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      Eldjarn and Das Are Stars at Home, but Not at Edinburgh Fringe

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      Over 1,000 stand-ups play the Edinburgh Festival Fringe each year, hoping for a big break. Some are already huge names elsewhere.EDINBURGH — When Ari Eldjarn, one of Iceland’s most popular comedians, takes the stage in his native country, it’s usually to sold-out crowds. In the spring, he played 15 dates in a 1,000-capacity auditorium in Reykjavik. The total audience for the run was equivalent to over 10 percent of the city’s population.Yet at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Eldjarn, 40, has found himself in less celebrated surroundings: the fourth room of the Monkey Barrel Comedy Club. On a recent evening, there were about 50 people in that space for Eldjarn’s daily show, “Saga Class,” with three rows of empty seats at the back. The air conditioning whirred loudly, and the thud of dance music occasionally intruded from another show upstairs.“Can you hear me all right?” Eldjarn asked as he came onstage. “I hear myself really well,” he said, pointing to the venue’s main speaker, which was just feet from his head. “But I have no idea if the people at the back hear anything.” Eldjarn then introduced himself as an Icelandic comedian, getting one of his first laughs of the act. “I love being in Edinburgh,” he added, “because there are actually other comedians here.”Vir Das’s Edinburgh show, “Wanted,” is focused on a stir he caused in India with a monologue that examined the country’s paradoxes and divisions.Jaime Molina for The New York TimesThe Edinburgh Fringe has for decades been an event that stand-up comedians flock to, hoping to make it big. Hannah Gadsby, an Australian comedian, won the festival’s main comedy award in 2017 with “Nanette,” a show that went on to become a Netflix phenomenon the next year; previous nominees for that prize include Eddie Izzard, Bo Burnham and James Acaster. At this year’s Fringe, which runs through Aug. 29, more than 1,300 comedians are performing. Most are little known in Britain, and some have to drum up their own audiences by handing out fliers on the street. Yet among them are a handful of comedians, like Eldjarn, who are actually big stars in their homes countries.Also appearing at this year’s Fringe is Stian Blipp, a Norwegian TV star, and Vir Das, an Indian comedian who has 7.7 million Twitter followers and multiple Netflix specials to his name. In Edinburgh, Das is playing to just over 100 people a day, if his show sells out.After his recent show, Eldjarn discovered that audience members had left him just over £20, or about $24, in a tip bucket by the door. He then walked across the street to spend the money on burgers for himself and one of his daughters.“This is definitely like starting over again,” Eldjarn said. In Iceland, he could “just go confidently onstage, make stuff up and people will laugh,” he added. But in Edinburgh, he said, “you really need a lot of good material.”To make his show — which includes jokes about turning 40 and disliking vaping — Eldjarn said he had taken one of his Icelandic sets, deleted anything that would not translate to a British audience, then tried to “salvage as much as possible” as he translated it into English. He was tweaking the routine daily in Edinburgh to try to get bigger laughs, he added.Blipp, the Norwegian comic, said in a telephone interview that he was also nervous about performing in Edinburgh. “I feel like a little boy again,” he said, “like I’m doing a second debut.”Inside the Teviot Row House Student Union, a small Fringe venue for stand-up acts.Jaime Molina for The New York TimesThe Monkey Barrel Comedy Club, where Eldjarn is performing.Jaime Molina for The New York TimesYet not all of the international stars at this year’s fringe were anxious. Das, the Indian comedian, said being in Edinburgh was “very much a holiday, if I’m honest.” He said he was usually on the road so much that it was a luxury to spend a month in Scotland working on his next special and soaking up experiences that might inform future comedy routines.Das, 43, is an old hand at the festival. He first performed in 2011, he said, in a venue “at the back of a pool hall at the back of a video game arcade.” For most of that run, he got only three or four audience members a night, he recalled. Another year, he said he built an audience with the help of a unique take on handing out fliers: He printed the show details on fake bank notes and dropped them around the city.This year, Das was not using any gimmicks to promote his hourlong show, “Wanted,” which was mostly sold out. (It is playing in a 102-capacity basement venue — a far cry from his last tour dates in Mumbai, where he said he played 10 shows at the 1,109-seater Jamshed Bhabha Theater over five days.)“Wanted” is focused on a furor Das caused in India last year, after he posted a monologue online called “Two Indias” in which he examined the country’s paradoxes and divisions. Das said the monologue, which had been performed at a show in Washington, was a way of showing his love for India and calling for social unity, but some accused him of defaming the nation. A spokesman for the governing Bharatiya Janata Party filed an official complaint (Das said in his show that the police had decided not to take it forward, and had dismissed other complaints) and a prominent Bollywood actress accused Das on social media of engaging in “soft terrorism,” a comment widely picked up on Indian news media. In his Edinburgh show, Das said, “I remember thinking, ‘This is so insulting to actual terrorists.’”Das said he used to adjust his material for Edinburgh audiences, but does not do that anymore. Many in the audience were British Indians, who came to his show to hear what India was like today, Das said, whereas Western audiences wanted to learn something new about Indian life. “Strangely, it’s become more important to tell an authentically Indian story for both the Indian and Western audiences,” Das said.In India, Das plays theaters that hold more than 1,000 spectators. In Edinburgh, he’s performing at a 102-capacity venue.Jaime Molina for The New York TimesAt a recent show, Das walked into the sweaty basement to booming music, as if he were entering an arena. He drew immediate laughs by remarking on the racial mix of the crowd. “I see Indian people,” he said. “I see people sleeping with Indian people,” he added. “I see random locals who thought Vir Das was a German comedian and are now thinking, ‘This isn’t what we thought it’d be.’”Then, he told a few preliminary jokes to give latecomers a chance to arrive before he started his routine. “It takes a while to get British crowds warm, and Indian crowds in,” he explained. (In India, a warm-up act does this before he comes on.)When the show ended, Das posed for a group selfie with audience members outside the venue — a requisite of the star comic the world over. After a gig in India, Das said, he would typically jump in a car to his hotel like any other celebrity. But here, he simply walked off, carrying a backpack. Barely anyone gave him a second glance. More

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      Kate Berlant Can’t Hide Any Longer

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      The experimental comic is known for freewheeling sets. Then Bo Burnham asked, “What if you actually tried to make something?” The transition has been hard.As soon as Kate Berlant walked offstage at the Elysian Theater in Los Angeles in May, she started spiraling. After months of workshop performances, her new solo show felt like a mess. The comic Tim Heidecker came backstage and told her he loved it. She didn’t look like she believed him.Over the next few minutes, Berlant, 35, speculated about what went wrong. Lack of focus? Not funny enough? Her sensibility not coming through? Her director, the comic Bo Burnham, had been emphasizing the same point: clarity, structure, clarity, structure. “I operate more with fragments,” she said, before her expressive face flattened: “I just don’t know what the show is.”Such anxiety is a normal part of the artistic process, but perhaps especially so for Berlant, whose show, titled “Kate,” is now in previews at the Connelly Theater in New York. After more than 15 years of improvisational, experimental stand-up, this is a departure: a play with a beginning, middle and end that tells a satirically formulaic story of a starry-eyed actress who moves to New York to make it big. This is real theater stuff, with props and multimedia and even a plot in which personal secrets are revealed.You may not know her name, but Berlant is influential in comedy circles, and her digressive style stands for everything that a scripted autobiographical play doesn’t. And she is having trouble wrapping her head around it. “It would be funny if this show is so bad,” Berlant said three days earlier in her Silver Lake apartment, her eyes lighting up, head swiveling, curls swinging, before pivoting into a parody of her rationalizing the flop. In the overly enunciated voice of the pretentious intellectual she had perfected in her stand-up, she said with a dismissive flip of her hand: “I don’t participate in the economy of distinction.” Then she cackled.In more than two decades as a critic of live performance, only a handful of times have I stumbled upon an artist so radically different, so thrillingly alien, that it scrambled my sense of the possible. Kate Berlant was one. It was at a sparsely attended stand-up show in 2013. Following a couple of setup-and-punchline craftsmen, her entrance felt less like the next act than an interruption. The first thing that stood out was her singularly silly physicality, herky-jerky, gesticulating clownishly, a parade of buffoonish confidence. Flamboyance baked into every gesture, her hyperarticulate monologues, which could also spiral, delivered stream of consciousness nonsense with the gravity of a religious epiphany.Berlant workshopped the show in Los Angeles, where she lives.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesWhat she did was not a performance of comedy so much as a narration of the experience of someone performing comedy. And while her cerebral-minded material had the sound of coherence, the music of a mind at work, its meaning fell apart upon scrutiny, which was part of the joke. Every time she began to tell you about herself, she either changed the subject, contradicted herself or, most often, criticized her own act, as if the commentary track infiltrated the show itself. The result had the ineffability of experimental theater yet the ingratiating gusto of showbiz, full of cross-eyed expressions and flirtations with the audience. Was it a satire of a certain brand of charismatic egghead? Maybe.She made me laugh hard, but it was difficult to figure out why. She resisted categorization, which made me try harder, perhaps an occupational hazard. The more I saw her, including the first time she did a half-hour set, I started noticing common themes: The performance in everyday life, the space between reality and artifice, confession and disguise. Even though she had no special or show, I wrote a column arguing that her elusiveness went against the grain of the dominant culture of prestige stand-up. Berlant seemed to be making a mockery of confessional comedy, emphasizing the artifice of her own performance, talking about herself but revealing nothing. Its title was “Keeping It Fake.”In fact, Berlant’s comedy grew organically, a product of studying experimental performance at New York University, improvising at open mics at night and bringing the academic language from one into the other. “I started taking these big ideas but abandoning them midsentence,” she told me. And when people laughed, she kept doing it.Offstage, warm and eager to joke, she really does speak with a certain academic cocktail-party flair. The more time spent with her, the less her stand-up seems like a character or a parody than a heightened version of herself. She says she might have been influenced by the language of the internet or her dad, an artist known for his mixed-media collages, but quickly contradicts herself: “It wasn’t a decision. It just happened.”Upon meeting a decade later, she recalled my review with a shudder. “It was the first time I was like, ‘Oh, that’s what I’m doing,’” she said, before explaining: “Stand-up is a person up there baring all, a direct channel to who I am. Authenticity. What I’m doing is devising this persona that’s hard to pin down. Resisting legibility.”Her comedy reflects her background studying experimental performance at New York University by day and performing at open mics by night. Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesAvoiding the legible (not to mention listening to critics) can be risky. Over the next few years, Berlant’s reputation grew; she became especially beloved in comedy circles though never quite found a breakout vehicle. She did an episode of Netflix’s comedy show “The Characters,” made sketch series with her friend and frequent collaborator, John Early, and got cast in cameo roles in movies by Boots Riley and Quentin Tarantino.She became a cult comic, both in the sense of the level of her popularity, but also the intensity of her fans. Many younger comics seemed to borrow her mannerisms and style. One night in 2018, after seeing a bunch of comics doing that flamboyant Berlant-style narration, I wondered on Twitter about her impact, and Bo Burnham responded by calling her the “most influential/imitated comedian of a generation,” saying that even he “slipped into stealing Kate’s vibes without trying.”The Great ReadMore fascinating tales you can’t help reading all the way to the end.Elsie Eiler is the sole resident of Monowi, Neb., where she operates a tavern that serves as one of the last gathering places for the remaining residents of the county. What will happen once she’s gone?TikTok is flooded with health misinformation. Meet the medical experts fighting bogus science, one “stitch” at a time.Viewers of the Hulu series “Only Murders in the Building” know the Upper West Side apartment building as the Arconia. But it has a name — and a dramatic story — all its own.But her act could be rarefied. The comic Jacqueline Novak, a friend, recalls going to the Stand comedy club and watching Berlant’s act bomb but impress the club comic Rich Vos, who was hosting the show. “Rich is laughing and looking around at me with delight, astonishment and wonder,” Novak said. “He gets up there and says he’s never met her before, then scolds the crowd and says, ‘She’s a star.’”Another time, a show-business manager called Berlant, who grew up in Los Angeles with dreams of movie stardom, and said, “Have you ever thought of being more normal and doing jokes?” She didn’t know how to respond.Asked if she would be happy as an experimental artist, a niche star, she adopted the glamorous hard-boiled voice of the Hollywood studio era: “I want to be on billboards, baby.”She had a running joke with Early that her greatest fear was a documentary in which more famous people talk about how influential she is. She was starting to feel trapped by her act. And her confidence had faded after she shot a special in 2019, filmed in black and white by Burnham and produced by Jerrod Carmichael, that was shelved. (FX just announced it will air in the fall.)In the pandemic, Berlant stopped performing for the longest stretch of her career. She filmed the series reboot of “A League of Their Own” and started a podcast with Novak. But she felt the pull of stand-up and in December returned to the stage. Burnham attended the show and afterward administered some tough love. “He said, ‘This is great and you could do that forever, but what if you actually tried to make something?’” she said he told her.Berlant, third from left, in the new series “A League of Their Own.”Anne Marie Fox/Amazon PrimeThe comic, playing a character called Kate, tries to cry on cue in her new stage show.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThis comment stung. But Burnham — coming off the success of “Inside,” an acclaimed special that leveraged themes he had worked on for years in an ambitious new form — pushed her out of her comfort zone to craft something structured, narrative-driven, a little less elusive. “Story,” she said, “is not where I live.” (Burnham turned down interview requests.)What she came up with centered on a struggling, self-involved actress, Kate, putting on an autobiographical solo show, a vanity project. The character is trying to mine her personal pain for entertainment. Burnham and Berlant started watching solo shows and working with those tropes. At first, she was making fun of this form and imagining the unraveling of her show with a multitude of technical problems, including fights with a production guy rooted in real issues she once had.Like her previous work, it’s about the embarrassment of performing. But she isn’t narrating a character so much as playing one and digging into her own insecurities to do so. “I am realizing there is a larger joke about my anxiety about not having anything to say,” she said. “I don’t have anything to say. It’s the semiotics of theater without the content.”Since I saw her performance three months ago, she has added several monologues in which she breaks character and talks directly to the audience as she criticizes and apologizes for her own show. It more closely resembled her old standup but also the spiraling that she did in May. “I’ve allowed myself to have moments in my familiar language,” she said in July. “It needs to be fun for me.”She also added a scene about her character’s childhood trauma that clarified the central challenge that repeats itself in the show several times: her inability to cry on cue. After failing to do so in a high-stakes audition, she ends up trying to cry in a small theater show, like, well, the one Berlant is doing now. If that sounds as meta as a Charlie Kaufman script, she did watch “Adaptation” on the flight back from London, where she performed the show to sold-out crowds. The part in “Adaptation” that stood out to her was the advice from a screenwriting guru: “Wow them in the end and you got a hit.”The climax of Berlant’s show — her trying to cry for a camera on command one last time and telling the crowd out of desperation that no one is leaving until she does — had always played well. But the structure has been streamlined to more clearly build up to it. She fails to cry, again and again and again, a close-up on her face projected on the wall showcases her clownish expressions. It’s oddly suspenseful, a sequence that builds like a joke but isn’t merely played for laughs. Even though this is a moment marked by artifice and absurdity, Berlant really commits to the emotional performance in a way that’s different from anything she’s done before.Crying can be something of a trick for an actor. But the way it operates in this show now is also more fundamental. “I’m realizing that this has to change her,” Berlant told me, speaking of the character. The change is not in finding a trauma, but in her relationship to the show she is putting on. She discovers that making the audience happy, the audience in the room, is enough.Scenes in which she criticizes and apologizes for the show have been added to “Kate.” As she explained, “It needs to be fun for me.”Chantal Anderson for The New York Times“For me, Kate Berlant,” she said, shifting to talking about herself, “to have a show in New York that works and people like, that is enough.”In an East Village coffee shop a few days before previews start, Berlant sounded more confident than ever, assured of the intent of her show if still uneasy, especially about finding ways to stay present and alive as she says the same lines over and over. In the Connelly Theater, the show now cleverly introduces itself like a parody of a pretentious art installation, with a lobby decked out in comically self-serious photos of Berlant, including several paragraphs of a mission statement that gives cult-leader vibes. In the theater, a vast video screen shows a film that positions her in a long line of great acting gurus (Meisner, Strasberg, Berlant) after lovingly scrolling through her IMDb page. You can sense the slickly ironic Burnham touch in the framing of the play.Berlant said the show had the silly comedy of her standup but was more emotional, adding that audience members have told her they’ve cried watching her try to.As much as this new show is about making something with a clear narrative, she still clings to the power of obliqueness. “This is the question I’m still facing: How much clarity does there need to be?” she said. “My character is doing a vanity project. It’s convoluted and half-baked. Does it really matter how clear it is?”The transition from comic to scripted actor is tricky, especially for an improvisational artist who has always poked fun at and reveled in the embarrassment of being a performer. She describes this is as being much more vulnerable. “I created a style of performing to avoid work,” she said of her comedy career, in what may or may not be a joke. “But there’s effort all over this show.”She paused dramatically, with just enough self-consciousness to wink at her own actorly flourish: “I can’t hide.” More

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      Patina Miller Chooses High Drama

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      The Tony-winning Broadway actor has made a career playing powerful women. Her latest is a drug queenpin inspired by 50 Cent’s mother in the newest “Power” series on Starz.At Screaming Mimi’s, an upscale vintage emporium just south of Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, the store’s manager, Dani Cabot, held out a variety of belts: a wide band from Donna Karan, a minimalist cincher from Claude Montana and what Cabot described as a “high-drama Moschino moment.”The actress Patina Miller considered the options, but not for long. “I think we’re high drama,” she said. She clasped the gold buckle around her waist, smoothing the fabric of a Bill Blass tiger print skirt.Miller, 37, who broke out about a decade ago in the Broadway production of “Sister Act” and then won a Tony for her starring turn in “Pippin,” is no stranger to high drama. Or a tight fit. While promoting the second season of the Starz series “Power Book III: Raising Kanan,” which premiered on Aug. 14, she is also appearing nearly nightly as the Witch in the Broadway revival of “Into the Woods.” (In September, when she begins shooting the third season of “Raising Kanan,” she will stick with the musical through its latest extension, performing on the weekends only.)Still, she had sneaked away on a recent weekday afternoon to comb through the racks of luxury secondhand clothing, looking for inspiration for her “Raising Kanan” character, Raquel, and for herself.“It takes me hours to find anything,” she said, as she headed toward a rack of 1990s designer looks. “Sometimes I just like to look around at all the colors that I won’t wear.”She wears dazzling hues in “Into the Woods,” including a purple gown, complete with cape. In “Raising Kanan,” a prequel to the original “Power” series, Raquel, the mother of the title character, favors a more muted palette, mostly lustrous blacks and blood reds meant to convey her status as an early ’90s queenpin. (As an adult, Kanan was played in previous “Power” series by Curtis Jackson, better known as 50 Cent, who is an executive producer of the franchise and whose own mother inspired Raquel.)Miller, above center, plays the Witch in a Broadway production of “Into the Woods.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn the prequel series “Power Book III: Raising Kanan,” Miller plays a drug queenpin in the ’90s. The series is inspired by 50 Cent’s upbringing in Jamaica, Queens.Cara Howe/StarzOn this afternoon, costumed only as herself, she had arrived in a swirl of muted earth tones — brown sandals, brown-and-blue sundress, blue straw hat, gold hoops. Medium drama.She held up a purple suit with a Muppet-y feel. “Definitely not,” she said.Sorting through the racks, she recalled her own acid-washed ’90s styles, modeled on the girl groups of the day, Salt-N-Pepa, TLC, En Vogue. Those same looks, she noted, have become fashionable again. “I just love how the things that were popular then keep coming back around,” she said, fingering a Geoffrey Beene blazer.Back then, in small-town South Carolina, Miller’s clothing came from Goodwill, which was what her single mother, a minister, could afford. With the money she saved on clothes, Miller’s mother paid for piano lessons and encouraged her daughter to sing in the church choir. (That encouragement helped her secure a spot at Carnegie Mellon’s theater program, which propelled her to Broadway, then onto shows like “Madam Secretary” and “Mercy Street.”)“This is a woman who had me at 15, who didn’t have her high school education, but she found a way to nurture me and invest in me,” Miller said. “I just come from really strong women.”Is she interested in strength and power herself? “I would be lying if I didn’t say, like, a little bit,” she said. “I want to have control of my life. I want to be as strong as I can.”“I just love how the things that were popular then keep coming back around,” Miller said about the ’90s-inspired styles that are currently in fashion. Sara Messinger for The New York TimesThis explains, at least in part, why she has made a career of playing strong women. The Witch can hex anyone in her radius. Raquel, an iron fist in a series of sumptuous leather jackets, refers proudly to herself as “the last bitch standing.” Both want to protect their children from the world, but the world — and the children — has other plans in mind. It would be easy enough to play either as a villain, but Miller prefers other choices.“They’re fighting for something; they’re fighting for their voice to be heard,” she said. “It’s more interesting to play the love,” she added.She retreated to the dressing room with an armful of hangers, emerging first in that Bill Blass skirt (“Ooh, dress up!” she said), topped with a grommet-studded Gianfranco Ferré blouse. The high-drama belt shifted the outfit into overdrive, so she switched out the blouse for a more restrained Calvin Klein shirt, adorned with bugle beads. She adjusted the hem of the skirt then pulled the waist lower.“The problem with me is my hips,” she said. Describing anything about Miller’s physique as a problem seems like a stretch. But sure.She asked for some shoes, but the store carried few size 10 pairs, and when Cabot brought her a pair of Ferragamo flats, Miller politely dismissed them as “a little bit church girl.” (She had enough of church girl looks in the actual ’90s.) In her bare feet, Miller made a Raq-like face in the mirror, eyes slit, mouth set.“Separately they’re both a vibe,” she said of the blouse and skirt. “And this belt, definitely a vibe.” But none of the vibes felt right for her, she decided. Next she tried a Missoni three-piece from the 1970s. “It’s not Raq,” she said as she slid on the coat. “But with my skin tone, perfect.” And yet the fit of the blouse was off. Back to the racks.Thrift shopping is a different proposition today for Miller, who shopped at Goodwill when she was young because it was what her single mother could afford. Sara Messinger for The New York TimesA Comme des Garçons blouse was too girlish, a white turtleneck too thick for summer. She tried on a leopard print Vivienne Westwood tunic, finished with the Donna Karan belt. It almost worked. A sea-green Halston caftan? “I’m so boring. I always go for the black,” she said. She tried on a jacket in palest pink. And then, in the men’s wear section, she found a black blazer, which Cabot styled with a gold collar, which made Miller look like a dance-floor queen.“Very, very Beyoncé,” Miller said, admiring herself in the mirror. “Totally Beyoncé on the horse. It’s a vibe, but not necessarily me.”She has been working, she said, to find the vulnerability within the powerful characters, she plays, and to find it within herself. “Because I think softness is a great thing, too,” she said. “It’s not bad to be soft. Black girls don’t get to do that. We always have to be strong, because that’s the best way we know. But when I see hardness, strongness on the page, I’m always like, What else can we say?”So from the rack she picked a softer item and a colorful one: a silk Karl Lagerfeld blouse in a rich shade of emerald.“That color would be amazing on you,” Cabot said.“Oh I know,” Miller replied.She decided to buy the blouse and the Donna Karan belt too. But Cabot, and the store owner, Laura Wills, surprised her, offering the blouse as a gift. “Come back and see us again!” Cabot said.“Absolutely,” Miller said as she paid for the belt.Back in her sundress, she stepped out onto 14th Street, where her own image, as Raq, looked back at her from a bus shelter. “I’m everywhere,” she said proudly. More

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      Interview: Feeling Very Old With Degenerate

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      This Is Not A Test on new show Degenerate

      Degenerate is a show about what happens when a 40 year old mother of two finds herself in the last chance saloon of midlife. Which is worrying considering some of us here at ET are past our 40s – suddenly we feel like we’re about to be put out to pasture. Or worse…

      But having got over our shock at discovering we’re clearly past our best, we still thought we should check in with This Is Not A Test to ask them more about the show that they describe as “a stand-up show that explores the bloody and surprising parallels between a Victorian vampire and a menopausal woman past her child bearing prime.”

      Let’s deal with the elephant in the room straight away. Are you really telling us over that 40 means we’re past our prime? How very dare you.

      Hahahaha! Controversy AND elephants straight out of the gate. Feels like a great start to us! 

      The best answer we can give is: age is just a number…right?

      Can we assume you are not spring chickens yourself then? Is some of this written from personal experience?

      Oh, how the tables have turned! You can definitely assume that at least half of us at Degenerate HQ are in that category. Write what you know they said…but make it a party.

      Ok, we’ll overlook the slight on our ages for now, what can you tell us about your 40 something in Degenerate? Why is she feeling like she is in that last chance saloon? What is she searching for in it?

      Oh man, we’ve really gotten ourselves into a bit of a pickle with this one, haven’t we. Who knew age could be so divisive?! I guess we did… but should we just kiss and make up? Or would that be too forward?

      But seriously, good question – that’s exactly what the show is about. We’re exploring why midlife feels like a last chance saloon and why hitting 40, combined with looming perimenopause can make the eternal life of the vampire look pretty appealing. As for our heroine, she’s searching for immortality!

      We often mistakenly think of fringe theatre as full of early career creatives, do you feel this can create a barrier to older participants? 

      We’d have to say you’re not wrong! Look around you. Early career creatives do tend to be young. Youth is where you are supposed to take risks, ask difficult questions, but we think middle age is just as exciting a moment to take those chances and start those conversations.

      So, yes, we’re “older” early careerers. We’ve spent the last decade having babies, careers and making theatre and don’t think those things are mutually exclusive. But the truth is, it is hard to have a family life and a creative life in functioning parallel. How does she do it all?? She doesn’t. She has A LOT of help. The upside though is we have had to become amazing at balancing, multitasking and staging an epic party without having a hangover!

      And there is talk of Dracula, is this literal, are things going to get a little scary or is Dracula a metaphor for the monster at the door?

      Come and see…if you dare (insert maniacal laugh here). If we told you, we might have to shove a wooden stake through your heart. And we would NEVER want to do that. We like you too much already. So come for the party, stay for the surprises.

      You promise shows with stand-up comedy, audience participation and improvisation, are we going to experience all this in Degenerate?

      We do and you are! It’s gonna be a wild ride. As we like to say: we promise everything, and nothing, all at once.

      The show is clearly labelled as a WIP – is this its very first outing, are you frantically writing it up to the last minute then?

      This will be the very first outing with Degenerate. The seed of this show came from a previous show of ours and has developed from there. We should add that we would never consider any of our shows to be ‘finished’ products but that is what makes it so exciting. So, frantically writing? No. Ever evolving? Yeah, we’d say so.

      So is it more stand up than play?

      Good question. It’s hard to say. The best way to describe it is somewhere in the surreal venn diagram where standup, comedy and theatre meet.

      Will there be a mic stand on the stage? And if so, will it only be used for the stand-up sections? Ask us in private why we hate mic stands on stage in plays!

      We hear you.

      Bad news though, there may be a mic stand… 

      But seriously, don’t leave a girl hanging. You must spill the tea about the mic stands! 

      Now we’re all dying to know!!

      We’ll tell you when after the show, promise… Moving on, and to show we read all our press releases received, did one of you really overdub a European supermodel! Please, do tell us more.

      Um you guys ARE good. 

      Yes, it is true, Maria did overdub a European supermodel for a bra company. This was when she was living the glamorous life in New York. She showed up for a voice job, was taken to a room with a massive movie screen and shown a scantily clad lady prancing around in her pants. They said to Maria – Can you make it seem like your voice is coming out of that body… Ouch. Know your strengths, right…?

      And let’s wrap things up, tell us why we should all be heading on down to 2Northdown later in August to see Degenerate?

      That’s easy – because we’ll show you a *bloody* good time!  – see what we did there? In all seriousness though, who doesn’t want a little under an hour of escapist fun? Times are dark, but we like living in colour! Or Color. Depending on where you’re from.

      Our thanks to the team at This Is Not A Test for a very fun chat. Come see us later and we’ll fill you in about the mic stands.

      You can catch Degenerate at the following dates:

      22/ 23 August @ 7pm. 2Northdown – Camden Fringe 2022. 2 October @ 9pm. The Bread and Roses Theatre – Clapham Fringe17 NOvember @6pm. Etcetera Theatre – Black Box Festival

      Further information and bookings here. More

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      Review: Without Bloodshed, the Ingénue Takes the Lead

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      Sophie McIntosh’s new play gathers five women in a college production for an exercise in youthful ambition and the corrupting clashing of egos.Hailey loves acting. Sweet and guileless, she doesn’t know Broadway is home to plays, as well as musicals. She is also as earnest in her love for her craft as she is genuinely talented — a combination that earns the freshman the coveted role of Lady Macbeth in her Minnesota college’s production. So, of course, all of the older girls resent her.Sophie McIntosh’s “Macbitches,” having its premiere at the Chain Theater, throws Hailey (Marie Dinolan) and four upperclasswomen together for a tight 85-minute exercise in youthful ambition and the corrupting clashing of egos. It’s (thankfully) not a direct takeoff on Shakespeare’s tale of royal bloodlust, but rather a very funny, well-observed and finely acted dramedy about what it means to be a young woman in a B.F.A. program in a post-#MeToo world.And it counts a revelatory star turn from Dinolan as its brightest point. As Hailey, she exhibits impeccable comedic timing that demands attention even when she’s in the background, staring at the bottom of her Cosmo with inebriated innocence. Not only can Dinolan play drunk well (tougher than you’d think), but she superbly inhabits her character’s inchoate ability to command a stage.Or, in this case, a fraught celebration. The gathering, organized after casting notices have gone up, is held at Rachel’s (Caroline Orlando), the program’s now-former de facto lead. Hailey is invited over by Piper (Laura Clare Brown), an introverted sophomore who’s coming up against the limitation of her talent and is perhaps unaware of what the ingénue’s presence at this intimate get-together might do to her friends. The agitated Lexi (Natasja Naarendorp) and the dispirited Cam (Morgan Lui) certainly do not need her there.McIntosh, the director Ella Jane New and their cast ably navigate these social hierarchies. Rachel is not a tyrannical, or even obvious, queen bee, but her lead turn in “Hedda Gabler” the year before ensures an unspoken air of achievement her friends can only admire. The way these students interact and move through Brandon Scott Hughes’s set — complete with “Hamilton” merch and posters from past college productions — feels real, seemingly informed by the cast’s own experiences among other actors rather than writerly necessity.Yet it’s the interactions happening outside the room that provide the play with a relevant, weighty backbone it would be well without, but is leagues better for including. These young women, though confident and well-prepared, are still working in a world ruled by men.Are their professors, who appraise their looks to determine their fitness for a role, supposed to mold them for the “real world,” or help them overcome its obstacles? How can you imbue a romantic scene with the power of instinct when the new norm of intimacy training necessitates planning? And is there any room for agency and ambition if your plan is sleeping up in an industry newly focused on power imbalances?McIntosh evokes these questions astutely, never putting too fine a point on any of them, or turning her characters into mouthpieces. With a fantastic understanding of tone and genre, “Macbitches” juggles headier themes while remaining a lively college drama, a riff on both Shakespeare and “All About Eve,” and a showcase for Dinolan’s blazing charisma.MacbitchesThrough Sept. 10 at the Chain Theater, Manhattan; chaintheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. More

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      Live Performance Is Back. But Audiences Have Been Slow to Return.

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      Attendance lagged in the comeback season, as the challenges posed by the coronavirus persisted. Presenters hope it was just a blip.Patti LuPone, Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig came back to Broadway. The Norwegian diva-in-the-making Lise Davidsen brought her penetrating voice to the Metropolitan Opera. Dancers filled stages, symphonies reverberated in concert halls and international theater companies returned to American stages.The resumption of live performance after the long pandemic shutdown brought plenty to cheer about over the past year. But far fewer people are showing up to join those cheers than presenters had hoped.Around New York, and across the country, audiences remain well below prepandemic levels. From regional theaters to Broadway, and from local orchestras to grand opera houses, performing arts organizations are reporting persistent — and worrisome — drops in attendance.Fewer than half as many people saw a Broadway show during the season that recently ended than did so during the last full season before the coronavirus pandemic. The Met Opera saw its paid attendance fall to 61 percent of capacity, down from 75 percent before the pandemic. Many regional theaters say ticket sales are down significantly.“There was a greater magnetic force of people’s couches than I, as a producer, anticipated,” said Jeremy Blocker, the managing director at New York Theater Workshop, the Off Broadway theater that developed “Rent” and “Hadestown.” “People got used to not going places during the pandemic, and we’re going to struggle with that for a few years.”Many presenters anticipate that the softer box office will extend into the upcoming season and perhaps beyond. And some fear that the virus is accelerating long-term trends that have troubled arts organizations for years, including softer ticket sales for many classical music events, the decline of the subscription model for selling tickets at many performing arts organizations, and the increasing tendency among consumers to purchase tickets at the last minute.A few institutions are already making adjustments for the new season: The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra has cut 10 concerts, after seeing its average attendance fall to 40 percent of capacity last season, down from 62 percent in 2018-19.Many Broadway shows have struggled to match prepandemic salesPercent change in weekly gross sales in 2021 and 2022, compared with the same week in 2019 More

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      In Two London Plays, Being Black Means Looking From the Outside In

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      Black characters in “Mad House” and “The Southbury Child” endure microaggressions and aspersions. The familiar scenarios hit home for our critic.LONDON — It was my second time here, and I kept trying to remember if I had felt as conspicuous during my first visit. I could count the number of other Black women I spotted during my five days here: the hotel receptionist with the French braid, whom I spoke with when I stopped in to ask to use the bathroom, the long-haired woman at my own hotel’s front desk, the woman talking rapidly into her cellphone outside a Starbucks, the two women (clearly tourists) with matching backpacks near the British Museum, and the young woman with the short, relaxed hair, who was clutching a shopping bag as she walked briskly down the street. That list isn’t comprehensive. But it’s not far off.So when the eyes of a white person linger on me, as they did numerous times during this trip, my imagination tricks me into thinking every glance is a rebuke — whether because of my obvious Americanness; or because of my race, my tattoos or my pink hair. I don’t know how to sit with my discomfort in these moments, and I inevitably ask myself: How much of an outsider am I?Such thoughts often cross my mind when I go to the theater — whether in New York, London or elsewhere — and sit among the predominantly white audience, watching the mostly white actors onstage. In choosing which London shows to squeeze into my short work trip, I gravitated to two brand-new family dramas, “Mad House” and “The Southbury Child,” with big-name stars and stories about white families.As these weren’t the domains of Tina Turner or Sister Deloris Van Cartier or Noma Dumezweni’s Nora Helmer, I didn’t expect to see any Black women on either stage. But I was wrong; in both “Mad House” and “The Southbury Child,” a Black woman — the lone Black person in each show — is not only a part of the play, but she also serves as an outsider who witnesses and comments on the chaos, enduring microaggressions and outright aspersions before making her escape.In “Mad House,” written by Theresa Rebeck (“Bernhardt/Hamlet”) and directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel, David Harbour (“Stranger Things”) plays a man named Michael who is watching over his dying father, Daniel (played by Bill Pullman) in rural Pennsylvania. But the father’s illness isn’t enough to stop the man’s unending stream of vitriol and abuse.It’s just the two of them now, since Michael’s beloved mother died, because of — according to his father — Michael’s yearlong stay at a mental hospital, which broke her heart. Rounding out the living members of this broken nuclear family are Michael’s brother, Nedward, a Manhattan stockbroker who pops up after a prolonged absence to take charge of Daniel’s assets, and his sister, Pam, a vicious manipulator who shows up halfway through the play to exacerbate the situation.Into all this mess enters Lillian, a Caribbean hospice nurse hired to help make Daniel comfortable during his final days. She maintains her professionalism despite Daniel’s crass come-ons, objectifying of her body, offensive comments about trans people (she’s so muscular she might be a man, he declares) and racist attitude (he repeatedly insists that he paid for her, like a slave). She’s spoken down to and bossed around by Ned and especially by Pam, who insists Lillian is unqualified. After Lillian shares a letter with Michael that she’s discovered among Daniel’s papers, the extent of his family’s lies come to light.Because I’ve seen so many plays in which the entrance of a Black character signals the beginning of a string of awful clichés and tropes, I am now leery when I see a lone Black person appear among a cast of white characters. When Akiya Henry, the actress playing Lillian, initially appeared in the first act, walking into Daniel and Michael’s kitchen, I felt this same foreboding.Originally from St. Vincent and the Grenadines, as the family members announce several times, Lillian is an outsider, and she’s a helper — quite literally, of course, since she’s a nurse. Armed with sharp retorts and a sassy, well-timed sucking of her teeth, Lillian punctuates the absurdity of the circumstances and brings the outside world into the confines of this unstable family home so the audience doesn’t get too claustrophobic. She is also the main inciting force that moves the story forward and cracks open the family dynamic. She’s not so transparent an archetype that her tale is left to the imagination, though: She gets a tragic, grief-filled back story, but only so the play can relate Michael’s emotional baggage through Lillian. She’s the mirror held up to Michael’s inner life.Racheal Ofori as the adopted daughter of a white family in Stephen Beresford’s “The Southbury Child” at the Bridge Theater.Manuel HarlanIn one of the other West End plays I saw, Stephen Beresford’s “The Southbury Child,” directed by Nicholas Hytner, the token Black woman is even more aware of her status as an interloper, and the script struggles to give the character dimension.Here, Alex Jennings (“The Crown”) plays a philandering vicar and alcoholic who becomes the town pariah after refusing to allow balloons at a young girl’s funeral. The Black actress Racheal Ofori plays his adult daughter Naomi, who materializes like the prodigal adopted daughter. Appearing in fitted tops and mini skirts after nightlong partying, Naomi is, well, the black sheep in more ways than the most obvious racial one. Unlike her religious father, she is what she calls a “militant atheist”; she lacks the same underlying bitterness of her mother and outshines her hardworking but overlooked elder sister.Naomi plays no role in the odd central drama about balloons but saunters onto the stage every once in a while, in her club clothes or pajamas, taking in the drama and mocking and jesting at her family and her status as the sole person of color. Like Lillian in “Mad House,” Naomi serves as the wise fool.Hers is one of several side stories in this intriguing yet overpacked play: Feeling alienated as a Black woman in a white family, she seeks out her birth mother in the hope that doing so will help her find her true self. In the meantime, her character is the snarky observer who then complains about being tokenized by her community. In one instance, she sneers as she describes the self-congratulatory white moms who proudly set up play dates between their daughters and the town’s Black girl.The similarities in the way the characters’ arcs end in each play are intriguing: For both Naomi and Lillian, the departures are abrupt. It’s as if neither stage has a place for these Black women beyond their roles as outside observers and truth-tellers. Once they’ve played their parts, they are seemingly given an out; finally spared from having to see the mess through to the end. But the exits of these Black women also seem like a validation that they don’t actually belong there. That they are exceptional.And, in a sense, they are — both Henry and Ofori make their characters compelling, so much so that sometimes they steal the spotlight. Not for long, though — never for long. Despite the strong Black female leads you can catch on some stages, too many productions still embrace a very narrow role for their Black women, who can nurture, drop snide remarks and reveal truths the other characters fail to see — so long as they know their place as visitors in the narrative. More

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      ‘Patience’ Review: At the Top of His Game, and Lonely

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      Johnny G. Lloyd’s new play about a solitaire champion examines talent, ambition and the rising stakes of success when you’re Black.The most powerful line in “Patience,” Johnny G. Lloyd’s new play about Black excellence, comes not from the world-champion solitaire player at its center but rather from a teenage opponent quietly eyeing the champ’s crown, skilled and ferocious and determined to dethrone him.“I’m not going to apologize for wanting to dominate,” she says. “I’m not going to apologize for making myself lethal.” And then comes the vital bit, landing like a punch: “I’m not going to apologize for losing, because one day I will be winning and winning and winning.”That’s the thing about the path to success, isn’t it — that talented people need to be allowed to stumble sometimes, then continue their quest. “Patience” itself is a case in point. Part of the Second Stage Theater Uptown series dedicated to emerging playwrights and early-career artists, the show isn’t a win for Lloyd and his director, Zhailon Levingston, but it’s hardly a wipeout either.Daniel Bryant (Justiin Davis), the play’s 25-year-old Black superstar, hasn’t stumbled in a very long time. Two decades ago, he exhibited a talent for solitaire, and his mother (Mary E. Hodges), who is also his manager, has been nurturing it ever since. Undefeated for four years running, he is focused, famous and alone at the top.Solitaire is an obscure choice of game to graft onto those glittery circumstances, but Lloyd is thinking figuratively — about a competition in which one’s true opponent is oneself, and about the pressure and isolation of being an only.Daniel is so adept at flying solo in his cosseted life that his adorable fiancé, Jordan (the immensely likable and funny Jonathan Burke), has a very specific, not-unreasonable-sounding fear: that one day the phone will ring and on the other end will be someone who works for Daniel, calling to dump him on Daniel’s behalf. Though he and Jordan have just bought a fancy new house, their relationship feels less than solid, and anyway, Daniel is a living-in-the-moment kind of guy.“The future is terrifying,” he says.On the fence about what should come next, he is tempted to retire — until the 18-year-old up-and-comer Ella (Zainab Barry) appears on the scene, threatening his dominance with her own Black excellence. Daniel’s mother, understandably frightened that her career will collapse if he stops playing, encourages a match between them without mentioning a crucial fact: She has taken on Ella as a client, too.Does that seem like an implausible conflict of interest and egregious betrayal of trust? Yes. Are we meant to give Daniel’s mother (the character’s name is simply Mother) a pass? Apparently. It’s a distracting complication that seems manufactured, and not for any clear reason — not even after the play’s Venus-and-Serena theme becomes overt.You will be primed for that motif early on, when Daniel tells a class of high schoolers that he has “been called the Venus Williams of solitaire,” and you think: Venus, really? Not Serena? Then Daniel’s friend, Nikita (Nemuna Ceesay), mentions that same fact about him, unnecessarily.When Ella happens to have the same surname as Daniel, though they’re not related, it seems tailored to the Williams sisters metaphor, in which of course she is Serena. On the plus side, the coincidence of their both being Bryants does allow Ella to make a pointed observation.“Very popular name,” she says. “Could go into why, if we really wanted to. Probably something depressing. Or — colonial.”Competition approaches: Zainab Barry as Ella in the background, and Davis with Mary E. Hodges, who plays his mother-manager. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt the McGinn/Cazale Theater on the Upper West Side, “Patience” has an across-the-board appealing cast, and the show is beautifully designed, except for an unpersuasive late scene involving the illusion of two Daniels. (Set by Lawrence E. Moten III, costumes by Avery Reed, lights by Adam Honoré, sound by Christopher Darbassie.)Ultimately, though, the play’s balance is off, as if it can’t decide whether Daniel anchors it, or if Daniel and Ella do, or if maybe the show wants to be an ensemble piece.Its heart, though, is invested in a future in which Black megatalents like Daniel and Ella — or Venus and Serena — don’t have to occupy the pinnacle of their field one at a time.“I will not be intimidated by the competition,” Ella vows. “I will welcome it, I will not try to crush it, I will encourage it, I will make room. I will make room and I will still win. Because I know there can be more than one.”PatienceThrough Aug. 28 at the McGinn/Cazale Theater, Manhattan; 2st.com. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More