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      Interview: Returning To The University of Colloquium

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      Katherine Stockton and Sean Bennett talk about Colloquium

      Back in July we had a wonderful and insightful chat with Katherine Stockton about Colloquium, her play that explores the lives of stuffy Professors, pompous Candidates, and struggling Students, all suffering under the regime of pressuring higher education. Since then the play has had a rather successful run at Camden Fringe (see our four star review here), undergone some rewrites, played a few additional dates and is now on its way back, first to Sewell Barn Theatre, Norwich and then Queen’s Theatre, Hornchruch.

      So it seemed a good time to sit down with Katherine once more to ask about the play’s journey since last July. And this time we were joined by producer Sean Bennett to help out.

      We originally spoke last July just ahead of Camden Fringe, how did you feel the festival run went?

      Katherine: The Camden Fringe was a great step in the writing process for me. Fringe slots usually allow for an hour-long show, which was a great basis for expanding into the 95-minute production we are currently showing. One of the best things about the Camden Fringe is the opportunity for my emerging actors to display their talents – and I have a fantastic cast that deserve that stage time.

      Sean: Fringe runs are always an intense process, but the cast and crew really pulled it out of the bag. Moving from theatre to theatre allowed us to explore different staging, different movements, and generally put the play through its paces and learn as we went along.

      The result? A range of great performances with some really positive audience and critic reviews, not to mention an OffFest nomination to boot. Of course, there is always room to improve and we will be taking everything we have learnt into our next performances.

      Given that the play is coming back in 2023, we assume there was plenty of positive reactions then?

      Katherine: Our run had great reception from agents, critics, producers and, most importantly, the general audience members. Getting a great review is one thing, but it will always pale in comparison to the sound of an audience enjoying themselves in the moment.

      Sean: Productions of this play have been going, in one form or another, for almost five years now, so we have built up a healthy backlog of reviews and reactions. Each time a run ends, we have taken advice and criticism on board, made changes, and gone into another run, each one receiving better reactions than the last.

      Our Camden Fringe run was by far our most successful run to-date, with healthy attendance, plenty of reviews, and lots of positive reactions. There are still some changes to be made as we head towards our 2023 shows, but we were overwhelmed by the support and congratulations we received in 2022, so weare confident that our audience this year will love what we have to offer.

      What did you learn from the Camden Fringe run then? And has that led to further changes?

      Katherine: Absolutely. We had responses that responded very strongly to the dialogue and intellectual debates, but less so about the overarching structure of the play. This was partly due to the hour slot we had to work with. Since, I have been able to write 35 minutes of new material that addresses this issue. I believe I have been able to construct a well-balanced play that ties up all its ends.

      Sean: Colloquium is a play that, at the very beginning, started out as a pretty comedic piece. Over the years, it has evolved into more of a drama with comedic elements. Reviews and feedback from Camden showed us where that arc hasn’t quite been perfected yet, with some changes from funny to dramatic being quite stark and sudden. The script has therefore been changed to account for this and hopefully give audiences a smoother experience of the story line, ensuring they stay enthralled from beginning to end. Our staging, too, has been tweaked based of some critics’ suggestions, adding to the realism of the piece and ensuring that nothing happens on stage that could distract audiences from the story.

      Theatre, in the end, is a collaborative process. Not just between actors, producers, and directions, but also between the production and it’s audiences and critics. They want to see the best bit of theatre they can find, just as we want to give the best performances we can. Learning from each other is what makes great theatre, and so that’s what we have done.

      You also did some dates later in 2022, where these always part of the plan or did they come about from Camden Fringe?

      Sean: A mix of both. As the play gained more recognition, theatres started to approach us with dates and performance offers, but some of the shows later in 2022 had already been set. This gave us the opportunity to put our learning from the Fringe into practice quickly, while it was all still fresh in our minds, and the minds of audiences and critics.

      And how much will have changed by the time the play hits the stage again in February? Are you constantly rewriting sections?

      Katherine: The show won’t feel like a brand-new play. The six characters: the retiring professor, the ambitious second-hand man wanting his role, the Eton boy, the Welsh applicant out of her depth, the struggling PhD student and the PhD student who refuses to engage with the world of Oxford in a way that will ruin her – they will all still be there. But the writing has been workshopped and had many eyes on it, so it will be a perfected and expanded version. I think it is important for developing writers to always be editing.

      You were meant to be taking the show to the drama school at UEA Norwich, do you feel the play’s themes are perfect for taking to other universities?

      (Due to issues with the venue at UEA the show has now moved to Sewell Barn Theatre)

      Sean: Even though Colloquium focuses on Oxford University there are elements in the story that are applicable across all higher education settings. Anyone who has been to university, or is there now, will see parts of their own experience reflected on stage, so we’re confident that all university audiences will enjoy the play and resonate with it.

      Katherine: This show speaks to any person who has suffered from the hoop-jumping regime of further education. The show was also first staged at UEA, so it was going to be a homecoming for me and other UEA alum’s on the cast.

      And then it’s down to Queen’s Theatre, Hornchurch, how did these dates come about?

      Sean: Our actors are spread across London and the East of England, so the Queen’s Theatre in Hornchurch was initially a rehearsal space that we used due to its geographic placement between our two camps of performers.

      We loved the space, and the theatre in general, and our director has worked there before and was keen to utilise the space as a venue for performances rather than just rehearsals. Based on these existing relationships with Queen’s, we were offered the chance to perform there and jumped at it.

      Is it the same cast for the 2023 dates? Does changing actors alter the play in any way?

      Sean: Small changes have been made to the cast in 2022 and 2023, mostly due to actors finding other employment or due to schedule clashes. This is the nature of Fringe Theatre, and we knew this going in. However, the core of the play has always been consistent due to the majority of the cast staying the same and the steady guidance of the director and writer throughout all runs.

      Characters change when a new actor takes on a role, that is unavoidable. But it’s also a good thing. Every time a new actor has joined the cast, it has been a positive experience for the play, without question. The key is that we always ensure that our audition process is rigorous and that there are always plenty of rehearsals for new actors to find their feet, embed themselves in the story, and bond with the existing cast.

      Katherine: I love and admire the actors we have kept, but a new actor can bring in a whole new energy to the production, and find new ways into the text. It’s fantastic to have new blood. We also have an excellent director, Molly, who folds any new cast member well into the net of our show with ease.

      Do you see Colloquium being developed further throughout 2023? Or do you feel it would have reached a point that you want to move on to a new project after all this time with this one?

      Katherine: I can’t really let go of the play. I am very emotionally tied to both its characters and themes. And I am passionate about the fact that it speaks to an experience of British culture that isn’t addressed by another great play that we have currently; the University interview experience. So, I will be sticking with this project and developing it – potentially with a regional tour.

      Sean: Colloquium has developed a lot since its first run, and we intent to give it a long life past 2023, hopefully being published and moving into long-run or touring professional productions. This is a play that we believe would resonate with audiences up and down the country, and so we would like to test that theory in the coming years.

      New projects are being talked about, as eventually the time will come for Colloquium to get published and released into the world for other casts and companies to license and perform. But, for now, we’re focusing on perfect our lay during 2023 and making it the best it can be, and putting it in front of as many audiences as we can.

      Thanks to Katherine and Sean for their wonderful insight into what it’s like to further devleop a play in this way.

      You can catch Colloquium at Sewell Barn Theatre, Norwich (3 & 4 February) and then Queen’s Theatre, Hornchurch (26 & 27 February). Further information on these dates and to keep up to date with any further dates, check out Katherine’s website here. More

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      When Monsters Make the Best Husbands

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      “Frankenstein’s Monster Is Drunk and the Sheep Have All Jumped the Fences” and “Heaven,” two plays in Origin’s 1st Irish Festival, offer two very different views of marriage.The monster is nestled in a glacier when the villagers dig him out, frozen but not dead, because he was undead already. Tall, broad-shouldered, hulking in his platform boots, he is instantly recognizable, and once he thaws, proves unpretentious despite his Hollywood fame.It is 1946 in a tiny European village, and he is the most endearing of monsters: awkward, uncertain, just wanting to help out. And in “Frankenstein’s Monster Is Drunk and the Sheep Have All Jumped the Fences,” a winsome cartwheel of a show that’s part of the Origin Theater Company’s 1st Irish festival, he finds lasting romance — with a local outcast who falls in love with him at first sight. Never mind that by his own account he is “constructed from the dismembered body parts of a number of different corpses”; their sex life is fabulous.Written and directed by Zoë Seaton for her Big Telly Theater Company, from Northern Ireland, this quick-witted frolic is adapted from Owen Booth’s short story of the same name. On the smallest stage at 59E59 Theaters, with a nimble and inventive cast of four, it is a fast-moving comedy that dares to tip into poignancy.The soulful, well-meaning monster (Rhodri Lewis) and his brisk, nameless wife (Nicky Harley) spend years finding a way to fit into their tiny village, whose populace is represented by the much-doubling Vicky Allen and Chris Robinson. With a large wooden cupboard as the movable centerpiece of its no-frills set (by Ryan Dawson Laight, who also designed the costumes), the play is the story of their marriage: passion, heartbreaks and all. Also mishaps — inevitable where a slightly bungling monster is involved.“One day he gets drunk and manages to lose her entire flock of 63 rare Italian blue sheep,” Robinson tells us, in narrator mode. “They spend years arguing about that.”With a dreamy, heightened air abetted by the lighting (by Blue Hanley and Sinead Owens), the play has tender depths. The monster and his wife can’t have children, and this grieves them terribly. But they get on with life, and with loving each other. And in their imaginations, they create together a whole secret world.In “Heaven,” Andrew Bennett plays a married man who fantasizes about a young man who looks like Jesus.Ste MurrayA very different kind of marriage awaits audiences at Eugene O’Brien’s two-hander “Heaven,” also part of Origin’s 1st Irish at 59E59. So does a helpful glossary of terms, stapled to the one-sheet program. “On the todd” means single; “up the duff” means pregnant; a “ride” is having sex; and so on.Mairead (Janet Moran) and Mal (Andrew Bennett) have been married for 20 years. In their 50s, the parents of a 19-year-old daughter who has never gotten along with Mairead, they haven’t slept together in quite some time. Still, Mal says: “We are the best of pals.”Back in Mairead’s hometown for a wedding, she kisses an ex-boyfriend — one of many she had before settling down with Mal, who lately has taken to indulging sexual fantasies about Jesus that he first had as an altar boy. A young man who looks like Jesus is a guest at the wedding, and now Mal has fantasies about him, too.Directed by Jim Culleton for the Dublin-based company Fishamble, “Heaven” is constructed as a series of alternating monologues by Mairead and Mal, narrating their alcohol- and drug-fueled adventures over the wedding weekend.It’s a well acted, reasonably entertaining play. But while “Heaven” might appear at first to be interested in shaking up the status quo, it turns out to have a drearily conventional spirit, certainly where Mairead is concerned.As the play nears its end, she makes a U-turn away from her own desire, abruptly keen instead on inhabiting one of the most selfless and desexualized of female roles. It’s an out-of-nowhere switcheroo, and it feels utterly imposed.Even so, O’Brien’s final line is perfect — in a shaggy-dog-story way.Frankenstein’s Monster Is Drunk and the Sheep Have All Jumped the FencesThrough Jan. 28 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes.HeavenThrough Jan. 29 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Review: ‘Not About Me’ Remembers Decades Shrouded by AIDS

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      Eduardo Machado’s autofictional play follows the playwright’s alter ego as he navigates gay life in the 1980s and ’90s.It’s one thing for a new show to take place, for the most part, in the downtown Manhattan of the 1980s and ’90s. It’s another to make audience members feel as if they are watching it contemporaneously: Eduardo Machado’s “Not About Me,” which just opened at Theater for the New City, could have been airlifted wholesale from that era.For New York theatergoers who lived through those times, the occasionally ramshackle acting and the endearingly primitive projections make for an experience akin to stepping into a hot-tub time machine. Younger people might think they have chanced upon a diorama of vintage East Village theater. Everybody is likely to agree that the eye-searing abundance of ill-fitting pants is pushing verisimilitude a pleat too far.The protagonist and narrator of “Not About Me” (take that title with a grain of salt) is a Cuban-born gay playwright named Eduardo (Mateo d’Amato) who bears a striking resemblance to Machado, a Cuban-born gay playwright. This autofictional bent is par for the course for an artist who has long drawn on his own story. Eduardo is even married to a Harriett, as Machado was in real life for nearly 20 years — “your wife who you have always made an offstage character in all your plays,” according to one of Eduardo’s friends, Frank (Ellis Charles Hoffmeister).Machado has acknowledged that “Not About Me” was prompted by the arrival of Covid, which reminded him of AIDS, “the first pandemic of my generation,” as Eduardo puts it. The show, which the playwright also directed, starts in the mid-1980s, when AIDS was still thought of as “the gay disease.” Dancing and cruising in clubs, Eduardo and his buddies are at first oblivious to the new viral threat, then mildly worried, then terrified. Complicating matters, he thinks of himself as bisexual. Eduardo spends most of the show flirting with men, especially Gerald (Michael Domitrovich, with whom, in another example of a real-life connection, Machado collaborated on the memoir “Tastes Like Cuba: An Exile’s Hunger for Home”), and going through an obsession with a troubled, temperamental actress named Donna (Heather Velazquez). He gets flak from both sides, as when his friend Tommy (Charles Manning) jokes that Eduardo should write a play titled “How to Go From Bisexual to Gay When It’s Convenient for Your Career.”Eduardo is almost always portrayed as the object of everybody’s desire, including, in a more platonic way, another actress, the Los Angeles-based Marjorie (Sharon Ullrick, stepping in for Crystal Field at the performance I attended). They are rehearsing a short Tennessee Williams play whose feverishness reflects Eduardo’s approach to life — swashbuckling, peacockish, omnivorous. More important, Marjorie has cancer, and Eduardo must learn to accept her looming death.The play can never settle on a tone, and many scenes land askew, teetering uneasily between earnestness and flamboyance — it often feels as if dramatic ones are played for laughs, and vice versa. It’s also never quite clear whether Machado, with cleareyed honesty, deliberately paints Eduardo as somewhat ruthless and a narcissist (after learning two of his friends have died, he wonders, “On my 40th birthday?”) or if he’s oblivious to how his alter ego comes across. This tension between intention and lack of polish — the show does not feel like it’s been workshopped to death — at least makes “Not About Me” stand out.The play slowly makes its way through the decades and ends in the present, with another pandemic that both crushes and spurs Eduardo. “To write, or not to write, that is the question,” he asks. Let’s rejoice that he chose to write.Not About MeThrough Feb. 5 at Theater for the New City, Manhattan; theaterforthenewcity.net. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      Interview: Delving into the darker side of hospitality

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      Lia Burge on her Vault Festival show, Crying into Bins

      Our latest interview for the upcoming Vault Festival is with Lia Burge. In February Lia is bringing her show Crying into Bins to the Festival, which is all about working in hospitality. The show is a spoken word performance full of the horrors Lia has seen first hand. We’re sure it’s one that will resonate with many people who have found themselves in the service industry at one time or another, and even if you don’t have that experience, we reckon it could be a real eye opener! If nothing else, we reckon you should go just to find out about the Margaret Thatcher memorial dinner!

      Crying Into Bins is playing 11, 12 and 18 February and you can book those tickets here.

      Crying into Bins is quite the title. What was the inspiration behind it?

      My friend had a full-on nervous breakdown at the end of a shift one night – just cracked. She was fingering béarnaise sauce out of ramekins into a food waste bin at the time (an activity anyone who’s worked in hospitality will recognise with a withering groan). The next think we knew she was on the floor sobbing, shaking – the works. It was simultaneously one of the funniest and most disturbing things I’ve ever witnessed. 

      And what can people expect if they get along to see the show in February?

      Something a bit different in terms of style I think. Somewhere between theatre and spoken word poetry. In any case, plenty of laughs and a lot to think about. I wrote it to offer a bit of catharsis to hospitality workers, and to explore how working in service can change and shape you as a person. 

      So, is it all based on things you really saw and experienced whilst working in hospitality or have you used some creative licence to embellish a few events?

      There are things in the piece that people will think I’ve made up. But I’m sorry to say that every single story, quote and moment of Crying into Bins is true and happened either to me or one of my colleagues.

      Care to share any of the real horror stories you experienced then which we might hear about in the show?

      If we’re talking tangible horror, my first thought is the time a pigeon got into the venue and was shot down with a BB gun just before the guests arrived. Its blood and guts smattered over 1500 champagne glasses we’d just laid out to pour. But if we’re talking psychological horror, I’ll just say these four words: Margaret Thatcher memorial dinner… You’ll have to come to the show to find out what happened with that one.

      Is it your first time performing in something you’ve written then? What made you decide it was time to write your own show?

      It is. I’ve been avoiding the obligatory ‘one woman show’ for years. I love being in a company, and I could never seem to write a decent play anyway, so it never appealed. But when I got into spoken word in 2018, I found a format that made sense for the way I write, and people really seemed to respond to the way I performed my poetry. It’s just storytelling really, but it has an extra bit of magic that brings it to life. I realise now all the training and my experience with Shakespeare and modern rhythmical plays must have sunk into my soul over the years!

      We’re big fans of spoken word – do you feel this is a theatre genre that is getting more popular at the moment?

      I do think spoken word is getting more popular, and it’s a real mixed bag out there. There are incredible life changing poets like Salena Godden and Kae Tempest, and then there are just people getting up and speaking their truth into a microphone. The latter isn’t often high art, but I think it’s popular because it facilitates creative expression. I’m sort of playing around with the standard ‘spoken word’ delivery and pushing back a little against the penchant poets seem to have for trying to imitate Kae – who is extraordinary… but inimitable. I love poets who use their own voice to tell their story – that’s what’s interesting to me. 

      You have taken part in Hammer & Tongue’s National Slam competitions. What are they then and how does taking part in those compare to putting on your own show?

      Well, a poetry slam is where competitors have three minutes to speak their poem – no singing, no props, no music. Usually the audience will be doing the scoring, so whether you win or not can have a lot to do with who’s out there! For me, it all started by accident when I told a poet friend of mine a story about an unfortunate toilet accident on the back of a horse during the Euros in 1996. She said “that’s a slam winning poem, write it!” I wrote it, I won my first slam, and then I was off! There is of course something more terrifying about getting up there as yourself as opposed to a character in a play. But once you’ve done your bit you can sit down again! Putting on your own show is a massive pressure in so many ways, but I’m looking forward to bringing the two worlds together and seeing what happens.

      Are the Vault dates the first outing for the show or have you been testing it out elsewhere?

      I’ve tested out bits and pieces at poetry nights and at a brilliant scratch night called Scratch Meet in Brighton, which I highly recommend. To be honest I did it to get my friends off my back about writing the piece in full, but the response was great – I think that’s because so many people have worked in hospitality over the years, which makes it highly relatable.

      And as the show is about hospitality, when you are a big star of the stage what would you like included in your own rider?

      Hahaha! I’m not sure… sparkling water? Whatever it was, I’d thank the person who brought it to me effusively.

      Thanks to Lia for taking time out of her day to chat to us. Crying into Bins plays at Vault Festival on 11, 12 and 18 February, at 3.10pm each day. More information and bookings can be found here.

      You can also keep up to date with Lia and hear about forthcoming shows via her Twitter account here. More

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      At Under the Radar, Family Histories Bubble Up With No Easy Answers

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      The Public Theater’s experimental theater festival is back in person for the first time since 2020. Here, our critics review a second selection of the works on display.‘Otto Frank’Through Sunday. Running time: 1 hour.It’s unnerving how seldom Otto Frank blinks in Roger Guenveur Smith’s hourlong “Otto Frank.” But then why would he? Having for 35 years tended the posthumous flame of his murdered daughter Anne — while doing the same for her sister and mother and six million others — Otto might well have had to force himself to keep seeing.You may need to blink, though. Not because the story Smith tells in his crushing, exhausting monologue, part of the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival, can come as a surprise. Anne’s diary, prepared for publication by Otto in 1947, has been outsold among nonfiction books, Smith tells us, only by the Bible. It was adapted for Broadway in 1955, and Hollywood in 1959.Yet we have rarely been asked, as we are here, to view the horror through a double tragic lens. Watching Smith inhabit Otto and endure his unrelenting memories feels like watching someone die in pain — and then keep dying over and over.That must be what Smith is going for. As has often been the case in his earlier monologues — about Huey Newton, Bob Marley and Rodney King, among others — he does not settle for dry narration. In lightly rhymed, intensely poetic cadences that sometimes spill into a kind of keening song (the live sound design is by Marc Anthony Thompson), he instead reaches out from history to make broader connections, beyond territory and time.Beyond race and religion, too. References to “the congregations in Charleston and Pittsburgh and Christchurch and Poway” mix synagogue shootings with murders in a mosque and a Black church. Otto also mourns enslaved Africans who were “marched to their death” during “the great middle passage” and name-checks massacres in Bosnia, Rwanda, Wounded Knee and Tulsa. (“Otto Frank” will be performed at the Oklahoma City Repertory Theater Jan. 27-28.) He even suggests that Anne “would be proud” of “the young American woman in a hard hat” — Bree Newsome Bass — who in 2020 climbed a flagpole in Columbia, S.C., to remove its confederate flag.Comparing atrocities (and braveries) is a tricky business, and the entire project of dramatizing the Holocaust is fraught with problems of scale. As was also the case with Tom Stoppard’s Broadway hit “Leopoldstadt,” I sometimes felt in “Otto Frank” that the names of the camps and the litanies of loss were being dragooned into dramatic service illegitimately. That doesn’t invalidate the sincerity and even the occasional beauty of the effort. But what Smith apparently felt forced to see sometimes made me want to look away. JESSE GREEN‘KLII’Through Sunday. Running time: 65 minutes.Drawing on works including Patrice Lumumba’s Congolese independence address, Kaneza Schaal evokes King Leopold II, the Belgian monarch who brutally reigned over the Congo Free State in the late 19th century.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs audience members take their seats for Kaneza Schaal’s “KLII,” they are offered bars of soap with which they can wash their hands in water buckets. Schaal is already onstage, sitting on a luxurious throne-like chair in the semi-darkness. A long beard spreads to the top of her red-and-gold uniform jacket. The figure she is evoking is King Leopold II, the Belgian monarch who, in the late 19th century, owned the Congo Free State (what is now, for the most part, the Democratic Republic of Congo).This dimly lit, moody prelude is quietly unsettling — quite a theatrical feat since nothing much is happening.Eventually, Schaal climbs a steep metal ladder to part-declaim, part-lip-sync a speech. This part of “KLII,” before the show makes a sharp turn in terms of artistic approach and content, is cobbled together from sources like Mark Twain’s satirical “King Leopold’s Soliloquy,” from 1905, and a 1960 address from the independence leader Patrice Lumumba, but Camila Ortiz and Ian Askew’s sound is so blurred by industrial-strength reverb and booming echo that little besides stray words and sentences emerge from the sonic murk. There is something Leni Riefenstahl-esque about the vision of a despot authoritatively spouting unintelligible — either by design or accident — verbiage, but a little goes a long way, and the scene overstays its welcome.After climbing down from her perch, Schaal, who conceived “KLII” and directed it with the designer Christopher Myers, takes off her makeup — literally wiping Leopold off her face — and tells us, in a conversational voice now free of distortion, about her young daughter’s passion for “Fiddler on the Roof.” Other topics in that monologue (which is credited to Myers) include a brief on what happened when soap manufacturers transitioned from animal fat to palm oil and a peek at her family history with the tale of her Grandpa Murara, who fled Rwanda and opened a guesthouse in Burundi.In a note, Schaal describes “KLII” as “an exorcism, in theater.” This implies a certain amount of release, but even in its intimate, more directly autobiographical second half, the show does not deliver, or even aim for, easy catharsis.Avoiding the obvious is to be commended, but Schaal does not connect the dots into a convincing whole. “KLII” is most effective on a purely aesthetic, visceral level, down to small details that linger, like the cups of hibiscus tea that are handed to theatergoers on their way out. Printed inside the cups is a hand, which feels like a symbol of extended hospitality, until you remember that Leopold would casually order Congolese folks’ limbs to be hacked off. ELISABETH VINCENTELLI‘Our Country’Through Sunday. Running time: 65 minutes.Annie Saunders carries Jesse Saler, who plays her brother in the semi-autobiographical “Our Country,” which probes Wild West myths about freedom and the erosion of a sense of national identity.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn the canon of dramatic siblinghood, Antigone may be the most heroic sister. A mythic rebel drawn by Sophocles, she risks her life to bury her disgraced dead brother, an enemy of the state.The experimental writer-performer Annie Saunders does not dispute the bravery of that act of devotion. But in “Our Country,” a somewhat ungainly examination of Saunders’s bond with and duty toward her own legally beleaguered younger brother, she suggests there might be another way of looking at Antigone’s self-sacrifice.“I just wonder, has it ever occurred to anybody that maybe that was not her job?” she says. “Like maybe she could have just lived her life?”Saunders, who created “Our Country” with its director, Becca Wolff, knows it isn’t that simple — that love, a shared past and the pull of familial obligation can conspire otherwise. When the age gap between siblings is wide enough, as it is between her and her brother, Rafe (Jesse Saler), the older one has memories stretching back to the younger’s arrival.“When you were a baby I took you for show and tell, when you were born,” Saunders says. “Did you know that?”“‘This is my brother. Everybody line up and pet him,’” Rafe says, teasing her gently, disarmingly.“Our Country,” at the Public Theater, takes much of its dialogue from recordings that Saunders made, with her brother’s consent, of conversations between them. She, a Los Angeles artist, tries to understand him, an anti-establishment, pro-gun, Northern California marijuana farmer with a checkered legal past cleaned up by clever attorneys. Now he’s “in hotter water than usual,” she says: facing charges that might put him in prison. She’s been asked, by their lawyer mother, to write a letter in support of him.“Do you concede that you are having a particularly Caucasian experience of our criminal justice system?” Saunders asks, and Rafe pushes her off her high horse immediately.“Would you like to talk about privilege now in your play?” he says.On Nina Caussa’s rustic set, the siblings assemble a giant play fort — a patchwork tent whose awning stretches over the first rows of the audience. Sister and brother talk and tussle, their physicality almost balletic as Saunders, who is smaller than Saler, repeatedly carries him, though sometimes it’s the other way around. (Movement direction is by Jess Williams.)As the title suggests, “Our Country” means to be about more than one pair of siblings. Saunders and Wolff are also poking at Wild West myths about freedom, and at the widening chasm where some semblance of national identity used to be.Inside the fort, recollections of family history vary. Maybe, it seems, that longed-for collective past was partly imagined even at the time. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES More

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      When Black Characters Double-Deal to Make Ends Meet, It’s Never Enough

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      In three Broadway plays this season, a quest for financial stability can’t undo the trauma of the past or dismantle the architecture that places a ceiling on Black futures.In “Between Riverside and Crazy,” a Black man haggles over the concessions he’s being offered by his former employer, the New York Police Department, eight years after he was shot by a white cop. In “Topdog/Underdog,” two brothers hustle pedestrians on the street and, at home, each other. And in “The Piano Lesson,” family members bristle at a scheme that would involve hocking a precious heirloom.While these Broadway plays couldn’t be more different, they all similarly explore what happens when Black characters aren’t able to achieve financial stability through traditional, or official, channels. They are left little choice but to create and work in their own separate economies: A hustle is the only way the Black characters can even the playing field. And yet they never manage to do so — at least not for long. Even when one profits from a con, it’s a Faustian bargain that comes at the expense of another Black man’s opportunities.Ultimately, there’s no real winning, no outcome that can undo the trauma of the past or dismantle the architecture that places a ceiling on Black futures.In that regard, the shows mirror the reality facing many Black Americans who have dared to dream of financial success. Back in the 1930s, the setting of “The Piano Lesson,” federal housing programs under the New Deal segregated Black families by steering them to urban housing projects far from the almost exclusively white suburbs. The effects of these government programs, along with a variety of other exclusionary tactics used by agents and white residents — what we now call “redlining” — put many Black Americans at a disadvantage. (In Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 classic “A Raisin in the Sun,” revived this past fall at the Public Theater, the Younger family experiences this firsthand when a white representative from the neighborhood where they recently bought a house offers them a bribe to keep them from moving in.)And it’s not just housing: There are racial inequities in hiring practices, and in pay rates and retention in the job force; gaps in access to quality education and health care; and of course Black Americans are imprisoned at disproportionately higher rates than white Americans.Corey Hawkins, left, as Lincoln and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Booth in “Topdog/Underdog,” which is full of hustles, games of deception and power plays that go beyond what the brothers do with a deck of cards.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Topdog/Underdog,” a revival of which is at the Golden Theater through Sunday, the brothers Lincoln and Booth share Booth’s tiny efficiency apartment. Lincoln’s wife has kicked him out, and Booth refuses to hold down a job. Lincoln supports them with a gig as an Abraham Lincoln impersonator, and Booth spends his days shoplifting, aggressively trying to woo an ex and planning his debut as a master of three-card monte. In some ways, Booth’s on top: Though he has no job, he gets along fine and still has his $500 inheritance. Lincoln’s struggling: a job that he fears he’s going to lose, no wife, no home and his own $500 inheritance is long gone.“Topdog/Underdog” is full of hustles, games of deception and power plays that go beyond what Lincoln and Booth do with a deck of cards. Booth never subscribed to the losing game of American capitalism by getting a 9-to-5, and yet Lincoln, a former card hustler, now takes “nowhere jobs” and plays the 16th president in an arcade that underpays and then fires him.Though the economy Lincoln built on the street was illegal, it was at least more reliable than what he faces in the traditional job market. Yet again, there’s a blood cost. After Lincoln pulls off the ultimate con — hustling his brother out of his inheritance — Booth shoots him.Nobody wins. Nobody profits.Stephen Adly Guirgis’s “Between Riverside and Crazy,” now playing at the Helen Hayes Theater (and livestreaming its final two weeks of performances), had its Off Broadway debut in 2014, during the early years of the Black Lives Matter movement. In the play, Walter, a Black former police officer who was shot while off duty, has lost his wife and is now being pushed out of his rent-stabilized apartment in an area experiencing gentrification.He tells his son, Junior, that despite following the straight and narrow — “Married your mother. Joined the police. Paid taxes. Bought insurance. Got a Riverside Drive apartment. Had you. Put down firm roots” — he knew he would be cheated and disrespected. It doesn’t matter that he’s an “old patriotic, tax-paying, African American ex-cop, war veteran senior citizen,” as he says twice in the play. At the end of the day, he’s still just a Black man in America.So he has no qualms lying about a detail in the shooting and later about demanding that his former partner’s $30,000 engagement ring be included in his new settlement. Given the circumstances, Walter’s con feels like reparations, not thievery. He successfully gets his payout and keeps his apartment, and the play ends with Walter ready to move on from his old life. But in this final scene we also see that his son has taken his father’s seat at the kitchen table. Dressed in Walter’s robe, Junior, an ex-con with a roomful of suspiciously acquired electronics, has been left behind. Though the city, in its deal with Walter, has expunged Junior’s criminal record, the play suggests that this is far from enough for Junior to build a life of success.In “The Piano Lesson,” a family grapples with how best to preserve its painful legacy, which is represented by an elaborately carved piano.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThese plays depict dire times — contemporary times (“Between Riverside and Crazy” is set in 2014, and “Topdog/Underdog” premiered at the Public in 2001) when the American dream, which has been accessible to white Americans since before the ink dried on the Declaration of Independence, is still so far out of reach for Black people.August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson,” however, is set in 1936, during the overlapping period of the Great Depression and the Great Migration, when Black Americans were working to distance themselves from the economy that slavery built — trying to survive, even thrive, amid national fiscal insecurity.When Boy Willie, a sharecropper in Mississippi, arrives in Pittsburgh at the home that his uncle Doaker Charles shares with Boy Willie’s sister, Berniece, he feverishly reveals his plan to become a respectable landowner. He simply needs to sell the watermelons that he hauled up there in his broken-down truck, and find a buyer for a family heirloom in his sister’s possession.The land he wants to purchase isn’t just any plot — it belonged to Sutter, the white man whose ancestors owned the Charles family as slaves and who employed Boy Willie as a sharecropper. By cashing in on his family’s history, and pain, Boy Willie wants to buy a piece of the American dream that was stolen from his family generations ago.Berniece is adamant that the price is too high, and she suspects that the recently deceased Sutter was killed by Boy Willie so that he could buy the property. Boy Willie goes behind his sister’s back to sell the heirloom, a piano engraved with the Charles family’s story of enslavement, separation and death, which is in large part a result of the instrument — a slave-owner’s anniversary gift to his wife, paid for in slaves. Though Berniece keeps the piano, and thus a connection to their family’s legacy, the cost is Boy Willie’s dream of the financial security and independence that would have come from owning his own property. (Though that dream, the play indicates, was always a delusion, because a Black landowner in the South would almost certainly be targeted.)Wilson’s play is a window into the ways our country’s perverse economics make even one’s trauma psychologically too pricey to keep. At least that’s Boy Willie’s feeling. For Berniece, it’s too valuable to sell off and forget.Boy Willie misses out on landownership, Junior loses his father, Booth his inheritance, and Lincoln his life. When it’s Blackness versus the American dream, that paradise of white capitalism, the house always wins. More

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      Feature: What Exactly Is Fringe Theatre?

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      Sara West debates what we actually mean when we say Fringe Theatre

      This is an interesting one isn’t it? Lots of us like to talk about fringe theatre, and certainly we like to see fringe theatre, but it’s a slippery term to define. And do we mean venues, or the productions, or the creatives?!

      If we want to find a beginning, 1968 is a good year to start. Until this time the Lord Chamberlain had been the official licenser of plays and had regulated restrictions on drama since 1737, because actors are well known for being a suspect bunch of degenerates who could subvert the compliant and submissive general public if not prevented, right?! The Theatres Act of 1968 finally put an end to that and abolished theatre censorship. As a result, a whole new genre of performance exploded on to the stage starting with the rock musical Hair, which famously, shock-horror, included nude scenes.

      It was no coincidence then that ‘alternative’ theatre in London also began in the same year, when the American Jim Haynes set up the Arts Lab in Drury Lane. The Arts Lab facilitated a collaborative environment for newly founded ‘alternative’ or ‘underground’ theatre groups, as well as offering free rehearsal space for companies on the condition that they performed in the Arts Lab theatre. Although the venue itself didn’t last long, it did start a movement that offered an alternative to mainstream theatre. Undeniably political in its intention, creators of theatre were supporting and reinforcing global outrage found in events like the anti-Vietnam protest movements of the mid-1960s.

      In the following year Tony Bicât and David Hare, both Cambridge University alumni, formed Portable Theatre. This was a year that saw widespread political unrest in Britain, where a youth-orientated ‘counter culture’ flourished and was seen to challenge the existing order. The two recruited actors from the Arts Lab to create a touring company, hence, ‘Portable’ theatre. They had basic costumes and minimal sets but managed to create and sustain powerful performance pieces, the like of which had not been experienced by audiences before, but which proved captivating and popular.

      And so now a pattern emerges: ‘Fringe’ theatre is most likely to be a minimal production with few actors promoting a political motivated narrative, quite possibly concerned with social injustice and always different from the mainstream – subversive even. Early fringe was also responsible for a different type of play. Starting with a generation that had grown increasingly distrustful of the way in which politics were presented and the authenticity of political life in general, shows were developed that played with form and moved away from a linear narrative. Highly surreal, comic strip and anti-naturalistic presentations became more popular and today the most interesting productions have continued that trajectory, incorporating endless forms of diverse and inclusive performance genres and delivery mechanisms.

      Another characteristic of fringe IS its slipperiness; its refusal to be defined. When content is highly relevant to the present and has a desire to break down social taboos, the raison d’etre of the performance is to prompt a response from the audience and deliberately create something that is at odds with the mainstream. If successful and the audience are informed anew, then fringe playwrights and actors tend to move on and find new subjects to bring attention to, but let’s not ignore the training ground that is fringe. All playwrights, performers and other creatives have to start somewhere. The King’s Head in Islington for example, the first pub theatre in London since Shakespeare, remains strong since its inception in 1970 and has proved an impressive training ground for playwrights, directors and performers alike. Names like Joanna Lumley, Maureen Lipman, Hugh Grant, Steven Berkoff and Tom Stoppard (to name but a few) have all graced the venue throughout its history.

      There are currently 19 or so functioning pub theatres across London, all fostering new talent. Tickets are as cheap as a couple of pints (or a large glass of overpriced wine!) and produce some of the most thought-provoking theatre. Writing in London Pub Theatres Magazine in 2019, Annie Powers declared “The joy of fringe theatre is its adventurousness and inclusiveness. I have often left a mainstream theatre feeling disappointed but have never walked away from a fringe play without feeling either exhilarated and inspired; challenged and disturbed… Fringe productions make you think and that is, in my opinion, what art should do”.

      There is more to say about fringe clearly, much more than this article will allow, and I have deliberately not written about the fringe festivals, as they are worthy of a dedicated feature all of their own. What I will say is that fringe is a fundamental part of theatre ecology and increasingly the best fringe venues are embedded in their local community, reflecting the social identity of that group. It will be interesting to see how those venues develop in the future: as their permanence within their community solidifies, do they lose the label of fringe? And does it matter? The young reactionaries who were behind the explosion of the first alternative performances are now the influential elder statesmen of the theatrical elite. As long as new talent and new ideas continue to push from the bottom, theatre will continue to reinvent itself, question the establishment and provide a voice for disaffected or marginalised communities. And that’s just one of the many joys of live theatrical performance.

      We plan to publish 26 individual features during 2023, released every other Tuesday. They are linked only by being about theatre and/ or reviewing. You can find all features published as part of this series here. More

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      Book Review: ‘Roald Dahl, Teller of the Unexpected’ by Matthew Dennison

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      “Teller of the Unexpected,” an elegant new biography, sidesteps the ugly side of the children’s book author while capturing his grandiose, tragedy-specked life.ROALD DAHL, TELLER OF THE UNEXPECTED: A Biography, by Matthew DennisonMany young readers who love the prodigious oeuvre of Roald Dahl can nonetheless cite at least one thing within it that gives them the ick. For me it was Mr. Twit’s beard in “The Twits” (1980), so ungroomed it might contain “a piece of maggoty green cheese or a mouldy old cornflake or even the slimy tail of a tinned sardine.” When millennial men in Brooklyn started growing big, bushy beards, my inner child dived under the table in horror.The ickiest thing about the life of Dahl, who died in 1990, was his well-documented antisemitism, capped by a 1983 comment about Jews to The New Statesman, in which he declared that “even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.” (That it’s custom for observant Jewish men to wear beards makes me even more uneasy about the demonized Mr. Twit.) The Dahl estate has posted an apology for his behavior on its website — linked discreetly under a Quentin Blake illustration of the author in a pink cardigan, looking beneficent and cuddly.Looking back, there were plenty of other oh-no-he-didn’t moments in the literature. The Oompa-Loompas of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” were originally African pygmies — Dahl called the actors who played them wearing orange makeup and green wigs in the 1971 movie “dirty old dwarfs.” And a rapey 1965 story for Playboy, “Bitch,” transformed its adult male protagonist into a “gigantic perpendicular penis, seven feet tall and as handsome as they come,” as if James and his famous peach had grown up and gone horribly wrong.But none of this is lingered on in Matthew Dennison’s elegant but somewhat glancing new biography of Dahl, subtitled “Teller of the Unexpected.” His subject has sold more books around the world than is possible to count. Netflix bought The Roald Dahl Story Co. in 2021 for a reported $1 billion; “Matilda” alone is movie, musical and multiple memes. Roald Dahl — not mere author but high-yielding content farm — may simply be too big to cancel.His own story has already inspired two major biographies, from which Dennison draws: one authorized, by Donald Sturrock, who also edited Dahl’s letters to his beloved mother, Sofie Magdalene; one not, by Jeremy Treglown. All of these accounts stand as necessary supplements to Dahl’s lyrical but selectively truthful autobiographical writing; Dennison notes his tendency toward “mythomania.” He figured unfavorably in “As I Am,” the memoir by his first wife, the actress Patricia Neal, whom he nursed aggressively (some would say sadistically) back to health after a stroke and then left for their friend, Felicity “Liccy” Crosland; and in a roman à clef by their daughter, Tessa. The first Mr. and Mrs. Dahl were rendered in softer focus mourning the death from measles encephalitis of Tessa’s older sister, at only 7, in the recent movie “To Olivia.”As Dennison reminds us, Roald — born in Wales, of Norwegian parentage — also lost a sister when she was 7, to appendicitis, and his father soon after. Backing into writing after a stint at the Asiatic Petroleum Company, his macabre voice and flights into fantasy were clearly engendered by brushes with death and violence.He had been caned at boarding school and, enlisting in the Royal Air Force, was burned and maimed when his Gloster Gladiator plane crashed in the Egyptian desert. After his baby son Theo’s skull was crushed after a taxi hit his pram, Dahl developed a cerebral shunt with a pediatric neurosurgeon and toymaker, like the Wonka figure he was simultaneously creating on the page. Then came Neal’s medical crisis, while pregnant with their fifth child, Lucy, and her rehabilitation, reenacted in a memorable 1981 TV movie, in which she was played by Glenda Jackson, and Roald by Dirk Bogarde. (Exploring Dahl’s personal and professional entanglements, you’ll tumble down an IMDB hole deeper than the giants’ in “The BFG.”)The author of previous books on Beatrix Potter and Kenneth Grahame, Dennison recaps most of these extraordinary events without fuss, riffling carefully through letters, diaries and other volumes, from the looks of his endnotes, but conducting no fresh interviews; there are no new revelations that I can discern, but instead refined interpretation. From the Dahl legacy, chocolate and bile and personality sloshing messily in all directions, he molds a digestive biscuit.“Teller of the Unexpected” is maybe best capturing its 6-foot-5-plus subject as a swashbuckler: zooming around school grounds on a motorcycle or parachuting metaphorically into power centers like Washington, D.C., or Hollywood, where Dahl was courted by Walt Disney himself to develop a movie about gremlins — devilish creatures with horns and long tails blamed for R.A.F. mishaps. (Gremlins would go on to appear in plenty of movies, including a 1983 “Twilight Zone” sequence startrng the Dahl look-alike John Lithgow, but this would not turn out to be one of the writer’s many lucrative franchises.) Encouraged early in his career by C.S. Forester and Hemingway, he was notoriously abrasive to his editors and had affairs with older and married women, complaining to a friend of Clare Boothe Luce’s voracious sexual appetite. In Dennison’s telling, Dahl’s contradictions are beautifully illustrated but not particularly interrogated: He is here charitable but cruel; arrogant and desperate for acclaim; a self-declared man of action whose livelihood was language. He was an aesthete who cared deeply about his surroundings, early on collecting birds’ eggs in drawers lined with pink cotton wool and growing up to appreciate the finer things: painting, wine, the great composers. Long before it was fashionable, he made himself a man cave, a “writing hut” steps from his family cottage, whose name, Gipsy House, also offends 2023 ears.And I think he would have liked Dennison’s writing style, lush but clipped, with such phrases as “the ubiquity of caprice” and “buoyant with slang,” full of a reader’s zest. This is not a potted biography, but it is a politely pruned one, idealism washing over the ick.ROALD DAHL, TELLER OF THE UNEXPECTED: A Biography | By Matthew Dennison | 272 pp. | Illustrated | Pegasus Books | $27.95 More