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      Lloyd Suh’s Plays About the Past Speak Directly to Our Present

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      The 47-year-old playwright Lloyd Suh is having a moment, with a handful of plays that reveal how history can exact an emotional toll across culture and time.His latest, “The Far Country,” opens at Angel Island, the notorious checkpoint off the coast of San Francisco, and explores lives fractured by the Chinese Exclusion Act, a racist policy that severely restricted immigration of Chinese people and limited those in the United States from gaining citizenship.The play, running at Atlantic Theater Company’s Linda Gross Theater through Jan. 1, has been well received by critics. In her review for The New York Times, Alexis Soloski called it “an act, loving and sorrowful, of reclamation, salvaging the history of early generations of Chinese Americans.”His aim, Suh said during a recent phone call, is to prove “the way in which memory becomes hereditary because of the way it lives in the body, the way it lives in the family. There’s poignancy there, but power too.”This mission also plays out in his acclaimed “The Chinese Lady,” in which audiences learn of Afong Moy, who, as possibly the first Chinese woman in the United States, was exhibited across 1830s America. The story, Laura Collins-Hughes wrote in her review for The Times earlier this year when it played at the Public Theater, traverses “188 years of American ugliness and exoticization.”Then there’s his fanciful “Charles Francis Chan Jr.’s Exotic Oriental Murder Mystery” — a metanarrative of Asian American history, set in Berkeley in 1967, a year before students there coined the term “Asian American” — which finds charm even in grotesque rebuttals of racist caricature. And an early one-act, “Disney & Fujikawa,” that dramatizes a 1942 meeting between Walt Disney and the Japanese American illustrator Gyo Fujikawa, whose family was held at the Rohwer War Relocation Center in Arkansas.Next up is “The Heart Sellers,” which debuts in February in Milwaukee and involves two housewives navigating feelings of isolation in a new country in 1973. The play’s title is a pun on the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, which, by ending U.S. quotas on the number of immigrants from outside Western Europe, saw a dramatic rise in global newcomers — especially Asians.Shannon Tyo and Jinn S. Kim in “The Far Country,” at Atlantic Theater Company’s Linda Gross Theater through Jan. 1.Richard Termine for The New York TimesDaniel K. Isaac and Shannon Tyo in “The Chinese Lady” at the Public Theater earlier this year.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBeyond its storytelling, “The Far Country” has reunited Suh with the actor Shannon Tyo, who originated the role of Moy in 2018 in a Ma-Yi Theater Company production of “The Chinese Lady.” She returned to the part for the show’s run at the Public.Suh and Tyo both said their continued collaboration is a testament to new creative and professional growth for Asian American theater workers made possible by diversity, inclusion and equity strategies as well as the broader racial reckoning in America that dovetailed with the pandemic.Having performed in “The Chinese Lady” both before and during the pandemic, Tyo explained the shift. “Prior to the pandemic, it’s almost like audiences didn’t believe us about our history of violence against our community,” she said. “The violence we’ve seen in our present is unfortunately what it takes to make our violent history come alive. People are more ready to believe us, ready to empathize.”In “The Far Country,” that sense of personal resonance and theater’s ability to refract a scene for different audiences — as was the case with Suh’s children’s play “The Wong Kids in the Secret of the Space Chupacabra Go!” — was amplified by the show’s director, Eric Ting.The script subverts immigration, he said, by focusing on how “the only way the characters can achieve a place in the American project is by severing ties with their ancestors.” He added that Suh “is really focusing on the destructive force of capitalism, how it disrupts and destroys families.”Separate from bureaucracy and labor, one character notes, “there is more strenuous work: the work of being Chinese in America.”For the cast and crew, takeaways varied. Whit K. Lee, who plays both a translator and a detainee, said he wept when he first read the script. His maternal great-grandfather had been a translator for 19th-century Chinese railroad workers in Montana and his paternal grandfather was held at Angel Island when he was just 9 years old (separated from his mother, Lee said, the malnourished child used rice rations to lure, kill and eat a pigeon).“So much is lost because our ancestors didn’t want to pass down these stories,” Lee said. “‘The Far Country’ allows me to help tell the story that I was never taught in school. I’m very proud to be Chinese, Chinese American, American Chinese and American.”But Suh, who last week won a $100,000 prize as a recipient of this year’s Steinberg Playwright Awards, is not alone in his success.With his work, Suh says his aim is to prove “the way in which memory becomes hereditary because of the way it lives in the body, the way it lives in the family.”Nathan Bajar for The New York TimesIn spring 2020, Asian American theater professionals mourned nine plays that were scrapped or curtailed when live performance spaces closed amid the unfolding pandemic chaos. In the last six months, a number of works by Asian American playwrights have been produced Off Broadway, including Jiehae Park’s “Peerless,” presented by Primary Stages at 59E59 Theaters, and Daniel K. Isaac’s “Once Upon a (korean) Time,” a Ma-Yi Theater Company production at La MaMa. Several more are planned for the spring, including “Elyria,” the playwright Deepa Purohit’s Off Broadway debut at Atlantic Theater Company, and Hansol Jung’s “Wolf Play,” which, after an engagement last winter presented by Soho Rep and Ma-Yi Theater Company, will return to the stage in January at MCC Theater.The works are not only the fruit of prepandemic efforts to include more Asian American storytelling in theater, but also a reclamation of agency and identity following anti-Asian bigotry and violence during the pandemic itself.“There’s certainly a range of activity now and a quantity of work and a variety of work that feels pretty fresh,” said David Henry Hwang, who became the first (and remains the only) Asian American playwright to win a Tony Award for best play, for “M. Butterfly” in 1988.“There has been an increasing number of AAPI playwrights challenging what has come before,” Hwang added, referring to Asian American Pacific Islanders. “Asian actors have been largely employed by ‘The King and I’ and ‘Miss Saigon,’ which have Orientalist aspects, white supremacist aspects, and with ‘Miss Saigon’ is actually pretty racist.”By contrast, said Suh, “I want Asian American actors to feel like it’s for them, their ownership. Not just roles in plays.” Asked if he has any interest in revivals of “The King and I,” “Miss Saigon” or “South Pacific,” he offered a deadpan “no” before laughing. “I don’t think those are pieces where it’s possible to have any kind of take that is meaningfully transformative.”More recently, breakthroughs and opportunities have manifested in the revisiting of classic works: An Off Broadway production of Edward Albee’s “A Delicate Balance” this fall had an all-Asian-American cast and a “Little Shop of Horrors” revival in California was set in Chinatown. And newer works have found audiences nationally: Lauren Yee’s “Cambodian Rock Band” and Kristina Wong’s “Sweatshop Overlord,” which had Off Broadway runs in New York.“It’s exciting to me,” Tyo said, “that we could build our canon ourselves.”Suh added: “This industry can be a marketplace where plays have value as commodities, but with all these shows it’s a reminder that the power of theater is in the conversations it creates, how one play leads to the next. That’s how the conversation sustains.” More

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      ‘The Collaboration’ Review: A Basquiat-Warhol Bromance in Bloom

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      Anthony McCarten’s biodrama about the artists’ work together lifts the curtain on their friendship, or at least it thinks it does.On the cover of the press script of “The Collaboration,” Anthony McCarten’s new bioplay about the Pop Art superstar Andy Warhol and the Neo-Expressionist phenom Jean-Michel Basquiat, the pair pose in Everlast boxing gloves and shorts, as if preparing to go 12 rounds with each other.It’s one of a series of promotional shots for a 1985 exhibit of 16 paintings that they made together, and surely one element of the photo’s endurance as a crystallizing image is that neither artist lived much longer. Warhol died at 58 in 1987 after gallbladder surgery, and Basquiat at just 27 in 1988, after a heroin overdose.Don’t judge a play by its cover and all that, but in this case, you wouldn’t be far off. “The Collaboration,” starring Paul Bettany as Warhol and a radiant Jeremy Pope as Basquiat, is fundamentally invested in pitting the two painters against each other: their styles, their philosophies, their musings on art and commerce. And their fluctuating cultural currency.Presented by Manhattan Theater Club and the Young Vic Theater, this transfer from London — whose opening night performance at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater was canceled on Tuesday because of a positive Covid case in the company — is considerably less curious about whatever lies behind each man’s public facade. But Kwame Kwei-Armah’s production would like you to think it’s lifting the curtain on exactly that as it tells the early-80s New York story of Warhol and Basquiat’s work on those 16 canvases, and the friendship that took root between them.“I am human, even if I don’t look it,” Warhol says in the opening scene, getting right to the crux of biodrama and its perennial appeal to audiences: the sense that it gives us an intimate, up-close glimpse at a public figure’s private life, with its complex messiness and struggle, inspiration and joy.All the better, naturally, if that public figure is played by a famous actor — like Bettany, so comically endearing last year as Vision in the Avengers television spinoff “WandaVision,” and so deeply creepy as the sociopathic Duke of Argyll in the mini-series “A Very British Scandal.”There is a frisson of celebrity in the air, then, when we first see Bettany as Warhol, peering at some Basquiat paintings at their art dealer’s gallery, looking displeased — and grumpier still when he hears that this 20-something commands higher prices than he does.So it’s rather lovely that Pope, a rising star, bests him as Basquiat. Not that this is a competition, let alone a boxing match. But if “The Collaboration” spurs you to spend time with paintings made by one of these artists, it’s going to be Basquiat.Pope summons not only his charm — a magnet for women, Basquiat dated Madonna — but also his brilliance, ache and depth. His paintings are layered and full, textured and emphatic; so is Pope’s performance. With his heart-melting dimpled smile, he plays the frenetic former graffiti artist as if he knows every pulse of Basquiat’s life that we don’t see onstage, and that McCarten’s blunt instrument of a script can’t convey.Bettany, though, barely locates more than two dimensions in Warhol, as if the task were to play an icon, not a human being. That could be deliberate. Funny, frail, effete, Bettany’s Warhol is as meticulously impersonal as his art, and my goodness he whines. And he does so in the particular way of characters who need to get some exposition out.Krysta Rodriguez as Maya, Basquiat’s girlfriend, with Bettany and Pope. The show covers the period Warhol and Basquiat created 16 paintings for a 1985 exhibit.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“I’ve never been the same since she shot me,” Warhol says, apropos of almost nothing in the first minutes of the play, referring to Valerie Solanas, whose 1968 attack nearly killed him. He mentions her several more times during the show, not terribly organically. And yet somehow, when Warhol at last nervously takes his shirt off in front of Basquiat, revealing his scarred and corseted torso, he has none of the vulnerability that Alice Neel captured in her poignant bare-chested portrait of Warhol — which you’d think he might have, live.For all the slenderness of McCarten’s script, it does feel padded, and even so it manages to skip from Warhol and Basquiat’s wary acquaintanceship at the end of Act I straight to an apparently solid friendship at the top of Act II. When their art dealer, Bruno Bischofberger (a wonderfully vivid Erik Jensen), finds a syringe in Basquiat’s couch, he asks Warhol to confront him.“You two are so close now,” Bruno says — which is news to the audience, especially anyone who might have popped out to the restroom at intermission instead of watching the wordless bromance video montage that played throughout, showing them learning to have fun together in the studio. (Projection design is by Duncan McLean.)Oddly, given how specific McCarten’s script is about the kind of period technology that Warhol uses when he films, the video the audience sees of them looks distractingly contemporary. But Anna Fleischle’s set is clever, particularly the large panel that hangs overhead, appearing sometimes like a skylight, sometimes like a Mondrian.McCarten, who made his Broadway debut this month as the book writer of “A Beautiful Noise, The Neil Diamond Musical,” knows the biodrama genre better than most. He built his career as the screenwriter of the movies “The Theory of Everything” (2014), about Stephen Hawking’s first marriage; “Darkest Hour” (2017), about Winston Churchill’s high-stakes start to leading Britain; “Bohemian Rhapsody” (2018), about the Queen frontman Freddie Mercury; and “The Two Popes” (2020), about Pope Francis and his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI. McCarten’s Whitney Houston biopic, “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” is due out Friday, and a film adaptation of “The Collaboration” is in the wings.Onstage, though, “The Collaboration” feels emptily formulaic — less like an insider’s view of its famous subjects’ lives than a kind of biographical tourism that gets into serious gawking in its second half. It doesn’t bring us any insight into whatever closeness Warhol and Basquiat had.If a sense of these artists’ relationship is what you’re looking for, try the extensive, palpably personal exhibition “Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure,” organized by his sisters and on view through Jan. 1 at the Starrett-Lehigh Building in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. There are touches of Warhol in it — mementos of the two men’s friendship, and of their creative kinship — and they’re very sweet.The CollaborationThrough Jan. 29 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Manhattan; manhattantheaterclub.com. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      Jim Parsons Takes the Romantic Lead

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      The Emmy-winning “Big Bang Theory” actor “could’ve done anything he wanted.” Now starring in the tear-jerker film “Spoiler Alert,” he’s forging his own path.Ten years ago, the actor Jim Parsons, riding high on the success of the sitcom that would lead to his eventually making the Forbes list as the highest paid actor in television, casually told The New York Times that he was gay and in a long-term relationship. He remembers not wanting everything from 2012 forward to be about his sexual orientation.Now starring in the romantic drama “Spoiler Alert” (in theaters), of which he was also one of the producers, and having just wrapped an Off Broadway run of the musical “A Man of No Importance” — both of which have him playing gay leads — he says he wouldn’t trade the work he’s been able to do for anything.“Right after that piece came out, I felt power in being part of a group that I had not known I could feel,” Parsons, 49, said on a recent video call. He added that he was happy not to end up pigeonholed as an actor who could only do gay roles, even if more work came his way featuring gay characters.“It became a beautiful exploration of myself,” he said. “Not to say I feel completely satisfied and that there’s not plenty I still want to do, but I don’t know how I could be much happier or feel more fulfilled.”Parsons ties this feeling of catharsis to a lifelong quest to find himself worthy of love and acceptance. Growing up gay in a Houston suburb, he said he spent his first two decades with a “very real understanding that love would be lost” to him in certain corners of his life. Years into a successful career, he still considers himself on a journey to overcome the feeling that it is “overwhelming and a bit difficult to accept that much love from so many people at once.”He said that his recent projects have reflected that journey. “It’s kind of funny, since so many of them I didn’t pick,” he said, “but this chance to discover these things about myself, and other humans in the process, feels like a gift.”Parsons, center, as Alfie Byrne in the musical “A Man of No Importance.”Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Spoiler Alert” is adapted from a memoir by the television journalist Michael Ausiello, recounting the cancer diagnosis of his husband, Kit Cowan, and the difficult path on which it set the two. It presented Parsons with an “open vein” of emotion that appealed to his lifelong fascination with mortality, one he said was deepened by the death of his father in a 2001 car accident, and the loss of his dog years later.“Both experiences were so painful, yet offered me a view of the preciousness of my time here that I had not experienced before, and I’ll forever now view my life through that lens of having loved and lost,” he said. “The thing that really crept up on me in the book was the story of two people who have this tragic, but also unique and rare, opportunity to go through an experience as close to two naked souls as you can be. It cracks open both of their hearts to see the risks that must be taken in order to live and love fully.”Parsons and Ausiello had interacted on red carpets and press junkets throughout the 12-season run of “The Big Bang Theory,” of which the journalist was a vocal fan, but it wasn’t until he asked Parsons to host a promotional Q. and A. for his book in 2018 that the actor learned Ausiello’s story.Jim Parsons’s Expanding UniverseThe actor stars in the tear-jerker romance “Spoiler Alert,” adapted from the memoir by the television journalist Michael Ausiello.‘Spoiler Alert’: The film follows the rocky romance — from meet cute to cancer — between Michael, played by Parsons, and Kit.On Stage: “He knows not only what marks to hit but exactly how to hit them,” our critic wrote of Parsons’s performance in “A Man of No Importance,” in which he starred this fall.‘The Big Bang Theory’: Parsons played the dorky physicist Sheldon Cooper in CBS’s hit comedy for 12 seasons. He won four Emmys for best actor in a comedy for the role.From the Archives: In 2012, Parsons led a Broadway cast for the first time in a revival of “Harvey.” He spoke with The Times about measuring up against Jimmy Stewart in the comedy.“I remember going back through Michael’s Instagram after reading the book, and seeing this picture of us at the Emmys,” Parsons said. “I saw the date on it and realized he’d been in the thick of all this when we took it, and I had no idea. I never met Kit, I didn’t know he was sick, I wasn’t friends enough with Michael to know, but I couldn’t shake that feeling.”Parsons became attached to the overlaps he saw between Ausiello and Cowan’s partnership and his own relationship with his husband and producing partner, Todd Spiewak. (A tweet from Ausiello, posted on the day of Parsons’s 2012 Times interview, points to two of these main parallels.)Ausiello recounted by phone always being drawn to Parsons’s comic rhythms, on- and offscreen, as well as his surprising career choices, like taking on a supporting role in the 2016 film “Hidden Figures” after having won four acting Emmys for “The Big Bang Theory.”Parsons, left, as Sheldon Cooper, with Mayim Bialik on “The Big Bang Theory.”Michael Yarish“We had this interesting rapport and snarky banter that made our interviews so much fun,” Ausiello said. “I looked forward to talking to him because it was going to be an entertaining experience; he was going to give me as much as I’d give him, and never miss a beat.”For the book Q. and A., this time it would be Parsons in the interviewer chair. “He shows up at this Barnes & Noble with pages of notes — he did his homework,” Ausiello said. “It was backstage, before we walked out, that Todd mentioned to me that they were interested in optioning the book; that was the first time I found out, and I was like a deer in the headlights.”For Parsons, the film proved to be the most involved he had been in any project. Though he mainly stayed out of its financial aspects, he played a central role in production, down to selecting his English co-star Ben Aldridge’s vocal coach — the same one he had as a student at the University of San Diego.The past few years have seen Parsons taking the reins more often through the production company he and Spiewak started in 2015, as well as stepping into more leading roles. This month, he finished a run in the Classic Stage Company revival of “A Man of No Importance,” about a closeted man’s efforts to lead a theater troupe. The Times critic Jesse Green wrote of his performance, “With his confident voice, unlined face and television polish, he never seems hopeless or, viewed from our time, too old for a new start.”His last stage outing before that, in the 2018 Broadway revival of “The Boys in the Band” (a 2020 film adaptation followed), saw him play opposite Matt Bomer, who also attained mainstream recognition through television before coming out as gay in 2012. In a phone interview, Bomer explained that he’d known Parsons as a “legend” in the suburban Houston high school drama circuit. (Though born a few years apart, both men grew up in Spring, Texas.)Parsons with Matt Bomer in the 2018 Broadway production of “The Boys in the Band.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHe said he came to respect Parsons’s leadership and “fearless approach to the character” while working on the production, in which he played an often unlikable colead.“Jim achieved the type of television success that happens once in a generation, and he could have done anything he wanted after that,” Bomer said. “He’s translated it into these really thoughtful choices and performances, and taken creative responsibility for a lot of projects that are so interesting and that I really respect.”Three years removed from playing Sheldon, the role that made him a household name, Parsons isn’t sure that this new film and the recent musical point to a new career phase of leading roles, as opposed to the ensemble projects for which he’s been known.“Both projects required such tremendous, constant communication with my partners, and I like having a lot to do,” he said. “It’s much easier, if I’m a lead, to be constantly needed on set or onstage than it is to have swaths of time off, where I can get in my own head. Because I’ll find something else to do, I promise you, and it won’t be nearly as healthy as just doing the work.” More

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      Review: In ‘Between Riverside and Crazy,’ Real Estate Gets Real

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      Stephen Adly Guirgis’s 2014 play finally comes to Broadway, its hilarious, loving and unvarnished vision of the universal human hustle intact.A retired, recently widowed New York City police officer sits in a wheelchair at his kitchen table with a woman from São Paulo he variously calls Church Lady, Miss Brazil and a purveyor of “jungle boogie.” She has come to offer him communion, but exactly what kind isn’t clear. Their bristling, flirtatious, shape-shifting argument, which touches on cookies, devils, freedom and faith, would be enough to make this among the great scenes in recent American drama, equal parts comedy, philosophy and cat-and-mouse game.Then it goes further. Way further.And that’s barely midway through “Between Riverside and Crazy,” the astonishing Stephen Adly Guirgis play that opened on Monday in a Second Stage production at the Helen Hayes Theater. First seen Off Broadway in 2014 and in 2015 — after which it won the Pulitzer Prize for drama — it is only now receiving its Broadway debut, tied up in a big foul-mouthed holiday bow by the director Austin Pendleton.As there wasn’t much to improve, what you see is mostly the same, with Stephen McKinley Henderson (as Walter, the police officer) and Liza Colón-Zayas (as the Church Lady) brilliantly re-creating their roles, along with most of the rest of the original cast. (The one newcomer is Common, playing Junior, Walter’s son.) The expressive revolving set, so crucial to a tale about who gets to live where, still reveals what the real estate ads don’t: the mess down the hallway, the joists beneath the floor, the bricks behind the plaster.The script, too, is mostly unaltered, except for the addition of a comment firmly rooting the story in 2014. It focuses on crusty Walter, who in the wake of his wife’s death has allowed himself and their rent-controlled Riverside Drive apartment to deteriorate. Junior now runs a fencing operation from his bedroom, which he shares with Lulu (Rosal Colón), a girlfriend supposedly studying accountancy but who seems more likely to be a prostitute. Oswaldo (Victor Almanzar), a recovering addict but not for long, likewise lives on Walter’s largess. A dog of uncertain provenance uses the living room as a toilet.Each of them, probably even the dog, has a rich back story and a richer, crosscutting problem; Guirgis is masterly at getting a boil going without seeming to work too hard at it. But the central crisis is Walter’s. Having been shot by a fellow policeman eight years earlier, in what he says was a racially motivated crime — Walter is Black and the shooter was white — he has always refused to sign the nondisclosure agreement that was among the city’s requirements for a payout.“An honorable man doesn’t just settle a lawsuit ‘no fault’ and lend his silence to hypocrisy and racism and the grievous violation of all our civil rights,” he tells Junior, who is less than impressed with the virtuous display.“Well, that’s a nice story,” he answers.When Walter’s former patrol partner and her fiancé bring news that the city is offering a new deal, that story finally turns. Over a home-cooked dinner of “shrimps and veal,” the partner, Audrey O’Connor (Elizabeth Canavan), urges Walter to accept the deal so he can secure his shaky hold on the apartment, which even at $1,500 a month — a tenth of its market rent — is a stretch on his pension. But she has other motives, too. The fiancé, Lieutenant Dave Caro (Michael Rispoli), is a slick operator hoping to enhance his department prospects by settling the case without a public-relations nightmare.Are Audrey and Dave right, despite their mixed motivations, to push Walter toward resolution? In any case, Walter insists on a deal of his own, the terms of which will make you gasp and then make you think.That all of this is the same as in 2014 doesn’t mean the play hasn’t changed. Great works always revise themselves, as time finds endless new lenses to put in front of them. The past eight years have underlined in “Riverside” the story of white police officers shooting Black men — even fellow officers — and blaming the victims, as Walter is blamed, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Those crimes, and their concomitant defenses, retint the story with outrage.Walt Spangler’s revolving set, the backdrop to a tale about who gets to live where, reveals the cracks in the plaster and the joists beneath the floor that real estate ads leave out.Sara KrulwichBut the play puts a natural brake on such interpretations, because Guirgis, entering any complicated debate, can’t help himself from complicating it further. Walter’s story, like everyone else’s, is open to question. Is he out for justice or just revenge? And against whom? The wheelchair, we quickly learn, isn’t his.Complications like that are unpleasant for absolutists; Guirgis’s needling of victimhood may please as few people on the left as his needling of Rudolph Giuliani may rile those on the right. Along with anyone who can’t tolerate profanity, which is basically the play’s linguistic glue, they will have a hard time warming to a playwright who isn’t interested in telling us what’s right. He only wants to show us what’s real.Everyone should see it anyway, to experience the pleasure of a great cast making a shrimps-and-veal meal of the incredibly rich material, even as it flips between comedy and tragedy on its way to the truth in between. Actually, that meal may even be too rich at points; the final scene can’t quite digest all that came before, and there are brief moments throughout when the actors’ love for the material itself begins to show through the facade of character, like those bricks behind the plaster.For the most part, though, Pendleton’s production is amazingly confident, featuring not just Walt Spangler’s set, but also top-notch lighting by Keith Parham, sound and music by Ryan Rumery and, especially, costumes by Alexis Forte, which tell their own story on top of Guirgis’s. And when the scene changes are as expressive as the actors’ attention to every nuance of each other’s actions, staging becomes a kind of emotional choreography: thrilling, precise, impossible to pin down.That’s Guirgis’s sweet spot. In plays like “Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven,” “Our Lady of 121st Street,” “Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train” and “The Last Days of Judas Iscariot” — all premiered or revived in New York in the past five years — he consistently writes about characters for whom the world as it is, or at least as it seems, offers no reliable templates for creating a credible self. A nice girl can be a prostitute. An addict can be loving. A hero can cry wolf. A fraud can make a miracle.That’s scary and yet also liberating. As the Church Lady repeatedly tells Walter, “Always we are free.” At any moment we can choose to be something better, or worse, than we are — or, in Guirgis World, most likely both.Between Riverside and CrazyThrough Feb. 12 at the Helen Hayes Theater, Manhattan; 2st.com. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. More

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      New Broadway Labor Agreement Includes Pandemic-Prompted Changes

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      The deal, ratified by members of Actors’ Equity, provides salary increases for performers and stage managers, and allows producers to make short-term hires.The union representing theater actors and stage managers has ratified a new contract that provides pay increases for those working on Broadway and, in a move prompted by the coronavirus pandemic, allows producers to make short-term hires to cover absent actors.Actors’ Equity Association announced Monday that its membership had voted in favor of the three-year contract, which by late 2024 would raise the minimum salary for performers working on Broadway to $2,638 per week. That reflects three years of pay increases: 5 percent this year, 4 percent next year, and 4 percent the following year.The Broadway contract, negotiated by Equity and the Broadway League, applies to commercial productions on Broadway, as well as to so-called sit-down productions, which are extended runs of commercial shows elsewhere in the country.The contract is important because Broadway is the segment of the American theater world where artists can most reliably make a living wage, and also because provisions in this contract influence others in the industry. The union will next turn its attention to negotiating contracts for touring shows and regional theaters (the regional theater contract also applies to the four New York nonprofits that operate Broadway houses).This Broadway contract, which goes into effect immediately, is the first negotiated since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. As shows returned, the challenge of staying open when company members tested positive for the coronavirus called attention to the important work of understudies, swings and standbys who keep shows going when illness strikes, and also highlighted the tension between a historic show-must-go-on ethic and disease transmission.The contract is the first to provide paid sick leave for anyone working on an Equity contract; previously, those earning above a certain amount were not entitled to paid sick days. In another first, the contract caps how many roles a swing can cover in one performance.And the contract allows for the use of short-term actors, with rehearsal time, to cover performer absences. The provision was a concession by the union to the producers.The union also highlighted a few wins for its members: a limited number of very long rehearsal days, and fewer rehearsal hours post-opening.The contract includes several new provisions prompted by discussion within the industry, and the broader society, about diversity concerns. Among them: commitments to employ technicians for certain hair styles, to consider gender identity when identifying spaces for dressing rooms and bathrooms, to set up a committee to talk about onstage intimacy, and to improve casting notices for those with disabilities.Kate Shindle, the president of Actors’ Equity, said the deal was a compromise reflecting the economics of the moment. The contract was ratified by a smaller margin than some previous pacts, suggesting disagreement within the union’s membership about whether it was good enough.“The industry is not entirely back yet, and while we were looking to reinvent the whole way the theater industry operates, we’re also faced with real financial considerations,” Shindle said.She said the wage increases were significant at a time when inflation is high, as are real estate costs in New York (which, of course, is where many Broadway workers live). She also noted that many in the industry had not had work while theaters were shut down, making their current salaries more important.Charlotte St. Martin, the president of the Broadway League, said in a statement that she was pleased with the ratification of the agreement, “which we believe represents a significant step forward for our industry.”She said several provisions “were ultimately directly responsive to the push from the union for less time spent in rehearsal and more time off for actors,” and she also hailed the diversity provisions, which were, she said, “in the forefront of our priorities.”“A key component to these changes is language that will allow us to hold everyone, including actors working on our productions, to the same standards when creating a safe and inclusive working environment for all,” she said. “We were able to achieve all of these significant improvements for each side while providing a meaningful and yet responsible economic package.” More

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      ‘Des Moines’ Review: Drowning in the Drink

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      A new production of Denis Johnson’s final play showcases many of his signatures: deadpan absurdism, misfit characters, heavy drinking and statements on the bleak fact of human mortality.Here’s how you make a depth charger: Pour some beer into a jar or mug of your choosing until it’s about halfway full and then drop in a shot glass of whiskey. Then gird your loins, because this isn’t a drink for the delicate.And yet the odd characters in “Des Moines,” which had its New York premiere on Friday night at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, can’t even use the depth chargers (as they call the drink) that they consume as an excuse for their peculiarities. The play, written by Denis Johnson and presented by Theater for a New Audience with Evenstar Films, drops a cast of characters into the depths and doesn’t try to reel them back in. Instead, we’re often the ones lost at sea.Written before he died at 67 in 2017, “Des Moines” is Johnson’s ninth and final play. A celebrated novelist, short story writer, playwright and poet, he is best known for the novel “Tree of Smoke” and the short story collection “Jesus’ Son.”“Des Moines” showcases many of his signatures: deadpan absurdism, misfit characters, heavy drinking and drug addiction, deception, and statements on the bleak, incontestable fact of human mortality.In one scene in the play, Dan (Arliss Howard), a 60-something cabdriver in present-day Des Moines, sits at an oval table in the center of a rustic wood kitchen, where he asks his pastor Father Michael (Michael Shannon) to do him an unusual favor. “It’s an experiment,” Dan says. “I just want you to suddenly yell at me to wake up — that I’m dreaming.”Though “Des Moines” unfolds across an evening and a morning in the Iowa home of Dan and his wife, Marta (Johanna Day), it may or may not be taking place in Dan’s imagination — or in a bizarre dream shared among its characters. Before the pastor appears, Dan recounts to Marta how he picked up a heavily made-up Father Michael for a ride outside a gay club on a Friday night, and how a woman named Mrs. Drinkwater (Heather Alicia Simms) keeps visiting him at work. She is a widow whose husband recently died in a plane crash nearby.Nef and Michael Shannon in “Des Moines.”Travis Emery HackettBut Dan and Marta seem as though they’re having different conversations: He’s jumping among the encounter with Father Michael; his conversations with Mrs. Drinkwater, whose husband Dan drove to the airport the morning of the crash; and the virtues of butter over margarine. She’s waiting for the chance to tell him about a serious diagnosis she has received.Father Michael, Mrs. Drinkwater, Marta and Dan, along with the couple’s granddaughter, Jimmy (Hari Nef), a trans woman whose botched gender affirming surgery has left her using a wheelchair, all join together in seemingly endless rounds of depth chargers. This party turns from karaoke to table-banging, thrashing and sex in a kind of otherworldly bacchanal of troubled souls.The dialogue is imbued with an uncanny disconnect; the characters feel so aloof that when they speak to one another, it’s as if they’re just shooting random phrases from the separate worlds each inhabits. In the middle of a conversation about Des Moines farmland, Father Michael says to Jimmy and Mrs. Drinkwater, “Sometimes the horror of my youth is so vivid — so near, so accessible, that I feel as if I just got plucked from it one minute ago.”That’s Johnson’s phlegmatic dread, so casual yet biting. But “Des Moines” also lacks the precision of Johnson at his best; there’s a vague emptiness and mourning that underscores every bit of the play.A program note mentions that Johnson and Arin Arbus, the director of this production, met in 2015 to workshop “Des Moines.” When asked if he would clarify the “mysterious and difficult” work, Johnson refused.Arbus’s direction accommodates Johnson’s vagaries and quirks, so watching the production feels as if we’re being taken on a long, slow ride to a remote destination — only to arrive, unceremoniously, at nothingness.There’s a tediousness to the production that somewhat diminishes its charms, the main one being the talented cast. Howard’s Dan is both disgruntled and likable despite himself and his low-key racism and homophobia; he rambles on about his dreams but refuses to dig any deeper, too frightened to address the hurt that he and others around him carry.Day keeps Marta taut with an underlying sorrow and resentment that perfectly counter Dan’s uneasy evasions. As Jimmy, Nef brings more color to the character than is written; with a bit of boldness and mischief, she incites some of the night’s mania but then fades into the background. Simms’s performance is a constant surprise, full of buttoned-up restraint, and then wild desperation and touches of something like joy — or as close to that emotion as a woman thrown askew by grief can muster.Shannon is hilariously awkward as Father Michael, lumbering around the stage with a flat-footed shuffle, his shoulders rounded and his pants pulled up an inch or two too high. He plays the pastor like a naïve child stuck in a grown man’s body, equally uncertain of his place in the play’s offbeat and mundane moments.In Riccardo Hernández’s set design, the entrances and exits are what often draw the eye: Stage right, the kitchen side door leads out to a small landing and stairs that allow us to hear every entrant before we see them. At stage left, an interior hallway, we get brief peeks into the characters’ dispositions, as when Marta gently braces one hand against the wall — just the slightest hint of difficulty. And upstage, behind the kitchen, French doors open to reveal Jimmy’s space, a jamboree of multicolored Christmas lights and beaming ornaments in stark contrast to the rest of Dan and Marta’s demure home décor.At some point in the midst of the show’s madness, Mrs. Drinkwater exclaims: “Everything is so ridiculous. It’s incredible.” It’s true — everything is ridiculous, and after an hour and 40 minutes, “Des Moines,” like a night spent drinking at home, ends with a stubborn lack of resolution. What do you get after getting sloshed one evening in the company of ridiculous weirdos? An incredible, senseless hangover.Des MoinesThrough Jan. 1 at Theater for a New Audience, Brooklyn; tfana.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      Review: ‘Hoagy Carmichael’s Stardust Road’ Takes the Path Too Well-Traveled

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      The York Theater Company’s production is enthusiastically performed by a cast of seven. But the nostalgic revue pushes the limits of its case for the songwriter’s music.You don’t hear much about Hoagy Carmichael these days, even if the prolific Tin Pan Alley songwriter is never too far. His 1927 song “Stardust” recently featured in “The Crown” and last year’s “Nightmare Alley” remake, and anyone who’s watched “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” has likely been taken in by Jane Russell’s lusty delivery of “Ain’t There Anyone Here For Love?” The hitmaker himself even popped up this year in the New York Film Festival’s restoration of the 1946 film “Canyon Passage,” playing a happy-go-lucky musician — bearing little resemblance to Ian Fleming’s dashing 007, whose looks Carmichael was said to have inspired.So the York Theater Company’s production of “Hoagy Carmichael’s Stardust Road,” a nostalgic revue developed in collaboration with his son, arrives with little baggage, and lands nicely enough. Tamely directed by Susan H. Schulman, the 90-minute production presents dozens of Carmichael’s standards, enthusiastically performed by a cast of seven. But the dance numbers, carried mostly by an agile Cory Lingner, come few and far between. The show is sporadically choreographed by Michael Lichtefeld, who leaves several segments largely unadorned, pushing the limits of its agreeable case for the man’s music.There’s a loose narrative throughline, which feels sort of like watching TV Land through an agreeable NyQuil haze — not necessarily a bad thing. Max, played by Dion Simmons Grier, runs the quaint Stardust Roadhouse saloon, and the show follows him and a few patrons through the first half of the 20th century. Each of the musical’s five acts, by way of James Morgan and Vincent Gunn’s scenic design, softly nods at Old Hollywood tropes (Club Old Man Harlem, U.S.O. Canteen), swapping wooden bar stools for brassier ones without much affecting the music choices.Now, Carmichael does not seem to have purists or Twitter stans gunning for faithful recreations of his work, so with over 40 songs on the program, it’s a missed opportunity that Lawrence Yurman’s arrangements don’t take more liberties with where Carmichael’s simple tunes might go. The excellent six-person band, beautifully amplified by Julian Evans’s crisp sound design, is certainly good for it; their smooth transitions set a crucial, continuous pace without which the piece would seriously falter.The band’s smooth transitions set a crucial, continuous pace, and Jenerson’s slow numbers are standouts.Carol RoseggThe respectfulness of the orchestrations serves its slower numbers well, as in Kayla Jenerson’s gorgeous “The Nearness of You,” and the mash-up of “Skylark” and “Stardust” she later duets with Sara Esty, a standout with a persuasive knack for the time period. But the classic “Georgia On My Mind” distinguishes itself as much thanks to the touching melancholy the band provides — get ready to feel like you’re slow dancing at a blues joint throughout — as it is because it allows Grier to soar into a full-throated vocal crescendo that lends the night a needed bit of soulfulness.Only “Heart and Soul,” sung with both by Danielle Herbert, breaks completely free of convention, jauntily staged as a cabaret act, with Herbert plunking away on a comically small toy piano. Then again, the handsome Mike Schwitter is let down when made to deliver “I Get Along Without You Very Well (Except Sometimes),” a song perhaps best quietly sobbed on the shower floor, as an 11 o’clock number.The revue has been in development for at least a decade and, though it in many ways still feels like a workshop, it is not without charm, thanks to its timeless music and chipper performers. While this current staging is missing a requisite ice bucket and ashtray next to each seat, it’s a low-key, classy affair best enjoyed with a pen in hand, marking down which songs might suit your next dinner party.Hoagy Carmichael’s Stardust RoadThrough Dec. 31 at the York Theater Company, Manhattan; yorktheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      The Breakout Stars of 2022

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      Here are the actors, pop stars, dancers and artists who broke away from the pack this year, delighting us and making us think.For many of us, 2022 was the year we emerged more fully from our pandemic cocoons, venturing out to movie theaters, museums, concerts — exploring our entertainment with eager, if weary, hearts and eyes before returning home to our TVs. Along the way, artists and performers across the world of the arts had, for the first time in years, the chance to connect more closely and fully with audiences, and deliver big. Here are seven stars who captured our attention in this moment and gave us a fresh perspective.TelevisionQuinta BrunsonIn 2014, Quinta Brunson had a viral Instagram hit on her hands: a series of videos called “The Girl Who’s Never Been on a Nice Date.” At Buzzfeed, where she was first paid for taste-testing Doritos, she made popular comedic videos for the site and then sold the streaming series “Broke” to YouTube Red. In 2019, she starred in and wrote for the debut season of HBO’s “A Black Lady Sketch Show.”That trajectory set her up to deliver a rare feat: a warmhearted but not saccharine network sitcom with a pitch-perfect ensemble cast that has managed to delight critics and audiences — all while illuminating the problems of underfunded public schools. The mockumentary-style comedy, “Abbott Elementary,” which she created and stars in, debuted on ABC in December 2021 and was nominated for seven Emmy Awards this year, of which it won three.“I think a lot of people are enjoying having something that is light and nuanced,” Brunson, 32, told The New York Times Magazine earlier this year. “‘Abbott’ came at the right time.”MoviesStephanie HsuIn “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” Stephanie Hsu plays a despairing daughter named Joy and the chaos-inducing villain Jobu Tupaki.A24When Stephanie Hsu was a child, she told her mother that she wanted to be an actor. Her mother “pointed at a TV screen and said, ‘There’s nobody that looks like you — that seems impossible,’” Hsu, 32, told Variety this year. Turns out, her presence onscreen was both possible and unforgettable, particularly her jaw-dropping performance in this year’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” a mind-twisting acid trip through the multiverse (and the human condition) that was a box-office hit and had critics raving.In “Everything,” her first feature film, Hsu nailed the complex role of both a depressed, despairing daughter (opposite Michelle Yeoh as her mother) and the maniacally evil, chaos-inducing villain Jobu Tupaki.“I think it’s so rare that you get to experience the scope of range within one character in one movie,” Hsu told The Times.Next up for the actress is a role in the Disney+ action-comedy series “American Born Chinese”; in Rian Johnson’s Peacock series, “Poker Face,” alongside Natasha Lyonne; and in “The Fall Guy,” an action movie starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt.Pop MusicJack HarlowThe rapper Jack Harlow, who released the album “Come Home the Kids Miss You” in May, earned three Grammy nominations in November.Eduardo Munoz/ReutersThose on TikTok probably first caught wind of the rapper Jack Harlow in 2020 with his viral track “Whats Poppin.” But it wasn’t until his verse on Lil Nas X’s “Industry Baby” last year — the song topped the Billboard Hot 100 — that his star really began its ascent.Now, the laid-back Harlow, 24 and a Kentucky native, had his first solo No. 1 hit, the Fergie-sampling “First Class,” from his second major-label album, “Come Home the Kids Miss You,” which dropped in May. In November, he earned three Grammy nominations, including for best rap album. And in October, he served as both host and musical guest on “Saturday Night Live.”“I’m looking to get away from rapping in a way where people can marvel at it and more something we can all enjoy together,” he told The Times this year.Soon, Harlow will star in a remake of the 1992 film “White Men Can’t Jump.”ArtTiona Nekkia McCloddenThe artist Tiona Nekkia McClodden in her studio; she had three major presentations of her work in New York this year.Hannah Price for The New York TimesOver the last few years, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, 41, “has emerged as one of the most singular artists of our aesthetically rich, free-range time,” Roberta Smith, co-chief art critic of The Times, wrote in her review of McClodden’s exhibition “Mask/Conceal/Carry,” a meditation on guns shown at 52 Walker in TriBeCa this year. Smith called it a “brooding beast of an exhibition, bathed in blue light.”And that was only one of three major presentations of McClodden’s work in New York in 2022. At the Museum of Modern Art, she presented a room-size fetish-themed tribute to Brad Johnson, a Black gay poet who died in 2011. At the Shed, she celebrated the groundbreaking 1983 festival Dance Black America with a program that included custom dance floors and video portraits of dancers.McClodden, who was a star of the 2019 Whitney Biennial (she won the Bucksbaum Award), emerged as a filmmaker before expanding to boundary-pushing art installations.Amid the pandemic and the George Floyd protests and counter protests, she decided to learn how to shoot guns, an activity that bore “Mask/Conceal/Carry.” “The statement is that I’m in the world, I didn’t try to run away from my position in this world, and I wanted to be able to defend myself,” she told The Times this summer.TheaterJulie BenkoA scene from the Broadway musical “Funny Girl” with Jared Grimes, left, as Eddie Ryan and Julie Benko as Fanny Brice.Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade, 2022Few can say they’ve seized an opportunity like Julie Benko, whose monthlong summer run as Fanny Brice in the Broadway revival of “Funny Girl” changed a lot for the actress-soprano who stepped into the role full-time between Beanie Feldstein and Lea Michele in the highly talked-about production. But even that degree of pressure didn’t weigh her down.“When you get the chance to play such an amazing role, there’s no need to take it too seriously,” Benko told the Times. “You just have to enjoy it.” Now, Benko has the title of “alternate” in “Funny Girl,” not “understudy,” performing the lead in most Thursday night shows (with an extra performance on Monday, Dec. 26, and for a full week in late February).Benko, 33, had understudied several roles before “Funny Girl,” including in the national “Spring Awakening” tour in 2008, and later in the “Les Misérables” tour, where she worked her way up to Cosette, the protagonist, from roles like “innkeeper’s wife.”In December, she will be performing at 54 Below in New York alongside her husband, the pianist Jason Yeager.Classical MusicDavóne TinesThe bass-baritone Davóne Tines performs a scene in “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife)” by Tyshawn Sorey at the Park Avenue Armory.Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“No one could accuse Davóne Tines of lacking ambition,” Oussama Zahr, a classical music critic, wrote recently in The Times when reviewing “Recital No. 1: MASS,” the bass-baritone’s personal and thoughtfully arranged Carnegie Hall debut“I really like structures,” Tines, who is in his mid-30s, told The New Yorker of “MASS” last year. “The ritualistic template of the Mass is a proven structure — centuries of culture have upheld it. Anything that I put into it will assume a certain shape. And what I put into it is my own lived experience.”Accolades for Tines have been mounting, including for, this fall, his performance in a staged version of Tyshawn Sorey’s “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife),” at the Park Avenue Armory; and for “Everything Rises,” his collaboration with the violinist Jennifer Koh, which opened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.In the work, Tines and Koh recount their complicated relationships with classical music as people of color. “I was the moth, lured by your flame,” Tines sings. “I hated myself for needing you, dear white people: money, access and fame.”DanceCatherine HurlinThe ballerina Catherine Hurlin, who was recently promoted to principal dancer at American Ballet Theater, in “Of Love and Rage,” by Alexei Ratmansky at the Metropolitan Opera House.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesShe may only be 26, but the ballerina Catherine Hurlin has been ascending for more than half of her life. As a girl, she secured a full scholarship to the American Ballet Theater’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School. Not long after, she became an apprentice with the A.B.T., then a member of the corps de ballet and eventually a soloist in 2018.Then this summer, she was one of three dancers promoted to the role of principal.“The simple serenity of Hurlin’s face, framed by cascading curls, is riveting, as is the daring amplitude of her expressive, singular dancing,” Gia Kourlas, the dance critic of The Times, wrote in June of Hurlin’s performance in Alexei Ratmansky’s “Of Love and Rage.”And in July, when Hurlin made her debut in the double role of Odette-Odile in “Swan Lake,” Kourlas called her “the future of Ballet Theater, the kind of dancer who has a fresh take on story ballets.”Her nickname? Hurricane. More