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      Peter Simonischek, Beloved Austrian Actor, Is Dead at 76

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      He played a prankster and adoring father in “Toni Erdmann,” the Oscar-nominated 2016 comedy that made him an international star, but he had long been a celebrity at home.Peter Simonischek, an eminent Austrian theater actor who found international fame as the shambolic prankster and adoring father in Maren Ade’s Oscar-nominated 2016 German film “Toni Erdmann,” died on May 29 at his home in Vienna. He was 76.The cause was lung cancer, his wife, Brigitte Karner, said.Mr. Simonischek was a member of the Burgtheater, the venerable Viennese institution otherwise known as the Burg, one of the oldest and largest ensemble theaters in the world.“He was one of the last great stars of Austria,” said Simon Stone, the Australian director who is based in Vienna and cast Mr. Simonischek in his 2021 play, “Komplizen,” at the Burg. Mr. Simonischek, he said, was a beloved public figure, recognized by taxi drivers and passers-by in the streets of Vienna, where he was more of a celebrity than most film stars.He was certainly easy to spot: a handsome, shaggy-haired bear of a man who used his physical heft to marvelous effect.His size “lent his performances a hulking grandeur,” said A.J. Goldmann, who covers German theater for The New York Times, “that could be tragic or give them a Falstaffian absurdity.”In the comedy “Toni Erdmann,” the story of a workaholic management consultant named Ines (played with brittle humor by Sandra Hüller), Mr. Simonischek is Winifried, Ines’s mortifying father, a retired music teacher who sets out to liberate Ines from her soul-squashing profession by camouflaging himself as Toni Erdmann, a loutish, lumbering corporate consultant to her boss, and upending all she holds dear.The film, written and directed by Ms. Ade, enthralled critics at Cannes and the New York Film Festival and was nominated for a 2016 Academy Award for best foreign language film (losing to “The Salesman,” from Iran). A.O. Scott, writing in The New York Times, called it “a study in the radical power of embarrassment” and described Mr. Simonischek’s character as “a slapstick superhero.”Mr. Simonischek in a scene from the 2016 film “Toni Erdmann,” which brought him international fame.Photo 12/Alamy Stock Photo“Sometimes he’s a clown,” Mr. Stone said of Mr. Simonischek. “And sometimes he’s an authority figure or a debonair leading man. He was willing to completely humiliate himself. He used his beauty and his imposing physicality as a kind of canvas on which he could paint any kind of disgusting or extraordinary quality that any of his characters needed.”In Mr. Stone’s play “Komplizen,” which he said translates not quite accurately as “Complicit,” Mr. Simonischek played an industrialist who is facing a reckoning as the world turns against him and his ilk.It is Mr. Stone’s process to write his scripts in rehearsal, to encourage the actors to come to the material fresh and make room for improvisation. It’s a grueling process, he said, and Mr. Simonischek excelled at it, cheering on the younger cast members who struggled with the practice. Also, the production called for a rotating stage, making rehearsals even more grueling.“Once you’ve got Peter in your corner, you can achieve anything,” Mr. Stone said. “His brilliance was infectious; he shared it with the cast on a daily basis. It’s a quality he has had from the beginning of his career — to make other actors brilliant while never becoming less brilliant himself.”Peter Simonischek was born on Aug. 6, 1946, in Graz, Austria. His mother was a homemaker and his father was a dentist who had hoped his son would study medicine, as Mr. Simonischek told an interviewer last year. But after seeing a performance of “Hamlet” when he was a teenager, he said, “I was lost.”He attended the Academy of Music and Performing Arts in Graz, and found work as an actor in Switzerland and Germany. In 1979, he joined the Berlin Schaubühne, an innovative ensemble theater, where he became a star. He joined the Bur in 2000.In addition to “Toni Erdmann,” for which he received the European Film Award for best actor, his most recent film roles include “The Interpreter,” a 2018 Slovak film, and “Measure of Men,” a German film about the country’s colonial atrocities in Africa; it came out in February.Besides his wife, who is also an actor, Mr. Simonischek is survived by three sons, Max, Kaspar and Benedikt, and two grandchildren. His first marriage, to Charlotte Schwab, ended in divorce.Just before his death, Mr. Simonischek had been playing the stage role of the patriarch of a Pakistani American family in a production of Ayad Akhtar’s “The Who and the What” at the Renaissance Theater in Berlin, following an enormously popular run at the Burg, where it opened in 2018. (The Renaissance stopped the show when Mr. Simonischek fell ill a few weeks ago.)The play tells the story of a devout and charismatic Muslim man whose daughter has written a novel about the Prophet Muhammad, scandalizing their traditional community and upending their relationship.Mr. Akhtar, who won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2013 and is the author of the critically acclaimed 2020 novel, “Homeland Elegies,” said that of all his plays this production is the longest running and most popular. And in contrast to its American run in 2014, it was staged with an all-white cast, only because that is the cultural and racial makeup of Burg’s ensemble. It’s a scenario that in years past might have given him pause, as he told Mr. Goldmann of The Times in 2018. But Mr. Simonischek and his castmates had won him over.Mr. Simonischek in 2008 with the German actress Sophie von Kessel in a dress rehearsal of “Jedermann” at the Salzburg Festival.Schaadfoto, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“What was remarkable was this weird alchemy,” Mr. Akhtar said in a phone interview, “because Simonischek at that point was the patriarch of Austrian theater, a father figure to the Austrian public, and he was playing this conservative Muslim father.“On opening night the notoriously stoic Viennese audience was in tears,” he went on. “Maybe not as much as me” — Mr. Akhtar said he was sobbing onstage at the curtain call — “but not far from it. It was one of the peak moments of my career.”At Mr. Simonischek’s death, Mr. Akhtar was in the middle of writing a play for him. Mr. Simonischek, he said, was “soulful, precise and enthralling — an actor whose heart and generosity were as wide as his talent.” More

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      Review: In ‘Love + Science,’ a Meet Cute Becomes a Medical Mystery

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      In 1980s Manhattan, two medical students find themselves at the forefront of the AIDS crisis in David J. Glass’s new play at New York City Center.The two medical students in “Love + Science” a new play by David J. Glass, quickly tumble into bed together and then spend five years too afraid to kiss. The time is 1980s Manhattan, and the students, Matt and Jeff (Matt Walker, Jonathan Burke), are gay men both researching virology when reports of a frightening new infection arise. In this meet cute turned medical mystery by In Vitro Productions, the pair find themselves at the forefront of the H.I.V./AIDS crisis, investigating a deadly threat to which they’re both vulnerable. Glass sets the clock ticking (the years are marked between scenes) and asks us to observe the history of the devastating disease, ensuing protests and therapeutic breakthroughs.Since the 1980s, a genre of plays dramatizing the AIDS epidemic, has generally sought to render on a human scale a catastrophe that might otherwise seem unfathomable. In “Love + Science,” Glass returns to the tradition of documentation, detailing both the microscopic maneuvers and social consequences of H.I.V. with the schematic precision of a lab experiment. (Glass is a senior lecturer in cell biology at Harvard University.) This meticulous drama that opened on Sunday at New York City Center functions primarily as a chronicle of developments, with characters whose particulars are cursory and incidental.Walker and Burke are able and appealing performers, but surface-level charm is all the information-saturated dialogue will allow. (The push and pull between them as lovers, hyper-informed by risk but lacking in chemistry, has the erotic charge of a leaflet.) Of the five supporting cast members, who play multiple roles, Imani Pearl Williams brings welcome pizazz as a lab student and a blind date who each deliver truth bombs like punchlines. Adrian Greensmith and Ryan Knowles make the terror and uncertainty faced by AIDS patients both palpable and affecting.The director Allen MacLeod’s lively production at least relishes the fun of 1980s aesthetics, with flashes of electric pink and blue in the lighting and projection design by Samuel J. Biondolillo and with costumes by Camilla Dely that are Zoomer catnip. And perhaps “Love + Science” will offer a bit of essential education, and opportunity for reflection, to those who did not live through the outbreak depicted onstage but have just experienced another pandemic.If the coronavirus is the playwright’s claim to timeliness, that context is left almost entirely inferred until a present-day coda attempts to draw a rushed and tenuous through line. At the performance I attended, the audience seemed to assume the show was over before its leap three decades forward. Not that the final scene offers narrative resolutions; the relationships between the characters hardly ask for any, and the future of scientific study is still unwritten.Love + ScienceThrough July 6 at New York City Center Stage II, Manhattan; loveandscienceplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      For Her New Play, Tori Sampson Revisited Her ‘Black Power Household’

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      “This Land Was Made,” at the Vineyard Theater, is rooted in the playwright’s personal connection to a political movement’s awakening.The narrator of “This Land Was Made,” the playwright Tori Sampson’s speculative account of the Black Panther Party’s powder-keg origins, is an aspiring writer named Sassy. “Consider me your time-traveling griot,” she tells the audience with wry buoyanc‌y, evoking the West African tradition of storytellers who propagated endangered legacies.The play, which opens on Sunday at the Vineyard Theater in Manhattan, is an act of oral history rooted in Sampson’s personal connection to the political awakening at its center. “Sassy is not me,” Sampson made clear during a recent interview off the courtyard of the Marlton Hotel, a short walk from the theater.“The Black Panthers were like family to her,” Sampson said of her mother, who was orphaned at the age of 3 and raised by an aunt who was a member of the Black Panther Party in the 1970s. She would accompany her aunt to meetings, where activists became like kin and their reverence for Blackness a guiding principle.Sampson’s mother, Wanda Louise Thompson, went on to raise the playwright and her sisters (her twin and an older sister) in a “Black Power household,” first in Boston and then in North Carolina, where they were taught, with some militancy, to value Black beauty and culture. (When her twin sister wanted a Britney Spears poster, for example, their mother insisted that two posters of Black artists go up alongside it.)Antoinette Crowe-Legacy as Sassy and Julian Elijah Martinez as Huey P. Newton in the play “This Land Was Made” at the Vineyard Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut orphanhood was also to be part of Sampson’s inheritance; she was 13 when her mother died of a pulmonary embolism, and she and her twin sister, whom Sampson calls “my lifeline and compass,” became wards of the state. After a year of moving between foster homes, the twins petitioned to attend an all-Black boarding school in Mississippi, where their independence was contingent on high achievement.“I’m trying to connect who I am with my past,” said Sampson, 34, who lives in Los Angeles and has written for the streaming TV series “Citadel” and “Hunters.” She has only recently begun to process that her experience as an orphan is integral to her work. “I was always yearning to understand what it would look like to have a family,” Sampson said. “My imagination would run wild making up stories.”That impulse reverberates through “This Land Was Made,” which is set inside a Bay Area tavern with soul food simmering in the back kitchen. “I wanted to write a story where Huey P. Newton walks into a bar and changes the lives of the people there forever,” Sampson said of the Black Panther Party co-founder. She got the idea for the play, a blend of historical fiction and sitcom conventions, when she learned that Newton’s rise to prominence began with an unsolved mystery.The facts in the murky case are these: In 1967, Newton and a friend were pulled over during a traffic stop in Oakland, Calif., in which Newton took a bullet to the stomach and a police officer was fatally shot. ‌Newton was charged and later convicted of voluntary manslaughter. (His conviction was eventually overturned‌.) Rallies ‌to “Free Huey” helped set off the Black Power movement.Sampson, right, with Kathleen Cleaver, a retired law professor and former communications secretary for the Black Panther Party, at Yale in February 2017. via Tori SampsonSo, if Newton didn’t pull the trigger, Sampson thought, who did? And what might Newton’s influence have been on his neighbors before his activism grew to an international scale? In the play, Sassy, Sampson’s narrator, claims to have heard the truth through the grapevine. “This Land Was Made” then unfolds as both a comedy and a call to action.Sampson said her taste for humor that bends toward social justice also comes from her mother. Though Thompson didn’t let her kids watch much television (only “The Cosby Show” for an hour a day), she adored “All in the Family” and considered its skewering of bigotry the height of the form. That show’s creator, Norman Lear, remains an inspiration for Sampson, who likes to wind up her characters and set them loose to elicit eye-opening laughs.“Tori has a particular tempo in mind for each character and how the ensemble builds together musically,” the play’s director, Taylor Reynolds, said of Sampson’s ear for dialogue. In fact, both women said the production was deep into tech rehearsals before Sampson watched the play with her eyes open.“Let them be loud and wrong,” Sampson said of her Lear-inspired ethos. “Just give them conviction and don’t hold them back.”Adam Greenfield, the artistic director of Playwrights Horizons, where Sampson’s play “If Pretty Hurts Ugly Must Be a Muhfucka” was presented in 2019, said her work demonstrates an “unrelenting investigation of identity that feels both global but also very personal.” A sharp and riotous sendup of ‌Eurocentric beauty standards, “If Pretty Hurts” is punctuated with fourth-wall-breaking monologues and draws on Sampson’s personal experience to interrogate the body-image pressures faced by Black women. (The New York Times critic Jesse Green called the play “an auspicious professional playwriting debut.”)While more grounded in the conventions of realism, “This Land Was Made” demonstrates Sampson’s fascination with how social constructs shape imbalances of power. (Sampson earned a ‌bachelor’s degree in sociology from Ball State University.) The play’s Oakland residents argue about colorism, assimilation and the fallacies of trusting the system, embodying the tensions that propelled Newton’s broader ideologies about Blackness.Sampson, who also writes for TV, has various projects in the works. “My life has never been a box,” she said, “so my mind doesn’t work that way.”Jasmine Clarke for The New York TimesBut Sampson, who began “This Land Was Made” in 2014, during her second year at what is now called the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, also aims to render the civil rights movement in America on a human scale.“I wanted to talk about the lowercase-p Panthers, as people,” Sampson said, in addition to exploring their role in striking up political currents that continue to reverberate. As violent incidents at the hands of the police have gained visibility over the past decade, often captured on video during traffic stops like the one Sampson imagines onstage, the consequences of failing to recognize the humanity of Black people have only grown.Conversations with former Black Panthers were also crucial to Sampson’s research process, more and less serendipitously. She spoke to Ed Bullins, the renowned playwright and the party’s onetime minister of culture, with permission from his wife, while he was in the hospital in 2014. (Sampson’s godfather happened to be his doctor.) “Make sure you remember those were some funny cats,” Bullins, who died in 2021, told Sampson of the party’s co-founders, Newton and Bobby Seale.The playwright ‌also interviewed Kathleen Cleaver, the first woman to hold a leadership position in the party, after Cleaver, now a retired law professor, spoke at Yale.If it’s true what Sassy says, that “every great story is about journeying to find home,” it follows that Sampson’s work will continue to venture in many directions. She is developing a play about a nerdy comedian who embarks on a superhero quest to regain her Black card after she mispronounces Tupac Shakur’s name during sex. (“It’s a lot,” she said.)‌ And she will directly address her orphan experience for the first time in an animated series called “How to Succeed Without Parents.”“It’s always going to look different,” Sampson said of her idea of home. “My life has never been a box, so my mind doesn’t work that way.” More

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      “The Motive and the Cue” Asks What Makes a Great Performance

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      “The Motive and the Cue,” a new play in London, imagines fraught behind-the-scenes maneuvering by John Gielgud, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor during rehearsals for a classic Broadway production.“The classicist who wants to be modern, meeting the modernist who wants to be classical.” So says Elizabeth Taylor, summing up the fractious encounter between the revered Shakespearian actor John Gielgud, and her new husband, the actor Richard Burton. It’s 1964, Taylor and Burton are the most famous couple in the world, and Burton is rehearsing the role of Hamlet for a Broadway production that Gielgud is directing.It’s not going well.That’s the setting for “The Motive and the Cue,” a new play directed by Sam Mendes, written by Jack Thorne, and starring Mark Gatiss as Gielgud, Johnny Flynn as Burton and Tuppence Middleton as Taylor.The play, which opened to enthusiastic reviews in May and runs through July 15 at the National Theater, in London, was an idea born out of the pandemic, said Caro Newling, a co-founder with Mendes of Neal Street Productions, which developed the show.Newling said that, during the first coronavirus lockdown of 2020, Mendes was thinking about why theater mattered, and what went into creating great performances. When they were discussing those questions, she added, Mendes recalled reading a copy of “Letters From an Actor,” an account of the 1964 “Hamlet,” by William Redfield, who played Guildenstern in the production. “Suddenly, bang, this idea shot out,” Newling said.A 1964 photograph shows Richard Burton, left, and John Gielgud in a rehearsal for “Hamlet.”Getty ImagesThe idea was a play based on the fraught relationship between the rambunctious, hard-drinking Burton and the repressed, elegant Gielgud during rehearsals for “Hamlet,” with the added combustible element of a sidelined, glamorous Taylor, sitting out her honeymoon in a hotel suite.Newling and Mendes started researching, and discovered another out-of-print book: “John Gielgud Directs Richard Burton in Hamlet,” a fly-on-the-wall account by Richard Sterne, an ensemble actor who smuggled a tape recorder into the rehearsal room.Mendes called Thorne, the playwright behind the stage blockbuster “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” and the television series “His Dark Materials,” and suggested the rehearsal dynamics might provide fruitful material.Initially unsure, Thorne found a focus by “understanding the position that Gielgud was in at the time. He wasn’t being loved by the public, treasured by the profession. His great rival Laurence Olivier was running the National Theater and a new kind of modern theater was dominating the West End. He took the Broadway job because he didn’t have other offers.”“Hamlet,” had been a defining role for Gielgud, who had played the part over 300 times. For the Broadway “Hamlet,” he came up with the idea — daring at the time — of doing the play as if it were a rehearsal run-through, in ordinary clothes. In “The Motive and the Cue,” Burton tries to stamp his brash personality on Hamlet, while the classicist Gielgud wants something more sensitively attuned to Burton’s deeper emotions.The cast of “The Motive and the Cue.” Jack Thorne, who wrote the play, said it was about “why we do what we do, what it feels like, and what it costs.”Mark Douet“What’s interesting is that Burton is getting it wrong, sort of on purpose, trying to show Gielgud that it must be modern,” said Flynn, who lived as a teenager in Wales, where Burton is a national hero. “I had a picture of him playing Hamlet on the door of my house for about 15 years,” Flynn said. “It felt eerie that now, I was playing him, playing Hamlet.”The irony of the Burton-Gielgud conflict, he added, was that Burton idolized Gielgud, and was desperate to be regarded as a serious actor. “He is incredibly successful, but deep down, he fears he has drifted into complacency, is not doing something valuable with his art,” Flynn said.The set, designed by Es Devlin, uses expanding and contracting scrims to create seamless transitions between the “Hamlet” rehearsals, a pink hotel suite in which Taylor and Burton throw glamorous parties for the cast and the scenes of more intimate encounters. One of these is between Gielgud and Taylor, who provides the psychological insight that allows the director to find a way to Burton.Middleton, who plays Taylor, said, “Elisabeth is the voice of reason, one of the wisest characters in the play.”“She completely understood Burton’s obsession with conquering Hamlet, and why it was so difficult for him.,” she added. “It was important to me to show she wasn’t this chaotic, floozy character she is sometimes seen as.”Tuppence Middleton as Elizabeth Taylor in “The Motive and the Cue.” The play is set shortly after Taylor’s marriage to Richard Burton.Mark DouetMuch of the play is concerned with how to play Hamlet: The breakthrough moment for Burton happens when he can connect his painful past to the character’s motivations. “This is what actors have to do when they strip themselves down to play a role,” Thorne said.In the end, the 1964 production was a triumph, running for 136 performances; “The Motive and the Cue” has been a hit, too. It is currently playing to sold-out houses and its popularity suggests that the play’s central ideas — theater as a community and a crucible of emotional connection between actors and audience — have resonated after the enforced closures of the last few years.“It’s about fathers and sons, classicism and modernity, the clash of these forces,” Thorne said. “But I hope it’s also about why we do what we do, what it feels like and what it costs.” More

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      American Airlines Theater on Broadway to Be Renamed for Todd Haimes

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      Roundabout Theater Company’s flagship theater will honor Haimes, the transformational leader who died in April.Roundabout Theater Company, the nonprofit with the biggest footprint on Broadway, has decided to rename its flagship theater, which currently bears the name American Airlines, in honor of its recently deceased and transformational leader, Todd Haimes.The theater, on West 42nd Street, is a 740-seat house that opened in 1918 as the Selwyn. It was renamed for American Airlines in 2000, when Roundabout assumed operations and raised money by making a sponsorship agreement with the airline.The airline’s naming rights expire in early 2024, according to a spokesman for Roundabout, and the nonprofit’s board decided to rename the building for Haimes, who had an extraordinary impact on the company: He joined Roundabout as managing director in 1983 and reversed its flagging fortunes; he held a variety of titles over the years, and at his death in April he was both artistic director and chief executive.Roundabout, now one of the largest nonprofit theaters in the United States, has five performance spaces in Midtown Manhattan: three Broadway houses, including the Stephen Sondheim and Studio 54 as well as the American Airlines Theater, plus the Laura Pels Theater, which is an Off Broadway venue, and the Roundabout Underground black box theater, which is Off Off Broadway, both at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center.On Thursday night, the lights of all Broadway marquees were dimmed in Haimes’s honor. Another ceremony will be held next spring to dedicate the Todd Haimes Theater.American Airlines did not respond to a request for comment. More

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      Review: In ‘Grey House,’ Broadway Gets an Expert Haunting

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      A new play about a sisterhood of sorrows brings something scary to the stage, but is delivering shocks and icks enough?Four strange girls, somewhere between 12 and 200 years old, live in an isolated cabin in the woods. Don’t they always?Marlow (Sophia Anne Caruso) is the alpha, bossing the others around — and also bossing the stranded outsiders, because of course there are stranded outsiders in a play that trades on the tropes of a million horror tales. In “Grey House,” the prime trope is coy creepiness. Of the small knife she occasionally brandishes, Marlow, who gives Wednesday Addams vibes, comfortingly says, “If I put it in your eye, it wouldn’t even hit your brain.”Good to know — and basically true of the play itself.“Grey House,” at the Lyceum Theater, is certainly an in-your-face assault, more in the manner of John Carpenter movies than anything seen onstage since the age of melodrama. It is so expertly assembled from spare parts by the playwright Levi Holloway and the director Joe Mantello that you may not notice, between the jump scares and the shivery pauses, how little it has on its mind. Something about cycles of abuse? The legacy of misogyny? Sure, let’s go with that.But mostly let’s go with the freak-out fun of the four telekinetic weirdos and their den mother, Raleigh, played by Laurie Metcalf in a stringy salt-and-pepper wig that’s almost as frightening as she is. Raleigh is not very maternal; Marlow says she is their mother “sometimes.” Other than feeding them and untangling their tresses as if weeding a garden, she generally leaves them to their own devices.At the start of the play, those devices include some kind of gas-mask contraption that an ethereal deaf girl named Bernie (Millicent Simmonds) is making. (Hint: It’s not a gas mask.) What Squirrel (Colby Kipnes) is making is even worse: a kind of tapestry of innards. (She is presumably called Squirrel because of her tendency to gnaw things like phone cords that if left un-gnawed would short-circuit the plot.)Luckily, the fourth girl, A1656 (Alyssa Emily Marvin), is just making nice. She translates for Bernie and, when the outsiders arrive, calms them with good humor. Explaining her name, she admits that it may be unusual but “it’s no A1655.”The outsiders, a childless couple, need calming because they’ve just wrecked their car on a requisitely dark and snowy mountain road. Max (Tatiana Maslany) was driving; swerving to hit a deer, she hit it anyway. The accident has left Henry (Paul Sparks) with his ankle mangled, or maybe his leg or maybe his soul — it’s a restless manglement, moving through him as the play’s 95 minutes tick by. In any case, Raleigh splints him up, and the girls give him moonshine as an anesthetic.Well, not really moonshine.“Grey House,” which comes to Broadway from Chicago, where it had its world premiere at A Red Orchid Theater in 2019, keeps its secrets as quiet as its shocks are conspicuous. Only gradually do we get any sense of how the marriage of Max and Henry was crashing even before the accident, or why the coven of girls, if not their minder, has such an interest in helping it come apart completely. By the time we do begin to put together a possible explanatory scheme, it’s too late to matter; the trappings of horror, if not any meaningful horror beneath, have scared the bejesus out of the psychological drama.From left, Sophia Anne Caruso, Alyssa Emily Marvin and Millicent Simmonds in “Grey House” at the Lyceum Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt least those trappings are superb. Though I’ve left undescribed the two other humans (at least I think they are humans) who fill out the cast, it gives nothing away to discuss the even-more-prominent title character. As designed by Scott Pask and lit by Natasha Katz, and especially as given voice by the sound designer, Tom Gibbons, the house seems to be the repository of feelings and history that everyone else is mostly sidestepping. It moans while they tease.That teasing quality, though sometimes charming — and often, if you are a scaredy-cat, a relief from the hard-core jolts — is the giveaway that “Grey House” should not be taken too seriously, regardless of its allusions to real-world horror of the past and present. (Yes, the Holocaust gets a hat tip.) We know too much about the rules of the genre, how information and staging will be manipulated to scare and delight us, to give much credence to anything deeper. In that way, “Grey House” is like a jukebox musical, squishing familiar arias — gore, ghosts, what have you — into a chic and enjoyable if mostly empty new container.Letting go of meaning in the theater in favor of sensation is a big ask today. The ambition of playwrights to speak directly to our times through emotional naturalism has largely wiped horror, mystery and their ilk from our stages. One of the last such plays to appear on Broadway was an adaptation of Stephen King’s “Misery” in 2015, starring Bruce Willis as an author of mystery novels and, as the psychotic fan who nearly nurses him to death, once again the great Laurie Metcalf.So another thing that has to be said for “Grey House” is that it has given artists who want to explore the opportunities and particular language of an unfashionable form a rare chance to do so. Metcalf and the rest of the cast turn that opportunity into a meal; by investing in its clichés without condescension, they do much to de-cliché them.But what makes the effort meaningful to artists — Holloway began thinking about the story after a family tragedy — may not make it meaningful to us. And though the theater is already a kind of haunted house, filled with odd beings and strange noises, horror may simply work better in a less live medium. When Max and Henry show up at the cabin, unaware that anyone is there, they look around at the spooky surroundings, listen to the wind howling, and somehow find it all so familiar.“I’ve seen this movie,” Henry says. Which is the problem exactly.Grey HouseAt the Lyceum Theater, Manhattan; greyhousebroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      ‘Prayer for the French Republic’ Heads to Broadway

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      The play, which is scheduled to open in January, joins a string of Broadway shows that confront antisemitism in the U.S. and abroad.Joshua Harmon’s “Prayer for the French Republic,” a play about a family grappling with contemporary and historical antisemitism in France, will transfer to Broadway this winter.The play will be produced by the nonprofit Manhattan Theater Club, which last year presented the play’s first run Off Broadway. The production will be directed by David Cromer, who also directed it Off Broadway; it will be staged at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, with previews beginning Dec. 19 and the opening scheduled for Jan. 9.Casting has not been announced.The production comes as concerns about antisemitism have been on the rise in the United States and beyond. Last season featured two shows about antisemitism — the play “Leopoldstadt,” about a Viennese family before, during, and after the Holocaust, and the musical “Parade,” about the lynching of a Jewish businessman in Georgia — both of which are leading contenders for Tony Awards this spring. And this season will include “Harmony,” a musical about a vocal group that runs afoul of the Nazis in early 20th-century Germany.“Prayer for the French Republic” will be Harmon’s second play on Broadway; his poignant singleness comedy, “Significant Other,” had a run in 2017 at the Booth Theater. But Harmon is probably best known for another comedy, “Bad Jews,” which was widely staged around the country.The play has a relatively large cast — MTC listed a company of 16 actors Off Broadway — and a three-hour running time, making it costly to produce on Broadway at a time when many theater nonprofits are struggling financially. This production is being financed in part by the Roy Cockrum Foundation, which was established by a Powerball-winning theater lover who supports ambitious work by nonprofits.Also this week, MTC announced that it has appointed a new executive director, Chris Jennings, to succeed the outgoing executive producer Barry Grove. Jennings is currently executive director of the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington. He will work alongside MTC’s artistic director, Lynne Meadow, who last year notched her 50th anniversary with the company. More

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      New York Public Library Acquires George C. Wolfe’s Archives

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      More than 50 boxes of ephemera from the playwright and director’s career include notes on “Angels in America” and research for “Jelly’s Last Jam.”When the playwright and director George C. Wolfe moved to New York City in his 20s, he got a job at an archive for Black cultural history, where his work saving newspaper articles and maintaining records fueled a habit of preserving his own ephemera.“It activated this sort of curiosity-slash-obsession about who gets remembered, what gets saved, what gets valued and what doesn’t,” Wolfe said recently.On Thursday, the New York Public Library announced that it had acquired more than 50 boxes of material from throughout Wolfe’s career, during which he became one of the most sought-after theater directors in the country. His productions, including “Angels in America” and “Bring in ’Da Noise, Bring in ’Da Funk,” garnered multiple Tony Awards, and he’s credited with revolutionizing the Public Theater over a decade as its producer.Working scripts, correspondence with theatrical figures such as Tony Kushner (with whom Wolfe worked closely on “Angels in America”) and photographs from throughout his career were purchased for an undisclosed amount. The archive also includes his research for historically driven productions, including for “Shuffle Along,” which Wolfe wrote based on the events surrounding the 1921 musical — a rare all-Black production at the time — and “Jelly’s Last Jam,” a musical about the life of the jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton, which is being revived next year as part of the Encores! series at New York City Center.Wolfe, 68, who directed “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” for film, cautions that the act of establishing the archive should not communicate that his career is waning. Rather, he views the process as making room for new stories, and — more practically speaking — making space in his home.“They were taking over,” he said of the boxes, “so I let them win.”Wolfe recalled that some of his saved materials included audition forms with his assessments of actors, notes from Kushner on Part 1 of “Angels,” and a scrapbook from his 1986 Off Broadway play “The Colored Museum,” which helped him gain national recognition as a playwright. Some items he said he decided not to part with just yet, including a note from Joseph Papp, the founder and longtime leader of the Public Theater, which Wolfe took over a couple years after Papp’s death, producing Broadway-bound shows such as “Caroline, or Change,” “Take Me Out” and “Topdog/Underdog.” (All three have had recent Broadway revivals.)Doug Reside, the theater curator for the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, has sought to persuade artists like Wolfe to begin transferring their collections earlier than they might have expected because of complexities around saving digital material that may be stored on machines that are quickly becoming obsolete. This became a priority for Reside when he was a researcher at the Library of Congress working on the archives of Jonathan Larson, the “Rent” playwright and lyricist, whose three-and-a-half-inch floppy disks were a challenge to salvage.“It has become really important to start preserving this history as close to the moment of creation as possible,” Reside said.Wolfe’s own career spans a period of rapid technological development: He wrote and directed his first play, “Up for Grabs,” in 1975, and directed his most recent Broadway production in 2019. The archives include handwritten letters and telegrams Wolfe received with feedback about shows. Further down the technological timeline, there’s a DVD with a preview of Act 2 of “Shuffle Along,” as well as email printouts related to “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.”“It’s telling the stories of the shows that I worked on,” Wolfe said of the collection, “but embedded in that, it’s telling the story of those times.”Wolfe has not yet agreed to transfer his digital archives to the library, but he said that he would consider doing so in the future. The collection will be accessible in about a year in the special collections reading room of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. More