Theater

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      New York Theater Workshop Announces New Artistic Director’s First Season

      by

      The Off Broadway nonprofit will embrace risk, said Patricia McGregor, its leader, favoring fresh over established works.For New York Theater Workshop’s first season programmed after the departure of its longtime artistic director, the Off Broadway fixture plans to produce an intergenerational saga centered on a Black family in Illinois, a lesbian farce set on a naval base, a story about a mysterious album of Nazi-era photographs, and a play with an unusual star: a Microsoft text-to-speech tool.The slate of shows, announced on Friday, has been curated by Patricia McGregor, who replaced James C. Nicola as artistic director last year. The organization has a track record of producing influential work, including its biggest hit, “Rent,” as well as celebrated productions such as “Hadestown,” “Once,” “Slave Play” and “What the Constitution Means to Me.”The 2023-24 season includes three world premieres and one work that debuted last year, favoring fresh over recognizable work. (The most recent season featured the Broadway-bound “Merrily We Roll Along,” starring Daniel Radcliffe, Jonathan Groff and Lindsay Mendez.) McGregor said that while there is certainly a place for those kinds of entrenched works at New York Theater Workshop, her inaugural season is focused on embracing risk and supporting artists whose work could be lost if the theater world becomes overly focused on name recognition, trusted forms and trying to ensure commercial success.“We’re more of a laboratory than a factory,” McGregor said. “Part of what the workshop wants to be is a testing ground.”This fall, McGregor will direct “The Refuge Plays” by Nathan Alan Davis, whose play “Nat Turner in Jerusalem” was staged at New York Theater Workshop in 2016. Produced with and staged at Roundabout Theater Company, the work is about four generations of a Black family who live in a home that they built themselves in a forest. An earlier version of the production was scheduled to start rehearsing in 2020 and was delayed by the pandemic.Later in the year, the nonprofit will stage “Merry Me,” a new work by the South Korean playwright and director Hansol Jung (“Wolf Play”). In “Merry Me,” which will be directed by Leigh Silverman (who directed last year’s voting-rights musical “Suffs”), a restless lieutenant seeks to pleasure other women on the base — including the general’s wife — during a blackout.“I love you so much I could die,” slated for winter 2024 and directed by Lucas Hnath, employs a Microsoft text-to-speech product for the monologues, in between songs performed by the playwright, Mona Pirnot. (The Microsoft-fueled actor is funny and strange, McGregor said, but it also comes off as surprisingly human.)Next spring, the company will produce Tectonic Theater Project’s “Here There Are Blueberries,” a play by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich about a collection of Nazi-era photographs that is delivered to the desk of an archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, making the news and setting a German businessman out on a journey of discovery about his family. Kaufman, who was behind “The Laramie Project,” will also direct the play, which premiered at La Jolla Playhouse in California and is currently onstage at the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington, D.C. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Brokeback Mountain’ Is Now a Play in London’s West End

      by

      Much has changed for L.G.B.T.Q. people since Annie Proulx’s short story was published in 1997. But a new theatrical version is a reminder that homophobia is far from over.In 2016, when the theater director Jonathan Butterell was considering a proposal to adapt Annie Proulx’s 1997 short story “Brokeback Mountain” for the stage, he wondered how to translate the prose’s vast landscape and insular emotions into a play.Last month, in a central London rehearsal studio, Butterell and Ashley Robinson, who wrote the play, tried to answer that question. To help the cast connect with Proulx’s story of a cowboy and a ranch hand falling in love against the wide-stretching landscapes of 1960s Wyoming, black-and-white photographs of American plains and mountain ranges were tacked to the walls during rehearsals.“The vastness has been there from the very beginning,” Butterell said in a recent interview. When it came to evoking the story’s emotional landscape, the director had stuck one sepia-toned photograph, of a lone cowboy in a snow-covered Wyoming, behind a pillar. The image “speaks to the bit of us that feels alone in the world,” Butterell said. “Maybe he’s at peace with this, maybe it’s the source of his agony.”Butterell’s “Brokeback Mountain” opened in previews May 10 at @sohoplace in London’s West End. It’s the first time the story has been adapted for theater — an opera by Charles Wuorinen premiered in Madrid in 2014 — and each version now follows in the footsteps of Proulx’s text and the film that popularized it: Ang Lee’s 2005 Academy Award-winning adaptation, which is often cited as one of the best L.G.B.T.Q. films of all time.Faist, left, and Hedges at @sohoplace. During rehearsals, black-and-white photographs of American plains and mountain ranges were tacked to the walls.Suzie Howell for The New York TimesButterell said he was aware of his audience having expectations based on the film. “They’re inevitable,” he said, “but I don’t mind that.”This theatrical version also has some Hollywood clout. Its lead characters, Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar, are played by the BAFTA-nominated actor Mike Faist and the Oscar-nominated actor Lucas Hedges.In late 2016, Robinson first wrote a treatment for what he called a “memory play” based on the short story, after speaking with the composer Dan Gillespie Sells and Butterell. Robinson’s script stated that the Wyoming setting should not be conveyed “in a purely literal sense,” and his story is set in 2013, with an older version of del Mar reflecting on the years he spent with Twist between 1963 and 1983.Proulx approved of Robinson’s vision. She has “high hopes for the play,” she said in a recent email interview. “When I read Ashley’s script several years ago, I thought he had done a fine job.”In Proulx’s story, del Mar and Twist’s interior worlds are conveyed by an omniscient narrator. In the stage adaptation, music does much of that work.“These two men can’t sing,” Gillespie Sells said, because “they don’t have an emotional dialogue.” Instead, a character called The Balladeer — played by the Scottish singer-songwriter Eddi Reader — sings with an onstage country and western band. “She takes us through time,” Butterell said. “Sometimes it’s from night to day. Sometimes it’s 10 years.”“Brokeback Mountain” will be the first time its two lead actors have appeared onstage in five years. Faist, who plays Twist, originated the role of Connor Murphy in “Dear Evan Hansen” on Broadway, and has had more recent success in film, including Steven Spielberg’s 2021 remake of “West Side Story.”Hedges “hadn’t acted in a while” when he was sent the script, he said, having been focusing on writing instead. The “Brokeback” offer and playing del Mar changed that. “There wasn’t an angle I didn’t love about this,” he said.“As terrifying and frustrating as it is, I really am having the time of my life,” Faist, left, said of the production.Shona LouiseAs the project entered its final week of rehearsals, both actors were grappling with the process in different ways. Hedges said he was experiencing “tragic and triumphant ups and downs” about his own work. “I have a day where I think I’ve figured it all out, and then a day when it all disappears,” he said. The “collective experience” of theater was daunting compared to working in film, he said, adding that onstage, “I can’t use tricks to make it through.”Faist concurred: “It’s a challenge, and it’s terrifying,” mainly because of the expectations of having to match the source material and 2005 film, he said. “But as terrifying and frustrating as it is, I really am having the time of my life,” he added.Butterell said that Faist and Hedges were “as men, as actors, very different creatures.” Faist, he said, had “a sense of life and vivacity,” while Hedges “has this deeply complex interior landscape that’s very much of Ennis.”Neither Hedges, Faist nor Butterell had revisited Lee’s film since they were approached for the project. “The truth of the matter is, no matter what, he’s not Heath Ledger and I’m not Jake Gyllenhaal,” Faist said of the film’s two lead stars, who both earned Oscar nominations for their performances. He and Hedges, Faist added, would both bring their “own weird things” to the roles.The production has forced Faist to confront his “traumas,” he said. “We can take those traumas, turn them around,” he added, and, he hopes, make the audience “think deeply about their own lives.”Following the success of the “Brokeback Mountain” film, Proulx said fans of her text sent her fan fiction that rewrote the ending of her short story, claiming the original was too sad. She told the The Paris Review that those fans had “misunderstood” the story and stated that it was, most importantly, about “homophobia.”Jonathan Butterell, the play’s director, said his two lead actors had different strengths: Faist, left, has “a sense of life and vivacity,” while Lucas, right, “has this deeply complex interior landscape that’s very much of Ennis.”Suzie Howell for The New York TimesThis is the first adaptation of “Brokeback” to be released since the Supreme Court made gay marriage legal in all 50 U.S. states. Robinson — who lives in Brooklyn but was raised in the tiny town of Lockhart, S.C. — said he wrote it to remind audiences that gay trauma still exists.“These stories aren’t necessarily being told anymore because of a trend to put onstage what we want the world to be,” he said, referring to the theater community. “That’s a wonderful thing to do, but we shouldn’t cancel out all of the opportunities to talk about what’s going on underneath it.”Butterell added that the fight against homophobia was “not over” in Britain either, citing a recent spike in the number of attacks on L.G.B.T.Q. people.“This is a tragedy,” Butterell said of the play. “Of course love exists — I don’t want it to be solemn — but the tragedy of this piece is that fear wins.” More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      Review: At ‘Tartuffe’ in the Park, Hypocrisy Is No Picnic

      by

      The 17th-century play, staged by the theater company Molière in the Park, skewers those who preach morality yet practice anything but.I like to think that Molière, the great French playwright who died in 1673, would have really enjoyed the flagrant hypocrisy of our current political moment. Each month seems to bring new duplicities and new scandals, lies big and small — the résumés embroidered like Rococo tapestries, the lawmakers endorsing conspiracy theories to boost their careers. A devotee of prevarication and double-dealing, Molière would have made the most, in three acts, of stories like these. In some ways and in multiple plays, he already has. More than 350 years dead, he can seem effortlessly, wickedly contemporary.But a current production of “Tartuffe,” presented by the theater company Molière in the Park, drawing from the playwright’s original version, takes a different approach. A cause célèbre in 1664 when it was written, the play was quickly banned by an archbishop with a limited sense of humor. It skewers not only those who preach morality while practicing alternatives, but also the toadies and dupes who keep people like that in power. Sounds pertinent, doesn’t it? This slick, streamlined production, however, staged outdoors in Prospect Park by the director Lucie Tiberghien, is so busy stomping around its small stage that it never reaches out into the present.The English-language premiere, which credits Maya Slater as its translator, has simplified the original, reducing the number of characters and mostly dispensing with the third act. When “Tartuffe or The Hypocrite” begins, Tartuffe (Matthew Rauch, oilier than a perfect New York slice), a priestly figure, is already installed in the home of Orgon (Yonatan Gebeyehu), a wealthy man. Orgon’s wife, Elmire (Michelle Veintimilla), and his son and brother-in-law all see through Tartuffe, but Orgon and his mother refuse to believe ill of him. Eventually, Tartuffe propositions Elmire. But even this doesn’t sway Orgon. He would rather disinherit his own family than believe his own wife.Molière in the Park first staged “Tartuffe” nearly three years ago, with a different cast and using a different translation. That was a pioneering work of Zoom theater, presented back when most of us were still figuring out how to use the mute button. (A live version, with a somewhat changed cast, followed a year later.) In his New York Times review, Jesse Green called the streamed show “full of delight for our undelightful time” and praised the production’s allusions to the Trump White House and Black Lives Matter. So how strange that this production, despite its modern dress, resists contemporary allusion entirely, reducing “Tartuffe” to a pedestrian domestic farce.Under Tiberghien’s direction, the play begins in high energy and high dudgeon, with most of the characters racing around the stage — a square set atop another square — and speaking couplets speedily, long before the audience has any understanding of what’s what and who’s who. That stage is plopped into the middle of a circular plaza at the park’s LeFrak Center, which serves as an ice-skating rink in the winter and a splash pad in the summer. The play, which is relentlessly interior, seems disconnected from this environment.And at the matinee I saw, it failed to connect with its audience — or at least the several dozen middle school students in attendance, who napped, whispered, fidgeted and surreptitiously checked phones. Teenagers are, like Molière, keen to discover and condemn adult duplicity. But barring a slow-motion sequence at the play’s end, they found little to divert or engage them. As both teenagers and headline readers know, we are in a moment of pervasive political and religious insincerity. Someone should tell this “Tartuffe.”Tartuffe or The HypocriteThrough May 27 at the Prospect Park LeFrak Center, Brooklyn; moliereinthepark.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

    • 125 Shares129 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Bad Cinderella’ to Close on Broadway, Ending Lloyd Webber’s Streak

      by

      When it concludes on June 4, an unbroken string of Andrew Lloyd Webber shows since 1979 will come to an end. His latest opened only in March.“Bad Cinderella,” a revisionist riff on the classic fairy tale, will close on June 4, bringing to an end, at least for the time being, composer Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 43-year-long streak of shows on Broadway.The latest musical, which opened March 23, was not the pinnacle of that career — it was greeted on Broadway by hostile reviews, garnered zero Tony nominations and struggled at the box office. Last week it played to houses that were only 54 percent full and grossed just $326,303, which made it the lowest-grossing musical on Broadway.It had fared slightly better in London, and not just because “bad” was not part of the title there — critics had looked on it more favorably when it opened in the West End after multiple pandemic-related delays, but it had only a modest run and a closing clouded by the way the cast was informed and some of the words Lloyd Webber used to describe the turn of events.The musical is, like most Cinderella stories, about a shabbily treated young woman whose fortunes change when she meets a prince. The twists, in this production, are that the protagonist is rebellious, Prince Charming is gay, and beauty standards are oppressive.In addition to music by Lloyd Webber, who is best known as the wildly successful composer of hit musicals like “Cats,” “Evita” and “The Phantom of the Opera,” the musical features a book created by Emerald Fennell (the Oscar-winning screenwriter of “Promising Young Woman”) and then adapted by the playwright Alexis Scheer (“Our Dear Dead Drug Lord”), and lyrics by David Zippel (who won a Tony years ago for writing the lyrics for “City of Angels”). “Bad Cinderella” is directed by Laurence Connor, who previously enjoyed more success directing Lloyd Webber’s 2015 musical, “School of Rock.”“Bad Cinderella” was capitalized for up to $19 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission; that money has not been recouped. The musical’s lead producer is Christine Schwarzman, a lawyer; together she and her husband, the Blackstone billionaire Stephen A. Schwarzman, are major players in New York financial and philanthropic circles. Christine Schwarzman has become increasingly active as a producer on Broadway through her production company, No Guarantees; she is also a lead producer of “Fat Ham,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in drama and is nominated for the best play Tony Award.At the time of its closing, “Bad Cinderella” will have played 33 preview performances and 85 regular performances. More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Daddy’ Review: Deeper Into the Internet’s Darkest Corners

      by

      In Marion Siéfert’s much-anticipated new show, the French director explores the dynamics of online grooming.The French stage director Marion Siéfert has her finger on the pulse of our digital lives. In “2 or 3 Things I Know About You,” she playfully tackled oversharing on Facebook, before turning to the perils of online streaming in “_jeanne_dark_” — a show that fell foul of Instagram’s moderation policies when it was relayed live on the platform.With “Daddy,” a sharp, no-holds-barred new production at the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe, in Paris, Siéfert has ventured even further into the internet’s dark corners. In it, a 13-year-old is groomed online by an older man and gets lost in a virtual reality game that exploits teenage girls for profit.It also marks a new stage in Siéfert’s career. “Daddy” is her first big-budget production for a major playhouse, and one of the Paris season’s most anticipated premieres. So Siéfert is swinging much bigger, on every level: larger cast, more atmospheric sets and a somewhat indulgent running time of three and a half hours. Yet her biting originality remains intact.Reality is no match for screen entertainment in “Daddy.” The central character, Mara, is a quiet teenager from southern France. A subtly written scene, early on, introduces her family: Her parents, a nurse and a security guard, are too exhausted by their poorly paid jobs to devote much attention to their daughters. It’s no surprise that whenever she can, Mara escapes to the brighter landscape of online gaming.In an unnamed video game, she joins Julien, a smooth-talking 27-year-old who is her frequent online partner in crime. The easy intimacy they have built is showcased through a spectacular video sequence: On a screen the size of the Odéon’s stage, we see a 3-D game designed by the video artist Antoine Briot in which Mara and Julien’s avatars who shoot at enemies with assault rifles before hopping on fluorescent skateboards.Throughout, we hear Mara and Julien banter over their headsets. “You’re the most badass girl in this game,” Julien says.The groundwork is laid for the abusive dynamic that ensues. When they first meet outside the game, on a video call, Mara confides in Julien that she dreams of being an actress. He compliments her, and tells her about “Daddy” — a new game that allows players, Julien says, to become avatars sponsored by sugar daddies, and showcase their talents to a “fan base.”Peres, right, has appeared in several French television shows and movies; Houel is a newcomer to professional acting.Mathieu BareyreSiéfert has a knack for assembling captivatingly unconventional actors, and just as “_jeanne_dark_” was tailor-made for Helena de Laurens, a shape-shifter unafraid to lean into grotesque physicality, “Daddy” owes much to its two central performers. As Mara, the 15-year-old Lila Houel, who came to the production with limited stage experience, is coarsely candid in these early scenes, with turns of phrase that emphasize the character’s working-class background. Opposite her, Louis Peres, best known as a screen actor, is a startling tech-generation descendant of Christian Bale in “American Psycho”: clean-cut, in control, smoothly scary.Siéfert’s smartest move is to leave video and special effects behind once the two enter the game world of “Daddy.” The virtual space becomes a sinister, near-empty stage dotted with what look like snow mounds, where Mara encounters other preyed-upon young women.The rules of “Daddy” aren’t wholly clear. Men invest so teenage girls can perform routines that earn them points with fans. Houel, for instance, interprets a scene from the movie “Interview with the Vampire”; the sparkling Jennifer Gold, who plays the game’s reigning star Jessica, delivers cabaret-style numbers, including Marilyn Monroe’s “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” from the 1960 film “Let’s Make Love.”The points and the fans are never shown — Siéfert keeps things deliberately vague. The focus is on the dynamics of child abuse, and the erosion of Mara’s individuality and willpower by Julien. While some scenes of verbal and physical violence are troubling enough to make you fear for Houel’s mental health, she rises to the occasion with astonishing sang-froid, quietly haunted then seething in the second act.Siéfert co-wrote “Daddy” with Matthieu Bareyre, and some of the points they make don’t need so much time to come across: Cuts would be welcome. Yet “Daddy” speaks to the zeitgeist and the lives of teenagers today with a mix of ease and critical distance that few stage directors can match.And even at 11:30 p.m., one final scene had the audience sitting up and leaning forward. After a bloody narrative twist, the back wall of the stage slid away to reveal the street outside, and a performer staggered out of the game into the Odéon’s leafy neighborhood — while a few passers-by stopped, puzzled, to peek at the action onstage. In Siéfert’s theater, the real and the virtual keep colliding in invigorating ways.DaddyThrough May 26 at the Odéon — Théâtre de l’Europe in Paris; theatre-odeon.eu. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      Before Taylor Swift or David Bowie, There Was Sarah Bernhardt

      by

      A centenary exhibition in Paris honors the French actress who invented the concept of the global star.In the 19th and early 20th century, everyone worshiped at the altar of Sarah Bernhardt. She was a stage actress at a time when the theater was the equivalent of a stadium, a global celebrity who ushered in the very concept.Born in Paris in 1844, Bernhardt was a sickly child whose mother preferred to ignore her. As an adult, she insisted on standing out. She captivated theatergoers with her hypnotic voice (Victor Hugo ‌‌called it “golden”) and her bombastic performance style. ‌No role, no métier, was too ambitious: She was a writer, painter, sculptor, director, entrepreneur and philanthropist, too. The ‌‌newspapers amplified the legend of the “Divine Sarah,” as did the sundry artists and writers who counted her as their muse.The fanaticism surrounding her was comparable to that inspired by the Beatles or Taylor Swift; her devotees made shrines and gathered below her hotel window; reporters tracked her movements like proto-paparazzi.A 1910 self-portrait by Sarah Bernhardt. As well as an actor and painter, Bernhardt was a sculptor, director, entrepreneur and philanthropist.RMN-Grand Palais, via Art ResourceBernhardt may have been an object of extraordinary fascination, but nothing about her was passive. She played for the camera, generating her public image on her own terms with dynamism and feverish originality. Bernhardt created herself relentlessly — filling her memoirs with tall tales about her origins, living her life on a scale that matched the epics in which she starred — as an act of resistance. Only she would define her, and even now, 100 years after her death in 1923, she dares us to try and pin her down.This roguish quality of Bernhardt’s is what drew me to a 1910 self-portrait that can be seen in the exhibition, “Sarah Bernhardt: And the Woman Created the Star,” running through Aug. 27 at the Petit Palais in Paris. It’s an oil painting of the actress as a clown, smiling slyly. Bernhardt went on to play another clown in Jean Richepin’s 1883 play “Pierrot the Murderer” — a famous photograph of the actress in her Pierrot get-up is on display in the exhibition — but the self-portrait struck me as a statement of purpose.In the 19th century, the clown was something like a poet, walking the line between reality and fiction and imagining an alternative to the status quo. It’s no wonder that Bernhardt saw herself in such a figure. On and offstage, her showmanship placed her in opposition to the everywoman bound by the strictures of France’s Third Republic.A installation view of “Sarah Bernhardt: And the Woman Created the Star.” In the foreground is the costume Bernhardt wore in Victorien Sardou’s play “Théodora,” in 1884.Petit Palais; Photo by Gautier DeblondeBernhardt dazzled because she was free. “She did whatever she wanted and didn’t care what others thought,” said Annick Lemoine, the director of the Petit Palais and one of the co-curators of the Bernhardt exhibition. “She loved men and women. She traveled the world. She had a son out of wedlock and raised him the way she wanted to. She had no fear.”At 18, Bernhardt joined the prestigious company of the Comédie Française theater, in Paris, but she wouldn’t stay long. A spat broke out between a veteran actress and the feisty newcomer, which led to Bernhardt’s dismissal — yet another upheaval in the young woman’s already tumultuous life. Her father was out of the picture and her mother, a Parisian courtesan, had shuttled her daughter around France — to a boarding school, a countryside nursery, a nunnery.Bernhardt, it seems, became accustomed to the hustle, and not long after she was kicked out of the Comédie Française she broke out in an 1868 revival of “Kean” by Alexandre Dumas. From ingénue to full-fledged luminary, she tackled gutsy parts like Cleopatra, Joan of Arc and Hamlet — characters she inhabited, like a wild spirit, rather than merely played. She took her greatest hits on the road and performed for audiences around Europe and the United States.Known for her over-the-top death scenes, Bernhardt had a flair for melodrama, and in her private life, too, she was eccentric with a taste for the macabre. One of her many hats was adorned with a taxidermized bat and she had a photograph taken of herself in a coffin playing dead.A photo portrait of Bernhardt by Otto Wegener around 1899 or 1900, with her bat hat.BnFThose are among the more than 100 objects from private collections and public institutions around the world on display at the Petit Palais, along with artworks by and about Bernhardt, her stage costumes, personal belongings, advertising campaigns, photographs, clips from silent films and phonograph recordings of her voice. (Naturally, she was among the first to exploit the era’s new technologies for self-promotion.)Bernhardt’s greatest roles resembled the personas of David Bowie. She didn’t bring, say, the Empress Théodora or the doomed singer Floria Tosca to life so much as she absorbed them into her own. Passing through a room in the exhibition dedicated to her theater characters is like encountering the bat-cave where she stores the suits and props for her alter egos. In the latter half of her career, bored by the tragic female roles that were her claim to fame, she played teenagers and men — and some teenage boys — as a woman well into her middle age.“Bernhardt was someone who demanded the right to be extraordinary,” said the American playwright Theresa Rebeck in a video interview. Rebeck’s play “Bernhardt/Hamlet,” which premiered on Broadway in 2018, looks at the backstage drama surrounding the actress’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s drama. When Hamlet, a neurotic depressive in most productions, was given the Bernhardt treatment in 1899, the character paradoxically appeared steelier and more overtly masculine than usual, irking traditionalist critics and teasing queer ideas about the fluid nature of identity. “People think that I completely reimagined the history of that staging for the play,” added Rebeck, “but I really didn’t change that much.”Rebeck said she was inspired to write about Bernhardt after visiting the Alphonse Mucha Museum in Prague, home to the towering posters of the actress that have become synonymous with the curvilinear designs of Art Nouveau. In 1894, Bernhardt ‌had ‌commissioned illustrations from a studio to promote ‌her latest play, “Gismonda,” but the first round of mock-ups was not up to snuff. She demanded new versions, stat, which gave the unknown Mucha, one of the company’s minor employees, his big break.Posters depicting Bernhardt by Jean-Michel Liébaux, André-Georges Dréville and François Flameng on display at the Petit Palais.Petit Palais; Photo by Gautier DeblondeMucha went on to design several more posters for Bernhardt’s shows; these lofty works, which depict her like a pagan icon, are also on show at the Petit Palais. Dozens of other artists rendered her likeness: she’s angelic against a golden backdrop in a painting by Jules Masson; a coy mistress in a full-body-length portrait by Georges Clairin. She’s a topless geisha in one sketch, a cartoonish chimera in another.A pioneering self-brander, Bernhardt would have certainly intuited the power of social media. But unlike the influencers of today, many seemingly hellbent on conjuring an illusion of authenticity, she refused to be anything but larger-than-life. That’s why, like Keanu Reeves or Nicolas Cage, she always played a heightened version of herself. The tension between her irrepressible individuality and dramatic skill produced something rare: stardom.Sarah Bernhardt: And the Woman Created the StarThrough Aug. 27 at the Petit Palais, in Paris; petitpalias.fr. More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Theater

      ‘The Habit of Art’ Review: Theater of the Creative Drive

      by

      A play within a play about W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten structures this sex-spiked comedy for the Brits Off Broadway festival at 59E59 Theaters in Manhattan.The poet W.H. Auden is expecting a rent boy, not a journalist. So when he opens the door to his home in Oxford, England, to let the much younger man in, it takes a while to clear up the confusion. Once the visitor has explained that he is not there to take off his pants, he commences an interview.“Are you writing?” he asks the poet.“Am I dead?” Auden ripostes. “I work. I have the habit of art.”Such a smooth, substantial-sounding phrase — a bulwark against others’ intrusive questions and Auden’s own self-doubt. Still, he is telling the truth.In Alan Bennett’s delectably smart, gently moving, sex-spiked comedy “The Habit of Art,” the year is 1972 and Auden is nearing the end of his life. Suspecting that God has rescinded his genius, he keeps writing anyway.“I have to work, or else who am I?” he says.All this, by the way, is part of the play within the play in the excellent production that the Brits Off Broadway festival has brought to 59E59 Theaters in Manhattan. “The Habit of Art” is partially about an imagined meeting between Auden and his old friend, the composer Benjamin Britten. But Bennett frames it with a band of theater people finding their way through a script that tells this story — or, as he wrote in his diary in 2009, the year “The Habit of Art” made its premiere: “a group of differently fractured people coming together to present something whole.”Directed by Philip Franks for the Original Theater Company, “The Habit of Art” takes place in a dingy rehearsal hall (the set is by Adrian Linford) where a company is rehearsing a new play. The absent director has left in charge the savvy, ego-soothing stage manager (a wonderfully brisk Veronica Roberts), while the playwright (Robert Mountford) fends for himself, trying to shield his script from tinkerers who would make cuts or additions.The actor Fitz (Matthew Kelly) is a terrible snob, his dignity affronted by playing Auden — a role that requires him to be stained, stinky, squalid: a great man in unglamorous decline. Henry (Stephen Boxer), as the self-contained Britten, at least gets to look civilized.In the play within the play, the composer pays Auden a visit, seeking his help, though they haven’t seen each other in decades. Britten is writing “Death in Venice” — an opera about an older man obsessed with a beautiful boy, a theme that echoes in “The Habit of Art” — and it’s not going well.“I came because I feel so lonely,” Britten says.“Of course it’s lonely,” Auden reassures him. “It’s new. What do you expect?”That’s the voice of long experience speaking — Auden in his twilight, yes, and also Bennett, who this week turned 89. The playwright knows too that, in his chosen medium, a creator’s isolation eventually gives way to collaboration: maybe maddening, bickersome and chaotic, but at least not solitary.Such is the nature of theater. Such are the habits of that particular art.The Habit of ArtThrough May 28 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. More

    • 150 Shares109 Views

      in Theater

      Sanaz Toossi on Her Pulitzer: ‘This Signals to Iranians Our Stories Matter’

      by

      The 31-year-old playwright received the honor for her first produced play, “English,” about a language test-prep class in Iran.Sanaz Toossi had just cleared security at the San Francisco airport when her cellphone rang at midday Monday. It was her agent, telling the 31-year-old playwright she had won the Pulitzer Prize in drama for “English,” her first produced play.Toossi, who had written the play as a graduate school thesis project at New York University, was in disbelief. “I asked, ‘Are you sure?’ And when she said, ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Could you please just double-check?’”The prize was real, and as Toossi boarded the plane home to Los Angeles, her phone began buzzing with congratulatory messages not only from around the United States, but also from Iran, where her parents were born and where the play is set.“English,” which Off Broadway’s Obie Awards recently named the best new American play, is a moving, and periodically comedic, drama about a small group of adults in Karaj, Iran — the city where Toossi’s mother is from — preparing to take the Test of English as a Foreign Language. The Pulitzers called it “a quietly powerful play,” and said of the characters that “family separations and travel restrictions drive them to learn a new language that may alter their identities and also represent a new life.”The play was originally scheduled to be staged at the Roundabout Underground in 2020 but was delayed by the coronavirus pandemic; it instead had a first production last year at the Atlantic Theater Company in New York, co-produced by Roundabout. It has since been staged in Boston, Washington, Toronto, Montreal and Berkeley, Calif., with productions planned in Atlanta, western Massachusetts, Seattle, Chicago and Minneapolis. (Toossi was in the Bay Area this week to attend the closing performance at Berkeley Repertory Theater.)The Pulitzers called “English,” about a small group of adults in Karaj, Iran, “a quietly powerful play.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesToossi, who was born and raised in Orange County, Calif., spoke Farsi with her family at home and English outside the home, and she visited Iran regularly while growing up. In a telephone interview on Tuesday, she talked about “English” and the Pulitzer win. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.How did the idea for “English” come to you?I guess I wrote this play out of rage for the anti-immigrant rhetoric that was, and is, so pervasive in this country. I’m so grateful that my parents were able to immigrate to this country and make something better for both themselves and for me. They worked their asses off, and they created beauty where there was none, and it wounded me to see them and myself spoken of like we didn’t belong here.What is the play about?It’s about the pain of being misunderstood, and how language and identity are interwoven.You are a writer, and you wrote a play about language. What did you learn about words?I feel incredibly insecure about both my English and Farsi speaking abilities — I feel like I know 50 percent of each language, and I feel like I’m always bombing job interviews because the words never come to me in the way that I want them to come to me. This play was, of course, so much about my parents and immigrants and hoping that we can extend grace to people who are trying to express themselves in a language they didn’t grow up speaking, but I think it was also a reminder to be kind to myself.What is it like to watch the play with audiences who are, presumably, mostly not Iranian Americans?It’s light torture to watch your play with an audience around you. I just watch them watch the play. I remember in New York when we did it, it was hard to feel like we were getting the wrong kinds of laughs some nights. But I also have been really moved by the non-Iranian audiences who have come to see the play and have found themselves in it. That’s what you ask of an audience, and that’s beautiful.As the play is done around the country, you are creating more work for Iranian American performers. Was that a motivation?I grew up watching media in which I was incredibly frustrated by our representation and the roles being offered to us. I know so many actors in our community, and they’re so incredibly talented, and to feel like their talents were not put to good use was frustrating. I wanted to work with them, and I wanted to give them roles that they loved. It was really important to me to make this play funny, because I didn’t want to shut our actors out of big laughs.In previous interviews you’ve talked about a fear of being pigeonholed.I don’t know if that fear will ever dissipate. I feel so proud to be Iranian, and to be able to tell these stories, and I just remain hopeful that when I turn in a commission that’s not about Iran, that it will be equally exciting.You do some television work. Are you a member of the Writers Guild of America? Are you on strike?I am on strike. I was on the picket line last week. I’m incredibly proud to be a W.G.A. member. I love theater — theater is my first love, and my biggest love — but I can’t make a living in theater. If I could, I would give my whole self to the theater. But the W.G.A. meant I had health insurance during Covid and I make my rent. I’ll be on the picket line this week too, and for however long it takes. For so many playwrights, that’s how we subsidize our theater making.What’s next for you?This year I had to ask myself if what we do is important. The people of Iran are in the midst of a woman-led revolution, and they’re putting their lives on the line. I wonder who I would be if we’d never left, and I wonder if I would let my roosari [head scarf] fall back, knowing it could mean my life. But I do really, really believe theater is important — I have been changed by theater, and theater has imagined better futures for me when I have failed in imagination. So I don’t know what’s next, but I just hope that in this year of so much pain and bloodshed, I hope this signals to Iranians that our stories matter and we’re being heard. And one day soon, I hope we get to do this play in Iran. More