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      Why Basketball Is So Popular Off Broadway

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      Basketball is central to the plot in new shows, including “Flex” and “The Half-God of Rainfall.”In Inua Ellams’s new play, “The Half-God of Rainfall,” the gods play thunderous games of basketball in the heavens. For Candrice Jones’s “Flex,” high schoolers practice their defensive stances while scraping by in rural Arkansas. Near the end of Rajiv Joseph’s “King James,” the two main characters play a one-on-one game of basketball using a crumpled up piece of paper after waxing poetic about the greatness of the N.B.A. star LeBron James.Basketball hasn’t just been on the playgrounds of New York City this summer. Hoop dreams are also playing out onstage, highlighting a theater, ahem, crossover that has become more pronounced in recent years.While basketball is not as popular as, say, American football, its cultural reach surpasses that of other American team sports because its players are among the most publicly recognizable. (Three of the 10 highest-paid athletes in the world, when including endorsements and other off-field endeavors, according to Forbes, are N.B.A. players.)“Watching a basketball game is the same excitement I get from watching great theater,” said Taibi Magar, the director of “The Half-God of Rainfall.” “It’s like embodied conflict. It’s executed by highly skilled performers. When you’re watching Broadway, you feel just like you’re watching N.B.A. performers.”For Joseph, who grew up in Cleveland, basketball is the most culturally important sport partly because so many international stars play in the N.B.A., like the Denver Nuggets’s Nikola Jokic, who is Serbian, and the Milwaukee Bucks’s Giannis Antetokounmpo, who’s from Greece.“It’s drawing from every place on the planet, which means that the sport has become a really important athletic pursuit globally,” said Joseph, whose play “King James” just ended its run at New York City Center.In Inua Ellams’s “The Half-God of Rainfall,” at New York Theater Workshop, Demi (played by Mister Fitzgerald) is a half-Greek god who becomes the biggest star in the N.B.A.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd basketball’s prevalence in pop culture — including in the worlds of hip-hop and fashion and more recently in film and television — has also penetrated the theater space. Dwyane Wade, who retired from the N.B.A. in 2019, was among the producers of the Broadway shows “American Son” and “Ain’t No Mo’.”“Even if one hasn’t played on a team or hasn’t played organized ball, we all have access to basketball,” Jones, who wrote “Flex,” said in a recent interview. “You go in any hood or any small town, someone has created a basketball goal.”In casting “Flex,” which is in previews at the Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, prospective actors recorded themselves playing basketball as part of the audition process. Jones and the show’s director, Lileana Blain-Cruz, who both played basketball in high school, said they wanted the basketball being played onstage to look authentic.“People have different styles, different ways of shooting, different personalities, different kinds of swagger,” Blain-Cruz said. “We care about the individual in the role that they play and how they’re playing it. And I think that aligns itself to theater.”Jones’s play, set in rural Arkansas, tells the story of a girl’s high school basketball team in 1998, which aligned with the second year of the W.N.B.A. So as the audition process advanced, the actors were asked to dribble, shoot and do layups for the creative team. Once the cast was set, some rehearsals weren’t about staging at all: The cast had basketball practice at nearby John Jay College.“There’s a kind of ensemble quality to it,” Blain-Cruz said about the sport. “Like an ensemble of actors playing together, a team of basketball players performing together. Together, they create the event.”Minutes later, as Lauryn Hill’s “Doo Wop (That Thing)” blared, Blain-Cruz led a warm-up with the cast that included hip openers and upward arm stretches. It could have doubled as pregame preparation. The set itself had a basketball hoop hanging in the rear, and a basketball court painted on the floor. “Flex” refers to a type of play basketball teams run, and the staged work features several instances of game play.“There’s a real rigor. It is real,” Blain-Cruz said. “That’s what’s so satisfying, I think, about sports onstage. There’s an honesty to it, right? Dribbling the ball is actually dribbling the ball. We’re not performing the idea of dribbling the ball.”After a recent outing to a New York Liberty game, the actress Erica Matthews, whose character, Starra Jones, is the 17-year-old point guard of the fictional team, said watching the players reminded her of watching live theater.“Basketball is very intimate. You can play a one-on-one game in a small amount of space,” Matthews said. “They’re actually performing on a stage and with the way the audience is surrounding them, the way they’re cheering, it’s basically storytelling.”Downtown at the New York Theater Workshop, Ellams’s “The Half-God of Rainfall,” a Dante-inspired “contemporary epic” about a half-Greek god named Demi who becomes the biggest star in the N.B.A., is in previews and is scheduled to open July 31. While “Flex” deals with down-to-earth issues, such as teen pregnancy, “The Half-God of Rainfall” transports basketball to a mythical world for immortals to deal with.At a recent rehearsal, cast members pantomimed slow motion basketball movements at the direction of the choreographer, Orlando Pabotoy. The actors Jason Bowen and Patrice Johnson Chevannes worked on setting up a proper screen, and Bowen later practiced a Michael Jordan impersonation — complete with the tongue wagging. (Jordan is referenced in the play.)As Ellams and Magar, the show’s director, looked on from desks cluttered with tiny inflatable basketballs, they worked on reallocating lines as the choreography required. Though this version of Ellams’s poem has a cast of seven, he said it can be staged with as many or as few performers as the production desires. (A 2019 production at the Birmingham Repertory Theater in England had only two actors.)Ellams, a Nigerian poet and playwright, who has played basketball since he was a teenager, said he created the character Demi to “do all the things that I never could” on the court. He mused that basketball has a greater draw to the stage because it is “a far more beautiful sport.”In Rajiv Joseph’s “King James,” which just ended its run at New York City Center, Chris Perfetti and Glenn Davis play two men who bond over their love of LeBron James.Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“There’s something humbling and mortal about basketball in the sense that there’s a simple equation,” Ellams said. “The ball bounces; it comes back up to your palm. You can break that down. This is solitariness, which invites the blues and what it means to play the blues. There’s a longing.”“There’s a natural melancholy about it,” he added, which makes it “easier to pair with the human spirit.”Of course there have been other basketball-related plays. In 2012, “Magic/Bird” explored the friendship and rivalry between the 1980s basketball stars Magic Johnson and Larry Bird on Broadway. The 2011 Broadway musical “Lysistrata Jones,” inspired by Aristophanes’s “Lysistrata,” followed a group of cheerleaders who withhold sex from their boyfriends on the basketball team because they keep losing games. Lauren Yee’s 2018 Off Broadway play, “The Great Leap,” also directed by Magar, tells the story of a teenage basketball prodigy who travels to China in 1989 to play in an exhibition game between college teams from Beijing and San Francisco.Daryl Morey, now an executive with the N.B.A.’s Philadelphia 76ers, commissioned a musical comedy called “Small Ball” that played in Houston in 2018. It depicts a fictional character named Michael Jordan — not the Jordan — as he finds himself playing in an international league with teammates who are six inches tall.“I think basketball is just the most important of all of the sports among the up-and-coming directors and playwrights, at least the ones I’ve spoken to,” Morey said.Not that basketball has a lock on the theater. Baseball has long been an object of fascination for playwrights, including classic shows like “Damn Yankees.” Richard Greenberg’s Tony-winning 2003 play, “Take Me Out,” about a baseball player who comes out as gay, had a Tony-winning revival on Broadway last year. In 2019, “Toni Stone,” written by Lydia R. Diamond, depicted the life of Marcenia Lyle Stone, who became the first woman to play in a men’s baseball league when she took the field for the Indianapolis Clowns in the Negro Leagues.Football and boxing, too: “Lombardi,” a biographical play based on the life of the legendary football coach Vince Lombardi, ran on Broadway in 2010, and 2014 brought a stage adaptation of “Rocky,” the famous 1976 underdog boxing film, to Broadway.But for the moment, it is basketball that is having a renaissance in theater. Or to put it in basketball terms, playwrights who take on the sport currently have the hot hand. More

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      A Reporter’s Unexpected Love Affair With ‘Notre Dame de Paris’

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      One reporter is hooked on the French spectacle that mixes acrobatics with a rock opera score.It seemed as if nothing would ever displace “The Phantom of the Opera” as my most-viewed musical.And then, “Notre Dame de Paris” happened.The 1998 French musical, which is based on Victor Hugo’s epic 19th-century novel (as is the 1996 Disney animated adaptation), made its New York premiere last summer at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center.I saw it twice then and, when it returned this summer, two more times; a fifth viewing is planned for Sunday’s closing performance in New York. And I’m not done: While in Paris this fall, I’ll see it twice at its original theater, the Palais des Congrès, for its 25th anniversary.As an avid theatergoer, I rarely go to the same production twice. (A recent exception was the Broadway revival of “A Doll’s House,” starring Jessica Chastain in a bewitching, minimalist march to self-discovery.)And after initially seeing “Notre Dame de Paris,” a second viewing didn’t seem essential. The musical, which is sung in French with English supertitles, follows the beautiful Esmeralda and the three men who vie to win her love: the kind hunchback Quasimodo; the twisted archdeacon Frollo; and the egotistic soldier Phoebus.The production has a plentiful serving of ear candy-esque power ballads sprinkled among its more than 50 (!) songs, but parts of it were also cheesy. A song debating the merits of the printing press at the top of Act II after a cliffhanger Act I ending? (I guess they had to leave at least one trademark Hugo tangent in there!) Frollo falling to one knee because he’s so overwhelmed by his desire for Esmeralda? The poet-narrator Gringoire’s Donny Osmond “Joseph” hair and psychedelic pants?Of course, those elements were meant to be campy. And now, they’re only part of my affection for the show.But it’s the show’s particular brand of rock opera sorcery that wormed its way into my heart and took hold.Blame “Belle.”Let me explain: About two-thirds of the way through the first act, there comes a song for the three men in love with Esmeralda that is the earworm equivalent of “The Music of the Night” in “The Phantom of the Opera.” “Belle” (the French word for “beautiful”) became the biggest-selling single of 1998 in France.A YouTube video of the song from the original production — featuring Daniel Lavoie as Frollo (Lavoie, now 74, is reprising the role in New York), along with Garou as Quasimodo and Patrick Fiori as Phoebus — played on a loop for a week in my apartment.Seeing the show for a second time last summer was a revelation: Already familiar with the plot, I didn’t need to read the supertitles as much and could actually watch the actors, especially the mesmerizing acrobats. (What does the guy who spins on his head for 20 seconds have to do to get a chance with Esmeralda?)The show, I have since learned, has a cadre of superfans who have seen it six, 10, even 20 times. And they travel. (One treat for New York audiences: an orchestra. “Notre Dame” is usually performed with recorded music.)So what is its hold on people?The Canadian director Gilles Maheu, who oversaw the original Paris run and several tours since, including the current one, credits the show’s timeless themes and music with its longevity.“I wanted to do the show outside of current fashion,” Maheu said of the musical, which maintains its original staging, in a recent video interview from his home in Frelighsburg, Quebec.“The traditional story line of three different people loving the same woman is one I think people recognize easily,” he added. “The songs are beautiful, and not only ‘Belle.’”Holly Thomas, 26, a guest service representative for a Broadway ticketing company and a stage manager, first saw the show in New York last summer — and is on track to have seen it 11 times here by the time it closes Sunday.“It deals with issues that we’re constantly dealing with as a general society — racism, misogyny, the corruption of power,” she said.Michael Lewis, 52, an I.T. consultant based in Boston, attended one of the original performances in Paris 25 years ago, and has also seen the musical in London and New York. In addition to its timelessness, he said, “the theme of migrants seeking asylum has resonance today,” he said, “especially given what just happened with the Pakistani immigrants on the way to Greece.”Here in New York, which is experiencing its own migrant crisis, the show’s overtures for shelter and asylum have had similar poignancy.My boss at The New York Times recently saw the show with his daughters — and the next day I received a message from him: “I must have watched this video of ‘Belle’ on YouTube at least a dozen times today,” he wrote.“Is this how it starts?” More

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      Review: In ‘The Saviour,’ Past Trauma Is Very Much Present

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      The gravitational pull of the hurts of yesteryear is on vivid display in Deirdre Kinahan’s drama at Irish Repertory Theater.Back stories can be dangerous things. A character besotted with them — especially reductive trauma-filled ones — colludes in her own miniaturization.That’s the case with Máire Sullivan, the central character of Deirdre Kinahan’s “The Saviour,” a two-character drama that is receiving its world stage premiere at Irish Repertory Theater. Propped up in bed on her 67th birthday, a languorous Máire (the lauded Marie Mullen, who originated the role in an online production of the play in 2021) enjoys a postcoital smoke as she waits for her lover to bring her a cup of coffee.Ciarán Bagnall’s set, with its chalky walls and dusty windows, suggests a room that hasn’t been aired out in years. It’s a fitting milieu for a woman who cultivates mental cobwebs. Even the “volcanic” sex she’s just had sends her mind hurtling to the past; addressing her confidences to Jesus, Máire, a devout Catholic, describes how sex was previously “foisted on me when I didn’t want it or offered for a bit of peace.”From there, clues pointing to a traumatic episode pile up. After her mother died when she was a young girl, Máire was sent to a Magdalene laundry, a “reformatory for whores and hussies,” as she describes it. These laundries, operated by Catholic religious orders and propped up with state funding, incarcerated thousands of Irish girls and women as late as 1996. Máire recounts the monotony of the work, the suffocating silence imposed on the “forgotten girls,” and the unmourned death of a friend who dropped “dead in the steam.” Such reminiscences, though chilling, seem both overly contrived and overly familiar when spatchcocked together, departing little from abused-children narratives handed down by Dickens and Charlotte Brontë.Even working with a script that leans too much on exposition, the galvanic Mullen shows impressive range, channeling Molly Bloom in a fist-pumping soliloquy about having sex as a sexagenarian one minute, chiding herself for “acting ridiculous” the next. When her son Mel (a guarded Jamie O’Neill) shows up to deliver some disturbing news about her lover, she unleashes a biblical wave of fury on him.Alas, for both these characters, the past is like a heavy fog that never lifts. (Mel hints darkly that Máire was an emotionally absent mother, frequently subject to dark moods, and even hit one of her children.) The gift that Mel brings for Máire’s birthday — a doll wearing a yellow dress with pink roses — is a throwback to a toy that the nuns at the Stanhope Street laundry snatched from her as a young girl. But even a seemingly heartfelt gift meant to restore something of the life that was taken from Máire is ultimately used as a weapon against Mel.As the play ends, Máire and her son, whose homosexuality she can’t bring herself to reconcile with her faith, are at an impasse. Under Louise Lowe’s direction, mother and son stand on opposite sides of a wall facing the audience, underscoring their estrangement, as Mel offers a moving reflection of a rare moment in his childhood when “Jesus left us a bit of room.” For all of Máire’s religious fervor, the continual resurfacing of trauma is the bigger issue. It exerts the gravitational pull of a black hole that sucks everything in and gives nothing back.The SaviourThrough Aug. 13 at Irish Rep, Manhattan; irishrep.org. Running time: 1 hour 10 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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      At the Salzburg Festival, Bertolt Brecht Pushes Boundaries

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      Brecht’s 1944 play “The Caucasian Chalk Circle” is set to challenge its performers and audiences, just as a once-banned Brecht would have liked.As a playwright and director, Bertolt Brecht revolutionized theater, dragging 20th-century politics into the room and swapping escapism for urgent and timely themes played out almost in the laps of audience members.He also provoked many theatrical companies — notably the Salzburg Festival. In 1950, Brecht was given Austrian citizenship after agreeing to adapt the 15th-century play “Jedermann” (“Everyman”), a staple of the festival since 1920. But he never did, instead embracing Marxist ideologies and moving to East Berlin, which prompted an official boycott of his work in Austria that lasted 10 years. His works have rarely been performed at the Salzburg Festival since.But now, “The Caucasian Chalk Circle,” his 1944 play written during his years in America, will be staged there on Aug. 12-22 (in German with English supertitles). In a theatrical choice that would have no doubt thrilled the ever-inventive Brecht, this “Chalk Circle” will be presented with the Swiss company Theater Hora, made up of actors with learning disabilities, underscoring the power of Brecht’s works to push the boundaries of both performers and audiences. This “Chalk Circle” feels more urgent and well-timed for those involved.“The play takes place during a civil war and is all about empathy,” Bettina Hering, the drama director of the Salzburg Festival, said in a video interview, “but it also shows that society is multilayered.”Like Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children,” “Chalk Circle” weaves motherhood into politics and the brutality of war. The play is based on a 13th-century Chinese parable, in which two women fight over the custody of a child. During wartime, a governor’s wife has abandoned her child, who is then saved by a servant girl. A judge determines that custody will be granted to the mother who can pull the child safely from a circle of chalk drawn around the child. Brecht used this as a metaphor for a misguided society.Rehearsal for “The Caucasian Chalk Circle,” whose cast includes, from left, Remo Beuggert, Simone Gisler and Tiziana Pagliaro.Rimini ProtokollBrecht’s own family story and life in the theater reads like a drama. Born in Bavaria in 1898 and raised in a strict Christian household, he became interested in politics, theater and writing at a young age (he was a fierce critic of the carnage of his generation of young men in World War I and avoided combat as a medic). In Berlin, along with the German director Erwin Piscator, Brecht created what became known as “epic theater,” or “dialectical theater,” which asked audiences to confront sociopolitical issues rather than suspend disbelief and be swept away.This revolution in German theater flourished during the Weimar Republic, but Brecht left Germany when the Nazis gained power, fearing persecution, fleeing to Scandinavia and then America, where he lived in the Los Angeles area and co-wrote the story for one movie (“Hangmen Also Die!”) and many of his most famous plays, including “Chalk Circle.” After World War II, he returned to Europe, and though never officially a member of the Communist Party, his Marxist leanings prompted that boycott of his work in Austria from 1953 to 1963.“One critic wrote that it was an atomic bomb scandal,” Ms. Hering said. “It was the equivalent of cancel culture today.”His works are often heavy on politics and religion, from fascism (“The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui”) to the clash between theology and science (“Life of Galileo”). He also wrote “The Threepenny Opera,” which the Salzburg Festival staged in 2015, with the composer Kurt Weill.Brecht died in East Berlin in 1956 at 58, leaving behind an enormous theatrical legacy.“One of his poems refers to the future when he won’t be needed, but we still live in a world he would recognize,” Tom Kuhn, a professor of German literature at Oxford University and one of the translators of Brecht’s “Collected Poems,” said in a video interview. “But we have populists strutting the stage. We have fascism. We have war in Europe. Brecht could comment on those in urgent and insistent ways.”That sense of relevancy is what drew Ms. Hering to “Chalk Circle” and to choose Theater Hora as the company to bring it to life. Brecht’s experimental theatrical style, as both a writer and director, felt perfectly suited to Hora, as did the mother-and-child plot of “Chalk Circle.”“People with disabilities are dependent on others,” Ms. Hering said. “They are like an eternal child in a way.”She invited Helgard Haug, a celebrated German director more associated with interactive theater who had never directed the Hora troupe, nor a Brecht piece, to lead this “Chalk Circle.” For Ms. Haug, it was both a daunting and exciting proposition.“I’m really interested when people really bring their own conditions to the stage where they are open enough to tell their own stories,” Ms. Haug said in a video interview. “It’s more than a discussion between two mothers. Can systems change? Can it be different? It feels special to stage Brecht with a group of performers who have their own approach and their own way to translate text into their own understanding.”The evolving relevance of Brecht’s works speaks to those still devoted to preserving his legacy and acknowledging that he created new possibilities for theater to educate and provoke audiences. And they inspire performers, playwrights and directors who come after him.“‘Chalk’ is a play for the moment, and I see it as a way to observe the difficulty of the world and how it is possible to find a right and honest way through chaos,” said Erdmut Wizisla, head of the Bertolt Brecht Archive in Berlin. “It is an invitation to think. He’s a poet. He’s a political author but not a politician. And that is why Brecht will always have a future.” More

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      Kevin Spacey, in U.K. Trial, Denies Abusing Position of Power

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      Facing accusations of sexual assault, the actor defended himself against multiple claims. He also admitted he got “the signals wrong” during one encounter.Kevin Spacey told a British jury on Friday that some of the sexual assault accusations against him were “pure fantasy” and “absolute bollocks.”On trial in a London courtroom, Mr. Spacey fired back at several questions that Christine Agnew, the prosecutor, put to him.At one point, Mr. Spacey said, “You’re just making stuff up now,” and at another, he called the prosecution’s case “weak.” On several occasions, Justice Mark Wall, the presiding judge, interrupted to ask Mr. Spacey to answer the prosecutor directly.Mr. Spacey, 63, has pleaded not guilty to 12 charges relating to incidents that the prosecution says involved four men and occurred from 2001 to 2013. For most of that time, the Oscar- and Tony Award-winning actor was the artistic director of the Old Vic theater in London.Sitting at the front of the courtroom, Mr. Spacey — wearing a blue suit and patterned tie — was cross-examined for nearly three hours, the day after giving his own account.At one point, Ms. Agnew asked Mr. Spacey if he agreed that he was “the golden boy of the London theater scene” at the time of the alleged encounters, and whether his accusers would have been unlikely to report him because of his reputation.Mr. Spacey said that he used his position “to help others, to create art” and to revive the reputation of the Old Vic theater. “I didn’t have a power wand that I waved in front of people’s faces whenever I wanted someone to go to bed with me,” Mr. Spacey added.Opening the case last month, Ms. Agnew, the prosecutor, said that Mr. Spacey was “a sexual bully” whose “preferred method” of assault was to “aggressively grab other men in the crotch.”In the days after Ms. Agnew’s opening remarks, the jury heard from the four anonymous complainants who detailed their encounters with the actor. Some complainants said that Mr. Spacey grabbed them. Under British law, it is illegal for anyone to identify complainants in sexual assault cases, or to publish information that may cause them to be identified.On Friday, Mr. Spacey said that he did not have a “trademark” move or grope people. “I know myself,” the actor said.Ms. Agnew asked Mr. Spacey about an encounter with one complainant, who told the British police that, during a party, Mr. Spacey hugged him, kissed him twice on the neck, said, “Be cool,” and then grabbed his crotch. Mr. Spacey pointed out that touching the man’s crotch was not his first action.“I am accepting that I got the signals wrong,” Mr. Spacey added of that encounter.During the morning session, Mr. Spacey was also asked about his encounters with the other complainants. He said that he did not clearly remember all of the events but that he had a “naughty relationship” with one complainant, and consensual oral sex with another.Mr. Spacey became most animated when asked about accusations that he assaulted a man on the day of a charity gala. The actor said he did not accept “a single word” of that complainant’s testimony. Mr. Spacey said that complainant may be motivated by “money, money and then money” to speak out against him.After Mr. Spacey’s cross-examination, the court broke for lunch. The defense is now expected to spend several days calling witnesses in support of Mr. Spacey’s case. More

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      New York’s Public Theater Lays Off 19 Percent of Its Staff

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      The institution, a titan among nonprofit theaters, is suffering from the combined effects of falling revenue and rising costs plaguing the arts world.The Public Theater, one of the nation’s most prestigious and successful nonprofit theaters, laid off 19 percent of its staff on Thursday as a financial crisis sweeps across the field.The move, which cost about 50 people their jobs, followed a 13 percent layoff at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and a 10 percent layoff at the Center Theater Group in Los Angeles.The Public, headquartered in Lower Manhattan and presenting work primarily Off Broadway, is by almost any measure a titan among nonprofit theaters — the birthplace of “A Chorus Line” and “Hamilton,” the originator and presenter of Free Shakespeare in the Park, and a creative anchor for some of the nation’s most influential dramatists.But the theater, like many others, is suffering from the combined effects of falling revenue and rising costs.“The economic headwinds that are attacking the American theater are attacking us, too,” Oskar Eustis, the theater’s artistic director, said in an interview. “Our audience is down by about 30 percent, we have expenses up anywhere from 30 to 45 percent, and we have kept our donor base, but it’s static. Put that all together, and you get budget shortfalls — big budget shortfalls.”Eustis said the Public would not shutter any programs beyond its previous decision to put its Under the Radar Festival, an annual program of experimental work, on indefinite hiatus.But Eustis said the Public would need to reduce the amount of theater it is staging in the short term — its next season, he said, will feature five shows at its Astor Place building, down from 11 in the last full season before the coronavirus pandemic. The traditional Shakespeare in the Park program will also not take place next year because its home, the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, will be undergoing a long-planned renovation, but Eustis said the company is seeking a way to present some Shakespeare at an alternate location (or locations) next summer.The theater’s executive director, Patrick Willingham, said the cuts would be spread across the company’s operations. “It’s a pullback in every department at every level,” he said.The Public currently has about 246 full-time positions, Willingham said. The company had a previous round of layoffs in 2021 as it tried to rebound following the pandemic closure of theaters, and it also had staff furloughs at the height of the pandemic. Willingham said this week’s layoffs were not a surprise to the staff because the need for spending cuts had been discussed internally for some time. “We’ve been really transparent with the employees over the course of this year,” he said. “We’ve been really clear that we were going to have to make reductions.”Willingham said the Public’s annual budget during the next fiscal year will be around $50 million, down from about $60 million before the coronavirus pandemic. He added that, thanks to federal pandemic relief funds and royalties from “Hamilton,” the theater is hoping it will not have a budget deficit during its current fiscal year, which ends next month, or the following fiscal year. “We’re making decisions that are actually trying to get ahead of what we’re seeing as this nationwide trend,” Willingham said, “so that we can get to a sustainable model we can rely on year after year.”Eustis, who is among the best-compensated artistic directors in the field, said he will cut his own pay by an unspecified amount — “I will be taking a significant reduction in salary,” he said — but that “nobody else would or should” have a salary reduction.He added that the Public remains committed to its Public Works program, in which amateur performers join professionals to put on musical pageants adapted from classic works, and its mobile unit, which presents Shakespeare in a variety of locations in and around the city, including at prisons and community centers.Eustis called the cuts “absolutely necessary to secure the Public’s security and future,” but also “tremendously sad and difficult.” However, at a time when some theaters are closing as a result of financial problems, Eustis said the Public is in no such danger.“This is not an existential crisis,” he said. “We are taking moves that mean that the Public’s existence and future will not be threatened. The Public will be here, and performing its mission, long past the time you and I are here.” More

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      A French Festival Focuses (Timidly) on English

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      The Avignon Festival’s new director wants to spotlight drama in a different language each year. This year’s first installment had some conventional choices.As soon as the Portuguese director Tiago Rodrigues took over at the Avignon Festival, France’s biggest theater event, he announced a symbolic move: Under his direction, there would be a special focus on a different language every year, starting, this summer, with English.There was wincing from some quarters: To many in France, English is already far too culturally dominant. In the end, they needn’t have worried. Of several dozen productions in the official lineup of this year’s festival, which runs through July 25, only six plays are predominantly in English.As a result, Avignon, which has long welcomed shows from a wide range of cultures, hasn’t felt much different this year. If anything, Rodrigues’s Anglo-Saxon choices seem a tad timid. Focusing on a language, rather than a country, could have opened the door to Anglophone theater from underrepresented regions. Instead, five productions came from British directors, two of whom, Tim Etchells and Alexander Zeldin, are already well-established in France.A few novelties are still to come, including work from London’s Royal Court Theater, which is largely unknown across the Channel. So far, however, the most intriguing discovery has been the sole American entry, “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge,” from Elevator Repair Service. This verbatim recreation of a 1965 debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr., about race in the United States, is spare and meticulous. From tables on opposite sides of the stage, Greig Sargeant (Baldwin) and Ben Williams (Buckley) spar with effective solemnity.The fact that Elevator Repair Service is widely described as “experimental” in its home country may amuse some French festivalgoers: “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge” is fairly buttoned-up by local standards. Only the short final scene, which sees Sargeant and April Matthis, as the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, break character and touch on racial dynamics in the making of a previous Elevator Repair Service production, feels truly biting.Catherine Dagenais-Savard in “Marguerite: The Fire,” which pays tribute to Marguerite Duplessis, who, in 1740, was one of the first enslaved people to be heard by a Canadian court.Christophe Raynaud de LageAnother North American production at Avignon is performed in French: “Marguerite: The Fire,” by the Québec-based Indigenous writer and director Émilie Monnet. It, too, touched on the history of racism by way of a little-known historical figure, Marguerite Duplessis. In 1740, Duplessis was one of the first enslaved people to be heard by a Canadian court, after she claimed she had been born a free woman.Together with three other performers, Monnet pays tribute to Duplessis in a production that has high points — including evocative choral and dance numbers — but feels overly linear, its text well-meaning yet monotonous. Like “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge,” “Marguerite: The Fire” also unwittingly plays into a French national sport: deploring North American racism while struggling to recognize it closer to home.In the French portion of the lineup, meanwhile, some directors also got involved in the Anglo-Saxon focus by adapting the work of English-speaking authors. Pauline Bayle, a rising star who was appointed to lead the Montreuil Theater last year, boldly took on Virginia Woolf. Unfortunately, the result, “Writing Life,” is strangely shapeless.The cast awkwardly veer between peppy contemporary digressions and bits and pieces lifted from Woolf’s works. One minute, they mention the threat of an imminent, pandemic-style lockdown, and engage in slightly forced interactions with three rows of audience members. The next, they grapple with Woolf’s intricate style, which comes across as bombastic by contrast.“Writing Life” at least came with English surtitles for non-French speakers — a welcome development for the Avignon Festival. While select productions already came with an English translation under the previous director, Olivier Py, Rodrigues has made it the default to appeal to more international visitors.The cast of “The Garden of Earthly Delights” is wheeled into the venue, a former quarry, by bus.Christophe Raynaud de LageThere were a handful of exceptions, not least Philippe Quesne’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” accessible only to French speakers. It’s a shame, because the production marked the reopening of a legendary Avignon venue: the Boulbon quarry, a majestic natural spot outside the city. It was last used in 2016, not least because of its eye-watering running costs: Fire safety precautions alone ended up costing 600,000 euros, or $670,000, this year.“The Garden of Earthly Delights” proved a loving reintroduction to Boulbon. In it, members of an eccentric, hippie-adjacent community are wheeled into the quarry by bus. They carefully lay a giant egg down in the middle of the vast space, and perform amusingly absurd rituals around it. Some recreate poses from paintings by Hieronymus Bosch; others deliver wacky poems or monologues. Even if you spoke the language, it didn’t fully make sense, but it felt at home against Boulbon’s arid, otherworldly backdrop.For English-speaking visitors, however, one major part of Avignon remains difficult to access: the Fringe, known as “le Off.” With nearly 1,500 shows on offer in small and big venues all around the city, it dwarves the official lineup, but very few productions offer English versions or surtitles.If you look closely enough, though, there are some opportunities to hang with the French crowds at “le Off.” A handful of venues offer surtitles on select days, like the Théâtre des Doms with “Méduse.s,” a well-crafted feminist reinterpretation of the mythical figure of Medusa by the Belgian company La Gang.Some performers find other ways to bridge the gap with English speakers. On Mondays during the festival, the French writer and performer Maïmouna Coulibaly, who currently lives in Berlin, performs her one-woman show “Maïmouna – HPS” in English at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint Michel. It’s a no-holds-barred exploration of her relationship to her body, including her traumatic circumcision as a child and her adult sex life. The back-and-forth between the two experiences induces a little whiplash, but Coulibaly brings galvanizing energy to the stage.Charlotte Avias and Camille Timmerman in “Punk.e.s,” which tells the story of the first all-female punk band, the Slits.Arnaud DufauAnd some French shows barely need translating. Justine Heynemann and Rachel Arditi’s “Punk.e.s,” at La Scala Provence, dives into the story of the first major all-female punk band, the Slits, with such chutzpah that, by the final musical number at a recent performance, quite a few audience members were on their feet.Charlotte Avias, especially, gives a manic pixie punk performance to remember as the Slits’ lead vocalist Ari Up, and Kim Verschueren, a powerful singer, finds shadowy nuance in the role of Tessa Pollitt. The set list — which cycles through the Beatles, the Clash and the Velvet Underground — could have used even more Slits songs, but “Punk.e.s” is a reminder that French artists have long taken inspiration from their Anglo-Saxon counterparts.There’s a way to go to before language differences don’t prove a barrier for theater. Still, the Avignon Festival is increasingly doing its part. More

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      ‘A Noiva e o Boa Noite Cinderela’ Review: A Performer Drugs Herself

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      In an ethically murky show at the Avignon Festival, the Brazilian performer Carolina Bianchi opens up about how she was drugged and abused, then knocks herself out with a spiked cocktail.A decade ago, the Brazilian performer and director Carolina Bianchi was drugged and assaulted. In “The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella” (“A Noiva e o Boa Noite Cinderela”), her new stage production at the Avignon Festival in France, she doesn’t merely open up about that experience. She relives part of it, night after night.Bianchi slips a similar drug into a colorful cocktail and drinks it, with a sinister “Cheers.” She talks to the audience about art and trauma, waiting for the effects to kick in, then spends the rest of the show unconscious.This all-too-real performance single-handedly jolted Avignon alive over the first week of the festival, turning Bianchi — an unknown, Amsterdam-based artist — into a sensation at the event. On the night I attended, one woman broke down in sobs on the way out. I felt nauseated at several points, as if “The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella” had tapped into my own fight-or-flight instinct.The show starts innocuously enough. Bianchi enters in a stylish white ensemble, and proceeds to deliver a lecture from a heavy stack of notes. From a desk, she examines sexual violence against women through the lens of art history, weaving in contemporary cases — chief among them the 2008 rape and murder of Pippa Bacca, a performance artist, as she hitchhiked in Turkey in a wedding dress as part of an artistic project.“The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella” may be a much safer form of performance art, but it doesn’t feel that way. Twenty minutes in, Bianchi starts drinking her cocktail. Before long, she is slurring her words and hunches over, then lies down on the table and loses consciousness.For a few minutes, time stands still. We know nothing unplanned is likely to happen: According to the French news agency Agence France-Presse, Bianchi takes a mix of tranquilizers, rather than an actual date rape drug (known in Portuguese as a “Goodnight Cinderella”), and medics are on hand. Yet her vulnerability is scarily palpable.After Bianchi is unconscious, the performance takes on a club-like atmosphere, with slinky choreography leading to sexual encounters that never look fully consensual.Christophe Raynaud de LageThen, for the next hour and a half, eight young members from Bianchi’s collective, Cara de Cavalo, take over. The backdrop rises to reveal another set, dotted with what appear to be bodies in various states of decomposition. The performers lie Bianchi down on a mattress next to them, and the atmosphere turns trippy, with loud distorted club music. Slinky choreography leads to sexual encounters that never look fully consensual.Throughout, on screens above them, Bianchi’s words continue to roll. Her narrative isn’t one of healing: She repeatedly compares her need to revisit the assault to Dante’s journey into hell. “How dare they say that surviving is revenge?” the text reads at one point. “No act of catharsis overcomes the damage.”The cast exercise real care toward the unconscious Bianchi. The group’s women are tasked with most of the physical manipulation, and their actions never mimic her assault. Yet one scene near the end would probably be too much to present in many countries. (In Avignon, viewers under 18 were “strongly discouraged” from attending.) Cast members spread Bianchi’s legs and insert a speculum and a small camera into her vagina, with a live video feed and in full view of the audience, as if to simulate a post-rape forensic examination.Is this ethical? Your mileage may vary: As a director, Bianchi is in charge, even as she relinquishes physical control. Yet it is deeply unnerving to experience this scene, knowing that the main protagonist will have little to no memory of it, even as it lives on in the heads of hundreds of audience members. Her inability to remember her own assault, Bianchi explains earlier, haunts her to this day.I hesitate to say “The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella” should tour widely, because that means Bianchi, who wakes up looking dazed in the final few minutes, will keep putting herself through this ordeal. Still, the production, billed as the first chapter of a trilogy, is already scheduled to visit Belgium, Germany, Spain and Switzerland. And love it or hate it, it doesn’t flinch from an uncomfortable truth: Sometimes there is no safe space to be found from trauma. More