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      Tony Awards Predictions: ‘Strange Loop’ and ‘Lehman’ Look Strong

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      We surveyed voters ahead of this year’s ceremony on Sunday. They are strikingly split in the races for leading musical performers.After a strange year on Broadway, it looks as if it could be a “Strange” night at the Tony Awards.Our annual survey of Tony voters — well, it was annual, until the coronavirus pandemic disrupted everything — suggests that Michael R. Jackson’s meta-musical “A Strange Loop” is favored to win the all-important race for best new musical at this year’s Tony Awards, which will take place on Sunday night. If there is an upset, it will come from “MJ,” the biographical musical about Michael Jackson.Over the past few days, I have connected with 181 of the approximately 650 Tony voters to talk about their choices in eight key categories. This is not a scientific poll — voting continues through Friday; the voting pool is distorted, and diminished, by coronavirus cancellations that left many ineligible to vote in some categories; and numerous voters have been scrambling to catch up with missed shows while hoping to vote at the last minute. To see actual statuettes handed out, you’ll have to tune in to the award show Sunday, which starts with a one-hour streaming segment on Paramount+ at 7 p.m. Eastern, and then continues at 8 p.m. with a three-hour segment broadcast on CBS and streamed on Paramount+.But interviews with a large subset of voters make clear which races are locked up, and which are insanely close.The race for best play is all sewn up.The best play Tony Award seems certain to go to “The Lehman Trilogy,” a riveting history lesson that chronicles the rise and fall of the Lehman Brothers financial empire. The play was originally written by an Italian playwright, Stefano Massini, and then adapted by a British writer, Ben Power.The survey suggests that “Lehman” will win easily — a supermajority of voters believe that it was the best play of the season, and those who do not support it are splitting their votes among the other four contenders, making any other outcome improbable.A plurality of voters also favor one of the “Lehman” stars, the great English actor Simon Russell Beale, in the unusual seven-nominee race for best leading actor in a play. Beale’s career has been spent mostly on the British stage, and this would be his first Tony Award.Simon Russell Beale, center, with Adam Godley, left, and Adrian Lester in “The Lehman Trilogy.” All three are competing for a best actor Tony Award.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhy is “Lehman” winning? The show, with a meaty subject that both explicates and implicitly critiques New York City’s hugely important financial industry, was a showcase for its three main actors, each of whom played many roles, and it had a showpiece set, designed by Es Devlin, that contained the action within a rotating glass box.Directed by Sam Mendes, it arrived on Broadway with a lot of buzz. After productions in Europe, it had been staged Off Broadway, at the Park Avenue Armory, in 2019, and that production was the talk of the town, becoming a best seller for the nonprofit, with some seats reselling for several thousand dollars.The road to Broadway was bumpy: “The Lehman Trilogy” began previews at the Nederlander Theater less than a week before theaters shut down in March 2020; it then resumed previews 18 months later and finally opened last October. The run sold well, particularly given that much of it overlapped with the pandemic surge associated with the Omicron variant, and it ended Jan. 2 before the production moved to Los Angeles for another brief run.Read More About the 2022 Tony AwardsHosting Duties: Ariana DeBose, who will host the ceremony, vows that this edition will celebrate the often unsung actors who have stepped in during the pandemic.Ruth Negga: The actress, who is nominated for her role as Lady Macbeth in Sam Gold’s staging of the play, infuses the character with intensity, urgency and vitality.Hugh Jackman: The actor may potentially win his third Tony Award for his role in “The Music Man.” He shared some thoughts on his life between film and theater.Choreography: Musicals like “MJ” and “Paradise Square” take on dances of the past but miss some opportunities to elevate the dancing; “For Colored Girls” effectively weaves language and motion.The play faced some criticism from those who felt that it soft-pedaled the relationship between the Lehmans’ early business practices and slavery; the production sharpened its references to race via script revisions made during the theater shutdown.Among new musicals, ‘A Strange Loop’ is the favorite.“A Strange Loop” also arrived on Broadway with a big head of steam: During the pandemic, it won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, based on an Off Broadway production staged by Playwrights Horizons and Page 73 Productions in 2019.The musical is about a young aspiring musical theater writer who is Black and gay, and who is haunted by a mostly self-critical inner dialogue that springs to life in the show.The musical, written by Michael R. Jackson and directed by Stephen Brackett, garnered the strongest reviews of the season, and picked up 11 Tony nominations, more than any other show.Voters praised the show’s originality and its raw honesty. As is true with every show, this one also has its skeptics — some voters find the songs unmemorable, or the explicitness off-putting — but in the Tony race, it is benefiting from the fact that there is no consensus about any of the other nominees.Some industry veterans have suggested that Tony voters who live outside New York might be reluctant to support “A Strange Loop” because its sexual content could make it challenging to produce on tour. But that does not appear to be a decisive factor: “A Strange Loop” is favored by half of the voters I spoke with; about one-fifth are supporting “MJ,” the musical about Michael Jackson, which they uniformly praised as entertaining, and the other contenders have less support.“Six,” the fan favorite that was all the rage in 2020, when it came within a few hours of opening before theaters shut down, seems to have lost some heat among voters who no longer think of it as a new show because its run began before the pandemic. But shed no tears for “Six”: it is proving to be hugely successful, with strong box office grosses and a thriving touring market.Several acting races are down to the wire.Voters are remarkably divided in the races for best leading musical performers.In the race for lead actor in a musical, the voters are evenly split between two young actors, Myles Frost, 22, and Jaquel Spivey, 23, each of whom is making his professional stage debut this season. Frost is nominated for his convincing depiction of a driven Michael Jackson in “MJ,” and Spivey is nominated for his soul-baring performance as the self-doubting protagonist in “A Strange Loop”; both have wowed audiences, in very different ways. Each of them has support from about one-third of voters.In the race for lead actress in a musical, the voters are torn between Sharon D Clarke, who played the pained but powerful maid at the heart of a revival of “Caroline, or Change,” and Joaquina Kalukango, who plays a determined tavern owner in the new musical “Paradise Square.”Joaquina Kalukango, left, of “Paradise Square” and Sharon D Clarke of “Caroline, or Change” are in a tight race for lead actress in a musical.Photographs by Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn the race for best actress in a play, Deirdre O’Connell, who uncannily lip-synced recorded interviews with a kidnapping victim in “Dana H.,” has a modest edge among the voters I talked to. But the margin was not big enough to predict what will happen with any confidence; the other leading contenders appear to be LaChanze, for her performance as a truth-telling actress in “Trouble in Mind,” and Mary-Louise Parker, for her performance as a woman abused by her uncle in “How I Learned to Drive.”‘Company’ leads in the musical revival category, but the best play revival is harder to predict.The death of the composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, one of the most important writers in musical theater history, was among the biggest theater stories of the last season, and it appears that Tony voters are now inclined to honor the final Broadway production that he worked on with the prize for best musical revival.About half of voters say they are choosing the gender-reversed revival of “Company,” which Sondheim strongly supported before his death. The show, first produced in 1970, previously centered on a man contemplating his single life as he turns 35; this version, directed by Marianne Elliott, puts a woman in the same predicament.The revival of “Company” appears to be the leading contender in the best musical revival category.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Company” appears to have twice as much support as its nearest competitor, the revival of “Caroline, or Change.”Tony Awards: The Best New Musical NomineesCard 1 of 7The 2022 nominees. More

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      New 42 Worker Files Bias Lawsuit Over Diversity Training

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      A white teaching artist at the theater organization says it discriminated against white people. The nonprofit declined to comment.A contract worker at a nonprofit New York theater organization has filed a lawsuit saying that the institution’s diversity trainings were themselves discriminatory.Kevin Ray, a part-time teaching artist at New 42, an organization that runs rehearsal studios, youth programs and a children’s theater in Times Square, filed the lawsuit late Wednesday in Federal District Court, accusing the organization of discriminating against white employees. He is asking the court to determine that New 42 violated the federal civil rights act as well as local human rights laws, and to award him an unspecified amount of damages.In the lawsuit, Ray, who is white, alleged that the diversity programs implemented by New 42 included “racially-discriminatory propaganda and lectures promoting discriminatory ideology on the basis of race.” Ray said he was asked to join a conversation about a “white affinity group” at New 42, and said the organization had designated a “white-identifying breakout room” at an online town hall.“In reality, ‘diversity training sessions’ were race-based indoctrination sessions that promoted the division of employees on the basis of race,” the lawsuit says.Ray’s job involves visiting schools for educational programs, usually related to a show the students are about to see. He claims that he has been assigned less work and has been subjected to retaliation after raising concerns about the organization’s diversity training programs.The lawsuit comes at a time when the use of antiracism training programs and the creation or expansion of diversity initiatives has grown significantly in the theater industry, as in many other sectors of society, following the unrest over racism in the United States in the summer of 2020.The lawsuit is being backed by an organization called the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, which says it is concerned about a “cynical and intolerant orthodoxy” that “pits us against one another, and diminishes what it means to be human.” The organization, founded by Bion Bartning, has filed other lawsuits challenging what it says are forms of discriminatory overreach by organizations trying to implement diversity programs; the Ray suit is the organization’s first in the arts arena, but it has begun an arts program as it considers other action.A lawyer for New 42, David Lichtenberg, said via a spokeswoman that the nonprofit had “no comment at this time.” More

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      Review: In ‘Snow in Midsummer,’ It’s Not Just the Forecast That’s Amiss

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      Adapted from a 13th-century drama, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s play is part ghost story, murder mystery and family melodrama.In the Chinese town of New Harmony, a three-year drought has ravaged the landscape. The lake has evaporated. Ash falls from the sky. Nothing grows. While some characters blame global warming, these natural disasters have a supernatural explanation. A young widow has been executed for a crime she did not commit. Before she dies, she curses New Harmony: Until she is avenged and buried, the town will suffer.In these broad, climactic strokes, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s “Snow in Midsummer,” at Classic Stage Company, resembles the 13th-century Yuan dynasty drama from which it is adapted, “The Injustice to Dou Yi That Moved Heaven and Earth.” A commission of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Chinese Classics Translations Project, the play updates a classical tragedy. But in this Classic Stage production, with hectic, erratic direction by Zi Alikhan, the translation appears garbled, stranding the play among genres and tones. A ghost story, a murder mystery, a family melodrama, and a tale of greed both corporate and personal, it has been staged in ways that confuse place, time and intention.After a prologue set three years in the past, before the execution, the play proper begins with the arrival of Tianyun (Teresa Avia Lim), a self-made woman intent on buying a local factory, and her adopted daughter, Fei-Fei (Fin Moulding). Tianyun makes and distributes synthetic flowers, as no real ones can grow in this drought-stricken town. Selling the factory is Handsome Zhang (John Yi), who will use the money to relocate with his fiancé, Rocket Wu (Tommy Bo). But the hungry ghost of the widow, Dou Yi (Dorcas Leung), threatens these transactions.The script exists on multiple planes — reality, surreality, memory — which the production collapses. There’s fog everywhere, and Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew’s evocative lighting is ghostly throughout. The set, by the design collective dots, is an undistinguished wooden platform, sometimes adorned with posters or flags or blood. The stage’s loft is at first a love nest. And then it is the afterlife. This offers little sense of place. I couldn’t possibly tell you how remote New Harmony is, how prosperous, how contingent on an actual China. The period seems confused as well, which does not feel like a deliberate choice. One character speaks of the Cultural Revolution as if it were fairly recent. But then how to explain the cellphones?Cowhig’s heightened language (“Heaven mistakes the wise man and the fool/Both leave me nothing but two streams of tears”) clarifies little. Queering a central relationship and applying the lens of climate change refreshes a classical drama. But in rendering the play as a mystery, Cowhig delays solutions until the middle of the second act, which means the audience will spend more than an hour watching characters without remotely understanding the reasons for their behavior, rendering the psychology somewhat flat.There are gestures toward implicating the audience in Dou Yi’s fate, but these are incomplete. In an early scene, Dou Yi offers her wares to several spectators. Each person seemed keen to buy one. In keeping with the script, the actress had to pretend otherwise.Chinese theater is so little seen here and in a time in which threats to Asian American and Pacific Islander communities feel more pronounced than ever, representation seems critical. But this play feels inchoate and its cast of Asian American actors underserved. At the performance I attended, several of the actors seemed under-rehearsed, others had vocal difficulties. Leung, in her bloodstained shroud (Johanna Pan designed the costumes), was made to scream and scream and scream.The play’s themes — a classical riff on no justice, no peace, a reckoning with the human impact on the environment — should reverberate. Instead only the screams echo. “Snow in Midsummer” may haunt you. But not in the ways that a ghost story should.Snow in MidsummerThrough July 9 at Classic Stage Company, Manhattan; classicstage.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      A Homecoming, of Sorts, for Viennese Plays

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      Two recent British dramas with Austrian roots made it to Vienna this season: “Leopoldstadt,” by Tom Stoppard, and Robert Icke’s “The Doctor.”VIENNA — Leopoldstadt is the name of a central Viennese district with a large Jewish population. It is also the title of Tom Stoppard’s 2020 Olivier Award-winning play, which opened on the West End shortly before the start of the pandemic.Two and a half years after its London premiere, “Leopoldstadt,” a multigenerational saga of an Austrian Jewish family’s triumphs and tragedies in the first half of the 20th century, has made it to Vienna, where it received its German-language premiere this spring at the Theater in der Josefstadt in a handsome and effectively traditional staging by Janusz Kica. (It will return to the repertoire in December. The London production will transfer in the fall to Broadway, where it will run at the Longacre Theater.)It is a fitting irony that none of “Leopoldstadt” actually takes place in Leopoldstadt, since many of its characters try — and fail — to escape the perceived stigma of being Jewish by reinventing themselves as Austrians.When I saw “Leopoldstadt” in London, I wondered how Viennese audiences would react to Stoppard’s fictional exploration of their history and culture. In particular, I was curious whether his re-creation of culturally oversaturated fin de siècle Vienna, a vanished world that continues to fascinate, would convince an audience more familiar with that glittering epoch. Especially in the first half, set around 1900, Stoppard wears his learning and erudition on his sleeve; at times, the amount of historical and cultural detail that peppers the dialogue threatens to derail the play, with its nearly 30 characters and unusually knotty structure.The closest thing Stoppard gives us to a conventional protagonist is Hermann Merz, an affluent textile manufacturer who has largely shed the traditions of his rag-peddling forebears and entered high society. The Merz clan is a motley bunch who celebrate Christmas and Passover with both relish and irreverence. Baptized and married to a Catholic woman, Hermann nonetheless boasts of the Jews’ colossal contribution to culture, without which “Austria would be the Patagonia of banking, science, the law, the arts, literature, journalism,” he says.Listening to Adrian Scarborough, who played Hermann in the London production, recite Hermann’s triumphalist speeches with bluster, I winced a little. Yet the lines sounded considerably less forced in the mouth of Herbert Föttinger, who played the character in Vienna, and in a faithful and fluid translation by the German novelist Daniel Kehlmann. It’s largely a question of temperament. Scarborough played Hermann as a nouveau riche climber who is both haughty and insecure, while Föttinger portrayed him as suave and self-possessed. We believe him when he observed approvingly that Vienna’s middle-class Jews “literally worship culture.” Föttinger’s elegance and poise at the start of the play helped make Hermann’s subsequent humiliations and his ultimate downfall all the more tragic. When an Austrian officer who had a fling with Hermann’s wife, Gretl, refused a duel with Hermann on the grounds that a Jew is born without honor and hence can’t demand satisfaction for an insult, we understood that this offense wounded Hermann more than his wife’s infidelity.Another ensemble scene in “Leopoldstadt,” which takes place in Vienna.Moritz Schell Hermann Metz epitomizes the worldview of a confident minority who had found acceptance and success in a culture that was an artistic, intellectual, scientific and political hotbed. (Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg and Arthur Schnitzler are all name-checked.) The way Stoppard conjures the milieu of assimilated Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Empire owes much to writers of the period, including Schnitzler and Stefan Zweig, whose posthumously published memoir, “The World of Yesterday,” is perhaps the most evocative and nostalgia-drenched chronicle of the era.“Leopoldstadt” leaps from the early 1900s to the years after World War I and from there to Kristallnacht, the anti-Jewish pogrom that the Nazis orchestrated throughout the Third Reich on Nov. 9, 1938. The pinging around is meant to be disorienting as we visit characters we last saw decades earlier — as well as some new arrivals — in radically changed historical contexts. In its latter half, “Leopoldstadt” finds itself on unsure footing only once. In a scene set in 1924, the family members discuss the Great War, the carving up of Austria in its aftermath, and the messy politics and competing ideologies of the interwar period. In London, I felt that the scene merely struggled to dramatize its themes; here it felt more awkward, and even redundant, as if Stoppard were lecturing the Viennese about their own history.Stoppard’s masterful final scene, in which the three remaining members of the Merz family reunite in 1950s Vienna, was sensitively directed and acted, but many of its revelations were less persuasive in German than in English. One of the family members, Leo, has been raised in England and, crucially, has no memory of his early life in Vienna. (Thus it’s a strain to imagine that he would speak perfect German without an accent.) Now a young man, he is a writer of some renown. In a painful reunion with his cousins — a New York psychoanalyst and a mathematician who survived the Holocaust — long-suppressed memories are dredged up and the past superimposes itself on the present in unexpected and haunting ways.Remarkably, “Leopoldstadt” isn’t the only recent British play with Austrian roots that made it to Vienna this season. Earlier in the year, the Burgtheater mounted the German-language premiere of “The Doctor,” Robert Icke’s 2019 rewrite of Arthur Schnitzler’s “Professor Bernhardi,” which was first seen at the Almeida, the London playhouse that Icke used to run.Sophie von Kessel, seated at right, as the title character defending herself before a panel on television in “The Doctor,” Robert Icke’s rewrite of Arthur Schnitzler’s “Professor Bernhardi,” at the Burgtheater.Marcella Ruiz CruzSchnitzler’s play, first performed in 1912, is an indictment of the Austrian antisemitism that Hermann Merz naïvely takes to be a thing of the past. The most conspicuous change that Icke, who also directed the production, makes in his version is a gender switch central to his reimagining and updating of the piece.Like Schnitzler’s prickly male protagonist, “The Doctor’s” lead character, Dr. Ruth Wolff (Sophie von Kessel in a tour de force performance), finds herself under attack for refusing to let a priest administer last rights to a delirious patient who is unaware that her end is near. In the original, Professor Bernhardi becomes the target of an antisemitic media campaign. In Icke’s retelling, Dr. Wolff becomes the victim of virulent social media attacks that smack more of misogyny. She defends herself against the anonymous online mob by appearing on television to debate a sanctimoniously woke panel. All this gives Icke ample opportunity to skewer cancel culture, identity politics and political correctness, although the satirical and the sincere often coexist uneasily, especially when his supporting characters moralize tediously. At the same time, the colorblind and “gender blind” casting challenges the audience to look past race and sex and reflect on the play’s moral conundrums impartially.As with Stoppard and “Leopoldstadt,” “The Doctor” feels like something of a homecoming: a Viennese return for a contemporary play rooted in the world of yesterday.Leopoldstadt. Directed by Janusz Kica. Theater in der Josefstadt.Die Ärztin. Directed by Robert Icke. Burgtheater Wien, through June 13. More

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      ‘Come From Away’ to Close, the Latest Broadway Show to End Run

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      “Come From Away,” the inspirational musical about a remote Canadian community that rallied to support thousands of stranded air travelers after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, will end its run on Broadway in October.The musical, which has been a hit on Broadway and has been successfully staged around the world, is the third show to announce a plan to close in the last two days, as it becomes clear that with New York City still attracting fewer tourists than it did before the pandemic, there are not enough patrons to support all the productions now running.On Tuesday “Dear Evan Hansen” and “Tina,” two musicals that had been selling strongly before the pandemic, both announced that they would close late this summer.“Come From Away” will close on Oct. 2. It began performances Feb. 18, 2017, and opened March 12, 2017; at the time of its closing it will have had 25 preview performances and 1,670 regular performances at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater.The musical continues to tour in North America and Australia and to run in London. A filmed version of the stage production is streaming on Apple TV+.The show was an unlikely hit — before it arrived in New York, the conventional wisdom was that locals would never embrace a musical about Sept. 11 because the subject was too potentially upsetting. The producers, seeking to build word-of-mouth first, took a roundabout path to Broadway, staging it in San Diego, Seattle, Washington, D.C., and Toronto before coming to New York.But the show, arriving early in the Trump administration, quickly became a success, seen as a parable about welcoming strangers and building community.The musical, which won a Tony Award for Christopher Ashley’s direction, is based on true events that took place in Gander, Newfoundland, where 38 commercial planes were diverted. The musical’s writers, a married couple named Irene Sankoff and David Hein, went to Gander a decade after Sept. 11 to interview locals, and created the musical based on those interviews; the show was first staged at Sheridan College in Ontario, where a school dean, Michael Rubinoff, had been trying to persuade someone that the subject would make a good musical.The show’s original star, Jenn Colella, who portrayed an airline pilot, will rejoin the cast from June 21 to Aug. 7.“Come From Away” is produced by Junkyard Dog Productions, which is led by Randy Adams, Marleen and Kenny Alhadeff, and Sue Frost, who spotted an early workshop of the show at a festival held by the National Alliance for Musical Theater.The show’s grosses have dropped significantly since the pandemic shutdown of theaters. Last week it grossed $461,760; during a comparable early June week in 2019 it grossed $897,186.On Tuesday, “Tina” said it would close Aug. 14, and “Dear Evan Hansen” said it would close Sept. 18. More

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      ‘Mr. Parker’ Review: Starting Over

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      The protagonist of this new play by Michael McKeever steps gingerly out of grief’s stasis and into the unknown.Being a famous artist’s spouse is not easy. Being a famous person’s surviving spouse might be even tougher. That is the plight of Terry, whose husband, Jeffrey, an artist, died as a result of a car crash. Terry, a novelist who put his own creative aspirations on hold when Jeffrey made it big, is confronting an issue many women in straight relationships have long endured: “I was defined by the man I married,” Terry says. “And now, suddenly, for the first time, I’m just … Mr. Parker. And I don’t know how to do that.”Michael McKeever’s “Mr. Parker,” which just opened on Theater Row, begins seven months after Jeffrey’s death, and Terry (Derek Smith) is still trying to find himself. A good start will be to date again, or at least to pick up a stranger — baby steps.That’s how Terry finds himself in his husband’s work studio — which feels less emotionally fraught than their apartment — on a hung-over postcoital morning. He can’t quite remember the guy’s name: Kevin, maybe? Actually, it’s Justin (Davi Santos), an easygoing, doe-eyed bartender-slash-Uber driver who is 28 to Terry’s 54.All in all, it looks like Terry was lucky with his rebound. Justin seems sweet and considerate, if overly chatty. “I am a walking encyclopedia of worthless Manhattan trivia,” he informs Terry, adding, “People either love it or hate it,” as if the ability to spout factoids were a highly contentious trait.McKeever’s previous Off Broadway shows, “After” and “Daniel’s Husband,” bore in on large societal subjects (gun violence, gay marriage) with a fairly heavy hand. That touch is in evidence here, too: As if losing a husband weren’t awful enough, Terry was at the wheel at the time of the accident. And then a few days later he had to agree to let the doctors turn off the machines keeping Jeffrey alive.Perhaps this is why the show, a Penguin Rep Theater production directed by Joe Brancato, is at its best in the lighter-toned scenes depicting Terry and Justin’s getting-to-know-you phase. McKeever and Brancato stick with a naturalistic, matter-of-fact plainness that does not shy from the benefits each man derives from the relationship: Justin has found a wealthy guy who pays for everything, while Terry gets to spend quality time with a hunky youth. Still, one wishes that the age difference were evoked in less simplistic brushstrokes. Justin has to explain to Terry that vinyl is cool but CDs are not. Terry complains that Justin spends too much time on his phone. You’d think Terry was a 90-year-old relic who had spent decades under a rock, not a man in his early 50s who used to be married to a hotshot artist and must have been exposed to technological and sociological changes.In any case, Terry has a living, breathing reminder of his inadequacies in Jeffrey’s sister, the brittle Cassandra (Mia Matthews), who is casually dismissive of Justin and tries to get the distraught Terry to be more proactive in his management of the imposing estate he now oversees.But Terry has spent decades in a famous man’s shadow and has forgotten how to make decisions for himself. Grief only compounds his stasis: He holds onto his old answering machine because it contains a saved message from Jeffrey, and endlessly postpones talking to a Whitney Museum curator who wants to organize a retrospective.“Mr. Parker” is not the kind of play that springs surprises on the audience, so its denouement is entirely predictable. And that is perhaps the show’s biggest asset: Real life can be ho-hum, too. One day you can’t move on, and the next, you can.Mr. ParkerThrough June 25 at Theater Row, Manhattan; bfany.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      N.Y.U. Names New Performance Space After Nation’s First Black Theater

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      The university is commemorating the African Grove Theater, part of a new building opening in 2023.A new performance space at New York University will be named “The African Grove Theater” in honor of the African Theater, a historic New York production company and venue widely considered to be the first Black theater in the United States, the university announced on Wednesday.Supported by a $1 million donation, the theater is on the fourth floor of a new multipurpose educational building at 181 Mercer Street that will open in spring 2023. It also will house the graduate acting and design programs for stage and film of the university’s Tisch School of the Arts.Where there was once merely a plaque with a brief history of the theater, there will be space to host theatrical performances, lobby displays, educational seminars and an annual symposium on the history of Black theater and culture.“This theater wasn’t ‘somewhere downtown’; it was on our campus,” said Laurence Maslon, an arts professor at N.Y.U. Tisch School of the Arts who is also a theater historian and co-chair of a university Committee to Commemorate the African Grove. “It has been part of our DNA for over 200 years.”“Felicitous is the word I keep coming back to,” he added.The original African Theater was started in 1816 by William Alexander Brown, a retired ship steward who started hosting music, poetry and short plays for Black New Yorkers in his backyard at 38 Thomas Street. The entertainment “tea garden” became known as the African Grove, one of the few spaces where Black patrons could enjoy leisure arts.In 1821, the theater moved to Bleecker and Mercer Streets — where the new performance space will stand next spring — expanding to a 300-seat venue known for staging operas, ballets and Shakespearean classics alongside original work, initially performed by Black performers for Black audiences and, later, integrated audiences. The original venture was not entirely peaceful. The theater faced harassment from white rivals and police raids. A yellow fever epidemic further ravaged the theater, which closed two years later. The last known playbill for an African Theater production was dated June 1823.The new theater will be a “space where we celebrate another tradition in the culture of New York City that has often been disregarded and overlooked and not understood,” said Michael Dinwiddie, an associate professor at N.Y.U.’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, who is also a theater historian and co-chair of the Committee to Commemorate the African Grove. “This was a theater that in its early time, was really creating a model for what the American theater could be. And that’s what we want the modern African Grove Theater to be.”Dinwiddie said he was excited “to see what happens culturally” for students who learn about the theater and understand that they are performing in a place that is “historic and sacred and new, at the same time.” More

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      Ruth Negga Thinks Lady Macbeth Is Misunderstood

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      The actress, nominated for a Tony Award for her magnetic performance in “Macbeth,” is drawn to female characters who challenge the status quo.Ruth Negga dazzles onstage. Not just because, as Lady Macbeth, she briefly wears a gold metallic gown in Sam Gold’s otherwise fairly casual staging of “Macbeth” at the Longacre Theater. But, rather, it’s because she infuses her character, and her marriage to Macbeth (Daniel Craig), with such intensity, urgency and vitality that I found myself missing her when she came to her inevitable end.Negga was nominated for a Tony Award for best performance by a leading actress in a play, which recognizes both her powerful stage presence and the gender parity that Gold’s revival sought to achieve. “Like a feral cat, she can seem quicksilver and weightless or, when enraged, menacing and bristly and twice her size,” Jesse Green wrote of Negga’s performance in a review in The Times.Even if Lady Macbeth appears in substantially fewer scenes than her husband, her cunning mind — and Negga’s command of Shakespeare’s verse — leave an indelible imprint. “Her language is very fertile, it’s very fecund and it’s very sensual,” Negga said last week in a video interview. “I think a lot of people associate that with darkness as well. But that’s another layer that I think this character has been burdened and muddied with.”Negga, left, with Amber Gray in the revival. “She’s not evil,” Negga said of Lady Macbeth. “It’s this archetype that chases her: the deadly villainess, the villain behind the man.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNegga, who plays the mysterious, seductive, blonde-haired Clare in the movie “Passing,” and the real-life civil rights activist Mildred Loving in “Loving,” is drawn to characters who try to circumvent the social circumstances into which they were born. Negga sees Clare, Loving and now Lady Macbeth as paying a price for such transgressions because they are either running out of time or, in the case of Loving, ahead of hers.Born in Ethiopia to an Ethiopian father and an Irish mother, and raised in Ireland and England, Negga, 40, spoke from her place in New York about the significance of seeing “Macbeth” as a love story, and why she finds the role of Lady to be liberating. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.You were playing Hamlet at St. Ann’s Warehouse right before everything shut down in March 2020. How has coming back to the stage, on Broadway with a different Shakespeare play, been for you?Revisiting the Tragedy of ‘Macbeth’Shakespeare’s tale of a man who, step by step, cedes his soul to his darkest impulses continues to inspire new interpretations. On Stage: Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga star in Sam Gold’s take on the play. Despite its star power, the production feels oddly uneasy, our critic writes. Onscreen: In the “Tragedy of Macbeth,” Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand embody a toxic power couple with mastery. Break a Leg: Shakespeare’s play is known for the rituals and superstitions tied to it. How does the supernatural retain its hold on the theater world?My isolation was book ended by two Shakespeare plays, which is really interesting because I hadn’t actually been onstage for 10 years before that. I didn’t realize how much I missed it. I think those two years of being so separate from people just compounded that feeling of “connect, connect.” It’s such a personal, visceral experience for the person playing onstage and the person receiving that performance. Because it’s so immediate and in the now, and it’s happening live, that kind of energetic exchange can only happen at that moment. It’s so weird — that’s why I love it.How did playing Hamlet prepare you for Lady Macbeth?I was approaching 40, playing this young man who was just entering his exploration of his adulthood and his place in the world, and I was guided by this moment of internal discovery and complete honesty. Hamlet is a truth-teller but he’s also a truth searcher, and for good or bad, and I think to his chagrin sometimes, nothing but the truth will do. That’s a very hard place to be, but it’s also where amazing transformation can happen. [The role] really tests your mettle, your physical and vocal stamina, and also what you’re willing to lay bare. And since everything’s laid bare, you can’t really hide anywhere. To be honest, anything’s a relief after Hamlet.With Lady Macbeth, was it hard to know what motivated her?Even before I started rehearsals I was like, “What’s all this jazz about her being evil?” She’s not evil, it’s this archetype that chases her: the deadly villainess, the villain behind the man. That’s what she’s become known for, and she’s been robbed of any idiosyncrasy or personality. But whereas we rail against [Macbeth] for his procrastination, I think she could have done a bit more thinking things through. But the thing is, time wasn’t on her side. This is what happens when you just have all these ideas and they seem great and you’re really getting things going and you don’t have much time. I mean she makes one bad mistake when you think about it.Which is?Well, I personally don’t think you need to kill people to get ahead! But I don’t come to a character trying to justify them, that’s not my job. I’m not interested in that. But very few people act from a core of badness or evilness. I loved her desire to be alive, to reach for things, to strive, and I was so excited to play someone who has such clear ideas of what they think they deserve, especially a woman. And when you realize that your desires and your ambitions are restricted by the status quo, one has to think quickly on one’s feet. They have to become quick and mercurial. That’s what she has a talent for. There’s a self-awareness there that I think makes her similar to Hamlet.Daniel Craig, left, stars as Macbeth. “There’s very much an awareness that this is a marriage of equals and respect, and I loved that,” Negga said.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe chemistry between Macbeth and Lady is so palpable onstage. Was that important to you?When I read this script, I thought, “Wow, this dies on whether you believe that they love each other or not. This is key.” Their relationship is the backdrop or the environment of this play; that’s what their action is born out of. But there’s also a love there that is very robust. You feel like they both draw strength from that union in a very equal, balanced way. And that was something that was important for me to not let be put to the side, or laid to waste or watered down in any way. There’s very much an awareness that this is a marriage of equals and respect, and I loved that.Marriage is central to some of your other characters, like Clare in “Passing” and Mildred in “Loving,” whose marriages to white men challenge the status quo.To me race is in the foreground, the background, the present, and it’s not something I have had to chase or I’ve had to ignore. It’s with me, it’s in me, it’s who I am. So stories about race and stories written by people of color, Americans of color, have always piqued my interest. How do people go through the world as a person of color with the structures and limitations that have been imposed by society? And how does the status quo come up against your personal desire and ambition? And how do you live the life that you want as best you can within these structures that are telling you, “No.”In “Macbeth,” the other characters are casually dressed, but at one point, Lady is wearing a gold gown. Why?That was really important to me and to Suttirat [Larlarb], our amazing costume designer. I think we both fell in love with Lady. My heart spills over with joy when I see women, any type of woman, just embrace who they are. And for me, her femininity is important because I was familiar with this idea that she could seem like this sexless, austere, bloodless, lustless sort of shell. That just doesn’t chime with the Lady on the page, so I wanted her to have no shame, be lusty and alive, and really enjoy her sexuality and her femininity, and not be frightened to stand out from the crowd.Is there another Shakespeare character that you long to play?I remember in college I used to do the Queen Margaret speeches [from “Richard III”]. They’re great because they’re deadly, speeches that are powerful and about power. It’s extraordinary that Shakespeare gave them to her. What I love about him, he doesn’t make his women saints. He gives you complexity. He’s not presenting a Lady Macbeth we can hate; he’s presenting a woman that we can see ourselves in, and a woman overwhelmed by grief. She has a great catharsis and a great internal reckoning. And I feel for her deeply. More