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      Bruce MacVittie, Ubiquitous Character Actor, Dies at 65

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      A co-founder of the Naked Angels troupe in New York, he was a familiar face in Off Broadway theater, in movies and on TV, often playing tough guys with tormented souls.Bruce MacVittie, one of New York City’s quintessential character actors, who made his Broadway debut in David Mamet’s “American Buffalo” opposite Al Pacino in 1983 and was a mainstay on Off Broadway stages for over 40 years, as well as a familiar face on television and in film, died on May 7 in Manhattan. He was 65.His wife, Carol Ochs, confirmed the death, in a hospital, but said the cause had not been determined.Mr. MacVittie excelled at playing tough guys with tormented souls, revealing a tenderness at the heart of his characterizations. His casting type was low-life and street-smart, but he himself ran in rarefied acting circles. In the mid-1980s, he helped found Naked Angels, a troupe of young film and theater hipsters (including Matthew Broderick and Marisa Tomei) who immediately dazzled New York with the celebrity wattage and social conscience of their theatrical endeavors.“Naked Angels was the club that was too cool to let me in,” the actress Edie Falco recalled in an interview. “I was just hanging around on the fringes, dying to get my foot in the door, but Bruce was already in. Bruce and I traveled through our actor travails together. We were young together and got less young together.”Mr. MacVittie in the thriller “Killer Among Us” (2021), one of his numerous film roles.Vertical EntertainmentMr. MacVittie’s career began in 1980 at Ensemble Studio Theater in Manhattan with a lead in Edward Allan Baker’s “What’s So Beautiful About a Sunset Over Prairie Avenue?”In 1988, after bit parts on the series “Barney Miller” and “Miami Vice,” he got his first big television job, partnering with Stanley Tucci in “The Street,” a vérité slice of blue-collar cop life set in the Newark Police Department. Claiming to be “the first television series shot entirely in New Jersey,” the show churned out 40 episodes in 40 days but lasted only a season. Still, it cast a stylistic shadow over future TV crime dramas.“Bruce’s background was working class, like me,” said Frances McDormand, another longtime friend. “There was something about celebrating this in our work that was important to both of us. Bruce had a pride about where he’d come from that he carried with him and was even cocky about. It was very charismatic.”Bruce James MacVittie was born in Providence, R.I., on Oct. 14, 1956. His father, John James MacVittie, was a worker at the Narragansett Electric Company; his mother Olive (Castergine) MacVittie, was a homemaker.Bruce grew up in Cranston, R.I., where he began to act in high school, and went on to graduate from Boston University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. He moved to New York in 1979. Four years later, after understudying for the role of Bobby in the Pacino revival of “American Buffalo,” Mr. MacVittie took over the part on Broadway and ultimately performed it on a national tour and in the West End of London.“Bruce carried this currency, especially for young actors then, like me, that he’d worked onstage with Pacino,” recalled the actor Bobby Cannavale. “The fact that he’d elevated to that role as a ‘cover’ made it even more heroic.”In 2011, after over 75 film and television appearances, including 11 different roles on various “Law and Order” franchises, guest spots on “The Sopranos,” “Sex in the City” and “Homicide,” innumerable theatrical roles, like his acclaimed performance as a displaced Cuban immigrant in Eduardo Machado’s “Havana is Waiting,” 10 seasons at the Eugene O’Neill Center Playwrights Conference in Connecticut and an equal number of summers at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts, Mr. MacVittie set aside his acting career to train as a nurse. He received a Bachelor of Science degree from Hunter College in Manhattan in 2013.In addition to his wife, he is survived by his daughter, Sophia Oliva Ochs MacVittie. His first marriage ended in divorce. He lived in Manhattan.Mr. MacVittie returned to acting in his last years, including in a featured role on Ava DuVernay’s lauded Netflix series, “The Way They See Us.” He confined his nursing activities to the palliative care of friends in need.“I loved Bruce MacVittie,” Mr. Pacino said in an interview. “His performances were always glistening and crackling; a heart and a joy to watch. He was the embodiment of the struggling actor in New York City, and he made it work. We will miss him.” More

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      An Arts Festival With Hardly a Stage in Sight

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      Performance venues at this year’s Kunstenfestivaldesarts, in Brussels, include a disused museum and the upper house of Belgium’s Parliament.BRUSSELS — As the biggest performing arts festival in Brussels got underway last weekend, there were few traditional stages in sight. Instead, spectators assembled in colonial-era monuments, a disused railway museum and even the debating chamber of Belgium’s Senate.There are practical reasons for the flurry of site-specific shows in the monthlong event, called Kunstenfestivaldesarts, said Daniel Blanca Gubbay, one of its directors, during a break between performances. After two years of pandemic upheaval, a lot of playhouses in Brussels were booked with rescheduled shows this year.The constraints led to a creative lineup, highlighting areas of the city that even frequent visitors don’t necessarily know. In order to see “The Weeping Woods and the Okapi Resistance,” a family-friendly puppet show created by Daniela Ortiz, audience members had to wander into a side alley of the large Cinquantenaire park — and stop in front of the “Monument to the Belgian Pioneers in Congo.”Unveiled in 1921, this sculpted tribute to the colonization of Congo is deeply uncomfortable to look at today. It features racist imagery and inscriptions that portray Belgians as the saviors of the local Black population. Since Belgium has recently begun to publicly reckon with its brutal history and to remove statues associated with it, “The Weeping Woods and the Okapi Resistance” could hardly be more timely.Ortiz is from Peru and remains based there. Here, she attempts to evoke Congo’s colonial-era plight through animal puppets manipulated by two performers from behind a curtain. In the story, the central character, an okapi, is captured by gleeful white puppets representing the colonizers.From a Belgian zoo, the okapi (a close cousin of the giraffe, native to what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo) then yearns for the independence of its native Congo, and conspires with other animals to overthrow the colonial regime. (They succeed, after strangling a human puppet and singing a song.) “The Weeping Woods and the Okapi Resistance” is full of good intentions, and on paper works as a counterpoint to its monumental backdrop in Brussels. Unfortunately, it was far too short and schematic to make for compelling theater: Initially announced as being an hour long, the performance ended up lasting 25 minutes.Aurélien Estager leading a mock tour at the Museums of the Far East as part of Satoko Ichihara’s “Madama Chrysanthemum.”Martine DewilThere was more to take away from Satoko Ichihara’s unclassifiable “Madama Chrysanthemum,” another work that premiered in a prescient setting, the Museums of the Far East. This complex in the north of Brussels, which includes a Chinese Pavilion and a Japanese Tower, is an Orientalist fantasy commissioned by Leopold II, the king who also oversaw Belgium’s violent rule in Congo.All the buildings have been shut for nearly a decade, for safety reasons, so “Madama Chrysanthemum” was a rare opportunity to look around. Ichihara, a Japanese writer and director, offered a playful introduction, too. The deadpan Aurélien Estager, one of two actors in “Madama Chrysanthemum,” welcomed the audience outside the Chinese Pavilion and proceeded with a mock tour of the surrounding landmarks.The tour ended inside the Museum of Japanese Art, one of the closed buildings. There, on a small, empty stage, Estager and Kyoko Takenaka launched into an offbeat performance inspired by the life of Masako, the current empress of Japan (who is also a Harvard-educated former diplomat). In a mix of Japanese and French, the text highlights the pressure Masako faced from the Imperial court, as well as public opinion, to produce a male heir.The critical light in which the show presents Japan’s royal family made it unperformable in Japan, Icihara said. Its surreal twists presumably wouldn’t help. Throughout, Estager assumes the role of a dog named Emperor, and Takenaka plays its owner, who dreams of being impregnated by an emperor (which one is deliberately unclear) even as she tells Masako’s story.An audience member playing the role of the interviewer in Fanny & Alexander’s “Se questo è Levi” at the upper house of Belgium’s Parliament.Werner StrouvenWhile “Madama Chrysanthemum” hijacks its Orientalist décor to tell a very contemporary Japanese story, “Se questo è Levi,” a one-man show, channels the solemnity of the upper house of Belgium’s Parliament. It’s a testament to Kunstenfestivaldesarts’ ingenuity that the organizers secured permission to stage an entire show inside the Senate’s debating chamber, with audience members watching from the lion-decorated seats of Belgian senators.“Se questo è Levi,” created by the Italian company Fanny & Alexander, takes excerpts from interviews given by Primo Levi, an Auschwitz survivor who wrote about his experience in the camp in “If This Is a Man.” The audience plays the role of the interviewer: A list of questions is provided, and they can be asked in any order. As soon as Andrea Argentieri, who plays Levi, is finished with one answer, anyone can chime in, using the microphone on each senator’s table.It may be artificial, but it is strangely moving, nonetheless, to address Levi, who died in 1987, so personally. When I asked him, “In your opinion, can you erase the humanity of a man?,” Argentieri, who mimics Levi’s demeanor down to the way he rested his glasses on his forehead, looked at me for a few seconds with unspoken pain before replying.Would it work in other contexts? It’s debatable, but in the Belgian Senate, Levi’s eloquent thoughts on the Holocaust and its legacy had the gravitas of an official hearing, for posterity. Perhaps they should be heard there more often.“Se questo è Levi,” like nearly all the other productions at Kunstenfestivaldesarts, was translated into three languages: French and Dutch, the main languages spoken in Belgium, and English. (The Senate is equipped with headsets for simultaneous translation, and in other venues subtitles are used.) That may sound par for the course in Brussels, the multilingual home of the European Union’s main institutions, but the city’s theater scene isn’t quite used to it.Wanjiru Kamuyu in Okwui Okpokwasili’s powerful piece of dance theater “Bronx Gothic.”Anna Van WaegSince the arts are funded separately for Belgium’s linguistic communities (with the exception of a few federal institutions), there is little crossover between French- and Dutch-language playhouses in Brussels, and many don’t provide subtitles. Kunstenfestivaldesarts has attempted to bridge that gap, with partner theaters from both sides.Over the first weekend, François Chaignaud and Geoffroy Jourdain’s “Tumulus,” a polyphonic work blending dance and music, was performed at the Dutch-language playhouse Kaaitheater, while the French-speaking performance space Les Brigittines played host to a new version of Okwui Okpokwasili’s powerful piece of dance theater “Bronx Gothic,” now performed by Wanjiru Kamuyu.The range of languages can be somewhat dizzying, as was the case with “Hacer Noche,” a two-hour Spanish show performed in the former railway museum nestled above the North Station. The piece is a quiet and sensitive conversation between the director, Bárbara Bañuelos, and Carles Albert Gasulla, a well-read man who works as a parking attendant. But there is a lot of translated text to absorb while hearing Spanish, and at times I wished the subtitles had slowed down to let their points about class, mental health and precarious work land.Yet that is a small gripe. In its current form, Kunstenfestivaldesarts shows Brussels at its best: a city of converging cultures, as open to addressing its past as it is to hosting others.KunstenfestivaldesartsVarious venues in Brussels, through May 28. More

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      Shows About Abortion Surface a Stark Divide

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      Decidedly anti-sensationalistic, Alison Leiby’s shrewd and funny personal monologue plays downtown. Uptown, a staged reading focuses on a gruesome case.A few nights after the leak of the Supreme Court draft opinion that would overturn the right to abortion protected by Roe v. Wade, the comedian Alison Leiby walked onto the stage of the Cherry Lane Theater, in Manhattan’s West Village, to greet the audience before her monologue.“How are we doing?” she asked, taking the temperature of a friendly crowd that had more men in it than you might expect. Then, easily: “The show is exactly the same as it was before we lost all of our rights.”Low-key sardonic, politically charged humor it would be, apparently. We might have guessed as much from the title of the insightfully funny piece she was about to perform: “Oh God, a Show About Abortion.”It is probably true, in terms of Leiby’s script and Lila Neugebauer’s direction, that the monologue — constructed around an account of the abortion that Leiby had three years ago, at 35 — has not changed. But the atmosphere surrounding abortion rights has; it’s more charged, more urgent, more anxious. And the audience always brings the outside world into the room.So here is the first thing you need to know about Leiby’s abortion story: In a smart and entertaining show, full of observations about the sometimes painful messiness of female bodies — menstruation, childbirth, lactation — and the social pressure to put on a happy face about all of it, her trip to Planned Parenthood is the least dramatic, most calmly straightforward part.“Does this feel anticlimactic to you?” she asks, when she’s done retelling it.She knows it must, because back when it happened, she’d expected something more lurid, too.“I think that I thought I’d have some kind of Scarlet A that tells everyone I had an abortion,” she says, “which would have been devastating because it’s private, and also red clashes with my complexion.”A laugh line, sure, but that bit about the fear of the Scarlet A? It lands.“Oh Gosnell: A Show About the Truth” is a staged reading based on court records that features the cast members, from left, Roxanne Bonifield, Kaché Attyana, Benjamin Standford and Andrea Edgerson.Russ RowlandA couple of miles uptown, at the Chain Studio Theater on West 36th Street, is a show that announced its New York run as “Oh Gosnell: The Truth About Abortion” — a tabloid title with stalkerish overtones, especially given that its own news release mentions Leiby’s show.A publicist for “Oh Gosnell” said that the creation of the play was inspired by Leiby’s comic monologue. “They laugh about it — we tell the truth about it,” says the website of the play now going by the name “Oh Gosnell: A Show About the Truth.”It’s written by Phelim McAleer, who is credited on IMDB as being a producer of the yet-to-be-released film “My Son Hunter,” starring Laurence Fox as Hunter Biden, and as a writer and a producer of “Obamagate,” starring Dean Cain, which The New York Post described as a play that had its premiere on YouTube. His other plays include “Ferguson,” about the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown.Laughter and truth are not mutually exclusive, of course, even if McAleer, a right-wing provocateur whose program bio calls him “a veteran investigative journalist,” implies otherwise.As for conveying any general truth about abortion, rather than specific truths about the gruesome case of Kermit Gosnell — a Philadelphia physician convicted in 2013 of first-degree murder for killing three babies after botched late-term abortions — it doesn’t. Neither is it constructed to persuade.The script for the play, simply titled “Gosnell,” says that it was “compiled, verbatim, from grand jury and criminal trial transcripts” in the Gosnell case. In a spare, somewhat murky staged reading directed by David Atkinson, it has a cast of seven that includes a compelling young actor named Kaché Attyana, who I hope will soon get better work.“The first thing I want you to be assured of, ladies and gentlemen,” a prosecutor (Roxanne Bonifield) says, close to the top of the show, “is that this is not a case about abortion.”For emphasis, she repeats that assertion. Maybe McAleer, the co-author of a book about the Gosnell case, and a producer and co-screenwriter of the 2018 movie “Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer,” didn’t hear her?Then again, in a program note, McAleer writes of the Gosnell trial: “Perhaps the desire to suppress information was why no national media covered the story. There is a reluctance to shine a spotlight on abortion in the U.S. Few people are prepared to go behind the doors and tell the truth of what is really happening there.”Heidi Schreck in her play “What the Constitution Means to Me,” which opened on Broadway in 2019.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe problem with saying that no national media covered the story — well, his own show contradicts that right off the bat, when images of news clippings about the case include one from The New York Times. (Projections are by Meghan Chou.)As for going behind those doors, women do that every day, seeking abortion care. Leiby did it. I’ve done it. My mom did it, too, pre-Roe v. Wade, to save her life from an ectopic pregnancy before my brothers and I were born.Telling the truth about abortion, though — speaking of those experiences, that is, in a culture where abortion remains heavily stigmatized — well, that is rare.Which is maybe why Leiby expected to feel something more sensational than relief after her own abortion.“I thought I’d spend the next few days or months staring out the window like I’m in a depression medication commercial,” she says. “I thought I would carry sadness and emptiness with me everywhere I went.”Kidding, a little bit? Probably. But the notion of abortion as an automatic trauma is pretty deeply rooted in the culture, and it’s not often interrogated onstage. Which leaves the mystery intact.And, conversely, gives the shows that do discuss it an added potency — like Ruby Rae Spiegel’s “Dry Land,” which harnesses the ticking-time-bomb feeling of an unwanted pregnancy, and Lightning Rod Special’s “The Appointment,” which juxtaposes wild musical satire with the crisp quiet of an abortion clinic. And, of course, Heidi Schreck’s “What the Constitution Means to Me,” which put an abortion story on Broadway.In the Signature Theater revival of Suzan-Lori Parks’s play, Christine Lahti (right, with Joaquina Kalukango) portrayed an abortion provider. Richard Termine for The New York TimesWhen Leiby mentioned the Scarlet A, I thought of Suzan-Lori Parks’s take on “The Scarlet Letter” — the one of her Red Letter Plays whose title we can’t print here — with its heroine, Hester Smith, who is described in the list of characters as “the Abortionist.” Kia Corthron’s “Come Down Burning,” which also has a heroine who performs abortions, makes a clear connection between the option to safely end a pregnancy and women’s ability to control their own lives.Then there is Ciara Ni Chuirc’s “Made by God,” which had its premiere this winter at Irish Repertory Theater: a drama about a shame-filled Irish teenager who died alone with her newborn in the 1980s, and about the seismic shift in public opinion that led Ireland to legalize abortion in 2019. The play’s principal anti-abortion character is an American interloper.Leiby — who reports, incredulously, that she whispered the phrase “an abortion” to Planned Parenthood when she called to make an appointment for one — means her monologue to start people talking about theirs.Beyond that, though, her show makes a broader point: about the need for women to be able to decide what they want and don’t want, and shape their existences accordingly.“I’m a woman who did something she needed to do,” she says, “to protect the life she built for herself.”It’s not funny, but it’s true.Oh God, a Show About AbortionThrough June 4 at the Cherry Lane Theater, Manhattan; cherrylanetheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes.Oh Gosnell: A Show About the TruthThrough May 15 at the Chain Studio Theater, Manhattan; ohgosnell.com. Running time: 1 hour. More

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      Interview: From France. With Love

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      Charis Ainslie and Sibylla Archdale Kalid on This Last Piece of Sky

      This Last Piece of Sky is set across two cities, following two young people. The first is Louis, who finds himself in hospital as his family cannot cope with his behaviour, and it’s here he dreams of a girl called Sarah. The second person just so happens to be called Sarah, and she also is causing her family anguish due to her behaviour at school. But what is it that connects the two?

      The play is from French writer Kevin Keiss. But don’t panic, Charis Ainslie has translated it into English for us, and along with director Sibylla Archdale Kalid, is now bringing it to The Space next week. We catch up with both of them in this interview to find out why they think audiences are going to love this play.

      Our knowledge of French theatre is, to be honest, lacking, so we thought we’d ask Charis and Sibylla to give us a little education.

      Bonjour, mesdames… ok, that’s the limit of our French*, but we guess you speak it?

      Charis: Yes, I’ve been visiting France since my early teens and lived there for two years. As a translator, I’m working with it in written form pretty much all the time, and I’m currently working with three French writers so am getting to speak it a lot more.

      So what first attracted you both to this French play?

      Charis: I loved the mysterious feel of it. It’s quite poetic, but it also has a real sense of urgency to it. When I first read it I couldn’t wait to find out what would happen. The characters are brilliant – right from the start I could hear what the characters would sound like in English, and that’s really exciting. I particularly loved the character of Granpy. He initially comes across as a cantankerous old man, always finding fault with his grandchildren. But as soon as the family is threatened, it becomes clear that he’s fiercely loyal and will do anything to defend them.

      Sibylla: The first time I read it I was left with a lot of questions and a lot of images in my head of the key moments in the play; a TV that won’t tune in, a young person’s scribblings on a wall, a family walking to a bus stop. The text is fairly sparse and doesn’t explain itself, so it was a tantalising creative challenge to get under its skin and fill in the gaps.

      How easy is it to translate a play such as this? Do you have to alter much to keep the lyrical flow of the original?

      Charis: The writer, Kevin Keiss, uses language creatively to create the ‘other-wordliness’ of the play and in particular to convey the mental state of the main character, Louis. Louis believes he has discovered the secret of the universe, and his language expresses both his wonder – in flowing, lyrical passages – and his sense of frustration and despair – when his speech becomes clipped and truncated, marked by abrupt hiatuses. The biggest challenge was to recreate that without worrying that it sounded ‘off’ or awkward. Once I gave myself permission to recreate the strangeness of the language, I really enjoyed playing around with the poetry of it and recreating its rhythms.

      The play explores mental fragility in young people, is this a theme that is the same whether it’s France on England?

      Charis: I think it is, yes. Although Louis is depicted as a mathematical genius, there’s a truth beneath that romanticised version of neurodiversity. The isolation. The medical world’s preoccupation with diagnosis. The sense that no-one is actually listening to you and what you have to say – if you could even put it into words. There’s also something hugely relatable in the way Louis’s family responds to him – their concern, and their sense of powerlessness as they try to support him. And after the last two years there’s something universal in the feelings of isolation depicted on stage. But there’s also a sense of solace created by the unlikely friendship of these two young people, without the play ever descending to offer solutions or trite answers.

      Sibylla: I think what’s so compelling about the play is that it’s not clear that it is about mental fragility; is Louis mentally unwell, or is he on to something that the rest of us are too close-minded to entertain? Either way, as Charis says, the resulting experience of isolation is close to the bone at the moment, whichever side of the channel you live on.

      The play is set across two locations, one of which has experienced a military coup, is this based on real events or pure fiction?

      To answer this, it’s helpful to start with Louis’s experience. Louis is discovering – or at least suspects – that the universe does not operate along our accepted notions of space and time. It’s significant that, while nobody believes him, the world of the play confirms his suspicions. We’re invited to believe in a world that could be tomorrow or yesterday, that has echoes of real events but could also be presaging the future. The clues in the play don’t necessarily point to a real place or a given reality but invite us to believe in something we can’t explain. In that sense, we inhabit Louis’s world.

      Have you thought how you plan to portray two separate locations when you are at The Space?

      Sibylla: One of the challenges of staging the play has been depicting two distinct locations whilst also allowing for the increasingly fluid boundaries between them as the story goes on. Technology – a TV, phones – have been a useful way of delineating different time periods, and our design consultant, David Medina Aguila, has carefully designed the costumes to use colour and period details to indicate different times and places. The script itself also helps in this sense, as the tone and energy of the scenes set in the two places are notably distinct from each other.

      Charis: We’re also going to be exploring the connections and porosity between the two worlds through sound, music and lighting. We’re working with a brilliant Sound Designer, Raffaela Pancucci, and a brilliant Lighting Designer, Catja Hamilton, and we’re very excited to see what they come up with! There’s already a strong musical motif in the play: Louis speaks of the genius of Glenn Gould – a Canadian pianist who made a famous recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations in the 50s – and there’s a strong parallel between them: Gould was a musical genius, and a very eccentric individual. Music is also an inherent part of Sarah’s family – her grandfather was a classical violinist. One of the most poignant scenes in the play is when the family are forced to destroy their record collection because music has been banned by the regime.

      You’re taking the play to a local school after your run at the Space, what is the reason you wanted to do this?

      Charis: We want to make theatre for young people, and we want to make it accessible to everyone. The Space has strong connections to its local community, and we wanted young people there to be able to enjoy a theatre experience they might not otherwise have – to imagine other worlds and dream a little after what they’ve been through these last couple of years. It fits with our view of what theatre is about more generally. I mean, just this week people are talking about a show that’s charging £400 for a ticket! That’s the polar opposite of what we want to do. So many small theatres are putting on great work – and the Space has an incredible programme: great theatre, great acting and shows that will echo in you long after.

      Any plans for what is next for you, or this play, after this run?

      Charis: We’d love this play to have another lease of life – not least because it’s the first part of a trilogy! And I also have another play by the same writer for younger children that I need to find a home for. It’s about a boy whose father has died, and his quest to remember his father’s voice – aided and abetted by a huge whale, two beautiful golden birds and a family of guinea pigs. What’s not to love?!

      Sibylla: Working with the cast on this play has only whet my appetite to explore this play further; it’s opened up so many possibilities and strengthened my conviction that this is a furiously timely piece of work, so we hope to bring it back to audiences soon. To continue Charis’ children’s theatre theme, I’m also in development with a BSL-integrated devised piece about a female astronaut for 7-11 year olds, which I am co-directing.

      Photos from rehearsals

      Merci beaucoup pour votre temps to Charis and Sibylla. This Last Piece of Sky plays at The Space between 17 – 21 May. The play will also be livestreamed on 17 May, and available for a further two weeks on-demand following the end of the live run. Further information and bookings can be found here.

      You can follow the play’s Twitter account here to keep up to date with any further announcements.

      * We would also like to apologise to our reviewer Jane Gian for suggesting we cannot speak French. Jane is fluent and will be even be reviewing Dom Juan at The Vaults during one of its French performances this weekend. More

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      Leaked Video of Jesse Williams’s Staged Nude Scene Denounced by Union

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      Despite an attempt to ban smartphones in the theater, a video of the actor’s nude scene in the Broadway production of “Take Me Out” circulated widely online.The first time “Take Me Out,” a baseball play with nude shower scenes, arrived on Broadway, there were no iPhones in the theater, because they hadn’t been invented yet.This year, when the acclaimed play returned for its first revival, the nonprofit presenting the show instituted a no-phones policy, requiring patrons to put their phones in locked pouches before entering the theater, in an effort to prevent the photographing of naked actors.The effort failed.This week, someone posted to social media video of a naked Jesse Williams, a star of the play, in a shower scene. The video circulated widely.The incident prompted outrage both from Second Stage Theater, the nonprofit producing the play, and Actors’ Equity Association, the union that represents stage performers.“We condemn in the strongest possible terms the creation and distribution of photographs and videos of our members during a nude scene,” Kate Shindle, the union president, said in a statement. “As actors, we regularly agree to be vulnerable onstage in order to tell difficult and challenging stories. This does not mean that we agree to have those vulnerable moments widely shared by anyone who feels like sneaking a recording device into the theater.”Second Stage, which distributes Playbills with an insert reminding patrons that “photos and videos are strictly prohibited,” issued its own statement, saying “we are appalled that this policy has been violated” and that “taking naked pictures of anyone without their consent is highly objectionable and can have severe legal consequences.”The theater said it was seeking to have the online videos removed, and was adding security at the theater to enforce its phone ban.Second Stage has been using Yondr pouches to restrict phone use — when patrons arrive, they are asked to turn off their phones and put them into the locked pouches, which the patrons hold through the show, and then hand back to be unlocked after it is over. The system, used at some comedy shows, pop music concerts and other live events, is imperfect — some people have figured out how to open such pouches, while others smuggle in phones despite the rules.“Take Me Out,” written by Richard Greenberg, is about homophobia in baseball; Williams plays a team star who comes out as gay and confronts discomfort among some of his teammates. In 2003, the drama won the Tony Award for best play; this week the current revival picked up four nominations, including one for best revival, and three for actors, including Williams, Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Michael Oberholtzer. Oberholtzer can also be seen, naked, in some of the online video.In the run-up to the show, Williams, best known for “Grey’s Anatomy,” discussed the nudity. “It’s terrifying in all the right ways,” he said on “The Ellen Show” last year. In an interview this year with The New York Times, he was more sanguine. “I’m here to do things I’ve never done before,” he said. “I have got one life, as far as I know. It’ll be fine.” More

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      ‘The Vagrant Trilogy’ Review: Palestinians in Exile, Yearning for Home

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      Mona Mansour’s rich trilogy, now at the Public Theater, follows a displaced Palestinian family.The matinee audience was filing out of the Public Theater’s LuEsther Hall the other afternoon when stagehands started dismantling the set — a rickety home in a refugee camp in Lebanon, where Mona Mansour’s border-crossing, alternate-realities epic “The Vagrant Trilogy” winds up.The scenery coming down before we’d left the room was a jolt: I’d wanted to stay in the show’s world for just a little longer. Which is saying something when a production stretches to three and a half hours, including two intermissions. And when, courtesy of the Covid pandemic, both lead roles are being performed by understudies.But Mansour’s rich trilogy about a displaced Palestinian family is captivating, and for all the protean theatricality of Mark Wing-Davey’s gorgeous production, watching it feels somehow like being engrossed in a novel, with that same luxuriant sense of immersion and transport. Woven of poetry and politics, threaded with comedy, it’s Stoppardian in its intellectualism and doesn’t shy from poignancy.Is it poor form to invoke a British dramatist when discussing a play that’s in no small part about the ravages of British colonialism? Quite possibly. But Mansour’s Palestinian characters are smitten in their own ways with touchstones of British culture. And Stoppard is, after all, a Czech-born immigrant.Nadine Malouf, left, and Rudy Roushdi, who play multiple roles in the trilogy of plays.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“The Hour of Feeling,” the trilogy’s first play, starts with a meet-cute on a hilltop near Ramallah in April 1967. Adham, a young scholar just back from Cairo and cultivating an expertise in the poetry of Wordsworth, is busy avoiding a party. Abir, a rebellious young woman raised on a nearby farm and modeling her personal style on the film star Julie Christie, has come up for a smoke. (There is much atmospheric smoking in these plays, which are spoken mainly in English and occasionally in Arabic, with English supertitles.)Abir and Adham’s attraction is instant. By June, when they fly to London for a lecture that he is giving, they are newlyweds. And when the Six-Day War breaks out during their trip, they face a choice: to remain abroad, in cosseted academia, or return home to upheaval.The rest of the trilogy explores each of those possibilities, proffering two different, incompatible realities that stem from 1967. The second play, “The Vagrant,” finds Abir and Adham in London in 1982, having decided to stay in a country that will always view them as other. In the third play, “Urge for Going,” set in the Lebanese refugee camp in 2003, home and family lured them back all those years ago, only to mire them in a different exile.“Palestine?” Abir’s brother says dryly to his niece, in the camp. “Your father’s homeland, thirty minutes away, depending on traffic.”Mansour has calibrated the narrative tension so expertly that in each reality we are deeply invested in the fates of her characters, among them Adham’s mother, Beder, embodied by Nadine Malouf as a funny, formidable, thoroughly unsentimental woman who has fought to give her brilliant boy the best possible chance in a hostile world. Her other son, Hamzi (Osh Ashruf), is a gentle, kindly man whom she left behind as a child, with his father, in that refugee camp, where he spends decades of his life.Caitlin Nasema Cassidy, as Abir, and Bassam Abdelfattah, as Adham, acquit themselves honorably. Yet maybe because they are understudies, they draw their characters in broader strokes than they might if they had more time to settle into such large roles. (Tala Ashe and Hadi Tabbal, both wonderful Off Broadway in “English” this spring, ordinarily play Abir and Adham.) They are surrounded by a solid company, even if some accents get slippery in the London scenes.Those scenes are often fun, though, especially the visuals; Allen Moyer’s sets, Dina El-Aziz’s costumes and Tom Watson’s wigs evoke the ’60s and ’80s to delightful effect. (Lighting by Reza Behjat; sound by Tye Hunt Fitzgerald and Sinan Refik Zafar; and video by Greg Emetaz are also excellent.) Malouf has comic magnetism as a flirtatious ’60s Londoner in fabulous orange slingbacks who can’t keep her hand off Adham’s thigh, while Ramsey Faragallah is eccentrically funny as a floppy-haired — and, it turns out, bigoted — ’80s professor who stirs his tea with the eraser end of his pencil.With Wordsworth’s poetry a motif throughout the trilogy, Mansour examines the sustaining psychic power of a beloved landscape — a home that one may leave but must be able to revisit. And through the Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali’s “Abd el-Hadi Fights a Superpower,” a chunk of which makes an affecting monologue by Hamzi in the third play, Mansour suggests the quiet tragedy of the geopolitical bystander: “His God-given rights are a grain of salt tossed into the sea.”It’s in this final part of the trilogy that we meet the two tightly bonded characters most likely to smash our hearts: Abir and Adham’s teenage daughter, the ebulliently ambitious Jamila (Malouf, at her most splendid), and her vulnerable brother, Jul (Rudy Roushdi, tenderly lovely). As bookish as Adham, Jamila is studying to get into college and join the wider world.For now, though, she still sometimes pretends with Jul that he is a talk-show host and she a marvelously successful guest with a string of doctorates.“How did you get out of the refugee camp?” he asks.“Well, it’s a long story,” she says.The Vagrant TrilogyThrough May 15 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 3 hours 30 minutes. More

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      ‘Which Way to the Stage’ Review: Theater Buddies, With Claws Out

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      In her new comedy, Ana Nogueira spins zippy fun out of a fairly conventional story about a friendship strained by resentment.If you have ever fantasized about casting your favorite musical or ranked the actresses who have played Mrs. Lovett, chances are you will be familiar with Jeff and Judy. You might even be them.We first meet the two besties by the stage door of the Richard Rodgers Theater. They are waiting, Playbills at the ready, for Idina Menzel — this is 2015, when Menzel was still headlining “If/Then” and stars occasionally met with fans after a performance (an activity now curtailed by the Covid-19 pandemic).Judy (Sas Goldberg) and Jeff (Max Jenkins) are arguing over the respective merits of Bernadette Peters and Patti LuPone in “Gypsy,” and Ana Nogueira’s “Which Way to the Stage,” at MCC Theater, is off, its needle already close to the red zone. At least Jeff and Judy agree on one thing: either of those two stars is better than the one they refer to simply as “Imelda” (Staunton, unless Marcos also appeared in “Gypsy”). “Like a caricature of a caricature of a performance by my mother in the Temple Beth Israel talent show,” Judy says.You might have sussed out by now that Judy is straight and Jeff is gay, and both have a way with quips.Admittedly this is a fairly conventional setup, but Nogueira spins zippy fun out of it, the theater references are on point, and the director, Mike Donahue, imparts a nice screwball-comedy pace. Then come the variations on the theme.Michelle Veintimilla, from far left, Evan Todd and Sas Goldberg at a drag performance by Max Jenkins’s character, Jeff.Richard Termine for The New York TimesThe first is that, somewhat predictably, Judy and Jeff are actors themselves — though she makes a living as a real estate agent while he is a Crunch instructor with a drag gig on the side.We also gradually realize that their friendship is heavy with barely contained resentment. Jeff lectures Judy when she uses a slur for gay men, only to casually drop demeaning words for women. After she takes off during his drag tribute to Menzel, a wounded Jeff demands to know what she thought of his act. It is obvious the last thing he wants is an honest opinion, but he pressures Judy anyway.“Which Way to the Stage” is about the performances people put on for themselves, their friends, family and potential loved ones, as well as the identities they hide behind. (Nogueira has experience both as a writer and an actor, with acting credits on such shows as “The Vampire Diaries” and the Starz series “Hightown.”)This tension between who we are, who we think we are and the personas we project is especially fraught for actors, and it weighs heavily on Jeff and Judy. (Goldberg, a standout in “Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow” and “Significant Other,” excels at suggesting hurt underneath sarcasm.) The veiled animosity between the two is brought to a head when they meet the handsome Mark (Evan Todd), who has the easygoing, insouciant charm of a born star — or at least someone who can live off his acting.Under its avalanche of knowing jokes, “Which Way to the Stage” has serious matters on its mind, including the undercurrent of homophobia and misogyny that can suffuse the relationship between straight women and gay men. Nogueira’s writing is at its best when she lets anger bubble to the surface, but like Jeff and Judy with theater, it seems as if she can’t quite decide whether her play is, at heart, about love or cynicism.“Which Way to the Stage” builds up to a conflagration that is the equivalent of an 11 o’clock number. But like many musicals, the show doesn’t know what to do with itself afterward, so it ends big with a move that feels like a Hail Mary pass. The attempt is fun to watch, but it also comes up short.Which Way to the StageThrough May 22 at MCC Theater, Manhattan; mcctheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. More