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      ‘A Little Life’ Review: A Collage of Unrelenting Torment

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      Hanya Yanagihara’s best-selling novel comes to the BAM stage, and raises the question: How much suffering can the protagonist (and the audience) endure?Pain is something most characters try to outrun — or that results, with some logic, from their actions. But in “A Little Life,” a bold and brutal adaptation of the novel by Hanya Yanagihara now playing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, it is the unyielding system of logic around which an entire play is built. The question is not why a man has suffered, but how much. The answer, it spoils nothing to say, is a lot.Conceived and directed by Ivo van Hove and adapted by Koen Tachelet, “A Little Life” is a kind of endurance test. As a doctor tells Jude, the melodrama’s human punching bag of a protagonist, “Only you know how much pain you can tolerate.”Those who’ve read the 2015 best seller know that the threshold required here is extremely high. Initially a chronicle of four male friends coming up in New York City, the story grows progressively darker as the gruesome details of Jude’s traumatic childhood are revealed. The novel was greeted with widespread acclaim, heralded by The Atlantic as “The Great Gay Novel” and pored over in tear-flooded book clubs. (Yanagihara is the editor of T: The New York Times Style Magazine.) But its reputation has since become more divisive, with critics who consider its torment of Jude to be manipulative and excessive.A character study that descends into misery on the page is an aesthetic experience suited to the form — you can put down a book whenever you want. But there are only so many times you can look away over the course of a four-hour show. A degree of remove, at least, is provided for those who don’t speak Dutch. (This production, which originated at Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, where van Hove is the artistic director, is performed with English supertitles.)Yanagihara’s immersion into the lives and minds of her characters (nearly all of them men) gets reordered and distilled here into abbreviated art openings, dinner parties and strobe-lit nights on the town. Slow-motion tracking shots of eerily empty Manhattan streets appear at either side of a sprawling crimson rug, visual cues for context and dread (van Hove’s longtime partner and collaborator, Jan Versweyveld, designed the set, lighting and video). Everyday furnishings (a bathroom sink, a working kitchen, an artist’s studio) are placed in contrast with the grandeur of the space (several rows of onstage seating trick the eye into a sense of intimacy).From left: Heijmans, Majd Mardo, Nasr and Edwin Jonker in the play, which originated at International Theater Amsterdam in 2018.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe men address their thoughts and circumstances to the audience and to one another, in a collage of reflections and exposition. There’s JB (Majd Mardo), the saucy and promising artist for whom Jude is a favorite portrait subject and sometime object of resentment; Malcolm (Edwin Jonker), minimally sketched as the architect who designs all of Jude’s dwellings; and Willem (Maarten Heijmans), whose friendship with Jude consumes much of the novel and suffers the most here from being rendered in shorthand, particularly when their relationship takes an unbelievable turn toward romance.And, of course, there’s Jude (Ramsey Nasr), a magician whose “sole trick is concealment,” according to his doctor (Bart Slegers). Jude is stubbornly elusive even throughout the novel’s 720 pages, less of a character than an amalgam of scars and cipher for the attention of others. Onstage, that disappearing act presents a conundrum. It is grueling to watch Jude use a razor to slice open his forearms a second, and then a third time, blood soaking his clothes. By the play’s third hour he looks like a walking murder scene. Flashbacks to the sexual abuse he experienced as a child, at the hands of a priest and then a doctor, and by a lover in the present (all played by Hans Kesting), are harrowing and unflinching, even as van Hove’s staging is sensitive and not overly explicit.Undoubtedly an argument could be made for facing mankind’s capacity for violence, even in an abstract, philosophical sense. But when does cruelty as a dramatic focal point in itself turn excessive, or at least cease to be compelling? (You might ask roughly a third of the audience members, who walked out by the end of intermission.) Of course, we instinctively recoil at the harm enacted on Jude; it is inhumane in the purest sense — no one should ever have to endure it. But these scenes might actually feel emotionally wrenching, too, were his character more than the sum of his grisly mistreatment.Whittle the story down to its major incidents, and what’s left is a series of escalating debasements until Jude all but disintegrates. This plays out onstage with a level of luridness. More time and attention are paid to Jude’s suffering than to anything else, including the relationships that we are presumably meant to invest in, and that might have been used to reveal more about Jude. It’s a problem in the book as well, but becomes rather stark onstage, as when Willem insists on beginning a sexual relationship with Jude that feels unearned and like another form of punishment.Nasr plays Jude’s agony and frustration to operatic heights, with the bracing screams and the running in circles of a man who wants nothing more than to escape his own body. It’s a marathon performance that manages to lend human form to what is essentially a pileup of impossible burdens. Of the four friends, Mardo’s JB makes the liveliest case for a person with interests other than Jude, a rare glimpse at a world beyond Jude’s quicksand orbit.But if there is an obvious conduit for empathy, it’s Harold (Jacob Derwig), Jude’s mentor and eventual adoptive father. Because a parent’s love is meant to be unconditional, the concern he expresses for Jude with moving insight makes the most sense of anyone’s. (No one talks about the tiny bit of relief that a parent feels, he says, when their worst fears are realized.) Ana (Marieke Heebink), the social worker who rehabilitated Jude as a teenager, pops up as a persistent voice in his mind and an unexpected narrative compass. She is the play’s sole key to forward momentum, encouraging Jude to reveal himself by way of the terrors he’s experienced.There is an absurdity to the bleakness of “A Little Life,” a sense that real life only rarely reaches such abominable depths. It’s a mechanism of great tragedy that it offers such cold comfort. After all that Jude has endured, how bad could death be?A Little LifeThrough Oct. 29 at the Howard Gilman Opera House, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn; bam.org. Running time: 4 hours 10 minutes. More

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      London Theatergoers Are on the Edge of His Seats

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      One family firm supplies seating for most of the West End’s theaters, from flexible new spaces to Victorian treasures. Its chief designer reveals some tricks and traps of the trade.LONDON — Earlier this month, during the first performance at the West End’s newest theater, @sohoplace, the audience repeatedly cheered the actors performing “Marvellous,” a comedy about a British eccentric. At one point, several hundred theatergoers even applauded a technician who came on to clean the floor.But there was one person key to the evening whom no one cheered, whooped or even politely clapped. And Andrew Simpson, the designer of the theater’s seats, was happier that way.“If a seat’s good, you don’t notice it,” he said. “You only notice it when it’s bad.” In the world of theater seating, he added, “No news is good news.”Simpson, 62, is in a position to know. He is the lead designer at Kirwin & Simpson, a family firm his grandfather founded that started out patching upholstery in a local movie house during World War II and now supplies the seats for most West End theaters. (It works with some in New York, too, including the Hudson Theater and St. Ann’s Warehouse.)Andrew Simpson, Kirwin & Simpson’s lead designer (and the grandson of the company’s founder) at the firm’s headquarters in Grays, England.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesThe West End is challenging territory for a seating designer. Many of the London theaters Simpson caters for are Victorian jewel-boxes: tight, ornate spaces built with more attention to gradations of social class than to comfort.Originally, according to David Wilmore of Theatresearch, a company that restores historic theaters in Britain, they would have had a few front rows of luxurious armchairs — known as fauteuils — for their wealthiest patrons. Everyone else sat on wooden benches. When middle-class visitors were finally accorded seats, Wilmore said, theaters preserved their old sightlines by forcing the sitters bolt upright — “part of that Victorian strictness in all areas: ‘You jolly well better sit up and listen!’”That won’t do for seats that now often cost hundreds of dollars to occupy.A recent tour of Kirwin & Simpson’s works in Grays, a working-class town east of London, included a room filled with rolls of multicolored cloth and a shed where five men were busy screwing, stapling and gluing sleek maroon seats for the forthcoming Ronald O. Perelman Performing Arts Center in New York. One warehouse is filled with emergency replacements, so that if a seat rips at, say, the Victoria Palace Theater — the London home of “Hamilton” — a new, perfectly matching one can be installed within hours.Each theater needs many types of seats. The new, 602-capacity @sohoplace has 12 types, according to Simpson, all removable to allow different styles of staging, but some tricky older spaces require far more.A seat that Kirwin & Simpson designed for @sohoplace, a West End theater that opened this month.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesThere are high chairs with built-in footrests, to give a clear view from the back of Victorian balconies where front-row patrons would once have sat directly on a low step. There are chairs with wide backs, but smaller seats, designed to fit perfectly into tight curves, and others with hinged armrests that can be raised so wheelchair users to slip into them. And there may be any number of things in between. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Theater Royal, Drury Lane, has over 160 different designs, with widths and angles tweaked to ensure the best view.The seats themselves have become less cluttered over time, losing accessories like ashtrays and wire cages for men to store their top hats. But in the most cramped spaces, Simpson still sometimes employs an illusion. Short armrests make a narrow aisle feel wider, he said, because visitors don’t have to squeeze past them to get to their places, and they are then less inclined to start thinking about how little legroom they have. “It’s all psychology,” he added.It similarly helped if the show was a hit. “If the stuff onstage is really good,” he said, “then people don’t mind what they’re sitting on. If it’s anything less than that, then the surroundings come into focus, shall we say.”The Sondheim Theater in London, which has a capacity of more than 1,000. The seats are by Kirwin & Simpson.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesInside the Kirwin & Simpson workshop.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesEven with the good will of a good show, it can be tough to accommodate theatergoers of varying shapes, sizes and tastes. Nica Burns, the chief executive of Nimax Theaters, the company behind @sohoplace, said she wanted the seats in all her venues to be comfortable for short people like her (she’s 5 foot 2 inches), who don’t want their feet to dangle in midair, and for tall people like her 6 foot 3 inch husband. While the theater was being designed, she kept two Kirwin & Simpson seats in her office and asked visitors try them. But, she said, “you’ll never find a seat that suits everybody.”One demand that Simpson hears increasingly is for wider seats. Last year, Sofie Hagen, a popular comedian, began a campaign on Twitter, urging theaters to publish details of seat widths on their websites, to help larger people like her decide if they wanted to attend. “The amount of times I’ve gone to see a musical only to be in constant, excruciating pain,” Hagen wrote. “Once I had to leave before the show even started because the seat was too narrow.”Hagen said in a telephone interview that every venue on her current British tour had agreed to display details of the width of their seats and she hoped more would follow. “If theaters had signs up saying ‘Fat people are not welcome,’ people would be like, ‘What?’,” she said, “but that’s subliminally the message we’re being told.”At @sohoplace, some dozen seats at the orchestra level and balcony discreetly offer an extra three inches of width, on top of the standard 20 or so. Simpson, the designer, said that during a test event he had happily shared one with his 27-year-old son.For some, however, a big seat might be a little too much comfort. Seats that leave theatergoers “practically rubbing shoulders with one another” make for more of a communal experience, Wilmore, the theater restorer, said.An original cast-iron row end from the Victoria Palace Theater, in Kirwin & Simpson’s workshop.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesMichael Billington, who resigned in 2019 after nearly 50 years as The Guardian’s chief theater critic, said he felt “a degree of austerity” helped keep audiences awake. For example, Shakespeare’s Globe in London has both Elizabethan-style standing space and backless wooden benches: Billington described those benches as “a form of terror,” but added that he certainly paid attention whenever he sat on one.The new seats at @sohoplace drew typically mixed reviews from some of their first paying users. In interviews with a dozen audience members at the recent “Marvellous” performance, seven were glowing. John Yee, 22, visiting from Canada and sitting in the balcony, said they were “comfy as hell.”Josh Townsend, who had a spot in the orchestra level, said he was 6 foot 2 and often struggled with seats that lacked legroom, yet @sohoplace’s were “really good.” The week before, he had watched “Dear Evan Hansen” in London’s Noël Coward Theater — whose seats are also by Kirwin & Simpson — and his legs were jammed against the seat in front. This was a huge improvement, he said.But though she had loved the show, Ayesha Girach, 26, a doctor, said the seats were so hard they were “probably the most uncomfortable” she had ever sat in. She then praised those at the Gillian Lynne Theater, just a few blocks away, where she’d recently seen “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.” “Those were really comfy,” she said. They were Kirwin & Simpson seats, too. More

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      Martyna Majok on Hoping for Magic, and Wishing for Ghosts

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      The playwright, whose Pulitzer-winning “Cost of Living” is now on Broadway, talks about “the precarity of life” and our inherent need to be taken care of.The playwright Martyna Majok has never met her father, so it was her grandfather who played the paternal role in her life. When he died, in Poland in August 2012, she didn’t have the money to travel to his funeral.“Also, I was afraid to go,” she said on a recent afternoon, “because I just didn’t want it to be true.” Not being there, though, gave his death a sense of unreality for her: “Sometimes I just think that we haven’t spoken for a long time.”Majok (pronounced MY-oak) was missing him on the snowy January night in 2014 when she lost her job at a bar in downtown Manhattan. (“They thought I had stolen $100, and they fired me because I was mouthy.”) Back home at the latest in a string of sublets, she started to write the poignant comic monologue that opens her Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Cost of Living.” It’s spoken by a hapless former trucker named Eddie, whose unmooring grief for his dead wife has him wanting to believe she’s texting him from the Great Beyond.“He’s hoping for some kind of magic, some miracle, something that communicates to him that we don’t just disappear,” Majok said in an upstairs lounge at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, where “Cost of Living” — which she dedicated to her grandfather, Pawel Majok — is having a limited Broadway run through Nov. 6. “That was definitely where I was at when I was writing it. I kept hoping that I would see my grandfather’s ghost. I was seeking it out. I was looking for signs.”Katy Sullivan and David Zayas in the Broadway production of “Cost of Living.” Majok insists that her disabled characters be played by disabled actors, a decision that Sullivan calls “bold as hell.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs tinged with longing as “Cost of Living” is, it’s also laugh-out-loud funny. Yet Majok considers it a romance, twining the stories of two New Jersey couples: Eddie and his estranged wife, Ani, who is adjusting to paraplegia following an accident; and Jess, a working-class graduate of a prestigious university who takes a job as a personal care aide to John, a wealthy doctoral student with cerebral palsy.Class figures prominently, as does disability. But to Majok it is a play about “the precarity of life” — the way that one bad break, financial or physical or emotional, can tumble a person into desperation — and the need we all have to be taken care of.Majok, who once juggled late-night bartending jobs with work as a personal care aide to two disabled men, insists that her disabled characters must be played by disabled actors. That stipulation, she said, has gained “Cost of Living” a reputation for being difficult to produce, and led some rights seekers to ask her to make an exception. Short answer: No.“Which I think is brave and bold as hell,” said the actor Katy Sullivan, an amputee who has played Ani in five productions — the world premiere at Williamstown Theater Festival in 2016, Off Broadway in 2017, Los Angeles in 2018, London in 2019 and now Broadway. “I am certain that she has lost out on income because she has drawn that line in the sand.”Majok is just as fierce in her dramaturgy, unafraid of lulling “Cost of Living” audiences into a pleasurable sense of comfort only to spring on them a plot twist that makes the whole room gasp, uncertain whether the emergency onstage is real or part of the play. During the Off Broadway run at Manhattan Theater Club, she recalled, a woman got out of her seat at that moment in the performance and started moving toward the stage to help.“I found that so beautiful,” Majok said, “because to me it was like, look at how instantly we care for people.”This is the tender-tough yin and yang of Majok, who pivots to humor if she tears up, as she did in speaking about her grandfather, the same way her characters joke if they go anywhere near self-pity.Lesson in betrayal: Sharlene Cruz, left, and Jasai Chase-Owens in last year’s New York Theater Workshop production of Majok’s “Sanctuary City,” at the Lucille Lortel Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJo Bonney, the director of the Williamstown, Off Broadway and Broadway productions of “Cost of Living,” said that Majok as a playwright “is never sentimental, even when people are in dire circumstances. She has faith, I think, in human resiliency. And that’s just very powerful.”Majok, whose other plays include “Sanctuary City” (2021), about a pair of undocumented teenagers, and “Queens” (2018), set among immigrant women sharing a basement apartment, was 5 when she came to the United States from Poland. She grew up mainly in New Jersey, where her mother cleaned houses and still sometimes does on the side.“I have offered to pay her to not clean,” Majok said. “‘I will give you $75 to not clean this house.’ And she’s like, ‘Why don’t you just give me $75 and I’ll still clean the house?’ I’m like, ‘No!’ Scarcity mind-set, scarcity mind-set.”In her childhood, there was some back and forth to Poland before she and her mother became firmly rooted here. Majok feels self-imposed guilt about having chosen as an adult to remain in this country, where her mother and younger sister are, rather than return to Poland, where their extended family is.That’s one reason the markers of success that she’s accumulated — among them an undergraduate degree in 2007 from the University of Chicago, an M.F.A. in 2012 from the Yale School of Drama, the Pulitzer in 2018, the Broadway debut this month — matter to her, as validation of her writing and her life.“I feel like I’m apologizing for leaving Poland,” she said in a second interview, which she’d requested in part to elucidate this. “If you leave your family, it better be [expletive] worth it.”What’s next for the playwright? She’s in the process of adapting a couple of books into films, and collaborating on a musical adaptation of “The Great Gatsby.” Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesScrupulous in her thinking, meticulous in her writing, Majok is easy with profanity. That day, sitting on a bench overlooking the Heather Garden in Fort Tryon Park, near her apartment in Upper Manhattan, she wore a gold necklace that she’d taken off before the photo shoot for this article, figuring it would never make it into a published picture.From a distance its lowercase cursive looks like maybe it’s spelling out a name. On closer inspection, though, it’s one brief expletive, three times in a row — a gift from Marin Ireland, who starred in the 2016 New York premiere of “Ironbound,” Majok’s breakthrough play about a Polish immigrant much like her mother, in which variations on that word appear 68 times.In the “Cost of Living” script, the number is 77, counting an author’s note explaining that in “the Jersey mouth” — and Majok does, after all, have a Jersey mouth — the expletive in question “is often used as a comma, or as a vocalized pause, akin to the word ‘like.’”Despite lingering worries about what she calls “the [expletive] hubris” of presuming she has the luxury to turn down work, Majok lets herself be picky these days about the projects she takes on. She has said yes to adapting a couple of books into films that she’s not yet allowed to discuss, but no to assorted screen projects about “lady murders.” On her wish list? Making a film of “Cost of Living.”And while she was never a collaborator on the musical adaptation of that play, which was announced in 2018, she is collaborating on a musical adaptation of “The Great Gatsby” — which sounds like an odd fit until she says that she sees Jay Gatsby as a working-class character.It’s a psychology that she understands.Far more stable than when she started out, Majok still has a vigilance within — a part of her that is forever anticipating the kind of fracture that could break her life.“I feel like I’m more prepared for catastrophe,” she said. “But you never [expletive] know.” More

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      Nathan Lane to Return to Broadway This Winter in ‘Pictures From Home’

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      The play, written by Sharr White and directed by Bartlett Sher, will also star Danny Burstein and Zoë Wanamaker.Nathan Lane will return to Broadway this winter, starring in a new play called “Pictures From Home” about the artistic and emotional relationship between a photographer and his aging parents.The play, written by Sharr White and directed by Bartlett Sher, is adapted from an acclaimed memoir by the photographer Larry Sultan, also called “Pictures From Home,” featuring not only staged portraits of his parents, but also interviews with them.Danny Burstein, a Tony winner for “Moulin Rouge! The Musical,” will play Sultan; Lane, a three-time Tony winner for “Angels in America,” “The Producers” and “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” will play the photographer’s father, Irving; and Zoë Wanamaker will play the photographer’s mother, Jean.The Broadway production will be the first for the play, which previously had developmental readings at New York Stage and Film, the Cape Cod Theater Project and the Alley Theater in Houston.White, whose previous Broadway plays included “The Other Place” and “The Snow Geese,” said he became interested in Sultan after seeing an exhibition of the photographer’s work in Los Angeles, where White was working as a writer and producer of “The Affair.”“I was totally captivated, and thought, who are these people?” White said. “The more I read, the more I thought it was an epic story and an intimate story, and one that embodies incredible contradictions.”White described Sultan’s parents as displaying “rejecting acceptance” of their son’s long-running artistic project, which he called “a gorgeous exploration of mortality.” He said the play includes some language from Sultan’s book, and some anecdotes gleaned from interviews with Sultan’s widow, Kelly, but that most of the dialogue was invented by the playwright.Sher, a Tony winner for his revival of “South Pacific,” has been working on the project for about a year, drawn to it, he said, as “an extraordinary exploration of the aging process.” He said the play “is fundamentally about art — who gets to depict what, and how you’re represented,” and said the production would make heavy use of Sultan’s photography.Lane, who last appeared on Broadway in 2019, said he had been unfamiliar with Sultan’s work before reading the play, but that he “thought it was a beautiful piece of writing — very funny and very quietly devastating” and said he hoped that its two subjects, “parents and mortality,” would be relatable to audiences.“It has a documentary feel,” he said, “and yet it’s highly theatrical.”The play is scheduled to begin previews on Jan. 10 and to open Feb. 9 at Studio 54. Although that theater is owned by the nonprofit Roundabout Theater Company, the play will be a commercial production, with Jeffrey Richards as lead producer. More

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      Interview: Now with Not Now

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      Max Elton and Matthew Blaney talk Not Now

      Finborough Theatre 1 – 26 November.

      In advance of David Ireland’s Not Now opening at Finborough Theatre in November, we chatted with Director Max Elton and actor Matthew Blaney about the play, playwright and bringing the show to London audiences.

      What can you tell us about the show.

      Max: The show is about a young man, Matthew, who is about to travel to London for an audition at RADA. The timing is not good, his father has just died, and in his place, his Uncle Ray emerges as confidant. The question is, is Ray able to help him navigate this difficult time, or is he a bit useless? David Ireland writes two types of plays. In one type babies are brutally murdered and dogs are romanced. This is the other type – though I think giving away anything more at this stage would be a bit of a spoiler and we wouldn’t be caught dead doing that. I think people will laugh a lot and feel like they’ve been treated to a deeply satisfying evening at the theatre – all in about 50 minutes. 

      Matthew: The play takes place in real time, in Ballybeen, East Belfast, where my character Matthew (an aspiring actor) prepares for his RADA audition that afternoon in London. It’s the day after his father’s funeral. He’s rehearsing the opening soliloquy from Richard III when his Uncle Ray interrupts him. Matthew is naturally feeling underprepared and is having second thoughts about going at all, and what unfolds is an examination on grief, identity, loyalty and love between the two men. It’s also feckin hilarious. 

      Ballybeen is where David’s from originally and listening to interviews he’s done in the past, and discussions in rehearsal, Matthew feels alot like how he may have been as a youngster; Matthew’s a very sweet kid: angry and awkward, but also very sincere. There’s a decency that slowly reveals itself in him I also find very touching.

      Max, you directed the very successful Yes So I Said Yes at Finborough last year, what was your first exposure to David Ireland and what made you want to direct his plays?

      Before Yes So I Said Yes, I’d directed The End of Hope at Soho Theatre which was a lovely show. I had come across it after seeing Cyprus Avenue at the Royal Court Upstairs. My response to David’s writing was completely different to anything else I’d ever seen. His characters get pissed off about the same sort of things that I get angry about. I don’t come from Northern Ireland and I don’t share the same history as many of David’s characters but on some level I strongly identify with them.

      Matthew, were you familiar with David Ireland?
      He’s the best! I’m delighted he’s known now in London and that his work has travelled successfully. He was writing for the Lyric Theatre in Belfast when I was taking classes at the Drama Studio nearly ten years ago. I was hooked right away – I distinctly remember Can’t Forget About You was a breath of fresh air.

      David Ireland has previously said that he thinks he is only ever writing for a Belfast audience but his work clearly has wider resonance and success. In London, Not Now will be his third play at Finborough and the Royal Court staged Cyprus Avenue to great success. What do you think is behind his success?

      Max: David’s flair and insight are on a different level to the vast majority of playwrights working today. He’s a one off and that quality resonates with people, wherever they’re from. 

      Matthew: He doesn’t shy away from the darkness. Certainly with Cyprus Avenue. I think audiences everywhere crave a safe space to be challenged, and seeing the horrors we are capable of doing to each other. Not Now is a quieter piece, but the anger is similar.

      Did you know each other before coming together for Not Now, had you crossed paths socially or worked together previously?

      Max: They had not but I was aware of both Matthew and Stephen. I’m thrilled to be working with both of them.

      Matthew: Unfortunately not. Stephen’s brilliant to watch and learn from, and I’m excited for audiences to see what he’ll bring to Uncle Ray.

      How has the first week of rehearsals gone, are you discovering anything new about the text or characters now that you are together in the room?

      Max: Rehearsals have been very exciting. Reading Not Now only gives you a glimpse of the iceberg with regards to its depth. We’re several feet under sea level now. 

      Matthew: It stops being funny very quickly! For us I mean – the jokes are class but it’s all coming from a painful place. You’ve got to really go there a little to find the truth behind the words, which Max has been encouraging us to do. By the time we get it up and running, the audiences should be reminding us we’re in a comedy again.

      Matthew, as a Northern Irish actor and given some of the plays themes of identity, how does it feel to bring this to London? Is there a little extra joy or satisfaction in taking on a role where you are playing a Northern Irish character in a play by a Northern Irish playwright? 

      I think it’d be difficult to tackle this without the lived experience, which David obviously has. I’m excited for people’s response to the play. The identity question is clearly a frustrating one (as the text explores) which hit me hard personally at Drama School. I’m delighted to bring some of that into my performance, and for audiences to see the complexities unfold in a very immediate and intimate way.

      Many of our ET team list The Finborough as one of our favourite London venues, tell us a little about working with the team? Max, we believe this is your third production here, you must enjoy working with Finborough?

      Max: I think Neil (McPherson – Artistic Director, Finborough Theatre) is brave enough to program work that other Artistic Directors shy away from. It is heartening to know that Neil prioritises excellent writing above all other factors when programming the space. 

      Matthew: Everyone’s been fantastic. I’m very chuffed to be a part of the team, and to get onto the stage pronto. 

      Max, originally you were due to bring back Yes So I Said Yes after its successful run last year but some scheduling issues got in the way. Was there a sudden ‘oh s**t’ moment when you realised you won’t be able to go ahead?

      Yes there was an ‘oh shit’ moment. It was very sad and it made me want to run away and start applying for jobs in the civil service. 
      There are many good days working in theatre and those of us able to do it should consider ourselves very lucky but the bad days can be really very miserable. That said, out of the ashes has come the opportunity to work on a play that I loved the first time I read it so the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport will have to wait until at least the new year.

      Tell us what you each have coming up after Not Now finishes? 

      Max: I’m directing a version of The Government Inspector by Nikolai Gogol at St Mary’s University, which I’m very excited about. Gogol characters can be truly repulsive but there’s something very clear and true about the way they act that I find very funny. 

      Beyond this I’ll be returning to my day job of repeatedly emailing Artistic Directors and Producers to assure them that I do indeed “hope they’re well” and am available for coffee at 1 hours notice.

      Matthew: I’m going to be doing a few nights at The Hope Theatre next year in January with a new play called The Best Pints by Jack Gallagher. He’s also a brilliant writer from back home and that’ll be nice to kick start the new year for sure.

      You can follow Not Now Play on Twitter. Our thanks to Max and Matt for taking the time to talk to us. Our thanks also to 19th Street Productions and credit to Lidia Crisafulli for the rehearsal photos.

      Not Now plays at Finborough Theatre from 1 November to 26 November. Tickets and further information can be found here. More

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      Another Miranda at the Public Theater: Luis A. Miranda Jr., New Board Chair

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      Luis A. Miranda Jr., a political consultant and activist whose son, Lin-Manuel Miranda, composed one of the Public’s biggest hits, “Hamilton,” was named chair of the theater’s board.Long before he joined the board of the Public Theater, and before his son, Lin-Manuel Miranda, composed one of the biggest hits in the theater’s history, “Hamilton,” Luis A. Miranda Jr. recalled the first show he ever saw there: Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf.”“My first experience with the Public Theater, in 1976, was of a production that could not be more different than everything that was on Broadway,” Luis Miranda, 68, said, recalling “For Colored Girls” and its intimate stories of Black female agency told through spoken word and dance.Now Miranda, a political consultant and activist who has worked in city government and the nonprofit sector, will be taking on a new role at the institution: The theater announced Tuesday that he would be its next board chair.Miranda said that his priorities included the renovation of the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, the home of the theater’s Free Shakespeare in the Park program, and support for the theater’s diversity and inclusion initiatives.While many theaters have begun to reckon with being “too white” in recent years, Miranda said, Public Theater had an early start on bridging the equity gap.“We’re not starting from scratch because the theater has a history of cultural transformation and putting onstage diverse actors, diverse writers,” said Miranda, who has been on the board since 2015. But he added that there was more to do and that he would work on initiatives that include antiracism training for board members and the hiring of a senior director of antiracism and equity.“Hamilton” started out at the Public Theater, before transferring to Broadway. “We never thought that Hamilton would be what it has become,” Miranda said.Miranda chairs the Latino Victory Fund, the Broadway League’s Viva Broadway initiative and the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance. At the Public he succeeds Arielle Tepper, who served as chair for nearly a decade. “I couldn’t be happier that he is taking over,” Tepper said.Oskar Eustis, the theater’s artistic director, praised Miranda in a statement for his commitment to the idea that “culture belongs to everyone.” More

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      ‘Chushingura — 47 Ronin’ Review: A Sprawling Tale of Loyalty

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      The palace intrigue behind a mythic battle from 18th-century Japan is the subject of this bilingual play in Manhattan.There is no getting around it: This show is far from perfect. Actually, it might be far from a conventional definition of good. The storytelling is erratic, and so is some of the acting; the production values are minimal.Yet during the vast majority of “Chushingura — 47 Ronin,” I was engrossed in the action, eager to see what was going to happen next. It did not even matter that I knew what was in store, having seen three film versions of the basic plot, including the Kenji Mizoguchi classic “The 47 Ronin,” from 1941. More celebrated plays have not exerted that kind of primal pull on me: Sometimes theater can be so elementally simple that it boils down to the basic enjoyment of a good yarn.And this one, about a band of warriors’ vengeful quest, is among the best of all time. The show, at A.R.T./New York Theaters, is a retelling of an event from 18th-century Japan that has spawned an impressively large number of movies (including one surreal misfire from 2013 starring Keanu Reeves) as well as TV series, artworks and comic books. (“Chushingura” is an umbrella term for the works inspired by the so-called Ako incident.)Now it’s the turn of the upstart New York company Amaterasu Za, which produces bilingual works rooted in Japanese sources and art forms. The show’s writer and director, Ako Dachs, also pops up at regular intervals as a narrator in English; the rest of the text is in Japanese, with simultaneous translation projected in supertitles whose synchronization can be haphazard. (The multitasking Dachs also did the period costumes and leads Amaterasu Za.)The tale is set in motion when, as so often happens, someone finally loses patience. Lord Kira (Hiroko Yonekura) is a scoundrel who, on a fateful day at Edo castle, taunts Lord Asano (Yasu Suzuki) one time too many. Asano attacks Kira and wounds him. Nobody dies in the skirmish, but Asano has broken the castle’s rules by “unreasonably” drawing his sword. Not only must he commit ritual suicide, but his estate will also be seized, and his samurai retinue and staff will be dismissed.Back at Asano’s home in Ako, his chancellor, Oishi (Tatsuo Ichikawa), rallies the samurai, now known as ronin because they are without a master, in a campaign to avenge Asano and restore his clan’s honor.While this suggests a lot of action, the vast majority of the show, which takes place on a fairly small stage, is dedicated to chatty palace intrigue, as if we were eavesdropping on conspirators. When there is a possibility that the unseen shogun might reinstate the fallen clan, some of Asano’s followers are bereft at the prospect of losing their excuse to kill Kira. Honor-bound duty has a messy way of turning into personal revenge.Yasu Suzuki, left, who plays Lord Asano, with Hiroko Yonekura.Melinda HallDespite writing that can be confusing — we are not told, for example, how Oishi’s group of 56 ronin ended up just 47, or maybe a supertitle zipped by too quickly — the story moves at a steady clip. And Dachs’s decision to have women play some of the male roles, most prominently Kira, is very effective.Gender-blind casting is, of course, not uncommon in Japanese theater, and Dachs herself is a former member of that country’s all-female Takarazuka Revue company (she is a familiar presence, under the single name Ako, on New York stages, most notably in Leah Nanako Winkler’s “Kentucky” and “God Said This”). That the actors portraying samurai wear headpieces in the traditional “chonmage” style, in which a ponytail is folded back over the top of the head, creates a sense of androgynous uniformity. (Mitsuteru Okuyama did the wigs.)So yes, “Chushingura — 47 Ronin” is far from the best show out there. But right now, this sprawling tale of loyalty to rigid codes certainly is unlike anything else on a New York stage.Chushingura — 47 RoninThrough Nov. 6 at A.R.T./New York, Manhattan; amaterasuza.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      Danielle Deadwyler Is the Beating Heart of ‘Till’

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      After critically acclaimed turns in “Station Eleven” and “The Harder They Fall,” her latest role hit close to home. That’s why she was hesitant to take it on.Danielle Deadwyler’s eyes are an instrument that she can play with precise control.In HBO Max’s postapocalyptic drama “Station Eleven,” they stare into your soul as Deadwyler’s graphic novelist character, Miranda, soaks in the world around her. In Netflix’s all-Black western “The Harder They Fall,” they’re the last thing a baddie sees before he’s killed by Deadwyler’s quippy gunslinger, Cuffee.And in her latest film, Chinonye Chukwu’s “Till,” about Emmett Till, the 14-year-old whose gruesome murder in Mississippi in 1955 by white supremacists helped spark the civil rights movement, they often fill your entire screen, tortured and unblinking in shocked grief, eyelids fluttering in painful remembrance. Though the actress has been an outsize presence in smaller screen roles in recent years, “Till” is her first lead part in a feature film.“I’d been reared in the history, but I didn’t know the intimacy of it,” Deadwyler, 40, said of Mamie and Emmett’s relationship in a recent interview on a rainy evening at the Park Lane Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. “So this was a chance to show what it meant to be Mamie both in public and in private, and how she was intentional about and navigating those two identities.”Deadwyler’s expressive eyes are only the beginning of her critically acclaimed performance as Emmett’s doting mother, Mamie Till-Mobley. Reviewing the film for The New York Times, Manohla Dargis praised Deadwyler’s range. “With fixed intensity and supple quicksilver emotional changes,” she wrote, “Deadwyler rises to the occasion as Mamie, delivering a quiet, centralizing performance that works contrapuntally with the story’s heaviness, its profundity and violence.”Deadwyler with Whoopi Goldberg in “Till.”Lynsey Weatherspoon/Orion PicturesDEADWYLER GREW UP with three siblings in southwest Atlanta, the daughter of a legal secretary and a railroad supervisor. Her mother, she said, was intent on giving the children a diverse cultural life.“My mom was like, ‘You can’t go to U.G.A,’” she said, referring to the University of Georgia. “She had intentions for us to get out of a certain comfort zone.”As a youngster, Deadwyler dabbled in theater and dance, taking her first dance class when she was just 4 after her mother saw her shimmying to “Soul Train,” and falling in love with theater in high school.But she didn’t necessarily want to be an actor, she said, nor did she even fathom becoming one.“It was just a part of my life since I was a kid,” she said, sitting cross-legged on the couch in a loose white button-up over black slacks and black crew socks. “It was lifeblood.”She stayed close to home for college, majoring in history at Spelman while continuing to perform in plays. She earned a master’s degree in American Studies from Columbia in New York, writing her thesis on sex-positive representations of women in hip-hop. (In 2017 she earned a second master’s degree, in creative writing at Ashland University in Ohio.)Whoopi Goldberg, an Outspoken StarThe comedian and co-host of the ABC talk show “The View” is known for her provocative opinions — and controversies.‘The View’: Since 2007, Whoopi Goldberg has been the often-irascible moderator on the daytime talk show, helping it become one of the most important political TV shows in America.Holocaust Comments: Earlier this year, Goldberg was suspended for two weeks from “The View” after she said repeatedly that the Holocaust was not about race. She later apologized.On Living Alone: After three marriages, Goldberg told us in a 2016 interview that she knows she doesn’t “want somebody in my house.”A Decades-Long Career: In 2019, the Times podcast “Still Processing” discussed  Goldberg’s career, from her days as a boundary-pushing comedian to her role as professional curmudgeon on “The View.”When she was rejected for the women’s studies graduate program at Emory University in Atlanta — “I cried in the bathroom at the trust fund where I was interning,” she said — she turned to teaching at an elementary charter school for two years. But with her youthful looks and wiry frame, Deadwyler struggled to be taken seriously. “Quinta Brunson’s character on ‘Abbott Elementary’ looks young, but she has a teacherly presence,” Deadwyler said, clutching her knees to her chest. “I just looked young — I was fresh out of grad school. The kids were like, ‘What grade are you in?’”But then came her big break: a role as the Lady in Yellow in “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” mounted by True Colors Theater in Atlanta in 2009.Screen work soon followed, including the lead in the 2012 TV drama “A Cross to Bear,” playing a homeless, alcoholic mother. She also began booking small television roles: the antagonist LaQuita Maxwell on Tyler Perry’s prime-time soap opera “The Haves and the Have Nots,” a recurring role as Yoli on the Starz drama “P-Valley,” and memorable parts in FX’s “Atlanta” and HBO’s “Watchmen.”The latter was the performance that came to mind when Patrick Somerville, creator of “Station Eleven,” was looking to cast his Miranda, the artist whose graphic novel drives the show’s narrative arc.“Her eyes can do anything,” he said. “You can feel how substantial the person is inside her whether or not she’s talking.”He put her through a lot of last-minute rewrites, but “she was never concerned with change,” he said. “She was always her own center. I was always impressed by her unbelievable confidence.”Deadwyler in “Station Eleven.” The show’s creator, Patrick Somerville, said, “You can feel how substantial the person is inside her whether or not she’s talking.”HBO MaxHER BIGGEST LEAP to date, “Till,” is one she almost didn’t take.Mamie Till-Mobley is best known for insisting on an open-casket viewing for her son’s corpse, to show the world what a mob of white men did to him, but the film focuses on her transformation from shellshocked parent to fervent activist. “My reps sent me the script, and I was like, ‘Do I want to do this?’” said Deadwyler, who is the single mother of a 12-year-old son, “because it’s a joyous endeavor, but it’s a painful one, too.”In the end, the role of Mamie resonated in her bones.For her audition, she submitted a self-tape that included the scene in which she knots a tie around Emmett’s neck — using her son, Ezra, as a stand-in — as he prepares to go down to Mississippi, telling him to “be small.” Then, in a video call with Chukwu, she re-enacted the moment when Mamie sees Emmett’s corpse for the first time. (“I warned my son, ‘Hey, man, you might hear some weird noises,’” she said.)Chukwu, the director, said she knew immediately that she was watching something special.“When I’m casting, I look at whether actors can communicate a story with their eyes,” she said. “Are they able to get underneath the words in a nonverbal way? Are they willing and able to dive into the work in a way that demands a vulnerability and focusedness? I saw all of that in her audition tape.”Deadwyler’s wordless ability to act with her whole body informed how she shot the film, Chukwu said.“I knew that I wanted the audience to see this Black woman’s humanity and that faces would be important,” she said. “But when I saw how much command and power Danielle had, I leaned into that even more.”Mamie’s testimony scene in the courtroom, for instance — a seven-page powder keg of grief, frustration and rage — is shot in one long take. Chukwu said she originally planned on eight or nine other setups, but when Deadwyler received a standing ovation from the cast and crew on the first take — a close-up on her face — Chukwu decided: She didn’t need any more.Deadwyler said the weight of Mamie’s suffering, her choice to fight battles for future generations even when she knows she cannot win in the present, settled into every part of her body on set. But the minute they wrapped for the day, a waiting car would take her home, Mahalia Jackson gospel songs on the stereo.“It’s a sonic shift,” she said. “It’s the same thing with Mamie: There’s a private self and a public self.”The director Chinonye Chukwu planned to focus on faces all along. But “when I saw how much command and power Danielle had, I leaned into that even more.”Simone Niamani Thompson for The New York TimesYet there were lighthearted moments on set that reflected Deadwyler’s sense of humor. “At first I thought she was very serious, and that she’d get very annoyed with me, because I’m not,” said Whoopi Goldberg, who plays Mamie’s mother and served as a producer of the film. “But she is also very silly.”Despite the film’s enthusiastic reception among both critics and audiences — it currently has a 99 percent fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes — it was a project that took more than two decades to reach the big screen, Goldberg said.“People would say, ‘You know, nobody wants to see that story,’” she said. “You’d say, ‘No, people do want to see it.’ I guess it was the reckoning that happened that finally got people interested in telling these stories.” (“Till” is the second project focused on Mamie and Emmett’s story to be released this year, after the ABC mini-series “Women of the Movement.”)“It has modern-day resonance,” Deadwyler said, adding that she has discussed the story with her son because “it would be neglectful for me to not talk to him about the possibilities.”AFTER THE PUBLICITY TOUR for “Till,” Deadwyler plans to take a moment — just a moment — to soak it all in. She can also be seen starring alongside Zoe Saldaña in the new Netflix limited series “From Scratch,” based on Tembi Locke’s memoir about an American student who falls in love with an Italian chef. And she has a few film projects in the works, among them Kourosh Ahari’s sci-fi thriller “Parallel” and Netflix’s star-studded airport Christmas thriller “Carry On.”“I want to collaborate with people,” she said. “And I’m looking forward to being approached for more projects, vs. doing 80, 100 auditions per year.”In the meantime, after being told that her face can be seen in ads atop New York taxis, she marveled at her change in fortune, though she hadn’t seen one yet. “I would like to go quietly into the dark,” she said, laughing.Deadwyler’s laugh is a curious thing, a sound you haven’t heard much onscreen: It’s a deep, rumbling, full-bodied “HA HA HA” that you can hear echoing down the hall long after the door closes. “Me, a serious person?” she says, eyes twinkling. “No.”I ask what else people get wrong about her.There’s that laugh again.“Everything.” More