclear for now: a successor will be named at a later date and Marting, 56, will program one final season before stepping down next June.HERE, a genre-bending arts center that commissions, produces and presents the work of multidisciplinary artists, was founded in 1993 when Marting and three colleagues (Tim Maner, Barbara Busackino and Randy Rollison) sought a permanent home for their companies of young directors: the Tiny Mythic Theater Company and Home for Contemporary Theater and Art. So they found a 13,000-square-foot raw space, borrowed a bunch of money, recruited volunteers to help build it out and rented a Ferris wheel for their opening performance.“We were just crazy ambitious, naïve, and we were just like, we’re going for it,” she said.The hustle paid off. HERE has not only managed to survive economic downturns, but in 2005, after renting for more than a decade, HERE also bought its space — a former mattress store-turned storage facility south of Houston Street and west of Avenue of the Americas.The arts center, which operates as a company, producer and incubator in addition to being a rental house, has presented critically adored hits, including “The Vagina Monologues” by Eve Ensler, now known as V; Taylor Mac’s “The Lily’s Revenge”; Young Jean Lee’s “Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven”; and Basil Twist’s “Symphonie Fantastique.” “Risk-taking is at the center of our curatorial process,” Marting said, “it has always been at the core of what we’re doing and hasn’t changed in any way.”During Marting’s tenure, HERE co-founded the experimental opera-focused Prototype Festival with Beth Morrison Projects, and Marting will remain a co-curator of that festival. She also started a residency program, which offers mentorship, financial backing and other support to theater, dance, music, puppetry, visual art and new media artists. In recent years, HERE has also created a self-care fund for workers whose disciplines are not covered by unions, instituted a five-day workweek (the theater industry standard is six), and implemented an eight-hour workday for technical rehearsals (referred to as “10 out of 12s” for traditionally 12-hour days with two hours off, contractually permitted by the Actors’ Equity Association).For Marting’s final season, HERE will present a lineup of women-led productions: Normandy Sherwood’s “Psychic Self Defense” (Sept. 12-30), a work of object-theater-puppetry in which a curtain is repeatedly lowered and raised; Heather Christian’s “Terce” (Jan. 10 to Feb. 4), a religious mass with a chorus of 36 women singing rock, gospel and a cappella harmonies; and Nia Witherspoon’s “Priestess of Twerk” (April 3-27), a performance work contemplating bodily autonomy.What’s next for Marting, a multidisciplinary artist herself? She plans to continue directing (including an interactive opera about a modern-day Joan of Arc), and to “say yes more than I’ve been able to,” she said.As for her legacy, Marting said she hopes to leave behind “a philosophy that is about artists at the center of the process.”“If artists are given what they think they need to make their best work, they’ll make their best work,” she said. “They can tell us best what their work needs to be magical.” More

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      Book Review: ‘Encounterism,’ by Andy Field

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      Conceived before the pandemic, Andy Field’s ode to sharing space in person glosses over the ways our everyday habits seem to have changed for good.ENCOUNTERISM: The Neglected Joys of Being in Person, by Andy FieldIt has been shockingly easy, hasn’t it, to fall out of the habit of being with other humans. All it took was one world-stopping pandemic that demanded we keep our distance from one another, and taught us to use technology to maintain that separation for months on end.At home with our screens, we have yet to bounce back from that disruption, yet to readopt old habits like commuting to the office or watching movies at the multiplex. If recent trends in bad behavior are any indication, we may also have yet to relearn the skill set of coexistence — like how not to throw hard objects at musicians during their live shows, even if it makes for eye-grabbing video.Into this precarious state of affairs steps “Encounterism: The Neglected Joys of Being in Person,” an argument by the British artist Andy Field for venturing out among the populace. To him, our most ordinary sidewalk interactions can be imbued with “friction and possibility … anxiety and joy.” These are little pockets of opportunity where compassion might grow.“What do we lose when we stop inhabiting the streets of our towns and cities?” he asks. “What understanding of the world, and of each other, are we depriving ourselves of as we spend less and less time in proximity to all these strangers and their lives that are so very different from our own?” In an author’s note, Field says right up front that the idea for “Encounterism” came before the coronavirus pandemic, not in response to it, and that he wrote much of the book during “the caesura it created.” That goes some way toward explaining why its chapters — essays, essentially — so often feel trapped in amber, describing realities of another time, as if no paradigms had shifted. It might also explain why the book so frequently relies on research that a person could do from home, though its premise suggests what a limited portal to understanding that can be. (Granted, I am a journalist, and I cover theater. I believe in showing up.)Field’s most vivid, potent writing channels the sensations of physical immersion in activities he clearly cherishes — like dancing in clubs, which he believes nurtures empathy among strangers finding a collective rhythm in the dark, or sitting in a crowded movie theater, navigating a shared experience with a laughing, shushing, crying, shrieking audience: “We hold each other tightly until the moment the lights come up, and then we all go our separate ways.” But Field’s opening chapter — an intended homage to the tactile care that hairdressers provide, and a nod to its absence when salons were closed — reads like a performance of appreciation rather than the genuine article. And a chapter on shared meals strains to convey the significance of everyday dinners, unmindful of the sacred longing that those simple social rituals took on early in the pandemic, when people could not eat together.This is the dissonance that trails us through the book, nagging all the way. Field makes theater and performance art, and he tells some entertaining stories about his offbeat career. (One involves a stranger, whom he was attempting to feed as part of an experimental piece, biting him hard enough to leave a bruise.) But he barely mentions what it meant for his creative work — so dependent on up-close, in-person presence, and often involving travel — to go remote.It isn’t that the memories don’t belong; it’s that the changes do, too, as do the insights that they brought. The best part of Field’s chapter on city parks is about the community he has found in the London green space where he walks his dog, and how vital that place became to him in 2020 and 2021, when people were often forbidden to meet inside.Even so, Field never truly gets at the fundamental, tangible value of being present, bodily, with our fellow human beings. Not until the lovely final chapter, on the pleasure of hand-holding, does he very briefly mention one of the most excruciating privations of the early pandemic: the inability of people to be with their loved ones, holding hands at a deathbed.But the book doesn’t plumb the desperation so many felt for in-person contact: to hug and touch one another; to sniff a new baby’s head; to gauge someone’s well-being in 360 degrees and three dimensions, unconstricted by the frame of a video screen.We have those multisensory joys back — yet whole in-person art forms (hello, theater) are mired in financial crisis because the audiences that have returned are just too small. Such a fragile moment cries out for a ferociously persuasive argument for engaging with the world in person, not through our screens.The epigraph of “Encounterism,” a quotation from the French novelist and essayist Georges Perec, is about questioning “the habitual.” But our habits are not what they were only a handful of years ago. Far better to register what’s habitual now and examine that.Laura Collins-Hughes, a freelance journalist, writes about theater for The Times.ENCOUNTERISM: The Neglected Joys of Being in Person | By Andy Field | 288 pp. | W.W. Norton & Company | Paperback, $17.95 More

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      Movie Stars and Broadway Veterans Share Theater Camp Memories

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      In honor of “Theater Camp,” a new movie about a fictional sleepaway site, we asked Broadway veterans and movie stars for their favorite camp memories.Molly Gordon and Ben Platt met as children at the Adderley School, a theater studio in Los Angeles that runs after-school programs and summer day camps. There are photos and home videos of them starring opposite each other in some very grown-up shows like “Chicago” and “Damn Yankees.” Two decades later — with the help of the actor-writer Noah Galvin, Platt’s fiancé, and the writer-director Nick Lieberman — they have spun those memories of wonky vibrato, stumbling choreography and an ardent sense of belonging into the feature comedy “Theater Camp,” opening Friday.Set at the financially rickety establishment of the title, the film bounces among campers and counselors in upstate New York as they work on an ambitious slate of productions: “Cats,” “Damn Yankees,” “The Crucible Jr.” and “Joan Still,” an original musical inspired by the camp’s comatose founder (Amy Sedaris). The movie began as a 2017 short, and after a yearslong struggle for financing (“We wanted to make a mostly improvised movie with children; a lot of people were not down for that,” Gordon said), it was shot last summer in 19 frantic days at an abandoned camp in Warwick, N.Y.Full of in-jokes (campers barter for bags of Throat Coat tea like they are Schedule I drugs), the movie is also a hymn to all of the outcasts and square pegs who finally find acceptance in a kick line. Theater camp is, as a closing ballad explains, “where every kid picked last in gym finally makes the team.”Over the years, theater camps around the country have yielded a rich crop of Broadway stars, composers and directors. The movie’s creators and a handful of Broadway veterans who credit camp with shaping their careers spoke with me about community, stage kisses and the transformative effects of “Free to Be You and Me.” These are edited excerpts from the conversations.Gordon and Platt in the movie. “I was just a crazy wild child and so excited to be in that environment,” Gordon said about her childhood camp experience.Searchlight PicturesMolly GordonActress (“Booksmart,” “The Bear”)Camps: The Adderley School, French Woods, Stagedoor ManorMemories: At sleepaway camp, I was never a lead. I was always in the chorus — “Zombie Prom,” “West Side Story,” “Chicago.” But I absolutely adored it. I had the classic experience. I could eat all the sugar I wanted. I got to be in completely age-inappropriate shows. I kissed two guys who told me that they were gay the next day. I was just a crazy wild child and so excited to be in that environment.Ben PlattActor (“Parade,” “Dear Evan Hansen”)Camp: The Adderley SchoolMemories: There’s an independence. You’re forced away from your parents, and you are having to risk embarrassing yourself; you throw yourself into things and fall on your face. It’s healthy failure. For queer kids, like me, it was where I was the most completely embraced, not having to fit a box or semi-pretend to be enjoying certain things. At day camp at Adderley, Molly and I were Adelaide and Sky in “Guys and Dolls.” We were Lola and Joe in “Damn Yankees.” We were Roxie and Billy Flynn in “Chicago.” We were Tracy and Link in “Hairspray.” I was pretty much the queerest Link Larkin. Molly, one of her first kisses was our kiss in that.Noah GalvinActor (“The Good Doctor,” “Dear Evan Hansen”)Camps: Northern Westchester Center for the ArtsMemories: My first play was “Charlotte’s Web.” My mom tells this really disturbing story of me coming onstage as the gander with my script in my hand, because I was so nervous about forgetting my lines. My mom was like, “I’m not certain that he’s cut out for this.” But it teaches you agency as a young person; it gives you real independence, emotionally and physically. There were kids of all shapes and sizes and gender expressions. I walked into a space and there were 120 like-minded individuals who all want to do “Anything Goes.”Jason Robert BrownComposer (“Parade,” “13”)Camp: French WoodsMemories: I went in thinking I was an actor, but I was also in the rock bands and jazz bands. Fortunately for everyone, actor guy has gone away. I was Pirelli in “Sweeney Todd” and Charley in “Merrily We Roll Along.” In a role I truly should never have been doing, I sang “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” in “Cabaret.” I was able to see this whole world of work. I’m not a happy-ending guy. And if all you see are the most popular shows, you might feel like that’s all there is. Because I got to do all this material that was darker than that, that was stranger than that, I got to say, “Oh, there is a place for the thing I want to do.”From left, Andréa Burns, Karen Olivo, Janet Dacal and Mandy Gonzalez, seated, in “In the Heights” on Broadway. Burns grew up going to the French Woods theater camp.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAndréa BurnsActress (“In the Heights”)Camp: French WoodsMemories: It was a miracle. In my own school, I was the only person who really liked theater. Going to this wonderland, where I met other kids who loved this as much as I did gave me a true sense of belonging. I played Sally Bowles in “Cabaret” and Aldonza in “Man of La Mancha” the same summer. I was 14, singing “Aldonza the Whore” and talking about sleeping around. The way we would root for one another, it was such a joyful experience. Being inspired by the gifts of my peers drove me to work harder. I discovered true happiness in that atmosphere of collaboration and growth. Quite honestly, I’ve been chasing that feeling my entire professional life.Celia Keenan-BolgerActress (“To Kill a Mockingbird”)Camp: Interlochen Arts CampMemories: I felt like I had landed in some sort of magical world. We were all talking about what our favorite Sondheim musical was instead of what was playing on the radio. The thing that has kept me in the theater for so long is that sense of belonging. I felt the most like myself when I was at camp. This feeling of wanting to do musicals was something that always felt singular and a little bit lonely, growing up, and then to be with all of these people who were so talented and loved it as much as I did, something clicked into place. Camp made me feel like, “Oh, this could be my profession.”Rachel Chavkin winning the Tony for best direction for “Hadestown.” She went to Stagedoor Manor as a child.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRachel ChavkinDirector (“The Thanksgiving Play,” “Hadestown”)Camp: Stagedoor ManorMemories: I did “The Cell,” where I played a nun who murders a bird or a child or both. I did Arthur Miller’s “Playing for Time.” I played the lead in “Ruthless!” and the evil mother in “Blood Brothers.” We did “Our Town,” and I played the stage manager. A huge profound thing about Stagedoor was it was filled with people who were alienated in their home schools. For queerness of all kinds, it was a haven. And as ambivalent as I am about the strange status games at Stagedoor, I don’t think I would be in theater without it. It nurtured my curiosity. And it began to teach me about taste. I showed up to college a year after leaving Stagedoor and saw my first Wooster Group show, and I was like, “I never want to see another musical again.”Jeanine TesoriComposer (“Kimberly Akimbo,” “Fun Home”)Camp: Stagedoor ManorMemories: I didn’t even know what theater was until I was 18. But it all started at Stagedoor for me. I was a music director and a counselor. I music-directed “Free to Be You and Me.” My friend was directing it, and she wanted new material and that was the first song I ever wrote. I immediately thought, “Oh, this is the missing piece for me.” At that point, I was still a pre-med major at Barnard. After that summer, I did the music major at Columbia. I did that because of Stagedoor. It was just a ticket to a whole different world. More