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      In a City of Monuments, History Lives Onstage and in the Streets

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      Three new plays at theaters in Washington explore how the past is both erased and inescapable.Although James Ijames does not specify the setting of his new play “Good Bones,” it sure seems like Washington. For one thing, a character says it “used to be a swamp.”That checks out; when I paid a visit to the capital last week, the summer humidity was already settling in. And hasn’t Washington become, as Ijames writes of the play’s locale in an introduction to the script, one of those places “that is now too expensive for most people to live”? It has: My older son, an elementary schoolteacher in D.C., is just squeaking by.Well, lots of cities are wet and pricey. But when two characters in “Good Bones” — one a new homeowner renovating a townhouse and the other a contractor intimately familiar with its former incarnations — discover that they both grew up in a nearby project called Dunbar Gardens, local bells may ring. The Paul Laurence Dunbar apartments are less than a mile from the Studio Theater, where the play is running through June 18.Of course, there are apartment complexes named for Dunbar, one of the country’s first Black poets to gain widespread recognition, in several American cities. Still, anyone who spends even a little time observing Washington’s glassy new high-rises squeezed up against its squat Federal piles, many built by enslaved people, will recognize Ijames’s spiritual geography: a place where history is both erased and inescapable.So even if it was a coincidence that the tension between past and present informed all three plays I saw during my visit, it was a telling one. “Good Bones,” Ijames’s follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning “Fat Ham” (now on Broadway), examines the theme through the lens of contemporary gentrification — though the gentrifiers and the gentrified are, in this case, both Black. The familiar knots of privilege and appropriation become even more tangled when the people raising the property values grew up in the same neighborhood as the people they’re pricing out.From left: Joel Ashur, Johnny Ramey and Cara Ricketts in “Good Bones” at Studio Theater in Washington.Margot SchulmanThe other plays look further back, and at other forms of erasure. “Here There Are Blueberries,” which I saw at the Shakespeare Theater Company, concerns the discovery in 2006 of an album of 116 photographs that depict daily life among the residents of Auschwitz. Mind you, these are not the concentration camp’s prisoners, who are never seen, but the jolly-looking Nazis who ran it. Why such an album survived, and what should be done with it, are questions that bedevil the archivists who narrate the story.Our responsibility to the past is also the crux of Kenneth Lin’s “Exclusion,” at the Arena Stage. The title refers, in part, to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which prohibited the immigration of Chinese laborers; designed to last 10 years, it was not repealed until 1943. The law, as well as the anti-Asian violence it in essence sanctioned, is, in the play, the subject of a celebrated book by a Chinese American historian named Katie who sells the television rights to Hollywood.You could almost write the next beat yourself: Katie finds herself participating in egregious falsifications, as a terrible injustice is turned into entertainment by the dumbing-down machine. It’s a heavy if sadly believable irony that the mini-series created by a smarmy producer sidelines its historical conscience (Katie gets fired) and eventually excludes the Exclusion Act itself.But because Lin’s play, running through June 25, is a satire, the curtain does not come down on that downer. In a comic turnaround that could be motivated more clearly, Katie comes to believe that the producer’s rewrites are justified. Yes, he has turned a doctor who in real life was lynched by a mob into a kung fu expert who lynches the mob instead. And yes, he has transformed a humble seamstress into a prostitute to make the role more attractive to the actress who will play the role. Still, when the show becomes a huge critical and popular success, providing visibility to Asian actors and a boost to her career, Katie accepts the strange trade-off of being seen by being erased.As directed by Trip Cullman with the bright colors and swift pacing of situation comedy, “Exclusion” is instantly legible and accessible. Still, its emotional high point is just the opposite: a halting conversation between Katie and the actress that takes place in unsubtitled Cantonese. And though what they say is thus incomprehensible to those who do not speak the language, it dramatizes with great poignancy the power of what we can sense but not understand.Tony Nam, right, and Karoline in “Exclusion” at the Arena Stage in Washington.Margot SchulmanThere are moments like that in “Good Bones,” too. The homeowners, Aisha and Travis, hear sounds in their house they cannot explain. Are they the voices of ghosts whose lives are being painted over by the beautiful pale blue of their new kitchen?Yet the plot turns, somewhat squeakily, on sounds they can explain all too well: booming music from a late-night party nearby. When Travis, over Aisha’s objections, calls the police to complain about his neighbors, the conflict is set in motion, pitting the entitlement of new wealth against the traditions of old community.The questions Ijames raises in “Good Bones,” directed by Psalmayene 24, are profound: How can cities feel welcoming to people whose ideas of welcome are incompatible? What is the responsibility of newcomers to the surviving structures, both physical and emotional, of the past? And though those questions do not yet coalesce into a tight narrative — the tacked-on happy ending is a carpentry job their contractor would redo immediately — “Good Bones” is a house in progress. By the time it gets to New York (the Public Theater plans to present it in an upcoming season) it may well look and feel completely different.“Here There Are Blueberries,” a Tectonic Theater project conceived and directed by Moisés Kaufman, also approaches history as a living process. Like previous Tectonic works, including “The Laramie Project” and “Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde,” it proceeds in the form of an investigation based on interviews and relevant documents.In this case, the interviews begin with archivists at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum — not far from the theater — as they process the astonishing trove of photographs sent to them by a possible donor who says little about how he got them. The images of Auschwitz leaders and workers enjoying outings and singalongs and rewards for their “accomplishments,” including bowls of fresh blueberries, seem to say almost too much.By the time the play introduces another Auschwitz album — one that fills the historical and emotional gaps of the first with images of inmates — you understand why, as a former Nazi propagandist explains, “One must harden oneself against the sight of human suffering.”Yet I’m not sure plays should. “Blueberries,” which closed on Sunday in Washington but will be presented next spring at New York Theater Workshop, is so brisk and unsentimental it sometimes feels merely clinical, or perhaps surgical, its unbearable topic opened up for autopsy.That’s effective, but the more powerful moments for me are those in which characters vitally and morally involved in the story — descendants of Nazis, a survivor of the camp — speak from painful experience about the ways history implicates them, and all of us, even as it starts to fade from collective memory. The procedural mysteries of the albums are, after all, less important than the living fact of their irrefutable testimony.Theater is its own kind of testimony. “Blueberries,” like “Exclusion” and “Good Bones,” uses drama (and comedy) to extend our thinking about the legacies of prejudice and resistance, power and deprivation. But then so does any tour of this history-rich, antihistorical city. As our teacher son walked us back to our hotel after seeing “Blueberries,” I asked him about a particularly impressive Beaux-Arts building we passed. “The Carnegie Library,” he said. “It’s now an Apple store.”Good BonesThrough June 18 at the Studio Theater, Washington D.C.; studiotheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.ExclusionThrough June 25 at Arena Stage, Washington D.C.; arenastage.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Rosalind Franklin’s Role in DNA Discovery, Once Ignored, Is Told Anew in Song

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      “Double Helix,” at Bay Street Theater, illuminates the British scientist’s contributions, which became the basis for James Watson and Francis Crick’s 1953 breakthrough.During the summer of 2020, the composer and lyricist Madeline Myers spent hours at the piano in her Manhattan apartment as she struggled to write three songs for her new musical, “Double Helix,” about the British chemist Rosalind Franklin. The challenge wasn’t strictly about marrying words to a score, but conveying the science of a crucial moment in the discovery of DNA’s structure — and making the songs entertaining.Franklin’s experiments, in which she successfully used X-ray crystallography to create images of DNA, became the basis for James Watson and Francis Crick’s groundbreaking 1953 discovery of the double helix structure. The breakthrough underpins our modern understanding of genetics and biology, but for years Franklin received none of the credit. (She died of cancer in 1958 at the age of 37; her male colleagues were later awarded the Nobel Prize.)Fast forward to a recent afternoon, when Myers and the show’s director, Scott Schwartz, were in a rehearsal room high above 42nd Street facing a new hurdle: how to stage those science-focused songs, including one number fittingly called “The Problem.” In this scene, six actors are in a lab using an X-ray crystallography machine to try to capture an image of DNA. As they turned their focus from a makeshift cardboard contraption to a screen positioned upstage, Schwartz called out: “We’re suspending reality in making the photograph immediately show up on the projection screen.”Schwartz and Myers faced a hurdle: how to stage those science-focused songs.Lenny StuckerThey were just weeks away from the first previews of “Double Helix,” which begin May 30 at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, N.Y. And though a certain level of make-believe is intrinsic to theater, getting this illusion right was especially tricky: Myers and Schwartz are trying to balance history and science with an emotional and multidimensional portrait of Franklin, who attacked her work with zealous dedication while being subjected to misogyny and antisemitism.While Myers knew “the play should not be about science,” she was committed to science being “the vehicle for this story.” That was Franklin’s worldview, after all. “There were dramatic liberties I could take with the history, but I just felt like I could not fudge the science.”Yet she also needed “the science to be simple because what we’re trying to show is the emotional conflict,” she added, “and all the power dynamics and the gender dynamics.”The production team also enlisted a few advisers, including Sonya Hanson, a research scientist at the Center for Computational Biology, to provide feedback on the script and the staging.“They’re doing a lot of work really incorporating the lab environment into the set,” Hanson said. Which is important, she explained, because “Rosalind was an amazing experimentalist” and any portrait of her life should make that clear.Massell, who plays Rosalind Franklin, was Hodel in the 2015 Broadway revival of “Fiddler on the Roof.”Lenny StuckerAlthough Franklin (portrayed onstage by Samantha Massell, who played Hodel in the 2015 Broadway revival of “Fiddler on the Roof”) was involved in the race to discover the structure of DNA, she was the only scientist not to write her own version of the story. “All of these accounts of what happened are certainly filtered through the biases that these people had,” Myers said. “And the only voice that we really just don’t hear from is Rosalind’s.”Myers began reading about the scientist in 2018, and felt an immediate kinship. “We’re both women. We’re both Jews. We’re both about the same age,” she said. But the biggest connection “was the way she felt about her work as a scientist was how I felt about my own work as a musical dramatist.”From left, Anthony Joseph Costello, Massell, Thom Sesma and Tuck Sweeney in the show.Lenny StuckerThis isn’t Myers’s first experience with bringing history to the stage. She was an original member of the “Hamilton” music department, and witnessed Lin-Manuel Miranda’s approach to creating an “arresting and moving” show about a historical figure, Myers explained. So when she started writing “Double Helix,” she wanted to ensure “the emotional stakes were greater than the actual historical stakes.”A central question: “Is life definable as biological matter or is life what we live and what we experience? And is Rosalind Franklin sacrificing what we live and what we experience in order to find that biological matter?” To heighten the choices that Franklin has to make in the musical, Myers turned what might have been, in real life, just a crush on the scientist, Jacques Mering, into a relationship. Franklin then has to choose whether to prioritize the relationship or her work.Schwartz, Bay Street Theater’s artistic director, said he was drawn to the project for its potential to fill in the blanks of Franklin’s inner world. “That’s what musicals are for,” he said. To use songs “to crack open the psychology of a character.”As for Franklin’s scientific snub, Myers isn’t looking for the audience to be “up in arms.” Instead, she wants people to leave the theater thinking: “What are the two strands in my own life that are competing for my time?” she said. “That is what the play is about. It’s about how we use our time not knowing how much of it that we have.” More

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      ‘Bernarda’s Daughters’ Review: Sisters Grieve a Father, and a Home

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      In her adaptation of Lorca, Diane Exavier emphasizes the importance of belonging to a place, and how painful it is to consign memories of it to the grave.Federico García Lorca described his oft-adapted “La Casa de Bernarda Alba” simply as a “drama of women in the villages of Spain.” But as the Haitian American playwright Diane Exavier knows, whenever women gather — especially during times of mourning — there is always more at stake.Exavier takes inspiration from Lorca’s work to craft “Bernarda’s Daughters,” but she replaces the tyrannical mother of the original with the oppressive smother of a New York City summer. Bernarda — referred to here as Mommy — is never seen but lets her five daughters cycle through the family home in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Flatbush as they watch over their grandmother Florence (Tamara Tunie) and grieve their recently deceased father.Men remain absent in this play as they do in Lorca’s, and their stench lingers. It’s partly a literal stench, represented by bushels of their father’s laundry the daughters must clean before Mommy returns. But more emblematically, it’s a figurative stink, reeking of the unappreciated sacrifices these women make for their men — especially the eldest daughter, Louise (Pascale Armand) — even long after those men are in the ground.Mommy is absent because she’s laying her husband to rest in Haiti, where it’s “cheaper than burying someone in Brooklyn.” Much of “Bernarda’s Daughters” hinges on quips like these, which relay Exavier’s ideas about gentrification. The play rarely comments on the systemic causes of this problem but reminds us of its effects: the deafening drum of construction, the garish view of new high-rises and the proliferation of fancy coffee shops. As Bernarda’s second youngest, Adela (Taji Senior), sourly notes, “It’s a different Brooklyn out there.”The sisters’ loss, then, is not only personal, it’s territorial. And each of Bernarda’s daughters responds differently. Grief makes the high-strung Louise greedier, the noble Harriet (Alana Raquel Bowers) hungrier for love, the ever-amorous Maryse (Malika Samuel) lustier, the righteous Adela quicker to anger, and the naïve Lena (Kristin Dodson) more dissociative, as she takes solace in her beloved reality shows. When the sisters do gather, their banter is humorous and animated. But every so often Exavier has a sister peel off to trudge through a metaphor-laced sermon.The director, Dominique Rider, demonstrates less control over these momentum-stealing soliloquies than he does the more naturalistic dialogue, tamping down the production’s bouncy energy with low-spirited melodrama. And Carlos J. Soto’s bleak scenic design offers little help. His set is an angular cavern of black mesh curtains and obtrusive columns, the opposite of every colorful and crowded Haitian home I’ve known.Abstraction does not serve this work, which ultimately thrives on specificity. Taking cues from island scribes like the Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite and the Jamaican dramatist Sylvia Wynter — whose translation of Lorca largely influenced “Bernarda’s Daughters” — Exavier uses this play to emphasize the importance of belonging to a place, and how painful it is to consign your memories of that place to the grave when its essence disappears. No wonder her characters reel off so many actual street names in the neighborhood — “the garbage all over Rogers,” “the Macy’s on Fulton,” “the grill on Church.” The naming is an act of remembrance, a way to preserve a home.Bernarda’s Daughters Through June 4 at the Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; thenewgroup.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.This review is supported by Critical Minded, an initiative to invest in the work of cultural critics from historically underrepresented backgrounds. More

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      Review: In ‘Aspects of Love,’ Some Problematic Attachments

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      A London revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s partner-swapping musical is a camp amoral romp. But is this obsession really the same as romance?For those who find regular love triangles too pedestrian, quadrangles and pentagons are also available. Unconventional arrangements are the order of the day in a dynamic revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Aspects of Love,” which opened on Thursday at the Lyric Theater in London. This two-act musical, inspired by a 1955 novel by David Garnett, pits a young man against his uncle in a tussle for the affections of a mercurial actress; it is a camp, unapologetically amoral romp featuring blithe betrayals, intrafamilial partner-swapping and questionable intergenerational flirtations. (It is a lot raunchier than Lloyd Webber’s most recent work, which invited the audience to “sing unto the Lord with the harp” during the coronation of King Charles III.)This “Aspects of Love” is exquisitely produced and superbly performed, but — like many a real-life libertine — it eventually buckles under the weight of its excesses.We begin in 1947, in rural southwestern France, where Rose (Laura Pitt-Pulford), a struggling actress, meets Alex (Jamie Bogyo), an adoring fan. Alex, 18, invites Rose to stay with him at a villa owned by George (Michael Ball), his rich uncle, and the two fall in love. But Rose then unceremoniously ditches Alex for his uncle, to the dismay of George’s partner, Giulietta (Danielle de Niese), an Italian sculptor.We check in with the four at intervals over the next 20 years, as the action moves to Paris, then to Venice, then back to the French countryside. Alex and Rose are never quite able to leave each other alone. To further complicate matters, both of them also get intimate with Giulietta. Cue jealousies, recriminations — and plenty of drama.Pitt-Pulford is charismatic and engaging as Rose. A vibrant stage presence, she is by turns imperious, flighty and needy — the quintessential histrionic thespian. Bogyo’s portrayal of a callow, love-struck young person is convincing; he is frequently exasperated, and we sympathize with his predicament because he is too inexperienced to know any better. Ball — who played Alex in the musical’s original production, in 1989 — is outstanding as George, a genial, urbane bon viveur who assures the teenage Alex that there are plenty more fish in the sea (“Life goes on. Love goes free.”) His serene sanguineness is the show’s beating heart.Members of the cast of “Aspects of Love” in London. The painted backdrops of John McFarlane’s set shift the action between rural France, Paris and Venice over a 20-year period.Johan PerssonThe production is immaculately put together, and John McFarlane’s luscious set design incorporates beautiful painted backdrops depicting Parisian street scenes and rural landscapes. A rotating stage is deployed to good effect during romantic scenes to evoke the head-spinning euphoria of early love.Though the show is practically flawless as an audiovisual spectacle, the story gradually wanes. Things take an unwholesome turn in the second act with the introduction of Jenny, George and Rose’s young daughter (played first, as a young child, by Indiana Ashworth and later, as a teenager, by Anna Unwin). Jenny develops an intense crush on Alex, and the ensuing will-they-won’t-they is skin crawling. The bawdy, pantomimic esprit of the first act gives way to awkwardness; an audience that had been positively purring at the intermission was palpably uneasy with this story line.To account for this somewhat jarring transition, we must turn to the novel on which the musical is based. Its author, David Garnett — known as “Bunny” to his friends — was a member of the Bloomsbury literary set notorious for their cavalier attitude in matters of romance. His parents had lived in a ménage à trois with a young actress, and eccentric sexual behavior was a recurring theme in his life. In 1942, he married Angelica Bell, his former lover’s daughter, whom, in a letter 24 years earlier, he identified as a potential spouse when she was just a baby.Garnett’s novel may have had a certain transgressive purchase in the mid-1950s, at the dawn of a revolution in sexual mores. But from a 21st-century perspective, the story feels, at best, a kitsch curio. There is something quaintly naïve about dignifying such flawed romantic entanglements — puppy love, infatuation, grooming — with the sentimental earnestness of the show’s soppy signature tune, “Love Changes Everything.” In truth, the ditty that best captures Garnett’s ethos is the “Hand Me the Wine and the Dice” from Act 2, an upbeat anthem to living in the moment.In both the novel and onstage, the characters are so thinly sketched that it is hard to take their emotions seriously, especially given the conspicuous discrepancy between their professed intensity of feeling and the fickleness of their affections. Maybe the real subject of this musical is not romance per se, but overweening egotism — what we would nowadays call narcissism. It is an enjoyable ride, and there is just about enough comeuppance to satisfy the moralists, but one is left wondering, to paraphrase Tina Turner, what love has to do with it.Aspects of LoveThrough Nov. 11 at the Lyric Theater in London; aspectsoflove.com. More

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      ‘Primary Trust’ Review: Sipping Mai Tais, Until Bitter Reality Knocks

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      In Eboni Booth’s new play, William Jackson Harper performs with astonishing vulnerability as a man alone and adrift.Maybe you’ve seen him tucked into the corner of a dive bar, muttering to himself now and then, empty glasses multiplying on his table. And perhaps you’ve thought — though, it’s just as likely you haven’t — What’s up with that guy?In “Primary Trust,” the playwright Eboni Booth zooms in on one such man: He lives in a fictional suburb of Rochester, N.Y., where mai tais are his drink of choice at an unlikely tiki bar named Wally’s. He is alone and adrift in this tender, delicately detailed portrait, though surely he has not always been. Listen, and he’ll tell you about the moment he almost drowned and how he learned to keep his head above water.“Primary Trust,” which opened at the Laura Pels Theater in Manhattan on Thursday, finds Kenneth (William Jackson Harper, of “The Good Place”) approaching 40 when the bookstore where he’s worked for 20 years closes shop. (The owner, played by Jay O. Sanders, needs cash for surgery.) But Kenneth has never found a job on his own; social workers helped him get his current one some years after he was orphaned.Much of this back story Kenneth relays himself, addressing the audience, in the director Knud Adams’s graceful production for Roundabout Theater Company, from what resembles a miniaturized model of a provincial square. (The scaled-down set is by Marsha Ginsberg, and the elegant lighting is by Isabella Byrd.) In 15 years, Kenneth explains, all this will be leveled and replaced by condominiums. The municipal motto — “Welcome Friend, You’re Right on Time!” — feels laden with uncertain melancholy: It could be a salutation from the threshold of death.Harper, right, with Jay O. Sanders and April Matthis, who, our critic writes, turn small roles into four-course meals.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMordant subtext and typically empty sentiments are among the ways Booth demonstrates that language can convey deep pain one minute and ring utterly hollow the next, usually in the service of capitalism. In contrast to Kenneth’s confessional narration are the rote greetings of a carousel of servers at Wally’s (all played by April Matthis, including one who becomes a fast and flirtatious friend) and the sales pitches Kenneth later lobs at customers (also played by Matthis) after he lands a teller position at a local bank. (“Primary Trust” doubles as the name of Kenneth’s new employer, and an abbreviated metaphor for what was lost when his mother died.)As in her superstore dark comedy “Paris,” presented by Atlantic Theater Company in 2020, Booth again probes the half-dread of working-class Black characters in a one-freeway-exit corner of the Northeast. And though Kenneth’s Blackness is an underlying aspect of his experience, it is not the acute source of his alienation. His foundational trauma, and his longtime coping mechanisms, are gradually revealed (early on it becomes clear that Bert, his near-constant companion played by Eric Berryman, is imaginary), and he begins to reach through the cracks of his isolation to discover good, decent people.Harper, who is onstage for nearly all of the production’s 95 minutes, performs with astonishing ease and vulnerability, particularly given the depths he is asked to plumb in monologues directly to the audience; he lends the currents flowing through Kenneth’s interior life extraordinary subtlety and immediacy. Booth’s one-man study is wonderfully vivid, but there’s only so much emotional engagement that the unburdening of feelings, rather than their enactment or discovery, can inspire. Her other characters are far more loosely sketched: Sanders and Matthis turn small roles, rich with concise, sideways detail, into four-course meals, paradoxically making them feel underused.The production’s play on perspective and proportion, with people as tall as buildings, enhance the undertones in Booth’s work that question who, and what, we pay attention to and why. Do New Yorkers, for example, who Kenneth remarks “step over human beings sleeping in the street,” think about places like this, or about why someone might be drinking for two at happy hour and talking to no one?Throughout the production a bell, like the ones that summon unseen workers from behind service counters, dings repeatedly, sometimes seemingly incessantly, variously marking the reset or passage of time. It feels like a disruption — an unexplained and overused device that interrupts the flow of life. Maybe it’s actually a wake up call, and not just for the man who’s been living in a daze.Primary TrustThrough July 2 at the Laura Pels Theater, Manhattan; roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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      ‘The Inheritance’ Arrives at a Festival of German Drama

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      A new production of Matthew López’s seven-hour play was among 10 shows chosen for Theatertreffen, a celebration of the best theater from Germany, Austria and Switzerland.Midway through Matthew López’s “The Inheritance,” a character lashes out at E.M. Forster, the British author of “Howards End,” who appears as a spiritual guru to the play’s protagonists.“Why should we listen to you lecture us about fearlessness and honesty? You were never honest about yourself,” the character screams, excoriating Forster for spending his long life in the closet.When “The Inheritance,” a seven-hour intergenerational saga about gay men in New York, opened in London in 2018, it was praised to the heavens. When the production transferred to Broadway a year later, there was far less critical love.This month, a reprise of the first German production of “The Inheritance” kicked off the annual Theatertreffen, a showcase of the best German-language theater, for which organizers selected “10 remarkable productions” from 461 theatrical premieres in Germany, Austria and Switzerland that debuted last year. The ethics of storytelling and of responsible representation emerged as unofficial themes of the lineup.López’s skill as a dramatist comes through in Hannes Becker’s translation, but the lyricism of his prose less so. Despite the impressive plotting and memorable characters, “The Inheritance” often fizzles during its generous running time. And the play’s cliché-riddled depiction of New York — an entire scene consists of little other than a lesson in how to order correctly at Peter Luger, the celebrated steakhouse — often had this New Yorker rolling his eyes.In the end, the production, which hails from the Residenztheater in Munich, is redeemed by heroic performances from the company’s ensemble. It’s a tough call, but for my money Vincent zur Linden gives the evening’s most indelible turn: Playing both the aspiring actor Adam and the hustler Leo, zur Linden shifts between coyness, arrogance and twitching brokenness. As Eric Glass, the play’s central character, Thiemo Strutzenberger fills a bland role with emotional complexity. And Michael Goldberg, one of the troupe’s older members, inhabits the play’s two mentor-like figures, Forster and Walter Poole, with avuncular gentleness and secret sorrow.Theatertreffen loves a good theatrical marathon, like Frank Castorf’s seven-hour “Faust,” seen here in 2018, or Christopher Rüping’s even longer “Dionysos Stadt” a year later. Yet sheer length does not an epic make. Compared to those gutsy avant-garde extravaganzas, Philip Stölzl’s sleek, handsome production of “The Inheritance” felt tame.“The Bus to Dachau” considers how the Holocaust is depicted in art and how it will be taught and commemorated when no survivors are left.Isabel Machado RiosWhen I returned to the festival several nights later, it was for a production much more in line with the formally daring, conceptually knotty theater more commonly found at Theatertreffen: “The Bus to Dachau,” a coproduction between the Dutch theater collective De Warme Winkel and the Schauspielhaus Bochum theater in western Germany.Subtitled “a 21st century memory play,” this absorbing production takes a singular and idiosyncratic approach to confronting the Holocaust through art, and asks what form commemoration and education will take once all of the survivors are gone.Featuring audience participation and live video — including blue-screen effects and Snapchat filters — the production tackles its weighty themes with an off-kilter mix of irreverence and severity. As the actors feel their way through the material, they explore the moral implications of depicting the Holocaust onscreen and how Germany’s culture of memory can carry a whiff of arrogance and even, perversely, of possessiveness.“The Ego and Its Own” was inspired by an 19th-century paean to radical selfishness by Max Stirner, the German philosopher.Arno DeclairYet while “The Bus to Dachau” found compelling ways to dramatize its risky and sensitive themes, another aesthetically bold production at Theatertreffen was ultimately less successful at bringing unlikely material to the stage.That work, “The Ego and Its Own,” from the Deutsches Theater, was one of two shows on the lineup that originated at Berlin playhouses. (The other was the choreographer Florentina Holzinger’s latest freak-out vaudeville-style revue, “Ophelia’s Got Talent.”)Inspired by an 1844 paean to radical selfishness by the German philosopher Max Stirner, the abstract production finds six actors cavorting on a white spiral ramp that resembles the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. The play’s director, Sebastian Hartmann, a festival favorite, and the composer PC Nackt fashion a musical revue from Stirner’s opus that is equally arresting and bewildering.The actors intone and belt out slogans from the 19th-century text while Nackt and a drummer accompany them with a wild, mostly electronic score. Stark lighting, live video, fog and even 3-D projections contribute to the trippy expressionistic atmosphere. But despite the constant multisensory stimulation and energetic performances, it quickly grows tiresome. It’s a trip, to be sure — but I’m not sure how it illuminates Stirner’s influential and contentious ideas.One of the festival’s closing plays, “Zwiegespräch” by the Nobel Prize-winning author Peter Handke is an emotionally resonant production about intergenerational conflicts.Susanne Hassler-SmithControversy often attends the works Peter Handke, the Austrian who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2019. For many, Handke has been tainted by his sympathy for Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian war criminal. The news of the writer’s Nobel win was met, by some, with disbelief, and his 2020 play “Zdenek Adamec” premiered at the Salzburg Festival under the threat of protest. Still, Handke, now 80, continues to publish and be performed at an impressive clip.His latest text for the stage, “Zwiegespräch,” was published as a book shortly before its world premiere at the Burgtheater in Vienna. The author dedicated the dramatic dialogue to the actors Otto Sander and Bruno Ganz, the stars of the Wim Wenders film “Wings of Desire,” which Handke wrote the screenplay for; much of this brief, poetic text is concerned with the essence of acting and storytelling. There is also a sense of fraught struggles between grandfathers, fathers and sons.At Theaterteffen, “Zwiegespräch” will be performed on Saturday and Sunday as one of the festival’s closing productions. Not long ago, it headlined another one of Germany’s main theater festivals, “Radikal Jung,” at the Volkstheater, in Munich, which is where I caught it last month.The dazzling production, overseen by Rieke Süsskow, a young Berlin-born director, heightens the dialogue’s intergenerational conflicts. She sets her production in a nursing home and distributes Handke’s text to a cast of actors playing frail residents and their sinister caregivers, somehow creating a convincing dramaturgy without clearly differentiated characters or a conventional plot.Much credit is due to her stage designer, Mirjam Stängl, and her ingenious set, a succession of folding panels that expand and contract over the width of the stage like a fan, and Marcus Loran for his hallucinatory lighting design. Thanks to the attentive artistry of Süsskow and her team, Handke’s 60-odd page pamphlet comes to life in an emotionally resonant performance about memory, loss, regret and the nature of art.Separating the art from the artist shouldn’t mean giving artists a free pass. In the context of this sensitively paced and finely wrought production, however, there seemed little doubt that Handke is attuned to the moral responsibilities of storytelling.TheatertreffenThrough May 29 at various venues in Berlin; berlinerfestspiele.de. More

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      He Made a Show About Grief. She Saw Herself in It.

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      Audible Theater’s leader and the creator of “Sorry for Your Loss” hope the autobiographical comedy helps others learn to talk about grief.Things are not necessarily as they appear. In Michael Cruz Kayne’s “Sorry for Your Loss,” a comedy show about grief, that is a prominent theme.When the producer Kate Navin caught the show last year at Caveat, a comedy theater on the Lower East Side in New York, she knew the instant he displayed a photo of himself with his wife and two children what he wasn’t telling the audience: that this wasn’t the full picture of his family, that it couldn’t be, because one of his three children had died.“In that moment I felt — I don’t want to use the word ‘seen’ because it can be cliché, but that’s the best word,” Navin said recently at a cafe in Greenwich Village.Her own family photos work the same way. Her first son, Jack, was 2 years and nine months old when he died in a fire with his grandmother, Navin’s mother-in-law, 10 years ago this August. Ask Navin what Jack was like and she’ll tell you he loved the movie “Cars,” prized raspberries above all foods and was remarkably kind — unusual for a toddler, she knows, having had two more.“You’d give him a bowl of raspberries and he’d hand them out to everybody in the room first before he’d start eating,” she said. “That was Jack. He was unbelievable.”Navin was deliberately not going to produce shows about grief when she joined the audio entertainment company Audible in 2017 to head its theater division.But when Daniel Goldstein, a writer-director who is a mutual friend of Navin and Kayne, took her to see “Sorry for Your Loss,” thinking that she might have a professional interest in it, he was correct. She thought the embrace of its humor could help other “lost parents,” as she calls them.Michael Cruz Kayne, pictured with his family in “Sorry for Your Loss,” a comedy show about reckoning with the death of his son.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe show running through June 10 at the Minetta Lane Theater, Audible Theater’s Greenwich Village base, is the latest iteration of “Sorry for Your Loss,” with shinier production values than Kayne, a staff writer on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” is accustomed to having at comedy clubs. Here he ponders the mysteries of permanent absence and lingering presence, and pokes at the culture’s deep discomfort with the inevitability of death and loss.Kayne, who hosts a podcast called “A Good Cry,” performed the first version of “Sorry for Your Loss” not long after a tweet he sent in November 2019, marking the 10th anniversary of the death of his son Fisher, from sepsis at 34 days old.Kayne had grown tired of not talking about that central fact of his life, which he said in a separate interview had become “the elephant in the room of my whole brain.” After the tweet went viral, he took that conversation to the stage, making a funny autobiographical show that allows sadness in.“I’m still at a point with it where I am happy to be identified with the story of my son,” Kayne said. “If that means that for a while, or forever, I am Grief Boy, things could be worse. This subject isn’t the only thing I want to contribute to the universe. But if it stopped here, I would feel like I got to say the thing I really wanted to say most of all.”These were not, by the way, maudlin interviews. But Navin did tear up when she recounted how terrified she had been of grocery shopping after Jack died, because she wouldn’t know what to say if she ran into one of his friends and they asked where he was.In the experience that Kayne articulates in the show, she recognized her own surreal isolation.She wants no one’s pity. But mention a child who died to someone who didn’t know, she said, and the conversation may not recover, because no matter how long ago it happened, people react as if your grief is fresh, and as if you are broken.“The mood shifts,” she said. “And it’s hard to be the person who caused the mood shift.”Kayne and Navin would like people to be less awkward about grief, which would let those who need to talk about it stop keeping it to themselves. “Sorry for Your Loss” provides one space for that.When I asked Kayne if he believes that art can heal, he quoted the W.H. Auden line “poetry makes nothing happen,” which he said he thinks about a lot.“I do think it’s possible for art to at least make you feel like you are not alone,” he allowed. “It’s so much to know that I’m not the only person who feels this way. If that is healing, which I think it is a little, then yes, I think art can heal people.”Navin, for her part, is certain that Kayne has changed her in a way that feels good, making her “less sheepish” about telling people that she has three children, and less worried about people’s reaction.“That’s a huge gift,” she said. “And he just makes me feel less damaged. Truly I feel less damaged than I did a year ago.” More

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      Summerworks Festival Opens With “Work Hard Have Fun Make History”

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      Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks festival opener, written by ruth tang, rages against the machines and examines human alienation.Like a dog nosing around in the background, a robot vacuum cleaner is a guaranteed scene stealer. Late in the new play “Work Hard Have Fun Make History,” the unfailingly compelling actor Susannah Perkins shares the stage with one: a whirring black disk busily roaming the industrial carpet, bumbling into walls yet never toppling over edges, at least not the night I saw the show.Perkins plays a phone service representative named Annie, on a call with a frantic customer whose new android assistant, an iWhip 2.0, has turned menacing.“What’s the command to make it go away?” the caller pleads.“‘Blades down, iWhip,’” Annie instructs.Perkins gives the line a perfect comic spin, but our eyes are on Annie’s own insensate labor saver. Unleash a robot and havoc may follow. Wouldn’t that be entertaining?“Work Hard Have Fun Make History,” whose title echoes an Amazon motto, is not at all on the side of the machines, but it is acutely unsettled by their rampancy in our increasingly fractionalized, disembodied culture. Written by ruth tang (who lowercases their name) and directed by Caitlin Sullivan, this is the first production in Clubbed Thumb’s 2023 Summerworks festival, an annual showcase for off-kilter experimentation at the Wild Project in the East Village.There is, unfortunately, a nagging sense that a tumult of tenuously related ideas and a diffuse crowd of characters have overwhelmed this thought-provoking, plot-free comedy, which above all is about human alienation: from the body, from physical presence, from other people.It is about labor, both the kind that brings home paychecks and the kind that brings babies into the world, and about out-of-control greed disguised as genius; thus a couple of amusingly dim tech-bro characters called Jeff (Sagan Chen) and Elon (the performer who goes by b). It is about gender identity, and sex, and coupledom, and the pain of parental rejection. It is about climate change, and artificial intelligence that gets ever smarter while remaining, in elemental ways, extremely dumb. It is about containers — shipping boxes figure heavily — and the spilling over of that which cannot be contained.Which is a lot to fit into a 75-minute show. On a utilitarian set by the design collective dots, under warehouse-stark lighting by Isabella Byrd, “Work Hard” is told in a series of fragmentary scenes that aren’t always as taut as they might have been. Elon and Jeff, for example, ramble.With much doubling by the cast of three, and some dialogue in voice-over (sound design is by Lee Kinney), the show has a progression that can be cumulative, as with a grumpily funny baby (Chen) whom we first meet in utero and follow into life. But this sharply observant, sometimes poignant, grimly comic play is too scattershot to gather force as it goes on.Work Hard Have Fun Make HistoryThrough May 30 at the Wild Project, Manhattan; clubbedthumb.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More