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      ‘The Shark Is Broken,’ a ‘Jaws’ Comedy, Plans Broadway Run

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      The play stars Ian Shaw, whose father, Robert Shaw, played a shark hunter in the movie.“The Shark Is Broken,” a comedy about the making of “Jaws” that stars the son of one of the film’s main actors, will open on Broadway this summer.The play is the brainchild of Ian Shaw, whose father, Robert Shaw, played Quint, the psychotic shark hunter, in the film. Its film set was plagued by problems, some exacerbated by Robert Shaw’s drinking, and the play depicts the fraught relationship between him and his co-stars, Richard Dreyfuss and Roy Scheider.In the play, set in 1974, the three men are trapped together on a boat, managing bad weather, (fake) shark troubles and alcohol.The play began its life at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2019, opened in London’s West End in 2021 after a pandemic-related delay, and had a production in Toronto last fall. The Broadway run is to begin previews on July 25 and to open on Aug. 10 at the Golden Theater.The play received a number of strong reviews in London, including from The Evening Standard, which said Ian Shaw “gives what is undoubtedly one of the best theatrical performances of the year.” (The Guardian was more restrained, saying that “too much of the humor hinges on 21st-century hindsight” but also praising Ian Shaw’s “loving and eerily evocative portrayal of his own father.”)Ian Shaw wrote the play with Joseph Nixon; the production is being directed by Guy Masterson and produced by Sonia Friedman and Scott Landis.The play joins what is shaping up to be an unusually busy summer on Broadway. There is already horror (“Grey House”) and farce (“The Cottage”) represented, along with three big musicals (“Once Upon a One More Time,” “Here Lies Love,” “Back to the Future”) and a solo comedy (Alex Edelman’s “Just for Us”). More

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      Megan Terry, Feminist Playwright and Rock Musical Innovator, Dies at 90

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      She wrote 70 plays, won an Obie Award and wrote and directed “Viet Rock,” a musical that predated “Hair” and is considered the first U.S. stage work to address the Vietnam War.Megan Terry, an Obie Award winner, a founding member of the Open Theater group and a prolific feminist playwright who wrote and directed a rock musical on the New York stage that predated “Hair,” died on April 12 at a hospital in Omaha. She was 90.Elizabeth Primamore, a writer who is working on a book about Ms. Terry and four other women writers, confirmed the death on Monday.Ms. Terry’s “Viet Rock: A Folk War Movie” opened at the Martinique Theater, an Off Broadway house, on Nov. 10, 1966, during the Vietnam War, after earlier performances at the Yale Repertory Company and La MaMa E.T.C., in the East Village.The rock numbers’ lyrics were poignant and pointed: “The wars have melted into one/A war was on when I was born.” One song advised against optimism: “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket/Baskets wear out and men die young/ Better to marry trees or elephants/Men die young.”The dialogue played with politics and popular culture. “Let’s all go gay with L.B.J.,” one character said, a twist on President Lyndon B. Johnson’s campaign slogan “All the way with L.B.J.” Others declared: “I lost my way with L.B.J.,” “March to doomsday with L.B.J.” and “I lost my green beret on the Road to Mandalay.”“Viet Rock” was believed to be the first American stage work to address the Vietnam War.“The piece ended with an image of rebirth,” the critic Dan Sullivan wrote in The Los Angeles Times, “but the image that stayed with the viewer was a mound of dead soldiers, male and female, muttering ‘Who needs this?’”The New York Times panned the production. Walter Kerr, the newspaper’s chief theater critic, dismissed it as “essentially thoughtless, from-the-gut-only noise.” The Village Voice called it extraordinary.A year later, one of its cast members, Gerome Ragni, and two partners presented their musical “Hair” at the Public Theater, which moved to Broadway in 1968 and found overwhelming international success.A 1966 poster for the Open Theater production of “Viet Rock” at La MaMa E.T.C. in the East Village. The musical received mixed reviews.LaMama ArchivesMs. Terry, in her mid-30s, went on to write “Approaching Simone” (1970), about Simone Weil, the French activist philosopher. It won the Obie Award for best Off Broadway play.Jack Kroll wrote in Newsweek magazine that “Simone” was “a rare theatrical event” filled with “the light, shadow and weight of human life and the exultant agonies of the ceaseless attempt to create one’s humanity.” Clive Barnes of The Times called it “a superb theatrical coup.”Marguerite Duffy was born on July 22, 1932, in Seattle, the daughter of Harold and Marguerite (Henry) Duffy. Her father was a businessman. Marguerite became fascinated with theater after seeing a play at age 7 — a passion that, by her account, her disapproving father ridiculed, giving her nicknames like Tallulah Blackhead and Sarah Heartburn, as opposed to Bankhead and Bernhardt.In high school, she worked with the Seattle Repertory Playhouse, learning early that politics and theater could be powerful but prickly bedfellows. The playhouse closed in 1951 under pressure from the House Un-American Activities Committee.Marguerite won a scholarship to the Banff School of Fine Arts in Canada, where she earned a certificate in acting, directing and design. Returning to her home state, she completed her bachelor’s degree in education at the University of Washington.She then took a teaching job at the Cornish School of Allied Arts, today Cornish College of the Arts, in Seattle. Her first plays, including “Beach Grass” and “Go Out and Move the Car,” were criticized for their frankness, which led her to take two drastic steps.She began doing her theater work under a pseudonym. Megan was the Celtic root of her first name, and Terry was a tribute to the 19th-century British actress Ellen Terry. And she moved to New York City.Her plays in New York included “The Magic Realist” (1960), “Ex-Miss Copper Queen on a Set of Pills” (1963), “When My Girlhood Was Still All Flowers” (1963), “Eat at Joe’s” (1964) and “Keep Tightly Closed in a Cool, Dry Place” (1967).“Plays by Megan Terry” is an anthology of three of her works, “Approaching Simone,” “Babes in the Bighouse,” and “Viet Rock.”Broadway Play PubOne of Ms. Terry’s most talked-about techniques with the Open Theater, an experimental New York company founded in 1963 by Joseph Chaikin, was known simply as transformation. An actor might begin speaking in one language and suddenly switch to another, having taken on a new character’s identity.In a scene in “Viet Rock,” one actor mimes being hit by gunfire and the others catch him. “Then, abruptly, the sounds change, the body is held high, and the group, rotating weirdly, has become a helicopter, transporting the wounded to Saigon,” the critic Michael Feingold wrote in The Times in 1966. Seconds later, he wrote, the actors became the hospital, and “shortly afterward turn it, without a qualm, into a Buddhist funeral.”The Open Theater’s last production was “Nightwalk” (1973), written by Ms. Terry, Sam Shepard and Jean-Claude van Itallie and performed in repertory with two other works. Mel Gussow of The Times called it “enormously enjoyable,” with a “strong and disquieting impact.”Ms. Terry also worked with the Firehouse Theater in Minneapolis. In her 40s, she moved to Nebraska to become the playwright-in-residence at the Magic Theater in Omaha and continued to produce experimental work.At the end of her career, she had written 70 plays. They include “Babes in the Bighouse: A Documentary Fantasy Musical About Life in Prison” (1974), “Sleazing Toward Athens” (1977), “15 Million 15-Year-Olds” (1983), “Dinner’s in the Blender” (1987) and “Breakfast Serial” (1991).Much of her work was intended, at least partly, for young audiences. “The Snow Queen” (1991) was a playful adaptation of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. “Headlights” (1990) was an examination of illiteracy.Ms. Terry was a founder, with five others, of the short-lived but influential Women’s Theater Council in 1972. She received the Dramatists Guild Award in 1983. Along with her wife, Jo Ann Schmidman, and Sara Kimberlain, she was an editor of “Right Brain Vacation Photos” (1992), an illustrated book of two decades of Magic Theater productions.Ms. Terry is survived by Ms. Schmidman.Saying goodbye was one of Ms. Terry’s least favorite activities. When she was getting her degree in education, she remembered the pain of losing the third-grade class she had student-taught all year. In her career, she found a way to avoid that kind of enforced separation.“I’ve always loved being in a theater company and being with people year after year,” she said in a 1992 interview at Wichita State University. “It satisfies my emotional needs and my intellectual needs. I come from a huge family, and theater gives you the chance to recreate the family in your own image.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More

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      ‘Breathless’ Review: Shopping Soothes an Anxious Mind

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      Laura Horton’s poignant comic monologue at 59E59 Theaters, part of the Brits Off Broadway festival, delivers a sympathetic portrayal of a sample-sale hoarder.Clothes can send Sophie into a rhapsody like nothing else does. Ever since she was a child, trawling thrift shops for secondhand style, her purchases have felt like victories.In those early years, some of the thrill came from finding name brands that would help her fit in better with the kids at school. But she has always had an eye for fashion, no matter how impractical.By the time she is a young adult, an aspiring writer living in London and stalking sample sales, the dresses and sweaters and shoes that she lugs home to her room in bulging bags have little to do with wearability. Does she need five ball gowns? Nope. But shopping is how Sophie soothes her increasingly anxious mind.Laura Horton’s poignant comic monologue “Breathless,” part of the Brits Off Broadway festival at 59E59 Theaters, finds Sophie at a breaking point. Played by Madeleine MacMahon, who gives her a nervous likability, Sophie would seem to have arrived at a joyous time in life. In her late 30s, she has a thoughtful, interesting new girlfriend, Jo, whom Sophie can envision as a long-term partner. Yet at the end of every date, she fabricates reasons Jo can’t come into her apartment.“There’s all the time in the world to see my place,” Sophie says, except there isn’t, because Jo is weary of being kept at a distance. Too mortified to confess that her apartment is stuffed with clothes — a dangerous, suffocating, hoarder quantity of clothes — Sophie gets dumped. She has, essentially, chosen Vivienne Westwood (Ah, that checkered dress!) and Stella McCartney (Oh, those silk-screened pants!) over a woman who’s into her.Stephanie Kempson’s production for Theater Royal Plymouth smartly lets us imagine Sophie’s labyrinth of apparel, her towers of shoes. The set and props are minimal: a couple of clothing racks hung with empty garment bags; a single shopping bag from Alexander McQueen. Throughout, Sophie wears the same casual outfit: loose overalls with sneakers. (Set and costumes are by Kempson, Horton and MacMahon.)The play takes vivid hold through MacMahon’s performance, which includes a small gallery of supporting characters. Among them are Sophie’s sweet, gruff father and her unflappably loving mother, whose warmth is as enveloping as a hug.There is also a journalist friend who (spoiler) promises Sophie anonymity in a story about hoarding, then splashes her name and photo all over a national newspaper. The betrayal hits so hard in performance that I wanted to implore the fictional Sophie not to believe her friend, as she does, that it’s all his editors’ fault.A program note says that the play is based on Horton’s “own experiences of hoarding disorder,” and quotes her as saying that she was “heavily influenced by ‘Sex and the City’ growing up.” It seems only right, then, that “Breathless” is onstage in a part of Manhattan — about midway between a Dior boutique and Bloomingdale’s — where luxury beckons, and the price is steep.BreathlessThrough May 7 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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      Review: Byronic Heroism in ‘Sardanapal’ at the Berlin Volksbühne

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      The director and star of the Volksbühne’s new show, based on a play by Lord Byron, picked up another role when one of the lead actors was missing in action.Before the curtain rose at the Berlin Volksbühne for Friday’s premiere of “Sardanapal,” inspired by Lord Bryon’s 1821 play “Sardanapalus,” the audience learned that one of the show’s lead actors, Benny Claessens, was “not doing well.” In heroic, Byronic fashion, the show’s director and lead Fabian Hinrichs rescued the evening by jumping into the fray and assuming his absent co-star’s role, along with his own.And so the show — a labor of love that verges on folly — went on. Hinrichs’s ambition, it seems, is to revive the English Romantic poet’s verse drama about Sardanapalus, an Assyrian king who lived in the 7th century B.C. and whose credo, in Byron’s memorable formulation, was “eat, drink, and love; the rest’s not worth a fillip.” Instead of pursuing violent conquest and martial glory, the powerful monarch of the title revels in the good life and inspires his subjects to do likewise.In a 2019 article about the play by Hinrichs that was republished on the production’s website, he writes that Byron’s forgotten drama “deserves a splendid rebirth.” A splendid rebirth is decidedly not what the Berlin audience got on Friday night.Hinrichs, a wry and charismatic performer who is also credited with the production’s music and the sets (along with Ann-Christine Müller), is a cult figure at the Volksbühne, known for his collaborations with René Pollesch, the German writer-director who is the theater’s artistic director. One of their productions together was a splashy extravaganza at Berlin’s biggest revue theater, in 2020.But this is Hinrichs’s first time directing a show at the Volksbühne; over the course of its intermission-less two hours, the production feels dramaturgically rudderless.Far from a faithful staging of Byron’s five-act tragedy, Hinrichs’s staging is essentially a revue. It recalls several of the Volksbühne’s other recent outings, including Florentina Holzinger’s “Ophelia’s Got Talent” and Constanza Macras’s “Drama,” which also combine dialogue, music and dance in messy, hard-to-classify evenings. The most sustained engagement we get with Byron’s work and themes is a corny YouTube tribute video of inspirational quotes that is projected onstage during the show.The production features dancers, an acrobat and a local youth orchestra, but it also spends some time in a Munich supermarket.Apollonia T. BitzanThe evening gets off to a slow start, with a series of disconnected musical numbers, both live (a gusto-filled saxophone solo) and canned (Barry White’s “Let the Music Play”). Hinrichs dances ecstatically to the disco classic before singing a song by Schubert.Before we get to ancient Mesopotamia, however, we find ourselves in a Munich supermarket at 5 a.m., listening to Hinrichs making small talk with the cashier (and holding up the checkout line). What does she think about while scanning items for eight hours a day, he wants to know. The actress Lilith Stangenberg launches into a lusty monologue about her love for the sea and sand. Stangenberg, an striking and eccentric comédienne, returns later in the evening as Myrrha, an enslaved Greek woman who is Sardanapalus’s lover.After waiting on the supermarket checkout line for an hour, we finally get to Assyria and to Byron’s drama. On opening night, Hinrichs, filling in for his absent star, clutched the script in his hand as he declaimed the epicurean monarch’s lofty verse. (Claessens’ name has been taken off the “Sardanapal” program for subsequent performances, and local news media have speculated about a rift between the actor and director; a Volksbühne spokeswoman said Claessens is unwell.)Under these trying circumstances, Hinrichs’s delivery was both muscular and somehow deflated. His signature laconic tone was unmistakable: wide-eyed yet world-weary, and shot through with grace and absurd humor. Yet in the context of a disjointed and meandering production, even Hinrichs’s performance grew exasperating.Still, there were some moments of reprieve. It was wonderful to find the Volksbühne’s longtime music director Sir Henry back on the main stage and at his piano. He accompanies Hinrichs as the actor warbles his way through the Schubert, performs as the soloist in the first movement of a Chopin piano concerto and even operates a floor polisher onstage in the supermarket scene. A late-evening fairy ballet for dancers in billowy white costumes was a high point, as was the lovely, all-too-brief scene in which the acrobat Christine Wunderlich recited a monologue during an aerobic silk performance. And a youth orchestra from a local high school accompanied Sir Henry in the Chopin: it returned later in the evening to perform some Philip Glass, and the evening wrapped up with (why not?) Abba’s “Dancing Queen.”In more ways than one, “Sardanapal” felt like a missed opportunity for the Volksbühne, which is slowly regaining its footing after a few extremely rocky years. February’s premiere of “Die Monosau” was an invigorating jolt of theatrical madness that felt like a vindication of the theater’s new model of collective leadership. I hope that “Sardanapal” isn’t too much of a setback for an institution that finally seemed to be on its way to recovery.SardanapalThrough May 30 at the Volksbühne theater, in Berlin; www.volksbuehne.berlin. More

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      Todd Haimes, 66, Who Rebuilt the Roundabout Theater Company, Dies

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      After rescuing the company from bankruptcy, he turned it into a major player on Broadway and one of the largest nonprofit theater companies in the country.Todd Haimes, who rescued New York’s Roundabout Theater Company from bankruptcy and built it into one of the largest nonprofit theaters in America, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 66.A spokesman, Matt Polk, said his death, at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, was caused by complications of osteosarcoma. Mr. Haimes had lived with the cancer since 2002, when he was diagnosed with sarcoma of the jaw.As the artistic director and chief executive at Roundabout, Mr. Haimes had an extraordinarily long and effective tenure. He led the nonprofit company for four decades, turning it into a major player on Broadway, where it now runs three of the 41 theaters.Roundabout has focused on classics and revivals but has also been a supporter of new work. Under Mr. Haimes’s leadership, it excelled on both fronts, winning 11 Tony Awards for plays and musicals it produced and nurturing the careers of contemporary American writers, including Stephen Karam, Joshua Harmon and Selina Fillinger.Among Roundabout’s biggest successes during his tenure was a 1998 revival of “Cabaret,” originally starring Alan Cumming and Natasha Richardson, that survived a bumpy start (a construction accident interrupted performances for four weeks) and then ran for nearly six years. It returned a decade later for a one-year reprise.There were many other triumphs, including a 2020 revival of “A Soldier’s Play” that is now touring the country. Both productions won Tony Awards.Catalyzed by America’s social unrest over racial inequality in 2020, Mr. Haimes led Roundabout in an effort to unearth lost gems written by artists of color. One result was an acclaimed Broadway production of the Black playwright Alice Childress’s 1955 backstage drama, “Trouble in Mind.” It had never made it to Broadway because Ms. Childress had refused to soften the show’s ending to make it less challenging for white theatergoers.Mr. Haimes joined Roundabout in 1983 as managing director. He was just 26, and the company, founded in 1965 and saddled with debt, was operating in rented space in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. At one particularly desperate point he used his own credit card to keep the company afloat. But a few weeks after he arrived, the board of directors voted to shut it down.A board member subsequently donated enough money to buy the company some time, and Mr. Haimes engineered a turnabout — cutting the staff, reducing expenses, improving marketing and, over time, expanding the audience with measures such as early weekday curtain times to attract an after-work crowd, special events for singles and gay theatergoers, and discounts for children. In 2016, he became the first presenter to allow the livestreaming of a performance of a Broadway show, a much-praised revival of “She Loves Me.”Mr. Haimes, right, with Gene Feist, Roundabout’s artistic director, in the theater in 1986. “I have no desire to be on stage, but I get a tingle just being around one,” he said.Jack Manning/The New York TimesBernard Todd Haimes was born on May 7, 1956, in Manhattan to Herman and Helaine Haimes. His father was a lawyer, his mother a homemaker.His onstage life was exceedingly brief: In elementary school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, he wore a dress to play the title role in a production of “Mary Poppins.” He later claimed that he had landed the part because he was the only child who could pronounce “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”He earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania and an M.B.A. at Yale. Before arriving at Roundabout, he was general manager of the Hartman Theater Company in Stamford and managing director of the Westport Country Playhouse, both in Connecticut.“I had no desire to trade stocks and bonds, and making Nivea cream wouldn’t turn me on,” he told The New York Times in 1986. “I’ve loved the theater all my life. I have no desire to be onstage, but I get a tingle just being around one, ever since I worked on the stage crew for ‘How to Succeed in Business’ on Broadway when I was in 10th grade.”He became producing director of Roundabout in 1989 and added the title of chief executive in 2015.“The advantage of my background is that all of my artistic decisions are being informed by management concerns,” Mr. Haimes said in 2004. “No one’s ever going to accuse me of being a crazy artist. The disadvantage is the same: that perhaps there are brilliant things other people could accomplish that I just can’t.”He is survived by his wife, Jeanne-Marie (Christman) Haimes; two children, Dr. Hilary Haimes and Andrew Haimes; two stepdaughters, Julia and Kiki Baron; and four grandchildren. His first two marriages, to Dr. Alison Haimes and Tamar Climan, ended in divorce.Mr. Haimes led Roundabout’s move to Broadway in 1991, when he began presenting work in the Criterion Center, which no longer exists. The move was a turning point for the company. “Because of the Tony Award eligibility,” he said, “we will have a tremendous advantage when it comes to obtaining the rights to plays, securing directors and attracting distinguished actors.”In 2000, he moved the company into the renamed American Airlines Theater, which is now Roundabout’s flagship house. It has since also acquired the theater at Studio 54 and assumed operations of the theater now known as the Stephen Sondheim.Among the Tony-winning shows produced by Roundabout during Mr. Haimes’s tenure were revivals of the plays “Anna Christie” and “A View From the Bridge” and of the musicals “Nine,” “Assassins,” “The Pajama Game” and “Anything Goes.” Roundabout was also among the producers of Tony-winning productions of two new plays, “Side Man” and “The Humans.”The company now runs five theaters, all in Midtown Manhattan, including the three Broadway houses, an Off Broadway theater and an Off Off Broadway black-box space that it developed to give a platform to emerging playwrights.Over the years there have also been flops and budget deficits, and some critics have suggested that Roundabout was overextended. Its enormous real estate footprint became a financial challenge that the company addressed partly by renting out some of its Broadway venues to commercial producers. The company made a significant amount of money, for example, by renting out the Sondheim for five years to the producers of “Beautiful,” the Carole King biomusical.Mr. Haimes was one of a handful of leaders of nonprofit theater companies in New York whose decades-long tenures have raised eyebrows among those who want more turnover. He held onto the Roundabout job even when he took another one, as artistic director of the deeply troubled Toronto theater company Livent, in 1998; that company collapsed, and Mr. Haimes stayed at Roundabout.Roundabout’s size — 150 employees and a $50 million annual budget — has given it the ability to support significant endeavors offstage. It operates education and training programs, including school partnerships that serve more than 4,000 students each year and a partnership with the stagehands union to train theater technicians.But like many nonprofits, it has not yet fully rebounded from the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. Roundabout staged one show on Broadway this season, a revival of “1776.”Mr. Haimes, who was often content to remain in the background, was a well-liked and enthusiastic figure in the industry. He was active in both the Broadway and the Off Broadway communities, serving on numerous committees, and over the years he taught at Yale and Brooklyn College.But he remained a businessman and a booster at heart.“Basically I’m incredibly insecure and don’t take myself seriously as an artist,” he said in a 1998 interview. “But somehow my taste seems to match up with what the public wants.” More

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      Barry Humphries, a.k.a. Dame Edna, Is Dead at 89

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      Bewigged, bejeweled and bejowled, Mr. Humphries’s creation was one of the longest-lived characters ever channeled by a single performer.Oh, Possums, Dame Edna is no more.To be unflinchingly precise, Barry Humphries, the Australian-born actor and comic who for almost seven decades brought that divine doyenne of divadom, Dame Edna Everage, to delirious, dotty, disdainful Dadaist life, died on Saturday in Sydney. He was 89.His death was confirmed by the hospital where he had spent several days after undergoing hip surgery. In a tribute message posted on Twitter, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia praised Mr. Humphries as “a great wit, satirist, writer and an absolute one-of-kind.”A stiletto-heeled, stiletto-tongued persona who might well have been the spawn of a ménage à quatre involving Oscar Wilde, Salvador Dalí, Auntie Mame and Miss Piggy, Dame Edna was not so much a character as a cultural phenomenon, a force of nature trafficking in wicked, sequined commentary on the nature of fame.For generations after the day she first sprang to life on the Melbourne stage, Dame Edna reigned, bewigged, bejeweled and bejowled, one of the longest-lived characters to be channeled by a single performer. She toured worldwide in a series of solo stage shows and was ubiquitous on television in the United States, Britain, Australia and elsewhere.A master improviser (many of Dame Edna’s most stinging barbs were ad-libbed) with a face like taffy, Mr. Humphries was widely esteemed as one of the world’s foremost theatrical clowns.“I’ve only seen one man have power over an audience like that,” the theater critic John Lahr told him, after watching Dame Edna night after night in London. “My father.” Mr. Lahr’s father was the great stage and cinematic clown Bert Lahr.Mr. Humphries conceived Edna in 1955 as Mrs. Norm Everage, typical Australian housewife. “Everage,” after all, is Australian for “average.”Housewife, Superstar, National TreasureBut Edna soon became a case study in exorbitant amour propre, lampooning suburban pretensions, political correctness and the cult of celebrity, and acquiring a damehood along the way. A “housewife-superstar,” she called herself, upgrading the title in later years to “megastar” and, still later, to “gigastar.”Mr. Humphries, wearing a hat in the shape of the Sydney Opera House, in 1976.Wesley/Getty ImagesIn Britain, where Mr. Humphries had long made his home, Dame Edna was considered a national treasure, a paragon of performance art long before the term was coined.In the United States, she starred in a three-episode series, “Dame Edna’s Hollywood,” a mock celebrity talk show broadcast on NBC in the early 1990s, and was a frequent guest on actual talk shows.She performed several times on Broadway, winning Mr. Humphries a special Tony Award, as well as Drama Desk and Theater World Awards, for “Dame Edna: The Royal Tour,” his 1999 one-person show.In her stage and TV shows, written largely by Mr. Humphries, Dame Edna typically made her entrance tottering down a grand staircase (Mr. Humphries was more than six feet tall) in a tsunami of sequins, her hair a bouffant violet cloud (she was “a natural wisteria,” she liked to say), her evening gown slit to the thigh to reveal Mr. Humphries’s surprisingly good legs, her body awash in jewels, her eyes agape behind sprawling rhinestone glasses (“face furniture,” she called them).Addressing the audience, she delivered her signature greeting, “Hellooooo, Possums!”By turns tender and astringent, Dame Edna called audience members “possums” often. She also called them other things, as when, leaning across the footlights, she would address a woman in the front row in a confiding, carrying voice: “I know, dear. I used to make my own clothes, too.”Mr. Humphries with the English actress Joan Plowright at the Lyric Theater in London.Evening Standard/Getty ImagesPerformances concluded with Dame Edna flinging hundreds of gladioli into the crowd, no mean feat aerodynamically. “Wave your gladdies, Possums!” she exhorted audience members who caught them, and the evening would end, to music, with a mass valedictory swaying.Between the “Hellooooo” and the gladdies, Dame Edna’s audiences were treated to a confessional monologue deliciously akin to finding oneself stranded in a hall of vanity mirrors.There was commentary on her husband and children (“I made a decision: I put my family last”); her beauty regimen (“Good self-esteem is very important. I look in the mirror and say, ‘Edna, you are gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous’”); and the constellation of luminaries who routinely sought her counsel, among them Queen Elizabeth II and her family. (“I’ve had to change my telephone number several times to stop them ringing me.”)Dame Edna’s TV shows were often graced by actual celebrity guests, including Zsa Zsa Gabor, Charlton Heston, Sean Connery, Robin Williams and Lauren Bacall.They came in for no less of a drubbing than the audience did, starting with the inaugural affront, the affixing of immense name tags to their lapels — for eclipsed by the light of gigastardom so close at hand, who among us would not be reduced to anonymity?“Chuck,” Mr. Heston’s name tag read. Ms. Gabor received two: a “Zsa” for the right shoulder and a “Zsa” for the left.A few pleasantries were exchanged before Dame Edna moved in for the kill.Mr. Humphries as Dame Edna in 1978. She referred to him as “my manager” and accused him of embezzling her fortune.John Minihan/Evening Standard, via Getty ImagesMr. Humphries as himself in 1978. He always spoke of Dame Edna in the third person.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“You’ve had nine hits this year,” she purred fawningly at the singer-songwriter Michael Bolton on one of her British TV shows. “On your website.”Turning to the audience after delivering a particularly poisonous insult, she would ooze, “I mean that in the most caring way.”Those guests who emerged relatively unscathed had the savvy to take Dame Edna at face value and interact with her as though she were real. The moment he donned those rhinestone glasses, Mr. Humphries often said, Dame Edna became real to him too, an entirely separate law unto herself.‘I Wish I’d Thought of That’“I’m, as it were, in the wings, and she’s onstage,” he explained in a 2015 interview with Australian television. “And every now and then she says something extremely funny, and I stand there and think, ‘I wish I’d thought of that.’”But the truly funny thing, Possums, is that when Mr. Humphries first brought Dame Edna to life, he intended her to last only a week or so. What was more, she was meant to have been played by the distinguished actress Zoe Caldwell.Mr. Humphries created a string of other characters over the years, notably the boorish, bibulous Australian cultural attaché Sir Les Patterson. But it was Dame Edna, the outlandish aunt who engenders adoration and mortification in equal measure, who captivated the public utterly — despite the fact that in later years, her mortification-inducing lines sometimes landed her, and her creator, in trouble.So fully did Mr. Humphries animate Edna that he was at continued pains to point out that he was neither a female impersonator in the conventional sense nor a cross-dresser in any sense.“Mr. Humphries, do you ever have to take your children aside and explain to them why you like to wear women’s clothes?,” an American interviewer once asked him.“If I were an actor playing Hamlet,” he replied, “would I have to take my children aside and say I wasn’t really Danish?’”By all accounts far more erudite than Dame Edna — he was an accomplished painter, bibliophile and art collector — Mr. Humphries, in a sustained act of self-protection, always spoke of her in the third person.She did likewise. “My manager,” she disdainfully called him. (She also called Mr. Humphries “a money-grubbing little slug” and accused him of embezzling her fortune. He did, it must be said, cash a great many of her checks.)But as dismissive of her creator as Dame Edna was, she rallied to his aid when he very likely needed her most: after years of alcoholism culminated in stays in psychiatric hospitals and at least one brush with the law.Mr. Humphries at the Booth Theater on Broadway in 1999 in “Dame Edna: The Royal Tour,” for which he won a special Tony Award, as well as Drama Desk and Theater World Awards.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘I Hated Her’John Barry Humphries was born in Kew, a Melbourne suburb, on Feb. 17, 1934. His father, Eric, was a prosperous builder; his mother, Louisa, was a homemaker.From his earliest childhood in Camberwell, a more exclusive suburb, he felt oppressed by the bourgeois conformism that enveloped his parents and their circle, and depressed by his mother’s cold suburban propriety.Dame Edna was a response to those forces.“I invented Edna because I hated her,” Mr. Humphries was quoted as saying in Mr. Lahr’s book “Dame Edna Everage and the Rise of Western Civilization: Backstage With Barry Humphries” (1992). “I poured out my hatred of the standards of the little people of their generation.”Dame Edna emerged when the young Mr. Humphries, under the sway of Dadaism, was performing with a repertory company based at the University of Melbourne; he had dropped out of the university two years before.On long bus tours, he entertained his colleagues with the character of Mrs. Norm Everage — born Edna May Beazley in Wagga Wagga, Australia, sometime in the 1930s — an ordinary housewife who had found sudden acclaim after winning a nationwide competition, the Lovely Mother Quest.Unthinkable as it seems, Edna was dowdy then, given to mousy brown hair and pillbox hats. But she was already in full command of the arsenal of bourgeois bigotries that would be a hallmark of her later self.For a revue by the company in December 1955, Mr. Humphries wrote a part for Edna, earmarked for Ms. Caldwell, an Australian contemporary. But when she proved too busy to oblige, he donned a dress and played it himself. After Edna proved a hit with Melbourne audiences, he performed the character elsewhere in the country.By the end of the 1950s, hoping to make a career as a serious actor, Mr. Humphries had moved to London, where Edna met with little enthusiasm and was largely shelved. (She blamed Mr. Humphries ever after for her lack of early success there.)Mr. Humphries played Mr. Sowerberry, the undertaker, in the original West End production of the musical “Oliver!” in 1960, and reprised the role when the show came to Broadway in 1963.But though he worked steadily during the ’60s, he was also in the fierce grip of alcoholism. Stays in psychiatric hospitals, he later said, were of no avail.His nadir came in 1970, when he awoke in a Melbourne gutter to find himself under arrest.With a doctor’s help, Mr. Humphries became sober soon afterward; he did not take a drink for the rest of his life. He dusted off Dame Edna and, little by little, de-dowdified her. By the late ’70s, with celebrity culture in full throttle, she had given him international renown and unremitting employment.Edna did not seduce every critic. Reviewing her first New York stage show, the Off Broadway production “Housewife! Superstar!!,” in The New York Times in 1977, Richard Eder called it “abysmal.”Nor did Edna’s resolute lack of political correctness always stand her, or Mr. Humphries, in good stead. In February 2003, writing an advice column as Dame Edna in Vanity Fair, he replied to a reader’s query about whether to learn Spanish.“Who speaks it that you are really desperate to talk to?” Dame Edna’s characteristically caustic response read. “The help? Your leaf blower? Study French or German, where there are at least a few books worth reading, or, if you’re American, try English.”A public furor ensued, led by the Mexican-born actress Salma Hayek, who appeared on the magazine’s cover that month. Vanity Fair discontinued Dame Edna’s column not long afterward.In an interview with The Times in 2004, Mr. Humphries was unrepentant.“The people I offended were minorities with no sense of humor, I fear,” he said. “When you have to explain the nature of satire to somebody, you’re fighting a losing battle.”Mr. Humphries drew further ire after a 2016 interview with the British newspaper The Telegraph in which he denounced political correctness as a “new puritanism.” In the same interview, he described males who transition to female as “mutilated” men, and Caitlyn Jenner in particular as “a publicity-seeking ratbag.”Sailing Above the FrayDame Edna, for her part, appeared to sail imperviously through. She returned to Broadway in 2004 for the well-received show “Dame Edna: Back With a Vengeance” and in 2010 with “All About Me,” a revue that also starred the singer and pianist Michael Feinstein.Mr. Humphries was back on Broadway as Dame Edna in 2010 with “All About Me,” a revue that also starred the singer and pianist Michael Feinstein.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs herself — it was she, and not Mr. Humphries, who was credited — Dame Edna played the recurring character Claire Otoms (the name is an anagram for “a sitcom role”), an outré lawyer, on the Fox TV series “Ally McBeal.”Under his own name, Mr. Humphries appeared as the Great Goblin in “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” (2012); as the voice of Bruce, the great white shark, in “Finding Nemo” (2003); and in other pictures.Mr. Humphries’s books include the memoirs “More Please” (1992) and “My Life as Me” (2002) and the novel “Women in the Background” (1995). He was named a Commander of the British Empire in 2007.Dame Edna also wrote several books, among them “Dame Edna’s Bedside Companion” (1983) and the memoir “My Gorgeous Life” (1989).Mr. Humphries’s first marriage, to Brenda Wright, ended in divorce, as did his second, to Rosalind Tong, and his third, to Diane Millstead. He had two daughters, Tessa and Emily, from his marriage to Ms. Tong, and two sons, Oscar and Rupert, from his marriage to Ms. Millstead.The Sydney Morning Herald reported that his survivors include his wife of 30 years, Lizzie Spender, the daughter of the British poet Stephen Spender, as well as his children and 10 grandchildren.Mr. Humphries had returned to Australia late last year for Christmas.Dame Edna’s husband, Norm, a chronic invalid “whose prostate,” she often lamented, “has been hanging over me for years,” died long ago. Her survivors include an adored son, Kenny, who designed all her gowns; a less adored son, Bruce; and a despised daughter, the wayward Valmai. (“She steals things. Puts them in her pantyhose. Particularly frozen chickens when she’s in a supermarket.”)Another daughter, Lois, was abducted as an infant by a “rogue koala,” a subject Dame Edna could bring herself to discuss with interviewers only rarely.Though the child was never seen again, to the end of her life Dame Edna never gave up hope she would be found.“I’m looking,” she told NPR in 2015. “Every time I pass a eucalyptus tree I look up.”Constant Meheut contributed reporting. More

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      Review: In ‘The Thanksgiving Play,’ Who Gets to Tell the Story?

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      Larissa FastHorse’s comedy of performative wokeness is also a brutal satire of American mythmaking.Rehearsal rooms are embarrassing places. Actors jockey, directors bloviate, writers fume at liberties taken.We see all of that in the rehearsal room where “The Thanksgiving Play” is set, even though what’s being rehearsed is just a holiday pageant for elementary school students. Yet not just any holiday pageant. Meant to “lift up” the Native American point of view despite including no Native Americans, this one twists the drama teacher who is creating it, along with her colleagues, into pretzels of performative wokeness so mortifying they induce a perma-cringe.If that setup makes “The Thanksgiving Play,” which opened on Thursday at the Helen Hayes Theater, sound like a backstage farce akin to “Peter Pan Goes Wrong,” which opened the day before, that’s true. In both plays, everyone behaves badly, tempers flare and nothing flies right.But for Larissa FastHorse, the author of “The Thanksgiving Play,” farce is not an end in itself. Rather, it is the hilarious envelope in which she delivers a brutal satire about mythmaking, and thus, in a way, about theater itself. The stories we create can do almost as much harm as the false histories they purport to commemorate, she shows. And well-meaning people can, too.The well-meaning people in this case include Logan (Katie Finneran) and Jaxton (Scott Foley): she an imperiled high school drama teacher (her production of “The Iceman Cometh” incited parents to seek her dismissal) and he an out-of-work actor (except for a gig at the farmers market). They have mastered the buzzwords of white progressivism and use them as protective amulets, holding space for others, acknowledging privilege, sharing pronouns without being asked. Jaxton brags that he even used “they” for a year.In short, these are ridiculous figures — and yet not so ridiculous as to be unrecognizable. Nor, in Rachel Chavkin’s cheerfully cutthroat production for Second Stage Theater, are they even unlikable. Turning Logan’s anxiety into a parade of comic tics and uncertain outbursts, Finneran is endearing and even sympathetic in her attempts at righteousness, no matter how wrong they go. And though Jaxton is an obvious skeeve, decentering his maleness only as a kind of tantric come-on, Foley does it so well that the character is somehow attractive.It’s less their bad traits than their good intentions that drive you mad. Logan has engaged a wide-eyed elementary school history teacher named Caden (Chris Sullivan) to serve as a factual backstop for the pageant, then mostly ignores him. (Sullivan does puppyish disappointment beautifully.) And her casting of Alicia (D’Arcy Carden) to represent the Native American experience — under the terms of a “Native American Heritage Month Awareness Through Art Grant” — turns out to be deeply flawed. A Los Angeles actor, a third understudy for Jasmine at Disneyland and a “super-flexible” ethnic type, Alicia is not, even a little bit, Native American.Foley and Finneran’s characters, who have mastered the buzzwords of white progressivism, are ridiculous figures yet not unrecognizable.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNevertheless, so clever is FastHorse’s setup, and so thorough her twisting of the knife of woke logic, that Alicia, if anyone, is our hero. In part, that’s because she alone is untroubled by her whiteness — or, really, by anything. (She defends her casting by pointing out that the actor who plays Lumière in “Beauty and the Beast” is not a real candlestick either.) Still, as the team proceeds to “devise” the pageant, she’s crafty enough to steer it toward her actual strengths. “I know how to make people stare at me and not look away,” she explains (and Carden convincingly demonstrates). She’s also good at crying.In mesmerizing moments like this, FastHorse neatly sets up the tension between identity and the performance of identity — a tension she doesn’t resolve but upgrades over the course of the play to a full-scale paradox. By the time she’s finished, Logan, Jaxton and Caden are left wriggling in agony as if under a moral microscope, reduced to saying things like, “We see color but we don’t speak for it.” Eventually they conclude that the only way to center Indigenous people is to erase them.Of course, they have been erased already — repeatedly. FastHorse, a member of the Sicangu Lakota nation of South Dakota, gradually introduces the horrifying undertow of that fact with filmed segments screened briefly between the live scenes. Distressingly, these segments are based on Thanksgiving projects that real teachers have posted online. In one, adorable young children performing “The Nine Days of Thanksgiving” are made to list the many things, like “six Native teepees,” that Indians “gave” the Pilgrims. In another, fifth graders shooting turkeys with prop muskets sing a song with the lyric “One little Indian left all alone/He went out and hanged himself and then there were none.”In the play’s well-acted but somewhat diffuse premiere at Playwrights Horizons in 2018, the film sequences were less awful and violent. For Broadway, they (and the production as a whole, including its set by Riccardo Hernandez) have been pumped up to emphasize the weight of indoctrination, among adults who should know better and children who can’t. Though this is crucial to the play’s project of undoing centuries of racist mythologizing, I was left a bit queasy thinking about the young performers. Weren’t they being indoctrinated too?Filmed segments screened between live scenes are based on Thanksgiving projects that real teachers have posted online.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut queasiness may be just what FastHorse is aiming for. She told the publication American Theater that she thinks a lot about “rhythm and release” in her writing. “You take your medicine, and then you get some sugar, then you take some medicine, you get some sugar.”Repeated several times over the course of 90 minutes, that cycle — enhanced by Chavkin’s pacing, which leaves you swallowing your laughter — can lead to an upset stomach. And the characters are sometimes so exaggerated for satire that they lose their grip on your emotions. Still, by the time the bloody tale of the Pequot massacre is enacted onstage, you may find yourself agreeing with Logan, of all people. Being a vegan, she already struggles with the “holiday of death”; I wanted to disown it entirely, from the turkeys all the way back to the Pilgrims.But “The Thanksgiving Play” is not primarily a brief for correcting American history. Like Tracy Letts’s “The Minutes,” which also uncovered a horrific massacre hiding in the clothing of civic pageantry, FastHorse is interested in how new information (new only to some people) might change the stories we tell in the future. The first step, to judge by the absurd crew onstage, will be to change the storytellers. FastHorse being the first Native American woman known to have a play produced on Broadway, maybe we’ve finally started.The Thanksgiving PlayThrough June 4 at the Helen Hayes Theater, Manhattan; 2st.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      How Lynn Nottage and Her Daughter Are Exploring Their Relationship in Writing

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      Can you collaborate with your mother, a Pulitzer-winning playwright, and develop your own voice too? Ruby Aiyo Gerber wasn’t too scared to try. Ruby Aiyo Gerber: For so long, I rebelled against wanting to be a writer, fearing that admiring any part of you was to be forever in your shadow. I had a lot of fear when starting the collaboration [on the opera “This House,” with the composer Ricky Ian Gordon, which premieres next year at the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis; based on a play that Gerber wrote, it’s about a brownstone in Harlem and its inhabitants over a century] that I wouldn’t be able to be my own writer, that I’d be like a version of you, that my words would turn into yours. Lynn Nottage: In both librettos we’re collaborating on right now [for “This House” and another forthcoming opera tentatively called “The Highlands,” with the composer Carlos Simon], we’re dealing with intergenerational trauma, intergenerational love. A daughter grappling with her legacy, a daughter grappling with her relationship to her mother, a daughter trying to decide if she wants to take this gift that her mother has offered her. Embedded in the themes we’re exploring is our relationship.culture banner More