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      ‘Straight Line Crazy’ Review: The Road Rage of Robert Moses

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      Off Broadway at the Shed, Ralph Fiennes is glorious in David Hare’s sputtering portrait of the man who paved New York.I doubt I’d have enjoyed meeting the real Robert Moses, New York’s paver of highways, evictor of minorities, eminent domain eminence and all-purpose boogeyman. But it’s a huge pleasure to meet him, in the form of Ralph Fiennes, in David Hare’s “Straight Line Crazy,” which opened on Wednesday at the Shed.Whether the creature Hare and Fiennes create has anything to do with the creature that created modern Gotham remains, for a while, an irrelevant question. Moses’ actual demeanor and utterance, as portrayed in the nearly 1,300 pages of Robert Caro’s biography “The Power Broker,” are little in evidence at the Hudson Yards theater.Fiennes is too gloriously entertaining for that. Melodramatic in the old-fashioned sense, a hero or villain from an operetta or Ayn Rand, he crows his lines like a rooster, albeit in an accent suspended somewhere between East Anglia and Texas. With his nose pointing straight up and his chest pointing straight out, he’s a figurehead on the prow of a ship that can slice through icebergs as easily as red tape.Also through consonants: When he says “boardwalk” — a thing he despises, with its “so-called amusements” and “lox and bagel merchants” — the word has three syllables: the board, the wal and the k.So what if Moses is racist, antisemitic (though Jewish by birth) and an unabashed elitist who aims to advance ordinary people’s fortunes “without having any respect for their opinions”? Here he is wit and pith personified — and why would he not be, with lines honed by Hare in high-gloss mode?Usually that high gloss means Hare is up to some undermining; in plays like “Plenty,” “The Judas Kiss” and “Skylight,” good badinage almost always means bad faith.But in “Straight Line Crazy,” the connection is unclear, forcing you to ask why such a progressive playwright would spend even half a play valorizing a man who, among many other practical atrocities, displaced 7,000 families to clear space for Lincoln Center and 40,000 residents to build the Cross-Bronx Expressway. A clue in the script: “Moses’ life is so prodigious and his reach so great,” Hare notes, “that I have chosen to concentrate on just two decisive moments in his extraordinary career.”From left: Danny Webb as Gov. Alfred E. Smith, Fiennes and Judith Roddy as Finnuala Connell in the play, directed by Nicholas Hytner and Jamie Armitage.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesApparently, one act will try to counteract the other, so it makes sense that the production, directed by Nicholas Hytner and Jamie Armitage for the London Theater Company, should introduce us to Moses in 1926. At that time he is merely the chairman of the Long Island State Park Commission, and his antagonists are not yet sympathetic proles but out-of-touch gentry.These are the owners of Nassau County estates whose gorgeous seclusion, not to mention their orchards, are threatened by plans for the Northern and Southern State Parkways. The play’s first substantial scene is in fact with a (fictional) Vanderbilt, supplied with a big-eared butler named Fergus and an even bigger sneer.“Leave him at the end of the drive,” this Vanderbilt (Guy Paul) instructs the servant after dispensing with Moses.But of course it’s Moses who dispenses with Vanderbilt. In their scene together and in the long one that follows, at a headquarters that serves as a hive of urban planning, the power broker is shown breaking under- and overlings like twigs to get his way.I say he is “shown”; he is not dramatized except to the extent he is self-dramatized, with prompts from those underlings. (Their interruptions of “Why?” “What do they do?” and “What’s that?” amount to dramaturgy by laxative.) Perhaps because they too are fictional, and purpose-built, they have few characteristics except those that pertain to Moses: Ariel Porter (Adam Silver) is the meek one who backs off every argument, and Finnuala Connell (Judith Roddy) is the spunky one who stands up to him, at least on small points.It’s not until an official overling arrives that any actual drama occurs. He is Gov. Alfred E. Smith of New York, a populist Democrat who is Moses’ patron and also, one begins to suspect, his patsy. That piquant combination, along with Danny Webb’s hilariously earthy take on the governor, gives the interaction between the men, needling each other among the maps and models of Bob Crowley’s set, the unlikely spin of a Mutt and Jeff comedy starring Laurence Olivier and Jimmy Durante.Helen Schlesinger as Jane Jacobs, the journalist and urban theorist, fails to emerge, as she did in life, as Moses’ greatest foil.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhat’s going on beneath the comedy is less funny: On the theory that no one will tear up a road once it’s built, even if they’d have forbidden it beforehand, Moses orders construction to proceed on the parkways without having obtained the governor’s approval. That this is offered as an amusing example of flair and determination instead of a warning about subterfuge and megalomania means that Hare has either fallen under the Great Man’s spell or wants to make sure the audience has.Surely, you think during intermission, as you study the weird intrusion of the mall-like Hudson Yards into the city’s urban fabric, things will turn around in the second act, which the program tells you is set in 1956. That’s when Moses’ plan to extend Fifth Avenue through Washington Square Park met with fierce resistance from a new kind of opponent: the “minstrels and artistic women with handbags” of Greenwich Village. Cue Jane Jacobs.Alas, that journalist and urban theorist, who has so far popped up merely to say hello, fails to emerge, as she did in life, as Moses’ greatest foil. It’s a strange choice to make Jacobs (Helen Schlesinger) a minor character. Perhaps because of the inconvenience of history — the two never met — we are denied a direct confrontation, and with it a satisfactory climax.Instead, Hare goes uncharacteristically soggy, hauling Moses’ alcoholic wife into the conversation for pathos and having Finnuala, after decades in service to the builder’s vision, finally repudiate it. Moses loses on minor, mostly made-up points, not the knockout that Jacobs, Caro and time actually delivered.But even as the directors’ invention fades along with Hare’s — the community meetings, full of serious nodding, are especially silly — Fiennes never falters. His Moses, like his performance, becomes a car in search of a road, gunning the engine with nowhere to go.That’s no tragedy. The play is still a pleasure, and Moses is still in the doghouse. The man who, in Hare’s formulation, thinks cars are the “can opener” to the tin that is America would not recognize a Manhattan that after decades of discussion is soon to institute congestion pricing.If the efficiency of the brute is often superior to the fecklessness of democracy in getting things done, it is not always as lasting — which is reason enough to see “Straight Line Crazy.” In the midst of what feels right now like the losing fight of progressivism, it’s worth peeking at the devil, with fear and envy and a little schadenfreude.Straight Line CrazyThrough Dec. 18 at the Shed, Manhattan; theshed.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      Lucy Simon, Singer and Broadway Composer, Is Dead at 82

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      She and her sister Carly Simon were a folk duo in the 1960s. Years later, she wrote the Tony-nominated music for “The Secret Garden.”Lucy Simon, who with her sister Carly began performing and recording as the Simon Sisters during the folk revival of the 1960s, and who then almost three decades later became a Tony Award-nominated composer for the long-running musical “The Secret Garden,” died on Thursday at her home in Piermont, N.Y., in Rockland County. She was 82.Her family said the cause was metastatic breast cancer.Ms. Simon was the middle of three musical sisters. Her younger sister, Carly, became a best-selling pop star after their folk-duo days, and her older sister, Joanna, was an opera singer with an international career. Joanna Simon, at 85, died in Manhattan a day before Lucy Simon’s death.Lucy and Carly started singing together as teenagers. Their father, Richard, was the “Simon” of Simon & Schuster, the publishing house, so a heady list of guests came through the household, including Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Their mother was Andrea (Heinemann) Simon.“We would go to cocktail parties and bring our guitar and sing,” Lucy Simon told The New York Times in 2015. “And people loved it.”Eventually, she added, they said to each other, “Let’s see if we can pay our way by singing.”Carly was a student at Sarah Lawrence College and Lucy was studying at the Cornell University-New York Hospital School of Nursing in New York in the early 1960s when, during summer break, they took a bus to Provincetown, Mass. (They had wanted to hitchhike, but their mother squashed that plan.) They quickly landed a gig at a bar called Moors, whose musical act had just been drafted. They arrived for their first show in carefully selected matching blouses.“Only later did we learn that the Moors was a gay and lesbian bar,” Carly Simon wrote in her 2015 memoir, “Boys in the Trees.” “What the mostly uncombed, ripped-jeans-and-motorcycle-jacketed audience made of these two sisters is lost to time. Lucy and I had taken our wardrobe at the Moors pretty seriously, and in return the audience probably thought we were twin milkmaids from Switzerland, or escapees from a nearby carnival.”They called themselves the Simon Sisters, even though, as Carly Simon wrote, “Lucy and I agreed that our stage name sounded schlocky and borderline embarrassing, plus neither of us wanted to be labeled — or dismissed — as just another novelty sister act.”In that book, Ms. Simon recalled the sisterly dynamic during that first foray into performing.“Anyone paying close attention would have seen how hard I, Carly, the younger sister, was trying to look and act like Lucy, the older sister,” she wrote. “I was now taller than Lucy, but emotionally speaking, Lucy was still the high-up one, the light, the beauty, the center of it all. Then as now, my sister was my grounding influence, my heroine, my pilot.”Soon they had a contract with a management company and were booked into the Bitter End, the Greenwich Village club that gave numerous future stars their start. An appearance on the musical variety television show “Hootenanny” in the spring of 1963 (along with the Chad Mitchell Trio and the Smothers Brothers) further boosted their profile. They appeared on the show again in early 1964.Some years earlier, Lucy Simon had composed a setting of the Eugene Field children’s poem “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod,” and the song became a staple of the Simon Sisters’ performances. Released as a single in 1964, titled “Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod,” it reached No. 73 on the Billboard chart. It also anchored one of the two albums they quickly recorded.The two sisters toured for a time, but after her marriage in 1967 to Dr. David Y. Levine, a psychiatrist, Lucy Simon pulled back from performing to focus on their two children. In 1975, she released a solo album, titled simply “Lucy Simon,” followed in 1977 by another, “Stolen Time.” But she found she had lost her zeal for performing.In the early 1980s, she and her husband produced two compilation albums featuring James Taylor, her sister Carly, Linda Ronstadt, Bette Midler and other stars singing children’s songs. The albums, “In Harmony: A Sesame Street Record” and “In Harmony 2,” both won Grammy Awards for best children’s album.In the 1980s, Ms. Simon took a stab at musical theater, working on an effort to make a musical out of the “Little House on the Prairie” stories. That project never bore fruit, but a connection provided by her sister Joanna led her to one that did.Joanna Simon was for a time the arts correspondent for “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” on PBS, and in 1988 she interviewed the playwright Marsha Norman. She asked Ms. Norman what she was working on, and the playwright mentioned an adaptation of “The Secret Garden,” the Frances Hodgson Burnett children’s novel, and said that she and the producer Heidi Landesman were looking for a composer.Lucy, left, and Carly Simon singing in Shubert Alley along Broadway in 1982. Lucy Simon was later nominated for a Tony Award for best original score, for the hit musical “The Secret Garden.”Nancy Kaye/Associated PressLucy Simon proved to be a good fit for Ms. Norman’s lyrics. The show opened on Broadway in April 1991. Reviews were mixed — Frank Rich, in The Times, said that Ms. Simon’s music was “fetching when limning the deep feelings locked within the story’s family constellations” but not always successful — yet the show was a hit, giving 709 performances over almost two years. Ms. Simon earned a Tony nomination for best original score. (The award went to Cy Coleman, Betty Comden and Adolph Green for “The Will Rogers Follies.”)Ms. Simon reached Broadway again in 2015 as composer of the musical “Doctor Zhivago,” but the show lasted just 23 performances.Lucy Elizabeth Simon was born on May 5, 1940, in Manhattan.“We all came out singing,” she once said of herself and her sisters. “And we kept on singing. At dinner we wouldn’t just say, ‘Please pass the salt, thank you.’ We’d sing it. Sometimes in the style of Gershwin. Sometimes as a lieder.”Carly Simon wrote in her book that the pass-the-salt singing started as a way to help her — Carly — with a vexing stammer. Their mother had suggested that instead of speaking the phrase, Carly try singing it. With Joanna and Lucy joining in to encourage their sister, it worked.Lucy and Carly Simon during an interview with The New York Times in 2015 at Carly Simon’s home on Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.Ryan Conaty for The New York TimesLucy Simon’s greatest hit as a folk singer, the “Winkin’” song, had a self-help element to it. At 14, she was given a school assignment to memorize a poem, but dyslexia made it difficult. She found that she could memorize the Eugene Field poem by setting it to music. Her version was later recorded by numerous artists.Ms. Simon’s credits also included composing the music for a wild 1993 HBO movie, “The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader Murdering Mom,” which won Emmy Awards for Holly Hunter and Beau Bridges.Ms. Simon’s brother, Peter, a photographer, died in 2018. In addition to her husband and her sister Carly, she is survived by two children, Julie Simon and James Levine, and four grandchildren.In 1985, Ms. Simon was in the hospital for surgery. She told a reporter that her two sisters had turned up to give her support.“When the stretcher came to take me to the operating room, we sang three-part harmony,” she said. “It lifted me.” More

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      ‘Hound Dog’ Review: A Soul-Searching Journey Strays Off Course

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      Melis Aker’s new play with music, presented by Ars Nova and PlayCo., follows a musical prodigy without drive or passion.The young woman nicknamed Hound Dog might have studied musicology at Harvard, but all the panel members at her Royal Academy of Music audition seem to care about is that she’s from Turkey.“It’s like if Joni Mitchell had a bit of an orgy with a few Turkish folk musicians, and then had a very confused baby,” one of the panelists says of Hound Dog’s song. Another detects an “Americana” influence, “which is … surprising.” The first one wishes that she’d use “the traditional Turkish instrument,” though it’s unclear what that would be.What’s jarring about this scene is not so much that educators at the Royal Academy of Music would have such clichéd assumptions, but that their phrasing would be so clunky and vague — they’re deciding on admission to a prestigious institution, not a neighborhood after-school program. Unfortunately, this lack of focus and attendant lack of bite are fairly representative of Melis Aker’s new play with music, “Hound Dog,” which is being jointly presented by Ars Nova and PlayCo.When we meet her, Hound Dog (Ellena Eshraghi) is back in her hometown, Ankara, pondering whether to attend the conservatory (yes, she ended up being admitted), though the reasons for her hesitation are unclear. Complicating matters is her fraught relationship with her widowed father (Laith Nakli), with whom she is staying.Intertwined with his frustration and impatience with Turkey as a whole, Baba is a big rock ’n’ roll fan, with a particular fixation on Elvis Presley. Hound Dog sniffs at his taste with the dismissiveness of the newly enlightened. “I took a class called ‘Sound in the Uncanny Valley’ with this crazy professor,” she informs her childhood bestie, Ayse (the crackerjack Olivia AbiAssi, making the most of an underwritten role), before deriding “the appropriation and commercial simplicity” of her dad’s favorite bands.The dogmatism is amusing and on point. It is also contradicted by what we hear from Hound Dog’s own music. Her folk-rock audition number, “Only in Time” (performed, like the others in the show, by a live band headed by the coolly composed singer Sahar Milani), does sound like a Joni Mitchell pastiche, complete with vocal mannerisms, so who’s appropriating what now?But it’s hard to tell why Hound Dog writes in any particular style or even what animates her in general: This supposed prodigy is portrayed as lacking drive and passion. Mostly Hound Dog gabs with Ayse over some joints, argues with Baba, visits her dopey high school music teacher, Mr. Callahan (Matt Magnusson), and mopes as she attempts to deal with her unresolved grief over her mother’s death a year earlier.Aker had a promising subject in a woman who is deeply ambivalent about her life’s calling, and, by extension, herself. Hound Dog tries to navigate notions of authenticity and identity as she looks for her place in her family and in the world. The last is evoked by brief references to the ways social, political and cultural forces have long hurled against one another in Turkey, including an encounter with a cop who asks Baba, “Your folks never tell you about playing foreign music outside ’round here?”Because Hound Dog’s soul-searching remains blurry, Aker and the director, Machel Ross, can never quite make her equivocations compelling to watch — an ambiguous situation since the character is partly autobiographical, with stage directions that use the first-person singular whenever Hound Dog (referred to as “Me” in the script) is involved.Yet more unfulfilled promise comes from the musical numbers, written by Aker and the brothers Daniel and Patrick Lazour, who are credited as the Lazours. One wonders, for example, whose feelings the band’s frontwoman is meant to voice. She could be Hound Dog’s siren-like alter ego, or perhaps she is a half-fantasized vision of her late mother. Or a mix of both. No matter: It’s hard not to feel that Hound Dog is stuck on the outside of her own story, listening in.Hound DogThrough Nov. 5 at Greenwich House, Manhattan; arsnovanyc.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      ‘New York, New York,’ a Film-Inspired Homage, Plans Broadway Bow

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      The new musical, based on the 1977 Martin Scorsese film, features songs by John Kander and Fred Ebb and is directed by Susan Stroman.“New York, New York,” a new musical inspired by the 1977 Martin Scorsese film of the same name, will open on Broadway next spring.The musical, set in the years just after World War II, is nominally about the lives of a diverse array of New Yorkers, including a musician who falls in love with a singer, as in the film. But, also like the movie, it is a tribute to New York City as a city of seekers and strivers.The musical will feature songs by John Kander and Fred Ebb, a songwriting pair best known for “Chicago” and “Cabaret.” The two wrote songs for the film, which was also a musical, including, most famously, the title song, which enjoyed renewed popularity in the city at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.The stage adaptation will include nine existing songs and 13 new ones. Ebb died in 2004; Kander, who is 95, has been actively working on the show, and the composer Lin-Manuel Miranda (“Hamilton”) co-wrote two songs with him and will be credited for contributing additional lyrics to the show.“The hero or heroine of the piece is New York City itself,” Kander said in an interview. “In the years of 1946 and 1947, the city was flooded with new young people, many of whom had been in the Service — I was one of them — looking to have a life you couldn’t have where you came from.”Kander said the show will track five story lines, but also will feature “a kaleidoscopic set of interludes where we see other characters.”The show features a book by David Thompson and Sharon Washington, and will be directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman. The cast has not yet been announced.The musical is scheduled to begin performances on March 24 and to open on April 26 at the St. James Theater. The lead producers are Sonia Friedman and Tom Kirdahy; the show will be capitalized for $25 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.The show will be large — Stroman said she expects an onstage cast of 27 and an orchestra of 19. Stroman and Kander began talking about the show before the pandemic, but now see it a tribute to the city’s resilience. “We knew the city would at some point come back, and that fueled us to write about it even more,” Stroman said. More

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      Review: This Time, ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ Really Does Explode

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      Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 classic ends on a note of cautious optimism. Its latest incarnation, at the Public Theater, does not.Leaving his recent “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” aside, Robert O’Hara doesn’t typically direct revivals; nor, leaving Shakespeare aside, does the Public Theater typically produce them. Yet on Tuesday the Public opened O’Hara’s take on Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun”: not merely a revival but a further “exploration” of an earlier production of a 1959 classic that is arguably as well known today as it was epochal when it debuted.How, then, to make it new? Apparently, on the evidence of this staging, by furiously underlining its subtleties and downplaying its conventional strengths, a reversal of standard procedure that produces a sometimes stunning, sometimes stunted result.It’s not as if the play needed help to feel relevant; like all great works it has proved itself incessantly timely. In telling the story of the Youngers, a Black family aiming to move from a “rat trap” tenement on Chicago’s South Side to a house in a working-class white neighborhood, it both reports on and anticipates the racist backlash to upward mobility that has been a blight on American life since Reconstruction. And in dramatizing the effects of that backlash on Walter Lee, the feckless dreamer of the family, it offers a piercing psychological portrait of Black manhood in distress.As was customary in her time, Hansberry prioritizes the real estate plot, wrapping Walter Lee’s personal drama (and that of his mother, wife, sister and son) in its ultimately hopeful arms. Beginning with the indignities of “ghetto-itus” — there are just two bedrooms for the three generations and a bathroom shared with neighbors down the hall — the play ends with them all moving out. Even the feeble houseplant, symbolically undernourished in the light-deprived apartment, is promised a new life.O’Hara signals from the start (and reiterates throughout) that he will flip the focus, at the same time broadening and darkening it. His production begins not, as written, with Ruth Younger (Mandi Masden) making breakfast, but with Walter Lee (Francois Battiste) carrying their sleeping son, Travis, from the dim recesses of the apartment to his bed on the living room sofa. It’s a haunting image that suggests the way the father’s hopes, and perhaps his failures, may be borne into the future — a future O’Hara and the scenic designer, Clint Ramos, literalize in a devastating coup de théâtre at the end.Francois Battiste as Walter Lee, right, with his son Toussaint Battiste as Travis, has no difficulty filling the additional space created by O’Hara’s interpretation of the role, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn between, no matter how judiciously Hansberry has distributed the play’s attention among the main characters — including the matriarch, Lena (Tonya Pinkins), and her daughter, Beneatha (Paige Gilbert) — O’Hara concentrates his prodigious theatrical imagination on Walter Lee.Battiste, among the most compelling stage actors today, has no difficulty filling the additional space created by that interpretation, making the character more alarming than usual but no less believable. Even when O’Hara has him step completely out of the frame of the play, turning what is already a horrifying speech (“O, yassuh boss! Yassssuh, Great white Father!”) into a brutal moment of minstrelsy, Battiste manages not to rip the skin of the role.But some of O’Hara’s other attempts to muscle in on Hansberry’s naturalism are less successful. Reaching not just forward but also backward along the family’s male line, he transfers some of the dialogue normally assigned to Lena to the ghost of her husband, who wanders atmospherically in and out of the action, looking unmoored. (The spectral lighting is by Alex Jainchill.) Also unmoored: a passage of postcoital pillow talk for Walter Lee and Ruth, created by turning dialogue that’s usually spoken live into a recorded voice-over. We hear the moans of their lovemaking too.Rather than creating the impression of buried fondness in their marriage, as it evidently means to do, the interpolation pushes the affection offstage. That’s a problem throughout. O’Hara directs most of the family scenes as overlapping free-for-alls, creating a generalized impression of dysfunction and very little of attachment. (Most of the funny and trenchant detail is lost in the noise.) At times I had the feeling that O’Hara, impatient with Hansberry’s occasionally laborious dramaturgy, had spun all the dials to the extreme right: volume, contrast, hue.Yet that was not the case in the earlier version of this revival seen at the Williamstown Theater Festival in 2019. Led more equally by Battiste’s Walter Lee and S. Epatha Merkerson’s Lena, that “Raisin” was just as daring but less cartoonish. And though the current cast is very good generally, it’s noticeable that the comic material is handled most deftly, with standout performances from the piquant Gilbert and, as a nosy neighbor, Perri Gaffney.Gilbert as Beneatha and John Clay III as one of Beneatha’s suitors, the Nigerian idealist Joseph Asagai.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRather, the problem seems to be that O’Hara’s continued exploration has escaped Hansberry’s orbit, leaving some of the graver characters stranded in the thin air between her style and his. As Lena, Pinkins, ordinarily capable of astonishing depth and power, is largely hampered by too much directorial business, including the sudden onset of a ferocious palsy no one onstage seems to notice. And where the script famously has her slap her daughter for blasphemy, O’Hara has her go much further, leaving Beneatha flat on the floor.Despite his similar approach to the play overall, it never stays down for long. It can’t; it has too much internal energy and direction for any single misstep, including Hansberry’s, to throw the whole thing off track. Beneatha’s choice between two suitors — a preppy conformist (Mister Fitzgerald) and a Nigerian idealist (John Clay III) — is fully engaging no matter how creaky the setup is. And though the scene in which a representative of the Youngers’s new neighborhood (Jesse Pennington) comes to “welcome” them with veiled threats is very nearly twirling-mustache melodrama, it’s nevertheless one of the highlights of American theater.In that sense, O’Hara — who aside from his brilliant direction of contemporary works like “Slave Play” and “BLKS” is a mordant comic playwright himself — is right to reimagine the genre expectations of “Raisin.” It’s what we do with all classics, not because they require it but because they can handle it. And if his pessimism about American racism is somewhat at odds with Hansberry’s cautious optimism, well, he’s had 60 more years of history to support his point. That the play is so prescient does not mean that its story is over. It means that, sadly, it never is.A Raisin in the SunThrough Nov. 20 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 3 hours. More

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      ‘Montag’ Review: A Dark Hymn to Female Friendship

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      Not quite a comedy and not quite a thriller, Kate Tarker’s play is an antic study of two women preparing for a game (or possibly an attack).In a basement apartment somewhere in Germany, Faith (Ariana Venturi) chain smokes cigarettes and drinks endless cups of coffee. Novella (Nadine Malouf) chomps her way through a bag of spicy chips. They argue, they dance, they try on clubwear, they play anxious games. Like lots of characters in lots of plays before them, they are waiting. But not for God or liberation or even a gentleman caller, not exactly. They are waiting for the man who is coming to kill them.This is the trap laid by Kate Tarker’s antic, frantic “Montag,” at Soho Rep, directed by Dustin Wills. Not quite a comedy and not quite a tragedy, sometimes a thriller and often something more bizarre, the play is a hymn to female friendship and, in harsher music, a study of the threat of intimate partner violence. No place, the show intimates, is safe. Not the kitchen table, not the stage.It takes time to figure all of this out, which may signal confidence in the audience on the part of Wills and Tarker, or brash unconcern. Lisa Laratta’s set, a box inside Soho Rep’s already petite stage, is an abstract rendering of a living room; Masha Tsimring’s lights suggest a perpetual midnight. Details about where we are and when we are and the contours of the women’s relationship are kept similarly shadowed. It’s exciting, in a way, this theater as jigsaw, and there’s satisfaction as each piece snaps together. But the murk of these early scenes can also feel like feints until the rules of the game come clear. Or nearly clear. Are these women’s sports and rehearsals preparations to meet death or to cheat it?There’s a realistic drama lurking inside “Montag,” a story of how a Turkish sex worker and an American military operative became friends, how they moved in together, whether this caused any ructions back on the base. That’s a drama I wouldn’t mind seeing, and it might have more geopolitical resonance, which this version gestures toward and then dismisses. But Tarker doesn’t trust that story, or she dreams bigger and weirder. Both, maybe. (The German setting, Novella’s job and the murderous inclinations of her common-law husband also indicate a dialogue with Büchner’s “Woyzeck,” a classic of German proto-expressionism.)Certainly “Montag” is more tethered to reality than Tarker’s previous play, the Alfred Jarry-ish farce “Thunderbodies.” Yet only in its late moments, when the two-character piece expands, careening into operatic hallucination, does it take on weight. The play makes sense as dreams make sense. When life feels like a nightmare, Wills’s production suggests, it should move like a nightmare, too.Malouf, always a welcome presence, infuses Novella with an unvarnished sensuality and a party-at-the-end-of-the-world abandon, born of having nothing left to lose. Novella can seem indolent, unconcerned, until she begins to scream. Venturi’s Faith holds herself more tightly, a jittery presence still trying to juggle odds, plans and probabilities even when logic has clearly failed. The less said about the characters played by Jacob Orr and Dane Suarez, an operatic tenor, the better, though they are played finely.If “Montag” conveys a stylistic restlessness, that puts it in good company. Two weeks ago, Sarah Benson, an artistic director of Soho Rep for the past 15 years, announced that she would step down at the close of this current season. Meropi Peponides, at Soho Rep since 2014, will depart as well. Under Benson’s tenure, the company has continued as a home for formal experimentation and audacious swings. In “Montag,” not all of those swings connect. But how wonderful that Soho Rep has made a space where artists can take them.MontagThrough Nov. 13 at Soho Rep, Manhattan; sohorep.org. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More

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      How a Pro-Nazi Camp on Long Island Inspired a New Play

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      YAPHANK, N.Y. — On a Sunday afternoon earlier this month, the playwright Bess Wohl stood on the shores of a lake in this Long Island hamlet about 60 miles from Manhattan. She admired the surface pleasures of the scene — the water, the leaves, a sky the blue of a faded Tiffany’s box, an obliging swan.“But I also see history,” she said. “I see what happened here.”What happened here was a summer camp, operated in the 1930s by the German American Bund, a pro-Nazi organization. Its teenage participants swam, hiked, competed in archery and went to dances, all the while absorbing Nazi ideology.“On the surface,” said Arnie Bernstein, the author of a book on the German American Bund, “it was like any other camp, except it was filled with swastikas.”The flower beds and rose bushes, he noted, were planted in swastika patterns. And there are photos of the camp of rallies that look like smaller, more rustic versions of Nuremberg.The camp finally closed in 1941, not long after the United States entered World War II. And the town erased it from memory. At the lake the local historical society sponsored a display board, detailing the history of Yaphank. The 1930s and Camp Siegfried were elided.Wohl has salvaged that history in “Camp Siegfried,” an intimate two-character play directed by David Cromer. It’s in previews now, and opens on Nov. 15 at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater. Over the course of a summer, a nameless boy, 17, and a girl, 16, fall in and out of what isn’t exactly love. It’s a play about seduction, Wohl believes — by bodies, by beliefs, by stories.The entrance to the camp.Bettmann, via Getty Images Former camp grounds in Yaphank. “If we’re going to live up to the moral imperative of ‘never again,’ we have to look at these stories, we have to tell these stories and we have to learn from them,” the playwright Bess Wohl said.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesShe learned about Camp Siegfried about two years ago, during the first summer of the pandemic. She and her husband, the public relations executive Steven Rubenstein, had booked an Airbnb in nearby Bellport. One morning, while Googling area attractions that she could visit with her three young daughters, Wohl stumbled on a site that gave the history of the camp and then she stumbled further, finding photos and archival film.“I was like, this can’t have happened right in my backyard,” she said. “It honestly seemed like a mistake at first, that these pictures were pictures of America.”This was an anxious summer, with both the coronavirus and President Trump’s re-election campaign raging. Wohl found herself driving, alone, through the private roads of what had once been the camp and the nearby bungalow community, with streets named for Hitler, Goebbels, Goering. (Those names have long been changed, but a restrictive housing covenant, which allowed only buyers who could prove German ancestry, stood until 2017.) On those drives, she was looking for evidence of what this place had been and how its past had been.On that Sunday in October, we took a similar drive, past Bach Court and Schiller Court, past signs that announced the community as private and the roads as having no outlet. There were no swastikas anymore. American flags and Trump flags had replaced the Nazi ones. A handful of buildings and bungalows from the 1930s remained. Otherwise the community looked aggressively normal, if strangely deserted, which had been Wohl’s experience.“What shocked me the most was how mundane and pretty and sort of regular everything seemed,” she said. “It’s part of what prompted me to write the play, because if we’re going to live up to the moral imperative of ‘never again,’ we have to look at these stories, we have to tell these stories and we have to learn from them.”For much of its running time, “Camp Siegfried” resembles a romantic drama, a coming-of-age story. That’s a queasy proposition, considering the play’s setting. In this boy-meets-girl, the girl lives on Hitler Street. Wohl — who has Jewish ancestry, a Jewish husband and is raising her daughters in the Jewish faith — is mindful of this, anxious even.“I find her very nervous about these risks,” Cromer, who is also Jewish, said during a phone interview, “beautifully nervous and not self-congratulatory about them at all. But that doesn’t stop her from taking them. It is difficult for her not to take these big risks. And then she executes them with rigor and thoroughness and depth. She does irresponsible things really responsibly.”Back in the 1930s: Adolf Hitler Street ran through Camp Siegfried.Bettmann, via Getty Images And now: Streets named for Hitler, Goebbels and Goering have long been changed, but a restrictive housing covenant, which allowed only buyers who could prove German ancestry, stood until 2017.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesWohl’s theater has always involved a certain amount of risk, of contradiction. Her plays often begin as thought experiments or personal dares. Could you write a play (“Small Mouth Sounds”) that is largely silent? Could you write a play (“Make Believe”) with a first act populated exclusively by children? What about a musical (“Pretty Filthy”) about the porn industry? Or a show (“Grand Horizons”) about the sexual and romantic lives of retirees?“She always goes just to the left of where you think she’s going to land on something,” said Leigh Silverman, who has directed two of Wohl’s plays, the Tony-nominated “Grand Horizons” and the early comedy “American Hero.” “She’s always going to embrace the weird, she’s always going to embrace the strange choice. She’s always going to keep pushing herself to do something different. She refuses to repeat the same genre, the same idea.”Recently, she has further expanded her command of genre and medium, writing and directing the psychological horror film “Baby Ruby,” slated for release next year by Magnolia Pictures; writing for the forthcoming Apple TV+ climate change anthology series, “Extrapolations”; and adapting “The Children’s Hour,” a 1934 play by Lillian Hellman, for television.Yet there are continuities among these works. Most of them operate with ample surface charm. (Wohl — funny, frazzled, wildly incisive, with a doll-like prettiness — operates that way, too.) “Small Mouth Sounds,” to take one example, is screamingly funny. But the screaming is the point. An author’s note that begins the play reads: “Everyone in the play is in some kind of agony. In this way they are not unlike the rest of us.”Rachel Chavkin, who directed “Small Mouth Sounds,” saw Wohl herself in that note. “I always think about Bess talking about the most tragic thing, and her heart simultaneously breaking as she’s laughing,” Chavkin said. “She’s holding the tragedy and the comedy in equal measure.”Luke Thallon and Patsy Ferran in a version of the play in London at the Old Vic in 2021.Manuel Harlan Wohl didn’t disagree. She likes to write plays and characters that arrive in familiar containers. “And then I lift the lid and there’s just nothing but agony,” she said. “The humor in my plays comes from deep, deep agony. Like really deep agony. That’s the rub that interests me.”This dual register — charm on top, existential anguish all the way down — attracts actors to her work. “That’s all you hope for,” said Samantha Mathis, who starred in “Make Believe.” “Comedy comes from extremes of emotion. So you just have to tap into the extremity of pain that these people are in and the truth of what she’s talking about, which is how excruciating it can be to be a human being sometimes.”Brad Heberlee, who has known Wohl since their days as actors at the Yale School of Drama and has starred in three of her plays, echoed this. “Her writing requires actors to bring their entire humanity,” he said. “The only way it can live is if you attach yourself to the depth of pain these people have, the truth of that.”Both of the “Camp Siegfried” characters are in deep pain — and really, what teenager isn’t? — which becomes more evident as the play goes on. “Camp Siegfried” balances sympathy for them with a horror of their situation and the hope that they may yet escape it.Wohl wrote the first draft swiftly, intuitively, in snatched moments during the summer of 2020, in a sweltering room at the top of the rental house while her children slept or watched “CoComelon.” A version of this draft was staged in London at the Old Vic in 2021. The critic for The Independent described it as “a consummately clever and insightful piece about the frightening psychological appeal of fascism.”“Telling these stories is a way of bearing witness and saying we have to pay attention,” Wohl said.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAfter that, Wohl wrote a new draft, with six characters, and then another, which shrank it back down to a two-hander, its central couple now deepened, the camp around them more convincingly imagined. The trick, she felt, was to balance the ordinariness and seeming wholesomeness of the setting — the swimming, the cookouts — with the genocidal ideas that circulated there. That moral danger had to be apparent, but not immediately. Indoctrination doesn’t usually happen all at once.“They don’t say to you, Hey, do you want to, like, kill an entire race of people?” Wohl said. “They say, You want to feel good, don’t you? You want to be part of a community? You love your country? You want to be a good person?” Indoctrination is stealthy, and so the play is stealthy, too, seducing the audience as the characters are seduced and then helping the viewers to shake off that seduction.“Camp Siegfried” joins several other current shows — “This Beautiful Future,” “Remember This,” “Leopoldstadt” — in exploring the roots and devastations of Nazism. But those plays all concern what happened in Europe. “Camp Siegfried” is local, set less than an hour’s drive from Second Stage, which makes the play a more precarious prospect here than in its London staging.“This is a deeply American play. It’s about America,” she said. “It feels very alive to do it right here.”Cromer wasn’t sure how American audiences would receive the play and its characters. “I’m scared if they love them,” he said. “If they hate them, I worry about that.”Yet “Camp Siegfried,” he thought, was worth the worry. Wohl believes that almost any play about this time and these events would be. Because if we know our history, maybe we won’t repeat it. Maybe we’ll have fewer genocides, insurrections, groundless invasions. Maybe not. But it’s the job of artists to try.In the parked car that same afternoon, Wohl looked out at what had been Hitler Street. “Telling these stories is a way of bearing witness and saying we have to pay attention,” she said. “Just keep telling and telling and telling the story. That’s how you keep it alive.” More

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      in Theater

      James Corden and the Dangers of Likability

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      No one knows what an egg yolk omelet is, but we all know that TV hosts should be relatable. Or should they? That didn’t do Ellen DeGeneres any favors.Not since Humpty Dumpty has an egg made such a mess.Last night, one week and countless news cycles after he was scolded for obnoxiously complaining about an omelet order at the Manhattan restaurant Balthazar, James Corden went on his talk show to do the kind of damage control once reserved for offensive remarks or acts of adultery.You knew it was serious because instead of telling jokes, he started by twice showing shots of his elderly parents in the audience, a classic humanizing gesture. Then he got down to the business of confession, adopting a grave face while expressing deep regrets about his terrible behavior to the wait staff.“I made a sarcastic, rude comment,” he said, adding that he understood and respected the difficulties of being a server, while not being quite able to resist sneaking in that the breakfast order was messed up no less than three times, including via a dish that would have inflamed his wife’s allergies. But no matter, ahem; back to the taking full responsibility. “It was an unnecessary comment,” he said with feeling. “It was ungracious.”This is hopefully the final chapter of an absurd and inadvertently revealing melodrama. Call it James and the Giant Breach. It began when Keith McNally, the owner of Balthazar, barred Corden from his restaurant in an Instagram post that was deliciously long on specifics (“Get us another round of drinks this second,” it said Corden demanded) and insults (McNally called Corden a “tiny cretin of a man”).According to a manager report posted on McNally’s Instagram, Corden, host of “The Late Late Show,” became enraged after his wife ordered an egg yolk omelet, only to receive egg white mixed with the yolk. After demanding a new dish, and receiving a second try mistakenly replacing salad with home fries, Corden reportedly erupted: “You can’t do your job! Maybe I should go into the kitchen and cook the omelet myself!”Corden acknowledged his restaurant behavior was “ungracious” on “The Late Late Show.”CBSThis is the entitled stuff of a villain from a John Hughes movie. It’s obviously bad behavior. As a former busboy, I understand the white-hot rage about it. And yet, what followed was a bit much. Corden was denounced on the internet as if he were a war criminal, his actions reported on by countless media outlets, his transgressions detailed in explainers and called out in thought pieces. Then came the devil’s advocates. Restaurant owners defended Corden in The New York Post, saying he had been lovely to them, leaving generous tips and singing with bartenders, never once pelting a sous chef with a pastry.An Omelet of ContentionJames Corden, the host of “The Late Late Show,” has found himself in the middle of a controversy over rude behavior toward the staff at a restaurant.An ‘Abusive’ Customer: Corden was accused of berating the staff of Balthazar in New York City over an error with an omelet order, among other things. The story prompted criticism of the TV host on social media.Damage Control: Here is how Corden addressed the situation on “The Late Late Show.”Dangers of Likability: One reason the controversy took off is that Corden “doesn’t seem like the kind of person who would humiliate a waiter over an egg,” our critic writes.Gossip on the Menu: Corden’s omelet, made exclusively with egg yolks, was not the only food tied to a celebrity in recent weeks. A certain salad dressing was also on everyone’s mind.This was followed by the first apology, and the rescinding of the ban. Like a generous priest, McNally, whose long history of aggressive behavior in public feuds didn’t seem to make many question how reliable a narrator of events he was, wrote a second post forgiving the star, adding that “I strongly believe in second chances.” Ahh, yes, sweet providence.Not so fast. Extending his misery — and that of the publicity team at CBS — Corden told The Times on Thursday that he actually did nothing wrong, which led to another tart response from McNally before Corden reversed course into a full-throated mea culpa for the cameras.It was all just another day on the internet-driven media, where the demands of algorithms lead to celebrity justice meted out on a regular basis. Yet as with many such brouhahas, it provides clues to soft spots in the culture, to the fragilities that were already there. The backdrop is that Corden, who plans on stepping down from his show next year, is part of a late-night landscape that is going through a transition if not a crisis. Not long after he announced he would be leaving, Trevor Noah somewhat abruptly declared he was ending his run on “The Daily Show.” (The latest rumor is he’ll be replaced by a committee of hosts.)Ratings for late-night talk shows have been declining for years. There is a growing sense that such invariably topical programs are a poor fit on streaming services. With the networks fading in relevance, there are also whispers of more dramatic shifts to lineups, including the storied NBC institutions of “The Tonight Show” and “Late Night With Seth Meyers.”We are in a moment when viewers are questioning what we want these shows to be and what makes for a successful host. For some network executives in the past decade, the answer is clearly likability. They have emphasized performers the audience can relate to, a star who, to use the phrase that used to be a political litmus test in the pre-Trump era, you would want to have a beer with. James Corden was that bloke.Often described as seeming to come out of nowhere (otherwise known as England), he presented himself as an ordinary guy, self-deprecating, quick to laugh, eager to please. His signature bit, “Carpool Karaoke,” pulled off the feat of making pop superstars also seem down to earth and relatable, making for charming television and great promotion. Talk-show perfection.Corden is not actually ordinary at all. He is a famous actor and gifted Broadway star. As it happens, he earned the late-night job in no small part because of his Tony-winning performance in the hit play “One Man, Two Guvnors,” and his latest drama could be seen as a callback to that show’s comic high point, where his down-on-his-luck character desperately tries to help an inept waiter. But his talk-show persona, like that of the forever boyish Jimmy Fallon, did not rest on his comic and musical talents, but on how he exploits them to seem like a garden-variety sweetheart.Corden with Nicki Minaj on his signature “Carpool Karaoke,” which makes pop stars seem down to earth.CBSWhat’s clear these days is that this edifice of ingratiation is shaky. Bank too much on it not crumbling at your peril. Just look at Ellen DeGeneres, whose reputation for wholesome kindness was used against her by the end of her talk-show run. The amount of testimony from employees that ran contrary to this image became much too incongruous for the public not to start tuning her out. DeGeneres is a brilliant comedian, but that was not her central drawing card toward the end of her career, a problem no publicist could fix.One reason this minor controversy about Corden took off is that on television, he doesn’t seem like the kind of person who would humiliate a waiter over an egg. More like a guy who would make a bad pun about eggs to be endearing.Likability has always been important in talk-show hosts, but balanced by other virtues like creativity, funniness, political or even journalistic insight, the ability to connect emotionally. Johnny Carson was far too remote to be considered relatable, and David Letterman developed a reputation for meanness that, whether earned or not, was part of his appeal to some fans. Even Craig Ferguson, Corden’s predecessor, relied on a certain roguish charm. The more politically minded hosts like John Oliver or Meyers would not be helped by a scandal over yelling at a maître d’, but I doubt it would cause such a fuss.The truth is that the rich and famous have been rude to servers forever. This is not a good thing, but it also hasn’t been big news until recently. Now social media gives every restaurateur, nanny, production designer and eavesdropper a platform that could reach a global audience. This makes it much harder for a celebrity to control his or her image, and almost impossible to maintain a pristine reputation. Being known as a nice person can be dangerous.John Mulaney is currently touring with a stand-up show about this exact theme. “Likability is a jail,” he says. Of course, unlikability can be one, too. Maybe the smart move for a talk-show host is to strike a balance so that public persona matches up as closely as possible to private self. And if you somehow can’t show respect to the people handling your food, tip exceptionally well. More