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      ‘Television’ Review: Small-Screen Dreams

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      A new show at the Wild Project in Manhattan imagines how a small 1950s community weathers the arrival of the mass media age.In “Television,” which opened Wednesday in a Thirdwing production at the Wild Project, the playwright and director Cameron Darwin Bossert once again zeros in on America’s most sprawling form of soft power: its homegrown media. It’s an uneven production, but one that continues Bossert’s examination of the clash between the country’s cozy self-image and its greedier actions.Here, he imagines what happens to a small Colorado town in the late 1950s once its local TV station loses its CBS affiliation. As with his previous diptych, “A Venomous Color” — a pair of plays, “Burbank” and “The Fairest,” about the labor conditions during the early years of Disney’s animation studio — he is interested in the small, midcentury moments when mass media quietly lost its innocence.With “Television,” Bossert reaches for a more epic canvas: wider and wholly fictionalized, like the ongoing soap operas that populated the era’s airwaves. But, over a period of just over two hours, he slowly loses his focus, and the piece overflows with expanding motivations and plotlines.The action begins quickly, at least, with Wesley (Arash Mokhtar), the owner of the ailing station, meeting a neighboring family, the Fitzwaters, and taking an interest in their son, Billy (Cian Genaro). Soon headed off to study psychology in Denver, of which his veteran father, Arnold (Dikran Tulaine), disapproves, Billy has been passing the time writing conveniently episode-length plays whose nuanced mundanity Wesley thinks would make great counterprogramming to the overwrought offerings, like “Gunsmoke” and “Johnny Staccato,” currently crowding the broadcast schedule.Along with his colleague Barry (Bobby Underwood), Wesley begins producing the kid’s scripts, which, starring the dreadfully serious actress Sandra (Aprella Godfrey Barule), become a regional sensation. Soon enough, the independent network starts looking to fill up their programming schedule, and mother Fitzwater (Mary Monahan) gears up to host her own cooking show.Success, naturally, takes its toll on everyone. Taking on issues as macro as shell-shock, imperialism and media saturation, and as intimate as the particular sins of the Fitzwater father, Bossert struggles to maintain his usual precision. He rushes through and doesn’t sketch the piece’s many characters thoroughly enough for us to be really invested.But they are all compelling threads, drawn intelligently from modern American legends — there is more than a little of Paddy Chayefsky’s “Network” here, especially regarding Lionel (Wesli Spencer), an affable mailman who slowly begins to lose it after being plucked to host a talk show.Bossert’s acuity for matter-of-fact dialogue, and directing it tensely, is still incredibly engaging, initially coming across as jarring before revealing the lively emotion behind it; the air in his plays is not dead, but rather dense. It’s underscored by Deeba Montazeri’s sparsely deployed sound design, whose melancholy piano is immediately reminiscent of golden age melodrama, and nicely serves Bossert’s larger intentions of compounding the personal and historical.“Television” might not rise above the sensory overload it seeks to address, but still shows Bossert as a keen observer of the origins of our current media landscape.TelevisionThrough April 22 at the Wild Project, Manhattan; thewildproject.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      Review: Skewering Masculinity, in a Hot and Sizzling ‘Fat Ham’

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      A modern gloss on “Hamlet” set at a backyard barbecue remakes the tragedy as a comedy, and as a challenge for today.What might life be like if we chose pleasure over harm?So a young man wonders near the end of “Fat Ham,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by James Ijames that opened on Broadway on Wednesday, at the American Airlines Theater. Keep in mind that the young man, Tio, is stoned to the gills when he dreams this philosophy.Still, in his world as in our own, the question of harm, and self-harm, is a serious one. You might even say it’s a classic, having found its most famous expression four centuries ago in “Hamlet,” without benefit (as far as we know) of weed.If Tio is a gloss on that play’s Horatio — a loyal, hearty friend to the main character — he’s also a transformation of the template for today: laid-back and open to anything. In his dream, he says, he’s been pleasured by a gingerbread man, even though he usually prefers the “gingerbread ladies.”In the same way, “Fat Ham” is a gloss on “Hamlet” — and the best kind of challenge to it, asking the same questions but coming up with different answers. That it is a raucous domestic comedy instead of a palace blood bath (and in Saheem Ali’s production, a nonstop pleasure in itself) means that despite the enduring belligerence of mankind, and especially of men, it sees a way out.That way out is softness. The Hamlet figure, Juicy (Marcel Spears), is a “thicc” Black mama’s boy ambivalently mourning the murder of his father and suffering from what Tio (Chris Herbie Holland) diagnoses as inherited trauma. “Your Pop went to jail, his Pop went to jail, his Pop went to jail, his Pop went to jail and what’s before that?” he asks. “Slavery.”But Juicy’s melancholy has a more immediate source. Within a week of the death of his father, called Pap, his mother, Tedra (Nikki Crawford), has remarried — and to no less a bully than Pap’s brother, Rev. On the day of the wedding, Pap’s ghost arrives, under a gingham tablecloth, to pin the crime on Rev and spur Juicy to revenge. (Both Pap and Rev are played by Billy Eugene Jones.) Yet whether considering murder or suicide, Juicy, like Hamlet, waffles.You don’t need to make any of those “Hamlet” connections to enjoy “Fat Ham,” because the parallels are not as telling as the divergences.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesKilling is not news to this crowd: Pap was in jail for shanking a cook at the family’s barbecue restaurant. And Rev struts his dominance during a backyard party at which the play’s action takes place by stoking the smoker with fresh hunks of pig. He doesn’t treat his nephew, now stepson, much better. “You pansy,” he calls Juicy, who thinks of himself as an empath. “Girly ass puddle of spit.” He then makes Tedra explain how they’ve spent his online-college tuition on a bathroom makeover.“Fat Ham” is certainly clever in its parallels with “Hamlet”: The barbecue is a neat translation of the “funeral baked meats” with which Gertrude and her new husband “did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.” The melancholy prince’s ploy to prove Rev’s guilt is no longer a play wherein to “catch the conscience of the king” but a game of charades. Sententious Polonius is now a church lady, Rabby (Benja Kay Thomas); her children are Opal (Adrianna Mitchell) and Larry (Calvin Leon Smith) instead of Ophelia and Laertes.But you don’t need to make any of those “Hamlet” connections to enjoy “Fat Ham,” because the parallels are not as telling as the divergences. It is in the relationship between Larry and Juicy that Ijames most directly and movingly addresses the cycles of male violence, seeing in the damage done to individuals the disasters of the world.In that sense, it’s telling that Larry is a Marine, living at attention, possibly suffering from post-traumatic stress. His dialogue is mostly obedient monosyllables until it flowers with feeling when talking to Juicy. Though their scenes of aching tenderness do lead to a physical confrontation — “Fat Ham” is based on a tragedy, after all — it is no fatal sword fight; they both discover that confrontation can be a means of breaking open, not just breaking.And so it goes with Juicy and Tedra, Opal and Rabby, Tio and the gingerbread man. All must learn to accept love as offered, not as imagined, and to reject love, like Rev’s, that is not really love.That “Fat Ham” achieves its happy, even joyful, ending honestly, without denying the weight of forces that make “Hamlet” feel just as honest, is a sign of how capacious and original the writing is, growing the skin of its own necessity instead of merely burrowing into Shakespeare’s. It’s also a sign of how beautifully the cast brings the writing to life.It is in the relationship between Larry and Juicy that Ijames most directly addresses the cycles of male violence, seeing in the damage done to individuals the disasters of the world, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesEveryone is excellent, and Thomas’s loud-lady-in-the-pew-behind-you routine is flat-out hilarious. But Spears, with his minute calibrations of feyness and fierceness, holds the whole thing together. In his scenes with Crawford, especially one in which Tedra pleads with Juicy to hold it together — “you don’t get to go crazy” — he lets us see how a character creates and re-creates himself in real time.Despite its wit and speed, Ali’s beautifully contoured staging leaves plenty of room for such quiet, profound moments. It’s a wider-spectrum account and bigger, too, than the film version produced by the Wilma Theater in 2021 and the stage premiere at the Public Theater last year.By bigger I don’t just mean Maruti Evans’s Broadway-size set, with its Broadway-size surprises, or the — really, must we? — confetti cannon at the end. (At least what it shoots is the opposite of artillery.) The performances, too, are bigger, their frank acknowledgment of the audience more sustained and more integral.For we are also part of this story. Not just when Juicy soliloquizes across the proscenium or Tedra casts us some side-eye. It takes more than seven fictional characters to choose pleasure over harm in a way that’s meaningful beyond a play — though it helps that no one in “Fat Ham” dies an unnatural death. (In “Hamlet,” almost everyone does.) If we’re to rethink masculinity after centuries of experiencing it as a call to arms, we need to witness what that might look like.For me, seeing “Fat Ham,” even multiple times, thus remains a revelation and a balm. It does one of the most important things we ask of theater: to rehearse, as many times as necessary, better ways to be — instead of choosing not to.Fat HamThrough Aug. 6 at the American Airlines Theater, Manhattan; fathambroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

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      In Her New Show, Rita Indiana Confronts All Kinds of Ghosts

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      “Tu nombre verdadero” (“Your Real Name”), which debuts Friday in New York, is a spiritual multimedia performance from the 45-year-old novelist and musician.“In the time you dropped a chorus, I wrote five novels.”It’s the kind of shot that only Rita Indiana could fire off in a song. The lyrics — which appear in “Como un dragón,” the lead single from the musician and writer’s last album, “Mandinga Times” in 2020 — encapsulate the interdisciplinary abundance she has cultivated over the last 20 years. They also show off a slick-talking, Caribbean kind of realness, which lives in the characters that populate her world.On a recent Friday afternoon, Indiana was running around at the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, posing for photos and working on set decorations with an assistant. She and her wife, the Puerto Rican filmmaker Noelia Quintero Herencia, were putting the final touches on a multimedia performance called “Tu nombre verdadero” (“Your Real Name”), which debuts on Friday at the Clemente’s Flamboyán Theater.Indiana, who sports a huge tattoo of an American buffalo on her right hand, sighed as she paused to rest on a bench. Tufts of gray sprouted from her shaggy pixie cut. “I’m a punk abuela,” she said, laughing. Not quite your average grandma.Over the last two decades, the 45-year-old Dominican artist has transformed into one of the Caribbean’s foremost cultural agitators. Indiana’s repertoire unsettles deeply entrenched cultural norms — she’s not afraid to write queer sex scenes in her award-winning books, or condemn corrupt politicians in her genre-shattering songs. In 2010, she and her band Los Misterios released the blistering “El juidero,” a record about diasporic longing and Dominican identity that shredded up merengue, rock and Afro-Dominican folk styles.Indiana’s early works were almost documentarian, exploring the everyday joys and contradictions of Caribbean life. In recent years, she has journeyed into freakier, more fantastical universes. For “Mandinga Times,” which was nominated for a Latin Grammy, she developed a demonic nonbinary alter ego, meant to symbolize all kinds of marginalized bodies.Her 2015 novel “La mucama de Ominculé,” a dystopian tale set in Santo Domingo, follows a transgender protagonist who travels back in time via a divine sea anemone to save the world from nuclear catastrophe. Scholars praise Indiana’s constellatory style, particularly the way she integrates tropical futurism, queer poetics and the buoyancy of Dominican speech to imagine the liberatory possibilities of the present. The acclaim has made her a literary superstar; she is currently serving as the acting director of New York University’s Creative Writing in Spanish M.F.A.At the Clemente, Quintero Herencia, who designed the sets for “Tu nombre verdadero,” whittled disembodied clay fingers while Indiana traced the creative process behind the show. It features her first new music since “Mandinga Times,” the LP that ended a 10-year hiatus during which she focused on writing. It’s also Indiana’s first piece as a New York resident. (The couple spent 14 years in Puerto Rico.)The show’s nonlinear story immerses the audience in experiences of death and illness, particularly as they relate to artists. Indiana said it explores the weight that an artist’s name has when they die. She cited the photographer, painter and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz; the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat; and the Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca as some of the figures that shaped the spirit of the performance. Indiana herself goes by a shortened version of her birth name (Rita Indiana Hernández Sánchez), and said she chose it not to Anglicize her identity, but because she felt Indiana was more interesting.The theatricality of “Tu nombre verdadero” draws on Indiana’s teenage years in the independent Dominican theater group Teatro Guloya, where she studied alongside the visionary actors Claudio Rivera and Viena González. Quintero Herencia has worked as a director, prop designer and set builder in most of Indiana’s films and music videos, and said the piece will feature dreamlike visual projections. “Tu nombre verdadero” is the “inevitable fate of our practices,” Indiana added.While conceptualizing the show, commissioned by the Americas Society, the couple navigated a wave of death, both personal and collective. They mourned the millions lost in the pandemic, as well as close friends, relatives and beloved musicians, like Quintero Herencia’s mother, the Dominican painter Jorge Pineda and the merengue icon Johnny Ventura. In part, the performance is a way to guide “our ghosts” to a better place and process our memories of them, Indiana said.The couple’s longstanding fascination with death and ancestral energies has surfaced in their previous work. “I never separate my art from my spiritual world and the world of my ancestors,” Quintero Herencia said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a movie, a documentary or a drawing. There’s always a channel that I open, that I know is connected to the ancestral world.” Indiana, whose father died violently when she was around 12, explained that death has intrigued her for as long as she can remember. She often wonders how a body “that we love with, fight with, work with, understand with, cry with” suddenly becomes nothing.It’s a subject that has also emerged from Caribbean colonial wounds. The island of Hispaniola, home to Haiti and the Dominican Republic, was the first New World colony settled by Spain in 1493. Indiana said the region is still confronting its sordid past — the massacre of native Taínos, the cruel violence of the Atlantic slave trade — and all the cultural knowledge and traditions that were annihilated in the process. “Colonialism is a machine of death,” she said. “We are a part of that — of all that pain and that whole factory of bones.”Indiana tapped a small crew of musicians for the show, including the composer and frequent collaborator Luis Amed Irizarry, who arranged the songbook for piano and drums. Efraín Martínez, a drummer who has toured with the merengue idol Olga Tañón and recorded with the reggae group Cultura Profética, also joined the lineup.The theatricality of “Tu nombre verdadero” draws on Indiana’s teenage years in the independent Dominican theater group Teatro Guloya.Luisa Opalesky for The New York TimesIndiana described the compositions as “bare bones,” far removed from the conventional structures of popular music. “It’s a more poetic language, more absurd,” she said. “The references are from my childhood, the music I heard when I was very small.” She recalled the influence of her great-aunt Ivonne Haza, a decorated soprano, who was a vocal coach for some of the Dominican Republic’s most renowned singers, including Fernandito Villalona and Sonia Silvestre. Haza would give lessons at Indiana’s grandparents’ house, where Indiana lived until she was 7.“That was like the soundtrack to my homework — four hours, five hours of that,” she explained, chuckling.The songbook is impressionistic, sculpting Dominican gagá, Spanish copla, Cuban son and other genres into abstract shapes. There is even an experimental merengue, inspired by Danny Elfman’s Tim Burton scores, and an English-language satirical country number that addresses the brutality of Latin American dictatorships. Indiana burst into the chorus of the song, adopting a Southern twang: “He’s our strong man, he’s our puppet, he’s our pawn/You should see how he trips/Over our banana splits/When we choose his killers from among his own.”Indiana’s fearlessness helped inspire the Dominican artist La Marimba to fuse and tinker with disparate genres — to not be afraid to “have your own identity and show it.” She called Indiana a key figure in a movement of Dominican musicians who adapted the country’s folk traditions for the contemporary moment.A generation of young Dominican writers also identifies Indiana as a lodestar. Johan Mijail, who appeared in a 2018 anthology of contemporary Dominican literature that Indiana edited, said that Indiana’s novels permitted Mijail’s own writing to “offer a view of Santo Domingo and its outskirts where music, popular culture and the urban could be taken as possible horizons for sexual diversity to bloom.”With “Tu nombre verdadero” almost behind her, Indiana is working on her own books, too. “I wrote a novel last year that’s in a drawer right now,” she said, describing it as a “gender horror novel” she will revisit later. Another book, set in Puerto Rico and related to the Vietnam War, is coming later this year.No matter the medium, Indiana’s work is nourished by endless interrogation. She noted that the commitment to scrutiny — both of self and community — is grounded in her lived reality. “As a queer person, I’m questioning my identity until I’m dead,” she said. “In this perpetual transitional state,” she added, “what is my real name?” More

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      Ariana DeBose to Return as Tony Awards Host This Year

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      The annual ceremony, honoring Broadway plays and musicals, is to take place June 11 at the United Palace in Washington Heights.Ariana DeBose, whose exuberant embrace of song and dance enlivened last year’s Tony Awards, will return to host the annual ceremony this spring.DeBose, who in 2022 won an Academy Award for her performance in Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” remake, appeared in six Broadway shows between 2012 and 2018, and was nominated for a Tony Award as one of three actresses playing Donna Summer in the jukebox musical “Summer.” She is currently featured in “Schmigadoon!,” a streaming musical comedy series on Apple TV+, and she has several upcoming films.Earlier this year, she sang the opening number at the BAFTA Awards, and a rapped section paying tribute to female movie stars was mocked and memed for a hot second. DeBose, who is 32, seems to have taken it in stride — in London earlier this month, she turned the kerfuffle into merch that raised money for charity, and last weekend she performed at Lincoln Center.This year’s awards ceremony will for the first time take place at the United Palace, a large theater in Washington Heights, in Upper Manhattan. The ceremony, which is presented by the Broadway League and the American Theater Wing, honors plays and musicals staged on Broadway; it is scheduled to begin at 8 p.m. Eastern on Sunday, June 11, and to be broadcast on CBS and streamed on Paramount+.This season’s Tony nominees are to be announced on May 2. More

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      In ‘Prima Facie,’ Jodie Comer Finds Her Light

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      The one-woman show, coming to Broadway, is the “Killing Eve” star’s first stage role. She dared herself to do it.Until last year, the actress Jodie Comer had never performed onstage. Comer, 30, a native of Liverpool, England, who began her career as a teenager, hadn’t gone to drama school. She hadn’t studied voice or movement. Her comfort was in the close-up, the medium shot. She knew how to make her face still and her voice quiet, and to let the camera do the rest. The theater directors she auditioned for didn’t trust that she could fill a stage.“It kind of felt unattainable,” she said.But she is filling one now. On Broadway, at the John Golden Theater on West 45th Street, her face is emblazoned above the marquee, twice. The art for the Olivier Award-winning “Prima Facie” — an intimate and harrowing monodrama about a woman contending with the fallout of a sexual assault — shows Comer bathed in pink tones, serene, in a barrister’s wig, her eyes closed; it also shows her washed in blue, screaming. Opening on April 23, the play, which Comer first performed in London last year, runs 100 minutes. She is alone onstage for all of them. It’s the theatrical equivalent of being shoved down a mountain the first time you put on skis, or off a high dive before you have even learned to swim.Comer put it a little differently. “I pushed myself,” she said.This was on a Sunday morning in late March, at an out-of-the way table at a West Village cafe. Comer, buoyed by the London-to-New York time change, had arrived early, chipper and casual in jeans and a fisherman’s sweater. (Casual, but not entirely anonymous: The reservation was in my name, yet a waiter had already brought a plate of complimentary pastries.) A plastic clip held her hair away from her face.About that face: Comer has wide-set eyes, full lips and an impossible milk-and-roses complexion. She looks like a Botticelli goddess who has stepped out of the canvas and into some cute ankle boots. And yet, if you have seen her previous work — the action comedy “Free Guy,” the action drama “The Last Duel,” the crusading BBC film “Help” and, most significantly, the queer assassin fever dream “Killing Eve” — you will know that her beauty is usually the least interesting thing about her. That prettiness is a mask she can remove at will, exposing something weirder, spikier, wilder beneath.A theatrical debut and an endurance test: Comer is alone onstage for the full 100-minute run of “Prima Facie.”Helen Murray“It’s like Jodie didn’t get the memo that she is staggeringly beautiful,” Shawn Levy, who directed “Free Guy,” told me. “Jodie is uninterested in relying on her physical appearance.”Unlike many beautiful actresses, Comer has mostly avoided wife, girlfriend and love-interest parts — and their inherent limitations. “From early on, my characters were quite nuanced or multifaceted,” she said. “I was probably very lucky that that’s where I started. Once people see you in that light, they latch on to that.”At the cafe, the morning sun showed her as friendly, unassuming almost, until she began to speak about her work. Then, behind those wide eyes, something like lightning flashed.“Jodie is extraordinarily powerful,” Shannon Murphy, a director who worked closely with her on “Killing Eve,” told me. “People aren’t just going to cast her as the girl next door. Because it’s a waste.”And yet, the role that Comer plays in “Prima Facie” is very much a girl next door, which lends the show much of its heartbreak and force. Written by Suzie Miller, an Australian attorney turned playwright, and directed by Justin Martin (“The Jungle”), also Australian, “Prima Facie” centers on Tessa Ensler, a promising barrister who has transcended her working-class origins and accent. When she finds herself the victim of a sexual assault, a crime whose accused perpetrators she had often defended, Tessa’s poise and selfhood collapse. In this play, the reality and violence of the assault is never in doubt. That it should happen to a woman like Comer’s Tessa — so pretty, so assertive, so canny — means that it could happen to anyone.“Prima Facie” debuted in Sydney in 2019, starring the Australian actress Sheridan Harbridge. When Miller and Martin knew that they wanted to take it to London, they began throwing around the names of English actresses. Martin suggested Comer. Miller said no. She had seen Comer on “Killing Eve,” as the mercurial assassin Villanelle, who is Russian-born and Russian-accented. Comer’s Emmy Award-winning command of the role was so absolute that Miller assumed that Comer was actually Russian. Once Martin gently corrected her, a script was sent.It reached Comer early in Britain’s lockdown, in Liverpool, where she was living with her parents. It spoke to her directly, and at volume. She had several friends who had undergone versions of Tessa’s experience. And the professional challenge was as serious as it was undeniable.“I was so fearful of it. I knew if I said no to it, it would be purely because of that,” Comer said. “But there was a part of myself deep down that believed I could do it, and I was interested in how I was going to get to that point.”That fear powered her initial approach to the role. “She gets scared,” Martin said. “But her way of dealing with it is to throw herself into it.”Comer as the assassin Villanelle with Sandra Oh in BBC’s “Killing Eve.” “People aren’t just going to cast her as the girl next door,” said Shannon Murphy, a director who worked closely with Comer on the show.BBC AmericaComer discovered theater in her teens. “I got into it because I enjoyed it. It made me happy. I don’t think that’s ever changed,” she said. A teacher put her forward for a radio drama, which led to an agent and to occasional television appearances. After graduation, she worked at a supermarket checkout and at a bar to make ends meet. Her idea of luxury was being able to make a living from acting only. Her first major break came seven years ago, when she was cast as the lead in “Thirteen,” a BBC drama about a woman who escapes from long captivity. Even then, Comer couldn’t land a stage role.But the recognition that “Killing Eve” brought changed all that. For Martin and for James Bierman, lead producer on “Prima Facie,” her lack of theater experience was never a problem. They offered her the resources — voice lessons, movement sessions — and the rehearsal time that she would need.Comer has always been an intuitive actor. The challenge, she found, was to take that intuition and extend it outward so that it reached the last row of the balcony. “Like, how do I emote from the top of my head to the tip of my toes?” she said.Rehearsals, which began early in 2022, were rigorous, as was Comer’s research. She spoke to barristers, to police officers, to a high-court judge. She visited a police station and attended a hearing. She had herself fitted for a wig. What would a woman like Tessa wear, she wanted to know. What would she eat? How would she sit, stand and speak? In watching some of the women barristers at work, Comer felt an immediate connection.“There were elements of it that felt like theater: the costumes, the cues, the rehearsal of the lines,” she said.The challenge in translating her instincts for TV acting, Comer found, was to extend them outward so that they reached the last row of the balcony. “Like, how do I emote from the top of my head to the tip of my toes?” she said.Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesTelevision and film sets provide elaborate, realistic environments. Especially if the projects are shot on location. Theater is a more symbolic space, a conjuration of lights and plywood, which offered Comer a kind of freedom. In that glow, she could experiment, she could play. “What theater really sparked in me was that curiosity and sense of imagination,” she said with all the eagerness of a recent convert. Onstage there was no armor, no safety, no ability to stop and take it again, particularly in the scene in which Comer, alone on the floor of the stage, depicts the assault.Miller was convinced, even during rehearsals. “She is magnificent onstage; she’s a theater animal,” she said of Comer on a recent video call. “She’s the character. She’s there.”But after years of performing on television and film, Comer hadn’t known how a live audience would respond. Her anxiety remained up until the first curtain and perhaps even after. “I was actually quite consumed by fear,” she said. “I didn’t really come up for air.”She recalled that, toward the end of the first preview in London, she heard a woman in the orchestra crying. “It was the most guttural cry,” Comer said. “It spread around the theater. It was like the audience were giving each other this unspoken permission to feel whatever was coming up for them.”Stephen Graham, an actor who worked with a teenage Comer on “Good Cop” and then again on “Help,” saw “Prima Facie” in London and wept through it, admiring “the beauty and the subtlety and the nuance and the craftsmanship that went into that performance,” he said.I didn’t see it in London, but I watched it a few weeks ago, on video, via a National Theater Live performance capture. Her craftsmanship was apparent from the first few minutes. Look at Comer in a robe, I thought to myself. Look how good she is. Then the character seemed to take her over. Absorbed in the story, I forgot about Comer, forgot about her beauty, and thought only of Tessa.Miller had noticed this, too. “You don’t look at her and go, ‘There’s a beautiful woman crying.’ You go, ‘There’s a devastated woman crying,’” she said.Over breakfast, Comer had said that despite her leading lady facade, she understands herself as a character actress, someone who wants to disappear into a part, even though or especially because she can’t even disappear into a Village cafe. “I’d love to get to a point where I play a role where I don’t recognize myself,” she said.“Prima Facie” began as a personal challenge, a dare almost. Could she manage alone onstage for all that time? Could she pull off the scene changes and the radical shifts in emotion? But it has become about something more.Women waited for her at the stage door every night in London, telling her that their experiences mirrored Tessa’s or that they were considering careers in law to support women like her. By vanishing into Tessa, she has given these women a way to recognize themselves. That image near the marquee? It’s her face, doubly exposed, but it’s also a mosaic composed of photos of women who submitted their pictures and stories. That’s what Comer wants: to feel part of something bigger than herself, to feel some greater purpose is working through her.“It’s those moments where you step out of your way when you feel the most fulfilled,” she said. More

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      The Broadway Star Phillipa Soo Sings Her Favorite Pop Song

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      In a new revival of “Camelot,” updated by Aaron Sorkin, the actress finds humanity in the legend of King Arthur and Guenevere.Phillipa Soo enjoys fantasy stories: “Lord of the Rings,” “House of the Dragon,” anything magical with kings and queens involved. That’s partly why, she says, she was drawn to this season’s Broadway revival of “Camelot,” based on the Arthurian legend and opening April 13 at Lincoln Center Theater. Soo, 32, stars opposite Andrew Burnap as Guenevere, King Arthur’s wife and ally — a role that’s long been associated with Julie Andrews, who originated the role onstage in 1960.But her interest went beyond the show’s mystical underpinnings. “Most poignant to me was this idea of Camelot [as] something that we are, as a society, striving toward — this ideal place where we can have democracy and justice and freedom,” she says. “We are grappling with this question of: What is human nature? Are humans fundamentally good? Are we fundamentally bad? Why are we here?”Those themes are central to the writer Aaron Sorkin’s new book for the musical, which is woven around the classic songs from Lerner and Loewe’s sweeping score. (Sorkin has stripped away the supernatural elements of the original — no more nymphs or sorcerers — to ground the play in a medieval-era reality.) Soo’s goal, then, is to make Guenevere “a real person,” someone driven above all by a desire to be loved. She sees Andrews’s iconic performance, with her gentle soprano that cemented the cast album as a musical-theater essential, not as a dare but an invitation: “She brought a lot of herself and her charm to her roles,” Soo says. “That was an inspiration for me to do the same.”Revivals are fresh territory for Soo, who began her professional career originating characters in new works: Natasha in “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812” Off Broadway in 2013; the namesake heroine in the 2017 Broadway adaptation of “Amélie”; and, most famously, Eliza in “Hamilton,” which debuted at New York’s Public Theater in 2015. But this past year, she joined the “Into the Woods” Broadway revival as Cinderella, and then did a brief run as Sarah in “Guys and Dolls” at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.Yet the new “Camelot,” directed by Bartlett Sher from a rapidly paced Sorkin-esque script, feels less like a remake than a hybrid of a golden-age classic and a contemporary play. (Sorkin also wrote “A Few Good Men,” which premiered on Broadway in 1989, and more recently adapted “To Kill a Mockingbird” for the stage in 2018.) “The book has a tempo in itself: Those deep debates and discussions that Guenevere and Arthur get to have with each other [are understood] in a different way because they’re not through song,” Soo says. “It feels more immediate … I have to focus in a way that I haven’t before.”Ahead of opening night, T asked Soo to sing and discuss one of her favorite songs: Regina Spektor’s “Samson” (2002). More

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      Review: Arson, Snowmen, Avian Attacks in ‘Regretfully, So the Birds Are’

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      A family of adoptees reckon with Asian American identity in this surreal play from Playwrights Horizons and WP Theater.There’s something amiss in this story of a New Jersey family.You might say it’s the sibling love affair, or the parent who’s an arsonist and murderer, or the parent who’s a racist snowman. You could guess that it’s the birds that have been dying because of the recent earth-to-sky migration by humans. You’d be right on all accounts, because the Playwrights Horizons and WP Theater’s coproduction of “Regretfully, So the Birds Are” is equal parts chaos and absurdity.In the new play, which opened Tuesday night at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater, a large family portrait hanging above a living room couch immediately clues us in to the Whistler family’s dynamic: the father, at the far right of the photo, and the wall beyond the frame, is obscured in a black cloud of scorch marks.A half-seared portrait is just one piece of the collateral damage of the dysfunction in this family, whose white matriarch, Elinore (Kristine Nielsen), is incarcerated for immolating her husband, Cam (Gibson Frazier), a former Asian studies professor, in his home office. Their three adult children, all Asian American adoptees, have their own issues: Mora (Shannon Tyo), a self-professed disaster, embarks on an overseas journey to find her birth mother just before her 30th birthday but falls prey to a woman posing as a family member (Pearl Sun).The youngest, 25-year-old Illy (Sasha Diamond), is a successful musician who has just bought real estate in the sky, the newest trend among billionaires looking to somehow build houses among the clouds. She’s also dating her daft 28-year-old brother, Neel (Sky Smith), to Mora’s horror; the couple says the romance is fine because the siblings aren’t related by blood. Neel then has a revelation about his musical abilities that leads him to Nebraska to find himself. Cam is reincarnated as a snowman who shares facts about Pol Pot and makes racist assumptions about Asia. And above their heads, the birds are conferencing to decide how to stop the human colonization of the sky.The script, by Julia Izumi, and direction, by Jenny Koons, emphasize the work’s quirkiness, but the anemic plot and feebly drawn characters are thrown together to unclear ends.Still, Nielsen and Frazier do what they can with the material, which includes casual quasi-incest, bird puppets wielded by the cast and, again, a racist snowman. Nielsen nearly runs off with the show as Elinore, a former opioid addict with dementia who has the play’s best lines. Her delivery is full of surprises, from aloof non sequiturs about, say, the usefulness of salad spinners, to her blunt appraisals of her children when they visit her in jail (“You may not be my best-liked but you are objectively the most responsible,” she says to Illy).Frazier gives a delightfully droll performance as the snowman, who offers the clearest keyhole view into how one of the show’s most compelling themes could have been executed. Though Cam’s Frosty incarnation comes across as little more than a gimmick, his misguided exposition on Asian history and culture make him a punchy satire of white Americans who fetishize a whole race of people.Because otherwise the siblings’ arcs fail to resolve or complicate the play’s flimsy interrogation of what it means to have an Asian American identity or to be Asian in America but feel bereft of a heritage. The sky homes seem to be the beginning of a class critique and the angry birds seem to be nods to environmental catastrophe. Or maybe they’re a metaphor for racial or social identity. Or maybe they’re just birds.Even the set design, by You-Shin Chen, reflects the play’s confusion. The small stage is awkwardly trifurcated: the half-singed living room, a treehouse with a sky backdrop and a yard with the snowdad. There’s little to identify the play’s other settings — Elinore’s jail cell, an airport in China, someplace in Nebraska, a bird council meeting, a funeral altar.“Regretfully, So the Birds Are” resembles its title: initially intriguing but ultimately incomplete.Regretfully, So the Birds AreThrough April 30 at Peter Jay Sharp Theater at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan; wptheater.org or playwrightshorizons.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      ‘Covid Vortex Anxiety Opera’ Review: Gloom, Zoom and a New Bloom

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      The veteran performance artist Karen Finley leads the audience through the troubles that plagued New York City at the peak of the pandemic.Restlessness, fear, despair, loneliness, exhaustion, worry, anomie: Remembering the peak of the pandemic in New York City, the performance artist Karen Finley takes the audience through a maelstrom of feelings in her new solo show, “Covid Vortex Anxiety Opera Kitty Kaleidoscope Disco.” That, of course, is after her grand entrance, wearing a white hazmat jumpsuit and a surgical mask zhuzhed-up with sequined fringe, she sashayed through the Laurie Beechman Theater to a mix of the disco classic “Don’t Leave Me This Way” and a chorus of pot-banging like the one that cheered frontline workers in 2020.Yep, she’s still got it.Even though she has long ago abandoned the shock tactics that made her a habituée in the culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s, Finley, who is also a poet and visual artist, remains as unwieldy and messy as ever. A scene in which she enacts a vintage Betty Crocker commercial by trying out a “recipe” onstage, mixing it in a plastic bucket, has an old-school sloppy, feral energy. At a time when the tiniest Off Off Broadway shows can have a soulless professionalism, this rawness feels like a jolt.Also unchanged are Finley’s obsessions: with art as salvation, with the incantatory power of words, with the issue of agency over our bodies, and with our often misguided, often awkward attempts to communicate with other humans. You can see how she would have a field day tackling an epidemic that kept New York residents at home and allowed communication only through masks or video calls.The evening is divided into short sequences organized around themes of sorts and accompanied by costume changes and projections of Finley’s videos and illustrations. (Her daughter, Violet Overn, oversaw the production design.)Reading her text from behind a lectern, Finley is in turn impassioned, mocking, beseeching, goofy, coy. The effect lands halfway between haunted sermon and ramshackle TED Talk — Finley has been a professor of art and public policy at New York University for several years now, so she has acquired a tiny bit of polish, but not all that much.The show is not as corrosive as “Unicorn Gratitude Mystery,” in which Finley covered politics a few months before the 2016 presidential election, but it is just as angry. Because if one thing has not dulled over the years, it’s her rage — at all those deaths in the early days of the pandemic, at a city in agony, at the breakdown of social rules and responsibilities. In a hallucinatory segment, Finley instructs people to put on a mask or, if they have one on, to at least wear it correctly. “I’m saying it nicely,” she insists. Sure, if “nicely” means exuding furor.A few beats later, Finley boogies to “Disco Inferno” while a video of men dancing in a club plays behind her. In one canny move, she ties together generations of deaths in New York caused by AIDS and the coronavirus, with a reference to the falling twin towers quick enough that it doesn’t feel exploitative but still pierces the heart.Like the most inspiring religious services, “Covid Vortex Anxiety Opera Kitty Kaleidoscope Disco” ends on an optimistic note, with Finley pivoting from shock and horror at the lost lives, access and control over one’s body into hope — for change, peace, courage, love. And art. Always art.Covid Vortex Anxiety Opera Kitty Kaleidoscope DiscoThrough May 6 at the Laurie Beechman Theater, Manhattan. Running time: 1 hour 5 minutes. More