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      Why Some Black Playwrights Are Saying Their Shows Must Not Go On

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      Several Black playwrights have canceled productions of their works, in some cases after performances started, because of concerns about conditions at the theaters presenting them.In Ohio, the playwright Charly Evon Simpson scuttled last month’s planned Cleveland Play House production of her latest work, “I’m Back Now,” after the director said that the theater had mishandled an actor’s report that she was sexually assaulted at the building where the theater housed artists.In Chicago, Erika Dickerson-Despenza forced Victory Gardens Theater to stop its production of “cullud wattah,” her Flint water crisis-prompted family drama, in the middle of its run last summer to protest actions that included the ouster of the theater’s artistic director.And in Los Angeles, Dominique Morisseau shut down a Geffen Playhouse production of her play “Paradise Blue” a week after its opening in late 2021, saying that Black women who worked on the show had been “verbally abused and diminished.”The steps by playwrights to halt productions of their own work reflects concerns by Black artists frustrated by what they see as a failure of theater administrators to live up to the lofty promises made during and after the spring of 2020, when George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police prompted nationwide protests and calls for change in many corners of American society, including the arts. In theater, an anonymously-led coalition of artists, known by the title of its first statement, “We See You, White American Theater,” circulated a widely read set of demands for change.“We don’t want to be pulling our plays — we are playwrights, we want our plays to be done, we are walking away from money, and we are walking away from seeing our work onstage,” Morisseau said. “But this is not an ego act and it is not a diva act. What we are doing is standing up when no one else will.”The cancellations have come just as theaters have been trying to reopen and rebuild following the lengthy pandemic shutdown.There has been notable change to address concerns about diversity and representation: An increase in the number of plays by Black writers staged on Broadway and beyond; a wave of appointments of administrators of color to high-level theater industry positions; the renaming of two Broadway houses after Black performers (James Earl Jones and Lena Horne).More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.But the cancellations reflect recurrent concern about conditions in the industry. There is pain all around — although actors are often still paid, the playwrights can lose fees and the theaters lose box office revenue and sunk production costs. And there are reputational risks: Will theaters still want to hire these artists? Will artists still want to work at these theaters?“It’s damaging to the theaters, it’s damaging to the playwrights, and it’s damaging to all the artists involved, but it puts a spotlight on issues that need a spotlight, and I hope it’s catching the field’s attention and reminding us that we haven’t solved all the problems,” said Sheldon Epps, a senior artistic adviser at Ford’s Theater in Washington, the former artistic director of the Pasadena Playhouse, and the author of a new memoir, “My Own Directions: A Black Man’s Journey in the American Theater.” “We had all those conversations and all those conference calls, and the talk was valuable but clearly a lot more action is needed.”The playwright Jeremy O. Harris threatened to pull “Slave Play” from the Center Theater Group in Los Angeles to protest its dearth of works by women. After they agreed to stage more, the play, starring Antoinette Crowe-Legacy and Paul Alexander Nolan, went on.Craig SchwartzThese cancellations began in October of 2021, when Jeremy O. Harris posted on Twitter an email he had sent to the Center Theater Group of Los Angeles, saying he wanted to “begin the process” of canceling that theater’s production of “Slave Play,” his acclaimed drama about interracial relationships. The Los Angeles production was to be the first since a pair of buzzy Broadway runs, but Harris was upset that the theater had announced a season with just one work by a woman.The reaction was immediate. The company apologized publicly, and within a week had pledged that the following season at its Mark Taper Forum would feature only work by women or nonbinary playwrights. Harris then allowed “Slave Play” to proceed; the production became the best-selling show at the Taper since the pandemic shutdown.“We have nothing to lose by telling a theater that we don’t want to be their mascots any longer,” Harris said.“Here’s the thing: writing a play is an act of community service, and even in pulling the play you are doing an act of community service — that is theater as well, because the conversation that gets sparked is similar to the conversation sparked by doing the play,” he added. “The only cost is to the ego of theater administrators who have dropped the ball in upholding the politics of the playwrights they’ve programmed.”Harris ultimately praised the Center Theater Group for its responsiveness, and Meghan Pressman, the theater’s managing director and chief executive, said she was “grateful” for Harris’s confrontation, even though it was difficult.“We’re being called to task, and we learned a lot,” she said. Morisseau was next, pulling the rights for “Paradise Blue” from the Geffen. The precipitating incident has never been made public, but Morisseau said at the time that “Harm happened internally within the creative team, when fellow artists were allowed to behave disrespectfully.” The Geffen apologized, saying, “an incident between members of the production was brought to our attention and we did not respond decisively in addressing it.”In an interview, Morisseau said she considered pulling her play a last resort.“I felt there was nothing else for me to do,” she said.And why have there been several cancellations in recent months? “I think what you’re seeing is a failure of institutions and institutional leadership to take seriously the harms against Black women,” Morisseau said. “It’s nothing new to us, but it is very disappointing to experience it in a theater ecosystem that we all seek to be better. You can’t welcome us and our stories, and not welcome the people who tell our stories and the bodies on whom our stories are told.”Playwrights, unlike screenwriters, have enormous power over the use of their work, sometimes by virtue of their contracts, and sometimes by virtue of the nature of their relationships with regional theaters.Prepandemic, there were occasional instances of playwrights exercising such rights for a variety of reasons. In 2016, Penelope Skinner withdrew a Chicago theater’s right to stage her dark comedy, “The Village Bike,” after a news report detailed allegations that the theater’s leader had mistreated performers; in 2012, Bruce Norris withdrew a German theater’s right to stage his Pulitzer Prize-winning race-relations satire, “Clybourne Park,” because he was angry about plans to cast a white actor to play a Black character; and in the 1980s, several playwrights canceled productions because of a union dispute.“We encourage authors to exercise all of their contractual rights to the extent possible,” said Ralph Sevush, the executive director of business affairs at the Dramatists Guild of America, an association representing playwrights.For the affected theaters, the cancellations have been disruptive — in each case, tickets had already been sold. Victory Gardens, which was already imploding when “cullud wattah” was pulled, has since stopped producing shows; the Cleveland Play House and Geffen Playhouse both issued apologies.“Cleveland Play House acknowledges there were missteps in efforts to respond to a sexual assault,” that organization said in a statement last month.The financial implications vary from case to case. Morisseau said that, when “Paradise Blue” was canceled, “Every artist got paid through their contracts. I, as the writer, and the Geffen, as the institution, are the only ones who took any financial hit.” David Levy, a spokesman for the labor union Actors’ Equity Association, said that “Every Equity agreement anticipates worst case scenarios in which a production is canceled before the full run of the show is completed. When that happens, the union does our part to enforce the contract so that actors and stage managers are taken care of.” In Cleveland, the union filed grievances that led to payment to its members for the canceled show there.The current round of cancellations is directly tied to the racial reckoning that has roiled theaters over the last three years; there have been a wide array of calls for change, from term limits for industry leaders and more diverse creative teams sought by the We See You petitions, to the renaming of theaters and the use of racial sensitivity coaches won in a pact negotiated by the organization Black Theater United.Black artists have cited the issues that propelled those movements in describing their current concerns. In Chicago, Dickerson-Despenza pulled the rights to her play after the dismissal of the theater’s artistic director, Ken-Matt Martin, who was one of three Black leaders in top positions at Victory Gardens. At the time Dickerson-Despenza decried the “white supremacist capitalist patriarchal values” of the board. On Wednesday, the board issued a statement saying, “Victory Gardens Theater vehemently disagrees with the characterization,” noting that it had had a diverse staff and board, and adding that “it is our hope that, rather than jumping to conclusions and casting aspersions, we can all move forward with a shared goal of having a vibrant and inclusive theater community for all.”Stori Ayers, who directed both the canceled production of “I’m Back Now” in Cleveland and the canceled production of “Paradise Blue” in Los Angeles, used similar language in an Instagram post about the two experiences, citing “white supremacy theater making culture.” Both of those theaters declined to comment beyond their written statements.Simpson, the playwright who pulled the rights for “I’m Back Now” from the Cleveland Play House, said she had decided to take that step after Ayers withdrew from the production over the theater’s response to an actor who said she had been sexually assaulted in an elevator at the theater’s artist housing.“To put it simply: if the health, safety and well-being of people working on my play is in question, then there’s no reason for the play to happen,” Simpson said. “I could no longer trust that the theater was going to take care of the people putting on my show.”Simpson said she’s not sure what will happen next with “I’m Back Now,” because it was commissioned by the Cleveland Play House, and this was to be its first production. The play is about three generations of Cleveland residents, including a historical figure named Sara Lucy Bagby, who was the last person forced to return to slavery under the Fugitive Slave Act.“You want the production, and you want to make it possible, and many of us are taught to be so grateful for that and to ignore things that may bother us,” Simpson said. “I didn’t ever imagine having to pull the rights.” More

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      ‘Becomes a Woman’ Review: A Girl Gets Wise in Brooklyn

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      A young woman works to free herself from the expectations of men in Betty Smith’s 1931 play.The Mint Theater specializes in dredging up long-forgotten plays, most of them classically structured and written between the late 1800s and the 1940s. Its latest find is so perfectly on brand that it could have been retrofitted by a canny theater archaeologist. A three-act piece from 1931, “Becomes a Woman” had never been published or produced until now. It’s also by a female playwright — to its credit, a demographic the Mint has long championed. This time, however, she has a familiar name, at least to a certain generation: Betty Smith, the author of the beloved 1943 best seller “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.”As it turns out, Smith wrote more plays than she did novels, though none were anywhere near as popular as the semi-autobiographical “Tree.” (Her sole Broadway credit is as the co-writer of the musical adaptation’s book, in 1951.)Alas, Britt Berke’s timid production does not make a strong case for “Becomes a Woman.” The evening’s liveliest aspect might well be the erratic outer borough accents.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.The themes here are similar to those one would find in the pre-Code Hollywood movies of the late 1920s and early 1930s — most centrally, that of a woman becoming pregnant out of wedlock and seeking emancipation from the controlling ways of her father and her boyfriend-turned-husband.Our heroine is one Francie Nolan (Emma Pfitzer Price), who shares a name with the central figure of “Tree” but is not the same character. This Francie is 19 and works at a Brooklyn five-and-dime store, where she trills the songs of the day so customers can decide whether they want to buy the sheet music.It’s easy to feel that little happens in Act 1, but that’s only because we have been trained to think of women talking to each other as being trivial. In fact, a lot of information and characterization is suggested in the affectionate banter between Francie and her older and more experienced colleagues, Tessie (a warm Gina Daniels) and Florry (Pearl Rhein), who try to impart the ways of the world on the younger woman. “A girl has to really like a man before she gets intimate with him, but a man has to get really intimate with a girl before he likes her,” Florry warns the innocent Francie. You can almost hear Barbara Stanwyck saying this line, and Rhein, who has a feel for the rhythm of the period’s language, gets close enough.As to who runs the world, Smith was under no illusion: Francie is under the yoke of both her blowhard, tyrannical father, Pa Nolan (Jeb Brown), and her rich boyfriend, Leonard Kress Jr. (Peterson Townsend). She gets support from Tessie, but ultimately the only person she can rely on is herself.It is not an easy arc to navigate, and Price’s Francie is not as vulnerable and naïve as the character should be at the start, not as steely as she needs to be by the end. Then again, her foils wilt: Neither Townsend nor Duane Boutté (as Leonard’s father) projects the confident authority of a man used to getting his way, while Brown draws Pa with thick Sharpie strokes.Smith could navigate a thin line between sentimentality and clear-eyed realism but alas, this production feels less like complicated life than a diorama of it.Becomes a WomanThrough March 18 at New York City Center, Manhattan; minttheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      Review: A ‘Seagull’ Airlifted to a World of Soy Milk and Prada Sneakers

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      Parker Posey stars in “The Seagull/Woodstock, NY,” as Chekhov comes to the Catskills.With so many Chekhov adaptations on the market, it’s fair to wonder whether the Dramatists Guild requires playwrights to crank them out as a condition of membership.If so, “The Seagull” is apparently the recommended source — appearing more often than “The Cherry Orchard,” “Three Sisters” and “Uncle Vanya” combined. The 1896 tragicomedy about the hopelessness of love and theater has set off a flock of homages and spoofs, often in one booby-trapped package.That most of the adaptations don’t stick doesn’t matter; since opening night, little has been heard from “Drowning Crow,” “Stupid ____ Bird,” “A Seagull in the Hamptons” or even “The Notebook of Trigorin,” Tennessee Williams’s 1981 stab. What counts, at least as far as selling the show is concerned, is the mash-up of a classic title with a modern sensibility, so that troikas and patronyms become sports cars and upspeak.The first question to ask in approaching these rehashes is: Do they make any sense if you don’t know the source? The second question is: Do they add any worth if you do?“The Seagull/Woodstock, NY,” Thomas Bradshaw’s entry in the reincarnation sweepstakes, clears the first bar, with maybe a trailing foot, in a New Group production that opened on Tuesday at the Pershing Square Signature Center. Airlifting the story from a 19th-century Russian estate to a 21st-century Catskills compound makes sense, and Chekhov’s artsy, spoiled, lovestruck characters are more or less at home in a world of soy milk, Prada sneakers and pans in The New York Times.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.These characters, mostly renamed with English soundalikes, constellate pretty much as the original 10 did. (Some workers on the estate have apparently been fired.) Their North Star, Irene, played by Parker Posey, is a moderately successful and immoderately self-involved actress who is “theater famous, not famous famous.” Posey, that former indie “it girl,” is perfectly cast as a woman who has won one Tony but can say with light sincerity, “I do need another one.”Along with her lover, the middlebrow novelist William (Ato Essandoh), Irene has returned from the city to visit her ailing friend, Samuel (David Cale), and her sensitive yet untalented son, Kevin (Nat Wolff). Kevin is in love with Nina (Aleyse Shannon), a neighbor’s daughter who stars in the play he plans to present to the assembled company. But Nina is in love with William, while another family adjunct, Sasha (Hari Nef), is in love with Kevin.There are yet more triangles and quadrilaterals of affection, not always clearly mapped in Bradshaw’s vigorous trimming of the text. (Even so, Scott Elliott’s production is a bit pokey, running 2 hours and 35 minutes.) But you do get the gist: Everyone wants someone they cannot have, and privilege breeds discontent.Whether Bradshaw’s “Seagull” also passes the second test for such adaptations — does the new version add any value beyond what the original offers? — may depend on whether you admire his work in the first place. His kind of theater, he has said, is about asking audiences to “question their own reactions” even if they are “outraged” as a result. This he has faithfully done in plays like “Fulfillment,” “Intimacy,” and “Burning,” which depict, often explicitly, incest, pornography, scatology and sadomasochism.Posey as the stage actress Irene with Nat Wolff, who plays her sensitive son, Kevin, in Thomas Bradshaw’s play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThere’s a lot of that in his “Seagull” too. Kevin’s ridiculous play — in the Chekhov a gassy symbolist fantasy — is more literally gassy here, as Nina extols the virtues of public farting. Its climax comes when, having asked audience members to share their “most recent masturbation experience,” she rewards the best answer with the chance to watch hers. With unusual delicacy for a Bradshaw play, this is staged in a tub behind a curtain.But mostly he translates the bad behavior of Chekhov’s characters to snark instead of smut. Take the famous opening salvo of the original “Seagull,” in which Masha is asked by Medvedenko, the poor schoolteacher who loves her, why she dresses all in black. Her ruefully funny answer — “I’m in mourning for my life” — becomes something merely nasty when Sasha, as she is now called, tells the rechristened Mark (Patrick Foley), “at least I don’t buy my clothes at Walmart.”If the play, with all its cattiness and cruelty, at times feels like “Mean Girls Goes to Camp,” it’s not always clear where the meanness is coming from. When Sasha or Irene cut someone down, as they frequently do with generous heaps of obscenity, Nef and Posey subtly show us that they’re mostly self-medicating with insults.But other times it seems as if no one, or perhaps just the popular yet perennially panned Bradshaw, is behind the rancor. It’s no accident that the names of the holies casually sideswiped in the rush of dialogue are mostly theatrical: Arthur Miller, Tracy Letts, “How I Learned to Drive,” Terrence McNally, Nora Ephron and Janet McTeer in an “all-female ‘True West.’”Grinding axes can be funny, and several times I caught myself guffawing in public, then regretting it privately. Though that’s probably just where Bradshaw wants us, the easy laughs don’t really provide added value; over time, they’re more subtractive.But then two things happen.One is that the play opens a new line of inquiry as Nina (who is biracial) and William (who is multiracial) explore the way identity inflects their art and ambition. “Interracial children are the glue that will one day bond our sad, broken country,” William says. To which Nina responds flirtatiously, “I don’t know. I think Black people should stick together.”This is the kind of alteration that enhances the original, giving a familiar relationship a different dimension.And then in its second half, the play changes again. Instead of looting or even building on Chekhov, it is drawn into the immense depth of his writing and becomes, at least fitfully, “The Seagull” itself. The tender scene in which Irene redresses, in both senses, her son’s wounds — he’s tried to kill himself — works exactly as it always does, no matter that it involves a conversational detour to P.S. 122. And the play’s infallible final gesture, here involving rude Scrabble instead of bingo, once again doesn’t fail.Still, I’m left to wonder whether a few moments of enhanced relevance are worth the bother of a comprehensive and often counterproductive update. Couldn’t this cast have pulled off the standard edition? And pulled it off more smoothly, without the staging longueurs occasioned by the rough text and the stop-and-go direction? (But do keep the fabulous contemporary clothing by Qween Jean.)Short of fulfilling a union requirement, there’s no reason for playwrights to keep pickpocketing Chekhov. Though as I write that I realize: That’s what we all do anyway.The Seagull/Woodstock, NYThrough April 9 at the Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; thenewgroup.org. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes. More

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      ‘My Neighbour Totoro’ Dominates Olivier Award Nominations

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      Studio Ghibli’s fantastical movie was an unexpected choice for a stage adaptation. Now, it is up for 9 awards at Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys.A stage adaptation of “My Neighbour Totoro,” an animated Japanese children’s movie filled with fantastical creatures, emerged on Tuesday as the front-runner for this year’s Olivier Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys.The show, which ran at the Barbican Theater in London and included numerous giant puppets, secured nine nominations for the awards — more than any other play. Those included nods for best comedy, best director for Phelim McDermott and best actress for Mei Mac as a girl who discovers a magical world near her home.The play’s high number of nominations was perhaps unsurprising given that “My Neighbour Totoro” received rave reviews when it opened last year.Matt Wolf, writing in The New York Times, said the play’s puppets were “the most endearing sight on the London stage” at the time. Sarah Hemming in The Financial Times said the Royal Shakespeare Company production was “a tender, remarkably beautiful family show that extols kindness.”Although “My Neighbour” secured the most nominations, it did not get a nod for best new play. Instead, four more grown-up dramas will compete for that title. Those include “Prima Facie” at the Harold Pinter Theater, a Broadway-bound one-woman show about sexual assault that stars Jodie Comer; “Patriots” at the Almeida Theater, a retelling of President Vladimir V. Putin’s rise in Russia; and Aaron Sorkin’s “To Kill A Mockingbird” adaptation at the Gielgud Theater.Those shows will compete with “For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy,” a play at the Royal Court in London about six young Black men who meet for group therapy.Jodie Comer’s performance in “Prima Facie” struck a chord with West End audiences and she was also nominated for best actress. She is up for that title against Mei Mac of “My Neighbour Totoro,” as well as Patsy Ferran for “A Streetcar Named Desire” at the Almeida Theater, Janet McTeer for “Phaedra” at the National Theater, and Nicola Walker for “The Corn Is Green,” also at the National.Before Tuesday’s announcement, many British theater critics had expected Emma Corrin to receive a nomination for “Orlando,” a play based on Virginia Woolf’s gender-fluid novel, at the Garrick Theater.That would have likely caused a media stir as Corrin, who is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns, has over the past year repeatedly urged award show organizers to make their acting categories gender neutral. Last year, Corrin told the BBC that it was “difficult for me” to be nonbinary and nominated in female acting categories.Emma De Souza, a spokeswoman for the Society of London Theater, the award’s organizers, said that Corrin was considered in the best actress category, but did not make the cut. “It was an incredibly competitive year,” De Souza added.The best actor award is set to be equally hard fought. Among the nominees are the rising Irish star Paul Mescal for “A Streetcar Named Desire,” Rafe Spall for “To Kill a Mockingbird” and David Tennant for “Good.” They will compete against Tom Hollander for his role as an oligarch in “Patriots” and Giles Terera, who starred in “Blues for an Alabama Sky” at the National Theater.In the musical categories, the nominations are led by “Standing at the Sky’s Edge,” also at the National. The show, about the residents of a housing complex in the northern English city of Sheffield, secured eight nominations, including best new musical. It will compete for that title with the “The Band’s Visit” at the Donmar Warehouse and “Sylvia” — a hip-hop musical based on the life of the suffragist Sylvia Pankhurst — at the Old Vic.Those three titles will face stiff competition from “Tammy Faye,” a high-profile production at the Almeida Theater that told the story of the televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker using new music by Elton John.The winners of this year’s Olivier Awards will be announced on April 2 in a ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall in London. More

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      Review: ‘Letters From Max’ Is a Sacrament of Grief, and a Comedy

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      The Signature Theater production is based on correspondence between the playwright Sarah Ruhl and a student of hers, who died of cancer at 25.The poet Max Ritvo, who was 25 when he died of cancer in 2016, knew exactly the impression he did not want to make if he and the playwright Sarah Ruhl ever cobbled together a book of their correspondence. He recoiled at the possibility that it would come across like “a Lifetime movie story of poor cancer boy and his wise, brilliant, loving mentor ministering to his heart and mind through every mortal peril and petty crisis.”Not to worry. “Letters From Max: A Book of Friendship,” published in 2018, is never for an instant maudlin. And “Letters From Max, a Ritual,” Ruhl’s warm and literary new play adapted from the book, is in no way a pity narrative. It’s a theatrical act of remembrance and a sacrament of grief, but it’s also a comedy. Because in their emails and texts, in their voice mail messages and face-to-face conversations, the character Sarah and the character Max make each other laugh.Jessica Hecht, a Ruhl veteran from “Stage Kiss” nearly a decade ago, here nimbly becomes the playwright — wonderfully comical, and as gentle as the soft, soft blue of the blazer she wears. This Sarah has a confiding rapport with the audience and an expansive sense of playwriting potential.Teaching an undergraduate course at Yale, she decides to admit 20-year-old Max, even though he has never written a play — “because,” she says, “funny poets are my favorite kind of human being.” When Max’s banished childhood cancer recurs, Sarah treats both him and his work with compassion, and a friendship begins to put down roots.In Kate Whoriskey’s witty, sensitive production for Signature Theater, the role of Max is shared by two actors, alternating performances. Ben Edelman, so excellent opposite Hecht in Joshua Harmon’s “Admissions,” is the more raucous Max, with a bigger personality that gets bigger laughs. Whatever is behind that facade, though, remains hidden from us. Zane Pais’s loose-limbed Max is the one who brings the tenderness, which cracks the play open emotionally and also, somehow, poetically. Skinny and floppy-haired, with a restless intensity and a searching intelligence, he is at once irrepressible and unavoidably vulnerable.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.This slender play has some of the spareness of poetry, which Sarah and Max periodically speak aloud. If, at a scant two hours including intermission, the production seems sometimes to be moving too fast, it also has interludes when it slows down — as in an exquisite scene between Max and a winged character who is both an angel and a tattoo artist, and is played by Edelman or Pais, whichever of them isn’t embodying Max at that performance.In that third role, Edelman (on piano) and Pais (on guitar) each also play underscoring music that they wrote with the sound designer, Sinan Refik Zafar. The last music the audience hears, though, was composed by Ritvo. The effect of it all, in tandem with the other design elements, is a sense of ethereality. (The set is by Marsha Ginsberg, costumes by Anita Yavich, lighting by Amith Chandrashaker and projection and video by S Katy Tucker.)Ruhl’s plays are sometimes mistranslated from page to stage — rendered less poetic than they are, and more earthbound. Like Les Waters with “Eurydice,” Whoriskey is the rare director who grasps the ineffable in Ruhl, and knows how to make sense of it in three dimensions. For all its talk of this world and corporeality, “Letters From Max” exists on a slightly other plane.Ruhl and Ritvo’s conversation was as much about the life of the mind, and the work of an artist, as it was about the life of the body and the existence of the soul. Ruhl has fashioned from it the kind of play that makes you want to dig in afterward: into the letters between them, into her plays, into his poems. Since the closure of Signature’s thoughtfully curated lobby bookstore — a casualty of the coronavirus pandemic — no production there has made me miss it as powerfully as this one.In my mind I can see the bookshop display that might have been: the volume of their correspondence; Ruhl’s many published plays, particularly “The Oldest Boy,” which affected Ritvo powerfully, and her epistolary plays “Eurydice” and “Dear Elizabeth”; his poetry collections “Four Reincarnations” and “The Final Voicemails” (which you can buy at Signature, along with their book of letters, but only at some performances); and “Words in Air,” the letters between the poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell that inspired “Dear Elizabeth.”If “Letters From Max” were any other play, I would think dreaming up a fantasy bookstore display — which is essentially a fantasy reading list — was a strange response. But it feels like a natural extension of the conversation pinging back and forth between Sarah and Max. Theirs is so much wider and more voracious a discussion than any stage could hold.So go see the play, and feel their relationship alive and tingling. Then open some of those books. Bliss.Letters From Max, a RitualThrough March 19 at the Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; signaturetheatre.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      ‘Fall River Fishing’ Review: So She Dated an Axe Murderer

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      A casually absurd play about the infamous Lizzie Borden, presented by Bedlam, cleverly undercuts the central dramatic event.There will be blood. And meat sauce. And dancing corpses. And Sharon Tate. Clarity? Not so much.Though, to be fair, if you aren’t ready for madness, perhaps a play about Lizzie Borden, presented by a theater company named Bedlam, isn’t your best bet.“Fall River Fishing,” written by Zuzanna Szadkowski and Deborah Knox, who also star, is a Rube Goldberg machine of a play: an entertaining spectacle of seemingly disparate parts that are actually interconnected. Yet this ornate display winds up feeling like a lot of show for an unimpressive payoff.But let’s begin with Lizzie Borden (Szadkowski), the woman from the gruesome children’s rhyme, who in 1892 took an ax and served 40 whacks in a double parricide that claimed the lives of her father and stepmother. Well, not an ax exactly, but a hatchet, as Bridget (Knox), the Borden family’s maid — and Lizzie’s kind-of lover — describes it. The weapon doesn’t actually appear until late in the first act, which comprises a series of domestic scenes in the Borden home, including interactions between Lizzie, Bridget, Lizzie’s father (Tony Torn), her young stepmother (Susannah Millonzi) and Uncle Nathan (Jamie Smithson), on the day of the murders.From left, Susannah Millonzi as Lizzie’s young stepmother, Jamie Smithson as Uncle Nathan and Tony Torn as the Borden patriarch in “Fall River Fishing.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesInstead of opting for an “American Psycho”-style gorefest, “Fall River Fishing,” directed by Eric Tucker, cleverly undercuts the central dramatic event, making the infamous real-life murders the anticlimax and continuing on from there. So from the start, we see onstage the bloodstained couch, the puddle of blood on the floor and red stains on the bed, though the characters sit and walk around the space as though everything is perfectly normal. Perhaps there is a touch of Bret Easton Ellis in this casually absurd play, which is packed from beginning to end with dark ironies. The most obvious being that the Bordens, despite wearing 19th-century fashion and sitting on 19th-century furniture, don’t just speak in contemporary English, but also make rather contemporary cultural references: to Cabbage Patch Kids, to the appeal of Greek yogurt, to the O.J. Simpson verdict.The dialogue is a constant stream of random quips, anachronisms, expletives, awkward gaffes and surprising non sequiturs. All of which is very funny — if that kind of quirkiness and drollery is your cup of tea. If not, you’ll struggle with the play’s humor, which may wear thin even for those enjoying it. After all, the play prioritizes its high-concept, heightened comedy over character building, plot or any of the usual forces behind a work’s momentum — so its engine runs out of steam almost immediately.It’s because of the no-holds-barred work of the cast and the director, however, that “Fall River” manages to stretch its charms for as long as it does (a nearly two-and-a-half-hour running time could have been cut by a full 60 to 90 minutes). Szadkowski proves to be an expert of deadpan humor from the first (unprintable) word she utters as Lizzie, who is both an insecure outcast and a selfish flirt with an endless need for attention. And, to make things worse, Lizzie is an aspiring actress who declares her performance as Nora in “A Doll’s House” — watch out, Jessica Chastain — her greatest feat.Knox’s Bridget makes a perfect pair with Szadkowski’s Lizzie, who strings the earnest maid along; Bridget follows Lizzie’s whims and bizarre scene studies, donning a wig and a pregnancy belly to play Sharon Tate (who makes an additional appearance). The Borden patriarch played by Torn is an unbearable misogynist, who wistfully recalls his first polyamorous marriage and the appeal of “foreign genitals, novel genitals,” courtesy of Tinder, with entertaining crudeness. Millonzi, as Lizzie’s alternately meek and vicious stepmother, performs her role with such otherworldly abandon that the character seems to have stepped out of her own universe, even within this already curious realm of weirdos and fools. Her physical performance is most impressive: She’s constantly draping herself over furniture, folding over suddenly and slouching around like a wet noodle. And Smithson is an utter delight as Uncle Nathan, a living, breathing cringe in the form of an adult man.After all of the jokes and the bloodshed and a brief waltz between the deceased, the play turns into a less interesting thought experiment in its second act, with Szadkowski and Smithson now playing a modern-day Nora and Torvald as they entertain some very bizarre guests. Soon everyone is digging into a bowl of spaghetti, hands-first, and rubbing it over their faces. By then “Fall River” has not only lost its steam, but also its appeal, and its last bit of sense.“This is nonsense!” Torvald/Nathan declares near the end of the production. True, but a little nonsense offers laughs and flights of imagination. Too much, and you leave the theater feeling mad.Fall River FishingThrough March 9 at the Connelly Theater, Manhattan; bedlam.org. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. More

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      ‘Elyria’ Review: The Past Catches Up to Them, Outside Cleveland

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      A microcosmic tale of the Indian diaspora, Deepa Purohit’s new play centers on the tangled history of two women and the man in between them.Watching an actor steal a show is one of the absolute thrills of live performance — but the purest method of that thievery has nothing to do with scenery-chewing, grand solo moments or sparkly razzmatazz. It’s nimble and cat-burglar quiet, not demanding attention, not meaning to upstage.As a doctor named Charu in Deepa Purohit’s new play “Elyria,” set in 1982 Ohio, Bhavesh Patel has the element of surprise very much in his favor. Charu is a mild, conformist, ordinary man — and in his muted earth tones, outfitted for obscurity. In his first scene, he arrives home from the hospital, pours himself a bowl of cornflakes, takes the last of the milk, has an unremarkable conversation with his homemaker wife. He’s a remote presence, lost in his own thoughts. Yet every beat and pulse of him has, for the audience, a subdued magnetism.It’s a genuinely exciting performance, layered and full, flecked with the driest comedy. The only trouble with such standout excellence is that it shifts the axis of the play, so that it seems as if Charu is at its center. “Elyria” in fact revolves around two women and their tangled history with each other, though they both also have a history with him: Dhatta (Gulshan Mia), who married Charu two decades ago, back in Tanzania, as their families had arranged; and Vasanta (Nilanjana Bose), who fell in love with him when they were young and had his baby, though he never knew.The sprawling “Elyria” is a microcosmic tale of the Indian diaspora, crisscrossing continents from Africa to Europe and North America. Directed by Awoye Timpo for Atlantic Theater Company, the play finds Dhatta and Vasanta in Elyria, Ohio, not far from Cleveland.Dhatta and Charu have lived there since 1969, parents to a college-age son, Rohan (Mohit Gautam), who is all-American in his preppy rugby shirts. Vasanta, who works in a hair salon at J.C. Penney, and her husband, Shiv (Sanjit De Silva), a would-be entrepreneur, are newly arrived after 20 years in Nairobi.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.“Not many of us East Africans here in these parts, no?” Shiv says when the two couples run into each other at the movies.Shiv, though, is the only one of them who has no idea that this is a fraught reunion, let alone that Vasanta’s presence in town feels to Dhatta like a betrayal and a threat, even a trauma.For almost all of Act I, the audience is left in the dark, too, about what is going on between the women, which makes the first half of the play feel in retrospect like prolonged throat-clearing.The story of “Elyria” revolves around two women, played by Mia, left, and Nilanjana Bose, whose pasts follow them from Tanzania to Ohio.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA spoiler, then, because there’s no discussing “Elyria” without it: Rohan, Dhatta and Charu’s son, is Vasanta and Charu’s biological child. Both women have always known it. Once the audience does, too, the many threads of the play begin to form a more taut, less enigmatic tapestry.But there are so many threads, and Purohit, attentive to her characters, wants to follow them all: the two marriages, the parent-child relationships, and Rohan’s charming, might-it-be-romance friendship with Hassanali (Omar Shafiuzzaman), a British exchange student. Memory sequences are also woven through, involving Vasanta and Dhatta’s younger selves, and there’s some lovely Indian dance. (Choreography is by Parijat Desai.)The muchness dilutes rather than intensifies. There isn’t time to give the history between the women the weight and tension that it needs if the audience is to invest in it.Jason Ardizzone-West’s geometric set, though, is a thing of spare beauty, the square stage (not raised, as it usually is, in the Linda Gross Theater) surrounded by the audience on all sides and elegantly lit by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew. The costumes, by Sarita Fellows, have some fun with 1980s fashion, despite a few misses, like Rohan’s jeans, which aren’t Levi’s but should be, and the way women wore leggings then versus now.But Patel’s Charu is perfect — even his too-long sideburns, a relic of the ’70s: as if the nation had slipped from the Me Decade into the Reagan era while he was distracted at work. Charu is comic and reckless, selfish and decent, myopic and real. It’s an exhilarating performance, a work of actorly alchemy.ElyriaThrough March 19 at the Linda Gross Theater, Manhattan; atlantictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More