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      Leaping ‘Into the Next Unknown’: Robert Lyons on the End of New Ohio Theater

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      The handwriting on the company’s wall, in chalk, was traced by a closing night crowd sharing memories of more than 30 years of landmarks and larks.The last performance of the last show at the 74-seat New Ohio Theater, on Christopher Street in Manhattan’s West Village, was “Ultra Left Violence,” a poetical, political, work-in-progress play by the company’s artistic director, Robert Lyons. Wrapping up the New Ohio’s final Ice Factory festival on Aug. 12, it was thrillingly, even touchingly, weird.Mid-show, members of the convivial audience were given chalk — a motif in the production design — to cover the black-painted walls with their memories of the New Ohio and its predecessor, the Ohio Theater, on Wooster Street in SoHo. After the spectators returned to their seats, the performance continued with the frenzied, prolonged smashing of a watermelon, which sent chunks and juice flying. (Tarps and rain ponchos were provided.)Experimental work was the soul of the New Ohio, a producer and presenter that closed for good on Aug. 31. The publicity line has been that the shutdown is the end of 30 years, but that’s a give-or-take number. It rounds up the life span of Ice Factory, the festival of new works that Lyons founded in 1994, and rounds down his tenure, which started at the Ohio Theater in 1988, when the owner of that space, Bill Hahn, hired Lyons, then 28, to run it. He served as the building’s super, too, and got a rent-free loft in exchange.“My wife says it wasn’t a job, it was a lifestyle choice,” Lyons said. “We lived upstairs. My daughter was raised there.”In 2011, after the Wooster Street building was sold, the Ohio was reincarnated as the New Ohio. Cumulatively, the two stages saw a jaw-dropping profusion of downtown artists (Taylor Mac, Mimi Lien, Knud Adams, Sam Gold, Lee Sunday Evans, James Ortiz) and companies (the Mad Ones, Half Straddle, Target Margin, New Georges, Ma-Yi Theater Company, Rude Mechanicals, Clubbed Thumb, Ping Chong and Company, Elevator Repair Service, Vampire Cowboys, the Talking Band).The shows Lyons remembers most fondly include “Surrender,” by International WOW; “Boozy,” from Alex Timbers; and “Particularly in the Heartland,” by Rachel Chavkin and the TEAM. Back in 1988, Lyons recalled, Anne Bogart’s “No Plays No Poetry” put the Ohio Theater on the map.As for the rented space that was home to the New Ohio, it will remain a theater, renamed 154 and run by the nonprofit ChaShaMa. In the coming season, 154 will host the company Out of the Box Theatrics, which focuses on marginalized communities.Three days after the final performance of “Ultra Left Violence,” Lyons arranged two chairs on the New Ohio’s immaculate empty stage and sat down for an interview. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.What’s your own favorite memory of those 30 years?Definitely one of them was when we did the Vaclav Havel festival, and he came to the [Ohio Theater] two or three nights in a row. Edward Einhorn did the festival. I directed one of the shows, and Havel came and saw it. Then he just hung out, and I bought him a beer at the concessions, and he was telling me about this play he was working on.That seems to epitomize what theater is to you: art and politics and hanging out.Exactly right, yeah. The thing I love the most about these 30 years is the community of people that I’ve got to know and bond with.What grabbed you about the old Wooster Street space?It was spectacular. It was 5,000 square feet of raw space with the old creaky floors, the columns, the barn doors that opened out onto the street. It was falling down around us. It had no air conditioning. It was famously hot during the summer, and it didn’t matter. People were willing to suffer for their art — to consume it and to perform it. It was a different time. I don’t think you could get away with that now.The other night here, what were you thinking as you watched the final show?It was very emotional, of course. I was trying to hold it together. [laughs] But I was just surrounded by so many of my friends. So it was a very warm, safe room to be in. It was a crazy show, and I was very happy to finish on that note. Like, let’s just do a bonkers intellectual circus, and see if it works.Why go out with a work in progress?I was consciously trying to make a statement to myself and maybe to everybody that I’m going to continue to do theater past this date. I’m going to stop running a theater, but I’m not done making theater. Now we’re spring-boarding into the next unknown.I’ve been getting a very steady flow of people telling me how sorry they are that we’re closing. But it was the right time. I’m 64, you know. For me, it’s not so much of a sad thing, but —Is it really not a sad thing?Talk to me in a month. [laughs] I’m still sitting here. I’ve had a key to a theater for 35 years in New York. I could always open up the door to a theater and go in. And Sept. 1, I won’t. The reality of that is going to hit.But it’s the right time?I was kind of done with the day to day of keeping a machine going. There was a point where I said, OK, we have the funding to get through this year. Then next year is a complete catastrophe. Because that’s where the field is, and all that PPP money and Covid money is ending. I would rather go out and [be able to] meet all my obligations and enjoy it instead of do one more year and be chasing money the whole time and worrying about “Can I keep it open?” and then maybe closing in the middle of the season.Your audience stuck around, but the funding got scarcer and —And the cost of making the work and the cost of staffing. That’s the combination.Is there still room for the truly experimental?Here [a downtown producer and presenter] is very good at it. Their work is very strange. They’re also paying people living wages. But I do think it’s harder. We’re always on the margin of a marginal form. I don’t know if we’ve ever been more than that, really.But you seed the wider theater.I agree. This is where everyone gets their chops. This is where everybody learns what they have to say and how to say it and what their aesthetic is. That translates throughout the regional theater system and uptown in the larger spaces. All of those have gotten more adventurous over the 30 years, because people are bringing their aesthetic — maybe not as wild, but still carrying it with them.In your final show, so much was drawn and written in chalk, meant to be wiped away — ephemeral, like theater.It’s very fleeting. Part of the magic of it is you do all the labor that goes into making a piece — the design team, the cast, the stage management team, the writers. Putting all that effort and creativity and thought and commitment into this, and we did it for four performances. You just think, who does that? And it’s theater people. That’s who.What makes it worth it?What do I want the fabric of my life to be? If it’s playing with other people as though it’s the most serious, important thing in the world, that’s a pretty good way to spend your time. More

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      Franne Lee, Tony Winner Who Also Costumed Coneheads, Dies at 81

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      She worked on “Sweeney Todd” and “Candide” and also on the early seasons of “Saturday Night Live,” contributing to the look of the Blues Brothers and the Killer Bees.Franne Lee, a costume and set designer who while doing Tony Award-winning work on Broadway in the 1970s also made killer-bee suits and cone-shaped headwear for early “Saturday Night Live” sketches, helping to create some of that era’s most memorable comic moments, died on Sunday in Atlantis, Fla. She was 81.Her daughter, Stacy Sandler, announced the death, after a short illness that she did not specify.Ms. Lee did some of her most high-profile work in the 1970s while in a relationship with the set designer Eugene Lee. She collaborated with him on productions including an acclaimed “Candide,” directed by Harold Prince at the Chelsea Theater Center in Brooklyn in 1973. It moved to the Broadway Theater in Midtown Manhattan the next year and ran there for 740 performances.“The production has been designed by those experts, Eugene and Franne Lee,” Clive Barnes wrote in The New York Times, reviewing the Broadway incarnation, “and they have knocked the innards out of this respectable Broadway house and made it into an obstacle course of seats, musicians’ areas, catwalks, drawbridges and playing platforms, with one conventional stage thrown in at the end of the space for good measure and convenience.”The Lees shared the 1974 Tony Award for scenic design, and Ms. Lee won another for costuming, her specialty. As the story goes, one person who saw that “Candide” was a young producer named Lorne Michaels, who was creating an unconventional late-night show for NBC. He was impressed and brought the Lees in as designers on the show that, when it made its debut in October 1975, was called “NBC’s Saturday Night” but soon became “Saturday Night Live.”The original “S.N.L.” cast quickly made its mark with outlandish sketches, and Ms. Lee was integral to the look of those now famous bits — dressing John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd in black when they became the Blues Brothers, turning cut-up long johns into the yellow-striped Killer Bee costumes, and more.Dan Aykroyd, left, and John Belushi as the Blues Brothers on “Saturday Night Live.” Ms. Lee designed their costumes.Edie Baskin/OnyxIt was costume designing on the cheap. Ms. Lee’s father, a tool-and-die maker, came up with the bouncy springs that were the Killer Bees’ antennae, which she finished off by sticking Ping-Pong balls on the ends. John Storyk, who first met Ms. Lee in 1968 when both worked at the short-lived Manhattan club Cerebrum, recalled in a phone interview dropping by the Lees’ apartment and seeing on her work table the beginnings of the cones that became the defining feature of the Coneheads, the extraterrestrials who were a recurring presence on the show in the late 1970s and later got their own feature film.In an interview for the book “Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers and Guests” (2002), by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller, James Signorelli, a longtime “S.N.L.” producer, said that Ms. Lee influenced fashion beyond the studio walls.“The way Franne Lee, our costume designer, dressed Lorne for the show suddenly became the way everybody in New York was dressing,” he said. “Lorne used to come out onstage wearing a shirt, jacket and bluejeans. Nobody had ever seen it. But before you knew it, everybody was sitting around in Levis and a jacket.”Laraine Newman, an original “S.N.L.” cast member, recalled one time when Ms. Lee herself became part of the action — not on the show, but during a photo shoot Ms. Newman was doing with Francesco Scavullo, the noted fashion and celebrity photographer. Ms. Newman was working a vampire look, complete with fangs.“Franne found me this incredible Edwardian black lace dress,” Ms. Newman said by email, “and we did wonderful shots with that, and then Scavullo had this idea that Franne should be my victim, and so there are shots of me like biting Franne’s neck. It was so hard not to laugh because Franne was making these faces trying to look horrified or drained of blood. It’s a wonderful memory, and it still makes me laugh when I think about it. She was so very talented.”Len Cariou, left, and Angela Lansbury in the original Broadway production of “Sweeney Todd.” Ms. Lee won a Tony Award for her costumes.Martha Swope/New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman CenterThat talent earned Ms. Lee another Tony Award in 1979 for her costume designs for the original Broadway production of “Sweeney Todd,” the Stephen Sondheim musical about a murderous barber who has his victims made into meat pies. The show was directed by Mr. Prince, who Ms. Lee said initially told her he was reluctant to take on the project despite her urging.“He told me: ‘You’re crazy, absolutely crazy! You can’t do a musical about people eating people,’” she recalled in a 2002 interview with The Tennessean newspaper. “‘I said, ‘Why not?’”Frances Elaine Newman was born on Dec. 30, 1941, in the Bronx to Martin and Anne (Marks) Newman. Her father had a small machine shop on Long Island, and her mother was an offset printing supervisor.Ms. Lee was studying painting at the University of Wisconsin, her daughter said, when she discovered her love of theater and costume design. She was married to Ralph Sandler at the time and relocated to Pennsylvania when his job took him there, doing costume and design work for local theaters. The couple divorced in 1967, and Ms. Lee relocated to New York.“Franne and I both answered the same ad,” Mr. Storyk said, recalling how they found themselves working at Cerebrum. Mr. Storyk designed the club; Ms. Lee was what was called a guide, leading patrons through the place, which promoted consciousness-raising and featured various interactive environments. It closed in less than a year.Ms. Lee, though, continued to pursue her theatrical interests, creating costumes for groups including Theater of the Living Arts in Philadelphia. She also met Mr. Lee. Among their earliest collaborations as scenic designers — with Ms. Lee still credited as Franne Newman — was a version of “Alice in Wonderland” staged by the director André Gregory in 1970 that drew rave reviews.Ms. Lee in 2015.Amber Arnold/Wisconsin State JournalThe two became a couple and Franne adopted Mr. Lee’s name, though the nature of their relationship remained hazy; Patrick Lynch, a longtime aide to Mr. Lee, said the two were never formally married. (Mr. Lee died in February.) In any case, their personal and professional partnership continued until 1980, the year Ms. Lee left “Saturday Night Live.”She continued to design costumes for shows in New York in the 1980s and ’90s, including a few short-lived Broadway productions and, in the mid-’90s at the Public Theater, Christopher Walken’s examination of the life and legend of Elvis Presley, “Him.”She also tried the West Coast for a time, working on a few television shows and made-for-TV movies. In 2001 she settled in Nashville, where she was involved in founding Plowhaus, a gallery and artists’ cooperative. She later lived in Wisconsin, and since 2017 she had lived in Lake Worth Beach, Fla., about 65 miles north of Miami, designing costumes for theaters in that area.In addition to her daughter, from her marriage to Mr. Sandler, Ms. Lee is survived by a son from that marriage, Geoffrey Sandler; a son with Mr. Lee, Willie Lee; a brother, Bill Newman; six grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.The frugal D.I.Y. ethos of her “S.N.L.” years stayed with Ms. Lee throughout her costume-designing career. In 2018 she worked on costumes for a production of Conor McPherson’s thriller “The Birds” (based on the same source material as the Alfred Hitchcock movie) at the Garden Theater in Winter Garden, Fla. It required a wedding dress, which she bought at a thrift shop for $45.“I’m a senior citizen,” she told The Orlando Sentinel, “so if I go on Wednesday, things are half price.” More

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      Theater to See in September 2023: ‘Ulysses,’ ‘The Pianist’ and More

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      Six shows and a fringe festival are among this month’s highlights in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and a bit beyond.Headlines about the theater industry’s troubles have been easy to find lately: layoffs, closures, shrinking audiences and seasons. The good news? There’s still a lot of theater out there.Philadelphia Fringe FestivalFringe theatergoing is a crapshoot; that’s pretty much a rule. But there is adventure to be had in plotting your way through hundreds of events, almost all of them uncurated. Circus, dance, comedy, cabaret, kids’ fare and more are part of the 27th year of this festival. Ticket prices are low, and offerings include a handful of digital shows. Sept. 7-24 at various locations in Philadelphia; phillyfringe.org‘The 12’The playwright Robert Schenkkan, a Pulitzer Prize winner for “The Kentucky Cycle,” dips into musical theater as the book writer of this show, with music by Neil Berg and lyrics by both of them. The Tony Award winner John Doyle directs this tale, which unfolds among the terrified disciples of Jesus, who have gone into hiding in the chaotic aftermath of his and Judas’s deaths. Sept. 8-Oct. 29 at the Goodspeed, East Haddam, Conn.; goodspeed.org‘Bulrusher’Jordan Tyson, left, and Robert Kellogg in rehearsals for a new production of Eisa Davis’s “Bulrusher,” a 2007 Pulitzer Prize finalist.Dave TavaniDuring the pandemic shutdown of in-person theater, when the playwright Paula Vogel championed underproduced plays by staging them virtually, this linguistically inventive drama by Eisa Davis got her full-throated support, and a high-profile digital production. Here is a chance to see it live, in a McCarter Theater Center-Berkeley Repertory Theater co-production. Set in a mostly white California town in 1955, it tells the story of a clairvoyant multiracial teenager who grew up there, and whose world finds new dimensions with the arrival of a Black girl from the South. The play was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2007, when Vogel was on the jury. Sept. 13-Oct. 7 at the McCarter Theater Center, Princeton, N.J.; mccarter.org‘Lunar Eclipse’A deftly nuanced, easily knowing depiction of marriage won the playwright Donald Margulies the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for his domestic comedy “Dinner With Friends.” Now he returns to that territory with this new play, starring Karen Allen and Reed Birney as a long-wed couple having drinks on their Midwestern farm, watching a lunar eclipse on a summer night. James Warwick directs the world-premiere production. Sept. 15-Oct. 22 at Shakespeare & Company, Lenox, Mass.; shakespeare.org‘Ulysses’Not even Elevator Repair Service, the venerable experimental troupe best known for “Gatz,” a marathon-length enactment of the full text of “The Great Gatsby,” is heedless enough to stage the whole of James Joyce’s run-on, epic masterwork about Leopold Bloom’s daylong odyssey through Dublin. Directed by John Collins, the company’s artistic director, this world-premiere production instead samples chunks from each of the novel’s 18 episodes, letting them erupt in all their verbosity, vulgarity, vivacity and — it is Joyce, after all — opacity. Co-directed by Scott Shepherd, who is also part of the seven-actor ensemble, it has an entirely reasonable projected running time: two hours and 15 minutes. Sept. 21-Oct. 1 at the Fisher Center at Bard, Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.; fishercenter.bard.edu‘The Pianist’This new play with music retells the story of the musician and composer Wladyslaw Szpilman, whose 1946 memoir of surviving the Holocaust as a Polish Jew in Warsaw was the basis for the Roman Polanski movie “The Pianist.” The director Emily Mann has adapted Szpilman’s book for the stage, with an original score by Iris Hond. Sept. 26-Oct. 22 at New Brunswick Performing Arts Center, New Brunswick, N.J.; georgestreetplayhouse.org‘Lizzie’When a murder case is so notorious that it’s commemorated with a children’s rhyme, enduring curiosity about it is almost guaranteed. Cross that with the trans-Atlantic success of “Six,” and you arrive at this production: a Lizzie Borden rock musical with an all-female cast. Written by Steven Cheslik-deMeyer, Tim Maner and Alan Stevens Hewitt, and directed by Lainie Sakakura, this show promises “to explore the historical record.” Sept. 29-Oct. 22 at TheaterWorks Hartford, Hartford, Conn.; twhartford.org More

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      Review: ‘Next to Normal’ Is Back, With Extra Pathos

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      A London revival of the hit musical brings extra warmth to the story of a woman in psychological free fall.A mind in torment is making for some terrific theater at the moment in London, where the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical “Next to Normal” is belatedly having its British debut 14 years after it opened to acclaim on Broadway. The local premiere at the intimate but important Donmar Warehouse runs through Oct. 7, and this engagement looks unlikely to be its last.In between its Broadway run and now, the show has been seen in an immersive production in Barcelona and its composer, Tom Kitt, has written a handful of other Broadway musicals.But as staged afresh in London under the astute eye of the director Michael Longhurst, “Next to Normal,” a portrait of a woman in psychic turmoil, has a renewed sting.Longhurst is soon to depart his post as artistic director of the Donmar (Timothy Sheader takes over the job next year) so is easing his way out on a high. In casting “Next to Normal,” he has plucked a supporting performer, Caissie Levy, from his lauded 2021 Broadway revival of “Caroline, or Change” to inherit from the Tony winner Alice Ripley the demanding lead role of Diana Goodman, a bipolar wife and mother whom we witness in accelerating degrees of distress. The result is transformative: Whereas the show I recall in New York (with a different cast) was commanding but chilly, this version owes its extra pathos to Levy’s innate warmth: You feel for Diana at every step, even as you fear where her wayward emotions may lead her next.Jamie Parker as Dan and Caissie Levy as Diana. Marc BrennerA Broadway alumna of “Hair” and “Frozen,” Levy from the start pulls you into her character’s increasing confusion. We see at the outset the difficulty Diana faces in simply making sandwiches, the bread laid out before her as if as if this routine domestic task were an unusual challenge.From there, the musical darkens to embrace shock therapy, attempted suicide and multiple hallucinations, the specifics of which are best left unrevealed. Some may chafe at the cumulative effect of a through-sung musical that lets neither its characters nor its audience off the hook; we witness Diana’s reluctant surrender to electroconvulsive therapy, followed by memory loss that further amplifies her trauma.Some may flinch at the unyielding nature of the despair that unfolds, but those attuned to its candor may emerge from the show with clarity: It’s no surprise that the final song is entitled “Light.” This musical opts not for fake sentimental uplift, but for the courage that comes from facing down mental illness, acknowledging human frailty and somehow finding a way to carry on.Several references move the world of the show on from a decade ago. Mentions of X, formerly known as Twitter, and climate change suggest the present day, and Chloe Lamford’s sliding, bleakly antiseptic set — representing both home and hospital — exists in colorless contrast to the blood that gets spilled upon it. (The London-based American performer Trevor Dion Nicholas ably doubles as the two doctors struggling to diagnose Diana’s condition.)Trevor Dion Nicholas doubles as two doctors struggling to find a diagnosis for Diana’s condition.Marc BrennerLevy steers the production, her voice softening on the plaintive solo “I Miss the Mountains” before acquiring the necessary steeliness for “You Don’t Know,” Diana’s furious duet with her husband, Dan. In that role, Jamie Parker, a onetime Harry Potter on the London and Broadway stage, communicates the anguish that comes from watching a loved one slip away: The sight of him, late on, curled up in despair in the family kitchen, is among the show’s most rending.As the couple’s musician daughter, Natalie, Eleanor Worthington-Cox brings some serious pipes to the part of a teenager determined not to follow in her mother’s fraught emotional path. Jack Ofrecio is properly sympathetic as her boyfriend, a good-natured stoner who attempts to keep Natalie from her own psychological free fall.And the production boasts a genuine breakout star in the fresh-faced Jack Wolfe, who seizes the role of the antic son, Gabe, and brings a darting sense of danger whenever he appears on the two-tiered stage. (The music director Nick Barstow’s expert band is positioned above the action, obscured now and again by screens that suggest a clouded mind.)In superb voice, Wolfe has an electrifying talent that more than matches Levy’s own, and when he rocks out on the character’s solo number “I’m Alive” — Gabe’s searing anthem of self-assertion — it feels as if there’s no more vital theatrical place to be.Next to NormalThrough Oct. 7 at the Donmar Warehouse, in London; donmarwarehouse.com. More

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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