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      Why Does Every Play Seem Political Now?

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      Theater about current events — both literally and abstractly — is changing the conversation between playwrights, directors and their audiences.IT’S ALWAYS BEEN a good argument starter to contend that all theater is political, even if the claim sometimes depends on stretching the definition of “political” to its vaguest outer limits. For one thing, unlike movies or television or books, theater requires you to leave your home and participate in the creation of an ad hoc collective, albeit frequently with the irritation that proximity to strangers can engender. And during periods when the people in charge belong to a party that, for instance, evinces loathing for the funding of art and artists, choosing to go to the theater can feel like a political act in itself. That’s all the truer if the experience challenges you to assess where you stand (or sit) in relation not only to whatever is being said or done onstage but to all of the reactions bursting forth around you.The people who create theater sometimes describe it, with what can seem like sanctimony or sentimentality, as a church. But more often, when it’s good, it’s like a community board hearing, not worshipful but prickly and pugnacious. That applies whether you’re in a 60-seat black box watching an Off Off Broadway play or in orchestra seats at … well, here’s where it easily can turn into a parlor game. “Hamilton”? Yes, obviously “Hamilton” is political. OK, what about “Death Becomes Her”? Of course — politics are inherent in a production about gender double standards regarding attractiveness and aging. “The Outsiders”? Class war with songs. The “Great Gatsby” musical? An indictment of kleptocracy, plus some dancing. And so on.Right now, though, the idea that all theater is political is less a rhetorical exercise than an irrefutable reality. It’s no surprise that the current New York season has foregrounded work like the blistering comedy “Eureka Day,” in which a series of steering committee meetings at a crunchy, liberal private school in Berkeley, Calif., turn into gladiatorial bouts pitting pro-vaccine parents against anti-vaxxers; Jonathan Spector’s play was topical when it was first produced on the West Coast in 2018 and is even more so now. Or that Sanaz Toossi’s 2023 Pulitzer Prize winner “English,” a poignant comedy-drama about four people in Iran studying English in an adult-education class, feels as if it were written in response to President Donald Trump’s first week of executive orders this past January rather than, as is actually the case, in response to the travel ban he imposed eight years ago. These plays may be even more resonant than their authors imagined they would be when they started to write them but, from the outset, their impetus was to find the frustrating, the bewildering, the nuanced and the human in our contemporary political landscape.What’s jolting at this moment, though, is how little those works seem like outliers. In the past year, we’ve had revivals that felt explicitly framed to reflect current concerns, like Amy Herzog’s reconception of Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 “An Enemy of the People” as a battle between principled health activism and rapacious capitalism, and the recent deconstruction “Show/Boat: A River,” which reshaped the 1927 musical into a kind of staged essay on the subject of its own racism. We’ve had revivals that read as political because of umbrage taken at their casting: What does it mean to have Audra McDonald play a Black Madam Rose in “Gypsy,” originally staged in 1959, and what does it mean if you insist that that choice, of all choices, violates the supposed principle of realism in musicals? And we’ve had new plays in which politics are baked into their very authorship: What does it mean to have the nonbinary artist Cole Escola create a star turn for themselves as Mary Todd Lincoln in “Oh, Mary!”? (Only good things.) A revival of a show that was never not political, the eve-of-the-Nazis musical “Cabaret” (1966) feels intensified in its implications in 2025, in part because Rebecca Frecknall’s immersive staging, more than past revivals, casts us, the audience, in the role of shamefully oblivious revelers, drinking and making merry in a Berlin nightclub as a world of darkness looms outside and onstage. Even “Wicked,” 22 years into a Broadway run that will apparently outlast us all, has, in the wake of its hit movie adaptation, been rebranded as an anti-authoritarian cri de coeur.The counterargument to all this is essentially that to a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and that plenty of options remain for theatergoers who just want to have a good time (a notion that is always invoked as if work that engages with the world must be the opposite of that). So sure, if that’s your thing, go ahead: Enjoy the stripped-down version of the 1993 musical “Sunset Boulevard” — no, wait, damn it, there’s that impossible-standards-of-beauty-and-aging thing again — or the upcoming musical “Real Women Have Curves,” which … nope, that won’t work either. It’s hard not to conclude either that there are an awful lot of nails out there right now or that, this season, we’ve all become hammers.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What Do We Want From Political Theater?

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      Playwrights and directors wrestle with how a piece of art can galvanize its audience.In an era of vanishing cultural authority and ever-abbreviated attention spans, being called relevant is one of the best compliments a work of art can get. We’ve always celebrated art that seems to speak to our political and cultural moments, but these days — when the news relentlessly inundates us — art can feel like a surrogate, a response we’re unable to summon ourselves. Relevancy is less a compliment now than an expectation.And of all the creative genres — music, film, television, literature — the form that we most expect to answer the confusion of the time is, arguably, theater. This, says Mark Harris in his story about the politicization of American theater, is partly because of theater’s inherent intimacy. Unlike a movie, it can only be watched by a certain number of people over a limited amount of time; and moreover, those people have to be able to 1) afford to see a play, and 2) get themselves to the theater itself. Mass entertainment it’s not.On the CoversSwap wears a Louis Vuitton tank top and pants, price on request, louisvuitton.com; stylist’s own belt; and model’s own jewelry. His sons Heavn (left) and Jru’Angelo wear their own clothing.Photograph by Luis Alberto Rodriguez. Styled by Carlos NazarioGabriel Medina (left) at State Management and Santino Guzman at Vision Los Angeles. From left: Celine by Hedi Slimane jacket, price on request, and pants, $1,200, celine.com; Celine by Hedi Slimane shirt, about $1,100, and tie, about $250, similar styles at celine.com. Celine by Hedi Slimane jacket, price on request, shirt, about $1,100, pants, $1,500, and tie, about $250.Photograph by Luis Alberto Rodriguez. Styled by Carlos NazarioYet despite its relative exclusivity, theater’s cultural reach is much broader than one might imagine, its reverberations more profound and longer lasting. And in 2025, Harris writes, “the idea that all theater is political is less a rhetorical exercise than an irrefutable reality.” The proof is in the current season of both dramas and musicals, with new offerings and revivals about, variously, immigration, race, vaccines and bodily autonomy. We want theater to articulate what we can’t; we want it to provide catharsis; we want it to speak to our anger and give us hope. But increasingly, Harris says, the question isn’t so much what can theater do for us as what we can do for theater. “What,” he asks, “does political theater want to do to its audience? Affirm us in our beliefs? Galvanize us into action? Shake us up? Persuade us? Provoke us? Rebuke us?” Any one of those things; all of them. What we may want most, though, is to feel something at all. More

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      Angie Stone, Hip-Hop Pioneer Turned Neo-Soul Singer, Dies at 63

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      After having success as a member of the Sequence, an early female rap group, she re-emerged in the 1990s as a practitioner of sultry, laid-back R&B.Angie Stone, a hip-hop pioneer in the late 1970s with the Sequence, one of the first all-female rap groups, who later switched gears as a solo R&B star with hits like “No More Rain (In This Cloud)” and “Wish I Didn’t Miss You,” died on Saturday in Montgomery, Ala. She was 63.Her agent, Deborah Champagne, said she died in a hospital after being involved in a car crash following a performance.Alongside musicians like Erykah Badu, Macy Gray and Lauryn Hill, Ms. Stone was part of the neo-soul movement of the late 1990s and 2000s, which blended traditional soul with contemporary R&B, pop and jazz fusion. Her first album, “Black Diamond” (1999), was certified gold, as was her sophomore effort, “Mahogany Soul” (2001).A prolific songwriter with a sultry alto voice, Ms. Stone specialized in songs that combined laid-back tempos with layered instrumentation and vocals.“Angie Stone will stand proud alongside Lauryn Hill as a songwriter, producer and singer with all the props in place to become a grande dame of the R&B world in the next decade,” Billboard magazine wrote in 1999.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Patina Miller, of Starz’s ‘Power’ Series, Spends Her Sundays

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      Patina Miller may play a fearless New York City drug queenpin inspired by 50 Cent’s mother on television, but for a long time, something scared her: having a child of her own.“I thought maybe I wouldn’t be good at it,” said Ms. Miller, 40, who plays the indomitable Raquel Thomas on the crime drama “Power Book III: Raising Kanan.” (The fourth season premieres Friday on Starz.)“I was always afraid of holding other people’s babies because I thought I’d break them,” she said.But now that she is a mother — to a 7-year-old daughter, Emerson Harper Mars, with her husband, the venture capitalist David Mars — she couldn’t imagine her life any other way.“Sundays are about being comfy, being with family,” said Ms. Miller, whose 15-year-old niece, Alanna Miller, also lives with her. She added, “It’s nice to sit and talk to each other without being on our phones.”Ms. Miller was born in Pageland, S.C., and raised by a single mother who encouraged her love for gospel music. She has lived in New York since 2007, when she moved from South Carolina after college and subsequently landed her breakout role as the nightclub singer Deloris Van Cartier in the Broadway adaptation of “Sister Act.” She won a Tony Award in 2013 for her performance as a circus artist in the musical “Pippin.”She has called the Upper West Side home for the past three years. Her family lives in a brownstone between Central Park and Riverside Park with their English bulldog, Maddie.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Mary Said What She Said’ Review: A Hypnotic Huppert

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      In this Robert Wilson production, Isabelle Huppert is everywhere onstage, all at once, reciting a nonstop script that may well touch on everything.Isabelle Huppert stands upstage center, demurely holding her hands in front of her waist, and starts to speak. She is motionless and in silhouette so we don’t see her mouth, creating a sense of dislocation as to where the words we hear are actually coming from. And as we quickly discover, the Robert Wilson production “Mary Said What She Said” interpolates live and recorded lines.But wait: After a few minutes, Huppert is standing a little closer to the audience. Moments later she is almost downstage. The entire time I could have sworn she wasn’t moving. How did she pull off that sleight of hand — or feet?Huppert is playing Mary Stuart and wearing a 16th-century-style dress, which means she can take tiny steps without the audience seeing them, as if she were on casters. This creates the illusion of stillness in motion, or perhaps freeze-framed movement — either way a neat encapsulation of Wilson’s art as a theater maker — that contrasts with the simultaneous verbal stream flowing in an almost uninterrupted manner over the course of this 90-minute monologue. (The show is in French with subtitles.)Written by Darryl Pinckney, who drew from the Queen of Scots’s letters, “Mary Said What She Said,” which is at NYU Skirball through Sunday, is inconceivable without Huppert, and she is the reason to see it.She gives a performance of rarefied virtuosity and rigor as she seemingly effortlessly handles the precise blocking and light and audio cues, the swings between immobility and fastidiously choreographed movement, the abrupt changes in tempo and pitch — and of course the dense, nonlinear text full of echoing repetitions, which must be a beast to memorize. Even when she’s not moving or speaking, she always needs to be committed to the moment. It is a marvel to behold.This is Huppert’s third collaboration with Wilson, after “Orlando” (1993) and “Quartett” (seen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2009), so at least she knows his exacting M.O. She was also familiar with the character, having played her in Schiller’s “Mary Stuart” at the National Theater in London in 1996.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Disruptor Asks, Is New York Finally Ready for ‘DOOM’?

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      Barking Doberman pinchers behind chain link fencing and performers who looked like they came straight from the Berlin club scene made the ultracool German performance artist Anne Imhof infamous.But last week, at her first rehearsal for “DOOM: House of Hope” at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan, there were no dogs in sight.There were still those impossibly beautiful performers, though, many very young. They were sprawled on the floor of one of the Armory’s rehearsal spaces, sitting at the piano, testing out bits of movement, or rehearsing lines from marked up copies of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” — the new project’s starting point.Belying her works’ fierce, sometimes aggro aesthetics, Imhof was a gentle, observing presence, not so much directing the performers but asking them how they wanted to proceed — utterly unlike the strict rigor of, say, a ballet rehearsal.“I count on chance and accidents and things that are not planned,” the 46-year-old Berlin-based artist told me. “There has to be enough openness to it that the performers have agency.”“I count on chance and accidents and things that are not planned,” said Imhof, 46, who conceived of “DOOM” as a performance best suited for the Armory, rather than an artwork for a museum. She had wanted to do a ballet for a long time.Tess Mayer for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Dakar 2000’ Review: Which One Is the Liar?

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      In Rajiv Joseph’s two-hander, a couple of Americans in Senegal twist, deflect, massage, stretch and maybe even tell the truth.We can’t say we weren’t warned. Boubs, the narrator of Rajiv Joseph’s new play, kicks off the show by informing the audience that “all of it is true. Or most of it, anyway.”That “most of it” does a lot of work in “Dakar 2000,” which just opened at Manhattan Theater Club. But while ambiguity and uncertainty have long been great fertilizers for storytelling, Joseph’s two-hander about a couple of Americans in Senegal remains strangely uninvolving.Some of the things Boubs (Abubakr Ali), a Peace Corps volunteer, tells the State Department employee Dina (Mia Barron, from “The Coast Starlight” and “Hurricane Diane”) may well be fabrications. Over the course of her friendly but insistent interrogation of Boubs, who was involved in a truck accident, we begin to suspect that Dina is no slouch, either, at fudging the facts.“You’re a good liar!” she tells Boubs at one point. “I don’t begrudge that skill set.”It’s a useful one for playwrights, too. Mining his own history, Joseph (“Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo,” “King James”) did go on a Peace Corps mission in Senegal after college, an experience he credits as instrumental in his becoming a writer. It’s unclear whether, as happens to this play’s hero, Joseph was ever asked to possibly fingerprint an alleged terrorist who was passed out, or maybe dead, in his hotel room. Has Joseph been the Le Carré of the Rialto all these years?But while the possibility of exciting action always hovers on the periphery, May Adrales’s low-energy production is bereft of any tension. That is an achievement of some kind for a show dealing with covert operations, and one in which a character is traumatized (or claims to be) by the 1998 bombing of the United States embassy in Tanzania.“Dakar 2000” begins promisingly as Dina grills Boubs about his accident, then starts making demands. It’s fun to watch her run rings around him, and Joseph and the cast keep the action moving as we ponder what Dina really wants, and whether Boubs is a useful idiot, a cunning faux-naïf, an idealistic young man, or all of the above. That Dina appears to be haunted by apocalyptic feelings — the play takes place during the chaotic, unsettled final lead-up to Y2K, when the world felt as if it was built on shifting sands — should make the stakes even weightier.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Theater Company’s Lost French New Wave Film Gets Its New York Premiere

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      Future members of Mabou Mines produced the footage over 50 years ago. Now it’s a film with new dialogue spoken by children of the original cast.The French film industry was hardly the only force spurring the barricades, Molotov cocktails and worker strikes that were synonymous with Paris in May 1968. But the French government’s attempt to fire the head of the Cinémathèque Française earlier that year supplied crucial kindling. And while the Cannes Film Festival managed to open amid the unrest, with a glittery restoration of “Gone With the Wind,” Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut were among those who helped scuttle the festival at the halfway point.This is the environment in which Lee Breuer and other ambitious New York theater artists found themselves dubbing French films into English for the Hong Kong market. They were also absorbing lessons in elliptical, pugnacious, visually striking theater from the likes of the Berliner Ensemble and the Living Theater, a group of New Yorkers living in voluntary exile in Europe.By 1970, Breuer had returned to New York and formed Mabou Mines, the influential Off Off Broadway theater troupe. (The other founding members included fellow dubbers Ruth Maleczech and David Warrilow, as well as JoAnne Akalaitis and Philip Glass.)But first the Paris-based gang set out to produce a silent film, called “Moi-même,” about a 13-year-old boy who tries to create a film collective through begging, hustling and sometimes armed robbery. They wrote some provisional lines of dialogue on a few envelopes and grabbed cameras, bankrolled by the man who owned the dubbing studio.They began shooting just as the protests were winding down — and then their unfinished project ground to its own halt. Now, over 50 years later, “Moi-même” will finally make its New York debut at L’Alliance New York on Thursday, co-directed and co-written by Breuer and his son Mojo Lorwin, who wasn’t born until 1984. Additional screenings are scheduled at Yale University Film Archives (April 24) and as part of a film festival in Athens, Ohio.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More