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      Lucy Moss Unwinds With Songwriting and TikTok Cleaning Tutorials

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      The Tony Award-nominated co-director of “Six” shares the corners of the internet she haunts to help her stay productive.At 26, Lucy Moss became the youngest woman ever to direct a Broadway musical: the global hit, “Six,” which she had co-written at 23 with Toby Marlow, and co-directed with Jamie Armitage. The show, structured as a pop concert battle in which the wives of Henry VIII compete to see who suffered the most, began at the Edinburgh fringe festival in 2017 and now has six productions running worldwide.At 28, Moss is now up for best direction and best original score at the Tony Awards, and just directed a reimagined revival of “Legally Blonde” at London’s Regent’s Park Open Air Theater, running through July and starring a largely queer, mostly Black and brown cast.“At first I was quite a snob about movie adaptations, thinking they’re usually not good, even though that’s not true,” she said on a recent Zoom call from her apartment in London. “It also wasn’t very queer, so I didn’t know if it was my vibe. Then I saw the original’s MTV recording and thought it was the best thing I’d seen in my life.”The London native discussed the diverse bits of culture — pop, online, and IRL — that propel her. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. A Weeping Willow in Regent’s Park When you walk in from the Baker Street Underground station, there’s a bridge and then this lone tree on the bank of the little lake. I’m usually on the tube stressing about something, trying to send 20 emails or whatever, so to then go into the park is just so beautiful, particularly when I was going in for auditions and meetings in the winter. I love weeping willows, I feel a very kindred spirit in them. They’re just falling over, like, “Ugh, everything is so difficult.” I can just look at it and go, “Yeah, same.”2. “Circle Jerk” by Fake Friends — Onstage I paid for, like, three tickets for the digital version of it in 2020 and kept watching it afterward — maybe 40 times? I immediately became their biggest fan from across the internet, and then we did “Ratatouille the Musical” together and became friends. I love how dense it is, textually. It’s such a rich rewatch, and just so funny and nuanced and stupid.I know it quite well at this point — the performances and choices and all that — and I imagine there’ll be new TikTok references [in the new production]. I just can’t believe I get to see it in the flesh. I’ve never been more excited to see a live show.3. Basketball Shorts They’re a great length; you can wear them high-waisted and still not have them be super short. I feel like myself in them. I went to a vintage shop and bought a bunch, so now I have a pair for every day of the week. Now I’m dabbling in wearing them lower, but high-waisting my underwear line, with a crop top. Although, last night, I had to give my phone to a friend because it kept pulling them down.4. Her Cousin Max My mom’s sister’s son is my best friend, and the baby of the family. I love that he has a phone now so I can send him sort of memes of geese and stuff. He texts like a grandma, with correct capitalization and punctuation. I texted him to remind him of the time he fell into the pond at my mom’s house and he replied, “Oh gosh! That brings back memories.” It’s like a novel.5. Cleaning TikTok (“CleanTok”) I watch these when I’m going to bed, when I should be reading a book or something. It’s so soothing and relaxing to see videos of people cleaning their bathrooms — especially the ones from Japan, because they have gadgets that click in and out of place. I watch and fall asleep, though, I’ve absolutely not learned anything from them. Actually, I realized how clean you can actually get things to be.6. The “Contrapoints” YouTube Channel She is just the queen of nuance. Her videos are such a weird, amazing combo of academia made really accessible, and comedy and dress-up. They’re only about an hour but still so thorough, and she’s so empathetic. Sure, she’ll mock people but she’s ultimately discussing the roots of what’s going on in society. She doesn’t place herself higher than anybody else.7. @ZeeWhatIDid I guess she’s kind of like an influencer? She’s a British teenage TikToker who is so charismatic and sweet. She does cosplay and makeup tutorials and Marvel stuff, which I’m not even into, but I’m just happy that TikTok exists for her. She’ll be doing highlighter on her face and talking about blinding your enemies; she’s so gorgeous and funny. I love that she’s living her best life online.8. Writing Songs It’s a good way to unwind without feeling like I’m wasting my life. I don’t have plans to do anything with them, and I often put in little personal in-jokes. I just like the actual process of writing something just for myself, particularly as someone who is usually writing with other people, and always to a specific end. If I was writing with Toby, they’d be like, “Oh no, that rhyme should be at the end of the line,” or something to actually improve it, but I don’t have to do that alone.9. The Bush Theater in London Lynette Linton was made its artistic director a few years ago, and I admire her so much. She runs this building in such an incredible way; the way that everybody in the building interacts with her and each other, it’s such good vibes. And the actual space is amazing: The library is gorgeous, there’s a nice little cafe, and the shows they put on are always championing and nurturing young, different voices that other theaters wouldn’t necessarily do. And it’s in west London, which is where I grew up. So it’s kind of the only cool thing in west London, basically.10. A 2014 Video of Russell Brand Giving Away a CroissantI used to watch his show, “The Trews,” where he would discuss the news, and it got a bit more serious. And then, in the middle of that, there’s this video of him trying to give away a luxury croissant on the motorway. I watch it so often and quote it all the time, which obviously nobody even knows. It makes me so happy, I just love the way he says “croissant” and sings about this segment being his “trafficky bit.” I’ve been obsessed with this video since then and I don’t think it’s going away anytime soon. More

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      In ‘Buggy Baby,’ Shadows Creep In

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      Josh Azouz’s vivid, nightmarish play at Astoria Performing Arts Center in Queens is a hallucinatory tale about two refugees and a talkative infant.In the tub, the baby is screaming and thrashing around, on her way to a full meltdown. Overwhelmed, her young mother has turned her back — not for long, but for long enough. The infant slips beneath the water.There is no actual water, though, and no actual child, either. The title character in Josh Azouz’s vivid comic nightmare “Buggy Baby” is played by an adult. Why, then, the terror that jolts through us as we watch her start to drown? More perplexingly, why is that sense of urgent immediacy so rare in this play?For lovers of gritty, messy, mordant theater that cocks an eyebrow at the world and dissects its cruelties, the ingredients of a potent experience would seem to be assembled here. When “Buggy Baby” made its premiere in London, in 2018, critics were left baffled but impressed by the hallucinatory tale.Yet Rory McGregor’s production at Astoria Performing Arts Center in Queens — produced in association with Dutch Kills Warehouse and Lawryn LaCroix — gives the persistent impression of being a bit too enamored of its own trippiness and less interested in telling this strange, unsettling story with the necessary clarity.In a crummy room in London, Nur (Rana Roy) and Jaden (Hadi Tabbal) are refugees from an unnamed country that no longer exists, scraping by on so little money that when a job cleaning toilets comes up, Nur urges Jaden to really try for it. They are not a couple, at least not at first, but they have become for each other a kind of family.In “Buggy Baby” Hadi Tabbal and Roy play two refugees who are scraping by.Emilio MadridThe widowed Jaden — who promised Nur’s father, his old friend, that he would look after her — earns a pittance as a gardener, and misses his dead wife. Nur is a college student whose daughter, Baby Aya (Erin Neufer), sleeps in her stroller; they can’t afford a crib. When Aya was born, her soft skull was misshapen, so she wears a helmet to make it round. And yes, it does take a minute to acclimate to the sight of Aya embodied by a grown woman in a stroller, dressed in a rubber-duck onesie, her purple helmet strapped on. (Costumes are by Avery Reed.)But once you get used to it, Aya is a fascinating baby: wry, no-nonsense, gimlet-eyed, with all the iffy muscle control and stubborn whims of a tiny new human. She is closer to Jaden, who cares for her while her mother is at school, than to Nur, who is afraid to pick her up. “Little gazelle,” Jaden calls the infant, tenderly.In the real world Aya would be too young to talk, but in the heightened surrealism of this play — with its set (by Brendan Gonzales Boston) painted shocking pink, and lighting (by Stacey Derosier) that shifts into lurid reverie — age is no obstacle to dialogue.“You’ve got a violent imagination for a baby,” Nur tells her, after Aya muses about chopping out parts of herself.“I’ve seen some terrible things,” the baby says, and this is true.So have Nur and Jaden, and when Jaden attempts to escape his own awareness by chewing psychedelic leaves from a cotton-candy-colored tree, that ugliness pursues him in the form of “rabbits with devil souls.” In his wrecked head, the upright-walking Burnt Fur Rabbit (Jeffrey Brabant) and Gunshot Wound Rabbit (Zack Segel) menace him and threaten Nur and Aya. (When, eventually, guns are involved, they are reassuringly, cartoonishly fake-looking.)Predatory men are a lurking presence in this play, and under the influence of those leaves, Jaden becomes one of them, with Aya entirely at his mercy. This is, hands down, the most disquieting element of “Buggy Baby.”Yet if there is a core to this show beneath the polychromatic cleverness, it remains elusive. Even when pure, battered realism breaks through, the dire circumstances of this unstable family are disturbing only at a distance: the peril they’re in, the pain they feel, the safety that lies somewhere just out of reach.Buggy BabyThrough June 26 at Astoria Performing Arts Center, Queens; apacny.org/buggybaby. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. More

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      Tom Stoppard’s ‘Leopoldstadt’ Will Open on Broadway This Fall

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      The play, about a Jewish family in Vienna in the first half of the 20th Century, will begin previews Sept. 14 and open Oct. 2 at the Longacre Theater.“Leopoldstadt,” Tom Stoppard’s much-heralded and uncharacteristically personal play about an early-20th-century Jewish family in Vienna, is coming to Broadway in September, bringing an unusually large cast and a pointed reminder of the perils of antisemitism to the New York stage.Stoppard, 84, is one of the great dramatists of recent decades; his four best play Tony Awards, for “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” “Travesties,” “The Real Thing” and “The Coast of Utopia,” are the most of any playwright in Tonys history. “Leopoldstadt” will be the 19th production of a Stoppard play on Broadway since 1967.“Leopoldstadt,” which begins in 1899 and continues through, and past, the two World Wars, chronicles 50 years in the life of one family. It is inspired by, but does not depict, Stoppard’s own family history; he was born in Czechoslovakia in 1937, but fled to Asia with his family when he was a toddler, has spent much of his life in Britain, and only learned some details of his heritage in the 1990s.“It’s two extraordinary hours where you go through this time and this exploration of a family: what they have to face, and how they come out the other side and deal with their past, cope with their present and think about their future,” said Sonia Friedman, a lead producer. “Being Stoppard it’s complex, but also incredibly emotional.”The Broadway production, with a cast of 38, is scheduled to begin previews Sept. 14 and to open Oct. 2 at the Longacre Theater. Friedman, who produced the Tony-winning best plays of the last three seasons before the pandemic, is producing “Leopoldstadt” with Roy Furman, another Broadway veteran, and Lorne Michaels, the “Saturday Night Live” creator.“Leopoldstadt” began its life with a production in London’s West End in 2020 directed by Patrick Marber, which won praise from the New York Times critic Ben Brantley; that run, which was cut short by the coronavirus pandemic, won the Olivier Award for best new play. The play then returned to the West End last year for a brief but profitable run.In New York it is again being directed by Marber, who also directed the last Broadway production of a Stoppard work, a 2018 revival of “Travesties.” In a phone interview, Marber said that he was looking forward to a third go at the material, following the London runs.“It’s a surprisingly enjoyable play to direct — even though it’s very painful and sad, it’s also full of lightness and laughter,” he said. “It’s fundamentally about memory, and time and love. But it’s also about fascism and immigrants and refugees. It’s about everything — it’s Stoppard.”Marber said that Stoppard has continued revising the play for New York, where he said he expects the play to resonate differently because of the ongoing war in Ukraine. “With any play, what’s happening in the real world affects the way you watch it,” he said. “Different things will pop out.” More

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      Portraits of the 2022 Tony Nominees

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      The Broadway season that just ended, the first since the pandemic shutdown, will be remembered for many reasons — the persistence of Covid, the death of Stephen Sondheim, the dwindled tourism and the indispensable understudies. It was a season for renewed appreciation: of song and storytelling and shared experiences, of a beloved art form and a rebounding industry. And it was a season that featured an extraordinary volume of work by Black artists, catalyzed by the social unrest of 2020. The 2022 Tony Awards, which take place June 12, offer an opportunity to honor some of Broadway’s best work; in anticipation of that event, we photographed and interviewed many of the performers, and a few of the writers, directors and choreographers, nominated for awards. Below are portraits and edited excerpts from the interviews.“MACBETH”Ruth Negga“I’ve always wanted to be an actress, since I was a really young kid. I just love stories in all shape and form. And for me, there’s a whole different draw: There’s an aspect of the performer, the peacock — something kind of lovely about being looked at, at the same time I’m quite shy in my normal life, so that’s an interesting dichotomy.” — Ruth Negga“POTUS”Rachel Dratch and Julie White“People really, really want to laugh. The laughs are like hyperlaughs. Maybe that’s pandemic-flavored. Obviously, I’ve done a lot of comedies, but this one you can just feel the cackles coming off the audience. I think it’s because people have been shut in for so long.” — Rachel Dratch“All the lady shows — we’re all keeping our clothes on. It’s the boys that are taking them off. I feel like that’s a step in the right direction.” — Julie White“TAKE ME OUT”Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Jesse Williams and Michael Oberholtzer“I decided at the age of 5 I was going to become an actor or a baker or a zookeeper. My dad reminded me that zookeepers were going to have to pick up lots of poop, and so then I narrowed it down to the baker and the actor, and the acting just seemed more fun. So it was a very early decision, and I’m glad it panned out.” — Jesse Tyler Ferguson“I’m making discoveries every day. It’s really liberating. It’s incredibly stressful. And it’s a lot of pressure.” — Jesse Williams“This is something that I never really thought about, and it’s kind of all I ever thought about at the same time. Not so much the Tonys, but to be in a position to have an opportunity to be in a play, in a production that is seen by people, that excites people, that’s talked about.” — Michael Oberholtzer“hangmen”Alfie Allen“I was going to be a snowboard instructor at one point if the acting didn’t work out. Came back from getting that qualification, and then I got a part in a film.” — Alfie Allen“Paradise Square”Joaquina Kalukango, A.J. Shively and Sidney DuPont“There’s hope in community. There’s hope in love. There’s hope for this country. And I think the more we see the things that are alike within us, the less we see the differences.” — Joaquina Kalukango“There’s 40 of us in this cast. To sing in a big group like that, which has been unsafe for a long time, it feels wonderful. That first rehearsal back when we all sang together, we were all just crying.” — A.J. Shively“I’m hoping that by me being in this space and by doing what I’m doing, that I can inspire young Black boys and men and inspire young hearing-impaired people to believe that they can do it — that there’s nothing, nothing that can get in your way as long as you push for it.” — Sidney DuPont“dana h.”Deirdre O’Connell“Because everything had stopped so radically, it felt like there was a real wide open spirit to the way people were going to the theater.” — Deirdre O’Connell“funny girl”Jared Grimes“I started dancing in the subways. We would set up the board, and we would just dance.” — Jared Grimes“company”Patti LuPone, Jennifer Simard and Matt Doyle“To experience any of Steve’s work is to realize what a human is capable of. He is complex, deeply human, nuanced and daring. He dares to write about every aspect of the human condition with a deeply beating heart.” — Patti LuPone, on Sondheim“Thank God Stephen actually came to the first preview. It was like a rock concert. He adored it, and he laughed from his head to his toes.” — Jennifer Simard“The first preview back was just so magnificent and overwhelming. And to have Stephen Sondheim sitting there with us, it’s a night that I will never forget.” — Matt Doyle“the music man”Hugh Jackman, Sutton Foster and Jayne Houdyshell“I get bored of myself. I think that’s why I like acting. With acting, you get to have complete freedom to do all sorts of things.” — Hugh Jackman“The pandemic was crazy. I remember when the theater shut down and all of a sudden you realize, ‘Wait a minute, what I do for a living just doesn’t exist right now.’ I don’t think anyone plans for that.” — Sutton Foster“It feels like a big privilege to be part of the group of people that have come together to make Broadway reopen and do it as safely as possible.” — Jayne Houdyshell“For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow Is Enuf”Camille A. Brown and Kenita R. Miller“I didn’t grow up during the internet, so we went to the library and we got videos of our favorite musicals and we would watch them over and over again, and the dance sequences, and I would learn them.” — Camille A. Brown (nominated as director and choreographer)“I get this tribe of sisters that have shown me what it really means to be a sister.” — Kenita R. Miller“How I learned to drive”Mary-Louise Parker, Paula Vogel and David Morse“I didn’t think the play would ever be produced. I didn’t think I’d ever find actors who could do it. I thought I was going to be judged and condemned for writing it. I realized I shouldn’t be afraid of telling the truth.” — Paula Vogel (nominated as playwright)“Just living in a world right now where judgment of other people comes quickly and it’s severe. And what Paula wrote, it doesn’t allow you to do that. It just opens you up.” — David Morse“We all have darkness. We all have things we need to be forgiven for. And I think that is something kind of important to remember.” — Mary-Louise Parker“A STRANGE LOOP”Michael R. Jackson, Jaquel Spivey, L Morgan Lee and John-Andrew Morrison“I’m a writer because I have questions, and I have things that scare me, and the only way for me to get over my fears is to confront them directly.” — Michael R. Jackson (nominated as book and score writer)“I grew up watching movie musicals. I was obsessed with them. ‘Dreamgirls,’ the movie: As soon as I saw Jennifer Hudson singing, I thought ‘I want to do that!’” — Jaquel Spivey“In many ways, I feel like it took the world to turn upside down for me to start to find some sense of visibility.” — L Morgan Lee“When I first moved to this city, and I would be auditioning, I would hear things like ‘Oh, your pearls are falling out of your mouth,’ or ‘You’re not thug enough.’ So to be able to be in a show where I can be as queer and as flamboyant and as gay and as big as I possibly can be, and it’s not only needed but celebrated, is amazing.” — John-Andrew Morrison“Mr. Saturday night”Billy Crystal and Shoshana Bean“People are starved for entertainment, and you look out and they’re all masked and yet they’re laughing as hard as they can and we’re getting the same energy we would get. It’s so important that people get entertained and we get some sort of semblance of normal life. This show has been very healing for all of us in a lot of different ways.” — Billy Crystal“The first night that we had an audience and heard that laughter en masse: It’s a drug. It’s crazy.” — Shoshana Bean“Lackawanna blues”Ruben Santiago-Hudson“There was a lot of trepidation, and a lot of second-guessing. I wasn’t sure if one person would show up. But one of the things I discovered is people need theater as bad as we need people to need theater. Human beings need to do what is innate in us, and that’s to be social creatures and to have shared experiences with one another.” — Ruben Santiago-Hudson“MJ”Myles Frost and Christopher Wheeldon“What I cherish the absolute most is getting here — the journey that it took even before I hit the stage the first time, and learning myself, learning more about Michael, meeting my cast mates for the first time. It’s little moments like that that stick out to me the most.” — Myles Frost“The last few months have been filled with highs and lows and a lot of fear, just around whether we could actually get up and get running, keep our cast on the stage, get our audiences in the door. I have learned a lot about my capacity to handle fear as an artist, and also, like the rest of the world, as a human being, and actually to find the best ways that I can to turn that fear into some positive and creative energy.” — Christopher Wheeldon (nominated as director and choreographer)“Clyde’s”Uzo Aduba and Kara Young“It’s exciting to be a part of the thing that people are craving, which is community. Theater has always served as something that is more than just entertainment, but in this time, even more than in the past, it feels like a healing. Some days, when the curtain will come up, I’m not even sure they’re applauding the show. A layer of this feels like it’s for another need.” — Uzo Aduba“I have to admit that I really was very eager to work. And because this was the cards that were dealt, I really hugged this moment with all of myself.” — Kara Young“Clyde’s” and “MJ”Lynn Nottage“I feel very proud to be part of a season in which we’ve had more representation by Black writers than in the history of, probably, Broadway in its entirety.” — Lynn Nottage (nominated as playwright for “Clyde’s” and book writer for “MJ”)“Skeleton Crew”Phylicia Rashad“Theater is always bumpy. That is nothing new. But it was great to be back in the theater.” — Phylicia Rashad“American Buffalo”Neil Pepe and Sam Rockwell“It’s come back in such a big, big way. And we were shut down two years ago. I think that’s why it’s really exciting.” — Sam Rockwell (shown with Neil Pepe, who is nominated as director)“Trouble in mind”LaChanze and Chuck Cooper“We need more stories that are showing the diversity in our community, not just the broad strokes.” — LaChanze“I just hope that those who made it into our little theater and were able to go on our journey with us, I hope that they left the theater moved and thinking and curious.” — Chuck Cooper“girl from the north country”Mare Winningham“I’ve learned that marinating in a role is really good.” — Mare Winningham“Mrs. Doubtfire”Rob McClure“When I was 15, I saw a community theater production of ‘Sweeney Todd’ that changed me, and by that, I mean my DNA. I went into that theater as one person, and I left that theater a different person. It was a magic trick that I didn’t know existed. And then I discovered that I could provide that magic trick for other people. And that’s why I act.” — Rob McClure“THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH”Lileana Blain-Cruz and Gabby Beans“When a piece of theater is good — and I feel like everybody is struggling and reaching for that — you walk out of the theater feeling more alive. And for me, wrestling with what it means to be alive is the eternal question.”— Lileana Blain-Cruz (nominated as director)“This character is completely free. She has no boundaries or self-consciousness. So I feel like inhabiting that energy has made me just expand as a person.” — Gabby Beans“the minutes”Tracy Letts“I’ve never felt more camaraderie with my fellow theater artists. This does not feel like a competition to me, these Tony Awards. It feels like a celebration — getting to return to our art form.” — Tracy Letts (nominated as a playwright) More

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      Asked to Adapt a Classic Play, This Writer Rethought Her Life

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      As she sought the truth for her characters on the page, Mara Vélez Meléndez’s real self began to emerge. Now she’s making her Off Broadway debut.In 2018, as part of a masters program in playwriting at Hunter College in Manhattan, Mara Vélez Meléndez was given a life-changing assignment: adapt a classic play. She chose “John Gabriel Borkman,” a rarely revived late Ibsen play about an ambitious banker, and in her reworking, the characters became members of the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico, created in 2016 by the U.S. federal government to resolve the island’s debt crisis.The resulting work, “Notes on Killing Seven Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Board Members,” recently opened at Soho Rep in Manhattan. But when Vélez Meléndez, now 29, embarked on the project, she knew little about the board, or “la junta” as it’s known colloquially in her native Puerto Rico, other than that a large percentage of the population was against its unelected power to oversee the island’s budget.Working against the clock — “I had one week until the deadline,” she recalled — the playwright hit a wall. No amount of research helped her understand who the board members were or why they were appointed by the Obama administration. The board’s mission — to put the island on a path to sustainable economic growth — has led to fiscal austerity and criticism that it has taken away the island’s sovereignty, effectively creating a modern colonialism.“Puerto Rico es la isla que se repite (is the repeating island),” Vélez Meléndez said, alluding to the Cuban writer Antonio Benítez-Rojo and his seminal reflection on the interminable colonial impositions laid upon Caribbean islands since Columbus’s arrival. “We’re always going back to the same thing,” she added.Christine Carmela, left, as Lolita and Samora la Perdida, who plays outlandish versions of the board members.Julieta CervantesIntrigued by the lack of information on the board members, Vélez Meléndez wrote a play that employs what she called a queer lens to investigate how “Puerto Rico was turned into a neoliberal playground.” (The play, a coproduction of Soho Rep and the Sol Project, is running through June 19.)Every trace of Ibsen disappeared in the process. It’s all Vélez Meléndez now. The play takes place in the office reception of “la junta,” a liminal space that conveys the timeless vacuousness of bureaucratic hellscapes. Lolita (Christine Carmela), a trans woman, arrives with one mission: “to decolonize the island of Puerto Rico.”On Being Transgender in AmericaPhalloplasty: The surgery, used to construct a penis, has grown more popular among transgender men. But with a steep rate of complications, it remains a controversial procedure.Elite Sports: The case of the transgender swimmer Lia Thomas has stirred a debate about the nature of athleticism in women’s sports.Transgender Youth: A photographer documented the lives of transgender youth. She shared some thoughts on what she saw.Corporate World: What is it like to transition while working for Wall Street? A Goldman Sachs’ employee shares her experience.Throughout the play, Lolita meets various characters, including a Nuyorican receptionist whose gender identity is unresolved and outlandish versions of board members (all played by Samora la Perdida). They not only fail to take Lolita seriously but try to convince her that they know more about her needs than she does.The playwright realized in trying to decolonize Puerto Rico, she was also learning how to decolonize gender identity, including her own. When she started writing the play, Vélez Meléndez had not yet begun to transition and identified as “cis, queer, question mark,” believing she didn’t have the right label to give herself.“I’m a political writer whose plays aren’t about politics,” Vélez Meléndez said.Josefina Santos for The New York TimesGrowing up in Puerto Rico, she had learned that being queer meant she had to like men, “but I never wanted to be around them,” she says laughing. She began writing for pleasure while pursuing a double major in journalism and theater at the University of Puerto Rico. “I wasn’t dating and really didn’t like sports,” she explained, so she found solace and unexpected joy in the works of Beckett and Ionesco.This in turn led to an interest in modern theater, including works like “An Octoroon” by her future Hunter professor Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. One of her mentors, the Puerto Rican playwright and performer Sylvia Bofill, suggested she should write her own plays.Upon moving to New York City for grad school in 2017, Vélez Meléndez found that gay and transgender people were everywhere. “There were trans girls on the subway, lesbian couples holding hands in the street, everything felt like a possibility,” she said. Soon, she added, she found a safe space among fellow theater-makers and new friends who allowed her to experiment with her gender expression in ways that would have seemed forbidden in Puerto Rico. Once she sat down to write, her sister had begun transitioning, and Vélez Meléndez wanted to include a trans character as a homage.Originally, it wasn’t Lolita who was trans but the receptionist character. Lolita is inspired by the real-life Puerto Rican nationalist Lolita Lebrón, who, in 1954, led an attack in the U.S. Capitol, which resulted in the wounding of several members of Congress. Writing scenes in which Lolita talks to the receptionist about decolonization made the playwright feel horrible.“It’s the TERF-iest I’ve ever been with myself,” she explained, using an acronym for “trans exclusionary radical feminists,” a term used to describe feminists who are transphobic. “Here I was telling this trans character they have to decolonize themselves when they had done it years ago.”Dissatisfied with the draft she presented at Hunter, Vélez Meléndez said she was shocked by the encouragement she received from her classmates and professor. Jacobs-Jenkins then introduced her to the director David Mendizábal, overseeing the Soho Rep production, who helped the play take a turn by asking, “what if it was Lolita who was trans instead?”Suddenly, as Vélez Meléndez was able to identify more with her lead character and her pleas, the play took on a life of its own. “It was a beautiful journey to witness,” Mendizábal said, “the truth of these two characters emerged on the page as she was emerging more and more in real life.” It was around this time that Soho Rep first showed interest in producing the play, but then the pandemic happened.This forced period of isolation allowed the young playwright to open up her spectrum of presentation. She started wearing more dresses and skirts, fully shaved her facial hair for the first time since high school, and when she tried on a crop top, she realized she looked like the kind of girls she crushed on. “Seeing myself in one of those women I was attracted to I knew that I could love myself,” she said.One day at the post office, when a clerk referred to her as “ma’am” everything clicked. “It kept clicking through the play,” she explained, recalling the effect this had on Lolita’s agency as well. Last July, she came out to her partner by saying, “I’m not trying to copy my sister, but I think this is happening.”“This was a case where the play was just writing itself. I was writing it, writing me, writing itself,” she added.With the newfound confidence she discovered during her transition, as well as the joy and elation of making her Off Broadway debut, Vélez Meléndez is looking forward to spending her summer working on a batch of new plays. “I’m going to write about my experience as a trans girl from the diaspora,” she explained. “I’m a political writer whose plays aren’t about politics.”Although she didn’t uncover much about how the oversight board works, writing “Notes on a Killing” allowed Vélez Meléndez to realize “there are many things we need to decolonize within ourselves before we actually get to start the country we dreamed of.” That in itself feels like the ultimate kind of political awakening, a revolution in the making. More

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      Mark Rylance on ‘Jerusalem’ and the Golf Comedy ‘Phantom of the Open’

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      One Tuesday afternoon last month, Mark Rylance was sitting in his London home, his face and body bearing the accouterments of Johnny (Rooster) Byron, the rowdy onetime daredevil he has been playing in a revival of Jez Butterworth’s “Jerusalem.”His mustache was long and feral; his bare arms stuck out of a sleeveless T-shirt, flaunting temporary tattoos. Despite the intimidating display, Rylance offered his assurance in a video interview that he was still very much his usual subdued self.“I’m not in character at the moment,” he said in his gentle speaking voice. “I’m still Mark at this time of day. He’s in there somewhere.”In a little while, Rylance would travel to the Apollo Theater, do some vocal warm-ups, play some volleyball in the empty seats with his co-stars, and spend another night in the wild and energetic guise of Rooster. The actor won Olivier and Tony Awards for the original West End and Broadway runs of “Jerusalem” just over a decade ago. Now 62, he has hardly lost a step in the revival: Reviewing the 2022 production for The New York Times, Matt Wolf wrote, “There’s mighty, and then there’s Mark Rylance in ‘Jerusalem,’ a performance so powerfully connected to its part that it feels almost superhuman.”This feat feels 180 degrees removed from the soft-spoken, introspective film characters that Rylance has played in recent years: his Oscar-winning turn as the Soviet intelligence officer Rudolf Abel in Steven Spielberg’s “Bridge of Spies,” or Peter Isherwell, the bumbling tech billionaire from Adam McKay’s farce “Don’t Look Up.”“I’m still Mark at this time of day,” Rylance said. As for Rooster, the character he plays in “Jerusalem,” Rylance said, “He’s in there somewhere.” Robbie Lawrence for The New York TimesRylance is once again in understated mode for the biographical comedy “The Phantom of the Open,” which Sony Pictures Classics will release June 3. He plays the golfer Maurice Flitcroft, a crane operator who slipped into a qualifying round of the 1976 British Open and proceeded to shoot an atrocious 121, making him an instant celebrity of sorts.Like the mercurial Flitcroft, Rylance enjoys defying audience expectations and slipping back and forth between roles at either end of the energy spectrum. As he explained, any character — whether easygoing or off-the-wall — could be an opportunity for new personal discoveries.“When I was younger, I was much more egotistically attached to concepts that would come up in my mind about how a character should be,” he said. “But now I know that there’s no bottom to the depth of insanity that will come up through me.”Rylance spoke further about his return to “Jerusalem,” the stark contrast between his stage and film roles and his performance in “The Phantom of the Open.” These are edited excerpts from that conversation.What has it been like to come back to “Jerusalem” after all these years?It’s a powerful event to be at the center of. The central dynamics of it have got stronger in society, the struggle between whatever you want to call it — order and chaos, machine and nature. Sometimes during rehearsals, I experienced feelings of resistance and doubt in myself.What got you past those feelings?Coming to my senses. I mean that literally: Stop thinking and smell the air. Taste whatever you’re tasting. Listen and look at the other actors. It immediately moves you into something much larger than your own fears or expectations. Doing long runs of plays, you can get into a rut of self-consciousness, and it feels like you’re in some kind of prison yard. But actually, when you come to your senses, the prison yard is open to the sky.The dynamism Rooster embodies — particularly compared to the inwardness of the film characters you’ve been playing lately — was that hard to conjure up again?It’s not a territory that I give myself license to explore very much, that kind of boldness of expression. He’s an exhausting but enjoyable character for me. I have to be quite careful with him. His appetite is strong. There’s a certain wrangling of him to the floor at the end of the show. “OK, calm down — it’s my turn again for a few hours.”Rylance in “Jerusalem” with, from left, Charlotte O’Leary, Mackenzie Crook, Kemi Awoderu and Ed Kear.Simon AnnandShould more actors revive the roles they played earlier in their careers?I’ve been lucky in my life to revive a number of parts. I played Hamlet at 16 in high school and then at 28 to 31 for the R.S.C. [Royal Shakespeare Company] and the A.R.T. [at Harvard], and then again at 40 at the Globe [Shakespeare’s Globe, where Rylance was artistic director]. Reviving parts was the normal practice for hundreds of years before filmed work came in. If we didn’t have film and television, Robert De Niro would probably be doing “Raging Bull” or “Taxi Driver” every five or 10 years, because people would want to see it again. Jimmy Stewart would be doing “It’s a Wonderful Life” every Christmas.Do you think of your film acting as a different undertaking than your stage acting, or are they one continuous thing to you?It all comes from the same place, of enjoying pretending to be someone you think is other than who you are. Eventually it’s all still you. It pulls different things out of me, things that are buried in the back of the drawer. Certainly, in the theater, I have a lot more access to a collective consciousness when I’m playing with an audience and it’s going well. You’re lifted into something larger than yourself. You don’t get it in film because the audience isn’t there.Have you been seeking out a specific type of character to play in the movies?I’m in the fortunate position to turn down roles, so I’m not completely a victim of fate. After a very explosive character like Rooster, I will be more interested in an implosive character like Cromwell in “Wolf Hall” or Abel in “Bridge of Spies.”Where would you place a character like Peter Isherwell from “Don’t Look Up”?I suppose the role in “Don’t Look Up” could have been either of those things. He might have been a much more expressive character like Elon Musk. But in the conversations with Adam, we were interested in his inability to communicate. There’s some kind of barrier between that kind of person and a true, intimate, satisfying connection with other human beings — or plants, animals, anything on the planet. He just didn’t know how to do that.“I was very much like Maurice,” Rylance said of the golfer Maurice Flitcroft, whom he plays in his new film. “I learned by watching television.”Robbie Lawrence for The New York TimesDoes making a movie like that feel like playing a professional sport?It’s a bit like what you see in English football matches, the coach and the player who’s about to be substituted, having a quick word. “Watch out for him” or “Keep on the lefthand side.” That’s what it’s like on film. You’re suddenly joining a team who have already been playing for a while — Leonardo [DiCaprio] and Meryl [Streep], they were all quite tired. They’d been playing for months when I arrived for my 10 days.Was there a time in your career when you’d turned your back on film and TV acting entirely?There definitely was. When I came to New York for “Boeing-Boeing” on Broadway, I became friends with Fran McDormand and Joel Coen, and they auditioned me for “A Serious Man.” I was very enamored of the script and their films and really wanted to do it. When I didn’t get the part, I was surprised by how sad I was. It was an unusual feeling for me. I can picture myself now sitting in the cafe, thinking, oh, I really want this. So I pursued getting a New York agent and manager and started to go for auditions. And they were breathtakingly dull and bad things. Eventually, out of guilt, I took a film where I ended up lying on the floor, being beaten with a hammer, fish and chips being sicked up on my face, covered in blood. The director was on his Game Boy, 100 yards away, not even watching. And I quit.You were ready to walk away from screen acting entirely?All my career, I’ve been told by agents that unless I make time for film and TV, I’m not a serious actor. I thought, my favorite Kabuki actors and Kathakali actors, they don’t worry about film and television. I’ve got this fabulous theater career, I make a fine living at it, I have great parts. And I got rid of all these agents and decided I would never work in film again, unless someone really asked me and I had the time. I guess nature abhors a vacuum, because a few years after that, Spielberg asked me to be in “Bridge of Spies.”But no hard feelings about how “A Serious Man” turned out?Michael Stuhlbarg was wonderful in that role and the better actor for it, no doubt about it.What appealed to you about “The Phantom of the Open”?I’ve done a lot of comedies in the theater and enjoyed it. That was always a surprise to me, because I was very shy as a teenager and completely surprised when I got up and made people laugh. Even “Jerusalem,” tonight, there’ll be moments that I’ll think, why are they laughing? And it’ll take me a while to figure out what it is. This is one of the few comedies I’ve been asked to be a part of in film, with a lot of aspects of Don Quixote, jousting at windmills, believing his own identity, not being persuaded by other people’s perception of who he is. Not sociopathic or psychopathic, where he doesn’t even hear what other people are saying — there’s a dignity to Maurice, that he honors his own truth, and I loved that about it.Rylance in “The Phantom of the Open” as the quite bad amateur golfer Maurice Flitcroft.Nick Wall/Sony Pictures ClassicsDid playing a real-life figure interest you?I’m wary of playing very famous people. Even William Kunstler [whom he played in “The Trial of the Chicago 7”] is a bit on the edge of people really knowing him. The comments from some of the real-life Chicago Seven people, when they saw the film, and the nasty things they said about us trying to portray these characters, stung. I’ve been asked to play Truman and different people like that. The shoe is a bit too tight.Did you know anything about Maurice Flitcroft before making the movie?No. Fortunately, there’s a lot of wonderful YouTube stuff. His interviews are amazing, because you think, “You can’t be serious. You can’t really mean that. You must be brilliant at winding up reporters for a laugh.” But I’ve watched them hundreds of times and I can’t see a crack in the sincerity. I just have to play this guy sincere.Are you a golfer yourself?As kids, we would borrow our granddad’s golf clubs and make a golf course in his lawns in Kent. As we got to 15, 16, we would sometimes go to the local golf course on a Monday morning, when no one else was there, and play — very, very poorly and with no training. I was very much like Maurice. I learned by watching television.As we see in the film, Flitcroft gained a new level of recognition when he came to America. Did that feel familiar to you?Sometimes, the Americans have more appreciations for the English soul than the English. But there’s also a reverse thing — maybe we English have a deeper appreciation for American culture. I certainly learned more about American culture when I came to study at RADA [the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art] in ’78 than I’d learned in America [where his family lived in the 1960s]. The young acting students were the ones who turned me on to Spencer Tracy, Bob Mitchum, Montgomery Clift, Jimmy Dean, Brando. Even Bob Dylan and Elvis, Frank Sinatra. All those people that my parents had loved to some degree — I hadn’t realized how deeply cultural and soulful they were until I was amongst young English actors saying, “Watch this, listen to this.”This makes me want to take a trip to England and learn what I’m missing about American culture.You could just take a day trip to New Jersey and get the same thing. More

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      Chekhov Two Ways, With a Robot and Baryshnikov Along for the Ride

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      When the director Igor Golyak began working on a staging of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard,” he had an idea in mind. “There was a concept,” he said, then interrupted himself. “I’d rather not talk about what it used to be, if that’s OK. The war started, me being from Kyiv and having this affinity for the Russian culture. …”Golyak’s voice trailed off. He was speaking in a coffee shop a block from the Baryshnikov Arts Center, in Midtown Manhattan, where his show, now titled “The Orchard,” is set to begin previews June 7 with a cast headed by the busy stage and screen actress Jessica Hecht as the estate owner Lyubov Ranevskaya. Also onboard is the center’s namesake, Mikhail Baryshnikov, as the old servant Firs.Golyak was born in Kyiv and his family landed in the United States in 1990, part of a wave of Jewish refugees. He finished high school in Boston then studied theater in Moscow — you might say Chekhov is in his bones. But although he felt he had a handle on the Russian writer’s work, the war in Ukraine made him reconsider his approach.Mikhail Baryshnikov, center, on the set of “The Orchard,” at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. “The miracle of Chekhov’s writing is that, no matter where it’s performed, it feels local,” Baryshnikov said.Amir Hamja for The New York Times“How do you do theater and Chekhov when there’s bombings and killings?” he said. “I keep asking ‘How and why and why is it important?’ But not on the theoretical level — on the level that really touches me. For me, every show is very personal. The idea in ‘The Cherry Orchard’ is the loss of a world, loss of connection, loss of each other, loss of this family. It’s a story where a human being is forgotten — Firs is forgotten,” he added. “And right now human being is forgotten.”In the play, a family in financial straits must decide whether it should sell its beloved orchard. In “The Orchard” this will be starkly visualized in a parallel virtual version that complements rather than merely captures the physical one — though streaming viewers get to watch parts of the version being performed live. (Audience members can attend either or both.)The virtual world is a post-apocalyptic dystopia in which the Baryshnikov Arts Center stands in for the orchard. There, the building, now a husk of its former self, is for sale, and virtual audience members can tour it as if they were doing a walk-through of a home on a real estate website.“It’s almost as if you’re inside this building and you find these magical rooms, and in each room, it’s like you’re finding a lost world,” the producer Sara Stackhouse said. “You’re discovering a letter or a memory, then you discover this theater where a play is in progress and you join it.”Jessica Hecht, center, with Nael Nacer during a rehearsal.Amir Hamja for The New York TimesThis grounds the show in a historical reality — Baryshnikov portrays the playwright in the digital version, and Hecht pops up as Chekhov’s wife and his mistress — while nodding to our troubled current circumstances.“The miracle of Chekhov’s writing is that, no matter where it’s performed, it feels local to the culture,” Baryshnikov wrote in an email. “How that translates in Igor’s version remains to be seen. Obviously he speaks the language the play was written in, but he’s taking a lot of risks — technical and artistic — and avoiding clichés.”Something that definitely can’t be called a Chekhov cliché is a 12-foot robotic arm, which sits in the middle of the physical stage — it is part of the family and tries to understand humans — and was painstakingly programmed to execute such tasks as serving coffee or sweeping the floor. (The production process has demanded many hours of Zoom calls with a technical team spread all over the world.)The juxtaposition of past and future (typically, Oana Botez’s costumes for the physical version are a hybrid of period and modern), human and robot feels like yet another leap for Golyak’s Arlekin Players Theater, which is based in Needham, Mass., and has been the rare company to use the pandemic as a creative spur.Until then, it had been a bit of a tough slog. As Golyak, now 43, learned the hard way, a young Russia-trained director was not a hot commodity in the American theater scene of the early 2000s.“Nobody wanted me,” he said. “For an immigrant, it’s very difficult: Where do you go? How do you start? I had an accent — and I still do, of course. I would send résumés but nobody would call me back. At some point I decided that I’m going to stop doing theater because it’s just not possible to make a living.” His day jobs included selling ads for the Yellow Pages.Eventually Golyak befriended a small group of other immigrants from the former Soviet Union, who asked him to help them work on scenes, guide them through what worked or not. He requested a nine-month commitment, and they agreed. Arlekin Players Theater emerged from that initiative, in 2009, and the troupe, which then mostly performed in Russian, developed an esprit de corps.From left: Nacer, Elise Kibler, Mark Nelson, Hecht, John McGinty, Juliet Brett and Baryshnikov during a recent rehearsal.Amir Hamja for The New York Times“We are like a family,” said Darya Denisova, 32, an actor with Arlekin and Golyak’s wife. “We celebrate holidays together, we support each other when there are emergencies. Now that there’s this awful war going on between Russia and Ukraine, we are all trying our best to support people in Ukraine. We’re looking for ways to send more money, to support, to organize more and more help.”The company quickly earned plaudits on the community-theater circuit, but it took the pandemic to give the company a decisive push into greater recognition.Russia-Ukraine War: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 3Power consolidation. More

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      ‘… What the End Will Be’ Review: Learning to Let Go

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      The intergenerational comedy is a poignant reflection on sexuality, mortality and Black masculinity by the playwright Mansa Ra.Kinship with our elders is a privilege not often afforded to queer people. How many sons have come out to gay fathers and grandfathers? Imagining the possibility of these generational bonds feels like a reparative gesture in “…What the End Will Be,” an astute and poignant reflection on sexuality, mortality and Black masculinity by the playwright Mansa Ra, which opened on Thursday night at the Laura Pels Theater.Did I mention it’s also a comedy?The play is set in a stylish living room in a posh Atlanta suburb, where Maxwell (Emerson Brooks) has taken in his ailing father Bartholomew (Keith Randolph Smith). Because Bartholomew has Stage 4 bone cancer, there’s only one way this can go, and he is already browsing for caskets online. But Maxwell, a careerist whose ambitions are a fortress against reality, is in deep denial. (“No dying,” he says to his father, laying the ground rules for their new living arrangement.)While Bartholomew is readying his goodbyes, Maxwell’s teenage son, Tony (Gerald Caesar), is figuring out who he wants to be. When Antoine, a femme and fabulous boy from school (Ryan Jamaal Swain), is caught sneaking out of Tony’s room, Tony reveals that he’s more than just a friend. “That’s your type?” Maxwell asks derisively, betraying a reflexive narrow-mindedness. (Tony had already confided in Charles, Maxwell’s more understanding husband, played by Randy Harrison.) But Bartholomew is pleased. “Bring it in, Champ!” he says, with a predictable aphorism about apples falling from trees.Then he grows wistful. “I wish I would’ve had somebody hug me when I came out of the closet,” he continues.Now, Chloe (Tiffany Villarin), a gracious in-home nurse, is Bartholomew’s most intimate source of comfort. The ghost of his dead partner (also played by Swain) haunts him like the pain he refuses to rate honestly on a scale from one to 10.Learning to let go — of personal hang-ups, social expectations and ultimately of life itself — is at the heart of “… What the End Will Be,” which is not shy on sentimentality. Directed by Margot Bordelon, the 90-minute production would not feel out of place on prime-time television, where straightforward setups deliver clear emotional payoffs with a side of laughs. But there’s gratifying nourishment in Ra’s recipe, a restorative fantasy as much as it is an unabashed tear-jerker.What if instead of being presumed absent, Black fathers were depicted as fallibly present? And rather than having his life taken away, a Black man were pictured in control over how he leaves the world? That all of the men in Ra’s play are gay fuels his confrontation with the assumptions and limitations heaped on them because they are Black.Assured and affecting performances from the cast succeed in tugging at heartstrings, especially Smith’s, whose frail ox ready for pasture is rueful but grounded, in a role that might easily turn maudlin. Swain is a total delight as the most self-actualized queen in the room, unwilling to dim his light for anyone still living in the dark. (“I’ve been offending people since I twirled out of the womb,” he says.)Bordelon’s staging for Roundabout Theater Company balances the play’s humor with its sobering central conceit. The slickly appointed interior, designed by Reid Thompson and covered with art that Bartholomew describes as Afrocentric, demonstrates Maxwell’s faith in the protective powers of material wealth. But money is no defense from human frailty.“… What the End Will Be” is less wide-ranging and conceptual than Ra’s previous work Off Broadway, “In the Southern Breeze,” and more playful and light-footed than “Too Heavy for Your Pocket,” also staged by Roundabout when he was known as Jiréh Breon Holder.In “… What the End Will be,” facing death really means reckoning with life — what makes it worth living despite its impermanence — and learning how to seize some measure of joy for yourself. It’s everything that is meant when we say that Black lives matter.… What the End Will BeThrough July 10 at the Laura Pels Theater, Manhattan; roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More